MOUNTAIN BOYS
THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING, but that’s not the only cliché in the room. There is also the subplot of the playboy and his prey.
I look at my lover and find he is looking directly at me. I am splayed in his DNA and panting hard, and a bit taken aback by what just happened, as my intention was to come over and cuss his triflin’ ass out and say I was not going to see him again. Nine months before, I had helped him move into this apartment—all that heavy-ass shit: couch, sofa, appliances, and the bed. The bed was the cruel part. He had said, “Me and you are gonna be spending a lot of time in this apartment together,” and then he stopped returning my calls.
Soon after that the pictures started appearing of him and this boy together; they went everywhere, clearly this was his boyfriend. Like, why didn’t he make his bitch help him move? I understand that life is by design a competition—okay, this other bitch won, that’s fine. But it was twisting the knife to make a boy who you are leading on carry the bed you and your boyfriend are going to fuck on every night. It was this act of hubris, this Agamemnon dancing on the red carpet moment, that made my hatred real.
Now he is smiling deeply at me. I want to smash his pretty fucking face into a car hood.
But then it happens, that moment where all the hate evaporates and it just feels good to see him again, smell him again, feel the weight of him on top of me. He fucks good. Is that all he’s good for? In this instant the answer is yes. Our first date had been a year ago—he had ignored me online for a year before that until a mutual friend of ours (who we were both fucking) gave him a solid recommendation for my skills for taking dick. (“He can really take some dick,” said the mutual friend to him.)
We sat in bed, postsex sweaty, the first day we met. He said to me, “I’m from the mountains,” and picked up a globe off his bookshelf and spun it and pointed to where. “The Andes,” he said.
“I’m from the mountains, too.” I took the globe from his hands, gave it a spin also, stopped it with my index finger, and pointed. “I’m from the Appalachians,” I offered. He smiled at me. “Awww, we’re both mountain boys. Cute.”
“I grew up surrounded by coffee trees. You?” he asked.
“I grew up in a cotton field—lots of roaches and rats. It was gross,” I shot back. He started giggling and eventually we fucked again and again and again until I was convinced that he liked me and that I wanted him. I let him charm me more, I let him let me think I was special—I knew at my core that he was waiting to unzip his face. I’m blindsided by how abruptly it all happened, how fast he left his phone off the hook.
I look at him now and actually laugh to myself. My horrible taste in men is fucking hilarious to me. I blurt it out. “Why didn’t you call me back?” I’m grossed out by myself before the sentence fully leaves my mouth.
He answers, “I just wasn’t feeling it,” and I get that feeling of wanting to break him again.
“Y’know, I know what it’s like. I’ve been in your shoes, too,” he adds nonchalantly, making hand gestures and looking to the ceiling. He starts talking, and I zone out. His level of compassion (or seeming lack thereof) is killing me. The emotional distance between us is as wide as the distance between the respective mountain ranges we grew up in—or maybe, even, much, much further. He begins to talk about some boy he fucked before me, someone who refused him, but I guess he can now forgive this person because he’s passing the rejection my way. He keeps talking and I tune in just in time to hear him say, “… and everybody is left with the ghost of somebody else, aren’t they?” I stop to ponder this. If this is true, then there have to be one hundred ghosts in this room already and that’s just the baggage I’m carrying. Lover boy for sure has twice as many. I imagine one hundred ghosts in the room (and one hundred only—I don’t give a fuck about his ghosts). There are too many men here and it doesn’t feel like a sexy gang bang. No, this feels like something that’s a lot more fucking annoying.
“One hundred boyfriends,” I say, deep in thought.
“What did you just say?” he asks, looking at me like he has just been rudely interrupted.
“I didn’t say anything,” I whisper, as I roll over and turn my back to him.
I begin trying to move past petty emotions and think about this scientifically.
