His man’s face, his Marine face, blindfold ripped away, seeing the spit-wet uniform of the sweaty, dark, handsome Slap Captain pulling his tits, making his sweat run, his moans deep.
He looks up at the smiling cruel face, the disciplined face taking him deep now into the Corps, initiated now into the inner rank of the Corps. His hard-muscled body, understanding, thrashes up, bound to the ungiving wooden chair, into a painful arch of ecstatic handless coming. The Slap Captain pins, with one solid punch, a pair of squadron wings into the Lance Corporal’s chest, metal into flesh. Fist into blood.
“That’s my boy.” The hands hold him very tight. The handsome mouth, mustache, and lips, press sweet, hard agony against his own. “That’s my man.”
ACT 2. CIGAR SARGE
SARGE IS HOT. REALLY GOOD-LOOKING. You offer him a cigar. He takes the box slowly. He pulls the cigar out slowly. Long. Fat. Brown. Wrapper crinkles. Cigar is soft inside cellophane. Sarge tears wrapper deliberately with his strong teeth. Feels cigar. Smells good. Aroma. Wets lips. Inserts first one end of cigar. Then other. Licks it smooth and wet. Taste feels sharp on his tongue.
You kneel between his spread thighs. Look up to watch him reach into his fatigue pocket for a match. Cigar locks in his teeth. Poised. Wet. You wait for the moment. Incredible moment. When a man strikes fire. Lifts it to his face. Match in one hand. Cigar in other. You watch his face. You know the taste of a cigar lingering in a thick mustache.
Sarge rubs his hand across his crotch. Your mouth burrows down into his fatigues. Your eyes look up into his face. Instead of lighting the cigar, he holds the match. He stares straight into your eyes. The butt-end of stogie juts square from his mouth. Surrounded by moist lips. Locked tight in his teeth. The match burns. Sarge gives the cigar another slow, long lick. He clenches it hard. Your hand moves faster in anticipation of the moment the match will touch the tip. When deep blue smoke will rise from the hot, red coal.
Sarge touches the match to the cigar. Burn point. Smoke curls. Fills his mouth. Rises in a rich blue halo around his face and close-cropped hair. He pulls on it. Easy. Smooth. The tip glows hot. Red. A burning coal. A weapon.
You kneel adoringly between his legs. Worshipping cock. Worshipping his face. The cigar smoke is his incense. Is your incense. The cigar is a thick cock. Wet. Hot. Burning. Commanding in his face. He exhales the smoke down on you. Spews smoke down on you. The smoke has volume. The smoke is thicker than poppers. The taste in your mouth is better than you imagined. The smoke lifts you higher. He puffs. He puffs, and between his thighs, you sniff the smoke he exhales. You snort the aroma.
You go down on him. Your eyes never leave his mouth. His cock is in your mouth. You pull your lips out. To the head of the dick. It’s your trick. You know it. He knows it. It’s your signal. You want him to hit his cigar and hold its heat. Hot against the back of your punk-ass neck. To keep his dick buried root-deep in your mouth. The back of your neck carries faint erotic marks of past cigar-sucks. You want his heat. You want his fire. You want his cum. You want the wet splash and the hot burn. You want the smell of cigar in his hair and mustache. You want the smell of his sweat. You worship his mouth. His prick.
You strip off your shirt. You drop your jeans. You hold your mouth open wide, coming up off his cock. Your wide wet oval of mouth goes down on his cigar butt smoking in his mouth. He puffs it heavy and hard. You wrap your mouth wide around the burning cigar. You inhale the smoke billowing from his mouth, curling up and out of his hard-bitten teeth. Again in perfect balance. Sarge on the cigar’s wet end. You on the hot. Cigar-locked together like two men fucking. One up the ass of the other: the fucker orders the fucked not to move, not to dare even flex his ass, or the cock buried hilt deep will shoot despite the fucker’s warning. Two men on one cigar. Smoke shared. His eyes roll back in his head. Close to your face. Down the length of hot cigar. You see all.
