A House Where We Both Could Live
Gary Garth McCann
August 1978
The guys are probably right, I’m a fool. In the early morning I watch my sleeping Irishman, Noll Duffy—if he really is Irish and if his name really is Noll, pronounced Null, short for Nollaig, Gaelic for Christmas and a name given to boys born on Christmas Day, according to Noll. He lies uncovered on his back on the queen bed we share in one of the two bedrooms on the houseboat’s upper deck. I know nothing solid about Noll except that five days ago he swam out to us from the gay section of Hippie Hollow, along the rocky shore of Lake Travis, while we cheered him to keep swimming till he reached our boat. He climbed up the ladder and stepped, naked, dripping, onto the deck and looked into my eyes, and I into his, and I’ve been falling in love with him since.
Am I fool enough to think he’s falling in love with me?
I slip from our room. I’ll return in mid-morning and check to see if Noll is awake, so I can crawl back onto the mattress and pull him onto my chest and kiss the top of his fluffy, light brown hair, soft as a baby’s, while he feels my biceps. Maybe he’ll kiss my balls. Likely he will. I have a donkey’s genitals, and Noll admits to being a size-queen. It isn’t unbalanced between us, but I bring to the table—the bed—what I can: besides my endowment, I bring long straight blond hair that reaches below my shoulders, a wispy beard, blue eyes, and a six-foot frame onto which I’ve built muscle at the gym. Otherwise, I have little to offer after thirty-five years of living, having just been laid off as a painter—a job I really liked—after flunking out of law school because I lost interest, and working four years as a paralegal which I detested, and now, unemployed, on a two-week vacation I can’t afford but planned when I thought I could. All this explains, according to Jerry, my best friend and the reason I’m on this boat, my attraction to Noll, who at twenty-nine has no ambition in life other than to drift from place to place attending rock concerts. What Noll does about money isn’t clear. He offered to pay for the nights that he’s spending on the boat, but I told him I’d paid my share for the room. Last night we all went into Austin to replenish a few supplies for our last two days, and Noll, with a wad of cash he took from an envelope he pulled out of his shorts pocket, picked up the check at a high-end Mexican restaurant someone had told Noll about and he had insisted we go to.
Quietly I pad down the steps to the main deck. Mona is up, her large, bare breasts at the table with a pot of coffee in front of them, her face behind a paperback mystery. At first I felt shy about being naked in front of Mona, who’s straight. By now, I’m used to it. Mona, who has one of the two downstairs bedrooms, is dark-haired and, if not obese, considerably overweight, like Clarence, who has the other room upstairs with mine. Mona and gay-but-subdued Clarence teach history at the same high school in Ft. Worth and are both opera aficionados, as is Jerry, who occupies the other main deck bedroom. Jerry is an architect my age with whom, years ago, I was lovers briefly, until he decided we both wanted the same thing in bed (I’m pretty sure I could have accommodated his wants). On this vacation Jerry brought along his latest, a twenty-year-old blond named Trevor, a drama major at Southern Methodist and also an opera buff. I believe Jerry’s obsession with twenty-year-olds is the real reason he and I aren’t together, and I don’t think it’s an accident that more of his twenty-year-olds than not have been as blond as me. We turned thirty, and Jerry lost interest in my body. I frequently accuse him of being gerascophobic, and he gets pissed. My intruding Noll—twenty-nine or whatever age he is if not twenty-nine—knows not a wit about opera but wisely has displayed interest, asking questions about the music always playing on the boat’s sound system. Noll’s questions are his one redeeming merit in our small group’s eyes, other than mine. I know quite a lot about opera from being around Jerry and Clarence and Mona, although I don’t really give a fuck about music. I read. I got my undergrad degree in English. All my life people have said I hide in books.
