Visible Lives

by Stanley Bennett Clay

  Sean Dawson particularly caught her eye, and hers his. Sean was more of a model than an actor. He was, quite frankly, too pretty for primetime, was more like one of those chocolate Ken dolls lying around in tight-fitting boxers and life-altering angst on daytime soap operas. You know, one of those perfectly chiseled, honey-colored morsels designed to give stay-at-home moms dominatrix fantasies and Madonna wet dreams, not to mention the willies and the envy he provoked among daytime, stay-at-home soap queens who fantasized about being him, having him, or killing him for being him. He was like Shamar was back in the day, what Eric Benet could have been if it wasn’t for the Halle pothole.

  But I digress.

  I can only imagine Frankie’s initial reaction to the beautiful face, so deep-chocolate-red-tanned that one could only think Caribbean—though he was straight out of Detroit—the stunning ear-length dreads, much like mine, that bounced around that perfectly chiseled face, and the goatee that circled his perfect smile.

  Turns out both Frankie and Sean got the parts on Grey’s Anatomy they had auditioned for, ended up working together, and before the end of their first day, Frankie had invited Sean out to dinner at the Porterhouse Bistro in Beverly Hills with hopes of serving up some dark chocolate poontang dessert back at her Miracle Mile condo.

  Now, to hear Frankie tell it, it wasn’t Sean’s scant notice of her ample breasts heaving out of her low-cut halter that re-awakened her sleepy gaydar, but the hot-ass waiter whose walk-away from the table was stripped naked by Sean’s keen and lustful eyes.

  “How did an old E. Lynn Harris fan like me let that get past me?” she asked me later that night over the phone.

  “You’re slipping, doll.”

  “All those stares and goo-goo eyes he gave me on the audition?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out boyfriend’s a fan. Saw me when I guest-starred on Girlfriends. I’m trying to get me some dick and he wants a goddamn autograph. You’re a top, right?”

  “Frankie!”

  “Well, I’m just asking, Junie. I’m pretty sure he’s a bottom. I mean, the way he was checking out the waiter’s crotch when he came back with our drinks.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Frankie.”

  “So you are a top.”

  “Francesca, I am not having this conversation with you. You’re my sister.”

  “Well, I’m only asking because it would be a shame to let all that phine piece of man go to waste. You should let your baby sister hook you up. I showed him your picture and he thinks you’re cute.”

  “Oh God, Frankie, you showed him that picture of me at Andre’s birthday party?”

  “It’s the only one I had of you on my phone.”

  “I look like a dork in that picture.”

  “You look like an intellectual in that picture. The dreads give you character; completely disguises your dorkiness.”

  “See?”

  “Besides, he has dreads too. You guys would make a great couple.”

  “Really?”

  “Trust.”

  “He really said that?”

  “What?”

  “That he thinks I’m cute.”

  “Actually, he said he thinks you’re a cutie pie. And he is totally gorgeous, dreamy brown bedroom eyes, lashes almost as long as mine, a perfect thick-lip smile, perfect goatee, a cute tight ass, maybe six-feet, six-one, I’d say a hundred-and-seventy-five, you know, skinny in that hot kind of way, and at least a size eleven shoe.”

  Well, it had been a while since I had been out with anyone, and he did sound absolutely delicious and just my type, so after a few hems and haws, I decided to meet my sister’s fan.

  Sean Dawson turned out to be everything Frankie said he was and more, and before I knew it, we were lost in the thrall of a hot and heavy affair after one dinner date. Perhaps we jumped in too quickly, but when the sex is as good as it was between us, caution and careful study were abandoned quicker than college final studies for a frat house orgy. It didn’t help that I had been celibate for eight months and had all this sexual tension built up inside ready to explode at the slightest touch, and it didn’t help that Sean was a male nymph feasting at the banquet table of carnal delights like a happy glutton who never met a calorie he didn’t like. For the next week, we devoured each other ravenously, took from and gave to each other with erotic abandon, ran through lube and condoms like ice cream and cake at a six-year-old’s birthday party.

