“Whatever, dude. You know it tastes better if you eat, like, vegetables and shit, and I get those salads at McDonald’s all the time,” said Britt.
“My cum tastes fine,” Cody said, dropping the butt of his cigarette in a beer can.
“So put your money where your mouth is. Or your mouth where my cock is,” Britt said.
“Fuck you.”
“You always scrunch up your face when you eat yours!” Britt said. By now he’d thrown a huge rod. It was exceptional when they found the language to talk about it, when they drew it out to the edge.
“That’s cause I’m cumming. I’m like, overwhelmed.”
“Bullshit,” Britt said, and it was, all of it was, but when it led where it led—Britt acquiescing to his own challenge, licking Cody’s load off of his slender stomach to compare and doing it hungrily (“How is it?” Cody asked. “Nasty,” Britt said after he’d eaten every drop. “Told you.”), then Britt jacking himself off and Cody sucking the cum off of Britt’s fingers, one by one till they were clean—how could you deny it? It was filthy, and it was hot.
But you weren’t allowed to say that. Once Cody had, and Britt shot him a withering look that dropped Cody’s stomach like a stone in a well. It took a whole day of strained cohabitation before they were doing it again.
Life was momentary for Britt Laney and Cody Jackson. One moment they were smoking a joint of dirt weed they’d scraped together from errant baggies, the next they were shoving garage tools up their asses. (That was thanks to Britt, who’d broken the ass-ice after months of them doing all they could to avoid it.)
Momentary because the boys, both nineteen, were away from home for the first time and enjoying every minute of their independence.
They’d met after their first semester at VyoTech, the local technical school where they were studying to become auto mechanics. By spring they had moved into a unit in the Opera House on Market Street. The Opera House had been just that in Groom’s late nineteenth-century heyday, when travel between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia had sent industry and the town’s population booming. At some point the block building was gutted and sectioned off into apartments that hadn’t been renovated since 1962, but who cared when you were paying $350 a month for a two-bedroom place? Not the landlords, that was for sure.
They were friends—best friends, and that was the extent to which they could admit to their relationship. They knew what faggots were and knew that they weren’t faggots. There were faggots in town; older guys, boyfriends apparently, who owned a house on Spring Street—Clitter Schreve, their gear-head townie friend, had pointed it out.
At first Britt had thrown a lot of fag-talk around, but that ebbed, mainly because Cody didn’t play up to it. Cody may have been confused but as far as he was concerned what he and Britt did was their business, and what the faggots did was theirs. As long as Britt thought the twain should never meet, he’d think the same.
It got a little tricky once they started blowing each other. It began as a natural progression from feeding each other loads of cum—Cody would sit on Britt’s scrawny chest, his dick close to Britt’s open lips, and it was only natural that his cockhead should bump against them. So Britt started wrapping his lips around the head of Cody’s cock—made it easier to catch his cum, anyway, and it wasn’t like you were chugging a cock past your gag reflex like some gutter whore.
Cody did it in turn, just like he did anything once Britt implicitly allowed it. They found it felt even better when the other used his tongue a little, nursing the head between his lips like it was a nipple or a lollipop. Then Britt went for broke and slid his mouth all the way down Cody’s big dick, and it was cool, no big deal—so Cody began taking all of Britt’s small one.
The rules regarding this were subtle and amorphous. It was okay to swallow a dick the whole way every once in a while, but bobbing the knob too much was suspect. Head movements were to be kept to a minimum. All of this was under the guise of eating each other’s loads, so if you were using your mouth to help that along, fine. Sucking to suck it was not fine.
Their asses were the demarcation point, the event horizon. But from the beginning their buttholes were engaged, squinching and releasing so exquisitely as surges of pleasure swarmed through their bodies. The act of throwing their legs over their heads, warm holes exposed to the cool air, had been an unspoken but key element to what made the self-facials so exciting.
It happened one night after they’d been doing beer bongs in their apartment with Clitter Schreve and another townie, who both eventually left to find crank. Britt and Cody fell into an old-school joint jerk-off, stroking each other’s cocks on the living room floor with big drunken smiles on their faces, the newly quiet apartment offering a giddy sense of promise and sexual release.
Cody had expected the usual—maybe some making out and then quasi-blowjobs. But Britt suddenly let go of Cody’s dick and began tending to himself, intently watching the porno on the TV. Cody got worried, wondering if he’d crossed some invisible line.
But something was up—Britt was beating off and making it last, drawing it out longer and longer. Cody’s back started to hurt from leaning against the couch, so he hoisted himself up on to it. That was when Britt swung his legs over his head, almost as if he’d been waiting for Cody to move, to give him an aerial view of his spread-wide ass.
“Man, I can’t wait to feed myself a load, you know?” Britt said. He ran his hands up and down his back, feeling up his sinewy thighs, then his butt. Cody’s tool was recharged—he could sense a boundary being tested. Britt was cupping his firm butt in his hands, and then his fingers were dipping into the brush of brown hair running down his crack toward his butthole. Cody had been keeping one eye on the porno for good measure, but then Britt’s fingers were definitely massaging his hole, touching it in little jabs that he’d couple with a grunt. When Britt wet a finger in his mouth, it could no longer go ignored.
“Dude, what are you doing?” Cody said.
“Can’t help it, man, feels too fucking good. You gotta try it.”
“No way,” Cody said as Britt brought the slick finger to his anus. He pressed it in. “Oh, man,” he said, looking up at Cody from his contorted position. “It seriously feels amazing.”
Cody thought I’m drunk enough, and got back down on the floor. He swung his blond-haired legs over his head, parting the thick cheeks of his hairless butt, thrilling to the feel of exposing that most sacred and profane of orifices. He wet his finger just like Britt had done and brought it to his light-pink hole.
The sensation wasn’t entirely new—he’d done it surreptitiously in the shower a couple times—but doing it with Britt was immeasurably different. It was always these moments that were the hottest, when they were doing things they said they’d never do. Britt had an engine-grease stained finger pushed all the way in his butt, then two, and Cody matched him finger for finger and stroke for stroke. Their simultaneous orgasms came like thieves in the night.
And so the ass became the focus. They devoted hours to fingering themselves, then sticking anything up their butts that they could find. Sharpie markers, screwdriver handles, an empty tequila bottle. To grease up they used a bottle of Lubriderm Cody purchased for $4.99 at Groom Pharmacy down the street.
A week later Cody, risking ridicule, bought a butt plug from the highway porno store.
“What the fuck is this?” Britt said, turning it around in his hand. Cody explained it, and then they tested it out on Britt, whose enthusiasm swelled along with his cock.
“It just sticks in there, huh?” Britt said, reaching back to feel it.
One afternoon during a break between classes he took Cody out in the woods beside the shop. Yanking down his coveralls, he showed him the red disc of the plug handle pressed up against his butt. He’d kept it in all day.
Later Britt came home with a double-ended dildo, a gesture so enormously suggestive (the thing was shaped like a giant mutant veined cock) he was compelled to say, “Don�
��t tell anybody about this.” As if, as if.
Cody had more difficulty stuffing it inside himself than Britt did (all in all Britt had seemed more adept at taking things up his ass, though both pretended not to notice this). But they had many memorable sessions on the couch and on the floor, ass to ass, banging each other in the butt, working in tandem, separate but equal.
The weather started to cool. Cody left town one morning to help his brother move some gravel. When he got back Britt was gone. Several hours passed and he didn’t return.
Cody tried to ignore Britt’s absence, but by 5:00 A.M. it was painful and obvious. He felt weird—he was mad at Britt, but he didn’t have a reason to be. He supposed he was worried about him, but that was stupid—Britt could take care of himself.
He lay on his bare mattress in the dark, ringed by dirty clothes, cigarette cellophanes, and empty beer cans. He wondered about this place he was in, the Opera House. Maybe he was lying where the auditorium had been. He imagined a woman on stage, her voice rising to the rafters and filling the space with overbearing sound, the audience taking it in with devouring ears and hungry souls.
Whatever. It was gone now. The lady underneath them was yelling at her kids. The guy next door sold heroin. Anything else was history.
Britt rolled in at noon the next day, Clitter Schreve in tow. Cody desperately wanted to ask what they’d been doing all night, but there was something about the way Clitter looked at him that made Cody go back to his room and shut the door. Britt and Clitter started hanging out a lot, sidestepping Cody like he was a pizza box they were too lazy to take to the Dumpster. Cody felt hollow.
One night he made Velveeta Shells & Cheese and offered some to Britt, who ate sullenly at the table. Some wall had been erected between them overnight and out of nowhere Cody could see.
Afterward Britt had a beer and Cody joined him. They watched TV, talking more as the beer kicked in; then they were swigging whiskey and getting colossally fucked up. Cody was on the floor packing the bong. He dropped some weed and was picking it up when Britt kicked him over.
“Hey!” Cody said, laughing like it was playful. Britt had the ghost of a smile on his face. He kicked him down again. Cody grabbed Britt’s leg and pulled him off the couch. They wrestled, drunkenly but seriously, knocking into furniture and using all of their muscle to hold each other down. Britt got Cody facedown on the floor and went for his boxers, tearing them off to expose his bare butt.
Cody felt violated. He grabbed Britt’s thigh, then his waist, and flipped him over so hard he knocked the wind out of him. He pinned Britt’s hands and yanked his sweatpants down. Britt’s hard dick slapped against his stomach. Cody stared at it. He looked to Britt who had his head turned to the side. After a moment he reached out to stroke it, like they used to do. Britt endured a minute of this, then flipped onto his stomach.
Cody was confused, but he put a hand on Britt’s ass and Britt backed up to meet it, so he kept it there. He got one dry finger inside him, and Britt was still gyrating his hips, face to the floor, silent. Cody stretched out on top of him, humping his dick against Britt’s fuzzy crack, the head of it catching on his hole. Then Britt was adjusting his ass, and the head of Cody’s cock went into Britt’s asshole, and Britt backed up to take more, the pain of being fucked dry somehow bearable for him. Maybe even necessary.
Cody barely remembered cumming inside of Britt, but afterward he saw that Britt had cum too, seemingly without touching himself—there was a wet stain on the carpet, like a bad dog’s mess.
Cody rolled off and lay on his back. He was beginning to drift off when a red bomb exploded in his face.
He opened his eyes to see Britt’s fist coming at him again. Britt, who’d awoken tangled in Cody’s limbs only to stumble to the kitchen and finish off the bottle of whiskey, crunched him square on the nose. Hot blood poured into Cody’s mouth. He got his bearings and pushed at Britt, who toppled easily. Cody stood up, blood dripping on his socks, on Britt, who was rolling on the floor like some useless thing, waiting for Cody to kick him, punch him, fuck him—wasn’t it all the same?
Cody stanched the flow of blood from his nose, wiped himself up with a T-shirt, threw a different T-shirt on his bare chest, and left.
The streets were dark, the lights on Market Street blinking yellow. He wandered, addled, until the sky started to brighten. He found himself in front of the queers’ house on Spring Street. Like all the other houses it was dark and quiet. He stepped into their yard and crept through the wet grass along the side of the house. He looked into a window.
He hadn’t expected to find them awake, but they were. One man was standing and one was sitting at the kitchen table. Cody had enough time to see that one of them, the smaller one, was pouring two cups of coffee, had enough time to think that they may as well be from another planet before the two men met his eyes.
A RETIRED WRITER IN THE SUN
Simon Sheppard
“Narrative coherence,” said the Witch of Capri. “They all want fucking narrative coherence.”
Quilty scribbled furiously. He would have brought his laptop to take notes, but he’d been warned beforehand that computers were banned within the sacred precincts of the Witch’s cliff-top home. Not even a voice recorder passed muster. Perhaps it was some kind of obscure test, the Labors of Hercules for interviewers. Or maybe it was just the sadism of an old queen.
“And if there’s one thing, my son, that life teaches one, it’s that narrative coherence—hell, coherence of any sort—is largely an illusion, the fretful workings of a mind struggling to superimpose order on this squalid mess we call life.”
