Hidden Treasure

May, 1979, Key West, Florida

I stopped at the fireplace and stared into it briefly. This is where he burned them, thinking he’d wiped that part of his life out, not knowing that I had copies. I set the duffel bag down and sank into the sofa facing the fireplace. We had fucked on this sofa countless times, but the only time I had seen a fire going in the fireplace was the night, twelve years ago, when Riel thought he’d burned his pornographic writings. Had he known when he burned that wealth of writing that three days later he’d be dead?

So many memories; some good, some bad; many secret; more than a few sordid events even by today’s standards—seen as even more sordid back then. I wondered if this museum would be opening to mark the Cuban-American novelist, Riel de Fuentes’s, sixtieth birth anniversary if some of his better writings were known to the public. Not even his death, back there, behind the house, on the pool terrace, from a knife wielded by a street hustler he’d picked up on Duval Street while I was off being fucked by Phil Costas, was honestly given. In the record books he’d been done in by a burglar. I guess the hustler qualified, because he walked away with the money Riel had in his wallet—not much, not nearly enough from a man who would be nominated for both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year. Perhaps the worst memory is that Riel had died before the novel was published that lifted him to the literary stratosphere.

It wasn’t for the works I had here in this duffel bag that Riel was held in international esteem, even though this was some of his best, most passionate writing. And I should know, as I had been his editor at Doubleday since 1955, not to mention his lover—well, one of them. But one of only a few closely held lovers because he had not wanted to be outed.

I stood and walked around the house, ensuring that everything was just as it had been the day he died. We had closed up the house then. I’d moved to the guest house at the back of the lot to wrap up the proofs of the novel that was to make his name. And I’d come here periodically ever since to work on material related to Riel’s writing life and to worry my memories. And, I admit, I came here periodically for the hedonist lifestyle. I came to fuck and be fucked in a never-ending orgy as long as I was here. Key West was one of the magnate locations for men seeking that sort of attention. I had studiously preserved the house as it was that day and it had paid off. The house was now to be opened as a museum, in another month, one to compliment that of Ernest Hemingway, a few short blocks away, on Whitehead Street.

It had taken time to get the museum set up, and it had only taken off as an idea the previous year when the house next door burned down and we were able to acquire that lot to provide parking for the museum. Riel had acquired this property early on, in 1953, the year after Fulgencio Battista had returned to power in Cuba in a dictatorship supported by the United States to maintain Cuba as a gambling playground for rich Americans. The Fuentes had been in opposition to Battista, so Riel, then thirty-three, had to leave. He only went as far as Key West after a brief, but momentous stop in Miami. His family was wealthy, and he had no problem acquiring this house on Von Phister Street and the house behind it, on Flagler, and combine them into one property. Each included a two-bedroom bungalow, although the Von Phister house was the larger of the two. He had a brick terrace, with a small swimming pool laid between the two houses and used the Von Phister building as his house and the Flagler Avenue one as a guest house and pool house.

And here he wrote his novels. He’d had the best schooling in the States—his mother was an American—and lived a life of leisure in Cuba before escaping from there, almost in the dark of night with no notice, leaving all that was materially Cuba behind. He had escaped with his memories of Cuba and its lifestyle intact, though.

He’d written four published literary novels in Spanish during his twenties in Cuba and had established a reputation in Latin America. He wrote ten more after coming to the States in the fifteen years he lived in Key West. Those novels were in English and captured life in Miami and Key West for Cuban-Americans. They were cult novels in that community until his death. It was the posthumous novel that brought him to the attention of the world at large. Within five years of his death—at least partially through my efforts at Doubleday—his earlier Spanish-language novels had been translated into English and he was being lionized.

He’d been in good company among National Book Award finalists for 1968, although he hadn’t won. Thornton Wilder had won for The Eighth Day. Other finalists, though, had been Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Chaim Potok, and William Styron. Heady company for a displaced Cuban-American writing niche novels for his own community. William Styron had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner that year. But Riel de Fuentes’s name had been in the mix for that to the end.

There were hints, but no more, of homosexual proclivities in his mainstream novels. What only a few of us knew was that he had been even more prolific in writing homosexual pornographic works that had never gone to publishers. I knew about them, of course. I was his editor in everything, working directly with him here in Key West once Doubleday, in New York, had assigned me to work with him. That was fine with Riel. We’d already met a few times in New York. We had already fucked. He was a submissive bottom; I was versatile. Together we were a passionate fit, although I had to look elsewhere to have a man’s cock inside me.

I not only edited his pornographic works as well as his mainstream novels—I also was a character in many of them, as was he. Many of the short story manuscripts, in particular, that were in the duffel bag by the fireplace now, were a fictionalized version of our life together. Much of it was written to celebrate and enhance our sex life at the time, which it surely did. It also was some of the man’s best writing. His prose in these was blazing hot. It wasn’t erotica; it was literary pornography. Everything was described in melting detail and there were no barriers to what his characters would do to obtain sexual release. I hadn’t been as able to give it up as he was when he burned his copies. I kept mine.

I had come down to Key West at the request of the museum board not only to check everything out but also to give a private tour before the opening to Riel’s son, who would be arriving by air two days hence. Riel had met an artist, Catherine Prentice, in Miami when he had gone there first upon leaving Cuba and before settling here in Key West. It had been a confusing and challenging time for him in which his whole world had been turned upside down. He had tried in the upheaval in his life to follow a different path than he’d been on in Cuba, which meant he’d turned from his basic, secret nature to try the heterosexual lifestyle.

