Best Gay Erotica 2010, page 12
The rain had stopped by the time we staggered into the kitchen. Will and I had dressed in our thongs again, while the other guys had slipped into their boxers. Reggie prepared gargantuan mugs of hot cocoa to which he added generous dollops of Bols crème de cacao and crème de menthe, and he set out a platter of colossal oatmeal cookies swollen with hazelnuts, black walnuts, and pecans, and dried apples, cherries, dates, raisins, and pineapple. “Hugh and I baked these earlier,” he said. “Before we knew that anybody was coming.”
We laughed at the pun, which seemed clever while we were all delirious from the incredible sex. We ate cookies and listened to the eaves dripping. Lured by the odors and our voices, Mustard and Ketchup ventured from under the bed. I slipped them a few bites though Reggie warned us not to gratify the beggars. I noticed that he broke his own rule.
While we were sipping from our mugs, Mustard and Ketchup bellowed a warning and rushed to the door. My heart leaped into my throat, and Will turned pale. Parting the curtains, I saw four pickup trucks stopping in front of the cabin. “Is there a back door?” I gasped. I had been having so much fun that I had completely forgotten about the indefatigable Brother Skeet and his flock.
“I’ve been expecting those boys,” Reggie said.
“Persistent bastards,” Hugh mused. “Probably hid out in their vehicles during the rain and then charged up this way. We’d better get changed.”
“What?” I gasped.
Reggie regarded Will and me with a steely gaze. “Remember when I asked you to trust us?”
“Yeah,” I gulped, hardly able to believe that Reggie and Hugh would hand us over to Brother Skeet.
“This is it,” Reggie said. “I need you boys to go out there and stall Skeet and his crew while Hugh and I get dressed.”
Will and I exchanged a glance. After we had sucked cock together, we trusted Hugh and Reggie, so I pulled the door open, and Will and I stepped forth into the glare of the searchlights on the pickup trucks. Horns blew with malevolent glee as the preacher and his men fixed their lights upon our nearly naked bodies, our dignity preserved only by our minuscule swimwear.
“Who-ee, we got the tootin’ fruits now, Brother Skeet,” Frank Clink shouted, and his brethren echoed his malice.
“It’s ’bout time. Get them thongs off ’em and bend ’em over the back of the truck,” Brother Skeet shouted. “And see if there’s more fairy boys inside that cabin. Boys, it’s a good night for a bonfire.”
“We’re gonna burn ’em at the stake?”
“Damn straight. Give ’em a taste of Hell ’fore they get there. Help ol’ Satan recognize his own.”
We had to stall them for a few more seconds. I couldn’t think of anything, but Will raised his arms, pointed at Brother Skeet, and intoned, “I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.”
Brother Skeet’s flock stopped, gape mouthed, uncertain, looking to their leader for guidance. Jack Skeet looked like he was about to shit, and even I had never realized that Will could command such a dramatic presence, much less quote verbatim from the Book of Job. After a befuddled silence, Brother Skeet shook himself and screeched, “Lay hold of them faggots and search the cabin.”
Rough hands seized Will and me, while two of the crew charged the cabin door. They had reckoned without the dogs, however. Mustard and Ketchup jumped against the luckless simpletons and knocked them backward down the porch steps. Behind the dogs came two men wearing state police uniforms. Reggie was holding his service pistol in one hand and a collection of handcuffs in the other. Hugh was brandishing a shotgun.
In less than a minute, Brother Skeet and his bunch were the ones bent over their pickup trucks while the two officers frisked and cuffed them. Will and I smiled beatifically as Reggie read the vigilantes their rights and placed them under arrest for attempted murder, attempted rape, attempted sodomy, possession of illegal weapons, possession of illegal substances, attempted kidnapping, assault, and assorted hate crimes. We laughed out loud when Reggie assured Brother Skeet that he would be spending the night in a secluded cell with the meanest, toughest butt fucker in the county jail.
A van from the jail arrived immediately, for it turned out that Hugh had alerted the sheriff before he ever climbed into the shower with us. Deputies had been watching the road, and when Brother Skeet and company moved in on the cabin, the law swooped down upon them.
After we watched the van carry Brother Skeet and his men off to jail, Hugh and Reggie drove Will and me back to our spot. Our bicycles were wet but undamaged, but our shorts, T-shirts, blanket, and picnic basket were soaked. Two reddish-brown muskrats were raiding the bags of soggy chips and the remains of our sandwiches. Still, the air had a clean smell. Wild geraniums had opened with rose and purple blossoms, and the rain had sprouted new growth on the quail plants, the winecup clarkia, and the naked bloomrape. Above our heads, a hunting owl hooted.
Will and I wrung out our cutoffs as best we could and slipped them over our thongs. Reggie patted my ass as it disappeared into the wet denim. “Guess you don’t want to sneak into your dorm in a pink thong.”
We loaded our bicycles and other stuff into our new chums’ SUV. As we drove up the path, we saw a mule deer with grayish fur and new antlers watching us from the willows. Farther on, a bobcat, identifiable by his short tail, darted across our path.
“Glad we didn’t disturb him while we were crawling through the rushes,” Will quipped.
“Better a bobcat than Jack Skeet,” Hugh commented.
Hugh and Reggie were reluctant to take credit for the arrest, and I wondered whether it was safe to be “out” if you were a part of the state police. The next morning, the media credited Will and me with capturing the gang. The Lithia Ledger headlined COLLEGE STUDENTS CAPTURE VIGILANTE KILLERS. Suddenly, we were heroes. That afternoon we received a call inviting us to a special celebration at the White House where the president would honor our bravery in a Rose Garden ceremony. We were scheduled for pick up by Air Force One for a ride to Washington with President Bush.
The next day, however, Will answered the phone, listened with an increasingly bothered expression, and announced, “It’s all off. The White House. The Rose Garden. Air Force One. They refused to give a reason.”
Grinning, I pointed to the campus newspaper’s headline, printed just an hour earlier. The bold type read GAY STUDENTS TRAP CHRISTIAN HOMOPHOBE RAPE SQUAD. It was a truth the White House couldn’t swallow.
The case didn’t come to trial until August, after Brother Skeet’s church had gone bankrupt paying for his defense. Will and I testified, as did Reggie and Hugh. Brother Skeet’s lawyer cross-examined us vigorously to no effect. In the end, the jury found the whole bunch guilty, and Judge Cross sentenced each one to twenty-five-to-life. Judge Cross even assured Brother Skeet that he would gladly sentence him to lethal injection if evidence surfaced of his other rapes and murders.
Will and I became the two most famous students at Lithia College, but our new fame didn’t make us forget our friends. Every weekend we bicycled along the slough to the Foggy Fenland. Sometimes we met Reggie and Hugh at our favorite spot, and other times we went directly to the cabin where Mustard, Ketchup, and their owners greeted us with joy.
8 BEAUTIFUL BOYS 8: THE FOLLIES REVISITED
Jamie Freeman
The room is dark when I first enter it.
It is familiar even though it has been fifteen years since I first came here, and perhaps a decade since my last visit. This place will never change. The Follies will live on, year after year, each season featuring a new crop of twinks treading the boards with reckless abandon. Each evening the more seasoned members of the company will drink vending machine coffee and read newspapers in the lobby between scenes.
I played here at the Follies most Saturdays while I was enrolled in an expensive university in Northwest D.C., learning to become a foreign service officer. I ducked my straight friends and became a regular at the matinees. The theater became a playground, or perhaps more accurately, a laboratory for my sexual awakening, providing me an unending stream of unattached bodies with which to define the stats for my personal ad.
