Clouds over Antibes

We were in luck—or, more likely, Mark Standish was connected enough—in that we were able to fold in with a convoy of British oil tankers having come through the Suez Canal en route to the Atlantic and protected by two British destroyers for the slow run from the eastern Mediterranean to exit the sea at Gibraltar. I drove the cabin cruiser while Mark stayed below and used my radio equipment to make the arrangements that greeted us when we reached Tangier. I’m sure he made transmissions to others as well, but I assured him I wouldn’t come into the cabin while he was doing whatever transmitting he wanted to do. Someone had arranged a slip for us at the marina in the port and we were met by two men—apparently Englishmen, although Mark quite pointedly didn’t introduce me to them and I never saw them again after they settled us in.

The men guided us to a top-floor flat in an old rat-warren section of the city overlooking the port, near the Grand Mosque, off the Rue dar Baroud, and left us there. The kitchen had been stocked. Bed linens and towels were set out, and they gave local currency to Mark and exchanged enough for me for us to get settled in. A grinning local woman, Yasmine, who lived lower in the building, was introduced to us as someone who would take care of our laundry needs and our shopping, if we wished. They clearly conveyed that we should wish that.

At that time, in the late summer of 1940, the Vichy puppet government in France still controlled—loosely—Morocco, so I was given to understand that Mark and I still needed to keep our heads down until I could arrange to get back to the States and he could go on to wherever he was going from here. It quickly became clear that he wasn’t planning to go anywhere else anytime soon—that his role of reporting on the ground to British intelligence was just to continue in Tangier. The flat was commodious, with stunning views from roof terraces across the city and out over the port to the Mediterranean, but its height proved to be to aid radio reception. There were three bedrooms. The smallest, the door to which had a lock that Mark kept in use, contained radio equipment, and Mark spent time in there every day. There was a guest room too, and we had a series of secretive guests, mostly men, put the room into use. They invariably were not introduced to me and kept to the room.

The main bedroom was where Mark and I slept, in the same bed. We continued to have sex, but not as frequently as we had for the brief time when I was with him at the Antibes beachside villa where we steeped ourselves in writing. We perhaps fucked a couple of times a week, but here, in Tangier, while I supposedly was trying to arrange passage to the States, we fell back into a rhythm of life that was almost like that of a married couple, one that was taken up, when we were together, with both of us writing on our respective novels and me typing the drafts of Mark’s novels. To the extent that the two of us were steeped in passion now, it was revealed in our writing and our discussion of each other’s work.

Mark did have another job here, which he kept me out of to the extent he could, and we did go out frequently at night to take in the gay cabaret life. Tangier had long been a safe haven for wealthy gay men driven out of their damning European home countries, and we found several groups of likeminded men, mostly middle aged and wealthy, to meld in with. Mark made it quite clear that I should give favors where we needed them.

I, being young, fit, blond, and good-looking was a hit among our new groups of friends. Some of the men we mingled with wanted to bed me and were willing to pay for it. I was still building finances for a run to the States, and I hadn’t lost my need and desire to be covered regularly, so I went with the men. Mark obviously didn’t care if I did. My circle of acquaintances broadened out to include wealthy and literary Arab men, and I went with them too.

The relationships we formed were quite unusual and interesting. This had become the focus of the novel I was writing, which I had given the working title “Despite Everything” and basically was a combination of the informal gay men’s clubs I had been part of in Antibes and was being drawn into in Tangier, all set against the backdrop of world war. The interaction, of course, was sexual in both places. Mark and I were “a couple,” but only in a loose sense. We did fuck, but we both fucked others as well and didn’t consider ourselves as permanent lovers. Mark, in addition to his writing, had a job to do in the gathering war. And I needed to accumulate money to finance a run for the States when that became possible, although the possibility became ever more remote as the war heated up and my acclimation to a gay life in Tangier deepened.

Men wanted me, and men could afford to have me openly in society here in accommodating Tangier.

Compared to mainland Europe, life in Tangier was almost idyllic for a gay man—especially a young, fit, blond, promiscuous gay man among a large flock of older, well-heeled gay men. And I had to admit that I was promiscuous. The worsening war in Europe encouraged a “party today, for tomorrow we die” permissive and hedonist atmosphere.

I received several proposals to leave my arrangement and become part of the households of other men, both European and Arab. Some of them lived like princes and promised the same for me. The offers were tempting, but they all seemed to come with a demand for exclusivity, whereas the arrangement with Mark was open for us both and I wasn’t ready to settle down with just one man. I hadn’t yet met “that man”. And I was still of an age and disposition that I needed to be covered frequently—preferably by a variety of men. In some of the wilder parties we attended, I could lie under three men during the party and still not go home completely satisfied. Of course, the men we partied with didn’t complain.

