Christmas vacation was over. Classes were starting tomorrow. It was Sunday night. Do I hate Sunday! Always have. And this one was really one to get rid of. The whole holiday had decidedly started spiraling downward right from the beginning. I had built up too many expectations and really thought it was going to be so good. Jeanne and I had decided we were going to spend the holiday week living together.
Her parents had gone skiing to Sun Valley for the vacation, and we would have the whole house for ourselves. I could hardly contain my excitement in anticipation. But when the time came and we actually lived together that week, something went awfully wrong. We were both in sour moods. We bitched at each other. We hardly wanted to touch each other. There was a contained fury in the air. It ended when Jean said she couldn't take it anymore, that it was a good thing she found out now rather than later and she'd appreciate it if I'd leave the house. That was the day before New Year's Eve.
I went to several parties New Year's Eve. Each one I went to I left before long. Looking around at who was there, everyone I saw appeared to me to be a champion loser. And I was king of them all. When anybody asked me where Jean was, I said I didn't know; we'd broken up. That was followed by an entirely unwanted, uninvited solicitude: "Oh, why? You two looked so good together." I couldn't explain.
It was after nine when I came up the steps of the 7th Ave. IRT at Sheridan Square. The street, which had been swarming last night with gay carousers, was nearly deserted now. But the corner paperback store was open. For want of something better to do, and not wanting to go back to my dingy one room and kitchenette, toilet in the hall, I wandered in and browsed through the novels and poetry and then found myself in the psychology section. The store was nearly empty. Maybe three other people were in it, a bag lady, an old beatnik with a graying beard and the clerk. I knew all the clerks, I thought. But I'd never seen this one before. Maybe he was a substitute. After all, who'd work the night of New Year's Day? But he didn't look like the kind who could be taken advantage of.
I often felt queasy when I went into a bookshop. The guys who clerk in bookstores are usually arrogant, cocky, too sure of themselves, and preening because they're on display behind their high counters. They're flirtatious in a cutting way. This one was gorgeous. I couldn't look at him and I couldn't take my eyes off him.
It was warm in the store though it was seriously cold outside. I had opened my coat. He was wearing an old pair of jeans that hung on him perfectly and a work shirt whose first few buttons opened onto a finely sculpted, smooth, bronzed chest, as if it were mid-summer. He had wavy chestnut hair and turquoise colored eyes. It was hard to keep my eyes in my book. My head was beginning to ache. My hands were clammy. I was a mess altogether.
The book I was trying to read was on behavior modification techniques.
Suddenly I was startled. He was standing beside me, slightly taller than me.
"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to scare you. We're closing early tonight. New Years."
"Uh, sure," I said, starting to shelve the book. I noticed we were the only two people in the store now.
Before I put the book back, though, he noticed it. Taking it from my hand, he asked me if I was interested in behavior modification. There was a sly look in his eyes.
I shrugged. "Do you think it really works?"
"Depends. Hypnosis can be pretty powerful." As he spoke he turned the pages of the book.
"Here," he said, "at the end there's a chapter on inducing a hypnotic trance." He started to read in a strong, soft, warm voice.
What was strange though is that I didn't hear him read. I noticed the third button on his shirt, the uppermost one that was fastened. For some reason this fastened button fascinated me. It glimmered and shone. It became two buttons and then collapsed back into itself and was only one. I felt lucid, clearheaded, even lightheaded and pleasantly warm. My body felt supple. I had the distinct sensation I was floating. And then I felt that kind of woosh inside me you feel when an elevator goes down.
"You really do have to go," he said. "I've got to lock up.
I looked at him overcome with a sense of admiration. I was not uncomfortable as I usually am in the presence of such a person.
"Good night," he said, as if signaling. "Perhaps we'll meet again.
I bowed my head slightly as he spoke and cast my eyes downward. I was not looking at his face but at the tips of his boots. I wanted to say "I hope so," but the only words that came out of my mouth were, "Yes, Sir."
With that I left the store.
