Monday, February 6, 2012

Allan, Part 3

(This entry is a continuation of previous posts, Allan, Part 1, and Allan, Part 2.)

It’s August of 2009, and I was in the grungier of Detroit’s two bathhouses. (It had been years since the gum incident at the older and cleaner facility, and I’d not been back since.) It was a Tuesday morning, and although I’d had a lot of sex since my arrival a couple of hours before, it hadn’t been that good. There’d been a weird guy who kept coming into my room every few minutes to ask if I want any company, while he showed me the tiny mushroom sprig that was his dick, barely visible beneath the thick bush of his pubes. I keep telling him no, but he wasn’t getting the message. Then there’d been the black guy who’d used so much teeth on my dick that I would’ve sworn he was trying to scrape off a layer of dermis.

Then a tall, thin guy had entered the room. The place had been pretty dark that morning, so I wasn’t able to see much about him. He wore a baseball cap. Once, when he removed it, he proved to have a very close-shaved head beneath. He didn’t say much. He softly pushed me down onto my back, on the thin mattress. He kept a hand on my chest as he straddled his legs and ass over my hips. Then he wriggled his hole down onto my dick, and began rising and falling in a regular rhythm.

And I thought to myself, Allan? Because there was something in his size and general build, and in the way he moved, and especially in his hunger for my dick, that brought to mind the boy I’d known nearly a decade before. There was enough to give me doubt, though. Allan rarely kissed me when we fucked, and this guy kept his mouth firmly on mine. Allan had always been into he sex for the pleasure of his own hole. This man in the dark kept asking me questions—Do you like that? Does that feel good? Should I keep doing that? Questions that made me suspect my pleasure was coming before his. And hot as the sexual haze might have been in which Allan had dwelled, years before, he never really struck me as completely present during sex.

This guy was not only present, but he was responsive, and sweet, and tender, and gentle, even as he milked two loads in a row from my dick, sitting on it. He wasn’t intending to let me up until I came. And again I thought to myself, Allan?

At the end of two hours of really good sex, all of which took place with me on my back as he attended to me with a very, very skilled hole from above, he got up and shuffled out. He closed the door to all but a crack on his way out. I was too weak and spent to get up and close it all the way. A few moments later, the door opened again. I was ready to shoo out the guy who’d intruded, but it was the baseball-capped guy again. He handed out a slip of paper. “You should text me on Tuesdays if you want to fuck,” he said, pushing it into my fingers. “I think we’d have a really good time.”

Then he was gone.

I didn’t recognize the number on the slip, to be honest. I kept it in my dresser throughout the week, and then got up the nerve to text it the following Tuesday. I got a reply back almost instantly, with an address, and the instructions to come on over.

The address, of course, was Allan’s. So I knew. I was willing to return to his tiny little house, however, because I recognized something had changed about him. I wanted to find out what.

The changes were evident when I stepped into the living room. He invited me in rather formally, I thought. “The place looks great!” I enthused, honestly, when I looked around. I’d never seen the curtains and blinds open in his living room before. The sun was warming the room and its old furniture. The living room was clean, and tidy. When I’d known Allan in the old days, he’d kept sheets thrown over everything, and there’d been layers of dust and cigarette smoke residue everywhere. Not now. There wasn’t even an aroma of smoke. The room looked as if someone actually lived there, rather than was camping out there and having sex on someone else’s furniture.

“I thought we’d go in here,” he said, shyly taking my hand and leading me down the postage stamp-sized hallway to the bedroom. The door was open. The room was dim, but not dark. Like the living room, it was completely clean and fresh.

“What happened—?” I started to say.

I’d meant to ask, what happened to all your drag queen stuff? Because the last time I’d been in that room, it had been filled with it. There weren’t any dresses spilling out of the closets. In fact, one of the closet doors lay open, and I could see there were only regular old shirts and pants within. The vanity that had occupied the wall opposite the bed was just gone. Completely gone. Any trace of Allan’s sequined past had just vanished.

It was when I saw him looking at me blankly that I realized something. Allan had no idea who I was.
He didn’t remember me from the decade before.

He didn’t know we had a history. He didn’t know I knew him, and was arriving with all the preconceptions I’d carried from before.

I know that people are thinking, If you guys fucked so much, how could you not know each other, even after a few years? Allan had changed, though. He’d been boyish when I knew him. He was a man, on our second go-round. He was leaner, and more muscular. His head was shaved.

