Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 08:57:45 -0500
From: Estlin Adams <estlinadams@gmail.com>
Subject: Sleeping As Others, 7

Chapter 7: Most Dads Like Me

33.

	It was weird enough Going to Meet the Tonys, I, John, sighed to
myself, like it was some ill-conceived television show.  Now I was going to
have to meet, or actually, re-meet, after several years' absence, one Tony,
as another.  I could only catch up with one of them today before he took
off internationally, and I had to arrange it so I met two of my former
beaus, both named Tony, on two consecutive days, yesterday and today.  And
yesterday's Tony had had his old hold over me all over again, his spell I
never used to be able to, and still cannot, resist.  And so I hadn't
resisted it and here I was, on the fourth Tony's doorstep, while I was
wearing, as fate would have it, the third Tony's skin.  And that could be a
problem, I reflected as I heard the first rumblings on the other side of
the door, as the third, yesterday's Tony, had black skin, and the fourth,
today's Tony, now squinting at me in the low light of his half-opened door:
not so much.

	The third Tony, yesterday's man, had leaped back into my life on
the merest pretext, the shortest phone call, with the odd truths of the
last several weeks of my life only half-apparent to him, and already he was
directing me to his house.  I'd arrived, not the man, Simon, he'd expected
me to be, but he was himself: smiling dimples and skin the color of
especially rich, ground coffee.  The muscular physique that this search for
Tonys was reminding me I liked projected itself onto the blackest screen
here, and I mentally checked his appearance against memories of the man I'd
met walking past a picnic nearly a decade before.  It took the grin, the
beam in the eyes against the darkness of the complexion to jibe with the
memories, and I'm afraid I kept studying his skin, as if I expected,
somehow, the very glow of his musculature to shimmer.  The statuesque bald
head looked etched, monumental, somehow, the eyebrows left invisible on
distinguished dark arches.

	Conversation had sparked haltingly yesterday, a strange man on
third Tony's couch and Simon's body not knowing how to evoke my, John's
memories of Tony, but still seeing, through Simon's eyes, what John had
once seen in him.  I offered the usual account of backward progress through
the Tonys I had known, the places they were supposed to occupy in some
quest to understand a changing self, and the fact that none of this was
just elaborate metaphor--Tony's head tilted further to the side on this
note, as he listened, uncomprehendingly but intently--but it really was my,
Simon's, John's, the earlier johns', experience.  It all landed in awkward
silences and a noisy clock somewhere chimed a discordant hour, as Tony was
still not understanding the point, but too polite to kick the white boy
out.

	The home was new since I had known this Tony, the neighborhood
surprising for a new town-home amid the area's dilapidated, decades-old
affairs.  The place was grand in its high ceilings, huge rooms, glistening
chandeliers, but almost unfurnished, looking less than lived-in.  Tony had
guided a short tour because again, it would have been impolite not to, and
we both sensed the conversation dying in that spacious, gapingly empty
room.  I was trying to summon the intimate details only this Tony would
know, but what I remembered came out as half-baked and raunchy
cliché, even more naked, it seemed, for the grand décor and
Simon's failure to fit within it.

	"I've got to decide soon," I'd heard this Tony say with a grand,
expansive gesture toward the wide open, interior space, "if this place is
all mine, or a house I'm going to share."  Not only my, but this Tony's
remarks had fallen flat, as the house seemed to emphasize its emptiness in
response, to reverberate hollowly through every nearly unfurnished square
foot.  This grand a place was in fact this Tony's own.  I gulped in the
silence, abandoning the search for the comforting, familiar details with
which I thought we could reconnect.  I just sighed, resigned, Oh, well.

	Well, maybe not, as, in passing a bedroom with the light switched
off, Tony had swept me into the darkness and onto what felt like a divan or
loveseat against a distant, shadowed wall.  Lips were kissing and clothing
was coming off.  After dark--I proverbially thought, silhouetted in this
room's darkness, but glimpsing the dim light still visible from the open
door across the room--after dark, all skin was black.  Silky skin slid
across my own, a bald head rubbed itself cranially along my chin,
shoulders, and chest, made me once again surprised skin invisible in the
darkness could feel so silky smooth.  Delicate fingertips undid flies of
jeans and guided down zippers as he stepped out of denim.  Tongues met
tongues as mouths opened and forgotten tastes, scents were remembered with
sudden contact, sudden familiarity with which one wanted to remember, and
to taste, even more.  Oh, yes, this Tony, the third one to come into John's
life, and the third one on this quest in reverse order through the ordinal
Tonys.  He tasted like this.  He liked when I did that.  He wanted me to
assume this position.  He wanted to be guided into that position, but
wanted you to know he didn't need the guiding, and was headed there with
his muscles, his frame, his scents and smells, all along.  Oh, yes, John as
Simon remembered the feeling, though this time it was Simon's, not John's,
body feeling it: sex with this Tony, more so than with the others of his
name, meant Tony was the virtuoso.  John was the violin.  Instrument lay in
the hands of the player, from my ignited toes to that temple dome of that
head.

	White Tony's bald head glinted duly in the next day's afternoon
light on his doorstep.  He wasn't playing and wasn't recognizing me and was
this close to throwing this stranger off of his doorstep.  While I had once
looked up at the fourth Tony from a shorter and much younger perspective, I
realized I now looked down into his eyes, loomed large on his front stoop,
intimidated and imposed, as Black Tony, as the old John never had.  His
eyes met mine, Tony's meeting Tony's, with looks he'd never given the old
me, something panicked and small behind blue pupils, something narrowing in
intimidation, but also quickly looking around, embarrassed at its own
plight and trying to hide--I now realize as black Tony meeting white Tony's
eyes--the fear in those eyes.  I stammer out identifiers of the old John,
bring out details only he and I would have known, prescribe my own, old
formula for the Tony's I've been meeting so far.  It's only when I say I
know he's leaving soon on a flight that the eyes change expression,
widening, dropping the panic, squinting as he says in a voice that's
pitched higher than the white Tony voice I remember, "You called me on the
phone and told me you were John?"

	White Tony's eyes roam up and down black Tony's body, still not
inside fourth Tony's place, though still, indeed, inside third Tony's body.
I'd regretting submitting in that lightless bedroom as soon as I'd felt
those old feelings, the instrument in the virtuoso's hand, the rubbing of
that head on parts of the body not expecting it, the drawing of the bow by
the master musician, the deeply resonant vibration through the body in
harmony--I'd heard myself, felt myself playing along, as only a virtuoso
knew his gifts, as only the tuned, perfected instrument could play.  Yo Yo
Ma with his best.  Clapton with Blackie.  Right down to the cigarette burns
off the bridge where he's been jamming too intently to flick off the ash,
right down to the tiny groove in the Stradivarius, etched by the millionth
strum of the bow.  I'd made music, I'd been his fiddle, I'd been instrument
perfectly timed, tuned, to become one with the player.  His hands, body,
cock, one rhythm matching mine, metronome and conductor guiding us in sync.
Stimulation of penis, prostate, tongue and lips in tidal ebb, orgasmic
flow, as regret was my whiny counter melody beneath spontaneous sighs, his
fingertips as violinist's bow drawn, strummed, slowly, sensuously guided
along bridges, over holes, touching minutely every etched groove of
instrument.  This Tony was too talented, too selfless in attending to one's
lover's rhythms, too synched with one cock, his, sinking inside and with
wrapped fingers gliding along the second cock, yours--how could I as his
instrument absorb him?  How could the played swallow the player in his own
selfish ecstasy?  If he knows the music ends, knows the rhythms end in
oneness, he knows as a singing, enchanted violin that he'll in a moment of
ecstasy, stop feeling the player drawing the bow.  How can he play, knowing
he'll be the player, when the play must end and will end?

	I still stammer in white Tony's front room, glad I've made it in
this Tony's home, remembering I'd let black Tony deep within my own.  He
still cast me a mean look, didn't trust me, regretted his decision to let
me in on the basis of my knowing about John's, my phone call alone.
Affection for John, an old me, shown in those blue eyes, resided somewhere
in the forehead, but I could see in the look in those eyes he saw someone
different.  He glimpsed another Tony whom he hadn't known, wouldn't have
gotten to know on his own, and would have thought less of me, of John, for
my having known.  He displayed conflicted attitudes in those expressions,
those unbelieving eyes, discomfort a black man was in his front room,
speaking inexplicably of a white man, it seemed, he kept telling himself he
held dear.