He and Catherine Prentice had had a torrid affair, lasting merely weeks, when Riel was endeavoring to go mainstream in his new country and persona. It hadn’t worked. Riel was a man’s man, and a submissive one. Catherine was bi, but she was aggressive and was attracted to Riel by his manly looks and his writing, which was in the vein of Hemingway. It didn’t take her long to catch on to the true Riel, however. The affair had lasted only long enough for her to be impregnated.

She decamped for Oak Park, Illinois, where she could worship at the feet of the Frank Lloyd Wright art style. The affair had been in 1952. Her son, who she named Neo, was born in 1953. Catherine and Riel had never married, but it was in the best interest of both to let their liaison be known in public—exhibiting that they both were normal, ergo straight—and the illegitimate Neo Prentice was raised as the acknowledged son of the novelist, Riel de Fuentes.

I had been sent to Key West in 1954, after Fuentes had moved there and two years after Catherine had left him and he hadn’t fully accepted that it was men, not women, he wanted. I had been in the Navy and nineteen when and where I was initiated into fucking and being fucking by men. I’d gone straight from the Korean War to Colombia University, studying to be a book editor. Riel de Fuentes had been my first editorial and long-term sexual affair hookup.

The son, who had never been to Key West, had requested to visit here. He was twenty-six years old, a handsome, dusky Cuban-heritage minor-productions actor in Hollywood and a male commercial model in San Francisco. He was not-so-openly gay, which I knew because I had met him twice at programs celebrating the novels of his father and had fucked him both times. I couldn’t help myself; he was the spitting image of his father. What I didn’t think he knew was that his father had been gay too. I certainly didn’t tell him. We hadn’t discussed it. Neo had been an easy lay. He wanted it. He had also wanted to know more about his father. I’d told him what I thought he would want to know. I left with the feeling that he was exchanging sex for information on a father he’d never been close to and was obsessing about that. I thought that was sad—and a bit pathetic. But he was a good lay.

I picked up the duffel bag and went through the main house one more time, turning off the lights. I exited onto the terrace and sat on a pool bed, putting the duffel down beside me. I had no idea why I was carrying it around or what I planned to do with its contents. I’d had the vague notion of trying to track down Phil Costas, who was a printer and who had printed up some of the pornographic material before Riel died and we’d distributed here locally under the pen name of Bill Morrison. Maybe, I thought, Phil was still here and still in business and more of the material could be printed the same way, with profits going into the museum endowment. The board didn’t have to know how the money had been raised. And if Phil was still here and still could get it up, maybe we could go a couple of more rounds. He would be in his early fifties now—we hadn’t kept in touch—and he had possibly the biggest cock I’d ever had inside me.

That isn’t the first thing I wanted to do upon my return to Key West. Finding Phil was an iffy proposition. He probably no longer was here. He may no longer be alive even. What I wanted first thing upon coming back to Key West was to fuck someone and be fucked in return.

It occurred to me that here, where I now was sitting, facing the pool, the outside lights at the eaves of the two houses combined with the breeze causing the surface of the pool to shimmer in small waves, was where Riel had died.

Ah, the memories. I stared into the gently moving water of the pool.

* * * *

I was barely nineteen, an E-1 seaman recruit, lanky, blond, achingly good looking, and already knew I wanted men, but I hadn’t done anything about it. I was ripe for it, and the Navy, where randy and fit men were isolated in a tin can on the ocean for months at a time, was a good place to get it. My destroyer was steaming off North Korea, in the spring of 1952. It had just strafed the northern coast and the men were in high spirits. An E-3 seaman sat on my chest in a tight bunk, stuffing my mouth with my briefs to keep me quiet and slapping his cock on my cheeks, while a burly E-5 petty officer, 2nd class—I couldn’t remember them by their names, only by their rank—tore my virginity out of me, holding my legs hooked on his hips, while he fucked and seeded me.

I had resisted a bit at first, but I hadn’t said no, and I’d certainly let them think yes in the foreplay. I was as hopped up and in heat as they were. I had thought long and hard about doing it, and now I was doing it. Once the E-5 was in me and the pain had subsided and he’d started slow-pumping me, I relaxed and took it. When the E-3 moved to sheath my cock and ride me in a cowboy, I was into it enough for all of us to know I’d both give and take without being a problem for the rest of the cruise, which I did. So, I was a full recruit to both sides at nineteen.

Visions of the Navy subsided and swam back up as memories of diving into this pool, naked, on my first night in Key West in 1954. I was twenty-one and working my first job—the only job I’ve ever had—at Doubleday. Riel had driven me from the airport. The atmosphere in the car was electric. We had fucked—he had wanted me to fuck him, which I had done—on two of his visits to Doubleday in New York in setting up his contract—and hooking up with me as his editor. Both times, we had moved from consultations at the publishing house to a “get better acquainted” dinner and drinks at his hotel. Then up to his room. The first time I’d done him in a missionary on the bed—the second time I covered, mounted, and fucked him in a doggie position on the carpeted floor below the bed. There was no question I was to be the top, but there was no question that he was in control. He’d asked me stay that night, which I did. He’d asked Doubleday to assign me solely to him the next day, in the late stages of the contract negotiations, and they had agreed to it. I was new, not yet a known quantity to them. This was my big break. I knew I was selling myself, but it wasn’t really new ground for me sexually.

As we drove back to his house on Von Phister in Key West, we both knew the first thing we’d do when we got there was fuck. He went beyond that.

“I’m highly sexed,” he said. “I’ve found that I work best when mellowed out. Part of your duties as my editor will be to fuck me every day.”

“I think I can do that,” I said.

“But I need my sleep and my space. I’ll be sleeping in the main house and you’ll have a room in the guest house.”

And, with that, the parameters were set. I don’t think I managed to cover him every day we were together, but it was close.

