by Rob Rosen
“Suck your dick? My pleasure. Why don’t you get comfortable?”
I had him lie back, head on the pillow as I positioned myself between his legs so I could see his face. He was cold, so goddamned cold. Everything—balls, cock—but I did it. It was like giving a Popsicle a blow job. The best part was that the big dick finally got hard. As it began to stiffen in my mouth, I realized that was why he’d made himself known to me: you can’t arouse yourself in the hereafter. If he was putting in an appearance with me, maybe he wasn’t quite resigned to his fate.
I couldn’t get all of him into my mouth, but I gave it the old college try, deep-throating his frosty pole until my tonsils were numb, licking and sucking until he finally became animated. He began to gently thrust, so I worked his balls as I sucked him toward his long-awaited climax. As he bucked up into me, releasing his icy load, I wondered how long it had been.
The come made my mouth ache, but I took it all, knowing that of all the dicks I’d sucked, his was the cleanest. He let out a long moan as he emptied, with-drawing only when he began to soften.
“Quite a payoff,” I remarked. “Been a while?”
He uttered a dismissive laugh and slowly stood. I thought he might disappear again, so I said, “You want some more?” I began to stroke my dick, then eased back and raised my legs. “Do you want to fuck me? I could sure use it.”
He started working himself again, and I saw the longing in his eyes. His cock remained soft. “Come here,” I said. “Let me help you with that.”
He slid down next to me, and I began to pull his big sausage. It came to life in my hand. Seconds later, I had him thrusting into my palm. “How about it?” I said.
He nodded and crawled between my legs, pushing them up as he stared at his target. I pulled my cheeks apart.
“Go ahead, stick it in. You might want to grease it up a bit first.” I pointed to the lube, which he picked up and squeezed. “Great stuff,” I said. He smeared his shaft and then guided it to my waiting hole. “Do it, man,” I coaxed when he hesitated. “Isn’t this what you came back for?”
He nodded, then rammed that iceberg into me, which made me cry out from both its temperature and size. He didn’t wait for me to acclimate to either; he began a full-out ride, pounding my ass while his mouth opened to a silent cry. I heard our flesh slapping, and had to remind myself this wasn’t real, that he’d materialized from the next world, and yet the sound was a totally human squishy fuck-slap. He got the bed creaking as his cold dick seared my chute.
When he let go his load, it felt as if a garden hose was turned on inside me. Cold come flushed deep into my bowels. That got me to pump my own dick, balls churning out another load. My hot cream, his cold one—what a pair.
“Don’t leave,” I told him when we’d finished and he started to get up. “Not yet,” I added. He hesitated, then sat beside me and let me run my hands over him for a few moments before finally saying, “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Why? Are there rules? No cavorting with the living?”
“Something like that. Only . . . ”
“What?”
“You’re in my house. It’s been quiet for so long, and suddenly all this . . . this . . . ”
“Fucking?”
“Yes. It’s just so difficult.”
“To watch?”
“To only watch.”
“Why me and not Jason?” I asked.
“I don’t find him attractive.”
I took hold of Graham’s dick, which immediately began to harden. He drew a long breath and started to thrust.
“You’re really more my type,” I said as he fucked my palm. “We can make this a regular thing if you want. Jason’s gone a lot, rehearsals and all. He’s an actor.”
He shook his head, even as he unleashed another come. I worked him until his chest had jizz all up it. It was while I was caressing his body that he dissolved, come and all. I lay immobilized for a few seconds, thinking he might reappear, feeling more alone than ever when he didn’t.
The house suddenly seemed cavernous. Cold and lonely. I got up, put on some sweats, and built a fire. When Jason arrived hours later, I made martinis and embarked on a serious effort to get drunk.
“What is it?” Jason asked, but I told him nothing of my day, insisting instead that I was simply pining for him and that he should fuck me on the living room floor. As he complied, I waited for the being-watched feeling, but it didn’t arrive. Jason, tired from his day, took forever to come and, as he pumped and pumped, I wondered if Graham Ellis had, now that he’d gotten what he wanted, moved on to his final reward.
