Michael Tolliver Lives (7 page)

He gazed at me solemnly for a moment. “You’re cool with it, then?”

“I’m new to it,” I said. “Let’s put it that way.”

“We could talk about it, if you want.”

I shook my head. “I’ll spare you the after-school special. I’m sure that gets old.”

“Oh, man,” said Jake.

“The thing is,” I offered, “I’m sort of an old dog. And you’re sort of a new trick.”

Jake smiled at my inadvertent pun. “Do you mind if I ask how you knew?”

I decided to banish the kilt queen once and for all. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “It had nothing to do with how you look, if that’s what you mean.”

“For real?”

I nodded. “You’re a handsome guy from where I sit.”

Jake was blushing furiously now, a tide of scarlet surging beneath his five-o’clock shadow. He plunged a fork into his burrito. “Can we go to your place, then?”

I nodded. “As long as you understand—”

“You won’t have to do anything to
me,
all right?”

“That wasn’t what I—”

“And don’t worry,” he added. “I’ll keep my jeans on. I don’t like that thing any more than you do.”

Jake followed me back to Noe Hill in his car. Once inside the house—and the proper lighting was established—I retrieved my hammered-copper pot tray from the drawer by the sofa. As I rolled a joint, Jake just stood there, bouncing on his heels and socking his fist into his palm like an anxious delinquent. He reminded me of myself, over thirty years earlier, all bluster and bluff, when I first went home with a stranger.

“Sit down,” I said, patting the sofa.

Jake sat next to me, but not especially close.

I lit the joint and held it out. He took it and toked expertly.

“Did you get stoned in Tulsa?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? I worked at Wal-Mart.”

“Does that mean yes or no?”

“It means what the fuck
else
is there to do.”

He passed the joint back to me, and I dragged on it fiercely, hoping it would give me the nerve to face the uncharted territory ahead. I took courage from the memory of a hot night in Chicago when I smoked a doobie on Navy Pier, then came back to the Drake and whacked off to straight porn on Spectravision and got off on it fine, especially with poppers, because sex, I was learning, is a place where all of us go, regardless of gender or sexuality. No matter where we begin, it’s just one big steamy locker room in the end.

Which is the scary part, of course.

“You wanna take off your boots?” I asked.

“That’s okay, buddy, I’m cool.” Jake was sitting forward, elbows on his knees, rocking a little as he gazed at me sideways. “You wanna kick back?” he asked.

I took a last drag on the joint, then stubbed it out in my little Roycroft ashtray. I scooched back into the nubby cotton bolster as Jake knelt between my legs and got to work with quiet efficiency, still wearing his jeans and a loose gray T-shirt. He popped the top button of my 501s, mercifully liberating my belly, but didn’t pull my jeans off right away, just fingered me studiously through the denim as if fitting my dick for a custom suit. When I started to get hard, he looked up. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“What does it look like?” I said.

He grinned and popped the other five buttons.

I said the first thing that came to mind: “You remind me a lot of a scoutmaster I used to have.”

“Oh, yeah? Did you guys do stuff like this?”

“Oh, hell, no,” I said. “He was straight as they come. He took us to the Everglades once, and I saw him in his boxer shorts. I never got over it.”

I felt the brush of Jake’s beard against my thigh as his tongue swabbed its way along my dick.
This is not his first time,
I thought. When he was finally free to speak, he gazed up at me intently.

“You got any?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Boxer shorts,” he explained.

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“Want me to wear ’em?”

“Sure.”

He hopped to his feet. “Where?”

“Straight back and to the left,” I said. “Second drawer from the top.”

He was gone less than a minute. When he returned he stood in the doorway for a moment, legs apart, to give me the full scoutmaster effect.

“Very nice,” I said.

It wasn’t a faithful reproduction of Mr. Ragsdale, but it was close enough.

