Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “That your favorite book?” he said to Sam.

  “It is.”

  “I like it, Sam, but it’s making me awfully horny.”

  Sam was alert. “What’s that you say?” He’d drunk hardly any brandy. “You said horny?”

  I forget, said Harry, yawning, turning over.

  Kevin’s favorite book was something he called Murder in Three Acts by Agatha Christie. He was the neighbor upstairs with a bigger hard-on than Gunther’s. And a writer. Jesus! You live with a reader, plus you got a writer tap-tap-typing all day and all night over your head like a—guardian angel, or a spy …

  Gunther said he had no “favorite book,” that the books he read were tools to open his mind. Harry’s mind, said Gunther, was impossible to widen. Long ago all its circuits, its possibilities, had been fused. Harry would always be a dumb piece of shit. “But with a little time, asshole, I’ll widen your asshole.” “It’s wide open already,” said Harry, throwing up a fart at him. “And so is my mind if only you knew, bookworm.” That was Gunther, a bookworm, a rundown worm who sometimes couldn’t even get it up; and what was he, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-two? Tell me. Harry would lie there on the floor and watch Gunther shake his misshapen cock up and down, to and fro, watch him curse it, and he’d laugh. “Your cock is a worm, bookworm. Why don’t you let it read a book, worm? Slip it in the pages like a bookmarker, bookworm. Yeah, Gunther, shake it! Go ahead and shake it good. Does a whole lot in motion. A whole hell lot of good.” Gunther would get furious with him, go apeshit. At least he, Harry Van, had a cock that worked, that hardened on demand, that wasn’t a limp pathetic spaghetti pink red and white thing like a dopey valentine. Gunther Fielder, who had so many books, that he called “tools,” yet the tool he’d been born with couldn’t cut mustard. Harry laughed. Even with a gag in his mouth laughter farted its way out of his body. Why not? Laughter’s natural when you see something ludicrous. “Tools!” A thousand “tools” on these shelves, and Gunther was impotent.

  No wonder then, as summer melted into September, Harry had come to feel closer to Gunther than to any other person in his life. The two of them were bound together not just by the sex they had, or the rooms they shared, but by all the lessons taught back and forth that don’t come out of books but from the knowledge of what the body can and can’t do. Sometimes Harry felt as though he had two bodies, his own and Gunther’s, and when he was in Gunther’s he felt sad, unable to exist happily inside him. Yet sometimes when Gunther began to punish him, for some petty shit thing, Harry was able to escape and inhabit instead the body Gunther lashed from, to feel from inside everything happening to them both. So Harry could think, and say, “This hurts him more than it hurts just me,” and not feel he was lying one bit. That was okay, though. I mean what’s the big deal.

  Still he wandered through the furnishings of Gunther’s apartment, this afternoon, feeling tired and weary. He needed some vitamin pills. His straps were beginning to chafe the red scratched spaces round his ankles. He needed Desenex too. “I feel sad more,” he said. “There’s not very much to do around here.” He sat down and started to jerk off, then put his dick back in his shorts. Too much trouble. It was too gray an afternoon to waste. He stared at the whitish, graying, yellowing fly of his shorts, and imagined the sun rising and setting inside it. Everytime he came, a sun burst. But if he wasted it too soon, on this dingy summer day, that would leave twenty minutes or so of afternoon spread out before him like an uninviting, colorless rainbow. So instead Harry patted his crotch and whispered to it. Talking into the final thing that kept him alive like a Hot Line volunteer on a switchboard.

  Then leaning back, he raised his legs above his head, and the long vinyl straps fell all around him like streamers, and gave him pleasure. He bicycled in the air, and the straps made a hissing noise round his head like the blades of a helicopter propeller. “Go, man, go,” he whispered, in a melody of his own invention. “Go, man, go, Speed Angel. Go, man, go Sky King.”

  Sometimes he wished Gunther would get a tattoo on each shoulder. That would look cool. One arm could have Speed Angel on it, and the other arm—turn around Gunther—Sky King. “And it would be me!”

  Gunther said he didn’t want tattoos, but Harry talked about them so much that they decided to tattoo Harry. It didn’t hurt as much as tickle, it was no worse than getting vaccinated. So far they’d only gotten up to the “e” in “Gunther.” Gunther was performing the job very slowly, with a sewing needle, a candle, and a bottle of Waterman’s blue ink. “Put clouds around it,” Harry would urge, leaning back and straining to watch the name grow longer across his ass. “Or roses, or planets. Don’t just make it just the name.” “Quiet please,” Gunther joked, “surgeon at work.” To make sure the ink would never run, he had Harry sit in a handbasin filled with water for twenty-four hours. “Or do you think maybe thirty-six hours? What d’you think, Harry?” Gunther seemed so worried Harry had to share his concern. “I guess, wow, I don’t know, we’ll just see after twenty-four, see if the ink’s still there.” “Okay, we’ll do it your way.” “I like this,” said Harry, sitting in the water, hands on his knees, as Gunther prowled around the bedroom dressing. “What about you, Gunther? This is kind of fun, ain’t it?”

  “I can’t find my other tennis shoe,” Gunther said, tearing the room apart. “Why can’t you keep this place in some kind of order? You’re home all day.”

  “I mean, like you do think it’s fun?” Harry asked uncertainly. “I mean I do. Wow, wait till we get the whole word ‘Gunther.’ How many more letters you got after ‘e’ in your name? Just a couple? I forget.”

  Finally Gunther found the shoe next to the toilet. He must have kicked it off while relaxing, taking a shit.

  “How many more letters past ‘e,’ huh, Gunther?”

  “One,” Gunther said, jiggling his car keys. He pointed to different spots around the apartment. “Try to get something done around here, okay? Today?”

  “Oh, sure, Gunther, yeah, except I’ll be sitting here in this tub all day like and I can’t get up. Wow, I’m sorry. I know, Kevin will come over. He’ll do it. I’ll ask him. I’ll ask Kevin to do it.”

  Gunther rushed to him. “I don’t want him here,” he said, his breath hot on Harry’s chest. “Got me?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Nosy kind of guy,” Gunther said after a beat, relenting, standing up again. “He’d like to break up our little arrangement here. He’s that kind of guy, nosy. I hear he’s been down here your ass is grass, got me?”

  Harry yawned, waving him away. “You sound like Cadet Capers,’’ he said. “Have a nice day.”

  Harry thought once more of that book, The Old Wives’ Tale. What a crock of shit. Why did Gunther want to read a book about old ladies anyhow? Tell me. He let his legs fall and rested a minute. The straps settled along the rug like black curly snakes. His ankles itched but scratching makes things worse. Their color was bad. The red patches looked as red as blood now. Above the kitchen sink Gunther kept a grocery list, but Harry couldn’t tell if Desenex was on the list because he forgot right now what letter “Desenex” begins with.

  In the middle of the night Gunther would wake up, startled, sweating, and from his crib on the floor Harry could see his eyes wide and white as baseballs. “What’s the matter?” “Ssshhh!”

  Then Harry would focus and hear what Gunther was hearing: the tap tap tap of Kevin’s typewriter upstairs. Gunther whispered, “Writing down our lives, and then what will happen!”

  “Aw don’t carry on about Kevin,” Harry said muzzily. “He’s harmless.”

  “He’s a fly on the wall!” Gunther insisted, his face so white and his breath so labored that Harry would have rushed to comfort him were he not strapped down by the balls to his Pliofilm-covered pad. This would go on at intervals all night sometimes and could drive a person Looney Tunes and completely haywire.

  It was true that Kevin was writing some kind of book, but he was secretive about it when aske
d. Was he really, as Gunther believed, listening in on their private talks and conversations? Was his book the story of their lives? “Well,” Harry said, “I’ll never read it so who cares?” And actually if a person is gonna get pushed around and get fucked all the time what’s wrong with an audience? It makes your life dramatic anyhow. Gives you a sense of interest.

