darren
The first time I had sex, I planned it. I was fifteen years old, and I wanted to be among that enlightened group of people who had had the experience of sleeping with someone.
The 29-year old guy who ran the Youth hotline of WSGA (West Suburban Gay Association—as in the west suburbs of Chicago) was the only one, much to my disappointment, who had actually declared himself available. How funny to think that he was, at that time, only two years older than I am today as I write about him.
Darren ran the suburban youth hotline from his suburban home—partly to help out, but mostly to meet cute, young guys. That might sound harsh—like he was only baiting little boys. But they weren’t little boys. They were horny—carnivorous—teens passing out of puberty into adulthood, and Darren was a lonely man, bound to a patch of real estate far from the city’s gay district. They found and fed off each other.
I came to Darren because he offered me the chance to understand my body a little better. He was patient and sought nothing in return but the contact of my flesh. Not that there wasn’t anyone else around, but the other guys in the youth group knew even less about this gay thing than me. They showed up once, maybe twice. They said nothing. They looked at me—perplexed—when I mentioned “coming out” to my parents. They weren’t prepared to talk. They wore makeup and got beat up in school. Or they dressed like the kids in their school and disappeared among them. They weren’t ready to tell anyone anything. They were scared.
At least Darren took some initiative, even if he was relatively old and ugly. True, he had the house, personality, butt, and hairline of someone ten or fifteen years older than he actually was, but he was not “old.”
In fact, he really wasn’t all that bad bad. He said if ever I was ready, he would like to m-m-make l-l-love to me. Yeah, he had a bad stutter.
One day, I told him I was ready, and I went to him as if I was going to the dentist to have an increasingly painful cavity filled.
He obliged. He put me on his big slippery waterbed. He had flapping lips and thin, stringy hair, but I had no point of reference. He didn’t have bad breath or anything, but he tasted like someone else, and that was the first time I’d known what it was like to taste another human. Well, even if Darren wasn’t the sexiest morsel of flesh cruising the ‘burbs, his awkward kiss caused an instant physical reaction in my body. Contrary to some of the books on sexuality I’d been reading, masculine sexuality was not concentrated in the penis. It spread out through every nerve of my body.
Still, when Darren opened my fly to expose my cock, I remember the chills increasing big time. There was the deliciously embarrassing terror of being naked. No way of putting up a posture to hide the raw physical intentions of my flesh. It stood up from every nerve, screaming, “Show me!” And it screamed with ignorance, not knowing the way, not understanding what was filling it with such pangs, such seemingly insatiable longings. It knew that Darren was not beautiful or “in love,” and I knew that I wanted better, but also that I wanted it now. There was no one else around, so I let the blood rush forward, filling my aching dick—almost apologetically or reluctantly—but violently all the same.
It was all downhill from there. I had already read so much about sex that none of it surprised me except maybe in an anti-climactic way. Which is not to say that I didn’t come because I did, though not as intensely as I’d expected to.
The big shock was that there was none. It was all about testing the waters. I’d always imagined what sex would mean to my body, but here was another body to deal with, a body with its own complicated mind inside. This wasn’t a posable body like the objects of my fantasies. It moved back. It had its own smell and taste. It exerted pressure and not always in the places I wanted pressure applied. The cock wasn’t rock hard right away, and it felt weird in my mouth. Not unpleasant or gross. But curious. Soft, yet increasingly stiff. My cock felt weird in his mouth too. Like it was underwater.
He rimmed me. I would never have imagined that someone would want to do that. I found it slippery but not particularly sexual. Like I was taking a dump without producing an end product. Or like I was sitting on a jet in the hot tub. I think if Darren had been some sort of Adonis, I’d have been less removed from the mechanisms of his tongue in my asshole, but being only moderately aroused, I took them with the same apprentice’s curiosity that distanced me from every one of his gestures. I tried absorbing as much information as possible by studying his movements, but never really got swept away with the sensory pleasure. It was like my ass—not yet aroused by its seducer—wasn’t ready to accept that a foreign object was being introduced into its center. His tongue was like a persistent little suppository that would have to be expelled at once. “I don’t know if I like that,” I observed distantly. He came up to kiss me with my asshole on his breath. Not as gross as I’d feared, but not really what I was craving exactly.