Now normally, I would have walked south over to Barrow Street. But suddenly, cold as it was I felt the urge to get a look at the Hudson River and started going west. When I got to West Street, for some reason I decided I did not want to go all the way to the river and was impelled to turn north. And then I felt something uncanny. I became aware that all this time I had been walking behind someone, not like following a stranger, but walking several paces behind someone I knew, understanding that I was walking with him but that it would be improper, disrespectful to walk beside rather than behind him. It was the man who had spoken to me in the bookstore. When he stopped, he held a door open for me, and, like a sleepwalker, I went in. He followed behind me, came up beside me and with an arm round my shoulder guided me down the hall and led me into an apartment.
I heard him speaking to me, but I could not quite understand what he was saying. Then I recited the alphabet backwards, something I was not aware I could do. When I opened my eyes it was apparent there was no blackboard in the room. I don't know why I thought that.
I told him my name was Jonah, but he corrected me. At first I thought he was telling me that my name was Steve, that I answered to the name Steve, but then I realized "Slave" was the word he was saying, not "Steve." My name was Slave; that was the name I was now going to answer to. Everything was becoming clearer. My name was Slave. Of course. Why had I forgotten that? Everything started coming back into focus. His name was Master. I tried to open my mouth but found it was impossible to speak. Of course. I hadn't been told to. I only spoke when Master commanded me to. That was clear. It made perfect sense. I could see him now. If anything he was more overwhelming than I had thought him to be earlier. I adored him. Intuitively, instinctively, I understood that my duty and desire combined in the overwhelming need to serve him, to worship him, to expose myself to him. He was my entire world. His will was my will.
I knelt before him and then I bowed low until the tip of my tongue touched the tip of his boot. And then in a frenzy of rapture, of desire, of surrender, losing consciousness of everything save some mystical affinity between my tongue and his boot leather, I began licking his boot. The more I did this though the more urgent my desire to feel his actual skin. I was licking his boot as if I could lick through the fine cold leather to that beautiful sacred foot worthy of all adoration inside. My licking became more ferocious. I was growling with desire.
He bent down. Placing his hands under my arms he raised me up. I stood stiff as a board violently trembling. I was naked. His eyes penetrated mine, carving out a hollow in my depth which only he could fill.
I understood that if I were to serve him (and there was nothing I wanted more) I had to be more worthy than I was at that moment. I had to be physically perfect and I needed training. I craved to be trained. To be perfect in body and perfect in obedience, and thus to approach worthiness to be his slave, that was something to live for.
ii
My first act of obedience was to put a black leather collar around my neck. Then I fastened leather bracelets around my wrists and ankles. Each band was fastened by a tiny lock and each had a ring pierced through it which could be attached to a chain. The only other piece of clothing in the drawer was the skimpiest black leather thong. After I stepped into it and fitted it, when it clung tightly to me, my master fastened me to the wall -back to the wall, to rings embedded in the brick wall- with strong short chains stretched from each of the leather straps. I could not move my head. Ten feet or so in front of me on a small stand, like an altar, a candle flamed and my eyes were focused on it unmoving.
Something was running in my head I couldn't catch, but something stayed still too. It lodged right in my center. It was a voice, but it was also more than a voice. It had the urgency of bone and blood and skin. "My name is Slave, Master. I am your prisoner, Master. I am your property, Master. It is my nature to obey you and to serve you, Master, and to be punished if I fail. The most important part of serving Master is pleasing Master," I recited.
"Look at you." I was stung by Master's scorn, but I shared it, too.
There was a full length mirror standing in front of me. I was looking at myself. I understood what Master was saying. It burned in me. How soft and undefined my body was, how it lumped here and hung there. It was not worthy of the leather and chains with which I was decorated. I was not fit to be a slave. I certainly had nothing to recommend me to my Master for a sexual slave or even as a house servant whose physical bearing and appearance, after all, must be a source of pleasure and satisfaction for his Master. A Master must never be disturbed by unsightliness or by the lack of discipline that a slovenly kept body betrays.
My face, my face was ok, but even that could use some work. The fatty slackness I'd allowed to creep in kept it from being what I saw now it could be, an exceptionally beautiful masculine face, especially if I wore black eyeliner. I understood the person I was to become, hard edged, steel tipped, tight, sharp, a precisely fashioned piece of equipment, sleek and shiny, a tool my Master wielded with an unbearable dexterity, proud like an expensive automobile. I felt the inside of my head filling up with adoration. I understood who I was. I was as empty headed as a girl in love and as tough as any brute.
