The Hunger

Williamsburg, Virginia: 1981

I see the man’s eyes light up from the park’s far end, as my feet kick up whorls of dust from runnels of wheat-colored gravel alongside the road.

One moment, he’s just some anonymous fellow in tight jeans and a checkered jacket, relaxing on one of the park's two benches. Mid-thirties, sandy-haired, mustached, his jaw soft and his hairline receding, though in the back it hangs to his shoulders. The next, after he recognizes me loping toward him, he’s sitting up straighter, taller, crossing one denimed leg over the other. He smiles in my direction. Nods slightly. Fingers tapping with impatience, he observes as I dodge a tourist family on the sidewalk and sidle past the wooden fence into the rectangular enclosure.

Another man I don’t recognize occupies the bench at the park’s western end. He’s probably an out-of-towner, a balding, stolid suburban type trying to appear younger in sneakers a little too new and white and a puffy down vest that’s a little too orange. When I pass, the stranger leans forward, alert, hoping I’ll choose him.

My friend waits for me, though. He pretends otherwise, left arm stretched with practiced casualness across the bench’s back, legs crossed, head turned slightly away. Yet his eyes dart my way as I approach. I sit down not next to him, but at the bench’s far end, where I too can angle my body slightly away from his. We say nothing. No greeting, no remark on the weather. We don’t acknowledge the other with a glance or nod.

It’s long past the peak of this Saturday. Though the Colonial Williamsburg bus still roars to a stop at the corner not too far away, few visitors alight from its steps. In the golden light of this Virginia late autumn afternoon, diminishing numbers of tourists walk along Duke of Gloucester Street. DoG Street, we students abbreviate it. Some families straggle from the heart of the colonial village, worn from so much history and walking and in search of something for dinner. A young couple, bathed in a honeymoon glow, strolls hand in hand, unable to take their eyes off the other.

The two of us watch in silence at the newlywed pair entranced in their young love, clasped hands swinging lightly between them, until they vanish. I extend my right arm across the bench’s top. My hand dangles behind. My benchfellow shifts slightly, imperceptibly leaning closer. Behind the bench, I feel an electric shock when his skin brushes against mine. I clear my throat and look away from the man, but my long middle finger tickles one of his knuckles. From DoG Street, no one can spy how we touch, or how our fingers nuzzle and entwine. The thrill of caressing him so publicly remains our secret.

At least, it’s a secret until the stranger on the other bench leans back as if stretching. He cranes his neck to spy how my friend and I stroke the other’s fingertips. His lips compress into an annoyed moue; he lets out a sigh so exaggerated that a DoG Street jogger turns her head in concern. Upset at being excluded, he shoves his hands into his jeans and exits the park, striding in the direction of the squat brick construction at the corner.

He’ll find the action he seeks there. The men’s room there is the town’s cruisiest, active from early in the morning until it’s closed after dark. Cocksuckers crowd the three stalls that look directly onto a line of unpartitioned urinals, waiting for the next bus drop-off of Williamsburg tourists, directly outside the restroom doors. Daddies and grandpas will stream into the tiled chamber, unzip and whip out their dicks, and pee, observed through the cracks by cock-hungry cruisers. Once the tide recedes and those who merely needed to evacuate their bladders wash their hands and leave the enclosure, one or two might remain. At the urinal, they stand and stroke themselves to hardness, hoping that someone will open both their stall door and mouth to accommodate them. Come dark, the tourists are few and the restroom occupied only by those looking for action; when the Williamsburg custodians padlock the doors at nine or ten in the evening, the action moves behind the brick building, to this handkerchief-sized park behind.

Though we’re alone, my seated companion still looks away. I gaze at my sneakers. Two of his fingers tug at me, secretly, behind the bench. “You hungry?” I hear him ask nobody specific.

“Yeah,” I reply, to no one in particular.

A last squeeze. “Let’s go,” he suggests before he stands.

***

I am forever hungry. I’m six-foot-three and one hundred and five pounds, a beanpole lingering in that phase of adolescence in which my stomach is always growling. No amount of food seems to sate it. For much of high school, my mother half-wondered if I had a tapeworm.

In my first weeks of college, the problem of keeping fed has only been forced into sharper relief, for one simple reason: I am on my own for the first time in my life, and stuff is so damned expensive. I’m fortunate that my parents have scrimped and sacrificed to pay my tuition to this state school. That three thousand a year is all they can afford, though. My paternal grandmother has coughed up enough to cover the cost of housing for my freshman year, and for this year only.

Everything else is up to me.

It’s the cost of the everything else giving me ulcers. I discovered days after my arrival that textbooks are eye-poppingly overpriced. Even when I settle for the most battered used copies that aren’t actually missing entire sewn signatures, I’m already into the hundreds of dollars. The piano lessons I’ve promised to keep up threaten to chew up a significant part of my budget. For the first time I’m having to buy my own toothpaste and saline solution and shampoo and soap, not to mention clothing.

Several little part time jobs are what pay for these necessities. Thanks to the pity of the college president’s wife, I’m playing the organ for a tiny congregation of Christian Scientists; from there I’ve wheedled my way into an afternoon position sorting books and papers in their reading room. I’m working a few hours a week in the admissions office. I take whatever odd jobs I hear about.

But meals are on my coin, too. The college requires freshmen to enroll for a food services plan. I’ve opted for the less expensive that allows me two meals a day in the school’s cafeterias. At breakfast I’ll gorge and assure myself that a big morning meal will allow me to skip lunch without consequences. My stomach begins to growl and protest before eleven, though, and continues throughout the afternoon until the cafeteria opens for dinner at five.

I’m usually the first in line.

To me it seems that I’m the only student in constant anxiety over food. Charlie, my roommate who hails from the elite halls of the Phillips Exeter Academy, has never stepped foot in either of the school’s dining halls. He spends his seemingly bottomless allowance on beer, pizza, and sandwiches hot from the deli ovens. My friends keep enviable caches of junk food in their dorm rooms. When I visit for study sessions, they inevitably suggest fortifying our late-night cramming with strombolis from Paul’s Deli. This notion of being able to spring for food without thought for a budget astounds me, every time. I have to demur, claiming fullness, then watch with stomach pangs while they chow down.

There could be two easy solutions to my money and food woes: I could make easy cash doing sex work. Or I could dip into the savings account where lies the ill-gotten goods of my sex work during high school. So far, I’ve refused to do either.

From several years of experience I know that even in a tourist town like Williamsburg a lanky youth might make money with his body. It’s a town of hotels for assignations. Corny a tourist attraction as it is, it still attracts horny men wanting to sully their sheets. If I didn’t care to ply my sex trade so close to campus, any of the former clients to whom I’d said goodbye two months before would be happy to shell out for a weekend reunion. A round-trip bus ticket from the ‘Burg to Richmond costs less than fifteen bucks. I could spend a single Friday night with a happy client or two and return with enough cash to pay for next semester’s textbooks. Easy.

I won’t, though. Fitting in on this campus has been difficult enough. After years as a racial minority in my public school system, then as the only white boy in my all-Black high school, the last few weeks have been a crash course on assimilation. In an environment where I’m not the only fair-skinned kid with blond hair, I feel like an alien. I don’t listen to the same music. When my dorm mates express wild enthusiasm for The Police, it takes me a full week to figure out they’re not talking about the law enforcement for whom I keep an eye, every time I cruise. Shortly before the semester commenced, I had to consult Lisa Birnbaum’s The Official Preppy Handbook for guidelines on how I should be dressing—even though I know it’s intended as a parody.

College is supposed to homogenize me. I want college to make me normal again. I am so, so tired of being the odd boy out. If any of these bright, shiny faces surrounding me were to discover my queerness, I’d probably have to drop out. If anyone were to discover that I scored easy cash from exploiting it—well, at that point I’m not sure my life would be worth living.

I’m equally stubborn about dipping into my sex work savings. A couple of hundred bucks a semester would hardly put a dent in the total sum, but I worked hard for that money and don’t want to diminish it with stupid practicalities. Even accessing the funds would be a pain in the ass: I’d have to make a trip home, get the bank book from its hiding place, visit the local branch, hide the book again, then return to campus. Too many steps, and parents would dog me questions the entire while.

Then there’s something else. Maybe it won’t turn out to be a big thing. I’m probably complicating stuff in my own head again. But weekly, when I sit down in the campus library to pore over The Village Voice, I’ve been seeing rumors about a thing they’re calling gay cancer. I don’t live in Manhattan and the chances of me getting something like that are slim, but it’s still enough to give me pause.

So no. I won’t resort to sex work. Though it’s part of my past, I’m resolved no one will ever find out about it. I won’t trade sex for money again.

But hungry as I am, I might trade sex for food.

***

From his seat at my side, my friend watches me eat. “Good?” is all he says.

I nod with enthusiasm as I shovel grub into my mouth. The salisbury steak special—two hamburger patties and mashed potatoes smothered in brown gravy, with both green beans and applesauce as sides—has half-disappeared from my plate. I eat like a starved man. Or at least a starved kid who hasn’t had a bite to eat since seven-thirty that morning. My friend observes my frantic feeding with a smile. “How’s school?”

Again my head bobs up and down. He doesn’t need to hear about my woes with Charlie, or how painfully I’m sleep-deprived from living on a hall of kids who sleep during the day and party all night. I know better than to burden the guy with my insecurities about fitting in. He’s just making the kind of small talk murmured by everyone here in George’s Diner this evening.

