He was so attractive and unusually well-mannered, I considered it for a moment.
“Actually, I don’t do that out here,” I told him finally, getting myself back into my pants. “You won’t have a hard time though. You look great.”
I meant what I said, that it wouldn’t be difficult finding someone willing to go down on him even if it meant no reciprocation. There are innumerable men who are happy to fellate other men regardless of whether they will receive services in return. In online ads every day, scores of men make the same offer. “You come over, watch some porn. Straight or gay, I’ve got ‘em both. Pull down your pants and let me give you the best blowjob of your life. No recip required.”
These insatiable cocksuckers have transcendent experiences giving head. They’re happiest when they’re at it. It’s amazing. You can’t believe it when you connect with one of them. It’s simultaneously incredibly fun and mildly terrifying, particularly when you imagine all the legs they’ve sat between on the floor, just there to perform a service. Don’t mind me. There are thousands of videos online of truckers and roofers and deliverymen plopping themselves down on the sofas of these types of men. Their pants are down, their shirts are on. Squeals are audible from an off-camera TV, the sounds of a female porn performer. Sometimes the guy will have a remote control in his hand, fast-forwarding to the good parts. Or a cigarette or a beer. They exert the full force of their will in striking the image of straightness, which they pull off surprisingly well considering that their genitals are in the mouths of other men.
Later that same week, I had an encounter with a second biker at the arcade. He was equally easy to spot, though he was far from the weekend warrior type. This one looked like he might actually have been a friend to old Rocky Dennis and Cher back in the Mask days. I could see a crowd gathering in one of the booths. I tried it and found the door unlocked. Four guys, all with their pants undone and cocks in hand. On the floor knelt the biker, a thin middle-aged man with a ponytail and a long, gray beard. He wore no shirt and a sleeveless denim vest with a big patch sewn onto the back, reading “Lone Wolf — No Club.”
He was at the center of an incredible scene. The lone wolf brought men to climax one after another. No recip required. Men entered and left the booth. It smelled strongly. Our pheromones filled the air. I stood in the corner and watched. It was disgusting and vile and fascinating. The biker seemed to be in the throes of something. A born again Christian might have taken it as proof that possession was a reality. We all kept feeding tokens into the slot. I didn’t know where any of it was going. It went on and on.
I stayed and watched until no one was left in the place that hadn’t been in that booth. It had been a long time and a lot of men. I kept expecting myself to leave in the next minute, and the next, and the next. But I stayed. Before that, I hadn’t known something like what I’d witnessed could spontaneously occur.
In the end, I was alone with the lone wolf. I couldn’t get a handle on him. He seemed almost like a machine to me, but I knew he was a real person with a framed photo of his mother in an apartment or trailer home somewhere. He hadn’t said anything the entire time, and he didn’t say anything now. He stood up as I was putting my dick in my pants, his knees hurt from being on the floor for so long. He was a mess. With his pants still around his ankles, he sat on one of the benches and took a red handkerchief from his back pocket. He tried to clean himself up.
“Thanks for letting me watch,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, his voice gravelly and parched.
41
I TRIED TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING ABOUT THE COP.
The time we sat naked on his back porch. I sat on his lap, and we looked out onto a field that hadn’t been developed into anything yet but would eventually become rows of tract homes. The only time I was ever naked with another man outdoors. Then I lit up a cigarette and he winced and pushed me away.
“That stinks,” he said. “Go sit over there.”
I remembered that once when there was something wrong with his hot tub, he had spread newspaper over his dining room table and sat a bunch of greasy parts and a little motor on it.
“You really know how to fix stuff like this?” I’d said.
“It’s not hard. You just have to be patient and think about what you’re doing.”
I had been at the cop’s house on his sister’s birthday one year. He had baked her a cake before I arrived. He left it on the counter to cool during our visit, and was icing it as I was leaving. He wore a gray bathrobe. One of those big plastic cake covers sat on the countertop. He put some frosting on a spoon for me to taste. The cake was a hideous pink color, and the icing had the flavor of melted rubber and sugary strawberry.
“I like it,” I told him. “You’re a good cook.”
“Thanks. I changed the recipe up a little.”
A Reader’s Digest sat nearby, open-faced against the countertop marking the recipe he had adapted.
I remembered precisely where we had stood in his kitchen. I could have found the exact spoon from which I had taken that single, revolting taste, if I could have somehow gotten back into that house of his to dig though the utensil drawer just for a minute.
We were talking on the phone again, but only because he occasionally answered when I called. Malcolm warned that I was blowing it, but it felt so good to hear the cop’s voice, I couldn’t stop myself.
He didn’t seem fascinated by the depth of my emotion anymore. And I was trying harder to imitate a calm and reasonable person when we spoke, because he was obviously fed up with my blubbering and arguments against the absurd age divide in his relationship.
I knew his feelings for me must still be in there somewhere, retrievable by the right combination of words or gestures, the way I imagined that if a maniac had a gun to my head, there must be some move I could make, some phrase I could use that would change the situation entirely. The hard part was figuring out what that thing was before having one’s head blown off.
One evening, after trying and failing to disconnect from a phone call with me for several minutes, the cop said, “You ever think maybe you made our thing out to be a bigger deal than it was?”
I was shocked he would suggest such a thing. “I don’t know how you could say that when we saw each other so many times and told each other so much.”
“Bud, I think we’re probably still in the single digits when it comes to face-to-face visits.”
“You think we hung out fewer than ten times? Seriously?”
I began listing the different occasions we had been together. Maybe it really hadn’t been more than ten.
“But we talked on the phone all the time,” I said.
“I know we did,” he said. “I used to always like it too.”
“You mean before you moved the kid in?”
“I asked you not to call him ‘the kid.’ You know his name.”
“I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Anyway, I got to go. I’m almost home.
“Sorry again,” I said.
In every phone call, I had to apologize. First for everything, then for something specific.
42
IT WAS JUST AFTER I ARRIVED. THE FIRST BOOTH I ENTERED. The light was on, the door unlocked. I pushed in and saw a movie playing with the sound turned off. On the bench, a colossal fat man on all fours, his rear end pointed at me.
I didn’t leave. I stood and took it in, all the folds of fat around his body. He must have showered just before he went to the arcade. The compartment smelled like Ivory soap and Right Guard deodorant. The scene was like some outrageous art installation.