John Travolta and his friends in Brooklyn had nothing on the dreams Zandy promised him. “When can we go?” Wally badgered. “When?”
“Oh, you’ve got to be a little older, babe. Just a little bit.”
Zandy passes him the pipe and Wally takes a long drag. He feels the buzz immediately, like a jolt of electricity.
“Alexander Reefy,” Miss Aletha says, coming into the room, “you take him across state lines and you’re going to jail.”
“Same for you, Missy,” Bertrand reminds her, “for supplying us with some exquisite weed.”
Zandy’s stretched out in his beanbag, ignoring both of them. He’s got eyes only for Wally. “It’s going to be so different for you, babe, when you get to be our age. It’s getting better all the time. Out there in San Francisco it’s like Sodom by the Sea. They even got a real live fairy elected to the city government. Harvey Milk is his name.”
“Milk?”
“Yeah. Milk. Funny name for a fairy, huh? But he’s showing all us queers that we got to stand up for who we are.” Zandy takes the pipe back from Wally and inhales, leaning his head back so his long dark hair brushes against his naked, freckled shoulders. “You’ve got it made, Wally, babe, you and all the little ones to follow.”
And he reaches over then and kisses him, his smoky breath on Wally’s mouth. Wally smiles, taking Zandy’s hands and placing them on his lips, kissing them and licking them, sucking each one of those knotty, twisted, beautiful fingers into his mouth.
Sleeping in Zandy’s arms, there is nothing else. No menacing father. No impossible expectations. No taunts. No bullies. No doubts, no fears, no separation from the living. Once Wally had been alone, so completely and powerfully alone. But sleeping with one ear pressed against Zandy’s furry chest, listening to his heart, there is nothing else. For the first time since he was little, in those long-ago, nearly forgotten days before his mother’s abandonment, Wally is happy. Content. Safe.
The only reason they’d ever met in the first place was because Wally had balls. That’s what Zandy says. Otherwise they’d still be strangers, Wally out in his quiet little subdivision off Washington Avenue, Zandy in his little shack in the swamps of Dogtown.
But Wally, hunched down and ready to spring, with the blinds of his windows pulled down tight, had begun making phone calls to Alexander Reefy.
“How would you like to suck my cock?”
“I might be interested.”
That’s what Zandy had said: I might be interested. Wally hadn’t known what to say in response, so he just slammed the phone down. I might be interested. No one had ever said that to him before.
Even though Freddie Piatrowski had told him that Alexander Reefy was a homosexual, to hear it confirmed—to hear a man acknowledge that he might be interested in sucking his cock—was almost too much for Wally’s senses.
That night, he couldn’t sleep. He beat off three times remembering those four simple words: I might be interested.
“Do you remember that guy that Freddie told us about?” Wally asked David Schnur the next day at school.
“What guy?”
“You remember. The guy. The …” Wally paused. “The homo.”
“Oh, the one that lives in Dogtown.”
“Yeah. You remember his name?”
David made a face. “Why should I remember his name?”
“Alexander Reefy. Like reefer. Remember?”
“Who cares what his name is?”
Wally leaned in close to his friend. “How do you think Freddie knew he was a homo? How come he’s so sure?”
“I don’t know, Wally,” David said, turning on him with supreme discomfort shining in his eyes. “Why are you asking me? Why don’t you ask him?”
Wally looked straight into David’s long, pinched face. He had to tell someone. He had to speak the words.
“He said he might be interested in sucking my cock.”
“Freddie?”
“No! Alexander Reefy! The homo!”
David seemed appalled. “When did he say that?”
“We were goofing on him. We crank-called him.”
“Who? You and who?”
Wally was already sorry he’d said anything. “Me and some guys. You don’t know them.”
“And he really said he wanted to suck your cock?”
Wally looked off, vaguely in the direction of the orchards. Somewhere behind those trees was Dogtown, and somewhere in Dogtown was Alexander Reefy.
“He said he might be interested,” Wally said, lost in a dream. “He might be interested in sucking my cock.”
“Wally, come over here.”
He’s getting ready to go home, walking his bicycle out of the backyard when Miss Aletha calls to him.
“I want to talk with you a moment,” she says.
“What is it?”
Her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail. Her low-hanging breasts, braless, make odd indentations in her Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“I want you to be careful,” she says.
“I always am. I avoid Main Street, which has all the traffic.”
Miss Aletha smiles. “Yes, of course, be careful riding your bike. But I want you to be careful in other ways, too.”
“What ways?”
“How old are you, Wally?”
“You know how old I am. You gave me a birthday party two weeks ago.”
“You’ve just turned fourteen.”
Why is she telling him this? Like he doesn’t know how old he is? Is she that high?
“You’re fourteen and Zandy is thirty. More than double your age.”
“I know.”
She sighs. “He’s lived a lot more in his life than you have, baby. We all have.”
“I know that, too. That’s why I like hanging out with you guys.”
“Just be careful, baby. I worry that—”
“What’s this little powwow?”
They look up. Zandy has come sauntering around from the backyard, still shirtless, with that thick mat of black hair on his chest that excites Wally so much.