We got back into the 69, and I sucked him off with my lips curled back over my teeth, as some “joy of sex” book I’d read had recommended. He didn’t last long.
Ejaculation was the most disturbing part of the encounter. The saltiness was to be expected, but the temperature was a real surprise, and I wasn’t real sure how I felt about that. I didn’t feel like throwing up or anything, but, again, it wasn’t exactly the magic I’d been dreaming of. It all seemed terribly perfunctory. He said he didn’t believe it was my first time ’cause I was s-s-so g-g-good.
I fell back into the pillows to prepare for my turn. There was a television on in the corner. The Three Stooges were breaking bottles over each others’ heads on the screen. “Wah, wah, wah. Dah, da-da, tah, tah.” Darren’s head was bobbing on my pole in time to the theme song. I burst out laughing. “Huh?” He looked so dumb looking up at me from down there. “Nothing.”
When I came, it felt fine. Totally different from a masturbatory orgasm, but not necessarily stronger. Like jacking off in a warm bathtub. Sort of soupy and slow. He sort of sucked down the sperm, which fast-forwarded the whole process. I almost wondered if it had happened. He licked the semen off the tip of my cock, and that make my legs jerk. Yeah, I’d come.
Curling up in each other’s arms at the end was the best part. We lay there for at least an hour just talking. I think I exchanged my perceptions of the whole experience with him. I don’t remember how he took it. He must have been disappointed that I wasn’t more swept off my feet.
“I kind of thought it would be different, you know? What was your first time like, Darren?” For starters, he didn’t seem to believe it was my first time. Apparently there was some other more experienced guy he did regularly who wasn’t as good at sucking dick. That was funny because I didn’t see what I’d done that was so special. It was only logical to fold the lips over my teeth like that. Not too hard or soft and keep it moving back and forth… Looking back now, I laugh to think that Darren himself hadn’t even mastered the technique, still relying on the vacuum system.
The next time we were together, he fucked me. I’d been really anxious to try it because… Because why? I don’t remember. Did the idea of a virile male body make me throw my legs up on their own eager instinct? Or was getting fucked something I’d read about, something that sounded fun to try? Then again, maybe it was my simple desire for accumulating experience that made me want to “go all the way.” All good reasons. I could think of maybe a dozen more. I haven’t a clue as to which seemed the most important at the time. “I’m ready to get fucked,” I told him simply.
He was surprised. “That’s w-w-wonderful.”
He loosened me first with his tongue, then his Vaseline-covered finger. I sat back and listened with the ends of my body’s nerves. It was weird. The finger, once it entered into the ass felt… Well, like a turd. Well, sort of. It was cold. My first impulse was to strain against it until it popped out, but I tried to resist that and do nothing—neither straining nor contracting. Just relax like Darren was telling me. There was nothing painful or troubling about his finger in there. I just kept wondering if I wasn’t going to shit on it, and wouldn’t that have been embarrassing! I tried not to care. I was just supposed to relax.
Next, his cock was there at the door. It entered a little at a time. It felt totally different than the finger, which really surprized me ’cause I thought it would just be more of the same only a little fatter. The tip sort of massaged the porthole and that felt pretty good. But then my muscles were too constricted to accommodate any more. They started burning. “Ow!”
“Sorry. I w-w-won’t move. It should s-s-stop hurting in a m-m-minute.” He waited with the tip of himself inside me. I was all tensed up, but I really wanted to try this, so I tried to relax like he told me. The pain wasn’t that intense. It was more about not knowing how much more there would be that was the scary part. I had a vague idea that this was like what women went through when they were losing their virginity. Not that I knew that much about women. I figured there’d be blood, and I didn’t know where it would come from or how much there would be.
A couple of more gentle thrusts, interspersed with fiery but quickly fading pains, and Darren was inside. He moved back and forth. It felt really weird. Not altogether unpleasant, but always a little bit like taking a big long shit, only someone else was doing it for me.
“How d-d-does it feel?”
“Weird.”
“Am I h-h-hurting you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“You’re s-s-so wonderfully tight.”
