My coconspirator had gone from amiable teddy bear to Gestapo bully-boy sex fiend in mere seconds. I looked on from the doorjamb, still holding two plastic bags full of auxiliary yogurt and two dozen eggs we’d picked up at a bodega on Jonathan’s block. Incidentally, Peter had insisted that the eggs be free-range and the yogurt organic, which cemented the image I was building of a caring, considerate person.
“Get fucking undressed,” Peter said. I recoiled with fear and briefly reckoned how easy it would be to dump the groceries and make a run for freedom, leaving these two lovebirds in flagrante delicto. This was rapidly beginning to seem very distant from the definition of sploshing that I’d been given. This poor bastard Jonathan was being treated like a sexual ashtray by a guy who’d been a gentle giant minutes earlier. I began to think through how my failure to go through with this would go down with Michael Martin, Nerve’s editor in chief. One of Michael’s conditions for taking the head position at Nerve was that I should be paid full-time to write. Up until then, I wrote the column in between reordering ink for the printer, answering customer service e-mails, and bothering the female interns, and for no extra pay. When he joined the company, Michael made it clear that if ever I felt I was in physical danger during an assignment, I should leave immediately. I certainly didn’t want to betray his confidence in me by using a lifeline—something I did only once in three years of sexual misadventures.
“We are about to fuck this faggot’s shit up,” said Peter as he intensified his thrusts into poor Jonathan’s face.
I stepped backward into the bathroom and slowly peeled off my clothes, folded them into a neat pile, and set them on the tank of the toilet. I stopped short of stripping completely naked, thinking that my nudity would be mistaken as a green light for full involvement. More important, the ongoing fight-or-flight process had rendered my penis both tiny and useless. As if I wasn’t already embarrassed enough. I didn’t realize I was shaking until I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I splashed my face with water. I’d seen this technique used in movies to provide a burst of clarity in harrowing situations, but it didn’t do the trick. Most of the water ran down my elbows and onto the crotch of my light gray briefs. It looked as though I’d peed in my underwear and only served to heighten the tension. I splashed more water on more underpants to detract from the singular pee patch until the whole front section was wet through and charcoal in color.
“What are you doing in there?” said Peter at full volume. He placed emphasis on “doing,” insinuating that I was wasting the opportunity to witness a homoerotic home invasion to clip my toenails or take a crap.
“Just a minute!” I said. I dabbed the excess water off my underpants with a towel then used it to wipe the accumulating beads of sweat from my brow. Jonathan made a guttural sound that was followed by a thud as he received what sounded like a powerful blow to the solar plexus.
I studied my face in the mirror. I was having a sense of a feeling that I get almost weekly. The feeling is a distant cousin to déjà vu. I feel like I have woken up in somebody else’s life and am momentarily paralyzed as I try and retrace my life’s steps and missteps to make some sense of how I arrived here, with them, in this moment, an opportunity, some bad luck begetting some good luck, a serendipitous meeting, a friend of a friend, dropping a name, being discovered, hitting my lowest ebb, my accent, a morsel of unrefined talent, the unflagging need to impress other people, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, drunken grandstanding at a party, a good feeling, going with the flow, it’s a small world after all, what the hell, I might die tomorrow.
“Grant!” said Peter.
“Don’t use my name!” I called back, instantly incriminating myself.
“Shhhhhhh,” hissed Jonathan, taking a moment’s rest from servicing his master.
Whack went the butt of the beer bottle on Jonathan’s skull. “Shut the fuck up!” said Peter.
As I mentally prepared myself to rejoin the fray, I reminded myself that I was being paid to be here, I was on the clock. None of the kids I grew up with would believe that a job like this even existed, let alone that “Grunt” Stoddard would be the person who ended up doing it. A social pariah back at home, I was now being paid to participate in bizarre sex acts, making up for lost time and enjoying an infinitely higher standard of living to boot.
