First came the fucking car service that I shared to the airport with two girls from New Jersey who lived on the hall upstairs from us. I thought that I'd probably do some mild flirting during the ride, just to boost my ego and make us all feel good, but by late afternoon I was tired and hoped that they'd be the same way. Instead, they were close and giggly and loud, excited to get home to their parents and high school friends and old boyfriends. They were coated in perfume or shampoo or hairspray or whatever the fuck it is that makes some girls smell like a mix of flowers, fruit, powder and rubbing alcohol. By the time I stumbled out of the car to the airport curb, I'd smelled enough.
My 6 p.m. flight was delayed so long that we didn't board until about 8:15, and then when we taxied out to the runway, the pilot came on the speakers to say that we were number twenty-six for takeoff. In that stale air, I convinced myself that I was coming down with a flu.
The flight was bumpy, so I couldn't sleep.
When we got within the New York perimeter, we circled New Jersey and Northern Pennsylvania for what felt like hours before they finally cleared us for landing. As the plane descended over Brooklyn toward LaGuardia, I looked out my left-aisle window to the Manhattan skyline, at which point I felt an addict's exhausted relief at coming home. I hadn't lived in the city since I was three, when my parents had their second son, my dad made law firm partner, and everyone decided we should move from the Upper West Side to Westchester. Even so, I was kind of crazy about the city. I hadn't seen it since the towers had been knocked down about 11 weeks before. I should have felt sad and reflective, but I guess I was just happy to see all the lights on, with everything still busy, bright and overwhelming.
(Right -- because what you want is the part where the college freshman freaks over 9/11. The crazed-by-global-affairs chapter isn't happening until later, so don't get ahead of yourself with the excitement.)
By the time I finally got out of the goddamn plane and walked through the fucking terminal -- feeling like the smell of DC-10, like old coffee and old upholstery and carpet from an old shitty van, like all of that was gassing out of my pores -- I wanted to lie down on my parents' couch for 48 hours and sleep. I was sweating the sweat that stress gives you even when you're body's cold.
My mom and my eleven-year-old brother waited in the terminal. She seemed excited to see me. Evan wore a hooded sweatshirt with my school's name on it, which was nice and flattering, but in my nasty mood, I wished he didn't try so hard, because sometimes that just made it worse.
"Is Dad in the car?" I said.
"No," she said, sounding weary. "Your dad's been at depositions in Chicago and woke up at four this morning. He's sleeping at home. We didn't find out how late you were until we got to the airport. So we've just been waiting. It's okay, though. I'm just glad you made it."
They had been inside LaGuardia for at least four hours. Even though my reflex was to be annoyed with them, and it was compounded a few times over by my hours in airline hell, the image of Evan and my mom sitting silently, flipping through magazines and crosswords, eating Burger King for dinner while they waited to see me, forced me to disarm. That was loyalty.
My high school friends were out in the city that night. Rick and Sanjay, and Andy Trafford and Danielle, probably a bunch of others, had been planning to meet somewhere downtown, where they'd get into an NYU bar or someplace in the East Village that would turn a blind eye to eighteen year olds. When my mom drove over Triborough and I glimpsed at the Midtown skyline and the condos on the Upper East Side, I felt angry that I wasn't down there with them. I was so tired that even if it had been possible, it wouldn't have been possible.
They'd been leaving me voicemails over the course of the night, sounding increasingly drunk and excited, recommending that I should come downtown to hang out no matter how late it was, and suggesting that I was a pussy if I didn't.
Even if I could have made it, I was going to be up too early the next morning, because my parents had decided that we'd spend Thanksgiving at the apartment of my dad's best friend. They'd known each other since law school and were partners at the same law firm. This guy, Phil Epstein, had a son a couple years older than me and a daughter still in high school. My parents were close to that family, and I'd known the kids forever, but we weren't really friends. The relevant Thanksgiving detail was that they lived on Central Park West just north of Columbus Circle, in the kind of place that you'd imagine a Wall Street lawyer owning. The apartment had a view overlooking Central Park and the balloons of the Thanksgiving Day parade.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, and it turned into a kind of a culture shock.