You feel him piss. Warm. Wet. All over your belly. You worship his face. His mouth. His cigar. His cock. His body. His energy sears you more than a match to a rich dark Havana.
Your eyes beg him. Your empty mouth pulling back from his cigar-mouth begs him. Your hands frame a small area on your belly, above your cock.
He looks at the space like a firebomber over target.
You need him. For once, finally, you need him to do it. Your eyes say he must. Please. Your face shows your need. Please. Your hard cock shows your commitment. Please. His own meat hardens. More. With three last stoking puffs on the butt in his mouth. You need it. He wants it. Again a balance. Control between you both. Consent. Mutual understanding. You need what he can give. He likes what you can offer.
Sarge pulls his cigar stub from his mouth. Your hands milk his cock. Pull his meat. His hand lowers the glowing tip to your groin. Your eyes lock together. Your eyes beg him. Your dick moves fast in your one hand. His cock moves fast in your other. His thick arm, cigar butt curled into the palm of his hand, moves down between your moving arms. The glowing tip is inches away from your belly. Three inches. Two. You can feel the heat from the tip moving warm toward your skin.
The energy locks totally between the two of you. Perfect partners. His eyes search your eyes one last time. Never has any man so totally offered what you so totally need.
A shadow falls heavy across his eyes. It says NOW.
His fist with the burning cigar butt moves in for that last body-inch and holds. The pleasure. The pain. His heat pours into your belly. Contact: the briefest second. A tick of pain. Seared. You come. Now. You come. His face moves in to yours. An inch away. You rock, jerk your cock. Worship him. Think of him. Together, you separate: his hand moves away from your belly. Your belly moves away from his hand. He keeps his eyes locked into yours. Balance.
Sarge tucks his dick toward your groin. He licks his hand. He shoves his cigar back between his teeth. Locks it down. He pumps his hard greasy cock over your red-spotted belly. He pumps his dick hard. Until the smoke filling his mouth, his nose, his chest fills your mouth, your nose, your chest. Until in the blue haze around the pair of your faces, his cock comes wet and hotter than any cigar, shooting healing seed, salving juice over the loving brand that will all too soon fade to a lover’s scar. Made by him. Made by this man. Made by this toker. This taker. To carry hidden and secret for the rest of your life.
Somewhere out there, Sarge waits for you.
Because you know what Sarge has and Sarge knows what you need.
Thomas, South Carolina
Dimitri Apessos
Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim; thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
SONG OF SOLOMON 7:4
Right on the northern tip of South Carolina we stop in a town called Thomas, mostly as a joke, as that is my ex-boyfriend’s name. “You’ve got issues,” Geof quips as we park outside the biggest building in town: a Masonic temple. Right away, it’s clear that something is wrong with the town of Thomas.
There are only two things I hate about being on the road. One is that my eyebrow ring often becomes inflamed when I go too long without showering. The other is the trucks. I have nothing against truck drivers and have often considered trucking as a future profession that would allow me to drive and smoke simultaneously. But I have never managed to get over the story of how Thomas lost his virginity, as he told it to me once in Barracuda in New York, on a humid afternoon in July.
Turns out that Lexington, Kentucky, where Thomas grew up, had a bar which, although not gay per se, had drag shows and hence attracted a mixed crowd. Unable to get in anywhere else, Thomas would go with a friend who claimed to be bisexual but who had never tested his hypothesis of sexual fluidity. When he was a senior in high school, Thomas met a big, muscular truck driver there who took an interest in him and bought him a couple of drinks. Cheered on by his eunuch friend, Thomas went back to the man’s truck and gave him the most valuable thing a closeted seventeen-year-old boy in the South has t
o give.
The back of a truck, Thomas?
“He had it made up really nice, back there. He had this carpet and lights. It was nicer than most houses.”
A truck driver, Thomas?
“He was buff. He was hot. He was really built.”
