The Men from the Boys Read Free Page B

in a closet, their existence unseen but their presence always known?
    And Javitz loves Lloyd in a way impossible for me: free of doubt, free of competition. We’re basically the same age, Lloyd and I, and in the gym we play silly little games: who can press the most weight, whose pecs stand out better beneath a white T-shirt, who gets the most looks from the boys. Yet neither of us would admit to playing such games or the seriousness with which we play them.
    â€œYou’re thinking about Lloyd and what he told you that Sunday morning last month,” Javitz says.
    â€œNo, I’m not,” I lie.
    â€œJeff, you’ve got to stop being so afraid.”
    I react. “I’m not the one preoccupied with death.”
    He gives me a look, eyes wide and eyebrows up. Maybe he’s right: why else has my mother’s riddle—that damned radiator with the steaming fangs—come back to haunt me?
    â€œYou and Lloyd have been together for six years, Jeff. It’s all right to be going through this.”
    â€œWe’re not ‘going through’ anything,” I snap.
    I wonder if Javitz ever thinks about what he and I might have been going through had we lasted six years. I met Javitz when I was just twenty-two, the same age as Eduardo, the boy I fell in love with last summer in Provincetown. Javitz was thirty-seven, just a little older than I am today. He seemed so old to me then: but old in a good way—a way these boys I trick with must see me. An older brother who’s still young enough to fuck but old enough to explain what’s going on. Before Javitz, all I had been looking for was a place to put my dick. Wide-eyed, eager, and horny, I was new to Boston, having arrived for my grad program in English at UMass with all the zest any boy feels upon his first move to a real city. I met Javitz at a reading by Allen Ginsberg, the very first poetry besides Dr. Seuss I’d ever heard read out loud. But what excited me more was the prospect of the boys who would undoubtedly show up. I wasn’t disappointed. There were plenty of boys, but it was Javitz who caught my notice, Javitz with his long black hair and smoke-chewed laugh and the magnificent way he saw right into my terror.
    â€œYou there,” he said, across the cheese and crackers. I raised my eyebrows questioningly. “Yes, you .” He grinned. “You look as if you need someone to show you around.”
    I did, of course. We made a date for the next night. He took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the north end of Boston, with red and white checked tablecloths and carafes of red wine. He promised to show me gay Boston and, if I wanted, gay New York too, sometime. “Sure,” I agreed, awestruck, sitting across the table from him. He knew so much, had been to so many places.
    â€œHow old are you?” he asked, sitting back in his chair.
    â€œTwenty-two,” I told him.
    â€œTwenty-two? Who has ever been twenty-two?” he sighed grandly.
    â€œYou, I imagine,” I said, trying to be cute. “Once.”
    It worked. He winked at me, and both of us were hooked. “So,” he asked, next question: “Are you out?”
    I lied, of course, and told him yes. Isn’t it funny? No one’s ever closeted when you ask them. But Javitz, as I was to discover, was a big-time activist, and he saw right through the cobwebs that shrouded my closet door.
    We went back to his apartment, a third-floor space in Cambridge near Harvard Square, crammed with books on Plato, the Trojan Wars, and Billie Holiday. Javitz taught ancient history at one of the community colleges. He enjoyed teaching, he said, but activism was what he loved most. “Every once in a while some trick will try to impress me with his knowledge of the fall of the Roman Empire,” he said. “I tell them: ‘That happened fifteen hundred years ago. Did you vote in the last election?’ ”
    He showed me