The Bandini Affair 01
Draginacht@aol.com (AKA Jeff)
Disclaimer: The following is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. The story contains graphic descriptions of sex between men. Anyone who is forbidden by law to read such material must stop now. This story is being posted to the Nifty Archive solely for the enjoyment of its adult readers.
NOTE: This is a do-over. I began this story some time ago but had to suspend writing due to a heavy workload. And when I was able to resume writing I found I needed to make a few changes. So here we are.
If you're looking for a quick release, this story won't do it. It takes a few pages to set up and I hope it will have some entertainment value.
This story is a spin-off of an earlier story, "David's Initiation." If you haven't read "DI," that won't be a problem because this story can stand-alone. However, some of the characters from "DI" will appear throughout the story.
Reader comments are welcome, just be sure to include the title in your subject line (even "TBA" will do) so that it doesn't get dumped as spam.
And I really hope you enjoy this work.
Leo walked up the Jetway of gate B6 in Memphis, dragging his roller bag behind him. His flight from Nashville was on schedule and he had a rather lengthy wait before boarding the flight to Amsterdam. He could have chosen a shorter route through JFK but Leo greatly disliked the hassle and the crowd at the New York airport. Memphis was closer, boasted a nice, friendly atmosphere and offered another chance to sample some of the famous local bar-b-que. Leo used his time judiciously by reviewing his plan of attack upon arriving in Amsterdam. He wanted to hit the ground running, gather his material and get back home.
Leo Carlsen is a 30-year-old freelance journalist. He normally concentrates on sports but at his loving wife Marsha's encouragement (read insistence) he accepted a rather unusual assignment. Leo was going to Amsterdam to research and write about the sins, depravity, immoral behavior, and loss of dignity associated with the gay lifestyle. It was to be a hit piece for a religious publication. He had originally selected San Francisco because it was easy to get to. But Marsha lobbied hard for Amsterdam because, as she put it, "it is the Mecca of Gaydom," or so she argued.
Shortly after takeoff, Leo chose the rubber chicken for dinner but he skipped the coffee and declined the adult beverage, as he didn't want anything to interfere with his plan to get some sleep. The business class seat was quite roomy for someone his size and Leo had no difficulty falling to sleep.
With a last name of Carlsen, you'd probably expect Leo to be six feet two inches tall with blond hair, blue eyes and an angular face. Well, you would be wrong. On his father's side, Leo's ancestry included a Swedish grandfather (hence the last name) and a Chinese grandmother. On his mother's side he had an Italian grandfather and an English grandmother. Such is the melting pot that is America. (There's a story about how that all came to pass, which we may explore later.)
His older brother Benito (older by six years) got most the attractive Scandinavian and Italian genes, leaving most of the Asian ones to Leo, who stood only five feet six inches tall and weighed, on a good day, 115 lbs soaking wet. Leo's face was more of an oval, with black hair on top that couldn't seem to decide if it should stand up or lay flat. He had beautiful, almond-shaped dark brown eyes, black eyebrows, and a wide, beaming smile that drew a smile from whomever saw it. One would have to describe Leo's complexion as not exactly white but alabaster. His body was naturally lean, and he moved with considerable grace.
He was a quiet, introverted, shy, but happy child who learned to read at an early age. Leo's idea of an exciting afternoon was to curl up in a corner with a book. He had two siblings, a brother Benito, six years older, and a sister Megan, two years younger. Benito, or Ben as he chose to be called, was the jock of the family. Leo was happy to go through life almost unnoticed and living vicariously through his brother's exploits. Leo studied every sport his brother played. His knowledge of football, basketball, baseball, and soccer was encyclopedic. Ben's friends often gathered at the house for work sessions and Leo was welcome to hang around and learn.
Leo's "invisibility" succeeded until he got to high school. His freshman English teacher noted a budding talent for writing and urged him to join the staff of the school newspaper. That turned out to be a match made in Heaven. Leo was a natural. He loved every aspect of journalism - except for interviewing fellow students, which he managed to avoid until one fateful day about five weeks into his junior year.
The newspaper editor was in panic mode. Their sports reporter was in the hospital following an auto accident and wouldn't be able to cover Friday's football game. When Leo walked into the room, all eyes focused on him. Before Leo knew what hit him, he had been recruited to step in and cover Friday's game. The game was hard fought but was lost. Leo interviewed the coach and several of the players in the locker room and went home to write his story.
