Ed, Frank, and Mark

I took his cum on my cheek, wiped it off with a Kleenex from my jeans pocket, and stood up from the park bench, ready to move on after he paid me. Instead he motioned me to sit on the bench beside him and, after passing me the two tens he’d had folded in the palm of one of his hands, stuffed his cock back inside his trousers fly and zipped himself up. He put an arm around my shoulders along the back of the park bench, used that hand to turn my face toward his for a kiss, and stroked my bicep with his fingers while we kissed.

“Can we just talk for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Sure,” I answered, thinking this might lead to an opportunity for a couple of more bills from someone I wouldn’t have to do a buildup with.

We were sitting within the shelter of a large pine tree with sweeping branches and looking out on one of the large open spaces in the center of Patterson Park in southeast Baltimore, not too far from the inner harbor, which then, in the early seventies was under robust redevelopment into a showcase city center. Redevelopment hadn’t reached this far out on Eastern Avenue yet, though.

The park wasn’t exactly deserted this hour before twilight, but there were many private places, like this bench, where men could meet for a tryst and not have a great risk of being seen or interrupted. This was a well-known place in Baltimore--the gay bar district was close by--for just exactly what I was doing here with a guy who called himself Tom and who I had met right here, less than twenty minutes ago, and had walked by a couple of times until we were both comfortable that the other one knew what we were here for and were interested. He’d wanted to talk before I gave him a blow job too. Often it was a quick suck and no talking. But this guy wanted to talk. He obviously wanted company as badly as he wanted sex.

He wasn’t really named Tom, of course, nor was the name I gave him, Dane, my real name--although it was close enough--but we both knew how it was with names. About as far as he’d gotten in revealing who he was was that he was a businessman in Baltimore for a couple of days on business. He was wearing a suit, which gave evidence to that. I just told him I was taking a year off before resuming school. I was dressed like a student would be.

We sized each other up. I could tell that he was attracted to my blond, curly hair and blue eyes and to my body, which was muscular, but toned just right for my size--not threatening but certainly not bringing “weakling” to mind. For his part, he was probably in his early forties but was trim and good looking enough. Not a standout, but definitely not a throw away. And he was dressed for success. Even was wearing a tie out here in the park, though it was pulled down from the knot. His suit coat was draped over the back of the bench beside him. His shirt cuffs were rolled up on his forearms, which showed a matting of curly black hair. I think he might have just come from meetings.

“Just out of high school?” He’d asked when we were sitting on the bench, sizing each other up.

“Yes,” I’d replied, “but I took a year longer at that than usual. I have trouble applying myself, they told me.” I didn’t tell them that I’d gotten set back a semester and moved to another school just because of that business with some guys on the football team.

“I want to go to college,” I said, “but I’d like some time off first. I’m kicking around the East Coast.”

“Where have you come from?” he asked me.

“Pennsylvania. West from here.” I didn’t tell him it was from a small farming community near Pittsburgh. I’d learned fast not to tell the guys I ran across everything about me. I’d also learned to make them come up with any suggestions. Which, of course, Tom had eventually. He obviously had wanted his cock polished. He seemed proud of it, and he had a good reason to be so.

“If you’re just drifting around, how are you covering your expenses?” he asked. “You doing odd jobs here and there? Is that enough to get you by?”

“I worked for a landscaping company while I was in school,” I answered. I let that cover what I could do to earn money here and there while I traveled. I didn’t mention that I had money stashed in a locker at Penn Station up on North Charles Street, enough to see me by for several months of travel on the cheap. That’s because I had, indeed, worked for a landscaper while going to school.

“But is it enough to see you by?” he asked.

“It’s never enough, of course,” I answered. He was angling for service, I could tell. That was what I’d been hoping for when he said he wanted to talk. I figured he had the money and was good for it.

That’s when he worked his way into telling me what I could do for him to earn some money. After all the roundabout talk, when it came down to it, he was very direct.

“I have this problem,” he said. “It’s called an ache in the balls. I’ll give you twenty dollars to suck me off.”

