Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

I was wandering around the living areas of the cottage on the shore of Spirit Lake that night, hearing discussions on all sides of me, above LeRoy Brown pounding out Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" on the piano, of how much everyone missed David Alexander and wasn't it a shame that David wasn't here and how much livelier the parties were when Alexander was sitting on the piano and thumping on its side as LeRoy punished the keys. And these weren't even members of the Wild Ones. These were summer-only friends who had the huge houses we all called cottages at the lake too who had descended by car or boat and half of whose names I didn't even know—or had bothered to remember. Most of the owners from the lake came from the Macon area, not Atlanta, and most of them were going to out-of-state colleges.

Thad and June and Maggie and Danny were off humping each other somewhere. Chas was making the rounds and pulling guys out of the melee for quickies in her room upstairs. She had tried me twice, to no avail, but she wasn't having much trouble with the local guys. Everyone was frenetic, panicking that this was the next-to-last weekend of the summer and they hadn't been laid enough, hadn't gathered enough memories of the good life at Spirit Lake in the summer.

Well, I missed David too. In ways these shallow, socially safe young people would never realize.

I walked through the open French doors at the water side of the living room and down to the dock. I stumbled onto the pier and to the water end of it, plopping down in one of the scruffy-white wooden Adirondack chairs pointed at the lake. I looked over to the other one, half expecting to see David sitting there. But of course he wasn't. He had been, though, last summer, on the next-to-last Saturday night of the summer season on the lake, coming out to where I was sitting in one of the chairs, smoking a cigarette, and seeking a muffling of LeRoy Brown back in the house, pounding away on Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer."

"You need to give up those smokes if you're going to take the state swimming crown," he said, as he reached me at the end of the dock and settled in the other chair. He was a magnificent specimen of a man just out of college. Dark complexioned, in a half-surly, bad boy look that was transformed the moment he gave you a smile. His hair was dark too, and he never seemed to be able to shave close, but on him it looked good. The women at college opened their legs instantly for a man who looked this good. He was shirtless, having stripped his off while walking to the dock. It was a hot night. I'd taken my shirt off too. I felt young and immature, not yet fully developed, in contrast to him. His was a mature man's body; my body was still working at it. I was a swimmer, blond and smooth chested, the chest muscled well enough, but not deeply—just enough development to serve the needs of a sleek line knifing through the water. He was hirsute, deeply tanned, broad- and deep-chested, already a muscular man. A god to those of us in the Buckland Wild Ones—to the whole community of youths on the western shore of the lake.

Any woman cavorting back there in the house would go with him in a flash. I think that's why he usually kept Maggie Campbell close—to ward off women throwing themselves at him. She had been safe, malleable, and uncomplaining since high school. Maggie wasn't with him now. He hadn't brought Maggie down to the dock with him. My body tensed up. It was always dangerous when he dropped Maggie before searching me out.

I pointed to the large crystal tennis trophy he'd brought out—his prize for winning the state title early in the summer. He wasn't carrying it around so much to brag as because of how much beer it would hold. It was at least half full now.

"You're ragging on me about fags . . . and training for sports," I said, "and yet you're walking around with a gallon of beer sloshing in that trophy?"

I had stopped after speaking the word "fags" and looked away, as he had done. I regretted the use of the word. There had been moments throughout the previous year at college, where we had reached a point where I knew what he wanted—what he wanted to ask of me, demand of me, take from me—but when I couldn't bring myself to give him the answer he wanted. It wasn't that I didn't want to give him that answer. It was because I was scared. It would change everything, completely reorder my life. In the summer of 1955 that wasn't something you decided to take on lightly—if at all. You were expected to hide it—to not have such thoughts and desires at all.

"Well, I didn't bring the beer out here to share with you," he said with a laugh, even as he handed me the trophy and I took a deep draw off it. "My sports training days are over anyway."

"But you have to be able to fit in the cockpit of that fighter jet you've volunteered to learn to drive," I said. I couldn't help making my voice sound a bit bitter.

"I've told you not to worry about that."

"Anything that takes you way from Atlanta . . . from Athens . . . from here, at the lake, makes me sad," I answered.

"And away from you?"

I didn't answer that. I just looked away from him, toward the dark shoreline across the lake, not wanting him to see how close to home it hit with that question.

"Maybe if you'd—"

"Please, David, don't put this on me."

"This is it, bub," He whispered, pulling his chair close to mine and reaching over the arm of my chair to place his hand on my crotch. "Who knows if there will ever be another summer like this?" he murmured. "You know what I feel, what I want."

