Sword and Sandal

by Roland Graeme

  Dirk was the epitome of efficiency. Once all of the elements for a film project were in place, he never wasted a minute of time, if he could avoid it. Our shoot was scheduled for the very next weekend. And, because virtually all of the guys in the cast and crew held down regular, weekday jobs, our “three-day wonder” would indeed be created during the course of that one weekend. We’d start shooting on Friday evening, and we’d wrap up the production on Sunday night—in the wee hours of Monday morning, if necessary.

  Practically bursting from my self-imposed celibacy, I reported to the apartment building on Friday evening, after putting in a full day at work first at the gym, then at the delivery service. (I’d arranged for another bartender to fill in for me at the leather bar on Friday and Saturday night; he was happy to work the extra shifts).

  Dirk was already there. So was Mark, who’s be doing the camera work. Seeing these two old friends helped me get over some of my nervousness. And when Dirk introduced me to our host, whose name was Brandon, I was pleasantly surprised.

  I’d expected him to be the stuck-up type, a snob with a superior attitude. But Brandon turned out to be the exact opposite. Very handsome, immaculately groomed, and well dressed in expensive “casual” clothes, he was soft-spoken, friendly, and funny. He made me feel right at home, as though the two of us were old friends.

  As he readily admitted, Brandon was a collector of gay porn, and he was crazy about porn actors. The mere thought of two or more guys getting naked and going at it in front of a camera got him aroused. (I later found out that Dirk had taken a logical step, given Brandon’s enthusiasm—he’d suggested that Brandon perform in one of his movies, himself. Brandon had refused, claiming he was too shy. But, a few years later, he changed his mind. He acted for Dirk, and he made quite a name for himself as a porn star—to the horror of his wealthy family. But that’s another story.)

  Brandon’s apartment was truly a showplace. I’d never set foot in any private dwelling like it. He was on one of the upper stories of the building, and his condominium had huge plate-glass windows which gave a spectacular view of Central Park. It was a large space. He had no fewer than three bedrooms and two bathrooms, because he often entertained overnight company from out of town. He hosted house parties which went on for days.

  The apartment also included a servant’s quarters, which was something I associated with old Hollywood movies, and which struck me as being extremely decadent. Brandon had a live-in servant, a sexy little Swiss guy with a French accent named Aubert, who functioned as a combination butler, valet, housekeeper, personal secretary, and cook. In short, he saw to all of Brandon’s needs, including his sexual ones. Aubert shared his master’s bed whenever Brandon didn’t have a trick spending the night; and (as Brandon casually explained to me), they often got into threesomes, foursomes, or group sex scenes.

  This was a glimpse into a lifestyle which was far removed from anything I’d experienced directly, myself.

  Brandon gave me a tour of the apartment. As he showed me around, the doorbell would chime every few minutes, and Aubert would admit another member of the cast or crew who had arrived. The apartment had been professionally decorated, Brandon told me, but every now and then he’d had to put his foot down and intervene, making sure that the decorator he’d hired didn’t make the place look “too goddamn faggy,” as Brandon bluntly put it. “What is this thing these guys have with the fucking flowered chintz?” he asked me, rhetorically.

  There was little flowered chintz in evidence, as a matter of fact. The apartment’s décor was heavy on brown leather, dark woods, chrome, glass, and marble. The lighting was subdued. A prevailing Asian theme tied the rooms together. There were deep-piled, soft-textured, multi-colored, hand-knotted Oriental carpets underfoot. Patterned throws and embroidered pillows were heaped upon the leather-upholstered sofas and armchairs. Works of art, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Indonesian—paintings, sculptures, ceramics—were everywhere. There was a fireplace in the living room, which was lit, sending warm air wafting out into the room.

  In his dining room, Brandon had food and drink set out on the table. As more and more men showed up and were admitted into the apartment, the ambience increasingly became that of an upscale all-male party. The only indications that filmmaking was going to take place were Mark’s camera, and the large photographer’s lamps on tripods, which were set up in the living room at the moment.

  By now, I noticed nearly two dozen men, wandering about the apartment, helping themselves to the refreshments, and talking quietly among themselves. Aside from the luxuriousness of the surroundings, the atmosphere almost felt like that of a typical gay bar, early on a Friday evening, when it’s too early to pick up anybody yet. During all the small talk, a lot of sizing-up and cruising was taking place.

