Chapter 3: Our Buddies, Ourselves
My, John's, ego could get used to these boosts. The rectum pulsed with pangs of remembered pleasure from what had been my own member. The lips remembered the stretching. The throat felt the fullness. The fingertips explored the new me and noted the new hairlessness, the wiry, compact musculature, the uncanny foreign-familiarity of looking at the world through yellowface, slant eyes, Asian carriage, when I had never been Asian up until now--if, indeed, I could call myself Asian, now. Was I just visiting an Asian body for the time being, when that body still felt the lumberjack's vestiges? The new me felt the afterglow and remembered the contact with the old me or the last me. Lumberjack was gone, I thought with a quiver of the sore aperture, which was sad. But he'd left me--or, the old me had bequeathed to my new self--I thought, remembering his fullness in my throat, the best of both worlds. The palms slid down the slope of the new, hairless stomach for the first, ritual wank of my new Asian cock.
Which was when--didn't I know it?--Mark decides to look me up for the first time that month.
"Hey! Oh," he pauses with the bedroom door half shut. "You're here." A slow smile slyly highlights his dimples. "I didn't know you knew John."
I'm still thinking how to reply, I'm still realizing he's walked in on me naked, and he's already sat down on the bed. He's only mildly fazed, it seems, to find Jim the Asian man nude in John's bedroom. The only unusual thing about that, in fact, is that I, John, don't appear to be around.
"You. . . . ?" I begin to say.
"Know John? Yeah," Mark says as an aw, shucks. "We go way back."
I must have smiled involuntarily at Mark's answer, for he returns my blush. Mark's been my closest fuckbuddy for years, so close we can walk in to one another's bedrooms anytime, for fun, conversation, or nothing at all. Through three of his serious partnerships and seemingly dozens of my partners coming and going, there's been Mark. Three cars, two accidents, coming out to the rents, handling the phobes, deciding he was bi, saying, no he wasn't--there's been Mark. My insatiable randiness, my need to break confidentiality about Matt to confide in Mark--he's been there. The flight attendant job that has him out of town, off the continent, for three weeks at a time, unable to tend regularly to a house pet, unable, or at least uninterested, in what would have to be a longer-term, if an incredibly patient, long-distance romance. The body that won't quit. The anticipation of the sexual need and the insatiability to match it. The understanding it's a fuckbuddy relationship and nothing more and nothing less, for years now. The smile I can close my eyes and picture at any time and instantly feel better about. All of that, he's summarizing to a complete stranger as "we go way back."
But wait, I guess I, Asian Jim, am not, are not a complete stranger. "You . . . .?," I begin to say again.
" . . . Know John. I already said, yeah." He grins but he already thinks I'm being silly.
"No. You know . . . me?"
The eyes widen, the grin thins to disbelief. "You don't remember, man?"
It dawns on me, and it must telegraph on Jim's face, too, that Jim and Mark must have hooked up, and that it would hurt Mark's ego immeasurably if his former trick had failed to remember him. I'm stymied, looking into his rather lost expression, not knowing if I should go ahead and play the game of acting like one of Mark's tricks, bowled over, of course, by the memory of the experience, or if I should try to explain to my best buddy it's me, John, inside and beneath an exterior that only looks like Jim. Only, it's a whole, naked exterior I haven't even yet moved to cover up, and an awfully naked baring of soul, too, that I would have to undergo to make Mark the second person, after Luke, to know about the multiple mes.
"Man," he repeats into the silence. "You really don't remember me." He quickly looks around one more time for the man he would recognize as John, then turns back to the man he doesn't recognize as John. He starts joining me in nakedness, removing the shirt, unzipping the fly, gesturing toward the tatt, flexing the bicep he thinks will jog Jim's memory. We're chest to chest and I'm starting to be amazed at the liberties Mark will take with another, already naked man in my, John's, bedroom.
But, "wait," I'm saying, pushing him back with flailing fingers. I want Mark to stay Mark. I don't want to swallow him up--well, I do--the way of the lumberjack and Trent. I don't want to lose a fuckbuddy through this, most unusual way of losing one. But how on earth can I explain this?
"Wait--what?" He's still amazed he's drawing a blank in Jim's memory department. "Why should we wait?" And again his eyes scan the bedroom, blur slightly out of focus wonderingly. "Maybe you were just playing"--he tugs at me testingly, experimentally--"playing with John."
I was just playing. As John. To his question, where is John, anyway, I contemplate acting like I'm running around my own place, looking for him (me), as though I don't (as he doesn't) already know where to find him, me. The comedy ensues in my head, but it's not the game I want to play with my fuckbuddy, who's still amazingly ready to bed another man in my bed without me, and who will stop being himself as soon as I give up the pursuit and let him catch me--catch him. Not that--I think, eyeing Mark's torso for the first time in a month--being Mark would be such a bad thing in itself to be. It's just that--pushing Mark's groping hands away--Mark would also stop being Mark, by virtue of becoming me. "I was playing," I say out loud, rewinding this thought process to an earlier point in a seemingly endless loop, "and I guess we both like playing. With John, I mean."
