Middle Men

Mando and I go back for a good grip of years. Both of us coming from the Las Palmas Courts, the cinder-block labyrinth of public housing units dotting San Antonio’s deep Westside. I grew up with the vato. We kicked it back in the day, good friends, camaradas, and when his moms jammed and his older brother died, he came to stay with us for a week until my moms had enough of us and asked us both to leave. That was fine. Shit works out like that in life sometimes. I went to stay with my tia on the Southside near the ghost tracks; Mando ended up with our homeboy Ralph and then with some chick who slang piedra from the Eastside. After that, I don’t know what happened to him.

He wrote my moms eventually, years after we’d gone our ways. A short letter, quick as footsteps. He’d been incarcerated for a few years, he explained, and was getting out and hoped to make contact with me. I’d changed by then. Grown out of the tonterias and bullshit. I was holding my own.

This was true. He’d changed, too. Life has that way of thickening us up, adding meat to our bones, lines to our cheeks and foreheads. On a Friday he showed up with a backpack and two sleeves full of tattoos, a deep wound like a rail track over the ditch of his neck bone. It was difficult not to stare. I figured later he’d tell me the story. I picked him up at the bus station, the city fuming around us, the sun hard as nails in the downtown skyline.

“All about change,” he smirked, a wry smile, half gleeful, semi-sly. Flesh had built on him over the years, hard cuts like welts in his neck and forearms, rippling down to wrists that had grown wider, too. His arms had grayed; I made out the letters strewn over the brown of his knuckles; I stared at a watchtower and a marvelous gray peacock, the plumes pulled up toward his elbow, showy and proud. Under the heaviness of the sun, his scalp stirred, slick, stubble coming up like dark pins. Exhaust huffed from tailpipes, and a Tejano jam eased out of my speakers. Too many years erected themselves between us. We just listened to jams, traffic knotted around us like fists.

“Everybody changes. Simón,” he said, nodding, which was Mexican Spanish for “yes,” and his hand fell on my thigh like a bird maybe or a hammer, that’s more like it. Heavy enough to run electric cords up my spine. He held it there a minute and rubbed at my thigh until my dick grew hard and noticeable in my shorts.

When we were youngsters, I never had the balls to admit what I liked. If I had, I would have understood why I both loved and hated this vato. In eighth grade we fought. Hard chingazos. In three swift hits, he busted my nose that day, ripped the skin off my lip, blood flowing freely, riot-like. I kicked him in the mouth once he’d fallen after my homeboy Sergio clocked him in the side of the head, right in the ear, and he swore, later, that he’d seen God, then, rising over the horizon of clouds, and that one of his teeth had loosened. My nose gushed—blood crept into my new shoes and dried there, and I kept the shirt, a souvenir or some senseless shit, in a box under my bed for some time: red, marked up with parts of my face, parts of Mando’s knuckle and jaw kept in the fabric, too. We fought because he supposedly had moved his mouth about my moms being a hoe and about me being a joto, and though I never believed he really talked all that shit, I boxed him nonetheless. An entire schoolyard of loudmouths urging you on has that effect.

In high school, before he dropped out, we partied, and homeboy made it known he was packing a fat dick. Showed it off. Whipped it out, even, whenever he could at parties or in the back of a slow-cruising ride. The large head glistening once he’d pulled back his skin and spit on it, stroked it a bit, just enough to make it throb. He loved the attention. Girls liked him. And I hated him for this. I wasn’t shy, but I was quiet, and a part of me always wanted to know what was happening with Mando, who he was with, why he wasn’t coming to school anymore. When I was horny, I used to think of his big-ass dick, imagining it next to mine, throbbing and with fat dabs of precum drooling off his large dickhead and onto mine. I jacked off with images of my dick opening up his mouth or his cockhead pushing inside my hands or along my jaw. Easily, I busted ten hundred thousand nuts fantasizing about this homeboy called Mando and his fat-ass project dick.

In my truck, the city groans, and Mando has my dick in his throat. I tell him I’m with somebody now, but that’s cool, he don’t give a fuck, he says, and keeps sucking me. He goes patiently at first, running his tongue along the fat vein I got on the side of my shaft, and it quivers, I think, as the homeboy I haven’t seen in years twists his lips over my cock, repeating this enough for my neck to pinch up and my eyes to shut themselves. His lips keep dragging over my shaft, and it’s the sound that flickers inside me: the slobber, the fucking his face, the sweat collecting at the base of my back, his stifled breathing, the suckling. I nut once in the very back of his throat, and the vato eats my cum, and when we get home my lover smiles enthusiastically when they meet.