I opened the bathroom door to see that Peter had stripped off his maroon sweatpants over his hi-top sneakers, but left his jacket and T-shirt on. He tipped his head back and dumped half of his beer into his own gullet and the other half into his fellator’s eyes, which evoked a faint cry of pain.
“What did you fucking say to me?” said Peter. He rapped Jonathan hard on the cranium with the bottle whilst waiting for an answer. Jonathan momentarily took his pistonlike hand off his member to give the universal sign language for “please keep it down.”
“Who do you think you are?” hissed Peter, reverting to his stage whisper. “I make the fucking rules here, you whoring come slut.”
Thanks to Lisa Carver and her sex contest, this wasn’t the first time I’d been in the same room with two naked and fully engorged men, but it was the first time I’d seen man-on-man action in the flesh. During sex, it seemed that there was nothing effete or sissified about the gay experience at all. It was something rougher, ruder, more brutish and manly than I had personally mustered before or since.
Peter briefly broke character and shot me a knowing wink.
“Are you getting all this?” he mouthed to me, pretending to be taking notes with an imaginary pad and pencil. I nodded that I was and Peter fought hard to stifle a chuckle. He pointed down at Jonathan’s head, as if to say “get a load of this guy,” and then held his palm to his beaming smile like an embarrassed Japanese schoolgirl. He looked down at my drenched underpants and shot me a quizzical look.
“Is everything okay?” he mouthed and grabbed two fistfuls of Jonathan’s thick wiry black hair, pulling his head back and forth along the length of his cock.
“Fine,” I mouthed back. “Water.”
I took the bags of eggs and yogurt to the small kitchen nook and set them on the counter. I opened the fridge to find most of the items on our shopping list packed tightly onto the shelves. I picked up an egg and showed it to Peter, with my eyebrows arched. He shook his head no.
“Gimme five,” he mouthed. He signed the numerical value with his fingers.
Without his penis ever escaping Jonathan’s generous lips, Peter then pushed our continually masturbating host onto his back, got down on his haunches above Jonathan’s face, and began drilling down into his face with gusto, his flapping hairy buttocks pulsing in the bluish light of the TV. Jonathan’s eyes were fixated on the smooth studs enjoying an impromptu pool party. I watched in awe at the mechanics of Peter and Jonathan for a minute or two before I caught sight of a fiesta of family pictures atop Jonathan’s Ikea shelving. There was our man Jonathan holding up a freshly caught fish with a young man in a frame with the word “Uncle” embossed upon it. Next to it was a picture of Jonathan at a wedding, kissing a lovely-looking girl on the cheek as a man I suspected to be his father looked on. The third picture was a younger Jonathan with several other guys wearing their Greek letters and giving effusive thumbs-up signs.
Jonathan tapped Peter on the shoulder like a submitting wrestler and motioned him closer.
“He wants you to start throwing stuff at him,” amplified Peter. I walked over to the fridge and pulled out a large container of French Vanilla yogurt. Taking a large, icy-cold handful, I flung it at Jonathan’s manically bouncing testicles.
“Yymmppfff!” he said, his airway stretched to accommodate Peter’s bulky appendage. I was worried that I had somehow hurt him, a fear that quickly dissipated as his stroking increased in both speed and vigor.
“Give him more!” commanded Peter. I grabbed the bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup and painted long sweeping brown lines the width of his hirsute torso and thighs and finishing with a flourish of concentric
circles around his private parts. Another indecipherable yell emanated from deep within Jonathan’s chest. He switched his masturbatory grip from the one-handed underhand grip to the unorthodox two-handed interlocking position, with thumbs pointed skyward, creating extra pressure between the heels of the hands. I ran back and forth from the kitchen nook with handfuls of eggs that I cracked one by one over his groin, great globs of crème fraîche that I catapulted between his hairy thighs with the aid of a serving spoon, bright arcs of ketchup squirted high into the air, while trying to get as little as possible on Peter, who continued to happily, obliviously bounce on top of Jonathan’s face. Our victim briefly let go of himself for the first time and hooked his arms over Peter’s thighs. The combined smell of the rapidly warming dairy products and my willing participation in a homosexual act was starting to make me feel dizzy, so I stepped off the Pollock-inspired tarp and took a breather.
