At one, at two, the activity among the trucks tended to fall off — except for the weekends. And even then, there was always some change of tenor.
Sometimes to walk between the vans and cabs was to amble from single sexual encounter — with five, twelve, forty minutes between — to single sexual encounter. At other times to step between the waist-high tires and make your way between the smooth or ribbed walls was to invade a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it — now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality — and failed because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of such a situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred all-but-strangers is hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community. At those times, within those van-walled alleys, now between the trucks, now in the back of the open loaders, cock passed from mouth to mouth to hand to ass to mouth without ever breaking contact with other flesh for more than seconds; mouth, hand, ass passed over whatever you held out to them, sans interstice; when one cock left, finding a replacement — mouth, rectum, another cock — required moving only the head, the hip, the hand no more than an inch, three inches.
That evening, because it was late, because it was not the weekend, as I crossed under the highway, I expected to find the former. But because activity always increased just before dawn, because the rain had kept people in at the night’s start, the latter is what I stepped into.
It was engrossing; it was exhausting; it was reassuring; and it was very human. At one point I heard someone saying to one guy who, I guess, got overexcited, “Okay, okay — calm down now. Relax for a moment. Just take it easy.” And later, when I emerged into a small opening, I saw, sitting on the back of one van, a tall black guy, in jeans and a red T-shirt, about thirty, whom I’d seen there every night I’d ever come, but who never seemed to do anything, fanning himself with a folded newspaper and looking very pleased.
I vaulted up into the van and was caught by two guys (“You okay there?”) steadying me, one of whom, I realized as I moved forward between him and someone else, was naked.
Later, pausing for minutes, I stood at the great beam along the edge of the water. Beyond the covered dock to the south, the sky was getting light. Looking to the west, I saw the black had taken a blue glaze. The water shook and shimmered with the cobalt reflection.
A little way down stood a white guy in his late twenties, early thirties. He wore workman’s greens, short sleeves rolled up over muscular arms. He had one workshoe up on the weathered ten-by-ten that ran the concrete edge. He looked like a driver from one of the trucks. He saw me looking at him and beckoned me over. I walked down the few feet between us, and he squatted, then sat on the blackened wood, put one hand on my hip, and, with very thick fingers, tugged my fly open. He moved forward, and I took his head, his ears against my palms. His brown hair was pulling away from his temples and thinning over a coming bald spot.
He grinned up, then went down.
Looking over his head at the water, I felt very good and very tired. Running across the stretch of dawn river just below us were two nets, one of shadow, one of light, on the wrinkling and raveling tide interlaced, interpenetrated, pulled endlessly one out of the other.
It seemed for a moment that both would become one, or would reveal themselves to be two aspects, differently lighted, of a complex singularity. …
The wet heat of his mouth on my engorged penis retreated, came forward, retreated, came forward again. The third time, he just stayed there. He let me go from his mouth to lean his head against my lap. Then he laughed and looked up. “I’m tired,” he said, with a kind of embarrassment.
If he’d had a morning like mine, I wasn’t surprised.
“Okay,” I nodded. “Stand up a minute. I’ll do you.”
He stood. I got down in front of him.
He let me go at his cock for about a minute. Then, with his work-hardened hands, he stilled my head. “I’m too tired,” he repeated and patted my shoulder. “I can’t make it. You work on him for a while,” and fed another cock — from a black guy who’d stepped up to watch us — into my mouth.
He let one hand stay on my head and with the other cupped the teak testicles with their tight hair, loose below my chin. I held on to his heavy, reddened ones, his uncircumcised dick slowly lowering, warm, over the back of my hand, till he patted me again, took a breath, turned — and my hand was empty and cool — to walk, unsteadily, away.
But I was exhausted too; the black guy helped me up and, about three minutes later, I started home.
19.61. The parallel column containing the discourse of repetition, of desire, whether satisfied or unrequited (but always purveying its trope of truth), forever runs beside one of positive, commercial, material analysis. Many of us, raised on literature, have learned to supply the absent column when the material is presented alone. And a few of us have begun to ask, at least, for the column of objects, actions, economics, and material forces when presented only with, in whatever figurative form, desire. I would have hoped that the parallel column to the accounts I have written above might have been the chapter of Voyage, Orestes! (or the pages from Out of the Dead City or The Ballad of Beta-2) I’d been working on that day, the day before, or the day after. But there is nothing — certainly not in The Fall — to maintain the split, the gap, the margin between columns. Nothing there sustains the river dividing the two shores that allows all articulate passage, a river that is itself never constituted of anything more meaningful than blue lines (cut by a red marginal indicator) over white paper — or the motion of light in water.
19.7. Three days after the last night on the docks I’d described, as I was going down the stoop steps into the noon heat to get a can of soda from the bodega down the block, I saw Billy coming across the street.
“Hey,” I called to him, “can I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure.” Billy edged between the parked cars and stepped up on the curb.
“Do you know anything about gonorrhea?” I asked, stepping down to the sidewalk.
“The clap?” Billy said. “Sure I do. You think you got it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He grinned. “Well, I just bet you ain’t been the good little boy you were supposed to be while Marilyn was gone, if you’re asking.”
“Shit, Billy — ”
“Naw — ” He raised his hand — “I’m not saying anything. You stingin’?”
“Yeah,” I said. “When I take a piss.”
“You drippin’?”
I frowned. “A little bit.”
“Are you fuckin’ around?”
“Yes, I’ve been fucking around.”
Billy made a painful face and grabbed his crotch. “Then you got it! Ow! That hurts me almost as much as it hurts you — ” Then he laughed. “Not to you, it don’t, huh? You better get your ass to the doctor’s. He’s gonna stick it full of penicillin, too. You’ll be okay.”
I grunted.
There was a doctor’s office directly across the street in a first-floor sunken apartment, whose sign on the wall I’d noticed every time I came through the alleyway. I checked to see how much money I had in my wallet, then crossed over.
When the nurse called me to go into the office, I was surprised to see it was the same doctor who, back at the clinic on Delancey Street, had lanced my jaw. “What’s wrong with you, young man …?”