  Brandon introduced me to the star of our film, a gentleman who used the name Matt Ramshead for professional purposes. With thick dark hair and a bushy mustache, Matt was the personification of the “clone look” which was fashionable at the time.

  He peered at me, a bit glassy-eyed, after we shook hands. It was obvious even to me that he was under the influence of some recreational narcotic or other.

  “Oh, you must be the wop muscle slut Dirk’s told me about,” he said.

  This wasn’t the most flattering way I could imagine of describing myself. But I didn’t take offense. “Yeah,” I replied.

  “I guess I’m supposed to fuck you, sooner or later.”

  “If that’s in the script. I mean, if that’s what Dirk wants us to do.”

  “I’ve got a pretty big dick,” Mr. Ramshead informed me. He wasn’t bragging; his tone of voice was utterly matter of fact. “The only reason I mention it, dude, is because some guys have trouble taking it. The last guy I balled in one of Dirk’s movies screamed like a girl, the whole time I had my dick in him. It kind of ruined the mood we were trying to create—you know?”

  “I think I can promise you I won’t do any screaming. I’ll try to limit myself to grunts and groans of suitably macho appreciation,” I said, not without sarcasm.

  My irony was lost on the stoned Matt. “That’ll be great,” he declared.

  When Brandon and I rejoined Dirk, he and Mark were debating where to film.

  “My bedroom will be good for at least one scene,” Brandon suggested. “And right here in the living room, in front of the fireplace—that’d be perfect for an orgy scene. We can move the furniture out of the way.”

  “We can use the master bedroom and bathroom, too,” Dirk said. “That whirlpool tub you’ve got in there—it was made for sex.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Brandon responded, with a laugh. “Now, this is supposed to be a birthday party, isn’t it, according to the script? Aubert’s got a cake on hand, with candles. And champagne. You want a scene where the birthday boy blows out the candles on his cake, don’t you, Dirk? Followed by all of the guys drinking champagne?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be fine, but later,” Dirk decreed. “Let’s get a couple of the sex scenes in the can, first.”

  Ever the pragmatist, Dirk wanted to shoot as many of the big sex scenes as he could. Once they were safely in the can, he could relax and he could afford to take his time fleshing out the rest of the film.

  “Come on, Gino, you’re up to bat,” Dirk told me.

  “Who, me? Already?” I asked.

  “The whole climax of the movie is going to be built around you,” our director promised me. “So we might as well get it out of the way. You’re a Times Square hustler, you see, the kind of whore who’ll do anything for money. Our birthday boy spotted you there on the street, trolling for johns, and he invited you to this party. You’re sort of his birthday present to himself. Only, he’s willing to share you with his other guests. So they all fuck you, one after the other, and you love it. At the end, the birthday boy screws you, and he ends up coming all over your face.”

  “Oh.” All this was new to me.

  “You’ll need to ha
ve your asshole nice and relaxed, and well greased, to take on so many dicks,” Dirk predicted.

  “No doubt,” I told him, drily.

  Brandon now intervened. “Maybe Gino would like to snort some coke, to put him in the mood to be gangfucked?” he suggested.

  “Sure. Why not?” I said.

  Aubert, like the dutiful servant he was, brought the lines of coke, already neatly arranged on a little mirror; and, handing me a straw, he offered them to me. (It was the first and last time I’ve ever been served drugs by a butler.) I snorted the white powder, which had an immediate effect on me. I was now so hot, so horny, that I was ready to take on every guy in Manhattan who possessed a functioning prick.

  As I settled down into position in front of the hearth, with Mark getting ready to aim his camera at me, Dirk gave me some quick last-minute coaching.

  Dirk wanted me to deliver two classic bits of dialogue while I was being gangbanged. One was, “Come on, you sons of bitches! This is your big chance to fuck a body like mine!” The other was, “I need another dick in my ass! Oh, fuck me—somebody, anybody, please, fuck me!” Apart from these gems, anything else my costars and I chose to utter during the course of our sex could be improvised.

