CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great portion! Swann has had his taste of freedom and now it seems he is having a great time with Chris. Excellent writing and I look forward to more!
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Swimming in Basements
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Chapter Ten
Tonight was a five ring night.
His heavy metal ring with the small blue stone that had fallen off his finger, the one that Joe had picked up and returned to him the day they met, which had come from his great uncle was on the middle finger of Swan’s left hand, under the large turquoise ring he wore to keep it there. In the other middle finger was the small emerald of the brass ring over the silver one with the white stone, and the gold and the checkerboard black and white ring bordered the others, Sometimes he wanted more rings and more cigarettes and this was a night for that.
“It’s nice to be back in the basement,” Swann said.
Chris Navarro was stretched out on the floor, scribbling in his journal, and he said, “I forgot about that swimming pool. I’m very much wishing we had a swimming pool in this basement.”
“I bet your dad would put one in if you asked.”
“Whaddo you wanna do?”
“Huh?” Swann had been watching the snow fall outside in the lower part of the great tree walled yard.
“When college is over, whaddo you wanna do?”
When Swann could think of nothing to say, Chris said, “It’s not that far off you know?”
“I don’t know,” Swann said, by which he meant he did not know what he wanted to do, not that he didn’t know he had only a year of school left.
“I had always imagined we would be together. You and me.”
Swann got up and went to the liquor cabinet, cigarette between his lips. He would make them drinks while Chris sorted out his thoughts.
“And then Sal,” Chris said.
Ah, there it was.
Swann didn’t say anything, which didn’t make is easier for Chris. Sal was gone tonight. He had spent the day with Doug and Joe at Joe’s family, and then was spending the night with his Mom and her new husband. While Swann poured the brown liquor into glasses, he realized he was being unfair, saying nothing, and he said to Chris, “Are you jealous?”
“No,” Chris said, sitting up and holding his hand out while Swann brought the glass to him. “That’s the thing.”
Swann sat down cross legged across from Chris.
“All through high school and in college you had someone. You had Jack, and then me, and then when we broke up, Pete, and then… whatever. But I only had you.”
“That’s not exactly true.”
“You were the only guy I ever loved.”
“That,” Swann lifted his pinky from the glass and drank, “I believe.”
“I’ve had sex with Sal multiple times in the last three nights, and only a few times has it been with you.”
“Right?” Swann said, sounding like a doctor.
“I didn’t expect I’d like it. I didn’t think I’d have feelings.”
“That’s never happened to me,” Swann said, pushing his pack of cigarettes to Chris.
“What?”
Tonight was a five ring night.
His heavy metal ring with the small blue stone that had fallen off his finger, the one that Joe had picked up and returned to him the day they met, which had come from his great uncle was on the middle finger of Swan’s left hand, under the large turquoise ring he wore to keep it there. In the other middle finger was the small emerald of the brass ring over the silver one with the white stone, and the gold and the checkerboard black and white ring bordered the others, Sometimes he wanted more rings and more cigarettes and this was a night for that.
“It’s nice to be back in the basement,” Swann said.
Chris Navarro was stretched out on the floor, scribbling in his journal, and he said, “I forgot about that swimming pool. I’m very much wishing we had a swimming pool in this basement.”
“I bet your dad would put one in if you asked.”
“Whaddo you wanna do?”
“Huh?” Swann had been watching the snow fall outside in the lower part of the great tree walled yard.
“When college is over, whaddo you wanna do?”
When Swann could think of nothing to say, Chris said, “It’s not that far off you know?”
“I don’t know,” Swann said, by which he meant he did not know what he wanted to do, not that he didn’t know he had only a year of school left.
“I had always imagined we would be together. You and me.”
Swann got up and went to the liquor cabinet, cigarette between his lips. He would make them drinks while Chris sorted out his thoughts.
“And then Sal,” Chris said.
Ah, there it was.
Swann didn’t say anything, which didn’t make is easier for Chris. Sal was gone tonight. He had spent the day with Doug and Joe at Joe’s family, and then was spending the night with his Mom and her new husband. While Swann poured the brown liquor into glasses, he realized he was being unfair, saying nothing, and he said to Chris, “Are you jealous?”
“No,” Chris said, sitting up and holding his hand out while Swann brought the glass to him. “That’s the thing.”
Swann sat down cross legged across from Chris.
“All through high school and in college you had someone. You had Jack, and then me, and then when we broke up, Pete, and then… whatever. But I only had you.”
“That’s not exactly true.”
“You were the only guy I ever loved.”
“That,” Swann lifted his pinky from the glass and drank, “I believe.”
“I’ve had sex with Sal multiple times in the last three nights, and only a few times has it been with you.”
“Right?” Swann said, sounding like a doctor.
“I didn’t expect I’d like it. I didn’t think I’d have feelings.”
“That’s never happened to me,” Swann said, pushing his pack of cigarettes to Chris.
“What?”
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“That whole…. I had sex with someone and then I started feeling things. It’s never happened to me before and I don’t think it’s happened to anyone else. I think the sex changes nothing. I think when you lay down with someone you’ve always had feelings for it just makes the feelings more intense. That’s what I think.”
“You’re saying I always had a thing for Sal?”
“Half the school had a thing for Sal.”
Chris blushed.
“The other half had a thing for you,” Swann said.
Before Chris could protest, Swann continued, “You have no idea how often I had to hear the… the fan fiction about you and Sal. Everyone suspected it. It makes sense. Him tall and olive and dark haired and green eyed, you pale and blond and blue eyed. It was, I confess, the thing I worried about.”
“Why would you worry?”
This was one of those moments when the answer seemed so apparent, but it wasn’t, and Swann found himself embarrassed, almost unable to put words together.
“For the very reasons I said, and here I was, little and black and unathletic, half blind, not what anyone would picture for either of you. You have to know when the two of you suggested…. What you suggested, it went through my mind that you all would leave me for each other.”
“What the fuck—?”
“And it would actually make sense,” Swann said. “It would serve me right. Who the fuck am I to be standing next to you and next to him and explaining, ‘I love you both, and I don’t want to give either one of you up’ and…. It’s all so silly.”
“The only thing that is silly,” Chris said, pressing Swann’s hand, “is that you think that in my whole….. twenty-one years of existence, when I keep coming back you, when I’ve been at your side since we were… Fourteen, that I would leave you. For anyone. And Sal is… if you can’t tell the difference between you and Sal and Joe and Sal, if you don’t understand how he feels, then you’re not as clever as I thought you were, Portis.
“It’s just that…. And now I’m kind of worried about talking like this, but… Being with Sal was like being with you. It was… He opened up something in me. We opened up something in each other, and I’ve never felt that with another… well, hell, with anyone except you, and I wasn’t expecting that. I sort of pictured that in the future it would be, it made sense, you and me in your house up in Evanston, starting out a life together. I’d get a job at a paper, or maybe go to Northwestern… or DePaul or something. And when you said something about Sal I thought, okay, well maybe that won’t be the way it is. But… What if Sal was with us in that future? What if we were having that future together, like this morning, when we all woke up together? It’s going to be the twenty first century. All the shit we thought couldn’t happen might. We saw Apartheid end, and then Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and then, and then we have email. I mean, that’s nuts. I can get on a computer and talk to you from wherever I am! So, anything we set our minds to do together is going to be possible. In this world.”
Chris’s face was filled with joy, and Swann was more in love with him than ever, but he remembered falling in love with Sal for a different reason, seeing him shirtless at the computer in this very room, reading a news article online.
We have email, we have compact disks. We saw Apartheid end, we saw the cracking of the Berlin Wall.
We saw Matthew Shepard hung on a fence, beaten and brutalized and left in the cold to weep till he died.
“That’s always been the problem with me,” Swann said. “I want to be positive, but it’s always a front. You’re looking to the future, and my head is always in the past.”
Swann wasn’t quite sure how he’d feel the first time he saw Jack that summer. The last time they’d been together was graduation night, almost two months ago. It seemed like another lifetime. Swann had halfway told himself that Jack didn’t love him nearly as much as he remembered, that Jack, big and strong and grown up and on his way to college would greet him with a handshake, a manly stiff upper lip. Much later, Swann would reflect that his problem was always underestimating how much he was loved. He was astounded when Jack jumped out of the car, ran to him and clutched him so hard he could barely breathe. It was more than a bear hug and, as thy embraced on the lawn, Jack whispered, “I missed you much. You don’t even know.”
When Jack released him, he still felt the crushing weight of him. More than seeing Jack he smelled him, the cologne that was like cedar, spicy and sweet and that clung to him long after Jack let him go. Swann was almost embarrassed by the look on the ex student body president’s face, his eyes shining and sort of serious under his thick, dark brows.
“I’ll go get your bag and say hey to Chris,” Jack told him. “We got a lot to catch up on.”
Jack lived on the east side of Ashby, the city west of Calverton, and the whole time he drove much too fast, looking at Swann over and over again so much that Swann wanted to tell him to look at the road. The whole time he drove he clutched Swann’s knee, and at the first red light he suddenly turned and kissed him. It was like a plug in a socket and Swann was suddenly aware of the level on which his body had been humming, the electric between the two of them. He wanted to say he thought it had died. He wasn’t sure if he trusted it to last. He begged Jack feebly to pay attention to the traffic light when it changed. Driving along the Riverway, somewhere Calverton turned into Ashby, and Swann, feeling ashamed, not sure if he should do it, put his hand between Jack’s legs. He was hard. Jack drove faster and then he said, his voice a little dry, “You can unbutton them.”
Swann worked feebly with Jack’s jeans and when they came to another red light, Jack just undid them himself and sighed while Swann touched him.
“No one’s home,” Jack told him when they reached the two story by the river. Jack did his jeans carefully and, not running, but almost in a stately way, the two of them went into the house, went into Jack’s room, and locked the door.
“You’re saying I always had a thing for Sal?”
“Half the school had a thing for Sal.”
Chris blushed.
“The other half had a thing for you,” Swann said.
Before Chris could protest, Swann continued, “You have no idea how often I had to hear the… the fan fiction about you and Sal. Everyone suspected it. It makes sense. Him tall and olive and dark haired and green eyed, you pale and blond and blue eyed. It was, I confess, the thing I worried about.”
“Why would you worry?”
This was one of those moments when the answer seemed so apparent, but it wasn’t, and Swann found himself embarrassed, almost unable to put words together.
“For the very reasons I said, and here I was, little and black and unathletic, half blind, not what anyone would picture for either of you. You have to know when the two of you suggested…. What you suggested, it went through my mind that you all would leave me for each other.”
“What the fuck—?”
“And it would actually make sense,” Swann said. “It would serve me right. Who the fuck am I to be standing next to you and next to him and explaining, ‘I love you both, and I don’t want to give either one of you up’ and…. It’s all so silly.”
“The only thing that is silly,” Chris said, pressing Swann’s hand, “is that you think that in my whole….. twenty-one years of existence, when I keep coming back you, when I’ve been at your side since we were… Fourteen, that I would leave you. For anyone. And Sal is… if you can’t tell the difference between you and Sal and Joe and Sal, if you don’t understand how he feels, then you’re not as clever as I thought you were, Portis.
“It’s just that…. And now I’m kind of worried about talking like this, but… Being with Sal was like being with you. It was… He opened up something in me. We opened up something in each other, and I’ve never felt that with another… well, hell, with anyone except you, and I wasn’t expecting that. I sort of pictured that in the future it would be, it made sense, you and me in your house up in Evanston, starting out a life together. I’d get a job at a paper, or maybe go to Northwestern… or DePaul or something. And when you said something about Sal I thought, okay, well maybe that won’t be the way it is. But… What if Sal was with us in that future? What if we were having that future together, like this morning, when we all woke up together? It’s going to be the twenty first century. All the shit we thought couldn’t happen might. We saw Apartheid end, and then Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and then, and then we have email. I mean, that’s nuts. I can get on a computer and talk to you from wherever I am! So, anything we set our minds to do together is going to be possible. In this world.”
Chris’s face was filled with joy, and Swann was more in love with him than ever, but he remembered falling in love with Sal for a different reason, seeing him shirtless at the computer in this very room, reading a news article online.
We have email, we have compact disks. We saw Apartheid end, we saw the cracking of the Berlin Wall.
We saw Matthew Shepard hung on a fence, beaten and brutalized and left in the cold to weep till he died.
“That’s always been the problem with me,” Swann said. “I want to be positive, but it’s always a front. You’re looking to the future, and my head is always in the past.”
Swann wasn’t quite sure how he’d feel the first time he saw Jack that summer. The last time they’d been together was graduation night, almost two months ago. It seemed like another lifetime. Swann had halfway told himself that Jack didn’t love him nearly as much as he remembered, that Jack, big and strong and grown up and on his way to college would greet him with a handshake, a manly stiff upper lip. Much later, Swann would reflect that his problem was always underestimating how much he was loved. He was astounded when Jack jumped out of the car, ran to him and clutched him so hard he could barely breathe. It was more than a bear hug and, as thy embraced on the lawn, Jack whispered, “I missed you much. You don’t even know.”
When Jack released him, he still felt the crushing weight of him. More than seeing Jack he smelled him, the cologne that was like cedar, spicy and sweet and that clung to him long after Jack let him go. Swann was almost embarrassed by the look on the ex student body president’s face, his eyes shining and sort of serious under his thick, dark brows.
“I’ll go get your bag and say hey to Chris,” Jack told him. “We got a lot to catch up on.”
Jack lived on the east side of Ashby, the city west of Calverton, and the whole time he drove much too fast, looking at Swann over and over again so much that Swann wanted to tell him to look at the road. The whole time he drove he clutched Swann’s knee, and at the first red light he suddenly turned and kissed him. It was like a plug in a socket and Swann was suddenly aware of the level on which his body had been humming, the electric between the two of them. He wanted to say he thought it had died. He wasn’t sure if he trusted it to last. He begged Jack feebly to pay attention to the traffic light when it changed. Driving along the Riverway, somewhere Calverton turned into Ashby, and Swann, feeling ashamed, not sure if he should do it, put his hand between Jack’s legs. He was hard. Jack drove faster and then he said, his voice a little dry, “You can unbutton them.”
