19. The First Time

Before I left this block, I’d had very little experience with—and absolutely no curiosity about—sex. All I knew about it was that it was something men—or people who thought they were men—did to other people to keep them silent, to keep them here. Death, it seemed, was the only way out. As far as I could tell, sex was like school, like church, like families: While involved with them, people seemed to do whatever it was they learned from whomever they encountered first.

And so it was for my first trick. I sucked a man who, though he was older than my father—wherever he was—would’ve been, had a face nearly as smooth as mine was not long after the day I received my First Holy Communion (What it meant, I still don’t know.) when someone about the same age as I am now cornered me in a rotting boxcar on the abandoned railroad track just beyond the rows of masoleums at the end of the neighborhood.

Ask kids, or adults for that matter, about childhood and they’ll tell you when they were the most scared, or the first time they were scared: the first time they were faced with a situation in which they couldn’t run, fight or hide. Most likely, it was also the first time they couldn’t tell anybody what happened. For some, it’s also the first time they realized they could die, or that someone wouldn’t let them.

Having had no brothers or sisters, I’ve never seen anybody’s body more closely than my mother’s in a housedress. And because almost no one but mother—or grandma, when she visited or stayed—ever approached me, not even to start a fight, I couldn’t react to those short, sharp steps the man who corenered me in the boxcar took toward me, from behind. Or to his hand, my first physical contact with him, clamped over my mouth. Or his command, “Inside!” in a voice I recognized: raspy, like he was trying to spit out chunky peanut butter.

I’d had no choice—I didn’t talk to strangers or talk back to an elder. —and I was in the grasp of someone whose face I hadn’t yet seen. When the things you’ve been taught to keep you out of harm’s way fail, nothing’ll get you out. At least, nothing you’ve planned or been taught. You’re not thinking about obedience or resistance; you’re just hoping the sitaution will be over soon, that maybe you’ll make it home, which is to say whatever you knew before that moment, however dismal it may’ve been.

“Don’t turn around!” As if I could—his palm sealed my mouth and forefinger nearly blocked my nostrils. He leaned; he didn’t tell me to step toward the boxcar. Or up the small ladder that climbed its side into the air inside the damp yet sandy darkness when I could suck in my first full breath, I couldn’t see a corner or the walls, but I knew they were only a few steps in any direction from me. For that matter, I couldn’t’ve seen him, even if I had turned around. It occurred to me, in a moment, that he probably couldn’t see me, either. But in that place, darker and more vacant than what I couldn’t see those nights when I closed my eyes but couldn’t fall asleep, he’d had--even after he’d momentarily let go of me—control over whether I could breathe, much less move. And I knew—but I didn’t know how I knew—that I couldn’t resist, much less defy, him.

I’d heard that voice before: like something you remember from a dream or some other repetition of some time you can’t recall. I knew it: I couldn’t mistake it for any other. For I wasn’t reacting simply to an authoritative, imperative tone I’d learned to react to in grown-ups—and to which I still react when someone seem to have the power, or rather, sufficient capacity toward violence, to kill or paralyze me.

It’s a force I’ve seen only in men, and it’s drawn me to actions I’d’ve never chosen consciously. Like my first trick. And why, when I sucked him, when I licked his groin, his ass, it all came back: When, as if I’d lost my eyes and ears, even the pores of his skin rasped, coarse as his hairs, against my salty tongue turning to powder back toward my throat while saliva—Where did it come from?—slicked between its tip and the crown of his cock. He said nothing; so did the man in the boxcar after he got what he wanted—at least for the moment—from me.

But something—I was going to say I knew what to do, but I didn’t—I just did. I sucked what was thrust into my face. And didn’t draw my tongue back into my mouth when they threw their loins, their rear ends, toward my face.

18. What We Had To Do

When I left, I wasn’t dreaming of summer skies and warmer weather. Not about mountains, or long wide boulevards from fountain-washed plazas to glistening colonnades and arches inside circles of torches and horns. I didn’t envision ancient temples thrust into the light of day after thousands, millions, of nights under volcanic earth. I’d had some idea I might follow a river, but I really didn’t know how or where I’d do that because the only river I’d seen bubbled suds beyond fences and highway overpasses at the far end of the city in which this block is located. That didn’t count. Nor did the creek that belched oily fumes between the state in which this block is located and the next one.

