Sail to the Sun

Hoagie kept me close. I had a windowless room in the basement of the inn, across from the room Hoagie kept for himself down the corridor off the wings of the small stage in the club room. Hoagie’s room—and mine—were beyond the six small cells, three to a side, off the corridor.

The room was fine with me—it was no worse, and better in most respects—than the space I had been given by the men who owned me in Thailand—with the exception of the small apartment the young pilot had taken me to. I could be alone there, and I counted it a blessing and a favor that Hoagie didn’t make me bring patrons back to my private space. The six cells between mine and the backstage area were where we gave the customers individual attention—for those times when someone didn’t spring loose to “treat the room.”

It was the activity called “treating the room” that I hated the worst. When some miner was willing to pay the price for this, Hoagie would call one or more of the dancers out on the stage, and the spot wouldn’t be extinguished when we had stripped down. We’d dance, naked, until the crowd could take no more, and then men would hop up on the stage with us and, if we were lucky, would take us right there, on stage, with the crowd satisfied with looking. When we were unlucky, we would be body surfed out into the crowd until we landed on a tabletop on our backs, and the crowd would descend on us and pull our legs apart and hold us down as customer after customer fucked us.

Hoagie would just stand there beside the bar and smile. The profit he received when some drunken patron treated the room would make him smile.

I was the only one of Hoagie’s boys who roomed at the inn. The other guys had more freedom than I did. They could live on their own and came and went as they pleased to work their shifts as waiters in the inn and then later at night as dancers in the club. If a diner at the inn hooked up with them, they could go anywhere they wanted to do their business and keep whatever they made above the set commission for Hoagie.

But Hoagie kept me on a much tighter rein. I never saw any of the money I earned—it all went to Hoagie, because, as he continually said, he owned me; he’d bought and paid for me.

I slept in my windowless room in the basement of the inn, locked in at night by Hoagie. He always knew where I was and what I was doing. And he beat me and fucked me just, as he often said, so that I wouldn’t forget that I was all his. I knew one of these days he would kill me, because his favorite fetish was to choke me during sex, to keep me on the edge of consciousness while he satisfied himself.

The other waiter/dancers I befriended often asked me how I could live like this. But how could I not? I had known nothing else all of my life. This life was one of luxury compared to my existence back in Udon Thani. Just having a room of my own was paradise, even if it came with a lock on the outside of the door. And I had almost never had time alone, to myself—at least until Estaban came. My life had always been one of waking-to-sleep servitude.

Perhaps the more meaningful question was why did Hoagie think he needed to lock me in at night—or why anyone would think he should share any of the money I brought in with me.

Where was I going to go? A young Thai man of mixed blood transported to the mountains of West Virginia. Unique. One of a kind in this community. No one to talk to in terms I knew; no place to go except where Hoagie placed me. And food enough in my belly to quench the growls of hunger as well as a roof over my head—a room of my own. I could not have hoped to provide for myself back in Udon Thani as Hoagie provided for me.

Hoagie’s demands and cruelty weren’t any more of an imposition than I had lived with all of my life in rural Thailand.

But when I said as much to Hoagie, he accused me of trying to manipulate him, of trying to gain some slight glimmer of control over my life—and he beat me so badly that I could not leave my room for a week, giving me, he said, something to think about should I ever dream again of breaking free.

But I wasn’t thinking of breaking free—even though I had, all of my life, dreamed—in the abstract—of sailing to the sun. I had no concept of this freedom Hoagie seemed to think I was reaching for. My dreams were only something I used to pull myself through the small inconveniences of life.

I didn’t even dream of sailing to the sun anymore. Not really. Except maybe when Hoagie was choking me while he was fucking me. I wasn’t a fool. In comparison with the wooden hole in the wall I had been raised in back in Udon Thani, I had already sailed to the sun. My horizons in my childhood were more than fulfilled in the life Hoagie gave me here in America.

