This place doesn't look real. It's a Lego model. A replica of a real place. Only with all the life siphoned out of it. A red-brick University out in the sticks. A no-place that doesn't exist. There are two guys here to meet me. One, his beard an act of domestic terrorism. The other grabs my attention more forcefully.
'Hi – WOW! This is totally amazing for me. It's you! It's really YOU! Allen Gilgamesh. Can I just say how much I admire your stuff...? You're like, totally a god to me. Call me Sugarfoot, they all do.'
It's not so much the two pink button-badges he flaunts – 'GLAD TO BE GAY' and 'JESUS LUVZ QUEERZ', more the fact that he's wearing Superman 'y'-fronts over his tight stone-washed pre-stressed jeans. His eyes half-closed and sleepy-looking. They escort me to the English-Lit faculty venue. One on either side of me.
'It's not the big lecture theatre' admits face-foliage apologetically. 'Not enough response. But the annexe is better for the bar, which is good, right?'
'Right.'
He gets me a drink. There's a scattering of people. Some posters. The reading goes fine. Terrorist-beard gives me an over-the-top talk-up which I strive, inadequately to match. I attempt some humour. Try a couple of new poems, which I think are pretty good. It's cool to know nothing. Riff through extracts from recent collections. But they're not really going for it. I know what they want. What they always want. The Rolling Stones got "Satisfaction". I've got "Yell", a poem both trashy and profound at once. Recording meditations and instants snatched from a more radical phase of my life. An evolution of the Gay species, opening with the primal 'Big Bang' detonation and closing with the entropy heat-death of the universe. Of course, the scandal didn't hurt. The high-profile obscenity trial, the defence lawyer calling eminent literary figures to pontificate on the worth of my slim black-and-white 'City Nights' collection. It's my legend. My pot-shot at posterity.
Now I know better how poems should breathe in and out, with iambic phrase-bugs chasing each other. How to adjust and modulate, putting more sound in my voice for emphasis at the correct stress-points. Splashing through couplets like puddles. This is my 'Un chant d'amour'. Experimental...? Naw – leave that to the Large Hadron Collider. And although the words still glister, after so many repetitions they're only words after all, words that mangle out into gobbledegook. That's all. Me – and the Stones, neither of us can get away without doing our greatest hit. Although I can't get no satisfaction from doing "Yell" on auto-pilot yet again. Although I do. Once it meant something. Once it meant a lot. That was a long time ago.
Afterwards, I hang around. To light-finger some books from the stand. A ballpoint pen. A pair of tweezers. Stretching time. Now face-foliage is occupied elsewhere. And I'm sat on a not-very-comfortable plastic chair with my legs crossed and my eyes half-closed, trying to look as though I'm not looking anywhere in particular, as if I'm doing nothing more demanding than... say, waiting for a bus. I mean, what am I actually waiting for? What do I expect to happen? But Sugarfoot zones in.
'Like, WOW man, that was incredible! A total blast. I mean – you, you're like everything I aspire to. You know that...? It's true. You've been a part of everything. You were there at the beginning. You're an integral part of Gay history, man. And I can't believe I'm here with you. WOW, you should know that I'm your greatest fan.'
Yes, me with the grizzled antennae-hair, thinning on dome-top, the round wire-rim spectacles, the bulging gut overhang. Until he gestures it's over and we're to go...
'Er, we go straight down here. Then up the stairs. We got overnight for you. Not too much. Not what you deserve.' Talking as we walk. 'Who is the significant other that "Yell" is dedicated to? Pray tell me.'
'Can't. I'm pledged never to reveal.'
'Is it a name I'd recognise?'
Ha, that's the tease. And it's a good string-along that's kept lit-crits chuntering away for two decades. You feed them teasing hints every touch and turn. Just to keep it bubbling. I wonder if he knows? I wonder if he's even read it? We did that mutual exploration thing when we were marginally younger than Sugarfoot is now, Neal and me both eighteen, with blazing urgency in our pants and nowhere else to take it. And it was so sweet. The fumblings and feeling-up, the rubbing and tossing-off, the tentative sucking and spurting. A confusion of inexorable gravities that draws us into each other's straining groins. But then things get complicated. To him, I guess, we are just friends. Friends who do stuff together. To me, it was more, and increasingly it's me doing all the pleasuring, him letting me do it. Then Neal meets her. They get close. They get married. She makes it subtly obvious she doesn't approve of me. Like she sees me as some kind of rival. And maybe I am. Because when she's not around, old habits resume. And I'm giving him head. She won't do it, she says it's one thing she can never bring herself to do, although for the life of me I could never understand why anyone would not want to suck so beautiful a cock. The great thing about being male is that you get to have erections. Just how wonderful is that? The great thing about guy-on-guy sex is that you get to share someone else's erection, which is even better, it provides a contact-high that multiplies the buzz. So I never miss an opportunity.
