Sail to the Sun

[This is a completed five-chapter novella, with posting to be completed within two weeks.]

The room was smoky, and with the spot on me, I couldn’t see much farther than the first row of men, all leaning over the edge of the stage. Men with bulging biceps bursting out of muscle shirts. Tattoos running up and down their arms. Leering and cheering and singing to me. Challenging me, daring me, begging me to take off that last thong. Beckoning me over to the edge and cajoling me to lean down so they could put their dollar bills in my string and playfully—maybe only half playfully—snap the string and maybe try to pull it down. But not all that seriously. All had been here before. They knew that success would mean a blackout and the end to my dance on the pole and platform. They knew that anything more private or doing in public what should be in private required a payment to Hoagie, standing behind them in the shadows beside the bar, beefy arms crossed. Seeing everything and assessing the worth of every man in the room, including me.

“Come on, Asian boy, stop the tease.” A voice raised from the second row—slurred, good natured, but ever hopeful.

Friday night in the back room of the Hawksbill Inn and motor hotel. All gussied up on the outside, out front a country inn serving gourmet meals for the well-heeled of eastern West Virginia, albeit few and far between, as well as those in transit from somewhere to somewhere else who thought they had driven the roads of the mountain state endlessly in search of a presentable place for a meal and a night’s lodging. In either case, those traveling through felt they’d died and gone to heaven when they’d stumbled on the Hawksbill Inn. Think of colonial B&B with upscale motel rooms running back from the east side. Those thinking they had stumbled on a gem in a pile of dirt weren’t seeing the parking area on the back, on the west side. Here the old pickups parked, their owners with a hard-earned paycheck in hand from the mines and indulging an itch that brought them to the darkened parking lot and the metal door opening to the black-walled stairs down into the catacombs under the burnished-wood walls of the plush dining room above.

1:00 a.m. in the morning. Amazing to think that three hours earlier, I was in a stark white dress shirt and neatly pressed black pants, solicitously serving at table in the upstairs dining room. I moved adroitly, as I had been taught, amid heavy mahogany tables and captains’ chairs set on old, worn oriental carpets in front of warming fireplaces and tables set with sparkling silver, starched linen, and the soft glow of candles, helping patrons order gourmet dishes and choose expensive wines.

“Shake that bootie. Whoeeee,” a raucous voice soared over the babbling din. I recognized the voice. I’d given him a blow job the previous night in one of the cells behind the stage after one of my sets. He’d paid Hoagie in ones and fives. It’d be another month before he could afford that again, but he promised he’d be back.

He promised he’d take me away from here someday. I can’t count how many promised that with the hope I’d give them free service until I realized there would be no taking me away. Fat chance of that I knew. Hoagie would put both of us away before that would happen. Even without Hoagie the idea was ludicrous. Me, a young Thai man, living openly with a burly miner in the mountains and hollows of West Virginia. I wouldn’t hold my breath to see that happen.

“Shoot the moon.” Another voice sailing through the air—and making my thoughts drift back, as the music drummed ever louder in my ears. I raised a leg high up the pole to cat calls from the murk, knowing I was nearing the moment when I unsnapped the thong and turned full frontal to the ring of reaching arms for an instant, a mere instant, before the spot was extinguished and I glided off stage, into the wings, and perhaps into the arms of a patron who had met Hoagie’s price—me not knowing until Hoagie met us at the cell door what the price would buy.

Shoot the moon. Bringing to mind what my mother would whisper to me as she pulled the curtain across the bed, the smell of the smoke and the heavy breathing of the man—invariably an American from the air base—having already told me the curtain would be pulled. Just another lonely and horny American airmen—just like the one of many possibilities who had fathered me.

“Shush now, little Atid,” she’d murmur. “Mother sails to the sun now.”

Each time she’d say that I would feel warm and close to her, as my name, Atid, meant “sun,” and for a moment, a moment only, I thought she was coming to me, to cover me with her arms and rock me back and forth and hum a tune of safety to me. But she never meant she was coming to me. And I would lay there on the other side of the thin curtain, hearing everything, knowing the moment she reached the sun, knowing she was being seared by the heat of the sun, crying out at the explosion.

It was not long, there in Udon Thani, before the American airmen came not always for my mother—but sometimes, when I was old enough, for me, and I learned myself what sailing to the sun could mean. Until then, I denied what it really meant. Sailing to the sun for me was rising out of the Thai jungles, above the trees and the fetid squalor of our alley and into the clean sunshine and the crisp air of the mountaintops. It was only a dream then; I didn’t expect ever to do that. And when I did get glimpses of it, I was sorry that it only shed understanding on the conditions I was born into. I think I would have been happier never to have known more or better.

