Hot Gay Erotica, page 8
I arrive at work after a particularly unsatisfying holiday. It is way too cold. I’ve had the obligatory dinner with friends who coaxed me out of my apartment that afternoon. I’ve just left Frank at Café Pick-Me-Up on Avenue A. I’m really on edge. Damn everyone and his holiday cheer.
Our typically well-attended party is about to burst at its seams, this being a holiday night. So many people are inside, I can’t navigate comfortably. It takes me at least ten minutes to traverse one end of the bar to the other. A good sign of a successful night, to be sure, but it doesn’t complement my sour mood. At around eleven-fifteen, I check my watch and think to myself that no one from our featured entertainment has arrived yet. Fifteen minutes later, I’m getting concerned. Still no entertainment. Midnight looms before us with no go-go. The open bar ends soon, the place is full of hungry, horny men and boys and the line stretches down the block and around 3rd Street. Dean tries to call the Rentboy.com booker. No answer. We try to call some of the guys from our regular crew, but of course no one is available. Exasperated, Dean looks at me and asks, “Wanna get naked?” As nonchalantly as if someone had just asked me to light a cigarette, the word okay comes out of my mouth.
Little do I realize what’s about to take place. I’ve heard countless stories from people who have moments of truth, epiphanies, awakenings, or even “God Moments.” What is unfolding before me is my God Moment. Mine happens to be a Go-Go God Moment.
There is no internal debate, no questioning. For reasons unknown to me, I simply answer, “Okay,” and I act. A window is opening. Once I begin the process, it is no longer my decision. I’m on autopilot.
My life flashes before my eyes. Instances when I have acted out the bad boy role replay like home movies. Untold crimes against society (at times of a superhuman nature) played out in the relatively safe confines of backrooms, bar bathrooms, club dance floors, even in the streets, now kick-start a more public rebellion. The anonymity of these feats will no longer be factored into my equation. My history of sucking and fucking at the world now serves as a springboard to an arena of the unknown.
I carry these thoughts with me as I make my way down the back hallway. I pop a Viagra, and climb the ladder to the dirty candlelit hayloft that serves as a changing room. I strip down to my underwear and begin to stroke my cock, as I wait for the pill to kick in. At first I play with myself gently. Then, I stroke myself a little harder. Where’s that lube? There it is. That’ll help, I think, as I pour the grease into my hand, and I rub myself up and down, pinch my nipples, rub my chest, fondle my balls. My cock is stiffening. The problem is I have too much time to think while I’m waiting to get fully erect. I wonder if my cock is big enough. My body really isn’t that great. I can’t even dance that well. Stop thinking so much! Focus! Focus! This is about sex, and sexual freedom. It’s a political act! That’s what it is! Stop the oppression!
The music is loud, raucous rock ’n’ roll, courtesy of DJ Lily of the Valley. This will be perfect—she plays all my favorite music. She’s calling to me from the main room. And so I climb down the ladder and push my way through the throngs of men lining the dark hallway, making my way toward the light. I step up and onto the stage, my fully engorged dick ready to be worshipped.
As I stand there, it never occurs to me that someone else is now driving this experience and I’m just along for the ride. The only direction I know is that of the music. The lights are pulsating and flashing. Luckily, I can’t see anything, save for the faces directly in front of the stage. I know now, however, that the jig is up. And so I dance and writhe and cavort and tease, and from that stage I am fucking each and every person in the room. Suddenly, I am the star of my own Self, and there is no stopping me. I taunt. I tease. I rock. I roll. Hundreds of men dance in front of me. Many approach me; reach up to me; rub my legs, my stomach, my thighs, my crotch. They slide money up and down my body, pushing it into my underwear as they cop a feel. The more I give, the more they give back. Finally, I slide my underwear down to the floor, step out, and I am free.
Time and space are no longer variables. I cannot say how long I’ve been dancing, or how many times hot sweaty men caress my ass, play with my nipples, and take my cock into their mouths underneath the strobe lights. This is what I know: I have been lifted high with an unbridled fervor. I have been carried to another dimension, one where man lives without constraint. And I have a soundtrack of heroes directing the journey: Blondie, Bowie, Queen, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux, Culture Club, Beastie Boys, Nirvana, Beck. They have always been with me, and now we work in tandem. Every triumph and every tragedy has led up to this moment. Courage. Fear. Vanity. Shame. Passion. Trepidation. Joy. Horror. Ecstasy. Tonight, I honor them all, as my shadow comes into my light.
