Lawnboy (12 page)

It certainly didn’t seem like William’s kind of party.

The line inched forward. We stood at a table where two men sat in nothing but their jockey shorts beneath a hand-printed sign: SUGGESTED DONATION: $10.

I turned back to William. “You mean we have to
pay?
”

“Quiet,” he said, passing a ten-dollar bill into my hand.

“And who’s this?” said one of the men to William. He was talking about me. He smiled. In different circumstances I’d have liked his chiseled chest, his lacquered Caesar haircut, shorn on the sides, but now, for whatever reason, he reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster.

“Where do we go?” William said, unnerved.

“Around the corner, to the right. You can check your clothes in there.”

I blinked repeatedly, not yet processing these instructions. I followed William down the hall, and, to my left, I saw it: a great room, perhaps forty feet long, its concrete floor covered with a plastic tarp, on which a hundred men of all ages, races, and levels of attractiveness, were clumped in threes and fours, standing in their perfect underwear and Doc Martens, leaning into each other, jerking off.

I stood there for a minute, intrigued and repelled at once. The participants were suffused with a crimson otherworldly light. A vision of terror and beauty. A J-O party, of course. What, then, were William and I doing here?

“Are you okay with this?” he asked. He seemed more than a little bewildered.

My brow tightened. I didn’t know how I felt. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought it would be a surprise. I thought you’d get a kick out of the surprise.”

I shook my head, a numbing sensation between my brows. My head itched. I followed him down the hall. We took off our clothes, shoved them inside numbered Winn-Dixie bags, and handed them over to the clothes check, a sweet geeky fellow who might have spent his days as a programmer. I imagined the flashing beeper on his belt, summoning him to fix the bug on some trust-accounting system so the dividends could get posted by day’s end.

We walked back to the big room and observed, like an audience at some Roman bacchanalia. It wasn’t what you’d think, though. A lot of it was just plain dull. I got the feeling that most of the guys liked the
notion
of the spectacle more than anything else, longing for intensity and pleasure, hoping to confront, then push past the boundaries of shame. Did they leave feeling empty, unsatisfied, going home by themselves, more solitary than ever before?

Around us “Rude Thing” spun out from the speakers, the longest dance track in history.

“There’s Cleve,” William said.

I watched Cleve, a randy, bespectacled thing with an amazing physique for someone of his age, fooling around with a kid twenty years his junior. At one point he glanced toward us, and—to our discomfort—waved. At once the cracks in his armor asserted themselves. I saw how Cleve had grown up thinking he was unattractive, knowing that his opportunities for sex were limited by his essential homeliness. I saw how his first visits to the gym at thirty had literally changed his life, how with the simple repetition of a few free-weight exercises four times a week, he could transform himself into the man he’d always wanted. I saw how his fooling around with the young muscled boy in these circumstances was all meant for display, not fun, how it was ultimately about declaring his status:
Hey, boys, look what I got. I’m not worthless anymore.

I wanted to relax into the situation, but I couldn’t stop stepping out of it, couldn’t put to sleep the critical apparatus—a necessary condition if I were to have a decent time. But already I saw myself fifty years in the future, telling younger people about what was transpiring before me: This is what we did to amuse each other, to kept ourselves from going crazy in the age of AIDS.

Not ten seconds later, a middle-aged man—a leather-daddy type—walked up to me with a posed, stern expression on his face. I felt a twinge of erotic feeling, a pleasant discomfort, though I couldn’t get beyond the fact that William was standing beside me, territorial, possessive. I couldn’t get into this. I held up my right hand.

The guy nodded, walked away, moving on to someone more willing.

“Creepy,” William said, his eyes fixed to the guy’s thin white waist.

I shrugged. “He wasn’t so bad.”

“You’re kidding.”

I dulled the expression on my face. On some profound level, I’d wanted to provoke something akin to jealousy, though I couldn’t say why. The air vibrated between us. I looked over at William, his grim, hopeless face, his pale, pockmarked back, and imagined him tasting flavorless in my mouth. Above our heads, a poster: Five Easy Steps to Safer Sex. I still didn’t know what we were doing here.

