The Painting of Porcupine City (8 page)

“Well I wouldn’t have chosen to share it.”

“Then I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it a little more this time, but only a little.

“S’OK.” He popped the last bite of crust into his mouth and washed it down with the rest of his water. He put the empty bottle on the curb and placed his hands flat on the sidewalk behind us, stretched his legs out over the hot asphalt. I looked out at the parking lot, where the sun glinted off bumpers and hubcaps, took another bite of sandwich and decided not to push this conversation any further. I’d been with weird guys but this guy was really weird. The question was whether he was prohibitively weird.

He shifted his butt on the curb, drew up his legs and rested his forearms on his knees. He looked up in the sky and shielded his eyes and watched some birds fly by. He grabbed a twig and broke it into a few pieces and flicked them onto the ground one by one. I watched all this, eating slowly.

“So nice out, I hate to go back inside,” he said at last.

“Yeah.”

Back at my desk I

banged out a long, frustrated email to Cara and she responded with one surprising word:

“Hot.”

That night I made burritos

and when Jamar showed up Cara and I dumped some of the rice and beans out of ours so there’d be enough left for him to make one. When we were done and rinsing the plates I told them I was going to go do some writing.

In my room I opened the closet and looked at the shirt with Mateo’s fist-print, which hung from a hanger at the front. I thought of our weird lunch, caught myself sighing, and felt silly. This all was uncharacteristic, a little too
Brokeback
for comfort.
Relax
,
Fletcher
, I told myself.
All you want is to bang the guy. It’s familiar territory. What’s unfamiliar is only that you haven’t done it already.
I held my fist against the knuckle mark, matching the shape against my skin.

I imagined Mateo’s greasy fist gripping my—

Gah, chill out!
It was way too hot out to get worked up. At my desk I looked at the paper rolled through my typewriter. I’d written only two sentences on this page—the beginning of a short story much less interesting than Mateo. He permeated my thoughts. The way he had his sleeves turned up. The way he licked mustard off his lips. That heavenly inch of fuzzy shin. Those eyes.

Thak thak thak.

I’d slid into the usual position, staring at the inky paper, mind adrift, not-quite-absentmindedly rubbing a boner against the underside of my desk drawer.

I put my hands on my face and stalked around my room. The luminescent thermometer strip on the side of my fish tank indicated the water was running a six-degree fever. A trio of neons hovered huffing and puffing near the surface. They looked like how I felt. I went to the kitchen and got some ice and dropped four cubes into the water. A fifth cube I pressed against my forehead. Water ran down my nose and cheeks and I licked it off my lips. Then I fell back on my bed. I flat-out needed to get laid. It was the only way to clear my head.

I didn’t have the energy to arrange a hook-up from scratch, and I hadn’t heard from Alex since bailing on him last weekend—but there were other options. I got my phone and texted a number in my Favorites. An old standby.

How’re you feeling tonight?

Five minutes passed. Empty minutes that years ago would’ve made me feel like a sucker, like a desperate horndog hanging on the other guy’s whims. But experience taught me how exhilarating it is to be the receiver of such messages. I was doing him a favor.

A response came:
Have a raid at 10 but can fit u in b4 then.

A short delay and then:
so 2 speak. ;-)

A knock on my door. “Thanks for the food, Bradford. I’m heading out.”

“Later Jamar.”

I worked my thumbs:
See you in 20?

The
OK
set me in motion. I pulled my shirt up over my nose to make sure my pits were decent, cleared myself for take-off, and went to brush my teeth. I pushed my wallet into my pocket and grabbed my keys off the kitchen table. Cara was stretched out on the couch with a journal open on scribbly pages and a pen wagging between her fingers like a joint. She slid her head over the arm of the couch and looked at me upside down.

“You leaving too?” she said. “You’re supposed to be writing.”

“I did write. A text.” I grinned.

“A booty call?”

“Perhaps. What are
you
writing? Journalizing?”

“My manifestos,” she said.

“When are you going to let me read them?”

“Never. You don’t let me read your stuff anymore.”

“I haven’t written anything worth reading.”