The weeks of our temporary resting stop with the intention, along with thousands of other European refugees who had made it this far, to go on to the isolated neutrality of the vast United States, at least for now, stretched into months and it wasn’t long until 1940 turned into 1941.

* * * *

It wasn’t long before I lost Mark, as well—although when I looked back on it, we had almost two years together in Tangier in what, really, was a very free and open relationship, with a lot of useful and enjoyable literary interaction. Mark wasn’t his real name, of course. He was given another name as soon as we reached Tangier and so was I. Neither was used for long. I kept forgetting mine and reverted to Brent. Mark didn’t seem to care. Although we shared a passionate interest in writing, my time with Mark continued to have a temporary cast to it, which, at the time, was exactly what I was comfortable with. It was only years later, when it no longer was possible, that I could have thoughts that maybe Mark could have been “the man.”

He stayed around long enough for me to be settled, and then he was gone, presumably back into the cauldron of the deepening war. I assumed he went to Gibraltar, just across the strait from Tangier. He’d gone there frequently, for ever-longer visits, while Morocco was under French Vichy control, but when the Allies moved into Morocco in 1942 and began using it for a staging ground to invade Europe, Mark just didn’t come back from one of his Gibraltar trips. By then I was living with Ian Parker-Smyth anyway.

I had always intended on going back to the United States, which presumably would have been easier when Morocco came under Allied control in 1942, but for some silly reason I didn’t want to abandon my cabin cruiser, and it wasn’t safe for me to try to make the ocean crossing myself in view of the increasing hold on the Atlantic of German U-boats. I wasn’t able to find anyone wanting to get to the States crazy enough to want to risk trying to get there with me on the cabin cruiser. I had, of course, sailed to Europe in it from the States, but there weren’t submarines on the hunt then. At some point, without my having made a conscious decision about it, living in Tangier became my focus.

It helped when I no longer was leading a tenuous financial life—when I exchanged hourly paid trysts, unsure of when the next would come—for becoming the live-in toy boy, in limited form, for Ian Parker-Smyth.

I met Ian at a Christmas party at his seaside villa to the east of Tangier that year, 1940, although it was not the chance meeting it purported to be. I could tell that Mark had had something to tell me—something that would change our lives—for a few weeks, but I was taken unaware by how he handled the issue. Ian was a well-known novelist, certainly better selling at the peak of his fame, better than Mark was or I ever would be. He was English and his novels were best-sellers at least until he got into trouble with “not-quite-old-enough” boys in London and critics began to pull the hint of this interest he had out of the plotlines of his books. He grew out of the fetish, or at least had by the time I met him when he’d reached his mid-sixties and had cooled down a good bit. But it had destroyed his reputation and sent him to Morocco nearly two decades before the clouds of war formed over Europe. He was quite wealthy, though, was continuing to write, with a publisher of his “on-the-edge” novels right here in Tangier—and his younger “companion” had returned to London and joined up in the war effort in the fall.

Mark took me to Ian’s Christmas party ostensibly for both of us to network with a successful novelist, but he had ulterior motives as well. If I thought during the party, which was quite intimate, all of the invitees being part of the middle-age gay male crowd in the city and Arab rent-boys having been brought in to flirt—and more—with them, that we’d come to this party on a whim, I was wrong. For a while I thought I was out of place here. I was neither one of the middle-age gay club members or an Arab rent-boy, but when I had gone out to the balcony overlooking the sea, I was brought to think that perhaps the whole party was planned around me.

Ian followed me out onto the balcony. “So, have you found permanent refuge here with us, Brent?” he asked, handing me a glass of smuggled French champagne to go with the one he’d brought out for himself.

“I am working my way back to the States,” I said. “I’m missing my sophomore year at Dartmouth.” Actually, I’d lost track of time. By this time, I was missing my junior year and I didn’t think Dartmouth was expecting me back at all.

“You are studying creative writing, Mark tells me.”

“Did he?” I asked, surprised. I knew that Mark would talk to Parker-Smyth about his own writing, but I was surprised that he mentioned mine as well. Parker-Smyth put a hand on the small of my back and smiled at me. I didn’t move away from the hand. I didn’t go to a party without the thought that someone there would fuck me. I didn’t mind if it would be the host himself at this party. Mark and I arrived at parties together, but we had no expectation that we’d leave together. I allowed the back of my hand to brush down the front of Parker-Smyth’s slacks, and we both knew the dance was under way.