The sex was pretty much as advertised. Mostly he went down on me, and that was nice, I have to say. He was a good kisser, too, though he seemed less interested in that. I felt kind of selfish, to tell you the truth, just lying back like a sultan, so I moved my leg up into those boxer shorts, thinking that a little pressure there might be appreciated. My leg was promptly redirected, so I returned to my passive state and took the rest of my cues from Jake. He wanted to see me come, he said, so I jerked off while he worked my nips with the efficiency of a seasoned safecracker. I left my load, as directed, on the front of his Nature Conservancy T-shirt. “All riiiight,” he growled. “Good one, buddy.”

We lay there side by side, limbs overlapping, until my breathing had subsided and I felt called upon to break the silence.

“Do people always ask you—?”

“—what my name used to be?”

I laughed. “Guess they do.”

“I never tell them,” he said.

“Why? Was it Myrtle or something?”

It was a calculated risk, but he did crack a smile. “It’s nothing to do with the name.”

“You just don’t know that person anymore.”

“Right,” he said. “Close enough.”

“I hear you,” I said.

“You ever need a hand, by the way?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by this.

“You said you were a gardener, right?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Well, if you need help…I’m really into horticulture.”

“Great.”

“I grew up on a farm. I don’t mind a little work.”

“I’ll remember that,” I told him. My usual practice was to hire one or more of the Mexican guys hustling for day labor down on Cesar Chavez, but it was like buying a pig in a poke, as my mother used to say. Lots of the guys are incredibly hardworking and sweet, but others can be falling-down drunk or homophobic or both. I don’t speak a bit of Spanish, but the word
maricón
has a way of leaping out at you, believe me. I’ve heard it so often on the job, you’d think it was a species of plant. Who the hell needs that?

Jake reached into his jeans and handed me a crumpled card with his cell-phone number. The card was khaki-colored and
JAKE GREENLEAF
was written in dark-green letters intertwined with ivy. Below, in smaller letters, it said: New Man.

I thought that was cool and told him so.

By mutual choice, Jake and I never played again, but several weeks later I asked him to help me with a job near Buena Vista Park. He was all I’d hoped he’d be: dependable, cheerful, and not too chatty on the job. Best of all, he seemed to enjoy tackling the tougher stuff—digging out roots, say, or hauling flagstones, or working in the rain. Heavy labor was apparently a kind of fulfillment to Jake, a necessary stop on his path to completion—if not completion itself. I could hand him the nastiest job in the world and feel almost noble about it. Ours was a match made in gardening heaven.

One day at lunch, when we were both eating yogurt in a client’s backyard, I noticed how the hair on my arms had grown and realized in a moment of shivery solidarity that Jake and I were probably
both
shooting testosterone. We’d never really talked about his pharmaceutical requirements, but this seemed like a logical opening, so I showed him my lushly foliated forearms and told him what had caused them.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It’ll do that.”

“It’s amazing stuff,” I said. “It really boosted my spirits…
and
my energy.”

He nodded. “Same here.”

“I worry sometimes about prostate cancer, but…” I didn’t pursue this thought since it wasn’t an issue for him, I presumed, and I was wary of destroying our cozy commonality. “Everything’s got its risks, I guess.”

Another nod. “That’s why I’m against surgery.”

I thought he meant surgery in general, which puzzled me.

“You know,” he said. “The operation. The addadictomy.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is that what it’s called?”

He grinned. “That’s what
I
call it, anyway.”

It took me a few more seconds to get it. “Oh, fuck,” I said, laughing. “Addadictomy.”

Jake looked pleased with himself. “A little tranny humor,” he said.

I’d never heard him use that term to describe himself, so I was emboldened to press further. “Have you always felt like a gay man?”

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ve always felt male. And I’ve always wanted to be with men.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.

Jake lobbed his yogurt can into a trash barrel like a kid shooting hoops. “I don’t feel very gay most of the time.”

It wasn’t hard to grasp the alienation of a guy who wants to chase dick without having one himself. Jake had spent most of his life feeling betrayed by his anatomy, but even now that he’d relocated to Queersville he was still too queer for the queers.
He just needs a nice girl,
I thought, reminding myself of my mother when she learned I was gay. But it was true. Men are hung up on visuals, as Shawna had recently observed, but women give weight to the heart and the mind when measuring attraction. If Jake identified as a butch lesbian—or even as a straight man—some woman would find reason to love him.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” I told him.