“What is wrong with this fucking pervert?” asked Peter. He positioned his anus directly onto Jonathan’s lips.
“I really don’t know,” I said. I was unaware that Peter was trying to initiate a call-and-response routine.
“It’s because he’s a disgusting little faggot, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What is he?”
“Disgusting little faggot,” I mumbled.
Jonathan’s face emerged from between Peter’s cheeks to shoot me a haunted glare that I found incredibly disturbing, before being quickly engulfed in flesh once again.
“Yes, but that’s not all, is it?”
“Nope.”
I hate when people make you grope around for an answer that they already know. It’s terribly condescending.
“Well, tell him what he is!”
“Bad? A bad man…uh…boy! He is a very bad boy!”
Peter looked over his shoulder with a disappointed expression. “He is an ass-licking queer, the come-gargling lowest of the low that doesn’t deserve to know happiness. That’s what he is!”
Jonathan moaned in ecstasy, but I found that listening to these nasty things, let alone making up insults of my own, was incredibly challenging.
“Um…he is a worthless piece of shit?” I stammered, but my intonation was all wrong and the utterance sounded more like a question.
I knew that Jonathan really wanted to be humiliated and abused, but as the words left my lips I wanted to recall them all. I imagined Jonathan mincing around D’Agostino, spending his emergency savings on food that would ultimately be matted into his copious tufts of chest hair, and I pitied the poor man. I wondered if he had a huge cast of rotating characters that would come over to defile him and his apartment, or if his first time with Peter was the actualization of a fantasy years in the making.
Peter’s frenzied thirty-second finale saw Jonathan’s head loudly bouncing off the floor. Spent, Peter dismounted and stood up.
“I am really feeling the burn in my quads,” he said before giving Jonathan a joyless punt in the ribs for seemingly no reason.
Jonathan had been furiously jerking himself off for over thirty-eight minutes, without resolution. He beckoned Peter closer and whispered something in his ear, inspiring his tormentor to spit in his eyes.
“He says that he can’t pay us,” whispered Peter. “He just lost his job.”
The money would have been nice but I was far too shell-shocked to care.
“And he wants us to piss on him,” he said. Peter sighed with gravitas. “He made me do this last time.” This detail was also mysteriously absent from the story’s first telling.
“Then we’re out of here,” said the big galoot. “I promise.” He picked up on my reticence to honor his wishes.
I GRUDGINGLY STOOD on one side of Jonathan’s prone body, Peter stood on the other. I exposed myself for the first time and took aim. Ordinarily, a knocked elbow at a urinal can prevent me from urinating no matter how badly I needed to go beforehand, so I wasn’t entirely confident that I could complete the task at hand. To my total shock, I was instantly aiming a jet of aqua vitae at Jonathan’s torso. He then raised his hips to signal that he wanted me to pee on his genitals and then opened his mouth, which I obligingly filled to the brim with hot urine, which produced a most satisfying sound. Jonathan writhed in ecstasy, his fist pumping ever faster. Peter stood with one hand on his hip and his eyes shut tight, attempting to clear his mind. I finished and stepped back, disgusted at the mess that was Jonathan.
“Would you mind looking away?” whispered Peter.
I spun around and again studied the smiling friends of the side of Jonathan I’d never get to know. Peter had hardly been human since his initial transformation when we first entered the apartment; it calmed me greatly to realize that the Jekyll and Hyde transformation wasn’t permanent. I watched a few minutes of a rough but silent locker-room gang bang and felt glad that I was normal enough to get off without the need for abuse, pornography, urine, and groceries.
“Hey,” said Peter. He sighed. He was visibly rattled. “Can you go into the bathroom?”
