A Gentleman and a Circus

March 2024

You walk like a New Yorke, someone recently told me. At the time, I chose to take it as a compliment. When I’m on the city streets, my pace is brisk, my stride sure and steady. I don’t weave. I don’t make sudden and unpredictable detours from my path. When some dumbass stumbles along, staring down at their phone as they step into the intersection to wander into my trajectory, I don’t veer wildly to accommodate them; I halt and stare until they glance up at the six-foot-three impediment blocking their path. They usually half-mumble a quarter-apology and move out of my way.

When I walk in the city, I do so with a destination in mind and a hustle in my step. But I still can’t keep up with the man with whom I’ve spent the last several hours. I’m power walking up Third Avenue like I’m being pursued by wolves—elderly wolves with a little stiffness in their hips, maybe, and who had a snack a little while ago so that they’re not ravenous—but my so-called chaperone is a solid two streets ahead. He’d been only a half-block in front when he’d dashed out into crosstown traffic at 119th, leaving me stranded at a Don’t Walk light. Not once has he looked over his shoulder to see if I’m still with him. Not even when he turns the corner onto 125th and vanishes does he glance behind.

I could jog to catch up, true. But it’s a nasty, windy March Saturday. When we’d left his apartment, three-quarters of a mile ago, the sky had only been spitting down droplets, but by now it’s a torrent of sideways rain. My left arm is soaked from the storm and sore from spearing the umbrella against the wind. Though I’ve avoided as many puddles as I can, my sneakers are sodden. I’m not about to collapse, by any means. The walk’s only the better part of a mile. But in this weather, wet as I am, I’m already hustling about as quickly as I care to go.

My watch reads 4:44 when I turn the corner. He’s still way ahead of me, plowing on toward the Metro North station, pausing only at a light before hopping only on the white lines of the crosswalk to the street’s north side. A train with red accents on its sides approaches from the south, its squealing brakes amplified by the cavernous dark space beneath the elevated tracks. That must be my train. Plainly, I’m not going to make it.

I see the back of Amir’s bald head as he yanks open the Harlem station door and disappears inside. You’d think he was the one trying to catch the 4:45, but no. I glance both ways as I race across the street, shake off my umbrella beneath the bridge, and follow him into the building. I wonder why I’m hurrying, as I make my way up both flights of stairs to the tracks above. I’m winded by the time I reach the top, but mostly I’m just grateful to be out of the rain.

Much to my surprise, the train still waits. Amir leans with his hands on the nearest of its closed doors as if willing them to open for me. I burst into laughter. “That’s not my train,” I tell him. When he stares at me in disbelief, shaking his head, I point to the legend of New Haven spelled out in red dots on the car’s signage. “That’s not my train,” I repeat.

The train jerks into motion and glides off. My friend gives it a benediction of shooing hands.

“It’s very sweet of you to escort me here,” I tell him, as I refrain from pointing out that I’d been pretty much on my own the last twelve blocks of the walk. “But you’ve got to meet your friend. I’ll be fine.”

“But I promised to get you to the train on time!” he says with genuine anguish.

“They come every half-hour,” I say in my gentlest voice. “That’s how the trains work. Go. You’re supposed to be heading to Queens, for dinner.”

My tone is amused, but he genuinely seems to think he’s failed me. A horn sounds to the south; one of the blue-striped Hudson Line trains approaches the station on the opposite track. “I am so sorry, handsome. I will wait with you.”

“I’m a big boy,” I remind him. “Another train will come. Go meet your friend.” He’s not going anywhere, though. His gallantry charms me, but it’s truly unnecessary. “Look,” I say, tugging at his cuff to pull him to the screen in the platform’s center. “My next train arrives in—” The bright display says 0 Minutes. As I process the information, another red-striped train squeals into the station. “Well. Now.”

Amir’s handsome bearded face lights up; his arms open wide. “I got you here in time, after all!”

“You did!” I tell him, grinning.

He grabs me by the shoulders and gives me a big hug, accompanied by a kiss on the cheek. My soaked winter coat leaks water like a sodden sponge when he squeezes. Then I find myself being hustled onto the closest car, where I squelch my way to a seat and collapse on the unyielding plastic. It’s not two minutes later, when I’m speeding on my way to the next stop, that I get a text from Amir. Thank you for coming! You were super sexy in bed! I love how amazing at sex you are!, it reads, accompanied by a half-dozen heart-eyed emoji.

Now, that’s the mark of a true gentleman.

I’d connected with Amir on one of the apps, right at the coldest point of February, after I’d been away on vacation for a week. You’re very handsome, he’d written. I’d grimaced to see that he’d sent the message twelve days prior. The guy was going to think I hadn’t appreciated his compliment. I sent him a quick thank-you, an apology for the delayed reply, and an explanation that I’d been out of town. Almost immediately, he told me not to worry. You are probably still as good looking as you were week before last.

This silver-tongued devil charmed me, and I had to admit I found him handsome as well. His profile portrayed him as an older European fellow of Middle Eastern heritage—and I had to chide myself for thinking of him as older, when he was a full decade younger than I. In his photos, he’s flexing his big biceps in a tank top in front of the Parthenon, or standing shirtless, furry-chested, and muscular on a sunny beach. I’m most attracted, though, to the selfie in which he’s simply staring into the camera with liquid brown eyes and a big smile that creases his dark beard. Let’s spend Saturday together, making love, he wrote. I’ll meet you at the 125th Station and walk you to my place.

No one has ever offered to escort me home from the commuter train, before. I couldn’t help but think what a gentleman he was. But, because his profile described him as a top, I needed to be sure what we’d be doing. What would you be interested in getting into, with me?

I want you to breed me deep, he replied.

Okay, then. I was in.

The forecast on this Saturday is for rain, all afternoon. I’d spied only a few droplets on my windshield when driving to my local station, but now that my city-bound train is trundling over the Harlem River Lift Bridge, it’s a downpour. I unsheathe my umbrella. Sheets of water pour from the overhangs as I step onto the platform; the splatter onto the street below is so loud that it overpowers the sounds of the train’s normal operations. Ugh.

But the moment I’m down the stairs and out through the station doors onto the street, a taxi pulls up to the corner, cascading water near my feet. Its back window rolls down and a familiar handsome face peers out. “Get in!” says Amir, plainly delighted to see me. He bangs on the car’s door in emphasis. “It’s too wet to walk!”

I’ve never been so grateful to crawl into a cab in my life. Amir seizes my umbrella and whirls droplets from it out the taxi’s window as he gives the driver directions back to his place. What a fucking gentleman, I think to myself, as he wraps the strap around the umbrella’s exterior and fastens the velcro. Why does it have to be so difficult to meet a gentleman who’s both sexy and sane?

Amir keeps his hand on my knee the entirety of our short drive, squeezing it for punctuation as he makes small talk. Was my ride into the city smooth? Any delays? How long was my commute, usually? It was truly a pleasure to meet me, finally.

“Finally?” I query. “We swapped our first emails two days ago.”

He turns in his seat and takes my left hand between both of his own. Looking me in the eye, he says, “But it feels as if I’ve been waiting for this forever.”

I am suddenly a puddle of goo on the seat of a New York City yellow cab.

Awkward as it is around a couple of the tighter turns, we dash hand in hand up two flights of stairs in the tiny apartment building above a ground-level row of fast food restaurants and bodegas. His mouth is already on mine even as he’s struggling to fit the key in the door; I’m breathless when he shoves me against the wall, once inside, and presses himself against me. “You are so handsome,” he growls.

The praise sends a flush through my body. I’ve been erect since the cab. “The handsome one would be you.” I steal kisses between syllables.

“No, you.” He strips off my winter jacket and tosses it onto a hook. It misses and slides to the floor, but I don’t give a fuck. “I love how tall you are. Tall, beefy…” I feel his fingers tighten around the bulge in my trunks. “Hung.” His lips fasten on mine, hungry. I’m helpless to do anything more than welcome his probing tongue and allow him to untie the bow of my joggers. “Are you going to fuck me, this afternoon?” he wants to know.

“Anything you want.” I’m already panting. There’s a half-cocked grin on my lips. “Tell me,” I say, hoping he might be one of those bossy bottoms who gives me orders. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”

His right palm riffles across my short hair as his left pulls me closer. “I need you balls deep in me.” Our eyes lock as he makes the request. I nod. In a hushed voice, he continues. “I need you to plant your seed inside me. Make me yours. Knock me up.”

“I can do that,” I say, equally quiet, but no less intense.

“I want you to lube me, shove your fingers in my hole and get me ready for that fucking big cock.” While he speaks, he removes his own shoes, then reaches down to help me off with mine. My sneaker rapidly rotates heel over toe as it flies down the little hallway into the man’s kitchen. “Then I’m going to get on my knees and you’re going to drive it all the way inside.”

“You betcha,” I promise. My heavy breathing isn’t entirely from the flights I climbed to get here.

Our passions are already riding high. In the moment, I’m a bit infatuated with the man, bowled over by his compliments, his courteous behavior, the intensity of his attraction. How long has it been since anyone from online has been simply nice to me? For months—maybe years, it feels like—whenever I consider hunting for sex, I’m met with conversations that end after I reply that I don’t host. I’ve endured countless men who talk a heated game until I press them to have me over. I’ve had to tolerate jerks who make promises and then ghost or block me. Hooking up has never been a weak man’s game, sadly, but at some point in this post-pandemic world, much of its sweetness has evaporated, leaving behind a noxious slick of its most oily and rancid components.

How amazingly refreshing, I think, to encounter someone who desired to meet, and who facilitated its happening, within the space of a couple of days.

