Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 22
My asshole.
And he is.
And it is.
But I get ahead of myself. And it is important when telling the truth to tell it exactly as it happened.
So, my prologue, if you will, is through, and, like a masterful storyteller, I will begin now at the beginning.
I was standing alone in the crowd huddled together at the Gala Reception for Out, Proud, and in Print, a conference for writers and readers who are LGBT and beyond. There we all were in a forgotten banquet hall in a forgotten hotel. And I too seemed to have been forgotten as I stood alone for several minutes, waiting for my friend to return with a glass of wine and some soggy hors d’oeuvres, when Caliban and his cocktail, held out far in front of him like Moses’ staff before the Red Sea, parted their way through a tight circle of whispered gossip and snickering.
My Moses, his face flush from the glory of the Lord and several glasses of Absolut, stopped in front of me and did a double take. He grinned as if he’d overheard the answer to all riddles and strode toward me until he was a few inches from my face.
“Whatever you’ve heard about me, I won’t bite.”
“Excuse me?”
“I won’t bite. Come a little closer.”
Closer? Any closer and I’d have to be inside him. But isn’t that what we all insanely crave? To have another live inside us so that we won’t be so alone? Then again, I already have more than enough voices in my head.
“Well, if you won’t bite, why should I?”
He laughed, his drink sloshing from edge to edge of the plastic cup’s wide rim. “I didn’t say I couldn’t. Just that I wouldn’t.”
Already with the semantics.
“Which one of my books is your favorite?”
I grimaced and scanned the crowd for my friend. He must have been abducted. I thought of storming through the throng of scribblers and word-wantons and doing a stall-to-stall search of all the bathrooms on this floor.
“I Am the Terrible,” I answered.
“I am,” he chuckled before sipping anew from his drink. “I am terrible. Especially in bed. A holy fuckin’ terror. You ready for the fright of your life?”
Providentially, my friend returned with our drinks—and the bartender’s number, I later learned—and I did not have to answer that question.
Instead we listened to Caliban rhapsodize about the wonders of a three-way with him. And I once more regretted my unwavering reliance on the social graces or, more truthfully, my faux politeness—a habit my mama had spanked into me as a child.
“None,” I had wanted to answer to his first question. “None,” I should have answered. For I’d recognized Caliban immediately. Unlike many other authors, he truly resembled his dust jacket photo. And I had had the misfortune of seeing that photo twice: once when I did not know better and had read his debut novel, and once when I did know better but had purchased a collection of his erotic fiction with the earnest hope it would be better than the hardbacked debut and read it charitably for several stories before I skimmed the remaining tales and then lobbed both the book and my estimation of Robert Caliban’s talents across the room.
Yes, our Mr. Caliban has, as of today, written several novels, a book of poetry, one play, and several collections of erotica under his own and various assumed names. He’d like me to list them for you here. I won’t. Sorry, darling. You do it so admirably at your website. But what he’d most want you to know, other than his URL, is how he looks. That I can do.
Warts and all.
Actually, warts excepted. I didn’t find out about those till later, did I, my love?
Imagine that a man of average height, build, age, looks, and—oh, yes—dick stands before you. Naked. And far from ashamed.
But, once again, I have gotten ahead of myself. Since this is a true story, how would I be able to describe his body unless I had seen it with my very own eyes? And how, you kindly remind me, could that ever have come to pass? For when I first met Robert Caliban, I was annoyed by his bombast almost to the point of revulsion.
Then again, reader, nothing draws a crowd like revulsion. Whether it be a crashed car or a yet-to-be-derailed ego careering toward some distant wall, some jump in the tracks, it pulls you to turn around and look.
To rubberneck.
And I did.
Not that night at the conference. No, the next day.
I had taken a break from the panels and gone shopping. Book shopping. I could have bought from a vendor table, but I was losing my ability to be either social or graceful and needed a respite. And for me, there is no place more restful than inside a bookstore.
Until he walked in.