I obligingly walked in and wiped some of the culinary shrapnel off of my legs and scooped out the dollop of ketchup that sat in the depression behind my collarbone. I took another look in the mirror and wondered if tonight was yet another of those forks in the road that would send my life on a hitherto unimagined trajectory. It had become apparent that large swathes of my family were reading my column. My mother had recently called, after what sounded like a few glasses of wine, and said grandly, “What you’re doing: Is it right?”
I said that I thought it was. I then averted a potentially damaging and definitely embarrassing confrontation by telling her how cool and open-minded everybody thought she was, which is partially true and totally did the trick. Up until tonight, it had all been racy yet forgivable stuff. Wrapping up a brutal, hard-core, gay home invasion by treating the victim to a golden shower seemed not right. Going to college, moving to New York City, and becoming a writer had set me apart from my peers back at home, but getting paid for chucking pudding at another man’s erection while he suffers a merciless forty-minute throat-boning put me in another galaxy entirely.
I quickly got dressed and tried to make sense of the evening’s events.
“It’s no use,” said Peter. He grimaced through the crack in the open door. “I really can’t go. Can you go wait by the elevator?”
I took one last lingering look at Jonathan. He looked both sexually enraptured and terribly hurt, his body twitching in a glistening, Technicolor swill that I had helped create. His eyes traced me across his studio and out of his life forever.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” said Peter.
I quietly closed the front door behind me and took some deep breaths by the elevator.
Close to seven minutes later, I heard a splash and orgasmic moan before Peter came barreling out the door and down the hallway. He waved his hands above his head.
“Call the elevator!” he shouted.
Peter bundled me through the opening doors and hit the lobby button half a dozen times in rapid succession.
“Oh my God,” he said. Peter gasped for breath, and finally satisfied that we were heading downward and away from Jonathan, said, “I drank half a gallon of water and I still couldn’t go. In the end I went into the bathroom, pissed in a cup, and threw it in his face!”
The irony of his intermittent stage fright wasn’t lost on Peter, who began giggling uncontrollably as we ran out of the building under the damning gaze of the doorman.
“Can’t wait to read about this!” said Peter. We walked north on Amsterdam Avenue for a block. I felt awkward.
“Do you want to get a drink?” I asked as we passed the Western bar. The experience had left me weak and I wasn’t ready to be alone just yet.
“I’d love to but I really have to run to a drinks thing, a work drink thing in TriBeCa,” said Peter. “But this was kind of fun, wasn’t it?”
“Totally!” I felt sad to the bone.
; It was after 11:00 p.m. and the A train was now running on the local track, which meant I had forty minutes to ruminate upon the evening. Anna would be waiting. I needed to hold her to restore some semblance of normalcy in my life.
I said good-bye to Peter in a flurry of awkward pleasantries and promises of a burgeoning friendship between us.
“We should definitely hang out,” he said a split second before I could.
“Oh, definitely.”
“I mean I think we sort of have to now.”
“Absolutely.”
I haven’t seen or heard from Peter since.
I waited on the freezing platform for almost fifteen minutes. I was cold and rattled.
I called Michael from a pay phone. I recounted the evening’s events to him and he agreed that the evening was so far from the definition of the fetish that I should try sploshing with Anna in the comfort of my own home as soon as I felt up to it.
I needed a hug. I studied other people in the car and decided that they could tell what I’d been up to. I felt disgusted with myself. We stalled at 125th Street for another ten minutes and I got home just after midnight. Upon opening the door, Anna could tell something had happened to me.
“Just hold me!” I said and fell into the apartment and her arms.
“What happened?” she asked. I always teased Anna for being cold and ruthless, but on rare occasions such as this one, the caregiver, the nurturer, came through.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I think that it’s going to affect me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
I’d been naked in a room with two fully engorged men having relations. When my sister was twelve, Pat Crouch, who lived across the street from our house growing up, told her that I was “going to be a gay.” Prancing around with naked dudes for a living went a good way to realizing her prophecies. Explaining to Pat Crouch that I was purely doing it for money would have only exacerbated things.
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