By the time I finished kneading the dough I was totally exhausted. Tranced out on the push and pull of it, I went way past the ten-minute mark the cookbook mandated. My muscles were aching and I was out of breath, and I kept going. Maybe all the extra kneading would make the loaf come out better than the dense lumpy tasteless bread I’d baked in the past, but that wasn’t why I kept going. Kneading dough spans a whole gamut of emotions: I was massaging my lover’s back; I was punching the President in the face, I was ripping apart the whole status quo. I was a fifties housewife nourishing her nuclear family. I was a five-year-old playing with modeling clay.

After the oven-heat of the kitchen, our bedroom felt frigid.

“You should try kneading the dough next time,” I said. “It’s pretty erotic.”

No response, not even a tiny fraction of a head nod. When Sprell is working he tunes the world out, which is a trick I can’t pull off. I’m very easily distracted. And then again—if Sprell called me or the phone rang while I was in there wrestling the dough, would I have noticed? My upper arms still ached, and my face was glowing.

After a long time Sprell said: “you find everything erotic.”

The trance was broken. “Let me see,” I said.

Our new panel showed a cute blond boy with scruffy hair and a ringer-T, looking exasperated. “But sex is FUN!” he was saying, splaying out his palms to make the point. In the previous panel, his older wiser roommate had said, back to the viewer, coffee cup in hand, “I’m just saying maybe you ought to cool it with the random hook-ups, is all.”

“It looks so good,” I said. “We have time for two more,” I said. “And then dinner.”

“All right,” he said, standing, flexing, joining his hands together high above his head and then leaning back as far as he could—which is not far. Neither of us has seen the inside of a gym since high school phys ed. He sat back down and assumed the monk position, leaning over the frame, his hands moving in slow, small, expert jerks. I had already scripted out the next several panels of our comic book, so I was free to worry about other things.

I went to the window. Grand Concourse was shrouded in fog. In the past two hours a cool damp day became a frigid November night. I was thirsty, but couldn’t brave the kitchen’s heat for a glass of water. Through the shoddy metal frame of the window came frigid air, which I desperately needed. Everything about our neat little domestic scene was suddenly super-erotic to me: the cluttered table, the poor lighting, the smell of baking bread. It all added up to the hardest hard-on I’d ever had—I took deep slow breaths to distract from the urge to unzip.

Intense concentration made it hard to read Sprell’s face. Was the work going well? Was he excited or infuriated? He always said faces were the hardest to ink, and watching his while he worked I got his point—I couldn’t put that expression into words, let alone draw it. I stared at him; I tried to focus on other things.

We’d written the outline together. Our comic book was full of sex, and it was hard to get much done in a day because the subject matter got us too turned on. Sprell was better at being disciplined. How did he do it? He wasn’t much older than me, yet was master of his libido in ways I could never manage. The night before, he and I had sketched in the hot n heavy sex scene that was the centerpiece of the book.

“Hell of a place,” Jerry says, standing in the center of the room in such a way as to show off the seat of his pants.

“Yeah, but it’s not mine,” Tim says. “I just rent that room over there, from this other guy.”

It’s four in the morning and Tim is in his normal pre-sex giddy mode. He’s trying to remember how to be a good host, but can’t keep his mind off Jerry’s crotch, Jerry’s face, the smell of Jerry’s sweat. Blurry flashes of Jerry dancing.

“Is he hot?” Jerry asked. “Does he let you suck him off if you’re short on the rent?”

“No, because we don’t live in a porno,” Tim says, reaching out to cup a hand around the back of Jerry’s neck. From his eyes it’s clear he’s slightly drunk, and totally smitten.

“What time is he due home?” Jerry asks.

“Are you kidding? He’s such an old fart. He’s probably been in bed since ten. That’s his bedroom over there.”

“Well then.” Jerry pulls Tim into his arms and they kiss, and Jerry grasps Tim’s shoulders.

It’s clear that Tim wants to prolong the kiss as long as possible, but he does not resist when Jerry starts to push him down onto his knees. Instead he keeps his eyes on Jerry’s perfect, booze-glazed face until he’s at eye-level with the Bulge. Jerry unzips, and pulls himself out, but Tim wants to see more. He unbuckles Jerry’s belt and pulls pants and boxers all the way down, and begins to unbutton Jerry’s tight-fitting overshirt at the same time as he starts sucking. “Dirty boy,” Jerry says approvingly, although from then on he does manage to can the porno talk. When he’s gotten Jerry totally naked, Tim squeezes his ass cheeks like it’s a matter of life and death. Even with his mouth so distorted by the size of the thing it’s dealing with, you can see from Tim’s face how deeply and totally in love he is.

All of which we boiled down to about eight frames. After that we did a long series of close-ups and details that got quite raunchy at times. Many of the frames were meant to leave the reader unsure of what body part was being shown (shoulder? buttock? hip?), but it all gave off a definite sense of throb and intimacy.

Inking tires Strell out almost as much as sex, and he joined me on the couch as soon as the frames were finished.

“How are they?” I asked. I couldn’t get up and look for myself on account of his body lying on top of mine.

