In the eyes of others, he must have been something like a devotional object promising healing and absolution to which people in large numbers make pilgrimages.
The men came and went, spied and hunted, kept searching, and, if they did not find a prey who pleased them, often settled for one another. For me, their hesitant yet aggressive approach was like a fatal stab, because in their eyes I was prey. I watched what they were doing and I fled. It seemed probable that they wanted their youth back for at least a few moments, to grasp my firm, pliant flesh, which had little to do with my personal traits. As if the very impersonal slumbering in me had set them on fire. I was longing for someone who would find my personality suitable, while they wanted anyone who with his body would satisfy their obsessions.
And I was similarly surprised that boys my age or a little younger steered clear of me. Of course, some of these boys made older men pay for the services they rendered, and they looked through me as if I were made of glass because I wasn’t going to pay them; but others must have smelled on my body’s scent that I was a complicated case. They gave me a wide berth or deliberately fished in the darkness for someone else, anybody, while making disgusting faces at me; in fact, they beamed with excitement as they made sure I watched what they were doing, in sheer revenge, right before my eyes, and this truly surprised me. I don’t know what I was supposed to see, but I saw that when they were having their pleasure with others for my sake, they were staying more indifferent to their own pleasures than to the pleasure they meant to provide for me.
The measure of things, the moral of their passions, was the most mysterious thing.
There was a square-built, very strong-looking boy with a large reddish boil on his neck who actually spat whenever we passed each other on the silent trail. He looked depraved, his nose and ears mangled; he might have been a boxer or wrestler. As we passed each other he said in a muffled tone that it was shit-faced guys like me whom he hated most, from the bottom of his heart. He said this even though he could barely have seen me in the dark. When we passed each other again under the flickering bluish-yellowish gas-lamp light, he spat again and asked me aloud how much time I had left of my working hours.
So maybe he thought I was a stool pigeon, and probably there were some real ones among us.
Don’t you worry; the guys will fix your mug but good.
I was rooted to the spot, but I also felt like laughing because hearing his threat it occurred to me that police informers here would have to show their pricks while on duty.
Without exception, every one of them showed a huge and insatiable interest in the others’ cocks, in their attributes and especially in their size.
I did too, but tried not to evaluate myself according to these standards.
However passionate the mutual emotional or bodily interest may have been, judging by what I saw I don’t think any relationship could develop without the introductory showing. This too was exactly the opposite of what happens with women. The men had to show a calling card, an invitation, some sign of the relationship’s preliminary condition. Perhaps they noticed that I wasn’t doing this, which would make me suspicious.
Cut the crap, come on, show it to me.
In most cases they offered it up in a stiff or at least semi-stiff condition — first from a respectable distance, then at a different location but a little closer — and only then was the fateful decision made. Sometimes I too tried to show it from a good distance, but it was no use because my heart wasn’t in it.
You see, I am showing it to you.
My knees would start to shake and I’d grow weak, unable to calm my fear. My hands shook so that my fingers couldn’t undo the concealed buttons in the fly of my well-tailored pants. My decision to do it, to let it happen that once, was in vain.
What the fuck are you waiting for.
Another reason I couldn’t do it was my tight-fitting, slippery wool pants. They used to call them tube trousers. The men begged me, they whispered from the bushes; with my tight pants and fumbling fingers, I must have raised hopes I couldn’t deliver on.
Here, you can grab hold of mine.
My senseless reticence made them impatient.
Then what in hell’s cunt do you want.
And they surprised me by how willingly and excitedly they showed them, how meticulously they prepared their cocks for the showing and, at the same time, how furiously and jealously they’d hide them from unwanted eyes. Everything that had to do with this particular activity sent shivers up and down my spine.
Don’t be afraid. You can show me your little one.
It was like a foreign language I’d never heard before yet understood from the first syllable, with all its phrases and expressions. It was also very surprising that I wanted to show mine too; maybe not like this, not to these men or not to everybody, but to somebody, not just anybody; it also was a surprise to me that all these penises, including mine, whether erect or semi-erect, seemed rather ungainly and repulsive. In all my searches I saw not one about which I could have said, now this, yes, let this be the one. And no less surprising was the most familiar, profound tolerance and empathy I had for them. As if I were saying, it’s all the same to me, it could be any one of them. Nevertheless, I had to realize I had no idea what to do with my insatiable curiosity.
Perhaps I was excited by the process of erection, the untraceable transformation of a cool body, which changes only with aging and then only imperceptibly. Erections kept surprising me with their inevitability as I continued to be motivated by the chance I might see yet another cock, no matter what kind, and compare its condition and substance with the sight of the man it belonged to. In my other life, it would have been inappropriate to imagine there were so many people as passionately curious about this as I.
They were practically treading on one another’s heels in the early hours of the night.
No wonder they’d trampled and sullied everything around the ruins of the Dominican cloister.
Although I understood their curiosity, its depth and pervasiveness still shocked me and had me in thrall; I felt I could never be free of it or conquer it. And because of this feeling, everything seemed to be the other way around in this life of mine — one of my two lives — the opposite of what I’d ever thought or should have thought, with a man’s cock more important than the man himself. Since a man’s cock was unlike the man or his body. I was surprised by the lack of conformity in the visible physiological marks; there was no sameness between body and cock. Every person is put together out of several people. I too differed from my cock; perhaps my penchant for humiliation and self-lacerating brooding originated in this shameful truth. Not to mention that the nature of my thinking differed substantially from the nature of my instinctual life; seeing so many different cocks gave me the impression that this extreme disparity characterized others no less than it did me. One person differs from all others physiologically, but one also carries distinguishing marks that show how one differs from one’s own self. It surprised me that I drew a conclusion from this multifaceted differentiation, which could be said to be general, but I don’t know what the conclusion was. As if it were the kind of knowledge which one can never get enough of or reach the end of. In the eyes of the men, the cock might have been the emblem of this knowledge of unknown character. Perhaps it meant that there is no I or, more correctly, that the I is only part of a larger, undiscoverable whole, or one might say that a man’s exterior, psychological makeup, way of thinking, or character won’t reveal what kind of cock he has, even though his cock is no less defining than his soul or mind. Of course, I can’t say what I mean by soul, or in what way exactly a cock would be defining, and mainly what could rationally justify men’s elementary interest in other men’s cocks if women and their procreative capacity were excluded from their considerations.