Josh

Josh

“Mr. Williams?” The doctor’s face was neutral, a mask over his impersonal compassion. I already knew what he had to say.

Afterwards, I went and sat in the car and rested my head on the steering wheel, my eyes closed. At a time like that, you’re supposed to think about your family, your wife and kids, your own life and its ending.

But I didn’t. I thought of Josh.

He used to call me Toss. It was his joke, because my name is Thomas. Thos., in all the old abbreviations. When he was pissed at me he called me Thoss. “Thoss, don’t be, like, so boring.” And his blue eyes would smolder.

We met when we were surfing, at a small beach several kilometers from the nearest country town, where the only other people were surfers or their hangers-on. We’d been surfing all morning, from before dawn, when the sea was still glassy, and had ignored each other, the way one does. We finished at almost the same time. He sat down next to me.

“Want some weed?”

We shared a joint. That was the beginning.

It was a long weekend, and by the end of it we were, well, not quite friends, but certainly mates. Those were good times, those years, before responsibility and doing the right thing and worries about our future and our health. We lived for each day. We didn’t have career worries, because we had no careers. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier and more relaxed than I was then. And Josh was a key reason for that.

He was a classic surfer – hair bleached to dry straw by the sun and salt, like Struwwelpeter, pointing every which way, its roots still dark with his natural color. His skin was tanned a deep caramel. I suppose he has moles and skin tags and keratoses, now. But he was beautiful then. Even I knew that, and I was straight. His shoulders were surfer-broad, his waist and hips as narrow as an energetic boy’s.

He had a wayward kindness. Things you’d expect him to care about, that other people cared about, for example if you were depressed or sick, he didn’t even notice. “Don’t, like, wallow, dude. People in Biafra” (or Bangladesh, I can’t remember what the current fashionable disaster zone was then) “have a fuckin’ shit time.” But he was a vegetarian, and even the occasional stray dogs he took in were fed on vegetables and cheese and wheat germ, never meat. They used to sneak out and get it from rubbish bins and gutters, and when they did he would look at them sadly and solemnly. “That’s, like, dead animal flesh, dude. Don’t add to the world’s suffering.” On the other hand, once I was sick in bed with the flu, and shivering and shaking with fever, and he wouldn’t even make me a cup of tea. “Like, it’s good for you to get up.” But in the end he relented. He always did, with me.

His hands were kind. Big hands, callused, warm, with strong spatulate fingers and bitten down fingernails. Hands which could wring pleasure from my body, pleasure I hadn’t known was possible.

We met again in the city, a week or two after the surfing trip. I was walking down one of those streets that climbs the side of the mountain, I forget the name now, when I heard a yell. “Hey, Toss, dude! Cool!”

It was Josh. He was in his incredible rust-bucket Morris 1100, which, while it never seemed safe or reliable, just kept going, like some wheezy and asthmatic old dog. The car smelled of engine oil and rotting plastics and the peculiar hand cleaner he always used after he’d fixed the engine – or the gear box – or the diff – yet again. It smelled of him, of Brut aftershave, of the sweet-scented toasted American cigarettes he used to smoke.

“Josh!” I was glad to see him.

“Dude! It’s, like, ace to see you again.”

I shared the ground floor of a Victorian slum house with a gorgeous Yugoslav girl, Yelena, who rebuffed all my advances; and a shifty medical supplies salesman, with bulging blue eyes, who left abruptly one day, one jump ahead of the police. The landlord, Mr. Lipshitz, was a very ancient Lithuanian immigrant, who would stare at us rheumy-eyed and querulous when we complained about the geyser, or the sink which didn’t drain, or the cracked toilet seat. We didn’t mention the whores who lived upstairs and brought back sailors late at night, men who tried to steal our stash or have sex with us. That would have gotten them into trouble, and they were kind and funny. And Josh and I didn’t faze them – the haphazard tolerance of fringe-dwellers.

Josh moved in, taking the salesman’s old room.

[This story has been temporarily withdrawn for publication in Forbidden Fruit. You can read the rest of it here.]