Learning the Ropes Ch. 01

"Tell ya what, big guy: Come on over for pho and some spring rolls. I stopped by the Asian market over on Tenth and got all the herbs and toppings to fix it up just like Mom used to make. The broth's been steeping away in the crockpot since six this morning."

He glances at his watch. "It's getting late, though. You gonna go down and catch the concert?"

"Nah, thought maybe I'd catch it on TV. You?"

He makes a face. "Fight those crowds? Nuh-uh. No thanks. Thought I'd catch some movie on the online movie service or something. But I gotta get all this stuff washed up and chopped up first."

He motions to the plastic bag full of leafy greens and exotic aromatics. "In fact, come over right away. You can have a beer while I prep this stuff."

"I won't be long: just need to shower."

"You can shower at mine."

"Yeah, but it's not a long ways across the parking lot. Besides, my clothes are drenched."

"You can borrow something of mine," he insists, and then he's fishing in a pocket for his keys. "It'll be like old times, eh? Don't take away my only chance to play host this summer."

He climbs a few stairs now, never looking back over his shoulder. "You coming or what?"

I feel a strange fluttering in my stomach. I wonder why he's so insistent on my coming over right away.

"You're dreaming, kid," I chide myself. And then, disgusted at the fact I'm even going there, I dash off after him.

"Hey, wait up!"

Mark's place is part bachelor's pad and part newlywed bride turned loose on the Pottery Barn catalog. He's gotten rid of the dining room table since I last visited, setting up a smallish home gym up in its place.

"Awesome setup, man. Thought you said you're having trouble getting to the gym."

"I did. That's why I got rid of my dining room set and put that up last week. Pulled a muscle the first day, so I decided to take it slow."

He pulls at his tie and then begins untying it with nimble fingers and painstaking care. "You gotta remember: I'm an old man."

"Forget that. You're not old. You can keep up with the best of 'em. If I'd a known you were looking to get in shape, I'd've offered my services."

He pulls off his suit jacket and goes to town with the Fabreeze now. He grins and shakes his head. "Services?"

"Yeah, I know a thing or two about staying in shape. I used to run track and cross-country."

"That's right. What about these days? You're not on any sports teams at the college?"

"Nah, too busy with work and class to do that."

"Remind me again why you're not living at home, eh? You live, what, twenty minutes away? Seems like you could be saving yourself a lot of money if you just lived at home. I mean, you're going to the local place anyway. I could see it if you'd gone off to university."

"If you must know, I'll tell you, but first let me use your shower?"

I begin peeling off the skintight running shirt. My skin is covered in beads of sweat, little droplets that make me practically shine in the low light of the living room.

"Dayum," he teases and then wolf whistles. "Take it off!"

I'm instantly red in the face but more concerned with a familiar pressure starting to build in my groin. I brush my hand across it, trying to adjust myself without drawing any attention to that particular area.

He finishes unbuttoning his own dress shirt and pulls it off to reveal a tank. His biceps are sculpted, triceps popping. I knew he was being modest when he said he wasn't in shape.

"I thought you said you were outta shape. Those arms could crush a man."

"I meant outta shape for a man. Not a boy. I know I could own you in arm wrestling."

"My great aunt arm wrestles the cousins at family reunions. If you wanna prove you still got it, how about a real man's sport?"

"What'd you have in mind? I can take you any time, anywhere."

I laugh and crouch down, ready to wrestle.

"You've gotta be kidding."

"Alright, if you're scared..." I offer. And then he shucks off his shirt and crouches to match my stance. Contrary to his complaints, his body is sturdy, muscled. He has some softness around his middle, but, heck, so do most guys my age; he's definitely in better shape than most men whose age is better than thirty.

I take in his physique: Mark's mom is Vietnamese. I've met her a few times. Sweet lady, awesome cook. His Dad was a card-carrying Quebecois and passed away a few years back. Mark's got a blend of Asian and Caucasian features thanks to his blended heritage. He often jokes he's the original multicultural poster child, in fact.

His skin is bronzed from the summer sun and his dark eyes are almost almond-shaped. He has a slight widow's peak, which he hides with a straight part down the middle of his salt and pepper hair.

His chest is muscled from years of playing sports, and he has a defined abdomen despite the extra softness that's got him eating salads. He's in good shape, and the sheen of sweat makes him look kind of like a middle-aged boxer.