My Master stuck a joint in my lips and commanded me to smoke. I sucked in a draft and inhaled. Before I could exhale my Master's mouth was pressing mine to catch the smoke I expelled and blow it back inside me. I swam in distant oceans and drowned and was dragged back to the shore where I corpse-like lay with my master's mouth pressed to mine trying to bring me back to life. He succeeded but the breath he blew in me for resuscitation was a different spirit from the one which had previously inhabited me and dictated who I had been. I was Jonah no more. Only the body remained, but even that through the rigorous course of a daily workout would become something else: the proudly submissive body of a magnificent slave.
iii
Weeks went by. I had disengaged myself from my previous life, the life I led before I became slave to my master. I did not start the new term in the film school at NYU. I got the few things from my room and moved out. I notified my boss at the cineplex that I was leaving my part time job. It had quickly become apparent to me that I had no viable alternative in life but to be his slave. It was right. The very rightness of it, that I had arrived at exactly where I was supposed to be, where I wanted to be, excited me. I was shaking with intense frenzy and trying to hold my body as still as steel. I was begging in a voice with hardly any sound for him to accept me as a slave, unworthy as I was.
"Kneel before me."
I knelt.
"Now bow.
I bowed.
He put his boot clad foot on my head and said, "I take you as my slave to own and command, to use as I will. You are my slave."
I said, my voice muffled, my face pressed to the floor, with an intensity of ardor and conviction that surprised me as I heard myself say it, "I am your slave. Neither am I permitted nor am I able to break this vow."
iv
I don't know where the exercise room was, but I spent many hours there, working out. There were about a dozen of us there, all newly initiated slaves devoted to making ourselves worthy of our masters. We knew this about each other without ever speaking. We understood that we were forbidden to speak. We understood we were each under discipline, and we respected each other and admired each other for this. We were a fraternity of slaves. Some of us were slaves to the same master and lived together in a slave harem. Though we never spoke, we bowed to each other when we encountered each other and we served each other, preparing each other, tightening locks, fastening straps, being a workout buddy, giving a massage or a blow job. We kept each other on our toes and shared a common identity. We also participated in rituals together, intuitively understanding how to work well together, as if we were dancers in a superbly choreographed spectacle. Those of us who served my master all had been tattooed on the upper left thigh with the image of a chain wrapping around a feather.
As my body hardened and formed muscular contours, I became less embarrassed to be naked but for a jock strap or a thong and sometimes a pair of thigh high black shiny boots with a Cuban heel. In fact, I desired it. I wanted to flaunt myself and tease, to reach an unbearable intensity of desire and then withhold myself.
Master teased me, called me a slut and said I was a shameless nellie with a perpetual hard on, and that because I had so great a tendency to be a whore I needed to be subject to particular restraint. I was locked into a chastity belt, my cock held flat inside a leather cage, fastened at my anus by a locking device which was pressed up into my anal passage. I was chastened. I had to learn that my cock did not belong to me, nor did my anal passage, nor my nipples, nor any other part of me. I was not free to express sexual excitement but only as it served to gratify my master. I understood it clearly. I was not to be the object of my own gratification. Such a narcissistic focus was a dereliction of duty to my master. I understood that. It was stealing from him.
I also understood that this self-focus of pleasure was inevitable from time to time, but there were things to do about it. Instinctively I knew. Anytime I felt a thrill running through my own body which had not been licensed by my master, I felt an intense desire for punishment. My entire body became as stiff as steel. A tension started to grow in me which could only be relaxed under my master's correction. I was to note each week all my trespasses. And each week there was a time set aside for confession and penitential discipline.
We were in a gorgeous drawing room with expensive furnishings. The bottom section of the walls was covered by a coffered, oak wainscoting. The upper section was given primarily to casements holding many-paned windows looking out onto a surrounding garden.