He honestly stops. A different expression creeps into his profile, as the ethics of fucking a fuckbuddy's fling come into soft focus in his mind. The surroundings loom larger for us. The emptiness of the apartment, except for us, becomes imposing upon him. It's momentarily impossible to ignore the fact that I'm not there. "Yeah, John and I have been playing for years," he says, fingertips still around where my waistband would be; "sometimes, right in this room.
"He might not, though," Mark says, "appreciate me telling you that."
Bingo, buddy, I think inside Jim, and notice Mark's eyes have roved to the bed, the chair in the corner, the speakers above the tv. The room didn't have spots of sentimentality for Mark and me, but it did have places of former opportunities, fully taken advantage of, and fully recallable, on some psychic level, to him now, if one could judge by Mark's appearances.
"You don't need to mind telling me," I say, feeling like I'm invoking what's already becoming a familiar gambit, "I already know."
"You know," he repeats, and the wheels working their way around in his head tell me he's wondering how much of his personal history with me, with John, John has told to other, seemingly random tricks. He's wondering just how okay he is, really, with John kissing and telling. He's wondering, too, really, how okay he is with me, Jim, listening to that kissing and telling, and kissing and telling it to someone else, even what that someone else had provoked it, in turn. Wherever those cogitative wheels finally came to rest, I noticed he was no longer touching my waist with his fingertips.
"Mark," I make Jim's lips and body say, pausing in my pose of maximum seriousness, under the circumstances, and realizing after the name has left my lips, it's the first time I've made Jim say his name, "I am attracted to you, and I know John's attracted to you, but I can't," I say, roaming my eyes up and down his mostly exposed flesh, "be with you right now."
"Because," and the eye contact is as prolonged as it is hurt and confused.
"Because I," and I drop my own eyes, knowing how hard this is going to be to explain, "I am John." And it's like the panel in a Doonesbury cartoon when Gary Trudeau just darkly silhouettes the figures--as there is no point, really, in fully filling in the features for every interim panel on the way.
You are John?
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
The John who lives here?
The John who lives here.
But you're Jim. You're not John. You recognize me. I'm Mark, and I recognize you--
Yes, I do.
--as Jim.
As John. Really.
Really?
Really.
This is some kind of a joke.
Not a joke. Dead seriousness. Why would it be funny--
Why would what?
Why would it be funny to pretend to be a guy in his own house, with his own . . .
"With his own . . .?"
Buddy.
Buddy?
Well, fuckbuddy. Best fuckbuddy.
Best fuckbuddy!
Best buddy. No doubt.
Okay, it wouldn't be funny to pretend to be a guy in his own house, to his best buddy, but that doesn't prove it's not what you're doing.
But why would I. . . Why would Jim do it, if he knew--if I knew--Jim couldn't get away with it, and knew you wouldn't believe me, and risked . . .
"Risked?"
Risked losing my--John's--best buddy in the process?
Losing John's buddy?
Losing my buddy.
Why would I stop seeing John because of something Jim did?
That's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm John. I'm saying what John is saying. I'm fucking whom John is fucking.
"You're fucking whom John is fucking."
Yeah, that's what I said.
Saying it as John?
Saying it as John. What about it?
It's just that you said whom.
Yeah, I dropped a whom bomb.
You did. That's exactly how. . . [very pensive eye contact] John would have said it.
Yeah, exactly. Right over there [gesturing toward the foot of John's bed] . . . we did it the first time.
We did it at my place the first time.
We, John and Mark. Not us, Jim and Mark.
Us, Jim and Mark?
We, John and Mark, did it, over there, more than five years ago, the night before your birthday. We'd shot pool. You'd had a black tee shirt and leather bomber jacket on. I had been. . .
Yeah?
Jacking you off in the jeep on the way to my place.
John told you that?
I keep telling you--
I can't believe John told you that.
Right. Why would he tell some random guy that?
He. . . you. . . wouldn't.
Exactly.
But Jim would?
Jim would. . . I don't know, honestly. We've both been with him. Would he?
Would you, you mean. You're calling yourself "some random guy"?
No, you are.
Jim isn't some random guy. Jim's . . .
"You're . . .?"
I'm John, but I'm talking about Jim who's not some random guy. He's. . .
"He's". . . ? You mean he's not some random guy, he's some random. . . Asian guy?
You're saying that, Mark.
But is that where you were going with his not being random?
No. . . . Yes?
That's so racist.
Is it?
Isn't it? You should know.
But should I? I haven't been Asian long.
What? You've always been Asian.
No. I haven't been Jim, and I haven't been Asian long. If I'm even Asian now.
I'm looking at you. You are Asian now. You don't get to start and stop being Asian.
Isn't that racist?
No, it's. . . Is it? [a pause. Befuddled silence.]
Look. We . . . concocted the same perverted Hollywood fantasy together.
We did, eh?
We did. C'mon, say it with me.
. . . You mean . . . Marky
Marky Mark. Fucking . . .
Fucking Matt Damon. In . .
In about 2002.
Exactly.
Why should . .
Sarah Silverman have all the fun?
Right. And why would John--me, John--tell anyone else that?
Because . . .
Because? You're really going to tell me a reason.
You're . . John's just that perverse with everybody.
Really? To picture Matt Damon bottoming?
Like that's a stretch.
So to speak.
Okay, you got me there.
I also know something about you that only John and a few other people would know.
John and a few other people? What other people?
Your boyfriends.
What about them?
You. . .
Yeah?
You share them. With others . .
Yeah.
With me.
With . . you?
With John.
Well, I . . . can't believe he told you that.
He didn't. I know. The pizza delivery kid from the burbs. The arts major in college. The guy who suddenly throws tantrums like he's a sixteen year old girl.
That is all kinds of fucked up.
Well, it's fucked up for the fact that John's . . . that I've, stuck around. All those boyfriends have come and gone.
No, it's fucked up that the buddy I thought I could trust is telling other men secrets about me.
But that's what I'm telling you. I couldn't know those things, right? Unless I was. . .
Unless you were . . .
John. Your John.
One of my . . .
One of your . . .
Johns. And I, John, kiss him, hoping to end the conversation and knowing it will play out this way time and again, as my former fuckbuddy wants to believe me but can't believe the proof offered to his own eyes. His lips recognize the kisses I as John used to give him, but the eyes see another guy, some of whom he's seen before and some of whom he's never met. I always have the info only I could have, but he half-assumes I, John, just go telling that to "just anyone," and therefore he ends up hating me more than he had before, only projecting that hate onto whom he thinks is the old John, and not blaming the new trick, not for kissing and telling, but for kissing and being told. I keep noticing, though, he keeps coming back to my place, half earnestly in search of the old best bud, and half curious whom he'll find in his place, in my place, next. I eventually decide it takes a kind of loyalty even to listen to me make the same case over and over again, and only occasionally to show willingness to sleep with me, whoever I happen to be. That he likes the majority of the men I'm hosting at the moment, I decide, reflects well on his taste and my taste cohering, and speaks well for the fact that he comes back for more, either to recapture the way things had once been, or to hear the latest twist in what he thinks is a series of elaborate lies. He can't explain how else I would know the intimate details about our time together, but he can't account, and neither can I, for the changing men he meets, all of whom claim in their own ways--in my own ways--to be the same old me.
He always backs away from the kiss, squinting and grimacing slightly in the knowledge I kiss as John had kissed, and ignite some of the feelings I has once ignited. He's wondering, it seems, what it says about me that so many men kiss as I do, or that he responds to so many different kisses in the same way from so many different men, or that he's the kind of guy--contra his own self-image--who would kiss so many guys in turn. There's self-investment tangled up in our chosen dates, in our chosen fuckbuddies, and even in our long spun-out history together.
But at the same time I have to pull away, and that seems sometimes to alienate him further. He'll keep kissing and it will get Frenchier and Frenchier, the hands moving slowly up and down chests and waists, and I have to stop him because I don't want to be him. I want him to remain Mark, and don't want to come to inhabit and have sex as Mark. Well, I do, as I always loved being with him, and might actually have dated him, had we not gotten so good at fuckbuddy flings. But indulging now, it seemed, would mean ending the fling and ending Mark as I knew him, to make him, however temporarily, the Mark I, John, would then be. I wouldn't even have a Mark, being Mark, to sleep with, then. Then, what would I do? And, then being Mark, whom would I do? Evidently, I'd think, licking the recently kissed lips and tasting Mark upon them, the same whom, whom John would do, too.
We would also, though he only half-believed me, or hadn't yet said he fully believed me, talk about Luke, even though Luke was still my, John's, boss. We would talk about Matt, even though Matt was still my, John's, client, whom I, as John and as Jim and Jim's successors, risked getting over-involved with. Luke more or less took each successive me ostensibly in stride, not even asking anymore about the faces not matching the faces in the badges. And yet he would still look at me longingly, too tellingly for a straight boy, too appraisingly for a boss, as if mentally measuring the distances between the height of my old crotch and my new, the plumpness of former and current butt bulges, the slack and tightness of khaki inseams, new and old. Mark kept coming back with the comments, bosses wouldn't accept a different person working the same job so easily. Straight boys wouldn't spend so much time, so obviously looking. Luke wasn't, and Mark wasn't, fully buying it, and Mark seemed to watch Luke, or examine what I told him about Luke, for similar patterns of accepting and rejecting belief. Luke, according to Mark's perverted fancies, wanted into my khakis. Which still didn't explain why he, as a straight boy and a boss with power over me, would want to.
Matt, for his part, would sigh and roll his eyes at the new assistant helping him each time he arrived, but hold out hope, dubiously, but still patiently, we'd establish the old rapport. He had to admit whatever new me spoke to him caught on quickly, knew the details, had, somehow, conferred with the old John enough to be caught up with remarkable ease. Newly gouged ribbon-scars on his arms would testify to his need for attention. Watery eyes and distant, anguished expressions would portend odd but full confessions. Male family members--his father, or an older brother John had never met--came in for full suspicion. The word abuse hung in the air as we got more and more enigmatically candid. New boyfriends got sheepishly described in turn, as if Matt felt some delight in describing his amours to successions of social workers, wanting, it seems, to provoke them with details at some moments, to draw back into equally provoking silences at others.
