Where the Boys Are, page 7
Bob stayed. He loved the city, the city loved him.
All morning the tree-butchers work. By the time the predicted afternoon thunderstorm blows in, the goateed cub has unbuttoned the front of his shirt, and I’m going to the window every other Homeric page to admire his curly torso-pelt. Spring rain peppers the panes. Spring rain can touch him, though I can’t. My eyes aren’t sharp enough to see, but I’m sure raindrops are beading in his chest and belly hair, glistening in the pearl gray light. Soon after the rain begins, the crew calls it a day. Sexy Cub climbs into a truck, as do his buddies, and the whole pack of them drives off, leaving scattered twigs and limbs to line Seventh Street, the gray of the bark going black with wet. They’ll no doubt be back tomorrow to torture what untamed trees are left.
Grateful for the silence, I put a few more logs on the fire—don’t have to drive in to teach today—pour some Irish whiskey just to warm up, and, without the Asplundh cub’s hairy chest to distract me, spend the rest of the afternoon finishing off The Homeric Hymns. By cocktail time the rain’s turned cold and steady, and I’m already buzzed. I savor a few Manhattans, then heat up leftover corned beef and cabbage. It’s a recipe Bob taught me. How I loved his country cooking. It kept both our bear-bellies intact. I was always pulling up his T-shirt and kissing on his hairy belly.
After dinner, nicely drunk, warm and sentimental, I put on some Celtic music, stretch out on the couch, and pull a comforter over me. Logs gutter, spit, and crumble in the grate. I close my eyes and imagine the tree-butcher cub tied to my bed, his dark eyes widening as I smooth duct tape over his mouth. I push a hand beneath my sweatshirt and run my fingers through my own chest hair. Cupping my whiskey-limp crotch, I try to remember the lovemaking Bob and I shared before things went wrong.
The Beekeeper Inn at Helvetia, empty save for ourselves. Night rain hard outside, filling up the trout stream, dripping off the spruce boughs surrounding the inn. We’ve had a great day, walking country roads past fields of cattle and goats, seeing signs of spring in the tiny white bells of snowdrops, the first buttery flowers of forsythia. We’ve sated our bear-appetites on the rich and tasty Swiss food served at the local restaurant: homemade cheeses and sausages, fried potatoes, and sauerkraut. We’ve gotten a good bourbon-buzz going, thanks to the flask I brought. Now I’ve got votive candles flickering around this high little bedroom tucked under the roof. This is our first romantic travel-weekend together, and I want it to be perfect.
Bob’s standing before me, head bowed, waiting to be told what to do. He likes to obey.
“Strip,” I say, and he does, pulling off his hiking boots, jeans, and WVU sweatshirt, revealing a burly body as rich with fur as the surrounding mountains are wild with woodland. “Leave the jock,” I say, and he does. Bob stands there in the chill of the room, staring at the floor and shivering. He knows how hot and vulnerable I think he is wearing nothing but a jockstrap.
Bob jumps nervously when I wrap my arms around him, then sighs and hugs me hard. Gently I buckle the studded leather dog collar around his neck and lead him to the bed. Pulling back the covers, then kissing his stubbly cheek, I say, “On your belly, hands behind your back.” Within minutes I’ve tied his wrists, roped his elbows together, and bound his ankles. It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, a man this strong and butch who allows me such intimacy and consents to such helplessness.
I pull off my boots and clothes now, goose-pimpling fast, and climb into bed, pulling the covers over us. Wrapping an arm around Bob, I snuggle up against him and pull his head onto my shoulder. I cup the meat of his chest in my hands, softly tousle his belly-mat. The candle flames shudder and jump. Sign of a ghost, my grandmother would have said. Outside, cold March rain drums the eaves, making music on the roof. The sound makes me solemn.
“You smell good,” I say. Bob doesn’t use deodorant most days just so I can savor his scent.
“Thank you, Sir.” He grins up at me and rubs his goatee against my neck. He knows how much I love it when he calls me “Sir.” He knows how besotted I am with him. He may be tied up, but I’m the one entirely bound.
With my free arm, I grab the flask off the bedside table, take a swig, then carefully give him a sip.
“I want to hold you and listen to the rain. In a little bit, I’m going to suck your cock till you’re just this side of shooting. Would you like that?”
