The Men from the Boys Read Free

writhing mass of human flesh out here under the lights: male flesh, young flesh, raw bodies and sweat, humping together, wet luminescent backs sliding against each other, nudging shoulders, hands massaging chests where hard stubble sprouts like rough new grass, all of us pushing, shoving, grinding, grunting. I’m reminded of the time the bar threw an underwear party last summer. I came on the dance floor: hands in my Calvin Kleins, hands fighting each other for a turn, hands, hands, hands without faces, and I came onto the floor to prove I still could.
    â€œSo what is it that you do?” Eduardo shouts over the music. Another inescapable question. My answer will distance us. I’m no houseboy, no clerk at the scrimshaw shop.
    â€œI’m a writer,” I say.
    Whenever I tell boys that I am a writer, they always respond in the same way. They appear to believe that this is significant, that they should somehow be impressed. “What do you write about?” they always ask in response, as Eduardo does now, a ridiculous question, one for which there is no answer. So I always say, as I do now:
    â€œWhatever I can.”
    Eduardo smiles. He knows he can go no further. He’s in over his head.
    Was from the start.

Boston, January 1995
    When I was a boy, my mother told me a riddle that terrified me. It went something like this: A girl is put in a room with no windows and only one door. That door is locked from the outside. There is nothing in the room with the girl but a radiator. Later, when they open the door, the girl is gone. What happened to the girl?
    The answer: the radiator.
    The radi ate her.
    That riddle has come back to me now as I sit here on the edge of Javitz’s hospital bed. He’s been here for more than three weeks, straight through Christmas, fighting off the pneumonia we thought was whipped back in November. The snow outside is battering the windows like a flock of suicidal gulls. It’s one of Boston’s infamous snowstorms, the kind that slick roads within instants, that drop eighteen inches of snow in an hour.
    I’m sitting here now, remembering that damn riddle, how the presence of a clinking, clanking radiator in a room terrified me for years, and then Javitz asks me about Spiro Agnew.
    â€œIs he still alive?” he asks, watching the TV that’s hooked up on the wall. The woman on CNN with the Barbra Streisand cross-eyes is talking about a bust of Agnew being placed in the rotunda of the Capitol.
    â€œI guess so,” I say. “They’re giving him an honor.”
    Javitz makes a sour face. “He was a crook. You don’t remember. You’re too young.”
    â€œI remember watching Nixon resign,” I protest. I was twelve, on summer vacation between seventh and eighth grade. My mother remained a die-hard supporter right to the bitter end. We both cried watching the resignation on the little black-and-white TV in the kitchen while she peeled potatoes for supper.
    â€œYou don’t remember all the terrible things Nixon and Agnew did. Nobody seems to anymore. Nixon would’ve been as bad as Reagan on gays and AIDS and all that stuff. Maybe worse.”
    â€œHow could anybody have been worse than Reagan?” I ask.
    Javitz closes his eyes. “Luise Rainer was,” he says. Talking about politics wears him out fast these days. “Especially in The Good Earth. ”
    â€œI’ll say,” I laugh. “And they gave her two Oscars.”
    â€œCount ’em,” he says.
    â€œTwo,” we say in unison.
    He takes a deep breath, eyes still closed. “We should do a Luise Rainer video festival this summer in Provincetown. What do you think?”
    I consider it. Every summer for the last five years, Javitz, Lloyd, and I have rented a place in Provincetown, that little spit of sand at the end of Cape Cod farther away from the rest of the world than anywhere else. How we’ve managed to do this, I don’t