“I figured I would just hang loose and see what happened with the draft. Some buddies of mine enlisted right after school, figured on getting it out of the way. I thought about it and I said to myself, no, let them come for me, I ain’t going out looking for them. And then when they finally called me I got out. Never expected it, but I went out for freshman football in high school and a knee went on me, and it turned out to be enough of a permanent injury to keep me out of the service. Never even thought of it until about two days before my physical. This cat was telling me how a back injury kept him out, a nothing back injury, and I remembered my knee would still go on me every now and then and I brought this up during my physical, and it was no question, 4F all the way. Talk about beautiful breaks...
“So I’ll get up in the morning and have something to eat, then maybe go on down the block for an egg cream, see who’s hanging around, shoot the shit a little. And maybe I run into somebody who says there’s a party that night, or something to do, or I’ll ask some girl I know if she wants to catch a movie. See, the point is that if anything comes up, I don’t make the Times Square thing. It’s more something I do when there’s nothing else to do.
“A couple of nights ago, for instance, you know, like I went home and had dinner with the folks, and my sister rapped a little about school and some boy who didn’t ask her to this party that she was hoping he would, and my mother said something about me looking for work, but no major hassle, because the way the unemployment is now, I mean everybody knows it’s impossible to find anything and the old man has been worrying himself about getting laid off after they finish the job he’s on now. And there was nothing to do, nothing happening, so I got on the phone and called Phillie.
“Usual conversation. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ ‘Hey, nothing much. What’s happening with you?’ ‘Oh, nothing happening.’ ‘Want to go catch a flick, see what’s doing?’ ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’
“Phillie’s the same age as me. I guess he’s a couple of months older, he’ll be twenty-one in May. We been friends for years. What’s funny is we were both coming to Times Square off and on with neither of us knowing about the other, and then I met him in front of a movie house and we got to talking, and neither of us is quite ready to say what we’re doing, and then it comes out and we laugh about it. We’re real close, you know, so going to Times Square with him is no hassle. We ride in together and catch a movie and stand around together, and if either of us scores an overnight it’s no sweat, and if not we’ll ride back out to Queens together. He just lives two blocks away from me.
“Not that I always go in with Phillie. Sometimes he’ll have something on, a chick or something, or he’s not in the mood, and I’ll go in alone. Either way it’s something to do, pass the time and pick up a couple of bucks.”
Cary is twenty years old. He stands just under six feet tall. His shoulders are broad, his waist narrow. His arms and legs are large and well muscled. His walk, unhampered by the trick knee that kept him out of the service, is a firm aggressive stride.
His black hair is worn longish, combed straight back from his broad forehead. He has long sideburns, and several months ago grew a moustache and goatee, which he has since shaved off. “I liked the look of it but the itching drove me out of my mind. It’s supposed to stop itching after the first couple of weeks but it never did, and finally I said the hell with it and shaved it off.”
Cary’s habitual costume, on or off Times Square, consists of tight dungarees and a black leather motorcycle jacket. At one time he had a motorcycle to go with it, but tired of it and sold it. “I loved the feeling of riding, all that power under you, but there’s so much hassle connected with a bike in this fucking city. You have to chain it up all the time or some son of a bitch steals it. And even with the chains it’s no guarantee. They’ll have a couple of guys with a truck and a pair of bolt cutters, and they’ll just cut right through the chains and toss the bike in the back of the truck and you’re fucked. And riding it in traffic is a pain in the ass. I like to go to bike pictures, and of course Easy Rider; which was totally out of sight. I saw that picture five times, I got totally wasted watching it. The whole idea of riding in open spaces. If I ever got out of the city I could see getting a bike and just taking off. Just grooving on the whole thing. But not around here.”
Cary is physically well developed, although he does not have the extreme proportions of the muscle boys in homosexual “beefcake” magazines. His physique came to him naturally and he has made no particular effort to keep in shape. He owns a barbell and a set of weights, purchased from a friend who was entering the Army, but does not work out with them regularly. “Every once in awhile I’ll go on a kick and do a little lifting, but I don’t really stay with it. When you think about it it’s just boring, pick ’em up and put ’em down, like my old man out on the job but without even getting paid for it. And at least when he’s done there’s a building standing there. All you get this way is muscles so you can lift more weights so you can get more muscles. It’ll be something to do now and then but that’s about all.”
Cary’s first homosexual experiences came in early adolescence, when a friend taught him to masturbate. “We were over in his yard shooting baskets, and he said something about jerking off and I didn’t know exactly what it was. I would get hard-ons and I would play with it because it felt good but I didn’t know anything about coming, that anything else happened except that you played with it for awhile and then stopped. I don’t remember what was said exactly but the outcome was that he was going to teach me to jerk off. We went in his room and first he jerked himself off while I watched. He came, and then he told me to try it. I practically wore it out but I couldn’t shoot, so he came over and did it for me, and I shot.
“I can still remember how it felt, because here it was, you know, this fantastic feeling, and I hadn’t expected it. I had no idea what it was going to be like and it was really great.
“After that I used to jerk off regularly. Sometimes I would decide it was a bad thing to do. You know the shit you hear about it being bad for you, weakening you. It’s funny, because since then, in all the years since then, I’ve read enough things about sex to know that there’s nothing wrong with it. That everybody does it, that men go on doing it now and then even after they grow up, that it probably does you a lot more harm not to do it than it does to do it. But even knowing all this I still to this day have a feeling inside me that there’s something wrong with jerking yourself off. I don’t know what’s wrong about it. I can’t pin it down, you know, what would be wrong about it. But even so I used to try then not to do it too often, and nowadays it’s very rare that I’ll do it. If I get the urge to come and I’m not seeing a girl or anything I can always find a faggot.”
For several months Cary went on seeing the friend who had introduced him to masturbation, and mutual masturbation became a regular part of their meetings. Sometimes they merely manipulated themselves in each other’s presence, but more often each would masturbate the other.
“What I would do, I would try not to do it by myself, to save it until we were together. I made this distinction in my mind between jerking off by myself, which I thought was bad, and jerking off with Eddie, which I don’t think I ever had any bad thoughts about. I knew it was something to keep a secret and I never told anybody about it, but if I ever felt guilty about it I never knew it.
“Having this secret made a bond between us. We were friends before but this made us much closer. We would get together all the time, you know, not that we would always jerk off but that we spent loads of time together. Tossing a football around or shooting baskets or just sitting and talking about girls. The ones we knew from school and imagining what they looked like naked and how big their tits were and what we would like to do with them. Imagining what it would be like to fuck a girl. I guess we were thirteen or fourteen. No, it couldn’t have been more than thirteen.