Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Still in the bathroom: “I sit on your lap and you talk to me like a father.” What if desire and power take the form of “Law” as we experience it, whether as the “father” or the “cop.” “Have you been a good boy?” “I have a special treat for you.” “Are you going to do a good job of it?” Whispered while tonguing his ear and raining kisses on his neck and cheek—all the language of blackmail and instrumentality, its context shifted to pleasure. Brian dutifully replied to his father’s cock, not daring to raise his eyes. These few phrases established father and son, where desire is accumulated and forbidden, yet we remained animals exploring pleasure, teasing prostates with inserted forefingers up to the first and second knuckle, learning by heart each other’s cock better than our own, needing to touch all his skin with my tongue: the tonguing of nipples until erect and then little bites accepted resistingly, tongue around the ears inside the head, his curls of blond hair a county line for a tongue going out of town, down the backbone, pause, into the crack, pause, testing the asshole—clean as a whistle, tidy boy—tapping with the slightest pressure, knocking again and again to produce a moan, the straining backward, the gasp of a penetration. Caressing him there satisfied me as though I were touching all of Brian at once.

  That got old and the kettle whistled. We settled back in bed with the coffee. There was no way around it, he loved me. It was plain to see in his melting eyes. More, in the steadiness of that melting gaze: he made me more naked than without clothes. I hadn’t been loved that way for years; my relief was so fierce you could call it passion. Brian loved me quickly and thoroughly, without a credit check on my personality. I felt abashed.

  Responding to my thought he told me the story of his falling in love (which I fill in):

  Brian and two women friends traveled from LA to San Francisco to spend Halloween with me. Brian wanted us to portray Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, and accordingly made costumes and masks which he brought along. They were brown, baby blue, scarlet and royal blue, with matching sequins and feathers. I forget which was mine but I rebelled when I saw the scanty muslin toga. “I’ll make my own costume,” I said, and so we went as Earth, Fire, Water, and a bumblebee. I drank—scared and belligerent. A blur of emotions. In a bar: “I’m a bumblebee, asshole.” We returned home; the scenario indicated passionate happy lovemaking for hours and hours. I dreaded it. Instead I drank a half pint of brandy on top of the evening’s beverages. That was October. I hadn’t divested myself of the summer’s construction project in LA, an escalating nightmare of fraud and anxiety. Ed and I formally separated in June; I desired him in the same way that I still require a cigarette, a physical call. I hardly drink, I never drank. Depressed, I ate Viennese pastry. Ed said he knew when I was upset because I left doilies around the kitchen.

  I drank myself into a crying jag. I peeled off my sweaty cigarette-smelling bumblebee outfit and cried on Brian’s hot skin for hours. Sometimes I paused, then a stronger wave would submerge me and carry me up. Crescendo. The pain registered as isolation. My body really hurt, my skin hurt, so I decided I’d better eat bread to absorb the alcohol. Besides, crying had made me claustrophobic. It was five in the morning. I got up feeling like Monday’s wash, put on one of my abject T-shirts and sat down in the kitchen, wearily sniveling and cramming saltines down my throat. “And that,” said Brian, “is when I fell in love with you.”

  We were on our sides more or less tangled up. His free hand meditated on the slimness of my waist, the power of my shoulders and chest. I basked in his general radiance. I loved his waist and the gold of his skin, I wanted to fold myself into it. Then he slid down and kissed my cock the way you kiss lips. He said, “I love your cock.” He said it with more fervor than customarily applied to a sweet nothing, and so lapidary that I assured myself I would remember it during that amount of “forever” which is to be my portion. I’ve been reading Jane Austen. He said it to my cock’s face, and I thought Oedipally, “A face a mother could love.” “How’s your mother?” And, “How’s her emerald collection?” I liked to hear him recite her stones. I think Brian felt he betrayed her a little, that my eagerness and the question itself was not in the best taste; “Gimme a break,” he would say. And here I am justifying his fears. But really I viewed her collection as a victory, a personal domain wrested from so much that was not hers. I liked its lack of utility and sexual shimmer. I liked the war that each piece represented, complete with siege, ground strategy and storming the fort. Her collection was an Aladdin’s hoard, not an investment. She had: (1) A diamond and emerald bracelet, groups of four each alternating around. (2) A diamond ring that Brian says doubles as a Veg-a-matic. (3) A diamond and gold brooch set in an inch-wide gold bracelet (Brian’s favorite). (4&5) Two pairs of diamond and emerald clips. (6) An emerald brooch, geometric design within a rectangle. (7) Many pearls. (8) A large emerald ring. Plus opals and a few token stones.

