Foolish Fire

by Willard, Guy

  My broadening chest now angled out in a curved line from my tight waist, and my shoulders were filling out. My buttocks were still small and firm, but my genitals felt heavier in heft. I performed isometric exercises shirtless in front of the bathroom mirror to tone up my muscles…and to admire myself as I shifted into various poses.

  I found myself comparing how I stacked up with the other boys. I still envied those who were more developed than me, with broader shoulders and more fleshed-out chests.

  From the summer of my sophomore year, I’d begun working out with weights. I’d bought a set of barbells and a book called The Perfect Body which explained how to exercise with the barbells. I switched to a diet which provided me with as much protein as possible; my mother began complaining about the amount of steaks I consumed. In between meals and after working out, I drank the famous “stamina drink” recommended by a Swedish body builder I worshipped. It was like a thick milkshake, and consisted of milk, eggs, and honey all whipped together with the blender.

  My goal was to have a body like those muscle men I admired so much at the beach every summer. This “beach” was actually only the shoreline of Echo Lake in the park, but it got quite crowded with sunbathers when the weather was fine. Last summer I’d gone almost every day.

  The dark sunglasses I wore gave me the freedom to devour those dream bodies with my eyes. Lying on my stomach pretending to read a book, I scanned those chesty college boys and health club instructors…well-built men whose bikinis waged ever-losing battles to cover up their charms. For me, these men were incarnations of Greek gods, whose solid burnished bodies gleamed like living bronze…whose chests were like hard, flat shields…whose neck, shoulders, arms, and thighs denoted pure power and strength. I could imagine that a finger put to those sinews would feel the steel-like hardness of solid muscle. Their tanned torsos reminded me of the ideal males I’d dreamed of in boyhood as I gazed longingly at the photographs which illustrated the encyclopedia entries on “Praxelites,” “Michelangelo,” and “Greek Sculpture.”

  I stationed myself as close to the water as possible, near a diving board which had been set up temporarily for the summer. Many of the most attractive men liked to go for a swim in the lake, and when they pulled themselves up by the wooden boat dock, the water, as if reluctant to let them go, would tug at them with aqueous fingers, clinging with a last desperate caress. As they stepped up onto land the water streamed off them, leaving their bodies glistening, their hair all wet, their swimsuits clinging so tightly that the outline of their genitals was clearly discernable. Sometimes a bit of pubic hair peeped out from the top of the waistband…and the casual gesture with which the man tugged up his briefs made my heart pound.

  Strangely enough, a man’s facial looks didn’t always matter that much. Although a handsome face was desirable, I lost interest if the man didn’t have the body to go with it. What excited me was his aura of masculinity. It was maleness I worshipped. With the concealment provided by my sunglasses, I unashamedly turned my head to gaze after a handsome couple walking by…and everyone assumed, of course, that my admiration was focused upon the woman.

  I still felt that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, women were far less attractive than men—even when judged by the most objective standards. At the beach, because almost everyone wore swimsuits, this was easy to confirm. When the girls walked by (even the most attractive of them), the way their buttocks and thighs jiggled showed the flabby tone of their muscles there. Boys, on the other hand, were more evenly muscled all around. A hand passing over their buttocks and thighs would feel nothing but a satisfying firmness.

  *

  We could hear the music from all the way out in the parking lot. As we stepped inside the gym, it was almost deafening. The basketball court had been transformed by some chintzy magic into the scene of Green and White Night. Tables from the cafeteria had been set up against the wall (where the bleachers had been folded in), and streamers in green and white—the school colors—hung from rafters and girders. The smell of popcorn balls and taffy made by girls in the student council or sororities hung over everything. A temporary stage had been set up opposite the home bleachers. The basketball court itself was filled with dancing couples, while here and there the chaperoning teachers looked placidly on.

  Judy immediately went off to chat with some friends she’d spotted at a table while I stood there waiting for her. She looked so excited and happy at being here that I didn’t take offense.

  Above the gym floor, multicolored lights—blue, green, orange—flashed on and off in time to the music, giving the effect of a jerky silent movie to the dancers’ movements. I watched the boys and girls jerking about spasmodically, letting their hair fall into their eyes, shuffling their feet, gyrating with puppet-like motions.

  In the swirling mass of boys and girls I spotted Jack dancing with a girl named Marybeth. She was energetically pumping her pelvis back and forth, back and forth, with a blank, lost look on her face. No doubt she was unaware that she was so brazenly revealing a very private act, for, to my eyes, her motions were nothing less than a ritualized version of actual sex. The interval between her and Jack was like the blank space between parentheses, a concession to public morality, which demarcated the difference between dancing and fucking.

  I knew Jack was sexually active because he never lost an opportunity to talk about it afterwards in the locker room. And, true to form, he always seemed to choose the sleaziest, least attractive girls in school—the ones who would put up the least resistance to the one thing he wanted from them.

  He himself was beginning to lose his looks. No longer the young god I’d known back in junior high school, he drank too much beer on the weekends, and was getting slightly overweight and flabby. Girls still found him quite attractive, though, and I could see why. His sexual conquests only seemed to add layers of glory to his unshakable macho confidence. There were still times when I felt twinges of my former longing.

