The Men from the Boys (15 page)

Lloyd sighs. “You've obviously thought about all the implications. The winter in Provincetown, the isolation ...”

“The support group, the community,” he says in response.

“The access to services?” Lloyd challenges.

“There are excellent services in Provincetown. And a free shuttle to Boston.”

The back of my throat begins to tighten. “You've already made your decision,” I say. “You're not talking about this with us. You're telling us. Just like when you decided to leave teaching and go on disability.”

Javitz looks uncomfortable, but doesn't say anything.

“Well,” Lloyd says, the psychologist now, “maybe there's some need to discuss all this further, but the bottom line is that we support you, Javitz, in whatever you decide.” He looks over at me.

I look from Lloyd to Javitz. I'm quiet for a moment. Then I say: “Of course.”

“We'll talk tomorrow,” Javitz promises, “and the next day, and the next, I'm sure.”

We all agree. Lloyd goes to bed. Javitz and I watch CNN for a while, not saying much, talking a little about Bosnia, about how it's genocide all over again, another Holocaust. Javitz decides to go home then. We kiss good-bye and I walk him to the door. “We'll talk tomorrow,” he promises, and I nod, convinced he's talked all this through with Ernie already, that our discussion is merely a courtesy.

I hit the dimmer switch. The light fades to a dull gold. I open the door to the bedroom.

“Lloyd?” I whisper.

But he's asleep. I don't feel like cuddling; not yet. I sit in a puddle of moonlight, a bright patch of blue a few inches from Lloyd's meditation table. Incense tickles my nose like the soft fur on the petals of wildflowers. Its fragrance comforts me, the way the scent of the lilies around my father's coffin consoled me at his wake. My family had all gathered then: aunts and uncles and cousins and in-laws, people I hadn't seen in years, people I don't expect to see ever again. Strange thing about family, how they come, how they go.

I close my eyes and picture myself all alone in the middle of a field, surrounded by daisies and black-eyed Susans. That's called meditation, I hear Lloyd say to me. Maybe it is. Maybe that's what I'm doing, sitting here, rocking myself in the dark. Maybe I'm meditating. I just know that if I'm going to be alone, this is where I want to be: in a field filled with flowers, under a warm summer sun, with no one around me, not a soul, not a single person who can ever leave me again.

FAMILY

Provincetown, July 1994

“Yes, strange thing about family, how they come, how they go,” Javitz agrees. We're sitting at the kitchen table. We've just cleared away our late-breakfast dishes and now we're drinking tea and reading the Sunday
Globe.
“My father left us when I was eight months old. But I've told you that.”

Many times, in fact. “I just don't understand it,” I tell him.

“What's to understand? He was tired of living over a delicatessen in the Bronx with four screaming children and a wife who was as cold as Long Point in February.”

“No,” I tell him, irritably. “I'm talking about
me.
My mother's phone call.”

“Oh. Right. That is how this started, isn't it?” He takes a long sip of his tea.

I had slept until noon. I woke up with a stranger's cum dried on my chest. I showered in a frenzy, rubbing my skin with the loofah until it was raw and red, angry at myself for not washing the night before. Already the stubble on my torso was pushing its way against the surface of my skin, little purple dots speckled across my pecs. Tomorrow it will itch. I won't be able to shave it again for a few days unless I want to risk severe razor burn.

Javitz made breakfast: Bisquick waffles. “You can't fuck up with Bisquick,” he says. It's something we share: memories of mothers cooking “from scratch” with Bisquick. His waffles always taste the same, crispy but dry. Sometimes he sprinkles a little cinnamon into the batter to perk them up, but not today.

“Oh,” he had said, suddenly remembering. “Your mother called while you were in the shower. She wants you to come down for your birthday.”

I'm shaking my head now in protest. “But my birthday's not till next month. Has she forgotten even that?”

“Darling,
call
her,” Javitz says.

“I will. Later.”

