In Memoriam

A note from the author: This essay is not sexual in nature. Merely personal, and maybe funny. I hope you'll read it anyway, however.

***

My dad died last Friday.

It was one of those passings that was both sudden and not. I wrote last year of finally convincing him to move from Virginia, closer to his children up north. After he got here, my dad seemed to spend more time in the hospital than out. He would fall, or develop issues from his blood condition. In his assisted living facility he’d tumble and require an emergency room visit, which would lead to him being admitted. He’d faint, or become dizzy and non responsive, or exhibit signs of another stroke. Last week he’d been admitted to the hospital after one of his breakfast fainting spells; he was fine and happily grilling the nurses on their knowledge of American history for several days—and then last Thursday he crashed and I got a call to get out there while I could.

It’s been a long time coming and something I’ve prepared for, for a year and a half. Simultaneously, those final few hours felt swift and shocking.

He had checked out long ago, though. We used to enjoy crackling banter—as I’ve recorded in these pages several times. This last year, the only topics of conversation to which he’d really warm up would be about his living center’s resident cat, and the meals served in their dining room. So I’d call, or more often visit, and hear what had been on the menu for every meal that week, and listen to his complaints about dining room baked goods, and then a rant identical to the last time I’d visited about how he’d like pancakes for breakfast sometime but they always bring him an omelette, and then I’d say well why don’t you tell them you’d like pancakes instead of an omelette and he says well I would complain but their omelette is always so good that I don’t mind eating it. Then, having exhausted everything he enjoyed talking about, we’d discuss the upcoming week’s menus, and by that time it would be lunch and he’d have to go.

He liked his new residence and had started making some friends, but it was plain that his heart wasn’t into it. His life had been so severely diminished.

***

His funeral is next week. Rather than focus any more on his death, allow me to share one story from his life—one I haven’t told before in its entirety, because it still creeps me out.

***

In the autumn of 2020, I had to live with my dad for six weeks. We were six months into the pandemic. I think as a nation we’d stopped disinfecting our groceries at that point, but restaurants were still only open for takeout. Masks were required everywhere. Schools were operating remotely, only. And my dad had prostate cancer.

He’d hidden the diagnosis for a good seven or eight months until his doctors told him his particular case was particularly aggressive. They ordered him to undergo radiation therapy five days a week for six weeks.

My father had extremely low vision. His eyesight was absolutely uncorrectable, even with the thickest lenses. He always lived in a world of blurs without edges and smears of color. He couldn’t really see faces or people’s expressions. He couldn’t read signs, even large ones. He wasn’t blind, but he could only really see clearly what he could hold an inch away from his eyes. Things like books, or an iPad, and for the former he’d still need a magnifying glass.

Because of his eyesight he couldn’t drive. During the pandemic he didn’t want to be climbing into stranger’s Ubers ten times a week to get back and forth from the cancer center.

Once I got over my irritation that he'd hidden his condition for so long, I was anxious to help.

My dad expected me to drive 375 miles both ways twice a week, heading home on the weekends, but I am not that fond of road travel. If I was going to be there for him, I was going to stay the whole time. I’d cook, I’d clean, I’d chauffeur. I packed up a bunch of clothing, my Playstation and electronics, tossed my Instant Pot in my car's back seat, and temporarily moved into my childhood house.

Away from home and loved ones, I was miserable. My quarters were uncomfortable. My dad was a hoarder, so the only place I could escape—from his stacks of magazines dating back to the early 1970s, the toppling piles of return address labels and years’ worth of canned cat food and bags of Halloween candy (some distant Halloween in the 1990s), the coffee cups jammed packed with toenail files and dried-out felt tips, the mail he never threw out and the largest collection of ketchup packets on the North American continent—was the postage-stamp sized bedroom I’d been allotted.

We got into a routine. We’d wake early and head to the cancer center. I’d drop him at the front door. Since I wasn’t allowed inside because of their Covid protocols, I’d sit in the parking lot and read until he was done with his radiation. We’d go home, we’d eat lunch. Then I’d shut myself up in the bedroom and only emerge to do some daily exercise and make a delicious dinner at which he’d turn up his nose because the name sounds funny or it has garlic?are we Italian now? or whatever happened to good solid food like Hamburger Helper? Once a week on Fridays, I’d order takeout online and bring it home. He never griped about takeout.

Everything was awful, but for the most part I bore it. Until one night at the end of the second week.

After midnight, that evening, I lay awake reading. I was finding it difficult in that place first to fall, and then to stay asleep. I was contorted in a twin bed trying to find a comfortable spot on a fifty-year-old mattress when I heard a rap on the door. “What?” I called.

My dad poked his head through the door. “Are you asleep?” he asked.

“Do you usually have conversations in your sleep?” I retorted.

“I think there’s a bird in my room.”

Now, my father at this time had the occasional memory lapse, though he refused to tell his primary physician or consult a specialist about it. I had never known him to be outright delusional, however. “A bird?”

“A bird.”

“How did a bird get into your room?”

“I don’t know. How do birds usually get into rooms?”

We weren’t getting anywhere. “Let me go look,” I sighed, heaving my aching back off the twin bed torture rack.

I already wore a t-shirt and boxer briefs. I grabbed my spectacles and put them on, because without them I was just as blind as my father. From my room we stomped across the landing to his bedroom, which ran the length of his colonial brick home. I poke my head in, expecting—what? For a pigeon to be perched on one of the curtain rods, I guess.

