“Looks like a whale,” Asa said, directing me to the right.
“Oh right, that big submarine sandwich.” I tried to laugh. Asa laughed a little and then said, “C’mon, it’s a whale.”
“You’re right.” I sensed him looking at me. We didn’t say anything else. Five minutes later we scaled down a cliff to the beach and walked along the water. The sun had begun to rise. I looked at Asa then away when I saw his eyes turn to mine. Ahead about twenty feet near the water I saw something move.
“What’s that?”
Asa stopped but didn’t answer.
“Is that a seagull?” I looked, trying to see it. “Yeah, it is.” The bird hopped cockeyed along the waterline. “It’s hurt.” I looked over my shoulder at Asa. Our eyes met. A moment later I hurried up the beach toward the bird. It was caught in a net. How the fuck had that happened? I dropped to my knees on the sand and the bird hopped in the opposite direction, dragging a piece of net with it. I inched forward to reach for it, and the bird pecked my hand. “Fuck!” I yanked my hand back. “Goddammit!” I shoved my hand out again, and the bird narrowly missed me. “Do it!” I shouted. “Just fucking peck me full of holes!” The bird squawked and then toppled into the water. That was when I lost it: I cried, bent over and choking. Asa was behind me on the sand now. I felt him and wiped my face. The seagull had calmed down enough that Asa was able to flip the net off it. The bird was free.
SHORT SAD SORDID SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS
Sam J. Miller
By the time I finished kneading the dough I was totally exhausted. Tranced out on the push and pull of it, I went way past the ten-minute mark the cookbook mandated. My muscles were aching and I was out of breath, and I kept going. Maybe all the extra kneading would make the loaf come out better than the dense, lumpy, tasteless bread I’d baked in the past, but that wasn’t why I kept going. Kneading dough spans a whole gamut of emotions: I was massaging my lover’s back; I was punching the president in the face, I was ripping apart the whole status quo. I was a fifties housewife nourishing her nuclear family. I was a five-year-old playing with modeling clay.
After the oven heat of the kitchen, our bedroom felt frigid.
“You should try kneading the dough next time,” I said. “It’s pretty erotic.”
No response, not even a tiny fraction of a head nod. When Sprell is working he tunes the world out, which is a trick I can’t pull off. I’m very easily distracted. And then again, if Sprell called me or the phone rang while I was in there wrestling the dough, would I have noticed? My upper arms still ached, and my face was glowing.
After a long time Sprell said, “You find everything erotic.”
The trance was broken. “Let me see,” I said.
Our new panel showed a cute blond boy with scruffy hair and a ringer-T, looking exasperated. “But sex is fun!” he was saying, splaying out his palms to make the point. In the previous panel, his older, wiser roommate had said, back to the viewer, coffee cup in hand, “I’m just saying maybe you ought to cool it with the random hookups, is all.”
“It looks so good,” I said. “We have time for two more, and then dinner.”
“All right,” he said, standing, flexing, joining his hands together high above his head and then leaning back as far as he could—which is not far. Neither of us has seen the inside of a gym since high school phys ed. He sat back down and assumed the monk position, leaning over the frame, his hands moving in slow, small, expert jerks. I had already scripted out the next several panels of our comic book, so I was free to worry about other things.
I went to the window. Grand Concourse was shrouded in fog. In the past two hours a cool damp day had become a frigid November night. I was thirsty, but couldn’t brave the kitchen’s heat for a glass of water. Through the shoddy metal frame of the window came frigid air, which I desperately needed. Everything about our neat little domestic scene was suddenly supererotic to me: the cluttered table, the poor lighting, the smell of baking bread. It added up to the hardest hard-on I’d ever had—I took deep slow breaths to distract from the urge to unzip.
Intense concentration made it hard to read Sprell’s face. Was the work going well? Was he excited or infuriated? He always said faces were the hardest to ink, and watching his while he worked I got his point—I couldn’t put that expression into words, let alone draw it. I stared at him; I tried to focus on other things.
We’d written the outline together. Our comic book was full of sex, and it was hard to get much done in a day because the subject matter got us too turned on. Sprell was better at being disciplined. How did he do it? He wasn’t much older than me, yet he was master of his libido in ways I could never manage. The night before, he and I had sketched in the hot ’n’ heavy sex scene that was the centerpiece of the book.
