Boy of the Westend

by Zack

  Mike snorted a humorous sniff with a wrinkle of his nose. “I’ll bear that in mind, Jim.” He held out his hand.

  Jim stared from under lowering brows, then dropped his pistol, stretched the fingers and took Mike’s hand, shook briefly, and then turned with a shake of the head and walked with his usual swagger back to the office. Mike watched his back until he mingled with the light sidewalk crowds in the direction of winged Eros rising erotically above Piccadilly Circus.

  Another goodbye. Life seemed full of them.

  That first year at the London Film School passed in a whirl, 1978 come and gone as a series of movie vignettes. Days spent learning what lenses do (for which Mike was already pretty well prepared, thanks to Fox Talbot), depth of field calculations, setting focal lengths and exposures, reading light meters in direct or reflective mode. Studio lighting, the art of key and fill, flood and rim light, yashmaks, barn doors, adjusting for color temperature with blue or orange gels. Use of the fabulous-quality Nagra tape recorder, spooling microphone cables correctly, recording and levels, playback, sound quality assessment, microphones of various types, sound effects recording and foley, crystal synch systems to the camera, transferring tape to magnetic film. Cameras and loading the film for 16mm and 35mm, report sheets for the labs, organizing “rushes,” the daily rushed prints off the negative for viewing and editing. Editing machinery, tape slicers, Pic-Synchs, Motorola running machines, split spools, synching rushes.

  In between there were lectures on subjects to do with make-up, production, location management, dealing with actors and studio crews, and film appreciation. Many a time Mike found himself working through the night at the cramped facilities; sometimes he went home and crashed in his own bedroom, but frequently a “night in the school” was actually a Rosen summons to his almost permanent Hilton suite and in return for a slap-up dinner a legs-in-the-air-fuck to follow. There was no love in such sessions, precious little affection even. But Mike put up with it. He justified being a kept “fuck-puppet” by repeating that once film school was complete and he’d arranged some job as promised, James would tire of him and let him go, a free man again.

  And yet there were disturbing signs as the months sped by that James Rosen was obsessively proprietorial. He might lose interest in his possessions, but he didn’t like anyone else getting their hands on them when he no longer had a use for them. For a whole period between September 1978 and some time in April 1979, Rosen was barely ever in England, and so Mike’s sex life went from frantic to non-existent. He had bumped into Julian a couple of times, but as he had feared the relationship was distinctly cool, without being aloof. Even though Mike had no aspirations to blow his friend again (or did he, really?), it was clear there would be no chance of that anyway—Jules had a slinky girlfriend, and he made no bones about how much he got from her. After the second time, Mike never saw Julian again—he was born of the straight world, Mike of the gay.

  Once, he popped over to Hammersmith intending to visit the Incognito store to buy the latest issue of Playguy only to find it closed down. A small card stuck inside the grimy window bore the legend:

  All magazine enquiries contact: Aiden Parnell

  Tel: 577 4653

  The following day during the lunch hour he shoved coins into the school’s pay phone and dialed the number. To his surprise the breathy voice at the other end said, “Aiden Parnell Publications?”

  Mike explained the reason for his call and discovered the operation had changed. Aiden Parnell had retained control of some titles and now worked at a studio set-up in Muswell Hill. He informed Mike he no longer published Playguy but that was no reason not to pay a visit. “By all means pop ’round, dahling, you might like one of the other magazines. After six? I’m here all the while. Do you look as hunky as you sound?”

  In spite of some reservations (Daphne’s words about modeling echoed ominously), Aiden’s last words intrigued Mike and against his better judgment he decided to risk it. With his father on tour again, Mike had free access to the car. He drove up to Highgate, past his old school and down Southwood Lane to cross the A1 and then up again to Muswell Hill. He parked the Alfa on the asphalt hardpan outside a rather rundown looking one-story building that housed the magazine publisher. One half of the semi-glazed front door stood partly open. He stood uncertainly just inside.

  “Hello?”

  “Door on the right, come on in,” came the disembodied voice he recognized from the phone.

