Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Nervously, and chastising myself for being nervous—it was a public facility, after all—I ventured into the men’s room. The stench was worse in there (although not as bad as in the women’s room, which was regularly fouled to drive them away) and I was drawn in as if on a wire. Three crookedly hung urinals lined one wall, two at adult height, one set closer to the floor. Three stalls stood opposite, their metal frames and doors so dented they looked as though they’d weathered an earthquake or stampede. Graffiti had accreted on these bent canvases in layers from the forlorn to the satiric to the disgusted and faux-disgusted, the ignorant and confused and illiterate. It clung to the crooked fractals in a palimpsest of lust that could be rendered in standard English only at the expense of a hieroglyphic anxiety vested with at least as much significance as the words themselves. i am the only one someone had scratched into the paint with the point of a pin, over which someone had written fuck you faggot!!! twenty-seven times with black marker, only to have someone else come along and cross out each and every you and replace it with me in blue ballpoint. This same person, or another person with another blue ballpoint, had altered the original i am the only one to read i am the lonly one, to which someone else had drawn an arrowed note that read its lonely cocksucker, prompting someone else to write it’s “it’s,” idiot. And this was just one of scores of impastoed narratives, all of them testifying to the mixture of lust and hatred that permeated the room as palpably as the smell of the toilets, a shit-spiked perfume so insistent and isolating—insulating—that before I’d finished untangling that first missive my penis was fully erect, and as soon as I saw hot 15 yr old boi will suk your dik 564-2319 it was out of my pants. My first time at the rest stop I jerked off to

  here every weds 6 pm latin hot mouth tight hole use me

  lookin for a faggot to eat my hole—“big” jim

  time me up rape me piss on me beat shit out of me dump me in the creek i want to be a statistic

  where r all the horny truckers this wkend? (11/4/92)

  stevey—takes it up the butt, always clean

  who gave me aids? i wanna to return the favor

  There was no editing this porn story, which was even more random than those chains of fetishistically linked homepages we used to navigate in the nineties, in which three or four clicks could take you from a surfer-looking twink whose rep tie had been pulled backwards like a dog’s leash to an actual dog fucking an actual man who was actually enjoying it. No way to transcribe it or represent it either. Even if you surrounded yourself with lifesize pictures of all four walls you’d still miss the squeak of shoes over sticky tiles, the clammy breath of toilet water a few inches below your balls, and of course the smells: of sweat, of cum, of piss, but especially of shit, which had seeped into the drywall like an old coffee pot whose glass has gone irremediably brown. Nor were the messages limited to homosexual expressions of desire or contempt. There were a few half-hearted, almost defensive heterosexual posts (if you ever get tired of shit on your dick call monica), many of which had been tagged with comments like ur not fooling anyone and i take care of dick better than any woman ever could. A lot of stuff about “niggers” too, most of it so theatrically vitriolic that I wondered if something about our helplessness before the biomechanics of urination, defecation, and copulation brought out the hatred in people, or the comedian. nigger wimmin take it up the arse someone had written, to which someone had appended so do nigger men, you (limey?) faggot. But it was Jews who, if not as heavily represented, came in for the most inspired epithets, or at any rate the most elaborate. stop the worldwide jewish conspiricy someone had written, and q: when can a catholic fuck a jew? a: only on ash wednesday. There were a few heil hitlers scattered around and a lot more 88s, so many swastikas that that they spun like pinwheels before my slitted eyes. Some energetic liberal had written antisemitic and drawn lines to a dozen different comments about Jews, Israel, the Holocaust, Nazism, and one lone free palestine! graffito, the tentacles reaching out in all directions like a genetically enhanced octopus, snaking around this expression of gut-deep contempt or that paean to thwarted love, and as it shimmied before my watering eyes I suddenly remembered that octopi reproduce only once: the female secludes herself in a crevice, lays her eggs, and dies, whereupon the hatching babies eat first each other and then their mother before the victorious cannibals finally venture out into the world. eat me flashed on one wall, eat me on another, eat me eat me eat me, and then, with a jagged wheeze—I think I’d actually forgotten I was masturbating—I came, ropes of semen splatting just to the right of a vertical graffito that read

  i

  love

  dick

  before sliding down to reveal

  i

  love emily

  dickinson

  the right-hand letters written in heavier ink than those on the left—which is to say, added by someone I just knew was a novice at the Academy—and it wasn’t until I finished laughing that I heard labored breathing coming from the stall next to mine.