I would speak to my mother of what I wanted sailing to the sun to mean, and she’d give me a soft look and tell me that was a lovely way to think of it. And that’s when she told me that she was able to do what she did for the American airmen because she held a double meaning of the term too. Yes, she had to open her mouth and legs for the foreign men in whatever manner pleased them. But in doing so, she opened up a world of continued existence for herself—and for me—although in the times I had displeased her, she was quick to point out the increasing expense and drag on her life that I was.

And so when the American major came to her and I saw the fistful of baht he handed to her and she turned to me and told me that my dreams of sailing to the sun would come true and that she would always think of me high above the clouds on a mountaintop, and the American smiled and put out his hand, I went with him. I went with him so that I no longer would be a burden on my mother and so that perhaps she would not have to fall on her back for a foreign man as much when I was gone. But I also went for myself. I could not see above the trees—to the warmth of the sun—from the hovel existence I led with my mother. Surely, I thought, any new life would be more like sailing to the sun than the life I then was trapped in.

I became the major’s houseboy on the American airbase and worked hard for him during the day. But I also worked hard for him in the night, sailing to the sun again and again, my legs open wide and his throbbing club moving relentlessly in and out of me, searing me with the heat of the sun, moaning and groaning just as I had heard my mother do for the American airmen, and exploding as I flew into the sun. Him walking into the room after a day at work and fisting the knot of my sarong and sweeping it off me. Telling me to run, to try to allude him. A game he liked to play. I would run and whimper for him, and he would track me down and push me to the carpet or onto my back on a table or desk or fold me on my belly over a chair. And roughly force my legs apart as he held me in a close embrace. He would search me deeply with his fingers and then, when I was moaning and groaning, mount me, riding me hard and deep, while I sobbed for him.

That was when I met Hoagie. He was a master sergeant and watched over men taking care of the heavy aircraft at the airbase, and I knew he must have been a heavy task master, because he certainly was cruel to me.

His quarters were near to the major’s and he would take long looks at me when he passed by—and he passed by increasingly. He would smile, and he was pleasant to me. He would stop to talk to me as I worked in the major’s yard, and, lonely as I was, I would smile back and would try to have something that needed done when I thought he’d pass by. He would bring me chocolates and little presents. I knew what this meant when the chocolates appeared.

He was a huge man. All muscle and bullet head. Bald and with arms as big as my waist. He told me he was a cook in his civilian life and that he wanted to know how to cook Thai food and show me how to make some Western dishes the major surely would like, if I showed him some Thai cooking. He told me he would become an innkeeper when he returned to his world—that he already owned what he’d turn into an inn.

I let him into the major’s house during the day. Most of Hoagie’s work shifts were at night, and the major’s were during the day. So, as a surprise for the major, I invited the master sergeant into my kitchen and for weeks I traded cooking lessons with Hoagie. All I wanted to do was to learn new American dishes that would please the major.

But when Hoagie had learned what he wanted to know about Thai cooking, he sent me sailing over the sun—not just to the sun, but over it. First he did it with his fists, beating me to the floor with blow after blow. Then lifting me and slamming me down on my back on the kitchen table and ripping my sarong off, and then my loincloth, leaving me naked to him. He forced my legs apart, twisting my ankles into the open slats of kitchen chairs on either side. Then, with one hand he grabbed my neck and choked me almost to the point of unconsciousness as he took his hard tool in the other hand and guided it to my hole and then forced his way into me—and we were sailing straight to the sun. I did black out then and didn’t come to until he had turned me on his hard member and was spouting his seed deep inside my belly.

He came to the house three more times during the day and took what he wanted from me before the major found that I was lying with another man. I was afraid to tell the major what Hoagie was doing; he told me he’d kill the major if I did. And I believed he was capable of doing that. The major wouldn’t touch me after learning I had lain under Hoagie. He beat me and told me he would turn me out into the night. But he didn’t. He locked me in my room—his laundry room where I kept a mat to sleep on, and let me out only to relieve myself and to cook his meals. He said that all I was good for now was to cook and clean for him.

There was a young pilot who visited the major sometimes. I thought that maybe they were lovers, but when I hinted at it once, the major just gave me a funny look and said that they liked the same thing too much for that. And then he laughed and called the pilot his bait. He said they went out to the clubs at night and that the pilot was so young and good looking that he would attract enough men for the both of them.

And indeed when the young pilot visited the major, it was me that his eyes followed around the room, not the major. They seemed very comfortable with each other, and I only saw them fight one time—and that was over me. After the major locked me up in the small room at the back of the house, I heard voices raised when the young pilot visited. They clearly had developed some sort of disagreement. It was only days later that the major opened the door to my room and told me to come out into the living area. The young pilot was sitting at the dining table; his eyes picked up my form as soon as I entered from the hallway, and I looked down, embarrassed, because I knew that look. That was the sailing to the sun look—the look of want.