“I want you, baby,” he whispers. Eyes still fixed upon each other, we disrobe where we stand. Sorting out our individual garments will be a challenge, later on, but in the moment neither of us cares how our socks knot or where our shirts land. I’m wearing only my gray trunks; he’s undressed save for a pair of brightly-striped red boxer briefs. Our eyes dance over each other’s bodies. Then, taking my hands in his, he leads me away from the entryway into the apartment.

I only have eyes for him. I get an impression of his home as we pass through it, though—a small living room cramped with furniture to the right and a small kitchenette to the left. Space is at a premium, as it is with so many Manhattan apartments, so from the corners of my eyes I can see how the walls are stacked high with…well, stuff. Atop a jam-packed china cabinet might sit milk crates, mouths pointed to the room’s center, containing folded summer clothing. Atop those, a teetering pile of books, or a collection of plastic hangers, or boxes of Christmas ornaments. Towers of Babylon loom across every wall, haphazardly heaped to the tall ceilings, forsaking tidiness for expediency. Down a hallway crowded with framed photos and primitive oil paintings we waltz, still glowing and thinking only of the other.

And then into the bedroom, where only the centers of the window wells admit light, so high are the stacked piles on either side. I don’t care, though. The bed is clear, and that’s our destination. Even walking backward, he knows exactly when to jump back upon the mattress. As he bounces, he beckons me atop him. Now, at last, my aching cock is free to grind against the bulge in his shorts, as he clasps me in a rough embrace.

Our lips meet, still greedy for each other. I lift for a moment to allow Amir to skim the trunks from my hips; we roll from side to side to do the same for him. Now we truly are naked. Nothing conceals either of us. There’s nothing I want to conceal. Our hands roam the other’s body unhampered. Our cocks mash and grind, craving attention, requiring release. I go down on him first.

Amir has a fat beast of a hog, dark in color and hanging heavy with foreskin, even erect. It releases a salty goo upon the back of my tongue I devour it, inch by thick inch. I hear him sigh, above. Fingers restlessly explore over and around my skull, as if he’s a phrenologist determined to coax out the most obscure aspects of my personality. I admit his fleshy knob as far as it goes and savor the way it stretches the back of my throat. The smooth skin of his balls contracts at the base of my chin, tickled and scratched by my beard. With my thumb and index finger curved into a U shape, I press the heel of my hand against his perineum, cupping the nuts with the crook of my fingers while shoving hard on the taint. He moans audibly, and pushes down on the back of my head.

When the sensations prove too much, he pulls me up to his lips. I’m atop him once again. Grinding. Thrusting. My cock slips down the side of his leg to shove against his ass. “Yes,” he hisses, his head thrown back. “I can’t wait much longer, baby. I want you inside me.”

“You don’t have to wait at all,” I assure him. I make a show of looking him in the eye and spitting on my middle three fingers. I reach down and let them maneuver their way toward my target. The slickness, when it spreads over his exposed hole, causes him to squirm. “Not if you want it.”

“I want it,” he whispers, spreading wide his legs. His own hands grapple down his sides and underneath his ass, spreading the cheeks for me.

“Do you want lube?”

“Just spit.” I take him at his word, and fill two fingers with saliva—once to probe more deeply into the warm concavity I desire, then again to slather over the length of my dick. I raise my body so I can pull up his hips and legs, aim my cock at his hole, and begin burrowing in.

I love this position: two men face to face, maintaining eye contact, while one opens the other. At some point, after I’m more than halfway in, I lean forward and plant my hands beneath his armpits. He lifts his head to meet mine. Our lips convene again, old acquaintances by now. Their reunion erases the last of his resistances: I glide to the base. He lifts his hips and wraps his legs around my waist. His arms clutch my back, pulling me in. Not the slightest pocket of air lies between us, we’re so close. I drive inside him, again and again, punishing the man for making me wait so long.

Sweat beads on my forehead, my nose. My beard must be a mess. We cannot get enough of the other, though. Like feral wolves we fuck, caring only for the moment, blind to everything around us. I cannot hear the sounds of the avenue over his heartbeat; my rasps and grunts drown the quiet pleas spilling from his lips. Everything around us darkens and fades until we’re the only two humans left in a private universe; we are completely enveloped within a cocoon woven from mutual gratification. Like a jackhammer I pound him, extracting my enjoyment stroke by stroke. For long minutes we clutch and kiss and growl until he begs, “Let me ride you.”

My eyebrows rise. Have I pushed him too far? Is he uncomfortable in our current position? But no. “You shouldn’t do all the work,” he pants. “Let me pleasure you.”

I signal agreement with a nod. I shouldn’t be doing all the work. And yeah. I do like to be pleasured. Pleasure and I are more than passing acquaintances. In fact, I like pleasure a lot. He doesn’t want to lose the connection between us, though. We both grin and snort as we shift our mutual center of gravity, rolling first onto our sides, then flopping like salmon to right ourselves once again with him on top. My dick swells and makes him gasp, from time to time. He retaliates by pinching my nipples, hard, the way I like. It’s not an easy process, this one-eighty flip with my meat wedged deep in his hole, but neither of us wants cock and ass to part ways. So while our grins acknowledge the silliness of the choice we’ve made, my hands still clasp him hips and draw him into me. At last, his knees straddle my ribcage.

“Beautiful man,” he sighs, smoothing my beard with his palm. “I am so lucky to have you.”

“You’ve got all of me, baby,” I say, gazing into his eyes. “Every fucking inch.”

“I need poppers,” he mumbles. He spares me a smile before rising a bit and leaning toward one of his bedside tables. The flat of his hand presses on my chest as he balances himself. “Your dick is just so big.” I laugh a little as he rummages around in the top drawer. Then, “Oh, fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

All the time he’s been hunting for the poppers, I haven’t been lying there, lifeless. Oh, no. I’ve continued to thrust upward inside him, grinding my hips in a sinuous infinity sign, keeping his hole open and happy. But now he’s clambering off me. My cock slips out and slaps onto my belly with a wet and disappointed smack. “I’ll be right back,” he promises, giving me a quick kiss before, on his knees, he shuffles backward off the mattress. I observe how his muscular butt jiggles as he pads down the hallway. “I need a new bottle. Do you want anything to drink?”

Such a gentleman. “I’m good.” I settle back to contemplate my good luck, as from the kitchen I hear the sounds of the fridge opening and closing, followed by the clatter of ice cubes in a glass. This moment of solitude is the first chance I’ve had to take a look at Amir’s bedroom. Like the living area, it’s jam packed with stuff. Basic furniture at the ground level—the bed, a writing desk, a chest, a wardrobe. Then layers and layers more atop them, teetering upward in stacks toward the—how high are these ceilings, anyway? Ten feet? Maybe twelve?

That’s when I notice it, in the midst of my content reverie. A clown doll with a porcelain face, dressed in shabby orange and red clothing, ams outstretched, staring down at me from high stop a pile of books with its oversized, unblinking peepers. Fuck, that’s creepy. Then I observe that it sits next to a girl twin with flaxen hair and equally garish duds, fixing me with her unmoving eyes.

In fact, only now is it striking me that everywhere I look, the upper reaches of the bedroom are adorned with nothing but clown paraphernalia. I’d been too smitten to notice when we’d burst into the room in a blaze of sexual heat, then too preoccupied to look up when Amir had been beneath me. But now I’m on my back, alone, and not in a haze of pheromones. All I can do is gaze around the walls’ upper periphery in abject horror.

Dozens of clown dolls, each a glossy and inhuman mold of waxen perfection, stare down at me, a panopticon of carnival horror. They’re adorned in multi-colored wigs, pointed hats, in striped pantaloons and polka-dots. Some have oversized buttons on color-blocked jumpsuits; others have fussy frills and ruffled collars. Rosy faces congregate with neighbors bearing white-caked scowls. And these aren’t cute clowns, either. These are some freaky-ass, killer devil clowns from decades ago, when kids were apparently of heartier stock. Their smiles are uniformly maniacal; the pinpoints of their painted eyes laser-focused on my nakedness.

I’ve just sat up and am staring around the room, panicked by so many dolls fixed upon me, when Amir shuffles back into the room with a glass of ice water and a bottle of poppers. “Hey, beautiful man,” he whispers, as he pounces on me.

You can do this, I think to myself as I thrust. You’re not scared of clowns. Though, admittedly, this is a particularly menacing assembly of clowns. They’re toys. A perfectly innocent collection of old, antique, unsettling, eerie, macabre…no, stop. It’s just a collection of dolls. And not only dolls. There are some old Ringling Brothers posters with clowns up there, too, and a number of old LPs featuring red-nosed clowns on the cover. I saw a couple of incredibly gaudy jack-in-the-boxes, too, their spring-laden contents on display, bent by gravity. There’s even a miniature clown bus filled with miniature…shit,, I’m still thinking about clowns. What the fuck? I’ve got a hot guy on all fours for me, a position I’ve requested solely because it lets me look down at the bed instead of up at the brightly-colored collection of…is that a whole clown village, over there in the corner? Like, a Department 56 porcelain clown village? Has he actually strung extension cords so that it—yeah, it’s lit up, showing off a circus train car filled with clowns, a little bar where presumably tipsy clowns congregate, a clown town hall…good lord.

“Is something wrong, baby?” Amir asks, peeking under his armpit.

“No, everything’s good,” I fib. Jesus Christ. I need to get the job done, here. I try to keep any clown-related musing to a minimum while I pound away at his hole. He’s enjoying himself, at least. There comes a point where he navigates me onto my side, and then onto my back again, but the moment those dead-eyed dolls hove back into view, I toss him onto his stomach and finish the deed while laying atop him. Only then do I roll us onto our sides, my cock still in his ass, so that I can hold Amir and whisper filthy things into his ear as he finishes himself with both hands.

He pants heavily, gives my forehead a peck, and gives me a big squeeze. “Amazing,” he sighs.