Mona and I exchange good mornings, and I fill a mug with coffee. Glancing outside, I see at the aft rail Jerry’s long, muscular back, water running down its middle from his soaked, scalp-plastered hair, which looks darker wet. Dry, Jerry’s hair is more like my new Noll’s than like that of any other man I’ve been with since Jerry. If Jerry weren’t always so sure of his snap judgments, maybe he’d wonder if I saw something in Noll that I’d seen in Jerry himself, such as luscious hair, and that that, rather than any lack I see in myself, is what makes me crave having Noll in my bed. I stand with my coffee and look out at the tanned heels and ankles of Jerry’s spread-apart feet, at his wiry calves and thighs separated from his spine by a less tanned bubble butt, at his head bowed so he can peer into the lake—a lake that’s as clear as drinking water, by the way—and I imagine Jerry and me together. We would make a well-suited, early middle-aged couple, he a little more handsome, as one guy usually is.
I carry my coffee outside and stand beside Jerry. “Trevor still sleeping?” I ask before he has a chance to ask me if Noll is still sleeping.
“Trevor’s twenty,” Jerry says, giving me his mean eye. “By the time he’s Noll’s age, he will have done a lot more than sleep.”
Jerry believes I make bad life choices, a belief that’s part of the dynamic of our friendship. Fuck a duck, Jerry, I think. I look into the water and watch fish seeking a handout. The evening before last Noll and I swam to the rock shore and sat on a boulder where someone had left remains of a chicken dinner. With our feet dangling into the lake, we dropped shreds of chicken in and watched the fish gobble it up. Two guys hovered nearby, but Noll didn’t say anything to them. I liked that, his not talking to them. We swim to shore two or three times a day, and one naked guy or another comes up to us, and Noll talks to him, at times in conversations I can’t hear. I’m afraid he’ll go off into the bushes with one of them, maybe he won’t even swim back to the boat with me. Good things in my life don’t last. They visit and move on quickly.
“Seriously, Craig,” Jerry says. In my peripheral vision I see his eyes boring into the side of my head. “Your Noll isn’t on the up-and-up. Last night, at that restaurant, when I went to the bathroom right after him, I walked in the door and some fat guy handed him the envelope out of which all that cash came when Noll paid the check. Your Noll took the envelope and gave the fat guy an envelope he had on him. What was that about, Craig?”
“Drug money?” I say flippantly and shrug.
“You should ask him. Remember that he was determined to go to that restaurant. Nowhere else would do. It’s like he planned to meet this guy there.”
“You can’t seriously think he’s a dealer, at least at any appreciable level?”
At breakfast yesterday Noll asked if I took any drugs. “Prescriptions, I mean,” Noll said. “No,” I told him, “just this vitamin.”
What would prescription drugs have to do with marijuana, hashish, LSD, or whatever?
“You and I smoke grass,” I say to Jerry, stating a mere fact. “More people do than don’t.” Clarence and Mona don’t; they say grass doesn’t do anything for them. “Grass has to come from somewhere,” I tell Jerry. “Some people are dealers.”
“And what was with those glasses Noll wore last night?” Jerry asks. “The lenses were as thick as a Coke bottle, and he couldn’t see through them. He probably bought them in the drugstore. He was hiding behind them. He bumped into a chair at another table as we left the restaurant. Is there a warrant out for his arrest or something? I’d want to know, if I were you.”
“They’re old glasses.” In bed Noll told me he’d forgotten to put in his contacts before we left the boat. I didn’t know he wore contacts. He’d never worn glasses before last night, and then didn’t wear them until he came out of the bathroom at the restaurant. Could he need glasses that thick, yet leave the boat without noticing he didn’t have his contacts in? Can anyone who needs glasses that thick even wear contacts? He realized that what he’d said, about forgetting to put in his contacts, didn’t make sense and changed his story. He told me he’d taken out his contacts before we left the boat because they’d started hurting, which made slightly more sense. “I can see without contacts, just not very well,” he said. He offered no explanation for the change in his story.
“I think you should find out where Noll’s money comes from,” Jerry says, using his don’t-be-a-stupid-shit-Craig tone of voice. “That is, if you plan to see him after tomorrow—which I think would be a mistake.”
