Best Gay Erotica 2012

by Richard Labonté

  Then a sense of opening and I think oh, I have to get to that place I really really need to take all the steps no matter how stupid or awkward or scary or lonely or desperate they feel. But I’m about to get on a plane, it’s already a week later and I’m really about to get on a plane I mean tomorrow. My sinuses are destroyed, nose running throat itching even something like a cough in spite of all the remedies and herbs and formulas I’ve been taking. And even without the congestion there’s that wall that spreads through my head that wall of longing to feel something other than this feeling that everything can only lead to this feeling.

  SUNDAY IN THE PARK

  Jamie Freeman

  George has a crooked grin on his face when I arrive. He’s leaning against the fence rail wearing blue and khaki, legs crossed nonchalantly at the ankles. Light streams down from the canopy far above, transforming his body into a dappled landscape of dark and light. A white comet trail of drying cum is smeared across his midsection, shimmering in the patches of shifting light.

  “Henry!” he shouts. “I was afraid the churchies got you this time.”

  It’s the same thing from him every Sunday. He thinks it’s funny.

  “Not this time,” I say.

  “Just as well,” he says. “Just as well.”

  There’s something reassuring about the ritual greeting, about having a place to go on Sunday afternoons, about knowing what to expect when I get there. Somehow it makes life milder and easier, like neutrals added to a spring wardrobe. Most days I’m just looking for a place to hide from the chaos for a while, a place to feel safe from the relentless temporal tide of new experiences. Sunday in the park with George is my religion. Dick is like communion; sometimes I partake, sometimes I don’t.

  I smile, settling next to him on the fence and feeling the lightness in the air.

  “I see you took your first communion without me,” I say.

  He chuckles, slightly embarrassed. “New guy looked like that Wolverine—had to drain him.”

  “This is my cum you drink; this is my body you eat.”

  “Christ on a cracker, Henry. You’re one fucked-up bubba.” He’s braying like a donkey now. I look at him sometimes and I can’t believe a guy this disconnected and backward is an engineering professor. But I like him anyway.

  I met George a couple of years ago. It was early morning and I’d come down to the park for a run. I was wearing loose cotton shorts and a tank top, worn Nikes pounding through densely swirling, knee-deep fog. The fog absorbed all sound and made the world seem more like a soundstage than a city park. I was running along a packed dirt path that twisted through the woods in the direction of the lake. I was starting to pick up speed when I jogged around a giant lichen-covered boulder and I heard a soft, sexy whistle pierce the white stillness. I looked toward the sound and spotted George leaning against the boulder with his enormous cock sticking out of his jeans. It was still only partially erect, but he was slapping it against his hand like a pork tenderloin, coaxing it to startling length and girth.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  I glanced at his face—the plain round features and the dark, laughing Cherokee eyes—but all I could see was that enormous cock, growing and growing in front of my eyes.

  I dropped to my knees in the dirt in front of him, took him in both hands and started working him over. I couldn’t get much more than the giant purple knob into my mouth, but I sucked it like I was sucking the juice out of an orange. He squirmed and did a little shimmy with his hips, working his head deeper into my mouth. I used my hands to stroke him, working up to a fast rhythm, encouraged by his “yeah, babys” and his “that’s its.” I was drowning in precum and pulling on him with both hands when he cried out, “Comin’ atcha.” I pulled his head out of my mouth, yanking and tugging on the shaft until a gusher of cum burst out of his slit, splattering my shorts and soaking the front of my shirt.

  “That was mighty fine,” he said. “Mighty fine.”

  I tried to brush the cum off my shorts and shirt, but the gooey mess just smeared everywhere, and when I stood up I realized my knees were black with damp soil. I brushed at them too, but the cum mixed with the dirt and I finally gave up and legged it back toward my car, trying not to be seen in my sullied state.

  I found out later that George is usually the one on his knees because most guys see his size and bolt like rats from a python. Eddie, one of the twinks who sometimes hangs out with me on Sunday afternoons, bumming cigarettes and gossiping about the others, says he once watched George fuck a guy against the outside wall of the men’s room at the far side of the park. He said the guy’s ass was stretched out like the Lincoln Tunnel, his lane wide enough for even George’s wide load.

  Eddie’s usually full of shit, but George told me the same story one time, pointing to this guy we call the Hat (because he’s always wearing one) and describing the sounds he makes when he’s taking something up the ass. A week or two later I walked up on the Hat getting fisted in the back of a Toyota Camry. The windows were rolled down and the Hat’s breath was exploding from his body in staccato bursts like bullets from a human tommy gun. Just like George described.

  I haven’t seen the Hat in a couple of weeks, so I ask George what’s up with him.

  “He’s here,” George says. He points down a side path. “The Painter’s finishing off the Hat.”

