“I used to think,” Nora said, “that people just went to sleep, or if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now”—she lit a cigarette and her hands trembled—“now I see that the night does something to a person’s identity, even when asleep.”
—Djuna Barnes
Your missing right foot was only a part of you, just like the fur that blanketed your body. I remember the look of fear on your face when I’d accidentally opened the bathroom door the morning after we met. You’d just finished showering. I simply needed to piss, but there you were, wet, the many shades of black, gray, and white in your body fur glistening like your beard, and the cone end of your shin. It didn’t look real. It wasn’t a special effect in a Hollywood movie. What was real was dripping. I saw the crooked scar of brown near the bottom of your shin. It wasn’t what I’d thought a limb amputated halfway below the knee would look like in daylight. You’d kept it cloaked, a shroud carrying the unborn child not yours, tucked inside a prosthetic shin and foot. Now it was pink, red, startled with a cry.
I looked up at your face: a volley of fire, spear, armor.
I said, “I’m sorry. I just needed to—”
“Get out.” Your whisper rumbled forth at 2,000 decibels. The ice in your voice, jagged and rich, knifed into my eardrums. Surely this would be the end of us. Already before we had our first breakfast, lunch, dinner.
I would’ve left, but I walked quickly to the stall, where behind you was a shower chair, and knelt before you as you remained standing. I leaned forward to kiss the cone of your shin. I took hold of your beautiful leg and kissed you down there, the space far more private than anywhere else on your body. We had traveled all over the world of each other the night before, but this was uncharted territory. I had to map the rest of your body as you stood petrified, not daring to kick me like the unwelcome conquistador I was. I closed my eyes and kissed the unreal topography of your most private world. I lingered my tongue all over your shin, a brand-new foreign language. I was absolutely frightened of what you would do to me. I didn’t know yet how to translate. I’d never been with a disabled man before.
You held onto the wall railing. Your knuckles turned into tiny snowcaps. Your skin dribbled paint drops of clarity. Your body trembled. You weren’t erect. I looked up. A glimmer of tears, a gush of aurora borealis. Heaven was marbled in your eyes.
I stood up. “You okay?”
You nodded; looked away. The white tiles in your shower were mirrors in a prison, opaque reflections about to turn full-color bleed.
Even though my body couldn’t decide which need was more pressing—ejaculation or urination—I left the bathroom. I could hold it in a few more minutes.
When I saw you again in the kitchen, you were already in your jeans, frying eggs in the cast-iron skillet. You looked up at me with an unexpected softness in your eyes. You had such a stoic face, but here, suddenly you were like an angel about to be given wings, your cocoon molted clear of shoulders, already furred and strapped with muscle. Surely all you had to do was to open up your arms to your full wingspan and take flight.
The way the sunlight rested on your bearded face while we ate . . . wow. Oceans once mad with fury came to a still; suddenly a pond filled with cattails and dragonflies in the grays of your eyes. Diamonds of snow married in your eyebrows. The rocks of crag all over the mountainside of your face avalanched into a smile filled with sky. I wanted so much to have my camera right there with me. But you’d made it clear how you disliked having your picture taken. You must’ve been afraid of disappointing men when they discovered your disability after drinking in one single gulp the hotness of your fur, pecs, cock. If my camera could flit about like a hummingbird, I’d have shot you from below and have you look incredibly imposing, especially if your face and chest were partially covered in shadow.
There’s something powerful about shadows. Voices stilled by the dark, voices afraid of the knife of sunlight ready to slash the dark in half, voices afraid to sing.
You weren’t just a ghost. You were pure shadow.
That’s why you still follow me no matter where I go.
Start anywhere, and there you are.
In my heart, it’s always winter.
My heart’s trapped inside a snow globe, not just inside the shell of glass, filled almost to the brim just enough to allow a flat bubble of oxygen to push the blanket of faux snow around and about to give the illusion of white falling, but my heart, made of plastic, is glued to a thumb-sized house, an evergreen or two, a frozen pond, two skaters never moving, everything locked to the floor. Shake, shake hard as one usually must, and watch the flakes cascade, settle with a puffy sigh all over the tacky contours, while my heart feels ready to explode from hypothermia. There’s not enough furnace. No fire, just room temperature water that will never melt the shellac hardening my heart. I am a child of factory, not of sun nor field, but a spit of souvenir coming down the assembly line.
Sticking a thermometer into the mouth of my heart, under its shivery tongue of flicker and fear, brushing up against the roots of molars, won’t help. Made of mercury, the thermometer doesn’t register the subzero fickleness of affection; the glass nub, silvery liquid dangerously toxic if broken, swallowed, bleeds dry until I am all glass. Shake me again. Maybe, maybe this time I will crack, a hairline fracture that will splinter the globe into shards, tiny swords that will pierce the cool polish of your heart. I would not rain down but float upward to the heavens where I will regard you, observe all you do, ponder. Go on. Go on, shake me again, and watch me snow tears down my cheeks in the darkness of shellac. Paint my house of heart white. Freeze me until I pale into nothing.
Every night when I lie here on this bed, I dream up conversations that you and I will never have.
Like right now: the window over there by the bed would be wide open, and even in the dead of winter, you’d want to keep it open just a smidge. You hated having a thick blanket on top of you when you slept. You were the kind of guy who felt hot no matter the season. You needed ventilation, wind, flight. Summers were too hot for you even up north. You used to work out for years and gained a lot of muscle until you lost part of your right leg in a car accident one winter evening. The driver was too busy arguing with his wife on his cell phone and hadn’t noticed a patch of ice right up ahead by the corner so he couldn’t brake his truck hard enough in time to prevent crumpling your side of the car so badly that—well, you couldn’t walk so easily like before.
