ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
PART ONE
Jay Strickland thought he would be more terrified than this if he were ever in a blizzard. There was snow back home in Lassador, and maybe you could even call it a blizzard, but a blizzard in the city was not like a blizzard in North Dakota where neighbors were two miles away and they were neighbors you didn’t know anyway. He had never known the world was so big until taking a bus out here. He knew in his head and from logic—but how far did logic ever go?—and from films that the world was big and that this land was big, but it was not until he was under what people called “big sky”, that he understood.
The sky back home was big. All sky was big if you looked at it, the sky on the train was big when it took him out of the city. But soon trees came in and towns came in and the sights of the world below obscured the view above. For hours and hours there had been nothing, and coming here there had been nothing. And this was the first time, as he stood in the prairie, outside of the house, that he could see the weather being made, as by the hand of God, and the weather spreading itself out.
But now the weather had come and terror didn’t come with it. Anger did not come either. All of those feelings that in a smaller world arrived had no place in this very big moment. Something like hope was here, and Jay knew the only reason it was present was because he could not despair. There was no room for it.
“If I despaired I would have to despair of everything, and if I despaired of everything I would have to kill myself, and there’s nothing here to do it with.”
I could stand outside and let that snow do it.
In a place like this, the snow might end up doing it anyway. All this way from Lassador that wasn’t New York and wasn’t LA and wasn’t even Columbus, but was home and was a place where he did not expect to die. All this way to come to a place where he looked out the window and saw snow driving white and grey and finally absolutely dark past the windows, all this way to find Michael Cleveland.
He left me, and does that make me a fool that in response I came all this way to find him? When he left, I did not try to stop him. The last year had been hard. I woke up one morning and he was packing and he said, ‘This doesn’t work. I mean it doesn’t work for you. It works for me just fine.”
We were always of the same mind. I never had to say, “What do you mean?” He never had to explain himself.
“We could be like this forever,” Michael said. “You could be the nursemaid to my crazy. I won’t have it.”
I did not stop him. That would have only been pretense, or I would have been one of those people who needs the crazy, what they call codependents. And I wasn’t codependent. I wanted my healthy Michael, and I wanted the joy of our first years, before the turn had taken place and things had gotten harder and harder and he was right, I would have stayed forever, and so because I could not leave, he did.
“Where are you going?” I had asked him.
“To my Dad’s.”
“Michael,” I began and stopped myself.
“He stood there with shirts in his hand, waiting to put them in his suitcase.
“Your dad’s is no place to be crazy in. At least go be with your mom.”
Michael kept packing He said nothing. He filled two cases. He said, “Is it okay if I come back tomorrow for other stuff?”
“Michael, you can come back as much as you want to.”
It was funny how I never called him Mike or Mokey. He just was not that, the same way I was never James. Michael and Jay, Jay and Michael.
I opened the door for him and closed it after him with not so much as an embrace. An embrace would have been a hug. A hug would have been a kiss. A kiss would have been lovemaking. We would have put off what needed to happen for another day, and it needed to happen. We both knew it.
I was never a shouter, so I went to our room—my room now—and got the phone and called him. I looked out the window and saw him, beside his car, pick up the phone.
“Call when you’re at your mom’s.”
“She’s only a half hour—” he stopped. “Okay. I will.”
What I remember and what seems important to tell is that Michael kept paying rent. I feel like I had to let you know that. Like I have to stand up for him. We got this house together and I had no plans of losing it. Even though he wasn’t there, his money was. But by then I was used to paying. In the last year he was sporadically employed and after he was gone, he was far more dependable that when he was here.
Dependable. I don’t even want to say that because I did not depend on Michael Cleveland. I loved him, and that’s something different. After he was gone, I was still seeing him once or twice a week, and there was air in my life and I hated to say that because it was like I had been suffocating before, and well, I imagine I was. Terrified, terrified for Michael and what he would do to himself. Terrified that I would wake up and he wouldn’t’ be there. The first few nights I had those dreams over again and I woke up, and was in a mild terror because he indeed was not there. And then I remembered why he was gone, that he was across town with his mother, that there was no reason for him to be here, and I felt lighter waking up without him, I felt… light.
Three months after he had left, we were at lunch, and Michael said, “I’m going back to Morelton.”
Morelton was the institution he’d been in when we were teenagers.
“I’m going to get my head screwed on right. I need to get my head screwed back on.”
I didn’t say anything for a while and then I said, “Michael, I don’t think it’s like that. I don’t think you can just get fixed.”
