Fairest Of All Book Reviews

Blurb

Where can a middle-aged, Persian-American genderqueer dyke find love these days? Online dating, of course! “Only butch dykes need apply” Behrouz writes, eager to swap quiet evenings at home with a smoking jacket, a cat, and a Sunday afternoon’s worth of well-used sex toys for a real relationship. Enter Lucky: younger, rougher, dominant, but far from perfect. Their first meeting explodes into powerful, rough, and panting sex, and Behrouz is soon determined not to let this captivator slip away. Their growing intimacy, set within a perfectly captured view of contemporary gay, transgender and queer life in San Francisco, makes this debut novel a mesmerizing read for anyone who loves erotic romance.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27214426-behrouz-gets-lucky

Buy links

Amazon Kindle: http://amzn.to/24GEjGp

B&N Nook: http://bit.ly/1X0hFmJ

Kobo: http://bit.ly/1Qwtxwv

iBooks: http://apple.co/1oW9ooZ

Google Play: http://bit.ly/21chrtU

Foreword

Let’s take the time to tell all. Behrouz and Lucky are older queer rascals, our favorite curmudgeonly, tenderhearted gay uncles rolled with a sweet coating of hedonism and snark. When we start off our story, Behrouz is sixty and Lucky is forty-nine years old. Although they both are easily settled into their gender identities, their preferred pronouns and the words they use for their various naughty bits are not apparent to our fine readers. After all, this is just a smutty little love story, so we can safely lay it all out on the line without worrying about asking rude, politically incorrect, or insensitive questions.

Behrouz identifies as a transgender genderqueer, and Lucky identifies as a butch dyke. Both Behrouz and Lucky were born female, and both often pass as male. Behrouz started taking testosterone late in life, at age fifty-five. Lucky never has taken testosterone and is not tempted to start.

If we were to ask Behrouz which pronouns they prefer, they would toss one fey wrist into the air and say, “Whatever you’re comfortable with!” That’s a lie. Behrouz prefers they/them or he/him. If we were to ask Lucky which pronouns she prefers, she would say she/her. Unless Lucky was topping and in the mood for honorifics, in which case she would prefer the more masculine “sir,” rather than the more feminine “ma’am.”

Behrouz and Lucky both call their clitoris their cock, flesh cock, or clit, but usually just their cock. They call the whole package their cunt. They own a ridiculous variety of expensive silicone dildos in many sizes, which they also call their cocks. Lucky has a favorite silicone cock, which is seven inches long, one-point-eight inches in girth, curved, and black. Lucky likes to say that black is classic and goes with everything. We concur with her good taste. Lucky and Behrouz both still have breasts. Behrouz binds to appear flat-chested and so that their shirts fit better. Lucky usually wears a sports bra. They will talk about both their breasts or their chest, and it means the same thing. As we all know, everyone has an asshole and assholes have no gender.

I wrote this book because I wanted to see more people like myself represented in smut and romance. I wanted to see older genderqueer and butch masculine-masculine couples having hot sex and BDSM shenanigans. I wanted to read about people with full lives, lives that included adult children, grandchildren, parents, books, marvelous food, over-the-top drag, and cuddly cats along with lots and lots of hot fucking. I wanted reality, with heartburn, forgetfulness, and aching joints. I also wanted protagonists that cared about San Francisco and were activists, in their own quirky way. And finally, I spent most of my childhood in Iran and love Iran as my other home. I wanted to include a little bit of that amazing and beauteous country in this tale so that my readers could get the chance to love the country too.

Chapter One

Lucky was sixty, and long past the age of hope, young lust, love, and bewilderment. I was sixty, using my senior discount to buy oatmeal, black tea, and ginseng at Rainbow Co-op, and silk neckties at Goodwill. I was a time-traveling, part-Persian expatriate. I had been an outsider all my life, and felt insulated that way. Insulation is protection, but it is also isolation. Even though I lived in San Francisco, that bastion of sexual and gender freedom, I lived outside of the galaxies of the butch, FTM, genderqueer, and leather communities. I’d hitchhiked across the country, been a streetwalker, smoked opium with princes, raised children, been fisted on Twin Peaks, sung in punk bands, grown up in Iran, had threesomes with bikers and members of British Parliament, and followed family tradition to become a librarian. I’d buried one daughter and two lovers, spent decades in the Midwest, kneaded bread, gotten sober, been homeless, pretended to be a boy wanting to be a girl, driven across town in a blizzard at 5:00 a.m. to slap a gigolo who was wearing pleated black silk panties, taught preschool, attended PTA meetings, and tickled grandchildren. It’s-a-long-story was my middle name.

At sixty, and in my considerable dotage, I spent my evenings wearing a quilted, charcoal velvet smoking jacket with a foulard silk cravat, and worn, cuffed flannels while delicately sipping English Breakfast tea with my cat, Francy, strewn across my lap, a pile of tattered paperback Dorothy Sayers mysteries at hand, and vacillating between wanting to manifest a lover and relishing each delicious second alone. Between chapters, and inspired by Lord Peter Whimsey and his paramour Harriet Vane, I imagined a lover, a you. If I could manifest you at 6:00 a.m. when I was lolling between the sheets distractedly having my morning prework come, or on Sunday afternoon when I was settling in for a leisurely fuck session with myself, my two biggest silicone dildos, nipple clamps, my S-curved metal dildo, a metal sound, a stainless steel butt plug, Eartha Kitt wafting from the stereo, a fountain of lube, dim lights, and a cushion of towels and rubberized sheeting to soak up the spillage…I would imagine a you.

Sometimes I craved you when I came home, tired from a day of advising patrons, giving restroom directions, problem-solving minor computer issues, and searching for copies of the latest bestselling romance. Sometimes I craved that moment of perfect domesticity when I’d open my door to the oregano- and tomato-scented smells of minestrone soup wafting from the kitchen, and you in the rust velvet armchair in the living room. I’d fall to my knees on the rough wool of our Tabrizi carpet, start to crawl across the red and gold fibers, imagining that moment when I could unbutton your fly and fill myself with your cock as an appetizer. Your pipe would be smoldering in the ashtray, filling the air with the sultry sweet aroma of tobacco and cherry. You’d lean back and spread your denim-clad legs, rubbing your cunt as I approached on my knees, the workday rolling off me the closer I got. Reaching your cunt, I’d rest for a minute, my lips caressing the bulge in your crotch, as grateful for your hand on the back of my neck and your packed jeans as I was for salt. I’d growl softly, nipping at the thick blue fabric, damp from my spit and slightly threadbare from past administrations. You would unbutton your fly slowly, each button releasing a soft pop. I’d cover your cock with my mouth until it reached my throat, then ease up and lick the shaft, lost in your smell and your palm firmly pushing my head into your cunt. Your cock would shove the outside world aside, erasing demanding supervisors, aching joints, and crowded MUNI buses until all that was left was your cock in my throat.

