Someday I’ll write a book about queer warriors, or maybe I already did, sure enough, a big fuckin book about a whole tribal nation of naked queer warriors and their dances and ceremonies and customs. And I’ll describe the wild initiation of young boys into the tribe, something loosely based on rituals that you might actually find in places like Papua New Guinea—cults of fellatio, the fetishism of semen, maybe the use of psychotropics to enhance the mystical frenzy. And I’ll use my own boys from right here in Sandburg as inspiration, I’ve seen plenty of them initiated by their older friends, I’ve seen those little guys getting their first taste of cock and cum.

No, wait a minute, let’s begin again, let’s spin reality and make it dizzy and then examine the topsy-turvy evidence. Who was the first of those little guys in my life? After I lost my teaching job in Chicago, after I said goodbye to my streetboy pals and moved back here to my old college town—who was the first? Before I met some kids named Robbie and Patrick and Travis, before I moved into my wacky old shack and oversaw the creation of my gang of buccaneers—who was the young treasure and joy of my life?

I can see him, I can hear him, his name is Angelo Joseph Patallero. Some people call him A.J. or Little Jay but we’ll just make this simple and call him Angelo. It’s strange about this town, so many attractive boys here, I’ve always been aware of it and I’ve always wondered about it, this phenomenon, this mysterious abundance of youthful male beauty in such an ordinary little place. But Sandburg isn’t really ordinary, not if you know its history and its culture. You need to remember that Sandburg boasts the largest railroad yards between Chicago and Kansas City, and that all of those railroads brought lots of manufacturing and lots of factories with them, and that all of those big factories attracted a diverse population of blacks and whites and Mexicans and even some Asians in more recent years. And then, of course, there’s the college here, which contributes a whole other stream of racial and ethnic variety to the communal mix. So you end up with an unusually heterogeneous town and an unusually conspicuous element of truly good-looking boys.

And that brings us back to Angelo, he’s one of them, he’s one of those kids who catches your eye as soon as you see him. I’ve been watching him for the past couple of weeks as he plays outside near my apartment, out there running around with some other boys who live on this block. I’ve only been here since last month, since May, so I’m still familiarizing myself with the local fauna and with this little guy in particular. Why him and not the others? It’s hard to say, it’s a question of nuances and subtleties, something about the energy of him and the spirited yelp of his laughter and the way he jumps and dances and hugs the other boys whenever he’s happy or excited. He’s one of those natural leaders, he’s got charisma, he’s electric.

You might think that I’d be out there meeting this kid and talking to him by now, same old routine for somebody like me, no big deal—but you’d be wrong, folks, because this is long ago, maybe 1982, and I’m not ME yet, I’m still learning. I’ve fooled around with boys in high school and in college and I’ve had plenty of experience with young hustlers in Chicago and in many other places beyond, far beyond, down in Mexico and even in Brazil, that’s all true. But now I keep getting older while the boys themselves stay just as young and just as forbidden—and don’t forget, we’re talking about a small Midwestern town here, this ain’t Juarez or São Paulo or even Ashland Avenue in Chicago, the rules are different here, these boys are no streetwise city beasts and you simply can’t accost them with the same kind of brazen temerity, no way, impossible.

So I keep watching and watching this boy as the days pass, finally it’s Angelo himself who makes the first move and who manages to bring us together, it’s the boy who ends up accosting the man. He gets his chance because I recently hurt my back while playing golf and now I’m outside to get some light exercise by taking a stroll around the block, suddenly I hear someone shout “heads up!” and I look around just in time to see a red Frisbee flying toward me and just in time to reach up and catch it. Angelo is standing and grinning at me from about fifty or sixty feet away, he’s with a group of other kids but he’s the only one I see, he’s the only one who will make himself my boyfriend and my darling. Some of those other boys will also become pals of mine—but none of them will be as special as Angelo, not even close.

I need to describe him for you, I know, I need to bring Angelo alive in your mind and in your imagination, this eleven-year-old boy in his sweaty white shirt and his gray shorts, that’s what he’s been wearing almost every day I’ve seen him, just that ordinary white undershirt worn as a T-shirt and those super-tight gray shorts with a zipper that can’t quite close all the way and a seat that looks ready to bust its seam over his lusciously rounded ass. Careful or I might start bitterly lamenting yet again the vanished splendor of boys in sexy clothing, I might start ranting against a diseased culture of stupidity and ugliness that now puts boys like Angelo into droopy knee-length shirts and baggy short pants and makes shapeless grotesques out of each and every one of them. But no, I’ll wait, I’ll publish a poem about all of this in 1995 and I’ll call it In Unspeakable Fashion, most of my friends will scoff and tell me that baggy clothing is just a fad, just a fashion, just a style, there’s no significance to it, soon it will change. Then I’ll write an angry screed in 2000 and I’ll call it Baggy-Pants Thuggery, most of my friends will scoff again and tell me that baggy clothing is just a fad, just a fashion, just a style, there’s still no significance to it, soon it will change, soon it will pass. Finally I’ll write a series of tales beginning in 2005 and I’ll call them Dreamboy Variations and I’ll bitterly lament yet again the vanished splendor of boys in sexy clothing, most of my friends will no longer scoff, most of them will no longer pretend that baggy clothing is just a fad, just a fashion, just a style, that there’s no significance to it, that soon it will change and pass away. Even they will know by now that paradise is lost and gone for all of us.

