Disclaimer: This reminiscence contains descriptions of consentual sexual activity between teen males. Ironically, if you happen to be one yourself, you're not allowed to read about it, so get back to your homework.
Some of the sex isn't safe, but the events described happened in the sixties.
BARRY'S BEST IDEA by janus znaiu
"Alright... ALRIGHT!" bellowed Mr. Culpepper, wiping his forehead with a rumpled hankie and tapping the podium briskly with his battered baton. "Let's come out of the stratosphere, group. Horns-- this AIN'T Harlem!" He said it to the whole section, who'd been on some free-form journey of their own. The rest of us were struggling through our third attempt at rendering Tommy Dorsey's 'Opus One'. He might have been addressing all the horns, but his stare was aimed right at Barry. It was the final, aggressive blatts of Barry's reading of the trombone break that had sent them to Birdland and beyond.
"We'll all take a short pause while Mr. Llewelyn consults his chart. You do see the notes in front of you, don't you Barry? You'll play those when we resume, or you'll be playing fifty solo choruses of 'Tiger Rag' for me at 3:30." It was Culpepper's musical equivalent of assigning 'laps' for misconduct. He had a different tune for each instrument. In a childish gesture of defiance, Barry stuck his tongue out at the back of Mr. Culpepper's head.
A failed professional violinist and natural martinet, Culpepper ran his band classes by the book, and the book was 'Mein Kampf'. A coarse man for someone of his calling; he had a tendency to quote Vince Lombardi and even dressed like a coach, complete with sweatshirt and whistle under ratty, bargain-rack tweed. Once he claimed, in an aside, that Napoleon had been a 'raving homo' on the strength of nothing other than the fact that he'd been a short syphillitic and that he had a cream pastry named after him.
The one class Barry and I had together was Band, and that only because I'd been moved ahead. In some misguided spirit of experimentation, our school would plunk us into more challanging classes with older kids if it looked like we were getting bored; 'enrichment' they called it. The results of all those piano lessons and music history classes with our father that my brother and I endured every Sunday afternoon made it plain to my tenth grade music teacher that I didn't belong with a bunch of kids who didn't know which end of a clarinet you blew into. So they enriched my scrawny sophomore butt into one of the reed chairs of the school concert band alongside a whole bunch of juniors and seniors. It was a bit scary at first, being the youngest kid in the class, but I'd been playing the alto for over a year and was starting to get a feel for it; I even liked it a little. Having Barry sitting nearby in the horn section gave me all the extra confidence I needed. Unlike most of us, he could really play. And a good thing too, because the rest of his academic record was pretty dismal; he badly needed the ninties he got in music and phys-ed to bring his average up to a shaky C.
Barry flicked his sheet music with the backs of his fingertips contemptuously."God, I hate all this cornball shit," he said to the kid beside him. He glared at Culpepper and raising his voice a little more with each word. "Why can't they give us somethin' hot to play for once? Man, I want to BLOW!"
That particular choice of word, innocent and appropriate as it might have been under the circumstances, caused me to snap my head back and catch Barry's eye. When he finally picked up on his unconscious double-entendre, he half-stood up, reached between the music stands and bonked me on the top of the head with the end of his slide. Then he shook his head and broke up laughing. So did I. That started a private, two-man giggle fit that began anew every few minutes until the end of practice. As the other kids filed out to go to their next class, I walked over to where he was slipping the parts of his horn into the crushed velvet indentations of its case.
"So you wanna blow, do ya'?" I was still tickled.
"Let's cut out this aft', Slim. I need some rack time. You too?" Dumb question. It had been three days of being in close proximity to him and little opportunity to touch him beyond a quick grope. A suitable venue was the hitch, as it so often was. "The housekeeper's home at my place." I said.
He knew that. Mrs. Kowalchuk always had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. Sometimes we'd ditch our afternoon classes on those days and go there to luxuriate in the rare freedom to just lay around boned in each others' company. We'd do each other on the rec room sofa while the afternoon soaps and game shows droned unheeded in the background. By the time the Christmas holidays approached, I'd not only learned to accomodate Barry's greatest treasure in my smallish mouth, I'd become damned good at it. I knew from the first time I blew him that I was never going to be able to throat that monster the way Barry did mine. So I concentrated all my brainstorming on making his big ol' dickhead real happy and let a good, steady hand-jive up and down his shaft control the progress of his climax. I got so that I could tell exactly what stage of excitement Barry was at almost all the time. It always turned into a game of trying to see how many climaxes we could cram into the few hours we had together before my older brother Nils came home from the university.
