I’m walking toward Broadway in the lower Seventies when I pass a storefront with a display of floral bouquets out front. Garish carnations dyed orange, bundles of freesia, drooping boughs of heather. On impulse, I stop to select a plastic-wrapped cone of roses. The bored young man inside smiles when I proffer them to be rung up. “For your girlfriend?” he asks.
“For my boyfriend,” I correct. He just raises his eyebrows, shares a knowing smile as if he’d already guessed that answer, and returns my change.
Almost at your place, I text, as I step out back out onto the sidewalk. It’s only a little before five, and already the sky is almost dark in New York. People are hustling homeward with swift steps; most of them seem to be in pairs. I’ve scarcely shoved my phone back into my pocket when it vibrates once more. I press myself against the shop front, pull it out, and see a notification from one of my cash apps. There are four digits before the decimal point.
So that part of the transaction is done.
Julio’s apartment is only a short walk from where I’ve selected my bouquet. In the vestibule I press a tiny button with my index finger, wait for the corresponding buzz of the door, and let myself in. I share my ride to the tenth floor with an older couple. They smile at the flowers, and then at me, conspirators in my wooing. I pull my mouth to the side, wryly bashful, and wish them a good evening when they exit on eight. At my floor, I step out, look both ways to find the direction I need to go. When I’m outside his door, I press the rectangular button beneath the peep hole. With one hand I hold the flowers behind my back, parallel to my spine.
I hear footsteps. The door opens. A man stands before me—shaved head, muscular, handsome, late thirties. I’ve seen photos, of course; they didn’t do him justice. Julio’s wearing nothing but a towel. His hairless pecs still glisten with droplets of water, as if he’s run to the door straight out of the shower. He’s considerably shorter than I expected, but it’s obvious he’s a powerful man. “Baby,” he says, looking at me with chocolate brown eyes. He speaks in velvet tones. “You got in early.”
“Hey, lover,” I murmur back. I lean forward from the waist over the threshold of his apartment until my lips meet his. His eyes close as he melts into the gentle kiss. One of his hands still holds his towel at the hip, but with the other, he cups the side of my furry face. “I’m home.”
The kiss ends. I straighten up. For a moment, his eyes remain closed, as if he’s still lost in the moment just passed. Finally, he smiles. “Yes, baby. You’re home. And I’m so glad.”
That’s when I present the flowers. He’s genuinely surprised; his eyes dart back and forth between the red roses and my face as if he can’t believe I’ve gone to the trouble. “What were you thinking?” he fusses, absurdly pleased, as he paces down the hallway into his little kitchen, roses in one hand, the ends of his towel in the other. The apartment smells of spices; there’s something cooking in the oven.
I follow him, and watch as he lays the flowers onto the counter and tucks the terrycloth to fasten it tight. “I was thinking that it has been a long time since I’ve been home, and that my boyfriend might like to know I’ve been thinking of him. Every day. Every minute. Every second.”
He’s flattered, I can tell. Both hands now free, he joins me at the kitchen door. “I missed you,” he tells me.
“I missed you too,” I say, softly. Our faces are mere inches apart. “My beautiful, beautiful boyfriend.”
That’s when he takes my face between his palms and draws me down for another kiss. This one is soft, deep, my tongue deep in his mouth, his hands holding me in place until he knows my taste. “You don’t have to say that.”
There’s a genuine bashfulness in the way he nay-says me. Is he fishing for compliments? He doesn’t seem the type. Maybe he’s unaware how striking are those rugged features—the crooked nose that looks like it might have been broken at some point, the sculpted brow, the point of his chin. I can picture him in his Wall Street pinstripe armor as a formidable foe, or as a beast lifting weights at the local Equinox. Here though, nearly naked, his damp flesh pressed against my fully-clothed body, he’s sincerely handsome. “I say it because it’s true,” I assure him.
Julio cracks a smile. He’s delighted, I can tell. And shy. Surprisingly shy. “God, I missed you,” he says, as he grabs my hand and leads me deeper into the apartment.
Julio’s home is no cramped walk-up; it’s a genuine luxury flat. I’d already noticed the gleaming stainless steel and marble of the kitchen. The combined living and dining areas seem professionally decorated, or at least the pieces have been chosen with someone with taste far better than mine, and with much deeper pockets. The oversized sofas are upholstered in rich, textured jewel-colored fabrics; the dining table is glass and steel. Plush rugs in earth tones delineate the different living spaces. It’s not a decorator’s showcase, though; the space looks lived-in. There’s a stack of mail on one of the occasional tables, and books that actually look like they’ve been read on the shelves; through the bedroom door I can see Julio’s work suit discarded on the mattress.
“Hey babe, I know I said we’d go out to dinner, but the show’s at seven and I thought I’d just cook at home so we wouldn’t be in such a rush.” He holds both my hands now as we sink onto a sofa together.
“That’s great,” I tell him. “It gives me more time to spend with you here, baby.”
Again, he seems pleased with my answer. “Are you tired?” he asks. “Let me rub my boyfriend’s shoulders.”
I laugh, and protest, but he’s already helping me out of my jacket. I admit to being a casual dresser at the best of times—a hoodie and jeans kind of guy. Tonight, though, I’ve made an effort to clean up. I’m wearing dark slacks and shiny black shoes, a dress shirt of deep purple with cuff links, and one of the few sports jackets I own. I’d had a haircut earlier in the week. I’ve been growing out my beard for the last two months, but earlier today I’d made an effort to trim the sides and groom back the startling chin so that it looks neat and respectable. Surrounded by all this finery, however, I feel a little like Cinderella, the kitchen drudge cleaned up for the ball.
Once Julio has positioned me so that I’m leaning over the sofa’s arm, I feel the warmth of his body across my back. His fingers begin kneading my muscles. It’s been so long since anyone has done this for me. I sigh, and allow him to continue. “You’re so tense,” he whispers in my ear. “Did you have a hard day at work?”
“No,” I murmur, my eyes closed. “I just missed you, baby.”
“Really?” he asks. “My god, you are so sweet. I couldn’t have asked for a better boyfriend.”
“Neither could I.” I groan slightly as he finds a knot and massages it into submission. “You are so good to me. So handsome.”
For reward, he plants a succession of tiny kisses upon the back of my neck. I gasp at the tickling sensation, then shiver as the fluttering pecks send a wave of tingles across my scalp and down my spine. “My sexy boyfriend.” His words, whispered directly into my ear, cause another tsunami of shivers across my skin.
Something is pressing into my lower back. Hard. Insistent. I’m pretty sure it’s his cock. I twist myself around, reach beneath his towel, and wrap my fingers around his dick. It burns like a branding iron in the palm of my right hand. I can feel wetness from its tip on the inside of my wrist. For a moment we stare at each other as I squeeze him tightly. “Oh god, I have missed you,” I tell him at last.
“Me too,” he says. Then he’s on top of me, his mouth on mine, his hands stroking my beard, my hair, the underside of my chin. Our kisses grow more and more desperate as I hold his rigid cock in my hand. It’s thick. Short—maybe five and a half inches. Uncut. I haven’t seen it yet, but can easily imagine the thick dark shaft, the fat and glistening head. “Baby, I don’t want you ever to go away again.”
“I won’t.” Tonight I’ll be saying all kinds of things I cannot really mean. We both know that. But in the moment? My promise is all sincerity. “I belong to you.”
“You’re my boyfriend,” he whispers, staring down from above.
“And you’re my boyfriend,” I reply. In that moment, I’m being honest.
We stare at each other in the moment. His flesh throbs in my hand. Then slowly, sweetly, he leans down to kiss my forehead. “Let me get you some dinner, baby,” he whispers.
There’s a breed of man who sometimes crave the close and established intimacy of a lover—a deeply-connected lover with whom they have a history—yet who have little time, or perhaps no serious inclination, to cultivate a long-term romance. In my experience, these men tend to have achieved success in their careers, perhaps at the cost of their own personal lives. These men sometimes reach out to me and inquire whether I’d be willing to fulfill, for a price, a specific fantasy.
The Boyfriend Experience. It has a name. The illusion, just for a few hours, or a day, or a weekend, of complete intimacy, of a familiarity that goes far beyond a hookup. It combines tenderness. Suavity. A gallant respect for the client and his emotional needs. The Boyfriend Experience is perhaps the deepest form of Method role-play I’ve ever encountered.
Take Julio. I’ve never met him before today. We’ve communicated only briefly, first through an app and then later a handful of text messages. There’s so much I don’t know about this man—what he does for work, what paths in life he’s walked to get to this point, his tastes in food, his family and friends, whether he’s one of those Taylor Swift gays. His surname, even.
And yet, how difficult is it, really, to be a good boyfriend to someone you’ve never met? I’m leaning against the kitchen lintel, glass of red wine in my hand, watching him putter around the stove and steaming some green beans. He’s talking about work. Someone named Gretchen has done something that I can’t in the least parse, but it sounds as if it could be grievous. Julio, now wearing a t-shirt and joggers beneath his apron, checks on whatever smells so good in the oven and chatters away about how he spent an hour consoling Gretchen and trying to educate her on how to avoid the problem in the future.
“You are such a good mentor, baby,” I tell him. I’m sincere. I’m not making a stab in the dark. It genuinely sounds as if he’s doing the right thing by this woman. “But that’s just the kind of man you are.”
He beams. Doesn’t the colleagues with whom he spends his days tell him such truths? I suspect not, after he replies with a shy, “Do you really think so?”
“Yes, I really think so.” For reward, he comes over, stands on tiptoe, and kisses traces of wine from my lips. “So tell me more. What happened?”
And then I listen, like a good boyfriend should.
We sit catercorner at one end of the glass-topped dining table over dinner, glasses of wine nudging together as closely as our knees. The roses I bought for him sit in a glass vase filled with water, at the table’s center. He’s pulled open the draperies, revealing a fantastic view of Broadway below, and of lights from the neighboring buildings. He’s still telling me work stories, dropping first names as if I’ve heard them all before, while I nod or shake my head at appropriate junctures, and ask questions when I feel the need for more clarification. I don’t find financial work all that fascinating, but I’m here to pay attention, so I do. Meanwhile, I eat the eggplant lasagna, laden with cream and cheese, that he’s sweated over, and compliment his cooking skills.
“I wanted to make sure you got a good meal before we go out,” he says.
“You are so fucking sweet,” I reply, meaning it. In my time I’ve cooked for plenty men I’ve loved. None of them have cooked for me. Impulsively, I place my hand over his.
“Anything for my boyfriend,” he tells me, as he leans in for another kiss.
The show is less than three blocks from his apartment, a way-off-Broadway comic revue of which I’ve seen other iterations. The theater itself sits on the second floor of the building, over a restaurant; once we’ve passed the ticket-taker, we slide across a vinyl bench to sit side-by-side at a cocktail table close to the tiny stage. The audience demographic seems to be mostly older than me, and definitely a lot older than my date, but there are young gay men in pairs sprinkled throughout the crowd. Once settled, I rest my left arm atop the padded bench’s back, around Julio’s shoulders.
“Cocktails?” asks a server.
Julio’s already studied the drinks menu. Without consulting me, he tells the young woman we’ll be having the theater’s fruity variation on a Moscow Mule. I’m taken aback at having someone choosing for me, yet slightly flattered, especially since of all the specialty cocktails on the list, he’d picked what I’d have chosen. “Everybody’s looking at us,” he murmurs in my ear.
“Are they?” I ask, scanning around. I don’t see any evidence of his claim, but I haven’t been paying attention to anyone else but him.
“They’re probably wondering how I landed such a handsome boyfriend.” I flush a little at the compliment. If anything, I suspect they’re speculating why such a good-looking Latin stud is saddled with such an old geezer—the prince burdened with Cinderella. He leans in a little closer, though, as if telling me a secret. “They’re probably wondering what a tall, handsome…big-dicked…stud sees in someone like me.”
Again, my scalp and spine tingle from the combination of flattery and close-talking. “I’m the lucky one,” I tell him. His hand rests on the table; with my left arm still around his shoulders, I cross my right arm to take his hand in mine. I look him in the eyes. “Because I’m out on the town with the most handsome boyfriend in the theater. If they’re looking—it’s because they’re jealous I have such a good-looking man to take care of.”
I sidle closer on the bench as I speak. It doesn’t take a psychic to know how pleased he is by those words. His eyes are liquid. His lips tremble with unspoken happiness.
“You are beautiful,” I tell him. I need no acting skills to mean what I say. The server arrives with our drinks, disappointingly served in bar glasses instead of copper mugs.
“You’re my gorgeous boyfriend,” he says, giving me a gentle kiss on the cheeks.
I raise my mule. He taps his glass against mine. “To us,” I suggest.
He agrees. “To us.”
Then the lights dim.
We hold hands on the walk back to his apartment, my larger paw completely encompassing his fingers. No one really turns a head to stare our way, but I sense that he wants to be seen like this. With someone. Together. Taken. The show had no intermission and hadn’t lasted more than an hour and a half, so it’s not even quite nine o’clock yet. “You want a hot dog, baby?” he asks, as we amble past the sidewalk brightly lit by Gray’s Papaya.
“No. Seriously, after your delicious dinner?” I ask. “You’re not hungry, are you? Do you want a hot dog?”
He squeezes my hand. “I’m hungry for something. Something I want only from my hunky boyfriend.”
My dick stirs at the insinuation. “I think I can accommodate you, in a bit.”
Up Broadway we stroll, seemingly in no particular hurry, though we’re both anxious to get back to his apartment. Along the way he tells me more about an upcoming work trip to Chicago, where’s he never visited before. I share a few of my hazy memories of previous visits to the city, but mostly he’s interested in telling me about the hotel where he’ll be staying, the deals he’s expected to accomplish. I know much more about Julio and his day-to-day workflow than he knows anything about me, at this point, but I don’t mind. A good boyfriend—in this situation—listens more than he speaks.
Once we reach his building, we fall silent. No conversation during our elevator ride up, though our fingers remain clasped. Neither of us utter a word as we walk down the hall to his apartment. I drop his hand when he fumbles with the door keys, and follow him inside.
“We’re home, baby,” he finally says, once we’ve crossed the threshold.
“We’re home,” I echo.
He turns to face me. All evening he’s been spoiling me with alcohol and food, with back rubs, with entertainment. Now, I sense, it’s my turn. I step forward until I’m able to hold him by the shoulders. My face looms over his. “You’re so good to me, sweetheart,” I whisper.
“I love being good to you,” he protests. His voice is soft. Breathy.
“Now let me be good to you.”
Slowly—slowly—I lean down. Our lips connect. I hesitate, pull back, and look into his eyes. “Do you love me, Julio?”
This powerful little man, this muscular athlete, seems unsteady on his feet at hearing the question. He breathes, “Yes. I love you so much.” My heart pounds more quickly when he says my name.
“I love you too,” I tell him. Again I give him the lightest kiss possible, our lips barely touching, our hastened breaths warming each others’ faces. “You know that, right?”
Slowly he nods. “I know.”
“And you’re going to show me how much you love me, right now,” I inform him.
“Yes.”
“Because you’re my boyfriend.”
“Because I’m your boyfriend. And because I love you.”
I look into those brown eyes and pause a moment before I say, emphasizing each word, “And I love you like no other.”
My erection rages as he leads me into the bedroom. Gently, carefully, he removes my jacket. Undoes my cuff links. Kneels to slip off my shoes. Lifts each foot to remove and fold the sock covering it. He stands, unbuttons my shirt, unclasps my belt. I finish the job of removing the rest of what I’m wearing, watching as he undresses.
He was solicitous with my clothing, but he shows no mercy to his own, in his haste to get naked. Shoes and socks fly. He yanks open his shirt front so quickly that I imagine buttons popping. His pants and shorts hit the floor with a thump. Then he’s on the king-sized bed, on his back, holding out his arms for me while I’m still shucking my trunks. “Come to me, baby.”
I straddle him on the mattress. Both our dicks are hard as cement; they strike against each other like fencing epees. When I lower my weight on his smaller frame, he wraps his knees and arms around my body and holds me tight. “I need you tonight,” I tell him. “I need to be deep inside you, sweetheart.”
“Use me,” he begs. I feel him reach for my dick, and then sense him squeezing it tightly for the first time. “I want that big dick making me pregnant.”
“Yeah?” I ask. “I’ve always wanted to have a baby with the man I love.”
“I need your babies.”
His moaning continues, though muffled, as I kiss him roughly. “I think about you all day at work,” I tell him when we come up for air. “People see me daydreaming and they tease that I must be thinking about my boyfriend again.”
“Oh fuck,” he pants. “That is so hot, baby.”
“They’ve all seen the photo of you I keep on my desk,” I tell him. “They all know that I’ve got the most handsome boyfriend out there.”
“You keep my photo on your desk?” he asks with wonder, as if this world for two we’re building is real. “Really?”
“Of course!” I exclaim, cradling him in my arms. “I’m proud of being your boyfriend.”
I retrieve my right hand, gently lift it to my lips, and deliver a payload of spittle to his rectum. “Oh fuck, baby,” he says again, as I slather the moisture there. “You don’t know how that makes me feel.”
I shake my head. “I know exactly how that makes you feel. Because I love you.”
“I love you,” he repeats, lost in sensation.
“Then show me,” I tell him.
It takes only the gentles of nudge to roll him onto his abdomen. I position a pillow beneath his hips, then spread his hairy little legs. He gasps when I taste him; my beard is covered with the scent of his shower soap, and of my own spit, as I lick my way into his pussy. Deeper and deeper I delve as he jerks, twitches, and groans. “Fuck me, baby,” he says, while I lap away at his most tender parts. Then, more sharply, “Fuck me!”
With that snappish tone, he sounds more like a client making demands. I’m not a dick for hire, though. I’m not his employee. No way. Not now. I’m this man’s boyfriend. I call the shots.
I love eating hole, and his is the perfect combination of fuzz and warmth. So for a while, I ignore him, and gnaw my way in. His tone is less aggressive next time he speaks. “Fuck me,” he begs as I pull apart his cheeks.
But no. I’m still rapt in my own passion for my boyfriend’s hole. It slides open when I insert two fingers, three. His back arches; his hips lift. I’m determined to pleasure him this way until he can’t stand it.
A few minutes later, he sobs. “Fuck me. Please fuck me. Please—just fuck me. Please.” I’ve tamed the boss. Reduced the beast to whimpers.
That’s when I pull myself to my knees and plant my hands on either side of his ribs. “Yeah?” I ask, sounding dubious. “Should I stick it in?”
“Yes.” He’s almost crying with frustration and pleasure.
“You want your boyfriend’s dick in that sweet ass?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Why?” he repeats. And now he wrestles with the pillow and manages to turn himself on his side, so that he can look me in the eye in that dark bedroom, illuminated only by the city’s lights. “Because I want to show how much I love you.”
I allow the words to hang in the air for a moment. Finally, I nod. Help him turn onto his back. Adjust the pillow once more beneath his hips. Haul his legs into the air, and aim my pulsing cock at the hole. “I want you to look me in the eyes as I slide in,” I tell him. He nods, anxious to have me inside. “And I want you to tell me how much you love me when it’s time to breed you.”
“I’ll tell you how much I love you right now,” he promises. “I love you, baby.” My head presses against the point of entry. “I love you so much.” I feel his flesh part to admit me. I hit the first ring, and press harder. “I love you,” he says. “I love you. I love my boyfriend so…ahhhhh.”
And then I’m in. True to his promise, he keeps his eyes wide open, adoring me from below as I slide to the base.
It’s after midnight. Julio sleeps in a fetal position, his legs pulled up, his head crooked down. It rests on my half-numb arm. I’m big spoon to his little. My belly is glued to his back by the juices of four loads. A few minutes before, he had asked, in the softest and most boyish of voices, “Will you stay until I fall asleep, baby?”
I’d kissed the top of his smooth head, and rubbed my beard against his neck. “Of course.”
He had sighed, and cuddled against me. “I have the best boyfriend,” had been his last words before subsiding into a doze.
I’ve been lying with him, listening to him breathe, for the last half hour. Down on the streets below I can hear the occasional whine of traffic whenever the lights change. Distant sirens occasionally cut through the quiet. Julio slumbers solidly, now. I’m able to retrieve my prickling left arm from beneath him without disturbing his rest. After I creep to my feet, I pull up the sheets and blankets from the bed’s bottom, where we’d kicked them a couple of hours before. His deep respiration continues as I tuck them gently around his shoulders.
I don’t take a shower—I don’t want to wake him, and I’ve a commuter train back home to catch. In the bathroom I do quietly run a washcloth beneath the faucet and sponge myself off, however, then check my reflection in the gloom before returning to the bedroom. My clothes are mostly in one place; I dress, check my pockets, and determine I’m good to go.
I’m walking in the direction of the front door when I see the roses I’d bought Julio, resting in their vase on the dining table. I pause, then pluck one from the rest. I wipe the water from its stem onto my palm, and tiptoe back into the bedroom. Then, gently, softly, I lay it upon the pillow where my head had been resting a few minutes before.
It will be the first thing he sees when he wakes in the morning, my boyfriend. I love you so much, he’d told me, I think, as I let myself out.
In that moment, those were the words I’d needed to hear. Even if, like Cinderella’s gown and carriage, their spell had evaporated at midnight.