And Mark, back in John's, Jim's, whomever's bedroom the next night, or when he was back from his latest transatlantic flight, would speak in Matt's silences, would make direct eye contact when Mark's eyes had glanced and looked away, would intimate, intimately, intimacies of a desired variety, Matt to John, or even John to Matt. And yet some jealousy animated these observations, even as doubt kept him from believing what had become his elaborate ruse, each new trick somehow, accurately, pretending to be John and to know John's whole history, even his intimate history with Mark. It always ended in the kisses he grew to know were proffered to shut him up, to stop him from asking, to get him realizing, each new John kissed like the old John, lit the fires the old John had lit, and knew viscerally, puckeringly, even if he didn't know intellectually, where he, John, and he, Mark, had, when they both were last themselves, left off.
You never are the same guy coming out of these places, John thought, that you were going in. He slid his ID through the slot underneath the glass partition. He told the faceless man on the other side he wanted a standard room, not a locker. He tried not to eye the men in line behind him as faceless fiddled with his ID, punched keys on a keypad, barked out laconically how much John had to pay. The card got returned, the fee paid, the key and towel indifferently pushed out of a cubbyhole and handed to him. A brief buzz accompanied the sound of a metallic door opening and he was in.
Music with a heavy bass boomed. A Motown inspired starlet insisted within the song's rhythms she had never needed her man, anyway, and the recording of her was the only woman's voice in the place. Men's grunts, real and recorded, echoed down dark corridors, resonated from several video-screen speakers at once, and made one mentally tune in, wondering, was that real, or another porn video loop? Then again, he thought, fingering his keys and looking for the room that corresponded with the number on the key ring, who cared? The grunter, and the recorded Motown starlet, sounded ecstatic, either way.
Guys in towels sauntered past. Beads of shower water streaked down bared backs, bared legs, bulges of buttocks unconsciously flexed as naked men passed in and out of lighted patches in dimly lit hallways. Doors clicked open and swung shut. Towels were shoved aside on one's own body or someone else's. Glances, looks became apparent in semi-darkness. Other physiognomies stared you down in full-dark blackness, telling you there were eyes there somewhere and that the bearer wasn't looking away, nor meeting your own glance directly. Blue doors stretched on into darkened corridors, stenciled numbers waxing one digit higher on each successive but never-ending door. The suggestion of a stairway leading down into more darkness, the shuffle of feet creeping along with an affected casualness, all generated the feeling one should keep on moving as fast as the bass played, and made John feel, five minutes into his first trip to the city's one bathhouse in six months, that he was still way overdressed.
Casually naked twenty-somethings brushed past apprentice trolls twice their age. Some of those trolls cornered twinks in corrugated metal mazes. Some just watched the ongoing march around them, contented themselves to be the bathhouse voyeur. An older man methodically laid out the largest collection of polyurethane dildos John had ever seen, then splayed himself suggestively, availably, on the cot behind his pointy line-up. Glory holes in stalls styled like nineteen-fifties bus station men's rooms had always seemed to him "too much," as if one needed a covert glory hole within a full-on, blatant bathhouse. Men strutted behind, men knelt in front, all the same. The numbered doors all looked alike, and the corridors all stretched on into the same sultry darkness, so the men became landmarks in the absence of anything else to enable him to track where he was headed: an older scruffy type cornered some glinting kid in this corner. A guy in a leather jacket and nothing else stood near the entrance to the holes. Two average, if rough guys always sat just outside rooms where they knew something hot was taking place. Audio voyeurs, they got off together, just on the hot fucking couple's sounds on the other sides of closed doors.
Grunts and screams gradually sounded less like forced, badly-acted scenes out of porn and almost took on timbres of sincerity, were they not recurring, echoing at top volume, every few seconds, from every speaker in the place. In childhood, John's repressed, sheltered mind had dreamed up a ten year old's version of a nightmare haunted house, with grunts and screams immaturely manifesting for little Johnnie the rattles of ghosts' chains, the lamentations of lost spirits, the cries of confinement in Purgatory. John concluded he just had not had much of an imagination for terror as a kid. But as an adult, his first over-night in an overly-audioed, constantly videoed bathhouse, he'd recognized and recollected the constant stream of screams and grunts from his childhood dreams, and convinced himself, not that bathhouses were nightmares, but that at some unconscious, latent level, little Johnnie had known in his dreams he'd revisit these dream-screams in a bathhouse one day. They were, for the realization, no less scary, just as terrifying, and, he reflected, naked now but for his jangling keys and padding his way down a dark hallway, they were a lot more sordid and sleazier than sweet child Johnnie could have dreamed. Hoarse snores in closed individual rooms clashed with human and rhythmic soundtracks and told him dreams also informed others' perceptions of this particular night at the baths. If his fellow sluts could be found anywhere, he thought, after the life-altering, body-swapping sessions they had had with him, this bathhouse--the only one in town--had to be the place.
And yet, he had to know that snore--he recognized it from somewhere, though he couldn't fathom where. It followed him down the corridors and up and down stairs, until he failed to realize he was only thinking about that snore, wondering where he'd heard it before, while actually not hearing it any longer. The parade of men walking around with him and against him, randomly coupling, kneeling and standing, parting again, laughing, smoking, avoiding one another--had its factions, its fixtures, its heartthrobs, but it had no former hims. Lumberjack didn't lounge in any of the open-doored rooms in full view of what would be many admirers. Trent didn't strut past the glory holes to see who was kneeling and peeping through enigmatic apertures. The original John didn't hang out where the mazes led out into the sultrier hallways. He never met himself, his selves, going or coming back, and he failed, as he usually did, to dissolve himself into the bathhouse tribe, to feel one with the raunchy rhythm of the place, to feel one is one player on one gradually converging team.