Tomorrow we go home. I start looking for a job. I can’t depend on a good reference because the man who let me go said I was too slow. Meticulous is what I am. I know I took longer on jobs than he said I should. He never knew how much longer because I didn’t report all my time. He needed to downsize, and I’m the one he got rid of. But if I’m a painter of interiors, they’re going to look designer-perfect when I’m done. I painted Mona’s condo, on the side, and she says I should go solo. Jerry said he’d recommend me for jobs when he has the occasion. So if I can’t find a permanent job working for another paint contractor…Only in the meantime, my unemployment benefits aren’t enough to cover my rent and car payment and insurance. My small savings account verges on the nonexistent.
“Don’t forget we’re your friends, Craig,” Jerry says and kisses me on the temple. It’s the second kiss I’ve gotten from Jerry on this boat. The other was on the mouth, full frontal, dicks rubbing together. It was for Noll’s benefit. Jerry had just said to Noll, “You’d better be nice to this man because I love him.” The kiss in front of Noll embarrassed me because I got slightly aroused. Noll, unfazed, took hold of my cock, smiled at Jerry and told him, “At least I know who some of my competition is.” That pissed Jerry off. He likes to have the last word.
I don’t tell Jerry that I’ve asked Noll to come and stay with me in Ft. Worth, to see how things go. I know he’ll wander off to concerts all over the country. If he’s really Irish (Clarence says Noll’s accent is fake), I wonder if he’ll be able to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. Noll’s answer to my invitation was, “We’ll see.” I don’t know whether he meant, yeah, he’ll come and we’ll see how things go, or he meant we’ll see whether he comes or not. My heart has such a boner for him I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it if he doesn’t come.
*
To ask Noll about the envelope of cash, I want to be away from the others. I wait till Noll and I swim to the rocky shore in early afternoon. I bring my trunks on the swim, wearing them around my neck with my sneakers tied to the them and floating. At Hippie Hollow, manmade Lake Travis is banked by boulders piled atop one another. I leave Noll paddling in the water and climb up onto a boulder, put on my trunks and squishy wet shoes, and I hop up onto another boulder and on up, boulder to boulder, and then scramble through the chaparral that covers the dry hillside to the dusty dirt lot where Jerry’s van sits among a dozen parked cars. The day we picked up the houseboat, we unloaded our luggage and supplies onto it, and the others motored the boat to where we’re moored, while I drove Jerry’s van around the lake. The houseboat has an inflatable dingy we use to get to shore when we put on clothes to drive into town. Jerry says I don’t need to check on his van, it’s insured and he doesn’t give a fuck if it gets vandalized or stolen, an affectation of anarchistic sympathies. He would be pissed if anything happened to it. I check on his van once a day and tell Jerry so, giving him the pleasure of being righteously irritated at me for wasting precious moments of my life, consistent with his gospel of my history of bad decision-making.
When I come back down from the parking area, I take off my trunks and shoes and sit with Noll where we fed the fish yesterday. There are other naked guys on the rocks and in the water, but none close enough to overhear us. One I recognize, a guy as built as I am and about my age. He was here yesterday. I climbed up the bank of boulders to take a leak away from the lake, and as I started back down I saw him talking to Noll. I figured he was making a play. The guy shut up and watched me approach, maybe assessing whether I’d be willing to share Noll with him in the bushes, but I froze him with a stare, and he said to Noll, “Nice talking to you,” and started to go. Noll asked the guy if he had any sunblock he could give him. “Since you’re leaving?” Noll is fair-skinned and rosy-cheeked. I didn’t know anyone could be so rosy-cheeked. He looks twenty, but I suppose he’s twenty-nine, like he says. Why would he lie and say he’s older than he is? I’m sure he’s of legal age. The stranger dug out two sunblock bottles from his backpack, all he was wearing except for a ball cap, mirrored shades, and sneakers. He handed them to Noll and hopped to the next boulder and the next and the next, heading around the curving shore. I asked Noll what the guy wanted, and Noll saw that I was jealous and smiled and lay his fingers against the hollow on one side of my stomach and said the guy had just asked about our boat. Noll’s so sweet to me, and I have so many flaws, jealousy being one.
