1

I put my number inside The Golden Spur, the book he was buying, along with his receipt, hoping he’d call me. There were real bookstores in the city, ones that didn’t fill their shelves with toys and candy, games and puzzles, ones not necessarily fun for the whole family. I was working in one of them. I’d picked him out, when he walked in. The boss didn’t want us reading while on the clock, and so I’d watch the boys like him and men when they’d come in, waiting for someone to respond. I was hoping he’d come back to look for me. You could tell by the way that some of them looked, the way some of them would look at me, that we were alike.

Nobody met anyone’s eyes where I was from originally, like everyone was afraid of everyone else, wanting what the other might not want. All shades over the windows kept pulled down, curtains kept closed, that’s how they lived there. No one who had any idea of what it was like would wonder what had brought me here. There weren’t a whole lot of options, and if any man had kissed me in his car, had taken a chance, putting his hand on my knee, asked me in; if any guy had showed me how he wanted me in that way, I would try my hardest to hold on to him.

He’ll come back to the bookstore, in Brooklyn, Park Slope, and I’ll watch him lock up his bike outside. Here you could go out for drinks and then home to his place, go to bed together, that very night. Something like love, that could make you stay anywhere.

Mostly, we’d go to his place, not mine.

Like me, he’d come from down South.

He’d be the third from that first year in the city, after the first boy who thought I liked sex too much, also not from the city; and the next, who’d like it when I came over to his place in Brooklyn Heights, sweaty, after having run around all day, already having been with somebody else, who liked it, he said, when I smelled all gamey. That’s what he called it. This new one, some nights he’ll fall asleep with just me stroking his hair.

One twin bed barely fit into the small room that was mine, on the top floor of a building converted into as many rentable spaces as possible, right across the street from the Wyckoff Projects, above the noisy, twenty-four-hour deli. I wasn’t going to let myself grow up to be like them, men I’d known back home, the streets all crowded with their cars, though there was little else there.

It’s just men who were connected through their talk of women, women’s bodies, sports, yard work; close to each other only if they’d gone to the same high school; happy, content, or trying to be, with the boat for the lake, freezers full of deer meat, new cars, and houses or trailers to one day own.

We won’t live in Chelsea, but we go there sometimes to housesit for one of his friends. The boy from the bookstore, it seems, likes making love in other people’s beds, more than when we are just at his or my place.

We’ll be up in a loft, early in the morning, trying not to make much noise, to be as quiet as possible; this turns him on, while his two friends sleep downstairs. Or we’ll be in another bed in an apartment in Clinton Hill, trying to make sure, consciously, or unconsciously, that when we come, finally, we come on each other’s stomachs, pressing against each other as tightly, as flat as possible, not coming all over whoever’s bed.

He’s friends with a librarian, whose sad, neurotic cat we tend to, who can’t really be left alone, can’t stand it. Thirteen, we are told he is, that’s an old man for a cat. He needs more care than that.

When he retires, the friend, the librarian, he moves from one place in Chelsea to another bigger, better place. It’s a move up in the neighborhood. Prime real estate. He tells us they call it the “Faggot Fortress,” some of the other residents, his neighbors. It’s a building that extends for blocks, that takes up a whole couple of avenues in the city, that’s how expansive it is. Behind a set of doors in the new place, the bed folds down from the wall. It’s called a Murphy bed.

In that same building in Chelsea, others like us will live. Others like us will love. Others like us will hold each other, move deeper inside each other, and deeper, deeper into each other, far into the night. Others are together, and one turns to the other, turns him onto his back, or the other turns onto his back, the other gets on top, or the other one turns onto his stomach, and the other one gets on top. Or maybe they stay side by side.

Some years later, another librarian, a big-deal one, one I know after the other has left town, great place or no great place in the F. Fortress he sold it, is getting everyone drunk, and we are talking not only of books. We are, after all, gay men. Here, have another glass of wine. On to porn. Here, there’s some more. Another bottle.

He points at me and says he just knows how I like to take it. He’s drunk.

It’s not a charge. It’s not like I need to defend myself.

Did he ask to know, really, what I was? Really?

I don’t tell him about what I loved most, when the boy I’d be with in other people’s beds would let me get on his back, would just lie down on his stomach for me. Or I don’t tell him how he liked it when I’d straddle him, get on top of him, locking my legs tightly, closely, clamped onto the sides of his lower trunk, while we’d move.

