After five joints, in total, K took to declaring himself a stoner. Also boasted he was growing his hair long, surfer style. Think Patrick Swayze, he said, in Point Break. But after one week, who knew, his head still sporting the buzz cut inflicted on him by his pops, saying no son of his would ever be called a fairy. But I am, K grinned down at us, cross-legged, from Johnny’s treehouse, his sixth doobie dangling from the side of his pert mouth. A no-good surfer fairy dude just awaiting my next big killer wave. I’m going all the way. This is just the beginning.
Of what?
K had me worried. I didn’t agree with drugs, not since my brother OD’d in a sleazy motel on the outskirts of Battle Creek, The Pleasure Palace. It was the proprietor who’d found him, naked and blue, barely breathing. And where was K hoping to find this wave? There weren’t many waves in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even that summer camp we’d attended on Lake Huron the previous year we’d not seen a single one. Flat as Kirsty Logan’s titties in her sports bra. That’s what K had said. And this as we were making out behind the canoe hut. K wasn’t interested in titties. Just me, his boy. I missed those days.
Two days after the treehouse incident, following baseball practice, K grabbed me. Man, he said, he had never called me man before, I heard Decker and Pitts up on the bleachers. The best way, they reckon, to toke a joint, is in your ass. You gotta help me.
We’d not done the ass thing yet. Still waiting for the right moment. His olds away. Or mine. A free house. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds on the stereo. Candles burning. Orion and Ursa Major shining down on us through the open window. It was going to be romantic as hell.
If you want drugs up your ass, I said angrily, that’s your own damn business, not mine.
But when K wanted something he had a way of getting it. Like a raggedy dog with a bone.
So this is how, one week later, we were in Johnny’s treehouse. Trash bags taped over the windows for drug den dusky ambience. The Doors’ The End playing on K’s precious battery cassette deck. And there was K bent over in front of me, pants around ankles, pulling his cheeks apart like a loon, butthole staring me in the eye like it knew what I was really thinking.
It didn’t. I was thinking love. Where did it go? I was thinking drugs up the ass was the beginning of a descent. I was thinking K in two years’ time, skinny and stinking, hanging around outside the 7-Eleven, selling himself to any old drunk to get a dollar to buy his next hit, a needle in his thigh or down his urethra.
And that’s when, joint lit, fingers trembling – thinking, do I do it or don’t I? Do I want to be an enabler to this drugs fest? – the rest of the gang burst in.
Johnny, Frank, Benji. The whole lot of them.
Some situations you can talk yourself out of. Some you can’t.
This was one of those.
Years later they still were going on about it. You remember that time?
How could I forget?
But weirdly, it broke the spell. Like K seeing himself through the eyes of others made him see who he was. What he was doing.
Two weeks later we did it for the first time. Mom had gone off to Ann Arbor for the night with this guy she was seeing. He was a big football fan and he’d got tickets for some football game there. Apparently Ann Arbor had the biggest football stadium in the U S of A. Who knew?
Mom worried about leaving me on my own but I told her I was sixteen now and what was the worst that could happen? You turning out to be a fag she said and that kinda hurt. She still hadn’t got over walking in on me jerking off over that torn out advert of Marky Mark in his Calvin Klein shorts and that had been two years before and I was so over him now.
Afterwards, I was lying in K’s arms. We’d done it in my mom’s bed—that’d teach her. K kissed me on the top of my head and apologised for being a jerk. It was great I said, the best, and he said, No, not that, about the drug stuff, I was just working through some things, my pops, life, us, me. Then he laughed. And you know, now I’m thinking about it, it wasn’t a joint Dekker and Pitts said, up your ass, it was speed. Speed I coulda prob’ly managed on my own. Dab it on a finger. Shove it up my butthole and there you go, two minutes later I woulda been speeding my tits off and that whole treehouse thing would never of happened. And we might never of got here, I said, kissing one of his nipples. Oh we woulda got here, said K. Me and you are inevitable. Written on the stars. Man, I’m addicted to you. And me to you, I said, and then we did it again and this time I came over my mom’s favourite coverlet. Her mom had crocheted it for her right before she’d gone blind. She’d been a bitch too. Even sightless she’d signed some petition denying gay rights for kids in the school system.
Families. Fuck em. Fuck em all.
It was me and K. That was what mattered.
The only thing. Yes siree.
BIO:
Drew Gummerson is a novelist and award-winning short-story writer of books including The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. He is a Lambda Award finalist, and won the Leicestershire Short Story Prize. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4 and in various anthologies. Drew lives in Leicestershire. His latest book, Saltburn, will be published in February 2025.
Linktree – https://linktr.ee/drewgum
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