They were gone; we were alive; I wished I were dead.
Crying and quavering, we put our filthy clothes back on. We were in a big park. We walked toward the closest streetlights. I tied my shirt around my waist and held my pants up to hide my bleeding rear end. We didn’t know where we were and were afraid to ask anyone. We saw a motel—we had to get clean, wash them off of us. I waited in the shadows while Don rented a room. The clerk didn’t care about his appearance: money was money, no questions asked. It was that kind of place.
The hot water and soap stung our cuts and scratches. We couldn’t talk but we needed each other. We huddled together in the bed, two wounded, helpless creatures, glad not to be alone in this horrible world.
In the morning we found our way back to the car, now with a parking ticket on it. The bar wasn’t open. We were glad. We drove out of Denver.
Gradually our fear and shame and pain eased enough that we could talk in strained fragments, but not about the rape. Something deep in us had been soiled beyond cleansing. We shared a terrible silent secret, but it brought us closer together.
As we lugged up into the front range of the Rockies, thick clouds blotted out the sun and started pouring snow, small dry pellets unlike the big wet flakes of Kansas, a swarm of white specks dancing in the headlights and trailing in skeins behind us. Numb almost to catatonia, we watched, glad of distraction, glad some beauty was left in the world.
To avoid thinking about what had happened, we debated the crucial issue of whether it was true that no two snowflakes were ever the same. Imagine from the very first flake until now, no two ever the same? Hard to believe. All through the Ice Ages, through all the ever-swirling polar snows since then, millions of jillions of flakes, and no two ever the same? Maybe if you counted the molecules on each branch, maybe no two had exactly the same number of molecules in exactly the same place. Other than that it seemed pretty unlikely. What if the snow kept on and covered the road? We didn’t have chains…should’ve thought of that. But for now at least, the flakes were too dry and small to stick to the road, so they were blown off by traffic whoosh. In the storm our car became a haven, and the swirling hugeness of eternal snows and endless mountains muffled our memories of the night before.
Still unable to confront our violation, we drove through the night listening to Wolfman Jack from XERF, Del Rio, Texas, the transmitter broadcasting from across the border in Mexico because its power was too strong to be legal in the United States, the Wolfman beaming all over the west—we used to listen to him in Kansas City, now he consoled us in the snows of Colorado. The Wolfman was obviously a weirdo who didn’t fit in, like us, but he’d found his groove and was good at it, megawatting his mad cackle and bizarre music; no top-forty payola picks for Wolfman; everything had a bit of a bent edge to it.
Beyond the windshield the mountains were now great humped shadows caught in the stab of headlights. The snow finally stopped, replaced by galaxies of stars in a clear sky.
Oncoming cars were sudden hurtling flashes, passing by on the way to who-knew-where secret rendezvous. Maybe they were trying to get to Denver while we were trying to get away from it. Or they were headed for KC; they might have been neighbors’ kin going for a Christmas visit, and we passed them in the night never knowing, never meeting, all of us tiny and lost.
The Wolfman knew all that, you could hear it in his voice, an ancient crazy wail part Negro, part pachuco; he had seen it all, done it all, and it had driven him over the brink into mad raps. The Wolfman might have even been raped once, and he was still here.
We drank black coffee and ate truck stop pie. Driving and sleeping in shifts, we piled up the miles, speeding out of the Rockies and through Salt Lake City, staid and quiet compared to Denver, then on to the desert with its white salt flats and wide blue lake reflecting the mountains in a windless tableau, an eerie expanse of emptiness like a Salvador Dali painting with time and gravity suspended.
Finally, both of us dizzy with fatigue, coffee not working anymore, we stopped at a motel overshadowed by a giant neon cowboy in Winnemucca, Nevada. We hit the showers and hit the bed. The room had two beds, but we got in the same one, needing comfort. In the dark our memories returned, and emotions we’d repressed for twenty-four hours flooded over us—terror, rage, disgrace. Holding each other, we cried in great gouts of grief over our defilement, cursing our attackers, then as that ebbed, we were overwhelmed by a need for love and tenderness. We hugged each other with soothing gentleness, replacing the brutality with affection. We kissed and caressed, to prove to ourselves that human contact doesn’t have to be cruel. If we hadn’t been half out of our minds, we might not have breached the boundaries of our previous friendship, but we craved solace too much to stop. Our touches blotted out the trauma, salved each other’s wounds. Hungry mouths found our cocks, and we kissed and consoled them in an oral embrace of healing. We offered to each other and accepted from each other a mutual orgasm of love, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Next day we refused to be sorry. We’d endured so much that we were now beyond conventions of perceived propriety. We were glad to have and to help each other every way we could. We’d paid our dues and didn’t need to regret anything or apologize to anyone. We were human beings again. We’d proved our rapists wrong: sex can be kind rather than vicious.
Did this mean we were queers, the lowest form of life, the depths of depravity? If so, so be it. Labels had no meaning to us anymore. Our lovemaking had been the best sexual experience we’d ever had. We’d both had girls before but found it no big deal, kind of overrated. This was different.
We drove through Nevada’s vast arid emptiness and the tawdry hustle of Reno, then finally reached the Sierras. The Chevy’s in-line six cylinders slowed as we began to climb. Cheering, we crossed the border into California, the state on the salient edge of possibility. Already we felt a new charge in the air. The highway was better, and it seemed we could coast all the way to the coast.
We stopped thirty miles short of the Pacific in Orinda, a suburb of San Francisco where Lee lived. Both Orinda and Overland Park were enclaves of prosperity, but rather than the stolid conservative cubes of Kansas, people here lived in split-levels with redwood balconies, overhanging eaves, cantilevered stairways, glass walls, and kidney-shaped swimming pools. We nearly wept with relief. The trip had been worth it. Here things were different. This was living!
