I can't imagine anyone who chances upon this little story finding it offensive, so I guess I'll ditch the disclaimer.
I would like to hear from readers, however. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to do with this story, and a little feedback might provide a clue. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? I'm open to suggestions, provided they do not involve interspecies activities, infantilism, or physical pain.
One of my old English teachers told me that she never knew what she meant until she'd said what she said. That's either really profound or utterly silly. I'll let y'all be the judge.
pijito52@aol.com
When Gay Nerds Attack©
Savants
We christened him Otto last Friday night when, after bong-hits and WOW in his basement bedroom, Jimmy Lawrence gathered us close to lay witness to a miracle.
"I can suck myself," Jimmy said. It was a non-sequitur, of course, and being pretty much wasted, Diego, Crispin, and I just looked at each other and shrugged. We took great pride in not making sense. If nothing really mattered, we reasoned, nobody got hurt.
"America's Got Talent!" Jimmy declared, waving to an imaginary crowd. "So eat your heart out, Susan Boyle."
"What the fuck are you babbling about?" Crispin asked, pulling himself up from his comfortable stupor.
"Yeah, what the fuck?" said Diego, who suffers from echolalia.
Jimmy explained: "The other day in A.P. Bio we're talking about savants -- you know, those blind retards that can play Chopin even though they can't wipe their own asses? Dr. Lupis says something cryptic like, "God giveth and He taketh away." Then Golden Boy winks at Melanie Deaton, whispers: "I think He forgot about us." Then that kid they call Larry the Laxer tells G.B. he can write backwards, like in a mirror, and the floodgates open. Tiffany-Amber Schwartz confesses that when she listens to Conor Oberst, she sees landscapes. Tae-Ho Park, he hasn't said anything since 6th grade, and all of a sudden, he's chanting: "3.1415926535 . . . " Says he's the Supreme Pi-Master. He's got it down to 76 places. Turns out the whole class is fucking savants."
"Shit, Jimmy, I can add numbers in my head. I could probably beat your goddamn TI-84 Plus. What's the biggie?" Crispin said, never the one to be undone.
"I can rap in Spanish," added Diego.
"Fellas: Tiffany-Amber is confused. She's not actually a savant. She's just got a little case of synaesthesia. Like that British guy who tastes bacon fat whenever he says his girlfriend's name." This was my contribution to the discourse, since having webbed toes on my left foot didn't qualify as memorable, and in this room, at least, neither did my stratospheric PSAT score nor the merely inescapable truth that I'm both nerd and faggot, an endangered species if ever there was one, except with these guys, who have known me all my life and somehow let it slide.
"You know everything, Remy. That should get you to the second round." The guys like to grow big off me. I don't care.
Jimmy was not about to be distracted. "News flash, news flash! I can suck myself. I can suck my own dick. You guys know you can't even come close." Crispin and Diego both look at me to see how I intend to play off a gambit unlike any we've heard before. I can't think of a single snappy rejoinder.
"You think I'm kidding?" Jimmy pushed, seemingly all-in on the flop.
Crispin finally pushed back. "No, Jimmy. We don't think you're kidding. We think you're disgusting."
"The technical term is auto-fellatio," Jimmy continued. "It's not disgusting. It's amazing. It's just not really marketable."
"Auto," Crispin intoned. "Automobile. Automatic. Autonomic."
"Otto. Otto von Bismark. Otto Preminger. You Otto be in pictures." Diego is brilliant, but orthographically challenged.
"Otto Fellatio. There's one for the movie." Crispin was obsessed with porn monikers. "He's gonna work with Gregory Pecker and Jenna Thalia."
"Dudes. You're not listening."
And precisely at this moment I knew it was going to happen, that here in the same room where we once played with Transformers, he was going to show us how he could suck his own dick. I knew as well that I was going to be fascinated, that I would be taking the image home with me to replay at midnight. And I knew that Jimmy Lawrence would forever thereafter be known as Otto -- a wink and a nod to certain truths we have always imagined belonged only to us.
Mobius Strip
I'll give Jimmy credit: the moment is so expertly choreographed that he shuts us up, silences the jokes he had to know we'd be making.
Just like that, he gets naked. Of course we've all seen him naked before, but always in context, etiquette and fear negating any possibility of psychic distress. I mean, I love the unidentified naked boys of my dreams (wood sprites and running backs in equal measure) -- something tells me this goes with being gay -- but I have always turned away from the nakedness of my three best friends. They're my friends, after all, and to stare with desire would be a deal-killer. Simply wrong. Like eating your pet or torching a church. For the moment, however, I have clearance, and my eyes can seal the moment in amber.
Jimmy is skinny like Jesus, all bones and ridges and sinew. His pale skin glows in the half-light. The wine-stain birthmark on his upper thigh looks like Italy unattached from the rest of Europe. For the moment, his dick -- the one he intends to ingest -- remains limp and blameless, but his brown nipples are hard as pencil erasers. I have no idea what the others are thinking, but even though nothing has happened yet, I'm starting to sweat and my balls have shrunk back into the inguinal canal. It's all too weird. Words have fled to higher ground.