Nothing. There was absolutely nothing in there. “Are you sure—?” Just as I started my inquiry, however, something small and black and evil chattered and fluttered from behind a bureau to flap its foul wings in my direction. I screamed—no shame in admitting it, I screamed loud and high—grabbed my dad, and hauled him out into the hall. Once I’d slammed shut the bedroom door, I yelled at my father, “That was a bat.”

“A bat?”

“How did a bat get in your bedroom?” I demanded.

To his credit, he actually thought about the question for a little while. “The same way as the bird?”

I stomped back to my bedroom and hastily attired myself in my Bat Vanquisher costume. Apparently, I thought that consisted of an orange hoodie zipped all the way up the front with the hood string pulled so tight, I had a two-inch puckered circle as a peephole, accompanied by a pair of calf-high zip-up leather boots. Oh, and those same boxer shorts I’d been wearing earlier. For a weapon, I carried my mom’s old gut-stringed tennis racket. In this alarming and singularly ineffective ensemble, I returned to the scene of the invasion, turned the knob, and went in.

I don’t know what good I thought the hoodie was going to do. The moment the bat started flapping my way, I let out more blood-curdling screams. I am not the person anyone should turn to, when it comes to ridding the place of small mammals. Insects I’ll do. At home, though, I’ve been known to flip out when the cats find a teeny tiny mouse to play with. They won’t kill it; they’ll just bat it around to teach it a lesson or two, then transport it up to the bedroom in the middle of the night to share with me. Usually after a good fifteen minutes of shrieking bloody murder and threatening the cats with a cat orphanage, I’ll calm down, trap the mouse under a discarded salad greens container, pick it up by sliding cardboard from an Amazon box underneath, and then disposing of the horrid wriggling thing at the far end of the nearby cemetery for the neighbors there to enjoy. 

It's a process to get to that point. I have to work through my process!

But a bat? Fuck. A mouse is tiny. It can only move so fast. It moves on the ground. A bat goes everywhere. It gets in your face. It’s huge. Decades before, when a squirrel got trapped in our family's fireplace, neighbors suggested that we lay down newspaper in a path to the front door, leave the doors open, and that when we let the squirrel out, it would follow the lighter-shaded paper to the exit. None of us believed that shit and were convinced that we’d end up chasing a squirrel all over the house. But sure enough, we put down the paper, opened the fire screen, and blip blip blip, the squirrel followed the path and hippety-hopped straight out the front door.

Maybe, I thought, just maybe I could do something like that with the bat. So I had my dad go downstairs and turn on the outside porch lights. In the bedroom, certain of instant death at any moment, I opened the windows and storm windows. That was not an easy feat, as my father never, ever admitted fresh air into the house, perhaps fearing that like the treasures of an ancient Egyptian tomb exposed too quickly to an outside draft, his prehistoric collection of Virginia Quarterly Reviews and TV Guides would disintegrate to dust in mere seconds. Some of those panes hadn’t been shifted since the sixties.

Then I turned out the lights and tiptoed out of the room.

“We are going to wait for half an hour,” I said. “You may sit on the sofa downstairs. The bat should fly out the window. We’ll check back and see if it’s gone.”

He didn’t have any other options, so I sat in my bedroom with teeth chattering as I cursed my luck. A half hour passed. We reconvened outside the door. I went in again and turned on the lights.

The bat immediately began screeching my way. I screamed and ran out again.

“So was it gone?” my dad asked.

“WHAT DO YOU FUCKING THINK?” I gently replied.

“What are we going to do?”

I knew exactly what we were going to do. “We are going to collect our valuables,” I gravely announced, “And then I am going to get the lawn mower gasoline can from the basement and we are going to burn this house down, walk away, and never look back.”

“I think you’re being a little extreme.”

“I did not sign up for this!” I shrieked. My watch read well past one a.m. I was tired and I hated rodents. Particularly rodents with wings. I hated being there. I hated being the only one who could actually do anything. “I did not sign up for bats. If I had known bats were going to be involved, I would not have agreed to stay in this hellhole for six weeks with you and the bats.”

Unperturbed by my outbreak, my dad repeated, “So what are we going to do?”

I sigh. “Just wait.” Back to my bedroom in my Bat Vanquisher costume I stomped. I pulled out my phone and opened Twitter to query my timeline. Anyone have any speedy hints for getting rid of a bat in my dad’s bedroom?

Apparently I had more followers up after midnight than I anticipated, because I started getting suggestions right away. None of them were great, mind you. My friend Sam sent me a DM. It’s easy. Just bop it!

Bop it?

Yeah. Just bop it!

My thumbs stabbed out, I am going to need a little more information than ‘just bop it.’

Okay you go slow, get ready, then you creep up and…just bop it!

He made the bopping sound so easy. I could creep. I had a tennis racket. I could get a trashcan. Maybe I could handle this bop it thing after all. “Stay out here,” I told my dad as I tugged tight my hood string. “I’m going to bop it.”

Inside the bedroom, I immediately spied the bat hanging upside down from the ceiling molding in the far corner. Go slow, I told myself, following Sam’s directions. My boots made a squeaking noise across my dad’s wood floors that I immediately regretted, in case the bat mistook it for his long-lost mate. But slow I was ordered to go, so I went slow.

Get ready. I brandished my mom’s racket in my right hand. My long fingers clutched the bottom of a metal wastebasket that my dad had owned since he was a kid. It was painted in Revolutionary War soldiers, all of whom were armed and ready to assist. Past my mom’s old bed I shuffled. Past the dresser. Past the foot of my father’s bed. The bat was still motionless. Glaring at me, probably. Yes, yes, I knew that blind as a bat was a commonplace for a reason, but I wouldn’t have put glaring past this particular bat.