“Yes,” he continued. “Just as important, he says you are a crackerjack at typing up his manuscript drafts—at figuring out what he’s meant by his chicken scratches on the margins of the previous drafts. That’s in addition, of course, to the writing you’re doing yourself. He’s shown some of the novel you’re working on now to me. Quite good writing, and you have the characters down. Very sympathetic.”

I was presuming that he was making sure I was gay and submissive, although I became sure that Mark had covered all of that before we came to his party, and we seemed to be beyond that. He had pulled my shirt tail out of my trousers from behind and the hand he’d laid on the small of my back was now placed on flesh, with an index finger snaking down into my crack. I remained within his control, not shrinking from him in any way.

The novel I was writing was about the relationships in a group of gay men stranded in a paradise that was facing destruction. “Thank you. That’s quite a compliment coming from an established novelist like you,” I said, reaching up and stroking his cheek in a gesture that was sheer sex, acknowledging that we were doing so much more out here on his balcony than discussing writing. His index finger sank to my hole, and I rose up on the toes of my feet and widened my stance to signal permission. The finger entered me.

“How long have you been here in Tangier?” he asked.

“We came—Mark and I—at the end of August.”

“So, nearly four months here, planning to go back to the States, but still here. It gets increasingly harder to make it across the Atlantic with the German U-boat threat, and yet you’re still here. Mark told me you have a cabin cruiser you are determined to use for the voyage—that you refuse to abandon it here. It would seem you like it here and aren’t all that keen to return to the States.”

“I’m not an ambitious person, I guess,” I answered. “And I’m learning valuable lessons on writing and publishing from Mark.”

“I’m sure you are, but Mark tells me that he’s taught you just about all he knows and that you need to soar higher. He’s suggested that you come to me.”

“Has he?” I asked. So, Mark and Ian have been working this out between them. That’s when I was sure that Mark was trying to shuffle me on. Later, when I confronted him, he came clean.

“I’m trying to help you resettle, Brent,” Mark said. “I have every reason to believe I’ll be leaving here sooner than later—and that I’ll be going someplace I can’t take you with me. Even now, those who provide this flat to us are unhappy that you are here—that you see much of what goes on here. I don’t want to draw you any further into this. It isn’t safe for you to know more than you do—well, as much as you do, actually.”

“Come to you for writing guidance or for more,” I asked Ian out on his balcony, probing the extent of the offer being made.

“Or, certainly for more,” he said, with a smile. “You know I want to lay you, I’m sure.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you will lie under me?”

“Yes.”

“You will come up to my bedroom now, and I will fuck you.”

“Yes, if you want.”

Ian wasn’t finished with his pitch on the balcony. His proposal wasn’t just for a casual fuck at his party, although I would have been satisfied with just that much. “I have need of a transcriptionist as much as Mark does. Mine has gotten all patriotic on me and gone off and joined the army. If you find you have a need to move from Mark, I can offer you much the same life here. You can do everything for me that you do for Mark.”

“Everything?” I asked, turning my head and looking directly at him. We’d both been looking out at the sea, both aware that he was feeling me up. He put an arm around me, holding me close to him as the fingers of his other hand were moving in my passage.

“Yes. Mark and I have discussed all that you do for him. I would know, even if he hadn’t, what you would do for a man from what you have written in your novel draft. I just didn’t know whether you would do it for me. I’d pay, of course.”

“If you’re asking if you’re a desirable man, yes you are,” I said. “I wouldn’t go with you only for the money.” He was, in fact, a desirable man, if quite old for me. In his sixties, I was sure. But he had been a very handsome man, and was both commanding and elegant still, tall and in good shape for his age. Of course, I wasn’t turning down is money either.

“I wouldn’t be as demanding as Mark is,” he added. “Shall we go upstairs now? I think the party down here can get along quite nicely without either of us.”

“Mark—” I started to say.

“Mark knows all and is quite content with this.”

“Well, then, yes,” I answered, my thoughts being more “well, screw Mark.”

I expected, of course, for Ian to screw me upstairs in his bedroom, and he did, after much effort, manage to get it in and have an ejaculation of sorts, but I could clearly see what he meant by how it would be different than it was with Mark. Ian was near the end of his sexuality. He was more talk now than ability to perform. We had met too late in life for him—and for my pleasure. Mark was still at his peak. I changed from Mark to Ian—I didn’t make any fuss about that; I could see he was trying to help me adjust to a reality he couldn’t fight any more than I could. But, whereas the literary partnership with Ian did, in fact, take me higher than I was reaching with Mark, our direct sex life was limited. He had trouble getting it up and keeping it up. He still enjoyed stroking me off and giving me head to a climax, but what he really enjoyed was watching me be fucked by another man. That this didn’t bother me as long as the other man was good at it kept Ian and me together.