“I know that,” he said gently, touching my head, “but I feel like my head’s gotten a little wobbly in the last few years, and I can get it reattached, straightened every now and again.”
And then he said, “Do you love me?”
“What a question?”
“I mean, do you love me? Because if you do you’ll understand I didn’t want to leave. I want to be sane again so that we can be together again.”
We had been best friends. We had grown up together. Michael had been my lover for seven years. I was twenty-five at the time. I knew I shouldn’t want someone to build their life around me.
I told him, “That can’t be your only reason. There’s got to be another reason.”
Michael looked away from me and he frowned. He drummed his fingertips on the table between us and then he said, “No, Jay, that’s really my only reason. I’d like to be mature and creative and say that I had a lot going on in my life, but I just want to be sane so we can get back together.”
Oh, Michael the wind is howling and the house almost feels like it’s shaking. This is what nature feels like. I want to say something about God, something about feeling unprotected something about all of the ideas of safety not making since here, something about how this wild and windy country with no protection and the full force of all that is blowing against this house must be like what your mind is, what I have felt sometimes, what the whole world is feeling. The whole world is frightened and crazy, and doesn’t want to crack, and that’s why when someone really does crack, they point their fingers, they distance themselves. They shake their heads. They say poor thing, poor weak thing. But I am weak here, I leave the living room. There isn’t anywhere I can hide from this storm.
Michael, I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t looking for you, if I didn’t hear you tell me that you loved me and the only reason you wanted to get better was to come back to me. It made it so that I could drop everything and come to find you. Early on, both of us saw the same thing in the world, that it wasn’t worth what people said it was, that everything offered wasn’t that much worth having, and then we picked up a stone and we turned the stone over and there were the worms and bugs underneath, glistening, shining, writhing with a hundred legs. We found beauty under the stones, and people like that can be romantics, people who are driven mad can, at last, let themselves be mad enough to love, so I can drop everything and come running to you and waiting for you in all this blinding whiteness.
Dalton stood naked in the bathroom with his phone in his hand and checked for the restaurant.
“They’re still serving cheese curds. That should definitely happen. Do you wanna come?”
“I’m exhausted,” Jay said, sitting on the toilet in his dressing gown. Negligently he caressed Dalton’s ass. Sergeant Dalton McBrayer who looked good in a uniform and, Jay confessed, good out of it. But how different he looked in the dark, how different faces and bodies were in the semi light and when they came back into the light there were the imperfections and the shallowness in cheeks, there were the differences in color that made one look wholly different. Dalton had very large slate colored eyes.
“Are you going straight back to Fort Wayne?” Jay asked.
“Tonight!” Dalton whistled. He was always whistling, always moving, as he was pulling his clothes back on.
“And then do you come back here?”
“I don’t know. Not very often. My life is…” Dalton did not look imperturbably happy right now, or tough and whistling and military strong, For a moment he was as he had been in bed, and he said, “My life is very… there’s a lot going on.”
Then he had said. “I wish there wasn’t.”
Jay had gone to school with Sean who was his first gay friend—except Michael, Jay reflected ruefully, really would have been his first gay friend. Sean told him that one night he’d gotten with a guy who had burst into tears in the middle of a blowjob.
“I’m still in love with my ex boyfriend!” he had said while his dick was in Sean’s mouth.
Jay had tried to stop laughing until Sean had burst out laughing himself.
“That shit was not funny at the time,” Sean said. “I tried to be really nice about it. Hell, I was really nice about it. But… Can you believe it?’
Jay could not believe it. When Michael was gone, he was sad and he knew he loved him, but they hadn’t been much of a couple in that last year, and it was in that last year that Jay thought about other men, not other boyfriends, but all the things he’d never known. His whole experience was Michael Cleveland, and this wasn’t entirely fair. After all. Michael had not been a virgin when he’d come to him. It was only a few days before Jay put himself online and he was surprised by what Sean called, “The phenomen of fresh meat”
“Everyone will want you because they’ve never seen you.”
Sean sat beside him at the computer.
“So, what are you looking for Black like you. Black but not like you. A Michael doppelganger. Damn, there’s one…. An Executive. A cokehead, That’s definitely a cokehead.”
Jay nudged him over so he could see his own computer screen.
“If I shop like I’m looking for prime rib I’ll never find someone.”
“What do you want someone for?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Jay said.
“I don’t want to be in love again. But I also don’t want to not be having sex. I’m not sure if I want dates or not. I’m really not sure.”
