tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-123160010243352292024-03-23T06:13:55.024-04:00A Breeder's JournalMr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.comBlogger837125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-1651031781395199722024-02-15T09:02:00.007-05:002024-02-15T10:40:39.131-05:00His Coy Mistress<p><strong>1979</strong></p>
<p><em>Had we but world enough and time,</em></p>
<p><em>This coyness, lady, were no crime.</em></p>
<p><em>We would sit down, and think which way</em></p>
<p><em>To walk, and pass our long love’s day.</em></p>
<p>The Professor recites from memory, his voice sheer vibration against my naked rib cage, a husky purr in my ear. I’m curled on his lap, my skinny legs hooked over the edge of his favorite easy chair, head against his chest, hands linked around his neck. There’s a smile on my face; I enjoy when he reads to me. </p>
<p>“Marvell’s admonishment, of course, forms a rebuke to his lady love who, he believes, is allowing precious time—and perhaps youth and beauty—to slip away with every moment of inaction. He can feel, as he says later in the poem, <em>Time’s winged chariot hurrying near, </em>and urges her to reconsider her stance of remaining at arms length when she could be engaging in, well, shall we say, love-making of a more fleshly sort. What?” he asks, drawing in his chin so that he might look down at me. His white beard prickles at my forehead. “What’s so funny?”</p>
<p>It’s true that I’ve begun to chuckle—not something I often do with clients. When someone pays for my time, it’s usually because they have an agenda; they’re more absorbed in having me act out and reinforce their desired scenarios. My interior monologue is not supposed to interrupt. The Professor is different, though. He calls the shots, but since I know he revels in my delight, I’ve no qualms in showing it. Sleepily, I respond, “Which of us is supposed to be the coy mistress and which the poet?” </p>
<p>He harrumphs, as if the answer is obvious. “In my silver-haired role as the elder, I…”</p>
<p>“Look,” I interrupt. “I’m the one who’s naked.” I gesture to my pale body, lying across him, then tug at the outermost layer of his clothing. It’s in the mid-forties outside, but here in his den, The Professor has his wood-burning stove blazing at a high enough temperature that in nothing more than my birthday suit, I’m roasting. Yet as always, he’s still wearing a nubbly sweater vest, a plaid dress shirt, and though he’s been retired for several years, a necktie. His only concession to the informality of our situation is a pair of house slippers instead of shoes. “I’m ready to go.” I guide his hand to the half-stiffness between my legs. “You’re the coy one.”</p>
<p>“I?”</p>
<p>“Thou!”</p>
<p>I’ve flustered him. I’ve always thought he resembles Professor Plum from my edition of Clue, his body a stack of rotund globes decorated like a snowman with spectacles and a white fringe around his bald dome. When he huffs and puffs his reddened cheeks, I half-expect him to accuse me of murdering Mr. Boddy with my lead pipe. “Coy!” I almost fly off his lap as he sits up straight in the armchair. Beneath that gray mustache, though, his lips quiver with amusement. His knees spread, revealing the tent in his woolen slacks. </p>
<p>Now that I’m on my feet, my buttocks broiling from the heat of the wood stove behind, I strike a pose. My hands drape across my pale-skinned nakedness as if I’m a Botticelli maiden, nude but preserving her virtue; I draw up a thigh to half-obscure my dangling erection. A Mona Lisa smile on my face, I look half-away from the man and slowly turn, so that he can admire every inch of my body. </p>
<p>“Oh, Kip,” he whispers, using the name by which clients know me. </p>
<p>Slowly, I revolve on the ball of my foot with the cruel deliberation of someone who understands the power of his beauty.</p>
<p>It’s not a sensation I often feel. School’s a constant reminder that I’m tallest, gangliest, and whitest of the students, a gawky anomaly loping through the hallways with books in hand and head hung low. There I’m an outsider, unsightly and a waste of space. At home, I’m told that good grades and accomplishments are more worthy than looks. The lectures feel like my parents settling for some sort of sad consolation prize.</p>
<p>Here though, as I model before the man and see the white planes of my slender body reflected in his lenses, I can view myself through the eyes of a man who shells out several twenty-dollar bills for my unclothed presence. To him, I glow. I am the naked youth who delights in flaunting his charms. I am poetry made luminous. His infatuation is more powerful than any narcotic.</p>
<p>“Come,” he at last whispers, beckoning. </p>
<p>The urgency in his voice stiffens my cock. Up and down, it dowses the den carpet as I pad back to him. The Professor receives me with soft hands on my skin. His face dives into the crook of my neck, where he inhales deeply of my soapy scent. With the utmost gentleness, he settles me once more across his lap, my head nestled against his scratchy sweater.</p>
<p>From the table adjacent, he pulls a familiar volume. “Let’s assay something much more modern, shall we?” I nod. He opens to the bookmark we left the last time I visited, and he begins reading to me from <em>Tristram Shandy</em>.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>My path from scrappy, self-taught hustler to selective rent boy hasn’t been without a few bumps along the way. When I’d first begun accepting my procurer’s business cards, scrawled across the back with an address to visit, I’d arrive at the appointed time ready to get the action started. <em>Tempus</em> was <em>fugiting</em>, after all, and I had some <em>diem</em> to <em>carpe</em>, or at least an unstated curfew to mind. Very quickly, though, I learn the difference between a twenty-buck trick ready to go by the riverside, and the needs of men accommodating a higher price for my time.</p>
<p>Few of them are paying strictly for sex, I come to understand; they have an agenda beyond beckoning me into the bushes for ten minutes of pleasure. Most of my clients are nervous and even unsure of their desires. If they’d been adventurous spirits, they’d be getting laid for free at the parks or tearooms or by cruising The Block for a young man on the prowl. However, these men don’t court risk. </p>
<p>Out in the wild, they’d have the advantage of choice. Absent that, I swiftly intuit that it’s my job to discover what my clients want. Winnowing out that vision and then becoming the fantasy is something I have to learn on the job, without training. All my life, though, I've cultivated invisibility to avoid bullying. It's made me malleable. Abandoning my own inclinations for someone else costs me no ego.</p>
<p>So for one man I become the submissive. I whimper and plead to increase his excitement. For another, I transform into reluctant and uneducated trade, degrading himself for the cold, hard cash. For some, I’m the young boyfriend with stars in his eyes, to others, the disinterested cocotte barking orders. None of these roles bother me. Losing my identity in the desires of another feels like sliding into a tub of warm water for a while, then emerging some time later to wipe down and dry off to return home drowsy, sated, and a little wealthier.</p>
<p>The freaks—well, of course there are a handful of freaks. I’m never coerced into enduring situations that make me uncomfortable; I reserve the right to say no. I rarely have to. The men with unusual fetishes by and large don’t bother me. To the older, wrinkled, bald man with a mummification fixation, who coincidentally looks uncannily like a hairless Sphynx cat, I’m the perfect subject; I lie still, arms at my sides, as I allow him to roll my naked body to and fro while he wraps me from collarbone to ankles in dozens of Ace bandages. Once confined, however loosely, I keep silent while he sniffs and licks my feet for an hour or more, masturbating all the while. Sure, the bandages are weird, but I feel swaddled and oddly safe, and there’s pleasure in the warmth of his mouth on my toes and his wet tongue on my soles. </p>
<p>There’s another fellow, from Richmond’s stodgy West End, who takes me to the unfinished basement of his expensive, gated home to dress me in cheap t-shirts and denim. He then sits me upon a webbed patio chair. While I watch, he’ll strip his portly body naked, lie on the dirty concrete, and stroke himself furiously while I do what he loves best: tear cap after gunpowder cap from a roll of red paper, tuck it beneath the domed, blunt head of a cap dart, and throw it between his thighs so that on impact, it explodes with a loud retort. He keeps a bucket of darts specifically for this purpose, but once I exhaust them, I’ll have to scoop them up, toss the spent cap papers onto the floor, and start all over again. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRqMinyDLN2LnUCAb7gqE0G9RlLR-fHJwTUUK3Iv3tbvR9EKojhWaavsmKXuAafE4nz4wiKhUZW-9xKFgYAoGfz2BIoAF0nwn7Re9nszHG9mZ-moNZ3dH9TsKGgtsw7_qIuJ27KxzlvBKeHH_1jcLEFPUiQbpNCXUcwrbn74Zt2AyGQZA45SlTlqCNNQ/s640/Vintage-Callen-MFG-CORP-Cap-Grenade-Antique.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRqMinyDLN2LnUCAb7gqE0G9RlLR-fHJwTUUK3Iv3tbvR9EKojhWaavsmKXuAafE4nz4wiKhUZW-9xKFgYAoGfz2BIoAF0nwn7Re9nszHG9mZ-moNZ3dH9TsKGgtsw7_qIuJ27KxzlvBKeHH_1jcLEFPUiQbpNCXUcwrbn74Zt2AyGQZA45SlTlqCNNQ/s320/Vintage-Callen-MFG-CORP-Cap-Grenade-Antique.webp" width="320" /></a></div>
<p>Eventually, when the air is acrid with gunpowder smoke and my ears ring from the firecracker pops, the man will heave his body upright and climax, spilling his seed atop the mess of dust and blackened, used caps. I’m never sure exactly what excites my patron about the scenario. Is it the scent? The mild danger of explosives so close to his testicles? Or am I a mere mannequin he’s posing in a recreation of some childhood trauma—an older brother or a bully who titillated, even as he frightened? I’ll never know, but in those chilly hours in the man’s basement, I sit in the costume my client prefers and perfect my aim until I can nail my imaginary bullseye, time after time.</p>
<p>But for the majority of my clients, I discover—half or more—I’m there for conversation. I strip down to my birthday suit, climb into bed or cuddle up on a sofa, and listen to men talk about their lives. Old men recall to me their youths and past loves; I hear stories of how and where men used to find each other in the decades before I was born. Some men chat about their work while I feign interest. A small handful fritter away their time complaining of being unloved, unrecognized, under-appreciated. </p>
<p>I may have entered the business assuming men were paying for my body. I learn that attention is what they truly need. And I, with my eagerness to erase myself in their lustful regard, am more than happy to form the flawless mirror to reflect their desire.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>“Choose something,” urges The Professor. I’m still naked, padding over the braided carpet to the bookcases that line his den. Much like in my own home, books occupy every room here. If a case to hold them can be made to fit, he’s done so. We always end our encounters thusly: he reads aloud to me with a book in one hand and my semi-erect cock and balls in the other, then I’m urged to pick a volume to take home. I don’t really require encouragement to read—I'm already one of those boys who loves books. Neither do I really need The Professor’s library; my mom has collected British novels all her life, and I possess a library card. He enjoys the intimacy of sharing, though, and maybe the responsibility of broadening my mind. </p>
<p>Secretly, I also wonder if it’s a way of ensuring I’ll come back, to return what he’s lent. </p>
<p>Already I’ve read his copy of Forster’s <em>Maurice</em>, only recently published despite being written decades before. He’s opened my eyes to Woolf, both with <em>Orlando</em> and <em>To the Lighthouse</em>. I’ve checked out <em>Gulliver’s Travels</em> and finished <em>Nicholas Nickleby</em>, after he’d begun reading it during our meetings. On my own, I’ve previously read the Brontës and Austen. My eyes dance along the spines, scanning title after title, as I try to make my selection.</p>
<p>“<i>The contemplation of beauty</i>,” whispers The Professor in my ear, as his soft hands caress my backside, “<i>causes the soul to grow wings</i>. Plato.” I feel his breath on the back of my neck.</p>
<p>I chuckle because he’s a bit of a pompous ass, both for quoting and naming Plato, but it’s hard to fault the sentiment. Besides, I like the shivers he tickles forth with his fingertips. The bookcase rocks slightly as I press my hands against it and arch my back, presenting the man my butt to do with as he likes. </p>
<p>But touching is all he’ll ever do. Touching and looking, and sighing at those parts of me he finds delightful. “How you tease, my coy mistress.”</p>
<p>“It’s not <em>me</em> who’s teasing,” I say, returning to my feet. I’ve chosen <em>Uncle Silas</em> to take home, mostly because Harriet Vane enjoys Le Fanu in Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries. </p>
<p>“Coy,” he rebuts, laughing to himself as he nods with approval at the title. “Let’s get you dressed.”</p>
<p>At fifteen, I’m already taller than The Professor by a good six inches. When he turns away, I spy something new and unexpected: a knot protrudes behind his ear, speckled and ugly. A crusty scab decorates the top. It’s roughly the size of a deviled egg half, seemingly slipped beneath the fringe of white hair ringing his scalp. Though I want to recoil, my heart beats faster as I reach out. I’d not noticed the injury when I’d been lying on his lap. “What—?” </p>
<p>The Professor flinches at my touch, then spins around. “Interesting fellow, Le Fanu. Not widely appreciated these days, of course, but the man really was a pioneer in the genre of…”</p>
<p>“James,” I say, speaking his name. It’s not a liberty I often take. Kids my age don’t address adults without an honorific like <em>mister </em>or <em>doctor</em>. Sexual intimacy cannot completely break down that taboo. Not even with my clients. I shut my mouth, though, when his shuttered lids lift to reveal something I recognize: a fear of being judged.</p>
<p>I’ve always known that I’m not the only trick The Professor pays for his time. I satisfy some side of him that needs to look at a naked youth and allow his hands freely to wander; I’m there to strip and model and allow him to indulge his avuncular instincts. He has a darker side, though, that needs debasement. <em>My vice</em>, he calls it. In the most delicate of terms, The Professor has let me know before that he also pays trade—rougher, more traditionally macho men, particularly those that give off an aura of danger—to rough him up and penetrate him in a way he craves. I know the welt is a souvenir of one of those visits.</p>
<p>It’s not the first. <em>My vice</em> is something in which he indulges infrequently, but it nearly always leaves a mark. I’ve seen other bruises before, especially around his neck and wrists. Once, the remnants of a black eye. It’s not right. It’s dangerous. Seeing that welt and the violence it implies makes me want to run in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>Yet I need to fix this. I cannot look at affliction without wanting to soothe what is swollen, to mend what’s broken, to smooth the ragged edges and sweep away the debris. “Why don’t you let me…instead of…” Already I know the idea’s as stupid as I am inarticulate. “If you need…<em>that</em>…I could try to do it.”</p>
<p>“Kip.” </p>
<p>“I know how!” In theory, anyway. When he looks away, turning his head so I can’t see the lump, I grow more insistent. If only he’d asked. If only he hadn’t wasted his time with a thug. I would have tried. “You wouldn’t even have to pay me. It would be, you know. Safer. I don’t like when you…”</p>
<p>“Kip.” All the usual good humor in The Professor’s voice has vanished. </p>
<p>“But…” </p>
<p>His head jerks to the side. Waits. Then snaps to the other. It’s the simplest and sharpest <em>no</em> I could have received. “Kindly say nothing more of my vice.” The words burn with frost. </p>
<p>The head-shaking had been a rebuke. This is a slap to the face. I shut my mouth and say nothing more. I’ve overstepped. </p>
<p>It only takes a simple change in tone to remind me of what should have been uppermost in my mind: The Professor and I are not equals. My likes and dislikes don't matter. I’m not in his home as a friend. I’ve forgotten that during the hour or two I'm with the man, I’m ornamental. Nothing more. I’m only as essential as the blown glass paperweight sitting on the man’s roll-top desk, and just as easily replaced. He’d sooner seek wisdom from one of the miniature plaster busts of the Great English Poets adorning his bookcases, than from me. </p>
<p>My dumb idea would never have worked. Accustomed though I am at transforming into what my clients need, there are limits. I can never been the streetwise thug with hair on his burly chest, not the greasy garage worker, not the mustached leather man from the Village People. I’m what men call chicken, the flip side to that coin. <em>Safer</em> isn’t what he wants. As much as I might wish, I can’t fulfill that fantasy of hypermasculinity that brings out the sexual submissive in him. </p>
<p>He can tell I’m deflated. “Don’t worry about an old fool like me.” His spirit artificially light, he takes my fingertips in his grasp and cajoles me back to the chair. “Let me watch you dress, before you go,” he pleads, sitting. I allow him to remove his book from my clutch, as with the gentlest of touches he propels me to the room’s center. “Slowly,” he adds.</p>
<p>He’s forgiven me, but in future I’ll take care not to cross that line again. I fish my t-shirt from the floor where earlier I’d flung it. It’s inside-out, so I wrangle it back into shape.</p>
<p>“Underwear first,” he orders. </p>
<p>I have little choice but to obey. Instead of dropping the tee, I drape it over my shoulder and retrieve my briefs. I slide one leg through a hole, then another, slowly, focusing on his appreciative gaze. Once the elastic is snug around my waist, I rest my long fingers of one hand upon my hips and hold onto the draped shirt, with the other. Then I turn, little by little, a full circle, head tilted back so that my long hair tickles my shoulder blades. This is why he's hired me: to be the most perfect trinket to complement his collection. </p>
<p>When I finish, he lets out a small, yearning breath. “<i>A sweet disorder in the dress</i>,” he quotes, “<i>Kindles in clothes a wantonness</i>.” And because he cannot help himself, he concludes, “Herrick.”</p>
<p>I can’t resist a groan. This ornament’s sense of humor has somewhat returned. “Show-off.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps I am. But Kip?” I stand still in my attitude, raising only an eyebrow. I endure a pregnant pause before he continues. “I do appreciate when you call upon me.” My lips force a smile. “Perhaps next time…we’ll have a bit of Keats. Would that be nice?”</p>
<p>Moments before, I hadn’t been sure of a next time. But now I appease him with a more genuine grin and a cheeky view of my butt while I shake out my shirt and slip my arms inside. </p>
<p>“My coy mistress,” he laments, as if drawing a full stop to the evening’s poem. </p>
<p>But in the twilight, the mistress bikes home from The Professor’s home, regretting what must remain unsaid, due to the disparity in their stations: that while the poet has the impudence to chide her for coyness, he does so with words and quotes and rhyme that frivol away both the precious minutes they spend together and what limited time he has left, as that fabled winged chariot looms ever close. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-76280002710438717722024-01-22T09:30:00.052-05:002024-01-22T10:04:54.578-05:00A Man Called Mother<p><strong>Summer 1978</strong></p>
<p>By dusk, he’s perched upon his chosen picnic table top, boots planted on the bench. The seat of his jeans scrapes across splintered wood speckled with faded forest green paint. Wide-spread knees support his elbows as he digs through a pack of smokes. He’s a denim-and-plaid loner who sports a big brass oval of a belt buckle at his waist, a Marlboro cowboy without his horse. A snap of a Bic lighter precedes a flash of flame; moments later, the persimmon kiss of a cigarette tip traces a perfect parabola in the darkness as it rises from calves to his lips, then back again.</p>
<p>Nearby, beneath the pine boards of the park shelter and around its perimeter, simmers a bacchanal of sexual pleasure. At the foot of the same picnic table, one man kneels before another, bobbing above a fistful of dick. Similar clusters have formed around the clearing. Pairs and trios relish each other in the heat of the August night. Other figures wend between the scattered tables, seeking solace from the shadows who loiter against the walls. Some men bide their time, unwilling to settle for the first pair of groping hands or hungry mouth; from figures that barely can be distinguished from the darkness, they choose their target and, like a spider in its web, wait for his approach. A handful haunt this quiet space beneath the wooded pines like restless spirits, flitting in nervous circles from soul to soul in search of someone to lay them to rest. </p>
<p>And among the whispers, the whimpers and the sharp intakes of breath, the murmurs of approval and the hushed laughter of men coming to their senses after climax, among the feverish hurricane of courtships and love affairs commenced and abandoned in the space of mere quarter hours, the man atop the table is the tranquil eye at its center. </p>
<p>The men here call him Mother.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb6URi-mCivypMMVkW7tFmwYNp5YrpmWJRascyOY03rp8LFLMb4-QrHfdiB4K3WgsKMz1uSf-35m7dbpoq8-z4MAB5XZoVwlyKqdagRdK6wTLbFvyMCF_ALWJfKz5AAGloq3nFESHhPCobKQTfeHnBST9iUKmPO83wwsyrK-Xn2Aie8j6qwipt_btG2w/s640/7671133_b1d99161.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="640" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb6URi-mCivypMMVkW7tFmwYNp5YrpmWJRascyOY03rp8LFLMb4-QrHfdiB4K3WgsKMz1uSf-35m7dbpoq8-z4MAB5XZoVwlyKqdagRdK6wTLbFvyMCF_ALWJfKz5AAGloq3nFESHhPCobKQTfeHnBST9iUKmPO83wwsyrK-Xn2Aie8j6qwipt_btG2w/s320/7671133_b1d99161.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><em>Mother</em>. Not because he’s effeminate. Far from it. Not with that ranch hand stance, the deep drawl, the skin of leather. Not with the thicket of mustache perched on his upper lip, meticulously groomed. <em>Mother</em>, not because he’s passive, nor because there’s a Father around who’s the real boss. Here, after hours in the woods of Bryan Park, long after the groundskeepers have ejected the last rowdy rednecks and swept the premises for stragglers, Mother’s word is law. Every man who parks his car in the adjoining neighborhood, who casually strolls the streets as if out for a nighttime walk, then ducks up the embankment to creep across a carpet of pine needles into the park’s forbidden cruising area, knows to abide by Mother’s rules.</p>
<p>He’s not Dictator, though. Not King, nor Chief. Mother, because among this band of outlaws who assemble for their quick trysts, he knows gentle persuasion works best. An appeal to a man’s better nature is a more effective motivator than barking directions. Men don’t mistake Mother’s gentle entreaties as anything less than dominance, though; what we do in these shadows is against every state statute. As criminals, we all fear authority more than we should. So when Mother ousts someone disobeying or flouting our shared conventions, after park hours, they stay ejected. There’s no appeal. </p>
<p>I’d learned Mother’s rules from the start, a couple of years prior, after the notion of park cruising had entered my mind when my mom had read aloud to my father an item from the paper about men being arrested here for public indecency. Instead of receiving the information as a caution, I’d immediately biked over to the park I’d previously only thought of as the gathering place for the annual neighborhood cookout, and scoured every restroom for graffiti that might indicate where the action took place. </p>
<p>It had been less than 48 hours later that I’d made my first appearance at the park’s northernmost shelter, by the light of a half moon. Mother had observed me for several minutes to ascertain that I knew what I was getting myself into before beckoning me to take a seat at his feet. I’d made the mistake of grabbing for him, in a clumsy way, thinking he wanted sex.</p>
<p>Mother has never so much as unzipped his Levis, though, not in all the time I’ve known him. He watches only, observing the trespassing pack around him. He is the guardian who keeps an eye to the east, where the sole road connects this section of the park to the neighborhood beyond, so that he can warn us of a patrol car’s approach. He may stroll around his domain to witness the couplings taking place, but I never see him partake. </p>
<p>That night, he had swatted away my hand and blown twin columns of smoke from both nostrils. “Child,” he began. Normally it was a particularity of address that annoyed me, but in his good-natured rumble it failed to make me bristle. “I’ve seen enough to convince me you know what you’re getting yourself into. But if you intend to come back, there are some things you should keep in mind.”</p>
<p>Apparently the very way I’d entered the park had attracted his displeasure. “We never, ever use the road,” he told me, pointing at the paved stretch running by Youngs Pond and up into these woods, that only minutes before I’d biked along. “Now, there’s no chain across it, like at the park’s main entrance, but that road is still closed after dark. Most people might think nothing of it, but someone with sharp eyes and a suspicious mind,” he said, waving his cigarette at the long row of dimly-lit houses facing Bryan Park Drive, “might see a boy riding his bike into the park. They watch, but they never see him ride out again. And they begin to think. And wonder. They start to worry. They might even worry enough to call out the pigs. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here. Bad things happen when the police come down on us. <em>Capiche</em>?”</p>
<p>I don’t know the last word, but I can glean meaning from context. I nod, and apologize.</p>
<p>“Now, the other night we had the boys in blue up here. Some folks ended up behind bars. All the regulars, the smart ones who know the rules, got away clean—because we help each other. Not a damn thing I can do about dumbasses who’ve got to get in another thirty seconds of fun—thirty seconds they could’ve used getting to safety. You planning on being a smart boy or a fuckin’ dumbass?” When I reply that I prefer the former, he nods with approval. “That’s what we like to hear.”</p>
<p> As men drift by, some shirtless, some with their pants around their knees, Mother lays out his other rules. He doesn’t abide any hustling. Over the following months and years of adolescence in which Bryan Park is a vital part of my life, Mother doesn’t bat an eye at the sex work I do everywhere else. That’s my own business. Within the park bounds, though, I don’t dare. In Mother’s philosophy, transactional sex invites a predatory element into this sacred space. If a man chooses to slip me a few dollars after excellent service, it can be considered a gratuity. Were I ask for it, or worse, demand a payout, I’d be violating one of Mother’s highest precepts. </p>
<p>Mother forbids certain items. The noise from transistor radios might attract attention from the local residents. Same with flashlights, even on the darkest nights. Glass bottles are a distinct danger to our community, though many of the rougher men try to sneak in booze anyway. A beer bottle could be too easily left on a table and knocked off in the dark, only to shatter on the floor and cause an accident. If someone sliced an artery in the woods, no one would have any way of phoning an ambulance or getting someone to a hospital. And the last thing any congregation of homosexuals needs is for their enemies to discover a dead body in one of their haunts. </p>
<p>Cigarettes are fine, and Mother turns a blind eye to the occasional joint, but any harder substances compound our crimes. There’s no fighting allowed. If two men become riled—jealous over a swain favoring one over the other, Mother or one of the regulars steps in to defuse tensions before they rise too high. </p>
<p>Up here, in the dark, in the woods, we are the lawless. We offend one penal code with our intrusion; another by congregating, a third with every proposition, and add to the increasing tally with every casual act of sodomy. Outlaws we may be, but as Mother reminds us, we can still be gentlemen. We cultivate rules for a reason: when we cannot rely upon enforcers of law to protect us, we must defend each other. We may not know each other’s professions or names—not our real names, anyway—nor might we even recognize each other in full light of day. But in the most essential and ephemeral of senses, when together, we form a community.</p><p>We call the man <i>Mother</i>, because in this space, no matter our ages or incomes or the color of our skins, sharing a mother makes the rest of us brothers. For a short time.</p>
<p>In my earliest weeks at the park, in my unofficial status as the newest and most tender of meat, I often find myself at the center of a scuffle. Two strangers, each desiring my exclusive company, might attempt a tug-of-war with my arms, or react with raised hackles when I prefer one over the other. I quickly become adept at silently defusing these potential scuffles, either by uniting the men in their attentions and servicing them both, or by placating one with whispered promises to return after I venture into a corner with another. Mother notices, and rewards me with nod or a subtle thumbs-up. </p><p>Weeks into my tenure, once I’ve proven myself, during one of my unoccupied moments he again pats the picnic table and beckons me to sit. Once I’m in position, he places an avuncular arm around me and murmurs in my ear, “How about you stop by my place this Saturday for tea? I’ll read your cards.”</p>
<p>With genuine enthusiasm, I agree. It’s a sign that I’ve been accepted into the tribe.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>This is what I half-expect, upon being invited to afternoon tea at Mother’s home: lace doilies, scones, and pale liquid, steaming hot, poured into Mother’s best china. Mother’s home, though, set in a blue-collar corner of Lakeside not far from the park, isn’t exactly the picture-perfect setting for a high tea. From a distance, it looks like a kid’s card house constructed from flat slabs of pitted aluminum siding, precariously perched atop a foundation of cinder blocks, overgrown with honeysuckle. </p>
<p>So what I actually encounter is amber brown beverage both brewed in, and served from, a glass jug that’s been sitting in the back porch sun all morning with a number of Lipton’s tea bags. While my scrawny backside attempts to find a spot on his sofa between the broken springs, I watch as he pours packet after packet of sugar, no doubt collected from fast food joints, into the concoction and stirs in a splash of lemon juice from a bottle. “Let it cool a little,” he advises, after pouring it over ice.</p>
<p>I’m not and never have been a fan of sweet tea served in the Southern style, but it’s a blistering day and tiny sips help alleviate the July heat. While Mother fusses with the jug and places a glass coaster upon the trunk acting as a coffee table, I look around the bare bones of his room. The sofa seems like a curbside find. The television, a black and white model jury rigged with a white wire hanger for an antenna, alternates between rolling snow and a weekend fishing program. Nothing about the furnishings is outright impoverished. Despite the hovering cloud of tobacco smoke, nothing is filthy. But Mother’s home definitely strikes me as the sort of bare-bones set-up of someone struggling to make ends meet—like birds that weave detritus into their nests, it’s a domicile crafted out of makeshift odds and ends. </p>
<p>While I watch him fuss with a packet of Nabisco Cameo cookies, I wonder why I’m even here. Tea, sure. I’d half-expected that to be an excuse for seduction. I wouldn’t mind being bedded today. Mother’s not an unattractive man. So far, I’ve not picked up on any sexual intent in his chit-chat. </p>
<p>“Now,” he finally says, plopping down on the sofa near me. He regards me with speculation over the rim of his glass. “Tell me about you.”</p>
<p>All I can do is stammer and stare. I hate talking about myself, particularly to strangers and in such an open-ended way. I add three years to both my age and my school grade in my inarticulate accounting, to which Mother nods and conceals his amusement with an index finger firmly tamping down his mustache. My baby face gives me away and, if anything, makes me look even younger than I happen to be. I’m so paranoid of exposure that every word from my mouth is a lie. I lie about the neighborhood where I live, the grade I’m in, the school I attend. </p>
<p>It’s not until he changes the subject to my secret life that I hew more closely to truth. When he inquires where I’ve cruised, I enumerate a lengthy list of toilets around town that I’ve discovered on my own—the public library downtown with its peepholes, the glory holes on the university campus where my parents teach. I brag about having walked The Block after dark and loitering in the Hotel Jefferson men’s rooms on weekends. I talk about how I’d begun my sexual career as a lookout in the cruisiest restrooms, observing the action while obstructing potentially hostile intruders, and I take pains to make the experience sound more distant in the past than it actually is. </p>
<p>I’m so voluble on the subject that it’s a few minutes before I notice I’m the only one speaking. Yet I continue, equally as anxious to show off my sexual credentials as I am to hide anything I consider truly personal. Though aware how close I come to braggadocio, I can’t stop. I’m a baby-faced adolescent painting himself as a jaded old roué, desperate for an approval I never knew I so badly needed. I’m a fluffy golden retriever overeager to run with the grizzled wolf pack. Yet I keep talking, though I know I should shut up.</p>
<p>Mother sits at the opposite end of the sofa, wiping condensation from his glass and taking the occasional sip, until at last I run out of words. My jaw hangs low for a moment, then snaps shut. “Well, all right, then,” he comments, amused. “How’s that tea?”</p>
<p>I flush red and try to wash away my embarrassment with a swig of Mother’s evil brew. I’ve just learned a lesson in not overselling myself. Desperate to change subject, I look around the room for any inspiration for a new topic. My eyes alight on a photograph on a shelf over the TV—perhaps the only truly personal touch in the room. It’s a black and white print on glossy stock, edges scalloped, that leans against an empty frame, as if Mother never quite got around to encasing it behind glass. I can barely make out two small figures, children maybe, on a beach. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing.</p>
<p>Mother’s face falls slack. He stares at the shelf, then back at me, seeming to see neither. Then he stands. “Let’s look at your cards,” he says.</p>
<p>I’m not the only one who wants to keep his personal life private, it seems.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Tarot cards aren’t new to me. It’s the nineteen-seventies. Everyone has an indulgence that’s a little hippie-woo-woo. My mom is heavily into yoga, which in this period isn’t valued so much as a form of exercise or wellness as it is as a key to spiritual transcendence; she’s also convinced she has the power of extra-sensory perception, which she leverages, with little success, to spy upon her partners’ cards in rubbers of bridge. Her best friend, Kay, is heavily into numerology and attends EST workshops. Kay’s kids, whom I have babysat on occasion, devour books about aliens. All my school friends, when they’re not playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, are obsessed with the goings-on in the Bermuda Triangle. I have a stylized used Rider-Waite tarot deck myself, gifted me as an afterthought by one of my dad’s students. She’d used to babysit us when I was younger, but she’d abandoned the cards for palmistry, shortly before I outgrew the need for her.</p>
<p>Never before, though, have I known anyone to handle the tarot with such authority. As we sit at the rickety dining table in mismatched chairs, I watch as Mother withdraws his deck from within the recesses of a carved teak box. He juggles the cards together a few times before handing them to me. “Shuffle,” he instructs. </p>
<p>I obey, gratified in a minor way by the eyebrow he quirks when I riffle the deck in what approaches a professional manner, a skill honed by countless after-school rounds of gin rummy with my mother. Then, at his instruction, I cut the deck into rough thirds, restock them, and begin the process again until he’s satisfied. Once I’m done, he takes back the deck and places the top three cards into a triangle with a fourth at the center. “Past, present, future,” he explains, tapping the cards around the perimeter. He turns them face up.</p>
<p>And he begins to read. I no longer remember these three cards once I’ve left the monastic quiet of his apartment. What I recall, however, is the expert way in which he conjures stories and meaning from the colorful medieval images. Details that my eye would miss, he draws attention to and explicates. My dad’s student, the babysitter, always had to pore over a tiny booklet for interpretations of any given card, and even those brief explanations seemed flat and uninteresting, divorced from the cards themselves. Mother’s means of interpretation is personal. He spins a story from the characters on the cards, making the world they inhabit feel occupied and alive.</p>
<p>“This last card is you,” he says, pointing at the triangle’s center before flipping it over. “Two of pentacles. Huh.” He’s resting both forearms on the table, leaning forward to look me in the eye. “I suspect this is a card that’ll be following you around all your life. See how this li’l bastard's got the two coins in his hand? He’s juggling.” His long forefinger darts out to trace the path of a band connecting the globes. “And this? It’s the infinity sign. He’ll be at it a long time. But see how he dances? This ain’t a burden for him. Change comes—change always comes, you know. It’s always on the horizon. Storms brew—see how those distant ships are in danger? Storms rock the ocean, the sun rises and sets, seasons change. Shit happens, some good, some bad. But look at you. You’ve got everything under control. You keep on juggling. You won’t be dropping those balls anytime soon. That’s just how you do. You see it, right?”</p>
<p>The previous three cards haven’t meant much to me, but somehow this image, the two of pentacles, hits home. I’ve always been the kid who keeps dancing, balls aloft and in motion, no matter what happens. I balance my academic responsibilities and my extracurriculars with the secret life that’s often my only joy. I keep in equilibrium my public and private worlds, good boy and bad boy, sinner and saint. On the card, those coins look large and heavy. The juggler keeps on juggling, though, even against a background of storm.</p>
<p>“That mean anything to you?”</p>
<p>I look up from the cards and meet Mother’s eyes, then nod. Though I’m not a true believer in divination, I recognize the truth of that one card. I suspect Mother is a juggler, too. </p>
<p>And though Mother will never know it, that one card will follow me around, the rest of my life. </p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Though I continue to haunt Bryan Park at night for the next three years, I never learn much more about Mother than a few rumors—how he’d had an influential job at the Federal Reserve until he’d been busted in a park vice raid, years before. How his name and photo had been printed in the <em>Times Dispatch</em>, publicly branded as a sexual deviant. How he’d lost his wife and two children in the aftermath and circled bottom until finding work as a florist’s assistant. </p>
<p>I never know if any of it is true. By the time I graduate from college and return home in 1985, even sleepy Richmond cowers under the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis. Like so many of the tribe that once danced beneath the stars, Mother is gone. Packs of outlaws no longer congregate in the park, after dark. Those that do, leave in their wake fields of litter—emptied glass bottles of cheap booze, the charred remains of joints, the kind of harder drug paraphernalia that would have been forbidden only a handful of years before. The neighbors become vigilant; the police patrol more often. </p><p>Camelot has fallen. Without Mother and his disciples, what was an idyllic Bedford Falls becomes a Pottersville of sleaze and vagrancy. </p>
<p>Those storms on the horizon, those roiling waters and the ships that flounder upon them, have arrived. As predicted, change has flooded in. So many of my companions have already been swept away in the waters, and those who remain cling onto the wreckage for dear life. </p>
<p>Amidst it all, I dance. I keep the balls in motion. I juggle on, and on.</p>
<p> Mentors arise from the most unexpected places. I’ve discovered mine on library bookshelves, in classrooms, in casual conversations in crowded bars. As a kid, I encountered one as a stranger on the other side of a men’s room glory hole, who offered tips on the culture and etiquette of cruising via a series of penned notes on squares of toilet tissue. Another later taught me the confidence of placing value in what I’d been giving away for free.</p>
<p>And then there was the mentor I met on the cusp between eras, a guardian who nightly sat atop a park picnic table with an eye to the horizon, watching for danger. A kind, quiet man who reminded his band of outlaws that they must remain civilized and treat each other with compassion. Not tyrant, not bully, not drill master. That lost generation called that man Mother. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-51116013376468027162023-12-02T07:53:00.002-05:002023-12-02T07:54:04.411-05:00Portrait of the Artist<p><strong>September 1979</strong></p>
<p>In the orthodontist’s mirror, for the first time in two and a half years I see a mouthful of straight teeth unencumbered by shiny metal and little rubber bands. When I run my tongue over the smooth surfaces, it’s not snagged and poked by wires or sharp edges. Sure, I’ll have to wear a retainer for a few years at night and return to this dismal little office from time to time, to ensure my teeth won’t drift and collide like wayward glaciers. For now, though, after long enduring both the uncomfortable hardware and the restless nights after each painful tightening, I’m free.</p>
<p>I’ve no context for what I’m supposed to be feeling. There’s <em>Freaky Friday, </em>the body-switching novel, in which Mary Rodgers’ juvenile heroine spends a harrowing day in her mother’s literal shoes, only at last to discover that her thirteen-year-old body’s had a glow-up, thanks to her crafty mother—braces removed, hair done, a new wardrobe courtesy of daddy’s credit card. Then there’s <em>Freaky Friday</em> the Disney movie, in which a butch and tomboyish Jodie Foster is shown admiring her unadorned smile in the orthodontist’s chair, followed by a montage of beauty shops and department stores in which she’s transformed into a—well, a version of Jodie Foster with the very slightest of hair waves and the faintest application of pink lipstick. Still pretty butch. Still very Jodie Foster. Not exactly a model of how I might celebrate the moment. </p>
<p>Out in the lobby waits my mother, back erect as she perches upon the edge of a seat, legs crossed, studying the detective novel in her hand. “Let’s see,” she says at my appearance. I bare my teeth in a grimace. She peers closely and shakes her head. “Let’s hope it takes. That’s a lot of money in that mouth.”</p>
<p>At home, my father makes a similar show of squinting and peering in my direction. His vision is so low, though, that he can’t distinguish any difference. “If you say so,” is all he says before returning to the pile of maps on his desk. Then, “Be careful. We paid a lot for those teeth, you know.”</p>
<p>I know. I’ve been reminded with every bill.</p>
<p>It’s not as if I can rely on peers to validate what should be a positive, life-changing rite of passage. My friends don’t notice a difference, even when I allow myself to smile more than I have in the past. And my torturers, now deprived of insults like ‘brace-face’ or ‘metal mouth,’ have plenty of other ammunition against me. There’s my beanpole frame, my freakish tallness, my spectacles, the cheap clothing that always seems to be out of style, but which I have to wear for the duration of the school year. There’s my dad’s seventeen-year-old Dart with the right side long ago bashed in and never repaired, now rusted, which is always laughed at when he drops me off at extracurriculars. And then there’s my whiteness, which in an all-Black high school is both my most obvious distinction, yet the least remarked upon. </p>
<p>The only congratulations I receive, that first week after my braces come off, is from my orchestra teacher. He’s startled at my sudden inability to play my school-provided instrument, so used am I to a solid quarter-inch of metal abrading the insides of my lips. “No braces! It will do wonders for your embouchure!” he exclaims, clapping his hands together.</p>
<p>It never does.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus20v2xeh0JD2DaZsIgvdOkzzmpyYCJ4lNFmHwN-EQlha5U6FdSNJ5aFo5iozb7AZ5Ok26vLmz3WL_OB7M7wKBYjt_LZpDuB8k0ndE_sxC8oVzvpSrJ-wkMDt1xPZEW_tkJIOh9u6EUCJtyJW36NqUnuu88oncJs9aPEZmZ_uzRuljKkodJVbREDv2w/s3917/Watercolors_with_a_brush.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3263" data-original-width="3917" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus20v2xeh0JD2DaZsIgvdOkzzmpyYCJ4lNFmHwN-EQlha5U6FdSNJ5aFo5iozb7AZ5Ok26vLmz3WL_OB7M7wKBYjt_LZpDuB8k0ndE_sxC8oVzvpSrJ-wkMDt1xPZEW_tkJIOh9u6EUCJtyJW36NqUnuu88oncJs9aPEZmZ_uzRuljKkodJVbREDv2w/s320/Watercolors_with_a_brush.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>
<p>“Hold.” </p>
<p>At the base of the spine, my skin twitches and pricks. The artist’s voice arrests my hand as it begins to move, however. I return it beneath the pillow, where it relocates the indentation from nestling so long beneath my head. My naked hips wriggle in protest. </p>
<p>“Hold,” he warns again, his voice barely audible above the whirring locusts in the branches outside. </p>
<p>“I’ve got an itch,” I complain. I’ve been lying in the same position for nearly an hour at this point: prone on an unmade bed, pillow beneath the right side of my face, both arms thrust beneath. My left leg is drawn up, while the right points where the man captures me from a leather-bound chair beyond the four-poster’s foot. All the practice I’ve had exchanging my body and time for cash should have made me perfect at this particular exercise of lying on a mattress without complaint. But at fifteen, remaining motionless without fidgeting is anathema to my very nature. </p>
<p>“Where?” he asks. I tell him. Without a word, the nude man sets aside his tin of paints and the board upon which he works, and rises to loom over me. I sigh with relief at the sensation of his nails against my skin, right where the agony is worst. He scratches back and forth for a long and satisfying moment, then runs his fingertips down my back to leave a trail of gooseflesh in their wake. I feel the flat of his palm caress my ass. Automatically I respond with shifting legs and by arching my hips with a deep, deep sigh.</p>
<p>Martin doesn’t like that. His hands guide me back into position, then reposition the clothing in which he’s dressed me. This week, it’s a white basketball jersey trimmed in blue and red, aesthetically pushed from the bottom almost up to my armpits. Below, a jockstrap. Adult-sized, I think, because it hangs loose around my waist. With the excess tucked on my underside, though, it’s impossible to tell. Calf-high tube socks emblazoned with red stripes around the top hug my legs. He yanks them both so taut that the cotton fabric curls my toes, makes a few final adjustments to my positioning, and settles in his seat. I listen as he picks back up his painting board, pulls closer the tray table with his brushes and water, and returns to his work. I close my eyes and commit to remaining as still and silent as possible.</p>
<p>It’s not the first of Martin’s watercolors for which I’ve posed. Tall stacks of his art lie atop the many old granny tables and bureaus that line his bedroom walls, each thick sheet of cotton rag separated by a layer of tissue paper, then thick cardboard. Somewhere among them is a deft study of me clad only in a tight tee, standing planted on my left foot, right toes bent on the floor, back turned to the artist, arms crossed over my chest so that only the tips appear over my shoulders. Another, completely nude save for another pair of tube socks, sleeping on an antique love seat with enough of my face buried in a chenille pillow that only the underside of my chin and nostrils are visible. A third, again in only socks, in which I sprawl in a Victorian armchair, one of my legs crooked over its arm, with a lacrosse stick angled over my knees. </p>
<p>All Martin’s art is beautiful, to my eyes. A few broad washes of color, a stippling of pigment to create an illusion of texture, sparse pencilled or inked lines for delineation. Every stroke is careful and considered. The finished work, a lesson in economy. </p>
<p>I’m not his only subject. There are a score of other men in various states of dishabille, brandishing sports-related signifiers of masculinity in varied tableaux. Separated from his many landscapes and floral still lifes, Martin’s nudes might form some kind of reimagined tarot, the subjects of his major arcana representing the spectrum from callow youth to old age. The last is represented by his unclothed self portraits, remorseless in their gaze. </p>
<p>Yet, as inspiring as his work may be, it’s never appeared in galleries or public shows. Perhaps he doubts his talent. Perhaps—and I tend to think this more the truth—he shuns the scrutiny that would accompany a public appearance. Either way, his moving finger paints, and having painted, moves on. </p>
<p>“All right. Take a look” The words, softly spoken, awaken me from my trance. So stiff that every movement is a new experience in pain, I rise from the four-poster and grab onto one of its carved columns until I’ve regained my balance. The too-large jock falls from my slim hips onto the floor as I take my first steps. The board on which he’s been painting straddles his spread thighs, angled flat to keep the paint from running. The paper still glistens where it’s wet. </p>
<p>The figure illustrated with sparse lines and broad washes is undeniably me. I recognize those skinny legs, somehow lent the impression of glinting hair below the knees, those narrow hips, the thin chest. He’s given me more of an ass than I actually possess, I fear. But even without much face on display, I recognize the boy as myself. </p>
<p>“Well?”</p>
<p>I cannot stand to look at myself in the mirror, but Martin’s hands have rendered me better than I deserve. “It’s beautiful.”</p>
<p>“Only because you are.” He sets the board onto the floor to his side, then seizes me by the wrist. Slowly he pulls me down. Every instinct warns that he expects a kiss. That’s a hard limit I’ve set from the first, though: kissing is something I never do. It’s a lie, of course. With anyone else, I love making out. </p>
<p>But even for cash, I dread bringing my face that close to Martin’s. </p>
<p>I’m relieved when instead, he pulls my hand to his cock, now stiffening between his legs. Once he’s wrapped my fingers around its obscene thickness, he whispers into my ear, “This is what you want. Right?”</p>
<p>I nod, grateful not to have to look at his ruined visage up close. “Right,” I say, fixing my gaze at the painting that lies on the floor beyond. I grin in an attempt to please. </p>
<p>That’s when he turns my head with his hands, forcing me to regard him. Our noses are scant inches away. I try not to shudder, so close to that sightless, dead left eye, that gruesome scar that curves from eyebrow to nose to jowl, a canyon of pinks and deep reds that’s ragged around its peaks. </p>
<p>The left half of Martin’s face is the stuff of nightmares. My eyes water as I am forced to acknowledge those brutal remains of past misfortune. Whether they arose from accident or act of violence, I do not know. I continue smiling, even as tears well. </p>
<p>“Your braces. They’re gone,” he remarks. I nod, not yet trusting myself to speak. “You’re even more handsome without them.”</p>
<p>“Let me take care of you,” is all I croak, at last breaking from his grasp. I know where he keeps the jar of Vaseline that’s his preferred lube. I retrieve it from the bedside drawer, then kneel at his feet and rub some between my fingers. Down here, with his massive dick at eye level, is where I’m more comfortable. “Relax,” I whisper, pushing at his belly. “Let me do the work.” </p>
<p>He lets out a long sigh as my slick fingers grease his needy flesh, and settles into his chair. His head lolls as my fingers slide back and forth over the shaft. Even at that angle, I close my eyes, so I don’t have to see his expression, or the ravages of his face.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I’d been warned about Martin’s appearance before I’d first met him, a few months before. Earl—the man whom to me is equal parts mentor, procurer, and Fagin to my Artful Dodger—had been careful to let me know what to expect. Still, when I’d arrived at Martin’s townhouse in the Fan and rapped the imposing brass knocker on the door of stained wood, I’d recoiled when it opened to reveal the figure within. Tall though I am, Martin towered over me at six foot five; though not exactly heavy, he weighed twice or more as much. Though he couldn’t have been older than sixty, he dressed like a very old man in a droopy cardigan, with the waistband of his slacks hiked up to a height Humpty Dumpty might have appreciated. His head was smooth and egg-like as well, freckled with liver spots and decorated with the shortest fringe of hair at the temples. </p>
<p>Then there was the face. I dared not stare at the disfigured left half, so I had unfocused my eyes and shifted them to the dour right as I proffered Earl’s business card, upon the back of which he’d scrawled this man’s address. “Kip,” I told him, using my working alias. </p>
<p>Martin had handed it back with a nod. “Kip.” There was a hesitation before he’d asked, “Do you still want to come in?” </p>
<p>I’d looked beyond the door into the man’s hallway and living room, crowded with antiques. Not spindly, delicate valuables that increase in rarity and appeal with age, but the heavy, hulking kind of antiquities inherited from family that one is loath to discard, no matter how unattractive they might be. Still, it’s tidy within, and the man was obviously waiting.</p>
<p>“Of course,” I’d replied, and crossed the threshold. </p>
<p>Later, I’d asked Earl what had happened to Martin. He’d shrugged. He didn’t know. I didn’t dare press answers from the man himself. I was too busy maintaining the fiction that nothing was wrong, that I didn’t notice his disfigurements. With each meeting, the pretense grew easier. Martin was a quiet man. A kind man. Even before he’d begun to pose me for painting, he took his pleasure in providing outfits for me to wear during our encounters. Tube socks with stripes were his fetish; he kept a plastic-wrapped 12-pack of them in a trunk at the bottom of his bed from which he would peel a fresh white pair with every visit. While he knelt and stretched out the elastic opening, I would slip my feet into one after the other, like Cinderella stepping into her Prince’s slipper. </p>
<p>With shaking hands, Martin put me into my first pair of black briefs. He would tug up my hips pairs of tight, high-cut red or blue running shorts with white piping—always new, never used. He would slide over my shoulders athletic jerseys I’d never otherwise wear, then crown my head with baseball caps and turn them rakishly to the side, like a delinquent in an old Archies comic. Once he fitted me with a pair of actual blue jeans, the first I’d ever worn—Levis, no less—just for the enjoyment of admiring me in denim. </p>
<p>He’d urge me to take these items with me, after we were done. “What am I going to do with them?” he’d ask, entreating me to accept his gifts. “Please. Wear them home.”</p>
<p>“I can’t,” I’d say.</p>
<p>“But it would make me so happy.” </p>
<p>It’s always difficult for me to talk about my family’s finances, of how despite my father’s white-collar job, we have precious little money to spare—not for vacations, not for luxuries, not for new cars, not for clothing other than the few basics my mother buys from Sears at the beginning of the school year, that I have to make last no matter how many inches or shoe sizes I grow. It won’t do suddenly to have new socks and shorts appearing in the laundry basket or new shoes in my closet, I explain. My underwear drawer is a neighborhood of lily white Fruit of the Looms; I can’t integrate it without notice or comment. And my mom has never, ever bought for me a pair of jeans. Jeans are too expensive. If she had, they would have been practical, cheap Toughskins. Never an expensive indulgence like real Levis. </p>
<p>His gifts would arouse questions. With what I am, with what I do for men like him, I cannot afford interrogation. </p>
<p>I confess these things in a stutter, with reddened cheeks and a choked throat, ashamed of having to lay bare the realities of genteel poverty to someone who lives in a townhouse full of heirlooms. I’m never sure he fully agrees with my logic. I’m grateful, though, when he stops pressing me to accept his gifts, because I intensely dislike having to say no. Though he continues buying new items for me to model, without comment he begins including an extra twenty in the fold of bills he hands me when I arrive.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I know by now what this man likes best, just like I know the quirks of all my regular clients. A firm fist around his slick shaft, a steady rhythm, the heat of my face close to his thighs, light fingertips down his balls. I’m barely breaking a sweat when his knees begin to jerk and twitch and bang against my shoulders. “Can you suck?” he breathes. “Is that okay?” I keep my focus squarely on his tool when he looks down at me. </p>
<p>Of course I can suck. I drop my jaw and engulf him halfway, turned on by the girth even as my taste buds resent the Vaseline’s mineral tang. He begins shooting immediately, thrashing wildly in his seat while I keep my lips glued to him. The semen arrives only as he subsides, a sour quarter-sized glob on my tongue that I gulp down. Slowly, inch by quarter inch, he slides himself out. </p>
<p>“Thank you, Kip. You’re a very kind boy.” He’s always at his sweetest, after he comes.</p>
<p>Kip is not my name. It’s what I let all these men call me, however. It’s more than a <em>nom de guerre;</em> Kip is an identity. He’s braver than I. It’s Kip who poses in the nude without demur, who shows off his body, who kneels on command. Kip is the fearless adventurer who smiles at strangers and winnows cash from their fists. At home, myself once again, I’m merely the boy who guards Kip’s secrets. </p>
<p>I’m the one now anxious to make my getaway, who wipes my mouth on a nearby towel and eases back onto my knees, ready to rise. Already I’m preparing what to say to wriggle out of this man’s bedroom—something about the lateness of the hour or the long trip home. But before I can struggle to my feet, Martin has rested his hand aside my cheek. “When did your braces come off?” The week before, I tell him. “You must be happy. May I see?”</p>
<p>His face looms uncomfortably close to mine. Every instinct warns me to squirm from his tender grasp and run, but I close my eyes and force my lips apart. </p>
<p>There’s indulgence in his voice. “Come now. You can do better than that. Show me those pearly whites.” He brushes the hair from my eyes. His good humor hardens into disappointment, when I hesitate. “Kip. Am I truly that terrible to look at?”</p>
<p>Earl had never been able to tell me what had happened to Martin, but my imagination is always overeager to supply answers. He’d been wounded in the war. Exactly which, I never quite decide, because I’m bad at both math and historical dates and can never quite reconcile the two around a specific war. He’d been a notorious criminal—though those of that bent perhaps didn’t live in swanky townhouses in this exclusive part of town. He’d suffered an accident as a child, or had been in a car crash.</p>
<p>Or—and this is the possibility that haunts me late at night, when I’m alone in the dark—he could have been attacked. There are men out there who delight in preying upon people like us. Who would happily pull out a knife to assault and mutilate, just because of a wayward glance or the wrong word or tone from another man. Since the second grade I’ve been subjected to words like <em>pansy, queer, </em>and <em>faggot.</em> I’d been lucky to avoid violence, so far. One day, my luck might run out. Maybe it had with him.</p>
