691 Suburban Dr By Natty Soltesz
They tore down 428 College Street a while back. It was the house I lived in my second year of college.
The University razed that whole block of College Street, in fact. They put up student condos called Ellsworth Gardens. I've been past them. Each unit houses four students. The siding is beige. The grounds are landscaped with white concrete walkways and bushes to keep you from walking where you aren't supposed to walk. It's one of the places they take prospective students and their parents on the University tour to show you how modern, safe, and utterly characterless the students' lives can be.
Character implies something that is out of the norm, something dangerous or profound. Something like what I experienced in that same location all those years ago, with my roommates Darrin and Randy.
I got a job with the University four years ago. Sometimes I feel like I'll never leave this town, like I'm harboring some sick attachment to it. The events that occurred here in my college days, particularly at 428 College Street, left an imprint.
Grand Avenue is the epicenter of the campus. It's the street where I work. Once it was lined with head shops, coffee houses, performance spaces, and hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants. Now there's American Apparel, Starbucks, T-Mobile, and Chipotle. I watched it happen, watched them go down one by one – their rent raised by the University (who basically owns all the land within a five-mile radius) so that the local businesses had to close up shop. Then the corporations came and turned the spaces into so many fluorescent-lit zombie shells of their former selves.
In turn the University raised tuition, and then raised it again. (While keeping a cap on employee salaries cause, you know, the economy). I couldn't afford to go to school here anymore if I wanted to, and they probably wouldn't accept me anyway. They want the cream these days, the stuff that floats to the top. I was always drifting somewhere in the middle.
Not that I'm bad at my job; I'm actually pretty competent. I head up communications in the computer science department – do press releases, newsletters, advertisements, organize events, that sort of thing. The benefits are good, the schedule is flexible. I couldn't ask for a whole lot more.
Except sometimes, I want to.
My dryer was broken, but I hadn't realized it until I stuffed in a load of wet clothes. I noticed a basket of my downstairs neighbor's wet clothes just across the basement floor. I found a roll of duct tape in the basement and put a big strip of it across the dryer door, all the while cursing my neighbor for not having the courtesy to do the same thing. Then I jammed my laundry in a heavy-duty trash bag and hauled the heavy sopping mess into my car.
I started driving. I guess I was consumed by anger about the dryer because I soon found myself in front of the Laundromat on campus, instead of one that was much closer to my apartment.
I parked and went inside. I hadn't been to this Laundromat since college. Unlike so much else on campus, nothing had changed. The people could've been beamed in from 2001. A prissy girl with a ponytail perched on one of the orange fiberglass chairs, reading an issue of Real Simple. A young buck leaned his butt against a washing machine. He looked at me then looked to the distance. His face left a lot to be desired but the fat tube in the front of his sweatpants didn't.
I slid quarters in the slots and got a load going. I was separating my whites from my colors when someone walked in the door. The late-afternoon sun was beaming through the front windows but even in silhouette I recognized McConnell, who'd been my weed dealer in college. He looked at me, stopped, and smiled. His hand was draped over one edge of his round laundry basket, the other edge rested on his hip.
"I'll be goddamned," he said.
"McConnell," I said.
"Nate," he said, sauntering over to me. I held out my hand to meet his and he pulled me into a hug.
"It's been a while," he said.
"You're telling me." McConnell had been a bit more than just my drug dealer, back in the day. In some ways he'd been the one who'd set off the events I'd had with my old roommates. Shit, we'd even had a four-way with him – me and Darrin and Randy, I mean.
He looked great. His hair was thinner on top. His face was shaved but weathered with stubble. His body seemed solid and built in his well-fitted t-shirt and jeans. The bulge in his jeans was just as impressive as I remembered.
"Where you been?" he said as he dropped his dirty clothes into a machine.
"Here, actually. I work on campus."
"No shit," he said. "You live around here?"
"Not really. I just moved to East Liberty. I was living in Turtle Creek, off the parkway."
"What the hell were you doing out there?"
"Renting a house. With my boyfriend."
"Oh. So now you're closer to the city?"
"Yeah."
"And still with the boyfriend?"
"No." McConnell chunked his quarters into the machine and the water started up.
"Sorry to hear that, old buddy," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
"So where are you living?"
"Just up the street," McConnell said. We shot the shit while our laundry spun. McConnell was working odd jobs around town. He seemed happy. He seemed the same, and there was something comforting about that. We folded our clothes next to each other.
"What about you, McConnell? Are you single?"
"Barely," he said, grabbing a pair of underwear from his basket. I couldn't help but glance at them – they were skimpy and hot.
"Like these?" he said, holding them up for me.
"Yeah, they're...pretty cool," I said.
"Wanna see me in them?" My heart skipped a beat.
"Sure."
"Let's go back to my place and get high."
My heart was racing as we walked the two blocks to McConnell's apartment. I hadn't had sex since I broke up with Jordan several months earlier. It was the longest dry spell I'd ever had, but the fact was that I wasn't trying very hard. We went inside McConnell's apartment and he set his basket of clothes on one end of his ratty plaid sofa. There was a bong on the coffee table, a Dazed and Confused poster on the wall.