I was going to bop it, though. I was going to take that racket, hold up the trash can, then I was going to bop it. Bop it down into the metal bin, then cover the opening with the racket head and throw it out the window. And by it, I meant basket, racket, and bat. All I had to do was bop it. Bop it good.

The bat stayed motionless as I drew near. With one shaky arm I held up the can. I raised my racket, ready to bop. I was going to give just the littlest of bops, and…

The damned vermin lunged for me. I felt its grabby little claws on my hoodie, scrabbling at the fabric. I started screaming again despite the open windows, tried to bat it away from my head, thought better about touching a fucking bat, then just dropped to the floor and yelled a lot more. When the bat retreated, flapping ostentatiously, I ran outside again and slammed the door.

“Did you get it?” asked my dad.

“Well.” I drew myself up with as much dignity as someone wearing my particular Bat Vanquisher gear can muster. “It’s been nice knowing you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home. North. Away from here. Good luck with your cancer thing.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll clear up,” he said, playing along.

“Stay put a minute,” I growled.

I went to my bedroom and shut the door. I didn’t cry, though I felt like it. I checked Twitter, where more suggestions were trickling in. Most of them were variations on Just bop it, so I shut down Twitter. I called home and unloaded my frustrations on my poor confused mate, who understood not a word of my rant and plaintively yawned, “How did a bat get in the bedroom?”

“OH I DON’T KNOW,” I thundered. “THE SAME WAY AS THE BIRD?”

But look. As much as I was freaked out by the task at hand, it was clear that close to two in the morning, I was going to have to conquer my fears and get the job done. The only alternate plan I could think of was to ask my dad to sleep in the living room overnight, then by daylight hire a professional to come care of the problem. I knew there were no guarantees to finding a bat control person that easily, though. Plus that would break our pandemic isolation, and I didn’t want to expose my dad to Covid.

It was up to me. This time I wasn’t tentative. I left the bedroom and was about to announce to my dad my plan. I was going to bop that bat good.

Only my dad wasn’t in the hall.

I called his name down the stairs.

He wasn’t downstairs.

I opened the bedroom door. “You coming in?” I heard my dad say. “Don’t let the bat out.”

I slipped inside and leaned against the wall. “I told you to stay outside.”

My dad was standing motionless at the foot of my mom’s bed. From somewhere he’d pulled out a plastic whiffle bat that had been mine when I was six. He’d assumed a classic batter stance. “I thought I’d go bat hunting.”

“You can’t see shit,” I pointed out.

“That just means the bat can’t see me,” he said with good cheer.

I was about to remind him that it doesn’t work that way when I remembered we could be attacked at any moment. “Where’d the bat go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see shit.”

I still don’t see the bat. “Did you hit it?”

“All I did was walk in and look around, and then you came in. I didn’t swing at anything.”

I didn’t get it. Did my dad scare the bat out the window? Did it just leave? I shuffled toward him and around the bed…and then I saw where the bat had gotten to.

“Don’t move,” I ordered.

Because beneath the foot of his left bedroom slipper was a slightly squished dead bat. I lowered my tennis racket for the first time that night and informed him of the fact. “Well, gawrsh,” he said in that tone of mild perpetual astonishment that I’ll forever associate with his delivery. “How the heck did that happen?”

And that, good folk, is how I prefer to remember my father. When I knew him at his best, he didn’t lose his cool while others ran around like a gay, screeching Chicken Little. In an emergency, he used to be the last person to lament and moan. And even in victory, he never gloated or aggrandized his achievements.

He couldn’t see the bat, that night. He didn’t know how to bop a bat any more than I did. But in a pinch, my dad got shit done. And I loved him for it.

(I did include an explicit no fucking bats clause in my agreements for overnight visits afterward, though.)

***

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Dick Dock 2024: Bear Bait

Provincetown: Bear Week 2024

In all the summers we’ve been visiting Cape Cod—annually for over a decade at this point—we’ve always heard the same thing from the locals: don’t visit during Bear Week.

Not that I dislike bears. I love bears. Maybe I'm even a bear. I’ve never self-identified as a bear or attended any bear events, but my face is certainly furry enough. Many of my best friends are bears.

Nor is it that the good people of the Cape mind the bears as a type or a population. Bears are fine people. It’s the sheer number of them, all at once, that makes the week overwhelming. Visibly bedraggled shopkeepers have told us that yes, that particular week in July is always when they move the most merchandise, but keeping up with the masses exhausts them to the bone. Restaurant owners, when we’ve shown up the week after the event to enjoy our vacation time, tell us we’re fortunate to have arrived when we did, since the Bear Week bears ate clean through their stock. From condo owners who rent out during the summers, I’ve heard nothing but horror stories of a dozen bears camping in a cozy space meant for a mere two, of furniture being disassembled and stuffed into nooks so that the bears could create sex pits, of leasing agreements being broken by content makers filming for their OnlyFans on semi-public decks and in backyards.

I like sex pits as much as the next degenerate, but restaurants running out of food? Unpardonable.

Until this year, we’d heeded the advice of the locals and avoided the event. Bear Week tends to be more expensive for rentals, anyway. The week prior or after suited just fine. Right around the turn of the new year, though, when it was time to pick a date for the season, it soon became clear that the choice was Bear Week or nothing.

