 James Williams is the author of the short fiction collection . . . But I Know What You Want published by Greenery Press, Fall 2002. His stories have been published in Advocate Men, Attitude, Black Sheets, Blue Food, International Leatherman, Sandmutopia Guardian, Spectator, and other magazines; online in Mind Caviar and suspect thoughts; and in anthologies such as Best American Erotica 1995, 2001, 2003, Best Gay Erotica 2002, Best SM Erotica, Bitch Goddess, Doing It for Daddy, My Biggest O, Rough Stuff 2, SM Futures and SM Visions. He was the subject of profile interviews in Different Loving, by Gloria Brame, Will Brame, and Jon Jacobs (Villard), and Sex: An Oral History, by Harry Maurer (Viking). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. E-mail James Williams.
Fire Island 1974: A Bedtime Story [That names have not been changed does not imply the people are real. - JW] 1. James Look: tinted pink in dawn’s early light, the failing moon is falling like the last mnemonic remnant of a brain, long since torn from its gray stem and twisting imperceptibly toward the near horizon in a brief, irregular ellipsis. Yet, we are still awake. That is your doing. I wanted to lull myself to sleep recalling a story of erotic indulgence that was true, as if any erotic story were not, however flagrant or pedestrian. But stories are stored, as they are conceived, in recall and other imaginative data, so their truths must lie in those most miscible grounds where what was so and what was not become the equal property of anyone who makes a claim on history. Remember Rashomon*? Seven different people recalled a single murder in a grove in seven different ways, and all were telling the truth. I will tell you the truth in these last moments of the night, and maybe we will sleep at last. It is up to you to find the other witnesses - unless, of course, you want me to be them too. The story I will tell takes place on Fire Island, New York, in July of 1974. My aunt, let us say, a Mame-like figure given to flamboyancies of all the senses, owns a home there one village block from the water in a family community, a couple of miles up-beach from the red-hot center where, those few short-sleeved years past Stonewall, pink angora sweaters and dry martinis still survive at night, and rumors persist amidst longneck beers by day. In her ordinarily theatrical drive to clarify something, anything, for the good of those she loves, my aunt has become fast if temporary friends with Joe, a radical stage director, and has invited him to weekend at her weekend house. Her brain-surgeon husband, a good-natured fellow who is comfortably indulgent of her bohemias, is absent - and, shortly, absent so is she: back to Queens to care for her children, too young to have begun to have children of their own. The stage director has brought along a friend and colleague and sometime boyfriend named Harry, who is himself a minor playwright with a wife and daughter lost back in Los Angeles to the age of ebullient sexual experimentation. I - once a mediocre amateur actor, and so on plausible terms with them both - had met the director years before in his Soho loft, where he plied me with not enough drinks and then, quite rightly, dismissed me as too jejune. Now we meet again, and, friendly at least to his hostess’s nephew, he shows me his round and mustachioed friend who is never in the breath of a thousand infanticides the kind of man I would spread my legs for, but: But Harry is sweet. Without a beat we make the sort of meaningful contact people usually flirt to achieve, and though I pretend that nothing is changed, I know from that moment the die is cast. His cock is in my mouth already, my still-tight asshole is reaching around his girth, I am lying beneath him while he labors to come, and if he is really so heterosexual as to please his wife, then he makes of me a happy girl. This is as much a vision as any I have ever had: it has no pictures, no beliefs, no words, and no melody, but I can dance to its distant beat. If in some far-off world I do already know what’s going to happen, back here I smile and go to help make dinner. Later that night I eat a little yellowed windowpane of acid and decide to go for a walk. I can’t help the acid - it’s a configuration of my generation as surely as gin was of Fitzgerald’s. Does it make the evening resonant, or would the night have shimmered over the ocean anyway, its ranked clouds scudding like cotton soldiers in the fully moon-lit sky? It looks to me like the Erté cover of a 1920s Vogue. I walk on sand packed hard by lapping wavelets, and stroll in foam lit Coke-bottle green by the milky stars. Each time I pass another group of houses up beyond the beach I pass another little village. In between are spaces large enough for twice as many villages more, where reeds stand still in a breezeless air. By the time I realize I’m growing tired I have not yet reached my destination, the bright extravagance of Cherry Hill. Do I dare go on? My feet, accustomed to city pavement, are beginning to give out in the sand. Home