So let’s not upset ourselves about the dismal millennium, here’s young Angelo in his tight half-zipped gray shorts that show off his beautifully bare legs, he’s a dandy little specimen, just look at those sturdy hips and shoulders and that bold stance, his whole body is a trim and supple enticement. I toss the Frisbee back to him and then I spend the next few minutes watching him frolic with his friends, he’s a good athlete, he’s fast and he’s graceful, two more times he throws the Frisbee to me and then rewards me with a high-spirited laugh when I throw it back.

Weeks later, after we’ve become friends, I ask him why he noticed me and why he decided to include me in his Frisbee game. He says that I looked sad and that I looked lonely, he was trying to cheer me up. “Well, Little Jay, you did a good job,” I tell him.

“Thanks, Big Jay,” he says back. Then he puckers his lips and waits for me to lean closer and kiss him, he always does that, right from the beginning, he loves to share affectionate little kisses and he always asks for them by lifting his face to me and puckering his lips. It’s not a romantic or erotic thing for him, it’s just his way of being friendly. Like calling me Big Jay, that’s also his idea. I mentioned earlier that one of his nicknames is Little Jay, a lot of his buddies call him that and I picked up on it, occasionally I use it as well—so Angelo quickly made it reciprocal by taking my own first name of Jake and turning it into Big Jay. Sort of clever. He’s a sharp kid, very bright, you can see the wit and the wiliness in his big brown eyes.

Did I finish describing him for you? Did I tell you that he has blondish hair and that he wears it in a mullet? Those mullets are funny, they’re popular this year, short on top and on the sides and long in back, Angelo reminds me of a little pony with his hair like that. Blondish hair, yes, not quite fully blond but lighter than brown and streaked with golden highlights by the summer sun. His face is still childishly delicate with chipmunkish cheeks and a softly rounded chin and those oversized Bambi brown eyes. His body, well, you already know, it’s sturdy and perfect and all boy, all intoxicating, I’d give anything to get inside those gray shorts of his, to take off every bit of his clothing, to see him naked. But I’m assuming and I’m predicting that I’ll never get lucky enough for that. I already told you, I have no experience with these small-town boys, I can’t imagine them ever wanting to show me their dicks or ever wanting to join me in bed for some seriously queer sex. It’s 1982 and I’m hopelessly naïve about these things, I know, I’m hopelessly ignorant and unenlightened—but Angelo will teach me, Angelo will open my eyes.

I can’t think of him as an eleven-year-old without seeing those gray shorts he always wears, they’re grass-stained and grease-stained and dirty and they have a tantalizing boybulge at the crotch where the zipper won’t quite zip. I ask him one day, hey Little Jay, what kind of underpants do you wear? He says they’re just “regular white ones” and then gladly unsnaps and unzips to show me the briefs beneath his gray shorts, I don’t think they’re Jockey or Hanes or even Fruit of the Loom, maybe just some generic brand from K-Mart or Sears. I ask him and he shrugs and says yeah, K-Mart, my mom buys ’em. Then Angelo asks me why I want to know. I tell him that I’m “gay” and that I like to look at boys in their underwear—especially white briefs like those, just exactly like those. This discussion feels reckless and I’m a little nervous but the kid only grins and takes off his gray shorts and says no problem, he thinks it’s funny, he gets himself a Popsicle from my freezer and then sits in front of the TV in his underwear and his socks to watch a Three Stooges episode.

The whole “gay” thing never seems to impress Angelo one way or another, he doesn’t ask me about it or ponder the sexual implications, it’s as if I’ve revealed that I’m left-handed or half German or arachnophobic, to Angelo it just means that I like to look at boys in their undies, which doesn’t bother him at all, he enjoys this new game between us. He just laughs when I wrestle with him and when I put my face against his crotch to smell the tart pissiness of those underpants, he’s never very clean, he always needs a bath, I love the musk of him, the little-boy odor of him. Yeah, he just laughs—and if I pull his underpants down to tickle him between the legs while we’re wrestling, even better, he’ll laugh louder and he’ll pull mine down and try to tickle me in return. So we’ve seen each other’s dicks by now, that’s right, and he’s even seen mine when it’s hard. I can’t possibly wrestle with him and not be aroused, after all. Angelo knows that I’m excited by him, he knows what a boner means, he’s young but he’s not a moron. He knows that my boner is because of him.

But it takes a while before I get to see Angelo himself with a hard dick. Not because he’s bashful or hiding anything from me, no, he’s just young and he doesn’t get aroused by wrestling or by being tickled and so far that’s all we’ve done, it’s enough to give me a hard-on but not him. Hey, we’ve only known each other for a few weeks, be patient, this is Sandburg, this ain’t Manila or Tangier. Angelo and I are still learning to trust each other, to love each other. Day by day we do hugging and we do kissing which feels more and more eagerly affectionate, more and more eagerly intimate. Day by day we play new games which get naughtier and naughtier. Sometimes the boy will come to my apartment with one or two of his friends, he’s popular, he has lots of buddies—but usually he comes alone, pounding at my door, smiling, ready for a big hug and a big happy kiss and then for some giggly mischief that gives both of us an excuse to take off most of our clothes and to grab each other and touch each other and to defy every prohibition of the world beyond. Does Angelo himself realize this? Does he understand what we’re doing? Maybe not at first, but he does now, I’m sure. He understands.

