Captured

Chapter 25. Free bag of charcoal with every new car!

In the morning I cooked us eggs and toast with orange drink, but no bacon or pork sausage. Real orange juice frozen concentrate is very expensive in Morocco, despite the amount of fruit grown within 50 miles of the Mediterranean coastline.

We spent the morning in our underwear as if we were still college roomies and we did that for nearly six years, almost every morning at UTA!

A while later I called Jen (on speaker phone) and we took turns telling her how we stole an airplane and made it back home, and it needed service and some kind of storage cover. Dan talked to her too. She said it sounded like we were having a good time. Dan asked her how things were going in Madrid and she admitted she got lost almost every week walking around her part of the city, she said there are like no straight roads or highways anywhere in or near central Madrid. She said she lives in a very old area of town and none of the roads were laid out on a grid back then. She said the roads in her area used to have horse-drawn chariots and carts on them during the day. And on the weekend everyone in town walked to the stadium to watch the chariot races every Saturday afternoon.

She said at first she tried using church steeples as navigation landmarks only to discover most churches had nearly the same spires, so she had to print out street maps of the area she lived in, which made her look like a lost tourist. She said in her part of the city there are almost no street name signs anywhere. They rusted and fell off decades ago but the ones that remain are mostly unreadable.

Then she started complaining: "In Texas the street signs er big and they sit on poles right at the intersection, they're easy to read and locate even if you don't speak English. But here the street name signs are tiny. They're like 150 years old and they are bolted up-high on the walls of buildings at the intersection so you really got to hunt for em. Half of em er rusted and unreadable." Dan reminded her they were just as bad in Barcelona. Then she remembered both of us used to live in a very old neighborhood in Barca, so she sighed and stopped her rant.

When she asked Dan how long he was staying he said he didn't know. He originally purchased tickets for being here ten nights, but the jet's here and it's only day #3. Dan looked at me as if he was asking how long he could stay but Jen suddenly said she had to go, she had a call on the other line from work. She was firing another customer service telephone rep today and had two interviews after lunch.

Jen told Dan that several of the older phone reps were local women and she felt their way of talking on the phone was more cultural than unprofessional. She said they probably talk to everyone, even at home like they do to customers. She had their supervisors talk about free training for all of them but they all declined, so each one was warned, but they all felt they were doing nothing wrong. Despite that the complaints followed many service calls. Some customers even used words like: Bitch, angry, scolding, disrespectful, insulting, and said `they don't listen.' That was when she had no choice but to start recording calls and terminating reps. Some of them had been with the company for a decade.

When Dan got off the phone I told him he could stay as long as he wanted but at some point I'll have to go back to work, then he'd be on his own. Dan insisted he'll be fine on his own. After that I was on the phone for a while arranging for service on the jet from the hangar at General Aviation. I also called about insurance on the jet, and that was expensive! I also ordered a custom fit cover for the jet from Cessna in Kansas. The lady on the phone at Cessna said she never spoke to someone in Africa before, our call was fun. She offered to ship 2nd day air if I ordered today. They had covers for our Citation in stock.

The maintenance guy at the airport said they'll do the service later this week in case I wanted to be there to watch, which some owners liked to do. I told him what work we did ourselves in Cyprus.

Dan told me after I got off the phone he had an errand he wanted to run locally, he'd be gone for a few hours. I was happy he felt confident enough to do stuff on his own here, and that is exactly what he did at noon. He returned at 5:15pm with two fully loaded plastic grocery store bags I didn't recognize. He said he took the ferry to Gibraltar and purchased pork: bacon, sausage, sliced smoked ham, and ham steaks. He spent $210 and filled both bags so we re-arranged my refrigerator and packed it full of pork stuff. He said he took the catamaran across to Gibraltar. I thanked him for the donation.

We decided to have ham steaks for dinner, cooked on the grille on the roof with baked potatoes (in the microwave but finished on the grill, and canned corn heated on the grill too.

He forgot to get charcoal so we walked down to Kmart and got a 30lb bag of hickory smoke charcoal briquettes. Up on the roof nobody was using the grills so we cooked a bunch of stuff and while we were up there the little kid I took flying, Maleet, came up and visited with us. I introduced him to Dan and Dan thought he was super nerdy looking but a cute little kid. I never mentioned stealing a jet or that we just flew all the way across the Mediterranean, literally from end to end! I offered Maleet a small slice of ham steak but he made a funny-yucky face and declined my offer. It's a delicious but unclean animal you know! While we stood near the grille Dan suddenly remembered and pulled a business card from his wallet, the butcher shop he went to said they could overnight pork in boxes with dry ice to anyone in an Islamic country. I chuckled and thanked him for thinking of my plight.

We had a huge dinner and made a ton of leftovers too. I told Dan I suspected Maleet came to the roof on his own a lot because he needed a private place to wank. Dan laughed. I told him I think he just started puberty and his voice just started to change too. Dan agreed and said it was funny hearing his voice break, some kids get it bad, other's not so much. After dinner I did dishes while Dan took another shower.

Then I took a shower and we listened to music on the radio and talked all evening, one by one we stripped to our underwear again and hung out on the sofa telling stories while sipping red wine and having good times like we used to in college. When he changed into shorts he stood near the sofa so I could watch.

I think that evening he started to realize how much nicer life was with no TV in the house. But I still wonder sometimes if he changed clothes in front of me because he liked teasing me or because he does it without thinking. Believe me, if I take off my clothes with anyone nearby it always enters my mind.

We got to bed late (for me) that evening. Like always I made up the sofa as a bed for him but he wanted to sleep on my bed, I didn't argue.

