|
Mugtoe
|
|
It's been a week and two days since I quit smoking. I walk at least three times per day from here at Zang & Davis down to Jefferson and back. I looked it up on google maps, and that is approximately a mile, I think. I have cut every bit of fat that I can out of my diet, and I take an aspirin every morning and separate the yolks from my eggs before making my morning omelet. I still haven't called a doctor. Frankly, I'm a tad scared of that, and I am resistant to spending the money, even though I have medical insurance. I read while I walk, so my walks are somewhat gentle. Even so, I sweat a great deal in the process and always feel better afterwards. I started this almost two weeks ago, and last Friday I had lost eight pounds when I weighed myself at the farm. I'll probably head out there tomorrow evening as well and check my weight once more to see if there's any more tangible evidence of progress in that regard. I still get some of that dull ache in my chest and my left arm, but I'm noticing improvement.
I'm reading a good deal more now. I just finished Jim Harrison's "True North" yesterday, and this morning I started reading Balzac's "The Wild Ass's Skin". I made the mistake of looking up the book online before I began reading, so I more or less know how it ends. It is, however, one of those books that makes me want to carry a pen with me so I can underline passages, write in the margins and otherwise tear it up in the process of owning it. That is my nature with books. Few of the paperbacks I read are suitable for much after I'm done with them. My copy of Stendahl's "Charterhouse of Parma" is held together by rubber bands somewhere.
I'm writing again, but everything is a jumble at the moment. I have several Word documents on both my computers at home and work that contain nothing but digitally scribbled notes and ideas that surface and give the vague notion of a greater substance in the depths beneath that remains hidden. If nothing ever comes from any of that, I still enjoy that process.
I had thoughts the other day about being celibate and avoiding emotional entanglements for the time being. I was on such a ride after giving up the smoking habit that I wanted to continue further removing whatever obvious props remained that allow the kinks in my psyche to govern me and create whatever tyranny under which I seem to labor. I still have that idea, but only by the accident of circumstance. An old lover of mine from years ago came over last night for a visit and lay with me in his arms while we watched a movie. I would've exchanged that tenderness for a quick fix had he been amenable to that impulse, but he was not. The moment he was gone I was glad nothing had happened. He has several women in his life now, and I am in need of my own company more than I am of some quick fix and the exchange of body fluids I would get from being serviced in that way. Still, it was nice to be quiet and lie next to someone and go through those motions.
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Bill,
Hey, buddy, I love the stuff you sent! In spite of what you think, I’m proud as hell of the belt and the holster. You’re right about the key fob - it’s odd looking - but I reckon I can handle that. I’m proud to have all that stuff. You do good work.
This past week or two has been rather eventful. I’ve had some major truck repairs. First it was my transmission, and that cost $1300. This past weekend the beast broke down half a dozen times on the way back from dad’s place on the river, and it felt like some kind of fuel problem. I’d had the filter in the tank replaced earlier this year, so I didn’t think that was the problem, but it still felt like a fuel issue. I took it to the shop, and they replaced a clogged in-line filter. Hell, I could’ve done that myself. I left the shop and got on the freeway, and it died again three times. I ended up unable to re-start it and stuck in the left turn lane of an intersection in Grand Prairie. I had it towed back to the shop. I’m a little annoyed that I’ll have to pony up the tow charge, but I’m assuming I’ll get stuck with it. The tow truck driver said he has an ‘89 Chevy truck that had identical problems, and that it ended up being the brain of the truck that was fried. I’m going to call the shop this morning and ask about that.
I just called the shop. They’re redneck as hell and reply in flat, monosyllabic utterances that make my gorge rise a bit, especially since I’m dropping some serious coin on them. I reckon that’s their job, however. I suppose I’ll know more about it by this afternoon. I’m going to be paying on this truck for a while, but I figure it’s still a better deal than going out and getting a new vehicle. I’m still trying to repair my credit and pay off old debts from my wilder days, so I’d be hard pressed to buy a new truck anyway. Mine is paid for and rarely gives me this kind of trouble. My insurance runs all of $35 per month, and the mileage isn’t so bad for a 3/4 ton pickup that is twenty years old.
My mother’s husband Jack passed away on Monday. I was about to eat Saturday evening when I got a call from her at Baylor in Irving. He had awoke from a nap with a stabbing pain behind his eye. She went in the other room and returned moments later to find him unresponsive. He never regained consciousness. He apparently had a massive hemorrhage in his brain stem and was more or less dead right away. They took him off life-support on Sunday and he stopped breathing early Monday morning. He was eighty-two and had been battling cancer most of this year. I figure the way he went was much preferable to what most of us probably have to look forward to. I was never particularly close to him, and this necessarily brings on some measure of family drama, but I still feel sorry for my mother and wonder how her life is going to change as a result of this. She seems to be in really good health at seventy-nine, and I don’t see any reason why she should change her living arrangements at all just yet. I’m not sure what her thoughts are on the matter, and I probably won’t ask. I’m not sure when the memorial service will be, but I assume it will be sometime this week, if only because his cousin flew down from Illinois. He’s being cremated, I think, so that takes some of the urgency out of it.
The other thing that’s been on my mind this last couple of weeks is my health. I was walking across a Wal-Mart in Hudson Oaks Friday night and experienced shortness of breath, pain in my chest and left arm and fatigue just walking from the front door to the auto parts section. I’ve had similar symptoms over the last few months, but it was pretty pronounced that night. I got a little frightened by it and decided to make some rather drastic changes. I have quit smoking for good. The sudden and forceful demonstration of my own frailty has made that rather a good deal easier than I’ve experienced in the past. I am doing my best to eliminate just about all the fat I can discover from my diet. Yesterday I had unsweetened oatmeal with sliced banana and an egg-white omelet for breakfast and then a Subway low-fat sandwich for lunch with water, and then watermelon for supper and nothing else. No more of my beloved kettle corn at the office. I checked it, and it’s loaded with trans-fats and shit. I’m also walking to work and back every day. My automotive difficulties have cooperated nicely in that regard.