  Mike walked through to enter a large, somewhat ramshackle room, with three work tables around the edges and a massive trestle table in the middle, behind which, wreathed in a nimbus of cigarette smoke, sat Aiden Parnell. He seemed to be alone. Mike had expected someone much older than this sprightly guy. He jumped to his feet, dropping a lit cigarette into an overflowing ashtray, and came around his desk to greet Mike with an appraising look. He was as lean as Mike though inches shorter, probably a few years older, into his twenties, and conservatively dressed in a blue-and-black -check shirt tucked into new looking 501s. His dark hair was neat and cut short. The skin around his bright eyes crinkled when he smiled.

  “My goodness, darling,” he greeted Mike breathily. “You are quite the looker, aren’t you?”

  “Er, thanks.” Mike laughed nervously. “I was wondering why you stopped doing Playguy?”

  Aiden whipped around, grabbed a Dunhill from a packet on his table, lit it, and whirled back again. “Not butch enough, dear-heart. I prefer a bit of beef in my men. We might get back to the chickens again some time, when I find a photographer into the slender and the fatally wilting. But for the time being HIS Exclusive is my thing… and you would certainly grace a few of its pages.” Aiden inclined his head in examination. “Hmm, I really ought to get you in front of the camera.” He ran a hand lightly over the outline of Mike’s chest and abdominals. He did a curious mini-spring back as if Mike had given off a spark of static, gave a delighted shrug, a happy grin, and a nervous, self-deprecating laugh which managed to add up to a campy kind of command.

  Mike quickly headed off what he presumed the demand in Aiden’s eyes required: the shedding of his clothes. “I— I don’t think I’d like to do that, really.” It felt a bit too close to what Jim used to expect of him, selling his body. He couldn’t possibly risk James catching sight of him showing his all in a magazine. And he naturally thought there would be more to stripping off than merely modeling. “Honestly, I really only came to see what the replacement for Playguy is like…”

  Aiden must have seen the concern in his expression, because his mouth screwed into a grimacing pout and he waved the Dunhill around like a smoky wand. “Oh sweet, you’re exceptionally pretty and all, but I don’t touch my models.” He gave a shudder of horror. “No, no, darling. When I fuck it has to be trade, fully paid for and totally disposable after the event—unless they please me in ord inately.” As if to cover up Mike’s gaffe, he turned about again and slipped a magazine from a low pile on the nearest corner of his desk. He held it out. “Or up on the Heath, of course. Here, a copy of HIS Exclusive issue two, just back from the printer.”

  Mike took the magazine, flipped a few pages and saw that the posed men were definitely bigger built than those in Playguy.

  “Do you do mindless anonymous sex?”

  Mike shook his head faintly. Flicking through the pages provided an instant turn-on from spreads of naked male hunkiness. “At the moment I don’t do sex of any kind.” He treated Aiden to a sad, little-boy grin to make his words a lie, but Aiden saw straight through that.

  “You’ve never been on the Heath? That’s terrible. We must go, immediately. You came by car, didn’t you? So we can get there in no time, and it’s not that far out of your way… by the way, where do you live, poppet?”

  “Swiss Cottage—”

  “Bona, my dear, hardly a bijoux diversionette, so you can drop me off later when we’ve had our fill, or rather when I’ve given some pert botty a fill. Come!”

  Mike felt t
hings were getting a little out of hand here. Aiden was barely an acquaintance, and yet something of the compelling drive in his twinkling eyes jabbed at Mike’s libido and tweaked an old Highgate memory. Was the “Heath” what the guys at school joked about, where men hung about to have sex with other men?

  Mike kept his gratis copy of HIS Exclusive, tucked under his arm as Aiden swept him out, kicking the door shut behind him after checking a jangle of keys on a fob hanging from his belt. Mike had no real idea where they were going and, as it turned out, non-driving Aiden had no idea how to get where he knew they were headed. “I take taxis, pet, and the driver usually knows.” When he mentioned Whitestone Pond and West Heath, Mike sighed with relief and set out confidently, which was more than he felt. It wasn’t every day he set off in the dark of a spring night with a complete stranger he’d just met, to a destination supposedly straining at the seams with anonymous sex. Fortunately, two years working the Dilly and having sex with strangers provided some confidence he’d be able to handle the experience.