	Black Tony had held me in final throes of passion, experience
telling me he'd dissolve in ecstasy at any moment.  I'd remembered our
times together as I waited for the inevitable release of muscles, as I felt
beads of sweat bouncing off of him and only onto me.  I'd once walked
unknowingly past the city's black gay pride in a park on a late summer
afternoon.  Looking up in my reverie, I'd seen a beautiful black man with a
huge snake on his arms, coiled round his back, hissing in my general
direction, slithering, one supposes, pridefully among the gay revelers
halfheartedly bumping to disco in a shady city park.  We'd made eye
contact, I'd looked at the snake, I'd looked back at him.  We had a mutual
spark.  We had a conversation starter.  I'd already sensed, how dear his
snake, how coiled and cold and tense beneath a rich black smile, a definite
dimple, a bald dome on someone who, decidedly, worried not a minute about
sunburns.  We'd spent the rest of the picnic together, black Tony, snake,
and me.  Back in his bed, starting to sense he was gone from my arms, I
briefly wondered if he still had the snake: was it somewhere here in Black
Tony's house?  Now that I knew that partners I had slept with and
transformed into, reappeared as Brian had done, but memories seemingly
swept clean of the affair, would Black Tony at some point retake his place
in this procession of ordinal Tonys, none the wiser that the man, Simon,
who'd visited him, had in fact been his earlier partner, John?  Would the
snake coil in the bed or in the cage alone, oblivious that its master was
gone for having been absorbed, as a mouse by the snake, into some other
predator's skin?

	White Tony's house looked overly still, old fashioned, this
erstwhile lover one of the only ones I'd had who was two decades older than
myself.  He wouldn't want to think of me with black guys, and I wasn't
surprised he didn't want to think of me as a black guy.  Words would come
to his lips which wouldn't come to mine as John, which black Tony from
yesterday would take as insults, which would forever divide men who had
gayness in common into separate camps, separate races, separate existences.
White Tony's friends, fiftysomethings, had heard of a peer moving to a
distant Southern city and one of them had said the mover could just live
there with the n-----rs.  I had been amazed they had said that word out
loud, evidently not for the first time.  Tony, driving, had consigned an
inattentive driver in the car ahead to n-----r as well as cocksucker
status.  I as John had looked at the driver once we'd passed him, not
thinking either label applied.  Tony in a fit of anger as they'd walked
rapidly home from a club at closing time had said he'd not wanted to hear
any more about the n----r cabdriver.  We'd both looked around the nocturnal
block to be certain no one had heard.  Tony had told me in confidence a man
had strutted, had tensed and flexed his flesh with his roguish, staring eye
hinting "come hither."  I took a moment to realize the point of Tony's
story was that a black gay man had dared to leer at him, had supposed Tony
would find black flesh sexy, had thought he would come hither--or at least
not run the other way.  I had had second thoughts on my own choices to fool
around with white Tony in light of what he thought about blacks, in light
of what he would say to me, had he known the extent to which I'd played
with others.  I hadn't grown up at the time in history white Tony had,
hadn't watched a high school go from four-percent to ninety-percent black
in the space of four years, hadn't been taught by parents to be racist and
heterosexual--only to grow up and find one of those promises had not been
his to keep.

	Black Tony, once in bed post-coitally, years ago, had innocently
asked my thoughts once the panting had subsided.  I'd said "the whole
black-white thing," and I'd turned just in time to see him roll his eyes.
I'd said some of the racist thoughts I'd known I'd had, some of the things
I'd heard my white friends say, some of the things I'd heard the
stereotypes about.  While he did have a scent I loved smelling, I didn't
associate the aroma with musk or sweat or even difference.  While I noted
the contrasts in our skin colors, it had been aesthetically, not
politically, as though we'd posed in some classical Mapplethorpe still.
Neither of our bodies conformed to stereotypes we'd heard about one
another, and after all, we'd been naked, when clothes ordinarily sheathed
stereotypes' truths.

	We'd had a weird and ongoing conversation, whether he'd wanted me
to say I liked sucking his big black dick, or should I leave out the black
part when I said that?  Was it the blackness I inherently liked about it,
or was that incidental to the dick I liked sucking?  Was it racist to say
that about him?  Was it racist not to say it about him?  Even if it was, or
were racist, would he want me to go on saying that about him?  He'd smiled,
he'd said in compensating terms he'd liked my big, pink Irish dick.  I'd
laughed, thanked him for big and pink, then said: but I'm not Irish.  I'd
been aware all along he couldn't very well claim not to be black.

	White Tony had called my dick Lars, for the word's proximity to an
appropriate word for size, and for his much closer guess than Ireland to my
ancestors' point of northern European origin.  The dick of a man twenty
years white Tony's junior had sprung to action, had shown largess, had
rejuvenated white Tony in alabaster paleness, in the sucking as well as in
the afterglow.  With white Tony, race hadn't come between us. But then, it
hadn't come between black Tony and me, either, once we'd worked through the
"whole black-white thing."  White Tony and I hadn't worked through the
racism, even if black Tony and I had worked our way through the race.

	All of this worked its way through my thoughts and memories in
white Tony's front room, and as white Tony's sets of memories, I probably
circulated through his memories and consciousness at the same time.
Neither of us voiced these thoughts, as I reflected how much older he
looked, as he tried to see any trace of the John he knew in what to him was
the foreign face of the man with whom he happened to share a name.  He
still hadn't invited me in his house past the front halls.  I didn't think
he was going to.  As for the old-time racist truism about leopards not
changing spots, black Tony had changed his, and here I was, John as Tony
and the former white boy, Simon, now as a black man.  White Tony hadn't
changed his, confronted, he thought, with a black man, to whom his home
remained closed.  I wondered for a moment, then abandoned the thought,
where does the gay man of either race fit into that truism or
cliché?  Could he, essentially or existentially, change his spots,
complementing or defying the leopards' ways?

	White Tony could not.  Black Tony could.  He could see John without
seeing race between them, could honestly not care what John said about him
and his big black dick.  And yet why had white Tony been paternal toward me
when I had been another John?  Why had I stayed with a racist partner, when
I had also, without telling white Tony, been with another man, even another
Tony, of another color? What could I learn about these Tonys, if this Tony
wouldn't let me into his house, if the other Tony had now been absorbed, if
either of them had any purchase on my origin story as this ever-changing
John?

	I turned to leave one Tony's hallway, embodying another, who had
been let in by one beau to the point of absorption, but kept out by the
other to the point of alienation.  White Tony and I had had race in common
but not age.  I'd lain in the bed of a man old enough to be my father.
Black Tony and I had looked at one another across racial divides.  But
neither he nor I had always noted, or always cared about the difference.
One made me his daddy's boy, and I, the old John, had gone along with it
willingly.  The other had never made me his white boy to complement his
blackness.  I had not not gone along with that, either or neither.  Maybe
my racism was neither visible nor regarded when I was with the white Tony.
My racism was visible but not regarded when I was with the black.  Maybe as
a kind of chameleon I could appear to share white Tony's racism, but also
appear to black Tony to lack it--not that I'm saying I wasn't actually
racist in either case.  I am, and have been, as we all are, a little bit.
Some of my best friends are--letting the white one's front door close
softly behind me--Tonys, after all.



34.



	They touched, they rubbed, they sparked.  They were in sync, in
touch, in tune. Two bald men's heads rolled upon one another, bristled with
stubble, pressed on one another' jubilant bodies. One moved his crown over
chin, over neck, down chest and amid musculature.  One felt shaven, sensual
skin skidding, skulking along belly, waist, pelvis.  The first rubbed
cranium against penis, testicles, taint. The second felt ridges against
thighs, legs, hips.  Laughing and lying stationary a moment, they switched
in a kind of bald-head sixty-nining, the lying one now rubbing, the rubbing
one now rubbed.  The smooth head felt every space and hair and muscle and
groove.  The rubbed body felt forehead and curve and crown and temple.
They kept rubbing heads and forgot hands, kissed only as they passed by
lips, gave in to mutual head-rubs, felt they could have sex only from the
eyebrows up and not feel either had missed anything.  Laughing Buddhas and
Tellys Savalis, Misters Clean and Patrick Stewarts, they gloried in shaven
pates, bald crowns, distinguished craniums, sensuously naked lobes,
uncluttered and hairless canvasses for beaming smiles below.  Bald on bald
was smooth and shear as insides of silks, as shear, rubbing wrestling
singlets, as touched, gloved finger tips that were top of bodies embodied,
physiques within gloved fingers instead. Heads were not what they lacked
without hair, but were what they were blessed with, an unblemished, naked
fullness that stretched back from eyebrows, that placed head to head, that
shared beads of sweat between lovers who were not even facing, but were in
fact heading, one another.

	Among many men in groups in bathhouses, any two of whom could get
with one another, the two bald ones always conjoin.  Among those cursed
with hair, the bald seem a special breed, crowned achievements willing to
bare what embarrasses others, willing to let what others protect, do more
than just recede.  Among satirical shows, the bald have their rituals,
their thing, their secret handshakes that are in fact esoteric, secret head
shakes.  Freemasonries of the mane-free, they are the opposites of
Hippie-opera odes to "Hair!"  They provoke the late-arrivals to lament they
had missed the ritual.  They get the most hirsute to envy the cleanly
shaved.  The grass is always greener, the shave is always closer, the head
one mere hair away from bald perfection--not just in and of one man, but in
a gay bald pairing, two.

