Slavko had marked his half-century years ago. A hard life had rewarded him with excess poundage; the hair on the top of his head had disappeared almost entirely, while the back and sides had turned gray—and not that silvery gray that sometimes can even look fashionable; no, this was a dirty-yellowish gray, like the color that never quite comes off the fingers of committed smokers. Hair sprouted from his ears, his nose, from the top of his nose, down his back, across his stomach, everywhere it had never been in his younger years, while the place where the first hair of his puberty had appeared—his ankles, which he had once so proudly compared at phys ed with those of his schoolmates—now showed nothing but bare skin, with only faint dots left, as on a plucked hen, to tell of his once-mighty bristles. The doctor had said he had an above-average supply of the male hormone that oversaw his transformation. He lived alone. His friends had gradually died off or grown distant—those whom he hadn’t already fallen out with. The more time he spent by himself, the more his desire grew for the warmth of another body, while the older he got, the younger were the men who caught his eye. Where is the crossover point? he sometimes asked himself in dread, for he saw no sign of a more tranquil old age, of enjoying a life of contented domesticity dishing the dirt with people he knew.

The call of his urges grew louder and louder; he got excited just by looking out his window of his apartment at the schoolyard across the street and the teenage boys running after the ball. An inner voice constantly compelled him to go out and meet new people, and would send him into a funk whenever he failed to get them into bed. It was always somebody new, each younger than the last—he had no time left for his old acquaintances, who phoned him now less and less often. He was rich enough to hire young men to come to his house to satisfy his desires, and he had done this a number of times, but still he longed for love. The men to whom he openly paid an agreed fee would maintain a certain distance toward him, as if he repulsed them. They expressed themselves mechanically; it might as well have been jelly doughnuts they were stuffing in a pastry shop: What do you like to do? What do you want me to do to you? Turn over! Did you come? Okay, seeya! They never opened their mouths wide enough for him to stick his tongue in; it was as if he was diseased—Please, don’t get personal!—they never kissed him, never stroked him, never tried to turn him on, never caressed him, hugged him, beat him; he was the one who always had to climb on top of them, tongue them front and back, turn them over, as if they were paying him. They didn’t even want to touch him—and all to protect their pose of disinterest, so they could say they weren’t queer but only did it for the money. Tell me what you want; you give me head, I fuck you; I don’t get fucked, I don’t give head, sorry, chum!—But who’s paying here?—You knew the score, take it or leave it!—and what choice did he have when his urges were getting stronger every year? He longed to have someone want him, at least a little, even if not for real, to have someone prove to him that even he had something to offer a man, something more than just drugs and money; he longed for them all not to be so direct, so hurried, so impersonal; he longed to have someone play the game of seduction with him, longed to sleep next to a warm body, to wake up in the same bed with someone and have breakfast together after morning sex. This was why he still went out to the clubs where he would meet young people—from the ones on skyscraper terraces, which at night offered New York–like views of castle turrets and church towers, to the ones so deep below ground it seemed there was nowhere the sewage could drain so it must just accumulate right there. His age and looks made him stand out among the young bodies in tight-fitting pants and sparkling Lycra T-shirts that showed off distinctly the separate parts of the body, each still keeping its own recognizable shape—which he could no longer say of himself when he looked in the mirror. He dressed as youthfully as he could, hiding a few pounds with certain fashion tricks, and armed himself with drugs, his ticket into the world of the young. He knew dealers; he knew chemists who manufactured Ecstasy in home laboratories; and he had mastered, in every nuance, the street talk of young people, which, whenever he forgot himself among older folks, made him sound ridiculous.

