6. A Story about The Boy
The Boy likes to be reminded of himself. He likes stories told by others about who he was. One story was told to him by an ex-boyfriend who now lives in San Francisco with a man he met on a bus in Nicaragua twenty years ago. This ex-boyfriend told The Boy how proud he used to feel to be his boyfriend.
“Everyone looked at you when we went out,” he said. “And I used to think: He’s mine.”
The Boy was amused when his ex-boyfriend told him this. Amused, though, is not the word to describe how The Boy felt.
Some random memories: Lying on the beach one day, The Boy (not yet eighteen) is approached by a man who invites him to take part in a porn movie. The Boy plays in the waves with a French girl. The Boy goes jogging on the beach late at night with his lover, goes to Prague with his lover and to Barcelona with his lover, and…but all this is in the years to come.
BLOSSOMS IN AUTUMN
Boris Pintar
Translated from the Slovenian by Rawley Grau
Years had passed since Slavko marked his half century. A hard life had rewarded him with excess pounds; the hair on the top of his head had almost entirely disappeared, while the back and sides had turned gray—and not that silvery gray that sometimes even looks fashionable; no, this was a dirty yellowishness, like the color that never quite comes off the fingers of avid smokers. Hair sprouted from his ears, from his nose, from the top of his nose, down his back, across his stomach, everywhere it had never been in his youth; and where the first hair of his puberty had appeared—on his ankles, which he once so proudly compared at phys ed with the ankles of his schoolmates—the skin was now bare, with only faint dots left as on a plucked hen to tell of his once-mighty bristles. The doctor had said he had an above-average supply of the male hormone that governed his transformation. He lived alone. His friends—those he hadn’t fallen out with—had gradually died off or grown distant. The more time he spent by himself, the more his desire grew for the warmth of another body, and the older he got, the younger were the men who caught his eye. Where is the crossing point? he sometimes asked himself in dread, for he saw no sign of a more tranquil old age, of enjoying a life of contented domesticity dishing the dirt with the people he knew.
The call of his urges grew louder and louder; he got excited just by looking out the window of his apartment at the schoolyard across the street and the teenage boys chasing the ball. An inner voice was constantly compelling him to go out and meet new people and would send him into a funk if he failed to get them into bed. It was always somebody new, always younger and younger—he had no time for old acquaintances, who phoned him less and less often. He was wealthy enough to hire handsome young men to come to his house to satisfy his desires, and he had done so a number of times, but still he longed for love. The men to whom he openly paid the agreed price kept a certain distance from him, as if he repulsed them. They expressed themselves mechanically; they might as well have been stuffing jelly doughnuts in a pastry shop: What do you like to do? What do you want me to do to you? Turn over! Did you come? Okay, see ya! They never opened their mouths wide enough for him to stick his tongue in; it was as if he was diseased—Please, don’t get personal!—they never kissed him, never stroked him, never tried to get him aroused; never caressed him, hugged him, beat him; he was the one who always had to climb on top of them, tongue them front and back, turn them over, as if they were paying him. They didn’t even want to touch him—all to preserve that disinterested pose, so they could say they weren’t queer but only did it for the money. Tell me what you want; you give me head, I fuck you; I don’t get fucked, I don’t give head, sorry, chum!— But who’s paying here?—You knew the score, take it or leave it!—and what choice did he have when his urges got stronger every year? He longed to have someone want him, at least a little, even if not for real; to have someone prove to him that even he had something to offer a man, more than just drugs and money; he longed for them all not to be so direct, so hurried, so impersonal; he longed to have someone play the game of seduction with him, to sleep next to a warm body, to wake up in the same bed with someone and have breakfast together after morning sex. This was why he still went out to the clubs where he’d meet young people—from the clubs on skyscraper terraces, which at night offered a New York-like view of castle turrets and church belfries, to the ones so deep below ground it seemed there was nowhere for the sewage to drain so it just accumulated right there. His age and the way he looked made him stand out among the young bodies in tight-fitting pants and shimmering Lycra T-shirts that clearly displayed the separate body parts, still in their recognizable shapes—which he could no longer say of himself when he looked in the mirror. He dressed as youthfully as he could, hiding a few pounds with certain fashion tricks, and armed himself with drugs, his ticket into the world of the young. He knew dealers; he knew chemists who manufactured Ecstasy in home laboratories; and he had mastered in every nuance the street talk of youth, which left him sounding ridiculous whenever he forgot himself around older folks.