It was in that week that I was too banged up to fuck that Estaban arrived. He was even younger than I was and had traveled up from Mexico with a band of men who seemed to be trying to keep a step ahead of the immigration authorities. They were stopping here and there on the way, they said, to Canada and would do seasonal or temporary worker jobs in the fields or on construction crews until they had enough money to push on north or until the local authorities became suspicious. When they had come by the inn looking for work, Hoagie had jumped at the opportunity to have the outside repainted at a cut price.

Estaban was small and prettier than most girls. And it was clear that he was being used by the men he was with. I was well enough to hobble around the inn and help prepare food and clean up even if I was too bruised to serve at table, and thus I was able to see that Hoagie was attracted to Estaban.

He seemed to be even more interested when the men Estaban were with showed a willingness to discuss selling the young man. I knew then that part of Hoagie’s attraction to me was the sense of physical ownership—that I was just an object that he owned and could use any way he saw fit.

I heard Estaban moaning in Hoagie’s office one evening and then crying out but almost immediately going silent in a cut-off gurgling sound. I involuntarily lifted my fingers to my neck in the darkness of my room, knowing what was happening across the corridor from me, and wondering if Hoagie had crossed the line at last. But the next day I saw Estaban walking with Hoagie out among the storage buildings at the edge of the parking lot. Hoagie was showing Estaban a small shed.

The next day, the painting completed, the band of workers had moved on. But Estaban was still here, working small menial jobs around the grounds and in the kitchen. In the early afternoon, I saw Hoagie take him by the wrist and lead him out to the shed, and I heard them having sex.

I came closer and peeked in the shed’s window and saw that Estaban was on his tailbone on a stack of mulch sacks and Hoagie was standing between Estaban’s thighs, his bare rump undulating in out in a very familiar act. Hoagie was holding Estaban up with hands around the young man’s throat and Estaban was gripping Hoagie’s biceps with his hands to keep from slumping down into Hoagie’s choke hold. Just as I was wondering if the cruelty was too much for him, I saw Estaban encircle Hoagie’s waist with his legs and start to put his own pelvis into a countermotion with Hoagie’s thrusts. The young man’s hands went to the back of Hoagie’s head and pulled Hoagie’s face down into his for a kiss. The long, low moan I heard was coming out of Estaban’s mouth. At least for now the Hispanic workman was accepting what he was getting.

So, Estaban was even lower in status here than I was. Hoagie owned him too, but he wasn’t even given his own room to retreat too—nor was he allowed to serve table as I was yet. Of course he wasn’t put on stage as a dancer either, but Hoagie had him inside the club bar, doing menial work at night, and on more than one occasion, I saw a patron paying Hoagie and leading the young Hispanic toward the cells behind the stage.

Thereafter Hoagie didn’t make as many demands on me as before, but I also sensed that his interest in me was waning, and I began to worry about what would happen to me if Estaban was elevated to my place with Hoagie.

* * * *

The first time I was with Buddy, we didn’t have sex. That was something of a turning point with me. I was a commodity. I had always been a commodity. Men paid for my time. But the time they were paying for always was for the sex. That is, it was until the first time Buddy paid for me.

I knew the night he decided to pay for my time. I saw him talking to Hoagie at the side of the bar while I was doing my dance. And I don’t know why, but I was glad. I was happy that he wanted to be with me.

Buddy was the young, tanned, and well-muscled blond man who had sat for so long at a table away from the edge of the stage—the guy who reminded me of my young pilot and who was unlike the others in the room, the miners, with their coughs and the grimy look they never could quite get rid of no matter how hard they tried. And their sallow skin and leers and catcalls and the way they’d look at me and stretch their arms out to try to connect with me—to possess me, if only for a fleeting moment.

But I guess I really need to go to earlier that day to describe well what happened that evening, to explain away where I went wrong in thinking it would be Buddy I went with at the end of my dance that night.