“Fantabulous,” he said sleepily. “How long until the bread is ready?”

“A bit still,” I said. “Twenty minutes. You want to take a nap?”

“Is that cool? Just a short one.”

“Sure.” Earlier in the day he’d made a huge pot of black beans and rice, which had been simmering on the stove for hours and could simmer for hours more. Clumsily, we shifted positions so I could get up without disturbing him once he was asleep. Which happened almost at once. Which is another skill I’m super-jealous of.

Our book was about the rocky friendship between gay go-go boy Tim and his older, lonelier, HIV+ roommate. Tim fell in love with a different boy every night but was weak on the follow-through. The roommate was getting over his lover’s death, but because of poverty had to share his mourning with a stranger who could cover the half of the rent his partner had been paying. I was proud of how little these two men resembled Sprell and me, how creative we were to come up with these two interesting fictional characters out of nowhere. But Tim’s pain was too familiar: the lust so hard and sharp you can’t separate it from love. That much came from me, I was sure, and it was strange to see it on the page and confront it from another angle. And Roommate—never named, never going out, hiding from the world, glimpsed only in fragments—had a grief entirely foreign to me, a depth of feeling I lacked. I didn’t know where it came from, and I feared it came from somewhere in Sprell.

Sleeping, Sprell’s face went as blank as stone. It was a strong, stubbly, masculine face. Watching him sleep I thought of tough young men with nowhere else to go, sleeping on the subway. Another uncanny Sprell ability: to go blank, to hide himself away. When we fought it drove me crazy the way all trace of him vanished, leaving me standing there shaking my fist at my own inability to get inside his head. His shaved skull and broad nose, and the wild chest hair that poked up through the collar of his T-shirt, made me feel hopelessly shallow and totally unable to get through to the Real Sprell.

The book felt like a baby felt, for couples who could have one. I imagine. We’d tried to think up a way to make a book about a happy committed gay couple, but there was no drama in that, and neither of us had ever seen a work of art like that. Even in gay films, the taint of porn and misery is everywhere. Without lots of random hook-ups and bleak forlorn doomed sex scenes, Sprell said, we might as well be doing cave paintings. Shit no one will ever see.

I read through what we had so far: fifteen pages, each one the product of a full Saturday or Sunday. In the past couple months we’d hardly gone out at all. Our evenings and our weekends were consumed with the book and with sex, and I had never been happier, and I panicked at the thought of how we would spend our time when it was done.

Pushing play on the VCR conjures up an empty gym. After a rousing round of racquetball, two boys share a glass of milk. The slighter, black-haired boy can’t keep his eyes off the bigger blonder one’s crotch, which presently swells with a hell of a hard-on. Although they’re both gorgeous I stopped the scene halfway through: I knew how it ended and it wasn’t so hot. Not my thing. Sad how well-worn my pornos were, how well I knew each scene and shrug and smile and shudder. I switched tapes.

Three beautiful Brazilian boys. They’re in the woods, in a clearing, on a sheet on the ground. One is standing on one leg, caught between a huge Something in his ass and a more reasonably-sized Something in his mouth. I’m drawn to the one in the middle, and not just because I find his face cutest. He’s the only one whose face shows something other than the two standard emotions of gay porn: fake ecstasy (the guy he’s sucking) and fake nastiness (the guy fucking him, barking, in Portugese, that’s right, suck that cock, yeah, take it, take it you fucking faggot slut). In little glimpses you can see something like fear at the edges of Middle Man’s eyes, and the crazy desperate love I know by heart, the drive to do degrading things, the need to inspire something—pleasure, lust, love, gratitude, contempt—in the blank face of a beautiful man. It’s the same look I get even now, after a monogamous year with Sprell, as close to married as they’ll let me get for the moment, when I see some stranger sitting across the aisle from me on the subway whose lips and eyebrows and haircut and a million other tiny things make me so weak in the knees that if he stood up and whipped out his cock my mouth would be on it in a flash. The scene fades out and then fades back in, and Middle Man is on his knees between his two lovers, who are standing, instants from orgasm. Sweat shines in the hair of his body, but it’s nothing like the other two, who have been sweating so much they look like they’ve just come out of the ocean churning dully in the background. When they’re through, and his face is thoroughly coated with jizz, he smiles a huge broad loving smile. I tell myself what all gullible lovers tell themselves: a smile like that can’t be faked. Then he comes. It’s a puny show next to those two juggernauts.

Once I got there myself, and got cleaned up, I headed back into the living room. I petted Sprell’s face and his eyes came open. “Hello,” I said, sinking into him.

“Hi,” he whispered. I cupped him in my arms like a heavy fragile expensive thing I had to carry to safety.

“Where does this come from?” I asked, picking a lump of lint from his navel.

“That’s one of the great mysteries of modern life.”

I kissed his belly button and then nested my head on his gut, the way you’d put your ear to a door to eavesdrop. Across the thin membrane I could hear his stomach gurgling, like water in a drain. The thought of what went on in there reminded me how little I understood this thing I held in my hands.

 

© 2007 Sam J. Miller - Contributor's Bio