I turned so slow, I padded out, bare soles smacking on cold lino, soles gingerly across hot pavement. Then I pedaled off so quick, swallowing all the air, eyes burning. I knew then. I could not afford to find him.

  X. Hard Evidence

  The boy Dan “touched” was the attractive youngest son of the heavy-set arresting officer. It later came out: This lieutenant tended to place his fifteen-year-old on nonschool days at better-known public urinals. This ploy rarely worked, since the intended victims enjoyed a communal word-of-mouth expert as their not-unprideful oral sex. Raleigh queers were long since on to that little trick and morsel. They did acknowledge as how the cop’s kid looked a bit like James Dean, and—why lie?—he was extremely well hung for a boy who’d only shaved the once, for Easter service. They nicknamed this troubled, smoldering boy the James Dean Decoy, Bait Meat, and, best perhaps, The Trojan Hose. They knew to run from the sight of him (only some jerky married out-of-towner—hiding from his own kind and their helpful information—would’ve gone near that infamous young beauty holding his infamous older-looking beauty).

  The Lieutenant encouraged his son, once stationed at busier urinals around our state’s capital, to unhasp his all and, having unzipped, to, what?

  I find imagining this father-to-son pep talk a very tough assignment. It may be the hardest thing to know. Eros: a magician’s implement bent on disappearing everything put in it.

  I understand Desire better than the Desire to kill Desire with a Desire of superior force, superior because fatal. To use your kid as other fellows’ ship direct into prison. To me this seems as Martian as I might appear to some cop willing to dangle his boy as fishing bait—literally, dangle. “Son, just maybe think of, oh, say, Marilyn Monroe. Then, nature being nature, what happens’ll happen, and don’t mind letting the old one near you see your whatever … peek, whatever…. Not to be scared, either. ’Cause Dad’s right back here. You just get the evildoer started and, by God, Dad and the long arm of the law’ll do the rest.”

  I have myself experienced joyous moments in public restrooms, commingling and looking at, and more. Some moralists would say that Dan should not have touched a boy that age, even if the kid seduced him. Some readers will not have got this far because I seem to be pulling for the wrong side.

  It is a medical fact:

  You can kill a starving man by feeding him too fast.

  As I write this, trying to reconstruct the start of Dan’s arrest, I’m still turned on somewhat. The impending tragedy adds wallop to a humid scene in this large men’s facility—four sinks, six stalls, eight urinals, all down the carpeted hall past Customer Services and Handy Layaway.

  Perhaps this bathroom became so popular because its unoiled entry-way door squeaked—because the foyer entrance is obscured from the urinals and booths—because this gives its friskier patrons two seconds’ warning. (That’s of no use, naturally, if a secret photographer is lurking behind the only closed door of stall number five.)

  I know all this because, at eleven, I insisted we go see a movie at this very Raleigh mall. Soon as my parents left me alone to watch Fred Mac-Murray and some irrelevant flying sheepdog, I slipped out, rushing straight to Penney’s.

  I found the sign still saying CUSTOMER SERVICES, HANDY LAYAWAY. I felt sad on discovering the crime scene abandoned. I paced off everyone’s deeds. My already adult dick out, I was crying some, feeling now nauseous, now aroused, titillated at acting it all out, at letting my part take all the parts.

  Dad is about to leap and photograph. At home he has two years’ of complete incriminating snapshots, stuck into a store-bought album that came stamped with the gilded words “Our Best Memories …” When he’s feeling discouraged about his other work on the force, some nights late, he’ll get them out and peruse the terrified faces depicted and feel … achievement? a quickening? The father knows that, when lurching forth, he must look only at the culprit. This’ll give Junior time to hide whatever just made the malefactor (on first seeing it) jump so, made him grow so immediately culpable when, invited to reach out, he does so, flashbulb.

  Booth’s metal door is kicked wide open. First bulb fires off, blinding in a mirror four sinks long, and another one is caught … red-handed, red-whatevered. The yelled legalities, barked sounds so loud on tile, and silver handcuffs flashing out. They’re soon cinched onto a fellow whose dick is yet quite free. The culprit’s dick is yet left sticking out, it’s unable to change gears that fast, belonging to a human beast, if a decent Rotarian one. Hairy wrists are bound in metal bands, but the sturdy papa hard-on is yet poking forth so far that even the cop, a fellow male after all, lets the pederast try and wedge it all back in, before the officer pulls his perp through the bustle of our leading Penney’s store, past MEETING YOUR KITCHEN AND BATHROOM NEEDS, UP TO 40% OFF, EVERYTHING MUST GO, where shoppers will be perplexed enough to see a handsome young man—head nodding shamefaced forward—bound in cuffs, and really shouldn’t have to deal with such a boner on him, too.

