They drove him to the express bus. He thanked them for the presents and they thanked him. He leaned over and shook his father’s hand. He kissed his mother’s cheek and she held the side of his head while he did so.
“Get home safe,” she said; then, suddenly, and with genuine enthusiasm, “Call me and we’ll have dinner soon.”
“I will!” he said, opening the door.
“I enjoy that,” she added, almost to herself, while her husband sat with two hands on the steering wheel, facing front, as detached as a chauffeur.
From the curb Jimmy turned to wave but she was looking down, digging for something in her pocketbook. A handkerchief, he hoped; but no, a cigarette. The car swerved into a U-turn and he looked away before his father’s side came into view.
HE WAS UNPACKING HIS PRESENTS—he’d been home for ten minutes—when he heard a loud noise from the hall. WoooOO—WOOOOOOO. The sound of a toy train. It kept repeating. It made his right ear throb. Then he heard a woman’s voice— Tabitha’s. He listened to the noise for about five minutes, hoping it would stop. It didn’t. He put on something neutral and homey—worn jeans, sweatshirt, and slippers—and went for the door. The boy, Charles, had never played in the hall before and he was going to nip this in the bud. He stopped, and stuck a pencil behind his ear. He unbolted the door; he opened it and there was Tabitha handling a foot-long locomotive—one of those friction things. “Tabitha?” he said.
“Huh?” she answered.
He spotted Charles standing in the shadow of the stairwell, mutely staring at him, his face vacant. Unnerved by the motionless boy, Jimmy asked her in a nastier tone than he’d intended if she would please take the train into her apartment. She strolled over with it instead. “He lost the screws,” she said. “I’m trying to get the bottom back on.”
Jimmy feigned interest in the toy. Charles looked like he couldn’t care less about it and just continued to stare at Jimmy who was still holding the door half-open with his foot, hadn’t expected this to take so long.
“Do you have any screws?” Tabitha asked him.
“Uh, no, I don’t—none that small.” He suggested she put rubber bands around the thing. Awkwardly, he said, “Well, so long,” and opened his door wider to go back in, but Charles bolted and darted over his foot into the apartment and expressionlessly, silently, ran around in small circles while Jimmy, appalled—after all, there was that damn calendar still in plain view on the refrigerator—pretended to be friendly and amused. “You want to move in here, Charles?” he said, fake-laughing, addressing the boy for the first time.
“Come on, Charles,” Tabitha said, and he ran out and down the hall. Jimmy, all smiley: “See ya, Tabitha.” She didn’t say anything. He shut the door cozily, like he’d opened it for a nice chat. He glared at the smiling stud on the calendar as though it were a boxing opponent, taunting and belittling him. He glanced from it to the garbage can, clenching and unclenching his fists. He marched over to it, grabbed the pencil from behind his ear, and wrote “CALL MOM RE DINNER” in one of the boxes below Mr. December’s gorgeous thighs.
He switched on his FM receiver and rolled the dial rapidly from one end of the band to the other, trying to find a song he liked, but he couldn’t. He put on a record and lifted the arm to the last cut on the side, knowing he’d done this so often that it had to have caused an aural scratch. He regretted this even though he didn’t like the next-to-last song and knew he’d probably never play it again. He turned up the volume and ground his teeth rhythmically to the music. He thought of going out but rejected this idea: he wouldn’t have been caught dead in a bar on Christmas. He decided to start saving for a video-cassette player so he could watch porn videos in the privacy of his own home. Then, as though performing a routine chore, he hauled out the stack of magazines from under his bed and plopped them on top of it. He knew he wouldn’t look at them all—only two or three. Whenever he goes on a trip, he also overpacks. He has always loved the luxury of choice.
A QUEER RED SPIRIT
C. F. Borgman
MY …
I have him by the loose leaf. I have him by the pen.
My name is …
He’s exhausted and spent. He moves the pen. I write through him.
My name is Brian Malv …
He’s bandaging his guilt for having forgotten to call Benjamin by writing a story about him. Clever of me, a spirit, to pick such a hunk for my medium. I’ve done it before. I get so physical, speaking metaphysically of course.