“Whatever. Write me a story and maybe I’ll let you read a few pages of mine.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“Take it or leave it.” She looked me over, still upside down. “You going out with Sexy New Guy?”

“If only. No. A consolation prize.”

“Not the Warcraft kid again, I hope.”

I laughed.

“Fletcher!”

“Don’t look at me like that. He’s convenient!”

“You
use
him.”

“How am I using him? He gets to get lucky without even leaving his apartment!”

“Ugh. Be safe.”

“Always.” I leaned down and kissed her upside-down forehead; her hair against my chin made me think of a bearded hipster I used to date named Scotch Tape. “Jamar went home?”

“Staying at his place tonight. He ran out of clothes here.”

“If you’re lonely I guess I could stay and chill....”

She looked at me and then up at the clock. “I’ll see you in an hour, Fletch.” As I was closing the door behind me I heard her mumble, her voice doing the equivalent of an eye-roll, “You and your Warcraft kid.”

My Warcraft kid was a

college junior named Mike Stepp, who lived in a studio apartment in the Back Bay with a turtle named Agamemnon and a huge-ass computer (two monitors, tower the size of an armoire) that seemed to wrap around Mike like some kind of life-sustaining medical equipment. Although the padded captain’s chair in front of said computer bore a permanent imprint of his ass, it was a good ass attached to a nice body, and Mike was cute all around. Tallish and lean, shaggy brown hair he was always swinging away from his blue eyes. And, most important in this kind of relationship, chill.

We met online a year ago, went out a few times, stayed in a bunch of times. I liked him. It’d been years since I expected anything to go anywhere, though, so I was hardly surprised when I felt him start to wiggle.

“Dating is so much work,” he told me one night when we were standing outside his apartment after splitting a pizza in Harvard Square. He pursed his lips and swung his hair away from his eyes with a flick of his head. “Not that you aren’t cool.”

I smiled. I hadn’t thought we were dating. Cute that he had.

“Between school work and work and my dailies,” he went on. “You know.” He looked apologetic.

“Busy schedule.”

“Yeah.... So.”

“So I’m getting the heave-ho.”

He shrugged.

“No problem. It happens. So I’ll see you around.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned down the stairs. Once upon a time this all would’ve made me sad, would’ve felt like another false start, another loss. Now I was already thinking about who I could call.

“Well, I was wondering, though,” Mike continued, leaning against the chipped black railing, “we get along well enough. Maybe we can still hang out every once in a while? Not dating exactly, but....”

I turned on the sidewalk and looked up. “Friends?”

“Sure, but more like....”

I smirked when I realized he was angling for what, in my opinion, we already had. Kiddo was looking for benefits. “Pals?” I teased, making him earn it.

“Oh, I don’t know!” He looked down at his shoes with an exasperated smile.

“Oh oh
oh
,” I said, rolling my finger in the air. I started back up the stairs. “You want us to be sex buddies!”

He gulped and grinned. “That’s as good a word as any, I suppose.” His eyes started to cross as I got closer.

“High five!” In a jocky, yeah-dude kind of way I smacked my hand against his. I could tell he was practically blowing his load.

“So you’d, uh, be cool with that?” he said.

“I’m open to whatever.”

“Sweet.” A giant grin.

“So text me, we’ll work it out.”

“Yup. OK.” He licked his suddenly dried-out lips. “Would you, maybe, uh, care to step upstairs and take this arrangement for a bit of a—test flight?”

“Haha. Well.” I wanted to, of course (little Mike wasn’t the only one practically blowing it), but now was the time to establish things, to seize the upper hand. “I can’t tonight. I really have to be getting home and—help Cara—with—groceries.”

“Oh. That sucks.”

“I know.”

He swallowed hard and gaped a little, the corners of his lips dry and his eyes big. Jeez, the poor kid. I felt for him. I wondered if it was really necessary to be the first person to reject the other. Experience taught me it was. It was a power-grab, sure, but it had a way of making things easier down the road. It was a good precedent to have rejected; it was a good fact to have in your pocket. “Text me soon, though,” I said. “We’ll get together.”

