At some point in my childhood, I asked my mother in what economic class our family fell. “Lower middle class,” she’d asserted without thought. Then, after reflecting a moment, she amended her answer. “Lower-lower middle class.”
Her answer surprised me. I knew what real poverty looked like. My mother was a founding member of a non-profit seeking minority equal housing opportunities. I’d seen the neglected interiors of multiple public housing projects; I’d accompanied her more times than I could count to document the appalling conditions of Richmond’s slum properties. I’d even recognized some of the kids in these places as my schoolmates.
My mother herself had grown up in genuine impoverishment, often never knowing when or if there’d be a next meal; her parents still lived in the uninsulated home her father had built by hand over the decades, one room at a time as he could afford. Its last addition—an indoor john and bath—had been added only in the late nineteen-sixties. They’d made do until then with an outhouse and by dragging a tin tub into the kitchen for a weekly scrub.
My family had inside toilets. Two of them. Since I was six, we’d lived in a two-story brick home with a slate roof in a nice neighborhood. When the lunch bell rang at school, I didn’t have to line up with the projects kids for free lunches—for many, the only hot meal they’d get that day. All of my family were readers. We watched educational TV and listened to classical music. How could we be lower-lower anything?
Not until I was older did I begin to notice the ways in which we differed from other neighborhood families. We lived in a respectable brick colonial, yes, but only because my paternal grandmother had bought it outright and signed it over to my father. Monthly, throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, he would mail her a check: two hundred and fifty dollars per installment until the debt was repaid. We were privileged to have our own housing taken care of, interest-free. On their own, on my father’s assistant professor’s salary and my mother’s part-time earnings as an adjunct, they could never have afforded a mortgage. Not in that genteel city enclave.
We also only had cars because of my grandmother. Our first vehicle was a 1963 Dodge Dart with a brown interior that she’d purchased and more or less immediately gotten into an accident that left the passenger side crushed and mangled; she’d sold it to my father at a discount and replaced it with a blue-interiored Dart that eventually also passed our way. My parents would drive those two 1963 Dodge Darts well into the late nineteen-eighties, wrecked doors and all. I could never figure out which was the greater embarrassment: my father’s Dart with the unusable, crumpled-in doors, or my mother’s more-or-less intact Dart covered with Jimmy Carter bumper stickers and political posters duct-taped in the windows.
We had enough money, as my parents would constantly remind me throughout my childhood, for what we needed. A roof over our heads. Food in the pantry. Perhaps a little extra for piano lessons from the elderly church member down the street. As a very young kid, it was enough.
In my teens, though, the disparities between me and other kids grew wider. I would walk long distances or take the city bus to school events, rather than suffer the hot shame of classmates witnessing the banged-up, rusted old Dart cough and sputter into a parking lot. In fourth grade I could get away with wearing outgrown trousers with hems high above my ankles. Not in middle school. Definitely not as a high schooler. As a family with limited money, cars and clothing were low priorities.
I didn’t complain—but I was mortified when I didn’t fit in. We never ate at restaurants, not even fast food, save for special occasions like a birthday. Meals at home were plain but filling. When beef grew expensive during a shortage in the seventies, we ate much cheaper horse meat—though I knew better than to admit it at school. We rarely went to the movies and never bought concessions. Although the annual state fair was held practically in our back yard and my friends attended nightly, the only times I ever saw it were on educational school outings. When I took up a wind instrument for middle school band, for years I relied on a school loaner. I was warned for years in advance that although my peers would all be getting their drivers licenses at 16, I wouldn’t be permitted to join them; car insurance for a teen was too expensive. I’d have to wait until I was earning on my own, to learn to drive.
We have enough to be grateful. Enough to know our poverty isn’t abject. With every year, though, the list grows longer of what my classmates consider commonplaces, that I consider privations.
This is why, the summer of our country’s bicentennial, my pulse quickens when, beneath the stalls of the Richmond Public Library basement men’s room, a stranger slips me a note scrawled with Bic pen upon folded toilet paper. $20 to do it here, read the spidery letters. $50 if we go to the Hotel Jefferson. A little later, the man slips me two Andrew Jacksons and an Alexander Hamilton as he pushes me to my knees with the flat of his hand atop of my head.
Fifty dollars. Fifty whole dollars. It’s the first time I’m holding so much cash. It’s weeks of my pitiful allowance—months. After our short walk, the man had handed it over as if it were nothing. To me, fifty dollars is riches unimaginable.
Fifty dollars in my hand negates all the mindfulness of wasting pennies and the eye to unnecessary expenses, the worry that some simple school requirement might require my parents to shell out more than they can afford, the poorer kid's constant apprehension of a sudden reversal of fortune. No matter how I’ve earned it, cash in my hand sets me ahead of the game. It makes me immune. Powerful.
