Topsy Turvy, Chapter Three

As promised, the next installment of a world I want to believe in...

By the end of March, our new arrangement had started to take on the coziness of established routine. A freak late snowstorm the second week of April nearly kept us home that Saturday, but after dithering for half an hour over dessert, we changed into our preferred cruising outfits–Jim’s torn jeans and leather vest, my sweater over a button-down shirt–and headed off.

Surviving a Midwestern winter, only to think you’ve seen the end of it, and then to find it’s returned for one last, frigid, gusting fling–it’s enough to keep even horny men at home with lube and a towel. The bar was emptier than it’d been in bleak mid-winter. We split up inside to cruise on own for a quarter of an hour, then found ourselves side by side, the separation apparently pointless amidst the dearth of likely hookups.

Around the peripheries of the bar, over a soundtrack blaring at a level even more stupidly pumped up than usual, men were trying to talk to each other in twos and threes. Across the room, Kurt leered at us from over a beer bottle upended into his face. His other hand was cupped over the mound of his jeans where his leather chaps exposed the denim of his crotch. Lowering the bottle from his lips, he wiped his mouth with the back of the hand that held it, set it down, and strode over to us.

He smiled and nodded at me, then turned to Jim with a gruff, “Hey there.”

“Hey there, yourself,” Jim growled back.

I couldn’t explain the surge of animosity and resentment that washed over me. Jim’s story of the night Kurt had fucked him hadn’t just gotten me hard the first time I’d heard it the next morning. We’d rehearsed it to each other more than once in subsequent weeks, Jim getting off on the raunchy retelling, and me getting off on watching Jim’s erection swell up over his thigh as he repeated the details of what had happened that night. But this was a new twist: a man back for more, a trick who on the second fuck might become a buddy. But more to the point, who simply presumed it was OK to saunter over and lay his claim when the two of us stood together.

Or maybe I was just jealous. Kurt’s buzzed red hair stood out again the pallor of his freckled white neck; his limpid brown eyes danced above a tightly clipped beard of copper with a first dusting of forty-something snow around his chin. His chest swelled in the black T-shirt under his leather vest. Jim melted into the crook of his arm as soon as Kurt raised it to clinch Jim’s shoulder. I couldn’t top Jim myself. But could I be Kurt’s boy right beside Jim, the one he turned his mitigated attentions to when he’d already pounded my lover into a happy pulp? Could I coax the two of them along, grabbing Kurt’s balls from behind while he plowed into the man I loved? Could I brace Jim’s chest against my arms while Kurt rammed him toward bliss?

There wasn't time to sustain such fantasies for long. Kurt was in no mood to beat around the bush. As he pulled Jim into a rough kiss, the muscles in his neck told me his tongue was well on its way to my boyfriend’s tonsils. Neither one of them showed much sign that my presence was cramping their style. Across the room where Kurt had stood before he made his move, the two friends he’d been with smirked at the three of us.

Kurt and Jim unclinched long enough for Kurt to turn and face me. “Looks like I’m gonna take your boyfriend here home to fuck,” he winked. “He’s pretty hot for it, and I gather it’s OK by you if I borrow his hole.”

I wanted to throw my drink in his face, but I stood stupidly, watching Kurt pull Jim away by the finger he’d hooked into his front pocket, the heel of his hand flattened across the fly of Jim’s worn jeans, his thumb pressed possessively into the denim. Beyond the doorway of the next room, Kurt turned around, pulled Jim’s head roughly forward into another long, greedy kiss, the hand he’d used to haul him by the belt-loop now reaching inside his shirt to knead the loose meat of his chest. Jim melted into him again, his face slumping into Kurt’s neck, his arms clinging around Kurt’s shoulders. Kurt looked up, and our eyes locked. He read my resentment, hesitated, and then his eyes hardened.

Prick, I said to myself, turning on my heel and heading for the door.

