Gay Man of my Dreams

I may or may not have lost my virginity to a gay man. He may or may not have been my first love.

It’s not like I was desperately head over heels can’t live without him gonna die without him in love. And it’s not like he was flaming flamboyant fashion slave stereotypical fudge pounding gay. He just liked the cock; so we had at least one thing in common.

The thing about Dustin, he was beautiful. Beautiful in that slightly dirty hippie move to Portland and clean up beaches and smoke lots of pot kind of way. He was beautiful in a wear lots of t-shirts and don’t cut your hair or shave your beard kind of way. Dustin was long and lean and his eyes were blue—clear, summer sky over Lake Michigan blue, and when he looked at you, he looked in to you. You know that look, the one that hooks into the pit of your stomach and pulls, or fire-cracks straight down to your groin and you feel that slight pounding twinge and ooooooh. Yeah, that look.

When we were growing up across the street from each other, before he knew he was gay and before I knew what an orgasm felt like, Dustin and I would watch each other. Like, when we were both out in our front yards at the same time and it was hot and summer and you were always sweating in the sunshine. I’d stand there in my bathing suit with the hose, spraying down our dry, sun-baked grass, or my dry, sun-baked brothers, or the dry, sun-baked little kids I babysat. And Dustin would sit on his trampoline, shirt off, reading a book. Or he’d kneel over on the lawn, pulling weeds out of the flowerbeds with his mom. And I would stare across the road, imagining the sweat collecting between his sharp shoulder blades and wonder what it felt like to kiss him. And he would stare across the road, imagining the sweat pooling between my breasts, and wonder how it felt to have a pair.

That summer, the heat just hung, thick and wet. You could feel it when you breathed, settling into your throat. I kissed Dustin a lot that summer, tangled my fingers in his shaggy hair and wracked my bony hips against his on his trampoline. It was always dark, after midnight, but never any cooler than the sticky days. Our bodies slipped and slid against each other’s, sweaty chest against sweaty breasts. I was fifteen and he was sixteen, and I couldn’t figure out why he never tried to have sex with me, why his fingers never found their way into my shorts, why our trysts on the trampoline involved only kissing and writhing and once—only once, his penis in my mouth (which lasted about thirty seconds and never happened again, until I graduated high school and conquered my fellatio phobia).

I called him my boyfriend and he called me his girlfriend and we didn’t have sex. That summer turned into that school year and I still called him my boyfriend and he still called me his girlfriend and we still did not have sex. And it seemed like he was afraid of my vagina. But I wasn’t particularly worried about it, as long as I had a boyfriend, a cute one. As long as someone was kissing me.

But then that school year turned into the next one, his senior year, and I still called him my boyfriend and took him on family vacations and went on his, and we snuck into each other’s beds in the middle of the night, but we didn’t have sex, and he was still afraid of my vagina.

“What gives, Dustin?” I groaned, frustrated and sweaty, the night after he’d been accepted to the University of Michigan. I’d spent almost an hour between his sheets, trying to take his boxers off, and he’d spent almost an hour artfully avoiding me.

“What do you mean?” He asked, sitting up and scratching his head, his fingers disappearing into his long, tangled hair.

I rolled my eyes. No longer was I the fifteen-year-old girl, happy to satisfy while remaining unsatisfied herself. I was seventeen, and smarter, more observant. I’d seen the way my boyfriend looked at the guys I worked with when he came to my restaurant, the way his eyes tightened with longing, the way his pupils dilated at the sight of their lean muscles and playful smiles. He didn’t look at me like that. He never had. I was beginning to suspect…something.

“I WANT TO HAVE SEX!!!!” I whispered loudly. “WITH YOU!!!!”

Dustin’s eyes widened and he sat up, the covers gathering at his waist. The moonlight through the window slid across his chest as it heaved. He looked at the wall, at his “Labyrinth” poster, then out the window, then at his hands, his bookshelf; anywhere but at me.

“Why don’t you want to have sex, Dustin?”

He said nothing.

“Dustin?”