Master was standing directly in front of me, looking straight into my eyes. He was wearing a tuxedo. I was standing fastened to an oak rack built into the wall fastened to it by leather straps and chains round wrists and ankles. My arms were pulled in a Y above me and my head was encased in a tight leather hood which covered it completely except for the oval eye slots. I had been bathed that morning in a special solution and my body was entirely hairless. My ears and nipples had been pierced. My head had been shaved smooth. I was naked except for the leather thong and harness, the nipple, cock and ear rings. His eyes held mine so powerfully I was unable to cast them down but was penetrated by his piercing gaze. He moved his mouth towards mine. Although to move caused pain because I was so tightly held, nevertheless I struggled madly to reach his lips with mine. Whenever I almost succeeded he pulled back and frustrated me. It intensified my excitement to a frenzy.
And then he ordered me to be absolutely still. The tension stretched through my body and my cock had turned to stone. It stood jutting out of me a sign of my surrender, my obedience, my complicity. My master took hold of the rings in my nipples and slowly turned them.
"Whose boy are you?"
I spoke the words from the bottom of my breath, "I am yours forever."
Before I had finished the sentence my master put his arm around the bikini clad boy who had just brought him a drink and bestowed upon him a rapture of kisses which the boy returned with abandon. At the same time a slim and exquisite man in high boots and a tight black miniskirt, a skin tight black tank top and sleek black hair, his back to me, started rubbing himself against my cock. He turned and faced me and began riding my cock. He took hold of my cheek and kissed me violently on the mouth. He was flogging me with his tongue. Gasping for breath, I had no desire but to obey his every wish. He was pressing something up my asshole and turning it. The swinging movements stirring within me found no relief in expression because of how tightly I was stretched on the fame.
"I want to see you groveling on the floor in despair, calling my name over and over again as you worm your way to the door but not before I've slammed it shut and left you all alone to your miserable isolation. God has made you too beautiful. For that you must be punished. You must suffer. You must know the despair of those who have been abandoned and have nothing to rely on."
"You want him, don't you," my master said with a smile. "Untie him," he commanded several nipple-ringed slaves who circulated unbound through the party in collars, bikini thongs and thigh high boots.
I was released and I stood at attention each muscle, tendon, sinew and bone stretched to its full height. My Master looked through my eyes down into the empty space he had carved out at the center of my being and he said very slowly so that his words filled me like a poison whose power rendered me helpless, "Disobedience to Master Frederick is disobedience to me." I fell on my knees before him. My head touched the floor. He did not hold out his foot to kiss, nor did I dare to initiate an approach. I felt guilty at my longing, knowing that what my master did not offer I had no right to; it was perverse of me, to desire. I was mortified.
v
I had no difficulty in understanding Master Frederick's genius for seeing through me. I was a worm, a groveling thing. The mud was too good for me, and I was blessed to be permitted to squirm in it. I was left unshaved. Prickly hair sprouted all over my body and as it grew became knotted with dirt. When Master Frederick came he would laugh. He stood outside my cell door looking in, not venturing within not wanting to disgrace his feet with the filth (some of it, it shames me to say, my own, for there was no other facility but the dirt in which I lay) that would adhere to them if he approached me. I knew to grovel then before him. It was an overwhelming impulse which began like a tickling in my belly. I began to squirm and wiggle before him. He would extend his silver tipped walking stick and lightly prod me here or there and set me jerking and squirming in that place. It was a reptilian dance I had been brought to perform for him. They slammed the door without notice and I returned to crouching on my belly in the mud. Most of the time, too, there was nothing left to lick in my dish, for it was filled, and that not too fully, only once each day.
I was awake during this period. There were no spells turning around in my head directing me this way or that. I was quite vacant. Master Frederick's control over me was entirely a bodily phenomenon. He was not at all reluctant to use straightforward torture to command obedience. And afterwards, after I was broken, my weakening continued through my sparse feeding. I had no choice but to surrender completely, give complete obedience, forbidding myself even to feel resentment or anger at my situation. It had to become natural for me to utter "Thank you, Master Frederick" when he slapped his leather glove across my face.
It happened like this. I was taken from my cell and hosed down and shaved and then carefully bathed, scented, rings reinserted in my ears and nipples. I had lost weight and fit easily into a tight black sleeveless mini-dress with spaghetti straps on the shoulders. I fit perfectly into a pair of spiked heel shoes with cross straps at the ankle. They had to have been made for me. I wore bracelets and a collar. I was then left alone in a small study. I was standing absorbed in emptiness when Master Frederick entered and I felt his leather glove's slap upon my cheek. Reflexively I said, "Thank you, Master Frederick," resisting the ricochet of my head in reaction, and felt an even harder slap and heard him say, "Hold your tongue. I don't want your thanks." I bowed my head intent upon submission.