That’s funny, I felt open and wet. I wondered if I hadn’t shit all over the bed. But I got a little tingly and stopped caring. But after a minute or two, it wasn’t so good anymore. The gentle massage had turned to a mild sandpapery burn. “It’s hurting again.”
“Okay. I’ll just c-c-come.”
He went in and out a couple more times, going further this time. He touched what felt like a back wall inside me somewhere, which hurt in a totally different way that was almost pleasant. Like someone slapping you on the back real hard (“Hey, buddy!”) but in the center of your being. Darren was masturbating me, and I came pretty violently. It was different than coming without getting fucked. Like it wasn’t just the cock coming, but some internal organ exploding too. Like coming from the inside of your soul.
But getting fucked after you’d come was a lot less fun, I discovered in the 30 seconds or so Darren lasted. That sandpaper action was working big time. And pulling out was downright gross.
“I hope I didn’t shit on you or anything.”
“No.”
“It felt so messy.”
“That’s the l-l-lube.”
“Oh.”
I went to the bathroom and lost what felt like diarrhoea. It was a cloudy stream of sperm, slightly discolored with traces of shit. No blood, no turds, no runs. My ass felt huge and soft. Would it cooperate with me from now on, or is that what butt plugs were for?
I was light and warm. I curled up in Darren’s arms and purred.
“It w-w-will be better next time,” he said. “You felt so good. I d-d-didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No, just for a second. But I thought it was going to be much worse.”
There wasn’t the slightest sadness over having lost my “virginity.” None of the trauma that I’d read about people going through. No intestinal cramps either. Just a couple harmless scrapes and a poke—like going to the doctor for a shot, only more fun—and then it was all over. Could that really have been the thing everyone got so worried about?
Was that sex?
I couldn’t help but wonder if vaginal penetration wasn’t more of a conclusive event. I wasn’t against trying it, but first I’d have to work up some sort of desire for a woman, something I’d had no success in producing in my own mind, though society had long been teaching me to try. Anyway, I decided, entering a woman’s genitals couldn’t be so different from fucking a man’s asshole that it led to a whole different level of psychic resolution. If anyone “went further” in hetero sex it had to be the woman due to the painful physical change her body supposedly had to undergo the first time. And, anyway, hers seemed like a needy role at best—if one believed the sex education literature available to a teenager in the Midwest in the early eighties—a role I wouldn’t get the chance to play even if I wanted to.
So, to answer my own stupid question: Yes, that was sex more or less.
The big trauma, I found, was afterwards, when the hunger I’d suffered in high school hallways and locker rooms up until now didn’t let up, only deepened into wider, more insatiable directions. I slept in my same empty bed in my childhood room, but it suddenly seemed even emptier and colder. My dream of sharing a bed with someone else now was now more tangible than the romantic fantasies I’d been nurturing, but that only made the failure to have obtained it all the more depressing.
Luckily, the loss of my virginity happened in the Midwest in thee early eighties, just before the American press had decided AIDS was worth devoting more than a half-assed, half-column article to. It was just a gay disease those promiscuous men in New York and San Francisco got. I didn’t think of myself as being among those shameful urban sleazebags who lurked in the bowels of stagnant saunas and stinking public toilets. I figured that being with someone who’d only had a limited number of squeaky-clean suburban partners was “safe.”
As it turned out, my reasoning wasn’t so far from being correct. AIDS hit Chicago in a big way much later than it hit New York and San Francisco, and in the suburbs it took even longer for the effects to be felt. Naturally, there were PWAs hiding in fear and AIDS deaths that had never been correctly labeled. Still, statistically speaking, fucking a couple of guys in the Midwest was a lot less risky than fucking just one in a backroom in Paris or New York.
In other words, I was damn lucky. A lot of things could have been different. Darren could have been HIV positive. He wasn’t. Neither were boyfriends numbers two through twenty. Thankfully, around number twenty-one, I started following the gay press, in which condoms started seeming crucial.
By the time I discovered that physical ecstasy did indeed exist, I would be a decade older and too disillusioned to live it out with the same aimless joy I might have found in my impulsive youth. The intellect which had allowed me to survive the hatred of a homophobic society and the viral manifestations of nature’s chaos would be the boring curse that would constantly restrict my physical expression with unflinching reason.
I.e., I talked too much to get the best booty.