Max was fast. I suspected years of applying makeup made him efficient in body painting. He spent a lot of time painting my face inside the outline of the pink triangle my firefly superhero wore instead of the big S.
“Here’s my suggestion,” he concluded after coming up for air. “There’s only so much I can do with the limitations of this type of paint and the brushes I have. If I try to fill in the pink triangle, I don’t think I can keep from messing up what I’ve done with your face. I think I should just spend a minute thickening the outline of the triangle, and then I’ll go back to making your light shine.” I agreed, and he continued with the pink outline.
Sam returned, picked up another brush, and worked side by side with Max to paint in the rays of light radiating out. He left for a moment, then returned with a crazy grin. In his hand wasn’t a brush but a tube. He squeezed it, and a thin line of golden glitter gel flashed in the sun.
“Perfect,” Max sighed. “Absolutely perfect.” They finished up, and then the rest of the workshop was spent taking pictures of one another and doing a number of group shots. Sam reminded us of the URL where we’d be able to find and download our images when the retreat was over.
We learned it was a tradition to not wash off the paint until dinner was over and the other participants were able to admire what we had done. Karl was with Keith when we all came in. I wasn’t sure how to react. To get to the serving line, I had to walk past him.
“Impressive results,” he said. He sounded polite. Civil. The way a stranger would give a compliment.
I decided it was too late to be anything but honest. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” As Sam had suggested, we had all brought a towel and spread them out on the benches before we sat down. With great nudity came great responsibility.
Chapter Fourteen
AFTER DINNER I headed back to shower. This time there were no unexpected hands on my back. I dressed for the dance. Fred was the DJ and had an eclectic collection that seemed to be meant for every taste. I bopped to Cyndi Lauper, Ricky Martin, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. There were country-western numbers that got the Patsy Cline drag queen on the floor. Several slow dances. I asked Max to dance. “I just want to be clear,” I told him as I pulled him close. “I both want to dance with you and secretly try to feel you up underneath your clothes.”
“As I like to say,” he whispered as we moved to the music, “you can’t be first, but you can be next.” As we finished, I felt Karl’s eyes on me. I didn’t really know what to do. But I felt it was all right for me not to know. I had spent so much of my life trying to plan things out, it felt good to just relax and not worry about it. I kissed Max on the cheek and walked out into the moonlight to sit by the fire. The only other one there was Keith.
He held up a cup of coffee in a salute. “Mind some company, or did you leave the dance to be alone?”
“I don’t mind,” I answered. “Just a lot going on in my head and I thought maybe a dose of moonlight might be good for me. Balance off the hours I spent naked in the sunlight today.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Everything. Nothing.”
“Karl isn’t exactly what we call in the trade, a happy camper.”
“Did he ask you to talk to me?” I heard a chill in my voice. I kept surprising myself.
“No, Brett. He didn’t. But there’s a reason why people in my position in locations like this are called camp counselors. I’ve been a psychotherapist for gay men for over thirty years. After a while you start noticing when people are holding themselves in certain ways. After seventeen years of running this and similar retreats in other places, I’ve watched people meet as strangers, become something more, and then come to realize that on some levels they’re still strangers, and they get hurt or they hurt others. Most hurt someone else unintentionally. Very few do it deliberately.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“I get the sense a lot of this is new to you. I’ve seen a lot of men arrive at the retreats who walk in like you did. Then the magic of the place—or more accurately, the freedom and the safety of the place—frees up something inside of them, and they move differently. They don’t look like they’re waiting to be hit. Or mocked. Or humiliated.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You may be too young for this—but have you ever taken an aerobics class?”
“No—I do spin classes.”
“There’s a gay comic who used to call aerobic classes gay folk dances. When I was younger, I used to go. Every now and then a straight man would attend. They were so easy to pick out. They’d get so excited with the dancing. You grew up in Utah. In your experience, what do other boys call a boy who wants to dance?”
“Sissy. Queer.” I wondered if I answered too quickly. It was obvious I didn’t have to think about it. Aunt Lindsey had even bought me the tap shoes. That was when I learned to never be noticed. I learned to extinguish my light so no one could find me.
