There were tears in my eyes
And my lips were parched dry from hot breath.
My pelvis was just
An amalgam of lust
As he labored for his little death.
Then, when he’d gotten off,
He got off with a cough
And came out with a whispered, “Hot shit.”
Then my shadow obscured
The asshole that allured
As I felt for, then fell into it.
Oh, the state of that hole
As I put in my pole!
It was drippily, slippily wet,
More a sluice than a slice,
Or, to be more concise,
As appealing as asshole can get.
For the thought of the cocks
That had shot molten rocks
Up that gully that so fully gaped,
And their bouncing behinds
As they blew out their minds,
Made it their poles and assholes I raped.
My vagina on view
As I fucked the foul flue,
My buns billowing open and shut,
I muscled him mean,
For I envied that queen
All the men who had been up his butt.
I was wholly aware
Of my hole in the air
As I fucked in his slushy, hot mush,
And my knowing the next
Dick desired what I flexed
Made me pop in that slop with a gush.
Then I sighed and half-swooned
And withdrew from the wound,
Shoving by the next guy in the chain,
Grunting, “Fucking great gash,”
As I stalked off to splash
In the shower and piss down the drain.
As I strolled the cell-block,
Looking now for rock cock,
There were plenty of men still lined up
With their towels on their necks,
Salivating for sex
Mad to add to the cum in the cup.
It was just a dark cell,
Not the heavenly hell
Where I’d just been the man of all men.
But the line, it would seem,
Was still dreaming that dream,
And the drunk guy was just going in.
They were zombies in thrall
To a mystical call
Which no longer now beat in my bone,
And their queen a mere pawn
As I passed them by, drawn
By a mystical call of my own.
I located by smell
A pitch-black orgy-cell,
Where on hard cement platforms and shelves
Men beyond or above
Holding out for true love
Polymorphously proffered themselves.
There I felt lots of rungs
And I smelt lots of bungs,
Then I fell down ass-up on the floor
To get fucked by a crew
Of butt-fuckers whose goo
I’d been fucking in minutes before.
TROUBLE LOVES ME
Steven Zeeland
Handsome young sailors half my age seduced me, gave me drugs, and pressured me to video-tape them performing lewd acts.
I never wanted to make a porn video. It happened by accident. With some help from the ghost of a beefcake photographer….
I know it sounds farfetched.
Running a background check on me will not likely make my claim appear any more immediately credible. My record includes authoring several books that could at first glance be mistaken for porn. Especially Military Trade, the cover of which depicts a nude Marine. And in various interviews I’ve called myself a “military chaser.”
But only for want of a better term.
To the extent that I have it in me to be at all a predator, I have always ended up captured by the game.
Bremerton, Washington—January 2001: Navy Stray Cat Blues
“Dude, I really need to jerk off.”
I turn my head to meet the sailor’s eye. But he suddenly looks worried at what he’s just said and doesn’t give me a chance to comment before hastily adding, “Hey, you don’t mind me calling you ‘dude’?”
Pro and I are lying on separate parallel couches, watching DVD porn on my living room TV.
I feign a frown. “No….”
Pro’s accent is so subtle I don’t really think of him as a Texan. But it occurs to me that back where he comes from young men still say “ma’am” and “sir.” And that maybe he just now remembered that the year he was born I graduated high school.
“Why would I mind you calling me ‘dude’?”
But before he can open his mouth I tell him that if he wants any lube, in the cabinet next to the TV he’ll find three different varieties, and I add which brand I use.
Pro’s preferences are not the same as mine. But he doesn’t take offense at my using a petroleum-based lubricant.
Pro likes his lube slick and water-soluble. And the skin tone pixels he studies on my monitor are of a different body type.
My own gaze is less focused, intermittently shifts offscreen, and especially during the longer super-slow-mo intervals unabashedly favors his body.
Pro’s body is flawless. His face is more handsome than any in my straight-porn DVD collection. He doesn’t mind being admired with his shirt off and his jeans around his ankles.
But Pro isn’t a hustler. And though the first time he visited me I paid him a respectable hourly rate for a test shoot in my studio, tonight he’s not here as a model. We’re just hanging out. My high-resolution digital camera is on the coffee table right next to me, and that’s where it stays the whole time Pro masturbates. Until, that is, the very end.
“I’m just about there, dude.”
“Pro, uh, do me a favor?”
A pause. Then, a low, flat, “What?”
I’m pretty sure I know what he’s thinking. Something along the lines of What the fuck? I should have known…. And just when I thought—Or maybe, God, I hope it’s pictures of the money shot he wants.
But one extraordinary quality I’ve already noted in Pro is his inimitable knack for shattering the ordinary. At random intervals, sufficiently infrequent to defy prediction yet somehow uncannily precisely timed, he’ll do or say something so off the wall as to utterly floor you. But so casually, and so adroit and so fleeting, that in the second it takes you to register and look to his face for some sort of accounting, you find yourself confounded by “the neutral face of the Buddha” (which is far and away the only trait of the insatiably desiring Pro even remotely suggestive of the Buddha). And Pro, for his part, has already declared his admiration for my own offbeat “edge.”
“I think we need to do something symbolic to mark this night. Would you mind ejaculating on my TV screen?”
Pro almost manages to not smile. “Are you sure?”
The monitor in question is a new, pricey, flat-screen Sony. A gift from a patron.
“Yes. I want to photograph your semen dripping down the screen.”
Pro gives my TV a copious “facial.” After he leaves the room to wash up I snap three shots and stare at the screen speculatively, wondering how much this AWOL sailor’s spunk would taste of the strychnine-rich methamphetamine he shared with me twelve hours ago (my first experience with street drugs since the 1980s).
Pro steps back into the room.
“Dude, when are you going to finally make a video of me? I’m serious. We need to do this. I wanna be in porn, man!”
I see this anecdote hasn’t strengthened my case any. How can I claim to be an “accidental pornographer” when I have all the equipment?
The first time Pro visited my studio, he thought out loud: “You actually have strobe lights.”
And what legitimate business could I have residing in a Navy shipyard ghetto devoid of any diversions save for sailors and seedy bars? It may be possible to accept an author of global ultramarginal cult s
tanding not opting for New York or Los Angeles. But it’s rather more difficult to concede much leeway to a vegetarian nondriver who opts to dwell where the only restaurant within walking distance is McDonald’s and still claims he’s not there for “military meat.”
Ah, but here’s where my story gains some credibility, if only as a potential insanity defense: You see, I moved to this isolated Navy ghost town—where it rains even more than in neighboring Seattle—from San Diego, California, “military chaser” central, USA. And military porn video central.
And I fled to escape my apprenticeship in military beefcake photography.
San Diego, California—January 1996: Pornographer’s Apprentice
Rewind five years.
I’m in the passenger seat of a cheap leased car, very slowly puttering through a mountainous stretch of San Diego County east toward the desert. Behind the wheel is a man of advanced years and failing health. His breath is rancid. He’s subject to wild mood swings. He recites the same anecdotes and same old jokes with trying frequency, and rarely betrays the faintest interest in listening to anyone else. But for once, I’ve managed to catch and hold his attention, reading aloud to him from the New Yorker.
It’s Susan Faludi’s “The Money Shot,” the part about the porn video former U.S. Marine John Wayne Bobbitt starred in to exhibit his surgically reattached penis.
David guffaws so loudly, is so delighted by the story, that I’m almost stoked. And mistakenly imagine that David might share my interest in Faludi’s cultural commentary on how ejaculating onscreen in porn video has supplanted more traditional demonstrations of masculine prowess such as working in a shipyard. Only a discharge of David’s intestinal gas prompts me to glance over and realize that he’s no longer paying the slightest attention.
“I’ve decided to send her my galleys for The Masculine Marine,” I conclude. “I know it’s a long shot. Probably we won’t end up meeting over arugula and bottled water in L.A. But a blurb from Susan Faludi—”
David looks at me intently. He nods, indicating the landscape to our left. “I’ve often wondered,” he intones, “how those rocks got there. “
Well, it’s less of a non sequitur than it was twenty-four hours ago, when he made the same pronouncement at the same spot….
This is day two of my new part-time job, assisting David Lloyd on outdoor nude photo shoots of straight military men.
Yesterday the model was a brawny Coast Guardsman named Andy who chattered nervously the entire two hours it took us to reach the desert. On the ride there he was too polite—or scared—to comment on David’s failure to observe the minimum speed limit and only once said, “Your turn signal’s still on.”
He did, however, put his foot down when David at last stopped the car and declared, “This is the place.”
David’s “ravine backdrop” was directly astride the highway and in clear view of its near-constant parade of retirees in RVs, who, confused by the fork in the road there, drove as slowly as David.
The Coast Guardsman balked.
I suggested, “Maybe just behind those rocks?”
David grimaced darkly. He raised his arms like a Joshua tree and bellowed, “There goes half the day right there!” We climbed fifty paces farther into the scrub.
At the conclusion of the shoot as we were packing up to leave Andy got some horrible cactus thing embedded in his foot and made a big deal of stoically yanking it out, for my benefit.
He was less stoic on the ride home, however, when David, in the thrall of another rambling stock narrative, momentarily mistook the treacherous two-lane mountain highway for Interstate 5 and drifted into the other lane. There were shouts, imprecations, and then apologies from Andy.
“Man! I’m sorry I grabbed the wheel. But you just missed hitting that car! We would have been dead! Man, you scared me!”
David graciously forgave him. Glancing at me in the rearview mirror, he rolled his eyes at this studly straight guy’s nervous-nelly attack.
Today’s model is a Marine. Because he’s stationed north of San Diego at Camp Pendleton, he drives his own car to a rendezvous point on the edge of the desert.
Kris is of Scandinavian ancestry. He fits certain of my stereotypes of Marines and Scandinavians. Kris is so reserved that even David runs out of banter.
And when David pulls over to his ravine backdrop directly astride the highway, Kris evinces a European absence of inhibition. David hands him the girlie magazine and we simply stand there as Kris casually works up a hard-on. By the second roll Kris has clambered onto a high rock and in plain view of passing cars swings his enormous erection. Chortling, David produces a ruler and measures it. “By God!” he roars. “Eight and three-quarter inches! That’s how big Mr. Smiley is!”
Pleased with the $500 he’s just pocketed, Kris is slightly less taciturn on the ride back. Thinking of Susan Faludi, I ask him whether he sees any potential connection between having proven his masculinity in the Marine Corps and modeling.
“No. You can get into a lot of trouble doing this.”
I realize I’m receiving instruction here: being rebellious and naughty is almost as much reward as money and attention.
As a third-generation Dutch American from suburban Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a Calvinist-cum-fundamentalist upbringing, I am not altogether dissimilar to Kris in terms of social restraint. This, I know, is a quality of mine that David values. To the extent I find the experience of witnessing more or less perfect physical specimens of the U.S. Armed Forces stripping and performing indecent acts sexually arousing, I don’t betray it. Still, when David calls me up a few days later and reports that at the conclusion of a second shoot, this time in a studio, Swedish Marine Kris requested and was granted permission to ejaculate, I almost feel left out.
David had no choice but to reshoot Kris—hastily. All eight rolls of film he shot in the desert were overexposed beyond salvation.
Even on his best days, David has to shoot double or triple the number of images any other photographer would, owing to his shaky hands. Tremor is a common side effect of lithium, the medication David takes for his bipolar disorder.
David is puzzled as to why this should be so much more a problem outdoors than in the studio. When I ask him why he doesn’t just use a faster shutter speed, he’s at a loss to answer. It’s never occurred to him to toy with the automatic settings on his Nikon, he confesses.
“I don’t have time!”
David earns upward of $100,000 a year from his photography. His work has been published in virtually every gay skin magazine at home and abroad and is endlessly recycled in phone-sex ads and other second-use outlets. Who am I to tell him about f-stops?
“The shoot was a total loss!” he thunders, with such outrage and wonder you’d think he’d just witnessed a cloud of locusts descending on San Diego specifically intent on devouring his Agfachromes of the Swedish Marine’s “Mr. Smiley.” “But I still had to pay Kris the same money again. In cash!” In a quieter tone he thinks to add, “And of course you’ll still get your check.”
I know that when David does pay me it’s as much for my company as anything. And he knows that I wouldn’t help him sort through slides or type up correspondence for fifteen dollars an hour if I didn’t enjoy hearing his stories.
And as outrageous as his demands sometimes are, I somehow still feel terribly guilty when I nervously announce to David that my roommate Alex Buchman is thinking of moving to Seattle.
He sees through me in an instant. “You are not seriously thinking of moving to Seattle!”
He looks more crestfallen than I anticipated. Given the onesidedness of our exchanges, I don’t like to think that David sees something of himself in me. It’s easier to focus on his sighs about how hard it will be to find another assistant like me—someone he can carry on a conversation with and who “doesn’t drool” over big-dicked Marines.
David grew up in Seattle. His final word is, “I give it two years, three at the most. You’re not a
Seattle kind of guy.” Nodding with conviction he turns his head away and pronounces, “You’ll be back.”
Bremerton, Washington—January 1999: Stiffed
Two years later Military Trade is almost off press. David is one of the “military chasers” interviewed. One of his naked Marines is on the cover.
But David suffers a massive stroke and dies some months before I write my English friend Mark Simpson that I’ve realized I’m not really a Seattle kind of guy. “Since I can’t seem to face returning to San Diego, I think I might as well take advantage of being perhaps the only person in Seattle who can move to Bremerton without losing face.”
Bremerton, Washington, is a downscale Pacific Northwest town located between the similarly depressed hometown of Kurt Cobain (Hoquiam/Aberdeen) and Seattle, with no Starbucks and only one employer, the U.S. Navy shipyard.
I’m drawn to an old brick apartment building of institutional appearance. Only after I move in do I learn that it was constructed during World War I as an annex to the Navy Yard Hotel.
The last time Bremerton flourished was World War II. Most of the storefronts are boarded up. But there are a lot of churches. And taverns.
Bremerton is notorious for its population of sexually aggressive women—“Fat chicks chasin’ fellas in the Navy,” in the offensive words of Seattle rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1987 song “Bremelo.”
I’ve never lived “on the wrong side of the tracks” before. By the end of my first week here I’m starting to feel a little creeped out. Walking through town I’m struck by the number of burned-out houses posted ARSON. REWARD.I pick up the local paper and read that a woman was raped in the parking lot below my bedroom window. A Friday evening crawl of waterfront bars leaves me struggling to picture myself fitting in here at all.
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