“I was such a little guy then, and he was so big. I wrapped both my hands around his bicep. For the first time, I felt how strong and hard and big a man’s body could be. I hung on to his arm and he lifted me up. Swung me right up off my bare feet, up out of the dust. Face-to-face. I guess I pestered the shit out of him. Every day for the rest of the summer, without my asking, he let me swing from his arms, betting me he was strong enough to hold his flexed double-arm pose while I hung, my face to his chest, with both my hands on both his biceps. I could hear his heartbeat and I wanted arms strong as his. He bet me I could chin myself from that position.” Kick grinned. “So I pulled myself up, the first time half-climbing his tall body. By the time summer was over, I was hanging from his arms and chinning myself up to his face. All that next winter, back in Mobile in my own bedroom, I stood in my white cotton underwear and started flexing my arms. Sort of posing the way boys do when they’re home alone with a mirror. I studied my arms. I imagined them growing big and hard. Like his. You should have seen me. Squinting my eyes. Concentrating on them to make them grow. Moving to an angle in the old mirror that, when I caught the distortion just right, made my arms look bigger than they were. It gave me an image to grow into. I really worked at it.”

  He lowered his voice in a kind of manly modesty.

  “I guess I have lucky genes. My mom and dad have good bodies. They said I was eating them out of house and home. The next summer I went back to Muscle Shoals about four inches taller and a few pounds heavier. But the trucker wasn’t stopping by anymore.” He leaned forward, rested his forearms on his thighs, raised his face, and looked me straight in the eye. “So that’s how muscle turned me around. Especially on arms. They’re big guns. That’s where a man shines. Ask any guy to show you some muscle and ten-to-one he’ll flash you a biceps shot. It’s natural. If I ever compete, I don’t care if I win or not, as long as I can take home the trophy for the best arms. So,” he said, “that’s it. That’s how I got hooked on muscle.”

  Kick relaxed back into Dan’s chair. He was smooth, slow, easy. Natural. The L.A. night was hot. In the duplex next door someone was playing the Eagles’ Hotel California. I could smell his body heating up the leather of his police jacket. Sweet sweat was building up in him. His blond face glistened. He was in no rush to wham-bam. His discipline of slow Southern savoring kept him in cool control of his courting foreplay. He was intent on pleasing me. I put the brakes on my usual aggression and thought, Let him play it as it lays. He smiled at me, the way a man smiles when he’s giving a new friend a gift. “I think I better take this jacket off,” he said. He stood up. He reached for the zipper. Everything slipped into slow motion. His blue eyes squinted, sizing me up. Slowly, deliberately, he grazed the back of his hairy blond hand across his strong All-American jaw. His holster and gun and nightstick shifted. His shoulders and chest bulked huge under the creaking leather jacket.

  One part of me thought, Omigod, this is Hollywood! Another part of me thought, O God, this is Heaven! The best gay sex scenes are half of both.

  I was hooked to the tits. I couldn’t, didn’t want to resist him. I picked up his scene. I jumped on in. Words came tumbling from my mouth. Sex talk. Muscle talk. Man talk. Whatever. The scene had begun. I wasn’t acting; nor was he. We were doing a number on each other. A real number. His hand slowly pulled the zipper down every tooth of the leather jacket.

  “When you take it off,” I said, “this will be my first look at you. At your body.”

  He smiled and pulled off the CHP jacket. Slowly. So slowly. That was his style, to move Southern-slow in the L.A. fast lane. First one muscled arm. Then the other. All his moves like the slow-motion Technicolor muscle movies of individual bodybuilders I watch every night clacking around on the Super-8 projector in my bedroom. He wore a tan CHP short-sleeve wool shirt. It bulged like armor over his chest. His gold seven-point star stood out on his left pec. His eighteen-inch upper arms filled the precisely tailored sleeves to bursting.

  He was arms. Heroic arms. His thick forearms were downed with soft golden hair. His wrists were squared off in the classic way wrists are presented in men’s watchband ads. His hands were perfect, defined, and powerful from gripping iron weights. His fingers and the backs of his hands were downed with sun-blond hair. His nails were clipped short. His arms, hands to shoulders, were arms to worship. This was no false god I had before me. In sex, I have few inhibitions. With him, I had none.