Three weeks later, when Anna was recuperating from her stroke, that meeting finally occurred. I took Jake by St. Sebastian’s Hospital one day after work and introduced him to my former landlady. She was thrilled to have company beyond her regulars, and I could tell that she saw in Jake a potential protégé. Jake, in turn, found a sort of spiritual grandmother, someone who understood him without effort or condescension. He would visit on his own after that, bringing her chocolate and magazines, then just sitting by her bed while she read. “He doesn’t have much to say,” Anna once told me, “but there’s a lovely little light in there.”

At that point Anna was just another tenant at 28 Barbary Lane, having sold the building in the early nineties to a Hong Kong investor. When her stroke made it clear that she could no longer manage that precipitous climb, it was Jake who proposed a solution. There was a vacancy in his building, he told her, a sunny garden apartment surrounded by level terrain. His own place was upstairs, so he could lend her a hand whenever she needed it. Anna accepted this invitation but only if Jake would agree to be paid for his services. She had a decent nest egg from the sale of the building, and she needed assistance from
someone,
so why shouldn’t it be Jake? She knew he needed the money, and he already felt like family.

She got a good deal more family than she bargained for. Jake’s flatmates, an investment counselor and a teacher at the Harvey Milk School, were also transgendered folk—MTFs like Anna—and they regarded their new downstairs tenant with something akin to reverence. Anna, after all, had affirmed her womanhood well before either one of them was born, so it was almost like having an ancestor around—or so they once told me.

I was invited to a cocktail party in the upstairs flat shortly after Anna took up residence. There were several dozen trannies in the room, hovering around her like acolytes. I couldn’t help remembering that Anna had struck me as the rarest of birds all those years ago, yet here she was now, just one among the many. She had never aspired to being ordinary, of course, but it must have been awfully nice to have a little company.

7

Footnotes to a Feeling

E
very six weeks or so Ben takes off for an afternoon of hunting and gathering at one of the local bathhouses. He invariably tells me this a day or so before, since he wants me to know he’s not sneaking around, and I do my best to receive the news as casually as he delivers it, since I want him to know that I’m cool with it. Such is the nature of our open relationship (modified plan), and so far it’s working. It’s a tricky little dance sometimes, but it’s preferable to the perils of endless monogamy or constant whoring.

I’ve seen too many male couples who have either neutered each other with enforced exclusivity or opened the relationship so wide that they turn into quarreling roommates and make their own sex life superfluous. In either case, romance dies on the spot. We don’t want that to happen. We’ve chosen to walk the middle road of full disclosure (minus details) and primary consideration for the feelings of the other. For the moment, that means no frolicking with mutual acquaintances and no sleeping over anywhere and no bringing guys back to the house at any time of the day. Our bodies may be shared from time to time, but our bed is just for us, the temple of our California King–sized love.

The first time Ben went to the tubs in Berkeley I drove down to the one in San Jose to show my solidarity with our plan, but this lame little tit-for-tat proved unsatisfying. I wasn’t even horny at the time, and my morbid preoccupation with Ben and some nameless beast across the bay turned my lone encounter into a lackluster foursome. I was done in half an hour and ended up next to the snack machines, boring some poor guy half to death with tales of my happy May-September marriage.

Since then, I’m more likely to be found cavorting with guys via my DVD on the occasional afternoons when Ben’s out playing. That’s fine with me. When it comes to sex, I’m happy to receive the occasional windfall, but I just don’t have the spirit for the hunt anymore. It’s enough to know that Ben will call as soon as he’s done, proposing plans for the evening and downplaying his fun. “Boy,” he’ll say, “they must’ve been having a special on little dicks,” and I’ll laugh at that and love him for it, whether it’s true or not, because, at the end of the day, I’ll have another eight hours of holding him in my arms.