Best Gay Erotica 2007, page 7
The woman cop walks back out to the swimming pool, hiding a smile, and the other cop gets out his handcuffs.
“Okay, hands behind your backs.”
I look at Scooby to see what he does and he just stands there, not acting like anything. I hate him.
He’s not offering to help me, not even looking my way. He’s checking a fucking Blackberry, typing those stupid little keys with his thumbs.
Luckily, this pisses the female cop off, too, so she practically runs over to him and cuffs him.
The two cops take us out and put us into the backseats of separate cars.
I’m in a fucking police car, freezing cold with only wet boxer shorts and a winter coat on. I can see my dick through the thin, wet, white fabric. This is the worst possible place I could be on the entire earth right now. This makes me more depressed, more sad, than I’ve ever felt before. I begin to sob. I’ll go to jail with no pants on. I’ll have to call my ex-boyfriend to bail me out. I’ll be pathetic once again. Even the memory of this night in the abandoned pool, something I would have jacked off imagining, will be tainted with darkness, with failure, like the rest of my life.
DAMAGED
David May
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty
and the world war both have their
start in the human brain.
—Elizabeth Bowen
It was generally agreed that the initial impact of the bus’s side-view mirror hadn’t caused Kevin’s temporary loss of memory, but rather the second blow to the head from when he landed on the sidewalk. The first only caused the concussion; it was the cracking of his head on the cement that knocked years from his memory. Which collision (either with concrete or with stainless steel) would have the profoundest affect on Kevin’s future by impairing any ability to experience his former passions, would never be known for certain.
Kevin woke up in the hospital and knew at once where he was, and that he must have been in an accident of some kind for him to be getting a sponge bath while heavily bandaged and aching all over—even if he had no memory of the Chicago Transit Authority’s assault, nor of how his head had ricocheted from one hard surface to the next; or even of how he had spent the last few days. It was only when he saw Lee standing at the foot of the bed that Kevin showed anything approaching confusion.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Lee. We live together. We had a wedding last summer in my parents’ backyard. Remember?”
“No. Are you trying to put one over on me?”
Lee pulled out his wallet and showed Kevin the picture of the two of them holding hands, both in morning suits, in a suburban backyard.
“For real?” was Kevin’s only response.
Doctors were called, questions asked of Kevin, questions to which he no longer knew the answers: What year was it? Who was the president of the United States? What was his address?
Looking at his driver’s license, Kevin saw that, indeed, it was the same address as the one on Lee’s license. He was also surprised to see that his hairline had receded and that he’d grown a beard.
No, I haven’t given you the expected descriptions of their godlike beauty, chiseled features, huge cocks and perfect bodies. This is because these details are irrelevant to the tale being told—as well as being untrue. But you, the Common Reader, want to know these things; you want to be assured that the men you’re imagining are worth getting hard for, worth thinking about as you rearrange your crotch. Suffice it to say that Kevin is fair and Irish while Lee is dark and of Welsh descent, and that they had, until this moment, shared that peculiar Celtic sensibility of taking a joy in life (which is to say, in food, music, the telling of tales, dancing and making love) with a passion normally associated with Mediterranean peoples, while living as a northern race. Both are furry and over thirty, though Lee is a few years senior. They are burly men who work out together several days a week, and if they were the type of men one was looking for online, one would call them Muscle Bears. Their beards might change with the seasons and the fashions, but they are always bearded and know that they are the kind of men who are the handsomer for it.
“Sometimes these things happen,” offered the nurse, a small brown woman with an indeterminate accent. “Memories usually come back in a few days. Do you want to see your mother now, Kevin? She’s waiting outside.”
“Hell no! If that bitch is here, you better call security because she is not supposed to be anywhere near me. There’s a restraining order!” Kevin turned to Lee for confirmation. “That’s still true, isn’t it?”
“Yup. And it goes for both of us.”