I recognized him by that trademark shock of hair. And that voice. Few, having heard it, would ever forget it.
“Why did I have to come to the Castro?” I lamented in a whisper. Of course Caliban would come here first in search of praise and propositions.
I picked up the nearest book at hand—some travel guide with an apple-cheeked Czech boy on the cover with a hungry look (literally) in his eye. I let my vision blur and listened to Caliban who, as if declaiming to a mob, asked, basso profundo, the bored youth at the counter which of his books was his favorite.
The answer must not have pleased our horny Sphinx. For he quickly began to beat his hand upon the counter, bellowing, “Don’t you know who I am?!”
I looked up, no longer able to pretend I was reading. I was not alone; the eyes of every reader were slithering toward him like filings to a magnet.
I was only a few feet from the eruption and able to notice something as peculiar as it was arousing. There was a swelling bulge in Caliban’s pants that he was banging against the wall of the counter in time with the slaps of his hand against its top.
“Excuse me, my sweet, innocent, naïve youth, but I asked you a question: don’t…you…know…who…I…am?”
“Robert Caliban, what an honor,” the manager exclaimed nervously as he rushed to the relief of his harried clerk from his office in the rear corner of the store. “Please,” he added as he picked up a stack of Caliban’s newest release, “won’t you sign a few of these before you go?”
Caliban stopped mid-slap, mid-bump, and turned, the red-bricked hue of his forehead and cheeks softening to the ruddy glow of a dedicated tippler, and showed us all, with several dime-sized stains on his upper thigh, how happy he was to oblige.
As he signed, I tried to sidle by, but Caliban spoke without looking up. “You know it’s impolite to stare and run.”
“Hello, Robert,” I said in a voice that would have made my mother proud. “I wasn’t staring.”
“Not at my face.”
Now I flushed.
“If you’ll wait for me to sign this last book,” and with the word “last” the manager sighed loudly, “I’ll be happy to leave these good people and allow you a more private viewing.”
The manager’s face mirrored the revulsion I felt. And I was so very revulsed. But I could not move. And then I was ashamed of my infirmity and all the more revulsed and therefore frozen where I stood until he took me, not by the hand nor the ear nor the nose, but by the belt out of the store.
He yanked me around several homeless youths encamped outside the doorway, and through a bickering middle-aged couple in matching flannel shirts, dividing their spoils from the emporium that modestly billed itself as a hardware store, and past the imploring looks of more youths, clipboards pressed to their yet-to-be-gym-sculpted chests like Bibles in paintings of missionaries from a century or two ago, doing outreach on safer sex. Further and further up the street until we were deep into the crowd, wading against the current of silent commuters heading home and boisterous tourists heading out.
Up, up, up Castro Street and into the parking lot of the Castro Theater. It was filled with cars, but empty of people. It was too early in the evening for the less brazen.
There he found a gate ajar and tugged me into the alley beside the theater. It was overgrown with the fat steel vines of ascending stairs and stray gray thickets of trash cans. I could hear the rumblings of a movie behind the curtain of bricks. The watery white-gold light of twilight slanted through the crevice and stopped a few feet from where Caliban had propped himself against the wall. As vigorously as he’d pounded against the counter and its top, he pushed me down onto my knees.
I hesitated but my revulsion had me. By the balls. I hadn’t felt this horny since I’d received my first acceptance in my first anthology. And isn’t horny just a polite way of saying that I had a very curious cock? It had to know. I had to know.
Eagerly and yet gingerly, I unwrapped him. His pants and shorts crouched in a heap at his feet; the buckle of his belt hung out like the tongue of an overheated dog. His shirt ended in the curls and wisps and fronds of his pubes. As for his beast, a prominent fixture in much of his prose, there it hung. And my curiosity, alas, was not sated, as I had hoped, but piqued. For I lied—just slightly—earlier.
Caliban had a big dick. Not pornographic. Thank the Fates. Although bigger than most. Certainly bigger than what you’d expect on such a prick.
