Heat Wave

Kevin Killian

 

 

 

 

Carey heard a chuckle, and turned around on Sixty-eighth Street. The man was gone, the place where he’d been now an empty space filled with sunlit air. Some kind of optical illusion, perhaps? Like the silhouettes they showed you in the service: are you looking at two vases or a woman’s head? Carey could have sworn he’d seen a man, sandy or auburn hair, slinking behind him, then again maybe it was just his hangover. “Next I’ll be seeing little green men from Mars.”

The sun was high, and the top of his head felt warm. He stood and watched with quiet eyes down the warm pavement that lay behind him. All was quiet as in a dream landscape. Silver sunlight and the black patches of adjacent alleys—nothing else could he see. Then from out of the silence, very close by, there came once more a low, throaty chuckle, louder and closer than before. There could no longer be a doubt. Someone was on his trail, was closing in upon him minute by minute. Carey stood like a man paralyzed, still staring at the ground that he had traversed. Then suddenly he saw him. Maybe fifty feet down the street, a man, studying a shop window with minimum interest. A young man with red hair, a shock of it standing on top of his head like a rooster’s red comb. Idly the man turned from the window display and looked inquiringly at Carey, who averted his head.

Carey stepped into a restaurant he’d never been to. Just to see if he’d be followed. The maître d’ was stern and authoritative. “Table for one?” he asked, holding a pink finger up in the air to summon a waiter.

“I’m not really hungry,” Carey thought, but he sat down at a booth, feeling the tight friction of the leather seat against his thighs like a warning or a caress. A slight breeze waved a plummy perfume from a large bouquet of red roses standing at the center of the table. He’d been seated at the last booth from one to the men’s room, by no means a choice placement. Bearing a fly-specked menu, the waiter approached. The wallpaper was flocked with water spots that streaked through a design of mallard ducks rising up out of a reed-strewn horizon. Carey read from the menu, “Victoria’s Canadian Tea Shop.”

“Thanks, that’ll be all,” he told the waiter, handing back the menu. “I’ll just have a bowl of soup.”

“No soup today,” replied the waiter, without emotion. “Too late, mister.”

Carey took back the menu as expected. “Ain’t that the story of my life.”

Then the front door opened and in walked a man, a man with bright red hair the color of fire. Carey opened the menu and covered his face with it. Prices and entrees swam before his eyes.

“Mister, what you like?”

“I’ll have the Salisbury steak,” he said quickly. “Maybe a couple of vegetables. I don’t know, go away and let me think about the vegetables.”

But the waiter wouldn’t leave. Steadfastly, he stood there with his palm out like maybe he was expecting a tip.

“People steal our menus,” the waiter observed, with a vast shrug. “I don’t know why.”

With a guilty start Carey passed the menu to the waiter, who nodded imperturbably, and added:

“Irving Berlin used to eat here and write his tunes on our menus. The owner’s got a couple of them framed in there—” pointing to the men’s room, which more and more seemed to be the heart of the restaurant. “Some men like a tea room, it brings something out in them. Maybe you agree, mister?”

Carey jumped up. “I’ll take a gander,” he said brightly, slipping into the alcove. “Irving Berlin…‘White Christmas,’ right?”

“Right, mister.”

Carey could see the red-haired man approaching the maître d’ with a question in his eyes. He saw the man take a photograph out of a card-case and display it. Lingering no longer, he pushed open the heavy door to the men’s room and hurried in. He tried to lock the door from within. But the catch was broken, and dangled loosely from the clasp.

The restroom was fairly large, about thirty feet long and ten feet wide. An elderly gent stood whistling at a sink, patting his face with some kind of green unguent: liquid hand soap. He stopped whistling when Carey barreled in.

“Look like you just saw a ghost,” said the old man.

“The prices scared me,” Carey said. “The prices on the menu.”

“Wait till you hit my age, sonny boy,” said the geezer to Carey. “Nothing scares a man of eighty but a flu bug or a warm pussy.” The old man chuckled and turned the tap with a great flourish. Cascades of faintly red water steamed out of the tap and soaked the old man’s green, slimy hands.