Another dark corridor, peopled only with the rustling of feet departing in the other direction, swept toward him the cold shudder of solitude among others, aloneness when those nearby were coupling, and--let's say it--when one was an Asian in a mostly Caucasian crowd. The cast of forehead, tucked-down eyes, miniature stature, jet black hair blended better with darkness than did the milky-white ghosts gliding by. The features signified submissiveness, the body sex-kittenishness, the mien assumed to be foreign and far away, even when they heard him speak local American slang without an accent. He hadn't felt it before because he hadn't been it before, but bias came along with the cruising. Attitude accompanied the picking and choosing. The couples aligned themselves as each would-be member thought to himself, I'm hotter than him, he's not in my league or well, let's see where this goes. The stairways began to descend more despairingly. Corners took insidious turns in mazes, turned up bereft and not just empty. Even the Motown starlet's beat had turned to a more minor key.
The Annoyings were even more so, and differently so, to boot. Annoyings always inhabited bathhouses, knew no boundaries, invaded personal spaces, insinuated themselves in threesomes with unwilling joiners numbers one and two. They overestimated themselves, took no nos for answers, assumed if you were there, then you were willing, followed you forever, and never took a hint. John had endeavored to escape them before, occupied one with chatter while a bud had escaped, and smiled and chatted with them to their faces, only to lose them in the mazes after five minutes more. One Annoying was practically attached to a beautiful twink, discouraging the other angels the twink already had in tow. Another asked John how hung he was and spoke of hot times later, then seemed to think "later" was always now, no matter how much or how little time had passed. In the worst scenario before, one was stuck with an Annoying until he found another or finally gave up in frustration. This time around, he would be an Annoying, if he and an Annoying actually got together. He removed his towel from around his waist and draped it, capelike, over his shoulders, showing how un-Asian a certain feature of Jim's, now John's, body stereotypically was. He wondered which would be worse: shunned for an Annoying's lacking set of social skills, or being shunned as an Asian, just for flat-out being an Asian.
It wasn't really all that different to come to a bathhouse in search of himself; it was, in a way, what he usually did. But as this self, no one else wanted him, and the rush went on indifferently, whether or not he tried to join it, no matter where he wore his towel or his cape. This league, this caste, he shuddered, feeling himself shrinking, was so much brisker, so much lonelier, than the coldest blowing wind.
15
It, a mouth on a busy night in a bathhouse, opened wide. It rubbed its lips and parted them. It touched and licked and brushed against. It parted further, moved along, took within, savored taste, felt fullness, took possession. Slurped with abandon. Worked away. Ran the tongue along veiny grooves on the underside, then traced the circumcision around the helmeted head, wiggled the tip of the tongue into the slit. Thought it had already tasted drops of sweet reward, then felt itself glad at the false alarm: more work, if one could call it work, still to be done.
A mouth could work a dozen dicks in a night and find each one different feeling, different tasting, differently responding. Reluctant droopies stiffened, towers grew, and geysers fired. Noses and upper lips glided against the clammily shaved. Teeth and tongues then hooked abundant, stringy pubes. Taste buds sensed recently toweled, coddled innocence of sweet, probably-never-before tasted cock. Mouths sensed the spunk of the well, umm, oiled, and knew they weren't the first mouths the man had occupied that night. Throats relaxed and engulfed, encompassed, drew in, proved right odd ideas, flying rumors about reflexes, put themselves, willingly and once again, to that test.
Taking a man inside you, watching yourself suck his dick as deeply, as repeatedly as you can. Exhaling around a luscious, beautiful rod. Sensing more hardness, greater girth this stroke or this time, and shifting one's technique to gain it next time, too. Glancing up and seeing eyeballs rolling back. Easing up and allowing one's self longer to savor. Licking the balls slowly to give the dick a rest. Returning insatiably to the dick made newly hard. Forgetting, as you're doing the deed, oh, yeah, cocksucker is supposed to be an insult after all. Reflecting, as you're choking down even further, whoever made it one didn't know what, or how much, he was missing.
Men stood on a raised dais and were serviced by gleeful kneelers, sometimes trading places with one another. Throats were soothed, gargled, as tastes on tongues and lips were shared with other kissers. Dick was gulped hungrily, desperately, imbibingly, taken within as though to say, you complete me, though not said to the man as bearer or completer--said to the dick itself. A porn star saying to his suckee, with conviction, and managing to sound manly saying it, "God, I love your dick."
A sweet rod had stayed cue-stick hard through a half hour of hearty sucking, as the mouth had watered, as the memories had formed. Balls that had hung to chin level at first bulged but drew up slowly, tightening as a rope drawn in and coiled. They'd moved up as time had gone on, as sucks had grown deeper and longer. They, the balls, had been up, abreast of the bladder, as marbles protruding from pubey, hairy flesh, as the man had shot his manna. Eyes opening as mouth remained open, sucker saw suckee's balls visibly sink back and weight down into expanding scrotum again.
