“You like volleyball?”
“I like rain,” he said.
“Well, the shit likes you too.” I wiped my face with my hands. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Arizona.”
“Shit. What are you doing here?”
“You know the aquarium?”
“Yeah, huge tourist trap.”
“I’ve got a one-year grant from school.”
“For what?”
“I study seabirds.”
“That’s weird, in a cool way,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Damon.”
“Asa.”
“You’ve also got a weird name, Asa, but it’s cool.” I shook water out of my hair. “I’ve got to get out of this shit.”
“Want to go?”
“I’ve always wanted to see Germany.” I was being a smart-ass.
Asa laughed.
“Seriously, German guys, totally scary.”
“What are you talking about, isn’t that a little World War II?”
“My dad’s German, and he’s a prick.”
We both got quiet. Waves came in, closer and closer to our feet. The guys playing volleyball had given up. The ball was abandoned on the beach, scabbed by sand. The players slapped each other on the back, and they smiled even though their game was ruined.
“My place is four blocks away,” Asa said. “It’d be nice not to hang out alone all day.”
Actually, I planned on heading back to a house where I crashed with some jerks from a bar. I thought I’d jerk off to some gay porn. Once in a while, I came across a film I’d done, and I’d stare at the screen thinking, When did I do that? Then I’d beat off focused on the other guy’s reaction to my cock up his ass, his mouth on my meat. How he liked me so much.
“I’ve got a warm shirt, a few beers, and a TV,” Asa said.
His offer was generous, so I figured I knew what he wanted.
Asa’s apartment was simple, living room, kitchen, one bedroom, and a bathroom with a tub and shower. In the living room, he had a sectional couch and a big-screen TV. Imagine watching porn on that. I’d never seen so many damned birds in my whole life. The entire place was covered with them: sketches of birds signed with Asa’s name, pictures of birds from magazines, posters of birds in flight, bird diagrams and bird skeletons—which kind of gave me the creeps. So delicate thin you could crush their bones with your bare hands.
“So why don’t you have any pet birds?” I asked.
“Don’t want to keep birds in cages.”
“But you work at the aquarium.”
“For conservation purposes, yeah.”
I sat on the couch. Asa had given me a shirt, but I hadn’t put it on. My nipples were hard. “Come here,” I said.
Asa sat beside me. “Hungry? I could make chicken with rice.”
“You eat birds?”
He laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I grabbed him by the back of his head, then kissed him. Asa pulled away. My dick was killing me. “C’mon, let’s make out.” I kissed him again. Then I grabbed his hand and put it on my crotch. “Jerk me off, then I’ll do you.” I moved my hips, pressing my cock against his hand. I was nervous around him, and so sex was how I’d decided to handle the situation. We’d get off. He’d like me. That was how it worked. I knew what he wanted.
Asa moved his hand to my stomach and then rubbed my skin there in circles. I stuck my tongue through my lips before I sucked in a breath. “That’s nice.” It was. I slid my hand over his crotch. He was hard. After a minute he pushed my hand away and then curled one of his around my hip. I waited. He scooted closer then leaned his head in the space between my neck and shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I couldn’t relax.
Asa put both his arms around me.
A month later, I moved in. Asa had caught on to my living situation, that I crashed with some jerks from the bar, and said, “You can’t do that. I’ll worry about you.” Sweet enough, if not slightly suspicious, but after three dates, I guess you could call them, Asa had let me jerk him off, and then he’d done me, and then I’d sucked him off one day after that, and he’d just about gone nuts while I worked on him. “Jesus…Christ… god…Damon,” and when I’d finished, proud of myself, mouth full of jizz, he’d given me this look I took for supreme lust, what else, and then he’d said something like, “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” and then I moved in here with a bag of clothes and a bunch of CDs, mostly goth, angry aggressive stuff like Sisters of Mercy and Ministry.
“This is horrible crap,” Asa said the first time I played him a CD, and I’d let my eyes bulge like Are you crazy? What did he listen to? Some truly sappy sick stuff: Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Simon, Jim Croce, Barry Manilow, and Carole King.