I think that’s about it. Cody remains gone, and I miss him. He is not amenable to mending fences right now, and I respect his wishes, though I bitch at him a fair amount about it. I should give him his space for now and just carry on. I’ve always been a loner of a sort, and I can function well. I do whine a good deal, however.
I’ll holler at you again soon.
Yer faithful correspondent,
|
|
|
|
|
One hundred years from now probably nobody will know or care what kind of car I drove or what clothes I wore or where I lived or how much money I had. But if I can make a positive difference in the lives of others, my physical existence in this lifetime may have effects that I could never predict. It's no matter that nobody would likely remember my name in that case.
There's no telling how long I will be remembered. It's of little import, because eventually EVERYBODY will pass out of the collective consciousness - even people like Caesar and Einstein and perhaps even the Christ and the Buddha. At that point the guy who painted on cave walls tens of thousands of years ago has the only real claim on some sort of anonymous immortality.
What's in a remembered name anyway? Does the fact that anyone may remember the words Frank Turrentine and speak my name somehow resurrect my consciousness and give me new life? I'll be gone. As my father says when we talk about his funeral plans: I don't care what you do with me, so long as you make damn sure I'm dead. I won't care at that point.
I fear dying, because I fear pain and the unknown. I don't particularly fear death, however, because, well, there's not much I can do about it; and it's something we ALL have to experience at some point. None of us are truly alone in that regard. I do believe in a Ground of Being that informs all life, but I don't think it matters which fairy tale narrative I subscribe to to explain existence and that Mystery that transcends human understanding. Those myths really only serve to reconcile me to those things while I am still breathing in and out.
I don't have to spend much time worrying about this kind of thing, however. Why would I waste any time on that? And I certainly don't see my life as so meaningless that I need to define it by my death. It's a common saying in my crowd, but it's true: What other people think of me is none of my business. It's relatively unimportant whether anyone remembers me or not. That is not what makes me who I am, and the opinions of others now or in the future isn't going to make my life right now any more enjoyable or worthwhile. If I want self-esteem, I should do estimable things right now for their own sake and not for a pat on the head from people I don't know who haven't even been born yet.
|
|
|
|
|
Sadie Morrow didn't give a shit that I was queer; she wouldn't have given a shit if I'd have had a third eye in the middle of my forehead as long as I'd make her feel desirable from time to time by fucking her and letting her buy the beer. She would bring me offerings of broken men in the same way that my cat would bring me a half-eaten horny toad if only I would pull her up against my naked, sweaty body and give her my finest sloppy sugar and then cover her face with the glaze that left her looking like a day-old Southern Maid doughnut. Sadie bestowed upon me the best that her feminine charms could offer. I was happy that she was so solicitous of my physical comfort, but I honestly felt rather put upon and objectified from time to time by that slut-in-the-headlights look she gave up at me from below my belt. Striving after the pleasures of the flesh was a way of life for me then, however, so I sucked it up and made the best of a dubious blessing. I've always been adaptable that way, I suppose. And she gave the most hateful, hot-bubblin' skull I ever got from a woman. That counts for a lot in my book.
I met Sadie in an AA meeting. I was killing time in the back row of one of those midnight candlelight gatherings where the unemployed and the unemployable sit about and try to outdo one another by speaking in hushed tones and secreting spiritual goo all over the room. I always felt as if self-support and right living were about the most spiritual things a man can do towards his fellows, no matter that I often fell a tad short of that mark, and I usually attended these funereal pow-wows to simply lord it over those who were somehow less aware of truths I considered to be axiomatic. Besides, once I'd been wired up past about day three, I tired of staying around the house once the sun had gone down. I knew that such a group of misfits and heathens weren't going to be too terribly discriminating about the company they kept.
I saw her sitting with her back to me and recognized her as a familiar face to whom I had never been introduced. As the group formed up at the close and was about the task of joining hands to ask for their Pat on the Head I slipped up behind her and whispered, "I can lick my eyebrows'n breathe through my ears, princess. Can I taste what you had fer lunch?"
She was trembling all through the Lord's Prayer trying to contain herself. I never considered that line terribly witty, but I suppose that it did come as a surprise under the circumstances. She turned and fell into my arms as the lights came up, and we had a little moment. She looked up at me biting her lower lip a bit and pressed her tits hard against my chest. I determined right then that conforming her to my will was a biological imperative in my life. I wanted to drag her outside and fuck her in the parking lot, and I found the awareness of that rather disconcerting to me. I am, after all, queer. There have been a few women in my life who have had that effect upon me, but they are so few and far between that I don't take them into account when it comes to assessing my orientation.
Sadie was not a fat girl by any stretch. But she had a comfortable fleshiness about her that I found very attractive. She was not any taller than I was. She also had that innocent look of a girl who blew her brother on his wedding day…but only because he guilted her into it. She had platinum-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, fair-sized perky tits, and that look on her face that said the lights were on and anybody was home who happened to be passing through. She trembled a lot, it seemed, and I felt sometimes as if I were in the company of one of those little dogs who roll over and piss themselves when approached too quickly. She also had a giggly whimper that said she'd just been caught being naughty, and she knew what she had to do now to get a pat on the noggin.
I was well known among the creatures who took up residence in those smoke-filled rooms with the bad coffee and worse furniture. There had been times when I had honestly wanted to make the attempt and offer my base metal into that alchemical chamber to see what sort of gold issued forth at the other end. I had more often witnessed the effects in my life and the lives of others who tip-toed around the periphery of that process without ever giving themselves completely into it. For us it was a spiritual sausage grinder, combining all the more unpalatable elements into an inert puree that, while safe to eat, had none of that spice that makes life worth living. I'd just go to get the heat off periodically and spend my time auditing the course and hanging with other like-minded folk who were in and out of the doors and occasionally drunk in meetings, pitching pennies at speakers from the front rows and being escorted out when we were too disruptive.
Sadie wanted something better. But anything was better than the cold plate of circumstance she brought to the table when she arrived. She went through all the requisite motions in her own way. While I sat in the living room of my grandmother's house smoking speed off a piece of foil, she would scribble nervously at the kitchen table in a stenographer's pad, working on another of her moral inventories. She carried that process with her as she sought relief in the immediacy of one more anonymous coupling on my shag carpet.