Swann worked feebly with Jack’s jeans and when they came to another red light, Jack just undid them himself and sighed while Swann touched him.
“No one’s home,” Jack told him when they reached the two story by the river. Jack did his jeans carefully and, not running, but almost in a stately way, the two of them went into the house, went into Jack’s room, and locked the door.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“So, I’m going up in three weeks for Freshmen orientation, and I thought you might like to come with me,” Jack said, stretching out beside Swann and touching his face.
“Would that be allowed?”
“I’m saying it’s allowed,” Jack said. “So it’s allowed. I mean, I’m going to have a single dorm room. At Saint Anthony’s they have this thing where all the teams live together, and I think I was supposed to live in the football dorm, but I kinda said no to that and they put me in a place called Dwenger. I’ll be in a single so, yeah, I think you should stay with me.”
Swann appeared to be thinking about it, but he was looking at the patch of dark fur on Jack’s breast, how it went down his muscled belly to his sex. He was looking at his sideburns and at his red lips, brighter in the hot summer light of his bedroom.
“Whaddo you think?” Jack stroked Swann’s face with the back of his hand.
“I think yes,” Swann said. “I wasn’t going to say no. Sometimes I just like being silent and looking at you.”
Swann Portis sat under a great window filled with afternoon sun, smoking the end of a cigarette, his arms rested on the arms of a great rattan chair he’d brought from the Birches, and if anyone in the sophomore class at Saint Francis of the Woods had known who Huey P Newton was, there might have been some reminder of him when Chuck Pritchard, Kieran Nash and Adam Dugger came into the large suite.
“This place is amazing,” the redheaded Kieran noted.
The tall, green eyed Chuck Pritchard, who was well liked because he didn’t say very much said nothing, but smiled, walking in and slapping Swann’s knee. There weren’t many Black people and half of them had decided to not get on with Swann from the beginning. That hard largely turned around in the first year, but Chuck had always been good. A day student, he said, “So this is how the other half lives.”
“Sometimes,” said Swann.
Swann realized that in a world where it was safe to throw about one’s hyper sexuality or homosexuality, he definitely would have made a go for Chuck who, even now, out of uniform, wore snug orange denim shorts and whose long caramel legs, green eyes and perfect features reminded him of sex. Once, last year, when they were at lunch he’d heard Chuck talking about having sex with his girlfriend and the orgasm making him pass out on top of her. He’d felt all sorts of ways. This was before Jack had shown up, and sometime before he had taken Jack into his bed.
Now, as he talked with the friend he semi lusted for, his feet propped up on a Tupperware box like a king, he thought of a few days later, after he’d left Jack’s bed, the smell of Jack, the imprint of Jack’s body on him, and Jack driving him back here, and Swann felt vindicated, ancient, well matched to Chuck, not some strange virginal fish out of water, not virginal at all.
“Oh, this motherfucker,” Chuck murmured as Brad came into the room with his boxes and blankets and brothers.
Swann shrugged.
“We needed a fifth. If you lived here, it could have been you.”
“I wouldn’t live here.”
“I understand.”
Kieran was not quite tall, not quite thin, red haired and wide faced. Adam was what you were supposed to look like. He was fashionable. He was dark haired, of average height, well made with short brown hair, nothing crazy, and they both kept saying, “This is neat, this is really neat.”
What was neat was the series of high ceilinged large rooms with their own bathroom, and Swann had already set up his space. Pete had been in the Greek isles all summer and brought back—though Chris coolly noted he could have gotten them from Pier One, arrases and dividers.
“Whaddo we need those for?” James, one of Pete’s cousin Harry’s best friend, asked.
“Privacy,” Swann said pointedly, for he could imagine wanting a great deal of privacy from Harry. Indeed, he briefly wondered if just getting a single room wouldn’t have been better.
So the first room, or the South Room as Pete called it, contained Swann’s bed, and Chris’s, along with nightstands and whatever else with one door leading out to the hallway. Their room was so large there was still room for the rattan chair, a sofa, a mini fridge and a microwave. A wide doorway with a door that was, in theory, to be left open, led to the next room, which was the main gathering area where they were now, and the last room, adjoining the bathroom, was where Pete, Harry and Brad would stay because, as Brad said, “Who wouldn’t want to be closest to the bathroom?”
“Anyone who doesn’t want to smell other peoples’ shit and hear a toilet flushing all night,” Chuck whispered.
“Well,” Swann said, “let them figure that out on their own.”
Down the hall some sophomores came. One bent down and farted. Another shouted, “Whoever pooted’s, not included.”
“Okay,” Swann said. “So I’m going to make this rule. A bodily function is a bodily function and can’t be helped. But that’s not going to be a thing in here. I’m not having people sticking their asses out and trumpeting farts. I’m fucking serious. I brought incense and candles. I believe in class, and whoever pooted will sure in the fuck not be included.”
“And I would like to make a rule that there is no smoking in here,” Brad announced.
“That’s not going to be a rule,” Swann said, flatly, and took out his pack of cigarettes.
“Swann! Swann!” he heard his name shouted down the hall.
“Swann!”
“Whaaaat?”
Two kids, one plump, one tall, both dark came into the room and he said, “Negroes, what’s up?”
“We were looking for you,” Vincent said, and the one Black priest—”
“Abbot Prynne.”
“Yeah, said you were here.”
“Aren’t yawl early?”
“No, it’s some Freshmen ceremony for today,” Varlon said.
“This is Vincent Joyner and Varlon Harper,” Swann introduced them to Chuck more than anyone else. “They are—”
“Freshmen,” Brad said sourly while making his bed.
“Yes,” Swann continued, “who went to the day school in town. We used to go over and help out and now they’re here.”
“I want to live here!” Varlon declared.
“No, you don’t,” Swann said. “But you can always visit.”
At this moment, an eager white boy with a hair cut somewhere between a soup bowl and a buzzcut with Clark Kent swirl curl, stuck his eager head in the room and cried, “Hi, I’m looking for the swim team? I heard some members of the swim team were here?”
“Freshmen live downstairs,” Brad said, pompously.
“Ignore my rude colleague,” Swann said, pointing with his cigarette to Chuck, Kieran and Adam as he named them.
“They are on the swim team. And you are?”
“Mike Buren!”
Michael Buren raced toward Swann, all energy and stuck out his hand.
Swann shook the boy’s hand.
“You’re amazing!” Mike shook his head.
“And you… are a friend of a friend. Chris Navarro.”
“Chris is the best. He’s wonderful!”
“He’s on his way. He told me you’d be here. Have a seat. Grab a grape soda.”
Swann pointed to the fridge.
“I’ve never had a grape soda before,” Mike noted as he took the purple can out of the refrigerator.
Chuck, Swann, Vincent and Varlon all looked at each other in amazement.
White people!
“Would that be allowed?”
“I’m saying it’s allowed,” Jack said. “So it’s allowed. I mean, I’m going to have a single dorm room. At Saint Anthony’s they have this thing where all the teams live together, and I think I was supposed to live in the football dorm, but I kinda said no to that and they put me in a place called Dwenger. I’ll be in a single so, yeah, I think you should stay with me.”
Swann appeared to be thinking about it, but he was looking at the patch of dark fur on Jack’s breast, how it went down his muscled belly to his sex. He was looking at his sideburns and at his red lips, brighter in the hot summer light of his bedroom.
“Whaddo you think?” Jack stroked Swann’s face with the back of his hand.
“I think yes,” Swann said. “I wasn’t going to say no. Sometimes I just like being silent and looking at you.”
Swann Portis sat under a great window filled with afternoon sun, smoking the end of a cigarette, his arms rested on the arms of a great rattan chair he’d brought from the Birches, and if anyone in the sophomore class at Saint Francis of the Woods had known who Huey P Newton was, there might have been some reminder of him when Chuck Pritchard, Kieran Nash and Adam Dugger came into the large suite.
“This place is amazing,” the redheaded Kieran noted.
The tall, green eyed Chuck Pritchard, who was well liked because he didn’t say very much said nothing, but smiled, walking in and slapping Swann’s knee. There weren’t many Black people and half of them had decided to not get on with Swann from the beginning. That hard largely turned around in the first year, but Chuck had always been good. A day student, he said, “So this is how the other half lives.”
“Sometimes,” said Swann.
Swann realized that in a world where it was safe to throw about one’s hyper sexuality or homosexuality, he definitely would have made a go for Chuck who, even now, out of uniform, wore snug orange denim shorts and whose long caramel legs, green eyes and perfect features reminded him of sex. Once, last year, when they were at lunch he’d heard Chuck talking about having sex with his girlfriend and the orgasm making him pass out on top of her. He’d felt all sorts of ways. This was before Jack had shown up, and sometime before he had taken Jack into his bed.
Now, as he talked with the friend he semi lusted for, his feet propped up on a Tupperware box like a king, he thought of a few days later, after he’d left Jack’s bed, the smell of Jack, the imprint of Jack’s body on him, and Jack driving him back here, and Swann felt vindicated, ancient, well matched to Chuck, not some strange virginal fish out of water, not virginal at all.
“Oh, this motherfucker,” Chuck murmured as Brad came into the room with his boxes and blankets and brothers.
Swann shrugged.
“We needed a fifth. If you lived here, it could have been you.”
“I wouldn’t live here.”
“I understand.”
Kieran was not quite tall, not quite thin, red haired and wide faced. Adam was what you were supposed to look like. He was fashionable. He was dark haired, of average height, well made with short brown hair, nothing crazy, and they both kept saying, “This is neat, this is really neat.”
What was neat was the series of high ceilinged large rooms with their own bathroom, and Swann had already set up his space. Pete had been in the Greek isles all summer and brought back—though Chris coolly noted he could have gotten them from Pier One, arrases and dividers.
“Whaddo we need those for?” James, one of Pete’s cousin Harry’s best friend, asked.
“Privacy,” Swann said pointedly, for he could imagine wanting a great deal of privacy from Harry. Indeed, he briefly wondered if just getting a single room wouldn’t have been better.
So the first room, or the South Room as Pete called it, contained Swann’s bed, and Chris’s, along with nightstands and whatever else with one door leading out to the hallway. Their room was so large there was still room for the rattan chair, a sofa, a mini fridge and a microwave. A wide doorway with a door that was, in theory, to be left open, led to the next room, which was the main gathering area where they were now, and the last room, adjoining the bathroom, was where Pete, Harry and Brad would stay because, as Brad said, “Who wouldn’t want to be closest to the bathroom?”
“Anyone who doesn’t want to smell other peoples’ shit and hear a toilet flushing all night,” Chuck whispered.
“Well,” Swann said, “let them figure that out on their own.”
Down the hall some sophomores came. One bent down and farted. Another shouted, “Whoever pooted’s, not included.”
“Okay,” Swann said. “So I’m going to make this rule. A bodily function is a bodily function and can’t be helped. But that’s not going to be a thing in here. I’m not having people sticking their asses out and trumpeting farts. I’m fucking serious. I brought incense and candles. I believe in class, and whoever pooted will sure in the fuck not be included.”
“And I would like to make a rule that there is no smoking in here,” Brad announced.
“That’s not going to be a rule,” Swann said, flatly, and took out his pack of cigarettes.
“Swann! Swann!” he heard his name shouted down the hall.
“Swann!”
“Whaaaat?”
Two kids, one plump, one tall, both dark came into the room and he said, “Negroes, what’s up?”
“We were looking for you,” Vincent said, and the one Black priest—”
“Abbot Prynne.”
“Yeah, said you were here.”
“Aren’t yawl early?”
“No, it’s some Freshmen ceremony for today,” Varlon said.
“This is Vincent Joyner and Varlon Harper,” Swann introduced them to Chuck more than anyone else. “They are—”
“Freshmen,” Brad said sourly while making his bed.
“Yes,” Swann continued, “who went to the day school in town. We used to go over and help out and now they’re here.”
“I want to live here!” Varlon declared.
“No, you don’t,” Swann said. “But you can always visit.”
At this moment, an eager white boy with a hair cut somewhere between a soup bowl and a buzzcut with Clark Kent swirl curl, stuck his eager head in the room and cried, “Hi, I’m looking for the swim team? I heard some members of the swim team were here?”
“Freshmen live downstairs,” Brad said, pompously.
“Ignore my rude colleague,” Swann said, pointing with his cigarette to Chuck, Kieran and Adam as he named them.
“They are on the swim team. And you are?”
“Mike Buren!”
Michael Buren raced toward Swann, all energy and stuck out his hand.
Swann shook the boy’s hand.
“You’re amazing!” Mike shook his head.
“And you… are a friend of a friend. Chris Navarro.”
“Chris is the best. He’s wonderful!”
“He’s on his way. He told me you’d be here. Have a seat. Grab a grape soda.”
Swann pointed to the fridge.
“I’ve never had a grape soda before,” Mike noted as he took the purple can out of the refrigerator.
Chuck, Swann, Vincent and Varlon all looked at each other in amazement.
White people!
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Well sorry I didn’t realise about the first posting but these were some excellent portions! Swann sure gets himself into some interesting situations. So much going on for him and I am curious as to what will happen next. Great writing!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you enjoyed it, friend! Yes, Swann is full of adventure!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“It’s not the same,” Jill said, passing her cigarette to Swann as she swung her legs around and they sat on the roof of Saint Francis. A little to the north, up the road and under the stars were the walls and spire of Saint Anne’s.
“I know.”
“I miss them,” Anne said. “I miss the girls and I mss Ben and Jack, and I thought it wouldn’t’ matter, but I think part of me thought when I got back they’d still be here.”
“Jill, if you keep talking that way, I’m going to get really sad.”
“Then I’ll stop.”
“I actually had a really good day, and now I’m thinking about him.”
“I didn’t mean to bring you down.”
“No, I would have felt this way no matter what. You’re just saying what I’m thinking.”