Monday, November 25, 2019
Monday, November 11, 2019
Straight Boy
Saturday night at the Governor Bradford. Two days after Halloween. The joint is packed; at both the front and back bar, staff bustle to keep up with the drink orders. The Black and Gold Ball is taking place down the street at the Town Hall; a little further down, at the Crown and Anchor, men are packed into the Wave for the Spooky Bear dance. Townies and gays alike crowd the Governor Bradford’s battered and sticky tables. Most wear costumes. I’m comfortably installed a bench directly across from the bar’s stage, where a drag queen busily attends to the karaoke queue.
Another group of townies swarm in, seeking seats. They shuffle to where we’re sitting. One of the party is a woman dressed as Nurse Ratched—I can tell because she’s wearing a white nurse’s uniform with a stick-on tag that reads HELLO MY NAME IS Nurse Ratched. She points to the empty chairs on the other side of my table. The noise of a drunk local singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ is so loud, and the sound system so ancient and staticky, that there’s no chance I can hear her soft treble over the cacophony. I assume she’s asking if the seats are unoccupied, however, so I nod and point and mime somehow that it’s okay for her to arrange them in a row in front of us. Nurse Ratched and her crew—a man in an Adam West mask and gray Batman uniform and a woman I assume is supposed to be his Catwoman, and a witch who’s seemingly raided Stevie Nicks’ skirt closet—arrange themselves with their backs to us. Nurse Ratched stands up to wave over a man in a doctor’s lab coat and, improbably, a rainbow-colored Bozo wig.
“Will I be blocking you if I sit here?” shouts the doctor, as he straddles the chair directly in front of me.
“You’re good. You’re good,” I reassure him.
“You sure?” Onto his lap the doctor rests the kind of oversized leather bag that Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman might’ve lugged around.
I hold up my hand and smile, to tell him he’s good.
I’ve already sung once on this noisy Saturday night. So many costumed partiers are stopping here before heading to their revels, though, that the queue of performers is long. Remarkably few are any good. In the center of the restaurant, on the brightly-lit stage that’s flanked by two giant inflatable black felines, another drunk is massacring “Walking in Memphis” so painfully that the cat-masked drag queen doing the hosting is smiling to herself and hiding behind her computer screen, struggling not to laugh. It’s terrible, but the point of karaoke is that no one really cares: everyone in the crowd roars along with the chorus about their feet being ten feet off of Beale, filling out the melody in ways the singer cannot.
At last the song mercifully ends, everyone cheers and applauds wildly. The drunk staggers offstage wearing the smile of a man who assumes he’s nailed it. When everyone at a karaoke joint agrees to a low bar for success…maybe he has.
My friends are on their fourth round of drinks, and I on my third Diet Coke, when another group invades our territory. Three men, three women, all in their late twenties or very early thirties, muffled in puffy coats. None of them are costumed; all are obviously grateful to be inside and away from the Cape Cod winds. They crash down with some force into seats to my left. From the way they weave and laugh a little too loudly, over too little, I can tell they’ve been drinking already. The women are laughing and chattering with excitement at the crowd; their eyes dash around the room from costume to costume. “Honey!” yells the blonde closest to me, as she struggles out of her coat and scarf. “Honey! Look at the two Eltons!”
At a table to my right sit a gay couple dressed as Elton John; the older and more inebriated of the two is wearing a ruffled and bedecked Elton jumpsuit in flamingo hues. His headdress is so elaborate and wide that whenever he turns his shoulders, its ostrich feathers dip into his neighbors’ drinks. I’ve had to pluck plastic straws from it several times already, when no one else would. The younger is dressed in a sequined baseball uniform that’s open to his navel. His chest is muscular and hairy. All the women, and all the gay guys, can’t keep their eyes off him.
The dude the blonde called honey plops down next to me, sharing my table. There’s not enough room on the benches for him to sit with the other couples. He’s kind of an adorable little bulldog of a straight boy, in his Syracuse hat and his bulky sweatshirt, his two-day growth of scruff. “Hey buddy,” he says, nodding at me. I’m feeling a little odd sitting shoulder to shoulder with a straight jock, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Okay to sit here?”
“Sure,” I tell him. My hip’s already against a division of the bench, so there’s not much further for me to slide. I make a show of attempting it, anyway.
“You singing?” he says, his hooded eyes directly meeting mine. The noise level in the Governor Bradford is crazy already, but even taking that into account, he’s speaking a little loudly; I can tell he’s been drinking for a good portion of the night. “You gonna get up there and sing for us?”
“Later,” I promise. His response is to grin at me and raise a clenched left hand. Oh, I think to myself, for a surprised moment. This is what the kids call a fist bump. I’ve only fist-bumped kids before. I graze my knuckles against his, then manage to fumble through some kind of elaborate man-shake that involves clasping, slapping, and more bumping. When it’s finally over I feel dazed and a little giddy. I haven’t done anything quite so hetero in years.
“How about your boyfriend?” he asks, nodding at my other side.
Whoops. I guess I’ve been clocked. The dude is pretty matter-of-fact about it, though; it’s always seemed as if the straights in Ptown understand what they’re getting into when they visit. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I say over the caterwauling singer. “And no, he’s not singing.”
“Oh, so you’re the singer in the relationship, huh?” he says. His mouth is so close to my ear that I can feel the warmth of his breath tickling its tiny hairs.
I laugh. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I repeat.
“Oh, oh!” He punches me on the shoulder in a manly way. “Footloose and fancy-free, huh?” His words are a little hesitant as he talks through his mild inebriation, but he’s friendly and kind of cute…and let’s face it. I’m easily charmed. “Good for you, dude.”
The blonde has already made a trip between the two bobbing inflatable cats to retrieve a few karaoke slips and a golf pencil. She’s scribbling something down to give to the drag queen. “And she’s your wife?” I ask.
“Four years in January.”
“Well, congrats.”
When one of the guy’s friends punches him to ask a question, he moves his attention away from me. It feels a little weird to be sitting so close to a stranger. Even by New York City rush hour subway standards, our hip-to-hip adjacency feels alien. He doesn’t seem to mind, though—and his wife and his friends don’t care. So why should I? I give myself permission to enjoy the proximity of a cute straight boy half my age.
I’m not really upset when Syracuse’s wife gets called to the stage before I get a second shot—some karaoke hosts try to let as many people have a first song before beginning the rotation again. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in no rush. The blonde gets up on stage, yells out, “Peeee Tooowwwwn!” and then, “This one is for my honey!” before pointing at the boy at my left elbow. I glance at him. He’s grinning up a storm, watching his wife through the screen of his phone as he videos her performance. She’s chosen a Beyonce power tune. It’s not a bad rendition at all. She’s more on pitch than just about everyone else, at least, and while she’s prone to shouting out “WOO!” at odd intervals, it’s clear she’s having fun.
“She’s good!” I tell my neighbor. “She’s really good!”
“I know, right?” His entire focus is on her. It’s sweet.
The wife’s girlfriends are out on the floor in front of the stage, dancing. When the blonde steps forward off the stage, she and her friends attempt a twerk line that doesn’t quite work out. The husband catches every moment of it on tape. I’m wondering exactly how much she’ll appreciate the incriminating footage the next day. But honestly, he’s so into his wife’s performance that my cold black heart can’t help but melt a little.
When the song is over, I congratulate the blonde on a job well done. The three couples order a celebratory round of drinks from the front bar. The orange-and-pink Elton takes his place at the stage to shout out Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” There’s another straw hanging from his headdress.
Midway through the qu’est-que c’ests, Nurse Ratched and her crew rise from the chairs directly in front of us. It’s time for them to hit the Black and Gold Ball. None of us have talked to any of them all evening, but they all make a show of waving and smiling as they exit. Only the rainbow-wigged doctor lingers behind.
“Sorry if I blocked your view,” he says to me.
“Oh no. It’s fine.”
“Let me prescribe you something for your trouble.” He opens his leather medicine bag and digs into it. I hear a rattling of glass At last he produces a little bottle and hands it over.
“Well thanks!” I tell him. How many of those did he have in there? I read the label after he’s gone. Spiced rum. My stomach heaves a little, but still. It’s a nice gesture.
The drag queen at last calls my name. “YEAH!” yells the straight boy through cupped hands, even though I’m still all of about three inches away. “KNOCK ‘EM DEAD!”
I’m laughing still when I ascend the little stage. “Hi again, darling,” says the drag queen. Her cat tail bangs against the curtains in back as she hands over the microphone.
While she queues up the song on her laptop, I lean over and say, “It kind of seems that tonight you’re less karaoke hostess and more babysitter.”
“Well,” she says, grinning. “I am so glad that someone noticed. Thank you, honey.”
When I’m in a karaoke bar that’s packed, I tend to keep away from ballads and stick to songs that get people dancing. So I’ve put in a request for “Jump in the Line.” It’s one of my better tunes, and its appearance in Beetlejuice gives it a slight Halloween connection. When the familiar calypso strains begin blaring over the loudspeaker, the drag queen raises her arms in the air and begins twirling. The fringe hanging from the arms of her catsuit flies everywhere.
I’m bouncing my knees and thrusting my hips in time to the beat. When I start bellowing out instructions to shake, shake, shake, Sinora, I hear whooping from the vicinity of the bench opposite the stage. My straight buddy is fist-pumping with one hand, and...oh god, videoing me with his camera in the other. Oh well. At least he’s enthusiastic. The three women in his group are already on the floor in a conga line, and other people from around the bar are joining.
I’m unable to keep a straight face through the song as the drag queen and I dance onstage, because her fringe keeps slapping me in the face as she twirls. “Best car wash I ever had!” I call out, during a break in the lyrics. She shrugs and spins some more, laughing with genuine amusement. Mr. Syracuse has abandoned taping me, I notice with some relief. He’s out on the dance floor with a score of other bar patrons, spinning around with a beer in his hand as the conga line snakes around him.
People are having fun. The drag hostess looks like she’s getting a break from tuneless drunks. I’m enjoying myself. The song feels like it’s over too soon, and to a round of enthusiastic applause I thank the crowd, hand back the mic, and step down from the stage. I’ve done a good job.
Or maybe—I think, as I wend my way back to my seat through a flurry of back slaps—maybe I’m just that clueless guy who thinks he’s nailed it.
“DUDE.” The straight guy is slapping my hand hard the moment I sit down. “You ROCKED.”
“Hey, thanks,” I laugh, as I settle back down on the bench. Something in my pocket makes sitting difficult, though.
“Did you see all the people dancing?” he asks. “You were crazy good.”
“I saw you dancing,”I say. I reach into my pocket. I’d forgotten I’d shoved the tiny flight-sized bottle in there. I slap it down and push it in front of my straight buddy. “Want a shot?”
He stares at the bottle, then reaches for it. “What is it?”
“Spiced rum. Some guy dressed as a doctor prescribed it for me earlier.”
The guy examines the label. “You don’t want it?”
“I don’t have the stomach for spiced....” My words trail off as the straight boy uncaps the bottle without hesitation and downs it in a single swig. I actually had in mind a little addendum to my speech about how I didn’t think it wise to chug from bottles given to me by strangers, but at this point a warning would be moot. The dude is already slapping the empty container on the table, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and giving me a thumbs-up.
I just laugh and shake my head as I stand. “I’m heading to the bathroom,” I tell my friend on the right. Up on the stage, a woman in her mid-fifties is gyrating her hips and wailing out the lyrics to “My Humps.” I have to push through the three twerking wives to get through the dance floor. On the way toward the back, a few people shake my hand as congratulations for my recent performance. I laugh, thank them, and try to pick my way through the packed tables toward the men’s rooms.
The restroom is a veritable oasis of peace, compared to the taproom outside. The fixtures are old and worn, like everything else in the Governor Bradford, but I’m just there to piss. I hear the door behind me swing open on its creaky hinges, admitting another blast of “My Humps.” I shake, zip, and turn to wash my hands.
Syracuse is leaning against the toilet stall, blocking the men’s room door. In the brightness of the restroom, I can tell he’s drunk enough that he’s using the sturdy frame to keep himself standing. “Hey,” I say, soaping up. “Your wife was really good earlier. Is she a singer?”
“You don’t like rum?” He’s not quite slurring. But he’s inebriated enough to be amusing.
I rinse, and grab for a paper towel. “What? Oh.” I wipe off the moisture. “Spiced rum is just not my thing.”
I’m ready to head back out. He doesn’t exactly step in my way and block me, when I move for the door. On the other hand, he’s not exactly moving aside, either. “You want to see what it tastes like?”
“Huh?”
This time he does block my exit by propelling himself from his leaning position until he’s standing in front of me. The dude is only five-six, something like that, so he has to tilt his head back slightly to look me in the eye. “I said,” he repeats, loudly and clearly, as if I’m the drunk one, “do you wanna see what it tastes like?”
“I’m not sure what….”
That’s when he cups the back of my neck and kisses me.
His tongue has been deep in my mouth for several seconds before the reality of what’s happening sinks in. I can indeed taste the lingering prickle of the spiced rum, the sourness of many beers on his breath, as he holds my head and hungrily makes out with me. His body presses against mine. Against my leg I feel the hardness inside his sweats, as it rubs my thigh.
For a microsecond I wonder if I’m taking advantage of a drunk dude. But no, I reason. If anything, he’s taking advantage of me. When I wrap my arms around his shoulders, he relaxes into the embrace, and allows me to invade his mouth with my probing tongue. His hands clutch my rib cage, and he kisses me harder.
Outside, it sounds like the whole bar is chanting along with the Black-Eyed Peas. The realization that anyone could walk in, at any moment, though, brings me to my senses. I manage to separate myself from the boy’s amorous grasp. He regards me with liquid adoration. “You’re hot, dude,” he whispers. Then, “I’ve never made out with a guy before.”
Oh, fuck it.
Once again my mouth covers his. This time, I’m the aggressor, pushing in deeper, harder. His erection burns like a brand through layers of thick cotton and denim. He grapples with me to draw me in closer. As we furiously make out, grunting, moaning, breathing heavily through our noses, one of his hands begins to quest lower. It gives my butt a squeeze. Makes contact with my hip. Then searches at the crotch of my jeans. My rock-hard dick is at an awkward angle down my left leg, but at last he finds it, all at once discovering its length and girth and firmness.
“Whoa.” Suddenly the dude backs off. His hand flies back, as if it’s been scorched. He stares at me. There’s fear in his eyes. Maybe even panic.
Too far, I think. I smile, then wipe my sloppy beard with the back of a hand. Then I nod, recognizing I’ve hit a limit. “It’s okay.”
Someone does walk into the men’s room right then. Thankfully, it’s just a townie looking to use the urinal. “So, um, thanks for that shot, dude,” says my straight boy. Outside, the song has mercifully come to a conclusion to raucous applause. He looks around and grabs the door’s handle, ready to make an escape.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumble, and head to the sink to wash my hands once again.
“Later.” He’s gone.
I don’t really need to scrub again, but somehow it seems wise to give him some time before I emerge from the men’s room. Wiser still to give my dick time to deflate. This is going to be awkward, I think to myself, as I wander through the crowd back to my bench again. Syracuse is dancing—I guess that’s what we’ll call his shuffle-step with a beer held aloft—with his wife when I get back. I don’t even attempt eye contact.
I’m alone on the bench for a few minutes until my friends and I decide it’s time to move on. That’s when the straight boy decides we’re friends again. “Hey, hey, hey!” he yells while I try to put on my coat. He sits beside me once more and throws his arm around my neck, like we’re the best of friends. “The night is young! You and your boyfriend can’t go!”
“He’s not my—“
I realize, too late, that he’s joking. He bursts into laughter. Once again, he holds out his fist. This time there’s only the slightest hesitation before I bump it. And then clasp. And then slap palms. His whole group yell out their goodbyes.
There’s a great load off my mind when I part as friends with Syracuse. At least he doesn’t seem to bear any ill will against me. Will he even remember that men’s room encounter tomorrow? I have no idea.
What I do know is that I can still taste the spiced rum on my tongue.
Another group of townies swarm in, seeking seats. They shuffle to where we’re sitting. One of the party is a woman dressed as Nurse Ratched—I can tell because she’s wearing a white nurse’s uniform with a stick-on tag that reads HELLO MY NAME IS Nurse Ratched. She points to the empty chairs on the other side of my table. The noise of a drunk local singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ is so loud, and the sound system so ancient and staticky, that there’s no chance I can hear her soft treble over the cacophony. I assume she’s asking if the seats are unoccupied, however, so I nod and point and mime somehow that it’s okay for her to arrange them in a row in front of us. Nurse Ratched and her crew—a man in an Adam West mask and gray Batman uniform and a woman I assume is supposed to be his Catwoman, and a witch who’s seemingly raided Stevie Nicks’ skirt closet—arrange themselves with their backs to us. Nurse Ratched stands up to wave over a man in a doctor’s lab coat and, improbably, a rainbow-colored Bozo wig.
“Will I be blocking you if I sit here?” shouts the doctor, as he straddles the chair directly in front of me.
“You’re good. You’re good,” I reassure him.
“You sure?” Onto his lap the doctor rests the kind of oversized leather bag that Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman might’ve lugged around.
I hold up my hand and smile, to tell him he’s good.
I’ve already sung once on this noisy Saturday night. So many costumed partiers are stopping here before heading to their revels, though, that the queue of performers is long. Remarkably few are any good. In the center of the restaurant, on the brightly-lit stage that’s flanked by two giant inflatable black felines, another drunk is massacring “Walking in Memphis” so painfully that the cat-masked drag queen doing the hosting is smiling to herself and hiding behind her computer screen, struggling not to laugh. It’s terrible, but the point of karaoke is that no one really cares: everyone in the crowd roars along with the chorus about their feet being ten feet off of Beale, filling out the melody in ways the singer cannot.
At last the song mercifully ends, everyone cheers and applauds wildly. The drunk staggers offstage wearing the smile of a man who assumes he’s nailed it. When everyone at a karaoke joint agrees to a low bar for success…maybe he has.
My friends are on their fourth round of drinks, and I on my third Diet Coke, when another group invades our territory. Three men, three women, all in their late twenties or very early thirties, muffled in puffy coats. None of them are costumed; all are obviously grateful to be inside and away from the Cape Cod winds. They crash down with some force into seats to my left. From the way they weave and laugh a little too loudly, over too little, I can tell they’ve been drinking already. The women are laughing and chattering with excitement at the crowd; their eyes dash around the room from costume to costume. “Honey!” yells the blonde closest to me, as she struggles out of her coat and scarf. “Honey! Look at the two Eltons!”
At a table to my right sit a gay couple dressed as Elton John; the older and more inebriated of the two is wearing a ruffled and bedecked Elton jumpsuit in flamingo hues. His headdress is so elaborate and wide that whenever he turns his shoulders, its ostrich feathers dip into his neighbors’ drinks. I’ve had to pluck plastic straws from it several times already, when no one else would. The younger is dressed in a sequined baseball uniform that’s open to his navel. His chest is muscular and hairy. All the women, and all the gay guys, can’t keep their eyes off him.
The dude the blonde called honey plops down next to me, sharing my table. There’s not enough room on the benches for him to sit with the other couples. He’s kind of an adorable little bulldog of a straight boy, in his Syracuse hat and his bulky sweatshirt, his two-day growth of scruff. “Hey buddy,” he says, nodding at me. I’m feeling a little odd sitting shoulder to shoulder with a straight jock, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Okay to sit here?”
“Sure,” I tell him. My hip’s already against a division of the bench, so there’s not much further for me to slide. I make a show of attempting it, anyway.
“You singing?” he says, his hooded eyes directly meeting mine. The noise level in the Governor Bradford is crazy already, but even taking that into account, he’s speaking a little loudly; I can tell he’s been drinking for a good portion of the night. “You gonna get up there and sing for us?”
“Later,” I promise. His response is to grin at me and raise a clenched left hand. Oh, I think to myself, for a surprised moment. This is what the kids call a fist bump. I’ve only fist-bumped kids before. I graze my knuckles against his, then manage to fumble through some kind of elaborate man-shake that involves clasping, slapping, and more bumping. When it’s finally over I feel dazed and a little giddy. I haven’t done anything quite so hetero in years.
“How about your boyfriend?” he asks, nodding at my other side.
Whoops. I guess I’ve been clocked. The dude is pretty matter-of-fact about it, though; it’s always seemed as if the straights in Ptown understand what they’re getting into when they visit. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I say over the caterwauling singer. “And no, he’s not singing.”
“Oh, so you’re the singer in the relationship, huh?” he says. His mouth is so close to my ear that I can feel the warmth of his breath tickling its tiny hairs.
I laugh. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I repeat.
“Oh, oh!” He punches me on the shoulder in a manly way. “Footloose and fancy-free, huh?” His words are a little hesitant as he talks through his mild inebriation, but he’s friendly and kind of cute…and let’s face it. I’m easily charmed. “Good for you, dude.”
The blonde has already made a trip between the two bobbing inflatable cats to retrieve a few karaoke slips and a golf pencil. She’s scribbling something down to give to the drag queen. “And she’s your wife?” I ask.
“Four years in January.”
“Well, congrats.”
When one of the guy’s friends punches him to ask a question, he moves his attention away from me. It feels a little weird to be sitting so close to a stranger. Even by New York City rush hour subway standards, our hip-to-hip adjacency feels alien. He doesn’t seem to mind, though—and his wife and his friends don’t care. So why should I? I give myself permission to enjoy the proximity of a cute straight boy half my age.
