Foolish Fire (18 page)

“Like I said, my first experience was with Dave. And that was one of the things we did.”

“You actually did it to him?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I guess I always wondered what it would be like, so the best way to find out was to do it.”

“What was it…like?”

“You mean the first time?”

“Yeah. Weren’t you scared?”

“Not at the time. But I was scared that someone might find out about it later.”

“What was it like?” I prompted again.

“You mean, how did it feel? Oh, about like what you might expect: hot and hard. As for the taste, it was a little salty.”

“Gross!” I felt a shiver creep up my spine.

He laughed. “You won’t believe this, but I didn’t know what to do at first. They call it a ‘blow job,’ so I guess I thought that’s just what I was supposed to do: blow. But after a while I knew that sucking would feel better for him, so I started sucking.”

“Go on.”

“At first I was only putting the tip of his dick into my mouth. I was afraid to let him go in more than that. Have you ever heard of the ‘gag reflex’?”

“No. What’s that?”

“It’s this instinct we all have. Basically, it’s to keep you from choking to death. If anything rubs against the back of your throat you automatically start to throw up. It’s natural. Some people have a very low tolerance and I’m one of them. That’s why I only let him in so far.”

“Go on.”

“As you keep doing it you get more and more used to it. First, I’d take him in as far as I could, for as long as I could. But when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d pull away and wait till I was ready for another try. I kept repeating this, and the more I did it, the easier it got to take him in further. Pretty soon, I could take him all the way in.”

“All the way? But your mouth isn’t big enough!”

“No. That’s why you have to relax these muscles here at the back of your throat. You can overcome your gag reflex with practice, and pretty soon it’s nothing. You can let him slide all the way in, even down your throat.”

“God!”

“You can practice with carrots and stuff. Anyone can learn to do it.”

“What makes you think anyone
wants
to do it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think I’m making all this up.”

“No way. But if someone could overhear us now, I wonder what they’d think.”

“They’d beat the crap out of me, of course.”

“Did you let him come in your mouth?”

“Not at first. But after the first few times, I wanted to see what it was like. So I let him.”

“Can you tell when he’s ready to come?”

“You can usually feel the excitement building up. The balls shrink up tight. Then the dick seems to grow even bigger and hotter just before he shoots off.”

“God! And what was it like when it happened?”

“I almost choked on it the first time. I didn’t expect there to be so much. I spent the next ten minutes coughing my guts out because it almost went down my lungs. It sounds funny now, but believe me, it wasn’t funny when it was happening. I felt sick for a long time afterwards, like I wanted to throw up. It was terrible. But eventually I learned how not to gag on it anymore.”

“How does it taste?”

“Kind of salty…like a warm, salty gob in your mouth.”

“Ugh!”

“I know. That’s how I was at first. But once you get over the taste and the texture, you even start to like it.”

I felt faint.

“You seem fascinated, Guy.”

“Well…anyone would be. I mean, who doesn’t like to hear about forbidden things?”

“You’re right,” he said. “I think most boys are interested in it, only they’re afraid to admit it. Deep down, they want to know what it’s like…doing it with another boy.”

“You’re probably right.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at my feet.

“You’re turning red, Guy.”

“It’s because of all the crazy things we’re saying.”

“I only want to know the truth. Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”

“I don’t like that smirk on your face. Since you put it like that, no, I don’t.”

“Oh. I thought you might.”

I was taken aback. “What makes you say that?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. And then he started talking in a softer voice. “You know, all through eighth grade I thought you had a crush on me.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The way you were teasing me, the way you got your friends to gang up on me. Underneath all that cruelty, I detected something else. I thought of your bullying as a sort of courtship.”

I shook my head in denial. He went on: “But once we got to high school, you started having all those girlfriends. I was watching you from the sidelines, so to speak…Wendy, Judy, Vanessa, the new girl I saw you with yesterday. I figured you couldn’t be gay. So I kind of gave up, even though a part of me—”

“—was still in love with me?”

He laughed. “It isn’t like that. Stop thinking of it as a boy-girl kind of thing. It isn’t like that at all. It’s something you’d have no idea of.”

The thought that he’d once felt attracted to me (and perhaps still did) sent a surge of joy into my heart.

