The Sweet Side Of The Ropes: Enthralling Tales Of Male-Male Romance Read online

  The only reason she'd been generous enough to give me the house during the divorce was because it was mortgaged up to the shingles. And did I see a single penny of the money we'd taken out against it? No, of course not. She needed a new BMW. She needed a cruise to the Virgin Islands. She needed a fucking fifteen hundred-dollar blue horse coat Shar Pei, whom she promptly named Princess, spoiled rotten, and slept with more than she did me.

  All I needed was to have my head examined. But as with everything else, what I needed wasn't on her priority list.

  The mortgage payment was simply beyond my means now I had to pay alimony. I'd tried everything to keep it, taking on an extra part-time job, advertising for roommates, but it wasn't enough. I tried to sell the house, but the market was in a slump. By the time sales revived, it was too late. I'd lost my home.

  But that's the story of my fucking life—a day late and a dollar short.

  And so I'm sitting on the curb with a handful of worthless junk and a hangover that could bring Superman to his knees as the sheriff slaps a big, silver padlock on the door of what used to be my home, waiting on the one person in my life that I knew I could always count on. Demetrjusz. Dimi to the world at large—only his mother, an immigrant from Poland, called him by his full name. Hell, only his mother could pronounce it.

  Growing up, Dimi's family lived above the delicatessen they owned down on the corner of Midland Avenue. I spent many nights in Dimi's family's kitchen eating golumpki and pierogis, listening to Dimi's mother sing off-key in Polish while Dimi's father sat in front of their old 19” television set laughing his ass off watching Night Court and Family Ties. As time went on, they became more family to me than my own.

  Both of my parents had crawled into a bottle shortly after I turned five and had never come back out.

  Not their fault, I guess. My oldest brother, David, had died two months short of his high school graduation. It was a drunk driving accident—he was DUI. From that day on I don't think my parents were ever sober enough to recognize the irony.

  But Dimi ... Dimi had been my best friend since kindergarten. It was destiny that had brought us together on our first day at school—his last name is Peretzie, mine is Peterson, and by virtue of the Universal Grade School Law of Alphabetical Seating, our desks were next to each other.

  I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday. Dimi came to class that first day dressed like a miniature of his father in a pair of long pants and suspenders, a long-sleeve button-down shirt, and a Windsor-knotted tie. Who sends their kid to public school wearing a freaking necktie?

  He was a marked man from day one.

  Dimi did, however, have a Transformers lunchbox, which was probably the only thing that stood between him and bodily harm at the hands of the third graders at recess.

  Now, you have to understand that to grade school boys in 1985, the Transformers were gods. When the teacher asked me what my father's name was, I answered, "Optimus Prime."

  Which resulted in my very first trip to the principal's office, but that's another story entirely.

  I was in awe of Dimi's bright red metal lunchbox, with its colorful Transformers artwork on the lid and matching plastic Thermos.

  I didn't have a lunchbox, Transformers or otherwise. I had a soggy-bottomed brown paper bag that smelled strongly of the wet tuna fish sandwich my bleary-eyed mother had shoved in there before I boarded the school bus that morning.

  I'm not fishing for sympathy here. Believe me, my adult life warrants far more pity than anything I experienced before I became legal. No, I'm simply explaining why I latched on to Dimi with a death grip that has never quite loosened, even after all these years.

  Dimi's mother made him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—with the crusts sliced off and cut in half diagonally, which to a kindergartener equated to five-star cuisine—and always packed him more than one. On that first day at recess as I sat looking blankly at the sodden mess in front of me that smelled like tuna but looked like wet cotton, Dimi opened his magic Transformers lunchbox. Without saying a word, he slid his spare sandwich over to me, winning my heart forever.

  He shared his lunch with me every day thereafter.

  In return, I stood between him and the rest of the kids whose greatest joy would have been to de-pant Dimi in the hallway. And so it continued from kindergarten on up to eighth grade, only the cartoons on the lunchboxes changing. From Transformers to Thundercats, He-Man, and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, all the way to the Super Mario Brothers, which I believe starred on Dimi's last lunchbox.

