I would have kept at him, wanted to, basking in feeling him in my mouth. Other than the occasional shudder or ethereal sigh, he barely moved, he wouldn’t protest. I entertained this travel romance in part because his cock was lovely, amicably sized and well-proportioned, straight and well-deployed. I could have played with it happily for much longer, but I felt his sack tensing and a rush of volume as his hips bucked, so I slid my lips off of him and pulled backward, looking up.
He sat staring at me, breathing heavily. His shoulders slumped downward in apparent exhaustion. I looked down at his erection, and I wanted to jump on top of it. I licked my lips.
“Jeans pocket,” he breathed.
I slapped his leg. “Talk about a foregone conclusion.” But I leaned back and reached for the jeans.
“At least you don’t have to go far. But you look good getting there…”
I opened the condom myself and perched it on him, rolling it down between my palms and leaving my hands wrapped around him, lifting my hips off his legs and squaring myself over the tip of him, and I looked into his eyes and kissed him while I slid the head of his cock into the moisture I had waiting for him, one centimeter at a time. Our lips crashed against each other, and rolls of sharp pleasure spread between my legs as he filled me. I relaxed onto the weight of his cock, sinking onto it just a bit further, rolling my clit against the spot where his shaft met his stomach, and we were both exhaling sweaty gratification.
He lifted himself up suddenly, wrapping his hand around my ass to steady me against him, and sat back against the couch with his feet on the floor. I felt him swirl inside of me as he moved, and my neck fell backward with the rush of it, but when he stilled and I could look down at him again he met my gaze by thrusting upward into me, and I met his thrust by grinding my sex against him, over and over again.
He was no longer listening to commands, I was no longer giving them, we were just breathing against each other with moans and grunts as we urged our organs together, both of us fervent with insistence. I felt the pressure of his body in and around me and it pinched pleasure through me, waves of indulgence and relaxation booming together, outward from my clit. I cinched my legs around his body as I tensed with orgasm, clutching him with the contractions of it, and he quickened his thrusts into me, intensifying my raucous climax, leaving me tingling when he collapsed below me and laid back on the headrest as I fell onto his chest.
The next morning at the threshold of my rental car, he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek and wished me a pleasant flight, then turned and walked back home.
No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Peaches Christ
Before Claire, I was drinking no more than an average professional, I suppose, given my age. I was at the office far too often to socialize on a nightly basis, and wouldn’t dare indulge if it were one of the many days of the week and weekend where I would have to wake the next morning and begin plugging away at work. But, more than that, I’d had little desire to get wasted on a non-social basis.
I’d never had much confidence in my ability to seduce anyone, but through a long line of relationships that turned on a friends-first dynamic like the one I’d had with Jamal, I got laid on occasion. I wouldn’t have listed chastity among my life gripes. And I’d fallen for people before Claire, of course. At one point I’d found myself so overwhelmingly impressed by one of my business school classmates, and seen so much in common between our playful lifestyles, that I’d even tried desperately to convince him that our Jamal-like sex-only relationship should be more. I daresay I made a huge fool of myself before realizing that he just wasn’t that into me. But because people, and men in particular, so often reacted to my personality with a decided lack of understanding, I couldn’t remember going into a courtship with any hope that understanding was forthcoming. Really, I’d had few courtships. People hit on me, but I was never sure how to hit on them (absent significant alcoholic motivations), and so my trial romantic interactions tended to be with people who didn’t interest me all that much. There were, of course, plenty of good people with interesting lives and substantial intellect among them, and I knew it was hardly their fault that whatever I was happened to be more than they could identify with.
It was only with Claire, who was, in hindsight, sort of rude and rather inconsiderate, that I felt the novel tug of the potential for understanding, and that in itself intoxicated me to no end. When I was forced to acknowledge what Claire really was, that potential evaporated before my eyes, and I was left unreasonably despondent in my withdrawal. Never despondent for having lost her as a person, but despondent for having lost an ideal. My time with Jamal shortly thereafter had solidified the feeling that romance was utterly hopeless for me. Then, I’d wholeheartedly adopted the lifestyle of a barely-functional alcoholic, not that I then could put my finger on why, or on what I so desperately sought to escape.
For the weeks after I’d parted with Claire, most of my outings were to bars. I could usually dig up a friend to join me, and I found that there were suddenly many days when I spent part of my workday hugging a cup of coffee with my head down on my desk. There was one exception, though.
San Francisco’s symphony was among the features of my City I enjoyed the most, and for reasons essentially opposite to the rest. The mood, the outlook, of the City and its festivals fed my taste for wild abandon and my hunger for vice, for experimentation, for investigation of the lascivious elements of humanity. The symphony, the ballet, the opera, these gave me respite from these abundant external stimuli and an opportunity to simply sit and think about what life was and why.