“Now that’s cute,” William said, pointing to a kid across the room.

William kept staring at him with an intensity that seemed forced, inappropriate. I didn’t see what was so great about him, but I kept quiet, trying to make sense of his interest. Maybe it was only because he looked like me, and I liked men who were older, butcher, who’d been around the block a bit. I’d have taken the leather daddy over the kid any day, but again, I kept my mouth shut. Soon enough, William’s stare had drawn the kid toward us—a calf to a block of salt.

“Howdy,” he said, quizzical.

I smiled, in welcome. Something hooked into my stomach. He stepped closer to the kid, then, to my confusion, stepped backward, disengaging himself. He nodded toward me, as if in collusion. What was going on here?

The kid leaned into me, kissed me ripely with his full red lips. His tongue was scratchy and sweet as he reached up, rubbing the knots from my shoulders. It felt good, unbearably good, but I couldn’t get into it—at least not with William standing there. The hook snagged deeper into my stomach lining. Was I going to be sick? I realized then that William didn’t want to participate, that he only wanted to watch, and that was the sole purpose for bringing me here.

“I can’t get into this,” I said, and pulled back from the kid. “I’m sorry.”

Both William and the kid looked at each other. The kid’s eyes seemed hurt and alarmed.

“I’m getting dressed,” I said, and hurried toward the clothes check.

“I thought you’d be happy,” he called out after me. His footsteps were brisk down the hall. “I did it for you.”

“Well, thanks,” I muttered to myself.

“Huh?”

“Fucking clueless.”

“Fucking what?”

“Fucking me.”

We sat in the front seat of the car without speaking. My back teeth ached to their roots. I felt something deeper than rage, a blank, zeroed-out place, a null set. I couldn’t find my foothold, for everything was rocking now, spinning too fast.

I went straight to bed. For whatever reason, I pulled out the obituary of Todd, which I’d kept inside the night table, and started reading it to myself. William stepped into the room, glowering, wounded.

“Are you still reading that?” he whispered.

They were the first words we’d exchanged in close to an hour.

“Yes, I’m still reading that. What’s it matter to you?”

He shook out a pillowcase he’d unfolded. He wagged his head. “This isn’t healthy. This feels inflated.”

“He was twenty years old!” I yelled.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything,”
I said.

He worked the case over the pillow. “
Fine.
Just don’t expect me to participate.” Then he crawled into bed, switched off the lamp, casting the room in darkness.

The burning crept higher in my stomach. My mind started wandering. I thought about the fact that he hadn’t encouraged me to work, hadn’t encouraged me to contact all those schools that had once accepted me. Or to make friends, for that matter. My thoughts were all over the place, scattered, as if hammered around the edges. What was I doing here?

“What am I doing here?” I said, repeating my thought aloud.

“Immature,” he muttered, staring at the ceiling. “Don’t be so fucking immature.”

“What?”

“You heard what I said.”

He’d hit bottom—a declaration that insisted only upon his age, his power over me. Something against which I couldn’t stand up. “At least I’m not shut down,” I said after a few minutes. “At least I’ve given myself permission to be affected by things.”

“La tee da,” he said.

Fine,
I thought. Take the last word. You don’t know how to fight anyway. Or I don’t. Our gestures said it all: this wasn’t working out. I decided that minute: it was over, kaput. Fine.

***

I waited three days. I picked a morning on which the sun wasn’t too hot and the wind was calm, a light southeast breeze pushing the fried leaves across the lawn. The weather was good. We might have been someplace ghastly, beautiful like Barbados, Antigua—islands to which I’d never been, but had imagined as real. I drove William to work, taking the long route on the bay front, past the mirrored towers and the marinas, actually feeling comfortable in his company. How civil we were, how amiable—no allusions to what had been happening in the last few weeks. Any bystander would have thought that there was nothing lethal between us. We were perfect for each other, no? I’d given him not one inkling of what I’d worked out, which buzzed me and prodded, slapped me high about the head as if I were stealing something expensive—a watch or a jewel.

