The evening commences inexplicably with an episode from the TV western “The Rifleman,” and a short documentary on FDR. Then the actual slide show begins. The avalanche of images quickly casts an infectious spell of something akin to sexual nausea, but continues relentlessly, lengthens, elongates, extends moistly, a garrulous caterpillar covered with prickles, a clenched forearm alarmed with hair, a profusion of naked men, strays, servicemen, hustlers bent into impossible shapes and positions to facilitate the revelation of their softest and most secret parts to the invading eye of the camera, facing appendages made vulnerable by exposure, lost boys reduced to their uncertain sphincters and fleshy apertures, placed on artificial landscapes as alien as the set of a ’50s science fiction film. Sandwiched at random in the midst of this prodigious display of young male animals are occasional summer vacation shots of people recreationally playing in and around the Castaic dam.
The water on the dam swirls into the water in the bathroom sink where I’m poised to piss. In the mildewed room, still dazed, I pull out my dick, stroke it roughly to take the last vestiges of erection out of it so I can piss through it and in the process regard the scar around the glans. For a moment I am assailed by the recollection of my own circumcision with a local anesthetic at the age of ten. My mother takes me and my eight-year-old brother for a routine physical and, at the family doctor’s insistence, our genitals are both butchered the following weekend.
Since I am the first, I notice one attending young physician is really cute, an overgrown boy, who winks at me and musses my hair in a gesture designed to put me at ease. This makes me feel especially vulnerable, laid out before him on the operating table, a green cloth draped over my midsection and legs with a hole where my groin is, leaving my generative organs looking wilted and exposed in repose, a wrinkled rubber bath toy awaiting execution. This unfamiliarity with my own body vanishes sharply during the administration of the local anesthetic, six shots of Novocain they inject around my scrotum and the base of my penis. The operation quickly swirls out of control when the surgeon starts to use the scalpel before the anesthetic takes affect. Queasy, yet still alarmed, I lift my head up in time to see blood spurting from the crown of my little prick. For ten days afterward we take stinging pisses through bandages and suffer the humiliation of our mother pulling down our pajamas to show any interested neighbor lady. Perhaps what she is really trying to show them is to what lengths she is willing to go to make her family fit into its adopted culture. I look at this indelible mark of Cain and Abraham and recognize the trace of its scar as the same one I have seen stamped on hundreds of fellows fallen beside me, especially when I can feel the pulsations of their heads and hearts throb within my clenched fist and swollen lips.
Disoriented and dizzy, I stumble and stagger into the kitchen and realize that I probably won’t successfully shake the fog out of my head until I’m in the street and on my way to work. Just out of my sight, on the periphery of my vision at the edge of the kitchen table under a pile of newspapers, I spot an SX-70 of what looks like a mound of meat. I vaguely remember a night when I suggest to a friend that we finish a pack of film taking portraits of each other, then tease and torture the pigment into distorted phantasms of ourselves that reduce us to caricatures out of Gargantua and Pantagruel, beings escaped out of a Rabelaisian universe, refugees from the grotesque, reproductive body of the mother.
I casually rifle through the small pile of picture cards and discover it’s a close-up I took of my lost friend Scott who was visiting Los Angeles for a week at New Year’s three years ago. The color is bad, all monochromatic and red, making Scott’s head look like a fruit and his complexion ruddy. In real life he has coal-black hair and green eyes and skin as translucent as egg shells. I have known Scott now for twelve years.
After the summer I first meet him I don’t see Scott again for nine years. Scott joins the Air Force. I get one or two letters a year, even for the five years Scott is stationed in Germany. When he comes back to the United States to the Army/Navy language school in Monterey, Scott contacts me and we renew our acquaintance. Scott is a tall, lanky, sensitive man, obsessed with playing the piano and with the possibility (but not the actuality) of having a fulfilling relationship with a woman. Except for Scott’s obsession with the piano, this makes him different from me only in the gender designation of the peculiar form of his desire. Years later, right before he vanishes from sight, Scott miraculously meets, has an affair with, and marries a schizophrenic woman, the perfect recipient for Scott’s vast, untapped resource of love.