  The sad fact was that the other boys just didn't like Dimi. It may have been because they coveted his lunchboxes, but I think the real reason was that Dimi, through no fault of his own, was different. Not that Dimi wasn't smart—just the opposite. He was a whiz at every subject. I don't think he ever got less than a “B” in anything ... except for physical education. In gym, Dimi stank like cow shit on a hot summer day.

  Slender and pale, his blue eyes looked enormous behind his Coke-bottle glasses. His hair was so blond that it was nearly white, thick and silky and cut by his mother with kitchen shears using an honest-to-god mixing bowl as a guide. But his looks alone weren't the problem. The sad truth was that Dimi wasn't very coordinated. He couldn't catch a ball, couldn't throw one either. Even worse, he ran funny. Not, ha-ha-oh-isn't-that-cute funny. No, Dimi ran Bozo-funny. When he tried very hard to run fast, he'd end up literally kicking himself in the ass.

  So you can imagine the suffering the poor kid went through during gym class. Dimi could have been the recipient of the first Lifetime Wedgie Achievement Award, if there were such a thing. I think his underwear spent more time inside the crack of his ass than it did covering it. There was always a spitball or two stuck to the back of his head, just as there was always a foot waiting to trip him up when he wasn't looking.

  Dimi was always the last one to get picked for a team in Phys. Ed.—until the sixth grade.

  That's when I grew three inches taller than every boy in my class and was made Softball Team Captain (a position second only to that of Jesus Christ in the eyes of sixth grade boys) by Mr. Lensik, the gym teacher. From sixth grade on, Dimi was always the first one I called in to my team.

  Didn't win me any points with the other boys, but since I continued to enjoy Mrs. Peretzie's cooking on a daily basis, I figured it was the least I could do for her son. Besides, Dimi was my best friend.

  We did everything together. Watched cartoons, built model cars, played video games; if anyone saw one of us, chances are the other wasn't far behind.

  What I liked best about Dimi was his sense of humor. He could always find something funny, no matter how serious a shitpile he was buried in. Of course, most of his humor was self-deprecating, a defense mechanism that I didn't understand until I was much, much older. Dimi laughed first and laughed loudest, especially at himself. But knowing him the way I did, I could see the pain that flickered in his eyes as if his heart never quite got the joke.

  Being a typical twelve-year old boy, I did my best to ignore what I saw, and chose to believe that Dimi was fine with it all.

  * * * *

  Damn, I wish he'd hurry up and come get me. The neighbors are peeking out at me from behind their Venetian blinds, no doubt worrying that I might take up permanent residence curbside. Any minute now, Mrs. Johnson, she of the mile-wide backside and cottage cheese thighs, is going to call out the Neighborhood Watch. The last thing I need is to have to do battle against a golf cart full of eighty-year old men in Bermuda shorts.

  Dimi would no doubt find that quite amusing. He always had the knack for finding something funny in any given situation—the silver lining as it were, especially if the silver was lamee.

  Oh, yes ... in case I've forgotten to mention it, Dimi is gay.

  Which may explain why he spent four years of high school fucking everything in a skirt. And I do mean everything. He even did Roberta Maxwell, the school's sixty-two-year old Biology teacher—on the lab table be
tween the dissected frogs and the beakers and Petri dishes, no less. Or at least, that's what it said on the wall of the last stall in the boys’ washroom. Dimi would never talk about it, not even to me. But Old Lady Maxwell always seemed to have a silly smile on her face when Dimi was in class.

  Of course, everyone with a vagina seemed to have smiles on their faces when Dimi was around, and with good reason.

  By our freshman year, Dimi had grown from an odd-looking boy into a beautiful young man. I use the word ‘beautiful’ not because of his later-realized sexual preferences, but because it's really the only word in the English language that suits him.

  Dimi was, and remains, beautiful.

