Men on Men

by George Stambolian (ed)

  Cars with bad mufflers blatted and farted through town or throbbed beside a lit cigarette kiosk in front of the dim covered market. The cars were always full of teenage boys, and when they’d get out to buy cigarettes or to go into a bar and buy a paper, he’d see they were fat or thin, usually big handsome men with black moustaches or the first faint charcoal sketches of moustaches.

  It struck Ray that it had been years since he’d seen guys this young. Expensive, childless Manhattan had banned them. Ray imagined that he was back in Findlay, Ohio, on a Saturday night, the dark silent streets suddenly glaring and noisy with a gang in two hotrods. He forgot for a moment that he was forty; he felt he was sixteen, afraid of the hoods who’d driven in from Sandusky or even from as far away as Toledo. He was afraid and curious and contemptuous and excited as he darted along under the old trees, hoping he was invisible.

  He crossed the street to avoid two strolling straight couples, and now he did feel forty. And queer. And foreign. He wouldn’t even know if they were gossiping about him. Worse, he knew he didn’t exist for them, he was invisible.

  As he headed up the gently winding street toward the town zoo, he passed a lone young guy coming down toward him, who stared at him hard, harder and longer even than the other Cretan men normally stared. The boy spit through his teeth as they passed. He struck his heels with spark-making violence against the pavement. And then stopped. Ray heard him stop behind him. If I turn around will he punch me?

  When Ray finally turned around, the young man was standing there staring at him. “Ya,” he said, that short form of Yassou, the all-purpose greeting. Ray could see he was handsome with regular features, an upper lip pulled back to show white teeth made whiter by his moustache and a black beard that he was letting grow in. He had on jeans and a denim jacket, and the jacket sleeves were tight enough to reveal well-muscled upper arms, not the netted cantaloupes Ray had for biceps, but longer, grooved haunches, the tightly muscled arms that the ancient Cretan youths had in those wall-paintings at absurdly over-restored Knossos: murderously slim-waisted matadors.

  He was either very tan or very swarthy. His hair was long and pushed back behind his cars. His slightly unshaved face (the look of the New York model who wears a two-days’ growth of beard as an accessory to his smoking jacket or white silk pajamas), his obviously American jeans jacket, and his long hair were the three things that made him look fractionally different from all the other voting men in this city of young men.

  He kept staring, but then when Ray looked away for an instant, he slipped” into a sidestreet. Ray wondered if he’d be jumped when he followed him. As he turned the corner, the boy was standing there and asked aggressively, “What you want?” and his faint smile suggested he already knew and that Ray’s desire was disgusting and entirely practicable.

  Ray said, “You,” with the sort of airiness that ruined Oscar Wilde, but that word apparently was not one of the boy’s dozen English words. He frowned angrily.

  “Sex,” Ray said, and this time the boy nodded.

  “But money!” he threatened, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. Ray nodded with a face-saving smirk he regretted but couldn’t wipe away. “I fuck you!” the boy added. This time as Ray nodded his smile vanished, a little bit in awe at the mention of this intimacy, once so common, now so rare, so gravely admonished, so fearfully practiced in his plagued city.

  “Profilatikos. You buy. Here.” He pointed to the lit cigarette kiosk on the corner.”

  “No! You buy,” Ray said, the facetious smile back in place but genuine alarm in his heart.

  “You,” the boy insisted, stepping into the shadows of a building.

  Now all of his teenage qualms did come rushing back. He felt his fear of and fascination with the prophylactics dispenser in a Kentucky filling station toilet he’d glimpsed once during a family trip through the Smokies. Or he remembered the time when he’d helped his mother turn back the covers for a married couple who were visiting them, and he’d seen under the pillow the raised circle of the rolled rubber in its foil wrapper. The very width of that circumference had excited him.

  He said the word to the impassive middle-aged woman in the kiosk. She lowered her head on an angle, dropped her eyes, said, “Ne,” which means yes but sounds to English-speakers like no. A second later she’d fished up a box that read, in English, “Love Party” above a photo of a woman in provocative panties, one nyloned knee resting on the edge of a double bed.