Further back on the roof were Chris and Pete, James, Harry, Chuck, and Kieran, and Brad.
“It’s going to be different,” Swann said. “But it’s going to be good. It’s just going to be a new good.”
“We need more girls,” Jill said.
“I don’t disagree.”
“That Chuck?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s beautiful.”
“Yes he is,” Swann agreed emphatically.
“Do you think he…?”
“I think he’s strictly about the puss, which is good for you. I think he’s strictly into Black girls, which is bad for you, though.”
“Well, shit,” Jill murmured as she took the last of his cigarette from Swann.
“Still, a bitch can try.”
“Well, this bitch won’t. And the idea of him having sex with all those girls puts me off.”
“Chris had sex with a bunch of girls and you’re still best friends.”
Swann nodded.
“I’m Chuck’s best friend, too.”
“Yes,” Jill allowed as she placed her hands on her blue jeaned legs and they both watched a semi coast down the road in the night, “but it’s different with Chris.”
Swann looked to the tall blond boy who was talking to Mike, and Chris looked, saw Swann, and waved.
“Yes,” Swann said. “But that’s because, as much has I love Jack, Jack is two hours away and four years older. And I’ve always had the feeling that one day Chris is going to be my next boyfriend.”
He wanted to know what she’d been going through all summer.
“Matt,” Jill said, simply.
Matt was her boyfriend from back home whom he had never met.
“We worked at the movie theatre together this summer. Which is to say he got me the job.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, he’s my boss. He thinks we’re going to get married.”
“That’s… intense.”
Jill tossed the end of the cigarette away. They both thought of having another as cars dashed down the road.
“It is, but I sort of encouraged it,” Jill said. “I mean, I was thinking the same thing except now it seems sort of unlikely since I’m fifteen, he’s eighteen—”
“He’s eighteen!”
“Jack is eighteen.”
“True.”
“Only Matt’s not going to college. He’s not really going anywhere. He’s sort of a loser, but anyway, I think the whole reason I talked about him so much and thought about him is because it meant I didn’t have to think about anyone else, didn’t have to think about meeting anyone here.”
“Or in town.”
“I never go into town, But really, anywhere at all.”
Swann nodded.
“How much do you all do?”
“Me and Matt?”
Swann nodded.
“We don’t have sex. I mean, we’re too young.”
And then she said, “It’s not the same for us like it was with you and Jack. You’re really mature and Jack is really grown up, and, at any road, you all can’t make babies. But we, me and Matt, we’re not old enough for that. I feel like he never will be old enough. I feel like if he was forty I wouldn’t trust him to… I dunno. I feel like I won’t know him when I’m forty.”
And then she said. “But he does do things. I mean, he puts his hands down there, his fingers. That man knows what to with his fingers. Good gravy on the Virgin Mary, you’re blushing. You of all people.”
“You’ve just never talked about your sex life.”
“You never asked! Do you think you’re the only one who has something going on? Matt’s tongue… when he gets down there, when it’s down there… oh my God. Best feeling.”
Swann sighed and frowned. “Now you make me miss Jack.”
“Did you all do stuff like that…. With your tongues?”
“Like blow jobs?”
“Yes,” Jill said.
Swann said, “I can’t say what was best, when he was doing it to me, or when I was doing it to him. The way his breath would get shallow.”
“And his stomach all flat and tense?”
“Yes!”
“And then his body tenses up.”
“And then the moment.”
“Did you swallow or did you spit?”
“It depended,” said Swann.
“Exactly,” Jill said.
Then Jill said, “Is it true that guys… or I guess they do it to women too… Put their tongues in….”
“What?” Swann looked confused. And then he said, “The ass?”
“Yes!”
“It’s true.
“I mean you have sex in it and you put your tongue in it?”
“You can,” Swann said. “But you don’t have to.”
“That makes so much sense,” Jill said, almost relieved. “I wondered what the purpose of it was, asses. When I’d see a guy with a nice ass—Jack had a nice ass—I’d wonder: well why are they nice? What else do you do but grab them? But… what you said, that makes sense,”
“You know,” Swann began, “last year, in the first semester, I stole a gay sex manual from the bookstore in town. It has all the pictures and photos of how to do this and that the other thing.”
“Really?”
Swann nodded. “That’s how I learned what to do with Jack. You wanna see it?”
Jill paused, stroking her chin, and then she said: “Yes.”
Was it better to have Jill here with him, the two of them perusing this book, or to be left on his own with a memory that made him ache so that his body could do nothing and his memory was the only escape? What was more a delight and surprise? That first time when, making love, he had pressed his face to the firm muscles of Jacks ass and pressed his tongue inside of him, surprised at the thrill of it, the joy of opening that way, delighted by how the older boy’s back arched as he cried out and clutched the mattress, and Swann was delighted by something he’d halfway heard of, but could not believe in, the pressure of his tongue pressing into the deepest most private place of sensation Jack had while, naked and beautiful, he thrust up his muscular ass and opened for Swann.
He was spoiled. At the time he did not know about the lover that only did one thing and liked it done to him but never reciprocated. Whatever Jack did, he did, and whatever he did, so did Jack so that he could not say what was best, his tongue in Jack or Jack’s tongue in him. Later, when Jill left and it was so late it was time for them all to be in bed, Swann closed the partition between him and Chris and, in the darkness of his dorm room, remembering his last time in Jack’s room in Dwenger, his naked body arched like a doorway over Swann as he had come, his thick penis jutting as it spurted once, twice, a third time, glossy semen all over Swann.
In the aftermath, the fuck rung out of them, the two of them lay together in their loneliness and sorrow and Jack cried until he fell asleep, and then Swann cried as well.
“I know.”
“I miss them,” Anne said. “I miss the girls and I mss Ben and Jack, and I thought it wouldn’t’ matter, but I think part of me thought when I got back they’d still be here.”
“Jill, if you keep talking that way, I’m going to get really sad.”
“Then I’ll stop.”
“I actually had a really good day, and now I’m thinking about him.”
“I didn’t mean to bring you down.”
“No, I would have felt this way no matter what. You’re just saying what I’m thinking.”
Further back on the roof were Chris and Pete, James, Harry, Chuck, and Kieran, and Brad.
“It’s going to be different,” Swann said. “But it’s going to be good. It’s just going to be a new good.”
“We need more girls,” Jill said.
“I don’t disagree.”
“That Chuck?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s beautiful.”
“Yes he is,” Swann agreed emphatically.
“Do you think he…?”
“I think he’s strictly about the puss, which is good for you. I think he’s strictly into Black girls, which is bad for you, though.”
“Well, shit,” Jill murmured as she took the last of his cigarette from Swann.
“Still, a bitch can try.”
“Well, this bitch won’t. And the idea of him having sex with all those girls puts me off.”
“Chris had sex with a bunch of girls and you’re still best friends.”
Swann nodded.
“I’m Chuck’s best friend, too.”
“Yes,” Jill allowed as she placed her hands on her blue jeaned legs and they both watched a semi coast down the road in the night, “but it’s different with Chris.”
Swann looked to the tall blond boy who was talking to Mike, and Chris looked, saw Swann, and waved.
“Yes,” Swann said. “But that’s because, as much has I love Jack, Jack is two hours away and four years older. And I’ve always had the feeling that one day Chris is going to be my next boyfriend.”
He wanted to know what she’d been going through all summer.
“Matt,” Jill said, simply.
Matt was her boyfriend from back home whom he had never met.
“We worked at the movie theatre together this summer. Which is to say he got me the job.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, he’s my boss. He thinks we’re going to get married.”
“That’s… intense.”
Jill tossed the end of the cigarette away. They both thought of having another as cars dashed down the road.
“It is, but I sort of encouraged it,” Jill said. “I mean, I was thinking the same thing except now it seems sort of unlikely since I’m fifteen, he’s eighteen—”
“He’s eighteen!”
“Jack is eighteen.”
“True.”
“Only Matt’s not going to college. He’s not really going anywhere. He’s sort of a loser, but anyway, I think the whole reason I talked about him so much and thought about him is because it meant I didn’t have to think about anyone else, didn’t have to think about meeting anyone here.”
“Or in town.”
“I never go into town, But really, anywhere at all.”
Swann nodded.
“How much do you all do?”
“Me and Matt?”
Swann nodded.
“We don’t have sex. I mean, we’re too young.”
And then she said, “It’s not the same for us like it was with you and Jack. You’re really mature and Jack is really grown up, and, at any road, you all can’t make babies. But we, me and Matt, we’re not old enough for that. I feel like he never will be old enough. I feel like if he was forty I wouldn’t trust him to… I dunno. I feel like I won’t know him when I’m forty.”
And then she said. “But he does do things. I mean, he puts his hands down there, his fingers. That man knows what to with his fingers. Good gravy on the Virgin Mary, you’re blushing. You of all people.”
“You’ve just never talked about your sex life.”
“You never asked! Do you think you’re the only one who has something going on? Matt’s tongue… when he gets down there, when it’s down there… oh my God. Best feeling.”
Swann sighed and frowned. “Now you make me miss Jack.”
“Did you all do stuff like that…. With your tongues?”
“Like blow jobs?”
“Yes,” Jill said.
Swann said, “I can’t say what was best, when he was doing it to me, or when I was doing it to him. The way his breath would get shallow.”
“And his stomach all flat and tense?”
“Yes!”
“And then his body tenses up.”
“And then the moment.”
“Did you swallow or did you spit?”
“It depended,” said Swann.
“Exactly,” Jill said.
Then Jill said, “Is it true that guys… or I guess they do it to women too… Put their tongues in….”
“What?” Swann looked confused. And then he said, “The ass?”
“Yes!”
“It’s true.
“I mean you have sex in it and you put your tongue in it?”
“You can,” Swann said. “But you don’t have to.”
“That makes so much sense,” Jill said, almost relieved. “I wondered what the purpose of it was, asses. When I’d see a guy with a nice ass—Jack had a nice ass—I’d wonder: well why are they nice? What else do you do but grab them? But… what you said, that makes sense,”
“You know,” Swann began, “last year, in the first semester, I stole a gay sex manual from the bookstore in town. It has all the pictures and photos of how to do this and that the other thing.”
“Really?”
Swann nodded. “That’s how I learned what to do with Jack. You wanna see it?”
Jill paused, stroking her chin, and then she said: “Yes.”
Was it better to have Jill here with him, the two of them perusing this book, or to be left on his own with a memory that made him ache so that his body could do nothing and his memory was the only escape? What was more a delight and surprise? That first time when, making love, he had pressed his face to the firm muscles of Jacks ass and pressed his tongue inside of him, surprised at the thrill of it, the joy of opening that way, delighted by how the older boy’s back arched as he cried out and clutched the mattress, and Swann was delighted by something he’d halfway heard of, but could not believe in, the pressure of his tongue pressing into the deepest most private place of sensation Jack had while, naked and beautiful, he thrust up his muscular ass and opened for Swann.
He was spoiled. At the time he did not know about the lover that only did one thing and liked it done to him but never reciprocated. Whatever Jack did, he did, and whatever he did, so did Jack so that he could not say what was best, his tongue in Jack or Jack’s tongue in him. Later, when Jill left and it was so late it was time for them all to be in bed, Swann closed the partition between him and Chris and, in the darkness of his dorm room, remembering his last time in Jack’s room in Dwenger, his naked body arched like a doorway over Swann as he had come, his thick penis jutting as it spurted once, twice, a third time, glossy semen all over Swann.
In the aftermath, the fuck rung out of them, the two of them lay together in their loneliness and sorrow and Jack cried until he fell asleep, and then Swann cried as well.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“Well,” Julie said, “we’d heard so much about you, I almost didn’t think you were real.”
Joe was pretty to him, but Doug acknowledged he was also a bit goofy looking, and could never quite imagine his face on a woman’s head. This was his cousin Julie. She lived out East somewhere, but had grown up near South Bend. Doug liked her.
“Finally, Aunt Talia was like, sooner or later you have to bring him around. Sal is the only other friend you ever talked about.”
“Where is Sal anyway?”
“Who cares?” Talia shrugged while they were eating loaded nachos on the floor.
“We’ve seen him a billion times already, frankly, and I’m not supposed to say this, “I never got what was so great about him, I mean, he’s not bad. He’s just like, you know, someone’s friend. But the way Joe goes on about you I thought, this guy better be interesting, and then you were, so it’s all good.”
“Well… that’s good,” Doug said, They were sitting on the floor of the den in Joe Stanley’s house watching some Christmas movie no one was paying attention to. Julia’s sister Patti was stretched out on the old leather sofa its sunken front legs, and Cousin Tony was half asleep in the recliner across the room, occasionally laughing at the movie and then falling back into snores.
“So… what does he say about me? Because… I mean, I had no idea.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“It’s too fucking late. And can we smoke in here?”
“No, but yes. Fuck it. Let me get my purse, my menthols are in there.”
When Julia had returned she said, as she sipped from her drink and pulled out her cigarette, “It’s not what he says. It’s just that he talks about you all the time. And then he stopped. Because I guess you went away or he went away…. Or something.”
“And then he talked about Sal again.”
“No. He never talks about Sal. But then he saw you again at this funeral?”
“Yes.”
“And he was all excited. Never heard my little cousin be so excited about—”
“Funerals?”
Talia laughed out loud.
“About seeing someone.”
“Well!”
“He told me about the ingenious way you and your cousin order chicken. He was super impressed by that.”
“Good God.”
“And about the apartment building your family bought then turned into like this town house.”
“A lot of families do that. Or used to.”
“And about the third floor and the library and the picture of the white woman who lived on a plantation and was like your great-grandmother.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I’m sure there’s something. Is it true you poisoned the whole junior class and then got expelled?”
“Okay, it wasn’t the whole junior class.”
Talia waited.
“It was just my junior year Latin class. And they recovered.”
Talia cackled. “No wonder he likes you. Joe’s such a square. He would never do stuff like that.”
