SoMa Literary Review - Boy From Red Bluff

Boy From Red Bluff

By Jere' M. Fishback

I’ll tell you how it happened, that messy business. I was living in San Francisco, a true adventure for a guy like me who’d hardly ever left Cincinnati. My uncle Roy, my mom’s brother, died and left me a small inheritance and I was between jobs and I thought, hey, I should go live someplace completely different and stay among people such as I’d never known. I’d always been interested in the Bay Area -- the Giants, the Golden Gate and, of course, the gay scene -- and I thought San Francisco would be a good choice. So, I contacted a rental service and leased an apartment for the summer, a one-bedroom place on Folsom, and the rent wasn’t too high and I got a cheap flight and next thing I knew I was hailing a taxi outside SFO’s baggage claim, juggling four suitcases and breathing the bay’s salty air.

I met the kid a few weeks into my stay. Our first contact was through the Internet, and after trading several messages we spoke a time or two by phone and it seemed we’d be compatible. He was twenty-one and his grammar was OK. He seemed funny and he was eager to leave his hometown of Red Bluff, a place up north, to visit me in San Francisco for a few days. So I said sure, come on down, and we agreed on a time to meet at the Transbay Terminal.

It was warm the night he arrived and I watched him move under the ceiling lights in the bus, heading for the door. He’s a small lad and his head barely reached the shoulders of some men he passed, and though I’d only seen a face picture I knew it was him right off, even before he stepped onto the pavement, because he moved with deliberation, as they say. From our phone conversations I knew there was nothing shy about him.

I waved and he approached and we shook hands. We stood on a sidewalk next to the bus, smelling diesel fumes, and he smiled. The kid did lots of smiling, but how much was genuine I could not say. In fact, I can’t tell you whether any of his behavior was sincere. I don’t read people too well, I guess.

He wore all black: a polo shirt, jeans and sneakers, and one leg of his pants was rolled to the knee, I don’t know why. Three days’ stubble sat on his face and a cow-lick sprang from the top of his head. He walked curious, too. His shoulders rocked from side to side, as if he moved through a crowd, dodging people, only there wasn’t a crowd. And during conversation his eyes wouldn’t stay with me, not long. They’d meet mine, slide off somewhere, then come back.

The bulk of his weight was below the waist, in the ass and legs, but his shoulders were broad enough for a young man his height and there was nothing feminine in his appearance or manner. He kept on smiling while we walked down Mission Street, toward my apartment, and we talked of things I can’t recall now. He carried a backpack and his laptop computer and that was it.

Now, I’ll admit I was sold on him even before we reached my place, even before he placed his things on my sofa and I put my arms around his waist and pulled him to me and put my tongue in his mouth and tasted the cigarette he’d smoked during our walk. My god, he was so young! And there was a tension to him, a fidgeting which never seemed to stop, as though he were plugged into a wall socket.

I’d hidden my valuables -- camera, wallet, and so forth -- because I’d feared he might be a thief. But soon as I met him I sensed he wouldn’t steal and this turned out to be true. He lived with me for ten days with all sorts of cash and credit cards and such lying about, but nothing ever went missing. Whatever money I lent him he logged on a sheet of notebook paper with the amount and the date and what he’d spent it on. Then he paid it back when he left.

How angry can you get with someone who behaves like that? You can’t, really.

We drank some beer that first night and chatted; he was easy to talk with. His story was a bit sad, and I think it was true. Maybe it explained what happened in the days afterward. Three weeks earlier his mom had broke some news to him: she told him he was an adopted child, that she and her husband had gotten the kid through some agency up in Oregon, when he was a baby.

For a long time before then, the kid told me, he’d suspected his parents were hiding a truth from him, and now he knew what it was. And I wondered how it made him feel. Maybe his head was all screwed up the first night I met him, from this news. Who knows?

He told me something else that first night. At age fourteen he’d taken a bus trip, alone, from Red Bluff to Portland, Oregon -- a ten-hour trip -- just to have sex with some guy, an adult he’d contacted over the Internet. At age fourteen!

Also, he had dropped out of school before graduating. He said, why should I stay in school when I can make plenty of money doing computer programming? I’m smarter than those other kids. Why sit around in classrooms learning stuff I’ll never use in the real world? I’ve already got several clients I do work for and they pay pretty well.

