JAMES HOGGARD
227
instance, he said that I spoke of
ministering
to him. I actually
said, "Let's screw." I love him. The room was our monastery.
For then nothing else counted.
To the flesh!
Our bedroom, as he indicated, has a beamed ceiling. Red–
wood beams stained richer than natural redwood. The color of
deep passion frozen on them. Also in the room, as he noticed, is
our bed. Kingsized. The sheets are Virgin Mary blue; and our
bedspread, accordioned at the foot , matches the beams in color.
To the left of the bed (left to whoever's on bottom) under the
high windows are two black-lacquered chests-of-drawers with
hunks of quartz at either end and in the middle, straddling the
pudendal crack between the chests, is my jewelry box which
Jerome also uses to store his cufflinks, studs and collar stays,
along with two steel pennies and an old quarter-sized parking
lot token. I shan't describe my jewelry, because since that night
I've rarely used it. On the other side of the room is a walk-in
closet which Jerome uses and a stand-outside-and-reach-in closet
which I use. Shoes clutter the floors of both closets. On the walls
is an even spread of paint, the color of rich cream. Somehow it
seems nourishing, more organic than the sheetrock it is. Radiat–
ing through the bathroom door are sunyellow walls, a copper–
colored bathtub matched by a copper-colored lavatory whose
sides plane out severely to the walls. The towels I use are any
number of colors. The toilet seat, which you can't see from the
bedroom, is black. Jerome calls it Satan's Lid. I've termed it
Luther's Grail. We seem unable to accept it as merely a necessary
fixture. We need to glorify it, no matter how rudely.
On the night he was describing, Jerome was wearing a pair
·of limegreen shortsleeve pajamas with boxer-type bottoms. The
middle button's missing from the shirt. Maybe that's the wound
he referred to, but I doubt it. He wasn't joking about the wound.
If
he was, however, he shouldn't have. There's a touch of crime
in my heart.
Closer to the flesh now. Jerome's chest is fairly smooth . He's
not very hairy except in the cranial and pubic regions, the two
areas which mean the most to me. His hair, which I trim, is light
brown except when he's by the window in the sunlight, and then