“No,” Doug said, “he really wouldn’t. Maybe that’s what I like about him. The last thing I need is a friend who’s as nuts as I am.”
“What are we all laughing at?” Joe asked as he came into the den, Sal at his side.
“Me and Doug were just talking about—”
“Me?”
“Get over yourself,” Doug said.
Sal slumped into an abandoned rocking chair, looking sleepy, and Joe stood next to the sofa, behind Doug, unconsciously rubbing his neck.
“You all smell like pot, you know that?”
Sal stretched.
“My stepsister.”
“You said they were square,” Doug said to Talia, crushing out his cigarette.
“Aha! So you were talking about me.”
Joes’s fingers felt good on his neck. He was conscious of how much he loved him.
“And I’m not boring,” Joe said.
“No one said boring,” Doug told him, reaching up to touch his spare hand because, apparently it was alright, “I said square. And smoking a joint on the way home doesn’t really change that.”
Sal tittered a little and turned on his side, pulling his hoodie up over his head.
Joe slumped down beside Doug, and then it wasn’t much longer before Sal’s head was back and he was snoring inelegantly and Joe’s head was lolled over and he drooling on the boy he loved.
“Well, that’s lovely,” Doug noted, but the magic of the day after Christmas and the strong smell of pot worked on him so that he was blinking when someone was switching a light on, and in the doorway stood Swann in his rings and chains, in his black trousers and elegant paisley shirt, broad brimmed hat turned to the side, and Sal was blinking up at him and Talia shrieked and said, “My God, you’re fabulous.”
And Swann, pleased and delighted, as if he had just seen something amazing said, “I know!”
“I’m sleepy.”
“How can you be sleepy? You just spent the last two hours drooling on me.”
Joe grinned and said, “I’m sorry. You wanna go out.”
“Not especially,” Doug discovered, and he was yawning too. “I mean, maybe later. I sort of want to go to bed.”
He sort of very much wanted to be with Joe since the moment the he had come back into the house and been rubbing the back of his neck, since he’d placed his head on Doug’s chest and fallen asleep and Doug could smell pot, but also the honeysuckle shampoo he’d used, and he could feel the light weight of shoulders and arms, the warmth of Joe Stanley.
“Do you want to go to bed?” Joe murmured as they went down the hall to his room. “Or…. Go to bed?”
“To be honest I’m really not sure,” Doug said.
In his room, Joe unzipped his hoodie and put it on the floor.
“I’ll shower first.”
“That’s not necessary. I like you smelling like Bob Marley.”
“Do I really smell that much like pot?”
“Yes.”
“If my mom smells it, she’s gonna—”
“Pretend that she doesn’t,” Doug said, as he turned back the bed. He looked around Joe’s room. He supposed Joe hadn’t stayed in it long term since junior year of high school. He would have come back for the summer, though. Briefly it went through Doug’s head that Joe and Sal must have had sex in this bed. Doug just couldn’t be bothered to care. There were posters of soccer stars—football stars—all in short shorts and polo shirts, kicking balls, jumping up and down, looking sweaty and intense and, frankly, like Joe, and there were a few Italian movie posters.
Joe stopped undressing.
“What are you looking at?”
“Primarily you.”
Joe grinned at him.
“I’ll undress slower then.”
“You do that.”
Doug did not undress slower, though. He stripped off his clothes, and while Joe watched the reveal of his brown limbs, the torso he loved, his own sex rose, and Doug stretched out his hand and pulled Joe into bed, smelling the weed, the shampoo, the salt of his armpits. He pressed himself to Joe, and Joe grinned as they locked limbs together under the covers, not even turning out the lamp. It felt like home.
“I love you, you know?” Doug said.
“It took you long enough to say it.”
“I was hoping you would feel it.”
Joe stretched out on his stomach, the way Doug loved and Doug ran his hand across Joe’s shoulders, down his spine, over the little hills of his ass. He lay on top of Joe, squeezing him and Joe squeezed back. He placed his stiff penis between the tender hills of Joe’s ass, and Joe squeezed their too.
“I feel it now,” he said, and they both laughed.
“You don’t mind that I’m square?” Joe said to the pillow, eyes closed as he savored Doug in him.
“You’re not that square. You’re fucking a Black guy in your mom’s house.”
“Good point! You’re my exotic boyfriend. I really am cool.”
Doug bit him and Joe yelped.
Doug pressed his penis deeper and Joe cried out. Doug said, “Very cool.”
Joe was pretty to him, but Doug acknowledged he was also a bit goofy looking, and could never quite imagine his face on a woman’s head. This was his cousin Julie. She lived out East somewhere, but had grown up near South Bend. Doug liked her.
“Finally, Aunt Talia was like, sooner or later you have to bring him around. Sal is the only other friend you ever talked about.”
“Where is Sal anyway?”
“Who cares?” Talia shrugged while they were eating loaded nachos on the floor.
“We’ve seen him a billion times already, frankly, and I’m not supposed to say this, “I never got what was so great about him, I mean, he’s not bad. He’s just like, you know, someone’s friend. But the way Joe goes on about you I thought, this guy better be interesting, and then you were, so it’s all good.”
“Well… that’s good,” Doug said, They were sitting on the floor of the den in Joe Stanley’s house watching some Christmas movie no one was paying attention to. Julia’s sister Patti was stretched out on the old leather sofa its sunken front legs, and Cousin Tony was half asleep in the recliner across the room, occasionally laughing at the movie and then falling back into snores.
“So… what does he say about me? Because… I mean, I had no idea.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“It’s too fucking late. And can we smoke in here?”
“No, but yes. Fuck it. Let me get my purse, my menthols are in there.”
When Julia had returned she said, as she sipped from her drink and pulled out her cigarette, “It’s not what he says. It’s just that he talks about you all the time. And then he stopped. Because I guess you went away or he went away…. Or something.”
“And then he talked about Sal again.”
“No. He never talks about Sal. But then he saw you again at this funeral?”
“Yes.”
“And he was all excited. Never heard my little cousin be so excited about—”
“Funerals?”
Talia laughed out loud.
“About seeing someone.”
“Well!”
“He told me about the ingenious way you and your cousin order chicken. He was super impressed by that.”
“Good God.”
“And about the apartment building your family bought then turned into like this town house.”
“A lot of families do that. Or used to.”
“And about the third floor and the library and the picture of the white woman who lived on a plantation and was like your great-grandmother.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I’m sure there’s something. Is it true you poisoned the whole junior class and then got expelled?”
“Okay, it wasn’t the whole junior class.”
Talia waited.
“It was just my junior year Latin class. And they recovered.”
Talia cackled. “No wonder he likes you. Joe’s such a square. He would never do stuff like that.”
“No,” Doug said, “he really wouldn’t. Maybe that’s what I like about him. The last thing I need is a friend who’s as nuts as I am.”
“What are we all laughing at?” Joe asked as he came into the den, Sal at his side.
“Me and Doug were just talking about—”
“Me?”
“Get over yourself,” Doug said.
Sal slumped into an abandoned rocking chair, looking sleepy, and Joe stood next to the sofa, behind Doug, unconsciously rubbing his neck.
“You all smell like pot, you know that?”
Sal stretched.
“My stepsister.”
“You said they were square,” Doug said to Talia, crushing out his cigarette.
“Aha! So you were talking about me.”
Joes’s fingers felt good on his neck. He was conscious of how much he loved him.
“And I’m not boring,” Joe said.
“No one said boring,” Doug told him, reaching up to touch his spare hand because, apparently it was alright, “I said square. And smoking a joint on the way home doesn’t really change that.”
Sal tittered a little and turned on his side, pulling his hoodie up over his head.
Joe slumped down beside Doug, and then it wasn’t much longer before Sal’s head was back and he was snoring inelegantly and Joe’s head was lolled over and he drooling on the boy he loved.
“Well, that’s lovely,” Doug noted, but the magic of the day after Christmas and the strong smell of pot worked on him so that he was blinking when someone was switching a light on, and in the doorway stood Swann in his rings and chains, in his black trousers and elegant paisley shirt, broad brimmed hat turned to the side, and Sal was blinking up at him and Talia shrieked and said, “My God, you’re fabulous.”
And Swann, pleased and delighted, as if he had just seen something amazing said, “I know!”
“I’m sleepy.”
“How can you be sleepy? You just spent the last two hours drooling on me.”
Joe grinned and said, “I’m sorry. You wanna go out.”
“Not especially,” Doug discovered, and he was yawning too. “I mean, maybe later. I sort of want to go to bed.”
He sort of very much wanted to be with Joe since the moment the he had come back into the house and been rubbing the back of his neck, since he’d placed his head on Doug’s chest and fallen asleep and Doug could smell pot, but also the honeysuckle shampoo he’d used, and he could feel the light weight of shoulders and arms, the warmth of Joe Stanley.
“Do you want to go to bed?” Joe murmured as they went down the hall to his room. “Or…. Go to bed?”
“To be honest I’m really not sure,” Doug said.
In his room, Joe unzipped his hoodie and put it on the floor.
“I’ll shower first.”
“That’s not necessary. I like you smelling like Bob Marley.”
“Do I really smell that much like pot?”
“Yes.”
“If my mom smells it, she’s gonna—”
“Pretend that she doesn’t,” Doug said, as he turned back the bed. He looked around Joe’s room. He supposed Joe hadn’t stayed in it long term since junior year of high school. He would have come back for the summer, though. Briefly it went through Doug’s head that Joe and Sal must have had sex in this bed. Doug just couldn’t be bothered to care. There were posters of soccer stars—football stars—all in short shorts and polo shirts, kicking balls, jumping up and down, looking sweaty and intense and, frankly, like Joe, and there were a few Italian movie posters.
Joe stopped undressing.
“What are you looking at?”
“Primarily you.”
Joe grinned at him.
“I’ll undress slower then.”
“You do that.”
Doug did not undress slower, though. He stripped off his clothes, and while Joe watched the reveal of his brown limbs, the torso he loved, his own sex rose, and Doug stretched out his hand and pulled Joe into bed, smelling the weed, the shampoo, the salt of his armpits. He pressed himself to Joe, and Joe grinned as they locked limbs together under the covers, not even turning out the lamp. It felt like home.
“I love you, you know?” Doug said.
“It took you long enough to say it.”
“I was hoping you would feel it.”
Joe stretched out on his stomach, the way Doug loved and Doug ran his hand across Joe’s shoulders, down his spine, over the little hills of his ass. He lay on top of Joe, squeezing him and Joe squeezed back. He placed his stiff penis between the tender hills of Joe’s ass, and Joe squeezed their too.
“I feel it now,” he said, and they both laughed.
“You don’t mind that I’m square?” Joe said to the pillow, eyes closed as he savored Doug in him.
“You’re not that square. You’re fucking a Black guy in your mom’s house.”
“Good point! You’re my exotic boyfriend. I really am cool.”
Doug bit him and Joe yelped.
Doug pressed his penis deeper and Joe cried out. Doug said, “Very cool.”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Those were two excellent portions! Thanks for posting them and I am enjoying this story a lot. Keep it up!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Penises!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Sal Goode was used to betraying himself. He’d done it since he was about seventeen. He’d done it since the day when exhaustion and pride were punctured when his father held him by the shoulders and told him, “I knew you weren’t a faggot.”
It didn’t matter what Father Reed said to him, or Father Roberts, the combination of hearing his father say that, and of knowing what he looked like to the girls, was enough to finally make him sleep with one, or two or three. Later, people would ask—people who weren’t Swann—If he was bi or if he knew what he was, or if he liked guys how could he like girls, silly questions like that. They didn’t understand what he barely understood himself. You liked a lot of things. Lots of things turned you on, and strange as it was to say, being liked turned him on, being popular turned him on, not having anything to hide turned him on, the idea of being a proper guy, a guy that fucked girls, a guy who knew how to finger a pussy, turned him on. The last girl he had been with was Courtney, the night he learned Garrett was dead. When he’d fucked her from behind and she cried out, it turned him on. The more she cried the more he fucked her. He fucked her till the heat rose in his balls and he came.
So being turned on wasn’t really much of an estimate for anything, not really. When he and Joe had been together it had seemed sort of natural. He loved Joe, but he had never experienced being “in love” with Joe. He didn’t really understand that difference either until they were both seventeen. When he did understand it, it hurt. It had been the weekend Joe invited him over and he had thought he was going home his old friendship, but Joe had started wrestling with him. Joe who had broken things off, Joe who said that what they were doing was sinful. And suddenly he realized Joe was trying to pull down his joggers. They wrestled and Sal resisted him, kicked him. Things got a little violent in the basement and they alternated between wrestling and pulling pants and underwear down. Sal got so excited he kissed Joe roughly, and Joe accepted, but moved his mouth away and suddenly, decidedly, made for Sal’s crotch. Sal pushed his head away, but Joe began sucking him, and it felt so good that Sal gave way to it. He lay in the dark, in the basement, with his joggers down, eyes closed, not caring anymore while Joe sucked him like a nursing baby. When he was ready to come, He held Joe’s head and unloaded in his mouth.
After that they were fucking again. They were friends again, but it wasn’t the same, and Joe said nothing about the months before, the reformed him, the heterosexual him, the him that had told Sal they were wrong to be together and twisted Sal in knots so that even as he sat in Joe’s basement that day, with his head between his legs, Sal was thinking of the upcoming date with this girl at Saint Anne’s and how he would probably nail her in the bushes that Saturday, like that one dude, the one that stayed in the dorm with Swann Portis and Pete Agalathagos.
You cannot see your life from the outside. You can’t be smarter than you are. If it were possible, Sal might have seen something better or something other. That was the year Joe began bringing Doug Merrin around, and it was also the year that Sal suspected his friend Chris Navarro was more than friendly with Swann Portis. It was when he saw something between Joe and Doug and he wanted to kill them because he realized they were in love. He buried all of this. It required to much examination. He fucked girls in the back of his car. If he’d unpacked any of this shit he would have realized he wasn’t jealous of Doug for being loved by Joe, he was jealous of Joe and Swann and Chris and Doug for being in love with someone. He was furious that Joe, who had told him how impure their love was loved Doug Merrin. In all the time they had known each other, Joe had never looked at Sal the way he looked at that little black Freshmen.