Berk, his name is. At least, I think it might be. The first time we’d met in the park after dark, shortly after I started the semester, he’d told me that his name was Burke, but not spelled the usual way. Since he hasn’t told me exactly how it’s spelled, it could be Burk. Maybe it’s Burque, or an even more outlandish rendition. In my head, though, I think of him as Berk. We sit at the diner’s counter side by side like old friends, though there’s at least a two-decade gap in our ages. “How’s your mom?” I ask, remembering my manners in the midst of swallowing.

He lets out a barely audible grunt of frustration. “Gettin’ on my last nerve. The usual. You know how it is.”

The small talk over, I continue shoveling giant forkfuls into my piehole. This one dinner out will afford me an extra meal, one day this week. Already I’m strategizing: should I treat myself to lunch on Tuesday, when the cafeteria serves pizza? I love pizza, even a from a food services tray. Or should I save the punch on my card for a day when my midday hunger can’t contain itself? To my side, Berk chews his burger in deep meditation.

We don’t always eat at George’s, though I’m happy when we do. The portions here are large and the price he pays for my meal doesn’t strike me as an imposition. Sometimes he’ll drive me to a barbecue shack out near Waller Mill Reservoir. Others, we’ll hop in his pickup truck and drive up Richmond Road to the roast beef carvery, where we’ll sit camouflaged among seniors and tourists.

Once I’ve done inhaling what’s on my plate, he crosses fingers at the knuckles and smiles. “You want pie? Or should we get going?”

I want pie. But I don’t want to appear like I’m stalling, or that the food is my main reason for meeting him. “Your place?” I suggest. As if going back to my dorm room and roommate accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old man is really an option.

His blue eyes light up with pleasure. “Yeah,” he says. “My place.”

***

It’s not really his place. Berk lives in the basement of a ranch house, where worn shag carpet covers cold concrete. His furniture is castoffs—a sofa that looks comfortable but, when sat upon, seems to have been stuffed entirely with broken springs and old gears, a coffee table with one short leg propped up by a brick. Over by the washer, drier, and laundry tub is Berk’s bed, a twin made up with a chenille bedspread. Overhead, floor nails poke through exposed bare boards. Rather than use the bald overhead bulbs, Berk has turned on several smaller table lamps.

I sit in an old aluminum-framed chair from the fifties upon floral plastic cushions covered by with see-through plastic enclosures. Berk, his hands in his lap, perches cata-cornered next to me on the sofa, enduring his mother as she tousles her hair. “What are you boys doing tonight?” she asks in cheery tones.

Berk’s fair skin reddens. “Watching the game.”

“How nice.” Berk’s mom pushes a pair of thick spectacles up her nose and smooths down the polyester front of her housecoat. “Now, I’ve made some snacks for the two of you, and there’s juice and beer in the icebox upstairs.”

“Okay, Ma.” Berk’s annoyance sounds more adolescent than I am, myself. She pauses for a moment, looking over the two of us. Uncomfortable as I am at her presence, at least there’s no trace of suspicion or concern on her face. She really seems to think that her darling Berk has brought home one of his little friends to watch the game.

Berk gives me a glance intended to imply apology, once his mother finally creaks up the basement steps and shuts the door behind her. We both wait a moment, heads cocked, to make sure she’s really gone. At his nod, I climb on his lap, plant my ass firmly on the bulge in those tight jeans, and grind. Our lips meet.

“Just keep it quiet,” he says in a whisper, as if I don’t already know. Through the floorboards, I hear his mother padding around in her slippers. Berk switches on the black and white portable TV sitting on the coffee table and lets the sound drown out her footsteps. I keep an eye overhead as I slide down between his outstretch legs and begin to unzip him.

I’ll suck him swiftly and silently, the way he likes, while he suppresses his grunts and groans. He’ll come with a sigh, then zip up while I swallow his tangy load and assume my previous position on the chair. In another hour, we’ll repeat the act, wary all the while of being interrupted.

After he shoots, we hear a creak above. Berk shoves me off and scrambles to close his open pants, while I scramble for my shirt. “MOM!” he howls with fury at the top of his voice. “MOM! Are you LISTENING?!”

Hooking up with a man only five years younger than my dad, who still lives in his mom’s basement, isn’t ideal. It’s not even something I want to repeat more than once every couple of weeks.

But I get a meal out of it. So for now, I make it work.

***

Mark the accountant looks like a thumb. Unfortunate, but true. Or maybe, if I’m being more generous, a Weeble—one of those rotund egg-shaped toys weighted at its bottom so it never topples over. Heft alone doesn’t lend that impression, though he is a stout man. Viewed face on, he gives the impression of something pink, squat and round stuffed into a short-sleeved dress shirt, tan slacks, and a tie, with a belt around his middle barely keeping it all together. He sits across the table from me at Morrison’s, the cafeteria chain with a branch on Richmond Road. Through thick spectacles he stares with astonishment as I shovel down forkfuls of meatloaf, boiled corn, and mashed potatoes, then wash it down with a mouthful of Coke.

“Whoa there,” he says in mild rebuke. “Slow down a little. That food’s not going anywhere.”

I swallow, chastened, and take a moment to retrieve a niblet with my tongue from an upper recess behind a molar. I know these table manners would shame my mom, but my hunger is extreme today. Eleven hours have elapsed since breakfast with no food in the interim. Trying not to eat, as my grandmother might say, like a wild savage takes some effort. But for Mark’s sake, I make the effort.

Morrison’s is one of those old-folk’s establishments I’d never choose on my own. I dislike the humid intensity of the steam trays and the wetness of the food as it’s slopped onto a plate by an attendant from watery depths. The slow indecision of the seniors as they push their trays down the chrome railings feels like being stuck forever in an attraction line in Hell’s amusement park. Morrison’s is the place my parents want to take me to dinner when they visit, because it’s cheap.

But Morrison’s with Mark is a free meal, and my companion is fairly generous in what he allows me to pile on my tray. I don’t push with two entrees, much as I’m tempted, but he allows a side salad covered with plastic wrap as well as the corn and green beans, and didn’t protest when I added an extra corn muffin or a dark brown dessert that straddles the conceptual divide between pudding and brownie.

I take an approach of taking a bite, swallowing, then holding my hands together beneath the shiny tabletop while I ask him a question. How’s work? That’s nice. Are you looking forward to Thanksgiving? Okay. Do you go anywhere? Oh, you stay at home. Oh, your wife cooks. That’s nice, too. How long have you been—? Wow, that’s a long time.

I can’t say it’s nice, this conversation. All I want to do is inhale my food before it cools. But it feels civilized, talking and eating, instead of trying to consume everything as quick as humanly possible. It feels like dating. Almost. In my mind, dating is something forbidden me; two men don’t date. Such a thing is unthinkable. But if I could date, this probably would be what it felt like. Dating is for the straight folk; it’s their prolonged and endless way station of conventionality between meeting and fucking.

Married man Mark and I will fuck. Once I’ve scraped my bowl clean of the brown dessert, Mark and I will exit Morrison’s and hop into his brown sedan. We’ll drive through town until we reach the pebbly stretch of empty road known as the Colonial Parkway, and choose in one of the several pull-offs between Williamsburg and Yorktown. Enshrouded in absolute darkness, we will strip to the waist. Mouth upon mouth, mouth on nipple, we’ll commune with each other, breaking the silence only with moans and hushed exhalations. The heat of our bodies and breath will paint the glass with vapor; he’ll have to blast the defroster to clear faint hieroglyphs of swipes and fingerprints from the windshield.

Afterward, I’ll feel dirty. During our drive back to campus, I’ll stew in a hot puddle of shame. Not because I’ve submitted myself to a man with the general proportions of Humpty Dumpty. Not because a wife sits at home thinking her cheating husband is at an Elks meeting. I sweat and shiver because I have stepped so close to my personal line of no long whoring myself out for cash—and because I know that I’ll do it again and again, whenever I’m hungry.

***

I’m not so naive that I can ignore the transactional nature of exchanging meals for sex. I’m fully aware of the pro quo I’m expected to provide for a plateful of quid. Hustling is something I’ve promised myself I won’t do, though. In my mind, I think of prostitution as the absolute last resort because I’m ashamed to have done it all through my adolescence. There’s no cultural respect for sex work at this or any earlier point in my life. Everyone know it’s a service only the dregs of society provide. Whores, prostitutes, rent boys, hookers, hustlers, streetwalkers—upright folk spit these words with contempt. There’s no space for a culture of pride to develop around a collective of people who sell their bodies for cash.

Class bias is always a part of the condemnation. To sell one’s body for cash is to become part of the great unwashed, voluntarily to join an untouchable caste. It’s impossible for nice people to conceive of anything lower.

For four or five years I’ve played with fire, selling myself in the parks and on the Block and then taking on regular clients. In high school, when I was isolated and alone I never felt shame. Among a thousand peers who believe sex work to be a punishment, to be sinful, I begin to internalize humiliation. I’ve earned a pile of cash that I was never able to spend or enjoy for fear of attracting my parents’ attention. I’m ashamed to withdraw from the account where it sits. I’m ashamed to ask my parents for help. So I dance on this line, knowing deep down I’m whoring, yet telling myself what I do is adjacent to courting these men. Men who are married or who are mere children in adult bodies. Men whom I convince myself are all I deserve, because I can’t conceive of meriting better.

