“Come look!”
My train was leaving from Grand Central Station in less than an hour. Back to Boston and the start of a miserable journey home. I anticipated that the long flight across the Atlantic would have to offer more excitement than what had avoided me during the previous two weeks. I thought about the buildup and the waste of money and the shrieks of envy from friends. I had nothing to take home and tell. Only a few scant photos of this tall building and that tall statue. And perhaps now a new Walkman that I had decided to buy.
At first I had convinced myself that this was the real and only reason for coming to New York. The shopping was great. It was cheap and I needed this latest boytoy contraption, out of necessity. I later accepted that I really wanted it out of sheer depression. How could this have happened to me? I had been in the city that never sleeps, had hardly slept, and still I hadn’t managed to get laid. Fucking drag queens, leather boys, hairy chests, and waxed legs in minis. I’m not saying these bodies aren’t needed in this world, but they just don’t do it for me. I’m more of a man-on-the-street kind of guy. Looking for the boy next door. Except the boys I want would never dream of living any fucking where near next door to me.
“He’s gonna do it!”
The shop boy who had been faking an interest in me, my job, my country—and all because of my expressed intention to purchase—was now ditching me to join a crowd that had gathered on the street outside. People were staring up at some obscure point in the sky. I thought it was one of those jokes. This was how New Yorkers got their kicks. They plot together and take the piss out of naïve and ignorant tourists. They offer us everything and then give us nothing. I checked for hidden cameras and was suddenly shocked to see that they weren’t all that well hidden. They weren’t fucking hidden at all. In the land of the free I saw that surveillance was everywhere. So I obediently joined in and looked up with the crowd. It took me a while to follow the line of the boy’s pointing finger before I could see it. But then I got it. One open window, and the tiniest speck of a man with his legs dangling down the outside of the Empire State Building. I heard the sound of fire engines racing toward us down 5th Avenue. My own despair disappeared while I joined the crowd in prayer that someone would get there in time to stop him or catch him or….
“Yep, he’s going.”
It occurred to me that my shop boy was no ordinary onlooker. Here was a poor, lonely man sitting on a windowsill on the verge of taking his own life. What desperation had driven him to it? How long had it been going through his mind? And all the boy could do was to nudge me and smile.
“Cool, hey?”
It was all a big joke to him. I found myself smiling back.
It was a warm day. The boy was wearing a sleeveless singlet so I managed to get a good glimpse of the dark patches of hair that jutted from the crevices of his armpits. I kept looking at them as he pointed out the speck in the sky to more and more people who joined us. He was about my height. Boys my height are a disappearing rarity in a world that seems to be stretching up higher and higher every day. Everything I had wanted in this city had proven to be way beyond my reach. I had decided that too many New Yorkers live with their heads in the clouds.
The man plummeted to earth with a splat.
“Well, that’s that, then!”
Perhaps for a boy from New York this was an everyday thing. For me it was one more hideous vacation memory to add to a long list of failures. I suddenly believed that the plane home would crash and I would finish my life lying on the bottom of the ocean. It would be the perfect ending to my miserable vacation. Perhaps it was all for the best. It would create a better story for the friends back home who could make up their own fantasies about the time of my life that I had. I wouldn’t have to ruin it by telling them the truth. I wouldn’t have to lie.
“So, you wanna come back inside and have a look at what I got?”
I was still staring at the spot where it had all started. I had watched every inch of that tiny speck as it had fallen. I had seen it splatter. I had a boner so big it was sickening.
“First time, hey?”
“To New York? No. I’ve been here once before.”
Perhaps that was it. I had done it all. There was nothing left in life for me to enjoy.
“No, I mean, the suicide watching.”
“Oh, yes.”
The boy smiled and showed me his bright white teeth surrounded by his dark brown skin. Italian perhaps. Maybe Spanish. I couldn’t tell. What did I care? This was the big melting pot of human culture.
“Makes you quite excited to watch it, hey?”