	Melville's weird whale metaphors and metonymies have him forging
allegories from each whale body part in turn until, in the oddest of them
all, man shuts himself up in bishoprick.  Vestment made of phallus, man
become whale, body become penis, the symbol in a ridiculous whale of book
brings us back to baldness: rubbing tips against one another, sensuously
heading one another's heads, bald men not only have, but are, their
phalluses.  Their bodies are sex organs, their penises are themselves,
their lives their sex acts, their body contact their mutual frottage.
Faces below heads pressed to faces.  Arms as extensions embracing phallus
bodies.  Legs as waists and trunks maneuvering members, heads, toward
maximum contact with one another.  Soft concussions mean jutted, butted
ecstasies.  Abutted skulls come as mutually close as unconjoined minds can
come.

	Cognitive, intellectual, cerebral sex conspires through brain
near-contact alone, head on head, self on self, eye to eye, cheek to cheek,
lobe to lobe.  Sex impulses don't have to travel up spinal cords to brains
to signal pleasure centers, but can splay out along craniums, have
head-sex, pivot sensuously together, locate G-spots in solar plexes,
transmit pleasures right back to hippocampuses just a few short neurons of
gray matter away.  With the bodies as penises rubbed together, the heads as
pleasure centers enabling visceral-cerebral ecstasies, why does one need
the non-cephalic body?  Why would one want hair?  Why would one go back,
once one has had bald?  Why wouldn't two haired men erotically shave one
another?  Why must one convince, when bald heads make it self-evident, the
naked pate is the sexiest part of a man there is?





35.



	 Why did he, John, have keep convincing these white guys, he
thought, that a black guy wasn't necessarily what they wanted him to be, or
what they thought he was going to be?  They leered lasciviously.  They let
their eyes slide down to crotch level.  They raised eyebrows in innuendo.
They assumed he knew hip hop.  They knew he could dance, or thought he
could, attributed swivel to angular hips, looked up to a muscled body they
assumed could clobber theirs.  One could sense the insecurity within the
desire in their eyes.  One wasn't necessarily a real person in those eyes:
one was just a chance for them to break their last unbroken taboo.

	Conversations had stopped short.  Eyes had quickly darted his way
on the brinks of punchlines.  Stories had trailed off.  He supposed that
was his fault: going to bars John had gone to as John or that John had gone
to as Simon.  He'd been the only black man in the white gay man's bar, and
he wasn't really black in any way he currently cared to explain.  They were
all a bit tighter and more self-conscious with the rhythm and blues on the
radio.  They rehearsed their knowledge of basketball and football stars,
assuming, incorrectly, that he cared about those sports or those players.
Being in league with other white gay guys was apparently one thing, he
thought, those eyes roaming around another afternoon bar scene (if one
could call it that).  When that league became interracial--if one black
even counted as integrating a crowd--it was something else entirely.  Their
roaming eyes, darting safely away in their glances from his own, told him
even they were wondering what that one thing actually was.  The thing was,
as their glances when they landed on him seemed to say, in his pants.

	That thing, stereotypically sized, he was afraid, amply girthed,
even, had had him thinking ever since the inaugural jerk with the new
dick--which he'd enjoyed with each new body he'd assumed, but especially
black Tony's.  Now that it was his, in the possessive, anatomical sense, he
rethought his words to its former owner.  "I like sucking that big black
dick" sounded different as suckee than it had as sucker, as black desired
and fellated, than it had sounded as white fellator.  It was an
objectifying thing to say, even when "the pleasure was all mine" meant it
was all that object's pleasure, not all that objectifier's.  The girth, the
blackness, the connection between the two, pleasured the tonsils and the
tongue.  The tongue and the pallet pleasured the foreskin and shaft, but it
wasn't the pink of the mouth, the white of the lips the dick desired.  It
wasn't the big, pink Irish dick that black Tony had once generously echoed
back.  It was the dark of the girth, the heft of the member, the mouth
wanted.  Tony, now that John was Tony, wouldn't have pushed John as John or
John as Simon off of the big black dick.  But he would not have wanted to
hear it called that, by another fellator or by a former self.  It took the
whole body to be the dick size and the dick color, as if, like another
bishoprick, he was a sex organ, rather than having a sex organ.  And that
was just as bad as leering at any black man in a bar as if he were a sexual
jukebox: anyone with the right deposit, the right combination, could play
any tune he wished.  But it was never what the jukebox wanted, and he was
starting to think it wasn't what the dick wanted, if the dick, as the whole
body, thought about it long enough.  He liked having the black dick now,
and he thought he would like having the dick admired, if he could stay his
new self, still.  But as for liking to suck black dick, somehow now, the
shoe was on the other foot.

	On the other seat at the time, though, was a guy with evident
problems making himself look away.  Too many buttons unbuttoned, hair
neatened and combed back a few too many times, he'd studied himself in a
mirror too long for a fortysomething before coming to a bar that would be
empty anyway. The constancy of the look, the return of the glance, so soon,
made John as black Tony wonder if in a way the man were still looking in a
mirror.  Was he looking for the reflections of attraction in whom he would
call a black man--maybe even call a negro man, were his wording out of
date?  Was he just checking out John to catch signs John was catching him
out in turn?  What was it in that face's unconscious ligaments, its
thoughtless expressions, anyway, that looked borderline familiar--to John,
Simon, or perhaps Tony?  Glances sidled.  Fingers tapped.  Toothpicks
seesawed, as a man, ill-at-ease, tried too hard to project the feeling of
ease.

	Easy, John within black Tony wondered if he could mess with him.
Could he pull it off?  He'd been black, if he even was, a few hours, and he
was about to try to swagger his way through messing with an over-confident
but ill-at-ease white dude, just because he thought he could.  Black Tony
buzzed his lips, John sipped gin through them, and a white soul in a black
body wondered to himself, where he'd gotten the gall.  It was probably
racist of white John to assume inside black Tony's body he'd be
irresistible to insecure white men.  It was probably racist of white John
inside black Tony to assume he could read this white man's thoughts about
him as a black man, when he wasn't "really" black.  John then caught
himself, checking himself: yes, this man, whoever he was, really was white.
But wait--was the next thought--was that something racist to assume?  He
hadn't, after all, heard the man say a word.  Based just on glances back
and forth, which neither man had admitted he'd caught off of the other yet,
he'd read the man's whole psychology, as a black man would read a white
man, before he reminded himself, yet again, he wasn't really black. Based
on that logic, though, he caught himself then thinking, was it racist, too,
to assume the other man was really white?  What if John Howard Griffin in
Black Like Me had met his walking opposite, a black anti-racist, cleverly
disguised as white?  Why, he would have to, to bear up his own logic,
improvise.  All shows, even whatever this one was, must--

	"Go on." the guy had suddenly said out loud.

	Black Tony was still catching up with how eerily the man had
completed his thought when he realized the man had not completed it at all,
and was not even looking at him or talking to him.  He undid all of the
mental arithmetic he'd done to arrive at the sum that the man had been
leering at him, innuendo on the mind, and wondered briefly if in his own
inverted narcissism, he'd projected odd attraction back onto the man in
turn.  By the time that thought had worked it way back through all of the
terrible implications, another man on another barstool had spoken up.
"Bisexual."

	The man who'd looked familiar, in the too-unbuttoned collar, said a
crisp "nope."  Other suggestions rang out in the circle of men around them:
pansexual.  Homosexual.  Asexual.  It was an enlightened place and there
were the tones and timbres of cynical amusement in ironic answers, but the
man was still brushing off as wrong all of the suggestions people had made.
Wilder guesses seemed to strike him as funny, as the name of the game began
to strike Black Tony.

	"Heterosexual," the man had said out loud, even as he was meeting
John's glance.  Was he really proclaiming his straightness in a gay bar in
the mid afternoon, all the while leering at Tony as another man, and as the
only black man in the place, at that?

	Queens jeered back disbelief and told him as much.  Predictable
questions reigned about why he was here, how he would demonstrate his
straightness.  A hand went for his back pocket and drew out his wallet as
he threatened to show them his kids.  "What's that going to prove?" from
some wag by the bar, stopped the gesture short.

	"What do you mean, what's it going to prove?" And suddenly five
voices all informed him of the ostensible queens among them who were in
fact fathers.  The wallet sank back into the pocket unopened and he stuck
with his story: he wanted to see what a gay bar was like.  Wanted to know
if he would fit in.  Wanted to know if he was really so much different from
his fellows.  Again, the eyes drew back to Black Tony, who had not yet said
a word to add to the conversation.