So that second Saturday in July I’d hopped a train solo and journeyed all they way through Connecticut and Rhode Island to Massachusetts, walked through downtown Boston to a dock, then enjoyed an open-air ferry trip to the Cape. From the Provincetown pier, I made the final leg to my rental on the town’s west end. Every step of my trip seemed to confirm my worst fears: the town was packed. I was arriving right around dinner time and my stomach was growling, but every restaurant was already overflowing with bears. Bears in spandex and tank tops. Bears in t-shirts sporting bear logos and cartoon bears. Bears in leather, though it was ungodly warm. The Mayflower restaurant had a line out of the door and around the corner; Spiritus, where folks grab quick slices of pizza to sit on the steps and people-watch, must have had over two hundred sweat-soaked men crammed within its open doors.

I tend to be averse to large crowds, so navigating Commercial Street just as the Tea Dance was letting out felt like a nightmare. I was the lone salmon navigating upstream against a torrent of bears who’d spent the last three hours drinking at the disco. By the time I threw my sweaty carcass on the rental’s bed, I regretted coming. I spent the evening eating takeout on my deck and texting friends that Bear Week was crowded and awful.

And then, the next day, the town just kind of empties out. I never see those huge crowds again. Never have I waited at a restaurant, nor have they run out of food. The crowds aren’t intolerable. I haven’t been invited to any sex pits, much to my sorrow, but neither have I been lacking for offers of hookups. Save for that initial Saturday, Bear Week has been much like any other—only a touch busier and hornier.

It’s Thursday, toward the end of my planned stay. I’ve gorged myself on my annual platter of fried clams, and bought my yearly t-shirt and baseball cap to commemorate my stay. I’ve eaten at the restaurants I always enjoy and mourned the ones have have disappeared since my last visit. Always, there’s one or two that vanish. Like New York, Provincetown is an ever-changing landscape.

I’ve finished one excellent book and started another, and spent my lunchtimes down by the docks, sitting in the shade and eating a sandwich while watching gray seals play in the blue waters. I’ve lain in the air conditioned comfort of my rental, afternoons, to escape the oppressive heat and humidity.

And then, in the evenings, I’ve emerged for activities that are a little more social. I’ve seen a couple of shows, met a friend or two for drinks. I’ve bellowed out karaoke at the Governor Bradford, for a mixed crowd of tourists, locals, and drag queens. And I’ve indulged daily in that most social activity of all—removing my clothes with other men so we can enjoy each other’s bodies. I still bone up whenever I think of last night’s escapade, when a married couple from D.C., two worked-out military men both in need of a daddy, waited ass up and blindfolded, side by side, on their queen-sized bed at the Boatslip.

Today I’ve been waiting around on people to follow through with texts. That morning I’d had a playmate I’ve twice met on my visits here—a handsome dark-skinned Latin man who loves to kiss—promise to get in touch this evening for a repeat visit. And earlier in the week, I’d been implored to meet by an extreme sub with whom I’d connected in 2023. His situation is complicated by the fact he has an owner, though, who’s promised to issue an invitation, yet hasn’t. Though daily the sub has promised that today would be the day, I’ve still never gotten my summons. I’m starting to feel strung along.

Since it’s well after eleven, it’s safe to say neither guy is going to text me at this point. So I put my phone on the charger, change into my most lightweight shorts and tee, pull on the sneakers, and head out into the night.

It’s time to hit the Dick Dock.

I’m walking from my rental toward the waterfront when, in the patio area of a nearby cottage, a group of five or six gay boys in their early thirties are enjoying a late-night dinner. They’re shielded by tall hedges, but when I pass an opening, they call out in a chorus, “Heeeeey, daddy!”

I backtrack a couple of steps. “Hello, boys,” I carol, as I lean over the latched gate. All the boys are white, skinny gym-toned twinks with nary a facial hair among them. All shirtless and in swimsuits, all clutching mostly empty bottles of lager.

“Look. We’ve got sausage.” A plate of severely charred kielbasa or wieners sits in the middle of the table, surrounded by a bowl of chips and various condiments. The lad speaking clearly intends his declaration as a double entendre. Though they’ve been drinking—a lot—the insinuation makes them all titter as one.

“Oh yeah?” I say, looking at the burnt whatever-they-are. “What kind of sausage ya got for me?” They look to each other for an answer. I decide to help them out. “Is it Italian sausage?”

“Are you Italian?” The youngest and blondest of the group wildly flutters his lashes my way. I can feel the breeze.

“I’m Scottish,” I apologize.

The one who seems the least drunk asks the others, “Do Scot...land...ian...ish people even have sausage?” Least drunk, but still pretty intoxicated.

“They make haggis,” I supply, trying to be helpful, though the conversation is getting more and more surreal. My information is greeted with a chorus of ewwwws.

The blond one bats his lashes again. “I bet your haggis is plump and juicy.”

With a reddening face, I chuckle. “You betcha.”

Picking up one of the cold franks from the platter, the blond kid rubs it against his lips. Then he opens up and prepares to take a bite, though once he gets a mouthful of what looks like solid charcoal, he makes a quick face and changes his mind. After wiping his tongue on the back of his forearm, he says with meaning, “My sausage is Slovenian.”

In gracious, grave tones, I alliterate, “I hope someday to savor some superb Slovenian sausage.” They all erupt in wild, raucous laughter. With me, not at me. Not once have I gotten a vibe that they’re mocking me. It’s clear, though, they’re just sparring with a stranger, and not inviting me to a sex pit, so I straighten up and give them a wave. “I hope you gentlemen have a wonderful night.”

“You too!” they all cry. Over the hedges, as I continue walking down Atlantic, I hear the blond one yell, “Come back to see your Slovenian son sometime!”

