Harold's body was wracked by a fit of coughing and he struggled for breath between coughs. His head ached with fever pain, and his eyes were glassy with illness. He was soaking wet and shivering.
Ben was at his bedside, one hand on his drenched forehead and the other pressed against his back.
When Harry was calm enough, he let go of him.
He took the pair of dry pajamas and some fresh underwear from on top of the dresser and put them on the table beside the bed.
Come on, kid. We gotta change you. You're soaked through. Could get sick, you know.
He lifted the quilt and helped Harry sit up. He unbuttoned the tops, pulled the snaps open at the waist and got Harry out of his pajamas. His once well-knit and muscled torso was wasted.
Underwear, too.
He folded him naked inside a big fluffy towel and patted him dry, folded him quickly but meaningfully in his arms, too. Then he helped him into new socks, underwear, and flannel pajamas. Then he gently toweled his head and combed his hair.
Now sit in the chair and don't move while I change the bedding, Ben said. I don't know what I ever saw in you.
Harry was too weak to be irritated. Ben would always be Ben, cheap jokes and all. He sat quietly; he did as he was told. Anyhow, he knew why Ben was doing it and liked him all the more for that.
It felt wonderful to be propped against a fluffed up pillow in a dry bed, in dry pajamas, half his face covered by a dry, fresh-smelling quilt cover.
When Lorenzo came home, they brought him a tray with soup and soft, dark bread and then a bowl of steamed organic vegetables and brown rice. He tried, but he could hardly eat any of it.
You guys have really been kind, he said to them. But I can't eat it.
Lorenzo kissed him on the forehead.
You're gonna get better. Don't get maudlin
But he didn't get better. In fact he died.
2
When Ben and Lorenzo had finally finished with the bureaucracy of death, they collapsed under the weight of grief and spent many days unable to concentrate on anything and broke down crying sometimes alone and sometimes in each other's arms.
Bill Anders at the ad agency told Lorenzo he oughtn't feel obliged to keep regular hours until he felt he could again. But Lorenzo did not believe in being self-indulgent, found it hard to go against the discipline he prided himself on. So he thanked him and said he would try to follow as much as he could his regular schedule.
Anders knew him, came round the desk and took him by the shoulders, looked him in the eyes. Bill Anders knew he had power when he needed it. Now he felt impelled by something in Lorenzo - no, by something in himself regarding Lorenzo.
This is too important to tough it out, he said. You do what I tell you.
His words had the power he unadmittedly wanted them to have. The tension flashed out of Lorenzo and he collapsed into Anders' arms.
It would be wrong to have sexual feelings at a time like this, gross, exploitative, blasphemous.
Nevertheless, Anders did and he was electrified by a high voltage jolt of desire that sent pulses rushing through him. He kissed Lorenzo on the cheek. Lorenzo had already sensed the force of his body, and their magnetic fields directed them. Lorenzo answered his kiss with a more daring kiss until they were tearing at each other with desperate kisses proclaiming by their appropriation of each other that life would not resign its appetite.
They looked at each other afterwards with the happy amazement that follows deep understanding.
It wasn't fair to Ben, and best would be not to mention it, Lorenzo suggested; Anders agreed.
They had touched each other. They were needy. They wanted each other.
Ben sensed something immediately the way a musician knows when a note is going sharp or flat.
3
My best friend dies, my lover leaves me, my position at the school is being defunded because of the economy. I'm overwhelmed. And Lorenzo tells me life is a force that insists on living.
And what do you want me to do?
Put some quiet in my mind.
You want me to soothe you?
Try to, yes.
Ben, look at me.
Yes?
Do you think I have no feelings?
What are you talking about?
What do you think?
I don't know. What are you getting at?
If I let my tender feelings for you...
You're my friend, aren't you?
It won't stop there with me. I can't cut myself in two.
Where are you going with this?
Nowhere. I won't do it.
He was unable to say anything, but he knew what she was talking about.
He shrugged. Ok, he said.
He left soon after. It was rainy. He sat on the cross-town bus. What in the world was he going to do? Everything was equally vacant.
4
He was diverted for a few minutes by the television. He had heard a little about Todd Bishop. Despite the pugnacious jibes of the right wing ideologue who was trying to undermine him, what he was saying now about getting rid of the anti-marijuana laws made sense.
But all that was somewhere else, and here he was where he'd hoped he'd never have to be again -- nowhere!
5
He got a job as an insurance claims adjuster. It was ironic. He couldn't get over it. Fate was a cynical bitch. He looked at wrecks, then wrote reports describing them and estimated how much they were worth.