When you're in college, you're only around people your own age, and the idea of parents and families, and old people and kids, starts to seem foreign. Sam Frost pejoratively called it "real people world." Three months, and my life had revolved around funny, vulgar arguments with Sam Frost; Thursday nights getting off with Matt Canetti; getting wasted on weekends; writing album reviews for the school paper; and trying to be the smartest boy in every discussion section. And then suddenly my ass is getting rolled out of bed at seven in the morning after I fell asleep at two, and I'm packed into my mom's SUV with middle brother Rob (who hates me, who I don't like either) and happy Evan, and my dad (who's been litigating some awful securities case, who's just glad as balls to have a day without clients and chaos) and my mom with her book of Times crossword puzzles. And I don't shave, because fuck you, and we're driving down to the city to spend the day with the family of another goddamn lawyer and of course traffic and parking are chaotic because of the parade, and I don't give a shit about a giant inflatable Snoopy balloon, but I'm trying not to be an asshole or even a little passive-aggressive, because I recognize they're not doing this to spite me.
Then I'm stuck handling these boring questions from people in their mid-fifties about how I'm liking school and whether being in the Midwest is an adjustment, at which point I get defensive about my college choice and find myself speaking bullshit like, "It's in the Midwest, but the town kind of reminds me of the Village. There are a lot of people there from the City." There are others in attendance with kids around my age who go to places like Princeton, but to places like Emory and Lehigh, too, and I convince myself that they think I'm weird for turning down Dartmouth and Penn (which I'm convinced they know all about) and are just pretending to think it's interesting. When the big balloons passed the window and people gathered to watch and comment, I made a point of hanging back. I chugged coffee, feeling bitter and hungover, even though I hadn't had anything to drink since the Saturday before.
All I'd wanted was to sleep in late. Maybe entertain Evan by throwing a football on our back lawn while he talked about sixth-grade basketball. Have an early dinner, take a nap, hang out with my friends that night while we watched football or a DVD. Instead, I was trapped being polite to a lot of people who didn't have anything to do with me.
In the early afternoon, Andy Trafford called my cell phone. I didn't pick up. He left a voicemail asking if I was doing anything that night. I didn't want to think about entertaining Andy, so I ignored his call. Between the parade and dinner, most of the party took the elevator down and walked around Central Park. I hung to the back of the group.
"Thanks for putting up with this," my dad said, dropping alongside me. "We didn't really think about it. I've just been busy as hell, and we didn't want to put together something big. I should have thought that maybe this wasn't the first thing you wanted to do."
"Whatever," I said. "I just hate talking about myself and having to answer all of these questions."
"You're a good sport."
"At least the Park is nice," I said.
Our group had made its way to the Sheep Meadow. When you get into an open vista in the Park, you feel like it's the bottom of a valley of tall buildings. There were a lot of families with their kids, spilling out from the parade, maybe walking over to the zoo. My dad complained to me about being a lawyer and rubbed the side of his face in discomfort. We passed what looked like a quartet of gay guys in their thirties, which made me arch my back and give them an angry look; at that moment, the sight of them triggered disgust in my heart.
Eventually, I ended up dozing on the corner of a couch in the crowded living room of that apartment. At dinner, I made a point of turning down a glass of white wine (my parents wouldn't have cared, but it seemed like I needed to make a point) and when the day wrapped at around seven, I slept in the car ride back to my parents' house, with the grease of my forehead leaving a smear on the passenger's side window.
It occurred to me that I could call Matt Canetti to commiserate. If anybody would have shared my tired frustration, it was probably him. But he was in Boston with his own family, and probably his own irritations to deal with, and the conversation would have been too much of a nuisance to be worth our time.
The next night I was drunk and exhausted, walking in the East Village after the last trains left Grand Central, waiting out the night to get home. My lips felt chapped and the cigarette habit that Matt Canetti was imparting left my clothes stinking and a scorched-broccoli flavor in the back of my mouth.
We played touch football in the afternoon, which involved people's brothers and guys who'd graduated high school a year or two ahead of us. I made a point of not bringing my middle brother Rob, even though guys from his class were there. After that we went to Rick's house to figure out a plan. I'll spare you the boring details, points of contention and phone calls, because the result was six of us catching a train down to the City and then taking the subway to Broadway-Lafayette. It took less than twenty minutes to find a half-empty bar on Second Avenue that didn't seem skeptical when six of us walked in and ordered a round.
