Serenading Stanley (5 page)

“Holy Mother of God!” she gasped, spotting Stanley in the doorway. “Maybe I should switch to Marlboro Lights!
”

Stanley slapped the soaked T-shirt in front of his manly parts and screamed, “Maybe you should
quit smoking altogether.
What the hell are you doing here? And extinguish that cigarette! This is a no smoking zone!”

His mother patted her chest, still trying to get a decent breath of air, and between gasps, she scoffed. “Oh, pooh! Don’t be silly. How can you expect me to visit if this is a no smoking zone? And what’s with all those fucking stairs? Where are we, the ninetieth floor? Can we see Beijing from here? And why is it so damn hot? Did I climb all the way up to the surface of the sun? Good Lord, my life is actually passing before my eyes!”

“So is mine!” Stanley screamed.

“You’re naked,” his mother said, finally able to stand upright.

Stanley spread out the soaked T-shirt a bit to better cover himself. “Well, I just got out of the shower, didn’t I? And how did you get in?”

She shrugged. “I let myself in with a bobby pin. Why are you using a shirt for a towel?”

“Well, I—”

“And why are you holding a bottle of Ivory Liquid. Dawn is better.”

“Jeez, Ma, I—”

“Don’t call me Ma. And why do you smell like dish soap? Is that what you were showering with?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Give me a glass of water. I’m dying here. Those stairs are
reprehensible!
”

“Good word choice,” Stanley said, “but I
can’t
give you a glass of water. I don’t have any glasses. Cup your hand under the faucet and drink it that way.”

“Like a farmer? I will not. What kind of boy leaves his mother to set out on his own without any glasses? And why are you still naked?”

Stanley slumped. “I don’t know.”

Beaten, and knowing it, Stanley slouched off to the bedroom to get dressed. He was halfway across the living room before he remembered to drag the wet T-shirt around to cover his ass as he walked away.

The minute he did, his apartment door opened in front of him. A young guy all dressed in black leather poked his head in like he owned the place. He wore boots with chains, leather pants with chains, and some sort of crisscrossing bandolier of leather and studs—and chains—strapped across his naked chest. He even had a little leather hat perched jauntily on his head. All he needed was a whip and handcuffs.

The young man spotted Stanley standing naked in the middle of the room, and his face broke into a smile like he had just won the lottery. As he continued to eyeball Stanley, his hand came up, and with his thumb and index finger, he commenced tweaking his nipple. A dreamy look came into his eyes. “Well, hello there, neighbor.”

Stanley dragged the wet shirt around to the front to cover his dick once again. Then he thought,
fuck it
! and threw the shirt across the room. It hit the wall with a splat
.

The nipple tweaker in the doorway ducked and said, “Ooh.”

“You must be ChiChi,” Stanley said, trembling with fury. “The guy who made the sign.”

ChiChi’s blissful smile broadened. “That’s me.” He had a heavy, lazy Mexican accent, rather like the Frito Bandito on muscle relaxers.

With his self-respect pretty much at the lowest ebb it had seen since the time his mother caught him beating off on the commode at thirteen, Stanley spread his arms wide and presented himself
in toto,
as it were. “Well, ChiChi? Am I cute enough to live in your precious building?”

Before he got an answer, the stench of cigarette smoke intensified, and he heard his mother creeping up behind him. God, the woman was a pain in the ass. “Introduce me to your leather friend, Stanley. Heavens, they let all kinds in this building, don’t they?”

It was at this point that Stanley threw in the towel. Or would have if he had owned one.

Still naked, but not really caring anymore, Stanley stalked off to the bedroom to get dressed.

Before he could slam the door behind him, he heard his mother casually say, “I love your ensemble, young man. Made from a cow, isn’t it? Is that like a bondage thing, or are you simply allergic to fabric?”

S
TILL
naked, Stanley stood in the bedroom and stared at himself in the dresser mirror. He could hear the hum of voices in the living room. The voices belonged to ChiChi and his mother. Good Lord, the leather freak and the most annoying woman in the world were having a chat. What the hell was his mother doing? And why was ChiChi wearing a leather bandolier? Was he a hooker? A Dom? A Columbian rebel?

