'34
An idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while. I finally sat down and wrote it down. I like the two guys in this story, and I feel a little sorry that neither one of them had the courage to try and make it together. ;w; I hope you all enjoy it though.
Title: ‘34
Word Count: 4865
Warnings: Nudity, sexual content, racial slurs/derogatory language
Disclaimer: The language in this story is not meant to target or offend any one group of people. It was used, sparingly, to illustrate society at that time. I hope that no one takes offense to the language used in this story, and that you all enjoy it. David Hardy and Joseph Sawyer © darkseraphim21
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>.
Work was hard to find in those days. Any man who had a job was a lucky sonofabitch, and he knew it. A man who could pay his mortgage and buy his wife a new dress and buy his son a catcher’s mitt was considered to be of equal status to God Himself. I wasn’t one of them. I had lost my job at the office back in ‘30, and I was forced to shuffle through the unemployment line with the rest of the unfortunate souls.
When the hammer fell, and the poison really started to flow through Lady Liberty’s veins, it was impossible to do anything. There was nothing for a fella to do back then. When you weren’t pounding the pavement, almost begging someone to give you a chance, most guy’s my age were hitting the bottle pretty hard. You may be asking how we managed to do that, when the times were so tough and the money wasn’t flowing like it used to. It’s simple: Give a man a choice of dimming the lights on reality for a few hours, and he’ll pay pretty much anything.
There was this place down on the corner from my apartment; Bailey’s. Some kind of Mick place, but the beer was cheap and the music was good. I used to go there when the walls of my apartment started to crowd in on me.
I was told what I needed was a dame, but they seemed more trouble than they were worth. Always fussing about not having any nice things, always turning off the radio when the Yankees were on base and there were two outs. A woman couldn’t understand, you know. She would tell you to find a job, like it was the easiest thing in the world, then she’d go down to the department store and spend your bill money on fancy hats and fur coats.
Bailey’s was always full, usually of sorry louses like myself. Men who would hide their faces under the rims of their fedoras, and nurse their beers like babes on a tit. They had the same hunched shoulders, the same ratty coats, the same holey shoes. A few years earlier, those shoes had been leather and spotless, proudly stomping through foyers and lobbies; but like the seams on those shoes, everything had started to tear.
I’m digressing. I guess even all these years later, I’m ashamed of what happened. I’m ashamed of who I am. And there’s no reason to be, I’ve been told. But back then, a man like me was chased through the streets with golf clubs while the cops laughed and passed a flask around. Look at that, they’d say to each other, Showing that little faggot what’s for.
All these years later, it’s still hard for me to talk about. And maybe it doesn’t have much to do with my shame. Maybe it has everything to do with him. Maybe what I really want to write about is how deep he touched me, and maybe I just don’t think I have what it takes to put that down. A man is damn good at writing about his interests; you can go down to the bookstore and see a million different books about sports and cars and puttering around the house on Sundays with a tool belt strapped around your hips. But how many of us are good at writing about what’s in our hearts? Not just the new fires that ravage and scorch, but the old fires. The one’s that have turned to embers, burning low and slow and hot.
Those old fires, I think, are the hardest to write about. Still far too hot to touch, putting out an awful lot of smoke. It’s choking me in there, you see. I can’t breathe, and I have to get it out.
I have to write about him, as little as I want to. I’m an old man now, the arthritic fingers that grip this pen aren’t the same fingers that once ran over his skin in the middle of the night. But I’ll try. If not for myself, then for him.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
Brooklyn, New York, 1934
I saw him sitting outside of Bailey’s. It was mid-September, and there was a bite to the air, but he had no hat or coat. I wasn’t surprised by his lack of proper attire, nor that he was sitting against the brick wall. If Mr. O’Connell - the man who owned the pub - found him there, he would probably run him off like a diseased alley cat. It seemed almost tragically fitting that above the man’s head, the sign on the wall proclaimed: NO COLOREDS.
You might be thinking that segregation and racism was a purely Southern problem. But around those times, a Colored man in New York State had about the same rights as a mule. Not many of us were proud of it, but the Coloreds had their own bars and taverns. Why this one was leaning against the wall with his big hands dangling between his knees was beyond me. I approached him - I’m ashamed to admit, I approached him the way a man might a dog he’s not sure will lick his hand or bite it off - and cleared my throat.
He looked up, half his face swollen up and his bottom lip busted. That Mick had already been at him, and I grimaced. He didn’t look like he was too upset about it though, he offered me a smile, and I returned it uncertainly. “David Hardy.”
“Excuse me?”
He grinned, sliding up the wall. He towered over me, easily by three or four inches. I flicked my eyes over him. He looked like any other man around that time, all patches and worn shoes. But there was something about him that was different: his easy smile. Even when half of his face was beat up and bruised, he smiled. “I’m David Hardy,” he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it.
I laughed, I think. What else was there to do when this giant man was pumping my hand and pulling my arm out of its socket? “Joe Sawyer,” I offered. I was very aware of how easily he could crush my hand if he wanted. For some reason, this gave me a little thrill. I couldn’t explain it then, and I still can’t now. Maybe I just liked how dark and strong he was. Maybe, with all that had happened, I wanted someone who was strong enough to carry all of my troubles.
Or maybe I was just really horny.