<p>To imagine that what might have happened to Martin could easily be my fate, with bad luck, at the wrong time, in an unfortunate place…well. That frightens me more than his face ever could. </p>
<p>His question has awakened my guilt. This is a man living with a disfigurement, secluding himself away from the world and hiring companionship because of his appearance. But he’s no monster, no B-movie Lon Chaney lurking around opera houses. This is Martin. The man who sees me in ways I cannot envision myself. The man who dresses me and calls me beautiful. The artist. Martin, the one person who has noticed what’s changed in me this week, without having to be told.</p>
<p>It’s Kip, the more courageous of us, who opens his eyes to meet the older man’s gaze, full on. “No,” Kip says. Martin’s palm still cups my jaw. I return in the gesture, resting my right hand against the left side of his face, in mirror image. My long thumb crosses the jagged crevice at an angle. “You’re not.” </p>
<p>We gaze at each other for an extended moment. The longer our eyes lock, the easier it becomes. It’s just a scar. It’s just a stupid, unfortunate scar, and too long have I allowed it to frighten me. To prove my sincerity, I lean forward, and press my soft lips against his. </p>
<p>“Oh, Kip,” he breathes. </p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I’ve agreed to stay for another hour. I’ve spent it curled in a hollow upon his mattress, still wearing the basketball jersey and socks. “Hold,” commands the artist, who sits crossed-legged and naked next to me, drawing board upon his lap. </p>
<p>I reach out and squeeze his flaccid dick.</p>
<p>He swats away my hand with a laugh. “Don’t hold <em>that</em>. Come on, now. I’m nearly done.” </p>
<p>“Let me see.” </p>
<p>“Let me <em>finish</em>.” He pushes me back down. “Smile?” My face is nearly numb from holding the same expression for long minutes, but he gently strokes and tickles my legs until once more I let loose another oblique beam. I’m rewarded by the scratching of his pencil. “Take a look,” he says at last.</p>
<p>It’s only a sketch, this time. Again, it’s composed so sparingly that I marvel I can recognize my half-closed eyes, my bulbous nose, the sharp jut of my chin. That unmistakable grin of mine, pulled to one side, as if someone has shared a private joke. Beneath the representation he’s scrawled a title. </p>
<p><em>Kip</em>, it reads, in quotation marks. </p>
<p>“I wish you could take it with you,” he whispers, tracing the very jaw he’s just committed to paper. “But I understand.”</p>
<p>He’s reading my mind. I nod, agreeing. I wish that, too. </p>
<p>This is celebration enough for my transformation, this intimate moment between the artist and his model. I watch as he rises, retrieves a clean sheet of tissue and a new length of cardboard from a stack in a cupboard, and places his latest drawing atop one of the piles. Already it’s fading into memory, soon to be buried beneath the floral paintings and figure studies of men in tube socks and athletic gear that surely will follow. Who knows when it might be appreciated again, or who might one day sift through all this unseen work and happen upon a portrait of a smiling youth named Kip, sketched from above where he once lay and smiled, one early autumn evening long ago?</p>
<p>Let them think kindly of it, I wish, as I watch it disappear.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-81923357917063023862023-10-03T09:30:00.066-04:002023-10-03T11:31:37.093-04:00Dear Sir<p><em>18, 5’6”, 160#, bottom.</em></p>
<p>The profile text is splayed across a photo of a bubble butt hugged by skimpy black cotton. </p>
<p><em>Fetishes: Hung cocks, hard cocks, cum, daddies.</em></p>
<p><em>Into: Oral (give only), fucking.</em></p>
<p>I absorb the slight information. It’s the sight of that ass that makes me click on the dialog bubble, where a red dot indicates a message. Very little gets my attention more quickly than a pretty ass, particularly this early in the morning. My hunch is that this kid knows how to show off the goods. It’s a suspicion corroborated by the series of photos with which he’s chosen to kick off our interaction: another of his butt and lower back, this time displayed in a pair of tight gray trunks that fall lower and lower around his thighs until they disappear altogether. The final pic is of the lower half of his face. The boy’s mouth is open, tongue out. His skin is pale as bone china; his lips, the prettiest shade of pink. </p>
<p>My juices are already flowing. I love what I see, so far. Then I read the message beneath the several photos he’s sent. <em>Interested in a tight virgin ass…?</em></p>
<p>Ugh.</p>
<p>No, I’m rarely interested in a virgin ass, especially the tight ones. I know some men salivate at the thought of a young cherry, ripe for plucking. The thought of it makes me deflate. I’ve had my share—and then some—of first-timers. I know how quickly downhill that scenario often goes. It’s all giddy anticipation and pleasure on both sides until the moment comes to slide into that unused hole. Then, no matter how gentle and solicitous a lover I am, it’s complaints and whining. Kids these days have been watching internet porn before they even figure out masturbation; they imprint on experienced models who take monster rods without so much as a change of expression. They see holes opening to accommodate tops with horse-sized dicks, and assume their own puckers will magically blossom the first time they’re opened. </p>
<p>And the thing is, holes usually don’t work that way. They <em>can</em>, certainly. Over time and with practice, they will. But with virgins, the one thing that attracts them to me—the size of my dick—is usually the biggest impediment to anyone’s pleasure. Admiring sighs of <em>It’s so huge!</em> turn quickly into whines and complaints of <em>It’s too huge! </em></p><p>I don’t get off on inflicting pain. Deflowering virgins is very low on my list of enjoyments.</p>
<p><em>Listen, </em>I tap back to the kid. <em>You’ve got an amazing butt, but I’m usually too large for inexperienced hole</em>.</p>
<p>His reply arrives in seconds. <em>Thanks!! Hmm, I’m down to suck you and try fitting it in and if it does I’m sure it’ll feel great!</em> I wish I had his confidence. I’m sure he’ll be howling once I’m in past the head. But before I can reply, he sends me another photo. This one’s of him completely in the nude, shot from behind. He’s kneeling on a mattress, legs spread, ass prominently on display, balls hanging heavy on the coverlet. Above the smooth cheeks rises his torso, back arched, his narrow waist rising to broad shoulders. </p>
<p>I feel my breath catch, a little. <em>You truly are beautiful, son. </em></p>
<p><em>Thank you!!! Love that big cock, too</em>. <em>Don’t you want to be my first?</em></p>
<p>I’m a weak man. The triumph of that ass, so artfully on exhibit, has eroded my good judgment. Or nearly has, at least. </p>
<p><em>I do,</em> I concede. <em>But I really don’t want to hurt you. Sorry.</em></p>
<p>He doesn’t reply immediately. That’s okay. I almost expect no reply at all. A few minutes later, though, I check back to see another message. <em>I got it. Can I ask something, though?</em></p>
<p><em>Sure</em>, I tell him.</p>
<p><em>I would like you to reconsider your decision, sir. Can I file a formal appeal, with your permission?</em></p>
<p>My lips quirk upward on one side to the unexpected response. He’s managed to disarm me. I’d been so ready to dismiss the kid before, to shunt him into the expansive bin where mentally I toss all men whose appetites outsize their actual capacity to follow through. With this single twist, though, he’s made me curious to know more. <em>What did you have in mind?</em></p>
<p><em>If you share with me your email, you’ll see. </em>I hesitate long enough that he follows up with the promise, <em>I won’t abuse it, sir.</em></p>
<p>It’s pledge enough that I take the chance and send him the address.</p>
<p><em>You won’t regret it. You’ll see.</em></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqMJrGtJmN_FzqmAopnNQ9MzPAK9YyxkblP4eZdFzONtx2MMSGIJwWjacHeVg4iQCme7C8NKuvzBw9DFJQ4L7RXX-dsXyCcmU-CFncRbxEF4eqjJOko2wzgYAzA_LrXbH613hgQkzFywX3omHZPCuHzWtReHvFFoTbW2xGuLLo4d_wRSJC0pMdrNlwBw/s680/Vulpine-Boxers-2-680x453.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="680" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqMJrGtJmN_FzqmAopnNQ9MzPAK9YyxkblP4eZdFzONtx2MMSGIJwWjacHeVg4iQCme7C8NKuvzBw9DFJQ4L7RXX-dsXyCcmU-CFncRbxEF4eqjJOko2wzgYAzA_LrXbH613hgQkzFywX3omHZPCuHzWtReHvFFoTbW2xGuLLo4d_wRSJC0pMdrNlwBw/s320/Vulpine-Boxers-2-680x453.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p>
<p>Hours pass. By noon, I stop expecting an email. What would it have contained, anyway? More photos of that round little bubble butt? Maybe a video of the kid jiggling the jelly for the camera? I don’t know. I’ve forgotten completely about it until the late evening, when I crawl into bed and try to settle down for the night. I make one last check of my email. Only one subject line leaps out: <em>I hope this is you</em>. I read it through, several times in succession, clearing my throat repeatedly.</p>
<p><em>Dear Sir,</em></p>
<p><em>I hope you will consider this my formal appeal to your decision not to take my virginity. My reasons are as follows.</em></p>
<p><em>1. You are hot af and basically my dream daddy. Looking at your pics makes my insides gooey and I really want to look in your sexy blue eyes when you open me up for the first time. I don’t want to settle for anyone less and that’s a fact.</em></p>
<p><em>2. I know you are SO BIG and I am a virgin but I have a dildo that I’ve been working on myself with, so it won’t be exactly like I’ve never had anything up me before. I have been wanting big dicks in my hole for a few years and I finally am ready to do it, and I want to do it with you. (See #1.) Also I have watched videos and know how to get everything clean so don’t worry about that.</em></p>
<p><em>3. I promise to be obedient and do everything you say.</em></p>
<p><em>4. If I cry or complain and get on your nerves, I give you permission to slap it out of me if you’re into that.</em></p>
<p><em>5. I know you must get a lot of guys hot for you and your big dick (see #1 again) but I will be worth your time. I will focus on you and your big dick and what it wants and needs and not worried about mine. In fact I don’t care if I get off at all. I just want to make sure daddy enjoys himself in my hole.</em></p>
<p><em>6. I know that I have picked the right man to do the job. You look like you know what you’re doing (which is important!!) and I am guessing that you’re really a decent man as well. I am not looking to marry you (yet, lol!) but it would be really nice to have my first time with a guy who is going to treat me okay and I think that will be you. </em></p>
<p><em>7. By the way I am not a total virgin, I have sucked two dicks before and think I am pretty good at it, it’s my hole that’s virgin. Hopefully not for long.</em></p>
<p><em>8. If you don’t like me when you show up, you can just walk out. </em></p>
<p><em>9. I don’t intend for you to have to go to any trouble or expense to make this happen, because that’s not right, so I will schedule it to your convenience and pay for a room to meet. I would even pay for an Uber for you so all you will have to do is show up and fuck.</em></p>
<p><em>If you have any questions just ask me and I will tell you anything. I hope that I have eliminated any doubts about my qualifications and sincerity to serve. I am happy to submit any supplemental materials you require but mostly I just want to submit.</em></p>
<p><em>Thank you, Sir. I the undersigned attest to the best of my ability that all the above information is true and I anxiously await your response. </em></p>
<p><em>Please reconsider.</em></p>
<p><em>Jason</em></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>The kid has made only one miscalculation: I never merely show up and fuck. I’m in a darkened room of a mid-grade hotel chain adjacent to the freeway, my ass squeaking across the faux leather of its single armchair. Legs spread, my chin rests on the back of one crooked index finger. My free hand drapes across the denim of my jeans. This boy stands a few feet away from me, shyly twisting his naked torso, waiting for instruction.</p>
<p>I remove my finger from under my chin, point it to the ceiling, “Turn.” The soft syllable shatters the silence. “Show me.”</p>
<p>The boy obeys. From the moment he opened the hotel room door, a few minutes before, his sole instinct was to hurry. He needs to be taught restraint. When he’s lunged, I’ve pulled back. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it at my pace. He’s picking up on my cues, though. Now, at my whispered command, he hesitates. A hint of smile crosses his lips. His shoulders twist first, as his puppy brown eyes continue to watch me. Then his hips follow. When he faces completely away from me, he turns his head to look at me once more.</p>
<p>I nod. Slowly. Deliberately. Signal my approval with a lick of my lips. I’d already made up my mind to stay, the moment the kid had greeted me at the door. He’s got the All-American looks of a small town athlete—the tousled, sun-kissed hair, the square jaw, the Clearasil complexion. He’s short, but with a wrestler's build. I make it clear to him that I won’t be up and leaving, by kicking off both my sneakers. They join his t-shirt on the carpeted floor, near the dresser. “That’s a good boy.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, sir.” His voice is deep. Husky with desire. </p>
<p>I can sense he wants to lunge at me again, but it’s not yet time. “Socks.” He’s in such a hurry to hook them with a finger and rip them off that he hops on one foot and nearly topples over. “Slow,” I remind him.</p>
<p>He understands. He props his behind on the mattress. Leaning over, maintaining eye contact, he removes them one after the other, waiting for my approval. I nod at last, then signal for him to stand once more. </p>
<p>Around his narrow waist hug a pair of ridiculous boxer shorts imprinted with anime characters I don’t recognize. They’re the only article of clothing he has left. “You want to take those off, don’t you?” </p>
<p>The boy has his thumbs hooked beneath the band, ready to plunge them to the floor, before he remembers our unspoken game of Simon Says. “Do you want me to?”</p>
<p>I don’t answer. I signal he should turn again, then fold down my fingers. He bends to show me his ass from this new angle, supporting himself with his hands on the mattress. “You understand what’s going to happen, if you do.”</p>
<p>His catch of breath is unmistakable, in the room’s quiet. “Yes sir.”</p>
<p>“What?” I ask. “What’s going to happen. Say it.”</p>
<p>Looking at me from beneath his armpit, he rasps out, “You’re going to take my virginity.”</p>
<p>“I might.” Boys work harder when they’re given a carrot on a stick as guidance. “You know what that means, though?”</p>
<p>He hesitates, so badly wanting to provide the correct answer. “Tell me, sir?”</p>
<p>“Stand.” He obeys. When his arms unconsciously cross his body, it’s as if he’s ashamed of his nakedness. The real nakedness on display, though is his desire for me. I can see it in the way he hungrily looks me over, up and down, as I sprawl, relaxed in my chair. I can see it in the way his lips waver, in his posture, in the tent of his shorts. My own pants are becoming tighter at the sight.“Very nice, son.”</p>
<p>“What does it mean, sir?” </p>
<p>I crook a finger and beckon him closer. My hands grasp onto his hips and turn him around. I cup one of his cheeks; it’s a meaty handful. “If I decide to fuck you,” I say in a voice so low that he bends to hear, “<em>if</em> I decide, it means that you are going to do everything I say without question. If I decide to fuck you, you will listen, and speak when told to.” </p><p>“Of course.” His hand flies to his mouth as he realizes he’s already made a mistake.</p>
<p>“If I decide to fuck you.” Repetition of the conditional sentence has hypnotized him into a glassy-eyed state. “It means you’ll have my big, fat cock shoved deep in your guts. It means I intend to fuck you until I shoot deep inside you. It means that you’ll be giving up your hole for <em>my </em>use. <em>My</em> enjoyment. You understand?” </p>
<p>“Yes, sir.” He can barely whisper his response.</p>
<p>“I didn’t hear you.”</p>
<p>The second attempt is stronger. “Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>Our eyes lock. I wait for a very long time before saying, “Take down your shorts. Slowly.”</p>
<p>He steps back, eyes watering and full of adoration. In this moment, the boy wants nothing more than to please. Head turned to observe my reaction, he lowers his boxers, inch by inch. There’s a moment when the elastic can no longer contain the restrained flesh; his bubble butt pops out over it, cheek by cheek. My gasp at the sight is genuine. </p>
<p>Our eyes lock again. He’s pleased at my reaction. “Spread your legs.”</p>
<p>His thick thighs spread apart as he separates his feet. Once again he grabs the bed’s edge, this time arching his back to show off the goods.</p>
<p>A soft sigh escapes my lips. “Beautiful.” I haven’t given him permission to speak, but mute gratitude fills his eyes. Every boy wants to hope he’s pretty, and this one truly is. I want to remember forever this moment, this perfect symmetry, this ideal application of the Euclidian geometry of globes. “Show me.”</p>
<p>He understands the command. His hands reach back and pull apart his cheeks. I see a whorl of sandy hair protecting his pink little hole. This time, I grunt. My mind might have been made up, minutes before, but from this point on, there will be no stopping me.</p>
<p>He doesn’t expect my hand on his naked flesh when I kneel on the floor behind him. “You have a perfect butt,” I whisper. My lips graze the porcelain-smooth skin; where it traces, my breath leaves in its wake a trail of goose flesh. </p>
<p>“Thank you,” he gasps, falling onto his elbows. </p>
<p>I cup his balls in my long fingers. He doesn’t shave them, but he’s fair-haired and smooth enough that they seem almost hairless. At my touch, the boy’s thick stub of a cock, rock hard, jolts into the air then flops back down to rap my knuckles. My nose nuzzles between his cheeks. Deeply I inhale, relishing the scent of the soap he’s used not too long ago. His thighs tremble as I pull apart those thick handfuls. Once his ass is open and the hole exposed, I lap out with my tongue, teasing the tip against the wrinkled pinch of flesh that aches for attention.</p>
<p>It’s not long before he’s prone on the strange mattress, ass high in the air, legs spread wide. His hands clench the hotel pillows and pummel them into submission; he bites hard into their foam depths to silence his roar. I know it must feel good, this first-ever phenomenon of mouth against hole. Never will he forget the sensations of wet tongue, of soft lips and the curious incursion of my fingertips, nor the abrasion of my beard against his butt, the scrape it between his thighs, as I lick and kiss and chew on his sweet pussy lips. I grind against the bed’s corner, uncomfortable in my jeans. I like this contrast, though, of his nakedness and of me in full attire—if anything might reinforce his vulnerability, it’s the fact that I could rise and walk out of this hotel room right now, and abandon him in this state of confusion and sheer need.</p>
<p>I have no intention of going, though. I stand and remove my socks. Undo my belt. Unzip slowly, letting the sound fill the room. Let my pants drop to the floor. I’m wearing a short-sleeved camp shirt that I unbutton slowly. He’s not watching, but he can hear the sounds as I disrobe. It excites me, knowing he’s picturing the scene in his mind and anticipating what’s to follow. </p>
<p>By the time I wrench down my trunks, I’m already hard and wet around the tip. My knees separate his thighs as I crawl up on the bed. The big head of my cock is already oozing precum when nudges his cheeks. “Oh fuck,” he says aloud, in a shocked voice. Clearly, the reality of the situation is dawning upon him. It’s one thing to dream about a big dick snaking open your tight hole. Being poised moments away from it actually happening is something else entirely.</p>
<p>“You understand,” I say, perched above him, “what I’m going to do to you.”</p>
<p>I’ve got my serious face on. My eyebrows stay in a raised position as he pulls himself up onto his elbows and looks at me over his shoulder. The kid is damned fine. Those slightly pouty lips, that pert nose, those liquid brown eyes framed by the longest lashes I’ve seen on a boy in some time—he’s a Renaissance sculpture come to life. “I’m worried it’s going to hurt,” he says in a soft voice.</p>
<p>I nod. It may. “This is what you wanted, though,” I remind him. “You still want it. Don’t you.”</p>
<p>It’s less question than confirmation. He nods. Eyes locked with his, I stick my thumb between my lips. Swirl it around. Get it good and wet. Pull it back out again, glistening, and apply it to his ass. The hole parts to accommodate it as he lets out a little gasp. “Are you going to fuck me now?”</p>
<p>I continue staring. Rotating my wrist, so that the top half of my thumb palpitates his hole. I allow myself to crack a smile. “You really need it, huh?”</p>
<p>He grins, then exhales a column of air when I push in a little deeper. “Yes sir. I really do.” I nod, still staring into those eyes. “So, are you going to fuck me now?”</p>
<p>“You will know when I’m about to fuck you.” </p>
<p>Because now is not the time. My plan is this: to draw out the build-up to the deed as long as possible, before consummating the act. That part will come. Oh yes. But this is what he’ll remember for the rest of his life: being told to strip, to show off his beautiful body. Being touched. Licked. Admired. Savored and appreciated. When in the future he masturbates, thinking of his first time, he’ll remember how deliberately paced was my deflowering. In another forty years, when he’s my age, maybe he’ll be thinking about the man who made it good for him, that first time.</p>
<p>That’s what he deserves, this trembling boy, whose hips gyrate with need, whose dry lips try to work out words as he experiences all these new sensations for the first time. A good memory. A good story to tell, even if he’s only repeating it to himself for years to come. He could’ve chosen some big-dicked asshole to pop that cherry, someone to spit and shove and stumble out into the night ten minutes later. He’s chosen me, though. To reward him for his exceptional taste, I’ll treat him right.</p>
<p>Which means that soon he’s ass-high again, with my mouth gnawing at his pucker. I stroke his boy dick, slick with what leaks from its tip, while he thrashes and bucks on my face. I seize his balls and tug to make him gasp; I spank his butt, just to see the reddening print of my hand across its white expanse. When he’s beyond words and the only sounds erupting from his chest are instinctive groans, I flip him over, hang his head from the bedside, and slide my monster into his mouth. He might have sucked two dicks before mine, but clearly no one’s taught him how to do it correctly. A little coaching, though, and I’ve got his lips wrapped around his teeth, his hands on my ass, and his throat opening to take me.</p>
<p>The kid loves it, too. Soon he’s deep-throating me like a pro, not even choking much. Feral snarls punctuate his efforts. Already he wants it harder. Deeper. More. I let him worship my dick. He holds it between prayerful hands, pulling me into him whenever I tease at depriving his young mouth. </p>
<p>But eventually, once I’m assured he’s worked himself into a cock-hungry frenzy, I step back. Tug him up onto the bed. Rest his head on the pillows. Once more I position myself between his legs and bring my face close to his own. The boy’s eyes are watery from the prolonged deep-throating. There’s slobber all over his face and chin. Hell, there’s probably liquid snot from his nose there, too. His bee-stung lips quiver, wanting to be put to use. “I am going to get your hole all slick with lube,” I tell him, low and slow. “We are going to make sure you are so, so wet and ready. Once you are, I’m going to take this big cock. I’m going to rub lube all over it until it’s pretty and shiny. Then I’m going to slide it deep into your boy hole. Understand?”</p>
<p>The kid takes a giant sniff and tries to collect himself. “Yes sir,” he says. There’s love in those eyes. This is the moment he’s wanted for—well, who knows how long.</p>
<p>I don’t often use the colorful plastic lube injectors I keep in my collection, but they’re handy for cases like this. They’re shaped like syringes, but with a nozzle at the tip where a needle might go. While he watches, I pull out the plunger to fill the pink tube with goo from a bottle by the bed, then use my thumb to prepare his hole for the invasion. He must have been telling the truth about using a dildo on himself, because he takes the few inches of narrow plastic into his hole without so much as a complaint. The lube is cool from sitting out on the bedside table, though, so he hisses when I inject it deep inside his guts. </p>
<p>“Hey.” I’ve positioned myself atop him. The snout of my dick knocks against his ass, requesting entry. The kid has his face buried in the pillow. He’s even pulled the sides up around his ears. It won’t do. He’s not going to get knocked up while blind and deaf. “Hey,” I repeat. “Look at me.” His jaws is slack and his eyes mere slits when he obeys. “It’s time, son.”</p>
<p>Now, I kiss him.</p>
<p>It’s the first time our lips meet. Not once had he expressed an interest in making out with me, but once our mouths connect, he turns over and wraps his arms around my neck as if he intends never to let go. Hungrily he opens for me. I expand my embouchure until my mouth surrounds his entirely. My tongue probes, unlocking flesh with flesh, inserting itself deep.</p>
<p>As above, so below. He doesn’t even realize my cock’s inside him until the halfway point, when suddenly he clamps down with a cry. </p>
<p>“Sssshhh,” I tell him, kissing his sweet face. “You’re doing great.”</p>
<p>“You’re inside me.” It’s equal parts terror and boast. “Oh my god,” he whispers, relaxing slightly. “You’re inside me.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” I say, grinning. I laugh a little. “I’m inside you.”</p>
<p>“Oh, fuck! You’re inside me.” Just when I think that maybe, <em>maybe</em>, we’ve established that I’m inside him, his head lolls back. “Fuck me,” he whispers. I can feel from the way I’m already sliding deeper that he’s loosening up once more. “Sir, fuck me.”</p>
<p>We’ve somehow gotten ourselves into an awkward position, during our tussle; he’s got one leg pinned to my chest and the other against the mattress, halfway between lying sideways and on his back. Without pulling out, I maneuver us until we’re both spooned and on our left sides. I’m all the way in, now. When I make an experimental gyration, then a slight thrust, he responds with a soft, happy murmur. </p>
<p>This is how his first fuck goes, then, with my arms around him and my chin nestled on his shoulder, peppering his neck with kisses. “Does it feel good?” I whisper in his ear, from time to time.</p>
<p>Always, his answer is, “It feels amazing.”</p>
<p>“Do you love it?” I ask.</p>
<p>“I love it, sir,” he’ll respond each time, shivering as my hands slide softly up and town his torso, across his tender nipples, down his hips. </p>
<p>Most important, when finally I ask, “Are you happy?” his response is a purr of contentment. He reaches behind, over his head, to pull me in for another kiss.</p>
<p>I take my time in my hole. When he’s ready, I make my strokes longer, so that he might relish the sensations. At several points, I take his smaller hand in my big one, to draw it back so can feel how hard he’s made me. His fingers dance along the length of my shaft and even probe the point of connection at which it plunges into his own hole. “It’s so big,” he marvels, more than once.</p>
<p>There’s a dreamlike quality to the entire encounter. It transcends the squalid setting of the hotel and the steady drone of traffic on the highway just beyond. We are both in this humid room yet also nowhere on earth, so completely wrapped up in each other are we. There’s no world beyond the horizons of our merged flesh, no sensations not aroused by our hands, mouth, and my relentless dick. He dances to the rhythm of my thrusting, hips moving with mine; I set my pace to the small, animal noises emanating from his parted lips. </p>
<p>“You’re not a virgin any more,” I tell him as I come closer to my climax. His response is a loud groan as statement’s truth hits home. “And you know what?” To a response that’s one elongated vowel, I whisper in his ear, “I’m going to reward you by shooting my load deep into that tight little hole.”</p>
<p>The hole in question tightens for a second, but I’ve anticipated his response and driven in deep. “Pwee,” he blurts.</p>
<p>It’s close enough a sound to <em>please</em> that I assume he’s asking for it. “Is that what you want? My cum in your guts?” He attempts to nod. “Dad’s load, knocking you up? That’s what you want?”</p>
<p>“Oh please.” I’d been correct. His eyes gloss over as he gazes into mine. He manages to moisten his lips. Sighs. “Make my hole yours.”</p>
<p>“This is what you wanted,” I say, shifting him so I can drive home with more vigor. “You wrote me the sweetest letter, asking for it.” I’m excited now. My cock is a poker left too long in the fire, and I can scarcely tolerate how it burns. “I don’t like disappointing a pretty boy like you.”</p>
<p>“No,” he says, seeming to agree. He can’t summon a coherent thought to save his life.</p>
<p>“You want it,” I remind him. </p>
<p>“…want…”</p>
<p>“You want it bad.”</p>
<p>“…bad…” he echoes.</p>
<p>Once again I kiss the back of his neck. “Here it comes, son.”</p>
<p>I don’t so much pound his butt as lunge into it. Great long thrusts, punctuated with strains and pauses, until at last the pressure builds beyond bearing. I flood him with my load, searing his insides with what feels like lava. I hear him call out, am aware of his hands pulling me deeper into him, holding me there. Together we buck, and thrash, and cry. I hold onto him for dear life, and find myself squeezing him hard when the sensations recede. For a long time we lie there, until the ringing in our ears dims, and the sounds of the highway and footsteps in the hallways outside ebb back into consciousness. His hands still clutch at mine, where I hold him around the ribs. </p>
<p>And then he bursts into tears.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>I’m horrified. In my post-ejaculatory low, I run through all the terrible things I might have done. I’ve hurt him. I’ve made him bleed. I ignored cues, pushed forward when he wanted me to wait. Maybe he’d wanted a six-packed muscle porn star for his first time, but he’d had to make do with my sorry dad bod, and only now is the gravity of that poor choice sinking in. I hadn’t expected tears. I don’t like hearing them.</p>
<p>But I don’t leap from the bed in horror. I don’t shove him away. He’s still holding my hands, after all. I hug him close, and kiss his shoulders. “Hey,” I say, in the consoling voice of a puzzled father. “Hey, now.” </p>
<p>A sob catches in his throat. He sounds inconsolable. Though I worry, I hang on through the storm.</p>
<p>My forearm is soaked when at last he subsides a little. Then, he hiccups. It’s a comic enough conclusion to the episode that I chuckle a little and try again. “What’s wrong, kiddo?”</p>
<p>“NOTHING!” The word erupts from deep in his chest, so loud that it makes my ears ring. </p>
<p>“Okay?” I don’t understand.</p>
<p>“It was AMAZING!” On a dime he’s turned, from sorrow to—I’m not sure what this emotion could be. Relief? Astonishment? He sniffs deeply to clear his nose, then frees himself to wipe the tears from his face. “Shit. I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“Talk to me,” I urge. </p>
<p>My cock is slopping out of his hole with a wet squelch. He waits until it hits the sheets with a thud before flopping onto his back. “I thought it was going to hurt bad,” he says in his everyday voice. “I thought I’d have to beg you to take it easy. I was gonna buy this stuff that numbs your hole, but then I thought that if it numbs my hole it’d probably numb your dick too, and I didn’t want that, so I was just going to put up with the hurt, but—fuck!” He’s all adolescent energy, now, ready to bound to his feet or bounce on the bed or run in wild circles to work off his excess energy. “It’s like I didn’t even <em>feel</em> it.”</p>
<p>“Sooooo, you’re saying I've got a tiny, toy-sized cock,” I drawl, with good humor. “Well, I’m sorry I don’t have a baseball bat-sized dong for a bottomless hole like yours, now that you’re a seasoned pro and everything…”</p>
<p>He gives me a light punch to the chest, then snuggles into my embrace. “No, seriously. You just made it feel…”</p>
<p>“Good,” I supply. He nods. “Well, I’m glad of that.”</p>
<p>He’s managed to defuse my worst apprehensions. I smile, happy at his mood. I can once again relax with the boy in my arms. “But why,” he asks, sniffing as he snuggles close. I shake my head, not understanding the question. “Why’d you make it so good?”</p><p>What's he betraying, with that question? That for years he'd anticipated nothing but the worst from his first fuck? That interactions with other men had left him expecting no more than the bare minimum—and maybe not even that? The answer is simple, though. “Because you deserve it.” My eyes close as I speak in a low voice. I hope he understands I'm being honest. “First time or not—you deserve it.”</p><p>Let him take that away, as the lesson.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” he says in a very small voice.</p>
<p>“Besides,” I say with wry candor. “That letter you wrote was fucking charming. That’s why.”</p>
<p>“Yeah?”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” I chuckle. Then I recite, in tones that are only slightly mocking, “<em>Dear Sir</em>. <em>I, the undersigned…</em>”</p>
<p>He interrupts my teasing by digging his fingers into my rib cage, forcing me to break out into defensive laughter. “It worked, though,” he grouses, before slinking down between the sheets to encircle my cock once again with his mouth. </p>
<p>“Oh, it truly did,” I sigh, as my cock stiffens once again.</p>
<p>Soon, neither of us are thinking about that letter at all.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-632017510800773812023-08-31T09:38:00.000-04:002023-08-31T09:38:17.123-04:00A Pornographer's Manifesto<p><em>Author’s note: I talk throughout this essay specifically about pornographic writing. I’m a professional writer, after all. Know, however, my comments apply to all the adult creative arts—erotic charcoals, sexy scenarios you paint on your tablet, explicit filmmaking, and especially that naughty piano sonata for four sexy hands you’re composing as the centerpiece of your Sunday Afternoon Fine Arts Orgy. </em></p>
<p><em>I also speak as a cis gay man. Reader, that might not be your perspective nor your audience. I hope you find the philosophies herein malleable enough to adapt into your own. I encourage you to customize them at whim.</em></p>
<p><em>If you’re expending your creative efforts in the service of the carnal, or if you’re allowing other adults to enjoy adult content from the fruits of your imagination, you’re my kind of craftsperson.</em></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Sometime during the pandemic, I began listening to podcasts. Yes, I know podcasts have been around forever. Not even when everyone was talking about Serial, though, had I ever been tempted to listen. I never understood the appeal of spending a dozen hours across as many weeks, passively allowing someone to drone out the same information I could cull from a quick one-minute browse on Wikipedia. </p>
<p>Then, in 2020, I found myself trapped in my home for weeks on end with nothing to do but fret. Narrated audio experiences filled a new kind of void. I could kick up my feet in my living room, game controller in hand and something relaxing like Minecraft on the TV screen while a podcast played. The hours wouldn’t exactly fly by, at least they ambled along more amiably than had I tuned into the 24-hour doomcasts on every news channel. </p>
<p>Quickly I accumulated a playlist of favorites. Shows about television and movie history appealed to me, as did programs diving deep into my favorite recording artists. I’ve never been big on true crime—I think it tends toward exploitation and poor handling of victims and bystanders alike—but I did find a couple of investigators who approached their subjects with sensitivity and compassion. Over time, I looked forward to certain shows and began supporting a few on Patreon. When restrictions eased, I continued listening. If I have to make a long car trip these days, I’m more inclined to turn on podcasts than music. </p>
<p>Then came an incident that shook me.</p>
<p>One of my favorite shows that I discovered right at the beginning of my podcast journey shines a light onto a certain type of pop culture specifically through an LGBTQ lens. I clicked with it immediately because of the genial hosts and their clever analysis of a genre many consider to be trivial or disposable. I was so entertained by the enterprise that I started working my way through several years’ worth of their old programs. Every long, isolated afternoon, when I’d unwind with the Playstation, for a couple of hours I wouldn’t miss my pre-pandemic life at all.</p>
<p>In one particular episode, these hosts got onto a tangent involving limericks. They were trying, and failing, to construct a dirty limerick from a specific first line that ended with a tricky-to-rhyme word. After a minute or two, the pair gave up and instead invited listeners to send in their best attempts from that first line. Well. When I was a fifth grader, limericks were my nerdy little thing. I grew up steeped in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear" target="_blank">Edward Lear</a> and fancied myself a real 11-year-old limerick connoisseur. My alarming output of the five-line, anapestic little poems prompted my homeroom teacher to sign me up for a citywide creative writing workshop that set me on a lifelong creative journey. </p>
<p>Plus, I like a challenge.</p>
<p>It was but the work of a few minutes to accomplish what the hosts could not: a perfectly-formed, absolutely filthy little masterpiece of such turpitude that once I’d finished, all I could do was rub my hands together and cackle in glee. After a bit of polishing, I tweeted the thing to one of the hosts and promptly went back to my much grayer, limerick-free life. </p>
<p>I’d actually forgotten about the challenge until a couple of weeks later, when during an ad break to thank their new patrons, the podcasters announced they’d received several limerick submissions. Immediately, I grew excited. My dirty poem was going to make my two favorite podcast hosts laugh! I turned up the volume to hear.</p>
<p>The first few listener limericks they read—well, they sucked. They <em>suuuuuuuucked</em>. The rhymes were terrible, the scansion just plain bad. One wasn’t even a limerick. Inwardly I gloated. I was winning this thing for sure. Okay, it wasn’t and had never been intended as a contest, but I have an unfortunate competitive spirit that manifests itself with obnoxious intensity, if I don’t tamp it down. And on that day, I wasn’t attempting to tamp. I was totally tampless and jittering with anticipation.</p>
<p>Finally it was my turn. The primary host paused slightly before reading off my Twitter handle, then launched into a diatribe that left me hot and flushed with shame. My social media profile, he warned all the listeners, was sexually explicit pornography. It was shocking. He launched into a description of all the things a hapless innocent might find if they were so naive as to dare stumble into my little den of depravity. Nude photos! Graphic depictions of homosexual sex! Licentious behavior! A corruption so absolute that no righteous soul should dare approach! In fact, they didn’t recommend listeners look me up at all, but since I’d sent in a submission, I’d forced their hand.</p>
<p>After what felt like an hour of these preliminary warnings, I think they finally read my limerick. I was in such a state of shock, though, that their reaction swept over me without registering. I felt humiliated at being called out in such a way, by two of my favorite voices, no less—two gay men who’d never spoken ill of anyone save for the LGBTQ population’s conservative foes. It felt like being spit on in passing by Oprah, or having Mother Teresa pick me out in a crowd, point a gnarled finger, and shout, “FAGGOT!”</p>
<p>Still licking my wounds, I visited my Twitter account to survey the broad swath of vice and debauchery I apparently was leaving in my wake. Sure, there were a couple of posts of naked dudes with erections. Many of my Twitter friends—and I choose the word <em>friends</em> here with deliberation—are sex workers. If I’m proud of someone with whom I have a relationship, I’ll spread the word about their accomplishments. Doesn’t matter to me if it’s an academic presenting a talk, a writer with a new article out, or yes, a sex worker promoting erotic videos or a website. </p>
<p>Overall, though? The amount of male nudity on my timeline that day was pretty minimal. Compared to the amount of shitposting I do on Twitter—tweets about campy movies I watch, links to my blog, comments about music I listen to, or reconstructed dialogs I’d had with my dad, or those bizarre conversations I have on the apps in which men approach me with unfathomable rudeness or ignorance—the number of nudes were insignificant. One had to scroll and scroll back weeks’ worth of microblogging to find even one.</p>
<p>At the time, I was confused anyone might feel my cheeky little Twitter profile merited the same neon yellow CAUTION! tape, hazmat suits, and flashing sirens as a nuclear waste spill. And that kind of treatment from gay men? Gay men whose very internet presences were poised on being perceived as thoughtful about LGBTQ culture? It <em>hurt</em>. I didn’t quit listening to their podcast. I was tempted, sure, but I still enjoyed the discussions enough that I thought my life would be the poorer for quitting out of embarrassment and spite. </p>
<p>What happened immediately after, though, is that I caught myself second-guessing everything I posted on Twitter. Was retweeting the glistening torso of my favorite, <a href="https://onlyfans.com/maximus7871" target="_blank">sweet-hearted, smiling Chaturbate model</a> dragging my timeline into the gutter? Would using the word <em>fuck</em> in a post tip the balance of my tweets from an R rating into NC-17? Should I skip all mention of my own past and present sex work altogether, so I didn’t offend the sensibilities of the more sensitive gays?</p>
<p>For about a month, I began overthinking all my social media interactions. Was I being too filthy? Were people going to perceive me as vulgar? Should I remove any old retweets featuring naked flesh? Should I try in the future to be nice and safe?</p>
<p>The moment I found myself contemplating that word, though—<em>safe</em>—I knew I’d stumbled down the wrong path. <em>Safe</em> is not a word I’ve ever wanted associated with my blog, my craft, or my process. I’m always encouraging my writing students to step outside what’s safe. Their work is stronger when they venture into territory that’s uncertain, even scary. Safe is for the timid. Safe is the unlived life, the long nights spent sitting on the sidelines, the uncorked bottle of wine saved for that never-arriving special occasion, the fruit that withers on the vine. <em>Safe</em> has never been anything that inspired me, nor should it appeal to anyone. </p>
<p>Fuck <em>safe</em>. Remember in the Narnia stories, how everyone always says about Aslan that he’s not a tame lion? I’m not a tame lion, either. I don’t want tame lions for students. I want my aspiring writers to <em>roar</em>.</p>
<p>What I am is a pornographer. I chronicle my sexual history. For thirteen years I’ve kept this blog with zero attempts at monetization. I’ve composed hundreds of essays about my erotic experiences, past and present, for the joy of writing and sharing. That’s how I roar. If pressed, I prefer calling my output <em>sexual memoir</em>: my goal has always been to create prose that’s evocative and textured. Fancy literary terms don’t disguise, though, that I write to heighten the senses, to set the blood racing—I write to arouse. </p>
<p>There’s a conservative world view in which any book containing sexual acts is porn and therefore deserving condemnation, if not outright consignment to a bonfire. Whether written by Nobel Prize Award-Winning author Toni Morrison or by some unknown in the sticky pages of a titty magazine doesn’t matter. Filth is filth. Under that eye, I <em>am</em> that toxic spill of nuclear waste. I’m dangerous to one and all. I’m a moral threat.</p>
<p>Yeah. I write about fucking. I am a pornographer. And you know what? I think you should be a fuckin’ pornographer, like me. Here’s why.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>1. Writing Pornography Makes You Better at Sex</strong></p>
<p>Writing about sex requires a specific skill set, whether you’re writing sexual memoir, crafting literary erotica, or tapping out dirty little crossover stories for your favorite fandom about Spock (the hot <em>Strange New Worlds</em> incarnation, not Nimoy) boinking Bucky Barnes. </p>
<p>At the most fundamental, it’s essential to know the mechanics of sex: how the basic acts play out, how foreplay progresses to greater intimacy, the myriad things people find to do with their parts, what happens (or doesn’t) at climax. You might take for granted that in this age of Pornhub and instantly-downloadable depictions of every sexual depravity known to man, animals, and tentacled aliens, that every adult grasps what fits where. I am here to vouch, however, that you are mistaken. </p>
<p>For the better part of a decade, not that long ago, I was a judge of an annual nationwide contest for the hottest sex scenes in unpublished romance manuscripts. The entries were 100% heterosexual and largely (yet not exclusively) written by women. The contest was a big deal for aspiring writers. Winning guaranteed the author an evaluation by the editor of a major publishing house; their manuscript would avoid the slush piles. </p>
<p>Every year, though, I was astonished by the sheer number of entries that showed a shocking and often comical lack of understanding of both male and female anatomy and the sex act itself. It often was as if the authors had not only never engaged in sex, but had never seen or read simulations of it in media, enjoyed a lecture in sex education, or even known anyone who’d gotten past first base. There’s a whole population of adult women out there under the impression that coitus is when a man kisses a woman with an open mouth—and that such <em>s’embrasser</em> can actually lead to pregnancy. It gets worse. In the wee hours of the morning, I am still haunted by the number of scenes I had to endure in which a heroine accidentally had sex <em>to completion</em> with a Toblerone box she mistakes for the rigid member of her slumbering lover. </p>
<p>(How? I hear you ask. A Toblerone box is triangular, with sharp corners, and bears no resemblance to a human penis at all! Why are a man and woman sleeping in a bed with a candy bar? Wouldn’t it get messy, once all that chocolate began to melt? Who explains the stains to the launderer? Reader, your still-traumatized narrator has no easy answers for you.)</p>
<p>But I digress. Writing about sex requires understanding the chemistry of attraction, the ways in which people gaze upon each other, the ways in which their breathing changes as they move close, how they touch and undress and merge. Writing about sex requires knowing its rhythms and having proficiency in its intimacies, being aware of its comical pitfalls and of the potential disappointments a skilled lover strives to avoid. </p>
<p>Knowing what makes a scene erotic, then elevating it above mere mechanics and into something special, heightens the writer’s perceptions and insights. Those color one’s bedroom adventures. Writing about sex makes one aware that every encounter isn’t merely a discrete occurrence or misdeed. Fucking is not something disconnected from the everyday, to be shoved in a hidden cubbyhole. Sex is the merging of two (or more) people’s stories—stories that began long before the rendezvous and continue past it into the future. Time spent with someone else is the ultimate act of authorial collaboration.</p>
<p>Realizing those things, and honoring them in writing, has made me a better lover. It’s given me insight into what motivates many men, and into how, together, we might fulfill our desires and fantasies. It’s made me more forgiving of fault in others—too forgiving, sometimes. Exploring my older stories has helped me to honor parts of my past I used to find overwhelming or shameful, and to recognize what still makes me vulnerable or frightened. And it’s left me with little patience for men who refuse to search themselves or to grow.</p>
<p>Of course, these points are all a subset of an ideal I uphold to all my writing students at the beginning of any given semester: that being aware and observant of the world makes one both a better writer and a better person in general. It’s something I’ve always believed. However, as even the briefest perusal of the literary biographies at your local library will prove, plenty of authors are <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2019/06/stranger-than-fiction.html" target="_blank">terrible people who use and spit out the ones closest to them</a>. I’m often not a prize to be around, myself. But I believe writing—and yes, writing pornography—to be a valuable tool for personal growth.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>2. Writing Good Pornography Sets the Example for Your Audience</strong></p>
<p>Allow me to discuss, for a moment, the obverse of my previous point. </p>
<p>I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember when pornography was an event. It was planned on the calendar. It took place at a destination to which one traveled. In the olden days, porn wasn’t something pulled up on a smartphone while sitting on the toilet at work. (I’m referring to the early days of porn films, not daguerreotypes with brazen hussies hoisting bustles to reveal their stockings. I’m not that old.) </p>
<p>It was in the early 1970s when my mom applied her lipstick and dabbed herself with Chanel No. 5 while my dad donned his best sports jacket and a clean work shirt for a Friday night out at the movies. The theater was the Biograph, a newly opened art house near the campus where they taught; the movie was the pornographic <em>The Devil in Miss Jones</em>. Yes, once upon a time, pornography was shown in mainstream places to nice middle-class married couples who would dress up to attend. They’d hire babysitters, perhaps have a nice dinner out beforehand, and make a night of it. Once at the sold-out theater, they’d sit quietly with their hands resting on the arms of their seats, observe the widescreen images of people fucking, eat their popcorn, then presumably head home to do something about those uncomfortably tight clothes.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0KK8Ye-tF1ZQHnET7WIwmcm4WSKZ9FQa0KtQbQntPIJm1O-SY4GMEtaFPV02mT4Twa89mwYtxZJdFMPQ9sV4tE7mZRRWl8mAUBVQ5e6wUAljFg6L9LFzzfWKK_-mAsbI_6Mf7dwE7yIEExP-zJT7z2_meLE0DGsFZ2eDlW3T-MWpnGQqFhXFqu-lcw/s1000/515w3Ms5fmL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0KK8Ye-tF1ZQHnET7WIwmcm4WSKZ9FQa0KtQbQntPIJm1O-SY4GMEtaFPV02mT4Twa89mwYtxZJdFMPQ9sV4tE7mZRRWl8mAUBVQ5e6wUAljFg6L9LFzzfWKK_-mAsbI_6Mf7dwE7yIEExP-zJT7z2_meLE0DGsFZ2eDlW3T-MWpnGQqFhXFqu-lcw/s320/515w3Ms5fmL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>I saw the ticket stubs for <em>The Devil in Miss Jones</em> on my mom’s dresser the next day. Even as a kid, I instantly knew what it was. Pornography was openly discussed in the seventies. New titles were infrequent and well publicized. People swapped opinions on <em>I Am Curious, Yellow</em> and <em>The Opening of Misty Beethoven</em> over meatloaf and spring peas at polite dinner parties. Late-night comedians fashioned monologues around the latest pornographic release, then men and women would repeat their best jokes around the water cooler. Comics like <em>Mad Magazine</em>, though their audience skewed heavily to teens and pre-adolescents, made frequent, uncensored references to <em>Deep Throat</em>.</p>
<p>Not everyone would see these films, of course, in the same way not everyone flocked to see <em>Herbie, the Love Bug</em>. Attending an X-rated movie was perceived as hip and chic, though most still regarded the genre as dirty. For a good decade, if nice couples desired to view pornography, they would do so in front of other nice people, in nice venues, in nice dress-up clothes and with their pants pulled up and the fly zipped shut.</p>
<p>Pornography didn’t become anyone’s filthy secret until the 1980s, when the volume of cheap porn flicks exploded and what had been mainstream entertainment transformed into sticky cassettes that lurked in the home VCR. I was firmly in my twenties before I saw my first porn flick—a William Higgins film with a dubious soundtrack I selected from a dirty printed catalog that appeared in my graduate school apartment mailbox. To purchase the tape, I had to write a check, send it through the U.S. Mail, then wait six weeks a plain brown package to be delivered. And wow. Was I convinced that transaction was a privilege and a convenience!</p>
<p>I cannot exaggerate how much sex changed, once adult movies could be (more or less) easily purchased via mail order, or rented for private viewing from behind a beige curtain at a mom and pop video store. I’m not referring merely to the frequency one might masturbate to the stuff—though taped porn and the technologies that succeeded it have spawned generations of young people who cannot conceive of self-pleasure without a movie playing. No, what changed were the very acts themselves. </p>
<p>For example: despite having a wildly active sex life during my teens and early twenties, and despite having been a sex worker during that time with hundreds of clients, never once did anyone attempt any rimming. I remember shouting, “Whoa! WHOA!” the first time someone flipped me over and started licking my butt in the late eighties. It was so <em>outré</em> and unimagined an act that I panicked.</p>
<p>“Relax,” said the guy performing this debauched new undertaking on my quivering hole. “I saw it in a porno.”</p>
<p>Now, I’m not saying that prior to 1987, nobody had ever attempted anilingus. My experience tells me that it wasn’t common, however, until we started seeing it on our VCRs. Porn educates its audience. Douching before anal sex was neither widely performed nor expected until 80s films showed us acres of sparkling clean California Blond butts, or until bottom porn stars started sharing their preparation tips. Watersports and double penetration? In my experience, rare before home porn, but much more common after. Straight men wanting women to do butt stuff? You can bet it’s because they’ve seen it in a video. The many straight men these days wanting women to do butt stuff to <em>them</em>? You know know their browser search history contains multiple variations on <em>pornhub milf pegging scenes</em>. </p>
<p>For better or worse, a society’s porn consumption educates and broadens its desires—and you have the opportunity, as a responsible and thoughtful pornographer, to contribute to the tone. Do you want to advertise your sexual hypnotism fetish and normalize it as an outlet for play? Here’s your chance to create a series of hypnotism stories so erotic and compelling that they’ll make a lasting impression on readers encountering it for the first time. What’s your kink? Alien cocoons? Nasty <em>Friends</em> roleplay? Fingerpainting a naked body? As long as it’s between consenting adults, enjoy the fuck out of it and share that love with others. They’ll respond. Think of how much better all those erotic chapter contest submissions would have been, had the writers been inspired by your amazing written or filmed pornography, rather than by Toblerone ads.</p>
<p>I’ve always maintained what I hope is a clear ethic in my erotic writing. I believe it’s important for individuals to explore and enjoy their sexuality. I believe in respecting my partners and their fantasies and in creating a safe space in which they might enact them. I believe in the importance of educating oneself about risk and behaving responsibly when mistakes happens. I believe in making the best with what I’ve been given, of saying yes to opportunities, of opening myself to the bounty the universe presents. I don’t wedge all those themes into every individual essay, but regular blog readers recognize my themes.</p>
<p>Often, my beliefs strike a chord with my audience. If I had a dime for every reader who, over the last thirteen years, told me I’ve changed the ways they think of and approach sex, or who’s slid into my DMs to thank me for helping them learn to say yes to opportunity—well. I don’t want to exaggerate. I’d have enough money for a couple of meals at Taco Bell. But it wouldn’t be a cheap burrito from the value menu. Oh, no. It would at <em>least</em> cover that Mexican Pizza combo, god damn it.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>3. Writing Pornography Pisses Off All the Best People</strong></p>
<p>Writing truthfully and honestly about sex and sexual culture, and particularly about queer sex, is one of the most dangerous things a person can do these days. By sharing your work—whether online, or through traditional publishing, or through social media—you are inviting anyone, <em>anyone</em>, to fling your way hurtful comments on your sexual tastes and preferences. Are you a young man in his twenties primarily attracted to daddies? Be prepared to have unknown commenters question your perverted desires and to recommend therapy, prison, or worse. Are you writing sensitive essays involving consensual scenarios of dominance, perhaps with physical, financial, or racial components? It’s best to brace yourself for comments about how sick are your partners and how vile you are for indulging them. Are you writing with flowery euphemisms about the sweet, vanilla sessions of kissing and hand jobs in which you engage with your legally wedded husband? More power to you, but it doesn’t matter. Haters are still going to pop out of woodwork to call you a groomer.</p>
<p>We survive in a culture in which the extreme right wing that doesn’t want the word <em>gay </em>spoken aloud at all. The LGBTQ population lives in fear, in many of my country’s fifty states. They have ample reason. Right-wing rhetoric has stirred up countless hate crimes. Twitter itself has become a cesspool of untrammeled conservative hatred, worse every day, laser-focused upon anyone perceived as vulnerable.</p>
<p>And when you, the artist, write pornography, when you create art from your life and your experiences and do so with sincerity and the desire to share, you are making yourself vulnerable. I have always considered that willingness to be vulnerable, that risky leap of faith an artist takes in releasing his work into the world, as the sweetest of gifts. It’s a beautiful thing, trusting strangers to witness art in its fledgling state, and to have that audience respond to your gift of vulnerability in kind, with generosity of spirit. </p>
<p>It’s soul-crushing when bad actors with worse intentions dogpile upon you to assert their own destructive impulses—particularly when they’re online trolls looking to score invisible points with oligarchs who don’t give a shit.</p>
<p>Don’t expect much of a better reception from many on the left. Your pornography will arouse hand-wringing and concern trolling. <em>If you talk about sex, the other side will think that’s all we’re about! Why can’t you keep things family friendly? </em> I know for a fact that you—yes, you—are acquainted with liberal LGBTQ folk who recoil in horror from drag queens or discussions of trans rights, or who think that men in harnesses, jocks, and chaps are too racy, too <em>much</em> for a big-city Pride event. Sure, a lot of those people might have an alt or a Grindr account where they post naughty photos from the neck down, yet won’t show face or admit to slutting around when no one’s looking. Being honest about their sexual life and desire? It’s not <em>safe</em>. </p>
<p>Hell, even some allegedly progressive gay guys like those podcast hosts, intelligent and articulate as they might be, don’t want to admit that gay men engage in, you know…gay sex. They talk about a gay topic to probably a mostly-gay audience, yet react in abject horror to a fairly mild Twitter feed with a bare modicum of full-frontal male nudity. </p>
<p>As an artist confronted with anger and disgust, you might start editing yourself bit by bit. Like I did for a while, after being called out on that podcast, you can second-guess every word that flows from your brain. You can censor your own work, chip away at your authenticity truth after tiny truth in an attempt to make your art as unobjectionable as possible. Know, though, that every compromise you make, every tiny concession to your invisible enemies, will begin to obstruct your creative flow until one day, it may not flow at all. What you create in the meantime won’t resemble your real, fearless self. It will be a cramped and sorry simulacrum, a duplication sent through the copier too many times until it’s unrecognizable. It might be more innocuous. It won’t be you. </p>
