Voices From The Other Side

by Brandon Massey

  “Some white guys got dick, K, just not me.”

  Kelly was throwing hostile looks over his shoulder at the sliver while he dribbled dry, when his friend—ever brazen—delivered the sixty-million-dollar question: “So, what’s up? Can I just . . . look at it? Feels like forever I been tryin’ to spy ’round urinal walls or peep you out in locker rooms, and the shit is stupid. I’m your boy; I just wanna look at it.”

  “Fine, get it out yo’ fuckin’ system then. But touch me, and it’s a fight.”

  The bathroom door creaked on its hinges, and then Josh was flicking on the light above the medicine-cabinet mirror, in addition to the ceiling light that already burned. Kelly felt like a giant drumstick underneath the red-orange heat lamps in some Popeyes chicken hut. “That’s amazing,” Josh said, hovering up close, gazing down. “You’re bigger soft than I am hard. Man, if I had that . . .”

  “You’d be some kinda freak show, with a big black penis swingin’ off yo’ skinny white body.”

  “Nigga, please, I’m not skinny.” Josh had been born and raised in this same black neighborhood, and he knew the talk, the vulgar music of it, as well as anyone else. “I’m in the gym every day.” And lifting his shirt he revealed the pale rigid washboard that was his stomach. “Feel that,” he insisted.

  “Are you out yo’ mind, motherfucker? I ain’t feelin’ shit on yo’ body while I’m hangin’ here in the wind.”

  “I’m just sayin’, pudgy,” and Josh punctuated by jabbing a finger into the flat but soft surface of Kelly’s stomach. “I’m hard, m’man. I’m ready.”

  “Ready to what? Be in one of yo’ uncle’s movies?”

  “Yeah, if I had what you got. The solution to your money trouble has been swingin’ between your legs all along, and I’m sittin’ right here with the hookup. Cheap Jew bastard says I’m not hung enough for his films. But you—you’re like a horse. He’d love you.”

  “Yeah, okay. Well, my mama taught me not to peddle my ass for money.”

  “It’s your dick, not your ass.”

  “It’s my dick, and I’m puttin’ it away now.”

  “Wait, man, wait. How big does it get?”

  Kelly stared then at the other man’s hawkeyed focus on the meat slung over the waistband of his sweats. There was a subtle note of desperation in Josh’s tone, and a kind of hunger, too. His dream was right there in front of his eyes, attached to someone else’s groin.

  Kelly had taken himself in hand to retuck and reclaim his privacy when Josh interjected: “Shit, man, just play with it for a second, okay? I just want to see. When am I gonna see a real one like that again?” His tone trembled slightly, as if he might cry were the meat pocketed so soon.

  “I’d give it to you if I could, Josh.”

  “You lie.”

  “Grass is always greener, m’man. You want to watch me jerk it, right? Guys always like that.” Kelly began a deliberately pronounced stroke, snapping the meat like a whip, making the big head thrash about. “It might take a while—these big ones take a lot to fill.”

  Josh didn’t care. The words were right there, but he didn’t know how to fix them on his lips and make them sound right. I could help you; I could touch it with you. The words never surfaced, as there was no right way to say them, but in his eyes the language of it lingered plain as day.

  “It’s no fun, man,” Kelly said, trying to convince him. “You can’t fuck in the positions you want ’cause you end up hurtin’ the ladies, your balls are always stinging like you been kicked in ’em ’cause you got too much ridin’ up front and no kinda underwear has the right support, and people are always staring ’cause you can’t hide the . . .”

  Kelly’s stroke had continued all the while, and the meat was responding. And Josh, his bottom jaw hanging, was hypnotized by the cobra and completely unmoved by what his friend had to say.

  I’m not gay, read the words in Josh’s eyes now, but I’ll suck your dick if you’ll let me, just to see it full-grown, just to live through it for a few vicarious minutes.

  “Go ahead,” Kelly said, his temper at a boil, his eyes bloodshot from all the flared arteries clouding the whites. “Suck it,” he said in a booming monotone.

