You Can Say You Knew Me When (29 page)

“Sixty,” I said, and threw a pillow, which he bunched under his chest, jamming the lumpy foam into his damp pits.

“I want that back later,” I said, already anticipating the musk he’d leave behind.

When the famous pie-fucking scene appeared, Jed began humping the bed. I leaned back against the headboard and watched the communion of his hips and the mattress, the rhythmic clenching of his perfect gluteal spheres, the traction-curl of his toes in holey white socks. All the while giggling at the screen and calling back to me, “Dude, are you watching this?”

“I’m riveted.”

This was either the luckiest day of my life or the hour of my death.
GAY MAN SLAIN IN NO
-
TELL MOTEL
.
SUSPECT CLAIMS SELF
-
DEFENSE
.

There was something exquisite about the prolonged, seesawing torture of this night, the not-knowing, the wanting-but-not-daring. Time was meaningless, stretching like elastic in the fullness of my fantasies, then snapping back as fear or decorum or a big, bright image of Woody’s face exerted its oppositional pressure. I was sending mixed messages, even to myself: standing under the coldest shower I could bear, then strolling past the TV in just a towel.

Me: “Not sure if I packed clean underwear.”

Jed: “Boxers or briefs? Dude, I’m betting you’re a briefs man.”

He knows I’m queer.

Jed: “If your girlfriend’s been buying your underwear, its definitely briefs.”

OK, so maybe not.

I dug a pair out of my backpack, held them aloft: “Boxer briefs.”

Jed: “Sweet.”

He’s way too interested in my underwear.

Jed: “So why’d you guys break up?”

Or he’s just being friendly.

I slid the underwear up my legs, like a surfer getting dressed under his towel, offering a flash of full frontal at the last pull. Jed’s gaze landed right there, unabashed, but without the follow-up eye contact that would definitively tip this in my favor. So, I told him about my ex-girlfriend, a creature who probably sounded to Jed like the sexiest woman in San Francisco—tall, with blonde curly hair, great tits and great fashion sense, a motorcycle rider who worked at a dot-com—but who was, in fact, a grotesque stitching together of Woody, Ian, and Colleen. “Things are rocky,” I said, “because I cheated.”

“Girls hate that,” he said.

“Guys, too.” Woops; restate: “I mean, she did the same to me, with this guy Roger? But I guess that’s my fault, too, because I’ve been such a loser for the past few months. Since my father died, which is a long story—.”

And then I was telling him the long story, a version of it anyway, one that started in the attic with the puzzle of that missing year of Dad’s life (glossing over dreamy Dean Foster), and went on to encompass Ray’s letters and Deirdre’s package with its paper trail of Teddy in the woods (glossing over Don Drebinski’s
sorcery
), and ended with how I’d fled town without telling anyone (glossing over Woody).

“I’m probably kidding myself. The thing about following your impulses is that it never plays out according to plan—you can’t make a plan out of an impulse
;
one is a rational process, the other is pure intuition
—
and now here I am in this motel, and no offense to you, but I have to wonder what the fuck I’m doing here—.” I cut myself off. “Too much information?”

He shook his head. “Dude, I’m your guy.”

“Meaning?”

“Yo, I grew up around here. My grandfather was one of the rich fuckers who put together that land trust. I’m a fucking encyclopedia of this place. Come on, ask me anything.”

“Can you get me onto that land?”

“No problem.”

“Do you think there’s still a cabin there?”

“I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure I can find that railroad car or, like, where I think it used to be. There’s only three actual peaks, the rest are just hills, so we’ll just climb them all.”

“Really?”

“One hundred percent.”

“You can hang with me tomorrow?”

“Nothing else to do.” Then he slapped his hands together. “Dude! I’ll show you the Goddess Twat.”

“Huh?”

“This big rock with a fucking split. Looks like total vagina. Luckily doesn’t smell like one. Right?” We bumped knuckles together as I added feminist solidarity to the list of all I was currently betraying.

The desire to have sex with Jed ebbed under the promise of tomorrow’s adventure. Even after he stripped off his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt to reveal a wife beater tank top, a fluffy tangle of curls poking out above the scoop neck; after he peeled down to his own underwear (boxers, plaid, baggy) and I watched him poke his hand through the fly and linger over a thorough ball scratching; after he dropped to the floor and sweated his way through countless push-ups; even then I resisted. He’d been delivered here for a reason—not to lead me astray but to guide me—and I’d be a fool to tamper with this kind of fate. Jed would help me, and then I’d go home. To Woody.