There was a puddle of water and urine on the floor that had overflowed from a clogged urinal, and although its ocher was now diluted, the acrid reek in the nostrils testified to its many years’ presence in this poorly lit room of broken, graffiti-scrawled white tile. The folk art on the walls portrayed queer fantasies come to life: ever-bigger cocks in ever-greater numbers—up the ass, in the mouth, inside the head. The cold draft that entered through a vent beneath the ceiling could not expel the odor of piss that penetrated every pore. Slavko was aware of neither the cold nor the stench; he had taken some X and had a few gin-and-colas, which made him feel both high and tranquil and certainly bolder and braver, his dick rock hard whenever he brushed up against some teenager on the dance floor. Younger guys couldn’t get it up when they took X, but it had precisely the opposite effect on him. But first he had to take a leak. He opened his zipper, pulled out his whizzer and let loose a pressurized pale stream in all directions, including down his pants, until he managed to tug the foreskin back and aim at the urinal, which was getting dangerously full and threatening to overflow. He glanced around at the other urinals and on his left noticed a boy whose pee-flow had just ended. Slavko instantly averted his eyes, but then, remembering that he was more courageous now, unabashedly looked back down at the boy’s dick, which he was still shaking dry—and now stroking it, making it thicker—and Slavko thought it could be a rather good-sized morsel if only he had the chance to work it over with his mouth. He glanced up at the face of the guy, who was looking straight into his eyes, which he instantly redirected back toward the guy’s cock. He knew he should say something but couldn’t think what.
“Want some X, dude?”
“You got some?”
Slavko reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a plastic bag of tiny pills; then, with his dick still hanging out of his pants, he took a pill from the bag and placed it in the mouth of the boy, who swallowed it dry as he kept stroking his cock. Slavko, who now felt no fear at all about staring at the boy’s rod, stretched out his hand and grasped this warm rising loaf, which smelled of mama’s kitchen.
“You like it, huh?”
“May I?” Slavko said, bending over, about to kneel in the cold puddle of water and piss.
“A cock like this you got to pay for!”
“Just a little, please!”
“It’s fifty or nothing. I need the money for drinks and my mobile.”
“Okay, but only if you come to my place. I’m not paying fifty euros to suck some guy off in the john!” said Slavko, sobering up and switching from seduction to business mode.
“So you want me to do you? You live far from here?”
“A couple of blocks. I’ve got my car outside.”
Slavko needed some time to get himself into the low seat of his Porsche but then took off so fast the wide tires squealed as he turned onto the road. He ran through a few yellow lights to show off the Porsche’s acceleration to his new partne
r, and in no time at all they were in front of his house in a quiet residential neighborhood in the middle of the city. He opened the garage door with a remote and led his guest up some inside stairs into a luxurious living room filled with Versace furniture, which evoked a golden-age happiness for the twenty-first century.
“Would you like a drink? Just put your coat anywhere! What’s your name, by the way?”
“Sebastijan.”
The boy removed his leather cap, and his thick, wavy, raven hair, shimmering like the metallic color of the Porsche, tumbled over his ears, though it kept the forehead-to-nape flow a strong hair gel had set in place. The haircut recalled the era of A Streetcar Named Desire and the young Marlon Brando, whose photo adorned Slavko’s bathroom.
“Whiskey if you got it.”
“Sure do.”
