Boyd

Three years ago, that night my neighbor Boyd stopped over drunk with a gun and asked me if we could fool around.

Boyd was on the bed with his jeans halfunzipped. My robe was open and I lay down next to him and pulled the jeans down more.
His dick was smaller than I thought. I started playing with it and thought, he’s not gonna get hard. Then he was hard, and I sucked him.
The pubic hair, under the healing scar that ran up to his ribcage, it almost looked like an open wound, he’d been shot a month ago, was untrimmed, dark. I like that.
I took off the jeans and his t-shirt that was green and said Man From Mars.
He said he didn’t want to kiss and I said whatever you want, you have the gun.
I played with his chest and sucked him.
But I really wanted to kiss him because he’s Belgian and has a babyface I want to bury my face into.
I took off the robe and sucked him and jacked him off and rubbed my rockhard dick on his leg. I thought, he probably doesn’t like this.
He asked if I had a rubber and said he wanted to fuck me. As much as I wanted him on top of me and inside me, I thought no, whoa, slow down.
And I don’t fuck guys who won’t kiss me. I say, anyway.
I lay beside him and started to jack myself, but he took my dick and jacked me off, really hard, and I came, hard, my dick was huge and I shot hard.
It took a few minutes to recover.
I’d gone to that place where there is nothing else.
His dick was standing erect. It was hard and jutted almost straight up. I sucked him and jacked him off. He pushed my head down hard on his dick and I choked. He tried playing with himself but said he couldn’t cum. He said it was his crazy pills.
There was warmth between us the whole time. It was turning to heat for me. I wanted to fall into him.
We laughed when I came so hard.
I wanted to cuddle with him, but that’s not how they fuck in prison, he said.

#remembermen

That night

I’ve been thinking about my first gay lover, the gym teacher. It was so hot. I was seventeen and he was twenty-seven. I had a big crush on him for a couple years. Then one night….
He took me swimming in the afternoon and I had no idea he was gay. On the way back in his car he said, “Why don’t you come over tonight?”
I thought he just wanted to hang out.
We both had school the next day. I answered him with the stupidest words I’ve ever said, “As long as you don’t want to go to bed or anything.”
Of course I meant as long as he wasn’t tired.
He chuckled, but I still couldn’t begin to fathom that he was gay.
See? I remember this so clearly all these years later. Ain’t life grand.
I was actually seventeen once. Hard to believe, now.
So I went.
It was so fucking hot. The way he seduced me that night, it was a porn film, it was a dream.
We saw each other for the next two years. Sex was incredible. Soaked in sweat. All the things he taught me about loving men.
So last year I looked him up online, I knew I wouldn’t actually reconnect with him, here, almost fifty years later, but it was a thought.
There’s his picture. I wouldn’t even know it was the same guy. Old and fat.
And also dead. He died in 2012.
That took a chunk of my history away from me in two seconds flat.
The most beautiful thing, we had it once.
Why am I dreaming of the past? It’s time to russle up some dinner.
And there have been so many guys since. I love men. At least on my deathbed I won’t be thinking, “Oh, I wish I would’ve had more sex.”
Or wait, maybe I will.

#remembermen

one/ten

Josh kept emailing that they could meet, but then not answering when Sam called or texted.

As soon as Sam had seen his picture he wanted to fuck him.

He wanted to meet him. The ex-Marine, the haircut, meat. From pixel transmissions and imagination to flesh. His flesh meeting ex-Marine flesh.

But Josh would email Sam to call him and then not answer.

He wasn’t even sure the guy was real.

He was too shattered to know, he thought, and he had never done this before.

He only had these transmissions.

Blond crewcut shaved high above the ears. Blue eyes. Josh was wearing a silver cross. He couldn’t be serious with anyone wearing a cross. So that was good. He just wanted to fuck him.

Sam was gullible. He wanted Josh to be real. To be a real ex-Marine who would fuck him like an animal.

Josh was a primal false hope for vacant hours while Sam was adrift in Minoan art, sea creatures and somersaulting people because he’d gotten stuck in an old art book while trying to pack.

The first day he tried he sat down and cried before he filled the first box.

He wasn’t even sure he could meet someone for sex. He had done that a lot before Don, but in bars or on beaches, never online.

It was a new world.

Josh was a serial killer luring Sam, hard to get so Sam would try harder. Sam would show up at his door, be chloroformed, wake up in a vat of acid carved up, Josh chanting.

All these guys were transmissions that could be lies. But he was hurt, he was lonely, he had to try.

He had to try to do something to escape the throbbing hopeless loneliness.

Josh sent three naked pictures. He said he lived by the hospital but didn’t send his address.

Sam liked the pictures. He created fantasies and jacked off with them.

Josh was an amalgamation of guys at The Roadhouse, in the aisles of Home Depot, at gas stations, in horror films.

But were any of the transmissions really Josh.

There were men everywhere.

Sam could walk outside and fall in love.

In the first picture, from the front, Josh’s cock must be seven inches soft. He’s wearing hot white boxer shorts with navy pinstripes. His cock and balls are hanging out the front flap. His balls are huge.

In the second, from the right side, his thigh is primary, his dick from the side, semi-hard, rising, but the hot part is how tight the leg of the boxer shorts is around his muscled leg.

The third is as if you were approaching the bed, his raised ass. Face down on the pillow, his legs spread open to show you his hole.

He sends his address by the hospital. He sucks Sam off and swallows Sam’s cum and then he fucks Sam and cums inside him.

This is how Sam jacks off.

He never really fucks Josh in the flesh, just through transmissions.

one/nine

The unrelenting throbbing of being alone.

The final months Sam had been alone in their house.

His horror film habit had started when Joe appeared.

He was looking for horror that was worse than his life.

Don and Sam had become addicted to pills when Sam’s dad died and they suddenly became responsible for Sam’s mom. Vicodin, Valium – they’d been on heavy daily doses for years. They were also doing cocaine almost daily, because Sam could pick it up easily from Scarlet at the club.

The nightmare with Don and Joe was happening. He couldn’t be dependent. He couldn’t be weak. He quit everything. He did it alone. He stayed in the house on the couch watching horror movies.

He could quit the pills because the pain of losing Don was worse than the drug withdrawal.

It was hard in the rock and roll bar.

In those final months his thoughts were overtaken with pictures of Don and Joe, a slideshow, or like flipping through a photo album, slamming down each page. He couldn’t stop seeing them together. It was a constant aching awareness, he hated it, but he couldn’t make it stop.

Hammers were smashing his brain with blood splattered and dripping down the interior membrane.

Images of them walking on the sidewalk and in the door of the apartment Don had rented for Joe, Sam saw them side by side there both in sport jackets as he drove to work, that apartment just a block from the club. Fuck Don. Images of coming home and finding them in the living room going through Sam’s CDs. Fuck them both.

Don promoted Joe everywhere. He booked a show for Joe in The Pub, booked studio time for Joe to record his album, drove Joe to a gig in New York. Images Sam had seen and some he could only imagine.

Images of the eggs in their refrigerator Don brought home from Joe’s family’s farm and said were the best eggs he’d ever eaten that Sam then wouldn’t touch.

The image in the late fall of finding the love song Joe wrote for Don on folded white paper on Don’s nightstand by their bed.

Don and Sam were always supposed to be together.

It ripped out his heart.

It wasn’t what he thought they were, what he thought they had.

There was no escape from what had been and what was now.

Like a movie you’ve misunderstood completely due to incorrect subtitles, and then a sudden shocking but correct translation making all the images tell a different story, a horrific story.

Who was he before Don? There had been a strength, but it was so long ago. A memory. He had relaxed that strength into Don, he had become Don, he thought they were one.

He wanted to meet a guy, or maybe he didn’t, and maybe that could never happen again anyway.

one/eight

Sam was afraid of the night. He couldn’t work. Each night he tried, but he couldn’t. He gave up on the couch with Duke and watched more horror movies.

He was lost, hopeless.

The pain was overwhelming. It was terrifying to be this lost.

He had The Roadhouse, just enough money, and he had time. He was pathetic.

Sometimes at night he had Clay.

Clay was a gorgeous High Renaissance portrait of an angel.

Sam felt an instant bond with him, but it wasn’t physical, at first.

He hadn’t looked like an angel at first.

It wasn’t like the way Don had fallen into Joe, at first.

He took Duke to Euclid Beach at sunset and they walked by the lake.

When they left the house he always felt he could be excited enough to work when they returned. And he would try. But no images came and no ideas and he sat in the studio and stared until he gave up for the horror films.

one/seven

I can’t get over being angry at you and I won’t. I understand why you left, I understand why you couldn’t be with me anymore. But that doesn’t matter. I’m still so very angry with you.

I’m having a really hard time forgiving myself, too.

But a twenty-one-year-old heroin addict did not sweep me off my feet, and become everything I wanted, so eventually I may be able to forgive myself.

The loss of everything loops in my head and never makes sense.

I really loved you, I thought you loved me, too. I can’t understand how you could stop loving me after sixteen close years. But since you did what you did, so recklessly, carelessly, I can’t love you again. The contradiction is a curse you cast on me.

You did agree with me immediately, vehemently, when I said it’s like some kind of voodoo between you and that kid.

Maybe you wanted to never worry about me again.

I’m an all or nothing guy. You think that’s a bad thing, bad to be black or white about things in a gray world.

I thought you wanted to spend time in your studio.

I was wrong, and you told me. I’m not like you, you said. I can’t spend that much time in my studio.

You repressed everything, I bared myself to you like a raw nerve in the wind.

Shallow, lying prick.

I still want to blow both your fucking heads off.

one/six

He won’t serve someone if they’re on their phone.

Sam gets lost in the hot guys’ eyes while they order, but then they say, “and for my wife…” or “for the little lady…” who is usually not with them, but waiting at the stage or at their seats for the band to start.

Sometimes the hot guy’s girlfriend is standing right there beside him. She can’t decide what to order and she needs her boyfriend and Sam to pay attention to her as she deliberates. Sam has to get the hot guy’s drink first, then the girlfriend is finally ready, and, surprise, she wants the same beer the guy got.

Each day scared him. Could he survive. He was old. He could end up on the street.

He decided he was playing the role of a bartender in an important play. He had to show up.

No one was responsible for him now and he felt unmoored and adrift.

He served hot guys.

This was to exist.

He flirted with the guys and made more tips. If he was high enough he’d rub their bearded cheeks. “Just let me touch your beautiful face,” he’d say.

Could he be close with a guy again.

He didn’t know what he needed.

He drew his fingers down the skin of the faces beneath their beards.

He only touched guys with short trimmed beards, or no beards.

Telephones had been party lines. Not sex party lines like in the back pages of The Scene, but shared telephone lines.

Now they were high tech walkie-talkie toys and everyone constantly played with their devices.

Creepy widowed Mrs. Rogers lived a few streets down, in a ravine, a gully, a tangled mass of gnarled trees.

Each time he or his mom or dad picked up the receiver she was talking on the line.

His mom would slam it down.

His dad would just try later.

Sam listened.

Gossip with her withering friends, talk of their yards and cats. Haunted static. The Twilight Zone.

There are bars on the cells to indicate range, and being in a no reception zone has become a trope in horror films.

one/five

He’d stay up late watching scary stuff with his mom while they waited for his dad. Three channels and UHF because they had the antenna on the roof and the rabbit ears inside.

His dad worked second shift setting lead type for the Akron newspaper fifteen miles away.

She had let him stay up late with her and watch the Thriller episode “The Premature Burial,” which scared him and made him claustrophobic for life.

It was Sam’s first memory of being scared.

He can’t watch a horror film with anyone in a sealed box beneath the ground.

He doesn’t like horror/comedy.

Or if they kill a dog he stops the DVD.

Look now. You pay cable providers to watch corporations sell you life.

Back then it seemed innocent, the way things worked. Now it was insidious.

He would be in blankets on the floor with his feet by the forced air register.

His dad would hang a utility lamp under the car hood to ensure the engine didn’t freeze and he could make the fifteen mile drive.

Don had taken all of Sam’s ambition.

Sam took half a Valium.

one/four

Two decades later now, he understood the Rip Van Winkle tale. He was suddenly old. He had been asleep with Don in the dream of love we’re promised.

Everyone at The Roadhouse was half his age, or at least twenty years younger.

Clay was twenty-five now.

He’d been twenty-one just like Joe when it happened.

Now he was the soundman and a bartender in The Pub.

The Roadhouse had two venues in an old Croatian Hall, The Pub, and the larger Stateroom, an old ballroom for dancing. The Pub held just over a hundred people, The Stateroom around five-fifty.

Local artists and lesser known touring bands played The Pub. National and international acts played The Stateroom.

Most nights there was a show in each room.

There was no danger or rebellion anymore. The new music was clichéd, could be categorized easily and dismissed.

Anymore was the saddest word to Sam.

It was a business. The sponsor, the new album, the merch.

He’d seen music dissipate among the masses and fall to the lowest common denominator.

He hated what everything had become.

The band guys had beards, wild and dirty Civil War-style beards.

Sam hated beards.

He wanted to see the guy’s face.

They had man buns and dreadlocks. They spun hula hoops and glow sticks. They spun yo-yos.

DJs spun EDM records and Sam couldn’t tell one song from another, where one ended and was segued into another.

New music was vapid.

Everybody had a band, and their girlfriend was in it.

But he loved the people he worked with, and that hadn’t happened at a job, and probably wouldn’t again.

Bartending was cash each night which had spoiled him.

He’d never been able to make it from paycheck to paycheck.

But somehow he was still around, in a brand new world, a perversion of what had been.

one/three

Duke’s profile makes Sam think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson inside 221B Baker Street by a crackling fire, with the violin and the newspaper and the solution.

He can also be seen as a hillbilly dog, a bit like the bloodhound the Clampetts have, but smaller, and tri-colored.

People passing them at Euclid Beach look at Duke and sing, “You ain’t nothin but a hound dog.” (Sometimes they continue by still singing, “Cryin all the time.”)

Kids love Duke because he looks like Underdog, and many cartoon dogs. He is a model for cartoon dogs: short, nonthreatening, cute, cuddly, exaggerated long body, long floppy ears, elongated nose, baleful, sad, drooping eyes, circled with natural black rings, like eyeliner, making the sad brown eyes sadder.

Kids surround Duke in the park to pet him and he rolls over and they rub his long white belly.

Sam thinks Duke loves kids because they’re short, close to the ground, like he is.

It’s not because Sam loves kids.

Sam and Don rescued Duke as a puppy a few years before the breakup.

In the first Recovery House the walks around the neighborhood were sad. He and Don had walked the dogs together.

But Don always complained.

Still, remembering the complaining seemed preferable to the clanging hammers in his head – Don/Joe\Don/Joe\Don – how long could this continue?

Whatever had made him think he and Don would always be together.

How did anyone get through this.

Did it never end.

He had dogs all his life, but Duke was the sweetest.

Duke was calm.

Sam couldn’t handle a needy dog now.

Russell called him a stoner dog.

Through junior high, Sam’s parents would drive him to JC Pennys and buy him new Hush Puppie loafers. The logo inside the shoes and on the boxes had made him always want a Basset Hound.

And maybe the cartoon dogs did too.

They’d always had dogs, not like Don’s family who was all allergic.