We got to talking, and he told me that he had come up North from Georgia. I had a feeling he wanted to expound on that, maybe go into just what was going on down there, south of the Mason-Dixon, but he never did. That sunny smile reappeared, and the dark shadows on his brow cleared. I imagined that a man who smiled like that would be an easy man to love, and my stomach got all tangled up in knots.
“The beer here tastes like piss,” I told him, “I have some back at my place.”
What?, a little voice asked, but by that point, I was past hearing it.
“Aces,” David said, rubbing at his swollen cheek with apparent discomfort. He didn’t show any evidence of being surprised by an invitation back to a white man’s apartment. No doubt, he was probably freezing out there, and looked forward to a place to warm his fingers and rest his bones. I didn’t know it then, of course, but he had his eye on something more.
Back at my apartment, I tossed him a brewski and he sunk down into my sofa. We talked about the Yanks, about Gehrig and their chances in the Series. I remember laughing with him, and feeling perfectly natural. He had a twang to his words, a slow southern drawl that moved like molasses over my body.
I felt like a real asshole the more we talked. He was telling me about his life back in Macon, about how he used to work for his daddy on their farm before the land was taken from them. He had worked on the railroads as a layman since then, hopping from place to place, “like a flea on a dog’s backside.”
He ended up in Brooklyn, and the work had stopped. No more railroads, no more factories, no more prospects. He told me he lived in an abandoned warehouse on the East side. “There’s a bunch of us squattin’ there,” he explained, “Colored, white, don’t make much difference there. Long as you stay quiet and keep your nose clean, the fuzz don’t give you no trouble.”
“You get beat up on much?”
David looked at me solemnly. I remember thinking that his eyes were sharp enough to see through me, and I dropped mine to my lap. “Yeah, they don’t know why, though.” I thought he might have been smiling, a sad, almost wistful smile. “I feel sorry for ‘em.”
“Sorry for ‘em,” I repeated, mockingly. “Sorry for the Mick that beat your face in?”
I looked up at him, just in time to see him nodding slowly. “They don’t know why,” he repeated, and there had been something ineffably patient and gentle in his voice. “I know people, Joe,” he told me, leaning back and taking a swig of beer. He looked at me sideways, and I flushed a bit.
“Oh, yeah? What do you know about me, Dave?”
“You a vamp,” he said, and a little chill went through me. A vamp in those times was a gal or guy who seduced men, and how the hell could he know that about me? I wasn’t a feminine man. There were fellas like that in the city. They ran around with their faces all dolled up and their clothes all silky, and they usually hung around at bars since the end of prohibition. They lit the cigarettes and cigars of rich men and batted their painted eyelashes. I wasn’t like that. I had been with men of course, but I had never gone out of my way to seduce them, or con them into my bedroom. He must have noticed that I was angry, because he sighed. “Maybe not a vamp,” he amended, “Maybe you just lonely.”
“You can go,” I told him. “I’m not gonna sit here and have some spade insult me.”
“You’re cuter’n a bug’s ear,” David said, giving me a crooked smile. “You know that?”
There was a part of me that was still pissed off. This man had assumed I was queer, and even though I was, it boiled my blood. And maybe what really festered in me was the idea that I couldn’t hide it, that someone else would be able to figure it out. Most people wouldn’t smile at me and call me cute, most people would brash my brains in. And people back then would celebrate them. One less queer boy in the world. The anger I felt wasn’t at the black man seated on my sofa, but in the world around me.
Most of me was warmed by the words, though. Still, I offered up some token kind of resistance. “You got a smart mouth, nigger, anyone ever tell you that?”
The word must have caught him off guard, because he blinked several times. He didn’t look angry, though, that was the worst part. The word itself had become so ingrained that he couldn’t even take offense any longer. No doubt he had heard that vicious word shouted at him all his life, as he walked through the dust of Georgia, and up into the ‘civilized’ North.
Civilized… There was no civilization anywhere in America during those years. Oscar Wilde once said he believed America was the only nation that had gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between; and he had been right. But then, he had been a faggot too.
That sunny smile eased across his busted face. “I been told,” he answered, “My daddy use to tell me I had a tongue that was waggin‘ on both ends. ‘Boy, you gon’ get yourself in trouble with that tongue of yours’ he use to tell me. But I ain’t never talked to no white man like this.”
“You gonna start with me,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed, and his smile stretched into a grin. “I figure you was a good place to start. You ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me.”
He was right of course, what could I have possibly done to him? Besides, I liked him. He wasn’t like anyone I had ever known before. Besides being Colored, he was companionable and happy. No one back then was happy.
There was a slight gap between his front teeth. He was kinky haired and had deep brown, half-lidded eyes, as though in a constant state of drowsiness. What I’m trying to say is there was nothing spectacular about him; he was in many ways like every other Colored man I had seen in the slums of New York. Except for that irreverent smile.
“Why did you come with me?,” I asked him, taking a long swig of beer to hide the slight tremble in my lips. “If you knew…” I couldn’t finish that sentence; to do so would be tantamount to dragging out my soul and beating it with a baseball bat. It hurt something deep in me, something as intangible as it was inane; my foolish manly pride.
David shrugged a shoulder and knocked back the rest of his beer. I noticed a scar, white and old, running beneath his right earlobe and down the side of his throat. That gave me a chill, and I purposefully looked away from it.
“I wanted someplace warm,” David finally answered, “Someplace where I could get the cold outta my bones.”
