by Rolan Graeme
“Maybe I can get it surgically removed,” Austin said, thinking out loud.
Jon snickered “Ramrod’s dick? A little late now, I’d say!”
“No, I mean the mole!”
“Don’t go all Californian on me, Austin,” Nick pleaded. Austin had already learned that Californian was Nick’s slang term for anyone who was superficial, and in particular, for anyone who was preoccupied by his own physical appearance.
Austin forced himself to sit there and watch all of the new videos, including the ones in which he hadn’t participated, which he enjoyed much more than seeing himself in action. Afterward, when Nick and Jon were congratulating him, he confessed as much.
Jon agreed. “I never watch my own stuff. Oh, when I was younger, when I first started, sure. I watched it obsessively and I always found fault with myself. But once it’s in the can, you can’t go back and do anything about it. It’s a done deal.You have to move on and live in the moment.”
“I used to watch my own performances, and other guys’, just to see what worked and what could be improved,” Nick said. “Now, I hardly have time to check out the competition, and when I do, it’s just to see if there are any trends I ought to be keeping on top of.”
“Or any really hot newcomers you’d like to top,” Jon joked.
“I’ve got my hot newcomer right here.” Nick gave Austin a quick hug and kiss.
Austin felt better. Jon’s praise sounded sincere, and Nick’s opinion was the one that really mattered, as far as Austin was concerned.
Jon turned out to be an ideal house guest. He was a night owl, but even his tendency to stay up late at night, and sleep in late the following morning, didn’t really conflict with Nick’s schedule, or with Austin’s, since Austin was so often an overnight guest, sharing Nick’s bedroom with him. After Nick and Austin went to bed in the evenings, Jon was perfectly capable of amusing himself as he sat up alone. He would watch TV, or read, or text-message people he knew, all across the country.
If he was usually still in bed, fast asleep, when Nick and Austin got up in the morning and went about their business, he made up for it during the day. Jon wouldn’t let Nick do a lick of housework while he was there. He not only compulsively kept the entire house clean and tidy. He took charge of the laundry and cooking duties as well, and even busied himself by attending to some long-neglected repair work that needed to be done.
“I like to keep busy,” he insisted, brushing aside Nick’s protests. “I’m not going to free-load while I’m here. I intend to earn my keep.” Nick, wisely, didn’t argue with his friend, but let Jon have his way.
The three men did go out on the town on some evenings, availing themselves of what little the area did offer in the way of night life. If Jon missed the bright lights of the big city, he didn’t show it. He got a special kick out of hearing Nick perform at the coffee shop on open mic night.
One evening, Nick put his foot down. He flatly refused to let Jon cook dinner for himself and Austin. “I’ve got about an hour of maintenance work I want to do on the website,” he told the other two guys. “And then we’ll go out for dinner, to a decent restaurant, my treat—no arguments. Assuming you two can amuse yourselves in the meantime? With your pants on,” Nick added.
“Oh. That kind of spoils what I originally had in mind,” Jon quipped. “But come on, Austin. We’ll let The Computer Geek do his thing.”
With Nick sequestered in his office, at his keyboard, they retreated to the kitchen to give him his privacy. Jon, somewhat to Austin’s surprise, was a skilled chess player. He’d brought with him a little traveling chess set, with magnetized pieces that could be stored inside the hinged box, which folded open to reveal the board. He’d been teaching Austin the game, and unlike some chess players, Jon didn’t insist on rapt silence during a match, but preferred to talk. He set up the game on the kitchen table, and they began to play.
“Has Nick told you why I phoned him that night?” Jon asked, casually. “What finally pushed me over the edge?”
“No.” Austin knew that Nick and Jon had gotten involved in what Nick described as some nice long talks, during the daytime, when both of them were often alone in the house together. But Nick had volunteered no details, and Austin was too diplomatic to ask. “Nick is very discreet, as I’m sure you, of all people, know, since you’ve known him so much longer than I have.”