He was on his back and I was on my side facing him. I reached over and set my hand flat on his chest and softly rubbed his right nipple with my thumb then I reached down and grabbed him, but he was hard already so I blew him, no hand action just my tongue on the right spot and he came in my mouth. My only warning was when he started micro-humping my mouth. It felt like a lot of semen, even for Dan so I silently rolled over to my side and hung my head over the side and held my mouth open and watched as his semen slowly started to drip out of my mouth. I tried to avoid making spitting sounds so I didn't sound like I was grossed out by his semen, which I wasn't. It's just that sometimes I'm not in the mood to swallow, especially when he makes a lot of come or it's really thick.

When his come is really thick or if he makes a lot I feel better opening my mouth to let it dribble out into the wastebasket. The texture is kind of awful when it's super thick. If I was God one change I would make in human men is if they ate a lot of something two hours before sex you could taste it slightly in his semen. So he could eat five pieces of Brach's red and white peppermint candies and have peppermint tinged semen a couple hours later, that would be cool!

Then I wanked in bed in full view of his allegedly hetero eyeballs. I agree, that just because a guy will let another guy blow him does not make him gay. Dan is probably very worried that I will tell the world he enjoys oral sex from another guy and his hetero man card might be revoked and noted in the Houston Chronicle. I am convinced Dan is not gay but for some reason he feels it is necessary to demonstrate that constantly to me (who else is gonna know but the two of us?). I think he is afraid he might somehow `catch' gay from me and suddenly start talking with a hissy gay accent, throw away his old blue jeans and boots, and buy tickets to see Elton John in concert one year in advance.

We got up early and I made breakfast then went to work, even though the shop was scheduled to be closed the rest of the week. I had two calls to return and one incoming temporary passport.

Surprise surprise, Dan showed up at work (2:31pm) and hung out on the sofa the rest of the day then we rode home together on the city bus. The rest of the day was routine. We walked to the store for fresh meat and pan fried thin steaks and veggies and we spent the entire evening in gym shorts, just like back in the dorms at UTA 14 years ago!

We shut off the lights and went to bed kind of early, I blew him again and then got on my knees and wanked and came on his chest. He watched me come and smiled when I spurt across his chest, but before I could clean it up he got out of bed and cleaned it off himself in the bathroom, but he wasn't angry. I think he was trying to be nice, but it looked awkward. I think someone else's semen on his skin bothered him. Yes, it's kind of like how we used to think back in high school: dick is gross, but my girl friend can suck mine, that's fine! That logic makes no sense.

Today I decided to work my normal hours again and like yesterday Dan showed up after lunch and spent the rest of the day with me. It was very nice having him nearby. When he's here but not in sight I tend to get distracted worrying about him. To some extent I guess I really try to be his mother.

He told me during the day he went to the Kingdom of Morocco office in Tangier and researched Americans buying land in Morocco. He showed me a pamphlet he got that explained the only way to do it was to apply for citizenship or dual citizenship. So he called Rabat and asked honestly and told them he spent two years in prison for a crime he did not commit and the charges were dropped and the case dismissed but he also had a DUI. They said a DUI did not disqualify him from dual citizenship as long as it was more than three years ago and has not been arrested since. On the down side the fee to apply for dual citizenship was $15k, and he had to submit to a background check in Morocco, fingerprints, DNA sample, mug shot, and it took up to 30 days for approval. The actual law in Morocco was kind of weird. American citizens could not own land but an American company could and build on it too. To start the process visit any regular police station, they could start the investigation process by taking mug shots, finger prints, and DNA samples.

Dan also did some real estate research and found a area with several building lots for sale (cheap compared to Texas), it was southwest of Tangier near the Atlantic coast and a nice 18-hole golf course. The land was a 10 acre olive tree farm but some kind of fungus killed the trees so today its ten acres of burnt tree stumps, they wanted $60k US for the land since it cannot be farmed for olive trees ever again, in case the fungus is still in the soil.

I located land for sale, also rural near the mountains but this place used to be a military airport back in the 1940s and had an old asphalt runway and thirty acres of weeds and rocks. The runway sat at roughly the same heading at Tetouan, northeast to southwest. It was 4800 feet long and overgrown by weeds. The old runway itself was too far gone to use for anything except maybe a hiking bike trail but it could be re-paved, the small runway was military and had a perfectly fine concrete roadbed under the asphalt. All it needed was a fresh coat of asphalt, three car lanes wide. That old airport had some buildings standing that were in sad shape, but they might have decent foundations. We decided to take a taxi down and survey the old airport. The amount of money I would save not paying rent at Tetouan might cover a mortgage payment on the airport property.

That evening we discussed how long Dan was going to stay and he said he didn't know or care so I stopped asking but he had a legal visit limit (60 days) as part of a regular visa stamp. I had a diplomat passport and a special stamp, sort of like a resident alien -- diplomat visa which was almost as good as a real Get out Of Jail Free card in Morocco. I had no limit on how long I could remain in Morocco, but if I quit State I would lose that stamp and be restricted to 60 days.

He fell asleep on the sofa, I slept on my bed.

In the morning he said he thought about it all night and wanted to apply for dual citizenship so we took a taxi to the Federal Building in Tangier and he got the forms and brought them home. Then I took the bus to work even though I was scheduled off. I was expecting a temporary passport to be delivered by courier today.

Rabat knows when I open the office because I clock-in on the computer which registers immediately in their HR office. Since I am salaried I can take time off but work anyway and they know it, and appreciate it. The ambassador thinks if you take time off and work anyway you are a model employee, in his mind you earn attaboys for being dedicated like he is.