I cannot bring disgrace to my family with sex work. My secret life can’t be exposed at college. I’m a lower middle class white boy surrounded by my betters, desperately trying to fit in. Actual hustling could imperil this chance at a fresh new start.

So I prevaricate, and tell myself white lies about what I’m doing. And after each free meal, I swear it will be the last.

Tonight’s will be the last, in fact. Selling myself for Morrison’s Cafeteria is a new low.

I have to do better.

I have to reform.

***

A week later I’m sitting in the car with—I don’t remember this one’s name. Mike? Martin? He’s a Virginian Good Old Boy with only a few strands of fair, wispy hair left to comb over his pate. His stubby, moist hands paw my thighs and crotch all the way down I-64. “Can’t wait to get a taste of that,” he says with knowing certitude.

I smile and wait to shudder until I can turn my head and stare out the window. Whatever his name is, I don’t find this pickup from the park the least attractive. If anything, with his spit-slick lips and beady, almost sadistic eyes, he repels me. But he’s offered to take me to someplace called Chi-Chi’s in Hampton Roads, and I, who’ve never had any Mexican food beyond a Taco Bell Grande, am anxious to be fed.

So when he takes a hand off the steering wheel to twist my nipple savagely through my shirt and he mistakes my cry of surprise and pain for excitement, I don’t correct him. I deserve the hurt, for what I’m about to do for a meal.

Because my hunger has returned.

My hunger always returns.

***

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Behind the Story: Sleazy A

I was a slut in college.

I admit it up front. There’s no shame in slutting. The undergraduate years are ripe for experimentation, and if we follow the metaphor to its logical extreme—boy, did I lean into the scientific method. Hard.

I arrived to college in 1981 with a firm sense of my sexuality, and without any shame or guilt. But I wasn’t out. Nobody was out. The adults I slept with weren’t out. Living as an openly queer person might have been an option in bigger cities, but not in the little Virginia college town where I was incarcerated for four years.

None of the students admitted they were gay. Not one. I was a theater major, for god’s sake. The department that statistically should have harbored most of the campus LGBTQ population. While most of my male classmates in the department eventually waved the rainbow flag as adults, in college they were strictly and belligerently straight. Although I ended flat on my back in the beds and upon the desks of more faculty members than I could easily count—including the entire French language faculty (it's a point of pride)—none of them self-identified as gay. Most were married, or ‘bachelors,’ or so deeply shut down that when they would admit light to creep through that closet door, it only betrayed how warped and stunted they’d become.

Despite the denial, it was so easy to get man-on-man action. A short jaunt into Colonial Williamsburg’s tourist area could net you sex with out-of-towners in the public restroom at any time of day, and the tiny park in Merchant’s Square was a hotbed of activity after dark. On campus, two floors of the student center had cruisy restrooms—one for quick pickups, often with horny tourists, another for more extended, dirtier sessions. I could visit the campus library restroom any time after lunch to find both staff and student dick. The gym showers could be cruisy. And if you had a car, the Colonial Parkway offered opportunities for off-road nooky. (And for getting murdered.)

In a quiet corner of the fine arts building was a telephone booth—for you younger folk, that’s a small, quiet room with a very large iPhone bolted to the wall—that after receiving a fresh coat of white paint, mysteriously and rapidly became a beta test for Craigslist personals. Guys looking for sex would scrawl in pencil or marker a brief description of what they wanted. Later, there might be a response with a suggestion of a date and time, and a place for an liaison. Others would counteroffer or write their own brief personal ad. Eventually, that phone booth was a network of cross-chatter assignation graffiti covering all four walls. Sure, there was always the risk of showing up and getting fag bashed, but a smart cookie might keep his wits about him and hook up with one of the weight room jocks, or a frat boy, or one of the sexy geeks with pale skin from spending all their times in the computer science basement lab, feeding punch cards into the mainframe.

We didn’t have apps or browsers or internet, but damn, if we wanted it, we sure got laid.

Last spring, when I was asked to contribute to an upcoming anthology of college-aged gay erotica, I was initially flattered, but dubious. The more details I heard, though, the more intrigued I became. The book was to be released as an actual physical paperback, styled to look like vintage pulps of a previous era. The collegiate theme itself would be retro, with stories set before 1990, at which point digital hookups became more common and then the norm. At the time the anthology was pitched to me, I was exhausted coming off a semester of teaching an unusually heavy workload. I was looking for a writing project that might be fun and completely unrelated to anything related to my workshops. So, I took a leap and said yes.

I came up with the idea for the long short story/short novel Sleazy A in the space of a couple of hours. I envisioned an inhibition-free college sophomore having a picaresque adventure in a single autumn weekend of 1981: one encounter that was nothing but unbridled lust, another with a deeply-closeted and ultimately fucked-up man, and then finally stumbling into an opportunity for a sweeter, but no less hotter, romance.

A lot of Sleazy A is rooted in autobiography. I set the action at my alma mater. The story’s hero, Wick, is perhaps a bolder physical idealization of myself at that age, but I think I remained true to the free-wheeling, sometimes naive mindset I had at the time. 

Wick’s French professor lover is based on the married French professor for whom I would kneel down anytime he looked my way, all my undergraduate years. He was a married man with two very young children; he’d brazenly bring the whole family to the ice cream shop where I worked, pretend not to know me while he bought cones for the kiddies and a sundae for the wife, then squeeze my hand with meaning when I’d give him his change. I really didn’t care about his home life. For four years he was a joyous and uncomplicated friend and provider of big dick, and I was sad never to see him again when I graduated. (I heard from a reader of the blog, once, who’d had a similar relationship with the man, after my time at the school.)

The deeply weird character of M.J., a man so paranoid about being seen with me that he’d make me duck and take cover in the parking lot of his apartment complex, is based on an economics professor whom first I dated, and then later I was stalked by. The meltdown that M.J. has in the story actually happened, and led to my first relationship break-up. Not included in Sleazy A is the back story that M.J. and my dad were college classmates, and M.J. carried a huge animus toward my dad for some mysterious reason. (My father was always a giant affable Golden Retriever of a man, so it’s impossible to conceive of anything he might have done in college to inspire that kind of long-lasting enmity. Also, when I once innocently asked my dad about M.J. and even pointed to his photo in an old college yearbook, my dad had zero recollection of him.) The one-sided feud between them gave any dad/son roleplay I did with M.J. a particularly pointed, yet not-unerotic edge.

And I did meet a sweet red-headed boy named David at M.J.’s place. Here is where memoir and fiction diverge. In Sleazy A, the characters of Wick and David meet and enjoy a sweetly romantic afternoon in a deserted amphitheater at the back of campus. The amphitheater is real. From the 1940s through the 1970s, my college affiliated itself with an outdoor summer patriotic historical pageant/extravaganza called The Common Glory. Actors like Jonathan Frakes and Goldie Hawn and Linda Lavin and Glenn Close earned paychecks from the thing before they made it big. The pageant shut down after the Bicentennial. The president of the Kappa Alpha fraternity used to take me to the abandoned dressing rooms for some very unromantic (but hot) fucking.

In real life, David indeed invited me to meet him at the amphitheater. When he asked, it was very clear he was interested in me, romantically. I waffled over going, but unlike Wick, I ultimately chose not to. I was attracted to David, yet anxious about the implications of getting involved with another student. Older men were my known quantity. I could count on them to keep their mouths shut about my sexuality and our meetings. They had bigger reputations at stake than I. My peers, though, I simply didn’t trust. I’d had other kids attempt to entrap me into admitting my queerness in high school, and my roommate at the time was sexually harassing me in the most painful ways. David felt like a too much of a risk. I chickened out.

David and I longed for each other for the rest of the year. Our paths crossed in the theater department when we were in two different one-act plays playing the same nights, one after the other. Backstage, we would smile wryly at the other from a distance and stare, while I’d ponder what might have been. In the spring, we sat near each other in a seminar on seventeenth-century British poetry. It was torture. All through the metaphysical poets, I was too distracted with longing to listen, or study. As I’ve written about before, at semester’s end, David spoke to me for the first time, after our final class. He pressed into my hand a smooth rock. For a long time it was a gift that puzzled me. One year, much later, I happened to get the rock wet. The water drew out from its surface beautiful, unseen colors and patterns. While staring at the transformation, I understood why it had been his gift. It may have been a reference to one of the poets we’d studied, that semester...I don't know. 

I still have the rock.

David was two years ahead of me, though, and graduated that semester. He moved to New York City to pursue acting. Three years later, he was dead from HIV/AIDS.

It’s been difficult, over the breadth of my life, to grapple with how much the AIDS pandemic has stolen. For so much of it, I was in denial.

I denied it was happening, until I couldn’t.

I denied it was taking people from me, then denied it could take many people from me…until I couldn’t.

I denied, in the face of what I fully expected to be certain death with no hope of a cure, that the pandemic was paralyzing me. That it was making my dreams smaller and smaller. Until, awash in ruin and afraid to hope for any future, I no longer could.

