Thomas (number 55) responded to the ad I’d placed in Odyssey magazine. “Cool, cute young couple, new to SF, seeking fun fuckable friends…” He talked to me for thirty minutes about how he’d always wanted to try the three-way thing. “The sandwich.” Turns out he already knew us from Eros. My tattoo was the dead give away. Even in SF there was only one anatomic heart with a cut-away window revealing machinery and a pink triangle. Yeah, he remembered me. “You’re cute. Woof.” He’d belly fucked me while Dan jacked off. We’d touched and kissed a long time, never changed names. He’d wanted to, so had I, but we’d both reconsidered. “Your boyfriend’s got a nice dick.”
“Wanna’ come over?”
“Sure.”
We put on music and candles. Dan and I had only done this once before, and it hadn’t been planned like this. We made out on the couch while we waited.
“He’s a little horny thing.” Dan always used third person to refer to me when I started touching his cock. He did have a nice dick. It was white and pink and smelled sweet. Maybe it was the pink against the white of his legs which made it look even bigger, or maybe it was the way it swelled at the base, coming up to the torpedo tip… Anyway, it sort of sagged when it got hard, like it was so big it couldn’t bear to stand all the way up. It was the kind of dick you could study with your tongue and nose for hours without getting bored. Size had so little to do with it, though that was nice too.
The doorbell rang and Thomas came in. We made jokes about the awkwardness of the situation or whatever. Then we got into it. Thomas had the features and body of a big dumb jock. He joked like a jock too. But he was pure out-of-the-closet SF guppie. Born and raised in the Bay Area, obviously. Nowhere else in the world could a guy be so proud to be a “dude” and be such a fag at the same time. We had absolutely nothing in common but our sexuality. And in that domain there was little we didn’t share, except my desire for Dan.
We dove in where we’d left off at the sex club a couple weeks before. I peeled off his oxford shirt and licked and bit his pulsing red nipples. He had one of those stocky chests with soft, dark, black hair in a geometric pattern. A bit like a French garden only 100% natural. It was the kind of chest I’d nearly died over during 4 years of don’t-look-don’t-touch high school locker rooms, and here it was in front of my nose, eyes, hands, mouth, right in my apartment… My brain wasn’t forming words to describe the sensory overload that had taken over, but the spin of stimuli created something like a multi-sensory refrain which can be best translated into English by: “He’s all mine delicious flesh I dreamed of so long right here in my hands and I can eat it taste it hug it fuck it all night long God yes.” Dan sucked his earlobes while I buried my nose in his armpit and took in his smell. Thomas turned to Dan, and I saw their tongues flick against each other. Their saliva, full of whatever homunculi, bacteria and viral info, was suddenly significant only in its capacity as dripping erotic fluid, full of the radiant sexual energy oozing from their humid, warm bodies.
My tongue joined their embrace. The familiar taste of Dan was mixed now with Thomas in a delirious elixir of flavor that was impossible to thoroughly register with the limited sensory apparatus of my body much less describe. I was far from being “drunk with excitement,” for this was no drugged trance. I had switched on every available mechanism in my mind and body to pay attention to what was happening to me. “Get this down, Don,” I told myself in a wordless, cerebral language. My whole being overflowed with the unique genetic information spilling out of these two delicious male—human—bodies and mingling with my own in the air, on our skin and in our mouths. The only tragedy was that I couldn’t possibly record everything, for it was happening too fast and it would soon be over… But I switched off that cassette to suck Thomas’s lips and lashes while Dan loosened his pants. We were soon naked, forming a triangle of flesh on the futon on the hardwood floor in the pink building on the hill on the peninsula in California where an earthquake might strike at any minute but didn’t. Dan’s cock was blushing between Thomas’s lips. I cradled Thomas’s silky balls in a cupped hand and studied his cock more closely than I’d been able to in the crowded sexclub. Where did the skin bunch up and where was it smooth? How many veins showed through the transparent flesh, and which shade of blue did they make when throbbing through an erection to bring it to life? In the club, our coupling had been passionate, even tender, but fast. Here we had the time to get to know each other, to experience the miracle of the perfect individuality of each others’ bodies. His cock was desperate, almost purple at the fat cushioned tip, cylindrical, dark, no-nonsense. There was nothing poetic or artsy about it. It was a cock for putting in your ass and riding. It was clean, blunt, cut, and big like American dicks are supposed to be.
