You Can Say You Knew Me When (7 page)

And that head shot: Dean Foster’s eyes beckoning, his lips drawing sensuous curves into his skin. Eyes and lips working in tandem, conspiring to ignite desire. My reporter’s instinct felt it as a dare: the primal male friendship of my father’s life, covered in secrecy, a forty-year silence so total there had to be a good reason for it. How to reconcile this discovery with the memory of my father as he’d lived, a man I’d never known to have close friendships with other men, who had failed to find any connection with his only son, who’d always been, to use Woody’s words,
emotionally unavailable?
A shiver skipped down my spine, like a stone disturbing the surface of deep water, and in the second it took to shake off the sensation, I knew what I would do: I’d look for Danny Ficchino. If he was still alive, I’d find him. I’d find out why he had been erased from our family’s history.

I found myself wishing I had tried harder to interest Deirdre in this. Her curiosity would make things easier; she could go through the rest of Dad’s belongings in the attic. Plus, we’d have something new in common, a project to get excited about together. This wish—that his death might afford us common ground again—flared at the edge of my thoughts like a shard of glass catching a beam of light. Flared, then dimmed. My sister’s needs, I knew, were more practical right now. She had a husband, a child, a house to manage; she had our grandmother’s future to consider; she had Carly Fazio in human resources ready to sign her up. If I truly wanted to be closer to her, I would have come home last year, not last week. If I wanted to delve into an obscure year from our father’s past, I would have to go it alone.

I
was so excited to see Woody again, to get away from New Jersey and that house crammed full of the past, the money talk and the old arguments. Riding to the airport I was giddy with anticipation, not to mention making choices based on my impending inheritance—springing for a seventy-dollar car service rather than a thirteen-dollar bus ride to Newark.

The flight was delayed because of winter weather. I called Woody to break the news, and then I did what I always did when stranded in airports: I cruised the restrooms. It’s an old habit left over from when I lived in Jersey City with my boyfriend Nathan. Back then—this was 1990 or ’91, and I was only a year out of college—I used to lurk in the men’s room in the underground transit station at the World Trade Center. The World
of
Trade Center, Nathan dubbed it, because of all the white businessmen in suits sucking off rough-trade Latinos wearing wife-beater tank tops. Nathan and I were nearly obsessed with one another, a love marked by demonstrative gestures (he was once arrested for spray painting
NO ONE LOVES JAMIE MORE THAN NATHAN
on a subway-platform billboard) and public displays of drama (the spray paint was to mark the spot where we’d had a screaming match a week earlier). But we were in our early twenties, so naturally we were always itching for sex with other people, too. Sometimes we granted each other
permission slips
for a night or a weekend. Young and queer, why should we limit ourselves? But inevitably one of us got jealous—usually Nathan, a brooding, wild-haired, motorcycle-riding college dropout with a Slavic gloominess—and we’d argue for a day, or two, or seven. I was proficient in foot-stomping retreats and door-slamming exits. He called me the Red Tornado. Détente would come in the form of sweaty makeup sex. Permission slips were revoked, new limitations imposed. Having strayed and reunited, fought and fucked, we’d sing our own praises, young enough to see our love as different than, better than, all other love. Nathan would write me a poem. Or seven.

And then it would start all over again.

After high school, after Eric, I had avoided the touch of men. College was relatively sexless for me—a couple of girlfriends, a couple of furtive liaisons with boys. By the time I got to New York, I was ready. I discovered that pale blue eyes, freckled shoulders and red hair were a currency with an appeal that ran deep, if not necessarily wide. I learned how to court admirers. I figured out how to
work it
. Nathan was less of a prowler than I, but not blameless. He preferred going home with someone he’d met at a bar, which I thought of as unnecessarily entangled—you had to converse, and spend money on alcohol, and exchange phone numbers, and in the end you were more likely to let emotions seep in, perhaps deciding this new someone was more interesting than your boyfriend. I preferred the quick and anonymous; no talking beyond
Thanks a lot, man. That was hot.
I wanted bodies, not biographies. For a while the World of Trade men’s room was unbelievably hopping, with sex acts so blatant you’d feel bad for the poor commuter who had stumbled in needing to pee.

The day I was flying back to San Francisco, I’d been coupled with Woody for over a year and a half, a year and a half of monogamous nesting. I’d been a model partner. Woody’s previous boyfriend had run around behind his back; cheating was the one thing Woody couldn’t abide. I didn’t even flirt with other men in front of him. Plus, having emerged from my slutty years without contracting HIV, it seemed ungracious to tempt fate.