David’s wasn’t the first AIDS-related death in my life. However, his was my first loss of one of my peers, of someone close to my own age for whom I’d had feelings. His was the first death that forced me to me acknowledge that the flood in which I and my fellows were drowning was irrefutably real. No matter how pretty someone might be, or how sweet, or how young, or how beautiful their art—no matter how well educated or beloved a person could be or how far from one of the big coastal cities he lived—he was not immune from dying to a disease at which the public and government merely shrugged. I turned seventeen in 1981, when the New York Times sounded the first warning bell for the virus that would consume so many. I was barely twenty-one when I learned of David’s death.

The last, fictional chapter of Sleazy A is my idealistic attempt to imagine what might have been had I the courage to meet David when he wanted. Yet from the distant future, as an author I also wanted to wrap my protective arms around these two kids. They meet in the very last months before all hell would break loose—the final weeks before all innocence would evaporate. I wanted the fictional Wick and David to experience their love outside the shadow of what was to come. And in the story's conclusion, I wanted to shelter and preserve them in their romantic cocoon, forever suspended in time among the twinkling amphitheater lights.

In a very real, sense, though, I wanted to honor the real David, who died too soon. Nearly a half-century on, I remember and mourn him as a beautiful, red-headed boy who had so much life ahead of him. Like all victims of that ongoing pandemic, he didn’t deserve his early death. In this story, at least, parts of him—his essential sweetness, the sincerity of his gaze, his yearning for another boy—can live on.

Art’s essential triumph is wringing redemption and even joy from the stuff of tragedy. I truly hope Wick’s adventures paint a lively picture of an era vanished forever.

Sleazy A and the anthology in which it’s included, Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men, is available today. I hope you’ll take the opportunity to purchase a copy to read not only my story, but as well the horny tales of other fine pornographers.

The Other Woman

I think I’ve mentioned before in these pages that during my college career I managed to have sex with the entire faculty of the French department. Not too impressive a feat, really, since there were only three of them at my little college.

The first of my conquests was the well-hung older professeur who would find me on campus, graciously ask if I cared to take a walk with him, and then escort me either to his office or to the nearest quiet men’s room so that I could go down on his enormous cock. The third of them was a scrawny little bearded queen who picked me up in Williamsburg’s one and only cruisy park, which was more a tablecloth-sized yard of grass that technically was only a park by the fact that it had a bench and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation hadn’t yet paved it over to make way for a Olde Tyme Ice Creame Shoppe.

It’s the second of the three that I’m thinking about today. In one of those strange coincidences, the two of us met in one of the cruisy restrooms at the university where my parents were teachers, a good sixty-five miles away from where he taught and where I went to school. During the spring break of my freshman year I was whoring around in the library on my parents’ campus; the second-floor men’s room was one of several hot spots on campus. I’d already sucked off a couple of guys when the outer door creaked open and someone strode across the room and occupied the stall next to mine. The guy had enormous feet. I wear size eleven, which is already boat-like enough. These had to be at least size sixteens. When the foot closest to mine began tapping, I anxiously dropped my hand and let my fingers dangle invitingly at the bottom of the metal divider.

As I’d hoped, he knelt down and thrust his already-hard cock under the stall. It was long—about eight and a half inches. Skinny—no where near as thick as mine. The knob at the end was a fierce red and was uncut, which in Virginia in the nineteen-eighties was something of a novelty. I knelt down, grabbed his balls in my hands, and gobbled him down.

I didn’t get much time on his cock because someone interrupted us. One of those trolls who wouldn’t go away. Neither one of us wanted to play with this guy lurking just outside the stall doors, so we passed some notes on toilet paper back and forth, negotiating what we should do. For some reason I kept the notes until about a decade ago, when I discovered that they’d more or less disintegrated into the pulp from which they came. I remember his dark and angular handwriting still, though, in which he begged me to go somewhere else with him on campus where he could fuck me.

He didn’t really have to twist my arm. We met in front of the library. He seemed to like the looks of me, though his appearance came as something of a startlement. Beale was a tall and angular man with a head of thick and fiery red hair that he kept in an unfortunate variation of the infamous bowl cut. It looked as if someone had taken a copper kettle and shoved it over the top of his skull. Also noteworthy were the glasses he had to wear for his poor eyesight. Those lenses had to be about an inch thick, and they were stuck in some of the ugliest horn-rimmed frames I’ve ever seen. From about the bridge of his nose to his large feet, Beale was an attractive and well-dressed man. It was just the top six inches it was difficult to look at.

Those weren’t the inches that had caught my interest, though. I decided to overlook Beale’s physical flaws and took him to the basement of a nearby classroom building. There we fucked uninterrupted. It was afterward, when I was pulling up my pants and preparing to make a quick getaway that he told me he was from out of town. He taught at the college down I-64, but he came to Richmond some weekends and maybe next time he did, he could give me a call and we could fuck again? I was charmed (and still horny) enough that I confessed I went to the very same college down the road.

This exchange started my mostly amicable and casual relationship with Beale. Unlike the big-dicked French professor who would only fuck me in his office or in a restroom, and unlike the prissy French professor who fucked me in the park, Beale actually preferred to have me over to his place when we had sex. Usually he’d pick me up on a Saturday morning. I’d stuff my backpack full of my homework and a change of clothes and he’d swing by the dorm. I’d get a little thrill from the risk that maybe someone I knew might see me getting into the car of an older man; he’d get a boy twenty-five years his junior in his front seat and in his bed.

Beale lived in the second-floor flat of an old farmhouse outside of town. For much of our Saturdays we’d sit quietly on his sofa, sometimes back to back, sometimes legs or feet touching. He’d grade his students’ homework. I’d do my reading. In the afternoon we’d retire to his bed and suck and fuck. Then he’d make dinner for me, and we’d watch television and screw some more in the evening, when he’d take me home. Once in a while he’d invite me to stay over. I usually agreed.

I never thought of Beale as my significant other in any sense of the word. He was a little startling enough in appearance—at least from the nose up—that I didn’t particularly want to be seen as his arm candy. With those Coke-bottle glasses off, though, and the straight bangs of his red hair brushed off his face, he wasn’t quite as horrifying. Just kind of cross-eyed. So no, we weren’t lovers, exactly. But I did like his company, and I looked forward to the Saturdays when he’d call and ask if I wanted to spend the weekend with him.

Then it all came crashing down, early in my junior year. I was walking across campus when Beale accosted me out in front of his department’s building, right as I was about to cross the Sunken Garden that’s an architectural feature of the campus. “I have to talk to you,” he said in a hushed voice. “I have crabs.”

Innocent that I was, I thought he meant I have crabs as in I’m going to make some delicious crab cakes fried in butter tonight. Want some? So I just stared at him blankly. “Crabs,” he repeated. “They’re a kind of sexually-transmitted lice. Did you give me crabs? No, of course you didn’t.”

Damn right of course I didn’t. I’d never had lice in my life. Sexually-transmitted lice sounded horrible, like something he’d made up in an attempt to scare me. I continued to stare at him blankly.

“It’s just that my boyfriend came down with crabs and he blamed me, and then I checked myself and I have them all over.” He was still keeping his voice down so that passing students and faculty and tourists wouldn’t hear. “Then he said that maybe that little whore I was cheating around with gave them to me. He meant you.”

Now, maybe over time I’ve boiled down in my memory his speech so that is sounds a lot more unpleasant than it really was. But of three things I was pretty immediately sure. One, he’d just told me I could have some kind of monster pubic lice. Two, he had a BOYFRIEND that I’d never known about. Three, that BOYFRIEND had just called me a whore.

So after I spent a little time processing all this information, I loftily intoned, “Please inform your boyfriend that I did not give you lice,” and stalked off. Then I never saw Beale again. (I saw him around campus. We just didn’t fuck.)

I was still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened to me as I crossed the Sunken Garden. It’s a wide-open space that on that day was just filled with sunshine. So I had good light when I looked down on my arm and saw something very small and insect-like crawling there. I flicked it off, and fled to the nearest men’s room.

When I had my pants down in the stall, I examined my crotch as best I could. To my dismay, I could spy several small blotches among the blond hairs. I had crabs. Not a lot of them—in retrospect I know now that if Beale and his boyfriend had them all over, it was infinitely more likely that he’d given them to me.

And this was in the days before the internet. I had absolutely zero resources to deal with the infestation. I was too mortified to go hunting in the library for information. I couldn’t call my parents and say “Hey do you know any remedies for crab lice? Oh no reason. Just wondering.” I didn’t have friends who’d know. I didn’t have a doctor and didn’t want to go to the campus clinic with anything so embarrassing.

But somehow I managed to figure it out on my own. I scraped off the full-grown lice that had burrowed into my skin. I noticed that there were adhesive little globes on some of my pubic hairs that probably were eggs; those either I detached with my fingernails, or plucked out the pube entirely and disposed of it in the toilet. Three times a day under a strong light I examined my crotch and thighs and scraped and pulled and felt like a dirty, dirty whore. I swore a vow—a sacred vow, witnessed by God himself—that I’d never have sex again. I felt grim and polluted.

My infestation was so light, though, that I’d pretty much rid myself of it completely in about four days. I kept my legs together and my pants up for another week while I nervously watched for more signs of the pesky little critters, paranoid at every itch. By the end of the month, though, I was so horny that I was once again throwing caution to the winds and putting out for anyone who stepped up behind me in the park at night. So much for that sacred vow, right?

