His mouth was wet and sweet from the full red mouthwashhe was always swigging. I felt a floral rapture springing up inside me, as though a huge sunflower were about to poke out of my mouth, my entrails about to turn into soft ropes of wisteria, my cock into a red-hot poker. Everything in me rose up to greet him, and Willy grabbed my pants and shook my erection as if it were a hand: “Average, as you say.” He bit my ear, “Sorry, doll, I don’t go for pencil meat. I’m a hopeless size queen.”
He seemed delighted to have demonstrated his power over me. Buffeted by his own witticisms and sexual splashiness, he was smiling a really huge smile. I saw in him the wide-eyed boy I sometimes impersonated, which made me concede the field to him. He was so much better at it, so much more appealing. I could still feel in my palms the girth of his tight, muscled, turned waist as he’d wriggled out of my arms a minute ago, exactly as though he’d been a small but powerful fish, a rosy trout breaking through the ice with the thrust of his tail.
Then Annie came in and she and William flattered each other about their appearance and kissed, standing, for a long time as I sat and looked on—crotch-height, child-height. They were certainly aware of me and were posing for me.
I left the young lovers after they’d assured me how much they adored me. They had even laughingly asked me to be the best man. Outside, it was dark already although only four o’clock, and fresh snow was falling in the quadrangle. I could hear typewriters clattering and see genies of steam lifting off the heated shower windows in the dorms. I passed the chemistry building and looked down at a lecturer in a basement laboratory. So much activity, I thought, and none of it immediately productive. I considered only farmers and steel-workers to be truly productive. The notion of intellectual labor struck me as purest sophistry.
I turned back and headed for the student union. I’dheard tonight was nude swimming for men only in the union pool. The showers were full, two facing rows of cubicles without curtains. I stationed myself in one and looked and looked across the aisle while trying not to stare. There was the man with the enormous black glasses now squinting glassless, and there, tucked in a protected pocket under his gut, was his penis. Two down was a swimmer with high, molded buttocks. As he turned, his ass seemed to be shaped by invisible hands, like the rubber balls boxers knead to strengthen their grip. I wondered how William Everett Hunton would evaluate the size of each penis—and suddenly a panic seized me, for I realized that I truly was limited by what God had given me, that I wasn’t a cloud of uncertainty but an animal with certain attributes and not others.
Perhaps because I hated my sexuality and believed it could be redirected, I’d come to see every aspect of my being as vague and shifting, and in that very cloudiness had lain my definition: I was the boy who hadn’t started living yet. But now I felt stigmatized by my actuality, by the mole between my shoulder blades, by the botched job of my circumcision, so that a dewlap hung down on one side but not the other. A Psych major had told me just yesterday that the army could spot queers by showing them slides of nude men. In spite of themselves, the queers’ eyes dilated a fraction—and that “in spite of” enraged me and scared me, for my pride, yes, my pride insisted I could be whatever I chose. Every morning the tabula was rasa . Maybe that was why the Buddhist doctrine of the non-soul, the anattā , attracted me so much, because it suggested I was potentially everything and actually nothing. I could wake up one morning gay or straight—or as nothing, since Buddhism seemed to annihilate such essences. I was afraid to make a choice of any kind.
From the showers and toilets my cruising moved out into the world. Although my school reputedly had a largepercentage of gay male students,
He seemed delighted to have demonstrated his power over me. Buffeted by his own witticisms and sexual splashiness, he was smiling a really huge smile. I saw in him the wide-eyed boy I sometimes impersonated, which made me concede the field to him. He was so much better at it, so much more appealing. I could still feel in my palms the girth of his tight, muscled, turned waist as he’d wriggled out of my arms a minute ago, exactly as though he’d been a small but powerful fish, a rosy trout breaking through the ice with the thrust of his tail.
Then Annie came in and she and William flattered each other about their appearance and kissed, standing, for a long time as I sat and looked on—crotch-height, child-height. They were certainly aware of me and were posing for me.
I left the young lovers after they’d assured me how much they adored me. They had even laughingly asked me to be the best man. Outside, it was dark already although only four o’clock, and fresh snow was falling in the quadrangle. I could hear typewriters clattering and see genies of steam lifting off the heated shower windows in the dorms. I passed the chemistry building and looked down at a lecturer in a basement laboratory. So much activity, I thought, and none of it immediately productive. I considered only farmers and steel-workers to be truly productive. The notion of intellectual labor struck me as purest sophistry.
I turned back and headed for the student union. I’dheard tonight was nude swimming for men only in the union pool. The showers were full, two facing rows of cubicles without curtains. I stationed myself in one and looked and looked across the aisle while trying not to stare. There was the man with the enormous black glasses now squinting glassless, and there, tucked in a protected pocket under his gut, was his penis. Two down was a swimmer with high, molded buttocks. As he turned, his ass seemed to be shaped by invisible hands, like the rubber balls boxers knead to strengthen their grip. I wondered how William Everett Hunton would evaluate the size of each penis—and suddenly a panic seized me, for I realized that I truly was limited by what God had given me, that I wasn’t a cloud of uncertainty but an animal with certain attributes and not others.
Perhaps because I hated my sexuality and believed it could be redirected, I’d come to see every aspect of my being as vague and shifting, and in that very cloudiness had lain my definition: I was the boy who hadn’t started living yet. But now I felt stigmatized by my actuality, by the mole between my shoulder blades, by the botched job of my circumcision, so that a dewlap hung down on one side but not the other. A Psych major had told me just yesterday that the army could spot queers by showing them slides of nude men. In spite of themselves, the queers’ eyes dilated a fraction—and that “in spite of” enraged me and scared me, for my pride, yes, my pride insisted I could be whatever I chose. Every morning the tabula was rasa . Maybe that was why the Buddhist doctrine of the non-soul, the anattā , attracted me so much, because it suggested I was potentially everything and actually nothing. I could wake up one morning gay or straight—or as nothing, since Buddhism seemed to annihilate such essences. I was afraid to make a choice of any kind.
From the showers and toilets my cruising moved out into the world. Although my school reputedly had a largepercentage of gay male students,
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