So what was I doing in Newark Airport Terminal C, lingering a little too long at a urinal, looking over my shoulder at every guy who walked in, hoping one of them would make eye contact?

I zipped up and splashed cold water on my face. Before anything could happen, I got away from the temptation conjured up by the piss-and-ammonia stink of a public toilet.

In my carry-on luggage was my father’s copy of
On the Road.
Its cover was frayed, its pages jaundiced, but it was dated 1958—an original paperback edition. As Nana would say, it was
the genuine article.

I’d read the book before, or rather I tried to read it, in college. I never finished; too rambling, too episodic, a self-indulgent string of adventures. Back then I was reading contemporary fiction—
Bright Lights, Big City
;
Less Than Zero
—the self-indulgent, episodic books of my own generation. And after college my reading list tended toward old-guard gays: James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal. With time to kill, and curious about what sent my father west, I decided Kerouac was worth a fresh look.

Ten minutes later I had plowed through two chapters, utterly absorbed. The beginning of
On the Road
recounts the narrator’s introduction to Dean Moriarty, an ex-con who blazes into New York full of wild energy, charming the intellectuals and the junkies alike. I knew the basics of the Kerouac legend, knew that his books were thinly fictionalized versions of his real life, and that Dean was based on Neal Cassady, who’d been a muse to the young writer. But that summary only hinted at what Kerouac must have felt for Cassady. From the moment Dean answers the door “in his shorts,” rambling on about sex, “the one holy and important thing in his life,” one idealized, sensual description after another piles up: thin and trim hipped and blue eyed and golden, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West,” “a western kinsman of the sun.” Dean can’t even park a car without being described as a “wrangler.” The Kerouac stand-in who narrates the book goes on at length about his “heartbreaking new friend”—heartbreaking!
—
describing him as a long-lost brother with a “straining muscular sweaty neck” whose “dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully.” I’d never heard anyone depict a
kinsman
so ecstatically. Sure, there are mentions of Dean’s wife, but she’s labeled a “whore” and dispatched pretty quickly. Sure, Dean and Sal make an attempt at a double date, but the girls never show and the guys don’t seem to care. Right there in the first few pages of Kerouac’s most famous book—the one that inspired a billion red-blooded boys, my father among them—an undeniable erotic current pulsed along the surface.

When I finally looked up from the book, my eyes landed on a guy staring at me from the next table. He was my age, maybe a couple years younger, dressed in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a baseball cap. His gaze was strong and direct as I took in his features—brown skin and black eyebrows, eyes a bit close together, big nose. Indian or Arab, perhaps. I looked away and then back. This time, he raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a smile. The nod I sent back to him was very cool, but inside, I was already percolating.

“Kerouac?” A Midwestern accent:
care-whack.

“Yeah.
On the Road.
Just checking it out.” I heard the hint of apology in my voice, caught reading a book I’d once dismissed.

“I’ve read all his stuff.” He stood up and moved toward my table, lugging along an enormous backpack, a fleece pullover and the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. He wore tan cargo pants with zippered pockets staggered down the legs and those newfangled hiking boots, the ones that look like basketball sneakers crossbred with the brown-suede Earth shoes of my childhood. So maybe this wasn’t a cruise. He was just one of those perennial backpackers, happy for the excuse to converse with a stranger.

He shook my hand firmly, asked my name, told me his. I wrote it down in my journal later, but I couldn’t quite make out my scrawl—it was either Rich or Rick. He asked if he could sit down, and I said yes, not sure it was such a good idea because as soon as he dropped himself into the seat across from me, he launched a monologue about his round-the-world exploits. He’d say, “Then I went to Micronesia. Have you been there? Jamie, you have to make a point to go. It’s unbelievable,” and continue on about a cavern, or a reef, or a ravine that was “the best example of its kind in the whole world.” Personal history came next. He’d been working on an MBA but ditched the program to create a business plan at a dot-com start-up, “installing servers for the B2B segment—that’s business-to-business?” I didn’t understand the specifics. Mention business and my brain shuts down. He said, “I saved a substantial amount of income, and then I said good-bye.”

“Cashed out your stock options?”

“No, I didn’t wait that long. The writing is on the wall. All those geeks will live to regret it, working sixty hours a week, waiting around for the big payoff. Get the money now, Jamie, ’cause the Internet honeymoon is quickly drawing to a close.”

“You sound pretty sure about that,” I said, thinking about Woody’s job at Digitent, a little San Francisco company also funded by venture capital, also providing B2B services I didn’t particularly understand. They were gearing up for their initial public offering. I hated the long hours that Woody spent at their chaotic, cubicle-pocked office, but he was firm in his plan to work hard now and cash in later.