I turned out the lights and curled up with my pillow, duly scented with Jed’s perspiration. The last thing I remember hearing were his footfalls on the carpet, the phone cord dragging behind him, the click of the bathroom door.

I woke to the sight of Jed seated in front of the window, quiet and still. Behind him was the glare of the sky or the sea, one indistinguishable from the other. His neck and shoulders curved gracefully; his white-gold hair, flattened by sleep, framed him like an aura. He was spacing out, or deep in thought, sipping coffee from a take-out cup, his expression either sublime or blank.

He pivoted, sensing me awake. “I got you coffee.” He nodded toward a second cup on the chest of drawers.

“From the front desk?”

“No. There’s an ex-presso place down the road. I borrowed your car.” He pulled a metallic knot of keys from his pants pocket and tossed it to the table. My keys, last located in my pants pocket. “What’s up with the no-CD-player situation?”

I sat up, blinked, rubbed my scalp, all the while knocking around the situation, lifting it up by the heels and shaking it hard, hoping something definite would fall to my feet. The main thing seemed to be that he was here, that he’d come back; he hadn’t stolen my car. So I could trust him; that was the lesson, right?

He was either completely guileless or so crafty it was scary.

I had half a boner from sleep, and I noted Jed noting it, bobbing in my boxer briefs as I made my way to the waiting cup of coffee, feeling like a beast, furry man on top, tumescent schlong below. I hovered and sipped. “No milk?”

“You seemed like a black kinda guy.”

I rubbed a hand on my belly. “I’m about as white as they come.” He looked away. The coffee was already cool enough to gulp. “Actually tastes pretty good.”

“If I’d gotten the free coffee from the desk you’d be complaining it was burnt.” I could see his need for approval side by side with his natural defiance. He knew he’d taken a chance by using the car. He wanted that to be okay with me.

I picked up the keys and clutched them tight. “Thanks for the coffee. But no one drives the car except me, okay?”

He mocked me with a little salute. “Okay, Dad.”

“I’m not old enough to be your dad.”

“I thought you were sixty.”

I gave him the finger and went into the bathroom to restart the day.

I drove toward the hills I’d last seen at sunset, up and up to a thousand feet, everything around me bright and green in the slanting March sun. Jed sat in the passenger seat, his boots on the dashboard, complaining about the music selection. “I’ve got a fucking killer pile of CDs, and all you’ve got is a tape deck and Elton John.”

“Consider it an education in pop history.” I’d glanced at Jed’s collection, made up of bands I’d seen photographed in magazines but had never actually heard, whose names were spelled strangely (Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park) or bore cryptic numbers (Blink-182, 311). He had a CD by Christina Aguilera—her single was inescapable right around then—though Jed claimed this one had been left behind by
someone I went out with
.

On Lion’s Gate, he directed me to a turnoff I hadn’t seen last night, not far from where I’d chased my hat. A small sign read
MID
-
PENINSULA LAND TRUST
,
DAY PERMITS REQUIRED
. The trust, Jed explained, kept its acreage undeveloped and paid property owners along its borders to limit their own construction, creating a secondary ring of green around the core. On the other side of these peaks, stretching from SF to San Jose, was the sprawling fact of modern life—the freeways and passenger rails, the strip malls and office parks—but here, in front of us, was the local gentry’s gift to the public.

I slowed down the car when we got to a clearing, and Jed pointed things out to me: a little valley down below belonging to a rock star; the parcel next to that owned by a famous scientist; a hill still being ranched for cattle. Jed claimed that at this time of year we could pull off the dirt road, jimmy the car behind some dense greenery and not worry about getting caught. Sounded like a plan to me.

He talked as we started our walk, telling me about his family, who had farmed in this area for generations (first hops, then apples) before donating their land to the trust, and how, as a kid, he’d explored these hills with his cousins. He threw his arms wide, animation taking over his face. “This is what I was talking about, dude. Tripping hella natural. You could get into that, right?” He spun around, head back, eyes on the sky, and I joined him, a couple of dervishes making ourselves dizzy, whistling as we collapsed.

“Teddy, we should take that E.”

It took me a second to understand that he was serious.