It started earlier in the day, during the dinner service. It was some sort of American holiday, their workers’ day I think, because the dining room at the inn was buzzing with activity and there were more than the usual number of families and all the customers were festive and dressed out like it was a special day.

I was kept on the run throughout the service, and Hoagie was doing his regular taskmaster routine. The kitchen was visible from three of the dining rooms, and Hoagie, as the master chef, was in top form, entertaining the diners by barking orders and keeping all of the cooks and waiters on the move and frazzled. The customers most probably saw this as all an act, but those of us who worked for Hoagie knew that he was dead serious and cruelly within his natural element.

Many of the men who came to the inn to dine knew exactly what happened there, in the downstairs club, and, although they did not play in the same game that the miners who frequented the club did, they played nonetheless. Hoagie was strict about all of his waiters sticking with the dinner service during the inn’s dinner hours, but any male customer who asked for the special menu had choices he could make in waiters and services by ordering by letter and number from this menu—and, for a price, for a very hefty price—he would be ushered to one of the inn’s special rooms after the dinner hour was completed. There he would be attended to by the waiter of his choice and served the services of his choice for which he had prepaid.

That evening I learned I was being ordered off the special menu—and when Hoagie informed me of that, I started to scrutinize the dinner customers, playing the game of trying to figure out who it was. Several of the men present had been ogling me and were quite friendly. Some others treated me like I was part of the wallpaper—but I had learned from experience that this often was a diversionary tactic, especially when their dining companions were their wives or girlfriends. Sometimes they went out of their way to at least pretend they weren’t interested in me.

I surveyed the room. I was apprehensive, because Hoagie had smiled a cruel smile when he’d told me I had work to do between the dinner service and my dancing stints at the club. A chill went up my spine when I saw that three men who were dining together were all giving me the once over and putting their heads together and whispering. I had visions of them all taking me together. I did not have to imagine what that might entail, because it had happened to me before.

Several of the tables I serviced were of groups of women, and although some of those groups were quite friendly to me, I dismissed them as possibilities. As far as I knew, Hoagie kept a male-only establishment here and none of the other waiters had ever told me they serviced women. There were a couple of young couples—but even more middle-aged and elderly couples. Most of these were ones who, although pleasant to me, were engrossed with their dining companions and barely saw me. Even more of the men of the older couples barely saw their female companions either—they were totally absorbed in their meals.

And then there were the families. Most of the fathers in these families were so busy trying to keep their children in line that they could do no more than give me apologetic smiles as they sent me off to respond to their children’s capricious demands. These were smiles of appreciation, because I was a very good waiter with their children—used to demands and to satisfying them.

I was especially solicitous of these young fathers. Having no idea who my father was, I admired and respected these men who would bring their families to an expensive restaurant like this and take the time and effort to satisfy their desires. Much of my time that evening was spent with a family with four small children and a middle-aged couple. They were all dressed very well, expensively. The father seemed to be a young businessman of some sort, and the older couple were probably either his parents or those of the wife. The middle-aged man, probably also a businessman, paid the bill and left me a generous tip, no doubt pleased that the way I interacted with the small children, helping to keep them entertained and happy while the parents and grandparents enjoyed their meals with a minimum of fuss.

I had decided that my after-dinner clients were the three businessmen who were spending more time whispering to each other than on their meals, so I was caught completely by surprise when at the end of the dinner hour, the young father of the family I’d spent the most time with at service was waiting for me at the inn’s kitchen door.

Hoagie had given me a key to one of the cabins, but when I made to move in that direction, the young man pulled me away from there and walked me back to the far fringe of the parking lot where a dark SUV was almost invisible in the darkness, well away from the nearest street light.

The shock that this young father was my client was doubled when he slid open the rear door to the SUV and arms reached out and pulled me inside. I found myself in the arms of the middle-aged man who had been at table with the family. And he was naked and already erect. He pulled my face down into his lap, as the younger man came into the middle seat of the SUV behind me and rolled the door shut.