My first time being The Other Woman in someone’s sordid affair came complete with my first STD and a sense of shame so complete I wanted to hide my head beneath the blankets for an entire month. Hey thanks, Beale!

Making a Difference

One morning last week I was in a terrible mood. Oh, it doesn’t matter why. To be entirely honest, I’m not sure I really remember. But it was only nine in the morning and already I’d boarded the commuter train to Grumpytown and was chugging full-steam ahead to Peevish Junction.

There are two ways that a day like this can go. Either I can wallow in my cantankerousness and stay inside my head all day, reliving whatever petty slight has chucked me on the jaw. (And to be honest, sometimes this is the path I choose.) Or else I can get out of that truculent mental space and back on a more normal track. Last week, I decided consciously to attempt the latter.

Over the years, I’ve found the most effective way to lift my mood in these situations is simply to do something kind for someone else. It can be something as simple as buying a gift for a loved one, doing an unexpected good turn for a neighbor, or going out of one’s way for a total stranger. I can't claim it's unadulterated altruism, but hey, I’m totally okay with having selfish motivations mixed up in doing something nice for someone. The other person still gets something good and unexpected and kind that they wouldn't have otherwise. And even if I don’t get my bad mood erased, at least I get to think about someone else other than myself for a change.

So there I was last week, trying to think of something to do that could benefit someone else. I did a little extra housework at home so that my other half wouldn’t have to. I called up a friend I know who doesn’t have a car and asked if there were anywhere he needed to go that morning. Then I sat down in front of the computer, logged onto my Facebook account, and a perfect opportunity dropped into my lap.

I thought I’d written about this long-past encounter at some point in my blog, but I can’t find a record of it. Years ago in college, there was a cruisy men’s room in the campus center. The library used to get a lot more traffic from men and boys looking for quick sex, but the campus center had a large restroom with a creaky door and a convoluted layout that was perfect for cruisers. Even better, next door to the restroom was the television room—which back in the early nineteen-eighties was only ever tuned to MTV. In those days, the network only played music videos. Many were the happy afternoons that I’d spend in that room watching Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Thompson Twins and listening for the creak of the restroom door to tell me that a potential cock to suck had arrived.

There was one summer in which I was working in Williamsburg and living in an apartment with two other students. I didn’t like either of my roommates. It was the year in which another former roommate had spread false rumors that I’d raped him (which I've written about before, here and here), so I’d had a fucking miserable two semesters and spent most of that summer feeling friendless and alone. I spent a lot of solitary time in that MTV room, over those hot months.

One day another student strolled by the open doorway of the TV room and stared in at me. I recognized him from around campus. He was one of those guys known as a total jock, the sort of dark-haired, dark-eyed prep who strolled around campus perpetually wearing sweatpants and a well-worn rugby short with fraternity letters over the nipple. Not only was he a frat boy, but he was the president of his chapter. And he had a rockin’ porn stache that approached the magnificence of that worn by John Oates during his heyday. Considering that we Southern boys were all clean-shaven and baby-faced in those days and only had about three people in the entire undergraduate population who had grown any sort of facial hair, this guy was an exotic.

I stared back at him. He lingered in the doorway for a moment, then disappeared. I heard the creak of the door, and seconds later, I followed.

I met him in the toilets. He stood up and stroked his cock for me and checked me out over the top of the marble partition. I opened his stall door, got on my knees, and sucked his fat cock for him. He grunted in appreciation, and riffled his fingers through my hair. All I could think at the time was Damn, a frat president likes me being his cocksucker! So when the guy yanked my face off of his dick, tilted my head back, and asked if I wanted to take a drive with him, of course I said yes.

He took me out to his truck and drove me down Jamestown Road in the direction of the lake that lay at the back of the campus. Decades before, the drama department had put on a historical pageant for tourists every summer at an amphitheater by the lakeside. Goldie Hawn had been in it—Linda Lavin, too. The pageant was long-gone, but the amphitheater was still there, overgrown and disused. The guy stopped his truck, led me to one of the old dressing rooms, yanked down my pants, and bent me over. Then he used spit to lube up his cock and he shoved himself in me.

The fuck was hot. I had a lot of fucking in college and I remember this one better than just about any of the others. It wasn’t romantic, or particularly passionate, but in sheer animalistic sex it was tops. The frat boy grabbed my hips and let me fucking have it. There were dressing room mirrors on the floor that reflected our copulation twice, four times, eight times, dozens of times over. As I braced myself against an old dressing table and let my head hang while he banged me like I was a bitch in heat, I could see our images over and over, in every direction.

After he shot his load in me, he knelt down and helped me draw up my pants. Then he indicated I should follow him back to the truck, so he could drive me back to the campus center. He didn’t say a word to me on the drive back, but as we drove, he steered with his left hand and put his right on my knee, and held it there the entire time. I think it was this part of the encounter that made me remember it so vividly in the years after. I’d spent months feeling shunned and ignored and shunted to the margins by just about everyone, but here was a total (and handsome) stranger who not only found me suitable to fuck, but who made me feel human again simply by putting his hand on my leg.

I never saw him again. But I never forgot it.

Back to last week, and my bad mood. I turned on my computer and was looking through my college’s gay and lesbian alumni page, only to see the frat boy’s name there. He’d just joined the group. And I thought to myself, You know, one of the nicest things I could do today is to let this guy know he made a difference to me, one hot summer afternoon. It seemed as if the universe was wanting me to make that right, to settle that debt with thanks. So I did.

I wrote him and explained that we hadn’t been social in college, but that I’d been an admirer of his and that he’d given me one of the best afternoons of my life, and that even if he didn’t remember me, I owed him a great deal of thanks. I didn’t go into detail.

I was surprised when he wrote back. I’d expected the thanks to be another that went floating into a great unacknowledged void. I was a little surprised, though, when he instantly suggested that we’d perhaps met in the campus center restroom. I don’t think he recalled the incident at all, or me, when I described it to him in a follow-up note. But I was able to let him know that no matter what he thought about himself back in those college days, or no matter what had happened to him since, I remembered him with fondness and gratitude, and immeasurable affection.

God damn, he wrote back. You were worried I wouldn’t respond. But you made my day. He told me that I humbled him with how deeply our simple encounter affected me. Then he wondered how many people he and I—and everyone, really—affected without really ever knowing about it.

And you know, after that, my bad mood evaporated. How could it not?

I know so many people who never speak of their affection for someone; we should be telling them when they’re in our lives. We should cherish people and mark the moments of grace they provide with thanks and praise and gratitude. Instead, we let these important moments pass and vanish unremarked. Sometimes the universe drops opportunities in our path to rectify the situation months, years, or even decades later. You need to repay this debt, it tells us, and provides us the means and the happenstance to bring it to fruition.

We hang back and balk, though. Sometimes it’s from fear. Sometimes it’s from stupid pride. But our time on this earth is limited; we none of us have unlimited chances. Sometimes, without knowing, we have remarkably few left.

I don’t care what your mood is today. Tell someone—someone other than myself—what a tangible difference he or she has made in your life. Let someone from your past know how much he meant to you, and how glowingly you honor his memory. Apologize to the person you’ve forgiven and never let know; forgive the person who needs it. Reach out to someone who hasn’t heard from you in a long time, if ever.

Let people know they’ve made a difference.

Make your time here worthwhile.

M. J., Part Four

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part Three.)

 After that trip in the early spring of 1983 which his car broke down outside a historic Virginia plantation, it didn’t take me long to figure out what made M. J. tick. The economics professor I’d been dating for most of one semester and the better part of another really only came to life sexually when I showed him contempt.

Unfortunately, we were at a stage of our relationship when that was all too easy for me to do.
For months we’d had a quiet, respectful, and timid relationship in which he’d given me gifts, taken me out to places where the menus hadn’t seen a refreshing since the nineteen-fifties, and subjected me to silent, boring sex under the covers of his bed with the lights off. When his car had ground to a stop and I’d had to handle matters because he was too preoccupied with fretting and fuming and stomping around his econo-box, I’d snapped at him. I’d stomped off to call a tow truck without consulting him. I’d mocked him in front of the tow truck driver. Probably most damning of all, I’d eaten his share of the sympathy cookies the nice lady with the telephone had given me. Right in front of his face. Without even a pretend offer to share.

The result? When we got back to his apartment, M. J. had practically assaulted me in the hallway, he was so overcome with desire and need. When I was easy and pliant, he’s been reserved and a bit clammy. The minute I showed him exactly how little I thought of him, he couldn’t get enough of me.

The following weekend he showed up with a box from the small department store in Merchant’s Square. He gave it to me with an air of expectation, as we sat in the parking lot of the gymnasium at the back of campus. I opened up the green cardboard lid, pulled back the tissue paper, and found myself staring at about three pounds of some of the ugliest wool ever knitted into a sweater. It was of a hue so grape-purple that if I ever pulled it over my head—and there was no way in hell I ever planned to—I would’ve been greeted with cries of Hey! Kool-Aid!

“What is this?” I asked him, appalled.

“It’s a sweater,” he said. “I thought you’d like it.”

“I’m not wearing this,” I told him. “Sorry.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because it’s hideous.”

He stared at me, then lunged. We ended up having sex in the back seat, right there in the parking lot.

