Almost Like Being in Love (21 page)

Authors: Steve Kluger

BOOK: Almost Like Being in Love

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Happily, the headmaster gave Craig his Victory Cup before intermission, and our diplomas followed shortly thereafter. By the time Reverend Sheedy stood up to bless the departing seniors and introduce some handpicked fossil from the Class of 1910, there were two empty seats in the fifth row. We probably should have stuck around until the end, but when you’re ninety minutes away from learning all the secrets of your best friend’s body, nostalgia over four years of preparatory education tends to be reduced to as few syllables as possible:
Bye. See ya
.

Oh, yeah. We both got A’s in French.
J’ai le béguin pour toi
, Craigy.

“You nervous?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then me neither.” We were undressing each other slowly in the living room-bedroom-kitchen-dining room-den of our new apartment. (Barry had left us some flowers and a pair of comps to Finian’s Rainbow, just in case we happened to be in Fayetteville over the weekend.) Though the train ride down the Hudson had been playfully erotic by Travis-Craig standards, that all changed as soon as we turned onto West 92nd Street.

In fact, once we’d unlocked our front door for the first time and stepped into a room that belonged to just us, our smiles faded swiftly—along with our self-confidence, our swagger, and (impossibly) our hard-ons. There’s a word for this kind of thing: panic.
Oh my God. Who are we kidding? I’ve
never made love to anybody in my life and Craigy’s only fooled around with
a couple of girls. What if we don’t know what to do? What if we hate it?

What if this was a mistake? What if he leaves and I never see him again?

Why is he kissing my shoulder? What happened to my shirt? Boy, that feels
good. Maybe I should take his off too. Why are there so many buttons?!

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he whispered nervously, holding me close. “I mean, we don’t have to.”

“How much time do I get to answer?” I mumbled back tentatively, touching his cheek and shaking like a 4.7 temblor two miles beneath Marin County. Then he pulled away and one-dimple-grinned me—the same damned smile I’d first fallen in love with—and everything exploded at once.
We have liftoff!
With a yelp, I pushed him backward onto our pocketsized mattress, yanked off his shirt (fuck the buttons), and dove.

There’s a word for this too:
Banzai
!

Round One lasted sixteen hours. Then we slept for another nine and started all over again. They say that biology limits what two guys can do together, but you sure as hell couldn’t prove it by us.

“Oh God,” he groaned, coming up for air. “What do you call that?”

“Improvisation,” I gasped in reply.

“Do I get to improvise too?”

“If you think you can measure up to—Yikes!” For the next three days, we never saw sunlight. There was something so right about being naked together in the dark—about eating potato chips off of each other’s stomachs while we watched Dobie Gillis at 3:00 in the morning, about reaching for each other’s bodies when we were still hungry, about exploring our different parts and learning how to make one another sigh, giggle, and especially squirm. We were a perfect fit—back-to-front, head-to-toe, top-to-bottom—and when we stumbled out into the blue-and-gold nimbus enveloping West 92nd Street on our first day of work, we discovered that the whole world had changed while we were in bed.

“This is a great peach.”

“This is a great plum.”

“This is a great subway.”

“This is a terrific sidewalk.” And we meant every word.

Remembering the rest of that summer is like peering through a kaleidoscope: the night games at Yankee Stadium, the hot dogs in Battery Park, pretending we were Lucy and Fred on the Staten Island Ferry, walking through Central Park in the rain just so we could watch one another get wet, chasing each other across the boys-only section of Jones Beach and falling into the sand together like a couple of horny puppies, making out at the top of the Empire State Building and educating a stupefied couple from Davenport, Iowa, while we were doing it, and discovering that our boss at the record store wasn’t such a stuffed shirt after all—once he’d realized we were boyfriends.

“Dougie, can we sneak out early? It’s our anniversary.”

“Oh, bullshit. You just had one last week!” There’s nothing quite as intoxicating as two boys throwing out all the rules and discovering freedom together for the first time. And when the same two boys happen to be head-over-toes in love with each other—well, think Field of Dreams squared.

One memory stands out above all the rest: June 24, 1978—my eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t so much the breakfast in bed that Craig had insisted on (Hostess cupcakes and Swiss Miss), or the surprise carriage ride around Central Park with his head on my shoulder, or the unbelievably out-of-print copy of Henry, Sweet Henry that Doug had helped him pick out and wrap, or the candlelit dinner at Beefsteak Charlie’s 'we brought our own candles), or the mezzanine seats that had cost him most of a paycheck just so he could watch my face light up when Liza Minnelli tore apart the Majestic in The Act, or even the fact that he stayed awake though the whole thing just for me. What I remember most is later on, in the shower, when he sang “Almost Like Being in Love” to me while we were standing under the spray together and letting our noses play with each other. And the way he dried me off gently, took my hand, and led me to bed—where we spent three hours proving that every lyric was absolutely true.

“Travis?” he murmured in a sleepy whisper, holding me tight. “You’re the only one. No matter what happens, you’re the only one. Happy birthday.” Then he drifted off blissfully before I could reply—so I smiled into his chest and squeezed his hand instead. It was the only time he ever made me cry.