The newspaper came out the following Wednesday morning. By lunchtime, Leo began noticing students he didn't know smiling at him and saying "Hi" as they passed in the halls. Later a couple of football players patted him on his butt as they walked past. Leo couldn't figure out what was going on. In his last class the teacher handed him a note to drop by the athletic office after school to talk to the football coach. To say Leo was nervous would be an understatement. 'Why would the coach have anything to say to me?' he wondered. 'Oh, I must have really made a mess of that article about the game,' he thought.
Leo needn't have worried, the coach wanted to thank him for such a well-written article. Although the team lost, Leo had been able to point out some positive aspects and provide the team with inspiration to do better next time.
The next game was away and Leo was invited to ride with the team. He managed to hide in the back of the bus and no one bothered him. The ride home wasn't a happy one because the game was lost. But that didn't stop Leo, he wrote another positive article that the players, coach, and students appreciated.
The next Friday was another home game and this time the home team won. As Leo approached the locker room he could hear the boisterous celebration and was hesitant to enter, but he did. He interviewed the coach first. Then he found the quarterback with a towel wrapped around his waist and they sat on some benches facing each other. The towel was totally inadequate to conceal the young man's ample equipment. Leo was faced with a dilemma. He knew he shouldn't look and the conflict was interfering with his interview. At one point the quarterback leaned forward, took the tape recorder and pad of paper from Leo and said, "Better let me hold these for a while."
The confused little Leo looked up at the quarterback as a pair of hands grasped him by his arms and lifted him from the bench. Four burley linemen hoisted Leo into the air and held him over their heads as they ran with him into the showers. The entire locker room was roaring with laughter and cheers. The noise was almost deafening as Leo stood under the water, fully clothed with the four players rubbing him all over to make sure he was thoroughly drenched.
Leo wanted to cry. But he knew that was the wrong response so he began laughing. The incident didn't take long to draw to a conclusion and all the team members approached to shake Leo's hand and pat him on his soaked back and congratulate him for being such a good sport. As he completed his interviews, the two linemen who had first picked him up did their best to dry him off.
Leo's greatest concern throughout the incident was that nobody noticed the erection he got from all the physical contact. If anyone noticed, nobody said anything. After all, his equipment wasn't that big.
Leo managed a solid four hours before the flight attendants turned the lights on and passed out the customs and immigration forms.
Leo placed his bags on the luggage carrier and began walking toward the 'ARRIVALS' hall. Today was Wednesday, 11:25 AM and he had just cleared customs and immigration at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. He passed by all the greeters holding signs with names of people he didn't know or tours he never heard of, and proceeded to the ground transportation counter where he purchased a ticket for the bus that would take him to his hotel. He walked outside the airport building to the bus waiting area and found it empty. The agent who sold him his ticket told him the hotel bus would arrive in about thirty-five minutes.
Leo sat down on a nearby bench to wait. 'I wish I'd followed my intuition and declined this assignment,' he thought. 'But Marsha was so supportive. "It will be great for your career," she said. "You're doing it for the church," she said.' Leo smiled but couldn't quite dispel the uneasiness he felt about accepting this assignment. And now that he was in Amsterdam, his apprehension was growing.
Leo watched the gray, flat, nondescript countryside as it sped past the bus window. It wasn't long before the landscape changed to a more urban setting with houses, large office buildings, and industrial areas. Leo was so engrossed in absorbing everything he saw that he was caught by surprise when the driver announced that they had arrived at the Marriott Hotel.
'I know my body clock is screwed up but I don't feel like sleeping right now,' he thought after getting settled in his room. 'I'll go for a walk and check out the area, maybe get something to eat. Nothing on the agenda until tomorrow.'
Marsha had helped him plan his trip and together they'd gone online to research "Gay Amsterdam." It was Marsha who suggested that he might begin by interviewing a male escort. Such a person might provide an interesting perspective for his article. She even selected the male escort service. Leo called the service and it took him a while to convince the agent that all he wanted to do was to interview one of their escorts - nothing more. The man he talked to finally agreed to arrange for an escort to meet at Leo's hotel room Thursday morning at 1000. However, the price for the escort was the same, no matter the purpose of the meeting.
Leo road the elevator down to the lobby and checked with the concierge who gave him a walking map with places of interest in the local area. Leo immediately noticed how close he was to the Rijksmuseum and the Heineken brewery. Those destinations he'd save for later.