Dan arrived after 3pm and spent the rest of the day with me, but we didn't talk much. I asked how the form looked and he said he already filled it in and mailed it to Rabat with a check. When he first said it he pronounced the name Robot, so I laughed and corrected him. He flipped me off and said Robot sounded better than Rabat. He said it ROW-BOT! I smiled but understood there is a lot of stuff to learn when someone from the States first moves to Morocco.

We took the bus home and he cooked dinner of pork sausages, like some kind of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages, toast, and eggs. It was weird but nice having breakfast for dinner. I felt like we were breaking the law by eating pork in Tangier.

I got a text late that afternoon that service on my Citation was finished and the jet was back on the tarmac and tied down. Dan apologized he forgot to tell me but there was a delivery, a large box was over by the hallway door. I looked and saw it was from Wichita Kansas, the home of Cessna, it must be the new covers, and maybe we could put `em on this weekend.

We spent the evening again in our gym shorts on opposite ends of the sofa with our legs intertwined, with a bed sheet over us and we talked with the lights off and often one of us had the bottom of our foot on the other guy's crotch. Sometimes I moved my foot around to massage his dick but he didn't seem particularly horny that day. He showed me how his finger tips were still stained black from being fingerprinted that afternoon.

We did something weird that evening, we slept together on the sofa, with our heads at opposite ends so we had each other's feet in the face all night, but we showered late so there was no odor problem. Luckily I am not at all into feet.

The next morning we decided to take the nicer bus to Tetouan (it boards at the train station and makes fewer stops along the way) and put the cover on the jet, we left before the sunrise and got back home at 10am, just in time for me to open the office 65 minutes late, I handed out replacement passports and talked to some interesting people.

Like yesterday Dan arrived after lunch and spent the rest of the day on the sofa reading the newspaper and some English language magazines he bought at a store. Since seating is limited when people came in he usually got up and left and walked around the market area near my office. My office is near one of the only vehicle openings in the wall around old Tangier. Semi trucks cannot fit through the hole but cars, small busses, and small cargo trucks fit just fine. If you want to deliver something inside the old city you have to hire a guy in a tuk-tuk, re-load it into his vehicle and have him deliver it since big vehicles are not allowed in the old city because the streets are too narrow and the overhead wires too low. It's actually worse than where Jen lives in Madrid where many streets are only 12 feet wide, but back in the 1700s with animal pulled carts they were considered wide enough for two lanes of traffic! Look at streets in the ancient city of Pompeii; they're similar to the streets in old Tangier except Tangier had no raised pedestrian walkways.

If Dan had to hang out near my office he usually ended up in the leather shop next door looking at all the nice jackets and shoes they had for sale, mostly made in the building upstairs.

I heard from local residents near my office that in Old Tangier if a fire breaks out the (volunteer) fire crew run to the scene and connect hoses to hydrants and put it out with no fire truck. The hydrants are built into the fronts of buildings, there are no standalone red hydrants like you commonly see in Europe and the USA, they're just large brass connectors and valves on fronts of buildings. The fire crews are local property owners who live and work inside the city walls. They keep hoses in their homes ready to grab and run. They use something like a thick garden hoses to combat fires. Newer buildings have sprinklers built-in.

Dan asked me how they pressurize the city water in the old city since there are no water towers. I told him there are two towers but outside they are built to look like all the other nearby buildings but if you look in the first floor windows you can see they are disguised to look like old buildings.

We discussed money and I said my best estimate was the nearly free Citation has cost me about $9500 so far, not counting rent at the airport, which was about $100 a month outside on the tarmac. It's the only jet there sitting out in the sun all day, but the new cover is designed for an environment like Morocco. The cover cannot prevent sun damage but it certainly slows it. The cover also has four oval pieces with wire frames that latch onto the jet engines intake and exhaust to keep them covered and keep insects and dust out. The cover does not protect the tires so I guess the thing to do for them is to smear them with automotive wax.

All tires made in North America and most of Asia are made with wax mixed into the rubber compounds. After the tire is molded the wax starts to bleed out of the rubber. The wax forms a protective coating to prevent damage by UV light and Ozone gas. The service guy stated emphatically that the worst thing you can do to any modern tire was to wash it or paint it black. The best way to take care of any tire was to leave it alone but maintain proper air pressure. Never wash any tire, ever. The actual worst thing for rubber tires is dry cleaning fluid, which is a non-flammable solvent sometimes called Perc.

That evening it soon became obvious he was horny, he only wore his gym shorts and no shirt. Dan took a shower and walked around wearing only the bath towel around his waist and it managed to let it `accidentally' drop to his ankles a few times. You see the problem is he doesn't want to ask me to blow him, he wants me to start things so he has a clear conscious that he never asked a man to suck his dick, but if I make the first move then it's morally okay. Whatever dude. To me it's about dick, not morality. He doesn't understand that, never will.

To Dan if I initiate sex it's like calling-in sick to work and bringing in a doctor's note -- it's officially excused. That's where his head's at.

He made dinner again, we had genuine BLT sandwiches with the rest of the open package of bacon. We still had four more packages left, two were in the freezer. Dan is actually a decent cook. He commented that the tomatoes here in Morocco were much nicer than the sim tomatoes in American grocery stores. He said you can tell the ones in America are fake because all of them are exactly the same color red, which never happens in nature.

We listened to music and cleaned the kitchen and the spills inside the refrigerator that evening. After that we took showers, I went first. He came in the bathroom and said he closed the windows because it started raining outside.

When I was done he got in, I left the hot water trickling.

After showers he went around and shut off all the lights and I saw outside it was raining hard, the rain was pelting the windows and the camera box outside too. We both went to bed early, 8pm. I rested my head on his tummy and nursed on his rod for a while, but he came almost immediately. After Dan comes he is usually at peace with the world and ready to sleep, just like an old dog.

There ain't no better friend on earth than an old dog.

The next day was Saturday, we called the realtor and took a Red taxi to his office and rode in his van down to see the old WW2 airport. The realtor dude said it was built by Germany for training paratrooper pilots for the Africa Corp in 1938, but it was abandoned in 1945 and purchased by a group of former military aviators in 1948 and closed again in 1968. The airport was purchased by a skydiving club in 1971, the only one in Morocco. The airport stayed busy until 1979 and was abandoned again and slowly became the wreck it is today. You can barely see the runway today, it's just a long patch of black pebbles and short weeds. But there are two buildings standing and the ruins of a couple more. The property is rather large and cheap too. Most people looking at the property would consider the crumbling old runway to be a bad thing. Based on what I learned that entire property would never have natural gas, cable-TV, landline telephone service, city water or sewer, and installation of electrical service would be expensive. Only an airplane geek would think the place had potential.

And I was wrong, what I said about the place before, it has two hangars, but neither of them has doors but the structures were fully intact, just wide open fronts. They sit side by side so it looks like one very wide building, open on the north side, facing the runway. The realtor said he heard the hangar doors disappeared in the 1960s.

There was another building still standing: an air traffic control tower and office. I think the barracks building burnt down decades ago but the foundation was clearly visible. The control tower building was made of reinforced poured concrete, even the roofs were poured concrete but the insides were totally stripped bare. Electrical service lines were still there but probably needed total replacement except for the poles themselves, otherwise that service was fully repairable. He said with all the small crop dusters working in the area if someone opened the airport there would probably be planes needing a place to land and re-load, re-fuel. Those alone might generate enough income to pay the mortgage. Maybe a small time air mechanic could run a shop here repairing crop dusters. I told Dan that might be a good hobby for him, or selling aviation gasoline.

All over Africa crop dusting services use rural streets as runways but that practice is not only illegal it's also extremely dangerous.

On the south side of the runway between the hangar and the barracks foundation the ground is hard as rock and covered by small rocks and weeds, it looks like that was where they parked airplanes, fire trucks, and most ground vehicles. The ground is tightly packed and you can drive anything across it still today. I can picture old German cargo trucks parked by the barracks on a Friday night getting loaded with soldiers to run into town to buy booze and maybe meet a local girl. I'm sure language was a huge barrier for most of those young people, now all of them would be in their late 90s if they were still alive.

He also said that since oil/gas production in Morocco are state-owned the cost for fuel and asphalt were really cheap, I might be surprised how affordable it would be to re-pave the runway. But we had a nice time touring the old airport. Two of the original German military unit signs were still visible near on the outside wall of the hangar. It was in German and had some kind of unit designation sort of like they use in the American military too. Dan asked what the name of the airstrip was during the war and the man said, "Flugplatz Hindenburg," but he said most signs were stolen long ago. Dan asked what that meant and the realtor said it meant something like Hindenburg Air Field.

Hindenburg was a well known last name in Germany in the 1800s and 1900s in the military and politics. There were several famous people (unrelated) with the last name of Hindenburg so it was no surprise the name was used for the name of the airfield in Morocco too, it's sort of like how Eisenhower or Kennedy are known in the USA today.

I asked where the tectonic plate fault-line was in relation to this facility and he said it was eight miles to the east. He's seen no sign of flooding, landslides, locust plagues, earthquakes, or floods here, this land is high and dry and flat and sits above a layer of bedrock about 50 feet down, so forget about putting in a water well here, all you're going to pump from the ground is granite. He jokingly said if you started drilling here it would probably be solid granite all the way to China.

"If you drill a well here you are a lot more likely to hit natural gas than water. And any shallow water would not be good to drink because of the mineral content." The realtor added.

We walked over to the old airplane hangars to take a closer look. I looked at the welds for cracking in the steel supports. These hangars were made of heavy steel I-beams welded to plates, those plates bolted to a reinforced concrete foundation. They were big enough for two B-17 or B-25 Bombers, which means the doors were wide enough and tall enough. But aside from the concrete slabs, three walls and the roof (and dozens of smaller windows), the two hangars looked to be structurally sound. They've survived a lot of severe mountain storms, since this airstrip is within five miles of the base of the north side of the Atlas Mountains. We stood outside and eyeballed the corners of the hangar and sure enough they looked perfectly vertical and straight. That was pretty impressive after 70s years.

Dan asked where all the crop dusters came from and the sales guy said most farms were on the south side of the Atlas Mountains, most of the farming in Morocco was south and east. Despite being a desert they can still support the right types of plants, like cotton, wheat, barley, olive trees, and grapes. He said all across the top tier of Africa, Morocco has the largest wine and olive crop of all the other nations north of the Sahara. Then he said "Don't take me wrong, there is a lot of farming all over the country, even around Tangier. But the big mega-farms are to the south. It's possible with a local airport opening for small aircraft it could really boost local farming because planting, weed spraying, bug spraying, and fertilizing can be done so much cheaper by airplane than a tractor. A typical farm here can spray a field with a tractor in 6 hours, but in a plane they can do it in eight minutes, which is a huge savings in fuel and employee costs. The biggest problem they have up here is access to runways, they cannot land those small planes at big airports because the two don't work safely together."