His “Yes, Sir” is so quiet it’s almost inaudible.
Gripping his jaw, I kiss him. I kiss him for a long time, our noses rubbing, our tongues exploring, our beards brushing together.
“You want to be gagged now, I’ll bet.” I clamp one hand over his mouth and with the other start fondling his nipples. His torso is so hairy it takes me a second to find the smooth areolas and the hard little nubs. He shudders, nods, and grunts beneath my hand, pushing his chest against my roughening touch. I lift my hand off his face just long enough to reach for the ball-gag on the bedside table. I push the fat ball between his teeth, leaving the leather straps dangling.
“Keep it in there,” I order.
Another nod, precious gesture of obedience.
“I’ll buckle it in later. Later, I’m going to make these ache”—I tug on one nipple and Bob nods again—“and then I’m going to prop your butt on a pillow and eat it for about half an hour”—Bob nods, I take another flask-sip—“and then I’m going to ride you till you hurt. Would you like that?”
Another nod. I move the ball around in his mouth a little, till I can feel his saliva on my hand.
“Rope not hurting you?”
Bob shakes his head.
“Happy?”
Bob nods enthusiastically. Candle flame leaps and spits.
“Me too.” I shift us onto our sides, work a nipple with one hand, and stroke his jock with the other. Soon he’s breathing hard through his nose, groaning around the ball. With his bound hands, he fumbles for my cock, finds it, grips it, and nudges its head against his warm crack. Is there anything sweeter than a hairy, macho guy who loves to be bound and gagged, who lives to take it up the ass?
Later, after I’ve fucked Bob into a state of well-plowed rapture but before I’ve untied him, I’m going to take a few snapshots. I’m experienced enough to know how quickly ecstasy can decamp. I want proof, in the face of whatever losses the future might bring, that, one night at least in my life, the world was exactly the way I wanted it. Once I made love to an absolutely beautiful and desirable man, held him helpless in my arms, and my touch made us both as happy as mortal limits allow.
Bob grunts impatiently. He pushes his ass back against my crotch, pushes his chest forward against my fingers. In answer, I rub my hard-on against him and dig my fingernails into his nipple till he whimpers. I admire a man who can take a little cruelty. The candle flame leaps again, bobbing wildly, filling the room with a weird shuddering shift between shadows and light.
“Buddy boy, you are going to be sore tomorrow,” I say, buckling the gag’s leather straps behind his head good and tight. Rolling him onto his back, I lift his legs onto my shoulders, cup his hairy buttcheeks in my hands, and begin chewing his stiff jock, its fabric full to bursting. The gag-muffled groans he makes are as poignant and haunting a melody as tonight’s chilly mountain rain.
Rain’s turned to snow. I can see flurry-flakes drifting past the windows. Nothing left but broken embers, a glow and shimmer in the grate. Tonight that’s all I want to remember, those times I made love to Bob. What a rough and beautiful captive he made, his hairy muscles roped up, bulging and sweating with mock struggle. What rapturous noises he made with a gag strapped in his mouth and my cock pushed up his ass. But whiskey’s insufficient amnesia. The other things, the unwelcome things, now it’s their turn in memory’s Möbius strip.
Before I saw his transformation face-to-face, I’d heard all about it. Not from Bob. My perfect husband turned ex, he and I lost touch right after we’d broken up. He claimed that he still wanted to be friends, but I ached for him too much to tolerate that. How could I be around him and not touch him, or watch other men touch him when I couldn’t? Even his emails made me hurt. So I’d told him to fuck off, and I’d avoided the Tap Room, where, word was, he and Ken often held court, and then the happy couple, full of hopes and ambitions, had moved to the city. No, I heard about New Bob from mutual friends, Keith and Tony. They were buddies Bob and I used to drink with at Windows, the upstairs bar on Seventeenth Street where the DC bear crowd used to meet for Friday cocktails.
I refused to believe he’d changed so much. Keith and Tony swore they weren’t making it up. After Ken the Drunk returned to the hills, after Bob enjoyed a few years of playing the field, he’d settled down. He had a new husband, also named Bob, a sleek, hairless little thing who could only talk about fashion, about the latest circuit party, about the newest designer drug, about his expensive home appliances, about his impressive salary, about his stock portfolio and his gym schedule. And—this is the part I couldn’t take in, refused to grasp—under his new husband’s tutelage my ex-love Bob had a new look. He was, in fact, someone else entirely.
