That same night, on the train going back to town, Mickey was sitting in the middle of the seat, holding Angie, and I was next to him, resting my head on his shoulder. Then Mickey grabbed me, all of a sudden, and gave me a long kiss, his tongue in my mouth and his hands on my chest. His eyes were looking into mine. He stopped and Angie was laughing and the young kids on the seat opposite, straight kids, civilians, were looking away embarrassed. Then Mickey sat back with one arm around me and the other around Angie. He was smiling a huge motherfucking shit-eating grin.
I had fallen asleep by the time the train got to Central. Later, Angie told me that Mickey had carried me all the way home.
Porn 3
GHASSAN HAD NEVER TOUCHED A EUROPEAN before, not even to shake hands with. He had never smelt one up close. He was finally to do so. It was fated to be this pale young man beckoning him to come closer. As he approached, the man’s features became more distinct, emerging slowly from the hellish darkness. The only light came from the video screen behind them and a solitary red globe above them in the corridor. The blood-hued flickering illumination distorted everything, so that the man’s fair hair appeared orange and there were deep shadows across the bottom half of his face. Still, Ghassan could espy the white scar on the left side of his top lip, that there was stubble on his chin. The man reached out and tugged at the front of Ghassan’s shirt, bringing him closer so that their lips were almost touching. Ghassan had to resist sniffing at him: he wanted to search the man’s body with his nose, as if they were dogs, not men; he wanted to determine the source of the man’s distasteful odour. He pulled away from the European, who then offered him an anxious shy smile. He reached for Ghassan’s crotch and had his hand swiped away. Ghassan breathed in.
The man smelt of offal, of guts and stomach and lungs. He did not smell of skin. He smelt of the foul secrets inside the body.
Aware that something had changed, the man tilted his head to one side, his eyes now alert and suspicious. The two men stared at each other, as if daring each other to make the first move, to speak, to reignite or disavow their earlier intimacy. This is a dance, thought Ghassan to himself with some disappointment, not so different from the one we dance with whores. The man suddenly coughed, an abrupt sharp sound, but it acted as a concession. The man had coughed, and then he had raised his arm to scratch his head, the gesture reminding Ghassan of something a little boy would do, an act that seemed to encompass shyness and diffidence and assertiveness all at once. It was a sweet, simple movement. As the man had raised his arm, Ghassan had glimpsed swirls of fine wet hair under the sleeve of the man’s shirt; as well, his nose had detected the tang of citrus. The man’s deodorant banished thoughts of decomposition, visions of flesh and meat. As did the sight of the dark hair against the man’s pallid skin. Ghassan’s cock pumped with blood; he placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and drew him close. This was desire.
He had first noticed this European in the orientation week at the university; he always sat two rows in front of Ghassan, and he was clearly equally bored by the lecturer. They all were. The professor for Chemical Engineering Applied Methods was one of those men who seemed never to have been touched by youth, one of those insipid sexless European men who spoke in a hushed monotone that squeezed any passion or interest from the words. Granted, there was little musicality or emotion to be gleaned from the dry calculus and rules of applied engineering, but the man’s dullness caused spontaneous yawning, restlessness and fidgeting among the students within the first five minutes of the lecture. Ghassan dutifully scribbled down the notations and equations the lecturer wrote on the whiteboard, but the words the man spoke were nonsensical. Ghassan trusted his own intelligence, he knew that his command of the English language was adequate — no, better than adequate, he had a true aptitude for languages — but the man behind the lectern might as well have been speaking an obscure dialect of some ancient lost civilisation. It was as if the tedium of his delivery drained the words of their meaning. Ghassan found he did not understand a word of what was being said.
The only thing that saved him from being bored senseless over the interminable creep of the hour was the freedom he had to examine his fellow students. The margins of Ghassan’s notebook were filled with quick sketches of the faces and bodies of the young women and men who sat around him in the lecture theatre. For the most part, the sketches were of the young blonde girls with their shamelessly exposed breasts. Tits filled the margins of his notes. His friends would lean over to look at his sketches and then giggled conspiratorially. They’d take turns guessing which girl he had sketched. They’d surreptitiously point to a young woman and ask in Urdu, Is it that slut there? Ghassan would smile and never confirm or deny their queries.
For him, sketching those interchangeable European women was a smokescreen for his real purpose. If any of his friends had taken the time to really study his drawings, if they had properly paid attention to his work over the year, they would have noticed that two portraits kept reappearing. They would have also noticed that these portraits were never mere caricatures, unlike Ghassan’s sketches of the European women, which were always crude and often insulting, their expressions either those of imbeciles or showing a trace of animal cunning. But it was different with the two recurring portraits of the men. The first portrait was that of the elegant, lean and dignified Omar. Ghassan’s love for his best friend was pure, a love beyond the degrading treacheries of lust and desire. Omar was untouchable, incorruptible. In every sketch Ghassan drew of him, he was unsmiling and straight-backed. He floated in the white margins of Ghassan’s notebook, separate from the vulgar sketches around him. The other recurring portrait was that of the young European man with the broad sloping shoulders who always took that seat two rows in front of Ghassan and his friends. Whenever Ghassan sketched this portrait, he would drop his free hand to his crotch. He did not dare do more than feel the bulk of his cock through the cheap fabric of his trousers. His love for Omar was pure. The European he wanted to fuck.
And now it was happening. The man was on his stomach, his jeans around his ankles, naked and vulnerable. Ghassan was shocked by the amount of hair that covered the man’s plump arse. It was unexpected. Ghassan realised at that moment that in his masturbatory imaginings of Europeans he had really always dreamt of youth, of boys between childhood and manhood. These were the degenerate fantasies that fed his lust. He had assumed that a European man would be hairless, smooth, that to touch white skin would always mean touching feminine skin. As with the sexless lecturer who had bored him all year, he had never thought of virility being something that European men could possess.
He could hear the man’s slow heavy breathing. His face, now hidden from Ghassan’s view, pressed against the filthy black vinyl of the couch, was most likely tensed, grimacing, anticipating Ghassan’s first thrust. The man had tried to kiss him but Ghassan had quickly turned him over. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to kiss him — in fact, there was no act between men that Ghassan preferred to kissing. Sometimes after their final evening prayers, Omar would hold Ghassan, they would stroke each other’s hair, and they would kiss, as Omar specified, as brothers, as friends, as comrades. Skin never touched skin. Omar’s purity was such that his passions were never inflamed.