As Eric looked up at the overhead highway, along chyme-smeared girders pigeons preened and strutted, nest to nest.
With a breeze, from one corner came the stench of shit and ammonia. Most of the time, that’s where the guys relieved themselves.
He’d gotten used to that, too.
Eric walked back to the wall, then picked his way to the stanchion’s end. Maybe he should have done it back home in the garage. If he waited, of course, someone might come. Time spent hanging out, or trying to cajole a fuck or a blowjob from whatever homeless guys were around, could take from five minutes to five hours. He did best, though, when they’d slept there and he got to them as they were waking.
Stepping over a smashed baby carriage—a month ago it had been in the street, where, for days, cars and trucks and SUVs had repeatedly run it over, till someone had thrown what was left up here—Eric reached the stanchion’s far side. As he stepped from the shadow, through high weeds, at the world’s rim, the sun ignited.
Eric closed his eyes, pulling back.
He walked around another five minutes. But, as happened once or twice a week, that morning no one was out…
No Joe, no Frack—or even Pickle.
And because Mike was taking him to Diamond Harbor, he didn’t have hours.
Eric took a long breath, made the circuit once more (in case he’d missed someone, hugging himself down in the grass, beside the bridge support, maybe rolled up in a blanket, maybe not, off in a sleeping bag or passed out on his back in the weeds, an empty pint bottle inches from his head and mud under his hip, where he’d wet himself: that had been his first time sucking off hungover but affectionately grateful Pickle), then, with a resigned breath, started home from under the highway.
* * *
[D] A SLANT OF sun crossed Mr. Condotti’s yard.
Beside the house, Eric stepped onto the loud gravel. Through a basement window he glimpsed TV flicker on a back wall. A pebbly step on and he saw, down the rock-walled stairwell, the upper Dutch door—open—at Bottom’s.
The foundation of the world was in shadow.
As Eric passed, Bill moved into the frame, behind the lower door, and looked up. “Hey, Eric.” Bottom wore a black leather jacket unzipped, with yellow metal teeth, and no shirt. Also he wore a full gorilla head mask. “Isn’t it a little early for you to be out?” The stepwell hollowed his voice. He reached up and lifted the ape head away from an unshaven jaw and curly auburn.
Bottom was grinning.
Eric blinked.
“I thought during the summer all teenagers slept till noon.” It sounded less hollow with the head off. Bottom had on tight jeans with frayed patches all over, where you could see through to his skin.
“I got up early,” Eric said. “So I took a walk. What you watchin’? The news? I didn’t think nothin’ was on.” It couldn’t be much past six-thirty.
“DVD,” Bill explained. “King Kong.” He looked at the mask in his hands. “The uncut version that came out this past Christmas. That is an awesome fucking film. Did you see it?” Bill was a thirty-one-year-old accountant with a downtown Atlanta firm. He’d grown up in New York. “The new one, I mean. The three-disc version with deleted scenes.” Turning, he tossed the gorilla head to a couch or table out of sight—or maybe back onto a bed.
“Yeah. I saw the regular movie last year, with Mike—at a mall, when we were driving back to Atlanta. Mike liked it a lot. I thought it was okay…some of it. But the end was stupid—I mean, when she falls in love. How’s a woman gonna fall in love with a giant gorilla? She could like him, maybe. But not fall in love.” Now that the mask was gone, Eric chanced, “Where’d you get the gorilla…thing?”
“My personal theory,” Bill went on, not answering, “is that Peter Jackson was not really trying to remake the original. He knew it too well and loved it too much. What he was actually trying to do was remake the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis version, with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges—with homages to the original one all through it. That’s the film he decided to remake the way it should have been made in the first place. And while he was at it, he worked a reconstruction of one of the scenes cut from the original back into it.” Bill opened the bottom door and stepped forward to the crumbling stair. “I’ve watched that lost spider-pit sequence twenty-five times, both the one Jackson did in his own version and the black and white one he made to fit back into the original. Hey, you want to come in and see it? It’s totally awesome. I was going to make some hot chocolate before I watched it again. The milk’s already heating.” He raised his brows expectantly. “If you’d like I can make some for us both.”