“Noll, I’m just curious,” I say today, conscious of my rival disappearing off into the distance and of my flaws, and pretty sure I wouldn’t drop Noll if he is a big-time drug dealer—although I’d worry about him getting caught or shot—but I know Jerry will hound me until I give him some answers about Noll. Noll and I each swing our feet in the water. “Why all the cash in an envelope?” I blurt.
He looks into the water and touches his foot to mine. “I just stick money wherever.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
The day he arrived, after our first fuck he and I swam back to shore and got his shorts and sneakers and a Stones-concert tank shirt he’d left on the rocks. He told me he had over fifty concert Ts or tanks, so many that he’d stopped collecting them. I’d brought a wad of plastic wrap from the boat and for our swim back waterproofed Noll’s wallet, which he said didn’t have much in it anyhow.
“I always have money,” he says, in answer to my question.
So was the envelope of money in his shorts pocket when we swam to the boat on the day we met? Did the cash get soaked? “You’ve never said what you do when you’re not traveling around?” I ask.
“Wait tables. Bartend.”
That’s good. Honest work. I tell him what Jerry said about the envelope exchange.
Noll looks over and gives me an innocent, what-are-you-accusing-me-of smile. He’s so cute and tightly put together. Half a foot shorter than me, narrower, thin wiry muscles, hair on his chest—the same fluffy brown hair as on his head—and a washboard stomach. He’s a sit-up machine. Whenever he’s not doing something else, like tending to me, he does sit-ups. “Your friend Jerry has a vivid imagination,” he says. “Maybe in the bathroom I had my cash envelope out of my pocket to get my comb. I remember a man asking me where something was in Austin, and I told him I didn’t know Austin, I live in California, and then he asked about my accent. I didn’t give him any envelope.”
I put my arm around Noll and pull his body snug against mine, his shoulder against my pectoral muscle. “I think Jerry’s jealous of you.”
“You think maybe?” Noll says, laughing.
“I didn’t know you live in California.” I assumed Ireland. Earlier I asked him where he lived, and he said, “Traveling,” to which I said, “Like Holiday Golightly,” thinking of the book Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Noll didn’t know what I meant, and I let it drop.
“So the money in the envelope,” I say. “Dinner last night wasn’t cheap.” I was shocked by the prices and ordered the least expensive thing on the menu. Jerry ordered with a vengeance, and the others split the difference between us. “You had all that money when we swam out to the boat the day we came and got your clothes?”
Noll looks off, watches a guy swimming in the distance. “You worry a lot about money.”
“Maybe because I don’t have any.”
“Some people do. Let’s say there are two guys, and one has a lot of money and a house where they both could live.” He looks at me as though I should understand.
“You have a sugar daddy?”
This he finds hilarious. “No,” he says when he stops laughing, “I don’t have a sugar daddy.”
“You have money?”
“Some.”
I remember that he told me his father died recently. His mother died before he knew her, and he’s an only child. He inherited some money, maybe a house, I figure, and now he’s blowing through the money. I want to sober him by asking what he’ll do when the money runs out. But I don’t want to play parent to him, I want to fuck him till his toes crack and he moans every dirty word he knows. You can’t play parent and fuck him like that, both.