In terms of keeping in touch, I hadn't been as diligent as the rest of them. Of course Andy was out in Berkeley, but the rest of them were a train ride apart from one another. Rick had taken the Acela from Philly to Boston to spend a weekend visiting Sanjay at Harvard. They seemed to know each other's friends and hook-ups. I'd been too sloppy to do more than send back two- or three-line e-mails asserting that things were fine, without any supplementing details. Rick wrote once seeming to suggest that he wanted to come out to catch a football game, but I'd demurred, indicating that maybe next year would be easier. I didn't know anything about the girl that Rick was hooking up with, or even that he was hooking up, or that Sanjay was basically at war with his roommate. Those things seemed to be common knowledge for everyone else.
Andy Trafford was the only one of them who I talked to with any regularity, and mostly that was about his sexual frustration. Once every couple of weeks we had a conversation that involved him crassly expressing a wish to ejaculate in the company of male cock, and then pressing me for dirty details about what I was doing with Matt, which, in turn, prompted me to utter variations on the phrase "fuck you."
"Just, like, e-mail me a picture of him," Andy once said.
"One, I have no pictures of him, and second, even if I did, absolutely not."
So seeing Andy that day, knowing that he knew what he knew and having done all of the things that we did, left me kind of on edge. The only two gay guys I knew enough even to talk to were Matt and Andy. Matt was completely compartmentalized, but Andy wasn't. Andy was the only link between dude fixation and the easier parts of my life, which was great when it was just the two of us, but otherwise made me want to steer clear.
And I guess I really wasn't at ease with that. I mean, I don't know what I thought he was going to say ("Hey, guess what? Joey's a homo!") but that didn't stop my imagination. What I wanted that night was just to sit around with friends who I'd known for 10 or 15 years, away from Matt Canetti and my issues and everything else that was preoccupying me at college, and I guess Andy's presence made that hard for me. Even if he didn't say anything, he was just a reminder of the things I wanted to shut out, if only for a long weekend.
What I did to make it easier was drink, and I drank a lot. I think I drank my first pint in 20 minutes and built momentum from there. I leaned my chair back against the corner of a wall, feeling some sweat cold on my forehead-
"-and I guess I'm not a math person," Danielle was saying, "which makes it really hard. I mean, I'm sure you remember how hard it was for me in A.P. calc-"
"-uh huh-"
"-and this is just killing me," she said. "I mean, I'm a smart person, right?"
"Yeah, of course."
"It's just that I feel so stupid. It's not what I'm good at."
"I wouldn't worry about math."
"College is turning out to be a lot harder than I thought."
"Yeah, but I mind it a lot less," I said. "I've got a Shakespeare class where we basically do a different play every two classes, which is tough, but I'd rather bust my ass on something that's interesting than study things I never cared about."
"You seem really calm."
"I'm just tired," I said. "It's weird being back."
"You've sort of fallen off the face of the earth," she said. "We were talking about that on Wednesday."
"Aww," I said, "I'm sorry. I've been pretty busy between classes, and I'm trying to do some work at the paper. The social life's been pretty demanding. I guess I haven't been hurting for stuff to do."
"I was saying that you have a girlfriend," she said.
"There's all of that, too," I said.
"Your love life was dead at the end," she said. "I didn't really get it, but I know you were more stressed out than most about getting into schools."
"I was just having fun hanging out with you guys," I said. "I'd gotten some things out of my system and there really wasn't much more left to offer me. Like, Rick thought it was kind of funny to date freshmen and sophomores, but I thought all those girls were idiots."
"God, I should have taken your attitude," she said, "instead of wasting my time worrying about-" She made an ugly face and moved her head in Sanjay'sdirection at the other end of the table. She took a cigarette out of my pack. "Whatever. He's one of my best friends now. It was just stupid of me to put so much into him when I knew he wasn't interested."
"Yeah, but you guys had fun. You love the fabricated drama." I lit her cigarette. "Besides, I wouldn't say that he wasn't interested. He was just pragmatic."
