Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

‘You alright, man?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he rasped, in a way that made it painfully clear he wasn’t. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Ye sure?’

‘Yeah. I’m grand. Just a bit … down.’

He was making a massive understatement and he knew I knew it, and he wanted me to know it.

‘Okay. Well, em, it was a great day.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m glad you were, ye know, here.’

‘Was I?’ he said, then laughed scornfully at his own pretentiousness. At least he was laughing.

Rez sighed and turned away, back to his bleak thoughts, the labyrinth he was lost in.

Jen was sitting beside me on the smaller couch, and she put her toe into my side and wiggled it. I turned to her.

‘Will we go to bed?’ she asked with a smile.

‘Okay.’

We walked slowly up the stairs holding hands, then into her room, which I had been in a few times before but never as what we were now: more than friends. Lamplight glowed low and soothing; there was varnished wood and soft curves to everything. It was uncluttered but cosy; the kind of room you wanted to be in.

We sat on the bed and kissed slowly. Her hands came up, pulling me towards her. She inhaled sharply, like she was trying to breathe me in. We both smelled of alcohol and drugs. She guided me on to the bed and I held her head in my hand, resting on the pillow. She began to undress me. My heart was thumping, my muscles tensing, partly in anxiety and partly in excitement. I slid my hands up her thin blue cotton top, cupping her breasts in my palms. They felt warm. I drew my right hand down and rested it on her flat stomach. I kissed the pale skin of her neck.

She unbuttoned my jeans, then guided me free with her hand, between the buttons of my boxer shorts. She held it, squeezing slightly, looking in my eyes. We kissed again and I put my lips on her nipples, and rubbed between her legs with my hand. She had started to moan softly, making sounds that seemed to form gasping, melodious little sentences I couldn’t understand. She reached over to the wooden bedside drawer and took out a pack of condoms, then helped me put one on.

We started kissing again. She was moaning more, her eyes closed, almost grimacing as if she was in pain.

She put her mouth to my ear and whispered, ‘Come into me.’

I pressed myself towards her, trying to slide into her without using my hand.

Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and looked into mine. I reached and then looked down. My dick had gone soft. The condom hung loosely on it, curving in the middle. In fast-rising panic I tried to shake and coax it back to action.

She did a little laugh but I was aghast, terrified. ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I pleaded.

‘Relax …’ she began.

‘But what’s going on? Why isn’t it hard?’

I was freaking out, close to despair. She tried to calm me down but I felt humiliated. Visions of lifelong impotence bombarded me, smothering me in horror.

‘Just relax,’ she said. ‘Here, lie back.’ She took it in her mouth and kissed it, licked the tip, flicked her tongue over it. I watched in extreme anxiety.

‘It’s no good,’ I moaned. ‘Why is it happening?’

Eventually, through Jen’s licking and coaxing I achieved what felt like a very precarious half-erection. ‘Now, put it in me,’ she whispered. I obeyed: as soon it was inside her I could feel myself coming. I tried to stop it but it was too late. I closed my eyes, devastated. Something in me seemed to expire, with a final, humiliated groan.

I lay on top of her and buried my face in her shoulder. She was trying to comfort me, saying sshhh and stroking my hair, while I stared in shock and agony at the wall. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine, it happens to lots of men. It’s all the drugs you’ve taken. That’s what happens, it’s normal.’

But I didn’t believe her: it wasn’t the drugs, it was something badly wrong with me, an affliction I had now for life. I was ruined; there was nothing left for me but to kill myself, or live like a hermit on some mountain, reading books and shunning society. I was ruined.

I pushed her away from me and lay on the bed, shivering with the comedown, helplessly viewing an inner montage of disgrace, humiliation and shame. She put her hand on me but I shoved it away. After that she didn’t try any more. She turned away on to her side of the bed and we lay there in silence, no longer communicating, no longer together. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

He awoke to find a black T-train driver shaking him roughly by the shoulder. ‘Okay son, gotta get off now, this the last stop.’ Kearney gazed up at the man, bewildered — and was blitzkrieged all at once by the fork-stabs in his brain, his heaving, sloshing gut, his parched mouth. As he stumbled off the train, squinting at a sign to try and work out where the fuck he was, it all came back to him — the party, the club, the fighting, the after-party, the wanking into a cake for a laugh, and finally everyone pouring on to the morning train to get home from the other side of the city. Then he must have passed out and the cunts had just left him there. Thinking of it, he started to giggle, despite the stabbing in his head and his ravaged condition.

He boarded a T-train going in the opposite direction, hoping it would get him back home. Whenever the train hit open air, rain slammed against the window, blurring up a near-black sky; Boston had been enduring a three-day torrent of rainfall, as if the blazing summer had imploded under its own extreme pressure. It showed no signs of letting up. Kearney tried to distract himself from his headache by listening to the Spanish conversation of the Latino man and woman who shared his carriage. They spoke quickly but he made out the words for food — hermano — and for party — mañana . Not bad, he thought, considering he had hated Spanish in school and surely failed it in the Leaving Cert.

An hour later, racked and raped by his hangover, Kearney finally found his way through the city’s polluted deluge to the apartment. (One of the lads had previously told him, ‘If you ever get lost, just follow the sirens and the screams of dying crack babies.’) The apartment was empty: despite the interminable downpour all the lads were up on the rooftop terrace, shirts off, roaring and stomping in pools of water, drinking cans of Budweiser. A Pogues album was playing on a tiny CD player kept under shelter, Shane McGowan’s feral howl an incitement to lunatic drinking. It was eleven o’clock.

A big cheer met Kearney when he stepped on to the rooftop. The lads grinned and congratulated him: ‘So you made it back. Good man, Joe, you’ve passed the test. Give the man a can of wife-beater!’

‘We were about to start takin bets on whether ye were raped and then murdered, or murdered and then raped. But it seems they didn’t bother to kill ye after the rapin. Fair play to ye though, ye made it.’

‘You’re a fuckin mad thing, Joe. Takin after your brother so ye are.’

Kearney grinned. His T-shirt was soaked and water streamed down his cheeks. He didn’t mind that they’d abandoned him on the train after he’d passed out — all that was part of it. He loved having the chance to hang around with these older lads.

Now Dwayne approached and gave Kearney a brotherly punch in the shoulder. ‘Good man Joe. That was a rite of passage. Gettin abandoned on the train in a foreign city when you’re too hammered to even stand up. Fair play though, ye made it back in one piece. You’re becomin a man.’ He slapped Kearney’s back. ‘So how’s the head?’

‘Not too bad now. I bought some Aspirin in a 7-Eleven on the way back.’

‘Good man. Get a few drinks into ye and ye’ll be grand. We’ve all had a bit of speed as well, let me know when ye want some. Last night was good craic but that’s only the start of it. This whole weekend is gonna be fuckin mental. And listen, Stu is comin tomorrow. I’m dyin for ye to meet him. He’s a sound cunt. He keeps tellin me about this special surprise he has. Fuck knows what it is. But c’mere, I have somethin for you as well, a little present for me kid brother. C’mon and I’ll show ye.’