My response to that led me to kneeling between his spread thighs, unzipping and fishing his tool out, and giving him a twenty-dollar blow job while he leaned back in the bench, arms stretched along the bench back in both directions, and moaned his pleasure. I knew how to give a man pleasure with a blow job. I had developed the skill with the guys from the football team.

“Such a soft mouth,” he said, his voice dreamy, his eyes closed. “Yes, there, like that. Again, please. Ahhh, shit. Fuck. Oh, Christ. Is that a bead you’ve got in your tongue? It’s driving me crazy.”

Yes, it was a bead I had pierced in my tongue.

He’d come quickly and hadn’t make demands for me to deep-throat him. Very polite about it, he was. He moaned as I licked it off, and he remained, leaning back, eyes closed, and dong hanging out of his fly, as I made to rise and leave.

“No, please, not yet,” he’d said, opening his eyes and motioning me to sit on the bench next to him. That’s when he’d said, “Can we just talk for a few minutes?”

I’d thought that would be it; he hadn’t mentioned going any further. But I began to wonder about that when he wanted me to sit and make out a bit with him and “just talk” after I’d sucked him off. I did a bit of a look around on where we could go if he wanted to fuck me. He was nice looking and built well enough and his dick was nice, but not frightening, so I was willing to do it if he offered at least fifty. I could see that, in back of us, there was an ideal spot--hidden under the sweeping pine tree branches, the ground under there covered with pine needles.

That isn’t quite what he wanted, though. He was nuzzling the side of my neck and had his left hand on my thigh, when he whispered in my ear, “I’ll give you another ten if you let me jack you off.”

He did it right there, right then. He pulled my face into his for another round of kissing, while he unzipped me, freed my cock, and stroked me to an ejaculation. It was kind of nice, and he wasn’t at all dominating or threatening. He might have been perfect if I wanted it soft, but I was sort of partial to getting it rough.

“What are you doing for the rest of the evening?” he asked, after he was done and he’d pulled a package of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket, offered me one, and then lit us both up with a flashy silver lighter. “Do you have plans? I don’t have any meetings tonight and am foot loose. There’s a club here--the Apollo Club--up, just off Eastern Avenue, in the Canton district I’d like to try out. I’d rather not go alone. We could stop in someplace for dinner, my treat, and then take in the club.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

“And then . . . maybe . . . I’m staying at the Belvedere on North Charles. Do you know that hotel?”

“No, I’m not from Baltimore. I’m just passing through.”

“But you might be willing to go to a hotel room with me?”

“Yeah, sure, if--”

“Maybe for, say . . . a hundred dollars.”

“OK.” I would have gone to the hotel room with him for less. I would have gone just to be able to sleep in a hotel room, even if there was a guy on top of me doing pushups on my body. This guy seemed a little soft to be doing pushups on my ass, though.

And that’s where, I guess, my Goldilocks story from the early 1970s started. Well, a bit after that. The deal with Tom didn’t go much further. But it was Tom who took me to the Apollo Club.

The Apollo Club was in a row of townhouses a block off Eastern Avenue that had been converted into various commercial enterprises. The club was in the upper stories of one of these row houses and there was a separate entrance to the basement with a sign, Nate’s Gym, over it. I was later to learn that these were connected businesses. The Apollo Club was a gay bar and music venue and the gym was for the club’s members--one membership card covered both, and there was an internal staircase between the floors as well as the separate outside entrances.

The main club room took up most of the first floor of the building. There was a bar at the side, a group of tables at the street side of the room, a raised stage for the bands at the back wall, and dancing and swaying space in between. The dancers took a position near the tables and the swayers lined up in a semicircle in front of the stage.

The band that night was one called the Drive Shaft, which was an OK name for a band playing gay clubs up and down the East Coast. They played loud rock and they were the personification of rockers--long hair, garishly colored tight pants, high-top boots, no shirts, and headbands. I think they were picked to be in the band as much for being hunks as for their music ability. I was taken with both. They definitely were studs and the music was about the same level of competence as the band I had done some singing for back in Ivywood, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t so much that it was great, as that it was familiar and made me a bit homesick.