I sensed him looking at me.
"So, which is it, snake or whore, which are you?
"I am a whore. I want to be your whore and to please you," I said, a hot shiver running through me from bowels to spine.
He lifted my fingers to his lips, looked at me and said, "You must serve me well." I blushed and felt a surge of confidence.
He wrapped me in a fur coat. We went into the back of a limousine. We rode. With one hand, he smoked a cigar. A blue cloud filled the car. His other hand rested on my upper leg, beneath the fur.
We entered the restaurant. "A table for myself and my whore!" "Yes sir," the maitre d' snapped militarily.
We drank and we danced and we became quite merry. Master Frederick handled me in such a way that other men knew it was ok for them to handle me too. I was taken more than once into a side room where I was exquisitely abused and forced in a number of ways.
I was returned to Master Frederick. He took me onto the floor and started dancing slowly with me. I began to swoon. And then I stiffened. His fist had clamped around my scrotum and held firmly both my testicles and pulled on them. I stiffened and I smiled and said, "My Lord." With his other hand he held me by the shoulder. He spoke quietly but fiercely. "These are out of place. My whore must be all woman. I shall have these cut off." He clamped harder. "Now say 'thank you,' kiss me," he said.
With the palms of my hands I caressed the back of his neck. "Oh, thank you, Master Frederick," I moaned. With infinite tenderness, as if they were made out of delicate old lace, I began planting kisses on his lips and then through the seam they made until I made him part them, and then deep onto his tongue and with my tongue onto the roof of his mouth. He squeezed harder. I smiled. He let go, slid his hands around me, taking one cheek in his hand and pulling it away from the other. I shot to attention as he shoved in his middle finger. "Your ass is a cunt, and it is mine. You'll see how a man turns a girl into a slave."
But I knew it already because I was unable to differentiate between bondage and adoration, between pride and humiliation, between Master Frederick's desires and my own. There simply was no difference.
He took me home, wrapped me in a mesh of gold lace, called me his concubine, opened a bottle of champagne. We were in a Louis Quinze bedroom, fluted crystal stems in our hands. He held the glass to my lips. I drank.
"When you're my girl you must be treated like a queen." He took my hand and led me to the bed. He turned me on my stomach and secured a blindfold over my eyes. "A Queen in captivity."
I drank champagne from his mouth when he kissed me. He fucked me and made me know I was a woman and I was glad I was a whore. It was my nature, my essence, to need to give myself completely again and again to every man I saw who has some muscles and a rock. I worship those kinds of men. I adore a man who knows how to break a girl. I just can't help it. They look at me and I melt. I absolutely wither. It's a natural weakness. Master Frederick tells me that it is my vulnerability that makes me so attractive. I appreciate that. I understand it because likewise it is his power, my sense of his strength, my sense that he can protect me (and that, if he wanted to he could crush me and I wouldn't be able to resist him) that makes him so stunningly attractive to me.
vi
The light from the morning window spilled onto my pillow and across my eyes as Shirley drew the drapes back. Shirley was my maid. She had once been one of Master Frederick's prized concubines. She displeased him however by an unspeakable insubordination. She spent two years in his dungeon, drugged most of the time, thoroughly broken. Like all Master Frederick's slaves she is thin and muscled. She always wears the same skin tight body suit. It is, however, of a dark brown leather, not black, as are her boots and the hood which rises from the collar and covers her scalp. She has a gaunt austere face with jade green eyes and full lips. She is captivating to look at and entirely unresponsive to any look. A chained cod piece locks in her unusable cock.
"She is not only your servant," Master Frederick advised me. "She is your warning."
I yawned. "Must I get up?"
"Master is very kind to you these days. It is after nine. He is pampering you. Come your bath is ready."
I walked naked from my bed through the warm room into the gilded and mirrored bathroom. When I got the full treatment it took hours. Today it was the full treatment, a depilation bath, an enema, a facial and a shampoo and dye. Then I was bathed and scented. My male genitals were repackaged in their leather cage and strapped down. I slid into a black bikini thong.
