Boy Crazy: Coming Out Erotica (31 page)

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Authors: Unknown

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The pitch of Library Slope brooks no lope on history mornings. You trail behind, a packhorse forever and always in his wake. It is antistudent the way he goes to class, one pen in his back pocket, an undersized notebook gripped by one corner like a checkbook. You ponder the insouciance of his beat-up boat shoes and sockless feet. You are jealous of those who knew him when the shoes were new.
 
You approach Ives Hall, a hideous modern pile; you are annoyed anew that Western Civilization after Luther is taught at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. You pull abreast of Boyd in the converging funnel of students. You want to shield him from them. You want to hold them at bay. There are assassins in the Forum. You move through the bottleneck of the door, up into the empty stadium of Ives 101, then you sit in
your
seats in the first row of the second landing. Here there is plenty of room to stretch your legs, another portrait of nonchalance, and plenty of time, fifty minutes, to sound the depths of his knee, a black-threaded lagoon under a mouth-shaped tear in his jeans. You are left-handed; he is right-handed. Your hands scribble side by side. His handwriting is open and square. Yours is a crabbed and secretive servant’s scrawl.
 
 
You and Boyd are lying on top of a grassy hillock or knoll or mound or butte, somewhat counterfeit as nature goes, since the campus store hums beneath its gradient. The wind is high and chill; you lean into each other when it blows down your careless throats. You are holding off the moment of indoors.
 
You are stretched out on the hillock, feet to head, facing each other this cold late morning. You are both leaning back on your elbows. What are you talking about, are you even talking? You are watching his blunt, thick hands. He dusts blades of grass between thumb and forefinger as he talks. You rub the earth in ten places with the balls of your fingertips. Ten tulips will grow there overnight, red as the daubs on his windswept knuckles. Not square like his, your fingernails are oval. Nail shapes are passed on, you think; you want to meet his parents. Your parents are suddenly dead, drowned at sea, burnt in a brush fire, held for a ransom beyond your means. All of Boyd is all you have.
 
A gust hits and you turn on your side toward him. Before you can recover your place from this breach of boy conduct, Boyd clamps a hand on your calf and picks a beetle off the back of your left trouser leg. His hand cups your leg. A beetle, he says. You hem something, abba dabba honeymoon, yabba dabba doo, the sun is in your eyes. The bug races through his fingers. His hand is there,
was
there. You catch your breath. You are not afraid of insects, you say. Boyd finds your formality funny, and he flings the thing away.
 
 
Three of you are oiled at noon in the Dust Bowl. You and Boyd and Rhoda are thirty yards away from your rooms; you are hundreds of miles away from your high school homes in Great Neck, Arlington, and Cincinnati, which you have been describing because you have flown there with closed eyes, fueled by coconut oil. Rhoda has arranged you on two yellow bedsheets. She anchors the center; her peplum one-piece so matches her sheets that you and Boyd seem to be lying on her magnificent train, footmen to the bewitching Queen of the Hawaiian Long Island. Boyd goes more native than you. His chest is turning cinnamon. Rhoda speaks and you slowly spread her red-lemony locks, coarse as unstrung rope, into a sunburst. Your care liquefies her voice. The heat, the smell of warming scented flesh, the siren call of summer coming, casts a spell. Long Island is host again to the Wampanoags, yet tropical toucans call from the birdbath. Rhoda says patio, split-level, French doors, toolshed, but you hear veranda, cupola, gazebo, louvers.
 
Attentive to your mistress, you implore her to turn over. You cream her back. She sighs out that Boyd and you must visit her in Great Neck. Boyd looks at you through sleepy lids and agrees. Your heart pulls your hand to your chest; your T-shirt will bear this oily handprint forever. Rhoda says you can stay in her brother Ronnie’s room, both of you, Ronnie is going to dental school. Boyd asks whether it is blue, and she giggles. You ask whether it is like the Amazon, and she sleeps.
 
You settle back and roast, conjoined in her munificence. After ten minutes of your backyard, Boyd sits up and says hey. Cooled by the shade he casts, you look over. It is very much like the Amazon, he says. He grins. His teeth are all you see. He is pearls and spices; what he has is what the explorers set sail for; he spins the astrolabe inside you, you set another course until the sun slips below the pillowcase.
 
 
You are having your hair cut. For the first time since grade school, your ears will show. The shape of your head will reveal itself through this haircut. Who you were before the fact of Boyd tumbles down the barber’s sheet in mousy cinders. You will be a new country.
 
At dinner you try again, as you did on Easter, when you wore the skinny tie, to inscribe happenstance into a Southern sense of timing. You say this haircut is a summer haircut.
 
It does not wash.
 
A tormentor asks whether there is an autumn haircut for the harvest moon?
 
A naysayer says your ears are boomerangs.
 
A philistine says your head is shaped like a half-peeled banana.
 
A rube wonders whether your mother got to keep the forceps.
 
Two down the table and across, Boyd eats. You do not always sit next to him at meals. Sometimes you love the air between you. Between mouthfuls, you hear him say he thinks your haircut looks great.
 
Very Fire Island says Miriam.
 
You cannot place that island. You have not heard of it.
 
Is that all you’re eating, Boyd asks. You shrug. He tells you to finish your cobbler. He pulls at an ear. He means your ear. You are not a new country. You are his protectorate.
 
 
Today you bring Boyd to Revival House, a secondhand clothing store. You are a preferred customer. Sheila B. Scholl saves merchandise for you, shapes your taste for pleats. From her dais, she watches the big parade down Cascadilla Street. Her purview is turbans and tea dresses and Tangee and tuberoses. She has sold you skinny ties and surplus and suspendered Belgian army pants.
 
