Playing with Fire. A Nurse's Journal.
By Boris B Chen.
Edited for Nifty.org Copyright July, 2022 Boris B. Chen All Rights Reserved.
What's this book about?
This book came from the journal of Bradley Fox, a handsome young man. He grew up in a dysfunctional family in the near-north suburbs of Chicago. Brad is a registered nurse, he worked in the burn unit at Northwestern University Hospital in Evanston where he worked for two years and was respected by his peers.
Brad described himself in singles ads as tall-slim-smooth-brown/brown. Brad didn't have much luck finding true love. On his days off he was a runner, swimmer, and avid reader of library books, friends described him as bookish and awkward around strangers.
The story contains excerpts from his journal as he met other men, but one in particular became the love of his life, but it was a very rocky road on the way to love and happiness.
Note: This book contains graphic descriptions of same sex acts and domestic violence.
I would like to thank a friend of mine (Mary P.) an actual ICU nurse from Yuma, Arizona. She donated the medical/nursing terminology for this story. The situations and characters in this story are totally fabricated. None of it ever happened.
Several scenes in this book take place outside the famous Baha'i Temple in Wilmette, Illinois. It might be a good idea to search for that landmark online to see what it looks like before reading the book. The red brick street beside the temple is Linden Avenue, which is frequently mentioned. The bullet shaped temple was used by pilots training to serve in WW2 in the Pacific and was called Point Obo.
Feedback to: borischenaz at gmail.
Characters:
Bradley Fox: 27 yrs old. Looked like actor Gregory Smith in the 2005 film 'Nearing Grace.' 5'11" 125lbs, brown/brown. No tats or piercings. Self confident, physically slender, built like a runner.
Patrick Flynn: age 18. Built like actor Joe Dallesandro in the 1974 film 'Flesh.' 5'9" dark red/blue 145lbs, sort of a sexy muscular bad guy appearance , identical twin brother, anger issues, dysfunctional family.
Phillip Watt: same age as Brad, in 12th grade he was 5'7" 132# brown/brown and somewhat pale. James: 29yrs old, 5'10" 180# blue eyes.
Chapter 1. Coming out to my parents.
I'm Brad Fox, or Bradley as my parents still called me. Yes, I lived in my parent's basement in Wilmette. You should practice my name so you say it right. You look in the mirror and with a tone of voice like you're tired of saying it, then say it like my mom: 'BRAD-leeee.' The way she said it sounded like she's chronically disappointed. She also doesn't yet realize I will probably be the guy that selects her nursing home some day.
They built me an apartment in the basement with one large room that was both kitchen and living room. It had a small bedroom, bathroom, and a long skinny area with washer/dryer and a spot for my desk in the back. I paid to live there and did the outdoor chores. My apartment had a private entrance that opened to the driveway in the back yard.
I went to New Trier East (NTE) in Winnetka, graduated in 1991, then left for nursing school at Western Illinois University graduated in 1995 with a bachelor's degree in nursing. It seemed they believed I would get married or move to San Francisco but I came back to Wilmette after college.
Most of the time I rode the 'L' (short for: Elevated) to work at Northwestern University Hospital in Evanston three nights a week. I worked weekends in the burn center, a six bed unit that sometimes doubled as an ICU step-down when we ran out of burn patients. The pay was very good plus I liked the night shift hours. My coworkers were cool, I was never sexually harassed by coworkers.
Yep, I'm out to my family, which happened during seventh grade. I could write a book about that weekend! I'll tell you the short version right here but there's soooo much more that went on.
I've had a few boyfriends after high school graduation. Macomb was not the most gay friendly town when I was there, so I mostly stayed on campus and kept to myself.
I know there's a certain crowd with the medical-sex fantasy. I'm not one of them but I've had more than a few patients drop a hint after they heard my slight gay accent and incorrectly assumed I wanted some action. Mostly they're gross, sometimes they're not. Let me tell you about some of them, the reason I started keeping a journal.
First off let me tell you some of my gay history: I came out to my parents when I was twelve. You could say my mom reached in my closet and dragged me out. I was in my 3rd floor (attic) bedroom at the time and had a (gay-ish) friend from the neighborhood spending the night, his name was Phillip Watt. We lived about two blocks from each other. Back then we did not use the word 'gay' we call ourselves 'queer.'