Barefoot on tip toe, I walked into a small darkened room with an altar against one wall and a candle upon it. I knelt before the altar. My body uncoiled and stiffened. My eyes were fixed upon the flame, my hands behind my back, palms resting upon each other upon my rump.
Master Frederick's voice filled the chamber. He commanded me to rise.
"Get dressed," he said.
My clothes were laid out on a small table. It had become my uniform, the skin-tight mini-dress, thigh-high boots, a collar and bracelets of leather and chain link, also a pair of dark shades. We were going out in the daytime. That was unusual.
Master Frederick was dressed like a yachtsman, tanned, tight white ducks, a boat neck with broad horizontal blue and white stripes that stretched tight across a commanding chest and a loose hanging linen jacket. He was very elegant and very casual. We stopped first for martinis at the big glass enclosed corner bar and then we hit the streets.
Spring Street was swarming with high class shoppers.
"They may talk about going to galleries," I said to Master Frederick. (When we went out together like this I was permitted to speak as much as I liked; in fact, I was expected too, for Master Frederick's pleasure, I am delighted to say.) "But, when all is said and done," I went on, "they are buying things."
"Don't you like buying things?" Master Frederick said taunting me.
"I don't need to," I sassed back.
"Why's that?" Master Frederick responded.
And then I really got up nerve and said, "Because I have you."
Master Frederick slapped me on my butt. I put my face up under Master Frederick's and kissed Master Frederick with a devotion that Master Frederick felt. Master Frederick gave me back a kiss. It sent waves of tenderness through me.
"Master Frederick," I breathed hotly in his ear, slightly dizzy.
"What if I fucked you right here, right now?"
"Would you," I pleaded and gasped as I felt his finger up inside me. He commanded me to keep walking. We walked slowly on that old New York side walk through crowds of people, our heads higher than theirs, looking defiance, his finger dancing within me as we strolled.
Later we stopped for coffee at a street café.
"Do you remember how you used to grovel at my feet, slimed with filth in a dark cellar? I can throw you back in there any time I desire for however long I wish. Master Frederick took hold of me by the jaw, eyes flaming with anger. "All you have to do is displease me. Do you understand?" Master Frederick was smiling. His eyes were closed doors my soul clung to, waiting for them to open.
'Yes, Master Frederick," I said. "I long to be treated however you treat me." I sat in the isolation of my own inferiority. Master Frederick smoked his cigar and began a conversation about Duane Hanson with a woman sitting at the next table.
I sat. Passers-by gave me the eye. I flirted back.
That night Master Frederick made me strip naked when we got home from the ballet and removed anything which had adorned or ornamented me. It dawned on me that he was going to return me to the cellar dungeon and the mud.
"Poor Tom's acold," I intoned. How a thought with an alien reference dared intrude astounded me, as did Master Frederick's lack of response. I was not punished. I was bathed and massaged. Silver rings were restored to my ears and nipples. My head was shaved smooth. My body, kept continually smooth and hairless, already was. I was given a rigorous massage and then I went through a rigorous physical workout. I recognized the exercise room. Afterwards I was massaged again. I was showered and dried by other of Master Frederick's servants. They handled me with something like reverence. A silver chain was put around my neck and two strands of small silver chain links hung down on each side of my chest. Each was fastened to the ring pierced through my nipple.
Master Frederick's loft was crowded with party-goers that evening. I was bare-chested (but for the nipple rings) and was wearing tight leather shorts and high heeled boots with pointed toes. I was permitted to walk freely among the guests. A lean, muscled blond, say twenty-four, could not keep his eyes off me. I was overcome by a perverse desire to tease him, to confuse him, to take possession of him. I looked at Master Frederick. He seemed to know what was going on for he was looking at me with an expression on his face I had never before seen suggesting that we were sharing in a joke we two understood while many others did not, that we knew something. And then he actually laughed, a friendly laugh, a laugh of recognition, a launching laugh which sets you going jauntily about your business.
"Good bye," I said voicelessly.
He kissed his finger, blew on it and sent the kiss to me. Then he turned, lifted a glass of champagne, looking back lifted it to me and then disappeared into the crowd of revelers.
vii.
The blonde was at my side, copper and golden and shining.
"You won't think I'm forward if I come on to you," he said, and slipped his fingers across my chest.