  Why rubbers? Ray wondered. Had he heard of our deadly new disease way out here at the end of the world, in a country where there are only two recorded cases, both of whom were visitors to New York? No, he must have in mind the old, curable maladies. Or maybe he just wants to dramatize our roles. I don’t mind. Rubbers are terribly 1958 Saturday night at the drive-in. Maybe he needs a membrane intact to suggest his own virtual virginity.

  A moment later, Ray was pursuing the boy through deserted night streets under big trees, big laurels so dry their gray-green leaves had started curling laterally. Distant motorbikes were test-drilling the night. The turn-of-the-century mansions lining these blocks were dilapidated, shuttered, and unlit behind rusting wrought-iron balconies, although trimmed hedges proved at least some of them were inhabited. The smells of garbage on a hot night alternated with the smell of jasmine, at first sniff slightly sweet, then ruttishly sweet. The boy wouldn’t walk beside Ray, although Ray thought it must look much odder, this strange parade. They turned right off the boulevard and walked up, up a hill through residential streets. The boy’s Keds shone almost phosphorescently white in the dark. Ray was calculating how much money he had in his wallet, while in his heart, his suddenly adolescent heart, he was exulting: “George, I’ve escaped you, I’ve gotten away from you.”

  In one sense he knew he was a slightly sissified middle-aged New York muscle queen somewhat out of her depth. In another sense he felt he was the teenage debating team captain in love again with Juan, son of a migrant Mexican worker who’d been brought to northern Ohio to pick fruit. The first confused conversation with Juan, the visit to the workers’ compound, the smell of cooking chili, the sight of candles burning even by day before the tin shrine of the Virgin … The one thing certain was that whatever was going on in Crete came before or after George and precluded George.

  As they walked along, the boy clicked a keychain, vestigial worry beads. Cats were everywhere, gliding in and out of shadows, daintily pawing black plastic garbage bags, slithering through gaps in fences, sitting on top of parked cars. Twice the boy stopped and scented the path—and now he looked like an Indian brave. Or so Ray thought, smiling at his own way of leafing through his boyhood anthology of erotic fantasies.

  They reached what looked like a schoolyard, dark and empty because it was summer and night, but otherwise like any schoolyard in Ohio—broken concrete playing area, an orange metal basketball hoop dripping rust stains onto the wood backboard, peeling benches, a toilet with separate entrances for boys and girls, a high fence surrounding the whole. The boy scrambled over the fence in two quick steps up and a graceful pivot at the top. Ray followed fearfully, awkwardly (“Here, teach, lemme give you a hand”). The boy gave Ray his hand and produced his first real smile, as dazzling as a camel boy’s (a new page in the anthology flipped open). His skin was surprisingly warm and plush and there were no calluses on his palm. Homer had told Ray that if parents could afford the luxury they preferred to shield their kids as long as possible from work. The boys, their adolescence extended well into their twenties, sat idly around the harbor at night, trying to pick up foreign girls (the sport was called ketnaki, “harpooning”).

  When they ducked into the toilet, in the second that Ray’s eyes took to adjust to the deeper dark, he walked by mistake right into the boy. They both gasped, the boy laughed, maybe a bit insultingly, his teeth lit up the room, Ray started to draw away but his hand had brushed against what could only be a big erection, “big” because of normal size; the boy’s youth, the ni
ght, the danger, the fact he would be getting some money later on, all these things made it “big.” Ray noticed the boy had already unzipped his fly. Out of eagerness?

  Ray wanted him to be eager.

  And then Ray, a famous beauty in his own right, a perennial hot number, hard to please, easily spooked by a maladroit cruiser, pursued throughout his twenty years of gay celebrity by hundreds of equally beautiful men, that elite corps of flight attendants, junior executives, and models—this Ray (he was trembling as he knelt) knelt before what could only be white Jockey shorts, yep, that’s what they were, luminous under undone fly buttons, tugged the jeans down a notch, pulled down the elastic waist of the underpants, and tasted with gratitude the hot, slightly sour penis. He whose conscience years of political struggle had raised now sank into the delicious guilt of Anglo fag servicing Mexican worker, of cowboy face-fucked by Indian brave, of lost tourist waylaid by wily camel boy. He inhaled the smell of sweat and urine with beady, calm pleasure. He felt like E.T. being recharged by spaceship transfusion.