Loneliness crept over me the next few days. I clung to Jason. He kept asking what was wrong, and I kept assuring him everything was fine, although I knew it wasn’t. I wanted Graham to return. I was pining after the hereafter.
Oddly, it was during an outburst that he reappeared. A rehearsal had gone poorly. I was consoling Jason, but when I suggested sex, he got miffed, and things went downhill from there.
“It’s not always about sex,” he shouted. “If I could solve my problems with my dick, don’t you think I would?”
Wounded, I went silent. That’s when I felt the presence. Looking past Jason, I saw Graham standing to one side. He was naked and pulling on his cock.
“Fine,” I told Jason. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you further.”
“I’ll be in the study,” he said, leaving me alone—or so he thought. Graham approached. I knelt and took his soft cock into my mouth.
After that, our encounters became a way of life, though maybe that’s the wrong expression. Graham, however, became more real to me than anyone else, even Jason, and I found myself longing for him, lost in thoughts of his touch even as I sat across from Jason at dinner. Months passed, and then time—as it invariably does—got me to thinking about what was next. Life with Jason had a finite quality. What, then, did I have with Graham?
He didn’t retreat now after sex, and I knew he’d fallen in love with me, as I had with him. “We must be breaking all kinds of rules,” I said one day as we lay in bed after a rousing round of sex. He was stroking my dick and issued a soft chuckle. “You know, I’ve fallen in love with you,” I added. He sucked in a long breath—so human—and closed his eyes. “So, what now?” I asked.
When he finally opened his eyes they were moist. I had my answer. “We keep on keeping on, don’t we?” I asked. He nodded. And then I thought of that movie from the forties, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, where the woman spent years waiting to die so she could join the ghost she loved. Graham knew what I was thinking and said, “We’re not a film.”
“What are we then?”
“An affair,” he said, luxuriating in the sound. “A beautiful affair that need never end.”
He kissed me then, with the cold lips I’d grown to savor. I thought of how Jason, being so much older, would die before me, and that when he did I wouldn’t be alone; Graham would be there. And when my time came, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “So we’ve got, like, eternity?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. He then rolled me over and pressed himself against me, his dick awakening in my crack.
“What’s the other side like?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Pasadena,” he said, his lips cold on my neck.
THE BALLAD OF
COWBOY SPRINGS
Louis Flint Ceci
It was time to go. Donny had already left, taking his mandolin and coffee grinder with him, and leaving two months of unpaid phone bills and his share of the lease behind. I had stupidly put the phone in my name, so I was on the hook for that, but the three months left on the lease wouldn’t be a problem; the way rents were going up in the Outer Mission, my landlord would have our place rented before I was down the steps with the last box of books.
San Francisco was getting too expensive for a writer/ performer of satiric folk songs—especially one who hadn’t written anything new in half a year. You’d think this city would be an endless
fount of subjects for satire, with its colliding populations of preening politicians, inflamed activists, and gaggles of cash-rich conscience-poor techies teetering on top of an understory of the homeless and undocumented. It was a real layer-cake of irony, but I just wasn’t feeling the love. So I chucked or gave away maybe two-thirds of my stuff (including some of Donny’s, but he wasn’t coming back for it, was he?) and put the rest of it in my sister’s basement in Oakland. I threw my camping gear into the back of my 2003 Toyota 4Runner and got the hell out of Dodge.
But where to now? Well, when you’re about as far west as the West Coast gets, and you can’t seem to find the gumption to run your four-wheeler off the cliff at Fort Funston (putting the “fun” back into Funston), your only choice is east. It was June. The Central Valley would already be hellish, but the Sierras beckoned. Maybe the thinner air up there would clear my head, allow me to write. And so I headed for Yosemite.
