Homeward Bound

When the scheme first got started, it seemed to be no big deal, really. By then there wasn’t anything to protect and after the first time as part of the boarding house service there wasn’t that much to be embarrassed about either.

My family came to Asheville when I was just ten. For me, it was an improvement over the dreary coal mining towns of western Pennsylvania. Asheville was a boomtown nestled in a bowl of mountains made up of the Blue Ridge Mountains running up against the Great Smokies. The railroad had been cut through the mountains thirty years earlier. It went through Asheville, already popular with the rich plantation families of the Carolina coast as a summer retreat from heat and mosquitoes and also because of its reputation as a healthy mountain environment for the cure of such diseases as tuberculosis, consumption, and melancholy. With the appearance of the railroad came summer visitors from much further away, including the superrich. Most notable of these was George Vanderbilt, who, as I was growing up, was constructing his premier American palace, Biltmore, in the hills just south of the city.

Construction was frenzied and mammoth, and business of all types was more than good. To accommodate both the summer visitors and the labor pouring into the city, boarding houses, renting rooms and two meals for a dollar a day, sprang up throughout the expanding city.

It was the cure that brought my family to Asheville in 1909, my father’s death in early 1917 that turned our house into a boarding house, and my mother’s own passing in the Spanish Flu epidemic in late 1918, that erased my dreams and turned me into a whore.

But that’s not true, really. I won’t whitewash my mother just to give her rest in her grave. I was a whore when she died. It was on me that I let men take me; it was on my mother that money was taken for it—and that it became a way of life, a replacement for what I wanted in life.

At eighteen, life was looking bright and full of possibilities for me. We had moved to Asheville because my father had contracted something in the mines, and he was told he needed to move to the mountains, somewhere with good sanatorium facilities if he wanted to live for any length of time. He didn’t carve out coal below the surface; he owned the mine. But he was a close-supervision sort of owner. He constantly went underground to spur his miners on and to maximize production. And the black lung disease felled him just as quickly as it did any of the miners.

My father, Horace Bairr—yes, with two “Rs” we constantly were telling everyone—had the means to escape the black-walled channels with their bitter, choking coal dust. He brought his family—just me and my mother—to Asheville, and had a good-sized wooden Victorian manse built in the newly establishing Montford district to the northwest of the city, where many working-class people were settling within walking distance of their shops in the city center. My father was more comfortable around the middle class, he said, than with the wealthier people building their summer homes on the mountainsides surrounding and looking down on Asheville.

My mother disdained the move—and my father, for that matter. She was from the Philadelphia mainline. And she would have built up in Grove Park if my father had a notion to listen to her—which he didn’t. But my mother was the half of the couple with a hardnosed sense for business. Away from Pennsylvania, my father allowed the assets of the mine to sift through his fingers and into the pockets of various unscrupulous relatives.

Although the relations between my parents were formally cordial, I would have to say they were icy cordial on my mother’s part. Not that she treated my father much different from how she treated anyone else—including me. With me, there always was a reserve of sorts, and an air of sufferance of some sort of burden that I was the living symbol of. My parents didn’t sleep in the same bed—or bedroom. And often, not in the same house. And they never had sex to my knowledge—never. This, of course, did raise some questioning on my part concerning my parentage and, just maybe, had something to do with my loose sense of propriety on the question of sex.

My father never raised a voice or a hand to my mother, and he indulged her in everything that he was capable of doing. But it seemed more from a respect for her gender and that she had married him and darned his socks than from a deep passion—or even particular affection. And in the brief time he was with us in Asheville, he was away on business quite a bit. Only in later years did I know how hard he must have worked to keep the family’s finances afloat—or the sacrifice he made to pretend we were a family.

When my father died in the back bedroom of our Montford house, taken finally by the hardening of his lungs in a wheezing bout of trying to suck in air that no longer had any place to go inside his body, my mother immediately used all of the savings left to them to add a bedroom wing, upstairs and down, to the back of our house, and opened it as a boarding house. The construction took an amazing short time of three months, but also an amazingly larger sum of money than my mother had figured. The construction boom was so healthy in Asheville at the time that she had to pay top dollar for materials and laborers.