It is in this experience that the full meaning of oppression reveals itself to me. It is as full and clear as the word freedom. Centuries of so-called culture and sophistication have brainwashed me. An imprint surfaces, and it is the tribal ghost dance of my ancestors who danced for guidance and for healing the spirit. I commune with my innermost Self, only to discover I have lit a match, and I see myself naked. There is a part of my soul (that is, my shadow) that has remained dark, in the dark. Now, I celebrate that darkness. This, my friends, is what I call the Shift.
Historically, I am a self-identified lurker. I am attracted to the night, to watching the stage from the audience, and to art. I approach it, I applaud it, I give it money, and I report on it to others. I dance around it. Now, however, this thing has occurred. The Shift. Once I engage it, I must continue. Once an idea presents itself, I must pick it up, feel it, smell it, taste it, and live it. Today, that is my only option. For what is the opposite of living? Dying. Killing.
The fact that my God Moment involves my having sex with hot, lusty men in front of hundreds of people, dancing and reveling to my favorite music, is not something I take lightly. It is poetry. Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson describes it in this way: “Great poetry makes these leaps and unites the beauty and the terror of existence. It has the ability to surprise, and shock—to remind us that there are links between the things we have always thought of as opposites. It is whole-making and thus holy, and the most important experience of a lifetime.”
THE END
James Williams
They say these are like opinions because everybody has one, but Stevie’s was so eloquent as to be a point of fact. More than that, it was the art he built his life around, at least as far as I was concerned. He used to get dressed up every now and then for any and every reason, but he almost always went out on a limb on Friday afternoons. When I came home from work he’d greet me like some barefoot Chippendale in tuxedo pants and bowtie collar, or a bristly, pneumatic hunk out of Tom of Finland; other times he’d show up at the door in hot pink deep-cleavage Spandex tank top tights, with or without a crinoline tutu. But whatever seriously grandiose sort of costume Stevie did on any particular day, he never liked to hide his chest.
Stevie’s chest was sculpted like a young god’s, curved in graceful planetary arches that rose like bridges crossing mountains, with milk-white arabesques of blue-veined marble set between shoulders of monumental granite, tapering to a waist I could easily have held if I had three hands, rippling like a school of fish in a tidal wave or like a dozen quivering loaves of fresh-baked pudding. His slim hips seemed to fade away from there, which made no sense at all atop his tree-trunk legs, yet there he was: cool and hot, chiseled and cuddly, firm and gentle, sweet and severe, perfectly proportioned like a 1940s cartoon of a he-man. He was my yab-yum, my juicy Lucy, my holy heavenly hunk-o’-honey, and I was the man he loved.
Not to say I didn’t love him back, I did, and not just for his physical magnificence; but we always had different agendas. In between those Dawn Redwood lower limbs he tucked not just a dick as big—to borrow part of Lenny Bruce’s famous mot—as a baby’s arm, but also, right behind, a pair of cheeks like boneless fresh-dressed roasting turkeys. Oh, my: first I think of him as art, then elements of earth, then in the original noir humorist’s imagery, then in metaphors of food…. And even if he was never quite simply human to me, food was certainly one of his advertised delights. Those evenings he greeted me in the least elementary drag he also set before me the greatest alimentary delights, which he had prepared, I came to think, in order to watch with fascinated horror the gustatory pleasures I expressed. He brought forth from the kitchen large roasts studded with rare fruits and spices, pungent birds and fish and cutlets grilled crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, toothsome grains and roots paired up as if for marriage with amendments made from their own juices, exotic pastel custards, sculpted vegetables intertwined with the opposites they attracted, buttered sauces savory and sweet, pastries puffed and tarts tatin’d; and while I ate he sat before me with his great, bare chest exposed; both massive, muscled breasts tripling the space they occupied whenever he raised his thigh-like arms to sip the steaming bowls of unadulterated, filtered, re-evaporated water he held to his face cupped in his plate-sized hands, watching me through the fog he turned into a misty curtain every time he exhaled.