I gave the older man deep head, while the younger one shed his cloths and undressed me. The younger man opened me up with lubed fingers and his mouth and then, for nearly an hour, the two men sat side by side on the seat and passed me back and forth, setting me down on their cocks and kissing each other as they traded in fucking me. In the end it wasn’t me they wanted at all. I was just part of the preparation. I huddled in the corner and watched the older man fuck the younger one to completion.

I had hoped that Hoagie would let me appear late on stage in the club that evening, as the two men had worked me well before they turned to each other for satisfaction, but when my first schedule stint on stage came up, Hoagie was at the door to my room, unlocking it and telling me to get my ass out on the stage—that it was a festive holiday crowd, ready to be separated from its money and more than ready to play.

He was right. It wasn’t even pay day in the mines, but the room was full and the crowd was raunchy and quicker than usual to get frisky and more boisterously reaching across the stage for me as I danced on the pole. I sensed that they were on the edge of someone stepping up to treating the room, but they didn’t quite get to that point—they, in fact, went beyond it. Seeking to find the balance, to lessen my trembling from contemplating the possibilities, unwanted after the taxing surprise I’d encountered in the back of the SUV less than an hour earlier, I looked out over the crowd, seeking a center of calm.

And I found the calm as my gaze fell on the young blond man, sitting at his table near the back of the room, nursing a beer and watching me with a sad look on his face.

Our gazes met, and he must have seen something in my eyes that motivated him, because he didn’t remain seated. As my eyes followed him across the room, he rose and moved to the side of the bar and was talking to Hoagie. I saw the young man pulling a wallet out of his back pocket, and then my attention was distracted by a salivating miner who had reached across the stage and managed to grab my ankle and was trying to pull me toward him. I leaned down and talked dirty to him and sweet talked him long enough for him to loosen his grip on my ankle, thinking I was going to let him kiss me. But then I waltzed away from him. When I looked up again, the young blond man was nowhere to be seen.

The crowd was getting quite rowdy, though—and bold. I saw that Estaban had been cornered at the bar and was being held in a customer’s lap and jostled up and down. I could see his bare, brown legs dangling helplessly at his side, and from the expression on his face, I knew that the customer’s fly must be open and he must have something buried up inside the young Hispanic’s channel.

Men were surging toward the stage, but, luckily, another dancer was within easier reach than I was, and he soon was being body surfed out into the center of the room, where he was set down on his back on a table and men were enveloping him. I saw his legs spread up and out over the shoulders of patrons and his feet shudder and go rigid and pointed as I heard a cry of invasion and raucous cry of victory from the swarm of men.

I was anxious then to get off the stage, to move to the wings and to see that the young man was waiting for me, waiting to take me away from this chaos. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that I wanted to be with him—for my time to be bought by him. There was something about him that was totally unlike any of the others. I was exhausted from my workout in the SUV, but somehow I had worked up a wanting to be with this man. I had never felt like this before.

Because I wanted to be off stage, it seemed like my dance was going on forever tonight, that I was having unusual trouble staying connected with the audience while still maintaining my distance, keeping them focused on the swirl of the dance without isolating their engaged arousal on me specifically and wanting me to fulfill the dreams that had brought them back to a dark hole of a room, spending their hard-earned cash—rather than luxuriating elsewhere for the hours they could sail to the stars or sun rather than cower in a cave, whether natural or manmade.

The dancer on the pole beside me gave a little cry of surprise as he slid down to the floor, having allowed his body to stretch out too close to the edge. I looked down and saw that an extra-large-sized hairy miner, all muscle and beer gut—stripped of his shirt—had a grip on the dancer’s ankle. The dancer looked up at me in panic as his body was being dragged back toward the edge. The miner reached up with his other hand and grabbed the band of the dancer’s thong at the waist, and I saw it snap as both of the miner’s hands grabbed the dancer by the waist. The dancer howled and his eyes searched mine imploringly as I could see in his face the moment of penetration and being pulled back on the miner’s cock. The dancer closed his eyes then and relaxed and allowed the miner to pull his pelvis back and forth on his sheathed cock. It was only the shock of flashpoint of it all that had gotten to the dancer. He knew that if the miner wanted to fuck him and was willing to pay, it could happen here as well as in the cells backstage.