Until that day we're upstairs in their bedroom and he has his pants down and I've got seven inches of his stiff cock pulsing in my excited mouth (I know its dimensions, we've done all the mutual measuring comparisons, he's bigger than me, but it seems appropriate), and she returns unexpectedly, walks in on us, catches us in the act just as he's on the point of orgasm. She goes hysterical, accusing him of all manner of nastiness. Treating me like shit. He's pleading and comforting her. I'm stood there, caught up in it. He phones me later. His voice strained and a little hoarse. She's laid down terms and conditions. If they're to stay together it's only if I exit forever. What can I do? It's that angry bitterness, that raging frustration that fuels "Yell", not all the other political stuff. It's that helpless howl of pain against cruel fate. I've never seen Neal since, but I've kept the faith. I wonder if he knows how much that separation hurts? I wonder if he's even read the poem it inspired...?
Sugarfoot walks beside me. I try to nod and grunt at appropriate places. Not that it's necessary. He does all the talking.
'You were there on the frontline of Gay Rights. On the barricades at Stonewall...'
Er, well, actually no. I was there in spirit with the Stonewall insurrection. I shared their anger, their noisy carnival of protest, by proxy, from a distance. I wrote stuff in support. Years later, visiting Greenwich Village, I did actually walk the full length of Christopher Street. But no, it's not true to say I was actually there as those joyous outraged heroes fought back at Police repression during the long hot summer of June 1969. New energies in the air. Stale old forms collapsing and falling away through exhaustion, repetition and boredom. New sensibilities busy being born. Even from a distance, those rumour were wonderful. Even now you can read between the 3D-lines, taste the freedom like yesterday's spliffs. News feeds on itself. Crazy-crowds in frozen chaos. Panic panic panic.
'And you were there with the Frisco Bath House scene...'
Again no. I was always too scared-as-hell of getting hurt by promiscuous sex. Not that I didn't think about it, and it's not that I haven't had my moments. Sure I have. But I usually have to like the guy, or relate to him on some human level other than just lust. Lust is good. I've got no beef with lust. I've grappled cocks and balls and hairy arses aplenty. It's just that all that grope-grabbery and anonymous ass-fuck stuff is a little too intense and way-extreme for me. Own up, I chickened out. I'm a nice guy, honest. But I lost friends there, when the plague began, in watery-eyed remembrance. Don't want to drag that past out into the light. I had long-term contacts in the Castro Beat-scene community, people who published my poems in scuzzy mimeographed magazines and promoted loft-parties where I was invited to read. And yes, I wrote about it all, and yes, we had some great furtive sex in the warm twilight too. But I was never, truly, part of the Bath House scene. Don't look back. That past is a wilderness of horrors.
He softens the waxy pallor of his face enough to form a sketchy smile. 'You prey on people? For material to populate your poems. You're predatory?'
'No, I've got no Yoda-sense. I can't alter your mind-set and reprogramme your motivations.' Imprecise, furry talk that goes nowhere. Verbally circling each other like skilled duellists fencing for an opening. But with the delicacy of a cat killing a mouse.
'And the Gay Pride rallies...'
Ah yes, that's true. I was on more of them than I care to recall. A sense of duty. Or self-promotion. Being there to be seen being-there. Me, Allen Gilgamesh, the great Gay Poet. Fractured beauty in the street, drinking in the sun. It was expected. The pink press ran the photos. It doesn't do my book-sales any harm. Know what I mean?
I walk like an apathy-android on autoshrug. Disconnected. Disengaged. It's not my problem. Not any more. I made my call. Did my bit. Made my contribution. I gave. I gave. I'm walking through Lego-corridors in a Sims simulation-reality. I keep expecting the ad-breaks to begin. The sponsorship tag-line for the commercial I'm living through. My thoughts clunk clunk clunk around in my head like irascible poltergeists. One feeling elbowing the next out of the way, in turn. Why the hell am I even here at all? I got no-place else to go. That's the truth of it.
His room. A quick-flash inventory. Senses working overtime. So keen my ears drink in the sound of stale air brushing up against the furniture. Nostrils sucking in the sour-sweet tang of his body, the funk-smell of his T-shirt, the sweat and skin-flakes soaked into the mattress. He's yakking about shooting experimental movies, drastic avant garde stuff. It's creepy. These young Gays, they wear their freedom like cheap cologne. And it's right that they should. Yet at the same time... it seems creepy to me. This world is not what it should be. All things are not equal. My feelings are befuddled. It's temptingly easy to despise these young Gays, mostly because they're younger, prettier, fitter, and more enthusiastic than I'll ever be again. He fetches a bottle of red wine from the chiller, slurps at its neck, and passes it across. I taste his saliva on the glass lip.
'Prithee, grant me one boon.' He's giggling gleefully. I wonder where he's going with this.
'Boon away.'
'Can't, I'm bashful. I'm too shy to ask.' But he's talking with his voice, not his brain.
'I wasn't aware you hunted monsters.'