“FINE!” He shouted, and I slammed my hand over his mouth. “Fine,” he whispered when I took my hand away. “Let’s have sex.”

So we did. And it was terrible. Limbs in all the wrong places, skin making strange noises where we rubbed together, and I didn’t come. Which is normal. But neither did he. Which isn’t so normal.

But we stayed together. And we had regular, bad sex. He graduated in June and we stayed together through the summer. The night before he left for Michigan, we lay on his trampoline together. It was the end of August and the nights were cooling off. We held hands and stared at our feet. We’d talked about whether or not we’d stay together when he went away to college, we’d talked about it all summer, but we’d never reached a conclusion. I was expecting him to break up with me, to give me the standard “We’ll be so far away from each other” speech that all my friends had gotten from their older boyfriends.

“I need to tell you something,” he said after we’d sat in silence for a while.

“I know,” I said. “We’re breaking up, aren’t we?”

He nodded.

“Because you’re going to Michigan, and I’m staying here, right?” I looked over at him, chewing my lip to keep the tears away.

He shook his head. “No, not because of that.”

This, I wasn’t prepared for. “What?”

“It’s not because of that. The distance doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Just shut up for a second and let me talk, would you?” His voice was wound tight in his throat.

I shut up, tilted my head back and looked up at the sky, and felt hot tears sliding down my cheeks.

“It’s just…” He paused, for a long time. Then, he pulled my chin, turned my head toward his face and looked right into my eyes, ice blue lasers locking in on me. “It’s just that I’m gay.”

My vision went white, then black. Little red lines danced across Dustin’s face and swirled around in the trees above our heads. My ears buzzed and whined, high-pitched and loud. “What?” I said, my body swaying.

Dustin tightened his grip on my chin. “I’m gay,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“I. LIKE. GUYS.”

He let go of my chin and I let myself fall onto my back, the impact bouncing both our bodies on the trampoline. I was quiet for a long, long time. Dustin lay down beside me, rested his head against mine and sighed.

“Are you really gay, Dust?” I asked after a while.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I definitely want to have sex with guys.”

“Me too,” I said, and we laughed.

I could sleep I could sleep when I lived alone is there a ghost in my house? I could sleep I could sleep

Come hold me. Or, maybe not that. Come lie down beside me and throw your arm over my stomach and I will breathe into your hair and twist it in my fingers and smell you and kiss you and wrap my legs around you and maybe eventually, you will sleep, and I will sleep, and when we wake up, I will have more to write about.

Come lie beside me while I kiss your shoulder blades.

My Sexual Frustration Peaks-- Violently.

I have never want to touch someone as badly as I wanted to touch L. in class today. It wasn't even all sexy touching. It was mostly just touch touching. He was right there beside me, inches away, so close that every time he moved his hands, he was encroaching on my proverbial "personal space," and I was literally aching to know what his skin felt like. Blood pounded in my fingertips and I couldn't sit still. I wanted to pull the back of his t-shirt up and run my hand over the smooth, warm skin at the base of his back, feel his muscles moving. I wanted to press my fingers against each vertebrae in his spine, feel bone against bone. I wanted to touch his fingers; the knuckles, the chapped skin on his palms because he never wears gloves and Chicago winters are windy. I wanted to rub our cheeks together, feel his scruff grate against me, scratch me. I wanted to bump jaws and teeth and hips. My knees kept jabbing in his direction, desperate to knock knobs with him. My toes, hidden safely inside my shoes, wanted to kick up gently against his-- leather and leather, skin and skin, bone and bone. I wanted to climb onto his lap and sink into his ribcage and his sternum, press my cheek against his shoulder, smell his collar bone, kiss his neck. I thought my insides would burst out of my skin, sitting that close to him without actually touching him. But I made it through, somehow, and when I got out of the classroom, I could breathe again. But my fingers still burned for his back.

Regarding my crush on Jack Kerouac

"...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' " -from "On the Road"

I want to put Jack Kerouac in a box. One that will fit in my pocket. I want to fold him up, sew him shut with his own long strings of sentences and fit him into a locket, maybe one shaped like a heart and worn always around my neck, the metal warmed from resting forever on my chest.

