No Church in the Wild

by Paine, Bacchus

  Eventually I could no longer see the external extent of Wesley’s cock over the curve of Grant’s ass, but my mouth opened as I watched him stuff an inch or two of the exposed portion deep into Grant with one swift, brisk, harsh pump. Wesley sighed as his torso fell atop Grant, and Grant wailed in a frenzy of bliss, his neck jerking backward from my shoulder.

  My hips bucked upward involuntarily as Grant paused his circling against me, and now I met the weight of two men to resist me instead of one. Wesley planted his hands at my sides and formed a plank over us, slipping his engorged, dripping cock halfway out of Grant before he plunged it back in, slamming his hips and muscled ass brutally against Grant’s behind, once, twice, and I felt the thrust from inside me as well as Grant’s body trembled on me and groaned. With the third stroke, Wes pulled himself out all the way to the tip of his sword and drove downward into Grant, who grunted boldy with pain and with pleasure.

  Now Grant hardly moved, but Wesley’s driving against him flowed through their bodies and into me. His patient exploration had given way to urgent, rampant pounding, his balls audibly slapping against Grant as he ravished him, and I felt as though two feet of cocks hammered against me in time. There was no longer any suppressing of my urges to moan, and I felt pleasure overwhelm consciousness as Grant’s body pressed against me, driven by Wesley, and then convulsed with orgasm. I rose to meet it, tightening myself around the length inside of me, and let my own pleasure wash over me and render my body limp.

  As Wesley saw us fold with exhaustion he quickened his pounding further, taking a matter of seconds to burst into Grant before he collapsed on top of him.

  Minutes seemed to pass with the three of us lying stacked that way, drained, sated, too weak with pleasure to pull apart. Warm and shrinking inside of one another. Eventually Wesley lifted himself on his arms and withdrew, standing to remove his condom and toss it in the trash, before he collapsed beside us on the bed. Grant began to roll off of me, and I reached to the side and handed him a Kleenex, for which he mumbled thanks. Consciousness was no longer an option, and I closed my eyes and fell immediately asleep.

  Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been lain in his brain and his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange, terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Odyssey

  In my sleep, in the baths, I am warm. I curl my toes onto Neptune’s mosaic, step, get caught in the whirling motions of the figures. As I stand rapt at the two women in V, the sway of VI catches my eye.

  Where are my clothes again? I turn my head to the left, looking for my spot, and there in VI is the threesome. A large pale woman lies catlike as a boyish figure rams her, and behind him a bearded man looks into the boy’s turned gaze as he slides his dick into the boy’s ass. They writhe together, all of them. Is this my stuff? I look down into the basket of clothes.

  I do not sweat, even covered as I am in some thin oil.

  I step to VII, and now there are four people, writhing in fresco. A woman lies on her stomach on a bed, blowing a man, and another woman bends beneath her to eat her out. The man she blows is packed from behind by another man. I begin to hear the figures moaning, wanton.

  I look back toward V, the women muffled and quiet together, scrape my gaze along the rest of the stalls, all the way to Elephantis the storyteller in VIII and back. Which stall is mine?

  A rustling beside me jerked me from the baths, and I peeked groggy eyes open to find sunlight sneaking into my bedroom and Wesley waking beside me, Grant inexplicably absent. I stretched my arms above my head and moaned a waking moan, looking back to Wesley to find him smiling at me.

  “Hey… good morning… and, thanks,” he said warmly.

  “My pleasure,” I replied, exultant with conquest and the image of VI in my mind for a moment before the night played back in my head, and I closed my eyes to hide the frown that came when the image of Isis breaking into a run away from me played back.

  What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

  Dorian Gray, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Shackles

  In late September the fog and wind and chill of August has burned away into the beginnings of a glorious Indian Summer, and our splendid gaseous orb sizzles stubbornly, reaching too far into the Northern hemisphere, leaving the City at 75 and sunny, with clear blue skies, and the people spill out onto the streets anew, scantily clad, and dance about like children at their first park.

  Of all of our festivals, this is perhaps the most risqué. This is a venue of exhibitionists, their kingdom that day encompassing those usually imprisoned by introversion. Voyeur compliments joined the exhibitionists, as did a cadre of curious residents either enamored of the nakedness or enamored of freedom or enamored of attending seemingly crazy events at least once, at the Folsom Street Fair.

  Folsom Street Fair is, in many ways, the same function as Union Street Fair. Local vendors are displaying wares in tented booths to entice the passersby, sunglasses and jewelry and colorful smocks. Attendees drink beer, browse, poke at said wares with little intention of buying. Occasionally one comes across a stage where someone plays music, and people dance nearby. Too few tents trailed by long flagellum lines sell overpriced beer in shoddy plastic cups.

  Yet the differences between these two fairs are so striking that few would dare to suggest they were comparable events. At Folsom the wares are predominantly leather. Leather straps, leather girdles, leather whips. Chains to bind yourself to anything or anyone you can imagine, or perhaps several people, a leathery iteration of the caterpillars of Bay to Breakers. Hairy vendors, male and female, sell whole outfits composed of a few strategically placed leather straps, though the strategy is not to hide one’s genitals.