So, since moving to the City, I had been thrilled to expend my golden-handcuff funds on symphony season tickets. I’d bought two seats under the impression that I’d want to bring along anyone I was seeing at the time, but I ended up scrambling in a desperate search for any friend, any companion, to accompany me with every ticket. Sometimes I took good friends, sometimes not so good friends, and sometimes I ended up going alone. Over time I’d found that the companions I chose didn’t seem to get what I got out of it, didn’t want to or couldn’t discuss it on the terms I did by instinct, or perhaps that they simply didn’t enjoy this particular exploit in the way that I did. I consequently grew more comfortable with going alone, and by Halloween I rarely bothered to invite anyone to join me at the symphony at all.
The Friday after Halloween, the image of the pretty girl with brilliant eyes I’d talked to at Trigger still lingered behind my eyelids, and every time I saw her there I chastised myself for failing to properly learn how to approach someone in public and strike up a conversation. At that point, most days of the week I chastised myself by drinking self-destructively. But that Friday I had a symphony ticket, and I wasn’t so forlorn as to ruin the potential of that experience with alcohol.
It was Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, among other pieces that interested me less. I put on a dress, donned my glasses to better see the movements of the musicians’ fingers, and sat calmly in my seat, warming up a bit as the strings did, and listened to the reciprocal notes of piano keys. Bach toyed with me, with us, I knew it, his keys taking one step forward and two steps back for what seemed like ages. My mind cleared, and there was neither Claire nor Jamal nor bars nor alcohol, only the focus on following the composer’s journey through the piece. Why did these notes frustrate me? It was Bach’s frustration, not mine, or it should have been. But why did he teeter so on the edge of progress and then backpedal? That wasn’t Bach, it was me, I realized. I felt myself always teetering. I was ready to match the notes at the very moment that their tempo sped and I felt Bach’s urgency at resolution, ready for him to offer me my own resolve. But, where my thoughts were
wholly consistent with the teetering introduction, I found I could not follow Bach to his resolution.
I’d asked myself why, asked myself what was holding me back. I can’t progress because these people I’m courting don’t understand me, I’d thought. But, as the pianist’s strokes grew more and more rapid, as the notes blended against one another and I felt the unified melody rise, I had another thought: Maybe I can’t progress because I don’t understand them.
I’d left the symphony that Friday secure in that latter thought, and secure in the notion that I should try to understand where others were coming from more than I ever had before, but without any concept of how I’d go about obtaining that understanding. I’d laid down in bed, sober, still trying to figure out how I myself could seek the understanding I was so vain as to expect in others.
And then, the dream again:
I only hear a drip, drip, drip around me.
I curl my toes on Neptune’s borders and step forward toward the first stall of Pompeii’s Suburban Baths. I have this dressing room all to my naked self. White gleams in marble around me, and on I walk, my neck trailing over as I pass the scene and stall marked “I,” with a fresco of a woman riding cowboy on a man. As I stare at the still painting I realize I’m hallucinating the figures to move, to writhe.
Their motion draws my eyes to stall II, where the fresco betrays a woman lying facing me, waiting for the man behind to enter her. I feel myself stepping with their movement, almost without will, warm air hugging me.
And III, a woman fellates a man, his hand pressing downward on her head, her cheeks prickling.
IV, where a diminutive slave boy eats the pussy of a grand bejeweled woman.
But as I step toward stall V, I wake, squeezing my eyes.
That’s the third time I’ve had that dream this week.
Groggily, I looked over at my cell phone to find matching text messages from my two best gay boyfriends.
One of my texts that morning was from Jackson, my gay husband, my oldest friend. Jackson had texted, “Joan bailed on Peaches tonight. Know anyone who’d want the ticket?” Peaches Christ, I’d learned recently, was one of the City’s more notable Drag Queens.
Jackson and I had gotten along famously since we were children, and we knew one another far too well. I knew of his youthful mischief, born of endless frustration with the inability to express his sexuality. There was no hiding my past from him, either. He knew I had been a fat kid. He knew what car I drove when I was 16. He knew my parents, the guys I’d kissed first, the girls who first hit on me. He was at the party I tried to throw in high school for New Years, when my parents were out late and my friend blew chunks all over the living room, and we drunkenly tried to clean it up, wringing the mop in our laundryroom slopsink, leaving a seeping cesspool of chunks that smelled of tequila for my parents to find. He knew the lie I told them that they didn’t believe about the dog being responsible and he knew they hadn’t believed it. He knew my SAT score. He knew how excited I got in Calculus class when the curves started to spin, and shared my disgust with our well-meaning but vapid teacher who could do nothing but copy the examples she didn’t understand from the book onto the whiteboard. He told me he liked men when we’d parted to go to college, after I’d watched him have serious, slowly-progressing relationships with a few boyish ladies.
He was the smartest person I knew from Mississippi, named even for his father’s pride in that armpit of a state. Our post-grad-school reunion in the City was one of the happier coincidences of my lifetime.
He was, simply, beautiful. Sharp-featured and honey-voiced, a lingering, slow accent. He wasn’t paper thin, but not bulky either, not short, but not particularly tall. People regularly commented to me that there was “just something about him,” and that something was reflected in the parade of hot, impressive, rich men who routinely followed him around like puppies. Women had always followed him too, but that meant substantially less to him.