It was deadly work and he needed the money.
At night he was tired. His brain was turned off and he became incapable of thought.
He walked over to Crazy Benny's one Friday night and tried to recharge himself with a brandy.
Chet introduced himself and wondered if he really liked that stuff and Ben confessed he didn't but that his heart had grown cold and one fire to warm it was as good as another and if he didn't like the taste, anyway, he wouldn't miss it then when he didn't have it.
Chet just looked at him.
Even if there were no other reason than that to shut you up.
What?
But instead of answering he silenced Ben's lips with kisses and pushed his tongue into his mouth as if it were his own domain.
Ben stiffened in response and pressed his tongue against Chet's.
Chet played with him and then withdrew his mouth. I'll buy you another brandy. It won't burn as much. I promise. He winked.
6
Ben was face down on the bed, naked, a leather cuff around each wrist and ankle, and from each cuff stretched a chain to one of the four bed posts. A ball-gag in his mouth allowed him to breathe and make sounds, but not to articulate words. Chet was twisting his cock inside him as he teased his back gently with a short black whip.
You are proud to be my steed, my great stallion. You tremble when your master rides you.
Ben threw his head back proudly like a stallion and whinnied.
His whole body shook and his bottom started going round at just the same pace as his rider's swiveling cock circling inside him and he bucked and bounded and each time met with his rider's confident response and each time found himself more firmly ridden, more deeply ploughed. Fingers dug into his nipples, and his master ripped the ball-gag from his mouth and he shrieked as he got fucked, his ass unable to grind his master's cock hard enough.
Thank you master, o, thank you master, thank you.
Chet whipped his muscled shoulders and pressing deeper inside him planted his semen in Ben's bowels.
I own you now, he said, almost growling.
But in the morning Ben did not act as if he'd understood that. So Chet was decidedly cold and explained that Ben would have to go since he was busy the rest of the day.
When Ben asked if they might exchange numbers, Chet said, I don't think so.
Ben froze in the middle of asking if something was wrong as he felt Chet's absence and his own confusion. He felt like a runner on air between two mountain ledges in a cartoon, who is just looking down and seeing that there is no ground beneath him.
He picked his leather jacket up, flung it over his shoulders.
Ciao, he tried to be friendly. Thanks for the ride.
Don't mention it.
7
Demons had entered his mind and were tomenting his consciousness with a death-dance he couldn't get them to stop. It wasn't only a daytime phenomenon. He had lost the ability to fall asleep.
Hypnosis, he thought. Hypnosis. The idea of being hypnotized became an obsession. He brought up the subject whenever he could to see what kind of response he might get.
So it wasn't surprising that he was standing beside a wrecked Toyota on an oil stained dirt floor in the back lot of a gas station in Astoria talking to a cute, tough, well-built, blond guy in garage coveralls who'd been inspecting the car -- about hypnosis.
First they talked business. Clay needed the wreck for Urban Melodrama, an installation a group of landscape artists was putting up on a vacant lot off Houston and the Bowery.
The car was beyond salvation but it had some scrap value and Ben had to determine what Clay could get it for.
As people do when they bargain, they began talking about other things.
One thing led to another or at least Ben made it. They went from the driver of the other car's having fallen asleep at the wheel to how the road can hypnotize you to have you ever been hypnotized?
But it was surprising that Clay said he had been and that he'd studied it and had practiced on himself and friends.
No? Ben said, up to his ears in interest.
Yeah, Clay countered. As an artist, he said, who wanted to hold people's attention with his work, and who wanted to get beneath their conscious layers of perception, the knowledge of hypnosis was very useful.
Could you hypnotize me?
Do you want to be? Clay said.
They finished negotiating the car. Clay got off easy. Just had to pay for the towing to lower Manhattan.
Clay invited Ben to come over to his loft the following day, any time after seven. They'd try it.
Tit for tat.
8
Clay had the top floor in an old industrial building that had stood vacant for over a decade and then found new life when Soho started to pop.
Ben rang the downstairs bell at eight and Clay buzzed him in and was waiting by the elevator, a big open lumbering freight cage of wire mesh.
He was wearing a pair of leather pants and no shirt. Ben felt weak looking at him.
Clay led him through a twisting passage to a steel door. Beyond that was another, and then a small vestibule opened into a grand space made of several large rooms to the left and then a great open room with windows on three sides that looked out over the city.
They smoked a joint and looked at the New York night skyline.
