Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “Well, I think you found them.” He was rubbing his fingers together to show he wanted cash. The other two guys were sort of jostling me,

  just enough to make me nervous. I took out my wallet.

  “See,” I told them, “no money.” I had two dollars in there, which the guy took out. He looked at the bills like he didn’t believe them; then he held one of them up, like it was dirty or something, and he spit on it, and then he spit on the other one. Then before I knew what was happening he punched me in the stomach.

  The other two guys were holding my elbows, so even though I doubled up there wasn’t much I could do. “Don’t,” I croaked, but he punched me again, and again—probably about five times. I couldn’t breathe.

  “I think that about pays the price of admission,” said the guy who’d worked me over. “Now, kid, you want to buy the lady a drink?”

  I could hardly see, I had tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t breathe to say either yes or no.

  “I think he wants to buy her a drink,” said one of the other guys. “I think he wants to buy her a two-dollar drink.”

  The guy who’d hit me gave me back the wallet, minus the two bucks. Then the other two guys gave me a shove up the stairs. I stumbled and slammed my palm against one of the steps, but I kept on going like a pack of dogs was barking at my heels.

  I could hear the black woman calling at me from the stage. “Bye,” she said. “You have a nice day now, you hear?”

  I went scrambling up those stairs and down that long dim hallway and up the next set of stairs and through the lobby. Nobody followed me, and the lobby was empty—that man in the silver jacket had totally disappeared on me.

  Out on the street the sun was shining, there was traffic, people walking by, billboards advertising XXX movies. I was shaking all over and sweating this cold sweat—though I was at least beginning to catch my breath. I had to start laughing. I went swaying along Broadway, bumping into people, reeling around like I was half drunk, laughing up a storm. And sobbing like a baby too, if you want to know the truth. It was blocks till I calmed down.

  I never told Carlos about that afternoon. It wasn’t that I was afraid to—just that I didn’t have any idea how. I couldn’t get it straight in my head. I just kept seeing these pictures: that little guy with the big dick standing there with his hands on his hips, like everything was totally normal, and the black woman saying the things she did, and then wanting that drink from me. It all made me squeamish to even think about—it was shameful somehow, like some disgusting dream you have and then would be embarrassed to let other people know about. Now that I’ve finally told about it, there doesn’t seem that much to it. It’s been ten years, and worse things have happened—but at the time, it bothered me so much that, if my belly hadn’t hurt where I’d gotten punched, I might’ve talked myself into thinking I’d made the whole thing up.

  The only other thing I never told Carlos about, at least not for a while, was going to the library with Sammy, and that book with the pictures in it—but that’s another story.

  SOMETIMES IT’D HIT ME, HOW EVERYTHING HAD gone by so fast. I’d been in New York about a month, and it was like a series of pictures that had no connection. There I was living at home in Owen, this so-called normal kid with his mom and his brother and sisters, and then all of a sudden here I was in New York living with this man who was probably crazy. I mean, how many sane people go driving around the country picking up kids in laundromats and giving them blow jobs the first time they meet them? I thought, maybe I’ve just gone off the deep end for a while. This thing came along that was so different from anything I was used to, and I fell for it—but pretty soon I’d wake up.

  Sometimes I tried to imagine sitting down and explaining to Ted what I was doing. I told myself, if you can explain it to Ted, then it must be okay. But I couldn’t imagine it. All I could imagine was Ted looking at me with those blue eyes of his, skeptical like always, and then sort of narrowing those eyes and shaking his head at me. I couldn’t figure any way to talk to him that wasn’t going to make me ashamed, that wasn’t going to creep him out. And that upset me.

  You have to understand how I was totally crazy about Carlos all during that time. Here I’d spent years of my life in Owen thinking about certain things—things I’d never have told anybody about even thinking about—and then Carlos came along and turned them into reality for me.

  What I’m talking about are the things we did in that bed of his.

  Things I spent a lot of hours in Owen dreaming about and jerking off to, but never expecting them really to happen to me. Never thinking there was somebody else who wanted them the way I did. Somebody who wanted me.

  Carlos totally loved my body—every bit of it. Which shocked me at first, that anybody could love everything about somebody else’s body the way he did, but it also completely excited me. With Wallace it was always how this was getting his rocks off, but where girls were concerned I was definitely second best. And with Cindy in the back seat of the car, well, we’d just fumbled around—if you asked me what did she look like, I couldn’t even tell you anymore. But Carlos treated my body like it was some amazing discovery of his he just couldn’t get enough of—sniffing my armpits, my asshole, licking my nipples and between my toes and behind my calves, all those places I never even thought about. He’d graze the top of his tongue along my skin—exploring my whole body that way, pulling all the different parts of me together into this one complete shining body.

  You could say he took this comic book kid, all jerky freeze-frames, and threaded him all together into a moving picture. It’s what nobody else in my life ever did with me, before or since. Just trailing his dry tongue around on the surface of me, he could cause me to explode on him.

  Then he’d go inside me.

