Bears, page 15
Well, let me open this story—which hopefully will not be utterly lacking in some frivolity or downright sneakiness—with a rather serious, perhaps even boring note: within a couple of years, God willing, I will turn fifty; for three years I have had a satisfying relationship with another man my age, a real cuddler with a balding pate, dark eyes, a thick moustache, and full buttocks, and during these three years, I have never been unfaithful to this man.
The reasons for this marital fidelity on my part? Well, with a still rather pleasant, bearded head, and a member that is still showing no signs of malfunction, I think, without any false modesty, that with a bit of luck and a little effort I could still pull a one-night stand or two in the more flirty haunts of Brussels. Nor am I fed up with the beauty of the male sex; quite the contrary, whenever I have the pleasure of crossing paths with a nice “bear” on the street, my dark eyes sparkle. So, let’s blame that little toddler Cupid for my current virtuous spell; probably for the first time in my life, the baby managed to hit my poor little heart so intensely with one of his arrows.
Oh yes, less boring and perhaps slightly more devilish, is also the fact that up to three years ago, I was a committed libertine, never particular about my partners, but nonetheless always with a pronounced preference for the more hairy, bearded, and plump specimen. During said libertine career, I must have exchanged intimacies with some two thousand men from some forty nationalities—intimacies that took place in forests, parks, cars, trains, hotels, porno cinemas, saunas, sex clubs, and naturally, also in normal beds, intimacies which, aside from downright S/M, must have covered nearly the entire gamut between soft and hard. Also during all those years, I had a steady boyfriend, named Giulio, and was thus naively supposed to be faithful….
Oh Giulio! Giulio of Viareggio! For twenty-one years, from 1983 to 2004 to be precise, we could call ourselves an item, despite the occasional breakup; we enjoyed seeing each other, and could say, beyond dispute, that we had the hots for each other. You always had a weak spot for tall, dark, bearded lads, which I certainly was when I met you. All those years, I just could not get enough of your broad torso with lots of bodily hair, your black beady eyes, and that innocent looking little arsehole between your hairy and well-shaped buttocks.
Nevertheless, our nearly daily capers remained rather vanilla, a little rimming from me and a healthy sixty-nine with simultaneous orgasm to conclude the affair, because when I wanted to undertake something more venturesome, a simple anal penetration, for instance, you always came up with the excuse that you “had not been brought up like that,” and that “those were the practices of a public woman.” That both you and I all too often tended to get up to some adventures under more hazardous circumstances was probably the reason for our relative unfaithfulness to each other, an unfaithfulness that we never really dared to broach openly, and which we always managed to cover with a veil of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy! Oh, how I was able to exercise the art of hypocrisy with near perfection all those years. Indeed, I was able to add one conquest after another to my love trophies behind Giulio’s back, in Paris, in Brussels, and naturally also in that ever-so-famous pineta in Viareggio, which was within walking distance of our digs!
That famous pineta! Oh, the voluptuous memories I have of my capers between the bushes there with, for instance, Fausto, a lupo solitario, a lone wolf from Leghorn; or Emilio, that enormously endowed purported bastard grandson of no less a figure than Giacomo Puccini; or with all the other men who apparently did not bother to give me their names while dropping their trousers. Such as…and in writing this passage, I am getting flushes of voluptuousness…that hunk of a bloke who lived in our neighborhood, ex campo d’aviazione, whom I saw walking around from time to time with presumably his wife and a daughter, aged about twelve. Except that sunny afternoon in May, when he had apparently left his little family at home, to have a nice, healthy walk along the forest paths near La Lecciona….
Well, what do you expect from me? That I should give an encomium here for all married men and fathers who could not resist, now and then, plucking the fruits of another representative of their own sex, such as this hunk, who was a good one meter ninety, with a broad build that covered nearly the entire breadth of an ordinary door, and with the curly head of an antique bust?