“You have a good trip?” Ray asks. He’s gripping Mando, his chest glowing over him like a hard hand, and his mouth grins, his eyes and his chin as open as the skyline. At the sink, I’m washing off, and together, they’re like us; together, Ray and my oldest homeboy appear to click. It’s a moment that stuns me, my lover holding Mando long enough for the both of them to erupt in laughter, an uncomfortable boldness unfolding itself, and Ray looking him over like a prize he’s come upon or a newfound tool.

He’s nodding and he’s smirking and he’s right. Seeing the two of them strikes the eye. At six foot and some change, Ray has a good foot on him, but they’re both strong, a tangle of triceps and traps. The way their bodies fit—one into the other, a socket joint or something fitting and right about their size—enthralls me.

“Damn, Pa. Y’all look fucking good together,” I say, reaching for my camera. I could stare at this shit for hours, though they both shy away. My lover, with his thick-ass arms, his clean-cut fade, his Big Red breath, his chest stout as two fists that hints about what he can do, can’t stop grinning. It’s jokerish what he does with his face, his grip denting Mando’s biceps, squeezing the muscle meat-belly. It’s obvious when his eyes go over Mando like palms or a tongue, and they stick, for a good moment, gripping the place where my homeboy’s neck parted once and skin grew over in a smooth heap of cells, off-color striations.

“You know he used to be a cop,” I add, then, and Mando laughs, and Ray laughs, too, and this is gonna be hella good, I think with a bulge growing up in my shorts. I watch Ray’s hand, a vise, veiny, thick knuckled, resting on my homeboy’s shoulder. Knuckles near the swollen skin mound, and I wonder if he’ll touch it. Mando’s eyes take in Ray’s size. This was us, I think, the thought halting itself before it sets in, lays root, accelerates.

By the pit, an old-school iron one my tio gave us when he, too, went to the pen, we eat and drink some and swap stories that hang in the air stiffly. August has its way with us; the beer sours our breath, and the heat moves in on us like enemies. Shirtless, Ray moves across the yard with five steps, dark patches forming atop his heart, the band of his shorts and the small of his back growing dark, too. He hasn’t shaven, and I’ve always gotten hard about him like this. The heat and the food loosen him up—he laughs rowdily, spit flying, offers Mando our spare room, and agrees to help him land a job here. “I know people,” Ray acknowledges proudly. Mesquite scents the air sweetly; whole logs disintegrate under the weight of the burn. Later, we laugh off the old days, our stupid-ass adventures, our errors, our small crimes. The dogs chew the uneaten gristle of steaks off our plates.

And when the night steals in on our talk, Mando retires to the back room. My lover and I shower, and in my mouth Ray’s dick feels wide, fist-like, stout. I tug on his cock with my throat as we take turns soaping our backs and pits and his trunkish thighs, which quiver when I press at them with both of my thumbs. In front of my face, his foreskin retracts, the blood gushing into him, and the fatness of his dick jumps; I can feel it in the pulse of my lungs. It’s new, though. Today, it feels new. He pumps his big cock into my face vigorously, and I say, “Not yet. Not yet.” But it’s too late. His knees buckle, and Ray has my tongue on his nuts; a heavy stream of white-boy cum streaks my nose and eyelids; it runs down my chin. “You like that daddy dick,” he whispers. “That big daddy dick.”

In bed, then, the television shooting off some “Law & Order” show, Ray reading a book about double-barrel shotguns and the untamable old West—Mando appears at our door. Above him, the transom feeds the hall, light shining over my homeboy’s skull, and he stands there for a whole moment, the light floating over and behind him, and he’s shirtless, his chest with its intricate maze of adelitas and the endless courage of head-dressed warriors, an hourglass, tallboy letters spelling where we come from pulled over the fur of his abdomen, a marvelous skyline of slim stout structures. Stray hairs jut over his waistband, waiting. It’s clear from the half-hard bulge in his shorts that he’s wanting to belong, to show us, to prove something, to join.

In a minute, homeboy has his shorts down at his ankles, and Ray’s wide hands grab at Mando’s thighs, which, dark and hairy, quake beneath what we do to him. Mando stands by the bed, and I’m behind him, my tongue shoved hard in between the crookedness of his teeth. We kiss his saliva minty and strict. My mouth sucking at the name on his neck, I run my hands over his ribs. They feel dented, stern. His nipples harden beneath my hands, the tufts of hair surrounding them, too. I’m reaching for his scar soon. It throbs, too, jabbing outward at the cool air, at my lip, at my small eye, the full flat stretch of it above his jugular, terribly near that fat perfect vein.