“Naw, that’s all right.” Then Eric said, “Mike don’t want me even goin’ into your apartment.” He remained up on the concrete. Suddenly, he said, “He’s asleep now. So he wouldn’t know.” He wondered if the gorilla mask was worth examining. It had covered Bill’s whole head. Was there fur on it? He’d seen it only seconds.
“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself. But I have a better idea. I know Mike likes that sorta stuff, too. I’ll lend you the DVD, and you can take it and watch it later with your dad. I’m going to bring up my little table and set it out. Then I’m going to bring up a chair—I only have one. But you go around and take one of Mr. Condotti’s. He won’t mind as long as we put it back when we’re finished. Then I’m going to bring out two cups of hot chocolate. We can sit right here and enjoy a morning of each other’s company—and Mike doesn’t have to get his knickers in a twist. Want me to bring up the monkey mask?”
“Why? It’s just a King Kong head.”
“Oh, you kids are so cool today—you’re gonna cool yourself out of everything interesting. How many people live two floors up from somebody who can say the magic word and change into a donkey, a phoenix, an ape, or a cockatrice? Hey, I like you guys—you and Mike. You’re good neighbors. Go get that chair, now.” Bill turned back through his sunken doorway.
Eric started toward the lawn table. And got in another finger-full. Lifting away one of Mr. Condotti’s green enameled lawn chairs, he carried it back.
Bill was already at the head of the steps, positioning the three-legged table with its pebbled glass top in front of his own wire-backed seat.
As Bill moved it, the table’s legs complained on the brick.
Speaking more softly, Eric said, “My dad don’t want me to go inside your place ’cause you’re gay.” He put his own chair, clanking, down.
Bill let go the table, looking at it. “Now how in the world—” raising a hand to his jaw, with its two days, possibly three, of auburn stubble, he rubbed slowly—“did I figure that one out for myself? Hold on a second. I’ll be back.” He turned to hurry down his steps.
A minute later, he was up again with two black mugs. One had a white skull and bones on it, the other a red noose. He set them on the glass. Like heavily creamed coffee, slightly tanner but with a purplish cast, cocoa turned within the rims. “Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, now.” Sunlight on Bill’s face made the unshaven hairs glitter. He pulled back his chair and dropped onto it, knees wide.
More slowly, Eric stepped around his and lowered himself, leaning his forearms on his jeans’ thighs. He meshed his fingers.
A jay creaked among the sparrows that had replaced dawn’s crows. “And while in no way am I suggesting that you bring the topic up with Mike, should your dad mention it again, you can tell him from me—if it occurs to you—I do not shit where I eat!”
Eric looked puzzled, unsure what Bill meant.
Bottom went on: “I live here, Eric. I would no more think of putting a hand on you than I would cut off one of my nuts with a spoon. A dull spoon. I am not a stupid man. And doing something like that would be unbelievably stupid—given how much of it’s running around loose in Atlanta.” Lifting the mug with the noose, he raised it toward Eric. “Cheers.”
Eric said, “I bet Bottom’s gotta be a rough name to have if you’re gay. People are probably always making jokes about you and stuff.”
>
Bill glanced at the clouds. “Tell me! But that’s what you get if you’re beloved of the fairies, the bottom of the dream of God, the great spool from which all tales are woven.” Again he looked at Eric. “That’s what a ‘bottom’ was, in Elizabethan English, by the way: a big spool at the bottom of a loom from which they took the thread for the brocades they were weaving.” Over his mug, he blinked pale eyes. “The thing about the jokes is, everyone who makes one always thinks he’s the first person to think it up—that’s the part I never understood.” A drop of chocolate rolled to the mug’s lower rim, hung there, and shook. Across scuffed black, one of Bill’s zipper pockets showed a red sliver. “You learn to ignore it.” Between the jacket’s zipper teeth, pumpkin colored hairs curved over his chest’s freckles.
For a moment Eric held his breath. Then he blurted: “If I went inside with you, Mike wouldn’t know—’cause he’s asleep. It’s my last mornin’ in Atlanta. Soon as he gets up, we’re gonna drive down to Diamond Harbor. My mom says she’s got a new waitress job, and I’m gonna stay with her for the next six months, maybe a year. If we go in now, I’ll suck your dick. You can fuck my ass—I got a third of a tube of KY up my butt already. You let me eat your ass out while you suck me off, and I’ll shoot you a load that’ll gag you. I don’t got the biggest fuckin’ dick in the world. But—” one of the things Eric had learned under the highway—“it ain’t the smallest you ever seen, either—”
Bill came forward the same time his mug clacked the glass. “Wooooah, fella!” Sitting back, he frowned. “I thought your dad told me you were on your high school football team or something…?”