Food was a stratagem for Stevie, as costume was another, and as his magnificent physique may have even been a third. I’d put nothing past him. And why would anyone as sumptuous as he go to all these troubles for a live-in boyfriend when the troubles themselves would warrant their own worth? Because, I think, of what he really cared for.
Dinner over—or my dinner, anyway, since it has always been hard for me to believe he actually survived on the hot water that was all I ever saw him consume—and the food preparations somehow miraculously dispensed with even before I had come home, Stevie left the dishes for some hour when I was asleep or away, and came to sit in my lap. “Came to sit in my lap” is all the truth of it, but wholly apart from the disparity in our sizes—Stevie towered over me when we both stood, was broad enough to shield me altogether from the sun, and weighed nearly twice what I did—the phrase doesn’t begin to convey the dimensions of the fable. When Stevie saw or decided I had finished with my meal he had a slow, salacious way of taking his steam bowl in a single hand and lowering it toward the table surface as if it were a Stanley Kubrick spaceship moving with balletic precision toward its orbiting satellite port: the cream-white cup of buffalo china, or the near-translucent bone of Royal Dalton, or the painted and filigreed low-fired clay of some contemporary artist whose name would be traded for Picasso’s in a quick year’s time, would start to dance in the embrace of his palm-sized fingers, and the plants along the highboy, decanters in the china cabinet, the glittering crystal chandelier, the dust motes its light shone upon, and the very air itself became the background against which the piece of pottery moved hypnotic. But as I started to imagine I could even hear its music, the cup would softly come to rest on the jacquard tablecloth, and only then might I become aware that I had watched its whole descent, entranced, transfixed, mesmerized, while Stevie watched my captive eyes.
Eyes to eyes Stevie then stood up, transported as if in a single fluid motion from his chair. Considering his size, I found his composure and grace marvels to behold; there was never a moment in all the time I knew Stevie when I did not think he was well aware of the impression he made on me. The music I had thought so recently belonged to the floating, dancing, landing spacecraft of his bowl now seemed to occupy his own very specific movements. If he was wearing anything at all above his waist—the bowtie collar, the plunging tank top, a delicately gaudy rhinestone choker—he next removed that, pulling it the length of one sinuous arm and then the other with rapidly sinuous fingers all waving like leaves on a lengthy stalk of kelp in a languid Pacific lagoon; then he brought the isolated item down to the tabletop as if to land through water, where, effectively, it died. Whatever the piece of costume was it shone on him and then, apart from Stevie, it became just another discarded trifle no one had ever needed. His hands commanded everything as they roved across the landscape of his chest, or fluffed his feathered hair, or plucked a nonexistent nothing from before my vacant vision, but they never roved without a destination known and plotted to its last coordinate, and then they moved with just that same sort of certainty to whatever belt or thread of elastic held his bottom clothing up.
I never saw a pair of pants descend as slowly as Stevie’s pants descended. It didn’t matter if he was letting the crisp black tuxedo slacks slide so their bold satin stripe crinkled as it caught the sun or candlelight, or losing tights he had to peel away like Beulah skinning a summer grape, or pushing his legs free from tattered jeans with holes he could have stepped through, or dropping his drawers like a nighttime bathing suit in the moon-shine. First those huge hands and every finger on them would begin to wander as if they were blind and hungry and searching for his waist. They were on a highly coordinated mission from which no force on God’s green earth could make them stray; yet always they seemed to have to seek that lean line out; always they seemed to have to make their ways from some far distant, civilized place across the mountains of his abs, down past the sultry valleys of his folded flesh, over his rivers and through his woods to the vast potential of his hot, humid, cloth-covered wilderness, where, by necessity and by design, they always managed to just stop short.
Some pants have belts and some have not; some have buttons and others do not; some zip and snap, some fold and tie, and some, even if they appear tight to the inexperienced eye, roll down easily as stockings off a close-shaved leg. Stevie let his fingers learn the nature of his pants each time, even if he had taken off the same pair every hour for a month. One finger might examine how the pants stayed up, while another began investigating how the closures worked this time; a third and fourth went off to learn how great was the expanse of pants, while a fifth remained aloof in case there was some call, unlikely as it seemed, to leave the pants in place a little longer.
