Flannelwood Read online

  Guys my age have had so little direct experience with friends dying from AIDS, and I saw the crow’s feet around your eyes. You’d alluded to having been out for a long time, having visited the city many times over the years, and trying out one relationship after another, all of which lasted a few months each. Your past was gauzy, full of whispers slipping through the sealed cracks of your house. The whispers tiptoed on cat’s feet made of wind chill, suggesting inchoate stories of no beginning, middle, or end. You’d loved, and they’d died, and you’d decided to try again.

  So was the endless cycle, the winding road you’d chosen to take.

  In the static electricity of your silences, I found myself remembering the many ways we’d made love. I know you’d react negatively to my phrase “made love,” but there is no better description of how you handled me. At first we were rough and aggressive; almost angry with each other, yet we weren’t. Don’t you remember? You’d said that I was the best fuck of your life. You kept wiping the sweat off your brow.

  You too were the best fuck of my life.

  Even though you were in your fifties, I was agog at your physical perfection. Here were the perfectly rounded pecs, aswirl with fur with each nipple perking up like a cherry topping a sundae. Here was the belly, an atlas of endless pleasure when I rubbed my face across its sea of fur and when I saw your stomach muscles knot each time you thrust harder into me. Here were the tree trunks of your thighs holding you up like the redwood you were when you towered above me, gripping the branches of my sapling body. Here were the mountainous ridges of your shoulders, bristled with fur that stood firm even when I held onto them. Here was your neck, strong as a horse galloping across field, and it took all my might to hang on when you shifted speed, tempo, angle. Here was your for ested beard, seasoning mine with salt and pepper as you rubbed it against me, until I felt properly roasted. Here was your tongue, long as a fishing pole darting so sharply for the trout of my tongue, hooking me, reeling me closer down your throat was the sweetest bait I’d ever known. Here was your nose, the chunk of marble that’s given many a sculptor the hardest time when hacking away, and yet shiny and smooth when my nose caressed yours. But more than anything else, I saw the entire universe open up in the telescope of your galaxy eyes. You were the moon, the stars, the cosmos. I was sucked into your black hole of need, and I didn’t need a theory to explain why I was here on this lonely planet.

  When, then, did you decide I didn’t exist in your cosmos? Were you indeed full of ego like Zeus, the Greek god who hadn’t yet learned the errors of his ways? The problem with being a god is the loneliness of being at the top. The universe is full of ghosts whose names and stories we will never uncover no matter how rigorously we make scientific and technological advancements. No matter how we may delude ourselves, we will never be superheroes.

  Sometimes, when I feel that intense ache for you, the kind that just about claws my heart into splinters, I pull up the pillows and wrap them in a fleece blanket so they turn into a big mass, something like your wide back that I can lean against while I sleep. I imagine the soft fleece to be the same thing as your furry back, but it’s missing the rise and drop of your breathing.

  I felt like a child next to you.

  Now I feel orphaned.

  My heart is all ashes. One puff of air, and I’m gone.

  Winter nights up north fill the darkest of hours, the most urgent of needs. If I don’t move for the first ten minutes inside my bed, the heavy blankets will collect the heat from my body like gold and spread it all around. I might feel a little nip in the air as I sleep, but my body will feel heavenly.

  Yet with you, I’ve turned cold as a corpse. I have forgotten to dream.

  I am a blank sheet of ice.

  Shorn of the frillery of dreams, I am immaculate. No bumps or bubbles anywhere.

  You can skate across me and know that I would never crack. You can crisscross and make figure eights. You could scratch scars all across my face so the rivulets of my tears from joy would line them. I am an atlas in parched hunger, a footnote in ache.

  Mornings when I awake, I still feel rapturous. The air is cold, but the dreams that blanket me keep me warm as I tiptoe on the chilly floor to the bathroom for a quick piss before I turn on the hot water for my shower.