	He whet his whistle with another sip, placed the rocks glass back
down on the bar and spun around to face him.  "So, it's girls over boys for
you then," he said to the man, granting him that.  "Is it also, though,"
and jet blacks amid white, white eyes stared him down, "whites over
blacks?"

	The man rocked back on his barstool.  "I've been with black. . . "
he started to say.

	"Lady?  Pussy?" John started to think he was overdoing the Negro
macho factor for a life-long white boy, but there had been too much of the
ring of "some of my best friends are. . ." in his voice.

	"Well, yeah." The man sat there and stared.

	"But never," Black Tony said, coming sauntering nearer, "Black
cock."

	"Never any kind of cock," the man said, but his eyes didn't remain
with Tony's, sliding down the clothed torso even as he disclaimed
attraction to the sex.

	"Never any kind," Tony echoed in a mockingly higher pitch.
Listeners in respective peanut galleries appreciated the insinuation.  "Not
what I asked, man."

	He decided to draw himself up to full height, stand what he thought
was menacingly in front of the bar stool, trying to telegraph the thought
that enough was enough.  "I never have and I never will sleep with another
guy, white or black."

	John as Tony, Tony as John was practically breathing on him now, a
finger on the front of the man's button-down shirt, about to take
inspiration from long-ago lumberjack's dive down his collar.  He lowered
the voice in what he thought was his best imitation of Barry White.  Over
his own internal objections he was carrying this too far, seducing a
straight man and a white man at once, he breathed, "that would be just too
bad, man."

	It took almost a full minute of uneasy silence before he felt it.
Trembles rocked the man from the tip of his spine on down.  Beads of sweat
broke out on a forehead he could barely see in the dimmed bar's afternoon
light.  The breath had even quickened a little, and if he pressed his
finger down on the man's pulse, he was sure it would be racing.  He'd
caught the man in his cockiness, called his sexual bluff.  The man was
visibly trembling, reaching out with shaky hands for his drink, eyeing the
neon exit sign unfortunately gleaming over Black Tony's shoulder.  A glance
at the bartender, running dishrags over carafes a few spaces down the bar,
netted him a look that said, you're on your own.  And yet, he seemed to
realize at the same time Black Tony knew the fact for sure: neither had he
made any move to draw himself away.  In fact they were in some kind of
weird sync.  He looked more and more familiar.  He'd risen to the occasion
he was not shaking to resist.  He'd come to a gay bar to flirt with
homosexuals.  He'd baited queens with his supposed heterosexuality.  He'd
walked right into John's comments about having had black pussy (yeah,
right) and wanting black cock--an assertion the man had not yet openly
denied.

	"It is what you wanted," John made himself continue in the same
Barry White voice of projected seduction.  His best black friend would
probably hate him for this.  The real Black Tony, could he know what he was
doing with his body, would probably hate him for this.  But he thought
about his chance to be the virtuoso, with this quaking fool of a man not
even knowing how soon and how splendidly, divinely he would be the violin.
"It is what you wanted when you walked in here today.  It's what you wanted
when you started bragging to a bunch of queens about being supposedly
straight."  He looked around briefly: no one in the peanut gallery was even
objecting to being called queens.  You could have heard one of their
hairpins drop.  He decided to risk saying it, though something about black
appropriation rang through his head with scolding tones.  "It's what you
wanted all of your white boy life."  He pressed his leg against the man
who'd sat back down on the edge of the barstool.  Shifting in loose pants
pressed his cock against the man's thigh as a thumb roamed to find
something in the man commensurately pressing against him in turn--and there
it was.  A smile lit up Black Tony's face as something akin to fear drew
down the man's eyebrows and eyelids.  He went back to shaking, but in his
fervor, he was visibly trying to convince himself that the shaking could be
endured.  That the shaking was even a good thing.  He had not seen this
coming.  He was not sure even now he was going to give in to Black Tony and
go along with what he wanted--or if he did, if he was going to live through
it.  But the shaking had its pleasurable elements to it, even to the man
with the nerves tight enough and edgy enough to do the shaking.  John
inside Black Tony decided he could live with that, for it was pleasurable
to him as well, to be sure.  John inside Black Tony would soon be inside
the man and it would be pleasurable, no doubt, for both of them.  He
practically picked the man up off of the barstool, endured the looks of the
queens as they awkwardly left the bar together.  He still hadn't, he
reflected, his hand on the seat of the man's ass in the parking lot amid
the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon--he still hadn't looked at
the pictures of his kids.





36.



	It, the nose, isn't on anyone's short list of sexy organs.  Hooks
protrude and schnozzes honker.  Nostrils flare and nose hairs grow.  Sniffs
convey haughtiness, ridges embody the stuck-up, inclinations follow the
nose's angle, aspiring or downcast.  Apart from its excess or its noted
crookedness, noses are never what makes or breaks a face.  No one would say
someone's nose gave away that someone's soul.

	And yet it speaks the language of pheromones.  It hears the calling
of scents.  It feels in its flares oils of essences, notes aromas, even
tells you one's lover, or another man, has worn these clothes lately.  It
breathes the air of musk, patchouli, subtle sweat, the body honed, the
sinuses drawing in the scents surrounding, wafting inside and outside the
body, as it is on the breeze.  It crosses the sense and invokes the deepest
memories, even as the sense most often forgotten about--until the need
arises, the aroma swells, the body glints its smells and the nose
sniffs--not in quick dismissive inhales, but breathing in deeply,
pervading, appreciating, dwelling, living in the scents surround.

	Dozens had sat on the balcony of a two-floor lobby, as the
introductory lecture for jury duty had droned on above, but as a cinnamon
bakery shop had gotten set to open for the day below.  Rising yeasts,
baking cinnamons, warming frosting had taken hold of every imagination, had
crowded out thoughts of civic duties, had gotten heats of jurors descending
stairs and removing wallets from pockets.  Mouths had been watering even
among those still seated.  Tastes had taken hold on tongues such that
bearers had thought they had already begun eating.  The litigious and
conspiracy minded, licking their lips in spite of themselves, thought the
cinnamon bakery must have an unfair advantage with the municipal courts.

	The long-term partner knew upon entering their home--he had gone
without that day; he had indulged; he had bought a dime bag; he had
overdone it; he'd shared all it with guests.  It smelled woodsy, pungent,
earthy--possibly Nor Cal more than Mexican.  It dripped from the walls.  It
pervaded the atmosphere, gave the lie to yesterday's promises to forgo, set
up the arriver's disappointment with he who had wasted his time alone at
home.  Over time he'd developed the senses, so he no longer had to ask if
his partner had used that day; he could smell it.  Over time he'd honed the
skill, if you could call it one, and no longer had to ask his partner how
good it was; he could inhale and tell.  His nose had learned the signs.  He
recognized the stinks.  He could guess which dealer his partner had called.
To borrow a metaphor, the scent, breathed in deeply, knocked something off
a shelf deep in his head.  When he went back to find whatever it was, it
was his old love for his partner, rotten and wafting, drifting meekly away
on the wind.

	Men entering a bathhouse in a rougher SF neighborhood long after
dark found themselves paying admission, second guessing one's wardrobe,
ignoring the whispered instructions before signing the blanks, but
then--getting themselves sniffed.  Bouncers in full gear smelled them
deeply head to toe, not as kink or fetish, but as olfactory inspection
before they finally let someone in.  Musks, colognes, perfumes, scents from
body washes, were enough to get the sniffer to kick out the errantly
sniffed, the perfumed, the cleaned--too much so, for an establishment that
reveled in raucous body sweat, men's odors, pungencies as turn-ons.  The
too cleaned were barred as those who were feasts for mouths, who were
natural bouquets for noses inhaling, freely, slickly played.

	Guilty boys in locker rooms remembered lingering aromas of decades
of arrested adolescence, sweaty garments in lockers, shorts and shirts
aired out near outside doors letting in hot airs of muggy afternoons.
Noses pressed quickly to jocks sniffed savored smells.  Rubbed tee shirts
yielded sweaty scents concentrated, breathed, remembered, as the mind
matched the smell with a taste, remember the body of the source, felt
intensely guilty for the sniffing.  Minds above noses admitted to
themselves, but to no one else, and to no one out loud, black boys did have
different scents, did perspire more sweetly, more chemically, in ways that
seemed forbidden and foreign, yet pungent and immediate hanging there in
the air.  One knew one heard awful stereotypes about others' smells, one
knew whole ways of thinking were formed, xenophobia riding on a visceral
rejection of body smells triggering fearful revulsion, history turning on
the potentially conquered smelling, and only then hearing, the invasion of
the Mongol hordes, the cuckold sensing mildews and molders as residues of
his rival.  One knew--John inside his latest host knew--he'd speak aloud to
liking sucking, but kept his own counsel, even with Black Tony, of love for
black scents, funky musks, bold flavors breathed deeply in adolescent
fantasies.  The burst of wind could carry the invaders' odors, trigger the
body reactions and the pheromone receptors, invoke the race-traitor guilt
just as the scents wafted by.  The smell could bring forth the memory,
could stir the loins, could shake the conscience, all before it had
traveled all the way up the sinuses, implanted itself in the front lobes,
consciously called forth a lover of old's personality amid the smells, the
scents that always trailed, sometimes preceded him.  John lay in the beds
of the invaders, the conquering, the conquered, guessing a life--a
sexlife--from smells, oils, flavors on beds betraying their owners, marking
their territory, signaling, as to dogs, the emotions of love, ecstasy,
fear.  The soul did leave its imprint in its aromas.  The nose did, in its
way, read its lovers' characters brought forth, then banished on the
passing breeze.  The inhaling head did soak in the pheromones, know amid
its irrational, creature knowledge that one was in fact breathing, one was
smelling, one was loving, scents of one's own.