“A little longer” is a phrase like “came to sit in my lap.” A thousand simple words like these could never convey the story any better than a picture could. For Stevie “a little longer” lasted for whatever period of time felt right or otherwise served his purpose in the moment, and the length of a moment in which his purpose was served changed like any other chronological demarcation: now a moment was fast as a fleeing drop of mercury skittering away forever down the floorboards of a declined hall, now it moved as slowly as a glacier melting at thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit in a permanently frozen ice field.
As long as Stevie thought he still held my attention: that was how long “a little longer” lasted, and the nature of the pants had less to do with how time moved for him than with what he perceived of my desire. In that way I suppose I might conclude that I was the one who controlled the flow of time, I was the one who determined the length of now, I was the one who could decide exactly what “a little longer” meant. But that conclusion would be no more true than it would be true for a person in a car, scouring the densest section of a major metropolis for a single vacant, legal parking space where he could leave his car before a bus prevented him from reaching it; or some delivery van claimed it out from under him; or a utility truck usurped it with a ring of orange cones; or another driver, spinning on a dime, made a sideshow U-turn in front of a dozen Keystone Kops all falling all over their feet to get to lunch, jammed the bumpers fore and aft, and slammed his Hummer into the forlorn formerly compact spot—it would be no more true for me to claim that I decided the length of Stevie’s now than it would be for that driver to believe that when, after a helpless hour of frustration, tears, and curses, his car skidded and stammered and stopped hopelessly jammed into a pothole from which it could not maybe ever be withdrawn and that happened to be right in front of his destination and that also happened to have a working meter waiting for his coin, he was actually responsible for the miracle: to just such a degree was I the captain of my fate with Stevie.
But like the hapless driver whose reward comes only from the virtue of apparent accident, so in the genuine fullness of time, each time the time would come when Stevie’s fingers, for whatever reason, found the switch, popped the button, opened the snap, untied the knot, flipped the zipper, and !! just like that his pants were gone, and in their place there stood revealed in all its splendid sculpted glory the ithyphallic member men and women the wide world over would have fallen to their knees to praise and worship if they only knew they could. Was it like a baby’s arm? It was like the cartoon spout of a cartoon sperm whale, rising from the sea floor, sending forth into the world the single source of the nexus lexis plexus of creation. If I had never raised my eyes from what was then displayed I could have been excused. If I had sat still gibbering in my chair no reasonable man could have possibly found my fault. If I had been struck deaf dumb crippled and blind, fallen off my rocker, fallen head over heels, flown to the moon and back, flown on the wings of song, flown with the wings of angels, died and risen from the dead, heard the voice of God and sung duets with Him, no one could have possibly imagined I had done anything he would not have done as well. Stevie had a beautiful dick. But he did not care about that at all.
Nor did he care about the Herculean balls he lugged about between those Douglas Fervent thighs he bared when all his pants fell down, though all the blessings, honor, glory, and power that belonged unto his dick most certainly belonged to them as well. But no: for Stevie all his costumes, all his cooking, all the stratagems of his musical, mystical body, all his hypnotizing actions and behaviors, all, all, all for him were nothing more than pre-foreplay, lead-ins to the final final act of finalé, the moment when climax changed to dénouement. All of everything he did was meant to lead us to the moment he desired, and wanted to remember.
Sure of my attention and certain I would go nowhere, holding my eyes with his until the entire weight of his turning head had to be precisely balanced on the single soft strand of his twisted spinal cord, slowly, slowly, like a liner out at sea, Stevie turned his monolithic body around in front of me. His skin changed colors in every plane, each plane changed colors in every light, each light illuminated another carefully delineated muscle group and made him seem a holographic poster for the International Child. From his disappearing face in shadow deep below his sinewed neck; from his brawny football shoulders down his curling back and curving hips; from his wide, long thighs to his narrow, exquisite ankles; Stevie turned. He turned his side to me, he turned his back on me, he let me see the ripely rounded melons of his ass and then, only then, he peeked back at me across an abyss that seemed to grow from miles to years as, hopeful, shy, too eager not to let excitement show, he drew his hands back and took a pair of gracious grips on both his high, hard cheeks, bent just slightly at the waist, and millimeter by silly millimeter, spread himself apart.
