Authors: Edmund White
At first this gay bar seemed to Ray an unexpected trove of sexy young guys until Homer explained that, technically, they (Ralph, Ray and Homer) were the only gays, along with the two hostesses, of course. Everyone else was, well, a gigolo, although that was too coarse a word for it. “Greek men really do prefer male company. All their bars are like this one,” Homer said with that ornithological pride old-timer expatriates exhibit to the newcomer. “The women don’t go out much. And the men think it’s normal to get money for sex—just remember
the dowries they receive. And then they’re terribly poor, the sailors, five bucks a week, that’s all they get. So, you take all these horny nineteen-year-olds away from their villages for the first time in their lives. Here they are, bored, lonely, with too much time on their hands, no unmarried Greek girls in sight …”
“Where are the girls?” Ray asked, embarrassed he hadn’t noticed their absence till now.
“Their mothers quite sensibly keep them under lock and key. I myself feel an infinite reverence for the intact maidenhead. Of course you know these scandalous mothers teach their daughters to take it up the ass if they must put out; anything to stay intact. Although why am I complaining? That’s my philosophy exactly.”
“So the sailors are alone and horny …”
“And naturally they want to party. That’s how they think of it. You buy them drinks and you’re a real sport. You ask them home. It’s a party. The only problem is how to wean them away from their
parea.”
“Come again?”
“Parea.
That’s their group, their friends, oh, a very useful word. If you want to pick someone up, point to him, then yourself. Say, ‘You, me,
parea?’”
“And what do they call us, the faggots?”
Homer smiled and lowered his voice:
“Poosti.”
“So we’re
poosti
on
parea …
Don’t rain on my
parea.”
“Yes,” Homer said somewhat primly, “but not so loud. You’ll scandalize the seafood.” nodding toward a
parea
of five sailors, smiling at them with lofty politeness.
After two hours of downing gin and tonic, Ray realized most of the boys weren’t drinking at all and were just sitting over empty bottles of beer, bumming cigarettes from one another and hungrily staring at the door as each newcomer entered. Only a few were talking to each other. Sometimes they seemed
to be inventing a conversation (involving lots of numbers, as even Ray could decode) and an emotion (usually indignation), but purely as a set piece to show them off to advantage to potential clients. The same tape of “Susanna” kept playing over and over, last year’s disco tune, which didn’t mean much to him, since it had been popular when George was already sick and they had stopped going out dancing.
He excused himself, pecked Homer on the cheek and squeezed past a suddenly amorous Dmitri, the hefty hostess, who smelled of sweat and Chanel.
Outside the night was airless, fragrant, the sky an enormous black colander held up to the light. Since it hadn’t rained in months, dust filled the streets, dulled the store windows examined by veering headlights, rose in lazy devils behind passing shoes. In a bridal store the mannequin of the bride herself was snub-nosed and blond, her hair bristling up under her veil at crazy shocked angles as though she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket. She was flanked by curious white cloth bouquets trailing white silk ribbons. Were they held by her bridesmaids? Ray had seen a woman bringing such a bouquet here on the plane from Athens. In that book he’d read, the exhumations of a dead person’s bones three years after death were compared to a wedding. The same songs were sung; the words varied only slightly. Both songs began with the words: “Now I have set out. Now I am about to depart….” Something like that.
On the corner a man was selling round green melons from a cart. Everywhere people seemed awake and watching—from a trellised balcony, from a waiting cab, from a rooftop café. In such a hot country people stayed up to enjoy the cool of the night. Kids, calling to one another, sped by on bicycles. In the square in front of the cathedral a whole line of taxis waited,
five drivers standing in a circle and disputing—what? Soccer? Politics?
Ray turned onto a deserted street lined with shops displaying lace trimmings and bolts of fabric and spools of thread. An old man with yellowing hair, worn-down shoes and no socks had fallen asleep with his feet up on his desk in an open-air stand that sold ex-votos in tin—a bent arm, an ear, an open eye, a soldier in World War I uniform and helmet—and also tin icons, the metal snipped away to frame crude tinted reproductions of the Virgin’s face. He also had long and short candles and something (incense?) wrapped in red paper cylinders, stacked high like rolled coins from the bank.
Cars with bad mufflers blatted and farted through town or throbbed beside a lit cigarette kiosk in front of the dim covered market. The cars were always full of teenage boys, but when they’d get out to buy cigarettes or to go into a bar to pick up a paper, he’d see they were fat or thin, usually big handsome guys with black mustaches or the first faint charcoal sketches of mustaches.