I laugh aloud and shake my head. Maybe he’s serious. Maybe he’s just teasing. Minor vacation flirtations are so easy to have here. I take none of their playfulness seriously at all.

The sausage boys’ rental sits close to where Atlantic empties out on Commercial, right across the ramp to the Dock. A big grin still lingers on my face when I cross the main thoroughfare and begin the trek down to the beach. As I step on the slope between the Boatslip and the houses adjacent, I notice a handsome young man wrestling with two loads of cardboard boxes beneath his brawny arms, broken down flat but stacked high. Obviously he works there. A hot otter, this kid, with wavy hair, a dark beard, and enormous, soulful eyes that lock onto mine with the intensity of a laser beam. A pair of white jeans shorts hang low on his lean and narrow hips; his tee cuts off at the shoulders and midriff, exposing a shocking amount of thick fur. BEAR BAIT, reads the shirt in huge black capitals.

The ferocity of his stare electrifies me. I don’t break stride, but I stare him down as I continue toward the beach, my eyes fixed upon his until I disappear below street level. I know, with sibylline accuracy, that he wants me. I know that he’ll follow. And sure enough, as I reach the top of the short flight of wooden steps leading down to the Dick Dock and the beach, I hear a mighty fwoomp as armfuls of cardboard hit the concrete above. I’m at the bottom of the steps when I hear Bear Bait’s flip-flops slap the ramp, scurrying at high speed to catch up with me before I disappear into the darkness beneath the Boatslip deck.

I wait for him right near the entrance, leaning against the closest metal piling. There should be enough light that he can see me. Seconds later, he hits the sand at such speed that one of his feet flies out from under him; he has to grab onto the railing to keep himself from a face plant. Once he’s got his footing again, though, he ducks beneath the wood, blinks to adjust his eyes, and looks around. He spies me almost immediately.

For the second time this week, I experience the lung-emptying impact of a man propelling himself at me in a full-body tackle. The boy is feral. Slavering and growling, he pins me against the rusty metal, hands clawing beneath my shirt at my skin. His mouth engulfs mine as his tongue forces itself deep inside. He tastes clean and fresh. It’s clear he hasn’t been drinking on the job. He’s kissing me so furiously that it feels as if my mouth must be bruising, but it’s the sweetest possible ache.

“Fuck, sir,” he pants, pressing against me with all his weight. One of his hands braces against the wall of the Dock; the other rests close to the top of my skull. His fingers rustle through the bristles of my hair while his thumb strokes an arc across my forehead. “I saw you up there…”

“I know,” I tell him in a soft voice. We’re staring at each other with the same force as we had on the street.

“I just kinda felt we had to…”

“I know,” I repeat. Some things don’t have to be put into words. While I admire his handsome good looks, I stroke and tug at his beard. I need to spend more time in Massachusetts. Boys back home treat me nowhere near as well.

“What’s your name?”

I’m about to tell him, honest. My mouth is ajar, ready to release the lone syllable. It’s a single syllable too long for a desperate and horny youth, though. Without warning, the impatient boy huffs, widens his eyes, and lunges once more for my lips. I feel scrabbling at my chest. He’s wrenching up my tee, scraping it so tight across my face that it feels like someone has opened a fiery forge door nearby. He wrestles the flimsy cotton covering from my arms and hands and flings it onto the ground. I’m incredibly turned on in the heat of this moment, but as I watch the sand fly from the impact, part of me is still thinking, Hey! That’s my shirt!

A moment later it’s Hey! Those are my shorts! when he yanks those down, seizes my ankles, and lifts one after the other to pry them off. When he’s done, I’m standing there solely in my sneakers. It’s the nakedest I’ve ever been beneath the Dick Dock. My dick points up and at an angle. Bear Bait stares at it and breathes, “Fuck yeah.”

He’s got what he wanted. Me, in the dark, almost completely nude. I’m too breathless to say anything and part of me just wants to enjoy whatever the hell he chooses to do next. When he looks up at me, I grin, half my lip curled, teeth on display. “All yours,” I finally remark.

I get the feeling he already knew. His eyes meet mine again. He’s got a hand jammed down the front of his shorts, where it furiously works his cock. Then, without warning, he impales his throat on me. There’s no working it in—just one swift motion, the sensation of something tight popping wide open, followed by sounds of his gargling and near-choking. The kid’s not in distress, however. Hell no. He’s spiking himself on my inches like his life depends on it, puncturing his larynx with such wildness that I wonder if he’s got an extra pleasure-producing nub deep in there somewhere, like Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat.

Normally I’m wary of guys who try to take me that deep. Often they’re doing it to show off, either to me or for themselves, without a lot of regard for whether or not I’m finding it pleasurable. Bear Bait isn’t contorting my shaft to painful extremes, though. He’s not clamping down on me, vise-like, with his throat muscles. Somehow he’s made himself wide open and deep for me and I cannot get enough. I’m vaguely aware of men passing us on their way to the area deeper beneath the Dock, but all my attention is focused on that mouth, the way my cock’s head plugs and savages that wet passage, and the satisfaction of grinding my nuts against the kid’s thick beard.

Long ropes of spit and mucus hang from his lips and facial hair when at last he backs off my tool and stands. He sniffs deeply to clear his nose. “Fuck me,” he demands as if I owe him. “Come on,” he barks, this time with the attitude that I’m his to boss around. “Fuck me!”

Little shit. I’ll show him who’s boss. “Yeah?” I snarl, narrowing my eyes. “Ask nice and maybe I will.”