OK, listen up, this is a good day, an important day, you’ll see what I mean about Angelo, I’ll tell you what happens. He greets me with his customary hug and kiss and then quickly takes off his gray shorts, this is late July and it’s hot and he’s not even wearing a shirt today, now he also takes off his shoes and his socks and we do some wrestling in just our underpants, the usual routine, he pretends to be Hulk Hogan and does a lot of growling and muscle-flexing and jumping onto me from the couch. This game eventually moves from the living room into the bedroom, where Angelo uses the bed itself as a wrestling ring and the pillows as his opponents, leaping and bouncing and slamming against the mattress, occasionally even launching himself bedside from my arms to body-slam with maximum power and spectacle onto the bed and its jangling springs.

But today is too hot for very much of this frenetic silliness, even Angelo soon runs out of energy, finally he flops onto his back and I flop beside him and we sprawl there all sweaty as we listen to some music from the radio. This is when Angelo gets his idea for a new game, something quiet and easy for us to do in this heat. Well, to be accurate, this is a game that we’ve already played before once or twice. But we were wearing more clothes those other times. “I’ll be Blackie again,” Angelo tells me now. “All right?”

“Yeah, cool, I like Blackie.”

“You do? Really? What’s your favorite part?”

“I like his kisses. They’re the best. Good idea, Little Jay.”

“I’m Blackie, not Jay,” the boy reminds me, then he grins and he meows because he’s talking about his cat, Blackie is the name of his cat and now Angelo starts imitating him by crawling around me on his hands and knees and by rubbing against me and nuzzling me with his cheek and with his shoulder. This is pleasure enough, already I’ve got an obvious boner inside my Jockey briefs—but then Angelo starts giving me those “cat kisses” that we were just talking about, first time we’ve done this in nothing but our underwear, so much better this way when he starts using his tongue to give me wet little kisses all over my body, no pants to interfere this time, no shirt, my young catboy is darting and flicking his tongue against my bare legs, my bare arms, my bare chest, he’s actually licking my sweat but he’s not at all squeamish, this is something new, this is surprisingly sexual, this is wild.

I can’t help myself, even if I’m being rash, maybe I’ll regret doing this—but suddenly I tell Angelo that we should play this game without any clothes, no stupid clothes at all, we should take off everything. “More fun that way,” I propose, already pushing down my briefs to free the bony beast within. Angelo has seen it before—my erection—but it always amuses him, he grins at it now and gives it a friendly swat and then another and another to make the thing dance from side to side, it’s a toy for him, it’s like a yo-yo or a Slinky. “Cats don’t wear underpants,” he agrees, needing only a moment to pull off his own briefs, first time I’ve ever seen him stripped down clean this way, naked pixie with a dangly little dick and pinkly unripe balls and that familiar devil-may-care grin. “Hairy cats in underpants,” he ends up saying, it makes no sense but he likes the rhyme of it.

“You’re no hairy cat,” I tell him, he’s kneeling beside me on the mattress and I run my hand down the naked front of him, over his tummy and his penis and the creamy bareness of his thighs. “Smooth little kitty.”

Angelo responds with a sly meow and resumes our cat-kissing game. What does he think is happening here on this bed? Why is he licking a naked man? What’s in his eleven-year-old mind right now? I don’t know and I don’t ask him, that’s for sure. I don’t say anything to distract him or interrupt him. I just keep touching and feeling him as he crawls around me and nuzzles me and flicks at me with his busy tongue, his head is near my chest and I’m petting his dark blond shag of hair that falls so straight and soft over his neck, now he meows again and turns on his knees to nuzzle against my legs and suddenly I’m looking right at his pretty little butt. I reach out and caress it, each white cheek is a perfect handful and the crack is slightly spread and I can see the rosebud hole. Angelo looks at me over his shoulder and croons “silly old Jake” and regards me with a grin, then he pays me back for feeling his ass by pretending to snap and nip at my dick and then by actually doing it, just quickly, he startles me by clamping his teeth right beneath the knob of my erection and biting down gently before releasing it and glancing up at me with another grin.

I need to help you understand that grin of his, those eyes, there’s such a confident and relaxed cleverness about them, such a soulful kind of wisdom and poise, often I feel that Angelo is somehow older and more mature than I am, he never seems flustered, he greets any new experience with serene and joyful aplomb. But those are just words, useless, you need to know this boy and to feel the spell of his smile and to hear the musical charm of his voice, definitely his voice, it can be so lively and piping when he’s outside with his friends or so seductively throaty when he’s inside with me. He really does say things like “silly old Jake” when we’re together, I’m not kidding you, he purrs endearments to me as if I’m the boy and he’s the man.

That cat-kissing game becomes an almost daily event between us, it’s not quite sex but it’s damn close, we always do it nude and we always take turns, Angelo usually starts and then I get my chance to be the kissing cat, on my bed or on the couch or on the floor of the living room, he licks me and I lick him. My erection remains a plaything for him, he always enjoys batting it with his “paws” or pretending to threaten it with his teeth, same as that first time, even gently biting it as a joke, making me crazy. And then, divine reward, I get to use my tongue all over his starkly naked body, he grins and he giggles as I have my fun with him, he lets me lick the cheeks of his butt and he lets me lick him in front and even kiss his penis, that’s only fair—he bites mine, I kiss his—once or twice he gets slightly stiff but not all the way, not a real erection, he’s still more tickled by this game than turned on.