  She has a few things. Is she ruling class? A question at this point is a double one: Who stands to gain what? Brian’s mother merely angles back a little of her own power in the going currency of charm and attractiveness. She’s not the Enemy.

  I met the enemy at a gay resort on the Russian River. It felt strange to be there, surrounded by money and its attendant—available and well-groomed flesh. Until that day I spent my vacation at a small neighborhood beach where nakedness was not so much a declaration. Each morning I took Old River Road to about five yards from the Hacienda Bridge, veered right and coasted down a steep grade that carried me back to an older level of houses and crossroads beneath the bridge. Like a dream: there is a world underneath this one and it’s here now. I parked at the end of Hummingbird Lane, stepped over a barbwire fence and its private sign, took a darkly congested path—maple trees and blackberry bushes—which became sunnier—manzanita and buck brush—opening out to the hot sun and an arid span of rock and sand bleached white right up to the river’s channeled coolness. Naked people lay as far from each other as possible. The air was white and deadlocked from reflected heat, it made the sunbathers look like quick sketches. When I wet my lips I almost tasted the remote breeze that stirred the tops of the laurel and Douglas fir growing up the opposite hillside. I couldn’t hear the river; a loud buzzing sound came from the spellbound air, the inactivity, the heat, my own breath—I either submitted to it or felt anxious.

  That stretch of river held a special attraction for me. A few white alders grew on a little island. Next to the island there was a small rapids with an alder overhanging it, and someone had tied a rope around a branch. A swimmer could grab hold of the rope and be carried up by the water—lithe and quick—legs, belly, everything washed and washed. Buoyed up like that, if I submerged my head a giant roaring surrounded me. It was so pleasurable I could endure it only a few minutes. I was bored, alone, diffused—there was no ground to be me pursuing my aims, no margin for the anxiety of perspective, resolution into categories. Gradually I spent more time dangling from that rope; finally I tied myself to it although I feared drowning. What a pleasurable agony each moment is as it dilapidates into the next. The water rushed, brought my body to a point, it felt good.

  My friend Sterling came up from San Francisco and stayed at a gay resort, which is how I found myself lying nakedly with him beside a swimming pool along with fifty other men. I was comforted by the smell of chlorine and hot cement. We looked like a David Hockney that had gotten out of hand; the sun was spinning ribbons in the water and also cooking eight thousand pounds of shellacked gay flesh. Sterling introduced me to suntan oil. His friend Tom, the enemy I mentioned before, had joined us. We repositioned ourselves to the full sun. I was on my stomach, drowsy, and Sterling absentmindedly put his hand on my left asscheek, he put his hand on my ass, he put his hand on my ass and he kept it there, he kept it there—I didn’t move a muscle and basked in his hand more than in the sun, pleasure spread to the back of my legs, my lower back and my nipples—not a muscle, he’d think I was uncomfortable, his hand was hotter than the sun on my other cheek�
��somebody said, “Bob’s got an ass like a peach.” Sterling, who’s black, said, “Not that much color.” I suggested wintermelons. “What?” said Sterling. “Wintermelons.” “What did Bob say?” asked Tom. “He said wintermelons,” Sterling answered.

