Sensei instructs Larry on a simple hip toss, then leaves Larry and his partner to find their way. Larry gets thrown a number of times but can’t manage to execute any throws himself. Sensei returns, checks his technique, explains a few points, and has the boys resume. Suddenly the other boy is whirling over Larry’s hip to land on the mat. It happens so fast and naturally that Larry wonders if the boy deliberately propelled himself, to be nice to him.
The boy gets back on his feet and they grab hold of each other, working back and forth, each trying to get the other off balance. Larry almost loses his footing, but blocks the other boy’s movement, converts his momentum against him, and again the other boy flies over him, onto the mat. It works, it really works! Larry is learning judo. The other boy’s body is nice. Not as hard as Sensei’s, but still very nice.
Like most of the guys, Larry doesn’t wash his gi. Over the weeks, it grows acrid with stale sweat, a badge of his effort. One evening, Sensei lectures them on the virtues of cleanliness, says he’s disgusted with them, and orders the whole roomful of them off to a nearby Laundromat. The other customers, Larry realizes, are slightly intimidated by all these boys tossing their martial arts uniforms into the washers and dryers, horsing around and laughing. Nice boys, really, but a lot of them. Larry hangs with Roger and a few of his friends. He can’t remember ever being this happy.
Larry moves on from throws to groundwork—grappling, twisting, and locks. One night he finally finds himself in the situation he has fantasized about so much: wrestling Roger. The boy he adores quickly has him in a painful position, his arm bent backward across Roger’s leg. Larry taps the mat, the signal of submission. Roger lets go immediately. They begin again. A few moves later, Larry feels himself being choked into numbness. “Better give,” says Roger and again Larry taps out. A few moves into their third match, Larry manages to get behind Roger, is trying to get a hold on him when—and he has had nothing consciously in mind other than trying to get the hold—his body betrays him. His cock suddenly swells and hardens and presses against Roger’s butt.
Deeply embarrassed, Larry falters and in that moment, Roger breaks loose, spins around, pins Larry, and sits astride him. The erection has disappeared. Roger smiles at Larry and wags his finger at him but says nothing. At the end of the evening, as they are going their separate ways, Roger is just as friendly as always, with a smile and a “See ya.”
The next session, Roger brings Jalene, his girlfriend, to watch him work out. She’s friendly to Larry, acknowledges him as a friend of Roger’s, and gives no sign of knowing what happened.
Liberated from his fantasy about Roger, Larry is now open to genuine prospects. Several times, in the library and elsewhere, he is sure he is being looked over. None of these possibilities excites him. He doesn’t return the smile, turns away from the glance. He is sure, however, that sooner or later there will be someone.
Still Larry says nothing to his parents about his judo, and over the weeks they don’t see that he is changing. As so often happens, perception is blinkered by habit. They look at the evolving Larry and see their son as he was. And then suddenly, as he moves across a room, Larry’s parents realize, both at once, that a quickness and grace have appeared in their son, a confidence, a better sense of his body. And his shoulders are broadening.
His father asks, “What are you doing with yourself, Larry? You working out?”
Larry shrugs the teenage shrug and mumbles, slips away to his room. Fear of failure is no longer an issue. But he cherishes his secret life. It is his, his accomplishment, not something for his parents to ask about, comment on, or judge.
After two and half months, Sensei announces that he’s taking everyone across town for a tournament against another dojo. This will be Larry’s first real competition and he is surprised to realize that he is looking forward to the challenge. His outlook is changing. He has more self-esteem.
Almost at the very moment he enters the crosstown dojo, Larry spots a guy whose name, he quickly makes it his business to learn, is Ralph. Slim and wiry, he’s in a lower weight class than Larry. They won’t be confronting each other on the mat. Larry hopes there will be some socializing after the contest.
Larry acquits himself well in the tournament, losing one of his matches but winning another. Waiting his turn between matches, he looks across the mat at Ralph, who smiles at him.
Larry’s dojo wins the tournament, which pleases Larry. Far more importantly, just as he is looking for Ralph, Ralph comes up to him to say hello. Neither of them has much experience with small talk so within a minute they’re grappling, practicing holds.
It’s time to go. The boys exchange phone numbers.
Over the next few days, they phone and text, finally meet at a mall and go to a movie. In the darkness, after several minutes of silent
Should I, shouldn’t I
? Larry dares to stretch an arm across the back of Ralph’s seat, half resting it on his friend’s shoulders.
Ralph leans into him.
As often as they can, the boys meet up, at malls and movies, once at a public swimming pool. Soon, they discover a remote area in a large park, and this becomes their private, favorite place. As on the judo mat, Larry finds his way with a partner slightly ahead of him. Ralph’s cock is the first he has ever touched other than his own. A little online searching fills him in about safe sex, but nothing the boys actually do is very risky.
Summer is ending and the boys have to confront the fact they go to different schools. They swear their mutual love and their determination to see each other as often as possible.