for the night is many towns away. I turn and start back. Little waves as curved as clams and mussels riffle on the water and sizzle in the sand like cooking cockles. The moon, it seems, has moved no farther, nor have the ranked clouds stirred since I set out. It is not the bones and muscles in my feet that now decline to carry me, but the tendons that give up, weak as Achilles’: my feet are flopping like hooked fish, like hanged men on the gibbet when the floor has flown away, like the stranger-limbs they are that have been severed from my body except for some integument. They will not hold me, yet I must get home: I have a mission that makes no sense. Dropping to the sand I crawl - what else? Hands and arms, shoulders and chest, knees and thighs, I call upon them all to carry me over the foot-sized dunes I sometimes fall face-forward into. Once I think I find Nirvana. Looking at the static sky that has not changed the whole time I’ve been out, I think I must be happy. By the time I recognize the beach that fronts my aunt’s house’s village, all my limbs are quivering when I use them and twitching when I don’t. I’m crawling now with my nose too close for comfort to the creosote-soaked wood, the boardwalk that serves as footpath here, and think I ought to sob with gratitude when I find the entrance to the square compound where my bed is waiting and I’ll have to crawl no more. The rooms of the house are built around a central open space sheltering more boardwalk and a Fire Island pine. Insects chirp and rasp and chirr and I can hear the ocean’s slop-slop-slop even here. Of mammals there is not a sound or scent or sight I can discern. Falling on my face at every other lunge I pass the sliding glass that is my room and crawl directly to the very next one. The door is open to the night, a mattress splayed like a spilt milk across the unpolished, carpetless floor. As I approach, the sheet is quietly thrown back like an opening mouth, and without any words I take his tight balls into my own open mouth and roll them softly, menacingly, on my tongue. I slide up his cock like some priapic devotee and ride it with my throat. I hear him hiss, and when he comes the inside of my mouth feels the way it does when I eat quail egg sushi and crush the yolk against my palate: everything inside is swimming in a warm, thick, liquid and perfectly frictionless smooth. There is no such thing as HIV on Fire Island in 1974, a cure for the clap is just a shot away. I drink his every shudder till he’s shining and starting to grow hard again. He pulls me up along his bearishly haired body and we kiss at last. We have never said a word to one another. 2. Harry From Los Angeles to New York is a six-hour flight; from Hollywood to Fire Island is a journey of a thousand miles. When I first stepped off the plane at Kennedy I saw armed guards keeping visitors, greeters, and well-wishers at bay. We have grown accustomed to maltreatment and the infringements of our humanity in these original, heady, end-of-the-empire decades, and some of the early coarseness has been smoothed over by triumphant oligarchs, but in the summer of 1974, for the first time in America, you could not walk a friend to an airport gate nor meet one at a landing flight, and when I got off the plane I had to scan a clutch of anxious, eager, irritated people waiting at the end of the corridor like a fist full of fingers at the end of an angry arm just to find Joe’s familiar face. Joe was literally leaning on a cop. Nearly swallowed in an ancient gray raincoat that hung down to the tops of his threadbare hi-tops, he balanced perilously on his cane as if the blue-suited elbow were a necessity. He seemed to have aged forty years in the three weeks since I’d seen him, and when he hailed me his voice quavered like a very old man’s before he broke down in a fit of rasping coughs. I hurried to the barricade and put my arm around the body I expected would feel frail. I was so surprised to feel his yogic muscles ripple at my touch that I remembered I’d forgotten he had taken body language seriously and trained himself to speak what his voice sometimes could not. “Haerrry, Haerrry, Haerrry my boy, how glad I am to see you,” he cracked and whistled as if through dentures he had never worn. “Take me home and let me get you out of this heat.” I tried to take him from the cop who saw that we were separated by the makeshift wall and simply moved it for me as if I were not a terrorist. Nodding in a sort of proletarian- brother kind of gratitude I slipped out of the arrival gate’s enclosure and embraced what looked like an infirm, dying man. “Joe,” I said. “Joe, it’s gonna be all right.” I looked into the cop’s wholly unsuspecting eyes. “Thank you, officer. Do you have a wheelchair?” The cop looked startled but Joe took over. “No, no, Haerrry, don’t make me ride in one of those damn things today. Let me walk again. Let me remember I’m a man.” I looked down on his shrunken form. “Sure, Joe. Sure. You just take my arm, and then we’ll walk.” I winked at the cop as if conspiratorially, though what our conspiracy might have been would take a Senate subcommittee to decide. We tottered down the corridor, never breaking Joe’s shuffling stride until we’d turned two corners and were headed for the baggage claim. Then Joe was my height again, fully formed, laughing and turning pirouettes with the gray coat rising up around his hips like a Hassid’s skirts - or no, like a dirty canvas tutu. “‘Thank you, officer,’ he sang, ‘Do you have a wheelchair?’ He-ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-heee. ‘Thank you, officer,’ he twirled around the last redcap who skeedaddled out of there, ‘Do you have a wheelchair?’ Harry you were priceless, Priceless, priceless! You have to consider a career on stage!” “Schmuck! How could you know I’d understand what you were doing? Schmuck! We could both be in jail by now!” “He-ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-heee.” * * * When we docked at Fire Island late that July afternoon the air was thick and still as custard. The sea was as calm as Bing Crosby on Quaaludes. The sky was like Dale Evans waiting for Roy Rogers to go to bed. We found a Red Flyer wagon to load my lonesome bag in, and as we trundled off down the boardwalk hand in hand I felt as if I were in some out-take of a rough cut of The Lady Eve, heretofore lost on the cutting room floor. Joe had shed the geezer drag and was scrumptiously tanned in white Ann-Margaret hot pants. I remembered why we’d become lovers, and forgot why we had stopped. The deal, he said as we strolled in step, was a weekend of fun ’n’ sun, no muss no fuss, and a few days in Soho before I went back home to Miriam. Gulls wheeled and kids at a distance shouted. The sea was in the air everywhere and I put my arm around my friend. But at the house there was another man, a man I wasn’t counting on, and Joe could tell right away I wasn’t going to sleep with him. He came to me in the middle of the night smelling sweaty with beach and sea and boardwalk. I’d lain awake stroking myself and licking the precum off my fingers while the moon made my room grow bright and brighter then darker and dark, listening to the crickets’ whirr; when they stopped I knew the time had come. I’d been hard for hours on and off and I was very ready. He crawled to me that first night, honey, literally crawled across the doorsill of my room, and when I let the covers fall away he sucked me off in thirty seconds. When I was hard again I pulled him up to kiss him, pushed him over on his belly, spit on my hand and spread his asshole with my fingers, then I came twice more while I fucked him till my dick gave out. 3. Joe “I’ll never forgive Harry for leaving me,” Joe said. Something by Lizst was playing too loudly for background but not loudly enough for him to listen to. “He didn’t leave you,” Liza countered mincing shallots on the maple cutting board. She paused to listen to a climbing arpeggio of triplets that resolved like a waterfall. “He went home to his wife.” “I rest my case,” Joe said. Moodily, he watched the oblong shallots shatter into tiny flecks beneath Liza’s knife, so sharp and quick it left no juice behind. If he imagined himself very far above the table he could see them all collecting like a crowd of hunky dandruff at a hair bar. He wondered what each would order: ‘Brylcream: just a little dab’ll do me, Joe.’ ‘Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie.’ Liza slid her wide blade underneath them all at once and flipped them into a pan where they started to sizzle instantly. ‘That’s what Head ’n’ Shoulders will do, Gentlemen: cut us down like a knife. It must be stopped at all costs.’ Liza started slicing morels. “Joe, he always goes back to Miriam. He always will go back to Miriam. He fools around, but he’s a deeply married man.” “He didn’t look so married when I took him to the St. Mark’s Baths.” “He fools around.” “And he’s not going to look so married sleeping with your nephew, either.” “They both fool around. Maybe they’re made for each other.” “I’ll never forgive him.” Humming an intricate counterpoint Lizst left out she tossed the mushrooms into the oil and stirred them with the shallots, adding herbs and spices from the bountiful rack beside her like an ancient mandarin calculating the age of the world on an abacus. “Did you set the camera up?” “Oh yeah,” he answered tracing runes to the music with his finger in the sparse dunes of fresh ground pepper her mill had left behind. “Yeah, the camera’s in and loaded with film, I double-checked the infrared sight, the sound is perfectly muffled, and the knothole’s so big you can turn the lens to any place in the room they could possibly reach. There’ll be a motorboat named Judy waiting at the slip from midnight on to take the film to Cherry Hill. The guy will work all night and bring you prints for breakfast.” He saw that they might just spell ‘Joe,’ but wondered what the signs he’d made could really mean. “Excellent,” she said. “Thank you.” She drizzled brandy into the pan and a minute later a little cream, turned off the heat, and poured and spooned