What I Couldn't See

This area in which I’ve lived for half my life is the most divided, racially and economically, of anyplace I’ve ever known. Though we refer to the vast region of southeast Michigan as ‘Detroit,’ that generality fails to connote what every native of the region knows: there’s a vast difference between the relatively prosperous suburbs and the city proper, which has been eating away at itself from within for years.

I lived within the Detroit city limits for many years when I first lived here—I moved into the downtown area as a student, then bought my first house in one of the so-called safe neighborhoods at the city’s edge. In the early-to-mid nineties when I bought the two-story colonial for a whopping twenty-four thousand dollars, safety was indeed very much a concern. It was the height of the city’s reign as the crack and murder center of the U.S. My neighborhood was a pleasant little racially-diverse enclave of friendly people just south of the city’s notorious 8-Mile Road that delineated the city border from the suburbs, populated heavily by police officers and firemen and other city workers who were required to live within its limits.

Back in the early nineties, an era that now seems as long-distant and antiquated as the middle ages, we had to cruise face to face in bars and parks and restrooms. Online was only becoming an option. I’d snagged a free Prodigy sign-up kit when I’d lived in my downtown apartment. In my new house, though, with my hot new Macintosh LC II pizza box and my 2400-baud modem, I made the leap to America Online, which outdid Prodigy with its nifty bells and gizmos. Not to mention its specialized M4M chat rooms, where excitement lurked.

It was in one of these chat rooms that I made my first AOL hookup. The guy was married, and older than I, and lived in one of the ultra-wealthy, ultra-white Grosse Pointes, the most exclusive suburbs in the region. That’s about all I knew of him. It was an era in which having digitized photos of oneself was a novelty, not a requirement; obtaining one would have required an expensive and clunky scanner, or more affordably, one of those nozzles one could attach to a dot-matrix printer that would have scanned a photo into a pixillated approximation of itself, line by line, as it jerked across the slowly-rotating carriage. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to figure out how to send or receive one, in those distant days. We were all such babes in the woods, then.

As it turned out, a photo didn’t matter. He didn’t want me to see him, anyway.

This is how it used to go down, with him. We’d see each other in the MI M4M chat room. Soon I’d hear the familiar trill of the instant message from him, asking if I could host. He’d name a time, and then I’d agree to be ready. I’d wash up, strip down, and then wait for him in the living room, completely naked. Door unlocked. On my knees.

Blindfolded.

I didn’t want me to see him, not ever. He had too prominent a job, he explained. A wife. Three kids. He didn’t want to be recognized, especially by the men he was fucking. So at his command I’d take a raggedly old bandana that I’d had since high school and wrap it around my eyes. I’d kneel on the soft peach-colored carpet in front of the sofa. And I’d wait, patiently, for his arrival.

He usually arrived quickly. When he was hunting, he wanted to get down to business as fast as possible. I’d hear the sound of a car door slamming outside, and then a step on my front landing. The whuff of displaced air between the storm door and my front door would follow, then the opening of the latch. My dick would harden as I heard him cross the threshold and drop his coat onto the floor. Then he’d walk over to me and take control.

Usually he’d grab me by the hair and blindfold and grind my face against his crotch. I was clean-shaven, then; he’d abrade my cheeks and jaw against the cotton of his slacks. My lips would snag against the cold metal teeth of his zipper. His belt buckle, frigid and hard, would bang against my forehead as he fumbled it from its clasp. Then I’d smell his dick, hot and needy, close to my lips.
Its scent was undefinable, but I’d recognize it immediately. There was soap, certainly, and the faintest remnants of the laundry detergent from his fresh briefs. But there was something else as well—perhaps the aroma from the bead of pre-cum that always lingered at his dick’s tip, or the mixture of oils and secretions that even the cleanest of man quickly accumulates in his out-of-the-way places. Regardless, I always knew when he’d pulled out that dick, just seconds before it plunged into my anticipating mouth.

He wasn’t gentle. He was a skull-fucker, the kind of man who liked to cradle my head in his hands and hold it motionless while he power-pistoned its wet depths. His dick couldn’t have been any longer than five-and-a-half thick inches, but the length didn’t matter. The vigor with which he used it did. He managed to open my throat with those shorter inches than most men with dicks my size ever could. The back of my throat would be hoarse and swollen from the assault for days, when he was finished.
I liked it like that.

He never undressed; he never took any more than five good strides into my home. He’d enter, close the door behind him, drop his pants to his upper thighs, and face-fuck me until he shot a load down my throat. When he came—and he came quickly—he’d thrust his dick so deeply down my throat that my nose and mouth would choke and gag, deprived of air, against his belly. Done, he’d shove me away roughly. So roughly that sometimes I’d fall back to the carpet, dizzy and off-balance. I’d hear the sounds of his buckling and fastening, and then the door opening and closing behind him.

Sometimes he liked to switch it up; he’d bring velcro cuffs with him that he’d attach to my wrists before he face-fucked me. A couple of times he cuffed my ankles and wrists and got me to kneel on the sofa in order to fuck my hole, but mostly he liked my mouth. He’d tell me how pretty my lips were, as he squeezed them with his stubby fingers, pinching the flesh tightly against his rigid meat. Or he’d whisper that I was better than his wife, as he’d insert his ring finger along with the rest of his dick.

He always told me to leave on my blindfold for five minutes after he left. I cheated, once. I wanted to see what this man looked like, this figure of wet dreams who played so powerfully into my fantasies. After my front door shut, I ripped off my blindfold and raced to the front window. Through the California privet I watched a perfectly ordinary middle-aged guy—slightly overweight, dark hair, former jock good looks—striding back to his BMW. I only caught a brief glimpse of him. I didn’t want to see more. It already felt a little like ripping down the curtain and finding that the mighty Wizard of Oz was a a suburban soccer dad.

After that, I left on my bandana, happy to remind blind for him.