by Dale Peck
During that same summer that George introduced me to homoeroticism, my public acceptance as “one of the boys” was severely challenged. The night is so clear to me. It was mid-August, sultry, humid, August, and the anticipation of returning to school was in the air. My buddies, Tommy, Tyrone, Leon, Peanut, and Kevin, we were all across the street from my house talking with some of the older boys—David, George, Doug, Wayne, Kenny, and Leon’s brother, Crip.
My mother’s bedroom was located at the front of our house and her windows faced out to the street. Her windows were open because there was no air conditioning in the house at that time. The night breeze was as much relief as we could hope for from the oppressive Washington summers.
Across the street from my house, on Douglas’s and Kenny’s front porch, we were talking about everything from sports to girls. It was the typical conversation of males in various stages of adolescence. We all shined in the streetlights that beat down on our variously muscular frames burnished by the summer sun. Our conversation rose and fell, exerting its brashness and bravado against the night, kicking around in our heads, drawing us into laughter and silence by turns, as we listened to stories of pussy conquests, petty scams, and recent ass kickings. The conversation was dominated by the older boys, who by turn tried to impart fragments of street warrior knowledge to us. We were sitting and standing, absorbing all this, relaxing our tough postures, allowing a communal trust to put us at ease and make us glib and attentive.
Crip was standing. I was sitting. It happened that from where I sat I could eye his crotch with a slight upward shift of my eyes. Well, one of the times that I peeked, Crip caught me. I would soon discover that I had cruised into very dangerous territory. Lulled by the conversation, I had allowed myself to become intoxicated on the blossoming masculinity surrounding me. I might as well have been shooting semen from wet dreams straight into my veins for the high I was on in this gathering of males.
Instantly, Crip jumped forward and got in my face. “I see you looking at my dick!” he hurled at me. I felt as though he had accused me of breaking into his house and violating his mother. Immediately, all conversation ceased and all eyes focused on me and Crip.
“Do you wanna suck my big, Black dick, muthafucka?” he demanded, clutching his crotch and moving up into my face. “Do you, nigga?”
Thank God my instincts told me to stand up. It was this defensive posture that perhaps saved me from an absolute humiliation, but my “No” was weak.
“Well why are you looking at my dick? ls you a freak? You must wanna suck it. Are you a faggot? You can suck it, baby,” he mockingly cooed, still clutching what was more than a handful of cock.
The fellas were laughing and slapping palms all around by this time. I was becoming visibly angry but I had still uttered nothing more than a meek “No” to his challenge. I then remembered my mother’s bedroom windows; they were open; she must have heard him.
The laughter began to die down. The sexual tension in the air was palpable enough to be slapped around. Crip’s attitude changed for the worse.
“You shouldn’t be looking at a muthafucka’s dick unless you plan to suck it,” he sneered. It now seemed that all along he had been bellowing at me, so I was even more convinced my mother had heard him.
“Are you funny, nigga?” he asked, deadly serious, which elicited more raucous laughter from the fellas.
“No,” I said, attempting to put more conviction in my voice. Crip was but an inch or two taller than me, and a pretty Black male. He carried beauty as agilely as some Black men carry footballs and basketballs and pride. I was surely attracted to him, but to even have hinted at that would have cost me more than the humiliation I endured that night.
So there we stood, me surrounded by gales of laughter punctuated by his booming voice, and all the time, in the back of my mind, I believe my mother was listening, in shock, hearing my humiliation. To her credit, if she overheard this she never confronted me with it.
Crip finally ended his tirade. The conversation resumed its boisterous, brash bravado. Shortly thereafter, I excused myself from the fellas, crossed the street, locked the door behind me, and cried myself to sleep in my bed. It would not be the last time I would cry myself to sleep because a male had inflicted me with emotional pain. It would not be the last time I would lock the door behind me and go to my bed alone, frightened of my sexuality and the desires I could not then speak of or name as clearly as I could articulate the dangers.
