The Unzipping of Perry

"The Unzipping of Perry"

by

Timothy Stillman

Perry awoke that morning with this sentence running trippingly through his mind, "You're a weak sister, mister." He awoke laughing in his dorm room. Summer was full out and green was everywhere. It was early and the sun was just getting up. There was a fly in his room. Buzzing about his head. He remembered the Mad magazine send up of "Psycho" in which the end panel shows Norman Bates' mother's stuffed corpse being turned around in her chair in the basement, and it's Jack Webb--ten four, Sgt. Friday--with crossed eyes, in a dress, with a fly buzzing around his head. Which made Perry laugh even harder. Out loud. Holding nothing in. Hysterical. Which made him think of the song that was big for about a minute and a half some years prior, "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha Ho Ho He He." Which really brought him to convulsions. Perry was of youth and the summer early June. He was naked in bed and seductive and comely. Because he was a horntoad and he was loved and lusted after and he did everything right.

He was tall, gangly, had dark hair a bit long, a fresh face, a fresh mouth, creamy complexion, a regulation six incher, but a damn fine looking one, balls a little bit bigger than you might think on such a thin boy, he did not have a Southern accent like the other hayseeds around here, though he had been born 10 miles from this college and had lived there all his life. He was proudly bisexual (though leaning more to homosexual, still kidding himself a bit about it though.) He always had a hard on. He had a hard on now. He hoped he did not grow heavy. He worried that at age 20 he would be saying goodbye to Lynn and Carter and Chris and Merry who would somehow or other stay young. Because he was also a boy/man wrapped up in himself and feared the years making the package of himself undone. So because he could get sad as hell too sometimes, he flipped on his bedside light, and played with his dick for a while. He loved how perfectly it had been manufactured. Loved the slit of it and the heft of it, the veins in the shaft. He loved the growing of it. The stages it had gone through. The delight when he started to be able to make a little clear cum liquid of it. The time he noticed, in the locked bathroom, as he lay, naked, on the soft bath mat, that a bit of fuzz was growing above it.. He loved how it could do perfectly marvelous things just by his willing it to. He did it now. Hands off. Just like a fakir making a rope dance in the air, twirling up into the hot noon day sun. It made him laugh.

He was in love with himself. He was sheened in perspiration, because he had turned the central air off in his room. He had the rectangular window at the foot of his bed all the way open. He smelled the alfalfa and the onion grass and the new mown hay though there was no new mown hay around this cow college to smell. He pinched his little tush. He raised himself up and felt the heat of his hips. Felt the tiny nipples on his chest. Thought himself a lucky boy a lucky man now and shamrocks all but gloried in his green as diamond grass eyes. He reveled in himself. He was his own home. He felt his legs with his hands and from inside the legs themselves. They were downy with brown hair. He diddled his ass and smelled his finger afterwards. He liked the smell of musk. He liked the smell of himself. He had introduced so many boys to sex, with his shrug, his deferentialness, his gentleness, his seeming not to care, his willingness to okay if you want, I'll jack you off, no, sigh, I don't mind, always saving himself for dead last because it was fun seeing himself do this to other boys as they took all of him in their eyes, thinking they could trap him, even more fun than their doing it to him, from his perspective, when they took even more of him in their eyes, like a blazing sunburst of exponential power.

He wished that fly would quit buzzing around his head. He wished he was in love. He tried as hard as he could sometimes. He wished he was not so beautiful. There was an epic poem in him and that poem was to be written by him some day if he could ever stop being such a horntoad, and he laughed at the image that brought to mind. He wished everyone could see him butt naked. He was just such a cool drink of water, such a tall lad with an epicure that was in the family jewels, but right now he was getting tired of that damned fly, buzz buzz, irritant, thought of the Mad magazine drawing of Jack Webb as Mother Bates and started laughing again.

He laughed so hard that it went straight into his stomach and abdomen and his dick just bounced like a baby in a buckboard going ninety miles an hour on a rocky country road. He loved to laugh. He would do anything for it. He would set stink bombs in his friends' houses and he would tip up a pail of water on top of doors for his friends to be doused with when they came through. They laughed with him, and if they didn't, he was not their friend anymore. And everybody wanted to be friends with Perry. Because he knew how to have sex. Because he knew the pleasure portals and how to open them.