The cold air cleared my head a little. The mostly deserted street seemed as good a place as any to shake off the rage that had boiled over at the sight of Jim necking like a teenager. The snow had stopped, and the moon had risen in a sky now full of scudding clouds. Up the block, I could hear the crunch of boots as the two guys who’d left the bar just before me trudged through a drift across the sidewalk. One of them I’d almost connected with myself. Stopping by a grey Honda, he fumbled with his car keys. From down the block in the other direction came a peculiar, soft whine, the spin of wheels without the sound of a gunning motor to accompany it.

At the end of the block, an electric wheelchair rolled halfway up the raked curb at the corner, pushing forward a foot, then sliding back. As it careened forward again, it listed to the left, and two arm braces that had been hooked over the backrest dropped off into the snow. A guy in black jeans, a green hooded sweatshirt, and a leather jacket leaned from the seat, made a swipe at the closer brace, and fell out of the chair into the snow. “Shit,” I heard him mutter softly, but with a clarity that fresh snow on a cold night somehow brings even to faint sounds at a distance.

He didn’t seem hurt, but I sprinted down the block. By the time I’d reached him, he’d already pulled himself up to retrieve the braces.

“I thought you could use a hand, but it looks like you’ve got things under control,” I said as he hooked them over the backrest again and lowered himself into the seat.

“I could still use a push, thanks. This thing’s made for Florida, not the Midwest,” he said. “I saw you coming out of Underdog. Place is busy?”

“Not on a night like this.  Anyway, I’ve had enough for one night.” I boosted him over the curb onto the level pavement and walked along as the chair whirred up the block, skidding a little on a couple of patches of drift that pedestrians hadn’t tamped down. “How far have you come in that thing on a night like this?” I asked.

“I live three blocks over,” he said. “Stupid night to try this. Cabin fever and horniness trumped good sense.” His sidelong grin was a little sheepish. It was a smile you couldn’t help but smile back at.

“I’ll wish you better adventure than I had tonight,” I smirked back. “I’ve never seen you here before,” I added.

“Just moved,” he said as we rolled up to the door. “My first time here. I gather it’s the only game in town.” He looked around. “And ain’t no ramp in sight. You?”

“Here the last year and a half.” I looked at the braces. “Can you make it in with those?”

“No problem. As long as I can find a place to sit.” He reached around for the braces, fitted them over his arms, then pushed himself up to a standing position with an obvious reserve of strength in his upper arms. The heft of his shoulders filled out his jacket. “I’m Paul. Can I buy you a nightcap to thank you for being a good scout?” He had tousled black hair, olive skin and a thick five-o’clock shadow across his jaw.

“Um, it’s complicated,” I said. “I really don’t need to go back in there tonight.”

“I’d just ask you to walk me home and I could offer you a beer there,” he grinned again, “but I’m staying with my sister, and she’s not keen on unannounced gentleman callers late into the night.” This time the grin had a little less sheep and a little more wolf to it. I noticed that inside the jacket, the sweatshirt seemed to be stretched across a chest massive enough to go with the shoulders. “Maybe some other time.” He paused. “Too bad I can’t ask you back,” he added. “I really do give the best blow job most guys I’ve slept with say they’ve ever had.”

I laughed, more than a little jealous of his chutzpah. He laughed too and looked like laughing came easily to him. He nodded to the stairs at the door. “If you could just spot me up those, it’d be a big help.”

What the hell, I thought. “Maybe I could spot you up the stairs to my house instead,” I suggested.

“Well, wonders never cease. A boy who knows good head on wheels when he sees it.” He started to hook the braces over the chair again, then instead held them out to me. “Tricking with me involves chores,” he said.

“I don’t think we can get the chair into my car,” I hesitated.

“It’s OK. I can drive over myself. If you can see me through the snowdrifts back to my place and then pick up your car, I’ll follow you home.” He laid the flat of his hand on my flank, just above my hip, his thumb digging into the hollow of my thigh. “Like a dog in heat.”

From Octavio Paz, "Piedra de Sol" (1957)

all is transformed, all is sacred,
every room is the center of the world,
it's still the first night, and the first day,
the world is born when two people kiss,
a drop of light from transparent juices,
the room cracks half-open like a fruit
or explodes in silence like a star...