One night the two of us take a number of SX-70s of each other, squeezing the color in some of them afterwards until the light streams from the beacons of our head holes and orifices, two subjects made out of vibrating shafts of light, although one I take of Scott has the clarity of one of Caravaggio’s boys. “We should exhibit these in the Louvre,” Scott suggests, laughingly. A Pre-Raphaelite Saint Sebastian, I think, as I gaze at the Polaroid of Scott—an etiolated martyr carved in marble.
It’s been two years, almost three, since I lost track of Scott. I even try the Air Force Locator but am given the whereabouts of another airman with Scott’s name instead. I never follow it up. After Scott comes and visits me from the Air Force base in Monterey that time, he calls me up long distance afterward and tells me he would have liked to have had an affair with me but is too afraid to because of his position in military intelligence. This information comes out of the clear blue sky and knocks me absolutely speechless. It turns into fantasy stuff for me in the following years, especially once, in the steam room of a bath house in Toronto, surrounded by young men of British ancestry, where I fancy that the towels must really be Irish linen and that Scott’s peeking at me through every cloud of steam, or from just behind every booth door in the toilet.
There is a lesson in futility to be learned here but I adamantly refuse to learn it. The day before Scott returns to Monterey, I take him to the barber to have his already short hair made even shorter to conform with regulation length. The whole time I just sit in a chair leafing through a stack of Field & Streams and True Detectives, half turned on by the smell of Scott’s dirty socks a few feet away, which lingers acridly on the periphery of my attention. How much nicer, I think, it would be to be sitting in one of those ubiquitous Charles Eames chairs in an airport on the way to Germany with Scott rather than on this torn vinyl bench at the barber’s. At the bus depot Scott asks me to button the hard-to-reach button behind the collar of his white Brooks Brothers shirt. Task accomplished, I slip my hand momentarily around Scott’s neck in a caress. Right before Scott boards the bus I embrace him impulsively. There has been no physical precedent for this. Scott is caught off guard and his eyes tear in response. He doesn’t even attempt to hide it, I notice, surprised, as he disappears into the bus. Scott is the kind of guy, possessed of such profound empathy, that later he seduces and has an affair with a friend of his who has grown suddenly suicidal, to keep him from killing himself, and it works.
The sequence of thought that’s led to Scott weighs heavily on me. What might have been, if only—you could waste your whole life in such idle conjecture, such vain contemplation. I flop back onto the bed. “Oh hell, work can wait another hour,” I mutter to myself. Thoroughly distracted now, I idly pick up a Time magazine to the right of the mattress. In an article about the Vatican Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York I am reminded of the vandalism of the Pieta years ago and of the effigy of the boy and his mother, that limp masochist across the nurse’s lap. The only way I am going to get Scott out of my system, I realize now, is to masturbate again, and it doesn’t take long to pull a few pertinent figments out of that visual generic pool of melted lubricant and congealed hearts and sketch them with something resembling desire.
This is how it goes: Me, I am clad in a pair of shredded BVDs (the twentieth century loincloth), a torn T-shirt and black Banlon socks that have seen better days, propped up on a rough-hewn throne of marble. Scott, barely con
scious, is draped over my lap and in my arms in nothing but his Jockey shorts, dying, ostensibly. Although it’s a daunting task, I gratefully attempt to soothe him as best I can with my hands, eventually annihilating my mouth somewhere in the vicinity of the elastic selvage of Scott’s underwear, the upsurge at at the apex of my thighs pushing up into Scott’s back—one martyr dying, lying on another martyr’s lap—a latter day Pieta for a new age and another picture for me to file away in my image repertoire. The formality of this eroticized psychodrama rapidly deteriorates into something less solemn and more frantic. For a fleeting moment, and only ephemerally, I am disturbed by the possibility that none of this fantasy is particularly correct politically, but I quickly dismiss that thought with a stroke of my hand. A few dry spasms are summarily achieved and my brain is flooded with beta-endorphin-induced nothingness, relief and remorse. I file away this series of icons lovingly for later, instant replay.
