Comfort and Joy Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ears and shaking it gently back and forth. "Of me too,"he added, giggling, scratching the nest of his hair. "We got our marchingorders last night, whenI got in."
"Your roommate kicked youout?"
    "Oh, yeah," McKenzie said, laugh still sparkling. "Put my ass right on the street, as of today. I don't blame himeither. I'msuch a son-of-a-bitch."
    As the conversation progressed, Ford found himselfmore and more intrigued. He invited McKenzie inside, and they sat at the kitchen table. The fellow was raucously good-looking, with a rakish, slant-grinned face that reminded Ford of the fair-haired villains incowboymovies.
    He claimed to be the scion of an old southern house, the great-great-grandson of one of North Carolina's Confederate generals, and a troublemaker since the day he was born. When he laid claimto this heritage, his blue eyes glazed, and he spoke of his family with brittle callousness. Because of his endless misbehaviors his father refused any contact with him, and he existed on student loans and the occasional dividend from rarefied family stocks. He also attended the university, asserting himself to be a philosophy major and naming the requisite himself to be a philosophy major and naming the requisite professors, whom he claimed to have bested in one classroom debate after another. Ford hardly knew whether to believe him or not; McKenzie spoke so glibly, it was easy to believe he could best even the experts in their chosen fields. The conversation amused them both to the point that Ford cut his morning class and drove McKenzie to the local package store, where they obtained gin and bloody Mary mix—gin being vastly preferable to vodka, even in a bloody Mary, according to McKenzie, because ofthe effects ofjuniper on the human dream state. "When I drink gin, I wake up with an erection the size of a telephone pole,"McKenzie claimed. "IfI could figure out how to write down my dreams before I forget them, I could have a pornographic bestseller."
    That they ended up in bed together before noon surprised neither of them. But what astonished Ford was his own reaction to the man. In the face of McKenzie's liveliness, Ford abandoned his own preferred game of self-absorption. McKenzie led him step by step, ravenous and lovely, his touch sparking heat in every line of Ford— in the living room of the Wyrick Street house, under the moving shadows of tree leaves on the carpet that had belonged to Ford's Grandmother Strachn. McKenzie's lithe shape drew Ford's hands irrevocably along its every plane, Ford fumbling with the buttons of McKenzie's shirt, almost tearing the T-shirt over McKenzie's head in his eagerness to get at the firm torso, the hairy chest, the pink, soft nipples. When the two men lay naked on the historic carpet and Ford brushed his lips down the length of McKenzie's cock, the fact of this initiation escaped Ford. He had lost himself somewhere withinMcKenzie.
    Late inthe evening, after theymoved to the bed and continued their long ritual of acquaintance, McKenzie moved his few belongings into Ford's house. The next-door graduate student, Kenneth, watched the whole moving process coldly from his porch, lit by a single bare bulb. Finally Kenneth glared at Ford and said, "You'll live to regret this, let me assure you," before returning inside and slamming the door. Hammond, confused, dashed back and forth between the houses, his club-like tail waggingwildly. At last, withthe move complete, Ford welcomed waggingwildly. At last, withthe move complete, Ford welcomed the ungainlymutt into his kitchen.
    The honeymoon with McKenzie lasted for weeks. To Ford, who had never before felt compelled toward anyone, the interval wore all the trappings of eternity. That he could lose himself completely in the presence of McKenzie came as a continual surprise; that he could desire McKenzie to the exclusion of nearly everything else shocked him even more deeply. He had never before had to wonder about his future, but with McKenzie