But you can’t expect a man and a boy to tease each other this way forever, we keep playing around for a couple of weeks and then I need to do more, I’m ready and I’m certain that Angelo is ready, nature is pulling us to the next level, this is inevitable. Here we are once again playing our game, we’ve taken off our clothes and our underwear and I’m sitting on the couch with Angelo crawling and climbing all around me and over me with his warm little body and his kittenish tongue, I’ve got my usual frenzied hard-on and now the boy is being cute and he’s nudging and rubbing against it with his cheek, looking up at me, grinning at me. Normally I’d wait until later to jerk off, until after Angelo has gone, and even now that’s my plan, even now when I reach down almost reflexively just to touch my own dick, christ, I’m dying here, this is painful, I just need to give the thing a quick squeeze, like clutching a sore thumb for relief—but then I keep squeezing it and stroking it and suddenly I’m actually masturbating while the boy leans back and watches me do it. This had to happen. How did I restrain myself until today? And why? Maybe I should’ve done this weeks ago. Maybe Angelo has been waiting for this, impatient and curious to see what a man’s big hairy thing can do. Well, OK, now he can stop wondering.

So who’s being initiated here? Me or the boy? Both of us, I guess. We’re teaching each other. We’re learning together. Our lessons are partly anatomy and biology and partly emotion, a varied curriculum of erections and orgasms, of play and pleasure, of loving, of trusting. And now Angelo watches as I finish jerking off in front of him, he stares with cheerful eyes and quiet fascination at a man’s ejaculation and at all of that messy semen. But the lesson isn’t over, not quite, Angelo waits until I’ve spurted and dribbled myself dry and then he leans closer against my side and gives me a smile of approval and dips one dainty finger into the puddle on my belly. He sniffs it and then sniffs it again. “This smells funny,” he tells me. “What’s it made of? Like milk?”

“Not really. It’s sperm. Little fishy cells of sperm. And the gunk they swim in. For making babies.”

“Little fish? They swim?”

“They look sort of like fish. Or tadpoles. Under the microscope.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m serious.”

“So they’re alive?”

“Yep, this is living stuff.”

“Cool,” the boy says, giving his finger another sniff, then leaning himself lower to sniff directly at the stuff on my belly. “Is it dangerous?”

“Like how?”

“Will it make me puke?”

“No, not necessarily.”

“Yeah, it smells like fish,” Angelo decides. He leans away and regards his slimy finger one more time and then tests it very cautiously with the tip of his tongue. “Tastes like fish. Nasty fish.”

“Cats like fish,” I tell him.

“That’s right.”

“Don’t worry, it won’t make you puke, even if it tastes weird.”

“Do some people like it?”

“Some people do, yeah.”

“It’s pretty bad,” Angelo says, he puts the finger into his mouth to clean it and then grimaces at the flavor. “That’s all. No more.”

“You’re brave, man. You tasted it. Good job, Little Jay.”

“When will I be old enough?”

“For what?”

“To make stuff come out,” Angelo says, giving me an exasperated don’t-be-dumb look. He’s been beside me this whole time but now I put an arm around him and encourage him to sit on my lap, meanwhile I shrug and say I’m not sure, every boy is different, you’ll just have to jack off a lot and wait and find out. He’s laughing because I still have an erection and I’m still slathered with cum and now he’s sitting on my lap and he can feel the hardness and the wetness against his back as I put both arms around him and hug him to me, he likes this, he purrs “my Big Jay” and settles himself backward against my slippery dick and my slippery stomach. We keep discussing his own looming pubescence and what he can expect. “You shouldn’t have to wait very long,” I tell him. “You’ll be twelve in October, right?”

“Just before Halloween.”

“So pretty soon you might start getting some pubic hair,” I say, reaching down and feeling the bareness of his lower tummy and his groin. “And your balls will get bigger.”

“Yeah?”

“They’ll get bigger and start making sperm,” I tell him, and now I’m feeling them as I explain, I’m cupping and I’m fondling Angelo’s young testicles as he listens to me and as I kiss his ear and his shaggy hair. And I can see, looking down the front of him over his shoulder, that his penis is hardening, it’s stretching out and then up, it’s growing as I continue to play with his balls, finally Angelo has himself a real boner and now I can touch it and I can squeeze the vibrant stiffness of it and I can finger its small rubbery head while the boy himself makes a noise like sighing and laughing at the same time, everything is different for him now, suddenly our games are about more than just teasing and tickling and giggling, suddenly Angelo understands the animal power of his own body and his own cock. He turns his face to mine and puckers his lips for kissing, he’s thanking me for this discovery, he’s rewarding me and I warmly accept, we kiss and then we kiss again, more than just friends now, these kisses are different, I’ve got an erection and Angelo has an erection and I’m holding it and rubbing it and nothing after today will be the same.

It’s remarkable, this difference, Angelo’s perception has shifted and he’s become acutely aware these days of his own nakedness and he’s excited by it in a whole new way. He’s lost the oblivious immodesty of childhood and he’s discovered the sexual reality of himself and the sexual reality of our friendship, he wants to see me masturbate again and again during these last days of summer, he wants me to feel him and to fondle him, he gets an eager boner now as soon as he undresses, he always shows it off and he sings that goofy “I want you to play with my ding-a-ling” song and he does a dance to make his hard ding-a-ling bounce a crazy jig. There’s a new frankness and randiness about him. He’s obsessed with “jacking off” now as the best game for us to play together, he watches me do it, he helps me do it, he evaluates the quality and the quantity of my ejaculations. But he’s just as intrigued by his own toy and by how it feels when he rubs it or when I rub it for him and by how it feels when it finally produces that orgasmic throb like some kind of magic or miracle between his legs, even better one day in September when that dry throb is suddenly a little moist, some kind of wilder and more potent magic this time, a drop or two of purest boyjuice. I kiss him and congratulate him, I tell him that he’s now shooting clear and pretty soon he’ll be shooting white, just wait, you’ll see.

