The Circle Review
The Conversations of Men
Paul Hostovsky
My girlfriend says she would like to be a fly
on the wall between two urinals.
What would she overhear? she asks me.
I tell her the last time a man spoke to me
above a urinal, I think he said, “How about them Bruins?”
And what did I say in return? she wants to know.
I say I didn’t know what to say because
I don’t know anything about hockey,
and I didn’t watch the game or even know
there was one. But I didn’t want him
to know that. So I think I said, “Goddamn!”
because it sounded heartfelt yet noncommittal,
because he may or may not have been a Bruins fan,
and because the Bruins may or may not have won,
and because he was trying to make contact
with his gender, and if I said I didn’t see the game,
or if I said I didn’t follow hockey or don’t
give a shit about the Bruins, he would probably
feel like he hadn’t made contact. And I would feel
less of a man. So I said, “Goddamn!” and he said
“Unbelievable!” and shook his head in approval,
or maybe it was disapproval—it was hard to tell, I tell her,
because the whole thing was more or less peripheral.
Fucking
Paul Hostovsky
I can still see the pharmacist’s face
as he sized me up at the register
and fished the Trojans out from under
all that camouflage of candy
piled on top like a piebald football team
in Troy, then counseled me with a wink, “Don’t
mix these up with those.” I was fifteen, a freshman
on an errand. Faith was much older, a senior
expert on the hydraulics of the penis
of her ex-boyfriend, Mark Winkles, whom
she forsook for my more literary point of view.
But I only ended up disproving
every borrowed theory of hydraulics
that between the two of us
I couldn’t come up with
that terrified, truant spring afternoon
we were scheduled to do it. “Fucking,”
Faith had warned me three months earlier,
speaking from her vast singular experience,
“is very intense. We’re going to have to
prepare you for this.” But our preparations
amounted to her talking about it all the time
which only served to undermine
my confidence. Under the leadership of Epeios,
the Greeks built their wooden horse
in three days, which allowed them finally to enter Troy.
For three whole months Faith built up “fucking”
to the point where I was totally
psyched out. When the time finally came,
I couldn’t get it up. I couldn’t get the Trojans on.
And I couldn’t get inside Faith, who finally, quietly
gave up, and went back to Mark Winkles,
leaving me in ruins, scarred for life.
But what I want to know is,
is this a classic story
or an atypical one?