“We’re like oil and syrup,” Asa had said.
Sometimes Asa was…very abstract. Like a poet or something. I wasn’t used to it, but I stuck around because I was curious or because I was better off here than where I had been before. Anyway, we got into a routine. Asa spent his days at the aquarium, and sometimes I stayed in the apartment and cleaned it; I even tried to cook but then I burnt some oatmeal and gave up. Other days, I went to the coffee shop and smiled enough to earn tips then came back and put it all on the table for Asa, except what I kept for cigarettes. When Asa came home he took a shower and then cooked us a meal. He was probably the best cook in the world. He made stuff like Ethiopian chicken, sweet and sour shrimp, and lobster linguine. Stuff I’d never had before, and so I started to put on some weight. After dinner, Asa sat beside me on the couch and read ornithology books, which was a big word for studying birds. Asa would tell me stuff: some birds ate red meat; some birds nested the same place every year; in some birds, the guy was better looking than the girl; some birds migrated; some mated for life. Then Asa told me about holding a bird in his hand while it died.
“You don’t hear or even feel it so much as you experience a sense of leaving,” he said. Then Asa shook his head. “I can’t explain it, exactly, but the experience comforted me, maybe because it was peaceful, and I constantly worry death is violent, like all this thrashing around when in fact it’s just a flutter.”
I looked at Asa then and felt afraid. I mean, what do you say? And how do you keep the relationship at a safe detached distance when the other guy says something like that? Basically, I changed the subject. Luckily, a horror film was on TV, and so I pointed out a birdlike man-creature tormenting a bunch of teenaged boys on the screen.
“Why do you like movies like this?” Asa asked.
I shrugged. “Been watching them since I was a kid.”
“Your dad let you?”
I didn’t look at him now.
“Let’s talk about your dad,” Asa said.
“No. I’m not talking about my motherfucking dad. Forget it.” Then I looked at him, and Asa watched me, which made me suddenly paranoid he saw too much. “Let’s fuck,” I said as a distraction, anything to get away from the dangerous stuff like talking or getting emotional. Sex was my safety net, familiar territory, something I was good at—fucking, making people happy that way.
“C’mon,” I said. “You want to.” I lifted my shirt over my head, tossed it aside and stood before him. Asa liked to look at my body. He’d tried to sketch me once. I touched my ribs, drew circles around my nipples until they got hard. “I’m horny for you. See?” I kicked off my jeans, then my boxer shorts, and then showed him my cock, stroked it, pushed the skin up and down to work out some pre-come, and then I got a little come on my finger and ate it. “C’mon, baby. I want to fuck you.” I sounded awesome, like a porn star. “What do you say, huh, let me fuck you, yeah? I love your ass.”
Asa watched me from his chair. “You love my ass?”
“Uh-huh.” No more words. I went to my knees on the floor. When I reached him I cupped the shape of his knees through his pants then pushed his legs apart and rubbed him through the denim.
Asa le
aned forward and pinched one of my nipples; the sensation was sharp as a gasoline smell. “Fuck,” I said.
Asa kissed me on my mouth. I kissed back. Then with my fingers fumbling, I opened his pants and got his cock out. He sat back and watched me. I fit his cock in my mouth, then let it bump the back of my throat and then fill each of my cheeks like an enormous gumball. I worked on his cock until he was about to come, which I knew by the spasm in the corner of his mouth, so I stopped.
“Damon,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
I motioned him down. Asa lowered himself to his knees in front of me then dragged his hand through my hair to my face.
“Look at me,’ he said.
I put my hands on his hips to turn him.
“Look at me, in my eyes.”
I looked and saw a feather in Asa’s hair. I was surprised to see it and fixated on it. It was kind of funny. Asa grabbed my face. We wrestled. I got my arms loose and pinched the feather from his hair and then showed it to him. Asa sighed. I pressed the feather into a ball between my fingers. Then holding Asa by the hips I turned him. He shifted without a word then leaned forward over the chair, putting his ass in perfect position. I oiled my cock with spit then pushed the head at his asshole. He opened a little at a time for me. Soon I was all the way in and moving. I had this thought his ass was moist and sticky as fish gut. I sank further, sandwiching him between me and the chair. He moaned underneath me.