“That’s Nick, all right. He’s a good friend. A loyal friend. Maybe the best friend I’ve got. Anyway,” Jon went on, in that same deceptively casual tone, as he studied his pieces on the board, “I was at the end of my rope, that night. Burned out. I guess I was going through some sort of a mid-life crisis. What precipitated it was, I got this offer from a studio out in California, to do a bareback video.”
“Oh, man.”
“Exactly. I’ve never done one, and I know Nick hasn’t, either. There’s money to be made doing it. Hell, there’s money to be made doing just about anything, if you’re not too particular and you don’t put a very high value on your self-respect! However, some of the major studios, the ones that insist on their actors using condoms, won’t hire you once they know they’ve gone down that route. There’s no turning back, in a sense, once you decide to bareback.
“So I stalled these guys, told them I needed some time to think it over. Then I could feel myself starting to get all anxious, bent out of shape, about the whole thing. I guess I had what you’d call a panic attack, and my way of dealing with that, of course, was to go out and get laid. I knew that picking up some decent guy and tricking with him wasn’t going to do it for me, Austin, not the way I felt. I knew I was going to have to just go out there and be a dirty sex pig, fuck and suck until I couldn’t see straight. I just let anybody do anything they wanted to me as long as it would take my mind off what a loser I’d allowed myself to become.”
Jon paused, and studied Austin’s last move on the chess board. “No, you don’t want to do that, Austin,” he coached. “See? Now I can move my knight here, to put your king in check, and, since the only thing you can do is move your king to this square, I can take your queen on my next move. I suggest you do this, instead.” Jon moved Austin’s piece for him.
“I see what you mean, but isn’t that cheating, you helping me out like that?”
“You’re still learning the game. I’m teaching you. We’re just playing for fun. And maybe this isn’t the only game I can teach you about,” Jon insisted. “But to get back to my story, which isn’t boring you, is it?”
“Hardly. I’m really interested.”
“So I’m undecided. Do I call these guys back and tell them I’ll do the video, jump on the next plane to the west coast, or do I tell them to fuck off, and they can feel free to hire somebody else? It’s driving me crazy. So I finally get all dressed up in my best leather drag and grab a taxi, straight to this really sleazy leather bar where the hardcore motherfuckers hang out. This is New York City, remember, so when I say hardcore, I mean hardcore. Guys who do for fun what you couldn’t pay me enough to do in a video, even though I’ve been on plenty of leather-themed and BDSM shoots.
“So I walk into this bar, ready to get it on with anybody who looks even halfway decent, and with more than one dude, preferably, and of course, not only does nobody recognize me, nobody seems particularly interested. Jon D’Eau, the big porn star, can’t get himself laid! Just what I needed, in the mood I was in!
“Finally, though, just when I’m so desperate that I’m about to start making the rounds of the top men, you know…or maybe you don’t know, Austin? By ‘making the rounds,’ I mean making it damn clear I’m available, offering to buy them a drink, offering to be their slave. I happen to overhear these two numbers in full leather drag talking about this new sex club that just opened, right around the corner. One dude says to the other how bored he is, so why don’t they go check out the action around the corner. And his buddy says, yeah, why don’t we? So when they walk out, I wait a second, so as not to seem too obvious, and then I fo
llow them.”
“Okay, Jon,” Austin interjected. “Back up a minute. You’re going to have to educate me a little, here. I suppose the term sex club is more or less self-explanatory, but I’ve sure as hell never been to one, so I’m not sure I known how they work, or exactly what goes on in one.”
“It’s simple. It’s an underground sort of thing. They don’t advertise through the usual channels. You find them on the Internet, or through word of mouth. They’re dumps, spaces rented in buildings of all sorts, but usually in the low-rent districts. You go in through the front door. Sometimes it’s more like an obstacle course of more than one door, that you have to negotiate. You show your ID, you pay the entrance fee, and you get a key to a locker. You take off your clothes and if you’ve brought any leather gear along with you, now’s your chance to put it on. Then you hit the orgy room, which consists of a space with low lighting, or no lighting at all, and a dirty bare mattress on the floor. If there’s more than one orgy room to choose from, then you know you’ve stumbled upon a higher class of dump. You get high, if you want to…and most of the clientele that patronizes these places does want to, and you have sex with anybody and everybody who appeals to you. Or who’s horny, available, and not too particular about who they have sex with, which is probably a fair enough description of you, at this stage in the activities.”