My sexual encounters with George ceased several weeks before summer vacation ended. In retrospect, I believe I stopped visiting him at the store and at his home as a direct result of the humiliation I suffered from Crip. I must have thought it would only be a matter of time before we would be discovered. Whatever my reasons, my refusal to engage in any more sex bewildered George. He continued to coax me to climb up on his back, but could no longer be seduced. He enticed me with money but I refused that, too. When I was sent to the store by my mother, I would go two blocks out of the way to another convenience store just to avoid the longing I recognized in his eyes, a longing that was partially stoked by my mutual desire. I would later discover that such a longing inhabits the eyes of many homosexuals, particularly those who believe themselves to be unable to come out of the closet.
The school year resumed itself uneventfully. The only change, other than those occurring because of puberty, was the increasing burden of carrying a secret. I was learning to live with it safely hidden away, but for how long? It was surely dangerous knowledge. There was no one I could tell about my sexual adventures with George. There was no previous reference of intimacy to compare to sex. I continued nurturing my desire in the long nights of my adolescence, quietly masturbating in my bed as my younger brother slept above on the upper bunk.
Black male adolescent survival in a ghetto context made me realize the necessity of having a girlfriend, a female I could be seen walking home after school. It would be my luck to date girls who were “good,” girls who were not going to experiment with sex beyond kissing and fondling, and even that was often only tolerated at a minimum if tolerated at all.
I was not the kind of male to force the issue of going all the way sexually. For me, it was enough to have a cover for my true desires, and that’s what these girl were—covers. But I treated them with respect. They were girl friends more often than not.
I had the opportunity to have sex with one of the girls I dated. She agreed to skip school with me one day. We hid out at her house, our mutual motive: sex. After a long morning of petting and kissing the big moment arrived. We stumbled to her bedroom along an unfamiliar path that frightened and excited us. I was nervous because I expected her mother or father or one of her siblings to walk in and catch us.
In our adolescent nakedness we were beautiful, but if caught, we would have been seen as being ugly. We were sixteen and fifteen and ripe with curiosity and desire. Her skin was honey gold, smooth, so soft to my touch. Her breasts were full and sweet, the nipples brown and swollen by my tongue. Her hair was plaited in thick braids that coiled atop her head like snakes. We were both virgins. Nothing in our timid sex education classes at school or our evasive discussions at home had prepared us for walking into her bedroom to face our beautiful nakedness.
I believe we both felt we had to go through with the act because we had gone so far. In my mind, George appeared, but that was different. He had not instructed me about girls or young women. No one had. I kept hearing the older boys scat about breaking the cherry, but there was no cherry hanging between her legs when I looked. What was there was wet and warm to my fingers.
She laid so still on her bed. I knelt above her, fondling her breasts, kissing her, imagining these must be the things to do to seduce her. Neither of us spoke. As our breathing escalated I grabbed my cock and guided the head toward her vagina. She opened her legs to show me the mouth that was there, wet and waiting. Sunlight poured over
us. Sweat bathed our bodies. We were straining ourselves to break rules we were taught not to break. We exerted ourselves against everything we were told not to do.
I pressed my head against the wet mouth. I pushed. She pulled away. I inched forward. Pushed. She pulled away again.
“Am I hurting you?” I asked nervously.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“We don’t have to do this,” I assured her, saying this more for my comfort rather than her own. I didn’t want to be doing this, after all.
“But I want to,” she said. “I want to do this. It will make you—it will make us happy.”
I rose up off her body. “Maybe this isn’t the right time,” I said. Looking down at her, I then realized how lovely she was and how little I knew of her. How little she really knew of me. I thought of George and a tingle stirred in my loins. I realized I didn’t desire penetrating her. I was doing this for my reputation. I thought I needed to walk away with a bloody sheet to prove what—that I could break a hymen? I had no thought about consequences. There was no condom to prevent pregnancy, no pills being taken that I knew of. We were entangled in limbs we couldn’t name, dry-throated, sweaty, pursuing different objectives in the afternoon bed we had stolen. My erection slowly fell. I lowered myself onto her again and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“We should probably get dressed,” I encouraged her. “Someone might come home soon.” That was the last and only time we were naked together. Not long after, we stopped seeing each other romantically.