  His skin, always so pale that it was nearly transparent, tanned surprising well. A few hours outside raking leaves to earn pocket money turned his skin a deep golden brown. His thick shock of white-gold hair and his wide, expressive blue eyes lent him a California surfer-look (the day he got contact lenses, we broke his Coke-bottle eyeglasses in half and burned them in a solemn, if slightly bizarre, ceremony over a trash barrel in back of the deli). It was a look that women—at least of the high school variety—couldn't seem to resist.

  Sprouting like a weed, he'd shot up past me in height to brush the six-foot mark, and had me by at least fifteen pounds—all of which was pure muscle from hefting heavy boxes at the deli—before our freshman Homecoming Dance. That first year of high school he discarded the suspenders-and-tie look, preferring ripped denim and tight tee shirts. When we arrived at the gym in time for the Pep Rally before the dance, every female eye zeroed in on him and remained there for the next four years.

  I, myself, wasn't exactly a bottom-feeder when it came to looks, but I couldn't compete with Dimi. No one could. He was perfection in Tommy Hilfiger jeans.

  I did, however, get lucky by association. What I mean by that is whichever girls weren't fortunate enough to snag a second date with Dimi (which, looking back I realize were all of them) got me as the consolation prize.

  Somehow, even back then, I thought Dimi's exploits were a little ... forced. As if he kept trying to prove to the entire world that he was the Stud of the Century, when everyone already knew he owned the title.

  * * * *

  Mrs. Johnson doesn't look happy to see that I'm still here. I wish she'd go back to her frozen Lean Cuisine dinner and stop spying on me. What is it that she thinks I'm going to do? Steal the fucking shrubbery? Commit lewd and obscene acts with the squirrels? Pee on her rhododendron?

  Damn it, Dimi, hurry up.

  * * * *

  Sometimes it seems that I've spent most of my life waiting for Dimi. Waiting for him after school. Waiting for him to dump a girl so that I could offer her a sympathetic shoulder (and other less compassionate body parts) to lean on. Waiting for him to finish washing his clothes so that I could do mine in the rinky-dink Whirlpool washer/dryer combination at our dorm.

  College really opened our eyes. We both attended State, roomed together for that matter. I studied computer science, while Dimi majored in Graphic Design and minored in sex. Well, maybe not minored—by that time he already had his PhD in the subject by virtue of life experience.

  Or so I thought.

  What I didn't know at the time was that Dimi had discovered something about himself that he'd been frantically trying to bury all through high school. Which was, of course, that Dimi liked men.

  The sex he was getting in college was a whole other animal than what he'd gotten in high school.

  He didn't exactly out himself to me, at least not on purpose. It was totally accidental, and completely memorable. I know. I spent the next five years trying to forget it.

  On our first night in our dorm room—a tiny eight-by-ten foot room with a window that overlooked the cafeteria dumpsters and twin beds—we'd realized that there might be occasions when we'd want to bring dates home with us. We decided on a system to warn the other when one of us was utilizing the room for purposes other than sleep. ‘Other than sleep,' being a metaphor for the horizontal mambo.

  The system was simple. Should one of us require the other to curl up on the sofa downstairs in the common room for oh, say an hour or three, we'd hang a sign on our doorknob. Said sign reading ‘Get lost, I'm getting laid.'

  Hey, I said the system was simple, not necessarily clever.

  Dimi, needless to say, used that fucking sign a helluva lot more often than I did.

  It had worked perfectly for us until one crisp fall night during our junior year. I'd had a late study group session at the library, and had come home at just past midnight.

  This is the point at which Dimi and I disagree—he swears that he put the sign up, while I know that there was nothing hanging on our doorknob. No warning at all. It's possible that someone snagged our sign from the door (I was never able to find it afterwards and had to make a new one), but I think Dimi was just too fucking horny to remember to put it up, and tossed it later to cover up his faux pas.

  Still, why the sign wasn't up really doesn't matter. What matters is that when I opened the door and walked into the room, I found Dimi bare-ass naked, hooked up to the plumbing of one of the football team's linebackers and riding him like a fucking jackhammer.

  Dimi's eyes went wide when he saw me, but man, those hips never even slowed down.

