It Takes Two (33 page)

“I’d feel safer,” he said, “in my own place. See, I’ve got a room over at the Royal Plaza Motor Lodge. It’s out on the highway. Not so many people around. Don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea.”

“Right,” I answered. No sense in that. So I asked him to wait two minutes while I went to my room for the rum bottle and a jacket. “We’ll take a taxi,” I said.

We hugged standing up, before he even got the door locked. With his pants, belt and white briefs around his ankles, his shirt unfastened and his cock as hard as a green banana, he dropped his arms to his sides and sobbed.

I held him close. “If you don’t want to do this, we can forget it.” He put his hands around me gingerly, as if grasping something fragile. “Show me what to do,” he said, glancing down. “Can’t you see I want to?”

Kneeling before him, I touched his cock lightly, fingering the smooth, buff-colored ring where some baby butcher had chopped off the protective skin. I thought he’d be wet but he wasn’t. Using both hands, I touched his sack, pulling the package down, reaching behind briefly and fingering the hair there. He took a step back. I kissed the head of his cock, licked the ridged underside and then took him in.

“Careful,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Mother of God, be careful.”

“We’d better get in bed,” I said. “Why don’t you help me get my clothes off?”

“Is that what I do?” he laughed. “I’ve never undressed another man.”

“Watch the zipper,” I answered. “That’s all there is to it.”

He had some funny quirks. I like to kiss, for instance, but he didn’t want to do much more than peck my cheeks in return. When I tried to worm my tongue inside his mouth, he turned away.

He’d touch my cock only when I guided his big hands south. I had to hold them in place and tell him what to do. Under the circumstances, this amounted to fondling myself by proxy and I gave up after a couple of uncomfortable attempts.

And yet I’ve never met a more enthusiastic first-time fucker. Sure, I was pretty good at warming a man up back there. Good teachers had showed me how to gently rub, prod and tease with hands and tongue until the other man felt empty and frantic.

By the time I inserted a second finger in him, his head was shifting left and right as if he was in some kind of confused pain.

“This OK?” I asked. “You with me, Frank?”

He threw his chest and head forward. “I can do it. Are you going inside me?”

Along with the bottle of Bacardi in my old pea-coat, I’d brought along a jar of Vaseline. Now I smeared greasy wads of it on our cocks and another wad inside him, going slow, stretching as gently as I could. When I explained what might happen, he looked almost startled. But all he said was, “I’ve never seen another fella’s bone before. You’re pretty big, aren’t you?”

When I entered him, he bit the air like a horse. Then he started crying again. “Hurts,” he whispered. “Show me. Is this right?”

I asked if he wanted me to stop. He said no, never, but to go slow and to touch him just a little.

A little was all it took. By the time I tickled his prostate five or six times he might as well have swum another fifty laps. On the verge of hyperventilating, he grabbed my sides and started patting me roughly. Rubbing his cock would have made him blast fast, so I tried to ease off, touching him gently near the base and behind his balls. But when he started fucking my hand, matching the rhythm of our breaths and hip thrusts, I figured time was up and I gripped and released him, tightened and let go, working my palm and fingers like a vibrating jock ring, sure that he was ready.

Frank was a handsome man: smooth skin, thick black hair, thin lips under a prominent nose, eyes you could dive into. His eyes stayed open, locked on mine, when he started to climax. “Yes,” he said. “Hurts. Don’t stop. Again, again.”

Pressing his hands down on the sheet beneath him, thrusting his hips up and down like an old pro, he unloaded three long shots onto his heaving chest and stomach. The first reached to his Adam’s apple.

He looked so seriously happy I almost lost control myself, lost touch with what I was trying to do for him. Hell, I was a week’s worth of horny, and sad that Bud seemed determined to keep me at arm’s length.

But something made me wait, maybe just the prospect of a long night mentoring this sexual neophyte. Or maybe I forgot about myself in the unalloyed delight I was giving Frank.