Since they shared the same name, maybe that made it easier to assimilate, to merge, easier for Country Bob to become his husband, Urban Bob. I’m thinking about natural selection, adaptation. Was it something like that? The salamander species transforms in caves, becoming blind. The moth species darkens over generations, blending in with bark begrimed with industrial smoke. The chameleon turns brown against a dead leaf, green against spring grass, and disappears.
So here I go again, despite all the whiskey. I want booze to give me sufficient weight, the inertia necessary to resist. I want not to be moved, not to be dragged back by reminiscence and its damned dragline, its fucking grappling hook. Here and now is bleak—embers, snow flurries, and, yes, I’d pay that tree-butcher boy a few hundred bucks just to sleep with me, no bondage, no fucking, just his hairy, solid body heat wrapped in my arms for the night—but this cold skeleton of the present wouldn’t be half so bad without the warm flesh of the past set right beside it in the same vivid field of vision.
So here we go again, and here I am again, visiting DC that last time. Long way from Gauley Mountain, from my midthirties, from the hyacinths Bob used to plant around the farmhouse my shaky finances finally forced me to give up. Why didn’t anyone tell me Bob might be at the rehearsal? Since I didn’t ask after him anymore, I guess everyone assumed I’d recovered. Ten years had passed. I’d changed jobs, moved to Virginia. Keith and Tony must have figured I was over the heartbreak. That would have been a safe assumption, I guess, if I had a normal heart. I’d had my share of tricks since Bob, even a few semisteady boyfriends. Anyone with any sense would have moved on, I know that.
I hate that fucking city. I’ve never been back.
So, DC, it’s snowing a little, very windy, flurries jitterbugging down New York Avenue. Tony and I duck out of the cold and into the church. We’re standing around the basement hallway, shaking snowflakes off our leather jackets, waiting for rehearsal to wind down, waiting to take Keith across the street to Café Mozart for a late dinner of hefty German food, good grub for a cold night. Keith should have been done with the Gay Men’s Chorus by eight PM, but of course things are running late. As a country boy, I was brought up to be prompt, but these city queers, they’re never on time, and it pisses me off. It’s rude to make people wait.
I’m staying with Keith and Tony for the weekend, so I can buy some gay books at Lambda Rising, eat some good ethnic food—during my time with Bob, I developed a real taste for his German, Italian, Mexican and Thai cooking—and hit the Eagle and the Green Lantern, maybe find a cub or two who need some Tie-Time. That’s about all the good a city has to offer, in my opinion: books, restaurants, and leather bars. I sample those pleasures and then get the hell out.
The honed blend of male voices reverberates in the next room. The song’s “Crazy World,” Tony tells me. He knows I don’t care jack-shit about Broadway, but I’ve got to admit it’s a very pretty melody. There’s a lot of shouting, laughing, and commotion as the music ends, the scraping of chairs, and then the doors open and out they come, a slew of well-groomed guys. About time. It’s pushing nine. I’m ready for a big stein of German beer and some sauerbraten.
Keith shouts over the noisy seethe, “Lemme get my coat,” and Tony says, “Lemme hit the john,” and they’re off in opposite directions. Introvert from Day One, I head for a corner to escape the moving stream of strangers. Most of them are too clean shaven and slight for me to flirt with anyway. Instead I think about the meal to come. I might really indulge and have some linzer torte for dessert. Bob used to bake me linzer torte for Valentine’s Day.
That’s when I hear his voice, in the midst of my greedy pastry deliberation. He’s calling my name.
I turn, startled, confused. I stare at the well-dressed men passing by, milling around me. It takes me a few seconds to recognize him. The voice is the same—low, rich—but the face and body are another’s. For years after our breakup, I used to dream that he would suddenly appear, out of a morning mist lit up by sunrise, out of a tulip-tree grove bright yellow with October. He would approach me like this, grab my hand, hold me close, and the sickening separation would end.