“Straight boys—straight men want to dance. It’s a human thing. Not a gay thing or a straight one. But most straight men learn early on not only to avoid dancing, but to restrain their bodies. They spend a lot of their younger years monitoring their movements. Nothing too graceful. Nothing too mannered. Nothing too enthusiastic unless it’s well hidden under the heading of sports.” He cocked his head like a bird, and I knew he knew. “When a straight man would come to an aerobics class, suddenly he was given permission to dance, because it wasn’t really dancing. It was exercise. The way when a jock slaps the ass of another jock when they’re on the field, it isn’t really homoerotic. It’s sports. So they dance. And they have so much enthusiasm. That would be so wonderful to see. And they were absolutely terrible at it. They had no control over their own bodies. They’d frequently bump into others or a wall. It’s like their consciousness was a helium balloon attached by a thin string to their bodies. They weren’t inside their bodies. That’s why they can be unemotional. In fact, it’s one of the few ways. It helps them keep up the façade of being masculine.”
I watched the moon come out of the clouds. I realized my cheeks were wet.
“Here I don’t watch straight men, Brett. I watch men who are more like me. And I watch them—sometimes it’s just for a little bit of time—let their consciousness inside their bodies. And they move in a different way. And so often they move with excitement and enthusiasm. And sometimes with the permission we give them here, they start to dance. And they dance with excitement. But because they’re so new at it—they bump into others. They run into walls.” He stopped talking and watched the moon. “Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, Karl in his enthusiasm might sometimes bump into you and hurt you without meaning to?”
He stood up. In the moonlight his hair wasn’t gray, it was silver. As he turned his head, his beard had flashes of silver in it. “I’ll tell you one more thing I’ve seen in my many years. When people are hurt, they often hurt the people they care about. Sometimes it’s because the people they care about are physically the closest ones to them, so it’s easier to hurt them. Sometimes it’s because they feel safest with the ones they care about and that lowers their inhibitions. When they’re in pain, they lash out, and the ones closest get hurt.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“Practice dancing. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. Practice doesn’t make perfect, Brett, but it makes it possible.” He walked away into the darkness. I stayed there a few more minutes until another cloud came and covered up the moon. I returned to the dance.
Chapter Fifteen
KARL WAS talking to Lady Teasedale. Tonight she looked as if she were a sixties white-booted go-go dancer on steroids. I recognized the song Fred had up. My granma had a green jewelry box, and when she opened the lid, a music box inside would start to play. The song was called “Stardust.” I tapped Karl on the shoulder. “May I have this dance?”
“Wouldn’t you rather dance with a real man instead of a twinky drag queen?�
�
I didn’t know if he meant it that way, but I heard it as spiteful. I had learned to think of him as wise and thoughtful. Now I considered that he might be in pain. And I understood if he was anything like me, there were a lot of men before me who had hurt him. You can’t be first, but you can be next.
I smiled gently. “I want to dance with someone I care about and respect. I want to dance with you. Look—I’m really, really new at this. I might be sowing my wild oats in the wrong way, in the wrong place, in the wrong season. But I’m trying to get better at it.”
“Oh God,” Lady Teasedale said, “you’re about to break into ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen,’ and I’m so not dressed as Julie Andrews. Quick—go dance away before your Drag Mother gets all weepy and ruins her makeup.” She literally shoved us into each other.
“Oh, what the hell,” Karl said. “I didn’t start off sowing my own damn oats all that well. No one tells you how to do it. There’s no app for it.” He pulled at me, and I realized he was automatically leading. I was okay with that. When the song was over, we walked outside. The moon was still ignoring us. Maybe it was having an affair with a cloud or a comet and couldn’t be bothered. Maybe it had the rest of the night off.
“I really liked your body paint,” he finally said.
“Thank you,” I said and meant it. “I’ve signed off a few times on a patient getting art therapy, but I didn’t really understand much about it. Having to think about what I needed to use was very healing for me. And again—I couldn’t have done it without you. What did you do when you were in the body painting workshop last year?”
“I didn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
He stopped so suddenly, I wondered if the fox was back and he was trying not to startle it. He took a deep breath and let it out.
“You know what I look like nude. I’m twenty-six, and as you pointed out, I look like a sixteen-year-old with a small dick. I’ve always avoided being nude in public. Tomorrow they offer a ride to a nearby river where you can swim in the nude. Guess what else I didn’t do last year?”