That didn’t mean I didn’t want him to fuck me, which once upon a time I could have left or taken. Are you two anal, we’d be asked, me and the one other boy like me I’m sleeping with toward my end of high school, even in our small town. One of the couples we met in the mall, one of the two we knew, in the city of Macon, thirty minutes north, they wanted to know. If you hung around long enough, you might meet others like you, in the mall.

They’d love to hear all about it, though we weren’t really doing it yet. Things moved slower there where I was from, than where I’d eventually come.

Off at college, no more waiting for parents to fall asleep, or trying to find somewhere to go during the day, to see what you could get away with, though off at college, you’d still not completely fled the nest. Another boyfriend, an older man. There was only one thing we hadn’t done yet.

There were more, but I knew what he meant. It was an easy guess.

We’d take turns with each other.

Come on, he’d say, you’re fucking me. And then I’d have to try to do it harder, slam into him, and he’d end up wincing, hurt, seizing up, staring at me, catching his breath, and we’d stop.

Other boys come here from somewhere else, too, who haven’t grown up with and in New York City, either. Boys like me who might go from place to place, before it’s all over, before they settle down, if they ever do. Boys who see how they might never have a home, if it isn’t in the bed or arms of another boy.

We are driving to Buffalo. Now that we live in the city, we like to get out of it, too, me and the boyfriend from the bookstore. We are driving with new friends. One of the men is one of those theorizers of men and boys like us. We meet people like this because my boyfriend and I both want to be writers. The older, more established writer keeps saying, while my boyfriend drives, things like, he could only imagine what the two of us got up to, what we must do together.

He says my boyfriend is like the Marquis de Sade.

He’s so turned on by what this man is saying, must be, about what he thinks about him, how he must be sexually, that that night in the hotel, he’s going to be more wild with me than he’s ever been before, after all this attention that’s been paid to him, and me, all throughout the drive. Or he’s just so happy to be there with me, once the man has left our room for his own.

When we two were still sleeping together, sometimes we’d run into someone one or the other of us knew. Like, when waiting for the subway together, the upstairs neighbor of my first boyfriend in New York, who asked us if we were brothers.

They show real films at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, like in Chicago, where I make sure to go see the Wakefield Poole retrospective, someone doing what he did long before I was even born, and Hustler White, when I’m there, thinking I might try to move there. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one man looks for another man in the theater, while the movie plays, over and over.

As a boy, I’d wanted to be in movies, because in some you could see how people lived, and felt, differently. In Chelsea, there was the Chelsea Hotel, but it was too expensive to stay there now, even just for a night, forget about someone like me trying to live there. He’d tell me how I reminded him of the boy in The Chelsea Girls, in one of the scenes where the film captures strips and stripes of lurid colors, as they cross the boy’s face, as he is talking. First red, then green. First stop, then go. One who talks about perception, touch, apples, on his lips; salt, on his skin.

Sweet of him to say, though we both know we’re aging, and he no longer will want me that way he used to, when we’d first kissed on his floor by his stereo, and he told me I didn’t have to go home that night. What I remember so much feeling was the rub against the texture of his jeans.

Boys, men here, we went as far with each other as we could see ourselves, and then we moved on to the next promising prospect. Some of us still thought of ourselves as boys, not men, or guys, not fathers, not dads, and for as long as we possibly could, we would.

The day before Christmas, in Fort Greene, a boy around my age would run his hand through my hair, while I gave him head. We started with me, ended up on him, the Lord of the Rings DVD he had been watching paused on the TV. It felt good to be rubbed like that and there. I used to always keep it so combed, something in it. Getting all dolled up, that’s what my stepfather used to say about me, when I’d be standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom or the bathroom.

After we’d both made each other come, he asked if I was doing anything for the holidays, and when I answered, asked him if he was, he said sure not going home.

2

In Brooklyn, Fort Greene, I would be living alone. No more sharing a bed in Manhattan, after she said I didn’t have to sleep on the couch if I didn’t want to, with a girl I’d gone to the same college as, now in the city trying to make her name as a photographer. No more sleeping in the living room, on the couch that was a futon, across from the projects, in Boreum Hill, before the area has begun being identified more easily by its one gentrifying street, Smith, where the boutiques all move in. Even that neighborhood is not safe. No more Bay Ridge, where I bring whoever I can get ahold of late at night into the living room, onto another couch that also folds out into a bed, nights I can tell how my roommate won’t be returning for the evening, and when I need to feel there might be other bodies needing like I do. Try to make sure we come on the floor and not the couch.