But this isn’t him. The black goatee is gone. He’s clean shaven. There isn’t any five o’clock beard-shadow. Even his smile is different. It’s guarded now, not broad and sunny. The chest hair that used to curl over his collar is gone. The unbuttoned gap at the top of his polo shirt shows smooth, shaved white skin. And the big chest, beefy arms, and bear belly are all gone. He must have lost fifty pounds since last we met. Now he has the lean waist and mildly muscled torso of an in-shape teenager.
I’m so stunned, so on automatic, Polite Pilot I like to call it, that what he says and what I say, that’s all lost. I get the name of the man he’s introducing me to—his husband Bob—but I already knew that. Slender guy, clean shaven, balding, handsome, aloof, in khakis and yellow dress shirt. Slip of a thing, half my size. I could break him over my knee. He’s civil, but he seems less than impressed with my scuffed boots, beat-up leather jacket, graying beard, and stocky frame. Around him, suddenly I’m self-conscious about my accent, the drawn-out vowels and diphthongs that mark me as a Southern mountain man, an accent, I notice, that My Bob seems to have lost.
So you’re the rough and trashy hillbilly my lover wisely dispensed with so long ago, that’s what’s in City Bob’s eyes as we shake hands. Ridiculous overweight hick.
He’s a corporate lawyer, I catch that much. They share a townhouse in Georgetown. They went to Paris last Christmas. I try to smile. Manners are everything. I keep looking at My Bob, trying not to stare, trying to remember who he used to be. A vague memory coalesces again and again, and again and again it dissipates, flowers of the pear trees back home, flowers falling apart on windy April days, scattering white petals all over my truck bed, as if I were hauling snow.
Bavarian wheat beer. It tastes like cloves. Ten minutes after Bob2 have gone on their way, I’m drinking the first of what will prove to be six beers in Café Mozart. The sauerbraten comes with spaetzle and red cabbage, and it’s all as delicious as Keith and Tony had promised. I have the linzer torte too, with whipped cream on the side. It’s almost as good as the ones Bob used to bake.
I’m weaving a little on the walk back to the car. My friends are kind. They try to explain what’s happened. They use terms I know little to nothing about: circuit boys, crystal meth, Ecstasy. They drive me back to their place, help me up the stairs. They strip me, tuck me into the guest bed.
When I shuffle down the hall and wake them in the middle of the night, when I beg them, they get out the condoms and the lube, they kiss my face and chest and cock. They ease me onto my hands and knees, and then they give it to me at both ends, a big bearded man riding my face, a big bearded man riding my ass. They fill me up as best they can. I sob and grunt, wince and slobber, rock forward onto one cock, rock backward onto another. I’ll never be able to thank them enough.
I’m unsteady with bourbon to begin with, and the front walk’s slippery with snow, and these cowboy boots don’t have much tread. But I need to fetch it tonight, or it’s liable to be hauled off by Asplundh tomorrow. I stand for a while looking up at the pale circular stubs where lopped-off branches used to be. They look like full moons, mouths agape, holes in love letters, little lakes of shaved skin. I rub my chill-stiff hands—wish I’d brought gloves—then I start collecting.
Snow dusts the street as I fill my arms. The bastards have left a good bit here. Branches, twigs—this will last me awhile, once it’s dried out. Good kindling, warm fires, warm as a young man’s nakedness.
Five armfuls, and the street’s clean, the woodshed’s a little fuller. On the back porch, I hold my hands out in the dark, let snowflakes land and melt in my palms. Inside, with a poker I break up the remaining andiron embers, then pull off my boots and drop them on the hearth. I strip to my briefs and stand by the window, watching the lawn slowly whiten.
Once, long ago, Dionysos appeared in the smoke, and the god’s hair was black upon His face and upon His chest and belly, the god’s body was young and strong, thick and hairy and ripe. Grapevines sprang from the black mountain earth, bears sported in the pines. The god fed me dark bread and wildflower honey, musky-sweet wines. With ivy vines, He allowed himself to be bound. The god glowed with surrender, sighed with sacrifice. Dionysos delighted my heart. He opened himself to me, the ache of earth for seed.
Shivering, I curl beneath the comforter on the couch. Spring snow is spotting the windows, assassinating the hyacinths. There’s something gleaming there, on the hearth, on my boot soles. It’s sawdust, I guess, wet sawdust, but in the fire’s last glow it looks like sunset sweat, like powdered gold.
