Dolphin-torn, gong-tormented

Facing the shore, naked men all stand the same way: hands on hips, legs apart, their sea-shriveled cocks outthrust. Alex bends into the tide as it slaps his genitals—“I fuck the sea!” he yells.

His skin is very tan, draped in thin gold bracelets and rings, his teeth very white. My friend and I swim out with him to a craggy rock. Again and again he dives and surfaces with fistfuls of clams, gathered from along the rock’s edge. Weeds and dime-sized jellyfish gleam on their shells. One he smashes open in his palm. He shows us its pale, vaginal center, then slurps it down raw.

My traveling companion, a gay man, has a talent for attracting men like Alex—young, handsome, sexually ambiguous. During the day he wanders the “gay sex forest” above the nude beach (less forest, more condom-littered shrubbery) while I swim and swig a wine bottle. The night before we went to a gay club in Odessa. An acquaintance of his (somewhat doddering, goggle-eyed, with a head like an egg) tried, repeatedly and without success, to ensnare him in the dark room—a series of winding corridors in the back, with walls soft-padded like an enormous intestine. When illuminated with a cell phone, they revealed a splatter of stale cum.

Eventually my friend visited the room with someone else, leaving the eggish acquaintance mooning in the karaoke room. I sat beside him and a beautiful man who wore a cigarette-dangling sneer. The karaoke machine scrolled Russian lyrics over incongruous films of Asian women giving massages, or of whales. “Where did he go?” the forlorn one kept asking. The other let out a strident laugh and proceeded to make snide comments about everyone in the club. He turned to me—“Ponyemayesh, podruga?” You get it, girlfriend?—then, without waiting for an answer, “Girlfriend gets it.” Through an opening in the wall, a leathery old man had his hand down his jeans. “You have a cigarette?” The man paused his masturbation to pass one to the beautiful boy.  

Like many things supposedly fun, such as team sports or children’s birthday parties, sex is not fun, per se. But in its most carnal and anonymous manifestations, at least it is honest. As a point of contrast, I worked at several camps this summer, and the high-schoolers there exchanged bedmates in an ever-revolving carousel of infantile fumbling. A new pixie-teen would cling to the boys during every night’s discotheque, all their throats blossoming dark hickies.

Why is teen sex so particularly gross? Maybe it’s old bitterness; at their age, my biggest vices were reading poems in math class or covertly rubbing against furniture. All that aside, I find their sexualities far more objectionable than, say, gay sex forest/dark room coupling.

The reason isn’t just sex, I think; rather, the sentimentality with which they imbue sex. Of course, I’m wildly generalizing, but young people, fed on rom-coms and Twilight, seem less DTF and more DTFL (down to fall in love). They’re the glass in which everything gross about modern romance is reflected, not darkly but dully.

On the nude beach, I bleed down my leg through a toilet paper wad, torn up where waves threw me against rocks below the surface. Slowly my skin burns and I get wine-drunk. Suddenly the sky goes purple and gray, then slits open into a storm. Up the beach there’s a large crevice in the rocks, and we crowd there for shelter: my friend and Alex and I and a homeless man, and a drunk Muscovite named Dmitri. “Oh my God, Alanis Morissette!” Dmitri yells, embracing me into his damp, cold chest. “I love your music!” 

The storm pounds the beach, releases itself in wind and hail. Large stones of it rap sharply against us through the cave opening. Curled in a puddle, mud- and blood-smeared, I shiver even as Dmitri wraps fleshy arms around me. The homeless man steals Dmitri’s cigarettes. When the hail subsides, Alex runs across the beach and dives in. His form bobs up, fine and gleaming in the spray—lashed by rain and the waves’ violent love.