“For the reals, Papa,” my homeboy repeats, and his voice, all two-hundred pounds of it, glides over my chin and up to my eyelids. I stare at the last name sprawled over his shoulders, a wing-like appendage, black and gray and firme. “This is good. This is prime,” he says with his tongue on my teeth. He knuckles my dick and whispers difficult shit.

I want my tongue to pull over his scalp again and again, and for that hissing sound never to abandon me. I want him to ache in that good way and to grind back on my dickhead with his hole, to pull my hips into his bones and to ask for me, to call me by my old name and grunt when I’m entering him.

I want to see it: my cockhead leaning at his pinch; I want to watch his culo swallow me slowly, just the head first so that the tender part of him taunts me, and I want to watch each inch slide itself inside of him, each part of me stabbing at that tender piece. I want to feel his warmth consume the part of me that throbs for him: the first time feeling a vato’s warmth—I want that feeling to revive itself, to never end again, my hands gripping his thigh muscles, trying to fix him where he stands, and this is what I think when his voice flinches and he mouths, “Fuck me, pa. Gimme it. Put it in me, guey.”

Slurping and gagging from the girth, Ray’s working Mando’s dick with his mouth and a hand, and his heavy-ass sac slaps at my vato’s chin. I can smell Ray’s saliva, and with my palm, I rub at Mando’s nuts from behind, and when I drop to my knees and push my face between Mando’s asscheeks, he squeals and seems weak, and I inhale as far as I fucking can, enjoying this oddly enough, the vulnerability of an old homeboy turned criminal turned fuckbuddy parolee giving in to my tongue, and my lover’s stiff wide mouth running the underside, all green vein, of Mando’s pinto shaft. Lividly, I punch my tongue at his hole, and Mando, his spine undoing itself, bends over the bedside, his mouth falling easily over Ray’s firm cock. Massive, Ray’s hands grab at Mando’s neck; bark-like veins gnarl as he grips Mando’s scalp and rocks into him steadily, the stubble beneath Ray’s grasp.

It’s easier than I thought. Entering Mando, I imagine the hard sun and the truck that afternoon and my own dick, fat enough to stretch the walls of his throat, now hitting him deep inside, the soft grunts beginning to vacate his jaw.

Soon enough, we have Mando on his back. Ray pumps into his whole throat, makes the vato gag, and it’s rowdy what he does to my homeboy’s face. Slobber flies each time Ray pulls out of Mando’s mouth and shoves his dick far back inside his skull, far enough to see his dickhead bulge in the damaged skin of the vato’s throat.

Near my own chin, I savor the feel of my homeboy’s calves, my mouth biting at his leg meat and heels, the leg hairs poking at my jaw, my nose, my eyelids. When I pull his feet to my lips, his ankles separate, and I’m feeling his hole clench over the root of my cock. “Like that,” I tell him. “Fuck, Pa. Fuck, Daddy,” I repeat.

“You like that,” Ray says. “You like this.” And his hands tug at my homeboy’s thighs, spreading him wide, letting me move that much deeper inside, my dick stretching out his hole so my balls swell and pull up and I know I’m about to bust my nut far inside him. The mattress here squalls, Mando producing an aching tough grunt from deep inside his belly.

I’m huffing. Ray shoots first, a fat load over Mando’s temple and earlobe, and he feeds Mando from his fist like he’s fed me time and time again over the run of all these years. On Mando’s jaw the cum settles like it belongs, like a part of his skin has pushed itself outward and announced itself. It’s nice, the sound of Ray’s lungs uncoiling, the look of Mando’s eyes gazing up at Ray feeding him gobs of whiteness from his knuckle.

And now Mando’s jerking himself hard, and it’s down, the moment two vatos come at once, my own cock sliding firm inside the pocket of his hole, rumbling, jerking itself with his tenderness on me. I come hard, and from the feel of his hole clenching my cock, I know this is rare, that it’s been a while for him, that he’s mine. Ours, I should say.

The cum on his stomach covers the long gray letters someone over the years left there with a radio motor and a Bic pen, he tells us later, once our breathing has quelled; the cum sits there in a heavy spurt that reaches up over the vato’s ribs and his imperfect black rosary and the rapid pounding of his heart sac or muscle. Ray spells a word there with his forefinger and thumb while Mando, his chin slobbery and rich, tongues the tip of Ray’s fat daddy dick. And fast, instinctively, I put my mouth to the fleeting size of that word spinning atop his belly, some word; don’t know what word Ray has put there, but the word sitting over the gray block name. I want my mouth to go at it, and it does.