I had somewhat of a crush on Brian, a guy who rented a room in the back of my house and sold coke on the strip in Dallas where he tended bar. Okay, so it wasn't exactly a crush; I just wanted to suck his dick and do his dope. His dope was pretty painful stuff. He was selling coke for Claudio, who owned a restaurant and bar over on Fitzhugh. The bar was called La Mariposa and was located next door to where the old Eighth Day had been just a few years previous. Brian and I would spend afternoons there doing shots of Grand Marnier and snorting eighty-cent lines off the bar. There was something not quite right about the coke. It felt like ground glass in my nose, though it was powerful enough. We had to continually use various nose sprays and other medicaments to alleviate our suffering. Brian would send me across the street to get hot dogs with mayonnaise, a taste I acquired at the time but to which I never fully adjusted, and then we would chase them with shots of "Grandmar" and a thick line of coke that almost brought the entire mix right back up. Then we would stand around for a few minutes holding our noses and wincing and trying to swallow.
Brian held forth in such a way that he wasn't really queer. I mean, he was queer, but the boys he was attracted to were either illegally young or so effeminate that he might as well have been straight. And I knew he was good to go if I had a girl that was worth fucking. I was a bit of a chicken-hawk and always had been, but I wasn't in the same category as he was and wasn't willing to venture down that road for any reason no matter how skewed my perceptions became. Sadie provided an easy avenue of compromise for my tastes, since I was willing to fuck her in any case if nothing else was available.
It was a hot time and memorable, and it only happened once. I reckon it's appropriately unfortunate that my principle visual memory of Sadie is the three of us scooting along my living room floor, Brian's pelvic thrusts the engine of our progress and Sadie's blissful grin upon my cock affixed until her head was bent near double against that old console television that used to blare out Soul Train on Saturday afternoons while my grandfather sat a few feet away rolling cigarettes and running the electric shaver over his face and laughing as the sun streamed in through the big picture window.
|
|
|
|
|
My love buried, broken and encumber’d
From disuse and neglect – I’d long forgot
Or even spoken of that muse – had brought
Me naught but pain. Rejected unnumber’d
Times, its ill effect upon my mood
Left me distrustful, sullen and jaded
At the thought of new beginnings. Faded
Was the image I’d traced for years. I’d brood
No more on past wounds and hurt pride, but live
In solitary contemplation, trust
No more faint promises of hope, let rust
My edge. After love I’d no longer strive.
And in a couplet’s sudden space you burst
Grace made you my best love, I your first.
|
|
|
|
|
“Guess what I got in my hands”
“I dunno. What?”
“A farm implement.”
It was three in the morning, and I was awakened by the phone. Jesse’s conspiratorial mumbles hinted at what he soon enough revealed. He was fucked up on Xanax and watching porn vids. More than that, he had a yo-yo, the short-handled, angle-bladed predecessor of a modern weed-eater, propped up against his coffee table with the end of the handle pushing into his ass.
“Hey, come fuck me.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Come fuck me.”
I was a bit stunned. I muttered back in weak protest.
“Jesse, my truck’s broke down.”
“Steal yer dad’s Suburban then. Come over here and fuck me.”
“It’s three a.m., Jesse, he’d be furious.”
“He’d get over it in a couple of days. Get over here.”
This was nuts. This was karma biting me on the ass. This was one of those moments I frequently fantasized about taken out of its proper context and placed into an impossible set of circumstances. I could not imagine turning him down. I had been blowing Jesse for years. He had blown me once, drunk, years previous. I had tongued his ass many times and had him teetering on the edge of asking me to fuck him. Lately I had watched him fuck himself with a dildo a few times while I sucked his dick and had lapped away at his hole when he would pull the toy away. But this was a straightforward demand for me to do the deed. I felt betrayed by circumstance and put upon by the world.
“You bastard, Jesse. My dick’s harder’n Chinese arithmetic.”
“Good. Come fuck my ass with it.”
He was so insistent. I could tell by his voice and by the single-mindedness of his thinking that he was pretty fucked up. I played out the possible scenario in my head. My father fitfully drowsing in the other room, alternately sleeping through the most cacophonous racket or waking to the brush of my shoes on the floor in the hall, would certainly wake up to find me gone along with his only reliable transportation and would begin to play out all the worst-case possibilities in his mind. He would first recall the times he had driven himself to the hospital in the midst of his heart attacks, and then he would segue into my many nights in jail and all the wrecked cars littering my past.
It was possible, however, that I could get away with it and have only my conscience to deal with.
“Come fuck me.”
Would Jesse even stay awake until I completed the twenty-minute drive to his trailer? Would he even still be in the mood? Would I arrive only to jolt him out of his current state with my knock on his door? I had no cell phone with which to buoy him up during my time in transit, and there was no guarantee that the order and organization of the Universe would not continue in this betrayal of my wishes in larger measure by denying me the prize at a moment closer to my attainment of it. The realm of the theoretical would be matched in its application, and the closer I got to achieving my ends would only increase my frustration at the denial. My history is replete with such instances of fortune’s fickle moods.
“Okay, but you’d better stay awake until I get there. Yer drivin me nuts as it is.”
“Just hurry, goddammit. I need my ass fucked tonight.”
I slipped out of bed and into my clothes in less than a minute without turning on a light. I crept down the hall to my father’s open door and found him sound asleep. The light from the bathroom fell upon his face to reveal that slack-jawed slumber which gave me license. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt either of us, and perhaps he would continue to knit that raveled sleave in my absence. No harm, no foul. I reached around the door and felt for his keys on the nightstand. High school janitors have fewer keys than my eighty year-old father – who has one vehicle and one locked door to deal with – but the truck keys were on a separate fob, easy enough to identify with a touch, and made little enough noise with their removal. I slipped out the backdoor – it was not as noisy as the front – and swore the dog to silence with an admonitory glance and a wave of my hand. I was outside.