“Jamie, I’m telling you—do you work for a pre-IPO?” There was something disconcerting about the way Rick kept using my name, all the while keeping his eyes intently locked onto mine. I decided to cast out a lead.

“No, but my boyfriend does.”

“Oh.” A pause. Something had registered. “Trust me, Jamie. Tell him don’t wait around. There’ll be a lot of disappointed wannabe millionaires any day now.” Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You guys should just get out there and travel together. It’s better to travel with someone, anyway. It gets lonely. You can imagine.”

“It’s a lonely planet, right?”

He smiled at me. “You’re a fun guy.”

“But I’m not much of a traveler. I’ve been in San Francisco lockdown for years.”

“San Francisco’s a
fun
city.” His voice had now, most certainly, gotten flirtatious.

I responded in kind. “I have a lot of
fun
there.”

“Yeah? You like to have fun?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I bet you and I could have some fun, Jamie.”

I cleared my throat. “Planning on visiting?”

“Yeah, actually. In a few months.” He leaned in even closer. “But we could seize the moment.”

“This moment?”

“What do you say?” He looked around, lowered his voice. “I need to use the bathroom. How about you?”

Bingo.

We stood at side-by-side urinals, blocked by a metal divider, though I knew he was pulling on his cock just like I was. As soon as the room cleared, we both stepped back and showed each other what we had. His was longer than mine, skinnier, uncut. He looked at me through narrowed eyes, nodded his head slowly and mouthed “Nice,” no longer the conversationalist, suddenly Mr. Sex. It seemed funny that I’d ever thought him to be straight. He had the gay-pornspeak down pat. He stopped stroking for a moment and let his cock lay swollen on his open palm to be examined like something on a deli scale. “I’d sure love for you to take care of this,” he whispered. “I’m going to be traveling for a long time.”

“Sounds good, buddy,” I said, speaking the ’speak, too.

He quickly checked over his shoulder, then motioned me into a stall. We squeezed in and locked the door and were immediately upon each other—no kissing, just a lot of groping. Frenzied and clumsy. Beyond the metal stall door I heard footsteps and voices. I thought about my bags, unattended out by the sink, with my father’s keepsakes inside. I imagined a quick-handed thief making off with them, or an anxious airport security guard calling in the bomb squad.

Rick stepped onto the toilet seat so that only one pair of our legs would be visible—a ploy I remembered well from my World of Trade days. He crouched and leaned forward, sucking my dick into his mouth with an audible slurp, one hand on my ass, the other on his own cock, which he was pumping madly. I shoved from my hips, hoping to get hard again in his mouth, which was dripping saliva into my pubic hair. I thought about the time my friend Ian got gonorrhea in his cock, transmitted from the back of someone’s throat. I thought about having to sit through a six-hour plane ride with a damp crotch. I wondered if Rick’s flight was delayed, too, or if he was in a rush, needing to finish this off quickly. Voices shot over from the urinals, two men speaking in an Asian tongue, Vietnamese maybe. I wondered if they could hear the slurping and heavy breathing. I wondered if Rick had ever been to Vietnam.

A wave of regret hit me, and I gasped for air. If I was going to cheat on Woody, couldn’t I summon up some pleasure, make this worth the guilt? But the guilt was in charge, a hidden overseer keeping my mind full of chatter and my dick at half mast. Rick finally pulled away from me, letting my cock—fluffed, but definitely not hard—bob out of his mouth. He looked up at me, his too-close-together eyes questioning, and I shrugged my shoulders. He pointed at his hard-on, and then back at me, mouthing, “You suck me?”

I shrugged again. “Okay. Sure.”

What I should have done was leave, get out while I could still salvage some sense of having resisted
,
but that didn’t seem fair to Rick. Of course, staying and continuing wasn’t fair to Woody, but there you have it: the inverse logic of infidelity.

So I crouched on the toilet seat, positioned as if taking a crap in the woods, and I let Rick guide his skinny brown cock down my throat. Out by the urinals it was silent again, and I guess Rick felt safe enough to speak. He said, “Jamie, this might be the last blow job I get for months,” and there was something so earnest, so grateful, in his voice that, unexpectedly, I was galvanized. I stopped thinking about confiscated luggage and delayed flights and STDs, and I stopped worrying about whether or not I was going to tell Woody about this, and I gave Rick some grade-A head, something he could remember when he was jacking off in Nepal a month from now, a lonesome traveler out on the road.