Whatever fanciful daydreams I might have been having disappeared. The man had not come with me for anything tawdry and - I felt then - abominable. He had wanted warmth and shelter, and understandably so. The gloves he wore were tattered and fingerless, and his chambray shirt and slacks were thin and ill equipped for Autumn in New York (which is merely Winter in disguise).
I had always prided myself on being a handsome man; my hair was dark blonde and wavy, my face was the pride of English and French background; narrow nose, light blue eyes, chiseled jaw. There was a divot in my chin, something that I often thought enhanced my masculinity. I believed then that when I entered the room, everyone stopped to watch me. But David made me feel small and average, and I was not sure how to feel about that.
I thought that I might be able to seduce him, which is to say, I had been thinking of behaving like a true ‘vamp’, something that I had never wanted. I nursed my beer disconsolately, sure that when he was warm David would leave.
But he stayed for several more hours. We returned our attention to baseball, comfortable territory. We moved uneasily into our pasts. I talked about my mother, who had raised me alone, and who had faced intense scorn from everyone she knew about her ‘bastard’. My father had run off before I was born, and my mother took as good care of me as she could. She worked two jobs, as a secretary in the daytime, and as a waitress at night.
My story was dull, and even I knew that. How could I unload my past woes to him? I had graduated from College with a 4.0 grade point average, I had entered one of the most profitable businesses in New York State at the age of twenty-four. I had been living the high life until the bubble had burst. The creature seated next to me had experienced none of the riches I had.
He had been born in Macon in 1902. His daddy had worked on the railroads, gone sometimes for months at a time. His mama, he said, had tended to their land with the help of him and his six brothers and sisters. He had attended a school for Coloreds only until his eleventh year, where he had left to find work.
Farming, mostly. And then he had discovered the rails. “I liked the freedom,” he told me, smiling almost sheepishly, “I liked that I could pick up without no idea of where I was goin’.”
I couldn’t help but smile back at him. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the words stirred something in me. Freedom. It was a powerful word, a word that seemed almost sacred. David’s eyes relayed this perfectly; they shone with something startlingly beautiful.
“New York,” David sighed, leaning back on my sofa. “New York, New York. Ev’rybody talks about it, how it’s this big ole place with lotsa people and excitement and ev’rybody got a chance there. But I ain’t got no chance. No one out there got a chance now. You,” he pointed at me seriously, his lips a grim line, “You ain’t got no chance ‘less you start moving your ass.”
I gaped at him. No one had ever talked to me like that, least of all a Negro.
His smile returned, “I better get goin’.”
I don’t know what the feeling was that welled up in my chest. It felt like someone was pressing a heavy weight on my heart. I grabbed his wrist, but couldn’t summon any words. He looked at me expectantly, his drowsy brown eyes smiling brighter than his lips. I sensed that he wanted me to tell him to stay, that he wanted me to put my hands on him.
So I told him, “Stay. It’s alright.”
Why? That’s a question I can’t answer even today, some forty years later. Just why had I invited him there in the first place? Just why did I tell him to stay with me? The idea that someone might find him there, that someone might find us together, must have loomed heavily in the back of my mind. If they found us, two men, one Colored, there would be Hell to pay.
But at the forefront of my mind, there was only him.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
That first night was the most uncertain, quivering, wonderful night that I can remember. His hands were hard and callused and he touched me with the hesitance and meekness of a child. When we kissed, I stood on the balls of my feet and he held my waist, and it was awkward and fumbling. My fingers on his slacks were as shaken and unsure.
But when he had me on the bed, when he was inside of me, when he was bucking into me and I was biting into my forearm to catch my shouts, we fell into rhythm. I remember thinking, He’s going to kill me. This is too much. My God.
The pleasure did seem too intense, too hot. I remember how my toes dug into his dark skin, how he kissed at my throat, how he pressed his face into my hair and whispered my name. That steady, droning mantra, Joe, Joe, Joe, until his voice was hoarse and faint. His breath caught, his body slippery on top of me, and he grunted into my ear when he came. He trembled for a long while against me, and I traced my finger over the scar that ran under his earlobe.
He shivered, but he did not pull away.
I shifted against him, rubbed myself into his hip. He took hold of me, stroked me with little finesse. I thrust up into his fist, using his shoulder instead of my forearm to catch my noises. He laughed, like being used as a chew toy was funny. I came with little warning, tossing my head back and locking my teeth together. Hnnnnn, was the only noise I made, a buzzing sound from my throat. I came over his hand and my stomach, and my vision dimmed to gray at the edges. He kissed my jaw, licked me like some doting puppy.
“Joe,” he murmured dulcetly into my ear, “Joe.”
I don’t know what he meant to say. I doubt that even David knew. He settled for nuzzling against my temple, his heavy body shifting to press into my side.
For a few minutes, we laid there in comfortable silence. We both drifted between consciousness and sleep, but we both eventually rose from the bed. We had to piss, for starters, but more, we had to wash. Every time, when I finished with a man, I would have to wash him off of my body; out of my body. If I did that, I could convince myself that what had happened… hadn’t.
With David, I felt no real need to cleanse myself. We both climbed into the shower, and we took time to explore each other more thoroughly there. He held me, my back nestled against his front, and he touched me in ways that no one ever had. There was no sexual frenzy to the touches, no aimless hunger; he touched me with gentleness and patience until the water turned cold and drove us back to the bed, where we bundled ourselves up and lay together.