I’d follow some stream, perhaps—past what? I woudn’t’ve known a forest, a desert or anybody’s countryside if I’d been dropped into it. I couldn’t’ve even imagined such things; I guess I wasn’t paying attention during the little time I spent in geography lessons. Couldn’t see much reason to—after all, how did anybody expect me to learn about things I hadn’t seen from other people who hadn’t seen them? Plus, I always figured, even after I knew I was leaving, that no place could be that much more interesting than this block. And certainly not any better.

So I never dreamed about the sights—and certainly not the smells—of any place else. I didn’t dream about anything in California, partly because I had practically no idea—apart from a bridge I’d probably never cross just like the one at the far end of this city, except the one in California was painted orange. And why would I want to go to a place with an orange bridge, anyway?

It wasn’t just my ignorance about anything away from this block. I couldn’t, I still can’t imagine any of it. I’ve seen some things and I remember a few places and even fewer people. But I still don’t try to extrapolate from what I’ve seen to what I haven’t. In fact, I’m still not curious about those other parts of the world that have passed before my eyes since I left this block. Getting to the places I’ve gone was simply a result, a consequence, of having left this block. All that I think about—Mother, you taught me well!—is a place to stay and something to eat. Relationships, whether physical or emotional, have usually been things I’d stumbled over and occasionally did for a bed and a meal, and sometimes even money.

The first time I turned a trick, I can’t remember whether I’d done it to eat or sleep, or whether I was hungry or tired enough to want either one. Somehow I knew I’d do it, sometime, somewhere. Wanted to make a promise not to, but couldn’t. Who would I’ve made such a promise to, anyway? Mothers? The nuns? The teachers? No, I couldn’t let any of them know I’d been thinking such a thing. The only others remaining were the other boys in the school, all of whom seemed younger, bigger and tougher than me.

Now, it seems silly to make such promises, or almost any other kind, for that matter. I realize now that I wasn’t repulsed by the idea of giving my only possession—my body—to anyone else for a period of time for cash or any other currency that would’ve been useful to me. No, that’s not all of it, either. It wasn’t even that I found the idea of sucking a guy’s cock, or letting him stick it up my ass, any more awful than any other carnal act—mainly because I didn’t know any others at the time.

It was the body—their bodies, the thought of them—that filled me with nausea. Their skin, their hair—even his, showered and lotioned—rasped against the inside of my mouth like cinders and dust. Like the ones I knew on this block, the ones who pretended not to know about the things they’d done to me. And who swore death unto anyone who’d do it to them.

Their bodies, his body, made me sick at first. Then angry—as if I were just barely suppressing my wish that my teeth could be a guillotine when his cock was between them. One night—I don’t remember when—I got past, if not over, that impulse. Then I believe the act became what I did, done for the same reason most people do what they do for a living: because it was what I knew how to do, however well or poorly. It’s true: I didn’t know how to do much else, not with my education or lack of it, or more precisely, lack of credentials. Mother’d taught me how to cook a few dishes, but somehow it never occurred to me to make them for anyone else. Actually, you can’t cook when you’re trying to forget the place you came from or to make it forget you. You can prepare foods; you can put them in front of somebody. But you can’t really feed people, much less satisfy them.

When you offer—when you can offer—no more than your body, or parts of it, and someone’s willing to pay, there’s really nothing else they can take from you. Offer it—offer the bodies you’ve known, as you’ve known them, and all anybody can do is take them and pay. Having lived, and nearly died, on this block, I could never relate to men in any other way.

Even Adam. He never touched me, much less fondled me. But , other than the presence of my body, what else could I, who hadn’t yet developed acne, offer a man who could no more remove the number tatooed on his forearm than he could erase his name from his birth certificate, if it still existed. After him, I never wanted to ask any man—anybody, really—his story. He once said, “They ask what you do. You tell; maybe they shoot, maybe keep you.” Sometimes, he said, they even feed you.

And what had he done. He said something about being a “doctor for the eyes.” Or maybe he’d been studying that—after all, he was old, not much older than I was when I left this block—when he was grabbed on a street in Cracow.

He’d never tried to describe that city—“It’s gone now, finished”—or the place where the soldiers brought him. He only said, “They made me doctor eyes.” Doctor eyes—I never asked what he meant, or even tried to imagine. I knew only, “Some braahn, some blue.” Whichever, he said, “I doctor.”

