The police station was not as clean as he thought it would be.

He expected freshly polished, waxed linoleum tiles that gleamed like the halls of the University first thing in the morning, when he got up for an early class and walked in the morning mists, under the shelter of the big, drooping shade trees, before the sun rose and the heat of the day took over. The air outside would be soft and damp and cool and humid with only a promise of the heat to come. He would pull open the big glass door of the Math Building, and there they would be, pristine, gleaming, stretching out before him until they began to converge in perspective, reminding him of a convergent series, though he couldn’t fathom the calculus of linoleum tiles, but a convergent series, that was always shiny and clean and fresh in the crisp air conditioned silence of the early morning.

Later in the day they would be scuffed but he didn’t seem to notice it, and even when scuffed and worn at the end of the day they didn’t seem wrong. Like math itself, the buildings could get messy without losing their essential order.

But this place was not air-conditioned. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead; some of the tubes were out. It was dirty and dingy and the walls gray; the chairs were plastic and cracked, the linoleum grimy and there was dirt and wax caked in the corners and edges of the place, and little streaks of dirt and paper bits and the smell of pine-sol antiseptic and puke and body odor, the stink of junkies, their sweat, especially the meth freaks, smelled so sharply and he could tell they were there, had been there, the odor lingered. Maybe he was part bloodhound, he thought, part dog anyway. It was disorderly, there was no mathematical value to it, it was chaos.

It fit his mood.

The police officer was not as mean as Barry had feared; he took the cuffs off as soon as he got him into the building, telling him he would leave them off if he could trust Barry not to run or make trouble.

Barry had neither energy nor any intentions to run, he was buried in a deep pit within himself, facing a place as black as a the depths of a coal mine, an endless, airless, hopeless hell.

Barry Holmes had nowhere to go. He was in hell, and you can’t run away from hell.

He woke in Kevin’s bed for the first time. Well, woke may not be the most accurate description, since Barry had really not slept - at least he didn’t think he had slept - all night.

But he opened his eyes for the first time.

The apartment was as bare a place as Barry could have imagined, it seemed as if it had nothing in it that was not steel or glass; and every surface seemed smooth and hard and unyielding. Well, everything but the bed. The bed was soft.

This room was spare, sparse, Spartan, empty. It was a single long room, in one corner a bench with weights, old, painted a medium black, the weights a more glossy black - even the lift bar - and yet well used.

Stacked in the other corner like the dirty dishes it barely restrained, was a tiny kitchenette. He noticed the dishes were black, the countertop black, the sink was even black porcelain.

A billowing curtain set off the doorway to what he hoped was the bathroom; he heard street sounds from that direction but there was another door to the street, he was sure this wasn’t the front entry, with a curtain over it, so he guessed he’d find black tub and tile and sink and maybe an open window in there. And a black toilet too, he figured.

Two windows were tightly draped, the third not quite so tightly fastened, grudging a little ray of light, a tiny stream in; it was not reflecting from the flat black, painted concrete floor with its single black throw rug but it was enough light to see by.

For furniture he could see a small glass table on a black rock pedestal with two matching steel chairs, a glass topped desk and black filing cabinet; a wardrobe in the corner, as black as the leather couch with cushions not soft and squishy but hard and square. Nothing else. Well, there was the black blanket on the bed.

About the only thing that was not black and bare was Kevin’s photo, centered along one wall, very professionally done, posed against a white background, and blown up to life size. It was not black, but it was bare. He was completely naked. The photo was the only thing on the flat black walls.

Barry drank in the exotic locale, storing it for later thought, realizing he had been wrong to think it hideous the night before, wondering what marvelous sort of person had a place like this; realized this was the kind of room a real person had, an authentic person, a person true to himself. Wondered for a moment if he could paint his dorm room black. Then he rolled over to look at the warmth next to him.

In many ways, Kevin was like his apartment.

He wasn’t black, but there was nothing excess to his body, nothing extra, no embellishments beyond his tattoos - wonder of wonder they were not black, about the only color in the entire place! He too was spare; he was reduced to his most simple and basic elements. His body was hard, buffed, shaved clean, and totally exotic to a boy of sixteen, who had never really seen anyone naked outside of the locker room at school.

Like his apartment, like his poster, he was bare, which was all in all too much for a boy who had until a few hours before, figured probably he was gay and that he was also probably a virgin. Probably? Well, definitions were complicated. And now irrelevant.

After last night he was Gay and not a virgin; he knew himself now.

Then Barry, for the first time he could remember, at least the first time since he made that disastrous mistake when he was thirteen with his fellow paperboy, reached out tentatively, sexually, explicitly, to another person.

Kevin stirred, and shrugged sleepily, slowly half-opened one hazel eye, then brushed the boy’s hands away, mumbled and turned away on his side.