He loves that expression, he’s always talking about “shooting clear” and he’s always trying to do it again, he tells me that he’s been practicing at home, he’s convinced that jacking off is like exercising or lifting weights, repetition can make you better and better. Angelo at home, yeah, that reminds me, I’ve never mentioned his home or his family and I’ve never explained how this young kid can spend so much time here at my apartment. The easy answer, to be honest, is by sneaking and lying. He started coming here during the summer when he was out playing with his friends and he was free to roam and to visit, now it’s autumn and he’s not here quite so much but he’s still here a lot, he stops by after school and he runs over on the weekends. He lives just around the corner, just a block away, so all of these rendezvous are simple enough to coordinate. But what about his mother and his father and his live-in uncle and his brothers and sisters? How do they feel about this friendship between me and Angelo? They know about me, they do, I’m not a total secret, I’ve met them and I’ve talked to them and I’ve even taken Angelo with me to the beach and to the park and to the golf course. That’s right, I’ve been teaching him to play golf, he shares my clubs whenever we go out, this is what his family knows about me.

But that’s all they know, they don’t realize how many times Angelo has snuck over here during these past few months, they have no idea, Angelo doesn’t tell them, they think he’s at the arcade or playing basketball with his buddies when actually he’s here with me, playing naked games, learning to masturbate. And learning to hump. This is new, this humping he does, he mounts pillows or couch cushions or wet towels and he pretends to fuck them, he’ll do this with anything that feels good against his dick, anything that can produce an orgasm. Last week we were wrestling and tangling and Angelo ended up on top of me, face to face with me, suddenly I could feel him humping his nakedness against my nakedness, sliding his cock against my cock, better this way than with pillows or towels, maybe even better than ordinary jacking off. This continues on his birthday and again on Halloween when he stops by early in the evening to show me his costume. He’s twelve now but he’s not too old for trick-or-treating, he’s wearing a rubbery E.T. mask, everybody is dressing as E.T. this year, he has me laughing like a ninny when he does his croaky “E.T. phone home” voice and parades himself around nude except for that ridiculous mask, before long I have this horny E.T. on top of me and he’s merrily humping and humping and I’m staring at his rubbery alien face and I still can’t stop laughing.

A few days later, while Angelo is here with me watching TV, his father and his uncle suddenly arrive pounding at the front door downstairs. It’s OK, no need to panic, the boy didn’t take off his clothes yet and we have nothing to hide or to explain. So what’s happening? Why are these Angry Villagers here to storm my castle? Angelo’s father is tense and pissed off and he asks me, “D’you have my son in there?” Notice the ominous wording of that question, man. Not: Is Angelo here? But: D’you have my son in there? As if I might have waylaid and abducted the poor kid. Meanwhile, Angelo’s uncle is also standing there in the doorway, his hands are practically clenched into fists and he’s glaring at me with a scary kind of malice. I could probably beat the unholy shit out of these two guys if sufficiently provoked, I’m no pacifist, I don’t mind bloodying my knuckles occasionally—but that’s not going to happen today and that’s not the point. This isn’t a barroom brawl. This is about Angelo and his pissed-off family and about me doing my best to stay out of prison. So I don’t fuck around and I don’t shoot off my mouth, I quickly call for Angelo, I live on the second floor of this two-apartment house and now the boy comes galloping down the steps to join us here at the front door.

Not even his father and his uncle can find a problem with Angelo’s prompt and proper arrival from upstairs, he looks so utterly normal and nonchalant, his clothes are on and his shoes are tied and there’s not a whiff of scandal about any of this, nothing amiss or inappropriate. The two guys look surprised, almost disappointed, they were probably expecting to barge in and discover a scene of depravity and molestation and a good excuse for trouble and for violence and for my eventual arrest. Too bad for them. Great luck for me. Nothing else to say or do, this confrontation is over, so I stand and I watch as the men grimly escort Angelo back to their house. The boy turns once and shrugs at me in a helpless gesture of parting. I shrug back, just as helpless, just as bereft.

This trouble with the Patallero family, I gradually learn, started on Halloween. Angelo ditched his friends when he came over here to visit me and to show me his E.T. costume, lovable little sneak, he should’ve been out trick-or-treating instead of here humping on top of me and rubbing boners. Somehow, don’t ask me for details, his friends betrayed his whereabouts and his parents found out and Angelo ended up being punished and grounded and prohibited from spending any more time here alone in my apartment. But he came back anyway. And I didn’t even know we were in trouble. Until his paternal and his avuncular bodyguards showed up to rescue him.

This is my first experience with the growing menace of sex-abuse hysteria, my first skirmish with the enemy, I was already familiar with this mounting madness thanks to the shrill and complicit media but I never encountered the chilling flesh-and-blood reality of it until this day in November. In a way, you see, I was right about the greater risk of meeting and loving boys here in the heart of small-town Middle America—but the risk isn’t from the boys themselves, they’re just as warm and willing here as anywhere else, they all love to play. It’s the parents, man, it’s that virulent community of “porch police” who pose the threat, there’s no big-city anonymity here, no hustling scene, vigilant eyes are on you wherever you go and whatever you do. The risks are big. The dangers are real. But the rewards are irresistible.