I grumble in vague agreement. Then, after a spell, I clear my throat and ask in a perfectly normal tone—an utterly reasonable inflection laden with no hint of judgment—“So, um. You like clowns?’

His eyebrows raise. “Why do you say that?” For answer, I simply gesture in a circle, in the direction where walls meet ceiling, at the clowns that—my god, have they multiplied? Amir’s eyes follow my glance. “Oh. I suppose so,” he shrugs. “They’re not as fun as you.”

It’s a flirty gesture I would appreciate more if I’d not had scores of beady little circus eyes on me. “I should think about getting back to the station, soon,” I murmur, already thinking of my getaway.

“Not yet.” My friend grabs me by the hand and pulls me close, then kisses me. “The rain’s supposed to quiet down in an hour.” I feel his fingers tickle my sides, my belly, then tangle in my pubes. “I’ve got dinner plans with a friend in Queens. I’ll walk you to the station, then go meet my friend…I’m sure we can find something to do for another hour.”

Oh, man. He is so sweet. All those clown eyes, though. “I’m not…” His mouth moves down to my nipples, where he chews, gently. “I shouldn’t…” Now he’s kissing my belly, moving toward his destination, inch by inch. I glance at the room’s upper reaches. “I…” I gulp heavily, as he swallows me down, cleaning off his own juices from my hardening flesh.

“Just lie back,” he says. “Close your eyes. Let me take care of you, baby.”

Yeah, I think to myself, as I sink into the pillows. I can close my eyes. I do like being taken care of. In fact, I like being taken care of, a lot.

***

Hey! If you've made it this far, chances are you enjoy my sexual memoir pieces. May I suggest you invest in an upcoming work of no-holds-barred sexy fiction? I've written a story called Sleazy A for an anthology entitled Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men. 

Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men is a vintage-style collection of hot, retro college-themed X-rated fiction penned by some pretty great authors of man on man erotica. And Sleazy A is based on some of my own college sexcapades. I'm very proud of it, and would be most pleased if you'd preorder a copy today. I'm providing the link, below!

The publishing house for this project can be found at Peterschutes.com . There are already ten vintage-style pulps on sale over there, with more to come. If you sign up for their newsletter, you’ll be eligible to receive a free eBook.

Order your copy of Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men right now!

Life Updates & Dirty Dorms

Gentle reader, it is a truth universal that when absence makes the heart yearn for its truant scribe of fleshly delights…Ahem. Excuse me. I’ve been hitting Bridgerton again. I’ll refrain from Whistledowning you all.

Hey, y’all. It’s been a while! There are reasons for my hiatus, none of them dire. I’ll go through them in a moment, after addressing the following.

This Site Has a New Look

You might have noticed there’s no longer an after-dinner-mint green hue to the background of the site, and I’ve also changed the name of it. To be honest, my eyes had grown weary of that sickly green color, and I was hoping the new theme might class up the joint.

A couple of you have written asking if using The Steed Archives signals my intent to sunset the blog. The short answer’s no. In fact…

There Will Be A New Entry or Two In the Near Future

Honest! I have one new essay nearly completed for your reading pleasure. I’ll probably post it early next week. There are also a few other encounters I’d like to chronicle while they’re still reasonably fresh in my mind, so expect some new erotic memoir pieces shortly. I’m sorry I didn’t get to them earlier in the year, but…

I’ve Been Busy!

During the winter and spring I had an unusually hectic class schedule. Normally, when I have delightful students (and I’ve been blessed by mostly delightful students for years), teaching is nothing but excitement and good times. However, this year I was plagued by several individuals who dragged their feet, didn’t contribute, resisted criticism, and made the semester a grind, both in and out of the classroom.

Additionally, right after the start of the new year, my elderly dad transitioned into an assisted living residence. The past couple of years for me have been a very hard road with him, as you’ve witnessed. Having him in a stable environment with round-the-clock supervision is a relief. Getting him adjusted, though, has neither been straightforward nor easy. He’s much closer to me now—only an hour’s drive, as opposed to eight. Commuting there and back takes significant bites out of my weeks, though.

Finally, in the spare time I’ve had, I really wanted to make headway on a couple of personal writing projects that didn’t involve dicks and holes. Erotic writing is valid and important. The fourteen years I’ve spent sharing my memory pieces here has been a core experience of my life. There are other literary pursuits that nourish me too, though!

Speaking of Dicks and Holes:
Introducing Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men

I am incredibly pleased to announce that one of my spring side projects is about to come to fruition. I guarantee it’s something you’ll enjoy.

Earlier in the year, I was invited to contribute to an anthology of erotic fiction, thematically focused on vintage college porn set in an era before mobile phones, before apps, heck, before the internet. It’s entitled Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men and is available for pre-order today!

Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men is an actual pulp-style book, the kind you can hold in your hands and proudly display upon your shelves. It’s handsomely printed and cleverly themed to resemble retro porn novels of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Seriously: I used to see very similar covers in my earliest dirty bookstores. Within its pages you’ll find four stories the evocative titles Under the Boardwalk and Dormitory Urges and The Tearoom in the Trees.

My contribution, written under the moniker of J.W. Steed, is entitled Sleazy A. It’s a hefty, horny novella, not some slender, fly-by-night essay. The story is a picaresque single weekend in the life of a college sophomore who adventures from tearoom to bedroom to dressing room, mostly on his hands and knees. I’ve set it in the nineteen-eighties, and yeah…it’s about two-thirds autobiographical and one-third pure authorial magic.

I had a blast working on it earlier this year. I honestly think it’s some of the best and most fun work I’ve done (where the characters are nekkid, anyway).

I’ll be writing in more detail close to the release date of August 1 about Sleazy A and its real-life inspirations, but I’d really like to encourage you to head over to Amazon and pre-order a copy before August. If you prefer to avoid Amazon, the book will be available in select bookstores as well, including sexy landmarks like the Tom of Finland Museum…as if you need an excuse to visit there. You may also request your local book vendor to order a copy.

Honest talk: I’ve been putting free smutty memoir pieces on this site for nearly a decade and a half. I haven’t clogged your pages with advertising. I haven’t paywalled access to my stories behind a Patreon or Fans-style account. I haven’t monetized this project in any way—nor do I intend to. Buying Dirty Dorms would really go a long way in showing me your support, however. Whether you’ve enjoyed my writing for a long time or are a relatively new visitor, please consider purchasing a copy. It’s an easy and sexy way to thank this independent author of pornography for all the dirty thoughts I may have inspired, these many years.

Plus, I’m hoping that Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men will be but the first of several interesting published projects to come. So, please. If you’d like to help support a queer artist, purchase a copy at the link below.

I will be grateful.

And think of the opportunities you have to share the sticky, sweaty love! Do you know an older daddy who likes vintage porn, or a good boy with daddy issues who revels in the written word? Consider buying a copy for him as a gift! Are you a dad with a college-aged son? Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men would basically be the absolute best guidebook you could give that young man before he trundles off to the quad and the residence halls this autumn!

Also, give that kid my number, while you’re at it.

The publishing house for this project can be found at Peterschutes.com . There are already ten vintage-style pulps on sale over there, with more to come. If you sign up for their newsletter, you’ll be eligible to receive a free eBook.

Purchase your copy of Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men right now!

Thanks for catching up, everybody. You’ll see more of me soon.

His Coy Mistress

1979

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

The Professor recites from memory, his voice sheer vibration against my naked rib cage, a husky purr in my ear. I’m curled on his lap, my skinny legs hooked over the edge of his favorite easy chair, head against his chest, hands linked around his neck. There’s a smile on my face; I enjoy when he reads to me.

“Marvell’s admonishment, of course, forms a rebuke to his lady love who, he believes, is allowing precious time—and perhaps youth and beauty—to slip away with every moment of inaction. He can feel, as he says later in the poem, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, and urges her to reconsider her stance of remaining at arms length when she could be engaging in, well, shall we say, love-making of a more fleshly sort. What?” he asks, drawing in his chin so that he might look down at me. His white beard prickles at my forehead. “What’s so funny?”

It’s true that I’ve begun to chuckle—not something I often do with clients. When someone pays for my time, it’s usually because they have an agenda; they’re more absorbed in having me act out and reinforce their desired scenarios. My interior monologue is not supposed to interrupt. The Professor is different, though. He calls the shots, but since I know he revels in my delight, I’ve no qualms in showing it. Sleepily, I respond, “Which of us is supposed to be the coy mistress and which the poet?”

He harrumphs, as if the answer is obvious. “In my silver-haired role as the elder, I…”

“Look,” I interrupt. “I’m the one who’s naked.” I gesture to my pale body, lying across him, then tug at the outermost layer of his clothing. It’s in the mid-forties outside, but here in his den, The Professor has his wood-burning stove blazing at a high enough temperature that in nothing more than my birthday suit, I’m roasting. Yet as always, he’s still wearing a nubbly sweater vest, a plaid dress shirt, and though he’s been retired for several years, a necktie. His only concession to the informality of our situation is a pair of house slippers instead of shoes. “I’m ready to go.” I guide his hand to the half-stiffness between my legs. “You’re the coy one.”

“I?”

“Thou!”

I’ve flustered him. I’ve always thought he resembles Professor Plum from my edition of Clue, his body a stack of rotund globes decorated like a snowman with spectacles and a white fringe around his bald dome. When he huffs and puffs his reddened cheeks, I half-expect him to accuse me of murdering Mr. Boddy with my lead pipe. “Coy!” I almost fly off his lap as he sits up straight in the armchair. Beneath that gray mustache, though, his lips quiver with amusement. His knees spread, revealing the tent in his woolen slacks.

Now that I’m on my feet, my buttocks broiling from the heat of the wood stove behind, I strike a pose. My hands drape across my pale-skinned nakedness as if I’m a Botticelli maiden, nude but preserving her virtue; I draw up a thigh to half-obscure my dangling erection. A Mona Lisa smile on my face, I look half-away from the man and slowly turn, so that he can admire every inch of my body.

