(no subject)
Continued from here.
I gently rapped on the double-doors to Kyle’s bedroom, and he bid me enter. I didn’t know what was taking so bloody long, but when I got inside I realized that he was sitting at his vanity with his head in his hands again, looking very miserable despite the fact he was dressed to the nines in a pleasingly tight pair of denim trousers that rode absurdly low.
“You slut,” I said, slipping a hand down his slacks, making sure to let one finger run down his pronounced crack. “These slacks are so obscene it should be illegal.”
He raised his head. “Are they? I surely wouldn’t want it to be too obvious that I’m on the prowl.”
“Oh.” I took my hand out of his pants and stuck it in my pocket. “Are you, now?”
He sighed, and got up to face me, crossing his arms over his chest. He was wearing a very nice green sweater, with a draping collar, but for some reason it was apparently too short to cover his arse. Kyle had not always been a good dresser, but he had come over the years to develop his own style, which I found interesting and titillating, or perhaps it was merely the idea of fabric gently brushing against his skin that intrigued me. “I suppose I am going to forever be on the prowl,” he said sadly. “It’s just a fact of life, isn’t it? We become romantically aware of ourselves and the people around us, and then we proceed to spend the duration of our lives groping around in the dark for something or someone, in most cases someone, to fulfill this unspeakable need that can barely be described. Do you know what I mean?”
He looked across at me, his green-brown eyes steady, studying my face. I thought he might be looking at my lips. I knew what he meant, and yet I did not - I was no longer looking for someone; in fact, I’d found him, and he was standing across from me, and I could see a strip of flesh between the top of his trousers and the hem of his sweater reflected in the vanity. (For the record, Kyle was not so gay as to purposefully go out and purchase a vanity. He was, however, gay enough to use the vanity that had come built into the woodwork in his bedroom.) The issue for me was that of all the men I had made a very earnest attempt at partially domesticated normalcy with, none had lived up to the standards by which I envisioned Kyle to live. Knowing this, it was hard to be honest with him. I was hardly about to say, ‘Yes, darling, you are my unattainable; won’t you come move into my flat with me? I am the fulfillment you’ve been waiting for.’ So instead, I cautiously said, “I do.”
“I do too.” He shook his head remorsefully. “I do too.” After grabbing a tissue, he blew his nose, and then said, “I’m sorry, I’ve been off contemplating what it will be like to spend the duration of my life in self-loathing. Did you need something? All this solitary misery must seem terribly rude.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m well. I just couldn’t stand to spend another moment with Miss B, listening to her go on and on about old books.”
“Why, sweetheart, I thought you adored old books.”
“And maybe I do, but there are few less interesting things in life than speaking about them with a fussy sort of widow who deals in these things for a living.”
“That’s a wonderfully cruel thing to say, Stan Marsh!” Kyle sat back down at his vanity, mouth open in exasperation as he dug around a drawer, not pausing until he uncovered a pair of tweezers. “She might be drier than Out of the Silent Planet, on the outside, but she’s got a sweet spirit that I readily admire. And don’t you call her a widow!”
“Well, what can I say? I’m low on sympathy tonight.”
Kyle grunted, frowning as he plucked his eyebrows. “I should have done this before you both came over,” he admitted. “I’m just running so late.” With a groan, he dropped the tweezers, and turned around to face me. “What do you think?” he asked. “Too heavy-handed?”
“I thought you looked fine before.”
“Well, thanks. As much as I appreciate your company while I dress, though, I find it terribly rude of you to have left poor old Miss B just sitting there to rifle through my Poiret tome.”
“Yeah, well, she can handle herself.”
“I don’t know how you can be so pitiless.”
“Well, she seems just fine,” I insisted. “I mean, we all lose people. You just lost Christophe.”
“Christophe may no longer be sharing my bed and soiling my linens,” Kyle began, nodding toward the bed for emphasis, “but he is alive, which means he is likely milling about somewhere. He will continue to frequent the same spots I do, and he’s clearly comfortable with that nasty radical MP I mentioned earlier. You know the one, Gregory?”
“I have never met him,” I confessed.
“Well, you know of him. I asked my mother to do some checking, yeah? You know, or tell me what she knew about him? Well, turns out he’s been holding up some censorship bills of hers, making little dreadful speeches about fairness and all that.”
