Floyd Harbor. Joel Mowdy
tinted windows. Her dress was flimsy black. Her pale cheeks were colored with blush. She never wore blush.
I found a job at a Greek restaurant after Shelly dumped me. Craig, the manager, was in his thirties. On Sunday nights, after closing, when the boss left, Craig and I sat at the bar and had a few drinks. Conversations turned to sex if they went on long enough. I told him that Shelly had been a virgin and I’d had to be patient with her, but she came around eventually, opened to me, even asked me to spank her a few times. He told me about his lady (that’s what he called her) and how he’d watched her jerk off a stranger in a dark corner at a nightclub.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” Craig said one night. “The ass is full of nerve endings. It’s supposed to feel good. The toughest guy will admit that taking a shit feels good. It doesn’t mean he’s gay, just human. What’s wrong with a finger? What’s wrong with two fingers if it feels good?”
I nodded, sipped my beer. The top three buttons of his shirt had come undone over the last three drinks. The lights above the bar were dim and the liquor bottles glowed like church windows at sunset.
Craig fixed his eyes on me, leaned in a little. “I’m not ashamed to say that. Play with my prostate. Massage my anus.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. I remembered when Shelly started loosening up in the bedroom, finally touched my balls, and before long I could talk her into grabbing anything—her hairbrush—and pushing the handle against my ass just as I was about to come. When she did this, I could imagine a hard penis pushing against me—an organ detached from anything human, like a rubber dildo, yet at the same time having the human capability to take pleasure in me offering myself to it.
Craig said, “Do you need to label yourself just because something feels good?”
“No.” And right then, I knew what would happen. “If it feels good, just go with it.”
His face was relaxed, his mouth slightly open. I could see his tongue pushing against the back of his teeth.
In the daytime, I sliced strips off a thick tube of gyro meat. First, I would slide a poker into the cylinder-shaped meat, and then it went into this vertical rotisserie that sent waves of heat into my face as I worked the knife along the side, shaving quarter-inch-thick lengths from the top to the bottom. Juice dripped from the meat and collected into a puddle at the base of the rotisserie. I jerked the knife back and forth. Back and forth. It was sweaty work.
If I had the chance, I would step out the back door to cool off, stick my hands in the snow if there was any around.
I met James in the bathroom of our second-floor dorm that December, a few weeks before I quit my job at the restaurant. I was back from work and had just finished showering. When I opened the curtain to the stall, James was lying on the floor. He had an openmouthed smile and his head slowly moved from side to side, his long hair fanned out behind him. I’d seen him before on those restless nights when I’d pace in my room, smoking cigarettes, writing crappy love sonnets on a whiteboard with my red dry-erase marker, counting the syllables with my fingers. I had a habit of peering through the spyglass on the door whenever I walked by it, as if I was expecting to see something in the hallway.
Something to take me away.
A few times, way past two in the morning, I saw James unlock his door.
Lying on the bathroom tiles, he said, “Hey, you live on this floor.”
He smelled like wet cigarettes and beer, a hint of cologne. I stood in the shower stall in my towel, my hand still on the open curtain. “Yeah,” I said, “I live in two-sixteen. You live in two-thirteen.”
“Yeah,” he said, still smiling and almost laughing to himself. “Dude, you should come out some night.”
“Yeah, I will. Sure. Sometime.” I stepped over him and walked out of the bathroom, not yet knowing his name.
I saw him again the next day, Saturday. I was tired of my job. I called in sick and figured I would get some reading done for psychology. I had to leave my room to do this. When I stayed in my room for too long I turned into a mad poet, my detachment from Shelly spilling out ugly onto my whiteboard.
James called from beyond the door. “Dude from the shower, come out tonight.”
I didn’t think he would remember. “Hey,” I said through the door, “listen, I’m flat broke, man. I get paid every other Friday, so if you catch me next Friday—”
“Don’t be a shit-head. Come out. We don’t need money.”
I didn’t see Craig again after I quit the restaurant. James would call or stop by my dorm room to see if I wanted to play the game. Mostly I was good to go, but sometimes I just didn’t feel like kissing up to some dog. I wanted someone to kiss up to me. I wanted to do something I wasn’t supposed to do, just for a night, and then I’d be good for weeks.
I hit the Bunkhouse. I could feel the men looking at me: skinny boy-faced men in their silver V-neck shirts, queens, bashful young ones out looking for the first time. There were always the guys looking for love, dressed in a polo shirt or knitted sweater; these men were tired of the scene. They had disillusionment stamped in their faces. They complained into their drinks that all anyone wanted was a random fuck. I stayed clear of them.
An older man in an expensive suit sat at the bar, nodding his head to the music and scanning the crowd. A gold watch peeked out from under the cuff of his jacket. He was a vulture, looking to impress a stringy-muscled boy—any one of them—as they came off the dance floor to wedge between the barstools for a drink. The boys were like me, except I wasn’t going to end up someone’s bitch. The suit could buy me all the drinks he wanted, but I was more like him than some gold-digging pretty boy.
My summer with Oryn started out like this: a lingering glance, a smile, a casual trip to his car in the parking lot. It was near the end of my junior year, and I had withdrawn from all my classes—dropped out, according to the school. I had no plans, no job. I had nowhere to go except home, and who wants to go there, admitting defeat? I sold my stereo and my computer and spent most nights crashing in James’s dorm room, where I kept my stuff in bags on the floor of his closet. Some weekend nights I’d go home with some butter face, or I’d make it down to the Bunkhouse and hook up, spend a night in a motel room at someone else’s expense. But the semester was coming to an end, and James’s dorm room wasn’t going to be an option anymore.
“Do you want to go to my apartment?” Oryn said as we left the Bunkhouse.
I thought about it on the short walk to his car. Waking up next to a man in his apartment: what was that like?
“I live in Astoria, but I can give you money to take the train home in the morning. I can drive you home in the morning.”
I spent the night, the next night, and came back a week later because Oryn had tickets to Porno for Pyros at Roseland. My things moved from James’s dorm room to Oryn’s apartment. Soon there was an empty drawer for my underwear.
I imagined the other clients dreamed about the beach while lying in their tanning beds, wearing Speedos or nothing and those little eye protectors while bright heat emitted from bulbs inches from their skin, but I saw only black with flashes of white, like a freshly paved wet parking lot, its shallow puddles reflecting light from a streetlamp, or a girl in black in the same desolate parking lot, her skin and her string of pearls standing out in the darkness.
After twenty minutes, my skin felt tight. I stepped out and looked back at the bed. I could imagine myself lying inside, even rotating while my body turned gold to match the color of my dyed yellow hair. The thought made me dizzy. Back at the apartment, all was quiet except for the humming of the air conditioner. This belonged to me until Oryn came home. I stripped and lay on the cool white sofa, my sweat drying to my skin. Oryn would find me sleeping there when he came home from work, the result of his romantic gestures blond and broiled.
According to Shelly, I had been romantic twice. The first time was on our