Macho Sluts, page 37
Curt was too much of a beginner to realize he was being dismissed in disgrace. He felt giddy with joy, thrilled at his own daring, awed by the men who had taken him to this magical place. He told the cab driver to take him back to the bar. Before he walked in, he took off his shirt, and men bought him drinks all night long to hear the history of his stripes. Just before the bar closed, he was taken in tow by a black master who had an easy smile and a bullwhip. He was off on the long road that might lead him to become the kind of person the spoiler would take an interest in again.
The master shut and locked the door after the boy, then turned to see the man he thought of as a junior S standing in his hallway with a friendly grin on his face and two beers in one big hand. The guy certainly made himself at home. But the aborted scene had left a bad taste in his mouth, and it was not hard for the spoiler to lure him back into the basement and entice him into lecturing on the merits and limitations of each of his treasures.
“Why do you think,” the spoiler said quietly, “some men can take heavy pain and others cannot?”
“Well, the masochists and submissives are not at all the same thing. There are fundamental differences. In my experience, you can’t get to a masochist by humiliating him or making him chew on your boots, although he might pretend he likes it if that’s the price of a good beating. And a submissive is not going to respond to anything as quickly as a hand around his throat. He understands pain only as punishment; he won’t cream in his jeans at the mere thought of you hurting him unless you do it to prove you own him.”
The spoiler nodded. This was his own observation, though he would have had to extrapolate from the difference between sadists and dominants. “Why is there such a difference?” he asked to keep Roger talking.
“Damned if I know. Been doing research on this all my life, and it keeps me so busy, the findings will have to be published posthumously. Submission is a deep-seated psychological need. I don’t mean to discount it. But masochism is inbred, almost biological. Somebody can be trained to be submissive, but if you want a masochist, you have to just go out and hope you find one. It’s how some people are wired. Like some people can’t stand the cold and other people never get cold. It’s not just a matter of wanting or liking pain, I believe it literally feels different to the person who can’t do without it.”
“Which do you think is more common?”
“Oh, submissives, definitely. Of course, you do get some overlap. A sadist has to be a bit of a master, a master has to be a bit of a sadist, or he gets no trade.”
They both laughed. The master held up his empty can. “You ready for another round?” he asked. The spoiler nodded, even though he had not finished the beer in his hand. He didn’t want to say no to anything. It would change the mood, set a bad precedent. “Laundry room is off of the dungeon,” Roger said, lumbering over to a door at the end of the room. “Got a fridge back there. Be back in a second.”
As soon as he returned, the spoiler turned the conversation from speculation and theory to something that had actually happened. Evaluating the scene would give him a cue to Roger’s emotional status. “I don’t feel too good about the way the scene ended,” he lied. “Maybe that kid really wanted to be a slave. If he just wanted to be dominated, I should’ve pushed his limits.”
The master waved a dismissive hand. “You were damned good to that kid, better than he deserved. Nothing wrong with what you gave him. He got exactly what he asked for, with bells on.”
“Maybe. I haven’t had this whip for very long. I have a lot to learn about how to use it.”
“Didn’t look that way to me.”
“Well, somebody like you ought to know. But I wonder if I was hitting him too hard. Do you think you could help me figure it out? I really like this quirt a lot. Makes my arm feel so good. I want to use it again, but I’m afraid the same thing will happen.”
The specter of that brutal length of braid never biting flesh again made the master blanch. “Of course. Of course. But what exactly do you need to know? You don’t have much choice about the amount of force it takes to crack it,” he said. “Once you flick your wrist the speed is standard.”
He was leaning on the pillar. The spoiler put his untasted beer down against the wall and came up to him, carrying the quirt coiled in his right hand. He touched his arm deferentially and said, “You could tell me how you think it feels.”