<p>Yet the process of playing it safe and murdering your very soul, frankly, will not win you any converts. It won’t lessen the foaming mouths from the right, nor will it remove the doubts of the tut-tutting left. If an outright masterpiece like <em>The Color Purple</em> can be banned as pornographic, editing a couple of cocks from your sketches or your stories has a snowball’s chance in hell to escape censure. </p>
<p>Don’t be a tame lion. Write to piss off anyone frightened of adult sexual content. Write to make your mommy and daddy cry. Be faithful to your experiences. Nothing created from a stance of integrity is shameful. Do not allow yourself to be shamed.</p>
<p><em>Roar.</em></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>4. Pornography Is an Act of Historical Preservation</strong></p>
<p>No work of art—and I’m including artful pornography in my sweeping statement—is utterly divorced from its time. As someone who writes sexual memoir, I can look back on my body of work and see trends across broad eras. Pre-PrEP vs. the wild explosion of sexual energy after gay men widely started taking Truvada. The carefree social days before 2020 vs. the post-pandemic landscape. It’s wild, looking back on my Twitter feed around the time of the monkeypox epidemic—was it really only last year?—and I was tweeting out like crazy resources and databases for men in the New York City area seeking inoculations.</p>
<p>I spent the better part of two years adapting essays from my blog into full-length memoir that focuses on my teen years as a sex worker during the 1970s. I was really struck, both while doing the research and later while trying to find a new literary agent for this beautifully-written and fucked-up work of art (Hi…still looking for someone unafraid of the subject matter! If you know of an LGBTQ-friendly agent or publisher who’d be interested, slip them my digits, would you?) how uniformly shocked my contemporaries were over how casually and successfully I got into hustling in a decade tucked between Stonewall and HIV. But they shouldn’t be. There’s a reason movies got made with Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields as 12-year-old sex workers in 1976’s <em>Taxi Driver, </em>and 1978’s <em>Pretty Baby</em>. Teen sex work was rampant and ignored in that weird era. Everyone’s darling, Eve Plumb, was selling her body in <em>Dawn, Portrait of a Teenage Runaway</em>, which then spawned <em>Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn</em>, a sequel about her bisexual, teen male counterpart. And these last two movies were made for prime-time TV!</p>
<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEgwGoRU_-yjuXbVKfgv_hxGoRBzuSdkh2sEpMWaniSGACfnxiyWIHC5SSCucZGgFb4pZYtr-Dz9pZ4ciwWd1xUXfHmNAsR3zjxTK7uGh2Af37wzNJx2DoYwmBlTbR4zZsp-BohdGbLGY7eNLjPKcVgGFev3u3pTrA5q7uelBtf_yr2ecfoeouPlAqYA/s540/5VfgXNnKDkGfmWkOzibS04t0uy8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="360" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEgwGoRU_-yjuXbVKfgv_hxGoRBzuSdkh2sEpMWaniSGACfnxiyWIHC5SSCucZGgFb4pZYtr-Dz9pZ4ciwWd1xUXfHmNAsR3zjxTK7uGh2Af37wzNJx2DoYwmBlTbR4zZsp-BohdGbLGY7eNLjPKcVgGFev3u3pTrA5q7uelBtf_yr2ecfoeouPlAqYA/s320/5VfgXNnKDkGfmWkOzibS04t0uy8.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br />Now, no school guidance counselors in the seventies were advising sex work as a worthwhile career. Parents weren’t saying, “Why can’t you hit the streets, like that nice Jan Brady?” Things weren’t that lackadaisical. But it’s wild, the difference between the swinging seventies and this post-Epstein era. Teen sex work would now never be portrayed with such nonchalance. Nor, as in <em>Pretty Baby,</em> would it be so unwisely romanticized<em>. </em>The work I put into my memoir, uncovering a decade both remote and unfathomable, often felt more like archaeology than writing. I wasn’t striving to defend the customs of that lost era, mind you. But I did work to capture its nuances and unspoken rules, so that others might understand how kids like me could’ve slipped through the cracks.<p></p>
<p>Every time you craft pornography, you too write as a historian, chronicling the world around you. You’re possibly an anthropologist, recording the cruising spots of your locale, their customs, their clientele. You might be a sociological expert on the dwindling bar culture of today, or the ephemeral customs and rituals of apps like Grindr and Scruff. Or you could take the perspective of a reporter, encapsulating the angst and terror of a gay man living in a red state, or who documents the sexual mores of lesser-known underground movements, like that of competitive leather or a polycule making its own rules. </p>
<p>Even wholly-imagined stories that are way out there speak of our contemporary obsessions. Whether you’re creating fiction or memoir, every tale reflects the time in which it was written.</p>
<p>The simple fact is: we don’t know what’s coming down the road. When I turned 17, the AIDS epidemic descended to decimate the entire tapestry of tearooms, park cruising, and street hustling that had been the only gay fellowship I’d known. I’d foolishly thought that world would last forever. It was never to return. Queer bars might vanish in the next ten years, the very same way. That red state could turn blue. Twitter has had the joy squeezed from it for a long time, and now has devolved into X; similar advances in technology and the companies behind it could render the apps a quaint footnote in future LGBTQ e-textbooks. </p>
<p>“Grindr?” some young future scholar will say, thinking the spelling is a misprint. “What the nanofuck was that?” Then he’ll clear his VR desktop with a blink and twitch his nose to fire up Pervertigo 3000, the latest visual cortex overlay that automatically scans nearby male DNA, extrapolates and projects probable penile length, filters anything less than 20.32 centimeters, and places a red highlight on an eligible subject’s crotch, while displaying all the naked simulated holofantasies his subjects have neural uplinked with the tetraweb.</p>
<p>Help that young scholar, pornographers. Write all the nasty stories about your Grindr hookups that you can, so he can finish his dissertation. Now, while you’ve still got time.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>5. Pornography Is Great at Getting People Off</strong></p>
<p>You might even say that’s its primary purpose. The best way to celebrate sex is to share it. When you write an especially steamy story, you’re quickening your reader’s heartbeat. Making skin prickle with sweat. You’re increasing the blood flow to private parts. Causing things to twitch and swell. Maximizing moisture.</p>
<p>Your words, artfully arranged, have the power to persuade your reader to reach down, to unzip, to thrust upwards, to grab what needs attention, to squeeze and pulse and rub. The images you paint will elicit gasps and moans. Hips will gyrate; nipples will ache and beg for attention. Your reader will close his eyes—but then force them open once again because he needs to continue reading. You have snared someone with mere words, and he will follow where you lead. </p>
<p>If you’re lucky, if you’re skillful, you’ll coax him toward a precipice from which he will not shy. Nearer, you’ll inch. With greater speed, his mind will race. He’ll time his strokes to your words, stepping closer and closer until over the edge he plummets, body shaking, semen pouring from his red and stubborn cock. This stranger, someone you have never met or seen, will thrash and rasp and pant to your words. Eventually, as his climax recedes, he will laugh at himself and at the shock of the pleasure you have brought him.</p>
<p>Now, pornography does not have to arouse. It can dumbfound, or disturb, or make its audience chuckle or cry. It can convey multitudes. But I ask you: is there anything more gratifying that bringing someone that pleasure?</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I say the following to my students, every semester. Every written word—every work of art—is a declaration of war.</p>
<p>An artist does not stoop to half measures. He writes to stake his claim, to make a stance. To conquer. To persuade. To sway both hearts and minds. Some writers are so skillful they evangelize rivals into followers. Others seek only to lay waste to their foes. </p>
<p>There are all manner of wars. Many are loud and bombastic, sounding of drums and cannon. Other hostilities are settled more stealthily, through the sly insinuation, the gentle innuendo, the poison pill. Some commanders wheedle; some flatter and humor their adversaries into submission. </p>
<p>Make no mistake, though: every artist writes to win.</p>
<p>Pornography can be a weapon in your war. If it is composed from a place of truth and experience, if it is deliberate in its aim, pornography illuminates. Its brilliant light throws into sharp relief what the sanctimonious most fear about themselves; it spotlights hypocrisy and blinds those who would not recognize its virtues. In the hands of an artist, pornography is an incendiary, ready to explode targets of religious and political oppression. </p>
<p>No wonder it frightens those accustomed to staying safe. </p>
<p>This is why I write pornography. Not because it’s easy. Not for fame or quick cash. I write pornography because sexuality is our gift from the universe. I write because it’s important to record, to preserve, to teach, to anger, to arouse. I make pornography, because pornography matters. </p>
<p>And that’s why I think you should make pornography, too.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-69345988048755418892023-08-14T10:34:00.003-04:002023-08-14T10:34:58.977-04:00Three and a Quarter Boxes<p><b><i>A note from the author: This essay is neither sexual nor administrative in nature. I won't be offended if, based on that information, you decline to read it. </i></b></p><p><b><i>I've been going through a lot with my father, lately, and this last month it's culminated into a crisis. Writing about it helps alleviate my anxiety. If you do take the time to read the piece, thank you, and know that I'm well, and coping.</i></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHRPwLtycXet0H4RNykjkw3kiOc1Jota3bHvcidlKW-5C_kQs1O-8AnSdMPN_qrzwakUaBIBLpx_utju3RsBLMkTb78ZtDEALjt4JW_hxpnMgj0-l1TKrjbtGrF1bqeGEKeajaf-Qf-FAdJks8iK55lCORnbLkC_DM8vy8N-LEuC8ggTR5nCZB2r1SMQ/s259/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHRPwLtycXet0H4RNykjkw3kiOc1Jota3bHvcidlKW-5C_kQs1O-8AnSdMPN_qrzwakUaBIBLpx_utju3RsBLMkTb78ZtDEALjt4JW_hxpnMgj0-l1TKrjbtGrF1bqeGEKeajaf-Qf-FAdJks8iK55lCORnbLkC_DM8vy8N-LEuC8ggTR5nCZB2r1SMQ/s1600/images.jpeg" width="259" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>My elderly father’s home holds thousands of books. Many were my late mother’s; she was an avid reader who collected paperback mysteries, Georgette Heyer romances, Holocaust memoirs, and editions on natural history by the score, who picked up old copies of Dickens and Austen and all her favorite British authors from library used book sales. She squirreled away her treasures two or three stacks deep in her bookcases, packed so densely they had to be extracted with delicacy, like sticks from a Jenga tower, lest the contents detonate. My father’s library is at least as extensive, though it’s mostly composed of dry, historical volumes about the Revolutionary War. His volumes occupy bookcases of their own—hefty, heavy, hand-crafted creations of oak that stretch from floor to ceiling.</p>
<p>Decades ago, when he retired, thousands more editions that had occupied his academic office came home to roost in my childhood bedroom. On a visit, I managed to persuade him to donate two or three hundred back to the university. Stunned archivists watched in horror as I single-handedly unloaded box after box of the dusty, super-specialized tomes onto their loading dock. Former students and a couple of specialized libraries have taken a few more off his hands. But his floors still bow from the weight of the combined library that remains, stacked and packed in their high, high piles in every case, on every table, on chairs and tables and dressers and in corners, alike. </p>
<p>Over the decades, I’ve begged my father to divest himself of more, but he’s always dismissed the notion. Our family loves books, he tells me. We never throw them away.</p>
<p>And out of all these books, these thousands of heavy, uncatalogued constructions made of cheap pulp or fine linen stock, of ink, of glue and cardboard and fabric, my father has chosen to salvage less than a dozen—his collection of Horatio Hornblower novels, from his boyhood. When I pry them from the shelf where for years they’ve been moldering for half a century, I become apprehensive at the creaking noises made by the living room wall into which it’s built. At the end of <em>Little Dorrit, </em>a neglected house collapses upon itself. I can so easily see that happening here.</p>
<p>Lined them against the bottom of this small cardboard box, the Forester novels seem like a meager selection. “Are you sure there aren’t any other books you want to take, when you move? Or are you not reading any more?”</p>
<p>“I can read,” snaps my father, from where he lies on the living room sofa. “My cam reads for me.” His vision is so poor and uncorrectable that he nearly qualifies as legally blind; he owns a device that takes a photo of a printed page and reads it aloud in a robotic voice. But no, he doesn’t read, not often. Mostly he watches movies on his iPad, held at the tip of his nose, or listens to the endless stream of Trump indictment news that plays on MSNBC. “I’m allowed to take what I like with me, you know.”</p>
<p>“I agree.” My tone is conciliatory. My father has decided—conceded, really—to agree with my sister’s insistence he move into her home. As fiercely as he desires his independence, it’s obvious that he cannot live on his own any longer. Although he was ambulatory in March after I nursed him through his strokes, he’s deteriorated since. “I think you absolutely should take whatever your heart desires. That’s why I’m trying to make sure these are the only books you want, out of—” I wave my arms, indicating the enormity of the house and its contents.</p>
<p>We have spent the last few hours taking an inventory of his possessions, in order to decide what should go with him. Not an easy task: my father is a hoarder. Not only of books, but anything else his Depression-childhood brain thinks might be of use. He has never thrown away a plastic cat sand tub, for example. As they empty, he fills them with water and stores them in the basement, in case of…I don’t know what. Drought? Famine? Nuclear war? During his hospitalization, I divested the kitchen of the literal hundreds of glass salsa and peanut butter jars he’d accumulated over the years, as well as stacks of plastic trays, several feet high, from Le Menu frozen meals from the 1980s. He buys cat food by the case and keeps it piled on what once was a piano; the dining room table is mostly taken up by three non-operational microwave ovens with which he can’t bear to part. </p>
<p>Every time I open a cupboard, out spill hundreds—literal hundreds!—of old margarine tubs and their plastic lids, warped with time. Baggies everywhere are stuffed with thousands of twist-ties so old that their paper has rotted away and the wire beneath corroded. It’s impossible to access his flatware because the drawer in which it lies is packed with plastic forks and spoons from decades of takeout, never thrown away, but lovingly hand-washed and stockpiled for an oncoming cutlery emergency. Dirty packets of ketchup and soy and duck sauce, cloudy with age, occupy their own shelf in what’s supposed to be a china cabinet.</p>
<p>He won’t throw out anything, even it doesn’t work. An old electric can opener that he received as a wedding present when Kennedy was President hasn’t functioned since Ford was in office, but it makes a fine stand for the 4-decade-old ceramic mugs packed with dried-out felt-tip pens he can’t bring himself to discard. I seriously upset him on this trip when I reclaim for recycling a first-generation, 13-year-old original iPad. It no longer works, mind you, but placed crosswise atop a metal trash can next to his bed, it’s a perfect little table for his nighttime cup of Pepsi. When I haul an actual little table from another part of the house to his bedside instead, he decides to use it as his upstairs walker, though it’s unstable and low and in no way designed to support his considerable weight.</p>
<p>The house is stuffed with <em>stuff</em>. I’ve made attempts in the past to spring clean, to expunge all the items in his pantry with expiration dates from the mid-1990s, to divest him of the twist-ties and Tostitos salsa jars and the foil trays from ancient TV dinners, to trash the stacks of Halloween candy bought, but never distributed, that have aggregated on the table by the front door for nigh on thirty years. Months later, somehow it’s all returned, or been replaced. My dad abhors a vacuum more than nature ever might.</p>
<p>It saddens me that, after an adult lifetime of accumulation, of amassing so much trivial and unused junk, of outwitting calamity by caching hundreds of gallons of stale water in his basement, that this old and frail man is suddenly willing to walk away from it all, carrying only a small suitcase of clothing and three—three and a quarter, now—small cardboard boxes. All he wants to take with him to my sister’s house are his most recent tax returns, his diplomas, a winter coat, a few framed photographs of his parents and of my mother, the Horatio Hornblowers, and his cats’ rabies certificates. How fucking sad is that? I look around the living room, trying to find something else that might be of meaning. “What about your book?” I finally ask, inspired.</p>
<p>“You packed the only books I want.”</p>
<p>“What about <em>your</em> book, though?” In the late eighties, my father produced his only academic monograph, a product of deep research into an obscure area of colonial history. When I google it today, the title only elicits a handful of citations before trailing off into unrelated websites. “The book you wrote.”</p>
<p>“Of <em>course</em> I want my book!” he thunders. “Why would you try to take away my book?”</p>
<p>“I’m not trying to take away your book!” I point out, affronted. I’ve already put a shrink-wrapped copy into the box. The slender volume barely adds any weight. “Just now, I suggested you take it.”</p>
<p>“I want my book!” He grumbles to himself. “You’d understand, if you had written any books of your own.”</p>
<p>I have to seal my lips shut, so that I don’t betray how deeply he’s wounded me. In better times, he might have remembered I’ve had sixteen novels published. </p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Earlier this year, after a week in the hospital’s neurology wing and then two more in a rehab hospital, my dad’s healthcare network set up a month’s worth of regular home visits from clinicians. One was a handsome male nurse who’d show up several times a week to check his blood pressure and other vitals. Another was the physical therapist who assigned him exercises to regain full mobility. A third was an occupational therapist who recommended home changes and made sure he could do the tasks necessary to take care of himself. If he followed their recommendations, they all told him, he’d surely make a full recovery, and have even more mobility than before the event.</p>
<p> After a full week of home visits, I took my father to a follow-up appointment with his general practitioner. “So,” said the doctor, a white, silver-haired older man like my father. “How’re you doing?”</p>
<p>Immediately my father began complaining. “I’d be a hell of a lot better if you gave me tips to get these god-damned therapists off my back.”</p>
<p>The doctor looked at him and replied, “How about you be nice to them and do what they ask?”</p>
<p>I knew that wasn’t going to happen. My father doesn’t just neglect his health—he rolls his eyes, says what he thinks the professionals want to hear, then promptly discards all their advice. He’d spent that entire month being the worst patient in every way imaginable. In the hospital, he threw actual screaming, kicking tantrums with his team of multiple doctors when they gave him news he didn’t like or refused to release him. He never understood that the staff were attempting to navigate him back to independence. Instead, he felt they were inconveniencing him, keeping him from the nest of filth and decay where he wanted to curl up and spend the rest of his days. </p>
<p>There was a point toward the end of my month-long stay with him it hit home that despite all the expense, all the exercises, all the schedules and his promises of change, all this gargantuan effort on his behalf, none of it was going to take. The occupational therapist had visited one afternoon to point out rug after little rug that needed to be removed. Each posed a walking hazard to an old man with a cane. Most of these rugs were former bathmats and even U-shaped toilet rugs with which my father couldn’t bear to part. Their fuzzy surfaces threadbare and so ancient that the rubber backings had disintegrated into dust, dozens covered every bare expanse of wood. A score more, hanging in a thick pile like a horde of trapper’s furs, lay over a second-floor banister. </p>
<p>So, trying to be a good son who didn’t want his father to slip on a rug and give himself a concussion on a pile of microwave ovens, I’d collected all the rugs, wheezing as each released its grime and must. I was heading to toss them in the trash in his alley when he barked, “Don’t throw those out!”</p>
<p>“Why?” I wanted to know.</p>
<p>“They’re perfectly good rugs!”</p>
<p>They’re not good rugs at all. “They pose a hazard,” I reminded him. “Your occupational therapist told you to remove them.”</p>
<p>“Well, once she’s out of here, I’m putting ‘em back!” he said.</p>
<p>That’s the moment I realized he wasn’t taking seriously any of what had happened. The rugs would be spirited away from the eagle eye of the OT, but only for as long as she visited. It wasn’t just these stupid little throw rugs, though. It was everything. The exercises that I’d carefully recorded for him in his own words, to ensure he’d be able to understand what he needed to do—he intended to disregard them. The talking blood pressure machine his doctor insisted he purchase and run twice daily, and which I’d made so simple for him to use—it would molder away beneath a layer of dust and discarded plastic bags. </p>
<p>Once I left, he was going to abandon the simple-as-pie system I’d instituted for getting rid of expired foods. He’d only use the dual pillbox system the rehab nurses had insisted upon until my back was turned, and then he’d go back to twisting lids and scrabbling for pills from the chaos of bottles, old and new, overflowing the upstairs hallway. I’d bought new sheets and blankets for his bed to replace the 40-year-old grimy tatters I found him sleeping upon—and I’d thrown those out—but once I was gone, he’d decree they were too fancy for every-night use, hide them away in the linen cupboard, and replace them with something worn and uncomfortable and long past its prime. I’d bought him a whole new wardrobe of easy-to-wear clothing, warm and clean with elastic waistbands, and shoes that he could slip on without having to fumble with laces—but although he claimed to love them, in my absence he’d be pulling on the same decrepit professorwear he’s worn since the 1960s with the tattered hems, the fabric ridden with holes and pee stains, the fussy buttons he no longer can navigate.</p>
<p>Despite surviving a life-changing event that could have left him disabled or dead, my father, the professor, had learned nothing. None of it had sunk in. He had zero intention of making any significant changes to his life. That’s what seemed suddenly so clear, as he defied me to take those stupid rugs to the trash. All the work I’d done that previous month, all the backbreaking labor, the worry, the consultations, the phone calls, the trips to hardware and medical supply stores, the entire nauseating afternoon it had taken to clean from his refrigerator foods so expired they had fossilized. I’d done it out of duty and love, but he didn’t give a fuck. I’d only wasted my time. </p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>A little earlier that March, the day my father came home from the rehabilitation hospital, I made a sweep through the house to clear up some of the most egregious downstairs trash. To be frank, I didn’t want the at-home nurse to arrive and stagger at the sight of all the deterioration and hoarding, then instantly call social services. So I grabbed several plastic grocery bags from his collection of thousands and made a circuit around the living room. </p>
<p>Gone, the dozens of wadded-up used Kleenex lying on every surface that ‘still have one more blow’ in them. Into the bags, all the used Q-tips set onto the mantel and end tables that ‘could still be useful.’ Charities mail my dad all kinds of crap as an enticement to giving. From these vultures, he’d collected on his coffee table no less than forty-two free manicure sets—the flimsy miniature kind suitable for giving the residents of a dollhouse a nail trim, not fit for human use—and set them out for display. I left him one and cleared off the rest. From the bookcases I snatched his piles of old wall calendars, many of which date back to the seventies (“You can reuse them again when the right year rolls around, you know!”) and the sacks filled with empty prescription bottles. </p>
<p>The real scourge of the charities are the return address labels. They’re cheap to make and send, and my father has never discarded a single one. The thick packets of peel-and-stick labels portray gentle scenes of winter snow and spring meadows, of fauns frolicking among wildflowers, of nighttime city skylines and jolly holiday figures. Thousands upon thousands of these return address labels can be found in every room of my father’s house. In the living room alone, I collect enough from the TV stand and the entertainment center (why have one when you can have both, in my father’s opinion), the coffee table, the sofa, both chairs, the bookcases, and from the interior of a carpeted cat tower. They filled no less than five supermarket bags. </p>
<p>I was heading through the kitchen on my way out to the trash can when my dad grabbed one of the bags from my hands. “Who said you could throw anything away?” I explained that I was trying to clean up before his nurse arrived, but he erupted angrily, “<em>You are throwing my life in the trash!</em>”</p>
<p>This, more than any other experience of the previous month, galvanized me into an ice-cold rage. “You know,” I intoned in the clipped, perfect diction I adopt only when furious. “Many people your age might look at their children and see what capable and competent adults they’ve become and consider that a life well spent. Others might reflect upon their career and personal accomplishments or upon their happy memories and consider <em>those</em> their life. If you think—” and here I brandished one of the bag beneath his face and shook it. “If you think that <em>five trash bags</em> filled with <em>cheap manicure sets</em> and <em>eleven thousand return address labels</em> are <em>your life</em>, then I say you’ve had a <em>pretty fucking lousy life</em>. How about you think about the things that matter, from now on, and be happy those aren’t being taken away from you?” Then I stomped out to the alley, slamming the door behind me.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Five months after that confrontation, I’m standing in my dad’s living room, having stowed everything he wants to take to my sister’s. In a few weeks, if all goes to plan, a hired crew will invade the house and do a complete cleanout of everything under the roof. There’s nothing here that I want. I’ll pack up what photographs my dad leaves behind, but I won’t be taking home anything else. Save for that small suitcase of clothing and the three-and-a-quarter boxes I’ve collected for him, my dad is simply walking away from everything he’s spent a lifetime hoarding.</p>
<p>So what’s been his end game, then? What’s been the point of hiding what was once a comfortable and welcoming home beneath layers of trash? Was it an attempt at being economical? It’s going to cost us thousands to discard these shambles he leaves behind. Was it a grand intention to repurpose things? Because the broken-down furniture and unwearable clothing donated, the junk trashed, the cat jugs emptied of their old water and tossed in a dumpster. Those thousands of books will probably end in a landfill, somewhere. Such a waste. </p>
<p>Throughout my young adulthood, my dad always harped on about how I needed to buy a home, how real estate was the best investment I’d ever make. Surely, though, he has to understand that simply buying a house isn’t enough. Owning it isn’t sufficient. That investment has to be maintained and updated and taken care of. Issues need to be addressed before they become problems; problems needs the attention of experts before they become disasters. </p><p>Whether for his home or his health, he’s done none of these things. I wonder if he suspected, last March, that those five bags of return address labels were just a harbinger of what was to come. </p><p><br /></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-89888211074524593532023-07-11T09:20:00.005-04:002023-07-11T09:57:06.201-04:00Bachelor Night<p><strong>July 2023</strong></p>
<p>It’s late and I’m sitting on my front porch after dark.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-k6i1pAVN4PK5L-Gsd9BEAh-iLaUSwPMYm9-1C3LOXpYNPaTDzT0VbwowxfbR5P0Rui3irL0i4Ift3bgA7PMK_XPpHutcxQt0QLQNhLzJ3ODM7I98wBNAroiiTj2yuzgUjp5GaFGTDj_kY12t4pmrl4BSPLV6npL_0c2h3rRs9rw2aNO8xnJ9AQAyhg/s540/360_F_207567302_tknjAI7WcVCVo5cRHyTqMu5D4gVjRtNB.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="540" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-k6i1pAVN4PK5L-Gsd9BEAh-iLaUSwPMYm9-1C3LOXpYNPaTDzT0VbwowxfbR5P0Rui3irL0i4Ift3bgA7PMK_XPpHutcxQt0QLQNhLzJ3ODM7I98wBNAroiiTj2yuzgUjp5GaFGTDj_kY12t4pmrl4BSPLV6npL_0c2h3rRs9rw2aNO8xnJ9AQAyhg/s320/360_F_207567302_tknjAI7WcVCVo5cRHyTqMu5D4gVjRtNB.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>The porch is my warm weather retreat. A massive blue spruce obscures the left side of the house; a dogwood and liberal plantings of shrubbery block the other. A dining table where I eat all my warm weather meals occupies one end; the rest is covered with comfortable chairs and loungers. Mornings, the cats bask in what sunlight streams in from the east. Summer afternoons, I’ll sprawl across one of the cushioned recliners, Kindle in hand and cool drink on a coaster, to read for long, lazy hours. Hot nights like this, long after the sun has set and the street’s traffic dwindled to only the occasional car, the nearest streetlight is over a block away, and the neighbors have long gone to sleep. Darkness covers me like a blanket. It’s one of those rare nights I’m a bachelor, and I’m looking to connect.</p>
<p><em>You look real close</em>, says the guy on Grindr. <em>Only 800 feet</em>. </p>
<p><em>That’s close all right</em>. He’s probably up the street, past the intersection a couple of blocks away and up past the wooded area to the north. There’s a city park near my home where men cruise sometimes. Late at night, they sit in the parking lot and blink their headlights at each other, hoping someone will join them in their cars. <em>I’m sitting on my front porch, stroking. You should stop by.</em></p>
<p>The guy’s Grindr photos are pretty attractive, actually. He seems to be in his mid-thirties and sports the build of a former college athlete; his handsome face beams in a welcoming way. He looks like one of those married, closeted dads that litter my stretch of suburbia. <em>What’d you have in mind? </em>he asks. <em>Would love to suck that big dick.</em></p>
<p><em>I live on a very dark street, </em>I tap out, cock swelling beneath my terrycloth shorts. <em>Drive on down, park in front of my house, then join me on the front porch. </em>It’s a sexy scenario, right? No one can see on my front porch during the day, much less when darkness enshrouds the neighborhood. It’s better than the park. Fewer mosquitos on a screened porch, for one thing.</p>
<p><em>It’s real dark huh</em>. <em>I like the sound of that. Is your wife/bf/family home and are they gonna interrupt us?</em></p>
<p>I assure him, <em>No one’s home. I just want to keep it to the porch. You coming by?</em></p>
<p><em>Yeah,</em> he says. <em>Especially with you so close. I need to suck. Address?</em> I give it to him. Street number, street name, zip code even. <em>All right then.</em></p>
<p>I figure I’ve got about five minutes before he’ll pull up. A man can get a lot done in five minutes. I rush inside to rinse and spit with mouthwash, then grab a cock ring and a towel. I turn off all the lights. I shut and lock the front door behind me as I step onto the porch again—no sense in not taking precautions—and I hide my keys in a lantern on the table. Then, heart pounding with excitement, I settle down on a chair and wait.</p>
<p>And I wait.</p>
<p>And wait.</p>
<p>Okay, so I’m being ghosted, I guess. I check back at the time stamps of our conversation. His <em>all right then</em> had arrived at 11:15. It’s now 11:42. Not quite a half hour, but almost. To <em>walk</em> from my house to the park only takes a brisk ten minutes. I mean, if he’d found someone to blink their headlights at him immediately after we’d exchanged messages and he’d decided to climb in to that guy’s Toyota instead, fine, whatever. At least he could’ve told me. At the same time, I’m unwilling simply to hang it up: the guy’s got my address. If I go indoors and to bed and he decides to come banging at the door, it’ll cause a ruckus I’d rather avoid. So I stare at my phone a little longer, feeling tired and vexed.</p>
<p>It’s 11:50 when he messages. <em>I’m at the address you gave me but it’s an apartment building and it doesn’t have a porch and all the lights are on and I don’t know what apartment you’re in.</em></p>
<p>What the actual fuck, dude.</p>
<p><em>You are not at the address I gave you</em>, I tell him. It never occurs to me to cut my losses, to be grateful that this stranger thinks I live in some strange apartment building, But I’m angry now, and I don’t think straight when my dander is up. </p>
<p>He replies back with an address that’s similar to mine, but isn’t mine. The street number is correct. The one-word street name is correct. Instead of an <em>avenue</em>, however, he’s on a <em>lane</em>. I live on the <em>avenue</em>. And the address on the <i>lane</i> to which he’s navigated, I see when I quickly map it on my phone, is <em>fourteen miles away</em>.</p>
<p>Now I’m fuming. <em>Did you not notice</em>, I ask him with what I think is commendable restraint<em>, that instead of driving 800 feet from the park that you were driving 14 miles?</em></p>
<p><em>I just kind of plugged it in to the gps and drove. I feel kind of stupid now I guess</em>.</p>
<p>Kind of stupid? <em>Kind of</em>? I mean, sure, it’s easy to type a partial address into your phone and get the wrong location. But how obtuse does one have to be not to a difference between 800 feet and 14 miles? How dense does one have to be not to question the disparity? Do I really want to get a blow job from anyone that witless?<em> Hey, let’s just call it a night then. No hard feelings</em>, I say, lying about the ‘no hard feelings’ part.</p>
<p><em>It’s cool. I’m already on the way. Be there in 20</em>.</p>
<p>Fuck.</p>
<p>Once again I’m stuck sitting on a wicker divan, legs crossed at the knee, mouth in an angry moue, staring at my phone in the dark for long, silent minutes. At last, nearly a half-hour later, I see a car pull slowly in front of the house. The motor idles a moment more. My phone buzzes with a Grindr message. <em>Should I park in front or what</em>.</p>
<p>I’ve already told the fucker to park in front, over an hour ago. <em>Just park where you are and get the fuck up here already, asshole</em>, I type out. Before I send, however, I deleted everything but the first five words.</p>
<p>This is when I get the second shock of the night. The guy heaving himself up my front walk is not an athletic man in his thirties. No, he’s a guy in his fifties or sixties who’s approaching 300 pounds. Even in the dark I can tell he no longer looks a thing like whatever twenty-year-old photos he’s using.</p>
<p>I’m not one of those guys with hard and fast rules about the types of men I meet. I enjoy big guys. I enjoy older dudes. What I don’t like, though, are guys who misrepresent themselves so egregiously. This guy is wheezing like he’s about to have a coronary as he hauls himself up my front steps, “Whew!” he says loudly. “Sure is dark here!”</p>
<p>I shush him. It’s a dark street, yes. I’d like to keep it that way, without neighbors flipping on porch lamps at his braying. “You know,” I say, trying to sound reasonable. “It’s late…”</p>
<p>“Yeah, sorry about the mixup. Could happen to anyone, though.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s quite true, but I let it pass. “Maybe we should just…”</p>
<p>Now that he’s on the porch and the door’s shut behind him, he feels free to grab at my crotch. My dick’s only half-hard, but it stiffens under the pressure. “Here’s what I came for. Any chance we can turn on the lights?”</p>
<p>I feel nothing but contempt for the man. “If we turn on the lights,” I point out, “Everyone will be able to see us.”</p>
<p>“Oh. But you said you don’t have any neighbors.”</p>
<p>“I <em>never </em>said I don’t have neighbors.” It’s true that the lots on either side of mine are empty, but I gesture to the houses across the street. “It’s <em>obvious</em> I have neighbors.”</p>
<p>“All right, all right,” the man says in the placating tones of someone who recognizes a snarling dog when he sees it. “How about we go…” He nods towards the front door.</p>
<p>“No.” Absolutely not.</p>
<p>“Guess I’ll just have to do it here, then,” he says, as if that hadn’t been the deal from the start. He lowers my pants around my ankles and kneels.</p>
<p>I’m in a rotten mood by now and aware that I should have sent him home before he’d maneuvered his way onto the porch, but whatever. His mouth is on my cock and it seems that letting him go at it is probably the easiest way to get rid of him. I resent the fact he’ll take away the message that he can get away with catfishing guys like me, using decades-old photos of himself on his Grindr profile. But I don’t want him making a scene. Keeping him quiet with a mouthful of my dick seems the simplest answer to all my problems.</p>
<p>The blowjob, though, is substandard. C minus at best. There’s too much teeth. He tries to get away with wrapping his fist around the shaft and fellating only the top couple of inches, but I’m not having any of that. I sit on the divan, spread my legs, and try to enjoy the paltry amount of pleasure he’s meting out, but ugh. I hate the fact that I’m having sex with this man just to get rid of him. My anger at last takes over.</p>
<p>I stand up and pull my dick from his mouth, then beat it. He thinks he’s excited me. “Yeah baby,” he whispers. “I knew you’d like my wet mouth. You gonna cum for me?” I try to ignore his talk as he clings onto my thighs. “Load up my mouth.”</p>
<p>I consider faking it—dark as it is, I could probably get away with some grunts and groans and then pretending I’d shot all over the porch floor—but in the end I finally shoot a load. It doesn’t feel great, but it’s a release, I guess. The seed falls into my cupped hand. I wipe it off on the towel and with both hands haul the guy to his feet. His mouth dives for mine, but I jerk back and escort him to the screen door. “Thanks buddy.”</p>
<p>“But…that’s it? Don’t you want to fuck my ass?”</p>
<p>Ugh. No. “Hope you get home safe.” I steer him through the door and put his hand on the rail, so he can navigate the steps.</p>
<p>“I thought we could…”</p>
<p>Whatever he thinks, I no longer care. I shut the screen door. He turns and huffs and puffs his way down the walk. I wait until I see his lights move away, down the dark street, before I retrieve my keys and let myself into the house.</p>
<p>After a shower, I plop into bed. There’s a badge on my Grindr app. I open it up to see a message from the guy. <em>Is that really all you wanted? I was hoping we could be fuckbuddies.</em></p>
<p>I allow the message to remain unanswered. I will never be fuckbuddies with this guy. Tomorrow, I’ll fire up the app once more and hit the block button. After that, I’ll think twice, on a bachelor night, before inviting anyone for a round of anonymous dark room sex on my front porch.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-76046842783503170662023-05-12T08:40:00.014-04:002023-08-14T23:08:02.140-04:00The Realest Real<p><strong>February 2023</strong></p>
<p>“Yes. Please. Like that.” </p>
<p>The kid skims along the twin mattress with serpentine motion, back arched, lean hips raised. Scant fuzz below his navel grazes the rumpled sheets. In this artificial twilight born of blackout shades and drapes drawn tight, his pale skin gives off its own faint luminescence, like foxfire on a summer’s evening. My outstretched fingers, long and thin, wrench apart the globes of his ass as I thrust inside. His hole is tight. So damned tight. It grips my shaft as I slide, back and forth.</p>
<p>“Make it swell, daddy.” I clamp down on my pelvic floor. The alteration in girth makes him groan. His head lolls back; a shaggy fringe of dark, straight hair tickles the top of his shoulders. Inside him I thrust deep. Another squeeze, to force more blood into the shaft. His chest collapses onto the bed, alarming the already creaking bedsprings. “Oh god.” The light tenor of his voice is muffled by pillows and bedclothes. “I’m gonna shoot, dad. Can I shoot? Please let me shoot, daddy.”</p>
<p>I reach down and swat away his greedy hand from his cock. This is dad’s job. Dad’s privilege, even. I spit in my hand and wrap it around the boy’s meat from behind. His shaved balls mount and surround my wrist as I spread the slick fluid up and down the shaft. His howls of pleasure redouble in the confines of the tiny room. </p>
<p>“I love you, dad.” As he convulses, his eyes open to look into mine. “I love you so much.” I nod at him, unblinking, connected by our locked stare. His face softens, overcome with emotion. “Oh god. I love you. I love you.” It doesn’t take long before he’s contorting at my grip. A few twists of the wrist, a few vigorous strokes, and he’s spraying his load. Anchored by my dick deep in his butt and my hand at the base of his spine, he buckles and thrashes as shot after shot of warm, sticky stuff cascades into my scooped fingers. The kid is loud. It’s a good thing no one else is home, or they’d be battering down the bedroom door. </p>
<p>At long last, he subsides. It seems a shame to wipe his semen onto the sheets, and more of a pity to let it go to waste. So I pull out and slap the goo onto my engorged cock. The sound echos with a wet smack. Then I shove it back in. He knows what I’m doing; his hips shove back to meet me as I drill his hole. I fuck like I’m holding a grudge, like I want to punish instead of praise. I fuck like I don’t care what bruises I raise upon either of us. It’s not long before I, too, fill his little room with a roar.</p>
<p>Afterward, we’re both drowsing in the dark, me on my back, him cuddled up and nuzzling my armpit, when he looks at his watch. “I’ve got class in a half hour.”</p>
<p>“I know,” I mumble. Three days we’ve met, now, during our lunchtimes. I’m well aware of his midday schedule.</p>
<p>“Mind if I shower?” He bounds up from the bed with sudden feline vitality, making me feel every single minute of the—god—four decades exactly that lie between us. All I have the energy to do is wave my hands and shoo him toward the little bathroom at one end of his untidy quarters. There’s a full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door; the kid doesn’t seem to know that from my angle on the bed, I can see everything he does inside. I watch as he cups, then slaps his round little butt so that the flesh jiggles. I see the mighty grin on his face when he probes his hole and discovers how wet are his fingertips, when he brings them away. I admire his slender body as he opens the shower stall and turns on the water. </p>
<p>While he waits for the hot water to arrive, he inspects his upper lip in the mirror over the sink, a scenario reflected once again for me upon the door, as he grooms the micro-mustache that grows there. Baby’s first facial hair. It’s really no more than the most featherweight trimming of dark peach fuzz, perilously clinging to the ridge above his lip, barely visible beyond arm’s length. I find endearing the care he takes in smoothing it down, though, after the wrangling our mouths have enjoyed. Pleased with what he sees, he backs away from the mirror and bounces on the balls of his feet, arms outstretched, bobbing and swaying as—left-right, left-right, left-right-<em>left—</em>he punches at the air. For a silent minute he boxes with an invisible opponent, eyes on himself in the sink mirror, his little cock springing up and down. Finally he grins in the glass, chucks himself softly on the chin, and disappears behind the shower door.</p>
<p>This is how I hope to remember the kid: lively and unselfconscious, happy with what he sees in himself.</p>
<p>In the bathroom, the sounds of water cease; there’s a near-silence once the kid turns off the overhead fan. That’s my cue to haul myself up to a sitting position and fumble for my clothing. I’m pulling on a sock when he he tackles me, his skin still damp, the sopping towel falling from his narrow waist onto the jumble of athletic footwear at the bed’s foot. “Don’t go,” he teases, butting his wet hair against my shoulder. </p>
<p>He’s so cute, this boy. I plant a kiss on the top of his head, and am rewarded by his shy smile. He crosses his skinny legs and leans into me. “Don’t go.”</p>
<p>“I have to go. <em>You</em> have to go.” I wrap my arms around him. “You’ve got class in…” I check my watch. “Twenty minutes.”</p>
<p>“I can be late.”</p>
<p>“You’re <em>going</em>,” I insist, returning to the sock that hangs halfway up my foot. “I’ve got to get back to my dad.”</p>
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<p>I’ve met the kid three lunches in a row, now, ever since he hit me up on Grindr the day after my dad entered rehab. I consider it something of a miracle my dad’s in the rehab facility at all, when I consider the tantrums he threw at St. Mary’s. For two solid days, my father ranted and raved and cursed at the world, insisting to his doctors that he would never go to rehab and that instead, I would run through physical therapy exercises with him. I would shook my head and informed the same professionals that no, I would not. In the hospital, he made himself so unpleasant that I took to withdrawing from the room whenever I could, and lingering as long as possible in the cafeteria for my meals. </p>
<p>Logical appeals didn’t seem to sway him. The prospect of 24/7 medical supervision, or physical therapy close at hand, the proximity of the rehab facility to St. Mary’s in case of an emergency or another stroke—none of that matters. What seems to change his mind, over the long weekend, is when the hospitalist begins comparing a visit to a rehab hospital like a mini-vacation or a spa stay. He’d have his own room, larger than what he occupied on St. Mary’s neurology floor. He wouldn’t be hooked up to any machines. When he wasn’t in therapy, he could relax in his room and watch TV or listen to music or read or use his tablet. (“You mean I’d have to sit in a lounge around a single TV with a bunch of crazy old sick people,” my dad complained, ignoring the fact he was one of those crabby old sick people. “No,” said the hospitalist, baffled. “Why would you think that?”) </p>
<p>What turned the tide completely was when the doctor added, “The food there is much better than here.”</p>
<p>For some reason, my dad enjoys the hospital food. No, he fucking <em>loves</em> it. He thinks it’s top-notch, lip-smackin’, gourmet shit. Never mind that when I, a pretty great home cook, had whipped up many a delectable dinner for him back in 2020 during his radiation therapy, he’d turned up his nose at my hearty stews and delicious dinners. Pour some Campbell’s chicken noodle in a cup, give him a slice of institutional meatloaf with a watery gravy, throw some succotash on the plate, top it off with a sealed plastic tub of vanilla pudding and serve it on a tray with plastic utensil, though, and the man is in hog heaven. The St. Mary’s meals make my stomach turn, but when my dad hears that the rehab hospital’s meals—three a day plus snacks, delivered to his bed hot from the kitchen—are even better, well. He meekly, perhaps even avidly, accedes to a transfer the next day.</p>
<p>And I have to admit, the rehab is experience is incredibly more relaxing. The facility itself is a one-level sprawl shaded by old oaks that’s older, but cheerful and easy to navigate. My dad’s private room is bigger than my living room and kitchen combined, back home. The staff is uniformly upbeat, friendly, and professional. I commit to memory every single one of their names, so I can use it when thanking them. We spend the first afternoon engaging in an activity that my father will talk about with fond relish for weeks after: filling out a week’s worth of menu requests. For an hour and a half I read out the menu choices for each upcoming meal while my dad considers big-picture questions like, what juice would he prefer with his breakfast on Thursday, tomato, orange, grapefruit, or apple? What should accompany his chicken cutlet, that night, macaroni and cheese? Or mashed potatoes? He smacks his lips over each culinary decision while the nurses bring him applesauce. </p>
<p>He is living like a king.</p>
<p>It’s the second day of his tenure that I snort a little, sitting at his bedside. “What’s your on phone?” my dad asks.</p>
<p>“Your hot nurse is on Grindr,” I tell him. Said hot nurse is a mere 35 feet away.</p>
<p>“What’s Grindr?”</p>
<p>We’ve discussed Grindr before, but my dad’s brain has little retention for anything that isn’t interesting to him. “It’s an app gay men use for sexual partners. You fire it up and see who’s nearby.”</p>
<p>He peers at me. “Which hot nurse? Laura? Or the one who takes me to the bathroom?”</p>
<p>“Molly,” I remind him. “Why would Laura and Molly, both women, be on an app for gay men? No, it’s Lance, the blue-eyed one who runs the gym.”</p>
<p>“He’s hot?” My dad seems baffled at the idea. </p>
<p>“With those shoulders and pecs?” I whistle. “Good lord, yes.”</p>
<p>“You and I have very different definitions of hot,” he grumbles.</p>
<p>I flip through the photos. “His profile says he’s into cruising, edging, and group.”</p>
<p>“Hedging!” My dad snorts with derision. “Absolutely not. Find someone who’s more decisive.”</p>
<p>I peer over the top of my phone, trying to decide whether or not he’s shitting me. A message pops up. It is not, sadly, from the nurse with the pecs and shoulders. <em>Looking, sir?</em> </p>
<p>I don’t interact with blank profiles. It’s an exercise in diminishing returns. Mr. Looking, however, immediately provides a photo, taken in the full-length mirror on his bathroom door. He’s a young guy of 19 or 20, slender, his chicken legs speckled with sparse, wiry fur, his chest smooth, his face nearly covered by a mop of shoulder-length, dark, lank hair. Even though he’s nude in the shot, even though he’s turned sideways in the shot to show off the surprising roundness of his butt and the silhouette of his hanging dick, there’s something in the serious intent of his expression that makes him seem, well, shy. It’s a quality I find irresistible. He’s only five hundred feet away.</p>
<p><em>I’m looking for either lunchtimes or after 6, if you can host,</em> I tell the kid.</p>
<p><em>Lunchtimes are great!</em> he replies. <em>My folks are home after 5:30 nights but you can come over today at lunch if you want.</em></p>
<p>I look over at my dad, who is holding his tablet up to his nose so that he can watch a noisy YouTube video of trains slowly traversing a crossing, somewhere in Nebraska. <em>I definitely want</em>. <em>Send me an address.</em></p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>A block and a half from the rehab hospital, the kid and I sit side by side on his twin bed, the room dark and quiet. His personal space is a contrast to the bright tidiness of the rooms I had to pass through to get here. His family living room looks blandly stylish, like an Ashley Furniture showcase. The kid’s bedroom, though, is plainly the space of someone who’s never had to look after himself. It’s not squalid. It doesn’t stink. Shoes lie in an unsorted pile at the foot of his bed, though, kicked off and tossed to lie where they tumble. The closet lies open; it’s difficult to tell where the hamper of dirty clothing ends and the piles of possibly clean garments begin. The walls are painted a deep blue and covered with posters, half with anime with which I’m unfamiliar, half with promotional posters for old Final Fantasy games. It’s definitely the quarters of an adolescent, or post-adolescent, boy.</p>
<p>He’s nervous, now that I’m here. Trembling, even. I’m aware I should be making the first move. Young men reach out to me because they assume a certain level of sexual mastery—they want a masculine dad type as a guide, one who know what to do and say, every step of the way. Normally, that’s a role I willingly play. With this skinny kid that I’ve just met, though, I’m less certain. He’s an attractive boy. I mean, that mop of messy hair is something that gets me every time, right in the gut and groin. Those pretty eyes, those big wide eyes, those <em>serious</em> eyes, as they stare sidelong my way. Shit. From the photo he sent I have an idea what lies beneath that oversized tee, beneath those baggy skater shorts. If he were sent to central casting right as he is now, he’d be starring as the sensitive and artistic best friend of some female college freshman no doubt played by a former Disney star. Or—and it unsettles me as I consider it—throw a hoodie over his head and paint circles beneath his eyes, as the tortured loner prodded into a school shooting. </p>
<p>No, don’t think about that. Fuckin’ Gen Z’ers. So difficult to work with, what with their puritanical views of sex. Even during the worst years of the AIDS crisis I’d never seen anyone as afraid of sex as these young whippersnappers. I’d lay a hand on him now, but he’s vibrating like a fawn that’s spotted a hunter, eyes wide, unsure which way to bolt. Fuck. Maybe this was a mistake.</p>
<p>His long, naked toes wriggle against the loop pile of his bedroom rug. I clear my throat and place a consoling palm in the middle of the kid’s back. “Look,” is all I say.</p>
<p>Then he lunges. His fingers encircle my skull; with hunger, he pulls my face to his and engulfs me in a kiss. His mouth tastes sweet, like bubble gum. Once he’s pulled me atop him, once he feels my weight pressing down upon his slender frame, he sighs happily as we kiss. His hands dive beneath my tee while his legs curl around my hips, locking me close. </p>
<p>All right then. Way to go, Gen Z.</p>
<p>We knock each other about to find comfortable positions on the narrow mattress. Piece by piece, our clothing arcs through the air and lands upon the mountain of sneakers on the floor. My beard abrades his skin, drawing satisfying gasps. His lips search for far-flung parts of my body while I poke and prod his soft flesh. “Please,” he breathes, when I clutch and squeeze one of his pert little buttocks. That breathing turns to rasps when I sit him squarely on my face. </p>
<p>I’m about to plunge inside him for the first time when he puts a hand on my chest to stop me. For a moment we remain still, captured in what must look like some advanced couples yoga posed with a name like The Wheelbarrow or The Farmer and His Plow. He looks up the slant of his body into my eyes, above him. “Let me say I love you, when you fuck me?” My lips part, surprised. “You don’t have to say it back,” he says in haste, afraid he’s gone too far. “I’m not gonna be a freak about it or anything. I won’t stalk you. I just…I just…”</p>
<p>My voice is level as I finish his sentence for him. “You just need to be able to say it to someone.” </p>
<p>He nods, almost ashamed I can read his mind. “Is it okay?” For answer, I keep my eyes upon his while I spit once more into my hand and rub it onto his already-slick hole. Then, slowly, gently, sweetly, I slide myself inside him, inch by inch. The kid’s lips part. His eyes become lidded once more. “I love you, dad,” he says in a tentative whisper, when I reach bottom.</p>
<p>“I didn’t hear you, son.”</p>
<p>He understands the permission I’m giving him. “I love you, sir.” Now his voice is louder, more confident. “I love you. I love you so much.”</p>
<p>I nod, understanding. It’s very okay. They’re words I need to hear.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>This raggedy college kid couldn’t have chosen better. Not because I know how to lift those bony legs into the air and spread them wide as my eyes bore into his. Not because years of instinct tell me where to touch, where to kiss, the exact moment I need to reach down and brush the hair from his face, nor because I know when and how to speak, and when—as now—to stay silent. No, he’s selected well because this week, this trip, I am in need of kindness, no matter how cosmetic.</p>
<p>I have been so lonely, these last two weeks. I’m a bottomless well, echoing, dry, its stones on the verge of collapse. All my energy I’ve poured into hospital visits and doctor consultations and making certain my dad has what he needs, into getting his home ready for his eventual return. A couple of random one-time sexual encounters don’t balance the terrible desolation I feel, the unhappiness that keeps me awake at night. </p>
<p>It doesn’t help that all through this ordeal, from home to hospital to rehab, my father hasn’t once acknowledged all I’m doing. He takes my back-breaking efforts for granted. That alone is fine—he can, and should, assume I’ll be there when he needs. But fuck, would it ever be nice to hear a <em>thank you</em> from his lips. <em>Thank you for helping me through this mess. Thank you for taking notes. Thank you for remembering and explaining my complex medical history to every new caregiver we encounter. Thank you for checking my wrinkly balls for yeast because I’m too shy to let a female nurse do it.</em></p>
<p>Loneliness has stretched me thin and made me unrecognizable, even to myself. An attractive boy saying he loves me during our most intimate moments is a temporary anodyne I welcome.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Day after day, lunch after lunch, he always smiles as I grow closer to letting loose inside him. His head on the pillow, his eyes looking up into mine. The sweat on our faces, stinging my eyes and gluing together our foreheads. He is so hungry as his legs pull me against him and his lips purse for more kisses. “I love you,” he tells me. I should say something in reply. I owe him that. Once I open my mouth, though, he shakes his head. “Nah. Don’t.” </p>
<p>“But you need to know…” I want to tell him how much it means, to feel a little less lonely. I want him to know how beautiful he is, and how much I enjoy our lunches together. I want to say…</p>
<p>“I know.” He prunes short my sentence with another kiss. “I wish it was real, though. I wish you didn’t have to go back home. I wish you could stay and…”</p>
<p>Whatever else he wishes I cut short with a thrust. His sweet-talk excites me. “Does this feel real?” I ask, jaw set. </p>
<p>He grunts from the impact. “Yes. Fuck, yes.”</p>
<p>“It <i>is</i> real.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” Once again, he begins to smile. His eyes puddle with satisfaction “It’s the realest real.”</p>
<p>“Then enjoy it. Dad's orders.” I lean down to cover his mouth with my own.</p>
<p>We lock into a clinch that neither of us releases until I’ve emptied myself deep inside. Throughout, he whispers three words, over and over. They soothe me. They lull me into a post-coital drowsiness, into which we curl beneath his sheet, big and little spoon. My beard nuzzles his shoulder. “Just because something is temporary doesn’t mean it’s not real,” I whisper. </p>
<p>His ribcage rumbles, content. When he turns his head to look at me over his shoulder, his long hair flops into my face. “I love you, daddy,” he says, one final time, as he drifts into a brief nap. Soon, we both must return to our lives. For now, we have each other.</p>
<p>My fingers riffle through his long locks. Stroke his head. I pull him close. <em>Dream on</em>, I think with affection as I watch him slumber. <em>Dream on, kid.</em> Then I wrap my arms around his chest to protect him, as I lie awake before colossal shadows.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-1499914692172029462023-05-01T08:40:00.006-04:002023-05-01T13:16:44.549-04:00Room 208<p><strong>February 2023</strong></p>
<p>Since my arrival in Virginia, I’ve been averaging about five hours a night of slumber. I know because I wear my watch as a sleep tracker. Mornings, my ears ringing from birds screeching before the light of dawn, I’ll blearily look at the tally of my nighttime hours, then groan. I’m used to much more rest than this. Back home, it’s eight hours or I’m a grumpy boy.</p>