It rained. In June. In California. If a fully decorated Christmas tree had sprung overnight from my forehead I couldn’t have been more surprised. Or disappointed. (I don’t particularly like Christmas trees.) The Tuolumne was flooded, so the campgrounds were closed. I turned around at the entrance, but still felt the urge to keep going. I headed for the Tioga Pass that would take me over the Sierras and down into Mono Lake and the high desert. It felt like the right thing to do. I’d been deserted by my boyfriend and my muse, so why not go all the way?
I camped that night at Big Bend above Lee Vining. The campground was oddly empty. It was too dark to pitch the tent, so I just rolled out my sleeping bag in the back of the Toyota and burrowed into it.
The sound of the door opening barely woke me. In fact, I felt it was important to keep my eyes shut, even if I was awake.
The warm length of a naked leg slid down my thigh as he slipped into the sleeping bag with me. “Shh,” he said, though I had said nothing. Then his stomach pressed against mine. I could feel his abdomen inflate and contract as he breathed. He slung his hips forward and pressed a remarkably hard cock against mine as he wrapped his arms around me, pinning my arms to my side. I knew that cock. Knew its size and shape and throbbing pulse. “Donny?” I whispered.
“Aw, now you’ve ruined it.”
My eyes flew open. I saw nothing but the pitch-black interior of the car. There was, of course, no one in the sleeping bag with me. How could there be? When Donny and I went camping, we zipped our bags together and did our best to zip our bodies together, too. But there was only one sleeping bag in the back of this car. There wasn’t room for two. I looked down at my cock. It still believed we had company, but I shook my head. “Sorry, fella; it’s just you and me.”
It bobbed at me, refusing to give up, but when I tried to give it what it wanted, it refused. It would spark a little from the friction, but then the heat would dissipate into the mountain air. I lay back with my eyes open, staring at the inside of the car. I should have pitched the damned tent. Then at least I’d be looking up at stars.
The next day was better. I drove up north on US Highway 395 along the east side of the Sierras, getting lost looking for a hot spring that I’d read about in Hidden Treasures of the Eastern Sierras. It was too well hidden, apparently, because I didn’t find it, but as I came around the corner of a twisting mountain road, I suddenly faced an expanse of wildflowers. They were Clarkias in full bloom, spreading up the rocky slope in a carpet of pink dotted with maroon. My eyes lit up as a wide grin spread across my face. There was a tickling in my brain as words and the sketch of a tune trickled into place. What was this weird sensation? Joy? Or simply altitude sickness?
The words and music bounced around inside my head as I drove to my next stop, a primitive campsite above Mammoth Lakes. I thought the internal chatter might keep me awake long into the night, as it often did back when I wrote tunes for a living. But I fell asleep almost as soon as the sun disappeared behind the peaks.
The next morning, I drove back down into the valley and headed south on US 395. The landscape of the eastern Sierras continued to pull me in two directions: up to the peaks and out into the desert. I took many side trips, finally stopping late in the afternoon at a private campground. I drove in looking for the pay station or the campground “host,” but didn’t see either. Signs along the way promised NATURAL HEALTHFUL HOT SPRINGS! in the CLEAR, RESTORING WATERS OF A MOUNTAIN STREAM! guaranteed to be NATURE’S OWN CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU! But the rains had swollen the stream to a river, and the hot springs were now a good twenty yards from the bank. Any attempt to wade out to them would have swept you away and cured what ails you for good.
I was not the only one disappointed by this turn of events. Several disgruntled campers lingered around the soggy semicircle of logs that constituted the NATURAL AMPHITHEATRE! A family of five bickered at one end; I sat at the other with a middle-aged man in a red-and-black flannel shirt and jeans whose contours made me wonder if perhaps he might be good for what ails me. His dark mustache showed streaks of gray, which were echoed at his temples. There was a tuft of black hair waving at me from the open collar of his shirt, so I struck up a conversation.
“Too bad about the hot springs,” I ventured.
“Is that what brings you here?” He smiled at me, a big, open smile with eyes that looked straight into mine, eyes I didn’t want to let go of.
“I’ve been driving around, looking for inspiration,” I said. You might be it, I added to myself.