I need to wear clothes that show I don’t care too much about my appearance, and then I might appeal to the broadest possible range of tastes. If I keep my nails painted punk, that’ll scare some men off. I get more outside the more I seem to blend in with the men, to on the surface be just like them, still out, late at night, the more the clearest message is the one that moves between our meeting eyes.

Granted, there may not be grounds for a relationship here.

So where was I from?

Georgia.

But that’s all I’d tell some.

To the city, that’s where the men who didn’t want to get trapped went, if what they needed was a change of scenery, when they saw the small towns beginning to isolate them. What begins to matter more than anything are the ways we could and did come together. There were places to go, if you wanted to meet guys like you, all over the city. Some worked hard during the days, and during the nights, when others were shutting their eyes, theirs would still be open, and looking, out on the streets, in the stores, in the bars, designated in one way or another as for our kind.

I’ve mostly stopped lying about my name, or what I do. I’m a student, I tell them. I write. The tattoo on my wrist, I can’t take it away, and it shows itself off, if I raise my arm up above my head, if I’ve gone inside with someone, undressed, if I’ve leaned back for them, gotten on my back, at least take off my shirt, really relax, do what some of them want me to do, the way they want me to. Then some ask if that’s my girlfriend’s name, and I have to laugh. A writer, a dead poet.

I couldn’t really live in the heart of anything, not the way I was struggling, financially. I didn’t sleep with Chelsea boys, I slept with Brooklyn men. I’d walk up and down, along, around the promenade late at night, out by the highway, where some of the better off in Brooklyn lived. There was an area up around there, up in Brooklyn Heights, where sometimes the men would stop their cars, open their doors, have you go with them to drive around some, until they could find somewhere dark enough to park, or they’d just begin while driving, down in the shadows of the car, steering, where they could get to your fly, get it open, get you out, look at you, hold and move it around with their one hand not on the wheel, stashing you back, dropping it, or moving you up under your untucked shirt, and putting the other hand back up on the wheel again, if at one bright corner they had to stop, behind or for other cars. Or that one right there was a police one. It could be hard to see inside them. All you had to go by, when considering whether or not you might want this or that one to slow down, try to provoke him somehow, was the kind of car he had.

They either stopped for you or they didn’t. If it was just a numbers game, the more like you there were around to catch, the better luck. You caught more flies with honey, I’d been told once, when coming off so angry at the world. You’d better get this all out of your system, while you were still young. Out on the streets of the city, you had to be able to take me for what I was, what I wanted to become, I kept telling myself.

If the sorts of men you were after didn’t really want to be caught, it could make for arrangements where of prime importance was only whether or not you were in the same neighborhood. Some required little else.

I’d move through different neighborhoods, like moving through different sets, tracking myself through different hands, putting myself into them, seeing who brought what out of me, how far I’d go with each, just how far I’d want to.

Depending on the boy or man, it fluctuated.

Red Hook, they called it, out toward the end of the island, where I was living underground, really, in the basement of a shacklike house, rigged for living, some electrical outlets put in, a hotplate, a space made for a shower. The ceilings were low and silver, and the whole basement felt at times like a tugboat. The moisture was kept pulled out of the air down there by a machine plugged in.

Nobody ever came inside, though I invited one or two in, kissed one boy outside the door, while he straddled and held up the frame of his bike. He’d ridden down from Cobble Hill. He laughed, because, he said, when he pulled away from kissing, he could feel my “boner,” pressing against him. Then we kissed some more, and he said I was a good one.

I liked to. I didn’t get to, not much. When he wanted to know how come, said I was so cute, I said something about my last boyfriend. He didn’t really like to, or he’d stopped wanting to. Said something then about just having stupid men’s room sex since then, for the last year or so. He himself was only kissing me because his current boyfriend never wanted to sleep with him anymore.

You lived in these compromised places, or with roommates, if you had no one in your life to share bills with you. Why didn’t I just get another job? I was trying to make ends meet, and I was trying some nights not to be so lonely. I would be looking to pull myself outside of myself, for ways to get further outside me and my own tendencies.

You could be so close, and still so far. Down Coffee Street, down six or so blocks, there was the water, and out across it, the view of the Statue of Liberty. You could see some big boats going by, if you got lucky, pulling their whistles.