Our typically well-attended party is about to burst at its seams, this being a holiday night. So many people are inside, I can’t navigate comfortably. It takes me at least ten minutes to traverse one end of the bar to the other. A good sign of a successful night, to be sure, but it doesn’t complement my sour mood. At around eleven-fifteen, I check my watch and think to myself that no one from our featured entertainment has arrived yet. Fifteen minutes later, I’m getting concerned. Still no entertainment. Midnight looms before us with no go-go. The open bar ends soon, the place is full of hungry, horny men and boys and the line stretches down the block and around 3rd Street. Dean tries to call the Rentboy.com booker. No answer. We try to call some of the guys from our regular crew, but of course no one is available. Exasperated, Dean looks at me and asks, “Wanna get naked?” As nonchalantly as if someone had just asked me to light a cigarette, the word okay comes out of my mouth.
Little do I realize what’s about to take place. I’ve heard countless stories from people who have moments of truth, epiphanies, awakenings, or even “God Moments.” What is unfolding before me is my God Moment. Mine happens to be a Go-Go God Moment.
There is no internal debate, no questioning. For reasons unknown to me, I simply answer, “Okay,” and I act. A window is opening. Once I begin the process, it is no longer my decision. I’m on autopilot.
My life flashes before my eyes. Instances when I have acted out the bad boy role replay like home movies. Untold crimes against society (at times of a superhuman nature) played out in the relatively safe confines of backrooms, bar bathrooms, club dance floors, even in the streets, now kick-start a more public rebellion. The anonymity of these feats will no longer be factored into my equation. My history of sucking and fucking at the world now serves as a springboard to an arena of the unknown.
I carry these thoughts with me as I make my way down the back hallway. I pop a Viagra, and climb the ladder to the dirty candlelit hayloft that serves as a changing room. I strip down to my underwear and begin to stroke my cock, as I wait for the pill to kick in. At first I play with myself gently. Then, I stroke myself a little harder. Where’s that lube? There it is. That’ll help, I think, as I pour the grease into my hand, and I rub myself up and down, pinch my nipples, rub my chest, fondle my balls. My cock is stiffening. The problem is I have too much time to think while I’m waiting to get fully erect. I wonder if my cock is big enough. My body really isn’t that great. I can’t even dance that well. Stop thinking so much! Focus! Focus! This is about sex, and sexual freedom. It’s a political act! That’s what it is! Stop the oppression!
The music is loud, raucous rock ’n’ roll, courtesy of DJ Lily of the Valley. This will be perfect—she plays all my favorite music. She’s calling to me from the main room. And so I climb down the ladder and push my way through the throngs of men lining the dark hallway, making my way toward the light. I step up and onto the stage, my fully engorged dick ready to be worshipped.
As I stand there, it never occurs to me that someone else is now driving this experience and I’m just along for the ride. The only direction I know is that of the music. The lights are pulsating and flashing. Luckily, I can’t see anything, save for the faces directly in front of the stage. I know now, however, that the jig is up. And so I dance and writhe and cavort and tease, and from that stage I am fucking each and every person in the room. Suddenly, I am the star of my own Self, and there is no stopping me. I taunt. I tease. I rock. I roll. Hundreds of men dance in front of me. Many approach me; reach up to me; rub my legs, my stomach, my thighs, my crotch. They slide money up and down my body, pushing it into my underwear as they cop a feel. The more I give, the more they give back. Finally, I slide my underwear down to the floor, step out, and I am free.
Time and space are no longer variables. I cannot say how long I’ve been dancing, or how many times hot sweaty men caress my ass, play with my nipples, and take my cock into their mouths underneath the strobe lights. This is what I know: I have been lifted high with an unbridled fervor. I have been carried to another dimension, one where man lives without constraint. And I have a soundtrack of heroes directing the journey: Blondie, Bowie, Queen, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux, Culture Club, Beastie Boys, Nirvana, Beck. They have always been with me, and now we work in tandem. Every triumph and every tragedy has led up to this moment. Courage. Fear. Vanity. Shame. Passion. Trepidation. Joy. Horror. Ecstasy. Tonight, I honor them all, as my shadow comes into my light.
