Muscle Men, page 14
“You like my ass?” he said.
“Oh, my god, yes. It’s so tight.”
“How often do you get a piece like this? If ever?”
“No, nothing like this ever.”
“Better than any girls you’ve ever had?”
“Better than any girls, or guys, or anything.”
“That’s right. Fuck me.”
I fucked him. “Can I cum inside you?” I asked.
“Not until I cum first,” he said, and remained true to his word. I stroked him and fucked him until he was crying out and his sperm started shooting, and every thrust I made sent another gush out of his cock. The feel of his asshole clenching impossibly tighter around my cock made me shoot too, hard. Releasing into him was like sacrilege, or an offering to the gods, either way.
Afterward, when I suggested he stay, I expected him to say no but he stayed and he ate and drank what Henry brought to him before turning in. The next day I asked him, didn’t he have to go to work?, and he said he suspected that no, he wouldn’t ever really have to work again. He wasn’t crazy about the bedroom I’d put him in but he said he’d walk around the mansion later today to try to find one that suited him better, and maybe he’d even take my bedroom if that was the one he liked best.
But that would only happen after he worked out in the gym—nude. Of course I could watch if I wanted, watch him work on the muscle of his beautiful body, which I did.
NEPHILIM LOVER
Rob Wolfsham
I didn’t know if Jordan White was just regular Tom Cruise–crazy or if there was some sublime genius to him. I met Jordan in my sophomore year creative writing class. It was an intro class filled with non–English majors forced to take it, so most of them didn’t care. But Jordan did. That first day of class, I would never have imagined his incomprehensible, logic-crushing view of reality. If he were just a guy I bumped into in the student union, I simply would have thought of him as some meathead, only interesting because of an impressive bullish physique. His dark brown hair was buzzed close on the sides, a military man’s haircut, geometric, structured, like his shoulders and torso. I’d find out later his cleaved musculature was forged from countless hours of obsessive mixed martial arts training. He liked to refer to himself as a Spartan, a facet of his obsession with ancient Greece and their philosophers, an obsession he would eventually want to share with me.
Before the first day of creative writing, the professor made us turn in a story by email so we could get a running start and workshop each other’s writing on the first day. Almost everything turned in was horrible or unintentionally funny, mainly because the non-majors didn’t care—or didn’t understand spell-check. But then again, why even try on the first day when everyone would label you an overachieving asshole?
“Welcome to English Twenty-three Fifty-one, which will hopefully be an exciting escape from your day-to-day rigors,” said Dr. Terrell Henderson, our professor, who looked like Teddy Roosevelt with his absurd mustache and rosy cheeks. He sported a Canadian flag pin on the lapel of his tweed coat, an almost too obvious badge of defiance and nonconformity in rural Texas. He sighed through a demure smile and leaned back in his chair, which was in front of his desk so there was no space between him and the surrounding circle in which we slouched. “I want to start by saying I could not be more excited for this class. I was so impressed with the stories you all emailed me. I hope all of you read each other’s work and were able to appreciate the artistry and patience you put into your craft.”
Really?
“But before we get to your stories, we’re going to go around the circle and introduce ourselves, saying our name, major, hometown and one crazy fact about ourselves.”
This was going to be a long class.
The circle reluctantly shared, wheeling through people who shrugged through the crazy fact with something obviously boring. The third guy to speak was an agricultural science major named Josiah. He wore khaki shorts, a pink Lacoste polo, and a camouflage cap advertising a duck-hunting group. He was from Fort Worth and his crazy fact was that he kept a sawed-off shotgun in his dorm room.
Dr. Henderson laughed nervously, as if a three-year-old had just said fuck.
Next was a threateningly beautiful and flighty blonde named Ashley Simpson. Yes, Ashley Simpson. But not the fading pop star Ashlee Simpson. Ashley and Ashlee went to the same Baptist church in Richardson, Texas. And they were friends on Facebook. She giggled through the explanation. She was a human development and family studies major, aka four years of home ec mixed with desperate dating to find matrimonial freedom from collegiate obligation. I envied that.
After a few more forgettable engineering and mass communications majors came the hard-bodied psycho I’d eventually come to know.
“Jordan White,” he said flatly to the circle, tilting his head tiredly. He sat with one arm stretched on his desk, one hand on the brim of his silver athletic shorts as he slouched back, knees bouncing in and out, shaved thighs massaging his balls and dick. “I’m from Houston.” His eyes narrowed at something on the floor, then he looked up. “I’m interested in dissonance.”
The professor did a half nod, half shake. “Could you elaborate?”
Other students perked up at the break in the rhythm of bullshit.
“Yeah,” Jordan said. “Dissonance between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. You know, the idea that we’re sitting here. I’m supposed to give out a fact. That becomes a posteriori knowledge in your mind about me. But you’ll still use preconceptions and understandings about me as a twenty-two-year-old white male to deduce what my thoughts or actions will be in a future event. That’s in direct dissonance with what I’m saying.”
Fucking philosophy majors. But at the same time, I was floored by the string of word salad that came from the buff meathead.