“Who is he kidding?”
“Not my mother, that’s for sure! He sounds like a complete bastard. In any scenario, my point about him is this: If I ever want Christophe for some reason, if only to gaze upon him, all I have to do is go down to the pub, or track down Gregory and make an inquiry. I should hardly commit to describing how I felt about Chris at the time we were cohabitating, because I certainly did not love him. I’ve loved once, and frankly, the endless search to reproduce it has been exhausting.”
For a moment, I paused. I’d never heard him say he’d loved anyone before, or to have singled the matter out so readily. I wasn’t sure to whom he could have been referring, as there would have been several pretenders. Craig? Eric? He’d just said it wasn’t Christophe. I badly wanted to know, and yet thinking about it was exhausting and disappointing. He was still babbling on about it, but I wasn’t paying very close attention.
“Kyle,” I interrupted. “The point?”
“Oh, the point. Let’s not forget that. The point, dear, is that as many times as I’ve had my heart broken, all of these men are still very viable, do you know what I mean? I believe I could have them again, if I liked.” He looked very sad. “But Butters,” he said in a hushed voice. The cross of his arms seemed like it had suddenly gone from stern to protective. “Well, he’s at quite a loss. He wasn’t left, not the way I’ve been left.”
“Or I’ve been left,” I reminded him.
“Sure, or that. You know, she was more like … abandoned. In a very real way.” Kyle paused dramatically one last time, and then concluded in a very breathy way, “Forever.”
“Seems like a long time.”
“Well, do you ever think she might meet someone again?”
“I don’t know, darling. I’m not in the business of projecting her love life.”
“Well, let’s try to help, if we can. Oh, right.” Kyle glanced behind himself and noticed his keys on the vanity, picked them up and made a protective fist around them. “These’ll come in handy if I need to get back in here.”
“Planning on abandoning the flat?” I asked.
“Well, no, of course not.” He slipped his keys into his front pocket. “But I try to keep alive the possibility of going home with someone else entirely.” He was about to shut off the vanity light when he paused, and said to me, “Please say you’ll do me a favor.”
“Anything, darling.”
He breathed deeply as a preface. “If I run into old Clyde, please don’t let him have me again.”
I obviously scowled, and he saw this and amended his request.
“Oh, all right, I suppose I should rephrase that. Please don’t let me do anything more with him. Everything but the meager two minutes of thrusting he can manage is so severely draining. I simply don’t want to do it.”
I had to think of something to say. “And here I thought you were enthusiastic about the whole thing.”
“Well, it’s his cock, dear,” Kyle explained. “It’s a beautiful specimen, and there’s something savory and nasty about it, something I can appreciate. But it’s him, you know, I cannot stand him.” With a rarely seen humility, he clasped his hands. “So, please, dearest, I am begging you. I cannot let my self-esteem drop any lower than it already has this week.”
“Well, certainly,” I said. Inwardly I felt numb, not quite sure of how I should feel about it. On the one hand, it was wonderful that Kyle hated old Clyde about as much as I did at the moment. On the other, his admitted compulsion to saddle himself in other men’s laps would always be disturbing to me.
“Thank you, Stanley. You are consistently my savior.”
After that, he turned off the vanity lights. We collected Butters, and caught a cab.
~
Perhaps a month after I had met Wendy, we were having tea with some regularity. It seems at university one’s time is all leisure, and I was enjoying her friendship to the hilt. Her bitter melancholy was amusing, and we seemed to share musical leanings, at least more so than Kyle and I did. Wendy had theatrical taste at the time, delighting in the choral voices of 50 young men on high and imposing organ chords pulsing through her high-end speaker system. Likewise, she found the minimalist twangs of the so-called Mod sound intriguing. Wendy was quite sleekly Mod herself around age 20, sporting opaque tights and short dresses with broad collars of bold, thick fabrics. We made quite a pair, walking along the river arm-in-arm, her with her knee-high scuffed boots and me with my sickening peroxide-bleached hair with creeping black roots. She liked to joke that my hair was nearly as long as hers, which swung around the small of her back wildly when she moved even slightly. Actually, my hair was not quite that long; it seemed to hover around my ears, although sometimes I became lazy or felt particularly glamorous and let it get down to my chin before I let Kyle cut it for me. At the time, Kyle’s own hair was a big red shrub, henna-ed imperceptibly and teased to abnormally excessive heights and shapes. In the post-modern world, this sort of hair might only be perceived as artistic, but in staid Oxford at the time, it was a direct marker of deviant sexuality. In fact, it was when my father first saw me after I’d bleached my hair that he realized that I was gay. He was livid, and as he was with a colleague at the time, entirely humiliated. I am sure he had half a mind to beat me, but my mother, with her persuasive powers of diffusion, talked him out of it, and it took only a year and a half or so of this for both Kyle and me to grow out of it and return to hair of a less outrageous nature. The damage was done, though.
