IN MEMORY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR'S DEATH AND REDEMPTIVE RESURRECTION, GET READY FOR A TAINT TINGLING, BALL THROBBING, COCK STRETCHING SPECIAL EASTER WEEKEND PASSAGE OF IF I SHOULD FALL!!!
LOVE AND MARIJUANA
We’re going to be playing at a Bar Mitzvah up in Ammon,”
“That’s out first bar mitzvah,” Shane said.
“Where the hell is Ammon?” Hale Weathertop asked.
“About an hour or so northeast of here,” Brad shrugged. “Nehru’s aunt got us the gig.”
Nehru raised his hand and bowed.
“I forgot your mom’s family is Jewish.”
“L’Chaim,” Nehru said. “You all coming?” he asked Rob and Jill.
“I am coming,” Rob said. “For a while, at least.”
“I miss being a roadie,” Jill said. “Of course I’m coming.”
“You were so never a roadie,” Shane shook his head.
“I was,” she insisted.
Brad shook his head. “You weren’t.”
“If I can be a swinger,” Nehru said, “Jill can be a roadie.”
Brad looked at his friend, remembering summer, when he’d called himself a swinger and said cause he liked to swing with lots of people and was friendly, and he remembered them walking side by side on the beach and he wished to keep it there, but he remembered, his skin, his skin, his skin, and the two of them together, pressed so tight there was no separation, the frenetic energy of lovemaking, the two of them creating something, twisted in sheets, the gleam of sweat on their skins, the taste of Nehru’s mouth.
“Brad,” Shane called. “Earth to Brad.”
“Uh…” Brad tried to laugh it off. “I spaced out for a moment.”
He felt like he was falling even though he felt the ground under his feet. More to steady himself than to introduce the song, he began to strum his guitar.
“Niall! Niall! Niall!” she panted.
He put a finger to her lips and then bit his own and moaned. Sonia pressed down on his chest. He was on his back. He hoped no one heard the squeaking of the bed springs.
“You gotta—” he started. The sensation cut him off. “Yougottabe quiet,”
he pleaded.
It was coming to an end much too quickly. He had to learn how to control his body better. He gasped in his dark bedroom, relied on Sonia to put a hand over his mouth for him, and then turning his face to the wall, he groaned as he ejaculated.
Neither one of them moved for a long space, and then Sonia said, “We’re supposed to meet the gang at seven. We gotta go.”
With the same cloth that Sonia wiped herself, Niall wiped, and then pulled up his pants and he and Sonia took turns straightening up each other’s clothes, without turning on the light. He made the bed look better while Sonia fidgeted with her hair, wondering why he’d be so finicky and why couldn’t they turn the light on.
“If your mom comes down the hall and sees the light out under your door, she’ll really know something’s been going on.”
Niall straightened his beret and opened the door. Shrugging, he led Sonia out and then closed the door to his kingdom.
“Hell, I’m surprised she even let me come up into your room.”
Niall wondered about that too, but shunted it to the back of his mind.
“You sure you got everything?” Sonia asked at the head of the steps.
“Yes, dear.”
An hour later, at Lake Chicktaw, Niall was scrambling around in his backpack and swore. “Shit!”
They all looked at him, Sonia’s eyes were mildly amused.
“Yes, dear?” the girl said, tilting her head.
Niall gave her the dirtiest look he could muster and then told them all, “I left at home.”
“Shit!” Bill cried at home from the driveway.
Dena didn’t even care.
“Dena,” said Bill coming in. “Do you know where the manual is to the car?”
“In Niall’s room,” she returned, not looking up from her magazine. “He was studying so he’d know how to fix a car—when it comes time to drive a car.”
Without hearing the rest of the sentence, Bill went upstairs, opened Niall’s room and flicked on the light. It smelled like the windows needed to be opened more. He looked around the room, found the manual laying next to the stereo, and then, as he picked up the manual, found a twisted bag on the dusty stereo top.
“Well, well, “ Bill murmured to himself, assessing the contents of the bag.
He could envision himself ripping into Niall the next morning and then—just as quickly, he had not desire. He could envisage himself in possession of something he rarely had recourse to.
Bill looked around with a raised eyebrow, as if someone might be hiding in his son’s room, then pocketed the bag and, slapping his thigh smartly with the manual, flicked off the light and closed the door behind him.
Bill walked to the gas station on Market Street, and walking back he was sort of in a jaunty mood. Really, that night he was in a naughty mood. He was still dressed in suit and tie from work. The night air was warm but not cloying. A few cars raced up Market and across the Street, where Breckinridge officially ended, was the depressingly named Gray Morning apartment complex.