  I still think of that moment when I caught you naked, your right shin dangling. The memory of tasting the most private part of you is what has kept me warm with wonder.

  MOONLIGHT, CAKED OF ASH

  Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

  —Marilyn Hacker

  JAMES, make me your Saturday night cigar.

  Snip one end of my paper-browned heart right here and see the dried innards of my soul rolled so neatly. Light me up with your match, and watch me burn hazily as you draw each flake of ash and flavor deep into your mouth, and breathe out my soul. Let my ashes cascade slowly like snowflakes on your shoulders on cold nights when you are in need of a man to soothe the chill of loneliness deep in your marrow.

  For you I would give up my books.

  For you I would give up my dead-end job.

  For you I would give up my body, my heart, my soul.

  Draw me into you again, and again.

  Each breath of smoke rises like a coil of rope from the pit of your guts reaching down like a hungry hand into the pit of my stomach. Each puff of smoke is an umbilical cord that must never be severed.

  We are a family of men and smoke.

  You drift anywhere in the air everywhere.

  This blood, made of ash and ether, shall not break.

  I grew up on a farm just outside a small town. It’s the kind of place where parents resign themselves to the reality of losing their children to elsewhere for college and jobs. The kids who stay behind are the ones who get all the love from their parents, and the kids who return for visits are always wondering if they’d done their parents wrong. The people left behind in small towns can’t see beyond the periphery of their places even when they can see on television how much the world is changing. They don’t want to believe such changes are happening, because to do so would mean acknowledging that they had been wrong all along. What would that make them look like? Fools?

  Right.

  That’s why I haven’t visited my own family in years.

  Each time I hear a woman cough, I think of Mom.

  I don’t recall the times she must’ve kissed me, but the smell of her is woven into the tiny clouds of smoke I walk through where smokers stand outside the front doors of office buildings. Their days are numbered. Soon they will go underground and learn how to roll their own cigarettes, much like how marijuana users figured out how to grow better and more potent cannabis in the privacy of their basements.

  How I long to draw again the aroma of you, feeling dizzy with desire.

  I don’t know if you still remember all our weekends together, but our second night was extraordinary. Fewer orgasms, yes, but we together were a well-oiled machine. You’d studied my body carefully with hands and tongue while I studied yours. Inhaling you made me realize that I had been only sleepwalking all my life.

  Do you recall what we did on our second night together? You smoked a fat stogie right there in your bedroom. You said you needed to relax a bit, so I watched you snip off one end of a new cigar. I was afraid that you would reek of those cheap cigars that I hated whenever I passed by some old men sitting on the stoop in my neighborhood. You caught the expression on my face. You said, “Don’t worry. It’s a great piece.”

  Then you struck a match.

  Somehow that flame lit me up. The way it flickered across your eyes as you focused on drawing that first puff. The way you softened a little after exhaling. The way you rested on the bed, with your legs wide open. “Come here,” you whispered.

  I crept close to you. I didn’t know what you wanted. I caught a sniff of the smoke that wafted from your cigar.
You were right. It didn’t produce that sickly cough I’d usually experienced around cheap cigars. I was surprised.

  You said, “Open your mouth.”

  I did. I felt strange when you took a hit from your cigar and leaned forward to my face. You sealed my lips with yours and exhaled the smoke right into my mouth. The ether felt intense, and I coughed. “Sorry.” My eyes watered briefly.

  “Let’s try again.”

  “Why?”

  “It turns me on, okay?”

  I nodded.

  When you were ready to exhale, I opened my mouth and closed my eyes. I felt your lips on mine, and a gentle puff tumbled into me. I still felt the urge to cough, but I squelched it. I felt strangely contented. The smoke had been inside you, and it was now inside me.

  We exchanged puffs like that for a while. I noted the stiffness of your erection, and you moaned when I stroked you while you propelled another puff into me. I was taken aback when I felt the quiver of your cock spasming. The inhalation of your puffs didn’t turn me on at all, but I was surprised by your forceful orgasm.