In the four years I was with Ian, he would bring guests he wanted to impress home—many of them Arabs who helped him keep his residency here—and would sit and watch them fuck me.

It was a little kinky, but it wasn’t outside my realm of experience or willingness, and it became the norm until the end of the war in Europe when Ian learned he had been forgotten enough—outside of being a celebrated novelist—to be able to go home to London. I think he was somewhat surprised to realize that he wanted to go home. His health was fading; he wanted to die at home, in England, not as an outcast in northern Africa.

Fortuitously, however, I had met Ali Bakr, the owner of several newspapers, including an English-language one, and a book publisher. He was a beautiful man not more than thirty-five when we first met in 1944. Ian had brought him to the villa, seeking a publisher for one of his novels that the London publishers wouldn’t touch because of content, and he’d given me to Bakr as a gift.

Ian had sat, watching, while Bakr fucked the shit out of me. Physically, Bakr was a beautiful man, and he was an expert cocksman. He really rang my chimes.

Bakr was a magnificent, all fire and power and cruel passion, big-cocked stud compared to Parker-Smyth and the other old men he brought home. He, dark, sensual, muscular, all white-toothed smile behind jet-black hirsute manliness, came in full Arab dress, slowly unbuttoning his pristine-white Arab robe to reveal his pelted naked muscularity and his proud erection. As Ian watched and brought himself to as near hardness as he could get, the stallion stripped and manipulated me, put me on my knees to take his cock in my throat, and then put me on all fours and strapped me on the buttocks as he rode me high on my hips like I was some sort of thoroughbred in a major race.

Afterward, Ian was able to mount me as well and to maintain an erection and produce an ejaculation that rivaled any he’d managed before.

* * * *

Like Mark before him, Ian had been, I found, preparing me to hand off to another man as he himself was planning to return to London to die. Bakr offered me a job writing for his English-language newspaper and offered to publish “Despite Everything” on that first night when he so fierily conquered me and left me panting and begging for more.

It became obvious that the two men had discussed this all beforehand. Both Mark and Ian left me, but they didn’t abandon me. They ensured my safety in a transfer of master. I had allowed myself to become the slave of another men—of other men, in succession—but they had treated me well. In the process, though, I slowly lost my independence, increasingly submitting control to the succession of men who took me under their wings. Morocco was a traditional, patriarchal society. Bakr’s offer to me was a master-slave arrangement, and I accepted it without realizing how far I’d come in being willing to be totally controlled by another man.

I had already begun working for Bakr at his English-language newspaper and my novel had reached the promotion stage in the summer of 1944, when the German retreat had been in train for two years, but I still was living with Ian while he arranged his affairs to return to London by that Christmas. I no longer was even thinking about returning to the States. Bakr was dominating me sexually, ravishing me each time we met once or twice a week, and fully satisfying my literary needs as well.

Ian had a heart attack and died in November, 1944, though, and never made it back to England. Bakr took me straight from Ian’s funeral to his fortress-like compound on the desert outside Tangier and locked me in his harem. He encouraged me to write, which I did, and he published what I wrote, making me a well-selling, if mysterious author in the English-speaking world. He also, though, used me as his slave and whore, bringing men in, just as Ian had done, and letting them fuck me to provide favor chits for Bakr, me acting as a courtesan, as he watched. The difference between Bakr and Ian, though, was that Bakr himself fucked me roughly after his guests had risen from me, and I was lying there on a divan, on my back, panting, legs spread and bent, open and vulnerable to his taking. I was so steeped in writing in that period that I hardly noticed I was also imprisoned. Bakr was taking care of all of my physical needs with the added benefit of publishing what I wrote.

I was approaching thirty, though, and both Ian and Bakr had had a fetish for far younger men. In 1948, he freed me, taking on a new, young, French slave and lover, and made me publisher of his English-language newspaper, with a contract to continue publishing my novels and selling the international rights to them by bigger, European and American publishers. I was financially secure now and took over the very lush beach villa Ian had owned.

After the war, Morocco once more became a French protectorate. Seeing other colonies gaining their independence following that war, a segment of the Moroccan population also became hungry for self-rule and began to agitate for independence, forming an underground movement. Ali Bakr came out too openly in support for self-rule and paid the price from a bullet in late 1948, leaving the newspaper and a share of the publishing house to me.

And still I did not return to the States.

[To be continued]