Free The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid; Andrew Tobias

they'll come back with us! Yeah, wow! "I'll take Kathy, if that's okay with you, Hank." "Yeah, okay, what the fuck," Hank said, obviously drunk out of his mind, and the world caved in again. What a funny way to mete out the death sentence: "Yeah, okay, what the fuck." But that is of course what Hank had done. "How should I know whether he wets his bed?" "Why didn't you call me about this when you first noticed it?" "Who has the red crayon?" "Do you want a blow job?" And now this, the worst of all.
    The girls came back; my head was awash in adrenalin. Hank asked them if they wanted to come back to the hotel. Sure they did. Hank took Gladys' arm, and Kathy and I followed. Gladys was chewing gum, obviously delighted. Kathy was less than delighted—yes! she would find a way to avoid sleeping with me! —but, while I wasn't Hank, I was apparently, to my dismay, good enough. I was silently going bananas.
    Hank and I, of course, were sharing a double hotel room. Not one of those where we slept together in the same double bed, though there had been many of those. (Can you imagine sleeping like that—with Ali MacGraw, if you prefer—and not being able to touch?) This room had two single beds and was ample for the four of us. But whatever was going to happen with Kathy, it simply could not happen in the same room with Hank. I could accept death. I could not accept torture.
    I said I liked privacy when I slept with a girl—a little lame, but reasonable, and I knew Hank would prefer privacy, too. It was so late at night the front desk was deserted, so I couldn't rent another room, even if there had been one. I went downstairs to the desk, behind the desk, and stole one of the keys hanging by an empty post box—hoping that it was indeed the key to a vacant room and that no one would be returning even later that night to use it.
    The BLBITW actually stole the key. Kathy and I adjourned to the, vacant, room. I immediately went to the bathroom and locked myself in, water running madly to drown out any thoughts that might otherwise be overheard. Was there any way out? I couldn't think of any. At least Hank wasn't there to see; that was the main thing.
    I emerged from the bathroom. Kathy was sitting on the bed. No, she didn't need to use it, she said—she had used one just a few minutes ago, remember?
    Kathy was no Hilda Goldbaum. She was one attractive girl, as even I could tell, and she was not about to do any of my work for me. But I wasn't really up to it, either.
    I'm sure my unhappiness and discomfort showed, and that sort of thing is contagious. I doubt Kathy was much happier than I was. I took off my clothes, except for my shorts, and, as it was two in the morning and no one was helping Kathy take off hers, she had no logical alternative but to take them off herself. We got into bed together. Luckily a fairly wide bed. I put my arm around her, and after a little while I muttered something about being sorry, that it wasn't her, that I was sorry, and I was dead tired, and would she like to go to sleep? Yeah. I turned over on my stomach and lay motionless—as far from sleep as anyone could possibly be, of course—for about three hours until there was a faint suggestion that the sun was on the rise. I rustled enough to wake Kathy and said that since I had stolen the keys to the room, maybe we had better leave before they found us. I would walk her back to her hotel room.
    We tiptoed out and back to her hotel. It must have been about five o'clock, judging from the light. I don't know what she was thinking through all this. No doubt she thought I was strange, and no doubt it was not a pleasant experience. Conceivably she thought she wasn't attractive enough to turn me on—well, of course she wasn't, but I don't mean that—and, depending on what little problems she brought to the encounter, the evening could have upset her as much as it did me. None of that occurred to me at the time.
    I left her and walked at my utmost cosmic to the