But that was if he made a turn across busy Market Street, to his left. He turned toward his right and was lost in the trees and quiet of the Breckinridge. Passing David’s house he wondered if his brother-n-law was meditating upside down, or something stupid like that. He thought of going to see his sister, but all too often she was a pain in the ass as well. Thom and Patti’s lights were on and he wondered if only three people needed a house quite that large, but then thought that they were good enough neighbors, really good people. It was a shame he didn’t know them better. He stared in the large picture window that showed the dining room, and then walked on. He went up the yard along the Lewis driveway and let himself into his own backyard through the side fence.
The Dwyers had a two tiered yard with a huge maple tree that stood in the middle at the end of the first drop. There was a row of other trees and then the back yard of the Mc.Carrens, and here Bill dropped down, his back to a tree he did not know the name of.
he took out the rolling papers. In college he’d only personally known one guy that used recreational drugs, and he had claimed that he did not know how to roll a joint. It had seemed an easy enough task to Bill. Now he saw that it wasn’t, but he also saw that if no one else could do it for you, you might have to learn to do it yourself.
And so he did. His first joint was a pathetic enterprise. He lit, tried to inhale, tried to light. When it was burning well he was shocked by the awful burning smell. He was afraid that the police might come at any moment, or the dean of Saint Alban’s college.
He puffed. Waited a second. No one was coming. So he puffed on.
Somewhere between concentration on inhaling and obsession with a beetle crawling up his shoe, Bill realized that he was high. Absently he looked to his left where one light was on in the Lewis house.
He wondered what they were doing.
Thom Lewis and his wife were laughing and the bathroom was filled with cigarette smoke.
“I told you we should open the door,” Thom said to his wife in his arms and between his legs as they lay in the bathtub. “Russell won’t be home tonight, and if he did come home... I can’t imagine that the sight of his parents taking a bath would shock him for life.”
“It would shock me for life,” Patti said, taking a drag from her cigarette and ashing on the tray she’d precariously placed on Thom’s right knee.
“Yeah, but look at your parents.”
“Watch yourself.”
“They could be lathering each other right now.”
“You’re really disgusting, you know that, Thom Lewis?”
Patti lifted the bottle of red wine beside the tub, swigged, and Thom, reaching forward said, “Don’t hog it, you drunk.”
“You don’t deserve vino,”
“Fine,” Thom took a swift puff from his cigarette and leaned back, feigning indifference.
Patti gave in. Thom swigged from the bottle and sank lower, his wife in his arms.
He began to wash her gently, gathering up the lather floating on waters, washing her arms and her back, her neck, kissing her ears. He began to murmur.
“Oh, Frank, Oh Sara, Oh Frank, Oh, Sara—”
“Stop that!” Patti laughed and elbowed his thigh. Thom grazed her neck.
“Don’t stop that,” she said.
“Remember when you and Chayne and Felice came over to Zahm Hall that one night, and I was trying to get this job with... I can’t even remember the company now, and I had a suit and tie on... Everything… And I was showing them around. But the three of you were in the chapel and you all started—I don’t know what you were doing...” Thom took a drag from his almost extinguished cigarette.
“We were playing exorcism.”
Thom laughed and hsook his head, “And I walk in and Chayne’s shaking holy water all over Felice, and she’s crying, “I’m melting! I’m melting!” and you’re kneeling the middle of the floor singing—”
“Ave Maria! Oh, my God, I thought you’d never forgive me for that!”
“I almost didn’t, Patti. The look on that man’s face. And then you get up off the floor and introduce yourself as my girlfriend. ‘And these are my friends,’ you say, judt as kind as you please.”
“I thought you hated Chayne for that.”
“I did. For a long time. I don’t think I saw the humor in that whole thing until just now.”
Thom leaned closer to his wife and hugged her. The ash tray was no longer on his knee.
“When you’re younger,” he confided to her. “it’s so many stupid things that are important to you.”
Patti reached back to touch her husband’s hair, still soft, still dry. They rocked, Thom’s eyes closed, and he whispered to her that he wanted to make love tonight.
“I gathered,” she returned.
“Hum?” Thom’s eyes opened.
“Your not so little friend downstairs has been poking on my back for the last twenty minutes.”
“Well, he’s happy to see you,” Thom said drowsily. “Now wash my back, and we’ll call the tub quits.”
He stood up and straddled her, a shower of sudsy water washing down into the tub. Patti watched the suds and water glisten over the roundness of his hirsute buttocks, watched his genitals hanging heavy and wet over her head before he sat down in the water before her. Only twenty years could make this so ordinary, and so beautiful in the ordinariness.
She scrubbed Thom’s back and neck and massaged him, and he moaned and told her it felt so good and she was sure that this was lovemaking too. She said, “I saw this couple today in the library. They were so happy—especially the man, and I was happy for them. I thought, how good it would be if everyone was that happy. The two of them reminded me of us—only young. But, I suppose they weren’t that young. Actually, the woman looked like she was close to our age.”