“I read your story,” the professor said, “about the police officer robbing the convenience store. It was interesting. I look forward to what else you’ll be writing for this class.” He sighed quickly. “Okay, next.” Teddy Roosevelt looked to where I sat. I was three empty seats left of Jordan.
“Um. I’m Greg,” I said. “I’m undeclared, from Dallas.” I ran a hand through my blond shoulder-length hair.
“Crazy fact?” the professor prompted.
I shrugged. I had a tough act to follow.
Josiah, the guy in the tight pink Lacoste shirt, coughed the word faggot. No one seemed to react.
I looked at pink-shirt guy. “My crazy fact is I’m a faggot, but I don’t own a pink shirt.”
The professor’s eyes fluttered in panic, but he smiled. No one really reacted. Either everyone was mentally asleep or they thought I was joking.
Pink-shirt guy blurted, “It’s salmon.”
“It’s gay,” I said, icy adrenaline coursing through my stomach. This wasn’t the first time I’d called out some jackass I didn’t know. I wanted to leap out the window in angry embarrassment—I had wanted to get through this class totally invisible and now that was impossible.
“If everyone would check his or her syllabus,” the professor said quietly, “you’ll find I won’t tolerate any language or writing that attacks someone’s race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. I hope that’s the only time I have to mention this.”
Pink-shirt guy wouldn’t look at me, but Jordan White stared at me hawkishly, knees still oscillating in and out, unnerving since I’m used to being the one creepily staring at a guy in class.
We jumped right into workshopping stories. Because I was last to introduce myself—as a faggot—my story was the first one up. It was obvious only two people had read it, since those were the only two who had anything to say.
“I think the story is too sarcastic,” Ashley Simpson said to the professor in an unsure way. “The narrator just seems to criticize everyone.”
“Hmm, yes,” the professor said. “I noticed that too. Do you think that is significant in some way?”
“Um, well, I guess because he’s gay?”
I leapt to response. “The narrator is straight.”
“Bah, bah, bah!” the professor jumped in. “Cone of silence!” His hands swooped the air around me.
Jordan White raised his hand. “Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason says that your soul is substance and yet simple.” He spoke like a soft-voiced preacher. “The homo’s story is about the soul connected to the conceptually material. The homo uses the word I a lot. That’s the soul speaking a noumenon. Perfection within and out. He’s God in his realm.”
What? I was spellbound by how absurd yet clever he sounded. Some looked at each other. My story was about a nerd getting ready for a party. It sucked. I didn’t want to try hard for the first day and be that guy. I hadn’t even noticed Jordan call me a homo. It was probably because he’d forgotten my name.
“Please, Jordan,” the professor said. “Refer to Greg as gay or use the full word homosexual. Wait, homosexual? Is homosexual okay?” He looked at me. “Oh, cone of silence, never mind.”
For an awkward moment, everyone was in a cone of silence, just the hum of the air conditioners and fluorescent lights around us.
“Let’s move on to the next story,” the professor said, sighing. “Pass your critiques to Greg.” Papers shuffled. I got a stack of copies of my story with written critiques like Good job and nothing else; several had nothing written at all; another copy had every semicolon slashed out and replaced with a comma.
I found Jordan White’s critique. He’d written a book on top of my story: black ink everywhere, scribbled furiously, entire paragraphs circled, sentences underlined, just an absurd mash of squeezed, nearly microscopic handwriting in the margins and between the double spacing. I could make out bizarre phrases like, “I side with the just man who does unjustly for justness” and “Children of Schem” and then at the very end a simple command to “Read Sitchin to find absolute knowledge.”
I would come to know later what that meant.
“How about we move along the circle counterclockwise,” Professor Henderson said, looking to Jordan. “Everyone find Jordan White’s story and let’s get into that.”
Only Ashley Simpson and I had anything to say about the story, and we had a brief argument about how Jordan used “too many big words.” I countered by saying a dictionary helps, and that despite his story being intimidating I thought it was a sophisticated piece that played with the “justness” of authority figures. In fact, I was being complimentary because I wanted to disagree with Ashley. The story was actually meaningless drivel about a cop robbing a convenience store, an obvious inversion of irony and an obvious polemic against authority.
The professor chastised the rest of the class for not reading. Pink-shirt guy said his email was messed up. Others joined in on that excuse or gave their own.
Jordan’s stare burned a hole through my face. He was in the cone of silence, but I wasn’t sure if I had flattered or insulted him by missing some grand point.
Class let out early since the professor discovered almost no one had read any of the stories we emailed to each other. He said from now on everyone would just have to pass out his or her story in class for workshopping next time.
Our class was one of the last evening classes in the department. The English building was almost deserted except for us. Mostly everyone took the main stairs and elevator down but I went to grab a Coke from the machine and then entered the east elevator.
I was alone. As the double doors began to close, I heard footsteps stomping closer. The doors were inches apart when a hand lunged through the small opening and grabbed a door and pushed them apart.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
Jordan entered, a backpack slung over one endless shoulder. He stood about six five. He had to have been at least 230 pounds. I caught my breath. “Fuck, you scared me.”
Jordan stood facing me as the doors shut behind him. “Did you really mean what you said?”