  Judy finally returned. Grabbing my hand, she pulled me out to the dance floor. As I danced with her, I imagined myself gazing down upon us all. The whole scene had the appearance of an ancient festival orgy performed before some temple dedicated to the gods of heterosexual love. Everyone was lost in his own dance. Alongside the dance floor, others were chatting with their friends, shouting to be heard above the noise of the music.

  I felt left out of it all, a stranger from another country who has wandered in to observe the customs of the natives. Was there anyplace here for me? A keen feeling of loneliness pierced me and seemed to spread out of me and float above like a wraith.

  Suddenly the lights got dim and the flashing colored lights died away. There was a pause during which the singer took a long drink of coke, and on-going conversations and laughter came into clear focus. Then the band started playing a slow dance.

  Judy pulled me closer to her and put her arms around me. Everywhere around us, couples had collapsed into each other, pressed tightly together. The girls’ heads were lolling lazily against the boys’ chests or shoulders, and the boys buried their faces in the girls’ hair. Arms encircling bodies, hands gripped tightly or loosely behind their partners’ backs, the dancers’ feet shuffled slowly as they rocked back and forth like seaweed drifting in the tide.

  Judy, clasped tightly in my arms, felt like a captive bird. I breathed in the fragrance of her shampoo and felt the soft press of her breasts against me. Her breath wafting softly against my ear was redolent of the spearmint-flavored toothpaste she used. And somewhere I detected the perfume she’d borrowed from her sister tonight—a drop on each earlobe perhaps. But the fresh, spring-like smell which underlay it all was from the acne soap she used, the quintessential smell of a high school girl.

  I spotted Jack a few feet away dancing with Marybeth. She looked as if she were being held up on her feet by him. Her face wore the expression of a loose swoon…there was a look of bliss on her upturned face and half-opened lips. Her arms groped up his broad back,
her hands buried themselves in his hair. I turned Judy slowly around so I wouldn’t have to see it.

  The music was now little more than a throbbing of bass and electric organ, the aural equivalent of a pulsing red light. Over that accompaniment, the singer’s cat-like vocals whispered a saccharine lyric about disappointment in love, a sentiment completely belied by the sexual throbbing of the music behind her.

  Judy and I swayed to the rhythm of the music, bathed in an aura of sweaty boy-girl lusts, our clothes sticking to our skin. There was a low whining in my ears and I felt as if we were aboard a slowly rocking rowboat at the pier, bump-bumping softly against the wooden pylon, the midnight wavelets licking, lapping at the curved hull.

  Judy turned her head aside and laid an ear against my chest. She felt so pliable in my arms, her soft flesh molded tightly against my chest and belly. A strand of her hair caught awkwardly between my lips. I freed it by pulling my head away.

  The inside of the auditorium was almost completely dark…we were all on a huge barge drifting loose into the night, into the perfumed mystery. There was a certain magic in the moment despite the tawdry reminders of everyday school life all around: desks festooned with colored streamers, the teachers in their suits and dresses, the green-tinted blackboard still bearing traces of the swaths made by a wet cloth which had wiped away algebraic equations. None of it could change my fantasy that we were all on a ship plowing through the night, a passenger liner with festive lights, propelled by desire and memory and dream.

  After the band finished their last number, the lights went on and the dance broke up. While the members of the dance committee began cleaning up, and the band were putting away their instruments, Judy and I joined the crowd going out the main entrance, chattering, laughing, to the parking lot out front. Ordinarily it was a teachers’ parking lot, but on dance nights it was open to the students.

  Outside, couples melted into the darkness, and there were sounds of cars starting up and car doors slamming. Here and there cigarettes were lit up. A girl’s voice called out from someplace: “Joanne, your purse!”

  I suddenly felt as if something had vanished forever, leaving only the smell of sweat and cheap perfume hanging in the air. A renewed wave of loneliness and self-pity overcame me—because all this was something from which I was forever shut out. At the same time, the moment became tinged with a sense of sadness—sadness, perhaps, at the impending loss of all this. It was almost like nostalgia, or deja vu, but for something which I was experiencing now. And then a strange thought hit me: Was this premature sense of loss what was normally called happiness?

  The night was warm, and many people were still standing around talking with friends, reluctant to go home just yet. Judy and I turned our steps toward the darkness of the football field, where we noticed other couples strolling or kissing. The smell of new mown grass and just-turned earth seemed to fill up the moonless night.

  As we stepped onto the turf of the playing field, I spotted several couples sneaking off into dark corners of the deserted bleachers. I pointed them out, and Judy whispered, “Let’s do the same.”

  We found a quiet spot just beside the announcer’s booth and sat down. She snuggled against me and raised her mouth for a kiss.

  I discovered Judy was a passionate kisser; she slipped her tongue into my mouth as soon as our lips met. There was a faint taste of bubble gum. I recalled seeing her in the hallway kissing Tyson just last week. So this was what he was getting then.