“But she’s your mother…”
“She also arranged to have me kidnapped so I could be held captive by some charlatan who promised he’d make me straight—but only after he’d taken all of her money, of course. Ask her yourself, if you want to. She’ll be happy to tell you about her Christian duty.”
“If you don’t call security, I will,” added Lee firmly.
The nurse hesitated, once more offering the information that the woman sitting in the hall with her well-worn Bible was Kevin’s mother, so Lee reached for the phone as the nurse shook her head in disbelief. A few minutes later Kevin’s mother could be heard screaming in the hallway: threats of legal action, God’s wrath, and the newspapers being informed of this outrage were all proffered with no effect. Lee smiled to hear the theatrically maternal cries of moral outrage, then turned back to Kevin expecting to see the same smug satisfaction on his partner’s face, but saw instead two empty eyes that registered no satisfaction in once again frustrating his mother’s martyrdom, but rather a dull dismay at the depth of the disturbed woman’s emotion.
Friends came to visit Kevin in the hospital. Photo albums and mementoes were proffered. Stories were told of Kevin and Lee’s life together. Bit by bit memories were recovered and Kevin’s lost years were pieced together. His college years, his courtship with Lee, his teaching second grade in Highland Park, all came back, but elicited no feeling from him. Always passionate about food, with very particular likes and dislikes, he now ate whatever was put before him when he was hungry, and then lost interest in eating when his stomach no longer felt empty. Always fond of children and animals, the mere thought of either now made him anxious and uneasy. His shared passion with Lee (fucking first thing in the morning and the last thing at night with the addition, when possible, of matinees and predinner romps), that had been the envy of all, was now like a withered ear of corn, a dried husk with no fruit within. Television provided no diversion in the hospital, offering only noise and confusing images; even his favorite old movies meant nothing to him.
When he came home, Kevin turned to books, the ones he had loved since he was a child growing up in southern Illinois. He started with the Oz books, once forbidden to him by his parents (and so, as a child, read only at the library), the complete collection of which were now his pride and joy.
The books he brought home had been examined with suspicion by his parents. No fairy tales, science fiction or fantasy, were allowed. Encyclopedia Brown, Tornado Jones, Henry Huggins and the Hardy Boys were grudgingly approved. Later came Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Jack London and Mark Twain, and finally his favorite, Charles Dickens, all of them passing before his parents’ ever persistent scrutiny. The Chronicles of Prydain and Narnia, along with Ray Bradbury’s books and J.R.R. Tolkien’s tomes, he hid in his school locker, only reading them in the homes of friends.
With sudden regularity, one or both of his parents would burst into his bedroom, accusation livid in their eyes as they pulled whatever he was reading from his hands, followed by their sullen disappointment at finding neither pornography nor self-abuse under their roof—both of which Kevin sensibly confined to deserted barns with his equally frustrated friends. Staying a few steps ahead of his parents, he took an easy pleasure in their bewilderment.
Now he read again the books he remembered loving, and in the comfort of familiar fiction he experienced something approaching pleasure. As the tales unraveled, as the characters’ lives evolved through each story, he found a singular solace in the otherwise empty universe he had come to inhabit. Sex with Lee had become mechanical and only about orgasm, one more task to be completed. Only when he was fucked did he find some lasting pleasure; the complex chemistry of his lover’s cum becoming a permanent part of him elevated his mood, sent into his bloodstream an endorphin-like release from an existence that was otherwise without affect. Alone in bed and dripping semen as his husband showered, he felt something like satisfaction: only then did he smile.
Unable to work, Kevin spent his days visiting psychiatrists, neurologists, social workers, attorneys, numerous therapists, the offices of his former union, and numerous government agencies in order to secure the needed income. Somewhere amidst his daily travels between and around Lake View and the Loop, it occurred to him that he could go to the baths. There he could again be fucked and again (since intimacy played no part in the primal joy that came from it) feel the same completion. Though he and Lee had until then been nominally monogamous, he paid his membership and went in without a second thought. The halls were not as crowded as he’d hoped, but there were enough men (and he was not so choosy about them, any more than he was about his diet) to provide the needed injection of cum; with more cum came more of the required chemistry. He felt better, almost happy, but ached for the euphoria he remembered once feeling in Lee’s arms, legs, cock and buttocks.
