Allan, Part 3

(This entry is a continuation of previous posts, Allan, Part 1, and Allan, Part 2.)

It’s August of 2009, and I was in the grungier of Detroit’s two bathhouses. (It had been years since the gum incident at the older and cleaner facility, and I’d not been back since.) It was a Tuesday morning, and although I’d had a lot of sex since my arrival a couple of hours before, it hadn’t been that good. There’d been a weird guy who kept coming into my room every few minutes to ask if I want any company, while he showed me the tiny mushroom sprig that was his dick, barely visible beneath the thick bush of his pubes. I keep telling him no, but he wasn’t getting the message. Then there’d been the black guy who’d used so much teeth on my dick that I would’ve sworn he was trying to scrape off a layer of dermis.

Then a tall, thin guy had entered the room. The place had been pretty dark that morning, so I wasn’t able to see much about him. He wore a baseball cap. Once, when he removed it, he proved to have a very close-shaved head beneath. He didn’t say much. He softly pushed me down onto my back, on the thin mattress. He kept a hand on my chest as he straddled his legs and ass over my hips. Then he wriggled his hole down onto my dick, and began rising and falling in a regular rhythm.

And I thought to myself, Allan? Because there was something in his size and general build, and in the way he moved, and especially in his hunger for my dick, that brought to mind the boy I’d known nearly a decade before. There was enough to give me doubt, though. Allan rarely kissed me when we fucked, and this guy kept his mouth firmly on mine. Allan had always been into he sex for the pleasure of his own hole. This man in the dark kept asking me questions—Do you like that? Does that feel good? Should I keep doing that? Questions that made me suspect my pleasure was coming before his. And hot as the sexual haze might have been in which Allan had dwelled, years before, he never really struck me as completely present during sex.

This guy was not only present, but he was responsive, and sweet, and tender, and gentle, even as he milked two loads in a row from my dick, sitting on it. He wasn’t intending to let me up until I came. And again I thought to myself, Allan?

At the end of two hours of really good sex, all of which took place with me on my back as he attended to me with a very, very skilled hole from above, he got up and shuffled out. He closed the door to all but a crack on his way out. I was too weak and spent to get up and close it all the way. A few moments later, the door opened again. I was ready to shoo out the guy who’d intruded, but it was the baseball-capped guy again. He handed out a slip of paper. “You should text me on Tuesdays if you want to fuck,” he said, pushing it into my fingers. “I think we’d have a really good time.”

Then he was gone.

I didn’t recognize the number on the slip, to be honest. I kept it in my dresser throughout the week, and then got up the nerve to text it the following Tuesday. I got a reply back almost instantly, with an address, and the instructions to come on over.

The address, of course, was Allan’s. So I knew. I was willing to return to his tiny little house, however, because I recognized something had changed about him. I wanted to find out what.

The changes were evident when I stepped into the living room. He invited me in rather formally, I thought. “The place looks great!” I enthused, honestly, when I looked around. I’d never seen the curtains and blinds open in his living room before. The sun was warming the room and its old furniture. The living room was clean, and tidy. When I’d known Allan in the old days, he’d kept sheets thrown over everything, and there’d been layers of dust and cigarette smoke residue everywhere. Not now. There wasn’t even an aroma of smoke. The room looked as if someone actually lived there, rather than was camping out there and having sex on someone else’s furniture.

“I thought we’d go in here,” he said, shyly taking my hand and leading me down the postage stamp-sized hallway to the bedroom. The door was open. The room was dim, but not dark. Like the living room, it was completely clean and fresh.

“What happened—?” I started to say.

I’d meant to ask, what happened to all your drag queen stuff? Because the last time I’d been in that room, it had been filled with it. There weren’t any dresses spilling out of the closets. In fact, one of the closet doors lay open, and I could see there were only regular old shirts and pants within. The vanity that had occupied the wall opposite the bed was just gone. Completely gone. Any trace of Allan’s sequined past had just vanished.

It was when I saw him looking at me blankly that I realized something. Allan had no idea who I was.
He didn’t remember me from the decade before.

He didn’t know we had a history. He didn’t know I knew him, and was arriving with all the preconceptions I’d carried from before.

I know that people are thinking, If you guys fucked so much, how could you not know each other, even after a few years? Allan had changed, though. He’d been boyish when I knew him. He was a man, on our second go-round. He was leaner, and more muscular. His head was shaved.

And he even fucked differently. We made love in his bed that first morning, for the first time ever. It wasn’t all about him getting his hole stretched to the maximum, either—though he certainly craved that. Between fucks (and we did fuck multiple times that morning) he would go down on me, and suck me from ass to mouth. He licked my nipples, and chewed them exactly how I liked. He touched me with the flats of his hands, all over. He rubbed his mouth and lips over my neck.

He even kissed me. Deep, sensual kisses that lingered, and tasted of mint.

At no time during the sex did he light up a cigarette or joint. He was there, and present, and responded to every one of my thrusts and jabs with keening and moans of pleasure, and gratitude in his stare. It was like fucking the best possible version of Allan, and it turned me on beyond belief.

Yet he didn’t recognize me at all, even when I stabbed him into his first anal orgasm with me since the reunion. I watched and held him as he shook and shivered and clung to me with his arms and legs both behind my back. “It’s been a long, long time since anyone did that to me,” he panted, laughing to himself.

But no recognition at all.

The truth is that I’d changed as well over those years. I’d weighed about two-twenty-five when I knew Allan the first time around, and I’d slimmed down to one-sixty. I was dressing better—or at least in clothing that didn’t swamp me. I’d grown a beard. My hair was longer. Something Allan said to me that morning gave me a better key to the whole situation, though. I was hinting around, trying to find out whether I was so forgettable, when he said something about his past: he told me that when he’d been younger, he’d been a messed-up kid. Constantly on drugs. Even dealing. (That I knew.) “I was pretty much in a haze for five years,” he said. “But then I cleaned up and got my act together.”

He had.

For a good six months I was Allan’s Tuesday-morning lover. He knew about my home situation, but didn’t care. He wanted a part-time boyfriend, not a full-time husband. So on Tuesdays, we belonged to each other. We’d spend hours in his bed, making love to each other, exchanging honeyed words, gently encouraging each other to orgasm. My climaxes were loud and explosive and left him juicy. His were more private, and intense, and always anal—I still never saw him blow a load, or even grow hard very often.

But he never remembered me. I kept thinking, Okay, this’ll be the fuck that brings it all back to him. Nope. Never. Allan didn’t like talking about those days before the millennium. He would evade when I brought up his past, or tried to get him to talk about a possible drag queen career. He didn’t want to go there. After a while, I didn’t see any reason to try to take him out of the present, which he so very clearly was enjoying. So I stopped asking.

My story of Allan ends with a whimper.

The winter semester after we started to fuck was kind of hellacious for me, scheduling-wise; I was teaching what was for me a full load, and I wasn’t as free on Tuesdays as I had been, the semesters before. I can’t remember why, but Tuesdays were the only day Allan could meet me—so there were a couple of weeks we missed being together.

Allan didn’t like that. I’d tell him a couple of days before when I’d have to cancel, and he’d seem resigned and sad about it. After a couple of weeks, it turned to petulance. I tried explaining that I wasn’t avoiding him, or fucking someone else, but that it was just work-related shit keeping us apart, but he didn’t want to hear it. The third time, he was outright angry. You know, he texted, just don’t bother texting me any more. Or calling. Don’t contact me at all.

I was irritated enough that day that I thought, You know, enough, then. I won’t. So I didn’t.

Then, three weeks later, I got another text from him. You were the last person I expected to treat me that way. Goodbye.

“You mean, to obey your instructions not to contact you again?” I snarled, and erased his number from my phone.

And that was the end of Allan.

Looking back, I regret it all. I couldn’t help the scheduling, of course, but I wish we’d found another day or night to meet—I tried, but he couldn’t. I wish we’d not parted so rancorously—that I’d been less irritable, that he’d been less dramatic. I wish he could’ve known how much I loved making love to him when he was off the weed, and also that he could’ve known how much I admired him when he was a mere boy, slutting out his hole to all takers in the baths.

It’s probably no coincidence that I started keeping a public sex blog shortly after the demise of my relationship to Allan. I had a keen and pervasive sense, then, of how easily encounters could be completely forgotten, and how time sweetly and slyly erases from the memory people who had meant everything and then some during the space of an encounter. I had a sense of things slipping away. And I didn’t want that to happen again.

Allan, I loved you, quite sincerely. We weren’t meant to be together for very long, but the universe was kind enough to bring us together twice, and to give us many moments of shared passion and intimacy.

I hope somewhere in your memory there’s a tiny space for me.