Cold or Holy Water
Scott Pomfret
By design, I date a drunk. He passes out by eleven. I wriggle from his dead-weight arm and dress in loose-fitting jeans slung low on my hips and a tourniquet-tight T-shirt that shows a strip of flesh above the belt. I race to the Pit, where that bound, electrical feeling of self-consciousness that attends real life leaves my limbs. Trees mask residual streetlight. Thin reeds dance over shadowed faces. Temporary conspiracies cluster around a smoke. A stoned college kid leaning against a tree trunk with his dick hanging out fingers himself.
On one side, a marsh ringed with rhododendrons slips into the river at some indeterminate point. On the other, community gardens are fenced against pests. Lush weeds grow along the paths worn into cavities in the rhododendron bushes, which contain little caves sculpted by tortured branches and furtive activity.
Although I’m an avowed proponent of truth, honesty, and rigor, the furtiveness doesn’t put me off, because the activity is openly furtive, like the secret handshake of some grand, multinational organization that supplies the elusive order underlying the ceaseless, vagrant movements constituting everyday life—think Masons, Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones, groups that require an invitation for membership and a painful initiation. My people are the dark, ironic cruisers for whom intimacy between men is always searingly ludicrous, who don’t, under any circumstances, kiss. They’re the most honest people I know.
My boyfriend caught me just once returning from the Pit. I told him the truth. For several weeks after, we were polite and cautious. Like a man who taught himself English without the aid of a native speaker, my boyfriend seemed to be testing words he’d never used before, words he’d pulled from a dictionary and about which he was still unsure of the pronunciation. He nattered on about how he and I would be old men together, the house we would own, the subjects we would bicker about in our rockers, whether we would grow pansies or succulents. His was a failed magic spell. His empty though perhaps necessary words weren’t, decidedly, a cock up the ass.
Among the mud flats, duck shit, smoking men, murmured conversation from the bushes, giggles, and stray farts, I exchanged languid pleasantries with one of the regulars, whose name I’ve never learned. Neither of us is the other’s type. Even on nights when the Pit’s dead, we say goodnight with clipped formality, as if to preclude the possibility of shacking up.
As we shoot the shit, the shadows become men—leering, predatory, preening, fucking. Their gazes are as hot as suns. An interested man abruptly stops and pirouettes for a better view. He says nothing and unbuckles his belt. I sink to my knees. I shed my pants so my ass is exposed. Others gather. They stand with their cocks in hand, shifting impatiently.
If I were to utter a name aloud—anyone’s name at all, even one of the names of God—the others would shrink away as if sprinkled by cold or holy water. But I keep mum. My mouth’s full. I visualize all they don’t tell me: those names, and their histories and hopes and disappointments and fears, various and fantastic.
As someone takes his place behind me, I brace against the mud. He thrusts. I imagine him in all his fullness: he secretly longs to be called faggot. He likes to have his sex acts described back to him in real time because he finds the names thrilling and dirty and astonishing. He calls his asshole his “mangina,” he abhors fairies, and on Sunday, he goes to church with his ancient mother, to whom he is not and never will be out, and afterward hurries home to get dressed for the club, where he’ll try to pick up teenage boys. Priests make him nervous, and he no doubt imagines he might become a priest someday.
A fist throbs down on my kidneys. I hear bestial noises and realize they’re coming from my own mouth. This, I think, is what everybody truly wants: to get fucked into oblivion. Again and again. One cock after another. In the Pit, I never have to be polite. I am—for once in my life in this padded-wall, self-conscious world—in some actual physical danger. I don’t apologize. There’s simply nothing to compare for honesty to the hard bone of a complete stranger rooting out what’s good in me, like a boar searching for truffles.
Some use condoms. Some call me bitch. Bruising and filthy, they’re nothing but cock and hurry and desire, as if they’re trying to despoil and ruin and punish me for some unmentionably delicious sin. It’s like being in the presence of hunters with knives. They eviscerate. They separate gristle from bone. My own limbs dance, each separately, and I am in the belly of the whale becoming someone else. When the last spasmodic jerk at my backside’s done, I raise my eyes as if to Heaven.
