They say these are like opinions because everybody has one, but Stevie’s was so eloquent as to be a point of fact. More than that, it was the art he built his life around, at least as far as I was concerned. He used to get dressed up every now and then for any and every reason, but he almost always went out on a limb on Friday afternoons, so when I came home from work he’d greet me like some barefoot Chippendale in tuxedo pants and bowtie collar, or a bristly, pneumatic hunk out of Tom of Finland; now and then he’d show up at the door in hot pink deep-cleavage spandex tanktop-tights, with or without a crinoline tutu. But whatever seriously grandiose sort of costume Stevie did on any particular day, he never liked to hide his chest.

Stevie’s chest was sculpted like a young god’s, curved in graceful planetary arches that rose embracing bridges crossing mountains, milk-white arabesques of blue-veined marble set between shoulders of monumental granite, tapered to a waist I could easily have held if I had had three hands, rippling like a school of fish in a tidal wave or like a dozen quivering loaves of fresh-baked pudding. His slim hips seemed to fade away from there, which made no sense at all atop his tree-trunk legs, yet there he was: cool and hot, chiseled and cuddly, firm and gentle, sweet and severe, perfectly proportioned like a 1940s cartoon of a he-man: he was my yab-yum, my juicy Lucy, my holy heavenly hunk-o’-honey, and I was the man he loved.

Not to say I didn’t love him back, I did, and not just for his physical magnificence; but we always had different agendas. In between those Dawn Redwood lower limbs he tucked not just a dick as big — to borrow part of Lenny Bruce’s famous mot — as a baby’s arm, but also, right behind, a pair of cheeks like boneless fresh-dressed roasting turkeys. Oh, my: first I think of him as art, then elements of Earth, then in the original noir humorist’s imagery, then in metaphors of food…. And even if he was never quite simply human to me, food was certainly one of his advertised delights. Those evenings he greeted me in the least elementary drag he also set before me the greatest alimentary delights, which he had prepared, I came to think, in order to watch with fascinated horror the gustatory pleasures I expressed. He brought forth from the kitchen large roasts studded with rare fruits and spices, pungent birds and fish and cutlets grilled crisp on the outside and soft on the in, toothsome grains and roots paired up as if for marriage with amendments made from their own juices, exotic pastel custards, sculpted vegetables intertwined with the opposites they attracted, buttered sauces savory and sweet, pastries puffed and tarts tatin’d; and while I ate he sat before me with his great, bare chest exposed, both massive, muscled breasts tripling the space they occupied whenever he raised his thigh-like arms to sip the steaming bowls of unadulterated, filtered, re-evaporated water he held to his face cupped in his pair of plate-sized hands, watching me through the fog he turned into a misty curtain every time he exhaled.

Food was a stratagem for Stevie, as costume was another, and as his magnificent physique may have even been a third. I’d put nothing past him. And why would anyone as sumptuous as he go to all these troubles for a live-in boyfriend when the troubles themselves would warrant their own worth? Because, I think, of what he really cared for.

Dinner over — or my dinner, anyway, since it has always been hard for me to believe he actually survived on the hot water which was all I ever saw him consume — and the food preparations somehow miraculously dispensed with even before I had come home, Stevie left the dishes for some hour when I was asleep or away, and came to sit in my lap. “Came to sit in my lap” is all the truth of it, but wholly apart from the disparity in our sizes — Stevie towered over me when we both stood, was broad enough to shield me altogether from the sun, and weighed nearly twice what I did — the phrase doesn’t begin to convey the dimensions of the fable. When Stevie saw or decided I had finished with my meal he had a slow, salacious way of taking his steam bowl in a single hand and lowering it toward the table surface as if it were a Stanley Kubrick spaceship moving with balletic precision toward its orbiting satellite port: the cream-white cup of buffalo china, or the near-translucent bone of Royal Dalton, or the painted and filigreed low-fired clay of some contemporary artist whose name would be traded for Picasso’s in a quick year’s time, would start to dance in the embrace of his palm-sized fingers, and the plants along the high-boy, decanters in the china cabinet, the glittering crystal chandelier, the dust motes its light shone upon, and the very air itself became the background against which the piece of pottery moved hypnotic. But as I started to imagine I could even hear its music, the cup would softly come to rest on the jacquard table cloth, and only then might I become aware that I had watched its whole descent, entranced, transfixed, mesmerized, while Stevie watched my captive eyes.