I didn’t answer him. At least, not about that. “No wonder what I said last night hurt you so much. I didn’t know.” Then I laughed. “I’m so new at this I don’t have a point of reference for cocks. Jeez, I always figured I was robbed when dicks were being handed out, but eventually I figured it didn’t matter because I’d never get a chance to use mine anyway.”
“So,” he said, turning to look at me, “you really think you have a small dick?”
“Like I said, I don’t know a lot about penises. When I worked up enough nerve to pull up pictures of guys on a gay site, they were always erect with a dick that looked like it could put someone’s eye out. The dicks I’ve seen at the gym I tried not to see, and besides, they were never erect—at least I don’t think they were. The only hard cock I’d ever seen in real life until I got here was my own, and mine sure doesn’t look like what I found on the Internet. Now since I’ve been here, I’ve seen three guys with erections. You, Danny, and Max. And you have the biggest cock so far.” That set him off laughing. I tried to figure out why. I couldn’t twist it around in my head to make it funny to me. I finally gave up. “What’s so funny?” That set him off on another gale of laughter until he was out of breath.
“Oh,” he said, but had to stop and try to breathe for a moment. “When you’ve spent your whole life telling yourself something until you believe it, when someone tells you you’re really the opposite—then you either think they’re making fun of you and you get pissed about their sarcasm, or you think maybe they aren’t lying or blind or crazy, and your own belief cracks enough to let a lot of things you’ve been holding back go. And it all rushes out in laughter, like a flock of birds rushing back for spring. So, yeah, Brett. I may have a small dick, but by God, I’ve got the biggest small dick!” Then he started laughing again.
Above us something moved in a tree, and it sounded like bells were ringing. “What’s that?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Mr. Utah. Mr. Never-Saw-A-Firefly-Before. It’s a mockingbird. The little bastards can sound like all sorts of things.” The bells rang out again. Then that changed and I thought it sounded like the broken cry of a crow.
“If a bird can learn to sing new songs, maybe we can too,” I said.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Mr. Farnsworth?”
“Is it working, Kookie?”
Karl grinned. “Want to find out?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I probably have a few more wild oats to sow, but I’m in a better place to find out tonight than I’ve ever been.”
“I might be able to teach you some planting techniques.”
I raised one eyebrow the way I had watched him do earlier. “You’ll teach me to suck-seed?”
“Can you kiss me with that mouth? I suspect you’ve got a dangerous tongue.”
I almost said, No, that would be Jimmy. But I wasn’t that stupid. I was a fast learner. I figured the best answer was to just kiss him. We were almost at my cabin. The moon had returned and lit up our path. We turned the corner, and the tree by my cabin was full of fireflies.
PAUL WALKINGSKY was trained as a traditional Native American Storyteller and frequently weaves the legends of his youth into his contemporary tales of gay romance. He was the original Director of Training for the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center and was one of the authors of the American Psychological Association’s training materials on HIV for mental health professionals. He lost his first partner to AIDS not long after they had keynoted the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. Paul is a former college professor with a long string of academic publications and has served as summer faculty for the Kinsey Institute as a specialist on cross-cultural sexuality.
“My aunt was at an event,” he likes to relate, “and a White guy looked at her name tag and said, ‘Pearl Walinsky—that’s Polish, right?’ Walkingsky is actually an old Osage name from Oklahoma.”
Paul splits his time between Seattle and the Valley of the Sun, which sounds more impressive than the outskirts of Phoenix. He’s illustrated several children’s books, and has retold and illustrated a Native American Origin of Corn legend for an anthology of transgender-focused stories. He felt it was an appropriate choice, since the corn plant has both male and female flowers on the same stalk. Paul is a NY Times and USA Today best-selling author and has won several writing awards. He’s known for a light comedic touch in all his writings.
By Paul Walkingsky
Mild to Wild in Massachusetts
Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS
www.dreamspinnerpress.com
Published by
DREAMSPINNER PRESS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
www.dreamspinnerpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Mild to Wild in Massachusetts
© 2017 Paul Walkingsky.
Cover Art
© 2017 Maria Fanning.
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 3230
5-7886, USA, or www.dreamspinnerpress.com.
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63533-396-1
Published April 2017
v. 1.0
Printed in the United States of America
Mild to Wild in Massachusetts Page 8