I had a shallow, translucent blue glass bowl on the dining room table that I filled with garnet-colored pomegranates, dusty plums, phallic bananas, and tart green apples, and sometimes I longed to see your house keys on the table next to the bowl of fruit. Did I want this complication to interfere with my quiet life? Did I really want someone to know my quirks and fears? To discover that I sometimes ate cheddar cheese, figs, and cookies for dinner, to twist her hand into my silver-haired cunt, to be privy to my mood swings and self-doubt, to be content to live with my need for solitude? I’m Middle Eastern to my part American core, and as such have a deep belief in fate. At a jaded and indecisive sixty, I decided to leave love and lust to fate.

How did we meet? How does fate decide to roll her dice? Was it at the park, commiserating over fawn colored pigeons fighting for brioche crumbs at our feet, while the ginkgo trees shed golden, fanshaped leaves on the park bench? Was it in an airport while listening to the murky flight update announcements, wondering if we should grab an overpriced stale croissant and latte before our flight, and finally reaching for our lattes at the same time, our fingers touching over scattered copies of USA Today? Maybe it was at work, sighing and rolling our eyes over gum-snapping coworkers, discovering mutual tastes in movies and politics in the lunchroom, meeting outside the office on the sly, and texting filthy thoughts to each other across the table during meetings.

In reality, we met prosaically. Lacking a noisy yet accurate village matchmaker, we filled out our profiles on OKCupid, rolled our mutual eyes at the idiocy of naming the five things one could never do without, and updated our profiles earnestly and regularly. I worried about whether I sounded too shallow, and you fretted about sounding too serious. I mentioned that I had an Isherwood haircut, lank thinning brown hair, hazel eyes, a husky build, and a pale DAR complexion. We both were annoyed at OKCupid’s lack of queer identity choices. I changed my sex from male to female and back again monthly, while she identified as bisexual so as not to leave out possible FTM matches. I mentioned that I was a daddy in the streets and a strumpet in the sheets. Although I took testosterone, I was not a man or even FTM. She put up an out-of-focus picture of her repotting plants, said she spoke French, ironed and starched her sheets, had olive skin, dimples, and a graying pompadour. She didn’t mention her sexual proclivities at all. I mentioned flagging red, gray, black, and navy right in the first paragraph, said that I cooked Persian food and collected bird skulls, put up a photo of myself half-dressed and playing an accordion, and said that only butch dykes need apply. She was eleven years younger than I, a rough-hewn-looking butch who gave me five stars, which made my heart flutter and my cunt get wet in anticipation. I rated her five stars back, and nervously sent her a short, overly edited but carefully flirtatious email suggesting that we meet for tea and conversation. Then I heard nothing for five months. In the interlude I went on a series of fruitless first dates, but I had not forgotten her. In spring she finally wrote back, suggesting that we meet for coffee. Her name was not Amber or Dixie or Tyler, but Lucky. And I wrote to Lucky, signing my name Behrouz, which means lucky in Farsi.

We met at Café Flore, the classic rendezvous for queer blind dating in the Castro. Public transportation was two steps away, so it was easy to flee from the date if it was awful. Café Flore was loud, and gay as fuck, with mediocre food and sweet servers. We were both on time. I wore pleated gray flannel pants, a white shirt with a Campbell clan wool necktie, my tattered gray Brooks Brothers jacket, purple silk socks with striped garters, horn-rims, my hair slicked to one side, and my favorite butterscotch-colored brogues. Lucky wore a stately pompadour, a red-ribbed wool sweater with frayed cuffs over a white oxford shirt, black 501 button-fly jeans, three gold rings on her right hand, and harness boots. She was stocky and muscular, a little shorter than my five-eight, had deep-brown hair threaded with gray, small breasts, olive skin, a chipped front tooth, hazel eyes, a large aristocratic nose with tiny nostrils, black framed glasses, and a beguiling swagger. She drank black coffee, and I sipped sticky-sweet soy chai latte.

I was immediately turned on by Lucky, trying not to look too eager as I glanced at her rough gardener’s hands, evaluating them for size and dexterity. I was nervous and unsure if she liked me back. I was never good at reading signs, and knew that my reserve was often read as disinterest. I wanted to feel her hand in my cunt. We started slowly. We talked about our cats, the general state of classism and disrepair in San Francisco, our jobs, food, and our upbringings. Lucky’s tuxedo cat, Elmer, had died two months ago, after living a long and productive life of catching mice, napping in her oval, vintage, pink porcelain bathroom sink, and skulking on bookshelves. My ginger cat, Francy, had one bronze eye, a puffed-out tail that was longer than her body, and liked to pee with me when I came home from work. I told her about my love of books, organization, and social service, which led to the good fortune of a job at the San Francisco Public Library. After studying biology, Lucky had fallen into gardening, and spent her days planning gardens and fondling manure and plants. We agreed that the recent invasion of stealthy, gleaming-white Google buses with blacktinted windows that transported entitled tech workers from their cubicle penthouses in San Francisco to their jobs in Mountain View were shark like, and wondered why they hadn’t been violently defaced yet. We mourned the loss of Plant It Earth, Osento bathhouse, Faerie Queene Chocolates, the dimly lit Mediterranean place on Valencia with Fat Chance belly dancers swiveling sensuously around the tables, The Red Vic Movie House, and Marlene’s drag bar on Hayes Street, and then we sighed like curmudgeonly old farts wondering where the past had disappeared.

Lucky was raised Jewish in Columbus, Ohio, a hotbed of Republican ideology and Christian intolerance, graduated a year early from Bexley School for Girls, then fled to UC Berkeley for sexual and intellectual freedom. Her dad was an insurance adjuster and her mom worked part-time in the ladies’ undergarments section of Lazarus department store. Her father worked late hours and fancied himself a suave businessman, leaving the house each morning awash in citrusy Spanish cologne and cigarette smoke, and sporting a flashy gold Rolex wristwatch won while playing cards. Her mom was bitter around the corners and sentimental in the middle. She was a brunette in turquoise double-knit pants suits and the sweetly floral scent of Chanel No 22. Lucky told me about coming home to find her mom drinking endless goblets of chardonnay while listening half-cocked for the metallic sound of her father’s key in the front door, and the sneaky shuffle that announced his belated presence home. Lucky was an only child, but lived in the same Tudor-style home in the same quiet middle-class neighborhood her entire childhood, with the oak-lined streets, and her aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends with their families protecting and loving her even when Lucky’s folks were distracted.

Since our family had moved every two years from state to state, country to country, and continent to continent, I found Lucky’s childhood geographic stability both exotic and enviable. At age seven, Lucky decided she wanted to be a boy. Each night she’d stare dreamily out her bedroom window while \ stroking the faint down on her upper lip to wish a mustache into existence. Wryly, Lucky told me that it didn’t work, but now she was content with her hard-earned butchness. As a child, Lucky escaped into books, and spent hours in the Bexley Public Library, scouring the shelves for anything related to sexuality and gender, which wasn’t much in the 1960s. Lucky’s curiosity and scholastic diligence paid off with a full university scholarship and an early release from Ohio. I’d also grown up immersed in books, hiding in odd corners at home with a stack of books and a pocket full of raisins. I related to the escapism that they provided to desperate kids like us, junior outsiders and renegades.

