Interrupted Escape

[This is a completed five-chapter novella to finish posting within ten days.]

Chapter One: Transition Points

“Craig. Craig. Professor Simpson.”

Shit. I’d hoped to get a clean escape. I stopped on my journey to the Delta check-in desk at New York’s JFK international for the evening flight to Amsterdam and turned.

“Hello, Kurt. You didn’t come from New Jersey to see me off, did you?”

My erstwhile live-in was approaching me, looking oh so young and sexy. Looking past him, on the outside of the doors to the departure hall, hovering, loathe to come in, I could see Kurt’s new lover, Austin. He was young and sexy too. How did I ever think that, at thirty-seven, I could hold a beautiful college junior? Perhaps if he had been taking a class from me at Rider University’s Westminster Music College, I could have held his attention for more than a semester. Housing and feeding him hadn’t been enough. If I’d had the power of grades over him, perhaps . . . but that was unfair and nasty of me. I had just gotten too old for him. I was getting too old for any of this. He had even said that to me, and it had stung.

“Of course, I did. I couldn’t leave it as it was. I would have loved to come on the Rhine cruise and gone to the Bayreuth music festival with you. I feel terrible that you have to pay for two fares—that there wasn’t time for you to find a replacement.”

Sure you did, little guy. You came to the airport to make sure I was getting on the airplane. Then you and Mr. Replacement are going to rush back to Lawrence and jump in my bed. What’s really regrettable is that I didn’t make an effort to kick you out of the house before I took this trip. But I did manage to cancel your airfare and get the money back.

“I don’t really want to talk about it, Kurt. It’s too late for any of that.” Even as I said it, I wondered if it really was too late—if we could somehow smooth this over. I was that pathetic. This having forty looming in my near future and not wanting to less loose of young men was eating me up.

I wondered when he was going to tell me he was leaving me. Would he have gone on the trip if I hadn’t honed in on the rumors on the campus and caught him in bed with Austin? Austin was a senior—a bass in the Westminster Choir that Kurt was a tenor in. They both were beautiful young men—and of much the same age. I didn’t have a chance once they’d found each other. But, of course Kurt would have gone ahead and taken the trip—and probably would have let me continue bedding him as well—if I hadn’t made him mad and lose control over what he thought our relationship had come to. He was a music student and had no morals that I’d ever discovered. It was a chance of a lifetime to have his way paid to the Bayreuth summer music festival in Richard Wagner’s town. Not as much of a thrill as it would be for me, of course, since I taught music composition, concentrating on the German composers, at Rider. But it would have been a special trip for him as well—with a Rhine cruise thrown in. All he’d have to do is to let “the old man” lay him now and then.

“I know how hard it is to get tickets to the Bayreuth festival,” he said.

“Do you?” I answered. Did he know that the shortest wait I’d heard about was six years—and that it had taken me seven years on the wait list? Fuck, he hadn’t even been the young man I’d been ticketing to go with me to the festival. Not even the second to last of the young men. I’d had a succession of male students in my bed since I’d joined the Rider faculty, thinking each of them, in succession, would become a permanent part of my life. They’d all been music college students. They’d all been in the Westminster Choir. I was in a rut. And I wasn’t getting any younger. I needed to escape—escape being on the treadmill of wanting much younger men in my bed. Once I’d reached forty that would be the natural end of all of that. Would my life end at forty?

The Rhine cruise and two weeks at the Bayreuth festival—and maybe a lone motor tour of Bavaria was the escape I needed now.

I should just cry off younger men altogether—maybe all men.

“I can’t dally, Kurt. And you can’t come any farther than here. I’m prebooked. All I have to do is get my boarding pass out of the machine and then go on to the business lounge. I’m sorry you felt you needed to come to the airport to see me off. You saw me off when you let Austin Taylor fuck you—and when you lashed out about me being too old to have sex with.”

That did it. He gave me a shocked look and shrank from me.

“I was drunk,” he said.

