Those Without Names in the City at Night - 1. Story

Those Without Names in the City at Night

by lesfeuxdemoncoeur

First mistake: using Google to hunt for porn.

Well. Actually. That was the first recent mistake, the short of it, if you will. The long of it would include not castrating or killing myself upon the discovery of my homosexuality, which happened on a Sunday when I was twelve. I remember it was a Sunday because I was in church when it happened. I remember I was in a church when it happened because sporting an erection within fifteen feet of a particularly threatening portrayal of Jesus on the cross sure felt dangerous, and left an indelible impression on my developing, Catholic-bred mind.

So. My first recent mistake, at the age of eighteen when left to my own devices on one of the first summer days following my high school graduation, was to succumb to my hormones and utilize cyberspace to gratify myself. This was a rare pleasure at the time. I was out to no one. I was hardly out to myself. As such, I was particularly wary of being found out. It was an eventuality I had come to terms with, in that I knew one day my friends and family would have to know that I would do more with the men I spent so much time with than play golf and talk about sports. These men and I would decorate. We would hold hands. We would watch sunsets. We would get naked and scissor each other's heads in our thighs and slop all over each other's dicks until we ejaculated, and then we would smear it all over the walls like savage kindergarten children.

Ahoy! I have digressed.

But I knew, I knew that I would have to tell them I was gay, one day. I knew it the same way small children perceive that they will one day own a house of their own. It's a vague, distant idea. Like marriage. Like retirement. Like dying. Like all those things that happen to other people. But I knew. I knew I would say, "I'm gay," and they would hear, "I like other men but we can't have conventional sex so we lube up our penises and do things to the impolite ends of each other's digestive tracts." I know this because I know how, when I find out a woman is expecting, she says, "I'm pregnant," but I hear, "My hairy and overweight husband who tells those jokes that make me smile apologetically to everyone nearby grunted on me for ten minutes a fortnight past, and my cooter hasn't bled since!"

Ahoy! I'm off topic again!

So. Pornography was a rare treat in which I indulged myself only when I was certain that I would not be intruded upon. Getting caught looking at naughty things is one thing. It is punishable, but it falls under normal. Getting caught looking at naughty homosexual things is another. It is punishable, not only by grounding, but, if one is of a certain mindset, by eternal damnation. Oh yes! Brimstone for all. So. It was with utmost caution that I typed into the search engine, "gay porn college boys."

What luck did I have! Until then I thought that ninety-nine percent of homosexual boys my age were, like myself, in hiding. I thought we lived among the heterosexuals, those who could manage our mannerisms well enough, and those of us who could not were destined to a life of staring, finger pointing, and occasional almost-hate crimes (legislation pending.) But for the sheer number of eighteen to twenty-one-year-old boys to participate in the volumes of pornography my search yielded, I reasoned that there had to be a young gay male on my block somewhere, next door, probably. And they were attractive, these porn stars, porn models, porn actors, whatever the politically correct term might be. Porn artists. Perhaps the correct term does not contain "porn" at all. Third-person sensualists. Pleasure exhibitionists.

Ahoy! Impertinence plagues my conscience!

In any event, in that computer chair, scrolling through endless pictures of attractive, well-endowed young men, I resolved to out myself. All of those boys in those movies, they were waiting for me! I needed only to market myself, to wear my label, to embrace refracted light as my symbol, and the boys would come streaming in with their healthy organs and creative uses of bed, floor, wall, and sink spaces. Naturally, I didn't want an actual porn star (or Vaudevillian of intercourse, Ahoy!) for my boyfriend. But I reasoned that if there were so many attractive boys willing to let loose for these pictures and movies, then there must be an exponentially greater population of boys who are more shy, though just as attractive, and know how to cook, have ambitions involving four or maybe even six or seven-year degrees, and can work out that kink I get in my back with massage oils and softly-spoken words. I needed only to come out, to announce my participation in this community.

Second mistake: coming out to my mother.

Oh yes. Hell hath no fury like my mother gesturing toward a chair at the kitchen table and saying, through clenched teeth, "Sit your ass down."

I sat my ass down.

"Repeat what you just said," she said.

I said, "I said, 'I'm gay.'"

A silence followed during which the dishwasher began its rinse cycle.