It was here that I got the first blow job of my adult life, in one of the filthy theater seats only a few feet from where I am standing now. I lean with my back against the wall and look down at them, thinking that perhaps in this seat, or that one in the next row up, I once sat in my Levi’s and black UCLA sweatshirt, trembling with fear as a man settled into the seat next to me. I remember the feel of his hand on my knee, then my thigh, then his fingers unzipping my pants. He was black with a handsome profile and a sweet smell, like stewed cinnamon or nutmeg. I remember his hands descending into my pants, my hips moving to allow him to pull them down and my dick out. I remember his hand coaxing me to erection and then, unexpectedly, expectedly, his soft, warm mouth descending on me, that feeling of softness and envelopment. His hand stroked me and his mouth caressed me with practiced skill. I was transported back to childhood experiments, backyard antics, then yanked forward into the sight of the writhing professionals fucking huge on the giant screen in front of me, into the depths of my crotch, into the deep throat of this kneeling man, into a world beyond childhood. And I came, and he sucked and sucked, as if he were afraid of losing even one drop. And it was over. I lay back exhausted. He thanked me quietly and left in search of another cock. I tucked myself back in, regained my strength and my composure, and eventually made my way to the exit, not realizing until I was on the Metro, staring distractedly at a beautiful blond boy in khakis and a white oxford, that I had a streak of dried, glistening come on the front of my sweatshirt.
Now, as I let my eyes adjust, the well-remembered smell of poppers and sweat and rot and sex assaults my senses. The room is warm today, almost humid. The spectators are a mix of older men dressed in business drag, postclones in the jeans and T-shirt combo, Capitol Hill wonks in immaculate white oxfords and khakis, and twinks in shorts and tight T-shirts.
As I stand here in the semidarkness, I feel a vague sense of physical connection to the shabby glory of the place. I look up at the peeling wallpaper and dark fittings and I know that, although I will forget the men, I will not forget the Follies. This place has a solidity in my memory that assures it of immortality. The feel of the Follies is one that I can summon at will, like a familiar physical sensation, the feel of my fingers curled around the knob of my childhood bedroom door or the feel of a favorite faded sweatshirt against my arm.
It has changed over the years, the old film projector removed, the back stairs and projection room converted into a warren of tiny cubicles and an upstairs room with barred windows. Men walk back and forth through the labyrinth, restless, caged, emerging on the far side of the room, walking down the far aisle and disappearing into a long hallway that runs, if it too has not changed, behind the screen.
I remember a man giving me a blow job back in that hallway of cubicles, and I try to recall anything about him. I have the sense that he was older than me, a little overweight, perhaps. I recall white cotton as if he were wearing a white oxford, though there is no clarity to the memory. This man who sucked me off so eagerly was just one in a long string of men on their knees, as anonymous as blades of grass in the lawn of the house where I lived at the time. And to him, I suspect that I too was merely one in an endless parade of boys dispensing their charms onto the soft expanse of his tongue, another pair of rounded buttocks to be groped, another choking sensation to erase the dull, dry residue of career, family, debt, and home-ownership. We shared a moment that afternoon, reading from the same script for a while, coming together for our separate purposes and, although I now have only the vaguest recollections of the scene, it seemed important at the time, a pivotal moment. There was something about it I thought I would remember always, but it is gone, washed away in a sea of other blow jobs, other bit players.
Today, nearly fifteen years later, I look around the room. There are so many older men, many long past the age of retirement. I make my way through a group of men who stand around the entrance to the passage at the back of the room, mock nonchalance cracking as I pass between them.
Their heads follow me: fresh meat.
I glance into the cubicles, climb steep wooden steps to the old projection room, and watch disinterestedly for a moment as a fat man gives a thin older man a blow job, the flickering movie barely visible through the barred window above the kneeling man’s head.
I stumble down the stairs in the semidarkness and make my way across to the far side of the theater, nothing piquing my interest. When I emerge back into the theater and cross the back aisle in the direction of the door that I came in, there is a disturbance behind me.
I move aside and a cute blond man in matching yellow soccer shirt and shorts passes by me, grabbing the sleeve of my T-shirt and whispering “C’mon.” I look at him in the flickering light from the screen and, seeing something attractive there, follow him across the lobby into a warren of connecting rooms, through another series of doorways, and into the restroom. Behind the restroom door is an empty shower stall, the knobs long removed, the pipes capped, an opaque shower door still intact, closing off the little cubicle from the world. He pulls me inside and kneels in front of me, hands already on my crotch by the time I have closed the door.