  He parked the Alfa carefully against the grass verge on the wide expanse of roadway surrounding Whitestone Pond. The minute Aiden led the way in a hurried walk that would have been a waddle if it weren’t for the steep downhill track through the encroaching trees, Mike was assailed by a cloak of sexiness engendered by the secret darkness.

  “We enter the Pleasure Dome which Kublai Khan did decree, except I suspect he got his rocks off with minge.”

  Mike felt more than saw Aiden shudder and wondered for the umpteenth time what it was some gay men had against women at every level. He simply never saw the female of the species as a sex object, but clearly many gay men did, with a sense of horror. Why?

  Eventually, the path leveled out and came to an intersection with another crossing it. Mike followed Aiden’s short form, just visible to his increasingly night-adjusted eyesight. They veered right onto the new track, which then emerged into a grassy, triangle-shaped space before plunging back into the overarching trees. He thought he saw furtive movement ahead, a face briefly lit up in the flare of a match put to a cigarette tip. And then they were walking, now slowly, between an avenue of dark figures lurking between the trees. Here and there distant street lights caught sparks from eyes.

  “Up here,” Aiden whispered. He turned off and climbed a sloping track that quickly leveled off.

  Mike slipped on the incline as he followed. At the top of the rise he made out a small clearing where the undergrowth had been pretty much trampled flat by repeated foot traffic. A visceral shock ran through Mike as his eyes resolved the scene. It heaved with men. The atmosphere reeked of lust, literally, for the consequences were being spilled copiously.

  “I’ll meet you back down there on the track in about an hour. Don’t go without me,” Aiden said in a bossy, hoarse whisper.

  Panic set in, but too late, as the publisher vanished between two tree trunks and Mike was alone… well, hardly. Even as he wondered what to do, a lad no older than himself dressed in a loose woolen shirt in a tartan pattern sort of ran into him.

  “Oh, hi, sorry.” A boyish face almost shining in the dull amber sky-glow grinned infectiously and hands groped Mike. Like some attractor machine, the momentary contact drew in two more men, one leather unclad, the other in cut-off denims and a denim shirt flapping open in spite of the chill night. Tartan laughed softly and pulled Mike into a hug and then as quickly slipped to his knees, fumbled with the jeans zipper, and swallowed Mike’s cock the second he had it out. Leather loomed from the night like a battle tank and closed his mouth over Mike’s lips while Denim attacked his rear, made somewhat vulnerable by Tartan having unfastened his jeans. Within a few more seconds the sudden action in the middle of the clearing brought an audience and a phalanx of hands to finger underneath Mike’s increasingly undone clothing.

  As both tits succumbed to assault, Mike knew himself as hard as a rock, and Tartan did a stunning job of bringing him toward an inevitable climax. He wanted to cry out to slow down, that he hadn’t had anything for what seemed like months, not even a solo jerk lately. And how fucking unfair that no one at the film school was either attractive to him or even halfway available anyway. Besides, wasn’t he chaste for James Rosen?…

  Oh, god, Leather’s up my ass—

  And he came. Beneath, Kid Tartan gurgled and slurped, and Mike shot down his throat to a vision of those school kids who once claimed to have stumbled across this witches’ coven of cum-splattered sensuality. As Tartan struggled out from under, Leather bent Mike over forcibly with a yank on his jeans and he felt the penetration push firmly home, his hips held as by a vise. Denim had his substantial dick out and stroked it to a full stiffy, foreskin back, crown glistening in the low light. Leather forced him down harder, and a moment later Denim’s dick was between Mike’s lips. Tartan supplied stroking hands wrapped around his chest to fondle his nipples, and countless invisible fingers stroked, probed, pinched, helped, and hindered. Leather at the rear and Denim at the front spit-roasted Mike in a fury of urgent hip thrusting until he felt the tips of their dicks might meet somewhere in his middle and he feared his body would be black and blue with bruises in the morning.

  And both pulled out to shoot. Not quite in synch. He felt hot spunk splatter his bared spine and then cum slimed his nose, cheeks, and lips. As suddenly as it began, the spunk circus moved on.

