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My Skin, My Sanity
by Kat Duff
When I turned fifty, the only scar on my body was the thin trace of an incision on my right thumb where a doctor removed a sliver when I was nine
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Good Weed, Bad Deed
by Jackson Lassiter
I was a late-bloomer as far as sex was concerned. At least compared to the other boys in my dusty little hometown in northern Wyoming. Most of them bragged about nailing some cheerleader by the time they were fifteen. Even by seventeen, the only nailing I did involved a hammer and wood. But I did like hearing their stories. The locker room talk was steamy.
Sure, I had dates. Plenty of dates. I’m good-looking in a ruggedly handsome way. I have loads of wavy hair, sky-blue eyes, and nice muscles. I’m lucky in the looks department. And the girls liked to give me attention, appreciating my sensitive and artistic nature as much as my physicality. It’s just that when it came down to the cold facts, I got cold feet. Cramped up in the back seat of someone’s mother’s Chevrolet – an overheated nymphet wriggling beneath me with her mound of Venus thrust toward my hesitant member – I froze. I knew I was supposed to slip a sweating palm beneath her bra cup or shove it under the elastic waistband of her panties, but I couldn’t. I always found a reason to stop.
“Not here. I don’t want it to be like this. Let’s wait,” I would whisper. What I really meant was, “not here, not you, I’m scared and I want to go home.” Eventually I would extricate myself from the damp tangle of arms and legs and partially clothed torsos. After a moment to cool down, the girl usually found my reticence romantic. I was just happy it was over. Girls petrified me, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Then Peggy found me.
In the mid-seventies, in a one-light town in the middle of a huge nowhere, without a theater or club or even a late-night restaurant, a group of teenagers will find other means of entertainment. My friends and I turned to marijuana. Enter Randy and Peggy.
They moved in from Minnesota, kids and dog in tow. After an introduction through someone’s older brother, Randy became our “source”. He received shipments in the mail, usually in the form of a cute little stuffed animal, its cotton batting replaced with high grade Mexican weed. This was a decent second income for his family, and we provided him a good business: such good business that we ended up seeing a great deal of them. Eventually we all became friends. Their living room became our hangout. It didn’t matter that they were in their thirties and we were in our teens. Ganja was the great equalizer. We passed the time rolling fat joints, eating junk food, and laughing. We were one big, high, happy family.
Randy was a huge man, unkempt, over six feet tall and burly, with hair and beard like Grizzly Adams and arms bigger than my waist. He was loud and aggressive and ruled his house with an iron fist. Literally. His dog, his children, even his friends toed the line. Nobody wanted to incur Randy’s wrath. Funny thing is, Peggy might not have been as big or loud or aggressive, but she definitely schemed better. Peggy didn’t take crap. Everyone, including Randy, ended up following her lead. He had the cocksure bravado, but she ruled that roost like the clucking mother hen she was.
By no means a beauty – two children and lots of marijuana munchies had left a sag here and a bag there – Peggy’s infectious laugh and easy comic flair were her appeal. She was the jovial den mother for our troop of Rastafarian-wannabe scouts, a merry leader with an uncanny ability to get exactly what she wanted. We all loved Peggy and the power of her wit, and where she ventured, our little band of misfits and outcasts followed: a string of hapless, stoned baby ducks. No one loved her more than I. In the midst of this spaced-out crush I gave up grappling with girls and devoted myself to spending time with Peggy and her bong. I would have gone anywhere with her.
As it turned out I only had to go as far as Billings, 135 miles to the north. In this wide-open part of the country, this was the city. It was time to restock our pothead paraphernalia and Billings lay claim to the only headshop within driving distance. Peggy arranged for the two of us to make the trip on everyone’s behalf. I skipped my classes the day of our venture, dressed with care and an eye toward looking older, and we headed north to Montana in a blaze of smoke. Peggy drove. I loved being with her as she guided us through the city; I even liked the way her breasts jiggled when the car passed over bumps in the highway.
As night fell and we headed back to Wyoming, I was quiet. Shopping for the latest in dope accoutrement had been fun, but being with Peggy was a schoolboy fantasy. I was reluctant to return her to Randy. When she suggested a detour through Yellowstone Park for a moonlight drive, I quickly agreed.
It was a warm autumn night. My new Fleetwood Mac cassette was terrific, the breeze was pine-scented, and the moon cast a gentle blue glow to the forest. The romance overpowered me. When Peggy suggested that we stop to stargaze, I was only too willing. She climbed into the back seat – for a better view, of course – and I followed her without hesitation, pulled by the electric current between us.
As we spooned in the back seat, her ample bottom pressed against the crook of my torso, I found myself getting hard. I guess Peggy found it, too. She flipped around, kissed me, and took off both our shirts in what seemed like one quick move. As she slid my hand over her maternal breast my palm wasn’t sweating, and I didn’t resist when she licked her way down my bare chest, unbuttoned my straining jeans, and took me in her mouth. Later, as she straddled my hips from above and aimed herself at my dick, her hippie skirt hiked up and my jeans pulled down, I had a sudden flash of understanding. Maybe it was her intensity, the way she took command without offering a chance for protest. This is why she and I had made this trip alone. This was her purpose. And I didn’t care. At that moment I loved her more than anything.
After the initial wilderness devirginization she became insatiable, plotting ways for us to be alone. We would clandestinely drive to the country, rocking her car on some solitary farm road, or she would pick me up a discrete distance from the high school for my lunch break and take me to her house, her hand in my pants the entire distance. Creeping in the house to avoid being seen, she would toss me to the floor and ride me like a banshee for exactly 45 minutes, both of us with one ear cocked for sounds of Randy’s unexpected return. I would leave her wet and asleep on her living room floor, running back to class five minutes late and flushed red.