Latino cock had bobbed, staying rigid, peeking out of satiny underwear, then its eye emerging, had shown its tropical girth. Had tasted of salts, had tickled throat, but had been withdrawn on a supine sucker, blinded at the time in darkness. Foreskin here, tip there, beaten base here, the dick had teased him, not knowing where he would taste it next. The mouth opening for him, for it finally felt willed with it again. The mouth didn't want to waste time with this dick in the ass, but wanted to keep on tasting him, keep on swallowing him, keep on feeling his fullness on this end. The mind above the mouth began to wonder if both ends could feel this way at once.
Some German guy in the bathhouse that night had a train of guys behind him and he'd picked this mouth, this body, this boy attached to that mouth. German boy had pulled him outside into tented shelters, still within bathhouse property, on a sultry night of echoing slurps in flimsy tent flaps all around them. The tent flap had barely hit the ground, and didn't stay down, as men formerly in German boy's train kept lifting it to look within. Shameless sucker boy got naked on the filthy outside ground and blew and blew and swallowed and swallowed the beautiful, deutsche dick, amazed at how much there had been. He'd cried when German boy had pulled himself out, spun the boy around, thrust himself in the other end to make the boy inhale sharply, wincingly, said something like ach, Ja! and was riding him. So help him, and he still respected himself for it afterward, but for the one and only time in his whole slutty life, the American boy had gleefully licked clean the awesome prong and savored it inside his mouth all over again.
Straight men only like to receive blow jobs. Gay men can remove the "only" from that phrase. Paired mouths have sixty-nined. Maws have been occupied by both members, as it were, of a couple on the same night. Trolls' gates had found their twinks. Tongues had felt the strain and relished it. Straight men actually thought one blew for the blown one's pleasure. Most gays knew the mouth got the better end of the deal. Mouths that had blown both, gay men and straight men, tasted no essential differences between their respective musky spunks. They'd held a cock in a throat, but not as long as the bearer had held it in his head. They'd gulped the drops of sweet, worked-for manna, not easily, sweetly rained down, but lovingly, laboriously sought from deep down within.
I, still John, still inside Jim, heard the same snore reverberate, then break, cough, the sleeper uneasy in his slumber and perhaps waking on his bunk for all the late-night bustle of activity. I stopped amid the bathhouse goers, tripping on obliviously around the hallway's next, endless turn. The snore at least connoted comfort, contentment, sleepy solitude in a place otherwise too preoccupied with coupling, getting off, moving on, and staying wide awake throughout. In the absence of familiar faces, former selves, the snore did sound familiar. Steady and constant, its sonorous qualities even beat the soundtrack's bass.
I stood before the door that it had to be coming from, felt it gently vibrate with the music and the sleeper's rhythms, purposefully looked away from the latest fleet of naked men padding by. The hoarse tonal quality stayed with me and sounded familiar, indeed, as though it had occurred at some key moment--and some moment lately, in fact. Some stud forced his way by and made intrusive eye contact, cruising the Asian sex kitty he thought he saw lingering in a doorway, and as I'm subtly avoiding further eye contact with him, the door to the sleeper's room opens. A hairy white man blinks sleepily, takes in me and the stud who's still in motion, yawns visibly and decides to leave his door open for the next interval, just to see whom he'll catch out of all the fish swimming by.
I'm not sure if he wants me or the other guy, but there's enough for me to go on already in the room's interior, dim light. Prominent cheek bones push up over-sized eyes that may or may not be blue in the dimness. The ample chest hair broadens into a mane and then tapers into a diamond shape over his mid stomach, curling cutely while still signifying virility, youth timed to mid-, maybe even early thirties. I'm back up to the eyes and realizing a question awaits in them, and it's impatient more than alluring, doubtful instead of "come-hither." I still feel I need another clue: on the doorknob on the internal side of the door, his shirt hanging down, cuffs and fringes touching the filthy floor. Flannel, and I have my clue. And, the potentially competing stud has moved indifferently down the hallway.
"Say, I think you know a guy I've been looking for."
He sort of chuckles, like it's an unusual pick-up line. I have to say, "no, really."
"'I know a guy you're looking for,'" he repeats in a voice that's an octave deeper than his face had told me it would be. Arching his back slightly to push out the chest, adjusting the bulge beneath the towel, he makes eye contact again. "But I'm not the guy."
"No," I say, though by this point our eyes are obviously roving over one another's bodies. "But you could be his brother. Do you have," I ask, pausing to hide weird nervousness all of a sudden, "a partner"--I have to trill the word for slight irony in a bathhouse--"who looks a lot like you?"
It's a presumptuous question to ask of a guy alone in the setting. The look goes from seductive to quizzical, a twinge of, "what the fuck?" He considers for a second. "To be honest with you. . ."
"Jim," I say in his inflected pause, not getting into the I'm-really-John business yet.
". . . Jim. I've got a roommate I haven't seen in three days. Don't know where he went. I looked around for him here earlier tonight, before I went to sleep. I've been. . . sleeping." Like I can't see the rumpled bedsheets, the lines on his face and forehead, like I care about any of that right now.