  It’s tough forcing yourself back into your britches while wearing the cuffs that’ve already cut reddened slices into downy wrists. Best to either deal with your zipper or your handcuffs, but both at once is pretty much a killer.

  XI. The Fellow Ship Docked Below Fourteenth Street

  Somehow, I’ve lived, grown, flourished, and fled Falls, by many, many states and jobs and beaux, and somehow, it’s 1990: The newest of my escape-hatch tree houses is called Greenwich Village.

  We speak of a lovely Saturday night in spring, and I’m carrying sixty dollars’ worth of rubrum lilies, careful that their red-black pollen not stain my pristine clothes.

  I am bound for a party whose parchment invitation insists overartfully, “Come as you would be, and as you are, but, if possible, tonight, in white, dear.”

  So, feeling good after a day of writing fiction that spawned four actual living, kicking sentences, I am gussied up in white bucks, white ducks, a pale tie, an off-white shirt—and I’m feeling nautical but nice when I hear a passing hot rod yell one word that I, in a naval mood, believe to be “Farragut!”

  I get hit full-face. Two Jersey-flung paper cups, one full of warm beer, the other all cold Orange Crush, and I am soaked.

  I hear laughing as they roar off. I’m left here gasping, doubled over. The shock of it has knocked the wind clear out of me, but nothing worse. I set the flowers on a stoop. Take stock. There’s a small cut on my forehead. Could one piece of flying ice have managed that?

  “Everything’s fine. No harm done,” I tell myself. But I am so stained and sogged. I smell like someone else’s four-day binge. I look down at the lightning bolt of orange sogged from my chest to the once-white crotch. I realize that even if I dash back home to change I have nothing white left to wear.

  One block north, I dodge into an alley. These lilies are trembling so, like still-living things. I hide against the hoodlums’ coming back for me. I know, through friends beaten or worse, that these New Jersey boys—if they got off a “good one”—tend to circle the block and swerve on back for further fun. I imagine fists next time, or hammers. This season, they favor hammers—the gay-bashing fashion accessory of choice. Innocence, my own, makes me wonder how they ever knew I was one. Duuhh! (Probably, I overdid. All the Wildean lilies, right?)

  Caught, I’m moved to explain to them: I don’t usually walk around all in white like Mark Twain, who claimed to be straight. Shamed, I consider just skipping the party. Maybe I’ll go late, when a spotless entrance will matter less. I pull out the sogged invitation, double-checking the address.

  We’d thrown White Parties all year. “Come As You Are” ones had recently been done to death. I now reread tonight’s prissy, funny, self-defensive “theme”:

  COME AS YOU WOULD BE, AND AS YOU ARE,

  BUT, IF POSSIBLE, TONIGHT,

  IN WHITE, DEAR.

  R. S. V.P.

  And, vowing to tell every-fuckin’-body how I got so orange and wet and why I smell of Hoboken brewery, I soon make myself into something of a party hit. Our specialty: a brand of bravery as flashy as some new perfume’s name. Cheap yet necessary, it’s the comic art that only other survivors will all recognize. I am become a tale of woe transcended—I am my own only sole excuse. I am the opposite of apology. Maybe I courted grief by being too far “out”? But I don’t seek to become a nose-rubbing-in Target, believe me.

  I have not been tortured fully. I am in good health, and have had hundreds of lovers, and I’ve never been arrested, yet. My heart’s been broken, but that’s pretty normal, right? I am not sick, nor do I think of myself as “sick.” My parents still ask for credit, having somehow heroically accepted my “life-style choice.” They still remember my birthday. But they swear I’ve rubbed their noses in it.