It was the Wendy of these formative years who introduced me to Eric Cartman. I suppose I should feel less guilt at having been responsible for getting her in with Token, because every time I met up with Eric I remembered that she had introduced him, in all of his destructive bad nature, to my life. I can see her with her fairytale hair and very blunt bangs pouring me a cup of tea over a dainty screen, the clumps of leaves catching as she told me very straightly about her friend Eric, whom she’d met in her French course, as they were working with the same tutor, a funny man named Mackey with a risible verbal quirk she made fun of on occasion.
“The problem, Stanley,” I recall her saying, setting the pot back down, “is that Eric’s not a true scholar. He’s a rower, you see, and I think foreign languages are just out of his grasp.”
“That’s really a shame for him, then,” I said after I sipped an Irish breakfast.
“Yes, well. He’s on the chopping block, I’m afraid, and he’ll be asked to go down if he doesn’t find another course.”
I blinked. “So?”
“So, I may have told him about you, and that your father held a professorship in the geology department. And … well, I may have implied that you’d be able to get him into a geology course.”
I demanded to know why she thought I’d do this.
“He’s a great friend,” she claimed. “It would mean so much to me. I just … well, let us suffice to say that I owe him a great deal.” Little did I know that as far as Eric Cartman was concerned, everyone owed him a great deal. I was not in the habit of pressing her, so I did not beg for more information on why exactly she felt she owed Eric Cartman anything. As I was about to discover, he was a petty bully.
The very moment he looked at me, with my straw-colored hair and pastel-colored pants, he immediately burst out laughing. “Wendy was correct about you, all right!”
“And just what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”
He wiped his eyes. “Oh, nothing. Except that you are, hands down, singularly the biggest, most obvious homosexual I have ever seen in my life.”
I was at a juncture. Should I help the man, or should I turn my nose up at him and forsake Wendy? I sniffed, and asked, “She said that about me?”
“Well.” He was large, even in those days - but this was a broad, well-built largeness, the result of many intensive hours spent exercising, rowing for his college, to be exact. “She certainly said you were handsome.”
I noticed his pink blush, his thick lips; his neck was strong and he held himself with a kind of pride that I had never seen before. It was the signet ring that gave it away; with his short, neat hair and baggy, collegiate clothing I’m not sure it would have been apparent, even with the come-on.
“So are you going to help me, faggot, or not?” he asked.
I helped him, all right - against my better judgment. Perhaps I was soft in those days, or just overly emotional. Perhaps I was still too new at this to be numbed by physical affection - or, as it was with Eric, fornication that almost lacked affection. He crashed into me like a plow, without any lubrication at all, even the slightest hint of spit. It was raw, and I bled profusely, which softened his thrusting, but by that time my asshole was stinging so intensively I could barely make out the feeling of being fucked. Kinder than I should have been, when he was finished I used the mingled, loose solution of my blood and his seed that slopped out over my buttocks to lubricate him.
Fantastic, no, but by the time it was over he’d somehow convinced me with mewling and slapping to speak to my father on his (or was it Wendy’s?) behalf.
My father saw in my tense expression what was going on, and I felt a bit sorry for him. Never when he was a younger man did he expect his queer son to plead with him to let one of his failing lovers join a geology course. It took only the first three weeks of the next term for my father to give up on him. Eric had no aptitude for work; forget languages or geology. As a last resort, I introduced him to Garrison, who did not blink at any pretty boy who wanted to read English. And Eric was, if nothing else, pretty; he got his looks from his mother, a busty daughter of German immigrants. I quickly learned that Eric’s grandparents had come into the country with Liane in 1943, their visas expedited as they were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In short, they were Nazis. Liane I met once, at a commencement ceremony - she was an insanely attractive woman. Eric had no discernable father, and I figured out within hours of meeting his mother that she ‘supported’ herself mostly on her looks and, at times, on her back. For whatever reason, this did not bother Eric. They had the same doe-like eyes and the same propensity for voluptuousness.