I spin the word with the same ironic inflection, "roommate?"
"Well," he says, and I get the sense he would be blushing if I could see him in better light. He sits down and checks that his towel isn't exposing too much--not that I would mind. On second thought, he spreads his legs far enough the towel comes to rest on top of his penis, to drape the organ as we talk. Noting this and noting that I've noted this, he goes, " so, what's your guy like?"
I start to describe lumberjack, from his technique to his smile to his workout routine, and once I finish, I don't have to ask if he recognizes him. He's started abruptly, arched his back more attentively, suddenly tensed with visual recognition. I end by confessing, though, I don't know lumberjack's name.
This makes him hesitate. "What did you call him?"
"We never, umm," I say, "got to that."
The smile cinches it. We know we mean the same guy. "Of course he didn't." He's standing with me now. "His hand was already down your shirt by then."
Yeah, I say, and it's like he could kiss me.
"Peter."
Peter. Of course. It all made a kind of cosmic sense.
"And you're here with him now? Where is he?"
I understand the excitement hasn't been on my account, but on lumberjack Pete's. "I said I've been looking for him."
"Yeah?"
"I didn't mean I had seen him here, or that I had come here with him."
Disappointment sets in, like he'd really been thinking I would take him to Pete.
I take a second to think that he has no idea that until recently I had been Pete. Pete had fucked Jim, the Jim I now was. I hadn't even known I had been Pete, that I had had that name, when I had stopped being Pete and started being Jim. We both peered through semi darkness, probably both picturing the man we'd been with, probably both wondering what the other man was picturing about him. Luke, if nothing else, had good taste in roommates. Luke, if nothing else, was blissfully ignorant of all my body swapping, and not just my trading places with his erstwhile romantic roomie.
"So, you don't know where I can find him?"
He just means, simply, geographically, where to find him. I answer, eschatologically, philosophically. "I don't know how to find them."
"'Them'?"
"Him."
We've almost exhausted possibilities. These aren't the kinds of conversations that are supposed to happen in bathhouses. "I thought he might be here, too."
We both watch a troop of Desperates go by in the hallway in a huddle, trailed by an Annoying. I have a flash of being left with an Annoying, and waking up as a fellow Annoying. I turn back to . . .
"And you are . . . ?" I restore the touch of seduction to the tone.
"Bryan," he says, seeming to note the seductive touch. We could possibly talk about one another for a while, it seemed, not about the buddy or the roommate whom we'd mutually lost.
Taking a lap around the club together once and turning heads, returning to Bryan's room and losing the towels, sharing the list of places where we'd looked for Pete, we two talked more than any other pair of men in the place that night talked. I still didn't tell Bryan half of what I was thinking. How could I possibly? We had met in a bathhouse and yet I had reasons for not wanting to sleep with him. I had been with Pete since he had seen him, yet couldn't explain where Pete had gone since then. I knew what my fucking did to the men I was with, but couldn't explain it to someone in a way that even Mark believed it, and Mark was ten times the soul mate Bryan was, blinking at me doubtfully as we finished a second lap. I looked at Bryan and saw Pete, though I hadn't even known he was Pete when I had been with him. He looked at me and saw some Asian guy, probably Pete's type, but evidently not Bryan's. I hadn't even known what it was like to be Asian longer ago than the last day or so. For all of that, it made for awkward bathhouse conversation.
We go to my room and we're kissing as we're commenting, slowly and noncommittally touching, rubbing lips. I kiss him as I kiss Mark, to show him I still kiss like John used to kiss, though it seems more and more that the physical lips and not your romantic intentions shape your kisses, that it's your body kissing another body as the bodies are predestined to kiss one another, and not the personality or the soul expressing itself in the pucker. All of this runs through my head and I chuckle--which is deadly the first time you're kissing someone.
"What? What's funny?" Eyes that had been closed in pleasure focus critically again. He draws back as much as he can while we're still breathing on one another's faces. I have never met a guy who can stand laughter the first time you're with him.
"Nothing," I say softly. I'm not laughing at him, but saying so would be a laughable line. "I'm not mocking," I do say, "just enjoying myself."
The light in his eyes tells me he doesn't fully trust this, but he draws in closer again, starts tasting my tongue with his. Two ordinary hook-ups in the club would be full-on rocking and fucking by now, and we're deciding if we're okay with kissing. We're so self-conscious, we've got to take it further.
A kind of jealousy coils in my spine and shoulders. A hesitancy heavies the lower lip even as it's kissing. Ab muscles flutter their way through nagging doubts. Alienation adheres among Asian boy's sex-kitten eyelids. Something in the ponderous bowels sends some anxious signals of warning to the rest of the system, which doesn't need to be warned. Jim's dick, already up and stirring, signals it wants the rest of these impulses to, umm, beat it already.