He was unzipping my shorts. I didn't stop him. I was trembling.

"I know you want it too. You've said as much. Your body is telling me as much. One kiss. That's all I ask for and I'll zoom up in the air—in my jet and beyond."

My face was turned toward his. I'm sure he could see the tears on my cheek. He came in with his lips for a kiss and I didn't deny him. He was fishing my cock out of my fly and fisting it. I couldn't hide from him that I was hard for him. And I didn't deny him this either.

"Oh, Lee," he muttered and was out of his chair, kneeling in front of me, taking my cock in his mouth. "This is it, isn't it? This is the time for this."

"David, no. No . . . not here," I managed in a strangled voice. "Anyone can come out here and see us. There's a houseful of people in there." The Joplin rags had ended, and LeRoy had moved into Cole Porter and Hoagie Carmichael mood songs. They would be slow dancing in there now, dancing close together, building up for "laters." But some couples' "laters" could come sooner, and they might drift out here to fuck on the sloping lawn between house and water.

"But you'll go with me? You'll let me take you?" he raised his face to mine, pleading. It wasn't in David's nature to plead. He was giving me a great honor—which reminded me.

"But I've never—"

"Then it would be my honor. I'd be gentle. I'm off to Valdosta in two weeks, Lee. Don't deny me this. Listen to what LeRoy is playing inside: Cole Porter's 'Anything Goes.' He's playing that for us. Here, come with me."

He fucked me in the voluminous backseat of the Alexander '55 fire-engine-red Cadillac Series 62 convertible that his family had just bought and he'd driven so proudly to the lake, bringing his younger, rising college freshman brother, Danny to the lake with him. Danny, who even now, while David was popping my male cherry in the back of the family car, was upstairs in Chas' bedroom losing his virginity to her.

David was gentle—at first—lying on top of me across the backseat of the car, between my spread legs, my left ankle hooked on the top of the backseat and my right on the top of the front bench seat, and with him, cooing to me and holding his hand over my mouth to stifle my deep groans, moving inch by inch up inside me with his thick cock. My luck to be deflowered by a horse-hung man. In the end, though, when he was three-quarters of a foot inside me, he lost control and started pumping in earnest. By then, despite the pain-pleasure, I wanted no less from him. His cock was all possessing, his kisses like wine. I never wanted him to stop sucking on my nipples; sending his cock revolving deep inside me; causing my channel walls to ripple from the pleasure of him; finding and rubbing, rubbing, rubbing my prostate with his bulb until I exploded in arcs of cum to his intake of breath and steely strokes. Again, and again, and again.

When he was done—and I had been undone—he said he didn't want me to leave him that night. I couldn't say that I wanted him to leave me either. He drove to a seedy motel at the north end of the lake that couldn't decide whether it sided with the Woodland whites or the Coon Town blacks and fucked me all night, leaving his girlfriend, Maggie, roaming through the lake house, nudging couples apart to ID them, and wondering where David was. She eventually found Danny, pounding furiously on Chas' locked bedroom door—where Chas was adding another, different charm to her bracelet—and led him away for each to console the other—laying a foundation for more intimate consolation when David's jet took a nosedive a few months later.

Late August to early November didn't leave much time for David and me. In fact, beyond the last weekend of that summer at Spirit Lake, there was only one brief, glorious weekend in October in my studio apartment at college in Athens.

I snapped out of the reminiscence to rejoin the summer of 1956, sitting on the dock, outside my family's lake cottage, where the next-to-last weekend of the summer was being celebrated and mourned in appropriate debauchery mode. LeRoy was on the slower Cole Porter songs now. It was his lot to play almost to the bitter end. He wasn't really a guest at the party; he was black; he was hired to be here. I sat through "Night and Day" and "Begin the Beguine." Couples were beginning to drift out onto the lawn to start their evening fucking. One couple already was at the other end of the dock, rocking against each other, playing "hide the hands." How much they missed David, they were saying, between moans and giggles.

I looked at my watch. Good thing it was time to be gone. I couldn't have stayed around for much more of this on this next-to-last summer party night. The rowboat was right there at the end of the dock, gently tapping against the pier. I moved down to inside the boat, untied the rope anchoring it to the dock, and pushed off with an oar.

I wasn't going to be state champion in anything this year if I didn't practice, practice, practice. I pushed away from the lights and laughter of the party into the wet darkness of Spirit Lake.