  One of the things about Carlos was how he looked at me. It was rude, and scary, and I never got used to it. He’d pin me there on the bed with those glittery black eyes of his, and then ease his dick into me, all the way up inside me. I’d take a deep breath, and he’d be balanced up above me, locking my wrists down with his hands, his dick in me and his eyes boring a lot deeper into me even than that—and me forcing myself not to look away, to keep staring back at him no matter how scary it was to lock eyes with him like that.

  He’d flex his dick in me, just once, and I’d practically faint.

  The only thing about all that stuff we did was, Carlos never wanted me to do any of it back to him. He wasn’t interested in that, like his body was something he already knew all about and so he was on to other things. I’d try, sometimes, to give him back what he was giving me—try to go after that wiry, fighter’s body of his. He had stomach muscles I could die for, and I loved the big veins in his arms. After he’d been inside me, I’d want to go down on him and get a taste of where he’d been. But he’d just say no, and push me aside to where he could get at me again. I guess you could say he was greedy with me, but I didn’t care one bit once he started in on me. In some weird way, it made him even more exciting to me—the way he wouldn’t let me really go at him the way he went at me. Like it was different for him in some way. Like he’d already been to all the places he was taking me too many times to want to go back anymore.

  I don’t really know about all that. Sometimes here at the Eddy I’ll be lying on the mattress dreaming about the things Carlos and I used to do—or I guess I should mostly say, what he’d do to me—and I just have to wonder. When I think about it now, I realize there were lots of things I never knew about him, and I guess, being just a kid back then, I never felt like I wanted to know. I can’t believe all the things I never asked him, but they just never occurred to me. But now I wonder sometimes. I wonder where he’d been, all those years before he met me, that made him so crazy for this sixteen-year-old kid the way he was. Crazy to the point where he didn’t want anything from me except me, and nothing else.

  After Carlos died, there were lots of newspaper articles—junk, mostly, which was pretty easy t
o shrug off. But one of them that Earl showed me from his scrapbook got under my skin like some wood splinter and stayed there. It was this famous movie critic writing in The New York Times, and I’m putting what he said in here just so you can see how totally different the Carlos I knew was from the one everybody else thought they knew.

  The single time I was in the presence of Carlos Reichart, at a film festival here in New York, he was so closely sheltered by members of his famous troupe, The Company, that there seemed to be a conspiracy afoot to keep him in some kind of protective custody from the world at large. He radiated what I can only describe as a remarkable aura of depravity, as if having come straight from unspeakable debauches. He seemed curiously disoriented—a master actor who suddenly and inexplicably finds himself onstage in the wrong play. And I suddenly began to realize something terrible about this man, or rather about my sense of him: that there are great directors whose films make one long, intensely, to know the man behind the film. But with Carlos Reichart, one must finally say that, however much one might admire his films, one had no desire ever to know the man himself.

  I guess I feel sorry for the guy who wrote that. I picture him going home from that day, and being really happy to see his wife, and the dog, and washing his hands with soap for a long time, and suddenly realizing that’s what he’s doing. I picture him telling his wife how much he loves her, which is something he hasn’t done in a long time, but seeing me and Carlos that afternoon scared him in some ways he doesn’t want to think about. Because he’s not dumb—he’s seen Carlos’s movies, he knows they’re better than anything anybody else is doing these days. And he also knows if he’s going to go on watching them, if he’s going to understand what they’re really about, then he can’t go on living the way he does. Which is too much for anybody to ask. He looks at his face in the mirror. What’s wrong with me? he wonders, and so he washes his hands again. He can’t get Carlos and me out of his head, that picture he has of Carlos walking into that room.

  It’s Earl all over again—getting nervous about something he sees and he’s not sure what to do with it. Maybe I’m being defensive.

  ONCE A WEEK THE WHOLE COMPANY WENT TO THIS little Italian place about five blocks from the apartment—long tables, benches, candles stuck in big fat wine bottles. The guy who owned the place owed Carlos some favor—at least that’s what Seth told me—and it must’ve been a pretty big favor too, for him to feed all those people so many times. But it seemed like he was happy to be doing it, and lots of times he’d come sit with us and get drunk along with everybody else. I remember his name was Gianni, and he had these sad eyes and big nervous hands he never knew what to do with.

  Carlos loved those meals more than anything. Some glasses of wine and some bread and a little spaghetti and a bunch of other people talking and laughing—that made him completely happy. He never ate or drank that much himself—he just liked watching everybody else, he liked to listen in and feel like he was part of something. He told me once that he thought that was what life was all about—people eating and drinking together. “People and food,” he’d say. “There’s nothing else that matters. Everything else that happens is just an imitation of that.”

  There was this Cuban grocery down the street from the apartment, where we used to stop in to buy a six-pack from time to time. There were always about seven or eight out-of-work guys hanging around, all jabbering away at each other in Spanish, so when you stepped inside, past all the jungle plants blooming in the steamed-up front windows, and the cans of black beans and guava juice with rust spots on them on the shelves, it felt like maybe you were in Cuba. At least it’s how I always imagine Cuba: this cheesy music on the radio, everybody smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. They drank these extra tall cans of Budweiser, even the women.