My mother’s failing—if you discounted avariciousness and a propensity to look the other way when it suited her pocketbook—was her pride. I always thought that upon my father’s death she could have fallen back on the good graces of her family in Philadelphia. But when she died and I had to inform her relatives that she had, I found that they didn’t even know my father had died or that my mother had had to go into business for herself to try to salvage the family fortunes. They had, however, told her that she was marrying below herself and that her union with Horace would come to no good. And she, no doubt, hadn’t told them of her straits after he died so that she didn’t have to see them gloat.

I believe she was right in that, because when I told them, plenty of gloating started—which was only wiped off their faces when I told them what my father had whispered to me in his last week of life and that my mother reluctantly then admitted to me—that my mother hadn’t much choice marrying my father; that she was pregnant at the time, and he was the only one knowing that she was who would have her.

The irony was that I, a sandy blond, blue-eyed child of slim build and slightly underaveraged height, loved my roly-poly, dark-haired, brown-eyed, large-framed father who wasn’t really my father a far sight more than I did the raven-haired woman who really was my mother.

But I mustn’t be bitter. My mother gave me life—more than once—in addition to having ruined, at least for a while, the life I had.

When my father died and after my mother had thrown up her bedroom wing and opened her boarding house, and only then, did she realize she couldn’t handle it all herself. She hired help, but help cost money. A son’s help didn’t.

At the time I was off at a small Presbyterian liberal arts college, Lees-McRae College, in not-so-far-away Banner Elk, fully intending to begin a life in writing arts. The good people of Lees-McRae were well-meaning and progressive of mind, and they were as delighted that I intended to be a writer as I was and were prepared to do everything they could to help me do that. It was all I ever wanted to be. I wanted to write plays, mostly, and my fantasy was to tell of the plight of the coalminers in Pennsylvania. Later in life, I was halfway grateful my dreams had been crushed at this point, as by then I realized that a mine-owner’s son had less than nothing worthwhile to say about the plight of men hacking at black-coal walls hundreds of feet below the ground.

But I was idealistic at that time—and open to anything new and mind-expanding. I started down a road of “other” choice, though, when I met Seth Evans. He had come to Lees-McRae from the far more sophisticated city of Winston-Salem down on the Piedmont. And he was open to anything new and mind-expanding too. And he was a poet. But his mind had already been expanded much more than mine had been. And it wasn’t long before we were taking hikes in the mountains surrounding Banner Elk, our books of short stories and poetry tucked into our backpacks along with the bottle of local moonshine Seth always was able to come up with, and a blanket.

During that first fall, we hiked at least twice a week, which the administrators at Lees-McRae thought was a fine addition of physical exercise to mental stimulation. I loved the poetry—at least what Seth picked out to read to me. He had a good speaking voice and was quite active in the college theater—an interest he was developing in me, saying I couldn’t really write plays without having experienced the role of the actor on stage. He was also handsome of face, with dark, curly hair and long eyelashes, and a firm, trim body. The poetry he brought became increasingly explicit, with him explaining what he saw under the surface of the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the bottle of local brandy he brought became increasingly full going up the hill and empty going back down.

I am sure I was prone to relationships with men in any event, but the friendship with Seth Evans and the homoerotic undercurrents in the writings of such poets as Walt Whitman and the German Adolf Brand and as elucidate by Seth moved my susceptibility along quickly.

We started with petting and tentative kisses. The broadest plateau in our relationship was the month of the hand job, where we each slow-pumped the other off while reciting memorable, then, not-so-memorable-later, love poems to each other. There was just that once, though, before my mother called me home, that he managed, through the combination of poetry, brandy, fondling, and my first blow job, to get his erect penis inside my nether channel.

But once is pretty much the whole ball of wax on the topic of sexual innocence.

I know I like to think that it was my mother’s calling me home to help with the boarding house that ended my idyllic, progressive and high-art trysting with Seth. But the truth of the matter is that I was escaping something. I must not have pleased Seth in our one taking of the sex act to completion—a painful completion for me, but one I endured and celebrated for freeing me intellectually and representing my choosing my own course in life. For that was the last time I laid with Seth, and the next week he was taking a fine arts student named Sandy on a hike up the mountain—instead of me. It might have been that the conquest was what was arousing for Seth rather than the consummation. It was a possibility that made me wary of initial couplings with men for the rest of my life. There had to be a second, follow-up time for me to begin to take it seriously.