  I jerked toward the sound, only to be greeted by the purple smear of my distorted face in the bulbous chrome cover of the toilet paper dispenser. A set of scrapes traced a rusty rainbow on the wall, as if the dispenser had been rotated up and back a thousand times, and even as one part of my brain assumed that this was how the dispenser was refilled another part was sending a hand out to—

  —but when my right hand came into view I saw that it was as burgundy-blotched as my left. My eyes dropped to my crotch, which was still uncovered, by cloth anyway, but my penis, which was normally only pinstriped by three thick purple lines, was now sheathed in a dark film of blood, and just looking at it brought to mind the pain from the places where the skin had torn along the edges of my birthmark from too-vigorous tugging. But even as I winced at the remembered pain, I remembered also ignoring the pain while I masturbated, remembered maybe even enjoying it in the same way I enjoyed the cesspool stink, because it expanded the corporeal reality of what I was reading, let me feel as if the words darting around my head issued from the mouth of a man in the stall with me, a real man whose real teeth chewed at my penis until it bled, and of course it didn’t make sense, how could even the most gifted cocksucker spew all this bigoted claptrap if my dick was in his mouth, but that was where my—

  —and then the door of the right-hand stall creaked open and I shoved the toilet paper dispenser up on its axle to reveal a hole about as big around as a coffee cup through which I glimpsed the gaudily embroidered back pocket of a pair of jeans slipping out of the stall, followed by the sound of footsteps squelching on the tiles as their wearer hustled out of the restroom.

  I let him go. I mean, I probably couldn’t have stopped him, but it didn’t occur to me to try. I’d never heard of a glory hole before, but some things you recognize instinctively. The edge of the hole looked jagged, but when I ran a finger over the folded metal the bumps were as smooth as keloids, and even though it was obvious they’d been filed down with some kind of rasp I let myself imagine that the metal had been abraded—eroded, as if the softening had occurred over a geological span—by the back-and-forth motion of countless cocks. When I looked to my left I saw a second hole on the opposite wall, its far side covered by a metal patch that was presumably the back of the next stall’s dispenser. My left hand reached out, and then each arm was hanging off a socketed wall, I was still sitting down but it felt as though I dangled between a pair of buildings like an avatar in a video game, which is to say I knew there was something perilous about my position, something that bespoke mortal danger, but the threat felt contingent, as if, if I fell to my death, all I’d have to do is boot up my next life and who knows, maybe it would work out better.

  Later on I imagined the suspension differently, not as a kid hanging from monkey bars but as a pig on a spit, run through from mouth to tail and revolving slowly as its flesh melted inside its skin. I never did manage the turn (though I
tried, believe me, and somewhere there’s a dude with a bruised dick who’ll back me up) but I got speared more times than I can count, sometimes one end, sometimes the other, sometimes both, and when that happened I found that if I jammed my mouth and ass against opposite walls and braced the muscles of my neck and back and tightened my abs until my spine extended an extra half inch I was able to lift one foot off the ground and hook the knee over an elbow, then lift the other foot up and hook it over its elbow, and then, lips glued to one wall, ass sealed to the other, I was less pig on a spit than an extension of the stall itself, of the building, of the mountains from which its stones had been mined, and as I writhed between the pistons driving into me fore and aft I imagined them plunging deeper and deeper, John Henry diving in from one end, the steam engine boring from the other, until in an apotheosis of penetration they opened a tunnel all the way through my body, a mineshaft maybe (I was a Stammers, after all), or maybe a road, but I liked to imagine it as a qanat, a hundred-mile-long tube following the rise and fall of intestine and esophagus until the liquids coursing through me reached equilibrium and filled my gullet like the cistern of some ancient city.

  Because even as they cored me they were rebuilding me. (“Shaft”: it’s its own antonym, a hollow tube, a solid rod, and “cleave” too, slicing open and sealing together.) The naive boy these men excavated was replaced with a worldly adolescent who, from the outside, still looked the same—still lurked in the back of classrooms, not because he was hiding, but because he wanted to make a quick getaway; still averted his gaze when he caught people staring, but smugly, rather than shamefully. (I almost wrote “shamefacedly” but that seems too on the nose, even for me.) I was being remade from the inside out, and if the gawkers didn’t register my metamorphosis it was only because they were too distracted by “the man that clothes me,” as Jesus told Judas, to see through to the godhead beneath. But at the rest stop I had only to lean toward the hole on the right side of the stall and present that side of my face to whomever was looking, and whether I was as beautiful as my mother liked to say didn’t matter: I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and any man who tells you he doesn’t want to fuck a teenager is a straight-up liar. I wore a hoodie to obscure my face and long-tailed shirts to cover the stains on my lower back, kept my ass centered over the hole on the left side of the stall, buttocks pulled open so that the purple smear of my birthmark blended with pink stretched skin before disappearing into my anus, and I always kept myself lubed with the cocoa butter or bacon grease or Bigeloil I’d once rubbed into my birthmark, and also, after an hour or three, the jizz of the one or two men a day who were willing to stick their dicks through a hole in a wall into the ass of an otherwise unseen boy on the far side. Oh, I was invisible to them, no doubt, but I was also invisible to myself. I was nothing but mouth and asshole; and the fifteen square feet of skin that connected them, whether purple or pale, was nothing more than gangue, there to be ignored or plowed through, and afterwards discarded as goaf.