"I told you I don't want to jack off in the theatre again." I reminded him glumly, "We're bound to get caught doing that. And there's nowhere else."
"Oh yes there is... " Barry said in a teasing voice. He shook a set of keys at me and grinned, "...Andy's apartment." Andy was Barry's oldest sister, Andrea. She'd gone skiing for a couple days and left it to Barry to feed her cat. Theatrically shifty-eyed, he slipped into a thick, conspiratorial whisper, tinged with a vaguely Eastern European accent, "You. Me. Parking lot. Ten minutes. Get it?"
"Got it."
"Good." he said.
A penchant for Danny Kaye routines wasn't all we'd shared over the past four months. We'd also confessed our love for each other, a very, very big step for us both. Oh, we hadn't said it in so many words exactly; it was as if we both knew that to verbalize it would somehow take us to territory neither of us was prepared to explore. I knew how Barry felt about me more by what he didn't say-- by the little flaws in my character he was willing to overlook, by the way I'd catch him beaming at me when he thought I was occupied with something else. But what spoke most eloquently about how he felt about me was the fire in his kiss. In my head, at those times, I felt like we'd become halves of a whole.
Since the beginning of the school year we'd fallen into something of a pattern, Barry and I. We did something together most weekends-- went to the movies, visited at each others' houses, even did some of our homework together. Every Saturday that we could, we'd drive into Toronto to go to The Colonial Tavern for the matinee show. They had a mezzanine floor overlooking the stage that was 'dry', so under-agers could see the show, usually some headline blues or R&B act, up from the US. I was captivated by the horny innuendo of the lyrics (and the not-so-subtle beat) of the Chicago blues; the best of it came through Toronto in those days-- Muddy Waters, Lowell Fulson, Howlin' Wolf. Barry dug it too, but less so, unless the featured band had a hot horn section. The day we saw the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, he had to be restrained or he would have surely jumped the railing and rushed the stage. It was wonderful to see him so happy. We had a lot of times like that.
At school, to our other friends and classmates, we were just two buddies who lived near each other and rode to school together because one of them had a car. Ostensibly, there was little else going on between us than a casual friendship. It wasn't an impression that we consciously tried to palm off on the world, it's just the way it turned out. Both of us kept more or less the same friends we'd had before we started hanging out. Barry had little in common with most of my other school buddies and I thought his, the silver-spooned scions of the country club set, were a bunch of over-dressed phonies. So we just naturally moved in separate orbits during the week. I'd see him in the hallways between classes and he'd shoot me a sly grin or lick his bottom lip a certain way if he was with what I called his Tennis Friends.
If we happened to run into each other on our own, we'd chat for a few minutes and very, very rarely we'd cop a feel or risk a quick buss, but doing that sort of thing was like playing Russian roulette with our reputations and we kept it to a minimum. I used to dream endlessly about some torrid broom-closet encounter, flash on scenes where we'd be blowing each other in some out-of-the-way corner of the school, but it never happened. We were both far too circumspect and justifiably paranoid to try anything like that. If we'd had the same lunch periods we might have snuck off to the ravine behind the school, but even there the risk of discovery would have been high; it was a popular spot for more traditional trysting.
The opportunities for privacy and convenience that I'd envisioned Barry's car affording us didn't pan out in reality either. I thought we'd be able to use it as makeout-mobile, much like our more conformist contemporaries did with their cars. But there were serious, unforeseen flaws in this teen idyll. Barry's car was a '61 Beetle. Thrashing about its cramped interior guaranteed us regular charley-horses and localized paralysis for our best exertions. And that was the least of it. Once the temperature began to drop with the passing of autumn, the real down-side of Barry's proletarian wheels began to make itself known: Volkswagon Bugs had an air-cooled engine, which meant we no heater to speak of. Compounding that was the fact that it was also a convertable. You can take my word for it-- nothing quashes the ardor of youth quite like pulling a sticky prong out of one's drawers in a cold, draughty car during a Canadian winter. Generally speaking, if it's cold enough out that you have to scrape the frost off the rear-view mirror, the one INSIDE the car, you don't want to be pulling your willie out unless you're actually in danger of pissing yourself.