“Joe.”
I was drifting, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.” He seemed diffident, so unlike the man who had earlier sat on my sofa and told me to get my ass moving. I traced the curve of his back down to one buttock and caressed him. “For what?”
He smiled against my shoulder. I mirrored him, weakly. For everything, I suppose. For giving him a place to stay, for giving him my bed and my body. But, I thought, when he began to drowse against me, that what he had really thanked me for was something wholly different. Thank you, he might have said, if his own pride had allowed it, For being my friend.
I closed my eyes and went to sleep, his breath warm against me.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
David stayed with me for six weeks. Our time together was filled with laughter and love making. I remember telling him, “I am not a rabbit, David. I have to find a job.”
The man who had told me to get my ass moving seemed unwilling or unable to let my ass actually go. He grabbed me and he had me, and I was reduced to the quiet growls and moans that dominated our life together.
I loved him, I know that now, and I sensed it then. When he looked at me, I felt warmth expand through my chest. But it was more than that. When he touched me, I thought that he might be the only one who could ever touch me the way he did. I thought that if I found someone else, it could never be the way it was with him. That wonderful mixture of weightlessness and heaviness that filled me when he was inside of me. That dazzling mixture of pain and pleasure when he kissed my mouth and his gapped teeth pulled at my lower lip.
That agonizing sweetness when he whispered my name, and only my name. Joe, Joe, Joe.
What?, I almost asked him, What is it? But I could never ask him that. I was afraid that he might tell me. I was afraid that he might love me as hopelessly as I loved him.
We both knew that it could never last. The rails called to him, and I had my own life there. And of course, if people found out about us…
I don’t think either one of us had the strength to think about that.
In late October he came to me. I hardly recognized the grim man standing in front of me. I can remember the gray light slanting in over his face, the rain pattering against the window. “Gotta get goin’ now, Joe,” he told me solemnly; his sweet, jubilant voice was gone. “Gotta get movin’ on.”
I had been expecting it, but I still felt a great, sweeping agony move through my chest. Anyone who has loved someone and been forced to let them go will know the feeling I am talking about. A feeling that someone has taken the most tender part of you and twisted it until it is wasted and broken.
I nodded, looking away from him. “Yeah.”
His callused fingers brushed my cheek, tilted my jaw up. I met his eyes, and I thought, You can’t. I love you. But all I said was, “See you around, Dave.”
It was not enough. Nothing would ever be enough. He leaned down and he kissed me and he told me, “I’ll be missin’ you somethin’ awful.”
Something about those words touched me deeper than anything before ever had. I was crying into him. I never cried. “So stay,” I told him, I begged him, “Stay, stay.”
But of course he couldn’t, and of course I knew that. I had my life, he had his, and the world would never allow us to be together. I felt an intense hatred towards the world on that day, and on many days to follow. I felt that I had been cheated out of my love, that I had been cheated out of my happiness.
Years would teach me that no one had cheated me. David and I had let each other go with our own cowardice. We had not dared to face that world together, and on that gray October day, he kissed my lips for the last time.
“Get your ass moving,” he told me again, voice low and choked against my ear as he embraced me. “Don’t you sit by the wayside and wait for nothin’, Joe Sawyer.”
I said nothing.
As he was leaving, I called out to him. I can remember clearly, even today, how he stopped and turned, his drowsy eyes red rimmed and his full mouth trembling. Tears cut down his dark cheeks. I hold that image of him in my memories, of that young and tragically tender man with his doleful brown eyes begging me.
David, David, David, my mind repeated, much like my lover’s mantra. I wonder now, as I have wondered all these years, if he might have stayed if I had told him how much I loved him. I torment myself with that, even now.
“Stay safe,” I told him. The wind outside whipped up, blowing rain hard against the window. David nodded, the corner of his lips twitching with a strained smile.
He walked out without another word.
When the door closed behind him, I wanted very badly to run after him. To tell him, I love you, I love you, but my feet were rooted to the spot. Was it pride that kept me from him? I don’t know. All I know is that I stayed there, and David moved on. I would often sit up late at night, waiting for the sound of him climbing the stairs to my apartment, waiting for the sound of his deep, distinctive laugh. Waiting for the sound of my name in his slow Southern drawl, Joe, Joe, Joe.
David never returned. I heard his voice only in my dreams. There is where I felt his lips against me. There is where I felt him pressing against me as warm water flowed over us. In those dreams, I told him earnestly how much I loved him, how much I needed him. In those dreams, he would smile against my ear and return the words.
We had let society dictate how we loved, and how easily we should give up and let each other go. We had let society dictate to us that our love was shameful, sinful, and unnatural.
But when I think of him that first night, so strong and so sweet and so trembling, I know that is not true. What we had together was something beautiful, and despite its brevity - perhaps because of its brevity - it was sweeter than any love that followed after it.
David; I wonder sometimes, late at night when sleep eludes me, what became of him. I wonder if he went further North, if he wound his way up through the States and into Canada. I wonder, more than anything, if he ever thought of me.
“I’ll be missin’ you somethin’ awful,” he had told me, and I have no doubt that he did. I have no doubt that as David Hardy made his way through the cold weather and hid himself from the cold eyes, he missed me terribly.
