Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 93
money was. They took Carte Blanche at the restaurant and so I
wasn’t a lonely man in a Chinese restaurant anymore, I was an old
queer with a young queer in a Chinese restaurant. I’ve been
looking down my nose at couples like this all my life, but I’ve felt
worse. We had this very big, very good dinner and so then I paid
the check with my Carte Blanche and he said didn’t I have any
cash and I said no, I’d given it all to him, hadn’t I, and he laughed
and we went back to my room although I was very careful not to
limp and wondered what I would do with the sixty dollars because
I wasn’t going to pay him that much. So then I hid my shoe in a
dark corner and we got into bed and he loved me up again and
then we talked and I asked him who he was and he told me.
“He said his name was Giuseppe or Joe but he changed it to
Michael. His father was Italian. His mother was white. His father
had a dairy farm in Maine. He went to school but he worked for
his father in his time off and he was about nine when the chief at
the dairy farm started to blow him. He liked it and it got to be a
daily thing until the dairy chief asked him if he would take it up
the ass. He was eleven or twelve then. It took four or five tries
before he got it all the way in but when it worked it felt wonderful
and they did this all the time. But it was a very hard life going to
school and working on the farm and never seeing anybody but the
dairy chief so then he began to hustle, first in the nearest town and
then the nearest city and then all the way across the country and
around the world. He said that that’s what he was, a hustler, and
that I shouldn’t feel sorry for him or wonder what would become
of him.
“All the time he was talking I listened very carefully to him,
expecting him to sound like a fairy, but he never did, not that I
could hear. I have this very strong prejudice against fairies. I’ve
always thought they were silly and feeble-minded, but he talked
like anybody else. I was really very interested in what he had to say
because he seemed to me very gentle and affectionate and even
very pure. Lying in bed with me that night he seemed to me about