I can’t picture the face of the first man I tried to kiss. The memory refuses me, just as he did when I lifted myself up from between his legs and brought my teenage body to its full height before him. He looked like he could’ve been the father of any number of the boys I passed in the hallways every day at school: men who had calluses from gripping footballs and hammers, the ones who sent gravel flying every time their trucks ripped out of parking lots, the ones I tried to study without getting caught staring. And here I was, staring up at him, my mouth just inches from his. I remember noting how neatly his beard framed his lips. The beard itself was well trimmed, in contrast to his faded Texas A&M polo shirt, worn Levi jeans, and work boots. His lips were gently parted in that moment, waiting.
LATELY, I’D BEEN visiting the library as frequently as ever. I even applied for a part-time job as one of the teens responsible for reshelving books; my application was rejected. Having exhausted what I had decided were all the library’s “gay” books, when I visited now, I’d quickly decide on a book or two and then stake out one of the computers with a screen facing away from the librarians’ desk. The filters on the computers intended to block out adult content were good, but my persistence made me better. I was in the midst of one of these computer searches when the man in the study carrel next to me leaned over in his chair and looked at my screen as if I weren’t sitting there. He turned to look at me.
“Are you into that?” he asked.
His voice was vague, hovering somewhere between curiosity and slight revulsion.
My hand, still on the mouse, double-clicked the exit icon as if without me. The rest of my body couldn’t decide how it was going to survive whatever was about to happen.
“What?” was all I could say.
“That,” he said again, nodding toward the screen. “Are you into that stuff?”
A sudden and forced stillness. Then, a thin stream of sweat slipping down my back. The heart’s pulse whispering in my ear’s inner chamber like a coconspirator. Get up and walk away. He can’t hurt you here with all these people around. Walk away, no matter what names he calls you, just keep walking. This is a Saeed-shaped trap.
“I like stuff like that too,” he said, almost sheepishly.
I had started to ease my chair back from the desk. I stopped. A voice in the back of my head spoke, This is how it goes: a truck pulls up to a gas station and the men inside smile. “Need a lift?” they ask, and James Byrd Jr. considers his answer, while the men inside the truck watch him. This is how it goes: two guys walk into a dive bar and see Matthew Shepard sitting alone. They strike up a conversation, a few more drinks, and then one of them nods toward the front door and the truck waiting in the parking lot. There’s room for one more if he wants to join them.
He stopped looking at me, shifting his gaze out past the study carrel like he was keeping an eye on someone in another part of the library. “You know the restroom out in the lobby, right?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Wait a couple of minutes and then meet me in the last stall.” He got up and walked toward the lobby without waiting for my answer.
One minute. I could just sit there for another hour until I was sure he had given up on me and then leave. The librarians were just feet away from me. I could tell them a stranger had tried to lure me into the restroom to do unspeakable things. There was a script I could perform; I knew it. Everyone knew this play and its ending.
Two minutes. Cody, the construction worker, the track coach, the senior in the school play, the football quarterback. I’d been looking for this man, or a man like him, for a long time: someone who saw what I saw whenever he looked at the bodies of other men. I couldn’t be afraid or innocent, knowing what I knew about myself. I’d been looking for trouble, and I probably deserved whatever happened to me when I finally found it.
Three minutes. I stood up from my chair and walked right through the question hovering in the air between my body and the body waiting for me in that restroom stall: What exactly did he see when he saw me?
When he had first walked into the library, greeted by the automatic doors’ electric sigh and a blast of cool air, he would not have seen me. He would have had to walk past the circulation desk, the children’s books section, and turn at the fiction section, before finally arriving at the four study carrels and computers. Maybe the carrel to the right was the only one available, so he sat there without much thought. Had he then happened to glance at my screen and catch a version of what he himself had been looking for? Or maybe, approaching the carrels, he had hovered behind me, just long enough to see my screen. Had he looked down at the back of my head, trying to picture my face?
I wonder if I looked like a grown man from where he was standing. In reality, I was a lanky, black, obvious teenager, obviously effeminate too, if given an opportunity to move or speak. But from a distance, maybe my body transformed, as the bodies of young black men are wont to do when stared at by white people in this country. Maybe my spine stretched itself into a basketball player’s posture, this stranger’s gaze giving me something I could never quite seem to give myself: the sense of being a real man, strong, even intimidating. Or perhaps he saw a black boy’s silhouette, a high-school-aged frame, and didn’t care, or cared even more. Maybe my exact body—limp wrist, fade haircut, brown skin, and all—was the sum total of the kind of body he had been building with piecemeal stares and stolen glances. Maybe he saw me and sighed, relieved to know that the universe had in fact been paying attention, had responded to his call. Or maybe I was just what was available, a slim picking on the way to the grocery store, in a suburb of some 80,000 people, twenty minutes north of Dallas. A body—no, a mouth.