Up 'till that weekend I'd never done serious stuff with a guy but thought about it all the time. I knew I was interested in guys since I was a kid but I never knew exactly what it meant until around 6th grade when we had human development class (aka: Puberty for Idiots). They never said the G-word or the H-word but I knew I wasn't interested in girls sexually but some were fun as friends. I liked looking at naked female bodies in magazines like Hustler, but boys were plentiful and I saw hundreds of them in PE three times a week, where everyone got naked and wet.
Phil stayed overnight several times a year at our place and me at theirs since we became best friends in 6th grade. I think we were in the same Cub Scout troop back in fifth grade but we didn't speak much because I was pretty shy and scared of getting beat-up for not being a macho boy. My parents made me join Cub Scouts to make me more masculine, but guess what? It didn't cure me. I was only exposed to more boys, and sometimes in bathing suits.
My life changed course in 7th grade one Friday when Phil spent the night at my house. I had an attic bedroom on our 3rd floor. It was a long and skinny room. My windows looked out onto the front and back yards. I could hear the L train wheels squeal if the windows were open. I grew up with that noise so I really never notice anymore. We ate homemade pizza that night then went up to my room to read my copies of Hustler, Penthouse, Passport, and Mad magazine with the radio on in the background. We both lounged around in our school PE shorts with the movie Johnny Mnemonic playing on VHS near the bed. I got that movie mostly to see Keanu with his shirt off.
Around 9pm we were both on our third mags getting plenty aroused, I was on my back, he was on his stomach half-way down the bed. He reached over and grabbed the lump in my shorts and said, "Jus checkin.'" Up to that weekend we'd seen each other in the gym showers and even goosed each other many times wrestling around at his place or mine, all in good fun. He had a nice body and had caught me staring at him (several times) in the locker room. We saw each other start puberty only a couple months apart near the end of 6th grade, that was a major event.
A few minutes later he set his hand on my hairless stomach and strummed my belly button like a guitar. I pretended not to notice. His finger went down inside my belly button hole and wiggled around then his hand moved back south to the ridge in my shorts and he gently squeezed it several times and rubbed his hand around, which made it hard. He pushed the leg of my shorts up and pulled out my boner then leaned over and took the head in his mouth and teased it with his tongue, then licked it like a popsicle.
Things got more intimate as we lay on my bed with my boner in his hand, I acted like nothing happened so he kept doing it. It only took a few minutes until he had my entire boner back inside his mouth.
What we didn't know was my mom had silently crept up the stairs into my room and was standing there watching us for about a minute until she gasped and stormed down the stairs to the 2nd floor hallway. I heard their bedroom door slam shut followed by muffled voiced yelling and a woman crying.
Phil looked at me with fear on his face. "Should I go home?"
"Nah, just be cool, but move back to that end of the bed for now." I reached down to fix my shorts and found my rod was totally gone but it was wet with saliva. Phil turned around and was reading his magazine at the far end of the bed like nothing happened. He stacked some pillows around himself so he would be hard to see from the stairs.
About thirty minutes later both my parents came upstairs like a pair of Christian Missionaries, they would have brought a bible along but none of us had one!
I've always wondered how Mom managed to get pregnant with me in the first place because she always acted like anything to do with sex was offensive, so the topic was forbidden at home.
"Bradley, do you have something you want to tell us?" Is what she said looking all serious, like she'd been crying and it was all my fault.
I sat there for a few seconds ignoring Phil with his red ears and worried look. I thought about it and considered that there really wasn't anything they could do to me because I was a minor and never got in serious trouble or used drugs or skipped school and my grades were all A's (except Gym was a B). So I swallowed deeply and quietly said, "I'm gay."
I used the word Gay instead of our word Queer because my mom watched Phil Donahue on WGN-TV and his experts used Gay.
You could have heard the termites in the walls the place got so quiet for a few seconds. Then they quietly marched back downstairs and the war was suddenly over. Phil was flat down on the bed so they probably didn't see him and forgot he was there. He offered his hand to exchange some skin silently. Then he pointed at himself and nodded yes. I knew already he was gay too, the entire 7th grade knew that secret. He was usually the one that got us into doing dumb shit.