In the second week of the new school year, Larry steps in when a bully harasses a frightened freshman. When the bully turns on Larry and shoves him in the chest, Larry easily deflects him into a nearby wall.
A teacher sees the scuffle and reports it. Both boys are sent home with letters to their parents. If the letters aren’t delivered there will be further, more serious punishment.
Larry’s parents have never had this kind of news about their son. His mother has to read the letter twice, its contents are so strange and unexpected.
“Larry, you were in a fight?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“It says you hurt the other boy.”
“I didn’t mean to. He bruised his arm when he hit the wall.”
“He hit a wall?” asks his father. “How? Tell me what happened. Who started it?”
Larry explains briefly, modestly. His father says, “Don’t get into fights.” But he is very pleased. Later, he comes to his son’s room, tells him that he knows something’s been going on, and this fight just makes him all the more certain.
Larry tells him about the judo classes.
“Why such a secret?”
Larry shrugs. “It’s not that big a deal.”
To Larry’s father, it is a very, very big deal. He’s so pleased, so relieved about his son.
Not long after, on a Saturday afternoon, after a movie near Larry’s house, the boys go to Larry’s to hang out. Larry’s mother is delighted. It’s the first time in a long time that her son has brought a friend home. When Larry’s father gets home, she suggests that they ask Ralph to stay to dinner. They’ll have a special treat. They’ll order pizza, whatever the boys want.
Larry’s father goes to Larry’s room to tell the boys the plan. Briskly, he raps at the door and pushes it open. His son and his son’s friend, clothes off, are entwined on the bed. All three freeze. Then Larry’s father retreats, closing the door.
Shocked, not entirely sure what exactly he has seen, he says nothing to his wife, but she knows something has happened and she has a good idea what, in general terms, it must have been.
Larry and Ralph slip quickly out of the house. Over burgers and shakes, they talk about running away to some other city. By ten o’clock, both are home, Larry going directly to his room.
It will be weeks before Larry and his father can look each other in the eye. They will never talk about what happened.
Soon, within months, the heat between Larry and Ralph will cool. They will find other guys to tussle with, fall in love with.
Over the next two or three years, as Larry’s father watches him grow to manhood, he will come to understand that the world really has changed and that his son, brave and strong, will make his way in it free of the burden that he himself has carried all his life.
A BEAUTIFUL MOTORCYCLE
Martin Delacroix
O
ne afternoon in 1964, a beautiful motorcycle greeted me when I came home from school. I was fourteen then, incurably queer, in a constant state of sexual arousal, and I planned to masturbate in the privacy of my bedroom just as soon as I could. But the motorcycle parked in our driveway trumped sex for the moment. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. I walked around it in circles. The gas tank was red and shiny, like a maraschino cherry, with HONDA and a bird’s wing displayed on both sides of the tank. The twin tailpipes were funnel-shaped, each as long as my leg, fashioned from perforated chrome. The seat was black leather. The bike’s headlamp was the size of a cereal bowl, with a ribbed lens. Sunlight glanced off a curvy chrome mudguard in the rear. A white plastic helmet with a leather chinstrap hung from one handgrip.
Placing my schoolbooks on the concrete driveway, I swung a leg across the bike’s seat, and when I lowered my butt to the leather it squeaked. I leaned forward and seized the handgrips, making revving sounds in my throat.
Rumm-rumm…rummrumm
.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” a male voice said from behind me.
I jerked with surprise, then turned. My sister, Patricia, age fifteen, stood beside a guy who looked older than her, maybe seventeen. My sister wrenched her lips and told me to get off the motorcycle.
Now
.
I left the seat
slowly.
(My sister couldn’t boss
me
around.) I lifted a leg and swung it over the bike’s handlebars, pivoting and jumping off. Then I rose to my feet. I stuck my hands in my back pockets and looked at the guy. He was slender, narrow in the hips, with blond hair precisely combed in the fashion of the day, kept in place with hair cream. His eyes were cornflower blue and his eyelashes were the longest I’d ever seen on a guy or even a woman. He wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt and leather boots. My sister told him I was her brother, Curtis.
He stuck out his hand. “Hi, Curt. I’m Dan.”
We shook and he gave me a firm grip. His hand felt warm and I smelled tobacco on his breath. He stood half a head taller than me.
“Nice bike,” I said, pointing with my chin. “Is it new?”
He nodded, speaking with an accent. (Philadelphian, I later learned.) “I got it a month ago. It’s a CB92R, fifteen horsepower, four-speed. It’ll do eighty.”
I said, “Cool.”
“I’m in a hurry right now,” Dan said to me, “but I’ll give you a ride sometime if you want.”
I told Dan I’d like that.
He climbed aboard the Honda, put on his helmet, and fastened the chinstrap. He turned the key and the engine started. It growled and sputtered, very cool sounds. He waved to my sister and me, then drove away, trailing a noise like a disturbed beehive.