Tom was sitting back in his chair, butt on the front edge, at one of the tables. Most of the clientele was younger than he was and I’m not sure that the Apollo Club was what he was expecting. I was up with the swayers, right in front of the lead singer, gyrating to the music and lip-synching his songs whenever he was doing one I knew. I caught his eye and he caught mine and we swayed and sang together, cutting the rest of the room out.

Next thing I knew there was a late forties, balding guy in a cheap suit, a shirt open down to his navel, a hairy chest, a thick gold chain around his neck, and a collection of chunky rings on his fingers putting a hand on my shoulder. I looked around, but he was looking up on the stage. I did too and saw the singer giving him a nod.

The man leaned in to me and yelled in my ear over the noise, “You a player, son? For men?”

“Yeah, sure,” I yelled back. Why not? We were in a gay bar. I really shouldn’t have been in here because I wasn’t old enough to drink. Of course I’d had a couple of beers already. But I was gay and I fucked for money, so that part wasn’t anything to hide.

“Want to meet the band?” he asked.

“Yeah, that would be great.”

“They’re off in another ten. Come on back to the lounge, where they unwind. I’m Ed, their manager.”

I looked over at the tables to see what Tom was doing. Tom wasn’t sitting at the table. I don’t know if he just went to the john, or was at the bar refreshing our drinks, or had had enough of the club and had left. And I would never know, because I was following Ed through a beaded-curtain-covered doorway at the side of the stage and back to a dressing room with couches for lounging--and, as I found, for fucking.

There were five guys in the band, and, as far as I know, I sucked and was fucked by all five of them over the next couple of hours. Thanks to a stash provided by Ed, I was high after the first fifteen minutes or so, so I couldn’t be sure. Before that fifteen minutes were up, though, I had the lead singer’s dick inside my ass and the drummer’s dick in my throat--at the same time. They had lines of cocaine set and I was offered that, but declined. I didn’t decline the reefers, which must have had something stronger than pot involved, the poppers, and the bottles of assorted liquor they passed around.

The lead singer held me in a standing clutch as soon as they entered the room, and we kissed as we felt up each other and he got my jeans and bikini briefs off. Then he had me on all fours with my mouth on the drummer’s cock, while he mounted and fucked me doggie style. He was replaced by the bass player, and after that it got fuzzy. Ed, the manager, was floating around managing, or at least functioning as a gofer.

I woke up in the morning, hung over, in a cheap hotel room. A neon sign running alongside the uncurtained window on the outside was flickering in red. I could see a lit R, followed by an unlit I, and then a lit L and E. Presumably the sign continued above and below the window. I was lying on top of the sheets, naked, on my back, my legs spread and bent. A hard pillow was stuffed under my tailbone. Ed, the manager, also naked, was sitting on the side of the bed, leaning over the nightstand, and taking a line hit of cocaine.

From the soreness and spasms gripping my channel I knew I’d been fucked royally--often and recently.

He rose from the bed and padded into the adjoining bathroom. From the back, he looked a bit pear shaped--but not too bad. His ass was fat. I heard him pissing in the toilet and the toilet flushing and then he was walking back to the bed. He had a beer belly, but again not bad for his age. He looked maybe five months pregnant. His chest was hairy and his pecs on the verge of going flabby. He was still wearing the gold chain. He had wisps of brownish hair combed over a bald spot on top of his head, but not enough to fool anyone. If he’d had the hair on his head that he had on his chest and his bush he’d be OK. He was stroking himself and I couldn’t see what he had to stroke, which wasn’t a good sign for him, but it meant I wouldn’t be taxed--or hadn’t already been taxed, I guess. From my position on the bed, I’d have to assume he’d already fucked me--along with some country’s army. The last I knew it had been dark and I was in the club. Now it was light and I was in his bed.

He dropped his hand as he approached the bed. He’d managed to stroke himself to an erection. He couldn’t have been more than four inches, but they say if it’s enough to reach the prostate . . .