There was a puddle of water that had overflowed, mixed with urine, from a clogged urinal; its brownish yellow was diluted on the floor, but the acrid reek in the nostrils testified to its many-years presence in this badly lit room of broken and graffiti-scrawled white tile. The folk art on the walls portrayed queer fantasies come to life: ever-bigger cocks in ever-greater numbers—up the ass, in the mouth, inside the head. The cold draft entering through a vent beneath the ceiling could not expel the odor of piss that penetrated every pore. Slavko was aware of neither the cold nor the stench; he had taken some X and had a few gin-and-colas, which made him feel both high and chilled, and certainly bolder and braver, his dick always rock hard whenever he brushed up against some teenager on the dance floor. Younger guys couldn’t get it up when they took X, but on him it had precisely the opposite effect. But first he had to take a leak. He opened his zipper, pulled out his whizzer, and released under pressure a pale stream in all directions, including down his pants, until he managed to tug the foreskin back and aim at the urinal, which was getting dangerously full and threatening to overflow. He glanced over at the other urinals and on his left noticed a boy whose pee-flow had just ended. Slavko quickly averted his eyes, but then, remembering he was more courageous now, unabashedly looked back down at the boy’s dick, which he was still shaking dry—and now stroking it, making it thicker—and Slavko thought it could be a rather good-sized morsel if only he had the chance to work it over with his mouth. He glanced up at the face of the guy, who was looking straight into his eyes, which he at once redirected back toward the guy’s cock. He knew he should say something but couldn’t think what.

“Want some X, dude?”

“You got some?”

Slavko reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a plastic bag of tiny pills; then, with his dick still hanging out of his pants, he took a pill from the bag and placed it in the mouth of the boy, who swallowed it dry as he kept on stroking his cock. Slavko, who now had no fear at all about staring at the boy’s rod, stretched out his hand and grasped this warm rising loaf, which smelled of mama’s kitchen.

“You like it, huh?”

“May I?” Slavko said, bending over, about to kneel in the cold puddle of water and piss.

“A cock like this you got to pay for!”

“Just a little, please!”

“Ten thou or nothing. I need the money for drinks and my mobile.”

“Okay, but only if you come to my place. I’m not paying ten thousand tolars to suck some guy off in the john!” said Slavko, sobering up and switching from seduction to business mode.

“So you want me to do you? You live far from here?”

“A couple of blocks. I’ve got my car outside.”

Slavko needed some time to get himself into the low seat of his Porsche, but then he took off so fast the wide tires squealed when he turned onto the road. He ran through a few yellow lights in order to show off the Porsche’s acceleration power to his new partner, and in no time at all they were in front of his house in a quiet residential neighborhood in the middle of the city. He opened the garage door with a remote and led his guest up some inside stairs into a luxurious living room filled with Versace furniture that evoked a Golden Age happiness for the twenty-first century.

“Would you like a drink? Just put your coat anywhere! What’s your name, by the way?”

“Sebastijan.”

The boy removed his leather cap, and his thick, wavy, raven hair, shimmering like the metallic color of the Porsche, tumbled over his ears even as it retained the forehead-to-nape flow a strong hair gel had set in place. His hairstyle was reminiscent of the period of A Streetcar Named Desire and the young Marlon Brando, whose photo adorned Slavko’s bathroom.

“Whiskey if you have it.”

“Sure do.”

Only now did Slavko notice the full beauty of Sebastijan’s symmetrical face, the smooth, white, poreless skin, the straight nose, the full lips, the slightly dimpled cheeks free of the age wrinkles that run from nose to chin—which he himself had had smoothed away through plastic surgery—the thick black eyebrows beneath a high even forehead, the curved black eyelashes, as long as any woman’s, and the dark pupils set in the white sclera of his eyes. Sebastijan took off his tight black leather motorcycle jacket, padded at the elbows and shoulders, and beneath it was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, which hung on him as loosely as his jeans did—but this hardly kept Slavko from imagining every muscle beneath the clothes. The boy looked firm to him, not too muscular but just enough to make it impossible to detect the least bit of fat on his body; he was of medium height and well-proportioned, and Slavko felt as though he could cook, wash, iron, and clean for this boy for the rest of his life.

“So are you into sports?”

“Martial arts. You know anything about it? I’m a European and national champion. I still work out now, just for myself. And I know how to party.”

“Want to do a line?”

