Flannelwood Page 3

  It was so beautiful to see that light in your eyes. Do you know how rare it was to be seen with such eyes full of tenderness and warmth as in that moment? I don’t know how you’d loved the other guys in your past, but I know how special I’d felt in your arms. I made sure to sleep on your left side so that if I curled my legs around you, I wouldn’t embarrass you by reminding you of your phantom foot. Did you ever notice that?

  You pulled up your jeans, went to the bathroom, and turned out the lights when you returned. I felt you pull off your jeans and your prosthetic foot. Thinking of you taking off your foot like a person taking off his shoes before going to bed was a weird concept.

  In the dark you explained to me that you didn’t mind cuddling for a short period of time, but you required space for sleep. After closing my eyes and feeling the intense warmth of your body, I immediately understood why you preferred not to cuddle. You were like a furnace! You turned to your side, facing the window, and I lay on my back, glancing at your massive silhouette. I was so drained that I managed to fall asleep, even in an unfamiliar bed.

  In my high school, there were two groups of smokers. The rich kids had to show how cool they were next to their shiny cars, and the ne’er-do-wells somehow had the money for cigarettes. The rich kids hung out in the parking lot, and the scrappy kids stood mostly hidden in the alley across the street from the school. The school administrators turned a blind eye though they stressed the dangers of smoking in their health ed classes.

  What I remember most from those classes was how negative everything was. If you were to have sex, you had to think about condoms or you’d get someone pregnant or get AIDS. If you had to drink, you had to think about not driving. If you did marijuana, you could get arrested and worse. Not once did anyone mention that sex could be so wonderful.

  Until I met my first boyfriend, I was furtive with sex, even oral sex. I was skittish, afraid that I was going to get it. He said, “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  I examined his body to my heart’s content, and I came to feel better about my own body. He gave me the confidence I needed.

  Then I saw your body, and I felt like a child again. How could my body compete with the majestic sculpture that was your body? You stood tall like an equestrian statue in a park. You were a redwood tree in bas-relief. You moved slowly and surely. Didn’t matter if you were wearing a prosthetic foot or not, you were surefooted.

  It’s not every day that I meet a veritable god, let alone sleep with him. I gave up on organized religion a long time ago, but until I met you, I never understood the meaning of the word “worship.” With you, I exhaled wonder.

  I didn’t fall in love with you our first night together. I’d been around the block enough times to know that what we had experienced was a case of acute lust. I was afraid to hope that you’d want an encore, or that you didn’t want a relationship, or anything to do with me again. I didn’t want to jinx us.

  Imagine how I felt when you asked me to stay another night. We had spent the afternoon naked in your living room. We watched an old Carole Lombard film on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I’d never seen it before. I thought she was a bit screechy in parts, but you had definitely acquired a taste for her. The other night I happened to see My Man Godfrey on TV at my house. It was the only time in my life when I laughed and cried at the same time. I wanted to be Lombard’s Irene to your Godfrey. The idea of an amputee butler hopping about serving drinks was ridiculous for he would be sure to lose a drop. But of course, you wouldn’t. You possessed more grace inherently than in any man I’d met.

  I’ll always think of you as My Man James.

  In the dark of night, when our bodies first became acquainted with each other, I saw the chest-wide tattoo on your back. Blue-black feathers had been artfully arranged to look like wings so that when you lifted your arms, it looked as if you were about to take flight. The fur coating your feathers made it more lifelike. Were you truly an abandoned creature not of this earth? In that moment of seeing your naked body with your massive wings and meaty ass, I felt honored to be in your presence. You’d made it clear that you didn’t see yourself as a god, but if only we could fly, the strata of puffy mist would’ve been sweet to us, buffering the hiccups of our flying in between the holy annunciations of orgasm. You wouldn’t have been ashamed of your imperfect leg; I wouldn’t be ashamed of my flat pecs and growing flab. Together we would’ve inspired hope in the hearts of those down on their luck with love.