Unable to procrastinate any longer I pull myself out of my overwhelming inertia and get dressed. As I put on my coffee-stained work pants and green and pink flower shirt, I play my current favorite song on my pre-hi tech record player. I’ve been playing it to death lately, trying to suck as much pleasure out of it as possible—a dirge in which the vocalist’s plaintive wailing insists that “...you don’t give me love, you give me pale shelter.” If the truth were told, I realize, I have hardly ever been in the position to voice such a complaint legitimately except in theory because there’s never been a willing, appropriate “you.” But somehow it manages to strike a sympathetic chord nonetheless. On the way to work the radio in my car plays another song by the same group. “This is going to be some day,” I mumble to myself, my headache radiating into clusters of stabbing pain behind my right eye. I decide that it’s not just “body hunger,” as my ex-friend Pam calls it, that gives me the shakes at night, but an ache that’s deeper and more difficult to define or relieve. I pat my groin and realize that the soreness I feel there is due to too much agitation so early in the day. But I can be sure that by dawn of the next morning there will no longer even be a vestige of this present ache.
The Nether Eye Opens
Don Shewey
When Jerry called, I knew from his name and his tense, timid voice that I’d given him a massage once before. I found him in my client log, but the entry didn’t churn up any detailed memories. The creature who arrived at my door might as well have been a total stranger. He was short and nearly bald on top, an out-of-shape blob of a middle-aged man with reptilian slits for eyes. My notes reminded me that he was “overweight and ashamed of it.” He didn’t seem to recognize me or remember that he’d seen me in the past. So I pretended I didn’t know him, either. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing only his white button-down shirt. He slipped off the shirt and wanted to hop right onto the table. I said, “I’d like to have you do some stretching before we put you on the table, to loosen you up.” He looked at me like I was crazy.
Reluctantly, he took a step away from the table. As I directed him to close his eyes, take some breaths, and become aware of his body, he followed my instructions, but he acted like a little kid annoyed at having an adult make him do stupid things, like walk downstairs one step at a time.
When I had him stretch him arms up to the ceiling, I noticed he was holding something in his right hand. “What’s that in your hand, Jerry?”
He showed me the white plastic inhaler.
“No,” I said, feeling shaky. “I don’t use poppers.”
He said, “You don’t have to.”
I said, “I don’t mix poppers with massage.”
He said, “They help me relax.”
I said, “I’m really a good masseur. You’ll be plenty relaxed.”
He dutifully deposited the tiny bottle on top of his clothes, which he’d left on the chair next to the massage table. As he lay on his back and I stretched out his arms and legs more, I tried to lighten the atmosphere with some chitchat. He didn’t respond. He kept his lips pressed together tightly. He seemed to be pouting about having his poppers confiscated. It made me nervous. I felt guilty for shaming him about using poppers. He resisted a lot of the massage. He seemed restless and impatient with my slow tempo, scratching himself and coughing. He never sighed and sank into the pleasure of being touched. I got the picture that he’s someone who’s used to going to masseurs for a half-assed backrub and a hand job, no questions asked. Perhaps at the beginning I could have broached the subject of his real desire and made some accommodation. Often I do say something like, “What’s the experience you’d like to have today?” Not that anyone ever says, “A half-assed backrub and a hand job, please.”
Guys like Jerry who crawl around in a snail shell of sex-shame rarely have much experience at asking for what they want. They either expect you to read their minds, or they’re masochistically resigned to whatever you want to dish out. In my desire to be conscious about sexual touch, you’d think I’d have developed a smooth routine by now of letting shy, sexually undernourished guys like this know what they’re in for with me. For instance, I could say, “I’ll get around to focusing on your erotic body, but first I’m going to spend about forty minutes massaging the muscle tension out of your back and your legs and your feet.” I refrain from being that direct because I want to avoid sounding too much like one of those wholesome Danish sex-education films. Rather than tease clients up to my level, I suppose I tend to sink down to their level of inarticulateness.
