How Long Has This Been Going On (32 page)

"Everybody finds what they need," he tells Henry.

"Are you southern?"

"Well, now, sure I am."

"Carolina?" Henry asked, for the hell of it.

"West," says the blond, "Virginia."

"That's just below Pennsylvania," says our Henry, meaning to give the boy welcome. "It's almost the North."

"No, it ain't," the boy contentedly replies.

"It's cold," says Henry, wrapping his arms about himself. "Have you a place to go tonight?"

"Didn't ask to stay over, did I?"

Henry, taking a deep breath, asks, "Is the rest of you as breathtaking as what I see? And could I get away with thirty? I think I could swing it that far."

"Well... thirty-five then."

"Come on." Henry looks down the avenue. "Here's a bus, even as we speak."

Henry pays for both of them, as custom demands, then joins the boy on the seats at the back.

"Much obliged," says the boy. He looks even nicer in the light. Nice skin.

"My name's Henry."

"Blue."

They shake.

Blue smiles again. "How much do you like me?" he asks. "A whole piece of a lot, or some?"

"Thirty-five dollars' worth, anyway."

"How much is that fer you?"

"A whole piece of a lot."

"Yeah. Okay. Where to, now?"

"East Seventy-fourth Street. Not far from the bus stop."

Blue nods amiably.

"Pardon my lack of expertise in southern folkways, but are you
named
Blue, or did you pick it up because of... the eyes?"

"No one is
named
Blue," the boy replies, as if telling a very small child, That face in the moon isn't
really
a man. "But that's all I been called ever. Or Whitey Blue, originally. Shortened it, see?"

On this bus are some vacant old men, a dating boy-and-girl or two, a few weary black women riding home after custodial work, three teenage music students—you can tell by the odd shapes of their black cases and the excited, confidential way they huddle together, as if trading aperçus on some wildly intoxicating subject, such as Pachelbel—and a smartly dressed woman with a boy just big enough to walk.

"No, Cal," she keeps saying, as he stares at a neighbor or starts staggering down the aisle. She carries a toy bag and offers him objects of fascination. He chooses a little plastic tuba, repeatedly blowing into the wrong end, then staring at the piece as if to say, They don't make these toys right.

Blue, sitting two seats away, reaches over, takes the tuba, turns it around, and hands it back to the boy.

"Now it'll really sing," says Blue.

"Cal," goes the mother, for no apparent reason.

Cal blows and the tuba sounds, a deep and absurd little bay. Cal glows at Blue.

"Told you," says Blue. By then Henry has risen to stand at the exit and Blue is with him.

"Bye, Cal," says Blue, as he leaves.

Cal waves. "Bye, bye," he says.

"That was a nice kid," observes Blue as they walk to Henry's building. "Headstrong and clever, I bet. He'll have fetching ways when he's a tad older."

That's right, Henry is thinking, as he unlocks. Get to me, guy. Dazzle.

Henry's apartment is early-middle have-not intellectual, a little den halfway up a brownstone, at the rear. Blue looks around with mild interest, moving here and there.

"The view is good," Henry tells him, pulling off his coat. "In the back?"

Blue obligingly samples it. "Yeah," he agrees, looking out. "Got yer own personal tree right there. A tree in the city."

"It's lovely when it snows. Early on a weekend morning, shimmering white, and... It's like one vast snowflake."

"Yeah?"

"Can I get you anything?"

"Glass a water?"

Blue's taking off his autumn-weight coat, his ratty sweater, his two T-shirts, his wacked-out old boots and socks, his pants, his shorts: one flowing rhapsody as Henry, in the tiny kitchen, looks on spellbound.

"Cold in here," says Blue, nude and grinning. "Snappy."

"I was just... some ice," says Henry, coming over with a glass.

"Much obliged." Blue takes the whole glass down, nice and slow, then bites off a piece of ice and chomps.

Henry stares at Blue. There's this slogan kind of thing that Henry likes to think of, even say out loud to himself when he's beating off—"a tight-naveled big-hung boy with a beautiful set of tits." It's a phrase of incantatory power; Henry can mesmerize himself with it. It's on his mind now.

"Yeah, I can see you like me, huh?" says Blue, putting down the glass. "Now, what do you need here? Want me on top of you, deep and smooth? You want to blow me? I'm willin' to please you. I can see by the surroundings here that you don't have a lot of dough to throw around. It's a sacrifice fer you, maybe. Not like those guys that pull up in limousines."