It was also in the baths that he rediscovered pornography and found that the visual of other men fucking was comforting as well as arousing, and the lack of plot a requisite for his being able to concentrate on what he watched. In the pornography he found online he discovered what he most wanted to see: a single man being fucked by many men until he dripped semen, a beatific smile across the bottom’s face. To be like that man, to be the man more men would want to leave their seed in, he took a renewed interest in his own appearance. He cut his hair short and trimmed his beard to little more than stubble. Now much thinner, he returned to the gym and firmed the farm-trained musculature waiting beneath his formerly zaftig frame. Almost every day he douched and went to one of the local bathhouses, got fucked and felt better. If Kevin was absent when Lee came home from work, Lee made his own dinner, walked the dog, and was happy to see Kevin looking so much better when he eventually came home with vague tales of losing track of the time. Lee was even happier to find Kevin was now eager for sex, or at least to get fucked, for only then was there any tenderness between them.
Until Lee woke up one morning with the clap, that is. At that moment everything Lee had suspected but denied came together with one final furious wave. He screamed at Kevin, whose impassive face drove him to distraction, yelled accusations that were only acknowledged with nods of agreement. Kevin denied nothing for he felt no remorse for his actions, but was, in fact, more intrigued than worried by Lee’s outrage. It was not until Lee’s hurt drove him to strike Kevin hard across the face in some final retaliation that Kevin felt anything at all. Pain, he realized at that moment, led to a pleasant release in its subsiding. If the pain were greater, so would be the subsequent release from it: just as every action had a reaction, so pain led to pleasure.
Frustrated at Kevin’s lack of response, Lee stormed out and Kevin calmly went online looking for an apartment. By the time Lee returned to their condominium (looking over downtown Chicago because lake views were static, even dull, to their shared Celtic aesthetic), Kevin had packed what he deemed necessary and left, moving into a shabby little apartment a block off of Halsted Street. He now had the settlement from his accident and his disability checks to live on. Still able to feel guilt, or at least discomfort, at having caused Lee such distress (though not enough to make any amends to his husband, only enough to remove himself from Lee’s proximity and so avoid further outbursts), he left a note bequeathing the condo to Lee. He moved out feeling something like satisfaction, partly because guilt had compelled him to make the gesture to the one who had been so kind to him, and partly due to his desire to be free of any future obligations now that they had used part of the settlement to pay the balance of their mortgage.
The apartment (damp and in need of painting, stinking of stale cooking smells and some faint chemical residue), recently abandoned by some disreputable character, hadn’t been cleaned between tenants. In his cursory examination of the shelves and cupboards Kevin found a loaded gun that he left untouched, comforted by the presence of something so passive and yet so powerful in his meager home. Cheaply as he could he bought a bed big enough to be fucked in and whatever furniture and other household goods—the bare minimum—he needed to eat and read and live. His favorite books were piled against the walls of his bedroom. A laptop that played his pornographic DVDs sat on the kitchen table, always on, always connected to the world of men looking for a man like Kevin who was eager to take their seed, alerting Kevin to their calls as he read and reread the Brontës, Dickens, Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, James, Hardy and Woolf.
He was treated for the clap, tested for syphilis, but did not stop getting fucked. He refused any other intervention, so focused was he on the only physical relief he’d found to the static colorlessness of his life. Knowing that the addition of pain would increase his relief from the stolid gray blandness, Kevin haunted the leather bars and their back rooms dressed as he had seen his pornographic role models dressed, in chaps and vest. Now men beat his ass with a gloved hand or belt, twisted his nipples, held him by the throat long enough to instill, in his faint appreciation of such things, the hope for annihilation. He was never so close to feeling happy as when he returned to his dingy apartment just before dawn, bruised and aching, his ass dripping blood and cum. On these mornings, in those few seconds before drifting off to sleep, he felt content, even at peace.