“No man on here is sure,” Sean said. “Everyone is a boner with a question mark. Do yourself a favor. Be sure.”
Dalton was the result of many be sures later. He’d shown up on a dark screen and then there was a picture of his plaintive face. Wide eyes, high cheekbones. Before he saw the uniform. Jay had wanted to hold him and tell him everything would be alright. He had a strange desire to shelter him.
“I’m only in town for the night,” Dalton had told him.
That was as well. He could indulge his strange need to protect tall but fragile white boys and move onto something else. Dalton had shown up with a smile, in a peacoat with a bag over his shoulder. He’d said he hadn’t showered and wanted to be clean. Jay sat in his bedroom and listened to shower water before he began to undress slowly and walk down the hall, press the door open. Datlton did what Jay had trained Michael out of years ago, which was shower with the curtain half open, Dalton of the long body that looked like it had been poured from smooth milk saw him and smiled, and Jay stepped in, pulling the curtain shut as Dalton’s arms fell around him, the pressure of his lips pushed on Jay’s, Jay’s mouth opening for his tongue, He closed his eyes and something like weeping went through him. He ran his hands down Dalton’s body, tall and strong, toned as Michael had never been and slick with the shower water that was falling on both of him. He had never been loved by another man before. He was loveable to one man, who was loveable ot him. Jay had never been desirable. This was new. He had wanted the sex and affection of Michael. He’d never understood he wanted sex and affection.
He remembered his mother saying, negligently, that sex was sex, not a big deal at all, and he’d heard, before he’d left them because they irritated him, at the gay student union, boys going on in nasally tones about how guys only wanted sex and sex was so shallow. But they were wrong. This wasn’t shallow at all. Wanting to be held, wanting this wrapping of limbs, this tender kissing, these fingers running up and down turning to hands stroking, massaging, tongues tasting, licking the shell of the ear, sucking the earlobe, tongue licking down the back to the cheeks, to kiss the cheeks to enter the ass, to kiss between thighs, to stroke the cock and make round and firm the sack, the shuddering moans and embraces, no, this was not shallow at all.
“I’m really attracted to you,” Dalton whispered into Jay’s chest. He kissed him and pressed the inside of his hand to Jay’s. “I really want you to fuck me.”
That night in the dark they rocked together and Jay felt like he was riding Dalton into the clouds. They both cried out for the joy of it, and when he came it was like fire, he felt like he was flying out of his body. Back in his flesh, Jay was bunched tight and was squeezing on him, ringing the last of his seed out. They lay in the dark half out of their minds, opening and shutting their eyes until they saw red and orange splotches in the dark, until Dalton rolled over on top of Jay and sheltered Jay’s body with his own hot limbs and hotter kisses.
A message came across his phone one day.
Do you rtemember me. This is Dalton.
He remembered everyone, and he said, “Of course I remember you.” As soon As Jay said he he realized that his life was had been long enough to start forgetting people.
“I’m coming to town tonight. I wondered if you’d like to go to dinner.
That was charming. He had known others since Dalton. There was a man who owned a business in Columbus and drove four hours, breaking road rules to arrive at Jay’s place in the dark. He showered in the bathroom a while and then they made love at two in the morning, and when he came back through town he always said he was on his way. The first picture of him Jay had seen was a his penis measured against a cola can. Jay had been amazed at the girth, and hadn’t had the bullshit in him to pretend he didn’t want to meet him, and so he had, several times. But Dalton was one of the few who said, “Let me take you t dinner.” Charles had said, “Let me take you to dinner,” and he had, but Jay had felt like he was putting up with Charles more than anything. He wanted to see Dalton whose eyes were wide and grey green and whose kisses were full of need and affection, the broad shouldered defender of America who himself looked like he needed protection.
Dalton arrived in his glasses and his uniform, not the ugly fatigues but a proper coat and jacket.
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
“Yes,” Dalton said, emphatically.
“I had better step up my game then.”
He went to change. He hadn’t known Dalton very well, didn’t know how out Dalton was, if Dalton wanted to be seen on a date with a man in his military uniform.
“I had to leave so quickly last time,” Dalton said. He was chewing gum. “I thought it would be nice to show some appreciation. Take you someplace nice.”
Dalton had not asked where Jay wanted to go, and Jay was glad enough of not having to make a decision. They ended up Van Buren House in the middle of downtown and Dalton said, “You order anything you want.”
“You msut be making a great money.”