  Please come back into my life and light up that stogie again.

  I was clean-shaven for the longest time. Of course, I’d always noticed men with scruff, but they always seemed to be from a different planet. Many of them intimidated me even when they blinked crazily on my gaydar. A few of them gave me the look of want, but I was too afraid. I didn’t think I was worthy of such hotness. But when I saw a few guys my age growing facial fur, I thought to do the same. Growing my first beard was surreal and exciting at the same time. I was morphing into someone I barely knew. Yes, there in the mirror was my face and its features I’d known all my life, but who knew that the fur growing like blades of moss could change the topography of my face so dramatically?

  I thought of those guys I’d seen on tractors in the summer and snowplows in the winter where I grew up. They didn’t always know who I was, but they were never standoffish with me. I was a male, and that was more than enough for them to acknowledge me with a nod while on their jobs. In my adolescent fantasies I’d never thought of the possibility of having sex with any of them except for Larry Fruell. He was the closest I’d ever come to feeling the possibility of attraction, of sex. I loved how his fingertips and nails were cracked and embedded with traces of grease. His hands were thick with muscle, and his shoulders were rangy. His jeans slipped a bit below the waist because he’d never tightened his belt enough. He had the flattest ass I’d ever seen on anyone. But more than anything, it was the orange fire of his beard that drew my attention no matter where he was. He was the first bear god who’d inspired in me the notion of oral worship in the halls of my fantasies. Once I saw Larry up close in the bike shop for the first time, I forgot all about the kneeling-and-standing-by-rote rituals of Mass on Sundays. Men like Larry had become my new religion, and I worshipped them from afar all the time. I was the only disciple in the church of one, which had no name; I did not have a Bible nor did I know how to write such a holy book. I was filled with scenarios of being naked with them and touching them all over. I hadn’t then known it was possible to have anal sex. After all, I was only fifteen.

  I wanted to cry out hymns of ecstasy there in my bedroom, but I had to learn the songs of silence every time I lay there on my bed and offered up myself once again to the heavens where beer-bellied truckers and squat tavern drinkers and solid-chested farmers lolled around the altar where I was to pay my respects. They weren’t always naked, and that was fine. I hadn’t yet seen enough variety of cocks to know the amazing moods possible with flaccid folds, growing thicknesses, and leaking hardness. All I knew then was that the cocks of my classmates in the showers after swim practice intrigued me, but I’d intuited that the cocks of men who’d worked hard with their bodies had to be different. All that physical labor had to have an effect on their dicks. I’d gauged the bulges of these men. I never saw the exact outlines of their genitals, but I could deduce from the way their jeans cupped them that they had to be far bigger than those of boys my age.

  My bed late at night was my hallowed altar where I’d offered up the sacrifice of my milky blood in exchange for the slightest hello from them. Didn’t matter if they knew me or not. Boys my age lost my interest. Guys who weren’t fastidious and studious like my schoolteachers compelled my eyes. I still read books, but I was filled with longing for that otherness, that tenderness, that rawness of energy pent up not only between my legs but also between an experienced man’s legs. Wanting an older man because of his age wasn’t the reason I’d wanted him; I wanted someone who wasn’t a boy, who wasn’t one of those arrogant football jocks. I wanted to touch skin that had a hint of wear and tear in it, and seeing the abundant hair on forearms drove me crazy. What’s more, many of these men didn’t give me attitude. I was probably just a slightly bookish teenager to them.

  When I saw you sitting at that table at the VFW Hall, alone that night, I felt as if you were my adolescence come to life. You were the daddy bear I didn’t know I was looking for until I laid my eyes on you.

  Way up north where I grew up, all sorts of loners have chosen to live out in the country, so we have this laissez-faire attitude about folks who are a little odd. We don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us. At most they’d say hi to us in the checkout aisle in a hardware store, and we’d know nothing more about them beyond what they wore and what kind of truck they drove. This is the way things are up north.