* * * *

I flinched when a frog dropped into the pool very near to my feet. I had been dreaming. I often did that here at the pool. I felt close to Riel here. That perhaps was a bit morbid considering he’d died here—right here. I doubted that the docents would point that out to visitors to the house museum. But then again, maybe they would. Maybe they’d even outline where his body was found in yellow paint. That was the sort of scintillating information that kept museums in the news. And telling someone that a burglar murdered Riel here would be different from telling them it was after they’d had gay sex.

I stood, picked up the duffel bag, and continued on to the pool house. The bungalow facing Flagler was two rooms deep. It was about forty feet wide, which meant there was only about six feet on either side to the eight-foot fence on the lot lines. The bedrooms—two of them—were on the front of the house, facing Flagler, and, as bathrooms with walk-in closets had been built toward the street onto both bedrooms, the front wall of the bungalow was right against the sidewalk. A parking space separated the bedroom wings, and the door was on the inside wall of that. The space had been covered, making it a carport, with a front door hard to get to when a car was parked in it. Riel was just fine with it being hard for uninvited visitors to get to the front door of the Flagler house—the other house was the main one. The people he’d invited, who parked on Flagler—usually hookups he wanted coming in from the back—knew to come around the side to the pool terrace. The back of the house, facing the terrace, was one long room, with the living room flowing into the dining area and into the kitchen area. The back of the house was almost completely glass.

The room I’d always used as a bedroom, which was a bit narrower than the other bedroom, so that the carport wasn’t completely centered, was on the right, with my back to the terrace. It had a three-quarter’s bed. The other bedroom had a queen-sized bed. I went to the closet in my room and stashed the duffel bag, changed into what I considered to be cruising clothes, and went out to the carport.

The carport was pretty much filled with a 1966 Buick Skylark convertible, the car Riel owned when he died. It had been here ever since, and was in nearly pristine condition, rarely having been driven. The caretaker of the compound drove it enough to keep it alive. I’d already found that it attracted young men on Duval Street when I drove to the gay bars. That didn’t bother me a bit.

I went to Jerry’s, a bar off Duval that had been a favorite of Riel’s when we were together. The bartender bar owner remembered me, and we discussed the “good old days” and the progress in getting the museum open. Riel and I hadn’t gone out together too much in public. This was one of the few bars we did go to. The people here had always been very discreet, and I was never aware of Riel having been outed. Few in Key West knew who he was—or cared until he started pulling in international awards. By then he was dead.

There was a group of twenty somethings at a table who were pretty raucous, but nobody in the place seemed to care. I, at the bar, certainly didn’t. I’d checked them out. I was cruising. The bartender pointed out that one of them, a cute surfer dirty blond lad, his hair long and silky, his build both slender and well-muscled, kept looking at me. When the others left, he stayed long enough, looking at me, for me to know he was offering a hookup.

He left the bar. I waited ten minutes before I also left. The red Skylark convertible was parked out front at the door of the bar, and Kenny—which I later was told his name was, although he probably didn’t give a real name any more than I did—was leaning in a James Dean pose against the fender of the car.

“This yours?” he asked.

“Close enough.” I’m betting he knew it was mine—that he’d seen me drive up in it. It belonged to Riel’s estate. It was still unclear how I fit into that. But no one questioned whatever I did with his things.

“Can I get a ride in it?”

“Sure. Is that all you want to ride?”

“What do you have in mind?” Kenny asked.

“Both ways,” I said. “You ride me and I ride you. Flip-flop. That’s the way I like it. I have someplace we can go.”

“Suits me fine,” he said.

Our first, flip-flop, fuck was in the Skylark in the guest house carport. I scooted over onto the passenger side after driving into the carport, while Kenny was going up on his feet and hovering over me, the heels of his hands pressed into the top of the car seat on either side of my head. I unbuckled and unzipped his shorts, pulled them down to his knees, and gave him head for a while. He returned the favor and went further. Kneeling on the car floor in front of me, he pulled off my jeans and briefs, and sucked on my cock, congratulating me on being horse hung. He asked me to put my ankles on the top of the windshield, which I did, and he rolled my pelvis up and sucked on my balls and ate my ass out.

He was preparing to rise over me and stick it in me, when I murmured, “The backseat. Let’s do it in the backseat.” There wasn’t much room back there, but we managed a completed flip-flop. I knelt sideways on the seat on all fours, and he mounted, penetrated, and fucked me to an ejaculation. I did him in a cramped missionary, with his shoulders and head on the seat and his pelvis elevated, his legs waving in the air, as I crouched between his thighs and had him warbling about my being horse hung again.

“Want to do it again, with more room? Want to come inside? I have a pool?” I asked.

“A pool? Sure,” he answered.

When I came out of the guest house in a terrycloth robe, wearing nothing else, Kenny’s lithe, naked body was making a perfect dive into the pool. I went over and sat on the foot of the pool bed and watched the young man swimming languid laps in the small pool. Once again, the beams of the lights on the eaves of the houses were reflecting off the surfacing of the pool, making it shimmer around the beautiful, nude body of the young man.

My mind drifted.

* * * *

The first thing Riel wanted to do when we got back to the house was to fuck. I convinced him I was too sticky from the day’s flights down from New York, which necessitated a layover in a small terminal the Key West commuter flight left from that was shirt-clinging hot and muggy. It had been much colder in New York when I’d left there that morning, and I wasn’t dressed for hot and sticky.

“I don’t want you dressed at all,” Riel said, with a smile. “Seeing you with your shirt clinging to your chest and going opaque turns me on.” He wasn’t giving up his “let’s fuck first” position.

“Why don’t you give me a quick tour then, and we can take a cooling swim before we fuck,” I said. “I’m not that turned on by hot and sweaty fucking.” He reluctantly agreed.