“Well, Patti, we’re not exactly relics.”
“No, but we’re not exactly fresh off the assembly line either.”
Suddenly she dunked Thom in the water and he shot up, spluttering, “What the hell was that for?”
“For the earlier remark about my parents—which I’m sure you thought I’d forgotten. Besides, you needed your hair washed.” Patti began scrubbing her husband’s head and Thom reached for the towel to dry his face.
“Guess who came to me today for an appointment. No, I won’t make you guess. Dena Dwyer.”
“It makes sense,” Thom said grimly.
“Um?”
“I carpool with Bill, remember?”
“Is he as unhappy as she is?” Patti asked. “I always thought she was such a bitch, but today I felt really bad for her. I wanted to help her. She’s coming over next Friday. I don’t even know that we got anywhere. What’s going on with Bill?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know.”
“Whaddo you mean, you don’t know.”
“Honey, we’re men. Men don’t talk about things like that.”
“Don’t make me dunk you again, Thomas!”
“Well, it’s true,” Thom said weakly.
“I know,” Patti said at last. “If women don’t know each other they don’t either. And not as many women do as used to. Thom, my life isn’t Steel Magnolias. Women do all that unity and sharing and girl power bullshit in the movies. In real life we got a hard way to go too. Not, maybe, as hard as men. Because you all aren’t supposed to have feelings.”
“Unless you’re Dave Armstrong, who’s probably beating on a bongo right now.”
“You know I caught Bill Dwyer staring into our window tonight?” said Patti. “He didn’t think I saw him, but I did. He seemed so lonely.”
They drained the tub, showered, began to make love right there, came directly into the bedroom, and Thom lay his wife down and didn’t care that they weren’t dry or that they’d make the sheets wet.
“No,” he said, “Don’t turn off the lights.”
“Thom!”
“I want to see you. I need to see you tonight.”
Make noise. You can make noise. Taste this, taste that, the eyes, the lips, the necks, the breasts, the arms and yes, don’t stop, the hands clawing down the back, raking his ass, bringing him further in. Slow, be slow. No, not slow, not, not , oh, my God! Oh, my God! Thank you God!
Stamped on the almost white morning sky was the fingernail of the shining white moon. Opening his eyes in lovemaking he had seen it, and then was unable to close his eyes again. All of the days since Rob had come to him felt like the sun. Tonight, in the house that was quiet when Anigel stayed with her sister and Russell was staying over with friends, Rob had come to him, he had undressed and straddled him and taken Chayne’s hands to his sides, up and down his ivory chest.
“Who’s your blue eyed boy?” he whispered, leaning down to kiss him. “Tell me who’s your blue eyed boy?”
Rob’s eyes were merry like an elves and his skin was cool to the touch, but when Chayne’s hands remained on it, warm with the heat beneath, warm with the beating heart that had slept in this bed beside him all of these weeks.
Coolness and predictability, a sort of invulnerability was what Chayne knew, what defined him in this life, that and being ahead of the game and ahead of everyone around him, but he found that he was never ahead of Rob and these days, never invulnerable to him. The September coolness came through the window, but the heat of the bed, or Rob’s limbs moving with him as they strove together was more than a match, and that… crescent… of moon… was like the light at the very tip of…
Chayne gasped as his head went into Rob’s damp shoulder and their bodies contracted and slowly released together, both of them shudder, holding each other more than making any great noise and climax overtook them. Even when it was done it was not done, and they lay in the bed, fingers still linked, hands still touching.
“I told Jill,” Rob’s voice was rusty, uncertain, not from the telling but because it was hard to speak after what they had just done.
“Well, at least I told her that I couldn’t be anything like a boyfriend.”
“I imagine,” Chayne cleared his throat, feeling the same almost inability to speak, “I suppose we’ll tell everyone. Everyone who matters. I never intended to hide it.”
“But you never intended to tell it either.”
“Well, there you go,” Chayne said. In the dark they lay face to face, only able to see the shapes of noses, lips, the fluttering of eyelids. “We never meant it to happen.”
“Rob, Look over there,” Chayne said, gesturing over Rob so that he had to turn around.
“The table.”
Rob stretched, stood up and went to it and Chayne looked over his young, narrow body and already he longed for him again.
There was a pile of folders and notebooks and bound sheaves of typed papers, and Rob look from them to Chayne.
“If you want them,” said Chayne. “those are all these things I did between high school and when I started college, the original Chayne.”
Rob had been absently scratching his ass and now he turned to his lover.
“Only if you want them—”
“Chayne!” Rob said.
Chayne propped himself up on one elbow.
“And they wouldn’t really give you any tips, except for how not to write.”
“Chayne, shut up!”
Rob came back to bed, kissing him hard on his mouth.
“I love you. You’re the best!"
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS..... THAT'S ALL FOLKS