I didn’t know all this yet when I saw you the first time at the Eagle on a Friday night. Everyone there seemed to know everyone else, but I didn’t know you. Your face, though: not even a discernible expression, a feeling of one way or other; partially hidden by the brim of your baseball cap, so I couldn’t see your eyes. I moved to the side for a better look. Your lush beard sang of birch, tall and squat with scarred bark eyeing saplings unweaving from the grass, sparrows twittering about on the telephone lines, balls of dandelion whiskers breaking up from the belly laughs of wind. You sat on a barstool, nursing a drink while Trevor Covins, standing next to you, carried on about something or other with his buddies. A former president of the Browell County Bears, Trevor was a hot daddy with his thick and wiry goatee streaking a bit of gray down the middle of his jaw. He reminded me of certain bears who were damn hot and knew it enough to pose naked long enough to enable nameless strangers like myself with longing upon their natural ruggedness of fur and muscle. I was always paralyzed when he glanced my way. I tried to smile, but he made it clear he wasn’t interested in me. I was simply not there, a twig snapped in half and rolled off the sidewalk.
That’s why I didn’t look at you again, even though you were woofy as hell. Your T-shirt, pulled on so tight, showed nipples pushing against the fabric. Your forearms were densely coated with fur that shimmered like rubies from the neon behind you. Your black beard was thick with gray and white unbraiding its strands everywhere, ropes of ship fraying at last from too many nights of storms at sea. Then you smiled slightly at someone in my direction. I glanced around, unsure if you’d smiled at me. No one was standing right next to me. No one was looking back at you, or me, or had someone been there, in that moment of my head turning to look, or had I imagined you looking my way at all? When I returned to you, it was as if I wasn’t there, no longer a blip on your radar.
James, look at me. In bear parlance, I’m considered a cub even though I don’t see myself that way at all. I’m forty-five years old, five feet nine, and 197 pounds with a scruffy beard. I don’t work out much. I’m gaining a bit of permanent weight every year, but I’m okay with that. I’ve always liked guys with a bit of padding on their bones, but not too much. I’ve never liked those anorexic twinks with haircuts so gelled that they looked like pewter under a mirror ball. During the nineties I saw those images of men dying of AIDS, skinny and laced with pockmarks of pallor. Their teeth sometimes reminded me of Max Schreck’s in Nosferatu. They were so young, so ravaged, and yet used for inspiration the same way disabled kids were used on Jerry Lewis’s Labor Day telethons back in the seventies. Seeing those men’s faces, weakened hands taped and wired with IV tubes designed to sell bravery— and newspapers and magazines, too, as they’d understood how Americans liked to gawk in the perpetual museum of freedom and horror—made each kiss I got from a man feel like charcoal skin—my own!—ready to crumble from the merest kiss of air. I wasn’t heavy back then. I knew I liked stocky guys, but I didn’t know about the bear community. It seems so obvious now, but I didn’t know where I could find gay stocky guys. I went out to the bars and clubs near the university, which were filled with young college guys like myself. They wanted to dance and party all night long, and they wanted to stagger, drunk and horny, with someone they barely knew, back to their dorm rooms. They didn’t want to think of dense textbooks, exams, grades; they’d become sloppily researched textbooks on love’s woes, having waxed and waned, and still didn’t learn a damn thing. They never took the time to study themselves in action, become case studies in the mirror of alcohol and haze of smoke, conduct experiments with tighter controls. Their hearts turned into footnotes of woe gone weary, now wary from age. Today they just fudge their stats when they cruise online for another hookup.
I never drank. Just never liked the taste of alcohol. Beer makes me feel queasy, like after ten loop-de-loops on the rollercoaster right after another without stopping, so I’m always someone’s designated driver. I never minded. I like seeing things clearly.
Funny how I hadn’t seen you so clearly until recently. I am a rearview mirror, sailing through space as your car careened out of control across the slickness of ice.
Hello guys!
I’m on this site because I think bearish men who aren’t afraid of oil and grease are mighty fine. I don’t use moisturizers or get pedicures either. I like my men to be of the rough and tumble variety. Shirts that show off your round pecs and bellies can be just as hot as fur that shoots out of collars.
If you spend your free time on video games, we are not a match.
If you are comfortable with long sentences, stick around. You won’t be disappointed. I promise not to bore you with the same old, same old.
If you think my profile is too long, please click elsewhere for your next victim.
Please don’t ask for my X-rated pictures. I don’t have any. Sorry about that, fellas.
I’m a former farm boy who’s an overworked and underpaid barista at the corner of Broadway and Hancock. You know that place, and I’m sure I’ve seen at least half of you ask for a cuppa cawfee. If you see me again, be sure to say hello and give me a special wink (woofs are always welcomed) so I know you’re a member of our bear family. ;-)
For those who are wondering about my stats, I just turned 45 (how the hell did that happen?!?), 5’9” (taller if I wear platform shoes, but I lost them one wicked Halloween), and 194 lbs (I keep trying to lose weight all the time, but if you can accept the fact that I may never be svelte again, that’s a big plus).
If I’m not busy watching movies that require a little brainpower to digest (like subtitles), I’m always reading. A good book is always like a good friend you wish you had. It’s like having a great conversation you wish more people would have. At any given time, I’m usually jump-reading two or three books. Right now I’m reading Cheryl Strayed’s WILD (was she really that ill-prepared for a long hike?), Jeanette Winterson’s WRITTEN ON THE BODY (definitely one of her best), and Nicholson Baker’s THE ANTHOLOGIST (a funny story about a man who tries so hard to write a foreword to an anthology but just can’t). Of course I have many favorite books, so let’s chat.
A singer that I wish more people knew about is Drake Jensen. I don’t much care for country music, but have you ever seen him? He’s friggin’ HOT. And no, he’s not a closet case. You should check him out in the music video “Fast Enough for Me.” His voice is sexy fine. I wish he’d croon to me naked. His hubba-bubba is sure a lucky fella.