He got up from the floor and walked back to the window to close the curtains. It had gotten so dark inside the room that the sky outside actually seemed brighter than it had been a few minutes ago. He looked over his shoulder at me. “You remember that time in the music room, way back in junior high?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“You were so much more aggressive about things back then. Now you’re scared.”

“I was a kid then—curious…just discovering things. I don’t know what made me do it. Just fooling around, I guess.”

“You wanna know something, Guy? I was actually ready to do it. Till you chickened out.”

“I didn’t chicken out. I told you I was only fooling around with you.”

“Well, a little while ago, you said you were curious about it. Was that ‘fooling around,’ too?”

“I said curious, yeah…but curious in an abstract way. That doesn’t mean I want to actually do it with someone.”

I found myself trembling but he didn’t seem to notice it—he seemed silently intent upon something, perhaps the memory of that moment in the music room. His mouth suddenly twisted into an amused grin.

“Who knows?” he said. “If things had turned out differently at the time, you might have had your curiosity satisfied long ago. More than your curiosity.”

“Get outta here…..”

Perhaps it was the effect of the marijuana, but I could visualize clearly what it would be like to have him suck me off. I could picture it vividly, down to the tiniest details….

Suddenly, he sighed loudly and said: “All this
talking
about it….”

His statement hung suspended in the air, unfinished.

I glanced nervously at the bedroom door. It was getting dangerous to remain here much longer. I knew exactly what he was leading up to, and my desire to escape the room became overwhelming.

When I looked back at him he was gazing straight at me. His smile was so suggestive that I sensed his desire like a keen smell. I felt dizzy.

The room had acquired a tingly, vibratory clarity; it suddenly became filled with menace.

I got up. “Listen, I have to go now. I—”

“I know, I know. You suddenly remembered something you had to do, right?” His faint smile had turned mocking. It looked pasted on; he was smiling with an effort. My stomach ached.

Somehow I found my way to the door. My fingers clawed for the doorknob in the dark; I found it, turned it. The hallway outside was even darker than the room but I managed to find my way down the stairs and out the back door, to freedom. But even as my feet began running, my feeling of release was tumultuously mixed with the keen ache of regret.

The Heterosexual Blues

From my room I heard the telephone ringing. I listened as the vacuum cleaner was shut off and my mother went to answer it. When there was no knock on my door after some time, I relaxed. It wasn’t for me.

Mark had called my house several times since that afternoon in his bedroom, but when I refused to come to the phone each time, he finally realized I had no wish to see him again. I had no other choice. He might get the wrong idea about me and I couldn’t take that risk.

I wished now that I had never pressed him to confess about his homosexuality. While it had still been an exciting possibility, I could live with it, but now that it was a fact, I could no longer think of him as a friend. He was a danger now, a threatening temptation to give in to my baser instincts. In his bedroom I had come dangerously close to stepping over the line. Too close.

I didn’t trust myself to remain indifferent to what he represented. His confession had contaminated me, weakening my defenses, sapping my strong resolve to remain pure. The surest way of building up my defenses again was to avoid seeing him. It was as simple as that.

At the same time, it was thrilling to know that Mark
was
a real faggot, that he had actually done the things I only fantasized about. It gave me the ability to delight in them vicariously, with no danger to myself.

But the games I played, and the things I fantasized about, were done with the consciousness that I was playing with fire. The thrills I experienced came from that very knowledge: I was stepping into forbidden territory and breaking taboos.

His confession also changed forever the dynamics of our relationship. I now had the upper hand: the power to tell someone else about his secret. But somehow I didn’t want to tell anyone yet, perhaps ever. Just the possession of his secret was satisfaction enough.

The telephone rang again. I held my breath and waited.

There was a knock on my door.

“Guy. Telephone.”

“If it’s Mark, tell him I’m out.”

“It’s Jack.”

“All right.”

I went out to answer the phone. It had been quite a while since I’d last talked to Jack. In fact, not since the end of the school year.

“Jack?”

“Hi, Guy. Are you free this afternoon?” He sounded a little breathless.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Mind if drop by in a little while?”

“No problem.”

I wondered what all the mystery was.

Ten minutes later there was a roaring sound out front, and the sound of a horn. I looked out and saw Jack getting off a motorcycle. I ran outside.

By the time I got there, Jack was standing beside the motorcycle and grinning broadly. “How do you like my new bike?”

