Hot Gay Erotica, page 9
I slipped off my chair as smooth as ice cream melting down a cone in hot July and threw myself across the scanty space that separated him from me. Kneeling, then, between the columns of his legs, looking up at the beach ball he had split apart, gazing through the blood-gauze curtain of his wondrous ball-filled sack to the living room beyond, I was, for these few minutes, king of all I beheld. This was why he’d buffed the body, made the food, worn the drag, studied me so carefully that he could hold me by the eyes while he took it off: so that if I were not yet smitten I would still be made to feel beholden to my fleshy icon, and give him in exchange this one thing he most desired. He thought that he had bought my love, and he felt he’d made a perfect bargain: he amused himself and me, and I rewarded him.
But I—I did not feel that I had paid when he performed his arts for me: instead I felt like a maestro’s courted guest. I did not think that I had bought my Stevie’s love or that mine had been bought by him, nor did I feel that I rewarded him when I heaved up on his legs and threw him facedown upon the fainting couch and plundered his hot hole with my hungry tongue. Instead I felt I had seduced an idol, taken, for the price of feasting eyes and belly lavishly, what other men would give their hearts to have. I did think we had made a bargain, but I thought the bargain went to me, especially since Stevie never for a single moment failed to think the world resembled the precious image he had made of it.
SLIPS
Rob Stephenson
You startle me when I turn on the light. You’ve caught me. You’ve been waiting there in the dark for me. You give me that face, the one full of despair underscored by your low harsh voice. You interrogate me without giving me a chance to answer. You are afraid of what I might say, but still you ask the questions. Under my baggy shirt, catastrophic drops run down from my armpits. You smell my fear. No, it’s the odor of cigarette smoke from my clothes that’s hitting you. Your words escalate in pitch. You want to hit back. You’re wearing that silk slip with the lace fringe on the bottom. It’s beige. It’s tight. I can see your cleavage and the blue green veins that ride just under your pale skin. It’s a composite of all the slips you’ve worn since I was a little boy, when you came into my room at night. The straps dig valleys into your shoulders. You sit with legs crossed on a reupholstered chair, one foot swaying back and forth as you berate me. This reminds me of the way your pinking shears open and shut as you cut along the black outlines of your dress patterns. All winter long you make awkward shapes on cheap yellow paper and pin it to brightly colored fabric. I envy the lovely, stringent designs dictated by the size and shape of your body. Now, your slip creeps up slowly, revealing varicose veins. They make a jagged blue music on the paper-white insides of your legs. You are still keeping time with your foot, but I hear a different beat. It’s the ticking of the plastic windup timer on those Saturday afternoons in the kitchen alone with you. There’s hot sugar in the air. I am standing too close to you, dropping glob after glob of chocolate chip cookie dough on stained metal trays. Maybe I’ll get to lick the spoon.
You and your younger friends surround me as I walk home. You are by far the tallest of the five. There’s no doubt that I’m an easy target. At this moment, I’m a ghostly white queer boy, high on god-knows-what. Your fist (dark brown skin on the outside, clenching, hiding the lighter skin of your palm) comes at my face and connects with my nose. You demand my wallet. I don’t have one. I never carry one at night. My blood drips onto my jacket. You take the few wadded dollar bills I hand you and I start screaming. You flinch as awful words gush out of me. You expect me to be frightened, but I have had too much to drink. I am surprised by my outburst. You and the others run up the street. I stumble inside my apartment and start to shake. Now I am afraid of you. You must be seventeen at most. You are so beautiful. And you hit me hard. Could you ever imagine what it would be like if you touched me in a different way? Maybe you can’t. Maybe if that happened, I would end up being the thief and you would be the victim.
You wouldn’t do it for me at first, but eventually put it on after I insist. The beige silk stretches tight against your hips. Your chunky posterior pulls the slip up in back. I have you lying on your stomach on my king-sized bed. Or is it queen-sized? The tiny straps and the metal clasps cut into your shoulders. Every time you move you tear the seams out a little more along the sides. But you try to keep still for me. Your chalky skin takes on the shade of a Brazil nut’s shell. My skin and the silk are bleached-teeth white. You push back against me and coax a few off-white pearls out of me. They bead up on the silk. You move again. The pearls smear and seep into the fabric. Then you stay still, trapped against me. I slap the side of your thigh. Kinky hairs poke through the worn material and tickle me as I glide up and down along the silken ravine you are offering. My hand continues to punish you and accuse you of imagined infidelities, encouraging them into existence. You know I want to make you feel good, but I don’t think I could bear it if you were truly happy. So I shove my knee under the lace fringe and grind your testicles into the mattress. I’m still pressuring you to want to hit me back.
I tell you you’re a no-talent bitch while I have you bent down over the arm of the sofa. It’s become obvious that I need to be in control. But whose apartment is this anyway? Is it mine? I’ve never been able to afford a place like this. And it’s so sterile you could lick clover honey off the floor. Maybe I should make you do that before the night is over. I can’t believe how hard I am inside you. Your plump tits are so soft in my faggot hands. These are real tits, the kind that babies suck, just as big as on your album covers. I’m accustomed to the hard, flat kind. I can’t imagine ever having received any sort of life-sustaining nourishment from sucking all those dry male nibs over the years. Maybe if they had offered up some for all that work, I wouldn’t have turned to chewing them; pinching them; slapping them; making them burn, chafe, and bleed. But for now, I just like to squeeze your girly tits like water balloons on the hottest day in August. I feel your hard nipples oozing their baby juice through the wet black silk onto my palms. I can’t tell if I’m in an ass or a cunt. I’m too busy fucking, looking at the faint canary sheen of dimmed halogen spotlights on the black slip you’re wearing.
You are downstairs making coffee. Many of your tastes still linger on my tongue. I steal the opportunity to peek into your closet. I’m immediately drawn to the crumpled pink slip on the floor, but there’s something dark splattered on it. I’m hoping that it’s paint. Why is it that everyone I end up going home with lately is unemployed? If this were the first floor, I would just hop out of the bedroom window right now. Instead, I pull out a glossy porn magazine from the short stack next to the slip. It has a caramel-colored guy on the cover, heavily retouched, pointing his special gift right at me. I look inside to see more pictures of him, maybe an asshole shot. But that’s probably asking too much from this publication. I find the section featuring him, but all the pages are stuck together. I decide not to pull them apart and risk tearing them. I wonder how long ago you spewed your wad across these pages. Last week? Five years ago? I find a page that is not stuck to another one. On it, a darker-skinned boy sprawls with much less of everything to offer than the cover guy. There’s a grayish powder in the crevice between the two pages. I touch it with my finger and consider wiping it on the slip. It’s the ash from a lit and then forgotten cigarette that was dangling from your mouth. I see you naked, hunched directly over the photograph with your hands full, puffing away. I smell your smoky flannel bedsheets and suck the ash off my finger. I’m hard again.
You are onstage singing at a big club. Everyone stops dancing to watch you, waiting to see if you will live up to expectations. You meet me backstage after your performance, after the fans have left. Your theatrical makeup makes you look clownish and in that formfitting outfit, your nipples look bigger than they are. I want to touch them, but they are sealed tight. Your clothes have become part of your skin. You kiss me. I taste your stage makeup; the powder sticks to my beard and I snort it up my nose. It numbs my gums and my tongue. I can’t feel you anymore. I can’t tell if I’m hard or not, but I follow you back to the apartment. Since I can’t remove your clothes, I decide to wear the scarlet slip myself. I feel the silk caressing my torso, teasing my ass. I’m hard all right. And so are you. You make me lick your clothes all over. It’s payback time. You smack me around with your big hands. I’m on my stomach, gasping for air. It would feel nice if I could cry. You ask me to describe what’s in the picture on the wall above your bed, but I can’t speak. You’re lubing me up with fat fingers. I can’t remember which apartment you mean, which bed, which picture. You’re starting to slip that latex-covered, coal-black slab into me. I realize the picture above your bed is the same picture above every bed that I’ve ever fucked in and I’ve never turned on the light to look at it.
