Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  What if I am a black woman who propositions one of these talented big fish. What a smile I’m capable of, I flash him one of these. I’m wearing a black beaded tunic I mentally refer to as my star-spangled night and the streets aren’t paved. Want some tequila? Just a splash. What if we’re naked together, clothes tossed over a chair and he only fucks me in the missionary position. What if I ask after a while if that’s all.

  What if he says, “Baby, I’m just warming up, just giving you a taste.” I am the bottom man and this river is the top man, lithe and muscular with two handfuls of flesh. I am a bottom, the person who really controls is the bottom and sex is the top and I arrange for it to take my streaming body and clear me of names and express me and bring me to a point. This is pleasure and I’m no fool.

  BRIAN SAID, “JACKIE KENNEDY MADE the pillbox hat famous. She made Halston famous, she made sleeveless dresses famous, she made Valentino famous. She made Gucci famous.” “Thrilling words,” I said, “I can only add that the discovery of the individual was made in early 15th century Florence. Nothing can alter that fact. Don’t you think that’s interesting? I do.” Brian laughed at me and said, “You’re like e = mc2, always brimful of meaning.” Then he asked conversationally, “Don’t you think your cock is more interesting? I do.” I thought it was a likely topic and finished my coffee. “Or am I putting words in your mouth?” he continued, taking my cock in his mouth and laying his head on my lap, still looking up at my face. I replied, “I reckon I’ll just kick back and get me some old-fashioned, down-home French.” Brian looked like a fetus. Then he sat up and said, “We boys in the back room voted you Mr. Congeniality.” “What makes me a great catch?” I asked, falling into his arms so he’d have to catch me. “Looking for compliments?” “I just want to sec if our lists tally.” Then, seriously, “You know, I have a very beautiful couch.” By way of response Brian tickled me, which escalated into wrestling. I lost because I wanted to see what he would do with an immobilized me; he held me down and started licking my torso while I mock resisted even though I was hard. “Want a frozen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?” he asked my extravagantly arching neck. I pictured them stacked neatly in his freezer. Coffee, Kools and peanut butter cups were Brian’s staff of life. I followed him into the kitchen, past his new room arrangement that I had just admired upside down through the bedroom door.

  Brian lived in a bungalow in Venice, CA—a bedroom, living room and kitchen. He furnished the living room with a mattress, a box spring, a large palm, a poster-size print of a sepia photograph of women in long skirts carrying rifles in the Mexican Revolution, and another poster of the Hiroshige woodblock print (36 Views of. , .). The room was spotless and these five elements constantly found new spatial relationships. I followed him: a small deco kitchen with a total of four dishes, three cups, two one-quart stainless steel saucepans, mismatched flatware for two and a half, and a knife. I liked the cups, Mexican enamel with a decal of an innocent nosegay.

  We stood in the dark kitchen kissing; that got old. He wanted to sit on my lap. I was so aroused I was wide open. We mutual masturbated like that and kissed—I was gasping. I caught our reflection in the window and it was funny to see us so localized inside these giant sensations of pleasure, my hips and muscles permanently cocked.

  That got old so I carried him to the kitchen table where he squatted like a frog and I fucked him. My own body knows what his experienced: each time my cock touched a certain point hot and icy shivers radiated outward. I burn and freeze. If you have a man’s body that is what you would feel. A cock’s pleasure is like a fist, concentrated; anal pleasure is diffused, an open palm, and the pleasure of an anal orgasm is founded on relaxation. It’s hard to understand how a man can write well if he doesn’t like to be fucked. There’s no evidence to support this theory; still, you can’t be so straight that you don’t submit to pleasure. Ezra Pound claimed his poetry was a penis aimed at the passive vulva of London. Perhaps that’s why his writing is so worried, brow-furrowed. We dallied with coming for a while but decided no. Brian loved to be carried and pleasure made me powerful, sent blood to my muscles and aligned them. I lifted him from the table and fucked him in the air. .