“I’m in a good place,” Dalton said, cheerily. “I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been.”
In the middle of dinner Jay said, “Dalton, where are you staying tonight?”
“I did get that hotel across the street. Actually, the Army got it for me, so… that’s great.”
Jay nodded. And continued on his lobster.
“I don’t want to presume,” Dalton began.
“Presume what?”
“It’s just,” Dalton said, “If you want to… you could stay with me.”
It was a nice room once Jay had said, “We have to adjust the temperature. It’s entirely too cold in here.”
He preferred his place to any hotel room, and thought it was foolish to stay here when they could be there, but this was new to him and new to Dalton McBrayer. Dalton stood straight backed, looking out of the window, and Jay joined him. Dalton wrapped his arms around him as they looked at the cars of downtown Lassador driving below them.
“I’ve never spent the night with another guy before,” Dalton said. “This is my first time.”
He said, “I’ve never spent the night with anyone.”
He leant down and kissed Jay on the lips.
Jay heard the phone ringing. It had been doing so for some time. This was the first time he’d had a flip phone and not a rotary. Everyone was using them now. Half asleep he thought it was Dalton’s and then, awake, he realized it was his. Dalton, always a heavy sleeper, had not even stirred. He lay naked and splayed on his stomach like a baby, legs apart, arms gripping the pillow, the candlelight in Jay’s room made a soft glow on the hollows of his cheeks, the noble beak of his nose, the slope of his strong back to the hills of his innocent ass. Amidst the hot and rumpled covers, Jay Strickland ran the back of his hand over Dalton’s warm body.
This was many times after the first time they’d spent the night together, and Jay opened the phone and touched the button to retrieve his voice mail.
“High, Jay, this is Kate Cleveland. If you could call me in the morning that would be great. Anytime will work. Have a good night. Sorry to disturb you.’
Kathleen, Michael’s mother. But she seemed alright enough, and Michael’s problems had not been his for some years. As he stroked Dalton, Dalton clutched his hand in his sleep, and his jaws clenched and unclenched. The warmth of Dalton’s hand, and of the covers, the soft roundness of his buttocks, the strength of his body, made Jay’s penis stiffen, and his scrotum tighten. He put the phone down and covered himself in the warmth of the blankets, spooning his body to Dalton’s. They’d make love in the middle of the night and fall asleep again in each other’s arms.
In the morning, while Dalton was in the shower, Jay called Catelyn and she said, “I’m so glad ot hear form you James. Have you heard from Michael?”
“No,” Jay said. “Not at all. Why?”
“Because none of us have. His father was the last to hear from him. Nine days ago. He was out in North Dakota. North Dakota! He said he felt really lost and then… nothing. Nobody’s able to reach him. Michael is missing.”
Michael
I don’t want to go on. I do not want to go on, and I do not mean this is some kind of suicidal way. What I mean is I, Michael Thomas Cleveland, do not want to move forward. I want to go back. I want to go back and back because there was a time when we were younger and life had more color in it. It hurt more, true enough, and maybe we were sadder, but the trees had a green to them they don’t have now, and the air had a heat and a wetness in it. All we had was each other. That was all we needed. It was enough. The world was big and black but endurable. Out of love with the heat of the day, we turned to the shade and learned to love the wet world of earth and pebbles. Unable to conceive of popularity or success in the world, we found beauty in something else.
I said, and I meant it, that my life would not revolve around you. That I would be better for myself, for my own goddamn sake, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t love myself enough for that. I still don’t. Myself was just the useless case I carried around because it enabled you to love me, And I loved you. I would have done anything for you. Until I couldn’t do anything. Until I couldn’t get out of this damn chair, Jay. And I did not revert. I did not go back to being crazy. Oh, no. I became something I had never been before. I became far more mad than I had ever been. When people say you’ve hit rock bottom, when people say there’s only up from here, they’re lying. Things can always go a little more downhill. The truth is, there is no end to south.
This is what madness looks like. It is always there, and always in the corner, and you wonder how long you will keep it at bay. Normal life. College happens. My first year as a teacher happens. It’s hard. It would have been better if I’d gone back to a Catholic school, but I told myself I’d never do that again. I imagine even there kids have problems. But here you see the children who come to school with no socks even in the winter, who don’t have coats because, even after you get them the coats their parents lose them or sell them. You smell the pot on them. You smell something like cat piss that you learn is meth. You check hair for lice and clothes for bedbugs. You do maintenance and hope you’ll do some teaching.