The coil inside considers Pete, this man who has been Pete's "roommate," what that means, exactly. Pete is missed by those sore shoulders, that kink in vertebrae further down the spine, felt dimly and in recollection by biceps, themselves uncoiling in one of Pete's protracted workouts. If I missed having Pete, being Pete, sucking and fucking with his magnificent dick, Bryan might have been lying there, for all I knew, picturing him, too, while actually kissing me. Was it hot to him that his boyfriend had bedded some Asian boy, now to be bedded by him, Bryan, in turn? Did it bother me that Pete had had a regular squeeze the night he had taken me, the Trent I had been, home with him, even with Bryan, whom I didn't know then, asleep and snoring nearby? Bryan was an excellent, sensual kisser, and his tongue worked in ways that showed force, potential: I wanted to know what else that tongue could do, as it ranged over other parts of me. I sensed he in his hairiness would like Jim's smooth bodyscapes, its hairlessness by balanced yin-and-yang contrasts, if that wasn't Asian enough. But would that make us more or less jealous of one another's erstwhile possession of Pete? Would Pete be more his, more mine, or none of the above, when two of Pete's beaus, I again chuckled to think, hooked up? I stifled further laughter as all these thoughts revolved and felt on our kissing lips a third pair, kissing in spirit, lumberjack Pete lingering there between us as we generated memories of him from contact with one another, a menage a trois of the mind.
Hesitancy heavies those lips, though, as John, Trent, the hallucinated, kiss Pete--my beaus, I guess, I'd loved and abandoned, literally, woefully so. I'm sure Bryan wondered why I didn't kiss back as quickly as he kissed me, and sure, too, that he'd started with the tongue to pick up the romantic pace. Couples in bathhouses cut to the chase and skip the kissing altogether, and here we were, picturing a third guy between us, yet making out like a pair of horny teens. But as we kept kissing I kept hesitating, knowing Bryan wouldn't be Bryan, I would be Bryan, if we let this go on much longer. I knew the pattern by now, knew I hadn't found anyone, even Bryan's former partner, after sleeping with them--sleeping as them. I couldn't plead ignorance; I knew what was coming. I couldn't say Bryan or Bryan's tongue had talked me into it; I hadn't even tried to tell him about Pete, about why I had recognized his snore, about why I had come looking for Pete in the bathhouse the same night he had. That was another in a line of cosmic coincidences, and it made me think of some method to this continuing madness, but how could I tell him that? Especially when his artful tongue tasted so good?
Alienation adhered to Asian eyelids, from under which I peeped out at my caucasian kisser. He had Pete's lumberjack looks without the bulky arms or the scent and taste of cigarettes. He also had the skin tone I, John, had once had, the next-door-neighbor charm of a white kid that could blend in anywhere. After a few days as an Asian I wanted those features back, having felt white guys' treatment of supposed Oriental sex-kittens, supposed owners of stereotypically small cocks, supposed speakers in the clipped staccato bursts that English-speakers associate with Asian tongues. This Asian tongue wrapped itself around a white one and wondered how racist any and all of this passionate kissing was. Bryan didn't appear to hold my Asianness against me, against Jim, and I only admitted to myself in unspoken meditations it was his whiteness that part of me wanted, along with the rest of him. There would be one less Asian, me as Jim, once I had made it with Bryan, but white John's soul would outlive yellow Jim's body, and would outlive white Bryan if and when Bryan turned around and bedded another boy in turn. Looking at Bryan between kisses, I didn't think Bryan's next boy would resist. Part of me just wanted to escape the cold alienation of being Asian, and as I look out of these slanted eyes at kissing Bryan, I'm sacrificing a yellow body for a white one, sacrificing that white boy's soul in turn. When did I, I wondered as I puckered, start acting at the behest of the Mongol horde?
Somewhere deep along the spine, by a twist of two of small intestine and near the appendix scar Jim didn't have but John did, the bowels steeled themselves. I don't just mean in the sense of intestinal fortitude, but also in a sense that hadn't yet been spoken between myself, as Jim, and Bryan, between Bryan's kisser and his soon-to-be-partner. We hadn't said it, but positions and gestures suggested Bryan would top. Bowels needed to be aware of this and needed to be ready. That got me reflecting back on Pete as Bryan's partner and thinking of that magnificent schlong in the hands of a partner as a committed top. Again, it seemed in furthering my own theories, the soul and the mind went along with whatever the body lent itself toward. But Bryan's body, shifting itself onto me as I thought this, must have out-forced Pete's, which must have meant Bryan's equipment commensurately outpaced . . .
Oh, my. My own stirring loins met Bryan's, and again, as with the lips, I'm sure we both felt a third in some imagined, penile menage a trois, with proverbial inches to spare. His hips were grinding and his thrusts were determined and my bowels were, umm, taking note. So, John, inside Jim in a different way than Bryan is about to be inside Jim, you're really going through with--letting him go through, with this? You're really working your way back to white from Asian, as racist as that is, though millions of Asians never can do so, and though it's probably racist even to think they would want to? You're really going to let him fuck you, knowing what his inclination tells you about Luke, his former beau, and knowing what his inclination tells you about the self you're about to be reborn as, as Bryan, resuscitated and yet murdered, him and yet also you? You're really going to let his kissing--his sucking--his nipple biting--his riming--his lubing you up--disarm all your moral qualms on his behalf and yours? The nervous bowels relaxed, the Asian eyes closed as pupils rolled themselves high up in sockets, the lips tensed as what were Jim's lips (for now) against Bryan's, the coil released. And I, John, Jim, Bryan, answered my questions.