Another boy on a bike rides suggestively around, down by this pier in Brooklyn. Different boy, different bike. Different borough, different pier. He raises up, then lets himself back down, the seat grinding up into his body, the split between his legs, as he comes back up and then down again.

When it’s obvious there’s little to say, more to do, he can take me back to his place. He has a roommate, but he’s probably not at home. Not at this time of the afternoon. If he’s there, he can sneak me in, then back out.

When walking around there late at night, two o’clock and three in the morning, sometimes four or five, but by then the light in the sky is coming up, there are wild cats. Even in the winter, in the snow, still some.

I’ve taken myself to riding a bike around, a trick one, BMX, but it is old, a used one, with its mirrored silver frame, tires once detailed with gold rims, that paint now rubbed down. The chain will slip, if I ride too fast, though I mostly only use it at night, not for any real transportation, to get from one point to another, more just to slowly breeze through streets empty and deserted, especially for New York. Remarkably, for the city.

There are trucks, too, hauling things. They pull through there, or they park along one of the back streets, closer to the water, idling over there, for some later hours of the night.

Once I work myself up to riding slowly over to one, after circling around, getting brave enough to finally sidle up to the door. A short exchange, pleasant but gruff enough, culminates with the driver rubbing his crotch, like I am mine against the bike frame and my own hand, a gesture that could be brushed aside if need be. We’re both horny, and he asks me if I know anywhere he could go to bang some bitches.

In Bay Ridge, Spectrum has been there forever, but it closes shortly after I move into that neighborhood. Some of the men out there don’t need the bars for what they want. Some will open their doors to you, around two, late at night, around three, have a curtain already hung up and in place, which you’re not to walk behind. Just stand there, in front of the curtain, and he’ll reach around.

He calls it a glory hole, even though there’s no wall, no hole, just his head under, around, the curtain.

The iron gate that leads to his space under the stairs is unlocked. He’ll wait there for you. All you have to do is drop your pants.

Around come his hands, helping you get them open and down, coming around then again with the little brown bottle he’s already taken up to his own nose hidden, offering you some now.

That’s all right, you don’t need it.

Oom-who, oom-who, mouth full of you, he mumbles for you to keep going, not to stop.

I’m blond, blue, roughly one hundred fifty, not smooth. Cut. Thirty-three. Appearances can be a trap. I have this, this one part of me. Top, if I fuck. With strangers. But I’m open to other things. Pretty versatile, otherwise.

Generally prefer scruffy types, I sometimes type when leaving an ad, looking to get out of the house some cheap way.

I like some of the clips on his DVD, called something like A Hundred and One Shots. Or A Thousand, like A Thousand and One Nights. Who could ever count so many? This man, whose house I go over to in Bay Ridge, has it going when I get there. It’s all fragmented ’cause it’s just for the good parts.

He wants me to find the door unlocked, when I get inside, take off all my clothes, and see him already on the couch.

Naked and stroking, he says, wanting to know if this sounds hot to me.

Before he’ll let me just come over, he wants to talk on the phone first.

I’d asked my writing teacher where he met his boyfriend, when he introduced me to him, and he said where everyone met these days, online.

In most of the “shots,” the scenes setting them up, even if they’ve begun with only themselves, the men eventually will have someone stumble upon them, to come join them, play with them, play along. I like best ones I imagine are from the ’70s, men from what appears to be this other time, dated with their mustaches, their bodies not shaved, not so all neatly groomed; muscles, bulk, or youth, thinness, not of such a seemingly set priority; in a more indeterminate state, in different ways nondescript, looking how I might like to when doing it, like a bit more than simply acting, a bit more desperate, and accepting, more accommodating, even, than purely pleasing, not so poised, at least not to my eye, trained on the here-and-now. Some things you only share with those you know are in some ways just as wanting as you. It wasn’t in front of a gold-rimmed mirror anymore I was trying to convince myself I was there.

What do I want, they ask, what could they do for me, they want to know. If there was ever anything he could do for me, just let him know, one who calls me “stud” says, who asks if I like to role-play and just for a minute, once, goes into another set of words, to play with me like we’re just two boys home alone. Another: You blonds, you always look so young. “Pretty boy,” my stepfather had taunted. The more different I could look back then from all those rednecks, the better. There was one bar for boys like me, called the Pegasus. The boy like me and I would go around looking for more like us. I’d say stop the car, there in that stretch of the park, in Macon, where a street pulls through. That one perched there, smoking a cigarette, on the hood of his car, parked off to the side, looked like someone I might like. Looked “bohemian,” an odd word at the time I liked the sound of in my mouth.