the mixture onto plates of fresh-popped toast points. As she left the pan in the sink and the plates on the table she pulled from the refrigerator two small bowls of endive, watercress, jicama, and mango loosely chopped together under a sesame oil and balsamic vinaigrette, and a bottle of unlabeled white wine. As he always did, he got the bread: a cibatta this time that needed some shoulder to slice. He sat down and she put her arms around him from behind, dropping her hot mouth to his neck and sliding her hands along his naked chest. She gripped his nipples between her thumbs and forefingers, and pinched and chewed for a long minute until he said, “The ice cubes are getting cold.” Then she stood up with a sigh and sat down to eat. “Well, Liza, I’m gay, you know. I can’t help it, I just don’t respond to women. You wouldn’t respond so well yourself if I were a woman coming on to you.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Well then to a sheep. You wouldn’t turn on to a sheep nuzzling at your teats now, would you?” Her expression didn’t change. “Well for Christ’s sake then, fuck what you want to fuck but leave me alone with my boys.” The music ended with a brave sort of flourish. Liza took a bite of the soaking toast and smiled. “I love lunch,” she said. * * * There were actually three cameras in all, each with its own roll of thirty-six exposures. She enjoyed watching Harry play with himself, but only started to take pictures when he lifted the sheet as James crawled toward him from the door across the floor. She took pictures of Harry’s balls and cock both in and out of James’s mouth and of his cock both in and out of James’s ass. She took pictures of James’s cock and balls growing fat and heavy while Harry fucked him. She took pictures of Harry’s face engorged with James’s genitals. She took pictures of the two men sleeping naked in each other’s arms. By that time she was intolerably wet, so she went to Joe’s room with a strap-on dildo in one hand and a jar of Vaseline in the other. Joe was sound asleep but he woke right up when she grabbed his balls. She was hunkered down so her face was level with his. “Now listen here, my friend, I know you’re gay but that can’t be helped. I am your hostess, your friend, your confidant, and your pimp, and I am a lady in need. Either you fuck me or I fuck you. Which will it be?” 4. Tomàs He knew she’d come home because the front door was ajar. He shut it and locked it, picked up his mail from the round marble table under the Tiffany chandelier, and took the letters and bills and journals into the kitchen where she’d also left a lot of food on the table. He held the pile of envelopes in his left hand and peered at the repast over his horn-rim glasses, which he secured on the bridge of his nose with the index finger of his right hand. A basket of bread, of course; a plate of cheeses, of course; a bowl of fruit, of course; a green salad, of course. Some casserole: he bent forward and lifted the lid of the orange pan, sniffing gingerly: cassoulet. The chafing dish held pieces of grilled rabbit swaddled in rosemary. He lifted the cover off a small plate to find rows of braised endive with leeks and red peppers. His glasses started to slide off his face and he dropped the plate’s cover onto the endive trying to catch them. Oily juice started to leak out onto the table where he could see the cover had cracked the plate. He put down his mail and took off his tie, sopped up the liquid with it as best he could, then used it to make a sort of dam around the base of the plate. At the sink he filled the bottom of a kettle with water, then he put the kettle on the stove and turned one burner on. He took a cup from the cupboard and a teabag from a canister nearby, dropped the teabag into the cup, and waited for the kettle to whistle. Out the window over the sink evening was starting to shut Queens down. A single bird sat on the topmost branch of Liza’s lady apple tree facing west, as if watching the impending sunset.“Tee-wee-wee-wee-wee,” it said. Tee-wee-wee-wee-wee also said the kettle. He turned off the burner and poured water into his cup. He carried the cup to the table and put it down while he wrenched a poorly cut slice of bread from the basket. He put the bread in his jacket pocket and picked up the mail in his left hand and the tea in his right, then went back past the marble table and up one flight of stairs to his room. He put the tea cup down on his dresser and threw the bag into his wastebasket. He put his mail next to the tea cup and the slice of bread next to the pile of mail. He took off his suit coat and hung it in the closet, then took tea, bread, and mail to a soft chair in the bay window where he sat down. He sipped the tea and set the cup and bread on the floor beside him. He looked through the envelopes without changing his expression, and flipped them one after another unopened into the wastebasket. There were a great many envelopes, most of them white, some manila, a few in odd colors like green or red. Now and then he slid an envelope