Sheila B. does you proud. Hey babe, she asks, where you been keeping? She takes up your hand while you make introductions. You know a townie, a character. You are having an outing.
 
Boyd stands before you and a full-length mirror. Nice broad shoulders, Sheila B. rasps, saluting his form in the way you deny yourself. Boyd rolls his eyes. Everything amuses him: the trash barrel of crinolines, the rat’s nest of brogues and wedgies in the trunk, the V-J chintz dressing curtain, the teeth of the hound in the Prince of Wales jacket. He listens to her details, but you, following his eyes, watch him watch the ash on her cigarette head for the rumba in her gorge.
 
She has a bowling shirt saved up for you, turquoise rayon with a rooster. In said shirt you stand, watching her tug the sleeve on Boyd. You prefer the fawn checked trousers you’ve put on. Sinatra pants, she calls them, take them off, your friend should have them. Boyd demurs. She insists you take them off, they’re for his jacket, take them off. She has one hand at his waist, one hand on yours. Take them off!
 
Sheila B. counts on your immodesty. You drop your pants. You step out of them. The rumba coils around your legs. Her garnets roll across her bosom as she hymns your boxer shorts. Only gentlemen wear boxers, she pronounces like an oracle.
 
In all the frippery of the years, she tilts and looks. Through her boogie-woogie cloud cover, Sheila wings it over with dainty lizard eyes. Nice match, she tells you, putting you together like a jacket and pants.
 
Benediction received, you crimson. What gold escapes your eyes that this bawd can pan? Your seam of ore is showing.
 
 
You are running with Boyd and Dave and Billy on a Saturday afternoon. Your course is not predetermined: he who leads, leads the way. You once were fast, but Dave trains with weights and paces you through the hills. You are liking very much the plock sensation of your feet on the ground as your eight-note boy tattoo invades the streets. Neighborhoods knuckle to your message. You are very much liking the locomotive ease with which you remove your T-shirt in full stride. You tie it around your waist as you accelerate over a suspension bridge, which offers a jubilant clang to meet you. You are nearly naked. You are a torso hung above the pavement. The air takes your dew. Your hair, in truth too short to stream behind you, does its best. You pull ahead of Boyd, whose gym shorts, the green the fade of spearmint, you are liking best of all.
 
Dave is surprised to find you two strides behind him. He points to turn you left, then sprints ahead. Everything is green as you suck air down Stewart Avenue; you will do this every other day; you are form, you are velocity itself. The four of you burst through the parking lot, shot through a ring like blades of grass into a lawn mower bag.
 
Then you are panting, hunched over onto the pavement. Dave shakes his legs backward like a colt. You kneebend your face into your shirt at your waist. Boyd rests his hand between your shoulders to keep from falling over. You will shower one stall over. You will never let him fall.
 
It is the eve of Saint Hilary of Arles. You and Boyd are in a cemetery. You skip about the tombstones. Boyd, very drunk, stops to lie atop a crypt. The stars will steady him, he says. Wish you may, wish he does. He goes to sleep. You sit astride a cenotaph. Your ankles are pressed in the web of your hands. You look to the clear, ringing heavens. You watch over his sleep. You shall wake your companion. You are not a gargoyle. You have never been so happy.
 
 
You are playing hearts in Dave’s room, six of you hunched over the table like gangsters. Boyd weaves in, passes a flask. He flops back on Dave’s bedspread. He cuts his forehead on a metal post. He declares blood. He tears out with embarrassment. Even before you rise, the other boys have turned. They know the invisible rope will yank you from the room, so you move even faster. That way no one else can measure its length.
 
Boyd has made good time in the dark, but you locate him in the trefoil recesses of the War Memorial. As if struck by lightning, he is slumped against the column. The dream of your days, his hand in yours, is nothing like your dreams. It possesses its own cool weight on its own frank stem. It is not much larger than your own, but you knew that. You have been appraising it so long, you think you have bought it at auction.
 
You clean his bloodied fingers with your handkerchief. Ten minutes before you were playing hearts as if life depended upon it; now you nurse your lover’s thumbnail. The juxtaposition of your devotions amuses you. There is a foreign palm open on your leg, a saint’s relic to be tucked into your pocket, the names of the dead cold against your back, and a flask gleaming on the cobblestones. The provident sequences of living overwhelm you.
 
You march him to the roach coach to settle him with food. You are making change when he bolts again.
 
You are heading up the back stairs to the dorm, praying he won’t split his head again on something sharp. Pssst, he says.
 
Boyd is inside a large, spreading bush. The hand you held is waving with the leaves. You give him food through the branches. You cross your arms. Come in, he says. You scoot under the hem of the hoop, where, crouched and feeding, aboriginal Boyd tells you that he made a pass at Miriam and she rebuffed him. She is the reason for his drunk.
 
You seize the flask. You pour the contents out and burst from the Boyd fort. The edges of Florence Nightingale’s cape tear on the branches.
 
The corridor is quiet. At the end of the hallway, uncertain of your footing, you stare down the bush from the third floor window. It catches fire.
 
Boyd comes up behind you. The electric light hurts his eyes. You suddenly dare to bring a chair and pillow from your room. You stand on the chair, you remove the lamp. The globe tips and dried insects flutter like rice puffs down your arms. You loosen the hot bulbs until they die. Your fingertips pulse with heat, then fade. You touch them to the carpet. Five irises will grow there overnight. Their shoots will stipple Boyd’s eyelids in his sleep. You murmur on. You go to sleep in the hallway. The last thing is milky light from the moon.

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