Babyface: Part 2

 (This entry is a continuation of Babyface: Part 1.)

Autumn 1985

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?”

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.

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?”

“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?”

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.”

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.”

It takes a liberal handful of slick reassurances to urge my friend back to his feet. “Only if you’re sure…”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The bells clank as I enter. Jim still sits behind the counter, looking at Style Weekly. “Oh.” He gives me only the briefest of glances and pulls up the sleeves of his cardigan. “Forget something, did you?”

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.

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.

With a horrible certainty, I realize something’s happened to Earl.

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.

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.

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 too 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Jim looks older. Jim looks old, and he should be only, what? In his mid-thirties?

Perhaps sensing my judgment, he narrows his eyes and snaps, “The fuck you looking at?”

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.”

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?”

I’d gone away to school, I wanted to point out. I keep my mouth shut throughout his provocations.

“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 long I’d been with him?”

He’s glaring at me, but I’m not the enemy any longer. “A long time.”

“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 them. That’s why he was up here. What did they ever do for him? I didn’t even have 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 my checkbook with my name on it.”

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.

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.

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.

Earl wouldn’t be the first of my lovers to die from the virus. That would have been David, the red-headed junior who’d wooed me as a freshman in college, 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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

Over the fallen we march onward. Though to what fresh battle, no one yet knows.

Poison Pen

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.

I know you and everyone else think you’re hot shit (LOL), reads this one. I haven’t even had my breakfast yet, and already my stomach hurts. 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!!

I don’t recommend it as a start to your productive day.

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. Little monkey legs, 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.

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.

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.”

“Yes sir.” He nods, then bites his lip. “I want it real bad. But it’s so big.”

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?”

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?”

“You may.”

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.

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.

But I don’t protest. I just want this boy to have the time of his life.

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.

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.

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?”

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?”

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.

“Go slow,” I tell him.

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 big.”

“And you love it,” I say. I’m giving him permission to love the hurt.

He nods, panting. “I love it. Fuck. You are so hot. Thank you.”

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 me. 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. 

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

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.

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.

“You want me to stay?”

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.

To this kid, I'm hot shit. That's all I need, for now.

Pool Boy

I’m horny and I’m angry. I don’t like it.

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.

I don’t know what it is that’s making me so crazy. I’ve had two nights of a stranger rimming me relentlessly in my hotel room, followed by an afternoon plowing one of the hottest muscle twinks 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.

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.

On this trip, he’s hit me up on Sniffies, so that’s the site I use to shoot him a message. I’m in my hotel room for a couple of hours. Want to come by?

I only have to wait a couple of minutes for his reply. I sure do. I’m showered and free now if you want me to come.

I want you to come, I tell him.

He asks for the address. I send it. Leaving now. I’ll be there in 15, he assures. Can’t wait.

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. Sorry. I’m meeting someone in a few. Maybe later?

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.

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.

Motherfucker.

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.

What kind of fuckery is this?

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. Okay. I get the message that you’re not coming over. A pity, since I’ve wanted to meet you for a while now.

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.

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.

I’ve nearly spooned out the last of the corn pudding when I get a message on the latter. Hi Sir. 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. Rudolph, it says.

All right. I like a little bit of self-deprecating humor.

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.

Hey, I think this trio of photos deserves as reply. Nice pics, son.

I bet you have a big cock, Sir. 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. Fuck yeah. I knew it, dad. Are you looking?

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.

Yeah, I reply. I’m looking.

Already I’m thinking of the kid as Rudolph, though I know it was a joke and unlikely to be his name. My car’s in the shop, he tells me. Can you come get me?

You know someplace we can go? 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. How soon can you be ready? Because if it’s going to be an hour or more, I’m going to have to pass.

Now. Come get me, Sir. I want you inside me.

Now is good. I like now.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

“Yeah.” His eyes flicker from mine to the floor.

“Yes, Sir,” I correct.

“Yes, Sir.”

“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.

I watch as he licks his lips. “Yes, Sir. Is that bad?”

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.

“Yes, Sir.”

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.”

“Yes, Sir.”

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?”

“A long time.” His response is breathy, excited.

“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?”

“Yes, Sir. I mean, no, Sir.” He barely aspirates the confession.

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.”

“Yeah,” he breathes.

“Yes, Sir.”

“Yes, Sir.” As my hands move over his body, his cock, his lightly hairy balls, he shivers. “Real bad things.”

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?”

“Yes, Sir. They make me suck their cocks.” His eyes open, seeking permission. I nod, giving it.

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.

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.

“Cocksucker,” I spit out, letting the word swing, pendulum-like, somewhere between praise and epithet.

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.”

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.

“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.”

“Yeth Thir,” he attempts to say, but I don’t let him off my dick. Not yet.

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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, This dude looks like the kind of man who fucks little faggots like me, and shoved a bottle’s worth of lube up your shitter before I picked you up, huh?”

“Please fuck me,” he begs.

“Please fuck me, Sir.”

“Please fuck me, Sir.”

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.

“Fuck me, Sir. Please fuck me. Sir, please fuck me.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

“Oh, I’m fuckin’ it, all right,” I snarl.

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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—“

“Shut up, cocksucker,” I growl, as I pin him against the exposed wood. “Daddy’s turn.”

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.

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.

Hey, says the message. Still looking? Lost track of time when my mom called.

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 Hey, I’m being delayed, but I’m still intending to be there when I can. Although over the course of an hour he was able to, you know, check out my profile on three other apps.

Right. No, I’m not buying it. Once again I feel that tide of anger rising.

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.

What Dads Are For

You are exceptionally handsome, Sir.

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.

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.

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. Thank you, I text back to the boy who’s caught my attention. But look who’s talking.

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.

I feel unworthy.

You wouldn’t happen to be looking this afternoon, would you, Sir?

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. I definitely could be.

Would you like to trade some pics, Sir?

His insistent use of the capital-S Sir 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. You are beautiful, son, I tell him.

What are you into, dad?

Eating and breeding hole, making out, oral, and open to much more. You?

Bottom here. Into kissing, oral, poppers, bondage, choking, kissing, kink, role play, voyeurism, exhibitionism, video taping, bb.

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.

I need that. Will you please breed me, Sir? Where are you staying?

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.

I can’t wait, Sir. It’s been over a week since I took cum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hear a knock at the door.

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.

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?”

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

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?”

“Yes, Sir,” he replies. His eyes are wet with adoration as he looks over his shoulder at me. “Anything you need.”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

He’s eager now, turned on by the scenario. “Yes, Sir.”

“Good boy,” I tell him.

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.

“You can do this,” I encourage him. “Show dad what a good boy you are.”

“Yes sir.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love it,” he gasps, his voice box vibrating between my palms.

“Say it.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

“That depends on if you want more loads from dad,” I warn.

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?”

“I can.” I grind my cock into his prostate, feeling the button press back against the head.

The sensation makes him close his eyes. “Oh shit,” he says. The words are urgent. “I’m shooting. Sorry, dad. I’m shooting!”

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.

“Sorry,” he pants, genuinely mournful. “I wanted to hold out. But you just made my ass feel so fucking amazing.”

“That’s what dads are for,” I say, as I enfold the boy in my arms and hold him close.

Maybe I haven’t lost my touch, after all.

Redneck Rim Artist

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.

I’m naked, legs spread, pillow clutched to my chest. And I’m waiting for a stranger to join me.

He’d messaged me on the apps only twenty minutes before. I’m a lil horny. U?

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. Me too, I’d told him.

Looking for some ass to eat, 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. Really need to munch a fuzzy hole for a long long time.

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, Haven’t been eaten out in a real long time.

Let’s change that right now, he’d texted.

I’d immediately clicked the location button at the screen’s bottom, to let him know where I was.

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.

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’.”

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.”

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

“Fuck yes, I do,” I manage to gasp. “I like it…sir.”

He lets out a feral growl. “Callin’ me sir is gonna make me get aggressive,” he warns.

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...sir,” I manage to say, as I look over my shoulder.

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 want 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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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: Back that ass up, daddy, or C’mon, faggot. Open up that pucker for me.

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…”

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 real rim job I’m gonna give ya.” With a shove, he pushes me back into the pillows. "Now hush."

I am helpless to resist.

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. Two hours. 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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

I grunt and nod.

When I look up for his response, he riffles fingers across my short hair. “Just like that. C’mon. Fuck!”

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.

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.”

“Thank you,” I say. Then I add, for his benefit, “Sir.”

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.

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.

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. Sorry for tuckering out last night, it reads. 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.

My short bark of laughter attracts attention from the waiting room’s other occupants. Beneath my mask, I clear my throat and compose myself. I’d like that a lot. I’m yours tonight, sir.

What kind of underwear do you wear? he asks.

Trunks, I tell him.

He sends me a sad-faced emoji. I really love daddy in briefs, follows. 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.

I manage to catch the sharp inhalation his words arouse, before anyone around me can hear. Understood, sir, my fingers stab out on the screen. 

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.

Last night was the work of a tuckered-out man? What the fuck are his usual rim jobs like, then?

I’m itching to find out.

Babyface: Part 1

Autumn 1985

Babyface, 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?”

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.

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.

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.

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 old are you?” they’d exclaim during break, or after class.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

A decade ago, catching something wasn’t a death sentence.

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.

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.

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 Honcho or Inches? 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.

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.

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.

“Like what?”

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?”

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.

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 I, Claudja, which he separated from my stack of trade-ins and pushed back over the counter at me with a firm, nuh-uh.

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, Danseparc. 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 Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington, 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.

“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?”

“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.

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, gratis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Continued in Babyface: Part 2.)