"Like what you see?" he asks, alerting me to my wandering eyes. Here I choke on my own spit, resisting the urge to hurl some snide remark or run the other way.

Fuck. What the hell is wrong with you?

No matter how many times I ask myself, no answer comes. I repeat this like a mantra in my head even as I brace myself for the impromptu wrestling match to come.

"Ready?" I ask.

"You know it. But what're you gonna do when you lose?"

I snort. "The day you pin me is the day I eat your Mom's pho buck naked."

He busts out laughing. "And I'm gonna have to hold you to that, you little shit. Loser loses his clothes. No trow, no pants."

"Underwear," I offer. "We're in the U.S., Mister Canada. On this last summer holiday weekend of our great nation, I'd appreciate if you call it by the Yank name."

"Fine. No underwear for you while you eat your noodles." He jeers. "You ready, kid? I'm gonna pin you and then smack your ass like your mama shoulda for sassing your elders." His attempt at a southern accent is pretty awful.

"Bring it," I counter. "One... Two... Three!"

And then our bodies collide in the middle of the living room, a few feet away from the oversized chest Mark uses as a coffee table and from his home gym. The smack of skin and spray of sweat is followed by grunting and struggle.

I lock my hands on Mark's shoulders and feel tension fill his muscles and mine. I pitch my weight left and then right, twisting my leg against his and then press hard into his torso. We cling together in the film of sweat and our body heat. I squeeze his deltoid and pull him off balance.

We fall to the ground. I crawl halfway onto his back. I'm sure I have him when I feel his forearm come down on my shoulder; he's pinned one side of my torso to the room rug. He flips me onto my stomach and the other shoulder comes down next.

I'm stunned at how fast it's over.

"Pinned ya," he declares. I stop struggling and drop completely to the rug. I'm covered in sweat and heaving in and out. I can feel the tight muscles of his arms and abdomen against my back. I notice I can feel his pelvis brush against my ass and I'm instantly rock hard.

Fuck. A wave of anxiety tears through my stomach. It feels like the ground has fallen out from under me. My heart is thudding in my ears. The room starts to spin.

I'm just thankful my dick is pressed against the carpet and not the other way around. This was stupid. What the hell possessed me even to tease about wrestling considering my... current condition?

"Alright. Drop trow," he says, rolling off of me and laughing.

"Yeah, about that..." I protest, never moving from my place, hugging the floor. I'm praying that my body will cooperate and let go of this tension between my legs. I know the minute I stand up, he'll know I've been hard. I have on my running boxer-briefs. They leave nothing to the imagination.

"Don't tell me you're getting cold feet now. No need to be shy." He laughs and then pulls me up to my feet. We're both standing there in our pants, as he calls them. And I see his eyes dart down to my groin.

"I uh..."

"Whoa, someone's happy to see me."

"Shit. Sorry, man," I stutter. "I was, uh, supposed to be spending the night with the girlfriend and, you know, I'm a little excitable. So, um..."

He guffaws and slaps my ass. "Hit the showers. Make it a cold one. Listen, I'm gonna finish off that broth and all the fixings while you're in there, and then you can mix up some drinks and boil the noodles while I get a shower in."

"Not going with beer?" I ask, trying not to be too obvious that I'm relieved he's not freaking out over the wood I'm sporting through my shorts.

"Too many carbs. Let's go with some highballs."

"What's that?"

"Whiskey and soda."

"Sounds good."

"And you can keep your shorts. I won't make you sit through dinner in your birthday suit. But you'd better catch me up, kid. I didn't realize you had a best girl."

"I'll tell you all about it," I promise.

He claps a hand on my sweaty shoulder and I forget about the possibility of getting rid of this lump in my underwear. It's harder than ever.

Mark doesn't seem to notice. He talks me through how to use the shower and shows me into the bathroom.

"Shampoo, body wash... And here's a towel," he says, tossing terry cloth at me. I go to catch it but it hits me in the face.

"Too slow, Joe. You alright?"

I mumble something about heat exhaustion and cover my waist with the towel, happy to be able to cover my inconvenient little problem. Mark turns on his heel and is almost out the door when he stops and flashes me a thousand-watt smile.