"God, that's your entire personality in a nutshell. 'He was just pragmatic.' You're so going to law school-"
"Yeah, then fuck me with lawn mower. Never."
"That's what my brother said."
"My dad's a lawyer. I know how awful that is."
Rick yelled from the other end of the table: "Cocksucker!" He pointed at me and then at one of the open pool tables.
I have problems with competitive situations. I can't play poker or card games or things like Monopoly -- I get too pissed off when a move works out poorly. (Even now, I can't gamble because of the ways I emote. The one time I played blackjack in a casino, a stern pit boss or security official or somebody like that addressed me after I screamed the word fuck and pounded a fist on the table.) Rick and Andy both had pool tables in their basements, which meant that they were significantly better than I was, and it drove me sort of crazy.
Andy and I played against Rick and Danielle. I had an easy shot on the five ball that tapped the corner and rested on the edge of the hole. "Goddammit!" I shouted.
"Nice to see that some things don't change," Rick said.
"Fuck!"
"Don't worry. It was a tough shot."
"Don't patronize me," I said.
"I'm not going to touch your balls," Rick said.
"They wouldn't do you any good," I said.
"I'm not going to even glance them," he said.
"You'd send his ball into the hole," Andy said.
"It never gets old."
Later that night Rick walked up to the bar with me. "I mean, I don't mean to sound earnest and shit, but you've been fucking hard to communicate with."
I was wasted by then. It made me feel guilty. I said that I'd be better.
"Nah," he said. "I was starting to wonder if maybe something was going on, if you were failing out or something fucked was happening."
"Not yet, motherfucker," I said.
The bartender brought our pints and I fumbled for money. I was drunk enough that I had to concentrate to see the 20 on the bill.
"Like, my sister had this friend who went to MIT and had kind of a nervous breakdown in her freshman year and another friend that got kicked out for dealing hard drugs out of his dorm room, so weird shit happens when people get to school. It's all okay, right?"
"I've just been, like, distracted and absentminded. But otherwise, I'd describe things as being great to very great."
"Okay, cocksucker. This was my one chance to be sure."
"Yes, I suck, as everybody's making clear tonight. I'll try to be better."
"Delicate little flower," he said. "I'm not being totally serious about the drug comment."
"I know," I said. I tried not to spill beer on myself as we walked back to our table. "If I think I'm going to flunk out or start dealing drugs from my dorm, I'll look to you for advice, counsellor."
The last train left at 1:53 in the morning, which would have had us at our parents' houses at about 2:45, but also posed the problem of transport from the train station, since we were all much too drunk to drive and even those of us with at least one lax parent would couldn't justify a wake-up call at 2:30 a.m. At a little after one, there was a quiet consensus that fuck it, you only live once, and that we'd stay out and chance it with trying to persuade a cab to take us back. I was so drunk that it seemed like all I did was hit the men's room and smoke cigarettes.
I felt a leg under the table brush against mine. I glared at Andy and stomped the foot closest to me.
"Goddamn it, fucker!" Sanjay said. "What was that?"
"Sorry," I said. "I thought you were Andy and that you did it on purpose."
"Jesus!" Sanjay pulled back in his chair. "Also, you can't stomp Andy and fuck up his running foot."
"But that fucker," I slurred, pointing a finger at Andy, who made a surprised face, "is just trying to, like, provoke and incite me."
"Cool it with the aggression," Rick said.
Andy was laughing at me.
I scowled at my empty glass and stayed quiet while they made fun of me. I take my lumps; I'm often an idiot.
About 90 minutes later we were outside in the cold trying to find a cab. I leaned against a brick wall for support. Danielle shivered and wrapped her face in a scarf. Andy put his arms around her shoulders to keep each other warm. They looked like they a couple.
We needed at least two cars. Rick tried to negotiate with a cab to take some of us home, but the driver asked for exorbitant fare and had a belligerent attitude. Rick shouted profanity at the driver as he sped away without us.
Andy pulled out his cell phone and dialed the car service of his dad's law firm. He requested three cars. One thing about our dad's jobs, they all had outside car services that supplied fleets of drivers and black sedans. My dad took the train down in the mornings, but most nights he was chauffeured home in a black car. I had a card with the number, too, but I'd only used it a couple of times. If I'd called for cars and charged it to my dad's work account, he probably would have just shrugged it off.
"Dumbass. Why'd you get three cars? We only needed two."
"But there are six of us," Andy said. "That's pretty tight."
"Glad your dad's paying and not mine," Rick said.
"Your dad's a fucking banker. He can pay for it more easily than mine."
Danielle whispered in my ear: "I hate these fucking, 'Your fancy dad is fancier than my fancy dad' conversations."
About ten minutes later, the first car came. Danielle and Sanjay left together, and right after that, the second car came. Rick and our friend Ethan got into the second car.
"I'll take care of drunk retard," Andy said.
"Are you sure?" Rick said. "I know how to handle him better. If he gets annoying, just punch him in the knee."
"I usually punch him in the face," Andy said.
"Later, fuckers," Rick said. "Call you tomorrow."
I stood shivering as we watched the car drive south on Second Avenue.
"Okay," Andy said. "Let's go."
"Where's our car?"
"I didn't call us a car yet. Let's go have another beer."
"Dude," I said, "I'm fucking exhausted, and I'm wasted." I thought to myself that I could all asleep on the sidewalk if I lost enough dignity to lie down. "I need to get home."
"I'm not going to, like, take advantage, if that's what you're worried about."
"I don't want to think about that other stuff right now."
First I went into a bodega and got a large cup of coffee. The hot paper cup warmed my hand. I needed the caffeine. Then we went into a bar that had only a couple dozen people inside. An old Ukrainian woman in a wig poured drinks. It was a quiet crowd with hipsters and neighborhood types, but the jukebox was loud, playing something by The Replacements. Andy got us two bottles of Miller Lite. We sat on stools in an empty corner by the window.
"I can't drink this," I said.
"Drink coffee then."
"Fuck, I'm tired."
"Where are you going to sleep?"
"I would've gotten in the car with Rick if I knew you were going to fuck around like this."
He drank from his beer and rolled his eyes. "No you wouldn't."
"I bet I would've."
"Fuck you then," he said. "You're there running around with some fucking hot boyfriend-"
"No no no. Don't say that so loud. That's not what he is."
"Yeah it is, that's what he is, and I'm sitting around doing nothing, so at least I get to sit here with you and live vicariously."
"What time do the bars close again?"
"Four, and it's not even three."
"My mom's going to kick my fucking ass."
"What's crazy," he said, "is that you started all of this, not me. You were all, 'Hey bro, feelin' hot in your sleeping bag?' and then I was, 'Duh.'"
"Shut up, dude, Why are you going over this again?"
"Because I'm, like, wasted and wound up," he said, "and there's still this kind of crazy thing -- right? -- that you had this idea that I, like, trapped you, and it's all my fault. Really it was you, like, all horned up and not getting to sleep and deciding it was time to do stuff."
"Having this conversation makes me want to vomit."
I did sort of want to puke. It was that feeling of the blood vessels getting tight in your nose, your face was too warm, and the air indoors went down heavy. This was before the smoking ban went into effect, and everything in me seemed to be sponging up the toxins of the smoky bar. My mom would complain about my clothes stinking.
"Someday somebody's going to kick your ass," he said. "I hope it's me."
I pressed the side of my face against the window just to feel cold. My torso was full like a beer barrel. "I'm not on a sitcom," I said. "You can't say something cute and then I'm giggly. I am conflicted, and dark, and tortured."
"No you're not. No one's who's actually conflicted and dark and tortured says that they're conflicted and dark and tortured. That's just your melodramatic way of acknowledging that you're retarded."
"I'm a complete and total retard. The whole situation is so completely retarded that I'm out of my mind." The air in that bar weighed five pounds per cubic foot.
"I agree with that," Andy said.
"I keep thinking to myself, 'Why me?' It's not like I'm into fashion or hairstyles or how colors look. I never gave a fuck about girly shit. I'm like," I paused. "How. The. Fuck. Did. This. Happen." That's how I said it. "This was not part of my plans."
"No. You can't plan for wanting dudes' cocks."