“Last term I played guard.” In the white enameled seat, Eric sat back, too. “I’m the team cocksucker. Me and Scott. We do about a third of the guys. The rest don’t even wanna know about no shit like that.”
“You’re a big, strong, very good looking boy, Eric. And butch as a beer keg. I admit it. I’m…surprised.”
“Yeah. Everybody pretends it don’t happen—at least with me.”
“With that Young Superman physique of yours you’ve had for the past year or so, people are probably afraid you’ll beat them up.”
“I don’t like fightin’.”
“Well, probably they don’t know that. I doubt it’s that much different from the way it was back at my high school.”
“I told my mom I was gay when I was twelve—when we was up in Hugantown—with her mom. She’d left the TV goin’, on one of those HBO shows. The gay ones was all she watched. I jerked off three times that night, and the next day I told her. That’s when her and Mike had broke up again. She said that was cool—me bein’ gay, and how she would always love me whoever I wanted to go to bed with. But I should wait to tell Mike. So I did. I ain’t told him nothin’, yet.”
“Dads being dads, probably she knew what she was talking about.”
“I hope she remembers I told her—”
“When your kid says he’s gay, Eric, that’s not something you forget.”
“I don’t even like gay guys.”
“Hey, now—you’re gay…” Bill’s puzzlement was disapproving. “How can you not like gay men—unless you don’t like yourself? Let me add, I always thought you were likable.”
“Sometimes—” Eric looked down at the vertical lines of sunlight on the nearer mug—“I don’t think I’m really gay.”
“Oh, come on. You just said you suck off half the football team—”
“A couple of the other line guys fuck me. I fuck Philly-Bob back. I hope he ain’t got AIDS, ’cause he won’t use no condom. He says that’s for faggots—I don’t know what he thinks he is. But I don’t argue with him. Besides, I don’t love those things, either—”
“And because you occasionally masturbate thinking of a threesome with a faceless young lady so that the quarterback of your dreams will be a little more turned on, you decide you’re straight—”
“I ain’t straight!”
“Okay, bisexual.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean I ain’t gay for the same reason I ain’t straight.”
Bill raised a reddish brow. Along the hedge, sedge and japonica bent and unbent.
“Like you said, gay guys are guys who…what was it? Won’t eat their shit…” Eric shrugged, as if the connection were self-evident.
Bill said, “You’re going to have to tell me more than that.”
“Scott’s gay—the other cocksucker on the football team. He actually likes those HBO shows. The one I watched didn’t have no black guys on it. At all. And everybody’s hookin’ up and gettin’ all upset if anybody screws anybody else who ain’t him. Scott sucks Hoagy—one of the black guys on our team. But he says he’d ‘rather not.’ Damn, I told him I’d trade him Hoagy for any two of the white guys I do in a minute! Hoagy’s a halfback. But ’cause Scott’s Puerto Rican, he hogs all the niggers—I think he likes the white guys better—but they make him, anyway. And he’s scared. You know, last term in school, Scott said we should spend some time hangin’ out together—’cause we both…” Eric shrugged. “You know. He really wants people to call him Scott, but everybody calls him Scotty, anyway. I wished I had a nickname. I wouldn’t even mind something crazy—like ‘Cocksucker.’ I mean, that’s what I am, ain’t I? And I do it good. But if he found out, probably it would mess up Mike’s head. Our coach, Mr. Doubrey, he would think it was funny. He’s gay too, but only me and Scott know—and Arnie Zawolsky. I mean, we’re the only three Doubrey actually sucks off. And he says he’ll kick us off the team if anybody finds out—not about us, about him. And we’re all scared. Well, maybe not Arnie—he’s too stupid to be scared; and big as he is he’s got a tiny dick. Six-foot four, and he’s like—” Eric held up his little finger, thumb covering the lowest joint—“this. But Doubrey says Arnie comes a lot. When I first got there, Arnie’s name was ‘Buckethead.’ Now it’s just ‘Buck.’ Buck Zawolsky ain’t bad.”