<p>When I visit Richmond for non-emergencies, I stay at a hotel rather than my dad’s. He doesn’t understand why I pay good money for a room than sleep for free at his house. A modicum of comfort is worth the cost, I tell him. Since I’m here indefinitely, though, the price of an extended hotel stay would be prohibitive. Plus after my dad comes home from the hospital—he’ll have to come home eventually, right?—I know he’d be more comfortable with me close at hand. So here I lie in my little sister’s old room, where the only clear space is occupied by my open suitcase on the floor—there’s no closet or drawers I can use, and no room for anything, anywhere else. </p>
<p>Part of my sleeping problem is the bed. It’s a twin mattress, half a century old; it was my birthday gift when I was eight. It might have suited my smaller self. Now, my feet hang off the bottom. It’s lumpy. Over the decades, the springs have collapsed. They now droop down on one side, so I have to bolster myself against the wall to avoid rolling onto the floor. Then there’s the room itself, five feet wide by eight feet long. It’s too hot at night, and too cold in the morning; the only twin blankets and sheets my father has are threadbare and older than I. </p>
<p>I’ve been spending my days at the hospital, arriving after breakfast and lingering until past dinner. By the time I get back to my dad’s, it’s dark and I have his cats to feed. His house is in bad shape, so I’ve been tackling bite-sized projects as I can. But exhausted as I am by day’s end, after I turn off the light and wedge myself into a fetal position on a mattress older than either the song “American Pie” or the TV show <em>All in the Family</em>, god help me, all I can do, long past midnight, is toss and turn. My lower back aches in ways handfuls of ibuprofen can’t mend. My eyes won’t close. I masturbate, hoping it might exhaust me, but beating the meat doesn’t do the trick. </p>
<p>Self-pity eventually wears me down, but it never lasts. I’m awake with the birds, bleary, unhappy, worn thin. </p>
<p>This can’t go on forever.</p>
<p>Today has been particularly grueling. Ever since he’s been admitted to the hospital, my dad has been unusually caustic with everyone within earshot, including myself. It’s a change from his usual, laid-back self; I’ve never known my father to say an unkind word to anyone, much less treat someone trying to do their job with contempt and disrespect. But today he’s been argumentative with the nursing and technical staff and even the doctors themselves. </p>
<p>It’s mostly the fault of the cardiologist who visited in the morning. After pronouncing my dad’s heart in good condition, the specialist declared he didn’t need to see any more of him. What the cardiologist meant was that my dad’s two strokes had contributing factors other than his heart. My father decided that <em>I don’t need to see you again</em> means he’s being released. </p>
<p>All day, when the hospital staff visit to perform more tests or to check his vitals, he demands to go home. When friends phone, he tells them he’s being discharged, above my protests. When the hospitalist—the doctor in charge of his case, who receives reports from specialists and makes any final decision—arrives around dinnertime and strongly recommends my dad enter a rehab facility for an unspecified period immediately after the hospital stay, my dad throws an actual tantrum. He screams at the top of his lungs that ‘his doctor’ said he would be discharged. He raves at length about ‘the comforts of home.’ At one point, he looks like he’s searching for something to throw. </p>
<p>After the hospitalist departs, I launch into action. I give my father a hissed, angry lecture about how he is <em>never</em> to speak to another member of the hospital staff in such a manner <em>ever again</em>. He’s behaving like a <em>child</em>. No, in fact, children behave <em>much</em> better than he. I remind him that I’ve been forsaking the comforts of <em>my</em> home in order to see him back to health, so the very least he can do is cooperate, participate in his own recovery, and <em>listen</em> more than he speaks. </p>
<p>I’m so angry that I’m sure sparks are flying from my skin. Once I’m done with my scold, I cool off in the lounge down the hallway, where I call my next-door neighbor back home. She’s a physical therapist who gives me a detailed list of all the ways rehab is more productive than any therapy my dad might do at home.</p>
<p>When I return, list in hand, calmer and ready to discuss with him the prospect of rehab, my father nastily accuses me of sneaking out of the room to conspire with the doctor—to send him away for good, he snaps.</p>
<p>I need a fucking break. </p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>So I’ve rented a hotel room. Just for a night. Just so I can sleep on a mattress that’s not tilting like the <em>Titanic</em>, post-iceberg, or doesn’t feel as if it’s been stuffed with garden trowels. I don’t care that I’m going to be spending less than twelve hours there. I need to sleep. No, I need a <em>good night’s sleep</em>, on a real bed, between sheets with a thread count higher than twenty-five. I want a thermostat that I can control, set at a temperature I choose. I want a room that’s dark and hermetically sealed against the sound of squawking birds at four-thirty in the morning. Going a little out of pocket for a night’s comfort is an indulgence I’ll allow myself. I deserve it.</p>
<p>When I check in, the imperious, effeminate clerk looks at my out-of-state license, then gives my rumpled clothing the once-over before inquiring, in a vaguely Teutonic accent, “Long drive?” It’s a shady comment, as the hotel is only ten minutes from the hospital, but I smile blandly and accept the twin room cards he passes over. To the elevator I stumble, then up to my third-floor room. Inside, in the living room portion of the suite, the TV immediately blinks on. A message welcomes me by name and hopes I enjoy my stay, triggered by either the door or the first-time presence of my room key nearby. I fumble for the remote and switch it off, toss my knapsack onto the sofa, and drag my weary feet to the king-sized bed in the room beyond. </p>
<p>Oh god. This bed is perfect. It’s clean. It’s <em>flat</em>. The pillows aren’t the thickness of pancakes. I fall back onto it with my arms outstretched, breathing a sigh of relief. The room itself smells like nothing. Not like the litter box for my dad’s cats, which for some reason sits directly outside the door of my sister’s bedroom. Not the staleness of a house sealed against outside air like an ancient pharaoh’s tomb. Just simple, air-conditioned neutrality, with only a phantom of disinfectant haunting the darkened bathroom. I arch my back and stretch, eyes closed, blissful, happy for the little luxuries of corporate impersonality.</p>
<p>Then I flick on my phone and open Grindr. Out of curiosity, I tell myself. Despite my weariness, though, I feel something stirring within. Seeking a hookup hadn’t been on my agenda for tonight—but I am what I am, and tonight I have a clean hotel room all to myself. There’s no harm in looking. I’m not surprised, when I check out the app’s grid, to see the desk clerk from downstairs staring back at me. I’d been pretty sure I’d clocked him, checking in. However, his profile very prominently proclaims, <em>NO MEN OVER 40 EVER!!</em> To which I roll my eyes, as that clerk will be hitting forty himself in a couple of years, and that kind of sexual karma has a way of hitting hard. More of immediate interest is the fellow to the left, only 15 feet away. The photo is of a torso, dark and blurry. I’m a little surprised when my phone vibrates and a number appears in the profile’s corner. He’s messaging me.</p>
<p><em>Looks like you’re real close</em>, he says. <em>You at the Fairfield?</em></p>
<p><em>Sure am</em>, I reply.</p>
<p><em>Looking for…?</em></p>
<p>I think. I hadn’t really been looking at all. Honestly, though, would I still be looking at this screen, pondering how to reply, if I weren’t interested? But ugh. I’m so tired. Mentally, I’m wiped. Do I really have the sexual wherewithal to spare for a random stranger? What is it I want, here?</p>
<p>I take a moment, then decide to be candid. My thumbs busily type back, <em>I need to suck some cock. I want someone who needs his dick serviced for as long as it takes. I want to be fed. </em>That’s exactly all I’m fit for, this evening. I don’t want to have to plan some elaborate scenario for a guy who needs me to be his daddy, or his controlling but understanding top man. I don’t have the perception or patience to navigate the tricky stepping stones across a river of consensual non-consent. </p>
<p>I just want to suck. I want a cock in my face and saliva enough to keep it wet and happy. I want a job to do, and a hard dick ready to make me go through with it. I don’t care what the guy looks like, or what he’s packing. My hands tremble as I wait for the guy’s reply. </p>
<p><em>Now?</em> He asks. </p>
<p><em>Now, </em>I say.</p>
<p>Again, I have to wait for a reply. Finally it comes. <em>Room 208.</em></p>
<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOKSQGGsw6pxZXwvPo97XzLIdicYN4LNCVESjtdJA9NU1VHa_oi-3uHHHqxZlHQdvG08gRu1OVVVvHBIwaLN02TuRbttsla36icLY1pH3GsgdtCYJ2O-1pdPqWK_9m8aHfWLF5A_u64mZ06-yX4-kzgo5D2gYc9YsAwjZ4xTUW1XTo9hNxtMXPsU/s500/s-l500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="500" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxOKSQGGsw6pxZXwvPo97XzLIdicYN4LNCVESjtdJA9NU1VHa_oi-3uHHHqxZlHQdvG08gRu1OVVVvHBIwaLN02TuRbttsla36icLY1pH3GsgdtCYJ2O-1pdPqWK_9m8aHfWLF5A_u64mZ06-yX4-kzgo5D2gYc9YsAwjZ4xTUW1XTo9hNxtMXPsU/s320/s-l500.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>
<p>I don’t need more invitation than that. I bound up, spry and alert, as if I’ve already had that fantastic night’s sleep. All my aches and pains evaporate. I shove my room key into my shorts pocket, give my pits a quick sniff—they’ll do—and sprint out the door, down the hall, and to the elevator. Once I’m outside the stranger’s room, I check Grindr to ensure he hasn’t changed his mind. Then I knock.</p>
<p>When the door opens, I’m a little taken aback to face a good-looking Black man wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants. He’s neither tall nor young; I’d guess him to be in his late thirties and barely five-foot-five. I stare at the bare torso that had been dark and blurry in his Grindr photo—well, at least now I understand why it had been so dark. However, I’m baffled why he’s settling for a shot that more resembles a blurry smudge than the lean and sexy man before me. He’s holding his left arm akimbo; I instantly spy a wedding ring glinting above his hip. His right arm is raised high to hold the door open, giving me a moment to blink at his surprisingly hairy armpit, the inky, tight coils that cover his chest, then finally the light beard on his face. His dome is completely shaved. </p>
<p>He’s checking me out as well, looking me up and down, not missing the obvious protrusion beneath the cotton fleece of my shorts. After a moment he grins, drops his arm, and steps aside. “Come on in.”</p>
<p>His room is identical to mine, though in the sitting area, his TV softly plays a repeat of a sitcom I don’t watch. We’re not here for television, though; he leads me to the bed at the suite’s far end. Bedside, he makes a leap into the air, sleek as any cat, to land on the mattress with a bounce on his butt. His lean legs open.</p>
<p>I seize one of his bare feet as I move between them onto the mattress. My other fingers dance up his thigh; before I can lay claim to my prize, though, he takes my right hand between both of his, then presses the palm to his abdomen. Without a word, he slides it upward, toward one of his broad and flat nipples. I squeeze it gently, then harder, judging his reaction by the satisfied slits of his lids. He nods as I move close; when my lips meet the raised circle, darker even than the skin surrounding it, a sigh escapes his lips. </p>
<p>While I gnaw gently at his nipple, I can feel him lifting his hips to lower his sweats. He cups my head to keep my mouth attached to his tit, but his other hand wraps my fingers around his hard cock. It’s firecracker hot to the touch. His clutch tightens around mine, showing me how firmly to squeeze. </p>
<p>I keep up the pressure while he disattatches me from his nipple. Hands on either side of my face, he looks me in the eye. “You a good cocksucker?” His voice is little more than an animal’s growl.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir.” The ferocity of his stare is everything to me. Those dark pools of carnality hypnotize me. My only immediate concern, in this moment, is a need to please the naked stranger. To prove to him that I’m worthy of the pulsing inches in my grasp. </p>
<p>“You want this?” </p>
<p>It’s a rhetorical question. We both know it. I swallow hard to clear my throat, so anxious I am to speak. “Yeah. I want that dick. Please.”</p>
<p>Still he holds my skull between his palms while his eyes bore into mine. “Suck it.” He spits the syllables at me like buckshot. “Suck it good.”</p>
<p>There’s a moment’s mad scramble as he kicks off the sweats from around his ankles and I, still holding onto his meat, press my chest into the mattress between his legs. This is my one chance really to examine what his piece looks like: I study what’s about to occupy my attention for the next few minutes. To memory I commit the image of that thick five and a half inches and the heavy, shaved balls hanging below them. I admire the dark sheath, smooth at the base and wrinkled where he’s pulled back the foreskin. The pinker, tapering head that’s smaller around than the shaft. I don’t care that his dick isn’t as big as my own. Screw that. It belongs to this good-looking stranger, and I’ve volunteered to satisfy. That dick could be a mere three inches and ugly as sin, and I’d still worship it like the prize-winning fuckstick it deserves to be. </p>
<p>His legs spread as I dive down. He’s groaning the moment he feels my hot breath on his balls. I feel warmth both on the back of my head and circling my neck; his hands are pressing me onto that thick, pulsing saber until my lips hit the base. “Fuck yeah,” he says, as I buckle and suppress my gag reflex. “That’s what I need.”</p>
<p>I grunt, eyes watering, as he drives himself deep into my throat. With that kind of determination to penetrate my gullet, it’s a good thing he’s not super long, and even better that his head is smaller in diameter than the rest. It tickles my tonsils as the column of flesh beyond attempts to force open my gorge. His hands push me more deeply onto his concrete firmness and hold me there as he grinds and thrusts. </p>
<p>When at long last he releases his grip and allows me to come up for air, I gasp and open my eyes, staring up at him through my tears with blind adoration. I feel his fingers run through my beard, against the grain, messing it up before he smooths it down again. “Suck that dick,” he orders.</p>
<p>My eyes close once more and I go to work. My thumb and forefinger angle the fat tool to match the trajectory of my lips as they glide back and forth along his length, lingering at both the tip and the base. The rest of my fingers cradle the man’s fat nuts and stroke the smooth skin. I’m glad I memorized the fat cock before I set to work; I can relax and let my mouth and tongue flick and linger over spots I hope he enjoys: the valley between his balls where sac meets shaft, the crevice from which leaks a constant supply of his precum, the tender spots covered by foreskin. </p>
<p>He doles out my reward—all the reward I need—in grunts and groans. Every time he lets out some new feral whimper of pleasure, my own cock hardens. I grind myself against the bed’s corner, feeling my shorts grow even more damp as I self-lubricate. It’s his pleasure that’s my priority. Not my own. I revel in his gasps, in the rumblings deep in his chest, at the air whistling through his nostrils when I do something he particularly likes. My jaw is sore and I’ve lost all sense of time—all consciousness of anything beyond the inches pistoning my stretched lips and aching throat. But this is what I wanted. I’m happy to lose myself in the bliss of service. </p>
<p>It’s a shock when, after how long I don’t know, his palms pry me from his fat dick and pivot my focus to his face. Into my eyes he stares, his pupils flared to their widest. “Sexy white daddy,” he whispers. I don’t know how sexy I can look, in that moment, mesmerized by his tool as I am, slobber all over my beard, lips puffy and wanting more. “Sexy white daddy, suckin’ my dick. You like it?”</p>
<p>“I love it.” I reply without hesitation. Pride and desire battle for precedence in my scratchy voice. “I love your big dick, sir.”</p>
<p>“Damn right you do.” I wish he would let me get back to my work, but he continues searching my eyes. For what, I don’t know. Then, without warning, he pulls me to him and covers my lips with his own. The kiss is shocking in its passion; I haven’t been kissed like this in far too long. His tongue invades my mouth as if he’s trying to root out my very soul; his arms hold me close to his chest as his palm cups the back of my skull. I’m helpless as he turns us over and introduces my back to the mattress. Still he kisses me, his cock driving into my stomach as his hands tug at my waistband. When the kiss ends, I open my lids to see him staring at me again. He rubs his nose against mine. “You’re a pretty man.”</p>
<p>Before I can thank him for the compliment, he’s sat up to complete the job he started. The man rips off my shorts. My phone flops out of my pocket, but he picks it up from the hotel carpet, folds my shorn clothing, and places both it and the device atop the desk at the bed’s foot. </p>
<p>“Shit,” he says, moving back to stand by the bed. “You a <em>big</em> boy.” He seems surprised that I surpass him in the cock department; I’m definitely surprised when he lifts a foot to press against me. The heel connects to my dick’s base, while the sole digs against my shaft. His long toes wriggle against my head, eliciting a snarl of pleasure. “You like that, huh.” I can only nod. He rewards me with another firm shove of his foot against my meat, then stands upright and strides around.</p>
<p>I’m horizontal across the mattress, at this point. From next to the air conditioning unit, he grabs my arms and drags me until my shoulders lie at the bedding’s sharp edge. My head dangles over the edge. I see his plan, now; after he points his hard dick down, my mouth is ready for the re-entry of his cock down my throat. He begins slowly, at first, elbows raised and out and his fingers interlaced at the back of his neck. Then he picks up the pace, leans down and braces himself against the bed to give himself more traction. I aid my own violation by grabbing his ass from below and pulling him into me. I want to be used like this. Use is my purpose, tonight. </p>
<p>He fucks my mouth like pussy, sometimes with such force that I feel sure my chin might bruise. The violence is worth it. All I care about is providing the wettest, softest, most accepting hole for his beautiful uncut dick. I’m sprawled across this stranger’s bed wearing nothing but a t-shirt and sneakers, my dick straining to the ceiling and leaking on my belly, but I don’t give a damn about what it might want in the moment. I can and will take care of myself later. My eyes water so freely that I have to keep my eyes clamped shut out of fear my contacts might float away. Saliva spills from the corners of my lips and runs up my face. My mustache keeps some of it from entering my nostrils, but not all. I scarcely notice my own discomfort, though. So long as the man keeps ramrodding my throat, using my mouth—so long as he’s relishing the sensation of my tongue sliding and clinging to the top side of his beautiful, magical tool—I’ll lie there and provide this man the pleasure he needs.</p>
<p>The pleasure he deserves.</p>
<p>I can tell he’s close when he changes position. Instead of balancing himself on the mattress with his palms, he grabs the sides of my skull to hold it still while plunging in and out. It’s enough to make me choke, but I defer my distress. Now’s not the time to distract him. He plugs my throat once. Twice. A third time. Than a few rabbit-like thrusts. His palms cover my ears, muffling his stream of curses, but I both hear and feel his body-rumbling groan as he unleashes glob after glob of semen into my throat. It burns when he withdraws, slowly, leaving a trail of his cock slime on the roof of my mouth. I get a brief taste of its strong, brackish saltiness before my throat begins to react from the abuse it’s endured these last several minutes. Much as I try to subdue my choking, he’s left the passage raw. I keep it as quiet as possible, but I need a moment to recuperate. </p>
<p>I try to wave him away, but he’s solicitous in his response. Though I’m taller and bigger by far, I find myself scooped up in his arms, then a pillow thrust beneath my head. He curls himself to become my big spoon and pulls me closer. That beautiful dick, now soft and still wet from my mouth, presses against the base of my spine. Soft lips pepper kisses on my neck; one arm holds me tightly while the other squeezes my dick to see if it’s still hard—it is—before roaming over my chest and belly. “That was so gooooood,” he whispers in my ear. “Thank you, baby.”</p>
<p>I sigh and smile, content. His tenderness is an unexpected bonus and I feel selfish for accepting it, but for a while, he shows no signs of stopping. I shiver as his hand travels from hip to shoulder, from beard to nipples, from the mountains of my buttocks to the bristly forest of my head. He hums with contentment as he grinds into me. It doesn’t take long, though, for his motions to slow, then cease altogether. His grip slackens. His breathing becomes slower. </p>
<p>The stranger has fallen asleep.</p>
<p>The only sounds in his dark room are the hum of the air conditioner and the quiet canned laughter on the TV in the other room. It’s with reluctance that I disentangle myself from his grasp. I’m not needed any longer. Across the mattress I slide, careful not to wake the man with any sudden or loud movements. I tug my shorts over my sneakers and shove my phone back into my pocket. With a last glance back at the sleeper, I pad quietly from room 208 with my hands plunged deep in my pockets to conceal the erection that’s been plaguing me for the last—whoa—hour. </p>
<p>Not until I’m back in my own room upstairs do I unleash the beast and pleasure myself. From time to time I’ll wrinkle my lips upward to take deep whiffs of the man’s scent from my mustache; the musk of him is as potent as any poppers. My orgasm, when it arrives, wracks my body and leaves it feeling spent. Covered with sweat and juices, only some of which is my own, I lie in the cool air and allow my lids to sink. </p>
<p>Now, finally, I can sleep.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-67741272927398970602023-03-24T09:14:00.003-04:002023-04-30T07:00:25.681-04:00Traveling Man<p><b>February 2023</b></p>
<p>A block and a half from my dad’s house, on the very street where I grew up, a man waits on his knees almost naked, clad only in a well-worn jock.</p>
<p>For decades, my dad and his next-door neighbors boasted the longest occupancy of anyone in the neighborhood. The elderly sisters who lived in the house adjacent to his, both professors at the HBCU down the street, passed away a decade ago, though, leaving my dad the area’s oldest and most enduring resident. Both he and I still refer to the houses by the names of the owners we knew when we moved there in 1971. I recite them as I walk down the block. The Alexanders lived here, the Duffys beyond, the Beckstoffers further down. It’s been an unusually warm early February, with temperatures in the seventies. With every step, with every bounce of my half-aroused dick in my shorts, I look through the windows of the homes I used to know well. The people living within seem like happy, ordinary families. They’re just not families I know, anymore.</p>
<p>I’m in Virginia on an emergency visit. The day of my birthday, I’d called my father before going out for the evening. He’d sounded strange, weak—disoriented and as if unsure of where or who he was. He’d been on a heavy four-day course of steroids, he gradually told me, prescribed by his physician prior to a couple of hormone-suppressing injections that were to lead up to his second round of radiation therapy for a return of his prostate cancer. He sounded out of it, and never once acknowledged my birthday. He’d been so unable to choose words or complete his sentences that my alarm bells began ringing. I asked him if he could manage for the evening by himself or whether he needed me to call someone. Eventually, he assured me he’d go to bed and lie down, and that he’d call if he needed me.</p>
<p>The next morning, he’d phoned. “I need help,” is all he’d said. I’d packed a week’s worth of things and had been on the road to Virginia within the hour. I’d found him weak, almost unable to stand; during my six-hour drive, he’d revisited his primary care physician, who’d suggested he was dehydrated.</p>
<p>When he wasn’t any better after two days of bed rest and many tumblers of water, I suggested we take him to an urgent care facility for a second opinion. The caregivers there had wanted him to visit an emergency room immediately, to rule out a stroke. After a thirteen-hour stint in St. Mary’s ER, during which various doctors kept saying they didn’t think his symptoms indicated any kind of neurological event, after a very late night MRI, a doctor arrived with results that indicated my dad had suffered two strokes a week before, both in the posterior region. St. Mary’s admitted him at two a.m. the following morning, and here I’ve been, stuck in Virginia for the indefinite future.</p>
<p>Enough of the hospital. My butt has been numbed by hospital chairs for days. If I’m not at the hospital, I’m thinking about the hospital, or about what I’ll have to do for my dad after he gets out of the hospital. I’ve been ungrudging with my care for a week, now. It’s time to be selfish. And right now, all I want to think about is my dick.</p>
<p> I pause to cross the street. One thing about my old neighborhood that’s changed since my childhood: it sure harbors a lot more homosexuals than it used to. The guy I’m heading to visit is a mere eight hundred feet away, but he’s not even the closest man hunting for sex on the apps. There’s HUNGTOP9 somewhere within a five-hundred-foot radius of my dad’s home, and a couple that only plays together who are looking for young and hung, that’s even closer. On Sniffies, I see a dozen shadowy outlines of cocks on avenues where I learned to ride my bike, or photos of pert, upturned asses splayed along streets I’d walk to my piano lessons. I don’t know how long this—what’s the gay counterpart to gentrification?—has been going on, but I’m entirely in favor.</p>
<p>There’s a vibration against my side. My pulse quickens as I read the message on my phone. <em>Bedroom’s at the top of the stairs. I’m ass up for you, Sir.</em> I’m already half-erect in these terrycloth shorts; I’m going to have to spend the rest of the short walk with my hands thrust in my pockets, if I get any harder. Before I darken the screen, another message pops up, punctuated by a devil emoji <em>Just saw your message about the ball gag.</em></p>
<p>My what, now? I break stride, confused for a split-second. Oh, I think. He’s joking. The dude is pretending I’d sent him such a text, so that when I show up and find him kneeling on the mattress, legs spread, I won’t be surprised to see him chomping on the ball gag he rarely gets to bring out. The sexual prop that makes him feel extra slutty. Okay. I can play along. </p>
<p><em>Good thing I definitely sent that</em>, I tap back, one hundred percent sure we’re both on the same page when it comes to playfulness.</p>
<p>My erection—by now at three-quarters mast—is protruding enough to be seen by any cars passing on my dad’s sleepy boulevard, but my phone is vibrating again. I shove my right hand in my pocket and use my fingers to tamp it down, while with the left I navigate my messages. <em>Now that I know what a kinky fucker you are we can have some real fun, </em>it reads. Then, immediately after, <em>I’ve set up a scenario you might like. You’ll see when you get here.</em></p>
<p>So far, I’m pleased with this guy. We’ve never discussed anything kinky. Not as far as I remember. Back in 2020, when I was down here for my dad’s radiation treatments at the pandemic’s scariest period, we’d exchanged a couple of mild messages about how it would’ve been nice to connect, if either of us had been hooking up. Which we weren’t. Periodically since, we’ve exchanged a couple of hellos. But today is the first time we’d both agreed we were mutually horny and available. At the same time, though, I’m intrigued. I like scenarios. Judging by the way it’s attempting to escape the temporary prison of my fingers, my dick seems to like the prospect of a scenario, too.</p>
<p>I look both ways and cross the final street. His house is a two-story colonial on the corner. The yard’s neatly kept, the gardens prepped for spring. Heart thumping, I tread the walkway. When my feet hit the stoop, I see the front door slightly ajar. One key sits in the lock; several others dangle on a ring beneath.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvk-K5bKAKlmjVMEbpDCPyWe_cUlQLgHnBWW5QJj--OVO3MNm-YodeJAjdxj9Z72h8BWTWAhEthOSypliriY0oQBfxIT7w3EFVT0rf7G44h_1-7Ib6MWNGOl-sQtTFRrLfmjaNoanoMP5Apnq9hpoa2FvOf5m9W4PjE_o2I2J7MMENaHPuq9-3Wo/s1024/images6931-5cfa665698ce2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvk-K5bKAKlmjVMEbpDCPyWe_cUlQLgHnBWW5QJj--OVO3MNm-YodeJAjdxj9Z72h8BWTWAhEthOSypliriY0oQBfxIT7w3EFVT0rf7G44h_1-7Ib6MWNGOl-sQtTFRrLfmjaNoanoMP5Apnq9hpoa2FvOf5m9W4PjE_o2I2J7MMENaHPuq9-3Wo/s320/images6931-5cfa665698ce2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p>
<p>I grin. So this is his big scenario. It’s not the first time I’ve encountered men craving a home intruder fantasy. When I pull open the door and step over the threshold, for a moment I’m apprehensive—there’s a big difference between an intruder role-play fantasy versus walking into the wrong home and being mistaken for an actual burglar by a gun-wielding homeowner. </p>
<p>But the layout of his home is just as he said, with carpeted stairs on the left and a sound of stirring beyond the top step. I set the keys onto the glass-topped table, just inside the door, which I shut behind me. He’s left a trail to follow, too. Not breadcrumbs, but pieces of clothing strewn in a path, beginning with shoes and socks, his tie, then a shirt, and ending with a pair of dress trousers tossed in a heap by the bedroom door. </p>
<p>Now that I’ve entered the stranger’s house, I allow my dick to leap free; it’s tenting my shorts at the sight of the man on his bed, face down, ass up, sprawled with his legs wide and a pillow tucked under his head. It’s a super-casual pose that I deduce is supposed to connote, <em>Oh golly, I was so tired from work that I had to shuck off all my clothes except this jockstrap I happened to be wearing and then I just collapsed here on the bed for a quick nap in this super-awkward position that exposes my butthole. </em></p>
<p>It’s a good scenario, all right.</p>
<p>“Well, lookee here,” I say aloud, halfway between a whisper and a snarl. My hands rub together in greedy expectation. “Thought this big ol’ house was empty. You made a mistake, mister, leavin’ those keys in the door so some stranger could come walkin’ right in.” Whenever I’m in Virginia, my Southern drawl tends to creep back; in this situation, it floods loose, loud and confident, making me sound like a bit player from <em>Smokey and the Bandit</em>. I kick off my sneakers. My shorts drop to the floor. “Guess I’ll be takin’ whatever I want.”</p>
<p>My words have the desired effect. The man’s hole gapes and twitches.“What do you want?” he says in a low tone, playing along. The homeowner is a handsome older man. I knew that from the photos on Scruff. He’s one of those fellows for whom photos don’t really do justice, though; the serious mug shot he’s posted on the app doesn’t show the heft of his muscles, nor the ass made round and full by countless squats over the years. Of course, I say he’s older, but I’m his senior by half a decade. He’s the one with the silver hair, though. He’s the one with his ass in the air.</p>
<p>I slap it, causing him to groan with pleasure. “Maybe this is what I want. For starters. Then that pretty mouth of yours.”</p>
<p>It’s not until I’m kneeling on the floor and shoving my face between his cheeks that I remember: didn’t the dude imply he’d be wearing a ball gag? Because I certainly didn’t see one. I’m gnawing at his hole while mentally reviewing my view from just moments before. Jock: yup. Other garments: nope. Ball gag: nuh-uh. Well, I’m not here to fuss about little details. Obviously I’m giving the guy what he wants, judging by the sighs and unsubtle gyrations of his hips. I use my fingernails to scratch ten pink trails down the surface of his ass cheeks, then dig in to pry them further apart.</p>
<p>The man’s hole tastes good. Clean. Ready. When I slide in a thumb, there’s no resistance; his ass is going to spread so easily. I like a loose gape. “Lookit you,” I say with contempt. “You some kind of cocksucker or something? You sure like that fine hole fingered.” Instinctively the man’s broad shoulder push themselves into the mattress. His ass rises; the small of his back curves in a submissive arch. My cock is engorged, by this point. It’s leaking precum like crazy. I could probably just shove it right on in and glide to the base without a drop of extra lube, but I’m enjoying putting this man in his place, first. “I asked you a question, faggot.”</p>
<p>“Fuck that hole, sir,” he says into the pillow. His voice sounds strained and anxious, as if he’s gone without filling for far too long. “If you need to fuck it, fuck it.” </p>
<p>“Dunno if I <em>need</em> to fuck it.” Since moving away, my vowels have rarely sounded so honeyed. I suck on two of my fingers, while I let the tip of my cock brush against the extremities of his cheeks. He tries to move back, to feel its kiss once more, but I’m too much of a tease to allow such a thing. “Looks like pussy.” I shove both fingers inside the loose hole. “Sure <em>feels</em> like pussy.” I twist in my digits until I hit the knuckles. “Maybe it fucks like pussy.”</p>
<p>“Please.” He snuffles the syllable into the pillow. It sounds again, but this time as a long, agonized supplication. “<em>Please</em>.”</p>
<p>The last sibilant hasn’t even crossed his lips than he rears his head and lets out a mighty roar. I’ve plunged inside, lubed with nothing more than spit and brazen desire. His hole feels good—hot and welcoming, the cozy refuge I’ve craved all week. I’ve got some aggression to work out, too, after long days of dealing with medical staff and one unusually crabby old man. This ass is what I’ve chosen to make suffer. </p>
<p>Not that he’s in pain, mind you. With grunts and growls he meets my assault, lifting his hips higher and spreading his own cheeks open so I might plunder him even more deeply. When he swings his head from side to side, trying to clear either his brain or his vision, or both, sweat flies in every direction. He’s like a wet dog shaking bathwater from his fur. I give his meaty ass another slap, and let loose with profanities that I know will excite him further.</p>
<p>“I should fuckin’ tie you up and call every thievin’ motherfucker I know to come dump a load in this slutty, wet hole. Feels <em>so</em> damn good.” Another slap, and he plants his face in the pillow once more with a grunt. “You’d probably like that too, huh, cocksucker?” When he doesn’t answer, I pull out all the way and wait, my scarlet inches wet and throbbing. “I asked you a<em> question</em>, son.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir,” he aspirates. He’s barely able to weave vowels to the consonants. “Whore me out. You own this hole.”</p>
<p>“Fuuuuuck.” I extend to word as long as it’ll go. “Damn right I do. You want more?” </p>
<p>“Yes sir. Please don’t stop, sir.”</p>
<p>I immerse myself inside him as far as I’ll go, and make myself swell. “You mean, like that?”</p>
<p>“Yes sir. Just like that.”</p>
<p>“Then what do I do? I dunno what you gay boys like,” I snarl.</p>
<p>“Go in and out. Just…please fuck me, sir.” His deep voice strains with desperation. “Use it. Breed this fag ass. Whore it out to your buddies.”</p>
<p>“In and out, huh? Hungry-ass li’l pig,” I growl, as I get back into the rhythm I’d established before. “Takin’ strange dick from any motherfucker who sees that open door. Damn, that’s sick.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir.” His breathing is becoming more labored.</p>
<p>“You’re a nasty boy, huh.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir, a real nasty boy.”</p>
<p>“Cum-guzzlin’, fuck-takin’, butt-hungry white-collar businessman with a hankerin’ for redneck meat…” I don’t even have time to reflect on how the verb <em>to hanker</em> never, ever makes an appearance in my vocabulary; his body begins to shake and spasm. I see his hand grab for his dick. With a mighty roar, he directs it in my direction, between his legs, so that it points back between his legs to the floor. Semen jets from the flared tip and lands on the wood with an audible splat. Another jet. Still another. It’s icing my black footie socks and oozing between the floorboards by the time he’s finished.</p>
<p>But just because he’s done doesn’t mean I am. “Shiiiiiiiit,” I drawl. “Must’ve really like my big ol’ dick. Fuckin’ cocksucker.” I grab a hip with one hand, and wrap the elastic of his jock around the back of the other, pulling him toward me. He’s compliant fuckmeat, now, and keeps his hole loose and open for me as I finish inside. “Get that pussy open for me, yeah, like that,” I growl. “Like that. Just like that. Just like…”</p>
<p>My own climax is deafening, when it arrives. I haven’t even so much as jerked off, this last week. My load floods his cunt. Over the roar of fire in my veins, I hear him grunt with surprise. Maybe it’s at the molten warmth of my load. Maybe it’s at the sheer volume of my wordless cries. He’s leaking now, so much that my nuts are soaked. “Now that’s the way you do it,” I say as my convulsions subside. I slap his ass before I pull out.</p>
<p>Now I’m sitting on a chair at the bedroom’s edge, a bit off-balance in my post-coital haze. A quick getaway is what I expect to make—since I’m a home intruder and all—but while I’m groping for my clothing, the man I’ve been fucking flips around to face me. Actually, it’s more as if he slides from the mattress and oozes onto the floor, like a boneless sludge, to assume a kneeling posture before me. “Holy fuck,” he pants.</p>
<p>I crack a grin as I put one leg through my shorts, then the other. “No kidding,” I say in my regular voice, now that the spell is broken. </p>
<p>He slumps against the bed frame and runs his hands through his short gray hair. “Holy <em>fuck</em>,”<em> </em>he says once more, shaking off the perspiration he’s collected. “You didn’t want the ball gag, though?”</p>
<p>I mean, he’d been the one suggesting he should wear the damn thing, then chose not to. “You tell me.” I shrug. </p>
<p>He watches as I pull back on my t-shirt. “So, I’ve gotta ask. You always travel with a collection of paddles?”</p>
<p>“What?” I say, taken aback. The question is so bizarre that I automatically laugh. I try to make a joke out of it. “No, not <em>always</em>.”</p>
<p>“How about that tens machine?” I know what a tens machine is. I’ve been around the block a few times, you know. But I can’t imagine why in the world he thinks I have one. I just stare, while he begins rattling off a list of gear. “I mean, it’s kind of crazy to think you pack a suitcase with those and the sounds, and a whole set of restraints. What kind of portable gloryhole do you have? Did you make it? Or buy one online?”</p>
<p>There’s more, but as he peppers me with questions, I’m felling unsettled feeling. It’s not dissimilar from looking at an illustration of a rabbit and then discovering that someone else is viewing the same thing and thinks it’s a duck—or that stupid controversy a few years back when people were arguing whether a single dress was black and blue, when it was obviously gold and white. I’ve been so certain that my view of the encounter had been one thing. Suddenly I’m being challenged to think that it’s perhaps something else. </p>
<p>The realization is not comfortable. </p>
<p>It’s not helped when I clear my throat and attempt to distance myself from his line of questioning with, “Oh, I put your keys on that table next to the front door.”</p>
<p>“Keys?” He sounds as flabbergasted by my non-sequitur as I’d been by his interrogation. </p>
<p>“Your house keys,” I say. Maybe the sexual haze hasn’t quite cleared from his brain. “I put them on the glass table?”</p>
<p>“Where’d you get my keys?”</p>
<p>“They were in your door?” I’m thinking, the whole home intruder scenario you set up? Remember? </p>
<p>But he looks blank. “Oh, did I leave my keys in the door? Really?”</p>
<p>“Wait.” He’s totally taken me aback. “You said you’d set up a hot scenario for me. Wasn’t it…?”</p>
<p>He tilts his head, not understanding. “I left clothes for you to follow. Didn’t you see them?”</p>
<p>I stand, laughing. This encounter has navigated a hairpin curve from hot to bizarre in a record timeline. “I’ll see you later,” I say, ruffling the guy’s hair and making a swift beeline for the stairs. </p>
<p>“Hit me up again sometime,” he calls to my back. “We’re so close.”</p>
<p>All the short walk home I can’t get one thought out of my head. <em>This guy thought I was someone else</em>. He’d mixed me up with another Scruff dude he’d been texting, some hot dom in leather who travels with a trunk full of gear and a portable glory hole. Here I’d arrived in Richmond with no more than a cock ring, a dirty mind, and a grin on my bearded face, while he’d been fantasizing about a rough ol’ top who’d show up with spiked paddles and electrical hookups and a freakin’ ball gag. I mean, I guess he’d <em>seemed</em> satisfied, but was he sitting at home right now thinking to himself, <em>That guy was pretty tame for a sick fuck with a Saint Andrew's cross and a collection of dildos shaped like horse dicks</em>?</p>
<p>And—oh, god. How badly had I misread the whole home invasion role-play thing? Here I’d thought we both were being impish, mischievous little devils spicing up an encounter, when all along he’d only forgotten and left his keys in the door in his haste to be butt-up for some fucker who wasn’t me. Holy<em> fuck</em>, could I be more dim? Stupid, stupid, <em>stupid</em>…</p>
<p>I interrupt my mental self-flagellation and roll over on the uncomfortable twin mattress that’s my bed for the foreseeable future. My phone’s buzzing. <em>That’s the hottest fuck I’ve had in years</em>, the guy a block and a half away has texted. <em>Thank you, sir. My hole is yours anytime you need it.</em></p>
<p>I roll back over again. All right, I think, as my anxieties ebb and my usual sexual cockiness flows in its place. Maybe I hadn’t done so badly, after all. Even without a trunk full of sex toys. After a review like that, I’m more inclined to see the guy again, sometime in the future. </p>
<p>Providing he understands who I am, of course.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-33468286585337879692023-02-01T09:34:00.001-05:002023-02-01T09:34:48.023-05:00Three Nights in Chincoteague: 1980 (Part 2)<p><i><a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2023/02/three-nights-in-chincoteague-1980-part-1.html" target="_blank">Part 1 may be found here.</a></i></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>We spend the next day on Assateague Island. The adults lounge under umbrellas, sunglasses on their noses, talking over each other. My little sister and cousins have brought inflatable toys for the surf, though the rocks and rough sand puncture them mere minutes after they’ve been blown up. There’s no need for floats, though, when the kids have buckets and spades for sandcastles, and seashells to discover, and the natural pleasures of the surf. I spend the day taking long, solitary walks, letting the waves splash over my ankles and calves. From time to time, crabs buried beneath the sand will resent my trespass and nip at my toes, causing me to yelp and stumble away. We eat sandwiches for lunch, play miniature golf in Chincoteague to get out of the afternoon heat. There are no historical markers to stand over in reverence, no battlefields, no lessons to learn. It truly is our first and only real vacation as a family. Though it’s no Magic Kingdom, everything about the experience feels fresh and new. I let the sun and wind bleach away the stain of what I’d done the night before, in the thicket.</p>
<p>It’s dark again. After the kids get tucked into bed, the adults play bridge in Bert and Jane’s cabin. And though I know I shouldn’t, when I see that firefly light of his smoke after dark, I once more wander out the back door and sit opposite the big-nosed stranger.</p>
<p>He’s wearing a fancy tropical shirt, a pattern of stylized toucans and palm trees on a dark fabric, over the same baggy shorts. Tonight, he’s got the bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other. He sits with his legs spread and dangling over the cinderblock stoop, lips slick with liquor. </p>
<p>If I were to encounter this man back home in this condition, say in Bryan Park late at night or by the riverside, I’d steer away. I’m not naive. I know red flags when I see them. In the park, I’d have plenty of choice. I’d let someone else cope with this ugly, alcoholic mess. I’m not at home, though. I’m in sleepy, family-friendly Chincoteague, a town of salt-water taffy and themed Putt-Putt courses and tributes to the books of Marguerite Henry, everywhere one turns. It’s late at night. I’m bored. I’m horny. The ugly, alcoholic mess has given me money for a blowjob before. He might again. I’ve dealt with worse.</p>
<p>“You hungry for dick?” he says, staring at me. </p>
<p>I startle at his loud bluntness. He’s not being discreet at all. Probably no one is close enough to hear, but even in an inebriated state, he should realize the risks of asking such a question within earshot of his wife. </p>
<p>“Come on, son. I got what you want. Aw, you loved it last night.” He’s grabbing at his junk and giving it a firm squeeze. I didn’t love it the prior evening. I’d tolerated it for the sake of the cash. Even now, the memory of his foul seed roils my stomach. He mistakes my hesitation for negotiation. “Oh, I see.” He digs into his pocket and once more pulls out that back-breaking bifold. “That’s the way it’s gotta be, then. Fuck.”</p>
<p>It’s not just the sight of his open wallet that propels me to my feet—though that’s part of it. He needs to hush. “Sshh,” I warn, as I sit next to him. “Keep it down.”</p>
<p>His head wobbles with the effort of a drunk imagining he’s keeping it steady, as he looks into my eyes. “This is what you really want, isn’t it?” He’s folded two twenties between his ring and little fingers. Between the index and middle digits is a mostly consumed cigarette that billows smoke in my face. “How much more if you be my wife tonight?”</p>
<p>My pulse quickens. I keep an eye on the cash. “What do you mean?” </p>
<p>“Come on. How much?” I shake my head at his words, not understanding. “Be my wife. Just be real sweet to me and be my wife tonight. Okay? How much more? Twenty? Forty?” </p>
<p>He’s wheedling, now, but I truly don’t understand what he’s asking. Be his wife? Is he going to dress me up? Smear lipstick on my face? Will I have to wear his ring? I swallow and lick my lips, though, while he flicks the spent butt onto the ground and, as he grinds it beneath his sneaker heel, pulls another two bills from his wallet. </p>
<p>My reaction must be as naked as his need. He twiddles all the cash between his fingers. “Come on.” The man leans in close enough to breathe his hot, boozy breath into my ear. “Be my wife.” </p>
<p>“Okay.” Red flags be damned. Eighty dollars is eighty more than I had a minute ago. It’s a hundred and twenty more than I had yesterday morning. The sight of his money stupefies any parts of my brain that might whisper warnings. He’s my Pied Piper and I have no choice but to dance. I nod, breathless, my pulse racing in anticipation, and allow him to tuck the cash in my greedy palm. “Let’s go.”</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Tree bark bites into my back, as he bulldozes me into it. The cotton of my tee does nothing to protect me. My head bangs against the trunk—not hard enough really to hurt, but with enough force to bring involuntary tears to my eyes. His shove knocks the wind out of me. </p>
<p>“You gonna be a good wife for me?” he says, looming nearer. I can’t answer; he’s clamped his palm over my mouth and jaw; the rough edge of his tobacco-strained hand is so deeply wedged against my nostrils that with every breath I rasp against years of tobacco calluses. “Yeah, you’re gonna be a good little wifey, aren’tcha. You’re gonna do what I say, because you love me.” Though it’s dark in that thicket, I can see how shot are the whites of his eyes with irregular red veins. I wonder how wide and panicked are my own. “You love me, right? I’m your husband. You gotta love me. Kiss me, baby.” </p>
<p>I can’t answer, but he doesn’t care. He brings his face closer and—with his hand still clamped to my mouth—plants his lips where mine should meet him. It’s this freakish act that disturbs me more than anything else that’s happened so far. I’d make out with the man if he wanted. He so obviously craves intimacy. Yet presented with its possibility, he denies himself. Four fingers separate our mouths from each other, but he passionately slobbers over them as if they’re the real thing. Once or twice I feel his tongue dart between the crevices and flick against my lips, but this is no kiss. It’s an obscene parody, and it offends me to my core.</p>
<p>“Good wife,” he at last whispers in my ear. “I know you like it. Now you’re gonna get what you want.” His left hand roughly unbuttons my shorts and yanks my shorts low enough for the elastic to pull tight around my thighs. He fumbles for my hole to jab a fingertip inside. He misses, poking me hard where my thigh meets my buttock. “Sweet piece of pussy,” he mumbles.</p>
<p>I’ve been around the block enough to assess the situation. Years of public play has taught me never to allow my little head to dominate the big one. The crude way he’d shoved me against the tree was frightening, yes, but I don’t get the sense he wants to hurt me. The big-nosed man is lost in some fantasy of his own creation that had been set in motion once I’d accepted his money. But the way he’s going about it—the mock kisses, thinking a cleft is a pussy, even the whole set-up of pretending to be his wife so he can fuck me—is so awkward and borderline comical that my instincts reassure me he’s not dangerous. He could be. Maybe he even should be. But right now, I don’t feel it. </p>
<p>He spins me around so that I’m facing the tree and pushes mid-spine to bend me over. Once again, the stranger covers my mouth with his stinking fingers. “Gonna make babies in you, beautiful. You want that, right? You want your husband’s babies?” With my mouth covered, I can only grunt. He spits into his free hand and sticks it down his shorts.</p>
<p>My pants are tangled in the vicinity of my upper thighs. When he tries to spread my legs, there’s only so far I can pull them. He doesn’t care. Once more I feel the stab of his fingers against my ass. They miss the mark by a few inches. His combined fingertips thrust and probe at the fissure where my legs meet as he growls in my ear.</p>
<p>“You’re gonna love my dick deep in that pussy, baby. Gonna fuck you like a man should fuck his wife. Deep and wet. Pump you full of my babies.” His breath is hot on my neck. “Pump you enough for twins.” </p>
<p>I feel his probing cock and I brace myself. Over the last several years I’ve had rough fucks. I’ve had hot fucks. I’ve had fucks that set my hole on fire and turned my innards to jelly, and fucks where I’ve had to lie there while I wait for it to be over. I’ve had painful fucks from dicks too big for me, and fucks where the guy wanted me to hurt. I’ve had gentle fucks, and fucks where my partner was so worried and solicitous that I had to take control. But I don’t know what the hell to anticipate from this guy. He’s been drinking. Now that I’ve sold myself for a few scraps of paper, he clearly thinks he can do whatever he wants. </p>
<p>What I don’t expect, however, is that he’ll miss my hole entirely and penetrate the crack between my legs. He gasps as the head of his crooked dick bursts through. “Oh, baby!” His breath singes my neck. “You’re so pretty with my dick in your pussy. I love you, baby. I love you.” </p>
<p>He lays his torso on mine, hugging me close. Part of me suspects he must, to keep himself upright. At least he’s liberated my mouth. When I work my jaw and moan in gratitude, he mistakes it for pleasure.</p>
<p>“You love it, don’t you,” he growls. His cock makes swift, rabbit-like strokes between my legs. I’ve had intercrural sex before. A few of my older partners and clients even prefer it, as it requires little preparation and usually involves less mess. But I don’t think the big-nosed man realizes he’s fucking my legs and not my hole. He seems to be relishing the sensation, either way, and I’m not about to ruin his fun. “Tell me you love it, baby.”</p>
<p>“I love it,” I whisper, while I hang onto the tree and squeeze tight my thighs.</p>
<p>“Yes, you do. You love your husband’s big fat dick. You want my babies?”</p>
<p>“Fill me with your babies,” I urge. “Get me pregnant.”</p>
<p>He grunts, pleased. “You better be ready. I’m not pulling out.”</p>
<p>I need this to end. Agreement seems the quickest route. “Don’t pull out.”</p>
<p>“Fuck yeah. Making babies in my wife. Like a real man.” He mutters these words and more to himself in a low, steady ramble. Juice from his dick, hot to the touch, has made my thighs slippery. He stabs and plunges and forces his way between them. At one point he withdraws and shoves back in with a mighty jab, this time hitting my hole and making me gasp. He thinks he’s in the wrong spot, though, and mumbles an apology before returning to the softer flesh below. </p>
<p>When he comes, it’s with a repeat of last night’s shudders and quakes. I can feel jets of semen splatter my legs, as well as the ground and trunk in front of us. I make pleased noises and rub my butt against him until he softens and withdraws, whereupon I fumble with my pants until they’re more or less back in place. I’m drenched with him, from head to foot. </p>
<p>“That was beautiful, baby,” he slurs, moving in on me with his palm cupped. “C’mon. Show me how much you liked it. Gimme a kiss.”</p>
<p>Our transaction was complete the moment he came. There’s no way I’m enduring that lampoon of intimacy again. I writhe out of his grasp before his hand can once more cover my mouth, and slip away through the trees back to the cabins. My shorts are soaked with the man’s sweat and semen; I can still smell the sickly scent of him all over my body, still feel his breath on my back. It’s going to be tricky, whether I’ll be able to slip into the shower and then into bed before the adults finish their rubber. One thing I know for sure, though, as I hasten back to the dark cabin: there’s no amount of money that will tempt me back into the woods with that man again.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>We’re all a little worn out, our last day in Chincoteague. The cousins are so tired that they actually request a nap, come late afternoon. Bert and Jane have joined them, in their cabin. I walk into our kitchenette to find my mom and dad staring out the back window. “What’s going on?” I ask.</p>
<p>My mother has her arms crossed and her neck set in a disapproving posture. My dad, whose sight is poor in the best of conditions, has to press his face close to the glass to see. He’s trying to be stealthy, at least, by ducking low. Without breaking his surveillance, he says, “This fellow next door seems to be…well, under the weather.”</p>
<p>“He’s drunk,” my mom summarizes. “Poor sod. Can you imagine the demons he must be wrestling with?”</p>
<p>Outside, I hear the empty chime of a bottle being set hard on concrete. Panicked that the ugly man has attracted my parents’ notice, I pretend disinterest and deflect. “We doing dinner anytime soon?” </p>
<p>“His poor wife,” says my mother.</p>
<p>She’s the last person of whom I want to be reminded. “So…dinner?”</p>
<p>My dad seems unwilling to leave his spy post, but my mother looks at her watch and sighs. “Teen boys and their stomachs, I swear. I suppose it’s that time. Though if Bert calls Carter a cracker one more time, I can’t be held accountable…”</p>
<p>“It’s just one more dinner, one more night, then we leave in the morning,” my dad reassures. “You can make it through that.”</p>
<p>My mom sighs as if she’s not convinced. I’m firmly in her camp, having learned one of the prime lessons of any vacation: there always comes a point when you’d rather be home.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>After we return from our final dinner out and the little kids have been put to bed, my aunt and uncle and parents gather for one last night of bridge. Through the back door, I can see the red firefly of our neighbor’s cigarette dancing in the dark. Though I’ve refrained from turning on any lights, and though I’m peeking out from behind the grimy gingham curtain over the back window, he must sense I’m there. He picks up a pebble from the ground, hauls back, and with a pitcher’s grace, nails the wood of the screen door with a loud crack.</p>
<p>“Stop that,” I scold in a whisper, once I’ve yanked open the doors and stepped out. “What the fuck?”</p>
<p>“I want you,” he says loudly. Then, acceding to my frantic gestures, he lowers his voice. “I want you, baby. C’mon. Be my wife.”</p>
<p>There’s no way I’m once again submitting to his messy caricature of lovemaking. Absolutely no way. I shake my head. </p>
<p>“You gotta. You love it. You’re my wife.” </p>
<p>I’m this man’s nothing. Arms crossed, and imitating my mother’s stance of imperviousness, I stand firm. “Listen. I can’t. My folks are expecting me…”</p>
<p>“Come on, baby.” He puckers his lips and kisses in my direction, then stumbles to his feet. “I’ll make it real sweet.” I shake my head. There’s a harder edge to his voice when he adds, “I know what’ll get those legs wide open.” </p>
<p>As he digs in his shorts for that wallet, I can’t help but pause. With two fingers he plucks out a twenty-dollar bill, then another. I’d resolved to walk away, but I make the mistake of hesitating. I could go through it once more. I’d be out of here tomorrow; I’d never have to see him again. I’m stock still as he pulls out a final twenty, then two tens. Eighty dollars. Eighty more dollars could numb a lot of the indignities I’d have to suffer, out there in the woods. </p>
<p>I’m still frozen in place when he pulls one more ten from the wallet. “You know you want this, at least,” he says, turning to spit with contempt on the ground. With a snap of his wrist, he tosses the bills into the dust at my feet, where they scatter.</p>
<p>I hate myself for being tempted, but it’s the disdain in his attitude that decides me. I won’t be going to the thicket with him this evening. Refusal is my clear right. I clear my throat and say, so that there’s no mistaking: “No.”</p>
<p>And then he slaps me.</p>
<p>I don’t see it coming. I’m too busy feeling virtuous to anticipate the swing of his arm, the arc of his open hand as it closes the gulf between us. He connects not with his palm, but with his stinking fingers. The slap is sharp enough a blow to make me see stars. We both stagger away from the other, mouths agape, eyes wide, nostrils flaring. With a sudden huff, the ugly man drops his ass onto the stoop. The life’s drained out of him: he seems stunned at what he’s done.</p>
<p>“Fuck you,” is all I say, before I retreat into the darkness, hand cupping my cheek, in the direction of the street. For the rest of the night, I sit alone on the front steps of Bert and Jane’s cabin, waiting for my parents. I’ll have to be all smiles and charm when they emerge. Pretending that nothing extraordinary has happened is the price I pay for the secret life I lead.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>The next morning, while my mother oversees our departure, my job is to ferry luggage from the front steps to the trunk of our Dart. I’m impatient to leave. I miss our cats and the happy mess of our house. I miss the familiarity of my cruising spaces. I almost miss high school. I’d be happy, right now, never to go on vacation again. </p>
<p>And here comes Bert, manfully hauling two large suitcases to his family’s new-model car, parked next to ours. “Morning, sunshine,” he says with a false grin. “Didn’t forget to pack your makeup bag, didya?”</p>
<p>Now I’m really ready to go. Without a word, I turn my back on my bully and stalk back to the cabin, ignoring his jeers. If I step inside, I’ll just have another bag thrust in my hands. So I circle around to the back. My neighbor’s door is closed and the windows shut. Though there’s an empty bottle of cheap bourbon lying on their steps, at least I won’t be forced into one final confrontation. Good.</p>