Ad libitum Da capo
KNIVES AND ROSES
Sean Meriwether
When your eyes close, that night slams into your mind. The skinny thug moving toward you, the gun in his hand quivering, You fucking faggot, a shot eclipsing all sound. Eyes open, the vision of him hangs sharply before you, a flash of light in a dark room. It never fades.
Your boyfriend, Richard, asks when you’re going to let it go. It’s been three months, he says. I hate seeing you like this. You close your eyes and turn away.
You’re back behind the bar, the junkie with the gun rushes in the front door, chaotic energy jerking his sinewy limbs. The dark pistol vibrates as it rises to meet you. Give me your cash. A nervous laugh explodes from your throat. His pinched face sours and the gun connects with your head in a blinding tang. You drop to the dirty floor and he stands over you, larger than life. Don’t you fucking move. You taste copper and snot and you don’t move.
The kid bangs the cash register open and wads the cash into his fist, slams the fist into his pocket; an exaggerated turn, every muscle in his body moving, and the gun is inches from your throbbing face. You fucking faggot, he says. It echoes in your head, louder with each repetition, purging up memories of your high school locker room.
You avoid the dark orifice of the gun and study the tattoo scrawled across the chalky underbelly of his arm, a long blade inked from wrist to elbow swarmed by angry roses. Each rose-bud is puckered like a virgin’s asshole, and a slim blade projects beyond its tight lips—an orchestra of potential pain. The black lines are jagged, the red already fading. Amateur, you say to yourself. Distinguishing feature to tell the police. You have three seconds to study it before the blast knocks you back.
The gunshot is like the clap of huge hands; not loud enough to cause the spreading burn in your shoulder. You touch warmth with your opposite hand, your fingers come away red and sticky and you stare at them like you stared at the tattoo. This is important , you think. I’m bleeding. You look into his confused blue eyes—they’d be beautiful in another situation—and he says it again, Faggot.
Your eyes pop open and Richard is staring at you. He worries about what you’re thinking. You tell him to leave you alone.
The police interviewed you in the hospital while you were hooked up to monitors that you could hear but can’t see. You told the two cops about the tattoo, its image so clear in the blur of events that it took on surrealistic importance. The cops promised to catch and prosecute the punk bastard to the fullest extent of the law, but they were going to need your cooperation. They urged you to come down to the station and look at some pictures. One cop handed you a card and told you to call when you were ready.
You didn’t tell them about You fucking faggot. You blamed it on the painkillers and the shock, but you knew the truth. You planned to tell the police the next morning, then when you got out of the hospital, then when you were looking at mug shots, but you never do tell them. You don’t tell anyone.
The cops weren’t optimistic as you poured over books of pictures that blended into the same face. Headshot, profile. Headshot, profile. Hundreds of criminals you realized were on the streets. None of them was your tattooed man. The police have no leads.
Richard turns all Oprah on you. He says, You can’t live your life as a victim. You have to take control of your life. You tell him to shut up.
The tattoo comes alive in your dreams. The roses dart off the Medusa head of the knife and fly at you. You are frozen as the roseblades slice through your clothes, teasing your hot flesh with their pinpricks. You lie beneath the blue-eyed entity in the darkness as your mutilated clothes disintegrate. Faggot, he says. You fucking faggot. The knife rams your ass, holy and searing, until you are reshaped in its form. In his blue eyes you are his tattoo, swaddled in roses. You wake up in a cold sweat with a guilty hard-on and roll away from Richard’s sleeping form.