  It was great sex—not because of the acrobatics, not even because he loved me and showed it and showed it, but because we were both there, very much of us, two people instead of two porno-movie fragments. Brian knelt in front of me, sucking the cock that fucked him. That’s one—among many—of the things I wouldn’t do. Don’t do too often. It’s not so bad, but all I think is now I’m doing this and what disease will I get. I quickly brush the cock with my hand like kids sharing a bottle of Coke, certain that no germs are killed, just so something besides my lips touches it first. I admired Brian’s range and mobility; his sexuality makes little concession to the world. I contrasted him favorably with myself. Brian is more sexually alive than anyone I know. A shower of sparks spills off his skin like inside a foundry. I’m a little more cautious, a little less generous. Let’s say I had to avert my eyes.

  I had to piss, Brian smiled, I laughed—a light went on about all the coffee he kept feeding me. Ed, whose dream life still seems definitive, described pissing into epic Busby Berkeley waterfall fantasies, erotic masterpieces of technical know-how. I presented to Brian the difficulty of pissing when hard, but in the spirit of the great director he assured me that when there’s a will there’s a way. All the same, these particular golden showers were intermittent. Kneeling, he put his head between my legs —I piss on his back, then slowly in his mouth. Because the temperature was all the same I couldn’t tell what was cock, mouth or urine, like pissing in a lake, just feeling warmth and a pressure outward. I envied Brian the clarity of his position.

  Not sex, but my concern for you makes this story vulgar. You see I named it before you could. Brian and I were both so powerful, admiring each other’s power. Surely power and sexuality seek each other out, even if ultimately they are held in a suspension. But our force was opposite to the kind that oppresses and controls, so it engendered permissiveness and generosity. Like the strategies of the two mothers who wanted to reclaim their lives: on the one hand, power lies in understanding the given terms and using them as leverage; on the other hand, power changes the terms. In literature, the former is technique— I wanted to create beautiful things (precious stones); the latter, tactics—I want a dynamic relation with my audience (my husband).

  I scooped Brian up, kissed him and carried him back to bed. He asked me if I’d like to hear about his confinement in a mental institution. He asked so politely that I understood he wanted to tell me about it: “You have to understand I repeated the story about 498 times during the first two days—doctors are even more curious than you—but I’ll try to make it fresh.” (It’s true he talked as though he were composing a letter.) He began, “Well, Bobbo, it’s like this:

  “I’d been whittling my life down so that smoking a cigarette became an actual activity. I just broke up with a boy named Aaron who lived about three blocks away. I used to visit him in his new apartment and model for a painting called The Junkie. It showed me sitting in a pile of garbage with a needle in my arm.”

  “You sat there with a needle in your arm?”

  “After I went nuts, Aaron told me he never found anyone who could hold the pose as long. I was taking a visual perception course taught by a woman named Edith Hammer. She was a great teacher; she’d show different works from different times and compare their visual components. After my second class I had an acute guilt attack, rushed to an art supply store and bought a large square canvas, paints and brushes. I rushed home to the apartment I had shared with Aaron but now occupied alone, and started painting.

  “At first the idea seemed lyrical and intelligent: to make a cross section of reality in the form of a house.”

  “Sounds like an idea to me. Meaning and Safety.”

  “The windows were shaped like coffins and corresponded to gravestones above. The windows opened on a blank hori
zon. Above was a cemetery scene illustrating a story from my mother’s childhood; it showed my grandmother and my aunt sitting under a tree, my mother as a child running to them, and my uncle as a baby watching the whole thing from behind the tree. It was done in mottled brilliant colors and I was very excited about it.

  “I would wake up every morning and see something else and keep working, drawn deeper into it. I saw duality in everything; the painting helped me break down reality into its basic components and I thought if I saw past the duality I’d get to the nitty-gritty. Meanwhile it was getting a little scary. I titled the painting The Conception and Evolution of Brainchild’s Unity Theorem, and when I printed that on a piece of paper and thumbtacked it to the lower comer, the gesture completed the delusion. I thought I had brought the symbol to reality—that some presence came from my painting through the white of the clouds which were unpainted, thus being a void. Then I had the terrifying conviction that I somehow evolved myself through the painting to be God.