It was a week after that that my mother called me home. I wanted to die or to run away from school, and I almost leaped at my mother’s request that I come back to Asheville immediately. I didn’t feel used—I felt rejected, unworthy. I sometimes try to deny that, but it was the truth—and the truth of that is probably the only thing that made me give in to my mother’s call so quickly and easily.

I pretty much provided the same functions a rather slow girl named Mary did at my mother’s boarding house. We took care of the in-house cleaning of the boarders’ rooms once a week, no matter how many times the occupancy of the room turned over; the stripping and changing of linen after each boarder, or weekly, if they were staying that long; and the set-up, service, and take down in the dining room for the morning and evening meals. No midday food service was provided, although the kitchen would turn out a lunch in a sack for fifty cents upon request, which few took us up on as that was almost the cost of the room for the night.

Behind the scenes were three blacks; two women—a cook and a laundress, and one young man, who did all of the menial chores that required muscle. His name was Samuel, and he had muscle to spare—certainly more muscle than intellect.

My mother’s role was to collect the money, quiz the boarders to within an inch of their lives to determine that they weren’t in town for the tuberculosis cure, and stride around and look authoritarian—which she did very well.

At the start, I went about my duties sullenly, but my mother soon tongue-lashed that out of me.

“I wanted to be a writer,” I whined. “Father saw that and understood. He encouraged it and told me the money was there for college.”

“Your father had no idea how far in debt he was. He died and left me to do what has to be done,” she replied, baldly and without a soft word for my father’s memory. “And you don’t have to go to college to write. Just sit down and write. Write of the interesting people coming and going in the boarding house.”

“When would I sit down and write, Mother? There is always something else to do.”

“So, learn to do it faster and more efficiently. If it’s a writer you want to be, you will find a way.”

And in that she was right, because I quickly did learn to work faster and more efficiently to free time for writing. I set up a little table and a straight chair under the window in my small room—and I found the time to write. She also was right about the people coming through the boarding house. I found much to write about, from the woman never leaving her room and always crying quietly through the night, afraid her husband would find her in hiding in Asheville—which he did in an act of high drama one Saturday afternoon—to the tubercular little old man even my mother could not turn away who she tucked in an attic corner, to the hog of a man and his wife and their two little piglets who my mother finally had to put on rations at their meals, to the young “widow” who my mother turned out along with one of the male lodgers in the middle of the night, to the retired preacher continually in his cups and uttering profanity under his breath.

But still there was an empty hole in my life—and what I most wanted to write about were things that one could not write about in the American south in those days. I had longings and desires that I could not talk about and believed I should not write about—left alone think about.

Although Seth apparently had left our fully consummated sexual encounter less than impressed, it had left me mesmerized, opened to a whole new world—and frustrated and confused. I wanted more. And it must have shown, at least to our handyman, Samuel, who was well versed in what one man could do with another. He saw in me what I was hungry for—and increasingly frustrated at not exploring—and he saw in me something he wanted. And he took it.

One morning he was in the back of the little barn we had out in the rear corner of the property, near the chicken coop my mother kept for their eggs and for Sunday dinners. My mother didn’t particularly want the boarders to know that she was raising what they ate on the property, this beginning to be considered unseemly in the city in that age, so the barn was hidden from the house by a copse of trees and a stand of boxwoods. It wasn’t just the chickens. She had a couple of cows and a pen of pigs back there too.

I was coming back there for eggs. But Samuel was back there slopping the hogs. He was stripped down to undershorts to dirty as little of his clothing as possible.

And to me, in my deepening frustration, he looked magnificent. He was six and a half feet of solid ebony muscle. His mug was as ugly as it could be, but he exuded sensuality and power—and fecundity. As strange as it seemed, ever since I’d first seen him, I could only think of the raw sensuality of him and think on all of the blow-bys he must have sired already off the women of Asheville. And as he stood there, in the midst of the hogs, with his drawers sagging and his massive manhood clearly traceable by the eye inside the rough cotton, I began to hyperventilate, grateful I hadn’t gathered the eggs yet, hoping I didn’t look too silly—and obvious to him.

Never for a minute did I think he would be interested in a man.

But that all changed when he gave me a big white, toothy smile and moved his beefy hands to the waistband of his drawers and pushed them down to the ground.

“Well, lookee what we’s got here. Mr. son of the owner, commen for somthin’. This what you come fer, pretty boy? ‘Cause this is what I got fer ya. Jam this up in yer stomach, I will. Make yer squeal like these here hogs. Nobody hear yer squeal back here. Yer can scream all yer want as I open you a wide one.”