  His mouth had been dry with fear. Now the penis striking his palate drew forth a flow of water in the desert. His knees already ached where he knelt on the wet cement floor. He took the boy’s limp, hanging hand and laced his fingers into his. He looked up to catch the glance, but his eyes were shut and his face blank, which made him look much younger and almost absurdly unintimidating. At a certain point Ray pressed the unopened rubber into the boy’s hand. Like a child peeping through a keyhole, Ray continued to kneel and to watch the boy breaking open the packet and methodically unrolling the rubber down the length of his penis. He got it going the wrong way, lubricated side in, and had to start over. Then the boy gripped him from behind and Ray felt the invasion, so complex psychologically, so familiar but still painful or pleasurable to accommodate, he couldn’t tell which, he’d never known which. The boy breathed on his shoulder; he smelled of Kantaki Fried Chicken.

  When Ray paid the boy, who aristocratically palmed the money without bothering to see how much it was, Ray used one of the few Greek words he’d picked up (this one at the laundry), avrio, the word for “tomorrow.” The boy nodded, or rather did what Greeks do instead of nodding, he clicked a “Tsk” between his teeth and jerked his head down, lowering his eyelids. He pointed to this spot, to the ground in front of them. Then he flashed ten and two fingers. “You like?” he asked, pointing to his own chest.

  “Yes, of course,” Ray whispered, thinking: These men… .

  He told the whole story at breakfast the next morning to Ralph, who was courteous enough to appear envious. After their yogurt and honey and the French roast coffee Ralph was at such pants to secure, they moved into Ralph’s studio with its one small window looking down to the sea and the lighthouse. The studio had little in it besides a rocking chair, an old battered desk, a small kitchen table freighted with tubes of acrylics, a big, heavy wood easel and a rack for finished paintings. On the wall was a watercolor, poppies brilliant in a silky field of green and tan grasses. “Well, it’s the only solution. For you,” Ralph said.

  Oh, he’s turned his envy into pity, Ray thought, pity for me, the ticking timebomb, the young widow, but my “only solution” doesn’t seem all that much of a hardship.

  As Ray walked around and napped in the hot, airless late afternoon he could feel a small painful spot inside him where the boy had battered into him and he smiled to feel that pain again. “Oy,” he said to himself in Betty’s accent.

  That night the boy was there exactly on time. His hair was cleaner and shinier and he’d shaved (not the moustache, of course). But he was wearing the same jeans jacket, although the T-shirt looked clean. They went through exactly the same routine, for Ray didn’t want to scare him off. He wanted to build up a fixed routine, the same place, the same acts, the same price. Tonight the only innovation was that Ray pulled the kid’s jeans and underpants all the way down below his knees and discovered that his testicles hadn’t descended and that his ass was hairy with nice friendly fuzz. Nor did he have a tan line; his skin was naturally just this dark.

  After sex the kid hopped over the fence and disappeared into the night and Ray walked home, downhill all the way through the silent, cat-quick, jasmine-scented streets. He felt sad and lyric and philosophical and happy as he’d felt as a teenager; since these encounters with the boy—strictly sexual—seemed a strangely insufficient pretext for so much emotion, he also felt something of a charlatan. “Objective correlative.” That was the term. T. S. Eliot would have said that his emotion lacked an objective correlative.

  The next night he asked him his name, which he discovered was Marco. “You must remember,” Homer said during the volta the following evening, “the Italians ruled Crete for hundreds of years. Maybe he has some Italian blood.” And again Ray had to describe his “find,” for that’s how the connoisseurs judged Marco. “Not the usual harbor trash,” Homer said, and he announced that he was going to start harpooning in the zoological gardens again, which he’d assumed had long since been fished out. Ray refused to divulge where he met Marco every night. He wanted one secret at least, his dowry, the smallest secret he could keep and give to Marco, and again he thought of that book and the way they’d compared marriage to death, or rather marriage to the exhumation of bones.

  Once he asked Marco where he lived, but Marco only waved vaguely in the direction of the shanty town inland and to the west of the harbor. “Spiti mou, to limani,” Ray announced, which he thought meant “My house is on the harbor,” but Marco only lifted an indifferent eyebrow, the counterpart to the Frenchman’s weary “Eh alors?” when smothered by Americans’ doggy effusiveness. That night, Ray broadened his area of conquest and explored Marco’s taut brown stomach up to his chest. By now there were several white rubbers on the wet cement floor like jellyfish washed up on the bleak shingle.