Oh, why the hell not? It was the kind of thing you would do for a friend who wasn’t sure he wanted to buy something he’d just spotted at The Noose, let him try out a few licks on your thigh, then take it out of his hand and whack his ass with it. “Sure,” the master said, turning around, doffing his jacket and the khaki police shirt underneath it. The spoiler took his clothing, hung it up (there was no shortage of hooks), and returned to run his fingertips across the bare, heavy shoulders. He palpated the skin, gauging its thickness, the ratio of fat to muscle beneath it, the placement of shoulder blades and spine. And, since he did not know if he would be allowed to touch this man intimately again, he tried to memorize every pore and freckle.
“If you could watch in the mirror,” he suggested, “just to check my form.” As soon as the master’s face turned toward the reflecting wall, the spoiler cast the quirt once across his shoulders, a tingling and invigorating strike.
“That’s fine,” the man said, getting a grip on the rings in the pillar. “Do your worst.” If he had known how long he would be clinging to those rings, he would have recoiled from them as though they were white-hot.
The work the spoiler did now made his flagellation of the pawn look like a hatchet job. He handled the quirt as if it were a detachable limb of his own body, hooked directly into his own nervous system, guided by his keen eyesight and even keener need to titillate and hurt. Long, single-tailed, braided whips may be the hardest whip to master. And the spoiler proved that all it took was enough skill to get as much modulation out of them, as much variation in their effect, as a razor strop or a cane.
The first blows were like kisses, kisses for a virgin turning into kisses for a whore, passion kisses, rape kisses, kisses becoming bites. Then the strokes were like a mother cat’s tongue on a squirming kitten’s pelt. It felt like kissing a man whose mustache and beard gradually became rougher and rougher. When the abrasion stopped, the pelting began, like snow, then like rain, then hail. Denting his back. Cosmic rays, flecks of sand, pellets of iron, then whole meteors fell, pocking his skin like the surface of the moon. The weight of the quirt seemed to increase. Roger could have sworn that the knot at the end of the cracker was embedded in his flesh and had to be yanked out before the whip could land again. Then the direction and speed of the blows changed, and instead of penetrating him, they sliced blade-like across his skin. It was like being slapped by a tiger or seized by an eagle.
It had been so long! The master screwed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead hard against the beam, trying to halt a flood of regret and bitterness. His body shuddered with joy. He prayed that the stranger’s arm would not wear out too soon.
How many years ago had he given up? It had been hard to accept the fact that he would never meet a sadist who would greet his masochism with joy, as the stuff of which great art is made. So he had moved to a new city to make it easier to complete his own work of art, creating a living, breathing replica of the man he had always hungered to please, whose hands and eyes he could envision perfectly. Someone (even if it could not be him) should pass under those deft hands, be stripped and dissected by those merciless eyes.
Then he had discovered, to his chagrin, that the true masochist is nearly as rare as the genuine sadist. He was often as alone and disappointed standing behind the whipping post as he had been when he hugged it to his breast and waited for the perfect blow that never came.
But these blows were like balm. Physical pain was so much easier to bear than ennui and self-hatred. When the man behind him stopped, he could not turn around because he was ashamed of his own excitement and did not want anyone else to see it. His cock was up, flushed and eager, the head so sensitive he almost came from feeling it rub against the fly-seam of his jeans. The thought of how obvious his erection was only made it come back against his belly in a full brace, instead of merely standing at rigid attention.
“Stop,” he said faintly, dishonestly, as if the whipping had not stopped already.
“But we aren’t finished yet,” the spoiler said, taking control in his sweetest, softest, most reasonable voice. ‘And I never will be,’ he thought, as the master kept his broad shoulders level, flexed in front of him, both booted feet flat on the floor. There was no evasion in that body, only attentiveness, receptivity. ‘I love what you are, beautiful and frustrated, a stallion in a herd of geldings, a sexual athlete surrounded by men too spoiled and lazy to pull their own puds, the last Roman gladiator in a world of puling Christians. I will never break you down or damage you. How could I, when this is exactly what you want and need more than food or sleep or your next deep breath?’
