Old Haunts

My time in this part of the country is limited. I’ve known that fact for almost a year now, but only in the past month have I been able finally to assign a date to the end point. I move in less than two weeks, so if there’s anyone I want to see, any place I want to revisit, the days are running out.

I woke up Saturday to a beautiful spring morning, one of those golden Michigan days in which the sun seemed to caress the new leaves on the trees, and for which the skies had clarified themselves to the intense blue of a child’s paintbox. I didn’t want to spend the day stuck indoors, packing, so I decided to take a nostalgia tour.

I hopped in my car and visited the first house I owned, far on the city’s east side. I’d managed to move out when prices in the area had tripled, yet the area was edging into decline. Driving by the old home, which now has bars on the downstairs windows and a metal gate over the front and side doors, very nearly took the sweet edge from my mood. No matter how valuable it is to be reminded of the bad things we’ve avoided, sometimes, I didn’t want to spend much time in a deteriorating neighborhood. So I went back downtown, to the university for which I’d originally moved, for graduate school.

I snapped photos of my first apartment building, and the classrooms where my department had offices. I revisited the department for which I’d worked temporarily, when I decided to regroup and take my life in a different direction. I snapped a few shots of the buildings where I’d spent evening after evening during the first blush of my off-and-on teaching career, lecturing about the great English novel in front of students who were only there to fulfill a humanities writing credit.

Then I revisited the more interesting spots.

First I revisited the oldest building on campus. Back when I was a student, it had been a run-down, decrepit, and frankly scary place full of twisting hallways that never went where you thought they ought. It was basically the Winchester Mystery House of academia, and an amazing place for sex back then. There was a rumor that the behavioral sciences sciences, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, had run a decades-long study of men’s cruising behavior in the basement restroom there, and I’d had it on the very good authority of a university building engineer that there was indeed an observation room (long in disuse) on the other side of the wall-long mirrors that hung over the array of urinals. It had been possible to walk in there at any time of day or night, when the building was open, and score dick, when I was a student.

I peeked into the auditorium where one of my tricks, a university psychologist from the counseling office, had taken me after we’d met in the men’s room. He’d locked the doors and fucked me on the lecture table in the dimly-lit room until we’d been interrupted by a janitor who wanted to empty the trash cans.

I checked out the old restrooms where I’d cruised and met the Spaniard who’d earned me the nickname of Beef Boy, and of the romantic actor who’d broken my heart when he didn’t call me as he'd promised, after our mind-blowing fuck. I visited the basement stalls that had been the absolute last hurrah of my career as a bottom, where I was fucked repeatedly by the quarterback of the football team. (And since I know that sounds like a cliche, I’d like to point out that the university had a football team that even the football team members laughed at.)

But mostly I went to the university library, where I’d had more encounters than anywhere else.
The library had as many as four active restrooms over my history there. There had been the secluded, tiny men’s rooms in the periodicals section stairwell, where sometimes the walls had been covered with so much profanity and scribbles of men seeking sex with each other that it was as complicated to comprehend and absorb as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. There had been the larger restroom on the ground floor before, where for three years men flocked to take advantage of a large, smooth-edged gloryhole that some enterprising fellow had created with a circular router. I’d spend many a lunch hour in there, snacking on dick after dick, or feeding my cum to strangers who were no more than a curious, guarded eye and a mouth to me.

The gloryhole had been bolted over with sheet metal long ago—I could still see the rivets beneath layer after layer of paint that’s been applied since. And no trace of action remained there. In the last of the four restrooms, though, the one in the highest reaches of the library’s main section, I could immediately tell that the place was still used for sex. I hadn’t cruised there in a couple of years, since I haven’t been affiliated with the place in some time. But even though they’d painted the stalls over recently, they couldn’t erase the giant peep hole that someone had made in the metal partition, probably using nothing more than a bolt hole from some previous toilet paper holder, and a sharp, rigid object like a screwdriver.

I’d spent so much time in those stalls, both as a student, then as a staff member. I’d come there almost every lunch hour for weeks at a time, sometimes. I’d anticipate the first day of school with an ungodly glee, because it was the day that all the curious new students looking for action would appear, and I could feast all day long on freshman dick. I’d met long-term fuck buddies there, and relationships that lasted for longer than a restroom trick ought.

Remembering all that, and knowing it was the last time I’d see the place, made me want to spend a little time there. So I slipped into the farthest stall, dropped my shorts, and started to work on the erection that had started growing the moment I’d stepped into the place.

I’d only intended to stay for a moment or two, tops, to smell the smells, to hear the old familiar sound of the old-fashioned urinals being flushed with violent sweeps of water every five minutes. The campus had been nearly empty, on a summer semester Saturday. A few tour groups had been roaming across it, where guides walked backwards followed by nervous-looking youths in shorts and T-shirts. The library itself was even more deserted. To my great surprise, though, I heard the sounds of footsteps in the stone stairwell outside, followed by the swinging of the bathroom door. Someone walked in, paused, and then walked over to occupy the stall next to me.

My boner doubled in size.

I leaned forward and looked through the peephole. Almost immediately I saw a dark eye on the other side, a swoop of black eyebrow, and skin the color of caramel. Both he and I adjusted positions, trying to take in more details. I saw a fringe of dark hair on his upper lip—not thick enough yet to be called a mustache, but obviously a point of pride. There was a young Latin boy on the other side of that peephole, and he was cruising me. I stood up and showed off my dick in profile, stroking it, displaying its length. I could tell from the shadows on the tile that he was watching. Then I sat down again, leaned forward, and waited.

He stood up. The kid wore a striped polo shirt that was clearly too large for his lean, pole-like body. His dick was a dark sausage, the foreskin clustered around its tip giving it the impression of having been pinched off into shape when it had been formed. When he stroked for me, the skin pulled back slightly, displaying the wetness at its tip.

I dropped down my hand, letting it dangle beneath the partition. I would have jerked him gladly, even sucked him some. To my surprise, though, he pulled up his jeans. I heard his stall door open, and then saw his silhouette outside my own. When I opened the latch and let the door swing open, he was standing there, clutching his baggy jeans so they wouldn’t fall to his ankles, his hard dick jutting out over the open fly. His hair was cropped short. His eyes, the color of obsidian and just as shiny, regarded mine, and then he nodded, before staring at my dick once more.

I stood up. Almost immediately he dropped to his knees, right there on the tile. I didn’t know if he’d cruised that particular restroom before, but I made sure that if someone came in, I could close my stall door at a moment’s notice.

No one came in, though.

He sucked me like he’d been denied his favorite treat for far too long. Forgotten was his own dick, though it still jerked and dripped on its own, over the teeth of his zipper. His hands cupped my balls and his mouth consumed me. His eyelids closed in ecstasy, and he moaned and grunted to himself as he used my meat to fulfill the need he had, deep inside.

He was so damned pretty. His lips extended as far as they could to take in all my dick. I could have cum for him, easily.

And then he stood up. “Fuck me,” he said, turning around.

When he dropped his jeans and showed off his caramel-colored ass, I threw all caution to the wind. “Get in here,” I told him, and drew him into the stall.

I shut the door behind me and positioned him over the toilet. I’ve fucked men in toilet stalls before. It’s risky, and if anyone comes in, it requires one guy to perch atop the john while the other sits between his legs, and it requires waiting out whomever’s invaded the restroom. I thought the risk was worth it, this time.

His pants fell around his knees. His hole was hidden beyond a fringe of dark hair. I spat on my fingers and rubbed the impromptu lube over that hidden place, satisfied when he let out a grunt. My cock was angry—beet-red, engorged almost beyond recognition, ready to punch and spit. I entered him roughly, not really caring that he had to bite down and suppress an outright yell. Because I knew that within moments, his hole would start to grip and clutch my dick, pulling it more deeply inside.

My instincts were right. The pain was only momentary. He wedged his shoulder against the low hardware of the toilet and looked behind at me, eyes full of gratitude and—I might even say—love. This is what spur-of-the-moment sex was supposed to be. Spontaneous. Rough. We both wanted to feel it, to remember it, to know that despite the enforced silence and the need for secrecy, that we’d both made our marks in that stall. Just as every other man masturbating there for decades had left trails of sperm drying on the layers of industrial paint, we were leaving sexual psychic residue of our own, forged through heat and need and connection.

My own noises were limited to small grunts and the odd catch of breath; he panted and lifted his ass higher, higher, for me to penetrate and use. The soft sounds of my thighs slapping against that ass echoed across the men’s room. They were soon followed by a soft sigh as I released myself into him, and the rattle of the toilet seat as he too, came across it.

I pulled out, let my dick drop, and was happy to note it didn’t need rinsing. He still knelt on the toilet seat, hole gaping, dick dripping with sperm, his head resting against the cream-colored subway tiles of the wall. I pulled up my pants, tucked my three-quarters-hard dick into my shorts, buttoned, zipped, and stepped out of the stall.

I heard the sound of him ripping toilet paper from the dispenser as I washed my hands. He stepped out, adjusted and back to normal, as I pulled some paper to dry off. Our eyes met for a brief second, and we nodded at each other. Transaction complete.

I wouldn’t see him, or this place again. But we’d remember each other. Of that I was certain.