City of Boys Read Free Page B

even happened, but this is my experience with junkies, that they exit right out of every situation before it’s even become a situation.
    —Let’s take the car, he says.
    You are my sweetheart, she says, and if you leave me, you will spend all your life coming back to me. With her tongue and her words and the quiet movement of her hand over my skin, she has drawn for me all the limits of my life, and of my love. It is the one love that has created me and will contain me, and if she left me I’d be lonely, and I’d rather sleep in the streets with her hand between my legs forever than be lonely.
    In the car, the boy slides his hand between my legs and then puts it on the steering wheel. A chill in the air, empty streets, and it’s late. Every second takes me farther into the night away from her; every second sends me home. We drive to Inwood Park, and climb the fence so that we are only a few feet away from the Hudson.
    —This is nothing like Ohio, I say to him, and he lights a cigarette.
    —Where’s Ohio?
    —Don’t you go to school? I ask him. —Don’t you take geography?
    —I know what I need to know, he says, and reaches over to unbutton my blouse. The thing about junkies is that they know they don’t have much time, and the thing about boys is that they know how not to waste it.
    —This is very romantic, I say, as his fingers hit my nipples like a piece of ice. —Do you come here often?
    What I like about this boy is that he just puts it right in. He just puts it in as though he does this all the time, as though he doesn’t usually have to slide it through his fingers, or between his friends’ rough lips; he just puts it in and comes like wet soap shooting out of a fist, and this is what I wanted. This is what I wanted, I say to myself as I watch the Hudson rolling brownly by over his shoulder. This is what I wanted, but all I think about is the way it is with us; this is what I wanted, but all I see is her face floating down the river, her eyes like pieces of moonlight caught in the water.
    What I think is true doesn’t matter anymore; what I think is false doesn’t matter anymore. What I think at all doesn’t matter anymore, because there is only her; like an image laid over my mind, she is superimposed on every thought I have. She sits by the window and looks out onto the street as though she is waiting for something, waiting for rent control to end, or waiting for something else to begin. She sits by the window waiting for something, and pulls a long string through her fingers. In the light from the window, I can see each of the bones in her hand; they make a delicate pattern that fades into the flesh and bone of her wrist.
    —Don’t ever change, I say to her. —Don’t ever ever change. She smiles and lets the string dangle from her hand.
    —Nothing ever stays the same, she says. —You’re old enough to know that, aren’t you, sweetheart? Permanence,she says, —is nothing more than a desire for things to stay the same.
    I know this.
    —Life is hard for me, the boy says. —What am I going to do with my life? I just hang around all day or drive my mother’s car. Life is so hard. Everything will always be the same for me here in this city. It’s going to eat me up and spit me out, and I might as well never have been born.
    He looks poetically out over the river.
    —I wanted a boy, I say, —not a poet.
    —I’m not a poet, he says. —I’m just a junkie, and you’re nothing but a slut. You can get yourself home tonight.
    I say nothing and watch the Hudson roll by.
    —I’m sorry, he says. —So what? So I’m a junkie and you’re a slut, so what. Nothing ever changes. Besides, he says, —my teacher wants me to be a track star because I can run faster than anyone else in gym class. That’s what he says.
    —Well, that sounds like a promising career, I say, although I can imagine the teacher in his baggy sweatpants, his excitement rising as he stares at my boy and suggests