Stanley stepped closer to the mirror and stared at himself a little harder, scoping himself out from head to toe. His body was long and lean enough, he supposed. His cock was of a respectable length and girth. His shoulders narrow, but nicely straight. There wasn’t a delineated ab in sight, but he had a nice trail of blond hair leading from his belly button downward to the healthy patch of strawberry-blond pubic hair framing his dick. His legs were fuzzy and nicely shaped, he thought. For a skinny guy, at least.

It was his head that needed work. His narrow face, with those geeky-ass black glasses he couldn’t see shit without, and the tiny ears too flat to his head, made him wish he could get a do-over in the looks department. Even ChiChi, the weirdo out there chatting with his mother, was a stunner compared to Stanley. And in all honesty, the sprinkling of dark hair across ChiChi’s chest, and the tight little belly button showing above the leather pants, and the way the man fit
into
those leather pants, made Stanley even more unhappy with the way Mother Nature had thrown Stanley F. Sternbaum
together.

Then Stanley imagined how he would look standing naked next to Roger Jane, and what little self-confidence he had managed to scrape together was suddenly scattered to the four winds.

Roger Jane was beautiful. And nice to boot. Roger Jane would be the perfect friend, the perfect lover, the perfect
everything.
And Roger Jane was so far out of Stanley’s league, it broke Stanley’s heart a little bit just to think about the guy.

So he
wouldn’t
think about him, dammit. He wouldn’t.

Stanley turned from the mirror with steely-eyed determination and threw on a pair of chinos commando-style before slipping his arms into an Arrow dress shirt. He turned the long sleeves up, left the shirttail hanging out to flap in the breeze, if he could find one, and tucked his bare feet into a pair of Hush Puppies.

Grabbing his keys and a couple of bucks, Stanley strode from the bedroom and confronted his barging-in neighbor and his nosy-ass mother, who were chatting in a haze of cigarette smoke at the kitchen table like they’d known each other for years.

“When the two of you finish your little tête-a´-tête, lock the door when you leave!” Stanley called out. And humming a merry tune, just to piss his mother off, he stepped into the hall and looked back as ChiChi said, “Your son’s a bit high-strung, isn’t he? Nice ass, though.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Sternbaum replied, casting a friendly finger waggle in Stanley’s direction to be annoying right back. “His father had a lovely butt. Made a point of showing it every time he opened his mouth too. He died of lung cancer.”

“Probably from secondhand smoke,” ChiChi wryly observed, flapping his leather hat in front of his face to clear the air.

And then, in her never-ending quest to embarrass the hell out of her son, his mother outdid even herself. “My son’s gay, you know.”

“Hell, who isn’t?” ChiChi replied, adjusting his leather bandolier so it no longer collided with his nipple ring.

And on that happy note, Stanley slammed the apartment door behind him and headed down the stairs.

After navigating the roasting hot stairwell, it was almost a relief to step outside into the blazing sunlight. He glanced up the street to make sure his Honda was still there, and seeing it was, he set out walking toward the campus. It was only two blocks away. How convenient was that?

By the time he’d passed the campus theater and the biology building and a couple of high-rise parking structures for students and faculty, he had calmed down enough to appreciate his surroundings. There were a few students around, but not many. When the fall semester commenced in two weeks, the joint would be packed. Thinking about it, Stanley fairly trembled with anticipation. He was on the last leg of his journey to becoming an archaeologist, and he could hardly contain his excitement. He tried not to think about where his many résumés would eventually lead him, but he was willing to go anywhere to fulfill his dream. Fieldwork on the cliff dwellings in New Mexico. A museum post in New York. Scraping bones or digging for treasure on the Yucatan Peninsula. It was all one and the same to Stanley. He just wanted to ply his trade. He just wanted to
work.

As always, his imagination was getting ahead of him. With the
thud
of reality reasserting itself, Stanley dragged his mind back to the present.