Oh yes…for some fifteen minutes or so, we withdrew behind the bushes, where we French-kissed each other intensely, after which I, with my dextrous mouth—more dextrous than the one of his spouse, I presume—left no nook or cranny untouched; his thick, dark nipples; his member that I would dare describe as “tozzo”—too thick compared to the length. Naturally, I requested with a husky voice for him to turn his back and bend over, to draw his massive, hairy buttocks open, and let me give his sweaty arsehole a serious licking—something his lawfully wedded wife had apparently never treated him to, because my hunk, just like me, at that point gave a heavy moan and released a heavy load on the dry leaves and pine needles in front of him.
When I opened the door of our apartment some fifteen minutes later, I naturally had to make an effort not to seem too blissful—to date, I still consider that hunk one of the most lust-arousing specimens ever to cross my path—but when I gave Giulio, who was busy making lasagna in the kitchen, a sweet kiss, he looked at me inquisitively and snarled: “Sai di cazzo (you stink of cock)!”
“What do you mean?”
“Sai di cazzo, what have you been up to?
“An olfactory hallucination?” I answered as calmly as possible.
“A what?”
“An olfactory hallucination, amore mio. Your head is so full of cocks that you think you are also smelling them.”
“Poppycock!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said laughing, “you are skittish again, admit it,” and I started pawing him, and we wound up in bed where I, as sprightly as I was at the time, had no trouble at all reaching another orgasm.
It goes without saying, however, that to prevent any unnecessary squabbles, I went about my business much more carefully after that incident, and got into a rather idiosyncratic habit: every time I cuckolded Giulio, in the pineta of Viareggio, or in the porno cinemas or public toilets, when we were in Brussels, I went immediately to the nearest café and downed a glass of cognac at one gulp, to rinse my mouth out with alcohol to cover up the odor of another man.
Well, I was never faithful to Giulio in the literal sense of the term, although my heart, my heart always belonged to him—aside from that night from October 31 to November 1, 1996. Let me explain.
On October 31, when I was thirty-six-years old, I arrived in Paris on the evening express train from Brussels around seven in the evening, and checked into a double room at the Chopin Hotel near the Place de la République. Giulio was to arrive the day after around eleven in the morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport on a flight from Pisa. Our aim was to spend a romantic All Saints weekend in the City of Light.
That evening, however, I was theoretically a bachelor, and after having dinner in a small restaurant on the aforementioned square, around ten thirty I headed for the One Way, on the Rue Charlot—at the time a fresh bear bar with dark rooms and all. I rumbled about those dark rooms without having reached a high point, so to speak, and then went up to the bar, sat on a stool, and started enjoying a beer in a corner of the café. Almost immediately, I caught the eye of a man my age standing at the bar, an attractive bearded man with a very dark skin: a good, somewhat chubby figure; moist eyes and fleshy lips, which I would not dare describe differently than “weak”—weak as in the song “My Funny Valentine”: “Is your mouth a little weak,” weak in the sense that he, as the French would say, looked très porté sur la chose, seemed to have a one-track mind.
And yes, the man came up to me, shook my hand, and introduced himself as Edward from New Orleans, though he lived in Paris, where he taught English.
“Ah, Louisiana!” I answered. “You are a successful mix of French, Cajun, and American blood.”
“And what brings you here to Paris?” he asked. “Where from?”
“Oh, I am from Brussels. But my steady friend is arriving from Italy tomorrow for an All Saints weekend.”
“Only tomorrow…” Edward winked at me impishly. “That’s funny. My steady friend is also arriving tomorrow, from French Canada.”
He caressed my cheek and asked me, in his funny French accent, as is usually the case with Americans, what I did for a living.
“Oh,” I replied, “I translate Dutch, French, and Italian, but I also write a lot, books, plays, scenarios for feature films….”
“Scenarios? My friend works for a big production company. What are your scenarios about?”
I started rattling on—about my writing activities, and how I had just finished a thriller that took place among fortune-tellers, and about my romantic comedy, and that perhaps it would not be a bad idea to introduce me to that friend of his the next day so that we could talk about the film world—when suddenly I thought I noticed some sadness in Edward’s eyes.
“I deduce from your enthusiasm that you are still in perfect health.”
I looked at him somewhat puzzled.
“That you are not…HIV positive. Like me.”