Although I was embarrassed, I also was pleased. The young pilot was a beautiful young man and he had always addressed me politely and been kind to me when he had visited. He was soft spoken and had a sweet smile that made me feel safe and happy. I could see how the major considered him a good man to take to the clubs with him. He exuded a presence that made others want to know him and please him—and to be with him. I felt a glow and an inner feeling of completion when he visited.

Looking past him, I saw that there was a stack of American money bills on the table in front of the young pilot. And thus I was surprised but I understood when the major said, “You are to go with Tom now. You belong to him now.”

The young pilot was kind and gentle and loving to me. He had to live in bachelor quarters with other pilots on the airbase, but he had a small apartment—just a single room with a bathroom and a kitchenette really off base in the red light district outside the gate to the air base. This had been where the major and the young pilot brought their men from the clubs, I learned—because they still did that, sending me out for the evening or, when the major was there, sometimes making me crouch in a corner and watch. They both used the men they brought to the apartment as the major and the other men used me.

But even then, the young pilot treated his men more gently and respectfully than the major did.

He certainly treated me that way the few short months he owned me. He spent more and more of the nights with me in the apartment—making slow and sensual sex with me. Covering my body with his sweet kisses and preparing me well for when he laid me on my belly on the bed and covered me close from above, and, with me being well opened and panting for him, sliding his member slowly and deeply into me and kissing me on the neck and shoulders and lips while he slowly moved in and out of me, asking me what I liked and then what I liked better, and giving me what I wanted. Sailing to the sun with him was all that I could wish for.

But that was not to last for long.

One evening, before the young pilot bedded me, there was a heavy knock at the door. When he opened it, there stood a drunk and disheveled Hoagie. He looked past the young pilot and found me with his eyes. In a slurred voice he said he’d come to use me and that he’d pay the pilot. The pilot refused and managed to push Hoagie out of the door and shut and lock it. The man stood out in the hallway and pounded the door and cursed for a short time, but someone from one of the other rooms opened his door and shouted at Hoagie and he left.

A few days later he showed up again, sober this time, and stood at the door, talking through the crack permitted by the length of the engaged night chain. He told the young pilot he wanted to buy me, and again the pilot refused. Hoagie then threw a wad of American bills through the crack and said I was bought now and that he would take delivery in his time.

The next evening the pilot went out to the clubs with the major, but they returned earlier than I expected and without other men. The young pilot had been beaten badly, and while the major helped him bandage his wounds, I overheard them discussing how Hoagie had come into one of the clubs and picked a fight with the pilot—and would have done worse to the pilot if others hadn’t pulled him off. The major said that the young pilot should do what Hoagie wanted, or it could go very badly with him. The major even mentioned that Hoagie was responsible for maintaining the plane the pilot flew, so the pilot should be very careful about doing his inspections before he took off. But the young pilot again demurred, saying that now that I was with him, he would keep me with him—that he would take me to the states. That . . . that he loved me.

I was so frightened and grateful and filled with warm feelings for the young pilot that night that, when we were alone, I had made him lie back on the bed in as comfortable a position as his wounds would permit, and I made long and languid love to his member with my mouth and then straddled him as gently as I could and rode his member until he flooded me with a sigh.

That was the last time the young pilot and I sailed to the sun. Two days later he did not return from his flight in the evening. Instead, Hoagie came to me. I opened the door to the knock, not knowing who it was, and Hoagie was standing in the doorway.

“If you have anything to take, get it and come with me,” he said.

“I cannot,” I answered in a weak, little voice. “I belong to the young pilot. He has told me to stay here and wait on him.”

“Tom isn’t coming,” Hoagie said gruffly. “Tom isn’t coming ever again. And you are mine; I paid him for you.”

I struggled when he wrapped his arm around me, but I was no match for him. And I angered and aroused him. He merely picked me up, supporting me doubled over with a strong arm around my belly, and carried me to the bed and fucked all of the fight and resistance out of me, sailing up and over the moon again and again with his pistoning cock, until I agreed to meekly go with him.

* * * *

Hoagie took me back to his quarters and locked me in a back room as the major did. And he let me out to clean and cook and then whenever it pleased him to fuck me cruelly—far more cruelly than the major ever did. He sometimes would hit me, but he never hurt me badly. He called me his obsession, the itch that he needed to scratch again and again. I endured him, counting the days he was marking off on the calendar he kept in the kitchen, the number of days that needed to pass before he would be leaving Thailand.

I did not know what would be in store for me from my next owner, but I endured by telling myself it could only be better than the here and now. In time I grew numb to the thrusting of his cock inside me before I was prepared to be fully open to him, and I learned to not panic when he was choking me, trusting that he knew the threshold not to cross. I almost regretted it when he went a stretch of days by going to the clubs rather than taking me from my room and laying me on his bed and slapping my thighs open to him. What would I face when he no longer wanted me, I wondered, with fear.