There were a couple dormant volcanoes in the Atlas Mountain chain which improved the soil all over the country. He also said the number two crop in Morocco was cotton and that was one that required crop dusting airplanes because they had to spray the fields with salt water to kill the cotton so the plants died standing upright and got stiff so the cotton harvester could cut them correctly. The plants had to be brown and stiff (like corn in the USA) otherwise the harvester just mashed them to the ground. There were other chemicals that could be sprayed by airplanes but salt water was the cheapest and safest. Usually they spray a mix of water, salt, and a weak plant killer.

We spent 90 minutes wandering around the airport and locating the four property corner stakes. We went inside each building and looked closely and took hundreds of pictures. Like the guy said the place was in ruins today but all the structures were empty but mechanically intact, but there would be some significant logistic problems to overcome, like the lack of water, sewer, and power. Electrical service would be the easiest to solve. But water can be trucked in by a delivery service, and rain should be caught and conserved, and each building had a septic system, the Germans built them to last so with maintenance most of them could probably be cleaned out and work fine again.

The realtor was pretty emphatic: there would never be city sewer or water on this property. None of the neighboring properties had sewer or water service either; they all captured rain and paid for delivery by truck. Dan asked if delivery water was drinkable and the realtor said it was safe but tasted like crap so you had to filter it, or buy water from the machine at the gas station in town. He said they purchase heavy plastic water tanks like they use on farms and partially bury them and that takes the place of the well.

The realtor commented about all the (Atlantic Wall) concrete structures along the coast of France, built by the Germans in anticipation of an allied invasion. Those structures are still standing today, because that's how the German military built things, to last to the end of the Third Reich, 1000 years. This airstrip was built the same way, to last. But the asphalt top on the runway is designed to age and crumble apart to protect the roadbed underneath.

His last comment about built to last nearly sold me but we had investigating to do. We got his business card as we toured the last building. It was the two story control tower. Like most of the others, all the doors and windows, plumbing, electrical were removed decades ago. But the concrete shell of the building was perfectly intact. Inside the building floor was covered with broken beer bottles and some trash. There was some graffiti on the walls but it was minimal and in Arabic.

We climbed the wide concrete stairs into the control tower and looked all around from the highest point on the property. From there I could see the mountain in Gibraltar and the Strait and out into the Atlantic and east into the Med. This was a lot higher than my 9th floor apartment in the city. I checked the distance, its 24 miles southeast of my apartment but its only three miles from the N2 Highway (it runs from Tangier to Tetouan). We're about 16 miles from Tetouan Airport here. That is another thing to check, if the Morocco government would re-license a private airstrip that close to an existing airport. When this one was built in the 1940s Tetouan (airport) probably didn't exist. It would have been too close to the sea and vulnerable to the British Navy.

I visually inspected that control tower building, inside and out. It was 100% a reinforced concrete building built to last a very long time. I never saw a single crack in the entire concrete structure. Even outside I carefully looked at the foundation and saw zero cracks, same as the hangars. It appeared to be standing perfectly vertical too.

We drove home and discussed the property. Between the two of us we had the $ to resurrect the runway. Daniel said he would buy a used motorhome and park it on the property, run commercial power, install a water tank and have water delivered and live cheaply at the airport and never be bothered about his DUI and his time in prison ever again. The asking price for a wrecked airport in need of everything was $110k US dollars for thirty acres of sand, rocks, and weeds. But we had a lot of research to do.

I think one of the thoughts Dan secretly had was to cancel his plans to fly home soon. We were back together as a team, like `identical best friends' once again!

It reminded me of one time long ago Dan and I were in a pizza place waiting for our carry out order and talking to a really nice chick behind the counter and he told her we were like the Three Musketeers. But she quickly noticed it was just two of us, and Dan's quick reply was that we haven't recruited a third Musketeer yet, but we were looking! We all laughed, but what he said was very true. We're still looking for number three. I suppose Jen might consider a position as the third nutcase.

Back at home in the mail my registration slip for the jet arrived, it was now legally titled to me and legal to fly. The service work was complete and it was mechanically ready. I asked Dan if he wanted to take a short flight over that area and around the mountains, down by Marrakech then back to Tetouan. He wanted to see that piece of land from the air as much as me. We set out a box for stuff to bring along. I also read the PDF copy of the Citation manual about toilet chemicals and decided to order a 5 gallon can of toilet concentrate and have it delivered to my place.

We both spent time in the bathroom trying to poop because we couldn't use the toilet in the jet yet. Dan discovered there was a bus route on the N2 Highway since there were several towns and two industrial parks between Tangier and Tetouan, so we took the N2 bus even though it took three times longer than the taxi. The taxi cost over $50+ Euros each way, but it was the fastest way to get to the airport. The bus was like three Euros.

The bus took an hour and fifteen minutes, we carried the box into the terminal and Dan carried it out to the jet, which was sitting covered and tied down after they serviced it. I paid the service bill with my credit card and scribbled out a flight plan, Tetouan to Marrakech and west to the Atlantic so I had a long line-up through the mountain pass with the runway at Tetouan. Just to be funny I drew three loops around the big mountain, each pass flew over the airstrip property. I never mentioned the old airstrip to the air services people. Everyone in Morocco knows it's there, its part of the history of the country. I think the airport was there before the country of Morocco declared its independence. The lady at the pilot services counter (she was the same lady we spoke to when we called the control tower at this airport) told us our cover on the Citation was falling apart. Dan showed her the box was a brand new cover from Cessna.

The Tetouan ATC office lady reminded me to stay above 3,500 feet near the mountains and hills because there were a lot of low altitude air planes in that area.

While I spoke to her Dan went outside to remove the old cover from the jet and folded it neatly on the tarmac. We set wheel chocks and tie down straps on top so they didn't blow away. The lady at the counter said the weather currently was: 89 degrees, cloudless skies, wind from the southeast at 2mph, humidity 75%, dew point 41 degrees, Barometric pressure rising as a large area of high pressure moved north from the Sahara. She smiled and said it was a great day for flying.