Reasons this was a bad idea: We’d get lost or sidetracked, my mission abandoned to the vagaries of the high. I’d already paid him for it, now he was looking to take it for free. And most worrisome of all, ecstasy didn’t get its reputation as the
love drug
for nothing. I have come to regret some of the overblown, intimate confessions I’ve made while listening to ecstasy’s sweet nothings pulse in my ears. I had a rule: only with longtime friends, only with committed lovers. (Realizing suddenly, wistfully, that Woody and I had never shared anything stronger than cocktails together.)

“I just met you,” I stammered, imagining the dangerous flood of feeling I’d no doubt have to share with Jed as the drug built toward its peak.

“Dude,” he said to me, “you’d be an awesome person to trip with.”

Reason I gave in to a bad idea: He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed. I’d been frowning at the dirt, avoiding his eyes, but now I looked up and felt him wipe away all my caution with something like sincerity on his face. That was all it took.

W
e hadn’t eaten breakfast, so there was little doubt that we’d feel the E soon enough. Empty stomach equals fast absorption. With a capsule pinched between his fingers, Jed traced a figure eight in the air, a magician readying for the trick.

“Wait!” I said. “We have to state our intentions first.” Good intentions, I explained, make for good trips. Don’t mess with your brain unless you know why you’re doing it. Clarify your intention and the drug will work with you, not against you. I had confidence in this reliable ritual of past hallucinogenic intake. Under the current circumstances, I felt that I needed it.

Jed said, “I intend to have fun and get off on nature.”

Before I’d met Jed (was it only last night?), before his presence changed the color of this adventure, my intentions were, if not clear, at least directed. “I’m looking for my father, so to speak, and I want to walk on the ground that he walked on and maybe even have the relationship to this place that he did. I intend for this ecstasy to make it a happy connection and not such a fucked-up one, which is what it’s always been.”

“It would take more than one hit to make me feel good about
my
father.”

“You think I’m asking for too much?”

“I think you’re being too heavy. You don’t do this every time you smoke pot, do you?” he asked.

“Pot’s not a drug,” I answered. But he was right. “Okay. I intend to have fun and get off on nature, too.”

Down went the magic bullets.

He led us along a deer path that paralleled a trickling creek. Overgrown manzanita bushes and twisty scrub oaks lined the way. Deeper in, redwoods stood in circles that marked the circumferences of long-gone center trees. The offspring grew, Jed said, not from dropped seeds, but up from the roots. He explained that the entire peninsula south of San Francisco had once been solid redwood forest, all of it logged to build the city, all of it obliterated soon after by earthquake and fire. So the gorgeous green fields and expansive views to the ocean that had awed me yesterday had come at a price: the old growth, twice destroyed.

The hike took us downhill and then back up, through a constant chorus of birdcalls. In his pages Teddy had wondered if birds
speak to each other across species;
I understood perfectly how he came to this question, and I listened closely to a volley of squawks and chirps with the idea that I might answer it. Jed was grabbing my attention, pointing in every direction with his strong, tattooed arm. He showed me different paw prints in the mud (coyote prints have claws extended, bobcats’ don’t, deer’s look like quotation marks); and poison oak budding down low (“leaves of three, let it be,” he instructed); and holes made by gophers that were now homes to snakes. “All of this wildlife should be freaking me out,” I told him. “But it isn’t.” I filled up with wonder, at the light filtering down through the leafy canopy, at the rising smell of wet earth at creekside, at the song the wind was making of everything it touched. “Nature is so detailed
,”
I whispered.

A big smile from Jed. “I can tell you’re feeling it, Teddy.”

“You can?”

The thrill of the onset: extended eye contact, grins of admiration, exuberance at whatever caught our attention. He was chattering away as usual but no longer seemed like he was trying to prove something. Instead of “dude” he was using my name—the name I’d given him. His almost clownish toughness had been replaced with a sweet enthusiasm. I felt the giddiness of witnessing his transformation. I felt the opposite, too:
Remember who you told him you are.
But it seemed now that my masquerade might simply dissolve, a clump of mud in moving water.

Sweat on my brow dampened my hat, sweat under my shirt tickled my chest, heat gathered in my feet. We stepped into a dusty clearing and sunshine struck like a searchlight, casting the trees at the periphery into velvety shadows. Jed thrust his chin skyward, his face pure contentment. Then he grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt and tugged it up over his head, scrunching it behind his neck.