Jimmy sighs and stretches like a swimmer. Crispin twitches, transfixed. Diego looks like he wants to go home. Me, I'm touching myself. I'm leaking in the still heat.
He plants his butt on his desk chair and spreads his legs. His dick starts to swell on its own. Gravity grabs his circumcised glans and it falls like a pink plum on a fragile branch over the chair's edge. Jimmy's got a man-sized dick, an honest seven inches, but he's not a freak, not even the biggest among us. And knowing what I do about vectors, angles, and the frankly unattainable, I'm not seeing it.
Suddenly, Jimmy has bent over himself. His ribs appear to have folded like lawn chairs. He grabs the underside of his knees and pulls his legs up towards his chest. He's alone in his reverie. Jimmy is willing time to stop.
His tongue darts out, flits and flickers an inch above his dickhead, a nectar-seeking hummingbird. Crispin laughs in the background, but I don't think he finds any of this particularly funny. Jimmy's tongue attacks again, and this time it seems as if his dick rises another inch to meet it. He tautens his tongue and jackhammers it into the pee-hole. This time, his lips descend around the glans, clamp for a few seconds, then slowly pull back. They descend again, taking in another inch. He holds this position for an agonizing instant, then releases. His dick is slimy with saliva and pre-cum. A strand hangs obscenely from his chin. Right now, there is nobody else in the room with Jimmy.
He bobs effortlessly, alternating speeds. I understand now that this is how he pleasures himself, and I wonder for an instant what might happen to our species if we could all administer such exquisite blow jobs to ourselves. I know for a fact I wouldn't get any homework done.
"I'm cumming," Jimmy says a minute later. He sits up, grabs his glistening dick, pumps, squeezes, and fires one, two three, four ropy globs onto the floor at his feet. "Fuck," he says. "Fuck," he wheezes. The bigger the explosion, the less there is to say.
"Oh my God, Jimmy," says Crispin. "That was nasty. Heinous."
"Sick," adds the human echo. "That's just. That's just wrong."
No, I want to tell them. Not wrong, but beautiful. Magnificent. I want to say, "Jimmy, that was so hot!" I want to offer him my own dick, let him work his magic. Then I remember that I'm gay and they're not -- despite what we've all just witnessed.
"We have proof," I say, hoping I sound unimpressed. "You are officially a savant, Jimmy. I mean, Otto."
Walls
Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Mrs. Margolis is a good teacher, but she's a victim of age and a class full of underachieving lint-pickers. She's in her late fifties, a grandmother already, and despite her best efforts to engage us, we reject her -- not aggressively, as in "you suck, bitch," but by ignoring her. That wants it torn down. She thinks that because we are the smart kids, we'll follow her to whatever practiced epiphanies she can draw out of this poem about two New Hampshire dudes rebuilding a fence. We sit there, determined to outlast her, to force her to make every one of her questions rhetorical and therefore meaningless. She deserves better, I think, so I raise my hand. Crispin and Diego shake their heads almost imperceptibly. No, Remy. This is why they hate us. The Triplets -- their own best argument for cloning -- sigh with epic disdain at my faux pas. No After-Prom invitation for you, dork, they're telling me.
"Yes, Remy."
"I'm wondering where we'd be without walls," I say.
"Go on."
"Where would I hang my paintings? Imagine living in a house without walls. How awkward would that be?"
"So you agree, Remy: good fences do make good neighbors?" This happens more than it should, me and Mrs. Margolis speed dating. But I can't help it. I have an inquiring mind. I need to know.
"Not exactly. I just mean that we'd all feel pretty naked if we knocked down the walls between us." I can hear a little burble of laughter: the word "naked" has that effect.
"Metaphorically, you mean?" Mrs. Margolis presses the issue.
"Pretty much. But think about it: shouldn't we be grateful that we can step behind a wall to change clothes?" There's a buzz behind me as the sleepy crowd comes to life. Three rows over, Crispin is smiling, no doubt imagining the Triplets naked without a wall to stand behind.
"Oh my God, Remy. You're so literal," says Jessica Triplet.
"Mrs. Margolis, Remy just wants to perv things up," adds Brittany Triplet.
"Inez, dear, I think I can handle this." Brittany's real name is Inez. Her parents couldn't have known.
Lindsay Triplet, directly behind me, kicks the back of my desk. "Faggot," I hear, though it could have been forget it.
"Mrs. Margolis. What would we see if we tore down your walls? And the Triplets'?" I'm feeling it, digging that familiar hole and jumping right in. "Face it. We all build walls, thick walls out of lies. We really don't want anyone to see us naked."
That word again. More titters -- a far funnier word if you ask me.
"I don't want to see you naked, Remy, that's for sure." Darwin Pyle, shooting over the zone from the back of the room. Darwin Pyle, a hemorrhoid in sweatpants, should not talk, but then again, he's been the butt and belly of jokes from the moment he waddled into Ms. Summers' class at Bryant Elementary, 190 pounds of fifth grader.
"Mirror, Darwin. Mirror," is all I can think of at the moment, knowing that smart as he is, he won't know what I'm getting at. This boy just needs a bigger wall than most.