He came out of the house covered in a terrycloth robe, wearing nothing else, in time to see me dive, naked into the pool. He sat on the end of a pool bed and watched me languidly swim laps as the late-afternoon sun deserted us over the Mallory Square pier to the west.

When I came out of the pool, he opened his robe and laid it aside. He gestured for me to come to him and I moved between his spread thighs. He leaned over and took me in his mouth and gave me head until I was fully erect and telling him I wanted to be inside him.

I sat on the end of the pool bed and he sat in my lap, facing me, and rose and fell on my cock as I palmed, squeezed, and separated his buttocks mounds to achieve maximum penetration. After we’d come and rested, I lay on my back on the pool bed and he rode my cock.

“I’m hungry,” I murmured later, as we lay, in the dark, stretched along each other’s bodies on the pool bed.

“I’ve been fed. You’ve fed me with your cock,” he answered. “But I’m not full.”

I turned him on his belly on the pool bed and he raised his buttocks for me, as I slid inside him and filled him.

Later I said, “I really am hungry. What they fed us on the plane should be a crime.”

He laughed, pulled away from me, and rose from the pool bed. “There is food in the refrigerator. Eat and come back.” He went into the main house and to his study, the second bedroom, and started pounding away on the typewriter. I thought he would be so engrossed in composing that he’d forgotten he’d told me to come back after eating. But he hadn’t. He abruptly stopped typing and called out that he wanted me—now. I put him on all fours on the pool bed, mounted him, and fucked him again.

I was still fucking him when Phil Costas—my first meeting with the hunky, large, muscular, and impossibly hung friend of Riel’s—arrived. He stripped as I was fucking Riel and mounted my back.

“This is my editor, Jack Edwards. Phil Costas, a printer, and my friend,” Riel said as the big man worked his cock inside me while I was inside Riel and started to pound me hard and deep. Thus is how I met Phil, one of the few other men fucking Riel regularly and privy to his secret, on the first night I spent in Key West. After Riel had come again, he broke up our little love nest. He went back to his study to bang away on the typewriter again, muttering that what we’d done all evening was just the inspiration he had needed to compose. Phil gathered me up in his arms, took me to my bed—he seemed to know the arrangements—and banged the hell of out me in every position he could think of. I almost thought I was back in the Navy and that there were more than one of him on top of me.

Welcome to the Key West lifestyle. I felt like I’d been liberated and come home.

* * * *

“Neat pool,” Kenny said, rising up on the lip of the pool and looking oh so fuckable as he brought me out of my reverie.

“Come here,” I said, pulling off the sash of my robe and spreading it open. He came into my lap, lowering his sheathing channel on my cock. We embraced as he rose and fell on my cock to my ejaculation. Then he rose off me, gently pushed on my chest, causing me to lie back on the pool bed. He grasped my ankles and raised and spread my legs. Moving in between my thighs, he penetrated me with his cock and fucked me to heaven. I luxuriated in the attention. Desirable men who will flip-flop aren’t easy to come by anymore.

* * * *

One reason I like to come to Key West periodically is that it’s closer to New York than San Francisco is and it’s one of the few locales in the United States where, if I wear something provocative, as I did the next afternoon when I went looking for Phil Costas, and have a half-way decent body, those who see me on the streets can safely assume that I’m gay and cruising. I didn’t go there often enough to know what the current signaling was for top versus bottom, but as I was happy to go either or both ways, I didn’t need that anyway.

Phil Costas’s printing shop was located across the key from Reil’s house, near the west-side marinas, on Caroline Street, when I’d lived here a dozen years earlier, and it was a long shot that I’d find him still there. I was looking for two reasons: One was that I was considering options about what to do with Reil’s unpublished pornography manuscripts. The other was that Phil fucked me with a dick that I couldn’t forget. I was right, though, that his printing shop wasn’t there anymore. A big building was going up covering the block his shop, with his apartment above, had been located. Workman were tearing up the sidewalk in front of it. There were two of them and they were real hunks. They were sharing a drill and taking turns. They were taking turns too using a padded vest while they had the drill going between their thighs and going bare chested while they were resting and drinking gallons of water and wishing it was beer. When I’d parked the Buick convertible half way up the block they were working on and came out of it, leaned against it, and contemplated the disappearance of Phil’s shop and they noticed me, they were quicker to trade off on the drill so I’d get a good look at the musculature of both of them.

Key West was that kind of town. Chances were that even the construction workers drifting here were gay and on the make. That certainly seemed to be the case here. And I had come here in heat.

I caught on that they were ogling me in my worn low-rise jeans, red mesh athletic T, and cowboy boots. I knew it was me who caught their attention. Otherwise their eyes would have gone to the classic convertible. It didn’t matter that I was forty-six. I’d aged well, kept in shape, and never had complaints about my looks. I kept a good set of wavy hair, which was key at my age. They, in turn, were in their late twenties or early thirties. One was a beauty and one looked like a thug, but what they both had were Mr. America bodies, no doubt kept in shape by that pneumatic drill they worked. The one with the drill leered at me and held his drill in such a way that clearly signaled to me that he had a power drill between his legs.

The moving drill mesmerized me into a trance. I smiled and waved when the hunk lifted the drill and pointed it at me, with the handle nestled into his crotch. That was some drill he had. I hoped it was indicative of what I could expect from him in bed.

* * * *

With randy guys cooped up on a destroyer off Korea with short, tense moments of action and long periods of just routine Navy maintenance duties, and not enough of those to occupy the entire complement of men, it was sorted out pretty fast not only who would give cock and take cock but who were the prettiest and most yielding of the seamen, who would do group activities, and who would do doubles. The smallest, prettiest of the men went to the officers. I was never small enough for their tastes and, although fair of face, I comported myself as a man’s man. However, I would do all of the rest.