<p>Not until I sit on the stoop for a final time do I notice bills littering the dirt. Tens and twenties, still lying where they’d been flung the night before. I look around, almost suspicious I’m being tested. Then, in a rush of motion, I’m down in the dust and pebbles, grabbing at the cash as if my life depends on it. Twenty, thirty, fifty, seventy, eighty—there should be another ten somewhere. It’s not at the foot of my steps, nor has it blown behind the metal garbage cans. My hands and knees are dirty, but I continue scrabbling for that final, elusive bill.</p>
<p>The back door opens. It’s my mother, hands on her slender hips, looking with disdain at the Old Crow bottle on the opposite stoop. Her disapproval gives me time to tuck a handful of grit and cash into my back pocket. “What in the world are you doing back here?” she asks, puzzled. “It’s not even nine in the morning and you’re filthy.”</p>
<p>“Bert…” is all I have to say to elicit a roll of the eyes and a sympathetic sigh.</p>
<p>“Once you’re in college, you can pick and choose when and if you see him.” She holds out her arm to summon me indoors. “If only I could be so lucky. Come on. We’re ready to go.”</p>
<p>But I can’t leave. In vain, I look around for that one last bill. It’s mine. Even though I didn’t earn it, even though last night I didn’t want it, there’s ten dollars to be had. I can’t abide the thought of anyone else claiming what I deserve. </p>
<p>Even as my eyes frantically scramble across the weedy wasteland, my feet trudge the stairs behind my mother. Every step away from that missing money is sheer torture. I have eighty unearned dollars in my hand. Eighty dollars is eighty more than I had a minute ago. It’s two hundred dollars more than I had when we arrived here. And yet I’m not satisfied.</p>
<p>All through my childhood and adolescence, my mother has drummed into my head that we have money enough for what we need. Enough to be grateful. They’ve somehow squeezed out a little more for this unexpected vacation. I should be happy. I should be appreciative.</p>
<p>Yet here I am, secretly mourning the loss of a petty sum, sweaty and sick to my stomach, my limbs trembling like I’m going through withdrawal, as I climb into our car. I could pick up ten dollars in five minutes at home. Hell, back home I’d turn up my nose at any man who assumed I was a ten-dollar trick. Why, then, do I spend our drive back to Richmond puzzling where that last bill might have fallen?</p>
<p>An hour ago I’d been just a kid with a side hustle, a soon-to-be senior in high school sitting on a profitable secret. The big-nosed man in the cabin next door had shown me what I really was: a junkie. I have a problem. I need more than I should. I want more than I need. I’m putting myself in the line of danger for a fistful of bills. Not just with this bozo from Raleigh: every time I climb into a strange car at night, or knock on a trick’s hotel room door, or when I disappear into the shadows along the banks of the James. I’m a slave to a flash of cash, a whiff of currency, and the promise of a sexual thrill. </p>
<p>“Tired out?” my mom asks from behind the steering wheel. It's a hot day and the Dart lacks air conditioning, so all the windows are open. She raises her voice to be heard over the rush of freeway wind, and looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You’ve been mighty quiet today.”</p>
<p>I mumble something and let my head loll, knowing I won’t be heard. </p>
<p>“I think he’s just tuckered out from a long vacation,” mutters my dad. </p>
<p>My mom isn’t so sure. “Too much vacation, if you ask me.”</p>
<p>Too much? It was only three nights in Chincoteague—mostly at Bert’s expense, my teenaged resentment emphasizes. Though I realize something about vacations, now, something I’d never learned from my classmates, when they returned from their amusement parks and ski trips and shopping excursions to the big city. I might be able to flee my small town. For a spell, I might be able to escape to better weather, or to different scenery, or for new sights. The one thing from which I’ll never be able to take a vacation, though, is myself.</p>
<p>What a fucking depressing thought.</p>
<p>I sit there, forehead pressed against the car’s vibrating interior and watch the pines pass by. In my private prison, I long for that lost ten-dollar bill, tossed by ocean winds, tumbling toward a flat and endless horizon.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-791757731702564282023-02-01T08:59:00.004-05:002023-02-01T09:37:03.832-05:00Three Nights in Chincoteague: 1980 (Part 1)<p>At some point in my childhood, I asked my mother in what economic class our family fell. “Lower middle class,” she’d asserted without thought. Then, after reflecting a moment, she amended her answer. “<em>Lower</em>-lower middle class.”</p>
<p>Her answer surprised me. I knew what real poverty looked like. My mother was a founding member of a non-profit seeking minority equal housing opportunities. I’d seen the neglected interiors of multiple public housing projects; I’d accompanied her more times than I could count to document the appalling conditions of Richmond’s slum properties. I’d even recognized some of the kids in these places as my schoolmates. </p>
<p>My mother herself had grown up in genuine impoverishment, often never knowing when or if there’d be a next meal; her parents still lived in the uninsulated home her father had built by hand over the decades, one room at a time as he could afford. Its last addition—an indoor john and bath—had been added only in the late nineteen-sixties. They’d made do until then with an outhouse and by dragging a tin tub into the kitchen for a weekly scrub.</p>
<p>My family had inside toilets. Two of them. Since I was six, we’d lived in a two-story brick home with a slate roof in a nice neighborhood. When the lunch bell rang at school, I didn’t have to line up with the projects kids for free lunches—for many, the only hot meal they’d get that day. All of my family were readers. We watched educational TV and listened to classical music. How could we be lower-lower anything?</p>
<p>Not until I was older did I begin to notice the ways in which we differed from other neighborhood families. We lived in a respectable brick colonial, yes, but only because my paternal grandmother had bought it outright and signed it over to my father. Monthly, throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, he would mail her a check: two hundred and fifty dollars per installment until the debt was repaid. We were privileged to have our own housing taken care of, interest-free. On their own, on my father’s assistant professor’s salary and my mother’s part-time earnings as an adjunct, they could never have afforded a mortgage. Not in that genteel city enclave.</p>
<p>We also only had cars because of my grandmother. Our first vehicle was a 1963 Dodge Dart with a brown interior that she’d purchased and more or less immediately gotten into an accident that left the passenger side crushed and mangled; she’d sold it to my father at a discount and replaced it with a blue-interiored Dart that eventually also passed our way. My parents would drive those two 1963 Dodge Darts well into the late nineteen-eighties, wrecked doors and all. I could never figure out which was the greater embarrassment: my father’s Dart with the unusable, crumpled-in doors, or my mother’s more-or-less intact Dart covered with Jimmy Carter bumper stickers and political posters duct-taped in the windows. </p>
<p>We had enough money, as my parents would constantly remind me throughout my childhood, for what we needed. A roof over our heads. Food in the pantry. Perhaps a little extra for piano lessons from the elderly church member down the street. As a very young kid, it was enough.</p>
<p>In my teens, though, the disparities between me and other kids grew wider. I would walk long distances or take the city bus to school events, rather than suffer the hot shame of classmates witnessing the banged-up, rusted old Dart cough and sputter into a parking lot. In fourth grade I could get away with wearing outgrown trousers with hems high above my ankles. Not in middle school. Definitely not as a high schooler. As a family with limited money, cars and clothing were low priorities. </p>
<p>I didn’t complain—but I was mortified when I didn’t fit in. We never ate at restaurants, not even fast food, save for special occasions like a birthday. Meals at home were plain but filling. When beef grew expensive during a shortage in the seventies, we ate much cheaper horse meat—though I knew better than to admit it at school. We rarely went to the movies and never bought concessions. Although the annual state fair was held practically in our back yard and my friends attended nightly, the only times I ever saw it were on educational school outings. When I took up a wind instrument for middle school band, for years I relied on a school loaner. I was warned for years in advance that although my peers would all be getting their drivers licenses at 16, I wouldn’t be permitted to join them; car insurance for a teen was too expensive. I’d have to wait until I was earning on my own, to learn to drive. </p>
<p>We have enough to be grateful. Enough to know our poverty isn’t abject. With every year, though, the list grows longer of what my classmates consider commonplaces, that I consider privations.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>This is why, the summer of our country’s bicentennial, my pulse quickens when, beneath the stalls of the Richmond Public Library basement men’s room, a stranger slips me a note scrawled with Bic pen upon folded toilet paper. <em>$20 to do it here</em>, read the spidery letters. <em>$50</em> <em>if we go to the Hotel Jefferson</em>. A little later, the man slips me two Andrew Jacksons and an Alexander Hamilton as he pushes me to my knees with the flat of his hand atop of my head. </p>
<p>Fifty dollars. Fifty whole dollars. It’s the first time I’m holding so much cash. It’s weeks of my pitiful allowance—months. After our short walk, the man had handed it over as if it were nothing. To me, fifty dollars is riches unimaginable. </p>
<p>Fifty dollars in my hand negates all the mindfulness of wasting pennies and the eye to unnecessary expenses, the worry that some simple school requirement might require my parents to shell out more than they can afford, the poorer kid's constant apprehension of a sudden reversal of fortune. No matter how I’ve earned it, cash in my hand sets me ahead of the game. It makes me immune. Powerful. </p>
<p>For the length of time it takes for me to complete a sexual transaction for pay, every myriad anxiety flares into ash like tissue set aflame. After that first encounter, I squirrel away more and more of the stuff, conditioned always to anticipate an austere winter. </p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>I’m 16 and it’s the summer before my senior year of high school when my parents announce we’ll be taking a vacation. We’ve never gone on vacation. Not a real one. </p>
<p>Friends vacation with their families. Many of them ski over the Christmas holidays; one brags yearly about visiting New York City to shop on Fifth Avenue and visit the tree at Rockefeller Center. At the beginning of the school term when teachers assign the obligatory summer vacation essay, I listen with envy while classmates recount their trips to the Grand Canyon, to Stone Mountain, their cross-country large family reunions, their exciting adventures in Disney World, which had opened less than a decade before. I was never going to experience the Magic Kingdom. I couldn’t even talk my parents into Carowinds, or even a trip to the admission-free South of the Border. The only reason I’ve been to the local theme park, King’s Dominion—which at the time consists of the drive-through Lion Country Safari, as well as the stand-alone Rebel Yell roller coaster—has been as a school field trip. </p>
<p>Visits to my grandparents don’t count: they’re less vacation and more obligation, and inevitably end in shouting matches and long, hurt drives home. My mother and father gussy up day trips and tried to sell them as giddy, madcap holidays. We’ll drive to one of the many Civil War battlefields close to home with a basket of ham sandwiches and potato chips, where we doze in the shade and listen to my father lecture about the movement of the troops. We’ll visit one of many Virginia plantations, to eat ham sandwiches and listen to my mother lecture about the evils of the slave trade. </p>
<p>If we really want to make a day of it, we travel an entire hour to Williamsburg, where we eat the inevitable ham sandwiches at Waller Mill Pond, then visit the colonial area and walk up and down Duke of Gloucester Street—the free area—while both my parents alternately lecture and quiz about early American history.</p>
<p>That’s why this announcement is so revolutionary. We’ll be spending three nights in Chincoteague, my parents inform us. I’ll be graduating high school in a year’s time. Since I’ll be off to college after that, our time together as a family is growing short. It’s a fine and almost sentimental reason to loosen the purse strings, I think, until I discover that my father’s sister’s family will be joining us.</p>
<p>In fact, my Aunt Jane and Uncle Bert are footing the bill for both families’ accommodations, which explains how my parents can afford this splurge. I’ve no particular opinions on Jane or my two cousins, the older of whom is all of nine. <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-cream-puff.html" target="_blank">Bert, however, I detest. </a>He’s a brusque blue-collar bulldog whose every other word is a racial or ethnic slur. When he’s not mocking my dad for being an ivory tower elite who can barely support his family, or dismissing my mom as a bleeding-heart liberal, he’s busy pointing out all the ways I’m a sissy. I read too much. I don’t play sports. No, swimming and tennis don’t count—only fags swim or swing a racket. He means real sports, like football. Had I ever even been in a fight at school? No? What kind of limp-wristed Little Lord Fauntleroy was I?</p>
<p>Bert’s litany of abuse commences the moment we pull up to the grim cabins he’s rented. In greeting, he crushes my dad’s metacarpals with a python-like grip, then complains about my dad’s effete handshake. He orders my mother to rustle up some grub without so much as a hello, raising her hackles. Warmed up, he turns to me. So my dad said I’d had lifesaving training at the YMCA pool? Who was I planning on saving from the waves with my toothpick arms and scrawny chest, a kitten? Haw haw! The idea! Maybe if I had an after-school job instead of keeping my head in the books all the time I wouldn’t be so pale and girly. Bert’s kids weren’t going to grow up sissies, no sirree Bob. Where was I going to college anyway, Sweet Briar? I’d fit in with all the girly-girls there. And they sure as heck wouldn’t have to worry about a boy in the girls’ dorm, not with me.</p>
<p>I abandon unpacking and slink through the back door to sit by myself, where I’ll be out of the line of fire. </p>
<p>The cabins are an array of a half-dozen drab, cinderblock constructions fronting a semi-circular drive. Functional, but plain. Behind the uniform huts sits a miniature concrete pool—more of a kiddie pool than anything—surrounded by rusted, webbed lawn chairs. The cabin’s back steps, where I sit, have a view of both it and a thicket of trees beyond. </p>
<p>“Afternoon.” A man sits on the steps of the cabin next to ours, snuffing out a Marlboro with his right hand even as with the left he withdraws another from its packet. A gold band decorates his ring finger. His receding blond hairline is what I first notice; the enormous nose, next. It’s narrow and long; the bulbous head at its end makes it look a little like a penis. The back door to his cabin stands open; beyond it, I can hear a treble monologue. His wife, I assume.</p>
<p>I nod. I’m not exactly in a mood for conversation with anyone, much less a stranger. I can still hear Bert, the self-declared bastion of straight masculinity, braying inside. This man strikes me as more of the same. He studies me whiles he taps the cigarette end on the packet, once, twice, three times, before lighting it. When finally he takes a long, slow drag, he stares through the smoke. </p>
<p>Even though in my mood I feel anything but sexual, I recognize the man’s regard. I’ve seen that speculative look in the eyes of many a stranger. It’s the unwavering attention of a man checking me out while pretending to do anything but; it’s equal parts curiosity and caution. I’ve seen it in the eyes of the homosexuals who gather at the riverside by dusk on warm nights, and from the car windows of men who drive The Block in Richmond’s downtown, looking to pick up a trick. Just as many times, I’ve seen that same expression on the face of married men who need to tamp down on urges they shouldn’t be having. </p>
<p>Every deep suck on that stick of tobacco, every long, casual exhalation, tells a story I’ve heard before. With his high forehead and that prominent beak, the man’s not exactly handsome. He’s not totally unattractive, either. I pretend to stare at the pool area beyond, while I steal glances his way.</p>
<p>“What?” I’m startled when he speaks, but his curt question is meant for someone inside his cabin. “All right already. All right!” When he rises, muttering curses beneath his breath, he’s taller than I assumed. Probably nearly as tall as I. He’s wearing the ridiculously short athletic shorts in fashion this year, tight and high around the thighs, yet on him still somehow baggy and unflattering. White sweat socks with broad red stripes hug his calves. We share a confidential glance. The man shrugs and rolls his eyes in the direction of his wife before he disappears into the gloom of his cabin. </p>
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<p>It’s easier than I think to stay out of Bert’s way, with our two families in separate cabins. We don’t eat dinner at a fancy restaurant that first night, but at a clam shack on outdoor picnic tables, where I sit far away from the adults. I’ve never seen the ocean before. When after dinner we drive a short distance to Assateague Island and walk the beach, it’s the first time I’ll ever stare at a flat and endless horizon or feel the satisfying crunch of sand beneath my soles, or hear the restless constancy of the waves, loud enough to drown out Bert’s long monologues.</p>
<p>After we return that night, my young cousins’ faces sticky from ice cream, they and my sister are sent to bed. It’s still too early for me to turn in, though. Nor do I want to join my parents in Bert and Jane’s cabin for cards and political sparring. For a while, I try to read in our quiet living area, but the furniture is spare and uncomfortable, the air muggy despite open windows. There’s nothing to do here at night. There’s nothing to do at home, either, but at least in my own bedroom I have the comforts of my books and my radio and my typewriter, when I feel creative. </p>
<p>Boredom weighs heavier in a strange place. I count knots in the piny paneling, I memorize the cornucopia pattern of a strip of wallpaper over the stove. Through the screen door in the kitchenette, I watch a lazy firefly hover over the ground, rise into the air, then settle once more. That’s no firefly, I realize, not with its red and constant glow. It’s the tip of a cigarette in the darkness. If I can see it, I realize, my neighbor surely can see me, in the brightly lit cabin.</p>
<p>I’m no longer bored.</p>
<p>It’s with a sense of showmanship that, pretending I’m unaware of anyone watching, I strip off my striped tee to mop my face. My sixteen-year-old body is nothing special. I’m not one of the hairy, muscular athletes who pose for the Jockey briefs ads that appear in <em>TV Guide</em> or <em>Sports Illustrated</em>. Over the last few years, though, I’ve learned that my smoothness and leanness, accented by the height I’ve achieved, is its own commodity. Popular, at that. Men enjoy gliding their knuckles over my ribs like they’re strumming a xylophone; they relish running their fingers through my shoulder-length hair as might a rapt Rumpelstiltskin as he spins straw to gold. I’m a lean blond twink. Men pay for that. They pay well.</p>
<p>With a deliberate lack of self-consciousness, I rub the crumpled tee over my shoulders and chest, then stretch my long, long arms toward the ceiling with a feigned yawn. I don’t look outside, but I keep myself framed in the door while I pop the button of my bright blue Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts. I don’t unzip; I merely hook my fingers into the waist as if I’m contemplating removing more. I’m the Gypsy Rose Lee of the Eastern Shore. </p>
<p>Outside, I hear the sizzle of a cigarette being stubbed out against cinderblock, then the pert click of a Bic lighter. I’ve got an audience of one.</p>
<p>I’m still playing with my tee when I step outside and sit on the back steps. My neighbor is perhaps ten feet away. He’s anticipated my company by spreading wide his long legs and letting his free hand dangle suggestively between them in the vicinity of his crotch. I can barely make out his face by the lights of my family’s cabin; his eyes glint like obsidian. Ever bold, I lean my naked torso sideways, planting my elbow onto the concrete. It’s not comfortable, but the pose shows me off and tugs open—slightly, so slightly—the V at the top of my shorts.</p>
<p>His eyes wander along every inch and byway of my bare skin, opalescent beneath the night sky. A fingernail’s length of paper and leaf burns and vanishes as he takes a long drag on his cigarette. He blows a column of smoke upward, tilting his head away from me—a gentleman, perhaps—but keeps me squarely in his sights. His free hand ventures lower. Its fingers brush against the synthetic fabric of his shorts, then linger. Teasing. Outlining. To anyone else, he might be scratching, or adjusting.</p>
<p>I let him know we’re speaking the same language by wiping my hand across my chest. My fingertips tease and pull at my nipples, sending electricity down my spine to my stiffening cock. I love these semiotics of desire: a flick of the tongue at the lips, the inclination of a head as eyes seek what’s half-concealed, knowing that if I lean a little closer and spread my legs a little wider, I’ll be able to spy the swelling bulge in his baggy shorts. The hunt is as much fun as the conquest.</p>
<p>“Where’re y’all from?” he at last asks, sucking down the last of his smoke. His bass voice is surprisingly quiet. I tell him we’re from Richmond, and my aunt and cousins from Baltimore. “Raleigh here,” he shares. “The wife had to see Chincoteague. Those damn books.” </p>
<p>I know what he means. There’s not a family with a horse-mad preteen girl that doesn’t know the <em>Misty of Chincoteague</em> series. “Where is she?” I ask, leaning forward.</p>
<p>The stranger looks over his shoulder at his dark cabin. “Asleep. What about your folks?” </p>
<p>There’s meaning behind the question. “I can do what I want.”</p>
<p>“Really, huh.” He chuckles. I’ve amused him. “You sound like a bad boy.”</p>
<p>My cock stiffens in my shorts as I rise and stride his way. I plant my ass onto his stoop. We sit only a couple of feet apart. “Maybe I am.”</p>
<p>“So, bad boy. What is it you want?” I know the answer is plain in my eyes, but he continues. “What’s your poison? Cigs?” He holds out the pack, one butt protruding from the opening. I shake my head. “I’ve got bourbon.”</p>
<p>There’s a half-empty bottle of Old Crow behind him, next to the screen door. “Nah,” I reply. I’ve been plied with liquor before, but I’ve never been tempted to accept. </p>
<p>“Don’t got no pot,” he says. With speculation he sizes me up. “Cash’ll do, I reckon.”</p>
<p>Now he’s talking. I sidle a little closer as he withdraws a bulky wallet from his shorts. My dad has a bifold like this, stuffed so full that it’s nearly two inches thick. From inside he withdraws a twenty-dollar bill, then its twin. My heart pounds at the sight of the cash, but I don’t want to seem too mercenary. “Maybe I’m just looking for fun.”</p>
<p>He hesitates. “Uh-huh. Okay, then.” When he opens his wallet once more as if to put away the bills, my hand shoots out and snatches the cash. His lips twist into a cruel smirk. Now I despise the man for testing me. He’s not a gentleman, after all. A gentleman would have folded those twenties and tucked them into the pocket of my tee, or he might have accompanied the withdrawal with a wink and a smile, to indicate a joke. This asshole, though, is taking pleasure in denying me what should be mine. In my eyes, it makes him even uglier.</p>
<p>Yet I want the money. Cash is the Pavlov’s bell that, rung at the right timber, floods my mouth with drool. The mere sight of the twin twenties is a narcotic to the indignities Bert will inflict over the next few days. Crushed and balled inside my pocket, they’re the analgesic to my pain. I don’t even notice, when the stranger grabs me around my neck and steers me to the thicket of trees behind the property, beyond the pool area, that his clutch is painful, almost bruising. For the sake of the cash, I ignore the rancid stink of the tobacco and Old Crow that emanates deep from his lungs whenever he wheezes; I forgive the violence with which he shoves me to my knees. When he drops his shorts to reveal a cock so crooked, so bent, that when fully erect it points at almost a ninety-degree angle to his right, the money in my pocket is enough anesthetic to help me dive for it hungrily and to welcome it in my throat, painful a fit as it might be.</p>
<p>He’s not a gentle lover. It’s with force he holds me down on his dick. When he finishes, it’s deep down my throat as I struggle for air. His semen is foul as he withdraws along the length of my tongue. Bitter as tar. I’d almost suppose it to be black in color, from the taste alone. Without a thank-you, without a word, he leaves me in the thicket, alone and gagging and coughing. Both my jaw and neck are sore. For long minutes, I wipe away tears and snot and struggle to regain some degree of composure. Then I brush the dirt from my knees, rise to my feet, and slink back to the cabin and into bed.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2023/02/three-nights-in-chincoteague-1980-part-2.html" target="_blank">Part two continues here</a></i></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-2659793469116593562022-12-31T11:30:00.000-05:002022-12-31T11:30:10.190-05:00My Turn<p>Once again, on this vacation, I’m sitting at a meal in front of an empty plate, across the table from a man who stares off into the distance and slowly chews a bite of gingerbread pig. No, <em>chewing</em> would indicate an end goal of actually swallowing. That’s an outcome unlikely to come to fruition anytime in the near future. <em>Masticating</em>, perhaps. What a cow does with its cud for endless hours, standing in a hot summer field as its tail flicks away flies from its shanks. Cows have tails, do they? Is that horses? Of course they do. Oxtail soup is a thing, right?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtA_T7BQd3S9RnTbDC9K6KnXi7uM1w96seXdSOOGJTsJnbsmeuyEU_zKrBhDtwGV1d1W8e9-iQCdbaz1pcOL_vLE_U0vrgHrVR92Un6TcOLULjPUMdnkgQ37uu1PcqqLYQCsVVV3Rlo-qajTMEKyt0C9Ds7dIV6JF1GKEjh51Md0TNG0_zp4VFIUI/s1201/Marranitos-Puerquitos-Pan-Dulce-HERO.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1201" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtA_T7BQd3S9RnTbDC9K6KnXi7uM1w96seXdSOOGJTsJnbsmeuyEU_zKrBhDtwGV1d1W8e9-iQCdbaz1pcOL_vLE_U0vrgHrVR92Un6TcOLULjPUMdnkgQ37uu1PcqqLYQCsVVV3Rlo-qajTMEKyt0C9Ds7dIV6JF1GKEjh51Md0TNG0_zp4VFIUI/s320/Marranitos-Puerquitos-Pan-Dulce-HERO.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<p><br /></p><p>I’ve been to the breakfast buffet twice already; my stomach bulges happily from a double helping of chilaquiles. Although my small party has occupied our table for a good forty minutes, <a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/search/label/eeyore" target="_blank">my friend Eeyore</a> has only picked at his plate. Years ago, Eeyore had surgery for one of those bariatric bands, to help him lose weight. Ever since, he’s been an exceptionally slow eater. Excruciating, long meals had been the first things I’d considered, when originally he’d proposed accompanying us on this Puerto Vallarta trip; I still have vivid memories of Eeyore in Provincetown, years ago, and the restaurant visits that lasted so long that lunch bled into dinnertime, and dinner past my bedtime. </p>
<p>But hey. Eeyore is an old friend. He’s not primarily <em>my</em> friend—I don’t have his phone number and we don’t text or talk outside our circle. I’ve know him for three decades and more, though, starting back in Michigan. He’d relocated to NYC in the early 2000s for a more exciting life, predating my own move by several years. Now, in two weeks, he’ll be moving back to Michigan again. This vacation is Eeyore’s last hurrah, and I’m not about to ruin it by grousing about the glacial ages he spends eating. </p>
<p>And isn’t the leisure part and parcel with a vacation? I’m supposed to be enjoying this weather, the atmosphere, the long and unhurried hours with no itinerary and no obligations.</p>
<p>“So,” I say, waving away the waiter as he threatens to refill my orange juice glass. “How’s that roommate of yours?”</p>
<p>Eeyore sniffs his pig before taking another considered bite. “Hell if I know.” This week, the Mexican resort has been taken over by a charter group—hundreds of gay men occupy every floor. Rather than pay double the rate for a single room, Eeyore has opted to be matched with an unknown roommate. He's barely seen the guy since our first afternoon. All Eeyore has told me about the guy is that he’s from Chicago. “I can tell he’s been using the shower, but I sure haven’t seen him.”</p>
<p>“Well, at least someone is having fun,” I say, suppressing a deep sigh.</p>
<p>Eeyore doesn’t have an answer to that, so I raise my phone and swipe through the apps. Some guy on Grindr from the hotel has been nagging me to meet with him. He mails from Montreal, and while the photos he’s sent me are decent enough, he gives off a creepy vibe. <em>I saw you at the mojito bar last night</em>, his current message reads. It’s a sequel to previous installments he’s texted, including <em>Hey wasn’t that you at the south end of the pool yesterday morning</em> and <em>I think I passed you in the lobby last night but you didn’t look my way</em>. </p>
<p>The combined effect of all these near-miss messages makes me grind my teeth. <em>If you see me, why the fuck don’t you just say hello????</em> I stab out with my thumbs. I pause, reconsider, then append a few more question marks for added emphasis. In the end, I think better of sending, delete the message, and ignore the text. </p>
<p>I’m about to shut off the phone and return to staring out at the horizon when a Scruff notification drops down from the top of my screen. <em>Is your offer still on the table?</em> I recognize the guy. We’d talked the night before. <em>I was hoping to get a taste of the natural Mister Steed</em>. He’s followed it up with a devil emoji.</p>
<p><em>Definitely still on the table, </em>I tap back.</p>
<p><em>How natural are you?</em></p>
<p><em>Haven’t showered since yesterday morning.</em></p>
<p>This information pleases him, judging by the row of emojis sweating, wearing sunglasses, and sticking out their tongues. <em>My hubby has gone into town for shopping and a massage. He’ll be away for a few hours. Can you come soon?</em></p>
<p>I look up to see Eeyore beginning to pick at his cold scrambled eggs. Our other table companion, his plate also long empty, stares at his own tiny screen.<em> Yeah</em>, I type back. <em>Give me a room number.</em> The Scruff stranger obliges.</p>
<p>My chair shudders across the tile as I rise and place my napkin on my plate. “I’m, uh, heading up to the room,” I say, placing my hands on my stomach in what I hope is the universal sign language for <em>I need to poop and I'm more comfortable doing so in the privacy of my own room</em>. “I’ll meet you guys…” Eeyore still has an hour or more to go with his food, I’m guessing. “...Anon.”</p>
<p>The fib elicits only grunts. I dash away to the elevator and head to my assignation.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p><em>I can tell by your profile that you’re a giving top. The kind of man who gets off on pleasuring others. </em>The message had popped up on Scruff the night before. I’m susceptible enough to flattery that of course I agreed with every word. I am a giving top. I do enjoy pleasing others. It’s a form of rhetoric, though, that the sender might easily turn into a selfish come-on: if I enjoy pleasing a hole so much, how about I please his? It’s why I’m pleasantly surprised by the follow-up. <em>You please so many others. Isn’t it your turn to be taken care of, once in a while? Don’t you deserve it?</em></p>
<p>I agree, nodding my head at the phone. Yes, I deserve it. Yes, I please so many others. I'm practically a saint! Maybe it is my turn to be selfish. <em>What did you have in mind?</em> I ask the stranger. His profile arouses me: he’s got handsome good looks and a fit, firm body that he shows off in multiple mirror selfies. His strong chin is accented by a full, dark beard. His eyes are full of humor and intelligence. It’s the kind of profile that I bet shows up on the app’s Most Woofed feature, on the regular. </p>
<p><em>How about when the time is right, you come up to my room, lay back, lift those legs in the air, and let me lick out that hole for a good long time. I’ll take care of you the way you take care of so many other lucky bottoms. Oh, I’ll take care of your cock, too. I’d be honored to worship that monster. But please. Let me honor that hole of yours first.</em></p>
<p>Upon seeing the offer, I swallow hard. I don’t get many offers to have my butt munched. The last time had been earlier in the year, when on one of my visits to Virginia a man had ended up <a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/06/redneck-rim-artist.html" target="_blank">eating it for hours</a> in my hotel room—but before that, it hadn’t had a good rimming in an eon. </p>
<p>While I’m considering the best way to accept while not seeming too needy, he messages me again. <em>Tops don’t do all the preparation bottoms usually do. If you bring me that hole natural, I’ll be a real happy boy. What do you think?</em></p>
<p>I know exactly what he’s asking, of course. Ordinarily, I won't let anyone near my hole unless it's thoroughly scrubbed and given at least a two-knuckle rinse. Poop smells during sex ruin the mood for me. I’d hate knowing I was the source of any bad odor.</p>
<p>But I’m of an age in which I rely on multiple psyllium capsules a day to keep my colon moving. Most of the time, my natural hole isn’t in too different a state from my hole out of the shower. I’m not worried about causing a nasty situation. <em>Yeah</em>, I type out. <em>Let me know when. My hole and I will be ready.</em></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p><p>“Damn,” he says, upon opening the door to my knock. He beckons me in. “You’re a tall drink of water.”</p>
<p>I laugh. I’m used to the reaction. “And you’re a handsome devil.”</p>
<p>He has the courtesy to blush a little. “Look who’s talking.” Then, standing on tiptoe, he takes my head between his hands and pulls me down for a kiss. His beard smells of vanilla and amber; a faded mint lingers on his tongue. For a long moment we stand there, just behind the closed door, arms locked about the other, faces mashed, eyes half-closed. “You’re a hell of a good kisser, too.” There’s a grin on his face: he likes not only what he’s seeing, but what he’s so far getting. His fingers wrap around my hand and squeeze while he stands once more on his toes to kiss me. “Come,” he says, tugging me toward the bed. “Let’s see what I can do for you.”</p>
<p>I shiver, and not just from the air conditioning blasting on my bare neck. It’s midday, but he’s drawn the blinds; though the room is dim as dusk, I can still tell it’s an untidy mess, though. On the sofa, someone’s thrown both clothing and electronics. The dresser top is crowded with shopping bags. Someone likes his souvenirs. There’s an open container of THC gummies, sugary and gem-colored, on the desk. The bed is a pristine oasis in the mess. Its white spread has been smoothed down; the pillows have been arrayed in a comfortable position. My host has laid out a black beach towel in the bed’s center, and now he guides me in its direction. </p>
<p>“You ready for someone to focus on you?” he whispers, his fingers slipping from mine. </p>
<p>My eyes don’t move from his as we speak. “Definitely.”</p>
<p>“Give you the attention you need?” He sits me on the bed and urges me to scoot back my butt onto the towel. I manage to get it done without messing up his careful arrangement. “The attention you deserve?”</p>
<p>I’m covered with what prickles like acres of gooseflesh. “Yes,” I whisper, watching him kneel on the bed’s edge and crawl up between my legs. “Please.”</p>
<p>His warm hands slide beneath my tee and press me down. The bearded man’s lips approach mine. As much as I want to taste those kisses again, he teases me by staying near enough that I can feel his breath on my facial hair, but not so close that our lips can meet. Not with his weight pushing me down into the feather pillows. “I am going to worship you,” he promises. </p>
<p>In that moment, I believe him.</p>
<p>He removes my shirt gently, as if helping a sleepy child to his bed. While I shiver in the room’s air conditioning, he coaxes up my hips and shimmies down my shorts and underwear. The former he folds and places in a neat square at the bed’s edge. The latter he crumples into a ball, to study and consider. “Are these yesterday’s?” he wants to know.</p>
<p>I nod. My plans had been to change my trunks when I showered before lunch. </p>
<p>My answer pleases him. With my tacit permission, he buries his nose and mouth into the still-warm cotton and inhales. My scent affects him like the strongest poppers; I can see his pupils dilate with pleasure as the musk hits home. Suddenly, there’s urgency between us. Breathing heavily, he throws my trunks onto the bed as if they’ve angered him; he crosses his arms and yanks his own polo from his hairy chest and yanks the basketball shorts from his waist. Beneath them, he’s wearing a red Nasty Pig jock. The head of his cock, fat and angry, protrudes over its band.</p>
<p>Once again he grabs my shorts and buries his face in them, like a pig at the trough. Maybe those deep huffs he’s taking vacuum out the scent, because several times he searches for new spots to huff. I can see a precum bead at the tip of his cock; when he tosses my trunks onto the floor and begins crawling his way back between my legs, the sticky droplet smears across the hair on his belly. “Let me do this for you,” he begs, as he pries apart my knees. Now he’s the one saying, “Please.”</p>
<p>I nod, giving him my approval. I find my hips being lifted into the air; his hands simultaneously support my weight and pry open my cheeks. I hold onto my ankles for balance. I’m totally exposed: only with klieg lights and a live studio audience could my hole be any more on display. </p>
<p>My sole spectator, though, seems enraptured by the sight of me. “That’s beautiful,” he murmurs, taking deep breaths. Thought I’m still confident in my lack of outright foulness, I know there must be other odors in which he’s reveling. The complex aroma of my balls after a day in the Puerto Vallarta heat. The sweat that’s accumulated and dried in the crease of my thighs. Perhaps even the nutty redolence of my cock, where the skin had been covering the head. He’s relishing them all. “You’re fucking beautiful,” he continues. “I’m going to enjoy this.”</p>
<p>“What do you…?” My question dies in my throat before it’s born, because he’s diving in to my hole with an open mouth. My legs flail; I buckle with such surprise that my bearded friend nearly drops me. While he continues to gnaw at my pucker, I struggle to regain balance. It’s just that his mouth on my ass feels so damned <em>good</em>. He uses the same tricks I employ on my hapless bottoms, rubbing his thick beard over the flesh, blowing a column of cool air on wet skin, biting the cheeks, rasping his teeth over what’s tender. He’s got me wide open and where he wants me. Although he props a pillow just below where I’m balanced on my upper spine, it’s not necessary—I’m holding onto my ankles for dear life, pulling myself open for him. I’m the eager accomplice to my own violation.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s too on-the-nose to say he has a shit-eating grin on his face when he comes up for air, but that’s the phrase that comes to mind. “Perfect,” he tells me. “I love this hole.”</p>
<p>He’s barely begun, and already I’m reduced to whimpers. “Just…do what you want. Please.”</p>
<p>“Naw, I’m serious, dude.” He addresses me with the gravity of a college lecturer, though what comes out of his mouth is far from intellectual. “You probably don’t hear it much. But this hole—is perfect. Not nasty. Just perfect in its natural state. I’m not tasting soap, or disinfectant. I get to taste <em>you</em>. The real you. Fuck, that’s hot.”</p>
<p>I can’t help it. My dick swells larger and flops to the other side of my belly.</p>
<p>He notices, and grabs for it. “Lookit this fat dong. Pussy pleaser.” He pulls it down between my legs until it flattens my balls on other side. “Fuck, lookit this thing. I bet it tastes good, too.”</p>
<p>When he engulfs it to the base, I howl. He’s yanking it to such an uncomfortable angle that the pain mingles with the pleasure his mouth and tongue bring me. It hurts, but I don’t want him to stop. As he sucks, his finger works into my hole. Another snakes in beside it. I’m already so wet from his oral assault that they both slide deep, without resistance.</p>
<p>Shuddering from the multiple sensations shorting every nerve, I clamp my eyes closed. It’s too much for me to take—but take it I do. I don’t get much choice. He throats my hog without gagging, though I can feel muscle and tendon opening and closing around my rigid inches with increasing vigor. When at last he comes up for air, spit flies from his lips to land on my belly. “Damn, fucker,” he rasps. “That’s almost too big to worship.” </p>
<p>I can only respond in wordless grunts and gibberish; there’s too much information flowing through my nervous system for my brain to process. He drives both fingers into my hole with a savage thrust, as if punishing me for challenging his oral skills. </p>
<p>“Don’t worry,” he assures me with a smirk. “It’ll get more attention in a minute.”</p>
<p>Back to my hole his mouth travels. He hauls my hips into the air with the flats of his hands, once more spreading me wide as he hunches over to devour me. Though I keep hold of my ankles, still I buck and thrash with every new sensation. Every now and again he’ll tweak something to give me a little extra pleasure: a tug of the nuts, or a pinch of my nipples, still sore from <a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/12/dumb-jock.html" target="_blank">my encounter with the Dumb Jock</a>. He’ll reach tenderly to lay his hand against my face, or else he’ll cover my skull with his palm and outstretched fingers and shove it into the pillows. It all feels good. Even if I were to protest—and I don’t—it would only come out as whimpers and sighs.</p>
<p>After long minutes he’s back on my cock, again pulling it painfully down at an angle it wouldn’t ordinarily enjoy. The rough treatment only makes it harder, though. I holler when he shoves fingers in my hole again, ramming that sweet spot deep inside until it's aflame. His not caring about my comfort only gives me more pleasure. I’m near tears, but I’m also harder than I’ve been in weeks. </p><p>“You know what would be really hot,” he speculates, wrapping his fingers around my slick, spit-soaked flesh. I grunt. “Getting some toy inside you. Ever had a guy work a fat dildo up that hole? It wouldn’t make you any less of a top. It would just give you a little bit back of that good love you give bottom boys like me.” He fingers drive home once more, making me gasp. “Think you’d like that sometime?”</p>
<p>In this moment, in my awkward geometry of resting on my shoulder blades with my ass propped high and my legs waggling like antennae, with my slobber running from my mouth and his dripping off my cock and out of my asshole, with my functioning brain switched off and my responses on autopilot—in this moment, he could suggest mating me with a miniature donkey and I’d think it a fucking fantastic idea. He takes my wordless consent as an invitation to widen my gape and shoves another finger in there.</p>
<p>It’s this that sends me over the edge, the impact of his probing fingertips ramming against my prostate as my wet hole accepts more of him. When he feels my cock begin to buckle and contract, he dives down to wrap his lips around the base, his throat opening to accommodate my girth. My orgasm is as painful as it is loud, as blinding as it is explosive. At one point I jolt to consciousness to witness my scarlet cock spraying a thick rope of seed onto his forehead and cheek and across his black beard. Then I’m sightless again, overtaken by another wave of the climax. </p>
<p>Even after, when it’s over and my butt meets the mattress at last, lava still flows through my veins. My dick is afire. Wet. Sore. Mistreated, but happy for the abuse. I feel the stranger’s furry chest pressing against my side as he lifts my left arm above my head and laps at my armpit. “Mmmm,” he sighs, smelling of my load. “You taste good here, too.”</p>
<p>“That was—“</p>
<p>With a finger on my lips, he silences my sad attempt to assign words to what’s happened between us. It smells of my ass. Not dirty. Masculine. Natural. “I didn’t say I was done making you feel good, top man,” he teases. “Roll the fuck over.”</p>
<p>At his push, I tumble onto my stomach. He lifts my hips and shoves a pillow beneath them, then wrenches apart my knees.</p>
<p>“I’m still feeling selfish, fucker.” I feel hot breath against my sore hole. My skin tingles at he touch of his beard. “Buckle up, 'cause now I'm <i>really</i> gonna make out with that pucker.”</p>
<p>Once again I sigh, and allow myself to drift away on a wave of sensation. I please so many others, after all. It’s my turn to be taken care of.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-15826075981680589002022-12-10T09:30:00.049-05:002022-12-10T09:30:00.218-05:00Dumb Jock<p>After a long Sunday morning basking in the Jalisco sun, yesterday’s stresses are starting to melt away. </p>
<p>Saturday had been long and uncomfortable, beginning with the ride a neighbor had provided to JFK. He’d weaved through New York City traffic at top speed like a cabbie on meth, before ejecting me and my carry-on onto the pavement in front of the Jet Blue terminal. Then had been the five-and-a-half hour flight, with customers packed like sardines. Next, the chaos of the Puerto Vallarta airport as for another two hours I wended my way through immigration and customs. The airport shuttle to the resort over the Zona Romántica’s cobbles had agitated every bone in my body and shaken loose my teeth. At the hotel, I’d been met with a queue for check-in that had lasted over an hour. I’d ended the day sore, tired, and crabby, convinced my week-long vacation was sure to be a bust.</p>
<p>Today, though, I’m feeling better. I’m settled upon a lounge chair with a view of the many shirtless men congregating around the pool. The Pacific laps at the beach below, its horizon level with my bare toes. I’ve got the diaries of Alan Rickman on my Kindle, and dark shades to cover my eyes. Late in the morning, the bartender has provided me with a drink concocted of seemingly incompatible elements—rosé wine, tequila, a squirt of 7-Up, and some liqueur I can’t identify among them, all of it laced with booze-soaked berries. Though the recipe turns my stomach to think about, the result is undeniably fizzy and, damn it, delicious. </p>
<p>This morning, life is good.</p>
<p>I crush the last of the tart blueberries between my teeth, drain the ice of its dregs, and set the glass down on a table. My feet search blindly for their sandals. It’s lunchtime.</p>
<p>I smile and nod at other men as I wind my way around the pool. Whitney is playing over the sound system, but she’s drowned out by 2 Unlimited blasting at the pool’s deep end. The resort’s director of activities has submerged several stationary bikes beneath the surface for an underwater spin class. Half a dozen game types churn their legs while doggedly listening to him bark orders over a looping soundtrack of “Get Ready for This.”</p>
<p>Too intense for me. I wander into one of the resort’s restaurants, where the lunch buffet is already in full swing. I toss a few tortilla chips on my plate, cover them with a liberal helping of roasted poblanos in crema, help myself to some short ribs simmered in a spicy red sauce, and find myself a table.</p>
<p>I’ve settled down with a napkin on my lap when I see him. He’s twenty feet away, watching me with large blue eyes. A barrel-chested brute of a man, sitting by himself, tablet propped in front of him. He’s got a head big and smooth as a melon. A salt-and-pepper mustache droops over his lips. Beefy thighs scissor restlessly beneath the table; his feet, larger and thicker than my own, have slipped from their flip-flops. From muscular shoulders hangs a tank top, black, emblazoned with the words: DUMB JOCK. Honestly—he looks like he fits the description. One of his nipples peeks around the cotton’s edge.</p>
<p>By the time I’m enough over the surprise of his eyes locked on mine, he’s already returned to his book. Soon enough, though, he peeks up again. From across the tables and chairs, our glances entwine. I smile. He nods back, face sober, then focuses once more on his reading.</p>
<p>That’s all right, I tell myself. The week is just starting. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>All afternoon, out on the beach, I’ve been watching a trio of genial hounds,. Sometimes the three come together and chase after gulls in the surf; at other points, they separate to nap in the sun. There’s one dog in particular who’s super-friendly. I’ve watched the fawn-colored terrier pad his way across the sand to unsuspecting tourists in their lounge chairs, to hop up between some surprised, suntanning tourist’s legs, then curl up for a nap. Or he’ll pant and wag his tail and demand petting and praise. I don’t know to whom the dog belongs, if anyone. It’s possible he’s living off the generosity of hotel visitors. The staff have a name for him, though, and don’t seem to object when he sits near the outdoors luncheon barbecue, tail still awag, patiently waiting for scraps to be tossed his way. </p>
<p>Later that night, there’s a show across the street in the hotel’s conference center. I’ve been watching for fifteen minutes, but I’m not feeling it—the crowd is larger than I’m comfortable with, the noise a little crazy. So I excuse myself to my friends and step outside, where I’m alone. Or nearly alone, anyway. “Well, hello,” I say, to the handsome lad waiting outdoors.</p>
<p>It’s the dog from the beach, his behind planted on the brick pavement, liquid eyes squeezed in my direction. It’s as if he’s been waiting for me. </p>
<p>“I’m heading back to the hotel,” I tell him. He immediately stands, turns as if he’s going to cross the street, and looks over his shoulder, waiting for me to follow. “No, not across traffic,” I say, automatically worried over a dog that’s not mine. The rush of automobiles in front of the hotel can be crazy; the staff have repeatedly warned guests that it’s much safer to take an underground walkway that wends its way beneath the avenue above to the hotel’s lowest level. It’s not the shortest distance between two points by a long shot, but I don’t want to be responsible for a strange animal getting struck by a car. “There’s a…you know.”</p>
<p>The dog seems to understand what I mean, even though I haven’t moved a muscle. He’s already changed direction, down the sloping sidewalk to the stairway zig-zagging beneath the street.</p>
<p>“Well, heck. Wait for me,” I exclaim, trying to catch up.</p>
<p>The dog stays close by my side the entire walk back, as if I’ve always been his human. He knows this route. “All right,” I tell him, when he looks over his shoulder as I fish my phone from my shorts. “I’m coming.”</p>
<p>There’s a message on Scruff. I recognize the face instantly. It’s Dumb Jock, staring at me from his profile with the mild resentment of someone posing for a prison mugshot. His two other shots are equally sober. <em>I think I saw you at lunch today</em>, he’s written.</p>
<p>“Hang on again,” I tell the dog, because I am the kind of person who talks to animals as if they comprehend. He automatically sits, tail still in motion. <em>Yeah, I saw you too. What’s up?</em></p>
<p><em>You doing anything? I’m alone in my room</em>. </p>
<p>I had planned to head back to my own room and relax a little, but the unexpected opportunity gives me pause. I look at the dog, who regards me with such loving eyes that I begin wondering if I might be able to smuggle him back to the U.S. at week’s end. <em>I can come right up.</em></p>
<p>Dumb Jock sends me a room number that I commit to memory. “Let’s go,” I tell the dog. </p>
<p>He’s already ahead of me, though, showing me the path beyond the brick steps beyond the hotel’s loading dock. I catch up, and amiably we walk down the last slope to an open area at the resort’s lowest level. The central elevators sit only a dozen feet to the right; in an open-air corridor that leads to the pools and the ocean beyond, staff members are setting up tables and draping them with cloths to make an <em>ofrienda </em>for the Day of the Dead, two days hence. </p>
<p>“Well, this is where I leave you,” I tell the dog. He responds by panting, weaving a path around my legs, then bounding past the <em>ofrienda </em>for the beach. Such a good boy. I already miss him.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I haven’t even finished knocking when Dumb Jock answers his door. The first thing I notice about him isn’t that he’s still wearing the same tank top I’d seen him in earlier that day. Not a stitch of anything else. Also, that he’s a good two inches taller than I. Ordinarily, I hate that. I’m used to being the tallest in any room. Stupid as it is, I’m always slighted when someone’s genetics have the effrontery to overtake my own.</p>
<p>But Dumb Jock looks at me with the same liquid eyes as my canine companion of a few minutes before. I swear that if he had one, his tail would be wagging. “Hey.” His bass is as low as I’d imagined, but also much softer. </p>
<p>I say nothing. Instead, I place a hand on his chest and push him backward, so that he stumbles over the threshold. The door swings shut behind us. Against the wall I push this stranger, tilting my head upward. He takes the bait, covering my lips with his own. Our mouths open; our bodies press tight against the other. His arms circle around my waist. I snake an arm behind his head and cup his smooth dome, pulling him into me. From deep in his chest, a groan travels, rumbling the flesh where we connect.</p>
<p>We’ve never spoken before. I haven’t even learned the Dumb Jock’s name. But from the way he melts into me as I kiss him deeply, I know the man. From his pleased huff he makes as I push him against the wall once more, and the way those big eyes open to drink me in, I take his measure. He’s a man too often forced into the dominant role because of his size. He’s a man whom others expect to take charge, when instead he wants to be taken care of. With that shirt he’s wearing, he’s proclaiming far and wide what he wants: to be treated like a dumb jock, a piece of meat. All brawn, all flesh—no intellect.</p>
<p>In the dark corridor leading from door to bed, I grab his wrists and pin them next to his shoulders. I stare him in the eyes. “So. What were you reading at lunch today?”</p>
<p>The question catches him off guard. He has to clear his throat and switch on his thoughts again. When he shares the name of Adrian Tchaikovsky, the British science fiction writer, I nod, recognizing it. We stare at each other in the dim light for a moment. </p>
<p>“Some pretty big words in that book. Especially for a…dumb jock,” I say, my voice level. </p>
<p>He sags in my grip. Gratitude shines in his gaze. I can see his brain flicker off once more as I kiss him again. </p>
<p>He skims the t-shirt from my torso and lets it fall to the floor. When I kick off my flip-flops, they tumble into the bathroom behind us. He’s already naked from the waist down; his rigid cock pokes against me as he attempts to slide down my shorts and trunks together without breaking our deep kiss. I have to pull away in order to strip off that tank top he’s wearing. By the time I lead him from the little hall to the bed beyond, our clothing is strewn on the floor, as tangled together as we are when we hit the mattress. </p>
<p>Once he’s on his back, I establish my dominance by raising my right fingers to my mouth. Inside their curl I nestle as much spit as I can produce. Dumb Jock’s legs are already spread wide when my fingers move to his hole. I can see his toes curl when the payload reaches its target. “Fuck,” he breathes.</p>
<p>“Oh, we will.” I promise. Then, after a pause, “Eventually.”</p>
<p>Naked, his body is impressive. He’s not ripped, but a lot of gym time has gone into sculpting the mounds here, the ropy coils there, the man-tits that had tented the tank I’d first seen him in. Compared to him, I’m a slob. But I’m the slob who’s making him feel good, with my fingers stretching and clawing at the sensitive spot between his cheeks. The lids of his eyes hang heavy, as if he’s falling asleep. Yet throughout my manipulations, he writhes and moans with pleasure, never more awake, never more alive. </p>
<p>“You’re a pretty boy, aren’t you,” I tell him. Some last shred of modesty prevents him from agreeing, but I nod and give him permission. “Say it. You’re a pretty boy.”</p>
<p>“I’m a pretty boy, sir,” he whispers. As reward, my index and middle finger dive deep into his moist hole, eliciting a jolt of electricity that sends him into a fit of shuddering. I can almost feel the residual crackle from his skin. “I’m just a fuckin’ pretty boy.”</p>
<p>“A dumb jock.”</p>
<p>“I’m a dumb jock, sir. A fuckin’ <em>stupid</em> jock.”</p>
<p>“Made for cock.”</p>
<p>Those weighted lids widen. “Made for <em>your</em> cock.”</p>
<p>“Maybe,” I say, pleased. “But you don’t even know me. I’m just some stranger you saw in a foreign country, one day. You don’t even know my name.” I can tell he’s struggling, trying to figure out if he should ask, but I go on. “You’re made for cock. You don’t care if it’s some dude you don’t know. You’re just a stupid jock who needs something thick and hard filling that hole. Right?”</p>
<p>He nods, desperate to share his agreement. In this moment, this quiet moment, long after the sun has set over the ocean just outside his window, when the pool area is dormant and the hotel itself silent, I’m saying the things he wants to hear and he loves me for it. I watch his lips struggle to find a reply good enough, smart enough. </p>
<p>I don’t give him the opportunity. Though he’s taller and bigger than I, when I grab an ankle and pivot it around, he instantly flips onto his abdomen as if made of tissue paper and popsicle sticks. He spreads his legs and sets his ass high, like a good boy. When I grab the hairy cheeks, he gasps, seizes a pillow, and hangs on for dear life. I dive in.</p>
<p>For long minutes I assault his hole with my mouth. He pleads with me in wordless syllables when my lips and tongue work their wet magic on the pink flesh; he protests when I rasp my mustache and beard across the slick surface. From time to time, I’ll give his cheeks a light bite, or I might scrape my teeth across their expanse and occasionally harvest a hair between them. He participates in his own use by wresting his cheeks apart with his own paws, to give me as much access as he can.</p>
<p>“How’s that feel?” I ask. Not because I don’t already know the answer—because I want to hear him say it. </p>
<p>“Oh god,” is all he can muster.</p>
<p>“What’s that?”</p>
<p>“I love it,” he huffs. “I fucking love it, sir.”</p>
<p>Between his tree trunk thighs I kneel. My erect cock points at its destination. “Still didn’t hear you.”</p>
<p>“I fucking <em>love it</em>, sir!<em>”</em></p>
<p>My hands plant themselves on either side of his rib cage; now my knees are on either side of his hipbones. The head of my dick plants its sticky kiss at the base of his spine. “You ready to be fucked, dumb jock?”</p>
<p>The musclebound bottom buries his face in the pillow. “Yes sir.”</p>
<p>My mouth hovers next to his ear, now. “Nah,” I tell him. “You’re not going to take it like that, eyes closed, face covered.” He turns his head and peers at me through slits. “Sit on it.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir!”</p>
<p>We switch positions. He arranges the pillows to support me, then carefully lays me in them as if I’m something precious. I use my thumbs to point my cock straight in the air. “Look at it, first,” I order. “Look at what you’re gonna be taking.”</p>
<p>Now he’s kneeling over me. He’s trembling to spear himself onto my meat, but he obeys and looks down. </p>
<p>“No. Get real close.” He slides back and brings himself to eye level with it. I swat him away when he tries to grab for it. “What do you see?”</p>
<p>“It’s beautiful.” He’s close enough that I can feel the heat of his breath, just below the head. “Fuck. It’s so big. I knew you’d be big.”</p>