  I found myself lying on my back on the carpeted floor in front of the living room fireplace. With my butt and my legs raised in the air, my greased asshole was fucked by half a dozen men in a row. I wasn’t even given a chance to find out most of their names, until after they’d screwed me. It was a sexual assembly line. Toasting in the hot, dry air from the fire, our bodies were flushed bright red, and we sweated profusely. This was just the kind of cinéma vérité which Dirk liked. He preferred his filmed sex to be as hot and sweaty and dirty and realistic as possible.

  And so, to make a long story short, I was gangbanged. After the climax of the group fuck, when I successfully delivered my come shot, I watched a couple of other sequences, each involving a pair of guys, being filmed. Then I took advantage of Brandon’s invitation to take a nap in one of the guest rooms.

  What I hadn’t anticipated was the need to get up, get dressed, and head out into the city’s streets at the crack of dawn the following morning. Dirk wanted to film the exterior shots of me, in my hustler persona, loitering around Times Square, and being accosted by Matt, in his character as the birthday boy.

  The reason we were shooting on location at dawn’s early light was, of course, to minimize the possibility of interruptions from pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

  “After all, we have to establish that the story takes place in New York,” Dirk explained to me, Matt, and Mark, as, bleary-eyed from our lack of sleep, we breakfasted on takeout coffee and donuts in Times Square.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, why does it have to take place in New York, necessarily? Couldn’t it be any other big city?”

  “That’s a good question,” Dirk conceded. “But—no offense—you haven’t been hired as a script consultant, or to make my life more complicated than it already is. I just need you to look sexy, and to suck and fuck, Gino—which you’ve been doing just fine, so far. Okay, stud?”

  “Got it,” I said, perhaps a bit sullenly. So much for any illusions I might have harbored about being respected for my probing intellect, as opposed to my probing penis and indiscriminately receptive anus.

  Matt, somewhat to my surprise, seemed to warm up to me. While Dirk and Mark argued about which sidewalk was receiving the best morning light at the moment, Matt and I engaged in small talk.

  “Is this really your first flick?” he asked me.

  “I’m afraid so. Does it show?”

  “No, on the contrary. You looked like a real pro, taking all of those dicks up your ass last night, one after the other. I was impressed. By the way, are you really queer, or are you just doing this for the money?”

  “I’m queer,” I admitted, adopting Matt’s own blunt terminology.

  “Most of you weightlifters are, aren’t you?”

  “I can’t speak for all of us. Some of us—sure.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “It does to me. The last movie I made, I had to work with two guys who both kept insisting they were straight, and that they were just doing it for drug money. They thought they were doing me a big favor by letting me suck their dicks and take it up the ass. Jesus, what a pair of prima donnas they were! Talk about attitude … who needs it?”

  “I hope I’m not like that.”

  “I’m sure you’re not. Come on, let’s get this show on the road. Let’s just have ourselves some fun, okay? Hey, Dirk! What’s the big fucking holdup? We’re ready. Can we get it in the can while we’re still young?”

  We rehearsed the scene, in which Matt accosted me on the street and ended up inviting me to his birthday party. Then we shot it, in one take, complete with sound.

  Dirk wanted me to stick around. He’d decided to add an additional scene to the “script,” in which Matt and I had sex one-on-one. We didn’t get around to shooting this until Sunday afternoon. In the meanwhile, I observed the other actors at work, which I found interesting. I also made myself useful by taking orders and going out to get fast food and takeout.

  Matt and I ended up romping in Brandon’s own bathroom, in his whirlpool tub. Then we adjourned to Brandon’s huge bed. The bedroom was filled with antiques; having sex on that bed was like screwing in the middle of an antique store, in fact. At one point, Dirk set up a pair of stepladders, one on either side of the bed, with a straight ladder laid across their tops. Dirk and another guy held the ladders in place, steadying them, while Mark risked life and limb by climbing up onto the straight ladder and out on it until he was above the middle of the bed. Aiming his camera down at us, he filmed Matt and I while we sixty-nined and fucked. This time, we flip-flopped, so I had the privilege of giving it to the legendary Matt Ramshead up his ass. He was a hot fuck.

