Without taking his fingers from Eric’s mouth, he turned, and together they walked again — while Eric felt some ineffable understanding of the hardness and history his tongue moved on.
Along both walls, within glass cases hung posters for a multiplex in some mall or a triple-X movie palace. (“The Opera House, Runcible’s Oldest and Only 24-Hour Seven Days a Week Adult Theater!”) Others displayed T-shirts, red, black, and blue, Turpens Truck Stop across the pockets. More and more cases were empty, though.
The long hall turned right.
The cases stopped.
Here the wall was weathered board, as though once the outside of an older building. “This used to be the dormitory. Now it’s for storage. But they keep the old john open.”
In a doorframe’s upper corner, green joists had pulled apart an inch.
Saloon-style doors hung on cylindrical hinges, eighteen inches from lintel above and limen below. Under them, Eric could see, behind the entrance plank, patches of broken white-and-black tiles, surrounded by concrete, as though two layers of history contested for the men’s room floor. Above the slatted doors, he saw an uneven green wall, run with pipes and cracks. Inside was a replastered patch, crossed with trowel lines and, still unpainted, white on industrial gray.
Finally, Eric pulled his mouth from the fingers.
The bearded man had dropped his other hand, opened his jeans’ zipper, and tugged loose his genitals. His cock’s base was thick. He arched forward, webbed with veins like wax cords a-wriggle on his skin. Bronze hair grew a third of the way along it. In front of his furry bag — one nut bigger than a fuckin’ Spalding, the other as small as a goddam jack ball — his cuff shook each step. “Hey — ain’t nothin’ wrong with my nuts. They may look a little strange ’cause the one’s so big. But they won’t hurt you — you can’t catch it. Sometimes guys worry about that, but most of ’em get into it. Doctors even got a fancy big word for it: orchitis. Fortunately, I got the kind that don’t hurt. Itches sometimes, but that’s all. I admit it: I lose a few guys right here — another reason I like to let you get a look before we go in. It feels a little funny if you decide to bolt once we get inside with the fellas. But that ol’ ostrich egg has made more than one cocksucker fall down on his knees and shoot right there in his skivvies. Hey, you know, that’s a genuine cocksuckers’ dick you’re lookin’ at — ’cause it curves down ’stead o’ up. You get on your knees and that thing slides right down into your face. Dynamite’s is longer, but him and that boy, Shit, both got the same cocksucker’s curve. We’re probably fourth or fifth cousins anyway. Down here, ever’body is — I never traced it through.”
Eric asked, “Who’s…Dynamite?” The big testicle oscillated in his mind between sexy and…well, weird. He asked, “You’re goin’ in there like…that?” But obviously he was. Eric grew even harder.
“This is one of them places where it’s better to go on in with it all hangin’ out. Besides, ain’t you got someone waitin’ in the car? I figured you didn’t have all day. And you asked for it.” Beside him, the big guy pushed the door with one hand and guided Eric in with the other. “Gotta get you a taste of Shit and Dynamite ’fore you leave. Come on, puppy. Learn a little of what’s goin’ on down here,” as Eric pulled down his zipper —
[0] — AND LEVERED OUT his own cock (I hope it ain’t too small for these guys…), full hard when Eric saw the men inside.
Some looked.
A couple of years older than Eric, one in a green workshirt with the sleeves torn off — like the boatman’s plaid — grinned over the shoulder of a rangy older man — the boatman’s age…? — whose pants were down around his hirsute thighs. (That’s a nice cock, Eric thought.) The kid had close-set green eyes, a sparse beard you could see through to his face, broad bare feet, a tan mat of kinky hair, and a wide Negroid nose. He’s black, Eric realized, though his skin was the same burned bronze as the boatman’s, as Eric’s. He shared a mouth with the older white guy. A smile deflected its line.
(Except for irregular patches of black and white tiling, cement had taken over the floor.)
Behind them were four others, three standing, one seated inside a doorless stall. All were looking at him.
In his dropped overalls, the older guy wore the same kind of shirt as the younger, its sleeves pushed up hard, heavy forearms, the front open over a black T-shirt.
The bearded boatman said: “That there is Shit — ” the kid smiled — “and this here’s Dynamite.” The older man nodded.
The barefoot kid’s nondescript pants were open, too — they weren’t jeans — and, as he moved, his cock slipped from the older man’s cheeks and, still hard, fell to a downward slant. Turning, the kid stepped over, reached out, caught Eric’s cock in his fist, and — more surprisingly — wrapped his other arm around Eric’s shoulders. “My hand’s kinda rough,” he said, with embarrassment. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“That’s okay,” Eric said. “So’s my cock.”
“No, it ain’t.” Looking down, the kid chuckled. “It’s a nice one.” With his other arm he hugged Eric — and (Eric was about to say, It feels good…) thrust his tongue as far down Eric’s throat as he could!
Eric hugged him back — surprised. The kid’s clothes were old, and he’d been wearing them a long time. Under their general funk was a smell like sweaty leather, which Eric realized was the kid himself.
The boatman had called him…Shit?
While their tongues rolled together and around one another’s, Eric saw over the kid’s shoulder that the doors on the three stalls were gone.
So were the seats on the commodes.
The partitions were enameled blue, grooved and gouged, inside and out. Even from within the embrace Eric could see, beyond Shit’s bearded jaw, holes drilled through the stall walls, some half-an-inch, some two inches. Some were patched with tin squares; other holes had been drilled beside the patches. (Eric’s tongue searched in Shit’s mouth, and found no teeth at all — at least on the upper left. The surprise made Eric harder.) Among the eight men in the small room, Eric could see, a stocky Mexican sat on the last commode, barefoot like the kid with him now. (Eric pushed his tongue right. Gaps interrupted the teeth there, with — above and below — saddles of gum between.) The Mexican wore no shirt at all under a black denim jacket with frayed edges, open over belly and chest; nor any underpants: black jeans pushed to his ankles, he smiled with a wide, pockmarked face.
Eric thought: That’s fuckin’ sexy.
Along the trough urinal, a pipe began to hum till, from its perforations, like tongues of glass, with small floshes, flaps, flops, and fluffles, water flushed the steel backing, to rush along the bottom.
By the urinal’s end Eric glimpsed a tall black man with a shaved head. (For an instant, he thought Mike was at the urinal. His heart gave a single astonished thump, before he recognized a different ear, a different head, a different shoulder, thinner arm, rounder back…! On the arm below the short sleeve were black tattoos he could not make out, since the man also shared Mike’s coloring. In three beats, though, Eric’s heart stilled.) Along with his stained dungarees he wore an orange and white road-worker’s vest strapped over a gray T-shirt. He held his hands in front of himself, but was turned away so Eric couldn’t see his cock.