I never did find out which camp, or other place of internment, he’d seen. Or where he passed through, camped out or simply ran. He’d talk only about the wind through the trees—you couldn’t escape it, he said—and a river that smelled of sulfur, “like a match burnt,” even though it’d frozen enough for him to run across. The hollow and hidden places he found, each of them good for a night, sometimes two. Abandoned, like everything else, at the first echo, the first scent of another person. “The city, the country, no matter,” he told me. “All dangerous.”

Once I asked about whether he’d thought about going back to Poland or any of those other places. He shook his hand in front of my face as if he’d been diabetic and I’d offered him fudge. “All done. No more.”

He never talked about marriage—having been, having not been, or even whether he’d considered it. As far as I know, he didn’t have any children. At least, I can no more imagine his having had them than I could see myself becoming a boy again. It wouldn’t be possible now even if God wants it—supposing, of course, that God exists, notwithstanding the human race’s attempts to create –and some people’s wishes to get rid of—him.

I never imagined that God, much less all those things I hadn’t yet experienced and would never imagine, would’ve changed me, changed the directions—whatever they’ve been—of my life. All I know, all I’ve ever known, was that if I’d stayed I’d’ve died a boy, of whatever age, just like the others on this block. The only way, as best as I could tell, to forestall my own death in boyhood—I wasn’t even thinking of what I’d survive into—was to kill. Yes, kill: before I’d have possession of my body—my life—taken from me.

I suppose that if I’d escaped and remained the boy I’d been—of course, it wouldn’t’ve been possible, but let’s say “if “ anyway—I’d’ve said I’d done “what I had to do.” They say that all the time. But the truth is that I was no more obligated to anybody to survive, whether I remained on this block or somewhere else, than I was to die here. Adam was gone. Even if he weren’t, nothing I could’ve done would’ve helped him. Mother’d done everything she could without selling her body—at least, as far as I know, she never did.

And, once I left, she never asked me to call, and I never promised I would: I think she knew I would. Partly out of respect, but also because I could and would do so. She’d never want to know the name of the city or country I was calling from, or whether the weather and scenery were pleasing. Only that I’d had a place to sleep and enough to eat.

17. Of Currents and Wakes

Only the wind’s mattered to me. Not the sun, the rain, the heat. Just the winds, and clouds opening and rippling across the sky like scarves. Leaves and sand whirl around and over shoulders of rock, of soil, and skid skitteringly toward your eyes or away from your head.

I suppose that if I could’ve stayed in one place or time, I’d find some way to end my days with the late autumn, on a beach. Alone, with nothing but my own breath and blood curling around splintered rocks and driftwood. Whether the sea glazed with the sun or grew heavy and gray with the sky, it always carried my image, or rather my echo: always a storm within, rising in a rage that turned and spilled itself on whatever, whoever came too close. They’d grow angry, they’d rage, but there was nothing they, I or the sea could do to change.

No, the rage isn’t against the dying light. What kind of light, anyway? (Amazing, the nonsense they had us take seriously in school! No wonder I’m practically illiterate!) I always preferred those days colored like gunmetal and brass to the polished, gilded jewels of spring and summer days. That kind of light, colorless to some but really clearer—that is to say less of a shield against sight, if not vision—than any other, brightens and darkens the way a day enters and leaves when there’s nobody to embrace against, or embrace, it. Or dress it in words it would never echo unless someone—someone I didn’t know growing up—uttered them, in colors I’ve never seen to this day.

The light doesn’t die on those days, on those beaches because, without those distractions of all of those men who’ve been called poets, your eyes adjust. So do your ears, because as the gray cloak of the day disappears like the walls in a darkened room, the rushing, rustling wind and hissing tides mimic each other’s voices, but you can still tell one from the other.

Some people stay away from those days that turn beginnings into endings, and back again, moving in circles around caverns and sinkholes fill of names, full of gazings. But I look for them when I’m awake; any dream I can remember the next day takes me there.

Those days by the sea—I’m not talking about a beach, a piece of sand to which people cling, or to town like the one Vivian showed me—grow colder. But my skin opens, like my eyes to the grayness, and rasps its glaze, a prickly film of misty needles, over me. I’ve always gone to the sea as late, or early, in the year as I could without getting sick. As long as I had the sea, the tides of clouds, and the wind that brought them all in—the wind that gave them life, the only life that didn’t assault or abandon mine—I could stand the cold, the wind, the rain. No, I wanted to be there, awake or in my dreams.