So, with the onset of winter we began to live for the occasional sleep-overs we had at my house. At first a charming convention left over from my milk-and-cookies childhood, they had more recently become a very useful dodge. But sleep-overs were something that I was finding it harder and harder to rationalize to my folks, who thought I should have outgrown what my older brother Nils derisively termed 'pajama parties'. Eight people lived at Barry's house and he shared a room with his younger brother. Our few sleep-overs there were studies in frustration. Not only did we have to do it in the dark, something neither of us prefered, we also had to wait until everyone in the house was asleep and Barry's brother could have awakened at any moment.
My brother had more than an inkling of what had developed between Barry and I and he spared no opportunity to meddle and judge. Nils, always prone to a certain pettiness, had recently taken to wearing his fundamentalist self-righteousness like a suit of armor. His trivialities voiced themselves from behind it in terse, veiled comments at the dinner table designed to put me (and Barry, if he was eating with us) in a panic, while leaving my parents scratching their heads, but in the dark. Both my parents were smokers, so allusions to 'fags' abounded; that sort of thing. When my folks weren't around, his comments got more pointed and cruel. Even when he varnished them with badly-feigned concern for our immortal souls, it was transparent that he was enjoying himself. I began to hate him.
The way he treated me was bad enough, but I could more than hold my own in the offensive banter department. Nils saved his most cutting remarks for Barry, who was too nice a guy to have developed a sense of the swift comeback. That always made me far angrier than anything Nils said to me, caused something hot and bilious to rise in my throat where it would burn for hours. It seemed unimaginable to me that they'd been best buddies at one time. It was almost as though Nils were punishing us somehow for having found each other and for being joyful in it.
Implicit in any interaction with Nils was always THE THREAT. That he might tell my parents what he knew hung over me like a sword of Damocles. In my favor was the fact that sex, especially abnormal sex, wasn't the kind of subject that was frankly discussed in our household. In fact, nothing uncomfortable was ever discussed that could be conveniently tucked away and forgotten about.
Our family life was full of secrets within secrets-- secrets we kept from each other and secrets we kept from ourselves. The few times I'd been discovered masturbating, it was difficult to say who was the more embarrassed, me or the parent who accidently caught me. It always ended with a stilted lecture designed to appeal to my sense of hygiene, with the threat of possible insanity and eyesight damage thrown in for lack of another better reason why one shouldn't abuse oneself. At our house, at least when our parents were in the room, absurd attention was paid to politeness and good taste, so I doubted Nils could find a way to broach the subject with them in the first place. And as Barry pointed out, to do so would have put an end to whatever depraved pleasure he derived from riding us. Fortunately for Barry and I, Nils graduated the year before or I'm sure he would have had us squirming at school too.
We cranked up the heat and stripped to our underwear as soon as we got inside Andy's tiny student walk-up. The cat got fed and watered and we poked around Andy's apartment for a while like horny secret agents. Barry held a couple pairs of Andy's panties in front of his boned fly-fronts and he explained what a diaphragm was for when we found one.
"It's to keep your cum from going where babies get made. The girl puts it inside her, like."
"Like a rubber, only backwards," I giggled.
"Wanna try one on?" Barry asked.
"A diaphragm? No fuckin' thanks!"
"Not a diphragm, dough-head, a rubber. Andy's got plenty of those, look." He opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a twelve-pack of what we used to call 'safes'.
"Okay," I was game. I'd never had the nerve to buy any to try, though I'd thought about it often. I pulled my almost-hard cock out a leghole of my briefs. My balls tumbled out behind. Barry ripped the cellophane wrapper with grinning teeth while I pumped up to full erection.
"Gotta peel your skin right back first, Slim," Barry instructed as he poised the rolled latex doughnut over my cockhead. His fingers tickled along my shaft as he unfurled it to the pubes. Satisfied that it fit properly, Barry bent over and swallowed the talc-dusted rubber whole, tugging at my sac the way he used to when he wanted to make my dick jump. My cockhead felt strange in Barry's mouth-- a little less sensitive than if it were bared, yet not so muted in tactility as it was when my foreskin covered it. His slurping and popping on my dick sounded a bit different than usual and he was attacking me with an atypical vigor.
