“You go to Mass everyday,” Jimmy said.
“Not there. Not at an Episcopal church. I used to wonder, if it’s just like Catholics why not be Catholics, but honestly, I can see about a million reasons.”
“They had a chick priest,” Jimmy said. “That was amazing.”
“I miss it,” Flipper said, leaning his head on Ross’s shoulder.
“Then why don’t you go?”
Flipper shrugged.
“I forgot.”
He kissed Ross on the cheek.
“Thank you, Ross, he said. “Thank you.”
He kissed Ross again and Jimmy said, “Are we about to have a big bisexual vacation.”
In the back of his mind was the memory that Jimmy had been with Flipper already.
“What if we did?” Ross said.
“Listen to Mr. Allan, high on Jesus and Mary Jane.”
“I think the weed is just making him horny,” Flipper said.
He grunted and stood up.
“The shit we’re saying should not be said on church steps. Let’s go.”
They stayed at the Holiday Inn a mile or so north. The room was cheap, and between the three of them even cheaper. Jimmy flipped around on the television and Ross yawned
“You cannot go to sleep.”
“I’m way the fuck too hungry to go to sleep,” Ross said.
“God, that’s right,” Jimmy said. “Do you guys ever get so high you forget to eat?”
“No,” both Ross and Flipper said, pointedly.
Flipper and Jimmy were of a height and size, but to be sure, Flipper ws the bulkier of the two. Jimmy was a rail. It was Flipper who had been an athlete and who, no matter what he did to his body, was still built like one. Not eating was not something Flip Sanders believed in
“There is a pizza place right down the block,” Flipper reported. “Because it’s Chicago, and we should be on our way there right now. Let us not forget our mission.”
The night was getting cooler, but the weather was still good, and Sheridan Road was lively in the evening. Ross took in the feeling of people going places, and there were even the people going nowhere slowly. Not far off, the El rumbled past, and they walked across the street after the passing car and entered a yellow lit place called Pete’s where they ordered slices of pizza bigger than their heads and wrapped in foil and paper. Jimmy got one cheese but both Flipper and Ross got two, sausage and pepperoni, and they headed back to the hotel where Ross, having done his duty to his stomach, went right to sleep on the first of the two beds, the one furthest from the TV, and Flipper opened a window and went out on the little balcony to smoke.
When he came back, Jimmy had one of the lamps off and he was on the bed with his pants down, masturbating to the porn he’d turned on.
“Really?” Sanders said, exhaling smoke.
Jimmy didn’t say anything. He just turned to the TV and kept boredly stroking his penis while Flipper watched it lengthen and expand.
“You’re so weird,” Flipper tried this time, but on his bed, Ross went on sleeping, and Jimmy went on stroking.
At last, Flipper shrugged and said, “I’m not sitting here and watching a dude with bleach blond hair fuck a chick with fat tits.”
“I already paid for it,” Jimmy said, eyes not leaving the screen.
“I paid for it, so it’s going to play out, and when it’s done you can watch whatever your innocent heart wants, Richard Sanders.”
“I’m going on a walk,” Flipper said.
“Alright,” Jimmy said, eyes already back on the screen.
Where he was going to go, he didn’t quite know. Chicago had the feel to Flipper of a very large small town. Instead of driving all over Walter or Sebring to not find what you needed, you drove all over the whole of Chicago and never found it. They’d been looking for a botanica and finally found one in Humboldt Park, a little store under a great mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown virgin in rose colored dress overlooking it. They would find no such thing here. There were rows of apartments to the El, and as he heard the train clacking over him, Flipper remember Jimmy’s cousin Macy saying, “The thing about Chicago is it’s not as easy as saying, oh this is a nice area, this is a bad one. If you don’t know where you are, you can cross from safety to trouble without even knowing it.
So Flipper stopped at a 7-11, got a Slurpee and some lube and returned to the hotel, strangely relieved to reach the parking lot on Sheridan Road, and once in the hotel, was pretty resolved to not go back into the night. The porn was still playing low and Jimmy was, less enthusiastically now, tugging on his cock. Flipper turned the last lamp off, because Ross was still asleep he said to himself, and he sat in the chair beside Jimmy on the bed, and drank his Slurpee a bit before sighing, putting it down and taking off his shirt, He unbuckled his cargo pants, stood up so Jimmy could see, and pulled down his briefs, his penis already well erect. He reached into the bag, took out the lube and squirted it on his hands, and then sat down to quietly touch himself in sympathy to Jimmy.
As the movie ended, Flipper heard Jimmy grunt and he said, “Did you come?”
“Almost. Did you.”
Flipper, still stroking himself, said, “Not even close.”
“I’m so fuckin’ horny,” Jimmy said. “Tonight’s made me so fucking horny.”
“Jimmy, I don’t get you,” Flipper said. “I don’t know what you want.”
“There’s really not that much to get,” Jimmy said, slipped his dick slowly back into his pants.
“Tonight we were all weird and huggy and you were leaning up on Ross and kissing him and we were leaning up on each other. And I’m feeling all sorts of shit. I’m gonna end up fucking a mattress.”
“And then we’re jacking off and Ross is right the fuck over there.”
“You know what?” Jimmy said. “If Ross wasn’t here this would be a lot less complicated.”
“You don’t want Ross here?”
“Of course I want Ross here. I love Ross more than I love you, but the only reason you’re acting weird is because when Ross is around you act better than you are.”
“No I don’t.”
“You do. You restrain yourself.”
“Maybe it’s alright to restrain myself.”
“Maybe it is.”
“You know why I think we both hang around Ross?”
“Because he’s our friend and the only person who will put up with us?”
“No. Well, yes, but no. But also… because he’s an angel. He’s the good guy. He goes to church and is a virgin and we want to be the good guys. But have you ever thought that he is with us because he likes the devil?”
“What?”
“While you think about that,” Jimmy said, “here’s the remote, and I’m going to go to sleep.”
Flipper slept on the bed beside Ross who had gotten up once to go to the bathroom, and then went straight back to sleep despite his resolution to write in his journal and take in the night breeze. Flipper, sure of Ross’s snoring, rose up softly and crossed the small space to where Jimmy, slept on his back in his jeans, his tank top on the floor. Flipper slipped off his briefs and the thin rayon shirt he wore, and placed his hands in Jimmy’s jeans and found his penis, almost tucked between his legs. He pulled on feeling it lengthen, and began to jerk him in his sleep that became a half sleep. As Flipper began to tug as his jeans, Jimmy pulled them down and then Flipper tugged them all the way down and pulled him lower down the bed, where he knelt, took Jimmy’s cock and pulled it into his mouth.
When he’d started all this he thought, It would be easier if I was high. Maybe I should have another joint or take something, but it seemed pointless when you were this sleepy. So he just did it. He was strangely pacified, naked and on his knees, sucking hard on Jimmy, slobbering all over his cock while the skinny boy twitched in ecstasy and stifled back moans, trying not to wake Ross. Flipper was greedy for this, and Jimmy moved between fucking his mouth and stroking his hair. Flipper moved onto the bed, pressing his erection against Jimmy so that they both sighed. Their bodies shuffled together, Flipper’s hands gripping Jimmy’s shoulders, and Jimmy’s hands reaching up to hold Flipper’s arms. As their mouths met and their tongues touched, Flipper groaned and exploded across Jimmy’s chest, and slowly, Jimmy turned him over, shuffling onto top of him, breathing hard from his nose, hair sticking up until he groaned, head arched to the ceiling and came in a series of ejaculations that felt like being punched in the stomach lightly, that felt like gradually, gradually, gradually, returning to earth.
They settled together for a few moments before Jimmy, belly slick, with semen, rose and went to the bathroom, returning with a cloth and wiped himself down, handing a cloth to Flipper. Flipper ran the cloth up and down him and lay down beside Jimmy, and the two of them resumed sleep in the dark. He was sated, but not completely, and he looked across the room to Ross who still lay asleep.
It took a while for Ross to realize he was enraged. Rage should have been bigger. Also, rage should never have occurred in the late night. He knew himself well. He may have known other people better. All of his life he had been an eye, and now he realized part of this was due to growing up in a house where no one had asked him to be a mouth. Once his mother had said, reflectively, smoking a cigarette, “You’re a good kid.”
That was strange to him because he knew that. He was always a good kid. Far too good, a bored kid, a disconnected kid, a kid who didn’t even know how to be troublesome. When his mother said this, he knew he sort of hated her, hated that she was sort of stupid, hated that she was ungrateful and untrying and disconnected, hated that she would use that phrase and that tone. She seemed to always be using someone else’s words, someone else’s tone. What should she have said? Why was he so fucking annoyed?
The first time he had smoked pot he began to realize all he had been missing, the parties, the socialization the everything he had been missing being this good kid, and he was trying to take it all down, all these walls he had put up. Even at twenty one he was sure that what he would regret was all the things he didn’t do, not the things he did… which were so few. Everyone thought he was together, and so profound. He thought he was boring.
But when you really believed something, when it was really real to you, how could you turn your back on it? And he had really believed in his morals. Like, by now he felt like he wasn’t straight, but it would have had to take a love like marriage for him to give up this virginity thing. And yet now it seemed old. Everyone around him had entered the sexual world. He heard sighing and fucking on the other side of the doors in his dormitory. Even Macy fooled around, and he was feeling odd now. He remembered the youth pastors and the people on Christian radio saying the more sex you had the more damaged you would be, the more people you were with, the more soiled you became, but he was starting to feel it was just the opposite. For lack of touch, Ross Allan felt himself perishing.
When he woke to the sound of porn and turned in his sleep to see Jimmy stroking himself, he watched avidly. Now and again Jimmy would look to see if he had awakened Ross, but Ross soon realized that the glare of the TV against his glasses made it impossible for Jimmy to see him seeing.
He watched when, in rhythm, Flipper and Jimmy masturbated together and fell into a nervous, aroused sleep when the video was over. He awoke to watch them having sex, and now he realized how jealous he was, how sad for the freedom he didn’t have, for the touch he was afraid of. As he watched them kiss hungrily, bodies melting together, he thought if only he could be like that, do that, be that free. When they grunted in orgasm like the orgasm on the screen, like the orgasms Ross had only had with himself, he felt a loss so keen he could cry.
And now the sex was over, like a business meeting, and he watched Jimmy’s thin naked body, his narrow ass, trot to the bathroom and return. Silently. his two friends wiped down and went to sleep, the TV switching to another movie, and Ross lay thwarted and angry. Like, this was not supposed to end. There should have been tenderness. There should have been openness. What about the fucking revelation? Not just this back to business.
Incongruously or maybe not, he thought of the white candles in the Candomble shop, and the little statue of the white robed old black man with his silver staff. Obatala, maker of heaven and earth. Ross saw himself lighting candles and burning nag champa
Obatala, strong king of Ejigbo
At the trial a silent, tranquil judge.
The king whose every day becomes a feast.
Owner of the brilliant white cloth.
Owner of the chain to the court of heaven,
Be with me now, bring me insight, power, peace.
The prayer came easier than the Our Father, and if that was so, and if these things came easier than what he’d been taught in Catholic school and what his parents had half taught him by sitting him in front of a Christian radio station they never paid attention to, then why did he hang on to whatever he clung to?
There was a strange feeling, almost like defeat that passed through him. There was something he had to pass through, and it was not merely mental. It would require doing a thing, like pushing a great rock. He looked over at his two friends dozing fitfully in the night. They would not save him or press him toward where he must go. He got up and made some coffee and sat on the balcony in the chilling pre morning, smoking. He probably smoked three cigarettes as he watched car and trucks, buses and vans pass by on Sheridan Road, and then something in him switched and he knew it was morning. A new day had come and the old was done, and Ross Allan rose and he got the pot and he took the gummy and he knew he’d be stoned, in a different place, but not a less real one. And he rose and got a beer from the fridge. He reached into his backpack and took out the red and black candle and lit it. He even lit just a pinch of incense. Some prayers had no words. They were just made of actions, and right now he bashfully, though his friends were sleeping, took off his clothes, laying them in a pile. He thought of showering, of washing the pot and funk and the old day away. But the old day had power in it. Chicago Day, the seventy degree beach had power in it. Guadalupe, large and earth colored, rising above them in Humboldt Park had power in her. What had happened in this room had power.
And so, turning of the TV, Ross rose, and there was only the bathroom light and silence in the room, and he looked over the bed where his friends lay, imagining pressing himself between them. The bed was barely big enough for the two of them. That made no sense, so Ross slowly pushed the two beds together, surprised by his new bed’s solidity, then climbed on. Jimmy was against the wall, curled and snoring, but Flipper woke, shaking his head, confused. He blinked in the darkness, and his hand touched bare flesh, shapely flesh. For a very brief moment he understood Ross was here, the beds joined as much a miracle as the continents dividing.
Flipper opened his mouth, but he didn’t speak. He understood, and he longed for it, the tender transformation he had been denied, largely because he didn’t know he wanted it. He slipped out of his briefs and pressed his body against Ross’s, kissing him and feeling the desire mount and the tension drain from them both. This hadn’t been the first time they’d kissed, and the prolonged kiss seemed like a continuation of what began at the church. Their touches were innocent and fumbling, and they did not try to hold down their noise. When Flipper’s tongue found its way between Ross’s thighs, he was embarrassed of the day that had passed, knew he should have showered, but Flipper murmured, as he kissed him and licked him there.
“You taste so sweet. You smell so good.”
Ross sighed and placed the pillow over his face as he gave himself to Flipper’s mouth.
In this new darkness, Ross could sense everything. He could sense Jimmy, waking up and turning on his stomach, Jimmy in his pajama pants and tank top. Jimmy, watching them and not knowing what to make of it, and so he touched Jimmy’s hair and drew his face down and, fearfully, stiffly, Jimmy lowered his head and the curtain of his honey colored hair, and electric passed through Ross as Jimmy’s mouth touched his while Flipper’s mouth pulled on his penis. As his penis thrut into Flipper’s mouth, James Nespres’s tongue flicked with his, and his hand reached up gently, caressing Jimmy’s hair and the back of his neck. His other hand thrust itself into Flipper’s hair and Flipper came up and kissed him, and then all three of them were kissing with a drunk need, and Ross’s hand was going down Jimmy’s back to his narrow little ass, and Jimmy was shaking off his trousers, lightly humping the bed while Ross’s hands ran over him, caressing his ass.
After being so long excluded from the world of sex and pleasure, Ross knew just what to do, after pretending disinterest, after years of being the good person he admitted he loved the strength of Flipper’s body, how his buttocks stood up round and firm. He loved seeing him play football or rugby, seeing his delicate muscles bulge, watching him half undress, the delicate V that went to his sex. He loved the long tall thin, homely sexiness of Jimmy, He loved being loved by them. He moved so that he was between them, not to interrupt them but so that the void they crossed in kissing each other was him, and sometimes he moved out of the way to let them express the tenderness for each other they could not express by themselves. He savored their gentleness, even more gentle than normal, and when they caressed him, when they touched him in a new way, they said, “We got you… We got you, baby...”
When he shuddered with the intensity of Jimmy kissing him down his back and Flipper sucking his nipples, one of them said. “We got you,” and when the sky began to turn grey as the three of them moved frantically, roughly, without gentleness, and Flipper pressed against him, cock to cock and screamed between gritted teeth, Jimmy bit gently down on Ross’s shoulder, and the stiff penis that had played against his ass, entered him, painfully. The explosion of Flipper’s semen and Jimmy’s entry made his eyes fly open, triggered a strange sensation, a small lament, as the virginal Ross Allan disappeared, quaking, in the triple spurt of his own seed up Flipper’s stomach, up his neck, onto his face.
The grey morning was just barely pressing through the heavy curtains, and Ross, so used to being the wise baby of the group, the little Christ child, felt like some old father when he caressed Jimmy’s damp head resting on his breast. Flipper was asleep, his arms about Ross, and Ross said, “Up.
“Up! Up! Up!”
Naked, he pressed himself from the bed and there was a different settled power in him, He walked across the carpet and acknowledged the red and black candle still burning as he opened the curtains onto a grey and rainy morning, and slid open the balcony door, letting in the cooled air of this new day, the day after that strange bit of magic summer. He put on the coffee maker but sipped from the cup of coffee he’d left on the edge of the bureau. He reached for a crushed pack of cigarettes, pulled out one and lit it, sitting at the half open window, legs wide apart, not believing anyone could peer into this darkness and see him, but knowing that if they could they would.
The coffee percolated, and the room smelled of it and cigarettes, of pot and the residue of incense. Vaguely it smelled of sweat and deeper things left in the sheets. Before he came behind him, kneeling and nuzzling his neck, throwing his arms over Ross’s shoulders, he felt Flipper’s presence.
Jimmy was last out of the new bed, though Ross was sure they would all return to it soon. Before they had been on such an urgent journey to Miami, and originally they had planned to be up and at ‘em, on the road by now, supposedly already on the I-65 merging into the road to Indianapolis. But now the rain was falling heavy and grey outside in the the early March weather, and Jimmy was taking a very long, splashy piss. Perhaps the naked urgency was gone because what they had been rushing toward was this, because they all thought it could only happen away from Walter, in the magic of Miami and never knew the magic of Chicago would do.
As Ross finished his cigarette and Flipper who had prepared a joint, took a hit its aroma touched Ross’s nostrils while Jimmy finished pissing in three splashes and hit the flusher. But the rain went on, steadily, though Ross sensed it was nearing its end, and below them cars drove steady on, yellow headlights peering through the rain while Ross took a long hit of the joint Flipper handed to him. Jimmy poured a cup of coffee and joined them, nude in the window, the patterns of rain painting themselves on his slender body, descending to his bush and his dangle, which Ross touched almost reverently, stroked, felt harden.
Jimmy sighed and took the joint Flipper handed him, He took a long inhale and a long, thick exhale of white smoke as he handed it to Ross who shook his head.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Jimmy wondered.
But his voice stopped as, almost carelessly, Ross, holding his penis, took it in his mouth and, mesmerized by its length and growing thickness, sucked on him, his tongue circling the head, flicking on the V, going up and down the shaft. In silence this went on some time until Ross stopped and said, “We go to Miami.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Jimmy said. “We have to…”
But Ross took him again, and this time Jimmy almost moaned like a child starting a tantrum, and as Ross took him, Flipper’s fingers kneaded Ross’s back.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jimmy swore, and Ross’s arms encircled him and Ross pulled him around to stand straight before him, as Flipper pulled Jimmy’s face forward for kisses, and he moaned, caught between four hands, two mouths, and all of these pleasures.
“But we need to talk… oh God! We need to…. Fuck…. We need to—”
One of Ross’s flingers flipped into his ass, piercing him where he’d rarely been touched.
“We need to figure things out and—”
“We’re…” Flipper said, kissing him as the tapping of the rain lessened, “going…”
“To Miami,” Ross continued in the midst of his lovemaking.
And as the three of them, Ross sitting, Flipper and Jimmy standing before and behind, continued making love in the open window of the holiday inn on Sheridan Road, there was nothing else to be said.
END OF CHAPTER FIVE