“And that let you say what you believed,” I responded.

He automatically turned his head and gave Austin, still on the other side of the glass, a pained look. That was it. He’d looked at Austin in shock, not at me.

With that, I gripped the handle of my suitcase and resolutely trudged toward the check-in machine. I hadn’t been able to resist pointing out that I had been going to take him to Europe business class. I always gave him the best. Of course, he had been a firecracker in bed.

But I needed to escape from all of that.

I didn’t look back. I was too afraid that I’d see relief in his face—or worse, either him retreating back to stand with Austin or Austin coming forward to take full possession of what once was mine—when I was a slave to much younger men.

* * * *

We landed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport at 6:45 in the morning and were at the baggage claim by 8:00 a.m. More than a dozen of those from my flight were gathering under a Uniworld sign for transportation into the city and to the River Princess, a river longship cruise boat that would be taking us up the Rhine and Main from Amsterdam to Nurnberg for eight days. Most of the cruise passengers coming in from the States were on this same flight. Most of the others didn’t get a few hours of sleep like I had, since I was in business class, so they looked like they were ready to fall over.

The river cruise didn’t cast off until 5:00 that evening, but the cruise line had taken everything into consideration and was picking us up in a bus at the airport and driving us into Amsterdam. They had a hospitality suite booked for us at the Montien Amsterdam Hotel, near where the River Princess was berthed, where we could rest and unwind, taking walks out into the adjacent canal-laced old city as we wanted and were able to. Our luggage was sent ahead to the ship and would, we were told, be in our cabins. We could check in on the ship anytime after 2:30. That gave us over four hours to check out Amsterdam from when we arrived at the Montien until the ship sailed. It would be our only time to see the city. We could either lunch on our own or a buffet would be set up for anyone who wanted to stay in the hospitality suite.

The tour director, a thirty-something once-god with golden hair, Horst, all smiles and good-will, was there to jolly us along. He glad-handed us all, taking a quick assessment of each as he did so, and, since he devoted extra time to me and assessed me in the same manner that I did others, especially young, good-looking men, I recognized immediately another men-preference top, although, in his case, there was a sizable dollop of bi capability, I thought, to keep the older women passengers twittering about him.

He must have assessed me correctly, as well, because once everyone had been settled in the hospitality suite or already sent on their way into the town, he took me aside as I was doing some grazing at the buffet before preparing to strike out for a mission in the city of my own that I’d been struggling during the flight whether I wanted to do or not. Whether or not I did would be sort of a watershed moment for me.

“You’re Mr. Simpson, aren’t you?” he asked, keeping his voice down so that the conversation would be private. That alerted me to the possibility that he’d make a pass, because before this what he had to say had been meant for and projected to the whole assemblage. This was something he wanted to say just to me, and he put a hand on my forearm to ensure I’d stay there to hear him out.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I believe you have a double cabin to yourself. Traveling alone, are you?”

“Yes. My companion couldn’t make it at the last moment.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he didn’t take ill.”

There it was. He was baldly checking on whether I was gay, as he surmised—and as I surmised about him. If I called him on the use of “he,” he’d just smile and say he was sorry, that he hadn’t perfected his English yet. He spoke perfect English, though. I didn’t see any reason to keep him in suspense.

“No. We just stopped seeing eye to eye, he and I.” I confirmed the “he” so that Horst didn’t have to do any more prying on that.

“A younger man?” Horst asked, pressing in. I apparently hadn’t been wrong about that pass, or at least that he was establishing some common ground between us for us to have a “special” relationship of some kind on this cruise.

“Considerably. He was a student at the college where I teach.”

“Ah. So, it’s Professor Simpson then, is it?”

“Yes,” I answered. I wondered if that piqued the man’s interest in me. Apparently it did, as he continued prying.

“Younger men can be so difficult. You perhaps would do better with someone more mature.” He’d dropped his light grip on my arm but then reached out and touched me again. “I should have everything squared away so that we could go to lunch together. I could show you an interesting district of the city—on and around Kerkstraat, beyond the Amstel River from here, just one of the major waterways and canals that flow through the city.”