For a couple more weeks we followed a similar pattern. I finally balked at going to the cafeteria for senior citizens on Richmond Road where all the food was boiled to within an inch of its life before being slopped into the steam trays, and we ended up banging like beasts parked behind the dumpster in back. I told him that if I had to listen to him talk about Reaganomics one more time, I’d fucking blow a gasket, and I ended up getting skull-fucked in a restroom along the Colonial Turnpike at eleven at night.

There was just some twisted part of M. J. that flared to life when I was nasty to him. That incident with the tow truck, though, had tipped him far enough out of my favor that really all I could see were his faults—the tasteful yet ridiculous and unwearable presents he gave me, the old lady kisses he gave me under normal circumstances, the clammy-fish touch of his skin against mine, the weird mole on his penis. The more I focused on those faults, the less I wanted to see of him, and the meaner I was.

Eventually I just stopped seeing him altogether.

That was the idea, anyway. He called one Friday night to tell me he’d be picking me up at our usual time, and I told him that I had something else to do. I didn’t feel compelled to make up a bullshit excuse. I didn’t feel I had to soften the blow that way. I just had something else to do, I said, and thanked him and hung up. The weekend after, I did the same thing. He didn’t even call the third week. I felt secure he’d got the message.

My big problem in my youth was an inability to conceive of confrontation. I’d do anything to avoid it. But here’s the thing: if I’d sat M. J. down and told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him any more, there would’ve been an argument and then a couple of days of hurt feelings, but very likely it would’ve been over and I could’ve moved on. My method of breaking-up-by-avoidance dragged out for the rest of the semester, and caused months of pain and annoyance and outright anger.

Because what M. J. started doing was to stalk me around campus. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he’d decided that me ignoring him was my attempt to fan the flames of his desire for me; the more he was denied and rebuffed, the more desperately he had to have me.

So when I would turn around and see him following me across the campus, I would roll my eyes and go back to my walking and pretend he wasn’t there—though it was hard to miss him following behind me like a sad, whipped puppy with a loyalty complex. I hoped he’d just ‘get the message.’ He seemed to interpret my scorn as a promise the most explosive sex of his entire life if he’d persist and stalk me harder.

Which he did, relentlessly. He followed me to classrooms at night where I was studying with friends, who would see his bearded face peeking in the door and announce that some weirdo kept looking in. He would follow me to the library on weekends, and stand in the stacks to stare at me mournfully until one of my study buddies would point him out to me. When I was working at the ice cream store where I earned my income, he’d sit in his car, parked in a space outside the big plate glass windows, staring holes through me while I pretended he wasn’t there.

I passed him off for a while as a friend of my parents—but it became pretty obvious, even to my oblivious companions, that no college kid really talked to his parents’ friend that much. They wanted to know why he was following me so much, all the time, all around the clock. They wondered if he was that way about me, a thought they’d usually accompany with titters and embarrassed glances. It had to end.

Eventually it did, in a hissing match outside the door of a classroom in the business building where I was studying right before final exam time. My friends had noted that ‘that weird guy’ was outside again, which caused me to slam shut my books and stomp outside to have it out with M. J. once and for all.

I didn’t want to see him again, I told him. He had to stop following me. He was embarrassing me. My friends all called him ‘that creepy old guy.’ My supervisor at work was on the verge of calling the cops because she thought he was a flasher. All the frustration of several weeks of stalking came spilling out of my lips.

M. J. looked up at me—he was a short man—and said in a plaintive voice, “But I love you!”

And I just shook my head at him, turned on my heel, and stomped away. That was the end of it, for real this time. I never spoke to him again, never saw him. I don’t know what happened to him, other than that his year-long position ended and he moved on to some other university.

When I look back on my life, there are plenty of incidents of which I’m not proud. That encounter nears the top of the list. Rather than hurt someone just a little, in a straight-forward way, I dragged out the pain and the suffering for weeks, and then topped it off as spectacularly as possible by packing in as much hurtfulness into a couple of minutes as I could muster. I still hear that cry of astonishment—But I love you!—in my nightmares. It haunts me.

M. J. didn’t love me. He might have convinced himself that he did, simply because it justified all the relentless pursuit in which he indulged when I started spurning him. Even when we had been dating and engaging in zestless sex, he’d never mentioned love, or any emotion stronger than a hunger for cafeteria fare or peanut soup. I didn’t love him, either. Toward the end, I didn’t even like him.

He still deserved better, though. If we learn more from the ways we err than the ways we succeed, my time with M. J. was an education. If I could, I’d tell him I was sorry. Sorry for being a know-it-all of eighteen; sorry for being so untaught about the ways people communicated outside of the bedroom. Sorry for being a total dick, certainly.

Neither of us were particularly what the other was looking for. We could have found some common ground, however, if I’d been a little less inept at meeting a challenge head-on. I wish I’d been man enough then to try it.

M. J., Part Three

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part Two.)

Over the several months I was seeing M. J. , the professor I’d picked up in the campus restrooms during my sophomore year, it wasn’t the presents that kept me going back. Good lord, certainly not. His offerings of clothing were so poorly-chosen that they inadvertently bordered on being calculated insults in a cardboard gift box.

It wasn’t for the sex, either, those grandmotherly fumblings beneath the covers that left me feeling dirtier and a lot less satisfied than when they began. It wasn’t for the company, which mostly was stiff and formal and slightly uncomfortable.

It wasn’t exactly because he was a professor and I was a student and we were each other’s forbidden fruit. I’d slept with a lot of faculty at that point (and would continue to do so all through college and graduate school), so our relationship wasn’t exactly a novelty.

No, mostly I kept going back because I’d never had anyone before who took me on actual dates. The men I saw tended to skip the dinner and the wooing and skip straight to taking me home and fucking the daylights out of me. Though instead of ‘home’ we’d usually use a toilet stall or a dark space behind a park tree.

Although the sex M. J. and I had wasn’t good, or even really competent, I liked being able to think of myself as dating someone. I liked being able to say, without divulging many details, that I was in a relationship. M. J. and I had never professed any affection for each other beyond “I like you in that sweater” (him) or “Thanks for dinner. I’ve never had Beef Wellington before” (me, and I never would again), but technically we were dating. I clung to that for a little while in my youth as a badge of honor.

I also liked the fact that I was whoring around with one of my dad’s old classmates. I had nothing against my dad, but at eighteen I was still adolescent enough that putting out for someone he’d once known—and who didn’t like him for some mysterious reason—tickled my rebellious underbelly a little. It was a private defiance, and not the kind of thing he’d ever find out about. But in a juvenile way, I thought I was Sticking It To the Old Man, and it gave me a little thrill.

By and large, though, M. J. and I stuck for a good three months to a repetitive cycle of Friday night gifts, dinners, and then a night at his apartment. And then one warmer day, he asked if I wanted to go on an outing with him.

It was cold enough that I remember wearing one of his gift sweaters—a white cotton turtleneck with a neck hole so small that pulling it over my face exfoliated more cells than a strong acid peel, and left me red and raw for the rest of the day. But it was also warm enough that the sweater was all I really needed in the weak sunshine of the late winter. I would guess that it was about March. And M. J. suggested we visit a plantation that was only a couple of dozen miles from Williamsburg.

That sounds lovely and romantic!, a good number of you are thinking. I was definitely not. I spent most of my childhood years visiting every damned plantation and Civil War battlefield within a five-state radius of home, and when you consider that I grew up in the former capital of the Confederate States of America, that’s a lot of damned plantations and battlefields. Nor did I trespass on these sacred grounds with an awestruck face and a sense of wonder at the scope of history I was privileged to relive thanks to the preservation efforts of historians like my parents. No, I had stomped around with a constipated look on my face and many long sighs of suffering. So when M. J. suggested we have a jolly afternoon’s outing to a plantation, my reaction was more like, Oh, fuck.

But I knew how to swallow my dislike of American historical sites by then. I told him that sounded dandy, and together we drove off in his car on a sunny Saturday afternoon to our destination.

If you’ve never seen a Virginia plantation, you’ve probably a picture in mind. A bucolic vision of a genteel country mansion with Palladian columns and classical revival proportions, facade whitewashed and gleaming, set back in a verdant paradise of greenery, where in times past gentleman farmers sipped mint juleps with their hoop-skirted wives on the verandah beneath the bougainvillea. Let me disabuse you of the notion. This place was no fucking Tara.

It was a two-room shanty on a rolling bank of weeds and dead waist-high grass, located along a particularly smelly turn of the James River, where raw sewage from the Hopewell wastewater plant seemed to be collecting and stagnating. There was no bougainvillea. There were snarled black cherry trees and wild sumacs, both of which I’d always been taught were weeds. And there was a dispirited woman handing out a slip of paper with the plantation’s history printed on it (free) and selling souvenirs (overpriced) on the front porch.

Touring the place didn’t take that long, but we gave our level best to make it last. With low spirits we peered into the plantation house, which had been furnished with chairs that had weathered for decades in someone’s barn and an old spinning wheel. We looked at the gift shop’s collection of corn husk doll kits and homemade lardy soaps and invisible ink books for kids. And finally we decided to walk by the James, where M. J. managed to get burrs all over his pants legs and cursed and threw a child’s tantrum about it. They were his good pants, he kept saying, though how he could tell the difference between them and any other of the countless pairs of ironed khakis he owned, I had no idea.