"Gentlemen. This has probably gone far enough. I see your point, Remy. Now, let's look at this last image: like an old stone savage armed. What is Frost suggesting here?" Mrs. Margolis has always been good with the band-aids.
Later, in the hall between classes, Diego calls me puto maricón and tells me that he doesn't like my chances for a long life. Somehow I understand that this is his way of saying that he has my back.
Still Life With Virgin
In case you haven't already guessed, I'm a virgin. Given my social standing and my contrarian urges, this hardly qualifies as news. And like most 16 year-old virgins, I consider my virginity a curse, a crime against my humanity -- just not such a compelling injustice that I'm willing to come down from the cross to rectify matters.
I do masturbate, however. Incessantly. I beat my meat. I spank the monkey. I bash the bishop. I polish the knob. I take my dick on wild adventures. Oh, the places we've been. Oh, the boys we've been with. Oh, the things that we've done together. Behind locked doors in a room -- with walls -- so plain and so sexless the Holy Father himself would be bored.
I've been rude. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Michael Remy St. Pierre Delorme IV. A lot of name for a little fella to carry around, I suppose, but one should never blame parents for having great expectations. I'm a junior at Caulfield High, one of those suburban compounds renowned for producing Merit Scholars, Nobel Laureates, and windfalls for local cosmetic surgeons. 3200 of America's best and brightest attend Caulfield, and I'm probably smarter than 3199 of them. Of course it matters not to me: I told Diego once that I'd sacrifice 20 IQ points if I could dunk a basketball, and all he said was, "you'd still be Remy, you'd still be annoying, you'd still be too fucking smart for your own good, and you'd still be a butt pirate."
What I didn't tell Diego was that I'd chuck 40 more points just to have a boyfriend, and I'd drop out of school altogether for a shot at being in love.
I'm looking in the mirror and I sort of like what I see. Late to puberty, I am definitely not the chiseled Adonis of Nifty-porn. I'm 5' 8" and I weigh 123 pounds; if you went looking for a six-pack, you'd come up about four cans short. And, no, I don't have "bedroom eyes that could melt the polar ice cap." But I am, well, clean and pretty. Androgynous. My mother is a portrait artist and she tells me I have perfect ears, an observation that hasn't exactly made me the talk of the town. And she's always yammering about how this golden light burns through my dark eyes. Fuck it all, I've been staring at myself for years, and I have no idea what I really look like. A suburban gypsy, perhaps. A sad-eyed clown. Narcissus taking it all in. Something like that.
I'm looking in the mirror and I sort of like what I see. There's some girl in me, yes, in my pale skin, my long eyelashes, my hairless legs, and my perpetually bruised smile. There's some girl in the vase of flowers on the dresser behind me and there's some girl in the books that fill the shelves. But girls don't have boners like the one I'm growing now.
And I really like my dick, soft or hard. I know everything about it. I've memorized its contours with my fingers, traced the veins that line the shaft, discovered those special pressure points that drive it wild. I know exactly what it likes to do. Hey everybody, say hello to my little friend!
It's actually quite long and surprisingly heavy -- and it looks even longer on my seventh grader's body. At the moment, in the fullness of desire, it arcs out into space like a vaulter's pole. I clench my glutes and make it bob. I swivel my hips and it propellers. I know I can make myself cum without touching it, but that strikes me as a cold communion.
My foreskin won't retract without a little assistance. I peel back the white sheath to reveal an enormous bing-cherry going maraschino, pulsating and slick with desire. It's so sensitive I can barely touch it without wincing. It's so sensitive I have to touch it or I'll scream. I think I've come to understand why men will walk through fire in search of the perfect orgasm, and why, when we get there, we wonder if this is what it's like to die.
I close my eyes for a few seconds and I am transported. A face appears, a boy's face, a familiar composite of every cute blond TV kid who ever went through puberty in primetime, except that this boy is utterly naked and comically well-endowed. He presses up against me, kisses me, drills his tongue into my tonsils. He spins me around, grabs my ass, and spreads my cheeks. I'm gonna fuck you hard, he whispers from behind, my little anime darling suddenly morphing into Kiefer Sutherland. He's rubbing three-day stubble against my nape and purring like a leopard. Then I feel his fifty dollar foot-long tearing through my love canal, and I think to myself: what a wonderful world! I'm being fucked and I'm loving it.
When I open my eyes, I realize that Kiefer's gone, and that it's just two well-lubed fingers doing the job. While my left hand is busy massaging my sphincter, my right is pumping away. I pull my foreskin all the way back, my exposed knob ripening to magenta as I tease the frenulum; I take the return voyage slowly, pausing to absorb every little bump along the way. I close my eyes again, hoping the boy comes back, but it's too late, I'm too far gone. My tummy rumbles, my legs quiver, my balls retract, and as I release about six thick seismic blasts, I nearly pass out. I breathe deeply, trying to regain balance. A glob of cum has puddled in the pucker of foreskin bunched over the head of my shrinking dick. The world is getting small again, and for an instant I think I'm going to cry. I can't understand why I feel so sad after a such a glorious wank.
Note: That's it for now. There'll be more, I suppose, if you want it and I can believe in it.