Chests puffed out, chins lifted, we stare each other down. There’s no real contest. I’m eight inches taller, broader, and bigger—plus I’ve got the dick he wants so badly. “Fuck me.” His voice is softer, now. Less bossy. Then he adds a meek, “Please.”

I remain impassive for a moment, but then crack a grin. I can’t help it. The kid is cute, trying to assert himself like that. I respect it. I get a quick flash of his smile before he lunges for my mouth again. “I got lube,” he whispers in my ear, before pulling out a travel bottle of Wet from his shorts. I guess it pays to be prepared, when one works at the Boatslip.

It’s the quick work of a moment for him to lube up his hole and slap a squirt or two of the gooey fluid over my angry cock. After he shoves the bottle into his back pocket, he spins around and drops his pants to the sand. I admire how he presents himself to me: back arched, butt at just the right level for plundering. I find his hole without any fumbling, and begin to push in.

He stands upright and leans back into my arms when I’ve worked myself all the way in. We kiss. With glittering eyes he regards me, happiness writ plain on his face. “Oh, shit,” he whispers, when I begin pumping in and out.

“You love it,” I declare.

He nods rapidly, one hand against the side of my face. Then he lets out a sound—how can I describe it? In my shock, it sounds as if he’s fallen asleep and begun to snore, only to rouse himself out of it immediately...several times, in rapid succession. It’s a series of whuffs and snuffles and snorts mixed with panting and ending with him rapidly moving his tongue in and out like a labrador at the water bowl. The noise isn’t off-putting, exactly. Just…surprising. He does it again when I push him down so I can probe his hole more deeply, regarding me with liquid eyes over his shoulder. For some reason, I’m convinced he's indulging in some kind of puppy play sound

Makes no difference to me. All I care about is fucking this hot, wet hole. Every thrust elicits a squelch from the mess of lube and spit and precum I’m making in his rectum. He adds to it with groans and whuffs and more of that pup noise. When I start slapping his butt, both cheeks, with a sharp overhand trajectory, he’s reduced to whimpers.

Had this been the other night, cruisers might have crowded around us or tried to join in. Bear Bait and I are obviously so much into each other, though, that no one approaches. Oh, we have an audience, all right. There are a good twenty or more men watching me plow the boy. They’re pulling down the elastic of their shorts to stroke their cocks, or they’re rubbing their bulges, or maybe hiking up the legs of their drawers to grab their knobs and pleasure themselves as they observe. But no one closes in. They stand a respectable six feet away, minimum, mostly against the cross-beams closer to the water.

Bear Bait is raising his ass as high as possible, his stance wide. His head audibly bangs the wooden wall. “Do it,” he begs. “Make it hurt.”

“Oh, you want it to hurt, huh?” I slap his ass again, harder, then jam myself in. “Squeeze.” I feel him contract his sphincter. “I said, squeeze.”

“Fuuuuuuck,” he groans, as he clamps down with every muscle in his pelvic floor.

This time, I feel it. “Good boy.”

He loves the praise. Craves it. Over and over he compresses, milking me as we both move our hips in synchronized rhythm. It honestly feels as if he has an extra hand in there, applying extra pressure. His palms planted flat on the barrier, he pushes back as hard as he can, We slam into each other with loud vigor, egging each other on

“I’m close,” I warn. Sweat’s pouring from my forehead into my eyes. There’s so much perspiration on my forearm, though, that using it to wipe my face accomplishes nothing. He’s doused, too; even in the dark I can see where his dampness has soaked the back of his cut-off shirt in the shape of a V.

“Give it to me,” he demands. He’s trying to be the boss, again. “Shoot that juice up my chute.” The kid’s not even trying to be quiet. He’s baying in his outdoor voice. “Knock me up, dad.”

“Christ,” I mutter, aroused by his insistence. Very little turns me on more than a bottom who’s aggressive and bossy in the heat of the moment.

I’m not sure whether I’m fucking him, or he’s fucking me. His hips are rabbiting up and down my meat with increasing urgency. “I want it,” he growls, making more of those puppy noises. “I want it and I’ve earned it. Shoot in me, sir.”

My vision’s already galvanic around the periphery. I’m seeing sparks, the closer I get. “Yeah?” I snarl. “You think you’ve earned it, huh?’

“Yes sir!” He looks over his shoulder and bares his teeth. “Breed your boy.”

And I do.

I’ve had some wild orgasms this week, but this one—shit. It’s like my nuts boil with lava, and I must eject it as hard and fast as possible before I spontaneously combust. The stuff keeps flowing, too. He wanted to be flooded? He’s getting it. I feel the stuff squelching from his hole and onto my balls even when there’s so, so much more to pump inside. Then, at the end, I shudder as my dick jumps and twitches, trying to expel those final, reluctant drops.

Still connected, he stands again, leans back, and cranes his neck to press his lips against mine. We kiss awkwardly until he pulls himself off, turns around, and collapses onto my naked body. This time, we make out as if we’ve only just begun. 

“Thank you for the seed in my butt, sir,” he murmurs as he nuzzles my earlobe.

“You are very welcome.”

We continue our intimacy for a moment more. “All right,” he says in normal tones, as he extricates himself from my embrace. “Gotta get back to work.” I stand back as he yanks up his shorts in one swift motion. “Thanks dad.” And with that, he’s gone, jogging across the beach back in the direction of the stairs.

I’m so wiped out from the experience that I don’t even remember I’m naked until I try leaning against the iron piling and pull away with a scaly covering of rust flakes. Where the fuck are my clothes, anyway? I find my shorts buried beneath a few handfuls of sand, no doubt kicked there during the tryst. My shirt’s a few feet in the other direction. I have to beg people’s pardon as I shake them out in the suddenly-cramped space. I really don’t want to wear the entire beach back to my rental.