  Mother took me aside one year after Dan was driven from town, when she saw me still gloomy and jumpy about the speed and injustice of his going, and—trying to help, I’m sure—she said, “There’s something we never told you about Dan, when you were younger and all?” I felt scared, seizing her white wrist, begging for news. “He was not exactly smart, Dan. He had other qualities that made up for it, and sweet as the day is … but not like your father or our doctor-lawyers, he was sort of always along because of his charm and the way he looked and his … not retarded, just not all that swift really, and …” She saw my face and added, “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. Maybe trying to make it easier for you to …” And I knew, in that absolute way we, so hooked genetically, knew each other, that Mom was about to say “get over him,” but stopped. See, that sounded too much like a boy-girl romance. “Maybe I’m trying to make it easier for you to forget him, son.” It was the wrong thing to have said. This close against my face, she saw that.

  XII. The Captain Hook

  I once literally hooked literally all of him. It proved to be a fad. This was the year those others caught, then vanished him.

  He had station-wagoned over to pick up Dad for further golf: shave and a haircut. Dad, fighting his latest financial reversal, was late. Those guys never tired of golf. Maybe their dick jokes helped? I owned a new green Spaulding fly-casting rod. I’d been practicing alone a lot.

  I felt I was getting pretty darn accurate. I could place my weighted silver hook just about where I wanted it. (Be careful what you aim for.)

  Dan discovered me tossing line at a chalked blue ring on the side of our white garage. Waiting for my father, Dan had come wandering seeking me. On our white-frilled porch, his golf buddies audibly milled, swilling vodka, massacring baby onions.

  “Why not cast her my way, pardner? You’re gettin’ good at it, I see that plain. Here, maybe try and put ’er about here?” Dan had spied a red plastic ring. It was the chew toy for Tuffie, our boxer. Dan lifted it free of a boxwood bush, then held red out, an exact right angle to his body. His jaw so square and blue, his face so blankly direct, he looked earnest as some model in a Red Cross diagram for Boating Safety. I felt weakened by appreciation, patriotic.

  Dan squinted in April sunlight. With his face screwed up, you saw how he must’ve looked as a boy, winsome if underfinanced, rawer. He was not like me. He’d been born poor. Part of his sexiness came from some lasting smell of that. I once believed that dogs were the daddies, cats were the moms. I once thought women were rich and men born poor. Go figure.

  Today Dan wore fresh-pressed chinos, deck shoes, a plaid short-sleeve shirt. He smiled across sixty feet. Distance reduced him to trout size. But his hundred-watt attraction remained a lure, immense. I readied my aim. I took a bowlegged stance. It was my own approximation of the Male. I posed, tough, fifty-six whole pounds.

  Dan’s pals played raucous Twenty-One on our side porch, they gossiped hard (some young country boy who worked at Aetna had got engaged to Donna!). Big drinks’ ice cubes clinked. I readied my rod, checked all my interior devices. It was a day of birdsong, temperature in the seventies, a day both gold and blue.

  Studying Dan’s pale inner arm held direct off his torso, I so wanted to touch him. “Here she comes, Dan. On your mark …”

  I aimed. I recall the thumb release of line. “Go!” The reel sang its precise ratcheting, pure play-out. April!

  (Later, during sex, I’d recall this giddying suspension. A man feels his release “go off,” you feel the aim-out pleasure unspiral into air, your reel line is moving, about to mainline joy throughout your groin, then flooding every cell of you. You know it’s literally coming, you are. You know that nothing on the earth—not even a jealous macho God—can stop it now, your gusher, eureka!

  The Fellow Ship fullsteamahead!)

  My silver line lifts a C shape of rolling light, midair. Settling. Then I feel the snap of my hook find something hard/good—a surface firm yet yielding—springy, live, worthwhile. There’s much game “play” in it. And, even as I realize I’ve hit, not the red ring, but one pale human wrist (not the left, holding a target, but Dan’s other one), some excitement, some malice unaccountable, makes me jerk it anyway. Gotcha, motherfucker!

  Snagging the arm of a man who’s always been only kind to me is a response so male, so savage, automatic—it scares me sick. The Sports Gene! “Owwweesh!” Dan howls. (Might this not be Dan’s exact sexual-release cry?)

  My rod drops to grass. I speed toward my prize. Even in pain, even after studying the wound I’ve caused, Dan is easing down. He’s kneeling on our lawn. Readying himself, because, at my level, he plans to comfort me!

  I follow line to him. Filament burns a hole in the center of my chubby fist. He’s before me, guessing how upset I’ll be. The guy prepares a grin. He means, even in his shock, to protect me from embarrassment.