The air was thick and the moonlight bright enough to negate the need for too much caution. I made my way to my father’s truck, considering the option of pushing it backwards a bit and then nixing that idea half out of sloth and half from a view that, whatever happened now, I was committed to my plan no matter how things played out back here at home. I climbed inside and turned the key. The headlights came on automatically – I always hated that about his Suburban – washing the front of the house and his bedroom window in light. I immediately put it in reverse and turned the wheel and made my way out the quarter-mile drive to the county road.
The road to Hardpan, the wide spot near which Jesse lived, seemed twice its normal distance, illumined one bend after another by the headlights and always offering up one more forgotten stretch before the next recognizable landmark. How differently the landscape presented itself in that respect, as if vying for my attentions. The world was tap-dancing while I was laboring under the tyranny of an impulse more imperious in its demands. The local fauna dove for cover at my careening approach on those contorted farm-to-market roads.
Grindstone Road at last and the culmination of a ten-year seduction that had seen me in and out of jails and rehabs and squandering whatever good judgment I’d brought from my raising to scatter at the feet of this beautifully wicked half-wit. I pulled into his drive and raised a cloud of dust behind me skidding to a halt inches behind his truck on the caleche gravel. I turned off the engine, killing the headlights, and saw the soft glow from the television set in his living room window.
I paused for a moment, frightened of the endless permutation of possibilities I was about to enact, but only for a moment. Momentarily blinded by the dome light in my truck I felt my way around outside past his pickup and aligning my steps with the path to the front porch. I hooked my toe upon the landscape timbers bordering his drive and pitched headlong into the cannas in the flowerbed.
Dazed for a moment, I struggled to my feet and continued to the wooden steps and shuffled across the deck, banging into the bicycle his kids had left on their last weekend visit.
“Man, could you make any more noise, motherfucker? Hurry up’n get inside.”
“Sorry, Jesse.”
His head disappeared once more behind the door and I followed him in. He picked up the condom-tipped yo-yo from between his overstuffed chair and the coffee table and laid it aside and sat back down on the towel he’d draped on the seat. He was naked except for his socked feet, and I quickly stripped out of my clothes in the corner. Normally, I don’t get really hard until I get started in a given sexual situation, but I’d been seriously boned since I left the farm. I was straining against my own flesh to bury myself in Jesse’s ass, but I wanted to work him over for a moment first. I rank sucking that man’s cock and eating his ass right up there with buttermilk chess pie and yellow-meat watermelon as one of life’s great and simple pleasures.
I got down on my knees next to his chair and scooted around in front of him. The soundtrack of “Anal Sluts” was barely audible from the television now behind me, but enough so that he could keep his attentions comfortably divided and diffuse. The Xanax didn’t hurt either. His eyes were half-masted and noticeably glazed. I took a brief moment to look him over and enjoy the view.
His tousled, dark-brown hair was kept short but for the bangs hanging down near his eyes, one of which had kept its own counsel since a knock to his head had blinded it in his youth. He was short in stature, but broad at the shoulder with well-developed muscles from his work as a carpenter and a generally difficult life all around. His arms were thick and heavily inked, one on the bicep and the other on the forearm, and his hands were fleshy and roughened by labor, dirty nails curving at the ends of his thickened fingers. Wide at the chest, thick pecs dotted by nickel-sized dark-brown nipples with an almost indiscernible trail of hair running between, his torso tapered slightly towards the waist. His belly, now building slightly from better food and beer and sloth, still looked solid enough to bounce a quarter.
Starting at his feet – delicate feet, really, but always double-socked, almost without exception, and this was no exception – one leg had a flame tattooed from the ankle halfway to his knee, the other, nothing but a small jailhouse tat on the ankle, now obscured by a sock. But his lower legs were covered in dark, coarse hair. I always loved the feel of it rubbing against me when I was between his legs. His thighs, well-muscled, smoothed out closer to his crotch. Coming down from his navel was a triangle of hair, not so much the proverbial “treasure trail” as a patch of coarse hair widening to the bush around his cock.
And his cock. It was perfect. Not too large but well proportioned at roughly seven inches and a little on the thick side. Swollen it seemed to thicken in the middle somewhat before a slight taper towards the little helmet on top. Beneath hung his two beautiful balls, like small kiwi fruit dangling between my two favorite spots in the entire world. I understand very well that I practice a form of idolatry with the kind of worship I give to such a transient thing as his body. I’ll own that unflinchingly. The crumbs I’ve gathered in this way under the banquet table of life have provided me with a form of nourishment that sustains and poisons me in exquisite fashion, and I suppose I will forever remain in a state of stunned and silent rapture about that dark, sweet spot of fascination, hypnotized and suspended in a state of aesthetic arrest while I pleasure Jesse and make him cum for me.
We both muttered to each other, almost whispering.
“Fuck me.”
“You wait just a minute. I wanna work you over a bit first.”
And with that I raised his leg and buried my tongue in his hole, sucking a bit as I slid in and out of his clinging ring lately loosened and relaxed by his own efforts. An almost inaudible moan escaped him as both legs raised above my shoulders. His ass was sweet, the smells and tastes of KY and sweat tinged his primary odor, that of a soaped and scrubbed cleanliness one wouldn’t expect from him at first glance. He was a fastidious animal to the point of vanity, at least in his hygiene. I’m not too terribly put off by the normal smells and tastes of a man, but there was never any question of that with Jesse. I could pull him sweating and dirty right off a jobsite and find him clean enough to eat by even the most finicky standards of taste.
I pressed my tongue as far into him as I could manage, straining at its roots while his hole hugged and then relaxed its hold. He gripped at the back of my head, pressing me into my labors with new insistence. I licked my way out and up along his perineum slathering his balls with my tongue until I reached the base of his cock. He was pushing it toward my face, and I mounted it with my mouth and slid slowly downward, rolling my tongue around and around his shaft. He rose against my mouth and grabbed either side of my head, moaning softly and licking his lips. I felt his cock pulsing and knew the throbbing, felt every point at which our bodies touched and shared sensation, worked in unison toward a common end.