  The fact that we were having sex morning, noon, and night, a schedule easily accommodated by our respective occupations as freelance photographer and freelance actor/model, made the decision to move in together an easy one if, what did not seem so at the time, a foolish one.

  We had gotten to know each other’s bodies before we got to know each other. You would think that at thirty-eight, I would have known better, but good dick and booty can blind the inner vision of a soothsayer.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I did love Sean, or would eventually come to love him, and he me. But during those first few weeks, lust was our master, and under its whip, we were happier than singing pickaninnies on Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation.

  So Sean moved from his tiny, over-priced West Hollywood single into my two-bedroom apartment in the fourplex I owned on Fourth Avenue, just south of Hancock Park. I bought the building with money I had won as a college contestant on Wheel of Fortune ages ago. At the time, I was a senior at UCLA. I also won three trips—Ireland, Tahiti, and Rio de Janeiro—which began my life-long love of travel.

  Although I had a cleaning woman—Mrs. Tremaine—coming in once a week, Sean’s slovenly ways and total sense of disarray kept the apartment in such a mess that Mrs. Tremaine threatened to quit, in spite of my best efforts to pick up after Sean. I eventually got Sean straightened out on the domestic front and he taught me how not to be so anal.

  Then Sean got his big break. He booked the role of Denzel Washington’s younger brother in some big-budget action feature shooting in Munich, Germany, which was also starring Brad Pitt. We celebrated with the best sex of our young romance, and since he would be gone for eight weeks, we had to get in enough high-powered lovemaking to sustain us through those two months of abstinence.

  Although I was so happy for him, seeing him off to Germany was like bidding farewell to a spouse being deployed to Afghanistan. That’s when I realized how truly much I loved Sean; dropping him off at the airport, kissing him good-bye, hungering for one more taste of him, feel of him, filling him, him filling me, missing him before he was even out of my sight.

  There was a bittersweet consolation attached to our respective occupations that linked us in ways that words could not describe. Sean was an actor and loved to be photographed, and I was a damn good photographer. The art we created on celluloid and framed, then hung on walls, perched on mantles, displayed bound like coffee-table picture books was good enough to give me warmth, if not the full encompassing fire of his flesh-and-blood presence that I craved nightly and daily and nightly when I dreamed of him spooned naked in my arms, the smell of his coconut-scented hair, thick, soft and twisted, my raging hard-on sandwiched between his long lean thighs, his soft ass hairs moistened by commingled jizzum and sweet manhole pucker sweat that made me shudder in my smiling sleep.

  In his physical absence, my morning showers, ritualized by masturbatory fantasies of him, were clear in my mind and my heart and my loins; the taste of his mouth, the taste of his dick, the taste of his ass while I twisted my nipples, slipped soapy fingers up my throbbing rectum and beat my meat with masochistic glee as I closed my eyes and joyously grimaced and strained at the thought of him sucking me down to my shaft and my balls, swallowing me whole with his mouth and his ass, and me shoving tongue, dick, fingers, and toys into that glorious, soft-hairy rimmed hole of his.

  Coming home after long sessions of photographing cute, not-a-care-in-the world toddlers, wide-eyed starlet wannabees, plus-size divas who brushed aside rejections like so many failed diets, bad actors with a
look, good actors without game, hapless hopeful dreamers of impossible, unstoppable dreams, I could not get to my solitude quick enough, to this love-hate relationship with his too very real absence and his fantasy presence.

  Still, my professional voyeurism kept Sean and his sex clear in my mind, even as I toiled behind my cameras, but save for the occasional dip into my studio washroom to milk my barking hound and calm it down, I had to wait until the end of my professional day to fully appreciate and pleasure myself with the porn that looped inside my head.

  I rushed home each night and allowed the very thought of him to work me into a frenzy ignited by his smiling face on glossy and matte eight-by-tens and those X-rated nude and sexy photographs of him I’d taken inside my head, the kind of photos I wish to God I had in hand, solo scenes on DVDs, scenes of me fucking and sucking and hungrily tossing the salad of my own private porn star.