Lee was a senior majoring in art history and was going to move into San Francisco as soon as he graduated. I’d met him once years ago when his family was visiting Don’s. The first thing he said when we were alone together was, “So you’re gay too. Groovy!”
We didn’t know what “gay” meant, so he explained. “How could you tell?” I asked.
“Easy, silly.”
I realized we’d both probably always been that way deep down, but it had taken this trip to bring it out.
Lee taught us a lot, most of it on his water bed. Then he introduced us to his friends in the city. Don and I got sucked and fucked in about eighty different ways. By New Year’s we’d fully come out.
We were a long way from Kansas and we weren’t going back. We forgot about college for a while and got jobs—Don as a waiter, me as a florist—and an apartment in the Castro, the emerging gay neighborhood. Eventually we both got master’s degrees from San Francisco State, Don’s in accounting and mine in poetry writing. But before that there was more to be learned in the streets than from books.
In 1969—the last two digits were prophetic—San Francisco exploded with gay festivals and parades. We held outdoor orgies at night in Fort Mason, a park at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Guys were dropping trou at the drop of a hat. Both gays and lesbians were finally no longer afraid of showing they were queer and could openly celebrate their sexuality.
Two guys bought a Turkish bath and turned it into fairyland. Soon similar places sprang up, bathhouses offering free and open gay sex in all its varieties. People could finally live their fantasies. The baths also served as cultural centers. Writers like Allen Ginsberg and Ray Mungo would read their work, musicians like Tim Buckley and Phil Ochs would sing and play, political activists like Rennie Davis and Harvey Milk would speak on stopping the war in Vietnam and creating economic justice in the United States. And everybody was nude! It was mind blowing. It seemed to be the nucleus of a revolution. But mostly it was sex, a freaky frolic. All sorts of people came—bikers, artists, businessmen. I once saw Rudolf Nureyev and Johnny Mathis kissing. One night Don, Lee, and I were part of a sixteen-man daisy chain, a full-circle cyclotron of male energy doing the bunny hop and singing, “Hang on, Sloopy.”
The country as a whole began to change, as the gay author Charles Reich predicted in
The Greening of America
. The country became more tolerant, less uptight. Repression gave way to free expression.
But unfortunately it wasn’t all peace and love—later, disease and death crept into the scene. When AIDS first started we had no idea where it came from. All we knew was that we were killing each other.
One foggy day Don and I stood on the Golden Gate Bridge and scattered Lee’s ashes into the Bay.
San Francisco had become a sad place, a city in mourning. Like many people, Don and I survived the plague by a pledge of fidelity. We were each other’s favorite sexual partner, so we decided to end the promiscuity and become each other’s
only
sexual partner. In addition to keeping us alive, this deepened our emotional bond.
Eventually, though, we got tried of going to funerals and decided to leave San Francisco. We moved back to, of all places—Lawrence, Kansas. By then it had changed enormously. It had a gay disco and a lesbian city councilwoman. William Burroughs, the great gay novelist, lived there and presided over a literary salon. But all of it was still imbued with Kansas wholesomeness, which we now found to be refreshing after the dark extremes of San Francisco.
Even our families have come to accept gayness. So Don and I are back where we started, back where we met as boys, before we learned to love one another. The place is now so different that it seems like a whole new world. A better one.
AFTER STOOLBALL
Tony Pike
S
toolball is played—by teams comprised of both or either sex—among the villages of rural Sussex, England. It’s like a rudimentary form of cricket, only the bat is rather wider and quite flat, while the wicket…Hell, you’re not reading this to learn about stoolball. You might not even be all that interested in the finer points of cricket. Anyway, this isn’t about the stoolball match, but about what happened afterward, on the farthest edge of the outfield, in the lengthening shadows of the lime trees in the dimming dusk, back in the magic hot summer of 1983.
John regularly worked on Marlpits Farm during his summer vacations. He drove tractors, mucked in with the strawberry pickers—who were local women mostly—in July, then in August followed the tractor-hauled potato spinner along the furrows, backbreakingly picking up the tubers it unearthed, meanwhile finding his sexual outlets in the most basic fashion whenever his trips on the tractor took him to outlying, unwatched-over parts of the farm. There he would dismount from his massive blue-painted steed, pull his pants down to half-mast, and pull on his ever-ready, obligingly hard dick until it disgorged its flying load across the stubble, or into the brambles, or up against the rear wheel of the tractor, depending on which way he happened to be facing at the time.
Like any other nineteen-year-old, he was proud of his tackle. Just over seven inches the last time he’d measured it and, he surmised hopefully, still growing. He was proud of its girth, especially at the base, from where it tapered to an elegant, hooded, rather petite tip. And he was pleased with its power to deliver: reliably, often, and copiously—as well as most pleasurably, to say nothing of its extremely impressive projectile power. The only downside to all this was the fact that, except on a very few fumbling occasions when he was much younger, the pleasure had been all his; it had not in recent memory been shared by anyone else.
He couldn’t reasonably have expected that to happen during his summer farming stints. Those of his fellow workers who weren’t women (most of whom were disqualified by age as well as by sex) were either young married men from the nearby villages or younger boys, some of whom were very appealing, but all of whom had girlfriends—a fact that they took the earliest opportunity to drop into the conversation. This was to make absolutely sure that John, an alien being who attended first a school and then a university many miles away, should not form any misleading impression that might lead to the embarrassment of both parties at some future date.