Sal was also aware that he had called Doug a little black Freshmen because he was angry and racist and because Black kids confused him and he was confused about Swann. He knew because he was almost afraid to say the word black and Swann openly and casually maligned white people, almost affectionately. Sal wished it hadn’t taken him so long to figure all of this shit out. His feelings would have matched his looks. He would have been a much happier guy instead of a good looking guy pretending to be happy.
The other night, when he had reached out for Chris Navarro, he had trembled. He had been like Eve reaching for the fruit. He was so backward. All those years living with guys and very few experiences. And all those years knowing Chris, and caring about him. Hell, they’d been friends. But except for Joe he didn’t talk to most of his fellow Frannies, and then he thought, could it be that they didn’t know how to talk about each other, how to feel about each other. Not that everyone wanted to sleep together, no, though certainly more did than Sal had known. But what did you do after a certain age with people whom you had been so close to? After eighteen, who were you going to shower with again? Who were you going to shit in front of or piss beside? Things which didn’t have much to do with romance, at least not to him. Who were you going to be so unformed with that your personality bled over into theirs, that you said things incredibly cruel to, and thing so tender? So you went your separate ways.
But they had not gone their separate ways. Sal was not a poet, and he wasn’t very good at saying what things smelled like, but Chris had smelled so good and God, what a beautiful body he had. With that retrospect that admired in the present things that were not allowed to be admitted in the past, he remembered coming into the locker room, watching the hot water beat down on Chris, long and tall and creamy like some rich vanilla, well formed, not skinny and bean pole like, not attenuated, not like some little boy’s body stretched out, but a beautiful, long limbed, almost hairless body. Chris turned around to him, not knowing Sal was observing, just thinking he was coming in to shower, and the water ran down his chest like one of those Greek statues, except Greek statues didn’t have that damn cloud of hair under the belly, or that pink sex that Sal made himself stop thinking of touching. At that time Joe was the only other boy he’d ever touched, and Sal undressed, thinking the only way to get himself off was to shower next to Chris, show off his own body. He knew by now how not to show a hard on in the shower. That would be for later, imagining his hands on Chris Navarro’s shoulders, his neck, the small of his back, down, down a little lower, wondering what Chris’s smiling mouth tasted like. Imagining him and that smart, sort of frightening Swann Portis in bed together, and so many people whispered they surely were.
He’d almost forgotten he ever wanted that. He’d almost forgotten about when the baby died and they all came to be with Chris. Swann and Doug were on the bed with him and Sal wanted to crawl into bed and hold him and was embarrassed for those thoughts. He’d forgotten about going online once online was a thing, and looking for the occasional guy and walking away, deflated, after someone’s orgasm, but cheated of the tenderness he’d been after. Except he wouldn’t have known to type the word tenderness. And he had almost forgotten one night on the side of the highway, Freshmen year, with a married man and how after it was over, the man had burst into tears and said his mother was dying. It would probably happen tomorrow. He didn’t know what to do, and Sal hadn’t known what to do either, but they just held each other and part of Sal was pleased by this. He even thought, if only I could get online and ask guys to meet and we could hold each other, I think I’d be happy,
Of course, the day Swann Portis had frankly looked him in the face was the day all that bullshit flew out the window. Swann had a bullshit defeating effect. You couldn’t very easily hang onto half truths and deceptions in his presence. Before Swann’s unmerciful eye, Sal understood both what he wanted, and how he’d never really had it. He didn’t want to hold Swann. Well, he did. But he wanted to fuck him. He could still see Joe, embarrassed as he quoted Swann, still hear Nina Simone singing:
“Don’t be psychic
Or you’ll blow it!
The answer better be yeah, yeah!
That pleases me.”
It didn’t matter what Father Reed said to him, or Father Roberts, the combination of hearing his father say that, and of knowing what he looked like to the girls, was enough to finally make him sleep with one, or two or three. Later, people would ask—people who weren’t Swann—If he was bi or if he knew what he was, or if he liked guys how could he like girls, silly questions like that. They didn’t understand what he barely understood himself. You liked a lot of things. Lots of things turned you on, and strange as it was to say, being liked turned him on, being popular turned him on, not having anything to hide turned him on, the idea of being a proper guy, a guy that fucked girls, a guy who knew how to finger a pussy, turned him on. The last girl he had been with was Courtney, the night he learned Garrett was dead. When he’d fucked her from behind and she cried out, it turned him on. The more she cried the more he fucked her. He fucked her till the heat rose in his balls and he came.
So being turned on wasn’t really much of an estimate for anything, not really. When he and Joe had been together it had seemed sort of natural. He loved Joe, but he had never experienced being “in love” with Joe. He didn’t really understand that difference either until they were both seventeen. When he did understand it, it hurt. It had been the weekend Joe invited him over and he had thought he was going home his old friendship, but Joe had started wrestling with him. Joe who had broken things off, Joe who said that what they were doing was sinful. And suddenly he realized Joe was trying to pull down his joggers. They wrestled and Sal resisted him, kicked him. Things got a little violent in the basement and they alternated between wrestling and pulling pants and underwear down. Sal got so excited he kissed Joe roughly, and Joe accepted, but moved his mouth away and suddenly, decidedly, made for Sal’s crotch. Sal pushed his head away, but Joe began sucking him, and it felt so good that Sal gave way to it. He lay in the dark, in the basement, with his joggers down, eyes closed, not caring anymore while Joe sucked him like a nursing baby. When he was ready to come, He held Joe’s head and unloaded in his mouth.
After that they were fucking again. They were friends again, but it wasn’t the same, and Joe said nothing about the months before, the reformed him, the heterosexual him, the him that had told Sal they were wrong to be together and twisted Sal in knots so that even as he sat in Joe’s basement that day, with his head between his legs, Sal was thinking of the upcoming date with this girl at Saint Anne’s and how he would probably nail her in the bushes that Saturday, like that one dude, the one that stayed in the dorm with Swann Portis and Pete Agalathagos.
You cannot see your life from the outside. You can’t be smarter than you are. If it were possible, Sal might have seen something better or something other. That was the year Joe began bringing Doug Merrin around, and it was also the year that Sal suspected his friend Chris Navarro was more than friendly with Swann Portis. It was when he saw something between Joe and Doug and he wanted to kill them because he realized they were in love. He buried all of this. It required to much examination. He fucked girls in the back of his car. If he’d unpacked any of this shit he would have realized he wasn’t jealous of Doug for being loved by Joe, he was jealous of Joe and Swann and Chris and Doug for being in love with someone. He was furious that Joe, who had told him how impure their love was loved Doug Merrin. In all the time they had known each other, Joe had never looked at Sal the way he looked at that little black Freshmen.
Sal was also aware that he had called Doug a little black Freshmen because he was angry and racist and because Black kids confused him and he was confused about Swann. He knew because he was almost afraid to say the word black and Swann openly and casually maligned white people, almost affectionately. Sal wished it hadn’t taken him so long to figure all of this shit out. His feelings would have matched his looks. He would have been a much happier guy instead of a good looking guy pretending to be happy.
The other night, when he had reached out for Chris Navarro, he had trembled. He had been like Eve reaching for the fruit. He was so backward. All those years living with guys and very few experiences. And all those years knowing Chris, and caring about him. Hell, they’d been friends. But except for Joe he didn’t talk to most of his fellow Frannies, and then he thought, could it be that they didn’t know how to talk about each other, how to feel about each other. Not that everyone wanted to sleep together, no, though certainly more did than Sal had known. But what did you do after a certain age with people whom you had been so close to? After eighteen, who were you going to shower with again? Who were you going to shit in front of or piss beside? Things which didn’t have much to do with romance, at least not to him. Who were you going to be so unformed with that your personality bled over into theirs, that you said things incredibly cruel to, and thing so tender? So you went your separate ways.
But they had not gone their separate ways. Sal was not a poet, and he wasn’t very good at saying what things smelled like, but Chris had smelled so good and God, what a beautiful body he had. With that retrospect that admired in the present things that were not allowed to be admitted in the past, he remembered coming into the locker room, watching the hot water beat down on Chris, long and tall and creamy like some rich vanilla, well formed, not skinny and bean pole like, not attenuated, not like some little boy’s body stretched out, but a beautiful, long limbed, almost hairless body. Chris turned around to him, not knowing Sal was observing, just thinking he was coming in to shower, and the water ran down his chest like one of those Greek statues, except Greek statues didn’t have that damn cloud of hair under the belly, or that pink sex that Sal made himself stop thinking of touching. At that time Joe was the only other boy he’d ever touched, and Sal undressed, thinking the only way to get himself off was to shower next to Chris, show off his own body. He knew by now how not to show a hard on in the shower. That would be for later, imagining his hands on Chris Navarro’s shoulders, his neck, the small of his back, down, down a little lower, wondering what Chris’s smiling mouth tasted like. Imagining him and that smart, sort of frightening Swann Portis in bed together, and so many people whispered they surely were.
He’d almost forgotten he ever wanted that. He’d almost forgotten about when the baby died and they all came to be with Chris. Swann and Doug were on the bed with him and Sal wanted to crawl into bed and hold him and was embarrassed for those thoughts. He’d forgotten about going online once online was a thing, and looking for the occasional guy and walking away, deflated, after someone’s orgasm, but cheated of the tenderness he’d been after. Except he wouldn’t have known to type the word tenderness. And he had almost forgotten one night on the side of the highway, Freshmen year, with a married man and how after it was over, the man had burst into tears and said his mother was dying. It would probably happen tomorrow. He didn’t know what to do, and Sal hadn’t known what to do either, but they just held each other and part of Sal was pleased by this. He even thought, if only I could get online and ask guys to meet and we could hold each other, I think I’d be happy,
Of course, the day Swann Portis had frankly looked him in the face was the day all that bullshit flew out the window. Swann had a bullshit defeating effect. You couldn’t very easily hang onto half truths and deceptions in his presence. Before Swann’s unmerciful eye, Sal understood both what he wanted, and how he’d never really had it. He didn’t want to hold Swann. Well, he did. But he wanted to fuck him. He could still see Joe, embarrassed as he quoted Swann, still hear Nina Simone singing:
“Don’t be psychic
Or you’ll blow it!
The answer better be yeah, yeah!
That pleases me.”
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Everything he was coming to realize now, he had come to realize in the last few months. He had really come to understand since the night he’d heard Nina Simone playing from Swann’s room. He had discussed these things with Swann in the car and in the dark because now he understood that he’d despised the idea of “talking about your feelings” because his father had, because, at the end of things, his father was afraid of whatever feelings might come up. So Sal had been inarticulate, leery of feeling. These days he was amazed by how unconfused, by how very articulate he actually was.
There was that part of him that didn’t want to offend, didn’t want to bring up old sit. Didn’t want to sound like a baby or like a… yes, there it was again, didn’t want to sound like a whiney girl. But it didn’t matter anymore.
That Christmas night he told Joe everything, rehearsed the years with him, and Joe understood that night, the one where Kyle died and Sal went to Courtney and then they’d both ended up crying and confused and naked in each other’s arms.
“Whatever we were,” Sal said, “we’re still friends.”
Joe nodded.
They had been getting high in Sal’s basement. You could be the new man, ready to embrace the coming twentieth century all you wanted, but sometimes you still needed weed for the conversation to flow.
“But the in love part… the sex part. We ruined that. It’s tainted between us.”
“And you’re in love,” Joe said, smoke leaking from his nose.
“And I’m in in love.”
And Sal added, “And you’re in love.”
“I am,” Joe said, chuckling, “I am indeed.”
So when Swann arrived at Joe’s house tonight, Sal felt almost instantly sober. He was putting it all together, that Chris, his friend, had dropped of Swann so that Swann could be with him, that he knew how much Sal loved him, knew how much Sal wanted the night with him. That Swann had some dim idea, probably not a dim idea at all, of just the pleasure he had in them sitting side by side, touching shoulder to shoulder, not even speaking. They stayed that way a while until Joe said he was sleepy, and then they drove into Ashby and came through the back door into Sal’s house.
Suddenly, on that little section entered through the back door, where steps went down to the basement and more went up to the house, Sal turned and kissed him, then took him by the hand and brought him through the large but empty kitchen. Someone was watching something in the living room, but Sal took him up the back stairs. It was showering time and whispering time and going to bed time.
Sal loved how, when they had sex it was almost always quiet, even at Swann’s large house in Evanston, now and again a startled noise escaped them, but they strived together in the dark and Sal loved being deep between Swann’s thighs, loved pressing deeper into him, the pushing back, Swann’s fingers becoming light claws on his shoulders, down his back, cupping his ass. They moved beyond words as Sal moved over him, body striving gently, perspiration beading on his brow.
“You always scratch the fuck out of me,” Sal said, rolling over in the dark.
“Let me see,” Swann sat up and ran his hands over Sal’s back.
“Oh my God. I never knew.”
He ran his hands to Sal’s ass, red with the print of his hand.
Sal grinned into the dark, then turned around and looked at Swann.
“I like it,” he said. “I must be a masochist. Whenever I feel your nails it gets me excited.”
“And here you were, thinking you were a square.”
Sal lay on his stomach, and Swann climbed on top of him, kissing the back of his neck.
“But I am a square,” Sal reached up, palmed Swann’s head. “It’s the only shape I’ve ever known to be.”
“I don’t know,” Swann sighed, squeezing Sal beneath him. “I feel like in the new year, when we get back to school we’ll have to learn to be as many shapes as possible.”
END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was that part of him that didn’t want to offend, didn’t want to bring up old sit. Didn’t want to sound like a baby or like a… yes, there it was again, didn’t want to sound like a whiney girl. But it didn’t matter anymore.
That Christmas night he told Joe everything, rehearsed the years with him, and Joe understood that night, the one where Kyle died and Sal went to Courtney and then they’d both ended up crying and confused and naked in each other’s arms.