Joe, Joe, Joe, he would have said to me now, and now, I would have asked him, What?
What?
Title: ‘34
Word Count: 4865
Warnings: Nudity, sexual content, racial slurs/derogatory language
Disclaimer: The language in this story is not meant to target or offend any one group of people. It was used, sparingly, to illustrate society at that time. I hope that no one takes offense to the language used in this story, and that you all enjoy it. David Hardy and Joseph Sawyer © darkseraphim21
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>.
Work was hard to find in those days. Any man who had a job was a lucky sonofabitch, and he knew it. A man who could pay his mortgage and buy his wife a new dress and buy his son a catcher’s mitt was considered to be of equal status to God Himself. I wasn’t one of them. I had lost my job at the office back in ‘30, and I was forced to shuffle through the unemployment line with the rest of the unfortunate souls.
When the hammer fell, and the poison really started to flow through Lady Liberty’s veins, it was impossible to do anything. There was nothing for a fella to do back then. When you weren’t pounding the pavement, almost begging someone to give you a chance, most guy’s my age were hitting the bottle pretty hard. You may be asking how we managed to do that, when the times were so tough and the money wasn’t flowing like it used to. It’s simple: Give a man a choice of dimming the lights on reality for a few hours, and he’ll pay pretty much anything.
There was this place down on the corner from my apartment; Bailey’s. Some kind of Mick place, but the beer was cheap and the music was good. I used to go there when the walls of my apartment started to crowd in on me.
I was told what I needed was a dame, but they seemed more trouble than they were worth. Always fussing about not having any nice things, always turning off the radio when the Yankees were on base and there were two outs. A woman couldn’t understand, you know. She would tell you to find a job, like it was the easiest thing in the world, then she’d go down to the department store and spend your bill money on fancy hats and fur coats.
Bailey’s was always full, usually of sorry louses like myself. Men who would hide their faces under the rims of their fedoras, and nurse their beers like babes on a tit. They had the same hunched shoulders, the same ratty coats, the same holey shoes. A few years earlier, those shoes had been leather and spotless, proudly stomping through foyers and lobbies; but like the seams on those shoes, everything had started to tear.
I’m digressing. I guess even all these years later, I’m ashamed of what happened. I’m ashamed of who I am. And there’s no reason to be, I’ve been told. But back then, a man like me was chased through the streets with golf clubs while the cops laughed and passed a flask around. Look at that, they’d say to each other, Showing that little faggot what’s for.
All these years later, it’s still hard for me to talk about. And maybe it doesn’t have much to do with my shame. Maybe it has everything to do with him. Maybe what I really want to write about is how deep he touched me, and maybe I just don’t think I have what it takes to put that down. A man is damn good at writing about his interests; you can go down to the bookstore and see a million different books about sports and cars and puttering around the house on Sundays with a tool belt strapped around your hips. But how many of us are good at writing about what’s in our hearts? Not just the new fires that ravage and scorch, but the old fires. The one’s that have turned to embers, burning low and slow and hot.
Those old fires, I think, are the hardest to write about. Still far too hot to touch, putting out an awful lot of smoke. It’s choking me in there, you see. I can’t breathe, and I have to get it out.
I have to write about him, as little as I want to. I’m an old man now, the arthritic fingers that grip this pen aren’t the same fingers that once ran over his skin in the middle of the night. But I’ll try. If not for myself, then for him.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
Brooklyn, New York, 1934
I saw him sitting outside of Bailey’s. It was mid-September, and there was a bite to the air, but he had no hat or coat. I wasn’t surprised by his lack of proper attire, nor that he was sitting against the brick wall. If Mr. O’Connell - the man who owned the pub - found him there, he would probably run him off like a diseased alley cat. It seemed almost tragically fitting that above the man’s head, the sign on the wall proclaimed: NO COLOREDS.
You might be thinking that segregation and racism was a purely Southern problem. But around those times, a Colored man in New York State had about the same rights as a mule. Not many of us were proud of it, but the Coloreds had their own bars and taverns. Why this one was leaning against the wall with his big hands dangling between his knees was beyond me. I approached him - I’m ashamed to admit, I approached him the way a man might a dog he’s not sure will lick his hand or bite it off - and cleared my throat.
He looked up, half his face swollen up and his bottom lip busted. That Mick had already been at him, and I grimaced. He didn’t look like he was too upset about it though, he offered me a smile, and I returned it uncertainly. “David Hardy.”
“Excuse me?”
He grinned, sliding up the wall. He towered over me, easily by three or four inches. I flicked my eyes over him. He looked like any other man around that time, all patches and worn shoes. But there was something about him that was different: his easy smile. Even when half of his face was beat up and bruised, he smiled. “I’m David Hardy,” he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it.
I laughed, I think. What else was there to do when this giant man was pumping my hand and pulling my arm out of its socket? “Joe Sawyer,” I offered. I was very aware of how easily he could crush my hand if he wanted. For some reason, this gave me a little thrill. I couldn’t explain it then, and I still can’t now. Maybe I just liked how dark and strong he was. Maybe, with all that had happened, I wanted someone who was strong enough to carry all of my troubles.
Or maybe I was just really horny.
We got to talking, and he told me that he had come up North from Georgia. I had a feeling he wanted to expound on that, maybe go into just what was going on down there, south of the Mason-Dixon, but he never did. That sunny smile reappeared, and the dark shadows on his brow cleared. I imagined that a man who smiled like that would be an easy man to love, and my stomach got all tangled up in knots.