  “One letter, moron. After ‘e’ just one letter. GUNTHER, Gunther! One letter more.” The ink was good ink, stayed in the skin. Harry felt under the shorts for the raised fruity letters on his backside, found them. Left cheek. Maybe they’d save the right for Gunther’s last name. That would look cool all right. His ass was already the hottest square foot of flesh that ever was. But there is always room for improvement. He forgot right now what Gunther’s last name says anyhow. Something stupid. Many letters. Not “Van.” “Van” is a good last name with not many letters in it. Three. Easy to write. He spit on his fingers and rubbed his left cheek up and down, loosening some of its soreness. From there it was a natural thing to do, to grab hold his hard-on and to pull on it. His fingers flew up and down, wet with spit, warm, sweaty. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and watched the underwear subside, still shaking, like a collapsed tent falling on some stupid Boy Scouts with merit badges who go to school but have no common sense. Jerks.

  Since his last escape from the Shelter, Harry had boarded for six weeks with one woman and counted that a long spell. Then with Paula and her mom I don’t know how long: two, three weeks, about average. Then ten days in New York City with two well-to-do vampires, where he’d had a good time kind of but still. Then living under the boardwalk down at the beach like a homeless hobo. And since then—his lips opened and shut, as he traced with a faltering finger the dates on the kitchen calendar—and since then, ever since then, he’d been here. “This is the longest time I’ve been in one place. This. This time. In my life.” No wonder then he felt settled at last. All this was his: this accumulation of boxes of dates and days. With a red pen he ran through the long seven-day weeks, all of which he’d spent here, under Gunther’s roof and thumb, and whooped, as happy as he could possibly be or ever had been in memory.

  Gunther had been in Kevin’s apartment upstairs one time, and he’d spotted a glass lying on the floor, and then he came downstairs and went crazy. “He keeps that glass there to listen through.” “Ah, Gunther, come off it.” “Whisper!” Gunther said, his mouth tiny, his voice hissing like a dragonfly. “When he’s not typing his ear’s to the floor, and do you hear him typing, do you, asshole?” “Gunther, I don’t even think he’s home.” “But how would we know!”

  “God, a fucking glass on the floor and you’re acting like this is what do you call it, Watergate?” “I said whisper.” “Is it Watergate I mean?” “Yeah Einstein,” said Gunther, resigned suddenly, his muscles relaxing as he came into Harry’s mouth, “yeah, yeah, yeah it’s Watergate you mean.”

  Gunther drove up and came in quietly. Harry didn’t speak. What was there to talk about? The house? Gunther thought so. He came out of his room, spluttering like Elmer Fudd about dust.

  “You can write your name on top of the dresser,” he said in disgust. “Melanie always kept my room in order.”

  “Who’s Melanie?”

  “Never mind her,” Gunther objected. “She’s someone I should have stayed married to.”

  “Maybe so if you don’t like dust,” Harry said as he went to find the duster. “You need a good lady’s maid if no dust is what you want. I’ve got too much to do already so fuck this dusting your dresser. I got allergies, you know.” He didn’t really, but he had to invent something, the way he thought that Gunther had invented a wife, to taunt him with, as if to say I used to fuck women. Jerk! He didn’t remember right now what allergies are anyway but big shit.

  Gunther returned to his car and shut the door, but remained seated there just watching him, an expression Harry couldn’t read written across his face. The motor revved. Gunther picked his two front teeth with a fingernail.

  “What are you waiting for, go, man, go!” Harry finally cried. He wondered about Gunther. When they’d first met, Gunther had been a mystery to him—now he thought he could see right through him, like glass. He used to fuck women. So did I, Harry thought dolefully. In the kitchen the floor and furniture looked dull and dark. As he began to clean them his heart just wasn’t in it, but who cared.

  For a long time Gunther sat without moving, his chin on his hand, looking out over the great billowing summer landscape which rolled away down the hill as if driven on an invisible flood toward the sea. When he turned to Harry his eyes were full of a puzzled sadness. “Clean up the house, okay pal?” In the old days, in their frenetic inconclusive talks, Gunther had often confessed his grief at being friendless. And now Harry heard in Gunther’s voice the lonely man’s indignation at the unworthiness of those given what he’d been denied. “Pal?” Gunther repeated.