Soon, I was not the most obvious homosexual Eric had ever met. “Varnish, really?” he asked Butters the first time I introduced them. Butters clung to Bradley and explained that he performed drag shows for tips on Friday nights at the local queer pub; Eric only guffawed at him and called him a faggot. Upon meeting Kyle, Eric wasted no time dissolving into fits of laughter: “You are the ugliest Jewess I have ever met!” he cried, and Kyle had slapped him. “Oh, you have no idea how to hit a man, do you? I can teach you, you know. I’ll spank your arse until it’s the color of your hideous hair. I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Jewess?”
In light of this, I told Wendy that after having gotten Eric into two separate courses, my obligation was fulfilled. “And I’m done sleeping with him, too, I can certainly tell you that much,” I added. “If he fails anymore courses you’ll have to find another of your queer friends to help him. I’m through.”
“But don’t you enjoy it?” she asked, ignoring my addendum.
I told her I didn’t. I hadn’t been with him since that day, and wasn’t hung up on it at all. Kyle, regrettably, found that he did enjoy sleeping with Eric. Oh, he would act infuriated about it, claiming all sorts of things: “I cannot stand him! If he calls me a ‘Jewess’ one more time I shall call up my father and have him enact a military tribunal and have all the Cartmans thrown out of England! They can be deported to Israel and tried and executed for all I care!” But ultimately, he thoroughly enjoyed Eric spanking his arse, up to the day when Eric left him. It was Kyle’s first relationship, and his first heartbreak. Sometimes, when two of your friends break it off (regardless of how little you actually liked one of them), you wonder which of them got the raw end of things. Kyle, of course, had been trying to find some happiness all this time, chasing every man who looked like bad news. Eric, on the other hand, hadn’t managed to find a man since.
Continued here.
I gently rapped on the double-doors to Kyle’s bedroom, and he bid me enter. I didn’t know what was taking so bloody long, but when I got inside I realized that he was sitting at his vanity with his head in his hands again, looking very miserable despite the fact he was dressed to the nines in a pleasingly tight pair of denim trousers that rode absurdly low.
“You slut,” I said, slipping a hand down his slacks, making sure to let one finger run down his pronounced crack. “These slacks are so obscene it should be illegal.”
He raised his head. “Are they? I surely wouldn’t want it to be too obvious that I’m on the prowl.”
“Oh.” I took my hand out of his pants and stuck it in my pocket. “Are you, now?”
He sighed, and got up to face me, crossing his arms over his chest. He was wearing a very nice green sweater, with a draping collar, but for some reason it was apparently too short to cover his arse. Kyle had not always been a good dresser, but he had come over the years to develop his own style, which I found interesting and titillating, or perhaps it was merely the idea of fabric gently brushing against his skin that intrigued me. “I suppose I am going to forever be on the prowl,” he said sadly. “It’s just a fact of life, isn’t it? We become romantically aware of ourselves and the people around us, and then we proceed to spend the duration of our lives groping around in the dark for something or someone, in most cases someone, to fulfill this unspeakable need that can barely be described. Do you know what I mean?”
He looked across at me, his green-brown eyes steady, studying my face. I thought he might be looking at my lips. I knew what he meant, and yet I did not - I was no longer looking for someone; in fact, I’d found him, and he was standing across from me, and I could see a strip of flesh between the top of his trousers and the hem of his sweater reflected in the vanity. (For the record, Kyle was not so gay as to purposefully go out and purchase a vanity. He was, however, gay enough to use the vanity that had come built into the woodwork in his bedroom.) The issue for me was that of all the men I had made a very earnest attempt at partially domesticated normalcy with, none had lived up to the standards by which I envisioned Kyle to live. Knowing this, it was hard to be honest with him. I was hardly about to say, ‘Yes, darling, you are my unattainable; won’t you come move into my flat with me? I am the fulfillment you’ve been waiting for.’ So instead, I cautiously said, “I do.”