Jay Strickland thought he would be more terrified than this if he were ever in a blizzard. There was snow back home in Lassador, and maybe you could even call it a blizzard, but a blizzard in the city was not like a blizzard in North Dakota where neighbors were two miles away and they were neighbors you didn’t know anyway. He had never known the world was so big until taking a bus out here. He knew in his head and from logic—but how far did logic ever go?—and from films that the world was big and that this land was big, but it was not until he was under what people called “big sky”, that he understood.
The sky back home was big. All sky was big if you looked at it, the sky on the train was big when it took him out of the city. But soon trees came in and towns came in and the sights of the world below obscured the view above. For hours and hours there had been nothing, and coming here there had been nothing. And this was the first time, as he stood in the prairie, outside of the house, that he could see the weather being made, as by the hand of God, and the weather spreading itself out.
But now the weather had come and terror didn’t come with it. Anger did not come either. All of those feelings that in a smaller world arrived had no place in this very big moment. Something like hope was here, and Jay knew the only reason it was present was because he could not despair. There was no room for it.
“If I despaired I would have to despair of everything, and if I despaired of everything I would have to kill myself, and there’s nothing here to do it with.”
I could stand outside and let that snow do it.
In a place like this, the snow might end up doing it anyway. All this way from Lassador that wasn’t New York and wasn’t LA and wasn’t even Columbus, but was home and was a place where he did not expect to die. All this way to come to a place where he looked out the window and saw snow driving white and grey and finally absolutely dark past the windows, all this way to find Michael Cleveland.
He left me, and does that make me a fool that in response I came all this way to find him? When he left, I did not try to stop him. The last year had been hard. I woke up one morning and he was packing and he said, ‘This doesn’t work. I mean it doesn’t work for you. It works for me just fine.”
We were always of the same mind. I never had to say, “What do you mean?” He never had to explain himself.
“We could be like this forever,” Michael said. “You could be the nursemaid to my crazy. I won’t have it.”
I did not stop him. That would have only been pretense, or I would have been one of those people who needs the crazy, what they call codependents. And I wasn’t codependent. I wanted my healthy Michael, and I wanted the joy of our first years, before the turn had taken place and things had gotten harder and harder and he was right, I would have stayed forever, and so because I could not leave, he did.
“Where are you going?” I had asked him.
“To my Dad’s.”
“Michael,” I began and stopped myself.
“He stood there with shirts in his hand, waiting to put them in his suitcase.
“Your dad’s is no place to be crazy in. At least go be with your mom.”
Michael kept packing He said nothing. He filled two cases. He said, “Is it okay if I come back tomorrow for other stuff?”
“Michael, you can come back as much as you want to.”
It was funny how I never called him Mike or Mokey. He just was not that, the same way I was never James. Michael and Jay, Jay and Michael.
I opened the door for him and closed it after him with not so much as an embrace. An embrace would have been a hug. A hug would have been a kiss. A kiss would have been lovemaking. We would have put off what needed to happen for another day, and it needed to happen. We both knew it.
I was never a shouter, so I went to our room—my room now—and got the phone and called him. I looked out the window and saw him, beside his car, pick up the phone.
“Call when you’re at your mom’s.”
“She’s only a half hour—” he stopped. “Okay. I will.”
What I remember and what seems important to tell is that Michael kept paying rent. I feel like I had to let you know that. Like I have to stand up for him. We got this house together and I had no plans of losing it. Even though he wasn’t there, his money was. But by then I was used to paying. In the last year he was sporadically employed and after he was gone, he was far more dependable that when he was here.
Dependable. I don’t even want to say that because I did not depend on Michael Cleveland. I loved him, and that’s something different. After he was gone, I was still seeing him once or twice a week, and there was air in my life and I hated to say that because it was like I had been suffocating before, and well, I imagine I was. Terrified, terrified for Michael and what he would do to himself. Terrified that I would wake up and he wouldn’t’ be there. The first few nights I had those dreams over again and I woke up, and was in a mild terror because he indeed was not there. And then I remembered why he was gone, that he was across town with his mother, that there was no reason for him to be here, and I felt lighter waking up without him, I felt… light.
Three months after he had left, we were at lunch, and Michael said, “I’m going back to Morelton.”
Morelton was the institution he’d been in when we were teenagers.
“I’m going to get my head screwed on right. I need to get my head screwed back on.”
I didn’t say anything for a while and then I said, “Michael, I don’t think it’s like that. I don’t think you can just get fixed.”
