ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
The Good Guys
Part One
At Nick Fabian’s funeral I sat in the pew beside my best friend, Michael Cleveland, and listened to him telling me that he had been about to kill himself when I had called him with the news that Tony was dead. Michael had explained it. He explained it all the way back to my house.
“It was like he’d done it so I didn’t have to. Like it was just too much death. He had taken my spot, and because he couldn’t go on, I had to. Or…” Michael looked doubtful about what he was saying, “Because he had given his life, I didn’t have to. And I know that sounds stupid… But…. it’s how I feel. When you told me about Tony,” Michael looked at the empty spot on the floor where Tony’s shiny casket had been, “I felt lighter. Not happier. But lighter. Like the weight had been lifted. It’s so strange.”
And I know I’m not one of the good guys because I thought how right now there was a large and long funeral procession for a nineteen year old football player who had succumbed to depression and killed himself, and I didn’t give a fuck because I really kind of hated him, and I would see him die a thousand times to save Michael Cleveland, and Michael was standing there next to me in his old school sports jacket that was a little too big, with his rumpled curly hair, and he said, “We’re getting late. I mean. The burial’s probably about to start. They must be at the cemetery. Are you ready to go?”
And I said, and my voice felt louder than I’d meant it, “Neither one of us liked him, we paid our respects. He’s dead. Let’s go home. Anything else would be…” What would my father say? “Pretentious.”
Michael drove us home, to his house, where he stayed with his Dad. My home with the shaded back yard where light glowed shiny through the broad leaves, and the den was beautiful and dimly dark in the afternoon would never be my home because it was full of my parents and their drama. The bleak two story Michael lived in with his father was full of space and housed by two barely connected bachelors, and so that bland space made it free. We went there.
“You thirsty?” he said.
“I am. A little.”
“But he didn’t serve because I knew where everything was. I got the water. He said, “Could you get me one too? While I go get chips.”
He said, “You wanna get high?”
I said, “Not especially, not now.”
He said, “Me neither.”
With our drinks and chips, we went upstairs.
He had a west window, and it looked over the backyard that didn’t have enough trees. And I remember his room was so clean that day.
“I felt like,” Michael said, “and this is stupid, “that I could clean my room today, have the cleanest room in honor of someone who couldn’t clean it anymore. You know?”
Michael shut the door and took off his jacket. He is long and tall and awkward, his back is long in that long white shirt. He put the blazer on a hook and then loosened his tie. He kicked off his shoes.
“I promised to never wear a blazer and tie again,” I said, draping my jacket over the chair, and also taking my tie off. Placing one and then the other Florsheim under the desk.
Michael turned to me, half smiling.
“Let’s try to keep those promises from now on.”
It was early summer, and Michael took off his dress shirt. He began to unbutton it, and he had on a wifebeater underneath. I thought what a sexy name for it, and why was it sexy? Beating your wife wasn’t sexy. And while my mind was on that path, I took off my shirt. But I never wore an undershirt and didn’t even look very good without a shirt on. Michael looked at me. Now, he took off his wifebeater and we stood there looking unimpressive, pudgy and too think, ungainly, his hair tousled, mine a little nappy, both of us in front of each other.
And then I took off my pants, and I took off my underwear and slipped off my socks. Michael undressed quickly. He came to me, suddenly, and I pulled his face to me, I kissed him and thrust my fingers into his thick hair. Our faces were fused together and then I pulled him to the bed. We tangled together, holding to each other, touching each other as much as we could, rolling back and forth so now the sun was hot on his back, now on mine, now his hands were all over me, now mine on his. We had to be together. We always should have been. As I held him in my arms and his head traveled down my body, as my fingers threaded through his thick curly hair, and I thrilled to the touch of his mouth I nearly wept for the memory of when he was away from me, when he was in the asylum and when he had gone off to Whittier, and when he was lost himself, and in all the nineteen years when I had felt no romantic way for anyone, and in the last four years when I had not known that We needed to be together in every way, possible, that I would give anything to keep him, and that he would do the same for me. So that afternoon, while across town Tony Fabian was being buried and others were weeping, my hands opened and closed and my legs lifted, and my hands reach town to stroke his hair as my thighs closed around him, and I cried out and my mouth was closed with his wet kiss, as I have myself to Michael Cleveland and he gave himself to me.