I stared at my mother's unmoving face. I thought I perceived a faint tremor above her lip. I also thought at that point that I would be able to hold my breath until the end of my life, which was doubtlessly imminent, hanging menacingly over my head like an old light fixture above a kitchen table. When she didn't kill me after a number of seconds, I looked up at the ceiling, hanging from which was an old light fixture. It hung menacingly over the kitchen table. What uncreative metaphors I make!

Ahoy!

"Your father and I suspected as much," she said.

"Oh," I said. I was surprised. I had always thought I came off quite normal. In fact, I was almost certain I did.

"We decided that if our suspicions came true, we would give you two options," she said.

I waited for the options.

"Get counseling," she said, "or move out."

Third mistake: moving out.

I did not voice a response to her ultimatum. I went upstairs to my room, grabbed a suitcase, filled it with clothing and the thirty-nine dollars I had earned thus far that summer, and walked out the front door. And tripped over that damned lip where the floor meets the doorway. Until I tripped I had planned to slam the door. I closed it lightly.

A certain quick-thinking numbness pervaded my consciousness. Realizations that my plans to attend college with their support: car insurance, health insurance, a home away from school, an allowance, care packages - these plans were ruined, submerged in words and hundreds of pictures of pretty boys I would never meet. I had last seen my relatives at Easter. I would not see them again. I would lose at least a few of my friends. My cell phone was in the house. I could not go back in for it. I had no way of contacting them. I would not impose myself upon them, for certainly my mother would be making calls to the parents of my friends she knew, and she would be telling them about my decision, my rebellion.

I walked to the outskirts of the City. I walked until the sun obscured itself by passing below the skyscrapers and lesser buildings in the distance. I walked through darkness into a City beaming with its own light. At length, I grew tired and stuck out a thumb. At some point I had begun to cry, and when I stuck out my thumb, I felt that it was not my appearance, but the fact that an eruption of emotion, refusing to contain itself within the bounds of my being, that brought a forty-something woman to the curb with an open passenger door in less than three minutes. I dragged myself toward the door and bent down so she could see me. I expected her to ask if I needed a lift. She said nothing until I got in the car and sat down.

"Any place in particular?" she asked.

"Just into the City," I said. My condition seemed to speak for itself.

I stared out the window at the sprawl of moving and static lights that made up the City, surrounded by that electric glow of light pollution, sometimes blue, sometimes orange, purple when it snows. I took in the field of buildings below when we passed high on a bridge - factories, warehouses, and garages. I imagined getting out of the car and pitching a glass marble into the night above and beside the bridge, and seeing it catch and refract light, making it its own, before losing that light and continuing on its arc through the air, finally landing with a metallic popping sound on one of the rooves below, then bouncing and creating increasingly stacatto noises into it worked itself into something of a trill, and eventually terminating in a less flattering rolling sound before the final fall to the earth below.

Ahoy! This is no time for poetry!

We entered the City in silence, if there is such a thing in an automobile in the center of a metropolis. I cleared my throat and thanked her and got out of the car at an intersection. At that point I had formulated a plan. To carry out this plan, I began walking. I looked for street corners, of which I found many. I looked for a particular kind of street corner, of which I found not so many.

But I found what I was looking for eventually. I found four lisping men, one wearing lipstick and fishnets, milling about under a street light. I held my suitcase to my chest and approached them. I cleared my throat again.

Mistake four: selling myself out as a prostitute.

One of them, the most muscular of them, a man's man of a gay man, set his jaw and started walking at me.

"Hold on, honey," the one with fishnets and lipstick said and waved him away with a flopping wrist. The other two tittered to themselves.

"Do you know what you're doing here?" the lipstick said.

I nodded.

He cackled. "Oh, do you now?" he said.

"I want to be like one of you," I said, feeling outside of my body as I never had before.

"Like one of us?" he said, "Like one of us? Or one of us?"

"What's the difference?" I asked, and felt the wetness dripping down from behind my unlearned ears.

"If I'm reading you correctly," he said, "You're already like us."

"I know that. I mean I want to do what you do."

"And what is that?"

"Sell myself."

The four of them laughed.

"You'll sell yourself no matter what," lipstick said. "It's the future of any gay man."

"Not necessarily..." And I didn't bother finishing because I felt a rebuttal coming on.