Dan and I went down on him together. I kissed Dan while licking Thomas’s prick, devouring Dan’s tongue and Thomas’s balls at the same time. The reassuring taste of Dan’s lips, which had come to seem like “home,” were mixed with the raw sexual spurt of Thomas’s rocky phallus. I pulled back to breathe, to take in what was happening. Dan was so beautiful slurping away like that, feeling such pleasure. I almost wanted to take a picture—not to take my own stab at living-room porn, but to capture the satisfaction on my lover’s face. Like I might take a photo of him winning the jackpot or opening his birthday presents.
Thomas wanted to “do the sandwich,” so he fucked me while Dan fucked him. Easier said than done. One kept slipping out. We added some pillows behind my back, then some more. Finally, we got ’em in and working back and forth. Thomas’s furry belly brushed against my balls, and Dan, behind him, sent Thomas’s cock into my center with a thrust of his own into Thomas… it was like receiving two men in one delicious injection. I had to think about other stuff (the phone bill, work on Monday, the latest Hollywood films) to keep from shooting off in the first couple seconds. But fuck, his fat dick was going in right up to the goddamn hilt and with his hot breath in my face, his tongue gently nudging—lapping—mine. Dan’s hand reached around between us and tickled my balls, sending shock waves of double sensation through my helplessly reverberating body… I shot buckets straight up, arcing it, spittling it all over. I let it fly up onto Thomas’s tits, as he yanked out of me and Dan yanked out of him to kneel on either side of me, jacking themselves off while kissing each other as I took their balls, a pair in each hand, and they sprayed me, neck to crotch, with hot, thick, male cock milk.
After the hot towel, we curled up on the bed and purred. He opened his mouth again: a stream of nonsense. The latest media scandals. Gays in the military. Star gab. A new disco song. I don’t remember what all. But just as I was about ready to tell him how I had to get up early the next morning, he blew me away by bursting into a soft song in the sweetest cracked voice I ever heard, like a gangster just out of prison singing “You are my sunshine” through burning tears to the fed-up sweetheart he’d put through hell. The song became a sentimental medley of the corniest hits of the last two decades, belted out with the force of Thomas’s whole naked body and soul. He didn’t give a fuck if he hit the notes or not, but he made sure I received them, whispering them in my ears, and hugging me tightly in the middle of the bed. Where was Dan, through all this? Somewhere at the other edge of the futon, clinging to Thomas’s back, maybe. It didn’t matter because the whole room had fallen away in the spell of one awkward guy’s simple song. He was just using the greeting card words he’d picked up from the radio to vent the tenderness he couldn’t find his own language to release.
And then, just as I was about to melt right into his arms and beg him to take my ass again… CUT! He burst into a boyish giggle: “‘Member that one? That was the best Rod Stewart ever.” Whatever tenderness existed in that gorgeous specimen of masculinity was only going to make its way out from behind all the muscles through the device of an excruciating cultural reference. A big, dumb, delicious jock in love with an ideal captured in a song. Maybe not so dumb and maybe not so in love, but he was safer playing it that way, and I was safer for noticing how he was protecting himself. How lucky for me, I thought, that for a couple of intense sessions he mistook me for the physical manifestation of his romantic ideal. Thank you, Jesus, for putting this hunk of man in my bed tonight.
Dan said he was hungry. We ordered a pizza, and he went to get it. Thomas wanted me again. This time I got inside him. No preliminaries. We were too hot. He wanted me INSIDE. He started on his back with his feet flat on the mattress and his knees bent, but soon, I had his ankles back to his ears like he’d had me a half hour before. I was slamming it in, panting. “Thomas, you feel so good.” I’d said that so often to Dan to mean so many different things—things that meant much more than they could ever possibly mean as I said them now. Yet I knew I was falling in love with this warm new man in my bed (while remaining in love with Dan and Bruce and John and Jordan and…), so I pushed his legs back and open as far as they’d go, his ankles in my hands, and I brought my body up on tip toes so that my cock was packing it in there at the deepest, most direct angle possible. “I’m fucking you, Thomas.” Each time I pronounced his name, it chilled me with all the mystery of his unexplored being. Who was this “Thomas” whose body I’d entered, and from what pain was his sweet little song born?
Dan came in with the pizza as we were just recovering from the physical trauma of the orgasm we’d withstood together. I couldn’t pry myself away from the mystery of his lips, the motion of his out-of-breath chest. “Mmm! Pizza!” He pushed me aside for a slice.
