Becoming Andy Hunsinger Page 11

  “I’ve seen you here before. It’s about time we met.”

  We exchanged names and shook hands, and then Dexter explained that he attended Tallahassee Community College. He said he was twenty years old, but to me he looked more like sixteen. Copper-colored freckles peppered his turned-up nose. His shock of yellow hair, pouty lips, and long eyelashes gave him a boyish look I found appealing. He wore a Nik Nik shirt with a pattern of tumbling dice scattered across a Kelly green background, along with a pair of tight-fitting, button-fly Levi 501 jeans.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  I talked about school, my apartment, and my involvement with AGA at the university, all the while taking gulps from my beer. While I rambled on, Dexter sipped from a can of Coke. He listened to my chatter as if my life was utterly fascinating, but when I’d drained my beer and I turned to order another, Dexter touched my forearm.

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  I looked at him and raised my eyebrows.

  Dexter said, “I share an apartment with a straight boy -- I can’t invite you home -- but my folks are out of town for the weekend. Want to go to their place for a while?”

  Do it, idiot.

  His family’s homestead was a single-wide trailer in the outskirts of Havana, a town fifteen miles north of Tallahassee, once famous for growing shade tobacco, a variety used to make fine cigars. We reached the trailer via a red clay road bisecting a pine forest. The nearest neighbor, Dexter told me, was a half-mile away. When we exited my car, a hoot owl’s call was the only sound I heard in the surrounding forest.

  Inside, Dexter flicked on a light. A battered sofa and a plaid Barcalounger faced a console TV. Framed photographs of Travis and his much younger brother, an elfin, carrot-topped boy with a toothy grin, sat atop the TV. The place smelled of cigarettes, but the kitchen was clean and a vase of freshly cut daffodils decorated the dinette table.

  “We can’t use my parents’ bed,” Dexter told me. “I wouldn’t feel right if we did.”

  We made love in his little brother’s room instead, on a double bed with Donald Duck sheets and a Star Wars bedspread. A total bottom, Dexter perched on the mattress on his hands and knees, and then I took him doggie-style. My hips smacked his compact rump each time I thrust. After we cleaned ourselves up, we slept together spoon-style, like sardines in a tin. I wrapped my arm around Dexter’s chest, and then I pressed my hipbones to his supple buttocks. I buried the tip of my nose in his hair -- it smelled like Herbal Essence shampoo, a sweetly fragrant brand popular at the time -- and then I fell asleep listening to him breathe. I slept through the night like I’d been drugged, feeling more contented than I had been in months.

  When I woke in the morning, Dexter’s head lay upon my chest, and one of his legs crossed my shins. His breath swept my skin. I studied his eyebrows and the curve of his nose. His features seemed as delicate as a flower’s. Sunlight spilled into the room through a pair of awning windows. Beyond the screens, a mockingbird tootled and a bushy-tailed squirrel hopped about the limbs of a live oak, looking like a circus acrobat.

  I could stay in this place forever. How I’ve missed another man’s affection.

  “I want to attend pharmacy school,” Dexter told me later that morning, over corn flakes. “It’s clean work and pays well, and sometimes you can snitch quality drugs: Quaaludes, Seconal, and such.”

  That weekend, an LPGA tournament took place at Capital City, and my caddying services weren’t needed. I was free to do as I pleased, so I spent the entire three-day weekend with Dexter. We hung out naked in the trailer, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. We prepared simple meals: beans and weenies, chicken with yellow rice, and bologna sandwiches. We showered together, brushed our teeth together, and watched TV together on the sofa. Every few hours, we’d hit the Donald Duck sheets, and then we’d try new positions: spoon-style, pogo-stick, whatever.

  A gaggle of free-range chickens and a single rooster roamed the trailer’s perimeter. Each morning, we served them breakfast from a feed sack stored under the kitchen sink. The chickens made a pleasant clucking sound while they ambled about the hard-packed earth, nipping at the seeds we’d tossed them.

  Sometimes we sat on Dexter’s concrete door stoop, wearing just our briefs. We smoked cigarettes and savored the shade offered by a towering live oak. Spanish moss beards festooned the oak’s spreading limbs, and the beards swayed when a breeze blew. In late afternoon, crickets chirped and the horizon above the western tree line turned as red as the clay road leading to the highway.

  Sunday afternoon, we pulled on our jeans and shoes, and then we walked through the pine forest, both of us shirtless and holding hands. Pine needles crunched beneath our feet; the air smelled of sap and damp earth. Mockingbirds chirped in the trees and a pilated woodpecker knock-knocked away. We came to a meandering creek; it babbled as it rushed across the surfaces of rocks and fallen tree limbs.

  I turned my gaze to Dexter. Dappled sunlight reflected in his yellow hair. His shoulders were freckled like his nose, and his chest rose and fell with his breathing. I pulled him to me, and then we kissed. Our tongues rubbed and our lips smacked while the creek gurgled and gushed.

  I felt as giddy as a teenager, as weightless as a feather.

  I had always been a city boy -- I’d never spent much time in the countryside -- and now I understood why some people chose to live in such remote spots. I felt as though Dexter and I dwelt in a separate world, in a land where society’s rules didn’t dictate our behaviors, a place of freedom where we could do as we pleased.

  That weekend we did intimate things I’d never tried before.

  I lay face-up on Dexter’s lap, stark naked, on the living room sofa. Using scissors, he trimmed my pubic hair to a wispy crescent. Then he dry-shaved my sac ‘til it was as smooth as a twelve-year-old’s. Shivers ran through me while he dragged the razor over my tender skin.

  On Sunday evening, I tub-bathed Dexter, treating him like a little boy. He soaked in warm water up to his hips, splashing and dripping, and looking oh so cute. I sat tub side, on a stool his mom had used to bathe his little brother, years before. I scrubbed Dexter’s back and freckled shoulders, his limbs and his smooth chest. He stood, and then I soaped his genitals and the cleft between his buttocks. I shampooed his straw-colored hair, cleaned his ears with a washcloth, and then I dried him head to toe with a fluffy towel. It sounds dumb, I know, but our little role-playing game in the bathroom was fun.

  On Sunday morning, when I drove us back to Tallahassee, Dexter held my right hand while I steered with my left. I hadn’t felt so close to anyone since I’d been with Aaron, so many months before. My weekend with Dexter had been more than a sexual encounter -- at least for me -- and now I hated the fact it would come to an end.

  Would we share future weekends? Maybe become more than friends? We had talked of many things: our families, school, career hopes, and our high school days. But we hadn’t talked about meeting another time.

  Go on: ask.

  I squeezed Dexter’s hand.

  “Are you busy next weekend?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Why?”

  “I’d like to see you again, if that’s okay.”

  Dexter pulled his hand away from mine. He rested his forearm on the passenger door’s sill and stared out the window.

  “What is it?” I said. “You don’t like me?”

  He swung his gaze back to mine. After drawing a breath, he moistened his lips. “I wasn’t honest with you about my roommate; he’s actually my boyfriend. He’s a Leon County Deputy Sheriff. He’s out of town for training right now; that’s how come I could spend this weekend with you.”

  I turned my gaze to the windshield. My stomach churned while I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel. I felt like I occupied a free-falling elevator. For a moment, my vision clouded and I honestly thought I might weep.

  Of course he has a boyfriend, stupid. You were dreaming. Guys like him aren’t just ava
ilable; this was a one-shot deal, a weekend trick and nothing more.

  Dexter laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Andy. It wasn’t nice of me to lie, but you’re so cute, and --”

  I shrugged his hand away. Then I pounded the Vega’s dashboard with a fist before I pointed a finger at Dexter’s nose. His emerald eyes didn’t look sexy now, only cagey, and I seethed at the knowledge he had played me for a sucker.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” I said. “In fact, don’t say anything at all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My experience with Dexter -- his casual lying, and his exposure of my deep-seated neediness -- made something crumple inside my head. A pall of self-loathing settled over me, and I quickly embarked on a course of self-abuse. I drank alcohol every night ‘til I felt numb. I took tranquilizers and smoked marijuana. I even quit going to the track to run with Biff Schultz and his roomies, making the dumbest of excuses, time after time, for my nonappearance. I’d already completed my graduation requirements, so I didn’t really care about my school performance; I skipped most of my classes in fact. But my work at Capital City suffered.

  “You look like hell,” Bucky Buchholtz told me on a Sunday morning, when I showed up for work an hour late with a head-pounding hangover. “Go home and take a nap.”

  While I pedaled my bike home, I shook my head. I knew I wasn’t treating myself well, but why take care of myself? Why worry about my future? I was a pitiful excuse for a queer, a guy who couldn’t find a boyfriend to save his life. Who wanted me?

  Nobody, it seemed.

  In the past, I had sometimes fantasized about sadomasochism. I owned a few porn magazines with photos of men wearing leather vests and chaps, some of them restrained and gagged. Stories appeared in the pages of these magazines, tales of bondage, of rough sex and verbal abuse. The material had stirred my curiosity, and now, as I dwelt in the depths of self-hatred, I considered experimenting with S & M.

  How would I feel if I groveled before another man, if he treated me like an animal, and I submitted to his will completely? Maybe a dose of abuse was just what I needed. Maybe I could find a guy who’d treat me like the undesirable faggot I was. Maybe I’d like rough treatment. Why not find out?

  A guy named Ray frequented The Gate. Tall and sinewy, maybe thirty-five, he always wore blue jeans and a leather vest. His buzz-cut hair, dark eyes, and tattooed forearms, gave him an ominous look, one I found intriguing. Word had it he roughed up his tricks, before and during sex. But details were sketchy on just how cruel Ray could be.

  On a Friday night, after I’d guzzled two bottles of Budweiser, I introduced myself to Ray. He sat on a barstool with the soles of his work boots resting on the stringers. He nursed a glass of beer. His Winston cigarettes and plastic lighter sat next to him on the bar. The glow from an illuminated beer sign reflected in dark stubble peppering Ray’s face. His white T-shirt had yellow stains in the armpits, and his blue jeans were ripped open at one knee. When we shook hands, his calloused palm rasped against mine like sandpaper.

  I tried making conversation by talking about school for a minute or two, while Ray listened with a bored expression on his face. Then, when I asked about his work, he answered in a gravelly drawl.

  “I’m assistant foreman at a saw mill in Perry. All day long, the saw blades scream like goddamned banshees. The pinesap stinks, and so do the niggers. A mill’s hot, sweaty work, something a college boy like you wouldn’t understand.”

  My cheeks burned from his insult, but I managed to blurt a response.

  “Look,” I said, “just because I go to school doesn’t mean I’m a pussy.”

  Ray’s lips folded back to reveal his tobacco-stained teeth.

  “All college boys are punks,” he said, “every goddamned one.” He waved a dismissive hand at me. “Why don’t you go talk with one of your Nancy-boy friends? We have nothing more to say to each other.”

  I looked around the bar, licking my lips, and shifting my weight from one foot to the other. The possibility of returning alone to my empty apartment made me feel depressed and anxious. I needed a man’s attentions, his flesh, sweat, and semen, more than ever. If I wasn’t good enough for a redneck who worked at a sawmill, who was I good enough for?

  I swung my gaze back to Ray.

  “Take me home with you,” I said.

  He looked at me and crinkled his forehead. “What did you say?”

  “I said I want you to take me home with you -- to Perry.”

  “What for?”

  “Sex,” I said. “Any kind you want.”

  Ray made a face. “What’s your name again?”

  “Andy.”

  “You wouldn’t like the treatment I’d dole out, Andy. Believe me: you’ll do yourself a favor if you find someone else.”

  Undeterred by Ray’s comment, I continued.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s have some fun, you and me.”

  Ray looked at his beer while he drummed his fingers on the bar.

  “I know you think I’m a punk,” I said, “but I’m really not. You’ll see.”

  Ray returned his gaze to me. “Will I now?”

  I nodded.

  He lit a cigarette, drew on the filter. Then he blew a stream of smoke. After leaning toward me, he whispered in my ear. “I’m warning you, College Boy: if you come to Perry, I’ll make you cry. That’s a promise.”

  A shiver ran through me, but I felt reckless and desperate. Now I had to close the deal with Ray, or I’d totally lose respect for myself. Who cared if I collected a few bruises? A night with Ray would certainly trump jerking off alone in my bed.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Ray’s rusty pickup truck sat before a boarded-up, shotgun cottage on a residential side street, two blocks from The Gate. The Ford’s windshield was cracked, its tires slightly flat. The dome light didn’t illuminate when we crawled into the cab, but a pale glow from a nearby streetlamp allowed me to see things. The truck’s cab stank of burnt tobacco, stale beer, and body odor. Detritus littered the floorboard: crushed beer and soda cans, empty cigarette boxes, potato chip bags, candy bar wrappers, empty condom packages, and dirty ass wipes.

  Ray turned the starter three times before the engine finally turned over. After tossing his cigarette butt into the street, he turned and grabbed the hem of my T-shirt.

  “Take this off.”

  I looked at Ray and crinkled my forehead. “Why?”

  Ray slapped my cheek, not hard, but enough to make it sting. Then he pointed at my nose. “’Cause I told you to. Tonight, you’ll do whatever I say, that’s how things work. Either do it or get out.”

  Nodding, I rubbed the side of my face with the flat of my hand. Then I pulled off my shirt and tossed it onto the dashboard. The night air felt cool on my bare chest. Ray reached for my nipple; he pinched it between his thumbnail and index finger.

  I flinched from the pain.

  “You are kind of cute,” Ray said. “We’ll have us some fun at my place.”

  I stared out the windshield and didn’t say anything. Already I felt a slight uneasiness. Exactly what did “fun” mean to Ray?

  Ray shifted gears, and then we drove in silence through the streets of Tallahassee, past the warehouses on West Gaines Street, then past our monolithic state Capitol building on South Monroe Street. When we reached a stoplight on the Apalachee Parkway, Ray turned to me; he hooked a finger in the waistband of my jeans.

  “Pull these down to your knees,” he said.

  I looked at Ray and made a face.

  “Pull what down?”

  “Your britches, dumbass. I thought all you college boys were smart.”

  “Why should I pull my pants down? Why here?”

  “’Cause I want to play with your goodies, that’s why.”

  I glanced here and there. At two AM, traffic on the Parkway was nonexistent, so we had our privacy.

  Just do it, chickenshit. Submit.

  I popped the bu
tton at my waist, ran down my zipper. After lifting my ass, I shoved my jeans to my knees. My genitals bulged in my white briefs. Looking into my lap, Ray flicked my crotch with a fingertip.

  “Lose them jockeys, too: down to your knees.”

  My cheeks burned and my hands shook while I eased the briefs south. My bare ass stuck to the chilly vinyl seat. The stoplight changed to green, and then Ray accelerated. Wind rushed through the cab, making me shiver anew. Ray reached his calloused hand between my legs while I squirmed in the car seat. My heart thumped and my pulse raced. Already, things with Ray seemed a bit nutty and downright lewd. Who knew what lay in store?

  By now, we had left Tallahassee’s city limits. We drove through the tiny village of Capps. Then, after we passed the exit to U. S. 19, the road turned toward the southeast. Ray continued squeezing and fingering my equipment. A half-moon had risen; its weak glow silvered pecan groves we passed. The land rolled and the Ford’s headlights cast two cones of yellow light. Ray was a man of few words, and we didn’t say much of anything during the trip to Perry. My pants and briefs remained at my knees, and Ray’s hand remained in my crotch, stroking and squeezing my tender flesh. Despite my unease about what lay ahead, I’d decided I would do whatever Ray told me I must, no matter how humiliating or painful it might be.

  Tonight, I told myself, is all about submission to Ray’s will. He’s in control and you’re not.

  Perry wasn’t a big town: a shopping center with a Winn Dixie, a McDonald’s, a couple of single-story motels, a liquor bar, and two churches, one Baptist, the other Methodist. The town’s only traffic light blinked at the Highway 98 intersection. A sour stench from a local paper mill wafted through the truck’s cab. About a mile south of town, Ray turned off the highway, onto a rutted dirt road. The Ford rocked and pitched, the chassis squeaked and groaned.

  Our destination was a one-story cottage with a covered front porch and a pitched tin roof, surrounded by slash pines and scrub oaks. No grass or shrubs grew in the yard, only weeds. Ray shifted into park, turned off the engine, and killed the headlights. I glanced here and there. Ray, it seemed, had no neighbors. Besides the house, I couldn’t see anything but blackness wherever I looked. When I reached for my shirt, Ray slapped my hand.