Younger Men

On my way back from Sir's, I stopped at the Starbucks in Doylestown to visit with Bucky. He was working, but managed to get a ten minute break. Bucky and I headed out to the porch and talked. On Bucky's side, it was one of those sophmore-year-late-at-night conversations, youth and inexperience sounding forth on issues of great import that youth and inexperience doesn't have a lot of experience with. The floating of trial baloons. I offered some of my slightly more time tested ideas, but mostly I just let Bucky go, and I listened to what he was saying. Especially what he was saying between the lines.

Bucky apparently is failing out of college, but he's accepting that. Apparently, he's accepting a lot of things about himself that he's been wrestling with. Like smoking. He's accepting the fact that he smokes. He likes smoking, and he wants to smoke, so he's gonna stop fighting that and smoke.

Uh huh.

Anything else that Bucky might be fighting but has decided to accept about himself? Was I mistaken, or was Bucky feeling his dick under his apron?

But in the wake of the conversation-filled afternoon with Sir, I was in a pensive frame of mine.

What is it about younger men? I'd never been attracted to one before. Au contraire, I tended to flee from them. But this ongoing flirtation with Bucky has given me a new perspective.

For one thing, they're attractive. We're all hardwired to look our best when we're about nineteen years old. If you're not goodlooking at nineteen, chances are you may not get there. Well, that may once have been true, but I think in that area in particular, biology is no longer destiny. But they look good.

But there's something going on beyond the physical. After being beaten and battered by life, and after meeting with disappointment more times than we could count, and after seeing people being ground down to stubs by hardship, and after getting intimately acquainted with human failure wearing the face of those nearest and dearest to me, how sweet is the allure of pure and unblemished potential?

That's what Bucky is all about certainly. Potential. Who knows where he's gonna end up? He's just about a blank canvas. When and if he gets his act together, what's it gonna look like? In Bucky I see what was once for me the green promise of the future, that sense of the world being your oyster. There are a lot of dreams I have at this point that aren't gonna come true. But Bucky's still might.

I guess this must be familiar to the parents of young children. Who can tell what the future holds for them. But for us easing into middle age, our supply of Get Out of Jail Free cards is dwindling and we don't even own Boardwalk or Park Place.

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