Best Gay Erotica 2005

by Richard Labonté

  The silver shovel of Romulus’s face leaps out, like an old-fashioned photographic instant when the flash powder goes off, to show me sucking the nipples of that pallid chest, until that image, too, is devoured by a black swarm of flies. His sullen rosebud mouth tightens; in a grainy, black-and-white twilight we’re huddled on the creaky bed of that tall, drafty room I always rented in Budapest.

  We must be ever so careful not to make any noise, not to wake his two brothers who are staying with us. What if they see us while….

  The dark bedroom in Syracuse pops back into hard focus. The obnoxious thought sweeps away the drops of fantasy leaking from neurons, scrapes away the bright emulsion. My very old mother is lying in the next room. Our doors have been left ajar all night. With a twinge of guilt, I imagine her reaction to these fantasies I’m having, then feel guilty enough to rise unsteadily and tiptoe into her bedroom to check on her yet again, a glimpse of the bundled form I’ve known since childhood, so still now and surrounded by foreboding; and then I come closer, bend with held breath until my face is nearly touching hers, to be sure she is still breathing….

  It’s hard to push these worries about her out of my mind by falling into another dream about Romulus. He must be on that clanging train from the Communist period, not headed east to Romania, as he’d promised when I sent him money, but west, to Vienna, where he thought he could sneak across the border. The train pulls in, he’s probably crouching in a crawl space over the toilet ceiling, and his half-bent knees are just starting to shoot pain as the Austrian border guards march through the cars checking passports and visas. Now a wooden baton is banging on the slightly ajar partition in the toilet ceiling, and when it won’t budge, the guard calls a colleague in to lean on, climbs onto the toilet seat, and bangs harder, jamming Romulus’ head against an iron beam and shouting in German, “Come out, you vermin!” When a foot finally dangles from the crawl space, they grab for it, yank down roughly; Romulus lands on the small of his back on the toilet seat and slides to the floor.

  Here in Syracuse, my thoughts tarantella around that image, realizing that he was probably already in that Austrian holding cell when I called his home on Christmas Day, while here I lie in this clean, powder-blue room with a full stomach, and he has only an empty belly and the overheated cell to rely on. This fearful yet excited thought is almost like a suburbanite’s thought of a rat in the cellar. Overfed and feeling strangely confined, you toss and turn on suddenly intolerable permanent-press sheets; everything is safely tucked away, the wall-to-wall freshly vacuumed, but there is that rat down there. You heard it scurrying. With a strange kind of envy you think of that alien heart in that pelt-covered body beating and beating beneath the warm, leathery skin, and those triangular, hair-pricked ears listening for your breathing. How can the two of you exist on the same planet? Maybe your skin deserves to be penetrated by those sharp, black-gummed teeth merely from the fact that they exist, it occurs to you in a half-dream, for what is the reason you yourself exist? The difference between you and that vagrant in some inaccessible place gnaws at you like teeth you can’t locate.

  Is he thinking of me while he is in jail? Is he dreaming of me hovering in space like some abstracted cushion of comfort? Certainly he can’t think of me where I am, on this absurd four-poster in suburbia. But maybe he pictures me in a New York gleaned from old movies, spider-black skyscrapers against a tarnished silver sky, gangsters and amber liquor, while he crouches there in his cell, angry and depleted like a rat in a cage.

  The thought makes me consider the musculature and the sinew of that underfed rat. The energy lurking beneath its sharp, glinting eyes, its twitching nostrils, its brain being drenched in cataracts of dopamine, the layer of fat on its belly to protect its rapidly metabolizing organs. It’s compelling enough to make you get out of bed in the middle of the night to go downstairs, seek out the humid trail left on the concrete cellar floor by the tail….

  At this point, the whiz of the tires of the Syracuse city plow on wet snow loosens the luminous grip of these ideas. The ray of a headlight brings the insipid blue of the bedroom curtains into view. Restless, I think about getting up to check on Mother again, but merely recover the image of her chest rising and falling, her frail form bundled in blankets.

  Then the curtains are swallowed back up by the darkness. I creep back to my bed of drugged, guilty fantasies; the half-dreams begin their rippling again, coaxed into larger and larger waves by the trails of codeine.

