Boys And Morton Street

In order to understand the words that were now falling in very quick succession out of his fellow drinkers mouth, Matthew placed his drunken ears closer to Jacobs lips who consequently flinched. Matt pulled back faking normalcy and offered his interlocutor an acted casual grin. Jacob accepted it and continued his discussion. This is what he deemed it, a conversation in which thoughts and opinions were shared in such a light as to allow personal and communal growth. Jake was one for the growth.
“Disney seems to be going in the wrong direction,” he continued, “enough with the fairy tales and now they want to forget two dimensional work, bullshit!”
He spoke with much more verve than Matt could gather for the subject so as a result Matthew repeated what Jake said and threw in a few obnoxious words like modernity, aesthetics, etc, and placed his eyes on Jakes and constantly found him staring away. Behind them Mike and David were playing pool expertly for the third round; they had won Jacob and Matt a round of shots earlier. The latter took a Tequila and the first a Gin. Every time Matt heard the balls jockey for position and their ceramic-like veneers clacking together, he reestablished the fact in his head that he did not belong here. Mike was the only reason he had made the trip to this dark bar around the corner on one of those nothing streets in New York City; which seemed really more important to the night owls who made their way on it ritually than to anyone else in the City or in the world for that matter. There were trashcans and broken people in the dark doorways lining the block and it seemed even God himself could care less about Morton Street.
Matthew Lawson was the only son of two terribly unimportant people with degrees in things they needed desperately to discuss, to each other, on a daily basis, while their son wondered why he felt like there had been a grand piano crashed and parked on his heart all his life; leaving him breathless and afraid of any action, emotional or otherwise, lest he be broken in half and left to fend for himself in some netherworld of dessert emptiness. This is how he saw the after-life, reflected of course in the teacups and hard-boiled breakfast eggs of his parents; Joseph and Mary.
Once upon a time a boy found himself lying on a mat outside in the night with another boy and alone together they spoke no words but their skins were touching in places they ultimately discovered they were hiding for no essential reasons. So they traveled the stairs toward the second floor and the empty classroom and on the cold marble floor, they stripped their shorts away. One lay on top the other and they simulated the positions they had observed and thus feeling awkward they decided to spend the rest of the night kissing each other. That was more pleasant anyway. Jake felt God was watching and he apologized in the morning.
“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he said suddenly remembering something and getting up to leave the bar.
“Sure,” Matt replied abstractly as Jake made his way past the pool tables and into the dim lighting that ushered him up a dark stairway and into the New York City night of Morton Street.
“No!” A loud exclamation traveled quickly from the pool table to Matt’s ears and he turned to find that Mike and David had won the game, again. Their opponents had scratched the eight ball just as they were about to make the winning move. Matt didn’t understand the basics of the game but the metaphor of the situation did not escape him. The stick can hit the ball hard but touching it lightly was against the rules. Everyone seemed to touched Matt lightly, if only they would just strike him with some determination. He would not be sitting here, watching Mike intently play pool, with the experience of suburban Southern California teen years no doubt, and wonder why Mike’s serious expression never looked so good in class as it did under the Budweiser fluorescent light of the pool table. Scarborough Fair came floating in through the window and suddenly Matthew was thirteen again watching his neighbors apartment and waiting for Antonio to get home.
Across the way, the alleyway on the Upper West Side, Antonio Fargas returned home every night and no sooner did he lock the door behind him did he remember to strip bare and parade his tanned and toned muscular body around his easily visible apartment. He had an audience of which he was quite aware and on the nights when their husbands were not home, middle-aged women with insurance salesmen and professor-at-NYU husbands, rested at the window with Matthew to watch Antonio. He played the guitar very badly and often let Simon and Garfunkel flood the communal sound space a little too loudly, but nobody ever complained.
"You want a cigarette man?" Mike asked seemingly not for the first time his eyes were saying. Matthew snapped back into reality and replied with an enthusiastic nod. They made their way slowly out of the bar, as this was New York City not some glorious orgy of night-life in Europe, and as Mike lit Matthews cigarette outside, Matt touched his hands to hold them steady and impose his will on them, like Greta Garbo in probably every scene before 1945. Mike laughed.
“What?” Matthew questioned waiting to join in eagerly. Mike modulated his laughter into a coy grin and blew some smoke in a James Dean pose that did not escape Matt.
“If you saw something Mike began, in one of his dream-like gazes, which signaled he was in no mood to offer a straight answer. lets say a miniature ceramic piano, as youre fond of those, Matt blushed a little obviously, if you saw it just hanging there with no one to possess it.would you feel badly for it or simply crave it?
Matthew pondered the question intensely, mostly to find the connection as there was always a connection and then without any warning from his brain or any faculties within his mind, the words escaped his lips, are you a miniature ceramic piano?
Mike replied with another smile, slightly more shaken than the first, but laden with intention. He tossed his cigarette prematurely to the floor and squashed it with his black boots. He placed his right hand on Matthews face and pulled his lips closer into the first kiss Morton street saw for the night and the last one Jake saw on his return, with a small miniature piano he found three weeks ago, before he ran into the N and R train subway station; that is not counting the couple making out from 79th until 116th.
A good kiss starts in the lips, a bad one ends there; Mike and Matthew shared several good kisses on and off Morton street and for the rest of their New York days. California would come later, but that is another story, for another time perhaps when one is not so tired of telling to you the romances of other people.

THE END