Small Town

And only a man who was genuinely confident about his sexuality would welcome the touch of a pair of hands on his buttocks, male hands, Lowell’s hand, taking hold of him firmly, pressing the cheeks together, coaxing them apart. He drew in his breath sharply at the touch, and again at the touch of Lowell’s cock at his own opening, his own portal, his very own entryway.

Oh Christ it’ll never fit he’s gonna tear me apart...

But he knew better. It had fit before and it would fit now, and he held himself in check, stopped his thrusting into the woman beneath him, and opened himself up to the man behind him. His sphincter tightened of its own accord — That’s why they call it an asshole — but then it relaxed, and now the head was in, and that was the difficult part, and now it was all in there, he’d taken it all, had almost sucked it in, greeting the insistent guest with open arms, making him welcome.

Oh, God, this was good. Fucking and being fucked, giving and getting. Heaven. He didn’t even have to do anything, could let Lowell supply the power that moved him within Susan. Sheer heaven.

All right, maybe he was bi. You could argue that everybody was, though not everybody was honest enough to admit it and act on it. Most straight men were too frightened of that capacity to let themselves feel it, let alone do something about it. And most gay guys, well, they were warped one way or another, had it hooked up so that they couldn’t fuck women without thinking they were fucking their mothers.

But if you got past your hang-ups, you could do anything with anybody and feel good about it.

And it was part of being a writer, wasn’t it? Tasting all of life, not just the blue plate special. Drinking deep at the well. What was it Flaubert said? Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Not, oh, yeah, I knew a girl like Emma once.

Nothing human is foreign to me. He couldn’t remember who said that, but it was some writer, it had to be, and he got it right. You couldn’t write it unless you could first find it somewhere in your self, and how could you do that if you were paralyzed with fear over who you might turn out to be?

Oh, Jesus, it felt good...

So many people didn’t get it. Same as one drop of African blood made you black in the old segregated South, same as one grandparent made you Jewish in Nazi Germany, in some equally objective eyes one interlude with another guy made you a screaming queen. Like that old joke about Pierre:

Ah, monsieur, do you see that bridge? I, Pierre, built that bridge. I built over twenty bridges. But do they call me Pierre the Bridge Builder? They do not.

Monsieur, do you see that lion? I, Pierre, tamed that lion, and all the other animals in the circus. But do they call me Pierre the Lion Tamer? Alas, you know they do not.

But suck one cock...

What was he when he heard that joke, twelve? Thirteen? About the age he was when he got his first blow job, at good old Camp Tamaqua, from good old Henrietta. Henry Blankenship his name was, but everybody called him Henrietta, which would have been cruel except the kid honestly didn’t seem to mind. And he surely did like to suck cock.

It felt great. I mean, a blow job generally does, and at that age, with no experience, Jesus. But he remembered how he’d sat there with old Henrietta’s head bobbing in his lap and thinking how great it would be if he could get a girl to do this to him. I mean, that’s not exactly gay, is it? To be getting head from a guy and wishing it was from a girl?

And it was just curiosity that made him imagine what it would be like to do what Henrietta was doing. I mean, everybody did that, didn’t they? Imagined it? And if he imagined it sometimes late at night when he was lying on his camp cot and spanking the monkey, well, that was natural enough, wasn’t it?

Here, as far as he was concerned, was the acid test: On this night and other Tuesdays, he had blown Lowell and been blown by him, had fucked him and been fucked by him. Had he enjoyed it? Yes, damn right he had, even as he was enjoying it now.

But had he ever done it without Susan present? Had he ever had the slightest interest in getting together with Lowell, or any other man, on some day or night other than this one, with no woman to share the fun?

Absolutely not. Never happen.