37.



	I flipped out my picture--me in the picture, that is, as John of
old--halfway into work again the next day and wondered why I bothered.  I
fretted with the sunscreen on the way in, as well, half-mad at myself for
squandering the only days of my life I hadn't needed to apply lotion to
whiter-than-white flesh.  Then I had to stop the mental thought process at
some version of "first world problems": was that all that blackness had
meant to me?  Was it only the luxury of doing without sunscreen for a few
days?  I hoped not, but I was uncertain what else it had been.  A few days
of being John Howard Griffin in a different body in a different era.  I
cinched up the man's jeans under what I had not realized ahead of time was
a budding gut beneath of bushel of chest- and abdominal hair.  And look, I
kept on thinking as I tried again to button top buttons that kept on
falling loose anyway: look at what I've got to show for myself.  For
himself.  For ourselves.

	That self, those selves. flashed in reflections of the glass doors
at the entrance to the building, John's face in the picture-badge
contrasting, I hoped, with the latest, once-again-white John.  He was dumpy
and hairy and had a body that was used to exuding confidence without
knowing it had not earned it.  It did not move gracefully and had no sense
of eloquence in its rhythms--a clumsiness of body like it was conscious of
its own need to move slowly and with concentration, that if it forgot that
slow conscientiousness it would trip up, mentally as well as gymnastically,
and knew how badly it would fall on its face.  Once again it conjured up
thoughts for me of where the self or the soul left off within the man's
body, and where the corporeality--the corpulence, I'll admit it, in this
case--picked up.  Somewhere within those folds of stubbly overconfidence,
the real John attempted gracious moves, elegant empathy, or at least a
sense of earned self-confidence.  It was all outside, I'd hoped, the man
loped on, shakingly unsure of himself, still twitching as a mysteriously
alluring man had drawn near.  Still seesawing his toothpick in a false show
of ease, I knew the real ease, the repose of John himself, dwelled within.
But how--almost tripping on a doorstop, way too far out in the common way
of a corridor--to bring it out, to bring him, to bring myself, out again?

	Going in had been the easy part.  I'd been amazed how quick a
supposedly straight white dude had gone for the dick.  Had loved it, had
reveled in it, had been absolutely shameless in his uninhibited attraction
to it.  In Black Tony's black room, where I myself had reflected not
forty-eight hours earlier that in the dark all skin is one and the same
shade, he'd pushed back foreskin.  He's lapped up cock tastes.  He'd
fellated with some of the most skilled men, white, black, and otherwise,
I'd ever been with.  He'd played along.  He'd returned favors.  He'd shed
his clothes.  He had never repeated his boasts, stilled his own shaking, or
said another word about his kids.  He'd never resolved what I had felt was
familiar about him, but my body, Black Tony's body, he'd made familiar inch
by inch, region by region, even scent by scent.  I'd briefly known the
virtuoso, having been the violin.  I'd briefly strummed and plucked and
played.  He'd allowed himself to play along, the quiver of newness
animating him, the breaking of taboos shattering his stillness, the
spontaneity keeping him effortlessly erect.  He'd dropped his inhibitions
at Tony's door and totally belied his ever having claimed that he was
straight, that he had kids, that he had no desire or need for black cock.
He'd liked sucking Black Tony's big black cock every bit as much as I had
as John, long ago and the other evening.  It was still a pleasure feasting
on the man's flesh as he'd feasted on Black Tony's.  But it was like he
wasn't even straight.  It was like I hadn't even been black.  It was like
he hadn't even been ashamed once the shaking had started.  It was like a
regular fucking, back when I didn't become the man I'd been fucking, or the
man who'd been fucking me, after said fucking had finished.  And yet as I'd
thrashed around the bed, thrusting mightily and lustily with Black Tony as
Black Tony had thrust and thrashed into me, I knew I'd look up, pulse
pounding, body orgasming, to Black Tony's empty bed.  I'd banished Black
Tony, for I didn't know how long, to acquire a body I didn't want.  To
teach a man a lesson he hadn't wanted ahead of time to learn.  They came
back, it seemed, weeks later, with no memory of the event, no recollection
of being with me, or of being me.  But I didn't know, yet, how long, or
where they went in the meantime, or if somewhere out there, the Black Tony
I had just been, or the man whose body I was now renting in his
Jungle-Fever shame, were somewhere, also meditating on having been with,
and on having been as, me, as John.  The shoe most decidedly was, I'd
thought, inching past another errant doorstop, on the other foot.

	"Oh, say," said a voice that made me stop, still not to my, John's,
old cubicle.  "I didn't know you were coming in today."

	Luke--an odd expression on his face--eyed me.  I realized my
picture placard had fallen off somewhere, and glanced back after it.  But
that was absurd.  Luke and I had long since established different Johns
would be arriving, all wearing John's badge, but none of their faces in
succession matching the appearance or the picture of the original John of
old.  Since I still hadn't spoken, Luke tried to fill in the gap.  "Had you
called for an emergency appointment?"

	 I was stammering out words that would tell him I was John, that he
was Luke, that, what did he mean he didn't recognize me, even if it was yet
another new me.  "No, I hadn't called," was the best I could improvise, I'm
afraid, still catching up, still wondering who Luke was taking me for.

	"It might actually work," Luke was now saying, sinking into a
cubicle chair.  I echoed the movement in the chair next to his, which
wasn't my usual place--a body ache and a tender twinge as I landed in the
chair, reminding me Black Tony's body had recently been in this body in
turn--and tried again to stall for time.  It appeared after a moment or two
of additional pantomime, it--whatever it was--might work, "because he's
coming in later today, too."

	It would have been several beats behind, and it would have spoiled
the effect, to ask who would be coming in.  "Oh, he is," I stammered out,
still grasping for the placard picture.  "I should have checked."  Quick
attempts at reading Luke's expression weren't giving me anything more to go
on.

	Luke's expression did, though, in different respects, offer what
seemed to be a fascinating read.  The head was cocked to an attentive angle
that wasn't all business.  The voice had left a professional tone behind as
he'd kept speaking, looking at me all the while but not always meeting my
eyes.  He'd hunched over in his chair as if wary of carrying himself and a
gleam had come into those eyes.  "We seemed on the verge of getting
somewhere," he said, still assuming I knew, getting where, verge of what,
or who--whom, he meant, were getting there.  I could only arch my eyebrows
in further mute questioning.

	"When John went storming off the other day," he said, a timbre of
tenderly confiding coming into his voice, "we had been just about to get
somewhere."

	I'm sure my eyes as this man's peepers bulged as it dawned on me
who Luke meant.  They squinted again as John went on.  "He'd been telling
John--"

	"And you were--" I was both prying and stalling for
time--"listening in?"

	"Yes," he fumbled, closing his own eyes for a moment, as if
rehearsing to himself how he would say this.  "We often discreetly listen
in when we can.  Not that"--this with direct, pressing eye contact--"not
that we don't trust one another, of course."

	Of course.  A stifled laugh added to many compounding emotions.  We
weren't supposed to listen in, nor claim we were, to other clients, but to
back one another up as equally capable agents of the same team.  Luke, my
boss, was blithely breaking that rule to me, whom he was mistaking to be a
client awaiting another client, his son, to arrive.  And I was still
spelling out to myself what the rest of that equation meant. Luke was
trying to tell me, whom he didn't recognize as me, that another me had
walked out, just when the son of the man whom he was taking me to be had
had a breakthrough.  That the breakthrough had been of the nature of
accusing the father, whom he was now taking me to be, of incest, was left
out of this forcibly pleasant conversation and couched as progress, as a
breakthrough.  Professionally, all of this was hard to take as a member of
Luke's team, following Luke's rules.

