Sword and Sandal

by Roland Graeme

  “You see?” Alain tells the torturer, with a smirk. “Even a wasp, as small as it is, can sting.”

  “A wasp can be crushed underfoot, too,” I retort, in another of the script’s hokey lines. Then I spit at Gidri.

  My defiance, of course, incites Alain to further efforts. He lets me have it with that little whip from head to foot, gloating over my pain. Then, just in case the homoerotic subtext of the scene isn’t obvious enough, he pauses—and he begins to jab at my body with the blunt end of the whip’s handle. He actually uses it to tweak one of my nipples—how that bit of business ever got past the usually stringent Italian censorship, I’ll never know—before he starts running it slowly and provocatively down my sweaty bare torso, over my abdominal muscles, heading south toward that rag of a loincloth.

  Alain pauses in his abuse of my, and he gazes directly at my crotch for a long moment. The viewer doesn’t have to be a mind reader to guess that he’s contemplating delivering the next blow from the whip right there, onto my genitals, through that flimsy, dirty scrap of cloth. But instead, Alain pulls the whip handle back, away from me—only to drive it viciously into my stomach, which makes me double over in agony and once again tug against my bonds. Alain then treats me, the torturer, and the audience to a sample of his evil laugh (he had a very good one).

  In another memorable sequence, Gidri throws a banquet-cum-orgy. He orders the palace’s slave girls to dress up Minussa in a clingy silk gown which exposes a lot of her cleavage. Then he forces Minussa to attend the party and to sit beside him, while he tempts her with jewelry and paws her. She resists his advances, needless to say. The guests aren’t so shy. Sprawled on dining couches, or on carpets and pillows heaped on the floor, they’re busy making out, in various combinations.

  Meanwhile, there’s entertainment, in the form of dancing. First, some scantily-clad girls perform a hooch dance in honor of one of the Assyrian gods. They writhe around the god’s statue amid clouds of incense, working themselves into a frenzy. Next, they’re joined by a group of equally lightly dressed guys. The resulting coed dance moves suggest a contemporary Roman discotheque, rather than ancient Babylon. Finally, the boys each grab a girl and they carry them off, kicking and squealing, out of camera range—where the viewer is supposed to assume that all sorts of unspeakable sex acts then take place. (Given the fact that, at my guess, at least sixty per cent of these male dancers were gay, I’d say the girls’ collective virtue was pretty safe.)

  Gidri is about to inflict upon Minussa a fate worse than death, when a soldier rushes in and delivers the eloquent line, “Your excellency! The gladiators are revolting!” (No kidding. You can say that again!)

  “Kill them!” Gidri yells. “Kill them all!” Then he turns back to Minussa. “I’ll return,” he threatens her, “and Ushar’s bleeding corpse will serve as our marriage bed!” (Talk about your basic kinky sex.)

  Perhaps the shrewdest critique of Il Gladiatore di Babilonia came from my father.

  About a year after its initial release, it actually played in the movie theater in my home town in New Jersey. My coincidence, I was visiting my family at the time. Daniel, like the shrewd businessman he was, saw an opportunity. He arranged for me to make a “personal appearance” at the first screening. Before the big night, a reporter and a photographer from the local newspaper showed up at our house. The reporter interviewed me, the photographer took some candid pictures, and the result was a nice little write-up about me in the paper—exploiting the “local boy makes it big in the Italian film industry” angle for all it was worth.

  Somewhat to my embarrassment, my personal appearance at the movie house turned into a big family outing. The word had gotten around town. All of our relatives, friends, and neighbors turned out for the event.

  At the theater, I noticed that, except for my large party, most of the audience was made up of adolescent and teenaged boys. In the back rows there were a few straight couples, obviously out on dates.

  Before the screening, I was set up with a table and a chair in the lobby. I signed eight-by-ten glossies of myself for my fans and chatted them up. Most of my young admirers wanted to know how they could acquire muscles like mine. Their most common questions, though, were did I really know Eric Streiff? And, if so, what was he really like?