I don’t see much of Angelo in the weeks that follow, then his entire family packs up and moves to a bigger house across town—not because of me, don’t be stupid, it’s a coincidence of timing that feels personally and cruelly motivated but it’s not, it’s just life playing tricks. So I figure we’re finished, Angelo and I, our forbidden affair is kaput. That’s my assumption. But I’m wrong. The boy actually has greater freedom now to see me, not less. He owns a cherry-red Huffy bicycle and he uses it to come visiting his old neighborhood on the weekends—even in the winter cold, no problem—he pedals his way over here from across town, a trip of maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, then he spends several hours flitting from house to house and from friend to friend until he needs to return home. There’s no way for his family to monitor his exact location these days, he can leave his bike in the yard of any of his pals and dash over here to visit me and to have some fun. There’s still some risk, of course, there’s always risk—but it’s not bad, it’s sort of exciting, even Angelo himself seems to feel the extra thrill of this illicit subterfuge, there’s a new kind of bad-boy defiance about him that makes each of his visits a kinky little adventure, this is where Angelo can try anything and test himself and fuck the rules.

So try to imagine this boy as a twelve-year-old, I’ll help you, I’ll give you some snapshots of him. Like the day he offers to pee on my chest or even on my face, it’s my choice, I can see him sitting there on my belly as I lie on the floor, maybe we’ve been wrestling, he’s straddling me naked and he’s grinning and waiting to douse me, he’s holding his dick and jiggling it in anticipation. He’s changed so much since I first met him, taller now, more sinewy in the arms and the legs, bonier in the shoulders—but he still has that same gentleness to his face and those same big dark eyes that can make you feel quivery inside. And he doesn’t have that hillbilly mullet anymore, now his blondish hair is uniformly shaggy all around and he usually wears it uncombed and unparted down over his forehead and his ears and way down onto his neck. He’s every dream you’ve ever had, and he’s mine. But finally I say no, don’t pee on me, that would be a fuckin mess. Maybe I should’ve said yes. He seemed disappointed.

Or another day, he brings me several condoms that he bought from a machine at some gas-station restroom. This begins his fascination with rubbers for the next few weeks. He wears one to school, hidden inside his pants, just for the subversive fun of it. He pisses in them, filling them like rubbery bags of lemonade. He puts them on me and jerks me off to capture my spurts of semen, then he puts the nasty things onto himself to enjoy the warm squishiness inside and maybe even to add a little spermy goo of his own. That’s his goal, to shoot white instead of clear, to fill a rubber with good stuff like mine, already his orgasms are nicely juicy but he’s not satisfied, he always fingers and appraises the stickiness produced by his own dick and then he shows it to me and says nope, Big Jay, I can do better, just wait—as if I’m the one who’s disappointed and impatient, not him. My pubescent faun, my naked imp, I can feel a new fuzziness when I pet him below the belly where his pubes will soon be, I can’t even see it yet but I can feel it, this fuzziness like velvet, a promise of adolescence and potency just there beneath the tips of my fingers.

Or one other day, one other snapshot, it’s April or May and it’s warm enough for Angelo to be wearing a T-shirt and shorts—not his old gray shorts, no, he’s outgrown those by now, he’s a bigger boy now, these are new yellow gym shorts and they’re very short and very snug. And he’s wearing them with knee socks, that’s the image to relish, look at him posing there by the door, those knee-high socks are tight and they flatter the shape of his legs and they prompt the onlooker’s gaze upward to the stark bareness of his thighs, you can’t stop staring at his thighs, they’re still pale after a gloomy Midwestern winter and somehow they look extra sexy that way, the natural paleness of them, so boyish and smooth, so hairless and pallid, Angelo’s naked thighs, you want to pet them, you want to lick them.

Let’s stay here for another moment or two, let’s dally on this long-ago spring day when Angelo arrives in his yellow gym shorts and knee socks and then gives me a kiss and tells me that he’s gay. That’s exactly what he says, right out, “I’m gay!” Or no, now I remember, he kisses me and then he grins and he says, “I’m gay, too!” It’s a declaration of his love for me, his allegiance, his loyalty. He’s decided that he’ll be gay just like me. We’ll be faggots together from now on, to hell with his parents and to hell with everybody else, he’s going to be a homo just like his buddy Jake. So is he really a natural-born fag? Or is he just saying this to please me? I can’t tell you for sure. Angelo will move away and be gone by next spring. I’ll never know him as an older teenager, as a young adult, as a man. Maybe he’ll end up dating girls and getting married and having kids, maybe I’ll be his one and only male lover—but I can’t tell you, I don’t know the end of his story.

Yeah, you heard me, I said lover. Even Angelo acknowledges this reality by now. He’s not just some little boy playing dirty games anymore, he’s old enough these days to think of himself as gay and to think of us together as some kind of erotic couple, he’s turned on by the romance of this, he wants us to be like sweethearts in a movie or in a song and he wants us to do all of those mysteriously intimate things that sweethearts do together. I know this because he tells me, he directs me, he’s just as assertive now as he was last year when he initiated all of our wrestling and all of our games. There’s that word again. Initiate. And it’s true, we’re still initiating each other day by day into the secrets of joy and the secrets of desire. Sometimes I’ve identified a boy named Chico as my first real lover. And sometimes I’ve said Robbie Bostanchic, I mentioned him at the beginning, you probably know him. But now I’m telling you that it’s Angelo, he’s the first one, my first real loverboy, he’s the epiphany and the sunburst. So you decide. I don’t care. To me, all three stories are true.