He was not clumsy like he found everyone else to be. He was erect hard ready for action at any second of the time or day. He loved the feel of flesh on flesh. He loved holding another boy and caressing him and playing with him and making music with his mouth on the boy's stomach which would tickle the organ of said boy with feather kisses and tongue licks and gentle little dreams come true, as Perry loved boys. He loved the sound of them the sight of them the feel of them he loved those little pump handles they had that reminded him of his days on the farm and he loved to pump those wells dry. Perry remembered and he remembered well. He was jacking off now. He felt the counterweight in his balls. Felt the laughter leave him, stirring away. He felt always serious during sex, even during private j/o sessions. He was moaning now, softly. He was kissing his thin shoulders. He was proffering his good looking talented clever bold ingenious penis and groin into the air. He loved summer and was glad to be young in it like a blue bottle fly in a glass jar, that was filled with the essence of first time, for Perry always and only went for first timers, no repeat action for him. He was not an opportunist. He was an equal opportunity employer. And if that meant a little work for himself and a little awkwardness for the other person, then he would help them over it. He would prepare them for all their tomorrows.

He was an attentive lover. He was a skilled and gifted lover. He had a mouth like honey and he could kiss to distraction. He was a web of sex, a box of happiness, a divining rod that always brought out the best in others, especially when he and the others were unclothed. And for a psych major, a real rarity, he had an imagination. He could spin the frightened lonely dreams of other boys out of them, he wanted them to be of success, not frustrated sadness. He knew what the old unrepentant dreams were, with their only giving him the slightest clues, he could dream them happy, he could celebrate the candles in them that needed to be anointed and needed to be snuffed out at the same time, because he wanted their first time sex memories and dreams to be of him alone, because he didn't want them hung on tenterhooks about that boy back in grade school or high school they were salivating over who would not give them the time of day or break their clock face either, stopping them in time. For that was the cruelest of all. Indifference.

Perry knew this, and if he looked like a young Dennis Weaver and if he had an infectious laugh, and if he wore a leather hide fringed jacket (kind of his trademark, like a Superman suit would be a trademark of the Man of Steel) and if he wore jeans tight to show his basket, and if he could make boys look into his eyes and get lost in the summer of them, then he would do so. Perry was a sad memory buster. Perry hated loneliness in others. He hated when people got hurt and he hated the people who caused hurt. So bizarre for a psych major, everything is always the other person's own damned fault and all that bullshit that just ain't necessarily so. Perry bucked himself up and down now. The summer morning was dawning red as a rash in the sky, and he felt his dick move tenderly as though it was alive and had a will of his own, in his hand. He spat on his right fingers and rubbed them on his shaft. He wanted to do this outside on the quad. He wanted a love in.

He wanted to show that although he almost never made out with boys who were not in his estimation and therefore the estimation of everyone else in the world who had of course sprung from his forehead (he was a psych major after all) worthy, he was in love with all boys, even the ones he wouldn't be caught dead with, but he was always nice to them, always talked to them after class or on campus or something, nothing much, a nod, a word or two, and they would smile radiantly because he had. Not that he was a superstar singer or a TV heartthrob or anything, though his resemblance to some of them was noted by him in his mirror and by others telling him so. Perry was so sexual now, all pores open and tingling, and his body felt like a molded glove was holding the entirety of him, as he stroked his balls and rubbed his dick, and he said the sex words, the magic words, as the back of his head dug deeper into the thin little pillow, as he reached for a pillow underneath it, also thin, and put it under his ass, which set the whole package up so well, which entertained that he was making a porno film, for some reason, it brought that image to mind, and he gloried in the feeling, the dry warmth of it. He jerked his head from side to side. He was a gathering all to himself. He was his own crowd. Not that he did not need others, for he did. Another slam at the psych creed--you need no one other than you. Okay Ace, if that's true, send all your friends packing, go to the highest mountain in the world away from everything, be alone all your damned days, and just grok on yourself forever more, as you need no one but you. More bullshit.