I rose one last time from his shaft and licked my way back down to the sweet spot, pressing hard into him with my tongue and going as deeply as I could manage before backing out. I gripped his thighs and slid him slightly closer, pulling his ass over the edge of the low-slung chair. I reached behind me for the bottle of lotion on the coffee table and created a quick and liberal mixture of KY and seminal fluid on my cock. He watched me from a dim distance through half-closed eyes and muttered under his breath.
“Fuck me good”
“I don’t know no other way, buddy, but I wanna get this in you right now.”
I don’t even know if he heard me. I barely heard myself. My concentration was on the head of my dick pressed against his hole and holding back for the briefest of moments. I was on the brink and savoring every second before I began my entry. He opened around the head of my cock, and I felt myself sliding inside, his warm, wet flesh pulling me further until I was buried deep within. I pushed against him, pressed along every fraction of an inch down the length of my throbbing, blood-engorged member, my balls fairly wedged between his cheeks and the head buried deep within, my belly brushing his balls.
We both moaned together almost inaudibly.
I pulled back until I was almost all the way out and then slowly plunged back deeply inside. I repeated this attenuated thrust at least two dozen times, eliciting with each stroke an exhalation of meaning, almost passion, from his upturned face. I was burrowing deeply into him, hitting some spot, some source of pleasure we’d both longed for and never known. I continued this rhythm, gradually increasing the speed of my thrusts. Against this metronome I leaned forward, raising his hands above his head with my own and ran my tongue hungrily over his nipples, sucking slightly and giving a nibble on those two erect, brown buttons atop the pads of muscle.
I searched along his chest with my tongue, still burying myself slowly and repeatedly within him, until I was licking along his neck and up to his ear. I was returning down his neck along the line of his jaw when his head turned and his hungry mouth met mine in a long, deep, searching kiss. My hairy belly and chest brushed and pressed against his own smooth skin, my tongue and cock buried deep within him in alternating movements. Synchronous and seeking we moved together in such a way for more than a minute, a point frozen in time like the orbit around a black hole of sexual ecstasy, set apart from all other human experience that gathers together to form the memories of a life. I was shaken.
I lifted back and let my hands slide slowly down along his torso until I once again gripped his thighs and pulled him more tightly against my pelvic motion, his ass lightly bumping my hips, his balls wedging between my belly and the mound of my pubic hair at the hilt of my buried cock, his hot, velvety tissues hugging the length of my shaft as he moaned under his breath and looked up at me through drugged eyes.
“Man, that feels fuckin good.”
“I’m gonna fill you up, Jesse.”
My rhythm increased in tempo. I had been sliding in and out nearly my entire length like a pump-jack, but now my strokes became quicker and a bit more abbreviated, burying myself once again hard after pulling back halfway. My breathing and his caught in little hiccups, and his eyes lowered their lids. His hands moved from my chest down to my hips, and then one of them slid down to his cock and began pulling, milking himself as I was inside him. His chest heaved upward each time I pressed into him, and his own strokes became quicker and less erratic, moving contrapuntally to mine as we both incrementally increased the speed of our motions. I held his legs out on either side to grant myself more freedom of motion and greater depth inside him. My balls slapped against the crack of his ass, my belly rubbing against his own balls as his fist beat against it bringing himself to the same moment I now approached. He gasped a repeated and pleading command.
“Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!”
“Motherfucker, I’m gonna cum. I’m gonna cum!”
I felt it rising from somewhere underneath my feet, under the ground beneath the trailer. The swell traveling up my legs and into my spine and spilling out, shooting out deep into his body. I drove into him and held, pressed hard into that spot, and suddenly a long, lacy strand of cum shot out of his own dick, making a line from his forehead, across his cheek, down his chest to its point of origin, following the track I’d laid down within. I pulled back and pushed into him one more time, and another, more substantial gush came from each of us, this one scattered, shotgun-like across his belly in milky puddles. One more, slightly less from us both and then I halted and collapsed on top of him, releasing his legs to fold around my waist and gasping into his laboring chest.
His hole gripped me in spasms. His arms slid from my back to either side of the chair. I licked at the cum on his chest and slowly slid out from inside of him. His legs slid down until his feet rested on the floor. His eyes remained closed as I lifted myself off of him. He was beautiful. I loved him.
I rose and walked into the bathroom and washed my cock. I returned with a warm, wet hand towel and cleaned him off as well and dressed myself. He said nothing; his eyes remained closed. I picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned off the video, bringing up the local morning newscast. It was then that I noticed the graying light in the windows and knew I must return soon to my father’s farm and face whatever consequences the night’s adventures had created. I straightened the coffee table and picked up the yo-yo, removing the condom from its tip and tossing it into the kitchen wastebasket. I leaned the implement in the corner by the front door. Jesse was asleep. I stared at him a moment. I knew this moment would not likely be repeated. I was fine with that. I leaned forward and lightly kissed his lips and headed home.
|
|
|
|
|
The Ground of Being that informs all life meets each of us where we are. What I think of as God is immutable and unchanging, the connect-ness and energy of everything. However, there is an infinity of inflections in which It is evinced and given expression. We are the Mind of God to the extent that we are awakened to the fact that we are Its component parts and willing to trust that intuition and acknowledge that this fact is true for us and for every other inflection of that Being – for all of Creation, in other words – and that each is equally valid and viable in its own right.
I have been set upon a particular path for over twenty years now, albeit falteringly and sometimes unwillingly. My chief obstacles to progress have been appetites and desires, fears and attachments that are disproportionate to my actual needs. These have bred resentment and self-destruction. They have also brought about a purging and humbling that is perhaps more immediate than it might be for some other people. To phrase it in the language common to the context I grew up with: God can command anything of me except that I accept His will. He can, however, allow me to have my own will to such an extent that acceptance of His will becomes the only viable, and comfortable, option. I become the author of my troubles. I am punished by my sins rather than for them; they are my own creation. I am the midwife of my destruction and regeneration through the agent of choice and free will.
The good news (yes, there’s more of that archaic language of my youth) is that the power to effect that regenerative process is available to me and requires little more than a small amount of willingness to effect its use. I simply have to let go and trust.