  On his knees, Dan is just about my own height fully standing. This close, his head appears enormous as a puppet’s, its handsomeness gone jagged as Sherlock Holmes’s hat and pipe and shoebill nose. He receives my running weight with a little grunt. He shields me from seeing his bleeding arm. Cardplayers have heard Dan’s holler. Two lean off the porch. “It’s nothing,” Dan’s baritone calls, warming my neck and ear. The one good arm cradles me against him. It pulls me closer to my target, home direct between a squatting hero’s opened knees.

  Tuffie’s chewed red plastic ring is now suspended—bull’s-eye—just above my friend’s clumped crotch. Other men are toasting us with bourbon, laughing, calling all their usual usuals.

  (In polite Falls, you never ever say what’s gone previously unsaid. If something has not yet been spoken, it probably never needed saying. So: “Caught you a big one, hunh, kiddo? Six inches shy of a six-footer, best just throw him back, what say?”)

  Trying to keep our dealings private, Dan smiles at me, apologizing for those clods. His fibrous arm flips over, accidentally showing me white skin, powder-blue marbled veining, and one long spittle of opaque red leaving the silver beak of my own hook. That surgical hook puckers a two-inch sample of someone’s bacon-fat flesh. “Noo,” I cry. The barbed beak looks too big ever to cut quite out of him.

  We’re bound together for good, flies tied. I nuzzle, sobbing, “Didn’t mean to, not to you, Dan….”

  I feel half faint, daylight overdoing it and drenching me, accusatory. I’m pitched even deeper in a pliant vise between Dan’s open sinew thighs.

  Mother, seeing my latest tangled mess from her kitchen window, will soon come running. As ever, perfectly supplied, she’ll hold a silver tray supporting Merthiolate, pedicure scissors, cotton balls plumped fast and hostessy into a silver salt-dish (Grandmother Halsey’s, 1870 or so). Plus Dan’s favorite drink—a light Cutty and water. (I heard “Cutty Shark,” I liked knowing that its label showed The Fellow Ship.)

  Dreading others’ seeing us, hating how pain alone permits our union, I cry “Really sorry” into splayed legs. They remain wide open. I’ve run right into their V-shaped shelter. I wedge now farther between.

  I am sobbing, he holds me fast. I am getting to touch good fur on the one arm I failed to hook. I find that, in his suffering, Dan doesn’t much notice how I hold him. And so, sick with boldness, I tip against the inner fabric of his much-washed pants.

  Mid-thigh, I read the Braille outline of sexual parts, his. They’re presented plain, canine in guilelessness, grapelike in gentle plentiful cascade. The very symbol of abundance, Mr. Dan’s portables nearby.

  Birds, disturbed by his wounded cry, go again all song. I hear Mother clanking in the kitchen, assembling emergency gear. And me? I’m just crazed enough by guilt and proximity. Using bloodshed as my excuse, I find nerve enough to cup my open right hand lightly—light as light itself—against them, against all his. Just overtop, no pressure. I simply do it, crying as distraction.

  First Dan only holds my shoulders, staring at my freckles. Then my pleasure—stirred, overambitious—leads me to tighten my clamp on him, his. My reach exceeds my grasp. I see his face change, slow.

  (Meanwhile, back at the crotch, my subtle squirrelish fingers register: my Dan today wears no underdrawers, unusual in Falls in ’57. My palm can tell: unlike Dad and me, my Dan here is not circumcised [born poor].)

  I see concern fold the brow of a squatting man who clutches a child, holding, unexpectedly, that dude’s own central credentials. No “Ooops.” No, “Errr, would ya please let ’em aloose now, son?”

  Instead: Dan himself glances down between Dan’s own mighty legs. Definitely checking on a little scoop-shaped paw now curved against his right-dressed member. Beneath my grasp, it feels as spongy as a round loaf of sandwich-sized Wonder.

  He still half-pretends not to notice. No one near the house can see what’s going on. Dan, metal-blue jaw, gives me one sleepy, dubious half-smile. In it, amused recognition, some pity maybe, much fellow-feeling, sadness, a father’s patience for one kid’s guileless curiosity. Oh, The Fellow Ship.

  He makes no move at all to close his legs or shift my hand. But—being Protestant—I know to remove my hand, for him. Enough. For now.