“I know that,” he said gently, touching my head, “but I feel like my head’s gotten a little wobbly in the last few years, and I can get it reattached, straightened every now and again.”
And then he said, “Do you love me?”
“What a question?”
“I mean, do you love me? Because if you do you’ll understand I didn’t want to leave. I want to be sane again so that we can be together again.”
We had been best friends. We had grown up together. Michael had been my lover for seven years. I was twenty-five at the time. I knew I shouldn’t want someone to build their life around me.
I told him, “That can’t be your only reason. There’s got to be another reason.”
Michael looked away from me and he frowned. He drummed his fingertips on the table between us and then he said, “No, Jay, that’s really my only reason. I’d like to be mature and creative and say that I had a lot going on in my life, but I just want to be sane so we can get back together.”
Oh, Michael the wind is howling and the house almost feels like it’s shaking. This is what nature feels like. I want to say something about God, something about feeling unprotected something about all of the ideas of safety not making since here, something about how this wild and windy country with no protection and the full force of all that is blowing against this house must be like what your mind is, what I have felt sometimes, what the whole world is feeling. The whole world is frightened and crazy, and doesn’t want to crack, and that’s why when someone really does crack, they point their fingers, they distance themselves. They shake their heads. They say poor thing, poor weak thing. But I am weak here, I leave the living room. There isn’t anywhere I can hide from this storm.
Michael, I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t looking for you, if I didn’t hear you tell me that you loved me and the only reason you wanted to get better was to come back to me. It made it so that I could drop everything and come to find you. Early on, both of us saw the same thing in the world, that it wasn’t worth what people said it was, that everything offered wasn’t that much worth having, and then we picked up a stone and we turned the stone over and there were the worms and bugs underneath, glistening, shining, writhing with a hundred legs. We found beauty under the stones, and people like that can be romantics, people who are driven mad can, at last, let themselves be mad enough to love, so I can drop everything and come running to you and waiting for you in all this blinding whiteness.
Dalton stood naked in the bathroom with his phone in his hand and checked for the restaurant.
“They’re still serving cheese curds. That should definitely happen. Do you wanna come?”
“I’m exhausted,” Jay said, sitting on the toilet in his dressing gown. Negligently he caressed Dalton’s ass. Sergeant Dalton McBrayer who looked good in a uniform and, Jay confessed, good out of it. But how different he looked in the dark, how different faces and bodies were in the semi light and when they came back into the light there were the imperfections and the shallowness in cheeks, there were the differences in color that made one look wholly different. Dalton had very large slate colored eyes.
“Are you going straight back to Fort Wayne?” Jay asked.
“Tonight!” Dalton whistled. He was always whistling, always moving, as he was pulling his clothes back on.
“And then do you come back here?”
“I don’t know. Not very often. My life is…” Dalton did not look imperturbably happy right now, or tough and whistling and military strong, For a moment he was as he had been in bed, and he said, “My life is very… there’s a lot going on.”
Then he had said. “I wish there wasn’t.”
Jay had gone to school with Sean who was his first gay friend—except Michael, Jay reflected ruefully, really would have been his first gay friend. Sean told him that one night he’d gotten with a guy who had burst into tears in the middle of a blowjob.
“I’m still in love with my ex boyfriend!” he had said while his dick was in Sean’s mouth.
Jay had tried to stop laughing until Sean had burst out laughing himself.
“That shit was not funny at the time,” Sean said. “I tried to be really nice about it. Hell, I was really nice about it. But… Can you believe it?’
Jay could not believe it. When Michael was gone, he was sad and he knew he loved him, but they hadn’t been much of a couple in that last year, and it was in that last year that Jay thought about other men, not other boyfriends, but all the things he’d never known. His whole experience was Michael Cleveland, and this wasn’t entirely fair. After all. Michael had not been a virgin when he’d come to him. It was only a few days before Jay put himself online and he was surprised by what Sean called, “The phenomen of fresh meat”
“Everyone will want you because they’ve never seen you.”
Sean sat beside him at the computer.
“So, what are you looking for Black like you. Black but not like you. A Michael doppelganger. Damn, there’s one…. An Executive. A cokehead, That’s definitely a cokehead.”
Jay nudged him over so he could see his own computer screen.
“If I shop like I’m looking for prime rib I’ll never find someone.”
“What do you want someone for?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Jay said.
“I don’t want to be in love again. But I also don’t want to not be having sex. I’m not sure if I want dates or not. I’m really not sure.”