I hadn't heard from my mother in seven weeks, but who was counting? Like friends, family comes, family goes. But family are not friends, despite what we might say. “My friends are my family,” Chanel insisted in an essay that won her an award from the Lesbian and Gay Press Association. “I have recreated what I lost—or rather, what was taken from me.”

My mother, until her retirement, was a greeter at Kmart. You know those women: “Hel-
lo
, and welcome to Kmart. Have a flyer.” They stand there in their blue smocks, and their voices are raspy with years of cigarette smoke. My mother is no exception. “Gawd,” she'd say at the end of the work week, “I've got corns on my feet from standing all day, and the edges of my mouth are cracking from smiling.”

She held that job for eleven years, until Kmart started cutting back, hurt by the giant Wal-Mart that went up across the street. They gave her an early retirement, and she still has the gilt-framed Employee of the Decade plaque they gave her hanging on the wall. She worked in housewares, too, but it's as the front-line greeter that she's still recognized on the street. “Hey,” I've heard more than one kid say, “that's the lady from Kmart.”

The one and only time she and my father ever met Lloyd she was still wearing her blue smock. I cringed a little, but I knew Lloyd would understand. His parents were farmers; the one and only time I ever met
them,
on a side trip to Iowa during our trip to Chicago three years ago, his father was actually wearing denim overalls and chewing on a sprig of wheat, just as I imagined him. I'm not sure how Lloyd imagined my parents. “This is Lloyd,” I announced to them, and my mother looked up from the kitchen table, exhausted, then rose and greeted him just as she would her customers.
“Wel
come,” she said, raspy voice and cracking smile. Then she sat back down to take off her shoes.

My father never held a job as long. Shoe salesman, night watchman, cab driver. “It's not his fault,” my mother insisted, the most devoted wife on the planet. “He's a hard worker.” Stores were forever going out of business, new employees constantly being laid off. The afternoon he first met Lloyd he had just been laid off yet again—either from Klein's Formal Wear or the cab company—and my mother was dog tired from working double shifts. “Just until you find something else,” she told my father. “I can carry us for a while.” But my father carried most of the conversation with Lloyd and me that day, as anxious as he was about work. My mother just sat there, massaging her feet.

“So what is it that
your
folks do, Lloyd?” my father asked.

“They're farmers.”

“Ah.” My father nodded. “Salt of the earth.”

“You going home to see them for Christmas?” my mother finally asked.

“No,” Lloyd said. “Jeff and I are planning to have some of our friends in for the holiday.”

My mother raised her eyebrows, then lit a cigarette. That's just what she thought: her gay son had abandoned his family for a group of faceless, nameless
friends.

But if friends become family, then they're no longer friends. They've become our new mothers, our chosen fathers, our replaced brothers, sisters, and cousins.

“Which am I?” Javitz asks now, bringing me back home.

“You're our maiden great-grandaunt Agatha, the one everyone suspected was a lesbian.”

He doesn't seem pleased with the association. “Couldn't I at least be one of those funny uncles?”

“The kind that play tickle-tickle with the prepubescent nephews?” I leer.

“I
abhor
children, and you know that. How about tickle-tickle with their fathers?”

I stand, approaching the window and wishing the clouds away. It's the first overcast day we've had in weeks. I'm becoming greedy. “Maybe I'll call Eduardo,” I say.

“No luck last night?” Javitz asks, with those eyes.

“Depends on what you'd consider luck.”

“Do tell.”

“I went to the dick dock.”

I wait for his response. He's got the
Globe
up in front of his face. He lowers it slowly, dramatically. “The dick dock?”

“Yup.”

He beams, like a proud father whose son has just said he was joining the firm.

“It was hot,” I admit. “Never thought such a scene could be so hot.”