  Until that night I'd never seen two men fuck. I'd never even given much thought to the mechanics behind it. I knew gay men existed, of course. Saw the rallies and protests around campus for gay rights. I even signed petitions supporting same-sex marriage and for equal protection under the law. I knew that men and women engaged in same-sex relationships, but somehow I'd never really thought about what that meant in terms of the physical act. Lesbians, yeah, sure—I'd seen my share of porn flicks after all. But men? It was sort of like thinking about your parents. You know that they loved each other, lived together, had children and so forth and so on, but you never really pictured them doing the Big Nasty.

  Like I said, college was an eye-opener.

  I remember standing there with my mouth hanging open. It took a few seconds for my brain to process what I was seeing—my first thought was that Dimi, for some reason I couldn't fathom, had chosen to have sex with an incredibly large, ugly woman.

  That was until I realized that the large, ugly woman had a dick big enough to qualify for a zip code, and a heavy five o'clock shadow.

  I couldn't move. Couldn't think. I damn near couldn't breathe.

  Then Dimi, being ... well, Dimi, spoke.

  "Either get in here and drop your pants or get out, James, but close the fucking door. I'm getting a draft."

  His words gave wings to my feet.

  I turned tail and ran, not stopping until my legs gave out.

  Nothing I did thereafter could ever totally erase the image that was burned into my brain that night. In all my years as Dimi's friend, I'd never seen him naked before. Not completely, at any rate. I'd seen him shirtless on many occasions, and often enough in only his jockeys since we'd been rooming together, but that was the extent of it.

  To see him, not only completely starkers but in motion, was something I simply couldn't forget. I wanted to. I tried. Believe me, I tried. But the image would pop back into my mind's eye when I'd least expect it, and almost always at the most inopportune moments.

  Like when I was having sex.

  There I'd be, hip deep in some chick I'd picked up on campus, going for the gold and then ... blam! Out of nowhere, the image of Dimi's smooth round ass would loom up, his lean hips pumping for all he was worth, cock sliding in and out of that football player's butt ... I'd try to force myself to think of something else, to concentrate on the girl underneath me, but it was a struggle that I usually lost.

  It was interfering with my performance, if you catch my drift. If I came, it was with that image of Dimi in my head. If I didn't come, I still had the picture of him in my mind. I just couldn't win.

  * * * *

  That's Mr. Alexander giving me the
evil eye from across the street. You'd think I was sitting here in a hockey mask revving a chainsaw like some splatter-movie maniac rather than just waiting for my ride. When Holly left me she took my reputation with her, leaving me just a hair above serial killer in the eyes of my neighbors. Even Mr. Alexander's wife's Pomeranian hates me. Damn thing looks like a yapping Q-Tip. Then again, so does Mr. Alexander's wife.

  The neighbors must have had a field day talking about Holly and me and our break up. Lord knows it wasn't quiet and amicable. We had some really loud fights complete with name-calling, doors slamming, and smashed china.

  * * * *

  Dimi tried to talk to me about what had happened, but I wasn't listening. I couldn't. Mainly, because every time I looked at him my mind's eye saw him naked. It was too hard to hold an intelligent conversation with him when I kept picturing him in nothing but his skin. Every time he'd try to bring the subject up, I wanted to either give in to maniacal laughter or run away screaming.

  Mostly, I chose the running away option, even when I forwent the screaming part.

  On the outside, I tried to pretend that nothing had changed. I went to class, slept on my side of our room, studied, and went to parties. I did everything, in fact, except talk to Dimi beyond what was absolutely necessary.

  Inside, my emotions were running headfirst toward a meltdown. I was angry, furious that Dimi had kept such a secret from me, outraged that he had had such a secret to keep in the first place. How could he be gay? He was Dimi, for shit's sake, the High School Sex God, the Walking Pheromone. He was my best friend! It was a mistake, I told myself. A fluke. Maybe he was drunk. Stoned. Maybe it had been a dare, a wager that he didn't want to lose.

  And maybe if I buried my head far enough in the sand I'd see China.