Wednesday, November 27, 2013

From the Archives: Faculty Party

I sat down this evening to write about an incident from my youth that had been on my mind for the last couple of days. I got a couple of paragraphs in, and then thought to myself, "Hey, maybe you'd better check to see if you've written about this guy before." Surely enough, I had, two years ago. Sigh.

Apparently the story wants to be repeated again, though. So here it is once more.

To my readers in the U.S., I wish you guys a happy Thanksgiving. And to everyone else, I wish you many things for which to be thankful.



When I was a kid during the nineteen-seventies, would occasionally throw end-of-semester Christmas parties in our home right before the holidays started.

Days before the party they'd start making a go of cleaning the living room, though for neither of them was tidiness ever a strong point. They weren't drinkers, but the colleagues and students they'd invite to these yearly shindigs would show up laden with spirits, and there'd be leftovers. Our basement bathroom—a mildewy, forbidding place that seemed so much like the movie set of a serial killing that I'm still reluctant to enter it when I visit my dad's home—was filled with liquor bottles that we'd begin hauling up the night before, until the dining room table was crowded with liquids of different colors (and of dubious age). My mother's ash trays got a thorough cleaning and the good ones were strewn around strategic places; my dad would pull out a bunch of LPs and eight-track tapes and have them stacked by the stereo.

My mom would spend an afternoon in the kitchen with cans and an opener and a jar of mayonnaise and emerge with space-aged canapés. The cats were banished outdoors. After a cold dinner, and before the doorbell would ring, I'd be sent to my room for the evening. Faculty parties were not for the young.

They were exotic, especially when I was fairly young. From my room, with a book in my lap, I'd listen to the swinging strains of psychedelia on the stereo, often improbably mixed with Nat King Cole singing Christmas carols, or Peter, Paul, and Mary. I'd listen to the laughter and smell the cigarette smoke and the clink of the liquor bottles and the increasingly loud and inebriated conversation and think to myself, This is what being grown up is all about.

My parents' guests were usually two-thirds other faculty from the university, and the rest were upper-level undergrads or graduate students. One of the things I used to do as a ritual, after the party had started, would be to go through their coats. They all lay there on my parents' beds, taken upstairs and tossed on the mattresses upon entering. When it was quiet upstairs, I'd tiptoe out and into my parents' room and just examine what their colleagues and students were carrying in their pockets. Mostly it was boring stuff like keys, or small change, or cellophane-wrapped Kraft caramels. Once in a while I'd stumble upon cigarettes, or more frequently, tiny little unsmoked joints tucked away in breast pockets, acrid-smelling and spilling weed from their twisted ends.

I had to time my stealthy investigations right. More often than not I'd be interrupted, either by hapless students looking for the bathroom, or couples (not always married, not always of the same generation) looking for a private tryst among the coats. I wouldn't say that my parents' parties were orgies, exactly, but they had their share of fucking. In the bedroom, among the wraps. In the spare bedroom, on the rusty twin bed that had been my father's as a boy. Outside in the back yard, behind the massive brick nineteen-fifties barbecue. In the basement, or down the outside cellar steps.

And once, in my room.

I was pretty young the night that Dr. Jones came into my bedroom. It was late—late enough that I'd given up watching the little portable TV from the kitchen that my parents had lugged up to my room for me to watch that evening, and had gotten into bed, but not so late that I was asleep. I had a book in my lap, and my knees propped up, and had stripped down to a T-shirt and briefs. Then my door opened. "Anyone home?" asked a tall black man. He slipped in quietly, raised a finger to his mouth to indicate I not say anything, and then made a pantomime of tiptoeing to my bed.

I knew Dr. Jones from my dad's office. They were in the same department; I'd seen him a couple of times a year since I'd been five or six—enough to recognize the face and associate a name, but not enough that we'd ever actually spoken. I raised my eyebrows. I think I told him that the bathroom was on the other side of the upstairs hall.

"Oh, I'm not here for the bathroom," he said. The man sat down on the edge of my bed. He was in his forties or fifties, and had a grizzled beard limned with white; it looked like his halo had slipped over his head and around his neck. An oversized mole decorated his dark, dark skin on his forehead; he had a large, nineteen-seventies Afro shot with gray perched like a helmet on his head. "Just needed to get away from the party."

He reeked of alcohol. His eyes, though unwavering as he stared at me, had that liquid sheen of the thoroughly inebriated. I nodded, and waited for him to say something.

"So," he started, putting his hand on my knee. Then, finding that awkward, he removed it. "You're just . . . sitting up here, real quiet?" I told him I was. "Must be real nice to be up here, where it's . . . quiet."

Again, his hand landed on my leg. This time, it made its way up to my thigh. Dr. Jones might have been an expert in African history, but subtle he was not. "What you doing there, boy?" he asked, when he reached my hip.

"Nothing," I told him. Despite myself, my boner was raging beneath the covers.

"You must be doing something, if you're making me do this." He pulled down the sheets. "I didn't come up here thinking I was going to do this. Must be you making me do it."

Maybe that kind of talk worked on other young guys, but I saw through it. His big hands pulled apart my legs, right below the knee. I didn't resist "You are a real pretty boy," he told me. "Real, real pretty. You got that creamy skin I like so much. Don't be scared, now." He talked like Barry White on a quiet storm radio station after midnight, and I have to confess that I was more aroused than frightened. "You got those pretty blue eyes, looking at me like that. You're making me do this," he said. "It ain't me, baby."

