more exciting, more legitimate) than Gordon’s.
Not that Gordon could have said for sure that Tony got erections. He and Tony were modest. They were careful not to look at each other urinating. They were pious, Tony especially so, being Catholic. He was always crossing himself in a speedy,nervous fashion that Gordon’s mother had initially taken for a palsy. On the shelf above Tony’s bed was a pocked, orange-skinned Jesus statuette with crossed eyes that gazed straight down at the mattress. What did Jesus see? Nights drenched in solitary sex, Gordon imagined. Manly sex. Sex that was all right with Jesus. But he couldn’t imagine anything that Tony actually did because he couldn’t imagine what Tony thought about.
In his own bed that summer he thought about Tony and the garter snake. A quick little scene, all he needed. It went like this: The snake slipped into Tony’s trousers. Tony yelled at Gordon to get it out. Gordon fished around a bit and got it out.
This was before Gordon had heard of queers and when he was reconciled to marrying Beryl, a conspiratorial, hairy-armed girl who claimed him at tea dances. And yet he knew that his fantasy was trouble and not all right with Jesus. Some things you know.
Eventually he forgot about it. Or buried it alive, because when he recalled it again, thirty years and a hundred lurid fantasies later, it was like the exhumation of a baby he’d fathered or killed, guilt thundering through him like jungle drums. But that was just for a few seconds ahead of the memory itself, which immediately struck him as pathetic. And so obviously symbolic he wondered whether he was remembering a dream. Snakes like coils of rope. A long, long dream.
Al Yothers is describing an attack of crabs he caught in the army when Gordon remembers his first sexual fantasy. Although the memory makes him feel fragile about his young self, that foetal specimen who against all expectations outgrew the jar, he tells Al the fantasy to get him to laugh.
Al laughs, all right. He has a cruel, goofy laugh, but Gordon courts it because when Al laughs at him it is the only time Al seems to let loose.
This snake fantasy Al finds so funny he chokes, and Gordon has to thump him on the back. “What a jerk!” Al manages to get out between guffaws. “What a
friggin’ jerk!”
(He said the same thing in response to another masturbation story of Gordon’s. The one when Gordon was fourteen and got into ecstasies of soaping himself in the bathtub, and if the bathroom was occupied, taking a cup of water into his bedroom, locking himself in and doing it there, using a bar of his mother’s Jergens for its thick lather. He told Al how one day he had just lathered himself up in his bedroom when his father knocked on the door and he realized too late that he had forgotten to lock it. He scrambled into his closet before his father came in, but of course his father found him huddled on the closet floor, naked and soaped all over, limbs, torso, face, looking—he knew, he stood in front of his dresser mirror afterwards—like the deranged victim of a hideous skin condition. And all his father said was, “You’re liable to catch cold, son.”)
He and Al Yothers are in Al’s bed when Gordon tells him the snake fantasy. It’s the first time they’ve been in Al’s apartment because before that Gordon thought that a flophouse would be safer, provided they entered it five minutes apart. But on two different occasions a shifty-eyed character wearing a Sternway Jewellers sandwich board stared at him going inside, and he began to get uneasy. And, anyway, those dismal rooms with their stained, brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in fronds and their banging radiators sounding like outrage, and no matter what room they were in some wreck next door coughing his guts out—Gordon found them suicidally depressing, more so when the sheets were clean, any sign of decorum in places like that seeming grotesque to him, like lipstick on a
Not that Gordon could have said for sure that Tony got erections. He and Tony were modest. They were careful not to look at each other urinating. They were pious, Tony especially so, being Catholic. He was always crossing himself in a speedy,nervous fashion that Gordon’s mother had initially taken for a palsy. On the shelf above Tony’s bed was a pocked, orange-skinned Jesus statuette with crossed eyes that gazed straight down at the mattress. What did Jesus see? Nights drenched in solitary sex, Gordon imagined. Manly sex. Sex that was all right with Jesus. But he couldn’t imagine anything that Tony actually did because he couldn’t imagine what Tony thought about.
In his own bed that summer he thought about Tony and the garter snake. A quick little scene, all he needed. It went like this: The snake slipped into Tony’s trousers. Tony yelled at Gordon to get it out. Gordon fished around a bit and got it out.
This was before Gordon had heard of queers and when he was reconciled to marrying Beryl, a conspiratorial, hairy-armed girl who claimed him at tea dances. And yet he knew that his fantasy was trouble and not all right with Jesus. Some things you know.
Eventually he forgot about it. Or buried it alive, because when he recalled it again, thirty years and a hundred lurid fantasies later, it was like the exhumation of a baby he’d fathered or killed, guilt thundering through him like jungle drums. But that was just for a few seconds ahead of the memory itself, which immediately struck him as pathetic. And so obviously symbolic he wondered whether he was remembering a dream. Snakes like coils of rope. A long, long dream.
Al Yothers is describing an attack of crabs he caught in the army when Gordon remembers his first sexual fantasy. Although the memory makes him feel fragile about his young self, that foetal specimen who against all expectations outgrew the jar, he tells Al the fantasy to get him to laugh.
Al laughs, all right. He has a cruel, goofy laugh, but Gordon courts it because when Al laughs at him it is the only time Al seems to let loose.
This snake fantasy Al finds so funny he chokes, and Gordon has to thump him on the back. “What a jerk!” Al manages to get out between guffaws. “What a
friggin’ jerk!”
(He said the same thing in response to another masturbation story of Gordon’s. The one when Gordon was fourteen and got into ecstasies of soaping himself in the bathtub, and if the bathroom was occupied, taking a cup of water into his bedroom, locking himself in and doing it there, using a bar of his mother’s Jergens for its thick lather. He told Al how one day he had just lathered himself up in his bedroom when his father knocked on the door and he realized too late that he had forgotten to lock it. He scrambled into his closet before his father came in, but of course his father found him huddled on the closet floor, naked and soaped all over, limbs, torso, face, looking—he knew, he stood in front of his dresser mirror afterwards—like the deranged victim of a hideous skin condition. And all his father said was, “You’re liable to catch cold, son.”)
He and Al Yothers are in Al’s bed when Gordon tells him the snake fantasy. It’s the first time they’ve been in Al’s apartment because before that Gordon thought that a flophouse would be safer, provided they entered it five minutes apart. But on two different occasions a shifty-eyed character wearing a Sternway Jewellers sandwich board stared at him going inside, and he began to get uneasy. And, anyway, those dismal rooms with their stained, brown-flowered wallpaper peeling in fronds and their banging radiators sounding like outrage, and no matter what room they were in some wreck next door coughing his guts out—Gordon found them suicidally depressing, more so when the sheets were clean, any sign of decorum in places like that seeming grotesque to him, like lipstick on a
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