Just below eighth street I tipped
into a Greek diner and sat on a stool near the cash register.
It was almost empty except for the cook, the counter man, and
a woman who looked like she hadn't washed in a long time. She
mumbled a lot and ran her fingers through her hair as the
counter man worked on her trying to pick her up. Finally he
brought me some coffee and the piece of pie I'd asked for
then returned to the woman. Halfway through my meal the door
swung open and this deaf mute walks in and leans against the
counter a couple of seats from me. He uttered a series of
squeaks and grunts and flashed me a smile. Something clicked
in my head, I mean, he was intense and oddly sexy with a
muscular body covered in scrapes and a few bruises. He looked
like he just walked out of some waterfront in an old queer
french novel. He managed to order a burger to go and as the
counter man went in the back to place the order he leaned
over the counter and lifted the plastic lid of the danish
case and slipped one inside his filthy shirt. He winked at me
as he speared a second danish and dropped it down his
neckline, then he walked over extended his hand and I shook
it. Something was clicking somewhere. When I shook his hand
he made an odd little gesture with his middle finger against
my palm and winked again. There was an air of desperation and
possible violence around him like a rank perfume. And that
was what suddenly became sexy to me. I tried to understand
this sensation, and why the remote edge of violence attracts
me to a guy. I associate with certain gestures or body
language or scars or other physical characteristics an entire
flood of memories and fictions and mythologies. It's
something in the blue-ink tattoos or coal-scratched rubbings
made in prison cells or in delinquent basement parties. Maybe
it's the sense that he could easily and dispassionately
murder someone or rob a liquor store or a small roadside gas
station or bang some salesmen in the head at a highway
reststop and steal his automobile; it's something about the
sense of violence carried as a distancing tool to break down
the organised world. It's the weird freedom in his failure to
recognise the manufactured code of rules. The violence that
floats like static electricity that completely annihilates
the possibility of future or security; I'm attracted to
living like that, moment to moment, with very little piling
up of information, breaking the windows of cause and
response. Beyond all this it's also what happens when
violence hangs above the road to the sexual act, that gets
subverted within the series of small kissing motions at the
base of my dick or across the underside of my balls. The
sweetness of the sad lips of that criminal face lowering
itself around my dick and the quiet sucking motion that I
guide him into. It is not just that violence fades into
sweetness; it's looking at the flesh of the body and
recognising that it is a restraint that keeps the blood
inside the form; where the blood of the body creates a
pressure so that it would spray out in every direction if it
were not for the skin holding it back; it's sensing the
history of that body and the temporariness of it all. I
understand that his body and mind have no understanding of
the proscriptions of this society's values; that time is lost
to him except for progressions of gestures that attempt to
satiate hungers of various sorts. When I engage with a guy
like this I am laying open a trust, illusory or otherwise,
that can strip open all the body's desires, and for a brief
moment of living we let ourselves get lost.
He followed me across the street into the sixth
avenue subway, down two flights of stairs, nobody around but
one passenger running for a train down a faraway staircase in
the gloom. I slowed up and was in between station platforms
when he grabbed me and pulled me close. There was something
silly about it but I didn't resist because it was hot too. He
pulled open his pants revealing more scrapes on his muscular
legs and his prick was growing hard and he formed the
soundless words: I like you. His enormous hands pulled apart
my shirt and slid around my chest and under my arms and
pulled my shirt back over my shoulders, his grizzled face
burrowing into my neck. The earth has a volume, my brain has
a volume, and I can't turn it down; I can't shut it off, but
it's moments like this that I sure know how to swim inside
it. He's going into a slow motion crouch, his hands moving
around rapidly like animated birds. As my dick is beginning
to slide into his mouth I realise he's trying to pick my back
pocket. I pulled his hands away and lifted them to my mouth
where I sucked on his fingers. He looked up still blowing me
trying to read my eyes like a bulletin. My eyes were blank.
He slowly pulled his hands away from my mouth and eased them
back towards my pockets. We both understood each other. I
locked onto his hands again and threaded my fingers through
his and made fists and started fucking his face more
violently. I didn't know if he was armed and I was trying to
figure out my exit. On the platform below I could hear my
train approaching from the distance. It was almost painful
the way he twisted his fingers till I let go and his hands
insistently went to my pockets; he was starting to get rough.
I leaned over and kissed the top of his head and thrust my
knee forward sudden and sharp catching him in the chest,
sending him backwards down a couple of stairs, that startled
mouth gaping and those eyes opening wide, enough time to pull
my pants closed and rush down the steps three at a time to
the train whose doors had just begun to open. I hopped on
with him behind me bellowing and the train doors shut with
him on the other side, fingers trying to press between to
pull them apart, rage colouring his face. He never got in and
I turned and slumped into a seat and realised the car was
filled with sleeping winos. Christmas eve and I'm on a train
full of drunks heading toward another future*