The campus was nicely laid out, with bright green lawns and shaded areas where Stanley could imagine reading or relaxing or eating his lunch between classes. He spotted the campus bookstore and made a mental note to return the next day with his credit card to buy the rest of the books he needed for his courses. He had a list the college had mailed him weeks ago back at the apartment.

On the wall outside the dean’s office on the second floor of the administration building, Stanley finally found what he was searching for—the class schedules for the fall semester. Ordinarily, he could access it on online, but his computer wasn’t hooked up at the apartment yet. That was another task he had to accomplish before classes began.

Stanley jotted down some notes concerning his schedule, then went in search of a Coke machine. He found one in an alcove between buildings, dropped in his coins, and, grabbing his soda, sprawled on the grass under a weeping willow tree to relax and cool off and give his mother and the bondage queen time to vacate his apartment.

He’d have to buy a lock for the apartment door too. Something mother proof. If they made such a thing. Happily, he had that money his father left him. It wasn’t much, but if he was careful, it should be enough to see him through until he finished his schooling once and for all.

Stanley closed his eyes, enjoying the cooing of a turtledove in the billowy branches above his head. The next-to-last thought that crossed his mind before sleep overtook him was the memory of how Roger’s hand felt as it slipped into his.

And then to further break the vow he had made not to think about Roger Jane, he wondered what sort of treasure he would have unearthed had he tugged free the drawstring at Roger’s waist and let those baggy blue scrubs slide to the floor.

S
TANLEY
settled into life in apartment 6C at the Belladonna Arms with a minimum of angst. He was so happy to be on his own for the very first time in his life, even his mother’s incessant phone calls pleading with him to return home couldn’t derail his contentment. Happily, the six flights of stairs that had damn near killed the woman on her first visit kept her visits few and far between. And when she did come, she usually came bearing gifts. A set of drinking glasses. Real honest-to-God plates and silverware. Down pillows. An electric fan for the bedroom.

The phone calls gradually lessened, and Stanley knew in her own agonizingly plodding way she was accepting the fact, as graciously as she could, that Stanley was on his own at last. That fact eased Stanley’s guilt considerably, and for the first time in his life he began to relish his new freedom.

August was such a scorcher that even the second fan that Stanley bought himself didn’t cool the apartment enough to make it bearable during the daylight hours. So Stanley walked. With two weeks to kill before classes commenced, he spent his time reacquainting himself with the city, the parks, and the zoo, all of which were within walking distance of his apartment. But his greatest joy was visiting the museums in Balboa Park. He spent hours perusing the dusty collections of treasures gathered by archaeologists who had come before. He would stare doe-eyed at some pre-Columbian relic or ancient Egyptian artifact, wondering all the while if someday there might not be a display in the Museum of Man, or one of the other venerable old institutions, with
his
name on the little index card in the corner—a card proclaiming Stanley F. Sternbaum to be the collector of the piece. Wouldn’t that be something?

During Stanley’s daily wanderings, as he climbed up and down the stairs to and from his apartment, he developed the strangest habit. And he couldn’t really explain to himself why. Well, he
could
explain it, but it was so embarrassing he chose not to. The habit was to step very quietly and very quickly between floors four and six so as to avoid running into Roger Jane, who lived on five. There was just something about the man that filled Stanley with discontent. He supposed it was jealousy more than anything else. After all, who wouldn’t be jealous of someone who looked like that? The mere thought of Roger’s beauty was enough to make Stanley unhappy for hours. Of course, it wasn’t the man’s beauty that made Stanley feel that way. Not really. It was Stanley’s
own
lack
of beauty that did it. Stanley even had the good grace to admit it wasn’t Roger’s fault for looking the way he did. Nor was it Roger’s fault Stanley was so paranoid about his own appearance that he felt inferior when comparing himself to Roger. Or that he would even feel a
need
to compare himself to Roger. But still, the feeling was such that Stanley would tiptoe quickly between the fourth and sixth floors every time he left or entered the building. He couldn’t help it.