It is in this experience that the full meaning of oppression reveals itself to me. It is as full and clear as the word freedom. Centuries of so-called culture and sophistication have brainwashed me. An imprint surfaces, and it is the tribal ghost dance of my ancestors who danced for guidance and for healing the spirit. I commune with my innermost Self, only to discover I have lit a match, and I see myself naked. There is a part of my soul (that is, my shadow) that has remained dark, in the dark. Now, I celebrate that darkness. This, my friends, is what I call the Shift.
Historically, I am a self-identified lurker. I am attracted to the night, to watching the stage from the audience, and to art. I approach it, I applaud it, I give it money, and I report on it to others. I dance around it. Now, however, this thing has occurred. The Shift. Once I engage it, I must continue. Once an idea presents itself, I must pick it up, feel it, smell it, taste it, and live it. Today, that is my only option. For what is the opposite of living? Dying. Killing.
The fact that my God Moment involves my having sex with hot, lusty men in front of hundreds of people, dancing and reveling to my favorite music, is not something I take lightly. It is poetry. Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson describes it in this way: “Great poetry makes these leaps and unites the beauty and the terror of existence. It has the ability to surprise, and shock—to remind us that there are links between the things we have always thought of as opposites. It is whole-making and thus holy, and the most important experience of a lifetime.”
THE END
James Williams
They say these are like opinions because everybody has one, but Stevie’s was so eloquent as to be a point of fact. More than that, it was the art he built his life around, at least as far as I was concerned. He used to get dressed up every now and then for any and every reason, but he almost always went out on a limb on Friday afternoons. When I came home from work he’d greet me like some barefoot Chippendale in tuxedo pants and bowtie collar, or a bristly, pneumatic hunk out of Tom of Finland; other times he’d show up at the door in hot pink deep-cleavage Spandex tank top tights, with or without a crinoline tutu. But whatever seriously grandiose sort of costume Stevie did on any particular day, he never liked to hide his chest.
Stevie’s chest was sculpted like a young god’s, curved in graceful planetary arches that rose like bridges crossing mountains, with milk-white arabesques of blue-veined marble set between shoulders of monumental granite, tapering to a waist I could easily have held if I had three hands, rippling like a school of fish in a tidal wave or like a dozen quivering loaves of fresh-baked pudding. His slim hips seemed to fade away from there, which made no sense at all atop his tree-trunk legs, yet there he was: cool and hot, chiseled and cuddly, firm and gentle, sweet and severe, perfectly proportioned like a 1940s cartoon of a he-man. He was my yab-yum, my juicy Lucy, my holy heavenly hunk-o’-honey, and I was the man he loved.
Not to say I didn’t love him back, I did, and not just for his physical magnificence; but we always had different agendas. In between those Dawn Redwood lower limbs he tucked not just a dick as big—to borrow part of Lenny Bruce’s famous mot—as a baby’s arm, but also, right behind, a pair of cheeks like boneless fresh-dressed roasting turkeys. Oh, my: first I think of him as art, then elements of earth, then in the original noir humorist’s imagery, then in metaphors of food…. And even if he was never quite simply human to me, food was certainly one of his advertised delights. Those evenings he greeted me in the least elementary drag he also set before me the greatest alimentary delights, which he had prepared, I came to think, in order to watch with fascinated horror the gustatory pleasures I expressed. He brought forth from the kitchen large roasts studded with rare fruits and spices, pungent birds and fish and cutlets grilled crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, toothsome grains and roots paired up as if for marriage with amendments made from their own juices, exotic pastel custards, sculpted vegetables intertwined with the opposites they attracted, buttered sauces savory and sweet, pastries puffed and tarts tatin’d; and while I ate he sat before me with his great, bare chest exposed; both massive, muscled breasts tripling the space they occupied whenever he raised his thigh-like arms to sip the steaming bowls of unadulterated, filtered, re-evaporated water he held to his face cupped in his plate-sized hands, watching me through the fog he turned into a misty curtain every time he exhaled.