  Whenever Carlos walked in, the three little kids who were always in the store, usually sitting on the floor playing some game with bottle-caps I could never figure out, would jump up and just start shrieking, they were so happy to see Carlos. I don’t know what for, exactly, since he never gave them anything that I saw—but there was just something about him that made those kids go wild. Like it was a holiday. And the women and old men would talk to him—he knew some Spanish, I don’t know where from—and they’d babble away, gesturing with their hands and laughing these big laughs that were like gunshots going off.

  Carlos was in some ways a really shy person, and he always seemed embarrassed a little by all their attention. But he also loved it. He knew they thought he was special, even though he’d never have told you that. But it brought him out of himself—the way certain things, some pretty kid walking down the street, or rain coming down in the morning, or just anything somebody might say that was odd to him, could bring him out.

  I remember one time we were in that grocery, and they were all whooping it up—Carlos was grinning that nervous grin of his and the little kids were clamped onto his leg and he was patting the tops of their heads. Then this man started talking to me. They never talked to me, and at first I couldn’t even understand what he was saying, his English was so terrible. But he was saying, “I give you job.”

  It sort of freaked me a little.

  “You want,” he said, “I give you one. Like that. You very fine boy for job.”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked Carlos. I felt like just some other kid clamped around his leg for protection.

  “You want a job? He’s offering you a job. They like you here.”

  “They don’t know me.”

  “I’m sure that’s why they like you so much. You could work here and live a regular life.”

  Carlos had never talked to me about getting a job. It always seemed like it was okay with him if I just hung around the apartment.

  I hated the idea of getting a job. How was I going to drink if I had a job? Though it was true, all those Cubans seemed to be drinking beer all the time. But they made me nervous—I didn’t want to work for a bunch of Cubans.

  The man who’d asked me did I want a job just kept smiling. He was missing one of his front teeth, and he was wearing this T-shirt that said STAYING ALIVE across the front, and also what looked like a blood stain or maybe it was grape juice.

  I had this sudden fright—Carlos was trying to unload me on these people.

  “A job,” I said. “Do I have to?”

  “Gracias, no,” Carlos told the man with the STAYING ALIVE T-shirt. “Tony’s got better things to do. He’s a genius. He sits around all day and thinks.”

  I couldn’t tell whether Carlos was criticizing me, and I guess he knew that.

  “I’m serious,” he told me. “You should just sit around all day and think. A boy your age.”

  Even if he was being straight with me I could never tell if he was also spoofing. I think he was probably doing both at the same time, all the time, and that’s maybe one of the five hundred secrets about Carlos that made him tick.

  He shook hands with all the men in the store, and pried the little kids loose from his waist, and this big fat woman kissed him on each cheek. He took the six-pack from them like it was made out of gold, and handed over the three dollars, which they took like it was three dollars they were going to frame instead of ever spending. Then we were out of there, the street was full of trash, it was starting to spit snow and this wasn’t Cuba anymore, it was New York.

  I guess it was Carlos’s idea of a compliment, but we never stole from the Cubans. I don’t know why—we stole from just about every other grocery in the East Village. In fact, we’d go all over Manhattan. The way we’d work it was this. Usually it was me and Carlos and Sammy and Verbena—we’d make a regular Saturday afternoon outing of it. We’d go into some store, Sammy would grab a basket, and the four of us would wander up and down the aisles.

  I remember the first time we did that—I didn’t know what was happening. Carlos walked me around the store, asking, Did I like to eat this? Or this? Picking up fruits and vegetables and cans of things. But whether
I said yes or no, or I don’t know, he just put it back on the shelf. Meanwhile Sammy was loading a few things in the basket—a loaf of white bread, a can of pork and beans. Okay, Carlos said after a little, we’re through. “You go with Sammy,” he told me, “and we’ll wait for you outside.”

  So I stood in the checkout line with Sammy, while Carlos and Verbena stood out on the sidewalk and made faces in at us through the window. Verbena in this faded maroon winter coat she always wore, with about six pieces of costume jewelry pinned to it. And Carlos with his headband on, since we’d had a little too much to drink the night before, and this funky black leather jacket that had just appeared on him one day, I don’t know from where.

  Sammy handed the things in his basket out onto the counter and then started to fumble around in his trousers pocket like he’d lost his money. Finally he pulled out this little change purse, the kind old grandmothers carry, but then he couldn’t get it open because his hands shook so much.

  Because I didn’t know what was up that first time, I was incredibly embarrassed standing there with Sammy while he took forever. I tried to catch the eye of the cashier, this Asian girl, to say I really didn’t have anything to do with this old man. But she was bored with him and me and everything else too—all she did the whole time was inspect one of her fingernails.

  Finally, after about five minutes, Sammy managed to pull out a folded-up ten-dollar bill, which he took forever to unfold. The whole time there was this line of other people formed behind us, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Then while the cashier was getting him change, he managed to drop the change purse on the floor right where she was standing, so in the middle of giving him change she had to bend over and help him pick up the pennies and quarters that were rolling off in all directions. After about ten more foul-ups like that, Sammy managed to get the right change, and in a minute we were out on the street with Carlos and Verbena.