'Sometimes the monsters hunt you. It's not that my appetite is broad, just that other folks are so narrow.' The sound of his Superman underpants scratch-rustling down his thighs as he tugs them free. He catches up the discarded briefs in his hand and hurls them against the wall for no obvious reason. His crooked little smirk. His pants too. Legs like white tapeworms. His clothes form a puddle on the floor.
'Me, I wanna suck your cock, man. I wanna be able to say that me, I'm the guy that sucked that famous iconic Gay cock. That me, I sucked you off. I wanna be able to say that.'
'Who'd believe you?'
'Me. I'd believe it. That's enough.'
'I see' I manage inadequately, seeing nothing. 'I guess it'd be churlish to deny you.'
It all happens with indecent speed. His T-shirt is gone. A skinny bone-white torso. Prominent nipples. The right one pierced and ringed. He liberates a long thin uncut cock. He tugs it as it swings free, like guys do, setting the small tight balls a-jiggle. He's hardly my dream fantasy-shag. But I suppose, if I wasn't the great Gay poet, he wouldn't look twice at me either. He squats down to unzip me, his hands not quite steady, dog-trust in his sleepy eyes for this big Beat word-slinger. He reaches for my belt, unbuckling it faster than thought. I'm conscious of the powdering of short black hairs on the back of my hand as he grabs both pants and underwear by the waistband and yanks them down, me stupidly lifting myself so he can release me, and out lolls my lazy cock. I'd like to be able to say it springs out, leaps to attention, upswings, bobs, bounds, vaults, capers, a booster-rocket aimed at Saturn. But no, it doesn't do that any more, it kinda flops out. It's no big deal, but it's like he can't take his eyes off it.
He looks up at me as though seeking permission, then lifts it reverently, rubbing it gently between thumb and forefinger until it shows signs of twitching life. A queer frightening exciting sensation. My mouth waters. So does his. My pulse beats a little faster. When he draws it into his mouth it's like the soft drape of a silk scarf. A hint of teeth on my glans. Just enough to stimulate. He's good with his lips and tongue. Practiced. I'm nudging his throat, aiming at his tonsils, he's sucking with an urgency. He's obviously well-used to doing this. My heart is thumping like mad now and yes, it's urging yes, yes, yes. Erect now, impossible not be, as his mouth works up, down and around me. Pumping it, I have to fight against the roaring of my senses, the tightening of the muscles in my stomach, my thighs, my buttocks, my gonads. This is the worst of all possible worlds. The sound of my life falling apart around me. The Gay Hero...? I'm not one thing or another. Like most everyone else, I'm a muddle. But I can see my own image reflected in Sugarfoot's inflated fantasies. I'm a fantastic creature of his imagination. I'm his smudged fictional creation. It's a testament to his strange clammy power that I exist at all. Thoughts feed off words. And words nourish thoughts. Blood is pounding in my head.
I'm sucking in hoarse ragged breaths as he sucks my penis in long deep strokes, making little appreciative murmuring sounds in his throat. Chills running down my brain. The light is flash-flickering. My cock throbs like toothache, setting up quivers that tremble the floor. Shivering, like every cell of my body is on vibrate. As though tectonic tremors are set up purely by emotional intensity. I could levitate from here to there on pure telepathy. Our irregular breathing is the loudest sound in the world. This scrawny young man gives a scrawny shudder, concentrating so hard he has my head buzzing, his breath coming fast, hot in my groin, as the tautness in the pit of my gut grows and grows. Then the long time-elevator of build-up begins. It starts quietly like an aching hunger in the bone-marrow, and grows to flash across separate nerve-cells, synapses, brain-cells, every touch-point in the body, radiating out from that intensity-centre, that nexus of mouth-penis connection. He's smirking up at me as I begin sputtering drizzles into his hungry mouth, his sleepy eyes unnaturally bright, and then he's chewing the viscous globs in his mouth, munching them, tasting them, savouring it like some pervy connoisseur kinkfest.
'Thank you, thank you' his voice slurred. 'You don't know what this means to me.' Sugarfoot, young and dumb with a mouthful of cum. He swallows, making his adam's-apple bob on his boy-scrawny neck.
'It's like you're passing the torch of your genius on to me. Now I've got your DNA-spermatozoa swimming inside me. It's as though I'm absorbing elements of your powers. Like it's something I can carry forward into the future.' He kisses the messy tip of my glans in a dreamy infatuated way, so that when he draws back he's still linked to it by a long milky strand of sperm. He licks it away, his tongue severing the connection.
I'm thinking, you do this to me and expect me to think afterwards? No. It's just a stupid groupie blowjob in a Lego no-place. Yet I get this crazy feeling that part of him is right. In this replica of a real place he's siphoning my life-energies out of me. Until I'm less than a ghost no-person in this no-place that doesn't exist. The real me, the real reality is left there, somewhere out in the past. Neal, where are you this night? We should be together, you and I. I still feel that ache, that lost sad longing...
BY TRISTAN TROTSKY