For the length of time it takes for me to complete a sexual transaction for pay, every myriad anxiety flares into ash like tissue set aflame. After that first encounter, I squirrel away more and more of the stuff, conditioned always to anticipate an austere winter.
I’m 16 and it’s the summer before my senior year of high school when my parents announce we’ll be taking a vacation. We’ve never gone on vacation. Not a real one.
Friends vacation with their families. Many of them ski over the Christmas holidays; one brags yearly about visiting New York City to shop on Fifth Avenue and visit the tree at Rockefeller Center. At the beginning of the school term when teachers assign the obligatory summer vacation essay, I listen with envy while classmates recount their trips to the Grand Canyon, to Stone Mountain, their cross-country large family reunions, their exciting adventures in Disney World, which had opened less than a decade before. I was never going to experience the Magic Kingdom. I couldn’t even talk my parents into Carowinds, or even a trip to the admission-free South of the Border. The only reason I’ve been to the local theme park, King’s Dominion—which at the time consists of the drive-through Lion Country Safari, as well as the stand-alone Rebel Yell roller coaster—has been as a school field trip.
Visits to my grandparents don’t count: they’re less vacation and more obligation, and inevitably end in shouting matches and long, hurt drives home. My mother and father gussy up day trips and tried to sell them as giddy, madcap holidays. We’ll drive to one of the many Civil War battlefields close to home with a basket of ham sandwiches and potato chips, where we doze in the shade and listen to my father lecture about the movement of the troops. We’ll visit one of many Virginia plantations, to eat ham sandwiches and listen to my mother lecture about the evils of the slave trade.
If we really want to make a day of it, we travel an entire hour to Williamsburg, where we eat the inevitable ham sandwiches at Waller Mill Pond, then visit the colonial area and walk up and down Duke of Gloucester Street—the free area—while both my parents alternately lecture and quiz about early American history.
That’s why this announcement is so revolutionary. We’ll be spending three nights in Chincoteague, my parents inform us. I’ll be graduating high school in a year’s time. Since I’ll be off to college after that, our time together as a family is growing short. It’s a fine and almost sentimental reason to loosen the purse strings, I think, until I discover that my father’s sister’s family will be joining us.
In fact, my Aunt Jane and Uncle Bert are footing the bill for both families’ accommodations, which explains how my parents can afford this splurge. I’ve no particular opinions on Jane or my two cousins, the older of whom is all of nine. Bert, however, I detest. He’s a brusque blue-collar bulldog whose every other word is a racial or ethnic slur. When he’s not mocking my dad for being an ivory tower elite who can barely support his family, or dismissing my mom as a bleeding-heart liberal, he’s busy pointing out all the ways I’m a sissy. I read too much. I don’t play sports. No, swimming and tennis don’t count—only fags swim or swing a racket. He means real sports, like football. Had I ever even been in a fight at school? No? What kind of limp-wristed Little Lord Fauntleroy was I?
Bert’s litany of abuse commences the moment we pull up to the grim cabins he’s rented. In greeting, he crushes my dad’s metacarpals with a python-like grip, then complains about my dad’s effete handshake. He orders my mother to rustle up some grub without so much as a hello, raising her hackles. Warmed up, he turns to me. So my dad said I’d had lifesaving training at the YMCA pool? Who was I planning on saving from the waves with my toothpick arms and scrawny chest, a kitten? Haw haw! The idea! Maybe if I had an after-school job instead of keeping my head in the books all the time I wouldn’t be so pale and girly. Bert’s kids weren’t going to grow up sissies, no sirree Bob. Where was I going to college anyway, Sweet Briar? I’d fit in with all the girly-girls there. And they sure as heck wouldn’t have to worry about a boy in the girls’ dorm, not with me.
I abandon unpacking and slink through the back door to sit by myself, where I’ll be out of the line of fire.
The cabins are an array of a half-dozen drab, cinderblock constructions fronting a semi-circular drive. Functional, but plain. Behind the uniform huts sits a miniature concrete pool—more of a kiddie pool than anything—surrounded by rusted, webbed lawn chairs. The cabin’s back steps, where I sit, have a view of both it and a thicket of trees beyond.
“Afternoon.” A man sits on the steps of the cabin next to ours, snuffing out a Marlboro with his right hand even as with the left he withdraws another from its packet. A gold band decorates his ring finger. His receding blond hairline is what I first notice; the enormous nose, next. It’s narrow and long; the bulbous head at its end makes it look a little like a penis. The back door to his cabin stands open; beyond it, I can hear a treble monologue. His wife, I assume.
I nod. I’m not exactly in a mood for conversation with anyone, much less a stranger. I can still hear Bert, the self-declared bastion of straight masculinity, braying inside. This man strikes me as more of the same. He studies me whiles he taps the cigarette end on the packet, once, twice, three times, before lighting it. When finally he takes a long, slow drag, he stares through the smoke.
Even though in my mood I feel anything but sexual, I recognize the man’s regard. I’ve seen that speculative look in the eyes of many a stranger. It’s the unwavering attention of a man checking me out while pretending to do anything but; it’s equal parts curiosity and caution. I’ve seen it in the eyes of the homosexuals who gather at the riverside by dusk on warm nights, and from the car windows of men who drive The Block in Richmond’s downtown, looking to pick up a trick. Just as many times, I’ve seen that same expression on the face of married men who need to tamp down on urges they shouldn’t be having.
Every deep suck on that stick of tobacco, every long, casual exhalation, tells a story I’ve heard before. With his high forehead and that prominent beak, the man’s not exactly handsome. He’s not totally unattractive, either. I pretend to stare at the pool area beyond, while I steal glances his way.
“What?” I’m startled when he speaks, but his curt question is meant for someone inside his cabin. “All right already. All right!” When he rises, muttering curses beneath his breath, he’s taller than I assumed. Probably nearly as tall as I. He’s wearing the ridiculously short athletic shorts in fashion this year, tight and high around the thighs, yet on him still somehow baggy and unflattering. White sweat socks with broad red stripes hug his calves. We share a confidential glance. The man shrugs and rolls his eyes in the direction of his wife before he disappears into the gloom of his cabin.
It’s easier than I think to stay out of Bert’s way, with our two families in separate cabins. We don’t eat dinner at a fancy restaurant that first night, but at a clam shack on outdoor picnic tables, where I sit far away from the adults. I’ve never seen the ocean before. When after dinner we drive a short distance to Assateague Island and walk the beach, it’s the first time I’ll ever stare at a flat and endless horizon or feel the satisfying crunch of sand beneath my soles, or hear the restless constancy of the waves, loud enough to drown out Bert’s long monologues.
After we return that night, my young cousins’ faces sticky from ice cream, they and my sister are sent to bed. It’s still too early for me to turn in, though. Nor do I want to join my parents in Bert and Jane’s cabin for cards and political sparring. For a while, I try to read in our quiet living area, but the furniture is spare and uncomfortable, the air muggy despite open windows. There’s nothing to do here at night. There’s nothing to do at home, either, but at least in my own bedroom I have the comforts of my books and my radio and my typewriter, when I feel creative.
Boredom weighs heavier in a strange place. I count knots in the piny paneling, I memorize the cornucopia pattern of a strip of wallpaper over the stove. Through the screen door in the kitchenette, I watch a lazy firefly hover over the ground, rise into the air, then settle once more. That’s no firefly, I realize, not with its red and constant glow. It’s the tip of a cigarette in the darkness. If I can see it, I realize, my neighbor surely can see me, in the brightly lit cabin.
I’m no longer bored.
It’s with a sense of showmanship that, pretending I’m unaware of anyone watching, I strip off my striped tee to mop my face. My sixteen-year-old body is nothing special. I’m not one of the hairy, muscular athletes who pose for the Jockey briefs ads that appear in TV Guide or Sports Illustrated. Over the last few years, though, I’ve learned that my smoothness and leanness, accented by the height I’ve achieved, is its own commodity. Popular, at that. Men enjoy gliding their knuckles over my ribs like they’re strumming a xylophone; they relish running their fingers through my shoulder-length hair as might a rapt Rumpelstiltskin as he spins straw to gold. I’m a lean blond twink. Men pay for that. They pay well.
With a deliberate lack of self-consciousness, I rub the crumpled tee over my shoulders and chest, then stretch my long, long arms toward the ceiling with a feigned yawn. I don’t look outside, but I keep myself framed in the door while I pop the button of my bright blue Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts. I don’t unzip; I merely hook my fingers into the waist as if I’m contemplating removing more. I’m the Gypsy Rose Lee of the Eastern Shore.
Outside, I hear the sizzle of a cigarette being stubbed out against cinderblock, then the pert click of a Bic lighter. I’ve got an audience of one.
I’m still playing with my tee when I step outside and sit on the back steps. My neighbor is perhaps ten feet away. He’s anticipated my company by spreading wide his long legs and letting his free hand dangle suggestively between them in the vicinity of his crotch. I can barely make out his face by the lights of my family’s cabin; his eyes glint like obsidian. Ever bold, I lean my naked torso sideways, planting my elbow onto the concrete. It’s not comfortable, but the pose shows me off and tugs open—slightly, so slightly—the V at the top of my shorts.