Brian wants to write about Benjamin Quinn and he knows very little. I, on the other hand, know Benjamin’s spirit. We are old friends. I’ve known him since Sodom, possibly even before that, but Sodom was where we got close. He’s a queer red. I’m a queer blue. I know only three purples.
My spirit colleagues scoff at my choice of Brian for a medium. They take communication between planes so seriously. “He’s shallow,” one spirit says. I answer, “He’s cute. He’s easy. He grows on me.”
So here Brian sits writing frantically at his desk, spaced out of his gorgeous head. Let it spill, Brian. It will dry. It will cake and make sense. You’re the icing, honey. The content is mine. The veil is drawn open, brushing the sweat from your hot brow. What were you saying?
My name is Brian Malventano. I live out here in Rockaway Beach, Queens. I feel so tight. All muscle. No fat. Hard. In me there is a blue sea center. I am the sky. I thrive on high drive sex. It’s in the air. I breathe it. I taste it. Maybe there’s something out of kilter in my gland secretions. Maybe it’s in the brain. All I know is I love men. I am constantly overcome with lust. I’ve made all sex be my religion. Orgasm is the highest sacrament. Vera, my psychic friend from Bay Ridge, once said, “Brian, you’re so physical that your mind is like free to roam all the layers of life. Your senses rule you. Your antennae receive and send out more than just sexual signals. You’re like a lighthouse in like some crazy psychic sea.” Vera has always had the hots for me. She really wanted to fuck around.
I see a trail of hair descending toward the elastic waistband of some runner’s shorts, and inside I scream, “Give me that! Strip for me!” I burn up. I feel the blood pumping through me. I am alive! It’s more than flesh. Sex is everything to me. Sex is in the stars. In the spice rack. In the sand. I see the hands of two lovers on the beach. I see their fingernails caked with sex. Sometimes at night, I dig a hole in the sand. It is wet and still warm from the day’s sun. I fuck the Earth. I come. Tears pour free. It makes me spiritual.
Anyway, I remember Benjamin singing in his shaky British accent, “The birds and the bees do it, let’s do it, da da da dada da.” We sat on his porch out here in Rockaway. I got him talking about sex. He could tell stories. He was old, an old queen from all over the world. He spoke with exaggerated movements and precise diction, and whenever he used a sexually explicit word, he whispered it. He sat in his “queen’s chair,” a high fan-backed rattan one. I sat on the rotting steps to his porch.
“Brian, dearie,” he said, and it always sounded like he was saying, “brandy,” “you’ve have the stars on your side. And you can thank your lucky stars for your big cock.” He leaned forward and whispered “cock.” “Just do what you do and enjoy it. Call it a religion if you will. God knows there are a lot of bodies that should be worshipped. I’ve genuflected in front of quite a few golden calves in my day, dearie.”
Benjamin lived next door to my uncle’s house out here. When Uncle Sal was killed, it turned out he had left the house to me. I moved in two years ago, and that’s when I met Benjamin. He screamed at me for cutting the climbing roses from my side of the fence. His house is covered with climbing roses. I was in my shorts, and as we spoke, I kept snapping my shears in the air. I knew he was queer right off the bat. I can tell right away. I made sure that my sexual equipment jutted out as far as possible. I snapped the shears nearer and nearer to my cock. Benjamin turned red. Finally he blurted out, “Cut what you will from your side of the fence, but be careful down the
re.” His shaky arm extended toward my crotch. I laughed. I assured him, “Hey, man, I’m as gay as a goose. Don’t be embarrassed. Believe me, I’d never cut it off.” And from then on, we were friends. I know he wanted to suck me off at times, but that would have been like getting a blow job from my mother. Benjamin was like my mother. I’d done it with older men, maybe fifty tops, but that was way back when I was a teenager and making bucks from it. Now at twenty-four, I’d rather expend my sex free into the sand and into the asses of muscle I fall for. I’ll save the royalty for my own old age, which gets me back to Benjamin’s porch.
Benjamin said, “You think I’m all dried up and old, dearie, but just because there’s snow on the roof, that doesn’t mean the fire has gone out of the stove.”