Anyway, without pulling out, I slowed, delaying my own release until his contractions stopped. As his breathing slowed, I gradually lowered myself onto him.

“That’s lesson one,” I said. “You get a gold star.”

“I’ve never…I didn’t…nobody told me what—what this was. Was nobody to ask. All I ever heard was, don’t do it.”

“You heard wrong,” I said. “This is dessert. This is what makes up for all the everyday shit men have to eat.”

Gently slipping out of him, I rolled off to the side. “Let me go clean up a little,” I said. “You want a towel?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want a towel. I don’t want to change anything about the way I feel right this minute.”

“You want to try it the other way?” I said. “Inside me. See how that feels?”

“Can I?”

“You’re a natural,” I answered. “We’ll have you saddled up in record time.”

As I got out of bed, he looked up and shook his head as if mystified. “Thank you, Dan,” he said, touching my leg. “Bless you.”

The glare inside the white-tiled bathroom hit me so hard I almost flipped off the lights. Instead, I squeezed my eyelids into slits, turned the hot water tap, rinsed off, pissed and toweled down. Frank’s odor was all over me—musky and slightly sour, a schoolteacher’s smell that was entirely different than Bud’s familiar combination of fresh sweat, talc and Ivory soap.

Returning to bed, I glanced into the open closet. Sometimes I’m nosy as hell and sometimes I find out secrets that aren’t exactly my business. One glance put it all together. I was surprised I hadn’t already figured Frank out. He was a voter-registration organizer who met with young people at churches in Colored Town. He’d never had sex with anyone and yet he was bold enough to ask another man, almost a stranger, to show him the ropes.

On wooden hangers just behind two ironed shirts, spillover light from the bathroom set off a Roman Catholic priest’s black suit, hard-collared shirt and vestments. A black fedora was perched on the shelf above.

I’d never fucked a priest before, not as far as I knew. So I stood there for a while, not thinking exactly, just taking it in, wondering if this was a step up, or a step down, from some of the mix-it-up sessions I’d sold myself into back in Japan.

When I got back in bed Frank immediately rolled toward me. “I think I’m ready to try that,” he said, drawing my hand to his bone. “What took you so long?”

“That your stuff in the closet? You’re not sharing a room, are you?”

“Just with you,” he said. “I like to travel light. Every bit of it fits in a valise I carry with me.”

Though I knew next to nothing about Catholics, I knew a starched-linen dog collar when I saw one, and I said so.

He continued rubbing my hands over his cock for a few seconds, then fell back on the pillow. “What are you talking about?”

“Your uniform,” I said. “The collar, black suit and robes.”

I’ll give Father Bridge this. The light was still on. His cock didn’t wilt or shrink an inch as he answered me.

“I hoped you knew by now,” he said. “And didn’t mind. I thought you might have guessed that I’m in holy orders. Wanda didn’t know at first either. But she caught on to how crazy I’ve been feeling, how lonely and desperate I get sometimes, doing the work I do. You were the one she and Tommy thought of—who might know how to teach a man with no experience.” He reached over and smoothed my shoulder and neck. “Everybody tells me you’re a true Southern gentleman.”

“And you’re really a priest? Didn’t you…I thought they…I thought you made some kind of pledge.”

“Most of us don’t know what we’re promising. I went right from the nuns in grade school to Villanova for two years, then the seminary. God help me, I tried. The ideal is a celibate life. But perfection isn’t in me.” He glanced down at his erection. “I see now how I’m made.”

“It’s all OK as far as I’m concerned, just a little surprising. But how do you feel about it? Think you’ll regret this in the morning?”

“It’s a sin, that’s for sure. But it’s a sin I needed.” He pulled my hands to him again and then rose to his knees. “Do you think we should use any more of that Vaseline?”

When I said I thought so, and started applying grease, he moaned, “Holy smoke, yeah, do like that. Tell me what I’m supposed to do. Do you want me here? Or up here? You’re going to get a bone too, aren’t you?”