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations. It means your attention span is long enough to hold a conversation in person. If you like to talk about the arts, that’s a plus too.
But if you still feel overwhelmed, relax. I’m actually an easygoing sweetheart. Let’s give ourselves a whirl of chitchat over a scoop or two at Cold & N’ice. Who knows, you might be lucky to find out what a great romp I am in the bedroom. Date is not a four-letter word.
Looking forward to hearing from ya.
Thanks, guys!
Bill
LAST UPDATED ON SEPT 23, 2013
James.
James. Oh, God. The way you light me up at night when I least expect it.
James. I whisper your name in the dark and watch it catch fire on the wind, tiny little flickers flouncing in the air that no one ever notices because their eyes are on the ground where they walk. The tiny curls of smoke dance and unfurl like wisps of hair just pruned, falling in tender clumps around the barber’s chair. Everything is ether and then some.
James. Your name means “supplanter.” You supersede and replace; old plants pulled out of the soil, new seeds sown. You have vision. The future is already in your rearview mirror. You take over the past, remake it as your own. The land is rooted deep inside your bones, musty earth damp from flash rains. You didn’t like it when people tried to call you Jim or Jimmy. You were quiet but firm about your name. You were to be addressed as James. Your shadow on the ground was sharp as blades.
James Alan. Your middle name means “handsome.” The stars poured the sugar of beauty deep into your veins and the moon peppered your skin with salt, and the skies pumped your eyes with blue and the clouds filled the rest of you with ocean, limitless as the horizon on an overcast day, so your body was of this earth and sea, your cock stripped bare at low tide, your past hidden at high tide. There was never an in-between, a landing with you; just a fleeting glance, a grip of slippery hands, a call for help, a plea from deep in the forest for a little understanding, a tenderness. But how you’ve lingered in the coral reef of my tongue, a breeze of balm floating just so, oh just so in my nose.
James Alan Sutton. You are the fire in the chimney of my soul. How I keep crackling, wood splintering amidst splotches of ember, singeing. I am nothing without winter’s ache. In the polar vortex of my heart, you hold all my matches.
On the first day of spring, you called me at the coffeehouse out of the blue. I was on a break.
“Hey.”
“Oh, hi, James!” I was surprised. It was a Thursday, and you always called me on Friday morning to confirm that I was indeed available to go up north for the weekend. “What’s up?”
“Okay.” A pause. “Look, I’ve been doing some thinking. Um, I’ve been thinking that maybe this is not gonna work.” I could hear in the background the faint hum of factory where you worked.
“What? We’ve been spending weekends together for—”
“Sorry,” you said. “I just don’t think we’re a good fit.”
“Wait. I don’t understand. I thought things were going great. Six months. Hello?”
“Look,” you said. “You want what I can’t give.”
“What’s that?”
“You want a boyfriend and all of that.”
“What’s wrong with wanting all of that?”
“It’s not you. It’s me.”
“Look,” I said. “Shouldn’t we, um, talk about this in person? I mean—”
Click.
That turned out to be our last conversation.
I left a ton of voicemails, but you didn’t answer.
March 20, 2014 was the first day of winter in my heart.
Sometimes I wish you could come into the room of my dreams and sit down on the sofa over there. Let my memory play its accordion, snippets of song we’d overheard while talking with each other in your truck, the unexpected pats on the shoulder, the ferocity of tongue into the darkest caverns of each other. We are the paintings in the Cave of El Castillo, we are the learned of Mesopotamia, and what’s left of us are the myths that will never abandon us no matter how long we shiver in the rain.
Listen not to the sound of rain beating down on the tin roof above us, but to the music of letting go from the hands of clouds once cupping so much water, so many tears. In that blind drop to earth, we awaken just long enough to see the grass ready to impale us a half-second before we hit and disintegrate into mist. Realign the radio antennae of ear to my broadcasts of everything about us. Television, and online too.
There, on my battered sofa in the opulent room of my dreams, you would slowly dawn upon me and fill me with the sunlight of your soul. Rain gone, long gone, you would stand up, the gentle giant that you are, and look down into my eyes. You’d say, “Come with me.”
I’d float right beside you.
We wouldn’t have the need to discuss anything; telepathy would be sufficient.
In that grotto where you liked to smoke a cigar alone, it would be perennially summer, and it would be there where you would marry me. We would be together until the time came for us to let go. At a hundred and one years of age, you would be the grizzled oak of a man, and I would be resting my head, the eternal sapling that I am, on your chest where I could hear the last of your heartbeat fade into eternity.
I would die happily a few moments later.
We would be buried together in the same cemetery plot, and our tombstone would read, TWO MEN HERE HAVE LOVED EACH OTHER LIKE NO TWO EVER HAVE. No names or years lived and died. Leave behind the most mysterious story for others to imagine and write. Love is a ghost that, once infected, never dies. It remains fatal and incurable. It haunts every bed we sleep in until the day we die.
You haunt me still.
Not knowing what one’s done wrong is the quickest way to become a ghost. Regrets are what make us lose skin, soul, control. We become bound to sins we are never quite sure if we’ve committed. We become filled with doubts that weigh down on our shoulders. We are sinners accursed with the sentence of uncertainty, so we haunt and haunt until we learn the answers. By then we’ve turned ourselves into ghosts, and it’s too late to change our ways. It’s much easier to flail in a sea of familiar pain than to soar like an albatross in the terrifying sky.
Should I continue and try to solve the mystery of you, or would you be one of those nasty corpses, found tossed into a ditch, that offers no clue as to why you’d died?
Have I fallen for a ghost who didn’t know he’d died long before he’d met me?
Are you a specter accursed with cold blood?
Do you remember how we first met? I even remember the date: Friday, October 4, 2013.