And I do not know any longer what came over me, but I started to stroke his short-cropped hair, and our lips met, first bashfully, but then we began to French-kiss each other passionately in a corner of the One Way bar, searching out each other’s nipples under our respective shirts, as Edward pressed his knee softly against my swelling member.
“You do not seem to be afraid,” he whispered.
“Your honesty has cast a nearly fatal charm on me!”
Fatal! That is how the starting signal was given for one of the most passionate nights of love in my thirty-six years of existence—it’s not for nothing that the French call it coup de foudre , a lightning bolt. We left the One Way, and made our way from the Rue Charlot pawing and kissing each other under the Parisian sky, and managed to find the Rue Saint-Antoine, where Edward lived, but so impatient we must have been to touch each other’s naked skin that we descended into Rue Filles du Calvaires and found our way to a passport photo booth, where we pulled down each other’s trousers and proceeded to fiddle with each other’s member, manually and orally.
And then the night of love in the bedroom of his apartment, high up in a building on the Rue Saint-Antoine, with a romantic view of the legendary roofs of Paris. Were I to describe this night by stressing “love,” I would only be providing a poor imitation of a Hollywood film about, for instance, a girl who, on the night before her wedding, meets who she thinks is the real man of her life. We told each other our respective life stories and in a nut-shell we seemed to have a long list of shared interests, we seemed to be astrologically perfectly compatible, and so on, and so on.
On the sexual front, I would probably break the illusion of that night by giving a blow-by-blow description, like a plumber, of our sexual and bowel organs, and what we did with them. Well, Edward was rather passive. And yes, I tend to prefer that. What’s more, I penetrated him with a condom, and we treated each other to fellatio, and we caressed and kissed long, and… and…and…the next morning when we woke up in each other’s arms, we embarked on yet another caper in our fresh love affair. We then breakfasted on coffee, orange juice, and croissants.
“I think I love you,” Edward said as he stirred his coffee.
“I think that I love you too,” I replied.
We looked deep and long into each other’s eyes.
“And what if we gave those lovers of ours their walking papers? We could take the train to Fontainebleau, for instance. Spend two nights, in a relais de charme, a fine hotel. Take walks in the woods,” he said.
“What time is your lover arriving?” I asked.
“At four in the afternoon. And yours?”
“Giulio? At eleven in the morning. What’s the time now?”
“Twenty past nine.”
I stood up.
“Shall we see each other again?” I asked, as neutrally as possible.
“An…experiment?”
I looked at my Edward, somewhat puzzled.
“Well, why don’t you come here this evening around eight, for the aperitif, with your Italian friend, and the four us, myself with my Arthur, and you with your…”
“Giulio.”
“…get a bite to eat in a neighborhood restaurant. No better way to find out if the two of us have a future together.”
“Okay,” I replied, somewhat hesitantly. Edward gave me the digicode of the main entrance to his building, and let me out.
Naturally, I was somewhat nervous from the time we took our leave to the time of the aperitif, but Giulio apparently did not suspect there was anything wrong. I went to freshen up in our hotel room, then took the RER to the airport to fetch him. I showed him my love in the same hotel room that afternoon, and we spent the following hours walking through the streets of the Marais. And as to Edward, I told Giulio in as casual a manner as possible that I “had a chat” with someone the night before, whose boyfriend could probably help me with my film career, and that we were expected by the person in question, whose name, incidentally, was Edward, around eight.
Well, the evening in question had an atmosphere a bit like a pièce de boulevard, an adulterous farce, by Feydeau, or a short novel by Françoise Sagan. Edward and I could scarcely suppress our fascination for each other. You know how it goes, a sheepish smile to each other, as a result of which Giulio and that Arthur—an attractive but rather pretentious little man—had sour looks on their faces. To top it off, Edward and I scarcely wanted to hide our private joke, so he asked, for instance, whether I found the view of the roofs of Paris “romantic,” and after two glasses of Kir I asked him to show me the way to the loo, “as I had never been to his apartment before.” Right.
The meal in the restaurant was if possible even more frivolous for Edward and myself, and even more tense for our Giulio and Arthur. We pawed each under the table, we scarcely paid attention to our respective spouses, we kept making lighthearted remarks about our dishes.
