Good Vibrations Magazine

When Richie got back to his hometown, that Midwesternly boring place he and his friends had nicknamed “East Jesus,” not much had changed, but then why should it have? Going off to college wasn’t like dying, and even your death wouldn’t really change your hometown, he figured, it’d just mean you’d make a lot fewer trips to the Burger King out on Lucille Road, even when they had that 99-cent special on Whoppers.

He had come back, with mixed emotions, to spend the summer at his parents’ house. East Jesus was one of those picturebook-pretty farm towns that hid, Richie knew, a not-so-beautiful heart. The fact that Richie’s family was Japanese-American, one of the few families of Asian descent ever to settle there, hadn’t helped. There were the usual to-be-expected taunts, of course, but as stupid as they were, they still hurt. Maybe even worse were the nods to liberalism, like when his sixth-grade teacher had asked him to explain Chinese New Year to the class. He’d done his best — Richie almost always did his best — but when he got home and told his parents about it, they were livid. “What’s next?” his father thundered. “Confucius’ Birthday?” It had taken Richie a few more years to figure out why they’d been so mad.

So when he figured the other thing out, became aware that his slanted eyes and ocher skin weren’t the only things that set him apart, he’d kept it hidden. His attraction to other boys was kept a secret, deep and dark. It wasn’t till he’d gone off to college two states away that Richie Yoshida had let the little beastie out to play.

Even then, it hadn’t been easy. He desperately wanted so many guys, including, distressingly, his to-all-appearances-straight-as-anything roommate. Richie always, it seemed, had a hard-on; he just didn’t know what to do with it. Sure, there was a Gay Students’ Alliance on campus, but he’d been too chickenshit to join. One night he’d circled around the hallway for at least 10 minutes, passing the meeting room’s closed door six or seven times before glumly giving up. He was, he figured, pretty much a hopeless case.

Then he discovered the men’s room in the Visual Arts Building. There was the hole drilled in the wall between two stalls. There were the hard-on drawings and requests for sex scrawled everywhere; they got painted over regularly, only to reappear, miraculous as stigmata, within days. And there was the Sketchers-clad foot that made its way past the partition, into his stall. The foot tapped as if by accident, but it was, pretty clearly, no accident. Richie bent over to steal a glimpse into the neighboring toilet, and there, bent over, was a good-looking blond boy, his face alarmingly pink from the blood rushing to his upside-down head.

“Slide under the stall,” the blond boy whispered.

“But…”

“Slide under.”

“How? I won’t fit.”

“Christ.” An exasperated whisper. “Just your legs and crotch, okay?”

Richie’s dick was already hard as an uncircumcised rock. He managed, sitting back on his heels, to get it on the other side of the stained partition, where the blond boy took it expertly into his nice wet mouth. It didn’t take long for Richie to come, and, to his surprise (Richie had tasted his own cum once and found it unpleasantly gamy), the blond boy swallowed every drop of it down.

Richie began to spend almost all his afternoons hanging out at the Visual Arts Building. The blond boy, it turned out, was a regular, as were several other young men. He gave them nicknames: Curved Dick; Football Player; Too Much Cologne. Eventually he ran into the blond boy outside the confines of the men’s room. Richie would have ignored him, but the blond boy struck up a conversation, and his easygoing manner and wide smile put Richie at ease. They went to a movie together, then to bed, the first time Richie had ever had real, full-fledged, lying-down sex with anybody. It was a revelation.

By the end of his freshman year, Richie Yoshida had joined the Gay Students’ Alliance and come out to his close friends. He’d even told his roommate, who’d said “That’s cool,” but started turning off the light before he stripped down for bed.

Then came finals, the end of the school year, and the trip back home to East Jesus and, he figured, to several lonely months of jerking off in the downstairs powder room, with its basket of scented soaps and its unintentionally camp wallpaper of pink poodles and Eiffel Towers. He’d have to keep secrets; he still couldn’t get up the courage to come out to his mom and dad. But he had a decent summer job at his fathers plumbing supply store, and he needed the money.

He’d been home for a few weeks, it was late June, when he spotted Bob Kondyra. Richie was with his mother at the supermarket. “Can I help you out with your bags?” said a sort-of-familiar voice, and when he looked, it was Bob Kondyra, wearing a supermarket uniform.

Kondyra — everyone called him by his last name — had been, well you could call him a “greaser.” All through school he’d sported an unfashionable pompadour. His attitude had been even worse than his grades. But Kondyra had been, maybe as a result of being held back once or twice, the first boy in Richie’s class to reach puberty. Back then, every trip to the gym locker room had been an occasion for wonderment. Kondyra’s body had hair where the other boys just had dreams, and his dick had been startlingly big.