When I saw you again for the second time, it was at the annual OctoBear Dance held at the VFW Hall on Portland Avenue. By then I’d searched all the local profiles for you on Bear411, and there you were. Someone had snapped a picture of you leaning against a stucco wall. Your arm rested on something out of frame, but there was something deep in your eyes. You had seen a lot of things you wished you hadn’t seen. You wore an old denim shirt, which you’d left open a bit at the top. The denseness of your chest fur mesmerized me. I figured you to be in your mid-fifties.
In the VFW Hall, you sat alone at a table away from the makeshift stage. The music was loud, even with only two speakers out by the stage; the husky DJ, who had a flaming red beard, had a notorious reputation for sleeping with the new arrivals before anyone else in the community did. I’m proud to say that he’d failed with me. I talked with some of my buddies near the doors that opened to the main hall where the music wasn’t too bad, but I couldn’t take my eyes off you the whole time. How could such an insanely hot stud be sitting all by himself? Where were your friends? I saw Trevor holding forth with his buddies, all muscular and good-looking. They were busy laughing and drinking beer from their plastic cups. I felt angry. Had they brushed you off with attitude? I didn’t know what to do. Should I even say hello to you?
When I saw Trevor glance your way and break into a laugh while cracking a joke, I knew what I had to do. I walked over there to your table. I was petrified that you’d give me attitude like your buddies, but I tripped against a chair leg jutting out and nearly hit your table with my forehead. I knelt halfway under the table.
“Hey, you all right?”
I looked across to your legs to check out your ample crotch, because hey, I’m a guy, right? I scanned down your legs. Wait—your right foot didn’t have an ankle inside your black sneakers. It was shiny like aluminum. Then I realized that you were wearing a prosthetic foot. Had to be. Then I checked out your ample crotch again, because hey, I’m a guy, right?
I pushed myself up onto my feet. “Yeah.” I felt a bit shaky, but I didn’t want you to see that. You see, I didn’t know what to think when I saw your missing foot. All I knew was that I had found you to be sexy, but that . . .
“You sure?”
“Why don’t you sit down?”
A blush of shame and embarrassment seeped into my face. I felt like a schoolboy sitting in front of his principal in his office, waiting to be sentenced to after-school detention. I didn’t dare look into your eyes.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“Are you freaking out over my foot?”
“Yes.” I didn’t look up.
“I’d still freak out, but what choice do I have? Either I stay home and feel sorry for myself, or I put myself out there and hope for the best.” He extended his hand into my line of vision. “Hello?”
I had been staring at your huge hand. Thick strands of fur lined the back of your fingers. I think I involuntarily licked my own lips. I felt skittish when I shook your hand for the first time.
“Name’s James.”
“I’m Bill Badamore.”
“Nice to meet you, Bill.”
“Likewise.”
“Don’t be scared of me. I don’t bite, and my missing foot ain’t contagious. I’m not a zombie.”
“Right. Right.”
“It’s okay.” You took my hand and squeezed it; I nearly creamed in my pants. I was that stiff. I wanted to rub my face all over your furry chest.
“Well, if I knew about your . . .”
“Disability. It’s not a dirty word. It just is.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” You smiled. “You’re very cute. My very able-bodied friend between my legs thinks so too.” My face must’ve been quite crimson because you grinned broadly at me. “Did you come here with your car?”
“Actually, I walked here. I live fifteen blocks from here.”
“Do you . . . uh, wanna play? I live an hour north of here. You’d have to stay the night. You okay with that?”
If I were a character in a cartoon, my jaw would’ve hit the floor.
You smiled. “Why don’t I meet you outside by the parking lot in ten minutes?”
I nodded.
“You go right ahead. I have to go to the restroom first.”
I got up and felt light as a dream. You weren’t just a hot face in a hookup app, a picture of hotness that gets reposted all over Tumblr. As I walked to the coat check and picked up my flannel-lined denim jacket, I was so afraid to look back at you; I wondered how you’d move with that fake foot. Okay, okay: I admit it. I was afraid of being seen with you, limping along while going out of that place together, but I didn’t check back on you. I was afraid that everyone would think that I was into having sex with freaks. I was relieved that you needed to go to the bathroom anyway. I waited outside in the parking lot and wondered if you were for real. It had been a lifetime since a stranger had met me in person and asked me to his home.
Outside you walked naturally in and out of street-lit shadows toward me. I was surprised you weren’t limping! You looked made of night in your leather jacket. I hadn’t realized just how tall you were. You told me later that you were six-five. Had I conjured you out of thin air?
“Hey.” There was a sadness in your eyes. “You’re scared of me, right?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never—”
In that moment you grabbed the back of my head and brought my lips to yours. You kissed me, and it was as if a dust-covered light bulb deep inside me went on. If I had felt skittish before, I wasn’t anymore.
I kissed you right back.
“Oh, you’re easy,” you responded with a light laugh.
I followed you to your truck, which was clean. No bits of garbage on the floor. For some reason I’d thought you would have a 4x4 Jeep, but your truck was retrofitted with an additional arm stick to take the place of your missing foot. I felt strange sitting next to you. All I could do was to look at your visage flickering in the passing lights of neon and traffic as we coasted out of the city.
I wanted to make conversation, but I was afraid of sounding too smart-alecky and scaring you away.
You smiled at me. “Hey.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen you talk with your friends at the dance, so . . .”
“Sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m tired of the radio. Tell me about yourself.”
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“Anything. We got fifty minutes left.”
That’s how I ended up telling you about my devout Catholic family. I have one sister and three brothers, who have this strange idea that all gay people are pedophiles hell-bent on fondling kids. That’s why I haven’t seen them for a long time. It’s hard because I’ve grown up with them, and when I’m honest with them, they don’t want me. Did that mean they didn’t love me enough? My mother died when I was twenty-eight. My family votes Republican because they don’t feel that gay people deserve “special rights.” Never mind the fact that we gay people simply want the same rights they have. The phrase “special rights” is pure homophobia.