***

when I am another, my acts
are more mine when they are the acts
of others, in order to be I must be another,
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don't exist
if I don't exist, the others that give me
total existence, I am not,
there is no I, we are always us,
life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon...

Queer Utopias, Continued: Topsy Turvy, Chapter Two

As promised in last week's post, Chapter Two (of eight) of a story from a world I dream of, believe in, and want...

You don’t need the verbatim transcript of the next rambling hour and a half. I’m not sure why it surprised me that a new hire in clinical psychology would turn out to be a good listener in the sack. I can only chalk it up to the intense lust between us that the channel opened up so fast into something still so raw--despite the years I’ve spent dealing with what my cousin Joe did when I was fourteen. Denial never entered into it. I’ve never suffered misplaced guilt that as I walked into his room he grabbed me from behind, yanked down my pants, and used his varsity-football-weight to pin me in place, barely spitting on himself before he shoved into me. He added more injury to it by muttering over and over as he ploughed in that it was time for me to learn about this and I’d thank him afterwards. Happily, “afterwards” at least came soon–it was over in about three minutes.

After all these years, I remain glad to say that a week later the motherfucker reported for duty and within five months was one of the last American G.I.s to get blown up in Viet Nam. The hardest part of getting the news was seeing Grandpa collapse in grief when all I felt was relief. I wouldn’t go to the funeral with the rest of the family, refused to sign the card my parents sent to my uncle and aunt. Though I know in a different world he might have found another way of dealing with his own desires, and some of what happened should be laid at the doorstep of the narrow, homophobic script we both grew up trapped in. Maybe someday I’ll be able to forgive him. Not yet.

After that, it took me till I was twenty to touch another boy without a tide of panic swelling over me. I lost nearly three years of ungathered rosebuds, in the heady days of the mid-70’s on a liberal campus, when even a lot of the straight guys in the dorm were happy enough to experiment, all of us cocooned far away from what would soon become the urban epicenters of the AIDS crisis. Finally, one spring night after too much cheap wine and three shared joints, it sank in I could pick and choose how I played, and nobody had to go near anybody’s butt. My friend and I were so stoned we couldn’t get past each other’s ears for the first hour. Our dicks were continents it took the rest of the night to explore. When we were sober enough to shoot, about the time a rooster started crowing on the farm over the fence from the library, the mess on the sheets was just the start of it: late the next morning I was still sponging dried splotches off the covers of books on my desk. And I was hooked, it still seems for life, on the pleasures of cock on cock, chest against chest, and the beauty of cum glistening on a man’s skin in the afterglow.

As time went on, it got harder to find men whose idea of hot sex matched mine. By the turn of the ‘80’s, as hippies morphed into clones, so many gay men settled into strict roles that Vanilla nearly disappeared amidst the vogue for Rocky Road and Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl. I branched out. With due diligence, I learned to suck very good cock–as I’ve been told often enough I believe it. But I lost count of the times when a finger going for my backside, or else an invitation into someone else’s, would grind things to a halt. Okay, I thought, so I’m a niche market like everybody else, and went out to buy white hankies for my back pocket that hardly captured my full range in the sack, but at least gave potential partners some idea of what I had in mind, and didn’t. Over twenty years later, here I was again in a place too small for men to self-select into subgroups (as they had in Southern California during the years I taught there), connecting with my dream man five days after I’d driven into town, only to find that Daddy was a bottom with a very hungry hole.

But into the bargain, funny, articulate, emotionally smarter than anybody I’d ever met, most definitely including myself. It was Jim who saved that first night, coaxing my erection back as we sat curled into each other at the end of a long, awkward conversation that stayed honest, if often painfully so, only because he kept prompting me. Jacking both of us off in his broad, slightly calloused hand. Calling me later in the day, making dinner plans for Friday after we’d survived our first week of term. The sex stayed good all that winter because we took so much pleasure in each other’s company, and it seemed worth using a little ingenuity to find common erotic ground. Both of us felt the drive to sustain things: this was no longer a dress rehearsal. The gig was certainly his last job before retirement, and, if you took the longer view, possibly mine too. Come spring, a shared love of gardening sparked our lust for the rambling, down-at-heel Victorian for sale two blocks off campus. At the housewarming, we joked that we’d married each other for custody of the daylilies.