“How are your sweetbreads and kidneys?” Edward asked me.
“Exquisite!” I replied. “And your quail?”
“Delicious,” Edward answered, and he gave me the drum-stick he had started eating, and I ate the meat round the bone clean—under the inquisitive glare of Giulio.
And yes, once we took leave of them, Giulio and I went to a café on the Place de la République, where he put me through a grilling.
“You behaved oddly tonight.”
I shrugged.
“Where did you meet that Edward?”
“As I told you, in the One Way, the bear bar.”
“And you did not get up to anything together?”
“Are you crazy?” I shouted. “Edward is really not my type, and what’s more, he was honest enough to confess right away that he is HIV positive.”
Giulio’s face turned almost purple, and he called the waiter immediately. “Monsieur, could you bring us a cognac as soon as possible?”
“Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Courvoisier?”
“The one with the highest volume of alcohol, and please be quick!”
“Certainement, monsieur.”
“And now, rinse your mouth out thoroughly,” Giulio ordered me when the glass arrived. “Are you crazy, to have finished off that drum stick that had just been in the mouth of someone who is HIV positive?”
I followed his order like a good boy, and stayed on my stool for two minutes with my lips pressed together. I then went to the toilets downstairs, where I glanced at the amused look on my face in the mirror, and then burst out in as uproarious a laughter as I have ever had in life. That Giulio of mine was so naive, and stupid and panicky, as if I could get AIDS in such a way. Yet, seeing how concerned my Giulio was about me, I had better not risk our love for that Edward! And yes, to bring this true story, which took place long ago, to an end, I naturally had to bring to mind what Barbey D’Aurevilly said, which I have gallantly cited by way of an epigraph.
BEAR-ASSED
Simon Sheppard
Porridge? What the fuck is porridge?” Lance Gold screwed up his pretty-but-tough face.
“It’s oatmeal,” said Daddy Bear patiently. “That’s what we eat for breakfast. Oatmeal. None of that mimosas-and-eggs-Benedict stuff for us up here.”
“Up here” was a cabin on the Russian River, north of San Francisco Bay. Lance Gold, en route from West Hollywood to his new home in Seattle, had found himself stranded when his car broke down near Guerneville. At two in the morning, in the middle of a driving rainstorm, no less. After a fitful night of trying to get some rest in the back of his BMW, he’d gotten picked up early the next morning by three burly guys in an antique VW bus decorated with dancing-bear Grateful Dead stickers and a black-and-blue leatherman’s flag.
“Eat it, Lance. It’s good for you,” said Daddy Bear in a—well, fatherly tone.
“I know what’s good for me,” Lance pouted. And clearly, he did. A perfect, hunky body manufactured at the gym, at least four workouts a week. Stunningly bronze, with an utterly precise tan-line. A torso shaved hairless. Pubes trimmed. Skin smooth as milk. Lance looked every inch the retired porn star, which in fact he was.
Jerry (“Used to be called Roger, but renamed myself after Jerry Garcia. Haven’t been the same since Jerry passed on”) walked into the kitchen. He was shorter and less stocky than Daddy Bear, but his gut was, if anything, bigger, and his bushy black beard less trimmed than Daddy Bear’s salt-and-pepper one. “Have some porridge, Lance,” he said.
“I don’t want any porridge,” Lance snapped, “thank you very much.”
“Are you sure?” Kid said from the kitchen doorway. Since they’d gotten back home, Kid had stripped down to his baggy boxers. By far the youngest of the three, maybe about twenty, his chunky body was already covered with a thick mat of coppery fur, though his reddish beard was neatly trimmed. He walked over behind Lance’s chair and began kneading the blond boy’s shoulders. “You must have had a rough night, sleeping in your car and all. Some porridge and a nice big cup of coffee will perk you right up. I’ll put some raisins and maple syrup in your oatmeal if you want.” He pressed his crotch up against Lance’s back, right between the shoulder blades. Lance felt the bear cub’s dick start to swell. Kid was not at all Lance’s type—too heavy, too hairy, too shaggy. But cute. Lance’s own cock started to get hard.