It struck Ray that it had been years since he’d seen guys this young. Expensive, childless Manhattan had banned them. Ray imagined that he was back in Findlay, Ohio, on a Saturday night, the dark silent streets suddenly glaring and noisy with a gang in two hot-rods. He forgot for a moment that he was forty; he felt he was sixteen, afraid of the hoods who’d driven in from Sandusky or even from as far away as Toledo. He was afraid and curious and contemptuous and excited as he darted along under the old trees, hoping he was invisible.
He crossed the street to avoid two strolling straight couples, and now he did feel forty. And queer. And foreign. He wouldn’t even know if they were gossiping about him. Worse, he knew he didn’t exist for them, he was invisible.
As he headed up the gently winding street toward the town zoo, he passed a lone young guy coming down toward him, who
stared at him hard, harder and longer even than the other Cretan men normally stared. The boy spat through his teeth as they passed. And then he stopped. Ray heard him stop behind him. If I turn around will he punch me?
When Ray finally turned around the young man was standing there staring at him.
“Ya,”
he said, that short form of
yassou
, the all-purpose greeting. Ray could see he was handsome with regular features, an upper lip pulled back to show white teeth made whiter by his mustache and a black beard that he was letting grow. He had on jeans and a denim jacket, and the jacket sleeves were tight enough to reveal well-muscled upper arms, not the netted cantaloupes Ray had for biceps, but longer, grooved haunches, the tightly muscled arms that the ancient Cretan youths had in those wall paintings at absurdly overrestored Knossos: murderously slim-waisted matadors.
He was either very tan or very swarthy. His hair was long and pushed back behind his ears. His slightly unshaved face (the look of the New York model who wears two days’ growth of beard as an accessory to his white silk pajamas), his obviously American jeans jacket and his long hair were the three things that made him look fractionally different from all the other young men in this city of young men.
He kept staring, but then when Ray looked away for an instant, he slipped into a side street. Ray wondered if he’d be jumped when he followed him. As he turned the corner, the boy was standing there and asked aggressively, “What you want?” and his faint smile suggested he already knew and that Ray’s desire was disgusting and entirely practicable.
Ray said, “You,” with the sort of airiness that could ruin a life, but that word apparently was not one of the boy’s dozen English words. He frowned angrily.
“Sex,” Ray said, and this time the boy nodded.
“But money!” he threatened, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. Ray nodded with a face-saving smirk he regretted
but couldn’t wipe away. “I fuck you!” the boy added. This time as Ray nodded his smile vanished, a little bit in awe at the mention of this intimacy, once so common, now so rare, so gravely admonished, so fearfully practiced in his plagued city.
“Profilatikos.
You buy. Here.” He pointed to the lit cigarette kiosk on the corner.
“No!
You
buy,” Ray said, the facetious smile back in place but genuine alarm in his heart.
“You,” the boy insisted, stepping into the shadows of a building.
Now all of his teenage qualms did come rushing back. He felt his fear of and fascination with the prophylactics dispenser he’d glimpsed once in a Kentucky filling-station toilet during a family trip through the Smokies. Or he remembered the time when he’d helped his mother turn back the covers for a married couple who were visiting them, and he’d seen under the pillow the raised circle of the rolled rubber in its foil wrapper. The very width of that circumference had excited him.
He said the word to the impassive middle-aged woman in the kiosk. She lowered her head on an angle, dropped her eyes, said,
“Ne,”
which means “yes” but sounds to English speakers like “no.” A second later she’d fished up a box that read, in English, “Love Party,” above a photo of a woman in provocative panties, one nyloned knee resting on the edge of a double bed.
Why rubbers? Ray wondered. Has he heard of our deadly new disease way out here at the end of the world, in a country where there are only two recorded cases, both of whom were visitors to New York? No, he must have in mind the old, curable maladies. Or maybe he just wants to dramatize our roles. I don’t mind. Rubbers are terribly 1958 Saturday night at the drive-in. Maybe he needs a membrane intact to suggest his own virtual virginity.