	Personally and not so professionally, though, my head inside this
man's head was still spinning.  Luke was recognizing me as Matt's dad and
assuming Matt's dad was there to speak to Matt with the mediation of their
counselor, John.  That John was there but couldn't be there had to go
without saying.  Really, I couldn't now say I was John, if he was taking me
to be Matt's dad.  Matt's dad, it sank in on me with one hell of a sinking
feeling, was the kind of man who said he was straight and then slept with
other men, as he had last night with me, and as he would soon again do, as
me.  And if Matt's dad could say he was straight as one thing and sleep
with a guy as the other thing, he could also say he'd never abused his son
as one thing, and turn out to have abused him all along, as the hypocrisy
this body he'd adopted unknowingly and blithely, apparently had put into
practice.  So, Matt didn't just want attention in darkly hinting at stories
of abuse.  So, Matt's parents had been sticking to their usual story in
previously denying it.  So, Luke had been wrong to throw me, John, off the
scent, and now here I was, but not as John or any of John's old iterations.
Here I was as the enemy, and I couldn't even say I was sleeping with the
enemy.  I already had.  I had met the enemy.  And he was--me.

	He was--Luke was--eyeing me even more strangely through what I now
realized was a protracted pause.  What had he asked me again?  Who was he
taking me to be?  How much of this had dawned on him as it had dawned on
me?  The eyes blinked with patient weariness, having been through too many
mind-bending turns with previous mes to mind an additional twist all that
much.  But he didn't know this me, was me, and I had not known this me was
a man he'd recognize, as the father of an important client, and as the
accused that client had been the accuser of.  And he wasn't currently
giving me an accusing look, just a softly implied conspiracy, as he if
would cooperate and strategize who would say what to whom when the son, the
accuser, the victim, the victimizer, arrived.  I sighed wordlessly, not
knowing where to take any of this next.

	Luke stayed silent, too, but in our mutual reticence something
sparked in an eye that roamed in spite of its owner's concentrations.  He
couldn't keep his eyes off me.  His glance darted to my fingertips,
followed up arms and spine, looked quickly away from my reciprocating
glance, clung, all the same, to the pants I'd thought had betrayed Matt's
dad's dumpy figure.  Like a child wading into shallow water he'd looked
tentatively back into my eyes, more and more willing, less and less afraid.
The reciprocated look then confirmed something, assured one another we
agreed, saw something extracurricular in one's another's eyes.  Luke was
wordlessly confirming to another man he'd also been, as a straight man,
with a fellow man.  They, Luke seemed to be thinking, shared the guise of
straightness.  And yet, as he seemed too to imply with that look, both of
them could conspire beneath that guise, could get out, could explore, could
enjoy one's self and be with a man who enjoyed himself, and creep back
under that disguise when needed.  Luke knew what Matt had said about Matt's
dad's history, and still looked at him that way--not accusing, not
understanding, but commiserating, even identifying with whatever it was
Luke saw in those eyes, or thought he saw in those eyes.  Luke wasn't as
straight, in short, as he pretended to be with openly gay me as John, as he
was when he was with a man whom he was taking also to be something other
than straight, when he could get away with it.  It was the subterfuge, the
secrecy, in short, more than the sexuality, he felt he had in common with
Matt's dad.  And he was, I realized in horror, okay with that.  And he was,
last of all, saying all of this and taking all of this in, in just one
glance.

	Now, Luke didn't know, and I as Matt's dad did, that in fact John's
eyes, too, glanced out at him, and manifested his personality, John's, on
some level, too.  Luke thought he was performing flexible heterosexuality
with a similarly flexible guy.  But he might also have unconsciously known
he was performing it for a gay guy in a not so gay, but also not entirely
straight, disguise.  Was this man, Matt's dad, bringing this behavior out
of him in ways he, Luke, was aware of?  Or was I, John within Matt's dad,
coaxing it out of him instead, in ways Luke only unconsciously realized?
Where did the heterosexual mask end with him and where did it end in this
case?  Why would he let it slip with a fellow "straight" man he suspected
of wearing disguises of his own?  Or, why would he let John inside of
Matt's dad see it, see him, if on some unconscious level, too, he knew he
was performing straightness for a not-at-all straight guy?

	All of which I was wondering in one way or another when it seemed
he pivoted his head yet another time, in still a different trajectory,
listening intently to me, though I still hadn't said a word.  The eyelids
slid closed.  The head tilted toward me.  I will swear, the lips began to
pucker.  As if, right there in our cubicle, ostensibly straight Luke would
make out with ostensibly straight Matt's dad.  As if, just because the gay
guy, John, was supposedly absent, two straight men could let their guards
down.  As if, back to speaking professionally again, any of this were the
way to act as preparation for a counseling session at which they might
prompt Matt to disclose.  I sighed in recognition of all of this.  I'm sure
he felt my exhale on his pucker as his eye slits began to widen again.  I
was a gay guy in the body of a man who pretended, unsuccessfully, to be
straight.  I was the employee of a man who also played the straight man,
but who let his guard down, but not while in my gay presence, but when he
thought he was safely away from my prying gay eyes.  I was Matt's dad, when
as my commentary here makes painfully aware, I couldn't even remember
Matt's dad's first name.  I hadn't even bothered to learn Matt's dad's name
before I'd slept with Matt's dad.  Matt really had all of this to worry
about, as he'd been trying to tell me, and had conceivably been sexually
abused by the ostensibly straight man whose body I currently wore as a
disguise.  And yet if I shifted around inside the body I'd unknowingly
adopted, I just couldn't feel this body's potential to abuse a little
boy--play around with a grown man and a well endowed one, sure.  But abuse
a child, and a loved child at that--I just couldn't see it, couldn't feel
it happening, at the hands of the man I now was, with the hands my body and
soul now wore.  And, if I finally took out the picture of the man's kids
he'd been boasting about in the bar the night before, there I would find,
of course, a picture of Matt.

	And there he was, walking in with his mouth already open in shock:
Matt, here to see me, John. But he was unable to see me, as John, for I'm
now the dad, instead, whom he doesn't want to see.







38.





You're here?



I'm . . . here.



After not coming home last night you just plan to come here instead?



No, I . . . didn't.



Didn't what?



I didn't plan to come here.  I .  . .



What, he dragged you here against your will?  He kept you out over night?



No, he didn't do either one.  It's all . . .  me.



It's all you.  So you did plan to come here.  You did stay out all night.
You did have something to say to me.



I did . .  I did have something to say to you?



What do you mean, emphasizing "I"?



I. . . never mind.  I'm glad to see you here.  I'm glad you're talking to
these guys.  I heard you made some kind of--break through.



Is that what John said?



No, it's what he said.  Luke.  But I think John would say so, too.



Oh, would he?  How do you know that?



I know.  I just do.



Have you been talking to John about me?  Have they been telling you what
I've been saying?



No, they.  They just said they were glad I was here, too, that you'd had
some kind of a breakthrough, that I could help if I--if I came here today.



So, they weren't kidding about everything I tell them being confidential.
It's funny about that, though, that each one I talk to seems to know what
I've told the other automatically.



Yeah, weird, huh.  Don't know how they manage that, either.



You really don't?  You don't come in and tell them?



No.  They know.  They're professionals.  I know.  I'm your--I'm your
father.



You say that like you're reassuring yourself of that fact.



Well, I guess I haven't always acted as a father.  I guess that might be
part of your problem. . .  Of my problem, too.



Might be part of the problem?  And I'm the one making the break throughs?



You're the one, son.  You know it isn't easy for any dad to have . . .



"To have". . . .?



To have a gay son.  As his only son.  It might even be more difficult for
me than it might be for most dads like me.



More difficult, how?  Dads that are like you, how?  Not sure what you mean.



You're a kid a dad like me is . . . proud of.



O--kay . . .



A kid that a dad like me might think . . . looks and acts a bit too much
like myself.



Umm.  Yeah?



A kid that a dad like me might . . .



I'm afraid to ask.



That a dad like me might share a few things with.



Lost me.  Share what kinds of things?



Well, maybe not things.



Things that maybe aren't things?



Yeah.



So, things that are . . . ?



Habits.  States of mind.  Tastes.



"Tastes"?  What the hell, dad?



Maybe just forget that I said it.



Maybe. . . . I'm the kind of kid that's difficult to understand as gay,
because I might not be different enough from you, dad, because I might have
more in common with you than dads would be comfortable with. . .



Yeah.  That's what I'm trying to say.



You'd be more comfortable if I weren't so much like you?



Yes, I suppose.



You'd be less uncomfortable if I were more foreign to you?  You're saying
that to your son?



Yeah, I suppose I am.  So, I've got a gay son, and I'm--



You're?



Okay with that.  But I'm--



You're . . .?



Not gay.  So, where did my influence as a dad. . .



--go wrong?



Where did it--leave off.



Ahh.  And where did some gay guy step in and finish it off?



Well, no.  But, I've got to wonder, right?