underneath the ones that remained in his hand, and when he came to the topmost envelope of those he’d saved he opened it and perused the letter before throwing it away. He kept a small pile of bills and magazines out from their envelopes on the floor and finally held only one last envelope all by itself. He hefted it to judge the weight, held it up to the fading light at the window though he could see nothing through it, smelled it, held it up to his ear. He sipped his tea again and finally opened the envelope and spilled onto his lap 108 5” x 7” glossy photographs of two naked men having sex. He vaguely registered that he vaguely recognized his nephew. He sorted through the pictures, now quickly and now idly, until he had divided them into a large pile and a small pile. He scooped the large pile back into the envelope and pushed the small one over beside his slice of bread, and he looked through the pictures until it was too dark to see anything clearly. He stood up and tossed all the pictures on the bed. He picked up the pile of bills and magazines and set it on the dresser. He undressed slowly, hanging up his suit pants with the jacket, lining up his shoes on the closet rack, dropping his shirt and socks and underpants into the hamper in the bathroom. After he turned on a dim lamp over the toilet he set his glasses beside the sink and drew a hot bath without beads or oils or any other additions, then settled into it wordlessly and quite comfortably. When the water became too cool he got out and dried himself, draped a robe over his shoulders, put on his glasses, took the envelope with the large pile of pictures in his left hand and the small pile of loose pictures in his right, and went back downstairs. He left the envelope on the marble table in the foyer and continued on into the kitchen. He looked at the table full of food and ate a piece of rabbit. He spread the pile of pictures out before him on the table and, with a small smile, masturbated into the cassoulet. The doorbell rang and someone started pounding on the door itself. 5. Liza He breathed a little sigh of exasperation and went to open the door. The small and very angry blonde woman standing on his porch didn’t even seem to notice that his robe was open and that his penis, recently released, was oozing one thin, fine, translucent liquid string depending to his knees and swaying in the draft. “I want my husband back!” she shouted up toward his face. He pushed his sliding glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Why on Earth?” “Why? Why? WHY?” She did not seem to have an answer. “Why - why on Earth are you telling me?” “Where is my husband?” He thought about the man who’d died in surgery that afternoon, but the hospital should have handled that. Besides, the man had not been married. The woman shouldered past him into the foyer, brushing his robe onto the floor. He tried to catch the robe but his glasses began to fall and he had to use both hands to catch them instead. By the time he put them on his face again the woman was well into the house. He followed her in some consternation and when he caught up with her she was already standing stock still at the kitchen table. Slowly she turned toward him. Her face had gone quite firm. She was holding a photograph. She spoke quietly and very deliberately. “Where. Is. My. Husband.” “James?” “Harry. HARRY. WHERE IS MY HUSBAND?” From the doorway where she was leaning with one hand on the jamb Liza asked, “Perhaps I can be of some help?” The woman whirled on her. “Who are you? Where is my husband?” “With regard to the first question, since you’re standing in my kitchen where you weren’t invited, I might better ask who are you? And with regard to the second, since you’re standing here with my husband, who is naked as a skunk and has clearly just had an orgasm, I might also better ask you some questions.” The woman seemed to actually notice the man for the first time. She looked him in the face, then looked him up and down and found that he was, in fact, naked. And, like Liza, she could also see that he had recently come. She held out the photograph and Liza could tell by her crumpling face that the woman had just begun to recognize what could be seen to be her own predicament. “But Harry,” she started to cry. “I want my husband.” “You must be Miriam,” Liza offered, coming down from the wall and walking toward the woman who nodded as if afraid to trust her voice. “Did you come all the way from Los Angeles?” The woman nodded some more. “Then you must be hungry,” Liza said patting the woman’s cheek with maternal certainty as she reached for a plate and spoon. “No one with a tongue can eat the nasty crap they feed their captives on a plane. Come on, sit down and have some supper; then we’ll talk.” Obediently, Miriam sat down before the plate Liza had set before her and started to eat. “Do you like it?” Liza prompted. Miriam nodded as if that was all she could remember to do, and then she found her voice. “Good,” she said, “what is it?” Liza smiled, happy that her
food was at work. “Cassoulet.”