"Hey, Will-don't sweat it, OK? At your age, anything physical is liable to get your blood pumping. I'm not worried about it, so neither should you be."

I try to smile and nod. He closes the bathroom door and I breathe a sigh of relief. Alone at last.

I'm covered in sticky sweat and hard as steel. I peel off the confining boxer-briefs and step into the shower. Before turning on the water, I get a good look at myself in the mirror.

If Mark is fairly thin, I'm downright lanky. Though I've tried weightlifting and even dieting in the past to try and put on some muscle, it's mostly no use. I don't mean I'm not trim and toned. Running keeps my muscles showing, and I do the push-ups and ab work I need to stay in shape.

I run my hands through my sandy shag of hair. Need to get a cut. My hazel eyes are looking a little tired, which must be the heat and the wrestling match earlier.

Not the smartest move ever, I decide, turning on the cold water tap and letting it cascade over my shoulders before allowing it to hit my pecs and then my groin. It has the effect I have been hoping for. The tension drains from my aching cock, and I set about lathering my body up, running my hands over sore muscles. My eyes drift to the whirlpool that springs up from the drain.

Up from this whirlpool floats an image from high school. I was good friends with Shane, a guy who transferred in from out of town. The city. He was really different from everybody else. Urban. He had traveled a lot and even spoke some Chinese or something. When he joined cross-country, nobody else would give him the time of day. He was soft-spoken and there were these rumors going around he was in a cult. And bi.

Well, it turned out he wasn't in a cult, just Buddhist. And I don't know if he was bi, but one day, we happened to be hanging out and watching a movie after going out for a run. Must have been summer break, I guess. Anyways, so we were watching this movie with subtitles. He was always getting me to watch the foreign stuff. I always complained I did enough reading in class, but he insisted it was good for me.

This particular movie was about these high school guys who go to this camp and are on a swim team. Well, one of them realizes he's gay and has a crush on one of the other guys. At one point, they're making out for what seems like forever.

"Whoa!" I said. "They can pan away any time, right?" I laughed. Silence. So, I turned over to look at Shane, and he had this glazed-over look on his eyes. In a trance, I guess. I tapped him on the shoulder, and that's when he asked me.

"Will, do you think anything like that could ever happen?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, you know, two guys realize they have feelings for each other."

I shrugged, squirming in my place next to him on my bed. We were sitting side by side, watching on my little TV that sat on top of my dresser. I looked down at my bare feet. "I guess. I mean, you don't really get a telegram about that kind of thing. I guess you just sort of figure it out sooner or-"

I turned over to judge his reaction, and he launched himself forward to catch my lips with his. My face was instantly ablaze, my ears thudding with my heartbeat and a faint ringing. His hand reached over to caress my cheek. It caught me off-guard, and I didn't pull away just then. His lips tasted like salt and sweet from the carb gels we ate during our long-distance run.

As luck would have it-and I have the devil's own luck sometimes-the door opened just then and my father saw us. He never hit me growing up. He had a mouth on him, and he would threaten to, but he never did. Well, that day, he did. He hit me, and he hit Shane. And he said words you don't ever want to hear your father say. And he made threats you never want to imagine your father could make. Shane ended up out on the front stoop with a bloody nose and threats that, if my father ever caught his faggot ass around his son again, he wouldn't be walking away from it.

We never spoke again.

My mother really worries about what other people think, and she has some weird ideas about what to do in situations like this. She called Mark up and asked him if I could stay over at his while she and my father went out of town, last minute. Family emergency, she said. Evidently, she was going to try and calm my father down and decide what should be done with me.

They ended up shipping me off to work in the fields near my grandparents' for the summer for less than minimum wage. They fed them some bogus story about my being caught shoplifting and how they thought it was from a lack of discipline. Where did we go wrong and all that. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, I just went along with it and endured lectures almost every night from my grandfather about the importance of living with integrity.

You'd better have your story straight when it comes to what you value. Walk your talk. All that.

But that first night, I went over to Mark's. Cheri was there, too, later on. Fridays were yoga night, so she didn't show up until quite a bit later on. At first, I remember sitting at Mark's dining room table with an open bottle of seltzer water in front of me, the only non-alcoholic beverage he had on such short notice besides coffee.

"You wanna tell me what this is all about?" he asked, opening a bottle of beer and taking a sip.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "My mom told you: family emergency."