Barry didn’t mind, he would wait. Love waits.

Barry Holmes was a most unusual boy. He was in college at sixteen for one thing, living in the dorms on a full scholarship for another and taking upper division math major courses for a third.

Some of Barry’s skills lagged his advanced academic placement, his status as a college student. Some of them lagged his actual age.

Life is not all simple linear growth, even on all sides. Barry is an example. Though wonderfully advanced in Math and no slouch as an intellect, yet his skills in other areas, sometimes the more practical ones of life, lagged. One might make the mistake of thinking he was too smart for a basic English composition course, for example. But it’s in just such a course that he demonstrates both his brilliance and the limited, uneven nature of his development.

Barry’s mind was growing as a college student, yet his body was still small - he looked fourteen, not sixteen - and his mind in some ways was even younger. And a sixteen-year-old can be quite new at love and life and sex.

So one cannot fault him for thinking he was experiencing love. He was, in fact , quite convinced of it, but then, what sixteen-year-old can really be instructed in love? What boy of this age will take the guidance of his elders? What teenager is not sure at alternating moments that he knows everything/nothing? And what is love if it is not what one perceives it to be?

It’s interesting that Barry talked about fatherly advice, for Barry grew up without a father, never had a father, had a mother who was most difficult but no father to give him advice. He did of course, have his brother Jack, whom Barry adored, eldest against Barry’s youngest, of the eight children in the family, and whose life here in the South, far away from the snow and cold and ice of home, had determined Barry’s choice of schools when Harvard and Princeton were vying for him.

On the other hand, sixteen is an eager student of the practice of love. And makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in discrimination.

So one must say that on the morning that Barry Holmes woke in Kevin’s bed he was in love, for who can judge the quality of another’s love, or deny its ferocity in the young?

Barry could not, of course contain himself, no teenage love can keep itself secret. So in a short time everyone at The Table, the unofficial community center for gay students, a round table in Lonnie’s Lower Level Café and Grill, in the basement of the Student Union, heard of Kevin.

Michael knew in his heart of hearts that Barry was a danger to him, that Barry wanted Abe, and Michael had no intention of giving up what he had won. Michael would do whatever it took to keep Barry away from Abe.

Michael had taken Barry to Ando’s a gay club, sneaked him in the back way, got him a fake ID, and tried to set him up with Ando. He was being generous, Ando was cute by Michael’s standards, not a prize like Abe, but not to be sneezed at.

That hadn’t worked, but Kevin was just as good for Michael’s purposes. It kept Barry occupied and away from Michael’s lover. That is all Michael cared about in the first place so he was well-satisfied with the results. If things had turned out a bit different than expected, no matter, Kevin would do.

Michael knew Kevin. Kevin had tried to pick up eighteen-year-old Michael, who was no larger than Barry but much more sophisticated, a number of times. He had the wrong target entirely - I mean, Kevin had no hair! No fat! What kind of guy is that?

Nothing Michael wanted - give him a big, fat, hairy, warm man any day, no one under thirty, thank you, and Michael was in heaven. He couldn’t imagine what anyone would see in Kevin. He did not like those muscles and smooth body a bit. Though he did have a cool apartment and a big dick, that part was nice.

He didn’t consult Abe, of course.

Michael’s thirty-something lover was a researcher at the University, and adjunct faculty. He was also the self-appointed Alcalde of the Table, its spiritual mayor, the man who gives justice and says what is proper. Abe’s duty was to nurture the young ones; and he wanted to protect this young, vulnerable, deeply bruised boy. He had had his eye on Barry ever since he first appeared, knew more about him than anyone else imagined.

And Abe was worried.

It had been five weeks of delirious love for Barry; he got his math done but was falling behind in every other course, because he could not think of anything but math and Kevin. His feet did not touch the ground when he walked, when he remembered to walk. And he was outgrowing his shoes anyway; he had finally hit a growth spurt. Love can do that for you.

Kevin had picked him up after his last class one Friday and took him to the apartment for hours and hours of sex, then off to the club, though Barry didn’t like going to the club with Kevin because Kevin usually didn’t pay attention to him there.

But this Friday was different for some reason. He walked with Barry through the whole club, holding him under his arm, while Barry preened at the attention his heart beating fast; and he took him to the crowded dance floor, which embarrassed Barry since he could not dance, though he liked to try once he got started. He did not pay attention to the others once Kevin took off his shirt, and Barry liked it a lot more, he was mesmerized by his lover’s beautiful body, moving to the beat, the play of his muscles under his tawny smooth skin, a sheen of sweat making his ripped manly body so much more erotic.

Then Kevin had told him to take off his shirt. And he got mad when Barry wouldn’t do it; but Barry was so embarrassed by his scrawny boyish body, so unlike a man’s, his man’s; Kevin kept insisting and finally, confused and shame-faced he did.