  BY DAY, RAY WOULD GO SWIMMING or motorbiking to old churches or ruined monasteries or hidden beaches, but all day long and during the endless evenings, he’d daydream about Marco. He bought a phrasebook and pieced together Greek words for that night’s rendezvous.

  Once Marco asked Ray if he should bring along a friend, and Ray agreed because he thought Marco wanted him to. But the friend was a portly sailor (“Greeks go off early,” Ralph had said, as though they were a temperamental triple cream cheese, a Brillat-Savarin, say). Ray sucked them both at the same time, doing one then the other, back and forth, but his only pleasure was in imagining reporting it to the other Americans tomorrow. The boys seemed embarrassed and talked loudly to each other and joked a lot and Marco kept losing his erection and he sounded nasty and used the word “putana,’’ which surely meant “whore” in Greek as well as Italian.

  Kay paid them both and was tempted to mutter “putana” while doing so, but that would be snapping the lime twig, so he swallowed his resentment (yes, swallowed that, too) and drew Marco aside and said “Metavrio” which meant “the day after tomorrow” (meta as in “metaphysics, beyond physics”). The delay was meant as some sort of punishment. He also indicated he wanted to see Marco alone from now on. Marco registered the compliment but not the punishment and smiled and asked “You like?” pointing to himself, asked it loud and clear so the other guy could hear.

  “Yes,” Ray said, “I like.”

  As he walked home, Ray took a stroll through the zoological gardens, where there was also an outdoor movie theater. Inside people sat on folding chairs and watched the huge screen on which a street lamp had disobligingly cast the shadow of a leafy branch. Tonight he sat outside but could hear the end of Querelle, of all things, dubbed into Greek and offered to the extended Cretan family, who chuckled over the perversities of northern Europe. In the closing sequence, Jeanne Moreau laughed and laughed a shattering laugh and the caged egrets dozing beside Ray awakened and started to chatter and call. Then the houselights came up, the families streamed out, for a moment the park was bright and vivid with crunched gravel and laughs and shouts, then car doors slammed and mot
orbikes snarled, the lights were dimmed and finally, conclusively, everything was quiet. Ray sat in the dark, listening to the awakened birds paddling the water, a leaf-spray of shadows across his face like an old-fashioned figured veil. The jasmine gave off a shocking body odor, as though one were to discover a pure girl was really a slut.

  Ray regretted his spiteful decision to skip a day with Marco. The depth to which he felt Marco’s absence, and his anxiety lest Marco not show’ up at their next appointment, made Ray aware of how much he liked Marco and needed him. Liked him?

  There was nothing to like, nothing but a mindless, greedy Cretan teen who was, moreover, heterosexual. Or worse, a complete mystery, a stranger, a minor tradesman with whom he was only on fucking terms.

  Then Ray told himself he liked his own sense of gratitude to Marco, the silence imposed on them by the lack of a common language, liked the metered doses of sex fixed by fee and divergent appetites. He liked the high seriousness of the work they did together every night. He also liked stealing bits of affection from his co-worker, whose moustache was coming in as black and shiny as his eyebrows and whose chest (as Ray’s hand had just discovered) was sprouting its first hair, this young man who would never love anyone, not even his wife, as much as Ray loved him.

  One weekend Ralph went off on a yacht with a Greek collector of his paintings; they were sailing over to Thera and wouldn’t be back till Monday. “Feel free to bring your child husband to the palace while I’m away,” Ralph said as he pecked Ray on both cheeks in the French manner. And indeed that night Ray did say to Marco, “Spiti mou,” showed him the house keys, and led him through town, walking a few, paces ahead just as on that first night Marco had preceded Ray. On the street of notions shops someone hailed Marco (“Yassou”) and talked to him and Ray, smiling at his own quick grasp of things, didn’t look back but turned the corner and waited there, in the dark. After all, it was a little town. And only last week a shepherd had discovered his son was getting fucked and had killed him, which Homer said most of the locals had considered fair enough.