“Eggs. Just sent out for eggs,” I stuttered out.

“I know yer want it. I seen yer lookin’ at me. I’se know that look. Not so hoity-toity back here in the barn, are it? Not like bein’ in the big house, bein’ the big lady’s little boy in the big house. Out here, it’s raw. Life is raw. Yer git what you want out here.”

“Eggs,” I muttered nonsensically.

“Strip down and come here and kneel to me and suck it,” he commanded. “Or go back to yer mammy and dream of what I got to stick up inside yer that you won’t git if you don’t do what I know yer wantta do.”

I stood there, trembling, rooted to the spot. Not able to move.

“Strip!”

The command hit me like a bolt of lightning, and it jolted me to move my hands to the top button on my shirt. But I fumbled there, unable to get the button out of the hole.

“Do it. Suck it”—he was waving it at me now, and I had no idea a cock could be that big and thick—and black—”And then I’ll give yer the ride of yer life.”

His outrageous demands motivated me. I pulled the shirt over my head and undid my belt and pushed my jeans down over my slim hips. But then I had no idea what put me kneeling in front of him and gagging at the brutal thrusting of his cock inside my mouth cavity. And before I knew it, he had me bent over the pig trough, my head turned and facing the milling pigs—and squealing along with them in their confusion and indignation at that first glorious, deep, stretching, rough, relentless, eternally lasting rear-end fuck by Samuel’s master cock.

Seth hadn’t speared me like this. I couldn’t have imagined that anyone could do this inside me. Samuel had to laugh and tell me to breathe once as I concentrated on trying to hold still and open for his plunging tool. He fucked me deep and widened my channel walls to the point I thought they would split. And he laughed and enjoyed it, holding once he was all in as I gasped for breath and scrabbled my hands back at him. He simply grabbed me by both wrists and folded my arms on my back, crossing them and holding them pinned by one fist, while his other hand prodded and slapped me elsewhere and a couple of times took the root of his cock and rotated his staff inside me to hear me groan and cry out for him. And when he’d come deep inside me—long after I’d done so—his flow burbling out of my channel and dribbling down my thigh, he held for mere minutes and then started to pump me again, at first slowly and then rapidly, his spent come lubricating the friction in my channel until I begged him I could take no more and he ejaculated again.

I lay there, under him, both of us panting.

He had reached depths of me and exhilarated me as I never could have known was possible. It put Seth’s seduction to shame and made what he called a fuck seem silly.

I felt Samuel’s cock softening and withdrawing, and, involuntarily, I whimpered a long, drawn out, “Noooooo.”

“No, what?” he asked leaning over me, still holding my crossed arms in thrall behind my back, and whispering in my ear.

“No, don’t . . . don’t . . . please do it again,” I moaned.

He laughed a deep, husky laugh. “My own little white boy whore. We’ll do it again. Yer can be sure of that. But not right this minute. A man’s got to recover, tho I do it faster than most. Young and virile, thas me. I knew you wanted it.” And then he pulled away from me and strode out of the barn and left me there, eye to eye with the disapproving pigs.

It may have been true that no one could hear my squeals from the house, but someone—someone I could name—must have been out and about in the rear yard—or what happened that night wouldn’t have happened.

In the dark, I lay in my bed, still swooning, hardly able to close my legs, and wanting more of Samuel—as soon as it could happen, no matter how rough and down dirty with the pigs it was. That just added even more excitement to the act.

I should have heard the scrape of the door on its rusty hinges, but I didn’t. And because the noise should have been a warning and I didn’t take it as such, the shoe salesman from the second room back on the second floor in the added wing probably assumed more acceptance than he should have—than he had a right to.

But he was in no mood to ask for rights and privileges. He was on me in a flash. I wrestled with him, bumping the headboard hard against the wall and sending the springs of the bed screaming angrily. Shocked by the surprise and the unexpected noise, and his dick already a couple of inches inside me, which, after the high I’d been in from Samuel’s fucking, I was of two minds about having there, I stopped fighting.

He pulled me down off the bed, momentarily dislodging his cock from my hole, and I murmured, “No, please.” I don’t know what he made of that. I don’t know what I meant by it—it scares me to think that I was murmuring my wish that he not withdraw from inside me.