You were quiet the whole time. Your eyes stayed steady on the road, and the green lights from the dashboard lit your face. With the way shadows played on your face, you looked as if you were half-ghost, half-human; you glowed radiation. In the flickering darkness I couldn’t read your face. I didn’t know what you’d thought of me. Had I said too much?
I stopped talking.
“You okay?”
“I think I said too much. Politics is such a downer anyway.”
“It’s okay. I like learning about you, and what you’ve said, I like it very much.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Go on.”
I talked about working as a barista-slash-assistant manager for what people consider a “chic” coffeehouse, but happens to be as generic and corporate as any fast food chain. Brewe Sisters is actually a Starbucks wannabe. I rattled off the popular coffee blends I make every day. I swore that it was not a joke when customers gave very specific instructions for their coffees. At first it was very confusing to keep things straight, but like anything else, repetition would make everything easy to do. I had wanted to become a writer, but having a MFA in Creative Writing doesn’t have much cred if you don’t have a lot of things published. I’d always wanted to become a poet, but no one wanted my poems. I think I got into my MFA program on the promise of my work sample and my undergraduate GPA of 4.0, but I can’t say that I’m as talented as people seem to think. Every day at the coffee shop I see people sit at the tiny tables with their laptops, and they seem to be able to write in spite of the distractions all around them. I envy them. I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but I’m too easily distracted. Plus there’s no money in literary fiction, which is what I want to do. I want to tell stories that explore what it means to be human, to be part of the world, blah blah blah. I don’t care too much for genre fiction. Not sure why. Maybe it feels so formulaic. Since I make pitiful income from my job, I borrow books from the library all the time. I say I’m a writer, but I’ve given up on writing. Just not worth it.
You said, “You don’t have to give up. You’re still young enough.”
“Oh, please. I’m forty-five.”
Then I asked you about your life.
You told me you worked in a food processing plant, prepping beets for canning. You dropped out of community college when you got a woman pregnant. You stayed married for three years, and you started having sex with guys in public restrooms. You were so scared of getting caught, but you met this guy Jeff in one of them. Turned out that he was married with kids just like you, and you two weren’t happy with your wives, so you told your wife that you met someone else. She never stopped giving you hell for the next fifteen years. You gave her full custody of your daughter, and you paid alimony and child support. You longed to see your daughter, Annie, more often, but she was basically a stranger to you until the day she came back from Houston, divorced and pregnant at thirty-one. She wept in your arms. You had to tell her that you didn’t have room for her and her kid in your small house. By then, you and Jeff had been broken up for a long time. He moved to the burbs southwest of the city, where he worked at a sewage plant. He was too heartbroken when his ex-wife remarried and moved to Florida. Of course, she took the kids with her. He hated feeling like a stranger to his kids so he too relocated there. You still hear from him time to time. You just can’t bear the idea of living too close to a city where people are rude to each other. Too noisy, too crowded, too expensive. You liked working in the plant, where you’ve been for the last thirty-seven years. Your coworkers were loyal to you. Your boss had said that your missing foot was enough grounds for dismissal due to potential safety issues, but everyone rallied around you. You just can’t imagine working anywhere else, and you’ve been saving up for your retirement. But it’s been difficult at times when a good prosthetic limb and foot could be as expensive as a new car. You talked a lot about wanting to become a woodworker in your garage once you retired.
I never thought you’d turn silent on the subject of your past after that first night.
I didn’t notice it at first, but when we made love that first night, you kept the bottom half of your right leg hidden. You hadn’t taken your jeans all the way off. When I went down on you, I rubbed my hands all over your thighs and knees, and without thinking, I moved my hands below the knees to continue rubbing the rest of your legs through the jeans. I felt jarred when I felt the brace holding your prosthetic foot. This of course hiccupped the rhythm of my cocksucking, but I averted my eyes from yours. My tongue resumed its loving. You never said a word about my tongue interruptus. Even after having orgasmed twice already together that night, I couldn’t risk asking you about your missing foot. I was afraid of breaking the trance-like atmosphere we were both in. Finally, you whispered, “We need to stop.” You smiled. “For now.”
It was so beautiful to see that light in your eyes. Do you know how rare it was to be seen with such eyes full of tenderness and warmth as in that moment? I don’t know how you’d loved the other guys in your past, but I know how special I’d felt in your arms. I made sure to sleep on your left side so that if I curled my legs around you, I wouldn’t embarrass you by reminding you of your phantom foot. Did you ever notice that?
You pulled up your jeans, went to the bathroom, and turned out the lights when you returned. I felt you pull off your jeans and your prosthetic foot. Thinking of you taking off your foot like a person taking off his shoes before going to bed was a weird concept.
In the dark you explained to me that you didn’t mind cuddling for a short period of time, but you required space for sleep. After closing my eyes and feeling the intense warmth of your body, I immediately understood why you preferred not to cuddle. You were like a furnace! You turned to your side, facing the window, and I lay on my back, glancing at your massive silhouette. I was so drained that I managed to fall asleep, even in an unfamiliar bed.
In my high school, there were two groups of smokers. The rich kids had to show how cool they were next to their shiny cars, and the ne’er-do-wells somehow had the money for cigarettes. The rich kids hung out in the parking lot, and the scrappy kids stood mostly hidden in the alley across the street from the school. The school administrators turned a blind eye though they stressed the dangers of smoking in their health ed classes.
What I remember most from those classes was how negative everything was. If you were to have sex, you had to think about condoms or you’d get someone pregnant or get AIDS. If you had to drink, you had to think about not driving. If you did marijuana, you could get arrested and worse. Not once did anyone mention that sex could be so wonderful.
Until I met my first boyfriend, I was furtive with sex, even oral sex. I was skittish, afraid that I was going to get it. He said, “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
I examined his body to my heart’s content, and I came to feel better about my own body. He gave me the confidence I needed.