I want to ring around his rosies, stuff my pockets full of his poems and the places where he once breathed so deeply he couldn't help but write about it. I want to stick Denver to my skin, whirling and drunk like he saw it, and soak Frisco into my hair, smoke-scented and sprawling.

I want the long nights spent talking-- the words left out in his mad frenzy to get where he was going, to see what happens next. I want to hit the pause button and just settle into a moment, wrapping "On the Road" around me and, like a rush of wild madness, feel it seep into me, sinking into my eyes and ears, nose and mouth.

I want to live this, breathing wild and frantic beside Sal and Kerouac and Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx and Remi and Eddie and Eddie's Girl and Major and Rita and everyone who ever took up a space similar to Kerouac's.

And so I guess I should admit it, now. I guess I should mention that I have a big, fat, juicy crush on Jack Kerouac. On him and his writing and his characters and his eventual, inevitable misery. Maybe I'm a couple of decades too late, but that boy is just the right amount of mad for me, for life, for being a writer.

The way he weaves his words, like he just closed his eyes and put himself back there, back to that second where everything was happening, and he just wrote it, typed the hell out of it, cigarette burning, eyes still closed, writing his life.

I want to be there, to see the expression on his face when he buries himself in his writing. I want to watch the way his fingers cramp and his shoulders clench and his back aches, the way the cigarette ashes float across the type-writer keys. I want to see the crease in his forehead while he crouches, taping together all those pieces of paper so he can just go and go and write and never stop. I want to witness his genius exploding across the page.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too dramatic. But what you have to understand is, I love him. I love Jack Kerouac. The kind of love where it is hard to find fault, the kind of love where all you can do is exist in awe, rapt and attentive, waiting for the next great thing he'll say, think, write, mumble.

Which is why I am too late. I was born too late to soak up the actual man, so now I just read, read, read. I don't care what they say about all of the other ones being crap-- I want to understand this man and everything he writes. Wrote.

I want to put Jack Kerouac in a box and take him out and listen to him spout lovely words and angry ones all full of passion. But since I can't do that, I guess I'll just settle for reading. Every word.  

My Writing

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth." -Kurt Vonnegut

One of my instructors at Columbia College asked me the other day how I would describe my writing. This is my answer... sort of.

I think there is a difference between how my writing is and how I want it to be.

I want my writing to be like music, like a song, like notes floating across the air, singing into your ears. I want my writing process to be like band practice, hundreds of jam sessions all culminating in an amazingly mind-blowing, life-altering performance of those songs I've worked so goddamn hard on, poured my life and soul and body into.

I want my words to slam into you, careening of the page like a car crash waiting to happen.

I want my stories to be unforgettable.

But the reality of it is that my writing is usually flowery and cushy, sloppy with love and lust. Boys and longing leaning up against the walls and waiting their turn to lie on my pages.

My words tuck themselves into your pockets, digging down and nestling into the corners where your fingers never quite reach.

My stories are all the same.

Unplayed Piano

I am an unplayed piano. Unplayed by you. My keys, all smooth and ivory, are gathering dust while they wait, dying to be touched. By you, mostly, but there are some days where I just want someone, anyone (almost) to play me, apply slight pressure here and there to make rich, fine chords come out, burst out from inside of me, clearing dust and age and sadness from my depths.

Make me sing, music boy. Write your songs on my spine and behind my knees and along my fingers. Kiss your lyrics into my neck and collar bone and hips. Fuck your beats into me, make me feel what you feel. Pound the keys, tickle the ivories, tell me a story with notes, chords, words, in a song.

I feel something inside of you when you rest your fingertips lightly on my black and white keys, barely making contact. Something that is almost ready to come out, burst out, sing out. It's moving inside of you and I feel the vibrations like bass lines under your skin. But then you take your hand away, the dust collected on my keys still embedded in your fingerprints, and let your arm hang loose and limp at your side. But your fingers are still buzzing, electric with the song we could have made, if only you'd played me.