"Limousines?" says Henry, tracing lines on Blue's torso.

"We get a few."

Kissing. Henry's attack is slow and tender, moving around the mouth to the neck and cheeks and ears. Blue concentrates on the mouth. Neither one uses a lot of tongue.

Blue smiles. "You fixing to do this clothes-on?"

Henry quickly steps out of his clothes.

"All so fine and trim," says Blue—but he is looking straight into Henry's eyes, not assessing him. "Most of the gentlemen on the street are pretty much past their proper time."

The kissing has made them hard, and Henry dives down for a little cock worship. He doesn't like sucking all that much—after thirty seconds or so it gets tiresome—but he sees it as part of the panorama. It places one by role, as god or acolyte. With a boy friend, Henry emphasizes his intelligence and talents and charm and wit and he plays god to them. With Wild Boys he needs to be taken over, taught, amazed.

Suddenly, Blue pulls Henry up and guides him to the bed, the two of them holding and kissing and grabbing, encouraging each other to up the stakes. Henry is taking out the Vaseline and pulling back the bedclothes and Blue is moving right along with him. It's not business: It's a date. It's sex. It's some real thing they're doing.

"Just go easy on me," Henry warns.

"Ain't supposed to be easy, kimo sabe," says Blue, winking as he greases Henry up. "Yer tight."

"I don't do this all the time."

Blue, helping Henry onto the bed, says, "Get on your back fer me, now. I'm going to do you knees-to-ears." Positioning Henry. Easing him. "You got to pull your shoulders back and kind of throw yer feet way out, and then you'll work real well. You got to really want it, like I really want to give it to you."

"You don't have to perform for me," Henry tells him. "Just be what you are."

"That's not so easy," says Blue, forcing in.

Henry gasps.

"Hurtin' you?"

"No, it's just... No, go ahead."

"You're almost ready. I can see that you're hot now."

"I'm thinking all about you," Henry tells him. "About everything you are.

"Bend up to it. Look at how my body's moving. That's the rhythm of it. Yeah.... Come with me, now.... That's the ticket."

"I hate this," says Henry, "but I need it."

A bit of silence, then, and the steady sawing truth of what Henry is undergoing. Staring at Blue above, he reaches for him, to pull him near, but Blue shakes his head.

"Can't get too close," Blue tells him cheerfully.

More silence.

"Some guys like it rough and yellin'," Blue says then, "but I think this is best. Smooth-style, real fiickness. You like me, right?"

"Yes."

"You feel me in there, right in the center a you?"

"Yes."

"I respect you fer saying that."

Out of his mind with fiickness, Henry grabs at Blue, crying, "Hold me, please. Hold me while you do this."

Blue hunkers down, shrugging Henry's legs off his shoulders so they can close up together.

"You don't want to be fucked," Blue tells Henry. "You want to be loved."

"Needed,"
says Henry.

"Can't always get that," says Blue; then he hears Henry moan. "Does it feel that good? I never understand that part." Building it, panting, straining. "Whether guys moan because they can't help it or because they just think they should."

"It's kind of...
Blue,"
Henry breathes out, caressing the back of the young man's neck, right at the hairline. "Blue, I'm not moaning."

"You are and it's nice." Blue nuzzles Henry's ear, cheek on cheek. "It's nice to get that out of a guy. Make him wild for it. Doing it to you. Let's really start."

"Blue!"

"Yeah, that's... Oh, Blue is fucking..."

"All the way! Fill me!"

"Yeah.
Yeah.
" Head back and eyes closed. "Oh, that's yeah for me right down to yeah, boy."

"...Blue..."

Gasping, slowing, eyes heavily lidded, Blue let it ran down, then rolled over to the side and laughed and patted Henry's chest.

"Good guy," Blue told him. "Real good guy."

Panting and wondering. The two of them, wet and hot. Scary, necessary. Without sex, what is art?

"Bit cool in here on our bodies," said Blue. "Pull up the blanket?"

Henry lay there for a while, then forced himself up to grab the blanket and cover them.

"You didn't get there?" Blue asked him.

"I don't come when I'm fucked."

Blue nodded. He was used to this. Only the most seasoned and exultant bottoms can ejaculate simply by being fucked. The myth that two men screwing leads directly to two men coming is an invention of the writers of porn.

"You want me to split?" Blue asked.

"No."

"You want me to talk?"

"How old are you, anyway?"

"Old enough to love."

"Do they card you in bars?"

"Don't go to bars."

Henry nodded. "Nineteen? Maybe twenty?"

"Seventeen."

"Wow."

"I look older, don't I? Twenty, I always figure."

"It's because you're so tall, I guess." Henry shoved back the covers and gazed upon Blue. "You're a very beautiful man."

"Thank you."

"So... smooth and flowing. But you don't go to a gym, surely?"

Blue shook his head.

"So where'd you get those shoulders from?"

Blue thought it over. "Willpower."

Henry laughed. He said, "You're a natural man. What were you like as a teenager?"

"I still am."

"I mean, as a kid, in school. Your parents. Your siblings. Your friends."

Blue considered this, looking at the ceiling, then turned to Henry. "I'd call that a funny thing to talk of with a stranger."

"Just to pass the time?"

Blue laughed. "You want to hear about the Parris boys?" he asked, grinning.

Henry nodded.

Blue stirred a bit, as if seeking a position fit for storytelling. "Well," he began, "this is about Billy Boy and Andy Lee Parris. That was the family farmed the spread just north of us. Sizable place. No back forty or anything, but roomy. Parrises had been workin' that ground so long that they'd moved the farm around over the years. Took this crop over from
there,
and that crop over
here,
you know? A number of wrecked old buildings was standin' in odd places where nobody'd bother with them any more, and one of these was the Old Barn. Basically just a deserted place for kids like Billy Boy and his younger brother Andy Lee to play in. Swing on a rope, hide-and-seek in the hay. Now, I will tell you that Andy Lee was a sweet guy in many certain ways. But Billy Boy was a tyrant to all. He was a bully, and yer friend Whitey Blue was one of his favorite targets."

Speaking at length, Blue's drawl grew thicker and more picturesque. Henry longed to put his arms around Blue as he listened, but he was fearful of vexing the mood.

"Well, Billy Boy Parris made it a rule that anytime I was found on the Parris land, he and Andy Lee could take me to the Old Barn and punish me for trespass. Course, they'd have to catch me first. But the Parris place was situated plumb between
our
place and school. It woulda made every trip longer by fifteen minutes if I'd walked around the Parris spread. I
had
to go across.

"So they'd be lyin' in wait for me, at Billy Boy's direction, and they'd jump me when I passed and waltz me up to the Old Barn. This wasn't mornin's, now, when you had to get on to school, and it was too cold then, anyway. But a spring afternoon would be the perfect occasion. Billy Boy and Andy Lee would get me in that barn and lock the door, and then they'd shuck down my pants, spit me up back there, and each take a turn doing the honors.

"It was this regular thing after a while, with me always trying to fight them off. And failing, what with there was two of them, even if I was big fer my age. So yer saying, How come this Blue here doesn't just go around the long way and avoid the Parris boys? Well, that was partly 'cause of my plain old bullheadedness, and partly because I kind of hankered after Andy

Lee. Now, that was one handsome West Virginia boy, I can tell you, with the dark hair fallin' over his eyes and the smile comin' up so slow you think yer watchin' the sun rise. Billy Boy? He was as pure and stupid a piece of trash as ever I knew. But Andy Lee was someone you might take any way you could get him.

"Anyway, this was all goin' on for a number of years with them and me. They'd catch me and ream my butt out, Billy Boy hasty and pushy and Andy Lee kind of slow and dreamlike. Then, one day, it was Andy Lee to catch me there all by hisself, because Billy Boy was took up with a flu. And that Andy Lee, he didn't grab on to me and run me up to the Old Barn the way he would when Billy Boy was with him. No, Andy Lee took hold of me almost gentlelike, and said I didn't have to go with him unless I wanted to.

"I said, Sure, I'll go."

Blue paused there. He seemed pensive. Then he smiled at Henry and said, "You like this story?"

Henry nodded.

"Don't usually tell such a thing to customers. But you seem finer than most. You suppose I could have some more water?"

Henry went to the kitchen, refilled Blue's glass, and returned to find Blue standing in the middle of the room, looking around.

"Lotta books here. You a writer?"