A stranger watches. What little streetlight strikes him suggests he’s perhaps twenty or twenty-two. His head is like a lightbulb, all swollen brow, saucer eyes, and small jaw, as if he suffers from hydrocephaly. He’s slim, slight, like a slice of a whole person, so thin as to be see-through.
“How do you do that?” he asks softly.
Uneasy mutters come from men lurking nearby, as if he’s asked a question for which none of us have an answer, or for which the answer is appalling. But the mutters could have easily risen from the swampy river or from emanations of the good earth under my knees and palms. Shadows drift away. The boy’s question—he’s hardly more than a boy—elicits consciousness and shame.
Years from now, some of the nameless lurking men will shudder and thank the hydrocephalic boy of their memory for having driven them out of the Pit. For having turned them away from darkness. In an instant, the boy has made many happy marriages and unions. It would be so pretty to think so. No doubt the boy has a mother that loves him. He looks like a boy who’s been loved. There’s no panther in him, only a mannered gawkiness of which he’s not particularly conscious because his precious mother has never taken him to task about it.
“Who are you?” I ask. “What’s your name?”
He helps me pull my shirt down from where it was bunched under my armpits. He makes me stand and yanks up my underwear and pants.
“Kick up your feet,” he says.
I kick my feet up on his bent knee so he can tie snug double knots in my now-filthy sneakers that my boyfriend will pretend not to see. He seems rapt, proud, and attentive, like a little child showing off his newly learned skill in tying shoes.
He looks up. “Where are we going?”
His presumption strikes deep. That we are a “we.” That we’re going somewhere. That we’re doing it together. Something inside me flops like a landed fish hooked on a line. I have that queer dislocated feeling you get when you catch a glimpse of a stranger in a dark mirror and realize it’s your reflection.
I take his hand. We tread the paths. The muddy softness underfoot is unseemly. I dance on my toes to avoid sinking in, and my new friend dances in turn. A bush shivers, whether from love within or a night breeze I can’t tell. Metal rasps on metal as someone somewhere tries to start a car that’s already running. Shadows become unmoored and slip away in pairs from the solids that cast them. My friend seems like a trick of moonlight.
I release him.
“Go on,” I grunt, giving him a gentle shove toward the street.
His shoulder proves more solid than a shadow. His feet are firmly rooted. It’s like trying to push away a tree. From an alley across the street, stray dogs watch us push and sway. Headlights splash the young man’s body briefly. Down in the Pit, his eyes were black as wet stones, but now in the braver light, they prove opaque, with a paleness near blue. I have an overwhelming sense that things in the Pit will be less true if my new friend doesn’t leave. I have a strange feeling he will betray me, or has already betrayed me, or is even now betraying me, without so much as a kiss.
“Go on,” I say again and a third time. I speak with a patient, knowing, altogether superior tone of inevitability that could easily breed resentment and resistance in a listener, and this effect is perhaps exactly what I’m hoping for.
He slips into the night like a moment of conscience. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t show any sign that he’s interested in my choice to remain behind, or whether it’s even a choice.
I shiver and shed a skin. I call out, but the wind rises to mute me. I start after my friend, but falter. To follow him seems as futile as following my own tail. No doubt he will accomplish everything. I think: That young man and me, we could have cursed the world together. The thought’s subversive. The conjunction “and.” The word “together.” It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that I’ve truly cheated on my boyfriend.
Back at my apartment, I root along the length of my boyfriend’s body. He wakes. I expect gratitude for my sexual interest, but he’s largely unsurprised. He accepts my interest in an obscene, amorphous, engulfing sort of way. After we get off, he doesn’t speak.
It seems monstrous to be the only one awake. I pass a hand in front of my boyfriend’s face. I shake him awake. I feel compelled to tell him something I don’t believe: that I’ve never wanted anyone besides him.
Scott Pomfret is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and dozens of short stories published in, among other venues, Ecotone, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. Scott writes from the cramped confines of his tiny Provincetown beach shack, which he shares with his partner of twenty-one years. He is currently at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. Find him on Twitter @bostonseanachie.