Chapter Thirty-Seven - Mike
I never expected to miss Roy as much as I did that June. With love and lust blossoming all around me, I couldn't wait for the Fourth of July break. So with the fourth on a Tuesday, I planned to Williamsburg midday on Thursday to pick him up and drive him home. He had a week plus the two weekends off and wouldn't have to be back at school until the tenth. I tossed and turned all Wednesday night and left about four-thirty in the morning. I was early enough to avoid the Richmond traffic and arrived about seven at the college. I had to pound on the door of his room to wake him up.
“You're not Roy.” Somebody else answered, somebody disappointing.
“You must be Mike. Come on in. Roy's still asleep.”
“No, I'm not. I just wanted you to answer the door. The middle of the night stuff is always for you.” Roy sat up and squinted at the sunlight.
“It's not the middle of the night,” I said. “It's seven-oh-nine, to be precise.”
“Mike, this is Tyler. Tyler, Mike. Come here.” He grabbed me when I was in range and pulled me onto his bed. I turned to glance at Tyler but Roy pulled me into a kiss. “It's ok,” he said, “Tyler likes to watch.”
“I'm dressing as fast as I can,” Tyler answered, eyeing Roy's erection which was poking out of his boxers. “I'll do the rest in the hall,” he hurrying out of the room barefooted.
“Do I have bad breath?” Roy asked.
“No,” I answered and immediately got another kiss.
“Good, I'll kiss you now, 'cause I will have after I blow you.”
“I don't mind,” I told him eager for whatever was going to come next.
“You don't mind the breath or the blow job?” Roy asked.
He looked so hot, mostly naked, still waking up, struggling out of the boxers. The next half hour was so sweet I can't even talk about it. There aren't any words except I love you. And I told him that a lot.
“You'll have to kill a few hours. I have three classes and they're spread all over the campus, so I'll meet you here about three, if that's ok.”
I agreed and took a little nap in his bed after he left, waking up again around nine-thirty. The room was a typical college room, I guessed, the first one I had ever been in and maybe a little neater than I expected at least on Roy's side. Tyler's side was covered in drawings - landscapes, buildings, bowls of fruit, and people. There was even one of Roy, naked from the waist up. He looked very handsome in it and it made me wonder if maybe Tyler had a little crush on Roy.
Ok, I thought, let's go see Williamsburg which is a very handsome, sort of historic town. Almost nothing in it is authentic, but almost everything is a great reproduction of a seventeenth-slash-eighteenth century colonial town. It's the best that a lot of time and Rockefeller money could produce. I saw the Governor's Palace and then went to the Art Museum which has a lot of genuine colonial furniture, even if the building isn't. It was early and the museum was nearly empty.
“If you appreciate the furniture, the best time to come is the winter,” a woman attendant said to me. “Then only the serious people visit.”
“What I like is seeing the personality of the maker in the piece,” I told her. “Could I look at the underside of this drawer?” She pulled it out for me. “Yes, this was a patient man. Sometimes the planing is obvious; but here, everything is finished, even the invisible parts.”
“Are you a woodworker?” she asked.
“I like to think so. I make some furniture at my farm out west near Harrisonburg. It's a lot more fun than messin' with the chickens.”
“The mountains are so pretty in that part of Virginia,” she added, probably just being polite. Tidewater people do not hanker for the Blue Ridge.
“Wow! What happened here?”
“A four-hundred pound tourist from North Carolina sat on a chair intended for a one-hundred pound Virginia lady. Our man says its hopeless to repair.” She pronounced North Carolina carefully, as if the words were poison.
“Could I try? To repair it, I mean?”
We spent the next hour in negotiations with 'their man' saying, “He can have it. It's just scrap lumber now” and me saying, “I'd like to try.” I gave the museum my cousin Frank's card for the construction company since I didn't have one of my own and left with the parts of the chair. I put them in the cab of the truck to keep them out of the weather and began walking back to Roy's room. I could hardly believe my eyes as I walked through a small copse of pine trees and undergrowth. A flasher! Some boy jumped out of the bushes, pulled down the front of his pants and then scampered away.
First I was shocked and then disbelieving. And then I laughed to myself. I've been flashed! It was a strange feeling, like a sort of rape, but totally harmless. Then twenty paces later he did it again. I was more prepared this time. There was no time to pull my belted, buttoned, and zippered pants down, so I pulled my shirt up and flashed my belly at him. A voice from the bushes said, “You're not supposed to do that.” Like I had hurt his feelings.
“I'm the one that's supposed to be annoyed,” I answered.
“But you weren't.”
“Maybe I was. How do you know?”
“Why are you talking to me? You're supposed to run away.”
“You're interesting and I've never been flashed before.”
“You like my penis?”
“No, you, not your penis. Come out and talk to me.”
“This is weird. I'm afraid.” He walked through the brush at the speed I was walking the path. I could see fragmented glimpses of him through the foliage. He looked incredibly young.
“How old are you?”
“I was born in 1841,” he said, “ but I didn't start school until 1883.”
“I don't think so.”
“Those are my years, not your years.”
“How old are you in my years.”
“Nineteen or maybe twenty. I was found nineteen years ago, but I was about six months old then, they say. I have a developmental defect, they also say.”
“Physically you look just like everybody else.”
“I do not relate well to other people.”
“There's a bench here. Sit and talk to me.”
He emerged. He did not look nineteen or twenty, he looked younger, but I couldn't even guess how much younger. I told him so. He showed me an state ID verifying his age.
“Nice picture,” I told him. “Looks just like you.”
“Want to see my penis again?”
“No. I'm thinking you need to find a better way to show it to people. A way that won't get you arrested and put away.”
“I already live in a half-way house. I'm already half put-away. But I know how to get out.”
“What if you had drawings of yourself. People always admire art, even nude art. It doesn't disturb them like real live naked boys.”
“Isn't that pornography? Dirty pictures of naked boys?”
“Not big hang-on-the-wall pictures. They're called art, even if they aren't very good. And I know an artist who might could make some of those drawings for you.”
“I show people the drawings and they say, 'What an artistic penis you have!' Is that it?” He sounded unconvinced. “You sure you don't want to see my penis again? What if it isn't artistic?”
“Trust me.”
It was easier to get the flasher to trust me than Tyler. “He's the flasher? The one who hangs around the campus? What's his name?” and then “You want me to WHAT? Are you crazy?”
“I think we can call him 'The Flash' for now,” I explained. His ID card had said Otis Karl, but I decided to let Otis reveal what he wanted.
“The Flash. Cool!” That was Otis's opinion.
“Take your shirt off,” Tyler requested. Otis stripped. “Dude!” Tyler commented. Otis had a nicer body than either of us had expected.
“Ok, I'm going to read this book and you two can start making art,” I told them. I lay on Roy's bed that faced the other way and listened. At first they were quiet, but Otis became impatient.
“How's it coming? Can I see?”
“No, wait … I said, wait!”
“Hmmmm ... Is my penis really that big?”
“You want to make a good impression don't you? Now sit down over there.”
After a few moments of silence, Otis asked, “How big is yours? Let me see.”
“No, turn your head a little more toward the window.”
“Mike let me see his,” Otis lied.
“Not true,” I said.
“Come on, flash me!” Otis teased.
I heard a rustle of clothing and Tyler said, “There … OK?” And then, “DON'T TOUCH IT!”
“It gets hard fast,” Otis observed. “Yours stands up straight. Mine just pokes out. See?”
“I'm gonna wait for Roy outside,” I said and hurried out of the room trying not to notice the two boys holding each others cocks.
Roy showed up about an hour later and saw me on the lawn. “You should have waited inside,” he said. “It's air conditioned.” He grabbed his stuff and we began the drive west. “I wonder where Tyler was. I wanted to tell him when I'd be back.”
I told him about hooking up Tyler and The Flash. He was disapproving. “What harm can it do?” I told him.
Monday we heard the news report that two men had been charged with indecent exposure in Newport News, one a William and Mary student and the other an escapee from a half-way house. I tried not to laugh because Roy didn't think it was funny at all.
