Would I go to Auschwitz? Would it make me a better person or a worse one? For a full week I wondered, walking the street or kneeling in K.’s bathroom in front of him, pacing the supermarket aisles or lying in bed. Would I be able to handle it? What would it say about me? What kind of person goes to Auschwitz the way others go to Cancun—with a camera and spare cash for souvenirs?

There was no reason to give it so much thought—going with K. to Krakow was never really an option. He invited me, but he’s a flake. That week was the week he was getting tired of me; I could see my time crashing with him was almost up, I was heading for the street again, so I had good cause to delude myself to the point of taking Poland seriously.

“They say it’s like a day trip, just a few hour train ride from Krakow,” K. says. His stuff was being shown in a show in Krakow; he’d get to bring a friend. But he had a lot more friends than me, friends he was on an equal footing with and friends he might be able to get something from.

“Would you want to go?” I ask, “To Auschwitz.”

“I don’t think I’ll have time. You can go, though, during the day while I’m doing radio interviews or other famous global artist stuff.” Yet yesterday I heard him on the phone with someone, saying, “you’d be able to buy all kinds of great bootleg music. Dirt cheap. Or is Poland in the European Union now? If it is, stuff’ll be super-expensive. Fucking Euro.”

“But if you had time,” I ask, “would you want to go? I mean, does it mean you’re a disturbed individual if you go to Auschwitz for a vacation?”

“I’d like to see it. It’d be intense, but that’s good sometimes. You know? Might make for some good material.” That’s K.: the moody painter always looking for good material. Fucked-up relationships; taking in street boys; sitting across from the passed-out-drunk guy drenched in his own vomit on the subway. K. collected intense experiences like normal people collect CDs. Intense was the key word with him; as long as something was intense it was good.

I’m standing naked at the window from some vague sense that he likes it, that the sight of me parading myself around with no shame ties in to his sense of me as a hustler, as a rough little punk, which I’m not, but which I recognize is important to him. “They say they still have the heaps of hair, and all the shoes, and the eyeglasses. Fucking mountains of eyeglasses of dead people.”

“That’s intense.” On his bed, above the covers, he’s shirtless, smoking, damp from sweat.

You can’t control the heat in his apartment. Either the heat is on or it isn’t; when it’s on, it’s way too hot. Huge ancient radiators keep the room parched and uncomfortable from October to April. So K. keeps the windows open, which only keeps the area right by the windows cool. I’m standing two feet from them, and just my feet are cold. The shock of cold against hot got me hard—more and more I needed outside stimulus to get hard around K.

“Take those off,” I say, turning to him, stroking myself, setting my jaw firm, being Butch. The pants come off and he starts on the boxers and I say, “not those.”

Because I know he needs it to get off, I try to be the stern gruff top. I climb up onto the bed and stand on it, in front of him, pointing my dick at his face, he leans forward, I push with my hips at the same time as I grab his face and pull it in. Fucking his face feels good, but it’s not my thing. I’d much rather be where he is. I grab a hand and pull it up to my ass, take his middle finger and start pushing it in. At least like that the stage is set for him to fuck me.

In a painting of K.’s, one of the ones that got him sent to Krakow, a boy-packed Abercrombie ad has been chopped up and stuck to the canvas. A whole lot of blonde boys wearing little, on beaches and fields or ski lodges. And then, down the middle, in blood-red drippy paint, are some lines from a poem: every woman adores a fascist/ the boot in the face/ the brute brute heart. It doesn’t say who said it, nor did K. get permission from Abercrombie to make use of their photos, so it seems like that painting is probably going to get him sued. But K. would like that. I know he would.

I yank my cock out of his mouth, push him back with both hands like I’m casting out a devil. “Stand up,” I say, and he does. “Take off those boxers.” His cock is bigger than mine, he’s in better shape, he’s way cuter. I think that’s why he needs to put himself at the mercy of other men: he’s ashamed of his own power. “Fuck me,” I tell him, turning my back on him, putting my hands up against the wall, feeling the cold cinder blocks under the paint. His building is a gross new thing, pricey and poorly-made.

After sex he says: “I think maybe I really will go to Auschwitz, after all. I’ll make time for it.” Maybe I’m wrong but I think that means he spent the whole time thinking about Auschwitz.

In the morning he’s full of ideas, so I have to get out. His apartment is his studio and he can’t stand to have people around when he’s working. I sit in the park with Gladys for a while, but I don’t say anything about Poland and when she asks about K.—when she asks, “how’s your sugar daddy,”—I just say, like I always do, he’s not rich enough to keep me.

“How’s Harold?” I ask.

“Oh, who the fuck knows. He knows how to hide from me. I went yesterday to the bottle redemption place he usually goes to, at the butt crack of dawn, he wasn’t there.”

“That sucks.” Gladys is one of the most beautiful women I know, and she has, by far, the longest fingernails I’ve ever seen. The first time I saw her they scared me, they looked like witch talons.

After she shuffles off I go the Virgin Megastore on Union Square and trance out, flipping through CDs without seeing them, thinking. Would I go to Auschwitz?