“Hell of a place,” Jerry says, standing in the center of the room in such a way as to show off the seat of his pants.
“Yeah, but it’s not mine,” Tim says. “I just rent that room over there, from this other guy.”
It’s four in the morning and Tim is in his normal presex giddy mode. He’s trying to remember how to be a good host, but can’t keep his mind off Jerry’s crotch, Jerry’s face, the smell of Jerry’s sweat. Blurry flashes of Jerry dancing.
“Is he hot?” Jerry asked. “Does he let you suck him off if you’re short on the rent?”
“No, because we don’t live in a porno,” Tim says, reaching out to cup a hand around the back of Jerry’s neck. From his guest’s eyes it’s clear he’s slightly drunk, and totally smitten.
“What time is he due home?” Jerry asks.
“Are you kidding? He’s such an old fart. He’s probably been in bed since ten. That’s his bedroom over there.”
“Well then.” Jerry pulls Tim into his arms and they kiss, and Jerry grasps Tim’s shoulders. It’s clear that Tim wants to prolong the kiss as long as possible, but he does not resist when Jerry starts to push him down onto his knees. Instead he keeps his eyes on Jerry’s perfect booze-glazed face until he’s at eye level with the Bulge. Jerry unzips, and pulls himself out, but Tim wants to see more. He unbuckles Jerry’s belt, pulls pants and boxers all the way down, and begins to unbutton Jerry’s tight-fitting overshirt at the same time as he starts sucking. “Dirty boy,” Jerry says approvingly, although from then on he does manage to can the porno talk. When he’s gotten Jerry totally naked, Tim squeezes his asscheeks like it’s a matter of life and death. Even with his mouth so distorted by the size of the thing it’s dealing with, you can see from Tim’s face how deeply and totally in love he is.
All of which we boiled down to about eight frames. After that we did a long series of close-ups and details that got quite raunchy at times. Many of the frames were meant to leave the reader unsure of what body part was being shown (shoulder? buttock? hip?), but it all gave off a definite sense of throb and intimacy.
Inking tires Strell out almost as much as sex, and he joined me on the couch as soon as the frames were finished.
“How are they?” I asked. I couldn’t get up and look for myself on account of his body lying on top of mine.
“Fantabulous,” he said sleepily. “How long until the bread is ready?”
“A bit still,” I said. “Twenty minutes. You want to take a nap?”
“Is that cool? Just a short one.”
“Sure.” Earlier in the day he’d made a huge pot of black beans and rice, which had been simmering on the stove for hours and could simmer for hours more. Clumsily, we shifted positions so I could get up without disturbing him once he was asleep. Which happened almost at once. Which is another skill I’m superjealous of.
Our book was about the rocky friendship between gay go-go boy Tim and his older, lonelier, HIV-positive roommate. Tim fell in love with a different boy every night but was weak on the follow-through. The roommate was getting over his lover’s death, but because of poverty had to share his mourning with a stranger who could cover the half of the rent his partner had been paying
. I was proud of how little these two men resembled Sprell and me, how creative we were to come up with these two interesting fictional characters out of nowhere. But Tim’s pain was too familiar: the lust so hard and sharp you can’t separate it from love. That much came from me, I was sure, and it was strange to see it on the page and confront it from another angle. And Roommate—never named, never going out, hiding from the world, glimpsed only in fragments—had a grief entirely foreign to me, a depth of feeling I lacked. I didn’t know where it came from, and I feared it came from somewhere in Sprell.
Sleeping, Sprell’s face went as blank as stone. It was strong, stubbly, masculine. Watching him sleep, I thought of tough young men with nowhere else to go, sleeping on the subway. Another uncanny Sprell ability: to go blank, to hide himself away. When we fought it drove me crazy the way all trace of him vanished, leaving me standing shaking my fist at my own inability to get inside his head. His shaved skull and broad nose, and the wild chest hair that poked up through the collar of his T-shirt, made me feel hopelessly shallow and totally unable to get through to the Real Sprell.