  “The more I tried to reason it out, the deeper I got. I tried burning the frame I had made in my bathtub, thinking if I partially destroyed the painting I could save myself. I was afraid if I burned the whole painting I might die or the world might end. I started schlepping the painting. I took it to school—‘nice’ —and then to Miss Hammer—‘spiritual.’ I wanted to throw up.

  “Finally after a visit to my friend Mary Dell (with the painting)—no one seemed to be able to deal with what was going on with me. I called Mary Dell back that night and she drove me to the hospital where I lied and said I had insurance and committed myself. The admitting shrink thought I was tripping.”

  Brian had finished. I felt trapped by his story: his years felt like a graph with sadness as both scales. It struck me that the same qualities—generosity, emotional presence—that paved the way for all this distress also made him good at love. Should I charge in and set up squatter’s rights in his experience? He wasn’t dejected, didn’t call for support or even sympathy. Just because of that, he seemed to test my aptitude for sympathy and support. I feared Brian might want to be saved, and how could I do that? Then I realized he just wanted me to pay attention. With tremendous exertion I asked him some interested questions. How long was he in? Nine months. Jesus! Did they try to cure him of being gay? (I squeezed his cock.) Yes, although they didn’t succeed. (He squeezed my cock.) But in the end the violence of Brian’s story was so much a condensation of dream to me that I was falling asleep; sleep was a cliff that I fell off, drifting slowly as a parsley flake in a jar of oil. Did he have to wear a uniform? Yes. They sedated him most of the time.

  Our bodies had turned around. We looked up at the ceiling, absentmindedly playing with our own and each other’s cocks, which enhanced my detached response to Brian’s story. As a postscript he added: “Aaron embraced the Bahai faith and swore himself to celibacy. He now lives in a trailer in Champagne, Minnesota, and calls me occasionally to ease the Way. The painting ended up in my shrink’s office closet. I moved to Los Angeles and found a job as the manager of the toddler’s department at Saks.” (I see him looking like the sun in his linen suit. He’s saying—with his hand over his heart—to a bullying child, “Hey, gimme a break.”)

  In the silence that followed we applied ourselves to each other’s body more creatively; we dribbled on some Vaseline Intensive Care lotion while Brian speculated that probably gay men have younger cocks because of the oils and lubricants. Truman Capote wrote that we also have youthful necks and chins, I added, because of all the sucking. I recalled an Isherwood quotation: “Of course it would never have occurred to any of them to worry about the psychological significance of their tastes.” I copied this passage on my journal page after three recipes for potato salad.

  I don’t think “disturbed” people are more healthy than “normal” ones, but sometimes there is a fine line, or no line at all, between “disturbed” and oppressed. Driven crazy is more like it. And the psychiatrist’s couch turns this oppression to profit. Are oppressed people more sexual? Other forms of discourse— languages of production and ownership—have been denied us or disowned. By default we are left with sex and the emotions —devalued as a Cinderella at the hearth. And then we become —maybe—Cinderella at the ball. Then we are blamed for embracing sexuality and we will be a bone in the throat of people who don’t. It’s the same with the popular cultures of gays, people of color, women, the working class. They are feared because they draw energy away from “productive goals.” And they are colonized, neutralized and imported into our stagnant mainstream culture. Sex is a sign of life. If sex is relegated to gays as a sign of our devalued state—becoming the shimmer of jewels— it’s strange to me that the Left hasn’t broached the topic of pleasure. You could say the Left leaves it to Freud, but where is pleasure in all his systems and epi-systems? In all that dominant where is the tonic, the home key?