“It’s a beauty!”

I admired its chrome finish, every little piece of which had been buffed until it shone with a high polish. The glittering silver contrasted with the tasteful flat metallic black of the rest of the body. The teardrop-shaped fuel tank was shot through with the thinnest piping of gold. It was a dream vehicle, a sexy symbol which was the very embodiment of tough masculinity.

I thought of all the lucky boys at school who already owned bikes. During lunch break and at the end of each day—with an appreciative audience of younger boys looking on—they would fondle, stroke, tinker at their machines with an exhibitionistic delight. I had often dreamed of the day when I would have my own motorcycle and be allowed to join that select group of boys in their black leather jackets and boots, who wore their maleness so casually, so carelessly, like a scar earned in a knife fight.

Jack could tell I was impressed. “Wanna go for a ride on it?”

“All right!”

“Where you wanna go?”

“Anywhere. Just get me away from here.”

He swung a long leg over the saddle and kicked up the stand. “Go ahead. Climb on back.”

He waited as I carefully settled myself in behind him, then turning the key in the ignition, he pushed the bike away from the curb. With a press of the automatic starter button, the engine whined briefly before exploding into life.

I felt my body vibrate in sympathetic rhythm.

“Hang on.”

I clutched at his waist as we shot off with a huge lurch and I felt my heart leap up with a thump. The vibrations of the powerful bike were like heavy, throbbing caresses along my thighs and buttocks. The leather of the seat felt warm and tingly between my legs.

We shot straight through the Liddell Street intersection. As we rounded the slow curve leading past the park, I had to lean with the bike, dangerously low and close to the pavement. By now the road was a blur of gray and the scenery was indistinguishable from the giddy excitement in my heart. Memoryless, I lived only with the sensations of the immediate moment. I was intensely aware of my own body—the racing of my heart as it pumped blood through my veins, the muscles of my whole body clenching in an ecstatic spasm.

My hands which had been clamped on either side of Jack’s hips gradually eased forward until they met and clasped in front of his stomach. In fact I was a little frightened at the eye-blurring speed with which we barreled past cars and took turns leaning over so far that I felt I could reach out and touch the pavement.

The masterful way Jack controlled this splendid machine gave him an added status in my eyes. I didn’t feel the slightest resistance to clinging tightly to his back. The combination of the bike’s vibrations with the hard feel of his body against mine was beginning to excite me. I pressed myself even harder against his body. As we leaned and dipped with every undulation in the road, I felt at one with the machine and with Jack. One entity, we shot through the heart of the universe.

When we finally slowed to a stop, we were at the intersection leading to the on-ramp of the freeway. I tapped his shoulder and shouted above the engine’s roar: “Where are we going?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. Apparently my words were carried away by the wind. The light turned green and we shot up the ramp and onto the wide, windy freeway.

As we roared down the fast lane, tears streamed back from my eyes, horizontally across my temple. I could feel the adrenalin pumping through my body, making me shiver.

Suddenly it seemed to me I was experiencing something that had happened long ago, somewhere in another time. It might have been something in a movie. And then I remembered.

It was all the way back in elementary school. There was a story in my second-grade textbook which, for some reason, I was never able to forget. It went something like this:

As darkness falls, a black horse comes galloping, galloping from out of the gathering dusk. It approaches a village and halts outside a farmhouse door. A little boy comes crawling out a window, sleepily rubbing his eyes, and climbs onto its back. The horse gallops on.

Next it comes to a town, where it halts outside another house. A little girl this time comes out, almost sleepwalking, clambers up onto the black horse’s spacious back.

And the horse gallops on…on and on, from village to village, town to town, city to city. And at each place, children climb up onto its back, where they curl up and fall asleep. They look so safe and secure there.

No matter how many children climb onto its back, there is always room for one more. For every child is welcome.

And the horse gallops on and on through the night, never tiring, never slowing, inexorably onward, forever galloping, galloping towards the end of the night. And the horse’s name is Dream.

At this moment, I felt that Jack’s bike was but another version of that fabulous horse. I could easily imagine the two of us riding off into the sunset on it, to the next town, and the next, all across America, in the night, all but invisible, going from town to town, city to city, leaving everything behind, picking up boys like me, befriending them, moving on. Jack was my heterosexual prince, come to rescue me from my fears and temptations, from my illicit desires…from Mark.