He would give anything to make the encounter last longer. From a drawer containing table linen he pulled out a plastic bag of white powder and handed it trustingly to Sebastijan, even though there was enough there to last the whole month. Spreading out his legs in manly fashion, Sebastijan sat down on the white sofa in front of the coffee table, which had an inlaid sun on its marble top and grooved legs; he shook a little of the white powder onto the table’s smooth surface, took a plastic card from the back pocket of his jeans, and used its edge to crush the cocaine. Slavko brought over an unopened bottle of twenty-five-year-old Chivas Regal, which was so expensive he might have been saving it for his wedding, two glasses, and a pitcher of ice with tongs, then sat down on the sofa, more than half of which was taken up by Sebastijan, and crossed his legs. In his hand he held a rolled-up ten-thousand-tolar bill, which Sebastijan would get, after they had used it, as a piece of discarded paraphernalia and not as payment for a love that was so sincere no amount of money could express its worth. With the plastic card Sebastijan divided the powder on the marble into two lines. Slavko stuck one end of the rolled-up banknote into a nostril, bent over the table, and vacuumed up a line with the other end. Then leaning back, he inhaled deeply, let out a grunt from the pleasure and the burn, and gave the little tube to Sebastijan, who vacuumed up the second line and lay back on the sofa without making any sound at all of either pleasure or displeasure.

For Slavko, getting high was the foreplay, and he now set to work unbuttoning Sebastijan’s jeans in search of the source of life. Sebastijan did not resist. He took the expensive whiskey from the table, undid the sealed cork, and drank it straight out of the bottle, without ice. Slavko, meanwhile, freed Sebastijan’s cock—of considerable size even in a flaccid state—and his heavy balls. The area around the boy’s cock was clean-shaven; so, too, were the balls and, as Slavko could feel with his hand, his ass. He took hold of the thick dick, put it in his mouth, and tried every technique he knew—with tongue, teeth, lips, and throat—to get it to stand up. Slowly it started getting bigger—he wasn’t yet totally out of condition—and he took it deeper into his mouth, could feel it in his throat; though nearly gagging, he didn’t stop; he wanted to see it in all its perfection. When Sebastijan’s cock was hard enough to stand on its own, he took it out of his mouth and examined it close up, like a work of art he longed to touch but feared setting off an alarm. It was straight, over eight inches long, thick, evenly proportioned with a rounded pink head the foreskin had slipped down from and a prominent vein that curved along it like ivy; the circumference, too, had to be close to eight inches—he had developed a mastery of dimensions ever since he once ordered over the Internet a latex cast of a porn star’s actual cock, which had come with all the vital statistics, but this cock was even lovelier, shapelier, and most of all, warmer and livelier, and unlike Kris’s, which he kept in his dresser, it possessed an expressive desire. He desired to feel its desire inside himself, and started undressing. When he unfastened his vest, his belly drooped over his belt. He was covered in the front by a dense mat of black, gray, and yellow hair which made it impossible to tell where his chest ended and his abdomen began; his dick was hidden deep beneath his belly, and his buttocks blended with his thick legs in a vast blob, across which oily mounds rose like volcanoes, some now extinct and plugged with scab. Naked as from his mother’s loins, only with a lot more hair and padding, he knelt on the floor, raised his bum in the air, and, placing his head between Sebastijan’s legs, used his tongue to solidify desire in a final yearning. When it seemed to him that Sebastijan’s dick was sufficiently hard, he gestured with his hand that it was time for him to take it in his ass, and the boy lifted himself up lethargically, tugged his jeans down to the knees, so that his muscular thighs could be seen with their sparse short black hairs, then knelt behind Slavko and spread his legs apart, legs now hairless from the knees down and adorned with blue veins, like the grooves on an ancient column that had collapsed under too much weight. Slavko inhaled some poppers from a little bottle, first in one nostril, then in the other, and felt he was as open as a book able to receive within itself all the holiness of this world. Sebastijan knelt behind this furry mass, which quivered like meat jelly, and sharp bristles tingled the sensitive glans as he stuck his penis in the chasm between Slavko’s thighs. Slavko, who knew he would have to help the boy find the way, spread open his rippling asscheeks with his hands, and Sebastijan saw, staring up at him, Slavko’s cabbagey hole, overgrown with matted hair and edged on one side by gnarled veins, as if pork cracklings grew on the pig’s butt, and on the other by scabbing from hemorrhoids injured during his last shit. Sebastijan leaned on Slavko’s back with his hands, looked up at the ceiling, and took aim. Slavko let out a sneeze, blood trickled from his nose, and Sebastijan, glancing down at his cock, which had gone limp before it could penetrate anything, saw that it was smeared with blood.