I not only would let a guy fuck me while I fucked another guy, but I’d let two guys fuck me together if I liked their bodies. It took a while, but I adjusted to it.

Seaman worked their muscles. My memory was dredging up two guys on the destroyer—one of them the E-3 who had popped my male cherry—who were real muscle men, a lot like construction workers who would work a power drill. They liked to corner me by the E-3’s bunk when the three of us were on rest period. What my mind was conjuring up was the first time, before I learned the routine and toughened up to take it. One was the E-3. The other was an E-2. Both were ugly as sin, but both had bodies to die for. That first time I thought I would die. The E-3 had me bent over his bunk in a doggie fuck. Other guys were standing around, watching, and pulling on their shafts. That didn’t bother me. Then he was pulling me up, keeping me on his cock, standing and holding my thighs out to the side with his beefy hands. I had to arch my back and raise my arms and lock my hands behind his neck to stay in place.

The E-2, leering, body built like a Roman soldier’s armor, came into my vision in front. He came in close. He reached between my spread thighs, grasped my butt cheeks, one in each hand, and rolled my pelvis up. I groaned and huffed bloody murder as he worked his cock in above the E-3’s already-buried cock. There was sucking in of breath and sneery laughter all around as the two fucked me together and I writhed, sandwiched between them. But I had endured. And I had made it onto the list of E-1 seaman who would take it. And each time after that brought less pain and more pleasure.

Fucked by two magnificently built muscle men at once. Fucked good.

* * * *

I’d leaned against the red convertible and watched the sidewalk drillers for some fifteen minutes after deciding visiting Phil was out of the question and while my memories went back to the destroyer days—being destroyed on that tin can some days. I came back to the world as the bare-chested one taking a water break sauntered in my direction. It had taken him a while to realize that I was loitering there because of them—that I was sending them an invitation. He was leering at me—challenging me to get in the car and drive off if I didn’t want to take him. He was letting me know that it would be rough. Beyond him, the guy operating the power drill between his legs was still leering as well.

They had a van parked on the lot of the building that was going up that was off the street and barely seen from there, which was a good thing, as it was rocking on its shocks for the next forty-five minutes as we fucked on the padded floor in the back of it. The construction worker had come to within eight feet of me and stood there, hands on hips. He muttered, “OK, let’s go, hotshot. In the van over there. Doubles.” He turned and walked toward the van as the other guy turned the drill off and walked in that direction too. I followed them.

That’s what I liked about Key West. Certain assumptions could be made unless contrary signals were given. There wasn’t a lot of preliminary dancing around that had to be done here. I had signaled that they could have me if that was their inclination, and nothing else needed to be said. He’d even said “doubles” and I’d kept walking behind him. In most every other city, it could take days to establish that a guy would do that.

The two muscle guys obviously liked each other and fucked around even when there wasn’t a third guy to ravish, as they did a lot of kissing and fondling and stroking with each other. They did a lot with me too. One guy was only a top. The other one, like me, was versatile. One fucked me for a while, while the other kissed him up, and I fucked the other one for a while, while first one fingered me and, eventually, put us in a chain, him doggy fucking me and me doggy fucking the other. Then they surfaced my E-3 and E-2 memories of the Navy, put me between them, one under me fucking up into me and the other holding my legs spread and raised and fucking me in a missionary.

I left the van stumbling like I hadn’t found my sea legs and humming Navy shanties. I’m happy to say I left them both stretched out on the floor of the van. They hadn’t returned to work by the time I drove off. They had, however, each told me what their work schedule was—when I could next find them here.

I was driving back across the key when I passed Kenny walking on the road. I pulled up beside him.

“Hey, Kenny,” I called out. “Can I take you somewhere?”

“And fuck me again?” he asked.

“Not if you don’t want to. If you’re not doing anything, I wouldn’t mind some company. We could just drive around and see the key. I’d like to see what’s changing. I’ve just tried to visit a shop that isn’t there anymore. It would be good just to drive around with some company. We could get something to eat—my treat—and something to drink, if you like.”

“And then fuck?”

“Only if you want. That would be fine with me, but only if you want. Hop in if you’d like to ride around a bit.”

He hopped in. We drove around. He liked being seen in a classic red convertible. He said he liked being seen with me too. I chose to believe him. We stopped at Mallory Square and had tacos from a taco truck. We went to a bar and had drinks. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed to be seen with a forty-six-year-old man. He seemed to be showing his “daddy” off. We drove to the parking area of Higgs Beach, a well-known gay pickup spot and necked in the front seat of the car. We weren’t the only ones doing it. He leaned over me, unzipped me, and gave me head. I did the same for him. We drove up the eastern side of the key to Smather’s Beach, by the airport. We necked some more and gave each other simultaneous hand jobs.

“Can I show you someplace to drive where we can go into the backseat and fuck?” he asked.

“Do you want to fuck again?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“We could go back to my place.”

“My place is closer,” Kenny said. “The Northside trailer court is just on the other side of the airport runway . . . if you don’t mind doing it in a trailer.”

“We’ve done it in the car,” I said. “I haven’t asked you how much you want. $300 like the other night?”

“I don’t need nothing for it,” he said. “I like you. This is more like a date.”

His trailer was small, but he was tidy. He didn’t have much, but all we needed was the bed and the shower. I fucked him in a doggie position and then he lay on his back and I rode him, facing his feet. They were good fucks, great fucks even. We took our time. We took care of each other. We took time afterward to stretch out against each other and cuddle, fondle, and kiss.

“Can I take you to dinner?” I asked. “Back to Mallory Square for the sunset.”

“That would be nice.”