In fact, I'd thought just the opposite. There's a rest stop on Route 3, the highway between Boston and Provincetown. I see the cars there every time I drive to or from the Cape. Once, our first summer here, a time when a little naïveté still lingered blissfully in my soul, I didn't understand why so many cars stopped at that particular place. I was always in a hurry, my windows down, my radio blaring, anxious to be in Provincetown in time for tea dance. I used to pride myself on not stopping the whole trip, not once between Boston and Provincetown, not even to take a leak. “You're young,” Javitz said, sighing. “Your bladder holds.”

Then, a year later, when I was rapidly becoming no longer as young, and my bladder no longer as impervious, I had to pee as I passed by the rest stop. I noticed four empty cars parked there. Someone was behind the fence: a man, older than I, gray hair, a beard. Why had he gone all the way back there to take a pee? I wondered. Surely these bushes here were privacy enough.

As I hauled out my dick and let my water flow, feeling the rush of relief settle all through my body, I spotted another man, and another, this time treading out of the bushes en route to their cars. Now, and only now, I began to suspect.

“Silly boy,” Javitz chided me later, sitting on the deck of our house in Provincetown. “Every rest stop in the world is a gay cruising spot. If you weren't so focused on tea dances and which boots were popular this year, you might have discovered that a long time ago.”

“You know all the secrets, don't you?” I asked, smiling.

“Most. Not all. I'm not through learning,” he said. “You'll learn them, too, one at a time. If you're open to learning them.”

Secrets, I thought. Gay life is filled with secrets. Well, I didn't want secrets. No sex in the bushes for me. I was out, loud, and proud, a Queer National, marching in the streets. How could anyone find sex on the side of the road hot? Sure, maybe after an action, when we'd be all hot and sweaty from chanting, a couple of us might grope each other on the sidewalk or in an alley. But we always went back to an apartment or hotel room: we always did it on sheets. “No offense,” I said. “But those guys—well, they're ...”

“What?” Javitz asked, arching an eyebrow. “Too old?”

“Well, there aren't many guys my age who do it.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, come on. The guys there are all—so—sleazy.”

“Sometimes they are.” Javitz smiled. “When you're lucky.”

I laughed. “Whatever floats your boat. It's just not my thing.” In the mirror, I checked my hair—how
thick
it was then—and headed off to the bar. Javitz could keep the rest stops, the dunes, the bath houses. It just wasn't my scene. I laced up my boots and headed out to find a trick—someone who would look, I realized then, exactly like me.

“So what did he look like?” Javitz asks now.

“Who?”

“The guy at the dick dock.”

I smile. “There wasn't just one.”

“This gets better and better.” He grins like a madman. “How many were there?”

“A whole ring. It was hot.” I sneer. “Of course, they were all servicing
me.”
That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it made the story better.

Javitz sniffs. “And here I was hoping you'd learned a lesson.”

“I
did.
Javitz, I was
rejected
last night.”

“Doesn't sound that way to me.”

“Not there. At the bar. Not one guy looked at me. At least, not one guy I'd go home with. That's why I went to the dick dock.”

“Oh. I see. Lowered your standards.”

“Well—”

“Fuck you, Jeff.”

And he sounds as if he means it. He stands up, pours himself some more tea. He carries it into the living room and stands facing away from me.

“Hey,” I say.

He doesn't respond for at least a full minute. Then, still facing away from me, he says: “You were not rejected if you ended up having hot sex at the dock.” He turns around. “No matter how
old
they were. In my book, that is
not
a rejection.”

“Okay, okay, mea culpa.” I hate it when Javitz gets like this. “Look,” I say, “there's something that I need to talk about....”

“What?”

“Well, I shaved my chest before I went out.” Javitz rolls his eyes over his teacup. “And I nicked myself. Then, later, one of the guys shot his load all over my chest and it dried there.”

“And?”

“And so—well, I worry.”

He sits down again, staring at me across the table. “About
what?”
He's still angry. What the
hell
is his problem this morning? “About
transmission,”
I say, articulating the word carefully, exasperated.

He matches my mood. “Oh, for God's sake, Jeff.”