  On our last day together, although I didn’t know it then, you surprised me. Just before it was time for us to leave your house for our ride back to the city, you turned around before opening the door to the outside and pulled me into your arms. It was strange to feel the mass of your body, not naked, through the stiff layer of your leather jacket atop the clothes inside. Your hug was fierce, hard. I thought you’d squeeze the air out of me, but I didn’t resist. This was the expected moment, long overdue, when you’d admit that you loved me. “Thanks.” There was a slight tremor in your voice.

  “For what?”

  “I feel like such an ass sometimes. I’m not very good about thanking people.”

  “I’m always thankful for every weekend with you.”

  “Well.” You smiled briefly and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Should we go?”

  Our conversation on the way back to my house was light, breezy. We talked about movies. Nothing heavy. It was as if we were meant to be, and this we would continue.

  Just when I was about to get out of the truck in front of my house, you patted my knee. “See ya.”

  I waved good-bye, and you were gone.

  Until then, and not even then, at least not until you hung up on me, did I understand what it meant to miss someone, not just a first love, but someone who’d made me feel alive more than anyone else.

  You I miss I miss you I miss: my heart doesn’t know how to speak coherently anymore.

  That familiar feeling of anticipation steamrolls me every Friday evening, and I get sideswiped when I remember you haven’t called me to confirm.

  The first few Fridays after you hung up on me I brought in my weekend bag to work, hoping that you’d change your mind at the last minute and give me a call as if nothing had happened. I kept looking out the window all day long.

  I tried to read a book on those Friday nights, but I couldn’t focus. I simply had to close my eyes and have another dream conversation with you while I listened to music in the heaven of my ear buds.

  I still think of you reclining on your side in the twilight between evening and dawn. I couldn’t see your face at all; just your Mount Rushmore backside. The absence of your face, always a treasure trove of clues, has made you too much of a mystery.

  When you first hung up on me, I thought it was your way of saying that, if not a new guy in your life, you’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease, like cancer. You knew how hard it had been for me to watch my first boyfriend fade away into a frightening heap of splotches and joints with barely a face. Maybe you wanted the redwood tree of you to shrink back into the broken sapling you must’ve felt yourself to be. I longed to tell you that I’d do it all over again with Craig, right down to his last moment, only that I would constantly tell him how much I loved him, show him how much by holding him like the child I felt like when he was strong and healthy in loving me in the days before he became sick. I’d have done the same for you.

  One night I dreamed of coasting down from the clouds above the ocean and seeing you there inside a glass coffin. I could see the nakedness of you, your arms bowed across your chest, as you looked peaceful in the sun shining. The sea around you had no horizon, and I was the lone seagull holding easily in the same spot above you, looking down on you. The winds kept me aloft as I followed your coffin bobbing gently in the waves. Hours dragged on with the sun not leaving. Ever. There was no night. Death stayed all day. The sun bored down long enough through the glass top of your coffin right at your face until your body caught
fire and filled the coffin with smoke. I swooped down and tried to peck at the glass top with my beak, but I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t stay long on the coffin; the heat from the fire within was too intense for my webbed feet. I tried to propel upward onto the winds that had kept me floating easily, but the waves were gone. No wind.

  I pushed off your coffin onto the water.

  I tucked in my wings and floated around your coffin. I paddled back and forth. My motions were the start of a huge wave that I didn’t see coming from behind until it was too late. The tiny old me had caused a tsunami made of fury and tenderness, but I didn’t see it coming. I was that focused on the fissures of smoke seeping through the fractures of your glass coffin. The cracks splintered into tiny islands that floated away from us, glittering like fat diamonds in the sun, and then the bottom of your coffin gave way. Your body, having been embalmed with the toxins of lies and love, had melted into goo.