As the afternoon turned to evening we lay naked, face to face on his bed and touched each other lazily
“Did you plan this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, honest. “When you told me you almost died, when you told me that you could be right there where Tony was and gone from me, I knew I wanted you the opposite. As close as you could be to me. That’s all I knew.”
I looked on his red lips, the dark soft eyelashes, the last of the sun on his thick hair, before speaking again.
“That’s all I know.”
He looked on me, his mouth half open. Michael had been fat, and some of that was on him so he was long and tall, but with large thighs, with a boy’s body growing to a man’s, his thick thighs, his long long legs, took me in and he pulled me to him and kissed me deeply. He placed is head in my chest.
“This is what we are now,” he said. “This is us.”
Michael
Oh, my God, the first time we meet I think, He gets me. He gets everyone. He has thick glasses. He is the first black person I’ve ever been friends with. I would say he’s different from the other black kids, but he is different from every kid. I don’t even know what that means. What I do know is he listens to me. We listen to each other. When I am with Jay, the rest of the shit doesn’t matter. All your life you wait for that, a best friend.
I thought I wanted to talk about some things, but now I realize they aren’t worth talking abut. Those first years at Saint Ignatius, they aren’t worth talking about at all. And it’s not worth talking about the crazy house. Though I will. I’ll tell all about it real soon, and how I read The Bell Jar when I was there, and that was a mistake.
But what is worth saying right now it how I felt when I got out, when I was junior at Whittier, lonely as fuck, and the phone rang, and there was Jay on the other end of it. I’d like to say I was smart, was so smart that I would know how sad I was and how Jay was the end of that sadness. But when he came back into my life it was like I was dead and didn’t even know it, or it was like I was two dimensional and then someone blew me up like a balloon, and once he was back in my world, he had to stay in my world. I was three dimensional when I was with him.
Jay does not understand that whatever he tells me to do, I’m going to do. I would burn down a bridge if he said, in that calm voice of his, “Michael, I need you to burn down that bridge.”
We’re sitting at Tony’s funeral, and it’s sad, it’s real fucking sad, but when it’s over, Jay stops us from getting up, from going into the car. Everyone is leaving. He makes to pray, gets on his knees. I join him. People are filing out. Now they’re all gone, and we’re just sitting and suddenly I don’t want to go, and I wonder why I thought I should.
“They’ll never miss us,” Jay says. “They don’t even like us.”
A half hour later we are together. The first time I had sex was when I was sixteen, junior year at Whittier High School, really about a few weeks before Jay came back into my life. We did it a few times. Being with Jay is not like that, and it’s not that being with her was bad. It was just less. People will say Are you gay? Are you bi? Are you sleeping with your best friend? But none of that shit works. Jay is not my best friend. Jay is my Jay. Jay is the person that nothing can be between us but our skin and sometimes even that is too much. When he takes off his clothes, when we come together, it’s like, it’s like a fever breaking. It’s like a spell breaking, I have to goddamn be with him. I have to kiss him. I have to have his tongue and my tongue together. I have to have my legs tangled with his. I needs his hands in my hair. I need to feel his soft skin, kiss his body. His body is my body. I need him to own mine.