And he even fucked differently. We made love in his bed that first morning, for the first time ever. It wasn’t all about him getting his hole stretched to the maximum, either—though he certainly craved that. Between fucks (and we did fuck multiple times that morning) he would go down on me, and suck me from ass to mouth. He licked my nipples, and chewed them exactly how I liked. He touched me with the flats of his hands, all over. He rubbed his mouth and lips over my neck.

He even kissed me. Deep, sensual kisses that lingered, and tasted of mint.

At no time during the sex did he light up a cigarette or joint. He was there, and present, and responded to every one of my thrusts and jabs with keening and moans of pleasure, and gratitude in his stare. It was like fucking the best possible version of Allan, and it turned me on beyond belief.

Yet he didn’t recognize me at all, even when I stabbed him into his first anal orgasm with me since the reunion. I watched and held him as he shook and shivered and clung to me with his arms and legs both behind my back. “It’s been a long, long time since anyone did that to me,” he panted, laughing to himself.

But no recognition at all.

The truth is that I’d changed as well over those years. I’d weighed about two-twenty-five when I knew Allan the first time around, and I’d slimmed down to one-sixty. I was dressing better—or at least in clothing that didn’t swamp me. I’d grown a beard. My hair was longer. Something Allan said to me that morning gave me a better key to the whole situation, though. I was hinting around, trying to find out whether I was so forgettable, when he said something about his past: he told me that when he’d been younger, he’d been a messed-up kid. Constantly on drugs. Even dealing. (That I knew.) “I was pretty much in a haze for five years,” he said. “But then I cleaned up and got my act together.”

He had.

For a good six months I was Allan’s Tuesday-morning lover. He knew about my home situation, but didn’t care. He wanted a part-time boyfriend, not a full-time husband. So on Tuesdays, we belonged to each other. We’d spend hours in his bed, making love to each other, exchanging honeyed words, gently encouraging each other to orgasm. My climaxes were loud and explosive and left him juicy. His were more private, and intense, and always anal—I still never saw him blow a load, or even grow hard very often.

But he never remembered me. I kept thinking, Okay, this’ll be the fuck that brings it all back to him. Nope. Never. Allan didn’t like talking about those days before the millennium. He would evade when I brought up his past, or tried to get him to talk about a possible drag queen career. He didn’t want to go there. After a while, I didn’t see any reason to try to take him out of the present, which he so very clearly was enjoying. So I stopped asking.

My story of Allan ends with a whimper.

The winter semester after we started to fuck was kind of hellacious for me, scheduling-wise; I was teaching what was for me a full load, and I wasn’t as free on Tuesdays as I had been, the semesters before. I can’t remember why, but Tuesdays were the only day Allan could meet me—so there were a couple of weeks we missed being together.

Allan didn’t like that. I’d tell him a couple of days before when I’d have to cancel, and he’d seem resigned and sad about it. After a couple of weeks, it turned to petulance. I tried explaining that I wasn’t avoiding him, or fucking someone else, but that it was just work-related shit keeping us apart, but he didn’t want to hear it. The third time, he was outright angry. You know, he texted, just don’t bother texting me any more. Or calling. Don’t contact me at all.

I was irritated enough that day that I thought, You know, enough, then. I won’t. So I didn’t.

Then, three weeks later, I got another text from him. You were the last person I expected to treat me that way. Goodbye.

“You mean, to obey your instructions not to contact you again?” I snarled, and erased his number from my phone.

And that was the end of Allan.

Looking back, I regret it all. I couldn’t help the scheduling, of course, but I wish we’d found another day or night to meet—I tried, but he couldn’t. I wish we’d not parted so rancorously—that I’d been less irritable, that he’d been less dramatic. I wish he could’ve known how much I loved making love to him when he was off the weed, and also that he could’ve known how much I admired him when he was a mere boy, slutting out his hole to all takers in the baths.

It’s probably no coincidence that I started keeping a public sex blog shortly after the demise of my relationship to Allan. I had a keen and pervasive sense, then, of how easily encounters could be completely forgotten, and how time sweetly and slyly erases from the memory people who had meant everything and then some during the space of an encounter. I had a sense of things slipping away. And I didn’t want that to happen again.

Allan, I loved you, quite sincerely. We weren’t meant to be together for very long, but the universe was kind enough to bring us together twice, and to give us many moments of shared passion and intimacy.

I hope somewhere in your memory there’s a tiny space for me.

27 comments:

  1. What a beautiful and touching end to this story. I have to admit that I was worried Allan would not have gotten off the drugs when you met him again. I'm glad for him that he did. I'm glad you both got to share what you shared with each other. And I'm incredibly glad you shared it with us. And even if he never put the pieces together and link the past and present memories of you together, I'm certain he remembers you to this day. What you both had is hard to forget. Thanks, my friend, for this post.