  “Yes,” Harry said, turning away from the screen door. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Look, Gunther, I don’t have any more friends than you do.” Instead he shut the door and leaned against it, trailing his straps like a host of pups on leashes. In the old days, before he’d made Gunther take him in, the two of them had sat up all hours underneath the pier where they’d met, where he’d been crashing, talking about women, cars, the weather. Often, leaning back, real fucked up and giddy, Harry had imagined that there were no studded boards above their heads, that the delicate band of heaven itself is all we need or want of shelter. In those days he had had the advantage of Gunther’s muted, suspicious friendship without having promised to make him happy. Now he’d lost that advantage, and brought happiness to neither of their lives, only a kind of sensual ecstasy that was, he began to see, his meat, not Gunther’s especially. No wonder then he felt he had brought Gunther to the brink of misery by conjoining their bodies. And now it was September.

  All through the house he crept, with a bucket of dirty water and a brush the size of a brick. Kitchen first, then Gunther’s room, then the front room, and lastly he approached the spare room. He’d never been in this room before, he’d been warned, like Bluebeard’s wife, to keep his ass out of it. “So it can’t be very clean,” he said, “and so it deserves a good scrubbing.” Viciously he threw open the door and saw nothing. Dust, dust, more dust; a closet door, closed. Big mother room with nothing in it but dust and a door.

  He took up the rug and dust flew into his sensitive sharp nose. “God bless me,” he said aloud after a sneeze. At this he had to crack a smile, against his will. His upper lip curved like a mustache. “And God bless Uncle Joey and Aunt Rube and Uncle Flem and Uncle Pete.” Forgotten people from forgotten territory. “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lay down on.” The tinny metal scrub bucket clattered to one side. Water and suds spilled across the wooden floor, under the closet door, so he opened it wide, noting how the water had soaked a throw rug inside, big shit. Nevertheless he took it up, swearing, and that’s when he noticed the hole in the closet floor, something bright beneath it, glittering in oils. His soapy red hands trembled.

  A secret!

  After a minute he threw both brush and rug to one side and stared into the hole, then sat back, his face and throat hot among the cuffs and sleeves of Gunther’s expensive winter clothes which hung above him, grinning and sneering like kids who go to school …

  Then he forced himself to look down again. Gleaming from the open space was a small oil painting. A beautiful woman, a goddess, was leaping over a brook. Her legs were long and her white dress flew behind her, happy, and over her head in a blue sky Harry saw a string of flowers and ribbons with words written on them. He choked. Heavy tweed, brass buttons, tickled his upturned face.

  “It’s very quiet in here,” Harry said. “It’s just me and the oil painting.” He looked downwards once more. “I can hear my own tears. Why, Gunther, why?”

  For it must be that Gunther had hidden from him this beautiful oil painting. “Why? W
hy?” He must have thought Harry would steal it. Harry did not touch it. Already the oil painting seemed to have lost some of its beauty. He’d lost something too: that beautiful faith he had in the goodness of people. “Gunther,” he said to himself. “Gunther suspicious. Gunther believing the worst of me, in this house, where I loved and trusted him. Gunther prying up the floorboards, sealing up valuables, pretending to be careless, letting me think I had the run of the house but hiding his feelings from me, from Harry, Sky King, Speed Angel …”

  The rug, the missing floorboards, the winter wardrobe and Gunther’s insistence, like Bluebeard, that he keep out of this closet—all tied together now to make the situation bleak as road tar. They spoke to Harry of a past, or a future (“I can’t decide which”), that belonged to Gunther Fielder and would never be his. But why hadn’t Gunther given him his trust? He’d given Gunther everything he had, and ever would have. Then Harry remembered the burns that ran up his legs and spotted his scrotum like so many scraps of shiny cellophane. Maybe Gunther had been burned too. Burning makes a person paranoid and mistrustful. But he’d been so fond of Gunther that he’d asked him no questions, once he’d determined what kind of pleasure he could take from him, a bee at the lip of flower.

  These burns that marked their love weren’t his. They hardly hurt; but insofar as they once had stung they belonged, like everything else in and under this house, to Gunther Fielder. Nothing was Harry’s. Gunther’s name was written on every surface. Harry stood and felt the uncompleted name on his ass, rubbed it ruefully. “You could write your name on the top of my dresser,” Gunther had complained. What an invitation! Like giving a blind man the run of your library. With a deep sigh, Harry replaced the boards carefully in the floor and spread out the rug. It was not until he reached the door that he thought of leaving Gunther.