There had to be boys like me all across America who wanted to be rescued, and they would be waiting for us. We would roar into town to pick them up and carry them away, for there was always room for one more.

With a slight lurch and a change in the engine’s pitch, the bike abruptly slowed down. Jack was heading for the next off-ramp. As we wound down along a curving road that led toward the far side of the Wilds, I recognized the old airport road, little used now since the new freeway bypass had been built.

We cruised for a while down this road until suddenly Jack turned off and steered down a dirt path which gradually got more and more overgrown with weeds. When we could go no farther without damaging the bike we stopped.

All around us was scrub grass. The sun was setting, staining everything a washed-out dust color. Gradually I began to recognize where we were.

This was the desolate stretch of scrubland west of the city where we’d often gone exploring as little boys, so long ago. The boulders embedded here and there like monumental markers in the parched scrubland made the place look desolate. Except for the railroad tracks which sliced a shiny welt through the landscape, there was absolutely no sign of life.

We got off the bike and Jack parked and locked it. There was a slight wind. Jack continued up the path on foot, and I followed. The tall weeds through which we made our way bent and swayed in the breeze. My light windbreaker whipped out behind me and climbed up my back.

“Why’d we come out here, Jack?”

He didn’t answer. His earlier euphoria about showing off his new bike had seemed to evaporate sometime during the ride. He was in a somber mood now. I stopped asking him questions and silently followed.

After about ten minutes, we were stopped by a barbed-wire fence which had never been there before. A sign nearby informed us that it had been erected by the city to fence off a proposed land development project. We went along its side until we came to a spot where trampled weeds left a smooth clearing. Searching the ground nearby I found a stick to prop apart two strands of barbed wire so we could climb through.

We slid down into the dried gully bed and climbed up the opposite bank. Slipping on treacherous loose stones and gravel, we made our way up the shallow trail leading to the old swimming hole. Soon the familiar boulders loomed just ahead. As we skirted the lip of the reservoir and made toward the shadow of the huge rocks, I recognized the old nooks and caves we used to play in.

Just ahead was the flat ledge from which we used to dive. When I spotted it I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia. Somehow it looked smaller, less forbidding than it used to, but perhaps it was because it was getting dark. I thought of that long, heart-gripping plunge and the jarring slap of water which always hit my butt.

I peered over the edge.

The water—so cool and refreshing in memory—was gone. Nothing was down below but scraggly weeds clumped together, their shadows lengthened by the setting sun.

“It’s gone,” I said. “What happened to the water?”

I lowered myself until I was sitting on the edge.

“Remember? The city dammed up some streams to re-route them to Echo Lake in the park.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t think it would affect this place, though.”

Far off toward the freeway, the cars glinted, flashing their windshields in the sun like message signals as they whipped along with a dull roaring sound. In the other direction rolled miles and miles of empty wasteland.

“Changed, isn’t it?” said Jack.

“Yeah. We used to have so much fun out here.”

“Didn’t we, though?” He looked a little depressed.

I wondered what was behind his strange mood. “Did you suddenly feel nostalgic for it? I get like that sometimes myself.”

He didn’t answer. After a long silence, he said, “You still going with Vanessa, Guy?”

“No. We broke up.” I laughed. “Now you can have a shot at her. With this bike of yours, it’s a cinch. She’s bound to fall for you.”

“Yeah.” He sounded tired.

“What’s the matter, Jack? You’re acting so weird lately.”

“I got a girl pregnant.”

“What?” I stared at him as the usual banal questions whirled through my mind: who? when? where? But I didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t even wait for me to ask. “It was Marybeth. Do you know her?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“I didn’t use a rubber.”

I thought of him dancing with Marybeth on the night of the Green and White Dance. He’d looked so happy and confident then—it seemed a lifetime away, locked away in a past so distant it was like fiction. Now he seemed so adultly tired. What had happened to him had happened to other boys as well—it was the gamble they all took. All of them, that is, except me. My own worries seemed so trivial now next to Jack’s. As always, he was far ahead of me. I was still the little kid with the little kid’s preoccupations, and he was the adult. I would forever be unable to catch up with him.

“What are you gonna do?” I asked.

“Get an abortion. That’s the only thing we can do.”

“Where? How?”