  My mother was impressed by the sight of me handing out autographed photos of myself. Her youngest son was a celebrity!

  My group took our (reserved) seats, all the way down in front. I noticed that, as soon as the auditorium’s lights were dimmed, the straight couples started making out, hot and heavy, in their seats. All of those young boys who were present found this activity quite titillating, so that their attention was divided between the action on the screen and the action taking place in the back rows. I hadn’t thought of The Gladiator of Babylon as a “date flick,” but apparently the girls found the movie so boring that allowing their boyfriends to get to second base seemed like a viable alternative to actually watching it. (It’d be interesting to know if any unplanned pregnancies had their origins on that night.)

  To my mortification, the members of my party applauded enthusiastically, when my stage name, Gene Dagaust, appeared in the opening credits. (“That’s Gino!” one of my cousins shouted, helpfully.) And they applauded even more vociferously when I first appeared on screen, with my torso bared for all the world to see. I had my own personal cheering section, which I hardly felt I deserved.

  I slumped down in my seat and forced myself to watch myself in action. With the benefit of hindsight, all I could see were the things that were wrong with my performance—all of my sins, both of omission and commission. It was a very long hour and a half. The only mitigating factor was the spontaneous response of the young male members of the audience. They cheered the good guys and booed the bad guys, at all of the appropriate points. They groaned and sniggered during my love scenes with the voluptuous actress who played Minussa. (“Oh, Gino—you dirty dog, you!” that same uninhibited cousin of mine yelled, the first time I got into a clinch and a lip lock with my leading lady.) The kids seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  As we left the theater after the show, my Dad subjected me to a cross-examination.

  “What happened to your voice?” he wanted to know.

  “That wasn’t me talking,” I had to admit. “They hired an Italian actor to dub in my lines.”

  “What, your own voice wasn’t good enough for them?”

  “I guess not,” the big movie star had to concede.

  “That girl you were kissing. I hope you respected her? Did anything go on between the two of you that you wouldn’t want your mother and me to know about?”

  “Of course not. She’s married. Happily married. Her husband used to come visit her on the set, and he’d watch us working. Those love scenes—they were just make-believe. That’s why it’s called acting. I was faking it,” I insisted, which in fact happened to be true. (Had I been required to embrace and kiss one of my male costars, things might have been different!)

  My mother gave me a shrewd, penetrating look. She wasn’t convinced by my denial. I knew what she was thinking. That slutty-looking Italian bimbo with the heavy eye makeup and the big breasts had taken indecent liberties with her sweet, innocent baby boy! Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. A lot of Italians had taken all sorts of liberties with me, with my full cooperation and consent; but all of them had been male.

  “They paid you to do this, Gino?” My father looked and sounded incredulous.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “To put on those costumes and wave that sword around—to prance around like that, with no shirt or pants on, like a gigolo in heat, showing off your muscles—they paid you good money to do that?”

  “Pretty good money, Papa.”

  My father looked at me with something like genuine respect, which I found highly gratifying.

  “Huh,” he grunted, at last. “I guess you’re a lot smarter than I thought!”

&nb
sp; Chapter Ten: My Married Man

  Once again, I’ll depart from strict chronology, in order to devote a separate chapter to an important turning-point in my life.

  As I’ve said, we completed production on our little masterpiece, Il Gladiatore di Babilonia, ahead of schedule, which saved the studio some money. I must say something in the studio heads’ favor—they weren’t stingy, as a rule. At the end of each shoot, they treated the cast and crew to a wrap party. When our Babylonian epic was safely in the can, they organized, at short notice, a celebration which was more lavish than usual. The studio hired an entire restaurant for the evening. We movie people took over the place, eating and drinking ourselves into a near-stupor. There was even a jazz combo, which provided background music while we dined, and music for dancing, afterward.