“The beer here tastes like piss,” I told him, “I have some back at my place.”
What?, a little voice asked, but by that point, I was past hearing it.
“Aces,” David said, rubbing at his swollen cheek with apparent discomfort. He didn’t show any evidence of being surprised by an invitation back to a white man’s apartment. No doubt, he was probably freezing out there, and looked forward to a place to warm his fingers and rest his bones. I didn’t know it then, of course, but he had his eye on something more.
Back at my apartment, I tossed him a brewski and he sunk down into my sofa. We talked about the Yanks, about Gehrig and their chances in the Series. I remember laughing with him, and feeling perfectly natural. He had a twang to his words, a slow southern drawl that moved like molasses over my body.
I felt like a real asshole the more we talked. He was telling me about his life back in Macon, about how he used to work for his daddy on their farm before the land was taken from them. He had worked on the railroads as a layman since then, hopping from place to place, “like a flea on a dog’s backside.”
He ended up in Brooklyn, and the work had stopped. No more railroads, no more factories, no more prospects. He told me he lived in an abandoned warehouse on the East side. “There’s a bunch of us squattin’ there,” he explained, “Colored, white, don’t make much difference there. Long as you stay quiet and keep your nose clean, the fuzz don’t give you no trouble.”
“You get beat up on much?”
David looked at me solemnly. I remember thinking that his eyes were sharp enough to see through me, and I dropped mine to my lap. “Yeah, they don’t know why, though.” I thought he might have been smiling, a sad, almost wistful smile. “I feel sorry for ‘em.”
“Sorry for ‘em,” I repeated, mockingly. “Sorry for the Mick that beat your face in?”
I looked up at him, just in time to see him nodding slowly. “They don’t know why,” he repeated, and there had been something ineffably patient and gentle in his voice. “I know people, Joe,” he told me, leaning back and taking a swig of beer. He looked at me sideways, and I flushed a bit.
“Oh, yeah? What do you know about me, Dave?”
“You a vamp,” he said, and a little chill went through me. A vamp in those times was a gal or guy who seduced men, and how the hell could he know that about me? I wasn’t a feminine man. There were fellas like that in the city. They ran around with their faces all dolled up and their clothes all silky, and they usually hung around at bars since the end of prohibition. They lit the cigarettes and cigars of rich men and batted their painted eyelashes. I wasn’t like that. I had been with men of course, but I had never gone out of my way to seduce them, or con them into my bedroom. He must have noticed that I was angry, because he sighed. “Maybe not a vamp,” he amended, “Maybe you just lonely.”
“You can go,” I told him. “I’m not gonna sit here and have some spade insult me.”
“You’re cuter’n a bug’s ear,” David said, giving me a crooked smile. “You know that?”
There was a part of me that was still pissed off. This man had assumed I was queer, and even though I was, it boiled my blood. And maybe what really festered in me was the idea that I couldn’t hide it, that someone else would be able to figure it out. Most people wouldn’t smile at me and call me cute, most people would brash my brains in. And people back then would celebrate them. One less queer boy in the world. The anger I felt wasn’t at the black man seated on my sofa, but in the world around me.
Most of me was warmed by the words, though. Still, I offered up some token kind of resistance. “You got a smart mouth, nigger, anyone ever tell you that?”
The word must have caught him off guard, because he blinked several times. He didn’t look angry, though, that was the worst part. The word itself had become so ingrained that he couldn’t even take offense any longer. No doubt he had heard that vicious word shouted at him all his life, as he walked through the dust of Georgia, and up into the ‘civilized’ North.
Civilized… There was no civilization anywhere in America during those years. Oscar Wilde once said he believed America was the only nation that had gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between; and he had been right. But then, he had been a faggot too.
That sunny smile eased across his busted face. “I been told,” he answered, “My daddy use to tell me I had a tongue that was waggin‘ on both ends. ‘Boy, you gon’ get yourself in trouble with that tongue of yours’ he use to tell me. But I ain’t never talked to no white man like this.”
“You gonna start with me,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed, and his smile stretched into a grin. “I figure you was a good place to start. You ain’t gonna do nothin’ to me.”
He was right of course, what could I have possibly done to him? Besides, I liked him. He wasn’t like anyone I had ever known before. Besides being Colored, he was companionable and happy. No one back then was happy.
There was a slight gap between his front teeth. He was kinky haired and had deep brown, half-lidded eyes, as though in a constant state of drowsiness. What I’m trying to say is there was nothing spectacular about him; he was in many ways like every other Colored man I had seen in the slums of New York. Except for that irreverent smile.
“Why did you come with me?,” I asked him, taking a long swig of beer to hide the slight tremble in my lips. “If you knew…” I couldn’t finish that sentence; to do so would be tantamount to dragging out my soul and beating it with a baseball bat. It hurt something deep in me, something as intangible as it was inane; my foolish manly pride.
David shrugged a shoulder and knocked back the rest of his beer. I noticed a scar, white and old, running beneath his right earlobe and down the side of his throat. That gave me a chill, and I purposefully looked away from it.
“I wanted someplace warm,” David finally answered, “Someplace where I could get the cold outta my bones.”