Perry was distributed and made with character, and his mouth opened and he whispered the name of a boy, though he refused to tell himself which one, and he spread his legs and became his own hourglass spider crawling up on the belly of love with crossed eyes and in a dress and looking like Jack Webb, and that did it, he laughed again, he lost concentration, he stopped bucking, and he just lay on the bed silly and foolish and happy beyond words. His dick shrank only a little, and he was still a sexual being, and sexual beings are in rut all the time. He could jack off, have sex, what?, four five times a day if he could muster the free time, if he could find the right partners dosey do. He was a glass boy that everybody saw their own dreams in and he was himself and he was definite, he was not solely in other people's minds and not in his own as well. He was a person with definitions and being and likes and dislikes he was not shy about making known, and if the other person didn't like it, well, sport, there's the door, see you around.

Perry never led anyone on. Never came on to anyone. Was always polite, engaging. He was only himself. He turned others down if they weren't right for him, as has anyone the right to do, kindly though, and if they got all bent out of shape about it, it was their problem. He sat on the side of the bed now, his penis straight out. He wiggled it without touching it. He drifted his fingers through his brown light pubic hair. He admired his bare chest and his pink tits and the way his belly descended so swan gracefully so eloquently into his package. He was part shadow and part red sunlight out the window and part light from his dim bedside table. He ached for sex. He craved it. He once had sex in the school library in one of the glass enclosed reading rooms on the second floor, Harry wanting to, pleading, begging, and Perry saying okay if you want, so sweat.

And Perry really put the pedal to the metal that afternoon and when he and Harry were finished doing the deed, they both looked up and found five or six other students hanging onto the outside of the glass walls of the room, like those Garfield cats in the back of car windows, held there on their bellies by suction cups. They applauded. Harry was distressed beyond words. Dressed as best he could with fumbly fingers, got his jeans on, forgot to zip up, got his shirt half on, left his shoes and socks behind and beat a retreat out of there as the students on his way patted him on his back and said "good show." Harry later left school. Health problems someone said. But that day lingered in Perry's mind like only one other annoying thing before it. There in the reading room, next to the wooden table and chairs. There on the blue nubby carpeting. In the over heated room of the over heated library. And Perry and Harry growing there in that almost breathless space of them and around them as though they were two hot house sexual flowers, blooming, ready to bursting. It was a lovely memory for a boy who did not need memories. It comforted Perry when he always knew now was what counted and nothing more.

But Perry reveled in the whole thing. He had never been so sexual. He was sanded well. He looked like Pinocchio might have looked had he been 20 and turned into a real boy. Perry was so sad about boys who melted wrong. By that he meant their faces could have been handsome had they not melted too much on the left side, always doomed to go through life, some of them like tragic clowns when they could have been as successful in amore and joie de vivre as was he. When the students looked at Perry in the reading room, after the exit stage left of Harry who everyone laughed at and who was laughed off campus (about which Perry felt very badly indeed; he honestly had not thought that far in advance, he was a psych major after all, whatever happens is everyone else's fault, not being paranoid or mixing one sentence psych textbook canards or anything, you had to be on the inside to understand all this stuff, like Perry was) he dressed slowly, like a stripper in reverse. The light was blond. The back wall of the room was wood paneled. The boys and girls were impressed that he could still be sporting a boner. Their eyes were riveted. Perry entered into their dreams, and in himself and later on, once in a group of two, later in singles, he had had sex with everyone of them.

One boy told him it was like communing, like praying. Harry had said that before Perry had made him that fateful day in the library. But in all fairness, Harry had said he wanted to try it there, hoped someone saw him, thought it would a wonderful rebellion against a screwed up life and strict Christer parents. Perry talked with him a few days after the incident. Harry had been in his room, trying vainly to study, when Perry knocked on the door, Harry didn't invite him in, Perry just walked in. Harry sat on his chair, Harry in blue overshirt and jeans and heavy socks and work boots, as though trying to make himself more manly, the work boots especially, Perry had not noticed him wearing the scuffed heavy things before, at his desk, kind of hiding his face. Perry sat on Harry's bed. Harry's roommate had moved out because he knew now beyond all doubt that Harry was a perv. It was lucky Harry had some health problems, in a way it was lucky, and had to leave school shortly afterward.

Harry wouldn't talk to Perry that day in the room. Perry was silent. He looked at the concrete, cold floor. Harry attempted to read his text, finally gave up, slammed the book shut. Harry after a long time, afternoon leaving, shadows getting longer, said every word a bomb of slow seeping adoration and pain, "I loved it Perry. I loved you. I loved people watching. I just freaked out at the end. I think I saw them watching before you did. I loved sucking you off. I loved the way your dick and my mouth made these little wet soaking sounds. I remember thinking I wish they could have heard that. It was the greatest time in my life. I was in a glass cage of the reading room and I was scared to death, but it was the greatest sweetest time of my life."

Perry remembered all this now, this early summer morning, that cold winter day last year. The damned fly had started it somehow. He tried to get back his laughter and humor but found it now strangely lacking. He hated it when he was serious, hated it when he had to think, for he never knew where that might take him. His dick was still hard and he stroked it, felt the strong warm hardness of it. He thought of Harry, nice Harry, with his small dick and his high schoolish choirboy face, the shyness of him, the way he cried into Perry's shoulder when they were lying still, after grappling on the floor of the reading room, the way Harry clung to Perry for dear life, and Perry knew it was no show, no act for Harry of the red hair and the freckle dusted face, and the body that smelled of summer farm hay.

The way Harry had kissed Perry's creamy though somewhat gaunt and high cheekboned face, the way Harry allowed Perry to remove both their clothes, and for another boy, another anybody, to finally finally see Harry's dick, and all dreams commingled in one as Perry leaned over and supped on Harry's hard on, and held its accordion tense giving body lengthening and shortening in Perry's mouth, bending and moving, as Perry pushed it into itself just a bit and then pulled it longer just a tiny bit, and full of love and desire and sex, and the inner purity that was Harry, but that final meeting of the boys in Harry's room a few days later, that final day of them, there was never another day of them, would not have been except Perry felt a bit sorry that Harry had brought this on himself, though certainly not guilty about anything he had done. When Perry was through, he moved on. But gave Harry this added break. Would have broken the cardinal rule and would have let Harry have sex with him that afternoon again if the boy had wanted.

"I knew there might be a crowd," Harry said. "Sex chemistry draws people like ozone in the air. I know you knew there would be too. I freaked after it was over, but I drank all your cum, and I loved it and I love you Perry. I'm sorry I hurt you, Perry. I'm sorry I humiliated you. If I did. I just love you."

This last a husky whisper, an unmeant whisper, Perry knew, because he knew that Harry did not love him. Harry might think he did, but Perry knew better. Everyone always falls in love with the first time. Perry had when he was 10 and the high school boy had come under his seductive powers. And afterwards had left Perry alone, saddening Perry immensely, making him feel lonely and powerless and like he had fallen into an abyss, but Perry at that age was as springy as his cock after he had been swimming, when in the summer hot bathroom, he would peel his trunks off, find his little water logged peter mashed and seemingly bloodless, white as a ghost a sheet white, his little balls smaller and wrinkled, and pulling off the trunks was like peeling skin off himself, his abdomen whiter than Casper the Friendly Ghost, but as soon as he was starkers in the bathroom, he sometimes fondling and sometimes not, saw his penis take on life again. IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE! He watched it magically resurrect itself from a little crooked splint of cartilage, as it grew itself back into shape, presto changeo, as it got its regular brown coloring back in it from the wet and damp of chlorinated water and the swim trunks that clung like sex after its all over and you can't get rid of it no matter how hard you try. Like Harry. That would be Harry's problem all his life. Not Perry's.

He realized now that the boy's name he had whispered, moaned, groaned a few moments ago as he had been pulling his dick had been Harry's. Being seen by the crowd. Giving the campus something to buzz over and they buzzed over it a long time, making Harry stay in his room and leave in the middle of one stormy rainy windblown dark midnight, never to be heard from again. It only made Perry more popular than ever. That's how his life had always been, would always be. Him taking pity and all. And Perry unaware that he had been thinking about him off and on since then and now. It was like they had been through a war together, though that was a stupid analogy, for both (key word, both) had loved being observed, Perry getting his dick creamed by this lovely boy with the big startled little boy eyes, who thought he, himself, was so unlovely, and that final afternoon Harry had been excited, flushed, though his words were hard to come by, somewhat drab, confused, stumbling, because Harry had said or Perry had discerned, that that sex time of theirs was forever the bench mark for Harry and he would never equal it, forget totally about his surpassing it. Perry had made a memory for Harry, that with the distance of time, would be a very beautiful one, and Perry had given Harry in effect away to all the other six or so students who had watched, mouths agape, silent, motionless, and it had not been awful or embarrassing for anyone. What Harry had thought was embarrassment was actually liberation, and Harry seemed to think it so, that final time, that final talk with Perry. Perry, being Perry, helped him see it. He had made Harry publicly sexual and with the best looking kindest most gentle boy on campus. The arrow had gone just where Harry had wanted it.