I hope he meant it. Because one way or another, I’m going to find out.

7. Craig McKenna: Flemingsburg, Kentucky Doesn’t speak English 8. Craig McKenna: Weslaco, Texas White supremacist 9. Craig McKenna: Manchester, New Hampshire

10. Craig McKenna: Sacaton, Arizona

11. Craig McKenna: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

12. Craig McKenna: Antigo, Wisconsin

FROM THE DESK OF

Gordon Duboise

The people at Vidiots are ready to put a hit on you if you don’t return I Wanna HoldYour Hand and Brigadoon. They wouldn’t even let me rent Tina Swallows the Leader until I paid your late charges. $34!

If you play that fucking song one more time, all of your CDs are going into the toaster oven. And Barbra Streisand burns first.

Remember in high school when they gave us Great

Expectations and there was this crazy old bat who locked herself in a bedroom for thirty years with a wedding dress and a bride-and-groom cake covered with ants? Keep it up. You’re getting there.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY PARK • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007

Doheny Library

Faculty Research Request

DATE: May 27, 1998

FROM: Travis Puckett

DEPARTMENT: History

BUILDING/ROOM: VKC/223

MATERIALS NEEDED

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS

I’ve got to break into the Harvard alumni database. This is urgent. Do we have any computer hackers on staff? I’ll indemnify the university in case any federal subpoenas start showing up.

I’m on it. Odds are that their backdoor password is ‚FUCK-YALE.‛ (We do
the same thing here with UCLA. nothing like airtight security.)

While I was checking out a short list of possibilities, I wound up on the
phone with a Craig McKenna from San Diego. For two hours. He’s a year
older than I am, he’s a landscape architect, and he has a 29-inch waist. Travis,
if it turns out you’ve domesticated me, I’ll kick your ass.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY PARK • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007

TO
: Travis Puckett

FROM
: Andrea Fox

DATE
: May 27, 1998

RE
We got it!

The $30,000 grant is yours. You owe Marsha Holmes your life. At the last minute she pulled in a couple of Poli-Sci section heads who brought charts and graphs and parabolas to prove you had a point. Dean Koutrelakos didn’t know what the hell they were talking about 'and neither did anybody else), so he threw in the towel.

Congratulations. ow will you call me?

Andrea

FROM THE JOURNAL OF

Travis Puckett

73. Craig McKenna: La Jolla, California Voted for Barry Goldwater 74. Craig McKenna: Grand Junction, Colorado Homophobic ski instructor

There are only four possibilities:

1. He has an unlisted number.

2. He lives outside the country.

3. The phone is in his boyfriend’s name.

4. Something happened to him. 'Don’t go there. He’s alive and he’s okay.)

So I lost the first round. Big deal. There’s still the 118 McKennas in St.

Louis plus the 1,732 McKennas in the forty-eight contiguous states and the two floating ones. If I have to call every one of them, I’ll find him.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t need a psychopathic history professor showing up from the Twilight Zone, and maybe he won’t even like me any more.

But he still has my heart—and if he’s not using it, I want it back.

Otherwise I’m going to go on loving him for the rest of my life. And there’s not a damned thing either one of us can do about it.

Somehow I never got around to telling him that.

September 14, 1978. The TWA terminal at JFK. o matter how hard we’d
tried, we couldn’t make the summer last beyond August. Labor Day showed
up and Barry Brush came back from Pennsylvania, so Craig and I hailed a
cab to the airport. It was the last adventure we shared together.

We sat in the terminal for three hours unable to speak, staring at each
other’s faces so we’d never forget the details. What could we possibly say that
would fit into words?

Finally, they called my flight to Los Angeles, but neither one of us moved.

This was all so obviously a bad dream we were going to wake up from any
minute—the alarm clock would go off, we’d tumble into the shower together,
we’d start fooling around, and Doug would give us hell for being fifteen
minutes late to work. But then they announced final boarding, and it was all
over. Craig reached for my hand.

‚I love you, Smerko,‛ he mumbled quietly.

‚Write to me.‛ By now the tears were streaming down all four of our
cheeks, but it was way too late to do anything about it. So we kissed each
other one more time—right there in the middle of the waiting room—and then
I let him go.

When Flight 18 pulled back from the jetway, Craig was still framed in the
window of the terminal, watching the plane and waving. That’s the way I
remember him.

People sometimes tell me I’m hyperbolic. ‚The sexiest thing that ever
happened to me.‛ ‚The coldest shower in orth America.‛ ‚The spaghetti that
gave me back religion.‛ But even after twenty years, saying goodbye to Craig
was the worst moment of my life.

Okay. Maybe he went into another line of work that’s easier to trace.

They have national listings for architects and engineers and real estate agents and people like that, don’t they? Or medicine. What if he became a doctor like his mother? The AMA is always putting out those membership bulletins every couple of—

Hold it.

Just a second.

Holy shit.

His mother was a doctor.