“Oh, Kip,” he whispers, using the name by which clients know me.

Slowly, I revolve on the ball of my foot with the cruel deliberation of someone who understands the power of his beauty.

It’s not a sensation I often feel. School’s a constant reminder that I’m tallest, gangliest, and whitest of the students, a gawky anomaly loping through the hallways with books in hand and head hung low. There I’m an outsider, unsightly and a waste of space. At home, I’m told that good grades and accomplishments are more worthy than looks. The lectures feel like my parents settling for some sort of sad consolation prize.

Here though, as I model before the man and see the white planes of my slender body reflected in his lenses, I can view myself through the eyes of a man who shells out several twenty-dollar bills for my unclothed presence. To him, I glow. I am the naked youth who delights in flaunting his charms. I am poetry made luminous. His infatuation is more powerful than any narcotic.

“Come,” he at last whispers, beckoning.

The urgency in his voice stiffens my cock. Up and down, it dowses the den carpet as I pad back to him. The Professor receives me with soft hands on my skin. His face dives into the crook of my neck, where he inhales deeply of my soapy scent. With the utmost gentleness, he settles me once more across his lap, my head nestled against his scratchy sweater.

From the table adjacent, he pulls a familiar volume. “Let’s assay something much more modern, shall we?” I nod. He opens to the bookmark we left the last time I visited, and he begins reading to me from Tristram Shandy.

My path from scrappy, self-taught hustler to selective rent boy hasn’t been without a few bumps along the way. When I’d first begun accepting my procurer’s business cards, scrawled across the back with an address to visit, I’d arrive at the appointed time ready to get the action started. Tempus was fugiting, after all, and I had some diem to carpe, or at least an unstated curfew to mind. Very quickly, though, I learn the difference between a twenty-buck trick ready to go by the riverside, and the needs of men accommodating a higher price for my time.

Few of them are paying strictly for sex, I come to understand; they have an agenda beyond beckoning me into the bushes for ten minutes of pleasure. Most of my clients are nervous and even unsure of their desires. If they’d been adventurous spirits, they’d be getting laid for free at the parks or tearooms or by cruising The Block for a young man on the prowl. However, these men don’t court risk.

Out in the wild, they’d have the advantage of choice. Absent that, I swiftly intuit that it’s my job to discover what my clients want. Winnowing out that vision and then becoming the fantasy is something I have to learn on the job, without training. All my life, though, I've cultivated invisibility to avoid bullying. It's made me malleable. Abandoning my own inclinations for someone else costs me no ego.

So for one man I become the submissive. I whimper and plead to increase his excitement. For another, I transform into reluctant and uneducated trade, degrading himself for the cold, hard cash. For some, I’m the young boyfriend with stars in his eyes, to others, the disinterested cocotte barking orders. None of these roles bother me. Losing my identity in the desires of another feels like sliding into a tub of warm water for a while, then emerging some time later to wipe down and dry off to return home drowsy, sated, and a little wealthier.

The freaks—well, of course there are a handful of freaks. I’m never coerced into enduring situations that make me uncomfortable; I reserve the right to say no. I rarely have to. The men with unusual fetishes by and large don’t bother me. To the older, wrinkled, bald man with a mummification fixation, who coincidentally looks uncannily like a hairless Sphynx cat, I’m the perfect subject; I lie still, arms at my sides, as I allow him to roll my naked body to and fro while he wraps me from collarbone to ankles in dozens of Ace bandages. Once confined, however loosely, I keep silent while he sniffs and licks my feet for an hour or more, masturbating all the while. Sure, the bandages are weird, but I feel swaddled and oddly safe, and there’s pleasure in the warmth of his mouth on my toes and his wet tongue on my soles.

There’s another fellow, from Richmond’s stodgy West End, who takes me to the unfinished basement of his expensive, gated home to dress me in cheap t-shirts and denim. He then sits me upon a webbed patio chair. While I watch, he’ll strip his portly body naked, lie on the dirty concrete, and stroke himself furiously while I do what he loves best: tear cap after gunpowder cap from a roll of red paper, tuck it beneath the domed, blunt head of a cap dart, and throw it between his thighs so that on impact, it explodes with a loud retort. He keeps a bucket of darts specifically for this purpose, but once I exhaust them, I’ll have to scoop them up, toss the spent cap papers onto the floor, and start all over again.

Eventually, when the air is acrid with gunpowder smoke and my ears ring from the firecracker pops, the man will heave his body upright and climax, spilling his seed atop the mess of dust and blackened, used caps. I’m never sure exactly what excites my patron about the scenario. Is it the scent? The mild danger of explosives so close to his testicles? Or am I a mere mannequin he’s posing in a recreation of some childhood trauma—an older brother or a bully who titillated, even as he frightened? I’ll never know, but in those chilly hours in the man’s basement, I sit in the costume my client prefers and perfect my aim until I can nail my imaginary bullseye, time after time.

But for the majority of my clients, I discover—half or more—I’m there for conversation. I strip down to my birthday suit, climb into bed or cuddle up on a sofa, and listen to men talk about their lives. Old men recall to me their youths and past loves; I hear stories of how and where men used to find each other in the decades before I was born. Some men chat about their work while I feign interest. A small handful fritter away their time complaining of being unloved, unrecognized, under-appreciated.

I may have entered the business assuming men were paying for my body. I learn that attention is what they truly need. And I, with my eagerness to erase myself in their lustful regard, am more than happy to form the flawless mirror to reflect their desire.

“Choose something,” urges The Professor. I’m still naked, padding over the braided carpet to the bookcases that line his den. Much like in my own home, books occupy every room here. If a case to hold them can be made to fit, he’s done so. We always end our encounters thusly: he reads aloud to me with a book in one hand and my semi-erect cock and balls in the other, then I’m urged to pick a volume to take home. I don’t really require encouragement to read—I'm already one of those boys who loves books. Neither do I really need The Professor’s library; my mom has collected British novels all her life, and I possess a library card. He enjoys the intimacy of sharing, though, and maybe the responsibility of broadening my mind.

Secretly, I also wonder if it’s a way of ensuring I’ll come back, to return what he’s lent.

Already I’ve read his copy of Forster’s Maurice, only recently published despite being written decades before. He’s opened my eyes to Woolf, both with Orlando and To the Lighthouse. I’ve checked out Gulliver’s Travels and finished Nicholas Nickleby, after he’d begun reading it during our meetings. On my own, I’ve previously read the Brontës and Austen. My eyes dance along the spines, scanning title after title, as I try to make my selection.

“The contemplation of beauty,” whispers The Professor in my ear, as his soft hands caress my backside, “causes the soul to grow wings. Plato.” I feel his breath on the back of my neck.

I chuckle because he’s a bit of a pompous ass, both for quoting and naming Plato, but it’s hard to fault the sentiment. Besides, I like the shivers he tickles forth with his fingertips. The bookcase rocks slightly as I press my hands against it and arch my back, presenting the man my butt to do with as he likes.

But touching is all he’ll ever do. Touching and looking, and sighing at those parts of me he finds delightful. “How you tease, my coy mistress.”

“It’s not me who’s teasing,” I say, returning to my feet. I’ve chosen Uncle Silas to take home, mostly because Harriet Vane enjoys Le Fanu in Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries.

“Coy,” he rebuts, laughing to himself as he nods with approval at the title. “Let’s get you dressed.”

At fifteen, I’m already taller than The Professor by a good six inches. When he turns away, I spy something new and unexpected: a knot protrudes behind his ear, speckled and ugly. A crusty scab decorates the top. It’s roughly the size of a deviled egg half, seemingly slipped beneath the fringe of white hair ringing his scalp. Though I want to recoil, my heart beats faster as I reach out. I’d not noticed the injury when I’d been lying on his lap. “What—?”

The Professor flinches at my touch, then spins around. “Interesting fellow, Le Fanu. Not widely appreciated these days, of course, but the man really was a pioneer in the genre of…”

“James,” I say, speaking his name. It’s not a liberty I often take. Kids my age don’t address adults without an honorific like mister or doctor. Sexual intimacy cannot completely break down that taboo. Not even with my clients. I shut my mouth, though, when his shuttered lids lift to reveal something I recognize: a fear of being judged.

I’ve always known that I’m not the only trick The Professor pays for his time. I satisfy some side of him that needs to look at a naked youth and allow his hands freely to wander; I’m there to strip and model and allow him to indulge his avuncular instincts. He has a darker side, though, that needs debasement. My vice, he calls it. In the most delicate of terms, The Professor has let me know before that he also pays trade—rougher, more traditionally macho men, particularly those that give off an aura of danger—to rough him up and penetrate him in a way he craves. I know the welt is a souvenir of one of those visits.

It’s not the first. My vice is something in which he indulges infrequently, but it nearly always leaves a mark. I’ve seen other bruises before, especially around his neck and wrists. Once, the remnants of a black eye. It’s not right. It’s dangerous. Seeing that welt and the violence it implies makes me want to run in the opposite direction.

Yet I need to fix this. I cannot look at affliction without wanting to soothe what is swollen, to mend what’s broken, to smooth the ragged edges and sweep away the debris. “Why don’t you let me…instead of…” Already I know the idea’s as stupid as I am inarticulate. “If you need…that…I could try to do it.”

“Kip.”

“I know how!” In theory, anyway. When he looks away, turning his head so I can’t see the lump, I grow more insistent. If only he’d asked. If only he hadn’t wasted his time with a thug. I would have tried. “You wouldn’t even have to pay me. It would be, you know. Safer. I don’t like when you…”

“Kip.” All the usual good humor in The Professor’s voice has vanished.