And it was enough. He came onto the bed, grabbed my ankles and wishboned my legs, crouched over me, thrust up inside me, and began to pump me. Yes, he must have been inside me at least once in the night. It felt squishy inside my channel from an earlier deposit or two--recently--and I’d remembered being douched late the night before. The band had thought that was amusing. I grabbed his biceps, such as they were, with my hands, moved with him, and made the noises of pain-pleasure I knew were expected of me. We both managed to come. He came quickly but held inside me and worked my cock until I’d come for him.

It was pretty much like that for the next five nights. He paid me fifty a day plus meals, minor drugs, and a few hours of sleep time in this luxury hotel.

When we’d “done it” the first morning and he was sitting on the side of the bed, smoking, and I was propped up against the headboard, also smoking--his smokes--he said, “Last night you indicated you had some experience working with a band.”

“Yeah, back where I came from I was in a band,” I answered.

“If you’ll be in my bed every night, we can take you on to help carry, set up, and tear down the instruments. Free food and booze. Coke and pot if you want it--if you let the band members do you too--and fifty a night. Interested?”

“Sure, what’s not to like?” I said. The translation for that was that it would be a string of days I didn’t have to dip into the stash I had in the locker at the train station.

“Oh, and you’ll get a club card too. There’s a gym in the basement. You’ll have plenty of time to work out there if you want. And your bod is so nice that I’ll bet you work out a lot.”

With that, he took my cigarette from me, stubbed both mine and his out on the surface of the nightstand, climbed on top of me, and fucked me again. He must have been extra horny that night, because there were nights he couldn’t get it up at all. Even when he did me twice, though, he couldn’t manage more than ten or fifteen minutes at a crack. He became my “too soft” Baltimore experience--not as soft as Tom, but not as nice either. By the second day I was regretting that I hadn’t gone to the hotel room with the businessman named Tom.

I, however, did like to work out in the gym. I didn’t think much at the time about him giving me a club card that included the gym, but that turned out to be the best thing that Ed, the band manager, did for me.

* * * *

The first time I saw Frank he was fucking a guy on a bench press at Nate’s Gym. It was the sort of place where that went on in the open and no one was shocked--more like everyone stood around watching and chanting “Fuck ’em, fuck ’em. Give it to ’em good.” And Frank was certainly fucking the guy hard. The guy was on his belly on the bench, which rose in incline under the bar hung in the stand at the end of the bench. His feet were pressed into the floor on either side of the bench and he had his tail raised enough to give Frank a good thrust angle. His arms were raised over his head, his fists gripping the bar. He was screaming bloody murder about Frank killing him, and, indeed, from what I could see of Frank’s weapon, pulling out of the guy’s ass, thrusting home, and then withdrawing to the bulb, and thrusting to the quick again, he could kill a man with it. He was hung like a bull, thick and long. His low-slung balls make a slapping noise on the guy’s inner thighs as Frank plowed him.

Even though the guy was complaining about the fuck, he held himself in place for it, so he must have had at least mixed feelings about it.

Frank was covering the guy from above, crouched over him, trapping the guy’s fists to the bars by his own fists. He wore brown leather driving gloves on his hands, the kind that left the fingers exposed. Frank’s sinewy-muscled legs were bent and pressing the other guy’s legs to the sides of the bench, and his feet, in gym shoes without socks and planted just to the outside of the other guy’s bare feet, were being used to leverage the rapid stroking of Frank’s cock. The bottom wore only a jock strap. Frank also was only in a jock strap, but his pouch was tucked up under his balls. Frank’s butt was tight, buns of steel. The cheeks were contracting and expanding in synch with his vicious thrusts.

Man was that guy getting fucked. I shivered from imagining it happening to me. I wanted to pull my eyes away from it, but I was mesmerized. The bottom was making a lot of noise, the signals on how well he was taking it and how much he wanted it mixed enough that no one was moving to extricate him.

