by Lev Raphael
He liked working there, the order, the precision of shifting newly pressed clothes from the pressing line to his own, bringing white tickets back down from the counter, putting them in numerical order and clipping them to their little metal hangers, arranging ties, slacks, completing tickets, bagging them, and hanging them away was a steady source of achievement. And it was different. He worked almost without thinking, his own movements part of the heavy whoosh of the air-conditioning, the thunk and roar of the cleaning machine, the thud, stomp, clank, and hiss of the pressing machine. It was a very private world back there his three afternoons a week. A younger neighborhood kid did the deliveries, and Louie seemed to be there almost every time he was; when Mr. del Greco did the pressing instead of Louie, Mrs. del Greco was at the front, taking in clothes, running the high gleaming register, laughing with customers as if she were at some fancy but friendly hotel. She knew everyone’s name, and spoke a few words to people in different languages: French, Spanish, German, Russian.
When he told her how impressed he was, she shrugged. “It’s not so hard to say shirt in five languages. We talk clothes, it’s no big deal.”
Mr. del Greco was easy to work for: a large, red-faced cheerful man, who never lost his temper even when things broke down, a pair of pants was somehow lost, a stain didn’t come out, a pipe broke. He looked just like Louie, only fatter and wrinkled, with less hair. Stefan envied how Louie and his father could tease each other a little, almost like they were friends.
The best part, though, was working with Louie. Louie didn’t talk much when he pressed, and it made Stefan feel very adult to share the companionable silences punctuated by the scrape of metal hangers across the bar in front of him, the roll and rip of plastic bags. He liked being behind Louie, watching the broad strong back and shoulders in the sleeveless white T-shirt, the large hands that made the pressing machine seem puny. Stefan had tried, but he couldn’t pull the levers all the way down as easily as Louie. Louie didn’t make fun of him, though.
When he was done, Louie would pull off his T-shirt and wipe his chest and under his arms. He had some dark hair in his armpits, and more across his chest, which was very thick and tight—from all the baseball, Stefan figured. That chest made him feel scrawny by comparison. He was totally flat, skinny, with a boy’s body, not a man’s.
They sometimes went down Broadway to the Greek place for pizza, competing as to who could shake on more Parmesan and red pepper, and eat his slice without sneezing or choking. Then they usually went to Louie’s apartment. Sometimes they did their homework together. It was strange to be taking classes that Louie had already had with the very same teachers. The assignments didn’t seem to change at all. Being friends with Louie made him feel confident about when he would go to George Washington High School, or “Gee Dubs,” as Louie said it was called.
“But don’t you want to take the exam for Music and Art?” Louie asked him. “I thought you said you were good at the piano. That’s the school to go to.”
Stefan shrugged. After years of playing, he had come to realize that he would never get much better, never become a pianist, but would always just play the piano. Hearing Rudolph Serkin perform Pictures at an Exhibition at Carnegie Hall a year ago had convinced him that he should let his music be a hobby, something he liked, not anything to live for or dream about.
He thought of explaining this to Louie, but decided, for now, to just say, “Sometimes it’s boring.”
“What about Bronx Science?” Louie asked.
“With all those nerds?”
“Yeah,” Louie said, “That would be pretty gross.”
Stefan did not say that what really mattered to him was staying as close to what was familiar as possible when he went to high school. He knew where George Washington was—but thinking of taking a train to the Bronx or to Music and Art scared him. Either choice took him out of the two neighborhoods he had grown up in, and he didn’t like that.
“Okay!” Louie said, slamming down a history book. “ ‘Nuf of this crap! Risk? Monopoly? Or maybe,” he sneered, “Scrabble for the walking encyclopedia?”
“Don’t call me that! I told you I hate it.”
Louie sat back against his bed, arms crossed. “I could call you a dictionary. Dick, for short. How’s that?”
Stefan enjoyed the teasing—it was strangely exciting, especially since it always wound up with their struggling and wrestling, like now, only today he ended up on the bottom, and Louie, who was heavier than Stefan had imagined, held him down, his arms pressed into the dusty carpet.
“Lemme go!”
“This time,” Louie drawled, like a cowboy, and they soon settled into a game of Broadside, one of Stefan’s old favorites. He loved the little red and blue plastic ships with their sails, the islands with cannons. It was like being in a pirate movie, where he could leap onto an enemy vessel and battle his way to the treasure.
“I like Louie,” Sasha said now and then, though nobody had asked him. This time, it was at breakfast.
Stefan just nodded.
Louie had come to dinner a number of times, and Stefan was right that Sasha wouldn’t appreciate how he ate. He caught Sasha’s half-amused frown when Louie used two fingers to push food on his plate, but neither one of them mentioned it.
Sasha said, “Maybe he might want to come to Rockaway next summer? To stay there a weekend or two. We could put a cot in your room.”
Stefan did not look up from his cornflakes, but ate more slowly. “Maybe,” he said.