But soon enough came the point when no amount of good will and mutual respect could bury what neither of us had succeeded in rationalizing away. Jim needed to growl provocations at a partner who’d respond by fucking him hard and rough and long. It burgeoned out of a wild core as key to who he is as everything I love about him, the tiger burning bright in his forest, mysteriously illuminating everything around it. We ignored it for months, to the peril of everything we were building. Meanwhile, I could hide in the shadow of that need, my own resentments smouldering like a coal fire from depths I’d never admitted even to myself. By late the next winter, a chasm had opened between our pleasure in each other’s company and the wellsprings of our erotic lives. Only sheer will to bridge it allowed us some intermittent sexual connection.

Valentine’s Day, he came home with a dozen sunburst roses, a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape, and his scary stroke of genius. “What I know is, my life’s richer for you in it. I can’t imagine the alternative. I think you want me around as much as I want you,” he said as he poured the second glass. “Here’s the best I can think of.”

When he’d finished his modest proposal, there seemed to be no reason to wait for Saturday. After dessert, we set out for the bar, figured out how to go our separate ways but still check in with each other. The hard part was conveying our availability when half the men we ran into knew we were an item, clarifying without awkwardness that we were indeed taken but could be had on friendly loan. I found myself chatted up by a sweet, humpy little blond senior who’d mooned over me all through a class in the fall, obviously more riveted by the hang of my trousers than my explanation of the impact of Foucault on the study of Elizabethan literature. When our thighs had settled up comfortably against each other long enough to establish that neither of us was moving on any time soon, I excused myself for a trip to the john.

Crunching across a floor still sticky with beer from a dropped bottle, I peered into the next room till my eyes adjusted and found Jim talking with two guys in bikers’ caps. One of them had a hand cupped over the firm curve of Jim’s ass while he took a swill from his beer. The chain from the guy’s belt loop to the oversized wallet in the left rear pocket of his black jeans could have held a hungry Rotweiler back from a bowl of raw hamburger. His close-cropped ginger hair disappeared into the upturned collar of his leather jacket. Jim beckoned me over with a cock of his head when I hung back. He put an arm over Ass-Grabber’s shoulder before introducing us.

I told him about my own run of good luck. “His final grade is in, and I’m going for it.”

Hesitation in both our faces and a deep breath before he answered, “See you by noon. Play safe.”

“Like I’m the one who’s gonna need to remember that,” I smirked, then bent in for a whisper. “Actually, I’ve met the guy before. His name’s Kurt. He does makeup for the theater department. Really butch makeup. Have fun.”

When Jim clamped his open mouth over mine, our thespian colleague responded by hooking his thumb deeper into the waistband of Jim’s frayed Levi’s.

“Don’t wear him out,” I told my trick-in-law as I took my leave and returned to mentor golden-haired Alcibiades.

Rehearsing the night’s adventures the next day was even more fun than Jim and I had hoped, a confirmation that what we shared was big enough to embrace the rush of freedom we’d allowed each other. I wanted to know what Jim had felt getting well and truly drilled for the first time in over a year and a half; was glad to hear how his trick had pried his straightened legs apart by the ankles to get better purchase as he slammed himself home; about how the arc of Jim’s load had overshot his upended torso onto the pillow behind his head. He wanted the description of my blond lad’s tan lines, still perfect, below the thickly muscled ridges of his hips, from three weeks on the Gulf Coast at Christmas; how after I’d kneaded our cocks together for half an hour he pleaded with me to let him get off.

The talk landed us back in the sack together, drifting off in each other’s soon-sticky embrace till we woke in panic at the end of the afternoon, each of us barely washing up and kicking into fresh trousers in time for dinner with friends.