A year passed and we were still secret lovers. I graduated from high school and took a job in one of the mines, putting off college because Peggy asked me to stick around. I was working the swing shift, volunteering for the less desirable evening hours so that my days – when Randy was working – were free for frolicking. Over time Peggy became more and more brazen, flicking her tongue against the back of my neck in their kitchen when Randy wasn’t looking or groping me as we passed in their hallway. She was in her stride, but for me things were at a standstill. Gradually my days had settled into a numbing inertia that I couldn’t explain. I worked, smoked pot, and put out for Peggy as she arranged it. We professed our love for each other but I felt something was missing, and it felt like something important. I didn’t know what it was, but even the sex lacked velocity. Sure, I was living every boy’s fantasy but I resented the secrecy. I was reduced to a pat on the ass here, a quick cup of the balls there, a toss on the floor when time and opportunity permitted. I wanted something else, but I didn’t know what. It was a push-pull situation. I loved the love, but hated being her meat. And I couldn’t stop.
One afternoon as I lay naked on my back on her living room floor, Peggy grinding on top while I followed with the appropriate motions from below, I noticed her youngest daughter had quietly slipped in and was watching us. She had sneaked home unannounced from a neighborhood friend’s house. At six, she wasn’t old enough to know exactly what was going on but she knew it wasn’t right. She bolted. Peggy didn’t care; she wanted to finish.
That night when my shift ended and I walked through the moonlight to my car at the edge of the graveled parking lot, I really wasn’t surprised to see Randy leaning against it, waiting for me. I may not have been world-wise in matters of sex and relationships, but after a year of hiding from this behemoth, I knew that things had come to a head. I had practiced for this moment. I was prepared. When I noticed that Randy was holding the biggest bone-handled hunting knife I had ever seen, my rehearsed speech about the love that Peggy and I felt – the love that could never be denied – stuck solidly in my throat like a piece of dry bread. Before I could catch my breath, he began to speak. He didn’t look at me; instead, he focused on cleaning the grit from beneath his fingernails with the tip of the blade.
“Do you think you’re the only one? That she hasn’t done this before? Do you think I didn’t know?” Randy mumbled, as much to himself as to me. He continued, not waiting for a response. “It’s always a boy like you, some kid she can boss around. Some skinny little sensitive kid who does exactly what she wants. Do you think she really loves you?” The polished metal of the blade glistened delicately in the moonlight, and I thought it best not to speak.
He looked at me and continued, slowly. “She likes boys, sissy boys, and you’re just the latest. Why do you think we left Minnesota? Goddam it! I tell her every time that she can’t keep doing this.” He turned his head and spat at the ground, as if clearing his throat would help clear his mind. I remained silent. We both stared at the dirt-flecked puddle of spittle as he spoke.
“She loves me, you know. She doesn’t love you, and she didn’t love any of them. She just likes a young dick. She’s always going to be with me, and I’m always going to be with her. We are a family.” He looked at me with a steely glare, opened the door and motioned for me to get in, gesturing to the empty driver’s seat with the knifepoint. He did not break eye contact. As I slid past his imposing bulk, I noticed that I really was much shorter and smaller than he. Oh my God, I was a skinny kid! I sat behind the wheel and he closed the door behind me. He leaned through the open window, his huge frame filling the space. “Only I’m not leaving this time,” he said, nearly whispering. “You are.”
With an eerie calm and more authority than I had ever heard before, he told me that I had to be gone by morning. I couldn’t say good-bye to Peggy; I wasn’t to tell anyone about our conversation. As if to illustrate the seriousness of his instructions, Randy absent-mindedly made a series of cuts in the rubber window moulding as he spoke. The flawlessly sharpened knife effortlessly sliced through the fleshy material. I watched in awe, barely hearing him yet completely understanding every word. Then he walked back to his old truck and waited for me to drive away. He followed me out of the parking lot, so close behind that in my rearview mirror I could see the glint of the knife he continued to hold in his hand as he drove. He followed me all the way home.
Through the early morning hours, as I packed what I would be taking on the road, Randy’s words came back to haunt me. “Skinny, sensitive kid. Sissy boy.” It was a mantra that repeated as I drove away from the sleeping town at sunrise. “Skinny, sensitive kid. Sissy boy.”
I wasn’t sad. Rather, I felt renewed, as if breaking the surface for fresh air after being submerged far too long in a murky depth. Here in the bright morning sunlight, the fresh country air fluffing my hair through the open car window, both the boy having sex with an older woman on the floor of her living room and the “other man” being threatened in a dark parking lot seemed so distant, so remote. Leaving the only life I had known, I drove alone, without a destination but for the first time in my own direction. Unfettered by expectation, I saw myself with clarity, not in a bright and sudden flash of insight but incrementally, a gradual claiming of the pieces of myself I found along that highway. My sensitivity was both salvation and strength. I finally began to understand that I was gay, and I knew that I had to move forward to live that destiny.
Life opened for me that morning. I felt like I had been given a gift and I was grateful. I wanted to turn the car around and drive straight back to Randy and Peggy’s, to thank them for setting me free. I wanted to reassure them that they would be OK, that I would be OK. As I searched for a wide spot in the highway to make a U-turn, my hand came to rest on the jagged edges of the cuts in the window moulding. Tracing the sharp outlines with one finger, I realized that turning around wasn’t such a great idea. Let them fend for themselves. I pointed the car south and pushed the gas pedal. And I haven’t looked back.
 Jackson Lassiter grew up nearly feral in the hills of Wyoming, where he gleaned an appreciation of the vagaries of Mother Nature and human nature. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his partner and a snappy Shih Tzu named Mona. You can reach him at jrinluck@verizon.net |
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