“I do that, too. Have you found any?”
I could mention the spark in his eyes, the bulge of his crotch (were those 501s?), the promise of firm turf beneath that flannel shirt. Instead, I said, “I saw something yesterday, a field of wildflowers. It made me want to sing.”
He laughed and looked up. The sky was beginning to pearl over into evening. “Oh, yeah, I get that, too. So, did you?”
“Hmm?” I’d been distracted by the music of his laugh.
“Sing. Did you sing?”
I thought a moment. “I haven’t written anything in months, but yeah, something did come to me. Well, the start of something, anyway.”
He leaned back, holding himself up by his outspread arms and letting his knees fall open. “Care to share?”
I had to close my eyes to clear my head, but once he was hidden from sight, the words and melody came back readily enough:
Be simple in your sorrow,
Care less about your fate,
For if you need tomorrow
To be happy, you’re too late.
I opened my eyes hopefully. He was looking down, a small smile on his face. But he said nothing. “It’s just a start,” I apologized.
“So, we should be like wildflowers?”
I smiled. This guy gets me, I thought. “Kinda.”
“But that isn’t true, is it?”
Or not. “What?”
“Those wildflowers will be gone in a day or two. Withered. Dead.”
“Well . . . ”
“You have to think about tomorrow. You have to make decisions today, or your tomorrow is in the hand of other powers.”
“Of course, you—”
“Every day, every moment, you have to decide to live in Christ or outside Him.”
And that was that. Well, I thought as I drove out of the campground, at least I haven’t paid a camping fee.
I made camp in the dark and ate an MRE whose flavor and consistency left no impression. As I looked up at the stars through the netting of my tent, the words started dancing again. I let them. If I were still the singing satirist of San Francisco, I would have flicked on the camp light and written them down. Instead, I just let them caper in the dark of the mountainside:
“The flowers wither, the grasses curl!”
So said Saint Peter to Saint Paul.
Come, my love, let’s give it a whirl.
Who cares if summer leads to fall?
For summer ever leads us all.
Not great, but as the border between thought and dream dissolved, I h
ad the feeling that whatever had been blocking me was being carried away down the river of stars.
Morning was sharp and clear. “Right, then,” I announced to the manzanitas. “Enough mountains; into the desert.”
The Hidden Treasures guide told me I was in Long Valley, the caldera of an ancient lava plume that had moved east ages ago and was now parked under Yellow-stone National Park. It had left plenty of heat behind, though, and the desert floor was dotted with small, locally maintained pools and springs (called “tubs”), and even a river so hot it could boil a dog alive (and apparently had, or else why bother mentioning it?). It gave directions to several less lethal spots, all of them off an intricate web of unpaved roads that seemed to follow no particular pattern in their layout or direction.
GPS was useless out here. After an hour and a half of dusty futility trying to find one of the local “tubs,” I gave up and simply drove through the desert. I didn’t tear up the roads; I just meandered wherever my 4Runner felt like running. I couldn’t get lost. The Sierras, still shining with the remnants of the snow dropped by the storm three days ago, clearly marked which way to go if I wanted to get back to the 395 and civilization. Finally, feeling pleasantly loose and relaxed, I stopped the car and got out.
The rain had done its magic here, too. The desert plants bloomed in yellows, reds, and colors I would have thought possible only in neon signs. I took a deep breath. The morning air was still cool but warming up. It carried the creosote smell of coyote bush and sage with a hint of . . . wait, was that sulphur?
I looked around. About fifty yards away was an outcropping of dark rocks, a few of them a little taller than a man, the whole group no larger than a school bus. From behind them, a thin plume of vapor trailed into the morning sky.
Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. I’ve found one.
There was no one else around and no cars visible up or down the road I’d been wandering, but I locked the Toyota anyway and headed for the rocks. Looking down, I could see there was a faint trail in the desert crust leading around to one side. Could this be one of the local hot springs I’d read about? And was it one suitable for human soaking, or was it a real dog boiler?