  Against my will these fantasies make me think of that girlfriend of his, the prostitute I know about, a little bloated from her late nights and beers, in a cheaply furnished room in a concrete high-rise, struggling against the drunken hand of a Chinese client whose pants are open at the fly. His hand is fumbling with her head in an attempt to pin it against the hollow-sounding plasterboard, and all because he wants to fuck her without a condom. When she finally bites the hand that is trying to muffle her screams, he lets go of her, but as she is straightening her ripped dress, a glitter of steel driven by an irrational flash of anger plunges between her ribs, after which protectors come running, the client is ejected, and the girl taken to the hospital.

  I don’t know it yet, but little by little I am arriving in her psychic space, becoming more and more like her. Black is leaking in from the hallway like tar. In the four-poster, my hand slides across my hip and a white hiss begins to travel up my legs. It is as if my shameful body were dissolving into these sharp flashes of pleasure, pulverized into black-and-white dots by my pumping heart.

  Afterward I stumble to the bathroom to wipe the come off with a paper towel. When I return, I stare out the shoulder-high window. That stray snowflake stuck to the pane seems something strangely apart from the scrim of falling snow. The storm lets up, revealing the huge evergreen across the road whose branches are piled thick with snow before the air becomes a prison of swarming white again, obscuring everything.

  Could my wish-fulfillment fantasies ever do any good? Or are they merely pathological? According to St. Ignatius, whom I happened to be reading before turning out the light, God’s grace is absorbed like a drop of water striking a sponge, whereas for those inured to God, grace is repelled like a drop of water ricocheting off a stone. But he also said that those open to Satan suck in evil like a sponge sucks up water, whereas the righteous are as indifferent to evil as a stone to a drop of water. Only loving, neither as sacrifice nor as selfishness, seems to bring any good.

  To be perfectly honest, these thoughts occurred to me only the next morning, at the breakfast table with Mom, in the midst of an opiate withdrawal headache, but they disappeared as I lay back against the seat that afternoon, on the train to Manhattan, two big spoonfuls of Hydrocodone flaring fantasies into scenarios of Romulus’s betrayal. Like a sponge polluted by unclean water, I soaked up pathetic notions, which replayed endlessly. From my mother’s home, I had called him in Sibiu again. He told me he planned to strip for the whores at the club where his brother was a bouncer. This sounded like a harmless idea but snagged my attention, the way a piece of yarn from a sweater catches on a casement nail and has to be worked off slowly in order not to unravel the whole thing.

  However, that afternoon, before starting the five-and-a-half-hour train ride to New York, I kept trying to clear my throat but couldn’t. I figured that a couple spoonfuls of the Hydrocodone would relieve it.

  Working emphatically with the train’s chugs, those opiates lulled me into repeated hypnogogic snatches, from which I’d come to with a start, before diving back in, finding the same scenarios gone no further in time, waiting to torment me, the beloved leaning over the balcony of a formerly Communist high-rise in Sibiu to the soft explosions of a beaten rug. Since it was a week before Easter, the beaters in this eastern country were at it from morning until dusk. Next to him on the balcony was a big blonde whose blue-veined skin seemed infused by the lead-ridden air. From the look of her skin-tight jeans and impossibly clumsy platform heels, they were on the way to the
club for the striptease, which suddenly began to overlap…that meaningless noise of a beaten rug becoming a musical beat charged with aggressive sex, as brazenly parted legs lowered jeans to reveal pubic hair inches from leering female faces. His strip to celebrate his brother’s birthday.

  The images flared up in some white-hot kiln, wilting sullenly into something taunting and sticky in the mildewed corner of a bedroom, which must have been the bedroom of his apartment in a concrete ex-Communist project. Inside, Romulus was gyrating on a bed like he did during the best times his cock was in my mouth. But into the bedroom came that same mercury-skinned blonde, her rubbery breasts bouncing gently in a harsh shaft of light.