  But most real actors and models these days are funny that way, willing to stick a camera up their ass for a big studio film or a small independent feature by a distinguished director and perform full frontal nudity and simulated sex on a legitimate theatre stage, but loath to do so much as show nipples in anything X-rated, even if they’re taken by friends and lovers. After all, friends can easily turn into foes and lovers don’t last forever, or so they say. But pictures and videos do. Big tabloid bucks can turn anyone into a Judas and wreck a promising career before the promise is fulfilled.

  And although I am a proud professional voyeur, exhibitionism was never my thing, though a less modest man with a body like mine would have been proud to put it on display, if I must say so myself.

  And so the double frustrations of not having Sean here and relying on the images of our lovemaking that danced in my head were both maddening and delicious, and his absence made my heart grow desperately full of want and implacable desire. It was not enough that we spoke on the phone every other day. (With his fourteen-to-sixteen hour a day shooting schedule, not to mention all the stunt work he had to perform and the lines he had to learn, he just didn’t have the time or energy for daily phone sex.) It was not enough that his deep baritone voice hit all my buttons trans-Atlantically. It wasn’t enough that the meat hung in the butcher’s shop while I starved with my face pressed up against the window. I was hungry for my man.

  Had I become obsessive? Addicted? I’m afraid I had, and I cherished the sweet pain of my malady.

  The Labor Day weekend was three weeks away and I had deliberately kept my schedule clear. My sister Frankie and I had planned to spend the weekend laid up at the beach in Oceanside, then come back on Monday in time for the annual family barbecue at our brother Andre’s place in Cerritos.

  “Hey, Doll.”

  “Hey, Big Bro.”

  “Listen, how set are you on Oceanside?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m thinking about flying over to Germany.”

  “To see your man!”

  “It’s been three weeks, Frankie, and I don’t think I can last much longer.”

  “I heard that, but you know Mom is gonna kill you if you don’t show up for the barbecue.”

  “I’m just going over there to get some sustenance, three or four days, then I’m flying right back, cheeks flush and full.”

  “I’m not even gonna touch that. So I know Sean is happy.”

  “Well, he doesn’t know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m going to surprise him.”

  “You sure you wanna do that, Junie?”

  “What?”

  “Just make sure you don’t end up surprising yourself.”

  Okay, I wasn’t born yesterday, but baby sistah’s ominous foreboding seemed just a little too Zane for my Barbara Cartland sense of romance.

  Chapter Two

  Fuck Barbara Cartland. Fuck Zane. And fuck Frankie. Why does she always have to be so damn right?

  It was Labor Day weekend but it was as cold as hell sitting at that tiny table at that funky-ass sidewalk café in the center of Munich, down the street from the Bayererische Hof hotel where the film company had put Sean up, but I didn’t care. I needed to be exiled to the cold, under a gray and gloomy sky, made to suffer for my foolishness, my naïveté, my stupid romantic notions.

  As much as I tried to empty my head of that hellish tableau, it looped over and over inside my brain like a bad YouTube porn video. I should have known from the muffled moans on the other side of the door. Come on, did I really believe that those were cries of distress and that here I was, to save the day, to rescue my baby from some fucking Heath Ledger seizure? Who was I fooling other than me? Certainly not the pale pixy fräulein, who bowed diffidently in her crisp maid’s uniform, easing discreetly past the scene of the slime, as oblivious to it as to a gentleman’s fart. But no, me, I had to drop my bags right there where I stood, outside of his room, in the cathedral-ceilinged, Persian-rug-covered hallway, and I had to rush right in, burst right in, and save my man from a fate worse than death. So I deserved exactly what I observed.

  Heroically, I body-slammed the door, but not even the ruckus of my crash landing could outdo the wild rhythmic cries of intolerable pain, pleasure, and bliss grunting from the wicked and wanton grimace of my lover’s tongue-wagging, wide-stricken grin, as his eyes flamed with unearthly delight. There he was, slung doggy-style over the damask-covered, armless, Queen Anne settee, as white thighs smacked his brown caboose, pink-white knuckles twisted in his sweat-drenched dreads, snatching his head back and forth, up and down, side to side, and the three-legged white jockey furiously rode his black ass, a wild neighing mare bucking for the finish line.