Frank looked to be in his early fifties. I asked and was told that he didn’t say much but that he apparently was a cop and pretty high up in the rankings. He had been a Marine, I could tell--or had wanted to be one. The Semper Fi symbol tattoo on his bicep wasn’t the only clue to that. He had a buzz cut of graying stubble; the demeanor of command and purpose; a mean, piercing stare; and he was a man of steel--muscular but not muscle bound. Hard as steel, veins popping out all over his smooth body other than the trimmed salt-and-pepper bush, sinewy and gaunt. Each muscle was perfectly defined, hard, and no bigger than it needed to be to get the job done.

I was also told that he came and went as he liked, did as he wanted, and picked out whoever he wanted and fucked them to a puddle of whimpering Jell-O. He certainly did that that night to a young, twenty-something guy, who was more pretty than handsome and with a bit more meat on him than necessary.

Frank was fucking the guy when I came to the gym and still fucking him when I left. I left, that first afternoon I tried out the gym after Ed had hired me and between gofer jobs he gave me in the early afternoon and having to help set the band up in the evening, thinking I wouldn’t be back, that Frank was too scary. But I couldn’t help thinking about him all evening, and, of course I was back in the gym the next afternoon.

Frank was there too, working out hard. I am almost ashamed to admit that I flirted with him. I worked equipment near him and gave more ogling attention to him than anyone else working out. He noticed, and gave me some hard looks. He was zeroing in on another young guy, though--a different guy from the one he’d fucked the afternoon before. He did come over to spot me a time or two and stayed around long enough to feel me up, get my hand on his crotch, and growl in my ear, “You get a ticket to cum. Gonna spike you into next week.”

I gave him a shot of the bead in my tongue, teasing him, and he gave me a harder look, knowing what I was telling him I could do with that.

Fool that I was, I didn’t perceive the danger of him happening until the next week, and I figured the band would be on its way somewhere else by then.

When I went to the shower, I didn’t see him still on the gym floor--or the guy he was working out with either. I discovered they were in the sauna. I opened the door to go in, only to see that Frank had the guy bent over on a shelf and was doggie fucking the other guy. He was grasping the guy’s hips and pulling all of the way out of him before slamming all the way in him--again and again. The guy was jerking and wailing with each thrust. I fled back to the shower and then out of the gym.

I had reason to put Frank into the back of my mind that evening because it was Saturday and the club was crowded during the performance sets. I helped set up the band and then stood in the wings while they were practicing an hour before the doors of the club would open and they’d start performing. When the lead singer started into his songs, there I was, in the wings, singing a harmony backup line in a low voice. I didn’t realize that Ed, the manager, was standing beside me until he put a hand on my arm and said, “That ain’t half bad, Dane. (I hadn’t told him my real name either and, as he paid me under the table--or, in my case, under the sheets--I didn’t see the need for him to know that much about me.) You didn’t tell me you could sing like that.”

“I told you I knew bands--that I’d been in a band,” I said. “I was the lead singer.”

“Let’s get you out there behind Snake and see what you can do,” he said.

Snake didn’t mind and we sounded real good together, and suddenly I wasn’t just a groupie helping to fetch and carry for the band. I was singing backup in the band as well. Later, in the lounge, Snake gave me a lot more respect than he had before when he fucked me. But he did fuck me. Ed was the same old Ed that night, although he’d drunk enough that he couldn’t get it up at all. Instead, he lay there beside me, close, jacking me off. By thinking back on having watched Frank plow two guys, I managed an ejaculation in Ed’s fist.

I avoided the gym the next day, but I was drawn to it on Monday afternoon. And I knew as soon as I entered that today it was going to be me. I hyperventilated, but I didn’t flee. It was like a moth to the flame. I knew I was going to be burned to a crisp but I wanted it so bad.

Frank came to me, just in gym shorts and sneakers without socks as soon as I entered the gym in shorts and a T-shirt. His body was magnificent, especially for his age. Hard as steel, both threatening and enticing. Rock hard pecks, with veins running along the surface and nipples bulging out. He came to me and pulled my T-shirt over my head, exposing my torso.