"So how did it happen? I guess it's better than coming down with ball cancer, of course."
"Boy," he said, "do I ever feel sorry for your boyfriend."
"That dude's even crazier than I am," I said. "He smokes ten packs of cigarettes a day and talks like a Marxist. It's all, 'Blah blah blah, I'm going to my frat party now, and military-industrial complex can suck my balls. Tristes Tropiques is the tits.'"
"Seriously?"
"God. Yes! Will you just call us a car so we can go home and stop talking about this?"
While Andy was dialing, I put on my coat to go out into the cold clean air. The outside air weighed significantly less. I breathed it in like I was drinking water. My eyes and throat felt better. I wanted to expel the bar smell. I inhaled through my mouth and exhaled hard out of my nose. We were somewhere on First Avenue near Houston. A cold breeze made my eyes water.
Andy almost lost his balance when he walked out of the bar. "10 minutes. Car 532."
"I want to walk around the block and not, like, stand still."
We passed guys with girls and groups of drunk guys and an old man escorting an old dog before bed.
"But you," I said, "you, you'll be totally okay. You're way better than I am. I'm smoking too much and drinking too much and studying too much. It seems like I spend, like, almost all of my time arguing with my friends. My friend Matt just kind of found me, but I don't even know what the hell I'm doing. I still don't know what's going on. Like, even when I get horny, I still feel like I wish it would all go away, and I feel like an idiot that it doesn't. It's kind of embarrassing. I feel pretty embarrassed by it. Don't you?"
"Nope," he said. "I've got nothing to be embarrassed for."
"You're lucky," I said.
"Just shut up. Sorry that I got you talking like this."
"What it fucking is, it's that all I wanted to do was come back here and just kind of crash. I just wanted to hang out and see everybody and not think about this shit. Instead I spent yesterday getting hauled in front of every fucking fat lawyer over fifty, and then tonight you got started with the entire shitshow. Congratulations. You got me."
And then we were on the Bruckner Expressway going north through the Bronx, sitting in the back seat of a sedan that smelled like fish and cigarettes, being driven by an Eastern European. We sat at opposite edges, like fighting siblings separated for the duration of a car trip.
I caught Andy glancing over. I was too drunk to be horny and I was completely annoyed with him, but I couldn't help it: I got boned. When I kicked him softly in the lower shin, pushing at him with the sole of my sneaker, it was like a junior-high flirtation.
"Stop," he said.
I kicked again.
"Quit it."
I did it again. He kicked back. We jostled below the knees. Then it stopped. He reached his hand over to the edge of my coat. I decided that the driver wasn't paying attention to us and that if he was, he couldn't see anything. Andy held onto my hand at the wrist.
"When we get to your parents' place," I said, "I'm going to get out for a second. I've got to take a piss pretty bad."
"Are you going to get out for just a second, or do you want to crash there? Nobody there will notice or care."
"I bet Rob is sitting up in my parents' living room hoping that he'll catch me coming home drunk, and then narc on me."
"Your brother really is a huge asshole," Andy said.
"Let's, like, decide when we get there."
But we didn't really decide. When we were there in the back seat, with Andy's arm kind of outstretched, I pulled it over a little more and held his hand against my hard-on. Andy signed the receipt while I jumped out of the car and ran to the side of the Traffords' house. I urinated against the exterior with half a boner. My semi had things all fucked up, so I was pissing horizontal in a difficult-to-manage spray. Andy came over to get me as I finished up, my dick still hanging out over my jeans and probably visible in partial silhouette.
He didn't touch it then, but he watched as I put it back into my boxers and zipped up. He took a couple steps closer, with his beer smell and clumsiness, and held my hard-on from the outside. Our bad balance almost sent us tumbling.
Andy fumbled with the keys and let us inside. We tiptoed to his room. With the bathroom door closed, Andy tried to take a leak while I rinsed with mouthwash and rubbed a wet washcloth at my face. I could smell my face being cleaned of bar odor. He was half-hard, too; he watched me scrub my face while his dick hung out.
Sometimes I can't tell if every dude around me is an exhibitionist, or whether I'm just a prude.