The only thing that made me consider it, I told myself, was the hope—the sick, sick hope—of getting fucked there. Did the place still have guards? Would they watch you sneak off into the bathroom—or the gas chambers—to get it on? K. would make a silk screen when he got back, I got fucked in Auschwitz, and sell T-shirts out of his studio, but it wasn’t K. who would fuck me there. Some thuggish townie Pole, who hangs around the place selling some kind of stuff—the concentration camp equivalent of Maps of the Stars Homes—and looking for guys like me. There’d be a lot of us. Anybody who goes on a field trip to Auschwitz has got to have conflicting feelings about degradation. The old Jewish ladies I knew growing up, the Brooklyn-bound broads who left the country like twice in their lifetimes, prioritized Auschwitz just below Jerusalem. What did they get out of that trip? How did it make them feel about themselves, about the world, about being Jewish? I could imagine the answers, but they weren’t pretty.

At night K. finds me in the park and takes me out, a Vietnamese restaurant, I get sautéed string beans and ask them to make it as spicy as humanly possible.

“You’re thinking of Thai food,” K. says. “If you want to hurt yourself from spiciness, you go to a Thai restaurant and ask them to make it hot.”

“I’ve never had Thai food,” I say, thinking maybe it’s a lie but maybe not, I can’t remember.

When they come I’m so happy about my string beans I can hardly eat them. I just look at them, even though I’ve had like four meals that day already.

“Vietnamese food uses this chili garlic sauce to make stuff spicy,” K. says. “Those are going to give you horrible garlicky gas.”

“And? You saying I shouldn’t eat them?”

“No, you should eat them, they look good. I’m just saying.”

He’s always just saying.

On his easel when we get back is a new big canvas, edged in that blood red he’s so fond of. Etched in with pencil are two male figures, doing something, I can’t tell what. He’s got a couple different sets of arms on them.

I never talk about his paintings with him. They make me feel stupid. I never get it, or he makes me feel bad for suggesting there’s nothing there to get.That’s another reason I’m going to get the boot. But I really don’t think there’s much to get.

During our after-dinner cigarette he watches his canvas and makes notes in a sketchbook. I in turn watch him. He’s really a very gorgeous boy. If he were a little bit more ruthless in bed he’d be perfect for me. He buzzes his hair every Sunday: it’s never more than a week long. When I can tell he’s finished I come again to his side, start rubbing his scalp, staring into his eyes—I can’t remember if I’ve ever been with a boy with blue eyes before—trying to get hard.

As has been the case for the past three days, it takes me some heavy fantasizing to get through the chore with K. Here’s what I’m thinking about:

The day is cold and grey, late winter. All the way from Krakow, all we’ve seen color-wise are shades of grey. The train chugs me off, drags me to Auschwitz: I try to imagine what the trip would have been like by boxcar. Another line from the poem pops into my head: I may be a bit of a Jew. And soon we come into view of the camp, with the words in German atop the gate: Work will make you free.

The rooms are heated, but not much. Barracks, torture chambers, work halls, mess halls. A tall blond thug Pole named Tadeusz has come with us from Krakow, sat across the aisle from me, caught my stares and never smiled. K. figures nowhere in this fantasy. As the group moves through the rooms I position myself again and again by Tadeusz, always immediately behind him, making him aware of me, forcing him to wonder what I want, admiring his ass and the tight fit of his shirt around his shoulder blades—strong, sharp blades, like breasts in reverse, or weapons hidden in his clothes to hack someone apart. He slows his pace, falls back, soon we are alone at the rear of the group.

I jam a cigarette in my mouth, tap him between his shoulder blades. He turns, cynical grey-blue eyes to make you cream all over yourself, and I make a lighter-lighting gesture with my thumb. “Got a light?” I say in English, but Tadeusz has nothing but Polish. And a handful of words in German, and in Russian.

His hair is cut Hitler-Youth short, although he’s more of a strapping Slavic peasant and probably wouldn’t have lasted two minutes under Aryan occupation unless he became a Gestapo informer. His grandfather had the same basic function; to hang around flaunting himself for gay men, letting them suck him off, then calling the SS and getting them sent down from Krakow to Auschwitz. He hands me a book of matches and unzips, hauls himself out, he’s huge, his unclipped foreskin taut around the swelled head. A truncheon. The smell hits me as soon as it’s out, he hasn’t bathed in a bit. I light my cigarette and he takes hold of my chin, takes away my cigarette with the other hand, puts it in his mouth, pulls me down by the chin.

I squat down but he pushes me back, so I’m sitting on my ass with my back against the wall. Then he steps forward, pinning my head back, tapping at my shut mouth with that huge cock. I open and in he goes, I think of snakes that can unhook their jaws to swallow antelopes. I need to learn how to do that. Is there an operation you can get, like getting ribs removed to be able to suck your own cock? Both of them would be good skills to have. Halfway through a half hour of steady hip thrusts he pinches shut my nose, which of course I’ve been relying on for purposes of breathing with my mouth clogged with cock. He lets go of my nose when he sees the panic flare my eyes, and gives me a friendly cheek slap.

Afterwards I feel disgusting, more for the way I’ve played K. than for my sick concentration camp fantasy. But that’s no fun either. Feeling guilty on both counts, I lie there waiting for sleep deciding how to leave him. Doubtless he’ll have lots of work to do in the morning: while he’s working I’ll sneak my stuff together, leave, not be where I normally am when he comes looking for me at night. I’d never have stayed so long with someone so unfit for me in bed if I didn’t need that bed so badly. I’m not going to leave the city, though; he’ll know how to find me if he needs to.

 

© 2005 Sam J. Miller - Contributor's Bio