Though momentarily deflated, I gave Father Bridge’s education my best shot.

When I left the room a few hours later, I found Bud waiting outside in his Jeep. He was parked at the north end of the row of rooms, six or seven doors from the still-sealed room where Wash Davis and Hillard Norris died. He wasn’t happy.

“I thought about getting a pass key and going in and breaking your nuts for you,” he admitted right off. “But come to find out, just sitting here half the night, I don’t really know what to think, or what you are, or why I followed you here, or if I even need the fuck to do anything about it.”

He looked so tired and angry and disappointed I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to slug me or was about to break into tears.

I touched his shoulder. “Why don’t we drive on back to the Caloosa, get some sleep and talk about the whole thing in the morning? We got to talk about what it is we’re doing to each other.”

As if he hadn’t heard me, he said, “Why the fuck did you have to come over here with that Yankee guy—and go inside with him? Especially here?”

“Because you left. You said you never wanted me to touch you again. And he asked me to be with him and I needed to be with somebody. It didn’t mean anything. Didn’t matter where it was or who. And now I’m asking you to simmer down and come on home.”

Bud hugged the steering wheel for a while and then muttered something I couldn’t catch. When I asked him to repeat it he swung his leg over the side of the Jeep, stepped out and yelled, “I’d fucking swim back to fucking Iwo Jima and fight the goddamn Japs a second time before I’d follow you back to your
other
fucking whorehouse, Lieutenant.”

And so we swapped salutes and parted company on the sidewalk.

The club room’s Lalique chandelier sparkled like a jeweler’s daughter. Imported from France by a Tampa wholesaler, it resembled a crystallized banana tree sprouting upside down from the starry-eyed ceiling. Combining long, swooping, clear-glass fronds and rampantly phallic, pastel fruit, the Art Moderne bauble gave me a hard-on the minute I spotted it in the dealer’s showroom. Unfortunately, the asking price was double my budget, so I kept on looking. But when the ex-GI salesman saw how much I wanted the thing, and once he learned that he and his secretary could be guests for a free weekend at the Caloosa, he marked the fixture down to cost plus shipping. As a sweetener, he threw in an installation package and stamped the work order asap. I was thus able to schedule a reopening party on the Saturday following Carmen’s beating.

The winter season was in full swing. Admiral Asdeck was in town briefly on his way to Havana. He and I and Emma Mae Bellweather stationed ourselves at the bar, telling war stories, greeting customers and speculating on the chances of posting a NO VACANCY sign before Easter.

In fact, the Caloosa was overbooked by four rooms on the following Friday. But I figured we’d work out the tight squeeze someway. If worse came to worst, I could always give up my second-floor single—and set up a dormitory for agreeable bachelors in one of the suites.

While I drifted in and out of raunchy fantasies in which three or four men frolicked in a seventh-floor shower, Emma Mae leaned back against the bar and began another tall tale.

“Well, gentlemen,” she said, rubbing her hands together, “There was this here pussy-starved master sergeant from Chicago—excuse my French, Admiral. But this butt-fucking senior trooper with a beer belly and a shirtsleeve full of hash marks, he shows up outside our billet after hours, and three sheets to the wind. Starts beating on the door, howling like a Polack banshee, calling out, ‘I need somebody to love!’ ”

“Love?” Asdeck answered, leaning closer to Emma Mae, his thin, appreciative smile savoring the word. “Imagine that.”

“Inspecting waves’ bottoms and laying waste to pussy is what was on his mind, Admiral. Not Love. So there was this big Tennessee girl with a mouth on her, Dorothy Ann Claremont, and she hollers down to him, ‘Plug yourself into these beauties, Sarge. That’s all the loving you’ll get here tonight!’ ” And she threw a big box of stale, leftover doughnuts at him—from the upstairs window.”

Couples were dancing and men were playing cards. Tommy was crooning a bittersweet love song: