Chapter 36: Cracking the Code
The morning broke warm, dry, and clear. It was Sunday, the weather was delightful, and we had the afternoon off. People were in a good mood. When I got to the dining hall for breakfast, the table was already half full. Shmu and Matt entered together shortly thereafter, the latter whistling like a Dwarf on his way to work.
"Well," said Brad to Doug as I put my tray down and sat at the table, "here's the gofer. Maybe he can pick you up something."
"What's up?" I asked.
"It's Doug. He's horny,"
"Oh," agreed Doug moaning into his stack of pancakes, "I got it bad."
"Well, it'll be a sacrifice," I said dramatically, "but anything to help a friend."
"No offense, guy, but you don't got what I need," Doug said plaintively.
"And what would that be?"
"Titties," said Brad. "Dougy want him some titties."
"Dougy want titties," Doug echoed.
"I remember the first time I did a girl," I said. "I was absolutely fascinated by her breasts. Unfortunately, that was pretty much all I was fascinated by. I started poking them to see if I could get a wave interference pattern going. When I suggested seeing how many pennies I could stack up on them, she drew the line."
"You been with a girl?" Doug asked, surprised.
"Yeah, why?"
"I thought you were gay."
I shrugged. "You're straight, right?"
"Oh, yeah," he said.
"But you've been with guys. What's the diff?"
Doug actually blushed, and there was suddenly an uncomfortable silence at the table. I started looking around at faces wondering what was up, but Brad continued and the mood returned to lightheartedness.
"First girl I was ever with was this chick named Tammy. I'm a junior in high school, right? She's a senior, and she gets me over her house and does the 'you want a massage?' thing. I was fucking clueless. The next thing I know, she's bouncing on my dick like there's no tomorrow. I came in about eight seconds."
"I didn't know you had to move," said Steven.
"Huh?"
"I was clueless too. I was fifteen, and I didn't know you had to move. I never read anywhere that you had to move. I just thought you just put it in, and...I don't know...that was it."
The boys laughed. "'Well, son,'" Steve added, imitating, I assumed, his father, "'the daddy puts his penis in the mommy's vagina, and that's where babies come from.' So I put it in, you know? But he never said, 'and then you pump her like a piston.' Definitely an important piece to leave out!" The boys pounded on the table in hysterics.
"And what about the first time you went down on a girl?" Drew added when they were able, again, to catch their breath.
"Now, there's an acquired taste!" Brad said.
"I almost puked the first time," Drew continued. "I actually spit when I came up for air. I was totally grossed out."
"Not me, man," said Doug. "I loved pussy juice from the start."
"My first time was great," said Corey.
"Yeah?" asked Steve, incredulously, "how old were you?"
"Twelve."
"It doesn't count if you're alone, Corey," said Steve, to general laughter.
"I wasn't alone," Corey returned, defensively. "I was with Arlene Mancuso.
She had these great big bazongas. I got her up to my room and I did her."
Everyone had something to say at once, from Doug's insistence that Corey still had his cherry to Drew's mere "Bullshit," to Steve's suggestion that Arlene was a blow-up doll.
"Wait a minute," I said, trying to quiet them down, "wait a minute. I just have one question...." When the uproar subsided and I had the floor, I turned, solemnly, to Corey, and said, in as appalled a voice as I could manage, "'Bazongas?!'"
The table exploded again with laughter and accusation. Corey insisted that he had lost his virginity at twelve while Doug, Brad, Steve, Matt and Drew heaped abuse on him. Finally, Steven hushed everyone to silence.
"So you did it at twelve, huh?" he asked.
"Yeah," declared Corey.
"Did you find her pooty?"
Corey looked at him blankly.
"You know," Steve said, "her pooty. That hard thing inside her vagina about half way in on the bottom - the one that rubs against the bottom of your dick and makes it feel so good?"
"Yeah," said Corey, dismissively. "Of course. I just didn't know what it was called."
"That's because I just made it up, dipwad," said Steven. The boys exploded again in derision. The taunts went on for another minute.
"That's enough," said Dan finally. "If the boy said he lost his cherry at twelve, then he lost his cherry at twelve."
To my shock, the pack backed down. Dan had said it was enough, so it was.
On the way over to the gym after eating, Matt ran up next to me and draped his arm over my shoulders.
"Heya, amigo."
"Howdy," I said. "You're in a good mood this morning, huh? Pleasant night last night?"
"Yeah," he giggled, "pretty pleasant. Listen, wanted to thank you for setting me up with Shmu."
"That asshole! He wasn't supposed to say anything!"
Matt stopped walking, pulling me to a halt next to him.
"He didn't," he said.
"Then how did you know?"
"I'm not stupid, you know."
I looked at his face. He was earnestness incarnate. I smiled.
"No, you're not," I allowed honestly.
"Just pretty."
I laughed. "You're certainly that!"
He started forward again, pulling me along with him. Matt tended to bounce when he walked, Lifting up a little on the balls of his feet as he moved forward. It was like walking next to Tigger. His arm across my shoulders fit comfortably, despite the spring in his step.
"You want to join us tonight?" he asked.
How had I ever gotten myself into a situation where I might actually answer no to a question like that?! Yet I had. My ass was so stretched out from the frolic of the night before that I was seriously considering fasting for a day just as a precaution. And it was still sore from the pummeling of the night before that, though the bruises had already faded to the point that it had ceased to look like sunset over the Pacific. And then there was the question of appropriateness and, I supposed, permission.
"I dunno, Matt," I said. "Let's play it by ear, okay?"
"Okay," he said, and we bounced on a few steps.
"So what's up with Dan?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Something's different," he said. "That thing at breakfast was weird."
My antennae were up instantly. Had Matt noticed it too?
"Weird?"
"Yeah. Don't you think?"
"What did you find weird about it?" I asked.
"Well, not just that he was defending Corey, which was pretty weird in itself."
"What then?"
"I dunno," he said. "There was something about him this morning. It's just...weird."
"Like Adam weird?"
He thought about it for a few steps. "Yeah," he said. "Kinda like that."
He had noticed it.
I spent my morning in the gym in serious work. While the boys took their Sunday practice with their usual grain of salt, I sat in the stands writing furiously in my little green notebook. Dan was different, and the difference was both clinically noticeable and, more importantly, measurable.
I pored back over my notes for instances of where I had transcribed Dan's behaviors from earlier in the summer. Yes. They were different. More importantly - more tellingly - the boys were reacting to him differently. It was subtle, but it was there. I spent an hour and a half in uninterrupted transcription of non-verbal behavioral moves - both Adam's and Dan's, now - into my notes.
By 10:30, I had been hunched over the notebook for so long I had difficulty straightening up. This was usually a good sign for me - it meant I had been productive. But even though I had a growing corpus of data, I was still missing the key to how to interpret it. I had the full five hundred pieces of the five hundred-piece puzzle, and I knew what the picture on the box looked like. What was missing were the edges. I couldn't seem to construct the neat, straight-edged rectangle of outer pieces into which the rest of the puzzle fit.
My back hurt, so to stretch it out, I decided to take a break and walk over to the dorm to retrieve the two large sacks of laundry from Dan and Adam's room. It had become clear to me that the two of them subscribed to the straight male Hamper Theory, in which one actually believes that leaving clothes that you've worn once too often in the hamper for a week somehow makes them magically clean. They weren't going to do their own laundry, assuming, I suppose, that some little fairy would swoop in and do it for them. Walking back to the laundry room in the gym with the two overstuffed bags, I laughed at this thought. They had gotten their wish.
The gym laundry had industrial sized machines. I could do both boys' loads at once. I wound my way through the complex. Down the hall, into the locker room past the bathroom, where a sound stopped me dead in my tracks.
From one of the stalls in the bathroom I heard easy, joyous, unmistakably familiar, muffled hysterical laughter.
When I got back to the stands after throwing the laundry in the machines, Shmu was sitting there, still a little red-cheeked.
"You are a dawg," I said.
"What?!"
"I heard you in there."
"Oh," he said and smiled wickedly.
"You're fucking unreal."
"What?! You say do Matt? I do Matt! Shmu follow orders good."
I laughed.
"You know, you shouldn't have said that about Doug this morning," Shmu said. His seriousness caught me off guard.
"Huh?"
"That he does guys."
"Why not? He did me a couple of times. Everyone knows. It's no big deal.
I said he was straight, didn't I?"
"It is a big deal," Shmu said.
"What, that I blew him? No it isn't. I've blown half the team. Like I said. They all know."
"No, not that you blew him. That you talked about it in front of the team."
"Why? They all know."
"Doesn't matter."
"What?"
"Look," Shmu said, taking a moment to figure out how to proceed, "I know how guys think..."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Get over yourself," he said. "You know how queers think. I know how guys think. Now shut up and learn something." I pursed my lips and stared at him somewhat angrily.
"It doesn't matter who you are, and it doesn't matter what you do. You can be gay, you can be a fucking ax murderer. But when you're with the team, there's an expectation about how you can and can't behave and what you can and can't say."
"The guys joke about doing each other all the time," I said dismissively.
"You're not getting the point, Mark. Listen. They can joke about it. Even you can joke about it with them. But...like there's a difference between joking about a guy having a small dick, and actually telling people that he really does. Does that make sense?"
"Talk more." It was starting to.