  Tom gazed abstractly down at his unformulated body, master of all he surveyed. The afternoon passed and much conversation got said and forgotten, but information about his wealth gathered like nuggets or objets d’art set mentally side by side on a mantel. Instead of ormolu clocks and Chinese epergnes, I counted three houses—mansions—in San Antonio, a farm in upstate New York, two houses in Florida, a ranch in the Panhandle, three houses in San Francisco, and condos in New York City and Palm Springs. These were his proud investments; he’d made this million on his own, not resting on the laurels of his inherited millions from Gulf Oil. Answering me, he said, “My watch cost $8,000. Look, it’s a twenty dollar gold piece with a diamond nob, set in a gold case.”

  Tom furnished much food for thought. It shocked me that he was so undefined. At thirty he still had his baby fat, aimless good will. He wore the most conventional plastic leather outfits. Never in his life had he voluntarily read anything more detaining than a magazine. Was this the Pomeranian Earl of Rochester, his overbright eyes leering subnormally under his peruke? I expected manners, Jane Austen, nice debates as to who takes precedence at dinner, fine points. How else do you know you’re different from the servants?—and the people who run your farms and rent your apartments? When I returned from the toilet he joked, “Did everything come out all right?” And later he asked it again.

  How could all that wealth be condensed in this fatuous presence? The answer: it wasn’t. The wealth stayed where it was, intangible. Maybe Tom’s character grew vague by way of response. Tom doesn’t live on top of his servants; his property remains as abstract as the money it equals. Even the fifty Persian carpets he treasures wait in constant breathless readiness to be traded or sold. So manners might be beside the point, the tweed and horses of his seniors a tip of the hat to feudal wealth. But how can I attack Tom’s life and still defend his sexuality? When Sterling, Tom and I walked back to my car we passed a bunch of “youths” whiling away the day lounging on their pickups, and despite Tom’s bank account they started yelling: “Death to Faggots,” “Get Outta Town,” “Kill Queers,” etc.

  Tom became vivid for me in one passage that afternoon. Is it surprising that the medium of his transformation should be pleasure? We were cooling off in the shallow end, watching the suntan oil slick make marbled paper patterns on the pool’s surface. We acknowledged a passing physique, a body that summed up what’s happening these days. Tom attempted a joke about fist-fucking that included a reference to a subway entrance. I said that I could understand the erotic charge of bondage and discipline, of water sports and so on, but I could never grasp fist-fucking’s sensuality. Was it homage to the fist and arm, that masculine power engaged, taken on because inside you? Tom responded with patience and expertise, accustomed to making things clear to laymen. He said that most fist-fucking is beside the point because it stops at what he called the trap. I think that’s a plumbing term. He said that the colon makes a righthand turn and then loops up all the way to the diaphragm. He drew the arch on my torso with his forefinger. If you negotiate that turn and forge ahead, your hand is a membrane away from the heart—in fact, you can actually hold your lover’s beating heart. More than that, after a while your two hearts establish a rapport, beat together, and what physical intimacy could exist beyond this?

  I let out a long breath. I was a little stunned. Until then, being naked, I felt naked. Facing this vista of further nakedness, I felt dressed and encumbered as a Victorian parlor.

  I joined Sterling; I lay face down on an orange plastic cot and dozed. Troubling images: We’re on top of a pyramid. The Aztec priest holds a stone knife in one hand and in the other he lifts the still-beating heart above its former home, the naked warrior, whose lower back balances on a phallic sacrificial stone. He’s held by half-naked priests at the hands and feet, his body still spasming and arching. That from the eighth grade. There were no undressed white people in my textbook. The compilers felt that Indians, like animals, did not possess enough being to be capable of nakedness. If I were that picture everyone’s cock would be hard as the stone knife.

  And this from Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire: “Never had I felt this, never had I experienced it, this yielding of a conscious mortal. But before I could push him away for his own sake, I saw the bluish bruise on his tender neck. He was offering it to me. He was pressing the length of his body against me now, and I felt the hard strength of his sex beneath his clothes pressing against my leg. A wretched gasp escaped my lips, but his bent close, his lips on what must have been so cold, so lifeless to him; and I sank my teeth into his skin, my body rigid, that hard sex driving against me, and I lifted him in passion off the floor. Wave after wave of his beating heart passed into me as, weightless, I rocked with him, devouring him, his ecstasy, his conscious pleasure.”