“You only think you’d like a funny nickname,” Bottom said. “Believe me: funny names get old very fast. Take it from ‘Bottom Boy’ a.k.a. ‘Bottom Feeder’—and I may kill you if you tell the wrong person. I’ve worked hard at being Just Plain Bill.”
“Yeah?” Eric smiled. “Well, maybe…Anyway, I figured perhaps we should at least try to be friends—Scott and me. So one Sunday, he takes me to this place and we have a…fuckin’ brunch! And he spends the whole time ogling these stuck-up gay high school kids and saying how he wants this one or that one, and how the person who loves him should never love nobody else. Then he reads me out this article in a gay paper that was in there about gay marriage and how important it is for gays to realize how necessary the right to be married is. And be sexually and psychologically responsible, because we’d been through AIDS already. And I’m sittin’ there thinkin’, I don’t want one guy. I want maybe nine or ten. And I want each of them to bring home another nine or ten, and we’ll all fuck: little guys, big guys, black guys, white guys, Chinese guys. In the library basement bathroom, a month ago, I had a feller what only had one leg. He was Filipino or somethin’ and didn’t speak no English. We practically tore down the stall. I thought they were gonna come in and catch us. I been lookin’ for that motherfucker ever since. I ain’t never known nobody with AIDS—”
“I have, mostly back when I was your age. But some things have changed. Though if you hang around with black folks—”
“Hey, I like old guys, fat guys, hairy guys, black guys, white guys—yeah, I wouldn’t mind somebody like me, too. But Scott wants to be safe and happy and…monogamous. He doesn’t even like the guys he sucks off on the team. But it’s like there’s a fuckin’ rule—”
“Do you?”
“They’re okay. Only most of ’em are straight. But that’s the problem, see? Straight guys, gay guys, white guys, black guys, to me it’s all the same fuckin’ thing. Love me, and don’t let me catch you lookin’ at nobody else. Or if you suck off a bunch of ’em, none of ’em wanna talk to you afterwards unless
they have to. I wanna hang out with somebody who wants to go to weird places and beat off together and suck each other off and watch each other do nasty shit with other people. Stand around with our flies open and our dicks hangin’ out and see how long the two of you can do that before somebody says somethin’. Go to the movies and beat off in the back row and see how many people come sit there to watch. I did that by myself once and a woman came and sat a seat away. She was okay, man! She gave me some of her popcorn, and when I finished she said she hoped I had a good time. Hey, what’s this guy—Scott’s boyfriend—gonna do with himself? Change the curtains every week?”
“Probably the most important thing for Scotty will be that he pays his half of the rent. Which I suppose is in the same line, actually.”
“But that’s why I don’t think I’m either one. I need me about a yard of dick every day,” a line Eric had been impressed with from one of the hillbillies behind the Verizon sign, though he’d never said it before. “Know what I mean?”
“Actually,” Bill said, “I do. Lord, the boy is naturally queer!” He shook his head, miming disbelief.
“But that’s why I don’t want nobody callin’ me gay. I’d rather they called me a fuckin’, cocksuckin’, piss-drinkin’, shit-eatin’ scumbag…than fuckin’ gay! At least that gets my dick hard. I don’t wanna grow up like—” Eric looked at his joined fingers. Well, it was his last day—“like you. I mean, I don’t wanna sound like you.”
Lowering them, Bill bunched his brows. “My northern accent…?”
“Not that! I mean you and Scott. Like you’re half a bitchy girl and half a man.” In his chair, Eric blinked three times, then took a breath. “But I probably will, huh?” His hands came apart.
“Only if you start hanging out with a lot of other people who talk like…me. And Scott. And who you start to think are cool. Also, the girl—at least—has come along a very tough road.” Again Bill’s brows lowered. “Remember. She has reasons to be a bitch.”
“I wanna sound like my dad…when he’s all relaxed and stuff.” Eric managed to drop his shoulders. “I wanna sound like the guys whose dicks I wanna suck and whose asses I wanna eat, and who I want to suck my dick and eat out my asshole.”