Beach Boys (11 page)

Merriman reddened and laughed. “I was only joking. No, no. I’m much too old for that.”

Cole shrugged, still studying Merriman’s build, his eyes nearly glazing. “You’re what? Thirty-five, forty? You might be surprised at the number of men who would pay to sleep with someone your age. Yeah. The Internet’s just full of sites advertising ‘mature men.’ And they do well too. Even among old guys. Old guys usually like boys, twinks, but sometimes they’re
looking for someone who can hold a conversation with them after the Great Event. And young guys like your type because sometimes they’re looking for a tutor, a teacher, somebody to show them the ins and outs of love, and you may take that as a pun if you wish. But no, Robert, I’m serious. Men like you have the best of both worlds. You’re young enough to retain energy and enthusiasm but old enough to have experienced life.”

“Ronnie,” Merriman said, still unable, even in the face of Cole’s enormously generous compliment, to shake off the feeling of déjà vu.

“Excuse me?” Cole asked with a slight turn of his head.

“Ronnie Antonelli. That’s who you remind me of.”

“And who is Ronnie Antonelli?”

“A kid I met early on when I moved to Atlanta a couple of years ago. He used to tend bar in a place on Ainsley Square, and we got to be acquainted. But he just disappeared a few months ago. Poof. Like that. Without even a goodbye to anybody.”

“Well, I’m not Ronnie Antonelli. I’m Cole, here to please you. And the meter’s running, Robert, and unless you want to waste the hour talking, I suggest we get started.”

* * * *

They came together with the easy and immediate intimacy common to like-minded men, as though they had indeed known each other previously and knew exactly how and where to touch each other to provoke the greatest response. Naked, of course, Cole was even more splendid: sinewy, vascular, pliant. His young flesh absorbed all of Merriman’s assaults upon it—the rough grasp of a pectoral or glute, the nearly incessant mouthing and sucking of prick, and returned right away to former firmness once freed. And even better, Cole seemed eager to return the ministrations, as though he were truly attracted to something else besides Merriman’s
one hundred and seventy-five dollars. He trailed his tongue down Merriman’s firm chest, past his rigid stomach, and into his crotch. He cooed at the sight of Merriman’s equipment and chirped cryptically, “It will do, it will do, it will do!” before devouring the cock whole. Merriman groaned at Cole’s expertise and hunger. He had never quite had a blow job of that intensity, and when Cole released him to jerk him to climax, he let forth a spray of semen that flew into the air and covered the both of them. Still Merriman’s pleasure could not be complete, due mainly to the nagging insistence that he had known this boy before, that this boy was indeed Ronnie Antonelli.

Cole looked at him and said, “Don’t get soft yet, my daddy-stud. You still have work to do.” He reinserted Merriman’s dick into his mouth and inflated it once more with his relentless sucking. When it was sufficiently hard, Cole instructed Merriman to stand, which he did. And Cole offered his ass to the client: a remarkably smooth, unblemished ass of the kind of musculature that made Merriman’s already-stiff dick strain for even greater dimensions.

Merriman took the condom and lube on the bed stand and prepared himself; then with great desire and anticipation, he entered Cole’s splendid butt and fucked him with increasing speed and pleasure. Cole grasped him from behind, urging him on even further, as though there were no limits to the speed of sex. Merriman heard his balls slap against Cole’s ass crack, and for some reason that gave him great drive in his fucking. Soon he announced he was going to come, yanked his dick from the hole, whipped off the rubber, and splattered Cole’s vast, tanned, smooth back with his semen. Cole turned, jacking himself, lay on his back, and brought himself to his first orgasm, all the while staring into Merriman’s eyes with a fervor nearly inhuman.

During their post-coital recess, stretched out beside each other, shining in the lamplight from their own sweat, Merriman thought of Ronnie. A fine kid who’d come south from
New Jersey to go to art school and to escape the brutal northeastern winters. He worked at the bar to pay rent and tuition. He was very popular, but according to a rumor which Ronnie neither confirmed nor denied, he liked women and had been hired because he would not fraternize with the customers. Merriman didn’t know about that nor did he care. He just found himself charmed by the boy: his openness, his sweet nature, his good looks. They struck up a conversation, became acquaintances. Merriman often went to the bar right after work when things were slow and he would have Ronnie all to himself, and they could talk an hour or more almost without interruption. He had wanted to see Ronnie outside the bar and asked him to dinner, but the boy had demurred.