“But…”

His head jerks to the side. Waits. Then snaps to the other. It’s the simplest and sharpest no I could have received. “Kindly say nothing more of my vice.” The words burn with frost.

The head-shaking had been a rebuke. This is a slap to the face. I shut my mouth and say nothing more. I’ve overstepped.

It only takes a simple change in tone to remind me of what should have been uppermost in my mind: The Professor and I are not equals. My likes and dislikes don't matter. I’m not in his home as a friend. I’ve forgotten that during the hour or two I'm with the man, I’m ornamental. Nothing more. I’m only as essential as the blown glass paperweight sitting on the man’s roll-top desk, and just as easily replaced. He’d sooner seek wisdom from one of the miniature plaster busts of the Great English Poets adorning his bookcases, than from me.

My dumb idea would never have worked. Accustomed though I am at transforming into what my clients need, there are limits. I can never been the streetwise thug with hair on his burly chest, not the greasy garage worker, not the mustached leather man from the Village People. I’m what men call chicken, the flip side to that coin. Safer isn’t what he wants. As much as I might wish, I can’t fulfill that fantasy of hypermasculinity that brings out the sexual submissive in him.

He can tell I’m deflated. “Don’t worry about an old fool like me.” His spirit artificially light, he takes my fingertips in his grasp and cajoles me back to the chair. “Let me watch you dress, before you go,” he pleads, sitting. I allow him to remove his book from my clutch, as with the gentlest of touches he propels me to the room’s center. “Slowly,” he adds.

He’s forgiven me, but in future I’ll take care not to cross that line again. I fish my t-shirt from the floor where earlier I’d flung it. It’s inside-out, so I wrangle it back into shape.

“Underwear first,” he orders.

I have little choice but to obey. Instead of dropping the tee, I drape it over my shoulder and retrieve my briefs. I slide one leg through a hole, then another, slowly, focusing on his appreciative gaze. Once the elastic is snug around my waist, I rest my long fingers of one hand upon my hips and hold onto the draped shirt, with the other. Then I turn, little by little, a full circle, head tilted back so that my long hair tickles my shoulder blades. This is why he's hired me: to be the most perfect trinket to complement his collection.

When I finish, he lets out a small, yearning breath. “A sweet disorder in the dress,” he quotes, “Kindles in clothes a wantonness.” And because he cannot help himself, he concludes, “Herrick.”

I can’t resist a groan. This ornament’s sense of humor has somewhat returned. “Show-off.”

“Perhaps I am. But Kip?” I stand still in my attitude, raising only an eyebrow. I endure a pregnant pause before he continues. “I do appreciate when you call upon me.” My lips force a smile. “Perhaps next time…we’ll have a bit of Keats. Would that be nice?”

Moments before, I hadn’t been sure of a next time. But now I appease him with a more genuine grin and a cheeky view of my butt while I shake out my shirt and slip my arms inside.

“My coy mistress,” he laments, as if drawing a full stop to the evening’s poem.

But in the twilight, the mistress bikes home from The Professor’s home, regretting what must remain unsaid, due to the disparity in their stations: that while the poet has the impudence to chide her for coyness, he does so with words and quotes and rhyme that frivol away both the precious minutes they spend together and what limited time he has left, as that fabled winged chariot looms ever close.

A Man Called Mother

Summer 1978

By dusk, he’s perched upon his chosen picnic table top, boots planted on the bench. The seat of his jeans scrapes across splintered wood speckled with faded forest green paint. Wide-spread knees support his elbows as he digs through a pack of smokes. He’s a denim-and-plaid loner who sports a big brass oval of a belt buckle at his waist, a Marlboro cowboy without his horse. A snap of a Bic lighter precedes a flash of flame; moments later, the persimmon kiss of a cigarette tip traces a perfect parabola in the darkness as it rises from calves to his lips, then back again.

Nearby, beneath the pine boards of the park shelter and around its perimeter, simmers a bacchanal of sexual pleasure. At the foot of the same picnic table, one man kneels before another, bobbing above a fistful of dick. Similar clusters have formed around the clearing. Pairs and trios relish each other in the heat of the August night. Other figures wend between the scattered tables, seeking solace from the shadows who loiter against the walls. Some men bide their time, unwilling to settle for the first pair of groping hands or hungry mouth; from figures that barely can be distinguished from the darkness, they choose their target and, like a spider in its web, wait for his approach. A handful haunt this quiet space beneath the wooded pines like restless spirits, flitting in nervous circles from soul to soul in search of someone to lay them to rest.

And among the whispers, the whimpers and the sharp intakes of breath, the murmurs of approval and the hushed laughter of men coming to their senses after climax, among the feverish hurricane of courtships and love affairs commenced and abandoned in the space of mere quarter hours, the man atop the table is the tranquil eye at its center.

The men here call him Mother.

Mother. Not because he’s effeminate. Far from it. Not with that ranch hand stance, the deep drawl, the skin of leather. Not with the thicket of mustache perched on his upper lip, meticulously groomed. Mother, not because he’s passive, nor because there’s a Father around who’s the real boss. Here, after hours in the woods of Bryan Park, long after the groundskeepers have ejected the last rowdy rednecks and swept the premises for stragglers, Mother’s word is law. Every man who parks his car in the adjoining neighborhood, who casually strolls the streets as if out for a nighttime walk, then ducks up the embankment to creep across a carpet of pine needles into the park’s forbidden cruising area, knows to abide by Mother’s rules.

He’s not Dictator, though. Not King, nor Chief. Mother, because among this band of outlaws who assemble for their quick trysts, he knows gentle persuasion works best. An appeal to a man’s better nature is a more effective motivator than barking directions. Men don’t mistake Mother’s gentle entreaties as anything less than dominance, though; what we do in these shadows is against every state statute. As criminals, we all fear authority more than we should. So when Mother ousts someone disobeying or flouting our shared conventions, after park hours, they stay ejected. There’s no appeal.

I’d learned Mother’s rules from the start, a couple of years prior, after the notion of park cruising had entered my mind when my mom had read aloud to my father an item from the paper about men being arrested here for public indecency. Instead of receiving the information as a caution, I’d immediately biked over to the park I’d previously only thought of as the gathering place for the annual neighborhood cookout, and scoured every restroom for graffiti that might indicate where the action took place.

It had been less than 48 hours later that I’d made my first appearance at the park’s northernmost shelter, by the light of a half moon. Mother had observed me for several minutes to ascertain that I knew what I was getting myself into before beckoning me to take a seat at his feet. I’d made the mistake of grabbing for him, in a clumsy way, thinking he wanted sex.

Mother has never so much as unzipped his Levis, though, not in all the time I’ve known him. He watches only, observing the trespassing pack around him. He is the guardian who keeps an eye to the east, where the sole road connects this section of the park to the neighborhood beyond, so that he can warn us of a patrol car’s approach. He may stroll around his domain to witness the couplings taking place, but I never see him partake.

That night, he had swatted away my hand and blown twin columns of smoke from both nostrils. “Child,” he began. Normally it was a particularity of address that annoyed me, but in his good-natured rumble it failed to make me bristle. “I’ve seen enough to convince me you know what you’re getting yourself into. But if you intend to come back, there are some things you should keep in mind.”

Apparently the very way I’d entered the park had attracted his displeasure. “We never, ever use the road,” he told me, pointing at the paved stretch running by Youngs Pond and up into these woods, that only minutes before I’d biked along. “Now, there’s no chain across it, like at the park’s main entrance, but that road is still closed after dark. Most people might think nothing of it, but someone with sharp eyes and a suspicious mind,” he said, waving his cigarette at the long row of dimly-lit houses facing Bryan Park Drive, “might see a boy riding his bike into the park. They watch, but they never see him ride out again. And they begin to think. And wonder. They start to worry. They might even worry enough to call out the pigs. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here. Bad things happen when the police come down on us. Capiche?”

I don’t know the last word, but I can glean meaning from context. I nod, and apologize.

“Now, the other night we had the boys in blue up here. Some folks ended up behind bars. All the regulars, the smart ones who know the rules, got away clean—because we help each other. Not a damn thing I can do about dumbasses who’ve got to get in another thirty seconds of fun—thirty seconds they could’ve used getting to safety. You planning on being a smart boy or a fuckin’ dumbass?” When I reply that I prefer the former, he nods with approval. “That’s what we like to hear.”

As men drift by, some shirtless, some with their pants around their knees, Mother lays out his other rules. He doesn’t abide any hustling. Over the following months and years of adolescence in which Bryan Park is a vital part of my life, Mother doesn’t bat an eye at the sex work I do everywhere else. That’s my own business. Within the park bounds, though, I don’t dare. In Mother’s philosophy, transactional sex invites a predatory element into this sacred space. If a man chooses to slip me a few dollars after excellent service, it can be considered a gratuity. Were I ask for it, or worse, demand a payout, I’d be violating one of Mother’s highest precepts.

Mother forbids certain items. The noise from transistor radios might attract attention from the local residents. Same with flashlights, even on the darkest nights. Glass bottles are a distinct danger to our community, though many of the rougher men try to sneak in booze anyway. A beer bottle could be too easily left on a table and knocked off in the dark, only to shatter on the floor and cause an accident. If someone sliced an artery in the woods, no one would have any way of phoning an ambulance or getting someone to a hospital. And the last thing any congregation of homosexuals needs is for their enemies to discover a dead body in one of their haunts.

Cigarettes are fine, and Mother turns a blind eye to the occasional joint, but any harder substances compound our crimes. There’s no fighting allowed. If two men become riled—jealous over a swain favoring one over the other, Mother or one of the regulars steps in to defuse tensions before they rise too high.