"Guys can joke about screwing girls and they can joke about being in love with girls. But you never hear a guy on a team saying that he's really in love - I mean, head over heels in love - with a girl. Not in front of the team. They'll tell you that one-on-one, or with a small group of their friends, but not in front of the whole team. It's not what you talk about when the team is together. It's just a rule."
"So the fact that Doug and I have talked about it in front of other guys doesn't matter?"
"Was it the whole team?"
I thought back. "It was Brad and Adam and Dan, I think."
"They're his friends."
"And the fact that I did Doug with Brad doesn't matter?"
"Nope," he said, "but I'd love to hear about that." I smiled and punched him playfully in the arm.
"I didn't write the rules," Shmu said. "I just know 'em. And rule number one is on a team, you can be gay, you can do gay, but you can't talk about doing gay."
"That's bizarre."
Shmu shrugged. "It's the way it is. Have any of them ever talked seriously about messing around with you when the whole team was together?"
"Yeah," I said, "I really think they have."
"Seriously? Not jokingly?"
I thought back. Hard.
"Actually," I said, "No, I think they haven't. Not seriously."
"There you go, then."
I looked out over the gym. Steven, the reader, was spotting for Corey, whom he'd tormented, on the vault. He had just ripped the kid a new asshole, but now was helping him with a move which, if Corey missed and Steven wasn't there to catch him, could result in serious and irreversible damage. Matt and Adam were joking around together on the parallel bars - the latter having done to me exactly what I had done to the former. Except it took me three weeks to figure out that Adam was setting me up with Dan, and Matt only three days to figure out I was setting him up with Shmu. Who was it who had thought these boys universally shallow and stupid when he first met them? Oh, right. That had been me.
"So what's with all the scribbling?" Shmu had my notebook open in his lap.
"Research."
"Right," he said, scoffing. "What research? How to get fucked by an entire team?"
"I have not been fucked by the entire team," I said indignantly, grabbing the notebook from him. Shmu raised his eyebrows at me. "I have only been fucked by half the team. And honey," I added, doing my best impersonation of Tallulah Bankhead, "I was fabulous." He laughed.
Funny how I just naturally assumed the role of a bottom when I was with him. I had always fancied myself as entirely versatile, matching my sexual practices to the partner I had been with. With Alex I had always topped. With John it had been 60-40, usually depending on his mood. But with Shmu I had only bottomed and when around him, I just naturally fell into the excesses of Bottom Camp.
"I told you about this," I said, returning to seriousness. "It's for my diss. I'm studying power dynamics among men."
"You didn't need to go all the way to the mountains for that," he said, grabbing my crotch playfully. "You got the Shmuster right in your own back yard."
I removed his hand from my crotch as if I found its presence there highly insulting. "I've had the Shmuster in my backyard," I said, haughtily. "Been there, been done by that. Yawn, yawn."
He laughed. "I don't remember any yawning. Yelling? Yes. Yawning? No."
"If we were two different people," I said, "we'd be perfect for each other."
"Yeah," he said somewhat wistfully. I all but saw his hair wave in the breeze as the absurdity of my statement flew over his head.
Would Shmu have been a good model for my research? No. He wasn't an alpha. He was truly charismatic, but not an alpha. He was a great top to be sure, but not an alpha. What was the difference, I wondered, between a Dan or an Adam and him? I reacted to the three of them in similar ways - ways that I never reacted to other men. How curious that was. What did it mean?
Shmu was talking, I realized. He was airing his suspicions that the majority of the team was really gay. Shmu thought everyone was gay. No, that wasn't true. Shmu thought everyone he thought was hot was gay. This was the first step in his adding them to his list of conquests. The bitch of it was that regardless of whether they were or weren't, he could usually manage to hook up with them. It was a gift. I had never known how he did it.
"I can tell you, though," he was saying when I tuned into his words, "my gaydar is going off big time."
"Maybe you should have your pinger adjusted," I said.
"That's what I'm trying to do!" he returned, smiling.
"How does your gaydar work, anyway? I mean, you pick up on guys I never would, and I thought mine was pretty well developed."
I didn't expect an intelligent response. Real tops were never articulate enough to be able to describe things. It made little difference, though. Self-awareness and the ability to articulate were not why they were put on the earth.
"You know how to do it," he said. "Just watch who they're watching."
In one, sudden, searing flash it came to me. He kept talking but I was instantly gone, blown completely out of the universe by my realization.
"Jesus, Mark, are you okay?"
"Huh?"
"You just turned totally white."
"I fucking know how they do it," I said in disbelief.
"What the fuck are you talking about, man?"
"Alphas," I whispered, my throat suddenly bone dry. "I know how to break the code. I know what to look for."