“You make it sound kind of grim, Jon.”
“It is grim. Let’s just say you have to be in a certain frame of mind to get into that kind of a scene, and to stay in it for very long. Needless to say, a lot of unprotected sex takes place in these clubs, and if you pull out a strip of condoms and expect your partners to use them, a lot of them are going to look at you as though you’re the one who’s crazy, not them. You get the same reaction if you don’t want to get high on whatever drug’s being passed around.
“Anyway,” Jon continued, “to make a long story short, I behaved in a way that would make a sex addict blush. I took on any and all comers, sucked cock and took it up the ass, nonstop, for I don’t know how long. It was an assembly line. Any guys who didn’t want actual body contact with me, but who wanted to watch, I invited to jack off and shoot their loads on me. I was covered with come before too long, as though I’d been dipped in it.
“Finally, even I’d had enough. Not only couldn’t I have gotten it up again on a bet, but my ass hole felt sore. I put my clothes on and staggered out of that dump. The sun was just rising. I could smell all those guys’ come on me. It was disgusting. When I passed a storefront, I was afraid to look in the window because I might see my reflection, and I didn’t want to look at myself.
“I went home and stood under a hot shower for I don’t know how long, scrubbing and scrubbing myself, but I still felt dirty, like I could never get clean. That’s when I first got the idea of calling Nick. Even so, I stalled. I put it off until that night, when I was tempted to go out on the town and repeat the whole sordid experience all over again. Thank God I finally did work up enough nerve to call Nick. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be in one of those sex clubs right how, high as a kite, fucking and sucking my brains out, and not even enjoying it.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, Austin. I’ve never had anything against sex, including group sex and anonymous sex. But this wasn’t sex. It was me trying to prove something to myself. Trying to numb myself with other men’s bodies and cocks, so I wouldn’t have to think, so I wouldn’t have to face myself. But all bad things have to come to end eventually, just like all good things come to an end, including orgies. So there I was on a street in Manhattan. It was dawn, I wasn’t numb any more, and I had to face myself.”
He paused, and Austin felt obliged to say something, anything, in response.
“When you put yourself down, Jon, you say you aren’t very well educated, or bright. But you’re really a bit of an intellectual, aren’t you? You’re awfully self-aware for a guy who keeps insisting he’s dumb. You can be very articulate.”
“Well, I do read a lot. Maybe I should’ve been a librarian.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The House Guest
“I have to drive up to Albany Saturday morning, and stay overnight,” Nick announced to Austin. “So I won’t be back until sometime on Sunday,”
“Oh? Where will you be staying? At some guy’s house?” Austin asked, trying his best to make the question sound casual.
“No, in a motel. This is a business trip. And not the kind of business you’re thinking about. I have to get this customer’s website up and running for her.”
“You have a woman customer, for a change?”
“Don’t be sexist, Austin. Women do use computers and run their own businesses, you know. I admit I may have used my fatal charm on this lady, to persuade her to hire me.”
Austin grunted. “As long as you don’t plan on using your fatal charm to go any further with her.”
“Not likely. She’s got a husband and two teenaged kids.”
“I’m not sure I can trust you in Albany overnight, Nick. I’ve never been there. Is there any kind of a gay scene up there?”
“Sure. It pales beside Manhattan, of course, but a gay man can find some amusement there. I may check out one or two of the bars.”
“Nick, are you trying to make me jealous?”
“I don’t seem to have to try very hard, do I? Believe it or not, I’m perfectly capable of having a few drinks in a bar, and talking to a few people, without necessarily ending up going home with any of them. Hey, let’s talk seriously for a moment, Austin. While I’m away, Saturday night, why don’t you spend the night at my place, with Jon?”