We don’t fuck, not the way that some people think of fucking. We press together, and my dick is pressed to his, and we press as much as we can rub, as much as we can hold on as tight as we can, glide across each other, kiss and sweat in that bed till the sheets are fucking soaked. They’re soaked, damnit. If what I am about to say sounds crazy to you, then I feel sorry for you, when I tell you I feel his dick pulsing under mine, and when we’re in bed I feel not like I’m making love to him, but like I am him, like I’m in his body feeling what he’s feeling, and he’s in me, and when he comes I’m going to feel it, and he’s going to feel me. Our orgasms are going to be the same. When he shakes and his eyes go wide it will be all I need. Same from him, and I can feel we’re coming together, and I can feel him shooting out, and there is heat like honey exploding between us in a pool, and we’re shaking and we don’t stop coming and I feel like it’s so strong, so violent I’m going to get knocked out of my body if he doesn’t hold onto me, and the same thing is going to happen to Jay if he doesn’t hold onto me, so we’re just there in bed, our bodies shaking and arching up and apart, and we’re holding onto each other, cause we don’t want to get lost. It’s strong enough to kill us almost.
When it’s done we can’t talk, we can’t move. We’re wrung out. It’s like the Holy Ghost, and it was holy, and we’re shaking and still twitching, our body jumping like we’ve been shocked. Our body, not bodies. We can’t say shit for a long time. We love each other, our fingertips touch, we keep doing that to remind each other we’re still here, we’re here, even though we can barely move, and we cannot speak.
` Jay knows everything. He’s like God to me. He knows and so, finally, when we can move, when we can hold onto each other and breathe even, I ask him.
“Did you plan this?”
After a long time he says, “I don’t know.”
He tells me that when I told him I was about to kill myself, that I could be the dead body in the casket he knew he wanted me to be the live body heaving right here next to him.
“I wanted you as close as you could be to me,” Jay says, touching my hair. “That’s all I knew.”
He is looking ae me, touching my lips, my eyes, stroking my hair.
He says: “That’s all I know.”
I am looking at him. Shorter than me, not fat, but not thin, brown, like… gold and chocolate and sweet with his brown eyes that can’t see shit without his glasses, with his nipples I want to touch, his little belly. I pull him in to me, wrap my thighs around him and kiss him as deep as I can. While my head is on his chest I hear him say:
“This is what we are now. This is us.”
Part One
At Nick Fabian’s funeral I sat in the pew beside my best friend, Michael Cleveland, and listened to him telling me that he had been about to kill himself when I had called him with the news that Tony was dead. Michael had explained it. He explained it all the way back to my house.
“It was like he’d done it so I didn’t have to. Like it was just too much death. He had taken my spot, and because he couldn’t go on, I had to. Or…” Michael looked doubtful about what he was saying, “Because he had given his life, I didn’t have to. And I know that sounds stupid… But…. it’s how I feel. When you told me about Tony,” Michael looked at the empty spot on the floor where Tony’s shiny casket had been, “I felt lighter. Not happier. But lighter. Like the weight had been lifted. It’s so strange.”
And I know I’m not one of the good guys because I thought how right now there was a large and long funeral procession for a nineteen year old football player who had succumbed to depression and killed himself, and I didn’t give a fuck because I really kind of hated him, and I would see him die a thousand times to save Michael Cleveland, and Michael was standing there next to me in his old school sports jacket that was a little too big, with his rumpled curly hair, and he said, “We’re getting late. I mean. The burial’s probably about to start. They must be at the cemetery. Are you ready to go?”
And I said, and my voice felt louder than I’d meant it, “Neither one of us liked him, we paid our respects. He’s dead. Let’s go home. Anything else would be…” What would my father say? “Pretentious.”
Michael drove us home, to his house, where he stayed with his Dad. My home with the shaded back yard where light glowed shiny through the broad leaves, and the den was beautiful and dimly dark in the afternoon would never be my home because it was full of my parents and their drama. The bleak two story Michael lived in with his father was full of space and housed by two barely connected bachelors, and so that bland space made it free. We went there.
“You thirsty?” he said.
“I am. A little.”
“But he didn’t serve because I knew where everything was. I got the water. He said, “Could you get me one too? While I go get chips.”
He said, “You wanna get high?”
I said, “Not especially, not now.”
He said, “Me neither.”