    -Ace

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  2. ...and how time sweetly and slyly erases from the memory people who had meant everything and then some during the space of an encounter. I had a sense of things slipping away. And I didn’t want that to happen again. Here's to people and memories never slipping away. Happy Birthday, Robbie.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Sir Throb. I appreciate being on your mind.

      Delete
  3. I returned to your blog just in time to read these 3 posts on Allan.
    It's been a while since I have read or commented.
    I'm just overwhelmed with conflicting emotions about how you have captured both the complexity and fragility of long term gay relationships.
    Your writing is so insightful and honest, and you perfectly capture both the good points and the human flaws in both you and Allan. You are the best gay blogger. I need to catch up on your past posts.
    --Bob, aka Loadseeker

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  4. That would be weird to have spent so much time together and not be remembered, but since he spent so much time in a drugged world it's easy to understand why he didn't rememeber.

    After awhile people who do drugs or drink heavyly can start loosing bits and pieces of the past. And since your appearance changed it would not have helped him in remembering. He also could have been very sexually active over that time and the many men would have been a revolving door in his mind and mixed together so even your voice would not be familiar.

    And who knows what lies ahead, you two could cross paths again one day which leaves you with the question of, would you pick up where you left off?

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    Replies
    1. Hey, my bed has a revolving door on it and yet I manage to remember most of my playmates, especially the ones I've seen more than once, and over a number of years. But substances can have a way of making everything a fog, particularly if one doesn't want to remember the time one spent on them.

      Delete
  5. You know where he lives...why didn't you ever try to talk to him?

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    Replies
    1. At the time, he told me not to.

      And now, we live 1200 miles apart, and I no longer have his phone number.

      Delete
  6. Just wanted to stop and say HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

    ErieBear

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  7. Even though it's about sex it has a certain quality of romanticism.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not sure the two can always be divorced, Jared.

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  8. Wow Rob! That must have been really hard. Being with someone who didn't remember your past relationship.

    I can understand why you started your blog soon after. The human memory is so fragile and short-lived. When we die it is gone, and in Allan's case the first part of your relationship with him was seemingly destroyed even earlier.

    You will have a better chance of staying in all your readers' memories, and beyond.

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    Replies
    1. You're very kind, Paul. Thank you. At the time I started the blog I didn't realize the correlation between it and Allan, but now I do.

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  9. Rob my dear friend,
    That is just another amazing blog that you just give us to read. I was glad that you saw him again and that he had change so much and didn't even recognise you. Glad that the sex was even better but i am so sad that it ended up like that. I love the way you finish that post and just love the last sentence. "I hope somewhere in your memory there's a tiny space for me." Let me tell you, i didn't met you yet and you already have a big space in my life my friend.

    Yves

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    Replies
    1. You are practically the sweetest man alive, Yves. Thank you.

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    2. When it comes from a sweet and king man like you, i will take it my dear friend.

      Delete
  10. Hi Rob,
    Your story made me think...I like it when someone come back into my life. My current best friend (and secret crush) was away in another city, but now that they are back, things are closer than they ever where.

    A belated Happy Birthday to you!
    Thanks for the stories!

    Chris

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    Replies
    1. Chris,

      I hope your crush isn't so much a secret any longer.

      Delete
  11. I don't believe your story with Allan is over. I've had similar types of exits and re-entry in lives of past lovers and friends. I can't explain it and woeastward the energy trying To unravel it- I've learned to just go with the flow. He will resurface in your life Rob.

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    1. Loki,

      It may not be. LIfe has thrown stranger things my way. On the other hand, we are so much farther apart, now. It'll be difficult.

      Delete
  12. Hey Rob,

    Been behind in my blog reading and catching up today along with all of my chores that need to be done.

    I want to say Happy Belated Birthday!

    Amazing how time changes each of us. I am glad that you were able to encounter Allan in a different light as he got older and cleaned up. I as a reader believe I need to thank Allan for the experiences you both shared that led to you start keeping a public blog of your sex life.

    You are one of a couple that got me blogging my sex life.

    Thanks for sharing this intimate experience with us all.

    Hugs & GROPE

    VRPB

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  13. Oh, Rob, you keep breaking my heart. There just aren't enough people on earth that live up to their capacity the way you do. Whether it's something your parents did, or Earl, or some other fortuitous mix of nature and nurture, my world is a richer place for getting to view tiny bits of it through your eyes and words.

    I've been saving all three parts of Allan for when I could get to them all at once, and I'm both glad and sad I did. They make a wonderful unit, but it would have been nice to savour some courses for longer before the digestif.

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