A year later, she began dating an older boy around school. We saw each other less often, and then one day I saw her in a maternity blouse. I believe she finished school—I’m not sure—but by that time she wasn’t my concern. I was seeing another “good girl,” walking her home, holding her hand, pretending I was consumed by love—safe, by all appearances, from being identified as a faggot.
Robin
by Eileen Myles
Rightaway I’d like to separate this Robin from all Robins you or I have ever known. This Robin I am about to tell you about is not someone that any of us know. She is somebody I found and I would like to tell her secret.
I call her Robin because she is red and black and angular and resembles a bird in her speed and in her cruelty. I fell in love with her briefly, last year. I’m just not in love with her anymore but there’s this residue.
She was sort of a famous junkie, which I thought was pretty exotic, never having been particularly involved with heroin, having had a taste here and there—I was at an art event a couple of years ago and a friend dragged me to the dinner afterwards and Robin entertained our end of the table with a story about how she had been busted for dealing dope, but instead of going to jail she informed on somebody else. She knew that she would die in jail, she knew she couldn’t take it. I was appalled and thrilled by her coldness. She spoke carefully, slowly, halting, choosing her words . . . how is it that junkies talk, very ornate, piercing and hollow and obviously this girl was a prince. A dead one. She smelled of flowers, she smiled at me when she got up to leave. I’m so glad you’re here she said intensely like I was the only soul in the room, or a soul who had a soul like hers.
I knew Robin had a girlfriend. Historically, they were kind of merged. My friends who used to do heroin said Robin ‘n Babe as if it were one word. Babe played in a band, played till all the band members were so strung out that they were no band. By then Robin ‘n Babe were an item so they teamed up and Robin sold drugs and Babe did them and they held sort of an elite junkie salon for a few years. Robin knew everyone in New York. Everyone on that trendy glamour junkie circuit. She wanted to write, had been doing so for years. In notebooks, in between experiences I guess. I think I had what Robin wanted and vice versa.
One day I was in her apartment and I found myself touching her leg. Her apartment was nice. Actually it was Babe’s. It was hard to unravel where one stopped and the other began—It was Babe’s bombed-out junkie rock star haven and Robin moved in when Babe kicked Lulu, the old girlfriend, out. Lulu died of AIDS. She wound up hooking on 3rd Avenue after they kicked her out of the band because she was so bad. The lives of drunks and druggies is such a treacherous moral landscape with avalanches and peaks and nasty pitfalls. Robin moved in and cleaned house, eventually at some point of successful drug dealing had extensive carpentry work done, the apartment had modernesque divides, shelves for aeons of rock star clothes and shoes, millions of records and Robin’s little dealing room lined with scales and books. There she sat with her extraordinary stark white-face, a weirdly shaped skull, kind of cubist and long, with raven-ish black hair. I adored her because she was a masque. This, combined with her sensibility, literary and scrupulous, made her essentially Aquarian to me, an endless revolving door.
Just before I put my hand on her leg I had asked about her and Babe. I was making an honest woman of myself. We’re roommates she said in her voice that was of the air, tentative yet treacherous. Actually, she leaned forward stretching her arms down to her pointed toes. “I don’t really know. We don’t really talk about it. Babe is not disposed to discuss anything so abstract as our relationship. She is not . . .” She sighed, thinking the better of continuing. “I don’t know what she’s doing.” “Honesty,” her face telegraphed. Robin had a deep morality of which she never spoke, but she communicated its breadth and its depth, by her protective pauses. You knew she was a good person because she held back at moments of deepest revelation. She did not spill, and I always felt that to push her a bit would be sloppy and expose my own lack of a system of conduct.
So I put my hand on this woman who smelled so good. Her fragrance was coming my way. When we smell a person’s perfume we think that we’re smelling their essence, their identity somehow. The body has to be there for the perfume to stick to, but when they’re gone it’s the perfume that we know. I’ve forgotten its name. I asked her once.