You start drinking so you can sleep, then take over-the-counter sleeping pills, then prescriptions, but they only make you groggy and more depressed. You stop showering and dressing. The television is your only connection to the outside world. Richard says, I can’t watch you self-destruct. You need help.
You agree to disagree. Richard moves in with his friend Cathy. The apartment is dead without him. You drink yourself into a stupor and wake up with your face in the toilet. This can’t go on, you tell the soiled ceramic rim.
Going outside makes you vulnerable, the tattoo man might be around any corner, behind every tree, but you begin to realize you want to see him. Your alcohol-fucked mind cranks into gear with plans for capture. If the police can’t find him, you will.
You hit the lowest local bars, slopping up cheap drafts while you attempt to private dick the bartenders. They eye you suspiciously; you don’t belong in their world like the kid didn’t belong in yours. No one knows the skinny guy with the knife and roses tattoo, but they always suggest another bar to check in.
Between bars you’re drawn to street punks and hustlers, boys who claim to be straight but jerk off for twenty dollars while you watch. You pick the ones with tattoos; they sit in the passenger seat of your car and pull on their soft cocks, talking big. You ask to see their tattoos, their malnourished flesh graphed with black lines and curves, skulls and Virgin Marys, knives and roses. You touch these marks, when they let you, tracing a map to him. He’s here, you whisper.
The hustlers send you to tattoo parlors, which are secreted in rundown houses, crowded trailers, and the back rooms of bars. You tell them who you’re looking for, describe the swirl of roses surrounding the knife, even sketch it from memory, but they can’t help you. The kid probably did it himself, they say.
Richard is in your apartment when you come home one night. It happened months ago. Why can’t you just let it go and move on with your life? You tell him to fuck off and throw him out.
Richard will never understand how the tattooed man changed you; he gave you a mirror to your true self. You want to go back and fight him, do something instead of sit inertly on the floor, but you can’t change the past or yourself. You swallow faggot until it fills the hole inside you with noise.
You pick up a gun in a pawnshop downtown. Its weight is comforting in your hand and you are energized by the black metal, as if it held a charge. You pace the apartment knocking off visions of the tattooed man with pretend potshots, Pow-pow.
The nightly dreams begin to fray; you are no longer paralyzed beneath him. You lunge out of the way in time, pushing him down with your feet. You knock the gun from his hand and turn it on him. You grab his loose jeans, yanking them down and exposing his hard cock, and he’s crying, Please do it. Your sleeping mouth explodes with the salty taste of him.
Lying awake in bed you draft a revenge fantasy. The gun is in your hand, the rose and knife tattoo inked across your arm. He’s huddled on the floor, completely under your control. You say, Suck my cock. He fights you with his eyes, but his mouth complies. You tell him to bend over, faggot, and he angles his lanky frame over the bar, exposing the moist pucker of his asshole. You open him up and fuck him, beating him with your cock. Each thrust is pleasure and payback. The tattoo on your arm swirls out to inscribe both of you, burning across your flesh like fire, until the knife is you, the rose him. You shoot into your fist as you imagine exploding in his crack.
The sketch of the tattoo is propped next to you as the ink artist rivets it into your flesh. You study the image that takes shape on your forearm, insisting that the lines be jagged instead of smooth, the red faded instead of full. He says, It’s your arm. The knife extends from your wrist to your elbow. The roseblades blossom across your skin, their puckered tips ripe with potential pain. It takes four excruciating hours, but the pain absolves you, you squint out the first tears you’ve shed in a year, then cry openly as the ink artist bends to his work without a word. He called me a faggot, you tell him. The man doesn’t respond.
You’re a walking oxymoron, you joke, an empowered gun-toting faggot, the tattoo still raw and flushed with blood. You lodge the .38 in the front of your jeans, a second cock, and swagger outside, back to the bar where it all started. It feels like an exact replica of the original scene. The bar is deserted except for the new bartender, a comforting bald guy who looks like a listener. You aren’t there to talk.