When we were back into his room he didn't go crazy making out with me or anything. He took my cock out of my jeans and my boxers and pressed the underside of my penis up against his. Andy unbuttoned his shirt and tossed off the gray Berkeley T-shirt underneath. It was nice to feel out his leanly muscled torso after having gotten used to Canetti's skin and bones. I pressed my hands against the ridges of his abs and his ribs. I lifted off my sweater and T-shirt so that our skin could touch. His skin wasn't as smooth and silky as Canetti's was, either -- he sweated a little more. There was more texture to Andy's body.
But he felt warm and comfortable and good, and after having gotten used to Canetti's sort of masterful calculations while hooking up and fooling around, it was simple to fumble with Andy, our cocks shoved up against each other while we both grinded clumsily, his balls flopping around on mine.
Andy came pretty quickly, of course. He hadn't hooked up with anybody since he'd last seen me in mid/late August. If he'd been dry-humping a mannequin, it probably wouldn't have required more than five minutes for him to spray. He groaned drunk and sloppily right before he let go, the first line of jizzflying hot and sticky up my chest and all over comforter, the second and third landing on my hips and his sheets. He kicked off his jeans and then pulled down on mine. He started giving me head. The sound of his lips sucking and smacking at my cock, like he was attacking a lollipop or blowing up a difficult balloon, got me turned on. I'm not sure whether Andy had gotten better at blow jobs from before, or whether he was just enthusiastic after a three-month dry spell, but whatever it was, it worked. He jerked himself off while he tried to take my shaft as deep into his mouth as he could. He made a gag reflex as the tip of my cock tickled at the back of his throat. Then he carefully pulled back. His tongue ran over the slit of my cock, slow and patient, like he was trying to absorb what he could as I felt my pre-cum rise out. I inhaled hard through my nose, and instead of smelling cigarettes, it was the coppery scent of Andy's cum on my torso and a whiff of whatever product was in his hair.
I whispered to him that I was going to cum. He took my dick out of his moth, and rubbed it tight and slow in the circle of his index finger and thumb. While I slowly fucked his hand, he took one of my balls into his mouth. When I came, it was pretty hard, too -- much more projectile than should have happened at 4:30 in the morning while wasted and dehydrated. If Andy had aimed my rod higher, it probably would have hit my face and my hair, but instead it sprang up benignly, leaving a line running from my solar plexus down to my navel.
This was enough for me. It was late. I was tired. The familiarity was cool and everything, but I wasn't the man coming across an oasis in the middle of the desert. I stayed hard and let Andy check out my dick for another 10 or 15 minutes before my body started to hurt from lack of sleep and excessive alcohol. It was Canetti's trick, and I got out of bed to put on my boxers and T-shirt, checking to make sure that Andy had locked his bedroom door before I did.
"Are your parents going to wake you up in the morning?" I whispered.
"No," he said. "I told you, it's not big deal. They'll probably make you stay for breakfast. Isn't that awesome? If you were a chick, there'd be all this drama, but they'll just assume that you crashed my room and that's it. Fuck, I wish we'd figured this out in eighth grade."
"Enough with the retrospective bullshit," I said, turning off the lights.
I woke up a couple times in the morning because Andy was leaving his fingerprints on my dick. I let it go for a couple minutes before shoving his hands off.
Sure, I stayed for breakfast, because Mrs. Trafford had donuts and made a great omelet with bell peppers, sausage and mushrooms. When I was fully dressed, she couldn't even tell that I smelled like her son's body fluid.
That night we hung out at Rick's place, shooting hoops in the cold of his driveway, then watching a DVD. Neither Andy nor I acknowledged anything weird, and I found myself enjoying the conspiracy.
His family spent Christmas in Paris, and we wouldn't see each other until the following summer. In between, Andy would enjoy a first male hook-up with somebody other than me, at which point, he was cleared for takeoff, and had better things to do then aimlessly ponder my genitals.
When my mom hugged me good-bye, she again noted that my jacket reeked of cigarettes.
I'd gone from being weary and relieved about getting home to weary and relieved about getting back to campus. The first thing that greeted me was Sam Frost and Chris Riis sitting in new beanbag chairs, playing video game hockey with cans of Molson Canadian next to them. Whatever it was I came back to, I was glad to have it.