“I do too.” He shook his head remorsefully. “I do too.” After grabbing a tissue, he blew his nose, and then said, “I’m sorry, I’ve been off contemplating what it will be like to spend the duration of my life in self-loathing. Did you need something? All this solitary misery must seem terribly rude.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m well. I just couldn’t stand to spend another moment with Miss B, listening to her go on and on about old books.”
“Why, sweetheart, I thought you adored old books.”
“And maybe I do, but there are few less interesting things in life than speaking about them with a fussy sort of widow who deals in these things for a living.”
“That’s a wonderfully cruel thing to say, Stan Marsh!” Kyle sat back down at his vanity, mouth open in exasperation as he dug around a drawer, not pausing until he uncovered a pair of tweezers. “She might be drier than Out of the Silent Planet, on the outside, but she’s got a sweet spirit that I readily admire. And don’t you call her a widow!”
“Well, what can I say? I’m low on sympathy tonight.”
Kyle grunted, frowning as he plucked his eyebrows. “I should have done this before you both came over,” he admitted. “I’m just running so late.” With a groan, he dropped the tweezers, and turned around to face me. “What do you think?” he asked. “Too heavy-handed?”
“I thought you looked fine before.”
“Well, thanks. As much as I appreciate your company while I dress, though, I find it terribly rude of you to have left poor old Miss B just sitting there to rifle through my Poiret tome.”
“Yeah, well, she can handle herself.”
“I don’t know how you can be so pitiless.”
“Well, she seems just fine,” I insisted. “I mean, we all lose people. You just lost Christophe.”
“Christophe may no longer be sharing my bed and soiling my linens,” Kyle began, nodding toward the bed for emphasis, “but he is alive, which means he is likely milling about somewhere. He will continue to frequent the same spots I do, and he’s clearly comfortable with that nasty radical MP I mentioned earlier. You know the one, Gregory?”
“I have never met him,” I confessed.
“Well, you know of him. I asked my mother to do some checking, yeah? You know, or tell me what she knew about him? Well, turns out he’s been holding up some censorship bills of hers, making little dreadful speeches about fairness and all that.”
“Who is he kidding?”
“Not my mother, that’s for sure! He sounds like a complete bastard. In any scenario, my point about him is this: If I ever want Christophe for some reason, if only to gaze upon him, all I have to do is go down to the pub, or track down Gregory and make an inquiry. I should hardly commit to describing how I felt about Chris at the time we were cohabitating, because I certainly did not love him. I’ve loved once, and frankly, the endless search to reproduce it has been exhausting.”
For a moment, I paused. I’d never heard him say he’d loved anyone before, or to have singled the matter out so readily. I wasn’t sure to whom he could have been referring, as there would have been several pretenders. Craig? Eric? He’d just said it wasn’t Christophe. I badly wanted to know, and yet thinking about it was exhausting and disappointing. He was still babbling on about it, but I wasn’t paying very close attention.
“Kyle,” I interrupted. “The point?”
“Oh, the point. Let’s not forget that. The point, dear, is that as many times as I’ve had my heart broken, all of these men are still very viable, do you know what I mean? I believe I could have them again, if I liked.” He looked very sad. “But Butters,” he said in a hushed voice. The cross of his arms seemed like it had suddenly gone from stern to protective. “Well, he’s at quite a loss. He wasn’t left, not the way I’ve been left.”
“Or I’ve been left,” I reminded him.
“Sure, or that. You know, she was more like … abandoned. In a very real way.” Kyle paused dramatically one last time, and then concluded in a very breathy way, “Forever.”
“Seems like a long time.”
“Well, do you ever think she might meet someone again?”
“I don’t know, darling. I’m not in the business of projecting her love life.”
“Well, let’s try to help, if we can. Oh, right.” Kyle glanced behind himself and noticed his keys on the vanity, picked them up and made a protective fist around them. “These’ll come in handy if I need to get back in here.”
“Planning on abandoning the flat?” I asked.
“Well, no, of course not.” He slipped his keys into his front pocket. “But I try to keep alive the possibility of going home with someone else entirely.” He was about to shut off the vanity light when he paused, and said to me, “Please say you’ll do me a favor.”
“Anything, darling.”