*
Our last evening on the boat I’d rather spend quietly aboard, as Clarence and Mona are, but instead I’m going with Noll to hear Tom Sparkler. Jerry and Trevor are coming too, because Trevor is curious. Like me, Trevor’s never been to a rock concert. At first Jerry refused, said he wouldn’t sneak into a concert, but Noll insisted that we would get in legitimately. “Standing back stage,” Noll said. Noll knows a manager of the company that’s putting on the concert, the logistical people. We arrive late, because Noll said that way we wouldn’t have to fight traffic and that concerts never start on time. Jerry’s van is waved through a gate that opens for “authorized personnel.” In the University of Texas Special Events Center, a building not yet a year old, men wearing red T-shirts that say “Tom Sparkler Staff” usher us down a sloping, dark aisle through what is, in the round theater, essentially a piece of the pie curtained off and serving as backstage. A band is already playing on stage. We stand in the dark, not so much backstage as to the side. Noll introduces us to a man in a suit wearing headphones, a man in his fifties, I’d judge. I shake his hand but don’t catch his name. The man stands with us as a spotlight circles the stage and crisscrosses it while the band plays the same refrain over and over and the crowd, on its feet, roars. I have to admit I’m excited. I would be ashamed to confess to Noll that I’m so uncool that this is my first rock concert. Even Jerry, who’s tried to act bored since we left the boat, is no longer glum-faced but staring at the opposite side of the stage. We watch for some sign of movement over there in the dark that will tell us the star is about to take the stage. The man in the suit and headphones lays a hand on Noll’s shoulder, the spotlight comes to our side of the stage, and Noll steps into it. My mouth drops open as the spotlight follows Noll to the center of the stage and he raises his arms and yells, “Hello, Austin!” The crowd sails into a frenzy. “Are you ready for some music?” Noll shouts. He and the band launch into a song I hear all the time at the gym.
Each of us on the boat knew the name Tom Sparkler, but none knew what he looked like or sounded like, nor bothered to speculate.
A few songs later a slender African-American woman with a short Afro and wearing a black pants suit pulls me farther away from the stage so she can talk into my ear. “Noll has a concert in San Francisco tomorrow evening, and he’d like you to come with him on the plane tonight,” she says. “He asked me to apologize to you. He didn’t mean to trick you, but personal security looms huge in his life. A year ago a crazy would-be killer fired a bullet that missed Noll’s head by inches. You might have heard about it in the news?” She looks at me as though she thinks I perhaps lack some of my mental faculties or else I’d know what she was talking about.
Speechless, I stare at her. I’m not sure I’ve closed my mouth since Noll stepped into the spotlight. I vaguely recollect a news incident in which someone shot at a pop star.
“He asked me to explain to you,” she says. “He hasn’t gone out in public since, but he wanted to see this Hippie Hollow. And then he swam out to your boat, and his security people were okay about him being with you on the boat but insisted he stay incognito. You guys really didn’t recognize Tom Sparkler?”
“Now I recognize his music, but I’ve never paid much attention to music.”
“I’ll say not.” She smiles. “When you all went into town, oh my, keeping our boy under the public radar!”
We both laugh, I because I’m giddy.
“And you and Noll on those rocks are going to be in somebody’s magazine—a lot of you, if you know what I mean.”
“Photographers? I didn’t see any.”
“It’s in their interest to not call attention to themselves or their prey. Each wants an exclusive.” She glances at her watch. “So, sweetie, from San Francisco Noll would like you to come stay with him for a while in his house in Malibu. He’s free for two weeks before he does another concert.”
Words don’t come to me.
“I know this is all happening fast,” she says, “but I need to know whether to bump someone from the plane.”
“I’d love to spend more time with Noll. I hate to bump someone.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll fly first class,” she says, and looks at a clipboard I hadn’t noticed in her hands before. “You’ll be taken to the plane before the concert ends.”
“My things are back at the houseboat we…”
“If you can ask your friends to take your things home, we can supply everything you’ll need. You don’t take any prescription drugs, right?”
“No,” I say. I realize what’s happening. “He does this a lot, picks up guys at his concerts?”
“He’s never brought anyone home, sweetie.” She glances at her watch again. “You won’t see Noll until you’re both on the plane. There’s a fifteen-minute intermission during the concert, but he spends that time lying down, sometimes even naps.” She laughs. “First time I saw that, I thought our boy is a bit of a cartoon character. But he knows what he needs to go back out there, and he’s able to catch a few winks. I wouldn’t be able to switch gears like that, no way.”
I want to kiss her on the cheek. I can’t stop myself from hugging her.