  Brian asked, “What would you like?” A thought sailed by, “It would be nice if you …” Here inspiration failed—I was dejected, couldn’t grasp the rest. It was growing light. I felt a little scared to be doing this for so many hours, a little “disturbed.” I thought of the Marquis de Sade, the business of being perpetually feverish, energy spiraling out because it’s mental, disconnected from physical rhythms, busy, busy, busy. I wanted my borders back; I wanted to curl into myself intact as a nautilus shell and let my sleeping mind group and regroup to absorb and master this experience. I said, “Masturbate me as slowly as you can.” We lay on our backs, side by side and head to foot. This is really a solitary activity for two in that your attention equals your sensation, and the hand on the other’s cock requires as little care as the hand that grasps a branch in the Russian River. We masturbated each other slowly, achingly gathering up skin into folds which were meditative and inward turning as the mantle of a 14th century Madonna; then in a reversal that we experienced as a huge change from night to day, or the turning in some great argument, we brought our hands down. It made us gasp. The pace was excruciating. We were permanently aroused, erectile tissue flooded and damned up, and so we enjoyed a kind of leisure and Mozartian wit based on invention. I knew from the first with Brian that we would continue. Love and friendship aside, you can tell on a first meeting the number of exchanges it will take to accomplish the various sexual permutations—know by the way he touched you rather than by positions and tastes.

  I could just see the top of Brian’s sunny head over the horizon of his chest. Silence, gasps—out of the blue he said, “You would have looked like dynamite in that toga.”

  What if I’m fucking on the grass in ancient Rome like we always do on Wednesday night. Is it Thursday? What’s one day? Nothing—you turn around and it’s dark, the tick and tock of day and night. What if I’m the woman? I’m languidly stretched out on the grass fanning myself with a spray of flowering myrtle. When he enters me I’m spread open as a moth, I’m all colors. What if I’m the guy when I feel someone on me and wham!—I’ve got a cock up my ass—I never saw the guy before and I still haven’t seen him but I ride his cock—why not? —I’m riding it across a continent of skin. I feel like a sandwich, the pleasure’s in the middle because no one has had or knows this much—I can’t see, I’m bellowing and I start to come, it begins in my ass as a pinpoint of light a thousand miles away. I move closer to it with a religious sense of well-being and when I come I shout a little prayer—I shout Je-Sus!

  What if I’m fucking this boy and his orgasm is so absolute it leaves me gasping. What if I’m watching the three of them calling on the “gods and gasping their extravagance—their arms and legs, their skin filled with rosy orifices, they look like an anemone. First I’m the woman, then I’m the man, then I’m Catullus, then I’m an observer remembering a poem, the distance becoming erotic.

  He’s going to make us into a poem, I’ve heard better lines. What if he takes us to his villa and merely to pluck at my nipples he feeds me olives pickled in caraway, dormice dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seed
s, sausages, orioles seasoned with pepper, capons and sow bellies, blood pudding, Egyptian and Syrian dates, veal, little cakes, grapes, pickled beets, Spanish wine and hot honey, chickpeas and lupins, endless filberts, an apple, roast bear meat, soft cheese steeped in fresh wine, tripe hash, liver in pastry boats, oysters and hot buttered snails, pastry thrushes with raisin and nut stuffing, quinces with thorns stuck in them to resemble sea urchins, because I’m handsome.

  Some people like sex, most men don’t. What if I’m blowing him, I look up as he brings down a knife—I either die or don’t die. I’m alone at night in bed, someone’s moving silently up the stairs—this was to be a sexual rendezvous but instead he intends to wrap a wire around my neck. I don’t die but my erection’s gone. I must begin again: what if he puts his hand under my tunic, his finger up my ass and I squirm down on it, why not? My girl’s laughing—dildos shaped like birds and fish. He’s moaning Nostra Lesbia, Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia—what is this, Latin? This guy’s obviously educated.

  Orioles must be aphrodisiac or maybe it’s the situation because all we want to do is fuck, we can’t keep our clothes on, we go to it, showing off for him. I love how our eyes go blank and then we think with our bodies. She licks it like a cat with her rough tongue, or like licking ketchup off your forefinger—one two, that’s all. Then men come and lift me and hold my legs and body while he fucks me and I’m blowing somebody, it’s fantastic, all I ever want to do is this.

  Brian and I were working ourselves around to coming; we enjoyed the sense of absolute well-being and safety that precedes orgasm. But now we are on our knees kissing urgently and masturbating ourselves. Our cocks felt a little ragged and wanted the master’s touch. Masturbation can feel better, although I favor a penetration for emotional meaning. Still, that was hardly necessary since we filled up the house to overflowing, and besides, we weren’t planning to have a baby.