Barry had not noticed how much attention the two of them were attracting, and what he did notice he passed off to others paying attention to Kevin’s beauty; he did not know his own, did not recognize that his small, smooth, soft, awkwardly angular adolescence his tight, small rounded ass and big brown eyes and the beaming smile he had when he looked at Kevin - these were attractive to many of the patrons. Kevin had known it, he had his plans, but Barry did not know himself so very well, in this way as in others.

It had been so confusing to Barry; he had not understood why Kevin would be paying attention to this other man, inviting him to go out to eat with them when they left Ando’s. He was old, at least thirty; much older than Kevin, and he was not nearly as good looking.

It was a miserably confusing night for Barry, for Kevin invited this man, his name was Ed, to their apartment, well to Kevin’s apartment, and then Barry realized that all three of them were going to have sex together.

And a chill ran up his back, he didn’t want to do this, but Kevin talked to him, assured him, asked him to do it for Kevin, kept smiling at him and looking deeply into his eyes with those hazel-brown, half-closed lazy eyes of his, and Barry put aside his doubts, followed his heart, did what the man he loved wanted him to do.

It wasn’t so bad, afterward, but Ed had seemed to want to have sex with Barry and so had Kevin, and that made him sort of the focus instead of Kevin like he thought it would be; he was sore and tired after but Kevin didn’t let him even sleep over, just took him back to the dorm at five a.m., kissed him and told him he was a good boy.

Well, that was enough for Barry. It wasn’t so bad. If it made Kevin happy it was OK.

And in time, Barry came to be used to it. Ed, Mike, Greg, a procession of men, and he did what Kevin wanted him to do. Little by little he became inured to it, and then Kevin wanted him to go with someone, alone, and he protested, but Kevin just told him it would be a good thing for him to have some experience on his own, he could come back and be better at sex for Kevin. And he cried a little then but Kevin got mad and said if Barry wouldn’t do it for him, then he obviously didn’t love him and he wouldn’t be seeing any more of him, and Barry could not stand that possibility, could not lose his love, he would do anything for Kevin.

For a while Barry couldn’t eat, he was so confused, he felt very unhappy except when he was with Kevin, and it seemed as if all Kevin wanted to do was have sex and have Barry have sex with someone else, and he didn’t quite realize it but he wasn’t really very happy when he was with Kevin, either.

The drugs were probably part of his confusion, it’s really not wise for someone who is already quite confused to use drugs, but Kevin was using them, and Barry wanted to keep up, to be adult, heck he was an adult after all, living on his own and all. And it isn’t as if he hadn’t seen drugs in the dorm and on campus, and even when he was in high school, after all.

Auntie Abe kept bothering Barry, asking him what was going on, he kept making it so very uncomfortable for Barry that Barry had to stop going to The Table. He knew now that Abe wouldn’t make him have sex with him, or make passes at him, he wasn’t wary of him that way anymore, he realized Abe was actually very nice and liked to take care of people. But Abe just didn’t understand how much Kevin loved Barry and he kept trying to tell him that Kevin might not really love him, and Barry couldn’t handle that.

There were entirely too many people who didn’t know, didn’t realize how wonderful Kevin was, who would say bad things about him and Barry didn’t need to hear that, he was loyal, loyal to the man he loved, the man who loved him. He wanted to be true to himself and you had to be true to your friends, bind them with hoops of steel as Polonius had said.

And his life seemed a whirl, his classes - many of which he was now cutting, and he didn’t need to work at them so much, he figured, it wasn’t so important now that he was in love - Kevin, Kevin’s friends, sex, going out and getting drunk and partying and drugging at the clubs, and private parties and more drugs with Kevin’s friends on the weekends. Some of them were surprisingly old, he didn’t know why Kevin, who was twenty-three, would know such old people. And when he came back from spending some time with them, every time, Kevin would praise him, tell him how good he was, how pretty, how much he loved Barry; told Barry that the way other men desired his boy made Kevin feel so proud to have Barry as his lover, to know that others wanted so badly to have what Kevin had. Barry thought there was something wrong with that, since they were actually having him, but he didn’t know what to say so he just shut up.

Of course, Kevin did not mention to Barry the money he was getting from those men. Sometimes for his services, always for Barry’s. Kevin had made a good living as an outcall escort, two hundred an hour, before Barry. Barry was worth at least that in addition and it was a lot less work for Kevin.

It might have been clear to Barry had he known about that. Or maybe not, we see what we will see. Intelligence is no certain bulwark against denial.

And then one day the man he was supposed to be having sex with turned out to be a cop. And suddenly Barry was in handcuffs and so was Kevin.

The cop asked him for his real name and ID, wouldn’t take the fake one Barry had, and then asked how old he really was. Eventually it all came out and the cop was looking at him skeptically until he got hold of the dean at the University and verified it all.

They decided to call his brother Jack to pick him up, and left a message for his mother, far away in that cold place Barry never wanted to see again; that cold, sharp, crazy woman.

And Barry felt his world coming apart, coming to an end, spinning wildly out of control.

Auntie Abe was a man of substance and also a man with a lot of contacts. It did not take long for word to get back to him.

Michael did not really understand that Abe, though he found Barry very attractive, was committed to Michael, and had no intention of switching. Though Michael often tried his patience unbelievably, he was as determined to stick with Michael as Michael was to keep Abe. His interests in Barry were professional, strictly based on his moral obligations to a young gay boy at The Table. His Table.

Michael was furious. Oh, he didn’t care about Barry, that kid was too stupid to believe to fall for that crap from Kevin.

He was mad because now all of a sudden all Abe wanted to do was help Barry, and that was exactly what Michael had tried to prevent. Now he had to figure out how to get Abe out of that mess and away from Barry all over again.

So he had done his best to lose the message about Barry getting arrested, but someone else told Abe about it directly, someone from the dean’s office who knew Abe had made a private call.

Michael kept trying to distract Abe but then Abe got mad and they had a fight and Michael started to cry.

That worked better, Abe spent the rest of that evening paying attention to Michael.

The police would not release him until Jack came to get him in person, because he was a juvenile. And of course they told him that Barry had to come to court and Jack had to come with him or his mother had to. And they told him the charges. Possession of altered documents. Underaged entry to a licensed premise. Misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance.

The worst thing was the look in his brother’s eye when he saw him. Barry never wanted to see that look, ever again.

He spent the weekend at Jack’s place, but they didn’t talk to each other, neither of them could even look at the other, and after mother called Barry was pretty frantic.

She was going to pull him out of school on Monday, she said, he was coming home where she could set him straight. He was going to a good Catholic High School until he was eighteen.

And Barry knew that she would have the strap ready for his arrival. And he knew that no matter how bad prison was, it could not be as bad as leaving University and returning to his cold, dead life with his cold, crazy mother.

He would die before he would do that.

There are a lot of deans at a big University.

There is a dean of students, a dean of each college, a dean of the faculty. There is a dean of public affairs, a dean of legislative affairs, a dean who handles the student union activities, a dean who handles fund raising, a dean who handles the Board of Governors. There are assistant deans, associate deans, adjunct deans, academic deans, functional deans. There are even deans for a day during registration when you need some stupid rule waived. Probably there are more deans than that.

But the thing about deans is, they are powerful, and usually one dean doesn’t mess with another dean once that dean makes a decision in his area.

Barry had a dean, and it was a stroke of luck that this dean, the dean of the college of liberal arts, had been in the Math department as a professor once. And yet he was a more earthly person than many mathematicians are; for one thing he had had teenagers once, and knew what it could be like to be a freshman and away from home without restraints.

The dean told him on Monday that they had to respect his mother’s wishes, because he was a minor. But the dean didn’t want to see Barry go, this dean had worked hard to make it possible for Barry able to come there, and felt personally that the school had failed to understand and take into account the needs of such a young person; was to blame for the problems in some sense.

That’s just what the University was afraid of, that they would be blamed, sued, and nailed in the press if it ever came out that they had a sixteen year old call boy in the math department.

The university really would have preferred to ship him off out of state as quickly as possible.

The dean stood his ground. The dean notified the police that he would take responsibility for Barry at least until his court appearance. He could stay on campus and attend classes, there was no reason for him to stop immediately and leave since he had to stay in the state anyway and his guardian, Jack, had approved. The dean talked to Barry’s mother and pointed out that Barry could not return to her until the court made a ruling, so Barry might as well stay in school.

The dean told Barry he was to report to his office every morning at nine a.m., and to call him every Saturday and Sunday morning. The dean had a counselor from the Student Mental Health service set up appointments with Barry twice a week.

Kevin was calling. And Barry began to ponder another part of Hamlet. “To be or not to be.”

After three black days in bed, Barry finally got up and got dressed, went to a class, then found his feet taking him to the Table.

And as happenstance went, it was a good choice, for Abe was there at that day and that moment, and Barry began crying and poured out his story.

Abe’s family had taught him how to work a system, how to work the back side of a system, to deal with the real decision makers where you could get what you needed instead of using the formal processes that didn’t mean anything. This was Abe’s forte, really, helping young gay boys in trouble, helping kids make a system work for them instead of against them.

Well, formal processes often didn’t mean anything, but you had to play the front end too.

Abe, of all people, knew exactly what to do.

© 2002 Philip Marks, aka Fisher Boy boyfisher69@yahoo.com