<p>“Big enough for a big ol’ dick-hungry stupid jock like you?” He nods, entranced. I’m turned on by the steadiness of his gaze. My erection swells; it deepens an even darker shade of red. Another drop of precum oozes out. I like showing off for this pretty boy. “Lick it. Just the tip.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir.” His tongue flicks out and catches the dewdrop balanced on the slit. He laps it down with the deep thirst of a dog at his bowl on an August scorcher. “Thank you, sir.”</p>
<p>“Now.” I give him a nod, and make a show of applying more spit to my inches. “You may sit on it.”</p>
<p>It takes only a moment for him to reposition himself so that he’s poised over the invading inches, and even less time for him to take it to the balls. His hole is wet and loose enough that I slide into his warm depths without resistance. </p>
<p>“There you go,” I say, soft and low. His head is raised to the ceiling, his eyes closed, once again. “Look at me.” He’s too lost in his pleasure to heed. This time I reach up and squeeze both nipples. Ever since one of them peeked out at me, during lunch that afternoon, I’ve been planning exactly what I intend to do to those pink, prominent nipples, each like a fat eraser tip. I know at that size, they’re well-worked. Abused, even. I pinch them tight between my thumb and index finger, commanding attention. “Look at me,” I repeat.</p>
<p>He obeys. </p>
<p>Once again, I feel every muscle in his body tense and release, tense and release so rapidly that they express as quivering. The electricity sets those sleepy eyes alight. I twist and squeeze the plugs of flesh between my fingers, knowing how good it must feel to have them savaged. “Look at me while I’m inside you,” I tell him.</p>
<p>With a rush of motion, he leans down to kiss me. The hollows of his eyes are moist with tears. “Thank you,” he says, as I grind into his hole. “Thank you, sir. It feels so good. Thank you.”</p>
<p>I haven’t let go of his fat nipples. They’re so long, they might wrap around my fingertips. I’m certainly tugging them as if I intend to pry them from his tits, and he’s only responded with adoration for the abuse. “Good boy,” I tell him, when he shudders and jerks to a particularly brutal squeeze. I wish I had a handy pair of alligator clips to tame those things. “Do mine,” I urge.</p>
<p>My own nipples are flat; they don’t get the attention they need or deserve. But I love them bitten, and chewed on, and squeezed. “Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>“Harder.” I can tell he’s afraid to let loose, even though I’m applying twenty times the force to his. “Come on, son. <em>Hurt them</em>.”</p>
<p>We’re staring into each other’s eyes once more, unblinking, intense. He obeys, crushing my nipples between his thick fingers, trying to gauge where the threshold lies for me between pure pleasure and the beginnings of pain. </p>
<p>So far, though, I’m only experiencing intense gratification. He’s doing exactly what I asked: hurting me, though in a way I need and want. “God, yes,” I hiss. “Good boy.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, sir.” He doubles down on the ill-treatment of my nipples, only inspiring me to dig my nails into his. </p>
<p>This is how we fuck—eyes locked, fingers affixed to each other’s chests, causing each other suffering to increase our pleasure. Sometimes I’m the one doing the thrusting while his muscles quake with sensation; sometimes he rides while I bask upon waves of pure sensation. From time to time, we kiss. I welcome those moments of sweetness as much as I love the pain he’s steadily applying at my command.</p>
<p>I don’t protest, though, when he lets loose of my nipples and grabs his own cock. “I’m close,” he says, beating furiously. Perhaps it’s the combination of sensation and torment that’s brought him to the edge; he certainly hasn’t been touching himself before.</p>
<p>“Do it,” I tell him. “Spray it on me.”</p>
<p>Scarcely are the words out of my mouth than he lets loose. I’m showered in what feels like dozens of individual tiny droplets of semen from chin to groin. His hole contracts and loosens around my cock, seeming to take me even more deeply. “Yes,” I tell him. Then, “Please. Just like that.”</p>
<p>Something about the slackness of his hole turns me on, in those moments immediately after he shoots. The feel of his fingers pinching and massaging my nipples yet again amplifies my need. “Please come in me,” he begs, shaking his head as if in disbelief. “Please, sir.”</p>
<p>I don’t need much begging. He holds still as I rabbit-thrust inside him, rapidly using his innermost ring as my personal fleshlight. My own orgasm swiftly follows, setting my cock so on fire. I can’t tell when my ejaculation begins or ends. All I know, as the haze fades, is that I have to lay my hands atop his to urge him from mauling my nipples any further. If I’m able to wear a shirt for the rest of the week without wincing, it’ll be a miracle.</p>
<p>He’s still regarding me when I come to. “That was amazing, sir.” There’s a big, broad, beautiful curve upward to his lips. I’m taken aback to think that until now, I’ve never seen this stranger smile. </p>
<p>“Thank you,” I tell him. “I really needed that.”</p>
<p>He smiles as we disentangle ourselves and mop each other with a hand towel from the bathroom, and as we sort through the clothes scattered across the corridor floor. He’s smiling still, once we’ve dressed and stand by the door. His arms lie on my shoulder, extended, gently crossed, as he gives me a deep kiss. “You’re an amazing top.”</p>
<p>“I’m all right.” My drawl is intended to signify that I know, and that I thank him for the compliment.</p>
<p>“You bred the fuck out of me.” He grins now, exposing even white teeth. Then, “Thank you. Good night. I hope I see you again this week.”</p>
<p>I nod and return his final kiss before making my exit. “Enjoy your book,” I say as farewell, then add, with an affection he’s earned, “Dumb jock.”</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-5877026301131243372022-11-18T09:30:00.005-05:002022-11-18T09:30:00.212-05:00No Guilt<p>The man’s fingers slip beneath the elastic of my waistband. Hairy knuckles graze my skin. I gasp at the touch. “Don’t freak out.” His voice is low. Reassuring. Gentle, even. “I’m gonna pull down these sweats, real slow. I just want to look at that big daddy hog you’re hiding under there. Okay?”</p>
<p>I hesitate, then nod my head. “Yeah,” I stammer out. “Sure. Whatever.”</p>
<p>Our eyes meet. Lock. Bore into each other. “I’m gonna take real good care of you, buddy. You’ll see.”</p>
<p>I take a deep, deep breath and release it with a convincing shudder. “Do it,” I order.</p>
<p>My new friend is a compact bulldog of a man. Big, broad forehead under a thatch of wavy dark hair. Beneath a thin layer of beard, a brutish jaw. Stubby, thick hands that help me raise my hips so he can slowly, gingerly lower my joggers to a tangle around my ankles. He’s got the thick build of a former jock. I wouldn’t exactly say he’s the body builder that he’s advertised himself as, but in the muscle tee with the sleeves ripped from the seams, he’s able to show off some impressive work on his shoulders and arms. “You ready?” he asks, now that I’m down to my trunks. I can feel his breath on my belly.</p>
<p>I take a long time to respond. “This is real new to me, bro,” is what I finally say. </p>
<p>“I know. I know.” The man sounds sincere in his concern, even as his fingers outline the distinct bulge my dick is making beneath a layer of black cotton. “I am gonna take real good care of this dick, though. You’re gonna go home to wifey afterwards and wonder why it took you so long to let a dude like me slobber over that big thing.” </p>
<p>There’s plenty of room in the back seat of his BMW X7 with the New York plates. Its rear windows have a dark tint; no one can see in, even with my back against the door and my head on the glass. I look around, though, feigning discomfort. “You sure this place is safe?”</p>
<p>“It’s real quiet. Nobody’s gonna come by.” I wonder how many times he’s done this before. Constricted though my ankles might be, his big barrel chest spreads my knees spread wide. His sprawl looks uncomfortable: he’s got his right knee on the back floor and his left leg hooked over the seat. “You don’t even gotta touch me. C’mon.” Now he’s whispering. Urgent. He rubs his cheek on my erection, hidden beneath the fabric. “Let a man make you feel good, for the first time.”</p>
<p>My heart’s thudding in its cage; my breath is already labored. The sexual tension is thick between us. For a moment, I even forget I’m not what I’m pretending to be. I take one last look around, seeing nothing outside but empty parking lot and a wall of spruce. “Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Do it.”</p>
<p>He pauses for a moment, making certain I won’t change my mind. “It’s only pleasure. There’s no guilt in accepting pleasure. Remember that.” Both his hands tug down my shorts so that my erection flies free and flops against my own skin with a slap. One of his meaty paws wraps around it—seizes it, makes it his prize. When he squeezes, the portion of dick above his knuckles reddens to a deep scarlet. Once again, he stares into my eyes. “Going in, buddy,” he warns me.</p>
<p>I let out a loud and honest groan as his mouth engulfs me.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>It’s on <a href="https://sniffies.com" target="_blank">Sniffies</a> that he messaged me, earlier that week. <em>Hey buddy,</em> says his initial message. <em>Gonna take a wild guess based on your pic and profile…up until now you’ve been 100% straight, married with kids. Never had a muscular cocksucker like me to take care of you. Think you’re ready to change that?</em></p>
<p>On the Sniffies map I can see he’s only a couple of miles away, somewhere along the interstate. He’s got a blank, anonymous profile. While I usually don’t respond to those, my curiosity is piqued. What in the world about my profile, posted on a gay cruising site, would make him think I’m one hundred percent straight? The only photo I’ve attached is of my erect dick, shot from above, hanging heavily between my thighs. I’ve stated my age and basic stats, but that’s about it. </p>
<p>He’s messaging again. <em>You probably stroke thinking about getting your first head from a masculine man, don’t you.</em></p>
<p>I could correct him, certainly. Should I?</p>
<p><em>I am willing to bet good money that you’re toying with trying a guy’s mouth for the first time in your life. Am I right? If I am, I volunteer. I guarantee you won’t find a better mouth for your first experience.</em></p>
<p>So far, I’ve not tapped out a fucking word. I haven’t had to. This stranger is presenting me with his hopes, his yearnings, his deepest fantasies, elaborately wrapped and fastened with an especially lurid bow. My choices are to discard his overtures because I dislike blank profiles, or to take his gift for what it is.</p>
<p>I choose the latter. <em>Wow,</em> I reply. <em>I can’t believe how close to the mark you came. Do I know you?</em></p>
<p><em>No. But I know your type. I’ve helped a lot of straight bros take that first step. Will you let me help you?</em></p>
<p>It’s at this point that I have to take a break and start preparing dinner. I boil some shells and stuff them with spinach and cheese. It’s a while before they’re sauced and baking in the oven, but eventually I return to the Sniffies page to discover he’s sent me a couple of photos. One of his face, with that bearded jaw, blunt as a cudgel, and those oversized, anxious eyes. Another of his body, a gym selfie, vascular arm curled and flexed in a mirror, amidst a field of weight benches and exercise machines. He’s the kind of ugly that somehow veers into hot, and my dick responds by swelling at the sight. <em>Come on,</em> he’s written. <em>I know it’s scary but I promise it will be oh. So. Good.</em></p>
<p>I’ve played the straight guy before, with <a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/search/label/the%20landscaper" target="_blank">The Landscaper</a>. I can do it again. <em>Let’s talk</em>, I write back.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>“Does that feel good?” he asks. His fist slides up and down over my spit-slick shaft with a grip so firm it’s maddening, as he nurses my nuts with his tongue and his hot breath. “Looks like you’re enjoying it.” </p>
<p>My reply emerges as a whimper. “Yeah.” </p>
<p>“Yeah, don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of you, bro.” Once again his mouth opens to encompass my girth. My head bangs against the glass as he goes all the way down. When he comes up for air once more, he clears his throat and rasps, “Damn, you are huge. Want me to keep going?” When I struggle for words, he stares up at me again. “You can say you like it.”</p>
<p>“I <em>love</em> it,<em>” </em>is what falls from my lips. Sincere. Genuine. “You’ve got a fucking <em>incredible</em> mouth.” </p>
<p>He likes the praise. I can tell by the way he deep-throats my length. His throat opens up to accommodate the topmost inches both without gagging and without abusing the head. His saliva drips down the shaft to my nuts, where the the droplets trickle and chill my skin. “Better than the wife?” he asks, before plunging down again. I cry out. All the blood in my body seems to have flown into my engorged dick, which looks so fat, so bloated, so wet and red, whenever it emerges on his upstroke. “Better than the wife?” he repeats, this time refusing to continue until I answer.</p>
<p>I’m panting now. “So much better. No fucking comparison.”</p>
<p>“I told you, bud.” Now he’s combining the fist and the torrid interior of his throat. I lock my fingers around the back of his head; his thick dark hair rubs against my palms like a Brillo pad. “Yeah. You really must like it.”</p>
<p>“Don’t stop,” I beg.</p>
<p>But he does. “You’re gonna come down my throat, bud. You’re gonna blow your first load with a dude.”</p>
<p>My chest contracts and expands. “I want it.” </p>
<p>“Yeah?” When I nod, he finally agrees to end the torture of denying me his mouth. “Get ready, buddy.”</p>
<p>It’s a good thing I’m hard as concrete; my dick would otherwise have been mauled by his rough treatment. His fist churns around my shaft, his mouth clamps down, cushioned by his lips. I feel his beard rasp with every stroke. The fingers of his other hand stroke my balls. One of them creeps down my taint and seeks my hole, where it burrows into the warm crack.</p>
<p>It’s the last violation, welcome though it is, that sets me over the edge. “I’m coming,” I warn the stranger. From my depths erupts a gargled, strangled sound that seems overloud in the car’s interior. The noise inspires him to take the entire length of me into his throat. There I throb and shoot what feels like jet after jet of my seed. His finger remains in my hole; his wet hand encircles my nuts, first clamping down upon them, then as my climax subsides, massaging from them the last drops of fluid.</p>
<p>“Shit,” I announce to the roof, my eyes closed. “<em>Shit</em>.”</p>
<p>I can hear the smugness in his voice. “Told you. You good, buddy?”</p>
<p>There’s a distinct contrast to the tone of his voice—deliberately cheerful, like we’re stepping off the tennis court after a rough game—and the gentle, loving what he’s treating my deflating dick. From the console between the front seats, he’s drawn a wet wipe that he’s using to clean me off, dabbing at me with soft strokes. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Real good.”</p>
<p>“You took a big step.” His voice is still matter-of-fact. “Proud of you, dude.”</p>
<p>“Thanks,” I say. He helps me pull up my shorts and my sweats. It’s not until I’m fastened up once more that I gesture to his grown and say, “What about you?”</p>
<p>“Nah.” I can see the stubby erection in his gym shorts, but he doesn’t touch it. “I get my biggest pleasure from servicing straight men like you. I’m real good. Hey,” he adds, as if he’s just thought of it. “We’re gonna do this again. Right? Remember what I told you?” </p>
<p>He’s said a lot of things. I search about in my memory to pick out what he might mean. </p>
<p>“There’s no guilt…”</p>
<p>“There’s no guilt in accepting pleasure,” I echo, as I take a look through the glass around the parking lot, this time for real. No one’s around, so I open up the back door and step out. </p>
<p>“That’s right. No regrets.”</p>
<p>I grin, agreeing with him. “No regrets.”</p>
<p>“Good. We’re doing this again soon,” he says, from inside. I nod and wave, and shut the door behind me.</p>
<p>The insides of my trunks are as humid as a Virginia summer thunderstorm. I feel as if I’ve been assaulted and robbed of my bodily fluids. My legs are a little wobbly as I totter to my car, a good twenty feet away. </p>
<p>But I mean, hell. Why wouldn’t they be? I’ve just lost my man-on-man virginity, after all.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-43209761336852431792022-09-19T08:57:00.044-04:002022-09-19T09:29:28.892-04:00Babyface: Part 2<p> <i>(This entry is a continuation of </i><a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/04/babyface-part-1.html" target="_blank">Babyface: Part 1</a><i>.)</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i><b>Autumn 1985</b></i></p><p>My friend Rand finds me outside and around the corner, a couple of minutes later. “Hey, where’d you go?” he asks, before noticing I'm planted on the pavement. My head had been between my knees when I’d heard the approach of his footsteps. His tone changes from plaintive to worried. “You okay? What’s going on?”</p>
<p>Encountering Jim had sent me into a fight-or-flight dilemma. I’d chosen to fly straight out of Beezie’s Records, the door’s mocking Tibetan bells jangling like laughter in my ears. The sight of him activated memories of my incarceration in his closet—my rage and hysteria, the helpless desperation of being trapped and not knowing when or even if I’d be discovered. Four years later, despite the sunshine and the bustle of a city street, I’m once more imprisoned within the crawl space’s tight boundaries. I’m exhausted and hopeless after hours of yelling and tears. The sheer weight of so much darkness seems to break every rib in its cage. Now, as then, I’m rasping for breath. Jim had birthed nightmares that plagued me for weeks and months, and that will continue to haunt me for years to come. He’d done it with a smile and a laugh. He’d gotten away with it. </p>
<p>A hand grasps my shoulder. I startle. Ignoring the traffic roaring by on the busy thoroughfare, Rand squats over the filthy pavement and searches my face. “Are you sick?”</p>
<p>“What? No.” I’m so accustomed to blending my personal life into the background that my panic attack, quiet and still as it is, feels like histrionics. I pull myself together and slip behind the bland facade from which my real self peers out at the world. “Did you get your album? You know, the Allman Brothers?”</p>
<p>Through his thick lenses, Rand blinks at my non sequitur, then holds up empty hands. “No. I turned around and you’d up and disappeared.” </p>
<p>I’m still breathing heavily. I decide to play into it. “Dusty old places like that make my asthma act up.” I don’t have asthma. “Just needed some fresh air, is all.” I’m hoping Rand will leave me alone. All I really want right now is solitude, but my fictional infirmity has made him reluctant to leave. “I’m good. For real. You don’t need to hang around.”</p>
<p>It takes a liberal handful of slick reassurances to urge my friend back to his feet. “Only if you’re sure…” </p>
<p>“I’m heading straight home.” My lies dull the metallic tang panic has left on my tongue. “I’m fine.” I’m well enough to climb to my feet. “You should get to the office. Elisabeth’s usually around this time of day.”</p>
<p>Rand seems to be assessing my fitness, so I bounce on my toes with an energy I don’t feel. Elisabeth is the teaching assistant with whom he’s enamored; the prospect of alone time with her is too tempting to resist. It’s with reluctance, though, that he deems me worthy to be left on my own. “Only if you’re sure.”</p>
<p>I wave him off with smiles and promises. I’m fortunate at this stage in my life, adrift as I feel after college, to have been accepted by his small, academic tribe. Despite my differences, despite holding myself at arm’s-length and never quite letting anyone in, Rand and the other graduate students have embraced me. Grateful as I am for his friendship, right now I need space. </p>
<p>At last, his long legs carry him back in the direction of campus. I should follow. Every instinct informs me the wise thing to do now would be to head home and never return to this third-rate used record store. </p>
<p>Yet there’s no mental scab I’ve ever refrained from picking. My lifelong response to adversity and confrontation is to remain stone-faced before it, unraveling only in my privacy. In fleeing Beezie’s, I have ceded victory to the enemy; nothing irritates me more than the thought that Jim might now be gloating at his victory.</p>
<p>I’ve faced much bigger fears since that day at the tag-end of high school when a man-child left me kicking and yelling inside a locked closet. I’m not a friendless kid any longer. I’m not a kid at all. Heart pounding and face red, I brush myself off, stalk back around the corner, and push through the record shop door.</p>
<p>The bells clank as I enter. Jim still sits behind the counter, looking at <em>Style Weekly</em>. “Oh.” He gives me only the briefest of glances and pulls up the sleeves of his cardigan. “Forget something, did you?”</p>
<p>My mouth opens, ready with a retort. Then I hesitate. I recognize that threadbare cardigan falling from his shoulders. I recognize the plaid shirt billowing beneath it. Earlier I’d registered how oversized they appeared on Jim’s scrawny frame. Jim’s not the type for cable knits, though, nor is L. L. Bean flannel his style. That shabby attire had once belonged to Earl.</p>
<p>Speechless and staring at Jim, I remember Earl lounging in a leather easy chair with that sweater buttoned around his middle, scribbling upon a card a new name, address, and time of assignation. Earl in that very cardigan, padding around his kitchen in slippered feet, making me a late-night grilled cheese, and himself a cup of decaf. The sweater had been new, four or five years ago. Now it looks ratty. Dirty.</p>
<p>With a horrible certainty, I realize something’s happened to Earl.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p>It’s only been a little more than three years since the gay cancer burrowed its way into my awareness. It feels like a lifetime. Barely a year has passed since scientists announced the scourge’s cause: it wasn’t poppers gone bad, as so many men I’d known had speculated, but a rogue virus. HIV, transmitted through bodily fluids. Rock Hudson had died of it, right at the beginning of the current semester. Although I’ve been hearing on the TV news in recent weeks that scientists have finally developed a test to discover infection in the bloodstream, no such thing has yet reached the public. Not widely. Not here. </p>
<p>In years past, the many expertises gay men cultivated were better suited to the worlds of espionage, or anthropology, or semiotics: how covertly to spy upon a man who’s piqued our interest, to evaluate his body language, to read messages coded in colored bandanas arranged in a back pocket. We arranged rendezvouses in clandestine places without being seen, became adept at distinguishing our own kind from enforcers of the law attempting to entrap us. We all have some proficiency in recognizing each other without word, sound, or often a gesture.</p>
<p>To survive this plague age, we scramble to assimilate new skills. We’re required to be sexual actuaries, to gauge each new encounter with an eye to risks far beyond the familiar. Does our quarry look like a local? Is he a regular good old boy who shops at the Army Navy Store, or does his clothing insinuate trips to a big metropolitan area where the virus spreads unchecked? We all like a good looking man, but is the one we want <em>too</em> good looking? Too in demand, attracting too many questionable partners? Does he cruise like a local, in fits and starts, not too fast or slow? A line had been drawn in 1981 between one era and another. On a summer night in the park four years ago, my outlaw brothers and I would all have been debauched beneath a full moon. To do so now indicates depravity of a type precarious to consider. </p>
<p>We’ve raced, too, to become diagnosticians. Without the benefit of any education, without even really knowing what to look for, we assess every potential partner for disease. We reject a man whose skin is too flushed or too warm to the touch. Our eyes search for lesions, though I have no clear concept of what a lesion might look like. If a man of a certain pallor walks my way, I might swerve to avoid crossing paths. Anything out of the ordinary is frightening and not worth the gamble.</p>
<p>One evening I accompany home a handsome fellow who seems like a safe bet. As he removes his clothes in the light of a table lamp, I can spy bluish bruises covering his body. When he moves close, arousal growing, he's accompanied by a faint, sickly-sweet scent, like a newborn's diaper. I vault from the stranger’s bed and away from his apartment as if my life is threatened.</p>
<p>All our snap judgments are based on faulty understanding. We’re medical imposters, forced into emergency-room rotations before we've cracked our first textbook. Real physicians are scrambling to stay abreast with the newfound virus and its ferocity. How can any layman hope to keep pace?</p>
<p>Not that I stop trying. My nights are often sleepless. I lie awake in my bed, staring blind into the dark, obsessing over every potential omen of my inevitable decline. As I try not to rouse my parents, my fingers travel every inch of my body—not for pleasure, as once they were accustomed, but to check for lumps, for inflammations and flaws. I’ve learned where my lymph nodes lie and prod them until they ache. I trace my hairline, certain the most minute shift might spell my doom. Somewhere I’ve picked up the term ‘night sweats,’ but haven’t learned enough to distinguish them from the ordinary perspiration of a warm Virginia night. A divot on my shin I know is from repeatedly banging into my bed frame worries me daily. I pick and poke at it until it’s tender and redder, reinforcing my worst suspicions.</p>
<p>It’s with my clinician’s eyes that now I appraise Jim. He’d always been a scrawny little shit. The wrists protruding from the cardigan are thinner than I remember, though. Too thin. He’s a scarecrow in those oversized clothes, a bundle of sticks about to clatter into a heap. His color is sallow; around his eyes the skin seems to have sunk and blued; red veins spiderweb the whites. His hair has thinned. He’s trained long strands over a sparse patch. </p>
<p>Jim looks older. Jim looks <em>old</em>, and he should be only, what? In his mid-thirties?</p>
<p>Perhaps sensing my judgment, he narrows his eyes and snaps, “The fuck you looking at?”</p>
<p>Once again, my instincts tell me to flee in the face of hostility, of danger, of probable contagion. I stand my ground, however. “That’s Earl’s sweater, isn't it.” </p>
<p>My soft-spoken observation deflates him. He crosses his arms and stares to the side, refusing to meet my gaze. If we’d been in a standoff, it’s over, with both sides limping away in concession. “So you don’t know. Of course not. You went away. No one thought they’d ever see you again. You never even checked in with him. Why would you, even after everything he did for you?” </p>
<p>I’d gone away to school, I wanted to point out. I keep my mouth shut throughout his provocations. </p>
<p>“She didn’t even let me have a suitcase to pack my clothes.” Jim’s speaking in low tones I must strain to hear. “I had to grab paper grocery bags and the laundry basket. Some of his stuff was in it. Fucking grocery bags. Do you know how <em>long</em> I’d been with him?” </p>
<p>He’s glaring at me, but I’m not the enemy any longer. “A long time.”</p>
<p>“Fifteen years. Fifteen fucking years of putting up with his—“ He presses his knuckles against his lips. His hand’s trembling suppresses whatever might follow. He doesn’t speak again until he’s under control. This time, words spray forth in a concentrated stream, like water from a hose end compressed by a thumb. “A person goes from a kid to an old man in fifteen fucking years. You know? All that…I shouldn’t have called the ambulance when it got bad, but I was…that’s when everything got…real, after the hospital. And she came. From fucking Charleston. He hated Charleston. Hated <i>them</i>. That’s why he was up here. What did they ever do for him? I didn’t even <em>have</em> a suitcase of my own! She wouldn’t let me take my TV. My plants. I had to scream bloody murder to get my checkbook out of the office, and that was <em>my checkbook </em>with<em> my name </em>on it.”</p>
<p>The record shop spins around me. I’m so light-headed that I stagger against one of the waist-high record bins for support. Jim’s grievances, building for years, have at last found an audience, though in a long-standing adversary. He spits his stream of consciousness in rapid fire, sometimes ranting, sometimes trying to wheedle me to his side. As a linear story, it makes no sense. But in its impressionistic way, it’s little different from what I’ve heard whispered by others: a tale of unexpected illness, of long-estranged family whisking away the afflicted, of a survivor being evicted from a home not in his own name. Real as any of our relationships might feel in 1985, in the face of an vindictive family and their lawyers, years of togetherness flicker into ash and smoke, like tissue to a flame. </p>
<p>Jim hasn’t mentioned what might have taken Earl down. He doesn’t have to. One doesn’t name the bogeyman when he crawls out of the cupboard. I have so many questions, though. How long was Earl ill? When did all this happen? What's become of Earl's business? Most important, perhaps most essential: is Earl alive or dead? Because Jim hasn’t said, either way.</p>
<p>I don’t ask these questions, though, because they paralyze me with fear. I don’t ask these questions because, on a very basic level, I’m convinced I might not be able to cope with the answers. Never does it occur to me that some finality might comfort me years down the road. I don’t yet realize how quickly a life's hanging threads accumulate and form knots that neither time nor care can untangle. </p>
<p>Earl wouldn’t be the first of my lovers to die from the virus. That would have been <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2011/06/moving-week-repost-david.html">David, the red-headed junior who’d wooed me as a freshman in college</a>, whom I had been too frightened to meet. After his graduation, he’d moved to New York City. I’d read about his death in the alumni magazine this last July. There have been rumors of others. A former customer as a teen—a retired college professor of literature, who liked reading aloud to me from Sterne while I sat naked on his lap, had been rushed to the hospital, accepted no visitors, and then never heard of again. Another man, a habitué of Bryan Park, married, the only person I knew who took vacations to San Francisco for the sex he could find there—vanished, presumed dead. No one knew his real name, to hunt for an obituary. Christ, I used to think Earl so worldly for all his trips to Manhattan, to Key West, to the West Coast.</p>
<p>“Fifteen years of watching little sluts like you roll across his mattress, that’s all I got out of him. And a fucking sweater. You thought you were special? You weren’t. You think going off to some fancy college makes you better than any other whore? It doesn’t.” Outside the shop, through the glass, shadows loom. We both glance at a gaggle of students checking out the posters in the front window. Jim lowers his voice. “So don’t come in here acting the little duchess to me, because…” The door opens. The kids who enter are younger than either of us. The boys are dressed in uniforms of jeans and polo shirts with the collars popped, the girls in flouncy Madonna skirts. Jim rolls his eyes at the sight and finishes his speech before addressing them. “…Because we both know where your precious Earl found you. We’re mostly classic rock and some jazz, guys,” he snipes at the kids, as if he believes they can’t appreciate either. “Good luck finding the stuff you probably like, though.”</p>
<p>Even as I navigate through this thicket of new fears, I recognize how tiring it surely is, being Jim: always to assume the worst of the world, to resent everyone in it for not supplying what he feels he's owed. It must take all his energy, gnawing at grudges. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, meaning it. If I were a more generous person I might try to convey my sincerity with a hand on his, or a hug. But this is the man who had locked me into a closet and left me to suffocate, inspiring years of claustrophobia and nightly torment. Even now, he's calling me a whore. This stiff acknowledgement is the best I can muster. </p>
<p>As I turn to go, he cranes his neck close and issues his benediction in a savage whisper. “It was in him. So it could be in you, too. Don’t think you’re immune.” His glance sweeps over the VCU kids, who are looking through the racks while chattering loudly. “They could crack you open and find it swarming inside. Think about that.”</p>
<p>This time I make my exit slowly, dignity battered, but intact. I never return to Beezie’s—nor do I ever again see or hear anything about Jim. Twice in my life he is the source of long-lasting misery: once four years before, then today. It’s because of him that from now on, when I perform my nightly exploration for lumps and bruises, I can't shake the vision of being rotten within. With a scalpel, doctors could slice me in one smooth motion from stem to stern and discover disease bursting from my seams. In the months to come, as I should be taking my first few tentative steps to building a career, I will not be able to shake this vision of myself as overflowing with foulness and death. Any day now, any moment, what lies dormant might surface upon my skin: I'll bear its mark, and none of my accomplishments will matter. All my studying, my teaching—I wonder when the day will arrive that proves my work was for nothing. Next month? Next week? Tomorrow morning? </p>
<p>This is my life, both now and for the unforeseeable future. I’m all of twenty-one years old and already I divide my life into four distinct acts. The curtain rises on my dewy innocence; Act Two covers the too-brief teen years reveling in both the discovery of sex and the independence I gain in selling it. In Act Three, my college tenure, the tone grows somber as with the eyes of a Cassandra I watch storm clouds gather, yet find no one I can warn.</p>
<p>This day, this encounter, commences what I can only conceive of as the last and longest expanse of the drama. Beyond the horizon it stretches, into the indefinite future, both its and my own conclusion well out of sight. Upon this stage, without benefit of a script, my outlaw brothers and I find ourselves inducted into an army of the dead and the dying. We know the enemy, though it cannot be seen. Our arms are inadequate, our shields shabby. </p>
<p>Over the fallen we march onward. Though to what fresh battle, no one yet knows. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-10461236481218095422022-08-23T09:30:00.107-04:002022-08-23T09:30:00.188-04:00Poison Pen<p>It’s one of those ugly blots on a Monday morning, waking up to find hate comments on my blog. Everything readers submit gets shunted into a folder to await my review. Most I can approve immediately. The obvious spam, I flag and delete. Then there are those special, occasional missives that fall into their own special category: nuggets of poison intended to put me in my place. They’re dispatches straight from the black center of the sender's personal misery, lobbed in my direction, the correspondent's self-loathing barely camouflaged. </p>
<p><em>I know you and everyone else think you’re hot shit</em> <em>(LOL), </em>reads this one. I haven’t even had my breakfast yet, and already my stomach hurts. <em>But you’re nothing but a fucking old creeper that chases after young tail so you can shove that nasty probably diseased senior citizen dick up inside it as fast as you can. It’s fucking pathetic and sure I bet some of the ugly boys are desperate enough to give in to you chasing them constantly but the rest of them know how disgusting you really are. Act your age already and give it up, creeper!!</em></p>
<p>I don’t recommend it as a start to your productive day.</p>
<p>But it’s not enough to deter me from meeting someone new, that afternoon. In fact, maybe it's the reason I give in. All I know is that several hours later, I'm nudging my dick’s knob against the puckering indentation of a boy a third my age, who's just moved into his dorm room. The long fingers of my one hand clasp both his ankles and pull his upstretched legs slightly to one side. They’re skinny, those legs, and covered with a thick dark fur utterly absent from the rest of his skinny body, save for perhaps a fringe on the perimeter of his hole, where I’m rubbing the ooze of my precum. <em>Little monkey legs</em>, I think, every time I notice how hairy they are. Mine were that furry in my teens, before years of office attire socks abraded them smooth.</p>
<p>The boy is craning his neck to look at what’s happening down below. His own cock is smallish, but thick. It points at an angle to his mini-fridge, where rests his phone and a pair of over-the-ear headphones. The phone has been lighting up and vibrating this last half-hour as friends message him, but he hasn’t once been tempted to check the incoming texts. “You’re so fucking big, sir,” he whispers.</p>
<p>I look him in the eyes, and nod. “That’s what you want, though.” He’s a good-looking kid. In a couple of years, when the angles of his face find themselves and take shape, he’ll be outright handsome. For now, he’s a slender little snack with a thick head of curly dark hair he must constantly brush from his face, a dandelion pouf of waves that, when stuffed beneath a baseball cap, make him look like a skateboarder or a wanna-be surfer. There's a row of those baseball caps on his dorm desk. Though there are two beds and two desks in the little room, only my boy's side of the room is so far occupied. “Correct? You want dad’s big dick.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir.” He nods, then bites his lip. “I want it real bad. But it’s so big.”</p>
<p>I release his ankles and let his trembling stems plant themselves bad onto the mattress. “How about you let me chew a little more at that hole, then,” I suggest. His dick leaps at the suggestion. I don’t miss the cue. “You liked the feel of my beard against it, didn’t you?” </p>
<p>He’s all eagerness, as if I’ve suggested a trip to Dairy Queen for his favorite flavor Blizzard. “Can I sit on your face this time?”</p>
<p>“You may.”</p>
<p>His suggestion is no hardship. The confines of his dormitory twin bed aren’t easy to navigate, but with some squeaking of the box springs we manage to switch positions. I now lie on my back. His pillow cups my head; his hairless testicles drape themselves on either side of my nose as he settles himself down. My tongue darts up into his smooth crack as his pearly cheeks separate; his little monkey legs dig themselves beneath my shoulders. I can taste my own essence, still fresh on his tight little butt. At last he lowers himself to perch on my jaw, leaving no distance between his hole and my hungry lips. </p>
<p>The boy loves when I scrape my teeth over the tender flesh, never biting, but scouring. He clutches the headboard as if for dear life as he begins to buck and grind his hips. I’m happy to help, seizing his stiff little dick like a handle, and with my face pushing back against his gyrations as hard as I can. He begins to curse aloud; one obscenity is barely distinguishable from the next as they stream from his pouty little lips. My free hand helps to separate his cheeks, so I can gnaw at the prize blossoming and winking from between them. If I wanted to protest at the savaging of my mouth by his hole, I couldn’t; I’m nearly smothered by the spread of his buttocks, by the canopy of his sac, the insistent pressure of his need.</p>
<p>But I don’t protest. I just want this boy to have the time of his life.</p>
<p>After a few minutes, he wrangles himself into a more daring contortion. His hands still cling onto the top of his wooden headboard. He's barely unpacked, but he's already hung posters for video game shooters on the wall above. He unhooks his feet from beneath me, though, and plants them flat onto the board, so that it supports his entire weight. It’s not something I’d allow him to do on my own bed, skinny as he might be. Somehow the laminated wood manages to support his weight without falling apart or separating itself from the bed frame. The athletic position make him look even more like a monkey clinging to a tree trunk, but it gives him the freedom to slam his greedy hole onto my mouth with even more force, his cheeks even more widely open than before. His hair hangs heavily from his dropped head. His groans become feral.</p>
<p>He can do this as long as he needs. I fucking love it. I’m no hurry, despite what my poison pen correspondent of the morning suggests, to get my dick inside the kid. Don’t get my wrong. My dick wants in. It’s so aroused by the boy’s assault that it points to the ceiling, dripping sticky threads that descend, slower than a drip of molasses, to my stomach. This kid can use my face as long as he cares to, or until my jaw erodes from the repeated onslaught, whichever comes first. </p>
<p>The end comes both too soon and not quickly enough. With care, he detaches himself from the headboard and, with wobbly legs, straddles my body. “Let me sit on it,” he suggests. “Do you like that?”</p>
<p>I like that very much. I spit on my fingers and add to the slickness of my dick. He sets one furry knee to my ribcage, then the other. On impulse, he leans down to kiss me, while his fist rapidly churns around his cock. He’s breathing heavily; his eyes gaze into mine with unadulterated desire. “You sure you’re ready, son?”</p>
<p>I already know the answer. He nods with vigor, closing his eyes when my fingers deliver another load of spit onto his hole. “I need that big dick in me, sir. I need it so bad.” He shifts his weight, calculating the angle at which he’ll attack his goal. “I need it so bad,” he repeats, whispering this time. Thick hair falls around his face as he settles back. “Fuck!” He winces as my cock pushes in. </p>
<p>“Go slow,” I tell him.</p>
<p>But he has other ideas. Grunting, he takes the girth in three swift stages—the head, the midsection, then a quick slam all the way down to the base. I feel the walls of his ass clench down on my inches as they seize up, after the invasion. He relaxes once he realizes there’s no more to swallow. “Oh fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck,” he curses. “You’re so <em>big</em>.” </p>
<p>“And you love it,” I say. I’m giving him permission to love the hurt.</p>
<p>He nods, panting. “I love it. Fuck. You are so hot. Thank you.”</p>
<p>This is what my poison pen fails to understand about me: I don’t think I’m hot shit. I know exactly what I am: a man traveling through his sixth decade, a man of modest attractions who’s never once advertised himself as hot or VGL, who doesn’t spend his free time in the gym, who has a belly. I’ve never been a man who chases after young tail. Young tail chases <i>me</i>. This boy with the thick mop of hair and the tight little hole recognized me as his prize and went after me relentlessly—not the other way around. </p><p>I’ve never hounded after anyone, especially young guys. My entire sexual career has been based upon letting others see me as I am, allowing them to make me their choice...and then rewarding them for their good taste.</p>
<p>Never in my life have I had to rely upon the charity of the sexually desperate. I’m no Adonis, but that's never a prerequisite for a good and giving lover. What I lack isn’t enough to stop me from making love like a sex god. I haven’t allowed the doubts of my decades to convince me I’m undeserving of pleasure, or that I shouldn’t share a student twin bed with a beautiful young man. One poison pen comment isn't going to change my convictions. I know exactly what I am: a diviner of the erotic who, with every whispered query, with every touch and gesture, dowses to find the hidden reservoir of another man’s sexual energies beneath the surface, ready to tap into the wellspring.</p>
<p>This boy bobbing atop my dowsing rod—this kid could have any stud he wanted. He’s chosen me. I might not be hot shit, but right now, today, for him, the look in his eyes tells me I’m the shit he needs more badly than anyone else in the world. I’m the shit his world revolves around, this very moment. I’m the shit that makes him pant and sweat and shudder. I don’t intend to let him down.</p>
<p>“You feel amazing.” My words of encouragement open his brown eyes. The moment’s lust has dilated his pupils. “You are so incredibly handsome, son.”</p>
<p>When my hand strokes his cheek, he leans into it like a young feline bunting his territory. “Not like you,” he tells me, planting his palms onto my chest. “Nothing like you.”</p>
<p>Now he’s found his center of gravity. I grunt wordlessly as he begins to buck on my hard cock. He settles on a motion I find irresistible, his hips sliding in a horizontal plane back and forth, causing my prick to swell as rapidly it slides in and out of his chute. He can tell I’m enjoying it. With a sadist’s zest, he ups the intensity of his attack. I’m the victim of his sweet friction, helpless to resist as he cruelly savages me with his rectum. My ramping excitement is a mere byproduct—it means nothing to him. He’s doing this for his pleasure, for his hole, for the sensations he can wring from every curve and vein and ridge in my cock. I can tell by his closed eyes and the expression of intent concentration on his face that he’s lost in his own raptures. “I’m going to shoot if you keep doing that, son,” I warn.</p>
<p>His lids open; his eyes focus once again. Staring at me from above, his jaw juts to the side with mockery. He grins. And he keeps on doing what he’s doing—and doing it even more vigorously.</p>
<p>The kid is toying with me by the time I approach orgasm, arching and thrusting to get me close, then halting to frustrate me. I recognize the fiendish pleasure he’s taking in bringing me to the edge. All it takes to thwart him is to grab his hips and thrust mine upward, deep into the warmth of his insides. We grin at each other as I take my turn to punish his tight hole. When he leans down, my open mouth engulfs his lips in a kiss. I stab inside him with a final brutal thrust that takes me over the edge.</p>
<p>“Is that your cum?” His lips are a mere inch from mine. He seems astonished as my dick swells and throbs, as deep as it can reach. “Fuck. I can actually feel your cum!” He reaches behind to make sure he’s got as much of me as he can take. “Oh, fuck!”</p>
<p>I don’t get much warning as he unknots me from his hole. My still-shooting dick falls onto my belly with a wet smack and a last gush of seed. He scoops it up with his fingers, collects more from his gaping ass, and slaps it onto his own cock. Then, with my assistance, back he sits on my dick and sinks to the bottom. Balanced on the flats of his feet and using my erection as his seat, he spreads the mixture of spit and cum over his own cock and balls. </p>
<p>He comes quickly, shooting as far as my nipples. I enjoy watching him thrash and quake while electricity sets his every nerve ajangle. I’m surprised, though, by how silent he remains as it happens. His lips work, as if praying; his breath intensifies, his chest heaves. But all I hear as he gushes his load over my stomach is the slightest of sighs. He’s in the habit of hiding his climaxes at home, I realize, and hasn’t shed it yet in his new digs. </p>
<p>I want to remember this moment forever. His pale skin, and the little pink nipples that have contracted to miniature pencil erasers. The awning of his hair above me. The traces of stickiness he leaves in it, while pushing it away from his face with cum-covered fingers. He way he rubs his nose with the back of his wrist, as he comes back to himself after his orgasm. The alarm in his eyes when I stir. “Don’t go,” he begs, pressing down on my chest. </p>
<p>“You want me to stay?” </p>
<p>For answer he lifts himself up. On the mattress’ cramped confines, he becomes little spoon to my big. His freshly-used ass presses insistently against the erection that’s only just beginning to fade. “Stay and fuck me again,” he whispers, happy for the moment to be in my embrace, but far from sated.</p>
<p>To this kid, I'm hot shit. That's all I need, for now.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-13736136087890543732022-07-27T08:40:00.061-04:002022-07-27T08:46:49.549-04:00Pool Boy<p>I’m horny and I’m angry. I don’t like it.</p>
<p>I’m horny enough that my dick’s had a mind of its own all morning. It’s the last full day of my visit with my father, and offers on Grindr and Scruff have been flooding in. I’ve put off all the men by explaining I’ve got some chores to do before I’m free. Then, while I pound nails into the fallen trim on my dad's screened porch, I fantasize about which little twink or otter I’ll be pounding later in the afternoon. While I’m insulating some of the pipes in his basement, my own pipe is tenting my shorts, ready to spurt. </p>
<p>I don’t know what it is that’s making me so crazy. I’ve had <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/06/redneck-rim-artist.html" target="_blank">two nights of a stranger rimming me relentlessly</a> in my hotel room, followed by an afternoon plowing <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/06/what-dads-are-for.html" target="_blank">one of the hottest muscle twinks</a> I’ve ever had. Perhaps the novelty of being the new meat in town is going straight to my littler head. When I order lunch through a sandwich shop app and drive out to pick it up, I’m basically violating with my eyes, over my mask, the cute guy behind the counter; he responds with a smile of regret that lets me know he registers and even welcomes my notice. His shift probably isn’t over for hours, though. When I pump gas for the trip back home tomorrow morning, the mere action of shoving the nozzle into the gas tank evokes in my gut a grunt that’s purely sexual. </p>
<p>By mid-afternoon I’m back at my hotel room. I’ve told my dad I’m taking the rest of the day for myself, and that I’ll stop off in the morning before I make the seven-hour drive home. After a quick shower, I flop onto the hotel mattress with my phone, ready to hook up. I’ve already made my choice. For a couple of years now, I’ve always wanted to get together with this guy who lives in the Fan. We’d originally talked on BBRT on one of my previous trips, and I dig his looks—mid-thirties, lean, long wavy hair, big soulful eyes. I have a couple of types that get my immediate attention, and this dude nestles snugly into one of them.</p>
<p>On this trip, he’s hit me up on Sniffies, so that’s the site I use to shoot him a message. <em>I’m in my hotel room for a couple of hours. Want to come by?</em></p>
<p>I only have to wait a couple of minutes for his reply. <em>I sure do. I’m showered and free now if you want me to come.</em></p>
<p><em>I want you to come</em>, I tell him. </p>
<p>He asks for the address. I send it. <em>Leaving now. I’ll be there in 15</em>, he assures. <em>Can’t wait.</em></p>
<p>Mission accomplished. My dick is raging already. When I review photos of the guy’s firm little ass, I lick my chops over how it points unflinchingly at the camera, ready to be impaled. The Virginia afternoon is hot as fuck, so I’ve turned up the rattly old air conditioning unit to fill the room with its chilly blast. Meanwhile, as a few more offers trickle in on the apps, I send some polite regrets. <em>Sorry. I’m meeting someone in a few. Maybe later?</em></p>
<p>Fifteen minutes pass. Twenty. Twenty-five. For long minutes I anticipate a nervous knock at the door. My dick has wilted some time ago. I try to tamp down my disappointment. The interstate could be busy. There might’ve been an accident. So I attempt patience, and wait some more.</p>
<p>After forty-five minutes, the horniness hasn’t abated, but the anger has kicked in. I’m being stood up. Every time I look at Sniffies, there’s a little blue dot on the dude’s profile to show me he’s online, but his location hasn’t changed at all. Onscreen he’s an inch away to the right—which means in real life, he’s a mile away in the Fan, not moving any closer.</p>
<p>Motherfucker.</p>
<p>When I fire up other apps, I’m annoyed to see that he’s checked me out on them since we made our assignation. In fact, I can construct an entire timeline of what’s happened since I gave him the hotel’s address. Fifteen minutes passed, then he visited my profile on BBRT at roughly the time he told me he’d be knocking on my door. Ten minutes after that, his Grindr profile looked at mine. Then, ‘just now,’ he’s looked at me on Scruff. </p>
<p>What kind of fuckery is this? </p>
<p>An hour and a half has passed since he told me he couldn’t wait. I send the guy a message on Sniffies, since that’s where we made the date. <em>Okay. I get the message that you’re not coming over. A pity, since I’ve wanted to meet you for a while now. </em></p>
<p>As I expect, I get no reply. I’m horny, I’m furious, and I don’t like it. But I know sitting in my hotel room, stabbing at the screen with my index finger trying to find a quick replacement, will prove a recipe for regret. So I recalibrate.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>My favorite barbecue joint is across town from where I’m staying. It’s worth the drive just to clear my head. My dad has accompanied me to barbecue spots across the city, but none of the chains he prefers compare, I think, to this locally-owned spot where I can order hush puppies and a side of corn pudding to accompany the generous helping of pulled pork the chef has slapped onto a rectangle of kraft paper on my tray. As I devour the spread, I flip between various apps on my phone—browsing the news headlines, looking at the subreddits I follow, and checking out the local grid on Grindr. </p>
<p>I’ve nearly spooned out the last of the corn pudding when I get a message on the latter. <em>Hi Sir.</em> It’s from a profile with no photo and very little information—a 23-year-old who’s less than a mile away, is all I know. I rarely respond to profiles that are blank or close to it. Just as I’m about to close the app, though, the kid sends a few more photos. The first is of him reclining on his bed, head tilted on his pillow. He wears a t-shirt of primary red; his hand rests just out of the camera’s view, between his legs. A good-looking kid. Clean cut. Well groomed. Whether from his natural, fair-skinned coloration or an acute case of sunburn, his nose is a bright red. The photo has a caption. <em>Rudolph</em>, it says.</p>
<p>All right. I like a little bit of self-deprecating humor. </p>
<p>The remaining pics are less boy-next-door than they are hungry-hole-down-the-street. There’s a shot of him bent over a bare mattress, knees spread wide and white ass in the air, taking a spit-slick Black cock. Then there’s a blurry shot of him on his knees, eyes unfocused and glazed, mouth agape, beneath a stubby dick that’s already left a spurt of jizz across his forehead. Finally, there’s a shot he’s managed to take of himself on his bed again. This one is both blurry and dark; he’s got his legs in the air and fingers probing a pink little hole. </p>
<p><em>Hey</em>, I think this trio of photos deserves as reply. <em>Nice pics, son.</em></p>
<p><em>I bet you have a big cock, Sir</em>. I can’t help it: my dick twitches at this form of address. In lieu of a written reply, I send him a shot of my meat hanging between my legs, thick and engorged. <em>Fuck yeah. I knew it, dad. Are you looking?</em></p>
<p>To myself I think: why not? I’m done with dinner. I’d left the hotel feeling nettled, in order to avoid fruitless hours of hunting for—and not finding—sex. And see? Here’s a pretty boy, throwing himself in my lap. </p>
<p><em>Yeah,</em> I reply. <em>I’m looking. </em></p>
<p>Already I’m thinking of the kid as Rudolph, though I know it was a joke and unlikely to be his name. <em>My car’s in the shop</em>, he tells me. <em>Can you come get me?</em></p>
<p><em>You know someplace we can go? </em>I could easily take Rudolph back to my hotel, but it’s a little bit of a haul by Richmond standards. Part of me, I admit, intends the question to see how serious this kid is. On my last pre-pandemic trip down here, I’d wasted an entire evening on some asshole without a car who’d expected to treat me like his personal Uber driver while he ran errands. When the kid responds in the affirmative, I have only one more question. <em>How soon can you be ready? </em>Because if it’s going to be an hour or more, I’m going to have to pass.</p>
<p><em>Now. Come get me, Sir. I want you inside me.</em></p>
<p>Now is good. I like now. </p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Ten minutes later and I’m pulling up to the address he’s given me—a squat Henrico bungalow boasting a rusted carport at the driveway’s end. I’ve scarcely pulled up in front than Rudolph flies out the side door. He’s shorter and smaller than I expected—no more than five-five or so—but his legs propel him down the driveway and into my front seat. Once the passenger door shuts, he points down the county road ahead. “Go straight. I’ll tell you where to turn,” is his greeting.</p>
<p>He sounds like he’s escaping from something. Probably still lives at home, I think to myself. I say nothing and pull away from the curb in the direction he’s indicated. It’s not until we’re away from the house and at a stop sign that I feel his hand on my leg. His fingers probe at my crotch. When I divert my attention from the road, he’s looking at me with liquid eyes, full of desire. “You’re hot, Sir.”</p>
<p>Under his fingers, my dick balloons. The kid’s pics hadn’t done him justice. There’s a redness to his face that I see often in the local men here, but only the very tip of his bulbous nose carries a touch of sunburn. He’s small for a twenty-three-year-old; I could almost carry him around by the scruff of the neck without much exertion. Cute. Definitely into me, from the way he keeps drinking me in. The boy exudes a puppy dog urgency as he paws at my parts and runs a hand over my chest. It’s all I can do to keep from swerving.</p>
<p>Eventually we reach his destination. Out here in the county, where the little ranch houses hold each other at arm’s distance, there are still stretches of undeveloped plots. At Rudolph’s prompting, I turn onto one of them, along a twisting gravel road that leads through thickets of wild saplings. Hidden beyond is a fenced-in property, overgrown with waist-high weeds. Its dirt parking lot, which could easily hold twenty or more cars, is almost completely invisible from the road. “Come on,” he tells me, letting his smooth little hands slide from mine once I turn off the ignition. “Nobody comes here.”</p>
<p>I swing my legs onto the dirt and click the remote to lock my car doors. The place must once have been a neighborhood pool; through the broken privacy slats in the chain link fence I can spy a rough slab of patio around a kidney-shaped outline. The pool itself has been filled with concrete long before, to prevent both liability and mosquitos. It’s eerily quiet back here. If anyone were to walk or drive down the only road in, we’d be sure to hear the crunch of gravel well in advance. I approve.</p>
<p>“Over here.” The kid beckons me to a large shed around one side of the property. Beyond the high grasses, there’s a padlocked chain, much distressed, linking the door’s handles. The kid retrieves an artificial rock stashed among several real stones in the weeds nearby, though, and flips it over to reveal a hidden compartment. He slides open a little door to produce a key. A few moments later and we're in the shed’s interior.</p>
<p>There’s not much in here. A few old empty plastic tubs that used to hold pool chemicals, but that’s not the smell that’s making my nose twitch. A pair of long-handled nets, neither of which retains any webbing. A stack of cardboard boxes lurks in a corner, slumping from gravity and damp. Two webbed folding recliners occupy most of the room’s length, set side by side. Rudolph positions me between them and pulls down on my neck. He stands on tiptoe so that my mouth can completely engulf his own.</p>
<p>We’re a contrast in sizes, he and I. I’m reminded of those porn sites that pair pint-sized boys with much bigger, older men. He seems to love the contrast, too. When I try to stand straight after our first, deep kiss, he jumps up and into my arms. When I catch him—barely, surprised—he wraps his legs around me. We kiss again. His mouth is hungry, wet and deep.</p>
<p>I can’t hold him off the ground indefinitely, so I try to let him down as gracefully as possible. “You’re so hot,” he says, reaching for my beard. “Do you like me?”</p>
<p>I remember the insecurity of that age. “You’re a sexy boy.” I look around the deserted shed. “You’ve brought men here before?” My question abashes him, I can tell. “You can say.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” His eyes flicker from mine to the floor. </p>