  For the first time in a while, Josh’s eyes elevated to meet his friend’s; he wanted to say something and Kelly knew what. “I know, Josh. I’ve heard it all before. You’re not gay, but you do wanna suck it. Everybody does, so go ahead.”

  Josh nodded, and the next sound was the thump his knees made hitting the ground. In tandem, Kelly’s heart seemed to slam the floor of his stomach. They were all the same; everyone, the same; everyone hungry.

  Kelly shut his eyes as Josh’s jaws opened.

  Something inside him was screaming . . .

  Something inside him was breaking . . .

  All he knew was that he couldn’t watch.

  That night, in the cramped quarters of Josh’s bathroom, the space behind Kelly’s eyelids had been bottomless black. But the longer he drifted in the nothing of it, the more it changed, its sealing embrace tightening into a stranglehold. Obsidian dark turned storm-cloud gray, then ethereal white. And like thinning smoke, there were shapes whirring on the other side—ghosts, waiting as if behind a veil.

  It was the veil of his mind.

  It was a scene snatched from some raw spot in his cerebellum, a forgotten moment seeping from an old mental wound, now reopened, like blood from a poorly stitched gash.

  Kelly’s buddy Josh had made the wound bleed again—his hot mouth, his course tongue, the occasional panting utterance: “Oh . . . Oh, god . . . it’s huge!” All conspired to rip through the scar tissue time had woven into place.

  Kelly was in the locker room during his freshman year of high school, in the shower, his bronze back bent like a question mark in the interest of hiding his penis, like a dog might hide its tail between its legs. His hands were down there as well, groping, trying to cover and conceal it. The shower spray was a relentless waterfall pounding his skull, his chest, every stinging bead an accusation.

  “Check Kelly out. Fucker’s hard again.”

  “What a homo.”

  The other boys, all naked and leering, barking and pointing, had formed a crude circle around him.

  “Every time we come in these showers, Kelly’s got wood. What’s the matter with you, faggot? You got everybody scared to drop the soap.”

  “I ain’t no fag.” Kelly’s eyes, had they been daggers, would have unseated the boy’s newly grown Adam’s apple from his throat.

  It was like this every time he took his clothes off in the locker room. They thought he was hard because he was bigger soft, bigger all day, than any one of them with a full hard-on. They thought he got off looking at them, but as his hurt, angry eyes roved the circle, it was sadly obvious that the shoe was on the other foot.

  They were the ones watching him, covetous and lusty, and covering up their own confusion with this nasty game of odd man out.

  “Look how big that shit is,” another voice called out of the circle.

  “Yeah, this faggot’s a big mutha. Gonna fix your ass, Dreaves. Fix it so you can’t sit down for a week.”

  “I don’t give two shits about Dreaves’s ass!” Kelly straightened his backbone, and found his accuser’s eyes. “I said, I ain’t no faggot.”

  “Yeah, you are. Your boner’s sayin’ what your lips don’t.”

  The pink-faced boy with all the mouth was pale and skinny, and had a flaccid penis like a button. All of them, pink and brown, a few dark chocolate, even the largest of them, were small by Kelly’s measure. In years to come, he would find the words, but at fourteen, the lexicon had been far beyond him.

  At fourteen, he’d wondered why he was different.

  He’d wondered what was wrong with his penis, why it wouldn’t just shrivel down and go away like everyone else’s. Why did it want to make him out to be a fruit.

  Someone threw a bar of soap, which connected with his left temple, popping him
hard, ricocheting as it staggered him. Laughter moved through the circle like cancer metastasizing inside the frailest of bodies, and another bar was flung, and another after that. Like slippery stones, they stung Kelly’s chest, bloodied his nose, and when one of those blocks of soap pounded his groin, striking his penis and his left testicle, he buckled over and groaned.

  This was when they seized him.

  “You gonna like this, faggot.”

  All their names were lost to him now, and even their faces were mostly blurs, but what they did with those bars of soap he would never forget. The way they forced him down to the wet tiles; the way the mildew looked overgrown in the grout line his right cheek had pressed into; the way all that angst and boy sweat and Ivory soap stunk to high heaven.

  “I ain’t no faggot,” he had sobbed.