And the harder it got, the pinker it became. As if the rosy-fingered dawn were flipping me the bird. I was quickly incensed and got lippy. First with the small, but growing, bud of the head. Then, in a series of slow, deep sucks, I inhaled the rest of his cock.
I gripped his ass to balance myself and discovered there was, after all, a pleasant side to Robert Caliban. It was round, ripe, and rising still. Not flattened like those of so many of us other office workers at Inspiration, Inc., forever sitting and taking dictation from the Muses. What, after all, do the Muses care for asses? Fortune, however, seems to forever favor them. But that is a different story altogether.
Then again….
To allow my hands to cup and clench and claw his cheeks, I had swallowed all of Caliban with each faster thrust. And in this case, the penis was a might like a sword. For the braggart had spoken true. He was a holy terror as he ravaged my mouth. But, fortunately, both he and his dick warned me, through a quickening succession of quivers, when to pull away. For I refused to swallow any more of his bitter ink. Better to be safe than sorry, and I knew I would be ever so sorry tomorrow when I recollected the hour when I became another notch in Robert Caliban’s laptop case.
So there, in front of my face, twitched the pinkest prick I’d every seen. A color so artificial it could only appear in Easter candy or young girls’ bedrooms. And then, enraged that I’d abandoned it in its most needful of moments, it spat hot and hard across my face. What didn’t land on me must have splattered the wall opposite. I almost turned to see if he’d written “Caliban was here.” Knowing Robert, it wasn’t impossible that he’d trained even his own cum to promote its master and his good works.
As his breath slowed, he spoke in low whispers that I should look in his back pocket. There was something there for me.
A finder’s fee? I mused. Perhaps a nondisclosure contract? It was obvious then how little I knew him.
Instead, I extracted a handkerchief as white as blow.
“A little souvenir to remember me and my dick by. I’m sure the cum will make a nice stain on it. It’s silk.”
And I thought Tom Wolfe was a dandy.
I unfolded it and stopped. I was aghast. There, woven along one edge, was his web URL.
I looked up in time to watch him sneer, “You never know when the mouth you’ve just fucked may also write for The New York Review of Books.”
I covered my shame and my face with the handkerchief and wiped.
While hidden, I tried to gather my wits, which were running, screaming, to and fro. Do I quietly get up without a word and walk away, never to look back, never again to look in the face any man, woman, or child with a title in print? Or do I punch him in the gut and run? Or….
I had to regain my dignity somehow.
I dug my fingers into Caliban’s butt.
“Oh ho. You want another go?”
But I wasn’t finished. With much grabbing and pinching of my fingers and shuffling and near-tripping of his clothes-bound feet, I turned Caliban toward the wall.
He looked over his shoulder; the ugly leer had been expunged. He was, refreshingly, startled.
“What are you doing?”
“I’d like to show you my press kit, Mr. Caliban.”
I swallowed a fat and fleshy cheek with my open mouth and bit. He moaned. He yelped. The skin and muscle shook between my teeth. I smiled, as much as one can with an ass in one’s mouth. I let my tongue lap the well-baked bun while my hand caressed the other.
And as I did so, I came closer and closer to his crack. I felt its heat. I smelled its ripe aroma. Sweat and the merest whiff of shit. I was intrigued that someone so full of it could smell of it so little.
I dragged my tongue up and down and up the crack, never pressing deeply. Only tracing the surface. Caliban was hissing through his clenched teeth, “Eat me. Eat me…please, eat me.” Please. That was probably the first time he’d used that word in months, if not years. And my mother had raised me, by both hand and hairbrush, to be polite.
So, I obliged.
And I was rewarded. For that was the first time I ever laid eyes, and then tongue, on the asshole of Robert Caliban. And it was love at first lick.