“No man on here is sure,” Sean said. “Everyone is a boner with a question mark. Do yourself a favor. Be sure.”
Dalton was the result of many be sures later. He’d shown up on a dark screen and then there was a picture of his plaintive face. Wide eyes, high cheekbones. Before he saw the uniform. Jay had wanted to hold him and tell him everything would be alright. He had a strange desire to shelter him.
“I’m only in town for the night,” Dalton had told him.
That was as well. He could indulge his strange need to protect tall but fragile white boys and move onto something else. Dalton had shown up with a smile, in a peacoat with a bag over his shoulder. He’d said he hadn’t showered and wanted to be clean. Jay sat in his bedroom and listened to shower water before he began to undress slowly and walk down the hall, press the door open. Datlton did what Jay had trained Michael out of years ago, which was shower with the curtain half open, Dalton of the long body that looked like it had been poured from smooth milk saw him and smiled, and Jay stepped in, pulling the curtain shut as Dalton’s arms fell around him, the pressure of his lips pushed on Jay’s, Jay’s mouth opening for his tongue, He closed his eyes and something like weeping went through him. He ran his hands down Dalton’s body, tall and strong, toned as Michael had never been and slick with the shower water that was falling on both of him. He had never been loved by another man before. He was loveable to one man, who was loveable ot him. Jay had never been desirable. This was new. He had wanted the sex and affection of Michael. He’d never understood he wanted sex and affection.
He remembered his mother saying, negligently, that sex was sex, not a big deal at all, and he’d heard, before he’d left them because they irritated him, at the gay student union, boys going on in nasally tones about how guys only wanted sex and sex was so shallow. But they were wrong. This wasn’t shallow at all. Wanting to be held, wanting this wrapping of limbs, this tender kissing, these fingers running up and down turning to hands stroking, massaging, tongues tasting, licking the shell of the ear, sucking the earlobe, tongue licking down the back to the cheeks, to kiss the cheeks to enter the ass, to kiss between thighs, to stroke the cock and make round and firm the sack, the shuddering moans and embraces, no, this was not shallow at all.
“I’m really attracted to you,” Dalton whispered into Jay’s chest. He kissed him and pressed the inside of his hand to Jay’s. “I really want you to fuck me.”
That night in the dark they rocked together and Jay felt like he was riding Dalton into the clouds. They both cried out for the joy of it, and when he came it was like fire, he felt like he was flying out of his body. Back in his flesh, Jay was bunched tight and was squeezing on him, ringing the last of his seed out. They lay in the dark half out of their minds, opening and shutting their eyes until they saw red and orange splotches in the dark, until Dalton rolled over on top of Jay and sheltered Jay’s body with his own hot limbs and hotter kisses.
A message came across his phone one day.
Do you rtemember me. This is Dalton.
He remembered everyone, and he said, “Of course I remember you.” As soon As Jay said he he realized that his life was had been long enough to start forgetting people.
“I’m coming to town tonight. I wondered if you’d like to go to dinner.
That was charming. He had known others since Dalton. There was a man who owned a business in Columbus and drove four hours, breaking road rules to arrive at Jay’s place in the dark. He showered in the bathroom a while and then they made love at two in the morning, and when he came back through town he always said he was on his way. The first picture of him Jay had seen was a his penis measured against a cola can. Jay had been amazed at the girth, and hadn’t had the bullshit in him to pretend he didn’t want to meet him, and so he had, several times. But Dalton was one of the few who said, “Let me take you t dinner.” Charles had said, “Let me take you to dinner,” and he had, but Jay had felt like he was putting up with Charles more than anything. He wanted to see Dalton whose eyes were wide and grey green and whose kisses were full of need and affection, the broad shouldered defender of America who himself looked like he needed protection.
Dalton arrived in his glasses and his uniform, not the ugly fatigues but a proper coat and jacket.
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
“Yes,” Dalton said, emphatically.
“I had better step up my game then.”
He went to change. He hadn’t known Dalton very well, didn’t know how out Dalton was, if Dalton wanted to be seen on a date with a man in his military uniform.
“I had to leave so quickly last time,” Dalton said. He was chewing gum. “I thought it would be nice to show some appreciation. Take you someplace nice.”
Dalton had not asked where Jay wanted to go, and Jay was glad enough of not having to make a decision. They ended up Van Buren House in the middle of downtown and Dalton said, “You order anything you want.”
“You msut be making a great money.”