His lips were on my calf, my knee, my groin, and then he was pulling up my T-shirt and yanking on my briefs. I heard the crackling of their elastic as he yanked them down, hard. My barely-teen cock flopped out of the cotton and slapped audibly against my belly. "See what you gone and did?" he asked, breathing heavily on my twitching, hard flesh. "You made me do this."

Dr. Jones roughly grabbed my balls, almost making me yelp out in pain. Then his mouth engulfed my dick. I'd had sex by that point, a few times. Even in my limited experience I could tell he wasn't the best of my encounters. He used too much teeth; he created too much suction rather than let his mouth and lips travel up and down the shaft. He was simply too drunk to do much good.

But a blow job was a blow job, and I'd spent the evening waiting for the party to end so I could turn out my lights and masturbate and get to sleep. A stranger's mouth on me was even better than that. It didn't take very long before my young nuts were retracting and my dick started to pulse out a tiny load of semen. Dr. Jones swallowed it all. "Fuck," he said. "See what you did?"

He mumbled another sentence or two into my balls, as he nuzzled there. Then he was very, very still.

He was asleep, in fact.

Apparently no one from the party noticed he was missing for over an hour. Not until people were starting to drift off into the December night did my father come into my room. "Have you seen—?" he asked, and then saw himself what he was looking for. Dr. Jones, sprawled on his back, head lolling over the mattress edge, arms at his side, snoring loudly at the very bottom of the bed where I'd rolled him. "Gawrsh," said my dad. He rolled his eyes.

I shrugged, trying to make it seem as if I were used to adults passing out on my bed every night of the week.

"Was he a pain?" My dad dipped down and grabbed his colleague beneath the arms, trying to stand him to his feet. I told him that he wasn't, not really. "Come on, Lamont," he said, shaking the older man. "Time to go home."

Dr. Jones hadn't stirred up the entire time he'd slumbered, after that hasty blow job he'd given me. He opened his eyes in confusion, saw my dad, saw me, and then became very suddenly and drunkenly awake.

"It's okay," said my dad, gently escorting him from the room. "Come on. We'll get you some coffee."

And that was my one and only encounter with Dr. Jones. I got the impression he was never really sure of exactly what we'd done, if anything; his memory was probably hazy of those confused few minutes before he passed out. Whenever I'd pass him with one of my parents in the department offices, he'd blink at me and work his lips as if he wanted to say something, but couldn't quite decide what. I, in the meantime, would only smile in the same way I smiled at any of my parents' colleagues, without betraying what happened between us.

If he thought it was a fantasy—well, at least he had a hell of a good fantasy.

8 comments:

  1. What a great story. It was fun to reread. I love your historical posts from your past. As always, you describe the styles and trends of the era, like the professors hair, and those mayonnaise (and probably cream of mushroom soup) based appetizers, and you create both a sense of nostalgia and a feeling of 'wow I can't believe we used to think that was cool/hip/healthy.'
    As always, thanks for sharing.
    As the thanksgiving holiday approaches, let me say that I am thankful for you and your generosity in sharing your adventures. You've brightened many a day with your writing.
    Thanks!
    Another Rob

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  2. Haha! The way he tiptoed to your bed, I could picture it! I'm glad you're up and feeling better, and even back to writing and feeling like yourself again. Thank you for all of the enlightening and always thrilling reads!

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  3. Yes, did read this before, but this time around I focused on "....brick nineteen-fifties barbecue".

    We had one in our backyard as far back as I can remember, but I really don't remember anything ever being cooked on it. I do remember our old metal BBQ grill of the era. The only thing I remember the brick one being used for was the burning of trash. The grill shelf would be taken off and my dad would burn trash, later I would as I got older. That was back when you could do that, now a days we have spare the air days and can't use fireplaces.

    I hadn't thought of that in years, maybe that's why you started to write about this party again. It was only to repost the old one which had the brick bbq mentioned and take me down a trip down memory lane.

    Thanks.

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  4. Happy Thanksgiving Rob! I remember this story and it was fun to read it again. I think I would have freaked out if something like that had happened to me as an early teen -- I didn't even jerk off until I was 17!

    Thank you for all your blogposts over the years -- you always entertain and frequently inspire.

    Paul, NYC

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  5. Rob,
    Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful that you are better and that you continue to share your sex life, sense of humor and wonder talent for storytelling with us.
    Laban

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  6. wow. just..........wow. god i miss those kinds of parties. my dad and mom used to throw them all the time for their medical colleagues. i fondly remember the pitcher of whiskey sour in the fridge.

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  7. That was... disturbing. From one perspective... Did he molest you, just there? You didn't really say that you were accepting of his attentions.

    Then again, didn't see a clear no, either.

    While, in concept, getting a blowjob from a stranger is a hot idea, this story has some deeply worrying overtones especially w.r.t the whole "you're making me do this". Bullshit.

    But, if you were okay with that, great. :)

    If not? Yikes. :'(

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    1. I am sorry that you, like so many others, feel the need to need to portray the man's actions as 'molestation,' when I make it quite clear that they didn't affect me negatively at all. Insisting to someone that he was molested does more harm than the act itself in these cases.

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