Up here, in the dark, in the woods, we are the lawless. We offend one penal code with our intrusion; another by congregating, a third with every proposition, and add to the increasing tally with every casual act of sodomy. Outlaws we may be, but as Mother reminds us, we can still be gentlemen. We cultivate rules for a reason: when we cannot rely upon enforcers of law to protect us, we must defend each other. We may not know each other’s professions or names—not our real names, anyway—nor might we even recognize each other in full light of day. But in the most essential and ephemeral of senses, when together, we form a community.

We call the man Mother, because in this space, no matter our ages or incomes or the color of our skins, sharing a mother makes the rest of us brothers. For a short time.

In my earliest weeks at the park, in my unofficial status as the newest and most tender of meat, I often find myself at the center of a scuffle. Two strangers, each desiring my exclusive company, might attempt a tug-of-war with my arms, or react with raised hackles when I prefer one over the other. I quickly become adept at silently defusing these potential scuffles, either by uniting the men in their attentions and servicing them both, or by placating one with whispered promises to return after I venture into a corner with another. Mother notices, and rewards me with nod or a subtle thumbs-up. 

Weeks into my tenure, once I’ve proven myself, during one of my unoccupied moments he again pats the picnic table and beckons me to sit. Once I’m in position, he places an avuncular arm around me and murmurs in my ear, “How about you stop by my place this Saturday for tea? I’ll read your cards.”

With genuine enthusiasm, I agree. It’s a sign that I’ve been accepted into the tribe.

This is what I half-expect, upon being invited to afternoon tea at Mother’s home: lace doilies, scones, and pale liquid, steaming hot, poured into Mother’s best china. Mother’s home, though, set in a blue-collar corner of Lakeside not far from the park, isn’t exactly the picture-perfect setting for a high tea. From a distance, it looks like a kid’s card house constructed from flat slabs of pitted aluminum siding, precariously perched atop a foundation of cinder blocks, overgrown with honeysuckle.

So what I actually encounter is amber brown beverage both brewed in, and served from, a glass jug that’s been sitting in the back porch sun all morning with a number of Lipton’s tea bags. While my scrawny backside attempts to find a spot on his sofa between the broken springs, I watch as he pours packet after packet of sugar, no doubt collected from fast food joints, into the concoction and stirs in a splash of lemon juice from a bottle. “Let it cool a little,” he advises, after pouring it over ice.

I’m not and never have been a fan of sweet tea served in the Southern style, but it’s a blistering day and tiny sips help alleviate the July heat. While Mother fusses with the jug and places a glass coaster upon the trunk acting as a coffee table, I look around the bare bones of his room. The sofa seems like a curbside find. The television, a black and white model jury rigged with a white wire hanger for an antenna, alternates between rolling snow and a weekend fishing program. Nothing about the furnishings is outright impoverished. Despite the hovering cloud of tobacco smoke, nothing is filthy. But Mother’s home definitely strikes me as the sort of bare-bones set-up of someone struggling to make ends meet—like birds that weave detritus into their nests, it’s a domicile crafted out of makeshift odds and ends.

While I watch him fuss with a packet of Nabisco Cameo cookies, I wonder why I’m even here. Tea, sure. I’d half-expected that to be an excuse for seduction. I wouldn’t mind being bedded today. Mother’s not an unattractive man. So far, I’ve not picked up on any sexual intent in his chit-chat.

“Now,” he finally says, plopping down on the sofa near me. He regards me with speculation over the rim of his glass. “Tell me about you.”

All I can do is stammer and stare. I hate talking about myself, particularly to strangers and in such an open-ended way. I add three years to both my age and my school grade in my inarticulate accounting, to which Mother nods and conceals his amusement with an index finger firmly tamping down his mustache. My baby face gives me away and, if anything, makes me look even younger than I happen to be. I’m so paranoid of exposure that every word from my mouth is a lie. I lie about the neighborhood where I live, the grade I’m in, the school I attend.

It’s not until he changes the subject to my secret life that I hew more closely to truth. When he inquires where I’ve cruised, I enumerate a lengthy list of toilets around town that I’ve discovered on my own—the public library downtown with its peepholes, the glory holes on the university campus where my parents teach. I brag about having walked The Block after dark and loitering in the Hotel Jefferson men’s rooms on weekends. I talk about how I’d begun my sexual career as a lookout in the cruisiest restrooms, observing the action while obstructing potentially hostile intruders, and I take pains to make the experience sound more distant in the past than it actually is.

I’m so voluble on the subject that it’s a few minutes before I notice I’m the only one speaking. Yet I continue, equally as anxious to show off my sexual credentials as I am to hide anything I consider truly personal. Though aware how close I come to braggadocio, I can’t stop. I’m a baby-faced adolescent painting himself as a jaded old roué, desperate for an approval I never knew I so badly needed. I’m a fluffy golden retriever overeager to run with the grizzled wolf pack. Yet I keep talking, though I know I should shut up.

Mother sits at the opposite end of the sofa, wiping condensation from his glass and taking the occasional sip, until at last I run out of words. My jaw hangs low for a moment, then snaps shut. “Well, all right, then,” he comments, amused. “How’s that tea?”

I flush red and try to wash away my embarrassment with a swig of Mother’s evil brew. I’ve just learned a lesson in not overselling myself. Desperate to change subject, I look around the room for any inspiration for a new topic. My eyes alight on a photograph on a shelf over the TV—perhaps the only truly personal touch in the room. It’s a black and white print on glossy stock, edges scalloped, that leans against an empty frame, as if Mother never quite got around to encasing it behind glass. I can barely make out two small figures, children maybe, on a beach. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing.

Mother’s face falls slack. He stares at the shelf, then back at me, seeming to see neither. Then he stands. “Let’s look at your cards,” he says.

I’m not the only one who wants to keep his personal life private, it seems.

Tarot cards aren’t new to me. It’s the nineteen-seventies. Everyone has an indulgence that’s a little hippie-woo-woo. My mom is heavily into yoga, which in this period isn’t valued so much as a form of exercise or wellness as it is as a key to spiritual transcendence; she’s also convinced she has the power of extra-sensory perception, which she leverages, with little success, to spy upon her partners’ cards in rubbers of bridge. Her best friend, Kay, is heavily into numerology and attends EST workshops. Kay’s kids, whom I have babysat on occasion, devour books about aliens. All my school friends, when they’re not playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, are obsessed with the goings-on in the Bermuda Triangle. I have a stylized used Rider-Waite tarot deck myself, gifted me as an afterthought by one of my dad’s students. She’d used to babysit us when I was younger, but she’d abandoned the cards for palmistry, shortly before I outgrew the need for her.

Never before, though, have I known anyone to handle the tarot with such authority. As we sit at the rickety dining table in mismatched chairs, I watch as Mother withdraws his deck from within the recesses of a carved teak box. He juggles the cards together a few times before handing them to me. “Shuffle,” he instructs.

I obey, gratified in a minor way by the eyebrow he quirks when I riffle the deck in what approaches a professional manner, a skill honed by countless after-school rounds of gin rummy with my mother. Then, at his instruction, I cut the deck into rough thirds, restock them, and begin the process again until he’s satisfied. Once I’m done, he takes back the deck and places the top three cards into a triangle with a fourth at the center. “Past, present, future,” he explains, tapping the cards around the perimeter. He turns them face up.

And he begins to read. I no longer remember these three cards once I’ve left the monastic quiet of his apartment. What I recall, however, is the expert way in which he conjures stories and meaning from the colorful medieval images. Details that my eye would miss, he draws attention to and explicates. My dad’s student, the babysitter, always had to pore over a tiny booklet for interpretations of any given card, and even those brief explanations seemed flat and uninteresting, divorced from the cards themselves. Mother’s means of interpretation is personal. He spins a story from the characters on the cards, making the world they inhabit feel occupied and alive.

“This last card is you,” he says, pointing at the triangle’s center before flipping it over. “Two of pentacles. Huh.” He’s resting both forearms on the table, leaning forward to look me in the eye. “I suspect this is a card that’ll be following you around all your life. See how this li’l bastard's got the two coins in his hand? He’s juggling.” His long forefinger darts out to trace the path of a band connecting the globes. “And this? It’s the infinity sign. He’ll be at it a long time. But see how he dances? This ain’t a burden for him. Change comes—change always comes, you know. It’s always on the horizon. Storms brew—see how those distant ships are in danger? Storms rock the ocean, the sun rises and sets, seasons change. Shit happens, some good, some bad. But look at you. You’ve got everything under control. You keep on juggling. You won’t be dropping those balls anytime soon. That’s just how you do. You see it, right?”

The previous three cards didn't seem relevant, but somehow this image, the two of pentacles, hits home. I’ve always been the kid who keeps dancing, balls aloft and in motion, no matter what happens. I balance my academic responsibilities and my extracurriculars with the secret life that’s often my only joy. I keep in equilibrium my public and private worlds, good boy and bad boy, sinner and saint. On the card, those coins look large and heavy. The juggler keeps on juggling, though, even against a background of storm.

“That mean anything to you?”

I look up from the cards and meet Mother’s eyes, then nod. Though I’m not a true believer in divination, I recognize the truth of that one card. I suspect Mother is a juggler, too.

And though Mother will never know it, that one card will follow me around, the rest of my life.

Though I continue to haunt Bryan Park at night for the next three years, I never learn much more about Mother than a few rumors—how he’d had an influential job at the Federal Reserve until he’d been busted in a park vice raid, years before. How his name and photo had been printed in the Times Dispatch, publicly branded as a sexual deviant. How he’d lost his wife and two children in the aftermath and circled bottom until finding work as a florist’s assistant.

I never know if any of it is true. By the time I graduate from college and return home in 1985, even sleepy Richmond cowers under the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis. Like so many of the tribe that once danced beneath the stars, Mother is gone. Packs of outlaws no longer congregate in the park, after dark. Those that do, leave in their wake fields of litter—emptied glass bottles of cheap booze, the charred remains of joints, the kind of harder drug paraphernalia that would have been forbidden only a handful of years before. The neighbors become vigilant; the police patrol more often. 

Camelot has fallen. Without Mother and his disciples, what was an idyllic Bedford Falls becomes a Pottersville of sleaze and vagrancy.

Those storms on the horizon, those roiling waters and the ships that flounder upon them, have arrived. As predicted, change has flooded in. So many of my companions have already been swept away in the waters, and those who remain cling onto the wreckage for dear life.

Amidst it all, I dance. I keep the balls in motion. I juggle on, and on.

Mentors arise from the most unexpected places. I’ve discovered mine on library bookshelves, in classrooms, in casual conversations in crowded bars. As a kid, I encountered one as a stranger on the other side of a men’s room glory hole, who offered tips on the culture and etiquette of cruising via a series of penned notes on squares of toilet tissue. Another later taught me the confidence of placing value in what I’d been giving away for free.

And then there was the mentor I met on the cusp between eras, a guardian who nightly sat atop a park picnic table with an eye to the horizon, watching for danger. A kind, quiet man who reminded his band of outlaws that they must remain civilized and treat each other with compassion. Not tyrant, not bully, not drill master. That lost generation called that man Mother.

Portrait of the Artist

September 1979

In the orthodontist’s mirror, for the first time in two and a half years I see a mouthful of straight teeth unencumbered by shiny metal and little rubber bands. When I run my tongue over the smooth surfaces, it’s not snagged and poked by wires or sharp edges. Sure, I’ll have to wear a retainer for a few years at night and return to this dismal little office from time to time, to ensure my teeth won’t drift and collide like wayward glaciers. For now, though, after long enduring both the uncomfortable hardware and the restless nights after each painful tightening, I’m free.

I’ve no context for what I’m supposed to be feeling. There’s Freaky Friday, the body-switching novel, in which Mary Rodgers’ juvenile heroine spends a harrowing day in her mother’s literal shoes, only at last to discover that her thirteen-year-old body’s had a glow-up, thanks to her crafty mother—braces removed, hair done, a new wardrobe courtesy of daddy’s credit card. Then there’s Freaky Friday the Disney movie, in which a butch and tomboyish Jodie Foster is shown admiring her unadorned smile in the orthodontist’s chair, followed by a montage of beauty shops and department stores in which she’s transformed into a—well, a version of Jodie Foster with the very slightest of hair waves and the faintest application of pink lipstick. Still pretty butch. Still very Jodie Foster. Not exactly a model of how I might celebrate the moment.

Out in the lobby waits my mother, back erect as she perches upon the edge of a seat, legs crossed, studying the detective novel in her hand. “Let’s see,” she says at my appearance. I bare my teeth in a grimace. She peers closely and shakes her head. “Let’s hope it takes. That’s a lot of money in that mouth.”

At home, my father makes a similar show of squinting and peering in my direction. His vision is so low, though, that he can’t distinguish any difference. “If you say so,” is all he says before returning to the pile of maps on his desk. Then, “Be careful. We paid a lot for those teeth, you know.”

I know. I’ve been reminded with every bill.

It’s not as if I can rely on peers to validate what should be a positive, life-changing rite of passage. My friends don’t notice a difference, even when I allow myself to smile more than I have in the past. And my torturers, now deprived of insults like ‘brace-face’ or ‘metal mouth,’ have plenty of other ammunition against me. There’s my beanpole frame, my freakish tallness, my spectacles, the cheap clothing that always seems to be out of style, but which I have to wear for the duration of the school year. There’s my dad’s seventeen-year-old Dart with the right side long ago bashed in and never repaired, now rusted, which is always laughed at when he drops me off at extracurriculars. And then there’s my whiteness, which in an all-Black high school is both my most obvious distinction, yet the least remarked upon.

The only congratulations I receive, that first week after my braces come off, is from my orchestra teacher. He’s startled at my sudden inability to play my school-provided instrument, so used am I to a solid quarter-inch of metal abrading the insides of my lips. “No braces! It will do wonders for your embouchure!” he exclaims, clapping his hands together.

It never does.

“Hold.”

At the base of the spine, my skin twitches and pricks. The artist’s voice arrests my hand as it begins to move, however. I return it beneath the pillow, where it relocates the indentation from nestling so long beneath my head. My naked hips wriggle in protest.

“Hold,” he warns again, his voice barely audible above the whirring locusts in the branches outside.

“I’ve got an itch,” I complain. I’ve been lying in the same position for nearly an hour at this point: prone on an unmade bed, pillow beneath the right side of my face, both arms thrust beneath. My left leg is drawn up, while the right points where the man captures me from a leather-bound chair beyond the four-poster’s foot. All the practice I’ve had exchanging my body and time for cash should have made me perfect at this particular exercise of lying on a mattress without complaint. But at fifteen, remaining motionless without fidgeting is anathema to my very nature.

“Where?” he asks. I tell him. Without a word, the nude man sets aside his tin of paints and the board upon which he works, and rises to loom over me. I sigh with relief at the sensation of his nails against my skin, right where the agony is worst. He scratches back and forth for a long and satisfying moment, then runs his fingertips down my back to leave a trail of gooseflesh in their wake. I feel the flat of his palm caress my ass. Automatically I respond with shifting legs and by arching my hips with a deep, deep sigh.

Martin doesn’t like that. His hands guide me back into position, then reposition the clothing in which he’s dressed me. This week, it’s a white basketball jersey trimmed in blue and red, aesthetically pushed from the bottom almost up to my armpits. Below, a jockstrap. Adult-sized, I think, because it hangs loose around my waist. With the excess tucked on my underside, though, it’s impossible to tell. Calf-high tube socks emblazoned with red stripes around the top hug my legs. He yanks them both so taut that the cotton fabric curls my toes, makes a few final adjustments to my positioning, and settles in his seat. I listen as he picks back up his painting board, pulls closer the tray table with his brushes and water, and returns to his work. I close my eyes and commit to remaining as still and silent as possible.

It’s not the first of Martin’s watercolors for which I’ve posed. Tall stacks of his art lie atop the many old granny tables and bureaus that line his bedroom walls, each thick sheet of cotton rag separated by a layer of tissue paper, then thick cardboard. Somewhere among them is a deft study of me clad only in a tight tee, standing planted on my left foot, right toes bent on the floor, back turned to the artist, arms crossed over my chest so that only the tips appear over my shoulders. Another, completely nude save for another pair of tube socks, sleeping on an antique love seat with enough of my face buried in a chenille pillow that only the underside of my chin and nostrils are visible. A third, again in only socks, in which I sprawl in a Victorian armchair, one of my legs crooked over its arm, with a lacrosse stick angled over my knees.

All Martin’s art is beautiful, to my eyes. A few broad washes of color, a stippling of pigment to create an illusion of texture, sparse pencilled or inked lines for delineation. Every stroke is careful and considered. The finished work, a lesson in economy.

I’m not his only subject. There are a score of other men in various states of dishabille, brandishing sports-related signifiers of masculinity in varied tableaux. Separated from his many landscapes and floral still lifes, Martin’s nudes might form some kind of reimagined tarot, the subjects of his major arcana representing the spectrum from callow youth to old age. The last is represented by his unclothed self portraits, remorseless in their gaze.

Yet, as inspiring as his work may be, it’s never appeared in galleries or public shows. Perhaps he doubts his talent. Perhaps—and I tend to think this more the truth—he shuns the scrutiny that would accompany a public appearance. Either way, his moving finger paints, and having painted, moves on.

“All right. Take a look” The words, softly spoken, awaken me from my trance. So stiff that every movement is a new experience in pain, I rise from the four-poster and grab onto one of its carved columns until I’ve regained my balance. The too-large jock falls from my slim hips onto the floor as I take my first steps. The board on which he’s been painting straddles his spread thighs, angled flat to keep the paint from running. The paper still glistens where it’s wet.

The figure illustrated with sparse lines and broad washes is undeniably me. I recognize those skinny legs, somehow lent the impression of glinting hair below the knees, those narrow hips, the thin chest. He’s given me more of an ass than I actually possess, I fear. But even without much face on display, I recognize the boy as myself.

“Well?”

I cannot stand to look at myself in the mirror, but Martin’s hands have rendered me better than I deserve. “It’s beautiful.”

“Only because you are.” He sets the board onto the floor to his side, then seizes me by the wrist. Slowly he pulls me down. Every instinct warns that he expects a kiss. That’s a hard limit I’ve set from the first, though: kissing is something I never do. It’s a lie, of course. With anyone else, I love making out.

But even for cash, I dread bringing my face that close to Martin’s.

I’m relieved when instead, he pulls my hand to his cock, now stiffening between his legs. Once he’s wrapped my fingers around its obscene thickness, he whispers into my ear, “This is what you want. Right?”

I nod, grateful not to have to look at his ruined visage up close. “Right,” I say, fixing my gaze at the painting that lies on the floor beyond. I grin in an attempt to please.

That’s when he turns my head with his hands, forcing me to regard him. Our noses are scant inches away. I try not to shudder, so close to that sightless, dead left eye, that gruesome scar that curves from eyebrow to nose to jowl, a canyon of pinks and deep reds that’s ragged around its peaks.

The left half of Martin’s face is the stuff of nightmares. My eyes water as I am forced to acknowledge those brutal remains of past misfortune. Whether they arose from accident or act of violence, I do not know. I continue smiling, even as tears well.

“Your braces. They’re gone,” he remarks. I nod, not yet trusting myself to speak. “You’re even more handsome without them.”

“Let me take care of you,” is all I croak, at last breaking from his grasp. I know where he keeps the jar of Vaseline that’s his preferred lube. I retrieve it from the bedside drawer, then kneel at his feet and rub some between my fingers. Down here, with his massive dick at eye level, is where I’m more comfortable. “Relax,” I whisper, pushing at his belly. “Let me do the work.”