Then I saw your body, and I felt like a child again. How could my body compete with the majestic sculpture that was your body? You stood tall like an equestrian statue in a park. You were a redwood tree in bas-relief. You moved slowly and surely. Didn’t matter if you were wearing a prosthetic foot or not, you were surefooted.
It’s not every day that I meet a veritable god, let alone sleep with him. I gave up on organized religion a long time ago, but until I met you, I never understood the meaning of the word “worship.” With you, I exhaled wonder.
I didn’t fall in love with you our first night together. I’d been around the block enough times to know that what we had experienced was a case of acute lust. I was afraid to hope that you’d want an encore, or that you didn’t want a relationship, or anything to do with me again. I didn’t want to jinx us.
Imagine how I felt when you asked me to stay another night. We had spent the afternoon naked in your living room. We watched an old Carole Lombard film on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I’d never seen it before. I thought she was a bit screechy in parts, but you had definitely acquired a taste for her. The other night I happened to see My Man Godfrey on TV at my house. It was the only time in my life when I laughed and cried at the same time. I wanted to be Lombard’s Irene to your Godfrey. The idea of an amputee butler hopping about serving drinks was ridiculous for he would be sure to lose a drop. But of course, you wouldn’t. You possessed more grace inherently than in any man I’d met.
I’ll always think of you as My Man James.
In the dark of night, when our bodies first became acquainted with each other, I saw the chest-wide tattoo on your back. Blue-black feathers had been artfully arranged to look like wings so that when you lifted your arms, it looked as if you were about to take flight. The fur coating your feathers made it more lifelike. Were you truly an abandoned creature not of this earth? In that moment of seeing your naked body with your massive wings and meaty ass, I felt honored to be in your presence. You’d made it clear that you didn’t see yourself as a god, but if only we could fly, the strata of puffy mist would’ve been sweet to us, buffering the hiccups of our flying in between the holy annunciations of orgasm. You wouldn’t have been ashamed of your imperfect leg; I wouldn’t be ashamed of my flat pecs and growing flab. Together we would’ve inspired hope in the hearts of those down on their luck with love.
On our last day together, although I didn’t know it then, you surprised me. Just before it was time for us to leave your house for our ride back to the city, you turned around before opening the door to the outside and pulled me into your arms. It was strange to feel the mass of your body, not naked, through the stiff layer of your leather jacket atop the clothes inside. Your hug was fierce, hard. I thought you’d squeeze the air out of me, but I didn’t resist. This was the expected moment, long overdue, when you’d admit that you loved me. “Thanks.” There was a slight tremor in your voice.
“For what?”
“I feel like such an ass sometimes. I’m not very good about thanking people.”
“I’m always thankful for every weekend with you.”
“Well.” You smiled briefly and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Should we go?”
Our conversation on the way back to my house was light, breezy. We talked about movies. Nothing heavy. It was as if we were meant to be, and this we would continue.
Just when I was about to get out of the truck in front of my house, you patted my knee. “See ya.”
I waved good-bye, and you were gone.
Until then, and not even then, at least not until you hung up on me, did I understand what it meant to miss someone, not just a first love, but someone who’d made me feel alive more than anyone else.
You I miss I miss you I miss: my heart doesn’t know how to speak coherently anymore.
That familiar feeling of anticipation steamrolls me every Friday evening, and I get sideswiped when I remember you haven’t called me to confirm.
The first few Fridays after you hung up on me I brought in my weekend bag to work, hoping that you’d change your mind at the last minute and give me a call as if nothing had happened. I kept looking out the window all day long.
I tried to read a book on those Friday nights, but I couldn’t focus. I simply had to close my eyes and have another dream conversation with you while I listened to music in the heaven of my ear buds.
I still think of you reclining on your side in the twilight between evening and dawn. I couldn’t see your face at all; just your Mount Rushmore backside. The absence of your face, always a treasure trove of clues, has made you too much of a mystery.
When you first hung up on me, I thought it was your way of saying that, if not a new guy in your life, you’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease, like cancer. You knew how hard it had been for me to watch my first boyfriend fade away into a frightening heap of splotches and joints with barely a face. Maybe you wanted the redwood tree of you to shrink back into the broken sapling you must’ve felt yourself to be. I longed to tell you that I’d do it all over again with Craig, right down to his last moment, only that I would constantly tell him how much I loved him, show him how much by holding him like the child I felt like when he was strong and healthy in loving me in the days before he became sick. I’d have done the same for you.
One night I dreamed of coasting down from the clouds above the ocean and seeing you there inside a glass coffin. I could see the nakedness of you, your arms bowed across your chest, as you looked peaceful in the sun shining. The sea around you had no horizon, and I was the lone seagull holding easily in the same spot above you, looking down on you. The winds kept me aloft as I followed your coffin bobbing gently in the waves. Hours dragged on with the sun not leaving. Ever. There was no night. Death stayed all day. The sun bored down long enough through the glass top of your coffin right at your face until your body caught fire and filled the coffin with smoke. I swooped down and tried to peck at the glass top with my beak, but I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t stay long on the coffin; the heat from the fire within was too intense for my webbed feet. I tried to propel upward onto the winds that had kept me floating easily, but the waves were gone. No wind.
I pushed off your coffin onto the water.
I tucked in my wings and floated around your coffin. I paddled back and forth. My motions were the start of a huge wave that I didn’t see coming from behind until it was too late. The tiny old me had caused a tsunami made of fury and tenderness, but I didn’t see it coming. I was that focused on the fissures of smoke seeping through the fractures of your glass coffin. The cracks splintered into tiny islands that floated away from us, glittering like fat diamonds in the sun, and then the bottom of your coffin gave way. Your body, having been embalmed with the toxins of lies and love, had melted into goo.