  At my first Fair I sauntered up to a stall where chains hung diagonally across its expanse, collected at the ends by bits of leather, and stood perplexed, seeking to understand how such a contraption was used or worn or strapped or pulled or spanked or stripped or whacked or wound or bound or curled or lain or stretched or tied or zipped (is that a zipper?) or wrapped or smacked up against a user. A kind lady-man in a leather corset walked up to me, put his/her hand on my shoulder, and explained that the version I considered so confusedly was a set of shackles with leather bindings for the wrists and ankles, and that s/he could also offer me a version with classic metal handcuffs, which s/he displayed, lifting the chainy masses with a gnarled, hairy, thick hand.

  “Thanks. I’ll be forcing my submissive to buy that.” I smiled and walked away, wondering who his/her target audience was.

  I had become acquainted with the Folsom Street Fair this first time with Jackson at my side, on one of his visits before he moved to the City, and it was he who answered my unspoken question.

  “Oh my god, Bacchus, look,” and he pointed at a small Chinese man, no taller than five foot, skinny almost to the point of emaciation, sparsely haired, slightly balding, with a penis so tiny it retreated beneath his tuft of black pubes with each tiny shuffling step of his leg. His hands were cuffed to one another, as were his ankles, and these two restrictions were bound to one another with a chain. He could only shuffle down Folsom Street, entirely naked, taking miniscule steps, handcuffs and footcuffs and almost hopele
ss muted fisticuffs clanging subtly as he did. Jackson named him then: “Shackles.”

  At every Folsom Street Fair since, I have seen Shackles shuffling up and down Folsom Street, entirely naked, bound, up and down along the booths, through the throngs of miscreants, never speaking a word or speeding his pace, prostrate.

  Shackles is hardly the only Folsom headliner, though I won’t claim to know them all. Certainly droves of the naked, the butt-plugged, the bound, the lashed, the tattooed, the jock-strapped, the singleted, the masturbating, the cock-ringed, the wigged, the pantsless and the nude, among so many others, walk proudly through the streets. Exhibitionism is gender-agnostic and beauty-agnostic, and it seems clear that the one characteristic that is unwelcome at Folsom Street Fair is self-consciousness.

  The stages are not limited to hosting music. In fact, a larger quantity of expositions are devoted to S & M. One prominent display features a thick rope curled and hung from the tent’s ceiling, whereon various persons, some volunteers from the audience, are strung up to be teased, struck, whipped, or scratched. Cubbies appearing as simple vendor’s booths become, upon closer inspection, a more grounded show of masochism, always voluntary, where a visitor is permitted to lay against what would otherwise appear a massage chair to be whipped, or perhaps to be stretched to his or her limits, but whatever the choice it appears to result in red marks across one’s back, or circled around one’s thighs. Other displays allow attendees to wrestle one another, or blow one another, or poke cocks through tiny makeshift gloryholes.

  Sometimes you pass a booth hosted by a porn producer, kindly distributing lighters and stickers and cockrings branded with their logos, like kink.com or Whore Magazine or Titanmen.com or manhunt.net or Teamworks or Slut Machine, etc., as well as a large number of porn studios exhibiting tawdry videos the public would otherwise have to search out with wary inquisition.

  Jackson and I never attended Folsom Street Fair as devotees of leather. We are merely interested in gatherings of persons the plain majority deems outsiders, as we ourselves have felt outsiders for the majority of our lives. Nor do we go to browse the booths – when you’ve seen the display of one porn studio, you’ve the gist of them all. No, what brings us back to Folsom, at least for the moment, are the attendees. One cannot guess who one will see, what one will see, sauntering up and down Folsom Street that day.

  This year would be a bit different, as we’d have much more company in our picaresque exploit. I’d had dinner with Grant after our excursion with Wesley, and it was clear from that meal that Grant did not want to discuss the topic going forward, so I didn’t invite him to this festival to give him space to consider his development without reference to these fringes. But, I was to see Isis for only the third time since she’d whisked herself away from me at the strike of the gunshots during Pride. Once, Ben and Jackson had hosted a dinner party that she attended. It was a couple of weeks after Pride, the first time I’d spoken at all to her since her final “I’m alive” text. We didn’t speak much more then. She said hello, and she was kind, and I asked her how her research was going. We didn’t sit beside one another and neither of us mentioned what had passed between us.

  The second time, Aaliyah invited me to join her for a party she was hosting with Carly at her house, and Isis was there. I approached her more brazenly then, and after the usual greetings I found we slipped back toward the easy, compelling intellectual conversations we’d once had. I told her all about the administrative reasons for the demise of Rome, and she’d told me about some new press on an “optimism bias,” and it seemed to me that we’d gotten back about to the easy familiarity of the day Ben properly introduced us. In the bathroom at the party, I’d checked the symphony schedule for early concerts of the season and found YoYo Ma was playing soon. I ordered two tickets on my phone. When I’d exited the bathroom and could engage her in conversation again I invited her to join me, and to my delight, she accepted.