The sex between us made everything else complicated. The first night he arrived, right after we drank those beers, I got him naked and we went at it and it was very good. The boy could kiss like an angel and he liked taking it up the rear, but then the condom broke inside him, something that never happened to me before, and he got upset and all worried about AIDS and such, and this was our first night together, for Christ’s sake, and already we argued and he skulked about the apartment and I didn’t know how to handle the situation. But we eventually talked and I convinced him I wasn’t trying to pass him a bug or whatever, and then we went to bed and resumed our sex and fell asleep in each other’s arms and when I woke in the morning there he was, naked and beautiful, and I could not believe my good fortune at having him with me. Things were going to be great, weren’t they?

Well, sort of.

The boy liked his sleep. If he ever rose before noon, I don’t recall it. Now, I’m not saying he was lazy about everything. The kid worked at his computer business like there was no tomorrow, hour upon hour tapping at the keyboard, taking online classes on programming, doing “encryption” and “decryption” for his clients’ projects and so forth. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but he liked to do this work late at night, starting maybe around eleven and continuing for hours, long after I went to sleep, so there was no sex at night before bed and that began to bother me.

And he was a slob. His shit was strewn everywhere: clothes, packs of cigarettes, wads of paper, his computer and all its wiring and headset. And the shelf over the bathroom sink was stacked with his shit: toothbrush, hair gel, deodorant, hairbrush, all of it. Not an inch of space left for me!

The first few days we had sex once or twice a day and it was good, but he’d gotten skittish about the anal stuff. Now we were just sucking cock and “wanking” as he called it, and it was good but not what I had expected, and he’d give me this shit when I’d wake in the morning and want to feel him up, he’d say, hey, don’t come on me or some such crap as that, and I’d think, hey, I’m giving this punk a place to stay in San Francisco, paying for the food and beer and all of it and he’s griping `cause I want to jizz on his ass? What bullshit!

And the kid could eat, too. Tons of food for such a little guy. I nicknamed him Dagwood because he’d raid the fridge, two or three times a day, and build these enormous sandwiches of ham and cheese and cucumber and onion and such. Huge sandwiches! I was hitting the supermarket most every day, just to keep up with him. And did I mention the beer? I won’t call the kid a drunk because he wasn’t. I never saw him drunk. But he liked beer and not the kind I drank, but some Czech brands, and he’d always grab several bottles at the store, which I always paid for. I paid for stuff he drank whenever we went out, too. And we were out often.

The World Cup matches occurred during this period, and the kid was a fiend for soccer. If Germany or England or Italy was playing in a match we had to go see them on a large screen TV at some bar, and I’m sure soccer’s exciting if you played it as a kid or whatever, but I didn’t and I find the sport rather boring, but I sat there for hours watching this crap with the kid while he smoked cigarettes and drank beer and hollered at the screen along with the rest of the folks in the place and I’d pick up the tab and I’d ask myself: Hey, how come you’re doing this?

Well, I told myself, it’s for the sex. But the sex got less and less as the days passed. After the first three days, it was strictly “wanking” and even that he wasn’t too eager for. It was more like a chore for him than a pleasure and this pissed me off but it was still nice having him there, naked and all in the bed, and he was someone to talk with. Right? So what if he ate like a horse?

Living with him and his appetite was better than being alone, wasn’t it?

I had friends come up for the weekend, an old co-worker from Cincinnati who’d moved to L. A. with his girl, and we all hung out together. I mean, the apartment was small and we lived close, real close, and my L. A. friend, he made some comments about the kid: how the kid’s shit was strewn everywhere like the apartment was his and not mine, how the kid did not help clean up. And one night my friend, the guy from L. A., said he did not think the kid was innocent, for a twenty-one-year-old he seemed pretty shrewd, and I tucked this observation into the back of my mind and mulled it over now and then.

That was another thing -- the way the kid did not help out. I mean, he’d brought a limited amount of clothes with him so they had to be washed every few days and I had a washing machine so it wasn’t a big deal for me to wash them along with mine, but one day I asked him to help me with the clothes and he said, hey, I don’t know anything about doing laundry, my mother does it for me. And I thought: Hey, you’re twenty-one years old and you don’t know how to wash your damn clothes? And who am I? your damn laundress?

