The Fulcrum

I’d seen the number on the restroom wall. On all the restroom walls, actually. The guy who’d scrawled it there in black marker had advertised in the cavernous men’s room in the lowest level of the campus’ largest building, where strangers congregated nightly for the purposes of finding sex. He’d also made his way to every other hot spot where faculty, staff, and male students hooked up—the uppermost levels of the library toward the front as well as the lesser-known tearoom in the periodicals section. The two men’s rooms in the liberal arts building where the afternoon action could be sizzling. The campus center basement. Even the basement of the art building, where men would take their campus center tricks for a quick fuck. Amazing action for young dick, said the scrawls, followed by a phone number.

It was 1987, and I’d just moved to the midwest for school. I was totally on my own, in my own apartment, supporting myself on a full fellowship and through little odd teaching jobs here and there. It was a heady time of independence. If I wanted to date, I could, without questions from roommates or friends or parents. If I wanted to have someone spend the night, all I had to do was ask. I controlled my meals, my finances, my time.

And I didn’t know it, but it was a time in my sexual life when everything would start to swing around and change. The fulcrum around which everything pivoted was the man behind that number. I just didn’t know how much my life would change, when I called.

He gave me a street number to visit the next night, at seven in the evening. I barely knew my way around town, and drove past his place three times without realizing. I’d been looking for an apartment or a house among the tiny little storefronts on that busy east side street, but he’d given me the address of a florist’s shop. As I parked my car, I was slightly leery of that. In my youthful ignorance, I pictured florists as the most stereotypical of all the so-called gay professions. My mind was already imagining some lisping, mincing Charles Nelson Reilly of a queen, complete with a periwinkle-patterned shirt open to the navel. I was a fool. The guy waiting inside was short, trim and muscled, and thoroughly masculine. He was perhaps in his late thirties or early forties. When I stepped in, his blue eyes twinkled and he smiled. “You are a tall one, son,” he said, looking pleased. “Shut the door.” When I followed his instructions, he added, “Now lock it. Come on.”

I followed him to the back of the shop. I’d expected an assault of floral scents, but all the blooms were safely refrigerated for the night. Behind the counter was a room I presumed was used for the creation of arrangements. “So what do you like to do?” he asked. He’d been wearing a canvas apron, but he removed it as he talked. “You like to get sucked?” I nodded. “You like to fuck?”

“I like to get fucked,” I said. I was still a total bottom, pretty much, at that point. Sure, I’d performed with another boy in my teen years under the voyeuristic eye of Earl, the guy who enjoyed watching me. I’d even fucked a few girls at that point, starting at the age of fifteen. They’d all been all right experiences, but I didn’t think they compared to the sensations I enjoyed when I was bent over for another man’s pleasure.

“Oh you do, do you?” The man nodded. I don’t remember his name, which is a shame. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got.” My pants were some baggy green khakis, I recall. He pushed me back against the door as he unfastened them. Beneath, I was wearing white briefs—this was in the days before I discovered that underwear came in different colors. He rubbed first his hand over the hardening bulge underneath, and then his mouth. Some of the bristles of his mustache cut through the cotton and poked at the skin of my dick, making it harder.

At last he sucked me. I remember he knew what he was doing. “Gotta get you slick for this,” he said, though I didn’t pick up on the meaning at the time. His spit slopped over my dick so thickly that my meat was dripping with the stuff when at last he withdrew. He stood. I thought it was my turn to go down on him, but instead he stopped me when I started to kneel, and shook his head. Off came his T-shirt, which he threw on the floor. He unbuckled his belt and let his jeans drop to the floor, so he could kick them into a crumpled ball in the corner. His dick wasn’t impressive, but he wasn’t hard, either.

Up he hopped onto one of the florist’s tables that took up most of the room. I remember that they had stainless steel tops, and the thought of his back meeting that cold surface made me wince. “Come here,” he said, lifting his legs in the air and beckoning me over.

I stepped forward, though I was already shaking my head. “I’m not really a top,” I said. By not really, I meant not ever. I hadn’t stuck my dick in an ass in about six years, at that point.

“Just feel,” he said. He still smiled at me. When he spoke, it was as if he were trying to sweet-talk a little boy into eating his brussels sprouts. He took my fingers and put them on his hole. It was already slick with some kind of lube. “All you’ve got to do is put it in.”

He lunged up a little bit to grab my dick, which admittedly was still hard. He pulled me closer to him, and began rubbing the head against his hole. I gulped a little. I guessed I was going to be fucking him after all. “Shouldn’t we use a rubber?” I asked. Already it was being engrained in us that it was evil to fuck without one, back in the days before barebacking even had a name.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. I remember how intently he stared at me as he spat on his hand and re-lubed my dick, then maneuvered his body so that our parts could connect. His eyes glazed over a little as the head slipped pass his ass lips. “You’ll see. It’s okay.”

Then it happened. That single, life-changing event. My dick slid into his chute, smoothly and cleanly, as if he’d inhaled it somehow. And what I felt was incredible. It was warm, and smooth, and warm, and moist, and so damned warm. The florist’s ass seemed to generate its own heat and electricity, cradling my hard dick tightly and from every conceivable angle. I felt as if I’d been swallowed. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my natural existence.

My florist’s head was resting on the cold metal of his table. “Yeah,” he said from the back of his throat. “Like that.” I’d never had any real instruction in fucking an ass at this angle. I let instinct take over. In and out I moved, not thinking about what I was doing too much. All I wanted is for that wonderful sensation to continue, and never in. “Just like that.”

When my orgasm came it shocked me. I mean, you’d think after a decade of masturbation and fucking I would have learned how it all ended. When I felt my nuts tighten, though, and my legs quake, and when I sensed the beginnings of that old familiar sensation pulsing at the base of my spine, I was totally caught off-guard. My surprise added to the moment, and before I knew it, I found myself shaking and quivering with the hardest and most powerful orgasm I’d ever had. Part of my mind panicked and wondered about the etiquette of what I was doing—did he want me to pull out? Should I have warned him?

It was too late by then, though. My body was shuddering and my cock was spewing out rope after seeming rope of semen deep inside the strange man’s hole. It felt as if I was shooting for hours. I closed my eyes, panted, and tried to swallow, but my ragged breathing had rendered my throat raw.

It was . . . At the time, words failed me. I'd never known, to put it simply. All this time I'd had the capacity for such pleasure, such wonder, such magic, in my own dick. I'd never known. Why hadn't I known? Why had no one told me about this, or about how warm and wonderful asses were? I felt as if I'd been swindled of something I'd never known could be.

At last I came to. My dick still prickled and vibrated. The florist had rested his legs on my shoulders. His blue eyes gleamed with pride. “So you’re a top,” he said.

I laughed weakly and shook my head. “I’m not. That was just. . . .”

“No.” He interrupted me with a firm voice. “You’re a top. You’ve got a top’s dick. That was what you’re supposed to be doing. Couldn’t you tell, boy?”

My dick slopped out of him then, followed by a palmful of white sperm that dripped down onto the table. I looked at my dick, still mostly hard, slick, and shining in what light there was. Then I looked at him, and after a very long time I nodded. Something had changed. I looked the same, I hadn't gone anywhere, but my life had completely turned around. He’d been right. That was exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

“Good,” he said. “Now you’re going to do it again, and this time, you’re going to last longer.”

And we did.

I never saw the florist again. I didn’t call his number, and I never gave him mine. But of all the fucks that truly changed my life, his was the one that set me on a course I’ve followed for the last twenty-three years.