His eyes wander along every inch and byway of my bare skin, opalescent beneath the night sky. A fingernail’s length of paper and leaf burns and vanishes as he takes a long drag on his cigarette. He blows a column of smoke upward, tilting his head away from me—a gentleman, perhaps—but keeps me squarely in his sights. His free hand ventures lower. Its fingers brush against the synthetic fabric of his shorts, then linger. Teasing. Outlining. To anyone else, he might be scratching, or adjusting.
I let him know we’re speaking the same language by wiping my hand across my chest. My fingertips tease and pull at my nipples, sending electricity down my spine to my stiffening cock. I love these semiotics of desire: a flick of the tongue at the lips, the inclination of a head as eyes seek what’s half-concealed, knowing that if I lean a little closer and spread my legs a little wider, I’ll be able to spy the swelling bulge in his baggy shorts. The hunt is as much fun as the conquest.
“Where’re y’all from?” he at last asks, sucking down the last of his smoke. His bass voice is surprisingly quiet. I tell him we’re from Richmond, and my aunt and cousins from Baltimore. “Raleigh here,” he shares. “The wife had to see Chincoteague. Those damn books.”
I know what he means. There’s not a family with a horse-mad preteen girl that doesn’t know the Misty of Chincoteague series. “Where is she?” I ask, leaning forward.
The stranger looks over his shoulder at his dark cabin. “Asleep. What about your folks?”
There’s meaning behind the question. “I can do what I want.”
“Really, huh.” He chuckles. I’ve amused him. “You sound like a bad boy.”
My cock stiffens in my shorts as I rise and stride his way. I plant my ass onto his stoop. We sit only a couple of feet apart. “Maybe I am.”
“So, bad boy. What is it you want?” I know the answer is plain in my eyes, but he continues. “What’s your poison? Cigs?” He holds out the pack, one butt protruding from the opening. I shake my head. “I’ve got bourbon.”
There’s a half-empty bottle of Old Crow behind him, next to the screen door. “Nah,” I reply. I’ve been plied with liquor before, but I’ve never been tempted to accept.
“Don’t got no pot,” he says. With speculation he sizes me up. “Cash’ll do, I reckon.”
Now he’s talking. I sidle a little closer as he withdraws a bulky wallet from his shorts. My dad has a bifold like this, stuffed so full that it’s nearly two inches thick. From inside he withdraws a twenty-dollar bill, then its twin. My heart pounds at the sight of the cash, but I don’t want to seem too mercenary. “Maybe I’m just looking for fun.”
He hesitates. “Uh-huh. Okay, then.” When he opens his wallet once more as if to put away the bills, my hand shoots out and snatches the cash. His lips twist into a cruel smirk. Now I despise the man for testing me. He’s not a gentleman, after all. A gentleman would have folded those twenties and tucked them into the pocket of my tee, or he might have accompanied the withdrawal with a wink and a smile, to indicate a joke. This asshole, though, is taking pleasure in denying me what should be mine. In my eyes, it makes him even uglier.
Yet I want the money. Cash is the Pavlov’s bell that, rung at the right timber, floods my mouth with drool. The mere sight of the twin twenties is a narcotic to the indignities Bert will inflict over the next few days. Crushed and balled inside my pocket, they’re the analgesic to my pain. I don’t even notice, when the stranger grabs me around my neck and steers me to the thicket of trees behind the property, beyond the pool area, that his clutch is painful, almost bruising. For the sake of the cash, I ignore the rancid stink of the tobacco and Old Crow that emanates deep from his lungs whenever he wheezes; I forgive the violence with which he shoves me to my knees. When he drops his shorts to reveal a cock so crooked, so bent, that when fully erect it points at almost a ninety-degree angle to his right, the money in my pocket is enough anesthetic to help me dive for it hungrily and to welcome it in my throat, painful a fit as it might be.
He’s not a gentle lover. It’s with force he holds me down on his dick. When he finishes, it’s deep down my throat as I struggle for air. His semen is foul as he withdraws along the length of my tongue. Bitter as tar. I’d almost suppose it to be black in color, from the taste alone. Without a thank-you, without a word, he leaves me in the thicket, alone and gagging and coughing. Both my jaw and neck are sore. For long minutes, I wipe away tears and snot and struggle to regain some degree of composure. Then I brush the dirt from my knees, rise to my feet, and slink back to the cabin and into bed.
I wish I had your self awareness & of others at that age. This is one of the reasons I want to be in bed with you.
ReplyDelete