I noticed that Barry had his hand jammed far down into the front of his briefs; his agitated, downy forearm showed through at the fly. I reached for his dick and he accomodated me by pulling his briefs down to the middle of his thighs, his waistband spanning the gap between them them so tautly that the letters of its logo became elongated and illegible. It was only then that I realized he'd been fingering his asshole for the whole time he'd been mouthing my cock. He laid a big tongueful of spit on his two middle fingers and reached behind and beneath him again.
The last several times we'd been together like this, Barry had been getting progressively more inclined to try things that involved our assholes in some way. It started the time he slipped off that nub of flesh behind my balls and accidently tongued my anus for several whole minutes. I was ambivalent about being on the receiving end, but leaned pretty heavily towards liking it. I never requested it, but I was always happy when he thought of it himself. Predictably, I was horrified that Barry might want me to eat his ass too, but he never brought it up. What he did ask for, and receive, was my sticking a finger in his ass. I reckoned that fingering his hole was the least I could do for him if he was willing to tickle mine with his mouth. And I learned to get pretty good at poking him too. I liked how the ass of his briefs would be rubbing against the backs of my knuckles while I did it. And I loved the way his cheeks would clench when he came like that, entrapping my hand, his sphincter contracting around my knuckle in time with the twitches of his spurting cock.
Surrounded by the Beatle posters and the carnival bric-a-brac of a fledgling coed, trying to avoid eye contact with the cat, I jacked Barry's dick while he continued jamming his hole and sucking me off. I wanted a snack too. I tugged on the waistband of his briefs to get his attention and he came off my cock with a loud champagne pop. "My turn," I announced. Barry slipped his Stanfields off one leg but left them on the other. He straddled my chest and brought his half-hooded knob to my lips, but instead of attacking his fat, steamy drooler, I let it hang there and went straight for his nuts. He let out a quiet whimper and he thrust downward a little to bring his bag directly over my mouth. The salt of recent sweat woke up my taste buds when I engulfed the first testicle I encountered. Beneath the perspiration there was the slight taste of hand soap and the faintest smell of urine. Barry's knuckles caught my chin from time to time as he stabbed his fingers into his hole; his other hand bumped my nose and forehead from the pounding he was laying on his cock. I gave my condomed dick a few tugs and continued to mouth Barry's jiggling balls, both at the same time. When they began to retract spasmotically in my mouth, I knew he was getting ready to spunk. His sudden lack of vocalization confirmed it.
I eased off his nuts and Barry slid backwards along my torso with his ass, forcing my boner to a standing position against his lower back. He wanked himself furiously, precum and spit blending into a noisy white froth. His face had already twisted into that curious, contorted sneer that always preceeded his orgasm. Barry bent forward and, with three explosive groans, deposited three thick jets of hot goo into the hollow below my breastbone. He scooped his load up as best he could and reached behind him to apply it to my latex-encased dick. Still leaning forward, he backed up a bit more until my cock stood in the very crack of his ass, bent uncomfortably downwards. Barry's back-and-forth rocking put even more pressure on my dick, but the heat of his crack felt incredible. He leaned forward and, involving me in a wet, wild-tongued kiss, shot his legs back. Presently he clamped my dick with his meaty thighs, its knob enfolded by his clenched crack. I thigh-humped Barry for several minutes with slippery upward thrusts that had us both moaning. Without warning, he spread his legs during one of my jabs and I found the head of my dick at the very nub of his hole. He half-sat up, looked down at me with a devilish grin and reached behind him to grab my cock. Still grinning, he clenched his asscheeks again and drew me further into his cleft.
The tip of my cock pulsed happily at the contractions of Barry's anal ring, but I had no inclination to do what he wanted. As if he could see my objection forming, he quickly lowered himself onto my poker with a determined shimmy, his eyes clamped shut in concentration, his lower lip sucked in behind his upper teeth. I could feel his sphincter beginning to yield. I grabbed his flanks.
"No." I told him. He stopped bearing down.
"No, not ever? Or no, not now?" Barry asked, pulling off me slightly, disappointment thick in his voice.
I couldn't look at him. "Not now," I waffled, unwilling disappoint him further.
I wondered if he'd used this occasion to let me fuck him because my dick was conveniently condomed. Maybe he'd suggested my wearing it to prevent me from balking on the grounds that I might get some of his shit on me. Once, when I was finished fingering his ass, I detected a fleck of his poo on my finger and kind of freaked out, running for the bathroom in disgust. Lately, I'd learned not to look until after he came and walk to the bathroom.