“I’ll be spotting you today, and I’ll want to see the effect of the individual exercises on your muscles.” It seemed like a logical reason and he did seem to pay attention to the definition of my chest and arm muscles, moving his half-gloved hands over them as I exercised on the chest press and lat pulldown machine. The feel of the leather of the gloves on my flesh made my skin tingle and my cock pay attention. I could tell he was hard too. I knew this would end with him fucking me. I knew he knew he’d fuck me. But I knew he wanted something else too.

“You still got that bead in your tongue?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered, showing it to him.

“Good. We’ll make use of that later.”

I was trembling when he slid my gym shorts off, leaving me only in a jock strap when we moved to the leg press. Once again he said he wanted to be able to feel my muscles--my legs and glutes--while I was working them. Once again there was logic to it. But we both knew he was undressing me, preparing me for him to cover and fuck me right here on the gym floor with all the other guys watching and cheering for him to drill me a bigger one. Already they were beginning to gather, to lick their chops, to move their hands to their own crotches.

I was on the incline bench press, lifting a bar bell, when he grasped my waist between his hands and started to turn me on my belly, in the same position I’d seen him fuck the guy a couple of days before. I balked, though, which surprised him and he let loose of my waist and I rolled off the bench and away from him.

“OK,” I said in a strangled voice, “but not here. Not in front of the others.” I scrambled up and headed back to the locker room area and the showers. Frank caught up with me at the door of the sauna. He pulled me inside; slammed me down on one of the shelves, taking the breath out of me; and hooked my legs over his shoulders as his face buried itself between my thighs and he worked my cock and balls and ate my ass out. Moaning, I just lay there for him, not offering any resistance, holding his head between my hands. The men who were in the sauna moved away from us, but they stayed in the sauna, all of them watching us closely. More men, ones who had been on the floor when Frank had made his move and who knew I was going to be fucked, crowded into the sauna to watch.

He was huge, entering me. There would have been nothing he could have done to prepare me fully for mounting. He didn’t half try. He obviously enjoyed being the battering ram at the gates. He invaded me without mercy, reveling in my cries, ignoring my beating on his chest, waiting for me to surrender and to go limp, a whimpering, conquered captive. He was only half way inside me when I reached that stage. When I did and relaxed and went limp, I discovered that I opened for him more easily, and he slid in the rest of the way more easily and began to pump me.

He didn’t finish me there, though. To make his point and to wipe away all thought that I had any say in this, he’d been pumping me for ten minutes or so, when he rose from me, pulled my limp body off the sauna shelf, and slung me over his shoulder. He handled me like I was weightless, and I was too cowed to resist him in any way. He walked through the audience in the sauna, which parted for him to pass and followed him back to the gym floor. He put me down on my belly on the incline bench press, lifted my hands to grasp the bar bell overhead, bent my legs so that the balls of my feet pressed into the floor on either side of the bench, and mounted and thrust inside me from above. It was the same position I’d seen him fuck the guy in that first day. It was the position I’d tried to resist to avoid the audience earlier. The audience gathered just as before. He was making his point of who was in control. They began to chant for my destruction, and he proceeded to do just that.

He fucked me on the bench for a good twenty minutes. Near the end I was open enough to take him without much pain, and the pleasure of it rolled over and over me.

Then he fucked me again in the shower, against the tile wall, me plastered to his chest, my knees hooked on this hips, and him showing his phenomenal strength by holding me prisoner and sliding my back up and down on the slick tiles with the strength of his up-thrusting cock.

“Time to make use of that bead,” he said, as he forced me down on my knees in front of him. “Clean it, and make love to it with that bead,” he growled. I did, and he managed another afterglow ejaculation down my throat. He left me in a puddle on the shower stall floor, moaning under the cascading water. The watchers at the entrance to the stall followed in his wake when he left. No one helped me up, dried me off, or gave me assistance as I painfully dressed in the locker room to leave.

I was back in the gym the next, Tuesday, afternoon. I was determined to deny him, to get a little of my own back. He had been too hard for me, too much. I wanted to tell him so. I wanted him to want me again and for me to say that no one should be treated the way I was--that he wasn’t that good, even though, truth be known, he was that good. I entertained the possibility of letting him fuck me again if he promised not to be as brutal as he’d been. It wasn’t long before I’d moved to moaning for him to fuck me again. This despite having already categorized him as “too hard.”