I WALKED INTO the lobby and hesitated for a moment. To the left were the glass doors to the parking lot. On my right was the door to the restroom.
I walked right.
The third and last stall was the only one closed. It opened as soon as I stopped in front of it.
The man stood tall with his hands on his hips, the look on his face written in a language I couldn’t read. But I took the boxers and jeans bunched around his knees as an invitation. I tried awkwardly bending forward while still standing, then kneeling on one knee. Then I finally decided to kneel, on both knees as if praying. The floor was cold and unkind. Still standing with his hands on his hips, he merely glanced down a bit as I strained to give him head. It looked easier in the pictures of gay porn I’d been hunting for online. I didn’t remember seeing people breaking a sweat in those pictures, but my shirt was already sticking to my lower back. Focus, I thought. Think about how much you’ve wanted this. I willed the entirety of my being to my mouth. Beads of sweat dotted my forehead.
I didn’t want what we were doing, what he was letting me do to him, to be over; it’s just that kneeling on the linoleum tiles stung my knees like a punishment and made me feel so far away from him. So I stood, intending just to angle myself into a more comfortable position. But standing directly in front of him, my mouth just inches from his mouth, lips parted in what looked like the beginning of a question, I realized I had never stood quite this close to another man before. Close enough for the front of my tennis shoes to tap the front of his boots, close enough for the jeans, boxers, and belt he had shimmied down his legs to press against my knees. And what had been starting to feel like work just a moment before was hotly dizzying again: the reality of his body—not another wet dream, or daydream—right in front of me. It was almost too much, too intense and long delayed and so, just like in all the dreams I’d been dreaming, I leaned in to kiss him.
He yanked his head away, leaving my mouth to grate against the soft sting of his beard.
Embarrassed, I ducked my head down and noticed, for the first time, his gold wedding band.
“I’m not into that,” he said. He laughed a bit, as if he were alone and had just remembered an inside joke. Except we were the joke. A fortysomething-year-old man getting an awkward blow job from a sixteen-year-old boy in the restroom stall of the Lewisville Public Library, just a minute’s walk from the police department, the courthouse, or the city council office. I kept my eyes on the wall to spare myself from the look on his face. I couldn’t bear to watch him transform back into a real man and leave me standing there, still a faggot, someone who swung that way and got stuck.
“No, not into that.” His Texas drawl worked wonders with the word “that.” He was already stooped down, already pulling up his jeans.
However much he was “into that” when I first crowded myself into the stall, my attempted kiss went too far. In the end, I probably spent more time sitting alone at the desk, trying to decide if I should follow him, than I did in the restroom.
Jeans zipped, belt back in place, he unlatched the door and slid past me out of the stall without another word. I heard the restroom door open and close and then I was just myself again, already becoming a vague memory he could pretend to forget as soon as the electric doors sighed and he stepped out into the sun’s glare.
Still in the restroom stall, I sat on the toilet and realized that I couldn’t taste him. There’d been so much talk in the chat rooms about the way men tasted; so many hilarious descriptions and names for cum, but all I could taste, swirling my tongue around my mouth, was my mouth. The restroom door opened and I listened as someone walked over to the urinals, unzipped his pants, and started peeing. It was funny, I thought, knowing that just a few feet away from me another man was holding his dick.
I flushed my empty toilet and walked past him toward the sinks. He had on a suit and tie; maybe he worked at the courthouse. After turning the faucet off, I hesitated for a moment as he walked up to the sink next to me. My eyes lingered on him in the mirror just a second too long. He looked up, not at the mirror, but directly at me. I snatched my stare away and walked back out into the lobby. A clerk was talking on her cell, an old man leaned down to sip from the water fountain, the automatic doors slid open for a woman pushing a stroller.
Walking through the parking lot outside the library, even though I knew the man was probably well down the road by then, I tried picturing him sitting behind the wheel of a truck, his wedding ring glinting in the sunlight as he steered himself into traffic. I cut through one parking lot after another on the way home, wondering where he must have gone next. Maybe he was in the produce section of a grocery store now, on to his next errand. He was holding the yellow sticky note his wife had left waiting for him next to his keys. She knew he would forget to pick up tomatoes if he didn’t have a list. She knew her man. Or maybe he was just pulling into the driveway in front of his house, letting the truck idle for a few minutes while he sat there, staring at bricks and flagstone, the lawn that needed mowing, a girl’s pink bicycle abandoned in the grass.