  She let me suck on her tongue for a while, and then she sucked on mine. I withdrew my tongue from her mouth and we let our lips brush lightly together, then glance away, then come back again for a fleeting touch. When this teasing became too much, we mashed our lips together hard, until we were both straining for breath.

  Finally, Judy pulled away. “So tell me: are you still going with Wendy?”

  I sat back against the wall of the announcers’ booth. “We weren’t going steady.”

  “Oh? Then what’s the situation between you? I mean, how serious are you?”

  “Well…. I don’t know.”

  “What about her? Does she want to go steady?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you like her? I mean, a lot?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Sometimes I like her a lot, and other times I’m not so sure.”

  “You don’t sound too serious about her.”

  “What about you?” I countered. “Aren’t you going with someone now?”

  “Nope.”

  “I thought you were going with Tyson.”

  “Oh we broke up ages ago.”

  “You still seem pretty friendly.”

  “Well, we’re still friends and everything.”

  We said nothing for a while. Then she took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. “Is it okay if I smoke?”

  “Sure.”

  But she made no move to light her cigarette. Across the field, the lights were going out in the gym, section by section.

  “Guy? Do you think it’s possible to love two people at the same time?”

  “I guess so.”

  She looked at me strangely, in an expectant manner.

  I kissed her, not knowing what else to do.

  Her hand was resting lightly on my chest as she kissed me, but soon I felt it creep up under my shirt and begin rubbing my chest. I felt uncomfortable because I knew it was a signal for me to reciprocate. I didn’t want to touch her, but at the same time, I couldn’t tell her to stop.

  She pulled away from the kiss and withdrew her hand.

  “What’s the matter, Guy? I didn’t know you were the shy type.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, what’s wrong, then?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Don’t you like what I’m doing?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “What’s the matter?” she taunted. “Don’t you like girls?”

  A chill like an icicle sliced through my heart. I looked at her hard to see if I’d heard right. “What’d you say, Judy?”

  “You heard me. What are you gonna do about it?” Her chin was thrusting up at me in a provocative manner.

  I got up. “Oh, I like girls all right, Judy, don’t worry about that. It’s just you I don’t like.”

  As I walked down the bleacher aisle and stepped out onto the playing field, I could hear her soft laughter in the darkness behind me, and it sounded so full of bitterness and self-pity that I felt chills run down my spine.

  *

  Walking home, I felt the haunting sense of loneliness I’d experienced earlier at the dance come over me again. It seemed to spread out from some core deep inside me and permeate my whole being. I was thinking of Judy, but my anger at her had diffused and turned into a familiar form of self-loathing.

  What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I respond? Was it only a matter of taste? But I’d felt nothing for Judy, no sexual arousal, no romantic interest. Other boys, I was sure, would have gone much further with her, and without the need to tell themselves they were doing it to be like the others.

  Jack would have jumped at the chance to fondle Judy; perhaps even now he was with Marybeth, in bed with her. I thought of how Jack would look, naked, then forced my thoughts away from the sight. Did I still feel an unhealthy yearning for him? It seemed like only yesterday that I’d gazed down on him sun-bathing…stolen his T-shirt and soiled it. When would I outgrow this childish attitude?

  Or was I, after all, turning homosexual?

  No. Impossible.

  Impossible.

  True, viewed from a certain angle, my feelings, actions, thoughts could perhaps be misconstrued by someone who didn’t know any better…the muscle magazines I used to collect…the things I’d done with Bobby during summer vacation…the things I fantasized about in class. All of that was solid “evidence” which could implicate me, stamp me as a member of that despised race of beings who walked the face of the earth, normal to all appearances, but who were not norm
al, not real humans. It was terrible how an illusion could be made to seem real by anyone who was maliciously inclined.

  But how was one elected to membership of that invisible race? And what constituted membership? One act? Two? How many? Did intentions count? Or whether the intent was deliberate or an innocent mistake? Was it too late to change?

  Suddenly I felt as if I’d been infected with a dreadful, contagious virus—as if, unknowingly, I’d wandered into a leper colony and discovered only long afterwards that I’d caught the disease from a brief, accidental brush with an inhabitant. And now the dreaded infection was deep inside me, working its way to my heart, weakening my defenses, corrupting me cell by cell.

  But of course it was all a mistake, a terrible misunderstanding. Once I sweated out the attack, weathered the fever, I would be all right. Everything would be as it had been.

  All I needed was time. I would be falling in love with girls, having sex with them before long. After all, all the boys did. It happened to everyone. I couldn’t be an exception. I was normal. Perfectly normal.

  It was just a phase I was going through, just as the book had said. A lot of boys went through it, and came out sane and happy on the other side:

  Most teens soon grow out of it…

  during adolescence, a time of change…

  not uncommon for a platonic infatuation for a member of…

  even to the point of actual…

  not to feel guilt over…

  irrepressible…

  find themselves doing…

  with true maturity comes an understanding of…

  at very different rates…

  on the average of approximately…

  a dull, lethargic feeling of listless…

  such as sports or other activities…

  twentieth century mores…

  prohibited…

  changes in attitude…

  tell your family doctor about any…