Whatever fanciful daydreams I might have been having disappeared. The man had not come with me for anything tawdry and - I felt then - abominable. He had wanted warmth and shelter, and understandably so. The gloves he wore were tattered and fingerless, and his chambray shirt and slacks were thin and ill equipped for Autumn in New York (which is merely Winter in disguise).
I had always prided myself on being a handsome man; my hair was dark blonde and wavy, my face was the pride of English and French background; narrow nose, light blue eyes, chiseled jaw. There was a divot in my chin, something that I often thought enhanced my masculinity. I believed then that when I entered the room, everyone stopped to watch me. But David made me feel small and average, and I was not sure how to feel about that.
I thought that I might be able to seduce him, which is to say, I had been thinking of behaving like a true ‘vamp’, something that I had never wanted. I nursed my beer disconsolately, sure that when he was warm David would leave.
But he stayed for several more hours. We returned our attention to baseball, comfortable territory. We moved uneasily into our pasts. I talked about my mother, who had raised me alone, and who had faced intense scorn from everyone she knew about her ‘bastard’. My father had run off before I was born, and my mother took as good care of me as she could. She worked two jobs, as a secretary in the daytime, and as a waitress at night.
My story was dull, and even I knew that. How could I unload my past woes to him? I had graduated from College with a 4.0 grade point average, I had entered one of the most profitable businesses in New York State at the age of twenty-four. I had been living the high life until the bubble had burst. The creature seated next to me had experienced none of the riches I had.
He had been born in Macon in 1902. His daddy had worked on the railroads, gone sometimes for months at a time. His mama, he said, had tended to their land with the help of him and his six brothers and sisters. He had attended a school for Coloreds only until his eleventh year, where he had left to find work.
Farming, mostly. And then he had discovered the rails. “I liked the freedom,” he told me, smiling almost sheepishly, “I liked that I could pick up without no idea of where I was goin’.”
I couldn’t help but smile back at him. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the words stirred something in me. Freedom. It was a powerful word, a word that seemed almost sacred. David’s eyes relayed this perfectly; they shone with something startlingly beautiful.
“New York,” David sighed, leaning back on my sofa. “New York, New York. Ev’rybody talks about it, how it’s this big ole place with lotsa people and excitement and ev’rybody got a chance there. But I ain’t got no chance. No one out there got a chance now. You,” he pointed at me seriously, his lips a grim line, “You ain’t got no chance ‘less you start moving your ass.”
I gaped at him. No one had ever talked to me like that, least of all a Negro.
His smile returned, “I better get goin’.”
I don’t know what the feeling was that welled up in my chest. It felt like someone was pressing a heavy weight on my heart. I grabbed his wrist, but couldn’t summon any words. He looked at me expectantly, his drowsy brown eyes smiling brighter than his lips. I sensed that he wanted me to tell him to stay, that he wanted me to put my hands on him.
So I told him, “Stay. It’s alright.”
Why? That’s a question I can’t answer even today, some forty years later. Just why had I invited him there in the first place? Just why did I tell him to stay with me? The idea that someone might find him there, that someone might find us together, must have loomed heavily in the back of my mind. If they found us, two men, one Colored, there would be Hell to pay.
But at the forefront of my mind, there was only him.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
That first night was the most uncertain, quivering, wonderful night that I can remember. His hands were hard and callused and he touched me with the hesitance and meekness of a child. When we kissed, I stood on the balls of my feet and he held my waist, and it was awkward and fumbling. My fingers on his slacks were as shaken and unsure.
But when he had me on the bed, when he was inside of me, when he was bucking into me and I was biting into my forearm to catch my shouts, we fell into rhythm. I remember thinking, He’s going to kill me. This is too much. My God.
The pleasure did seem too intense, too hot. I remember how my toes dug into his dark skin, how he kissed at my throat, how he pressed his face into my hair and whispered my name. That steady, droning mantra, Joe, Joe, Joe, until his voice was hoarse and faint. His breath caught, his body slippery on top of me, and he grunted into my ear when he came. He trembled for a long while against me, and I traced my finger over the scar that ran under his earlobe.
He shivered, but he did not pull away.
I shifted against him, rubbed myself into his hip. He took hold of me, stroked me with little finesse. I thrust up into his fist, using his shoulder instead of my forearm to catch my noises. He laughed, like being used as a chew toy was funny. I came with little warning, tossing my head back and locking my teeth together. Hnnnnn, was the only noise I made, a buzzing sound from my throat. I came over his hand and my stomach, and my vision dimmed to gray at the edges. He kissed my jaw, licked me like some doting puppy.
“Joe,” he murmured dulcetly into my ear, “Joe.”
I don’t know what he meant to say. I doubt that even David knew. He settled for nuzzling against my temple, his heavy body shifting to press into my side.
For a few minutes, we laid there in comfortable silence. We both drifted between consciousness and sleep, but we both eventually rose from the bed. We had to piss, for starters, but more, we had to wash. Every time, when I finished with a man, I would have to wash him off of my body; out of my body. If I did that, I could convince myself that what had happened… hadn’t.
With David, I felt no real need to cleanse myself. We both climbed into the shower, and we took time to explore each other more thoroughly there. He held me, my back nestled against his front, and he touched me in ways that no one ever had. There was no sexual frenzy to the touches, no aimless hunger; he touched me with gentleness and patience until the water turned cold and drove us back to the bed, where we bundled ourselves up and lay together.