  Two boys had sat on his back to keep him down.

  “I ain’t no faggot!” he had screamed. “I’m not! I’m not!”

  His arms were held while two fellows made a wish with his legs, opening the gate for a third. By the time the coach intervened, screaming and cursing, and snatching naked youths off Kelly, slapping the one with his hand in the cookie jar, the damage had already been done.

  It had taken two hours in the emergency room for the doctors to extract the three bars of soap Kelly’s so-called teammates had wedged up his rectum. The entire junior varsity football team was suspended for the two weeks that followed, but that was a small price to pay for what they’d done. While they lounged at home, Kelly had been wearing sanitary pads to school. The way those bars of soap had reamed him, he’d bled for days after, and shitting had burned like there was a blowtorch stuck up his ass.

  For months afterward, he’d wake in the small hours of the night washed in sweat, with the words “I ain’t no faggot” still falling off his lips.

  Those words found his trembling lips again in Josh’s bathroom.

  “I’m not . . . I’m not . . .” Kelly whispered with his eyes sealed, his voice painfully naked.

  Josh nodded, his mouth full.

  “I ain’t no faggot,” Kelly said as his eyelids sprang open like shades snapping to the call of their springs. The bass in his voice was mounting in tune with the tremble in his balls. “I’m not . . .”

  Josh’s eyes gazed up to his wide-gored mouth. Me either, said those hazel eyes. It’s just so amazing that I had to see it in action. His eyes said a lot, but his mouth said more. He was a cocksucker, and it was Kelly’s cock. If they were not queer, then what were they? What would the boys from the shower room think?

  “I’m not a faggot!” Kelly boomed as a stream of tear-water rolled off his left cheek.

  Then grabbing Josh by the head, by two fistfuls of hair, he bellowed it again and again as he drove himself into the tight O of that little mouth.

  The sounds turned suddenly into muzzled gags and Josh’s telling looks turned to terrorized alerts as his hazel-emblazoned eyeballs threatened to pop from the sockets. Josh’s arms and hands sprang up, striking Kelly’s forearms, as if to throw loose his hold, but Kelly was fifty pounds the greater man, even if his stomach lacked the deep abdominal cuts Josh was so proud of. Kelly’s arms were like immovable logs, and his clenched fingers were as certain as a death grip.

  Scrambling, choking, unable to grasp anything else, Josh caught the slack at the seat of Kelly’s sweatpants, dragging the cotton down the sprung-wound hemispheres of the other man’s ass, leaving claw trails in the bronze skin as that relentless pelvis locked out and fired in with mechanical determination. And when Kelly at last shoved away from the smaller man’s head, he was roaring, screaming from one mouth and spurting from the other. And Josh was also spurting—vomiting—as he toppled backward.

  The first convulsive gush had fired not just from Josh’s mouth, but also from both his flared nostrils. The second wave found Josh on his knees with his face in the bowl of the toilet. Kelly was snatching up his pants then, trembling, taking unsure stumbling steps toward the door.

  “That . . . that was my fault,” Josh sputtered between gasps, an arm jutting out, his fingers clutching after Kelly’s leg, only to have the fabric wrenched from his grip as the other man moved through the door.

  “C’mon, man, don’t let this fuck up our friendship.”

  Kelly froze, head slowly rotating to cast his sight back the way he’d come, not knowing what to say. How could this idiot have thought this scene could do anything other than fuck up their friendship? Guys didn’t suck their friend’s dicks, even the really big ones.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  Josh stared, again with pleading eyes—sincere eyes. “It was my fault,” he said.

  “I’m goin’.”

  “Alright man, but don’t be a stranger.” The shame was like a shadow over Josh’s entire person. “I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . .”

  Kelly was sorry, too, but the words never found his lips. His legs made long strides in which his gonads were, as ever, being painfully jumbled and gnashed.

  “Wait!” Josh shouted after the man, stalling him at the front door. Turning on his heels, Kelly found the other man’s silhouette hovering in the bathroom door, his shadow falling into the dark hall ahead of him. “I just wanted to say, I know you’re not a faggot.”