“My name is Jack, by the way,” I said. “Jack Edwards. I’m from New York. I’m a book editor. The house I took you to is where I work when I’m down here. On an author’s novels.” I didn’t go so far as to say which novelist or that he’d been dead for twelve years.

“I thought your name was—”

I didn’t wait for him to read my fake name back to me. “Yes, well, the other day, that was just a pickup. It’s usually not safe to give real names.”

“I gave my real name. I’m really Kenny,” he said, a little piqued.

“That’s not really a good idea the first time, a stranger pickup, I said. I didn’t think that was your real name. I wasn’t planning ever to see you again. You shouldn’t reveal too much about yourself.”

“I suppose. But now you’ve told me your name—if it’s your real name. And you’ve told me more about yourself.” His eyes shifted to a desk and I saw a typewriter and a pile of papers. Maybe the guy was trying to be a writer.

“Yes. I guess I’m saying it’s not just a one-time hookup now. We’ve fucked again, and I felt like it was something else—more intimate—than the other night. More caring.”

“I felt that way too.”

“Anyway, I feel like I want to see you again while I’m here. I’ll be here a few more days. And I’ll be coming back, I’m sure. Why don’t you go take a shower? Then I will, and we can go to dinner.”

While Kenny was in the shower, I scanned into his manuscript and then read the opening more closely. When he came out, I said, “I hope you don’t mind. I read some of your manuscript here. It’s good. Very good. I could help you with it if you’d like to try to get published. I told you I’m a book editor for a publishing house.”

“Yeah, you told me that. You don’t have to pretend you like my writing to get your dick in me, you know.”

“I’m not pretending, Kenny. It’s something for you to think about. I’ll go get my shower now.”

“There’s plenty of water,” he said. “I know the trailer park looks like the pits, but they have good service here.”

“Good to know,” I said, winking at him as I went off to the shower.

After dinner on the Mallory Square pier while we, and a couple of hundred tourists, watched a glorious setting of the sun over the gulf to the west, we went back to the Flagler Avenue guest house and fucked the shit out of each other for the rest of the night.

Oh, how I love the Key West lifestyle.

We fucked through the morning too, each time taking our time, drawing it out and making it romantic, doing so more as lovers than as guys just getting our rocks off. I drove him back to his trailer the next day, saying I had to do a pickup at the airport anyway, which wasn’t a lie.

We agreed to hook up again as we both had time—he worked part time at a marina on the northwest side of the key off College Road.

“And we’ll have to find time to start going over your manuscript,” I said.

“If you’re really serious.”

“I’m really serious, Kenny. It’s good. I think it could be made publishable. This is my work. This is what I do. I’m not taking you for a ride.”

“Other than flip-flop fucking,” he said. “Not on the writing.”

“Yes, other than that,” and we both laughed.

* * * *

I felt silly at the airport being about the only man at arrivals not carrying a sign with the name of who I was meeting. I knew who I was meeting; I’d had who I was meeting naked under me. I also stuck out because most of the others were young men—paid escorts—there to pick up middle-aged businessmen coming in just for a few days to bang the paid escorts or get banged by them. I was forty-six. It was quite apparent when Neo Prentice spied me, his face lit up, and he came straight for me that I wasn’t his paid escort. He was a movie actor, although not an A-level one, and a male model. It was a given he would look like a million dollars. I’ll bet mine wasn’t the only cock in the terminal that gave a lurch when he came into view. The surprise was that he wasn’t alone. There was another young man in tow behind him who was just as much a hunk. And whereas Neo was only half Cuban, this guy looked all Cuban—and all white teeth and muscle.

“Jack, it’s good to see you,” Neo said as we came together. “I brought Tajo Peraza along. He models in San Francisco too.”

“It’s obvious he does,” I said, sorry for the middle-aged businessmen coming off the plane. All of the paid male escorts sent here to pick them up were hyperventilating about Neo—but even more obviously about Tajo, who obviously was a hung power top. He even walked with a wide-stance swagger that seemed to say that what he had between his legs was both too big and too hot for even him to handle.

It immediately was clear to me that Neo had brought his own gear shift to this outing and that whatever Neo and I had had together—twice—wasn’t so enticing that Neo hadn’t thought he needed to bring his own human dildo.

But I was wrong. The first thing Neo did when we got to the house was to send Tajo off to explore Duval Street, where I’m surprised he wasn’t devoured alive or kidnapped to be a sex slave, and Neo hopped in bed with me.

He was a sexy young man. And he took a cock like he was being sacrificed on an altar, laying himself out, completely open and vulnerable to me, denying me nothing, taking me deep, murmuring praise and encouragement—declaring that I was the best, the thickest, the longest, the longest lasting. It was all lies, of course, especially at my age, but it helped me give and get a superlative fuck.

We did it on the bed in the master bedroom of the main house even though I’d set him—and Tajo when I realized he had come with Neo—up in the guest house main bedroom. We fucked on the bed where Riel and I fucked for years. It hadn’t been my intent. As far as I knew Neo didn’t know that his father and I were lovers. As far as I knew Neo didn’t know the Riel took male lovers. I was giving Neo a tour of what would be the museum layout and he pulled me on top of him on the master bed and brought me into a lip-lock kiss while he unzipped my jeans and grasped and guided my cock. I don’t know how he lost his trousers and briefs, but he did, and I fucked him right there, in a missionary, both of us nearly fully clothed, but both of us in high heat.

Then I fucked him again, both of us naked, in a Flying Dutchman, me sitting on the side of the bed, with his body, skewered on my cock, cantilevered out over the carpet, arched out like the figurehead on an old sailing vessel, and me grasping the wrists of his flung-back arms and pulling him on and off the cock. There was a tribute to the construction workers of the previous day too in which I put him on the carpet on his shoulders, his legs waving in the air, as I jackhammered down into his channel. And, when I was exhausted and he wasn’t, he rode me in a cowboy.