He was there for hours. During the night, he changed hands, implements, the position of the subject. But by the time he was done, too tired to lift his hand to wipe the sweat from his face, they both knew that the master’s expertise at administering pain came from a very deep well of need for it. And the master knew he had to go back to that well as often as possible if he wanted to keep his expertise or just his sanity. We usually don’t know how much we need something until it’s possible to get it.
The spoiler helped the master up to his bedroom and applied ice to his welted back. He wanted to stay but did not know if he could sleep there, show his face in the morning, and still be forgiven. He said off-handedly, “I wasn’t about to let that kid come in my mouth, rubber or no rubber. But I don’t feel that way about you.”
No human being is ever too exhausted to feel curiosity. “Why?”
“Because you deserve it,” he said simply.
“Blow jobs bore me limp,” the crusty voice said bluntly. The master was lying on his side. The spoiler slid into bed behind him. He had already located a bottle of lotion on the night table and pumped himself a handful. Now he twirled his hand around the head of his dick, soothed the rest of the cream up the shaft, and eased his hard-on between the master’s lightly furred thighs. The leg muscles tightened, and the hard buttocks thrust back at him. He ran his fingers over the bruised shoulders and the master grabbed his own cock and began to pump it.
“You want me to fuck you?” the spoiler asked. But he ran his hands over the bruises before he could get an answer, and the master bucked. By reflex, he shoved his hips back into him. It felt good to hump the crack of Roger’s ass, the cleft between his thighs, to nose the head of his dick into the loose ball-bag that was being jostled up and down by the master’s frantic hand. This was no time to go looking for a condom, so the spoiler continued to pet and press upon the fresh welts and thrust between the close-held thighs until both of them came.
“That would have felt even hotter if my ass had been marked up,” the master rumbled.
“True.” The spoiler was falling asleep.
“I have some things down there that have never been used.”
“They will be, then. Tomorrow.” He took the other man in his arms, made himself a pillow on his near pectoral, and slept.
It actually took more than one tomorrow.
This was the spoiler’s avocation and the reason he chose to live like a retired spy or prince in exile. It had nothing to do with revenge or competition. The men he pursued had committed no crime that should be punished. In his eyes, they were clearly his betters, or he would not have wanted them. Since he had no interest in bottoms, he did not even think of himself as a top. He was more like a trusted servant who would think nothing of knocking his drowning and struggling master unconscious so he could be paddled to safety. Or he was like a radio telescope, one of those huge dishes so sensitive they can hear the stars frying in the vacuum of deep space. Instead, he heard the unvoiced cries for rescue from the yoke of obligation, the exaggerated expectations of others, of minds too weary to concoct another scene and hands too discouraged to show off their unusual skills.
He had to work hard, very hard, to get away with this and succeed at it. But it was worth it to him because he went after the only men in the city who could tell him whether he was a virtuoso or a hack. He once spent almost six months studying Japanese bondage pornography, which had taken twice that long to obtain, practicing intricate knots, experimenting with different types of rope, until he could take a man he thought of as his model (who never realized he was not the star of the show) to the bar with him, trussed in a harness that was a sphinx’s riddle, a sonnet to restraint. If he could, the spoiler would have apprenticed himself to the Yakuza. All this to fascinate a man he had had his eye on for two years, a man who was an expert with rope, to make it safe for the two of them to speak to one another and create a pretext for getting together sometime later in the week.
Then there was that bike run—two hundred mostly drunk and lust-crazed men rutting with each other. He didn’t like drugging people, but that time he had slipped a discreet tab of acid into his idol’s beer, then led him through the woods to a clearing (prepared that morning) where a leather sling hung from the strongest branches of an old oak tree.