Perhaps. Still, I cannot see a truck without conjuring a vision of the young Thomas, not then knowing that the gay metropolis lay in his future, frightened, silent, following this man to the far end of the parking lot. Parting his immature legs, facing the truck’s inner wall, his arms lifted in painful ecstasy, a large, unkempt man of the road behind him, thrusting and pushing into him the frustration of life on the highway, further excited by the disbelieving relief of having found a boy for the night. In how many towns was he this lucky? One out of three? One out of six?
Biting his lip, Thomas tried not to cry. In the back of this majestic sixteen-wheeler something was starting—a life of clubs and bathrooms and missed connections, casual sex and failed relationships, trying to return to that spot, trying to get back to that place that hurts so sweetly and feels so good, because it allowed a seventeen-year-old boy to be held by someone so much larger, so much stronger than himself, that he couldn’t help thinking it may just be okay after all.
Not a single person is walking in the streets of Thomas, South Carolina, and the only shops are of a religious bent. People are staring at us from behind dirty store windows and dusty windshields. The population appears to be predominantly black and exclusively Methodist. Maybe a freed slave colony? A pair of young black men roll down their car window and, without slowing down, throw an exaggeratedly queeny catcall in our direction.
“Hey boys!”
Are they really gay? Do they think we are? We decide to get the hell out of Thomas, South Carolina, without finding out.
My fondest memory of Thomas is not of the Sex Scandals through History Halloween party we went to dressed as Socrates and Plato. Nor is it of the Valentine’s Day weekend we spent at my schoolmate Valerie’s in Vermont, back when I was still in the closet and we pretended to be just friends, frightened that she would figure us out and overjoyed when she told us the only space to sleep was her roommate’s double bed. No, the fondest memory I have of Thomas has no specific date attached to it. It is of a random sunny midsummer morning in my frat house in New York.
I don’t know if it was a weekend, or if I just had woken up with enough time to waste before we both had to go to work. What I remember is sensing the luxury of time, with the early morning sun searing in through my window and the faint humming sounds of the city’s construction workers and garbage trucks providing a permeable screen to reality.
Thomas was always a heavy sleeper, and this morning was no exception. The smell of him in my bedroom, excitingly alien yet comfortably at home, and the sight of his lean, boyish body on my mattress, sparked a flashback of all the affection and tenderness I had ever felt towards him. Usually he was the forward one and I was the one who let it happen; he was the aggressive initiator of intimacy while I went along for the ride. But not this morning. Waking up next to him, seeing him lying there on my bed half naked, gave me a devoted urge I had never thought I would experience. I wanted to serve and service him, please him while receiving no pleasure other than that of knowing I had pleased him. I wanted him to lie back, half-asleep, and to be reeled slowly into the reality of the day by my lips and my fingers.
Running my fingers along his naked torso, smoothing his skin, caressing his form, sliding my hand down to his waist, then lower, reaching the daily morning anchor between the sleep and the body, I was turned on as never before. Energized, I sat on his legs, placing one hip on either side of him, and started kissing his neck. Taking in the smell of his body—a blend of sleep and sweat and morning dust—I worked my way down, kissing his bony collar, his lean chest, his hollow stomach.
At his waist, I paused to honor his strong morning hardness. I licked the bulge in his briefs, still taking in every smell as he slept. His cock twitched, moving purely because of the friction between my tongue and his skin, like a flower turns to the sun without the earth’s awareness.
Excited beyond the point of control, I pulled down his underwear and leaned back to admire the full hard size of his thick and long morning glory. I kissed the tip with tenderness, as if I were meeting his mouth or exciting his ear, and then parted my lips to go down on it as far as I could. His sleepy moan startled me; I had been viewing him as a painting or a photograph. I had objectified the picture of him glowing under the sunlight on my bed, knowing already that the image would stay with me—a memory fueling nights of longing and nostalgia long after he and I went our separate ways.
Loving his half-asleep, half-awake excitement, I took his erect cock deeper into my mouth, faster, faster again, with confident rhythm—a circular motion from the neck, as he had taught me. When he put his semiconscious hand on the back of my head, I lost it. Moaning now with each circling of my neck, as his hand guided me, I stayed on him for what seemed like hours; in reality it was probably forty-five minutes. (Thomas always took a long time—especially in the morning—but this particular day I did not mind.)