As I’ve said before, there’s really no such thing as memory. Some people’s recollections simply have more tangible, tactile reference points than others. Sometimes those touchstones are buried or locked in the vaults behind people’s eyelids. There’re recollections, for me, for the ladies at mother’s funeral, of this block. Of course, they brought me back, for mother: her funeral, and for other reasons, I’m sure. But somehow those recollections presented themselves—no, they nudged their way to me—more forcefully, more vividly, along those windswept stretches only a few steps from water too cold to swim, from the first hint of frost through the deceptively mild first days of November.

Then there was the fifteenth. That’s when you knew the winter’d come, and how long and cold it would be. Grandmother—mother’s mother—told me so. The firteenth—the day when an uncle, my mother’s brother—whom I never met—entered the world. She told me—actually, mother told me she said this—that she knew winter’d be long and his life’d be short. And that both would be difficult.

As I’ve been told, he died away from this block, on the opposite end of this planet. Still, he died the same way as all the other boys are snuffed out: from violence carried out by another boy, who may or may not grow up somewhere else. But, because he was taken from this block to a place marked only by two coordinates on a map on the other side of an ocean he never saw until he got on the troop ship that carried him across it, his death seems—no, is—more arbitrary than any other on this block. At least on this block, a boy dies because of something he’s done. He may not’ve recognized its possible consequences at the time, and most often, the act—it may be a single word uttered at the wrong time, in the wrong tone of voice—seems, at least to anybody who hasn’t lived and escaped death here, not to warrant the price of someone’s life, whether at the moment the act was committed or a few years later. Hey, someone can die simply for allying one’s self with someone whom someone else detests.

Even Adam. He died, I’m convinced, because he moved, because of whatever circumstances, here. He may’ve died in the same way, or even on the same date—the night before Christmas Eve—if he’d been someplace else. However, he came to this block: a place that couldn’t ease his, or anyone else’s, pain. It allows you only to hold it down, whether with food, alcohol or other substances, until there’s no other way out.

Of course, he might’ve lived—and died—in exactly the same way as he did in another part of this city, or some other city. Maybe no place in the world could’ve offered him an alternative, or distractions besides children who’d stop by and listen to his stories because he’d give them sodas.

One year, I managed to convince Vivian to take me down to the sea—always near, but never in, the town she showed me—every weekend until the middle of December. Then we went every night, for as long as we could stand the chill and stay awake, until that night: the twenty-third of December.

There was no escape from the wind that night. The completely clear sky and the water, rippled even at low time, reflected the moon and sky. It was all almost too bright for my eyes. Our feet shifted, sank and shoved sand the wind whirled to the backs of our necks.

“I’m tired of carrying these!” I hurled one of my sandals—strappy silver slingback stillettos stolen (no, saved) from a Salvation Army donation box around the first time I met her—with the wind, blowing along the tide toward a spot where it curved and crests of foam crept a few feet closer to the deserted board walk. The glittering shoe I hurled landed in a wave, which receded and left the sandal among shards of rocks and shells. “Damn!” I muttered.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I dunno. Hey, what do you say we throw a few things out. See who can make them skip.” I’d seen someone do that on TV once.

“Yeah. But you have to throw side-arm.” I never done that before in my life. “How many times can you make it skip before it sinks”

She made a pebble skim across the tops of ripples---I didn’t count how many times—before it disappeared. Then I pulled off my other sandal—They never fit and they looked awful on my feet—sidearmed, like she demanded. But it sank.

“No, you’ve got to do it like this.” I didn’t pay attention. What could I throw next? There was nobody else on the beach, so I could’ve stripped naked and thrown myself in the water. But I kept on the long, flowing gown—really a loose, shapeless smock—and reached underneath to unhook my bra (the first one I’d bought) because it was too tight around the chest even though the cups were too big. And I'd had to pull back my panties up because I’d stretched them. I’d’ve taken the dress off, too—Vivian wouldn’t’ve minded—but I’d already begun to bristle in he chilly wind. And she wanted to get back to her place.

Neither of us spoke on the way back. I remember thinking that the few weeks that preceded that night—from the fifteenth of November, which’d been the coldest in the history of that town, though the milder yet darkening gray days that followed—had been just an interlude.

I wondered if, or when, she’d see the new clothes inside a box of mine that she wouldn’t open. Or the jars I’d stashed inside of them.