“Whatever we were,” Sal said, “we’re still friends.”
Joe nodded.
They had been getting high in Sal’s basement. You could be the new man, ready to embrace the coming twentieth century all you wanted, but sometimes you still needed weed for the conversation to flow.
“But the in love part… the sex part. We ruined that. It’s tainted between us.”
“And you’re in love,” Joe said, smoke leaking from his nose.
“And I’m in in love.”
And Sal added, “And you’re in love.”
“I am,” Joe said, chuckling, “I am indeed.”
So when Swann arrived at Joe’s house tonight, Sal felt almost instantly sober. He was putting it all together, that Chris, his friend, had dropped of Swann so that Swann could be with him, that he knew how much Sal loved him, knew how much Sal wanted the night with him. That Swann had some dim idea, probably not a dim idea at all, of just the pleasure he had in them sitting side by side, touching shoulder to shoulder, not even speaking. They stayed that way a while until Joe said he was sleepy, and then they drove into Ashby and came through the back door into Sal’s house.
Suddenly, on that little section entered through the back door, where steps went down to the basement and more went up to the house, Sal turned and kissed him, then took him by the hand and brought him through the large but empty kitchen. Someone was watching something in the living room, but Sal took him up the back stairs. It was showering time and whispering time and going to bed time.
Sal loved how, when they had sex it was almost always quiet, even at Swann’s large house in Evanston, now and again a startled noise escaped them, but they strived together in the dark and Sal loved being deep between Swann’s thighs, loved pressing deeper into him, the pushing back, Swann’s fingers becoming light claws on his shoulders, down his back, cupping his ass. They moved beyond words as Sal moved over him, body striving gently, perspiration beading on his brow.
“You always scratch the fuck out of me,” Sal said, rolling over in the dark.
“Let me see,” Swann sat up and ran his hands over Sal’s back.
“Oh my God. I never knew.”
He ran his hands to Sal’s ass, red with the print of his hand.
Sal grinned into the dark, then turned around and looked at Swann.
“I like it,” he said. “I must be a masochist. Whenever I feel your nails it gets me excited.”
“And here you were, thinking you were a square.”
Sal lay on his stomach, and Swann climbed on top of him, kissing the back of his neck.
“But I am a square,” Sal reached up, palmed Swann’s head. “It’s the only shape I’ve ever known to be.”
“I don’t know,” Swann sighed, squeezing Sal beneath him. “I feel like in the new year, when we get back to school we’ll have to learn to be as many shapes as possible.”
END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was an excellent end to the chapter. It was great to hear from Sal and his perspective as it doesn’t happen too often. Great writing and I Iook forward to more soon!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yes. It was good, but also difficult. Swann is a big talker and Sal is a quieter guy. Swann knows exactly how he feels and how to express himself, and Sal has spent a long time running from himself. So,, its great to write from his head, but also difficult, because Sal is sort of just discovering who he is.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
WEEKEND PORTION
Chapter Eleven
“Hey, you! That’s right. You, Doug! Get your nose out of that book and be social!”
Douglass Merrin had not wanted to go to summer camp. No, he was afraid to go. Afraid of being sent off with these other people, and let’s admit it, these other white people. He would have been happy to stay at home on the block and run up and down Judson and through Sheridan Square with James and Louis and Brian Hicks. He would have spent his afternoons with Tasha and Aisha who lived down the street on the second floor of the apartment that looked like an old house, and the evenings would have been spent with his cousin Swann, going through all of Swann’s books and messing around with his paints, but this year his father was sending him to camp because, so he said, Doug needed to learn to be social.
That didn’t make any sense, and when Doug became more himself he would say that didn’t make any damn sense, but here he was, on the third hour of this awful bus trip with kids he did not want to be with, and the only thing that sort of made an uneasy time less uneasy was that some tall, scrawny, thirteen year old with a blond afro who sort of looked like Danny from the Great Space Coaster had decided that they would be friends. He was, in fact, his camp councilor. Doug was old enough to know when he was being pitied and didn’t want to think about the fact that Chris Navarro was befriending him out of duty.
Another councilor was singing loudly:
“Oh, they built the ship Titanic,
to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water wouldn’t
go through.
But
The Good Lord raised his hands
That the ship would never land
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
And the other kids knew the chorus.
“It was sad, so sad.
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down
to the bottom of the seaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
And the kids even knew that while have the bus droned the word sea, the other chanted:
“Little children lost their turtles
and old ladies lost their girdles
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
Chris, rolling out of his awful green canvas seats and into the seat where Doug sat, shook the little black boy in his large glasses by the shoulder and sang:
“Oh the captain smiled and winked
As the ship began to sink
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
But Doug wasn’t having it. He looked at Chris like a very old, very irritated little man who had no time for bullshit, and lifted his book to his face, and whatever duty or pity Chris was feeling toward the boy, that was the moment when something in him changed.
“How old are you, Merrin?”
“I am eleven,” Doug said, precisely. “I just turned eleven a month ago.”
“You don’t give a fuck do you?”
Doug raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, that got your attention.”
“Did you swear because you swear, or did you do it to impress me?” Doug asked.
“Cause…. You kind of seem like a Boy Scout.”
“I am a Boy Scout. And Boy Scouts swear.”
“You know what?” the little boy put down his book, still looking quite ancient.
“Before, I thought you were stupid, but now you’re interesting. You can stay.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Mike shouted.
Mike Buren was twelve years old, on his way to eighth grade and in Sioux Cabin with Doug, Jason, Mitch, Tony, Seth, Dan and Dan, a bald headed kid named Scott, and Chris. Chris tolled his eyes and Doug, who had been kneeling at the base of an elm, looking at moss through a magnifying glass got up and followed.
“I need to go to the infirmary!” Mike almost bellowed, scratching himself. “I got poison ivy all over me.”
“Lemme see,” Chris frowned while Seth and one of the Dan’s laughed behind their hands.
They were on a nature hike, and the only people not wearing shorts in this heat were Chris and Doug. Doug had a thin long sleeve tee on for good measure, and when one of the Dans asked him why, he said, “Because nature’s no joke.”
“Mike, your arm looks fine.”
“It’s red! Look at it.”
“That’s cause you’ve been scratching it, you cunt,” Mitch said.
“If we get back and we find out that I’ve got something—”
“Then we’ll be back at exactly the same time as if you don’t.” Chris said.
“Ey, Mikey, the nurse can treat your arm and we can change your diaper for you when we get back,” Mitch said, and the Dans cackled around him.
Doug came and looked at Mike’s arm, and then he said, “You see that plant?”
“Yes,” Mike said, looking relieved to be believed. He was skinny, little, very young looking with what Doug thought was an unfortunate haircut. He looked like a New Kid on the Block. Mike showed him his arm and said, “See, they told us that was poison ivy. They told us.”
“They told us,” Doug said, nodding like an old man. “But they were wrong, Mike.”
There were a few chuckles and Doug said, “That is Acer negundo. It’s native to the area, and it’s actually a maple. The common name is box elder. It’s not poisonous, and—” he continued, looking around at the sniggering boys, “no one else would have known that but me. You’re the only person who had the sense to know you were walking through something that might be poisonous, so that makes you the second smartest person in this group.”
As they continued walking, no one was in any doubt who the smartest one was, and to prove it, while everyone else became a lot more cautious about where their bare legs and arms were, Doug freely picked berries and flowers off of trees.
“How’d you know all that?” Chris asked him.
“You think this is the first time I ever went outside?” was all Doug said.
“Ey, Doug!” Mitch lifted up a fistful of plant that he and the Dans were standing in the midst of: “This more box elder?”
“No,” Doug said, calmly. “That’s poison ivy and poison oak.”
While half the cabin was covered in calamine lotion and moaning, Mike Buren came out to the porch where Doug was sitting and said, “Thanks.”
“For?”
“Not being a jerk.”
“I try not to be a jerk,” Doug said.
Mike laughed.
“What?”
“You’re funny.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna go on a walk?”
Without waiting for an answer or giving Chris notice, they walked away from the clearing the cabins circled and into the trees, Doug pointing out, “This is an elm, and this is a locust. This is maple. This is poison. This is not…. You can eat this.”
He stopped and sat on the ground, pulling up mushrooms and popping them into his mouth.
“My granddad says those are toadstools and you shouldn’t eat’em,” Mike said.
“These aren’t,” Doug said, handing Mike one. “But you shouldn’t eat them, because you don’t know how to tell what’s what.”
“Where are you from?” Mike wondered as they kept walking.
“Chicago,” Doug said, blandly.
“Then how do you know all this?”
“They have trees and plants in Chicago too.”
Doug added, “They even have coyotes.”
“They don’t!”
“They do.”
“Hey, Doug! Look? Can we eat these?”
Doug followed Mike, who was about to grab some tall thin mushrooms, and he said, “You could, but I wouldn’t.”
“They’ll kill us!” Mike said, almost dramatically.
“Probably not, but they’ll give us an interesting time. That’s pholiotina.”
Mike frowned and waited for Doug to explain.
“Magic mushrooms. Shrooms.”
Chapter Eleven
“Hey, you! That’s right. You, Doug! Get your nose out of that book and be social!”
Douglass Merrin had not wanted to go to summer camp. No, he was afraid to go. Afraid of being sent off with these other people, and let’s admit it, these other white people. He would have been happy to stay at home on the block and run up and down Judson and through Sheridan Square with James and Louis and Brian Hicks. He would have spent his afternoons with Tasha and Aisha who lived down the street on the second floor of the apartment that looked like an old house, and the evenings would have been spent with his cousin Swann, going through all of Swann’s books and messing around with his paints, but this year his father was sending him to camp because, so he said, Doug needed to learn to be social.
That didn’t make any sense, and when Doug became more himself he would say that didn’t make any damn sense, but here he was, on the third hour of this awful bus trip with kids he did not want to be with, and the only thing that sort of made an uneasy time less uneasy was that some tall, scrawny, thirteen year old with a blond afro who sort of looked like Danny from the Great Space Coaster had decided that they would be friends. He was, in fact, his camp councilor. Doug was old enough to know when he was being pitied and didn’t want to think about the fact that Chris Navarro was befriending him out of duty.
Another councilor was singing loudly:
“Oh, they built the ship Titanic,
to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water wouldn’t
go through.
But
The Good Lord raised his hands
That the ship would never land
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
And the other kids knew the chorus.
“It was sad, so sad.
It was sad, so sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down
to the bottom of the seaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
And the kids even knew that while have the bus droned the word sea, the other chanted:
“Little children lost their turtles
and old ladies lost their girdles
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
Chris, rolling out of his awful green canvas seats and into the seat where Doug sat, shook the little black boy in his large glasses by the shoulder and sang:
“Oh the captain smiled and winked
As the ship began to sink
It was sad when the great ship went down!”
But Doug wasn’t having it. He looked at Chris like a very old, very irritated little man who had no time for bullshit, and lifted his book to his face, and whatever duty or pity Chris was feeling toward the boy, that was the moment when something in him changed.
“How old are you, Merrin?”
“I am eleven,” Doug said, precisely. “I just turned eleven a month ago.”
“You don’t give a fuck do you?”
Doug raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, that got your attention.”
“Did you swear because you swear, or did you do it to impress me?” Doug asked.
“Cause…. You kind of seem like a Boy Scout.”
“I am a Boy Scout. And Boy Scouts swear.”
“You know what?” the little boy put down his book, still looking quite ancient.
“Before, I thought you were stupid, but now you’re interesting. You can stay.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” Mike shouted.
Mike Buren was twelve years old, on his way to eighth grade and in Sioux Cabin with Doug, Jason, Mitch, Tony, Seth, Dan and Dan, a bald headed kid named Scott, and Chris. Chris tolled his eyes and Doug, who had been kneeling at the base of an elm, looking at moss through a magnifying glass got up and followed.
“I need to go to the infirmary!” Mike almost bellowed, scratching himself. “I got poison ivy all over me.”
“Lemme see,” Chris frowned while Seth and one of the Dan’s laughed behind their hands.
They were on a nature hike, and the only people not wearing shorts in this heat were Chris and Doug. Doug had a thin long sleeve tee on for good measure, and when one of the Dans asked him why, he said, “Because nature’s no joke.”
“Mike, your arm looks fine.”
“It’s red! Look at it.”
“That’s cause you’ve been scratching it, you cunt,” Mitch said.
“If we get back and we find out that I’ve got something—”
“Then we’ll be back at exactly the same time as if you don’t.” Chris said.
“Ey, Mikey, the nurse can treat your arm and we can change your diaper for you when we get back,” Mitch said, and the Dans cackled around him.
Doug came and looked at Mike’s arm, and then he said, “You see that plant?”
“Yes,” Mike said, looking relieved to be believed. He was skinny, little, very young looking with what Doug thought was an unfortunate haircut. He looked like a New Kid on the Block. Mike showed him his arm and said, “See, they told us that was poison ivy. They told us.”
“They told us,” Doug said, nodding like an old man. “But they were wrong, Mike.”
There were a few chuckles and Doug said, “That is Acer negundo. It’s native to the area, and it’s actually a maple. The common name is box elder. It’s not poisonous, and—” he continued, looking around at the sniggering boys, “no one else would have known that but me. You’re the only person who had the sense to know you were walking through something that might be poisonous, so that makes you the second smartest person in this group.”
As they continued walking, no one was in any doubt who the smartest one was, and to prove it, while everyone else became a lot more cautious about where their bare legs and arms were, Doug freely picked berries and flowers off of trees.
“How’d you know all that?” Chris asked him.
“You think this is the first time I ever went outside?” was all Doug said.
“Ey, Doug!” Mitch lifted up a fistful of plant that he and the Dans were standing in the midst of: “This more box elder?”
“No,” Doug said, calmly. “That’s poison ivy and poison oak.”
While half the cabin was covered in calamine lotion and moaning, Mike Buren came out to the porch where Doug was sitting and said, “Thanks.”