She said there were two commercial flights due today, one at 2pm the other at 3:45pm. I said we'd be back around 2:30pm, it was currently 1pm. Both of those regional passenger jets also carried a load of passengers back home. So that meant it was more like four flights and not really two.

I walked outside to the jet and started the checklist. I also programmed the tower frequency and the main simplex com channel (Unicom) into the radio. There is one frequency all airplanes can use at airports with no control tower or if they have a power outage. In Morocco the main radio channel (known worldwide as: Unicom) for uncontrolled airports was 122.9mhz. The tower frequency for Tetouan was 129.900mhz. I programmed both of those into the radio's memory along with the tower freq for Tangier ATC, Madrid, Robot, and Marrakech. I had them all memorized. If the tower was closed it was customary for pilots to continue to use the same channel to announce their plans before executing them.

Radio channels for airports can get complicated. The bigger ones have one channel for incoming flights. Sometimes they have one channel for incoming flights from different directions. Then they have the control tower which handles takeoffs on another channel. There might be a channel for airplanes on the ground moving around the airport. And even if they say its okay to do something it's up to the cockpit crew to always look first. The problem with most cockpits is they have very limited visibility above, behind, and below them, and radar can only see straight ahead.

After he removed the slowly disintegrating old cover Dan opened the cabin door and pulled out the stairs. We took our time going through the ten page cold-start checklist. I did the outside checks and especially checked hydraulics and engine oil, I checked closely for any sign of leaks and checked the batteries too, so we did a lot more than was required by the book. I even got on my knees and carefully inspected all six tires and their air pressures too.

After our careful inspection I called for permission to taxi, she said the airspace was empty, no flights due for at least 20 minutes so I lit the jets and after the self tests passed we started to roll toward the taxiway then toward the west end of the runway. We stopped short and called for permission to roll onto the active and take off, she said: `Affirmative Charlie November Twenty Seven Alpha Citation you are clear to take off eastbound, after liftoff turn right to a heading of 180 and an altitude of 3600.' I didn't want to go higher so Daniel could see the ground better. At that height you can still see the highways but not the traffic. Dan poked it into the autopilot while I slowly pushed the throttles forward and we started our roll. Moments later we flew over the beach, I caught a glimpse of Cabo Negro then we began our climbing turn to the south up and over the mountains. Dan kept his eyes out the windows on his side with his cell phone in camera mode taking pictures and video.

I turned on the radar but all there was to see was radar reflections off the mountains. He pointed out a green speck that was probably one of those crop duster planes at 800 feet. We flew a route around the mountain peak and made two passes over the old German airbase property so he could take photos. I seriously dipped the wing on his side so he got a better view.

As he took photos out the cockpit windows Dan shouted, "Oh great view, thanks Alex. I can actually see the runway, what's left of it!"

Then we flew around the mountain peak again and down to Marrakech and over some of the farmland in that area. It's very mountainish down there, but any further east or south and it turns into flat desert with some very majestic and beautiful sculpted mountain peaks, they look almost otherworldly. I tried to fly over the movie studio so he could see the huge movie sets in the desert but I couldn't find it at 480mph.

I looked at the fuel gauge and saw we were down to 49% so we headed west toward Rabat then along the coast north toward Asilah and turned northeast and called Tetouan tower about air traffic and she said a plane just landed so their runway was not clear but would be in about 3-5 minutes. So we turned toward Tetouan and began our approach and descent. Our airspeed gave them twelve minutes to clear the runway. They would call us when the runway was clear.

When we were twenty miles out I saw a flash of reflected sunlight off the regional jet as it turned off the runway onto the taxiway toward the terminal so we were clear, I called again to confirm that we had permission to land. We approached like normal and touched down on the stripes and turned around at the end and taxied back off the runway. I estimated that from wheels chirp to the time we turned off the runway was about 2.5 minutes in the Citation. I had to use the throttle to speed our turn onto the taxiway. Let me tell you when you have to backtrack on the active runway it makes me feel very unsafe, I'm reminded of the deadly KLM plane crash on the foggy runway in Tenerife in 1977.

We taxied to the terminal and parked beside the old nylon jet cover and shut it down. We sat there and chatted briefly while Dan looked through his collection of photos. Then he got up and told me to join him in back. I realized I've never flown in the passenger section of a private jet before, only the cockpit.

It was starting to get pretty warm inside the jet parked in the desert sun so we finished the shutdown list and closed it up and pulled the new cover over the top and hooked the straps under the fuselage. Then we sat in the shade with a nice breeze outside and talked for a while. Dan stood up and picked up the old jet cover and walked to the terminal building and stuffed it into a trash can sitting outside.

Across the tarmac the regional jet already unloaded its arriving passengers and their luggage and started boarding another load of passengers leaving the hotel-resort area. The hotels share a short bus to haul their guests from the hotel to the airport and back. Lots of the people who vacation near Tetouan live in central Africa (Chad, Niger, and Mali). For charter flights in Morocco the way they handle security is very different than the USA. Here its done as people board the bus at the hotel, not at the airport. When they buy a vacation package it includes roundtrip airfare, hotel, meals, and transport to the airport. So aviation security starts when they buy a trip package in Mali and ends when they leave the airport in Mali on their way home. Its also why there is almost zero crime in that huge resort area near Cabo Negro.

I watched a video online recently about a guy from France, a marine biologist who was researching shark repellants for hotel beaches and claims he patented his invention. They run a jetski along the entire waterfront, which is almost ten miles long. They run about 300 feet out from the beach north and south parallel to the shore, over 50 foot deep water emitting a sound and electrical impulses that annoy the hell out of all fish and makes then quickly turn around and swim away. I'd hate to read it failed and an enormous Great White ate a swimmer in five foot of water despite the repellant but the guy said it works on nearly all fish but not jelly fish.

We've all seen these shark repellant inventions before, they seem to work for a while then someone is bit and the inventor disappears and goes to another resort beach area to sucker them into paying for his service. I like the barrier they built on Gibraltar. It's made of tons of rock and only small fish can pass over the barrier. Of course even big man eating sharks start life as small fish.

Back at home Dan said he wanted to split the fuel cost with me, so I pulled out the photo of the instrument panel display and did some math and told him $210 bucks, which only covers fuel. He handed me $220 and we called it even. We agreed the Citation is not the best airplane for sightseeing at low altitudes, it goes too damn fast. After that he copied all the photos and video he shot into my computer on the coffee table.

For dinner we decided since it was such a nice day we'd cook steaks on the charcoal grille on the roof. He carried the food, I carried the charcoal, the starter tube, and some newspaper pages.

We rode up to the 10th floor in the elevator then took the fire exit stairs up to the roof.

While we were waiting for the charcoal to get up to temp my neighbor kid Maleet showed up and joined our merry group and he was always interesting to talk to. He described his life in public schools in the 5th grade. Dan thought he was a cute kid but very dorky. He said we should have offered to take him flying. I pondered on all the things Maleet never mentioned, like drugs and bullying. But if he is in an Islamic school maybe they are strict about that stuff, I had no clue. I had to assume there were Islamic elementary and middle schools here but I never asked before.

While the charcoal continued to light in the tube I told Dan my only charcoal trivia story. "You know Dan there is an interesting charcoal business story, right?"

"No, what is it?"

"Ford Motors back in the early days of the Model-T made their wheel spokes out of wood, and they soon made a huge mountain of scrap chunks of wood, real hardwood. So they started another company to buy the scrap from Ford and process it into charcoal. And if you bought a new Ford Model-T you also got a bag of charcoal since driving around on a Sunday looking for a nice spot outside town to have a cook-out was one of the things you could actually do with a car back before highways existed. People drove out to parks with their Kingsford Charcoal for a great lunch. It also created the old insult term: Sunday Driver!"

Dan said that was interesting. Then I told him that was when the term Jay Walking came into being too. Originally Jay Walking (or Walkin' like a Jay) was an insult, it was shouted at people who didn't follow the rules about where to cross the street, which really became necessary due to the rapidly increasing car traffic. A common bird in the USA was the Blue Jay but as towns grew the Jays moved their nests out into the rural areas so being called a `Jay' was being called an unsophisticated rube from rural America. If you crossed the street in the middle of the block it was called Jay Walking because you were walking around like a rube from the farm. After that story the coals were all lit so he poured them into the heavy steel grille bolted to the roof of the building, then used his grille brush to clean the grate.

"So Kingsford Charcoal was named after Ford Motors?" Dan asked.

"No, Kingsford was someone who worked at Ford and started the charcoal business, it was a coincidence that the name Kingsford was similar to Ford. The wood used to make charcoal was purchased as scrap from Ford Motors because their wheel spokes back then were made of wood and they had an actual mountain of scrap wood. As an industrialist scrap and waste really bothered Henry Ford. He was always looking to eliminate or sell waste." I think my second story actually clicked in Dan's brain, he's not a trivia hound like me.

We stood there watching the steaks cook on the grille and talked more about charcoal. I told him that today I thought wood scrap was ground up into tiny bits and compressed into charcoal size chunks then baked at high temps in an oven to turn wood into charcoal.

"A similar but even bigger business is wood pellets." I told Dan. "Those tiny round pieces of compressed wood used in smokers and home furnaces because in some parts of the country cooking or heating with pellets is actually kinda cheap. There are even some on-demand electricity generating plants in the world that burn pellets by the ship load to make steam and generate peak load electricity." Wood pellets are a renewable energy source.

When Dan cooks steaks on the grille he goes by internal temperature. At 136 degrees F we pulled `em and went back downstairs.

We ate dinner on the sofa with music playing. Plates and glasses on the coffee table, I told him I should get one of those coffee tables where the top lifts up and over so you don't have to bend over to eat.

We never turned on the lights and after dinner and stayed on the sofa side by side and talked until 9pm then showered and got in bed.

Dan got in bed first, then I finished my quick shower and toweled off. When I walked around the curtain in the dark I could still see him sitting up in bed stroking his boner, I took that to be an invitation.

I crawled into bed and rested the side of my head on his soft warm tummy and held his rod in my mouth for the longest time. He gently toyed with my hair and rubbed my back and shoulder and arm. It was about as affectionate as Dan could get with another guy. I barely moved my mouth but held him for a long time and he leaned back with his eyes closed, in the dark, and enjoyed it. To me it was an extremely intimate situation. The fact that we can do this stuff without it getting awkward is one of the top reasons why I feel so strongly for Dan. He rarely ruined the moment by saying stupid shit.

For nearly 20 minutes I kept perfectly still and was able to gradually take him nearly all the way into my mouth. I can do it if I relax and inch it in slowly. He says it feels wonderful when I take all of him in my mouth, he says it's better than pussy. I rest one hand on his balls and close my eyes and pretend to fall asleep. Slowly, my head moves up and down as he breathes and I can hear his stomach gurgling as it digests his steak. It's probably my favorite sex act with Dan, I could do it every day if he felt the need.

After twenty minutes I took a mouth break and rubbed his head side to side across my lips and all over my face. I kissed it and licked it and played with it for another twenty minutes and he finally said he could take no more, he needed to come. So I got up on my knees and moved over between his legs and started stroking it by hand with the head between my lips. All my mouth effort was focused on his piss slit against my tongue, which drives him crazy (it drives most men crazy). I felt his nuts were drawn up and knew he wouldn't last much longer.

Then Dan started to moan and squirm and knew it was time. He slapped the mattress with both hands and softly said "Oh oh oh oh oh oh" and exhaled deeply and his body suddenly became limp.

He squirted once in my mouth then I pulled off and aimed it toward his face and he came on his chest and stomach, his front side was just covered with semen. Dan didn't speak for a while after that one.

I let go and rolled over onto my side and spit it into the wastebasket then relaxed on my side of the bed and waited for him to do something.

His first words were, "Holee fuck! That was super intense, it nearly hurt."

I mumbled, "You're welcome."

I rolled toward him and lip locked with his right nipple and sucked on it for a while (getting his semen smeared on my face). Then I got up on my knees and started stroking and in seconds I came on his chest. After I was done dripping on him he got up and walked quickly to the bathroom and took another shower.

After he was cleaned-up and back in bed he whispered to me to come close to his face. He grabbed the sides of my head and pulled my mouth into his and slowly kissed me on the lips and said thanks for great sex. I thanked him for having a fantastic dick and reminded him I would gladly do it every day if he wanted.

As I fell asleep I considered if getting married to Jen meant I couldn't do this anymore I'd call off our marriage plans. The only thing that would make this better is if Dan could tear down the bullshit hetero wall he built between us. He's not pretending to be hetero, he's pretending to be `not gay' in front of me. He thinks I care. I couldn't care less. But it's so stupid and self-defeating. He has no secrets with me, but he acts as if he does. I've been sucking his dick for nearly 20 years!

I also considered how horrible it would be for me if Dan got married some day and cut me off.

If one day Dan told me he was coming out as Bi I'd tell him it happened in 10th grade, it's no big deal, everybody knows anyway. Just enjoy your life, and be proud of your body.

"Hell Dan, God gave you a dick that most guys would be thrilled to have and you want to keep it all tightly packed away like it was dangerous, like it might bite someone!" I suspect the thing he's worried about the most that he might someday French kiss me and discover he's been wrong about gay sex his entire life! And that would be the day he surrendered to his urges and started to speak with a hissy fag accent he couldn't control.

I told him before those guys talk hissy because they want to, it's totally voluntary. They tried it for a few days and it stuck in their head, it's like moving to England and then you start speaking with their accent. I've told Dan that hissy fag talk is clearly not gay, its political. But lots of lifelong hetero men believe hissy talk is fag talk, but it's not. And women do hissy talk too for the same reasons. Hiss is the same thing as Up-Talk (aka: Valley Girl Speak), it's a person's way of publically telling strangers what social group they live in. It's a form of virtue signaling.

We discussed `gay' for nearly an hour in the dark on the sofa, sandwiched together.

"What does it mean to you?" he asked me.

"Well remember I don't consider myself truly gay. And I believe the vast majority of gay men around the world live silent lives acting straight and normal, the silent majority. To me a gay man is someone who prefers the company of other men, he likes the same things most other men but when it comes to sex he prefers intimacy with other men. He enjoys his erections and enjoys his orgasms, and loves the excitement and pleasure that comes from sharing it with other men. He also prefers men because you never have to guess if what you are doing in bed feels good, because you can test it on yourself, since we're all built the same."

"Some men prefer anal sex over everything, I've tried it but I still like oral sex the most, I prefer vaginal sex over anal sex any day, but yes I've had anal sex, top and bottom. Some men kiss men, others don't. I've heard the main reason why men don't kiss men is the feeling of razor stubble on the upper lip, they prefer the smooth hairless upper lip of a woman. I will kiss guys but I'll admit women are better kissers by far. One of the reasons why I love Jen so much is she could be installing ceramic floor tile in her kitchen, she could be on her hands and knees spreading tile adhesive with a trowel and I could get on my knees behind her, slide her shorts down, slide it inside her, fuck her right there on the kitchen floor, then she can immediately go back to installing tile and it's no problem. With most women that would be a tremendous sin you would never be forgiven for, and if they were on their period then no-way Jose! With guys you don't get any of that drama crap."

"I like women's breasts and nipples, I like their smooth curved bodies and belly buttons. But most of them are too catty, moody, and difficult to understand, too easy to offend. You may have noticed Karen is usually a woman, rarely a man. Honey, do I look good in this? Honey, does this make my ass look big? Those are all traps that no man would ever ask."

Dan asked me if gays were born or made and I said it's both, but about half of gay men sensed it before they started kindergarten, but most gays are the silent masculine type. Then I told him I felt gay men and women represented about five percent of the population (one in twenty for men, even less for women). And I was aware I felt desires for men when I was a little boy, long before I knew anything about sex or where babies came from. I told him Gay was often easier to see in women because they got boyish haircuts (Amelia Earhart) and dressed in men's type clothing.

I finished up by telling him it seemed to me like Gay men had code of ethics that steered them into serious relationships with other men, and they preferred sex with men, it just felt right. Bi men liked to have sex with people they felt attracted to, and they dropped the pretense of a supposed moral code, just do what feels right. Enjoy sex, have fun, be safe, and enjoy your life. To Bi men sex was an expression of strong friendship or love and it didn't matter if that person had a penis or a vagina.

Contact the author: borischenaz mailfence