Four urinals lined the wall to their right, one a little shorter to accommodate child patrons. On the left a row of stalls stretched to the far wall, in which was set a window—one window, too small to climb through, covered with a fine metal mesh. Street noise. Irving Berlin’s lyrics to “Heat Wave” hung, framed, next to this window. Very nice. Very nice decorative bullshit. One of the doors to the toilets was ajar, and Carey slipped inside it.

“Yessirree,” called the old man. “When you hit eighty, you’re not scared of the Devil himself.”

“I bet,” Carey called, over the partitions. Then, breathless, he examined his surroundings. One door, two marble walls that stopped a foot from the floor, a toilet built into the far wall with a flush handle. The walls were covered from top to bottom with messages from other men. Graffiti, that lined the gray marble from top to bottom. Just the kind of reading Carey preferred in lighter moments.

In the stall, Carey sat down on the cracked black wooden seat and put his head in his hands. He needed pictures, though, pictures more vivid than the graffiti. Lifting a hip, Carey reached back and took his wallet from the back pocket of his slacks. He’d had this wallet since the service, and it looked it. “I’ll buy you a new one,” his wife had said.

“You buy too much,” Carey had said.

The money he opened to now had come to him from his wife. All in all, there must have been sixty or seventy dollars in the wallet. “I don’t want you arrested as a vagrant,” she said.

Fuck vagrancy, Carey thought, in the toilet stall. From an inner compartment of the scuffed brown wallet he pulled out a fistful of mementos and pictures. This was his past: somehow it felt correct to bring it out now, here, amid the pungent scents of Lysol and men’s piss. This handful of memories and impressions. A subway token clinked on the damp tile floor—Carey let it lay where it fell.

“Yessir,” called out the old man, “when you get to be my age, every day you wake up to some new terrible thing.”

Carey shuffled the stack of cards and papers from hand to hand, while listening with one ear to the sound of the tap water and the old man whistling Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”

“So long, sonny boy,” called the old man, finally finished cleaning his old palsied hands. Carey heard the restroom door swish open and shut. Then, in the sudden gray silence, he pulled out a card—“any card,” as the jokers in the bars tell you to—and turned it over from back to front. It was a picture of himself at eighteen. He looked frank, confident, alert. Now he was thirty-two. Carey took a deep swallow and waves of feeling washed over him in deep, regressive movement.

He was sitting there, his cock draped across his palm neither soft nor stiff, with its usual dead weight and perplexity, when he saw the hole in the wall. When he noticed it wink at him.

His eyes widened forcibly, as though he’d been given a jolt of electricity or shock treatment. Again he saw the wall blink, or appear to blink, its gray solid surface part and join again. There was a hole in the wall, and someone was standing in its light, in the next stall.

The wall that separated the two stalls was a thick slab of Italian marble, and in its center a hole had been drilled in the ancient, sexual past; through this hole now a finger poked, nail upward, and then twisted to measure the dimensions of the space it was in. Three-inch circle? Something like that. Carey gazed steadily at the moving, questing finger, thinking to himself, “It’s the red-headed guy.”

The finger continued to probe, leaving fingerprints all over that portion of the inner wall it touched, greasy fingerprints, as if left from liquid hand soap or semen. In his fantasy that finger wanted to stretch to an unimaginable length to touch the very tip of his penis, which he held firm in his own right hand. He looked down at himself, and his cock slid forward in his lap, gaining on him. He felt his balls tingle, and grow warm.

The finger withdrew and Carey next saw an eye staring at him, a placid green eye that blinked once or twice but otherwise made no signal. Carey smiled at the eye politely.