“For?”
“Not being a jerk.”
“I try not to be a jerk,” Doug said.
Mike laughed.
“What?”
“You’re funny.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna go on a walk?”
Without waiting for an answer or giving Chris notice, they walked away from the clearing the cabins circled and into the trees, Doug pointing out, “This is an elm, and this is a locust. This is maple. This is poison. This is not…. You can eat this.”
He stopped and sat on the ground, pulling up mushrooms and popping them into his mouth.
“My granddad says those are toadstools and you shouldn’t eat’em,” Mike said.
“These aren’t,” Doug said, handing Mike one. “But you shouldn’t eat them, because you don’t know how to tell what’s what.”
“Where are you from?” Mike wondered as they kept walking.
“Chicago,” Doug said, blandly.
“Then how do you know all this?”
“They have trees and plants in Chicago too.”
Doug added, “They even have coyotes.”
“They don’t!”
“They do.”
“Hey, Doug! Look? Can we eat these?”
Doug followed Mike, who was about to grab some tall thin mushrooms, and he said, “You could, but I wouldn’t.”
“They’ll kill us!” Mike said, almost dramatically.
“Probably not, but they’ll give us an interesting time. That’s pholiotina.”
Mike frowned and waited for Doug to explain.
“Magic mushrooms. Shrooms.”
CharmedFan28
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That was a well done portion! This flashback was cool. I love learning more about these characters pasts. Great writing and I look forward to more soon!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“Ok, so how do I look?’
“Like your hair is albino.”
“Well, I had to get it like this to get out the purple,” Mike explained, “and now I can get it back to my color.”
“So you dyed your hair purple so you could bleach it, so you could dye it your natural color?” Doug asked, sitting cross legged in Mike’s apartment.
“I may have not thought everything through.”
Mike, who was on his way back to the bathroom ,shouted back, “Go ahead I know you wanna laugh.”
So Doug did, but he stood up and walked through the very small, messy Lincoln Park apartment to the bathroom where Mike was coloring his hair again.
“You’re so…” Doug said.
“Yeah?” Mike turned to him and then back to the mirror as he combed the color through.
“You were always trying to be more than what you were.”
Mike frowned, but only slightly.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Doug wasn’t entirely sure. He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to figure it out, then said, “It’s like someone told you that you weren’t enough, and so you always try to add something.”
“Like purple hair?”
“Or the elevator shoe scheme.”
“I was short. I am short.”
“Not really,” Doug differed.
Mike had been puny. Swim team and water polo had suited him, and he was still athletic. Shirtless in jeans, he turned to Doug, and his arms and chest were smooth, but he had an adult’s body. Doug just decided to be honest about the sweet looking boy who had grown into a handsome, eagle eyed twenty year old.
“You don’t really know what you look like.”
Mike grinned from the side of his mouth and shook his head.
“That’s why I can’t listen to you, Merrin. I’d feel so good about myself I’d never lift a weight or swim a lap again.”
Doug shook his head.
“If you think I’m good looking,” Mike said, “it’s the low self esteem that keeps me looking like this. I highly recommend it.”
Even when he was eleven, before he’d been sent off to summer camp, and would be sent off for the next several years, Douglass Merrin experienced himself as separate from others. From a very early age, he would be on the school playground and there was a game, Boys Chase Girls, Girls Chase Boys. It would start with someone shouting, “Boys chase girls!” and then they would chase the girls in a circle which would suddenly revert when someone shouted, “Girls chase boys!” He didn’t remember a teacher doing this. Maybe it was one of the older kids. What he remembers is not being a part of it, just watching and thinking, “There they go. There they go.” And then finding himself crawling through the leaves, looking at roots and plants and telling himself stories. Sometimes he let others into the stories, let them play along with his fantasy games, but other kids didn’t really know how to imagine. They weren’t that fun. Looking back, when someone said, “All children are artists, we all start out with imagination,” Doug would think to himself, no, but that simply is not true.
Once he was invited to a party at the YMCA for some kid he’d long forgotten. Again, he remembers there were games and he sort of half assedly played them and then bowed out, watching the boys and girls and thinking, there they are. There they go. Even though he was only about seven, he could see in Deborah’s face the worry. Her child was strange. He wasn’t part of this. He was looking at something else. He was not one of the crowd. He was only sort of putting up with things and ready to go. When he saw his mother’s face, a new feeling rose in him which he would only later identify as embarrassment. He didn’t really fit in, and he hadn’t much cared about that until right then.
It wasn’t that Doug didn’t love people. He simply didn’t feel the need to love or be loved by everybody. People were a trial to him, fitting in was painful. The two years when he had lived at Saint Francis with Swann had been golden, but when Swann and Chris and Joe were gone, things had gotten very hard very quickly. Even Mike hadn’t been a help. Truthfully Mike had been a great hindrance, which was why he had been reluctant to contact him before Christmas break ended, and surprised by his reception.
From DePaul to South Shore was about forty five minutes, and when they got there, Donald looked up from his Tarot card lamp table at the bay window and asked, “Did you go to school with ANY black people?”
“This is Mike,” Doug ignored his uncle.
“That’s not Joe,” Donald said, unnecessarily.
“He’s just a friend,” Doug said. “He’s here to help me take some of my stuff down to Saint Anthony’s.”
“Swann and the others came and got most of it,” Donald said, “Are you staying for lunch?”
Mike looked at Doug and Doug said, “Yes, yes we are staying for lunch.
“There’s no getting out of it,” Doug said as they headed to the third floor, “and you’ll be glad you did, anyway”
Had it been Sunday, Doug would have felt pressed, and so would Michael. There was something small about Sunday, so close to the working week. And tomorrow would be registration day for the new semester. He’d have to be there in time, but today, after they’d gotten the books, the globes, the pillows, the blankets and all the knickknacks Doug wanted for his room, there was time to eat with Donald and Pam, and when they stopped by, Popeye, Miss Samela and Jewish Jason. then a little before two, they were back on the road, and the road was rising sickeningly high.
“That’s why they call it the Skyway,” Mike teased him, and they were going through the toll station and then entering the state of Indiana.
Swann had given detailed directions not only to Saint Damian’s but to Dwenger Hall, and when Doug and Mike finally pulled in, he was, despite the winter chill, standing on the porch between Jill and Katy.
“Like your hair is albino.”
“Well, I had to get it like this to get out the purple,” Mike explained, “and now I can get it back to my color.”
“So you dyed your hair purple so you could bleach it, so you could dye it your natural color?” Doug asked, sitting cross legged in Mike’s apartment.
“I may have not thought everything through.”
Mike, who was on his way back to the bathroom ,shouted back, “Go ahead I know you wanna laugh.”
So Doug did, but he stood up and walked through the very small, messy Lincoln Park apartment to the bathroom where Mike was coloring his hair again.
“You’re so…” Doug said.
“Yeah?” Mike turned to him and then back to the mirror as he combed the color through.
“You were always trying to be more than what you were.”
Mike frowned, but only slightly.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Doug wasn’t entirely sure. He crossed his arms over his chest, trying to figure it out, then said, “It’s like someone told you that you weren’t enough, and so you always try to add something.”
“Like purple hair?”
“Or the elevator shoe scheme.”
“I was short. I am short.”
“Not really,” Doug differed.
Mike had been puny. Swim team and water polo had suited him, and he was still athletic. Shirtless in jeans, he turned to Doug, and his arms and chest were smooth, but he had an adult’s body. Doug just decided to be honest about the sweet looking boy who had grown into a handsome, eagle eyed twenty year old.
“You don’t really know what you look like.”
Mike grinned from the side of his mouth and shook his head.
“That’s why I can’t listen to you, Merrin. I’d feel so good about myself I’d never lift a weight or swim a lap again.”
Doug shook his head.
“If you think I’m good looking,” Mike said, “it’s the low self esteem that keeps me looking like this. I highly recommend it.”
Even when he was eleven, before he’d been sent off to summer camp, and would be sent off for the next several years, Douglass Merrin experienced himself as separate from others. From a very early age, he would be on the school playground and there was a game, Boys Chase Girls, Girls Chase Boys. It would start with someone shouting, “Boys chase girls!” and then they would chase the girls in a circle which would suddenly revert when someone shouted, “Girls chase boys!” He didn’t remember a teacher doing this. Maybe it was one of the older kids. What he remembers is not being a part of it, just watching and thinking, “There they go. There they go.” And then finding himself crawling through the leaves, looking at roots and plants and telling himself stories. Sometimes he let others into the stories, let them play along with his fantasy games, but other kids didn’t really know how to imagine. They weren’t that fun. Looking back, when someone said, “All children are artists, we all start out with imagination,” Doug would think to himself, no, but that simply is not true.
Once he was invited to a party at the YMCA for some kid he’d long forgotten. Again, he remembers there were games and he sort of half assedly played them and then bowed out, watching the boys and girls and thinking, there they are. There they go. Even though he was only about seven, he could see in Deborah’s face the worry. Her child was strange. He wasn’t part of this. He was looking at something else. He was not one of the crowd. He was only sort of putting up with things and ready to go. When he saw his mother’s face, a new feeling rose in him which he would only later identify as embarrassment. He didn’t really fit in, and he hadn’t much cared about that until right then.
It wasn’t that Doug didn’t love people. He simply didn’t feel the need to love or be loved by everybody. People were a trial to him, fitting in was painful. The two years when he had lived at Saint Francis with Swann had been golden, but when Swann and Chris and Joe were gone, things had gotten very hard very quickly. Even Mike hadn’t been a help. Truthfully Mike had been a great hindrance, which was why he had been reluctant to contact him before Christmas break ended, and surprised by his reception.
From DePaul to South Shore was about forty five minutes, and when they got there, Donald looked up from his Tarot card lamp table at the bay window and asked, “Did you go to school with ANY black people?”
“This is Mike,” Doug ignored his uncle.
“That’s not Joe,” Donald said, unnecessarily.
“He’s just a friend,” Doug said. “He’s here to help me take some of my stuff down to Saint Anthony’s.”
“Swann and the others came and got most of it,” Donald said, “Are you staying for lunch?”
Mike looked at Doug and Doug said, “Yes, yes we are staying for lunch.
“There’s no getting out of it,” Doug said as they headed to the third floor, “and you’ll be glad you did, anyway”
Had it been Sunday, Doug would have felt pressed, and so would Michael. There was something small about Sunday, so close to the working week. And tomorrow would be registration day for the new semester. He’d have to be there in time, but today, after they’d gotten the books, the globes, the pillows, the blankets and all the knickknacks Doug wanted for his room, there was time to eat with Donald and Pam, and when they stopped by, Popeye, Miss Samela and Jewish Jason. then a little before two, they were back on the road, and the road was rising sickeningly high.
“That’s why they call it the Skyway,” Mike teased him, and they were going through the toll station and then entering the state of Indiana.
Swann had given detailed directions not only to Saint Damian’s but to Dwenger Hall, and when Doug and Mike finally pulled in, he was, despite the winter chill, standing on the porch between Jill and Katy.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“Well, it took you a while.”
“We met your Uncle Donald,” Mike explained.
“That’ll do it,” Swann said and came down the steps to help them.
“So,” Katy said, when they’d gotten back to Swann’s beloved third floor, “we checked with housing to see if anyone will be moving in this semester, and the answer is no, so you take the corner room, room 46.”
“Is that how college works?” Doug wondered, entering into a room that already was filled with his things.
“No,” Mike said.
“That’s how this college works,” Katy said. “When you go to registration tomorrow, cause you’re a new student, they’re going to give you a room you don’t fucking want, and you’ll have to re register to live here, and that’s just a waste of time, so you might as well move in now and get formally registered later.”
“That is… very kind of you,” Doug said.
“You’re Swann’s cousin!” Katy declared. “And Jill fucking vouched for you.”
“I did,” the red headed girl said.
She pulled out of her pocket a key.
“This is the key to room 46.”
“How do you have it?”
“I stole it from Housing.”
Doug didn’t even blink at this, though Mike did.
“I stole it, copied it, then returned it. Now, listen, every room key will get you into the hall, so you only need your room key. I don’t know how secure that it, but that’s the way it’s done here. So… there you go.”
“What’s going on here? What’s the traffic?” Joe’s voice demanded. He dropped his box when he saw Doug and ran to hug him.
“You literally just saw me,” Doug said while Joe squeezed him.
Sal had snuck up and wrapped an arm around Swann’s waist.
“Who’s going to dinner tomorrow?” Swann asked.
“School’s doing dinner tomorrow?” Katy said.
“No… I mean at Birches?”
“Can I come?” Trisha, who had just showed up, demanded.
“You better come,” Doug told her. “Donald’s starting to suspect we don’t know any other Black people.”
“It’s funny,” Joe had said a few days earlier, “it’s not like we went to school with that many people, but I don’t think I remember Mike.”
“It’s no reason you would,” Doug said as he was preparing to go.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“No, I’ll be back here tonight.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“I know. I’ve driven it before.”
In the midst of talking, Doug realized he had to give way, that this was part of love. He was so used to being alone ,and being with Joe was the opposite of being alone. He was so used to saying, no, I’ve got this, and Joe was pointing out, very clearly, that he might not want to drive for easily over two hours, perhaps three in traffic, to hang out with someone he had been friends with a long time ago, and then have to do the drive all over again to get back to Ashby that same night.
“Better if we stop at your folks’ house, and then head out the next day.”
Doug had agreed grudgingly, but by the time they had reached the Skyway, and still had some time to go, he was glad Joe had made the suggestion of coming along. Joe, who probably liked Deborah better than Doug did, said he would stay with her until Doug came for him. They squabbled about the details a bit but, finally, Doug insisted on being dropped at Mike’s and having Joe, who knew Chicago less, drive to his mom’s house.
“Call me,” they commanded each other as Doug had gotten out of the car before Mike’s apartment. Part of him doubted the whole thing. He never quite believed people wanted to see him. Past Fullerton Avenue, they’d gone down rows of stately townhouses, some of them quite modern. But it was finally an old corner three story over a restaurant that matched the numbers Mike had given, and it was here he met his old friend.