I guess you've got to wonder.  But you're awfully worried about how you'll
look to others as the father of a faggot.  More than you're worried for the
faggot's welfare.



You've got to use that word, Matt?



It's one you use, isn't it?



Not anymore.



Oh?  Since when?



Since .  . . well, before last night.



Does that mean something happened last night, or you just stopped using the
word?



Let's not get hung up on this.  You used the word.  I did not.  You're such
a good kid, you've always acted the way a dad would want a kid to act.
We've always been close.  I didn't see--



You'd call that close?  You didn't see what--?  You didn't see this coming?



I didn't see this coming.



"This"?  You didn't see having a gay kid coming?  Because that way, I'm not
enough like you.



Well, because. . .



Because this way, I'm too much like you?



Meaning . . . ?



Meaning, maybe you need me to be more unlike you, than I need to be--



Than you need to be . . .?



Than I need to be unlike you.  . . . Or maybe, more than I need to be like
you.



Like me, how?  Unlike me, how?



Like you in . . .



Yeah?



In neither of us being 100% . . . straight.



Oh, so, I'm not . . . either?  Not 100%?



Not. . .  no, dad.



What told you that?  Where'd you get that?



You got to admit, dad, you've always . . .



I've always . . . ?



You know what you've always . . .



You can't just tell me what I've always?



You know what you've always, right?



No, I guess I don't.  I loved your mother, right?  I had other girlfriend
before her, right?



. . .



No, really, I'm guessing here.  I've mentioned them, haven't I?



Well, yeah, you've mentioned them.  You don't remember any of them now?



Not important.  I loved them, I loved your mom, I was, I mean I have been
. . .



Yeah. . . ?



A good, loving dad to you.  Haven't I been?



. . .



I guess that silence means I haven't been.  I guess I really don't know how
I've always been.  Tell me.



You've been a good dad.  A loving dad.  The guys I see, they on some level
. . .



. . . Yeah?



They on some level--hard to admit this: The guys I fall in love with remind
me of . . .



. . . of me.



Yeah.  How did you know that?  Was I leading up to it?  Did one of these
guys tell you that?



No, these guys didn't tell me that.  Thank you for telling me that, son.
We all, I've heard, look for things in our partners that remind us on some
unconscious level of our parents.  [mocking a prep-school sing-song:] I
want a girl, just like the girl, who married dear old dad.  You just want a
guy like him instead, and I'm kind of flattered by that.  And you just have
to live with having admitted it yourself.  Most of us block out oedipal
stuff so we don't have to think about it.  You look at a hot guy and then
see some reflection of me in it, and beat yourself up for that.



Yeah, I guess I do.  And, funny you should mention the beating up.



Yeah?  How so?



Because I think you beat yourself up for it, too.



For having a gay son?  No, I've stopped beating myself up for that.



Meaning you once did, huh?  But, that isn't what I meant anyway.  You beat
yourself up for the same things I beat myself up for.



The same thing, son?



The same thing.  You won't even admit it now, will you?



. . .



Guess that means you won't.  Didn't think so.



Look, if you force it out of me, it's not an admission or a confession,
right?  It's a torture tactic.



Which means you are admitting it?



No, it just means I'm objecting to your tactics in making me.  What if I'd
forced you out of the closet before you were ready to come out of it, say,
five years ago?  It wouldn't have been fair of me, right?



Well, no, but if you're saying it would be wrong of me to force you out of
the closet, are you admitting that's where you are?



No, I'm not admitting anything, I'm pointing out a confession under
coercion isn't really a confession.



Oh, under coercion, huh?  So, if I'm coercing you, you're not admitting to
anything.



Because it would have been wrong of me to coerce you, and I didn't.



But you did--



No, I didn't coerce.  You've got to admit that.



That's not what I mean.  I hadn't finished speaking yet.  You didn't coerce
me.  You didn't force me.  You did, though. . .



I did . . .?



Play with me.



. . . Play with you? How do you mean?



Our play, when I was a kid.



Okay.



Our play.  What we did when I was a little boy.  You remember it, yeah?



I don't know that I do.



How could you not remember?



I'm not sure I can tell you how I don't remember.



How could you forget?



It's not that I've forgotten.



You haven't forgotten, but you can't tell me how it is that you don't
remember.  Those aren't contradictions?



Those aren't contradictions.  Just believe me.



But if you haven't forgotten, and you can't say why you don't remember, are
you saying it never happened?



I don't know what "it" is yet.  How can I confirm or deny something
happened if I don't know what that something is yet?



But you had to know.  You had to know how attractive you would have been to
a son.  How excited the son would get, how excited I did get.  How much I
admired you at the time.



Me?  Really?  You admired this man, as much as all that?



Yes.  Are you so modest you can't believe that?



No, it's just.  Are we looking at the same man here?



Yeah.  Well, it was years ago, after all.  You were awfully young when you
had a kid.  You played very rough, very close, very affectionately.  You
had to know I would . . .



No, I didn't have to know you would.  Or that I would.  If I even have.
Your sexuality wasn't even an open secret then, kid.



So, you do know, you do remember.



No, I'm just saying.  None of our dads knew when we were kids which ones of
us would turn out to be.  And they kept playing with us anyway, and we keep
on playing with our own kids anyway, not knowing who will be, and not
knowing when going so far will mean going too far.



. . . . "which ones of us"?



Yeah.  That's what I said.  You got me: who's this "us"?



We gay guys?  Us gay guys?



Us guys, who may or may not be.  And for little kids, isn't that going to
be, or might that just be, everybody?  How can we know?  How could I have
known?



How could you still know, though?  How could you still not know?



Umm, how so?  Lost me.



If you worried about it then and still played with me, if you felt
something yourself then and still played with me.



Those are some big iff's, son.



If you felt something yourself then and still played with me when I was a
little kid, did you keep feeling that way and keep playing when I was
older?  When I was old enough to understand, old enough to . . .



Return the affections?



Yeah. . . .  That was some sigh.



You were my son and I didn't know you were gay, and I didn't play with you
any more or any less or any more . . .  lecherously than any parent plays
with any of his kids.  I never crossed a line in my affections and I always
acted appropriately.  How can a straight man know when he's going too far
in his gay son's estimation?



So you're back to saying you're a straight man?



So you're back to doubting me?



Yeah, have to say I am.  And I have to think you crossed that line again.
And that you knew what you were doing.  And that you knew in your heart of
hearts, what you were doing to me.



What I was doing to you?  You were a kid.  We were playing, innocently
playing.  This body isn't really--can't really be. . .



Capable?  Like it's all up to the body?



No, just that . . . this body doesn't feel like it could . . . do something
like that to a kid.



So you're denying any direct memory of it, and acting like it's somebody
else's body, that could or could not do something. . . that you can't
remember.



Right.  Sounds messed up, but right.



Messed up is right.  It's always been your body and you must remember it,
right?



Well, no and no.



No and no?  It hasn't always been your body?  Like you're not the man you
once were, and shit like that?  You really don't remember, and you are just
asking your body if it feels like it remembers something the brain and
memory have forgotten?



Just trust me on this one.  I bet John could explain it to you.



I'll bet John would say you're just bullshit denying everything, the
memories, the responsibility. The understanding, everything.



I--John would say that?



Man, that "I--John" shit.



What about that "I--John" shit?



It's exactly the kind of thing that John's been saying lately.











39.



	God, it's hard to stare down that kid's expression, him thinking
I'm his dad and catching every nuance of what I say that gives away what I
know and don't know about him, about us.  As we're speaking, and we're
still speaking now, we're making weirdly frustrated eye contact as we're
finishing one another's sentences, as we're catching one another trying to
look away, as I'm trying to stay one step ahead of him: what do I know and
don't I know as John?  What do I know and don't I know as John, who slept
with his dad, not knowing it was his dad, a few hours ago, that I cannot
now give away knowledge of knowing?  How do I not break some form of
confidentiality for myself, when I'm not myself, not really myself, even
though what I'm carrying out in this conversation is my job, John's job,
John's real way of earning money, even when he isn't really John anymore?
Luke discreetly withdrawing, Matt forcing his hands, palms in, into his
jeans pockets, and me left trying to keep conflicting scripts straight, but
also, oddly, trying not to laugh at the trap I've managed to get myself,
managed to get Matt's dad, managed to get Matt himself, into.