  I was innocent beyond irony.

  “You are,” I said, “perfect.”

  He smiled, and something in the way he smiled assured me there was no vanity in him. Only an honest pride. He was a man who realized the body perfect for himself. He was a body artist, a muscle artist. Bodybuilding is a subjective sport, but he was as objective as any sculptor unveiling his work.

  He kept his look straight on me. His fingers reached for the buttons on his police shirt. Again, slowly, deliberately, he opened the shirt: at his neck, down across his hairy blond chest, down the length of his washboard belly. He pulled the shirttails from under his belt. He dropped his arms down to his sides. He rotated his shoulders. The tan wool shirt pulled open over his chest and tight gut. He smiled at me, and slowly raised his left hand to palm inside the open shirt. I watched his hand run up the ripple of his belly and then smooth and cup his pectoral muscles. Already he had shown me more than I ever expected. He might have stopped and I could have flown back home happy. I’ve always loved seduction.

  He peeled his uniform shirt deliberately off first one shoulder and then the other, revealing how wide side-to-side were his shoulders, how thick front-to-back was his chest, how wide were his lats under his shoulders and alongside his chest until they narrowed down to the tight V of his waist. He handed Dan the shirt, and stood before me, stripped to the waist, with his high-booted legs apart. The tailored lines of his motor-cop breeches clung to his thighs, swelled over his butt, and bulged at his zippered fly.

  He was the incarnation of every mighty sexual hero I had ever conjured up in my erotic fiction. He was a vision stroked out of my one-handed study of hundreds of movies of bodybuilders. He was theology, literature, myth. He was Adam before the fall, Billy Budd in full bloom, a male god rising tanned from a blue sea with the vine leaves of a satyr wet in his hair. He was what I had always wanted. “You are,” I repeated, showing ritual respect owed to an artist generous in sharing his creation, “perfect.”

  “You told me,” he said to Dan, “that your friend liked muscles.” Then he shined right on me. “Your friend,” he grinned, “loves muscles.”

  “Your muscles. I love your muscles,” I said. I had been lost and now I was found. “I love your proportion, your bulk, your definition. I love your symmetry. I love your look.” I could not bring myself to say to these men that suddenly in my always terrified heart, I was a little less afraid of dying, which bullies had made me fear. Looking at Kick, I knew that if a being were to meet me on the other side of the squeeze of death, that if there were some sweet god, then what must eternal heaven be like, if god only looks this good, and this good feeling infusing my body lasts forever?

  Dan sat silent as a sentinel off to the side, watching, stroking himself like a man watching a vision he knew would come true. The night heated up. Kick stripped in the spotlight set in the ceiling. His chest and abs glowed with thick blond hair. Long golden fur fleeced his thighs and calves and feet. His dick was more than most nylon posing trunks could pouch. “You can tell I ain’t,” he joked under his breath, “a hundred and eighty pounds of hamburger in a two-ounce posing brief.” We played muscle sex until the hour before dawn. Kick posed and flexed under my oiled hands. Something more than sex, something like an understanding, was bonded between us. Dan knelt off in the corner stroke-watching the match he had made. He said later that Kick and I both were like beggars at an ecstatic feast, that we were perfect yin-yang, that gods need worshipers as much as worshipers need gods. I only know that I knelt before Kick for hours, rising up, stroking and sniffing and licking his body, eyeing his face close up, breathing his sweet breath, and for hours he posed, tireless, flexing arms and chest and belly and legs. He encouraged my sexual muscle-talk, following my words with his moves, as if I was scripting a scenario he had waited all his life to hear. We were smiles of a summer night, rising together up to that moment before climax, falling back, savoring the pleasure, rising up again, until our final mutual salute to triumphant masculinity.

  Honest manliness is never half-revealed. When it’s there, it’s all there, total, present. Roman emperors could have tortured me to death, and with my eyes upon him, and his gladiatorial smile upon me, I could have been, even at his hands, the most joyous of martyrs. I could have died for love.