“You made it!” Mike cried. “You bring Joe with you?”
“Joe is on his way to my mom’s house.
“Well, as you can see, it’s not much, but I’ve cleaned.”
“It looks great,” Doug had said. “It looks fantastic, actually.”
Doug had Birches, of course, but he had never had his own place. Mike’s little studio on the third floor of an old building in Lincoln Park seemed like an adventure.
It had been spending the day with Mike that they had decided Mike would help him back for Saint Anthony’s, and now Mike was right here, in his room while he plugged in the fake Tiffany lamp and nodded in approval.
“Well, this is it,” Mike said. “How do you feel?”
Doug shook his head.
“I haven’t been in school for three years, and last the time it sucked.”
Mike shook his head.
“You’ll love it,” Mike said looking around Room 46. “This place seems kind of awesome. I sort of wish I’d gone here. College is nothing like high school.”
Doug scowled and shook his head.
“It better not be.”
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“We met your Uncle Donald,” Mike explained.
“That’ll do it,” Swann said and came down the steps to help them.
“So,” Katy said, when they’d gotten back to Swann’s beloved third floor, “we checked with housing to see if anyone will be moving in this semester, and the answer is no, so you take the corner room, room 46.”
“Is that how college works?” Doug wondered, entering into a room that already was filled with his things.
“No,” Mike said.
“That’s how this college works,” Katy said. “When you go to registration tomorrow, cause you’re a new student, they’re going to give you a room you don’t fucking want, and you’ll have to re register to live here, and that’s just a waste of time, so you might as well move in now and get formally registered later.”
“That is… very kind of you,” Doug said.
“You’re Swann’s cousin!” Katy declared. “And Jill fucking vouched for you.”
“I did,” the red headed girl said.
She pulled out of her pocket a key.
“This is the key to room 46.”
“How do you have it?”
“I stole it from Housing.”
Doug didn’t even blink at this, though Mike did.
“I stole it, copied it, then returned it. Now, listen, every room key will get you into the hall, so you only need your room key. I don’t know how secure that it, but that’s the way it’s done here. So… there you go.”
“What’s going on here? What’s the traffic?” Joe’s voice demanded. He dropped his box when he saw Doug and ran to hug him.
“You literally just saw me,” Doug said while Joe squeezed him.
Sal had snuck up and wrapped an arm around Swann’s waist.
“Who’s going to dinner tomorrow?” Swann asked.
“School’s doing dinner tomorrow?” Katy said.
“No… I mean at Birches?”
“Can I come?” Trisha, who had just showed up, demanded.
“You better come,” Doug told her. “Donald’s starting to suspect we don’t know any other Black people.”
“It’s funny,” Joe had said a few days earlier, “it’s not like we went to school with that many people, but I don’t think I remember Mike.”
“It’s no reason you would,” Doug said as he was preparing to go.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“No, I’ll be back here tonight.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“I know. I’ve driven it before.”
In the midst of talking, Doug realized he had to give way, that this was part of love. He was so used to being alone ,and being with Joe was the opposite of being alone. He was so used to saying, no, I’ve got this, and Joe was pointing out, very clearly, that he might not want to drive for easily over two hours, perhaps three in traffic, to hang out with someone he had been friends with a long time ago, and then have to do the drive all over again to get back to Ashby that same night.
“Better if we stop at your folks’ house, and then head out the next day.”
Doug had agreed grudgingly, but by the time they had reached the Skyway, and still had some time to go, he was glad Joe had made the suggestion of coming along. Joe, who probably liked Deborah better than Doug did, said he would stay with her until Doug came for him. They squabbled about the details a bit but, finally, Doug insisted on being dropped at Mike’s and having Joe, who knew Chicago less, drive to his mom’s house.
“Call me,” they commanded each other as Doug had gotten out of the car before Mike’s apartment. Part of him doubted the whole thing. He never quite believed people wanted to see him. Past Fullerton Avenue, they’d gone down rows of stately townhouses, some of them quite modern. But it was finally an old corner three story over a restaurant that matched the numbers Mike had given, and it was here he met his old friend.
“You made it!” Mike cried. “You bring Joe with you?”
“Joe is on his way to my mom’s house.
“Well, as you can see, it’s not much, but I’ve cleaned.”
“It looks great,” Doug had said. “It looks fantastic, actually.”
Doug had Birches, of course, but he had never had his own place. Mike’s little studio on the third floor of an old building in Lincoln Park seemed like an adventure.
It had been spending the day with Mike that they had decided Mike would help him back for Saint Anthony’s, and now Mike was right here, in his room while he plugged in the fake Tiffany lamp and nodded in approval.
“Well, this is it,” Mike said. “How do you feel?”
Doug shook his head.
“I haven’t been in school for three years, and last the time it sucked.”
Mike shook his head.
“You’ll love it,” Mike said looking around Room 46. “This place seems kind of awesome. I sort of wish I’d gone here. College is nothing like high school.”
Doug scowled and shook his head.
“It better not be.”
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CharmedFan28
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An excellent portion! Thank you so much for continuing to post. I appreciate it!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
There wasn’t anyone who didn’t think the new love arrangements wouldn’t change the old sleeping ones, but it turned out Swann was pleased to sleep in his own room, be with his own friends and sleep alone in his own bed no matter how much he loved Sal, and Michael was staying over with Doug that night, so that left Sal and Joe to stay in their room same as ever.
Early the next morning, Sal, Katy, Trisha and Chuck, newly returned, headed to McDonalds for breakfast and brought back bags of Mc.Muffins, biscuits, sandwiches and pancakes. As Sal poured syrup, his eye caught Joe and they smiled at each other. It had been weeks since they’d shared their old room and their old life, and each was remembering the very first time Sal had stayed over, how Joe’s mom got up and went and brought back pancakes from McDonald’s when their friendship was new, and they had joined their bodies together for the first time. Things seemed so fresh back then and everything felt possible, and it felt more or less the same way now.
Swann dragged Mike and Doug over to Halleck Hall ahead of the line he feared might be there for registration, but there was no real line yet, and as soon as the doors opened, Doug was among five of the first students in.
“You’ll be living in Harshman Hall,” Marcus, the head of housing said.
“I was wondering, when is too early to apply to live in Dwenger?”
“Aren’t you a Freshmen?”
“I’m a twenty year old Freshmen.”
“The usual age is twenty-one and over.”
“But for real,” Doug said, his expression not changing.
“For real we could make an exception. It’s not that many people living there now, and a twenty year old Freshmen does sort of count as a non traditional student.”
“Oh, I’m very non traditional.”
“We could get that paper work going about Tuesday?”
“Not sooner?”
“Well, there’s a lot going on right now.”
“There’s actually nothing going on right now,” Doug said looking around. “I mean, clearly there will be later, but right now there is literally nothing going on.”
Marcus was rotund and bald and black, a former football player, and he said, “You’re Swann’s cousin, right?”
“Yup.”
“You want to room near him.”
“Yes. I was actually thinking room 46.”
Marcus’s face changed.
“You already stayed there, didn’t you?”
“I… may have.”
“You already have a key, don’t you?”
“When you say have a key, do you mean—”
“Yawl Portises,” Marcus shook his head. “Give me that sheet.”
Obediently, Doug handed it over.
Marcus scratched it out what was printed and wrote over it:
“Room 46 Dwenger Hall.”
He said, “You don’t even need the key, do you?”
“Not really.”
Doug was given an advisor who looked like a hoot owl with bad skin, and he disliked him at once. They argued over even the number of classes he would take before Doug said, “Are you paying for this or am I? Because I thought it was me.”
He had seen the brochure and knew what was needed for each major. There was a class called Core that everyone in a year had to take, so he would be starting with Core 2 since it was winter, and take Core 1 and Core 3 together next year. He took botany and biology and then Composition 101.
“Twelve credits is usually enough to start you off.”
“But I want a lit course,” Doug said. “If I’m going to do college, I want to do it.”
Swann was there now and whispered that he was taking Ancient Literature and Greek tragedy with Dr. Garrity, so Doug signed up for that too.
“It’s a two hundred level course,” his advisor said, dourly.
“Oh, for fucks sakes, I’m twenty years old, you saw my old transcripts. I don’t have to be a rocket scientist for Ancient Lit. Just put me in the fucking class.”
Dr. Kermit, his advisor, wanted to say he’d never seen another student like Doug except he had. Two years earlier, looking exasperated, Swann Portis, who stood beside his cousin right now, had put him through the same miserable paces.
Officially enrolled, excited but a little frightened, Doug headed back to Dwenger hall between Mike, who shook him by the shoulder, and his quick striding cousin.
As they walked the main quad, and folks called out to him, Swann said, “I can’t wait for you to fall in love with this place. I’m so glad you’re here.”
Back in Dwenger, Sal and Joe were shaving in the bathroom, towels wrapped about their waists.
“One half hour,” Sal said, “and we’ll be ready for Chi.”
As Mike was heading out, Doug said, “I know you’re safe and its only like forty five minutes back to your place, but please, please, call when you get home.”
“You too,” Mike said, looking embarrassed as he slipped his hands in his pockets.
“And you better not be joking about getting together in a few weeks.”
“Of course I’m not,” Doug said.
After Mike drove off, Swann said, “Well, now it’s time for us to get back to campus.”
“I was going to say that its like the old gang is back together again,” Doug said. “Except not really. Chris is back in Lafayette. Pete’s in Indy. Ben and Mike are staying here, and Jack….”
“I was supposed to call Jack,” Swann said. “Ben left me his number.”
“Oh?”
Swann nodded.
He said, “There never was just one old gang. The gang was never really static. We were always changing.”
Early the next morning, Sal, Katy, Trisha and Chuck, newly returned, headed to McDonalds for breakfast and brought back bags of Mc.Muffins, biscuits, sandwiches and pancakes. As Sal poured syrup, his eye caught Joe and they smiled at each other. It had been weeks since they’d shared their old room and their old life, and each was remembering the very first time Sal had stayed over, how Joe’s mom got up and went and brought back pancakes from McDonald’s when their friendship was new, and they had joined their bodies together for the first time. Things seemed so fresh back then and everything felt possible, and it felt more or less the same way now.
Swann dragged Mike and Doug over to Halleck Hall ahead of the line he feared might be there for registration, but there was no real line yet, and as soon as the doors opened, Doug was among five of the first students in.
“You’ll be living in Harshman Hall,” Marcus, the head of housing said.
“I was wondering, when is too early to apply to live in Dwenger?”
“Aren’t you a Freshmen?”
“I’m a twenty year old Freshmen.”
“The usual age is twenty-one and over.”
“But for real,” Doug said, his expression not changing.
“For real we could make an exception. It’s not that many people living there now, and a twenty year old Freshmen does sort of count as a non traditional student.”
“Oh, I’m very non traditional.”
“We could get that paper work going about Tuesday?”
“Not sooner?”
“Well, there’s a lot going on right now.”
“There’s actually nothing going on right now,” Doug said looking around. “I mean, clearly there will be later, but right now there is literally nothing going on.”
Marcus was rotund and bald and black, a former football player, and he said, “You’re Swann’s cousin, right?”
“Yup.”
“You want to room near him.”
“Yes. I was actually thinking room 46.”
Marcus’s face changed.
“You already stayed there, didn’t you?”
“I… may have.”
“You already have a key, don’t you?”
“When you say have a key, do you mean—”
“Yawl Portises,” Marcus shook his head. “Give me that sheet.”
Obediently, Doug handed it over.
Marcus scratched it out what was printed and wrote over it:
“Room 46 Dwenger Hall.”
He said, “You don’t even need the key, do you?”
“Not really.”
Doug was given an advisor who looked like a hoot owl with bad skin, and he disliked him at once. They argued over even the number of classes he would take before Doug said, “Are you paying for this or am I? Because I thought it was me.”
He had seen the brochure and knew what was needed for each major. There was a class called Core that everyone in a year had to take, so he would be starting with Core 2 since it was winter, and take Core 1 and Core 3 together next year. He took botany and biology and then Composition 101.
“Twelve credits is usually enough to start you off.”
“But I want a lit course,” Doug said. “If I’m going to do college, I want to do it.”
Swann was there now and whispered that he was taking Ancient Literature and Greek tragedy with Dr. Garrity, so Doug signed up for that too.
“It’s a two hundred level course,” his advisor said, dourly.
“Oh, for fucks sakes, I’m twenty years old, you saw my old transcripts. I don’t have to be a rocket scientist for Ancient Lit. Just put me in the fucking class.”
Dr. Kermit, his advisor, wanted to say he’d never seen another student like Doug except he had. Two years earlier, looking exasperated, Swann Portis, who stood beside his cousin right now, had put him through the same miserable paces.
Officially enrolled, excited but a little frightened, Doug headed back to Dwenger hall between Mike, who shook him by the shoulder, and his quick striding cousin.
As they walked the main quad, and folks called out to him, Swann said, “I can’t wait for you to fall in love with this place. I’m so glad you’re here.”
Back in Dwenger, Sal and Joe were shaving in the bathroom, towels wrapped about their waists.
“One half hour,” Sal said, “and we’ll be ready for Chi.”
As Mike was heading out, Doug said, “I know you’re safe and its only like forty five minutes back to your place, but please, please, call when you get home.”
“You too,” Mike said, looking embarrassed as he slipped his hands in his pockets.
“And you better not be joking about getting together in a few weeks.”
“Of course I’m not,” Doug said.
After Mike drove off, Swann said, “Well, now it’s time for us to get back to campus.”
“I was going to say that its like the old gang is back together again,” Doug said. “Except not really. Chris is back in Lafayette. Pete’s in Indy. Ben and Mike are staying here, and Jack….”
“I was supposed to call Jack,” Swann said. “Ben left me his number.”
“Oh?”
Swann nodded.
He said, “There never was just one old gang. The gang was never really static. We were always changing.”