Angel Lust

Chapter One-2

All my guilt evaporated; I knew it. Surely, this could only be like the furry, wise bumblebee sucking . . . gentle nectars out from the waiting throats of flowers. A pale morning glory or miniature white calla lily, all sugar-soft, came to mind. “Man,” Niko said. “You gonna suck my little boy’s d**k?” He smiled benignly. “Why not? It’s the same, right? s*x, kids; it begins there.”

I took the boy’s thing from my mouth, then kissed Niko on the cheek. He laughed quietly, and I began to suck the child again, until I, too, became of the same young flesh as this flower’s heart; and soon the boy’s sweet little member and my own wet mouth became quietly one, as Niko watched, a hard-on obviously growing in his pants. All of this I knew was in Paul’s deep sleep; or perhaps I could say . . . in mine.

His flesh had become my own; and we were now both curled around one thing. One marker on the vast flowing fields of time, although I could not say this marker’s given name.

Did I know it? Did it have one—what is it, this marker’s name? Does it (or he, is the marker a “he”) have a name?

I could not say, but only knew that we were now curled around the same flowering thing, gathered in a pulling of time. An immense pulling as mysterious and revealing as the furled tip of the boy’s silken foreskin, opening in the darkness of my mouth . . . within that glowing, circus-watched room.

I gave the boy back to Niko, who drew his briefs back up and gently put him back into his bed. “He’s gonna have nice dreams,” Niko Stamos whispered, smiling. “No nightmares. No monsters. None of that Star Wars s**t. I can tell. I can see it.” He closed his eyes, and I wondered what he was thinking: always the unknowable question, even for beings like us. Then he kissed the little boy and put him back into his bed, and we tiptoed out.

His own room was further down at the end of the hall. It had always been his, he said, after he closed the door and we quickly dropped both our jackets on the bare floor. After his wife Angela had left him with the kid and he moved back in with his parents, he took back his room. His mother was happy. She thought Angela was only a w***e, a putana, anyway; real skata, s**t.

There was no light in the room, except for a streetlight outside behind the drawn window shade. Niko lay down on the narrow bed, not much bigger than Paul’s and pulled me to him. His fat tongue went into my ear and he said, “My father used to kiss me like I kissed Paul. I ain’t supposed to know. Some think the boys just forget. But it’s tradition, they been doing it in Greece since Socrates and the old dudes. It’s why us Hellenes are so smart—we’re hellenes of smart guys, you know? Cause the daddies kiss the little d***s of their boys.”

He took off his shirt. He had the muscular body of a young gladiator; bulked-up forearms and biceps. Beautiful chest sprinkled with sugar-sweet black silky hair that even glittered like spun glass in the dark. The hair got very thick between his two small pointed n*****s. They were like little coffee beans, but soft and ready for my mouth. I reached over and kissed them. I could feel Niko’s c**k mushrooming under his tight jeans.

“Yeah, baby,” he whispered softly. “You sure know what you’re doin.” I thought I was going to cream right there. “Wanna cigarette?” he asked.

I told him no, but he lit one anyway and smoked it for a moment and then unlaced his work boots. He shucked them off and then bent over and took his socks off. I leaned over, unbuckled his belt and lowered his jeans. They came off next.

Now all he wore were his clean white Jockey shorts, making a kind of bluish, silver glow in the dark with his c**k bulging under the silver-white cotton. I ran my hand over the big bulge. His tight hairy stomach trembled. He wanted it: I knew. Me. And just the two of us together, in this moment of intense isolated desire.

Suddenly I could really smell his body. Whiffs of motor oil, olive oil, some mild still fresh-smelling bathroom soap (Ivory? Lux?); then the more intense scents of his rough feet and hairy hands. Then his hair, with an “herbal” shampoo; even some kind of barbershoppy hair tonic,. And finally his own basic smell: Sweat, skin, the whole sexy, raw man—“So how come you picked me?” he asked, taking another drag from the cig. “Hey!” he interrupted himself. “Why don’t you get naked yourself?”

I started to strip off my T-shirt, and he grabbed it and pulled it off me. “You’re so blond!” he noticed. “You remind me of a girl. She had hair just like you. But it came out of a bottle. Ya know?”—he paused, then said—“I’m drunk enuf to wanna lick you, too.”

He pulled me to him, then brought his mouth to my chest. I was hard in my jeans, and he fondled it, then unzipped me and pulled my d**k out. I did not wear underwear. My d**k was not as long as his, but fat. I am cut. “I don’t suck boys,” he said. “But right now, Tommy, I could suck you!”