After three hours of exchanging stories and too much coffee and chai, we started to talk about sex and desire. Our drinks cooled as the temperature heated. We both lived in San Francisco, home to sexual freedom and excess, with everything from International Ms. Leather, to the Eagle, Mr. S, the 15 Association, the Exiles, regular play parties for every identity and orientation, BDSM coffee houses, and more. One-time hookups, public play, and casual sex were easily obtainable, but I was embarrassed to admit to Lucky that in my mid-fifties I’d grown out of the ability to do casual play and sex. It didn’t work for me anymore, and although I missed the immediacy and physical relief of instant sex, I needed lovers, continuity, and intimacy. Lucky commiserated, and said that she’d felt the same ever since turning forty three. Even though we agreed that we both wanted love and deeper intimacy, everything felt dangerous and forbidding—as if we were getting ready to foolishly leap off an emotional cliff, our hearts potentially shattered on the shoals below.

I flushed as our eyes met. We both stopped breathing for a second, unsure if we wanted to continue. Finally, Lucky inhaled, leaned forward, pierced me in my eye with the future, and murmured, “Tell me. What do you want? What do you need?”

I blushed, my eyes widening and quickly looking down, and my cunt tingling. I admitted to wearing my hankies on the right, and a proclivity for getting fisted, giving head, ass-fucking, bondage, and getting beaten. Lucky reached across the table and held my hand, my palm facing up and her calloused hand beneath mine, leaving me feeling exposed, trapped, and cradled all at once. I swooned a little at her touch. Lucky smiled a lopsided, sweetly sly smirk, and I imagined one pointed incisor sharply peeking through her lips, her teeth hard against my neck and biting my flesh. She told me she was a top and a sadist, and had been that way since she was a baby dyke in plaid flannel shirts, Frye boots, and Carhartts. I blushed again, and felt my nipples harden painfully in the tight confines of my binder, as I whispered through dry lips that although there was no accounting for chemistry, thus far we seemed to have chemistry just fine. I told Lucky that I had simple tastes really, all I wanted was to suck her off, then be beaten, and fisted until we were swimming in a pool of come.

Lucky asked, “And what do you call your top? Daddy or Sir?”

And I answered, “I call my top, baby.”

Lucky looked at me with her hazel eyes turning green as polished sea glass. She leaned closer, took my hand, and bit the side of my palm while looking into my eyes. As she bit harder, my hips lifted, and I groaned. I wanted Lucky’s teeth on my neck, my breast, my ass. There is a vulnerability to a hand’s underbelly. It is my favorite place to be bitten, so tender and so blatant—I melted. I wanted her to read my desire with her mouth, hurting me because she needed to, and me letting the sharp sensations course through my flesh, forming a loop of desire between us.

“Baby,” Lucky said, managing to draw the word out like we’d already taken our clothes off and were lying hip to hip. She didn’t huff up in toppish indignation, wasn’t quizzical or offended, but understood that “baby” was my code for hotness, tenderness, and love.

After four hours at Café Flore, Lucky murmured, “Let’s go.”

Lucky stumbled lightly over the shallow steps leading down to the sidewalk, exclaiming that her new bifocals were a bear to get accustomed to, then leaned in to kiss me on the sidewalk in front of a gaggle of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and next to the organic stone-fruit stand at the farmers market. “It’s Raining Men” was playing tinnily through Café Flore’s speakers. She kissed exactly correctly…and if that sounds dry, it isn’t meant to be so. Her lips were firm and pliant, and fit mine like a T-shirt on a teenager. She’d mastered the art of the tender lower-lip bite, and as I delicately licked the corners of her lips, we quickly became breathless. We pulled away a quarter of an inch to prolong the anticipation, and fell onto each other after five seconds. I pulled Lucky closer as a Sister with a violet Marie Antoinette wig wolfwhistled in our direction. Lucky slipped one muscular thigh between my legs as my cunt melted and throbbed. I moaned into her mouth as her wide palm smoothed my back under my jacket, and I whispered that I wanted her hand inside of me. Now. Lucky growled—a low nip from deep in the back of her throat. The Sister with the lime-green boa passed us a fistful of condoms. I was starry-eyed and damp as we stumbled to my apartment in nearby Hayes Valley.

It was dusk, that magical time when the day ends and night begins, when responsibilities dissipate, and mystery and longing fill our hearts. The evening air smelled of jasmine, anticipation, and piss, the violent and sweet scents circling us as we walked. The moon was rising as bright as a streetlight, and the sidewalks were full of early evening dog-walkers, with their pups tarrying by trees and potted plants while the owners peered into their palms at their phones. We barely talked. We’d talked through an entire afternoon. Words mean something, but I needed to know how Lucky tasted, how she touched, how we smelled together as we heated up. All I could think of in that fifteen-minute walk was Lucky’s hand in my cunt, her gardener’s fingers entering one by one, packing me full of her. Anything else was gravy on the cake. You know.

By the time I unlocked the door to my flat, it was dark and the full moon watched us. The streetlights had followed us home, each lighting one by one as night fell and we were closer to my apartment. I unlocked the top bolt, then struggled with the pesky bottom one, trying to make the stuck key turn. As I jiggled the lock in the dark hallway, Lucky pressed her body against mine from behind, rubbing her cock against my ass, and reached around to untuck my shirt and run her hands up toward my nipples. I moaned, humping the doorknob with my clit and almost dropping the key. Finally the brass key turned, and the door flew open under our weight. Lucky pushed me suddenly through the dim foyer, down the hallway, and into the sandalwood-scented living room, then to the floor. I wasn’t expecting the quickness, and fell to the Persian carpet, my jacket still on and my shirt half-untucked. She stood over  me, unbuckled her black leather belt, threw off her sweater, unbuttoned her jeans, pulled out her dick, and started stroking it with her hips insolently cocked forward.

“On your knees. I want you to suck my cock. Now.”

I crawled over, leaned forward and opened my mouth. I loved filling my mouth with stuff, whether it was cock, chains, or fingers. My cunt was soaked, my dick was throbbing, and I wanted nothing more than to suck Lucky’s cock. I wrapped my lips around the black silicone and took it to the hilt while looking up greedily at her. Lucky thrust her hips forward, then drew away, teasing me with just the head until she roughly pushed it all the way in again, banging my throat rudely. I could smell her cunt heating up, and sucked her cock, pushing it hard against her cunt, then letting up, and then pushing it in again. I was lost in the rhythm, smells, and sounds of cocksucking, feeling my cunt muscles spasm the more turned on I became by Lucky’s moans and growls, and the feeling of my mouth being stuffed.

Lucky grabbed my head, shoving me harder into her groin while letting loose with a stream of fuck noises and words. “I’m gonna fuck your mouth until I come. Suck me, my little invert.” I was slobbering with drool running down the sides of my mouth as I made slurping and snorting noises while she pulled my hair and fucked my mouth. I desperately wanted to jack off, but even more desperately wanted to suck her dry. I wanted Lucky to come down my throat and out my asshole, her heat burrowing into my body. I wanted her to come like lightning through my cunt. I fucked her cock harder with my hot mouth, until with a tremendous series of guttural grunts Lucky came, my swollen lips wrapped around her big black cock.

