Back at the Antlers, we got naked quick. Roland put so much effort into fucking me, his asshole got a little pursed, and I gave it one clean lick. At that he got so hard I thought his cock might break off, and I sucked it until he came over my tongue, onto my chin.

Then we ordered pizza and champagne and watched my Lakers crush the Nuggets. I could feel my heartbeat in my vagina. During timeouts, Roland spoke of Paris: the boulevards, the apartments, the Seine. I knew the beauty of his description came out of his disgust with the Tomahawk. He’d seen too many ruins for a guy his age.

Soon he was folding me into a fantasy of what we could do there, on the boulevards of Paris. Had I ever been to Paris?

“Yes,” I said.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing to live there?”

“I’m too New World.”

“Even a beggar could be happy there,” Roland said.

5.

The men I dated always described a certain limit in me, a check against intimacy. I think Keith was the last one I let in. After that, I contained a wall that no one ever scaled.

I’d met Keith on campus when I was a freshman at USC. He was wheat-pasting posters for a show his band was playing, and I caught his eye. It’s not that I’m unattractive, though my style back then was unspeakably bad, but I remember feeling confused about what drew him to me. It would take time to realize that what enticed him wasn’t beauty.

He had the unnaturally green eyes I’d come to believe, from various movies and books, to be portals into extrasensory dimensions, and he spoke with an ease, present in the moment, foreign to my horny male peers. I went to his show that night at Small’s K.O. and passionately admired how he became lost in the songs, which weren’t any good, his flat, hairless stomach thrusting against the keys.

We started seeing each other every day at his apartment in West Hollywood. I wasn’t a virgin when I met him, but he made me realize I’d been having pretty indifferent sex. He set about learning my body with an intent that I thought sweet, and would make me come again and again, almost against my will. It was the first time sex surpassed the pleasure of masturbation.

After that night at Small’s, I didn’t go to his shows anymore. Keith was really trying to make it as a musician—what kind, he didn’t seem to care—and so his bands were often just groups of strangers assembled by some semi-connected impresario trying to turn a buck. He kept a Sony Handycam in his apartment and would film audition tapes of himself playing one instrument or another.