He had sneaked up on me unnoticed, startled me, which in turn alarmed him, and he would have collapsed if he hadn’t leaned against the silky trunk of a thin tree and pressed his cock to it.
He pressed it against the tree so as not to come.
Now he alternated between watching the mustached assistant’s cock and mine, and he wanted to get his hand on mine. Then, by the tree trunk, he’d come with loud screams, his sperm shooting up incredibly high, and I’d run away through branches slapping my face. I did not want to look at his face now, either, or see any part of him.
Our shoulders almost touched.
One filled one’s place and became a captive of the somber lineup of men. I didn’t want to see who was standing on my other side. That man was very close to me too. I wanted to remain strictly with the impossible fiction to which all the others also clung.
We’re here to urinate, nothing else. Locked into this fiction, everyone stood there utterly alone.
Everyone was careful to avoid unwarranted glances.
However, everyone peeked out a little from behind his seclusion. Not to dispel solitude but to search for prey and gain some advantage; to keep an eye on the others lest they commit some incautious act. Being able to see someone else’s without showing one’s own was considered an advantage. Which allowed one to gauge and judge the members of others without submitting one’s own to a similar scrutiny. That would keep one’s place open in a virtual hierarchy. At first, most of the men relied on their peripheral vision. The mustached one showed his to me, but the boar-headed man could see it much better, which made him very aggressively proffer his own. The purpose of the jockeying was to see who could stimulate better and therefore emotionally surround the other one, who was the more adroit, the more cunning, the more attractive, the more competitive, who could exercise more power over the other and who would submit first to the secret hierarchy.
The more protracted the preparation, the higher the fever rose and the more general the tension became. Everyone received some of it and everyone helped increase it. It was enjoyed even by those who for some reason had been excluded from seeking a mate or didn’t want to participate actively and instead preferred to take larger gulps from the common source of pleasure.
With little tricks and a constant increase of tension, it was possible to compel a targeted person to leave his foxhole at last and submit to the potential verdict of the phalanx.
This was not an entirely new situation for me because I had conducted serious fieldwork in the subterranean urinals on Grand Boulevard, though I thought the results not quite satisfactory. I had worked there like a thoughtful ethnologist who had to keep a distance from the influence of observed forms of behavior. If one man felt confidence in another or, because of his deep attraction, lost patience and showed a small measure of initiative, it remained an open question whether the second man would be satisfied with what he saw and, abandoning the mutually nurtured polite appearances, reciprocate the confidence, and also who else might profit from this secret dialogue disguised as a chance occurrence, and as a third party might be induced, precisely by what he had seen, to interfere in the adventure.
At any rate, after a while it was possible to know who was or was not curious about someone, whom one feared, who might wind up as a third party, insinuating himself between the initial two and snatching away the chosen one, who was ready to flirt with anyone or everyone, what a person’s cock was like and whether it would fulfill the promise of the man’s body. Or, if it was impossible to answer these questions right then, because the chosen one was too far away and concealed by others, at least one could guess by their behavior where his place might be in the secret hierarchy.
One could also be aware that the subject, direction, and temperature of a person’s interest, despite every visual agreement, even despite the hierarchy, might change very rapidly and sometimes for no good reason.
What happened then was probably something other than what the men had expected even of themselves.
After another bit of time had passed in this seemingly motionless silence, one could sense who were the ones who had already managed to establish contact, how they were flooded by their mutual attraction, how they began to lose their inhibitions and find their way around obstacles. One could also spot the ones who remained hopelessly alone, or guess who’d be scrounging off the sights of developing reciprocity between others. Because there were men who wanted nothing more than to watch and follow others only with their glances. From the beginning these men behaved as if they had no interest at all in the busy activity around them. With their eyes and ears they followed and absorbed the smallest movement and coldly rejected any attempt to approach them. They refrained almost pathologically from direct bodily contact. They must have been satisfied with very little. Peeping was their profession and they had no shame about it. Persistently, for hours at a time, they’d stand in the same spot and, no matter what happened, their faces remained indifferent to everyone and everything.
Of course they never showed their own to anyone.
They took the rich nourishment of their sense organs with a certain reservation, which had a touch of gourmandise.
It was impossible to know when and with what they had their fill, but suddenly they’d button up their flies and, behind countenances transformed into masks with neutral gazes, they’d make their way from the depths of the urinal up the stairs to take home their daily booty.
Occasionally, though, they were denied even this small gain. Not everyone liked having others witness their pleasure. Some were angered or embarrassed by the presence of others, though some were indifferent to voyeurs or even liked the peepers’ quiet indifference, gaining an unexpected boost from the mute witnesses’ enjoyment.
Many things could be clarified in the motionless silence in which the tap kept dripping evenly.
It must have been leaking somewhere, because there were glistening spots of water on the flagstones.
The question of what one’s intentions were regarding the other was left open.
Among these men, intentions had well-defined genres, and they strictly observed the borders between genres. It was impossible to tell by another’s exterior what that person wanted to do, how reserved he was or how far in shamelessness he would be willing to go, where he would want to do it, whether he had a place of his own or would insist on staying here and doing it in front of the others, or what they might do with each other emotionally, whether this connection would last for only a few minutes or possibly for a lifetime, and what the others would make of all this, but, based on a certain amount of practice, everyone could have his own intuition.
There were many questions, but not one of them referred to an entire personality — only to its various characteristics and the ever-shifting basic situation. To how these characteristics could be made to speak without having to exchange a single word with the other man.
To make contact with the other man directly, without an intermediary, and somehow with all the others as well.
Even the most experienced ones kept turning around, like birds, because they feared being exposed and, in their fickleness, had to keep an eye now on this one, now on another one.
Without much effort, I too adjusted my behavior to these rules and open questions, and therefore caught myself doing everything the same way; in the name of pure sensory perception I was just as fickle as the others. Soon there was no situation I didn’t scrutinize and evaluate according solely to my senses, evading morality and reason.