<p>“Yes, Sir,” I correct.</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.” </p>
<p>“So you just…pick up strange men online and lure them there, huh.” He’s wearing a pair of denim shorts faded almost to white, save at the seams, and a loose-hanging shirt made of something approximating linen. While I talk, I begin running my fingers up its placket, loosening the fastenings one by one. At some point, perhaps in his haste to escape his house, he’d mismatched the buttons to their holes. It gives him a lopsided look. </p>
<p>I watch as he licks his lips. “Yes, Sir. Is that bad?”</p>
<p>I neither nod, nor shake my head, reserving judgment. My hands move up, knuckles grazing his smooth stomach. “So you bring them out here. Where anything could happen.” His heart thuds so strongly that each beat stirs hairs on the back of my hand. He nods. “Yes, Sir,” I prompt again.</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.”</p>
<p>The size difference between us is making my cock rigid. It demands to be shoved in the young man’s holes, but for now I keep it from asserting itself. The exertion of willpower hones my voice to a steel-hard edge. “You’ve been doing this a long time, I bet.”</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.”</p>
<p>I’m at the last button. My fingers tweak it loose, so that the fabric falls to reveal his skin, opalescent in the indirect light. I turn him around and relieve him of the garment, then spin him once more so he faces me, gently as a father might get his kid ready for bed. “How long?”</p>
<p>“A long time.” His response is breathy, excited.</p>
<p>“Months?” He nods. “Years?” There’s a hesitation, but at last he nods. “I figured. A boy like you can’t do without cock, right?” </p>
<p>“Yes, Sir. I mean, no, Sir.” He barely aspirates the confession.</p>
<p>I unbutton his shorts. Slowly, deliberately, I pull down their zipper. The boy has a tiny waist. My long fingers might be able to encircle him if I tried, it almost seems. I turn him around again and draw him close, allowing myself to run my fingers over his skin before hooking my thumbs under the waistbands of both the denim and his shorts. “Then you bring them to this godforsaken place and make them do things to you.” His head falls back against my chest. His eyes are closed, his jaw slack. Down fall his shorts around his ankles; the boy’s cock, thin and short, pokes out like a flagpole. “Bad things.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” he breathes.</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.”</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.” As my hands move over his body, his cock, his lightly hairy balls, he shivers. “Real bad things.”</p>
<p>I let go of him. He drifts forward, eyes still closed, his naked body twirling, slow motion, in the shed’s twilight, until he’s facing me again. “Like what?” I direct his hands to my own shorts, where my cock demands attention. “Do they make you…suck their big cocks?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir. They make me suck their cocks.” His eyes open, seeking permission. I nod, giving it.</p>
<p>Down on his knees he goes. My shorts have no zipper. He yanks down the elastic waist to my knees. As my eight inches flop upward, his mouth opens; his tongue darts out. His hand clasps the lower half, seizing his prize. I feel the kid’s hot breath before I plunge between those pretty lips.</p>
<p>My own heart thuds in its cage as the boy goes to town on my meat. I lean back so I can have a clear view of him in action. He’s no dabbler; he knows what he’s doing. I watch his own skinny dick jerk and throb unattended, nearly slapping against the shed’s concrete floor. Already he’s leaking precum. </p>
<p>“Cocksucker,” I spit out, letting the word swing, pendulum-like, somewhere between praise and epithet. </p>
<p>He opens his eyes at the word and allows my dick to slip from his mouth. “Yes, Sir.” His words are sibilant and indistinct with the spit dripping from his lips. “Just a cocksucker, Sir.”</p>
<p>His address makes me harder. Redder. Thicker. I grab the back of his skull and hold it while I shove my cock as far as it will go. Though he can’t quite manage the last couple of inches, his lips greedily reach for the base, trying to make a show of engulfing the whole thing. I give him credit for trying.</p>
<p>“Your folks know what a dirty little faggot cocksucker they’re raising?” I ask. Through a mouthful of dick, he shakes his head. “But you go back home from here with a gut full of seed to lie to mommy and daddy about where you’ve been, huh.” It’s a shot in the dark, but he nods, his eyes gazing up at me with sheer adoration. “You don’t even know my name. Getting anonymous dick in some—“ I look around at our surroundings. “—skanky-ass lean-to.” He grunts, agreeing. “You let strangers fuck you too, don’t you.”</p>
<p>“Yeth Thir,” he attempts to say, but I don’t let him off my dick. Not yet. </p>
<p>“Figured.” I curl my upper lip in a show of contempt. “Little faggot boy, going ass up for who the fuck knows who.” I grab a handful of the kid’s sandy hair and thrust my hips in and out of his mouth, feeling his saliva on my balls. “Letting strange men sodomize that boyhole.”</p>
<p>When I withdraw most of the way, he raises his glance to me again and grunts. “That’s what my holes are made for, Sir. Faggot holes for men like you.”</p>
<p>“Someone trained you right,” I comment. He digs that, responding with grunts and an instinctive arch to his back. When I pull out from between his greedy lips, he responds with a whine of outrage, like a toddler deprived of a favorite toy. “Up,” I order. Then, “Around.” Once he’s obeyed, I turn him so that his hands are planted on the webbing of one of the recliners. “Well, well. Look at that ass,” I hiss, when it’s on display. "No wonder men like me want to fuck it." Automatically he spreads his legs, widening his stance. </p>
<p>The boy’s butt is compact. He’s still young enough that he still carries a slight layer of baby fat, which bounces when I slap it hard. “Ow,” he says—from instinct, not actual pain.</p>
<p>“Come on,” I growl, slapping it again, this time harder. The sound fills our tiny space. “Don’t try to tell me that ass hasn’t been smacked before.” </p>
<p>“It’s yours, Si—“ I interrupt his obeisance with another hard whack. His head flies up; his eyes widen. If I thought Rudolph loved me when he was sucking my dick, that was nothing to the look of sheer veneration he’s giving me now. “Fuck.”</p>
<p>“Damn right I will,” I say, deliberately misinterpreting the four-letter word as permission, or invitation. My fingers probe at his exposed, pink, hairless hole. “Jesus Christ, son,” I exclaim, as if my slippery fingers have discovered something foul. “You’re already fucking lubed up!” Rudolph can’t stand any longer. He tumbles forward onto the ancient lawn chair so that his face and knees dig into the woven fabric. He’s light, but I don’t trust the chair to support both our weights, so I remain standing as I finger his pucker. “You just checked out my profile, thought to yourself, <em>This dude looks like the kind of man who fucks little faggots like me</em>, and shoved a bottle’s worth of lube up your shitter before I picked you up, huh?”</p>
<p>“Please fuck me,” he begs.</p>
<p>“Please fuck me, <em>Sir</em>.”</p>
<p>“<em>Please fuck me, Sir.</em>”</p>
<p>I hesitate, as if unsure. “I don’t know. There’s no telling how many men have been up this boyhole before.” I’ve got three fingers in, now. Plus the tip of the fourth. He’s wide open and obviously well-used. It’s a hole that begs to be stretched even more. </p>
<p>“Fuck me, Sir. Please fuck me. Sir, please fuck me.”</p>
<p>He repeats the words over and over while I pretend to consider my option. At long last, as he squirms his hips and repeats his litany, I spit on my fingers and spread the fluid on my enraged inches. Then I shove it in, at long last.</p>
<p>He seizes up almost immediately, then relaxes as I force him back down onto the lawn chair. I slide to the base with little resistance. The kid has been fucked before, and probably often. That smell I’d wondered about earlier, the one tickling my nostrils—it’s not damp or chlorine. It’s probably the scent of dried sweat and semen from all the hookups little Rudolph has lured here over his sexual career. Thinking about the boy using this abandoned shed to collect seed makes me more aggressive.</p>
<p>“This what you wanted?” I ask. “Is this what you want, cocksucker?” I don’t need to hear his answer. I’m being rhetorical. The chair’s aluminum frame grates across the concrete as savagely I stab into the boy’s guts. </p>
<p>He’s the happiest little pup around, though. “Yes, Sir!” he carols, holding onto the armrests for dear life. “Fuck it, Sir. Fuck that hole.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I’m fuckin’ it, all right,” I snarl. </p>
<p>The chair’s top half comes to rest against the shed wall; Rudolph grabs onto a support beam to raise himself up and look back at me. “You can fuck harder, Sir,” he promises. “Get in there with that rape stick, Sir.” </p>
<p>Little turns me on more than a boy complicit in the abuse of his own hole. I seize the kid’s neck and hold it while I savage his rectum, one searing thrust at a time. “A man could do anything to a boy like you back here,” I growl in his ear. He nods, agreeing. “No one would ever know.”</p>
<p>“Yes…Sir.” The words are an effort for him. I tweak his nipples hard, making him cry out. “Right there,” he sobs. “Right there. Right there. Right there. Yes.”</p>
<p>I know I’m hitting the perfect spot. I can feel his little button jamming against my thick cock head. Again and again I stab at it, making him cry out each time. His tiny prostate has probably never been hammered so hard. </p>
<p>“Oh, fuck,” he at last says. He sounds shocked, and looks down at his dick. I thrust down onto the button and hold it, while I feel his ass convulse around my thick meat. Cum shoots out of his dick. One long strand hits the shed wall. Then a second. A third flies lower, onto the beam. Then a fourth, onto the lawn chair. While I hold him still, his body shivers and thrashes as cum continues to fly from the tip. “I’ve never—“</p>
<p>“Shut up, cocksucker,” I growl, as I pin him against the exposed wood. “Daddy’s turn.”</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>I don’t drop Rudolph back at home until after dusk. By the time I reach my hotel, the sky’s dark and I’m two loads lighter. It’s close to nine-thirty by the time I’ve showered the boy’s scents from my skin and flopped down on my bed. I fire up my phone, intending to catch up on any messages I might’ve missed while I was out pounding.</p>
<p>Sniffies is still open on my phone’s browser. I’ve got a couple of the usual ‘Hi’ messages from anonymous profiles that I can easily disregard. A couple of interesting offers that I might’ve contemplated, if Rudolph hadn’t hit me up. And then, at the top, a message from the wavy-haired fellow from the Fan who’d stood me up earlier. It’s time-stamped from only ten minutes before, while I was washing up.</p>
<p><em>Hey</em>, says the message. <em>Still looking? Lost track of time when my mom called.</em></p>
<p>I mean, there’s not even an apology attached. Apparently I’m supposed to swallow whole the belief that after he told me he’d be arriving in fifteen minutes, his mother called, and that he’d then engaged in conversation with her for six and a half hours. And that during those six and a half hours—particularly during the crucial first ninety minutes or so in which I was stomping around my hotel room, certain I was being stood up—he wasn’t able to to use his phone or any other device to send me a quick message to say <em>Hey, I’m being delayed, but I’m still intending to be there when I can. </em>Although over the course of an hour he <em>was</em> able to, you know, check out my profile on three other apps. </p>
<p>Right. No, I’m not buying it. Once again I feel that tide of anger rising. </p>
<p>But you know what? It’s not worth it. I roll my eyes, shake my head, and block the guy on Sniffies. I block him on Scruff. I block him on Grindr. And finally, I block him on BBRT. I don’t need to engage with that kind of gaslighting. And besides, my loads had found a better home.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-42726467518001801372022-06-29T09:12:00.000-04:002022-06-29T09:12:20.645-04:00What Dads Are For<p><em>You are exceptionally handsome, Sir</em>. </p>
<p>My attention perks up at the message. Whose ego wouldn’t respond to such outlandish flattery? The adverb alone makes my dick swell, where it lurks within my terrycloth shorts. </p>
<p>I’m visiting my dad in Virginia for the week. Today I’ve been with him since the early morning; he had one of his semi-annual checkups with his oncologist at nine, and then a blood draw for a subsequent, different specialist, tomorrow. We’ve stopped at the pharmacy, where I’ve plumbed the mysteries of my dad’s several prescriptions. I’ve clipped his cats’ claws. I’ve navigated the complications of ordering a deli sandwich for his lunch, which involves reading each of the dozens of ingredients from the deli’s app, then listening to him expel air through his lips and ruminate before he approves or vetoes each one. I’ve bought and replaced a toilet seat for him. And it’s not even yet two o’clock. </p>
<p>Now I’m sitting in his living room, Grindr open on my phone, as he putters around his kitchen and listens to MSNBC at top volume. <em>Thank you,</em> I text back to the boy who’s caught my attention. <em>But look who’s talking</em>.</p>
<p>He’s got several pics visible in his profile. A selfie in his car, square-jawed, wearing a baseball cap, his cool blue eyes staring into his camera lens. Another in red flannel, equally serious, revealing straw-colored hair, cut with military severity. A third of his torso, emblazoned with a massive dragon tattoo across his left pectoral. He’s all of twenty-three, this young dreamboat, and he’s going out of his way to flatter me. </p>
<p>I feel unworthy.</p>
<p><em>You wouldn’t happen to be looking this afternoon, would you, Sir?</em></p>
<p>It just so happens that I might be. When I’m visiting my hometown, it’s usually my custom to take a break mid-afternoon to head back to my hotel to relax and decompress before meeting my dad once more for dinner. <em>I definitely could be.</em></p>
<p><em>Would you like to trade some pics, Sir?</em></p>
<p>His insistent use of the capital-S <em>Sir</em> gives me wood. So do the more explicit photos with which he follows up. Two are of his cock, taken in a way that shows off the furry blond hair on his legs; the remainder are of his backside. My heart rate soars at the sight of his impossibly narrow waist. He’s chosen jockstraps in differing colors to accentuate the round globes of his ass. <em>You are beautiful, son</em>, I tell him.</p>
<p><em>What are you into, dad?</em></p>
<p><em>Eating and breeding hole, making out, oral, and open to much more. You?</em></p>
<p><em>Bottom here. Into kissing, oral, poppers, bondage, choking, kissing, kink, role play, voyeurism, exhibitionism, video taping, bb.</em></p>
<p>It’s quite a list. From the kitchen, my dad asks for the third time if I want either some of the cookies he’s baked, or a slice of cake. I yell no, and reply to the kid with a couple of explicit photos of myself: one in which my cock is impaling and stretching out a hole, and another in which it’s greased up and shiny as I stroke it for the camera.</p>
<p><em>I need that. Will you please breed me, Sir? Where are you staying?</em></p>
<p>I should go for this kid, right? I really want to. I give the boy my details and my phone number. I’ll be in my hotel room after three, I tell him. </p>
<p><em>I can’t wait, Sir. It’s been over a week since I took cum.</em></p>
<p>Although my father’s eyesight is bad enough that I could be outright tenting and he wouldn’t see, I adjust my shorts, make my promises to be back by dinner, and head to my car.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>Back in my hotel room and after my shower, I lie on the mattress while a stream of air conditioning blows over my half-naked body. Now, my uncertainty rises. I’ve barely tiptoed back into having sex after a two-year hiatus. I’m older. My body has changed during the pandemic: my waistline’s a little more snug, my back feels creakier. I feel I’ve lost flexibility. In the half-darkness, as I review the shots the boy has sent, I’m assailed with doubts. Why in the world would a kid of this caliber want me? He looks as if he should be collabing with porn stars for his OnlyFans, or curating shirtless photos for his influencer account, not resorting to hitting up some near-geriatric for anonymous fucking in a sleazy hotel room. </p>
<p>Already I’m anticipating an expression of disappointment on his face, the moment I open that door and he sees the gray in my beard and realizes I’m over twice his age. What’s he going to do, I berate myself, when he shows up and sees what a fat fuck I’ve become? Two years have given me more of a belly. It’s made me slower. Perhaps it’s erased any skills I once might have boasted. Maybe I’m not the top I once was. Maybe this entire encounter will be nothing but disappointment for us both. Whatever I used to have—whatever might have made me stand out a little among the competition—I’ve probably lost.</p>
<p>Although the kid has already texted me to say he’s out of the shower and on his way, there’s still time to abort this doomed tryst. I could send a stupid excuse and opt out of meeting—I should opt out, in fact. How could I have been so stupid, to subject this boy to my gross corpulence? To him, I’ll probably look like some demon, straight out of the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.</p>
<p>Then my reason takes over, as I look at his photos on my phone and play with myself. Come on, I chide. The young man had contacted me, after seeing one of my selfies on Grindr. I’d sent him more. He knows what I look like. He knows how tall I am, how much I weigh. I don’t lie about my age, so he’s aware of that, too. He’s smart enough to make his own hookup choices. If he wants to get naked with me, why deny him the opportunity? I’m reasonably sure I haven’t forgotten how to fuck. My tongue is as glib as ever. No matter what happens, I still have the skill set to give this boy a good time. I’ll focus on that, and let the cards fall where they may.</p>
<p>I hear a knock at the door.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>He’s standing in front of me, now, kicking off a pair of flip-flops as he looks me over. “Wow, dad.” He looks me in the eyes. “You’re even more handsome than your photos.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, son.” I couldn’t be more sincere in my gratitude. His hungry eyes still bore into my own as he drops his basketball shorts to reveal the bulging gray jock beneath. He’s taller than I thought, nearly my own height—maybe six foot two. As lean as his photos. Beautiful. If I’d seen him on the street, I would’ve turned my head with a silent prayer he might meet my stare with his own. Yet here he is before me, telling me how attractive I am.</p>
<p>He’s about to take off his tank top with the same speed when I hold up a palm to arrest him. I sit on the bed’s edge. “Slowly.” I lean back.</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir.” The boy understands. He pulls himself to his full height. Runs the fingers of both hands through his short, blond hair, so that I get a glimpse of the corn silk decorating his pits. His eyes lock on mine as he crosses his wrists at the waist and, in one smooth, practiced move, slowly lifts his tank up and over his head. Once balled up in a hand, he uses it to mop moisture from his face. Then it joins his shorts on the floor.</p>
<p>There’s a half-smile on my face as I drink in the sight of him—that lean waist, the worked-out chest with its coiled Chinese dragon, the muscular thighs that shift his weight from side to side. I point an index finger to the ceiling and give it a twirl. Again, he knows exactly what to do. Looking at me over his shoulder, he turns. I draw in a sharp hiss of air at the sight of his ass. In the photos, it had been perfect. My impression is only improved, in person. Twin globes, pert, framed perfectly by the gray elastic. He watches as I lean forward with my elbows on my knees, appreciating the view. “Am I okay, dad?”</p>
<p>I chuckle. “Okay?” He’s not asking out of cockiness, nor from vanity, I can tell. There’s a genuine tinge of anxiety behind the question. I sit up and look him directly in the eyes. “No, son. You’re not okay. You are fuckin’ beautiful.” He opens his mouth to thank me, but I’ve hooked my pinkie and index finger in the elastic bands separating buttock from thigh. When I tug him toward me, he stumbles backward with surprise. I press the heel of a hand on the small of his back, and he bends. </p>
<p>“Oh!” is all he says when my mouth meets his pucker. He smells of soap. Though his legs are covered in blond fur, the pelt ceases where the jock begins. My hands run over the smooth skin of his back and chest and ass; his hole is completely hairless. The boy tastes so good. This isn’t going to be some lick ’n’ stick. I need to spend some time on this hole.</p>
<p>“Come here,” I order, as hastily I plump two of the pillows in the bed’s center. His hips grind into them as he flops in a diagonal across the mattress. Once he’s settled, I dive back in.</p>
<p>“Your beard…fuck,” he whispers. He’s grinding his hole back onto my face, mashing it hard as he can, trying to abrade my facial hair against the tender flesh. “May I do poppers, dad? Please?” I grunt to let him know I approve. I hear, rather than see, his lungs expand to accommodate the vapors from within the little brown bottle. Beneath my tongue, though, his ass blossoms. </p>
<p>For long minutes I apply heat and pressure to his pink hole, working in moisture, opening it wider. His hips rise and fall in tidal rhythm. His groans subside to whimpers, then rise in volume to become noisy pleas once more. My own cock lies, thick and hard, at an angle beneath my thigh as I grind it against the bedsprings. It can’t go unsatisfied for long. At last, I seize the boy’s ankles and pull them apart. Between his legs I slither up, until my dick juts against that wet crack. “Dad needs to be inside you, son,” I whisper in his ear. “You understand, right?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Sir,” he replies. His eyes are wet with adoration as he looks over his shoulder at me. “Anything you need.”</p>
<p>“Give me those poppers.” I hold out my hand as he scrabbles to find where they’ve rolled. Once mine, I unscrew the little cap and curl a thumb halfway over the aperture. “Head back now. Breathe.” He takes a tentative sniff as I force the bottle beneath his nose. “Breathe deep, son.” This time he obeys, huffing deep. “Other side. Sniff deep, son. It’ll get you ready for dad’s big dick.”</p>
<p>“Is dad going to bareback me?” He knows the answer, but as he takes another lungful of poppers, it’s clear he needs to hear the answer aloud.</p>
<p>“Dad is going to slide his raw dick up inside your tight little hole,” I promise, “and fuck his beautiful boy. Then he’s going to fill his son full of seed. How’s that sound, sport? Think you can handle a real man’s dick?”</p>
<p>He’s eager now, turned on by the scenario. “Yes, Sir.”</p>
<p>“Good boy,” I tell him.</p>
<p>I haven’t forgotten how to turn a bottom on. Not in the least. This perfect specimen of youth is arching his back. His neck is craning upward, his lips begging to be covered with my own. When our mouths meet, he exhales, the scent from the bottle still in his lungs. We kiss deeply. His eyes close. </p>
<p>“You can do this,” I encourage him. “Show dad what a good boy you are.”</p>
<p>“Yes sir.”</p>
<p>When my knob begins to probe at him, he whimpers a little. I need no more than a little more spit to slick him up. He opens for me while I slide deep, inch by inch. “You’ve got it,” I whisper, as it hits home. “You’re doing it, son. You feel so…damned…good.”</p>
<p>“Oh god.” His head hangs now. The pillows hold his hips at a perfect angle for me. I draw his legs together and surround them with my own, as I drive in. My hands wrap around his neck, applying a gentle pressure. He responds with gratitude, shoving backward onto my cock. “Yes, sir. Thank you, dad.”</p>
<p>“Good boy,” I whisper again. As I fuck, deeper and faster, I keep up a stream of filth in his ear. “That is one sweet ass, kid. Made to be fucked. Dad’s going to fill up that boyhole with seed, just because you show it off so well, son. It’s not right to tease your dad like that.” I lose track of my words, even as they continue. The sensations feel too good. The velvet of his clutch grips and milks my shaft; he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Tell dad you love his big cock.”</p>
<p>“I love it,” he gasps, his voice box vibrating between my palms.</p>
<p>“Say it.”</p>
<p>“I love dad’s big cock in my little boyhole,” he trumpets. “I love my dad fucking me. I love my handsome dad’s enormous—oh, Christ.”</p>
<p>Hearing the words force me to stab harder. At home, late nights after I’ve turned out the lights, raccoons fuck in the trees outside my bedroom windows, screeching like they’re being murdered. Those are the sounds we’re making, now—deeper, but just as loud and unbridled. This is no longer lovemaking. What we’re doing is mattress-bouncing, barnyard fucking, no less frantic and feral than animals in the moonlight. “Good boy,” I growl once more as I pound into him. My arm is now wrapped around his neck; his chin rests in the crook. “Take it. Take it. Take your dad’s cum.”</p>
<p>When I release into him, he’s ready for it. His hole opens wide to receive my gift; simultaneously he turns on his side and takes me with him, as I continue to convulse, so he can release his swollen cock from its elastic confines. Still shooting, I reach around to feel it, feverish and slick in my grasp. “May I cum, Sir?” he begs.</p>
<p>“That depends on if you want more loads from dad,” I warn. </p>
<p>Immediately he releases his cock. I, too, take my hand away, in case he’s too close. “I do,” he admits. “I do want more loads. I can wait. Can you cum again?”</p>
<p>“I can.” I grind my cock into his prostate, feeling the button press back against the head.</p>
<p>The sensation makes him close his eyes. “Oh shit,” he says. The words are urgent. “I’m shooting. Sorry, dad. I’m shooting!”</p>
<p>I’m lying both beneath and beside him, with enough clearance to peer at his midsection. He’s not touching himself, but his his erection pulsates and shudders. One jerk toward the ceiling. Two. Then, hands-free, as his hole contracts around my only slightly softened dick, semen shoots from the tip. The thick fluid arcs through the air and lands on his abdomen. Another jet flies onto the blanket, a third onto his forearm. The remainder oozes from the tip in a slow and inexorable gush. </p>
<p>“Sorry,” he pants, genuinely mournful. “I wanted to hold out. But you just made my ass feel so fucking amazing.”</p>
<p>“That’s what dads are for,” I say, as I enfold the boy in my arms and hold him close.</p>
<p>Maybe I haven’t lost my touch, after all.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-29653910803497489382022-06-07T08:30:00.038-04:002022-06-07T09:51:45.211-04:00Redneck Rim Artist<p>I’m face down, sprawled diagonally across a double-sized mattress, listening for footsteps and hearing nothing louder than the refrigerator’s purr in the corner. I’ve turned on the bathroom bulb and closed the door so that only a cupful of light spills through the crack; at the hotel room’s other end, I’ve slipped the security latch between the outside door and its frame, keeping it slightly ajar. I’m facing away from the sliver of illumination from the parking lot and third-floor outdoors walkway, angled in my direction.</p>
<p>I’m naked, legs spread, pillow clutched to my chest. And I’m waiting for a stranger to join me.</p>
<p>He’d messaged me on the apps only twenty minutes before. <em>I’m a lil horny. U?</em></p>
<p>I don’t usually talk to profiles without photos, but it’s my first night in Richmond. After a six-and-a-half-hour drive and dinner with my dad, maybe my judgment was impaired. Or maybe I’m intrigued by his screen name: RimUDown. <em>Me too</em>, I’d told him.</p>
<p><em>Looking for some ass to eat</em>, he’d sent me. He’d followed up the invitation with a photo that had made my heart beat a little more quickly. The shot had been of him in baggy denim and an open plaid shirt with the arms ripped out. He’s twenty-six, maybe twenty-eight. A backward trucker hat tames a strawberry-blond mane. His shoulders are broad and defined; his biceps bulge. His chest is lightly furry. A treasure trail leads down from his navel to the top button of his jeans. It’s not the photo of a man posing for a mirror selfie—he’s tousled and carrying a rake as he laughs at the camera, as if someone he knows has caught him walking up the driveway from taking care of the lawn. <em>Really need to munch a fuzzy hole for a long long time. </em></p>
<p>My insides had unglued at his words. I don’t get many men offering to eat my ass, even though I always crave a good rimming. Most bottoms seem more intent on getting my mouth on their own rears as a prelude to fucking, though intellectually I know the act doesn’t have to end in penetration. This stranger hasn’t mentioned topping me, though, or insinuated it's on his agenda. So I’d taken his offer at face value, and replied, <em>Haven’t been eaten out in a real long time.</em></p>
<p><em>Let’s change that right now</em>, he’d texted. </p>
<p>I’d immediately clicked the location button at the screen’s bottom, to let him know where I was. </p>
<p>That was fifteen minutes before. Moments ago, he’d sent a message to let me know he was in the parking lot. Before planting myself prone on the mattress, I’d given him the room number and cracked the door. And now I wait. I look at my watch. It’s 9:35.</p>
<p>My eyes are squeezed tight shut when I hear the door open, then shut behind him. There’s one soft thud, then two, as he kicks off his sneakers so they collide against the hotel room’s chair. His hands, warm, callused, seize my ass cheeks, They squeeze, pull, appraise. “Turn over,” says the boy in a soft drawl. “Let me see the man I’m gettin’.”</p>
<p>I obey. My cock is rigid, erect at an incline from my body, a textbook example of an acute angle. The shaggy-haired boy standing at the foot my my hotel bed is wearing the same trucker cap and jeans as in his photo, but tonight his top is clad in an old NASCAR tee that’s seen better days. Again, the arms have been ripped at at the seams to expose muscles of which he’s obviously proud. “Fuck, daddy,” he says, leaning down to rub his hand over my beard. “You are hotter’n hell<em>.” </em></p>
<p>When he looms close, in the twilight I see his cheeks and chin are covered by wispy facial hair. He smells of beer. The stranger removes his hat, and allows his wavy flow to hang on the sides of his face. “Thank you,” I say, a little breathless as he reaches between my legs to feel me. </p>
<p>“Damn, daddy.” His fingertips pry at my hole. “I bet you're gonna taste good.” I watch as he removes his shirt, but leaves his pants intact. His arms are a deep red-brown, while his chest is nearly as white as my own—a real farmer’s tan. The boy's deep drawl and his dress and mannerisms have a direct effect on my cock, making it even more rigid. I’ve landed a redneck after my ass, and the knowledge leaves me panting.</p><p>As his probing becomes more insistent, he once more leans in close. Long hair tickles my ears and chin as his lips press against mine, surprisingly soft. Usually I’m not aroused by the taste of cigarettes on a man’s tongue, but I’m already hungering for his man’s attention. He could smoke a pack and I’d not bat an eye. “Get that ass up,” he orders, his voice still quiet. “I need t’get in there.”</p>
<p>I’ve barely managed to roll over when I feel the sensation of his hands forcing apart my cheeks, followed by the tickle of his hair on my skin. When his mouth meets my hole, I gasp aloud. With only twenty minutes between his first text on the app and our meeting, I’d not had the time for a deep douching—but I’m glad I had the foresight to hop in the shower and give myself a two-finger soap-and-rinse to the second knuckle. </p>
<p>The boy grunts as he dives in. The sensation of his mouth on my hole is so sudden, so forceful, that without knowing what I’m doing, I arch my back. My head flies up as I let out a cry of joy, or of need, or of animal instinct. Perhaps all three at once. He places the butt of his hand on the small of my back and pushes down. I’m his to command, for the duration of what’s to come.</p>
<p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
<p>From time to time his teeth scrape against my ass cheeks in gentle, lingering bites. Otherwise, though, his mouth never leaves my hole. For long minutes he licks and abrades his bearded chin against its tender length. He grunts like an animal as he takes me with his tongue, sending it deep within. I gasp and shudder when his cupped hand collides with my ass in a loud smack. “You like that, daddy?” he asks, releasing his prey from his mouth for the first time. “You like gettin’ your ass whupped?”</p>
<p>“Fuck yes, I do,” I manage to gasp. “I like it…sir.”</p>
<p>He lets out a feral growl. “Callin’ me <em>sir</em> is gonna make me get aggressive,” he warns. </p>
<p>The redneck is clenching my butt wide open; he’s already given me the most thorough rimming I’ve had in years. If he wants to get more aggressive, I’m willing to let him bring it on. “Do what you want...<i>sir</i>,” I manage to say, as I look over my shoulder.</p>
<p>I’m rewarded by him pulling himself beside me on the mattress. The flat of his hand lands on my ass with another slap. “What I <em>want</em> is to punish that ass, faggot,” he growls, as he kisses me roughly. He spanks me again, harder. My flesh prickles and twinges as the blood rushes to the surface, but I don’t regret my offer. The room echos with the sounds of his hand against my butt, as he wallops it again and again, pushing me closer to my limits. “Then reward it.”</p>
<p>And again I’m over the pillow, ass stinging from his thrashing. The hotel room’s air conditioning blows frigid air over my over-warm flesh as his mouth probes its deep, protected center. My eyes roll to the back of my head. Drool oozes from the corners of my mouth onto the sheets.</p>
<p>I don’t know how long he’s in there. I just know that for endless moments I’m his. Once every while I’ll moan when he gives me a paddling, no doubt adding depth of color to an ass already scarlet from his punishment. “Love me some handsome daddy ass,” he murmurs with affection at some moments. Then, at others, “Gimme that hole, faggot.” </p>
<p>I respond to both endearments with equal fervor. If he wanted to fuck me, I’d let him. But he never makes that move; he doesn’t even unbutton his jeans, though with insistence he humps the bed’s corner and sometimes plunges his hands beneath his tight, narrow waistband. He’d doing exactly what he promised, by giving my hole the attention it didn’t know it needed. </p>
<p>At one point he grabs a bottle of poppers from his pocket, twists off the cap, and inhales deeply. One side, then the other. “Your turn, cocksucker,” he growls. Before I know it, he’s straddling my ribs, cupping my chin with one hand to tilt back my head. He holds my left nostril shut and hands me the bottle. I half-cover its aperture with my thumb and take a deep sniff. He repeats the gesture on the right. “That’ll loosen you up good,” he says, satisfied, as he lands another smack on my backside.</p>
<p>His occasional paddlings keep me from completely drifting away on the waves of pleasure his lips and tongue set into motion. These sharp bursts of not-quite-pain are my anchor to reality, between what feels like the endless attention he pays to my hole. I alternate between whimpering and panting, between moaning and simply huffing with pleasure. At times he’s so determined to dive deeper that he propels me across the mattress. I scarcely notice that I’m contorted against the padded headboard or am even dangling off the mattress and sprawled halfway onto the floor until, with his rough hands, he grabs my waist and hauls me like a fertilizer sack back into position over the pillows. I’m no longer thinking. I’m operating on sensation and instinct only. I respond to his every order: <em>Back that ass up, daddy,</em> or <em>C’mon, faggot. Open up that pucker for me.</em></p>
<p>After what could be an hour, or perhaps even days, he lifts himself up and sits on the edge of the mattress. I hear him twist open the cap of the bottled water I’ve left for him on the bedside table. Still trembling, my ass sore, I twist myself around and try to summon words. “I…that was fucking amazing,” I say, feeling sheepish at accepting so much attention. It’s a rare luxury to take a deep dive in that vast reservoir of pleasure. “You really didn’t have to…”</p>
<p>Sweat is pouring down his face, but he cuts me off with a grin. “Oh, I ain’t finished, daddy. Just getting my mouth wet for the <em>real </em>rim job I’m gonna give ya.” With a shove, he pushes me back into the pillows. "Now hush."</p><p>I am helpless to resist.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p><p>I look at my watch when, at last, he flops his back across the foot of his bed. It’s 11:42. The fucker has been at it for two hours. <em>Two hours</em>. My ass cheeks burn mildly, as if someone’s holding a flame to the bare skin; I swear I can feel every scrape of my redneck’s teeth across them still. “Damn, daddy,” he pants. In the dark, I can see how slick with sweat is his torso; a tattoo of Tigger dances across one deltoid. The redneck stretches like a cat. “You fuckin’ wore me out.” </p>
<p>He’s got to be kidding. I’m the one whose brain is still on the centrifuge he set into motion. “Let me do something for you,” I whisper. I don’t know who I’m kidding. At this point, I’m pleading.</p>
<p>“Y’ain’t gotta,” he assures. But neither does he protest when I loosen the button at his waistband, nor when I tug down his zipper. From a thatch of ginger hair springs his cock. It’s not especially large, but when it lunges upward, released from its prison of ragged denim, the sight of multiple filaments of the ample precum that’s been flowing for the last two hours, binding cock to pubes, make my own erection harder. Each sticky rope looks Lilliputian, tiny tethers straining to contain the giant, Gulliver. “C’mon,” he says, catching at my wrist as I dive forward. “You don’t gotta.”</p>
<p>I do gotta. I engulf his cock to the base, and then some. It’s salty from the fluid he’s been leaking and natural tasting, as if he’s been freeballing in these jeans all day. I have to show him my gratitude, though, and neither a bit of scent nor traces of hours-old pee are going to stop me. I caress his nuts in my left hand, and encircle the base of his meat with my right as I throat his thick, cut cock. </p>
<p>“Suck it, daddy,” he whispers at last. Both thumbs flick against his nipples. “Suck that hog, faggot. That’s what you wanted all night, wasn’t it.”</p>
<p>I grunt and nod. </p>
<p>When I look up for his response, he riffles fingers across my short hair. “Just like that. C’mon. Fuck!” </p>
<p>I’m prepared to suck for as long as it takes, considering the attention he’s lavished on me. But I’m barely a minute into the blow job when he lets loose his load. Growling obscenities, he clutches the back of my head with both hands and drives in deep, holding me down on him as his cock pulses and contracts. His cum is bitter-tasting on my tongue, but I swallow it all with gratitude. After a gasp for air, I go down on his softening dick and nurse it until every last oozing trace of his seed is down my throat. Then I settle back on my haunches on the floor, waiting to see what he’ll do.</p>
<p>After a moment he stirs, then laughs. “Didn’t expect you to do that, daddy.” He sits up and helps himself to what’s left of the bottle, then checks the cap to the poppers and shoves them in his pocket. “But you sure are good at it.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” I say. Then I add, for his benefit, “Sir.”</p>
<p>He growls once more with pleasure at the title, then stands and yanks me to my feet. The cock that had been softening swells as it jabs against my thigh. It’s the first time I’ve stood since his arrival, and I now see I’m a full head taller than he. He’s still the boss, though, when he grabs the back of my neck and pulls me in for a deep kiss. “Beat that cock off thinking about me when I leave,” he orders, as he pulls on his tee. </p>
<p>It’s the one order tonight that I disobey. Even though I still stink of his spit and cum and sweat, and jerking off would bring me release, I content myself with lying there in the dark, atop that strange bed, sleepily remembering everything that’s gone before. It’s rare that I’m treated like another man's hole. I’m in no hurry to cut short the novelty.</p>
<p>He messages me on the app the next day, while I’m in a doctor’s waiting room, waiting for my father to emerge from the offices within. <em>Sorry for tuckering out last night</em>, it reads. <em>Had a long day at work and didn’t have all the energy I wanted for eating that daddy hole. If you’re around tonight late, though, I’ll make it up to you.</em></p>
<p>My short bark of laughter attracts attention from the waiting room’s other occupants. Beneath my mask, I clear my throat and compose myself. <em>I’d like that a lot. I’m yours tonight, sir.</em></p>
<p><em>What kind of underwear do you wear? </em>he asks.</p>
<p><em>Trunks</em>, I tell him.</p>
<p>He sends me a sad-faced emoji. <em>I really love daddy in briefs, </em>follows. <em>If I walked into that hotel room and found my daddy faggot in briefs tonight, I might just have to lay him over my knees and give him a real paddling before I go to town on his hole.</em></p>
<p>I manage to catch the sharp inhalation his words arouse, before anyone around me can hear. <em>Understood, sir,</em> my fingers stab out on the screen. </p><p>There’s a Target between my dad’s house and the hotel where I’m staying. I can pay a visit when I’ve dropped him off after dinner. My cheeks are still sensitive to the touch, but the notion of further manhandling excites them. I hate wearing briefs and think they look ridiculous...this evening, though, my redneck with the farmer’s tan will enter my room and find daddy face down, wearing a black pair by Hanes, ready and willing for as much abuse and molestation as he cares to deliver.</p>
<p>Last night was the work of a tuckered-out man? What the <em>fuck</em> are his usual rim jobs like, then? </p>
<p>I’m itching to find out.</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-58646700714355275362022-04-05T09:00:00.011-04:002022-09-19T08:59:14.400-04:00Babyface: Part 1<p><em><b>Autumn 1985</b></em></p><p><em>Babyface</em>, they call me. All the grad students in the English department have picked up on the moniker. “Hey, babyface,” they’ll say, as they pass me on the fourth floor of the Hibbs building. “How’re classes going, babyface?”</p>
<p>The nickname’s not used without affection. I’m well-liked within the department, much to my surprise. By the first two weeks of my Master’s degree program, I’d spoken up in class more than all four undergraduate years combined; I discovered my peers respected my opinions. The academic reputation that had taken a bruising as a sophomore and junior is on the rebound. Dr. Levan is a notoriously hard-to-please professor who teaches our academic methods class. He’s such a stickler for the MLA style that in our first assignment, only I and one other student escaped failing by producing error-free bibliographies. When, at the end of another class scolding, he had brandished one of my essays, called out my name, and announced, “This is of a quality that should be published!”, I’d feared from the other MA candidates the same sort of blackballing a teacher’s praise might have gotten me in high school. </p>
<p>But no, they were proud one of their own had gotten such high commendations from the most fearsome of faculty. Ever since, I’ve been in demand for study groups. The MFA students in creative writing invite me to the Village Cafe for coffee, where in a crowded booth, I nurse a cola and read as they hunch over their journals to scribble. When they throw bohemian parties in their little apartments, serving shots of Midori in jelly glasses, cross-legged on the floor, I’m always on the guest list. For the first time in my life, I’m popular—or whatever passes for it, among a certain subset of teaching assistants in one of the most minor graduate programs at a big university.</p>
<p>But still, when I emerge from the tiny office I occupy in shifts with two other students, it’s always to my new nickname. “Babyface!” they’ll say, dragging me by the sleeve to the terminal room. “I think the computer ate my paper. Come see if it’s really gone?” And I, with five years’ experience of writing long essays in EMACS, will follow.</p>
<p>The pet name is my own fault. An urban university attracts an older, working demographic. Most of my fellow graduate students are in their thirties and even forties. When I’d enrolled in the fall and found myself surrounded by scholars twice my age or more, I’d attracted attention. “How <em>old</em> are you?” they’d exclaim during break, or after class. </p>
<p>They gave the distinct impression they regarded my youth as freakish, and I, wary of being ostracized, demurred. “Oh, I just have one of those young-looking faces.”</p>
<p>They’d pry, trying to learn more. Wasn’t I fresh out of college? How old was I, exactly? My inclination is always to push back against public scrutiny of my private business; I share what I want, when and how, and not because of peer pressure. Through evasions and some outright lies, I finally manage to leave an impression I’m twenty-five and back in school after a break, instead of really being a hair past twenty-one, with an undergraduate diploma so fresh the ink is barely dry. Most of my freshman writing students are older than I. However, in my instructor drag—pleated tweed trousers and pinstripe dress shirts from the Spiegel catalog, my dad’s narrow ties from the nineteen-sixties—I have no problems leading a classroom. I assume a podium as if all my life I’ve been speaking in public before strangers. I’m engaging. Confident.</p>
<p>But still intensely private. My closest friend these days is Rand, a gangly thirty-five-year-old from Kentucky who has spent most of his adult life in the military. At times I wonder if I’m friends with Rand because in him I see an older, alternate-universe version of myself, one whose hair had gone from blond to pitch-black, like my mother, instead of remaining fair. If I’d not worn braces in my early teens, my teeth might be as crooked at his, my overbite as prominent; if I’d not gotten contact lenses, my spectacles might be as thick and unavoidable. Rand, however, is undeniably, doggedly heterosexual, though. His crush on one female teaching assistant is the stuff of legend. Whenever she walks into a room Rand occupies, he’s all puppy-dog eyes and wagging tail, an overgrown amiable Labrador anxious to please his mistress. I suspect it’s this behavior that accounts for the time I spend with Rand at school: his crush is discussed so much that it distracts any curiosity about my own affairs. </p>
<p>Not that there’s any romance in my life. Sex…some. I’ve returned to the Business Building men’s rooms when I’m horny. They’re nothing like a decade before, at the height of the seventies, when the overflow of men cruising for cock would spill upward, story by story, and one might encounter five floors of restrooms crammed with men in the stalls and at the urinals, eyes probing, mouths welcoming, hands reaching out to connect. A decade ago, there were only two venereal diseases of note and they both could be treated with antibiotics. </p>
<p>A decade ago, catching something wasn’t a death sentence.</p>
<p>Lately the restrooms are nothing like they might have been even three or four years in the past, much less ten. The long-standing second floor glory hole has long since been bolted over with metal plates on both sides. The graffiti urging men to show up at certain times or at other campus hot spots has disappeared. In the past I could walk into the room, take a stall, and within moments have an erect cock and a pair of spread legs shoving beneath the partition, demanding attention. </p>
<p>These days, I grade papers or read for my own seminars, the lone occupant of the echoing restroom. Sometimes, after a half-hour or more, someone will push open the door next to mine, drop his trousers, and tap his toe. But it always takes a long while, and sex is never a guarantee. A hand extending beneath a stall used to be a gay greeting, harmless and welcome as a fist bump. Now it’s a risk. A threat. A reminder that any stranger potentially carries the virus that feels like it will kill us all. </p>
<p>So men stay away. I wonder what they do now, in this strange new world in which we’re not supposed to touch or hunger for each other. Do they pleasure themselves while thinking of times past, as I often do? Do they limit their fantasies to the two-dimensional images within the pages of <em>Honcho</em> or <em>Inches</em>? Or do they deny themselves altogether, and think themselves more virtuous for doing so? Many of these men never thought of themselves as gay. Perhaps they’ve scampered back to their wives and girlfriends, reformed for good…or at least until they slip up.</p>
<p>And I sit in my solitary stall, back cramped, ass growing numb on the institutional seats, lonely and bored, wondering why I am the lone holdout who keeps returning when he shouldn’t. </p>
<p>It’s after one of these lengthy sessions that I limp back to the fourth-floor English Department and my office, backside dead after sitting in a stall for ninety fruitless minutes, intending to drop off the cache of freshman essays I’ve graded before I return home. Rand is waiting at my desk, however, his lengthy praying mantis limbs folded over each other. “Let’s do something,” he suggests.</p>
<p>“Like what?”</p>
<p>His brow furrows. “Coffee? Early dinner?” I shake my head. I’m not a coffee drinker, and three-thirty is too early for the evening meal. “Record store?”</p>
<p>To the last, I happily assent. Weekends, Rand and I sometimes meet at Plan 9 Records in Richmond’s Carytown. We’re both diehard vinyl collectors in a world of cassettes and lately, compact discs. Compact discs are new, however, and much as I covet their shiny, jewel-like surfaces, I can’t afford the four hundred dollars or more it would cost to buy a player. Vinyl is cheap, and the burgeoning market in used LPs makes them even cheaper. Carytown is a haul from campus, though. Bohannon’s on Grace Street is closer, but it sells more drug paraphernalia than it does actual music. “Beezie’s?” He nods at my suggestion.</p>
<p>Beezie’s Records sits on the southern edge of our urban campus. My bedroom at home is bigger than its retail space, but the elderly owner trades only in used LPs. B.Z. himself is an elderly man with the long stringy hair and affectations of a former hippie, who communicates only in grunts and sighs. When I show up with an armful of promo albums courtesy of my college friend Carol, who now works in music promotion, B.Z. will flip through the stack with a practiced eye, express his lamentation with a deep exhalation, slam the big knob on his mechanical cash register with the side of his fist, and slide over a few bills that usually within minutes I’ll spend upon albums from his bins. The closest to actual speech I’ve ever gotten from him was the one time he rejected an album: Claudja Barry’s <em>I, Claudja</em>, which he separated from my stack of trade-ins and pushed back over the counter at me with a firm, <em>nuh-uh</em>.</p>
<p>B.Z.’s not behind the counter by the front door when Rand and I squeeze into the little shop. My friend immediately heads toward the bins of used albums that sit on waist-high tables in neat lines. I linger by the counter for a moment, glancing through a stack the store’s owner has priced, but not yet shuffled into place. My current passion is Canadian band Martha & the Muffins; I’d do anything for a hard-to-find copy of their release of a couple of years before, <em>Danseparc</em>. There’s nothing in the M bins, though, nor do I find anything new by Robyn Hitchcock in the H’s. I’ve slid down to the D’s, vainly hoping I might stumble across <em>Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington</em>, which I’ve coveted for a few years, when someone emerges from the store’s back room to sit behind the counter. It’s not B.Z. But even B.Z. Isn’t much of a presence when he’s there, so I don’t pay much mind to his stand-in.</p>
<p>“Babyface!” Rand calls from the corner. He waves a release by the Allman Brothers Band, which is far from the kind of music I listen to, but I give him a thumbs-up. “You find anything yet?”</p>
<p>“Still browsing,” I say, turning back to the bins. Then I look up, and see B.Z.’s replacement regarding me, steadily. The clerk is in his mid-thirties and wears a hole-ridden, oversized cardigan that signals defeat. His hair is thinning. His eyes are big and sunken. Despite his gauntness, I recognize him instantly.</p>
<p>In my teens, I’d done a lot of low-key sex work, much of it facilitated by a man named Earl, a fellow habitué of the parks where I’d cruised. Through Earl, I’d met dozens of men willing to offer good money and a comfortable bed for an hour or two of the same services I’d been offering on my knees among the pines, <em>gratis</em>. </p>
<p>Earl had helped me open my first savings account for the money I was earning between other men’s sheets. I’d hung out at his Northside home throughout high school; for a handful of years he seemed like the only man who really saw me for what I was. When I had anxieties about college and my future, it wasn’t to my parents that I turned, but to Earl. His doors were always open when I needed refuge. I recognized from the start that his motives were never entirely pure, but neither were mine. His agenda of pimping out boys when it was convenient for his business interests aligned with the acquisitive ambitions of a kid whose family had little money to spare. Our use of the other was mutual and agreeable.</p>
<p>My time in Eden came to an end courtesy of Earl’s younger boyfriend, Jim. Jim occupied a renovated attic in Jim’s house. Much of the time, when he was home and I’d be visiting, he’d manifest only as the muffled choruses of Fleetwood Mac on his turntable and the acrid smell of weed. Other times, he’d make his disapproval of me known with vicious put-downs—remarks about my gangly limbs, or my bony body. </p>
<p>Jim’s dislike of me came to a head when he blamed me for a vicious falling-out he’d had with Earl. When he found an opportunity, he locked me into a closet in his garret, unsuccessfully attempted to phone my parents to tell them their son was a cocksucker, and then left me me imprisoned for the better part of a day. That night, Earl returned to find a feral beast screaming and trying to beat down the bolted door. I’d lunged at Earl full of fury and eager to draw blood, and Earl had sent me away. I’d never returned to the house nor seen either man, since.</p>
<p>Now, sitting on a stool behind the counter that was usually B.Z.’s throne, Jim glowers at me. During his best days he had always been unkempt and rawboned—thirty dressed for sixteen in graphic tees too tight and short for him, his clothing and uncut hair smelling of pot. I’m shocked to see him in this state, in that threadbare cardigan and an plaid shirt two sizes too large. He looks like a boy dressing in his daddy’s castoffs. The malice in those eyes is all that remains of the Jim I used to know. </p>
<p>Rand is still talking to himself behind me, as he flicks through the bins. Jim sneers, then twists my friend’s endearment into what sounds like a curse. “Well hello, babyface,” he says. </p><p><br /></p><p><i>(Continued in </i><a href="http://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2022/09/babyface-part-2.html" target="_blank">Babyface: Part 2</a><i>.)</i></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-32286336711809474632022-03-07T09:00:00.103-05:002022-03-07T10:45:14.380-05:00Seconds of Yes<p>One of the ironies of COVID is that our extended isolated downtime has forced me to confront the traumas of a pandemic that came before.</p>
<p>In 1981, the <em>New York Times</em> published an article with the headline of “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html" target="_blank">Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals</a>.” I was a young, sexually-active man of seventeen who, a month before, had graduated from high school. The previous autumn, I’d engaged in one of the grander deceptions of my adolescence: dead set on escaping the suffocating South and finding other men like myself, I’d defied my parents and secretly applied to a university in Manhattan. I’d sent for the application materials on the sly, paid the fee from my own sex work savings, copied numbers from another financial aid application, and (in the biggest betrayal of all) forged my parents’ signatures. I was determined to be a resident of New York City in the nineteen-eighties. </p>
<p>The university accepted me and extended a scholarship, but I ended up declining. My mother had burned out, physically and emotionally, trying to get Carter re-elected in 1980; she seemed so fragile in the following months that though I yearned for life in the big city, I chose a college close to home. My betrayals might break her completely, I feared. I mourned the loss of the metropolitan existence torn away from me, though. All that summer and during my undergrad years, I pored over the pages of the <em>Times</em> and the<em> Voice</em>, trying to imagine what my alternate-universe self attending school in the Village might be up to—what clubs he’d be exploring, what seedy little shows he’d be seeing, what personal ads he’d be answering. </p>
<p>I read that first article in the <em>Times </em>with unease. In a cubicle in my college library, I searched through the New York newspapers to find any follow-up. I obsessed over any articles about what was for months called GRID, and then AIDS. Early on, I recognized that if I’d stubbornly followed my whims, I would have landed in an epicenter of this mysterious disease. </p>
<p>But I didn’t live in a big city like New York or San Francisco, so I convinced myself that whatever the new syndrome was, it would pass me by. </p>
<p>During college, I majored in magical thinking. I conjured reasons I’d weather what was shaping up to be a serious storm. I was safe because I’d never sniffed poppers, which for a very long time was suspected to be a cause. I was in a very small college town; the disease would never reach as far as its dirt roads and sidewalks of brick. The men fucking me were either professorial sorts, whom I could of course count on to recognize the signs of disease before they allowed it into their beds, or rednecks who never ventured into the big cities where a virus was on the rampage. </p>
<p>I imagined myself immune because I was good at heart, or too young to catch anything, or too important for the world to lose, or simply because I willed it so. When people I knew in college began dying immediately after graduation, those fictitious protections dissolved like tissue in a thunderstorm. Men died I’d known in my home town parks, from the days and nights I’d cruise there. I saw my old mentors emaciated and covered in sores. A colleague of my father's, known to be a confirmed bachelor, suddenly developed cancers that my parents discussed in hushed whispers. Mornings, I’d read the obituaries for names I might know, like an elderly person might. My college classmates attended each other’s weddings; I only entered churches for memorials.</p>
<p>Death surrounded me. Even when I left my native state for an unknown new home, I couldn’t escape its reach. I witnessed my best friend, a wide-eyed boy my own age, wither over the course of mere weeks; as dementia ossified his brain, I would hold him in my arms to calm his distress when he couldn’t remember where or who he was. I felt his skin, hot and fevered, against my own, while he wept at the unfairness of it all. Close to the end, his family took him away to die. I never saw him again. </p>
<p>And how did I react to this decade and a half of horrors? Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Then I’d circle back to denial again, never managing to achieve acceptance. Day after day, loss after loss, I’d reassure myself that I was still alive, that I was okay. Never once did I acknowledge that survival alone was insufficient. I put out of my mind the cost of longevity. I concentrated on anything else instead. </p>
<p>I’ve kept journals since my teens, but I suspect any future historian looking through them would be puzzled how the word AIDS never appears in their pages. They’d find plenty of memories of good times with friends, but nothing of the hospital visits, nor of the funerals, nor of the consolation I might try to take in another survivor's arms. I aspired to be a writer, but never could I put pen to pad and confront the disease ravaging everything and everyone I knew. Writing about it, accepting it, would make it too real.</p>