The book felt like having a new baby would feel, for couples who could have one. I imagine. We’d tried to think up a way to make a book about a happy committed gay couple, but there was no drama in that, and neither of us had ever seen a work of art like that. Even in gay films, the taint of porn and misery is everywhere. “Without lots of random hookups and bleak, forlorn, doomed sex scenes,” Sprell had said, “we might as well be doing cave paintings. Shit no one will ever see.”
I read through what we had so far: fifteen pages, each one the product of a full Saturday or Sunday. In the past couple months we’d hardly gone out at all. Our evenings and our weekends were consumed with the book and with sex, and I had never been happier, and I panicked at the thought of how we would spend our time when it was done.
Pushing PLAY on the VCR conjured up an empty gym. After a rousing round of racquetball, two boys share a glass of milk. The slighter, black-haired boy can’t keep his eyes off the bigger blonder one’s crotch, which presently swells with a hell of a hard-on. Although they were both gorgeous, I stopped the scene halfway through: I knew how it ended and it wasn’t so hot. Not my thing. Sad how well-worn my pornos were, how well I knew each scene and shrug and smile and shudder. I switched tapes.
Three beautiful Brazilian boys. They’re in the woods, in a clearing, on a sheet on the ground. One is standing on one leg, caught between a huge Something in his ass and a more reasonably sized Something in his mouth. I’m drawn to the one in the middle, and not just because I find his face cutest. He’s the only one whose face shows something other than the two standard emotions of gay porn: fake ecstasy (the guy he’s sucking) and fake nastiness (the guy fucking him, barking, in Portuguese, That’s right, suck that cock, yeah, take it, take it you fucking faggot slut). In little glimpses you can see something like fear at the edges of Middle Man’s eyes, and the crazy desperate love I know by heart, the drive to do degrading things, the need to inspire something—pleasure, lust, love, gratitude, contempt—in the blank face of a beautiful man. It’s the same look I get even now, after a monogamous year with Sprell, as close to married as they’ll let me get for the moment, when I see some stranger sitting across the aisle from me on the subway whose lips and eyebrows and haircut and a million other tiny things make me so weak in the knees that if he stood up and whipped out his cock my mouth would be on it in a flash. The scene fades out and then fades back in, and Middle Man is on his knees between his two lovers, who are standing, instants from orgasm. Sweat shines in the hair of his body, but it’s nothing like the other two, who have been sweating so much they look like they’ve just come out of the ocean churning dully in the background. When they’re through, and his face is thoroughly coated with jizz, he smiles a huge, broad, loving smile. I tell myself what all gullible lovers tell themselves: a smile like that can’t be faked. Then he comes. It’s a puny show next to those two juggernauts.
Once I got there myself, and got cleaned up, I headed back into the living room. I petted Sprell’s face and his eyes came open. “Hello,” I said, sinking into him.
“Hi,” he whispered. I cupped him in my arms like a heavy, fragile, expensive thing I had to carry to safety.
“Where does this come from?” I asked, picking a lump of lint from his navel.
“That’s one of the great mysteries of modern life.”
I kissed his belly button and then nestled my head on his gut, the way you’d put your ear to a door to eavesdrop. Across the thin membrane I could hear his stomach gurgling, like water in a drain. The thought of what went on in there reminded me how little I understood this thing I held in my hands.
SNOWED IN WITH SAM
Jeff Mann
Every dream must have a setting. This one’s snow.
Late January 2005, dusk in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I park my pickup and stride through deepening white toward the house, a ramshackle old place isolated among oaks. Against the stairs, I stomp my boots to dislodge snow from the treads, and I know Sam must hear the pounding. Because this is my world, the world I’ve made, what he feels is not dread but delight in knowing I’m home.
Inside, I shoulder off my leather jacket, toss my backpack in the front hall, and head for the kitchen to pour us both a drink. Sam’s where I left him, where I’ve dreamed him to be. He looks up at me. He grins around the rubber ball strapped in his mouth. I take off his cowboy hat—Resistol, black straw, bad-boy signifier—kiss his bald spot, tousle his thinning brown hair, replace the hat, and pour out a tumbler of Bushmills Irish whiskey. The chair creaks as I sit in it heavily, as I lean back and take that first welcome sip.