Lucky’s hand loosened on my hair for a minute, then she pushed me backward on the rug. I fell awkwardly on my back, supported by my elbows and looking up at her dazedly. She kneeled over me, her pompadour sexily disheveled, her cheeks flushed, her eyes half-closed and blazing, then took my face between her calloused hands and we kissed, a long luxurious smooch, full of promise. I shrugged off my jacket as Lucky did the same. As I was unknotting my necktie, I heard the swooshing sound of her leather belt being jerked rapidly through her belt loops and looked up to see that she’d doubled it up and was grinning at me evilly.

Lucky shoved me sideways growling, “Bend over the ottoman.”

I kneeled over the high, Moroccan-leather ottoman, as she yanked my flannel trousers and my briefs down to my knees. Lucky’s hand reached between my thighs, cupping my cunt, then withdrawing slowly, her fingers separating my labia and running from my cock to my cunt to my asshole. I could feel salty sweet precome drip down my thighs. I moaned and pushed back, trying to draw her inside of me. I didn’t care where, I just needed her fingers inside of me pumping and rolling and fucking…filling my hungry holes. Instead, she stood up, hovering over me, letting the heat between us build. Suddenly she drew back and let at me with her belt against my ass. The first hit was a kiss. My cunt was slammed into the ottoman and my ass reached up for Lucky. She hit me harder the second and third times. I still wanted to jerk off, but didn’t want to come yet, so I shoved my clit into the side of the leather, forgetting about the belt and spreading my legs to expose my cunt to her touch, then closing them rapidly as I remembered what was coming and the leather flew through the air. The next hits were harder and faster, and I could feel Lucky’s grin and her hard-on behind each swoop of the belt as it thumped my ass. I was making whimpering noises, and each time her belt hit me, it drove my chest forward, pushing the air out of my lungs with a whoosh. My ass was on fire and my cunt felt hollow. Suddenly, I heard the snap of latex. Lucky dropped to her knees and started grabbing my burning ass, twisting my newly bruised, tender flesh. I moaned at the fresh pain. Then there was a cold slurp of lube and one finger circling my hole. I was frantic for her hand and bucked, trying to suck her in, but she slapped my ass with her free hand.

“Impatient, are we?”

One finger, a second finger, and finally a third slipped into me, with her thumb rubbing against the side of my engorged, stiffened clit.

“Please fuck me. Please! I need your hand inside my cunt,” I begged.

Lucky groaned but pulled out, prolonging my agony as she teased my cunt by barely dipping her fingers inside of me. I sobbed as she finally started pushing four fingers into my cunt while biting my shoulder with her pointy teeth. By now I was inarticulate with wanting to get fucked. The world had shrunken to Lucky’s hand in my cunt and her breath on my neck. Then she was twisting her hand inside, I opened up to Lucky, pushing back, and we were fucking—her gardener’s hand in my cunt, the wettest nest, everything swollen and rippling. Lucky’s mouth. My cunt. Lucky’s cunt. My cock, my clit. Lucky’s cock. I was fucking her back and she was growling. I was making noises that said, “Fuck me fast and hard.” I could feel my orgasm start in my belly—a heavy roll undulating from my chest down to my cunt as I shot out a gush of come, my cock swelling and my cunt clenching around her fist. Lucky was shouting as I sputtered hoarsely, my salty come squirting out a second time, soaking us both.

I slid off the ottoman to the carpet, panting, my pants tangled around my calves and come dripping down to my knees. Lucky fell down to the floor and we held each other close until our breathing slowed down. We were still mostly dressed, our clothing soaked with sex and sweat. I tried to get up, and my knees creaked as I stumbled over my twisted and damp trousers. I tipped over onto the floor laughing. Lucky was in better shape, but her wrist joint ached, her shirt was wet up to the armhole with my come, and her cock was listing perilously to the left. I sat Lucky down on the olive mohair sofa, put Eartha Kitt crooning “C’est Si Bon” on the stereo, poured her a snifter of cognac, and hung up our jackets. Woozily, I staggered into my bedroom, fetched Lucky a fresh shirt from my cedar-lined wardrobe, changed into a dry pair of pants, and made my way to the kitchen to fix us a postcoital snack of a simple omelet, à la Alice B. Toklas.

In the kitchen, I turned on Marlene Dietrich dramatically singing “Black Market” and swung my well-oiled hips. I let the warmth of the afterfuck flow through me lazily as I vigorously beat the eggs, water, cheese, and a hearty sprinkle of coarsely ground black pepper with a fork, then slid them into the hot skillet. Soon the omelet was bubbly and I plopped bread into the toaster, singing along with cabaret singer Marlene’s racy wartime entreatments from A Foreign Affair.

I could hear Eartha Kitt’s husky voice as I strolled back into the living room carrying a silver tray with plates of hot omelet and crisp buttered toast. As I walked through the French doors into the living room, Lucky was humming to Eartha while rubbing her wrist. I cleared the low, Persian, engraved copper-tray coffee table of leatherbound books, dime-store mysteries, a prickly tomato pincushion, and a clutch of fountain pens and put down the tray, then sat down next to Lucky, massaging her wrist and hand, pressing my thumbs into her over-fucked joints. We ate, denim knee to flannel knee, devouring the steaming eggs quietly.

Eggs and toast finished, I suddenly became nervous and insecure. Was this just a queer, kinky, senior citizen version of the one-night stand? Did I want this invasion of heat and conversation in my midst, winding its way through my apartment and life? It was easy to know what I wanted when my legs were spread—my cunt and Lucky’s hand conversed fine. What the fuck was I doing? I must have jolted in panic, because Lucky removed my empty plate from my lap, leaned over, and snuggled me against her shoulder.

Lucky said softly, “Hey, you.”

I said, “Hey, you too,” back. And this is how it all started.

Blurb

Country boy Tony is seduced by a smooth talking pornographer, who brings the young man to New York to star in a violent sex film. An escape, a marriage and a murder follow the story’s cinematic arc of innocence, betrayal, redemption and revenge.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27214438-boys-of-life

Buy links:

Amazon Kindle: http://amzn.to/1L7zK1B

B&N Nook: http://bit.ly/21cliqS

Kobo: http://bit.ly/1SoKyde

iBooks: http://apple.co/1p5tnSK

Google Play: http://bit.ly/1X0nuRc

Excerpt

Even if their adventures were sometimes so cruel as to be revolting by our standards, if they were obscene in such a grand and total way as to become innocent again, yet beyond their ferocity, their eroticism, they embody the eternal myth; man standing alone before the fascinating mystery of life, all its terror, its beauty and its passion.

—FEDERICO FELLINI

The first time I met Carlos Reichart I was standing in the Nu-Way Laundromat folding up a bed sheet, which is probably a strange way to meet the one person who’s going to ruin your life.

It was September, and there was this light drizzle coming down past the windows of the laundromat. The fluorescent lights made everything look even more depressing than usual—concrete block walls painted yellow, these blue and green palm trees painted over the yellow. The concrete floor and the stale heat smell that comes from dryers.