Kondyra was the envy of the prepubescent; despite his evident social liabilities, he seemed to have no problems finding girlfriends, and if some of the girls had bad reputations, well, so did Bob Kondyra.

“Richie?” said Kondyra.

“Yeah,” Richie said, “I’m back here for the summer. Mom, you remember Bob Kondyra?”

“Sure thing. Hi Bob.” His mother smiled, though every word she’d ever heard about him had been bad. Richie hadn’t told her about Kondyra’s dick, though, which throughout high school had remained prodigiously larger than average, filling Richie with barely suppressed desire whenever the boys hit the showers after gym.

“We should get together, Richie,” said Kondyra. “Catch up.”

“Sure thing,” said Richie, though he was more than a bit surprised. When Kondyra had taken notice of him in school at all, it was, Richie recalled, with scarcely concealed contempt.

He might have forgotten about the whole thing if it hadn’t been for the dream the next night. Richie rarely remembered his dreams, and when he did, they almost never had much to do with real life. But there it was: a dream about a motorcycle, a mysterious road that went nowhere, and Bob Kondyra. And Kondyra’s dick. When Richie woke up he’d puddled the sheets with cum.

So he went back to the supermarket the next day and made it a point to run into Bob Kondyra. Bob, it turned out, had the next day off, a Sunday, and Richie would be welcome to come over and talk about old times.

After Sunday dinner, Richie borrowed his mother’s Ford without telling her where he was going. He smuggled out a half-bottle of Scotch as he left the house.

Kondyra’s place was pretty much what he expected, down to the Pamela Anderson poster on the wall. Things started out awkwardly enough, but fortunately Kondyra had left the TV on when Richie arrived; sitcom noise papered over the silences. Generous applications of Scotch soon made things almost relaxed.

“I always figured you didn’t like me, Richie.”

“That’s not true.” A convenient semi-lie.

“I figured you thought I was stupid.”

Silence.

“You got a girlfriend, Richie?”

“Nope, not now.” Richie took another burning swallow of liquor.

“You ever had a girlfriend, Richie?”

What was he getting at? Should Richie tell the truth or not?

“What do you mean?” Richie’s head was swimming.

“I mean,” and Kondyra fixed him with a semi-drunken stare, “that you always wanted…”

“Wanted?”

“…to suck my dick.”

There was really nothing to say.

“You can suck it if you want.”

It had to be a trick. On TV, Richie suddenly noticed, John Ritter and Suzanne Somers had gotten in a spat. “Chrissy!”

“You can suck it.” Kondyra’s hand was kneading his crotch.

“Um…” said Richie, and then couldn’t think of any more to say.

Kondyra unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis. It was, if not quite as large as Richie had remembered, still a sizable piece of meat, and it was getting harder by the second.

Richie took another swig of booze and dropped to his knees. There, just inches from his face, was the thing itself — Bob Kondyra’s notorious dick.

“All you guys want to suck it,” Kondyra slurred, “you want to suck it even more than the chicks do.”

Clearly, more had been going on in high school than Richie had suspected. Which guys? he wanted to ask. Which guys wanted to suck it? But he couldn’t, because by that time his mouth was full of Kondyra’s swelling cock. It was just a tad ripe, and it stretched his jaws, but it was otherwise thoroughly satisfactory.

“Oh yeah,” Kondyra mumbled, “feels good.”

The Three’s Company rerun had given way to the evening news. The supposed-President was saying something about bringing religious faith back into public life. Richie sucked harder. There was a commercial for antacid. Kondyra reached for the Scotch bottle and gulped down another swig.

“…in cities from New York to San Francisco,” the TV announcer was saying, “homosexuals by the tens of thousands celebrated the anniversary of a riot at a Greenwich Village gay bar, a turning-point in the movement for homosexual rights.” And some guy started gushing about what a wonderful day it was and how he’d come all the way from Oregon to San Francisco just to march in the big parade.

“Look at them,” slurred Kondyra. “Look at them fucking faggots.”

Richie could have taken his mouth off Kondyra’s dick, could have just stood up and gotten the hell out of there. But he didn’t. He sucked harder, accelerated the pace, until Bob Kondyra half-rose from the chair and shot a big load down Richie’s near-gagging throat.

Richie stood up, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and, grabbing the Scotch bottle, said, levelly, “Next time, ask another fucking faggot to suck you off, okay?”

He walked unsteadily to the door, let himself out, and got into his mom’s Ford. He was, he knew, a long way from the land of rainbow flags, rainbow bumper stickers, rainbow necklaces and rings, from Dykes on Bikes and gay marching bands. Driving cautiously, he headed back to the house he grew up in. The place he grew up in. East Jesus, Minnesota.

Simon Sheppard is the coeditor of Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power and author of the forthcoming collection Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories (Alyson, 2001).