Eyes to eyes Stevie then stood up, transported as if in a single fluid motion from his chair. Considering his size, I found his composure and grace such marvels to behold there was never a moment in all the time I knew Stevie when I did not think he was well aware of the impression he could not help but make on me. The music I had thought so recently belonged to the floating, dancing, landing spacecraft of his bowl now seemed to occupy his own very specific movements. If he was wearing anything at all above his waist — the bowtie collar, the plunging tanktop, a delicately gaudy rhinestone choker — he next removed that, leading the length of one sinuous arm with a few more rapidly sinuous fingers all waving like leaves on a lengthy stalk of kelp in a languid Pacific lagoon; then he brought the isolated item down to the tabletop as if to land through water, where, effectively, it died. Whatever the piece of costume was it shone on him; and then, apart from Stevie, became just another discarded trifle no one had ever needed. His hands commanded everything as he seemed to let them rove across the landscape of his chest, or fluff his feathered hair, or pluck a nonexistent nothing from before my vacant vision, but they never roved without a destination known and plotted to its last coordinate, and then they moved with just that same sort of certainty to whatever belt or thread of elastic held his bottom clothing up.

I never saw a pair of pants descend as slowly as Stevie’s pants descended. It didn’t matter if he was letting the crisp black slacks from his tuxedo slide so their bold satin stripe crinkled as it caught the sun or candle light, or losing tights he had to peel away like Beulah skinning a summer grape, or pushing his legs free from tattered jeans with holes he could have stepped through, or dropping his drawers like a nighttime bathing suit in the moonshine. First those huge hands and every finger on them would begin to wander as if they were blind and hungry and searching for his waist. Like his hands, of course, his fingers were on a highly coordinated mission from which no force on God’s green Earth could make them stray; yet always they seemed to have to seek that lean line out; always they seemed to have to make their ways from some far distant, civilized place across the mountains of his abs, down past the sultry valleys of his folded flesh, over his rivers and through his woods to the vast potential of his hot, humid, cloth-covered wilderness, where, by necessity and by design, they always managed to just stop short.

Some pants have belts and some have not; some have buttons and others do not; some zip and snap, some fold and tie, and some, even if they appear tight to the inexperienced eye, roll down easily as stockings off a close-shaved leg. Stevie let his fingers learn the nature of his pants each time, even if he had taken off the same pair every hour for a month. One finger might examine how the pants stayed up, while another began investigating how the closures worked this time; a third and fourth went off to learn how great was the expanse of pants, while a fifth remained aloof in case there was some call, unlikely as it seemed, to leave the pants in place a little longer.

“A little longer” is a phrase like “came to sit in my lap.” A thousand simple words like these could never convey the story any better than a picture could. For Stevie “a little longer” lasted for whatever period of time felt right or otherwise served his purpose in the moment, and the length of a moment itself in which his purpose was served changed like any other chronological demarcation: now a moment was fast as a fleeing drop of mercury skittering away forever down the floorboards of a declined hall, now it moved as slowly as a glacier melting at 33° F in a permanently frozen ice field.

As long as Stevie thought he still held my attention: that was how long “a little longer” lasted, and the nature of the pants had less to do with how time moved for him than with what he perceived of my desire. In that way I suppose I might conclude that I was the one who controlled the flow of time, I was the one who determined the length of now, I was the one who could decide exactly what “a little longer” meant. But that conclusion would be no more true than it would be true for a person in a car, scouring the densest section of a major metropolis for a single vacant, legal parking space where he could leave his car before a bus prevented him from reaching it, or some delivery van claimed it out from under him, or a utility truck usurped it with a ring of orange cones, or another driver, spinning on a dime, made a sideshow U-turn in front of a dozen Keystone Kops all falling all over their feet to get to lunch, jammed the bumpers fore and aft, and slammed his Hummer into the forlorn formerly compact spot — it would be no more true for me to claim that I decided the length of Stevie’s now than it would be for that driver to believe that when, after a helpless hour of frustration, tears, and curses, his car skidded and stammered and stopped hopelessly jammed into a pothole from which it could not maybe ever be withdrawn and that happened to be right in front of his destination and that also happened to have a working meter waiting for his coin, he was actually responsible for the miracle: to just such a degree was I the captain of my fate with Stevie.