“I’m in a good place,” Dalton said, cheerily. “I’m in a better place than I’ve ever been.”
In the middle of dinner Jay said, “Dalton, where are you staying tonight?”
“I did get that hotel across the street. Actually, the Army got it for me, so… that’s great.”
Jay nodded. And continued on his lobster.
“I don’t want to presume,” Dalton began.
“Presume what?”
“It’s just,” Dalton said, “If you want to… you could stay with me.”
It was a nice room once Jay had said, “We have to adjust the temperature. It’s entirely too cold in here.”
He preferred his place to any hotel room, and thought it was foolish to stay here when they could be there, but this was new to him and new to Dalton McBrayer. Dalton stood straight backed, looking out of the window, and Jay joined him. Dalton wrapped his arms around him as they looked at the cars of downtown Lassador driving below them.
“I’ve never spent the night with another guy before,” Dalton said. “This is my first time.”
He said, “I’ve never spent the night with anyone.”
He leant down and kissed Jay on the lips.
Jay heard the phone ringing. It had been doing so for some time. This was the first time he’d had a flip phone and not a rotary. Everyone was using them now. Half asleep he thought it was Dalton’s and then, awake, he realized it was his. Dalton, always a heavy sleeper, had not even stirred. He lay naked and splayed on his stomach like a baby, legs apart, arms gripping the pillow, the candlelight in Jay’s room made a soft glow on the hollows of his cheeks, the noble beak of his nose, the slope of his strong back to the hills of his innocent ass. Amidst the hot and rumpled covers, Jay Strickland ran the back of his hand over Dalton’s warm body.
This was many times after the first time they’d spent the night together, and Jay opened the phone and touched the button to retrieve his voice mail.
“High, Jay, this is Kate Cleveland. If you could call me in the morning that would be great. Anytime will work. Have a good night. Sorry to disturb you.’
Kathleen, Michael’s mother. But she seemed alright enough, and Michael’s problems had not been his for some years. As he stroked Dalton, Dalton clutched his hand in his sleep, and his jaws clenched and unclenched. The warmth of Dalton’s hand, and of the covers, the soft roundness of his buttocks, the strength of his body, made Jay’s penis stiffen, and his scrotum tighten. He put the phone down and covered himself in the warmth of the blankets, spooning his body to Dalton’s. They’d make love in the middle of the night and fall asleep again in each other’s arms.
In the morning, while Dalton was in the shower, Jay called Catelyn and she said, “I’m so glad ot hear form you James. Have you heard from Michael?”
“No,” Jay said. “Not at all. Why?”
“Because none of us have. His father was the last to hear from him. Nine days ago. He was out in North Dakota. North Dakota! He said he felt really lost and then… nothing. Nobody’s able to reach him. Michael is missing.”
Michael
I don’t want to go on. I do not want to go on, and I do not mean this is some kind of suicidal way. What I mean is I, Michael Thomas Cleveland, do not want to move forward. I want to go back. I want to go back and back because there was a time when we were younger and life had more color in it. It hurt more, true enough, and maybe we were sadder, but the trees had a green to them they don’t have now, and the air had a heat and a wetness in it. All we had was each other. That was all we needed. It was enough. The world was big and black but endurable. Out of love with the heat of the day, we turned to the shade and learned to love the wet world of earth and pebbles. Unable to conceive of popularity or success in the world, we found beauty in something else.
I said, and I meant it, that my life would not revolve around you. That I would be better for myself, for my own goddamn sake, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t love myself enough for that. I still don’t. Myself was just the useless case I carried around because it enabled you to love me, And I loved you. I would have done anything for you. Until I couldn’t do anything. Until I couldn’t get out of this damn chair, Jay. And I did not revert. I did not go back to being crazy. Oh, no. I became something I had never been before. I became far more mad than I had ever been. When people say you’ve hit rock bottom, when people say there’s only up from here, they’re lying. Things can always go a little more downhill. The truth is, there is no end to south.
This is what madness looks like. It is always there, and always in the corner, and you wonder how long you will keep it at bay. Normal life. College happens. My first year as a teacher happens. It’s hard. It would have been better if I’d gone back to a Catholic school, but I told myself I’d never do that again. I imagine even there kids have problems. But here you see the children who come to school with no socks even in the winter, who don’t have coats because, even after you get them the coats their parents lose them or sell them. You smell the pot on them. You smell something like cat piss that you learn is meth. You check hair for lice and clothes for bedbugs. You do maintenance and hope you’ll do some teaching.