Still, for late winter, the weather was nice. I’ve always enjoyed being outdoors. And burrs or no, it was still a welcome change from the usual routine into which we’d fallen.

Then came the fateful trip home.

I knew something was wrong when M. J. started the car and pulled down the dirt country road that led from the plantation back to civilization. His wheels made a terrible grinding noise, somewhere halfway between an amplified root canal drilling and a banshee’s curse. “What is that?” M. J. asked me.

Like I knew? I didn’t drive then. I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-one. My parents were too cheap to let me. (It occurs to me now that M. J. had made some vague noises about teaching me to drive, too—which might have been another reason I kept seeing him until that point. And yes, if you were to call up my father right now and ask him why I wasn’t allowed to drive until I was twenty-one, he will happily admit, “I was too cheap.”) “I think you should stop,” I told him.

He ignored me, and kept driving down the road. Every time he accelerated, the noise would get worse. When he slowed down, its intensity lessened a little, but it still sounded like the kind of thing Ellen Ripley might’ve heard right before the alien queen sawed through the hull of her spaceship. “I think you should stop,” I said.

When M. J. turned onto the two-lane road, the mere act of steering around a corner made the sound triple in intensity. “STOP THE CAR!” I yelled at him, bracing myself against the dashboard as if the whole thing might explode at any second.

We tumbled out of the car when he pulled it over to the side of the road. And there, in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia, we proceeded to have our first fight. “You can’t drive this the way it sounds,” I kept insisting.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said, dubiously. Over ears still ringing by the decibel level of the ‘nothing,’ we argued back and forth for a few more minutes. Finally he said, “What do you want me to do? Call a tow truck? Go to some stranger’s house and call a tow truck? What are they going to say when they see us together?” He was hysterical, almost. It was the most heated I’d ever seen him. He kept pulling at his beard and throwing his hands in the air. “Who am I going to tell them you are?”

He went on and on in this vein for a very long time. I listened to his hysterics in amazement. My mother had a motto that ran a little something like You don’t owe anyone an explanation until you actually owe them an explanation. In other words, some stuff is nobody’s damned business. It’s a stance that’s worked for a lifetime. When he was purple-faced and had worked himself into a tizzy, I turned and stomped off to the closest farm house—a good half-mile away—knocked on the door, and explained that my car had broken down. In return I got the use of their telephone, a good deal of sympathy, and a small bag of sympathy cookies. They’d been baked by Keebler elves, but still.

“Funny, the woman at the house didn’t ask if I was a student fucking my professor,” I announced when I got back to the car much later. “I don’t know how she could’ve missed that.” In a sullen mood, I ate all the cookies and listened to M. J. ’s half-hearted attempts to apologize.

Unsurprisingly, the tow truck driver didn’t grill us on our relationship when he finally arrived, either. He was a hearty, oversized guy who simply tsked at my tale of the strange noise, hooked the car up to his truck, and then agreed to tow us back to Williamsburg. Simple as that. However, I had to do all the talking, down to giving M. J. ’s address. M. J. merely glowered, stood by fretting, and wrung his hands in case I said something accidental like, Did I mention that this elderly homosexual is engaging me for illicit sexual intercourse?

My memory of the driver is of something like Yukon Cornelius. Enormous, red-headed, and bearded. Once the two of us were in his front seat and he was driving us homeward, he kept up a constant stream of chatter. “So you and your dad were out looking at the plantation, huh?” he asked me, fairly quickly on.

I was wedged between Yukon Cornelius and M. J. in the middle of the seat, arms crossed because I was still appalled at M. J. ’s behavior. This question tickled me, though, even though I could hear an appalled sigh from M. J. ’s side of the truck. He could’ve been my dad. They were only a year apart. “We sure were,” I said. “Dad’s not really into old stuff, but I like it.” Well, I thought it was a clever double entendre at the time.

“Well that was real nice of him then,” said the driver. “You know, it’s real nice when a dad and a son do things together. My dad and I weren’t close at all, and time runs out mighty quick. Mighty quick.”
“My dad and I are very, very close,” I said with a straight face.

“That’s real heartwarming,” said the driver. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“We do a lot of fun stuff together,” I remarked, ignoring the fact that M. J. was hyperventilating beside me.

While the driver and I kept up a friendly conversation about nothing in particular, I did something daring. With my left fingers, which was crossed over my chest and tucked beneath my other arm, I tweaked M. J. ’s nipple. He jumped about three feet out of his seat. The driver couldn’t see anything. It was just some devilish stubbornness in me determined to make M. J. as uncomfortable as possible.

It was a long drive. When minutes passed and the driver didn’t ask any awkward questions, or attempt to nail us on the validity of our supposed father/son relationship, or notice me rubbing my hand up and down M. J. ’s ribcage, M. J. finally relaxed. He even crossed his arms and let his fingertips rub and bob against my own.

It was the tenderest moment of our relationship, honestly. Definitely the most spontaneous.

The whole bad afternoon had an unexpected effect on M. J. . Once we were back in his parking lot and Yukon Cornelius was waving out of the window of his truck, M. J. had to turn to me. “Thank you,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You handled all that by yourself and you shouldn’t have had to,” he said.

I shrugged again.

“It wasn’t even your car. Your were right. I over-thought everything.” At least his apology was hitting all the right notes. I had to give him that.

“It’s all right,” I said, unbending a little.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve never wanted to fuck you more than I have right now.”

Now, that part was a little bit of a surprise. “What?” I asked.

“I want to take you inside,” he said, close up, his hand on my wrist, “and I want to fuck you like you’ve never been fucked.”

M. J. had always told me that word was too much of an Anglo-Saxonism, but here he was using it three times in rapid succession. “Well, okay,” I agreed, without having to think about it too much.

We ran into his apartment. He shoved me roughly against the wall. I fell onto his carpeted staircase with one hip. We didn’t retire upstairs to the bedroom and hide under the blankets. We didn’t turn off the lights. He wrestled my pants off me right there in the hallway, pushed me roughly down on the staircase, and fucked my ass so hard that my knees got carpet burn. It wasn’t a long fuck, but it was violent, and animal, and the hottest thing I’d ever done with him. When pulled it out, he allowed me to clean him off for the first time with my mouth.

That would have been hot enough, but then he leaned back against the door and crossed his arms. “Jack yourself off,” he ordered. Then, as he nodded to let me know it was all right, he watched while I spread my legs and whacked away at my dick. I came in my hand—I was afraid what he might do if I dared get it on the carpet, amorous mood or not. Barely had I finished when he grabbed my hand. “Get upstairs,” he said. “Get in bed and take off your clothes.”

I did. He joined me shortly thereafter, and we did it all over again. It might have been the first time I was anxious to have sex with M. J. .

But as time proved, it was also one of the last times.

M.J., Part Two

(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part One.)

The first thing I found out from Professor Washington—M.J.—on our date was that he and my father had known each other during college. My father had been a year ahead of him. The coincidence wasn’t that far a stretch. I was attending my college because it was my dad’s alma mater; he’d really pushed me to attend because of his idyllic memories of the place. M.J.’s entire reason for hooking a visiting professor position at my college had been to assess whether or not he could wrangle his way back into the college as a faculty member. It really is the kind of school that people attempt to linger around,long past their expiration date.

The second thing I found out from M.J. was that he didn’t like my dad. We were sitting in the King’s Arms Tavern, which is what passed for a classy dinner joint in town back then, eating peanut soup, when he let that little tidbit drop. “Why not?” I asked, when he made that announcement.

I was sitting there in my clean but rumpled khakis—the only pair of ‘good pants’ I owned—and that black-and-yellow striped sweater he’d given me and ordered me to wear. My hair was combed neatly, though not on the side, as he’d done in my office. “Because he was a dick,” M.J. said, before taking a bite of his pork chop.

And that was as much as I ever found out about that. I had to wonder if he was remembering my dad correctly. He’s a sweet man. Absent-minded, yes. Paranoid, absolutely. Unable to come within a hundred yards of a computing device without breaking it and then feeling the urge to phone me about it, guaranteed. But he’s not a dick. I’m frequently a dick. He never is. (Later on, when I asked my father in a casual way if he remembered M.J., his puzzled response was, “Who?”)

The topic put a damper on conversation for the rest of the evening. He ate his dinner in silence and I ate mine looking around the room at the tourists and wondering if it was ever going to be over. Then he escorted me to his car, and drove me back to his apartment on the campus’ outskirts. Using the slightest and gentlest of touches on my bee-striped elbow, he steered me through the front door and up to his bedroom, where in silence he undressed me in the same unerotic manner he might’ve undressed a five-year-old nephew for his bath. He laid me in the bed, removed his own clothes, crawled in beside me, and turned out the light.

For a moment, we lay there unmoving between the chilly sheets. I wondered if that was it.

Then he was on me, straddling my chest and shoving his cock into my mouth. M.J. wasn’t gifted down there by any means, and his dick looked even shorter under the best of circumstances because he had pubes that would’ve made Rapunzel stop, pout, and ask his secrets. That shit was long. I remember once noticing that tendrils of it snaked through the fly of his underwear still, after he’d peed at some public toilet earlier in the day and undressed for me later in the day. When he was fully erect, his pubes were still longer than his dick. I’d feel them tickling my face long before I felt the nudge of a cockhead against my lips. It was a bit of a turn-off.