Before the intermission I recognize another song I hear at the gym and the theme song from a movie Jerry and I saw.
Sometime after the intermission a man in a sports coat says in my ear, “Craig Stander, if you’ll come with me, please.” Soon he and I are in a van with other people, two wearing black short-sleeve shirts that say in small red letters above the pocket, “Tom Sparkler Staff.” As I get my wits about me, I recognize my escort in the sports coat as the man I thought was hitting on Noll on the rocks at Hippie Hollow, the one who gave Noll two tubes of sun block. The guy’s ball cap and shades had hid a lot of his looks, but I’m sure this is the same fellow. I wonder how many other naked guys on the rocks those days were Noll’s security men.
We drive to the Austin airport—close to the heart of town in 1978—park on the tarmac and file up the steps and onto a waiting plain white jet. The fuselage is one-and-two seating. My guide motions for me to take a window seat and sits across the aisle from me. Under his sports coat I glimpse a holster with a gun.
We sit for an hour or so. To stretch, I stand and lean over my seatback and look toward the aft of the plane. Most of the seats are behind mine. In one I see a heavyset man wearing the thick glasses Noll wore at dinner last night. I think of Noll asking, on the way into Austin yesterday afternoon, if Jerry would stop at a drugstore so Noll could buy a certain skin cream. The rest of us waited in the van while Noll ran in. He came out wearing a new, cheap tourist’s cowboy hat tilted down to his sunglasses. After we were seated in the restaurant, Jerry yanked the hat off Noll’s head. “And take off those goddamn sunglasses too,” Jerry snarled. Noll ignored him but a few minutes later went to the bathroom and returned with the sunglasses replaced by the thick-lensed glasses that apparently belong to the man now sitting a few aisles behind me on the plane. I turn forward and resume my seat and laugh.
Outside, beyond a wire mesh fence, a small crowd peers at our jet. Inside, I can hear only the idling of the engines. Another van pulls up—or perhaps the same van that brought me to the plane earlier—and five men in sports coats pop out and spread themselves about and scan the area. They return to the side of the van and surround Noll so that I almost can’t see him as he walks to the plane and mounts the steps, disappearing from my view altogether until he drops into the seat beside me and, without a word, kisses me. He kisses me and kisses me.
*
August 2017
I’m no longer thirty-five, but seventy-four. Noll is sixty-eight, and still performing. I sit at the counter in a Dublin pub and sip from the foam on a pint of Guinness and furtively watch three rosy-cheeked young bartenders as they stare at a soccer game on TVs mounted above and behind my head. Other TVs, in front of me behind the bar, allow me to feign to watch the game when really I’m savoring the bartenders’ delectable, sweet faces. During a commercial I mention to one of the fellows that the pub looks so empty.
“It’ll be full tonight, after the Tom Sparkler concert. Are you going?” he asks.
“No,” I say. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I started entertaining myself otherwise during Noll’s concerts, although I always travel with him. We’re in Ireland now as a stop on his current European tour. “I’ve been to some of his concerts,” I tell my young barkeep.
“He tends to run late, so it may be past midnight, but this place will fill up with fans from the concert. People here love Tom Sparkler. He was born and grew up in Dublin, you know.”
“I love him too,” I say, and think back to the day on the houseboat on Lake Travis, almost forty years ago, when we became a couple.
__________
Gary Garth McCann’s novella, Yong and in Love, will be published this fall and his novel, The Shape of the Earth, is forthcoming in 2019. His legal thriller The Man Who Asked to Be Killed is praised in The Washington Independent Review of Books. His stories have appeared in Erotic Review; Mobius; Off the Rocks; Q Review; Best Gay Love Stories 2005; and Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly. He has been honored by Maryland Writers’ Association first prizes for short fiction and mystery. He blogs at garygarthmccann.com and latelastnightbooks.com. He lives in Annapolis with his husband, the first out professor at the Naval Academy. As a writer, he uses Todd’s surname as a middle name.