  On Sunday evening, we all sat down to a wonderful dinner prepared by Aubert, accompanied by plenty of hard liquor and wine. And then, after dessert, Dirk suddenly remembered that he’d forgotten to film one scene. The two actors who were supposed to do it together were every bit as stuffed and smashed as the rest of us, by then. But they manfully staggered into one of the guest rooms, which was quickly pressed into service as the set—because the bed had clean sheets on it—and they performed, to Dirk’s satisfaction.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t until after midnight that Cum as You Are was a wrap.

  The other five porn movies I made for Dirk were filmed in considerably less luxurious locations. We didn’t use Brandon’s apartment again. Instead, we shot inside Dirk’s own apartment—in his living room, bathroom, and (of course) bedroom. It had one advantage. The place really did look like a typical gay man’s apartment in Manhattan at the time—which, after all, was what it was. In other words, it had a shabby chic, a grubbiness, if you will, that seemed authentic.

  We also filmed, during the daytime, down on the waterfront, at certain piers which were notorious at the time as cruising areas. And, at night, in the back room of a well-known leather bar.

  Today, these six films of mine are available in their entirety on DVD, and individual scenes from them can be viewed over the Internet at the touch of a button. This ubiquity creates a misleading impression. People assume my porn career was much more extensive than it really was. They think I must’ve spent all of my waking hours having sex in front of Dirk’s, or rather Mark’s, camera.

  But to return to my story. After completing the sixth (and last) of the films with Dirk, I found myself at a crossroads.

  I still thought of myself as a bodybuilder, first and foremost. I thought I had as much potential as the next guy who stripped down to poising trunks and oiled his body, before going onstage to pose and flex. And I had my buddy Eric Streiff to look up to, as a role model and for inspiration. I wanted to be just like Eric. Hell—I wanted to be Eri
c. My own identity wasn’t of any great importance to me.

  The realm of the muscle men had come a long way since a guy name Angelo Siciliano—who became better known by his pseudonym, Charles Atlas—entered a physique contest held at Madison Square Garden in 1921, and won the title “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” It was no longer a matter of pure, brute strength. In fact, the world’s strongest men tended to be rather unsightly, being more chunky and hunky. The by-word in the land of the lifters was not strength, but proportion and form. Although you wouldn’t want to kick sand in the face of even the lowliest of title holders, their goal was more a good, nicely proportioned overall look than an impressive military press.

  This shift in image and the proliferation of lifters also led to a proliferation of bodybuilding organizations—each sponsoring more titles than a score of European monarchies. Back in the days when I competed, at any given point, there were three Mr. Americas, each sponsored by a different group, while a bodybuilding groupie could also choose from three Mr. Worlds and two Mr. Universes.

  I began competing in contests which were sponsored by Federation A (as I’ll call it), which was one of the four major organizations active at that time. In order to compete, of course, I had to travel, which was difficult to do, given my work schedule. Sometimes, I simply couldn’t away, in order to go out of town for a contest. As a result, whenever I could participate in an event, I did my best not to miss it.

  Unfortunately, my habit of jumping from city to city, and winning titles in each one, didn’t sit well with Federation A’s officials, who were notorious for wanting to keep their athletes under strict control. Threatened with a two-year suspension for breaking one of their rules about traveling without their knowledge and permission, I said “screw it.” Like many bodybuilders before me, I transferred my allegiance to the more prestigious Federation B.

  Like all four of the big bodybuilding associations, including Federation A, their rival Federation B was the personal barony of one bodybuilding kingpin who, as they say, shall be nameless here. He’s dead now, but I don’t want to run the risk of being sued for libel by his heirs. Suffice it to say that Mr. Nameless was, undeniably, a shrewd businessman. He used the stars in his stable to promote magazines, training programs, vitamin supplements, and a plethora of the kind of high-energy, high-protein health foods which were the mainstay of most lifters’ diets. Federation B, like the other physique guilds, was a big business—and I admit that I did well in it for a time. I picked up more titles—Mr. East Coast, Mr. Eastern America, and numerous ratings such as “Best Arms” and “Best Legs”—before I entered my first Federation B Mr. America contest. There, I won first place in my height class, but lost out on the all-around Mr. America to a guy who was reputed to be Mr. Nameless’ boyfriend at the time.