I could talk again. “Feels good doesn’t it?” I fucked him. “Yeah, it feels good.” The base of my cock felt wedged at the mouth of a channel, but beyond that, open sea. “I’m going to come up your ass, babe.” Then I did it: I dug my nails in his hips and shot off. Asa breathed heavy, and I stayed inside him and reached around and found his cock. Together we jerked him off, up and down, around to his balls, up to the head. I felt him pulling air into his lungs.
“Want me flat on my back?” I asked. “Want me to throw my legs over my head and open my asscrack up? Want to fuck me like that?”
Asa moved our hands faster. The muscles in his arm flexed, and then he gasped, and a ribbon of spunk splashed my hand. He took hold of my wrist. “What if I fall in love with you?” he said, trying to see me over his shoulder.
My cock slipped from his ass then, and I crawled backward. “Hey, it’s just the sex talking, babe, because it felt good, that’s all.”
When Asa slept he frowned, like something that didn’t bug him during the day rushed him at night, then ransacked him. He made sounds in his sleep, which woke me and then left me sitting on the bed inside a yellow stain of lamplight. I watched him sleep.
I didn’t sleep well anyway. I’d suffered years of insomnia. After a while you got used to a punch in your stomach waking you up while you slept with a pillow over your head. “Get up, join the fucking party.” Dad roughed me up as a way to entertain his friends. He’d hit me up the side of the head, give me a shove. He made me wait on his guests, clean up after them and say things like, “I’m not a pussy.” Dad liked everything rough—parties, poker, people. His girlfriends always looked like hardened plastic. One used to come to my room and suck my dick. She’d say, “Your dad shouldn’t talk to you like that; you ain’t no pussy.” I couldn’t help it: I shot off in the woman’s mouth making believe she wasn’t a woman, not a woman sneaking into my room, or a woman Dad fucked and beat up.
I wanted to know what or who ransacked Asa’s sleep and I scooted close to him on the bed at night and tried to read the lines in his forehead like a palm reader would read your hand. I couldn’t see anything, and then he’d make a sound, as if he strained against the sheets, and I got so close I nudged him.
Asa opened his eyes. I scooted away, and then he focused his gaze on me. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Sorry if I woke you. I must have, you know, jostled the bed, sorry.” I wondered if he knew I’d been staring at him while he slept.
“It’s okay.” Asa yawned. “I had a dream, I think.”
“About what?” I really wanted to know without showing I wanted to know.
“It was weird, like I was stuck and couldn’t move.”
“I’ve had dreams like that before. I want to run but can’t. Was something chasing you?”
Asa thought and then shook his head. “My mother drowned, for real I mean, not a dream.”
I nodded, trying not to blink. Short spasm under his left eye.
“I was there,” he added and then rolled over. I realized I was supposed to comfort him, that a lover would do that, but I sat on the bed instead fixing my eyes on the back of Asa’s head like a kid frozen to the side of a pool while his mother drowned in front of him.
Not long after that Asa brought up the worst idea in the world.
“I met a guy, nice guy, who’s a therapist, and I thought you could talk to him.”
“What? No. I’m not talking to a shrink.”
“But if you can’t talk to me about your dad, I thought you’d talk to him.”
“No. I mean it, just drop it.” I stood from the couch, walked across the room and then felt like the ball those guys on the beach had hit back and forth a few months ago; I paced the room.
“I thought I might talk to him too,” Asa said.
“Whatever, if that’s what you want.”
“But I think it would be good for both of us, you know, to deal with our crap.”
“You knew what I was about when you invited me here,” I retorted. I was mad and decided I had to do something. What I did was throw a beer I had in my hand, which hit the wall with a thump. Asa didn’t move. Usually if I did that, a guy hit me.