  The dream clung like molasses as I forced my eyes open. The light in the train compartment tried to strip the images from my eyes as if it were picking off insects. Then once again black syrup coated my vision, my head began to sink into a cone at the end of which his brother the bouncer leered. His face was a slab of meat with the forehead bandaged from a boxing accident. As the club MC, he gloated through a fisheye lens to announce over and over that the one and only Romulus was about to get naked for the whores, whereupon the body spread open in the jabbing spotlight, the bluish skin of the girl stood stony against all the other female faces.

  I flailed away from the image and tried to stand, but couldn’t unstick myself. Now the dank bedroom featured a nest of undulating hips and slapping thighs, until the train finally pulled into that satanic, rubbery smell of rot that greets you each time you come back to New York and jerked to a stop.

  Two weeks later, in Budapest, in the very room I’d imagined, his pungent cock dangles over my face as I sit on the floor between his legs and nip at the foreskin. His dick smells strongly of vagina. He’d disappeared for six hours, hooking up with his pleading girlfriend, I later found out. He took her to the movies, but then, he added, casually, fucked her in the toilets. And there I lay in bed waiting and waiting and growing progressively more anguished, more angry, watching CNN, whose images, seen through the haze of the codeine tablets I took, one after another, somehow faded into this girl I’d imagined: the watery hair, the easily bruisable skin…and I no longer identified with her, nor felt I was becoming her in that abject sense I’d felt before and she becoming the enemy.

  When he finally came back, it was getting late. The river and the cable car stop below our window were awash with golden light. On the balcony, the gusts of wind were surprisingly balmy. White shirts under jackets glimmered on the black bridge across the Danube like white blossoms in liquid tar.

  By four in the morning, after we had argued for hours about the girl, he was asleep, and I, despite the codeine, was wide awake. It’s true that night seemed to cradle us like black cotton wool and that the air was lazy with cigarette smoke nudged by gusts of river wind rattling the French windows at the balcony. Certainly things were tinged with doom, even if night seemed also to make a false promise of permanence. His leg on mine felt light as a wing. But when he moved away only an inch, it was like watching his body through the wrong end of a telescope.

  I just couldn’t sleep, so I left the room and walked to the edge of the Danube, whose waters seemed like a kind of rush into a fate I no longer had any choice over. When my eyes fixed on the black meanderings of the water, I thought I saw a flicker of light that suggested a glimpse of a white shoulder or a ringlet of wet hair, or young legs twirling. Limbs twining in a dark, cold place. It suddenly occurred to me that Romulus hadn’t even gone to the movies or taken her into the bathroom; he had probably found a street-level window open in an abandoned building and slipped inside.

  She was angry and confused and suspicious about this pitiless American, who Romulus said was his “uncle” and demanded every moment of his time. But she loved the way he pulled the wet lock of hair away from her eyes. The mattress looked horrible with its huge stains, but first he took off his coat and made a sort of mat out of it, and then he took off his sweater and covered her with it. And then his strong hands began to wander over her body, slip inside her blouse, cup her breasts as if they were made to fit them.

  It felt so good to be caressed by the lips of that hawk-like face. The zipper of his jacket cut into her buttocks and she accepted it, it was like him entering her. All his hardness pushed against her, like metal the temperature of a body.

  Now he was kissing her and biting her at the same time. She sucked the nicotine off his tongue, hating its acrid, metallic taste. The idea of the American who didn’t want to meet her was making these hard, insistent kisses more valuable. The sudden sting of cold air on body parts felt good; it was as if she was mocking the cold, or as if the cold was fucking her. Suddenly it was like the room flipped upside down, she was on top of him feeling powerful, straddling his narrow hips with her thighs, her breasts swinging above him as he lay underneath lean and pale, moaning with pleasure. Reaching down she could touch her clitoris with her fingertips, and then she took hold of that sharp weapon and pierced herself with it fast enough to hurt. After the first stinging insult, it belonged to her, sliding past her fingers as she massaged her clit, and she watched his face, usually so contained and compact, open as it would during torture, until his hips began to lunge upward as if someone had applied electroshock.