I’m not really upset when Syracuse’s wife gets called to the stage before I get a second shot—some karaoke hosts try to let as many people have a first song before beginning the rotation again. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in no rush. The blonde gets up on stage, yells out, “Peeee Tooowwwwn!” and then, “This one is for my honey!” before pointing at the boy at my left elbow. I glance at him. He’s grinning up a storm, watching his wife through the screen of his phone as he videos her performance. She’s chosen a Beyonce power tune. It’s not a bad rendition at all. She’s more on pitch than just about everyone else, at least, and while she’s prone to shouting out “WOO!” at odd intervals, it’s clear she’s having fun.
“She’s good!” I tell my neighbor. “She’s really good!”
“I know, right?” His entire focus is on her. It’s sweet.
The wife’s girlfriends are out on the floor in front of the stage, dancing. When the blonde steps forward off the stage, she and her friends attempt a twerk line that doesn’t quite work out. The husband catches every moment of it on tape. I’m wondering exactly how much she’ll appreciate the incriminating footage the next day. But honestly, he’s so into his wife’s performance that my cold black heart can’t help but melt a little.
When the song is over, I congratulate the blonde on a job well done. The three couples order a celebratory round of drinks from the front bar. The orange-and-pink Elton takes his place at the stage to shout out Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” There’s another straw hanging from his headdress.
Midway through the qu’est-que c’ests, Nurse Ratched and her crew rise from the chairs directly in front of us. It’s time for them to hit the Black and Gold Ball. None of us have talked to any of them all evening, but they all make a show of waving and smiling as they exit. Only the rainbow-wigged doctor lingers behind.
“Sorry if I blocked your view,” he says to me.
“Oh no. It’s fine.”
“Let me prescribe you something for your trouble.” He opens his leather medicine bag and digs into it. I hear a rattling of glass At last he produces a little bottle and hands it over.
“Well thanks!” I tell him. How many of those did he have in there? I read the label after he’s gone. Spiced rum. My stomach heaves a little, but still. It’s a nice gesture.
The drag queen at last calls my name. “YEAH!” yells the straight boy through cupped hands, even though I’m still all of about three inches away. “KNOCK ‘EM DEAD!”
I’m laughing still when I ascend the little stage. “Hi again, darling,” says the drag queen. Her cat tail bangs against the curtains in back as she hands over the microphone.
While she queues up the song on her laptop, I lean over and say, “It kind of seems that tonight you’re less karaoke hostess and more babysitter.”
“Well,” she says, grinning. “I am so glad that someone noticed. Thank you, honey.”
When I’m in a karaoke bar that’s packed, I tend to keep away from ballads and stick to songs that get people dancing. So I’ve put in a request for “Jump in the Line.” It’s one of my better tunes, and its appearance in Beetlejuice gives it a slight Halloween connection. When the familiar calypso strains begin blaring over the loudspeaker, the drag queen raises her arms in the air and begins twirling. The fringe hanging from the arms of her catsuit flies everywhere.
I’m bouncing my knees and thrusting my hips in time to the beat. When I start bellowing out instructions to shake, shake, shake, Sinora, I hear whooping from the vicinity of the bench opposite the stage. My straight buddy is fist-pumping with one hand, and...oh god, videoing me with his camera in the other. Oh well. At least he’s enthusiastic. The three women in his group are already on the floor in a conga line, and other people from around the bar are joining.
I’m unable to keep a straight face through the song as the drag queen and I dance onstage, because her fringe keeps slapping me in the face as she twirls. “Best car wash I ever had!” I call out, during a break in the lyrics. She shrugs and spins some more, laughing with genuine amusement. Mr. Syracuse has abandoned taping me, I notice with some relief. He’s out on the dance floor with a score of other bar patrons, spinning around with a beer in his hand as the conga line snakes around him.
People are having fun. The drag hostess looks like she’s getting a break from tuneless drunks. I’m enjoying myself. The song feels like it’s over too soon, and to a round of enthusiastic applause I thank the crowd, hand back the mic, and step down from the stage. I’ve done a good job.
Or maybe—I think, as I wend my way back to my seat through a flurry of back slaps—maybe I’m just that clueless guy who thinks he’s nailed it.
“DUDE.” The straight guy is slapping my hand hard the moment I sit down. “You ROCKED.”
“Hey, thanks,” I laugh, as I settle back down on the bench. Something in my pocket makes sitting difficult, though.
“Did you see all the people dancing?” he asks. “You were crazy good.”
“I saw you dancing,”I say. I reach into my pocket. I’d forgotten I’d shoved the tiny flight-sized bottle in there. I slap it down and push it in front of my straight buddy. “Want a shot?”
He stares at the bottle, then reaches for it. “What is it?”
“Spiced rum. Some guy dressed as a doctor prescribed it for me earlier.”
The guy examines the label. “You don’t want it?”
“I don’t have the stomach for spiced....” My words trail off as the straight boy uncaps the bottle without hesitation and downs it in a single swig. I actually had in mind a little addendum to my speech about how I didn’t think it wise to chug from bottles given to me by strangers, but at this point a warning would be moot. The dude is already slapping the empty container on the table, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and giving me a thumbs-up.
I just laugh and shake my head as I stand. “I’m heading to the bathroom,” I tell my friend on the right. Up on the stage, a woman in her mid-fifties is gyrating her hips and wailing out the lyrics to “My Humps.” I have to push through the three twerking wives to get through the dance floor. On the way toward the back, a few people shake my hand as congratulations for my recent performance. I laugh, thank them, and try to pick my way through the packed tables toward the men’s rooms.
The restroom is a veritable oasis of peace, compared to the taproom outside. The fixtures are old and worn, like everything else in the Governor Bradford, but I’m just there to piss. I hear the door behind me swing open on its creaky hinges, admitting another blast of “My Humps.” I shake, zip, and turn to wash my hands.
Syracuse is leaning against the toilet stall, blocking the men’s room door. In the brightness of the restroom, I can tell he’s drunk enough that he’s using the sturdy frame to keep himself standing. “Hey,” I say, soaping up. “Your wife was really good earlier. Is she a singer?”
“You don’t like rum?” He’s not quite slurring. But he’s inebriated enough to be amusing.
I rinse, and grab for a paper towel. “What? Oh.” I wipe off the moisture. “Spiced rum is just not my thing.”
I’m ready to head back out. He doesn’t exactly step in my way and block me, when I move for the door. On the other hand, he’s not exactly moving aside, either. “You want to see what it tastes like?”
“Huh?”
This time he does block my exit by propelling himself from his leaning position until he’s standing in front of me. The dude is only five-six, something like that, so he has to tilt his head back slightly to look me in the eye. “I said,” he repeats, loudly and clearly, as if I’m the drunk one, “do you wanna see what it tastes like?”
“I’m not sure what….”
That’s when he cups the back of my neck and kisses me.
His tongue has been deep in my mouth for several seconds before the reality of what’s happening sinks in. I can indeed taste the lingering prickle of the spiced rum, the sourness of many beers on his breath, as he holds my head and hungrily makes out with me. His body presses against mine. Against my leg I feel the hardness inside his sweats, as it rubs my thigh.
For a microsecond I wonder if I’m taking advantage of a drunk dude. But no, I reason. If anything, he’s taking advantage of me. When I wrap my arms around his shoulders, he relaxes into the embrace, and allows me to invade his mouth with my probing tongue. His hands clutch my rib cage, and he kisses me harder.
Outside, it sounds like the whole bar is chanting along with the Black-Eyed Peas. The realization that anyone could walk in, at any moment, though, brings me to my senses. I manage to separate myself from the boy’s amorous grasp. He regards me with liquid adoration. “You’re hot, dude,” he whispers. Then, “I’ve never made out with a guy before.”
Oh, fuck it.
Once again my mouth covers his. This time, I’m the aggressor, pushing in deeper, harder. His erection burns like a brand through layers of thick cotton and denim. He grapples with me to draw me in closer. As we furiously make out, grunting, moaning, breathing heavily through our noses, one of his hands begins to quest lower. It gives my butt a squeeze. Makes contact with my hip. Then searches at the crotch of my jeans. My rock-hard dick is at an awkward angle down my left leg, but at last he finds it, all at once discovering its length and girth and firmness.
“Whoa.” Suddenly the dude backs off. His hand flies back, as if it’s been scorched. He stares at me. There’s fear in his eyes. Maybe even panic.
Too far, I think. I smile, then wipe my sloppy beard with the back of a hand. Then I nod, recognizing I’ve hit a limit. “It’s okay.”
Someone does walk into the men’s room right then. Thankfully, it’s just a townie looking to use the urinal. “So, um, thanks for that shot, dude,” says my straight boy. Outside, the song has mercifully come to a conclusion to raucous applause. He looks around and grabs the door’s handle, ready to make an escape.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumble, and head to the sink to wash my hands once again.
“Later.” He’s gone.
I don’t really need to scrub again, but somehow it seems wise to give him some time before I emerge from the men’s room. Wiser still to give my dick time to deflate. This is going to be awkward, I think to myself, as I wander through the crowd back to my bench again. Syracuse is dancing—I guess that’s what we’ll call his shuffle-step with a beer held aloft—with his wife when I get back. I don’t even attempt eye contact.
I’m alone on the bench for a few minutes until my friends and I decide it’s time to move on. That’s when the straight boy decides we’re friends again. “Hey, hey, hey!” he yells while I try to put on my coat. He sits beside me once more and throws his arm around my neck, like we’re the best of friends. “The night is young! You and your boyfriend can’t go!”
“He’s not my—“
I realize, too late, that he’s joking. He bursts into laughter. Once again, he holds out his fist. This time there’s only the slightest hesitation before I bump it. And then clasp. And then slap palms. His whole group yell out their goodbyes.
There’s a great load off my mind when I part as friends with Syracuse. At least he doesn’t seem to bear any ill will against me. Will he even remember that men’s room encounter tomorrow? I have no idea.
What I do know is that I can still taste the spiced rum on my tongue.
Monday, October 14, 2019
Reader Questions: Findom Edition
I have a few hot adventures I mean to write up in the semi-near future, but first some questions from readers, today. I solicited my Twitter followers for queries about sex, sexual politics, advice, and whatever was on their mind, and they obliged in spades; I’ve chosen a handful for today, and promise to get to the others.
If you’re not following me on Twitter, by the way, you should. I don’t tweet with the regularity of a hyperactive teen girl or the leader of the free world, if you can tell the difference, but I’m there regularly. There’s a link to my account in the sidebar.
This is embarrassing because I’m a long-time follower and reader, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t post my name with the question, but I’m 22 and still a virgin. I obsess about guys and watch a lot of porn but I still haven’t taken that step. How late is too late to lose your virginity? I guess I’m asking when is the ideal right time?
I’ve had this question before, and I think I’ll be answering it in exactly the same way I’ve done in the past—but it bears repeating. There are men like myself who lost their virginities at a very early age, who were ready to shed it, and for whom doing so was the right choice.
There are men who lost their virginities in high school, or in college, or in their twenties, when they had more of a sense of self and more of a feeling for their own desires—and doing it then was appropriate for them.
There are men who lose their gay virginities late in life, either from not realizing what or who they truly were, or from fear of facing that fact. My opinion is that it’s a pity it took them so long, when they could’ve been having fun during all those years of self-denial—but at least they come to their senses in the end.
As for those men who live in fear and never allow themselves to take an easy step that might bring them happiness? Well, if you haven’t lost your virginity, gay or otherwise, by the time you’re laid out in your coffin . . . I’d say then it’s too late.
Look, you’re 22. Obviously it’s not too late for you. You could get laid this afternoon and have a great sex life for the rest of your life, if you really wanted. If you’re balking today, though, why not take some time for self-exploration and ask why? Is it body issues? Because guys out there with all kinds of looks and bodies are having enjoyable sex.
Is it worry that the first time will be kind of a disappointment? Well, quite honestly, if you were to poll everyone you know about their first times, you’d probably get a general consensus that they were, on average . . . average. Might as well get the first time over with, and enjoy the better sex that comes after.
Are you concerned that any sex you have won’t be as blistering hot as the porn you watch? Dude, no one has porn star-level sex. Porn stars don’t have porn star-level sex. World-famous sex bloggers don’t have porn star-level sex except about seventy percent of the time. (Well, sixty-five.)
Or is it out of fear? It’s okay to be fearful—we all have our anxieties. Engaging in sex means having to get out and talk to people, sometimes even to talk to strangers and make yourself vulnerable in front of them. For some people it involves admitting one’s sexual orientation—whatever glorious form that might take—not only to oneself, but to others as well. Is it fear of your parents? Of the religion that’s corroded your pleasure center? Only you can answer this question, my friend.
If you’re scared, recognize that your unease is totally normal, and think about surveying your inner landscape in order to figure out exactly from where it springs. Consider identifying, overcoming, and eliminating fear—or at least reducing its influence in your sexual decisions.
You deserve pleasure. You don’t want to reach the end of your life and regret never having experienced one of the most joyous things we humans share with each other. Turn off the porn, get out from behind your computer, and fuck for real. You’ll thank me.
Besides sex, what are you passionate about? What in the universe fills you with joy?
I love this question, even as I grumble about how difficult it is to answer.
I had to do some thinking about this issue in my middle thirties, however. I’d reached a point in my life at which I wasn’t really enjoying much of anything. I occupied a university position that I’d held for years; I’d show in the morning, sit behind my desk, shut off my brain, and proceed through a series of appointed tasks and problem-solving. Six p.m. would roll around. I’d stand up from my desk and be astonished to find I’d been there for eight hours—yet I couldn’t really remember much of what I’d done at all, or why any of it had been important.
I lived in a fog for years. I wasn’t happy. It showed. My family life suffered. My health wasn’t fantastic. I wasn’t a treat to be around.
Sitting at a desk pushing papers and drafting emails and—god—attending endless staff meetings deadened my soul. I knew something had to change, so I spent a long time figuring out exactly what.
Eventually I confronted the certainty that I wanted to do was stop stagnating and create.
Ever since I was a kid, I loved the act of creation. I loved imagining things, then bringing them to life. I loved the goofy process of writing silly plays starring my friends, of writing terrible limericks with unpredictable punchlines. I spent hundreds of giggly hours staring down at notebooks or poised over my dad’s old-fashioned manual typewriter, putting thoughts to paper. In college and grad school I wanted nothing more than to be a writer—to channel all those creative energies onto the page.
When I wasn’t studying or teaching, I wrote short stories and drafts of novels. I even then had some minor work published, but I never seriously thought of pursuing writing as a career. In my unconsidered opinion—and more importantly, my parents’ opinions, despite their academic bent—on the scale of dubious respectability, the only career separating writing from full-time vagrancy would have been something along the lines of professional male cheerleading.
After years of soul-sucking numbness, though, I knew I had to do that thing which filled me with joy. And I have, ever since.
I love the act of playing with ideas on paper. I love taking the materials of my real life and arranging them in ways I control, in scenes I direct, in ways that help me share the ideas I need to share. No matter what the medium, creation is a potent form of magic. It’s assembling insignificancies into something new for others to behold—a something that can be beautiful, or powerful, or startling, or so awful in its ugliness it makes strong men weep. Creation brings me joy.
This, too I love: helping the aspiring discover their own artist within. Helping others tell their stories artfully and thoughtfully. Fostering in the creative a love of playfulness, then watching their excitement when they fashion inconsequences into importance.
And hey. Maybe I’m still not much of a treat to be around—you’d have to ask the people who know me, really—but at least I’m happy.
Do you ever talk about your experience in findom, Sir? I was going to ask how you got started in findom, if it’s appropriate.
For those who think that you, gentle reader, have misspelled ‘fandom,’ and that I’m about to launch into a tale about having dressed up as Commander Riker for a Star Trek Convention (you can see it, right?), I am going to have to take a moment and explain what my reader means here. ‘Findom’ is an on-trend portmanteau word meaning financial domination—a form of erotic humiliation. Think of it as sexual domination not over a submissive’s choices and actions in the bedroom, but over that submissive’s wallet and bank account.
And before we proceed: don’t be all judgmental over someone else’s fetish just because you don’t approve. There are a hell of a lot of white-bread nobodies just itching to turn up their noses at yours. Yeah, some people think it’s weird you want to dress up in athletic gear and call me ‘daddy.’ I mean, don't let it stop you. Daddy likes that one, too. But someone out there sure thinks you're a sick bastard for doing it.
With that out of the way, it’ll be easier for me to explain what financial domination is not: it’s not an exchange of money for sexual favors. It’s not demanding cash, then providing in return one’s own mediocre nude selfies on the internet. That’s an onlyfans account.
When it comes to explaining how financial domination goes down . . . well, that’s a little more complicated. There are probably as many styles of practice between a financial dom and his sub as there are people engaging in it. If you were to troll through the findom hashtag on Twitter right now, for example, I suspect you’d see a lot of tweets that run along the lines of HEY LOWLIFES. This APEX PREDATOR wants to DIG THROUGH YOUR SCUM WALLET while you JERK YOUR PATHETIC DICK to this ten-second murky video of me fumbling in my boxer shorts that’s seemingly filmed in the gloom of a nuclear winter while my filthy bathroom mirror and soiled laundry on the floor is plainly visible in the background. ACCEPTING TWENTIES AND FIFTIES ONLY!!!!
I am not that kind of financial dominant.
There are financial dominants online who solicit donations of fives and tens and Starbucks cash from random strangers, none of whom they know, and none of whose names they ever learn. Some submissives may enjoy the impersonality of that kind of arrangement. I am not that kind of financial dominant, either.
I’ve written many times about the erotic aspects of financial dominance in my life in my blog. My first real-life encounter with it, in fact, is enshrined in an early entry entitled ‘Fag Tax,’ in which I accept a financial tribute simply for having a desirable dick. A lot of so-called financial dominants would’ve simply accepted the man’s first offer of a cool forty bucks via PayPal simply for the privilege of looking at my dick while I exhibited it on a public cam site. To me, that’s not dominance; that’s just me being a cam whore. Per usual.
For me, the erotic charge, the actual act of humiliation over this particular cash sub, was what came afterward, when I rejected his proposed tribute as pitiful and insulting—and turned down his follow-up offers of sixty and seventy-five bucks as a total waste of my time. Forcing him to swallow his pride and cough up a hundred bucks? That’s humiliation. It makes my dick hard.
That particular entry, when it appeared in 2010, opened up a new source of cash flow in my life. In the years since, after dialogue and mutually agreed-upon guidelines, I’ve entered into contracts with select men to exert control over their wallets. I don’t advertise what I do; I don’t go on Twitter with a handle like @BigDickedBreederFinDom and demand Venmo payments for my Frappuccinos. (Though I don’t know. I could go for a Java chip right now, if anyone’s reading this.) I’ve found over the years that the right submissives find me. Together we figure out ultimately what’s best for them—and for my bank account.
When it comes to acting as a financial dom, my focus tends to be on the humiliation—what’s the sub willing to do for the mere promise of my engagement?
Consider this: in person, some men enjoy submissive extremes. When they want to hook up, they promise me things. They’ll dress up for me—in various types of gear. They’ll promise to service my feet, to make my dick and balls the altar at which they worship. They’ll greet me head down and ass up and become a faceless hole to fuck. They want to be called names: boy, son, faggot, racial epithets. They want to be spanked. Slapped. Spit on. They want their nipples clamped. Their dicks caged. Their holes plugged. They want to strap on a mask and a tail and pretend to be my puppy.
Every act of submission . . . each and every of these little humiliations . . . gets me harder. It’s one way I’m wired. They do all these things for my superior dick. And I love it.
From my perspective, my relationship with my cash subs isn’t much different. They’re expressing their submission to me, their desire for my personal attention—yet at a remote distance. Just as with the men kneeling on their mattresses with their holes presented and their faces in the pillow, I find the triggers that thrill them to the core. One of those triggers, inevitably, lies in sending me money—and if I’m to remain engaged, sending it regularly.
Just as I’ve been involved with fuck buddies for long periods of time, I’ve had cash subs serve for months, even years. One of them has been serving me since the day that ‘Fag Tax’ came out, in fact—a nine-year relationship that’s actually among the most intimate and creative I’ve had.
Some of you are wondering what these subs get out of it, though—other than the privilege of sending me triple-digit Amazon gift cards and electronic cash? Just like I pay my real-life subs a lot of attention when we meet, my cash subs score a decent amount of my time. I like to set personal goals with my financial subs. For one it might be a goal of dicks to suck at an adult bookstore for the week; for my longest-term sub, for several years, I set a weekly goal of loads to take in my name, with the requirement that he send me daily emails detailing the real-life encounters.
Men I meet in person love taking orders from me. How to present themselves. What to wear. What to say. How to address me. They like being told what to do, what position to take, when they should suck my dick and when they need to get ready to taking a breeding.