He breathed deeply as a preface. “If I run into old Clyde, please don’t let him have me again.”
I obviously scowled, and he saw this and amended his request.
“Oh, all right, I suppose I should rephrase that. Please don’t let me do anything more with him. Everything but the meager two minutes of thrusting he can manage is so severely draining. I simply don’t want to do it.”
I had to think of something to say. “And here I thought you were enthusiastic about the whole thing.”
“Well, it’s his cock, dear,” Kyle explained. “It’s a beautiful specimen, and there’s something savory and nasty about it, something I can appreciate. But it’s him, you know, I cannot stand him.” With a rarely seen humility, he clasped his hands. “So, please, dearest, I am begging you. I cannot let my self-esteem drop any lower than it already has this week.”
“Well, certainly,” I said. Inwardly I felt numb, not quite sure of how I should feel about it. On the one hand, it was wonderful that Kyle hated old Clyde about as much as I did at the moment. On the other, his admitted compulsion to saddle himself in other men’s laps would always be disturbing to me.
“Thank you, Stanley. You are consistently my savior.”
After that, he turned off the vanity lights. We collected Butters, and caught a cab.
~
Perhaps a month after I had met Wendy, we were having tea with some regularity. It seems at university one’s time is all leisure, and I was enjoying her friendship to the hilt. Her bitter melancholy was amusing, and we seemed to share musical leanings, at least more so than Kyle and I did. Wendy had theatrical taste at the time, delighting in the choral voices of 50 young men on high and imposing organ chords pulsing through her high-end speaker system. Likewise, she found the minimalist twangs of the so-called Mod sound intriguing. Wendy was quite sleekly Mod herself around age 20, sporting opaque tights and short dresses with broad collars of bold, thick fabrics. We made quite a pair, walking along the river arm-in-arm, her with her knee-high scuffed boots and me with my sickening peroxide-bleached hair with creeping black roots. She liked to joke that my hair was nearly as long as hers, which swung around the small of her back wildly when she moved even slightly. Actually, my hair was not quite that long; it seemed to hover around my ears, although sometimes I became lazy or felt particularly glamorous and let it get down to my chin before I let Kyle cut it for me. At the time, Kyle’s own hair was a big red shrub, henna-ed imperceptibly and teased to abnormally excessive heights and shapes. In the post-modern world, this sort of hair might only be perceived as artistic, but in staid Oxford at the time, it was a direct marker of deviant sexuality. In fact, it was when my father first saw me after I’d bleached my hair that he realized that I was gay. He was livid, and as he was with a colleague at the time, entirely humiliated. I am sure he had half a mind to beat me, but my mother, with her persuasive powers of diffusion, talked him out of it, and it took only a year and a half or so of this for both Kyle and me to grow out of it and return to hair of a less outrageous nature. The damage was done, though.
It was the Wendy of these formative years who introduced me to Eric Cartman. I suppose I should feel less guilt at having been responsible for getting her in with Token, because every time I met up with Eric I remembered that she had introduced him, in all of his destructive bad nature, to my life. I can see her with her fairytale hair and very blunt bangs pouring me a cup of tea over a dainty screen, the clumps of leaves catching as she told me very straightly about her friend Eric, whom she’d met in her French course, as they were working with the same tutor, a funny man named Mackey with a risible verbal quirk she made fun of on occasion.
“The problem, Stanley,” I recall her saying, setting the pot back down, “is that Eric’s not a true scholar. He’s a rower, you see, and I think foreign languages are just out of his grasp.”
“That’s really a shame for him, then,” I said after I sipped an Irish breakfast.
“Yes, well. He’s on the chopping block, I’m afraid, and he’ll be asked to go down if he doesn’t find another course.”
I blinked. “So?”
“So, I may have told him about you, and that your father held a professorship in the geology department. And … well, I may have implied that you’d be able to get him into a geology course.”
I demanded to know why she thought I’d do this.
“He’s a great friend,” she claimed. “It would mean so much to me. I just … well, let us suffice to say that I owe him a great deal.” Little did I know that as far as Eric Cartman was concerned, everyone owed him a great deal. I was not in the habit of pressing her, so I did not beg for more information on why exactly she felt she owed Eric Cartman anything. As I was about to discover, he was a petty bully.