“Lucky fucker,” I hear someone murmur, as I sidle by.

Lucky fucker? Maybe. Who does he mean, exactly? The Bear Bait kid? Or me? Either way, I don’t know how much luck had to do with it. This evening felt more like a monumental display of the laws of physics: two bodies exerting their gravitational attraction, perhaps, or a classic example of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable, erect object. I use the hem of my shirt to mop up the mess on my face, as I stride back onto Commercial.

When I pass the house of the sausage boys, I peek over the gate to see if they’re still gabbing away. All of them have vanished save one—the Slovenian twink, who lies sprawled sleeping on a garden bench beneath the kitchen window. He lets out a snore and shifts position. I leave him be.

Pretty soon, after a shower, I’ll be doing the same.

***

Hey! If you've made it this far, chances are you enjoy my sexual memoir pieces. May I suggest you invest in a work of no-holds-barred sexy fiction? I've written a story called Sleazy A for an anthology entitled Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men. 

Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men is a vintage-style collection of hot, retro college-themed X-rated fiction penned by some pretty great authors of man on man erotica. And Sleazy A is based on some of my own college sexcapades. I'm very proud of it, and would be most pleased if you'd order a copy today. I'm providing the link, below!

The publishing house for this project can be found at Peterschutes.com . There are already ten vintage-style pulps on sale over there, with more to come. If you sign up for their newsletter, you’ll be eligible to receive a free eBook.

Order your copy of Dirty Dorms and Fresh Men right now!

Behind the Story: Sleazy A

I was a slut in college.

I admit it up front. There’s no shame in slutting. The undergraduate years are ripe for experimentation, and if we follow the metaphor to its logical extreme—boy, did I lean into the scientific method. Hard.

I arrived to college in 1981 with a firm sense of my sexuality, and without any shame or guilt. But I wasn’t out. Nobody was out. The adults I slept with weren’t out. Living as an openly queer person might have been an option in bigger cities, but not in the little Virginia college town where I was incarcerated for four years.

None of the students admitted they were gay. Not one. I was a theater major, for god’s sake. The department that statistically should have harbored most of the campus LGBTQ population. While most of my male classmates in the department eventually waved the rainbow flag as adults, in college they were strictly and belligerently straight. Although I ended flat on my back in the beds and upon the desks of more faculty members than I could easily count—including the entire French language faculty (it's a point of pride)—none of them self-identified as gay. Most were married, or ‘bachelors,’ or so deeply shut down that when they would admit light to creep through that closet door, it only betrayed how warped and stunted they’d become.

Despite the denial, it was so easy to get man-on-man action. A short jaunt into Colonial Williamsburg’s tourist area could net you sex with out-of-towners in the public restroom at any time of day, and the tiny park in Merchant’s Square was a hotbed of activity after dark. On campus, two floors of the student center had cruisy restrooms—one for quick pickups, often with horny tourists, another for more extended, dirtier sessions. I could visit the campus library restroom any time after lunch to find both staff and student dick. The gym showers could be cruisy. And if you had a car, the Colonial Parkway offered opportunities for off-road nooky. (And for getting murdered.)

In a quiet corner of the fine arts building was a telephone booth—for you younger folk, that’s a small, quiet room with a very large iPhone bolted to the wall—that after receiving a fresh coat of white paint, mysteriously and rapidly became a beta test for Craigslist personals. Guys looking for sex would scrawl in pencil or marker a brief description of what they wanted. Later, there might be a response with a suggestion of a date and time, and a place for an liaison. Others would counteroffer or write their own brief personal ad. Eventually, that phone booth was a network of cross-chatter assignation graffiti covering all four walls. Sure, there was always the risk of showing up and getting fag bashed, but a smart cookie might keep his wits about him and hook up with one of the weight room jocks, or a frat boy, or one of the sexy geeks with pale skin from spending all their times in the computer science basement lab, feeding punch cards into the mainframe.

We didn’t have apps or browsers or internet, but damn, if we wanted it, we sure got laid.

Last spring, when I was asked to contribute to an upcoming anthology of college-aged gay erotica, I was initially flattered, but dubious. The more details I heard, though, the more intrigued I became. The book was to be released as an actual physical paperback, styled to look like vintage pulps of a previous era. The collegiate theme itself would be retro, with stories set before 1990, at which point digital hookups became more common and then the norm. At the time the anthology was pitched to me, I was exhausted coming off a semester of teaching an unusually heavy workload. I was looking for a writing project that might be fun and completely unrelated to anything related to my workshops. So, I took a leap and said yes.

I came up with the idea for the long short story/short novel Sleazy A in the space of a couple of hours. I envisioned an inhibition-free college sophomore having a picaresque adventure in a single autumn weekend of 1981: one encounter that was nothing but unbridled lust, another with a deeply-closeted and ultimately fucked-up man, and then finally stumbling into an opportunity for a sweeter, but no less hotter, romance.

A lot of Sleazy A is rooted in autobiography. I set the action at my alma mater. The story’s hero, Wick, is perhaps a bolder physical idealization of myself at that age, but I think I remained true to the free-wheeling, sometimes naive mindset I had at the time. 

