Baby-Man

Yesterday I wrote about one of the French professors I bedded in college. With a little bit of pride I should point out that he was not the only French professor I disrobed as an undergraduate; by the time I’d finished my four years at the school, I’d managed to have sex with all three of the professors who comprised the faculté Français. Oh yeah, I collected them all. If the campus had been a Monopoly board, I could’ve built hotels in Romance Languages and Economics.

One of my readers yesterday commented that it was so ‘very me’ to have found a four-year fuckbuddy in my first hour of freedom on my college campus. In a way, I suppose it is. But to squash the illusion that I am some gifted superstud with a supernatural ability to ferret out the good fucks in any situation I’m in, let me assure you that within the first day of arriving at college, I had my first stalker as well.

I wasn’t the most social kid at my college. I was a year younger than most of the freshman, and I’m pretty sure it showed. Tall and gangly though I might have been, I still was an extremely young-looking seventeen when I left for school. I was quiet where the other kids on my dorm hallway were loud and crazy. My roommate was a bit of a lout who, the moment his parents disappeared, began drinking so much beer that he was drunk by 4:30 and had vomited all over his bed, his desk, and out in the hallway before nightfall. The other guys on my hall thought he was hil-ar-ious, and had turned my dorm room into party central.

So I took advantage of my first couple of days at school to find all the places on campus where guys went for sex. There were a few.

I’d already located the basement of the student center with the French professor. I went back after dinner and sucked off an older student in the same place. Then I discovered that the first floor of the campus center had a little action going on itself. I cruised the library and found that the second and third floors in the stacks were a place to find dick even fairly late in the day. I sussed out a toilet in the psych building with some promising graffiti, though I wasn’t sure it would pan out as a sex spot. (It never did.)

And then I found the tourist restroom.

My college, I’ve said before, is one that was adjunct to the tourist spot of Colonial Williamsburg, that quaint living history display of pre-revolutionary America. When one left the modern campus and walked through its most historic buildings to the very front, the tourist attraction sprawled out before one, across the street. First was a buffer of gift shops and restaurants known as Merchant’s Square. A couple of blocks below began the attractions.

Between Merchant’s Square and the historic area proper, however, was a small visitor’s information center. The tour busses stopped there every ten minutes, disgorging dozens of passengers who’d collect maps or buy tickets at the tiny booth within. It was little more than a satellite information booth, of course—the real ticketing and information center was an air-conditioned behemoth of a building a couple of miles away. I spent so much time at the small visitor’s center, however, because of the men’s room. It was perfectly set up for cruising.

In the men’s room were three stalls and three or four urinals. They were set perpendicular to each other in the room so that through the cracks of any of the stalls, one commanded an unobstructed view of men whipping out their dicks and peeing. Or, more often than I thought probable, stroking themselves to hardness and showing them off to the men behind the stall doors. The place sometimes seemed to have as many cruisers as urinators. Handsome tourist daddies free of their families for a few seconds would become hardened perverts, masturbating themselves into the urinals while men watched. Professors from campus would come down, unzip, and find a willing mouth in which to relieve themselves. A couple of the bolder students, myself included, would visit and feast on the buffet of dick presented with every new busload. I’m not exaggerating when I say the place was like a Roman orgy—at all times of day, really, but particularly at night.

I also found out that first night at school how the tiny little park behind the rest center, scarcely more than a handkerchief of grass and two park benches, was where men went to get into activities more involved than practical for a small restroom. When night fell, the only people in the darkness there were guys fucking—sometimes ten to twelve of them, making no more noise than the occasional grunt or sigh of relief when they came. I don’t remember exactly who got me that first night. It was just strange dick to me, and I welcomed several in my mouth and a couple in my ass in that little park before finally I slunk back to my dorm room, where the guys were still drinking in the dorm hall and bullshitting about all the pussy they’d fucked.

Freshmen had about a week of orientation before classes actually started. I found myself with some free time the next day, so back to the visitor center I went. I spent about an hour watching men pee and getting the occasional flash of an erect dick, but at midday the center was too busy to be conducive for action. I wasn’t getting any, in other words. After a while, though, someone came in and sat in the middle stall, next to me. We did the dance of the tapping toes. A moment later, he handed me a note beneath the stall, written on toilet paper and wrapped around a pen. Would you like to go somewhere else? he wrote.

Sure, I wrote back.

I know a spot where we can talk and stuff.

Okay, I scrawled, and waited for him to pull up his pants and go so I could follow him.

But no, he had more to say. Are you really going to follow me?

Yes. Yes, yes, a hundred times yes, I thought to myself. Just get going!

After what seemed an eternity, he finally rebuckled his trousers and left. I followed him out a moment later, and looked around for the guy with the shoes I’d seen once I was outside in Merchant’s Square.

I wasn’t too pleased with what I found, either. The guy was not at all attractive. He was obese, for one thing. While I’d been with big men before (and since) and hadn’t really minded very much, there was something off about the fellow that didn’t make me want to follow him. He couldn’t have been older than thirty or thirty-two, but he dressed like an eighty-year-old in cheap synthetics with elastic at the waistband and snaps instead of buttons; even his dock siders looked as if they’d been extruded in shiny plastic. He was effeminate to the point that his shiny shirt had a not-so-subtle floral print. His eyes were tiny and set far back in the shrunken apple doll head that was his face. He was just an all-over not very attractive man.

But I was young and stupid, and instead of disappearing into the crowd as I should have, I decided to do the polite thing and go through with it, even though every atom of my body was telling me not to.

When he said he knew a place to talk, he wasn’t kidding about talking, whereas I’d been expecting more ‘and stuff.’ He took me to a little green alley by the Governor’s Palace where tourists didn’t really venture—only Williamsburg employees rushing to and from an employee restroom hidden behind a privet hedge nearby. He sat down on the grass with his ankles crossed like a kindergartener, and settled his hands onto his lap and stared at me while I sat across from him, but not too near. He was like a baby and a gross old man, all wrapped up in one unappetizing package. “What’s your name?” he asked. Like a fool, I told him. He addressed me with it. “So you’re a homossssexual,” he said.

I stared at him. I was a restroom cocksucker, and a park slut. I had been bent over picnic tables and thrust up against trees and had my head knocked against urinals. I’d seen more dicks than the average urologist and done it in every conceivable position and variation, but I’d never had anyone who had intentions of banging me sit down and make me identify my sexuality.

“I think it’s best that you admit you have homosexual leanings,” he said, smiling patiently. I was furious. I almost wondered if he was some kind of evangelist who’d infiltrated the restrooms to find gay guys to proselytize. “Well, sugar, you’re lucky you found me,” he said, reaching out to clasp my knee. I scooted back to avoid his touch. “I’ll be gentle your first time, unlike most of the brutes who hang out in that place.”

Now I understood. He thought I was a virgin, cruising the restroom for the first time. “You know, I don’t want to. . . .” I started to mumble.

“Of course you don’t want to be a homosexual,” he said. “It's awful. But you are. You should just admit it.” I wasn’t going to admit anything to this weirdo. If I’d been bolder or more assertive—in short, if I’d been then the man I am now—I would’ve excused myself, or simply said something like, Listen, bub, you’ve got the wrong impression about me. But I was not as adroit then, and unused to maneuvering out of a sticky situation. He used my name again. “Do you want me to tell you the names of famous homosexuals throughout history? Or do you want to hold hands?”

I did not. So I did what I shouldn’t have done, which was to bolt. I mean, I stood up and ran like a wild man, pell-mell down that little gravel alley, kicking up colonial dust in my wake. The entire time it happened, the enormous baby-man yelled out my name in my wake.

The nightmare should’ve been over at that point, but no. When I went back to the visitor center that night, thinking I could get some dick without a hassle, I sat down in one of the stalls and started jacking myself erect when I looked to my right and saw my name scrawled on the partition, in black marker. It makes me sad you can’t admit what you are, it said. My heart almost leapt out of my chest. I yanked up my pants and recomposed myself. Before I left, though, it struck me to check out the other stalls. Sure enough, he’d written in all three. You are a homosexual, it said in the middle one, with my name prominently attached. In the third, beneath my name, it said, Admit the truth.

I have to confess here that what upset me so much wasn't the notion that I was gay. I had kind of figured that out, by this point. It was that he used my name, so publicly. In a panic, I left the men’s room and walked out to the little park where I’d had so much fun the night before. Men were moving in the gray shadows. I couldn’t make out what they were doing, exactly, but I was sure I wanted a part of it. A tall man brushed by me. The tips of his fingers stroked the corduroy of my pants. He looked back over his shoulder and jerked his head for me to follow.

Then I heard a familiar voice from the bench, saying my name loudly and breaking the hushed spell of the park. “Fancy seeing you here,” said the baby-man, in the most meaningful of tones.

I fled again, as he called my accursed name at my back.

In short, I allowed myself to become victim to someone who delighted in making me uncomfortable. These days, I know pretty much how to handle it. Then, I didn’t have the resources or experience. I’d avoid the park and the visitor center for a couple of weeks at a time, then go back for a few days and enjoy myself until I ran into the baby-man again. He would always use my name, very loudly and prissily, as if he took great pleasure in embarrassing the hell out of me. From time to time he would refresh the graffiti, coming up with fresh words to rekindle the hell of my mortification.

It’s hard to believe now that I allowed that shit to go on for three and a half years. It wasn’t until my senior year that I got rid of the guy. I used to meet up with a guy who worked for Williamsburg as a slave—by which I mean he was an actor from Brooklyn who was paid pretty well to strip to the waist, adopt an African accent, and portray a colonial slave, of course—who would change into street clothes and hang out at the park with me on warm nights. He was a muscular man of great comeliness who always made me feel very flattered when we’d make out and swap blowjobs in the bushes. When one night I started to flee because of the baby-man, he made me stop and listened to my complaints. “Oh, that old queen,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Fuck that shit,” he said. “Just pretend he’s not there and do whatever it is you want. That’ll make him stop.”

I was dubious, but I took the advice. And sure enough, once I pretended I didn’t care, the baby-man left me alone. When he’d call out my name and say something insinuating and sly, I’d pretend I didn’t hear. If he wrote on the bathroom walls, I pretended I didn’t see. There were other people with my name, after all. Eventually he got tired of playing a game without a partner, and disappeared for the last semester of my college career.

Fuck that shit was one of the best lessons I learned in school, frankly. I apply it on a daily basis, still. I wish I’d just been a little quicker on the uptake.