Get comfortable, Clay said. Sit in this chair, and look at me. Watch the pendant I'm holding. There. Do you see it begin to swing. Follow the swing of the pendant as if your eye-strings were tied to it.
As Ben's eyes grew heavy, the focus of their attention shifted from the swinging pendulum to the inescapable depths of Clay's eyes. Their power overwhelmed him. He felt a large space being carved out inside him. Inside that hollow he felt a craving need for Clay. He wanted to worship him.
He heard the sound of water rushing, and saw the shimmering surface of a rushing brook, and felt its frosty waters washing over his naked body until he was quite transformed. Something he did not like about himself, some filthy appendage that was not him but had come to define or characterize him had been scrubbed away. He was lying bronzed in the blazing sun on a ledge of red rock on the edge of a broad-backed lake. He felt the bundles of his muscles stretched to their fullest and the sleek garment of his flesh tightly covering them. Where his mind had been now there was only a golden radiance and an inescapably beautiful music that was always just beyond hearing.
9
When he woke up Clay was straddling him and all he could see was the tunnel of his eyes. Clay had hold of his stiff cock and was pressing it to his own. He lowered his head and kissed him on the mouth, sucking his breath out of him.
10
Ben didn't want to see Lorenzo but Lorenzo spotted him on Mercer Street before he could turn the corner.
What have you done to yourself? Lorenzo asked almost in awe.
What do you mean?
You look terrific.
Thanks, Ben said bitterly.
Hey don't be mad.
I gotta run.
Don't you have time for a coffee? I never see you anymore.
I gotta run, Ben said, and left Lorenzo standing there watching his butt as he walked away from him.
Ben wandered without direction for a while with a troubled mind, unable to stop it from whirring, and unable to hold on to any thought. He felt a crack, a fissure running through him, and through that crack, he felt his spirit leaking away.
He punched Clay's number on his cell and Clay picked up.
Hey, I'm not sure why I called. I was just...
Come over.
What?
Come over now. Where are you?
On Wooster Street, near where the old firehouse used to be.
You're not far. Come over. He hung up.
11
Clay had a cup of green tea waiting and told Ben to drink it, and then said very quietly, I am here, and Ben lowered the cup onto its saucer, his hand dropped into his lap and his head fell forward onto his chest.
Breathe, deeply, Clay instructed. Let the in-breaths inflate you. Open your eyes, strip down to your jock, stand up, straight, tall, proud. I want to see your nipples stiff and pointy.
Take off your shirt.
Pose.
Stay like that.
12
Ben began to understand what Clay wanted from him, and the more he did, the more he wanted to do what Clay wanted. He wanted to please him.
Ben stopped assessing wrecks. He gave up his room in Park Slope. He moved into the loft.
He became Clay's secretary, assistant, cook, body servant, and slut.
He wore black eye-liner and short black leather shorts with side slits, and boots up to his knees. He shaved his chest and wore a black leather collar and a triple-banded silver ring on his left middle finger.
He found a chromium cock ring while going through Clay's jewelry box once and asked if he might wear it.
Take your shorts off, Clay said, and the briefs.
Clay eased one testicle from inside Ben's naked scrotum through the circle of the cock ring and then helped the one behind it through too. No hard-on, he said sharply and licked Ben's cock so it was slippery enough to worm through into the circle. He had to be quick because it was beginning to stiffen, anyhow. Once the ring was secured at its base, a tight cap around cock and balls, the cock stood hard as steel and sharp as a blade.
Clay pushed him onto the bed so that he lay on his back, then cuffed his hands together behind his head. Beginning at his arm pits he scratched his nails across Ben's chest, teasing his nipples with increasing pain, but it kept dissolving into ecstasy.
He took the stiff and starving cock into his mouth and tongued its slot and took it all the way to the back of his throat. It felt like he had enclosed it in the depths of himself and he kept sucking it with his throat as his tongue stroked it.
13
Clay never did that again, and Ben never forgot it and always longed for it, hoped for it, held himself back from begging for it for fear of displeasing Clay.
But Ben did a lot of cock sucking himself after that. Clay liked to pick a stud up on the street and shoot him getting sucked.
GETTING SUCKED premiered at a loft on Prince Street. J. Hoberman from The Voice jumped up and down about it and then David Denby wrote a defense of it in The New Yorker and then Elvis Mitchel turned it into a gold mine in The Sunday Times, where Susan Sontag said it was the first thing she'd seen since Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" that had anything to contribute to the archeology of sex.
[When you write to me, please type the story name in the subject slot. Thanks.]