When his own moans intensified and his neck arched, pushing his head back as he propelled his pelvis upward, I knew what I had to do. For the first time ever, I swallowed his morning juice, completing the connection, directly from his insides to my insides, through his cock and down my throat.
When it was over, I couldn’t bring myself to move off him, so strong was my affection for the form of his body. I stretched out my legs and lay my head on his chest, falling back into sleep with him, the sunlight illuminating the dust as it descended on us and around us, filling my bed and the room with particles of the morning, of New York City, of the Upper West Side, on a lazy summer day.
Before leaving Thomas, South Carolina, we get a double cheeseburger with fries at Hardee’s and buy a Jerry’s Kids muscular dystrophy shamrock. I sign it George Rupp and the lady behind the counter puts it up on the wall next to the cash register using messy Scotch tape.
Walking back to our parking spot, we see a woman in her fifties leaving her car, without locking the door, and walking towards a gloomy shop offering “What Would Jesus Do?” paraphernalia. It appears that in South Carolina the law requires only one valid license plate, because her car’s front is adorned with an impostor. It says “I” followed by a heart and ending with an empty, complex circular shape. I love clouds? I love smog? I love the sound of one hand clapping?
Geof asks her.
“Cotton,” she answers, without a hint of humor.
Just the other night, Thomas slept over again. We broke up almost a year ago, and in the meantime we have traveled many times back and forth on the road between civility and talking shit behind each other’s back. But college was only a couple of weeks from being over, and I wasn’t even sure where he would go or what he would do. I had been thinking about him but had too much pride to call and talk to him.
Tony and I had been downtown, hitting the bars, and I didn’t get back to the neighborhood until three in the morning. I needed one more beer before going to sleep, but I was completely broke. Maybe my friend Sheila would be bartending at Saints and maybe she would treat me. It was worth a try.
Of course, when I walked into Saints, Sheila wasn’t there. But Thomas was, sitting at the bar with two of his fraternity brothers, drunk off their asses while he was sober. I sat with him, and we talked until the bar closed. He told me about the job he would soon be starting, the studio in Brooklyn he was moving into, what he had been up to, and he promised to call me when he had his new number. Almost an hour later, mutually shocked at what seemed like an indication that he and I could be friends after all, he walked me home.
On my stoop, we hugged. I took in his smell—and all the old memories flooded back. We stood hugging on the corner of 113th Street for fifteen minutes, maybe more, as I breathed him in and relived the greatest moments of the most romantic yea
r of my life.
On his neck I smelled all the overly long lunch breaks we had taken from our summer jobs together at the Manhattan Mall; how sexy he had looked crying on the night I told him I needed to be alone; how good it felt to be held by him when I broke down in his arms after I came out to my parents. Most of all, however, I smelled on his neck that summer morning in my bedroom, and at that moment we both knew what had to happen, even if it was just once for old times’ sake.
We kissed. I asked him to come upstairs. He asked if we were crazy. I didn’t answer. That night I relived the full year I spent with him, the year that I discovered the male body, the looks you get when you walk down the street holding a guy’s hand, the innocence and relief that is only associated with coming out with a loving, experienced, totally devoted boyfriend. The knowledge was in there—in the bed with us all night—that this could not be a return to what we had once shared. Too much time had passed, and we had hurt each other too much. But for one night it felt great to pretend that we were still together. that nothing bad had happened, and that I was still with my first boyfriend, thinking that what we had may just last forever and unsure of what I would do if it didn’t.
The lady outside the WWJDshop points at my Che Guevara T-shirt and asks me if that is a picture of John the Baptist. I tell her that it is, then Geof and I climb into our car. Driving off, we pass by what seems to be the only theater in town. It’s playing Arsenic and Old Lace—an extremely old movie about two nice elderly ladies who kill their dinner guests. I recall Peter Lorre being in it.
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