  My father was a slender man. The joke in my family was that we were all born like Dad, and that once we hit our thirties, we become like Mom, who was a bit heavy. I can see that happening to my own body, and that I look like her doesn’t make me feel masculine. I do have her lips and eyes, but I move just like my Dad. He walks quickly and nimbly, and he isn’t always patient with others. Of all his sons, I’m the most stubborn. If I make up my mind, that’s pretty much it.

  Dad is the same way.

  I knew it was pointless to argue with him once he banished me from his house.

  Mom shrugged her shoulders. She knew that it was just as pointless.

  When I came up north, she would come over to my sister Sally’s house. We’d talk, but it wasn’t the same. Mom acted as if she was committing a crime. Sometimes I got the impression she didn’t want to know me too well. I was too bookish, too smarty-arty for her. How do you explain to a woman who’s never gone to college that literature isn’t about being smart? Literature is reading about people’s lives and caring for them as if they were your own flesh and blood. It’s about appreciating the craft and the clarity that comes from telling a good story. It’s about seeing yourself in the characters and discovering things you hadn’t realized before. Which is exactly what we do with the people in our lives. Mom had never cared to read much. Dad never finished college either. They married right out of high school and started having babies right after. Same old story. No need to go into details.

  After all, you’ve grown up with people like my parents.

  Though Mom’s been dead for twelve years, not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. She is everywhere. When I see a woman walk with her child across the street from where I stand in Brewe Sisters, I think of her.

  Mom had married a difficult man, and she bore him five children, four of whom didn’t move too far from home and gave her grandchildren. Being the youngest, I was the only one of her kids who went off to college, and I didn’t give her a grandchild. She was absolutely devoted to her grandchildren. I think they gave her a reprieve from Dad.

  I never thought he could be considered abusive until years later. He never drank, but there were moments we were growing up, when he became frustrated with crops and bills and everything, that he used a hollow rubber cord to whip us. We kids had to stay in line, much like the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. We never talked about it, even when we were completely alone in the house. We were afraid to whisper even in the dark. We intuited it was wrong, but who were we to argue with Dad?


  To argue with him was to risk death.

  My third oldest brother, Sammy, spouted off at Dad once because he didn’t like the curfew. He wanted to go drinking with his buddies on his last weekend of high school. Without a word, Dad moved quickly and slammed a nice one on Sammy’s chin. He fell backward against two kitchen chairs, which broke in parts. His head hit the edge of the table. He collapsed to the floor.

  All of us stood still.

  Mom rushed to Sammy’s aid.

  Dad said, “When you’re feeling better, you can fix those damn chairs.”

  He walked out of the room.

  I couldn’t believe that no one had suggested he go to the hospital.

  “Shouldn’t he see a doctor or something?” I asked.

  Mom turned and looked at me coldly. “There’s no blood. See?” She looked at Sammy. “No blood. Don’t need to take him there. Just some rest, and he’ll be fine.”

  Her dismissal was breathtaking.

  Sammy seemed to have recovered well, but a few years later he slipped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk downtown and hit his head on a streetlamp. They did a X-ray or a MRI on him, and it turned out that he had sustained a permanent crack from that kitchen table.

  He was never quite the same again. He had a mild form of short-term memory loss, and he had the sad habit of walking into a room and standing still for a few minutes, trying to remember what he’d come into the room for. But if you put him out in the fields, he knew what to do. He was a born farmer.

  I wanted to remind Dad that Sammy’s condition was his fault, but I was afraid he’d hit me too.

  Growing up, I came to link the smell of freshly brewed coffee with the snarl of cigarette smoke on those cold mornings when I got up early for school. When Mom wasn’t busy stirring oatmeal for us, she sat by the kitchen window and looked out on the road we lived on. I saw the ache of wanderlust in her eyes, but she never said anything.