“You didn’t crush the coke enough! And you’re not at all hard. Give me a sec, I’ll be right back!”

When he returned from the bathroom, having wiped off his nose and ass, Slavko handed a Viagra pill to Sebastijan, who downed it with whiskey; he didn’t need one himself. The Viagra would be working in about half an hour, if the boy got even a little aroused, so Slavko started piling on the tenderness. He stripped him naked and was astounded by his well-toned, evenly proportioned body; he had been with a number of young guys, but never had he felt such a powerful attraction to any of them. He lay Sebastijan down on his back and applied all his arts on him: a combination of erotic massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, and other spiritualities he had learned about from self-help books. Every muscle on the boy’s abdomen was developed; his clean-shaven pectorals were still well defined. Slavko bit one of the nipples a little too hard, on purpose, just so he could hear Sebastijan’s voice, for he lay beneath him as if dead. A full-body tongue massage can reveal new erogenous zones, and straight boys get turned on when you lick their ass, so Slavko lifted up Sebastijan’s legs—the boy was so flexible he could have done a full split in the air—and moved his tongue closer to the solid, clean-shaven pink butt, which might have broken his nose if the boy had clenched it. The anus, so tightly shut it was barely visible, tasted slightly sweet from the Chanel Allure Sport cologne the boy had scented it with, since geezers were always trying to stick their tongues up his butt. By tongue-massaging the sphincter muscle, Slavko managed to get Sebastijan’s dick to stand up again; then he squatted over him as if he was going to sit down on him—but when he spread his asscheeks apart with his hands so the boy could enter him, the inflatable dragon all at once deflated. Slavko realized it wasn’t going to work and so got ready to screw Sebastijan himself instead; his own dick, after all, was still so hard it hurt. Raising Sebastijan’s martial-arts legs, he brought his crooked hard-on right up to the boy’s ass-blossom, intending to push his way into that open-sesame cave. He took aim at the world navel, his dick solid as a rock, but he couldn’t make it go in, despite its being much smaller than Sebastijan’s.

“Have some poppers; it’ll make things easier!” he said, holding the little bottle up to one of Sebastijan’s nostrils while closing the other with his hand. And when the boy had inhaled the fumes of the liquid, which smelled like glue, he repeated the procedure with the second nostril. Then he lifted Sebastijan’s ass up a bit and managed to get the pointy little head of his dick to go inside, but Sebastijan at once pushed him out with a cry of pain.

“Have some more poppers and it won’t hurt! Here, take a big whiff!”

Sebastijan was pale; the sweat was beading on his forehead. He took a deep whiff of the poppers, several times in each nostril, and seemed to be lying there completely open, when suddenly his body tightened in a convulsion, and he gripped his chest with his hands and looked straight at Slavko, his eyes showing white all around. For a moment, Slavko was terrified, but then he lay down next to the boy and started caressing him, warming him with the heat of his own ample body.

When he woke up in the morning, Sebastijan still lay beside him, his lips open, ready for an intimate kiss, his cock hard, if no longer warm—and now he did not go limp at the sight of Slavko’s withered blossom but satisfied him to the full. After they had breakfast together, Slavko went out and bought the biggest freezer he could find.

 

Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau

Originally published in Slovene as “Cvetje v jeseni” in the short story collection by Gojmir Polajnar, Druzinske parabole (Family Parables) (Ljubljana: SKUC, 2005).

 

© 2008 Gojmir Polajnar

 

Gojmir Polajnar is a free-lance writer, reviewer, translator and editor, and has completed a variety of written works, including a novel, short stories, plays, scripts for cartoon strips, a film screenplay, a book of essays. "The Symposium", a story from his collection, Family Parables, was selected as one of the ten best Slovene stories of 2005 by the Slovene Writers Association and the journal Sodobnost. Rawley Grau is completing the English translation of his collection and a novella under the title Family Parables, which includes "Blossoms in Autumn" and "The Symposium".

His short story collection, Atlantis, has been published in Slovene, Ljubljana: SKUC, 2008; and in Serbian, Belgrade: Balkanski knjizevni glasnik, 2008. "Swan Song", a story in Atlantis, was nominated for best Slovene story of 2007 by the Slovene Writers Association and the journal Sodobnost.