Food was a stratagem for Stevie, as costume was another, and as his magnificent physique may have even been a third. I’d put nothing past him. And why would anyone as sumptuous as he go to all these troubles for a live-in boyfriend when the troubles themselves would warrant their own worth? Because, I think, of what he really cared for.
Dinner over—or my dinner, anyway, since it has always been hard for me to believe he actually survived on the hot water that was all I ever saw him consume—and the food preparations somehow miraculously dispensed with even before I had come home, Stevie left the dishes for some hour when I was asleep or away, and came to sit in my lap. “Came to sit in my lap” is all the truth of it, but wholly apart from the disparity in our sizes—Stevie towered over me when we both stood, was broad enough to shield me altogether from the sun, and weighed nearly twice what I did—the phrase doesn’t begin to convey the dimensions of the fable. When Stevie saw or decided I had finished with my meal he had a slow, salacious way of taking his steam bowl in a single hand and lowering it toward the table surface as if it were a Stanley Kubrick spaceship moving with balletic precision toward its orbiting satellite port: the cream-white cup of buffalo china, or the near-translucent bone of Royal Dalton, or the painted and filigreed low-fired clay of some contemporary artist whose name would be traded for Picasso’s in a quick year’s time, would start to dance in the embrace of his palm-sized fingers, and the plants along the highboy, decanters in the china cabinet, the glittering crystal chandelier, the dust motes its light shone upon, and the very air itself became the background against which the piece of pottery moved hypnotic. But as I started to imagine I could even hear its music, the cup would softly come to rest on the jacquard tablecloth, and only then might I become aware that I had watched its whole descent, entranced, transfixed, mesmerized, while Stevie watched my captive eyes.
Eyes to eyes Stevie then stood up, transported as if in a single fluid motion from his chair. Considering his size, I found his composure and grace marvels to behold; there was never a moment in all the time I knew Stevie when I did not think he was well aware of the impression he made on me. The music I had thought so recently belonged to the floating, dancing, landing spacecraft of his bowl now seemed to occupy his own very specific movements. If he was wearing anything at all above his waist—the bowtie collar, the plunging tank top, a delicately gaudy rhinestone choker—he next removed that, pulling it the length of one sinuous arm and then the other with rapidly sinuous fingers all waving like leaves on a lengthy stalk of kelp in a languid Pacific lagoon; then he brought the isolated item down to the tabletop as if to land through water, where, effectively, it died. Whatever the piece of costume was it shone on him and then, apart from Stevie, it became just another discarded trifle no one had ever needed. His hands commanded everything as they roved across the landscape of his chest, or fluffed his feathered hair, or plucked a nonexistent nothing from before my vacant vision, but they never roved without a destination known and plotted to its last coordinate, and then they moved with just that same sort of certainty to whatever belt or thread of elastic held his bottom clothing up.
I never saw a pair of pants descend as slowly as Stevie’s pants descended. It didn’t matter if he was letting the crisp black tuxedo slacks slide so their bold satin stripe crinkled as it caught the sun or candlelight, or losing tights he had to peel away like Beulah skinning a summer grape, or pushing his legs free from tattered jeans with holes he could have stepped through, or dropping his drawers like a nighttime bathing suit in the moon-shine. First those huge hands and every finger on them would begin to wander as if they were blind and hungry and searching for his waist. They were on a highly coordinated mission from which no force on God’s green earth could make them stray; yet always they seemed to have to seek that lean line out; always they seemed to have to make their ways from some far distant, civilized place across the mountains of his abs, down past the sultry valleys of his folded flesh, over his rivers and through his woods to the vast potential of his hot, humid, cloth-covered wilderness, where, by necessity and by design, they always managed to just stop short.
Some pants have belts and some have not; some have buttons and others do not; some zip and snap, some fold and tie, and some, even if they appear tight to the inexperienced eye, roll down easily as stockings off a close-shaved leg. Stevie let his fingers learn the nature of his pants each time, even if he had taken off the same pair every hour for a month. One finger might examine how the pants stayed up, while another began investigating how the closures worked this time; a third and fourth went off to learn how great was the expanse of pants, while a fifth remained aloof in case there was some call, unlikely as it seemed, to leave the pants in place a little longer.