The slow-as-hell hydraulic elevator began its descent from the sixth floor. “In the critique?”
“Yes, about how the cop in my story was an example of unjust authority.”
“Well, yeah, but I wasn’t being very profound.”
“You were right. Different from the others who spoke,” he said.
“Good,” I said, unsure how to take that. “You’re different from what I expected, that’s for sure.”
“What did you expect?”
“When I read your story, I expected some pretentious creative writing major with a stupid mustache and a fedora.”
He smiled, the first break in his serious shell, a crumpled smile like he wanted to frown or not show his teeth. His angular face grew more attractive with a little humor in it. He said nothing and I felt like I had to fill a gap. “What did you expect when you read my story?”
“A scrawny homosexual.”
I nodded. “Oh, okay. Well, you’re perceptive. Have you bought the novel we’re supposed to read for this class? Pam Houston’s Waltzing the Cat?”
“Yes. After reading Schopenhauer, reading Pam Houston cannot compare.”
“She’s not a philosopher,” I said, offering the same smilefrown. “It’s just a light romance, a coming-of-age novel.”
“She writes to impart her simple a posteriori knowledge on her readers—her narrow view of romance, her negativity because no man wants to fuck her.”
“Didn’t Schopenhauer have a negative view of women?”
“Only a male’s intellect clouded by sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex, the fair sex.”
“What?”
“Schopenhauer said that. You haven’t read him.”
“I’ve read his Wikipedia article.”
“Wikipedia is rarely true objectivity.”
The elevator reached the first floor with a ding. Finally. I hadn’t realized it, but Jordan had backed me into the corner of the elevator. He towered over me. His pecs were solid armor. His navy blue shirt hugged his nipples in the cold, sterile air of the English building. There wasn’t an ounce of body fat on him. He was pure muscle, from his wide neck down to his bulging hairless calves.
I weaseled my way around him. “I have to get back to my dorm.”
I didn’t see or hear from Jordan until the next week’s class. He said almost nothing through everyone’s critiques, and then disappeared when class let out. He didn’t stare at me like before, and I was oddly disappointed. But a few days later I got a friend request on Facebook. It came with a message that said, What chapters are we supposed to read in the book?
I accepted his request and responded and then got an instant message from him that said, What’s the deal? We discussed what was needed for next class. I then asked him something that had been nagging me.
I read through the critique you wrote on my story, I typed. The one that was for the first day of class. What does “Read Sitchin” mean?
Wow man, was the response. He will be and already IS the most profound thinker of ALL TIME. Greater than Einstein = emc2. Greater than Herman Kahn game theory.
Why haven’t I heard of him? I typed.
The entire Middle East knows about him. About the Nephilim. About Nibiru. The West has been tricked.
That moment, that one little chat, is where Jordan White’s rabbit hole opened up and swallowed me. But I penetrated Jordan’s mind by choice. I went in because I was physically attracted to him. I was attracted to his muscles. His writing. His vocabulary. His bullshit. But, first, to his muscles.
Come over and I’ll show you, was his next message, enticing little words in that little window.
Jordan’s place was in the neighborhood next to campus, so I walked from my dorm. It was only a couple of blocks. He lived in the backhouse of a well-manicured, Tudor-style home. It was nine P.M., but there was still some daylight in early September. I walked through the street’s back alley to Jordan’s house. He answered the door wearing a black wife-beater and shimmering blue athletic shorts. He was sweating from head to sockless Air Jordans, huffing for air. “You came,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You sounded scared.”
I looked him up and down. “I sounded scared through a chat window? You haven’t scared me yet.”
Jordan’s place was a surprisingly large one-room efficiency. It was spotless, everything tidy, especially the hundreds of books on two ceiling-high bookshelves and a computer desk with papers neatly stacked in individual towers. The centerpieces of the room were a giant Bowflex exercise apparatus and a red punching bag hanging from a large steel stand. There was a flat-screen TV, but no couch, just a king-sized memory foam mattress in the corner with blue boxing gloves sitting on top, the only two items not in some kind of order. The punching bag swayed almost imperceptibly. There was nothing on the white plain walls. The room, despite being orderly, smelled faintly of body odor and pot. Of course pot. Not surprising.
Jordan walked to the bookshelf, leaving me in the doorway. I entered and shut the door. He pulled several books from shelves at random and set them in a neat stack on the desk. I watched the muscles in his deltoids and biceps work, gripped by the black cotton of his A-shirt.
“This is Sitchin?” I asked, thumbing through the stack of books. There were titles like Secrets of the Ancients, The 12th Planet, The Stairway to Heaven, and Genesis Revisted. “You can’t expect me to read all of these.”
“Why not?” Jordan said sternly, pausing in his book retrieval.
“Dude, there’s like seven fucking books here.”
He held up The 12th Planet. It looked to be about five hundred pages. “I read this in an hour.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Learn how to speed-read.”
“I don’t believe in speed-reading.”
Jordan grabbed my backpack off my arm, an aggressive, unexpected move. His hand had snapped out like a serpent. I jerked back. He unzipped the bag rapidly and yanked out my notebook. A few papers went flying. He opened the notebook and pulled out a stapled story.