I knew, from having checked it out before, that Kerkstraat was the center of the gay district of the city.

And there was the other shoe dropping. He wanted to know if we fit. If so, he was suggesting a tryst in the gay district before we got on board. I was flattered. He was a handsome man and looked like he had a good body. He was probably a couple of years younger than I was, but he had grounds to be talking about more mature men with me. Time to lower the boom, though.

“I enjoy covering younger men,” I said. “I covered the student. I am thinking that you cover men as well. I’m sure you could help me find temporary companionship, but I’ve been to Amsterdam before and am familiar with Kerkstraat. I’m afraid I have other plans today, but it’s been good of you to offer to help me find entertainment.”

He knew it was useless to propose further. We both were tops. He was very smooth, though, and took the declining of the invitation in stride. He easily backed out of the situation, smiling at me and keeping a hand in by suggesting, “Perhaps we can do a bit of cruising together during the tour. I know of welcoming venues in every town we’ll stop in.”

I just bet you do, I thought—but I just smiled back. At this moment I didn’t think I’d be doing any cruising—the question of whether I should escape from the life altogether at this point was what I’d been struggling with during the seven-hour flight from New York—but I didn’t want to close out on possibilities either.

I had something to check out here in Amsterdam, and it meant going to the Kerkstraat area. It just didn’t fit into my plans to have Horst, or anyone else, accompanying me, and I didn’t need anyone showing me how to get there. I’d been carrying around directions on how to get to Kerkstraat for years.

* * * *

As I walked into the city on the main street, Damrak, leading directly from the hotel and the river bank at the central rail station, where I could see the River Princess tied up and taking on supplies for the cruise, I nervously fingered the folded, crudely drawn map I’d been carrying tucked in my wallet. I’d gotten the map nine years previously, the last time I’d been in Amsterdam. Damrak changed into Rokin, and at the end of the canal off the Amstel River, I made a right onto Heiligeweg.

As I walked down the old Amsterdam streets, crossing a concentric pattern of canals, my mind worked over what I was either walking toward or away from, a conundrum that I had been mulling as I was flown across the Atlantic. Was losing Kurt—and doing so so easily to a younger man when I had been contemplating settling down with him—a strong signal that I should just give it up? Was it fortuitous that I was coming to Amsterdam? It was here, nine years previously, that I had transitioned from submissive to dominant. Returning was giving me an opportunity, or challenge, to reassess my lifestyle and decide whether to escape it or try to escape back into it.

Sixteen years earlier I had been a young college student myself—one who had gone on occasion with women but who was beginning to acknowledge that I was more attracted to men, to older men—to men who covered me. I was in Bangkok on a student year of discovery from the music program at Julliard, where I was being steeped in the music of Asia. There I met, came under the influence of, and was initiated by a forty-five-year-old man, Cowboy. I wasn’t given the option then of deciding whether I wanted to be a dominant or a submissive. Cowboy had aggressively and definitively made that decision for me. He encountered me when I was drunk, maudlin, feeling sorry for myself, and confused. And he had laid me out and made me take it and convinced me that’s how I always wanted it.

Cowboy was a legend in Bangkok. He was an imposing and charismatic black former professional U.S. basketballer, who had run afoul of the law for profiting from point controlling and had retreated to Thailand, where he had opened a chain of highly successful bars catering to the whole range of preferences—as he himself had done. One drunken night when I pulled myself away from intensive studies and found Soi Cowboy, the domain of the hugely dominant master of the street, Cowboy took me to an upper room in one of his clubs and demonstrated that the whispered claim that he had the biggest cock in Thailand and knew exactly how to use it could be credibly defended.