  And over everything and through it, supporting it, infusing it, concealing and transforming and ultimately drowning it: the smell of shit, as thick as the humidity on a hundred-degree day. More than once as I waited in the center stall I heard footsteps enter the men’s room, followed by a muttered “Lord Jesus give me strength!” and the feet hurrying back the way they’d come. And not just the smell. Shit was visible everywhere, from the floaters dissolving in tea-colored water to the tread marks on the cracked tile to the smears fingerpainted on the stall by someone who found himself without toilet paper or, who knows, just didn’t want to use any. Someone who felt compelled to acknowledge the sine qua non of our love nest, maybe, or protest it—in there there wasn’t much difference. I visited the rest stop almost every day for three years and the smell never once failed to take me by surprise. No matter how much I steeled myself for it, it brought the gorge to my throat and tears to my eyes. But I also took refuge in it, because I knew it was the miasma as much as the isolation that made the rest stop the haven it was. There were days when no one showed up and it would be me and an empty stall, and after a few futile hours the stink would overpower not just my senses but my consciousness, until I had to run home and scrub myself inside and out with a self-hating flagellation that would’ve made my mother proud. Other times it vanished from my awareness. When, say, I heard the tentative tread of prospective trade—the probing steps, as if the filthy tiles might collapse beneath his feet, the exploratory push at a stall door, the tight inhalation when he saw the open glory hole and understood that he was getting lucky today—or when my eyes were closed and a dick filled my mouth or my ass. But there were also times when I was caught up in a perfect double-ended in-out groove and would suddenly realize I was smelling shit. Not just smelling it but tasting it, savoring it, gulping it down with the cock in my mouth or kegeling it into my rectum with the dick that was plowing me, and even as part of me trembled with self-loathing another part glutted in the foulness, which stood as a negation of everything culture is supposed to do, to mean, and as such imbued me with a feeling of world-destroying power—the power of a Khan, a Napoleon, a Hitler. Because it was my mouth and my ass that held the men on either side of the walls. They were smelling what I was smelling and were as repulsed as I was, at it and at themselves, but they stayed anyway, because they couldn’t get enough of me.

  Which makes me wonder that it took so long before one of them made a serious effort to talk to me. Or, you know, not. By the late ’90s cottaging had become an anachronism in the US. In the few places it persisted it was mostly a nostalgic act, its clandestine aspect recast not as necessity against homophobia but protest against heteronormativity. But the South’s always lagged behind the rest of the country when it comes to questions of identity, not to mention liberation. If we have a greater tolerance for “eccentricity” than the puritanical, conformist North, that clemency’s only granted if the weirdness comes across as übermannish individuality or infantile weakness rather than learned, i.e., collective behavior. Isolated freaks are cool, in other words, but anything that smacks of tribalism has to be destroyed. My tricks were probably closet cases is what I’m saying. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to talk to me. They didn’t want to be talked to—to be outed to themselves, let alone society, as faggots—and once they’d shot their loads shame and disgust hurried most of them from the rest stop with the same urgency with which lust had dragged them there. A few guys tried, of course. Would lean forward and smile at me through the glory hole, or, if I closed the dispenser on them, climb on the toilet and look down at me over the edge of the stall, but I’d just pull my hood further over my face and hunch over with my hands in my pockets until the smell drove them away. Sometimes all they wanted was for me to give them my dick as they’d given me theirs, but that was as impossible as showing them my face (although occasionally someone pressed his ass blindly against the opening and I got to fuck him). But one day, after who knows how many months and how many men, a voice floated through the hole without the intrusion of a face.

  “Hey, Tuesday.”

  I jerked back, even though I could see nothing through the hole besides the far wall. It was Tuesday. I always went to the rest stop Tuesday after classes, which let out late, at four. The cleaner would have been there earlier in the day, and if someone wasn’t already waiting I took a few minutes to piss on the floor and clog the johns with toilet paper and maybe even leave a mark of my own. But I also went to the rest stop every Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday, and what my partner was really telling me was that he was the Tuesday regular. Which shouldn’t have surprised me but did, and it was wonder as much as anything else that prompted my reply.

  “Hey.”

  “It speaks!” the voice laughed. Just to spite him I didn’t answer.

  “You suck dick like no one I’ve ever met before. It’s like you’re trying to merge with it.”

  I swallowed a snort. “This
isn’t a play by Edward Albee. Say what you mean. Say what you want.”

  “Duh. I want you.”

  “Unless there’s someone else in there, you just had me.”

  “Now who’s talking like a play? I want all of you. Not just your mouth.”

  “You want the other end, go to the other stall. That’s how it works.”

  “I know you got your rules. Your, whatever, system. I can even admire it in a way. But don’t you ever want to lay down next to a whole man, feel more of him than just his dick?”

  Mostly I wanted to correct his grammar, but even as he spoke my hand was fiddling with my penis, which was as sticky and limp as a shrimp pulled from the muck, but also twitching with faint signs of life. It’s been decades since I was a teenager, but I still miss the recovery time.