“Hey!”
He started showing me his range of Walkmans again but I don’t remember anything of what he said. I knew that he knew I had been excited by what I had witnessed. I could see the way he kept noticing the thick line of flesh that veered off toward my left thigh. He never fixed his eyes on it for long, but they kept coming back.
“Have you ever thought of doing it?”
It wasn’t the sort of question to ask a stranger. You don’t just come out with it and ask people if they have ever thought of ending it. It was out of place.
“Getting that close to death? Stroking the hand of God?” I asked in response. “Sure, I have.”
My thoughts were nothing to do with jumping from a skyscraper’s window. That’s not how I imagine death for me. I’d imagined it differently…like the placing of a pillow over my face with a firm hand on top, pressing down so hard that I can hardly breathe while a man jerks me to orgasm. Only at the last possible moment, only when the cum is right at the tip of my cock, only when I have less than a second of life left in me and I am crawling and clawing for breath to save myself from dying, only then is the pressure released, the pillow removed, the flow allowed to spring forth.
“Aaaaaagh!”
The boy grabbed hold of my throat with his bare hand and pulled me backward. He dragged me toward the back of the shop.
I could have tried to struggle. I did for a second but then he squeezed even more tightly on my Adam’s apple until I thought it would burst. Normally I hate it even when people try to lick me there. I even have a fear of shaving. I can’t stand putting a razor blade within an inch. The thought of someone biting into it or of my own hand slipping and cutting—it’s always been too much for me to handle. But I let him do it. I decided there and then that maybe it was time for me to get over my reliance on vanilla. If I were to survive this trip, I needed a real New York–style story to take home and tell. I had to face my fears.
Draining my breath, he forced my face to meet his stare and dived to explore my mouth with the roughness of his tongue. The harsh stubble of his face ripped my softer skin. It would be sore for days. I could already feel the dead layers of skin flaking off. People would think I was just one more white boy caught out by the sun. Another tourist with no brains. He kicked my legs open and forced my head down. My friends would see it all differently. They would admire the scars, and then me. I had been to the place everyone spoke of and I had been more than just another passing face in the crowd. In a city that promises so much, I had been its center. I had lived it. I wasn’t like the hundreds of faces that stampeded up and down the street outside, staring in through the large glass windows and walking on, oblivious to the sight of me on all fours. My head had been pulled back so far that all I could see was the ceiling. I could see cracks forming in the paintwork. I could feel his huge brown cock ramming its full force up my hot, steaming arse.
The roots of my hair screamed out as he wrenched on a tuft at the front that I had gelled so neatly into place that morning. He yanked my head back further as he slammed away from behind.
“Wanna die today, motherfucker?”
I thought of responding and asking if he could possibly give me more pleasure to accompany my death, but I found that I just couldn’t speak.
“Can you picture him falling? Did you get off on that? Falling all the way down, head first and twisting, smacking off the side of the building as he goes, can’t be long now until he’s on the ground, with a splat, dead, fucked, smashed, smashed to fucking shit, brains all over the place, oh fuck, oh jesus fuck….”
I listened to the silence. I waited until I heard him come with a huge gasp of air as if he’d been holding back for breath, and then I realized that I too needed to breathe. My eyes were ready to pop. My face was burning red. This boy had fucked me to the brink of insanity. He’d taken me and himself one step closer to that ecstasy of death. And when he finally agreed to remove his hand from my mouth, just before it went too far, I let out a gasping scream and collapsed onto the cold tiled floor. The Walkman I had been clutching fell from my hand. It slid through the open door and out onto the street where it was instantly crushed underfoot. Cool air rushed up inside my arse.
I paid for the Walkman and left. Outside, standing on tiny scraps of plastic, I looked up at the colossal height of the Empire State Building. I thought about taking one more trip to the top. An elevator ride to the tourist observatory desk on the 86th floor. Maybe there I would find an open window. I checked my watch. My train was leaving in fifteen minutes.