  Throughout the shoot, I’d adhered religiously to my usual routine. I worked out regularly, got as much rest as I could, and stuck to my diet. I made sure I looked good on film, in all of those scenes in which I was half-naked. To guarantee that I displayed a maximum of muscle, along with a minimum of body fat, I virtually starved myself. There were times when I reported to the set feeling a bit light-headed, as a direct result of having so severely limited my intake of calories.

  Now that the film was finished, I could eat like a normal human being again. I planned to strap on the feedbag and stuff myself. If I blew up like a balloon and got bloated, that’d be fine; I could always lose the extra weight again, in the gym.

  And so, at the party in the restaurant, I sat there and virtually inhaled anything edible within reach. It was probably a disgusting spectacle; but Alain, who happened to be seated at the table opposite me, seemed to find it amusing.

  “Wouldn’t it be more efficient simply to puree all of your food, and feed it to you intravenously?” he asked.

  “Make yourself useful, Alain,” I mumbled, around a mouthful of pasta. “Pass the bread, and the wine. And are you going to finish that?” I asked, eyeing the half-eaten breaded veal cutlet on his plate.

  “No, I’m full.”

  “Well, I’m not. Give it to me. I’ll finish it.”

  “I don’t doubt that you will.”

  After gorging myself on several different desserts, washed down by more wine, I actually felt satiated—blissfully, piggishly so, and for the first time in weeks. Too stuffed to move for the time being, I sat there and burped, watching the dancers.

  When I finally roused myself and left the restaurant, Alain was in fact dancing with one of the attractive young female extras, who’d shaken her booty in honor of the god during the banquet-cum-orgy scene. I knew that Alain was bisexual, of course. I wondered if he was going to get lucky, before the evening was over.

  Personally, I was more than ready to call it a night. I hailed a taxi, fell into its back seat, and, upon our arrival at my hotel, I somehow managed to stagger into the lobby and take the elevator up to my room. There, I stripped, and I stood under a hot shower for a long time, sweating and trying to sober up a little before I went to bed.

  I was lying naked between the sheets in the dark, in a post-gluttonous stupor, when the bedside telephone rang, waking me. I answered it in a groggy voice.

  It was Alain, who apologized for calling so late.

  “Oh, that’s okay, Alain,” I told him. “Hey—did you fuck that chick you were dancing with?”

  He laughed. “Certainly not. She’s a pretty girl, but she’s just a child.”

  “As though that would stop you.”

  “You’re rather cynical, Gino.”

  “No, I’m rather well acquainted with you and your habits by now—that’s all. And you’re an extremely horny fucker, or so I’m told, by those who are in the know.” Ordinarily, I might not have spoken to Alain so freely; but wine and drowsiness had loosened my inhibitions. “Anyway, why are you calling?”

  “I wanted to see you and talk to you before I left town.”

  “And I want to see you and talk to you. But I thought we were going to do that tomorrow, at the train station. I promised I’d see you off. That hasn’t changed, has it?”

  “No. I’m looking forward to meeting you at the station, as we’d planned. But we may not be able to talk there. Not intimately, with so many other people around.”

  Based on my admittedly limited experience with Italian train stations, I had to agree. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. It’s always noisy there. But what, exactly, do we have to talk intimately about, Alain?”

  “Oh, a few things have come to my mind. Your plans for the immediate future, for example. Do you really intend to go back to America, until it’s time for you to start work on your next film?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a whole month to kill before I do that spaghetti western. I may as well go home, and see my folks. There’s really nothing to keep me here in Rome, in the meanwhile.”

  “What if there were? Something to keep you here in Europe, I mean—if not necessarily in Italy, let alone in Rome?”

  “Such as?”

  “I’d like to suggest an alternative, which would give you a chance to take it easy for a couple of weeks. And then, after that, if you chose, you could still fly home and spent the other two weeks with your family, before you have to come back to Rome.”

  “All this sounds good in theory. Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Yes. But … listen, Gino. I don’t like to talk with my friends at great length over the phone, when I can avoid it. That always seems so impersonal. May I come and have a drink with you in your room?”

  “I’m in bed. I mean—I’m not dressed.”