The most horrible darkness rose above me, and—
Something—a huge hand? a slosh of wave?—slapped my frail body hard, far, far into the distance, I was flung so quickly, so hard, it felt as if my feathers would be plucked from velocity, as the dark tall waves chilled and ice-cubed everything. Everything that the waves had touched got the loud kissquake of death and turned into the Death Valley of ice. The force of my flight was such that I sailed straight across, not down, until the globe slid underneath me and I saw the faint silhouette of a mountain—no, an island. The mountain jutted so high up in the clouds that it was easy for me to swerve my tired wings to the right and coast down to the shore. The water around the island was warm. I made myself at home under a coconut tree and went straight to sleep.
At that moment I woke up in my bed. I didn’t want to forget you. Not now, not ever.
Please don’t die. You are not something once beautiful found in an ocean. The world is full of bottled elegies waiting to be opened and heard.
Inhaling you deeply after a week of imbibing the myriad smells of coffee at work was a much-needed heaven of musk. You had worked all day, moving up and down the assembly line doing quality checks and troubleshooting; you had twenty-six people working for you. You never showered right after work when you came down to the city and picked me up, so your truck was perfumed with the Chanel No. 5 of sweat, the most sublime odor much like the fresh break of soil the morning after a night of deep rain, the kind that reminds me of moss and mushrooms, the taste of you unfiltered, unlike a cigarette, filling my nose and tongue until the aroma, pungent like men’s rooms and lusty like gyms, leaped down my esophagus and into the capillaries of my veins until my entire body became a single pump of blood coalescing into the trunk of my cocktree, glistening with the resin of desire. I groveled happily like a pig sniffing furiously for that hidden gold of truffle lost in the roots of your armpits. I swallowed your pearl-seeds deep into the lining of my stomach, a fallow field waiting to be sowed. I floated, a spore of mushroom amber whispering on the wind of your breath.
Come shade me with the beads of rain from your eyebrows. I am fungi, and you are bark. Together we will burrow roots deep into the earth and never bury our history.
When you first asked me to stay with you on weekends, I felt giddy. There had been many moments in my life after college that made me wonder if anybody wanted to date. Seriously. Didn’t matter if their profiles had said that they were looking for a long-term relationship. Guys simply don’t want to date. They say that they want to date and possibly have a LTR, but that’s just a come-on to guys who don’t sleep around. They’re fresh meat. That’s what I’d learned from online dating, which is why I don’t pay attention whenever someone says in his profile that he’s interested in dating. Not true.
Each weekend up north with you felt like some sort of test. The problem was, I never knew what kind of test I was supposed to pass.
In our first hour together in your truck, I kept looking at your dashboard-lit face. We talked like shadows skirting the halo of light.
You slowed the truck down. I hadn’t realized that we were already close to your house. The road we were on had been lonely with no traffic. Up ahead was a small white house with a sconce lamp next to the door. We got out of your truck. In the distance, I could hear an owl whooing. The stars were clear above us. The October air was crisp. “Come on,” you said.
I walked around the front of your truck, and you grabbed my arm. You pulled me close. Your tongue on my lips demanded attention. You gripped your arms around me, and I couldn’t stop roaming my hands all over your back, your firm ass. You were strong as soil, land. Everything was a crisp quiet, yet a million little sounds surrounded us. I couldn’t pinpoint anything, but they were loud. I had no idea! But I loved the feeling of muscle tensed up in your back. You had worked your body for a long, long time. Even if you seemed like a big guy with a flat belly, you had very little fat. I loved looking up into your face. Something about guys taller than me gets my engine humming happily.
Finally you panted. “Let’s get inside.”
Your house was small and well-maintained. Nothing was ever out of place. The checkered linoleum floor in the kitchen showed its age, but everything else was clean. There was a nook with a built-in table off to the side, like a booth in a diner. The gas stove was small. The lights above were fluorescent, but soon warmed up to a more pleasant glow.
You took my hand and led me straight down the hall to your bedroom. I was struck by the fact that the hallway didn’t have pictures hung on the walls. Then I saw on the wood paneling the softened scuffs from hands having touched the walls too often. In the tiny bedroom you leaned against a tall dresser for a brief moment before you took off your T-shirt. I gasped. I’d never seen such dense fur up close. I had seen many pictures of furry chests online, but nothing prepared me for the vision of you. This time I pulled you into my arms. My fingers felt alive feeling those thick strands of you weaving in and out of them. I gasped again when I felt the fur on your back. I felt as if I’d found manna. Indeed your body was the closest to heaven I’ve ever experienced here on earth.
You said, “Take off your shirt, boy.”
I cringed at being called “boy.” I know that when a man is older, the younger one is usually called “boy,” or sometimes “son.” But I wasn’t looking for a daddy. I was so boned up that I didn’t correct you. I simply pulled off my T-shirt. I was afraid that you’d find my body not to your liking.
Your hands rubbed all over my hairless back. The first time you have sex with someone can be haphazard. You don’t know yet the exact locations of his erogenous zones or what else turns him on. You two stumble blindly at times around each other in the heat of fearing that this one time together will be the only time you’ll ever have together. You find that one guy likes to have his nipples pulled up hard, and another guy can’t stand it because his nipples are too sensitive. And so on. I find that the second and third times with the same guy are always better. I know to zero right in on what turns him on. It’s great having sex with the same guy over and over again.
I remember thinking the same thought about you when our hands and tongues and mouths and bodies fell into contact. We were magnets that couldn’t be pulled apart. Don’t you remember that? I do. My body still does.
Allow me to stand here in the Great Hall of Soldiers, graced with marble and memory, if you will please, kind sir, so I may swear my oath of loyalty to you before all.
Let me be your soldier of love.
Let my hands visit the landmarks of pain embedded in your body.
