The Pool

In that latitude, the architecture--six stories of motel rooms ringing a pool and patio--was supposed to suggest the swinging freedoms of a mid-century California, promised land.  But in Montana, the blue astroturf of the outdoor walkways was too exposed, eroding under the seizures of winter while the railing overlooking the swimming area was shedding big flakes of matte-black, industrial paint.  Perhaps some one was being fingered, framed for some, as yet, unnamed crime.  A semi-permanent stain, paint stuck easily to the voyeurs' sweaty palms.  

And it was March when I stayed there, and some indigent animal in bleached carhardts and a baseball cap had peeled back the infected tissue.  He exposed the gangrenous green of the moss and the moldy blue toxins that were overwhelming the pool.  From the fourth floor it was like being in the observation balcony of some surgical theater.  He had cut away the flesh, the muscle, the breast plate of bone.  There were the organs slow-cooking in the stew that is life.  The stench was attractive, suggesting summer.  The stench was repellent, suggesting death.

As is always the case, this brief meditation on mortality made me horny.  In lieu of casting myself from this brave height onto the cement beside the pool, my body sloppily draped on the red brick wall, denting the navy blue trash bin, or tearing the silver vinyl roof of my rental car, I go online to find some remnant of living, some breathing being that would come give me a blow job.  He will revive me with the breath of life.

As if he had gotten lost, as if he had forgotten, he arrived much later.  He arrived with the rain.  And his hunger was greater than mine.  Dire.  He wants more than breath.  He wants more than blood.  Profoundly alienated from life itself, he wants to hold its code.  

Like the medieval man touching the Bible that the bishop offered him and feeling the fire of God, like the spaceman tracing a journey from his wrecked craft through a jungle teeming with an orgy of butterflies, like the farmer using both hands to reach in the furnace and turn a calf on a cold January night, this boy begs for life in its exaggerated purity.  He wants the distillation.  He begs me for my DNA; falling into his eyes and caught in the web of his moans and sighs, I oblige him.