Blazing Addles

Alan sat at the window of Denny's darkened bedroom with his back turned to the room. Clothed only in boxers and his shirts, he spoke quietly into the phone of regrets for this week, but hopeful plans for the next.

The bathroom door clicked and fluorescent light flooded across the space. "What are you doing?" Denny demanded. He stood naked and dripping on the carpet.

Alan craned his neck around. He held a cordless handset up in the air.

Denny held up a matching one.

Oh dear. "Simon, I'll have to call you back." Alan clicked the connection closed.

"In my own house? With another man?" Denny dripped onto the bedroom carpet and slammed the handset on to the dresser.

Alan stood and turned to face him. "As thunderstruck as I continue to be by the magnitude of your homophobia, I've always felt...special...in that you would create such loopholes in your logic just for me. Are those salad days coming to a close?"

"Of course not." Denny went back for a towel. He wrapped one around his waist, the embroidered name falling front and center. With the other towel, he dried his upper half. "When you love someone, you don't have to like them. Or what they do."

"Then I fail to see the problem." Alan went to the bathroom for dressing supplies and opened a new pack.

"You're supposed to be with me!" Denny held the dresser and leaned over.

"I am with you." Alan spread his ass cheeks apart.

"You're cheating on me with him." Denny made a jerky gesture towards the phone.

"You had no objection to my dive into the typing pool this afternoon. Hold still." Alan smeared the antibiotic on.

"That's different. She's a girl." Denny paused and looked over his shoulder. "She was a girl, wasn't she?"

"A woman, and yes. But I see no difference between her and him—aside from somewhat less confusion about whose underwear is whose when reclaiming it from the pile on the floor. You're done." Alan pressed the dressing on and slapped Denny's other cheek in dismissal.

Denny straightened up. "You bet your balls it's different. Girls have—" Denny made cups with his palms and jiggled them in front of his waist.

"So does Simon." Alan tossed the wrapper out.

Denny dropped his hands.

Alan crossed back to stand in front of him. "Denny, I have and will continue to make many concessions in my life in favor of more time spent enjoying our friendship; I don't begrudge any of that. I value you beyond anything I may have traded for such a privilege. However, there are certain pleasures that I have no wish to relinquish. And as an Olympic level hedonist yourself, I don't believe that you would ask or wish me to."

"He's a man; I'm a man! There's nothing you can be getting from him that you can't get from me." Denny shed his used towels and tossed them onto the bathroom floor.

Alan regarded him queerly. "No, I don't believe there is."

"Then why do you need him? Why can't Denny Crane be what you need?"

"Which of us are you asking?" Alan held his eyes.

Denny's eyes narrowed. "You think that—sublingually—I want to have sex with you?"

"No." Alan went to the dresser and removed a pajama set from the bottom drawer. He passed it into Denny's hand. "I know for a fact that you do not. Given the extent of your capacity for delayed gratification, were that the case we should have both been prostrate on the floor in rug-burned bliss with a spent jar of Tucks pads between us before the first commercial break of the first episode.

"But I do think that Denny Crane is—beyond all else—a consummate expert at getting whatever he wants. If you want more from me, why aren't you taking it?"

"I don't want that with you."

"Denny, even you must realize that you must make a decision here. You cannot have it both ways."

"Sure I can." Denny swirled a fingertip about his ear. "Mad cow. I can say one thing one day, and forget it the next. And it's not fair of you to use our relationship to push me into something I don't want. That's what God invented secretaries for." One hand on the dresser to steady himself, Denny stepped gingerly into his pajama bottom.

"Denny, I give you my word of honor—and you are one of the very few souls who can believe the import that my own particular brand of honor does hold for me— that I would never intentionally do that. Or want to. But I have no wish to cause you pain or distress, yet I cannot change who I am or what satisfies me.

"There are as many kinds of sex as there are people, breed of dogs and sheep, phallic vegetables, 900 numbers, posters of celebrities and small furry rodents all put together. You have already been a larger part of my sex life than most persons with whom I have had penetrative intercourse."

"As it should be," Denny muttered.

"One thing I have learned from my sex therapist is that labels and conventions don't matter. Desires and pleasures and being true to oneself is what does. We can't process, bottle and label our feelings and then dole them out a drop from here, a swig from there in some FDA approved pyramid plan of what we should and shouldn't do to be healthy. We have to trust ourselves to seek out what we need in raw form. There are no safety or warning labels. We have to trust who we are to believe that what completes us, what makes us feel good is okay.

"I am merely concerned that amidst your homophobia and preconceptions, you are missing out on that which you have just now told me you want very much.

"If there is something you want—something I'm able to give and enjoy giving—I merely point out that it is available to you."

Denny pulled back the bed sheets. He kept his gaze down and away. "This is my side. And with the staples in, I can only sleep on my left side, so if I'm turned away from you, it doesn't mean I want to be." He lay down and faced the edge.

"Got it," said Alan. He flicked off the bathroom light. For a moment he contemplated his dress shirt, then finally climbed in the other side as he was.

