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.
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