Incidentally, I also woke to a text from my business school friend Ben merely asking, “What’s up today?”
Ben hailed from New York, specifically the Longer Island, but he had fallen for San Francisco just as I had and had refused to leave it, too. I’d suspected for years, as had most of our mutual friends, that the reason why was a certain taste for cock, and I was elated to hear his confirmation after what seemed like decades of suspicion. As with most “gay” men, his first confession was one of bisexuality. I’d mentioned Jackson, actually, and how he was elated at the possibility of fucking James Franco, as Ben and I sat watching the Spiderman movie together.
“Yeah… I think I would too.”
I sort of cocked my head toward him and looked him in the eye, waiting.
“I mean… I’m open to that, too.”
I nodded and said, “Cool, cool. We should hit the Castro.”
“Yeah,” he offered, timidly, “I could be down for that.”
Of course, that was his way of saying “I want cock,” and I knew it. His getting it was another matter entirely. He was bashful, at least in matters not to do with intellect. I suppose he couldn’t deny the relative supremacy of his intellect. Jackson would later comment to me that Ben was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, and I tended to agree. Ben looked down often, shying from personal conversations, though he could hold a conversation with anyone about virtually anything.
Ben’s James Franco confession had come less than two months earlier, barely before my stint with Claire began, and, despite more than a couple of Castro visits since, including our Halloween, I hadn’t seen him getting any cock. Certainly it was coming. There was so much cock to be had. But he’d seemed so reserved when it was in reach. After he’d confessed his interest in men, he’d gone to New York to work on a deal for over a month, and we’d had little occasion to talk since, both of us inundated by our jobs and me wallowing in discontent, with my hole where the hope was, to boot.
That evening, Peaches Christ was producing a drag review called “Silence of the Trans,” and Jackson and I were in happy possession of tickets. “Trans” was, I suppose, misleading nomenclature. “Trans” could mean “transsexual,” as in a person who had taken hormonal and/or surgical action to switch his or her gender, or intends to, or potentially that such a person identifies more with the gender opposite the one listed on his or her birth certificate. It could also potentially mean “transvestite,” or a person who enjoys dressing as one of the opposite gender. Straight men can be transvestites, but gay male transvestites are the only “Drag Queens.” As Ben had been on the East Coast for a while, I thought it fitting that he be welcomed back to the, er, flexibility, of San Francisco by Peaches. Jackson was amenable, so I extended the invite, which Ben accepted.
Later that evening, Jackson and I had joined the long line that formed in anticipation of Peaches Christ, which began at the doors of the Castro Theatre and wrapped around the corner. Peaches encourages her fans to dress up for shows, and in this City that meant more Drag Queens all made up in the line, tall and sequined, women in black with white-painted faces, the grandest gauge earrings I’d ever seen. Certainly enough patrons wore simple t-shirts and jeans, as Jackson and I did, but in general the line had a strong scent of San Francisco on it. We didn’t wait long, noting the more remarkable costumes (a full Hannibal Lecter straightjacket and mask, a dominant leather male, a gold Drag-bikini) before Ben walked up to me and said, “Hi.” He wore a simple Gingham plaid shirt and jeans, his smallish nose hardly poking out between his gray eyes, a mop of dark brown hair thick on his head.
“At long last,” I started, “I have the chance to introduce two of my favorite people. Jackson, Ben. Ben, Jackson.”
“Hiya. Heard many good things,” Jackson said as he reached out to shake Ben’s hand.
Ben accepted his hand and said, “My pleasure,” and I heard something almost flirty in his voice that I’d never heard before. Throngs of summery hipsters swirled past us on the sidewalk, and more costumed patrons fi
led into the line behind us.
Ben’s eyes fixed on Jackson for a moment before he said, “So… how are you liking our fair City so far?”
Jackson beamed. “I love it. I mean, I miss having space sometimes, but – well, there’s no place like this. This is like gay Disneyland,” and he swept his hand demonstratively across the line.
“Amen to that,” I chimed.
“So, what part of New York are you from?” Jackson continued.
“The part where people are angry.”
Jackson cackled, “That doesn’t help me...”
Ben smiled. “I know, I wouldn’t have thought most were angry before, but here… anyways, I was born in….”
And so they went on making small talk, with almost no input from me, until Ben was citing some book to Jackson he’d recently read about how dense urban environments, particularly welcoming ones like this, fostered high degrees of creativity. I’d read the book, and I added a note on its thesis, which I suppose reminded Ben that I was there, and I suppose in turn prompted him to take a good look at my grim countenance, because suddenly he said, “Bacchus, are you okay?”
“That’s a loaded question,” I replied.
“I think that’s a ‘no.’” The emphasis Ben placed in the center of his sentence was precisely the sort of intonation our mutual friends had seized upon in the past when they predicted he’d turn out gay.
“Ha, I missed you, man.”
“So what’s up?” He looked over at Jackson as though Jackson might answer for me. I suppose he might have.
No Church in the Wild Page 5