I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I cleaned the sinks and the showers, the oven and the baseboards, the tile grout, the exhaust fan, the medicine chest. Then I went to work on the garage. I could have been Astrid Muth, my mother’s fanatical, desperate friend, who cared for her yard with such scrutiny that she literally probed through her flower beds in order to stop the weeds before they’d sprouted. I got it now. I was something like Astrid. After an entire afternoon, only two hours before I was to pick William up at the station, I set to work on my backpack. As I wanted to travel light, I didn’t pack much. Some T-shirts, a pair of jeans, shorts, underwear, jacket, sweater, flashlight. The rest of it? The truth was I didn’t need anything more than that.

I walked into the den, the room in which I’d been scheduled to sleep on the day of my arrival. What had I been thinking? I stared at the rusted pipe on the floor. The water murmured. And all at once a scorpion pulled itself out of the neck, nearly translucent, creeping over the rusted rim.

I paused once before the front door, patting the Dobermans twice, three times upon the head. “You be good to Daddy, now. Will you miss me?” I spoke aloud to the empty white walls. The house was still, unbearably still, yet starting to turn. “You really weren’t a bad guy,” I said. “Son of a bitch.” And then I left.

They huddled beneath a lone palm in their bright yellow jackets. I walked faster. Something twinged my shoulder blade. I had to tell myself that the simple fact of my appearance was not the prime reason for their gathering, that they didn’t exist to taunt, to yell
faggot
to any lone boy who happened to walk through the field. Clearly, I said to myself. See clearly. They were simply conferring, talking about tonight’s football game. Nothing wrong with that. Paranoia. Residue, it seemed, from an earlier time.

I walked along the treeline. My sneakers caked with marl. It took all of three hours for me to start asking myself why I left. He wasn’t the worst of partners. He wasn’t condescending or surly; he wasn’t unctuous, lunkheaded, dishonest, or cheap. His breath was fresh, pleasant; he smelled good—lavender and sea salt, a surprising mix. Each Wednesday night, as part of his weekly caretaking ritual, he tweezed the hairs from his earlobes, back, and shoulder blades, leaving behind a trail of fibers, like carpet threads, all over the bathroom tile.

It occurred to me that I had hurt someone.

Sometimes in passing moments I still wonder what he might have thought when he finally returned that night from work, having taken a cab home from the station, only to see the car lolling in the driveway. Was my absence in the house instantly palpable? Or had he dropped into his favorite chair, switched on the lamp, called out
Evan
—only to realize minutes later that I had really gone? Was he angry or wounded, searching urgently for a note, an explanation that would never surface? Or did he feel a certain satisfaction, a smugness about it all? Could he have said to himself:
He will be back?

He really wasn’t a bad guy.

I found the pipe at the end of the path. The scrub had thickened since I’d last been out here, denser since the brushfire, but I appreciated that, knowing I’d be sheltered, safe. Vapor trails stitched across the sky. I eased down into the pipe feet first, pulling myself across its floor, its cylinder surprisingly warm, dry, cocooning. I fumbled for my shirt and balled it behind my head. I had no good reason to feel this good. It was hard to believe that so few people had ever known the humble pleasures of sleeping outside.

The sky went dark. In the distance I heard the boys, more ominous now, their war cries coiling up into the trees. They were starting a fire. Laugh it off, I told myself. Means shit. And then I fell asleep, not waking up until a full night later, when I sat up, feeling a seepage of water on my shirt.

***

I started walking. I stored my backpack up inside a rotted palm—“Old Merv,” I called it—freeing me up to go anywhere. Coral Gables, Westwood Lakes, Medley, Aladdin City, Cutler Ridge, Coconut Grove—I walked through half the towns of the county, over dams and drainage ditches, past service stations trembling with orange strips of neon, jogging, then running, then jogging again. A chevron of sweat dripped through my shirt. A white ecstatic granule vibrated inside my head, and I wanted to aim myself into that place, to break through its crust and explode it, to
be
that—that calmness and void, that place without movement.