I thought, “Sure, I get it. You mean you can still get it up even though you’ve got white hair, but Benjamin, your highness baby, your hair is gone, and you wear a dark toupee.” You see, he’s always worn a brown rug taped to his skull. It looks fake. Sometimes I noticed the tape edges on his forehead. I should have said some sort of joke at the fence that first day we met, like, “Hey, that almost looks real,” or, “That’s a very realistic hairpiece,” or something that would have made it clear to him that I knew it was fake. Then it never would have bothered me. Hell, what do I care what he puts on his head. I dyed my hair maroon last winter. But anyway, I was afraid that I might hurt his feelings. I figured that in his head, he thought it looked good, and who was I to say anything.
Once I accepted the lie of the rug on his head, though, I always felt off a bit when I looked at Benjamin. I worried for him when it was windy in the Shop-Rite parking lot and I was helping him to my car and his hands were full of bagged groceries and I could see the toupee about to fly off his head. I would grab the bags and look away, giving him time to straighten the hair back on. And I never just barged into his house, especially in the hot days of summer. I always made noise outside on the porch, knowing he would surely be inside watching television, bald, airing off his skull. I would give him a minute to slap the thing on before I walked in. God, I remember talking at the fence during August and the sweat would be pouring from his adhesive hairline, and I’d want to yell, “Just take the damn thing off!”
Believe it or not, I think I was on the same wavelength as Benjamin. There was something in him that intrigued me. I would watch him putter in his overgrown garden from my bedroom window. He seemed content to spend his days either in the garden or watching television. I really had nothing in common with him. He was old, I was young. He was bald, I was hirsute. Not apish, just hairy enough in all the right places. Did he have a hairy chest? No, I remember pink, and I think he had a few white hairs growing around his teats. I was “out,” and he was still “whispering.” I was openly gay and he was just openly swishy.
Whoa! I wonder about Vera the Psychic. I let her read the preceding page, and she said she felt, I mean FELT, that I had looked up the word “hirsute,” which I didn’t. Tony Santini, this guy I used to sleep with, used to say his dad, Angelo “Big Deal” Santini, was hirsute. “Hairsuit,” we called him. I’m beginning to wonder about Vera reading any more of this story. Oh, and then she said that she thought “swishy” and “gay” were similar, not opposites! I said, “The day I sway around like Benjamin Quinn, is the day they castrate me. I am not a swish, Vera, and I’m as gay as a goose!”
Okay, so Benjamin and I had nothing in common except that we lived next door to each other, and we were both bent. Bent Neighbors! That’s what I should call this story.
Anyway, my point is, there was something magnetic about Benjamin to me. I certainly wasn’t sexually attracted to him, I mean fuck my own mother! But I loved him. He was a character. He was a gay one who had made it to old age next door to me. We were in the same tribe. Maybe it was meant to be, us being neighbors, so I could write this story. I psyched into him. I understood his vanity. Hell, I wouldn’t want to be bald. I mean balled, yes, but not bald unless I chose to shave my head. But really the hair thing was no big deal now that I think of it. I was just trying to show what he looked like and that was the first thing that came to mind. He was so odd. I’m not odd. That’s another difference.
One too many differences!! This has gone on too long, Brian. Make your point and move on. And while I’m at it, honey, let’s keep Vera away from these papers. Can you hear me, Brian? That’s it, let me in here on your lap.
The young man means well. It’s true he is full of psychic energy. I love to play with him. I work him up, lapping his ideas with my tongue. Sex is the key to his spirit. I get him so hard that he moans for release. And that’s where I slip in. I must get off in time to get through. That’s the catch, trying to jump back into time. I am a spirit. Time is like a Broadway show, and getting into time is like getting cast in the show. You wait and wait for the callback. Well, this stud with the urge to write is my show. As long as he is here in this time of yours, I can slip onto the stage. You see, Brian is tuned to my wavelength, a queer blue wavelength. His confused but enthusiastic brain has all the letters, even a few ideas, waiting to be assembled. When I get him receptive, I can write through him, pushing his pen, revealing the truth. Truth is revealed in many ways. As I said before (Oh, I do love this time thing—before, after, then, way back, all those words), as I said before, some spirit communicators possess stuffy academic types. I go for the physical. Why be so serious? That’s what I love about Red. He has a sense of humor too. Brian is a young Italian stud. I love it!
Hey! he is really into me! Wait till I tell Vera.
Brian, relax. Feel this? Feel that? Mmmmm. That’s it.