“Missy is just telling me to be careful.”
Zandy exchanges a look with Miss Aletha, then turns back to Wally. “You better be getting home, babe,” he tells him, “or else your parents are gonna start asking questions.”
Wally smirks. “I’m out playing ball with Freddie Piatrowski.”
“That’s right.” Zandy walks up to him and tousles his hair. “Such a little star athlete.”
Wally feels the shudder zap through his body, the same shudder he feels every time Zandy touches him. His cock gets hard in his cutoff denim shorts again.
“Be careful riding back home,” Zandy whispers in his ear.
Wally looks up. Miss Aletha has gone back into the house.
It was Wally who made the first move. Coiled up like a Slinky ready to shoot across the room, he had called Zandy again.
“Can I come over?” he breathed.
How he found the nerve, the appalling guts, to ask such a thing, he’s never been able to fathom. Zandy explains it simply by saying he has balls—and that day they were filled up to the bursting point with boycum. It was a lazy Sunday in the early spring, when the buds on the trees were all starting to pop and the daffodils were opening in his mother’s rock garden. Wally’s father was snoring in his chair in front of the TV in the living room. He was home all the time now, working at Schaefer’s Shoes, and on the weekends all he did was sleep. In the kitchen, Wally’s mother was packing lunches for her husband and son to take with them the next day. Bologna and cheese sandwiches on Wonder bread, with a thick smear of mayonnaise.
Wally had pulled the phone down the hall into his bedroom, and cupped his hand around his mouth as he whispered into the phone.
“Please. Can I come over?”
“How old are you?” Alexander Reefy asked.
“Sixteen,” Wally lied.
It was an age pulled from the air. Something told him it held some
magic. He didn’t know it was the age of consent in the state. But Zandy did, and he agreed. “All right,” he said. “Come on over.”
Wally can’t remember much of that first bike ride over to Zandy’s house. He assumes he came straight down Washington Avenue, dodging the traffic, then turned left on Main, scooted around the Lutheran church and South End News and then past the factories along River Road. He does remember that Zandy’s front porch light was on. He parked his bike and marched up to the little red house and rapped on the door.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Wally. I called you.”
Zandy eyed him from the crack in the door. “Yeah, like every day for two weeks. What do you want by coming over here?”
“I want to have sex with you.”
Zandy seemed stunned by his precociousness. “No way you’re sixteen,” he said, checking him out.
“I can’t wait that long.”
The man behind the door laughed out loud. “You little ballbuster.”
“Please.”
“Please what?”
“Can I come in? Your light is on.”
Zandy glanced up at his front porch light. “So it is. But what’s that got to do with all the tea in China?”
“Please.”
Zandy sighed and held open the door.
They almost didn’t have sex that day. Wally may have gotten inside but now he was at a loss. What did he do next? What did he say? Did he just take off his clothes right there in the foyer? Did he grab Alexander Reefy’s bulge, so enticing in his faded Levis, covered in paint splatters and American flag patches and flower appliqués? What did homos do to start having sex?
For his part, Zandy seemed aloof and indifferent, sauntering over to the frayed overstuffed chair, sitting down next to his Lava lamp, sipping some tea and lighting up a cigarette. Wally sat opposite him on the musty-smelling couch.
“There’s a whole world out there, kid, and when you’re old enough you’ll find it,” Zandy told him. “We all do eventually. You’ve just got to be patient.”
“I can’t be patient. It’s like I’m ready to explode. I think about it all the time.”
“Sex, you mean. You think about sex.”
“Yeah.” Wally’s throat was tight, his breathing hard.
“There’s more to being gay than just having sex, babe. You’ll find that out. It’s about culture and music, dancing and friendship, all sorts of things. Not just sex.”
Wally nodded. It was a perspective he would come to appreciate in the weeks and months to come, but sitting there that first day it meant nothing to him, just a phrase—a string of words to get past if he wanted to have sex.
Zandy thanked him for coming. He promised him that things would get better for him, that all he had to do was wait, and then he walked him to the door.
Now or never, Wally thought.
He grabbed the older man’s crotch.
“You little hooligan,” Alexander Reefy said, his voice deeper than before.
There was a moment of suspended time, of paralysis. Their eyes held.
Wally grabbed his crotch again. The cock inside was harder this time, fuller.
Zandy reached down and kissed the boy full on the lips.
That first day all Zandy had to do was touch Wally’s dick. With those hands, those knotty hands. Hands that fixed cars, changed oil, rebuilt engines. Hand jobs—no sucking, no fucking. But it was enough. Wally came in ten seconds, flat. Then he was out of there, pedaling back home on his bike as fast as his frightened little feet would take him.
But the following Sunday he was back, and that’s when Zandy gave him his very first blow job. He sat Wally down on the edge of his bed, kneeling in front of him and unzipping his fly. There was no expectation of reciprocation.