I did not experience a strict religious upbringing, but the power of those metaphors and the language of those rituals informed the world around me and became familiar. It was not until I was grown that those symbols and rituals slowly became more transparent so that I began to see past them to the power of the Mystery that lay beyond. Even that, however, was not sufficient to grant me freedom from those fears and attachments that held me in bondage most of the time. I had a good deal more to experience before the pain of holding on was greater than that of release and trust in the Process. My steps even now are halting at times. I am easily distracted, and the habits of years are warm and familiar friends to look back on as I tread into unknown territory.
The difference now, I suppose, is that I’ve been given something – Grace, for lack of a better term – that allows me enough Big Picture sense to give up whatever romance is left in the sordidness of my petty ideas of happiness. I no longer want to scrounge for crumbs under the banquet table. I know as well that it is actually a pot-luck, and I have much to bring that others might also be fed, and that abundantly. To negate that is to deny the reality of my own existence and experience and put the blinders back on and plunge into the creation of my own limited powers – to rule in hell so as not to serve in heaven. That limited view of service is the perception of a paradigm blinded by self-will that is not aware of how amplified I become by opening myself up honestly and willingly to what is available to me and through me daily.
Self-honesty is not penance. Service is not a chore. Willingness is the key to freedom from a prison of my own construction that held me in bondage to the tyranny of my impulses, fears and resentments – an animal existence and a living death.
“Resist not evil; keep yer eyes on Jesus.”
However, the Order and Organization of the Universe, that Author of the cycle of life and death, meets each of us where we are. For some people the road to enlightenment must be a chore and a penance, a discipline and hard work, and I suppose at times it can be that for all of us when our attachment to our own limited purpose blinds us to what is freely available. It’s simply a matter of temperament for some and a quirk of human nature for the rest. We all have kinks in our psyches that must be worked out in their own way.
I listened to people tonight share their experience with forgiveness and willingness. I saw how each person wrestles with their own fears and attachments, and how some let them fall away as they move toward something higher. Those impediments tend to fall away of their own weight in that rarified air, even though our feet must remain on the ground – we carry them between our ears, after all.
All this in hopes that I can write better porn.
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Bill,
Hey buddy! Lordy, it’s been days and days since I’ve written to you, and I’m not sure why. I’ve been right here at the house, and I’m sober as a panel of judges still. In any case, my apologies for this delinquency, and I shall remedy that right now.
The air-conditioning is out here at the house, and I’m trying not to think about that at the moment. It hasn’t been so bad that I couldn’t stand it, but it hasn’t been good either. There’s a decent breeze at night, and I have a ceiling fan that pulls the air in from outside. That’s not so bad, but the insects get on me when I lie down, which is not something I’m accustomed to. You probably know all about that sort of thing, so it makes me a bit more right-sized to mention all this to you. I realize when I write to you about my problems that things could be worse. It gives me a decent perspective on things.
Well, it’s Thursday evening now, and I think we got the AC fixed today more or less. Dad flipped the circuit breaker out on the compressor, and I changed the filter on it, and it started blowing cooler air. So I shut my windows, and it eventually started cooling down a bit in here. I wish we’d have thought of all that a few days ago, but, as dad would probably say, suffering builds character of some sort.
I’m listening to the 13th Floor Elevators and winding down a bit. It’s 1045pm. I’ve been doing cold-calling to restaurants from home to recruit managers this week every morning and afternoon before and after the lunchtime rush, but I haven’t been having much success at it. I’ve been calling Darden companies (Red Lobster and Olive Garden), and they’re pretty hard to recruit from anyway. But I figured I should start with some hard ones and take my lumps. I’ve been getting pretty discouraged, even though I’ve been having some luck getting people to talk to me. I’m just not getting any real bites; nobody’s sending me their resumes yet or scheduling interviews with me so I can send them on to my client companies. This is sort of a racket, but I’ve historically been pretty good at it. And it beats working for a living, that’s certain. So anyway, I keep telling myself that this is no good and I just want to move to a place of my own in Dallas and get a regular job and have a paycheck I can depend on. The heat didn’t help either.
Well, this evening I didn’t go to Dallas for a meeting for a change, and I was here in the evening until about 730pm when I took off for Weatherford to hit a meeting over there. I guess being here later in the day made a difference. I love it here in the evenings. I walked around the garden and grubbed up some new potatoes and moved the sprinkler around and played with the dog and took stock a bit and just enjoyed being here. No matter what happens or where I end up, everything is really just okay today right now, right this moment.
I get worked up pretty easily. I chew on things a bit much and forget about how good things really are for me most of the time while I’m spinning off into orbit with whatever problem I have in my head. Today I went outside at lunch and pulled weeds out of the cucumber patch and overdid it a bit. I came inside for lunch and felt dizzy and lightheaded and weak in the knees. I’d been out in the heat bent over for too long without realizing I was getting overheated. I had a headache the rest of the afternoon, and I was grumpy as hell. Sticking around here to enjoy the evening outside made a good bit of difference to me after a relatively miserable day alone in my head. Things could be a lot worse for me. I feel pretty silly when I whine to you about this crap.
I saw a great show last Thursday night, the 18th. I went to a reunion of the Dicks. They’re one of the top five punk bands of all time. I don’t know if it’s accurate to call them punk or not. I don’t like labeling music that way, but they’re definitely one of the great bands of the last thirty years or so, and I saw them in a club with a handful of other bands, including Limp Wrist, a queercore band fronted by an acquaintance of mine from San Francisco named Martin Sorrondeguy. I’ve talked to him online and on the phone for a little over a year now, and it was the first chance I’ve had to meet him in person and hang out a bit. We had breakfast the next morning and talked a while, but I would’ve liked to hang out all weekend if I could. I had to get back home, however. The other bands at the show were The Victims (from Sweden. I’ve seen them a couple of times before in Minneapolis – at the Triple Rock Social Club and in a basement of a big punk house called the Kremlin), the Pedestrians, Iron Age, the Bayonettes and Army of Jesus. As I say it was a great show and more fun than I’ve had in ages. I’m tickled to death that I got to see the Dicks, and a lot of my friends are jealous of me; that makes it even better yet.