  Alain’s laugh was quick. “I don’t expect you to get out of bed on my account. Stay there. Don’t bother to get dressed, either. And don’t worry about your reputation. Leave that sort of thing to shopkeepers, and other conservatives. And you’re a big boy, aren’t you, who can take care of himself? Anyway, what have you heard about me? That I insist on having sex with everyone I work with?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “There aren’t that many hours in the day. And, unfortunately, I don’t have quite the stamina I had when I was your age. So trust me. Your manly virtue is safe with me—for the time being.”

  “I’ll be here waiting for you,” I said.

  “I’ll be there very soon.”

  We hung up. I got up and put on my bathrobe. I always slept naked, but I was still that guy from a respectable working-class Italian-American family in New Jersey, who’d been raised right. I wasn’t about to receive a visitor in the nude.

  I’d barely had a chance to look at myself in the bathroom mirror and comb my hair before the phone rang again. It was the desk clerk, telling me I had a visitor. I told him to send Alain right up.

  “I’ve brought my own bottle and two glasses,” Alain announced, when I opened the door and let him in. He was indeed carrying a large brown paper bag. “This way, we won’t have to bother with room service.”

  “I’m going back to my nice warm, comfortable bed,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Go right ahead. I’m astonished that you can even think about going to sleep, after all that food you consumed.”

  “I was making up for lost time.”

  “Obviously. When you’re a little older, Gino—when you’re my age—you may find out that some of life’s pleasures are even better when they’re taken in installments, spread out over a longer length of time.”

  “Yeah?” I replied, automatically, not really grasping what he was saying.

  The room was lit only by a small lamp which I’d switched on, on the nightstand beside my bed. There, Alain now set down a bottle of cognac and two glasses.

  I shed my bathrobe and I slid in under the sheets. I stuffed the two pillows under my head and my shoulders. I lay back against them, naked and exposed above my waist.

  I was (reasonably) wide awake now, and alert enough to be able to think more quickly, although I made an effort to keep my thoughts from showing
on my face.

  I’m behaving like a whore, I told myself. Flaunting myself in front of Alain, prick teasing him. But maybe that excites him. Maybe that’s what he likes. He’s taking for granted that I’d be willing to put out for him, isn’t he? That must be the whole point of this unexpected late-night visit. He’s probably not wrong. I’d love to go to bed with him. It’d just be sex, after all. He’s not unattractive—far from it.

  Alain was smiling at me. “Look at you. You have a mature man’s body. Big and hard and fully muscled, like a Greek god’s. But inside, you’re still such a child.”

  “Oh, am I? You think I’m immature?”

  “I think you’re unspoiled. There’s a difference. Do you want to know something? When we first met, when I first saw you, I thought to myself, ah, he’s young, he’s beautiful—but he’s not for you.”

  “No? Why not for you?”

  “Because I’ve been burned by too many young, beautiful men in the past. Oh, I had a lot of fun with them—I don’t deny that. But I usually paid the price, afterward. I had my regrets.”

  “You talk as though you were an old man,” I protested. “But you’re—”

  “What? What am I?”

  “Well, it sounds kind of silly, for me to say it. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re awfully damn young and beautiful, yourself.”

  “Merci. It’s always pleasant to hear that. Even though, in this case, it may be the wine talking.” Then, softening the tone of his voice, Alain asked, “Speaking of alcohol—don’t you want a drink? A nightcap? I suppose it can’t do you any real harm, at this point.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have what you’re having there, thank you.”

  He filled both glasses, and then he brought a chair up to the side of the bed. He handed me one glass, and, seating himself, he took a healthy swig of the cognac himself. Then he reached over and he took the top hem of the sheet in his free hand, and the back of his hand brushed against my stomach. I didn’t move, although I could feel my abdominal muscles contract, tensing up. I tried not to blink, tried not to show any emotion. I doubt that I was very successful. Slowly, carefully, Alain pulled the sheet down to my mid-thighs, and he left it there. My genitals were now fully exposed.