Some kind of sexy thirties jazz was on the stereo. I knew I was in her house now, not Babe’s. The design was hers, but the ornaments were Babe’s. Babe’s paintings and the guitars and record collection. She had made a home for Babe, kind of a mother or a wife. I found that so hot to discover an ex-heroin dealer in the middle of the art world who was really a good woman, once I told her that—I couldn’t believe how hokey it sounded and by her silence I knew she was horrified. I bet she wanted to break the silence of our affair just to tell Babe some of the stupid things I said.
Okay well if this is all right I put my hand on her leg. It seemed seductive enough. I’m really attracted to you I said. The feeling is mutual she replied. Soon we were half-dancing half making out in the middle of the room and it was really hot, I mean she had a hard desperate mouth, her hands were up my shirt and I was feeling her ass. All my instincts were on target in the particular way I felt like a bow and arrow nocked, then release.
Soon we were on the bed, ripping our pants off and this was when I began to feel in the middle of their relationship because you knew you were going wild in the precise same place where a couple woke each morning and looked at that painting, Babe’s.
I think this is going to be a problem she said. She got up and sat on the chair, lit up a cigarette. A move I regard as “womanning” me—I’ve felt it before. It’s the gesture of a torn, or badly married, man.
Well, are you going to tell Babe. Yes, I’m quite certain we are due to have a conversation about this, among other things. She bit each syllable as she spoke. Robin had to go to work, she was a cook, a neat transformation for a dealer, though actually she was a cook first, that’s how she started dealing drugs. Cooking in all of Ricky Mountain’s restaurants. Even sold him the drugs he’d OD’d on legend says, though Robin says it’s not true. And she was the one who told me the legend. Someone else got him those. It was weird she said to have your boss coming in the kitchen to buy from you. They always came to me, she said of her connections. It was never something I decided to
do. They knew I could help them, she said.
So she went to work, pretty wonderful, all vulnerable and pink. The pretty Robin. One of many. I guess I went home. I went running down in the park by the East River. I needed to stretch out my feelings that were really making me crazy and all furled & unfurled.
We had a date the next day at 4. I don’t know how I tolerated my home, I think I was working or something, some piece of writing, but I stopped at three to let feeling build, and then it was 4:15, 4:30 I was out of my mind. Quarter of 5 she called. Where are you! Well I’m out doing a few errands. It took a little longer than I thought. Are you coming over? Well I had thought I would still do that, but it is pretty late. She was almost needling me off the phone. Yeah, c’mon I said. Up the stairs came this angry woman who I sometimes thought resembled Elizabeth Taylor or Keith Richards and sometimes when she was really nice, Donovan. Frozen and mean in a white jacket coming up my steps. Hello, I said, holding the door. I was no longer in fun-affair with vulnerable married woman. In one day that was already over. She sat in her white jacket on the small orange couch. Do you want a drink? I had automatically stored exactly what she had served me from her refrigerator the day before. I was glad she said no because I would have been ashamed to reveal what a copy-cat I was. Raspberry Soho Cola. Your furniture is not very comfortable she said.
I feel nervous I confided nervously teetering over the counter that faced the itchy couch. “Why do you feel nervous, would it make you feel better to tell me?” These quiet utterances thundered like the I Ching. What a jerk I am. I never wanted to go to hell, but I thought I could date the devil. “I feel funny.” Do you want to go up on the roof I asked. No I don’t. Why would I want to go up on the roof? This is awful. I have invited a wolf into my home. I went over and started knocking into, touching, kissing the wolf. It was the only thing I could think of doing. C’mere get up I huskily growled. Where are we going she whispered. Tamed. Over there. I pointed at the bed. My goal from the day before was to get our clothes completely off, that kind of sex. I was trying to get her shoes off, to be sort of sexy/servile but I was so awkward she pulled her weird green ’70s rock star boot back to herself and started untying. Behold the skinny body I loved. I was revolted but addicted.