I waved and he waved and I walked up the street, feeling his eyes on me until I turned the corner. He was obviously going to scramble upstairs and rub one out ASAP, which probably meant the call wouldn’t come tomorrow. I expected to hear from him on the second or third day. It was the second.

Knowing what I knew now—that Mike was a gamer but not a player of games—I would’ve gone for it that first night. There was no tug-of-war in our arrangement. No power trips. That’s why I’d kept it going for so long. It was convenient when I was too lazy to get anything else started. For the first few months the arrangement was a novelty for Mike and he called me a lot, and I, even when I didn’t really need it, got a kick out of obliging. But as with most things the novelty did wear off, and the booty-call aspect wore off almost completely. At this point we tended to hang out, get dinner, go shopping, whatever, and then fall into the sack almost as an afterthought. Over the last six months it had practically turned into dating. It was averaging once or twice a month at the moment.

I texted:
I’m parking.

When I got to the front of his building I buzzed and he buzzed me in. The building smelled of Pine-Sol and old carpets. I went up the stairs—four flights in an old brownstone lit by funky chandeliers—and arrived panting at his door. I was regular enough to let myself in. The apartment was cool, almost cold. He had a big, rumbling a.c. to offset the heat his monster computer churned out.

“Yo,” I said, shutting the door behind me. It was sticky in the jamb and a practiced bump with my shoulder closed it. I turned the lock. I was in a tiny kitchen that opened into the main part of the studio. I left my shoes near the door.

“Hey Fletcher,” Mike said from around the corner. “Just give me a sec here.”

I noted the mac and cheese clinging to a pan on the stove and I noted the dishes in the sink. I walked barefoot into the main room. It was long and narrow and if not for the fancy old marble fireplace (nonworking, I presumed, and in which Agamemnon’s twenty-gallon tank was wedged) and the ornate crown molding, the studio would’ve looked like a boxcar. If I spread my arms I could almost touch both walls at once. Jamar could easily have touched both walls at once. The rear of the studio was a loft, raised up like a deck, and beneath it, with his desk pushed against the back of the loft ladder, was Mike’s computer and Mike, happy together, two peas in a studio.

He looked over the top of one of the monitors and smiled. His hair was pretty long but he’d clearly taken my advice and splurged on a good haircut. “What can I do you for?” he said.

“For free. Hey, your hair looks smokin’.”

“Thanks. I tried that place on Newbury.” He gave me a little smile before lowering his eyes to a monitor. “Find good parking?”

“Decent.” I leaned against the ladder.

“We haven’t done this like this in a while.”

“I know. I kind of need it. Stressed.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Nothing major. Writer’s block. The heat. Deadly combination.”

“Ah.” He looked at one screen, then the other, then back at me. “Sorry I have to rush it.”

“No worries. Shall I go up?”

He looked at the other screen intently for a moment, typed something, and then looked up again, flicking his hair in a way that made my dick stir. “Yes. I’ll be up in two shakes of a troll’s horn.”

I climbed the creaking ladder. I could feel on my toes the heat rising off the computer. Against the top rung I scraped the soles of my feet to rid them of the sand and tiny pebbles tracked in on shoes. Mike’s futon mattress lay on the floor up here—there wasn’t the clearance for an actual bed.

“Whew, hotter up here,” I said, balling up my t-shirt.

“I know, sorry.” He was coming up the ladder now, more and more of the body I’d come for staggering into view. “Heat rises.”

“Must be a bitch to sleep in.”

“Lucky we don’t plan on sleeping.” He said it sultry and we laughed and got undressed in a tangle.

Mike hadn’t been with very

many guys before me but I wouldn’t ever have guessed. He could’ve authored a series of instructional textbooks about the things he could do with his mouth. I lifted my head off his pillow and looked at the top of his head bobbing near my belly and fell back again and said, “Insane.”

When we were done I

scooted to the edge of the mattress and reached for my shorts. Mike wiped at the jersey sheet with a hand-towel in quick little wax-on wax-off circles.

For the same reason I kept fish—to give a guy something to talk about while he was putting his pants back on—I sometimes wished Mike would hoist Agamemnon’s tank up into the loft, to quietly scritch around on his rocks while we shagged and then be a post-coital conversation topic.