The Next(7)

Pale white skin … blood dripping down Nathan's abdomen …

My brain had been so contained in the vault of my apartment, so confined  to uninterrupted, grey self-reflection and shadowed, unpunctured  bubbles of thought it seemed to jump at the opportunity to free  associate when presented with even a mild stimulus.

A Swiss Army knife blade grazing the shirtless boy's cheek …

There was a damn good reason why I kept the curtains closed. I moved my  hand to the edge of the curtain and gripped its soft thickness.

I could re-seal the vault.

I looked back at the less evocative apartment of the Couch Potatoes, and  all at once I found a surprising comfort in their inactivity. The  longer my gaze lingered on the Couch Potatoes, the more I envied them.  How comfortable they were with each other. The hypnotizing television  was something they both agreed to be the tranquilizer of their life, and  they had no contention about it. Plates of pasta, chicken, a loaf of  bread, the remote control, gentle shadows in the quiet flickering TV  light. They needed nothing else to define the fabric of their  relationship.

To be content with another. To require no more than what you have and to  know you require no more. I had no idea what this state was like. Was  it earned? Genetic? Just luck? Was it, perhaps, a template molded by  your parents' practices during your youth?

A white porcelain dish shattering against the brushed steel handle of the wooden cupboard.

Paul and I grew up in a violent household-parents throwing dishes at  each other in coffee and/or alcohol-fueled arguments, then ripping us  from our Legos and Hot Wheels, strapping us in the backseat of the  Volkswagen, and speeding angrily away to someone else's strange house.  As angrily as one could speed away in a putt-putt-putt Volkswagen bus  anyway. Then returning the following afternoon, only to have the drama  repeat the following evening. Day after night after day after night,  shattered dishes and skid marks on the pavement.

Our father had obliterated the television screen with the mixer and  never replaced either, so we had zero Dukes of Hazzard, zero Knight  Rider, zero Dallas and Falcon Crest, and zero baked anything, but we had  my grandmother's old first edition Enid Blyton Adventure Books. Paul  and I would escape to the State Park and live out adventure stories we'd  read: Valley of Adventure, Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure,  River of Adventure, Sea of Adventure. Our adventures were epic, and we  educated ourselves with every tree, cave, bush, volcanic remnant of  rock, path, creek, valley, fallen log, and shadow of that park,  integrating it all into our stories. We were the masters of the kingdom.  Princes of the wooded valleys. At least until one of our parents  shrieked for us to come home, his or her strained voice echoing over  miles through the trees.         

     



 

City folks would visit our kingdom, completely unsuspecting that every  step they clumsily took would be spied on by agile nine and  twelve-year-olds just feet away in the bushes or above them in the  crooks of the tree branches. A family's picnic became a drug smuggler's  secret rendezvous. A jogger with her dog became a femme-fatale on a  covert operation to be followed and uprooted.

But the two teenagers that visited our park on the hot, dry afternoon in June changed our lives forever.

One teenager called the other Jessie. I never got the other one's name.  Paul and I spotted them settling down in an isolated glen from the point  we called King's Rock. We went down to the creek, crossed the slippery  tree that had fallen across it last winter, and snuck up to the glen.  Jessie and the other boy were lying close to each other in the shade  head-to-toe. There was nothing more delicious to my brother and me than  the irony of people thinking they were alone when they were decidedly  not. We relished our ability and dexterity to scale trees, burrow  through bushes, blend into the shadows, and traverse the grass, leaves,  and acorns on the ground in silence.

The teenager named Jessie lit up a joint and passed it to the other.  Both teenagers were athletic and tall, in jeans and sneakers. The boy  with no name had a yellow t-shirt on, while Jessie's shirt was stuffed  in his back pocket. Jessie had smooth skin, colored naturally by a  fearlessness of the sun. His chest was toned and just beginning to grow  hair. Jessie was dark-haired with Italian features while the other boy  was a rough-looking blond. Paul and I put our feet in the knots of the  pine tree and climbed to a point where we could clearly see them, but we  remained obscured by shadows and bushy branches.