He sighed. "My mom is the queen of that kind of 'emergency.' She played the same card whenever I got caught doing something I wasn't supposed to, which was more often than I would like to admit."

"Why's that?"

"I don't like to admit I got caught."

I made a feeble attempt at laughing. It was a funny joke; I just wasn't in a jolly mood.

"So, I know what it's like. I've been there."

"Oh, you've never been here like I am right now."

"Try me."

"I kissed a guy. Well, he kissed me."

Mike's eyes widened, but he recovered quickly, taking a swig of his beer and nodding. "And your mom wasn't too happy?"

"My dad," I corrected. "And unhappy is just the tip of that iceburg."

"I'm sorry, Will."

"I didn't ask for it. I mean, he's a guy on cross-country with me. Has a bit of a reputation, I guess you might say, but we were watching this movie, and then he kissed me."

"Did you kiss him back?"

"No!" I dropped my eyes back to the seltzer water. "I mean, I don't think so. It happened so fast..." I realized this left things too muddled. "I am not queer."

"Nobody said you were. And if you were gay, what difference would it make?"

"Oh, come off it, Mark: you and I both know that's just something people say to make kids feel better. Nobody, least of all my parents, is OK with two guys kissing."

"Maybe nobody in this town, but there are plenty of good people who are just fine with it. Hell, some people are even more than just fine with it." He laughed at his own attempt at humor.

"I just didn't ask for this, you know? I haven't even had a girlfriend, and then this fag from school comes over and fucks me over like this."

Mark slammed his bottle down on the table. "Hey, Will, what's wrong? That's not you, kid. I know that's not you. Why you talking like that, hmm?"

I rubbed at my eyes. The stinging in them told me I was precious seconds away from tears. I sighed and looked up at the vaulted ceiling in the dining room. "I just don't want things to get all fucked up. I'm not gay."

"Things are only as fucked up as you believe them to be. You're, what, fifteen? Nobody knows what they like at fifteen. And your hormones are going wild. So, you kissed a guy?"

"He kissed me," I countered.

"So what? Who cares? It doesn't matter. Did you slip him the tongue?"

I screwed up my face at the thought. "Gross, Mark!"

He grinned at me and then sighed. "What a waste."

"Come again?"

"This is your time to figure stuff out. You're young. You're not tied down. Why the hell not? If this guy liked you enough to kiss you, you should've kissed him back."

I sighed. This guy was crazy. Here I was with a bruise on my arm from where my father hit me and nursing a bigger bruise to my pride, and he was telling me I should've been French kissing some guy who came on to me? Still, I guess it made some weird kind of sense when he said it.

"You ever do anything like that?" I asked.

"Kiss a guy?"

"Yeah. Or whatever."

Mark got this far-away look in his eyes then. "No."

"See?"

"No, but it doesn't mean I didn't ever wonder. And if some guy would have kissed me when I was your age, I probably would have just gone with it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

"You're a weirdo."

"I guess I just don't have the same hang-ups you do."

"I don't have hang-ups."

"Then why are you using the language of the ignorant?"

He had a point. I nodded and took a sip of my seltzer water.

He handed me his beer.

"What's this for?" I asked.

He shrugged. "You kissed a boy for the first time. Might as well add another first to your day to round it out."

We talked well into the evening until Cheri came home from the gym. She cooked a quick stir-fry and made bright conversation to take my mind off of the family emergency my mother had phoned about. Mark didn't correct her but also assured her there was nothing to worry about. My mother had called to tell him that much. He didn't miss a beat. The guy was solid when it came to crises of the personal type. It was that night, when I lay in bed looking into the darkness, I realized I loved him more than my own father.

I shut off the water and towel myself dry. I study my reflection in the mirror a moment longer before realizing I don't have any clothes to change into. I go to open the door when I see they have been set out on top of the little cart beside the bathroom door. A pair of navy boxer shorts and a black tank top. These, I slip into, and I step out of the bathroom, swiping at my wet hair with the towel.

Mark is just bringing a small spoon to his mouth from over in the kitchen. The kitchen is open to the living room, save for a wrap-around bar with barstools lined up. He stands at the counter on the other side of the bar, his eyebrows creased in concentration.

"Is it soup yet?" I ask.