"Help me put away this laundry," McConnell said. I followed him into his bedroom. McConnell stuffed his clean, folded clothes into a couple drawers. "Time to get comfortable," he said. I leaned back on my elbows on the bed. McConnell lifted off his t-shirt, smiling at me as he tossed it on the floor. His stomach was tight and flat, his body a little worn but natural and sexy. He ran his hands over his chest and stomach and started undoing his jeans.
"Not wearing any underwear at the moment so you'll have to excuse me," he said. First I saw his brown pubic hair, then the base of his thick cock. He popped open the buttons on his fly one by one, and his half-hard cock sprang out. He stripped off the jeans.
"Remember this?" he said, indicating to his cock.
"How could I forget?" He laughed and turned around to grab the pair of sexy underwear from his drawer, giving me a view of his strapping back and tight ass. Then he stepped into the briefs. The gray pouch was bursting with cock but somehow held it all in. McConnell ran his fingers under the elastic, making adjustments.
"Look good?" he said.
"Great,' I said.
"Let's go smoke that bong." I sat on the couch next to McConnell as he procured a jar of pot. I was half-hard and leaking in my jeans. Part of me was wondering if some sex was going to happen, but I was content to follow McConnell's lead and enjoy watching him walk around in his underwear.
"I gotta tell you, I haven't been high in eight years," I said.
"You're shitting me. You used to smoke...well, as much as any of us I suppose."
"I felt a little hazy in the head for a while there, so I quit."
"So we're gonna pop your eight-year weed cherry today, eh?" McConnell said, packing the bong.
"Looks like it," I said. McConnell handed me the bong. I flicked the lighter, touching the flame to the edge of radiant green bud where it crackled and flamed. Then I released the slide, taking in the chamber of smoke, holding the hit in for a minute before releasing it into the air. "I don't even know how I ended up here, there's a Laundromat four blocks from my house. Then to run into you..."
"Fate," McConnell said. I shrugged and passed him the bong.
"So your girlfriend obviously doesn't live with you," I said as I looked at the clothing piled behind us on the back of the sofa, the porn DVDs under the coffee table.
"She lives with her parents. It's a casual thing. I consider myself single when she's not around."
"Interesting."
"So how's single life treating you?" McConnell said, taking a hit.
"It's still a little raw."
"Miss the sex?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Was it as good as the sex we had back in the day?" He handed the bong back to me.
"I don't know. Not really," I said. If the University had given grades for sexual experimentation then my roommates and I would've been the fucking valedictorians. We'd started out as dorm buddies, but somehow ended up messing around together – just jacking off at first, but increasingly we did just about everything three guys could do with one another, including getting McConnell in on the action.
"Jordan – my ex – he was straight, too. Just like you and Darrin and Randy."
"Huh?" McConnell said. "Your ex boyfriend was straight?"
"Well, he considered himself straight. He said he was gay for me."
"Sounds like some bullshit," he said.
"Well, weren't you straight?"
"No sir. I've been having sex with guys and girls since I was eight years old. I've never had much use for labels."
"Hm. I guess I never asked," I said, taking a hit. "I guess Darrin and Randy were pretty much the same. I wonder what they consider themselves today?"
"You all haven't kept in touch?"
"Nah," I said.
"That's too bad. They were fun guys," he said. I nodded. The fact was that I'd had to distance myself from them. Darrin especially. We'd fucked around with one another in a fairly democratic fashion, but when it came to Darrin there was something more. Unfortunately it was largely one sided. In fact, as my high-flying brain processed it, sitting there on McConnell's couch, it had been pretty similar to what I'd endured with Jordan, my ex-boyfriend.
"Time changes people," McConnell said. "You should call em up, maybe."
"Maybe so," I said, considering it. Darrin and Randy had been fun guys, even beyond the sex. Shit, they'd been my best friends. I wondered if I'd been protecting myself too much. When I said goodbye to McConnell he brought me in for a tight hug. I could feel his dick pressing against mine, but that was the extent of our physical contact, and I was strangely okay with it. If nothing else, I figured I'd have something to fuel my jack-off fantasies for the foreseeable future.
I'd left my cell phone in the glove compartment of my car and when I got back to it I found I had two messages. The first was from a number I didn't recognize. I dialed my voicemail, the message cued up, and for the first time in five years I heard my old roommate's voice. "Hey dude. It's Darrin. Long time no see. I saw you had your cell phone number on your Facebook profile, so I thought I'd give you a call. I'm out in Philly now...well, near Philly. You should come out and visit, catch up. Anyway, give me a call."
I don't know if I believe in fate or any sort of pattern to the universe. As best as I can tell it's all chaos and your only choice is to ride the wave and make the best of it. But the fact of it is that some subconscious thing made me go to that laundromat that day, where I made contact with not one but two people from my past. It was like some cycle was up for renewal and in one afternoon, the wheel started to turn.
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