I’ve started taking an interest in dating again for the first time since Matt and I broke up in February of 2005, and I guess the sap’s rising a bit with me. I don’t guess that’s a bad thing, but I feel like I’m working at cross purposes in a way even now. It’s not that I’m still living in the past. I just don’t know that I want a boyfriend or anything substantial really. But I also don’t want to just sleep around. Anyone I like enough to spend the night with is probably also someone I’d want more from. It’s a fine line in some ways, and maybe I’d be better off just doing without completely for a while longer. After being with someone for six years or so, I don’t feel like being a dog again, really. There are a handful of guys I’d date if I felt like that, but distance or circumstances stand in the way of most of that, and I suppose I’m glad in a way. I don’t want to get involved that heavily with anyone at this point. I have too much on my plate. That being said, I’m still a pretty serious flirt, and I can make googootalk with the best of em.
I still need to get an income that I can depend on and retire some of my debts. I still need to be self-sustaining in some pretty substantial ways. I’m forty-two years old, and I live with my father out here on the river and depend on him for my upkeep. People keep telling me what a good son I am for looking after the old man. That always gets me a bit. I didn’t move down here to take care of my dad. I moved down here because I had nowhere else I could realistically go and have the kind of comfort level I’m afforded here. Not only that, really. I love the old fart. I love living on the farm. I love my dog and having a handful of animals around. I love working in my garden and having this huge sandbox to play around in. I love living on the river and being able to run off down there and wade around in the Brazos anytime I feel like it. Come to think of it, it’s been weeks since I took a walk in the river with my dog, and I should probably do that soon. I haven’t gone fishing in ages. Hell, I don’t even have a fishing pole anymore, and I live on a fucking river, for fuck sake! I found an old tackle box in the chicken house the other day, and I brought it inside the house and set it on my bedroom floor. It’s still sitting here behind me unopened. I think it’s full of plastic worms, but I’m really not sure, to be honest. I should take a look one of these days.
This weekend I’m going to a conference in Dallas at a hotel. I’ll be there all weekend, and I may just swim in the pool and otherwise stay in my room the entire time and read and decompress a bit. I don’t currently have a book to read, and I may take two or three and just enjoy myself that way. There will be speakers and workshops and things to do, but I’ll still have lots of free time to kill, and maybe doing nothing will be a nice change. No internet, no phone, no work, no chores, no nothing. We’ll see how that works out, but some alone time might be a good thing for me. I was supposed to share the room with a guy I’ve been seeing, but I called him yesterday and we both agreed that maybe we shouldn’t be that involved right now. I’m not even sure he’s going to be sharing the room with me anymore. I told him he was welcome to – there are two beds – but it doesn’t matter to me much whether he does or not at this point. I’ll enjoy having the room to myself if he doesn’t show or call me up. And I’m not going to hunt him down to find out. He hasn’t given me any money for the room yet anyway. He’s still welcome to stay there, but he tends to go AWOL a bit as it is. I also don’t know if I could resist crawling in bed next to someone I’ve been that intimate with just because we both agreed it wasn’t a good idea. I don’t’ reckon he’s any wiser or more centered in that regard than I am, and I’d just as soon not have the aggravation. But I’ll find some way to deal with it if that eventuality comes along.
I wish I had money to send you, kiddo, but I still don’t have an income of my own and won’t hit dad up for money to give to anyone else at this point. I wish I could stay on top of writing to you better, but trust that it’s not because I don’t think of you regularly. I have started several letters lately and for some reason nothing comes of them. I don’t know why that is, but I’m sure the reasons don’t matter much when you’re not getting anything at mail time. I hope that work isn’t too hard on you right now, and I hope that you’re dealing okay with the heat. I know it’s got to be miserable most of the time. It’s at least ten percent more humid down there in Huntsville if not more than it is here on the river. And it’s pretty damn humid and miserable here with no air-conditioning. I reckon I got a taste of your world in that respect these past few days.
Anyway, I’ll write again when I get back from the weekend, and maybe I’ll have some decent news to report about life out here and what’s going on. The world out here is diminished without you in it, but I reckon I’m fortunate to have you as a friend no matter where you are.
Yer faithful correspondent,
|
|
|
|
|
I went to Dallas this evening to see an old neighbor lady in the hospital. She was our next door neighbor when I was growin up and still lives next to my mom. She's in her late 80s and was always sort of a surrogate mom to me when I was a kid. She's from North Carolina and has a thick brogue and is the sweetest lady I've ever known. She'll probably get better and go home, but when I walked in the door and saw her I busted up and just bawled for a while. She was asleep and nobody was there, and I pulled it together before she woke up. She was more worried about how overworked the night nurses were than anything else. I kissed her goodbye and told her I'd come back to see her if they kept her into next week, and then I went back to my truck and cried some more. I drove into Dallas to hit a meeting and see some old friends I hadn't seen for a good long time.
My friends told me that a guy I'd known for a long time and never got along with had died of a heroin OD two weeks ago. I felt bad for him, though we officially were always sort of at odds with one another. He'd apparently lost everything and then mortgaged his condo for drugs and was gettin his electric from an extension cord to another unit. They didn't find him for a few days after he passed. I saw him last March at the rodeo in Fort Worth where he was filming some stuff, and we'd been very nice to one another at that point. I also found out that another friend had died of a heart attack behind the wheel recently. None of that stuff is really surprising, but it was still kinda sad. The guy who died of a coronary had been my lawyer back in 93 on a DWI charge.
While I was gone a big gust of wind blew over a piece of the fence in the backyard and the goats had gotten out. Dad fell twice tryin to get em back in - he wasn't really hurt - and they ran off down by the river somewhere to bed down out of the wind, I guess. I'll try again in the morning to get em back if the coyotes don't get em before then. That's $350 on coyote food if I can't retrieve em. It's a bit of a disappointment. I'd gotten kind of attached to em in a short time, and I spent a good part of the day yesterday building that shed for em as well. 