“Why?”
“I’m not saying that Jon needs a keeper, but he might get lonely. I’ve already mentioned it to him. He’d enjoy having your company.”
“Okay. I’ll do it. I guess Jon and I can find something to do to keep ourselves out of trouble, while you’re gone.”
“That’s the spirit, Austin. Make yourself at home. I’ll make sure the refrigerator is well stocked before I leave. Oh, and—”
“What?”
“If you and Jon should decide to fool around a little with each other while I’m out of town, that would be okay with me. I wouldn’t mind.”
“Jesus, Nick!” Austin protested. “I don’t need you to set me up with other guys!”
“I know you don’t. And you don’t need my permission to trick with other guys, either. I didn’t mean to imply that you do, but I know Jon likes you. He’s attracted to you. Who wouldn’t be? And we’re all friends. Jealousy and possessiveness would be stupid and completely out of place, when it comes to the three of us.”
“Jon’s a very sexy guy, and I like him as a person, but I don’t feel the same way about him that I feel about you.”
Nick smiled. “Well, that’s rather flattering to hear.”
That Friday evening, Austin went to Nick’s house after work. Nick, as so often, was seated at his computer, so, after greeting him, Austin went in search of Jon. He found the man in the small space Nick used as a laundry room, transferring a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer.
“Hi, kid,” Jon said. “I understand you and I are going to have this place all to ourselves, tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll miss Nick, course, but it’ll be nice to spend some time one-on-one with you. Too bad Nick won’t miss me,” Austin added, sourly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, I suppose he will miss me, but not in the same way I feel about him. Let’s face it, Jon. Nick doesn’t love me,” Austin complained.
Jon made a wry face. “Jesus, you sound like somebody in one of those made-for-TV movies. You know, the kind in which the poor misunderstood middle-class white kid goes through some sort of a crisis, which is resolved after the last commercial break.”
Despite himself, Austin had to laugh. “Aw, shut the fuck up.”
“I don’t mean to tease you. You’ve got it bad, don’t you? You’re
really hung up on my old buddy Nick.”
“I guess so.”
“So tell me. Which would you rather be with…some guy who thinks he’s in love with every guy he has sex with, or a guy like Nick who’s a lot more realistic and cautious? And who isn’t going to pretend to himself, or to you, that he’s in love with you, until he really knows he is?”
“The latter, I suppose.”
“Exactly. And Nick does like you. A lot. I can tell that much.”
“Nick likes a lot of guys,” Austin said, moodily. “Maybe I’m asking for too much, but I’d prefer to be one guy he doesn’t just like.”
“Let me tell you something about Nick. He gets along with people. That doesn’t mean that, outside of business, he has much use for them. He doesn’t let himself get close to many of the men he has sex with, if you know what I mean? He always tends to hold a lot of his real self back. But with you, it’s different. I’ve noticed something, just in the short time I’ve been here, watching the two of you. With you, Nick gives a lot more than he usually does. He lets his guard down. My advice to you is, try to be grateful for that much, and don’t be impatient. Give the man time to get used to the idea of being with you.”
Nick insisted that they eat out that evening, his treat, so he, Nick and Austin went to a restaurant, and then they stopped in at The Driveshaft for a drink. Jon, Austin noticed, ordered a ginger ale.
“You two lovebirds can get smashed, if you want to,” Jon said. “I’ll drive you home.”
Lovebirds, my ass! But Austin had to admit that he was having a good time. He couldn’t help noticing how all the men in the bar stared admiringly at his two companions, and at him, envying him for being in their company. Nick, like Jon, was friendly and allowed a few strangers to strike up conversations with him, but he concentrated his attention on Austin, which was flattering.
Nick didn’t want to drink a lot because he had to get up early in the morning to drive to Albany. Nevertheless, he had a few, and when they left the bar, he and Austin, if not exactly drunk, were definitely buzzed and feeling mellow. Jon drove them back to the house, where Austin and Nick said goodnight to him, went to Nick’s bedroom, and made love.