That was a nice turn of phrase: “squalid mess.” Quilty struggled to get it all down.
“So you would say that you didn’t abandon erotic writing, that it abandoned you?”
“A neat formulation, but no. I simply realized that I could write porn till the crack of doom, and I’d still never succeed in getting it right.”
“Getting what right? Never succeed? But…” The Witch of Capri was, after all, perhaps the preeminent voice in the entire history of gay erotica. Under a variety of pen names—some brutish, like “Ramm Hardin,” others, like “Firbank Fiore,” exuding more than a whiff of camp—he had churned out a remarkable seventy books, more or less, meanwhile maintaining a parallel, highly acclaimed career in Genuine Literature. All that was, of course, why Quilty was there to interview him.
“The ineffability of desire, my lad. Let me tell you a story.” The Witch of Capri had, in fact, told a surfeit of stories over the preceding day and a half, but Quilty let him continue. His doctoral thesis, like it or not, depended on the garrulousness of an old man.
“Several years ago, I met this young man—and I mean young, he was nineteen at the time, or so he said—on the phone sex lines.” The renowned Witch of Capri jacking off to phone sex? Now that was an image. “He was, he told me, tall, skinny, and a redhead, still living with his parents. And he had the softest, shyest, horniest voice. The first time we spoke, he came so quickly that I hadn’t time to unzip myself. Subsequently, he’d phone me at odd times when his family was gone, and every time I heard his voice on the phone, I became instantly erect.
“He, for his part, became rather adept at phone sex. He would tell me what he was, or wasn’t, wearing, and follow my lead, or at least say he was doing so. I would command him to get some spit on his hand and slide a finger up his ass, and in short order, he’d be making the most delightful moans. He didn’t come as quickly as he had at first, either, though he still outpaced me every time. And he did have an annoying habit of hanging up as soon as he’d come, though a ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Thank you’ certainly wouldn’t have been out of place.
“But that’s not really the point, is it? If the redheaded boy had been a character in a story I was writing, I would have been expected to add some narrative aspect, some conclusion, some—no pun intended—climax. His parents would have walked in on him while he had his young dick in his
hand. We would have arranged to meet, and would have had fabulous sex. Or he would have turned out to be fifty, bald, and fat. Or something. But none of that happened. He phoned me perhaps a dozen times, got off, hung up, and eventually ceased calling. That was all.”
He sipped his gin and tonic and looked off to the horizon, where an improbably lovely sunset, freighted with metaphor, colored the late afternoon. “But the truth is that, more than a decade later, that unseen redheaded boy remains one of my erotic touchstones. After god-knows-how-many tricks in my life—I was quite a looker in my youth, but you already know that—I still desire that voice on the phone more than I’ve ever wanted just about anyone. And thinking about it still gets me hard.” Quilty, unable to restrain himself, looked down. Sure enough, the Witch’s rather awful caftan was tenting up.
The Witch of Capri finished off his G&T. “And nothing I could possibly write…well, let’s just say that I retired for good reason. Shall we go in for dinner?” He rose shamelessly and, preceded by his famous erection, left the terrace.
The von Gloedenesque serving boy—he reeked of Mediterranean rough trade, and Quilty could only hope he was of age—cleared away dishes that had been licked clean of panna cotta, and poured fussy little glasses of port.
“I came, as you’re aware, from a good deal of money, so I’ve been able to afford all this.” With a grand sweep of his arm, the Witch indicated his surroundings, including the handsome young man. “And, really, at this stage of my life, there are only two major causes for discomfort. First, there’s the inexorable passage of time, which is, you know, or at least can surmise, a bitch. And, perhaps more acutely, there’s my utter inadequacy when confronted by the beauty of men…well, let’s be honest, young men. Of course, I can easily afford to hire company. The financial aspect of such transactions might well be viewed as somehow demeaning, it’s true. But when a smooth, slim twenty-year-old strips down, lies back, his lovely cock standing straight up against a jet black thicket of pubic hair, and, at my command, opens his ass to me till I can see the pink corona, glimpse the darkness within…” He sipped the port and stared into middle space.
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