<p>I was sinking fast, those years. Yet I refused to admit how deep were the waters I tried to tread, or how overpowering their current. </p>
<p>The current pandemic has really done a number on the creative writing classes I teach. For a while, they were only on Zoom, which I disliked. Admittedly, I didn’t have to get dressed up for Zoom classes, nor did I have to commute. The students were amused whenever one of my cats would climb up onto the desk and stare into my laptop’s camera for minutes at a time, so that it appeared she was talking instead of me. But I hated the electronic lag; the virtual classroom felt impersonal in the most personal of seminars. </p><p>Last autumn, I was at last allowed to teach in person again. Because of the school’s precautions, however, we were masked up and spaced around the perimeter of the room, and a custodian hovered outside to evict us the moment the class was supposed to be officially over, so he could spray down the place with disinfectants.</p>
<p>This semester, Omicron hit at an inopportune time in the enrollment window, causing most prospective students to look at the spring catalog, shake their heads, and stay at home. I’ve never had such a low enrollment. But the class is relaxed; we’re at a point in the pandemic in which we aren’t as freaked out, hearing someone cough down the hall. Each week, I ask my students to bring in whatever they’ve been working on. They read aloud, I listen, and we we all provide our feedback. When there are a quorum of writers present, the system works. With low enrollment, even one absence can put me in a tough position in which I need to fill time in a constructive way.</p>
<p>So I’ve stockpiled some essays of my own. For the last year I’ve been working on my own book-length project, and I’ve been mining it for short sections to share. This last week, however, it occurred to me I’ve been sitting on god knows how much old material of mine from my twenties, when I was about the same age as many of these kids. Why not pass some of those, and let the students have at them?</p>
<p>I’ve always archived and backed up all my writing projects through the years. I’ve a folder on my hard drive dedicated to any fiction I might have worked on before 1995 or so—at least, from the years when I stored all my labors on floppy discs. It’s a jumble of miscellaneous files and subfolders all (thanks to the vagaries of various operating systems and having copied them from floppies) without any dates to identify when I might have worked on them. Some I can remember. The murder mystery that was supposed to be my first big breakthrough: I remember working on it in the summer of 1988, when I was teaching an undergraduate course in Shakespeare and needed a frivolous project to fill out the long hot Detroit afternoons. The post-apocalyptic science fiction novel I abandoned after a hundred pages, I remember writing in 1989 while I considered giving up academe altogether. </p>
<p>Still searching for something I might take in for my students, this last week, I browsed through the files. Some I remembered vividly; others I didn’t recognize at all. The more I read, though, the more I realized that all of them, in some way or another, were about the terrible times I was living through. They all were about death, and disease, and loss. </p>
<p>My murder mystery, which an amateur detective who worked in a funeral home, and who lived my experiences of feeling beaten down from having to attend countless memorial services—all identical in their basics, each populated with families hostile to outsiders. My SF novel, in which the protagonist wanders alone among familiar, now-empty streets, missing the people who once lived there. A play I wrote, in which a longterm same-sex couple, both deceased, are helpless to prevent young, straight newlyweds from moving into their former home. Another play in which a wealthy family watches without emotion as an apocalypse descends upon the town beyond their closed gates. A short story in which the protagonist fashions charms to ward off a deadly plague threatening his village. Another science fiction draft in which two sleight-of-hand artists are stranded on a planet suffering from a disfiguring ailment. A strange thriller in which a woman refuses to allow her lover to touch her, for fear he harbors a terrible secret.</p>
<p>They all were about AIDS. Everything I wrote for fifteen years, every novel draft, every short story, was about the pandemic roaring its way unchecked through my population. I don’t think I ever was fully conscious of what I was doing. It’s so obvious, though, reading everything from the vantage of decades later. </p>
<p>As I sat there last week, reading through these old files created with software that hasn’t existed since before Clinton was President, I really wanted to reach back through the decades and give my poor young self a hug. Years later, that kid is still trying to unpack the trauma and guilt of surviving. Even at this remove, it’s still tough for him to admit how much and how many he lost. </p>
<p>One of my folders, labeled simply, <em>From Davy’s Chair</em>, is a collection of short stories. I don’t remember composing them, but I’m guessing by the fact they were saved in MacWrite format that they were from the late 1980s. The titular Davy is a barber; each story is a monologue from a client who speaks while Davy works in silence. </p><p>There’s a rowdy story from one customer about meeting his current husband at a gay bar; another is the stream of consciousness of a drag queen about finding someone to look beyond the wigs and makeup at the man beneath. There’s a story I actually kind of love about a man who, in trying to escape the romantic interest of female coworker, makes up elaborate stories about an imaginary boyfriend to keep her off his back. When she loses interest, he continues fabricating the stories because he’s lonely, and can’t stop.</p>
<p>Then there was a final story told in Davy’s Chair, probably the closest I ever came to directly addressing the disease stealing the people in my life: <em>Seconds of Yes</em>. Is it good? Well. I was young when I wrote it. Reading such an old draft triggers the editor and critic in me. I see hundreds of ways it could be improved. The teacher in me want to fix it, just as I want to help my own writers make their own work better. But I’m going to reproduce it below with all its flaws intact. </p>
<p>Imperfect as it is, the story reminds me of a boy so intent upon surviving that, as the tide pulled him down, he didn’t realize his frantic prose gestures weren’t waving, but drowning.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong></strong></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Seconds of Yes</strong></p>
<p>I don't lay out. The idea's always turned me off. When I see people slathered in grease, half naked in the sun, it reminds me of bacon. I don't like thinking of myself as sizzling pork product, you know? But yes, I've been getting more sun lately. I need to get out of the condo, sometimes. Thanks for noticing, Davy. Just the usual, this time—I’m getting a little shaggy.</p>
<p>Did I tell you about my new hobby? You'll never guess. No, it's not basket weaving. Think bigger. I'm talking danger, adrenaline. I'm talking excitement. I'm talking about raw energy coursing through your body, your heart in your mouth. I'm talking bungee jumping. </p>
<p>Emerald City's been having it on weekends, the sports bar? Fridays and Saturdays—usually I go both nights. They've got that large parking lot, you know. The manager's hired a crane for the summer, set up bleachers around the edges, added more tables to the patio. The crowds are amazing—boys from all over the city come just to see people jump. You'd be surprised. It's like a roller coaster, but without the track, without the train, without the safety restraints. Not very much like a roller coaster at all, maybe.</p>
<p>The first time I did it I was trashed, I admit. I don't even remember the trip up. One minute I was drinking at a table with some of the guys—I don't even remember who, that's how bad off I was—and then I came to with a terrible crack in my neck. There I was, swinging upside down, feeling stretched like Silly Putty, with my wallet twenty-five bucks lighter. And everyone was cheering and clapping like crazy.</p>
<p>I didn't mind the attention, of course, but after I pushed through the crowd, I stumbled away from the parking lot thinking, never again. Too risky, too dangerous. Not worth killing yourself over. I've seen those videos on TV—some poor kid concussing herself on the bottom of the jump platform, or worse, the broken bungee. I don't need this crap, I thought. But at home that night, I conked out right away. Then I woke up the next morning feeling, well, <em>happy</em> for the first time in a while. I have trouble sleeping these days, you see. Most nights I lie awake, listening to Bernard's breathing. I have to be ready to rouse him if he slips into a nightmare, ready to towel him down if he needs it.</p>
<p>How is he? Oh, Bernard's fine. He's fine. Yeah, really. I’ll tell him you asked.</p>
<p>Let me tell you about bungee jumping.</p>
<p>The first part's all anticipation. Getting on the rig and helmet, waiting for your turn, the ride up. All the while, you're taking deep breaths and steeling your nerves. Yeah, even when it’s not your first time. You’re preparing yourself for one moment, that swift passage between safety and uncertainty, between sane and loony tunes. The transition from the <em>no</em> screaming in your skull to everlasting seconds of <em>yes</em>.</p>
<p>At the top, the wind whips by. Sometimes it's hard to hear. At the top, the people you know vanish. If you looked for them—which you don't because you're concentrating and focusing on the moment—they'd be only featureless faces, lost among the other bodies on the bleachers. Everybody disappears, Davy. You don't think they would, but they do. At the top, you forget everything except the ground below, and your distance from it.</p>
<p>No, Bernard doesn't come to watch me jump. He won't leave the condo often, these days. He knows where I go and he knows what I do, but he doesn't say anything. Sometimes it surprises me how different we are. Most of our friends can't believe we've lasted for nine years. At first it was the superficial differences I noticed—the tomayto-tomahto kind of thing. I'd say <em>vomit</em>, he'd say <em>puke</em>. I'd say <em>ejaculate</em>, he'd say <em>jizz</em>. I'd say <em>masturbate</em>, he'd laugh and say <em>jack off</em>. It took me the longest time to say the word…well, the f-word…when we would…you know.</p>
<p>It used to be Bernard who took risks. Sky diving. Hang gliding. He would always urge me to go hiking with him in the desert or camping in the mountains. Once he took made vacation reservations for the both of us at a dude ranch. You heard me. A dude ranch. Can you believe it? It's just like you probably picture—a bunch of men in worn jeans and chaps walking around wearing ten-gallon hats. And Bernard? He was out learning to rope steer, trying to buck broncos. Don't give me that look, Davy. Real broncos. It was dangerous. He could’ve been thrown or trampled. His rear end was red for a solid two weeks after, but everywhere else he glowed with tan. Me, I was still lily-white all over.</p>
<p>Now Bernard stays at home and twice a week I'm throwing myself off a high platform into nothingness, with a stretchy cord the only thing keeping me from cracking my head against the asphalt. Funny, isn't it? And Bernard doesn't worry, like I used to worry about his adventures. Like I worry about him now, nights, when I lie awake to make sure he’s breathing. Sometimes I rest my ear against his ribcage, to listen for fluid in his lungs.</p>
<p>Bernard has a lot going on. He doesn't need to waste worry on me.</p>
<p>At the bottom, after the earth rushes to kiss you and time stops, after you've forgotten everything in that time it takes to fall, you swing in a gentle arc. Back and forth, over the crowd, over the yellow lines of the parking lot, over the patio where nervous diners watch. The world comes back, bit by bit—it starts with your muscles aching, where the harness pinches. You pick out your friends, waving in the bleachers. Then your memories return, along with your problems and fears. For a few moments you're trapped there, swinging, dangling like a side of beef in a butcher's shop. That’s when you realize nothing has changed. Not really. But there's always the next Friday night, so you let the anticipation build again.</p>
<p>Oh, that looks great. Thank you. And thanks for asking about Bernard. I'll tell him you said hello. Wait...I’ve got your tip right here. See you in three weeks? Some night, come over to the Emerald City and watch me jump, okay? Maybe you'll try for yourself—it's an experience you don't regret.</p></blockquote><p></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-1549366611055629192021-08-20T08:30:00.001-04:002021-08-20T08:30:00.194-04:00The Cream Puff<p>When I was very, very young, my father’s sister was the coolest of cool aunts. Straight out of art school, Aunt Jane affected a bohemian lifestyle, choosing to live in a run-down studio apartment in one of Baltimore’s dicier neighborhoods. She’d always wanted to be a painter; she’d lavish layer upon layer of oils upon her outsized canvases to achieve abstract results, usually in different shades of a single hue. One of her gloomier works, a study in browns that resembled a lake in a cavern, or perhaps the cross-cutting of a tree trunk, has covered one full wall of my father’s bedroom for decades now. She exhibited at no-name downtown shows where hungry artists made a dinner from the cheese plate served on opening night; she wore cat’s-eye glasses before they were popular.</p>
<p>I loved going to her apartment, when we would visit Baltimore. She would bring out a bottle of red chianti in a straw-covered bottle to share with my parents, though she’d drink most of it herself. We’d sit around a coffee table on her super-modern and super-uncomfortable butterfly canvas sling chairs, and dip bread cubes into her fondue dish. My parents were very young themselves, and preferred Jane’s unconventional flat to the antiques and rigid deportment required at my Maryland grandmother’s house. Visiting Jane was a breath of fresh air.</p>
<p>Then she met and married a man named Bert, and that was the end of that.</p>
<p>Bert was already divorced when she met him, and a decade older. Jane’s ambition was to paint; Bert thought all art was crapola. Both my father and my sister might have rejected the country club society in which they grew up, but their manners were pure Baltimore Blue Book. Bert installed shelving for a living and was proud of his calluses and perpetually dirty nails. He swore like a sailor, scratched himself at the dinner table, and made it very clear he wasn’t interested in any conversations that weren’t about sports. </p>
<p>I don’t know what Jane saw in him. Perhaps he was an act of rebellion. Perhaps opposites really do attract. Either way, they married quickly. My grandmother moved out of my father’s childhood home into a smaller apartment, and sold the property and its contents to my aunt. She and Bert moved into my grandmother’s house, surrounded by my grandmother’s furniture, her photos, her books. She slept in my grandmother’s bed, cooked in her kitchen. A metamorphosis took place. Very quickly, my aunt Jane transformed into a younger version of my grandmother: easily irritated, narrow-minded, constantly disapproving. She tucked away her paints and canvases behind a wall in the basement, never to touch them again. She became the kind of person who cared about what the neighbors thought. Jane was no longer cool.</p>
<p>A lot of her change of outlook had to do with Bert. He mocked anyone with a degree higher than high school—especially my parents, with their multiple graduate diplomas and professor titles. Effete intellectuals weren’t real men. Real men worked with their hands. A real woman didn’t teach, either; she stayed home, like Jane. My mother’s activism enraged him. The two butted heads with vicious abandon at every family gathering, especially when she would talk about her pet projects—voter registration, equal housing opportunities, birth control. Bert was a lazy conservative who couldn’t muster any better arguments than Archie Bunker with his vague talk about welfare queens and the minorities trying to get handouts instead of working hard, and my mother delighted in shooting down each and every of his protests with actual facts and figures. It didn’t matter; she was a woman, and he could holler louder, so he stomped away from every argument fuming, but convinced he’d shown the Southern broad what’s what.</p>
<p>My father didn’t like his brother-in-law much, either. Not only would Bert insult my mom, but he’d would take every opportunity to remind my dad that his house was bigger, his neighborhood was better, and that he relied on his hands instead of his namby-pamby education to make his way in life. (That the house and neighborhood was my grandmother’s, and not anything he’d achieved himself, didn’t seem to matter.) When we’d arrive as a family for a visit, Bert would mince toward my dad with loose wrists and imitate comedian Alan Sues’ tag line—<em>Laugh-In</em> had been popular just a couple of years before—“It’s Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.” Though my dad ignored the barbs, but I could tell they’d make him bristle. I didn’t exactly understand the inference…but I could tell from my father’s reaction it must be unwholesome.</p>
<p>I got the worst of it. Bert constantly needled me, from the second grade up, weighing my every word and action against some imaginary standard of stalwart boyhood that I could never attain. I was a quiet kid. Not a sissy—I wasn’t especially effeminate, nor did I play with dolls. Even in the late nineteen-sixties or early seventies my parents were progressive enough that they wouldn’t have cared if I’d been girly. Other kids, though policed the genders with such fascistic zest that I’d learned never to cross those lines. </p>
<p>My interests didn’t lie with the boisterous pursuits of many boys, though. I preferred to read, to get my schoolwork done. I wrote stories and poetry. “You gotta get his nose out of the books,” Bert would bark at my parents, when I’d visit Maryland and spend the trip in the attic bedroom reading. “Christ, he’s gonna end up a pansy.” There was no piano at my grandmother’s old house, but when at my mom’s command I’d play during their visits to us, Bert would spend the entire performance tapping his foot with impatience, or sighing. When my piece was finally over, he’d skip the applause and bolt, disgusted that my parents would pay good money for lessons. For a <em>boy</em>. </p>
<p>In fourth grade, I started independently making cookies and breads and meals for the family, finding recipes and trying them out (with my mother’s glad approval, since it was less work she had to do). I was once pressed into service to make dessert during one of Jane and Bert’s visits. I spent a couple of hours baking one of my dad’s favorite desserts—puff pastry from scratch, filled with an eggy homemade vanilla custard, drizzled with chocolate sauce (Hershey’s…I was only 10). When I approached the table, thinking everyone would love the delicious pastries I’d labored over, Bert rolled his eyes and tossed down his napkin. “Cream puffs?” he said. “C’mon. Cream puffs from the cream puff? This shit writes itself.”</p>
<p>My aunt, who rarely attempted to leaven any of Bert’s insults, this time put a hand on his arm. “Just eat your dessert.”</p>
<p>“All I know is my kids are never gonna grow up to make cream puffs like some kind of faggot.”</p>
<p>My father froze. My mother pushed back her chair, folded her napkin, and all the while staring at Bert, remove the plate of pasty from my hands and suggested I take my serving to my room. I gladly obeyed, closing my door as tightly as possible and turning on the radio, so that I wouldn’t have to hear the fireworks below. </p>
<p>I knew by then what <em>faggot</em> meant.</p>
<p>All through my childhood and adolescence Bert needled me. Not all his aggressions were so overt: most were subtle. He took my father and I fishing on his boat, but ‘accidentally’ left the bag of books I’d brought on the dock. He’d plan outings to football games, knowing I found them excruciating. He’d parse every word I spoke in the hope of finding something to mock. It got to a point after puberty that it seemed easier to remain silent for days on end, whenever our families visited. Even if I was quiet, though, Bert would interrogate my parents. How could they raise such a sulky boy? Or was I, with that long hair of mine, a sulky girl? </p>
<p>Every time we’d drive up to Baltimore, or Jane’s family would drive down to Richmond, I would have to dig deep and endure, knowing I was in for day after day of non-stop taunts. We all know how adaptable humans are: we learn to diminish unpleasant stimuli we can’t avoid. Bert was the most unpleasant stimulus on that side of the family. Though we couldn’t ignore his bullying, we marked it privately, rolled our eyes at it in public, and pretended as best we could that it wasn’t happening. </p>
<p>Because Bert was wrong about nearly everything. He was wrong about race. He was wrong about social services—or at least hopelessly Neanderthal. He was wrong about music, wrong about art. He was wrong to convince Jane never to paint again, when it had been something she’d wanted to do for a lifetime before him. He was wrong about treating service workers like shit. He was wrong to be a complete and relentless asshole to a little kid. When someone is incontrovertibly, absolutely, astonishingly wrong about everything, he’s easier to dismiss, right?</p>
<p>Of course, no one save myself realized Bert was right about one thing. I was a faggot. A pansy, a cream puff. I had to come to terms with my sexuality during the rough tenure of his withering disdain. My loving parents could dismiss his name-calling, his scorn, the scrutiny he gave to my every word and action, because they assumed like everything else, he was misinformed and incorrect. I, however, knew if that brand of harassment could come from someone related to me (by marriage…but still), what would follow from strangers would be even worse. Perhaps even violent. No little kid should have to grow up with that kind of constant fear around a family member. </p>
<p>So, when I could, I stopped making myself available for his sarcasm and insults. I stopped seeing my aunt and uncle when I started college. I politely declined to take any more trips to Maryland; I’d stay away when they visited my parents. After I moved away, I’d listen to the news from that side of the family from my parents, and then later from just my dad. But after Bert had made my life miserable for such a long period, once I was of age and gave myself permission not to tolerate it any more, it ended.</p>
<p>I’ve only seen Jane and Bert twice in the years since. The first was at my mom’s funeral, which happened at a point long after my sexuality was known to everyone. Neither of them could even bring themselves to address me afterward, either at the church or the interment, much less the gathering at my dad’s house. The second time was several years later at a family wedding—a teetotal affair micromanaged by a bridezilla who threw a public tantrum that people had the nerve to bring gifts not on the registry. I’d been warned by my dad in advance that the clusterfuck would be alcohol-free, but Jane unbent enough to join me and her brother for shots from the trunk of my car. (My dad <em>never</em> drinks. That’s how bad it was.)</p>
<p>I was the oldest of the grandchildren on that side of the family. Jane and Bert ended up having two sons, both more than a decade younger than myself. Neither of them grew up as Bert’s ideal boy: they weren’t athletic, unruly, or manly in all the traditional ways. The older played sports unwillingly until he hit his adolescence, when he refused to participate any longer. He preferred video games, and eventually bourbon from the family’s liquor cabinet: after drunkenly trashing the house and many of my grandmother’s old things, he had to be sent to rehab in his very early teens. He straightened out as an adult; he married, had two kids, got a job as an architect. But even though he’d hit all the tick marks on his dad’s American Dream checklist, none of it lasted. His wife divorced him, and took the house and the kids. For years he was in so over his head with child support and payments on a home in which he didn’t live that he had to board in an elderly couple’s home. </p>
<p>Jane and Bert’s younger son is more of a mystery. ‘Sensitive’ was always the word I heard used to describe him, or ‘artistic’—and I know from experience how well sensitivity thrives in the emotional desert where Bert walked. As soon as my younger cousin was able, he managed to find a scholarship to study in Australia. He stayed there for a decade, working in IT. “It’s like he decided to move to the other side of the globe to get away with us,” Jane would joke with my father, probably hoping that if she spoke the words aloud, it might make them untrue. He moved back to Maryland, but only after Jane and Bert finally gave up the family home at the turn of the millennium and relocated to Tennessee. He never married. He lived with two women, but only as roommates—they both were involved in romantic relationships with other men.</p>
<p>I remember my dad calling me with his suspicions, about fifteen years ago. “I think he’s gay,” he said about my younger cousin.</p>
<p>“Because your gaydar’s so good?” I asked.</p>
<p>“He’s never once had a relationship. Not that he’s told his mother about,” my dad reasoned. “He had to move to Australia to get away from them for a decade. I genuinely think he’s gay and terrified to come out to Bert. Bert would explode.”</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>“He probably figures it’s easier to wait until after his dad is dead to live openly. Poor kid.”</p>
<p>“I know.” If that’s what was going on with my younger cousin, I’d lived it myself. I’d had more than enough of Bert, growing up.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p>
<p>I’m writing this essay as a form of self-soothing. When I tell stories on a page, when I collect my memories and arrange them into a pattern I find satisfying, and true, and real, it helps pacify the turmoil in my head. Cobwebs gather on much of what I remember, particularly in passages of my mind on which I’ve long shut and locked the door, intending never to return. Giving them an airing does me good.</p>
<p>I’ve been resurrecting my experiences with Bert because he’s dying. My dad called me last month to say Bert had experienced a few strange symptoms that sent him to his doctor, and then a specialist, who diagnosed him with an advanced form of leukemia. Within a day he was rushed to a special treatment center in Texas; after only a few days there, they sent him home with the news that he only had four or five days to live. It was all very abrupt and unexpected.</p>
<p>My dad said Bert called him to say goodbye, and that the man seemed fairly reconciled to the approaching darkness. At least he was dying at home, with hospice workers helping, and his wife and older son by his bedside the entire time. (My younger cousin has declined to be there.) Since then he’s been on painkilling drugs, so not entirely present any longer. The prognosis of four or five days came three weeks ago. He’s been holding on, improbably, ever since.</p>
<p>My aunt’s reacting as anyone might, coping with the death of someone to whom she’s been married for over four decades. She calls my dad and cries. She’s made plans to sell the house in Tennessee and to return to Maryland. She watches her TV shows, helps with the painkillers, and waits for the inevitable. My father is elderly himself, and has always probably expected to go before his little sister and the man she married, and certainly before any of his own children. He provides what support he can, and keeps me informed. It’s sobering to him, though.</p>
<p>And I react by arranging my memories onto a page. The pain Bert caused is long in the past, though the scars ache when I summon the many psychic souvenirs he left. I turned out okay, despite his warnings: my love of music and of language and poetry, my queerness, my stubbornness in refusing to change to please him—those things he despised made me the man I am. </p>
<p>Writing all these words has made me realize how Bert must have made a straw man of me to scare his own children. The aspersions he cast in my direction, the ways in which he sniggered and mocked the girly boy who liked reading instead of camping, who preferred Beethoven to baseball—how that picture he painted of my softness must have terrified his own kids. He must have made such a bugaboo of me. I was the thing they must never emulate, the unholy creature he feared one of his kids might become.</p>
<p>This straw man, however, feels nothing but pity for Bert. So much time wasted, frightening little kids. And to what end? The pansy has prospered, while Bert’s older son wallows in mediocrity and bankruptcy, and the younger is a wounded little boy in his late forties, refusing to see the man who might hate him because of what he is. </p>
<p>It might not be the outcome anyone would have predicted. I’m certain it’s not the outcome anyone, save maybe the cream puff, deserves. </p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-15251785925594082332021-07-23T08:30:00.036-04:002021-07-23T08:30:00.188-04:00Conversations with My Father: Summer Visit Edition<p><i>(I spent last week in Virginia with my dad. If you haven't heard, we drive each other crazy.)</i></p><p><i><br /></i></p>
<p><b>My Dad:</b> What’re you looking at on your phone?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Twitter.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Oh, you’re on the Tweeter? </p>
<p><b>Me</b>: It’s Twitter.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: What do you twit about?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: On <em>Twitter</em>, one <em>tweets</em> about…oh, never mind.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Are you into politics?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: No, I definitely don’t enjoy politics on Twitter.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: I thought the Tweeter was all about politics.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: No, I do gay Twitter.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Gay…? Is that a whole different Tweeter?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: No. Who you choose to follow kind of determines what kind of content you see.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: What’s the gay Tweeter like?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: It’s mostly nude selfies…</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Oh, are you posting a nude selfie?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Um, we’re sitting in a car in your doctor’s office parking lot. Am I nude?</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: I don’t think so?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: You don’t <em>think</em>…? Well, did you see me take a selfie?</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: No?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Okay then. </p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: But you know I do have really, really bad eyesight.</p>
<p><br /></p><p>---</p>
<p><br /></p><p><b>My Dad</b> (upon seeing me wearing a baseball cap): Are you wearing a baseball cap?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Yep.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Do you always wear baseball caps?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Not <em>always</em>, but I wear them pretty often.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Do you play baseball?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: They’re just to cover my head. Especially when my haircut grows out. I’m a lousy baseball player.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: I have a lot of baseball caps.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Yes, I know. They’re littering your office.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Do you want some of my baseball caps?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: GOD no.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Well!</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: I mean, no thank you.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: What’s wrong with my baseball caps?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Well, for one thing, they’re all incredibly ugly.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: <em>Well!</em></p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Okay, let me put it this way. All your baseball caps either are emblazoned with the logos of various freight railroad lines…</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: I will have you know that the railroads of the Eastern Shoreline directly contributed to the growth and development of the…</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: And then the rest of them are gifts from your sister and they all have really obnoxious embroidered cats on them. I’m pretty sure one of them says <em>I LOVES ME KITTY</em>.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: You love cats.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: I do love cats but I do not want to proclaim that love to the world like a crazy cat person.</p>
<p><b>My Dad:</b> So what’s on your hats?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: A couple of days ago I had on a Provincetown cap. Yesterday was our college…</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: What’s on your hat now?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Uh…it’s just a clothing logo.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b> (taking the cap and holding it a centimeter from his eyes): A clothing logo? It looks like…a baseball diamond.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: It’s supposed to be a pig. A...stylized...pig.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: A pig? What manufacturer of clothing has the logo of a pig?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: [<em>mumbles</em>]</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: Come again?</p>
<p><b>Me</b> (louder): NASTY PIG.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: So you won’t tell people you love cats, but you don’t mind telling people you love nasty pigs?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: That’s…pretty accurate, actually.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: And you wear a hat that tells everybody you like pigs.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Yes, I do.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: And then other people who like pigs come up to you and say, ‘Hey, I like pigs too.’</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Depends on which bar I’m in.</p>
<p><b>My Dad</b>: What?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Nothing.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTKmvcd8jWHtoO6Qk33W2Ord8-HJ1iahyphenhyphenCy1SKUHE9FgxLuAQZlafRyRLBWTwp92yOv1L_YTJtRp21g_ZZINA0tgL8-r3B5CtxiQSlKYqcCJED7ZIBkmSS2JHQALJkjC60AXlUaS6Pdg/s618/DTw_tXdUQAEaEi4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTKmvcd8jWHtoO6Qk33W2Ord8-HJ1iahyphenhyphenCy1SKUHE9FgxLuAQZlafRyRLBWTwp92yOv1L_YTJtRp21g_ZZINA0tgL8-r3B5CtxiQSlKYqcCJED7ZIBkmSS2JHQALJkjC60AXlUaS6Pdg/s320/DTw_tXdUQAEaEi4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>---</p><p><br /></p>
<p><em>(On the penultimate day of my visit, my dad had an invitation from his old college roommate to visit, so I drove him to Williamsburg, where we both went to college</em>.)</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Were you seeing anyone in college? You mother and I never heard if you were seeing anyone.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Mostly I just slept around.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Your mother and I were virgins until marriage.</p>
<p><b>Me</b> (snorting): Not I.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: I don’t know whether it was from choice or whether it was just the way things were back then.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Well, ultimately, if you’re happy with how it turned out, it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Who were you sleeping around with? Not that roommate of yours, [<em>he names my sophomore roommate</em>]?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: No. He didn’t know he was gay then.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Not that other roommate of yours, [<em>he names my junior roommate</em>]?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: <em>God</em> no. He was a crazy conservative Christian closet case.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: You knew how to pick them, I guess. Didn’t you have a boyfriend at all?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: I kind of had one my junior year, but what a dick.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: He <em>had</em> a dick? Or he <em>was </em>a dick?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: He had a huge dick. And he definitely was a huge dick.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Why, what did he do to be a dick?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: The biggest thing was that if we were going anywhere together on campus, he would make me walk twenty feet behind him.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Why?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: I guess he just didn’t want thinking people we were together.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: It wasn’t because he thought you were funny looking?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: OUCH.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: I didn’t mean it like <em>that</em>. </p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Jeez, whose side are you on?</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: I mean, maybe he thought it would look funny for two boys to be walking <em>together</em>. Like you said, maybe it was just the way things were back then.</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: Guys walk together all the time. You walked with your old roommate this afternoon.</p>
<p><b>My dad</b>: Why did you stay with him for a year then?</p>
<p><b>Me</b>: You heard me say he had a big dick, right?</p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12316001024335229.post-60502638549479364092020-09-21T08:30:00.062-04:002020-09-21T16:45:18.502-04:00Monday Morning Questions: Public Apology Edition<p><em><b>I can tell by the way you write you’re educated, but all you write about is sex. Is it just me or does it seem like a waste of all your education to have your entire life obsessed with one thing? Seems like you could be doing something better with your time, I don’t know.</b></em></p>
<p>I extend my deepest apologies that you have tracked down and visited a sex blog on the internet to find that it is primarily focused upon . . . sex. </p>
<p>I thank you for bringing this unforgivable oversight to my attention. My highly-honed mission statement here at <em>A Breeder’s Journal</em> is to be absolutely everything to absolutely everyone. Obviously I have failed in this regard.</p>
<p>In order to make amends, I would call to your attention the fact that at my twitter account (<a href="https://twitter.com/meetthebreeder" target="_blank">@meetthebreeder</a>), you will find that I am not only obsessed with sex, but also with the pop music group Steps, the video game Animal Crossing, and with incredibly bad television shows. It is upon Twitter I thus achieve a rich diversity I obviously have failed to garner—much to my eternal regret—with my blog. </p>
<p>Thank you for bringing these oversights to my attention. Rest assured that in the future, I will do everything in my control to tailor the contents of my personal sex blog to the needs of you, the individual who pays absolutely nothing for its content, who never buys me gifts, and who doesn’t contribute to my income in any way. Until that day comes, here’s an image of kittens with laser eyes on pizza slices:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaKPLIRjNrc_Ri9fdNp4iLwjgnx5m5Hiut2pm60x7sLVtqmOfbWgAwe0xhQ98MNAdeF53-Z9kHxZ267p7t3SosF86pt9NztYhcZhRNrGn6R2ntT8oNydYe-_-4jl7Q86BRooHBP399Bg/s1200/6de5077703a5b0b79ffe5f565cd5fbea_6f35ea74ceaea632b13bd1828b80a5c3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="857" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaKPLIRjNrc_Ri9fdNp4iLwjgnx5m5Hiut2pm60x7sLVtqmOfbWgAwe0xhQ98MNAdeF53-Z9kHxZ267p7t3SosF86pt9NztYhcZhRNrGn6R2ntT8oNydYe-_-4jl7Q86BRooHBP399Bg/s320/6de5077703a5b0b79ffe5f565cd5fbea_6f35ea74ceaea632b13bd1828b80a5c3.jpg" /></a></div><p><br /></p>
<p><em><b>I have a gentlemen caller who is trying to get me into a cock cage. It's not as if I had nothing to do with that desire (I sure did) but I also have not decided yet if I just like the idea of being in one (I never have). I'm enjoying every moment of his attention, though it is a bit hard to keep any sort of focus! I probably will buy one on my own and find out the answer - is this something I'd rather just fantasize about?</b></em></p>
<p>I’ve noticed a curious correlation between a huge rise in interest in chastity caging and the current pandemic. Were I still an academic, I’d propose the theory that men are turning to chastity devices as a way to deal with increasing uncertainty during a time of lockdowns—asserting control over a device from which they can be released any time, unlike how most of us captives have felt during this COVID-19 crisis. </p>
<p>If you’re interested in genital restraint, why not give it a try? Unlike auto-erotic asphyxiation, it's a safe kink to explore. </p><p>I’ve held the keys to many a man’s cock cage over the last several decades. Physically held the keys, that is. A guy will buy a chastity device and I will lock him into it. Then I will take the only copies of the keys that can release him, thus leaving his little dick restrained until I return. It’s a kick for both parties. The caged party gets the sexual thrill of being denied and controlled; I get the knowledge that the boy has ceded his own sexual freedom to me, plus the sadistic knowledge that the longer I deny him, the more discomfort and need he experiences.</p>
<p>The longest I’ve held a key was probably for about five years, with a local guy I’d see frequently. No, I didn’t keep the guy caged that entire time—the longest period was for maybe about a month. When in lockdown, he was totally free to suck as many cocks and he wanted and to take as many loads in his hole as he could collect. The only time he would get himself off, however, was when I granted him the favor of unlocking his penis cage myself. I enjoyed that control. He enjoyed my superiority, and loved to hand over his own sexual authority to a more dominant personality.</p>
<p>That relationship may be a more extreme example of chastity and control; not everyone who locks himself into a cock cage hands over the key to someone, much less for years at a time. You may wish to experiment by letting yourself be caged (without an actual lock) for the length of a single sexual session, to see if you like it. That’s enough for most men who engage in the kink. If you choose to explore longer periods of chastity, add a single day at a time, and see how much you can endure.</p>
<p>Consider the type of cage in which you intend to imprison yourself. Solid plastic cages tend to be the cheapest—but how disgusting are they going to be, and how rancid will they become from your own urine and secretions, when you wear them for days at a time? You’re going to want to select something that allows you to keep clean (unless staying dirty is your goal—and if so, no judgement), that can be flushed with extended wear, and that’s going to make you feel sexy and good about yourself, even as you’re denying yourself or being denied your own sexual autonomy. </p>
<p>If I had to pick an ideal cage for enforcing chastity on someone long-term, I’d probably choose a steel cage, like those by <a href="https://www.maturemetal.com" target="_blank">Mature Metal</a> (modeled below by my friend <a href="https://twitter.com/verswolfXXX" target="_blank">@verswolfXXX</a>—I wish I were close enough to hold his key). The cage allows air and water to circulate. The heft of the steel construction means it can’t be easily ignored or forgotten, even as it’s concealed by everyday clothing. From a fetish perspective, it’s everything a guy could ask for.*</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWi0YHYf5IRFSxX9sxXg4EdAQXzI5nXoZkvrhrNvBnyhsS0RukoPEDqIzGvFR7rwZAPv7VcFM9xuU9dU51ymbEe-1hnYHKywzWtyqNQ1_Za0fuBaVSloBUtOZfyATnMQOzRja_VTSzYg/s2048/signal-2020-09-12-192000.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWi0YHYf5IRFSxX9sxXg4EdAQXzI5nXoZkvrhrNvBnyhsS0RukoPEDqIzGvFR7rwZAPv7VcFM9xuU9dU51ymbEe-1hnYHKywzWtyqNQ1_Za0fuBaVSloBUtOZfyATnMQOzRja_VTSzYg/s320/signal-2020-09-12-192000.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>As for actually handing over the key to someone—I don’t recommend beginners take that step immediately. At least, not without keeping a copy of the key for yourself, in case of emergency. Ask yourself the following questions: are you going to be in raptures at the thrill of being caged while the man caging you is towering over you, only to be irritated by the mundane realities when he isn’t? Will the fellow be responsible enough, and considerate enough, about your health and sexual well-being to uncage you on a schedule you can tolerate? Is he going to be around enough to do so? Can you truly rely upon your key holder not to ghost you?</p>
<p>Most dominant-submissive scenarios require mutual trust between parties. Make sure your trust in your partner is rock solid before you make any commitments that might end up with a professional having to take bolt cutters to your most delicate regions.</p><p><i>*Note: I have not received any promotional consideration from Mature Metal for this endorsement. I just like their stuff. @verswolfXXX, on the other hand, owes me his hole for pimping him.</i></p>
<p><em><b><br /></b></em></p><p><em><b>Could you tell us about your best/worst gloryhole experiences?</b></em></p>
<p>I’m finding your question difficult to answer. Not because I’m ancient and my memory is like a sieve just yet—but because I’ve had so many excellent gloryhole experiences, and because I am having a <i>lot</i> of difficult trying to summon up even one truly bad one. (If someone remembers one from my decade plus of this blog, remind me. I’m ancient and my memory is like a sieve.)</p>
<p>Let’s start with the latter. It’s not so much an actual singular experience as an ongoing circumstance. There was a year when I was a doctoral candidate that I would visit a gloryhole in the campus library, in an out-of-the-way men’s room in a far stretch of the library’s periodicals section that few people visited. Chances were that if anyone trekked the long route to that restroom, they were looking for business. </p>
<p>The gloryhole itself had been hacked into the sheet metal partition between the two stalls within. Someone had used pliers to bend back the points of jagged metal so that they wouldn’t stab anyone in the groin or face; someone else had applied electrical tape around the perimeter on both sides to smooth it out and prevent injury. I used to spend hours at a time at that glory hole. Lunch times were particularly busy. I’d sit in the stall further from the two doors leading in, sucking cock after cock. Students, faculty, staff, men from the streets. Some would stride in already hard, unzip, and without prelude shove their meat through the hole. I’d efficiently take care of it, swallow the load, and await the next horny fucker standing impatiently by the sinks for his turn.</p>
<p>I know, it all sounds very good, but after the hole had been open for about a month, a rival arose. Some lump of a person from the local community (in my head, I remember him as the wheelchair-bound Andy that Matt Lucas used to perform on <em>Little Britain</em>, but he probably wasn’t that repulsive) discovered the hole and would attempt to commandeer it at the same times I did. (So basically, whenever the library was open.) </p><p>If I arrived after my rival was already there and I spied him through the hole, I honorably followed the Cocksucker’s Code and would leave. He, however, like a total asswad, would refuse to vacate the other stall when I had arrived first. Cocksucker’s Code says the first cocksucker claims the hole, so I would stubbornly refuse to budge when he'd shuffle in, groan, and heft his enormous backside on the other seat. On those days, no one got sucked. Men would come in, wait a little bit, see that nothing was going on, and then leave for greener pastures.</p>
<p>Sadly, gloryholes are ephemeral things. That particular hole was open only about six months before the school’s custodial staff welded new metal over it on both sides. I’d had it to myself most days for maybe the first third of that time. The last two-thirds were a bitter rivalry to the end between two cocksuckers, with both of us losing out in the end.</p>
<p>Okay, now the <i>best</i> gloryholes. I’m going to divide this into two parts—gloryholes knowingly created for their intended use, and gloryholes in the wild. </p>
<p>The best manufactured gloryholes I would visit were at <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2010/07/toronto-memories-bijou.html" target="_blank">the late and much-lamented Bijou in Toronto</a>, during the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands. The Bijou was essentially a clothes-on bathhouse in the basement of a building in Toronto’s gay district. It featured what was known as the Slurp Ramp, an elevated platform with stairs, partitioned on all sides so that guys who wanted to feed would stand on the platform and slide their meat through the dozen-plus gloryholes around the perimeter. Cocksuckers below would stand on the ground, the holes at mouth level, fighting for the prime cocks. The room was dark save for what light filtered in from a TV playing porn in an adjacent room.</p>
<p>I could easily spend hours at a time at the Slurp Ramp, sucking cock after cock, then climbing the ramp and taking my pick of the eager mouths, then heading back to the floor once more. I’d often drag myself back to my hotel at three in the morning, shirt covered in dried cum despite my best attempts to take every drop, weary and exhausted, but happy. I even once had a cock poke me in the eye so insistently that I lost a contact lens in the dark, there.</p>
<p>Best gloryhole in the wild: probably my first, what was then known as the Business Building (now Harris Hall) at the university where my parents taught, in Richmond, Virginia. <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2010/03/sexual-education-gloryhole.html" target="_blank">I’ve written before of my business in that particular building</a>, so I’ll keep it brief. But let me paint you a picture of public cruising in 1975, when my prepubescent self went exploring while my mom or dad would be teaching a two-hour seminar in the evenings. </p>
<p>The Business Building was a six-story structure with all its men’s rooms stacked atop each other, directly across from the same stairwell. Though there were no facilities on the first floor, the second and third floor boasted identical large U-shaped restrooms with five stalls apiece, basically all of which had gloryholes drilled into the particleboard. Floors four through seven had smaller restrooms with only two stalls apiece. </p>
<p>The action would always start on the second floor. Men would occupy the stalls and fuck and suck through the holes and beneath the partitions; others would stand at the urinals on the side of the U invisible from the door leading in and out, and either fuck and suck there, or watch what was going on in the stalls, or wait for someone to open a stall door for sex. Some men watched the action from the sink area in front of the door; they would take it upon themselves clumsily to impede intruders who weren’t regulars for just enough time it took for the men in the stalls to climb from their knees and back onto the seats. If the second floor restroom was totally occupied—and in the evenings it always was at capacity—men would take their business up to the third floor. If both the large restrooms were too full, the action would spill up the staircase to the fourth floor, to the smaller facilities. And then up to the fifth and sixth, if necessary. In the mid-seventies, it was never unusual to find all five upper stories…every stall, every urinal…occupied with cocksuckers and sodomites and voyeurs, going at it until ten or eleven at night. </p>
<p>And those weren’t the campus’ only cruising spots, either: the campus library there was equally cruisy, as was the Hibbs Building, where in 1976 I finally gave in and let my first stranger fuck me.</p>
<p>By the time I graduated college in 1985 and had started studying for a Master’s degree at that university, the AIDS epidemic had struck fear into everyone. The Business Building tearooms had emptied out; the gloryholes patched over. Occasional shenanigans happened in the second floor restrooms, but I’d have to waste fruitless hours there in the silence for it to happen, and the cruising scene there became no longer worth the investment of time. The spillover from floor to floor that had taken place nightly, for years, was gone forever. Generations after mine would never experience anything like it. (Hell, most of my generation never experienced anything like it.)</p>
<p>I miss the gloryholes of the Business Building. They were where I’d seen my first erect penis. They were where I’d been taken in hand by my elders and shown the ropes of making contact and pleasing anonymous dick. The Business Building restrooms were where I was protected by, and welcomed into, the fraternity of cocksuckers.</p><p><br /></p>
<p><em><b>Have you had many experiences with cum rags? I am a little obsessed. I have always hunted for them— both my brothers, my dad, roommates— pretty much my entire life I’ve tried to track down the rag/cloth/sock/tissue just to smell the musk of it or lick out anything still wet and sticky. Maybe a question for the blog and probably something you’ve got a story about!</b></em></p>
<p>As a kid I was scrupulous about leaving absolutely zero evidence of my masturbation around the house, so I’d shoot my boy loads on my stomach, wipe them up with tissue, and then toss the hardened mass in the toilet to flush the next morning before my parents woke up. Later on, most of my sex was happening in the parks and toilets around the city, so I was usually shooting there (and leaving the evidence either down someone’s throat or spilled on the ground). </p>
<p>I don’t think I actually realized guys kept towels or scraps to mop up their seed until I was in my early twenties, when a Latin guy fucking me would mop up my leaking ass or the semen I’d spewed onto my chest with a terry-cloth towel he kept beneath his bed. When he was done, he’d simply toss it back under. The next time we’d play, it would be harder and crustier than before.</p>
<p>I’ve written before about <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/search/label/darryl" target="_blank">Darryl</a>, a guy I used to play with back in Michigan who had a serious fetish for underwear used as a cum rag. Probably of all my encounters, he had the biggest cum rag fetish of anyone I knew. And of course, for readers of my blog, I’ve made crusty cum rags out of old socks and raffled them off. </p>
<p>Maybe this is a good question for my readers, too—have any of you gentlemen harbored a fetish for cum rags? Whose did you track down and how did you get them?</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em><b>As someone who has done financial domination and has seen finsubs, what do you think are the signs to you that a sub is taking it too far?</b></em></p>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://mrsteed64.blogspot.com/2019/10/reader-questions-findom-edition.html" target="_blank">a long answer last year</a> about my relationship with the fetish known as findom—financial domination, or being a cash master to cash slaves. For those unfamiliar with the scene, or with my relationship to it, I advise taking a moment to review what I said there.</p>
<p>I’m not one of those low-investment cash masters whose day-to-day involvement with his subs extends only as far as posting scowling photos of himself on social media and demanding money for new footwear. Any findom arrangement with me is an investment of my time and energy. I am always devising ways in which my submissives should express their gratitude for my attention in ways including, but not exclusive to, what’s in their wallets or bank accounts. </p>
<p>As a responsible dominant, I don’t allow a submissive to make promises that he’s going to be unable to keep. One of the first assessments I make of a prospective cash slave before accepting him is of how sustainable a commitment to me is going to be. In the flush of sexual excitement, a submissive will promise all kinds of things—but when a man's boner deflates, does he have the actual wherewithal to follow through? I may ask to see bank statements, pay checks. Invasive as that might seem to you, to cash slaves, a good rummaging in their finances can be as erotic and exposing as bending over with bare buttocks. </p>
<p>I keep an eye out for signs of trouble. Late offerings. Missed tributes. Emails that sound stressed or distraught. Lack of response altogether, as if he’s avoiding me. I look for signs that draining a submissive’s wallet is causing trouble in his home life, such as missed bill payments, or an inability to pay essentials. Money arguments with their significant other. If a submissive wants to deny himself luxuries in order to please his cash master, that’s one thing. If he’s genuinely unable to make commitments to his landlord or to utility companies, that’s another, and it’s a sign that the sub should withdraw and reassess his ability to serve a cash master.</p>
<p>In general I think it’s fair to ask the very same questions about cash servitude as it might be about other behaviors that might interfere with everyday life—from something as mild as too much video game playing or too much time on social media, to more serious interferences like too many party favors or too much alcohol. Is it interfering with the person’s family relationships? Is it affecting his work? Is it causing the submissive too much stress? Is it even affecting his health? </p>
<p>If any of these turn out to be the case, I feel it’s the dominant’s duty to step back and ask the submissive to make changes in his life before he’s permitted to resume his tributes.</p>
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<p><em><b>How do I get over my shyness? I wanna suck my friends dick. He’s gay. I’m gay. We have many things in common. Lotta flirting. My underwear are always wet after he leaves. And I kick myself for not just jumping him? I feel like I’m getting signals. How can I tell and how do I tell him I wanna swallow his dick and his load.</b></em></p>
<p>It’s kind of tough to tell when flirting is mere playfulness—a form of social lubricant that keeps the dialogue flowing—and when it’s the real thing. Is it the real thing on your end? Are you flirting back because he’s flirting? Or is there actual intent behind it, on your part?</p>
<p>If the latter and you’re truly trying to hook up with your friend, I’d recommend a little more directness. However, if you’re typically a reticent type, I wouldn’t try leading with “Hey, shove those inches of yours down my throat.” That might be too much for a shy personality to handle, right out of the gate. </p>
<p>However, even a morbidly shy person can speak up and say, when the double entendres fly, something earnest and honest along the lines of, “Hey, am I reading too much into this, or is there something between us you’d maybe like to explore?” Or, “I can’t tell if you’re just being playful with me, or if you’re flirting for real. Can we talk about that for a second?” You’re the one who knows the typical interplay between yourself and your friend. Think up something like those above statements, memorize it, and have it ready to go at an appropriate point.</p>
<p>If your friend says that yes, he’s been wanting to jump your bones too, fan-fucking-tastic. Enjoy. Know, however, that you absolutely run the risk of having your friend say, “Oh shit, nah, I was just jokin’ with you, bro.” Just because you’re both gay doesn’t mean that sex inevitably is in the cards. But you know what? It’s better to ask, get rejected, and to know, than to waste months or years of your life pining after someone who’s just a flirt for the fun of it. </p>
<p>If it does turn out that your friend isn’t into the idea—you’ve still got a friend. Hang onto those. They’re tough to find these days.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Do you have questions for future editions of Monday Morning Questions? Email me at the address on the sidebar, or send me a DM on Twitter.</i></p>Mr. Steedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13439409354795921043noreply@blogger.com4