Then he was simply gone, without notice or explanation.

The memories brought him regret and some sadness, and to dispel them, he sat up on his elbow and stared down at Cole, who was awake and appeared to be contemplating something himself. “So, when you’re not doing this, Cole,” he asked, “what do you do?”

Cole smiled up at him in a most disarming way and reached out to stroke Merriman’s hirsute forearm. “Well, I’m like any kid who moves to the big city in pursuit of his dreams. I’m an artist.”

Merriman’s breathed stopped momentarily. Cole noticed his alarm. He reached up to touch Merriman’s face, to hold it, as though to give him comfort.

“You look sad. Didn’t I please you? You seemed to enjoy yourself. Oh, but I know what it is. You look at me and you think of your friend, don’t you? The one who disappeared. I do remind you of him, and that hurts you, doesn’t it, because you loved him? Don’t be sad. Just enjoy the moment. If you want to think I’m him, think it and enjoy. No? Well, then, I’m going to make you forget him, or at least ease your pain.”

Cole raised up and pressed Merriman back to the bed, holding him there with one hand on his chest as he kissed Merriman’s face, running his tongue over Merriman’s eyelids, the bridge of his nose, the ridge of his chin, setting off streams of chills throughout Merriman’s whole body. Their mouths met, and it was as though something had clicked shut for Merriman at last, something which had hung open too long; it was complete. Cole had brought him the promised balm. His lips, his tongue seemed to draw from Merriman any lingering doubts, regrets, grief. Merriman opened his eyes and looked up into Cole’s face, which seemed different somehow, altered. He had the same features, the same dark eyes, red lips, arrowhead nose…but they were…illuminated, maybe, and not just by the lamp. For a moment Cole looked otherworldly, like some sunstruck seraph on a lavish church window, an angel with or without divine intention. Cole smiled.

“You feel better now, Robert?”

“God, you’re beautiful, Cole!” was all Merriman could say.

Cole’s smile deepened. “So are you. And I want to be as close to you as I possibly can. Do you understand? As close as two people can be…as though we shared the very same skin.”

Merriman didn’t quite understand Cole, but he agreed about being closer. He wanted that too, almost needed it now, as though his instincts were not his own but driven by something outside himself. A warmth, a light emanated from Cole, as though he were a human taper.

With alarm, but with awe too and a great desire which overpowered any fear, he watched as Cole’s whole face and body became luminescent—lit not from without by the paltry offering of the lamp but from within by a force greater than mere electricity. Something told him he should scream, scream, move away, struggle, but he did not heed it. It was too beautiful seeing Cole becoming something more than a man; he was a pure sphere of light now, losing skin, hair,
features, gaining fluorescence in their place, and when Cole, thus transformed, leaned down to kiss him again, Merriman accepted him with gratitude, and he felt himself being transported somehow, as though on the MARTA, moving rapidly from station to station, passing corridors of light, one after another, until thrown on their blinding walls were tableaus of earlier moments in Merriman’s life, scenes of him as a handsome youth and his erotic encounters with other handsome youths, nameless faces, interchangeable bodies, like madly whirling slides in a runaway magic lantern. They passed into another tunnel with undiminished speed and came back out to yet another station. And on the platforms fleeting past he thought he could see himself standing, Robert Merriman, thirty-eight, relatively young and handsome, until the succeeding platform showed him older and grayer, given to paunch and stooping shoulders and then older still and older until he was no longer recognizable, until everything went black.

* * * *

He must have slept because he dreamed. He was in a room of stainless steel floor and ceiling and bright-reflecting glass, but he wasn’t alone. Others surrounded him, on all sides of this crystalline auditorium, pinned as he was to the mirrored walls. All around the room. Dozens of them. At first the brightness of the room permitted no comprehension; he could not read or discern the features of his fellow captives: their faces, their entire heads, were only blobs of intense light.