"Don't worry, Jens," Barry said, using my given name instead of 'Slim'-- a signal that what was to follow was heartfelt. "I wouldn't want do it to you," he said earnestly, "I mean, I want to do it to you, but I know we can't. I know it would hurt too much, 'cause of my size, like. But that doesn't mean you can't... you know."
"Another time, maybe" I told him, feeling creepy about giving him false hope and feeling even creepier about not being able to bring myself to give him what he so obviously wanted. I tried to put it out of my mind. Citing his apparent inability to use the word 'fuck', I comforted myself with the speculation that Barry didn't really want to get fucked so much because HE wanted it, but rather because he was, as ever, concerned with my pleasure. He was always coming up with great ways to get me off that I would never have thought of.
"Sure," Barry said, "another time... " But there was something in his voice that told me he'd never bring it up again.
In hindsight, I can see that the act of penetrating Barry's ass (or, God forbid, offering him mine) would have removed the last claim I had on being 'not queer'. That chart-topper of the queer stuff Hit Parade-- fucking-- was the only thing that we hadn't done. It had to stay that way. I didn't think I had the guts to face the final body of evidence afterwards.
"Okay!" Barry said with an unconvincing cheerfulness and scooted back into a kneeling position between my splayed thighs. He slipped my cock back into my Jockeys and began mouthing it with abandon. I always loved the way he'd grate his bared teeth along the length of my upturned rod when it was cloth-bound like that and I took comfort in the fact that he was doing the thing he enjoyed most. Barry ate cotton with all the gusto and determination of a boll weevil. The condom made my dick slide against the fabric in a novel way. It seemed like the more saturated the front of my briefs got, the more my cock rubbed against it. Without warning, Barry gobbled my dickhead and as much of my shaft as stuck out my waistband. My breathing quickened and I began banging Barry's shoulders with the insides of my knees.
He pulled off me and watched himself jack my dick with measured strokes, the sticky latex smacking as he pulled on it. Inside the condom my foreskin seemed to have disappeared. My entire dickhead was coated with preseminal fluid and it formed tiny bubbles around the ring of my glans. The rubber slipped easily along my shaft under Barry's hand and on every marvelous downstroke, my entire glans shone, mis-shapen under the stretched latex and the pressure of Barry's grip. I usually managed to keep the advance my climax a quiet affair, but this time I couldn't help myself. A series of throaty grunts, in time with Barry's strokes, gave over to loud, percussive OHs as the tension built.
"You gonna cum soon?" he asked rhetorically in his Goofy voice, grinning at me like the village idiot.
My laugh cut the urgency, but only for a second. "You BASTARD!" I gasped, and fell back to less intelligible sounds. My cock was already beginning to pulse its warning and Barry ripped the sticky condom off, painfully yanking out more than a few pubes in the process. He gripped my cock, vice-like, just behind the glans. As if the accumulated pressure of my wad was too much for him to hold back, Barry abruptly unclamped my cock and held it lightly, letting it spurt where it would. One long white banner caught Barry's neck and chest. The next one, just as long and creamy, flew in a graceful arc that laid a bead of jizz from my left tit to my navel. Everything that followed burbled over Barry's knuckles. My cream-coated, unhooded glans looked like a badly-iced cupcake. Barry slurped the white off it with a noisy, ticklish vengence.
Andy's shower was one of those ones where a curtain goes all the way around a small tub, from a circular pipe hung from the ceiling. There was little enough room for one person in it, but Barry pulled me in behind him nevertheless. I was hard as hell but I had to piss from all the soda we'd drunk. I bent forward and tried to pee, bending my turgid pole downwards and bearing down on my bladder. It came out in a split stream, half of which splattered Barry's instep.
"Asshole," Barry carped good-naturedly, "You just PISSED right on my fuckin' foot!" He prodded my shoulder and my stream stopped for a few seconds, then reappeared as a faltering yellow flow.
"Sorry, it's kinda hard to tell where it's gonna go when it's hard like this." My piss stopped altogether.
"You could turn away or somethin'. Sheesh!" Sudden inspiration lit up his face. Presently an amber streamer began to flow from Barry's crimson piss slit. He halfways smiled at me and grabbed his meat backhand. He directed the hot stream to my ankle and got it almost up to mid-thigh before I could get out of the way, but in the confines of the tiny shower stall there was nowhere to run; all I could do is turn my back to him. I felt the stream flow along my the crack of my ass and dribble off my bag to run down the inside of one leg. I surprised myself and Barry both by turning to meet his spray front-on. My cock twitched as Barry moved closer and the last of his piss splashed off my balls.