It was delicate and yet textured—like the creases formed when layers of silk are placed one atop the other. And it subtly writhed when I touched it with the tip of my tongue. Caliban, however, lacked the refinements of his own hole. He flinched at the first few wet kisses before abandoning himself altogether, banging his fists on the brick and arching his ass until it swallowed both my nose and my mouth.
Although I could not breathe, I was ecstatic. Here, at the end of Robert Caliban’s bowels, I had found his one sweet and soft spot. Even the devil himself could be redeemed. But it was not merely a network of nerves, wrapped in succulent flesh. It was a mouth with a set of lips more gentle and more enchanting than any I’d known on a man. And I’d known a nearly biblical roster of men who begat a good kiss.
But what it did when I replaced my tongue with a well-sucked finger bewitched me. It gripped it in its wet and firm embrace and suckled. Suckled with its muscular lips. Firmly pulling me joint by joint deeper into its slick throat.
My dick was to be curious no more. I released it with my free hand and stroked it. It had the answer it had come for. I yanked my cock urgently. It was ready to make known its opinion of his most eloquent orifice with a hot spew of praise and chest-heaving exaltations.
I shot across and into the clump of Caliban’s pants and shorts. After wiping my dick with the handkerchief, I wrapped it around my business card and tossed it down into the impromptu well made of walls of sticky fabric.
“Call me when you’re ready for the best star-fucking of your life. And, by the way, I hated your last book. Were you sleeping with your editor or what?”
I stood, a bit shakily, and began to walk away, only to hear him whimper, “Yes.”
And with that, I returned to my flat and, I assume, he to his and his mate’s.
Yes, he had—still does—a husband. Then again, this was San Francisco. What cocksucker didn’t have a man waiting unawares at home or on the prowl himself with his lover’s blessing?
Me.
But I was often the odd man out. And when you trick here, you are more likely than not to be the odd man out. Three’s a crowd after you shoot. For them. And for you.
And I wouldn’t have wanted to go home with him anyway. For a night or for good.
We were both better off this way. If he accepted my invitation, we could come together and he could brag of his authorial prowess and I could nurse from the newly discovered font of his creativity. Then part merrily and remain merry.
I honestly wanted no more than this since I was between boyfriends and books. Suffering those slow, bone-grinding seconds of emptiness, of expectation. Waiting for the angel to trouble the waters and then drag my lame body and laptop to the pool and be filled. And Caliban had built a tolerable home with a lover who shopped and cooked and cleaned and fucked him every Saturday night and, when asked, dutifully read his work and said, “It was nice, hon,” or that he didn’t get it but he knew it was good, before returning to the kitchen or the embrace of the television or the Internet.
Forgive me, sweetness, for telling tales out of school. But you know he’ll never read this. Still, just the thought gets your dick thudding against the snug walls of its cotton cocoon, doesn’t it?
Ah, yes, dear. Now all the world knows you wear briefs. And quite well. Many the dick-licking man who thinks a pair of briefs is the gilded frame around the penis. But it never hangs just right without the swell of the well-mounded ass. And Caliban is an ass like no other.
Aren’t you, Robert?
Obviously, I did finally receive his call, and Caliban his fucking.
It came a week after our “writers’ retreat” in the alley.
Just long enough for someone to tend a sweetly bruised… ego.
His partner was away. Where, I did not learn. Still don’t know. It has taken a year of fingering and fucking his hole just to be given his name, though his pictures hang throughout the rooms we’ve rutted in. But I will spare the innocent here and neither reveal it nor coyly obscure it.
He has endured enough.
He alone lives with Caliban.
That first night, I was given the grand tour. Led through a Victorian warren of antechambers before I was granted admittance into the Holy of Holies: the book-lined office wherein he’d conceived each opus in the ever-burgeoning oeuvre of Robert Caliban.
And there, on a floor strewn with pillows from throughout the flat, he crouched on all fours and commanded me to paddle him with hardbacks. A new one for each swat until there were none. Then, at last, I would be allowed the “privilege” of fucking him. I balked until I imagined what that suckling hole would do to my dick.