There’s more, we’re not finished, Angelo says “I’m gay, too!” and then he tells me to put on some “classic” music for our afternoon together, he digs my classical stuff, it makes him feel cuddly and romantic. He likes for us to undress each other and to get into my bed and then to hold each other, to caress, to smooch, he loves these long and lingering minutes of foreplay as we listen to Wagner or Puccini or Beethoven, he loves to lose himself in the music and the passion, he croons endearments to me and he purrs and he mews in his usual kittenish way, he lets me kiss him everywhere and he lets me suck him, it makes him shiver with pleasure to get his pecker sucked, I’ve been doing this now for several weeks whenever he comes over, he adores it. And he’s not timid about returning the pleasure, he enjoys snuggling down against me and using his tongue on me, licking my balls, licking my dick, it’s just like our old cat-kissing game—only now he’ll keep going and he’ll take my whole erect dick into his mouth and he’ll suckle it lovingly until he can feel my spasm and my gush, that’s enough for Angelo, he doesn’t care for the rank flavor of adult sperm, he’s OK with a little of it, he actually likes to taste and to swallow that first hot squirt, but that’s all, no more.

I could continue but our time is short, I need to show you Angelo as a thirteen-year-old, our final months together, the end of our journey. You’re wondering when he finally shoots white for the first time, I know, I don’t blame you. But actually there’s no definite first time, not really, it’s more of a transition than a sudden event, it happens gradually and it happens mostly when Angelo is masturbating at home, he brings me rubbers with the milky evidence inside and he shows them to me proudly and then we do our best to produce a fresh sample here at my apartment. This is when Angelo grows and ripens into the fullest succulence of his boyhood, all rag-mop hair and lean muscle and randy cock, he overwhelms me, every precious bit of him, even the smell of him, there’s a new heat and a new pungency to his armpits and to his crotch where he’s starting to get some frizzy hair, it’s the sweet stink of adolescence and boysex, it’s the scent of lust.

By this time, I’m happy to tell you, Angelo’s family knows about his regular visits to my apartment and they no longer interfere with us. He’s thirteen now and I’ve known him for almost two years and I haven’t kidnapped or murdered him yet, so I guess his familial overlords have lost interest in our friendship. Maybe we would still end up encountering fresh dangers and difficulties, Angelo and I, if he stayed here in Sandburg and we continued our love affair, maybe his increasing recklessness and flamboyance would be our eventual downfall. It’s possible. I’ll never know, but it’s certainly possible. He’s becoming a gleeful young sociopath, a budding anarchist, he reads not only my own stories but also the stories and books and poems of Burroughs and Ginsberg that he discovers here in my apartment, also the stories in Fag Rag and Pan and sundry NAMBLA publications, even the silly little tales he finds in my copies of Joyboy or Piccolo or Hot Teens, where he also finds a wealth of pictures to further fuel his imagination and his juvenile radicalism. He tells me that I should make copies of these dirty pictures and distribute them around town for people to find, like maybe in churches or schools, it would be so funny. I say yeah, interesting, but how do I make the copies? Angelo grins at me and pushes some unkempt hair from his eyes and then shrugs. “I’m just the idea guy,” he says. “I don’t worry about the details.”

“You always have good ideas, that’s for sure.”

Angelo nods, he’s not modest, my memory of this day is vivid and I can hear Swan Lake pounding from my big JBL speakers as we talk back and forth, I can see the boy jump to his feet and start dancing around my apartment as if he’s onstage with Baryshnikov, it’s January and I have the heat up and Angelo’s cheeks are reddened from the warmth and from his own excitement. There’s no limit to his energy, earlier today he was sledding and skating with some friends over at Lake Swanson, tomorrow he’ll be in nearby Stonerville for a basketball game, he’s on his junior-high team, he plays guard. Yes, he’s both a scholar and an athlete, a talented jock and a straight-A student, he’ll listen to Russian ballet while reading poetry by Ginsberg or Whitman and then he’ll go outside for a quick game of football or Frisbee with his gang of buddies. Years later, decades later, I’ll still weep from the loss of him, I’ll still miss him like an amputated limb, I’ll dream about him as the boy he was and as the man he must have become.

But let’s not be sad, not today, not with Angelo feeling so frisky and so happy as he dances himself around my apartment. This is your best chance to see him shoot some genuine big-boy cum, he’s just about ready to get undressed and get busy, he’s already horny from looking at the pictures. Hell, he’s always horny. He fantasizes about bringing some of his pals up here for sex, he’s been talking about it for months, he wants to mess around with other boys, the idea of it makes him hot, it arouses him, he’s frantically curious to see and to touch and to taste the cocks of these other neighborhood kids. He promises me that he’ll do it soon, he’ll bring over his bud Chris or his bud Danny and he’ll do shit with them on my bed and they’ll suck each other and they’ll let me watch, no problem, these other boys will even let me do stuff with them as well, he’s sure that these friends of his will agree to this and will enjoy this, he already jokes around with them about jacking off and they already make a game of grabbing and groping at one another’s crotches and trying to give each other boners. So it’ll be easy to do more, just wait, it’ll happen. That’s what Angelo promises me. He doesn’t know yet that time is our enemy.