He was gentle and careful with me the first time, if insisting that I take the biggest cock in the land could be called that, but he took it slow, with preparation, moving it inside me carefully and with precision, minimizing the pain and shock, as it sank in and stretched my walls. He made me take it, though, all of it, raw, stretching me to the point that, even in my drunkenness I thought I would split. But he made me not care—not as long as he was holding me close, was inside me deep, working me, coming inside me again and again, breeding me.

It helped that the booze made me relaxed and as open for him that first time as possible. He trained me to it so that it wasn’t long until we fucked with passion and abandon and my channel was gauged to his demands and my need for him had become as great as his lust for me that first time was.

Cowboy was my first, and he wasn’t a one-off encounter. For the rest of my study-abroad year in Bangkok, I went to Soi Cowboy, and he took me to an upper room, and he groomed me as a submissive—and he shared me with others, with customers. For a brief period, I was a male prostitute as well as a college student.

I went back to the States, and I laid down for men. Often it was for men who were in a position to serve my career ambitions. As I grew older, I appreciated the role they took in young men’s lives—mine, in particular. I saw it as my responsibility to do the same for other young men.

I also retained an appreciation for the sexual training that the black bull, Cowboy, had given me in Bangkok when I was a twenty-one-year-old college student. After I returned to the States, Cowboy and I continued to correspond over the years, and when, ten years ago, I informed Cowboy by letter that I would be doing a study tour of Europe, starting in Amsterdam, he wrote me that a son he’d sired on a Dutch woman, one of many by-blows, I was sure, owned and operated a gay club in the city, He would, Cowboy was sure, love to meet and accommodate me. The son had had enough success as a middle-weight boxer in Europe that he’d managed to follow his father’s footsteps as a club owner. I was sure there would be no opportunity to follow up on Cowboy’s invitation, but I had folded the crude map locating the son’s club, Chester’s, and stowed it away in my wallet and then just put the whole matter in the back of my mind.

Cowboy’s son, Chester, for whom his club was named, did indeed accommodate me. What surprised me, though, and served as a transition in my approach to the lifestyle nine years ago, was that my assumption that Chester being a middle-weight boxer would mean that he was a vigorous power top like Cowboy, his father, was wrong. He wasn’t. He was a determined power bottom. In an added week in Amsterdam to my European itinerary, Chester, with whom I clicked immediately upon walking into his club, turned me from a submissive bottom to older men to a dominant top of younger men. Over the previous nine years, I was slowly transitioning myself mentally, moving into occasional flip-flops and more than occasional dreaming of younger men under me, but Chester, in that week, had made the transition complete.

And here I was at another transition point. Having lost Kurt, who I had begun to consider settling down with, and at a crossroads of, do I at my advancing age, continue to try to dominate younger men or do I escape from the lifestyle altogether? Chester, now nearly thirty, wouldn’t be a young man anymore, but we had clicked and he had helped me through one major transition—how to be the older man, and the top. Perhaps, since I fortuitously had a day to kill in Amsterdam, he could help me with this momentous choice.

I passed the Bloemen Markt—the area of the morning wholesale flower market—and crossed two canals, and there, just as the tattered map I’d had for nine years had told me, was Kerkstraat and the prominent sign for Thermos, a renowned gay bar and sauna. I’d been able to tell for several streets that I was in the center of gay life in Amsterdam.

I stood there and swallowed hard. Until now I’d told myself I was just checking out if Cowboy’s son’s club, Chester’s, was still here. If so, then I’d make a decision on whether I’d seek him out again. Was I here just to talk with him—ask him how his father, who I didn’t correspond with anymore—was doing and whether he thought someone could escape the lifestyle? Or was I hoping he’d want me to bed him again? Was I here to climb back on the wheel after being without for a couple of months, my last session being an angry, forceful taking of Kurt that didn’t turn out at all well? The club, Chester’s, was just a block from here if my memory and this map were accurate.

Except that it wasn’t there. I walked a block, and then two, and then two back, scrutinizing the business fronts on both sides of the street. Where Chester’s had been was now a flower shop, with a sign saying there was a dance studio in back. Had Chester changed businesses? Was the popularity of the nearby Thermos so great that it had run other men’s clubs in this area out of business?