His torso: flat, downy, glistening. Skin flush from exertion. An unexpected, tiny silver ring piercing his right nipple. His jeans sagged below the long runway of his abdomen, exposing the underwear I’d seen last night and a patch of darker hair, curling out like a hundred little antennae. He said, “You feel it. Right?”

“I feel so much.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

Whatever he’d told me hadn’t prepared me for this. Desire boiled up, groin to chest to brain, my skull a kettle already rattling as the steam built to the warning whistle.

“We need to find a secret meadow,” I told him. “The secret meadow is the goal of all drug trips. A little womby place to sit in while you’re peaking.”

“We already have a goal, Teddy
.
The railway car!”

“Oh, yeah.” I was bursting with appreciation. “It’s so amazing how you’re keeping me on track.” Jed was beautiful on the outside, but now I saw it came from underneath his perfect surface—a core of solid gold. He was my trusty cub blazing the trail, my magic boy with his bag of potions, a studly version of my own younger, brazen self. I formed thoughts beginning with his name, sentences I needed to utter, needed him to hear—and then I sealed them off.
Think like Teddy.
Had Teddy known this awe that couldn’t be voiced? This risk that felt like joy?

“Dude, let’s look at each other’s tattoos up close.” Not sure how long we’ve been here, sitting side by side, stripped down to our underwear. Jed’s sun-warmed skin is only inches from mine. Now he peers at the snakes wiggling around my upper arm. “Infinity,” I say. “Change. The cycle of life.” All I can muster for explanation.

His right arm is dense with symbols, flames and roses, crosses and ankhs and daggers from his wrist to the cuff of his shoulder, all of it bright and new, as if wet to the touch. “No one ever looks really close,” he whispers. “You want people to, but they don’t, they stay back.” He lifts a fingertip to my snakes, traces the ink, goosebumps my skin, wave-crashes my brain. I clench a fist, making what I can of the muscle. “If you worked out you’d be gigantic,” he says, gripping me.

“How long have you been working out?” I ask. “How long to get like this?” My hand goes to his chest. Soft surface, solid beneath.

“Since freshman year. I started before everyone.” He leans back, closes his eyes, offers himself up for display. He says, “I did everything first.”

A risk: my fingers on the nipple ring. A tug, a twist. “Oh, fuck, Teddy, don’t do that.” A half-hearted protest, a no-means-yes. Another tug, then I release, pull back. It’s too much.

I tell him I need to lie down. I roll away from him. Grass under my head, along my skin, tickly, itchy. Exhale to relax. Examine the tiny yellow and purple wildflowers, like starbursts of pigment. The heady moist smell of growing things. My face in the blades. A caravan of bugs, so many of them, crawling along as always. A whole world down here where human feet trample without noticing, without care.

My eyes are closed when he douses me. A shock of wet from above. Jed laughing as he drains his water bottle onto my skin.

“No fair!”

“Yes. Fair. Now do me,” he says.

I stand up. He arches back. I pour water onto his forehead, face, neck. His strong neck. I want those tendons between my teeth, against my tongue. Water flows where my hands want to roam, beads on his skin, saturates his underwear. The fabric clings. Then we’re two wet dogs shaking off, flinging droplets at each other. Then we’re squeegees, hands upon each other, slicking each other dry, mussing hair, giggling, falling into an almost-naked embrace.

Heartbeat deafening now. I have to say something. I try, “It’s hard to be regular,” but it comes out, “It’s hard to be regal.”

To which he smiles and says, “It’s hard to be legal.”

And I say, “It’s hard to fly like an eagle.”

And he, “It’s hard to bark like a beagle.”

And me, “And now I’m hard as a steeple.”

Which is how we both wind up staring at my crotch. “Not quite,” he says, reaching down, squeezing me there, hanging on too long, not long enough.

I whimper his name.

Which is when he sprints across the secret meadow in his boots and his socks and his soggy boxers, looking less like a nature boy than a punk go-go dancer at the Stud on a Saturday night. He jumps up to an oak branch. Climbs, turns, waves.

Is he running away or showing off? I remember our intention, to
have fun.
I run to join him. Bark sandpapers my skin as I follow him up. Wet skin now cold in the breeze. The sky through the branches is iridescent, a sheet of glimmering pearls, glowing atoms, precisely daubed paint. The two of us in the tree’s leafy hold, pausing to find some breath.

“I gotta say it, dude.” He stares at me across a branch, his pupils enormous and dark. “I fucking love you like a brother.”