What are the mechanics of desire? In what feels like all of three seconds my mind spins into a hard flashback on past lives—men I loved, some who I eventually hated; they are all still there somewhere, all hovering around. I called them “boyfriends,” though this was not always the case. But they were all like pieces of bubblegum you chew hours after the flavor leaves and that you accidentally swallow, and then (supposedly) sit in your guts for seven years. It was like the woman in the eighties who always swallowed her chewing gum and one day the doctors had to surgically remove the tennis ball–sized wad of gum from her intestines—this was the level of exorcism I needed.
I look at the picture of his boyfriend on the nightstand. He is young. He looks very studious. He looks like a young Black man who respects himself. I love him for that because I personally couldn’t be bothered with all that at his age. He also looks innocent in a way; perhaps the right word is fragile. I myself am lots of things—petty, jealous, a danger if provoked, certainly sensitive—but not fragile. I could fuck a crocodile and I could survive an atom bomb. This boy who I’m looking at in the picture—not so much. He looks like a child, like he needs a blanket. It’s as if he picked this kind of boy just to corrupt him—was that the game? I can tell that this boy doesn’t have a clue about the level of whore his boyfriend is. I was called here because this man is bored. Some part of him after nine months is bored with fucking this fragile boy.
My sixth sense tells me that there are aspects of the truth his boyfriend would shit himself over if he knew. This child has probably never seen his boyfriend high on drugs getting fucked by five guys—but I have. What sides of himself does he show this boy that he refuses to show me? I banish the thought as soon as it pops up. I’m sure it would not help me to know, and I want out of here.
I look at the cheater boy and he is snorting lines of cocaine off a hand mirror and watching Black and Latino–themed porn on his computer. He has a hard-on and he looks over at me like it’s time for me to bend over again. I sigh internally and feel something that might be like self-esteem—but probably should be more accurately categorized as wisdom—well up in my bones. I’ve answered every question I needed to hear.
His boyfriend comes in from work early—he failed to tell me that, of course, and I can hear the lock of the front door jostling. I’m beginning to think he did this on purpose; he wants to let his two puppies sniff at each other. I’m feeling violence in me again, but I’m vulnerable because I’m still naked on the bed and feel no great desire to get dressed in a hurry.
His boyfriend walks through the door and sees the lines of coke on the mirror, the porn on the computer screen, and his boyfriend and me naked. He rolls his eyes in this manner that lets me know he has walked into this scene before. Perhaps this boy is not as fragile as I thought. He gets undressed by the bed and says to me, “I need you to sleep on the couch”—I pause for a second and remember that I was the one who helped bring the couch in, too. I had some form of sympathy at first but now realize that I don’t like my “lover’s” boyfriend and that I also can’t stand him. Knowing is always half the battle.
I get dressed and, in hating neither the player nor the game, I let my checkered-print Vans pitter-patter softly toward his door. “It’s ok, young man, he’s all yours,” I say, passing the boy.
There is secret sanctimony in me as I close the door and walk away. I would be lying to myself if I believed for a second that I wasn’t going to fuck him ever again; I would, for sure. But this next time, my role would be clearer. I would be the ghost who haunted his sex, not the one who haunted his heart.
BOYFRIEND #100 / THE AGENT
NEW YORK CITY WAS BIG FOR NO REAL REASON, mu
ch like the mood I was in. He asked me (but really he was telling me), “Your writing is great—do you want to be famous?” I was young at the time and believed anything an older, handsome man told me.
“Yes, I want to be famous, it’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I said, stumbling naked around his Hell’s Kitchen loft, high on Percocet and with nine glasses too many of white wine in my belly. It was the way he always grabbed my chin softly when he really wanted me to hear something he was saying, or maybe the way, on the third night I stayed over, he gave me keys to the apartment.
“The new poems—what’s the journey?” he asked. (I hated when agents said the word “journey.” No, literally, like, barf.)
“I don’t care for a journey,” I explained. “I’m just making a map, something that says, ‘You are HERE.’”
His eyes always lit up whenever I explained myself. He was older, Jewish, with a body sculpted from some Chelsea gym and I could not not want him. He had been a B-boy dancer in the eighties; he showed me the black-and-white pictures of him popping and locking on cardboard on some random sidewalk, proof he had been handsome all his life. I stumbled to his bathroom, a forgotten boom bap soundtrack from some rapper he once fucked blasting in the background on his record player. I closed the door and raided his bathroom cabinet for pills—I knew he would have some. He bought REAL cocaine, like, the kind that came from teeny tiny jars. I bought speed-laced bullshit from little baggies; the shit he had had me rocking and reeling on some other trip. He knocked on the door because he knew that I knew that he knew what I was doing. “The benzos are on the top shelf, baby, take a few for later.”
“Okay, thank you,” I said.
“I love you, little boy,” he said.
“I love you too,” I said.
“The new poems are good—if I make you rich will you take care of me?” he said.
“For the rest of my life,” I said.
I took the blue pill.
MEANDERING (PART TWO)
SOMETIMES I LIKE WALKING DOWNTOWN, particularly on those days where I say, “I’m not afraid of the world today. I am a citizen of the world!”
My New York boyfriend reached out earlier that morning and tried to brainwash me into domesticity again. “We can get married and have a house in the Hudson Valley, I’ll build a fireplace. Do you like fireplaces?” he texted.
“Naw dude, fuck all that,” I texted back, but then sort of regretted it.
I was strolling down the street in the East Bay. It was seventy-four degrees. It was February. It was Valentine’s Day AND Black History Month. I felt sexy.
My friend was having a reading at the bookstore downtown. She had written a new play about a genderqueer railroad operator that was set in 1920s Russia. She and her crew were staging a dramatic reading of the text.
There was loads of time to kill before the reading so I went by a particular building; I wanted to see if it had finally been finished. I first found it two days before Valentine’s Day last year, when I was out late and chanced upon Yusuf, an Eritrean guy. Twenty-three? He seemed twenty-three.
He had a deep brown complexion with tones of red in it. He looked beautiful under the streetlight and his afro was impressive. His curls were soft. He lived with his brother, who didn’t know he was gay, so he fucked guys in the abandoned house by his apartment building that was being fixed up.
The basement was cemented and exposed to entry by these rectangular openings in the wall where I imagined a door would be one day. I shined the light on my phone in the interior to make sure no one was sleeping in there. I also noticed that the windows were all shaped like Moorish doors and there were exposed, stained-wood beams crossing all over the ceiling—the room was unfinished but already beautiful.
The sex was telepathic—we both knew that I wanted to get fucked.
I braced my hands against the cement wall and breathed him in. His dick was right and exact. It was always a rush doing these things with handsome strangers. It was like a familiar roller-coaster ride and though it was obscured from public view in the undone basement, I could still feel the night air on my skin. Pants and underwear down around my ankles, my back and torso lifted, he raised the back of my shirt and hoodie to get more leverage on me, treating my clothes as if they were the reins of a jockey riding a horse. I played with my nipples.
I slowed for a second, though—my mind kept going back to the exposed, stained-wood beams on the ceiling and I felt worldly and sophisticated. I had never gotten fucked and appreciated architecture at the same time. Before I could get too pleased with myself, he finished in me. He gave that god-awful grunt that men do when they want to say, “Ok, let’s stop now.”
“You gonna call me again?” I said to fuck with him.
“I’m gonna call you all the time,” he said as he hugged me from the back and kissed my ear. I knew it was a total fucking lie, but it was still sweet to hear.
I stood in front of the house now—they hadn’t laid a hand on it since, and it was still a hollow shell. I was tempted to explore it but decided to get on to the reading.
* * *
SOMETIMES I LIKE WALKING DOWNTOWN. On first Fridays they have the art walk festival. I spent last year avoiding it, but decided that it was sunny and time to go. I started avoiding it after I had a series of panic attacks the year before. The last time, I ate a pot cookie and tried to ride the train to the festival. In my head I couldn’t shake the thought of hearing bullets coming from some unknown location and a sniper being the cause. I had been reading the newspaper too much, perhaps, but I couldn’t even make it to the train entrance, and took an immediate cab home.
Today my sense of doom was somehow nonexistent. I pranced through the art walk and made it to the play reading. I skipped on picking up whiskey and regretted it halfway through the reading because I was falling asleep, and besides, there was the honest-to-god truth: drama is more dramatic when you’re drunk.
Either way, by the time the reading was over it was dark outside but still strangely warm. I walked briskly enough to take off the flannel I was wearing. I was strolling through downtown just long enough until I was walking side by side with a car that had been slowly following me for a block.
The older Latino man within demanded I get in and come to his house. I obliged.
He lived in one of the newer high-rises downtown. The floor plan was so complex that it felt like you were in an endless doom of bad gray carpeting and metal gray doors. Like, if he was a serial killer, there would be no way I could both fight him off and find my way back to the front lobby without his help.
He brought me to what seemed like an unfinished workout room and invited me in, leaving the lights off. There was a window with a bit of the moon shining through, and I could track his movements, so it seemed safe enough.
“Do you like dirty fucking asshole?” he said in this voice that was supposed to be dirty and hot, but dear god—the question.
“Um, I mean, like, hmmmm, I like, took a shower today…,” I fumbled. I’m not really into scat play but also didn’t want to come off as judgmental or like a square. He got the hint.
“It’s ok—I’ll go rinse … Wait here,” he said as he left the room.
I sat in the unfinished gym of this yuppie-living complex. I was looking up at the exposed wires from where a light fixture would be and thinking to myself, I should leave, but at this point I was feeling too horny to go anywhere. Why couldn’t he just fuck in his apartment? Ah, he lives with his boyfriend—or someone. Anytime a grown man can’t fuck in his own house there is always some kind of backstory. And it’s never a really interesting one.
The man came back after about twenty minutes.
“How is your boyfriend?” I asked.
“He’s watching TV,” he explained, pulling down his shorts.
“Does he want to join in?” I asked, just to fuck with him.
“No, we don’t have sex anymore,” he said, matter-of-factly.
I fucked him doggy-style becau
se it’s the easiest way for two strangers to cum. He was facedown pretending that I was someone else. I was watching him facedown pretending that he was someone else. He was facedown pretending that he was someone else. I was watching him facedown pretending I was someone else.
It was over soon.
He slapped me on the ass as I walked out the door of the weird gym. “You’ll find your way out,” he said, already walking away. Miraculously I did find my way out without any help—maybe I could escape a serial killer.
Before I realized what I was doing, I walked all the way northwest of downtown to go back to the mysterious unfinished building. I wasn’t sad, bummed, or even slightly inconvenienced, to be honest, but I did have the urge to remember a day that was before today. I had the urge to think about a time that had felt, for lack of a better term, romantic.
HOOKER BOYS (PART THREE)
I HAD DECIDED TO FUCK A HOOKER that night because I was bored and it seemed like the most morally fatigued thing I could do given my circumstances.
I had not been drinking for some months after a title bout I had with four bouncers at the bar down the street. I had saved a bit of cash and figured I should enjoy some specific form of vice. I still did cocaine, but without alcohol it just felt like a wash, so none of that. I thought about maybe just going to spray-paint something, but that just felt “too free,” both spiritually and emotionally. I wanted to engage in commerce and challenge myself and the only thing left was to pay for sex with a hooker. “Sober fun” was damn near an oxymoron but I was going to have it tonight, by god, and how!
I scrolled through the grimy site of all the boys slinging dick for money and I felt like I was at some sort of weird shopping mall. They all had “gay face”—that look of overenthusiasm, or like they had all been male cheerleaders in high school and it had simply fucked up their lives forever: “READY?! OK!”
100 Boyfriends Page 9