Dan must have been feeling a little awkward. He saw that I was in love. He wasn’t really jealous, just concerned that he’d been left out, I think. Love is always awkward. And exciting. At first. He joined us in bed as I went to get the plates. I came back and they were fucking…
Or maybe it went this way: Dan never went to get the pizza. I fucked Thomas right in front of Dan who watched and jacked off. Then I said I was hungry and went and got the pizza and came back to find them fucking. Yeah, that’s probably the way it happened. Anyway, Thomas was fucking Dan like a dog. Bam, bam, bam. I got a wave of jealousy. He’s just trying to catch up with me. He doesn’t even want it. But that was completely stupid, of course, even if it were true. I stopped caring and watched them with the same distance as I might watch a porno film. To witness two people aroused to such a desperate physical state from which you are removed is at least surreal if not scary. No wonder sex seems disgusting to people who can’t get it up. But here was the added attraction of knowing both of the participants and of having had both of them in the way they were having each other at that moment. Thomas’s prick looked big and shiny with the condom and the lube. It was doing the piston thing without a pause. No nonsense. Dan was receiving it at that level: a fuck. Period. They came. Thomas kissed Dan a couple of times and came over to me to curl up. I think he spent the night. The pure, guiltless joy of sleeping next to a pile of naked bodies you’ve just finished making love to exposes marital bliss as the lie it is. We’d returned to the pile of animal flesh we were, snuggling into each others’ armpits for warmth.
Later, we went to Thomas’ to do it again. This time, Dan fell away into outer space (i.e., somewhere on the couch) while we made love. There was nothing spoken about his exclusion, but we all felt it, and none of us knew what to do. Maybe after we fucked, we stroked Dan at the edge of the mattress like our pet cat while we played with each others’ lips and whispered sweet little songs. Or maybe Dan went home saying he had a headache. Or maybe I went home with Dan after making a date with Thomas to come back alone. The details have faded away as they always do. It’s the mood that stands like a veiny boner before me. That song by K.D. Lang on the stereo which he accompanied softly into my ears, sending calculated shivers through me. The sadness oozing from Dan’s cold body. His screaming silence just out of my fingers’ reach. My instant aching love for Thomas. My mind loaded helplessly with his taste and aura. Loving him though I knew it couldn’t last. Loving him violently so I could live this for what it was, as far and deep as it would go. And then the pain that flowed from Thomas: his story of the lover who’d left him. All our sorrow collected in that room, the rejection and loss we’d almost resolved for one or two nights, intensifying our love-making. There was something decadent about it all, but nothing we’d droolingly planned. Three hearts were getting broken, and we’d all fall down in the end. We clung to each other, each of us realizing at some level what was going on.
The end of the story was much less tragic than it could have been. I saw Thomas a couple more times, alone, while Dan went to sex clubs or saw old boyfriends. We started talking to each other before and after sex, the inevitable mistake, and confirmed what I’d already guessed to be true: we had nothing whatsoever in common. We got bogged down in discussions neither of us wanted to have. We fucked twice each night and twice each morning. I kissed him goodbye on the train in the morning. That shocked him. I didn’t want to hear about his computer job. That irritated him. He didn’t want to hear about my writing. I dropped it. I’d seen none of the latest Hollywood releases. I was “out of it.” I had a lover named Dan, whom I had no intention of leaving. He wanted a companion to share his dishes. I wanted to make gorgeous, intense love with a beautiful man. He couldn’t understand how I could be willing to have a relationship that succeeded on one level but not another, how I could let love mean more than one thing. He wanted it like a dishwasher: all in one.
But that’s not fair. In all honesty, he remained a complete mystery to me. See, Thomas found another boyfriend even sooner than I’d figured he would. And that was the end of our little romance. Dan held me in his arms while I sobbed… for about ten minutes.
There was a phone call or two. A tentative date for a last fuck that we ended up canceling. We walked past each other in the crowd with a “Hi’ya” or just a nod. That big boy who’d entered me, let me inside himself and whispered his pain into my ears while kissing my lashes—he was just another face in the crowd.
It’s so tempting to reduce him to a “type,” while I’m at it, as I’ve already come too close to doing: “jock in high school, found out he was gay, looked for guy to play house with, scared into American dreamy…” Which may be essentially true, but he probably goes way deeper, as most humans do, however superficial the role he’s come to play.
And then again, no one is really that special. My sweet Thomas is just another of my hundred lovers—faces in the crowd as I am a face in the crowd as is the reader of this paragraph. And in the crowd, all the types and their sufferings are dissolved into a whirl of energy which all but drowns out anything so tiny as a personality—though, miraculously, such a fragile and intricate thing manages to exist and does so most beautifully when we are making love to another being with our whole body and mind.
Don Bapst 