With our drinks and chips, we went upstairs.
He had a west window, and it looked over the backyard that didn’t have enough trees. And I remember his room was so clean that day.
“I felt like,” Michael said, “and this is stupid, “that I could clean my room today, have the cleanest room in honor of someone who couldn’t clean it anymore. You know?”
Michael shut the door and took off his jacket. He is long and tall and awkward, his back is long in that long white shirt. He put the blazer on a hook and then loosened his tie. He kicked off his shoes.
“I promised to never wear a blazer and tie again,” I said, draping my jacket over the chair, and also taking my tie off. Placing one and then the other Florsheim under the desk.
Michael turned to me, half smiling.
“Let’s try to keep those promises from now on.”
It was early summer, and Michael took off his dress shirt. He began to unbutton it, and he had on a wifebeater underneath. I thought what a sexy name for it, and why was it sexy? Beating your wife wasn’t sexy. And while my mind was on that path, I took off my shirt. But I never wore an undershirt and didn’t even look very good without a shirt on. Michael looked at me. Now, he took off his wifebeater and we stood there looking unimpressive, pudgy and too think, ungainly, his hair tousled, mine a little nappy, both of us in front of each other.
And then I took off my pants, and I took off my underwear and slipped off my socks. Michael undressed quickly. He came to me, suddenly, and I pulled his face to me, I kissed him and thrust my fingers into his thick hair. Our faces were fused together and then I pulled him to the bed. We tangled together, holding to each other, touching each other as much as we could, rolling back and forth so now the sun was hot on his back, now on mine, now his hands were all over me, now mine on his. We had to be together. We always should have been. As I held him in my arms and his head traveled down my body, as my fingers threaded through his thick curly hair, and I thrilled to the touch of his mouth I nearly wept for the memory of when he was away from me, when he was in the asylum and when he had gone off to Whittier, and when he was lost himself, and in all the nineteen years when I had felt no romantic way for anyone, and in the last four years when I had not known that We needed to be together in every way, possible, that I would give anything to keep him, and that he would do the same for me. So that afternoon, while across town Tony Fabian was being buried and others were weeping, my hands opened and closed and my legs lifted, and my hands reach town to stroke his hair as my thighs closed around him, and I cried out and my mouth was closed with his wet kiss, as I have myself to Michael Cleveland and he gave himself to me.
As the afternoon turned to evening we lay naked, face to face on his bed and touched each other lazily
“Did you plan this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, honest. “When you told me you almost died, when you told me that you could be right there where Tony was and gone from me, I knew I wanted you the opposite. As close as you could be to me. That’s all I knew.”
I looked on his red lips, the dark soft eyelashes, the last of the sun on his thick hair, before speaking again.
“That’s all I know.”
He looked on me, his mouth half open. Michael had been fat, and some of that was on him so he was long and tall, but with large thighs, with a boy’s body growing to a man’s, his thick thighs, his long long legs, took me in and he pulled me to him and kissed me deeply. He placed is head in my chest.
“This is what we are now,” he said. “This is us.”
Michael
Oh, my God, the first time we meet I think, He gets me. He gets everyone. He has thick glasses. He is the first black person I’ve ever been friends with. I would say he’s different from the other black kids, but he is different from every kid. I don’t even know what that means. What I do know is he listens to me. We listen to each other. When I am with Jay, the rest of the shit doesn’t matter. All your life you wait for that, a best friend.
I thought I wanted to talk about some things, but now I realize they aren’t worth talking abut. Those first years at Saint Ignatius, they aren’t worth talking about at all. And it’s not worth talking about the crazy house. Though I will. I’ll tell all about it real soon, and how I read The Bell Jar when I was there, and that was a mistake.
But what is worth saying right now it how I felt when I got out, when I was junior at Whittier, lonely as fuck, and the phone rang, and there was Jay on the other end of it. I’d like to say I was smart, was so smart that I would know how sad I was and how Jay was the end of that sadness. But when he came back into my life it was like I was dead and didn’t even know it, or it was like I was two dimensional and then someone blew me up like a balloon, and once he was back in my world, he had to stay in my world. I was three dimensional when I was with him.