  The Painter’s another regular. He has the dubious honor of having literally scared the shit out of this little twink we call Monkey (because he is skinny as a rail and he sometimes climbs up into the live oaks and drapes himself along the branches). Monkey was on the ground that day, strutting a little, but starting to lose his swagger as the sunny afternoon light shifted to deeper, evening hues. He passed me a couple of times with a look of desperation on his face, like he was suddenly afraid of the woods. The last time he passed me, I saw the Painter come zooming around the corner, walking fast. About ten minutes later Monkey came running back along the path, tears streaming down his face, holding the loose waist of his baggy jeans in a wad in his right hand. He tripped on a root when he reached the parking lot and flew at the ground, rolling and tumbling onto the gravel.

  “You okay, kid?” I called, but he was up on his feet, running for his old Ford pickup. He was out of the parking lot by the time the Painter came stumbling up the path. He was buttoning the fly of his 501s with a dumb, half-stunned look on his beautiful face. I like looking at the Painter, with his strong jaw and patrician nose, his dark eyes and full, luscious lips, all the individual details coming together to form a radiant whole, like the face of Apollo staring down from a Roman altar. Sometimes he makes me feel things.

  “What happened, man?” I asked.

  He stopped and looked at me, blinking his eyes like I’d just turned on the light over his bed. His cheeks were spotted with pink, his lips red around the edges.

  “I dunno,” he said. “It’s so strange.”

  I waited for him to process the moment.

  “He was right there with me at first, down on his knees—kneeling on my shoes, actually, to keep his knees out of the mud—and his mouth felt so good, so tight and round and… moist, I guess. And he was moving through this rhythm, like he was trying things out to see what would make me groan loudest. He had his hands on my hips, banging me into his mouth—wham! wham! wham!—and then he stopped suddenly. And I said, ‘Come on, Monkey,’ and he leaned back on his heels and looked at me again and then—I swear to god this is true—it smelled like shit, suddenly, like he’d…I don’t know about that part, really, but then he just took off like a bat out of hell. It was so strange. Do you think he got upset ’cause I called him Monkey? I mean, maybe he got offended or something.”

  “I don’t think he knows we call him that,” I said.

  “Oh, shit. Do you think he thought I was being racist?”

  “Maybe…”

  “But he’s white.” The Painter looked distraught.

  “Not cool, man. I think he’s b
rown.” I said this mainly to make the Painter squirm. I’m pretty sure Monkey’s people were from Italy.

  “I just don’t know, Henry. He was so cute…and he kinda left me in the lurch.”

  I looked down at his pants. “What’s that, dude?”

  He looked down at the smears of wet scarlet that trailed down his right leg.

  “It’s paint.”

  “Looks like blood,” I said.

  “It’s not. It’s paint.”

  “Just sayin’,” I said. “Looks like blood.”

  The Painter started rubbing the paint into the worn denim of his jeans. There was something sexy about the motion of his hands and I was mesmerized by the pale fingers streaked with red against the faded blue denim. I imagined the smell of the denim, the dampness of it near his crotch where his precum has soaked through. I could feel my cock slithering inside my underwear.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, considering my options. I was pretty sure Monkey stuck his hand in the wet paint and, bewitched and beguiled by the taste and scent of cock—and probably tweaking—mistook wet scarlet paint for blood. I laughed out loud, a sudden, harsh bark of a laugh that made the Painter look up. Our eyes locked, green confronting brown.

  He put his fingertips on my hip. Sensation radiated out from the point on my hip like ripples in a still pond. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into the woods to finish what Monkey had left undone.

  A couple of months later, the Arts section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a profile of the Painter. There were photos of him standing in a rather tidy, spacious loft in front of a trio of canvases in brilliant reds and oranges. One of the photo captions read, Brilliant autumnal paintings from the Young Turk of Pointillism. I was surprised by the extravagant praise heaped on a man who had once convinced me to pee on his muscular chest. The memory surfaced as I read the article: the waterfall of yellow cascading down the tan planes of his chest, the copper-colored nipples, the black running shorts tented beneath the flow, and then hovering wetly above all of that, the gaping mouth full of perfect white teeth, and the dark brown eyes, pupils wide with pharmaceuticals. The piss play had done nothing for me, but the ecstasy in his glazed eyes told me he was being transported beyond the yellow stream, beyond our sweating bodies or the green canopy above us.

  I don’t remember many details of the newspaper profile, but I do remember one image and one quote. The photo featured the Painter standing in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, his feet bare and his clothes speckled with red and yellow paint, hands crossed over his chest, his left hand holding half a dozen paint brushes tipped in red, yellow and orange. He had a look on his face that was somewhere between concentration and transcendence. And the quote was audacious in its simplicity: “Art is about taking all the fragments, all the bits and pieces of the world as we know it, and making meaning. Art gives meaning to our experiences.”

  I’m leaning against a wooden fence listening to George talk about a new guy he calls the Soldier. He’s talking about having seen him a couple of times running in a tight gray Army T-shirt, about the pattern of the sweat stains on his muscular chest and under his arms. And then he’s talking about sucking him off under a pedestrian bridge, about the big mushroom-headed cock and the scent of curry on his skin. And then he’s talking about letting the soldier fuck him in the men’s room near the band shell, about hearing an old Rosemary Clooney song coming in from the open window, and the overpowering smell of the newly painted stall walls. All of the pieces of his story are swirling around in my head, mixing with the voice of Rihanna coming from speakers out on the lawn beyond us. The yellow sun is high in a brilliant blue sky and I close my eyes, feeling the warmth on my cheeks and eyelids, and listening to George. “And he had these binoculars…”

  “So what makes this one guy stand out? What makes that experience special?” I ask.

