Faculty Party

When I was a kid during the nineteen-seventies, would occasionally throw end-of-semester Christmas parties in our home right before the holidays started.

Days before the party they'd start making a go of cleaning the living room, though tidiness was never either of their strong points. They weren't drinkers themselves, but the colleagues and students they'd invite to these yearly shindigs would show up laden with spirits. Our basement bathroom—a mildewy, forbidding place that seemed so much like the movie set of a serial killing that I'm still reluctant to enter it when I visit my dad's home—was filled with liquor bottles that we'd begin hauling up the night before, until the dining room table was crowded with liquids of different colors (and of dubious age). My mother's ash trays got a thorough cleaning and the good ones were strewn around strategic places; my dad would pull out a bunch of LPs and eight-track tapes and have them stacked by the stereo.

My mom would spend an afternoon in the kitchen with cans and an opener and a jar of mayonnaise and emerge with space-aged canapés. The cats were banished outdoors. After a cold dinner, and before the doorbell would ring, I'd be sent to my room for the evening. Faculty parties were not for the young.

They were exotic, especially when I was fairly young. From my room, with a book in my lap, I'd listen to the swinging strains of psychedelia on the stereo, often improbably mixed with Nat King Cole singing Christmas carols, or Peter, Paul, and Mary. I'd listen to the laughter and smell the cigarette smoke and the clink of the liquor bottles and the increasingly loud and inebriated conversation and think to myself, This is what being grown up is all about.

My parents' guests were usually two-thirds other faculty from the university, and the rest were upper-level undergrads or graduate students. One of the things I used to do as a ritual, after the party had started, would be to go through their coats. They all lay there on my parents' beds, taken upstairs and tossed on the mattresses upon entering. When it was quiet upstairs, I'd tiptoe out and into my parents' room and just examine what their colleagues and students were carrying in their pockets. Mostly it was boring stuff like keys, or small change, or cellophane-wrapped Kraft caramels. Once in a while I'd stumble upon cigarettes, or more frequently, tiny little unsmoked joints tucked away in breast pockets, acrid-smelling and spilling weed from their twisted ends.

I had to time my stealthy investigations right. More often than not I'd be interrupted, either by hapless students looking for the bathroom, or couples (not always married, not always of the same generation) looking for a private tryst among the coats. I wouldn't say that my parents' parties were orgies, exactly, but they had their share of fucking. In the bedroom, among the wraps. In the spare bedroom, on the rusty twin bed that had been my father's as a boy. Outside in the back yard, behind the massive brick nineteen-fifties barbecue. In the basement, or down the outside cellar steps.

And once, in my room.

I was pretty young the night that Dr. Jones came into my bedroom. It was late—late enough that I'd given up watching the little portable TV from the kitchen that my parents had lugged up to my room for me to watch that evening, and had gotten into bed, but not so late that I was asleep. I had a book in my lap, and my knees propped up, and had stripped down to a T-shirt and briefs. Then my door opened. "Anyone home?" asked a tall black man. He slipped in quietly, raised a finger to his mouth to indicate I not say anything, and then made a pantomime of tiptoeing to my bed.

I knew Dr. Jones from my dad's office. They were in the same department; I'd seen him a couple of times a year since I'd been five or six—enough to recognize the face and associate a name, but not enough that we'd ever actually spoken. I raised my eyebrows. I think I told him that the bathroom was on the other side of the upstairs hall.

"Oh, I'm not here for the bathroom," he said. The man sat down on the edge of my bed. He was in his forties or fifties, and had a grizzled beard limned with white; it looked like his halo had slipped over his head and around his neck. An oversized mole decorated his dark, dark skin on his forehead; he had a large, nineteen-seventies Afro shot with gray perched like a helmet on his head. "Just needed to get away from the party."

He reeked of alcohol. His eyes, though unwavering as he stared at me, had that liquid sheen of the thoroughly inebriated. I nodded, and waited for him to say something.

"So," he started, putting his hand on my knee. Then, finding that awkward, he removed it. "You're just . . . sitting up here, real quiet?" I told him I was. "Must be real nice to be up here, where it's . . . quiet."

Again, his hand landed on my leg. This time, it made its way up to my thigh. Dr. Jones might have been an expert in African history, but subtle he was not. "What you doing?" he asked, when he reached my hip.

"Nothing," I told him. Despite myself, my boner was raging beneath the covers.

"You must be doing something, if you're making me do this." He pulled down the sheets. "I didn't come up here thinking I was going to do this. Must be you making me do it."

Maybe that kind of talk worked on other young guys, but I saw through it. His big hands pulled apart my legs, right below the knee. I didn't resist "You are a real pretty boy," he told me. "Real, real pretty. You got that creamy skin I like so much." He talked like Barry White on a quiet storm radio station after midnight, and I have to confess that I was more aroused than anything. "You got those pretty blue eyes, looking at me like that. You're making me do this," he said. "It's ain't me, baby."

His lips were on my leg, then my groin, and then he was pulling up my T-shirt and yanking on my briefs. I heard the crackling of their elastic as he yanked them down, hard. My teen cock flopped out of the cotton and slapped audibly against my belly. "See what you gone and did?" he asked, breathing heavily on my twitching, hard flesh. "You made me do this."

Dr. Jones roughly grabbed my balls, almost making me yelp out in pain. Then his mouth engulfed my dick. I'd had sex by that point, a few times. Even in my limited experience I could tell he wasn't the best of my encounters. He used too much teeth; he created too much suction rather than let his mouth and lips travel up and down the shaft. He was simply too drunk to do much good.

But a blow job was a blow job, and I'd spent the evening waiting for the party to end so I could turn out my lights and masturbate and get to sleep. A stranger's mouth on me was even better than that. It didn't take very long before my young nuts were retracting and my dick started to pulse out a tiny load of semen. Dr. Jones swallowed it all. "Fuck," he said. "See what you did?"

He mumbled another sentence or two into my balls, as he nuzzled there. Then he was very, very still.

He was asleep, in fact.

Apparently no one from the party noticed he was missing for over an hour. Not until people were starting to drift off into the December night did my father come into my room. "Have you seen—?" he asked, and then saw himself what he was looking for. Dr. Jones, sprawled on his back, head lolling over the mattress edge, arms at his side, snoring loudly at the very bottom of the bed where I'd rolled him. "Oh, jeez," said my dad. He rolled his eyes.

I shrugged, trying to make it seem as if I were used to adults passing out on my bed every night of the week.

"Was he a pain?" My dad dipped down and grabbed his colleague beneath the arms, trying to stand him to his feet. I told him that he wasn't, not really. "Come on, Lamont," he said, shaking the older man. "Time to go home."

Dr. Jones hadn't woken up the entire time he'd slumbered, after the hasty blow job he'd given me. He opened his eyes in confusion, saw my dad, saw me, and then became very suddenly and drunkenly awake.

"It's okay," said my dad, gently escorting him from the room. "Come on. We'll get you some coffee."

And that was my one and only encounter with Dr. Jones. I got the impression he was never really sure of exactly what we'd done, if anything; his memory was probably hazy of those confused few minutes before he passed out. Whenever I'd pass him with one of my parents in the department offices, he'd blink at me and work his lips as if he wanted to say something, but couldn't quite decide what. I, in the meantime, would only smile in the same way I smiled at any of my parents' colleagues, without betraying what happened between us.

If he thought it was a fantasy—well, at least it was a good fantasy.