"Oh? You have yourself imagined as settling down with one, perfect, fulfilling man for the rest of your life? Is that what you see? You're young. You haven't hit twenty yet. But you have some realizations coming your way, and they'll come soon. You'll think about the essence of a gay, if I am so self-aggrandizing as to use such a heavy word to describe... this, us. In relationships where two men, their desires repressed usually for nearly a decade before they get to act them out, finally get to have at each other, what option is there, other than selling out? A pretty face comes along, his personality matters little. What matters is that sloppy thing in your pants that's been waiting so long now," he flourished his hand here, "to get out and do its thing."

"Umm..." I said.

"What? 'Um' what?"

"I don't know if that's really... there's a lot wrong with that."

"I'm sure there is. If you don't sell out for sex though, it'll be something else. You'll play the intellectual gay boy with all the right advice to your little girly friends and they'll be so thankful for you," he shrugged dramatically here, "until they get married and have less and less time for you and can handle their problems on their own."

"Whatever. I just want to make some money."

"You want to be one of us? Not just like us?"

"Sure."

"Well go down the street then. There's a group of boys your age there."

I nodded and left. Walking in the direction he pointed, I thought about what I thought I was doing. I told myself I could do it. Bend over or lie on my back with my legs in the air while someone did this and that to me. I could do it. I had put fingers up there before. I had even managed to get a particularly phallic bottle of facewash up there before, and I handled it just fine.

Ahoy! My solitary explorations!

I saw three boys sitting in front of an alleyway in the middle of the night in the middle of the City. I walked toward them at first as if I were just going to pass by. When I felt that they were all looking at me, I hesitated.

"Can we help you?" the smallest of them said. He had the look of those little tough guys in movies. Compensating short stature with a nearly violent eagerness.

"Some... men down the street said I should come to you guys," I said with not even the radioactive remains of self-assertion.

They laughed.

The most attractive of them, (and I wondered if he considered doing movies instead of being on the street), asked, "Have you ever been a whore before?"

The other two looked as if they were about to laugh again, but because the pretty boy kept a very serious face, they did not.

I shook my head.

Good," pretty boy said, "then you can take the next customer. We're sore, all of us."

I swallowed and nodded. I began to shake.

"What do I do until then?" I asked.

"Just wait," he said, and then to scare me a little, "One'll come soon enough."

And when one came soon enough, I think pretty boy was a little surprised. And boy did I nearly evacuate my bladder on the spot.

"All right. He looks rich. Ask him for sixty, no, sixty-five. Don't get fuckin' corny and ask for sixty-nine. Go!" pretty boy said at me, all too fast and all too real.

I didn't move.

"Jesus Christ, kid. Do you even have lube?" he said.

"No."

"A rubber?"

"No."

"This is the last time I'm doing this for you," he said, and handed me a rubber and a bottle of lube. "That whole fucking suitcase and you don't have a rubber? My God."

Ahoy! Sexual Apparatuses! Apparati?

Ahoy! Difficult plurals!

Mistake five: putting out as a prostitute.

I approached the customer. He had all grey hair, was more than modestly obese, and smelled, from a distance of several feet, like cigars.

The short boy came up behind me and took my suitcase from me. "This isn't part of the act," he said. I was certain they were going to steal my things.

"Hi," I said to the man.

"You new?" he asked.

I nodded and started a long staring contest with the sidewalk.

"I can tell. How much?" he demanded. He already sounded impatient.

"Sixty," I said, cheating myself out of the extra five pretty boy said I would be able to get.

He gave me thirty and I gave him a dumb look.

"Half now, half later," he said. He was smiling condescendingly, giving up impatience to the idea of fucking something this naive, this innocent, myself.

He started walking toward the alley where the three boys were, and I followed, dumb dog that I was. I stepped into the darkness of the alley, two buildings acting in collusion to create the shadows from which I would not escape intact, with all that was mine. He walked me all the way to the back of the alley. I looked behind myself at the boys, craning their necks in my direction. I could tell by the way they were moving their heads back and forth and up and down that they could not see me, or at least not see me well.

He then put his hands up my shirt and walked me against one of the brick walls. I had never appreciated, until then, the softness and moisture of my own hands with which I had always touched myself so thanklessly. This man's hands were so dry, like the stitching on the underside of carpet, and I felt like he was making a thousand infintesimal scratches on my chest and stomach as he made his passes. He was a man who bought eighteen-year-old boys because his hands were insufficient to satisfy himself.