The more voices I gathered in my head, the better. The more they might build to a finer opinion, counteract, balance each other. More options. More possibilities. More ways to see myself, see how men could be and want. Then the more chances to escape.

It’ll begin to tickle them, scratch at them, when I haven’t shaved in a while, and I’m letting my beard grow in. In his DVD, when the scenes shift more toward what I’d guess are the ’80s, the settings move to nicer ones, bigger beds, richer sheets, bigger and smoother men on them. Afterward, after we’ve gone through a number of the scenes, manipulating ourselves and each other, together, or I let him do to me whatever he wants, don’t really object, he tells me I can sit down, relax. I don’t have to put my shoes and clothes right back on just yet. I can sit on the chair with the towel he’s spread out on it for me, catch my breath. Do I want a beer or something? Some offer. Some before, some after. And if I take off too immediately, some are not going to ask me back.

Let him talk to me some more about my body, while he spreads out on the couch, keeps himself nice and hard, still slick, slippery. Squeezes out a bit more lube. I used to like to get it in my mouth. We were in love, so I could take in more of him. We were only doing it to each other.

All sorts of things are said in the heat of the moment, in the throes, but he wants to talk, too. About his job. He has birds in cages and cactus in terrariums. He’s a landscaper. His ex, they both still live in this building, since they broke up. His ex got to keep the front apartment, while he moved into the back of the building. But they’re still on the same floor, still close. They both like the neighborhood. Still like each other.

What’s wrong with me, he keeps asking. I’d seemed so removed, so distant, earlier. He asks me if I just broke up with someone. You know how it is, he says, when you’re fucking around, and you’re saying to yourself, what am I doing here?

His ex is a man of fewer words, almost fewer even than me. I know because some nights I go to see him, too.

Just because they’re no longer interested in each other, that doesn’t mean they’re no longer interested in sex. He does keep saying how some night he was going to let me fuck him, wanting to know would I like that, did I want that, like that might keep me interested, coming back. But he was going to have to be ready for it. I haven’t lost my restraint with him, or he with me, like slipping inside the boy between neighborhoods, on the outskirts of my old one, not just his mouth, when he pulls me back, on top of him, on his back, strong legs up around me, spurring me.

His ex wants me to enter their building quietly, to walk down the hall quietly, will emphasize mostly the way I should come and leave, makes sure I know how not to get lost in that building. When I get to the top of the staircase, go up one flight to the second floor, take a left, go down to the end of the hall. One scene in the movie he has on a couple of times when I arrive starts by showing a “soldier” alone in his military jeep, and then when he’s caught with his khakis down, playing with himself over and through the steering wheel, he says something to the effect of, what would you do with one this big, Sergeant?

I was from “The International City,” a joke, basically. They called it that because of everyone in the military who moved there. I used to think older men might help lead the way, might point me out of there. Sheltered, I knew, I needed to get away. Then I began to go to them because I thought I knew what I could expect from them. Believed I knew what they wanted from me.

Could he offer me a drink?

Back in Macon, this one with his life, dog, obviously expensive things, side table for his cocktails.

Something sweet.

He’ll put it in some Coke.

In my class in the city, we were reading The Ravishing of Lol Stein. (“She says that in school—and she wasn’t the only person to think so—there was already something lacking in Lol, something which kept her from being, in Tatiana’s words, ‘there.’”) I was taking out loans from the government, ostensibly for school, and I’d defer until I couldn’t any longer, I figured. Who cares if you die in debt?

In a small town, you needed to move, so you didn’t keep coming across whomever, when it hadn’t worked out. When I walked out of the building in Bay Ridge, I walked along a sidewalk that ran along road on one side, park on the other, a highway on the other side of the park.

A year and a half since I’d known where I could try to go at night when I just didn’t want to go home, that long since I’d been with someone I didn’t feel I had to protect myself from in subtle ways in sex. Then two years, three even, when I’m doing what you could call just fucking around. Or you could call it trying to see if the only thing I’d lost was a release. The city was full of alternatives.

I’d read the words wrong, sometimes in class, or mispronounce, like slips of tongue, though not quite, exactly. Things like reading “unwordly” in place of “unworldly.” Maybe not a pointless juxtaposition.

Make it feel good, make it feel good for yourself, he kept saying to me, when he wanted me to control the way, the speed at which, I was going in and out of his opening.