I FUCKED UMBERTO ECO IN TORONTO, 1977

Summer of ‘77, I started cruising in public bathrooms. I was an undergraduate student in Toronto, and the world of buggery was a scintillating new sphere. With no Virgil to show me the ropes, I learned the routine slow and empirically. I studied the college campus lavatories: a mix of students, local labourers, even some professors. Eventually, I knew the schtick inside-out. Some guys practically lived in bathrooms, eyeing anyone at the urinals. I was less prolific. I must’ve fucked a modest forty or fifty guys there. 

I took my learnings beyond the bathroom. One night in Queen’s Park, I stood statue and scanned over the candidates probing me with propositioning looks. I was young, sharp-jawed, and slender, so I usually had a bouquet of prospects. Sometimes it was fun to flatter the uglies, the flabby, the passed-over. That night, I felt generous and matched an older man’s gaze. He was stocky and balding, but composed with debonair grace. No hint of paranoia, no hint of shame. His thick Italian voice summoned me to a Yonge St. hotel suite.

There, he disrobed. Jacket sewn with elegant haberdashery, tweed trousers, argyle socks puddled on the floor to reveal a body rotund and unimpressive. His kiss was warm vinaigrette breath, stale and enticing. He thumbed my asshole. Tasted me with a wine connoisseur's patience and appreciation. Penetrated me soft and slow, whispering encouragement. His shaft was stiff and sturdy, though demarcated by little gouges across the flesh, as if scooped-at by a quarter-teaspoon. I pretended I didn’t notice the strange grooves, and he made no mention either. Afterwards, we lay in bed. He mused effusively on the brutalist peacock topping Robarts Library.

I can’t remember my sister’s birthday, but I can still recall the fragrance of Umberto Eco’s sweat. What that says about me I don’t wish to interrogate. The fuck was hardly transformative, but it was nice to be loved by a man whose every fiber spoke softness. The next time I saw him would’ve been around 1984. He was on TV, interviewed about his first novel. He spoke candid and poised with the same unwavering confidence he screwed me with.

Today, I’m old. I’m frail, grey, flaccid. They built a TTC entrance at the Northern side of Queen’s Park, hacked away the obscuring undergrowth, drenched the space in floodlights. Umberto Eco’s been dead a near-decade. I never read his books, but I did inhale the perfume of his perineum, tasted the pollen of his loins. In that sense, I trump any of you mighty men of letters.