	There's sexual tension in those eyes as I look at my, Matt's dad's,
son, something reciprocal, something waiting for me to confirm it.  I can
see him, who I now am, so avidly going down on a man, whom I just was, so
avidly for a straight man.  And yet it seems they have only had the
conversation so far of the son coming out to the dad, and not that long
ago.  They don't seem to have had the conversation about the dad coming out
to the son--as gay, as bi, as pan, as whatever the kid means as he says
something about "not 100% straight."  I have to act like I understand that,
and act like I've anticipated it and can roll with it.  What comes out is
some mishmash from what I wish the educational, sex ed films would
cover--but they never do, or they never did back in the day, because they
were always aimed at the straight kids.  So, I'm saying in the sincerest
tone I can muster, "To have a gay son.  As his only son," and God, I don't
even know if I'm right about that or I'm forgetting a sibling somewhere
they never mentioned.  If I can't as John recall Matt's dad's first name,
how can I remember whatever other kid he, I, might once have mentioned?
"It might even be more difficult for me than it might be for most dads like
me," I continue, with a riddle-me-this tone as my desire to stick to some
kind of logic doubles back on itself.  I'm even giving myself away by
admitting to my lack of confidence about things I should have, well,
straight. "No, really, I'm guessing here," I'm finding myself, himself,
saying about having had a string of former girlfriends.  "I've mentioned
them, haven't I?," I say, and it comes out rhetorically before the kid
screws up his face in feigned disappointment.  Matt's dad had been
surprisingly homosexual in bed last night, but I still couldn't feel in
this new body of mine, of his, a capability to be a former womanizer, even
out of some weirdly compensatory bravado or something.  I still certainly
thought, looking into his, my, son's eyes, this body and this mind--what I,
John, could feel of it--didn't seem capable of abusing a kid, even in the
most loving of abusing ways.

	But, "Our play, when I was a kid," the kid says, making the most
meaningful eye contact an ambiguous glance can make.  I'm stammering
through answering that one, conjectures running through a head that the kid
thinks would be flowing with memories--guilty ones at that.  He catches me
in saying I don't remember, then leaves me no room, of course, to draw the
distinction that John can't remember what Matt's dad can.  It's like I'm
back with Mark again when I first turn up as Jim, and Mark's hurt that I,
as Jim, don't remember him.  The look in Matt's eyes tells me he wants me,
Matt's dad, to remember, but also wants him, me, to deny it vehemently.
I'm being prompted to admit, as another man, what I cannot remember, being
another man, that man to have done.  Even not responding, is taken as
responding, and I can see what's at stake in his, in my son's eyes.





40.



	I'm eyeing dad too intensely and I try to look away, but I can't
not look at him.  He's weaseling, lawyer-like, out of saying what he
doesn't remember, can't, in Reaganesque ways, recall.  And yet it's not
lecherous or light flirting, but some half of some conversation we've
needed to have with one another for a long time.  I've come out to him and
dropped some hints about our play together, and he's not followed up.  He
has to have memories, he has to admit to it, he has to be as uncomfortable
about it speaking to me as I was uncomfortable, telling him what he already
should have known.  Did he, in fact, know it?  Was it all, I wonder,
searching for sincerity in an expression that was trying its best not to
meet my eyes, was it all an act he was trying to keep up--just today, or
somehow, always, in our time together as father and son?  "You'd be more
comfortable," I hit him with, "if I weren't so much like you?" and the
reference to comfort seems to throw him off balance, to make him
self-consciously aware he cannot possibly look very comfortable right now,
as he tries, uncomfortably, to answer a question about comfort.  It's like
he's doing a mental inventory of his body and his mind in asking himself,
"like him," like me, how, exactly?  An eyeball roams up and down my body,
discerning signs, I guess, of effeminacy, of weakness, of something a son
naturally reflects as his father's genetic mirror.  I lose patience and hit
him again with, "But if you haven't forgotten," a premise borrowed from
what had already sounded like shaky logic as he had said it, "and you can't
say why you don't remember, are you saying it never happened?"  Fallacies
of many questions gape widely open beneath us, and I can sense him winding
up to say it's an unfair question, a way of asking as the old, misogynist
example went, how long has it been since you stopped beating your wife?

	He digs himself out of my logic and implants himself in his own,
and I'm blotting and concealing tears rising in my eyes.  He's sincerely
trying to follow through on the conversation, and he has recourse to what
most dads would say and do after sons came out to them.  But we're not
talking about most dads, or about him as an exceptional one, not in the
sense he wants to speak about it in.  It also deftly intellectualizes the
whole thing, as though we're talking about some father and son pair out
there, and not about us, and as though we're just generalizing about
father-son interactions, and not living through the history of how we
played once, once when he did understand, but I wasn't old enough to,
understand what we were doing.  "How can a straight man know when he's
going too far in his gay son's estimation?" he asks, making rare eye
contact as he says it.  I hate how generalized and depersonalized it is (a
straight man, not him, whatever he is), how conjectural (how can he know?),
how false in its appeal to common sense (when he's going too far, as if
conventional wisdom in the straight family world could have anything to add
about the errant, homo son), and how it casts even me (his gay son) in some
distant stance.  This is what gets kids to stop listening to parents and to
logic, when it can be so twisted, it can be used against an opponent, even
when stressed sincerity struggles, noticeably, distressingly, in the eyes
of the arguer.













41.



	The eyes tell me nothing in weird darkness, but somehow my ears are
burning all along.  I have no idea where I am, and it seems I have
temporary amnesia, not knowing how I got here, not knowing how much of what
I remember really happened, and how much of it I'm dreaming, making up as I
go along.  It's all a blank for the last several hours, though the parts of
my body that ache rawly tell me dully I've had sex, somehow and with
someone, not too terribly long ago.  And there's even--something--strange
about the sex, but the tricky memory won't tell me what it is.  It just
flashes visions of my son, like that's supposed to help me understand
what--possibly whom--I've done.

	And this place seems to be some big warehouse, made into a kind of
labyrinth.  Music pulses but no one is dancing.  Lots of people walk
around, but none of them are clothed.  There's a whole assortment of
people, but none of them are women.  It's odd how many dark corridors lead
past rooms with open doors, how many ladders and staircases seem to be
there just as ascents and descents, not really as means of getting
anywhere.  Odd, too, how much eye-contact everyone seems constantly to be
making.  Some voice comes out of the steamy ether as I walk: "None of our
dads knew when we were kids"--and I look around, but none of the lips are
parting to say the actual words; no single throat seems to be uttering what
it's like that they're, or possible we're, collectively thinking--"which
ones of us would turn out to be."  And the sound hovers there, incomplete,
as I seem to be the only one asking, turn out to be what?  And then even
I'm not so dense as not to get it: turn out to be gay, and it seems I'm the
one non-gay in the place.  Not so fast, an inner voice says to back myself:
not so fast, about yourself, and not so fast, about any number of
apparently gay guys, currently walking naked around this place.

	Ouch, that hurts, to have conscience smite me, as I'm discovering
I'm naked, too, and must have willingly come into a place like this, naked,
and not like Schwarzenegger in a Terminator movie, abruptly, nakedly
arriving in some other-worldly, time traveling scene.  I'm about to assume
his character's crouch and his residual Austrian accent, but no one would
get it, and it's too serious a scene for playacting.  One of the doll
beauties, young enough to be my son, takes his turn at eye-contact, and
says--but again, it's just a disembodied voice; his lips aren't moving; his
throat isn't speaking--"you knew in your heart of hearts, what you were
doing to me."  It has an accusing, guilt inducing tone to it, and also the
assumption I must know as the listener and as the owner of that heart of
hearts, what I did, to whom I did it, and what I knew that he didn't know
about it in turn.  My son comes up in my mind again and in whatever
real-life this is I'm experiencing, I'm still looking in the kid's face in
front of me.  We could have fun together if I'm his type.  I could still go
home to a woman tonight and not tell anyone, even my son, it ever happened.
I think by now--I gather, finally breaking eye contact from the kid, as
though I should have offered him a cigarette or something by now--the kid,
my son, knows already, can feel it somehow.  But if he's accusing me of
knowing something I was doing to him, it's too late now to bring it up
anyway.

	So is a guy who goes into a place like this--and it was clearly an
outlaw's hideout, some kind of sex club built around steamy
baths--necessarily a gay guy?  Was I a gay guy, for having come here,
evidently, and for going other places like it?  Why did I do to gay clubs
and claim I was straight, just showing off?  Why did I listen to my one son
coming out to me, and not chime in that I'd felt the urges, too, and had
acted on them?  It's not like I'm totally honest with the kid about
anything, anyway.  It's not like you're--like I'm, even--the man you once
were, and shit like that?  But it's not like you can change, gay to
straight and straight to gay, or can you?  It's not like you can go back
and erase the lies you told someone just to protect them, and start over,
honest and fresh, or can you?  It's not like the play really hurt the kid,
or really made the kid gay, or pushed him in that direction, or did it?
It's not like the play, what I can remember of it, ever meant molesting the
kid or getting into something borderline incestuous with him, or was it?
It's not like I'm totally honest with everyone, including with myself,
about everything all the time, anyway.  Or, am I? And, I wonder if,
wherever I am, I can catch up with the flirty kid with the roaming eye, who
just, once again, walked by?