I grabbed my dick and tried bear down enough to force more pee out, straining to the point of farting. When the piss finally flowed, it did so like cum, in rhythmic spurts of yellow that came to eye-level and fell back hot on my belly and crotch. I stuck out my tongue and was rewarded with a few drops from the last of the diminishing jets that made it that high.
"Whoa! How did that taste?" Barry wanted to know.
"Like this," I told him, thrusting my tongue into his open mouth, chortling at my own nastiness. Pissing on myself, much less tasting it, was something I'd never even thought of trying on my own. I doubt whether I would have considered it anywhere but under a running shower.
"Any idea why my parents would be having dinner at your house tonight?" Barry asked on the ride home.
"I didn't know they were,"
The Llewelyns were friends with my folks, but I wouldn't have called them best pals. Half a dozen times a year they'd "double date", usually to go to some concert or dance. Pop would join Barry's dad for golf once in a while and our mothers had the kind of relationship some women have when they have nothing much in common, but for the fact that their husbands and children are friends. Other than our annual July First barbeque, I couldn't remember the Llewelyns ever breaking bread at our house.
"Tis the season, I guess," Barry said brightly , clearly shrugging it off.
But I sat with an uneasiness I couldn't shake for the life of me. December was the busiest month of the year at the deli, with all the extra catering and literally thousands of corporate gift baskets to prepare. Most nights it was ten or eleven pm before the folks got home in spite of all the extra help they took on. I couldn't imagine why anything as frivolous as seasonal socializing would interfere with putting cash in the till; it never had before. I was dogged by the fear that it could only have something to do with Barry and I.
I came in from doing chores that evening some time after the Llewelyns arrived. The stink of Mr Llewelyn's cigar permeated the downstairs of the house, even from behind the closed door of the music room where both sets of parents could be heard talking quietly in serious tones. I couldn't hear any of the words spoken, but it seemed like Pop and Mr. Llewelyn were doing most of the talking. I was getting really scared now. I'd convinced myself that Barry and I had somehow been found out. Unable to concentrate on my homework, I napped fitfully until I heard Mrs. Kowalchuk calling everyone to the table.
If they'd found out about Barry and I, they were being remarkably self-contained. Dinner conversation was restricted to business-related matters-- the rising cost of wages, retail sales taxes and the like. After dinner they all took their coffee back into the music room, including Nils, which ordinarily would have had me fretting, but I took stock of the situation: They didn't close the door behind them again. This time their voices were more animated and convivial, as if the business they'd met to discuss had been put to rest. Somebody played a Stan Getz album. The cognac came out. I went upstairs feeling a hundred percent better.
I was in my room when Barry's parents left. Soon after their car pulled out, Nils tapped on my bedroom door and let himself in. He sat on the edge of my bed, flashed a self-satisfied smile and gave me the news.
"The Llewelyns will be moving to British Columbia in April," he said.
"Bullshit," I told him, but I knew from his gleeful sneer that he was right
"But look on the bright side-- you'll be sharing a room with Barry. Until he has to leave FOR GOOD at the end of school, that is." He was enjoying himself far too much.
"Go fuck yourself, Nils. You're making all this up." I said, wishing I could believe that.
"Hey, behave yourself, little brother. You have ME to thank for having him in here with you. They were going to put him in MY room 'cause it's bigger. As if I'd have that faggot in there with me. I'd never get any sleep worrying about him trying to maul me.
"Maul you? Don't flatter yourself, chump."
"Say what you like, he's gone as of the end of June."
"Bullshit!" I stormed out to confront my parents.
My folks explained it differently, but the information was the same. Mr. Llewelyn was going to open his own car dealership on the west coast somewhere. In fact, he'd already bought a house in their new community and the one they lived in here had been sold privately only that week. Beginning mid-April, the three highschool-aged Llewelyn kids would be staying at our house until the end of the school year, when they'd fly out to B.C. to join the rest of the family. Barry's older twin sisters, Bronwyn and Gwen, were to occupy the guest room and Barry would bunk on a roll-away cot in mine.