I unbuckled my jeans and lowered them, while he lowered his head to my crotch and licked the soft swelling mushrooming head of my c**k. I was getting very hot. He started to dribble saliva all over me, and used some of it to jerk me with. I had to hold back to keep from exploding in his mouth. I drew away from him for a minute and then took off my sneakers, socks, and jeans. It felt nice to be totally buck naked there with him. I pulled off his Jockeys. We lay for a while just holding on to each other’s d***s and kissing. I thought I was going to start creaming all over the air, all over myself, even in myself. You must know how that is, right?

“You wanna answer my question?” he asked.

“About?”

“Why you picked on me? One day I got out and there’s you, and we end up eatin a hot dog in front of the factory, with you lookin at me. So what happened?” He paused, then looked directly into my eyes. I knew he could see very little there. But I was looking into his, and all I could see was want and hope . . . with desire, nakedly trailing behind them.

“Chance,” I lied. “Accident.” I kissed him with my mouth open, getting my tongue deep down into his mouth.

“Wow, can you kiss!” I nodded my head. “You’re wrong. It ain’t no accident. You’d been following me. But why? You thought I was. . . .” He paused again, then said it: “Gay?”

“I didn’t think anything really. I just knew,” I paused, then said: “that we’d mean something to each other. Get it?” He nodded his handsome head. “It’s attraction, that’s all. It could happen anyplace.” I knew I was lying, but then I stopped lying: “I also thought.” I stopped, not sure I could say this. Sometimes words were harder than s*x. Anyway, why not say it? “I thought, Niko, you were sad. Like you were calling out something to me. Understand?”

“Sad?” He looked seriously at me. I had gotten to him.

“Yeah. Sad. There was something sad, I could feel it.” My face was now at his. “You were missing something. I saw that.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. So I wanted to do something for you.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I am sad. You knew. Boy!” His eyes filled with tears. “My wife went off with another guy. We had an arranged marriage, like they do in Greece, I was so lonely in it. I think we never liked really each other. It didn’t work. At least I got Paul. I was happy when I f****d her and she got big and we got the little boy. I’d never been so happy. I guess I was only playin at something, ‘cause I wasn’t cut out to be a husband. I knew that. But I was scared, you don’t know how much that bothers me.”

“Scared of what?”

“Bein’ just a malakas. That’s Greek for a jerk-off, a guy who can’t get it up when he needs it. When you been fed one line all your life, and you f**k that up—and I was sure I did, no matter what people said—it was like eatin’ skata for a year. After we broke up, my parents insisted we keep the kid. ‘Sure! Let her be a putana,’ Mama said. ‘We get Paul.’ But that didn’t make me feel a lot better, even if he was what I really wanted.”

I looked at him, watching the words flow softly out of his mouth, without judging any of them. The flow stopped. He hesitated, then said: “This is crazy, but . . . I don’t believe in homosexuality.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just not something I believe in. I believe in Christ Almighty, the family, the home, but homosexuality just don’t seem real to me. This gay business, once you get outta bed, just blows away. You’re just two guys then, strangers on the street again. Know what I mean? It ain’t real to me.”

I nodded my head. I did understand, and didn’t want words like “gay” or “homosexuality,” or any words at all, to get between us. Certainly not then, not what I felt was beyond words. And certainly, beyond those words.

It’s funny the way a word like homosexuality, so “scientific,” precise, as if it actually described anything that human beings ever really did—or felt—could get in the way of so much. No wonder the stupid fundamentalists liked to throw it at you and then watch people skitter away, like it was a bomb. The oldest bomb.

The word came out of him like a road block: an indictment. It made no sense to me. I guess it was the old sin crap. Did man invent sin, or God? And if God did, then why was sin, which came from Him (or It) such a bugaboo? At least this sin, the “gay” one, was; though it’s always been around (and around and around, believe me).

But he was right. I’d picked him: I had roamed over to him. And now with everything standing between us disappearing, I wanted no road blocks, but only one road . . . right there. “Do you believe in angels?” I asked.

“Angels? You mean like nice guys with wings?”

“Sometimes angels can be nice. But not always. Some angels are demons, too. Some do the bad work, as well as the good.”

“Then what are they?”

“Spirits. Part of the spiritual nature of the world. It has that, you know, a spiritual nature as well as a physical one.”

“You’re losing me, man.”

“Okay, let me put it like this. Angels are like warmth when you’re cold. You start to rub your hands together; you seek warmth naturally, sometimes without even knowing it. But the truth is, we have no more heat or warmth than anyone else.”

“We? Are you saying you’re—”

I shook my head quickly; why let that out? I did not want to spook him before I got to the good parts—like sucking his d**k. Not that that was the only thing I wanted; there were other things, I admit it. Still, why was I being such a . . . I think he said the word was malakas? I couldn’t tell him the truth right then. No way. “No. I didn’t mean to say that. I mean, anyway, don’t worry about it. It’s—”