Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction (10 page)

“Stop playin’ around, Danté!” he gurgled, pawing at my arm.

“I’m not the one who’s playing.”

His shocked eyes stared back, filled with an emotion I couldn’t put my finger on…fear, lust, anger, whatever… I don’t know… I tried to kiss him but he turned away, yelling something I couldn’t hear over my harsh breathing and beating heart.

But I could see his lips moving, shiny, wet, bits of spittle flying. It made me want to kiss him more, his shirtless, 501-clad frame writhing between my erection and the wall. By that point, I wasn’t Danté anymore, and he wasn’t my pale friend Ray with the cool-ass aquarium, silvery hair, and gecko toes. A sexual demon, a succubus, was in control now, making me do things…things I’d only dreamt about.

Ray’s face turned red, which energized me further. I tore at the button-fly of his Levi’s, slapping his hands away. We struggled further along the wall, dislodging photos, awards, a clock. A pole lamp crashed to the floor. We stumbled over it into the armoire, knocking books from the top and all sorts of crap out of the front. I managed to get his jeans to his knees, which finally tripped him up. We toppled to the carpet.

He tried to crawl away through the wreckage of his room, kicking at me, but that succubus was faster, stronger, smarter. Together we subdued him.

He exhaled, his body went limp, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

 

“Yeah, I love you, and I’m sorry
.
” Ray’s eyes were half open when I touched his face, wiping at that tear.

He slapped my hand away and then went limp again. But his jaw was tense, as if he was grinding his teeth, and a second tear oozed hotly along the path of its predecessor.

I felt sick. He was the last person I wanted to hurt, the last person I wanted to be angry with me. But he was, lying naked on the floor, wrestling with his emotions, trying not to cry, all because of me.

I reached out again because I ached to console him. I needed for him to not be angry with me. But before my hands could reach him—the same hands that moments ago muffled his screams—he sprang off the floor.

I sat up, watching him fumble with his clothes. His jeans and briefs were tangled around one sneaker. He methodically untwisted the material, angled everything appropriately, and then slipped his other leg back in and pulled them up. He pressed his palms to his thighs and slowly smoothed the wrinkles out.

I watched him slip into his other sneaker and carefully tie it up. Then, as he gathered the Polaroids from the bed into a pile, he stopped and stared into the tank at something floating.

His voice was far away. “Another one bites the dust.”

He put the pictures in a drawer, stared in the mirror and tweaked his locks for a very long while, occasionally stopping to pose and flex his muscles, face dispassionate as before, eyes bloodshot.

His image began to quiver as moisture welled in my eyes. I felt overwhelmed and frantic, like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the air, like I was drowning in hot quicksand, like I was some tiny primordial thing sinking into the tar pits.

I closed my eyes and took a series of deep calming breaths, back to back….

“Dude!”
he barked.

My eyes snapped open. I noticed the sun was shining brightly now, though rain still poured. Ray was watching me through the mirror with an expression that made my eyes burn.

“It’s fuckin’ late. The movie starts in forty-five fuckin’ minutes. Get fuckin’ dressed!”

I yanked myself off the floor, not as excited about pig guts and gore anymore, and did exactly as I was told.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sung works at a little stall off Lafayette and Canal. They sell an abundance of T-shirts stuffed into a remarkably compact space; colorful stocking caps with the symbols of baseball teams hang, clothespinned to wires, from the low rippled-tin ceiling. Imperceptible until you are almost on him, a small old man sits in the tight corner, shaded beneath a broad visor, making keys behind a shelf of rolled shirts and the gold key chains of pocket-sized skylines. The visor obscures his face and, with his back to you all day, he appears to be fashioning something more than keys. Grinding away all day like that you would expect him to produce swords, something large and magnificent.

