by Tulsa Brown
(04/14/2004)

"I collect orphans," he said.

I nodded blankly and smiled, eyes darting, looking for escape. Fruitcake. Nutcase. These events always brought the crazies out of the woodwork, disguised as would-be writers or gushing author groupies, convinced that pumping your arm brought them one step closer to fucking John Grisham. Or Hemingway.

But the man wasn’t shaking my hand, he simply held it, clenched my bear’s paw in his cool, knobby grip. He wasn’t overtly scary: thirty-ish in a bad brown suit, long and thin as an afternoon shadow, dark hair that should have been cut a month ago. Harmless.

Except for the eyes. They were watery-blue, slightly magnified by the large lenses of his glasses and rimmed red with passion. I’d been to enough ‘Meet the Author!’ nights to know the worst danger wasn’t the tin-tasting salmon canapés.

"Well, it was nice to meet you but I really should be --"

"I have almost 300 of yours," he blurted.

"Pardon?"

"Your orphans. Mostly remaindered copies, but some I found in second-hand bookstores or at garage sales. I hit the jackpot at the hospital fundraiser -- a whole cardboard box of Jack Vigoreaux! I got it for a song. I was the only bidder."

Knife wound. I remembered giving the hospital those copies for their library, the fluttery, chirping gratitude of the old hens. Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Vigoreaux.

The man’s eyes were luminous at the remembered triumph. My intestines threatened to spill onto the carpet. I wriggled out of his grip, my voice like chalk.

"I’m very...flattered to meet such a fan." I was still murmuring my excuses, pulling away when lightning struck and spun me. "Any copies of Every Little Kiss?"

"Sixty-seven."

"That many! The print run was less than a thousand."

"Three-Legged Press," he recited proudly. "I was so sorry when they went under in ‘96." Then his face softened. For an instant he was beautiful, reverent eyes and ruddy, velvet mouth. "Kiss is my favorite book."

"Mine, too," I croaked. A terrible faux pas. An author never admits he has a favorite book, let alone his own. Or his first. In that instant we were the only two people in the room, bridged by a secret, shameful love of the imperfect.

I’d squandered my own copies, passed them out with reckless abandon to men I loved or lusted after, anyone I’d wanted to impress. It was my resume, my calling card, a cocky hello or lacerated, bleeding goodbye. Now, twelve years and three novels later, the only copy left for me was in my mother’s sunroom, pristine, unopened, wedged between the Bible and Funk & Wagnalls.

"Are any of them autographed?"

He nodded. "More than half."

I reeled, dizzy with fresh pain. Thanks, Jack! I’m honored. I’ll never forget you.

"Do you want to see them?"

See the betrayal in black and white, written by my own hand? Know for certain the names of men who’d discarded me, probably before the sheets were cold?

"Yes."

We slipped out of the bookstore. I wouldn’t be missed in the ensemble: the bug-eyed children’s author, the screechy poetess, the blustery ex-captain who’d built an entire writing career around the battle of Vimy Ridge. Local authors. We knew each other’s shtick like second-string Vaudevillians.

The collector’s name was Laurence. With an ancient sheepskin bomber over his suit he looked younger, a careless, dreamy Perpetual Student. Ironic, because I was in my ‘professor’ uniform, tweed and turtleneck, autumn beard. I hailed a cab and we crawled into the close darkness of the back seat, the ancient springs giving way to slide us together, thigh to thigh. The firm length of his muscular leg was a pleasant surprise. He smelled nice, too, unpretentious soap and the warm, animal musk of his wooly collar. It was like huddling beside a friendly llama.

We started the journey in silence. I was still shell-shocked, but the first blaze of treachery had burned off. Spider-fingers of a different grief stole into my clothes.

There is no book like your first. It’s what you write when you don’t know any better, raw and clumsy, painfully real. Other novels are just ideas you lasso and reel in, polish up with a thesaurus and send out to trot in the ring. Trick ponies.

Every Little Kiss had been the mustang of my body, bucking, snorting, pawing at the dirt for thirty years before it broke the traces and thundered out. It was my story, the lean, hungry sinews of sex and desire, my bare flank turned bravely to a ravenous unknown. That book told the world I was gay, in stilted, stiff-legged prose that shamed me now.

It was also the truest thing I would ever write. The gust was ferocious, possessive. I wanted them back, all sixty-seven, signed or not.

"...it started. With his copy."

I flinched, awake and guilty. "Oh," I said pleasantly.

The cab pulled onto a narrow street, traveled past a long row of boxy war-time houses. It stopped at one that zig-zagged in front, the strange toothy grin of a wheelchair ramp.

Laurence smiled as we trudged up the slope. "I know it’s an eyesore -- sure makes it easy to get a dolly into the house, though."

A dolly! How many books did he have?

Walls full. I stood in the doorway and gazed at the tiny living and dining rooms, each paneled floor to ceiling in a colorful patchwork of spines. I was agog.

"I finished my Masters in England." Laurence shrugged off his bomber and suit jacket in one quick thrust. "Lived down the street from a rare book store. Didn’t come back with a dime," he said cheerfully. "Here, this is your section."