“A little longer” is a phrase like “came to sit in my lap.” A thousand simple words like these could never convey the story any better than a picture could. For Stevie “a little longer” lasted for whatever period of time felt right or otherwise served his purpose in the moment, and the length of a moment in which his purpose was served changed like any other chronological demarcation: now a moment was fast as a fleeing drop of mercury skittering away forever down the floorboards of a declined hall, now it moved as slowly as a glacier melting at thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit in a permanently frozen ice field.
As long as Stevie thought he still held my attention: that was how long “a little longer” lasted, and the nature of the pants had less to do with how time moved for him than with what he perceived of my desire. In that way I suppose I might conclude that I was the one who controlled the flow of time, I was the one who determined the length of now, I was the one who could decide exactly what “a little longer” meant. But that conclusion would be no more true than it would be true for a person in a car, scouring the densest section of a major metropolis for a single vacant, legal parking space where he could leave his car before a bus prevented him from reaching it; or some delivery van claimed it out from under him; or a utility truck usurped it with a ring of orange cones; or another driver, spinning on a dime, made a sideshow U-turn in front of a dozen Keystone Kops all falling all over their feet to get to lunch, jammed the bumpers fore and aft, and slammed his Hummer into the forlorn formerly compact spot—it would be no more true for me to claim that I decided the length of Stevie’s now than it would be for that driver to believe that when, after a helpless hour of frustration, tears, and curses, his car skidded and stammered and stopped hopelessly jammed into a pothole from which it could not maybe ever be withdrawn and that happened to be right in front of his destination and that also happened to have a working meter waiting for his coin, he was actually responsible for the miracle: to just such a degree was I the captain of my fate with Stevie.
But like the hapless driver whose reward comes only from the virtue of apparent accident, so in the genuine fullness of time, each time the time would come when Stevie’s fingers, for whatever reason, found the switch, popped the button, opened the snap, untied the knot, flipped the zipper, and !! just like that his pants were gone, and in their place there stood revealed in all its splendid sculpted glory the ithyphallic member men and women the wide world over would have fallen to their knees to praise and worship if they only knew they could. Was it like a baby’s arm? It was like the cartoon spout of a cartoon sperm whale, rising from the sea floor, sending forth into the world the single source of the nexus lexis plexus of creation. If I had never raised my eyes from what was then displayed I could have been excused. If I had sat still gibbering in my chair no reasonable man could have possibly found my fault. If I had been struck deaf dumb crippled and blind, fallen off my rocker, fallen head over heels, flown to the moon and back, flown on the wings of song, flown with the wings of angels, died and risen from the dead, heard the voice of God and sung duets with Him, no one could have possibly imagined I had done anything he would not have done as well. Stevie had a beautiful dick. But he did not care about that at all.
Nor did he care about the Herculean balls he lugged about between those Douglas Fervent thighs he bared when all his pants fell down, though all the blessings, honor, glory, and power that belonged unto his dick most certainly belonged to them as well. But no: for Stevie all his costumes, all his cooking, all the stratagems of his musical, mystical body, all his hypnotizing actions and behaviors, all, all, all for him were nothing more than pre-foreplay, lead-ins to the final final act of finalé, the moment when climax changed to dénouement. All of everything he did was meant to lead us to the moment he desired, and wanted to remember.
Sure of my attention and certain I would go nowhere, holding my eyes with his until the entire weight of his turning head had to be precisely balanced on the single soft strand of his twisted spinal cord, slowly, slowly, like a liner out at sea, Stevie turned his monolithic body around in front of me. His skin changed colors in every plane, each plane changed colors in every light, each light illuminated another carefully delineated muscle group and made him seem a holographic poster for the International Child. From his disappearing face in shadow deep below his sinewed neck; from his brawny football shoulders down his curling back and curving hips; from his wide, long thighs to his narrow, exquisite ankles; Stevie turned. He turned his side to me, he turned his back on me, he let me see the ripely rounded melons of his ass and then, only then, he peeked back at me across an abyss that seemed to grow from miles to years as, hopeful, shy, too eager not to let excitement show, he drew his hands back and took a pair of gracious grips on both his high, hard cheeks, bent just slightly at the waist, and millimeter by silly millimeter, spread himself apart.