 

Our hot first experience at turning each other loose continued to sustain over time our conviction we’d found the right groove, even when one of us, or both, sometimes drew a blank at the bar. Or when, as often as not, the fantasy of somebody new turned out to be more satisfying than the reality. I didn’t have to play Greek-shepherds-by-the-brook every week with a new twenty-something; he didn’t have to get reamed out within an inch of his life every seven days. Sometimes it was enough knowing we could if we wanted to, and the opportunity presented itself. However the night played out, the next day’s reunion in our own bed felt like homecoming.

Queer Utopias

I’m very grateful indeed that the world I live in is vastly more accepting of sexual diversity than I dreamt possible when I was struggling to come out forty (good God, yes, forty) years ago--i n the midst of Anita Bryant’s saccharine crusade and the rise of the Moral Majority, in a time raw with the memory of Harvey Milk’s assassination. But I’m still not satisfied. I still dream about other ways we could be in the world. About other worlds we could live in. At key moments, writing erotic fiction about those dreamscapes has helped me go on wanting and believing in a world where queer men are fully at home.

Several utopian novellas have come out of those daydreams. Below you’ll find the opening of one of them. I’ll post a chapter a week of this story until it’s complete, interspersed with other posts.

Topsy Turvy celebrates three queer men who risk inventing new forms of loving connection. It’s also about intergenerational love (relax, everyone’s over 18), about the potential of our sexuality to blast through psychic roadlocks, and about the sexiness of differently abled bodies.

I know that in creating a differently abled central character, Paul, I run the risk of objectifying someone with an embodied experience  very different from mine. I’ll say three things about that. First,  there’s some of me (or wishful thinging about myself) in Paul's character, given my non-standard, degenerative spine and the (so far) mild disability consequent on it--not that most people immediately notice the limitations on what I can do, at least for now. Second, I narrate the story in the voice of another character who feels full respect and growing awareness, as Paul educates him about what he can and can’t do, about help he needs and help he doesn’t. Finally, I’ll gratefully receive feedback and correction about this aspect of the story I’ve spun.

I hope you enjoy.

Topsy Turvy: A Utopian Erotic Fantasy

1

The music is insipid and too loud and the lighting stinks, but Underdog is the best bar in town for our Saturday night tandem cruise–the sort of place you find only in a Midwestern college town, with enough gay guys around to create critical mass, but not enough to split apart into erotic niche markets. Corn-fed blond farmboys who desperately want to get their legs in the air, but you’ll never read the signals if you aren’t a corn-fed blond farmboy yourself; willowy, epicene aspirants to the remake of Brideshead Revisited (one kid, I swear to God, came in every weekend last fall wearing tweed and schlepping a teddy bear); daddies like my Jim; a gaggle of drag queens who regularly arrive en masse as the cast of the opera the music school is currently performing; aging preppies like me; and several extremely hot trans men, one of whom, with quite possibly the most perfectly defined chest in town, and almost certainly the hairiest, is chair of the economics department. It’s a scene that could go horribly awry with rampant bitchiness: everybody knows everybody, at least by face. But somehow, it all holds together with good humor and good will, and the gossip remains if not minimal, then at least mostly benevolent and playful.

It took Jim and me a lot of time and some very rocky steering to work out the arrangement that had brought us here together every weekend and reunited us at home by Sunday noon to compare notes, usually to end up back in the sack together for another hour, getting each other off on common ground while swapping stories of scenes we couldn’t imagine sharing.

Nearly three years ago in 1997, at the September reception for new faculty, we zeroed in on each other across a room awash in academic small talk. Within fifteen minutes we’d sequestered ourselves in the corner. So much for networking with the other new hires. Jim’s thick white hair, his close-cropped beard, his ice-blue eyes, the heft of his shoulders under his shirt, all drew me to him. His tanned, thickly muscled forearms reminded me of my grandfather’s as I sat as a little kid on the arm of his chair, watching him blow smoke rings while the Cincinnati Reds ran the bases on TV.

Before I’d screwed up the nerve to ask him back to my place, he asked me back to his. We tried to be discrete about it, but the matching bulges in my freshly pressed chinos and his faded jeans must have given us away to anyone who glanced our way below waist level.