I was on my hands and knees on the braided rug beside the bed. And he left me there, covering my back with his chest. And then he was mounted on my tail and inside me again, pumping me quick and hard and breathing heavily in my ear.

“Getting it as good as that big black bastard, ain’t you?”

I wasn’t, but I was getting it good enough not to struggle with him. He wasn’t stroking as hard or deep or thick as Samuel did. But he was stroking. And right now that was all that mattered. He was showing me that Samuel was not the end of it. That it could keep going.

He didn’t last long, and when he was spent, he just pulled out of me and was gone. But I was floating along, conflicted and feeling guilty, but not sorry it happened. I rolled over on the braided rug and ran my hand down my belly and stroked myself to completion.

I dozed then, but was half awake when I heard the murmuring on the other side of the door. Then the scrape of the hinges. And there were two of them in the room with me then. The shoe salesman had returned and also an older, heavier man, who I didn’t identify until the next morning.

The older man had a stubby, but quite thick cock, and when he pushed his knees under my buttocks as he pushed my legs open, I had to wrap my legs around his waist to keep him inside me. But I did that, moaning all along because the salesman was tonguing and nipping at my nipples, giving me sensations that Samuel didn’t and bringing memories of Seth back to me.

The salesman fucked me a second time, taking more time at it then and more expertly finding the sensitive spots along my channel that made me groan and gasp.

In the morning, I found that I hadn’t been the only one screwed in the night. The salesman had absconded without paying his dollar fee for the room and board—and, worse, so did a man with his family that had been with us for a week. I never could quite figure out how that man had gotten into and out of his wife’s bed that night without waking her.

So, my mother was as screwed by these men as I had been. In later life, I had to smile ironically at that, though, as it led to what she caused me to drift into.

One or both of the men—I prefer to think it was the salesman—must have enjoyed his night quite a bit, enough to talk of it. Because suddenly our boarding house became quite popular. And my mother, though feigning outrage and indignation, didn’t hand the money men now appearing at her door and asking for the extra service back to them once she’d realized what they were asking—and after she caught Samuel fucking me behind the latticework under the rear porch one afternoon.

What she did was give me a slightly better room at the back of the house, on the other side of the kitchen from the guest wing, with a private hallway leading back to it with no other guest room doors off it. And she put an Oriental carpet on the floor there that nearly filled the room and muffled the sound of the bed rocking on the floor. And she moved the brass bed to the center of the room where the headboard wouldn’t bounce off the wall and had Samuel oil the springs before giving him notice to find other work. And she put on a strong thick mattress.

I told her I didn’t necessarily like the idea—and would be finding out where Samuel went. She told me I didn’t have a choice in the matter if I wanted room and board myself. And that I’d be too tired to go looking for Samuel. As usual, she was right.

In the late fall of 1918, she saved my life for the last time. The Spanish flu ripped through Asheville probably worse than almost anywhere else in the United States. The railroad that had been the city’s angel of life now was its angel of death, bringing in waves and waves of people coming for the cure for something that the mountain air and sulfur waters could not cure.

I got the fever and lay in my bed close to death for nearly a week. The entire time my mother was there, at my side, fighting for my recovery. I recovered, but she then contracted it and didn’t beat it.

Within a week of her death I was informed that her ambitious construction program meant that the bank had a whole lot more ownership rights over the boarding house than I did and that it would be auctioned off from underneath me.

That’s when Mrs. Childress of the Swannanoa Boarding House over on Woodfin sauntered up my walk and settled in the rocking chair next to mine and told me she would be happy to offer me the same position at her boarding house that I had here at my mother’s boarding house.

“The exactly same duties,” she said slowly and deliberately. And then she gave me a piercing stare, no doubt wondering if I realized what she was offering. I did. But she shot it home by adding, “Except that I’ll give you half of whatever the men give me. And if they give you extra, you can keep it. I knew your mother well. My offering is much better, I’m sure, than hers ever was.”

In that she was right. And when I didn’t realize enough money for my part of the auction of mother’s boarding house to return to college, I collected up my scant belongs and my handwritten manuscripts, and I moved over to a small bedroom made from the end of an upstairs hallway at Mrs. Childress’s.

When I pointed out that my mother had put my bed in the center of the room and the room was at the back of the house—noting that Mrs. Childress’s room was right next to mine—she just smiled and said she’d manage to endure the inconveniences.