Jay does not understand that whatever he tells me to do, I’m going to do. I would burn down a bridge if he said, in that calm voice of his, “Michael, I need you to burn down that bridge.”
We’re sitting at Tony’s funeral, and it’s sad, it’s real fucking sad, but when it’s over, Jay stops us from getting up, from going into the car. Everyone is leaving. He makes to pray, gets on his knees. I join him. People are filing out. Now they’re all gone, and we’re just sitting and suddenly I don’t want to go, and I wonder why I thought I should.
“They’ll never miss us,” Jay says. “They don’t even like us.”
A half hour later we are together. The first time I had sex was when I was sixteen, junior year at Whittier High School, really about a few weeks before Jay came back into my life. We did it a few times. Being with Jay is not like that, and it’s not that being with her was bad. It was just less. People will say Are you gay? Are you bi? Are you sleeping with your best friend? But none of that shit works. Jay is not my best friend. Jay is my Jay. Jay is the person that nothing can be between us but our skin and sometimes even that is too much. When he takes off his clothes, when we come together, it’s like, it’s like a fever breaking. It’s like a spell breaking, I have to goddamn be with him. I have to kiss him. I have to have his tongue and my tongue together. I have to have my legs tangled with his. I needs his hands in my hair. I need to feel his soft skin, kiss his body. His body is my body. I need him to own mine.
We don’t fuck, not the way that some people think of fucking. We press together, and my dick is pressed to his, and we press as much as we can rub, as much as we can hold on as tight as we can, glide across each other, kiss and sweat in that bed till the sheets are fucking soaked. They’re soaked, damnit. If what I am about to say sounds crazy to you, then I feel sorry for you, when I tell you I feel his dick pulsing under mine, and when we’re in bed I feel not like I’m making love to him, but like I am him, like I’m in his body feeling what he’s feeling, and he’s in me, and when he comes I’m going to feel it, and he’s going to feel me. Our orgasms are going to be the same. When he shakes and his eyes go wide it will be all I need. Same from him, and I can feel we’re coming together, and I can feel him shooting out, and there is heat like honey exploding between us in a pool, and we’re shaking and we don’t stop coming and I feel like it’s so strong, so violent I’m going to get knocked out of my body if he doesn’t hold onto me, and the same thing is going to happen to Jay if he doesn’t hold onto me, so we’re just there in bed, our bodies shaking and arching up and apart, and we’re holding onto each other, cause we don’t want to get lost. It’s strong enough to kill us almost.
When it’s done we can’t talk, we can’t move. We’re wrung out. It’s like the Holy Ghost, and it was holy, and we’re shaking and still twitching, our body jumping like we’ve been shocked. Our body, not bodies. We can’t say shit for a long time. We love each other, our fingertips touch, we keep doing that to remind each other we’re still here, we’re here, even though we can barely move, and we cannot speak.
` Jay knows everything. He’s like God to me. He knows and so, finally, when we can move, when we can hold onto each other and breathe even, I ask him.
“Did you plan this?”
After a long time he says, “I don’t know.”
He tells me that when I told him I was about to kill myself, that I could be the dead body in the casket he knew he wanted me to be the live body heaving right here next to him.
“I wanted you as close as you could be to me,” Jay says, touching my hair. “That’s all I knew.”
He is looking ae me, touching my lips, my eyes, stroking my hair.
He says: “That’s all I know.”
I am looking at him. Shorter than me, not fat, but not thin, brown, like… gold and chocolate and sweet with his brown eyes that can’t see shit without his glasses, with his nipples I want to touch, his little belly. I pull him in to me, wrap my thighs around him and kiss him as deep as I can. While my head is on his chest I hear him say:
“This is what we are now. This is us.”