A moment later, Ray was pursuing the boy through deserted
night streets under big trees, big laurels so dry their gray-green leaves had started curling laterally. Distant motorbikes were test-drilling the night. The turn-of-the-century mansions lining those blocks were dilapidated, shuttered and unlit behind rusting wrought-iron balconies, although trimmed hedges proved at least some of them were inhabited. The smells of garbage on a hot night alternated with the smell of jasmine, at first sniff slightly sweet, then ruttishly sweet. The boy wouldn’t walk beside Ray, although Ray thought it must look much odder, this strange parade. They turned right off the boulevard and walked up, up a hill through residential streets. The boy’s Keds shone almost phosphorescently white in the dark. Ray was calculating how much money he had in his wallet, while in his heart, his suddenly adolescent heart, he was exulting: “George, I’ve escaped you, I’ve gotten away from you.”
In one sense he knew he was a slightly sissified middle-aged New York muscle queen somewhat out of her depth. In another sense he was the teenage debating-team captain in love again with Juan, son of a migrant Mexican worker who’d been brought to northern Ohio to pick fruit. The first confused conversation with Juan, the visit to the workers’ compound, the smell of cooking chili, the sight of candles burning even by day before the tin shrine of the Virgin … The one thing certain was that whatever was going on in Crete came before or after George and precluded George.
As they walked along, the boy clicked a key chain, vestigial worry beads. Cats were everywhere, gliding in and out of shadows, daintily pawing black plastic garbage bags, slithering through gaps in fences, sitting on top of parked cars. Twice the boy stopped and scented the path—and now he looked like an Indian brave. Or so Ray thought, smiling at his own way of leafing through his boyhood anthology of erotic fantasies.
They reached what looked like a schoolyard, dark and empty
because it was summer and night, but otherwise like any schoolyard in Ohio—broken concrete playing area, an orange metal basketball hoop dripping rust stains onto the wood backboard, peeling benches, a toilet with separate entrances for boys and girls, a high fence surrounding the whole. The boy scrambled over the fence in two quick steps up and a graceful pivot at the top. Ray followed fearfully, awkwardly (“Here, teach, lemme give you a hand”). The boy gave Ray his hand and produced his first real smile, as dazzling as a camel boy’s (a new page in the erotic anthology flipped open). His skin was surprisingly warm and plush and there were no calluses on his palm. Homer had told Ray that if parents could afford the luxury they preferred to shield their kids as long as possible from work. The boys, their adolescence extended well into their twenties, sat idly around the harbor at night, trying to pick up foreign girls (the sport was called
kemaki
, “harpooning”).
When they ducked into the toilet, in the second that Ray’s eyes took to adjust to the deeper dark, he walked by mistake right into the boy. They both gasped, the boy laughed, maybe a bit insultingly, his teeth lit up the room. Ray started to draw away but his hand had brushed against what could only be a big erection, “big” because of normal size; according to gay logic the boy’s youth, the night, the danger, the fact he would be getting some money later on, all these things made it “big.” Ray noticed the boy had already opened his fly. Out of eagerness?
Ray wanted him to be eager.
And then Ray, a famous beauty in his own right, a perennial hot number, hard to please, easily spooked by a maladroit cruiser, pursued throughout his twenty years of gay celebrity by hundreds of equally beautiful men, that elite corps of flight attendants, junior executives and models—this Ray (he was trembling as he knelt) knelt before what could only be white
Jockey shorts, yep, that’s what they were, luminous under undone fly buttons, tugged the jeans down a notch, pulled down the elastic waist of the underpants and tasted with gratitude the hot, slightly sour penis. He whose conscience years of political struggle had raised now sank into the delicious guilt of Anglo fag servicing Mexican worker, of cowboy face-fucked by Indian brave, of lost tourist waylaid by wily camel boy. He inhaled the smell of sweat and urine with heady, calm pleasure. He felt like an alien being recharged by spaceship transfusion.
His mouth had been dry with fear. Now the penis striking his palate drew forth a flow of water. His knees already ached where he knelt on the wet cement floor. He took the boy’s limp, hanging hand and laced his fingers into his. He looked up to catch the glance, but his eyes were shut and his face blank, which made him look much younger and almost absurdly unintimidating. At a certain point Ray pressed the unopened rubber into the boy’s hand. Like a child peeping through a keyhole, Ray continued to kneel to watch the boy breaking open the packet and methodically unrolling the rubber down the length of his penis. He got it going the wrong way, lubricated side in, and had to start over. Then the boy gripped him from behind and Ray felt the invasion, so complex psychologically, so familiar but still painful or pleasurable to accommodate, he couldn’t tell which, he’d never known which. The boy breathed on his shoulder; he smelled of Kantaki Fried Chicken.