  The most horrible darkness rose above me, and—

  Something—a huge hand? a slosh of wave?—slapped my frail body hard, far, far into the distance, I was flung so quickly, so hard, it felt as if my feathers would be plucked from velocity, as the dark tall waves chilled and ice-cubed everything. Everything that the waves had touched got the loud kissquake of death and turned into the Death Valley of ice. The force of my flight was such that I sailed straight across, not down, until the globe slid underneath me and I saw the faint silhouette of a mountain—no, an island. The mountain jutted so high up in the clouds that it was easy for me to swerve my tired wings to the right and coast down to the shore. The water around the island was warm. I made myself at home under a coconut tree and went straight to sleep.

  At that moment I woke up in my bed. I didn’t want to forget you. Not now, not ever.

  Please don’t die. You are not something once beautiful found in an ocean. The world is full of bottled elegies waiting to be opened and heard.

  Inhaling you deeply after a week of imbibing the myriad smells of coffee at work was a much-needed heaven of musk. You had worked all day, moving up and down the assembly line doing quality checks and troubleshooting; you had twenty-six people working for you. You never showered right after work when you came down to the city and picked me up, so your truck was perfumed with the Chanel No. 5 of sweat, the most sublime odor much like the fresh break of soil the morning after a night of deep rain, the kind that reminds me of moss and mushrooms, the taste of you unfiltered, unlike a cigarette, filling my nose and tongue until the aroma, pungent like men’s rooms and lusty like gyms, leaped down my esophagus and into the capillaries of my veins until my entire body became a single pump of blood coalescing into the trunk of my cocktree, glistening with the resin of desire. I groveled happily like a pig sniffing furiously for that hidden gold of truffle lost in the roots of your armpits. I swallowed your pearl-seeds deep into the lining of my stomach, a fallow field waiting to be sowed. I floated, a spore of mushroom amber whispering on the wind of your breath.

  Come shade me with the beads of rain from your eyebrows. I am fungi, and you are bark. Together we will burrow roots deep into the earth and never bury our history.

  When you first asked me to stay with you on weekends, I felt giddy. There had been many moments in my life after college that made me wonder if anybody wanted to date. Seriously. Didn’t matter if their profiles had said that they were looking for a long-term relationship. Guys simply don’t want to date. They say that they want to date and possibly have a LTR, but that’s just a come-on to guys who don’t sleep around. They’re fresh meat. That’s what I’d learned from online dating, which is why I don’t pay attention whenever someone says in his profile that he’s interested in dating. Not true.

  Each weekend up north with you felt like some sort of test. The problem was, I never knew what kind of test I was supposed to pass.

  In our first hour together in your truck, I kept looking at your dashboard-lit face. We talked like shadows skirting the halo of light.

  You slowed the truck down. I hadn’t realized that we were already close to your house. The road we were on had been lonely with no traffic. Up ahead was a small white house with a sconce lamp next to the door. We got out of your truck. In the distance, I could hear an owl whooing. The stars were clear above us. The October air was crisp. “Come on,” you said.

  I walked around the front of your truck, and you grabbed my arm. You pulled me close. Your tongue on my lips demanded attention. You gripped your arms around me, and I couldn’t stop roaming my hands all over your back, your firm ass. You were strong as soil, land. Everything was a crisp quiet, yet a million little sounds surrounded us. I couldn’t pinpoint anything, but they were loud. I had no idea! But I loved the feeling of muscle tensed up in your back. You had worked your body for a long, long time. Even if you seemed like a big guy with a flat belly, you had very little fat. I loved looking up into your face. Something about guys taller than me gets my engine humming happily.

  Finally you panted. “Let’s get inside.”

  Your house was small and well-maintained. Nothing was ever out of place. The checkered linoleum floor in the kitchen showed its age, but everything else was clean. There was a nook with a built-in table off to the side, like a booth in a diner. The gas stove was small. The lights above were fluorescent, but soon warmed up to a more pleasant glow.