This time, Wally didn’t run, but hung around for a while. Zandy gave him some apple juice and they sat in his living room, papered with posters of Karl Marx and Janis Joplin and Barbra Streisand. With Zandy sitting next to him on the couch, his arm draped around his shoulders, Wally started to cry. Fear? Shame? Gratitude? He had no idea. Zandy sat there holding him. “Yeah,” he said softly, stroking Wally’s hair. “I know.”
Wally couldn’t remember ever being touched like that. The hand in his hair, the soft caress of his face, felt nothing like what he was used to. His mother had never touched him like that, even when he was little and things were good between them. And the only time his father ever touched him was to smack him against the back of the head. The same place Zandy caressed while Wally cried.
That was the real epiphany. Zandy’s hand, full of softness and gentleness and love. Wally closed his eyes, allowing the sensations that spread through him to fill him up, to send waves of energy through his body that were more shattering than anything he had ever known before. Zandy’s hand—stroking his hair, running down his back, tickling his arms. This was the revelation, far more even than the orgasm he had just experienced.
The next time, Wally met Zandy’s friends. A tall man-woman everyone called Miss Aletha, who wore a blond wig and purple mascara. Bertrand, her (his?) boyfriend, a thin, shy man with tattoos on his arms, who was learning to be a magician. They all worked together as handymen, mechanics, odd-jobbers—a slow-paced existence, a leisurely stroll through life. There were others, too, who’d wander variously through Zandy’s house, strange-looking types with mustaches and flannel shirts and very tight jeans, using female pronouns to refer to each other and popping Donna Summer and the Bee Gees into the eight-track. Wally has come to love the music that fills Zandy’s house. Even more, he loves that he can tell these guys that he jacked off to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. They all had, too. And unlike David Schnur, they admitted it.
Nowadays, Wally and Zandy often make love in the orchards, one a smooth pink boy, the other a dark furry man. The whole experience has been shattering for Wally. That’s the only way he can describe it: shattering. Everything he used to think about—even the way he used to think about things—has been shattered into a million pieces. It was as if he’d been living with a hard clay shell around him, and he’d finally burst through it, breaking free.
“Do you want to feel me inside you?” Zandy whispers in his ear.
“Yes,” Wally pants.
It hurts bad. Wally wants him to stop but doesn’t dare ask him to—because he knows he wants this. He wants to feel every bit of it.
“Oh,” his mother says, lifting his dirty underwear out of the hamper. “Oh,” she says, and Wally knows immediately what she’s found.
She looks over at Wally with terrified eyes.
“Are you … is everything … all right, Walter?”
Why had he put his bloody Fruit of the Looms in the hamper? Why not toss them in the Dumpster behind the Dairy Queen? Why had he put them in the hamper for his mother to find?
“I’m fine,” he says defiantly.
She says nothing more, just gathers up the clothes into a basket and lugs it downstairs to the washing machine.
“You need your mother’s help,” Miss Aletha tells him. “She could be an ally.”
Wally laughs. “No. She can’t help me. I’ve given up on her.”
“Well, you can’t let your father decide your life. He’ll have you marching off to World War III. When you graduate you should go to a college of your choice.”
“I want to go to acting school. I want to be an actor.”
“A regular Montgomery Clift,” Zandy says, smirking, settling down into his beanbag and lighting a joint.
Bertrand is at the dining room table practicing his magic act. A green parakeet is perched on his finger and Bertrand is trying to entice him to dive into a top hat filled with birdseed. “I’m hoping to land a job,” Bertrand says, “with Ringling Brothers.”
“That might be the best thing for you, too, babe,” Zandy says, winking over at Wally. “Run off and join the circus.”
“I will,” Wally tells him, “if you come with me.”
Later, they make love, in the orchards again, kissing each other so hard that their teeth clink against each other. Zandy runs his tongue down over Wally’s chin to the hollow of his throat and all the way down his goose-pimply, concave chest to his belly button. Wally’s cock is aiming at the moon. Zandy swallows it with one noisy gulp. The boy shoots hard, sending tremors all through his body. Zandy swallows every drop.
Zandy’s cock isn’t always as hard as Wally’s. In fact, it’s often soft, a fat brown stub. When he wants to fuck Wally he has to tug at it for a long time in his hand, greased up with Vaseline. Then he sticks it in Wally fast, as if he’s afraid it will go soft again. Wally knows if he put his mouth on Zandy’s cock it might stay harder longer, but it’s the one thing he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do, and he wonders why.
“Are you in love with him?” Missy asked one night, after Zandy had fallen asleep, snoring like a bear in his chair.
“Yes,” Wally answered.
She smiled indulgently. “Do you know what that even means?”
Wally bristled. “Of course I do. Aren’t you in love with Bertrand?”
“We’ve been together sixteen years. Do you think you and Zandy will be together that long?”
“Why not?”
She sighed, running her hand through his hair. “You’re right. Why not indeed?”
Am I in love with him?
Do I even know what that means?
Of course he does.
“Someday,” Zandy’s telling him, holding his hand as they walk through the orchard, the june bugs chirping all around them on this late summer night, “someday the world is going to be very different.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true. Someday, babe, we’ll be able to hold hands anywhere, not just here, hidden in the woods.”
All American Boy Page 20