He stayed the rest of the night. After about an hour discussion he got back into position and jerked me off, I came on my stomach. Then he got up on his knees, jerked and came on my pale white stomach. It was about 2am before we got to sleep. That was the first time we saw each other orgasm or did anything more than casual goosing. We'd had a hard time discussing jerking off because we lacked a vocabulary and felt somewhat embarrassed admitting we did it almost every day.
The entire house was abnormally quiet that night.
The next morning Mom came back upstairs like the Spanish Inquisition and woke us up. By then we were both in our shorts at opposite ends of my bed. Phil could have slept on the sofa in my room but never did. We were in a totally non-sexual position when she blasted up the stairs without knocking. She looked a little upset and I secretly hoped she was up all night crying about her loss.
Phil went home on his bike without breakfast but they did not order him to leave, he left on his own. We ate in our kitchen without speaking. I hated the silent treatment from my parents because it meant they were unsure what to do next (uncertainty from management was never a good sign). I think I created a situation they were unprepared for, their silence was better than 'get out of our house you disgusting sodomist!'
They never really said anything about my pronouncement or anything for months to come. I later found out they both went to see a head shrinker who directed their lack of a response. I heard years later that they also worked on Mom's fear of discussing sex too. I think that alone said something serious about my parent's relationship and my suspicions about Dad's secretary and him.
Phil and I continued to perform dick pleasure experiments until the end of high school. Most of Wilmette was paved and well lit so we had to be creative to find places to do stuff without getting caught. The grassy park near the Baha'i Temple was one of our favorites, plus it was only one block from home but we had to do it in the trees along the Chicago River, usually up in the trees.
Ever suck dick up in a maple tree? I have.
When I got my driver's license Dad gave me his tired old black 1983 BMW 320i (185,780 miles), then we tried doing stuff in the back seat parked in various dark places. One weekend we spent three hours in the parking lot at the Wilmette Police Department in the back seat with black towels over the windows and got away with it, that was our crowning achievement. We also used the parking garage at Evanston Hospital often too. By our Junior year there wasn't much we hadn't tried. We knew every square inch of flesh on each other.
When I went to college in Macomb Phil and I fell out of contact and I haven't seen him since August of 1991. I knew his family moved that year, he had my address at school but never wrote. Someone from NTE said Phil got married to a girl he met in Florida, that's why he left Illinois. I guess he found the cure, or maybe he got better at telling lies.
Mom and Dad seem to have accepted that grandkids were not likely (I was their only child, the heir apparent). I sensed they had a desire to do what's right for me but didn't want to hear any of the sordid details was why they built the basement apartment (while I was in college). I could come and go without them seeing my every move or who came over. Plus I cut their grass and ran the snow blower in addition to paying $20 a week to cover utilities. I seldom ate their food since my place had a small kitchen. The only things my basement apartment lacked were a dishwasher and vast cabinet space so I ate lots of microwaveable foods on paper plates, I learned that skill in college.
At school they paid my books and dorm expenses all four years and tuition. Back then WIU tuition only cost $115 per credit hour. They owned a business in Chicago (Reliable Medical) and were rather wealthy, plus I think they realized I was the only heir so they couldn't disown me. But the bottom line was I was always reliable, honest, and responsible. Mom still called me a sodomist sometimes, her apparent frigidity made me suspect dad and his busty secretary at the factory.
There's a lot more to the story of my coming out but I'll say that for me it was not a single event, but each time got easier. Now, years later Mom and I still never discussed my sexuality but she was slightly interested if I was dating or in love, probably holding onto hope that one day it would be a woman that would produce a grandchild. Accidents happen!
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail
Note to readers: To those that read the original version of this book that appeared on Nifty, circa 2016... you will notice it has undergone a major re-write. My first intention was to correct the dreadful grammar and post it quickly on Nifty, but the more I worked on it I realized it really needed a major overhaul. Most of the original characters will remain the same but this version will be more dramatic.
Your comments (criticisms) and suggestions are always welcome and valuable to me. Keep in mind this story is 100% fiction.
Some of my other books on Nifty are: Crossing Panama and Response Team. My older books are available on Amazon, some of them will eventually return to Nifty after I write custom versions that don't violate copyright rules. My most popular book to date on Nifty was: Our Cabin in the Woods (aka: Camping in Kentucky).