We fucked until dusk. Tajo didn’t drag back until I was in the kitchen of the guesthouse preparing a late dinner for us all. I’d say the reunion with Neo Prentice was glorious except that there was no flip-flop. He didn’t give cock. That and I wasn’t entirely comfortable fucking both a father and a son, especially on the bed I’d so often fucked the father.

It wasn’t nonstop fucking. We had interludes in which we discussed the museum, his father’s books, and when we moved to the depths of discussion, Neo’s father, Riel. It was obvious that Neo knew little about his father and hadn’t even met him in person—and that the young man was torn up by the loss and the feeling of rejection.

“He didn’t give me a moment’s thought. He totally rejected me,” Neo complained.

“That’s not true, Neo,” I said. “He acknowledged that he’d fathered a son—and that you were that son. He talked about you in interviews. I know he did, because I handled the texts of them.”

“But he never—”

“Stay there a minute,” I said. “These were supposed to be a poignant element of the museum tour, but they are yours, so you can decide.”

“What do you mean?”

I hopped out of bed, went over to the closet, and opened the doors. “Look up on the shelves, Neo. The boxes covered in brown paper.”

“So?”

“These are as old as you were at several points in your early life. These cover your first five years. Your father cried when he decided to stop these out of frustration.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Two a year for your first five years. Your father picked out the presents himself, but I wrapped them, and I took them to the post office. One at Christmas and one at your birthday. And I invariably was there when the postman brought them back marked refused. He didn’t throw them away. He stuck them here in this closet. And checks. They never did stop until he died. I know they went. I cut them myself. Those your mother cashed. It’s not his fault he wasn’t in your life. It wasn’t his fault if your mother never told you he was sending support checks.”

Neo got up and walked over to me at the closet. He was a beautiful young man—and more than that, he was the spitting image of Riel. I wanted to hustle him back to the bed and we’d already fucked twice. But I let him pick out a present and open it. It was a miniature conga drum. I laughed in spite of the tension in the air.

“I suppose your mother would have sent that back even if she’d opened it and seen what it was,” I said. “But I’m sure your father wanted to give you something that represented Cuba—so you wouldn’t forget you were half Cuban. Do you want to open the others?”

“No, I guess not,” Neo said. He seemed to be stunned—in a haze. “Are you saying these will be covered in the commentary the museum gives out about my father? That they’ll say he had a son?”

“Yes, and, if you want, they will identify you as his son. Your father would like that, I know. As I told you, he never kept you a secret. I can show you the scripts the docents are learning to follow in the tours if you like and we can add your name in. And I don’t know why your parents didn’t get married. It may not have been his fault, or not wholly so. I know your parents were both volatile and strong-willed people.” I was hedging here. I knew why they broke up. Catherine didn’t see anything wrong with having women for lovers, but she couldn’t accept that Riel slept with men. But Neo didn’t know, I didn’t think, and I wouldn’t be the one to tell him. He seemed to be purposely blind to it. What did he think I had been here, in Riel’s life—Swiss cheese? Shit, we’d just fucked. He knew I fucked men like a bunny. What did he think his father kept me around for thirteen years for?

Leo sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands. “He must have been so ashamed that I never tried to contact him.”

“You were fourteen when he died, Neo, and you’d never known him personally.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “And he would be so ashamed of me now, knowing what I’ve become.”

“You’re a successful movie actor and model, Neo. Your father would be delighted at that.”

“Why?”

“Because you look exactly like him and you are in entertainment professions, just as he was. Novel writing is an entertainment profession. And to be what you are requires that you be an extraordinarily handsome and sexy man—which you are. He would have been pleased and amused. He would see in it that he could be a sexy movie actor and model too.”

We both laughed, but I could tell that this wasn’t all that was bothering Neo.

“What more, Neo?” I asked.

“I go with men. Men lay me. You lay me. I’m a submissive to men. My father was macho from everything I read, and he wrote macho novels. I’ve read them all.”

“Macho novels were what men wrote at the time. But not everything from that time was what it seemed to be.”

“I suppose,” Neo said.

I had come “that” close to telling Neo about his father, of making the son see his father as what he was. I’m sure that subconsciously he knew—or suspected. I knew then that before he left, I’d tell him and find a way to make him believe it. It would not be helpful for me to just declare it. I’d had to find a way to make him see it, accept it, and then understand that his father would be proud of him. But I’d have to think about how to do that—or if I would be disloyal to reveal something that Riel had worked so hard to keep secret.

But then it was time to think about Tajo coming home and to worry about dinner.

“Why did you bring Tajo with you?” I asked. “You didn’t think you’d want to be with me?”

“I was afraid that maybe you wouldn’t want to be with me,” Neo said, “that you wouldn’t want someone as blatantly gay as me.”

I laughed and now, in view of how we’d just fucked, Neo did too.

After dinner Neo and Tajo stripped down and dove into the pool. When they came out of the pool, they fucked on the pool bed—in the same place where Riel had been murdered by a hustler from the street who like to play with knives. I sat across from the pool, watching them, as they kissed and fondled each other. Tajo went between Neo’s raised and spread legs and his perfect, rounded buttocks orbs began to bob and shimmer as he went into the steady rhythm of fucking Neo. They were both beautiful young men. Watching them fuck was like watching an art film.

* * * *

It had been the same the night Riel died. We were both beautiful men and the two of us fucking had attained the quality of an art film. We swam, naked, in the pool that night. When we came out, we fucked—I fucked Riel—on a pool bed right there, right there were Riel died that night and right there were Tajo was now fucking Neo.