Alan pressed his chest against Denny's back. It was less of a physical feeling, and more to open some channel between them, to validate a connection previously seen only in his mind's eyes. He reached around with his arms and was grateful for the odd position. It was so much easier to give when he didn't have to face the donee. Hands slipped under the pajama top and began to move against Denny's chest, then it was physical for him as well. He rubbed stiff nipples against the curve of Denny's back and wondered if, given enough time, he could come from this stimulation alone.

But Denny lay disturbingly still. A man did have a right to change his mind, didn't he? Even if he didn't remember what he had decided in the first place.

Alan willed himself stop and pull back. It wasn't difficult; he'd had plenty of practice over the years.

"Denny--?"

"Don't make me think about it," Denny mumbled. "Thinking's not my strongest suit these days." He picked up Alan's palms and placed one over each of his breasts.

As the blood rushed away from his brain, Alan again began to move.

Denny's respirations quickened, and Alan dropped one hand lower, to belly and flanks and whatever else was exposed above the elastic band. He moved rapidly caressing all the skin he could reach, as if in the sweep he could somehow collect something of Denny and save it for all time.

Denny's erection bumped Alan's wrist, and Denny either shivered or recoiled. From behind, Alan couldn't be sure which. Alan paused and held on just breathing. He'd broken moments far less fragile than this.

"Denny Crane." The words came out crisp and clear.

"What's that for?" The absurdity added to the emotional hash tipped some critical mass, and Alan would have laughed if he weren't afraid that would be the one thing too much for his friend to take.

"You're incredulous," said Denny. "I know. I've see it every day. You can't believe you're actually here with Denny Crane. I'm helping you get through this."

"You're helping...me?"

"I am."

"You are," Alan murmured, and he allowed it to be true.

With a deliberate movement, Denny placed Alan's palm atop his bare erection, and Alan's breath was drawn completely away.

The contact seemed more spiritual than sexual—albeit in a libidinously spiritual type of way. The pressure in his own groin seemed to fuel more a need to touch than to be touched, the perfect situation for prolonging this communion.

But there is something catalytic about the touch of unmistakably aroused bedmate, and Alan became a man obsessed. He dropped his head to Denny's neck and began to suckle, freeing some barely concealed oral reflex. Wrist kept pace with lips, and when Denny went still within his hand, it took Alan several seconds to realize why. He raised his hand to his nose and inhaled deeply, wiping the semen off on his face and neck. Then, just before his hand dried, although he knew he shouldn't, he allowed himself one tiny lick.

Not for the first time, he angered at what HIV had stolen not only from the dead and infected, but from everyone who had relied upon the carnal to connect with the world and those whom they loved. He could empathize with those who risked death rather than surrender the one contact that allowed them to feel alive.

"Alan." Denny's voice broke his reverie.

"Yes, Denny." Alan locked his arms around Denny's chest and held on.

"Aren't you going to—?"

"No."

There was a pause. "You don't know what I was going to say."

"It doesn't matter. There's nothing I want that is not contained in this moment, so whatever it is, the answer is 'no, I'm not.'"

"Alan."

"Yes, Denny."

"I...read people; I can't read you from behind me." Denny started to roll within Alan's embrace, somehow bumping hip against Alan's groin in the process. His head still pressed at an awkward angle into a pillow. "Now I can read one thing." Denny spoke into the feathers. "But that's not enough. Let me turn over." He jerked loose of Alan's arms and tried again to roll. It put pressure on his injury, and he winced.

"Stay there," said Alan. He clambered over Denny's body to lie facing him, balanced precariously on the mattress edge. He teetered, and Denny grabbed his shoulders, pulling him in. Through his boxers, his erection crowded Denny's thigh in a tantalizingly casual way.

"Better?" asked Alan. He forced an especially light tone into his voice to counterbalance his mood, which was anything but.

Denny shook his head. "I don't get you." He searched Alan's face, dropped his gaze down between their bodies, then brought it back up to hold his eyes.

Alan smiled a little wistfully. He put a hand to Denny's shoulder and fondled the soft fabric of the pajama top. "My friend, one of the things that draws me to you—awes me—is the indefatigable manner in which you turn everyday life into the absurd, and then on a whim, stand in front of a judge and just as easily present the absurd and turn it into something patently matter-of-course. I cannot pretend to understand it, nor do I wish to, as I prefer to enjoy the perfect wonder.

"But I ask you, can you credit me the same? Can you trust that although you may not share or understand my predilections, that they do in fact work for me?"

Denny gripped his shoulders tighter. "I need this to work for you. I don't want you holding back...going to someone else because you think that I'm afraid."

Alan looked away, more because he had no choice. "You'll have to forgive me. In my egoism and in my self-absorption, I utterly failed to consider that you might be afraid too." He let his forehead fall to Denny's breast.

Denny put his arms around him. "You have a lot of issues, don't you?"

"You have no idea." Alan nestled a little closer in.

"Alan." Denny's voice was very soft.

"Yes, Denny?"

"You're on my side." Denny jerked his head towards the empty half of the bed.

"Sorry." Hands first, Alan crawled back over his torso. He put arms around Denny's chest and closed his eyes.