Sung, arms crossed, folds his tall body atop a stepladder in the middle of the sidewalk, ostensibly because there’s no room in the stall if even one customer enters, but also because this elevated position allows him to survey the bustle for potential shoplifters. He does this with a look of serious concentration; chain-smoking, perched like a studious chess player, he sifts for crime. Since taking the job he’s only caught two shoplifters. A fat, tearful tourist woman in a college sweatshirt tried to steal a key chain. He caught her and blocked her way while shouting for police. Fellow venders poured in as her relatives calmly videotaped the entire episode. And a black boy took a swipe at some hats. Sung leapt from his perch to collar the kid, but an unseen confederate punched him in the mouth. He wore that swollen, bloody lip proudly. When we kissed he would do so roughly, pushing open the cut against my mouth, sticky warmth leaking out between us, painting the tip of my tongue red. After his bottom lip healed he got it pierced, a silver ring that hung like a handle, a doorknob I could turn but never open.

Besides key chains and lighters, he sells a variety of jade Buddhas and fans and shiny, folded Chinese clothes.

“Only white people buy these,” he told me with a huge, knowing grin.

These were
Shou-yi
, funeral clothes, Sung explained. Dressing for corpses, for that prom the afterlife must surely be. Surpluses, the odd sizes, off-patterns, were sold to tourists in Chinatown, to white people, presumably as pajamas or Halloween costumes.

 

I come by at closing. My temp job in a midtown accounting office ends at five, so I kill time at the Strand bookstore or at Boy Bar until seven. Sung doesn’t like me to hang out while he’s working. I tell him he’s not working, he’s smoking. He answers with a smile. Our apartment is close. Saying I live in SoHo sounds grand. It’s not. Our room is half a living room divided by a sheet, fortified by a couch with a foldout bed, a white couch made beige from a variety of undefined stains merged into one dull color, like a cup of tea with milk gone cold. Our clothes have spun into piles in the corners, wrapped around empty cigarette cartons and old flyers for clubs come and gone and yellowed paper towels and crushed cans and empty beer bottles. Sung has at least one of every hat from work. They are strewn about like exhausted Christmas lights. He wears one every day all day, even while we sleep, when we fuck.

Sung fucks me with his shoulders back, his eyes shut tight, his prominent uneven front teeth pulling back his surging bottom lip, his stomach muscles stressed and sharp with crocodile folds. The grainy brown beads of his nipples are always hard. Alternating his hands behind his back and on his hips, he fucks me like he’s doing tricks on a bike. I’ve finally been able to discern his birthday from the row of digits atop his passport photograph; he’s two years older than he told me. We should start using condoms.

 

While he was at work I read his passport the way expatriates read foreign newspapers, looking for economic gossip from home. Facts that clarify, not straddle distances. In his passport photo he is wearing a fresh white Lacoste shirt, collar turned up. No cap. His hair is wild, not as long as it is now but definitely yearning to grow, stretching toward the edges of the photograph as if to pull the corners in, collapsing his picture in on itself. His passport photo dares shoplifters, police, the world to hit him, secretly knowing he’ll relish the blow. Blood makes for better fingerprints. Malaysian-Chinese, Sung has been here on a tourist visa well past his allotted six months; two months ago he ran out of money and had to work. He left the youth hostel and moved in with me one week after we met.

 

The living room has no heat. In bed we pile on top of each other for warmth, spreading our coats over an old quilt our roommates begrudgingly lent us. As we change positions in the night I am always chasing his mouth, putting my lips near his. In the morning the room is heavy with the stale cream corn sweetness of his breath.

Part of the deal to rent out the living room is I can’t use the kitchen. Since it’s winter I keep milk on the fire escape. Cereal boxes are up on the bookshelf, all other meals we eat in Chinatown. At work I steal lunch out of the break room refrigerator, or buy a couple of hotdogs off the street. Part of the deal to keep this place is no television, no stereo. Sung lives with me though part of the deal is no one can stay over.

The couple we share the apartment with are students, musicians; they’re extremely unhappy that we are in their living room, but the need to make rent doesn’t give them an option. At first I tried to be friendly, but there is something anemic about this couple. They shy away from words, even to each other; most of their communication is a series of complex nods with their chins and a lot of pointing. Worse, they’re one of those sad couples that have begun to look alike: they both have long, brittle blond hair that coats the tiny bathroom floor. Only the male’s weak goatee allows me to tell them apart. Sung hates them and, as far as I can tell, has never spoken to them. He calls them Hansel and Gretel. At first I laughed, but now I frequently forget their names, lulled into their preferred form of communication when I see them: weary waves, nods, some pointing.