  I knelt in front of him, between him and the mirror, sizing up the perspective of his muscle in the posing light. I had never before been ambidextrous, but I found my right hand reserved for myself. My left, as if for all my life I had been saving a virgin hand for stroking his hard-pumped muscle, palmed the contours of his body. I ran my left hand up his magnificent calves and thighs, not daring to touch his long hard rod for fear the muscle-worship would revert to purely genital sex. His dick was veined thick and heavy as his arms. I ran my hand up his washboard abs and stopped, flat-palmed, where his belly met his hard rounded pecs. We both dripped sweat. He looked down upon me, and for the first time our eyes locked into an affirmative understanding. He raised his magnificent arms wide, never taking his eyes from mine, and rolled his broad shoulders. My hand on his upper belly felt his pecs harden and his abs tighten. He took a deep breath, and with all his might, flushing red, muscles pumped and veins roped around them, he intensified his look deep into my eyes, and pumped down tight and hard into the Most Muscular pose. His body quivered. Veins corded his massive neck. His jawline set hard. Heavy streams of sweat poured from his blond hair, down his forehead, around his eyes, along his lantern jaw-line, and dripped, I want to say like sanctifying grace, down on me. I looked deep into his resolute face. We hung in perfect balance: the adoring worshiping the adored. I knelt in high fealty to his presentation of ideal manhood.

  Our eyes locked tighter in an unspoken energy of understanding. Hours before, we had left Dan behind, watching in amazement from the corner. Then we rose from the room, the mirror, the light, the clock. We moved to another dimension. We rose in that frozen moment to where the only clock was the one heart ticking between us. He held his body in the full locked-down power of his muscle armor. He was as graced with spiritual energy as he was with physical muscle. We were beyond words. My eyes looked hungrily into his, feeding back what he was giving out, circulating his energy back to increase his muscularity, to heighten our intensity, look to look, face to face, soul to soul. If there is a sweet god who meets me at death, and if his god-face is to reassure me, then let him look at least this good, and let that good feeling of that frozen moment be the beatific vision that lasts forever. Inside the moment of our intense look that held no secret from each other, I knew this was no false idol I had before me. At this moment, more than any spent kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, I experienced true adoration.

  “I worship you,” my voice said, and it was my voice and not my voice. Something that belonged to both of us was speaking. “I worship your muscles, your bodybuilder face, your muscleman soul, I worship all men in you. I honor all men in you.” I fell into a litany of worship, stroking myself, rising slowly up toward his glorious face, shooting my seed over his veined thighs, and without pause continued on pleasing his insatiable satyr hunger. My pleasure in him pleasured him even more. My energy toward him caused him to pump out more male intensity. I hardened again. He displayed his double-biceps shot bringing his big arms to full flex. My hand ran up his body and held firmly onto his baseball biceps. I began to pull myself up to his chin. His eyes stared straight ahead into the mirror behind me, and, without touching himself, he shot hot rivers of seed and sweat down my face and chest.

  Later, he said, “I felt I was taking all your energy. I usually pose alone. No one’s ever followed along so well. I don’t want to take anything from you.”

  I held my palms toward him. “Does a man holding his hand out to a fire ever feel he’s giving rather than receiving heat and light?”

  I wanted Kick. I wanted him soul and body. Through incarnated muscle, he opened his soul to me, for longer than an instant, and I, through my worshiping words, opened mine to him. We knew nothing about each other; we knew all there was to know. I wanted his spirit. My journey at long last ended. We had both shot in salute to what passed between us. It was not private parts, not crotches, not mere ejaculation, not sexual spasm. It was total whole-body orgasm. I wanted his Being. My homosexual searching had been no more than a physical trek across the geography of men’s bodies to find this man’s homo-masculine essence through the medium of his muscle.

  I push on my sweet-tooth of death. Sitting on this plane, flying home, I know I will never see Kick again. He will become one of those nights that on my deathbed I will remember. Sometimes perfect acts are better not repeated.