In any case, now I was launched into my usual massage routine, and there was no way of stopping it gracefully. I knew giving him a thorough massage had value. I also suspected that he couldn’t give a shit.
Everything changed when I got around to his butt. My notes told me I had done butt work on him before, so I felt confident in moving in for close butt touch. When I spread his cheeks and lightly brushed the coarse black hairs and the shiny pink skin around his stretched-out butthole, he twitched as if shocked by an electric current. When I rested the palm of my hand against his pelvic floor and rocked him back and forth, his erection swelled out from under his ballbag, the snail poking its head out of its shell, antennae first. Even if I’m pretty sure that someone wants butt massage, I like to check. Sometimes people have hemorrhoids or loose bowels or some other condition they’d prefer to conceal. I leaned in close to his ear and said, “If you like, Jerry, I could put on gloves and do some more massage around your butt.”
“Okay,” he said.
I stepped over to my supply cabinet and grabbed a pair of gloves and a tube of K-Y. When I turned around, he was reaching for the inhaler he’d left on top of his shirt.
I was on him in a flash. “If you insist on using poppers, Jerry, I can’t continue with the massage.”
“What?” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was hard of hearing or just selectively so.
I retreated from my ultimatum. “I’d rather you not use poppers during the massage.”
“Okay,” he said again. He returned his head to the face plate like a child scolded.
“I want to invite you to keep breathing and taking in all the sensations you’re feeling, Jerry. Does that sound okay to you?” He shook his head yes, face down, buried in his shame.
I climbed up on the table and knelt between his spread legs. The sight in front of me—the hairy back and flabby butt of a middle-aged man—wasn’t the most appetizing I’d ever encountered. I wasn’t turned on but I wasn’t turned off either. Some people can’t imagine touching let alone giving an erotic massage to somebody they’re not attracted to. For a lot of young gay men, the idea of having anything to do with a guy like Jerry would be absolutely unthinkable. I don’t mind. In fact, I like it. I like the feeling of control, of being entrusted with another human being’s vulnerability. I have a hard time only when clients assume that, because I’m touching them erotically, that we’ve suddenly moved into some kind of reciprocal sex mode and they’re free to grope me.
I guess that sounds awful. Like, �
��Don’t kid yourself. I’m the attractive one around here. I’m the one who gets to touch and have power.” Well, it’s true. I want it to be clear that I’m in control. I want them to behave. There’s definitely arrogance on my part. But no contempt. Anyone who presents his tender butt for loving touch gets a big gold star in my book. He can rest assured I’m going to take good care of him.
With Jerry, I felt like a spelunker ready to hunt for treasures in the secret cave. I pulled on first one white vinyl glove, then the other. The latest box of surgical gloves I bought were the smallest size, and they’re skin tight on my hands. They make me look like Mickey Mouse in evening wear.
In contrast to his lassitude during the back massage, the man on the table now began to respond to my every move— the cool breath on his tight butthole, the firm pressure of three fingers over the opening, the cool slipperiness of lubricant being rubbed rhythmically over the folds of skin covering his sphincter. He jerked and twitched whenever I hit an especially sensitive spot. I knew I wasn’t hurting him. I knew he was flinching because he wasn’t breathing smoothly enough to distribute the intense sensations. So I coached him to breathe all the way down to his toes.
I went into him easily, one finger then two. I brought him up onto his knees with his head resting on the table, his butt in the air. He wrapped his feet around my calves. When I slid the length of my middle finger across his swollen prostate, he groaned with pleasure. “Deeper,” he requested. I adjusted my posture so I was a little higher and slid a third finger into his ass all the way up to the last knuckle, held it there, and vibrated it. With the other hand (whose glove I’d peeled off), I stroked his inner thighs, circled his balls, and tugged on his hard cock. Then I reached around and put my left hand on his lower belly just above his pubic bone and pressed inward, so his prostate received pressure from both sides.
Best of the Best Gay Erotica Page 14