"I'll pull on a jacket and we can get out of here," I said.
"Don't get a jacket," he said. "I've always dreamed of being led through the streets by a man as fantastic looking as you who was bare-chested and be-ringed in his nipples."
"You can still have something to dream about. I'm getting a jacket. Don't move. I'll be right back."
He didn't. I was. We left.
The night was balmy on West End Avenue. The moon was visible above the Hudson in the distance. We passed by the elegant brick buildings which endow the Avenue with a quiet, self-satisfied dignity. A clear breeze flowed through the street and we swam in its current.
"Everything is about ecstasy," he said.
"Everything?" I responded
"At least it ought to be," he answered.
I smirked.
"Why are you so cynical?" he said.
"I'm not cynical," I said.
"No?" he said. "Tell me what happened to make you cynical."
"Are we tricking or having a psychoanalytic probe?" I said.
"What's the difference," he said, "...as long as you love me."
"Love?" I said
"There goes your cynicism again," he said.
I groaned and took him by the neck and turned his face towards mine.
"Now listen," I began, but before I could finish, his mouth came down against mine and his tongue did not have to force his way in nor was mine at all shy about exploring that entrancing passage to his soul thrust upon me.
He backed away.
"Ok."
"Ok what?"
"Ok I can deal with the cynicism."
I didn't even contradict him. I just smiled at him with something like an affection just beginning to grow. In fact I tousled his hair and in retaliation he tousled my scalp. By the time we got to his place we were running and laughing indecorously.
It was a brownstone in the 70's off Central Park West.
The whole thing was his.
"It's not my fault," he said. "My parents are very rich. They gave it to me. I couldn't refuse them. It would have been disrespectful, unofficial."
The moon was hanging in a marvelous crescent and we could see it through the skylight in the attic.
"Are you guilty about your wealth?" I asked.
"You want something to drink?" he said.
"To smoke?"
"Sure."
We shared a joint. It was good nutty stuff.
"Not guilty," he said, "but aware."
"Why don't you give it away?" I asked.
"What do you think I'm doing right now?" he said taking hold of me and kissing me. I flamed alive in my sex and kissed him back with all my heart. Finally, I pulled myself away.
"That's not what I meant," I said. "If you're guilty about coming from a rich family, about being rich, why don't you give your money away?"
He began tickling me, and then stroking me and then playing with my nipples, silencing me with his mouth. Everything flew out of my head. He was looking straight at me. My eyes were falling into his. I felt easy, entirely easy, floating in a delirious dream. Something was whole and full inside of me.
A great sadness then overhung my heart during the days that followed. We led a quiet life, affectionate, continually somehow touching each other, kissing lightly, getting stuck in each other's eye paths.
The pain of this unidentifiable sadness grew upon me and I looked at him with pathetic eyes and he soothed me like a loving mother not reproaching my despair but letting it extinguish itself in the warmth of his tendence.
Then a great fearfulness grew in me and my entire desire was to cringe and withdraw and make myself as small as possible. I cried with fright, without let up. He held me as I sobbed. The depths of despair were bottomless. He held me and gave me from his body and breath the substance which served me to construct within me an essential solidity. To achieve fullness of person! That seemed like something important, worthwhile. The words themselves just in their reverberating resonance within me became arguments for themselves. And all this while I sobbed and all this while he held me.
It must have been a funny sight, if anyone could have seen it: two such young men as we were, hard sculpted bodies trained to the erectness of a beautiful tension, softly one of them crying in the arms of the other who was softly drawing forth and dissolving that almost endless grief. My crying began to mix with laughter. I was crying at the joy of this moment, of his being and presence, and I was laughing at an undermining pain I could not fathom, but which threatened every joy. My body was shaking as if its frame would burst. I breathed. He stroked me out of it and they were lightening eyes looking into mine, smiling, smiling. He kissed the tears away from my eyes. It wasn't corny. I wrapped my arms about him and pulled him closer, tighter to me. How strange that in the midst of all this softness we both had become so hard.
"Can you trust me now?" he asked.
"You only know after," I whispered, sliding my lips up his neck and nibbling at his ear. "and it's always before,"
(When/ If you write me, please put the name of the story in the subject line. Thanks.)