Summer Teeth

It was the yellowest part of dusk, when the daylight was just beginning to drain from the sky, as if someone had turned off the faucet of sunlight and let only a little down the drain. Most of the cars around me hadn’t bothered to turn on their headlamps, when I pulled off the highway and into the familiar rest area less than an hour north of my dad’s house, in Virginia.

One of the advantages of my new location is that it cut roughly in half the time it took to drive to my dad’s place—from about fourteen to seven. Fourteen is hell. Seven, not so bad. By rights, I should’ve left New England in the morning and passed this particular public rest stop in the mid-afternoon. I started late, though. Very late. I’d been out late the night before, and had some piano duties in the morning, the Sunday I left. And then I’d had to get some allergy medicine. And then I’d had to stop and clean up a mess at home. And then the family had wanted me to get lunch with them. And then . . . and then . . . there’s always something, right?

I’d fucked in this rest stop before. I’ve stopped in late at night and picked up strange men from their cars, and gotten them to blow me. I’d gotten a few to climb into the back seat, away from the glare of the overhead lamps illuminating the parking lot, and sit on my cock. A couple of times I’d picked up truckers. One had hungrily sucked me off after midnight behind the building in a pool of shadow; the other had taken me back to his truck and let me fuck him in his cab, while he chewed on my nipples so vigorously I winced for a week whenever my shirt fabric would rub across them.

If it had been mid-afternoon when I’d reached this point, I would’ve driven on by. Nothing happens there during the day, that I’ve found. But since dusk was approaching, and the habit was strong, I pulled in. Inside the building, I usually cruise in the further-back of the two men’s rooms, the one that the truckers usually use. It’s a little less trafficked usually had fewer of the opposite sex passing by the door on the way to the women’s room.

The man was already standing at the urinal. He was tall, unshaven. Handsome, in his own way. Though he wore a young man’s ringer T-shirt, a much-worn pair of jeans, and a battered pair of cowboy boots, he had to have been in his fifties. His hair was gray and carefully trimmed; his forearms were tanned, lean, and firm. He stood with his left hand holding his dick, his right thumb hooked into the frayed fabric of his jeans pocket, his fingers pulling apart his fly. He was already looking back over his shoulder, casually, very casually, when I entered.

He paused for a moment at the sound of my footsteps before letting his gaze fall on me. Down. Up. Eye contact. Then casually, very casually, he turned his head away.

But not so much he couldn’t see what I was doing.

I stepped up to the urinal next to his. Men don’t do this, usually. Not when there are three or four empty urinals on either side of a guy. We space ourselves. We head to the urinal furthest away from the man already occupying a space. Even the most heedless of us leaves an empty urinal space between a man standing there and ourselves. Stepping up next to a man in an empty bathroom is deliberate. It’s provocative. It’s an act of intent.

And my dick was intending to get wet.

I started stroking it at the urinal. It didn’t take much to get hard. I’d already felt myself swelling at the sight of the handsome guy in the worn work clothes. I could see his left hand working his own dick, though he kept his hips close to the porcelain. Our eyes met over the little partition. He nodded. So did I.

I stepped back, allowing light to fall onto my stiff dick. He looked back at the doorway, then down at the rod pulsating in my fist. His jaw jutted out at the sight of it. “Fuck.” He mouthed the word, more than uttered it.

His turn. He stepped back to show me his meat. It was respectable—a good six inches, fat at the base where it was surrounded by pubes the color of pewter, and narrower at the head. “Nice,” I grunted.

“What’re you into?” he asked.

But then we were interrupted. We both turned back to the urinals and pretended we were attending to the business at hand, peeing the way no two men do in an empty restroom unless they happen to be blood relatives and/or handcuffed together. Someone had entered the open doorway and, with the sound of track suit fabric swishing as his thighs rubbed, managed to warn us of his approach. I didn’t look immediately, but could hear the intruder at the sinks, close to the doors. Swishing, and swishing, and swishing some more, with that annoying sound that shiny synthetic fabric makes when it passes over each other.

When I saw my new friend looking back over his shoulder, and not bothering to pretend to conceal it, I decided to turn my head as well. Was the guy cruising? No, he was not. He was studying himself in the mirror. Quite frankly, it looked as if he were trying to pop a zit on his upper lip.

The man was—how can I put it kindly?—dressed as if he were mentally challenged. I don’t think he was; there wasn’t anything about his posture or the way he moved that indicated so. But he did indeed wear a shiny, dirty, synthetic track suit and a nasty-ass T-shirt that at some point had probably been white, but was now a Jackson Pollock of snot trails, food stains, and general grunge. He had what my spouse archly calls ‘Summer Teeth.’ As in summer there, summer not.

There’s a character Matt Lucas plays in the British TV show Little Britain named Andy—pudgy, wheelchair-bound (allegedly), lard-pale, desperately unattractive, glasses thick as Coke bottles, of an age that could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty-nine. This guy had Andy’s general appearance and sad, bald dome and Benjamin Franklin haircut. He was rotund. He wore a headband, as if he’d been jogging. And after he’d finished examining his lip, he began undressing right there in the middle of the floor, in front of the sinks.

First he kicked off his shoes so that they went flying against the tiles beneath the sinks. Then he pulled up one foot and started to pull off his sock, while he hopped around on the other. He repeated the performance again, switching sides. Then off came the jacket of his track suit, and then his pants.

My would-be sex buddy and I were kind of gawking outright at this point. My dick had deflated not just at the guy’s entry, but at his prolonged wardrobe change, which wasn’t proceeding exactly swiftly. I think we were both hoping that the guy would just give it up and go away so that the two of us could make some arrangements, but by now he was stepping out of his pants and leaving them in a plastic puddle on the floor.

Off came his undershirt. It was one of those moments in which you want to exclaim “Whoa!” and avert your eyes at the sight of so much unsexy flesh, made even more pale and luminous by the harsh florescent lights. I think I winced. It was quite a sight. The guy slapped himself twice on the belly, looked at himself in the mirror (totally unconscious of the two of us the entire time, I might add), and then gathered up his clothing from where he’d shed it all over the floor and stuffed it into a paper supermarket bag. He put his socks on top, and then his shoes, and standing there in nothing but a pair of briefs with a yellowed front, kicked the bag to the wall.

Then, from a battered and beat-up flight bag, he pulled another outfit. Another track suit, to be exact. Another track suit that was exactly the same. I know what you people are thinking. “Oh, he was just changing into a fresh track suit, silly,” you’re going to tell me. “He’d been driving all day and wanted some fresh clothing.” But people, this was not a fresh track suit. The T-shirt he pulled on was just as disgusting as the first had been. Just as stained. It looked like it stank. The track suit was not only made of the exact same loud material, but had the same logos on it. It was even the same color. The athletic shoes he pulled out of the bag were just as battered and shot. The socks, just as yellow. If anything, the new identical track suit was in even worse condition than the other one, as it had been wadded up and shoved in its carrier with little regard.

I think the both of us were standing there with our jaws dropped. My buddy zipped up quickly, when the guy started hopping around the restroom floor to pull on his sock. “Good luck,” he murmured, with a pat on my back. I wanted to tell him to wait, that I’d walk out with him, but he was already on his way. I zipped, edged past the crazy fool with the Ben Franklin hair, and made my way out to the parking lot.

It doesn’t take much to spook a public encounter sometimes, and the gentleman in the track suit had managed to squelch this one. I saw my buddy taking strides with his long legs in the direction of a white van near where I’d parked. He didn’t linger, though, or make any advances to inviting me into the van. He pulled out, winked at me as he passed, and was on his way.

Damn you, Summer Teeth!