Only now did Slavko notice the full beauty of Sebastijan’s symmetrical face; the smooth, white, poreless skin; the straight nose, the full lips, the slightly dimpled cheeks free of the age creases that run from nose to chin—which he himself had had smoothed away with plastic surgery—the thick black eyebrows beneath a high, even forehead; the curved black eyelashes, as long as a woman’s; and the dark pupils set in the white sclera of his eyes. Sebastijan took off his tight, black leather motorcycle jacket, padded at the elbows and shoulders and under it wore a sleeveless T-shirt, which hung on him as loosely as his jeans did—but this hardly kept Slavko from imagining every muscle beneath the clothes. The boy looked firm to him, not too muscular but just enough so it was impossible to detect the least bit of fat on his body; he was of medium height and well proportioned, and Slavko felt as though he could cook, wash, iron and clean for this boy for the rest of his life.
“So you into sports?”
“Martial arts. You know anything about it? I’m a European and national champion. I still work out now, just for myself. And I know how to party.”
“Want to do a line?”
He would give anything to make the encounter last longer. From a drawer that held his table linen he extracted a plastic bag with white powder and handed it trustingly to Sebastijan, even though it contained enough to last the whole month. Sebastijan, spreading his legs in a manly way, sat down on the white sofa in front of the coffee table, which had an inlaid sun on its marble top and fluted legs, and shook a little of the white powder onto the table’s smooth surface, took a plastic card from the back pocket of his jeans and started crushing the cocaine with its edge. Slavko brought over an unopened bottle of twenty-five-year-old Chivas Regal—which was so expensive he might have been saving it for his wedding—two glasses and a pitcher of ice with tongs, then sat down on the sofa, more than half of which was taken up by Sebastijan, and crossed his legs. In his hand he held a rolled-up fifty-euro bill, which Sebastijan would get, after they were done with it, as a piece of discarded paraphernalia and not as payment for a love that was so sincere no amount of money could express its worth. With the plastic card Sebastijan divided the powder on the marble into two lines. Slavko stuck one end of the rolled-up banknote into a nostril, bent over the table and vacuumed up a line with the other end. Then leaning back, he inhaled deeply, let out a grunt from the pleasure and the burn and gave the little tube to Sebastijan, who vacuumed up the second line and leaned back on the sofa without making any sound at all of either pleasure or displeasure.
For Slavko, getting high was the foreplay, and he now set to work unbuttoning Sebastijan’s jeans in search of the source of life. Sebastijan did not resist. He took the expensive whiskey from the table, undid the sealed cork and drank it straight out of the bottle, without ice. Slavko, meanwhile, freed Sebastijan’s cock—of considerable size even in a flaccid state—and his heavy balls. The area around the boy’s cock was clean shaven; so, too, were the balls and, as Slavko could feel with his hand, his ass. He took hold of the thick dick, put it in his mouth and tried every technique he knew—with tongue, teeth, lips and throat—to get it to stand up. Slowly it started getting bigger—he wasn’t totally out of condition yet—and he took it deeper into his mouth, could feel it in his throat; though nearly gagging, he didn’t stop; he wanted to see it in its fullness. When the cock was hard enough to stand on its own, he took it out of his mouth and examined it close up, like a work of art he longed to touch but was afraid of triggering an alarm. It was straight, over eight inches long, thick, evenly proportioned with a rounded pink head, which the foreskin had slipped down from, and a prominent vein that curved along it like ivy; the circumference, too, had to be close to eight inches—he had developed a mastery of dimensions ever since he once ordered over the Internet a latex cast of a porn star’s actual cock, which had come with all the vital statistics—but this cock was even lovelier, shapelier, and most of all, warmer and livelier, and unlike Kris’s, which he kept in his dresser, it possessed an expressive desire. He desired to feel its desire inside himself and started undressing. When he undid his vest, his belly drooped down over his belt. He was covered in front by a dense mat of black, gray and yellow hair, which made it impossible to tell where his chest ended and his abdomen began; his dick was hidden deep beneath his belly and his buttocks blended with his thick legs in a vast blob, across which oily mounds rose like volcanoes, some now extinct and plugged with scab. Naked as from his mother’s loins, only with a lot more hair and padding, he knelt on the floor, raised his bum in the air and placed his head between Sebastijan’s legs, so as to stiffen desire with his tongue in ultimate yearning.