  The vampire’s erotic charge consists of just this meeting of heartbeats, yet our hero consumes the life he is experiencing. Rice weaves homosexuality into vampire society. Does she think it will make the dead deader? “The pleasures of the damned,’” “the pleasures of the damned”; in “Carmilla,” once Le Fanu underscores his vampire’s grief, you are free to enjoy by proxy her lesbian embrace: “She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, ‘Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation …’ ”

  So death accompanies this heart stuff. And some would say, do say, that Tom’s journey through the anus is a trip to the underworld. Yet this is all very far from the harmony of Tom’s description, far from the particular realm of pleasure that expresses the urge to be radically naked. Tom isn’t dead, neither are his partners. The construction on their pleasure comes later. As Tom and his friend get dressed, culture, ideology and conflict all enter simultaneously, telling us we are supposed to be alone, discontinuous. We experience this as safety. We experience as transgression the penetration of our boundaries, fusion with another, and they warn us that this transgression is fearful as death. Naturally the vampire always wears a criminal half-smile. This guilt, even if slightly embraced, even if an inch stepped toward, becomes a sexual apparatus increasing the pleasure it decreased, a second ego becoming its own opposite.

  I woke up on the plastic cot in the sunlight and shade, looking at a grid of sun the cot stenciled on the cement, thinking over and over Orfeo ed Euridice, Orfeo ed Euridice. I forgot who I was; the music and sunlight seemed more real. It was not a Freudian pun on the composer’s name, nor—I think—the trip through hell motif. Not even the “Dance of the Furies” to which I did my situps every morning. It was the following band I recalled, “The Dance of the Blessed Spirits,” so limpid and noble that I would lie back exhausted and just float.

  Sterling was by my side; the rest of the pool area was mostly deserted. He told me a story about his mother which reminded me of Brian’s mother and her emeralds. While Brian’s mother operated in that middle-class locus of power, the parents’ bedroom, Sterling’s mother went outside of the house, changing the terms. Sterling grew up in San Antonio where his father, a gambler also named Sterling, had married in his forties a woman twenty years younger. Along with other business ventures, Sterling Sr. ran a “buffet flat.” He usually had a mistress but age brought respectability, and now he confines himself to real estate and Adele. Sterling recalls only one fight from his childhood. He can’t remember why, but Sterling Sr. slapped his mother. They were in the kitchen; Adele stood in front of a stove filled with a complicated Sunday dinner. She yelled, “You want a fight, motherfucker? I’ll give you a fight!”—and she systematically thr
ew at her husband: muffins, potatoes, roast, salad, peas, collard greens, gravy and peach pie. Sterling Sr. stood uncertainly for a moment, weighing the merits of an advance. Finally he broke for the front door. Adele followed. She continued throwing the household at him, including, Sterling said with a pang, a cranberry glass lamp with lusters. Sterling Sr. jumped in his car and started to pull away but Adele got a rifle and blew out his tires. He skidded to a service station, changed tires, and spent a few days in Dallas. This affair triggered in Sterling’s mom a meditation; its theme was power and it signaled a change in her relations with Sterling Sr. At that time she worked for a travel agency. Her employers, an alcoholic white couple with liberal views, absconded to Mexico with the advance receipts for a tour of the Holy Land, leaving the agency more or less to Adele. She moved it to the black section of San Antonio and became financially independent. On one of her guided tours of Los Angeles she acquired a lover; they met there for years. All this strengthened Adele’s marriage. The two went past the inspirational bitterness of events to the events themselves, and now they are enjoying their sunset years, closer than ever.

  “What’s a buffet flat?”

  It’s a railroad flat, a long maroon hallway with many rooms: one room had two men doing it, another had two women doing it, and really each room had anyone with anyone, doing it. It’s a sexual buffet. You paid an entrance fee to watch or act. I like the town meeting aspect of this. Also there were stars whom the audience egged on; 1910—big hats and skirts—or the twenties, a little tunic of dark spangles. Against that antique clothing nakedness becomes more naked.