From the Archives: Faculty Party

I sat down this evening to write about an incident from my youth that had been on my mind for the last couple of days. I got a couple of paragraphs in, and then thought to myself, "Hey, maybe you'd better check to see if you've written about this guy before." Surely enough, I had, two years ago. Sigh.

Apparently the story wants to be repeated again, though. So here it is once more.

To my readers in the U.S., I wish you guys a happy Thanksgiving. And to everyone else, I wish you many things for which to be thankful.

When I was a kid during the nineteen-seventies, would occasionally throw end-of-semester Christmas parties in our home right before the holidays started.

Days before the party they'd start making a go of cleaning the living room, though for neither of them was tidiness ever a strong point. They weren't drinkers, but the colleagues and students they'd invite to these yearly shindigs would show up laden with spirits, and there'd be leftovers. Our basement bathroom—a mildewy, forbidding place that seemed so much like the movie set of a serial killing that I'm still reluctant to enter it when I visit my dad's home—was filled with liquor bottles that we'd begin hauling up the night before, until the dining room table was crowded with liquids of different colors (and of dubious age). My mother's ash trays got a thorough cleaning and the good ones were strewn around strategic places; my dad would pull out a bunch of LPs and eight-track tapes and have them stacked by the stereo.

My mom would spend an afternoon in the kitchen with cans and an opener and a jar of mayonnaise and emerge with space-aged canapés. The cats were banished outdoors. After a cold dinner, and before the doorbell would ring, I'd be sent to my room for the evening. Faculty parties were not for the young.

They were exotic, especially when I was fairly young. From my room, with a book in my lap, I'd listen to the swinging strains of psychedelia on the stereo, often improbably mixed with Nat King Cole singing Christmas carols, or Peter, Paul, and Mary. I'd listen to the laughter and smell the cigarette smoke and the clink of the liquor bottles and the increasingly loud and inebriated conversation and think to myself, This is what being grown up is all about.

My parents' guests were usually two-thirds other faculty from the university, and the rest were upper-level undergrads or graduate students. One of the things I used to do as a ritual, after the party had started, would be to go through their coats. They all lay there on my parents' beds, taken upstairs and tossed on the mattresses upon entering. When it was quiet upstairs, I'd tiptoe out and into my parents' room and just examine what their colleagues and students were carrying in their pockets. Mostly it was boring stuff like keys, or small change, or cellophane-wrapped Kraft caramels. Once in a while I'd stumble upon cigarettes, or more frequently, tiny little unsmoked joints tucked away in breast pockets, acrid-smelling and spilling weed from their twisted ends.

I had to time my stealthy investigations right. More often than not I'd be interrupted, either by hapless students looking for the bathroom, or couples (not always married, not always of the same generation) looking for a private tryst among the coats. I wouldn't say that my parents' parties were orgies, exactly, but they had their share of fucking. In the bedroom, among the wraps. In the spare bedroom, on the rusty twin bed that had been my father's as a boy. Outside in the back yard, behind the massive brick nineteen-fifties barbecue. In the basement, or down the outside cellar steps.

And once, in my room.

I was pretty young the night that Dr. Jones came into my bedroom. It was late—late enough that I'd given up watching the little portable TV from the kitchen that my parents had lugged up to my room for me to watch that evening, and had gotten into bed, but not so late that I was asleep. I had a book in my lap, and my knees propped up, and had stripped down to a T-shirt and briefs. Then my door opened. "Anyone home?" asked a tall black man. He slipped in quietly, raised a finger to his mouth to indicate I not say anything, and then made a pantomime of tiptoeing to my bed.

I knew Dr. Jones from my dad's office. They were in the same department; I'd seen him a couple of times a year since I'd been five or six—enough to recognize the face and associate a name, but not enough that we'd ever actually spoken. I raised my eyebrows. I think I told him that the bathroom was on the other side of the upstairs hall.

"Oh, I'm not here for the bathroom," he said. The man sat down on the edge of my bed. He was in his forties or fifties, and had a grizzled beard limned with white; it looked like his halo had slipped over his head and around his neck. An oversized mole decorated his dark, dark skin on his forehead; he had a large, nineteen-seventies Afro shot with gray perched like a helmet on his head. "Just needed to get away from the party."

He reeked of alcohol. His eyes, though unwavering as he stared at me, had that liquid sheen of the thoroughly inebriated. I nodded, and waited for him to say something.

"So," he started, putting his hand on my knee. Then, finding that awkward, he removed it. "You're just . . . sitting up here, real quiet?" I told him I was. "Must be real nice to be up here, where it's . . . quiet."

Again, his hand landed on my leg. This time, it made its way up to my thigh. Dr. Jones might have been an expert in African history, but subtle he was not. "What you doing there, boy?" he asked, when he reached my hip.

"Nothing," I told him. Despite myself, my boner was raging beneath the covers.

"You must be doing something, if you're making me do this." He pulled down the sheets. "I didn't come up here thinking I was going to do this. Must be you making me do it."

Maybe that kind of talk worked on other young guys, but I saw through it. His big hands pulled apart my legs, right below the knee. I didn't resist "You are a real pretty boy," he told me. "Real, real pretty. You got that creamy skin I like so much. Don't be scared, now." He talked like Barry White on a quiet storm radio station after midnight, and I have to confess that I was more aroused than frightened. "You got those pretty blue eyes, looking at me like that. You're making me do this," he said. "It ain't me, baby."

His lips were on my calf, my knee, my groin, and then he was pulling up my T-shirt and yanking on my briefs. I heard the crackling of their elastic as he yanked them down, hard. My barely-teen cock flopped out of the cotton and slapped audibly against my belly. "See what you gone and did?" he asked, breathing heavily on my twitching, hard flesh. "You made me do this."

Dr. Jones roughly grabbed my balls, almost making me yelp out in pain. Then his mouth engulfed my dick. I'd had sex by that point, a few times. Even in my limited experience I could tell he wasn't the best of my encounters. He used too much teeth; he created too much suction rather than let his mouth and lips travel up and down the shaft. He was simply too drunk to do much good.

But a blow job was a blow job, and I'd spent the evening waiting for the party to end so I could turn out my lights and masturbate and get to sleep. A stranger's mouth on me was even better than that. It didn't take very long before my young nuts were retracting and my dick started to pulse out a tiny load of semen. Dr. Jones swallowed it all. "Fuck," he said. "See what you did?"

He mumbled another sentence or two into my balls, as he nuzzled there. Then he was very, very still.

He was asleep, in fact.

Apparently no one from the party noticed he was missing for over an hour. Not until people were starting to drift off into the December night did my father come into my room. "Have you seen—?" he asked, and then saw himself what he was looking for. Dr. Jones, sprawled on his back, head lolling over the mattress edge, arms at his side, snoring loudly at the very bottom of the bed where I'd rolled him. "Gawrsh," said my dad. He rolled his eyes.

I shrugged, trying to make it seem as if I were used to adults passing out on my bed every night of the week.

"Was he a pain?" My dad dipped down and grabbed his colleague beneath the arms, trying to stand him to his feet. I told him that he wasn't, not really. "Come on, Lamont," he said, shaking the older man. "Time to go home."

Dr. Jones hadn't stirred up the entire time he'd slumbered, after that hasty blow job he'd given me. He opened his eyes in confusion, saw my dad, saw me, and then became very suddenly and drunkenly awake.

"It's okay," said my dad, gently escorting him from the room. "Come on. We'll get you some coffee."

And that was my one and only encounter with Dr. Jones. I got the impression he was never really sure of exactly what we'd done, if anything; his memory was probably hazy of those confused few minutes before he passed out. Whenever I'd pass him with one of my parents in the department offices, he'd blink at me and work his lips as if he wanted to say something, but couldn't quite decide what. I, in the meantime, would only smile in the same way I smiled at any of my parents' colleagues, without betraying what happened between us.

If he thought it was a fantasy—well, at least he had a hell of a good fantasy.

A Flipped Switch

During my lengthy and delirious illness last month, at least I managed to bring a little comedy into the household. There was the time, for example, that I decided it would be nice for everyone in the immediate vicinity if I took a shower. I got up, blundered into the bathroom, turned on the faucets, and then went back to bed to wait for the water to warm up . . . then I promptly fell asleep for ninety minutes. On the minus side of that, all the walls of my flat were moist for the rest of the evening. On the plus side, no one complained about dry skin for a few days.

I also discovered that an extended illness makes me even more absent-minded than usual—and here we’re already talking about a pretty high baseline in which I’m doddering around mumbling, What was I about to do next? or Where are my pants? or What month is it? I got up one morning determined to be helpful, emptied a can of food onto a plate for the cats, and then left it for some reason on top of a bedroom dresser. (The cats found it, eventually.) I put a DVD box set in the refrigerator, and left a half-full container of ice cream in a cupboard. (The cats found that eventually, too.)

But I think the oddest mistake I made during those long weeks was when I accidentally switched from top to bottom for a couple of weeks. That was interesting.

I think I did it on one of my more feverish days. I logged into a site and saw that for some reason, the little ‘About me’ box still had some travel plans listed in it from, well, 2012. I went to change it. Somehow I managed to do so. But along the way, the same way I ended up putting ice cream next to the spaghetti in a cupboard, I managed to change a menu item from top to bottom.

And I didn’t notice, or even think about it, for a few days. I was feeling decidedly unsexy during my illness. I think it was the first time in my life I’ve gone a month without even so much as an erection. I wasn’t online much. If I was, it was to look at the pretty pictures, not because I was actively cruising. But a couple of days after I think I made my little error, I started to get emails from guys I’d never seen before.

Nice dick, but what’s your ass like? one guy wanted to know.

Damn boy I want to shove this dick up that tiny pink hole, said another.

U pretty. how hard u like 2 b fucked son? read the third. By that time, I was kind of noticing a pattern here. (Actually, I was busy blushing and modestly muttering, “Pretty? Son? Oh, go on,” at the last guy’s mail.) At first I ascribed it to something in the air—some random alignment of the stars that was making all the guys in the area feel more toppish than usual. It took me a full week to figure out I’d been a dumbass who’d accidentally flipped the switch on my profile.

By the time I’d actually clued in to what I’d done, though, I’d come to a couple of conclusions. The first was a gratifying realization that if I ever did decide to pack up my erection and take dick for a living, I at least wouldn’t be coming up totally dry. The second was that my bottomy profile seemed to attract a definite type—namely, uncut men of color.

I mean, some of the dicks on these guys who were messaging me about my little pink fuckhole were massive, meaty slabs of thick dark meat that made me look like a wee little tadpole in comparison. The men themselves were hot and handsome guys for the most part. Muscular. Built. Some in their twenties, some in their fifties, and lots from in between. Most of them were outspokenly aggressive. No white guys. Most were black, but there were a good number of Latin men in there as well.

And I kept looking at those profiles and thinking to myself, Damn, that is really tempting.
I’m not really sure what the attraction was on their part, unless it was the notion that they weren’t going to find a better contrast to their own skin than my lard-white complexion. I was flattered enough not to question it.

Don’t worry, full-time bottoms. I know you’ve got enough competition amongst yourselves without a fever-addled amateur mucking things up. I’m not flipping. If I were, though, at least I’d be consoled by the thought that I’d still be popular in some beds.

A Note on my Absence

Many of you—well, some of you at least—have been wondering where I’ve been for the past month. Was I dead? Did the stalkers get me? Did I at last come to my senses and make a devout vow to keep my dick in my pants and my hands off other men’s junk and never again to kneel on a floor except in godly prayer?

Nah. I was just sick.

It started off as one of those things in which I felt fragile and slightly delicate. Like some heroine in a regency romance, I wanted to fan myself, clutch the arm of a fainting couch, and declare that I’d been overcome with the vapors. Then the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back for roughly four weeks, staring at the ceiling and groggily wishing that someone could just put me into an induced coma and wake me up when it was all over. I had the chills, I had fevers, I had nightmares. Fun stuff.

Early in the month I managed to drag myself to the doctor. He looked me over, said I was dehydrated, and then sent me to the phlebotomist for blood work. The phlebotomist was a big German woman with her hair in a bun. “Sit!” she ordered, pointing me to her chair. I sat. “Roll up ze sleeves!” I rolled ‘em. Because she really did talk like that, and I was frightened to disobey. She reminded me of Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein.

I watched as she poked and prodded the insides of my arms. “Vhy do you have no weins?” she wanted to know. “Make ze fist! Clench ze fist! Relax ze fist!” Her expert fingers felt like they were leaving bruises as she searched for the missing weins—I mean, veins. “You are dehydrated!” she announced at last, as if I’d done it on purpose just to spite her.

“Yes, the doctor said that,” I agreed.

“This is no good! No good!” she yelled at last. In the distance, horses whinnied and lightning flashed. She untied the length of elastic from around my right arm and tourniquetted it onto my left, then scowled as if she intended to scare the veins into appearing. They didn’t. Finally she prodded around some more. “Most men, they have big strong manly weins!” she told me. “You, though! You have leetle beety baby weins! For you I use leetle beety baby needle for your leetle beety baby weins!”

I felt obscurely defensive on behalf of my little bitty baby veins. “I’m big where it counts,” I protested.

Frau Blücher stared at me. Then she let out a hearty laugh that rocked the fillings right out of my teeth. “Beeg where it counts! Hah-hah-hah!”

So at least I made a new friend there.

The doctor didn’t do much for me other than refer me to a specialist, whom I couldn’t get in to see for a good two weeks. The specialist, however, gave me some much-coveted drugs that have been, knock wood, getting me back on track. That is, at least I’m spending most of my days upright rather than imprinting the fabric texture of my sofa onto my face while I drool and blankly watch The Chew.

When I’m sick, though, I really don’t feel like writing. There were times in my youth when I imagined to myself that should I ever be struck down by some fatal, lingering illness, that I’d use my remaining time to pen some touching, insightful, and beautifully-written memoir about my malady. Nope! I now know that if that time ever comes (knock wood again) I apparently will be the first to say, “Fuck that mess.” Then I’ll lie in my hospital bed scarfing down junk food. (Sadly, my appetite was the only thing unaffected last month.)

But when it’s difficult for me to string together anything more coherent than “More aspirin, please”, it’s tough to write blog entries. There were a couple of times I hauled out my laptop and contemplated posting something brief just to allay the fears of my readers, but then I’d think about the effort I’d have to put into pushing all those little keys and it would seem like way too much work for what I could manage.

Thanks to those of you who emailed or left comments while I was out of commission. As I said, I’m feeling somewhat better, and anticipate getting back to my normal energy levels soon. Bear with me while I get back to speed, would you?