  “He was hot,” George says. “I just told you.”

  “But why tell that story?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. You know I love your stories.”

  “Like a Sunday sermon for the kneelers and the benders,” he says.

  “If it’s a sermon, there’s gotta be a message,” I say. “I mean, there’ve been a lot of guys…what makes you remember this guy in such detail? The smells, the sounds—why is it so vivid?”

  “It wasn’t very long ago.” George looks at me with dark eyes unaccustomed to abstraction. “And I have the database.” The database started decades ago as a Lotus spreadsheet and has progressed to Excel and finally to an Iphone app in which he enters encoded information about all of his tricks. It is a mass of sortable data points; he gets hard just scrolling through the table, reading the dates and times and inches and sounds and positions and colors.

  “Yeah, but…I mean, what makes it worth remembering?”

  He blinks. “Are you putting me on?”

  I let him off the hook. “Yeah, kinda.”

  He laughs, slaps me on the back and takes off for an ambling lap around the lake.

  I lean back and close my eyes, letting the sun warm my face and neck. Bright colored dots appear on the inside of my eyelids, my own personal kaleidoscope. Sweat trickles down my back. I peel off my T-shirt and hang it over the fence rail.

  Yesterday I was with a man I met on Craigslist. He had dark curly hair and a Cary Grant dimple in his chin. His body was plain and a little stocky, but his ass was flawless. His skin smelled of baby powder. The day before that I got sucked off under the stall in the men’s room at Macy’s by a guy with fat fingers and an MIT class ring. Before that there was a guy who wore a gingham shirt and yawned while he was blowing me; a guy who had a wide silver wedding band and a carpet of hair that enfolded his entire body like a wetsuit; a guy with amber eyes and overactive sweat glands; a guy wearing flip-flops in the elevator at work; a guy trying on khakis in the changing room at the Gap. I can take myself back a couple of weeks before the details become blurry, the incidents bleed into each other like chalk drawings on the sidewalk abandoned to the rain, and the majority of the experiences are lost.

  I carry around bits and pieces of my past, holding them close and attempting to draw meaning from them, but sometimes I wonder if they are real or imagined.

  When I was eighteen I met a guy named Tony in front of a rack of foreign films at Pick of the Flicks, a neighborhood video store. He was holding a copy of My Beautiful Laundrette and reading to himself. His lips moved slightly as his eyes scanned the words. He was tall and chubby, but he had beautiful hands and an amazing, wide-open smile. I struck up a conversation, which moved from the video store to a coffee house to the apartment he shared with a couple of other guys. Pretty soon we were naked, rolling around on his futon beneath a poster of Madonna, with “Northern Exposure” on the television, and then he was lying on his back, looping his arms under his legs and pulling them back to expose his pungent, intriguing rosebud. I slid two fingers inside, feeling my way around the loose heat. I grappled with a condom and plunged in a little too quickly. There was a little stop-and-go, but when he got used to me we found the rhythm and he started yelling like it was the end of the world. About the time his roommates started banging on the wall he shouted, “I’m comin’, stud!” and shot all over himself. I was right behind him, straining and pumping, wracked by a truly powerful orgasm. When I had depleted myself, he pulled me against his chest and I was shaking so hard I couldn’t resist. We squelched together on his bed. I felt tremors rocking his body. “Holy shit,” he said over and over like a mantra, rocking me against him until he started to cry quietly in the candlelight. John Corbett’s calming voice whispered from the little television, the sound drifting in the air above us, blending with the smell of sweat, lube and vanilla candles.

  I remember that night so vividly that even now I can conjure the details: the smell of his body, the feel of his chest shaking beneath mine, the sound of him crying, the candles, the television—even the strai
ning postorgasmic exhaustion I felt that night—but I cannot remember his face. And I did not remember it nearly ten years later when we met under different circumstances at a friend’s wedding. Tony, now heavier and married, approached me with a plate of cake balanced in one hand and said, “Dude, please don’t say anything.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He broke into a relieved grin. “Thank you. It was a long time ago and, well…” He looked around the room to see if anyone was listening and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “It was the best sex I ever had. I mean, it almost spoiled me for women completely.”

  “Oh, well. Thanks, man.”

  “You don’t remember.”

  “Um…”

  “I’m Tony. We met at Pick of the Flicks like, ten years ago.” He started giving me details and it was not until he mentioned “Northern Exposure” that I realized who he was. He remembered different details too. He said we were standing in new releases; that we’d gone to Chili’s for drinks; that he’d been living with a girlfriend who was out of town. He remembered me crying as I lay on his chest. I watched him recount the tale with detached amazement. We might have lived entirely different experiences, so radically different were our memories. But something had happened that night: something that made him cry and something that made me have that crazy, overwhelming orgasm. So why were our memories so different?