The Nu-Way was the only laundromat in Owen, Kentucky, and doing laundry there was one of the things I hated most. The clothes in the washers went round and round, and in the dryers too. In two weeks there you’d be back again, washing the same clothes over and over. That was exactly what your life was.

I remember hearing on the radio, years later, about some tropical depression out in the Atlantic that was being upgraded into a storm. We were making a movie on this estate in the Hudson River Valley, and Seth Rosenheim, Carlos’s cameraman, made the joke, “That’s what happened to Carlos—a tropical depression upgraded into a storm.” What it suddenly made me remember, though—those words tropical depression—was the Nu-Way Laundromat: maybe the clothes spinning in the dryers, and those green and blue painted palm trees that were supposed to cheer the place up but only made it more depressing. Or maybe because I met Carlos on a day when it was raining and somewhere, some ocean, it really was the season for tropical depressions and storms.

I was tugging bed sheets out of the dryer, stuffing them back in the plastic garbage bags I’d brought. When I looked up, this man was staring at me. He was sitting on the wooden bench that ran along the windows in the front of the place, and he had a little spiral notebook in his lap, the kind you buy for school. He must’ve been writing something down, only he’d stopped and was looking around. I guess he’d seen me because he was staring, and when I glanced up we were looking right at each other.

I expected him to look away, but he didn’t, and for some reason I didn’t either. But then I did, I went on folding those sheets. I had this feeling he was staring at me the whole time, and when I looked back at him it was true, he hadn’t moved. It was this questioning look, like you give somebody when you think you might’ve seen them before, or you might know them but can’t remember from where. Only he looked like he knew exactly who I was. That’s what I felt—here was somebody saying, Oh, I know exactly who you are even though I’ve never seen you before. Like he’d been waiting to meet me for a long time and he’d known he would—he just didn’t know when or where it would happen and now here it was.

Maybe I’m making all that up, but I don’t think so.

There wasn’t anybody but us in the laundromat. I hadn’t noticed him till I noticed him staring at me. He was maybe forty years old, not gone to flab anywhere but tight like the head of a drum. With his high cheekbones he looked like he might have Cherokee blood in him. His black hair was combed back from his forehead, and he was wearing this black long-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar. His eyes were black too, crazy glittery eyes like country people sometimes have, and that thin hard hollowed-out face. Only he wasn’t any country person. He was definitely somebody from somewhere else.

I kept on folding sheets, but he was starting to bother me. I felt like he was studying me, but when I looked up again he’d gone back to writing in his little spiral notebook. Just then, he looked up right when I was looking at him—it was like I was the one who’d been looking and not the other way around, and he’d caught me.

There was something about those eyes, more like some animal’s eyes than a person’s—some really smart animal that’s always on the lookout, the way you see hunting dogs go on the alert. Like even here in this laundromat some keen sense of smell in him was sniffing out things other people wouldn’t pick up on.

I pretended I was trying to see past his head to something passing by on the street. All of a sudden he came bolting up at me from where he was sitting. I must’ve looked surprised—he sort of raised his eyebrows in a friendly way and sailed right past me to the washing machines, where he started pulling out clothes and tossing them into the dryers. He probably opened up fifteen washing machines, nearly every one in the place, and threw his stuff across into that many dryers. I had to laugh—each time I thought that must be all of it, there was still another washer for him to open and pull clothes from. He stopped loading the dryer and looked at me. What’s so funny? was what that look said.

Before I knew I was going to say anything, I said, “You got a pretty big family.”

“You might say that,” he said. “You got a pretty big family yourself.” He was looking at the stack of laundry I’d piled up—with my mom and my brother, Ted, and my two little sisters, there were five of us. “You married?” he asked me.

“Do I look old enough to be married?” I said. I was sixteen.

“Around these parts,” he told me, “sure. Don’t you people marry when you’re about twelve years old?”

He had this sharp accent, and I knew then he had to be this total stranger to Owen. Nobody in Owen ever talked that way. It sounded sort of snide. I couldn’t know at the time that was just the way he was with strangers; you’d never guess it, but he was this shy person really.

“Hey, just kidding,” he said. “Don’t you hate doing this stuff ?” He took in the whole room. “I mean, isn’t it the worst?”

“It’s pretty bad,” I told him. “But you really do have a lot of clothes. Using up all the washers in the place.”

“See,” he explained, “I’m doing laundry for a bunch of people.”

“That’s nice. How’d you get suckered into that?” I wanted to pay him back for that line about my being married.

He looked at me with a kind of odd look.

“Suckered?” he said.

“You know, doing everybody else’s laundry for them.”

“Just think,” he said, like it had any kind of connection with anything, “we’d never’ve had this stimulating conversation if I hadn’t brought all their laundry in here.”

“Yeah, right,” I told him.

I’d finished putting my laundry into garbage bags, but since it was still raining outside I hopped up on a washing machine to sit and wait for it to stop. I wished it wasn’t raining because I sort of wanted to be out of there. I was afraid this guy might talk to me some more, and I didn’t really have anything else to say to him.

And I guess he didn’t have anything else to say to me either—he finished shoving everything in the dryer and then went back to his bench and started writing in his notebook again. From where I was sitting on the washer I couldn’t really see him. Not that I wanted to, but something kept getting the best of me and I’d look over my shoulder to where he was. But he was never looking up at me, which I was glad for. He just kept writing in that notebook.

I couldn’t figure out what he could be writing, and I sort of wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want to start us talking again—so I sat there trying to be as blank as I could and watched the rain, listening to it drum the roof and wondering if it’d take long to get a hitch back to the house, or whether I’d have to walk it in the dark. The more I thought about all that, the more depressed I got. Like everything else, it was something I seemed to be doing all the time with no stop to it.

I wondered where he could be from, what reason he was stopped in the Nu-Way Laundromat with more dirty clothes than practically the rest of the town put together. There was something I liked about him, the way he sat there writing in that notebook and never looking up at me even though I knew he knew I was still there some kind of lonely feeling I got looking at him, some queasy kind of loneliness I knew from when sometimes I’d lie on my back on the ground and look into the sky wondering if it ever had an end to it and knowing it didn’t. It nagged at me, this feeling, which was why I kept glancing over at him the way I did. Like maybe I could surprise something and then I’d know what it was I was looking for and not being able to find.

Part of it was, to be honest, I was just bored sitting there waiting for the rain to be over and watching the whole row of dryers with their loads spinning behind glass and the rain just kept on and finally the dryers came to a stop.

They’d been stopped a minute or two and he hadn’t made a move.

“Your stuff ’s all ready,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can go now.” He started tucking stuff away into garbage bags.

“It’s raining,” I told him. “I don’t want to get wet.”

“Smart kid. And I see you’re into the garbage bag fashion statement too.”

“It’s just that I have to walk. It’s easier to carry that way.”

“Yeah sure,” he laughed. “I know a garbage bag buff when I see one. Where do you have to walk?”

“A ways,” I said. I thought maybe he’d offer me a ride, but he didn’t, he just concentrated on stuffing his bags full of clothes. Okay, I thought. I’m out of here. If he sees me walking in the rain he can get the point, or if he doesn’t, then fuck it. But I didn’t go. It was still raining, and I just sat there watching him stuff piles and piles of clothes into his garbage bags, probably fifteen in all, till finally he was done. He looked over at me and grinned this tight grin, like something was paining him. “So,” he said with that sharp accent of his, “you want to help me stow these in the van? Since obviously you plan to sit there all night.”

“I’ve done worse,” I told him.

“Yeah? I want to hear about it.”

I shrugged.

“No really, I do.”

“How about giving me a ride home instead?”

We were lugging the bags out to his beat-up orange VW van in the parking lot. He opened up the back. “Careful,” he said, “don’t just go slinging things around. You’ll break something.”

“What’s all that stuff ?” I had to ask. The back of the van was totally full of junk—worse than some handyman’s station wagon.

“Equipment,” he said. “Cameras and whatnot.”

“You take pictures?”

He made some sound like “anngh.”

“It’s this movie project,” he said. “All these clothes, they’re for my crew. They go through them like diapers. I was the only one not hung over today, so here I am.”

“A movie project,” I said. “Like what kind of movie project?”

“Like a movie movie. Like we’re making a movie,” he said as he piled the last bag on. It made a pretty impressive heap. “I’m Carlos Reichart,” he told me all of a sudden. “I’m not famous, so don’t pretend you’ve ever heard of me, because you haven’t. Now hop in and let’s go.”

The front seat was as filled up with junk as everywhere else in that van—pieces of paper torn out of a spiral notebook and tools and empty beer cans and Barbie dolls missing an arm or a leg.

“Excuse the mess,” Carlos said. “I didn’t exactly expect to go ferrying local youth around town.”

“You never know,” I told him. It got to me, the edgy way he had of talking—but at the same time I felt pretty easy with him. It was strange. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg about making some movie— but that was okay, he was still the most interesting person right at that moment that I knew in Owen.

“But let’s talk about you,” he said. “What I’m always curious about is other people. People who live in little towns and carry their laundry around in garbage bags. I don’t know anything else about you except that. I’d like to, though. Maybe I’ll write a movie about you.”

“Some movie that’d be,” I told him.

“Well, you never know,” he said. “But right now—where’re we going? Where’s home? Or we could go somewhere and talk. Surely you don’t have to go home and cook dinner too? But are you hungry? What time is it? I have no idea of what time it is, but I haven’t eaten all day—I’m starving. That pizza place serves takeout, doesn’t it? What’s the drinking age in this part of Kentucky? Ten? Eleven? We could get a six-pack and takeout pizza and live it up in the back of the van.”

It almost made me laugh—he sounded like he was afraid if he stopped talking I might say something, and then everything’d be ruined. Like I might bolt in between sentences. I never heard anybody like that before, and I guess it interested me.

“Sounds okay,” I said, not knowing exactly what I was okaying out of all those things he said, but definitely excited by the prospect of some beer. I knew my mom wasn’t coming in till late—it was a Friday, and lots of Fridays she was out all night. And my little brother, Ted, could take care of my sisters fine. He definitely had sense enough to heat up something or other from a can.

We picked up a pizza and two six-packs and then drove a ways out of town to where the road turned off to Tatum’s Landing. You could put boats in the river there if you wanted to—there was this concrete apron that sloped down into the water. With night coming on, and the rain, nobody was out there.

When we’d climbed over all those garbage bags full of laundry, his and mine both, into the back of the van, Carlos said, “Pretty cozy, huh?”

“Well, at least it’s different,” I told him, which it was definitely that.

I downed those first couple of beers like no tomorrow, which he did too, and then once we were both on our way to relaxing, he started asking me questions again. Did I go to school, what was it like at home, did I have a lot of friends? He kept watching my face the whole time he was talking, the way nobody ever watches you. He kept asking me questions. I guess I was sort of flattered.

“Yeah, I go to school,” I told him. “It’s pretty feeble. I live out on Route 27—back the other way out of town.”  Like Carlos could care less or anything.

“A farm?” he asked, like that was what he wanted it to be.

“Nah,” I had to tell him. “It’s just this trailer. It’s me and my mom, and I got a brother and some sisters. It’s okay, it’s better than this house we used to live in that was falling down at the time.”

“And where’s your dad?”

I sort of had to laugh—I guess I never knew what else to do. “My dad,” I said.

I hadn’t talked to anybody about my dad in a long time—it wasn’t something any of us ever talked about.

“I’m just this stranger,” Carlos told me. “Don’t say anything you don’t want to.”

“No, I got no secrets,” I told him. “I don’t care.”

“Good—if you don’t, I won’t,” he told me, again looking at me like he did all the time. I remember wondering at the way he kept looking.

“There’s these two theories about my dad,” I told him.

“Theories?” Carlos asked.

“Depending on who you talk to,” I told him. “One theory says he’s laying out in the Wahrani swamp.”

“What?” Carlos seemed really alarmed.

“Yeah. Where he got knocked off by some of Mr. Hodge’s men for getting himself involved in this liquor running scheme over in Christian County. See, it was a dry county back then—six years ago. So that’s one theory. But then this other theory goes, my dad just up and left one day. My mother thinks he’s in Louisville living it up right now.”

“And what do you think?” Carlos asked.

“I don’t think anything. I was just this little kid back then. All I know is, my dad used to beat up on my mom a lot. Or he’d go lighting into one of us.”

“What do you mean, lighting into you?”

“Well, if she wasn’t around. You know, at night. He’d go asking us where she was, and it didn’t matter what we said, he’d still light into us. So we just always made stuff up.”

I had to laugh—suddenly I was remembering something.

“What’s so funny?” Carlos asked. He was taking all this in, like it was serious stuff—which I guess it was.

I told him, “I was just thinking.” I had to laugh again before I could go on. “This one time, my brother, Ted, heard my dad stomping back to the bedroom where we were sleeping, and I guess Ted just couldn’t take it one more time. So he went diving under the bed. Which when my dad saw that, it gave him this total fit. He completely forgot about my mom and went tearing after Ted, and the whole time Ted’s yelling, Leave me alone, and my dad’s yelling how Ted better not be hiding from his own dad. He’s cussing and screaming, and Ted’s screaming, and my dad finally manages to grab hold of Ted’s underwear, which is all Ted’s wearing, being asleep and everything. So here’s Ted screaming and my dad tugging at his underwear to try to pull him out and Ted hanging onto the bedpost for dear life. Then pow! The elastic band just pops and my dad goes flying across the room.”

Carlos was still studying me.

“I guess you had to be there,” I told him. The way he watched me made me sweat.

“It’s a pretty funny story,” he said. “It’s a hoot.” He said it in this way that you couldn’t tell whether he thought it was a hoot or not.

“It wasn’t too bad for me,” I told him. “Live and let live—that’s my motto.”

“It’s a good motto,” said Carlos. “It’s my motto too.” He handed me another beer, my fourth or fifth I guess. I remember thinking how great it felt to be talking like I was. I didn’t have too many friends, none really since everybody I knew at high school was so feeble-minded and boring. So most of the time I didn’t say anything much to anybody. But Carlos really did seem to want to know about me. It’s funny I never thought that was weird, it was just something I accepted about Carlos from the very first. Plus I never minded telling him anything he wanted to know, which I wouldn’t normally do with somebody.

He just let me talk, and he listened, and he never told me much about himself in return. So you could say that even ten years later I still don’t know major facts about him.

Not that major facts tell you anything. The Carlos I knew was never the major facts that everybody else knows—his movies and his awards and what all the magazines said about him. What I knew was the Carlos who’d sit there and listen to you ramble on about anything and study you like you were the most interesting person he’d ever met.

It’s stupid little things I remember—the way he never ate a slice of pizza till it was cold. I chalked it up to his being so interested in listening to me talk—but later I learned he always did that. He was scared of burning his tongue; I mean, the way other people are scared of drowning, or snakes. Maybe that’s bizarre, but it’s why Carlos never drank a hot cup of coffee or ate a bite of hot food straight from the oven.

It’s a stupid little thing, but it’s Carlos. It’s just as much Carlos as all those movies he made and everything the newspapers said about him after he got famous, or maybe I should call it notorious.

“So what I want to know, Tony,” Carlos asked me, “is what did you think about all that stuff with your mom and dad? I mean, when you sat down and thought about it. That’s pretty rough stuff.”

I had to shrug. “I guess I never really sat down and thought about it,” I told him.

“But don’t you ever try to put it all together? How one thing leads to another, what it all means?”

All I could do was make a face.

“I’m dead serious,” he said. “You really should think about these things.” He leaned forward, like he had some secret to tell me, and I remembered thinking how he was looking right through me like some maniac, all bright black eyes I couldn’t look away from. “Otherwise,” he said, “if you don’t think, then who’re you going to be? How’re you going to know anything? Look—try this: every night before you go to sleep, choose one thing you remember and then think about it. Try to think what came before it, and then what came before that, and try thinking back as far as you can.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

“See where it gets you,” he told me. “I guarantee—you’ll find out all sorts of things. Useful things. You’ll be amazed.” He pointed to his head. “It’s all in there. You discover you’re a totally different person from the one you think you are.”

I’d stuffed myself on pizza and he hadn’t had a bite. But his eyes were fired up with a kind of excitement. I was pretty skeptical.

“The kind of nightmares I have,” I told him flat out, “I can just see the trouble I’d go getting myself into if I was to lie there thinking about things before I went to sleep.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly. That’s why you have those nightmares. You’re not thinking about those things you need to think about. And they have to get out somehow.”

Maybe if Carlos had left me just with that—gotten up and walked away right there—then that would’ve been enough. That would’ve done it. Who knows? Here I am ten years and a few thousand miles down the road, and there’s not much else to do except lie around and think. And think and think. Who knows? It hasn’t helped the nightmares any—Carlos was wrong about that. But sometimes I get the feeling, if I think about things long enough, if I try and remember the way things happened and not the way I might wish they’d happened, then—who knows? Maybe I might really be able to think my way to something that’s on the other side of all this mess. I don’t know.

Carlos finally took his first bite of pizza, which by that time was bone cold. He folded the wedge in two before eating it, and I noticed how his fingernails were cut smooth down to the quick. While he ate, I told him about the part-time job I’d had for a while loading flats at the lumberyard till it closed down and I hadn’t found anything else since then, and how I was going to drop out of school and as soon as I was eighteen I wanted to apply for a job as a penitentiary guard since they made good money.

All of a sudden, in between bites, he looked up at me, right in the eye, and said, “I bet you’re a big hit with the girls around here. I bet you’ve got fifteen girlfriends.”

It kind of took me by surprise. “Don’t I wish,” I told him. “It’s emptier than the moon around here, girlwise.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. He wasn’t eating anymore, just looking at me.

I tried to think of something interesting to tell. “Well, I used to go out with this girl,” I said. “It’s sort of amusing, I guess. There was this guy Wallace, he worked at the lumberyard too—in fact, he was how I got the job there. He was older than me by I guess about five years. Anyway, we used to go out with these two girls. What happened was, they were sisters, and Wallace wanted to go out with the younger one, only her mother wouldn’t let her go out unless her older sister was chaperoning. So the way Wallace got around that was, he set me up with the sister, who was about three years older than me, and Wallace went out with the one who was my age. We’d go out on these sort of double dates.”

“Yeah?” Carlos said.

“Yeah. There wasn’t much to it. Those girls weren’t really into much.”

It felt good and drowsy to be lounging around in the back of that van, with the rain still coming down steady and it getting dark outside. It was our last beer.

“Like what?” Carlos asked.

“Nothing much.”

“Surely they were into something?”

“Oh, kissing,” I said.

“Yeah?”

I had to laugh. “A little hand action,” I said.

Carlos just kept studying me. He had thin dry parched-looking lips.

“Tell me more,” he told me.

“There’s not really anything to tell,” I said.

“Oh, there’s always something to tell,” he said.

He made me laugh, he was so curious. He had this way of sucking in his cheeks that made him look even thinner than he was.

“Well,” I told him, “if you have to know.”

“I don’t have to know,” he said. “But I’d like to—I’m new around here.”

“Yeah, well. We’d park somewhere and Wallace and his girl were in the front seat and me and the sister in the back, and we’d all be necking around. You know—the windows getting all steamed up and it was almost like those two girls’d gone and rehearsed everything in advance.”

“What do you mean?” Carlos wasn’t going to let me out of this story once I was into it.

“Well,” I said, “they’d both say almost at the exact same time, like they clocked it—okay, that’s enough, you got to take us home now.”

“That’s a drag,” Carlos said. “So did you take them home like they wanted?”

I’d totally forgotten those girls, but now I was hating them all over again. “So what else were we supposed to do?” I said. “It was so frustrating. Jeez was it frustrating.”

Carlos stopped chewing on his pizza. “Did you ever come when you were with them?” he asked me, looking at me with this look that made something turn over inside me.

I laughed—nobody had ever asked me anything like that before.

“Well, did you?” Carlos asked me again. I got the feeling he thought this was funny—which I guess it was, me and Wallace trying all the time and never getting to home base with those girls.

“Nah,” I told him. “They’d always cut out way before that.”

Hearing that must’ve relaxed him. He took another bite of pizza and chewed it up. “That must have been pretty rough,” he said.

“Well.” I didn’t know why I was telling him all this. Like I said, I never talked to anybody like this. “See,” I told him, “usually after we dropped them off, Wallace would ask me if I wanted a beer, which I usually did, and then he’d just go crazy about what cockteasing cunts those two girls were, and how if they didn’t watch out they were going to be in for a surprise one night. Stupid pig cunts, he’d call them.”

“That’s funny,” Carlos said. “Stupid pig cunts.” He said it like he was trying it on for size.

“So then what would happen?” he asked.

“We’d sit on the floor in his living room. We’d drink beer.”

“Yeah?” He daubed at the corner of his mouth where a string of cheese was.

“We’d watch each other jerk off,” I admitted.

It felt strange to say that to somebody I’d just met, especially somebody who was more than twice as old as I was. Especially somebody who was making me sweat under my armpits the way he did—nervousness, I guess. But it also felt, well—exciting, like here was this secret thing I was suddenly talking about.

“Sounds kind of depressing,” Carlos said. “Did you do anything else?”

I shook my head. “The yard closed and Wallace moved away. I didn’t see those girls again after that.”

“Did you want to?”

I shook my head. I’d never really thought about it. “I guess not really,” I said.

We’d finished the beers. I wished I hadn’t told Carlos that story— suddenly I felt more depressed than I’d been all day. But all at once he reached out and put his hands on my shoulders so that we were face to face looking right in each other’s eyes. I felt full inside, like something in my chest had expanded a couple of sizes and was pressing against my heart and lungs. I was a little drunk. I dared myself to keep looking into his eyes.

He held me there at arm’s length, not saying anything, the two of us studying each other. There was this fine stubble on his chin, and I noticed how his eyebrows met above his nose. I could smell my sweat there in the van, and maybe his too, this sweet-sour smell.

I was very aware the whole time of beer building up in my bladder, and how I really needed to piss something awful. But that didn’t stop me from returning Carlos’s stare right back into his eyes and locking him there, not moving, just letting it go on between us to see when it would have to break.

After what seemed like forever he said in this quiet voice, “I thinkyou’re very special. Do you know that?”

“What I know,” I told him, reaching up and putting my arms on his shoulders the way his were on mine, “is that I really, really have to piss.”

He laughed out loud, a really loud laugh, and leaned his head forward onto my shoulder. “You’re funny,” he said. “You’re crazy. Go piss. I have to piss too.” I relaxed a little and managed to haul myself over all those garbage bags and open the side doors of the van. Carlos followed me. It wasn’t raining so hard as before, but it was still raining. We stood in the rain next to each other and pissed these long streams of piss, mine clear and Carlos’s dark yellow. Carlos aimed his so that it intersected with mine, and they hit the ground together in one single stream.

I could tell Carlos was staring at my dick the whole time I was pissing. Well, I thought, it wasn’t like I hadn’t glanced over at his. When he finished he didn’t stuff himself back in his pants. He just stood there with it hanging out, waiting I guess for me to finish. Which I did, and zipped up.

He reached over and put his hand on my belt buckle. I didn’t move. I didn’t brush his hand away. I didn’t do anything.

He crouched down in front of me, looking up at me the whole time with our eyes locked. Then he undid my jeans and slipped them down. I kept saying to myself, Tony, do something, but I couldn’t do a thing. It was that animal thing in him, which I picked up on from the first. I felt his hands on me and I couldn’t move. My dick was starting to crank up under his touch, and I realized it’d been half-hard back there in the van when we were talking, only I hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Before I knew it he was touching my dick with the tip of his tongue. He ran his tongue up and down the sides of it, and then he slid it in his mouth.

I’d never felt anything like that—before I knew what’d hit me, whoosh! I gave out this huge groan, and there I was shooting off in his mouth. But he didn’t seem to mind, he just kept going at it harder than ever until finally he came up for air.

“Oh man,” I said to him. It was like somebody’d gone and knocked the breath out of me. I was sorry I’d come in his mouth without telling him I was going to—I thought he’d be upset. “I didn’t mean to do that, really I didn’t,” I said.

He wiped his mouth but kept on crouching in front of me. Then he started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing—and I had to laugh too, so hard it was almost like crying. Laughing at how crazy it was, what’d just happened with us.

“You know,” Carlos said when he finally stopped laughing enough to get his words out, “I’ve got you now. I’ve got you.”

“What do you mean?” I had to ask. Suddenly I thought—maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s some kind of lunatic.

“Here’s a scientific fact for you,” he said. “A person’s semen contains every piece of information about that person. It’s all coded in there, genetically. And you know what? I think that’s miraculous, Tony, I really do.” Then he started laughing all over again. All I could think of was to grab both his ears and ease that laughing mouth of his back down onto my dick, which hadn’t stopped being hard even after I came.

That shut him up, and it felt great to be inside there again. I started pumping into him, pushing my hips against his face till I came again.

This time he jumped up and sort of scooped me into his arms, and before I knew it he’d kissed me. It was pretty surprising—his tongue just pushed on in, and it was like he had a mouth all gooey with snot. Only it wasn’t snot, I figured out in a flash.

“Yecch!” I pulled away from him. I didn’t want a mouthful of come, even if it was my own. It tasted slimy and disgusting. And I didn’t exactly like a guy trying to kiss me, either. “Why’d you go and do that?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Carlos was still clinging onto my shoulders and talking right in my face. “Passion of the moment. That’s what I love about you crazy kids.” He let go of me and did this little dance. “All that energy,” he said. “I bet I could make you come three times in a row if I wanted.”

I was getting back into my pants and it was my turn to laugh.

“Any more and it’ll fall off,” I told him.

I wasn’t feeling bad or anything. In fact, I was feeling pretty great, even if he had tried to kiss me.

Back in the van, driving back to town, he didn’t have much to say— but every once in a while Carlos would start laughing to himself, like he was remembering something—or like some little kid who’s so pleased with himself he just doesn’t know what to do.

“Well,” he said. “All in a day’s work. Anything else I can do for you?” We were driving down Main Street, and I was looking at everything thinking, It all looks the same, it’s like nothing happened to change anything. And I guess I felt glad about that.

“You could buy me,” I said to Carlos, “a bottle of Canadian Club whisky.”

I knew it was straight out of the blue, but what the hell?

“A what?” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him. “A bottle of whisky.” I pointed out the Main Street liquor store, which was the only thing in downtown Owen that stayed open in the evenings.

“Never a dull moment with you kids,” Carlos said. He swung the van over to the curb and hopped out. The van was still running, the keys were in the ignition. “Now don’t try to drive off or anything,” he told me. I don’t know where he thought I was going to go.

When he came back out, he handed me the bottle in its paper bag. “Notice,” he said, “how I’m not asking any questions.”

I just smiled at him. I was feeling pretty content. “It’s time for me to go home,” I said.

My mom’s car was in the drive. We stopped by the steps that led up to the trailer, and I pulled the laundry bags from the back of the van and hefted them onto the steps so they wouldn’t get in the mud. “Thanks for the ride,” I told Carlos. It didn’t seem like the right thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t believe everything that’d happened.

“So—see you around,” he said, like the whole thing had been kind of amusing to him.

I stood there watching the taillights of his van down the road. Then they were gone and it was just me. I felt incredible and scared at the same time, and completely empty too. I took a swig from the whisky bottle and then stashed it down under the trailer, behind one of the concrete block foundations. Then for about half an hour I just sat on the steps beside the black plastic garbage bags that were tied up to keep the laundry dry inside them. It was chilly out there, the clothes I was wearing got soaked though with the rain, my hair was all stringy and falling down in my face. But that was okay, that was what I wanted.

 Paul Russell is the accomplished author of various works of both fiction and nonfiction, including several award-winning novels, anthologies, poems, short stories, essay, and book reviews. He is a Professor of English at Vassar College. He lives in upstate New York.Website: http://paulrussellwriter.com/
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