The eye closed, then withdrew. In a moment Carey heard the sharp sound of a zipper descending, then the soft ribald fold of cloth. He began to tremble in his loneliness and his longing, waiting for what he knew must come. Next an enormous cock, bigger than his own, appeared through the hole, inch by inch, to come to rest, ringed in a nest of soft, crisp, orange pubic hair, like a birthday corsage for a little girl, a toy. Finger, eye, cock: finally Carey put together the various parts of the body that had been shown him, figured they were all one male. This sum of addition made Carey swoon; if this wasn’t the man who’d followed him into the restaurant, Carey would eat his hat. In sexual life, he’d always had a weakness for redheads. Why not go for it? Here I thought I was being followed. Hell! I was being cruised.

A strip of ripped toilet paper, ringed with gray moisture, floated to the wet floor. Carey read the words. Touch it. Then they dissolved.

He raised his left hand shakily, to the bobbing cock, felt its satiny heat with two fingers. In response it lifted its weight to meet his tentative touch. The ringing in his ears vanished, his headache with it. The cock shot forward; Carey put his mouth to its head and kissed it. Inside his mouth the cock had little volume of its own, but a great suggestion of propulsion and questioning. Carey’s nose hit the marble wall, which deflected it…“I’ll make it easy for you,” said the man in a low throaty whisper. Bent in two, Carey sat back onto the toilet seat sideways as, from under the marble partition, two bare knees came forward, followed by long white thighs, then the whole crotch was squatting directly into his face. An athletic guy, obviously, confident, bouncing on his heels with his pants and underwear drawn down to his ankles. I could pick his pockets in twenty seconds, Carey thought obliquely, as he leaned down to the floor to suck Red’s dick. Down so low his face felt damp and clammy, and the muscles in the left side of his face started to harden and contract, as he pressed his mouth over the large head of Red’s expansive cock. “Red” spoke the familiar words of praise and contempt.

“That’s good, Carey,” he said. How’d he know my name? “That’s as good as a woman any old day, I guess.”

Athletic guy—mysteriously knowing guy—and a guy who really knew not only what he wanted but how to get it out of Carey. How’d he know my name? All in all Carey had to hand it to him, but now wasn’t the time or place. The thick stern hardness in his mouth was smooth to his tongue, to his throat, filled him to the tonsils. He was breathing through his nose like a drowning man.

Carey reached up through Red’s legs and his hands passed through the light growth of hair on the thighs, till he felt the creamy weight of the ass in his hands, then the delicate filigree of the balls. Red was practically sitting on the floor he was so excited. “Is your dick hard?”

“A little,” Carey replied, and the sound of his own voice unnerved him. Again the hardness in his mouth throbbed, as though he was hitting some kind of nerve. “Mount me,” the voice said. Obediently Carey let Red slip out of his mouth, which instantly felt hollow. “Slide under,” Red commanded, and Carey, oblivious to the piss spilled on the tile, slid his crotch into the crack of the freckled butt, which glistened from exertion and summer heat, his smooth cheeks pulled neatly open with most of his fingers and from sheer will. A pale hand, coated in some shiny invisible glop, guided A to B. From there nature took its course. Carey grabbed Red’s waist with both hands; inside, Red’s asshole was sweeter and warmer than Carey would have thought possible. From every surface it sank around the column of Carey’s dick, and together, through some unspoken physical signal, the two men began to heave slightly, in and out, in a 3-D tangle of limbs and swollen distended muscle. Carey’s lungs started to expand at approximately the same rate as his cock. “Don’t cream in me,” Red pleaded.

“Maybe I will,” grunted Carey.

“Don’t come in my fucking ass,” Red begged, with a long gasp between each syllable. “Don’t shoot no big wad up my hungry hot hole.”

“And maybe I won’t,” Carey said.

After a while, Red rose, adjusted his clothing and left. Carey lay back against the stubby toilet and panted. The cards and photos he’d taken from his wallet were spread on the wet tile exactly as they had fallen. His hands were grimy, thick with sweat and shit, urine and cum.

Outside, from the dusty corridor, he heard a pleasant chuckle. “We’re having a heat wave,” sang a whiny tenor. “A tropical heat wave.” Only other thing Carey heard was running water, the white sound of water through underground pipes.