Soon enough, though, he grew used to the light and saw that each of them resembled the other. They were practically the same: old men; white hair grown shaggy and shoulder length; naked, pectorals flabby and distended like old women’s breasts; stomachs full and pendulous enough to cover their genitals; legs withered down to brown, crusty, vein-scarred feet. Trolls. That’s what they were. The old and the undesirable. Instead of dreaming of buff young hunks
with bronzed muscles and extraordinary profiles, men like Cole and Ronnie and the endless others right there in Atlanta, he had dreamed of trolls. He laughed. The others watched him, confused, even upset by his laughter; they all turned their hoary faces his way. Some grunted, others cried out in weak attempts at speech.

The old man to his left, however, had a steady, strong voice not yet atrophied by his advanced years.

“Don’t laugh,” he said with contempt and warning. “You are one of us too. Look.” And he pointed Merriman’s attention to the opposing mirrored wall, where other trolls stood chained, helpless, and afraid. In the glass Merriman saw himself—surely it must have been him—it was his forlorn, shocked, unbelieving face staring back. It was the same nose and mouth and eyes, but withered now and frosted with gray hair.

He had always heard that as soon as you realized you were dreaming, you would come awake.

“I’m dreaming,” he shouted, rousing the others to moans and gibberish. But he did not wake, and the horrid phantasms around him did not disappear; he was still an old man staring back at himself. He squeezed his eyes closed and pressed hard against the glass panels behind him, hoping to force himself to consciousness. And when he opened his eyes again, he thought for a moment that he had succeeded: for there, standing in front of him, was his normal reflection, his as of yet unlined face and dark moustache, his full head of dark hair with only flecks of gray at the temples. He was relieved until he realized this was no reflection at all but an actual face, his face, staring at him, smiling. The face spoke.

“It’s Cole, Robert. Yes. I know you must be wondering how this happened, how I became you, and if I had the time to explain it to you, I would. But that time will come later.
Now I just want to thank you for this gift and assure you that I will use it well. Through you, through your beautiful face and body, I will give many men more pleasure than they’ve ever experienced before. And more. I will make the old men feel like they are still players in the games of love and sex. I will give them back some part of their youth, or at least the illusion of it. And they will give me the money I need to sustain my temporal disguise, my ‘human’ needs. And the young men and the men on the very cusp of middle age? The ones like you, Robert? I give to them also—the kind of sensations I gave you tonight. But I take more from them than I give, as you can see now. I take their youth, their vitality, their energy in sex and everything else. Through them, through you, I will live on and on, Robert, never aging, never losing the love of live.”

He laughed and it startled Merriman to see his own mouth part and his teeth show in vivid contrast to his tanned cheeks. “And when I’ve gotten all I can get from Atlanta, I’ll move on to some other place thronging with beautiful young men. Until then, I will be Robert Merriman for awhile, until I have taken all I can from you. Thank you again, Robert. You can rest assured of what you have done for me, this bit of contribution you have made to eternity, and you can die with it as well.”

Robert—for it was Robert now, not Ronnie, not Cole—leaned over to kiss Merriman. Then something occurred to him. “Oh yes. Ronnie. You were curious about Ronnie Antonelli. And you were right, of course. There. That’s him.”

He pointed to a troll standing some four or five men to Merriman’s left. Gone was the handsome face, the lithe physique, all replaced by wrinkles and white hair, warts and varicose veins. Merriman’s doppelganger turned back to him, smiled deeply, and whispered, “Good night, Robert. Good night, sweet prince,” and turned away a last time, moving slowly past the
line of moaning, beseeching old men—if men they still were—and when he got past that troll that had once been the young and handsome Ronnie Antonelli, the decayed, decrepit, erstwhile youth reached out with a withered arm and cried, “Robert, it’s me. Ronnie! Ronnie Antonelli. You remember me, don’t you? I don’t know what’s happened. I don’t know what’s going on. Please don’t go. Please. I need you, Robert. I need you!”