  I went back to our room and climbed into bed. Romulus stirred, made a childish mew with his lips, began to drift back into sleep. I remember thinking at the moment that we were nothing but statues in some utopian tableau. And then I made a little sigh and thought, The character you think you rescued keeps being pulled back, inhaled again and again into those landscapes of deprivation. But for now, in the dark and middle of the night, we had escaped the premises of our respective cultures. So I sat there watching him plunge back into unconsciousness: that sweet prelude to betrayal.

  The Bigg Mitkowski

  Davem Verne

  You gotta see my dick. It’s bigg, like my name with two g’s. Big enough that my pants bulge every minute and my pastor makes me say ten Hail Marys for every inch of tool I don’t use. That’s a lot of Hail Marys! He says God bestows an extra half-foot on the lucky ones to teach us a lesson, but the only lesson I ever learned was how hungry my dick gets. I call that penis fever: when your cock is perpetually pumped and needs daily satisfaction. Father Murphy urged me to join the military and get my dick under control, so I left confession and marched to the recruitment office, and along the way my shaft got swollen for days.

  “Hey, Mitkowski!”

  Someone was dogging me as I walked up Ninth Avenue, strutting my thick thighs and large ass like a Polish bronco. I grabbed my crotch just to remind myself how good a cock-suck might be right now. You know you’re really huge when you can never get more than half your length between a pair of legs. Father Murphy says in God’s kingdom one size fits all. What I don’t tell the good Father is that I find use for all of it anyway, every inch of my Polish manhood. This huge dick finds all the room it needs in a guy’s mouth.

  Basic description: eleven-inch boner with a thick pink head, wide-veined shaft like a marble column, and fueled underneath by two huge balls, mega-sperm engines that blast proliferating Polish cum at high-octane levels. I like to glide my cock in my hands, lather it with spit between two palms, watch it get moist and swollen, and then let it hang awhile like an overdue guest. I do this five times a day—at home, at work, at the gym, and twice after hockey practice. It only takes a minute. And I never come. I leave it alone and let my nuts suffer. That way I can walk around all day and the next with a hard-knocking pussy-banger on top of fat, aching balls.

  My admiring crew is strictly Hell’s Kitchen blue-collar trade: sweaty, stiff-necked, hard-working sons of Ireland with flushed faces and meaty hips. There’s Flannery, Keegan, and Manny, all part of the same horny pool: dickheads ready to plug any Brenda McFadden hole. And in the middle of this New York City brood stands the Bigg Mitkowski, the Polish Pick-of-the-Litter, with an eleven-inch ass-cracker backed by almighty hips muscular enough to
bang open the gates of Heaven! In short, I am the model among men and a blessing to my father.

  And make no mistake, I’ve never touched, fondled, or sucked another guy’s pecker. This is a fact. For the simple reason that I’ve got more batting between my legs than my whole gang put together, so why reach for some other guy’s Ready Ryan when he’ll be stripping his jock and hopping his West Side ass up and down on my beef anyway?

  “Mitkowski!”

  Manny chased down the sidewalk with his low-rent girlfriend, Molly. She and her sisters have sampled my wieldy woody with a two-handed jack job each, but the ghetto girls always want a little more. I hurried into my building and ducked inside the elevator, but Manny dumped Molly, jumped in, and the doors closed behind us.

  “So what’s up, Bigg? When’s boot camp?”

  I looked away from Manny so he could get a fair view of the package broadcasting through my sweats. I was comfortable with being ogled by other guys. It didn’t bother me. I’m a lot of man all at once, you understand.

  I spread my legs. The elevator was dingy like a cage in a zoo. I smelled something funky. The pale fluorescent bulb bathed us in low-income lighting. Whatever the smell was, it didn’t leave. Maybe it was my balls raring to explode. My cock was leaking jism, saturating my sweats. I kept my eyes sealed as my hand reached under my jock, tugging at my groin. I kept tugging for cum, like I was playing hockey with my balls.

  “Gee,” Manny said, his voice soft and sulky. “Can I be honest with you, Bigg?” Manny was shorter than me; in fact, he was the shortest guy in my crew, but he had the best build, solid thighs, and a braveheart chest. “I never thought this day would come, Bigg. You enlisting to be all that you can be, fight the war on terrorism, get behind our leaders.” He stammered and his face turned red.