But, although he saw that I was in the gym, he ignored me and was working on spiking another guy who, as far as I knew, was in there for the first time. The fucker ignored me. I was just a one-time piece of tail for him. He was hard, unyielding, cold steel.

I had been warned beforehand by the guy at the check-in desk that it was all the conquest and conquering for Frank. One time and that was it. I hadn’t absorbed that. I had thought it couldn’t possibly be true for me, but it was.

Deflated, I went upstairs to the club to start setting up for the Gear Shaft’s sets that night only to find their gear was gone.

“I let them go early,” Mark the club manager said. “I have a more popular band coming in earlier than expected. They didn’t tell you? You’re not with the band permanently?”

No, quite clearly I wasn’t with the band permanently.

* * * *

“They didn’t tell you they were pulling out?”

I looked at him--seeing him for the first time. He’d been there, of course, moving around, overseeing everything, but I hadn’t scoped on him before. I wondered why not. The man was a hunk and a half. Late twenties or early thirties and really built. Now that I thought about it, I’d seen him in the gym, working out, and he’d been bloody beautiful. Blond, curly hair and blue eyes. A lot like me, I guess, but more powerfully built. I’d first thought he was a bouncer here until someone told me he was the manager. Someone else said that, no, he owned the place. I hadn’t given any thought to him beyond this. Until now.

“No. I haven’t been paid either,” I answered. It didn’t occur to me that this Mark guy would think that we were talking about more than a couple of hundred dollars. His response was immediate and sympathetic, though. And he put a hand on my forearm that almost made me hyperventilate. The man was beyond sexy.

The question remained whether he was . . . but, then, if he owned a gay club and gym chances were good that he was gay.

“That’s tough to swallow, I know,” he said. “Say, I’ve heard you sing with Gear Shift and I’ve seen how you work with getting the amps set up and working. As you know we have a house band here. You could work with them until you decide what you want to do.”

“Thanks, that’s generous of you, but--”

He interrupted me, though, and came in close, and gave me a look like I’d seen several times before. “I know what you did for the band and for the manager. I can offer you a place to stay too--for certain services rendered. My digs are up on the third floor of this building. What say you come up there for dinner with me and we’ll discuss the possibilities?”

He took his time preparing me, lying on top of me between my spread thighs lengthwise on his sofa, with my shoulders propped up on the sofa arm. We kissed, with lots of tongue, while we felt each other up. He sucked me until I moaned and I sucked him big and throbbing. He wasn’t as big and threatening as Frank was, but he was way beyond Ed. A great cock, really, built to stretch and dig but not to threaten to split or come up into the back of my throat--a real pleasure tool, and he knew how to use it. By the time he did use it, stretching me internally to deep moaning and taking me to heaven, I was begging for it. And he gave it--on the sofa, in his bed, in the shower, in his bed again. He was insatiable and so was I. We fit together perfectly. And he varied it. He could be the lover, but he could give it to me rough too when I begged for it--and he loved the bead in my tongue.

Like in the Goldilocks story, Ed had been too soft; Frank had been too hard; Mark was just right.

He was just right through the rest of the summer and well into the fall as I worked with the house band on stage and he worked on me in his bed. And he was just right when I was “discovered” and offered a band of my own. And he was just right when he came to New York with me and became my manager and opened another club--and then one in Chicago and Houston and San Francisco. My band played in them all, and he fucked me in them all.

He is still just right forty years later when we are both retired and enjoying the high life in Jamaica. I still have the locker at Penn Station in Baltimore and we still call Baltimore our home. I never got farther than that on my own on my precollege journey. For that matter, I never got to college. But I’ve traveled the world with Mark since we met. I still keep that original amount of money I brought with me from Ivywood, Pennsylvania. It looks like a pitiful amount now, but I mark my life a success because I’ve never had to dip into it.

Well, no, I mark my life a success because I met the “just right” man--Mark.