Chapter 36 Boys
BOYS
HAMMER
I am running a lap of the oval, side by side with the footy boys. I can smell fresh turf and dog shit and sunscreen mixing with sweat in the October sun. We handball the footy to each other. I take a couple of cheeky bounces. This ground is terrible, but it’s all they have.
We finish the lap, and Brick hands over coaching duties for the Perth Centurions to me for the day. We’re calling this a footy clinic: some community outreach Wookie and Tessa cooked up to repair my image. A real AFL star teaching skills to an amateur club.
Charlie Roth is on the sidelines, roped into being club photographer for the day cos none of the boys wanted to give up their chance to train with me.
Brick and Zeke introduce me to the team. I learn names I will probably never remember: Jack. Tommo. Fergus. Dom. Rogan. Mason.
I run some drills. I boot a massive goal to impress them all.
I teach skills most of these guys are never gonna master.
Only Brick and Mason are halfway good. The rest haven’t got the build, speed or talent – but they’re having a great time.
It reminds me of my Auskick days as a boy, when footy was fun.
We finish training with a match sim, then a cool-down lap around the oval.
Charlie takes a team photo of the Perth Centurions in their new red-and-black guernseys, me in the middle in my Eagles gear, throwing a shaka. The straight bloke in the haystack.
But here, it doesn’t matter who we fuck.
We are all boys. I think this is what I couldn’t put into words with the footy club.
What they’ll never get is how, gay or straight, boys just wanna be boys.
We grow up wild and dirty and kinetic, unstoppable turbos, boys to teenagers, teenagers to men, playing, chasing, racing, wrestling, fighting.
We jump on piles of each other, we throw each other to the ground, we twist each other’s nipples.
We burp, we fart, we piss the shit off the toilet bowl.
We make too much noise and we use too few words.
We can’t always express our emotions the way we’d like.
We laugh too much and cry too little. Some of us beat our chest and some of us shrink.
We get scuffs and grazes and bruises. We play in the rain, we fall in the mud, we lie in the sun.
We put our hands down our pants when we are alone and our best mates are our dicks.
We look tough but nobody sees how tenderly we cup our own nuts.
We’re meant to grow out of it, but some of us don’t want to.
Some of us play and compete with other men as our job or our hobby.
We fill our days with other men: we out-muscle men, fight men, tackle men, race men in our dick machines.
And some of us love being around other men so much it makes us excited.
We want to spend time with men in locked rooms with our clothes off.
We press our naked male flesh against each other, without flinching.
We grapple, without fear of losing. We want so badly to be close with other men, to smell their testosterone and taste their sweat, that we push ourselves inside each other, fusing into one, metal welded to metal, soldered to each other so tightly our bodies become red-hot and molten, a steel alloy of lust, muscle and power.
‘Hammer, we’re hitting the Shed for team drinks,’ Brick tells me, as the big tanky tatted bloke – Jack – collects the footies up into a sack. ‘It’d mean a lot to the boys if our new straight mate joined us.’
‘Yeah, s’pose I could join youse for a froffy,’ I say casually. I catch Zeke’s and Charlie’s eyes and have to look away fast, before one of us smirks at the term ‘straight mate’. ‘Don’t wanna dog the boys, ay.’
‘Mate, never dog the boys,’ Brick says.
‘Yeah the boys!’ Jack booms in a stadium shout, clapping us both on the back.
And the ‘YEAH THE BOYS!’ echo explodes from the whole team of us, an automatic bloke chorus, stubbled jaws open, blue Gatorade spit flying into the sun, throats hoarse and gruff, and my voice is among them, my words their words, my sonic boom shout so loud it could split me open, into pure light.