  You took my hand and led me straight down the hall to your bedroom. I was struck by the fact that the hallway didn’t have pictures hung on the walls. Then I saw on the wood paneling the softened scuffs from hands having touched the walls too often. In the tiny bedroom you leaned against a tall dresser for a brief moment before you took off your T-shirt. I gasped. I’d never seen such dense fur up close. I had seen many pictures of furry chests online, but nothing prepared me for the vision of you. This time I pulled you into my arms. My fingers felt alive feeling those thick strands of you weaving in and out of them. I gasped again when I felt the fur on your back. I felt as if I’d found manna. Indeed your body was the closest to heaven I’ve ever experienced here on earth.

  You said, “Take off your shirt, boy.”

  I cringed at being called “boy.” I know that when a man is older, the younger one is usually called “boy,” or sometimes “son.” But I wasn’t looking for a daddy. I was so boned up that I didn’t correct you. I simply pulled off my T-shirt. I was afraid that you’d find my body not to your liking.

  Your hands rubbed all over my hairless back. The first time you have sex with someone can be haphazard. You don’t know yet the exact locations of his erogenous zones or what else turns him on. You two stumble blindly at times around each other in the heat of fearing that this one time together will be the only time you’ll ever have together. You find that one guy likes to have his nipples pulled up hard, and another guy can’t stand it because his nipples are too sensitive. And so on. I find that the second and third times with the same guy are always better. I know to zero right in on what turns him on. It’s great having sex with the same guy over and over again.

  I remember thinking the same thought about you when our hands and tongues and mouths and bodies fell into contact. We were magnets that couldn’t be pulled apart. Don’t you remember that? I do. My body still does.

  Allow me to stand here in the Great Hall of Soldiers, graced with marble and memory, if you will please, kind sir, so I may swear my oath of loyalty to you before all.

  Let me be your soldier of love.

  Let my hands visit the landmarks of pain embedded in your body.

  Let them drill deep for the crude oil of release and relief so that you will see only gold in your feelings.

  Let them map the land mines of self-control hidden in your body so you can trip them safely without losing another foot.

  Let them operate on your wounded heart and let the steady drip of blood from my heart transfuse and blend into yours.

  Let me be your liberator.

  Let the war inside you be over. It’s gone on for t
oo long. When love’s the object of war, no one wins. The prize is only a country of hurt.

  Let me prove my undying allegiance to the most magnificent country of you.

  When I was a kid, I loved looking out on the snow-swept fields at night. The moon gave them a cool glow, and if I squinted just so, I could see diamonds littering the white dunes. The trees were black as silhouettes. No fine details anywhere. They had been deadened, broad-stroked into iconic symbols.

  After you hung up on me, I thought of you wearing a long cape that flowed behind you in the subzero winds. Your beard was as long as a wedding dress train, and it was beautiful to behold. It shifted shape like a cat’s tail, yet not as slender. It caught the wind of your emotions as you plodded with your crutches. It wasn’t clear where you were headed, and I couldn’t see your face from such a far distance. You were moving slowly, yet far more quickly. Maybe my dreaming had a way of speeding things up, much like how movies use jump cuts to convey time gone past. I didn’t know why you were out there in the fields; only that you had to be out there.

  I loved the moon, but even it didn’t illuminate why you hung up. It had a face much like yours, full of gray silences, startling brightnesses punctuated without warning. I wanted to call out to you, to insist that you come to my place where a fire could thaw your bones, but you’d turned your back against me. You’d turned yourself into a shadow as black as tar.

  That hurt. I’d mourned for a lost love before, and I knew I didn’t have the strength to mourn again. Not while you were still alive, not while you’d told me you’d passed all the necessary tests.

  “Me too.”

  You patted my knee in your car that first night I came to your house. Looking back, I realize you must’ve lost a large number of friends. You were of that generation who’d heard the phrase “He’s dead now” one time too many. You never told me about them, but I didn’t need to ask.