Let them drill deep for the crude oil of release and relief so that you will see only gold in your feelings.
Let them map the land mines of self-control hidden in your body so you can trip them safely without losing another foot.
Let them operate on your wounded heart and let the steady drip of blood from my heart transfuse and blend into yours.
Let me be your liberator.
Let the war inside you be over. It’s gone on for too long. When love’s the object of war, no one wins. The prize is only a country of hurt.
Let me prove my undying allegiance to the most magnificent country of you.
When I was a kid, I loved looking out on the snow-swept fields at night. The moon gave them a cool glow, and if I squinted just so, I could see diamonds littering the white dunes. The trees were black as silhouettes. No fine details anywhere. They had been deadened, broad-stroked into iconic symbols.
After you hung up on me, I thought of you wearing a long cape that flowed behind you in the subzero winds. Your beard was as long as a wedding dress train, and it was beautiful to behold. It shifted shape like a cat’s tail, yet not as slender. It caught the wind of your emotions as you plodded with your crutches. It wasn’t clear where you were headed, and I couldn’t see your face from such a far distance. You were moving slowly, yet far more quickly. Maybe my dreaming had a way of speeding things up, much like how movies use jump cuts to convey time gone past. I didn’t know why you were out there in the fields; only that you had to be out there.
I loved the moon, but even it didn’t illuminate why you hung up. It had a face much like yours, full of gray silences, startling brightnesses punctuated without warning. I wanted to call out to you, to insist that you come to my place where a fire could thaw your bones, but you’d turned your back against me. You’d turned yourself into a shadow as black as tar.
That hurt. I’d mourned for a lost love before, and I knew I didn’t have the strength to mourn again. Not while you were still alive, not while you’d told me you’d passed all the necessary tests.
“Me too.”
You patted my knee in your car that first night I came to your house. Looking back, I realize you must’ve lost a large number of friends. You were of that generation who’d heard the phrase “He’s dead now” one time too many. You never told me about them, but I didn’t need to ask.
Guys my age have had so little direct experience with friends dying from AIDS, and I saw the crow’s feet around your eyes. You’d alluded to having been out for a long time, having visited the city many times over the years, and trying out one relationship after another, all of which lasted a few months each. Your past was gauzy, full of whispers slipping through the sealed cracks of your house. The whispers tiptoed on cat’s feet made of wind chill, suggesting inchoate stories of no beginning, middle, or end. You’d loved, and they’d died, and you’d decided to try again.
So was the endless cycle, the winding road you’d chosen to take.
In the static electricity of your silences, I found myself remembering the many ways we’d made love. I know you’d react negatively to my phrase “made love,” but there is no better description of how you handled me. At first we were rough and aggressive; almost angry with each other, yet we weren’t. Don’t you remember? You’d said that I was the best fuck of your life. You kept wiping the sweat off your brow.
You too were the best fuck of my life.
Even though you were in your fifties, I was agog at your physical perfection. Here were the perfectly rounded pecs, aswirl with fur with each nipple perking up like a cherry topping a sundae. Here was the belly, an atlas of endless pleasure when I rubbed my face across its sea of fur and when I saw your stomach muscles knot each time you thrust harder into me. Here were the tree trunks of your thighs holding you up like the redwood you were when you towered above me, gripping the branches of my sapling body. Here were the mountainous ridges of your shoulders, bristled with fur that stood firm even when I held onto them. Here was your neck, strong as a horse galloping across field, and it took all my might to hang on when you shifted speed, tempo, angle. Here was your for ested beard, seasoning mine with salt and pepper as you rubbed it against me, until I felt properly roasted. Here was your tongue, long as a fishing pole darting so sharply for the trout of my tongue, hooking me, reeling me closer down your throat was the sweetest bait I’d ever known. Here was your nose, the chunk of marble that’s given many a sculptor the hardest time when hacking away, and yet shiny and smooth when my nose caressed yours. But more than anything else, I saw the entire universe open up in the telescope of your galaxy eyes. You were the moon, the stars, the cosmos. I was sucked into your black hole of need, and I didn’t need a theory to explain why I was here on this lonely planet.
When, then, did you decide I didn’t exist in your cosmos? Were you indeed full of ego like Zeus, the Greek god who hadn’t yet learned the errors of his ways? The problem with being a god is the loneliness of being at the top. The universe is full of ghosts whose names and stories we will never uncover no matter how rigorously we make scientific and technological advancements. No matter how we may delude ourselves, we will never be superheroes.
Sometimes, when I feel that intense ache for you, the kind that just about claws my heart into splinters, I pull up the pillows and wrap them in a fleece blanket so they turn into a big mass, something like your wide back that I can lean against while I sleep. I imagine the soft fleece to be the same thing as your furry back, but it’s missing the rise and drop of your breathing.
I felt like a child next to you.
Now I feel orphaned.
My heart is all ashes. One puff of air, and I’m gone.
Winter nights up north fill the darkest of hours, the most urgent of needs. If I don’t move for the first ten minutes inside my bed, the heavy blankets will collect the heat from my body like gold and spread it all around. I might feel a little nip in the air as I sleep, but my body will feel heavenly.
Yet with you, I’ve turned cold as a corpse. I have forgotten to dream.
I am a blank sheet of ice.
Shorn of the frillery of dreams, I am immaculate. No bumps or bubbles anywhere.
You can skate across me and know that I would never crack. You can crisscross and make figure eights. You could scratch scars all across my face so the rivulets of my tears from joy would line them. I am an atlas in parched hunger, a footnote in ache.
Mornings when I awake, I still feel rapturous. The air is cold, but the dreams that blanket me keep me warm as I tiptoe on the chilly floor to the bathroom for a quick piss before I turn on the hot water for my shower.
I still think of that moment when I caught you naked, your right shin dangling. The memory of tasting the most private part of you is what has kept me warm with wonder.