Our eruptions and disasters. Despite these, really, trust me, we can’t be beat. Set us up and watch us blow. Now and then we fail and admit defeat.

I’ve been up all night waiting for Jimmy to come over. He just got back from a semester abroad reading French and he said he really missed me. I’ve been laying on my bed listening to the Slits and reading about Pompeii and at 2:15, when I’d just about had it, Jimmy comes over. He is my height and size, but he’s a couple years younger and with dark features. He is an air sign and I can’t decide if he is: psychic, silly, stupid and psychotic. I have decided that he’s sexy. 

Volcanic activity seems sort of weird, because it’s so violent and explosive. Actually, Volcanoes announce their activity well before they blow, just really subtly in earthquakes. Passive-aggressively. It’s like you don’t hear the sound but you hear the echo of it.

Jimmy and I met at a nightclub once, in the hallway in the basement. He was out with some friends of his from school, and one of his girlfriends knew the friend I was with, and they caught up in the hallway, two teenage drag queens sniffing cheap NYU blow in the glow of the ATM machine. Jimmy and I stared at each other from across the hall. I thought maybe I might puke or something. Then he smiled this really charming, goofy good-guy smile, and mean babysitter inside of me melted. She decided to let her kids break all the rules: no bedtime, watch TV and eat as much ice cream as you want. We went home together that first night.

Jimmy came this time and picked me up in December to go out drinking. He wanted to go to bars with his college friends. Tiny crowded fag bars downtown near campus, on a night where creepy older guys go to cruise college boys, and college boys go to get cruised. I stand in the back of the room with Jimmy, drinking vodka and listening to him tell me stories about the last three months and how he’s learned so much in Paris and had a boyfriend but they broke up and he missed me. Various older guys come up to talk to him. Friends of his from school, too, come over and gruffly ignore me. I think Jimmy likes it, but it’s driving me wild. We keep ordering drinks until the bar gets crowded and we’re drunk enough to brave the cold and walk to his house.

He lives in an expensive fake-poor east village apartment his parents pay for until he gets a job working with French. There’s no elevator, and drunk, we’re climbing the stairs, dizzy and barely able to stand up, pausing at the landings to make out. He lives with a pair of twin girls from Alabama, sophomore pre-med fantasies who are having a party tonight. His place is tiny, the girls are brushing each other’s hair and drinking warm 40oz in the living room, country radio is blasting from speakers in the kitchen. They are so glad to meet me cuz Jimmy’s told them about his older boyfriend Billy. They giggle and Jimmy blushes. They ask us to join them to smoke a joint. Lisa’s grinding weed on a glass coffee table and her nails are painted blue. They’re watching an expensive-looking gigantic ultraviolet bright television, extra loud, a show about deer-hunting.

We go to Jimmy’s bedroom, messy white sheets and suitcases unpacking on the floor. He pushes me onto the bed and lays on top of me. We’re still cold from outside and as I regain feeling I can barely breathe from Jimmy squirming on me. He’s sweet and shy looking all of a sudden, on top of me. He asks me if I missed him and I did. His mouth is huge and hard to kiss. He is talking quietly in a high voice about his boyfriend in Europe.

“I thought about you when I was having sex with him. He was smaller than me and always wanted me to fuck him, but you and I are the same size and all I want is this.” He says, grabbing my dick through my jeans.

“I’m taller than you,” I say. 

“No you’re not,” Jimmy says and smiles. We undress and are rolling around on a gigantic white down comforter. It’s suddenly stuffy in the room. We’re starting to sweat; the radiator hisses.

Volcanoes just show you what’s inside the earth – it’s scary, but if you think about it, on the inside the Earth is always on the move. A volcano is like a window or an eye. 

Under the sheets we interlock our legs and he tells me how much he missed me. Jimmy is sweet. He pushes me onto my back and climbs on top of me, saying that he wants me inside of him. He hands me a condom and some lube from a drawer near the bed and we start fucking. He moans and says that it hurts. I ask him he wants to stop and he keeps saying no. His roommates are cackling outside the door, every time there’s a gunshot. I sit up while he straddles me and we kiss and he says that he missed me and he knows I missed him too, he says. He can tell. It’s hard to maintain balance, we’re still drunk. The room is pitch black except for a sliver of light on the floor, coming from underneath the door.

I jerk Jimmy off while we’re fucking and he runs his fingers through my hair. Sex with Jimmy makes me feel like an artist. I’m using my creative energy, we’re making something where there used to be nothing. I close my eyes when Jimmy kisses me and I see red LED lights blinking across my eyelids. I feel like Jenny Holzer, political manifesto libber on t-shirts. I edit, update, shorten. It can’t come quickly enough. ABUSE OF POWER comes as no surprise. There is no surprise with Jimmy. He is elemental, inevitable and volcanic. Surprises are overrated. My head aches.

Jimmy says, “Lie still.” And I do, as a feather as a board, it feels like, I jump into position. He whispers “I wanna do it while you’re still inside of me.” It feels like being secret, a voyeur or something. Inside a volcano heat rushing to the surface. Hot heavy and slow. I’ll keep calm. I’ll be real quiet. Jimmy gasps and shoots hot white cum, carried over from the European continent, onto my stomach, my chest. Some lands on my neck, almost steaming.

And the thing about volcanic activity is that it’s not always explosions with smoke and lava. The heat forms strange ecosystems on the mountainside. Hot springs. Neon blue algae, creatures which can only live at insane temperatures. All bubbling up, steaming through the sod on the side of the craggy peaks. Entire worlds are sustained by the heat from the volcano. It’s not even the volcano’s heat, it comes form the center of the Earth and the mountain’s just the gun of it.

I tell Jimmy I’m gonna cum too. I push him off of me and shoot onto my stomach; it mixes with Jimmy’s cum, hardening, crystalline.