GI Joe Probably Doesn’t Talk About It, Either

Or, This All Happened When I Was Younger, Slimmer, and Probably Cuter

This happened to me the summer after my sophomore year of college. I wrote about it in third person (this time) because that’s how it’s always felt. If nothing else, the experience has affected my perspective on things.

—

“Do you want a blow job?” the scruffy man said.

Rob craned his neck to see if the man might be talking to someone behind him. He wasn’t. “I’m sorry?” He was hoping he had misunderstood. Being offered oral sex in the toy department of Maine’s capital city K-Mart was a new experience for him.

The man repeated his offer more slowly. “Do you want a blow job?”

Rob sometimes collected action figures, and the K-Mart aisles were usually good places to find cheap GI Joes, the real American hero. The man’s worn jacket might have been Army-issue once, but his kung-fu-dick-sucking grip wasn’t an action feature Rob was looking for.

“I’m all set,” Rob said.

The man nodded. Rob spun on his heel and fled from the GI Joe aisle. Concern that the man might approach a child with a similar offer brought him up short in house wares, and he skulked back to the toy department to intervene if necessary.

It Gets Lonely In Those Trenches, Brother.

The man was gone.

Rob left the store empty handed. It made him sad that the man was so lonely he had to offer oral sex to random people in K-Mart and wondered how often the ploy worked. Had the ragged man ensnared a handful of men, a dozen, with his siren call of illicit, no-strings orgasms? Was he even now deep throating someone’s husband in the tool department or maybe in the alley behind the mall?

Rob drove back to the place that he had earnestly called home before he started college two years before. His mother greeted him as he entered the kitchen. “How was work?” she said.

He shrugged. “Do you need a hand?” He helped her wash the dishes then went up to his room to read. Later, when his parents were in bed he’d come back downstairs and watch TV or log on to America Online. It was easier to pretend he was alone and independent when the house was quiet.

A couple of weeks later he took a walk on his lunch break. He had an hour to kill so he crossed the bridge to Cony Circle and took a left on Eastern Avenue. He walked briskly so he could get as far as the Pine Tree Arboretum or the Augusta Mental Health Institute before he had to turn around. His stride lengthened as he entered the straightaway in front of the Big Apple. As he passed by it, the payphone set up near the convenience store’s air machine rang.

Nothing Good Comes From Picking Up.

Rob stopped walking. The phone rang again. He stepped off the sidewalk and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” he said.

“Do you want me to suck your dick?” said the man on the other end of the line.

Rob tried not to look around. The caller could be inside the store, leaning over the ice-cream freezer to see what reaction he’d caused. Or he might be in one of the apartments on the other side of the street, penis in one hand and phone in the other.

“No.” Rob hung up the phone carefully. He jammed his hands in his pockets and abandoned the rest of his walk. He got back to work twenty minutes early and spent the extra time in the break room reading old magazines and listening to coworkers complain about the manager.

The next Friday Rob bought a Greyhound ticket to New Hampshire to visit a woman he hoped would promote him from friend to boyfriend. Rob boarded the bus with a rucksack and a paperback and took a window seat near the middle of the bus. He started chapter one of the book as the bus filled.

One of the last passengers was a broad-shouldered man in a corduroy vest. All the singly seated passengers eyed the man as he weaved his way into the depths of the bus. The man stopped next to Rob. “This taken?” he said.

“Nope.” Rob picked his rucksack off the empty seat and put it on the floor in front of him. The man squeezed into the seat. He put the briefcase between his feet and offered his hand. “Dave. I do outside sales. Tractor parts.”

Rob shook Dave’s hand. “Rob. Sophomore at Wheaton College. The Massachusetts one.”

The man leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms. “Nice to meet you.”

Rob returned to his book and had started chapter two by the time the bus lurched out of the station. Dave’s eyes were closed, the hairs of his reddish brown mustache moving in time with his breath. Rob turned the page.

The bus rocked, and the man in the vest shifted closer to Rob. Rob felt something on his leg, sliding toward his groin. It was Dave’s hand. Holding his book in both hands, Rob pushed his forearms against the top of his thighs, trapping the questing hand in place. Dave pushed harder. Rob pressed down more firmly. Dave’s eyes stayed shut. Rob’s eyes stayed on the pages of his book.

The silent struggle continued for miles.

Frankly, Rob wasn’t sure what to do. He had two gay uncles, one by blood and the other because he’d been living with the blood uncle for twenty years. Rob feared that if he yelled at the man in the vest, denounced him and accused him of trying to fondle him, it would move gay-straight relations back years. There might be a riot. On the other hand, the vested man’s hand was uncomfortably close to Rob’s penis.

Finally, just above Freeport, Dave withdrew his hand. Rob stayed wary, ready to slam down his penis barrier at a moment’s notice.

Dave reached into the inside pocket of his vest and drew out a notepad. He put it on his knee and wrote Rob a note.

If you relax, the note said, you might enjoy it.

Rob motioned for the pen and wrote back. I might if I were gay, but I’m not.

Dave wrote. You don’t have to be gay.

I would have to be. Rob handed back the pen.

The man in the vest put the notebook back in his pocket. “At least you’re polite about it,” he said. He moved to a new seat when the bus stopped in Portland.

Rob rode the bus unmolested. He tried to read, but couldn’t keep his head in the words. He wondered if he’d handled the man in the vest correctly. He hadn’t wanted to hurt the guy’s feelings; he just hadn’t wanted to be groped. Had he overreacted? Had he given off some signal that he wanted a hand job from a burly stranger?

Somewhere ahead lay the woman he hoped would become his girlfriend. He wasn’t sure he should tell her about the man in the vest. He doubted it would help his chances.

She picked him up at the bus station in her 1988 Jetta. “How was your trip?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Are you having a good summer?”

I’ve had three random people try to get into my pants, he wanted to say, your turn. I just had a really strange encounter on the bus, he could have offered, can we talk about it? The last few weeks have been a little fucked up, he might have admitted.

Rob sighed. “It will be good to get back to school.”

Rob Greene (R.W.W. Greene) is the author of several science-fiction novels published by Angry Robot Books. His newsletter “twenty-first-century blues” examines culture, technology, art, and the systems that shape our lives. In writing this article, Greene used Claude (Anthropic) as a tool for feedback.