 

After work we go straight back to the apartment. Sung fucks me, hands on his hips. When he cums he exhales the sound of a collapsing church. I can’t cum until I hear that sound, beams crashing down on me, lying across my chest. I shoot a river of frosting, pungent little wedding cake bells strung right up to my chin, and I open my eyes. Sung is looking at me, panting through an open smile, dry spittle whitening the corners of his mouth, the baroque musculature of his stomach brilliant with sweat. He looks at me the same way I examine his passport photo. Running his finger over points of departure, he smears the semen cooling on my chest in a circular pattern.

He hasn’t said anything to me and I haven’t told him I found the return ticket he purchased last week, hidden among his papers and passport; the date of departure, next Thursday, from JFK.

 

Snow on the roof spreads an alien topiary garden of crystal mysteries. We take the fire escape up here sometimes to smoke. In nothing but untied sneakers and cap (of course), wrapped in the dirty quilt, Sung sucks warmth from his cigarette, the cherry burning like Mars in a telescope. I took the time to dress and grab a coat. He finishes his cigarette before me and rushes down the fire escape and back through the window. I tap my ash out on the ledge, into the hole Sung made in the snow with his extinguished cigarette butt, hot ash melting snow to water, running off the roof in tiny black droplets. Part of the deal is that I not smoke in the apartment.

 

Tonight we’ll go for dinner a few blocks east of Bowery, above Canal, a cheap Chinese diner. Imprisoned carp list to one side in the window aquariums, slowly blinking unfocused, molten eyes. Sung and I have a half-dozen restaurants where we can eat a full meal for five dollars or under. Afterward we have a similar number of East Village bars to drink in, but we always go to Boy Bar first. Friday nights I pick him up and we hit a check-cashing place on Elizabeth Street that has the best rates. We go to Boy Bar early to score. And here we divide. I like K, Ketamine. Sung likes coke.

It’s the typical chorus line of hunched expectancy at the bar; we grab our usual booth in the back and order drinks, waiting. Everyone is waiting. In a sad synchronized swivel, every head at the bar turns in unison as the door opens. We always take the back booth, its leather seats held together by duct tape and desperation, to avoid joining the sorry expectancy at the bar. This has earned us a certain amount of favoritism from our dealer, Lonnie. Lonnie’s going for a typical Lower East Side hipster look: rumpled, earth-toned clothes, faux-fallen rock star chic. He’s always unshaven, a limp cigarette at the corner of his mouth, and though young his cheeks are jowly from constant drinking. The lines of his neck look dark, as if filled with dirt. He always wears a black knit cap low, right to his eyebrows. Often his eyes are secreted behind cheap, mirrored aviator glasses, the lens marred by huge, blurry fingerprints. He’ll slide smoothly into our booth, waving over a drink, tipping the bartenders with a handshake laden with slim baggies of coke. This pays for his drinks and his right to do business here. We score over small talk. He treats us like friends, using our names way too often, in an unusually high voice. It’s a forced, crackly casualness that over time has become authentic: the weight of paranoia that comes with his profession, subsumed by the sing-song breeziness he’s adopted to counteract nuanced fear.

He likes Sung more than me. He sits next to me so he can look at Sung while he talks to us. Everyone likes Sung. He greets everyone by nodding his head and smiling. It’s such a simplistic act of immediate approval I’m surprised it works so succinctly, so consistently. And his smile. His uneven teeth the opposite of ugly, Sung’s smile is a roller coaster, a carnival billboard inviting everyone in for a good time. It gets free coke out of Lonnie. Or at least he’ll front a bag or two before payday. After handshakes exchanging twenties and drugs, Lonnie takes his place in the bathroom, his roost between two sour urinals. The bar’s patrons shuffle to the back, one after another, to score. He’ll hang out in the bathroom for two hours, then leave. On the way out he always slaps me on the back. Passing the table he points his finger like a gun at Sung and makes like he’s shooting him. Sung always laughs, grabs his chest and falls back into his seat. By now Sung has been able to do two or three bumps of coke off his wrist, so it’s quite natural for him to show off the insane delight that is his smile.