The Men from the Boys (12 page)

He seems to have forgotten any dilemma he had about sleeping with a married man. He called me the Monday after I saw him on the breakwater. Lloyd had gone back to Boston, so I invited Eduardo over, and he's been here ever since.

“Then you're a lucky little shit,” I say to him. “When you get to be an old man like me you'll be all set.”

“I said ‘older,' not ‘old,' ” he says, his face suddenly in mine. “You're
not
an old man.”

We've spent yesterday and today together. Last night, we walked along the beach, barefoot in the surf, holding hands and talking for hours. “I have a confession to make,” he said.

I looked at him.

“I was born here,” he told me. “In Provincetown.”

“Really? I never met someone who was actually
from
Provincetown.”

Eduardo nodded. “Of course not. You gay tourists never do.” He smiled. “My parents still live here. My father's a fisherman. Like his father, and his father before that.”

“And you?”

“No thanks. There's no work here even if I wanted to stay. I moved to Boston a few years ago, after graduating high school. But I've come back this summer. Lack of money, you know what I mean?”

I did. “So are you really a houseboy?” I asked.

“Sure.” He smiled. “I couldn't exactly live with my parents. Would you want
your
parents watching your every move in the summer?”

I would not. I reached over and gave him a quick kiss behind the ear. Eduardo was charming, much more so than I had given him credit for. And bright, too. In the fall he'll be going back to school in Boston to study graphic design. He's out to his parents. They're accepting, even if they think exposure to all those drag queens on Commercial Street during his formative years may have had something to do with it. Mostly, though, they worry about AIDS. They've seen all the memorials announced in the local paper. Unlike many small-town families, they haven't been able to ignore the plague.

“I haven't lost any friends, not yet,” Eduardo said. “But it scares the shit out of me. That's why I could never, ever, fuck without a condom. Maybe even two.”

I laughed. “That's a smart boy,” I said, the right line for this particular role.

“But a lot of my friends,” he confided, “don't think like me.”

“I know.” Too many of the boys I have been with have eagerly spread their legs without any negotiation, without any conditions. I've nudged at their holes with the head of my dick and they've groaned, “Yeah, come
on.”
But I've always declined, with horrible difficulty, wanting so badly to ram it up there, to ride their asses, to break their baby arrogance, their sense of youthful invulnerability. “How about that?” I'd tell them afterwards, in my fantasy. “And do you know what?
I have AIDS!!”

Yet I've never done it. And so fucking is rare for me—especially since condoms repulse me. Their very smell, the very touch of latex. No matter how much those safe-sex educators have tried to eroticize them, condoms reduce my hardness to withering pulp.

But not Eduardo. “I
like
condoms,” he said. “I do. Just the sound of the tear of cellophane makes me hard.”

“Pavlov's bottom,” I slid, grinning.

“And the ones that taste like mint? They're
awesome.”

I leveled my eyes at him. “Sucking dick was not meant to be minty fresh.”

“Oh, you jaded old queen,” he laughed, lunging at me.

That's how Javitz had introduced himself to Eduardo the night before. “Don't mind me,” he said, walking in while we were making out on the couch. “I'm just a jaded old queen.”

They eyed each other with keen interest all night, although I'm sure neither would admit it. “You were at
Stonewall?”
Eduardo fawned, looking at the photos Javitz always stuck up on whatever refrigerator door he was currently using.

“No, dear,” Javitz corrected, indulgently. “That's the March on Washington. From 1987. A while after Stonewall.”

“Wow,” Eduardo said. “Nineteen
eighty-seven.”

Javitz cocked an eyebrow at him. “Don't you
dare
tell me how old you were then.”

“Fifteen.”

Javitz exhaled monstrously, then stood up, lit a cigarette, and strolled out towards the deck. I laughed. “You keep quiet,” he shouted back. “It's been a long time since
you
were fifteen, too.”

“I don't believe in age,” Eduardo offered.

Javitz turned around. “What a delightful child,” he said, sitting down again. “Now tell me, Eduardo, what do you see in
him?”

“Everything,” the boy said, the moon in his eyes, and I melted.

Now he's trying to convince me I'm not an old man, bless his little heart. “I would never date somebody who's
old,”
he's saying. We've just gotten back from the beach. My skin is nearly as brown as his. “Old is a state of mind. If you're old, you can't keep up with me.” He snaps his fingers on both hands. “Who said Gen X are slackers?”

He grabs my crotch as I walk past him. I pull back. We've had sex a total of five times in two days. The last time, he wanted to fuck me. With two condoms, I'm sure. But I'm not yet ready to let Eduardo top me.

“Come on,” Eduardo coos, getting real close and putting his lips on my neck.

It's happening again. Eduardo's sweet—sweet as the nectar that seems to exude from his pores. But that zesty sense of newness is gone, after just a couple of days. I don't know why I should be surprised.

“I need to crash,” I say, gently moving my head and extricating myself from his grip.

He looks at me tightly. “How come whenever you want it, I give it? Doesn't it work the other way around?”

No, I want to say, it doesn't, But instead: “Eduardo, I'm just tired. All that sun.”

He pouts. “Well, what are you doing later?”

“I really need to get some writing done.”

“So you're not going out?”

“No. I don't think so. If I do, it'll be last-minute.”

He makes a sound in his throat. If he were a comic-strip character, it would have been “harrumph.” But he's not, of course: he's flesh and blood, with a heart and a soul, and for the slenderest of moments I pity him for having stumbled into my lair.

He's in my face again, but tenderly. “I really like you, Jeff. Really.”

“What do your friends say about that?”

“Who cares what they say?”

That tells me exactly what I need to know. “They say I'm using you,” I tell him.

“I told them we're becoming friends,” Eduardo insists.

“Are we?”

“Sure.” He looks at me with suddenly scared eyes. “Aren't we?”

“Of course we are.”

“Friends who fuck.” Eduardo laughs, as if this is something we've invented, something that's never happened before.

“They're called fuck buddies,” I explain.

Eduardo seems to consider this. “No. I don't like that term. It's too—
seventies.”

“Seventies?” “You know: all those baby-boomer gay men with the flannel shirts and handlebar mustaches, the Village People and all that....” He smirks. “Surely
you
must remember.”

I narrow my eyes. “I didn't graduate from high school until 1980.”

I'm not surprised he's confused. Nobody much talks about my generation. Nobody thinks about those of us in our thirties anymore. A decade ago, they did. There was even a television show called
thirtysomething.
It made history by showing a gay male couple in bed together. I think that was the only episode I ever watched. Because see, back then, a
whole decade ago
when I was
twenty
something, the show had no relevance for me. Of course, it held
great
relevance for that generation which precedes mine: those ubiquitous baby boomers. Being “thirtysomething” in the 1980s was the subject of major national discussion. Talk shows and books and movies all concerned themselves with the trials and tribulations of thirty. I tuned out: what, me worry?

“Ah, youth,” Javitz would say, while he and his ex-hippie cohorts lamented that they had become the people they'd once said were too old to trust.

I knew them all, Javitz and his friends. Now Javitz is one of the few who are left. Many of the rest are sick, and those who aren't are well into their forties, edging fifty. There's been a lot said about their generation, about their contributions, their achievements. But you don't hear much about the thirtysomethings of the nineties. Part of the problem is that we're not easily defined. “You're just a youngish baby boomer,” Javitz told me. And technically, he's right: the baby boom wasn't officially over until 1963, a year after I was born. But ask someone born in the late 1950s or early to mid-1960s if they remember anything about Woodstock or the assassinations of Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, those essential creation myths of boomer culture. Without those events in your consciousness, Javitz insists, you're no boomer.

Others would lump us into the X population: the thirteenth generation since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a group of babies apparently born between 1961 and 1975. But ask a guy in his early thirties if he cared when Kurt Cobain offed himself, if he thinks rap is music. We might not be aging flower children, but we ain't no slackers either.

“While you were watching
The Partridge Family,
we were out fighting to save the world,” Javitz has said, and he's right. The boomers may have fought at Stonewall, but we—their younger siblings—were the kids they were fighting for. We were the first generation of queer boys and girls who could pick up a newspaper and read about gays and lesbians fighting back, marching in the streets. I remember hearing about Harvey Milk being elected and then assassinated. “That fruit in San Francisco,” my father called to my mother as he sat in front of the TV set. “They just got him.”

I'd scour my thin, ill-spaced hometown newspaper for any mention of the G or H words. I knew the name of the enemy then, and it was so much simpler in those days: Anita Bryant. Dade County. Proposition 6. John Vern Briggs. It all seemed winnable somehow, back in those days before the plague, before the rise of the religious right. I couldn't wait to get out there, claim my space. In high school, my buddy Stick—always so much more
worldly
than Gordon or I—would tell us of his friends in New York, dancing and fucking until dawn. I couldn't wait to be old enough to join them. Of course, I never did. By the time I was old enough and comfortable enough with myself to go out and play, I couldn't anymore. “Sex equals death” and all that eighties bullshit. Maybe that saved me, Javitz has said. Maybe, but it still was a drag.

“I'll tell you something about the seventies,” I say to Eduardo. “There was a sense of promise, a sense of hope. You never had that. Maybe that's why all you guys are slackers.”

“I'm
not
a slacker,” he reminds me.

And he's not. He's got his hopes, his dreams. Yet he didn't put
his
muscle into an ACT UP or a Queer Nation, the way my generation did.

Maybe that's because we knew Javitz and the fags and the dykes like him, those guys in the flannel shirts and handlebar mustaches, the women with the labrys signs dangling from around their necks. “Who do the children have to teach them how to be gay?” I'd asked Javitz.

“You?” he'd answered, and I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic.

“I'm tired,” I say, unsure for just a second to whom I'm responding. “I need to sleep. Maybe we can get together tomorrow.”

Eduardo makes a face.
“Maybe?”

“Look,” I say, “we're not married.”

I kiss him good-bye at the door and assure him that yes, I will call him, that yes, we are friends, and that no, I don't view him as just a fuck buddy. I close the door and tell myself that's the last I'll see of him. He'll hurt for a while, I'm sure, but he'll get over it. He's a boy. Boys are resilient. Push them down and they spring right back up at you, in your face, all sloppy lips and fervent plans, desperate dreams and raging libidos. He'll bounce back, I assure myself. He's a
boy.

Boston, February 1995

We're heading out to the suburbs on this bright, blustery, wintry day, but first we have to find our car.

It's not always easy to remember where you last parked your car when you live in Boston. During the winter, we use our cars so rarely that they can get piled over with snow for weeks. Lloyd thinks he parked on Clarendon, but we haven't seen it yet, so of course he's getting paranoid that it's been towed. My cheeks are stinging from the cold wind and I'm trying not to get cranky, as it is Lloyd's birthday, after all, and going to the suburbs was what he wanted to do. Javitz finally spots the car over on Milford Street, so we hurry across the street to follow him.

The boys in the windows of Mildred's look warm, reading their newspapers and sipping their cappuccinos as giant-sized mattes of Joan Crawford loom over them. One boy even looks up and smiles. We call the cafe windows along Tremont Street “display cases,” where both the customers and the merchandise can have their pick. But today I want nothing of their pretty little lives, for we're on our way to the Big Boy.

The closest Big Boy is out in the suburbs, and Lloyd insisted we celebrate his birthday there. He grew up with the Big Boy chain in Iowa. “Down-home white-trash cooking,” he said, and I agreed. Sometimes, when Lloyd and I are feeling down, we sneak out to the Big Boy, ordering fried chicken dinners (me) and spaghetti with that thick red sauce (him), remembering when our mothers would take us to the Big Boy for being good. Our excursions always end with the heaping hot fudge cake, slobbered with fake whipped cream and topped with a maraschino cherry. The trendy restaurants in the South End just don't have the same appeal when you're feeling blue.