Striking out in no particular direction, Leo crossed the bridge over the nearby canal and wandered up one street and down another, looking in store windows. The early March wind was chilly and the sky was gray, but at least it wasn't raining. Then he spotted it, the kind of shop he'd read so much about in his research, a "Sex Shop." He stopped and looked in the window. Pornographic magazines (with colorful disks pasted over the most interesting physical attributes of the men and women on the covers), videotapes, CDs, books, and a selection of rather tame, innocuous sex toys were on full display.
Leo hadn't expected to come face to face so quickly with one target of his project. But here he was. A lace curtain across the window prevented him from seeing into the shop. 'What the hell,' he exclaimed to himself, "let's have a look at some of this stuff. No time like the present to get started.' He felt strange, uneasy, guilty, as he pulled the door open and stepped across the threshold. A few men were browsing through the variety of things on display tables. Leo worked hard to convince himself he had nothing to feel guilty about. He was on a job. 'It's not like a member of my church is gonna walk through the door and catch me here.' The magazines on the tables had none of those colorful disks covering the significant endowments. For the first time, Leo felt a rush of excitement and it bothered him. He continued looking.
Looking up from one of the tables, Leo realized that the shop was much deeper than he'd first thought. He noticed the back wall was covered with bookcases, or rather shelves with videotapes and CDs on them. There was a long counter 'guarding' the back area and Leo had to go up two steps to enter it.
"Can I help you, sir?" an older man of about 45 or 50 with long brown hair asked.
"Oh, no," Leo replied, somewhat startled at the question. "I'm just looking." Leo wondered how the man could so easily and quickly identify him as an American. How else would the man know to speak to him in English?
"Okay, that will be 4 euros if you want to come in and look." Leo quickly calculated 4 euros to be approximately $5.
"Four euros just to look?" Leo asked with a note of surprise in his voice.
"Yes, but you can apply that toward the rental of anything you chose to view."
'Ah, okay, I get it, he expects me to rent a video. But where will it view it?' Then he noticed some booths, 5 of them, along the sidewall. 'So, that's the deal. Well, lets charge it to the experience.'
"Okay," Leo agreed as he reached into his pocket, extracted 4 euros and handed them to the man.
The man took the money, placed it in a drawer, and handed Leo a ticket stub. 'I guess this is what I used for my discount,' Leo thought. 'No, not a discount, it's a... oh well, maybe I won't find anything to view.' Silently, Leo walked to the back wall and began looking at the titles on the front of the CDs and VCRs. 'This is more daunting that I expected. How in the world am I supposed to know what to watch? Maybe the shop clerk can help me.'
"Excuse me, Sir," Leo began as he walked back toward the man who took his money. "I don't seem to be able to find anything. Could you recommend one of your more popular videos, please?" 'God, how stupid did that sound!' Leo thought.
Without comment, the man placed his hand into a bin on top of the counter and began rummaging through some CDs. Finally he selected one and extended it toward Leo.
"Singapore Fling!" Leo read the title. On the front was a picture of two naked young men kissing. One was white and the other was medium brown, not black and they were positioned is such a way that their flaccid cocks were touching. At that moment Leo realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled then inhaled deeply. 'Yes, this will do,' he thought. 'Why is it that the first porno flick I see is homo, not hetero?'
"This will be fine," he said to the clerk. The man extended his hand, palm up, as if asking for the CD back. Leo handed it to him.
"That will be four more euros," the man explained.
'Damn, ten bucks already. I'm not sure it's worth it. Oh well... nothing ventured - nothing gained.' Leo reached into his pocket and handed the man four euros.
"Booth number five," the man said. "Press the play button when you're ready." Leo watched the clerk remove the CD from the jewel case and insert it into a player.
'Boy, this guy could win a grouch contest,' Leo thought as he turned around and walked toward the viewing booth with the number 5 on it. The first thing Leo noticed when he entered the booth was how sticky the floor was. 'Somebody must have spilled a Coke in here,' he thought. The curtain fell closed behind him leaving barely enough light to see to sit down. At least the seat was comfortable. His eyes began to adjust and he could see a box of facial tissues and a waist basket. Looking up and to his right, Leo spotted the video monitor and directly below it was a button with the letters "PLAY" illuminated on it.
'Okay, here goes.' Leo pressed the "PLAY" button and waited. After a moment's delay, the music started and screen came to life.
*** To be continued ***