  There he was, punched, jabbed, and massaged with what looked like at least twelve inches of manhood, confirmed by the triple-X condom wrapper crumpled on the floor, whose length and girth I immediately envied.

  But then I was too shocked and too turned on to know exactly what I felt, seeing what I was seeing, angling my head in disgust, figuring out how my slim little boy could take all of the knockwurst this Brad Pitt–looking dickmeister was poling him with. And who says white boys don’t pack? Maybe it’s a German thing.

  God, if I only had my camera, which was packed away in one of the bags I had left in the hallway, I would have finally gotten on film the picture that I’d cum to a thousand times in my head.

  Exhausted and spent but not yet done with his feeding, it took Sean a few more escalating grunts to realize that I was piled just inside the doorway like a sack of dirty laundry tossed down a chute to a cold basement floor. I was what he saw, huffing with anger, jealousy, want and desire, turned on and turned off, struggling to drag myself up from the floor where I had landed so doofusly. German Brad was too busy stretching my boy’s asshole into a Diana Ross grin to notice my steamy pathetic vigil, my rise from the puddle and shame of raging tears and the throbbing hard-on that my anger and hurt could not control.

  And then suddenly our eyes met in that frozen moment in time, Sean’s and mine, and I could tell by his newly contorted face, transmogrified from savage lust to stinging dread and bewilderment, that I seemed to him a phantom, a blur, an unbelievable reality that shocked and frightened him into an orgasmic explosion, an explosion in foreboding sync with the ravishing rattling, the spastic throbbing of that loose-cannon, latex-wrapped white boy’s missile exploding inside the jaws of his ass.

  Spent and sweaty, the Brad clone collapsed on poor Sean. Sandwiched between the Nordic Adonis and the Queen Anne damask, stained with spit, sweat, and cum, Jackson Pollock smeared on pristine brocade, what was left of my man smiled up at me meekly with a pathetic smile that could not find an answer to my silent question, “Why is another motherfucker’s dick up your ass?”

  “Jesse, wait,” Sean pleaded as I straightened myself, turned around, and walked out the door, “let me explain.”

  Yes. That’s what I heard him say as I snatched up my bags in a Dominique Deveraux snit, as I marched grandly toward the elevator, dreads bouncing with fury, sum
moned it with the touch of an outraged finger, boarded it with my head held high, swung around to give him, wrapped in his cum-stained towel, leaning out of his doorway, an evil eye answer to his tearful reprise, “Let me explain, Jesse. Please, just let me explain.”

  And as the doors of the elevator shut coldly between us, I had resolved that he would be shut out of my life.

  Still, as the elevator carried me down toward the street-level foyer, I saw him, the vision of him. I turned to it, and looked at it, all of it, the lips I would never kiss again. The dick I would never taste again, the beautiful ass I would never know again. The eyes my eyes would never see again.

  My heart snapped the picture, but as the doors of the elevator opened wide to the bustling and anonymous foyer, my mind, the smarter of the two, burned the negative. And so there I was, freezing in a cold and heartless Germany, hovered over by dirty ghostly clouds, seated at a table at some dreary outdoor café, drinking bad coffee, luggage at my feet, wishing that I smoked, understanding why folks needed to smoke after something like this, wishing I did drugs, but scared by the very idea.

  Still, the dank and the harrowing cold was not punishment enough. I truly needed to freeze my balls off, get whipped by the razor winds that purpled my ebony cheeks and chapped my chattering lips. I needed the flagellant elements to drag out my penance, make me painfully accountable for my stupid stupidity.

  I turned on my phone for the first time since fleeing the scene where my immediate ex had been getting his cookies done. I erased the missed calls from his cell and presumably his hotel room. I called my airline instead and re-booked my flight back home, but they had nothing until the next day, so I found a room in some cold, tacky dive, strapped on my camera, and decided to make the best of my self-pity, my sentence in this city I shared with a man I never wanted to see again.