Before other's eyes, Perry, in their safe little glass cage, had caressed Harry's legs, held each one at a time, observed each leg intently, held Harry's precious little cock, and kissed it like God blessing his prime saint, had made love to Harry for everyone to see, and though Perry had indeed not noticed the crowd, (or had he?) had not felt the inordinate intake of the breath of them and the breath of the reading room sucked out and on hold, he had known someone might be watching, why else had Harry chosen such a public place and a place walled on three sides by windows? What else could the idea have been? Perry just wished Harry had been brave enough to try it with them, or someone, and perhaps he had tried it with someone now. Maybe he had saved Harry's life. Made him realize his own self esteem. That was what psychologists were meant to do, wasn't it?

Perry was perfect. It was not his fault others were not and had such trouble with life. He said often that he had not made a mistake since fifth grade, and everyone believed him, and that he was bi and made it with both sexes, because he was himself and knitted into knowing exactly the right thing to say, exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right moment, he was given dispensation for the gay part by pretty much everyone. It was after all Perry and that made it okay.

Perry walked to the open window of red purple sky and green green summer and he was a part of it, felt a slight hot breeze on him, and for a moment, he thought that perhaps Harry had sat him up, not to be laughed at, but to use Perry as a status symbol--though Perry disallowed that, he had been used once and only once in his life. He would not be laughed at, because no one laughed at him after that high school kid he had seduced, who Perry had phoned a few nights later, logy with infatuation and lust, and the high school kid had said with a smirky voice "give me a break, you twerp, get lost" and had hung up the phone, not slammed the receiver, not disconnected abruptly, but just the phone placed on the receiver almost gently, as though Perry was the receiver.

The fly was buzzing around him now. Frantically buzzing. A big fly. Seemed to have green wings. Watch it, don't hit the fly, it might be Al Hedison, Perry thought, getting the joke accurate when everyone else had gotten it wrong. He put his hand on the window ledge and stuck his head out into the hot humid air. There was a grass lawn of deep redolent green in front of him, one story below, still dewy from the departing night, that went to the street across from which was the field house and the gym. He rubbed himself. He wished he could have group sex again. He considered the reading room thing group sex.

He wished he had known what it was like for each person then to see him, and to see Harry, and though Perry later went down the list of the observers and had each of them, breaking his tradition of only going for the most beautiful boys and girls, cause if truth were told, two of the six were real dogs, but it had been erotic with each of them, even the most unlovely, it had all counted for him in a different way than before, because Perry was remembering how it was with him and Harry in front of their eyes. He imagined that each person carried the two boys' reflections in their eyes, at least in their memories, and each one saw them differently there in the glass cubicle, and they saw, not Perry alone, or Perry and themselves, not even Perry when he was making it with two boys at once, no, they saw Perry and Harry, lost in their own land. Perry had not been grandstanding. Harry had. Perry had let him. Because Perry knew. Harry had slipped past the barriers somehow. This troubled Perry now and he wished he had not thought of it this way. He had to discipline his mind more.