Still, it was a great night. I went to a little out of the way Chinese restaurant with about a dozen people who I hadn't spent time with in years, and I did impressions of folks we know and knew and we all laughed our asses off and had a great time. There was a guy there who I'd known when he first showed up all torn up years ago, and he told me he never forgot how I'd taken him out for sushi and spent time talkin to him while he was still shakin it off back in 92 or 93 - I don't remember exactly when. He's doing great now, and it was nice to know that somethin I thought nothin of at the time had made such a lasting mark on him. It was during a time when I really believed all that stuff and tried to live it. It's only been about a week now, but I'm glad I made that decision a week ago almost by accident and found myself back amongst those folks.
I reckon I looked pretty ridiculous walkin around the back road at midnight tonight with the dog and a flashlight bleatin like a goat to try and get a response from the girls. I didn't hear anything, but likely as not they're way down by the river or off in someone's yard somewhere. There's a pack of feral dogs that run the bend here, and they're really my main concern. I'll get up early again and go huntin em up.
It's 134, and I'm kinda wired up on coffee and adrenalin. It's been years since I tried to do this, and I remember now how whacked my chemistry can get during the first few days. So it's no biggee, but I'll be beat tomorrow, and I'd wanted to till and plant cantaloupes and tomatoes and peppers all day for the old man.
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Bill,
Hey buddy, I’m sorry it’s been a few days. I got fired last week and haven’t been able to make time to write. It wasn’t a big deal, really, inasmuch as they apparently were going to eliminate my position soon anyway. I didn’t know that going into it, but I overslept last Thursday and gave them all the ammo they needed to get rid of me before they went after my boss, who went on vacation the same day.
So now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just give up this experiment and head back to Texas. Dad gets biopsy results today on a growth on his ear, and his health is deteriorating a bit again anyway. I have wheels now in Texas and could just as easily do temp work down there as up here.
I honestly thought when I moved back up here that there was a chance of me and Matt getting back together. Now, not only do I see that as unlikely, I don’t want it myself at this point. I want to move on and put as much time and distance between me and this situation as possible. What I really, REALLY want to do with my life now and for the foreseeable future is work myself out of my debts.
Am I starting to resemble a human yo-yo?
I’m not in a bad mood, really. I figure I can do anything and go anywhere I want to once my debt is paid down and I have some savings. I don’t have any legal problems. I don’t have any relationship tying me down to any particular place. I’m a grown man. I have some sadness about this whole period of my life, but only because of how long I held on to it and muddied the waters as a result. But Lord, that is balanced out and then some by what will perhaps be some of the happiest moments I’ve yet tasted. That may also be part of the problem.
I can be a prisoner of my former happiness. I can engage in the euphoric recall of a past moment of bliss until I blot out everything else in my life. It’s no different than any other rush I’ve chased in my life. What is that about? I think it’s a spiritual thing in some sense. I reckon the same impulse has driven religious contemplatives and other addicts throughout history. In this instance, I just substituted love and affection, or the security of a relationship, where before I had placed the approval of my family or a boss, or the rush I got from a gram-shot of crystal in my arm or a fifth of whiskey in my gut and my brain. Whatever comes between me and what’s real eventually turns bad or gets removed. That’s as it should be. My difficulties only really arise when I try to hold on to those things when I should let them go. Whatever is in line with what’s real will always come back around, if only from time to time, or it won’t matter. It’s really all in how I position myself and my expectations.
I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to perform the correct spiritual calculus in order to get God to jump through the hoops for me and give me a sustainable happiness that isn’t predicated on circumstances, or to give me the circumstances I demand upon which to predicate that happiness – that may be a better way of putting it. The thing is it’s really my job, and though I play hell with it, it’s a fairly simple task. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It may be one of the hardest things in the world for me to choose how I wish to feel and think, but it’s also perhaps the most important job any of us have, I suppose, and the most basic.
I miss my dog. I miss the independence of having my own wheels, even though for me that is a calculated risk so long as I am not continuously sober.
I miss having a job and resources of my own and paying my own bills. I didn’t realize how important that really was for me until I went back to work in December for a company that paid on time with checks that don’t bounce and takes taxes out and has at least some form of benefits. That is the first time I’ve had that circumstance in years and years. For the entire time I was in Minneapolis with Matt I was supporting the two of us on my gross income and not filing with the IRS and just accumulating more and more debt and stress with each paycheck. I minimized that in my mind at the time, because I had the compensation of life with him, which was a substantial compensation, truthfully. But as married life waned, the stress of my mounting debts began to outweigh the security I’d formerly found in the relationship. It had to end. It was just hard on me the way it ended. But it’s been a year. Get over it already.
I reached that spot in my head almost the moment I returned to work a couple of months ago. I was suddenly engaged again in doing something constructive, even if it was very incrementally accomplished for the moment. Some of the former feeling came back up over the weekend, and I just want to be away from it finally. I’m not willing to put myself into that mess again. I’ll do whatever I need to in order to get away from it once and for all. I was already starting to feel ridiculous when I came back last May for a month. I’ve drug it out now until there’s no point in even trying to explain the situation anymore. I just really, really, REALLY need to walk away quietly and soon and let it go. That’s not even sad anymore.
I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to do with myself circumstantially once I am out of debt and free of all this. I think about where I’d like to live, and I really just don’t know. I have an attachment to the farm, but I don’t think that’s something I can’t let go of. I think sometimes about moving to San Francisco and living there, but I’m not sure what drives that impulse. I feel the same way about New York City or Denver also. Austin is the only other place I can think of right off the bat that I would want to live in. While those thoughts are more in the form of useless daydreaming than firm goals, they are still useful in that they are forward-thinking instead of a clinging to former attachments.
My hopes of getting out of debt, however, are far more concrete, and they represent the one real opportunity I have to engage myself in something I desperately need to be doing. It’s also something that will make me feel better than just about anything else I could think of to be doing at the moment. My only concern is that I will have let things go so long again before I get back on track that the IRS will take matters into their own hands and structure my repayment as they see fit. I can live with that as well at this point, but my plan was to get back on track this very month. Hopefully I can almost accomplish that, if not actually.
So I may be back in Texas soon. I trust things will work out the way they should no matter what choice I make. I’ll keep you informed.
Faithfully,
Frank
|
|
|
Showing 11 - 20 of 33
·
1
·
2
·
3
·
4
·
|
