Reflections at One a. m.

by Bob Waltrip

He is lying beside me in all his twenty-one years of collected glory. It's late at night, and there's a dog barking somewhere outside. Maddened by lust, a tom cat screams. The boy is asleep, snoring a little. He is lying on his back, with his right arm across his stomach, his left arm thrown up and outward at his side, in a pose of pure grace. I touch the fingers of his left hand. Oh God help me. The feel of them. The tenderness so sharp that I could cry.

"Fn-arr-gh," he says, and I poke his side to make him quit it. He rubs his nose with his right hand and stops snoring. The hand is on his chest now.

This bed. This room. An old desk, covered by my typewriter and manuscripts and rejection slips and apple cores. Baltimores. Who's your friend? Honey, I ain't got none.

I once had a crush on Ludwig Erhard.

I am instantly mistrustful of people who talk about their bowel movements and their sex life.

Vice squad cops have wet dreams, I'll bet.

If you play with frogs you'll get warts, and if you masturbate you'll grow a long hair in your palm.

While talking with old, distinguished people I have an abnormal fear that I'll break wind loudly and unexpectedly.

Chopin was born in 1810. Not that anybody cares.

I like cats and little kids who climb up into my lap and cuddle up to me. I like little stringy-haired girls with runny noses who squat in the yard and watch ants working; little boys who endlessly kill each other with wooden swords; baby kittens who piss in zinnia beds and cover it up with one elegant paw.

This boy is sleeping, and I am at peace. This son of ever responding kisses, after performing the most intimate acts of love, is now entrusting himself to me by sleeping at my side. I want to do something to show my gratitude. I kiss his chest, but it isn't enough. It doesn't suffice. I should pour ashes over my head, or make a speech. I should carve a little statue of him and makes him my little local god, and offer burnt sacrifices to him daily.

How strange and warm it is with him here. I can feel the heat of his body in this bed that has seen only sterile sheets before. White percale offers little comfort to a man insane with loneliness and despair. But now? Oh. Ahh. Mmmmm. Security. Instead of a million tons of shattered-glass aloneness in my gut, I now have the mellifluous dawn of contentment. He is here, and I am with him now. It's like getting out of jail.

And all the complexity of waking life is removed. Right now he's not talking about girls (still making half-hearted protestations of heterosexuality that neither of us appreciate), or drinking beer out of the bottle, or telling me about baseball games or cars. No wrestling matches and bruised arms now. It is reduced to this elemental thing. One man in bed with one boy, and so relieved and happy that he cannot sleep. Tomorrow the boy will be James Adam Hughes, but right now he's my sleeping lover.

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