Eric asked: “He said that?”
“Um-hum. ‘You go’n’ swaller it all down. Don’ spill none, now…’
“I sucked.
“He hardened — and came.
“I swallowed.
“‘Yeah, da’s good. Make dis nigger feel real good, boy. Okay. Ah’m goin’ back to sleep.’ Really, it’s what he sounded like. ‘You go on to sleep, too, if’n you want.’ Obviously he’d started out from somewhere around here. His hand was wood-rough and rubbed my face, and I stretched out, my cheek half on wet cardboard, half on the grass, that heavy penis still in my mouth, getting softer, shrinking.
“No one had come by, and we were kind of behind some bushes…
“Through my nose, I got in a breath, and hugged his thigh. He hugged my head back, I remember — with just one hand (but it was a hug. Not a press or a pat or a squeeze. It was a one-handed hug) — and, after maybe three breaths, clearly he’d gone back to sleep. So after eight, nine more — ” Bill shrugged — “I did, too.
“Another half-an-hour or so and I woke. His cock wasn’t in my mouth anymore. I thought he’d gone. So I looked up. Somebody was sitting next to me, hip right against my head. I raised up on an elbow.
“His back was to the stone. From somewhere, he’d gotten a cardboard container of coffee, though — unless it had been delivered by some meals-on-wheels charity group, rolling through the park while I was asleep — it was hard to imagine him, in those pants, leaving the place, making it barefoot to a coffee stand, and getting back. When I sat up, he was looking into his cup.
“I pushed up onto my knees, then I stood. With his kind of foggy eyes he blinked at me and held up the coffee. ‘You wan’ some?’
“The thing I remember, he was one of those guys whose hands — like your dad’s — were completely black. I mean, his palms, the undersides of his fingers, his nails. To this day, I have no idea if that was weeks of dirt, or pigmentation, or if it was from being out in the sun for so long.”
Eric said: “That’s from his work.”
“Oh,” Bill said. “Well, I do know it was…incredibly beautiful.
“He said, ‘I got some fren’s. Dey gonna like you. Dey love to fuck a lil’ redheaded white boy.’ My hair was redder then. ‘Dey love to have you suck on ’em. A couple of ’em is even white — like you. You get me some pants, an’ I could really make same money offa you, boy. I give you some, too. No bitch o’ mine ever complained I didn’t treat her right. I ain’t a rough daddy: I be a good daddy. I ain’t got time to be mean and nasty. You gonna like hangin’ out wid me — if you got some damned pants I can wear. An’ maybe some shoes or sneakers. I’d be real good at sellin’ yo’ ass. I got a lotta experience at it, too. An’ whenever you don’t be workin’ you can suck dis nigger till you can’ suck no mo’. You can drink my piss. Eat my cum. An’ I’ll make love to you too, lil’ boy. I like to lick my lil’ fellas’ noses out when I make love to ’em. You ever had anyone do dat to ya’?’” Bill chuckled.
“He said that?” Eric felt himself swelling to half-hard, let his legs fall wide, then brought them together.
“Um-hm,” Bill said. “I mean I have seen you from time to time, out my window here, when you were walking to or from the garage and didn’t think anyone was watching — ”
“Oh…” Eric glanced down and rejoined his hands, tightening them with an embarrassment that had hounded him since a playschool teacher in Baltimore had noticed him at, and yelled at him about, his habit. “That sounds — ” since Bill had noticed it, he was surprised that, till now, he hadn’t mentioned it — “kinda complicated.”
“But over the next five seconds, Eric, I went from thinking he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, with the most mouth-filling cock I’d ever sucked — and I’d sucked a pretty fair number, by then, too — to totally terrified. You have to understand, I had a walk-up fourth floor apartment on 112th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. My lowest dresser drawer was full of old jeans, some of which, yes, had holes in the crotch, but even they were better than what he had to clutch together, just to walk around. And he’s sitting there, saying, ‘Come on, now. Sit down wid’ me. Help me finish dis coffee.’
“When I didn’t sit, he held it higher. ‘Go on. Have some. It’s good.’
“So I took the cup, and tasted it — God, it was sweet! It must have been a quarter sugar! I gave it to him, stepped back, and said, ‘No. No, I’m sorry…!’ Then I turned and…ran through the park, the bushes, the trees, the paths, everything!
“And, you know, Eric? I’ve often thought that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life — or one of the stupidest. I figured that out by eleven o’clock the same morning, once I’d had a few hours of real sleep. When I got up, I put some jeans I thought might fit him and some old runners into a brown paper Bloomie’s bag and spent another fourteen hours walking in the park, looking for him. (Did I mention he was shorter than I was?) But New York is such a big city, people get lost from you — like that! Even in Atlanta, you have a better chance of finding somebody after you think you’ve misplaced them. I never saw him again. But regularly I think: Suppose I’d sat down with him and said, ‘Okay,’ and stayed.
“Even taken him to my place, to get some clothes — or just to finish sleeping.
“You know, I…might have been happy — for what? Half an hour? Ten hours? Until he brought the first guy to fuck me? Or the fifth? Or the fiftieth? Suppose I’d given him the pants that would have been nowhere near as difficult for me to get as it was for him to wander, half naked, to panhandle up some coffee and come back. Three days maybe? Or three weeks? Or even partnered around with him for a…couple of years? Dropped business school and done…a hundred and fifty — maybe a thousand of his ‘friends’? Of course, I could have gotten my head bashed in. But with the few thousand I’ve done on my own since then — ” Bill frowned — “I don’t think so. Besides, that can happen in any situation. And like I ran away then, I could have run away in five hours, or five days, or five months. Or five years. But maybe that extra happiness — ” and again he was smiling — “I might have had would have helped to make all the hours, when I was miserable over what, yes, this guy or that guy had done — like not even notice I was alive, mostly — a little more bearable. So, now we’re prepared for the cold, naked moral that ends the tale. You ready?”
“Okay.” Eric shrugged. “Sure.”
“Good. Because I’m going to tell it to you.
“Eric, sometime in your life — it may be in twenty minutes, or two months, or six years, or twenty-five years — you are going to find yourself in a situation that, simply because of all the things you have done, you will realize holds the possibility of…happiness. Now it won’t be like mine. But it will be something lots fewer people could understand than could have understood…well, what I just told you about. But when it happens, don’t be like me, Eric. You say, ‘Yes.’ Because if you don’t, it gets all bottled up, and you end up smashing your rifle butt into the bellies of pregnant women, or strafing perfectly nice gorillas off the Empire State Building or changing the curtains every week or jamming the handles of toilet plungers up the assholes of prisoners and attaching generators to their scrotums with alligator clips — straight or gay, because someone doesn’t want you looking at anyone else; because you think, somehow, that will make you feel better; that will make you happy.”