6. James Even with models in place it takes a long time to shoot a roll of film if you know only approximately what you want in your pictures and you don’t have the luxury of a motor-drive. I hear the first distinctive sssnk of a shutter about the time Harry lifts up his sheet, and by the time I take his balls into my mouth I could if I had to point to one of three knotholes the camera has to be hidden behind. Perhaps it’s the acid, but tonight I seem to be able to do two things at once, and, reticent as I usually am, putting on a show seems like an entertaining other choice. Making love with Harry I reach down deep into my repertoire and pull out all the stage tricks I remember about highlight lighting, use of shadows, and position for effect. I make sure to show the juicy parts except every now and then when I feel like being a tease or I want to make the camera drop a few frames. It simply doesn’t occur to me for days to wonder how anyone could have planned for me to be here when I didn’t know myself that I was coming till I’d arrived. Maybe Harry was expecting someone else who never came. When I get around to thinking about tonight it makes me nervous about the pictures’ future, but by then it’s really too late to worry. Later, when Harry has fallen asleep and the camera is gone, I find that I’m hungry for more night air. I still can’t walk and I’m only taking it on faith that I will ever be able to walk again, so I crawl naked into the Fire Island night on my sandburned knees and then I crawl all the way to the beach. Exhausted and exhilarated with my night full of efforts I sit against a tree that has become driftwood, and marvel as the brilliant pearl of a moon I saw earlier first melts to a yellow puddle on the flat black sea and then almost immediately becomes an equally flat dull copper shining wanly across the Island from somewhere west of Brooklyn. In this briefly two-dimensional night the sky holds not a single cloud, nor does it show a single star. Who am I now, I wonder, and what have I made up? How could I describe tonight’s history, and who would believe me? I hear a shuffling in the sand, and someone very softly calls my name. Does that mean I’m not alone? Is there someone else who could tell my tale? I answer the mystery voice - “Hello?” - and Harry walks into the rancid moonlight dappled like a camouflaged soldier. “You aren’t wearing any clothes,” are the first words he ever says to me. I look down at my body and it’s true. I look back at him. “You going to stay up awhile?” “Yes,” I say, breaking my own silence with him. “Awhile.” “You’ll get cold. Or busted. I’m going back to bed. Take this,” and he peels off his sweatshirt and hands it to me. Then he takes off his pants and hands them over too. Now Harry is bare as the day he was born, plus a lot of body hair. I kiss his cock which for me is just at face height. “Good night, sweetheart.” He bends down to kiss me and I kiss him back, and then I’m alone again. I put Harry’s clothes on the sand beside me. The air is soft and warm and moist and feels like an extension of my skin so that if I don’t move my muscles I can imagine my body’s disappeared. In the mind that remains I say aloud that I could die at peace right here, right now; then, far away at what must be the end of the island, I see the lights of a dune buggy start to come my way. This is how Frank O’Hara died, I muse, run over drunk on a Fire Island beach. I am not so ready to meet my unmaker as I thought I was. I scrabble out of its presumptive path and instantly its lights go dark. Now: the moon has set. Pull down the blinds, my love, and let’s go to sleep. # * Rashomon, the famous movie (1950) directed by Akira Kurosawa, and starring Toshiro Mifune, among other great Japanese actors, was based on two stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892 - 1927), “Rashomon,” and “In a Grove.” In the former story, set in the ruins of what once had been Kyoto’s great Rashomon gate, a servant recently fired by an unnamed samurai debates whether to become a thief or to starve honorably. It is in the latter that the seven testimonies to a single murder conflict so as to make truth itself unknowable. Copyright
© 2002 James Williams. All rights reserved. Do not copy or post.
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