  Sheila’s wildly dilated eyes told the story of the hunger in her, the fire that could never be snuffed, born out of the need to consume all of Kelly. Her lips tensed, her bottom jaw trembled at the tremendous effort. She wanted the probe of him to journey so deep that the fat, round glans might somehow kiss her living, beating heart.

  But this was only fantasy; she was no sword swallower. And when her jaws had taken all the strain they could and her tonsils could be lodged no farther back in her throat—the gag reaction kept at bay no longer—it was then time to explore another angle, another orifice.

  Kelly’s worries over the eviction notice were forgotten, along with the ache in his balls, and even the unwanted memories from the shower room of his youth and that recent raw night in Josh’s bathroom, as Sheila’s face came off the stake of him and the glistening hole of her mouth formed words hot as molten sex. “Fuck me,” she said.

  And then it was as though their movements were rehearsed. Fluidly Kelly came up out of his old La-Z-Boy as Sheila swiveled on her heels to present her upturned rear.

  “Take my ass,” she offered. “Take me hard.”

  His hands held the hemisphere of her buttocks like two basketballs pressed together, though these tawny globes were warm and malleable to his touch.

  Eyeing the wonder of the whirl, he knew Sheila would do anything for him.

  She would give any part of herself to what hung between his legs, what weighed on her now, like a supermarket-checkout separator, dividing the halves of her buttocks.

  Directing the spear lower than where she’d asked, Kelly slid instead into the velvet tunnel of her sex. The action garnered a long rolling moan from the O of her mouth, and several ticks later came the familiar gasp as the enormous bauble head thumped her cervix.

  It hurt a bit, the increasingly thunderous pounding by a loving battering ram bent on bringing down her walls.

  It hurt so wonderfully that she had to scream, had to cry.

  The music of their sex bore a note beyond the ordinary, beyond the raucous moaning Kelly sometimes heard through their too-thin bedroom walls and beyond the soundtrack that filled the halls of the whorehouse on Summer Street, where the sounds of animal sex were omnipresent.

  Sheila’s vocal gymnastics—the booming bellows all women made with Kelly—had an edge something like the sound a woman might make when being punched in the stomach.

  He would be gentle with Sheila because he loved her. He wouldn’t dip much more than half of himself in the well of her, a well in which his bucket was already scraping the bottom. He would never take her ass, as she’d implored, because the harpoon of him would, at the very least, have her feeling as though she was split in two.

  He
would go slow and easy, and only halfway, and still she would bleed.

  They always bled at least a little bit.

  There were times when Kelly didn’t want to be gentle, though, when the urge to fuck came over him like a rage, and stirring only half his spoon inside the pot wasn’t good enough. At these times, he liked to visit the whorehouse on Summer Street.

  If he was paying, he didn’t have to be gentle, and there he could order what he wanted—a bottomless pussy, though none were without bottoms for him.

  The last time he’d been down to Summer Street, he’d come through the rusted iron door that hung on the face of the condemned-looking building and entered into the many-shrouded receiving room to wait his turn.

  Everywhere the eye fell, some length of fabric hung from the walls, covering the boarded windows, draping the room, such that it looked the way an Arab harem must. It always struck him how different the inside was from the out. The production was much more than one would expect from a ghetto whorehouse, and the woman responsible—immense and boisterous behind the receiving table (what part of her large body didn’t blossom out around it)—was Big Mamma, a personality who also outstripped the expectation of the female pimp.

  Kelly had strode up to the table. Tall behind the scrawny black scab of a man in front of him, he had overheard the smaller man’s complaint: “What do you mean, Regina’s still out?”

  “I mean, she’s sick, and she’s got the night off.” Big Mamma’s eyes never even settled on the little man. Rather, they drifted Kelly’s way, measuring his broad shoulders, traveling down, down until she was also measuring the pronounced bulge that began at his groin and journeyed like a snake down his right leg. That night he hadn’t worn underwear.

  “What about an Asian girl?” The scab was talking again.

  “This ain’t no Chinese restaurant,” Big Mamma said.

  “I need a tight girl, though.”

  “This ain’t Burger King neither, motherfucker. You can’t have it your way.”