The idea excited him so much that he thought of it all day in school, at lunch, even in bed at night. Sleepovers were for much younger kids, but as soon as he started working in the cleaning store, he imagined Louie sleeping over at his apartment. It could never happen, which made the fantasy more precious. But Rockaway—wouldn’t that be like a sleep-over? They’d be in the same room all night, would stay up and talk, and eat potato chips and listen to the radio, make fun of kids at school or people they’d seen at the beach, play cards, wrestle.
“I’m glad you’re working,” his mother said on the phone a few weeks after he started his part-time job. “It’s good experience. And Sasha says you have a new friend,” his mother chirped.
“Jeez, Mom, I’m not a two year old.”
There was a dangerous silence, and his mother hissed, “Don’t ever use that tone with me.”
She was always going on about his “tone” he told Sasha afterwards. “What am I, tone-deaf or something?”
Sasha peered at him, and then started to laugh. “I hope not,” he said. “After all those lessons!”
Sasha’s laughter kept Stefan from saying he wished Sasha hadn’t said anything about Louie. He wanted to keep that private. But he knew that pretty much everything that happened to him got passed on to his mother and even his father. It wasn’t like spying exactly, which was what Stefan had felt it to be when he was younger. It was more like the price Sasha probably had to pay, to keep things going, since it was all so unusual.
“Your mother’s in New York?” Louie had asked, amazed.
“Brooklyn.”
“Shit, that’s New York! Even Staten Island is New York. I thought both your parents lived in Michigan, or were dead or something.” Louie frowned, obviously trying to remember what he’d heard. “I mean, you live with your parents unless they’re dead, or crazy, or in jail. So how come?”
He wanted to tell Louie, to be able to tell Louie, everything. But it didn’t make sense to him, didn’t really add up. There were too many blanks—like why they sometimes seemed to hate the Old Country even though they were always comparing America to it, with America generally losing out, why they had no relatives, why his father and mother seemed to enjoy the distance from each other and from him—well, at least he couldn’t exactly see that they were suffering.
“It’s all fucked up,” he said, feeling hopeless.
Louie reached over and stroked his hair.
Stefan thought he might start cryi
ng, and he felt ashamed of how good it was to have Louie’s hand touching him. He broke away. “Don’t do that!” he said. “I’m not a baby!”
“No?” Louie was at him, tickling, going “Coochy-coo” and Stefan didn’t laugh, couldn’t laugh. He got angrier and angrier, feeling ridiculed, and fought back until Louie rolled onto his back and Stefan was on top of him, feeling hard in his pants. He closed his eyes because Louie was silent, motionless, and he started rubbing his body against Louie’s.
“I know what you want,” Louie said quietly. And the soft voice seemed to crackle like a short-circuiting plug.
Stefan didn’t understand. He couldn’t move.
“Let’s go into the bathroom,” Louie said, getting up, brushing off his black chinos.
Stefan followed him and when he tried to shut the door, Louie put his arm out, stopping it. “Keep it open, so we can hear.”
Hear the front door, Stefan realized, briefly frozen by the image of Louie’s mother finding them there, just standing there, but red-faced and breathing hard, ready for—
Louie unbuckled his thick black belt, unsnapped and unzipped his pants, pulled them down with his white shorts. He was squinting, breathing hard.
“Touch it,” he said.
Stefan had seen lots of guys in the showers after gym, had watched them soap up and get harder, gotten harder himself. But there was always a wall between them—as if the spray from the shower heads was impermeable, some kind of force field. Now, he was standing only a foot or two away from Louie, who was getting hard. Louie’s was even darker than the rest of him, fatter than Stefan’s, though just as long, hanging down in front of large round balls with a little hair on them. Louie pulled his short-sleeved shirt off as if he were opening curtains on a stage, tossed it into the bathtub, where the gold and green paisleys looked like fish swimming in the white porcelain.
“Touch it,” he said again.
Stefan felt as exhilarated and free as if he were in the Super Bowl, returning a punt all the way down the field for a last-second touchdown. He pulled his own pants and shorts down, held himself out as if to say they were equals in this moment.
Louie moved closer, and so did Stefan. They both reached out and soon they were leaning into each other, pulling, stroking, licking their hands for moisture, bringing them back. Stefan kept wanting to laugh out loud, to shout with relief that at last he was living the fantasy he had hardly let himself know was coiled inside of him like a snake, waiting to spring. He felt Louie’s balls and back, the tight round behind that quivered underneath his hands, as Louie sighed and shifted from foot to foot. Louie’s hands were very warm and heavy wherever they rested.
“Faster,” Louie said, gritting his teeth, and soon he splattered all over Stefan’s flat hairless belly. Louie fell against him, moaning a little, held him tight at the waist as Stefan rubbed up against him, harder, harder, imagining they were back on the floor, or in bed, and he too felt himself explode like wild and pounding drums, gluing himself even more tightly to Louie’s body.
He couldn’t speak.
With his pants still down, Louie hobbled over to the sink to get some tissues, and they wiped each other off as if it were just a spill at the kitchen table. The smell in the air—sweat and something else—was so intoxicating. Stefan wanted to just sit on the edge of the bathtub and breathe it in and in.
But what was he supposed to do or say now? Surely Louie knew—he was older, he was in high school.