Wick’s French professor lover is based on the married French professor for whom I would kneel down anytime he looked my way, all my undergraduate years. He was a married man with two very young children; he’d brazenly bring the whole family to the ice cream shop where I worked, pretend not to know me while he bought cones for the kiddies and a sundae for the wife, then squeeze my hand with meaning when I’d give him his change. I really didn’t care about his home life. For four years he was a joyous and uncomplicated friend and provider of big dick, and I was sad never to see him again when I graduated. (I heard from a reader of the blog, once, who’d had a similar relationship with the man, after my time at the school.)

The deeply weird character of M.J., a man so paranoid about being seen with me that he’d make me duck and take cover in the parking lot of his apartment complex, is based on an economics professor whom first I dated, and then later I was stalked by. The meltdown that M.J. has in the story actually happened, and led to my first relationship break-up. Not included in Sleazy A is the back story that M.J. and my dad were college classmates, and M.J. carried a huge animus toward my dad for some mysterious reason. (My father was always a giant affable Golden Retriever of a man, so it’s impossible to conceive of anything he might have done in college to inspire that kind of long-lasting enmity. Also, when I once innocently asked my dad about M.J. and even pointed to his photo in an old college yearbook, my dad had zero recollection of him.) The one-sided feud between them gave any dad/son roleplay I did with M.J. a particularly pointed, yet not-unerotic edge.

And I did meet a sweet red-headed boy named David at M.J.’s place. Here is where memoir and fiction diverge. In Sleazy A, the characters of Wick and David meet and enjoy a sweetly romantic afternoon in a deserted amphitheater at the back of campus. The amphitheater is real. From the 1940s through the 1970s, my college affiliated itself with an outdoor summer patriotic historical pageant/extravaganza called The Common Glory. Actors like Jonathan Frakes and Goldie Hawn and Linda Lavin and Glenn Close earned paychecks from the thing before they made it big. The pageant shut down after the Bicentennial. The president of the Kappa Alpha fraternity used to take me to the abandoned dressing rooms for some very unromantic (but hot) fucking.

In real life, David indeed invited me to meet him at the amphitheater. When he asked, it was very clear he was interested in me, romantically. I waffled over going, but unlike Wick, I ultimately chose not to. I was attracted to David, yet anxious about the implications of getting involved with another student. Older men were my known quantity. I could count on them to keep their mouths shut about my sexuality and our meetings. They had bigger reputations at stake than I. My peers, though, I simply didn’t trust. I’d had other kids attempt to entrap me into admitting my queerness in high school, and my roommate at the time was sexually harassing me in the most painful ways. David felt like a too much of a risk. I chickened out.

David and I longed for each other for the rest of the year. Our paths crossed in the theater department when we were in two different one-act plays playing the same nights, one after the other. Backstage, we would smile wryly at the other from a distance and stare, while I’d ponder what might have been. In the spring, we sat near each other in a seminar on seventeenth-century British poetry. It was torture. All through the metaphysical poets, I was too distracted with longing to listen, or study. As I’ve written about before, at semester’s end, David spoke to me for the first time, after our final class. He pressed into my hand a smooth rock. For a long time it was a gift that puzzled me. One year, much later, I happened to get the rock wet. The water drew out from its surface beautiful, unseen colors and patterns. While staring at the transformation, I understood why it had been his gift. It may have been a reference to one of the poets we’d studied, that semester...I don't know. 

I still have the rock.

David was two years ahead of me, though, and graduated that semester. He moved to New York City to pursue acting. Three years later, he was dead from HIV/AIDS.

It’s been difficult, over the breadth of my life, to grapple with how much the AIDS pandemic has stolen. For so much of it, I was in denial.

I denied it was happening, until I couldn’t.

I denied it was taking people from me, then denied it could take many people from me…until I couldn’t.

I denied, in the face of what I fully expected to be certain death with no hope of a cure, that the pandemic was paralyzing me. That it was making my dreams smaller and smaller. Until, awash in ruin and afraid to hope for any future, I no longer could.

David’s wasn’t the first AIDS-related death in my life. However, his was my first loss of one of my peers, of someone close to my own age for whom I’d had feelings. His was the first death that forced me to me acknowledge that the flood in which I and my fellows were drowning was irrefutably real. No matter how pretty someone might be, or how sweet, or how young, or how beautiful their art—no matter how well educated or beloved a person could be or how far from one of the big coastal cities he lived—he was not immune from dying to a disease at which the public and government merely shrugged. I turned seventeen in 1981, when the New York Times sounded the first warning bell for the virus that would consume so many. I was barely twenty-one when I learned of David’s death.

The last, fictional chapter of Sleazy A is my idealistic attempt to imagine what might have been had I the courage to meet David when he wanted. Yet from the distant future, as an author I also wanted to wrap my protective arms around these two kids. They meet in the very last months before all hell would break loose—the final weeks before all innocence would evaporate. I wanted the fictional Wick and David to experience their love outside the shadow of what was to come. And in the story's conclusion, I wanted to shelter and preserve them in their romantic cocoon, forever suspended in time among the twinkling amphitheater lights.

In a very real, sense, though, I wanted to honor the real David, who died too soon. Nearly a half-century on, I remember and mourn him as a beautiful, red-headed boy who had so much life ahead of him. Like all victims of that ongoing pandemic, he didn’t deserve his early death. In this story, at least, parts of him—his essential sweetness, the sincerity of his gaze, his yearning for another boy—can live on.

Art’s essential triumph is wringing redemption and even joy from the stuff of tragedy. I truly hope Wick’s adventures paint a lively picture of an era vanished forever.

Sleazy A and the anthology in which it’s included, Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men, is available today. I hope you’ll take the opportunity to purchase a copy to read not only my story, but as well the horny tales of other fine pornographers.