I am not hard, but within moments, blood rushes to my crotch as his hands and his mouth assault me.
“Wait,” he says, jumping up and pulling his shorts down and over his white sneakers, flinging them onto the filthy tile floor of the shower stall. “Do you like my diaper?” he asks grinning.
“Sure,” I say, more curious than surprised.
“Yeah, baby, you’re so hot. I just love hot guys to see me in my diaper. Yeah.” He kneels back down, one hand rubbing his boner through the front of the diaper, one holding my cock against his frothing lips.
“Let me see your dick,” I say, leaning back against the wall of the shower stall and looking down across my chest and stomach at his tight white diaper.
He pulls his dick out and strokes it a couple of times. It is small, thin but well-shaped, not too thick, but not tapered to nothing like many I have seen. He himself is short, lean, compact. He reminds me of my ex, Robert, but not as beautiful, not as sculpted. I remember Robert, muscular and nearly naked in his diaper at Halloween last year, and smile.
“You like it?” he asks. “You like my thick cock sticking out of my diaper?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” I whisper, though in truth, the diaper does nothing but distract me and obstruct my view of his dick.
He returns to my dick, his throat opening to take it all in.
“I’m gonna shoot my load,” he announces, too soon. “I’m gonna shoot my load all over my diaper.”
I look down at him in silence, wondering where this all came from, how he became this particular person playing this particular role, in this particular place. Too many steps to contemplate, I suspect.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Uh, not yet,” I say, somewhat surprised as I see him shudder.
“Yeah, baby,” he moans. “Look at me coming in my diaper. Yeah, oh, yeah.”
“You came?” I ask, trying not to sound incredulous, watching as his erection fades within the confines of the diaper.
“Yeah, I did. Sorry ’bout that.” He leans back on his heels and reaches for his discarded shorts. “Maybe next time we can both come.”
“Yeah,” I agree, slipping my half-erect dick back in my shorts and watching, puzzled, as this little sprite of a man jumps up and flits out of the shower stall.
I follow diaper-boy into the lobby and duck back into the theater.
I wander in and out of doors, past old men in shirts and ties with cuff links and tie tacks; past an overwhelmingly ugly but jovial overweight man who laughs and says, “Hey, didya notice we’re the only ones here under seventy?” in a tone that implies that we have enough in common to spark a rousing physical encounter. I smile and walk away.
I brush off a dozen wandering hands, rows of questioning eyes, a score of whispered promises and pleas. “I’d love to get that knob in my mouth.” “Just let me have a piece of that and…” “If that thing gets hard, come find me, ’cause I’d love to suck on that for a while.” “Hey, hey, you, come over here, come here.”
A young man in a white shirt and dark tie with scared eyes wanders in, poses for a while, sneaks clandestine looks at me. I wonder if he sees in me a compatriot in this land of geriatric, overweight, homely, marginalized men, this world of darkness and age. He is a beacon to these men, many of whom doubtless see themselves in his visage. They see themselves as they were before the wrinkles and the liver spots and the sage of encroaching old age took them firmly in hand. His crisp white shirt and immaculate hair seem out of place here, ivory tower meets sewer tunnel.
We fail to connect although our eyes dance a slow, furtive waltz. I reach out with my eyes above the chaos of his flustered appraisal of the room; he looks at me with immobilized hunger and bolts, disappearing out the front door, unfulfilled.
I wander out of the theater and make my way into a smaller room off the lobby where terraced seating faces a sextet of cubicles and a large television playing Hungarian porn. The step-like seating is covered with rough indoor-outdoor carpeting, for cleaning purposes, I suppose. I picture a bored man in flip-flops and shorts with a green garden hose spraying away the accumulated coded residue of a hundred million genetic dead ends.
Or perhaps the carpet is never cleaned, I think, noting the dark, ballooning stains and the thick smell of proteins, reminding me of chewed graham crackers. I also smell amyl nitrate, cigar smoke, sweat, shit, urine—all the primal smells that I have come to associate with the underground meeting places of my tribe, the smells below the dance floor, behind the curtains, in the bedrooms and bathrooms and basements of the world.