Today, this moment, all of Angelo’s plans seem plausible. I trust him. He’s frank and forthright about his goals. I remember him saying, “I’d like to give Chris a blowjob and find out if it’s fun.” Or, “I wanna suck Danny’s dick and see how I like it.” Or even, “I can’t wait to try sex with those guys, I think it’ll be extremely cool.” This is the way he reasons and the way he talks, always very sensible and analytical, it might sound phony to you but it’s not, it’s true, Angelo doesn’t bother with codes or innuendos or hints, he comes straight out and tells you what he wants and why he wants it, no nonsense, no bullshit. But this precocious little man is also pure boy and he can happily abandon himself to madness and mischief. I have a poster on my wall from the movie Pixote, I kept it rolled up until recently but Angelo persuaded me to display it for anyone and everyone to see, no matter that it shows a naked boy, big fuckin deal, Angelo convinced me to hang it and to be proud of it—and now, as he dances past it here in my living room, he pauses to give Pixote a lover’s kiss on the mouth and then on the dick, he says let’s pretend this is Danny (that’s his true crush, his true favorite) and then he rests his fist between the posterboy’s legs and he sticks out his erect thumb and gives it a quick and noisy sucking. It’s an effectively obscene pantomime and it makes Angelo glance at me and start laughing. I laugh right back and I tell him to quit horsing around, man, we’re wasting time! He swipes the hair from his eyes and he nods, he’s definitely ready, he unbuttons his flannel shirt as he crosses the room toward me, he unzips his jeans, he grins and he lets me see the rude bulge in his underpants.

Watching him strip will always thrill me, I’ll never tire of it, watching my boy get nude in front of me as he takes off his shirt and his pants, as he takes off his white socks, as he takes off his underwear and lets his erection pop up free, it’s such a pretty thing, such an appetizing five-inch wiener standing up so hard and so red between the paleness of his belly and the paleness of his thighs, goddamn, what a scandalous body he has, all of that delicious ivory skin, all of that delicious thirteen-year-old bareness, look at him with his fuzzy new patch of pubic hair and with his balls hanging so much bigger and heavier than before, the way they dangle, the way they sag, the sinful plumpness of them. Now he stays standing in front of me as I undress, he watches me and then steps forward to where I’m sitting and waiting for him on the couch, he offers himself into my hands and I start worshipping the naked smoothness of him while he remains standing there before me like some voluptuary idol, like some debauched cupid. I kiss the soft warmth of his stomach and then I kiss lower and I nuzzle the stiff warmth of his prick with my cheek and with my lips, Angelo chuckles and pinches at his own nipples and lets his hips loll forward into my embrace and lets his dick nestle itself into my mouth. The music is still playing around us, those sensuous Tchaikovsky melodies, our passionate soundtrack as we begin now to make love on this dreamy January afternoon. Within two months Angelo will be gone. His family will move to Colorado and I’ll never see him again. He’ll leave Sandburg without even saying goodbye. But that’s later. Today is ours.

The boy savors this prelude of cocksucking and then he moves himself into position for something different, for his favorite new way of busting a nut, he turns around and settles himself onto my lap with his back against my chest. No, correct that, he’s actually sitting on my belly, right on my pubic hair, so that my dick is up between his legs and standing hard against his balls and against the crack of his butt. Now he can start, now he can jack himself off with one hand and he can hold my dick with the other, he can press and rub my erection between the cheeks of his ass while I use both hands to reach down and to spread those bare cheeks for him, to open his crack good and wide for him as he keeps using my hard thing like a dildo, pushing the knob of it against his own asshole, using it to tickle and to tantalize himself, just a little, just enough, intensifying his pleasure—like fingering inside himself, only better. If you’re standing in front of us, in front of the couch, you’re lucky, you can see Angelo perched on me with his legs wide apart and his butt spread open and his anus showing all pink and raw inside as he continues to push my cockhead against it, squirming himself onto it as he masturbates, letting an inch of it sink into him, up into his hole, you can watch my thing going in, easing in, maybe two inches now, no more, that’s ideal for Angelo, that’s all the cock he needs or wants in order to heighten the achy sweetness of his orgasm when he finally cums. And there it is, the real stuff, my boy’s semen, you can see the creamy glisten of it as he spurts and as he spurts once more and then as he squeezes out a final ooze of it from the tip of his tired penis.

That’s the reality these days for Angelo, that’s the soul of him and the truth of him, he wants to be “gay” and he wants to try sex in the ass and he’s starting to sample it whenever he masturbates, using my erection as his anal toy, taking a little more of it inside of himself each time we’re together, getting accustomed to the feel of it. I’ve never actually fucked him, not yet—but it’ll happen before he leaves. One day he’ll straddle me face to face and he’ll take a firm grip on my boner and he’ll sit himself onto it slowly and slowly and slowly until it’s all the way into his ass and he’s riding it up and down, gently at first but then faster and rougher, up and down, letting it churn inside his rectum, riding it and riding it, you can hear the deep slurp of it inside his butt. This really happens, this is one week before he leaves me, Angelo is getting fucked for the first time and he can’t stop grinning, he can’t stop laughing under his breath, he leans himself farther toward me so that we can kiss while we’re screwing, this makes it perfect for him, this is the game he’s always wanted to play.

No, never mind, forget all that. None of this is real. Farewell to Angelo Joseph Patallero, the epiphany and the sunburst, the best and the first. Forget the way he laughed and the way he danced. Forget the smell of his hair and the tenderness of his kisses and the bright heaven of his eyes. Forget his murmured endearments and his innocent whispers of love. No more. This is all illusion. This is the end. Angelo was a dream and now I’m awake. Now I start over. Now I begin again.