The very moment he looked at me, with my straw-colored hair and pastel-colored pants, he immediately burst out laughing. “Wendy was correct about you, all right!”
“And just what the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?”
He wiped his eyes. “Oh, nothing. Except that you are, hands down, singularly the biggest, most obvious homosexual I have ever seen in my life.”
I was at a juncture. Should I help the man, or should I turn my nose up at him and forsake Wendy? I sniffed, and asked, “She said that about me?”
“Well.” He was large, even in those days - but this was a broad, well-built largeness, the result of many intensive hours spent exercising, rowing for his college, to be exact. “She certainly said you were handsome.”
I noticed his pink blush, his thick lips; his neck was strong and he held himself with a kind of pride that I had never seen before. It was the signet ring that gave it away; with his short, neat hair and baggy, collegiate clothing I’m not sure it would have been apparent, even with the come-on.
“So are you going to help me, faggot, or not?” he asked.
I helped him, all right - against my better judgment. Perhaps I was soft in those days, or just overly emotional. Perhaps I was still too new at this to be numbed by physical affection - or, as it was with Eric, fornication that almost lacked affection. He crashed into me like a plow, without any lubrication at all, even the slightest hint of spit. It was raw, and I bled profusely, which softened his thrusting, but by that time my asshole was stinging so intensively I could barely make out the feeling of being fucked. Kinder than I should have been, when he was finished I used the mingled, loose solution of my blood and his seed that slopped out over my buttocks to lubricate him.
Fantastic, no, but by the time it was over he’d somehow convinced me with mewling and slapping to speak to my father on his (or was it Wendy’s?) behalf.
My father saw in my tense expression what was going on, and I felt a bit sorry for him. Never when he was a younger man did he expect his queer son to plead with him to let one of his failing lovers join a geology course. It took only the first three weeks of the next term for my father to give up on him. Eric had no aptitude for work; forget languages or geology. As a last resort, I introduced him to Garrison, who did not blink at any pretty boy who wanted to read English. And Eric was, if nothing else, pretty; he got his looks from his mother, a busty daughter of German immigrants. I quickly learned that Eric’s grandparents had come into the country with Liane in 1943, their visas expedited as they were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In short, they were Nazis. Liane I met once, at a commencement ceremony - she was an insanely attractive woman. Eric had no discernable father, and I figured out within hours of meeting his mother that she ‘supported’ herself mostly on her looks and, at times, on her back. For whatever reason, this did not bother Eric. They had the same doe-like eyes and the same propensity for voluptuousness.
Soon, I was not the most obvious homosexual Eric had ever met. “Varnish, really?” he asked Butters the first time I introduced them. Butters clung to Bradley and explained that he performed drag shows for tips on Friday nights at the local queer pub; Eric only guffawed at him and called him a faggot. Upon meeting Kyle, Eric wasted no time dissolving into fits of laughter: “You are the ugliest Jewess I have ever met!” he cried, and Kyle had slapped him. “Oh, you have no idea how to hit a man, do you? I can teach you, you know. I’ll spank your arse until it’s the color of your hideous hair. I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Jewess?”
In light of this, I told Wendy that after having gotten Eric into two separate courses, my obligation was fulfilled. “And I’m done sleeping with him, too, I can certainly tell you that much,” I added. “If he fails anymore courses you’ll have to find another of your queer friends to help him. I’m through.”
“But don’t you enjoy it?” she asked, ignoring my addendum.
I told her I didn’t. I hadn’t been with him since that day, and wasn’t hung up on it at all. Kyle, regrettably, found that he did enjoy sleeping with Eric. Oh, he would act infuriated about it, claiming all sorts of things: “I cannot stand him! If he calls me a ‘Jewess’ one more time I shall call up my father and have him enact a military tribunal and have all the Cartmans thrown out of England! They can be deported to Israel and tried and executed for all I care!” But ultimately, he thoroughly enjoyed Eric spanking his arse, up to the day when Eric left him. It was Kyle’s first relationship, and his first heartbreak. Sometimes, when two of your friends break it off (regardless of how little you actually liked one of them), you wonder which of them got the raw end of things. Kyle, of course, had been trying to find some happiness all this time, chasing every man who looked like bad news. Eric, on the other hand, hadn’t managed to find a man since.
Continued here.