Perry was not in the glass cubicle anymore by himself. He had shared himself. Like he had shared himself with that high schooler he seduced, or had it been the other way round? The bulky football player boy who had sucked Perry's little weenie and made it pop, and Perry had slung his little boy arms around the kid who had a name though Perry couldn't remember it right now, but he had cried out the bigger boy's first name, and was so inordinately happy as he tried to hold onto him, tried to get the boy to go to sleep with him there on the park grass that summer night, when they risked being found out, but the older boy had squirted on Perry's face, the cum on Perry's right eyebrow, a line of it on Perry's right cheek, and the older boy had licked it off as Perry had closed his green shamrock eyes so tightly, and felt that heavy thick hot lascivious tongue on his face, as the boy's heavier longer penis had rubbed against Perry's thin ribbed chest and he wanted the boy to eat him, to devour him, to take him in from the summer heat and the itchy grass, and make him safe and secure and loved, and he said I love you and then he phoned him a few nights later, after waiting for the boy to call him (from that point on, Perry made sure it was the reverse) but the boy wouldn't have anything to do with him, and that was the last mistake Perry had made.

He stroked himself now to completion. He pushed his abdomen out and he rubbed his butt with one hand, he rubbed one hand on his penis and let it when it came do it by itself, the penis shooting around crazily, dizzily, the cum thick and juicy going all over the place, on Perry's well developed legs, on the glass, on the floor, on the wall, like a Gatling gun fired without anyone afterward holding it as it shot off round after round, like in "The Wild Bunch" whose tag line was "When the west was drenched in blood." When Perry was drenched in cum. His balls clenched. His legs. His butt. He came so powerfully. He remembered the high schooler. He remembered how good he felt for a time. Then the void. To be filled over and over again, he knew, successfully. He was a psych major after all.

He remembered Harry and the glass walls. He had broken his cardinal psychology major rule--don't think about it, if it hurts, don't think about it, and Perry had held to that rule hard and fast. He leaned his tired body against the window frame. He was out of breath. His balls hurt. He spread his legs and let the cum run down his thighs. He breathed hard, like summer coming for a fast run then off into the distance, in the season's final game and it was over for good for another year. His lungs breathed in hard and fast and deep. He gasped for breath. It was like he was old and bent and worn out inside. First time that had happened. He got a charley horse in his left leg. He grasped it and hobbled to the bed fell on it and massaged his leg. It happened sometimes when he masturbated extremely hard. But never when he was with partners. It would have been embarrassing. Perry when around anyone else was always in charge, in control.

Perry had a great imagination, though he was not one for thinking. After the pain went away, didn't last too long anyway, he lay covered with sweat, on his back, on his narrow bed. The fly had followed him. Buzzed Perry's face, like a low flying plane. Perry felt the tracks of sperm on the bed covering, sperm that was still dripping out of his cock and from the line of it on his thighs. He hated that high schooler. He hated that somehow or other Harry had invaded his inviolate world. Perry had always been a loner who had given out treats, because he was kind, because he was generous, and he truly was. But now as he closed his eyes, and listened to his dick deflate, he thought he had made some mistakes, though he wasn't sure exactly what, and he should be sure, with Harry, and with that damned high schooler who must have had a name but Perry couldn't remember it still. It bothered him. The fly flew around him. Like it was bottled up in a little glass cubicle with Perry. Hey, don't kill that fly, it might be Harry.....something, some name, can't remember, Perry thought drowsily, the heat getting to him, gently soothing him to sleep.

When he woke, he knew, he would forget about Harry and the high schooler and he would swat the fly whoever it was, and if that didn't work, Perry thought, shrugging himself into oblivion, he would check his abnormal psych text book. Maybe it would have a one liner to fit whatever vague problems all this was suddenly causing him. Cover the problems, whatever they were, with a clever four or five words, easy to tag and forget, wrap the forgotten memories in clothes of invisibility, and toss the thing overboard in the deepest recesses of time and memory gone, never to be thought of again. Perry slept. His dick though small again wiggled. It had a dream in mind for him. The dick got bigger. If a dick could smile, this one did. It got to work. For it loved him so and would always do right by him. It was Perry's after all.

There was only the lazy buzz of the fly that Perry heard now only in his dreams. The droning sleepy sound of it. As it landed on the pillow beside Perry's face, and appeared to drowse as well. The room felt close, stifling, hot. The glass walls, Perry's dream said, bringing the whole thing up again, can be broken, just double your fist and hit them, hit them hard, now and now! Smash it through so you can breathe! Breathe! Expand your lungs and shout for someone to HELP YOU ESCAPE!!!

And an hour or so later, the sun shining in hard yellow hot through his window, Perry, true to his word, forgot the whole thing.

the end