“Yeah, I feel it, too.”

Except brothers don’t lean toward each other and kiss. With their mouths open and ready.

Like this.

We hike further uphill, pants and shirts stuffed in my bag. It’s a definite climb, tough work on smoker’s lungs, and we’ve foolishly wasted most of our water. But my steps are strong; I could sprint with the vitality I took from locking onto Jed’s lips. The unskilled hunger of the moment, the unsure tittering that ended it, the matter-of-fact words that followed: “Dude, I just had to do that.” “No problem. I was feeling it.” “Cool.”

Now Jed takes the lead, a few paces ahead. Silent now. There’s something troubling in this arrangement. Is it the cold shoulder, because things went too far? Or it may be that the trip has already peaked. You never know until you’ve passed it.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I ask.

“That bunch of trees, there.” He points higher up, licks sweat off his upper lip. His eyes are expectant.

An unseen critter darts through the weeds—a startling, dry rustle. A finger of fear traces my neck. A clench takes hold of my jaw and stays there. Teeth grinding.

We find the creek again—or else it’s a different creek, I can’t tell—and follow it up toward what must be its source, or near to it. The gurgle louder as the slope intensifies. The soft earth underfoot giving way to rocky terrain. This must be the highest hilltop around. Oaks give way to evergreens; pinecones crumble underfoot.

“Check it out,” Jed says, indicating up ahead.

A convex wall of gray rock, a giant triangle, upside-down, with a thick vertical split bisecting it. Top to bottom the crease is nearly four feet long. Spring water erupts in a firehose flow from its center, where a nub of rock swells clitorally. At the base, nearly symmetrical boulders, giant solid tubes, project forth like thighs.

I know before he tells me. It’s the promised Goddess Twat. Those hills behind could be her swollen belly, her ripe green breasts.

“The owner of this vagina would have to be fifty feet tall,” he says.

“What about the dick that could fill it up?”

“I’d like to see that,” he says.

“Oh, would you now?” My tone is too arch, it shoves him back to silence.

“You still feel the E?” he asks finally.

“Sure, but not so strong.”

“Time for the dope.” He retrieves the pipe from my bag—remarkable how comfortable he is going through my stuff. Remarkable that I don’t mind. He puts flame to the bowl. “This will kick it back in.”

He’s right. Suddenly it’s all there again: the euphoria up on stilts, wobbly, the pot-heat gurgling down below like quicksand. And in between, filling up my vision, the giant vulva, blotched with parallelograms of light, purple shadows, rust-red lichen.

For some length of time, I watch the entire mass of it throb.

“Jed, it’s like it’s talking to me.”

“What’s it saying?”

I comprehend something I didn’t just a moment before. It settles upon me like sunshine: This is it, the place he wrote about, where he
planted his flag
. It must be: the pine trees, the fountain, the highest peak. I say, “He was here.”

“You’re talking about your old man?”

I reach in the bag, retrieve my father’s pages, read the passage: “
Where the water spills forth like the very eternal juices of Mother Earth herself
.” For a moment Jed, who has occupied my every thought for hours, is not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking instead of what I came here for; I’m thinking it has found me, and I can’t speak fast enough to pace my thoughts. “This is why I’m here, the place I was meant to find. Remember what I said, how I wanted to make a connection with my father?” He nods, trying to keep up. I read: “
And so I did the thing which is known to men as taking care of the Need. That was my way to claim this hilltop for all the bums like me past and present.
Jed, I have to pay tribute.”

He says, “I’m with you, dude.” But his eyes ask me what the fuck I’m talking about.

I spell out what it means to
take care of the Need
. He laughs. I tell him that’s what I think I should do. Here. Now. His smile flattens. He grabs the lighter, brings the pipe to his mouth. Sucks in deeply.

I’m removing what’s left of my clothes, boots kicked out, socks peeled off. I step out of my still-damp underwear, my feet scrunching pine needles, the breeze blowing on my already stiffening cock.

Jed is staring. At the rock formation, at me, at the rock. At me.

“I’ll give you some space,” he says, holding smoke, but he stays put.

I tell him, “You brought me here. You’re part of the connection.” These words rise up from instinct, too. Everything locking into focus.

Jed exhales. Nods. It could be the drugs, or desire. Could be he actually gets what I’ve said, though I could hardly explain it myself if asked. I can see him make a decision even before he whispers, in an almost solemn voice, “Just tell me what to do.”