“Joe.”
I was drifting, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.” He seemed diffident, so unlike the man who had earlier sat on my sofa and told me to get my ass moving. I traced the curve of his back down to one buttock and caressed him. “For what?”
He smiled against my shoulder. I mirrored him, weakly. For everything, I suppose. For giving him a place to stay, for giving him my bed and my body. But, I thought, when he began to drowse against me, that what he had really thanked me for was something wholly different. Thank you, he might have said, if his own pride had allowed it, For being my friend.
I closed my eyes and went to sleep, his breath warm against me.
<~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~>
David stayed with me for six weeks. Our time together was filled with laughter and love making. I remember telling him, “I am not a rabbit, David. I have to find a job.”
The man who had told me to get my ass moving seemed unwilling or unable to let my ass actually go. He grabbed me and he had me, and I was reduced to the quiet growls and moans that dominated our life together.
I loved him, I know that now, and I sensed it then. When he looked at me, I felt warmth expand through my chest. But it was more than that. When he touched me, I thought that he might be the only one who could ever touch me the way he did. I thought that if I found someone else, it could never be the way it was with him. That wonderful mixture of weightlessness and heaviness that filled me when he was inside of me. That dazzling mixture of pain and pleasure when he kissed my mouth and his gapped teeth pulled at my lower lip.
That agonizing sweetness when he whispered my name, and only my name. Joe, Joe, Joe.
What?, I almost asked him, What is it? But I could never ask him that. I was afraid that he might tell me. I was afraid that he might love me as hopelessly as I loved him.
We both knew that it could never last. The rails called to him, and I had my own life there. And of course, if people found out about us…
I don’t think either one of us had the strength to think about that.
In late October he came to me. I hardly recognized the grim man standing in front of me. I can remember the gray light slanting in over his face, the rain pattering against the window. “Gotta get goin’ now, Joe,” he told me solemnly; his sweet, jubilant voice was gone. “Gotta get movin’ on.”
I had been expecting it, but I still felt a great, sweeping agony move through my chest. Anyone who has loved someone and been forced to let them go will know the feeling I am talking about. A feeling that someone has taken the most tender part of you and twisted it until it is wasted and broken.
I nodded, looking away from him. “Yeah.”
His callused fingers brushed my cheek, tilted my jaw up. I met his eyes, and I thought, You can’t. I love you. But all I said was, “See you around, Dave.”
It was not enough. Nothing would ever be enough. He leaned down and he kissed me and he told me, “I’ll be missin’ you somethin’ awful.”
Something about those words touched me deeper than anything before ever had. I was crying into him. I never cried. “So stay,” I told him, I begged him, “Stay, stay.”
But of course he couldn’t, and of course I knew that. I had my life, he had his, and the world would never allow us to be together. I felt an intense hatred towards the world on that day, and on many days to follow. I felt that I had been cheated out of my love, that I had been cheated out of my happiness.
Years would teach me that no one had cheated me. David and I had let each other go with our own cowardice. We had not dared to face that world together, and on that gray October day, he kissed my lips for the last time.
“Get your ass moving,” he told me again, voice low and choked against my ear as he embraced me. “Don’t you sit by the wayside and wait for nothin’, Joe Sawyer.”
I said nothing.
As he was leaving, I called out to him. I can remember clearly, even today, how he stopped and turned, his drowsy eyes red rimmed and his full mouth trembling. Tears cut down his dark cheeks. I hold that image of him in my memories, of that young and tragically tender man with his doleful brown eyes begging me.
David, David, David, my mind repeated, much like my lover’s mantra. I wonder now, as I have wondered all these years, if he might have stayed if I had told him how much I loved him. I torment myself with that, even now.
“Stay safe,” I told him. The wind outside whipped up, blowing rain hard against the window. David nodded, the corner of his lips twitching with a strained smile.
He walked out without another word.
When the door closed behind him, I wanted very badly to run after him. To tell him, I love you, I love you, but my feet were rooted to the spot. Was it pride that kept me from him? I don’t know. All I know is that I stayed there, and David moved on. I would often sit up late at night, waiting for the sound of him climbing the stairs to my apartment, waiting for the sound of his deep, distinctive laugh. Waiting for the sound of my name in his slow Southern drawl, Joe, Joe, Joe.
David never returned. I heard his voice only in my dreams. There is where I felt his lips against me. There is where I felt him pressing against me as warm water flowed over us. In those dreams, I told him earnestly how much I loved him, how much I needed him. In those dreams, he would smile against my ear and return the words.
We had let society dictate how we loved, and how easily we should give up and let each other go. We had let society dictate to us that our love was shameful, sinful, and unnatural.
But when I think of him that first night, so strong and so sweet and so trembling, I know that is not true. What we had together was something beautiful, and despite its brevity - perhaps because of its brevity - it was sweeter than any love that followed after it.
David; I wonder sometimes, late at night when sleep eludes me, what became of him. I wonder if he went further North, if he wound his way up through the States and into Canada. I wonder, more than anything, if he ever thought of me.
“I’ll be missin’ you somethin’ awful,” he had told me, and I have no doubt that he did. I have no doubt that as David Hardy made his way through the cold weather and hid himself from the cold eyes, he missed me terribly.
Joe, Joe, Joe, he would have said to me now, and now, I would have asked him, What?
What?