What also turned me off was that M.J. had a mole on his dick. It wasn’t a flat discoloration, or even a beet-colored bump. No, this was a full-blown, juicy, dark red mole that sat like a cooked pea three-quarters of the length down his cock, and every time M.J. straddled my chest and inserted it between my lips, my goal was to do anything to keep that mole out of my mouth.

I’m not really sure why I was so repulsed by it. I had some fear that my teeth would scrape it and I’d find myself spitting it out, maybe, or that I’d accidentally bite it off. Either way, I’d wrap my hand around the base and keep it from crossing my lips.

Or else I’d talk him into fucking me. “Don’t use that word,” M.J. sniffed the first night, when I said it. “It’s Anglo-Saxon.” I wanted to point out, every time, that I was Anglo-Saxon, and that I was pretty sure the name he’d called my dad was an Anglo-Saxonism, but I didn’t see the point of pressing it. If I used words like fuck or shit in front of him, I found out that first night—even if I was beginning him, “Fuck me, fuck my ass,”—he’d stop whatever we were doing to lecture me like a maiden aunt about to wash out my mouth with soap. It was certainly a lecture of a sort I never got from my own dad, the alleged dick. But M.J. liked to fuck, even though he didn’t like to say the word. He would rub my hole with a tiny fingertip of jelly from the ancient jar of Vaseline he kept by the bedside, and then with me face-down and my nose in the pillow, he’d insert himself, raise himself up and down a few times, then gently squirt a load into my hole.

It was about as passionate and erotic as pushups. Then he would roll over and fall asleep. Typically I would spend the night with him. In the mornings, he would either make sure I was back to campus in time for class, or if it was a weekend, he would take me into Merchant’s Square to the men’s department store there and pick out something for my wardrobe. His choices were always conservative, always something I didn’t want, and always something I’d never wear except for him. But he did like it when I wore his clothing on our dates.

That first date was the hard template to all the many dates that followed over the following months. M.J. would track me down somehow—either stumble across me on campus, or call my dorm—tell me when he’d be picking me up, and give me a time to be there. We’d have a silent dinner at a stodgy restaurant with good meat-and-potatoes food. He’d have a glass or two of wine. We’d retire to his place, I’d submit to being undressed, and then I’d struggle to keep his dick out of my mouth and try to maneuver it to my ass. There’d be five minutes of old-lady lovemaking, and then he’d lurch off of me and fall asleep.

Yet for some reason I kept going back to him. For a few months I considered him my boyfriend, even. I think on a lot of levels it was because with M.J. I had a lot of firsts. My first actual dinner date. I’d spent a couple of nights at Earl’s during my teens to work parties, but M.J. was the first guy with whom I actually slept side by side, the way boyfriends do. His gifts weren’t great, or even good, but with M.J., for a while, I felt like I was being courted. He was a gentleman, and I was young and dumb enough to think that maybe a gentleman was really what I needed.

Part of me, too, enjoyed the drama and intrigue of it. I’d always had older fuckbuddies, but now I had an older, even an elderly (at forty-three) gentleman caller! Someone who knew my father, even! The lies I told my roommate on the nights I spent away were at first elaborate tales of deceit and justification, but as time went on, I just left for the night or the weekend and didn’t bother to tell him in advance. I would’ve said that I grew devil-may-care and didn’t give a fuck what he thought I was doing, but I didn’t want to be accused of being Anglo-Saxon.

This is how M.J. and I carried on our relationship, such as it was, for a good four or five months. Until the warm weather of spring came around, that is, and an impromptu excursion out into the countryside changed things.

M.J., Part One

His name sounded like a weighty bludgeon of patriotic shout-outs: Franklin Madison Jefferson Washington. To me, he was always M.J.

I met him on my knees in the second floor restroom of my college library, where I spent a lot of my cold winter nights. The restroom’s most active hours were shortly after dinner, when students and staff would casually pour into the building, disappear into carrels, and settle beneath the blanket of white silence to study. I would usually start the evening at my favorite spot—the desk with a direct view of the men’s restroom door, just down the aisle of British literature to its left. From there I could listen to the door’s creaky hinge and peek down the aisle to see who was entering and leaving. If some of the more notorious campus trolls were out and about that night, I could stay in my seat and get some studying done. If it was someone hot, all I had to do was scoop up my books into my backpack. I could be in the heat of the action in ten seconds flat.

Watching was usually my goal, anyway. The reality was that I was so perpetually horny that I’d spent an hour studying—maybe—and then finally give in to temptation and spend the rest of my night in the restroom until I got laid, or satisfied . . . the latter took a lot more work than the former. It was on one of those evenings when I met M.J. I’d already given a couple of handjobs to unknown men beneath the marble partition when the door creaked open. There were only two stalls in that particular restroom; I liked to sit in the first of them, so I could peek at the men as they walked into the room. It had a perfect view of the urinal opposite. That’s where M.J. stood when he entered. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches, a pair of pressed khakis, and a button-down shirt. The faculty uniform of our institution, in other words. Over his shoulder hung a khaki-colored soft briefcase from Land’s End, with all four of his initials embroidered beneath the handle.

He looked over his shoulder. Stared at me, through the crack in my doorway. I saw he was a short man. A very, very old man. (He was forty-three. Which is younger than I am now.) Bearded. Grizzled and gray at the ends. His forearms were covered with a thick, thick coat of fur, which I interpreted then to mean the rest of his body was hairy as well. (It was.) I really went after the older guys at that time, so I had no problems in opening my stall door and showing him that I was hard and stroking.

He moved over to show me his hard cock. It wasn’t big, by any means. Four and a half inches, maybe, and I suspect I’m being generous in my imagination. I didn’t care. I wasn’t a size queen. I opened up and sucked him through the fly of his khakis, as he ran his fingers through my hair and looked at me fondly. He came quickly, shooting a sour load into my throat and then lingering in my wet mouth until he’d softened again.

I’d closed the door to the stall and had wiped down my mouth when he tapped gently at it again. He’d zipped up and washed his hands, and he looked over the top of the door down at me. There was a torn-off slip of paper hand towel between his fingers. “Are you a student?” he wanted to know. I nodded and told him I was. “Can you come to my office tomorrow at two?”

It was an unusual request, but I didn’t see any reason why not. The paper he handed me had an office number in Morton Hall on it. I did some recognizance that evening and found out not only his name, but from the department newsletter hanging in the hallway that M.J. was a visiting professor in Economics that year. It was the best I could do, twenty years before Google.

When I appeared in his office door shortly after two, he looked up from his desk hastily. I suspected that he’d been anticipating my arrival for some minutes. “Come in, come in,” he said hastily. “I hope this wasn’t too much of a bother.”

I told him it wasn’t, and asked if I should close the door.

He looked shocked at the suggestion, rightfully picking up on the fact I assumed he wanted my mouth again. I’d blown and taken fucks from several other professors over the previous year. There was no reason to presume he was any different from them. “Good heavens no,” he said. “I wanted to thank you for oral attentions last night.”

That’s the way M.J. always talked, when he spoke about sex. He sounded like someone’s maiden aunt, or a Victorian spinster reflexively smoothing down the antimacassars of her spotless parlor. “You mean the blow job?” I asked.

He looked horrified that I’d refer to it by name. “I wanted to thank you with a gift.” From one of his desk drawers he pulled out a box. I recognized it as a gift box from one of the tiny Williamsburg men’s stores in Merchant’s Square. He pushed it across the table. “Open it,” he said.

I’d been expecting more dick. Not a gift box. I pulled I across the desk and opened it. Inside was a sweater. It was a wool sweater of black and yellow horizontal stripes, each roughly four inches wide. It was pretty hideous. “Try it on,” he said.

Now, in college I was not the best dresser. I was also not the richest kid around. I was working two jobs in the afternoons and on weekends in order to pay for my expenses, and clothes were not at the top of my priorities list. I had three pairs of corduroys between which I alternated, and a couple of clean but worn cotton shirts. M.J. stood up from his desk, shut the door most but not all of the way, and out of sight of the hallway, tugged me into the sweater. It had one of those tight necks that raked all the skin cells from my face as it went over the head.

“There,” he said. “Very handsome.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic comb, which he ran through my hair. When my hair was longer, it always parted itself naturally in the middle. He made a very artificial part on the right side, and swept the hair over my forehead. “What do you think?”
I looked in the little mirror hanging on the back of his office door. I thought I looked like a Young Republican. And in that sweat, I thought I looked like an enormous bumblebee. “I guess it’s okay,” I said.

“You look very handsome this way. Now, I am going to pick you up tonight at seven-thirty and I am going to take you to my place,” he announced. “Where’s your dorm?” he asked. I told him. I was living at the very back of the campus, in housing supposed to be for creative artists. “Now, I want you to be waiting out front for me, and I want you to comb your hair nicely and wear this sweater and a pair of nice pants so I can take you out to dinner.”

I’m afraid I gaped. This sounded like a date. Men didn’t date me. Men fucked me. I’d never been on a date. Somehow I stammered out an okay.

“And wear nice shoes,” he added. I figured I had a pair of Top Siders that would suffice.

Then the next thing I knew, I was being ushered out of M.J.’s office and deposited in the hallway. “No sneakers!” he warned me, before sending me on my way.

I guessed I had a date.