After we had fucked, while we were cooling down and wondering if we’d fuck again before Riel went into the main house, to his study, to write, and I went to the guest house to sleep, we argued. That’s when he told me that he was thinking of coming out of the closet, of declaring that he was queer. He said he was tired of living a lie.

I was terrified. I was here to babysit him for Doubleday. They would see him coming out as declaring that he was living a lie with his macho books. The bottom would drop out of the Riel de Fuentes market. They had identified his new novel as a blockbuster. They had already nominated him for the National Book Award and put a fortune into an advertising campaign. Coming out now would have ruined all of that.

“And what? Ask Doubleday to publish your list of porno books?” I asked. Angry and panicked, I was brutal.

“I’m going to burn all of that,” he said. “Coming out of the shadows doesn’t mean I want to exploit my writing—or confuse what I write. I just don’t want to live a lie. I don’t reject being queer. It’s not some sort of disease. It’s just what I am. I want to be part of making it normal. I think someday in this country it will be accepted as nobody’s business but the men’s and nothing to condemn or disadvantage them about.”

“Burn it?” I was aghast. As far as I was concerned, it was his best writing. It would be sacrilegious to burn it. Besides, some of it was about us—Riel and me. He was going to burn what we’d been with each other, make it just like it hadn’t happened? I’d kept copies in my editing that he didn’t know about, but that wasn’t the point. “And I suppose you want to pull back what we’ve given to Phil Costas to publish,” I said. “You wouldn’t want that published, even if it’s in pen name.”

His answer shocked and further angered me.

“Yes, I think that would be best.”

I abruptly rose from the pool bed and stumbled toward the guest house.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “Don’t be mad. Let’s discuss this.”

“I’m getting dressed and going over to Phil Costas’s place to tell him your wonderful news.”

Then Riel was mad too. “At this time of night? You’re just afraid I’ll be going out and hooking up left and right rather than giving most of me to you, aren’t you? Well, I could. The Duval Street gay bars are still open.”

I didn’t answer. When I’d dressed and left, he was in his living room, feeding manuscripts into the fireplace.

I went to Phil’s. He calmed me down by taking me to his bed—me kicking and screaming at first, but Phil much more powerful and determined than I was—spiking me deep and fucking the stuffing out of me. Fucking the anger and panic out of me. Convincing me to go back to Riel and calmly discuss the matter.

But it was too late for that. One of Phil’s friends called him to let him know that Riel had been murdered. That he’d gone out to the bars and taken the wrong male hooker home.

* * * *

“I want to show you something—to discuss something with you,” I said the next morning. Neo and Tajo were sitting at a patio table by the pool, in terrycloth robes, nothing underneath, and having breakfast. They looked far more alert than I felt, which was strange, as they’d kept me awake all night with an all-night fuck fest in the main bedroom of the guest house. That wasn’t fair, though. I was kept awake mainly by worrying about what I was going to do. How I was going to make it up between Neo and Riel.

“Perhaps you could find something else to do for an hour or so.” I said to Tajo. “I have something to discuss with Neo and I don’t know whether he will want it to remain confidential or not.”

“I’ve only been down one side of Duval Street,” Tajo said, with a smile. “I’ll go get dressed.” Then he was gone and it was just Neo and me. I was standing at the table, holding the duffel bag I’d put in the back of my bedroom closet in my hand. Tajo was a good sort as well as a hunk. He was laid back and, I could tell, went with the flow. I think he’d be good for Neo.

“What’s that?” Neo said, gesturing to the duffel bag.

“What this is is a hidden treasure, Neo. It’s been a treasure in hiding for twelve years now. This is your father. The other side of your father. The reason why you need never worry again that he might not be proud of you—what you are and how open you are about that with the world.” I set the duffel bag down beside his chair and sat down in the other.

“Open that when and if you want, Neo. I can tell you about your father, but you might think I was making it up just to make you feel good—about him and yourself. But after you’ve looked at what’s in that bag—if you decide you want to do that—and I show you the papers that establish that Riel de Fuentes and Bill Morrison are the same author, I think you’ll understand. I was thinking of how or whether to publish all of that myself—not in my name or to my profit, of course—but now I realize it really belongs to you, that your father would want you to have it—and that it’s your decision what to do with it. There were two copies. Your father burned his, but if he lived in today’s world, I don’t think he would have done that. I hope you don’t burn it. It’s the heart and soul of your father.”

He looked up at me. He put a hand on the bag but didn’t open it.

“I wasn’t just your father’s live-in editor, Neo. I was his lover. Yes, your father was gay. And on his last night alive he told me that he was planning to come out, that there was nothing to be ashamed of in loving men. What he said convinces me that he would be proud of you—especially that you are not hiding it.”

“You and my father?” And then, after a pause, “I guess I should have known.”

“What you should know, Neo, is that I loved him, and I can only hope that he loved me too. And I’m not ashamed of that. And I’m not ashamed of wanting to fuck you anytime I can get a chance to either. Now, I leave you with your thoughts on where you want to go with this from here.”

I walked back to the guesthouse and entered the living room. I couldn’t resist looking back toward the terrace at that point. Neo had opened the duffel bag and was going through it.

When Tajo came back, horny and in heat, from Duval Street a couple of hours later, I could tell that everything would be fine with Neo now. Tajo wanted to fuck.

“I heard you do a mean threesome, Jack,” he said to me.

“Yeah, he sure does,” Neo agreed.

I put Neo on his back, legs spread, on the bed in the guest house’s master bedroom, and fucked him. When we were going good, Tajo saddled up behind me, mounted me, and, setting the rhythm for all of us, fucked me.

All was right with the world, and Bill Morrison became a best-selling author in the world of gay male erotica.