He said, “Damon, I just want to talk.”
I was out the door.
Not much later, I sat inside a bar. I wasn’t sure how many drinks I’d had, but I smoked at least twelve cigarettes, and my heart felt like it was striking the bars of my rib cage and wanted to get out. One of the jerks I used to crash with showed up and sat next to me. Cole: inky red hair and dark eyes and a weird smile that implied he knew shit about me I didn’t want him to know. He bummed a cigarette. Few minutes later he nodded at the bathroom. I followed.
Inside a stall I said, “Ask you a favor?”
“Yeah, whatever.” Cole took his dick out and began to jerk off.
“Hit me,” I said.
“What?”
“Hit me in the face.”
Cole stopped jerking off. “Can I still fuck you if I do?”
“Yeah.”
Cole balled his hand into a fist. “You ready?”
“Yeah.” I steeled myself. A second later my chin felt dislocated and throbbed like a sonofabitch. I tasted blood in my mouth. It was sort of a relief.
“All right?”
“Yeah, hit me again.”
“You serious?”
“Do it.”
This time Cole socked me below my left eye. I felt a pop and thought for a second my eye had jumped ship, and then I felt my face and my eye was there, but the area underneath had puffed up. Little more relief. “Good, I’m good,” I said.
Cole smiled. “So let’s fuck.”
I turned, then put my hands on the wall above the toilet. Blood dribbled from my mouth to the bowl. Cole jerked my pants down then stuck his finger between my asscheeks to rub my hole.
“Got a condom?” I said. “I’m kind of…in a relationship.” I squeezed my eyes shut and shook with the cold sweats.
“Red one, size magnum.” Cole chuckled. “Can you handle it?”
“Fine,” I said. “Make it hurt.”
“You’re a weird faggot.” Cole opened me up pretty good, and I pressed my nails into the wall until they felt like they’d open like lids.
Cole shoved his cock so far up my ass he pushed my face to the wall. “What a juicy hole,” he said. “Maybe you’re bleeding.” He started to pant, then got incoherent behind me. I wanted him to finish. Just finish. “I’m going to blow,” he muttered behind me. Yeah, do it; I’m a lousy worthless stupid whore. �
�Yeah,” he said, “yeah.”
When Cole finished, I yanked up my pants. He peeled the condom off his dick then flicked it into the toilet. I tried to see come mixing with blood. Cole smacked my ass, startling me.
“Where to, want to crash at the pad?”
“No thanks.” What was wrong with me? I hurt all over.
“Well, I don’t know why you’d bother going back to the boyfriend. Who’d deal with your shit?”
I grabbed Cole by the throat. “Shut up, shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about him.”
Cole threw up his hands. “Fine, let go.”
I did.
“Weird-ass faggot,” he muttered.
Then I was alone.
I let myself into the apartment. The kitchen was dark. A second later a light came on. I held up a hand. “Damon,” he said.
“Hey.” After a minute I put my hand down.
“What happened? Did somebody jump you?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Asa came over and studied my face. Part of me was so glad to see him I couldn’t bear it. He left and came back with a wet rag; I took it. Asa left the room.
Maybe it was the next morning, although I wasn’t sure what time it was or what planet I was on initially because my head felt two sizes too big for my body, but Asa woke me. Still dark outside. I managed to say, “What?” Then sort of panicked. Asa stood next to the bed, already dressed. I expected him to hand me a bag of my stuff, as in this is it. I think I moaned. I think I shook my head.
“Thought we’d go for a walk,” Asa said.
“Where?” My throat hurt.
“Beach, to clear our heads.”
I tried to read his tone and couldn’t. So I stood out of bed and winced from the pain in my head before I got dressed, jeans and a sweater.
Moments later, we headed down the street. The sky was blue-black like a bruise. For a while Asa kept his hands in his pockets, then he pulled one out and pointed at the sky. “See that constellation there?”
I looked, and the stars blurred like I’d cry or something fucked up like that. I swallowed. “No.” Then I stared as hard as I could.
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