When it seemed to him that Sebastijan’s dick was hard enough, Slavko gestured with his hand that now he would take it in his ass, and the boy lifted himself up lethargically, tugged his jeans down to the knees, so it was possible to see his muscular thighs with their sparse short black hairs and then knelt behind him and spread his legs apart, legs now hairless below the knees and adorned with blue veins, like the grooves on an ancient column that had collapsed under too much weight. Slavko inhaled some poppers from a little bottle, first in one nostril, then in the other, and felt he was as open as a book capable of receiving in itself all that was holy in this world. Sebastijan knelt behind this furry mass, which quivered like meat jelly, and the sharp bristles tingled the sensitive glans as he stuck his penis in the chasm between Slavko’s thighs. Slavko knew he’d have to help the boy find his way and spread open his rippling asscheeks with his hands, so that Sebastijan saw Slavko’s cabbagey hole staring up at him, overgrown with matted hair and edged on one side by gnarled veins, like pork cracklings growing on a pig’s butt, and on the other by scabbing from hemorrhoids wounded in his most recent shit. Sebastijan leaned on Slavko’s back with his hands, looked up at the ceiling and took aim. Slavko let out a sneeze, blood trickled from his nose, and Sebastijan, glancing down at his cock, which had gone limp before it could penetrate anything, saw that it was smeared with blood.
“You didn’t crush the coke enough! And you’re not at all hard. Give me a sec, I’ll be right back!”
When he returned from the bathroom, having wiped his nose and ass, Slavko handed a Viagra pill to Sebastijan, who downed it with whiskey; he didn’t need one himself. The Viagra would be working in about half an hour, if the boy got even a little aroused, so Slavko started piling on the tenderness. He stripped him naked and was astounded by the boy’s firm and well-proportioned body; although he was used to young guys, he had never felt toward anyone an attraction of this magnitude. He laid Sebastijan on his back and applied all his arts: a combination of erotic massage, acupuncture, chiropractic and other spiritualities he had learned from self-help books. Every muscle on the boy’s abdomen was perfectly formed; his clean-shaven pectorals were still well defined, and Slavko bit one of the nipples a little too hard on purpose just to hear his voice, for he was lying beneath him as if dead. A full-body tongue massage can reveal new erogenous zones, and straight guys get turned on when you lick their asses, so Slavko lifted up Sebastijan’s legs—the boy was so flexible he could have done a full split in the air—and moved
his tongue closer to the solid, clean-shaven pink butt, which might have broken his nose had the boy clenched it. The anus, so tightly shut it was barely visible, had a slightly sweet taste from the Chanel Allure Sport cologne the boy had scented it with, since geezers were always trying to stick their tongues up there. By tongue-massaging the sphincter, Slavko got Sebastijan’s dick to stand up again; then he squatted over him as if to sit on him—but when he spread his asscheeks with his hands so the boy could enter, the inflatable dragon instantly deflated. He saw that it wasn’t going to work and got himself ready to fuck Sebastijan instead, since his own dick was still so hard it hurt. Raising Sebastijan’s martial-arts legs, he brought his crooked hard-on right up to the boy’s blossom so as to penetrate that open-sesame cave. He aimed his dick, solid as a rock, right at the navel of the world, but he couldn’t get it in, even though it was a lot smaller than Sebastijan’s.
“Have some poppers; it’ll make it easier!” He held the little bottle up to one of Sebastijan’s nostrils and closed the other with his hand. And when the boy had inhaled the fumes of the liquid, which smelled like glue, he repeated the procedure with the second nostril. Then he lifted Sebastijan’s ass a little off the floor and got his dick’s pointy knob to go inside, but Sebastijan pushed it out with a yelp.
“Have some more poppers and it won’t hurt! Here, take a big whiff!”
Sebastijan was pale, sweat beading on his forehead. He took a deep whiff of the poppers, a few times in each nostril, and seemed to be lying there completely open, when all at once his body tightened in a convulsion; he gripped his chest and looked straight at Slavko with wide-open eyes. Slavko was terrified for a moment, but then he lay down next to the boy and started caressing him, warming him with the heat of his own ample body.
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