We’d barely closed his door before we started clawing off each other’s shirts. Ten minutes of necking finally landed us in his bedroom. Racing to kick off our pants, we backed far enough away from each other for me to get a look at the full length of him naked except for his boxers, and my jaw dropped. He could have been my grandfather’s twin, transported forward in time, from his neck to his waist. The same sexy, sinewed forearms that had me riveted back on campus; the same firm curve of long-toned and well-preserved muscle sloping forward from his collarbones, the same broad, taut plane down his stomach to his crotch, the sixty-something softening of his flanks.

Not for want of trying when I was six or seven, I never got much of a look at Grandpa completely naked. So I had free rein to imagine that I was staring at his cock now. Jim’s shaft pointed toward his navel, practically flat against his belly through the fly of his shorts, his circumcision scar deep brown against the ivory skin above and below it. I wanted to trace it with the tip of my tongue. Showing off, he pulled his nuts through the opening to let them hang like two ripe plums in their tightening drawstring bag. They fit perfectly into the palm of my hand, my thumb extended up along one side of his pole and gently brushing toward his frenulum. He groaned and cradled the back of my neck, gathering my face into the tiny, tight point of his nipple, then pulling me down with him as he sank onto the bed.

Clutching the width of my briefs from waistband to leghole in his fist, he hauled them down to the middle of my thighs, flipped me over onto my back, and pushed into my chest with the flat of his other hand, straddling my hips. The head of my cock poked underneath his nuts, stuck in a fold of skin on the backside of his scrotum.  His balls rose and fell as I thrust up and down under him. I reached forward to twiddle the head of his cock. After a couple minutes, spitting into my palm, I pulled myself out from underneath and laid our two shafts parallel in my grip while I went on bucking my hips. Our sacs collided on each forward thrust.  When Jim grabbed my dick and shoved it back under his balls, I felt a momentary surge of unspoken irritation but pushed past the annoyance, as I angled further down between his legs, my cockhead grazing his perineum. An almost burning intensity triggered my flow of precum.

He still held my chest down under the weight of his upper body behind the flat of his right hand. The hint of coercion in it started to stir up some very old anxieties. He shifted, lying down on top of me so that we pressed together groin to shoulders. We were drenched in sweat by now, sliding over each other in the saltiness of it. The pressure of his chest slamming into mine and the heave of our bellies against each other distracted me from being still pronged under his balls, the top of my glans still rubbing his cock root.  He rotated his feet to clamp them around my calves, wrapped both arms tightly around my shoulders, and rolled to flip us over again.

I’m on top of the hottest man within fifty miles, I thought, and I know exactly what I want to do with him. Reaching between us to dislodge my dick again, I spread my legs wide enough to catch his shaft in the furrow between my scrotum and thigh. The feel of my whole midsection undulating against him took me to a place where I can hang at the edge of orgasm almost indefinitely. The radiating energy turned my whole torso into one vast erogenous zone.

As if reading my mind, he reached for a bottle of lube from the drawer of the night table, drizzled it over me, slid his hand to my root and up again. Fuck, you’re perfect, I thought--if I was capable of thinking anything by then. Fixated, relentless, I started to settle back into my rhythm against his abs, when he reached down to run his lube-slicked fingers into the crack of his ass, then hiked his legs up, preparing to sling them over my shoulders. I hadn’t noticed the condom he’d taken from the drawer along with the lube. Now he handed it to me.

Shit, I thought.

“Put it on. I want you to slam the living hell out of me,” he said, closer to a command than a plea.

“I can’t,” I finally spat out.

“I bet you can.” He broke into a grin. “And I promise you can do anything else you want with me afterwards.”

“No. I mean, I really can’t.”

We looked at one another for what seemed like forever, watching the fantasy melt away in each other’s eyes. He lowered his legs, sighed, and laid his cheek on the bulging biceps of his crooked arm.

“You were really into what we were doing,” he said. “I guess I broke the mood.”

“If I could, I’d do it,” I said, starting to go soft as I sat astride him. For all my frustration, I meant it. Our eyes met again. I looked down at his chest–at my grandfather’s chest–and then felt sheer rage with myself for bursting into tears.

“Sshh,” he murmured, half sitting up to put a hand on my shoulder.