  It was almost a month until the symphony came, and in the interim I invited her out twice when I’d be drinking in her neighborhood with friends she knew. She politely declined each invitation. When it came time to go to the symphony, we got along just fine, though I confess our conversation was less personal than it once had been, and she struck me as withdrawn. Nonetheless it was a pleasure to look at her and smell her and hear her voice, and I told myself to be happy with what I got. After two icy encounters and two declined invitations, though, I’d grown wary of her reaction to any mention of our dance, and I’d elected not to bring it up myself. Somehow it seemed that a night out alone together without mention of that subject loosened her a tidbit, because in a discussion of Jackson and Ben she’d bit on a mention of the Folsom Street Fair. I’d always found her open curiosity intensely arousing, and arousal returned to me now.

  “I’ve never been,” was her simple assessment.

  “Oh, dude, you have to try it. At least once. If only to know that such a thing exists.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Exposed and leathery,” I replied.

  “Hmm am I going to be scared?”

  “I hope not, but you may be forced to wonder how it is allowed to happen in broad daylight… it’s hard to say, because my opinion of what’s desirable and attractive is probably colored by what I see of myself in anything… in Folsom I see the other edges of society…”

  “I see. Well, I guess I am curious… okay, if you do go let me know and I might join.”

  So I did.

  I’d met Jackson and Ben at Ben’s place, their faces still reddened from what I supposed was a morning exertion. I collected Isis on the walk over to them, having extolled the virtues of the sociological study one could undertake at Folsom to her curious ear via text for a week. I couldn’t have been happier that she accepted my invitation(s). Aside from my lingering urges to see her, to revive the friendship we’d formed, I was glad to avoid being a third wheel. As I walked behind Jackson and Ben, Ben’s spindly arm cradled around Jackson’s shoulder, moving slower now through the crowds in order to walk two-by-two, I was particularly thrilled with her presence. Even as a mere friend, I told myself.

  This was a festival where we did not dress to blend. Jackson and I had learned to wear black to be as inconspicuous as we could, having been told at our first fair that our standard summer clothes made us look “too normal” by two separate random strangers.

  Our foursome waited on an obvious lot on 11th Street together for Aaliyah, who’d not yet had the painful pleasure of Folsom herself. She appeared, donning a simple blue t-shirt and cargo shorts. Isis had worn a pink tank top and jeans, her skin bronzing already in the Indian summer, perky breasts straining even elastic fabric. I liked the pop of the color on her, but had by now admitted to myself that I would think she looked alarmingly lovely in a burlap sack. I consequently made no assumptions about how third parties would perceive her.

  “You ready for this?” I asked them.

  “Let’s do it,” Aaliyah replied.

  The couple of blocks down 11th Street we were required to walk to enter the fair betrayed a trickle of the patrons we would find inside. Most wore some manner of black clothing, and the gleam of leather shone frequently around us. As we approached the gate, where the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence collected donations to cover the costs of the fair, a man in his mid-fifties, drawn but not skinny, walked out toward us, penis swinging to and fro, wearing only a pair of black military boots.

  “Oh my,” Isis said.

  Jackson turned in Ben’s arm, “Darlin’, that’s nothing. When you see this in all its glory, you may have a hard time believing the whole thing is permitted to happen in broad daylight.” That made me smile.

  At the gates, Ben made a five-dollar donation on behalf of us all, and we attempted to attach the stickers we gained as a reward to our exposed, sweating skin with limited success.

  We were not alone in our exposure; if anything, we were underexposed. It seemed half the fair’s male attendees had
seen fit to wear only speedos, and the singlet returned in force, prompting me to wonder where exactly one purchased a singlet. For this, I’d brought my camera.

  I realized that the beers we bought would be the first alcohol I’d seen pass Isis’ lips since Pride.

  Armed with hops, we sauntered along the stalls, pausing occasionally to pet some leather, or photograph a flamboyant drag queen, or watch a blowjob.

  “Damn,” she said at the blowjob. The giver was adamant at his task, head twisting in a blur as he sucked, and I laughed out loud when Wesley’s performance rang through my head.

  She looked up at me. “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing just… not the most hardcore I have seen.”

  Jackson and I could barely conceal our excitement when Shackles passed, clamoring to steal a photograph of him from the front – a feat we’d never achieved. I thanked unnamed gods that the exhibitionists here were oh-so-amenable to being photographed. I got a photograph of a Santa-fat man with a three-inch stubby penis standing naked (besides his Converse) on the sidewalk. I got a photograph of a butt plug, in use, with a flag on the end, of a double-blowjob, of a circle jerk of high school wrestlers. I photographed a leather fetish moocow outfit, a porcelain Egyptian mask, sets of jockstrap wrestlers, assless chaps, drag queens beneath parasols, especially hairy backs and cowboy hats.