After considerable pacing backward and forward, I forced myself to enter the flower shop. The young man behind the counter was obviously from this district: thin, swishy, pink hair, and jewelry hanging off everything. He flashed me an interested smile. I have no idea how easily gay men are able to gauge and classify other gay men, but they quite often are able to do so. He’d gauged me correctly except for taste. He accorded me no sexual charge whatsoever. I, in turn, was obviously of sexual interest to him. He started preening when I was still approaching the shop.

“What was here before?” he responded to my question, leaning over the counter and giving me the eye. “A gay club, I think. Maybe four or five years ago. It closed.”

“I think it was called Chester’s,” I said. I damn well knew that was what it was called, but I didn’t want to reveal my knowledge of the district and my need that much to this young man. “Owned and managed by a mixed-race young man, a boxer. He would be about thirty now.”

“Yes, I think that was the name. Oo, I’m sorry I missed the mixed boxer. Was he sexy?”

“Yes, he was,” I said, turning before we could get further into that and leaving—although I wanted to give Chester his due. He was very sexy indeed. As I left the flower shop, I saw the cruise director from the riverboat, Horst, across the street. Had he seen me? Was he following me, I wondered. But when I looked up again, he was gone. I walked on.

I needed to know more about what had happed to Chester. Thermos was still here, so I let my steps carry me in that direction. This time the young man at the desk was sexy as hell. He quickly assessed me too and registered interest, showing a bit of disappointment that I wanted information rather than all of the other pleasures Thermos had to provide.

“Yes. Chester’s,” he said, with conviction. “Nice guy. A great bod. A weight lifter I think. Did you think he was a real looker?”

“Yes, very sexy,” I said. “He was a middle-weight boxer. I knew his father and that is the reason I’m looking for him.” I wanted to establish that I knew Chester in a larger context than just sex—as good as that had been. But I thought it would help to extend that to having known him biblically for what I wanted to ask. “I’d like to hook up with him again. I’ve come from the States and have a day in Amsterdam. Do you have any idea where he went?”

The receptionist laughed. “A day in Amsterdam won’t help you, I’m afraid. I believe he married—a Dutch girl. Got her knocked up and did the right thing, although I’d guess that put a crimp in his style with men. I’ve also heard that his father owned a string of bars in Bangkok and, when he died, Chester inherited them—that he closed up here and went to Bangkok. I do know that he left the country, though.”

“Pity,” I said.

“You say you knew his father?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“But you didn’t know he’d died?”

“No, I didn’t. I knew him in Bangkok.” And he knew me—every inch of me.

“I’m sorry,” the attendant said.

“So am I. He was a good man.” Cowboy had, in fact, been a good man—on several levels. There was a moment of silence, but it was companionable enough.

“If it’s someone like Chester you’re interested in, we have plenty of men here at Thermos today. I don’t know if you want one half black, but I think we can match you up with a good body. Men who are fit.” He posed his body to show that he was fit—and most likely that he was on offer. “I’d be happy to show you a thing or two in back. You’re American here for a day? I’m sure we could waive the entrance fee for you if you give us good recommendations.”

I thanked him but he could see I was not in the mood, not having found Chester.

When I left Thermos, I went back to the flower shop and bought a long-stem rose, which I placed by the door outside as I left. I’m sure the shop assistant hoped that it was a gesture of flirting with him, but it wasn’t for him. It wasn’t for Chester, either. It was for his father, Cowboy. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised he’d died. He’d lived so large that an early death was understandable. But I hadn’t known before now that he had passed on, thus ending one of the stories of my life.

As I was walking back to where the River Princess was berthed, I was thinking that maybe looking for Chester had brought me closer to a decision to just hang it all up and become a sexless, middle-aged music professor. Otherwise, I might have taken the cute young Thermos receptionist up on his offer.

TO BE CONTINUED