It got so, after about five days, he didn’t want to do sex anymore, like I had the plague or something. He kept saying “not-here-not-now” so much I told him I was going to buy him a T-shirt with the words Not-Here-Not-Now printed on the chest. I called him a tease and I think this got him worried `cause about an hour later he came on to me and we had good sex and I thought: OK, maybe I just have to be more assertive with this kid and he’ll do what I want him to.

But it wasn’t the case. He spent more and more time with his computer, more and more time sleeping, and less time with me. I saw all the tourist stuff -- the Golden Gate, Candlestick Park, Sausalito and Fisherman’s Wharf -- by myself. And he kept on eating those godammed sandwiches and drinking beer and his shit continued to be strewn about my apartment like flotsam on the ocean right after a shipwreck and I grew damned tired of it.

Then this one day he asks me if he can use the phone to make a local call and I said sure, and who does he call? Some former “sex partner” of his who lives in town and a few hours later the phone rings and I answer and it’s this guy with a deep voice, very aggressive-sounding, asking for the kid, and I’m thinking: this is bullshit, I don’t want this guy calling here. But I handed the phone to the kid and they chatted and the kid was laughing with this guy like the guy was Mr. Right. Yo-ho-ho. Ha-ha-ha. And I thought to myself, hey, if this other guy’s so great what are you doing at my place?

Human nature’s a strange thing, isn’t it? We want something -- a new car, a new piece of ass, whatever -- and we want it so badly we ache. But once we get whatever it was we wanted, then it’s no longer important, its specialness fades, and we take it for granted like electricity or indoor plumbing. Then we start dreaming of something else -- an item we don’t already have, a thing which’ll be tough to get.

And that’s the way it became with the kid. I mean, if I’d seen him on the street two weeks earlier I’d have taken out a second mortgage just to buy a night in the sack with him. But now, even though I had him lying next to me each morning, I didn’t care. I was tired of his shit strewn everywhere, tired of looking at his damned hair gel and toothbrush on my bathroom shelf. Tired of watching him devour the contents of my refrigerator.

So the time came when I brought up the subject of his departure, and when I did he grew sad and his eyes watered and he said he didn’t want to leave. He said Red Bluff was a shit hole, that he hated living there, but his parents gave him a free home and food and his mother did his laundry and how could he pass that up? But he clearly preferred life in San Francisco with free beer and food and housing, all provided by me. And who wouldn’t? So I told him, I said, look. I need some time to myself. This apartment’s small and it’s cluttered all the time and I need a little space. Why don’t you take a bus back to Red Bluff? Then maybe in a week or two you can come back. I’m here for the summer, you know, and it’s only the middle of June.

Well, he made a face and went on about how much he liked me and I’m thinking, oh yeah, you like the beer and the Dagwoods, kid. But me? I don’t think so. I’ll be forty-fucking-five years old in October. That means I’ve got twenty-fucking-four years on you and I sure ought to be smarter than to get saddled with a gold digger at this point in my life. And what’s in it for me anyways? This “not-here-not-now” business? Great.

Of course I didn’t say those things to his face, not in those words, but I let him know, nice as I could, that him staying with me any longer wasn’t an option.

So he packed his shit into his computer bag and his backpack (How did he get it all in there? It had practically filled my whole damned apartment!) and he stood at the front door, grinning like we were best friends, and I thought to myself: Jesus, just leave, would you? I’m not kidding, I was that eager to see him go, this sexy boy who’d shared my bed for ten days. And we traded the lightest of kisses and then he was gone, down the stairs, into the street. And I thought I would be sad, standing at my door, holding the knob, and I waited for a wave of regret to wash over me, but it never appeared. All I felt was relief.

I’ll never see the kid again. He doesn’t want sex from me and I don’t want his mess, so we’ll continue on with our lives, pursuing new and different goals. And if it weren’t for a few photos I took, I’m sure I won’t remember him two years from now.

I wonder, too. Has he forgotten me? Did those ten days mean nothing to him?

Maybe yes and maybe no. Who can say? But if I were a gambling man, I’d put my money on yes.

Up there in Red Bluff, I’ll bet he can’t remember my name.

Jere' M. Fishback is a former journalist and trial attorney. He writes short fiction, novellas and novels. He resides in Pass-a-Grille Beach on Florida's west coast.