Can you be prepared to see a whole wall of yourself? Your name queued up in row after row? My face prickled and my stomach swayed, queasy with sudden embarrassment. It was as if my writer’s secret jerk-off fantasy had materialized for the scrutiny of the world.

But there – the shelf of narrow blue spines. Kiss. I pulled one out, heart thumping. I was startled by the condition: torn cover, dog-eared pages, soft with wear. This book had been read. Devoured. I kept flipping through in wonder, avoiding the frontspiece, where I would have signed. Whoever had owned this copy, I forgave him.

Laurence slipped in beside me. He’d tugged off his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his white shirt. His bare neck was ruddy by contrast, a naked thigh in the sheets.

"This isn’t all of them," he said. "Some are on loan to Harbor Lights."

He noticed my quizzical look. "The hospice. They were so good to us."

Us. My eyes touched down carefully, surreptitiously around the room for the first time. Photographs. A handsome, scholarly man fading by degrees, the continuation of the story I should have been listening to in the cab. I realized this six-shelf tribute wasn’t to me, but to someone who’d enjoyed me. A memorial.

"How long?"

"Four years ago." Laurence smiled ruefully. "Long enough that I should’ve torn down that ramp."

"But you need it for the book dolly."

He laughed, we both did. I was suddenly light with relief, effervescent, a marble statue returned to flesh.

Laurence tilted his head, shy eyes smoldering blue. "Do you know which scene is my favorite? The bus station."

"Funny – I hardly remember it."

He reached for the tattered book in my hands. "I’ll show you."

"Why don’t you read it to me?"

Laurence was a wonderful reader. Sitting together on the couch, he entranced me with the spare, famished voice of my younger self.

"I wanted to smell him in the blunt, probing animal way, a dog wound around into the tail of another. I wanted to lap up the sour days on his skin just to shock my mouth."

I pressed my knuckles against the side of Laurence’s leg. He clasped my hand and moved it on top of his thigh. Long, thrilling muscles. I stroked him hard, polyester crackling, threatening to ignite. His breath thickened, the story slowed. I crept into his crotch, teased the tight plum of his balls gathered by the fabric, cleaved by the seam.

"Oh." He put the book down and Kiss became the real thing. Our mouths twisted like grappling wrestlers, tongues plunging; my beard bristled against his late-night stubble. I rose up and straddled him awkwardly on my knees, my erection straining in its cramped quarters. Laurence unzipped me and my pants opened in a hot fissure. He groped me through my underwear, murmuring happily, then pulled away, lips gleaming, glasses smudged and tilted.

"Let’s do ‘the bus station.’"

The sweet shorthand tingled with wickedness; my life had become someone’s fantasy. He hadn’t finished reading the scene but it came back to me now in a hot stripe of memory and lust. Only this time I wouldn’t be me.

"All right. But you have to take your clothes off."

The drapes were already closed. The living room lamp gave an intimate yellow cast to the room, not the stark, blue-edged glare of fluorescent, but it would do. I pulled off my sweater and left my pants on, unzipped, as if I’d just stepped away from a urinal.

Laurence’s naked body was austere, swirled with a layer of dark hair. He had the stretched, unfinished look of a much younger man, knobby at the wrists and knees, meaty between his legs. There the helmet of his cockhead bobbed, trembling. Had I looked so alluring twenty years ago?

I remembered the words. "You want it, boy? Come on."

He stepped close and leaned his face into my wooly chest, rubbed one cheek against it, then the other. I closed my fist in the back of his thick hair and he inhaled sharply, ready. I forced him to his knees and pressed his face against the tent of me. The pressure and sight of him sent me sailing. I smelled that day again: acrid, unapologetic sex, raw current flowing without wires. Or strings.

Laurence began to gnaw me through my underwear, a leisurely, drunken mouthing that blew hot swells against my balls. I ground against his teeth, riding the knife-edged pleasure. Oh, damn -- too good, and it had been too long. I brought him to his feet.

"Lube?" I asked.

He leaned forward, bracing himself against the back of the couch while I oiled him. Each of my hands was in love with a different landscape: one caressed his firm, fleshy pillar, the other luxuriated in his scalding crevice. My erection bumped his thigh impatiently like the muzzle of a fractious horse. Mustang.

He moaned softly when I entered him. For an instant I was transfixed by the velvet squeeze, pulsing in sweetness that latex couldn’t dim. Then instinct seized my loins. I began to buck, mindless, plunging strokes and slapping flesh. I fumbled beneath our bodies and gripped him, let him thrust into my hand. But all the world was my own cock and the bent-over burn of my rutting, the unstoppable drive into his core, the center of animal triumph.

Winning, I brayed.

It was almost 2 a.m. when I called the cab. Dressed again, my clothes nettled me, the chafe of civilization. Laurence wore a burgundy bathrobe, his wiry, masculine frame overwhelmed by the rich folds. He looked like an orphan, bundled for rescue.

He gestured at his collection of me. "Do you want any of them?"

I hesitated. The sight of the tall shelf was strange now, like discovering one of my old suits in the closet, the one with the wide lapels and shiny weave. It was a dead thing and I was alive. Stirring.

I kissed his cheek, then his lips. "They’re better off with you, even if you give them away. Besides, you could always read to me."

Laurence smiled.

I slipped out into the early morning feeling light, quick, in the mood to run.

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