Each of his heroes required a different form of worship. Over the years, he had learned how to do tattooing. He had pierced his own tits, perineum, and cock-head to teach himself how to run needles through the body. He had spent weeks constructing an apparatus that could hang a man without killing him, and tested it on himself. He collected, piece by piece, a complete and authentic uniform for an officer of a disbanded and disgraced army that was nevertheless the ultimate fetish of a particularly handsome and worn-out man. The trunk of his car was specially altered so a victim could be kept bound securely there for hours without smothering. A friend of his who owned a ranch kept one stall vacant for his use, equipped with a saddle and bridle tailored for a human beast of burden. He had a trunk full of diving gear, pieces of firemen’s garb, latex garments imported from England and Denmark. He had learned enough kendo to enter a local contest and lose to the appropriate party. Under his bathroom sink, he kept the largest collection of catheters and enema nozzles to be found outside a medical museum. One pursuit had required him to give up coffee and asparagus for months and subsist for three days on nothing but fresh strawberries. Somewhere, in one of his closets, there was even a suitcase containing a makeup kit, a pair of false eyelashes and another pair of equally false tits, a red Spandex minidress, crotchless fishnet hose, a blonde wig, and seven-inch patent leather spike heels. There was nothing, nothing he would not try to learn or concoct or arrange if it would snare a topman, master, sadist, or dominant for a few precious hours.
It never occurred to him to wonder what impact he had on the lives of the men he ministered to. He assumed that they continued on exactly as they were before they met him. Why shouldn’t they? Their reputations were not besmirched or tarnished—he never told anyone about his adventures since he knew no one else would understand them. He was available if they wanted him again, so there was no need for them to submit to someone who was less discreet or kind. Why would they feel reduced or humiliated? If he had thought about it, he would have assumed they felt flattered, since he himself felt only gratitude and admiration for them.
He was obsessed, and that is not the best frame of mind for tracking one’s impact on the world. He paid no attention at all to his backwash. In other words, he wasn’t watching his ass.
The fact that he did not gossip did not mean that others held their tongues. When Curt arrived at the leather bar spouting tales of his adventure, there were those who where unkind enough to ask why the two lucky topmen had not come with him, and speculate about what had gone on while they were alone together. When the spoiler stood in the middle of the grove and plunged his gloved arm up to the elbow in distended ass-lips and Crisco, he was so pleased by the idyllic setting that it did not occur to him that other people were sexing in the woods during the run. Some of them heard the groans and curses of the man he was fucking until the sling made the oak tree creak and sway. Two of those who were interrupted by this racket went to see what all the fuss was about, and what they saw made a story that traveled fast and far.
The spoiler was not always kind in the pursuit of his obsession. He often did the emotional equivalent of picking people up and moving them out of his way as if he were passing the ketchup to a stranger in a diner. The erstwhile tops and persistent bottoms he brushed aside were not pleased to be treated like so much flotsam, and some of them had a taste for revenge. He had made enough enemies to acquire his nickname, and not enough friends to hear what it was.
He also did not think that some of his targets might become, in turn, obsessed with him—too obsessed to risk seeing him again. He never knew that the bondage expert began to tie himself up every morning, putting himself in a complex wire harness that he wore under his business suit. This excited him so much that he repeatedly had to leave his desk to masturbate. Lunch hours often led him into the thickest shrubbery of the cruisy part of the park. Sometimes he did not come back to work. The spoiler could not comfort him when he lost his job, because he did not know about it, but the other man could blame him for it, and did.
We are raised to think that everything in the world occurs naturally as a set of paired opposites. It is almost impossible for us to know what anything is if we cannot locate and define its counterpart. The spoiler was an anomaly. The same system that created him found that he threatened its premises. And that system was not known for dealing with irritating matters by making pearls out of it.
There are many reasons why an individual selects one particular role. A man who knows that his need to bottom is much stronger than his need to top, and who persists in presenting himself as a bottom to other people even if he does not get played as often as he would like, may be more stable than a top with a full dance card. A desire that a bottom can take in his stride may horrify a top beyond endurance. The sad truth is that many tops (even good ones) are made out of failed bottoms. To such a man, there is no point in topping if it does not somehow make him a better person than the meat-puppet he is working over. There is a dignity in self-control, there is glory in ruling others, but there is none in being a bottom who simply can’t get laid.