My cash subs enjoy taking orders, too. I’ve had some enjoy being directed to wear fetish gear or women’s underwear beneath their business clothing. Some subs have requested ‘brainwashing’ orders in which they view a certain amount of bareback porn per day, or watch poppers training videos, or submit themselves to subgenres of porn (piss play videos, for example) to which they desire exposure. Some have begged for forced masturbation sessions, while others have asked me to order their genitals locked in cages, the keys to which they’ve ceded control to me. For many I’ve set up schedules: when they’re supposed to hit the poppers, the times of day they’re permitted to eat their meals, the hour each day they’re supposed to text and remind me how grateful they are that I’m their cash master. (And for the record, I notice when those texts are late.) I find out what makes them tick, and I construct my orders from the information.
Subs show their obeisance to me many ways. The men I meet in person? After the fuck, when they’re sated and happy, they share their secrets—sexual and personal. So do my cash subs, through their confessional emails.
The men I fuck enjoy the thrill of exposure—of being discovered naked in a hotel room, of sucking dick in semi-public or public places, of being photographed with my dick in their holes, and of having those photos appear in my online sex profiles. Some have given me keys to their apartments so that I can arrive unannounced at a moment’s notice. My cash subs? They expose themselves to me in different ways. Many send me videos at regular intervals in which they masturbate, praise me by name, and defile their holes with toys. A few send me their bank statements or give to me the passwords to their online financial accounts, knowing that I can violate their privacy at any time.
No one cash sub does all these things. None of the bottoms I meet in real life do all the things a submissive bottom can do, either. (Though some have tried.) I suppose my point is that to greater or larger extents, the partnerships I have with my cash subs are indeed very much partnerships—a back-and-forth, a mutuality of expression. I don’t just take. I wouldn’t just take. Taking doesn’t excite me. Discovering a man’s buttons, pushing them, relishing the responses, then claiming my reward? That excites me as much as it does with a bottom kneeling before me.
My attentions don’t come cheap. If someone’s only going to tribute the amount of a Manhattan movie ticket per month, they shouldn’t expect the amount of time a movie might take—only about as much as it would take for the counter clerk to print the ticket. As with all things in life, you get what you pay for.
I haven’t written explicitly much about my involvement in financial domination for much the same reasons I don’t write much about my home life. I’m protective of intimate relationships that might be misunderstood; I won’t allow them to disparaged or ridiculed or devalued. Financial domination has been a part of my life for nearly a decade, though—a significant amount of time. It’s not the reason I get up in the mornings, but the connections it’s helped me make have gotten me through many a tough day.
If you’re not following me on Twitter, by the way, you should. I don’t tweet with the regularity of a hyperactive teen girl or the leader of the free world, if you can tell the difference, but I’m there regularly. There’s a link to my account in the sidebar.
This is embarrassing because I’m a long-time follower and reader, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t post my name with the question, but I’m 22 and still a virgin. I obsess about guys and watch a lot of porn but I still haven’t taken that step. How late is too late to lose your virginity? I guess I’m asking when is the ideal right time?
I’ve had this question before, and I think I’ll be answering it in exactly the same way I’ve done in the past—but it bears repeating. There are men like myself who lost their virginities at a very early age, who were ready to shed it, and for whom doing so was the right choice.
There are men who lost their virginities in high school, or in college, or in their twenties, when they had more of a sense of self and more of a feeling for their own desires—and doing it then was appropriate for them.
There are men who lose their gay virginities late in life, either from not realizing what or who they truly were, or from fear of facing that fact. My opinion is that it’s a pity it took them so long, when they could’ve been having fun during all those years of self-denial—but at least they come to their senses in the end.
As for those men who live in fear and never allow themselves to take an easy step that might bring them happiness? Well, if you haven’t lost your virginity, gay or otherwise, by the time you’re laid out in your coffin . . . I’d say then it’s too late.
Look, you’re 22. Obviously it’s not too late for you. You could get laid this afternoon and have a great sex life for the rest of your life, if you really wanted. If you’re balking today, though, why not take some time for self-exploration and ask why? Is it body issues? Because guys out there with all kinds of looks and bodies are having enjoyable sex.
Is it worry that the first time will be kind of a disappointment? Well, quite honestly, if you were to poll everyone you know about their first times, you’d probably get a general consensus that they were, on average . . . average. Might as well get the first time over with, and enjoy the better sex that comes after.
Are you concerned that any sex you have won’t be as blistering hot as the porn you watch? Dude, no one has porn star-level sex. Porn stars don’t have porn star-level sex. World-famous sex bloggers don’t have porn star-level sex except about seventy percent of the time. (Well, sixty-five.)
Or is it out of fear? It’s okay to be fearful—we all have our anxieties. Engaging in sex means having to get out and talk to people, sometimes even to talk to strangers and make yourself vulnerable in front of them. For some people it involves admitting one’s sexual orientation—whatever glorious form that might take—not only to oneself, but to others as well. Is it fear of your parents? Of the religion that’s corroded your pleasure center? Only you can answer this question, my friend.
If you’re scared, recognize that your unease is totally normal, and think about surveying your inner landscape in order to figure out exactly from where it springs. Consider identifying, overcoming, and eliminating fear—or at least reducing its influence in your sexual decisions.
You deserve pleasure. You don’t want to reach the end of your life and regret never having experienced one of the most joyous things we humans share with each other. Turn off the porn, get out from behind your computer, and fuck for real. You’ll thank me.
Besides sex, what are you passionate about? What in the universe fills you with joy?
I love this question, even as I grumble about how difficult it is to answer.
I had to do some thinking about this issue in my middle thirties, however. I’d reached a point in my life at which I wasn’t really enjoying much of anything. I occupied a university position that I’d held for years; I’d show in the morning, sit behind my desk, shut off my brain, and proceed through a series of appointed tasks and problem-solving. Six p.m. would roll around. I’d stand up from my desk and be astonished to find I’d been there for eight hours—yet I couldn’t really remember much of what I’d done at all, or why any of it had been important.
I lived in a fog for years. I wasn’t happy. It showed. My family life suffered. My health wasn’t fantastic. I wasn’t a treat to be around.
Sitting at a desk pushing papers and drafting emails and—god—attending endless staff meetings deadened my soul. I knew something had to change, so I spent a long time figuring out exactly what.
Eventually I confronted the certainty that I wanted to do was stop stagnating and create.
Ever since I was a kid, I loved the act of creation. I loved imagining things, then bringing them to life. I loved the goofy process of writing silly plays starring my friends, of writing terrible limericks with unpredictable punchlines. I spent hundreds of giggly hours staring down at notebooks or poised over my dad’s old-fashioned manual typewriter, putting thoughts to paper. In college and grad school I wanted nothing more than to be a writer—to channel all those creative energies onto the page.
When I wasn’t studying or teaching, I wrote short stories and drafts of novels. I even then had some minor work published, but I never seriously thought of pursuing writing as a career. In my unconsidered opinion—and more importantly, my parents’ opinions, despite their academic bent—on the scale of dubious respectability, the only career separating writing from full-time vagrancy would have been something along the lines of professional male cheerleading.
After years of soul-sucking numbness, though, I knew I had to do that thing which filled me with joy. And I have, ever since.
I love the act of playing with ideas on paper. I love taking the materials of my real life and arranging them in ways I control, in scenes I direct, in ways that help me share the ideas I need to share. No matter what the medium, creation is a potent form of magic. It’s assembling insignificancies into something new for others to behold—a something that can be beautiful, or powerful, or startling, or so awful in its ugliness it makes strong men weep. Creation brings me joy.
This, too I love: helping the aspiring discover their own artist within. Helping others tell their stories artfully and thoughtfully. Fostering in the creative a love of playfulness, then watching their excitement when they fashion inconsequences into importance.
And hey. Maybe I’m still not much of a treat to be around—you’d have to ask the people who know me, really—but at least I’m happy.
Do you ever talk about your experience in findom, Sir? I was going to ask how you got started in findom, if it’s appropriate.
For those who think that you, gentle reader, have misspelled ‘fandom,’ and that I’m about to launch into a tale about having dressed up as Commander Riker for a Star Trek Convention (you can see it, right?), I am going to have to take a moment and explain what my reader means here. ‘Findom’ is an on-trend portmanteau word meaning financial domination—a form of erotic humiliation. Think of it as sexual domination not over a submissive’s choices and actions in the bedroom, but over that submissive’s wallet and bank account.
And before we proceed: don’t be all judgmental over someone else’s fetish just because you don’t approve. There are a hell of a lot of white-bread nobodies just itching to turn up their noses at yours. Yeah, some people think it’s weird you want to dress up in athletic gear and call me ‘daddy.’ I mean, don't let it stop you. Daddy likes that one, too. But someone out there sure thinks you're a sick bastard for doing it.
With that out of the way, it’ll be easier for me to explain what financial domination is not: it’s not an exchange of money for sexual favors. It’s not demanding cash, then providing in return one’s own mediocre nude selfies on the internet. That’s an onlyfans account.
When it comes to explaining how financial domination goes down . . . well, that’s a little more complicated. There are probably as many styles of practice between a financial dom and his sub as there are people engaging in it. If you were to troll through the findom hashtag on Twitter right now, for example, I suspect you’d see a lot of tweets that run along the lines of HEY LOWLIFES. This APEX PREDATOR wants to DIG THROUGH YOUR SCUM WALLET while you JERK YOUR PATHETIC DICK to this ten-second murky video of me fumbling in my boxer shorts that’s seemingly filmed in the gloom of a nuclear winter while my filthy bathroom mirror and soiled laundry on the floor is plainly visible in the background. ACCEPTING TWENTIES AND FIFTIES ONLY!!!!
I am not that kind of financial dominant.
There are financial dominants online who solicit donations of fives and tens and Starbucks cash from random strangers, none of whom they know, and none of whose names they ever learn. Some submissives may enjoy the impersonality of that kind of arrangement. I am not that kind of financial dominant, either.
I’ve written many times about the erotic aspects of financial dominance in my life in my blog. My first real-life encounter with it, in fact, is enshrined in an early entry entitled ‘Fag Tax,’ in which I accept a financial tribute simply for having a desirable dick. A lot of so-called financial dominants would’ve simply accepted the man’s first offer of a cool forty bucks via PayPal simply for the privilege of looking at my dick while I exhibited it on a public cam site. To me, that’s not dominance; that’s just me being a cam whore. Per usual.
For me, the erotic charge, the actual act of humiliation over this particular cash sub, was what came afterward, when I rejected his proposed tribute as pitiful and insulting—and turned down his follow-up offers of sixty and seventy-five bucks as a total waste of my time. Forcing him to swallow his pride and cough up a hundred bucks? That’s humiliation. It makes my dick hard.
That particular entry, when it appeared in 2010, opened up a new source of cash flow in my life. In the years since, after dialogue and mutually agreed-upon guidelines, I’ve entered into contracts with select men to exert control over their wallets. I don’t advertise what I do; I don’t go on Twitter with a handle like @BigDickedBreederFinDom and demand Venmo payments for my Frappuccinos. (Though I don’t know. I could go for a Java chip right now, if anyone’s reading this.) I’ve found over the years that the right submissives find me. Together we figure out ultimately what’s best for them—and for my bank account.
When it comes to acting as a financial dom, my focus tends to be on the humiliation—what’s the sub willing to do for the mere promise of my engagement?
Consider this: in person, some men enjoy submissive extremes. When they want to hook up, they promise me things. They’ll dress up for me—in various types of gear. They’ll promise to service my feet, to make my dick and balls the altar at which they worship. They’ll greet me head down and ass up and become a faceless hole to fuck. They want to be called names: boy, son, faggot, racial epithets. They want to be spanked. Slapped. Spit on. They want their nipples clamped. Their dicks caged. Their holes plugged. They want to strap on a mask and a tail and pretend to be my puppy.
Every act of submission . . . each and every of these little humiliations . . . gets me harder. It’s one way I’m wired. They do all these things for my superior dick. And I love it.
From my perspective, my relationship with my cash subs isn’t much different. They’re expressing their submission to me, their desire for my personal attention—yet at a remote distance. Just as with the men kneeling on their mattresses with their holes presented and their faces in the pillow, I find the triggers that thrill them to the core. One of those triggers, inevitably, lies in sending me money—and if I’m to remain engaged, sending it regularly.
Just as I’ve been involved with fuck buddies for long periods of time, I’ve had cash subs serve for months, even years. One of them has been serving me since the day that ‘Fag Tax’ came out, in fact—a nine-year relationship that’s actually among the most intimate and creative I’ve had.
Some of you are wondering what these subs get out of it, though—other than the privilege of sending me triple-digit Amazon gift cards and electronic cash? Just like I pay my real-life subs a lot of attention when we meet, my cash subs score a decent amount of my time. I like to set personal goals with my financial subs. For one it might be a goal of dicks to suck at an adult bookstore for the week; for my longest-term sub, for several years, I set a weekly goal of loads to take in my name, with the requirement that he send me daily emails detailing the real-life encounters.
Men I meet in person love taking orders from me. How to present themselves. What to wear. What to say. How to address me. They like being told what to do, what position to take, when they should suck my dick and when they need to get ready to taking a breeding.
My cash subs enjoy taking orders, too. I’ve had some enjoy being directed to wear fetish gear or women’s underwear beneath their business clothing. Some subs have requested ‘brainwashing’ orders in which they view a certain amount of bareback porn per day, or watch poppers training videos, or submit themselves to subgenres of porn (piss play videos, for example) to which they desire exposure. Some have begged for forced masturbation sessions, while others have asked me to order their genitals locked in cages, the keys to which they’ve ceded control to me. For many I’ve set up schedules: when they’re supposed to hit the poppers, the times of day they’re permitted to eat their meals, the hour each day they’re supposed to text and remind me how grateful they are that I’m their cash master. (And for the record, I notice when those texts are late.) I find out what makes them tick, and I construct my orders from the information.
Subs show their obeisance to me many ways. The men I meet in person? After the fuck, when they’re sated and happy, they share their secrets—sexual and personal. So do my cash subs, through their confessional emails.
The men I fuck enjoy the thrill of exposure—of being discovered naked in a hotel room, of sucking dick in semi-public or public places, of being photographed with my dick in their holes, and of having those photos appear in my online sex profiles. Some have given me keys to their apartments so that I can arrive unannounced at a moment’s notice. My cash subs? They expose themselves to me in different ways. Many send me videos at regular intervals in which they masturbate, praise me by name, and defile their holes with toys. A few send me their bank statements or give to me the passwords to their online financial accounts, knowing that I can violate their privacy at any time.
No one cash sub does all these things. None of the bottoms I meet in real life do all the things a submissive bottom can do, either. (Though some have tried.) I suppose my point is that to greater or larger extents, the partnerships I have with my cash subs are indeed very much partnerships—a back-and-forth, a mutuality of expression. I don’t just take. I wouldn’t just take. Taking doesn’t excite me. Discovering a man’s buttons, pushing them, relishing the responses, then claiming my reward? That excites me as much as it does with a bottom kneeling before me.
My attentions don’t come cheap. If someone’s only going to tribute the amount of a Manhattan movie ticket per month, they shouldn’t expect the amount of time a movie might take—only about as much as it would take for the counter clerk to print the ticket. As with all things in life, you get what you pay for.
I haven’t written explicitly much about my involvement in financial domination for much the same reasons I don’t write much about my home life. I’m protective of intimate relationships that might be misunderstood; I won’t allow them to disparaged or ridiculed or devalued. Financial domination has been a part of my life for nearly a decade, though—a significant amount of time. It’s not the reason I get up in the mornings, but the connections it’s helped me make have gotten me through many a tough day.
Monday, September 23, 2019
Mister Top
So here I am, in my hotel room in Virginia, alone in the dark once more. Naked. Almost naked, anyway—I’ve got a baseball cap on, brim turned to the back. By request, I’m also wearing a pair of black athletic socks and my sneakers. There’s a rubber ring around my cock and balls. Otherwise, I’m completely bare, alone, and shivering in the gloom, kneeling with my forearms planted on the mattress, my knees spread, my ass in the air.
Once again I’ve left the door propped open by the latch. Thankfully, I don’t have long to wait in this submissive position. When the door opens to admit the harsh light from the hallway, I lower my head to hide it in shadow, and arch my back. I’ve walked into enough hotel rooms where bottoms are presenting their holes to know how to make it look good.
The man’s deep voice sends a shiver up my spine. “Damn, top,” he says. I hear the soft sound of him slipping off his shoes, followed by the metallic tinkle of his belt being unbuckled. I swallow hard. “You look so good.”
The touch of his hand on my ass startles me; I hadn’t realized he was so close. Another hand, on the other cheek. He pulls my ass apart to expose the hole to the air-conditioned cool, and I hear the weight of his belted jeans hit the floor. Although he keeps his hands on my butt, I feel motion—then the warmth of his breath mere inches away from my flesh.
“You look so fine. So fuckable,” he murmurs, as his meaty hands massage my ass. “Mister . . . Top.” My legs twitch. There’s mockery in his voice, but his tone isn’t malicious. “You’re my bottom tonight. You know that, right?”
“Yes sir,” I murmur. His hands are all over me now. I feel the flats of his palms pulled down my spine, over my ass, down my thighs. His hands tug at my hanging balls. He wraps his fingers around my rock-hard cock.
“Mister Top,” he says again. “Ass up for some big black dick tonight.”
“Yes sir,” I whisper to the mattress.
He’d hit me up online several days before I’d even arrived in Virginia. A handsome guy—big warm eyes, cocoa skin, trim beard, lightly muscular body. In his photos, his narrow waist led down to a huge uncut dick. Nine inches, at the very least. My eyes bulged at the sight of it, after he messaged me with a polite hello.
Maybe we can get together while you’re in town, he’d messaged, if you’d be interested.
I’d blinked a couple of times, reading the words. Yeah, who wouldn’t want to get together with such a good looking man? But at the same time, he’d branded himself as dominant in his profile. Top was listed as his preferred position. Not versatile top—top. Every single one of his photos, save for the exception that was only his smiling bearded face, made sure to put his enormous dick on display. His profile even read that he was looking for deep holes that could accommodate him.
Though his invitation to get together surprised me a little bit, given the uber-top impression he was projecting, I figured I knew what he wanted. I get invitations from tops all the time who want a little walk on the wild side—especially when I travel. They need to lap up a little what they’ve been dishing out, especially from someone who’s not going to stick around long enough to brag about it. Fuck, I’ve even had professional porn actors who were exclusively and infamously all top in their videos come to me for a little anal relief. I like flipping tops. This guy was going to be just like every breeder I’ve known who’s needed some dick in his hole.
Well sure, I said, playing it cool. But what would you get into with another top man like me?
His answer surprised me. You’re sexy as hell, and I was kind of hoping I could convince you to bottom.
Interesting.
I hadn’t bottomed in years. Fucking years. Periodically I get the urge to have a man inside me, sure—but those urges don’t come around very often, and when they do, I find that no one is exactly offering. This guy, well. He was offering.
But did I have that urge?
I looked at his photos again. It was a big dick. The previous guy to fuck me was the Russian some years ago, who boasted similar equipment. A fat nine. The last time I stumbled out of the Russian’s midtown apartment, I felt like my prolapsed hole was dragging along behind me on the concrete sidewalk. Why couldn’t I find a nice dude with a starter dick to take care of my need when it swung around, like Halley’s comet? Why is it that only tops with monster dicks wanted my hole?
First-world top problems, right?
But yeah. Something stirred inside me as I looked at those photos. It wasn’t longing. Not yet desire. But curiosity.
I’m really not much of a bottom, I warned him. It’s been a really long time. I’m not even sure I could take that monster.
He writes back with the same expert assurance I would give a novice bottom. You can take it. I’ll relax your hole and make good love to you and make you want it…then I’ll go in nice and easy. You look like you’d be hot to fuck. No pressure. We both would love it. Just think about it.
Oh, I thought about it. I thought about it while he kept hammering my phone with photos of his big dick, and of his big dick inside wide-open mouths, and of his big fucking dick inside other mens’ gaping holes. Every dick shot tickled the flames of my curiosity higher and higher; every reassurance that I would love his enormous meat inside my tight hole simply fanned the fire higher. If I hadn’t been in a mood to bottom when he’d first approached me, within twenty-four hours I was a hole in heat.
Let’s do it, I finally told him. We made a date for Tuesday, my second night in Richmond.
You won’t regret it, he replied.
I was visiting town to help my dad get to some medical appointments. The state mercifully revoked his driver’s license a few months ago. Although he is perfectly capable of using Uber to get places, it’s peace of mind for me to be there for more knotty scheduling. Tuesday was a complicated rush of early-morning doctors’ offices followed by a supermarket sweep before the hurricane projected to sweep up the coast later that week, and then a late afternoon run to his periodontist. After dinner with the old man, I’d made an excuse to head back to the hotel early.
I had cleaning to do. I’d brought my large enema bulb with me, and I got to work. Luckily I don’t have to rush—he planned to be at a movie with friends until after nine. By the time he’d be done, I would be clean inside and out, toweled dry, wearing the gear he requested, and on my knees.
I’ve got to admit. This guy is smooth. “You are gonna feel so sweet wrapped around my big dick, baby,” he’s telling me, as he kneels on the floor.
Pulling my hips down to this face, he spreads my cheeks again. “Oh, fuck,” I grunt, as I feel his big broad tongue lapping at my ass.
“That’s right. Mister Top is gonna get his ass fucked tonight.” His lips press against my pucker as he begins a long, unhurried make-out session with my hole.
I buck. I squirm. Sounds are issuing from my mouth that I haven’t heard from myself in years. Damn, he’s making me feel good. I’d sensed a confidence in him when we’d been exchanging texts the week before—the kind of confidence I suspect I normally exude, that puts nervous bottoms at ease and makes them desire to be opened. One finger at a time is slipping in and out of my spit-slick chute. I’m not resisting in the least. It’s true that I’d been warming up with the inflexible nozzle of the enema bulb for more than an hour, but even so, I’ve shown much less resistance to the invasion than with other guys who’ve tried to top me in the past.
My butt is high in the air, my knees spread to their widest, the side of my face planted to the bedspread, where drool is probably puddling around the corner of my open mouth. Want, want, want, my brain beats like a drum. I want this dude inside me. I want his dick. I want it all, now.
Next thing I know, he’s flipping me over onto my back, shoving a pillow beneath my hips. My legs are up in the air and he’s on top of me, his muscular body pressed against mine, his hips between my raised thighs. When his dick swings forward and collides with my ass, it feels like a heavyweight punching bag knocking against my hole. “You gonna give it to me tonight, Mister Top?” he murmurs into my ear. A shiver begins spreading from the top of my skull down my spine. “You gonna give me that sweet hole?”
“Yes,” I whimper. “Fuck yes.”
“I’m gonna get so deep in you your eyes will pop,” he swears. His mouth covers mine, and my whole body responds: my legs wrap around his hips, my arms around his shoulders. My spine arches. My skin feels as if it’s aflame. His kisses are deep, rough. He grunts slightly the harder we press our mouths against the other’s. Finally, he pulls away and looks me directly in the eye for the first time since he came into the room. “How do you want me, baby?”
“You tell me,” I say. I’d do anything for him at this point. “Any way that gets in deep.”
“Get on your knees.” He slithers down the bed to its bottom and stands. Pats its edge. “Show me that ass.”
I reposition myself face-down once more, my knees digging into the corner of the mattress. He helps himself liberally to the lube I’ve left on the hotel desk behind him, and works the cold gel against my hole. His fingers dig in the pucker, spreading the goo inside. I don’t think I’ve ever been so receptive to a man playing with my hole, before—tonight is going to be fucking special. I can just sense it.
“Are you ready for the fuck of your life, Mister Top?” he asks in the low, sexy voice of an overnight DJ at a Smooth Jazz format station.
“Please,” I whimper. “I want it.”
There’s a pause before he answers; I feel some fumbling at my ass as warm flesh presses against it. And presses against it. And presses against it some more. “Oh, I know you want it. . . .” he says at last.
I hear the lube bottle being squeezed again, followed by its plastic clatter on the desk. He uses his sticky hands to adjust my positioning slightly. Then there’s more activity in the vicinity of my hole.
I’m stuck in my downward doggie style position, and can’t really tell what’s happening back there. “I want it so bad,” I tell him.
“Oh, you are gonna get it.” He shifts around some more. Fingers my hole. I feel the head of his dick tickling against my point of entry. Then some fingering. Then more pressure. And now I’m beginning to wonder—because this isn’t some kind of erotic foreplay that’s going on back there. Can’t he find my hole in the dark? Is he unable to get inside me? Am I not as open as I think I am?
I reach behind and pull apart my cheeks for him. Maybe that’ll help. Again I feel his dick as it bounces across my fingers and lands in the vicinity of my hole. There’s some pressure, but nothing’s going in. Am I doing something wrong?
Finally, after what seems like long minutes of fumbling, he sighs. “Sorry.”
“What’s the matter?”
“My ding-a-ling just isn’t cooperating tonight.” I hear the sound of him wiping himself with the hand towel I’ve left on the desk chair, and stepping into his clothing. “You deserve better.” I clumsily roll over onto my butt.
“Wait—wait. . . .” I say. “You don’t have to go.” He’s still pulling on his pants, thrusting his arms into a white tee. “Do you want to make out some more? Let me suck it.” He’d seemed hard, or at least mostly hard, when we’d been kissing.
“It’s me. When it gets like this, I takes too long to get over it.” He’s putting on his shoes, now. “I’m real sorry to disappoint you, Mister Top.”
A million calculations are going through my head. I’m studying every word for candor. Is he just being kind in making excuses to get away? Was my ass so repulsive that I made him go limp? He seems genuinely embarrassed, though—and he’d been so amorous and sincere when he’d been eating me out and then kissing me. If I’d been that unattractive to him, would he have gone to the trouble of all that? Would I, in a similar spot?
On the two occasions in my life when I’d lost my erection, I felt so cornered, so immediately caged by fear and embarrassment that no matter how gentle and loving my partner’s ministrations might have been, I probably wouldn’t have recuperated. Nine years ago, when my lover Spencer had attempted to pick a fight with me and it ended with him deriding my alleged ‘toy-sized dick’ during sex, I not only lost my erection, but I couldn’t get hard for a full subsequent two or three weeks—and with Spencer, never again.
Yet I wasn’t getting a read of insincerity from this man. He made me genuinely sense he was ashamed his equipment wasn’t functioning as intended. Decades of fear, though—all arising from being sexually assaulted in my twenties—make me feel like the guilty party. I’d dared to ask for anal attention—something I never do, something that makes me feel vulnerable and often a little frightened. The second it hadn’t worked out, I was retreating to that fearful corner and worrying about what I’d done wrong…rightfully or not.
He gave me a quick kiss on the lips before he left. “Sorry, Mister Top,” he said. Then he was gone.
And I was in my Virginia hotel room with a rarely-hungry hole, alone in the dark once more.
Once again I’ve left the door propped open by the latch. Thankfully, I don’t have long to wait in this submissive position. When the door opens to admit the harsh light from the hallway, I lower my head to hide it in shadow, and arch my back. I’ve walked into enough hotel rooms where bottoms are presenting their holes to know how to make it look good.
The man’s deep voice sends a shiver up my spine. “Damn, top,” he says. I hear the soft sound of him slipping off his shoes, followed by the metallic tinkle of his belt being unbuckled. I swallow hard. “You look so good.”
The touch of his hand on my ass startles me; I hadn’t realized he was so close. Another hand, on the other cheek. He pulls my ass apart to expose the hole to the air-conditioned cool, and I hear the weight of his belted jeans hit the floor. Although he keeps his hands on my butt, I feel motion—then the warmth of his breath mere inches away from my flesh.
“You look so fine. So fuckable,” he murmurs, as his meaty hands massage my ass. “Mister . . . Top.” My legs twitch. There’s mockery in his voice, but his tone isn’t malicious. “You’re my bottom tonight. You know that, right?”
“Yes sir,” I murmur. His hands are all over me now. I feel the flats of his palms pulled down my spine, over my ass, down my thighs. His hands tug at my hanging balls. He wraps his fingers around my rock-hard cock.
“Mister Top,” he says again. “Ass up for some big black dick tonight.”
“Yes sir,” I whisper to the mattress.
He’d hit me up online several days before I’d even arrived in Virginia. A handsome guy—big warm eyes, cocoa skin, trim beard, lightly muscular body. In his photos, his narrow waist led down to a huge uncut dick. Nine inches, at the very least. My eyes bulged at the sight of it, after he messaged me with a polite hello.
Maybe we can get together while you’re in town, he’d messaged, if you’d be interested.
I’d blinked a couple of times, reading the words. Yeah, who wouldn’t want to get together with such a good looking man? But at the same time, he’d branded himself as dominant in his profile. Top was listed as his preferred position. Not versatile top—top. Every single one of his photos, save for the exception that was only his smiling bearded face, made sure to put his enormous dick on display. His profile even read that he was looking for deep holes that could accommodate him.
Though his invitation to get together surprised me a little bit, given the uber-top impression he was projecting, I figured I knew what he wanted. I get invitations from tops all the time who want a little walk on the wild side—especially when I travel. They need to lap up a little what they’ve been dishing out, especially from someone who’s not going to stick around long enough to brag about it. Fuck, I’ve even had professional porn actors who were exclusively and infamously all top in their videos come to me for a little anal relief. I like flipping tops. This guy was going to be just like every breeder I’ve known who’s needed some dick in his hole.
Well sure, I said, playing it cool. But what would you get into with another top man like me?
His answer surprised me. You’re sexy as hell, and I was kind of hoping I could convince you to bottom.
Interesting.
I hadn’t bottomed in years. Fucking years. Periodically I get the urge to have a man inside me, sure—but those urges don’t come around very often, and when they do, I find that no one is exactly offering. This guy, well. He was offering.
But did I have that urge?
I looked at his photos again. It was a big dick. The previous guy to fuck me was the Russian some years ago, who boasted similar equipment. A fat nine. The last time I stumbled out of the Russian’s midtown apartment, I felt like my prolapsed hole was dragging along behind me on the concrete sidewalk. Why couldn’t I find a nice dude with a starter dick to take care of my need when it swung around, like Halley’s comet? Why is it that only tops with monster dicks wanted my hole?
First-world top problems, right?
But yeah. Something stirred inside me as I looked at those photos. It wasn’t longing. Not yet desire. But curiosity.
I’m really not much of a bottom, I warned him. It’s been a really long time. I’m not even sure I could take that monster.
He writes back with the same expert assurance I would give a novice bottom. You can take it. I’ll relax your hole and make good love to you and make you want it…then I’ll go in nice and easy. You look like you’d be hot to fuck. No pressure. We both would love it. Just think about it.
Oh, I thought about it. I thought about it while he kept hammering my phone with photos of his big dick, and of his big dick inside wide-open mouths, and of his big fucking dick inside other mens’ gaping holes. Every dick shot tickled the flames of my curiosity higher and higher; every reassurance that I would love his enormous meat inside my tight hole simply fanned the fire higher. If I hadn’t been in a mood to bottom when he’d first approached me, within twenty-four hours I was a hole in heat.
Let’s do it, I finally told him. We made a date for Tuesday, my second night in Richmond.
You won’t regret it, he replied.
I was visiting town to help my dad get to some medical appointments. The state mercifully revoked his driver’s license a few months ago. Although he is perfectly capable of using Uber to get places, it’s peace of mind for me to be there for more knotty scheduling. Tuesday was a complicated rush of early-morning doctors’ offices followed by a supermarket sweep before the hurricane projected to sweep up the coast later that week, and then a late afternoon run to his periodontist. After dinner with the old man, I’d made an excuse to head back to the hotel early.
I had cleaning to do. I’d brought my large enema bulb with me, and I got to work. Luckily I don’t have to rush—he planned to be at a movie with friends until after nine. By the time he’d be done, I would be clean inside and out, toweled dry, wearing the gear he requested, and on my knees.
I’ve got to admit. This guy is smooth. “You are gonna feel so sweet wrapped around my big dick, baby,” he’s telling me, as he kneels on the floor.
Pulling my hips down to this face, he spreads my cheeks again. “Oh, fuck,” I grunt, as I feel his big broad tongue lapping at my ass.
“That’s right. Mister Top is gonna get his ass fucked tonight.” His lips press against my pucker as he begins a long, unhurried make-out session with my hole.
I buck. I squirm. Sounds are issuing from my mouth that I haven’t heard from myself in years. Damn, he’s making me feel good. I’d sensed a confidence in him when we’d been exchanging texts the week before—the kind of confidence I suspect I normally exude, that puts nervous bottoms at ease and makes them desire to be opened. One finger at a time is slipping in and out of my spit-slick chute. I’m not resisting in the least. It’s true that I’d been warming up with the inflexible nozzle of the enema bulb for more than an hour, but even so, I’ve shown much less resistance to the invasion than with other guys who’ve tried to top me in the past.
My butt is high in the air, my knees spread to their widest, the side of my face planted to the bedspread, where drool is probably puddling around the corner of my open mouth. Want, want, want, my brain beats like a drum. I want this dude inside me. I want his dick. I want it all, now.
Next thing I know, he’s flipping me over onto my back, shoving a pillow beneath my hips. My legs are up in the air and he’s on top of me, his muscular body pressed against mine, his hips between my raised thighs. When his dick swings forward and collides with my ass, it feels like a heavyweight punching bag knocking against my hole. “You gonna give it to me tonight, Mister Top?” he murmurs into my ear. A shiver begins spreading from the top of my skull down my spine. “You gonna give me that sweet hole?”
“Yes,” I whimper. “Fuck yes.”
“I’m gonna get so deep in you your eyes will pop,” he swears. His mouth covers mine, and my whole body responds: my legs wrap around his hips, my arms around his shoulders. My spine arches. My skin feels as if it’s aflame. His kisses are deep, rough. He grunts slightly the harder we press our mouths against the other’s. Finally, he pulls away and looks me directly in the eye for the first time since he came into the room. “How do you want me, baby?”
“You tell me,” I say. I’d do anything for him at this point. “Any way that gets in deep.”
“Get on your knees.” He slithers down the bed to its bottom and stands. Pats its edge. “Show me that ass.”
I reposition myself face-down once more, my knees digging into the corner of the mattress. He helps himself liberally to the lube I’ve left on the hotel desk behind him, and works the cold gel against my hole. His fingers dig in the pucker, spreading the goo inside. I don’t think I’ve ever been so receptive to a man playing with my hole, before—tonight is going to be fucking special. I can just sense it.
“Are you ready for the fuck of your life, Mister Top?” he asks in the low, sexy voice of an overnight DJ at a Smooth Jazz format station.
“Please,” I whimper. “I want it.”
There’s a pause before he answers; I feel some fumbling at my ass as warm flesh presses against it. And presses against it. And presses against it some more. “Oh, I know you want it. . . .” he says at last.
I hear the lube bottle being squeezed again, followed by its plastic clatter on the desk. He uses his sticky hands to adjust my positioning slightly. Then there’s more activity in the vicinity of my hole.
I’m stuck in my downward doggie style position, and can’t really tell what’s happening back there. “I want it so bad,” I tell him.
“Oh, you are gonna get it.” He shifts around some more. Fingers my hole. I feel the head of his dick tickling against my point of entry. Then some fingering. Then more pressure. And now I’m beginning to wonder—because this isn’t some kind of erotic foreplay that’s going on back there. Can’t he find my hole in the dark? Is he unable to get inside me? Am I not as open as I think I am?
I reach behind and pull apart my cheeks for him. Maybe that’ll help. Again I feel his dick as it bounces across my fingers and lands in the vicinity of my hole. There’s some pressure, but nothing’s going in. Am I doing something wrong?
Finally, after what seems like long minutes of fumbling, he sighs. “Sorry.”
“What’s the matter?”
“My ding-a-ling just isn’t cooperating tonight.” I hear the sound of him wiping himself with the hand towel I’ve left on the desk chair, and stepping into his clothing. “You deserve better.” I clumsily roll over onto my butt.
“Wait—wait. . . .” I say. “You don’t have to go.” He’s still pulling on his pants, thrusting his arms into a white tee. “Do you want to make out some more? Let me suck it.” He’d seemed hard, or at least mostly hard, when we’d been kissing.
“It’s me. When it gets like this, I takes too long to get over it.” He’s putting on his shoes, now. “I’m real sorry to disappoint you, Mister Top.”
A million calculations are going through my head. I’m studying every word for candor. Is he just being kind in making excuses to get away? Was my ass so repulsive that I made him go limp? He seems genuinely embarrassed, though—and he’d been so amorous and sincere when he’d been eating me out and then kissing me. If I’d been that unattractive to him, would he have gone to the trouble of all that? Would I, in a similar spot?
On the two occasions in my life when I’d lost my erection, I felt so cornered, so immediately caged by fear and embarrassment that no matter how gentle and loving my partner’s ministrations might have been, I probably wouldn’t have recuperated. Nine years ago, when my lover Spencer had attempted to pick a fight with me and it ended with him deriding my alleged ‘toy-sized dick’ during sex, I not only lost my erection, but I couldn’t get hard for a full subsequent two or three weeks—and with Spencer, never again.
Yet I wasn’t getting a read of insincerity from this man. He made me genuinely sense he was ashamed his equipment wasn’t functioning as intended. Decades of fear, though—all arising from being sexually assaulted in my twenties—make me feel like the guilty party. I’d dared to ask for anal attention—something I never do, something that makes me feel vulnerable and often a little frightened. The second it hadn’t worked out, I was retreating to that fearful corner and worrying about what I’d done wrong…rightfully or not.
He gave me a quick kiss on the lips before he left. “Sorry, Mister Top,” he said. Then he was gone.
And I was in my Virginia hotel room with a rarely-hungry hole, alone in the dark once more.
Monday, September 16, 2019
Only For You, Sir
Just parked in the lot outside, sir.
I’m lying on the king-sized bed in my hotel room, naked in the dark, when the phone lying on the bedside table lights up with the text, illuminating the popcorn ceiling above. I lift my head, grab the device. My cock comes to life, slowly lolling to one side as it grows heavier and thicker. I’ve already considered how I’m going to reply, so it’s but the work of a moment to thumb out a response.
Dad is taking a nap in room 208, son. Let yourself in and wake him up the way you used to.
After I hit send, I spring to my feet and pad across the carpet. My cock is still stiffening. It bounces and swings with every step. I angle my body so that it’s mostly hidden from the hall when I pull open the door. There’s a latch at the top intended to keep intruders from forcing their way in. I swing it so that it extends over the frame and prevents the door from swinging all the way shut. Then I scamper back to the bed once more, dive under the comforter, and arrange myself into a slumbering position: flat on my back, hands raised above my head, head tilted to one side.
While I wait, I take stock. There’s lube on the bedside table, with a couple of hand towels. The blackout curtain is pulled to maximum, so that despite the bright street sign of the Mexican restaurant next door, the room exists in perpetual twilight. My cock ring is snug against my balls. This position is stupid, though. Who sleeps on his back with his arms over his head like some cheesy porn magazine spread from the eighties? Onto my side I flop, as I tuck one of the many hotel pillows under the crook of my neck and pull the comforter up to my chin. This is how I really sleep.
My room isn’t far down the hallway from the elevator. Though the crack in my door is only a sliver, I can still hear the grind of mechanics as the elevator door slides open and the pad of approaching footsteps gradually grows louder. For a moment the room is bright as the door opens; then dark, as my visitor softly shuts it behind him and flips the latch. I consider closing my eyes to feign sleep—but why deny myself the sight of his shadowed figure kicking off his sneakers, removing his calf-high athletic socks? I watch as the boy drops a baseball cap onto the floor and crosses his arms to seize the hem of his t-shirt. There’s a crackle of static as he pulls it off, then lets it drop where he stands. The shorts and briefs he discards last. He steps out of both in one fluid motion, his back to me. I’d seen his ass in photos, but my first glimpse of it in the flesh—pale, round, and blue in the room’s gloom—takes my breath away. My dick pulses, fully hard.
I finally close my eyes when he turns. I feel a rush of cool air as the bedclothes lift. Quietly, softly, as if he’s actually fearful of waking me, the boy crawls into my bed and slides close to me. I feel a hand groping my midsection. It connects with my hip, slides to my rigid dick. Then a mouth, warm and wet, wraps around my shaft. I allow the boy to suck me for a moment or two before I stir. “Who’s there?” I ask sleepily.
He releases his hold on my meat and slides up until his head is on my pillow. “It’s me, dad. Barry. Your son.”
“Barry?” I ask. “But I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“I know, dad,” he says. There’s an earnest and even innocent yearning in his voice that moves me. It moves my cock, too, so that it butts against his hard stomach. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Yeah? How?”
For response, he presses his mouth against mine and wraps his muscular arms around my chest to draw me close. When I slide my tongue through his open lips, I can feel him tremble with excitement. My hands roam up and down his hard body. The shortest of stubble grazes my palms when I slide them across his chest; though the crack of his ass is furry, the skin of the globes is shaved smooth. Even in the dark I can tell he’s handsome. His eyes remained closed as we make out; he sighs and shivers as my hands discover near places to explore.
When I gather spit onto my index and middle finger and spread the slippery stuff over his hairy hole, he rests his chin on my shoulder and lets out a little gasp. “I remember you like that,” I whisper to him.
“I do, dad. Oh god, I do.” He yanks off the comforter and lets it fall at the foot of the bed, admitting the cold to play over my skin. Then, with his big hands, he adjusts a couple of pillows and nestles me onto them, face up. He straddles my thighs. The guy is what—30? 32? I can’t remember from his profile. He’s got the hard, worked-out body of an athlete. I gaze at the broad plains of his pecs, the dark quarter-sized nipples, the flat and rippled valley of his abdomen, his narrow waist, the obliques that lead my gaze down to his erect dick. The glitter in my eyes must be obvious; shyly, he grins and covers himself like a Botticelli virgin, one hand crossed to his shoulder, the other slanted down to his hip.
“You’re even more beautiful than I remember, son,” I whisper, as my hands run over his smooth flesh. When I cup his cock between my palms, it leaps from their embrace. “You’re all grown up now.”
I’ve never seen this guy before, of course. This meeting is our first. It hasn’t been at all difficult, however, to intuit the sexual fantasy that excites him the most, even without overt discussion. He’s a boy with daddy fantasies—and I’m a dad who’s happy to indulge him.
Goose flesh ripples out across his skin; I can see his nipples harden into points at my words. “You were my first, dad,” he whispers, his eyes half-closed, as he gives in to the vision.
“I am your best,” I correct.
The boy’s lids lift. Our eyes lock, as he nods. “Dad is always my best.” He lifts the tips of his middle three left fingers to his mouth to moisten them. His back arches as he reaches behind to wet his hole with the spit. “I need you inside me, sir.”
“I need you more, son. It’s been so long since you visited your poor old dad.” Ordinarily my M.O. is to take a little longer to get to this point. I like to finger the hole, get it slick, flip the boy over, eat him until he groans and begs for me to open him up. This hungry faggot has his own agenda, though. Every time I mention our putative relationship, his libido surges. He’s flooded with desire. I feel his fingers grapple to find my cock . . . which isn’t much of a feat, as it’s been standing erect and nudging against the boy’s ass cheek the entire time he’s been straddled over me. He guides me to the vicinity of his hole, lifts his hips. I know what’s coming next.
Or at least, I think I do. I’m anticipating the meeting of tip to hole, followed by the gradual accommodation of a tight chute as my thick hardness stretches its walls. What I get is the last thing I expect. This hungry bottom aligns my shaft to his point of entry, then simply impales himself in one violent motion. There’s no gradual anything, in his haste to engulf my entire eight-plus inches. One second my cock is exposed to the AC’s gentle breeze; the next it’s roughly swallowed by this boy’s hole. He lets out a mighty groan as he slams down on me, so loud that had I not already been blinking and thinking about the consequences of what might’ve happened had I not been so rigid, or aligned so perfectly, that I would’ve been completely taken out of the moment. But my dick’s still intact, and his insides feel warm and wet and in need of fucking . . . so I quickly find myself back in the mood.
“Fuck,” I whisper. He’s bucking and riding, head lolled back, eyes closed, hand on his dick. “You really needed that.”
“I needed to feel my daddy’s cock rip me wide open,” he says. Now he looks down at me. “Was that all right, sir?”
“Oh yes.” I reach up with my right hand to cup his chin and cheek. “It’s very all right.”
As I prop myself up on my elbows, he leans down to kiss me once more. My tongue bores deep into his mouth; my fingers cup the sides of his face. He leans onto the mattress with the heels of his hands and begins bucking wildly. The boy has great ass control. I can tell he’s trying to do some fancy milking of my dick with the considerable muscles of his glutes. The sensations are working for me. Other guys often try to produce the same effect, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as the way his chute clamps and loosens around my meat as his hips gyrate to and fro. I know I’m pumping out precum, because his ass grows more and more slippery as insistently he grinds.
His nipples are sensitive. Sensitive? That’s an understatement. When my thumbs and forefingers reach up to grasp them, his ass becomes a vise, his back arches, he throws his head back so abruptly I worry that he’ll wrench his neck. I twist. His body spasms; his lungs expel a low groan. All I have to do in order to tighten that already-taut hole is give those knobs a yank. It’s like turning the volume from zero to ninety with a simple pinch.
Finally he speaks. “This is exactly what I remember,” he manages to grunt out, syllables arriving in fits and spurts. “You inside me, in my bedroom.”
“After school,” I suggest.
His eyes open and look down into mine, full of love for the suggestion. “After school,” he agrees.
“You used to come home from lacrosse,” I say. I don’t know where the lacrosse came from. My dad played it as a kid, but I hadn’t thought about it in years. “All sweaty. Dragging that lacrosse . . . stick up the stairs. Your hair all tousled.”
Slowly he rocks, slowly milking my dick. “I would always hope you’d follow me, dad.”
“How could I stay downstairs after watching that hot ass walk by? I’m the father of the most beautiful boy in the world,” I say, giving the nipples another tug.
He clenches, moans, and begins to pick up the pace. “Did you really used to think that?”
“I still do.”
Our eyes lock. I hope he can read the truth in them—even if it’s our own truth we’re creating.
“You know most dads don’t have a relationship with their boys like we do.”
He nods. “You always said it was our secret.”
“Oh yes. Definitely our secret,” I reply.
“You said I shouldn’t tell anyone that my daddy shoves his massive cock up my butthole.”
I shake my head. “No, you definitely shouldn’t mention to anyone that your dad loves stretching that beautiful little butt.”
“Good boys keep secrets.”
“Like you always kept ours, son.”
Spinning this fantasy together, detail by detail, noticeably excites him. My boy is leaking from the tip of his cock onto my abdomen. As up and down he bobs on my dick, the spiderweb strands of precum stretch and slacken, glistening in what little light there is. “I just wanted my dad to keep pumping his seed in me forever.”
“Greedy.” When I say the word, he clenches down on my meat, as if attempting to wrench it from my body and forever keep it for his own.
“Only for you,” he whispers. “Sir.”
“Yeah?” I’m still toying with his nipples as if I’m maniacally twisting the dials on an old cathode-ray television with poor reception, but although his body is twitching and convulsing with every new sensation, our eyes remain open and locked upon each other. “You don’t say those pretty words to other daddies?”
“Only,” he reiterates, then pauses as he draws his ass up to just below the crown of my dick, and then slamming back down as roughly as he had upon first taking me, “for you, sir.”
“How about those sweet kisses, son?”
“Those,” he breathes, as he leans down and plants one on my lips, “are only for you.”
Our mouths devour each other. It may be a fantasy we’re weaving, but we’re spinning it mutually, in the moment. We’re fashioning something demonstrably false: a tissue of lies based upon nothing but desire and longing. Yet right then, with every word, with every thrust, with every kiss and fumble and groan, we’re creating something more than the mere two of us. Our own truths. Our own reality, contained entirely in the dark of that hotel room The sweet perfume of our mutual fancy smells like sweat, and testosterone, and the salty prickle of precum.
He is a greedy boy. Up and down his hole slams on my cock. He knows what he wants. He’s determined to get it. When it arrives, my semen jets into him, erupting almost painfully as if it’s molten. “I can feel it, dad,” he grunts, as I buck and struggle beneath him. He holds me down, keeps me from moving, as he shifts his determined grinding to a shorter, swifter rhythm. “I can feel you shooting. Just like you used to.”
I gargle out something that makes no sense. I’m lost in my orgasm. Shuddering. Shaking. Struggling to catch my breath. My boy’s cock is flopping up and down and striking my belly like a mallet attacks the tight skin of a timpani. And then, on one of its pendulous thuds as my own waves of pleasure subside, it erupts. His seed jets out, splatting onto my face, marking the pillows, covering my chest, then finally, slowly, oozing out onto my belly.
We’re both breathing heavily. Trying to reorient ourselves. Moistening our lips, wiping the sweat from our eyes. Is this going to be the moment when the fantasy dissipates, when dad and son become two perfect strangers and their exchanges become small talk? Or will we continue creating our own world together?
At long last, I clear my throat and speak. “I don’t think I’m done with you yet, son.”
He nods. “I hope you never will be . . . dad.” Then slowly, relentlessly, he begins grinding those hips once more.
I’m lying on the king-sized bed in my hotel room, naked in the dark, when the phone lying on the bedside table lights up with the text, illuminating the popcorn ceiling above. I lift my head, grab the device. My cock comes to life, slowly lolling to one side as it grows heavier and thicker. I’ve already considered how I’m going to reply, so it’s but the work of a moment to thumb out a response.
Dad is taking a nap in room 208, son. Let yourself in and wake him up the way you used to.
After I hit send, I spring to my feet and pad across the carpet. My cock is still stiffening. It bounces and swings with every step. I angle my body so that it’s mostly hidden from the hall when I pull open the door. There’s a latch at the top intended to keep intruders from forcing their way in. I swing it so that it extends over the frame and prevents the door from swinging all the way shut. Then I scamper back to the bed once more, dive under the comforter, and arrange myself into a slumbering position: flat on my back, hands raised above my head, head tilted to one side.
While I wait, I take stock. There’s lube on the bedside table, with a couple of hand towels. The blackout curtain is pulled to maximum, so that despite the bright street sign of the Mexican restaurant next door, the room exists in perpetual twilight. My cock ring is snug against my balls. This position is stupid, though. Who sleeps on his back with his arms over his head like some cheesy porn magazine spread from the eighties? Onto my side I flop, as I tuck one of the many hotel pillows under the crook of my neck and pull the comforter up to my chin. This is how I really sleep.
My room isn’t far down the hallway from the elevator. Though the crack in my door is only a sliver, I can still hear the grind of mechanics as the elevator door slides open and the pad of approaching footsteps gradually grows louder. For a moment the room is bright as the door opens; then dark, as my visitor softly shuts it behind him and flips the latch. I consider closing my eyes to feign sleep—but why deny myself the sight of his shadowed figure kicking off his sneakers, removing his calf-high athletic socks? I watch as the boy drops a baseball cap onto the floor and crosses his arms to seize the hem of his t-shirt. There’s a crackle of static as he pulls it off, then lets it drop where he stands. The shorts and briefs he discards last. He steps out of both in one fluid motion, his back to me. I’d seen his ass in photos, but my first glimpse of it in the flesh—pale, round, and blue in the room’s gloom—takes my breath away. My dick pulses, fully hard.
I finally close my eyes when he turns. I feel a rush of cool air as the bedclothes lift. Quietly, softly, as if he’s actually fearful of waking me, the boy crawls into my bed and slides close to me. I feel a hand groping my midsection. It connects with my hip, slides to my rigid dick. Then a mouth, warm and wet, wraps around my shaft. I allow the boy to suck me for a moment or two before I stir. “Who’s there?” I ask sleepily.
He releases his hold on my meat and slides up until his head is on my pillow. “It’s me, dad. Barry. Your son.”
“Barry?” I ask. “But I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“I know, dad,” he says. There’s an earnest and even innocent yearning in his voice that moves me. It moves my cock, too, so that it butts against his hard stomach. “I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Yeah? How?”
For response, he presses his mouth against mine and wraps his muscular arms around my chest to draw me close. When I slide my tongue through his open lips, I can feel him tremble with excitement. My hands roam up and down his hard body. The shortest of stubble grazes my palms when I slide them across his chest; though the crack of his ass is furry, the skin of the globes is shaved smooth. Even in the dark I can tell he’s handsome. His eyes remained closed as we make out; he sighs and shivers as my hands discover near places to explore.
When I gather spit onto my index and middle finger and spread the slippery stuff over his hairy hole, he rests his chin on my shoulder and lets out a little gasp. “I remember you like that,” I whisper to him.
“I do, dad. Oh god, I do.” He yanks off the comforter and lets it fall at the foot of the bed, admitting the cold to play over my skin. Then, with his big hands, he adjusts a couple of pillows and nestles me onto them, face up. He straddles my thighs. The guy is what—30? 32? I can’t remember from his profile. He’s got the hard, worked-out body of an athlete. I gaze at the broad plains of his pecs, the dark quarter-sized nipples, the flat and rippled valley of his abdomen, his narrow waist, the obliques that lead my gaze down to his erect dick. The glitter in my eyes must be obvious; shyly, he grins and covers himself like a Botticelli virgin, one hand crossed to his shoulder, the other slanted down to his hip.
“You’re even more beautiful than I remember, son,” I whisper, as my hands run over his smooth flesh. When I cup his cock between my palms, it leaps from their embrace. “You’re all grown up now.”
I’ve never seen this guy before, of course. This meeting is our first. It hasn’t been at all difficult, however, to intuit the sexual fantasy that excites him the most, even without overt discussion. He’s a boy with daddy fantasies—and I’m a dad who’s happy to indulge him.
Goose flesh ripples out across his skin; I can see his nipples harden into points at my words. “You were my first, dad,” he whispers, his eyes half-closed, as he gives in to the vision.
“I am your best,” I correct.
The boy’s lids lift. Our eyes lock, as he nods. “Dad is always my best.” He lifts the tips of his middle three left fingers to his mouth to moisten them. His back arches as he reaches behind to wet his hole with the spit. “I need you inside me, sir.”
“I need you more, son. It’s been so long since you visited your poor old dad.” Ordinarily my M.O. is to take a little longer to get to this point. I like to finger the hole, get it slick, flip the boy over, eat him until he groans and begs for me to open him up. This hungry faggot has his own agenda, though. Every time I mention our putative relationship, his libido surges. He’s flooded with desire. I feel his fingers grapple to find my cock . . . which isn’t much of a feat, as it’s been standing erect and nudging against the boy’s ass cheek the entire time he’s been straddled over me. He guides me to the vicinity of his hole, lifts his hips. I know what’s coming next.
Or at least, I think I do. I’m anticipating the meeting of tip to hole, followed by the gradual accommodation of a tight chute as my thick hardness stretches its walls. What I get is the last thing I expect. This hungry bottom aligns my shaft to his point of entry, then simply impales himself in one violent motion. There’s no gradual anything, in his haste to engulf my entire eight-plus inches. One second my cock is exposed to the AC’s gentle breeze; the next it’s roughly swallowed by this boy’s hole. He lets out a mighty groan as he slams down on me, so loud that had I not already been blinking and thinking about the consequences of what might’ve happened had I not been so rigid, or aligned so perfectly, that I would’ve been completely taken out of the moment. But my dick’s still intact, and his insides feel warm and wet and in need of fucking . . . so I quickly find myself back in the mood.
“Fuck,” I whisper. He’s bucking and riding, head lolled back, eyes closed, hand on his dick. “You really needed that.”
“I needed to feel my daddy’s cock rip me wide open,” he says. Now he looks down at me. “Was that all right, sir?”
“Oh yes.” I reach up with my right hand to cup his chin and cheek. “It’s very all right.”
As I prop myself up on my elbows, he leans down to kiss me once more. My tongue bores deep into his mouth; my fingers cup the sides of his face. He leans onto the mattress with the heels of his hands and begins bucking wildly. The boy has great ass control. I can tell he’s trying to do some fancy milking of my dick with the considerable muscles of his glutes. The sensations are working for me. Other guys often try to produce the same effect, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as the way his chute clamps and loosens around my meat as his hips gyrate to and fro. I know I’m pumping out precum, because his ass grows more and more slippery as insistently he grinds.
His nipples are sensitive. Sensitive? That’s an understatement. When my thumbs and forefingers reach up to grasp them, his ass becomes a vise, his back arches, he throws his head back so abruptly I worry that he’ll wrench his neck. I twist. His body spasms; his lungs expel a low groan. All I have to do in order to tighten that already-taut hole is give those knobs a yank. It’s like turning the volume from zero to ninety with a simple pinch.
Finally he speaks. “This is exactly what I remember,” he manages to grunt out, syllables arriving in fits and spurts. “You inside me, in my bedroom.”
“After school,” I suggest.
His eyes open and look down into mine, full of love for the suggestion. “After school,” he agrees.
“You used to come home from lacrosse,” I say. I don’t know where the lacrosse came from. My dad played it as a kid, but I hadn’t thought about it in years. “All sweaty. Dragging that lacrosse . . . stick up the stairs. Your hair all tousled.”
Slowly he rocks, slowly milking my dick. “I would always hope you’d follow me, dad.”
“How could I stay downstairs after watching that hot ass walk by? I’m the father of the most beautiful boy in the world,” I say, giving the nipples another tug.
He clenches, moans, and begins to pick up the pace. “Did you really used to think that?”
“I still do.”
Our eyes lock. I hope he can read the truth in them—even if it’s our own truth we’re creating.
“You know most dads don’t have a relationship with their boys like we do.”
He nods. “You always said it was our secret.”
“Oh yes. Definitely our secret,” I reply.
“You said I shouldn’t tell anyone that my daddy shoves his massive cock up my butthole.”
I shake my head. “No, you definitely shouldn’t mention to anyone that your dad loves stretching that beautiful little butt.”
“Good boys keep secrets.”
“Like you always kept ours, son.”
Spinning this fantasy together, detail by detail, noticeably excites him. My boy is leaking from the tip of his cock onto my abdomen. As up and down he bobs on my dick, the spiderweb strands of precum stretch and slacken, glistening in what little light there is. “I just wanted my dad to keep pumping his seed in me forever.”
“Greedy.” When I say the word, he clenches down on my meat, as if attempting to wrench it from my body and forever keep it for his own.
“Only for you,” he whispers. “Sir.”
“Yeah?” I’m still toying with his nipples as if I’m maniacally twisting the dials on an old cathode-ray television with poor reception, but although his body is twitching and convulsing with every new sensation, our eyes remain open and locked upon each other. “You don’t say those pretty words to other daddies?”
“Only,” he reiterates, then pauses as he draws his ass up to just below the crown of my dick, and then slamming back down as roughly as he had upon first taking me, “for you, sir.”
“How about those sweet kisses, son?”
“Those,” he breathes, as he leans down and plants one on my lips, “are only for you.”
Our mouths devour each other. It may be a fantasy we’re weaving, but we’re spinning it mutually, in the moment. We’re fashioning something demonstrably false: a tissue of lies based upon nothing but desire and longing. Yet right then, with every word, with every thrust, with every kiss and fumble and groan, we’re creating something more than the mere two of us. Our own truths. Our own reality, contained entirely in the dark of that hotel room The sweet perfume of our mutual fancy smells like sweat, and testosterone, and the salty prickle of precum.
He is a greedy boy. Up and down his hole slams on my cock. He knows what he wants. He’s determined to get it. When it arrives, my semen jets into him, erupting almost painfully as if it’s molten. “I can feel it, dad,” he grunts, as I buck and struggle beneath him. He holds me down, keeps me from moving, as he shifts his determined grinding to a shorter, swifter rhythm. “I can feel you shooting. Just like you used to.”
I gargle out something that makes no sense. I’m lost in my orgasm. Shuddering. Shaking. Struggling to catch my breath. My boy’s cock is flopping up and down and striking my belly like a mallet attacks the tight skin of a timpani. And then, on one of its pendulous thuds as my own waves of pleasure subside, it erupts. His seed jets out, splatting onto my face, marking the pillows, covering my chest, then finally, slowly, oozing out onto my belly.
We’re both breathing heavily. Trying to reorient ourselves. Moistening our lips, wiping the sweat from our eyes. Is this going to be the moment when the fantasy dissipates, when dad and son become two perfect strangers and their exchanges become small talk? Or will we continue creating our own world together?
At long last, I clear my throat and speak. “I don’t think I’m done with you yet, son.”
He nods. “I hope you never will be . . . dad.” Then slowly, relentlessly, he begins grinding those hips once more.
Monday, June 24, 2019
Stranger than Fiction
1.
Two men sit near the fountain in Bryant Park, one spring afternoon. Their metal chairs are pulled close; the men incline toward each other, rapt in a low-spoken conversation that cannot be heard over the plashing of the water. Anyone sitting nearby—the tourists with their Fifth Avenue shopping bags, the lone businessmen staring at their phones over a sandwich, the office women in their smart casual wear spearing takeout salads with plastic forks—might assume the men to be lovers, so cocooned are they in their own world.
They’re both tall, these men. Six foot three and six foot four. One is older, bearded, handsome in a modest way, gray at the temples and the corners of his chin. The younger, taller man has a square face with an even more sharply geometric jaw; he looks as if he’s been willed into being from soft, pale clay by a clumsy and inexperienced sculptor. When he leans back in his seat for a moment to stretch, he resembles a golem, hulking and lumbering, a shaped construction, not quite finished. Or perhaps someone might imagine him a throwback to a taller, more ancient race, a race with facial planes set at alien angles from our own. Lazily, with his enormous hands, he reaches for a cardboard coffee cup from the table to his side. He leans in again to speak. His lips are mere millimeters away from the older man’s ear. They move, barely aspirating their message.
The older man listens. He sits back, but only slightly. Their faces are close. So close. They must breathe each other’s air; surely they feel their own heat reflecting from the other’s skin. They could kiss without moving.
Now the older man nods, and stands. When he extends his hand, the younger man hands him the cup, then reclines in his metal chair with his Neanderthal hands resting on his stomach. In the direction of Forty-Second the older man disappears.
He returns five minutes later. Now he proffers the coffee cup to his friend. As the young man snaps off the plastic lid to peer inside, the older man takes his seat. His errand is rewarded by a smile that transforms the young man’s face from golem to angel; the youth leans forward, whispers something into his ear, and kisses him, gently, on the cheek.
The youth raises the cup to his lips and takes a sip. It must be to his liking, for he chugs down the contents, raising the cardboard container high in order to drain the last drops. Then he leans back into his seat, letting his arm rest on its back. There’s a cocky smirk on his face, now. For a long moment on that cool spring afternoon, the two sit there, drinking each other in. Basking in each other’s smiles. Saying nothing, and not needing to speak.
2.
I first encountered Christopher fifteen years ago. I still lived in Michigan; he was a student at one of the state universities. I need to meet you, sir, he wrote on Manhunt. You are everything I’ve ever wished for in a man.
When I told him I was flattered, he escalated his desires. I need you to dominate me. I need you to strip me, to tower over me, naked at your feet. I need to soak in your urine. I need to feed on your piss, and make it part of me. I need to suck your dick and take your seed, then have you piss directly down my throat. Please say that it’s okay for me to feel the way I do, sir. I need you.
Well. I'm susceptible to being objectified, especially in such a flattering way. Christopher recognized that our distance was an impediment—and our timing was off, as he would be graduating and moving out of the state in less than three months. But please allow me to continue fantasizing about you, sir, he would beg. You are everything I’ve ever wanted, in looks and attitude.
Christopher was an aspiring writer; I was just about to have my first book published. I write from life, he told me, when first I asked what projects he was undertaking. I don’t write memoir, but my life feeds my fiction. Just like you should feed me your piss, sir. I’d laugh, flattered by his sexual banter, and try to steer the topic back to more high-minded things like the love of writing we both shared. Somehow, though, he would always end up begging for more photos of my dick. I’d find myself hardening to his dirty talk, and allow him to flatter and cajole me.
After his graduation, Christopher moved back home, deep in farm territory. We kept in touch, vaguely, on social media. I followed his adventures abroad as he moved to Eastern Europe to teach, and to work on his novel; I cheered for his success when he began to review other people’s books online. From time to time, he’d send me quick messages. I still think of you. I visit your Manhunt profile just to look at your photos, and dream about that hard cock filling me with your piss, he’d say.
I’d ask how his novel was coming. Fine. But not as fine as your engorged meat would look spewing its urine all over my skin.
I moved to the East Coast; Christopher remained in the midwest. But then one day I received a message. I’m coming to New York, he told me. My novel is being published. Can I meet you?
Could he meet me? Of course he could meet me, I told him. I offered to take him out to lunch, to celebrate. We made a date of it, at an upscale pizza restaurant that’s a favorite of mine. Over lunch we talked—high-minded things, at first. His struggles with his editor. The excitement he felt over his first novel’s publication. What lay in the future for him.
His novel, he told me, was of a young man’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk—or at least, that’s as much of the plot I could absorb, as when he explained it to me over pizza, under the table the sole of his foot pressed insistently on the hard bulge in my pants. His was a tale of dark, sexual obsession, anyway, based on a relationship he’d experienced while he’d lived abroad. “It’s about an aspiring writer teaching in Eastern Europe who falls for . . . well, I guess you could call him rough trade. The man is older and straight, but willing to let the writer suck his dick when the writer pays enough. The writer follows . . . well, I guess you could call it stalking . . . he stalks the straight man around Europe. The climax is when the straight man beats the writer and steals all his money after making him perform oral sex.”
“And this novel—it’s based on a relationship of yours,” I said later, after lunch, as we exited a Starbucks and began strolling up Fifth Avenue in the direction of the public library. Christopher agreed that it was. “How closely based?”
“Closely.”
“Was the real other man older, and straight?”
“He identified as straight. He was older.”
I thought for a moment. “Did you pay him?”
With a wry grin, Christopher admitted, “I paid him a lot.”
“Did you . . . follow him around Europe?”
“I stalked him.” I’d avoided using the s-word, full of judgement it might have been, but here it was, out in the open.
I looked sideways at him, then. I had one last question to ask. “Did he beat you? Please tell me you didn’t let yourself get beaten.”
He shrugged. “My stories are from life. I live my stories.”
He hadn’t answered my question. Then again, he had.
I attempted to change the subject. “What’s your next book to be?” I wondered.
Again, he shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll have to live some more, and see.” He, too, was anxious for a shift in topic. Hands in his pockets, he nudged me with his shoulder. “I really like spending time with you. Don’t go yet. Let’s sit somewhere and talk for a while.”
I nodded, feeling the warmth between us. “I’d like that a lot. Bryant Park’s up ahead. Want to find a table and sit for a while?”
“I want more than that.” But he skirted the library with me, and together we found a table near the fountain.
3.
It’s a year later. I’m sitting in an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, near the back of an assembly of chairs in the store’s largest wing. The store would be closed in another ten months, but that news is yet to come. Tonight it’s abuzz with patrons. Perhaps forty people surround me, listening attentively to Hilton Als introduce Christopher, with fulsome praise for his newly-released novel. Hilton Als. Award-winning critic Hilton fucking Als is introducing my friend, I think, glowing. How amazing a journey is that?
Christopher takes the stage. He towers over the little podium, an ungainly giant looming over a child’s prop. He acknowledges Als, nods at the audience to thank them for their applause, and clears his throat. In a halting, quiet voice, he begins to read.
I recognize this passage immediately. I haven’t read it yet, although the book was auto-delivered on publication to my Kindle a day or two before. I recognize the premise because Christopher described it to me the previous spring. The American writer and the scowling object of his obsession are alone in a room. The dark-featured man shoves the American to his knees, and unbuckles his black market 501s. He forces the American to taste his dick, its foreskin ripe from piss and unwashed juices. Hungrily the American obeys, but some impulse impels him to pull away. The man in the 501s seizes the writer’s wrist so violently that the American cries out in pain. A slap across the face. Another. Through tears, the American parts his lips to finish what he started.
The audience listens respectfully, perhaps taken aback by the explicitness of the passage. Many hold their hands before their mouths to convey an expression of deep thought, their eyes fixed on the floor, or just below the podium. I, on the other hand, am perhaps feeling too deeply the war of wills my friend is describing in his soft monotone. When Christopher reads about his character being slapped yet again after he has swallowed the trade’s semen, all I can think about is a fire-red handprint marking Christopher’s porcelain skin; when the writer is forced down onto the bed and beaten, over and over, by the man’s angry fists, all I picture is how the bruises must have looked on Christopher’s face and body. Finally when, in a sudden turn-around of feeling, the trick pleads like a boy with the writer to forgive him and never to abandon him, I have to struggle against the impulse to fly to Eastern Europe and track down this son of a bitch, especially when the last thing his fictional counterpart does is to rifle through the writer’s wallet before stalking out the door with the writer’s promise and his cash.
At the conclusion of the reading, Christopher raises his head. His blue eyes peer out at the audience as if surprised we’re still here. He thanks us with a hasty nod. An employee of the bookstore asks people to line up for the book signing.
I already own an electronic version, but I intend to buy a physical copy of the novel as well, so I can have it autographed. I’m near the back of the line. There’s only one woman behind me, in fact, glancing at her watch. Patiently I wait as closer to the table I draw. I’m not talking to anyone else in the queue. I have plenty of time to observe Christopher as he signs book after book, and makes casual chat with each person who’s come out to see him. I get the impression he’s genuinely surprised at the attention. He makes eye contact with everyone as he hands back their inscribed copies. From time to time, he graces them with one of his goofy grins, or with a trademark dazzling smile. Those smiles animate his crooked face. I would do anything to see him smile at me that way.
Finally, after a long half-hour, it’s my turn…and he beams when he recognizes me. My heart beats a little faster as I draw near. By now, I’m the actual last person; the woman who’d been behind me had given up, fifteen minutes before. “Oh my god,” he says, rising. We lean over the table and hug. When he realizes there’s no one else left, he abandons his post entirely and walks around to join me. “I did not see you in the audience.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I tell him. I hope he knows how much I mean the words. I cannot think of anyone of whom I’ve been prouder.
He leans in close. “What you should be proud of is that massive cock of yours,” he murmurs directly into my ear. “I need to feel it sliding down my throat. I need it pissing directly into my gut.”
I laugh, but I’m a little taken aback by the deflect. I was just getting over the rawness of the abusive sex scene he’d just shared with the bookstore patrons, and a little shocked he could shift gears so quickly into sexual aggressiveness. But of course, he’s lived with that scene for a long time, at this point; he’s written it and edited it, and edited again, and has looked it after his copy editor has edited it. It’s raw to me, but at this point rote to him, I reason. I know how the cycle of publishing renders the written word overfamiliar.
He’s still murmuring into my ear as he scrawls something into my book and hands it back to me. “I wish I could have you over tonight, so you could open my throat with that enormous dick, but I’m staying at Jason’s.” He nods in the direction of an Asian-American young man his own age, who’s chatting with a group of other late twenty-somethings near the entrance. I recognize him. He’s another author. “I don’t think he’d appreciate me worshiping that fat dong and letting you hose me down with that horse-stream of piss in the middle of his living room.”
I look at the book’s title page. Christopher has inscribed my name, and followed it with the words, What I want to say won’t fit on this page. Thanks for coming. Christopher. What in the world is that dedication supposed to mean, I wonder? The words sound handsome enough. Yet do they really mean anything?
“Hey,” says Christopher in my ear. “A bunch of us are going to grab a drink.” I perk up. Perhaps an invitation is in the offing. I deflate just as quickly, when he continues his thought. “Maybe after my friends and I are done, I can catch up with you again and we can go somewhere.”
“Where, Christopher?” I ask. I probably sound more testy than I intend, but I can’t help myself. The group of young people waiting nearby have been shooting questioning glances our way. Clearly they’re anxious to start their revelry. Some of their faces I’ve seen in Christopher’s social media. A few are authors with one whole book apiece to their names. They’re the hot young voices of LGBT letters today, or something like that. Hot in a literary sense, anyway. There’s not one I’d swipe right on. “Where exactly would we go?”
Okay, so I’m not part of his elite little social circle. Am I such a troll I can’t be asked out for drinks? Why am I not even introduced as a friend? Is it my age? Am I dressed badly? Am I an embarrassment? How? I’ve got more writing credits to my name than all these whelps put together.
He’s trying to smooth over the situation. His voice is sweet and soothing in my ear. “I don’t know. Maybe you could hang out somewhere on your own and then meet me late, near the bar. We could find a parking garage or something. An alley. I don’t care. I just want to get that cock of yours down my throat. Then you can finish me off with your piss. Come on. Say yes.”
As he hisses his serpent’s song, wearing a smile all the while, I’m staring at the dedication he’s written. What I want to say won’t fit on this page. What I want to say, right now, can’t even come out of my mouth. Minutes ago I’d felt so proud of this kid. I’d reveled in every decibel of applause he’d wrung from his captive audience. I’d been proud of him for years, from the time he was a college student, through his adventures abroad, from the time he got his agent to this very evening, on the publication of his first novel. Every step of the way, I’d been the beaming father figure urging him on.
Now, though, I grapple with a new certainty. I was never central enough to think I'd been Christopher’s mentor, but I’d certainly fancied myself a colleague. We were players in the same game. In that moment, though, something struck me. Every interaction we’d ever had, when I would try to talk with him about writing, he’d always drag the conversation back around to my cock. I’d accept the flattery, smile and laugh it off and try again to converse like a peer. He’d ignore anything I said and beg for my piss.
To Christopher, I wasn’t an avuncular compatriot in wordsmithing. To Christopher, I wasn’t even—and for the first time in a decade I allowed to think the words—a friend. To Christopher, I was a big alpha cock. I was a bladder of warm piss. I was a dark sexual obsession to someone who collected sexual obsessions like Pokémon.
You don’t pull your sexual obsession out into the light for others to examine. You don’t invite him to some noisy Brooklyn brewery with your little friends. Sexual obsessions lurk in dark alleyways, waiting to waylay a successful author on his way back to his buddy Jason’s sofa, on the night of his ultimate triumph. Sexual obsessions push a bright young genius on the cusp of wild literary success to his knees in a parking garage stairwell, to drench the writer’s pressed jeans and crisp, ironed shirt with a fire hose dick.
I live my stories was my friend’s credo. To Christopher, I was a character in some plot he was formulating—a minor shadow in some potential future novel about a writer with a dark sexual need for degradation. I wasn’t a friend or a colleague. Not a mentor. Not an advisor. I’d never be someone he turned to for advice, or for kudos, or for a sofa when he visited the city. Fuck, I wasn’t even a real person. I was merely an actor in the drama he was concocting in that cranium of his, and one with a severely limited role, at that.
“I need to get back home,” I say, and stammer out something about the last trains back to the suburbs.
His eyes measure me for a moment. The light in them flickers out. His smile vanishes. “We’ll catch up,” he tells me.
I nod, and shove my second copy of his novel into my bag as I blindly stumble past his friends for the door.
4.
What does it mean, to live one’s stories?
I’m sitting on a bench in the Borough Hall station, waiting for the train. A whole section of century-old tiles have fallen from the mosaic overhead; what remains reads BOROU ALL. I’m glad, this late at night, that no one’s around to see me now. My face must be poker red after my conversation with Christopher, minutes before. Shame, from not being good enough, for not being highbrow enough to hobnob with the likes of Hilton Als and the smart literary set. Embarrassment, for assuming my friendship with Christopher was something substantial. Anger, for time wasted. Despite my self-pity, though, I can’t stop thinking about this question.
I write a lot about my life. I chronicle what happens to me. I resurrect memories from the past. Arranging experience into memoir, sharing oneself with others, are noble arts, I think. I look for stories in the time that’s passed, the people I’ve met, the conversations and encounters that fill my days. I try to make sense of the ebb and flow of coincidences, to discern patterns, from the tangles time weaves as I dance through it. When I sit down to sort my life into sentences and paragraphs, I’ll use literary techniques in the distilling; I’ll condense conversations, I’ll streamline the action. But I hew true to what happened, I summon yet don't much alter the things that were said and the feelings I had. What I don’t do is to manipulate my life and the people in it in order to achieve a outcome that suits a story I want to craft.
Tonight, I suspect Christopher does.
I don’t deny chasing stories when I can. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and chances are I’ll take the one that looks like it might yield a tale to tell later. I am always wanting to see what happens next, and next after that. Christopher, however. I now had a mental image of Christopher as a giant, looming over a drafting table covered by scale stage set models—one maquette decorated like a bookstore with rows of metal folding chairs arranged in rows, a cut-out cardboard podium from which juts a bent paper-clip microphone. Small paper cut-outs represent the people; all but one sport blank faces. The exception, standing in the back, has a penciled-in beard.
Another maquette. This one of a dark alley. Christopher slouches a duplicate of the tall bearded paper doll against a concrete wall in the shadows; he arranges a spotlight above upon the even taller stand-in for the writer, hesitating in a pool of white and casting a long shadow behind, as he pauses at the alley’s black mouth. A third, earlier scale model sits to the side: a city block. A classical building, a library twin lions guarding its staircases, has been erected from foam board and glue at one end; behind it, a park with a large square of green open space and a miniature baroque fountain. The same two cut-out miniature men sit close to each other at a table nearby.
Had Christopher, in each scene we’d shared, taken me like a paper doll and trotted me exactly where he’d wanted me? To him, was I nothing but the dirty old pervert in his own bildungsroman? I suspected so. I was of many among his real-life sexual obsessions, perhaps fodder for a future tale along the lines of his first novel.
In the quiet sanctity of that subway station, I wondered about the other people in Christopher’s life. How far had he gone for his art? Did Christopher use his smiles and sheer will to keep his hustler returning for scene after bitter scene? Did he calculate exactly how many euros to withdraw and leave in his wallet, one night he knew it would be plundered, weighing a theoretical balance between satisfying his so-called straight lover, without breaking his own bank account? Awful as it was even to think—did he practice in his mind just what cruel thing to say, to compel a man to strike him?
If any or all these things were true, is that the only difference between high art, and mere chronicle—the author’s manipulation?
I could be overreacting. I draw out my phone and pause before thumbing out a text to Christopher. I'd like to talk sometime. Maybe this week, while you’re still here?
Perhaps he’s not at the bar yet, or his author chums are boring him, for he writes back almost instantly. How about you talk while I’m between your thighs with your big dick in my mouth.
That’s not really a conversation, though, I tell him.
If you come in my mouth, I might be ready to talk.
My thumbs stab out a reply. It seems as if the only part of me you find desirable is between my legs.
There’s a moment before he writes back. I guess I’m accepting it will never happen, he says.
A train announces its impending arrival, first with a distant horn and the rattle of its cars, and then with a gleam of its headlights piercing the black depths of the uptown tunnel. I stand, and during the moments the train pulls into the tunnel and draws to a stop, I tap out another message. I'm enormously flattered you seem to find me sexually magnetic. If you were to set out to seduce me in person (and we had a place to go), you'd succeed. If you perceive resistance, it's only because I prefer my sexual encounters to arise from the moment, rather than adhere to a predetermined scene. It's not from lack of attraction.
I hit send, and wait. I wait for a reply all the way back to Grand Central.
I wait for it on the commuter train home.
I wait for a reply all the next day, and the whole week he’s in town.
Three years later, and I’m still waiting.
I was a paper cut-out in a maquette that refused to stand where placed, a disobedient actor who turned down the bit part he was offered. I haven’t heard from Christopher since.
5.
Two men sit near the fountain in Bryant Park, one spring afternoon. Their metal chairs are pulled close; the men incline toward each other in conversation. Anyone sitting nearby—the park custodians sweeping leaves and debris from the sidewalks, the couples walking their miniature dogs, the old men strategizing at chess across the way—might assume the men are lovers, so cocooned in their own world are they.
The younger and taller of the men, his eyes blue, his lips drawn into an impossibly wide smile, leans forward so that his mouth is millimeters away from the older man’s ear. The young man’s smooth cheek grazes the older man’s beard so lightly it seems more warmth than actual touch. He inhales, then holds his breath for a moment before whispering. “I can’t take my eyes off the bulge in your pants.”
The words, barely aspirated, tickle and tease. The older man’s heart beats more quickly in response; perhaps he shifts in his chair to ease the tightening in his trousers. He wets his lips, but says nothing.
“What wouldn’t I give to have you in my mouth right now,” says the young man. It’s cruel, what he’s doing. No good can come of his promises. The younger man stays with a friend when he visits the city, while the older man lives too far away. “Sucking you. Licking you from stem to stern. Slobbering over your enormous . . . rigid . . . dripping . . . fat cock.”
His cheek still tingling with proximity, the older man swallows hard. “Why are you torturing me?” His voice is low. It trembles.
They barely have to turn their heads to make eye contact. “Maybe you’re the one torturing me,” says the younger man. He rotates the Starbucks cup in his hands. “I’ve finished my coffee. But I’m still thirsty.”
The older man sits back, just slightly, enough to look his companion in the eye. Their faces are close. So close. They must breathe each other’s air. They could kiss without moving. “Are you saying—?”
“I’m thirsty,” repeats the young man, his eyes unwavering as each stares at the other.
Now the older man nods, and stands. When he extends his hand, the younger man hands him the cup, then reclines, his Neanderthal hands resting on his stomach. In the direction of Forty-Second the older man disappears. He strides toward the stone building that houses the public facilities, keeping pace to the thudding of his heart. Even at this early hour of the afternoon, there’s a line outside the women’s restroom door, but none for the men’s side.
Once inside, he waves his hand beneath the faucet to set the water in motion. He rinses out both the white cardboard and its plastic lid, once, twice, sniffing to see how much of a coffee aroma is left. Then he strides to the urinals, sets the cup on top of the urinal’s ledge, and unzips. Perfunctory partitions divide the porcelain fixtures, but when the older man reaches for the open cup and brings it with his hand down into the urinal basin, the man next to him glances over. Then he averts his eyes, minding his own business in his best New Yorker fashion, or at least a reasonable approximation. The older man finishes his business in the cup, affixes the lid, and strides back to the basins to wash his hands.
Five minutes have passed by the time he returns to the table by the fountain. He holds out the coffee cup, which still radiates a body temperature warmth against his hand, then sits. The younger man spreads wide his knees, pries open the lid, and peers within. When he looks back up at the older man, there’s light and heat in his eyes. He bestows on the older man one of those dazzling smiles, making the older man feel all in an instant loved, and desired, and yes—young again. As the youth sets aside the lid on the table, he leans in. “I am going to relish every drop of you,” he whispers.
He kisses his benefactor on the cheek. Surely, the older man thinks, the imprint of those lips will leave a permanent mark, hot and moist and red.
Cup raised, the young man downs its contents. When finished, he taps the bottom of the container to release any final, reluctant drops. When he leans forward again, his breath is ranker, more acrid. “Delicious,” he whispers. “Look what you made me do.”
The older man is too flustered to reply. He’s betrayed by his pounding heart, his shortness of breath, his increasing hardness, the hormones coursing through his veins. He works his lips, but nothing comes out. Instead, he watches his young friend lean back in his chair smugly to consider the empty Starbucks cup, and in his own head replays the youth’s last words.
Look what you made me do.
It should have been the older man’s line.
Two men sit near the fountain in Bryant Park, one spring afternoon. Their metal chairs are pulled close; the men incline toward each other, rapt in a low-spoken conversation that cannot be heard over the plashing of the water. Anyone sitting nearby—the tourists with their Fifth Avenue shopping bags, the lone businessmen staring at their phones over a sandwich, the office women in their smart casual wear spearing takeout salads with plastic forks—might assume the men to be lovers, so cocooned are they in their own world.
They’re both tall, these men. Six foot three and six foot four. One is older, bearded, handsome in a modest way, gray at the temples and the corners of his chin. The younger, taller man has a square face with an even more sharply geometric jaw; he looks as if he’s been willed into being from soft, pale clay by a clumsy and inexperienced sculptor. When he leans back in his seat for a moment to stretch, he resembles a golem, hulking and lumbering, a shaped construction, not quite finished. Or perhaps someone might imagine him a throwback to a taller, more ancient race, a race with facial planes set at alien angles from our own. Lazily, with his enormous hands, he reaches for a cardboard coffee cup from the table to his side. He leans in again to speak. His lips are mere millimeters away from the older man’s ear. They move, barely aspirating their message.
The older man listens. He sits back, but only slightly. Their faces are close. So close. They must breathe each other’s air; surely they feel their own heat reflecting from the other’s skin. They could kiss without moving.
Now the older man nods, and stands. When he extends his hand, the younger man hands him the cup, then reclines in his metal chair with his Neanderthal hands resting on his stomach. In the direction of Forty-Second the older man disappears.
He returns five minutes later. Now he proffers the coffee cup to his friend. As the young man snaps off the plastic lid to peer inside, the older man takes his seat. His errand is rewarded by a smile that transforms the young man’s face from golem to angel; the youth leans forward, whispers something into his ear, and kisses him, gently, on the cheek.
The youth raises the cup to his lips and takes a sip. It must be to his liking, for he chugs down the contents, raising the cardboard container high in order to drain the last drops. Then he leans back into his seat, letting his arm rest on its back. There’s a cocky smirk on his face, now. For a long moment on that cool spring afternoon, the two sit there, drinking each other in. Basking in each other’s smiles. Saying nothing, and not needing to speak.
2.
I first encountered Christopher fifteen years ago. I still lived in Michigan; he was a student at one of the state universities. I need to meet you, sir, he wrote on Manhunt. You are everything I’ve ever wished for in a man.
When I told him I was flattered, he escalated his desires. I need you to dominate me. I need you to strip me, to tower over me, naked at your feet. I need to soak in your urine. I need to feed on your piss, and make it part of me. I need to suck your dick and take your seed, then have you piss directly down my throat. Please say that it’s okay for me to feel the way I do, sir. I need you.
Well. I'm susceptible to being objectified, especially in such a flattering way. Christopher recognized that our distance was an impediment—and our timing was off, as he would be graduating and moving out of the state in less than three months. But please allow me to continue fantasizing about you, sir, he would beg. You are everything I’ve ever wanted, in looks and attitude.
Christopher was an aspiring writer; I was just about to have my first book published. I write from life, he told me, when first I asked what projects he was undertaking. I don’t write memoir, but my life feeds my fiction. Just like you should feed me your piss, sir. I’d laugh, flattered by his sexual banter, and try to steer the topic back to more high-minded things like the love of writing we both shared. Somehow, though, he would always end up begging for more photos of my dick. I’d find myself hardening to his dirty talk, and allow him to flatter and cajole me.
After his graduation, Christopher moved back home, deep in farm territory. We kept in touch, vaguely, on social media. I followed his adventures abroad as he moved to Eastern Europe to teach, and to work on his novel; I cheered for his success when he began to review other people’s books online. From time to time, he’d send me quick messages. I still think of you. I visit your Manhunt profile just to look at your photos, and dream about that hard cock filling me with your piss, he’d say.
I’d ask how his novel was coming. Fine. But not as fine as your engorged meat would look spewing its urine all over my skin.
I moved to the East Coast; Christopher remained in the midwest. But then one day I received a message. I’m coming to New York, he told me. My novel is being published. Can I meet you?
Could he meet me? Of course he could meet me, I told him. I offered to take him out to lunch, to celebrate. We made a date of it, at an upscale pizza restaurant that’s a favorite of mine. Over lunch we talked—high-minded things, at first. His struggles with his editor. The excitement he felt over his first novel’s publication. What lay in the future for him.
His novel, he told me, was of a young man’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk—or at least, that’s as much of the plot I could absorb, as when he explained it to me over pizza, under the table the sole of his foot pressed insistently on the hard bulge in my pants. His was a tale of dark, sexual obsession, anyway, based on a relationship he’d experienced while he’d lived abroad. “It’s about an aspiring writer teaching in Eastern Europe who falls for . . . well, I guess you could call him rough trade. The man is older and straight, but willing to let the writer suck his dick when the writer pays enough. The writer follows . . . well, I guess you could call it stalking . . . he stalks the straight man around Europe. The climax is when the straight man beats the writer and steals all his money after making him perform oral sex.”
“And this novel—it’s based on a relationship of yours,” I said later, after lunch, as we exited a Starbucks and began strolling up Fifth Avenue in the direction of the public library. Christopher agreed that it was. “How closely based?”
“Closely.”
“Was the real other man older, and straight?”
“He identified as straight. He was older.”
I thought for a moment. “Did you pay him?”
With a wry grin, Christopher admitted, “I paid him a lot.”
“Did you . . . follow him around Europe?”
“I stalked him.” I’d avoided using the s-word, full of judgement it might have been, but here it was, out in the open.
I looked sideways at him, then. I had one last question to ask. “Did he beat you? Please tell me you didn’t let yourself get beaten.”
He shrugged. “My stories are from life. I live my stories.”
He hadn’t answered my question. Then again, he had.
I attempted to change the subject. “What’s your next book to be?” I wondered.
Again, he shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll have to live some more, and see.” He, too, was anxious for a shift in topic. Hands in his pockets, he nudged me with his shoulder. “I really like spending time with you. Don’t go yet. Let’s sit somewhere and talk for a while.”
I nodded, feeling the warmth between us. “I’d like that a lot. Bryant Park’s up ahead. Want to find a table and sit for a while?”
“I want more than that.” But he skirted the library with me, and together we found a table near the fountain.
3.
It’s a year later. I’m sitting in an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, near the back of an assembly of chairs in the store’s largest wing. The store would be closed in another ten months, but that news is yet to come. Tonight it’s abuzz with patrons. Perhaps forty people surround me, listening attentively to Hilton Als introduce Christopher, with fulsome praise for his newly-released novel. Hilton Als. Award-winning critic Hilton fucking Als is introducing my friend, I think, glowing. How amazing a journey is that?
Christopher takes the stage. He towers over the little podium, an ungainly giant looming over a child’s prop. He acknowledges Als, nods at the audience to thank them for their applause, and clears his throat. In a halting, quiet voice, he begins to read.
I recognize this passage immediately. I haven’t read it yet, although the book was auto-delivered on publication to my Kindle a day or two before. I recognize the premise because Christopher described it to me the previous spring. The American writer and the scowling object of his obsession are alone in a room. The dark-featured man shoves the American to his knees, and unbuckles his black market 501s. He forces the American to taste his dick, its foreskin ripe from piss and unwashed juices. Hungrily the American obeys, but some impulse impels him to pull away. The man in the 501s seizes the writer’s wrist so violently that the American cries out in pain. A slap across the face. Another. Through tears, the American parts his lips to finish what he started.
The audience listens respectfully, perhaps taken aback by the explicitness of the passage. Many hold their hands before their mouths to convey an expression of deep thought, their eyes fixed on the floor, or just below the podium. I, on the other hand, am perhaps feeling too deeply the war of wills my friend is describing in his soft monotone. When Christopher reads about his character being slapped yet again after he has swallowed the trade’s semen, all I can think about is a fire-red handprint marking Christopher’s porcelain skin; when the writer is forced down onto the bed and beaten, over and over, by the man’s angry fists, all I picture is how the bruises must have looked on Christopher’s face and body. Finally when, in a sudden turn-around of feeling, the trick pleads like a boy with the writer to forgive him and never to abandon him, I have to struggle against the impulse to fly to Eastern Europe and track down this son of a bitch, especially when the last thing his fictional counterpart does is to rifle through the writer’s wallet before stalking out the door with the writer’s promise and his cash.
At the conclusion of the reading, Christopher raises his head. His blue eyes peer out at the audience as if surprised we’re still here. He thanks us with a hasty nod. An employee of the bookstore asks people to line up for the book signing.
I already own an electronic version, but I intend to buy a physical copy of the novel as well, so I can have it autographed. I’m near the back of the line. There’s only one woman behind me, in fact, glancing at her watch. Patiently I wait as closer to the table I draw. I’m not talking to anyone else in the queue. I have plenty of time to observe Christopher as he signs book after book, and makes casual chat with each person who’s come out to see him. I get the impression he’s genuinely surprised at the attention. He makes eye contact with everyone as he hands back their inscribed copies. From time to time, he graces them with one of his goofy grins, or with a trademark dazzling smile. Those smiles animate his crooked face. I would do anything to see him smile at me that way.
Finally, after a long half-hour, it’s my turn…and he beams when he recognizes me. My heart beats a little faster as I draw near. By now, I’m the actual last person; the woman who’d been behind me had given up, fifteen minutes before. “Oh my god,” he says, rising. We lean over the table and hug. When he realizes there’s no one else left, he abandons his post entirely and walks around to join me. “I did not see you in the audience.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I tell him. I hope he knows how much I mean the words. I cannot think of anyone of whom I’ve been prouder.
He leans in close. “What you should be proud of is that massive cock of yours,” he murmurs directly into my ear. “I need to feel it sliding down my throat. I need it pissing directly into my gut.”
I laugh, but I’m a little taken aback by the deflect. I was just getting over the rawness of the abusive sex scene he’d just shared with the bookstore patrons, and a little shocked he could shift gears so quickly into sexual aggressiveness. But of course, he’s lived with that scene for a long time, at this point; he’s written it and edited it, and edited again, and has looked it after his copy editor has edited it. It’s raw to me, but at this point rote to him, I reason. I know how the cycle of publishing renders the written word overfamiliar.
He’s still murmuring into my ear as he scrawls something into my book and hands it back to me. “I wish I could have you over tonight, so you could open my throat with that enormous dick, but I’m staying at Jason’s.” He nods in the direction of an Asian-American young man his own age, who’s chatting with a group of other late twenty-somethings near the entrance. I recognize him. He’s another author. “I don’t think he’d appreciate me worshiping that fat dong and letting you hose me down with that horse-stream of piss in the middle of his living room.”
I look at the book’s title page. Christopher has inscribed my name, and followed it with the words, What I want to say won’t fit on this page. Thanks for coming. Christopher. What in the world is that dedication supposed to mean, I wonder? The words sound handsome enough. Yet do they really mean anything?
“Hey,” says Christopher in my ear. “A bunch of us are going to grab a drink.” I perk up. Perhaps an invitation is in the offing. I deflate just as quickly, when he continues his thought. “Maybe after my friends and I are done, I can catch up with you again and we can go somewhere.”
“Where, Christopher?” I ask. I probably sound more testy than I intend, but I can’t help myself. The group of young people waiting nearby have been shooting questioning glances our way. Clearly they’re anxious to start their revelry. Some of their faces I’ve seen in Christopher’s social media. A few are authors with one whole book apiece to their names. They’re the hot young voices of LGBT letters today, or something like that. Hot in a literary sense, anyway. There’s not one I’d swipe right on. “Where exactly would we go?”
Okay, so I’m not part of his elite little social circle. Am I such a troll I can’t be asked out for drinks? Why am I not even introduced as a friend? Is it my age? Am I dressed badly? Am I an embarrassment? How? I’ve got more writing credits to my name than all these whelps put together.
He’s trying to smooth over the situation. His voice is sweet and soothing in my ear. “I don’t know. Maybe you could hang out somewhere on your own and then meet me late, near the bar. We could find a parking garage or something. An alley. I don’t care. I just want to get that cock of yours down my throat. Then you can finish me off with your piss. Come on. Say yes.”
As he hisses his serpent’s song, wearing a smile all the while, I’m staring at the dedication he’s written. What I want to say won’t fit on this page. What I want to say, right now, can’t even come out of my mouth. Minutes ago I’d felt so proud of this kid. I’d reveled in every decibel of applause he’d wrung from his captive audience. I’d been proud of him for years, from the time he was a college student, through his adventures abroad, from the time he got his agent to this very evening, on the publication of his first novel. Every step of the way, I’d been the beaming father figure urging him on.
Now, though, I grapple with a new certainty. I was never central enough to think I'd been Christopher’s mentor, but I’d certainly fancied myself a colleague. We were players in the same game. In that moment, though, something struck me. Every interaction we’d ever had, when I would try to talk with him about writing, he’d always drag the conversation back around to my cock. I’d accept the flattery, smile and laugh it off and try again to converse like a peer. He’d ignore anything I said and beg for my piss.
To Christopher, I wasn’t an avuncular compatriot in wordsmithing. To Christopher, I wasn’t even—and for the first time in a decade I allowed to think the words—a friend. To Christopher, I was a big alpha cock. I was a bladder of warm piss. I was a dark sexual obsession to someone who collected sexual obsessions like Pokémon.
You don’t pull your sexual obsession out into the light for others to examine. You don’t invite him to some noisy Brooklyn brewery with your little friends. Sexual obsessions lurk in dark alleyways, waiting to waylay a successful author on his way back to his buddy Jason’s sofa, on the night of his ultimate triumph. Sexual obsessions push a bright young genius on the cusp of wild literary success to his knees in a parking garage stairwell, to drench the writer’s pressed jeans and crisp, ironed shirt with a fire hose dick.
I live my stories was my friend’s credo. To Christopher, I was a character in some plot he was formulating—a minor shadow in some potential future novel about a writer with a dark sexual need for degradation. I wasn’t a friend or a colleague. Not a mentor. Not an advisor. I’d never be someone he turned to for advice, or for kudos, or for a sofa when he visited the city. Fuck, I wasn’t even a real person. I was merely an actor in the drama he was concocting in that cranium of his, and one with a severely limited role, at that.
“I need to get back home,” I say, and stammer out something about the last trains back to the suburbs.
His eyes measure me for a moment. The light in them flickers out. His smile vanishes. “We’ll catch up,” he tells me.
I nod, and shove my second copy of his novel into my bag as I blindly stumble past his friends for the door.
4.
What does it mean, to live one’s stories?
I’m sitting on a bench in the Borough Hall station, waiting for the train. A whole section of century-old tiles have fallen from the mosaic overhead; what remains reads BOROU ALL. I’m glad, this late at night, that no one’s around to see me now. My face must be poker red after my conversation with Christopher, minutes before. Shame, from not being good enough, for not being highbrow enough to hobnob with the likes of Hilton Als and the smart literary set. Embarrassment, for assuming my friendship with Christopher was something substantial. Anger, for time wasted. Despite my self-pity, though, I can’t stop thinking about this question.
I write a lot about my life. I chronicle what happens to me. I resurrect memories from the past. Arranging experience into memoir, sharing oneself with others, are noble arts, I think. I look for stories in the time that’s passed, the people I’ve met, the conversations and encounters that fill my days. I try to make sense of the ebb and flow of coincidences, to discern patterns, from the tangles time weaves as I dance through it. When I sit down to sort my life into sentences and paragraphs, I’ll use literary techniques in the distilling; I’ll condense conversations, I’ll streamline the action. But I hew true to what happened, I summon yet don't much alter the things that were said and the feelings I had. What I don’t do is to manipulate my life and the people in it in order to achieve a outcome that suits a story I want to craft.
Tonight, I suspect Christopher does.
I don’t deny chasing stories when I can. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and chances are I’ll take the one that looks like it might yield a tale to tell later. I am always wanting to see what happens next, and next after that. Christopher, however. I now had a mental image of Christopher as a giant, looming over a drafting table covered by scale stage set models—one maquette decorated like a bookstore with rows of metal folding chairs arranged in rows, a cut-out cardboard podium from which juts a bent paper-clip microphone. Small paper cut-outs represent the people; all but one sport blank faces. The exception, standing in the back, has a penciled-in beard.
Another maquette. This one of a dark alley. Christopher slouches a duplicate of the tall bearded paper doll against a concrete wall in the shadows; he arranges a spotlight above upon the even taller stand-in for the writer, hesitating in a pool of white and casting a long shadow behind, as he pauses at the alley’s black mouth. A third, earlier scale model sits to the side: a city block. A classical building, a library twin lions guarding its staircases, has been erected from foam board and glue at one end; behind it, a park with a large square of green open space and a miniature baroque fountain. The same two cut-out miniature men sit close to each other at a table nearby.
Had Christopher, in each scene we’d shared, taken me like a paper doll and trotted me exactly where he’d wanted me? To him, was I nothing but the dirty old pervert in his own bildungsroman? I suspected so. I was of many among his real-life sexual obsessions, perhaps fodder for a future tale along the lines of his first novel.
In the quiet sanctity of that subway station, I wondered about the other people in Christopher’s life. How far had he gone for his art? Did Christopher use his smiles and sheer will to keep his hustler returning for scene after bitter scene? Did he calculate exactly how many euros to withdraw and leave in his wallet, one night he knew it would be plundered, weighing a theoretical balance between satisfying his so-called straight lover, without breaking his own bank account? Awful as it was even to think—did he practice in his mind just what cruel thing to say, to compel a man to strike him?
If any or all these things were true, is that the only difference between high art, and mere chronicle—the author’s manipulation?
I could be overreacting. I draw out my phone and pause before thumbing out a text to Christopher. I'd like to talk sometime. Maybe this week, while you’re still here?
Perhaps he’s not at the bar yet, or his author chums are boring him, for he writes back almost instantly. How about you talk while I’m between your thighs with your big dick in my mouth.
That’s not really a conversation, though, I tell him.
If you come in my mouth, I might be ready to talk.
My thumbs stab out a reply. It seems as if the only part of me you find desirable is between my legs.
There’s a moment before he writes back. I guess I’m accepting it will never happen, he says.
A train announces its impending arrival, first with a distant horn and the rattle of its cars, and then with a gleam of its headlights piercing the black depths of the uptown tunnel. I stand, and during the moments the train pulls into the tunnel and draws to a stop, I tap out another message. I'm enormously flattered you seem to find me sexually magnetic. If you were to set out to seduce me in person (and we had a place to go), you'd succeed. If you perceive resistance, it's only because I prefer my sexual encounters to arise from the moment, rather than adhere to a predetermined scene. It's not from lack of attraction.
I hit send, and wait. I wait for a reply all the way back to Grand Central.
I wait for it on the commuter train home.
I wait for a reply all the next day, and the whole week he’s in town.
Three years later, and I’m still waiting.
I was a paper cut-out in a maquette that refused to stand where placed, a disobedient actor who turned down the bit part he was offered. I haven’t heard from Christopher since.
5.
Two men sit near the fountain in Bryant Park, one spring afternoon. Their metal chairs are pulled close; the men incline toward each other in conversation. Anyone sitting nearby—the park custodians sweeping leaves and debris from the sidewalks, the couples walking their miniature dogs, the old men strategizing at chess across the way—might assume the men are lovers, so cocooned in their own world are they.
The younger and taller of the men, his eyes blue, his lips drawn into an impossibly wide smile, leans forward so that his mouth is millimeters away from the older man’s ear. The young man’s smooth cheek grazes the older man’s beard so lightly it seems more warmth than actual touch. He inhales, then holds his breath for a moment before whispering. “I can’t take my eyes off the bulge in your pants.”
The words, barely aspirated, tickle and tease. The older man’s heart beats more quickly in response; perhaps he shifts in his chair to ease the tightening in his trousers. He wets his lips, but says nothing.
“What wouldn’t I give to have you in my mouth right now,” says the young man. It’s cruel, what he’s doing. No good can come of his promises. The younger man stays with a friend when he visits the city, while the older man lives too far away. “Sucking you. Licking you from stem to stern. Slobbering over your enormous . . . rigid . . . dripping . . . fat cock.”
His cheek still tingling with proximity, the older man swallows hard. “Why are you torturing me?” His voice is low. It trembles.
They barely have to turn their heads to make eye contact. “Maybe you’re the one torturing me,” says the younger man. He rotates the Starbucks cup in his hands. “I’ve finished my coffee. But I’m still thirsty.”
The older man sits back, just slightly, enough to look his companion in the eye. Their faces are close. So close. They must breathe each other’s air. They could kiss without moving. “Are you saying—?”
“I’m thirsty,” repeats the young man, his eyes unwavering as each stares at the other.
Now the older man nods, and stands. When he extends his hand, the younger man hands him the cup, then reclines, his Neanderthal hands resting on his stomach. In the direction of Forty-Second the older man disappears. He strides toward the stone building that houses the public facilities, keeping pace to the thudding of his heart. Even at this early hour of the afternoon, there’s a line outside the women’s restroom door, but none for the men’s side.
Once inside, he waves his hand beneath the faucet to set the water in motion. He rinses out both the white cardboard and its plastic lid, once, twice, sniffing to see how much of a coffee aroma is left. Then he strides to the urinals, sets the cup on top of the urinal’s ledge, and unzips. Perfunctory partitions divide the porcelain fixtures, but when the older man reaches for the open cup and brings it with his hand down into the urinal basin, the man next to him glances over. Then he averts his eyes, minding his own business in his best New Yorker fashion, or at least a reasonable approximation. The older man finishes his business in the cup, affixes the lid, and strides back to the basins to wash his hands.
Five minutes have passed by the time he returns to the table by the fountain. He holds out the coffee cup, which still radiates a body temperature warmth against his hand, then sits. The younger man spreads wide his knees, pries open the lid, and peers within. When he looks back up at the older man, there’s light and heat in his eyes. He bestows on the older man one of those dazzling smiles, making the older man feel all in an instant loved, and desired, and yes—young again. As the youth sets aside the lid on the table, he leans in. “I am going to relish every drop of you,” he whispers.
He kisses his benefactor on the cheek. Surely, the older man thinks, the imprint of those lips will leave a permanent mark, hot and moist and red.
Cup raised, the young man downs its contents. When finished, he taps the bottom of the container to release any final, reluctant drops. When he leans forward again, his breath is ranker, more acrid. “Delicious,” he whispers. “Look what you made me do.”
The older man is too flustered to reply. He’s betrayed by his pounding heart, his shortness of breath, his increasing hardness, the hormones coursing through his veins. He works his lips, but nothing comes out. Instead, he watches his young friend lean back in his chair smugly to consider the empty Starbucks cup, and in his own head replays the youth’s last words.
Look what you made me do.
It should have been the older man’s line.
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