It was, of course, only a matter of time before Lee found him, either by plan or by chance. Those who knew them saw Kevin in his new haunts, places where Lee would never go, and word eventually reached Lee of where Kevin could be found, and of what he was doing there. Lee’s appearance at the Eagle that night was like the Bad Fairy’s at Sleeping Beauty’s christening: noisy, distressing and very unwelcome. He grabbed Kevin by the locked chain around his throat, swore at him, cursed him, spat in his face, and finally struck him hard enough to knock Kevin against the wall with such force that the impact echoed through the bar, causing a momentary pause in the otherwise constant buzz of conversation. No one intervened, of course, Kevin’s reputation being such that bystanders assumed it was all part of a planned and negotiated scene: the deep, demented psychodrama of formerly reputable homosexuals who had recently eschewed bourgeois respectability. But when Kevin was slammed against the wall with that loud and distressing thud, it was his head that hit it first. Then something extraordinary happened.
Yes, I am a notorious romantic and will, as usual, provide you, the Common Reader, with a happy ending. But please remember that this is fiction. In doing my research for this romance of erotic possibilities, I learned that while much is known about the brain and how it functions after an injury, there is still more not known than known. Think of this story, then, as a black-and- white movie made Before the War, one wherein the writer projects his deepest desire into an otherwise disturbing tale. Experts might roll their eyes at the coming conclusion, but even they are compelled to admit that not enough is known to absolutely refute my fable of love challenged. And even if they can refute it, why should they want to when suspended disbelief is so essential to the enjoyment of any erotica?
Kevin wept. Everything unfelt for the past year suddenly gushed forward with tears, sobs and broken sentences: a confusion of joy and pain, of angst and pleasure, that fell into a single proverbial pile at the core of his being, a muddled mess of emotions, all fragments with jagged edges. Knowing that Kevin was constitutionally unable to fake tears, Lee gathered his husband in his arms, held him close, and took him outside into the cool autumn air. Eventually Lee loaded him into their car, secured him in his seat, and took him back to their condo with the downtown view. By the time they were in the elevator, Kevin was better able to stifle his sobs, but this meager control was lost when he saw the dog’s excitement on seeing the return of his long lost friend. They went straight to bed. Lee held Kevin all night, even after the sobs subsided. Eventually they slept, the dog snoring quietly at their feet.
When they awoke it was not like it was before the accident. It never could or would be the same again. Something had returned, however, some vital fragment fallen back into place, and they awoke making love for the first time in over a year. Kevin was eager to please Lee in any way he could, remembering again the inner map of Lee’s flesh and the secret soft places that made Lee writhe under Kevin’s touch.
May I not do what I wish with my characters—even if their actions horrify the Common Reader? I know the inner workings of these men better than you do, and I am compelled to proceed to the coming finish—pun intended. I can’t help it if you’re yearning for some simple one-handed tale (many of which I’m not ashamed to have written) that relies on the formula recurrent to every gay skin magazine: ten pages, with sex on the first page, an upbeat ending. No, this tale must wend its way to its own conclusion, one that might be other than what the Common Reader prefers. And now I have to ask you to remember that Thanatos and Eros were not mere gods to the ancient Greeks, but Primal Forces and, more significantly, Inseparable from Birth: where one found One, one also found the Other, like Cosmic Conjoined Twins.
Kevin’s tongue found Lee’s asshole, found the moist smoothness beckoning beyond the otherwise hairy mounds of inviting flesh. The hole, unbreached for so long, resisted his ministrations at first, and it was only with patience and persistence that he caused the beige flower to open and give in to the onslaught it craved. Kevin’s cock, truly tumescent for the first time since the accident, glistened with precum and spit as it found the familiar hole, the place where it had once been so welcome. As Kevin entered Lee, they looked into each other’s eyes for confirmation:
