Sordid Truths

The café in the West End YMCA overlooked the gym and multiuse court area where teenagers now play-ed basketball. I hoped the caffeine in my black coffee would knock the whiskey out of my system. The bo-ys had my attention—their colorful shorts and vests, their physicality, beauty, and skill, the complexity of their communication. They were ideal entertainment, like a good film, only the plot was more complex and subtle, more profound and affecting. The boys swaggered like powerful yet graceful great cats, the-ir fluid movements loaded with energy. I watched their springing leaps and speeding sprints, their heavy hands and feet flapping, their eyes sizing up the ball, the net, their team members, themselves and eve-rybody who’d become spellbound by them. Were they being competitive or showing off? My favorite pla-yer caught a pass. He ducked and swerved, faked a pass, then stopped. He attempted a shot that defied the laws of physics. The ball fell short. This wasn’t important. He’d attempted something magnificent an-d everybody felt it. There was something different in his walk now—a loser’s cool, boastful pride. Often gay men were well-groomed, had the best physiques, wore the hippest clothes, and were the only ones who laughed in serious, macho places such as a gym. But compared to these boys we we-re aesthetic travesties. One effortless breath, smile, yawn, or sulk from these creatures cast us into the shadows, putting some of us to shame. I was never the kind of gay who fantasized about straight men, believing them to be more masculine and therefore more desirable. When it came to being male, gays nailed it for me. But teenage boys were on a whole different level, unspoken about.Gertrude Stein wro-te, “What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?” Too quickly I ma-de a comparison between Lionel being satisfied to have me in his sight and what I was doing now with these boys. As I had with Lionel, I justified my behavior as harmless.I changed into my shorts and cross-ed the edge of the court to get to the stretch mats. I didn’t fancy pushing myself with a strenuous work-out, so I decided to do a half hour on the bicycle. The alarm on my watch went off. Distracted, I stepped onto the court without looking where I was going.Immediately somebody tumbled into me. We both fell to the ground. He landed on top of me and clumsily rolled off. physical contact with the boy. The scent of fresh sweat wafted off him and went straight to my balls. I noticed the lovely smell of washiWhen I came back up I faced the showerhead, letting the water flow over me. Some days the water merely felt wet. Today it was a sensual mix of medicine and magic. Gradually I realized that somebody else had come into the room and was at the shower immediately behind my back and bum. Feeling vulnerable, I turned around.The person behind me was just rotating away, turning slowly to face the wall. It felt like a performance. More importantly, it was my favorite boy from the court. I was dumbstruck.Naked he was beyond perfect. I wondered if he’d turned away to hide his dick. In doing so he gave me the view I preferred, of his bum. There was nobody else in the showers to see me, so I allowed myself to enjoy the spectacle. It would be a My Boy lathered his body and washed his bum hole. (Of course I focused on this.) When he rinsed, he moved his hand back towards his bum and left his fingers resting in the crack. If only he knew the affect he had on me. He probably didn’t have a clue. There was no way he could begin to conceive what he did to my brain, my groin, my heart, my very spirit. At his age surely he was unaware of anything sexual. Fortunately I never had to worry about getting hard in the showers. I’m just not wired that way. After all, it was a public place, not a sexual one. I’d as soon expect to get turned on while shopping in a crowd of people. Even so my dick impressed me by not springing up rigid and pulsing now. It seemed my excitement was more cerebral than physical. Would my dick lie? I don’t think it had the ability. It had with punters, thousands of times, but that was different. With them I was pretending, thinking of things that truly turned me on. Perhaps I was just kidding myself.Several minutes passed. I continued facing straight ahead, my eyes feasting on My Boy. Like a more classy lap dancer he slid his fingers slowly up and down the crack of his bum. His other hand disappeared in front of him at crotch level. I could only fantasize what it was doing. I suppressed the desire to drop to my knees and worship him. How prettily the water trickled down his back. Why did the water from my showerhead pour fast and gray yet his flow in slow motion, silvery gold with glittering highlights? His soft bum hair caught the water and held it a moment before it allowed itself to drop off. No wonder the water wouldn’t let go: What thing in this universe wouldn’t want to stay there as long as possible?Just when I was about to give up and leave the room, fearing I wouldn’t be able to take any more without losing my mind, my dignity, or my freedom to stay out of prison, My Boy turned his face towards me till it was just over his left shoulder. I backed into my shower a little, not wanting to be caught drooling. He continued to turn, twisting his torso slightly, and stopped. His tongue brushed the tip of fluff above his top lip, and again he rubbed the crack of his bum, deeper this time, with more intent.Was I mistaken, clueless, fucked up from two glasses of whiskey? Desperately my brain did the math. I was twenty-three. He was sixteen, fifteen, at worst fourteen. There was less than ten years difference in our ages. I’d dated men much more than ten years older than me.My Boy brought his other hand behind him and ever so subtly pulled his cheeks apart, just a touch but enough. The water flowed over him and now I could see how sensual it was. When it fell from his bum it must taste like nutty caramel at the heavenly temperature of cum. Clever, beautiful, lucky water. The liquid nothingness had never seemed so worthy of my jealousy. Fuck it. I tried to work things out in the conscious, overused, increasingly irritating rational part of my brain, and in doing so convince myself that there was just cause for what was likely to happen next. Lionel was forty years my senior . . . silly Art at least another ten . . . that made fifty . . .My Boy continued facing to the side, somewhat in my direction.What was stopping me? Morality? I don’t think so. I’d never quite seen eye to eye with that tired old bitch. The law? Damn the law. Nobody was around; I’d hear them if they were. For once the annoying amplification of noises in the locker room would be a good thing, work in my favor. Surely this was a sign.Step towards him, you fool, I told myself. This is the chance in a lifetime. Do it. “You are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment,” said another part of my brain. My deliberations tormented me.My Boy turned his head more, and his torso, until he was looking straight at me. Golden water flickered over his eyelashes. His perfect kissable lips and deep mouth smiled with a boyishness that made me blush, considering what was running through my head. It was all over now. Having had his outrageously cheeky fun he was probably going to leave casually, as though at this moment he wasn’t the most important thing in my life.But no. He shifted his weight once more and began turning his whole body. The tip of his dick came bobbing into view. From the height of it, he had to have a hard-on. It took all my will not to look at it. I pictured myself deep-throating him to the point of gagging. Lazy and comfortable, he completed his turn.The cheekiness of the young. Twenty years ago he could have been arrested for being naked in public showers.What harm could it do to look? Maybe destiny wasn’t just a lazy, slightly druggy way of enabling people to put up with things. If this was destiny then it was out of my hands, beyond my control. (Like that would stick in a court of law.) I looked at his dick. Jesus Christ! Before me was the dick that God had made for Adam. It didn’t have veins, wasn't blue or even red but just a creamy pink color, the same as his face. It looked brand-new. It stood straight up, fully hard, firm and rigid against his tummy. He smiled at me as though it was the most natural thing in the world.Back up, I told myself. Did his hard dick have anything to do with me? Maybe this always happened to him in the showers, or he was from some civilized country where nudity wasn’t sinful or disgusting and hard-ons were nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about. Perhaps his smile was just expressing, Oops, it’s happened again. Mum says it’s my age.Even if I had caused it, I couldn’t assume that it was an invitation. It was his sexuality and arousal, not ours. Then again, as soon as he showed me his hard-on didn’t it then become ours? He didn’t have to turn around. He could have just reached for his towel and dried himself without exposing himself to me.As the scarily biblical voice in my head debated with the terrifyingly medieval feeling in my gut, My Boy stroked the golden wisps leading down to his pubic hair, placing his dick in front of his hand. There was nothing significant about this action but my whole body absorbed it. Any action he made might have had the same affect on me. My world was all about him now. His other hand rubbed his chest lightly, where the hair had sprung up in patches like freshly sewn grass seedlings. The only thing missing was a soundtrack playing, so dreamlike was he, so filmic the whole visual.A door slammed open in the locker room. “Engel! Get your bleeding arse into gear,” came the caricature voice used by all Phys.-Ed. teachers. The volume of this cry shocked me and the visual that went with it was disturbing. Bleeding arse? Ouch!“Coming, sir.” said My Boy. Again a double meaning, but this time much more pleasing.The door slammed shut. Once again splashing water was the only sound. Teacher had gone.My Boy didn’t seem too fazed by the interruption. He pulled a resigned face, parted his lips, and said, “I think you like me?” He definitely had a German accent.“Yes,” I said.For the first time I felt stirring in my groin.He smiled. “My name is Fritz.” Could it have been more German? “Yours?”“Aiden.”I had an overwhelming urge to smile also.“Aiden,” he pronounced. I loved hearing my name come from his mouth. “Will you give me your telephone number . . .” He paused, I assumed to word the next sentence in his head before actually saying it. “We can get together sometime?” he finally said, The word sometime had the upward lilt that people seem to use when English is not their first language.“I’d love that,” I said.He smiled again. “Good,” he said, and nodded.I still had not emptied my balls in preparation for David.