Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler
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for his friends.”
“I remembered him from the football game. He’s really nice.”
“Did he see you shopping?”
“No. I saw him so I said hi.”
“That’s very nice of you, and nice of Hank to invite you along to the bar.”
“He didn’t invite me.”
“That’s not just Guinness, you know,” Hank pointed out, thinking I cared about the beer, “that’s a Guinness triple-X. This bar’s terrific. I haven’t seen triple-X since Hattie and I took Noah to Dublin for the horse races.”
“He didn’t invite you?”
“I told him I was supposed to meet you, and he said you were in the bar.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” Hank asked rhetorically, taking the boy’s beer and lifting it up to my face. “Just look at that foam, thick enough to raise kids on. You could build a house with that foam.”
“It’s remarkable, Hank.” Turning to the boy: “Is that what you told your parents?”
“Oh, no way.” Dogan dismissed this lunacy. “They didn’t see you. I told them I ran into a friend from soccer camp who was staying at the hotel. They think I’m staying overnight with him. They don’t care.”
“You don’t mind if Herbert tries it, do you? Go ahead, Herbie, after a sip of the scotch it’s a real high-class boilermaker.” Herbert sniffed the stein suspiciously and then tried it. I was surprised he seemed to like it.
“Tastes kind of like oatmeal, Hank. I mean with dirt and alcohol in it. That’s very nice, a very fine beer.”
“Well, that was kind of dumb,” I whispered to Dogan. “Now you can’t go home, plus there’s no ‘friend’ here to stay with.”
The boy rolled his eyes, then just looked at me.
So that now, to the delight of many of you and the horror of some, Dogan and I are going to spend the whole night together in the same bed (my bed, by the ill-paned window at home) for the last time, and in some detail. We’ll have unskilled, enthusiastic sex, minimal but valued conversation, and a snack at what was probably three in the morning. Those of you who can’t stomach any more of this sort of thing can skip ahead to Chapter 3, where the narrative resumes.
We shared a taxi home, Herbert, Dogan, and I. The boy insisted I make a ruse to Herbert about some book I was lending him, which I did, halfheartedly, and which sweet Herbert led the boy to believe he believed and also found unremarkable (“Oh, he mentioned that book to me just yesterday, didn’t you now, and how it must be lent soon; how convenient for everyone; I hope I don’t miss the eleven o’clock news”). Since the narrative hounds have all skipped forward anyway, I’ll just dispense with the clumsy linkages and survey some of the highlights of that night.
The slight weight of Dogan’s hand on my shoulder when we leaned in the doorway, worrying the lock open. The fact that he let the same hand drift along my back when the lock slid shut and we walked in. The ease with which he stood and peed and talked to me while peeing, and that I heard him through a bathroom door he hadn’t bothered to close. The vista in the dark. Him still fiddling with the buttons of his fly when he came out. Dogan—I don’t think I mentioned he was 5 feet 8 inches or so (two or three inches shorter than I), with a lanky floppiness that wobbled between puppy dog and deer, that his messy hair was fine and dark brown, that his eyes were large and deep beneath a single brow, or that he habitually kept his lips slightly parted as if about to speak—looking out the window at the city’s nighttime profile, then flopping back on the bed as if he lived in it. The elegance of his prone posture, like a poorly drawn swastika or a spinning ninja weapon that had tired and fallen in the midst of its long trajectory. These words: “Use both your hands.” Because we’d only ever had sex before in a nervous hurry, how he lay on the bed talking to me not undressing or rushing himself at all. I didn’t know what he thought, but I thought there were ruses ahead, long conversations or fidgeting, feints toward the couch or a sleeping bag, when in fact he lay down on the bed because he was there to sleep with me. I sat down so my hip touched his, and I let my hand drift onto his leg. “Use both your hands,” was his final instruction.
The spring of his puckered fly, when both my hands got there after traveling the length of the inseamed thighs. That he watched and smiled. His long arms fiddling against the window glass behind his head while he reclined. The crushed and folded paperback (Rousseau’s Émile) stuck underneath him, produced only after five or ten minutes when the arching of his back to push a tremulous and exposed organ deeper into my mouth made it convenient, I suppose, to grab the book and toss it to the floor. At this point he was just a long baggy bundle of soft clothes with an engorged penis protruding from the middle; I had my shirt partly undone—hardly the picture of romance. There was traffic outside, honks and the late-night blatting of taxis, periodic bus roars, and the drunken chatter of partygoers returning home. The railroad tower became especially interesting for a protracted minute or two that is difficult to account for. I simply lost my focus on the great slobbery organ for a stretch. It had slipped from my mouth again and, poking haphazardly, had found my eye socket and brow so that I pulled it aside in one hand, still enjoying its remarkable heat in my fist, and stared across Dogan’s pulled up shirt and long arms (drawn back behind his head) at the beautiful lighted masquerade of the window-framed city. The railroad tower, as I said, looked especially homely and real amidst the delicious fakery. It appeared, just then, to have an actual history and function. I wobbled the boy’s organ like a joystick, absent-mindedly, then saw him in the dark, staring out from the hutch of his baggy shirt like a rabbit in the nighttime forest. I kissed the head of his cock, then pushed it down flat against his belly, where I smushed it for a while. He groaned some, thrusting like an infant trying to reach the taut nipple, only not leading with his face: thrust, groan, thrust-thrust, groan, which was endearing, so I petted him like a dog. He turned on his side, and this petulance aggravated me. Rolling him over I pulled at his clothes without explanation, dragging the unbuttoned jeans and boxers sharply down to his shapely ankles and slipping the baggy shirt over his head so that he was all just flesh and startled as I rolled my hairy head all over him and began kneading his body with both great grabbing hands like a panicked shopper unleashed in the midst of a monetary collapse. This was quite unlike our usual furtive blow jobs. He took to it like a boy to wrestling, tore my shirt, and tugged my trousers down, all the while smushing himself in acrobatic variations on and against me and whatever else got drawn into the maelstrom: pillows, sheets, clothing, and the like. His breathing became furious and uncontrolled, his brow and back wet with sweat, until, flopping me down against the twisted bedding and straddling my hips to drive his soccer-drenched open-air thighs and slobbery organ over my tummy, he let out a great fart. We both stopped, and then he laughed. I really shouldn’t include this with the highlights at all, but it provides such a nice contrast to the idealized Dogan I’ve tried to preserve. Other contrasts: his chaste pucker when I whispered, “Can we kiss?” I don’t know if he had never kissed with an open mouth, or if mine offended him, but his closed eyes and pert, expectant lips endeared him to me. I pecked his cheek and whispered “there.” My alarm when, while rolling in our romp, I found myself on top of him, impressing the enormity of my body on the true prematurity of his; Dogan wasn’t merely lithe or gangly or slim, he was a little boy, a nervous, pulsing envelope of flesh and growing bones whose sexual development had rushed in advance of the rest of him so that this great, potent organ was appended to the birdlike frame of a tall twelve-year-old (by the calendar he was fifteen). I had to hold myself slightly off the mattress with a well-placed elbow or two to avoid crushing him.
Our conversation, after our last shared orgasm, lying now in the manner of spoons, Dogan in front, me behind, the boy dressed in hastily found boxers and T-shirt, me in nothing, while outside the window the city was mostly silent and dark:
“Are you really working at a museum?”
“Yes.” (Would I ever stop lying to him?)
“Do you have to? I mean, I thought the school gave you pay even though you had to leave and everything.”