But like the hapless driver whose reward comes only from the virtue of apparent accident, so in the genuine fullness of time, each time the time would come when Stevie’s fingers, for whatever reason, found the switch, popped the button, opened the snap, untied the knot, flipped the zipper, and !! just like that his pants were gone, and in their place there stood revealed in all its splendid sculpted glory the ithyphallic member men and women the wide world over would have fallen to their knees to praise and worship if they only knew they could. Was it like a baby’s arm? It was like the cartoon spout of a cartoon sperm whale, rising from the sea floor, sending forth into the world the single source of the nexus lexis plexus of creation. If I had never raised my eyes from what was then displayed I could have been excused. If I had sat still gibbering in my chair no reasonable man could have possibly found my fault. If I had been struck deaf dumb crippled and blind, fallen off my rocker, fallen head over heels, flown to the moon and back, flown on the wings of song, flown with the wings of angels, died and risen from the dead, heard the voice of God and sung duets with Him, no one could have possibly imagined I did anything he would not have done as well. Stevie had a beautiful dick. But he did not care about that at all.

Nor did he care about the Herculean balls he lugged about between those Douglas Fervent thighs he bared when all his pants fell down, though all the blessings, honor, glory, and power that belonged unto his dick most certainly belonged to them as well. But no: for Stevie all his costumes, all his cooking, all the stratagems of his musical, mystical body, all his hypnotizing actions and behaviors, all, all, all for him were nothing more than pre-foreplay, lead-ins to the final final act of finalé, the moment when climax changed to dénouement. All of everything he did was meant to lead us to the moment he desired, and wanted to remember.

Sure of my attention and certain I would go nowhere, holding my eyes with his until the entire weight of his turning head had to be precisely balanced on the single soft strand of his twisted spinal cord, slowly, slowly, like a liner out at sea, Stevie turned his monolithic body around in front of me. His skin changed colors in every plane, each plane changed colors in every light, each light illuminated another carefully delineated muscle group and made him seem a holographic poster for the International Child. From his disappearing face in shadow deep below his sinewed neck, from his brawny football shoulders down his curling back and curving hips, from his wide, long thighs to his narrow, exquisite ankles, Stevie turned. He turned his side to me, he turned his back on me, he let me see the ripely rounded melons of his ass and then, only then, he peeked back at me across an abyss that seemed to grow from miles to years as, hopeful, shy, too eager not to let excitement show, he drew his hands back and took a pair of gracious grips on both his high, hard cheeks, bent just slightly at the waist, and millimeter by silly millimeter, spread himself apart.

I slipped off my chair as smooth as ice cream melting down a cone in hot July and threw myself across the scanty space that separated him from me. Kneeling, then, between the columns of his legs, looking up at the beachball he had split apart, gazing through the blood-gauze curtain of his wondrous ball-filled sac to the living room beyond, I was, for these few minutes, king of all I beheld. This was why he’d buffed the body, made the food, worn the drag, studied me so carefully that he could hold me by the eyes while he took it off: so that if I were not yet smitten I would still be made to feel beholden to my fleshy icon, and give him in exchange this one thing he most desired. He thought that he had bought my love, and he felt he’d made a perfect bargain: he amused himself and me, and I rewarded him.

But I — I did not feel that I had paid when he performed his arts for me: instead I felt like a maestro’s courted guest. I did not think that I had bought my Stevie’s love or that mine had been bought by him, nor did I feel that I rewarded him when I heaved up on his legs and threw him face-down upon the fainting couch and plundered his hot hole with my hungry tongue. Instead I felt I had seduced an idol, taken, for the price of feasting eyes and belly lavishly, what other men would give their hearts to have. I did think we had made a bargain, but I thought the bargain went to me, especially since Stevie never for a single moment did not think the world resembled the precious image he had made of it.

 

© 2004 James Williams - Contributor's Bio