The Good Guys

Michael

Oh, my God, the first time we meet I think, He gets me. He gets everyone. He has thick glasses. He is the first black person I’ve ever been friends with. I would say he’s different from the other black kids, but he is different from every kid. I don’t even know what that means. What I do know is he listens to me. We listen to each other. When I am with Jay, the rest of the shit doesn’t matter. All your life you wait for that, a best friend.

I thought I wanted to talk about some things, but now I realize they aren’t worth talking abut. Those first years at Saint Ignatius, they aren’t worth talking about at all. And it’s not worth talking about the crazy house. Though I will. I’ll tell all about it real soon, and how I read The Bell Jar when I was there, and that was a mistake.

But what is worth saying right now it how I felt when I got out, when I was junior at Whittier, lonely as fuck, and the phone rang, and there was Jay on the other end of it. I’d like to say I was smart, was so smart that I would know how sad I was and how Jay was the end of that sadness. But when he came back into my life it was like I was dead and didn’t even know it, or it was like I was two dimensional and then someone blew me up like a balloon, and once he was back in my world, he had to stay in my world. I was three dimensional when I was with him.

Jay does not understand that whatever he tells me to do, I’m going to do. I would burn down a bridge if he said, in that calm voice of his, “Michael, I need you to burn down that bridge.”

We’re sitting at Tony’s funeral, and it’s sad, it’s real fucking sad, but when it’s over, Jay stops us from getting up, from going into the car. Everyone is leaving. He makes to pray, gets on his knees. I join him. People are filing out. Now they’re all gone, and we’re just sitting and suddenly I don’t want to go, and I wonder why I thought I should.

“They’ll never miss us,” Jay says. “They don’t even like us.”

A half hour later we are together. The first time I had sex was when I was sixteen, junior year at Whittier High School, really about a few weeks before Jay came back into my life. We did it a few times. Being with Jay is not like that, and it’s not that being with her was bad. It was just less. People will say Are you gay? Are you bi? Are you sleeping with your best friend?But none of that shit works. Jay is not my best friend. Jay is my Jay. Jay is the person that nothing can be between us but our skin and sometimes even that is too much. When he takes off his clothes, when we come together, it’s like, it’s like a fever breaking. It’s like a spell breaking, I have to goddamn be with him. I have to kiss him. I have to have his tongue and my tongue together. I have to have my legs tangled with his. I needs his hands in my hair. I need to feel his soft skin, kiss his body. His body is my body. I need him to own mine.

We don’t fuck, not the way that some people think of fucking. We press together, and my dick is pressed to his, and we press as much as we can rub, as much as we can hold on as tight as we can, glide across each other, kiss and sweat in that bed till the sheets are fucking soaked. They’re soaked, damnit. If what I am about to say sounds crazy to you, then I feel sorry for you, when I tell you I feel his dick pulsing under mine, and when we’re in bed I feel not like I’m making love to him, but like I am him, like I’m in his body feeling what he’s feeling, and he’s in me, and when he comes I’m going to feel it, and he’s going to feel me. Our orgasms are going to be the same. When he shakes and his eyes go wide it will be all I need. Same from him, and I can feel we’re coming together, and I can feel him shooting out, and there is heat like honey exploding between us in a pool, and we’re shaking and we don’t stop coming and I feel like it’s so strong, so violent I’m going to get knocked out of my body if he doesn’t hold onto me, and the same thing is going to happen to Jay if he doesn’t hold onto me, so we’re just there in bed, our bodies shaking and arching up and apart, and we’re holding onto each other, cause we don’t want to get lost. It’s strong enough to kill us almost.

When it’s done we can’t talk, we can’t move. We’re wrung out. It’s like the Holy Ghost, and it was holy, and we’re shaking and still twitching, our body jumping like we’ve been shocked. Our body, not bodies. We can’t say shit for a long time. We love each other, our fingertips touch, we keep doing that to remind each other we’re still here, we’re here, even though we can barely move, and we cannot speak.

`Jay knows everything. He’s like God to me. He knows and so, finally, when we can move, when we can hold onto each other and breathe even, I ask him.

“Did you plan this?”

After a long time he says, “I don’t know.”

He tells me that when I told him I was about to kill myself, that I could be the dead body in the casket he knew he wanted me to be the live body heaving right here next to him.

“I wanted you as close as you could be to me,” Jay says, touching my hair. “That’s all I knew.”

He is looking ae me, touching my lips, my eyes, stroking my hair.

He says: “That’s all I know.”

I am looking at him. Shorter than me, not fat, but not thin, brown, like… gold and chocolate and sweet with his brown eyes that can’t see shit without his glasses, with his nipples I want to touch, his little belly. I pull him in to me, wrap my thighs around him and kiss him as deep as I can. While my head is on his chest I hear him say:

“This is what we are now. This is us.”

Jay

That first night we lay together, and my hand was in his curly hair and Michael said, “I’m afraid.

“You make me want to get it together. Get it together for you.”

“You are together. You can’t blame yourself for…”

“Being crazy? No, I guess not. But I can blame myself for exacerbating things, not taking my meds, putting myself in situations I know it’s hard to come out of it.

“And yet… I can’t blame myself, and that’s why I’m scared. You’re getting something broken. I’m afraid I’ll fly of the deep end. I’m afraid I won’t be what I wish I could be for you. I lived today. But what about tomorrow. I am so frightened that I won’t make it. One day.”

I don’t have it in me to say all the lies. To say it will all be alright. It’s never alright. Or to promise him nothing will happen. In the end everything happens.

I don’t mention again how all this happened because Tony died. After all, once we made the decision to come back to his house, we never saw all those others guys who went on to the burial. We never saw them again. And we had barely seen them before. It does make me wonder though, how many starts to life begin by the ending of life? I once heard a man say that one of his children died, and when he was at his wife’s side while she gave birth to their son, he felt the presence of his departed daughter, as if the boy was coming from the same place the girl had gone, and for that moment they were together. So maybe it is like that, how the moment of life given back, and life departed are together. And maybe, in the end, it doesn’t do to speak of it too much.

Michael asks me if I want to stay with him that night. Of course I will. There isn’t anything else I want more. I need decent clothes though. We need food, though. When he says there’s a frozen pizza in the refrigerator, I just look at him.

We shower together and then get dressed again. It is night now, the gentle warm, soft night of summer where the sky is a rich blue that still has sun in it, and even though the stars are a billion years old they look newly polished. It is not warm enough to ruin the effects of the shower, not like it was a month ago, in the worst of July. We cross town and come into Mom and Dad’s house. Dad says little. Mom asks about the funeral. What can I say? It was sad. I’m going to stay with Mike. Hi, Michael, Mom says. She’s always liked him. He follows me back into my room and get clothes.

At every turn he is so close to me. He is breathing at the back of my neck, every move we make, his fingers gently touch my hand. His shoulder is just a little against mine. We are never apart. I love it, this closeness. It’s everything I can do to not be lie down and have sex with him in this room, after these four years where, really, honestly, truly, I never knew we were this too each other, after the black time when we were parted, me with bandaged eyes and temporary blindness, and him in a crazy house.