He unbuttoned my pants, panting all over my face and neck, and shoved his sandpaper hand in my underwear and groped around, and I hardened in spite of myself. After a while, he undid his belt and pulled down his pants. In the darkness, in the shadows between the two buildings, I could still see the immensity of the invasion which he planned to put inside me. When I hesitated, he grabbed my bangs and pulled my face toward it, and did not let go until I had put the head in my mouth.

There was a smell. The smell of a fifty-year-old man, aged early, overweight, out of shape, and his most stifled organ, festering in cotton for what must've been at least sixteen hours since he showered that morning. The fetid smell of stagnation and, in my imagination, the remnants of every other boy whose skin his had breeched. He had probably done everything conceivable with the three boys outside the alley. I began to imagine them, as I made myself move my mouth on him, how they handled him, what mental feats they accomplished each time they made it through a session with him without breaking. I thought about pretty boy and the little tough guy, and the one that did not speak. I wondered if they messed around with each other, or if, like all enjoyable things that become a means for living, the sex had become a chore, the pleasure ineluctably torn from the act.

A chore. Taking out the garbage. Taking in garbage.

The man began to flex his feet, and then he told me to get up. He quickly pulled my pants down and made me face the wall, and I concentrated very hard on what details I could make out or even imagine on that wall. He fumbled with the rubber, and then the lube, and then me, and so went my night, biting off screams in the shadows of two buildings while three boys strained their eyes at struggling figures and their exchange in the dark.

Mistake six: failing to die.

Ahoy! Was life ever more upsetting?

I woke up shivering in the alley with the three boys huddled around me, all feigning indifference. When I was ostensibly awake, the one that had hitherto not spoken said, "This is not your life."

I nodded and ignored the fact that he had probably spent at least ten minutes coming up with that line. I had started crying before the man had finished with me. I had sobbed and quivered beneath him like every creature not deserving of life or consideration. The boys had to watch my while I rocked myself to sleep, muttering to some imagined, caring parent in the air above the alley.

I left the alley.

Mistake seven: feeling charitable.

Because my life as a prostitute was over, I forfeited my earnings to the three boys before I left. I would not need it where I was going. I still had thirty-nine dollars of my own, provided they didn't steal it from my suitcase, which, after I checked sometime later, they had indeed stolen.

Ahoy! Those bastards!

Had I been more presciant, I would've kept the money and used it to buy myself breakfast, and then a cab back home. Instead, my suitcase and I wheeled our way, over many hours and an unknowable number of miles, back home, back to that doorstep to the house with the computer where I made my original mistake.

Ahoy! Biblical reference!

From Hell to the Time of Waiting.

I had committed my seven foolish mistakes, and they, along with mental images of that lipstick-wearing, sooth-saying faggot on the street corner, scrambled about my mind as I stood, dumb, at the threshold of the door I had tripped out of approximately twenty-four hours earlier.

I knocked. Hit hit hit. It was a struggle not to do that friendly, rhythmic knock people do. (You can't force Willy to or he... won't go!) Like that.

I waited and thought about the past night: came out, moved out, sold out, put out.

My mother answered, and in the background I saw my father, home from work, apparently, on grounds of my having left, bathed in the sick blue light of the television, and his face screwed up like a bad smell had drifted into the room. He did not look at me. My mother, however, glared at me, and I fretted she might strain a cornea. Traces of concern and spite rippled under her eyes, and she could not have known to hide them.

"Are you done with whatever life you thought you were going to lead?" she asked.

In that instant, standing on the threshold, I envisioned my future. I would undergo counseling during the summer to maintain my right of their protection, and I would work fifty hours a week at a restaurant where I would charm the customers into extravagant tips. I would go to school in the fall and meet a handsome, intellectual young man with a passion for early twentieth century British literature and deconstructionalism, as well as fine tastes in theater and exotic foods. We would move in together and devote our time to school, work, a network of admiring friends, and each other. I would acknowledge my family only two times in the future, when each of my parents passed away. I would cultivate my own Paradise, lying in my man's arms nightly after pleasing him to the extent that my soft skin, my soft words, would allow.

Ahoy! What great plans!

But for that moment, standing at the threshold: "Yes, I am done with that life."