  Soft spring blossom worked reasonably well for a wipe down. Mike slumped back against the bole of a tree, quietly gasping while he zipped up and adjusted his damp shirt. He felt a warm pressure against his shoulder as Tartan leaned back beside him. The kid flipped open a box of cigarettes, pulled out two and lit them from the same match. He handed one to Mike without bothering to ask whether he did or not. It was nice of Tartan to be solicitous. Mike took it gratefully and inhaled deeply. He refocused to see the clearing had emptied out a bit.

  “First time up here?” Tartan said softly. He blew out a stream of smoke.

  “Mmm.”

  “Me too. Fun, though, huh?”

  Mike coughed and it turned into a quiet laugh. “I’m going to be sore in the morning. That fucker really drove in.”

  “You give as good as you get. That was a fantastic cum-job.” He reached down and gently rubbed Mike’s balls.

  “Will I see you again?”

  Tartan smiled lopsidedly. “I don’t think that’s the rules.”

  “This place has rules?”

  “Everywhere has rules. So we might run across each other another night here.”

  Mike nodded. The rules, yes. After all, there were the James Rosen rules to be obeyed, Cap’n, sir.

  Twenty minutes and another cadged ciggie later, Aiden strolled down the main path, peering left and right until he spotted Mike seated on the stump of a tree. “Darling, there you are.”

  Mike got up and joined him. They began to walk toward the hilly climb back up to Whitestone Pond.

  “Did you have some fun?”

  “You could say so. Thanks for making me come, which I did, by the way. I don’t even know any names of the guys.”

  Aiden paused long enough to light up. “That’s the point. The Hampstead Heath rules of engagement. Anonymous and mindless sex. The only thing better is a well behaved puppy fresh out of the shower, gagged and ready on the bed.”

  “You don’t…” Mike blurted out, unhappy at the thought of anyone being tied up.

  Aiden laughed easily. “No, it’s a figure of speech. I have a couple of regulars. Now, are you sure I can’t entice you to throw off your clothes for my camera, not even for ready money, as Lady Windemere was wont to say?”

  Mike expressed his certainty. “I prefer it behind the camera. If you ever go into making movies, give me a call—” The words died on his lip and he froze at the unmistakeable sight of a policeman peering into the interior of the Alfa where he’d parked it against the verge opposite the edge of the Pond. “Oh shit.”

  “No need to fret, pet.”

  “He’ll
know where we’ve been.”

  “Just out for a breath of fresh air. Good evening, officer!”

  The cop straightened up and glared at them. “This your vehicle, sir?”

  Mike nodded. “Well, it’s my father’s actually.”

  “Might I ask to see your driving license, please?”

  A quick fumble in his jacket and Mike handed over his mint-fresh license.

  The policeman produced a small flashlight and illuminated the papers. He clicked the torch off, handed the papers back. “You young gents should be careful, out this time of the evening. Especially around here.” He glanced down at West Heath. “Some very unsavory characters wander these woods.”

  “We’re just on our way home,” Mike said.

  “And we will be most careful, be assured on that point, constable,” Aiden added with mock formality. “Bloody pigs,” he amended as soon as Mike pulled away and headed toward Highgate. “Smile politely at you one moment, next they’re bursting in through the front door on a raid for obscene material.”

  Aiden waved a cheery farewell when Mike dropped him off at the studio in Muswell Hill. On the way back to Swiss Cottage, he cast his mind over the events of the evening. No denying it, the unexpected explosion of sex had been fun, and while his dick and gonads had loved the action ( and, admit it, your ass ), it left him empty deep inside.

  I want to be in love and be loved. Oh, Kevin… it could have been so good as we grew together. Where are you now?

  But he knew dwelling on it could only lead to melancholy. Better to concentrate on finishing the film course.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Transfer Job

  Tom Pincheon groaned in frustration at a low thunder of feet from the wooden floorboards above the studio area. “Oh fuck! Cut!”

  The two actors sighed and relaxed while the Bolivian student whose name Mike could never remember ( yeah, Chambi ) straightened up from the viewfinder of a giant 35mm Mitchell BNC camera, a machine probably older than the combined ages of the six students forming the crew gathered around it. In the penultimate term of the film school course, Tom was director of the studio synch-sound exercise from his own script. Mike, buried under a pair of heavy headphones, sat uncomfortably crouched on the hard floorboards of the small studio attending to his industry-standard Nagra tape recorder.