Louie told him to get dressed, so he did. Louie ran cold water into the large round pedestal sink, half-filling it, and leaned down to dunk his face. He splashed in it like a dog digging its snout into a snowbank. Stefan handed him a towel when he was done.
“Thanks,” Louie said. And they went back into Louie’s room to play some cards. Stefan didn’t ask if anything was wrong, because Louie wasn’t acting different. They kidded each other, talked about the card game, sitting there cross-legged on the floor as if nothing different had happened.
But upstairs, Stefan felt like he was a stranger. He looked at the Degas ballet dancer prints in the living-room, at the shining friendly piano, at everything that was familiar and welcoming and felt himself alien, alone. This was the biggest secret he had ever had, and he guessed from Louie’s silence that in a way it even had to be a secret from themselves—it wasn’t something to talk about.
He was alone in the apartment, because Sasha had gone to see a neighbor down the block, and that was okay with Stefan.
He thought of when he first moved in, and some questions about a pregnant lady they saw at the library led Sasha to take out some books on sex for him. Stefan had read through the complicated books in a haze, as if it were all less real than The Hobbit or I, Robot which he was reading at the time. Even when he had started to wake up wet in the crotch at night, and had discovered how much fun it was to rub himself into his sheets and feel a little burst, he had not really connected all that with the books he’d read.
But this was different. This was sex, it had to be, even though he couldn’t remember reading anything about two guys together, with their pants down. He felt like Henry Hudson discovering the widest river anyone had ever seen, mysterious and frightening, but leading him onward. He wanted to do it again with Louie, he wanted to see Louie naked—as naked as all the guys he realized now he’d always tried not staring at in the showers—like Eddie Morrice, who really looked like he had a skinned hot dog hanging down there, and Eric Stone, who guys joked about, because the end of his was covered over, with something like a little hood that made it pointy. Eric had to pull it back, to wash completely, and Stefan had been fascinated at the small temporary ring of flesh.
Blushing, he couldn’t help wonder what Sasha looked like without clothes—he’d never seen him in anything less than a bathrobe—and now he squeezed his eyes shut as if he could squeeze the picture right out of his brain. He went to the piano to lose himself in playing, it didn’t matter what. But even the grave opening of the Mozart Fantasia couldn’t wipe away the images of naked men: teachers at school, all the guys in his class. He imagined them lined up and frozen like statues or trees, and they were all his. He could move among them, touch anyone anywhere, do whatever he wanted with them.
What he most wanted was to be with Louie again. And he was, that night, lying on his back after Sasha was asleep, and Stefan had put away his book, The Time Machine. Pulling with both his hands, cupping his balls, he imagined Louie there, smiling, guiding him, applauding as he splashed his own face.
A few nights later, after their homework was all done, Louie came up to his place so they could watch Ben Hur. Sasha was off giving a late lesson.
They gobbled pretzels and popcorn. Stefan had seen the movie before, been excited by it, but sitting there now with Louie he understood his excitement for the first time. It wasn’t just the battles, the trumpet calls, the costumes and huge pillars, even the vicious chariot race. It was Charlton Heston, slim, dark, hairy, almost naked.
“You can see his dick,” Louie muttered, waving at Charlton Heston’s loincloth in one scene.
“Wow.”
Stefan imagined himself in the sea-battle scene, rescuing Louie as a Roman, and drifting on a large raft with him. They would hold each other, and touch, and later, picked up by the Roman galley and returned to Rome, they would be bathed by slaves, perfumed, combed, massaged, and dressed. They would feed each other, drink from the same goblet, and at night find themselves in a room swathed in silk and cloth of gold, where they would spend the whole night together.
“Would you want to do it with him?” Stefan asked, when there was a close-up of Charlton Heston.
Louie shrugged. “You’re enough for me.”
Stefan forced himself not to fling his bowl of pretzels into the air with a shout. He just stuffed some more into his mouth and chewed.
“Those Jews,” Louie said at one point, shaking his head.
“What about them?”
“They killed Jesus,
dummy! That’s what.”
Stefan remembered Sasha explaining this question to him years ago. So now he said: “The Romans did it, and it’s wrong to blame the Jews.” His words sounded stiff, rehearsed, and he wasn’t sure he meant what he said.
“That’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says they did and they knew it and God’s always gonna hate them. Haven’t you read all that?”
Stefan was too embarrassed to say he had never opened a Bible, not even in the library or a bookstore. He always felt a vague unease around one—something in Sasha’s attitude had communicated itself to him. And once his mother had said, “More people have died because of that book than any other.” It left him feeling that somehow the book itself was as dangerous as kryptonite for Superman.
“You’re so stupid, sometimes,” Louie concluded, and Stefan had to quietly agree. “Aren’t you worried about going to hell or anything?”
Stefan felt on safer ground. “My Uncle says he’s seen hell, and it’s on earth.”
“Like where?”
“In Europe, in the War.”
“Was he a soldier?”
Stefan fell silent. He didn’t want to reveal the vastness of his ignorance and be mocked even more, but he didn’t want to lie to Louie either.
Luckily, there was a key in the door, and Sasha let himself in.
“Hi, boys. What are you watching?”