But when the calendar ran out of waiting days and Hoagie packed to return to America, he took me with him.

As we prepared to leave—with the hassle Hoagie went through to get me documented to go with him showing more than anything else had his determination to have me—I couldn’t help but think of the young pilot. I tried not to think about what had happened to him, why I’d never seen him again after Hoagie came to the apartment and took me away. I knew why, of course, but I did not want to think about it. But when times were roughest with Hoagie—when he was taking me hard and choking me and I was afraid he was going to kill me—I transported my mind to that interlude with the young pilot. He had told me he was taking me to America too. But I wondered if he would have gone through all of the red tape that Hoagie had to get me there.

Hoagie told me I was his now, that he had bought and paid for me, and that he could do whatever he wanted with me, even in America. And of course I believed him. I had known nothing else, no other life than being some man’s servant and bed toy. Even the young pilot had owned me.

Hoagie had been telling the truth about being a cook. I learned that he was a chef, and he’d somehow come back to America with enough money to fix up the place he owned, which he named Hawksbill Inn, and to set it up to suit himself.

I was not the only young man who worked at the inn for him or who sailed to the sun with him. But as far as I could tell, I was the only young man he owned. The others came and went as they pleased and, I think, kept at least part of their wages. I didn’t.

“Show us what ya’ got, boy. Let it swing.” The voice sliced through the din and brought me back into the real world. I turned and spread my buns with my hands as I leaned deep and looked out into the crowd with a provocative smile. The string riding in my butt crack was thin, and I knew I was giving the room a good rim shot. I could tell they were interested by the sucking in of air across the smoke-filled space and the whistles.

I was looking back at the bar, though, at the end, where Hoagie customarily stood. He wasn’t there, and this is why I was looking. I wanted to know what, if anything, I had to look to when I left the stage. If he was there, in the stage wings, my time and attention probably had been paid for, and my night was not over. Someone would be waiting for me in the wings. But who? I scanned the crowd, trying to decide who was missing. I couldn’t tell.

My eyes fell on a young man sitting somewhat apart and staring at me quietly—not yelling wishes and wants or cat calling as most of the rest were. Just nursing a beer and watching me with a sad look on his handsome, chiseled face. Someone not like the rest—the thin and sinewy miners, with their coughs and concave chests, incongruent with the hardness of their muscles—and the dark cast of coal dust to them that they never seemed able to wash away. A young man—not much older than I was—who worked out and who was too tall and bulky for the confined spaces of the mines. Not sallow from life underground as most of them, but tanned and robust. I’d seen him there before, but, as always, he sat apart and just gazed at me sadly and nursed a beer.

I was struck almost immediately by the similarity between this young man and my young pilot. And my heart went out to him. And I found I was dancing for him and him alone. That somehow transported me away from the here and now, and I felt myself lifting through the roof and over the trees, Sailing free—upward.

The music in the room had reached the signal point where I knew it was time for me to turn from the pole and place my hands on the snaps at the sides of my thong. There was a sudden hush in the room—anticipation. The clientele was regular. There were few places for miners to go in this region of West Virginia if they liked men. The sudden silence from the floor of the club room was deafening, and I could hear the gasps escaping and the cheer forming as I unsnapped the thong and let it fall—and stood there for what was an eternity for me but only a split second for the patrons in the room before the spot died and I glided into the wings.

No one was there. No patron waiting for me. I was initially relieved, but then I began to panic and hyperventilate as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and saw him there. Hoagie was standing just beyond the wings, a look in his eyes that I knew so well—a sailing to the sun look.

I felt the steely grip of his hand on my wrist and he was pulling me down the hallway, past the cells used by the customers, to his own room. He spun me into the room and backhanded me across the face, sending me to the floor, as he unbuckled his belt and let his trousers drop to the floor.

I gagged and instinctively reached for the enclosing leather strip as he noosed the buckle and slipped it over my head. He backhanded me again, telling me to drop my hands, which I did. A beefy arm went around my narrow waist and he shoved my chest down onto his desk top. A drawer opened and then slammed shut and he was pulling my hands behind my back and tying them together at the wrist. I cried out in pain as his sheathed cock slid into my channel, and then I forgot anything but that tight belt around my neck as he pulled back on it until I was at the point of fainting and then relieved the pressure but pulled once more as soon as the rasp left my breath, while stroking hard and deep inside me with his angry cock, again and again and again.

Now, at the point of blacking out, I willed myself to think of the sailing to the sun that I longed for. Sailing up, over the trees and hillsides of West Virginia. Into the air, above the clouds, sailing toward the sun—and merciful unconsciousness.

To be continued.