He lets out a long sigh as my slick fingers grease his needy flesh, and settles into his chair. His head lolls as my fingers slide back and forth over the shaft. Even at that angle, I close my eyes, so I don’t have to see his expression, or the ravages of his face.

I’d been warned about Martin’s appearance before I’d first met him, a few months before. Earl—the man whom to me is equal parts mentor, procurer, and Fagin to my Artful Dodger—had been careful to let me know what to expect. Still, when I’d arrived at Martin’s townhouse in the Fan and rapped the imposing brass knocker on the door of stained wood, I’d recoiled when it opened to reveal the figure within. Tall though I am, Martin towered over me at six foot five; though not exactly heavy, he weighed twice or more as much. Though he couldn’t have been older than sixty, he dressed like a very old man in a droopy cardigan, with the waistband of his slacks hiked up to a height Humpty Dumpty might have appreciated. His head was smooth and egg-like as well, freckled with liver spots and decorated with the shortest fringe of hair at the temples.

Then there was the face. I dared not stare at the disfigured left half, so I had unfocused my eyes and shifted them to the dour right as I proffered Earl’s business card, upon the back of which he’d scrawled this man’s address. “Kip,” I told him, using my working alias.

Martin had handed it back with a nod. “Kip.” There was a hesitation before he’d asked, “Do you still want to come in?”

I’d looked beyond the door into the man’s hallway and living room, crowded with antiques. Not spindly, delicate valuables that increase in rarity and appeal with age, but the heavy, hulking kind of antiquities inherited from family that one is loath to discard, no matter how unattractive they might be. Still, it’s tidy within, and the man was obviously waiting.

“Of course,” I’d replied, and crossed the threshold.

Later, I’d asked Earl what had happened to Martin. He’d shrugged. He didn’t know. I didn’t dare press answers from the man himself. I was too busy maintaining the fiction that nothing was wrong, that I didn’t notice his disfigurements. With each meeting, the pretense grew easier. Martin was a quiet man. A kind man. Even before he’d begun to pose me for painting, he took his pleasure in providing outfits for me to wear during our encounters. Tube socks with stripes were his fetish; he kept a plastic-wrapped 12-pack of them in a trunk at the bottom of his bed from which he would peel a fresh white pair with every visit. While he knelt and stretched out the elastic opening, I would slip my feet into one after the other, like Cinderella stepping into her Prince’s slipper.

With shaking hands, Martin put me into my first pair of black briefs. He would tug up my hips pairs of tight, high-cut red or blue running shorts with white piping—always new, never used. He would slide over my shoulders athletic jerseys I’d never otherwise wear, then crown my head with baseball caps and turn them rakishly to the side, like a delinquent in an old Archies comic. Once he fitted me with a pair of actual blue jeans, the first I’d ever worn—Levis, no less—just for the enjoyment of admiring me in denim.

He’d urge me to take these items with me, after we were done. “What am I going to do with them?” he’d ask, entreating me to accept his gifts. “Please. Wear them home.”

“I can’t,” I’d say.

“But it would make me so happy.”

It’s always difficult for me to talk about my family’s finances, of how despite my father’s white-collar job, we have precious little money to spare—not for vacations, not for luxuries, not for new cars, not for clothing other than the few basics my mother buys from Sears at the beginning of the school year, that I have to make last no matter how many inches or shoe sizes I grow. It won’t do suddenly to have new socks and shorts appearing in the laundry basket or new shoes in my closet, I explain. My underwear drawer is a neighborhood of lily white Fruit of the Looms; I can’t integrate it without notice or comment. And my mom has never, ever bought for me a pair of jeans. Jeans are too expensive. If she had, they would have been practical, cheap Toughskins. Never an expensive indulgence like real Levis.

His gifts would arouse questions. With what I am, with what I do for men like him, I cannot afford interrogation.

I confess these things in a stutter, with reddened cheeks and a choked throat, ashamed of having to lay bare the realities of genteel poverty to someone who lives in a townhouse full of heirlooms. I’m never sure he fully agrees with my logic. I’m grateful, though, when he stops pressing me to accept his gifts, because I intensely dislike having to say no. Though he continues buying new items for me to model, without comment he begins including an extra twenty in the fold of bills he hands me when I arrive.

I know by now what this man likes best, just like I know the quirks of all my regular clients. A firm fist around his slick shaft, a steady rhythm, the heat of my face close to his thighs, light fingertips down his balls. I’m barely breaking a sweat when his knees begin to jerk and twitch and bang against my shoulders. “Can you suck?” he breathes. “Is that okay?” I keep my focus squarely on his tool when he looks down at me.

Of course I can suck. I drop my jaw and engulf him halfway, turned on by the girth even as my taste buds resent the Vaseline’s mineral tang. He begins shooting immediately, thrashing wildly in his seat while I keep my lips glued to him. The semen arrives only as he subsides, a sour quarter-sized glob on my tongue that I gulp down. Slowly, inch by quarter inch, he slides himself out.

“Thank you, Kip. You’re a very kind boy.” He’s always at his sweetest, after he comes.

Kip is not my name. It’s what I let all these men call me, however. It’s more than a nom de guerre; Kip is an identity. He’s braver than I. It’s Kip who poses in the nude without demur, who shows off his body, who kneels on command. Kip is the fearless adventurer who smiles at strangers and winnows cash from their fists. At home, myself once again, I’m merely the boy who guards Kip’s secrets.

I’m the one now anxious to make my getaway, who wipes my mouth on a nearby towel and eases back onto my knees, ready to rise. Already I’m preparing what to say to wriggle out of this man’s bedroom—something about the lateness of the hour or the long trip home. But before I can struggle to my feet, Martin has rested his hand aside my cheek. “When did your braces come off?” The week before, I tell him. “You must be happy. May I see?”

His face looms uncomfortably close to mine. Every instinct warns me to squirm from his tender grasp and run, but I close my eyes and force my lips apart.

There’s indulgence in his voice. “Come now. You can do better than that. Show me those pearly whites.” He brushes the hair from my eyes. His good humor hardens into disappointment, when I hesitate. “Kip. Am I truly that terrible to look at?”

Earl had never been able to tell me what had happened to Martin, but my imagination is always overeager to supply answers. He’d been wounded in the war. Exactly which, I never quite decide, because I’m bad at both math and historical dates and can never quite reconcile the two around a specific war. He’d been a notorious criminal—though those of that bent perhaps didn’t live in swanky townhouses in this exclusive part of town. He’d suffered an accident as a child, or had been in a car crash.

Or—and this is the possibility that haunts me late at night, when I’m alone in the dark—he could have been attacked. There are men out there who delight in preying upon people like us. Who would happily pull out a knife to assault and mutilate, just because of a wayward glance or the wrong word or tone from another man. Since the second grade I’ve been subjected to words like pansy, queer, and faggot. I’d been lucky to avoid violence, so far. One day, my luck might run out. Maybe it had with him.

To imagine that what might have happened to Martin could easily be my fate, with bad luck, at the wrong time, in an unfortunate place…well. That frightens me more than his face ever could.

His question has awakened my guilt. This is a man living with a disfigurement, secluding himself away from the world and hiring companionship because of his appearance. But he’s no monster, no B-movie Lon Chaney lurking around opera houses. This is Martin. The man who sees me in ways I cannot envision myself. The man who dresses me and calls me beautiful. The artist. Martin, the one person who has noticed what’s changed in me this week, without having to be told.

It’s Kip, the more courageous of us, who opens his eyes to meet the older man’s gaze, full on. “No,” Kip says. Martin’s palm still cups my jaw. I return in the gesture, resting my right hand against the left side of his face, in mirror image. My long thumb crosses the jagged crevice at an angle. “You’re not.”

We gaze at each other for an extended moment. The longer our eyes lock, the easier it becomes. It’s just a scar. It’s just a stupid, unfortunate scar, and too long have I allowed it to frighten me. To prove my sincerity, I lean forward, and press my soft lips against his.

“Oh, Kip,” he breathes.

I’ve agreed to stay for another hour. I’ve spent it curled in a hollow upon his mattress, still wearing the basketball jersey and socks. “Hold,” commands the artist, who sits crossed-legged and naked next to me, drawing board upon his lap.

I reach out and squeeze his flaccid dick.

He swats away my hand with a laugh. “Don’t hold that. Come on, now. I’m nearly done.”

“Let me see.”

“Let me finish.” He pushes me back down. “Smile?” My face is nearly numb from holding the same expression for long minutes, but he gently strokes and tickles my legs until once more I let loose another oblique beam. I’m rewarded by the scratching of his pencil. “Take a look,” he says at last.

It’s only a sketch, this time. Again, it’s composed so sparingly that I marvel I can recognize my half-closed eyes, my bulbous nose, the sharp jut of my chin. That unmistakable grin of mine, pulled to one side, as if someone has shared a private joke. Beneath the representation he’s scrawled a title.

Kip, it reads, in quotation marks.

“I wish you could take it with you,” he whispers, tracing the very jaw he’s just committed to paper. “But I understand.”

He’s reading my mind. I nod, agreeing. I wish that, too.

This is celebration enough for my transformation, this intimate moment between the artist and his model. I watch as he rises, retrieves a clean sheet of tissue and a new length of cardboard from a stack in a cupboard, and places his latest drawing atop one of the piles. Already it’s fading into memory, soon to be buried beneath the floral paintings and figure studies of men in tube socks and athletic gear that surely will follow. Who knows when it might be appreciated again, or who might one day sift through all this unseen work and happen upon a portrait of a smiling youth named Kip, sketched from above where he once lay and smiled, one early autumn evening long ago?

Let them think kindly of it, I wish, as I watch it disappear.