Marijuana was mysterious to us. We recognized the pungency of the smell  from other visitors to our kingdom, but we'd never tried it ourselves.  Never had a need to with imaginations as active as ours. We nestled in  the branches for several minutes, listening to Jessie and the other boy  mumbling. Jessie seemed more talkative then the other.

The boy withdrew a magazine that they took turns flipping through. The  magazine had photos of naked women with pendulous breasts. From one page  to another, Jessie and the boy would alternately laugh and then remain  transfixed on an image for an extended couple of moments, wordlessly,  moist lips slightly apart.

Jessie reached for the other boy's crotch.

The other boy slapped his hand away.

"Fuck you," the boy said, standing up.

Some tones of voices tease, and others pierce to the marrow of your  bones like a cold steel syringe. Paul and I had heard enough arguments  from our parents to know the type of voice that precedes appliances  flying across the kitchen and cracking tiles.

Jessie laughed at him and told him to relax.

The boy remained standing, arms crossed, with an agitated stern look on  his face. Jessie stopped laughing and looked him directly in the eyes.  He righted himself, kneeling directly in front of the boy. They stared  at each other in this duel-leveled stance for at least a minute. Then  Jessie stretched out his arm, slowly and smoothly, toward the standing  boy. The boy eyed him wearily and angrily but did not move away.

At last Jessie's hand made contact with his knee. The standing boy's  breath grew shorter, but he remained still, his limbs stiff. Jessie's  hand slowly inched its way up the boy's jeans. As Jessie's hand neared  his upper thigh, the boy's crotch began to bulge.

Jessie boldly put his hand on the bulge.

Suddenly the boy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small  Swiss Army knife, red and shiny. Paul and I usually carried similar  pocketknives of our own to shear off the thorns of blackberry vines for  our bush forts. We kept them hidden from our parents under the loose  tile behind the toilet in the basement bathroom. We'd neglected to bring  them that day. The blond boy flipped open the large blade of his and  held it in his right hand. Apart from that efficiently executed  movement, his legs remained planted in the same spot. He whispered  slowly and deliberately, "What the fuck d'ya think you're doing?"

Paul looked at me. The excitement of spying had turned to fear. He  motioned with his head that we should back down the tree, but I  immediately saw the impossibility of this. Climbing up a tree is one  thing. Climbing down is more challenging because you cannot anticipate  which tree branches your feet will land on, and we'd likely make enough  noise descending to be discovered. Paul and I redirected our fascination  to the scene below.

Jessie hadn't removed his hand from the boy's crotch. Instead, he looked  up directly into the boy's eyes and unfastened his belt buckle. The  knife remained suspended as Jessie put his fingers on the boy's fly and  pulled it down tooth by tooth. The boy gasped as his penis finally  pushed through the jeans, its head protruding from the top of the  waistband of his white underwear. His knuckles were turning white. His  face was also turning white with an expression of ferocity that made my  heart race, beads of sweat lining his forehead.         

     



 

"Stop," the blond boy forced out as if he were being strangled.

Jessie did not stop. He pulled the band of the underwear down the shaft  like a flag lowered reverently down a pole at sunset. The boy's dick  jolted forward onto Jessie's face, but Jessie remained with a stillness  that betrayed either the terror of a crouched doe before the pounce of a  lion or the predatory assuredness of the lion readying to pounce. With  the thick red meat pressed against the side of his nose and the  vibrating knob half an inch from his eye, Jessie was frozen, waiting for  some cue from the standing boy to proceed or withdraw.

The standing boy growled under his breath, brought the knife down with  deliberate intent to Jessie's cheek, and held it there. The only  movement was the boy's penis twitching as it engorged even more, the  blood rushing through the shaft and slamming into the head in steady  forceful surges.

Jessie remained suspended at the point of the knife for a full thirty  seconds. Then his tongue emerged from between his plump red lips and  extended toward the shaft. When its tip finally touched the side of the  boy's erection, the standing boy drew in an enormous breath.