His name isn’t really Sam, but, for the sake of avoiding lawsuits, let’s call him that. Not that, outside of my head, he would ever read this story, this book. The guy’s married to a beautiful, talented woman, they have several beautiful children. In my heart I’m a criminal, God knows, but my sociopathy isn’t translated into action, simply because the legal repercussions would be too great. (And who knows? Like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, I might not be able to bear up under the weight of guilt.) And so, outside of this tale, Sam would never find himself here, bucked and gagged on my kitchen floor. But today that’s not his choice, that’s mine. I create what I can. In fantasy, at least, at last, the laws of probability have no power.
Today he’s here, and he’s happy to be here, happy to be my hopelessly helpless boy. Along with the signature cowboy hat, he’s got on faded jeans and black cowboy boots. And a slave collar: a short length of chain padlocked around his neck. He’s shirtless, needless to say. For me, his hairy chest possesses the power of a religious icon, so of course in my world he’s perpetually bare-chested. And tied. A man as beautiful as he is, according to my peculiar leather aesthetic, should be bound almost constantly, and very frequently gagged. Don’t ask me why I feel this way. It’s as much of a mystery as the constellations’ silent revolutions, the sticky bud scales splitting in the spring. Some of you, I know, understand. To use the vernacular I share with my mountaineer brethren, I cain’t hep it.
Bucked and gagged? For the vanilla boys out there, it used to be a Civil War torture/punishment. Sam’s sitting on the floor. His hands are tied together in front of him. His booted feet are tied together. He’s folded up in a hot and hairy package—early Valentine’s Day gift to myself—his arms wrapped around his legs and held in place by a wooden dowel roped between the crooks of his elbows and the crooks of his knees. If this weren’t fiction, I never would have left Sam tied that way all day, while I taught, sent out poems to magazines, called my partner, attended a committee meeting, and gathered material for my second-year tenure review. Much too uncomfortable a position to endure for long. Once my buddy Everett tied me this way, and I made it to three hours. I was whimpering by then, I who pride myself on how much pain I can take. He kindly ass-fucked me before he untied me.
Outside, the snow is gray
with nightfall, a hue I’ve seen on surf-smoothed shells at Daytona Beach, where my partner John and I occasionally visit his parents. Somewhere, out in all that cold, a mourning dove musters its sad coo-coo-coo, sound made over the grave of some Celtic warrior—Diarmuid, maybe, or Tristan—who’s died for love. The whiskey feels like rolling oak embers around my tongue. I look down at Sam looking up at me in the last of the light and know that if anything will redeem my petty rages and flaws, it’s how deeply I love beauty.
We sit together in the dark’s deepening for a while. It’s very quiet, the sort of blessed silence snow brings, erasing the world I do not want, which is to say everything outside this room. Sam sighs, as content as I. He rocks a little in his bonds, bites down on the ball in his mouth, and looks up at me, eyes as dark as mine—and isn’t this what I’ve always wanted, to adore a man this beautiful and talented, to control and protect him and see in his eyes that adoration returned? He settles his chin on his chest, the brim of his hat cocked over his eyes. I take another swallow of whiskey, then reach down to stroke his goatee.
His chin’s wet with drool. After only a short time, a man with a ball-gag in his mouth starts to drool. Any of you who have read other erotica I’ve written know what a fetish this is for me. (I cain’t hep it.) It certainly is arousing now, with the man I find most desirable on the planet stripped to the waist and roped up at my feet. I rub his goatee, get my fingers good and wet, scrawl my initials on his cheek with his spit. When I bend to kiss him, I bump my forehead on the brim of his hat, so off it comes—placed carefully on the kitchen table at my elbow—and now my beard’s brushing his lips, his moist-furred chin, my tongue’s running over the ball, over his mustache. Nothing much hotter than kissing a gagged man, especially Sam, feeling him press his mouth against mine, listening to him groan with frustration as he tries without success to work his tongue around the ball—it’s buckled in too tight—as he tries to push the gag out. What he wants is his mouth filled not with rubber but my tongue’s meat. Soon enough. I lick the tip of his nose, then straighten up and take another sip of whiskey. Smiling, I sit back and nod, and Sam takes his cue. He bares his teeth around the ball and chews on it. He growls and shakes his head from side to side, works up another mouthful of slave-slobber that brims over the corners of his mouth and drips onto his belly. He tugs hard at the ropes holding him in place and growls some more.
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