I don't remember anything about the rest of that night other than being told it was too late to phone the Llewelyns to talk to Barry. I don't remember how I got to sleep, or even if I got to sleep. The next morning when Barry came to pick me up for school he was his usual bubbly self. He emphasized how cool it was going to be to be roomies and downplayed the reason for it. That was typical Barry. Of the two of us, I was the one more likely to say the glass was half empty. It seemed unendurably cruel of fate to give us the proximity we'd longed for so much, only to put a time limit on our enjoyment of it. To him, moving to the west coast was an adventure to look forward to; for me, it was like having a close relative with a terminal illness. It peeved me that he wasn't as torn up by developments as I. It was as if part of him were already someplace else, as if he'd already begun to make the break between us, in his head. So it was that I started losing Barry, began grieving him three months before he even came to stay with us.
Christmas came and went. It was never much of an occasion at our house, despite all the decorations, the exotic foods and the orgy of paper-tearing. Few people ever came by over the two days the deli was closed, knowing that my parents would be exhausted and that they'd have to throw themselves into preparations for their extensive New Year's catering after only a short respite with the family. Barry came over Christmas Day though, and we exchanged gifts; I got him a Swiss Army knife and he got me a silver-colored ID bracelet with 'SLIM' engraved on it. We hung out in my room, necking, glancing warily at the door whenever we dared, and making plans for New Year's Eve.
My folks had an annual tradition of going to the city overnight for a black-tie ball at one of the big hotels. They'd take their party clothes to work with them and made a point of leaving the deli by midafternoon, leaving the last of the catering to the staff. Nils would be out of town as well, at some suitably supervised, non-alcoholic overnighter for wholesome young moderns. He'd be with Sheila the She-weasel, who was carrying herself more like fiancee material every day. That gave Barry and I the joint to ourselves for the whole night, something that had never happened before. Putting my sadness on vacation for the moment, I wracked my brain for something we could do that would make our night memorable. I didn't know that Barry had already taken care of that.
On New Year's Eve, I called Barry the minute I was alone in the house and he came right over. "I didn't think you were moving in until April. Bring your laundry or somethin'?" I asked, when he let himself into the entryway, commenting on the leatherette attache case and the bulging gym bag he carried.
"Hey, this ain't the only party in town, Slim. Let's see a bit of gratitude," Barry chided. But I knew he was happy to see that I'd greeted him already undressed to the briefs and socks.
"You mean like this?" I asked. I grabbed his ass and ground my crotch into his. He dropped his bags and pulled me still closer to him. I remember the cool of his nylon parka's sleeves on my back as he enfolded me. We kissed for a long time like that and I felt his dick fatten against my leg. I stifled the urge to drop to my knees; for once we had time.
"Want a soda?" I asked Barry as he dumped roughly half the contents of his gym bag onto the center of the music room floor. Out tumbled many items: a spare pair of jeans, a paperback book, a couple pairs of briefs, a bottle of baby oil, a balled-up pair of wool socks.
"Got anything stronger?"
"Well, my pop said we could each have one beer, but I thought we'd open it at midnight," I told him.
"Grab 'em right now-- we'll have 'em as a chaser for THIS," Barry extracted a tall bottle of greenish liquid from his seemingly bottomless gymbag and held it out for me to see.
"What's... Char-treuse?" I read off the label. "I thought that was a color. That must be the color." It looked like used paint thinner to me.
"I dunno, it's some kinda booze one my dad's friends gave him at Christmas. He won't miss it though. I heard him tell my mom to pitch it in the trash." I couldn't imagine what sort of alcohol such an inveterate tippler as Jack Llewellyn would commit to the garbage, but it didn't bode well.
"Smells like the woods, kinda," Barry said before taking a long pull off the bottle. He came up sputtering. "Wow! That'll put hair on your chest!"
I was all for that. He passed me the bottle and I took a tentative sip. "You sure this isn't cough syrup?" I asked. But I got us our beers and a pair of shot glasses anyway, assuming that you tossed small hits of the liquor back, like pop did with with his aquavit.
By the time the bottle was a third gone, our lips stuck together-- to our own and to each others-- from the thick, sweet concoction. My head and spirits were light, but my body felt like leaden putty. I would have prefered to just lounge as we were, me in my jockeys and Barry in the bottom half of a pair of his thermal long underwear. These ones had a long rent along the inseam at mid-thigh that was safety-pinned in half. I was just about to reach inside it when Barry suddenly sprang off the sofa and began fiddling with the clasps of the attache case.
It opened to reveal a camera and flash equipment, all tucked neatly into their own compartments. "If my old man knew I snuck this out of the house, he'd lynch me. He just got it for Christmas. You know what it is?"
The cover of the instruction booklet, tucked inside the lid of the case read: Poloroid Automatic Land Camera "Sure looks like a camera to me, Barry."
"But not just any camera-- this one gives you your pictures without having to go to the drugstore for them."
"Convenient," I observed.
Barry sighed, "You're missing the point, Slim. It means that we can take any kind of snaps we like, 'cause nobody'll ever see them but us. ANY kind of picture. Even horny ones with no clothes on, if we like." He let that sink in. He lit a menthol cigarette and belted back another shot of Chartreuse. "See, if you take pictures of naked people with regular cameras, the developers call the cops on ya'. C'mere, I'll show you how it works."
Despite a million misgivings, I got completely rigid over the idea of taking dirty pictures of ourselves. I watched over Barry's shoulder as he put the pieces of the camera together and unfolded the accordion-like bellows. He attached the flash and aimed the lens at the black Boesendorfer concert grand that dominated the middle of the room. It was kind of a totem in our house. The only thing, other than a few trunks, that my parents had brought with them from the old country, it was the center of pop's universe. The room lit up briefly from the flash and Barry had me mark the time. He pulled a tabbed card out of the camera's side and set it on the coffee table. A few minutes later we were looking at a pretty acceptable likeness of my father's piano.
"Cool!" I told him.
"Yeah, we have seven shots left. First let me take one of you. Go sit on the sofa again."
"Are you sure nobody's gonna see them but us?"
"Not if we're careful where we keep them. We'll take four of you, because I brought the camera and you can take three of me to keep, along with the shot of the piano."
It suddenly dawned on me what was happening. Barry was providing us with some sexy momentos of each other for later, when we'd be on opposite ends of the country. He might not have been too quick at schoolwork, but he was miles ahead of me in resourcefulness. And I was touched that he wanted more shots of me than he was willing to give me of himself.
I sat on the sofa with my legs out in front of me, unsure whether to pose myself or wait for Barry to tell me what position he prefered me in. He wasn't usually shy about expressing that. I suddenly became aware of my semi-nakedness and the long boner tenting my briefs. Beating back the notion that some stranger might see the pictures, or worse, someone I knew, I arranged my dick at a stance under the cotton I knew Barry would find appealing and leaned back with a questioning look.
"Yeah, that's good, Slim." He handed me another shotglassful of the liqueur and stepped out of his longjohns. He straightened out the folds of my pouch a bit and circled me a few times looking through the viewer to find his best angle. There was a loud pop and the flare of magnesium.
I took the next picture, a foreshortened shot of Barry lying on the floor with the back of his head against the cushioned seat of the sofa. He had his knob between his thumb and two forefingers, his pinky delicately extended. The way I angled the camera, it looked as though he were about to take a bite out of his own exaggerated dickhead, though I didn't notice that until we saw the developed picture. We spread the picture-taking out over the course of the next several hours, unwrapping and savoring the results like expensive bonbons. In between, we made love, unhurredly and without the usual threat of interruption.
Barry took two more of me boned in my briefs. His last shot, one that he took painstaking care to pose me for, was of me standing naked in front of shelves of records with one foot on a low stool, my peeled cock throbbing free and upright in front of me. For the first time, I got an inkling of what Barry might see in me physically.
I only wanted to take pictures of his marvelous cock, but Barry put one pair of the briefs he brought with him on, insisting I take at least one of my allotment of pictures with him wearing them. It turned out to be the hottest shot of them all. Barry was only semi-erect in it, but he had his foreskin rolled back and the edge of his glans showed in marvelous relief under the fabric, which was utterly wet with my spit by that time. The flash caught him just as he was glancing up at me, his fingers just about to reach in past the waistband, which he'd pulled outwards with his other hand, exposing the top of his bush.
Barry and I hit the saturation point with the Chartreuse long before we got drunk enough to get sick from it. We gathered up the carnage and went up to my room, where we lay on my bed to watch the ball at Times Square and we listened to Guy Lombardo play 'Auld Lang's Syne' on my old black and white.
"Happy New Year, Jens," Barry said and leaned in to kiss me again. I could only hope it would be.
END
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