I turn you on, man. The goddamned spirits are into me!
I read that Jack Kerouac wrote on a roll of shelf paper, nonstop, on speed, running the roll through the typewriter. This spirit might have a lot to say. If this works out, maybe I should get a typewriter to take with me when I move to Mark’s apartment in Soho. I am, as Vera says, a lighthouse. Mmmmm, I feel so good. Like standing on a rock, getting drenched by warm waves, salty naked burning. So, this spirit thinks I’m hot. Hey, I can dig it. Vera said to surround myself with white light and no spirit can harm me, and I dig the attention. Beat. He fights me on my using “into” but I say, Hey, then go find a science freak. I am “into” writing the story of my dear neighbor, Benjamin Quinn. I wish I knew more about him. I am into erections and shooting stars!
Come, come. That’s it. Now Brian is relaxed and receptive and I can tell the story of Benjamin Quinn who was born in Australia in 1917.
There is a ship in the North Atlantic. On the deck of the ship, which is headed for the Great War in France, stands a handsome drunken sailor named Teddy Purnhagen.
Hey! I am into Teddy Purnhagen! I am into Teddy’s pants!
Brian, don’t fight me. He focuses on the sailor’s erection. I too focus on the erection.
Teddy Purnhagen rubs his crotch, unbuttons his pants, and pulls his penis in the moonlight. It is midnight. The deck is deserted. Teddy’s legs flex and he moans and ejaculates. He finishes the last of the whiskey from the flask his father had given him at the train station in Ohio. Teddy slips from the deck into the ocean and is drowned beneath the hull and mangled by the ship. His twentieth-century life (He was born in 1900 and had always thought of his life as innovative. He was going to explore the world beyond Ohio. A new generation, a new century) came to an abrupt end in this drunken, drained slide into the Atlantic.
In that dark night there were millions of stars visible. The star pinpointed above the ship became Teddy Purnhagen’s signature star on his short life. Just as the Big Dipper is connected by stars, everyone has his own constellation. If all the high points of Teddy’s life were connected, the picture, the symbol that would appear would look very much like a man with an erection.
Teddy Purnhagen’s signature star, which is the dickhead on the man with the erection, is Benjamin Quinn’s first star. As Teddy’s spirit, my friend, Red, surfaced from the Atlantic,
it soared to the dingy flat above the bakery in New South Wales, Australia, where baby Benjamin was being born. Red, exhausted from the whole Purnhagen confusion and the flight, nestled deep into the new safe pure innocence of the baby. Benjamin cried. The midwife whacked him on the buttocks. He cried louder, but was soon coaxed to sleep by a very tired red spirit.
Catherine Quinn and her husband, the baker, were thrilled with their new son. He was to be their only child. Benjamin’s father burned to death when the oven ignited his apron and the entire bakery, while two-month-old Benjamin was out for a ride in the new baby carriage his mother pushed. His father had worked overtime baking for three weddings and four wakes in order to save enough money to buy the best baby carriage for his son, and because of his exhaustion, he became careless, and as he fumbled with a tray of biscuits near the ovens, his apron caught fire. Catherine proudly pushed her son, letting herself dare to show off for once. She felt that people seeing the new pram and the handsome child were envious of her. She let herself feel lucky and well off, and then with her head held high, she noticed the smoke rising above the buildings and she returned to her street to find her husband charred and dead, pulled from the fire, and their home burned to ruins. At that moment, Catherine felt she was being punished for her brief moment of pride. The guilt she accepted fertilized the seed of cancer that was in her uterus.
She took the baby and the buggy and moved to Sydney where she was hired as a cook for a wealthy banking family. Catherine and Benjamin were given two rooms off the kitchen in the banker’s mansion. She wrote to her only living relative, her sister Evelyn, who lived in London: “Heartache upon heartache, the Lord works in strange ways. I accept that and pray for forgiveness for my wrongdoings. My little Benjamin is the only joy I know. He is a very quiet obedient child. The family has given us two extravagant rooms. One has a carpet covered in red roses. The lady of the house told me that the carpet came from Hong Kong. I admit that I have overheard her tell guests that all of their furniture is imported. That is how rich they are. Pray for your poor sister and nephew. Your sister, Catherine.”
Men on Men Page 5