  We lay in each other’s arms with the L.A. dawn already coming in the windows. “Sleep well, my fellow worshiper,” he said. He kissed me. “I know,” he whispered, “that you know what we know.” I buried my face in his neck. He closed his eyes and drifted off. His breath, his slow even breath, in sleep was sweet. I can never thank Dan enough. Nor ever forgive him. Lying last night folded in Kick’s huge arms, the thick hair of his chest warm under my left palm, I memorized the moment I know will never come again. I’ll never forget lying in the tousled sheets with Kick, him sleeping, me knowing, with my head on his shoulder and my nose in his blond hair, the fact, the godawful-fucking fact that in a finite changing world, no ticket is a round-trip fare. Life is a one-way ride through distraction to oblivion. This man, with these muscles, in whose arms I felt so shielded was a handsome, distracting way station on a journey I know we all must make alone. I slept and tried to dream that I might die before waking.

  FUCKED ON KILIMANJARO

  Jay Starre

  Philippe couldn’t recall what exactly had made him decide to undertake such a stupid challenge. His body ached all over, he was gasping for breath at least half his waking hours, and according to their guides there was worse to come.

  Granted, the African landscape was absolutely gorgeous. Stark and increasingly barren, but with exotic plants scattered among the rocks and the unmistakable tracks of a lion around their camp that very morning, the slopes of the famous African volcano of Kilimanjaro were interesting to be sure. But. It was fucking exhausting, and Philippe was tempted to turn back nearly every morning. He was not a wimp, at least not most of the time. He loved hiking and had the thighs and butt to prove it, muscular and taut as a bowstring.

  He would have given up except for one thing. Not his ego, not that at all. He had already gone higher on Kilimanjaro than most of the rest of the population of the world in just his first three days. One thing, and one thing alone got him up that morning and gave him reason to pack with a groan and push his aching muscles ahead, one step at a time.

  Ralph was a lanky redhead, with serious blue eyes and a quirky smile, rarely offered. As the air grew thinner and the trail more difficult to negotiate, the man’s perky buttcheeks hovered ahead of Philippe, beckoning him onward. He had taken to following just behind Ralph on the trail, and the redhead had seemed content with the situation.

  Ralph often stopped while Philippe struggled to catch up; they would take a drink and gaze at the surreal landscape in companionable silence. Ralph had a thick Southern accent, which Philippe, born and bred in New York City, found adorable. But talking wasted precious breath, and neither had the energy to muster up conversation while hiking.

  They shared a tent at night, which Philippe thought was a stroke of absolute luck. When he fell into his sleeping bag on the rocky, uncomfortable ground, the tall, athletically perfect redhead was snoring beside him.

  It was Africa, but it was cold after dark on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. The flimsy tents kept out the wind, and fortunately the tour company provided small propane heaters, which Philippe and Ralph gladly lit once they crawled into their tent.

  On the third night of their grueling ordeal, they lit their heater and nestled side by side in their thick sleeping bags. Philippe was content, Ralph already snoring beside him. The guy fell asleep almost instantly every night.

  Philippe was supposed to turn off the heater after it had sufficiently warmed the tent. They had agreed on that, while Ralph woke first in the morning and lit it then so they could get up without shivering to death.

  Philippe’s mind wandered. He found himself half dreaming, half fantasizing. Ralph’s taut butt globes pumped steadily and provocatively before him, just out of reach. Encased in the flashy emerald shorts he liked to wear, each separate ass mound rolled and clenched and rose and fell, the deep divide between them promising hidden delights. Philippe contemplated that deep crack. Hairless, he was certain. A puckered hole. Pink. Tight. Willing.

  Ralph’s snoring diminished, then ceased. Next thing Philippe knew, he was sitting up and blinking sleep out of his eyes. It was the middle of the night and he heard Ralph’s soft voice grumbling in the darkness.

  “You forgot to turn off the fucking heater, Philippe! It’s hot as Hades in here.”

  That sexy drawl stimulated his already bone-hard cock, which twitched nastily and bobbed up into the hot air of the tent. Philippe realized he had thrown open his sleeping bag in his sleep, with the heat he supposed. His exposed dick was stiff as hell.

  It was too dark to see much of anything, but he could just distinguish Ralph’s lean form as he crawled to the foot of the tent and turned off the heater. Without that small glow there was no light at all, and Philippe was thankful his rude erection wouldn’t be visible to offend his new buddy.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18