“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you still let us be friends. I’ve gotten a lot from it.”
“I’m glad too,” I said. “So have I.”
I have no way to be sure, of course, what that experience meant to Carla — or, indeed, how often it returned to her. Here we are speaking, and I feel it’s important for me to say it clearly, of a situation where laws were violated, where the kinds of moral and ethical concerns Carla herself was now working with in her job were, on both sides, mine and hers, called sharply into question.
Were I asked what tales were characteristic of my young manhood as a gay male, what comes to mind are those nights circumstance put me beside some other man, peacefully asleep, whom I knew I could not touch — and so lay sleepless the night in a paroxysm of desire. But all the tales I have told and shall be telling tonight I’ve chosen precisely because they are uncharacteristic.
So, another tale — in this case of a muscular Puerto Rican, with curly black hair, whose workshirt bore a name we’ll say was “Mike” in yellow stitching across the gray pocket. He wore a green jacket with a green and yellow knitted collar — to the same theater where I met the first young man I spoke of. Across the back, yellow letters spelled out “Aviation Trades High School,” from which, I presume, he must have graduated sometime over the three-and-a-half years I knew him.
Mike was as regular a visitor to the theater as I was. He was handsome, in a bear-like way. From a couple of quiet approaches, however, I’d gathered he was not interested in me. From time to time, I would see him sitting in various seats in the balcony or orchestra. Nearly as frequently, as I walked up or down between the lobby and the balcony, I would pass him, sitting on the stairs toward the top, sometimes leaning forward, forearms across his knees, sometimes leaning back, elbows on the step two above and behind.
Once, after I’d stopped paying much attention to Mike, I was sitting a few seats away from another black man, in green work clothes and dilapidated basketball sneakers. Knees wide against the back of the seat in front of him, he was slouched low in his chair, watching the film.
Mike, I noticed, was slouched equally low in the row ahead, one seat to the right.
Then something moved near the floor.
I glanced down — to see a hand. Under the seat and behind the metal foot of the ancient theater chair, it looked rather disembodied. But the fingertips now and again brushed the rubber rims and black cloth uppers of the man’s right sneaker. Glancing at the top of Mike’s head, then down at the man’s foot — the man seemed oblivious to what was happening — I realized Mike had reached down between the seats and was playing with the man’s shoe.
“Ah…!” I thought, in all the self-presumed sophistication of my own sexual experience. “So that explains it!” And, four or five times over the next few months, I noticed Mike, now in the balcony, now in the orchestra, at the same practice with different men.
This was back in the years when today’s ubiquitous running shoe was just emerging as the casual fashion choice. As is more usual than not, I was at least a year behind most other people; and it was only that week that I broke down and got my first pair — in which, I confess, I never ran in my life.
They were a conservative gray.
One day I stopped at the Cameo and, on my way to the balcony, passed Mike sitting on the steps. Several people stood near the top, watching the movie; I stopped behind them, largely to watch them.
Minutes later, I happened to glance down. Mike’s hand was on the step, the edge of his palm against my shoe sole. I was surprised, because till then I had considered myself outside his interests. My first and most innocent thought was that his hand’s straying to that position had been an accident, even while more worldly experience said no. Precisely because of what I knew of him already, while it might have been an accident with someone else, his hand’s resting there could only have been on purpose — though his attention all seemed to be down the stairs.
I tried to appear as though I was not paying any attention to him. He continued to appear as though he was not paying any attention to me. I moved my foot — accidentally — a quarter of an inch from his hand. His hand, a half minute later, was again against my shoe. Again — accidentally — I moved my foot a quarter of an inch closer, to press against his fingers — and two of his fingers, then three — accidentally — slid to the top of my foot.
In ten minutes, Mike had turned to hold my foot with both his hands, pressing it to his face, his mouth, leaning his cheek down to rub against it.
To make the point I’m coming to in all this, I must be clear that I found his attention sexually gratifying enough so that I continued to rub his hand, his face, his chest, his groin with my shoe until, at last, genitals loose from his gray work pants, he came — and, over the next three weeks, when we had some four more of these encounters, I came as well during one of them.
We do not even have a term for the perversion complementary to fetishism. The myth of the sexual fetish is precisely that it is solitary. Its assumed pathology is the fact it is thought to be non-reciprocal. A major symptom of the general insensitivity of our extant sexual vocabulary is that as soon as fetishism is presumed to move into the realm of reciprocity, the vocabulary and analytical schema of sadomasochism takes it over; and to me this seems wholly to contravene common sense and my own experience.
Mike and I became rather friendlier now — when we were not directly engaged in sexually encountering one another. If we met outside the theater on the street, we said hello and nodded. If we passed in the theater stairwell, we might exchange brief small talk. There were no words at all, however, about what we were doing. It was clear to me that Mike did not want to flaunt his practices before the other patrons, with some of whom he was rather more friendly than he was with me. Among the theater’s younger clientele were a number of hustling drag queens and pre-ops: their teasing and joking could be intense. And these were the people who, in the theater, were Mike’s conversational friends.
Running shoes, at least the brand I’d bought at that time, do not last as long as they should. Soon it was time to replace them.
I thought of Mike.
By now, though, I’d glimpsed him several times get as involved with other men’s running shoes or sneakers as he could from time to time with mine. I felt nothing but empathy and goodwill toward him. But clearly some excited him more than others. The specifics of his preference, however, I hadn’t been able to piece together. How, I wondered, do I ask about such a thing? How do I put such a question into language?
Not much later, when I was getting up from my seat in a legitimate 42nd Street movie house where I’d gone to see some genre horror film, I saw Mike — also leaving. We smiled across the crowd and nodded to each other. I decided the best thing to do was to be as open and aboveboard about my curiosity as possible.
“You know,” I said, as we joined each other, walking toward the lobby, “I’ve got to get a new pair of sneakers, one of these days soon. What kind do you think I should get?”
He seemed not to have heard me. So I persisted: “Is there any kind you like particularly — some kind you think are the best?”
Mike stopped, just inside the lobby door. He turned to me, a look blooming on his face that, in memory, seemed a combination of an astonishment and gratitude near terror. He leaned forward, took my arm, and whispered with an intensity that made me step back: “Blue…! Please… Blue!” Then he rushed away into the street.