I was about to turn and run for the wings. Only discipline kept me there. Hoagie would beat me if I ran. This was unusual for a club night, but it wasn’t unheard of. A couple of times a year the crowd would go wild like this. But Hoagie wouldn’t care. He’d stand there and take in every separate tableau. It mattered not whether his dancers got fucked in the cells or here in the main club room. The stories of the occasional orgy here were good for business. Hoagie had a steel trap for a mind—and the patrons knew it. If they fucked a dancer on the floor, they paid, same as if they had a private session in the cells. And nobody would be leaving tonight without paying for whatever he had consumed and enjoyed.

I couldn’t see Hoagie in the room. But I assumed he must be there someplace, although he had trained the barkeep to keep score as well as he did. The first dancer was off the table now, sandwiched between two men, both enjoying his channel together. I knew he would receive an extra-large portion of the sex price for that, so I didn’t feel too sorry for him.

Whoever was operating the sound system was either inattentive to the music because of the entertainment value of what was happening around him, or was perverse, because I was sure the music should have stopped by now. A burly, red-headed miner and a thin, swarthy, nasty-looking sidekick were eyeing me now from the edge of the stage, and I saw that they had lifted their legs up to the stage—their bare legs—and were about to spring up to my level. I steeled myself for what was to come.

But at long last I heard the turn of the music that signaled it was time to drop my thong, embrace the darkness of the dowsed spotlight, and glide back into the wings, where waiting for me was . . . not the young blond man I was expecting, but one of the gray-beard middle-aged men I had served at dinner, a man who had kept his face virtually buried in his food as his female companion rattled on inanely in a loud, nasal voice.

And then I made a mistake. I breached the premier rule of a prostitute seeing the client for the first time. I let my face show my shock and disappointment—and, yes, more than a little dose of disgust at a man who would ignore me in the dining room but would drive his wife, who I had seen and served, home and then return to buy a half hour of sex with me. Showing true feelings was a taboo; the first rule in this business is to feed the client’s fantasies—to make him feel special.

I could see the anger rising in the man from my double take. And he wouldn’t know that it wasn’t so much how he looked to me as it was that I hadn’t expected it to be him.

He took my wrist in his hand, and I could tell from the strength of his grip that he wanted to hurt me now. I led him down the corridor toward the cell assigned to me for my after-dance assignations. We passed by two figures. One was Hoagie, who was showing me an ugly look that indicated that I would be beaten for letting my guard down like this—although I didn’t know why he cared; the man had already paid him and Hoagie would latch on to any tip I would get too. But perhaps he was mad because he now knew that the tip would be small or nonexistent.

The other figure that materialized from the darkness of the hallway as the client and I passed was the young blond man I had thought I would find waiting for me in the wings. He was looking forlorn and sheepish—embarrassed to be back stage to see me and the older man and knowing where we were going and why—and that I wasn’t going with him.

“A half hour,” Hoagie muttered to me as we passed him. “There’s another one in line.”

Although Hoagie had no inkling of the effect of that statement on me, my spirits were lifted. It appeared I’d have my time with the young blond man after all.

All I had to do in the meantime was to endure a half hour with a large, gray-bearded man, whose face was flushed with anger and insult. The client made me pay dearly in that half hour for what my face had betrayed when I’d seen him in the wings. The man slapped me around and forced me to the floor on my knees in front of him and assaulted my mouth with a stubby but thick and hard dick. He wanted me to gag on him, and he made sure that I did. He wanted to degrade me and put me in my place for having reacted to him as I did—and I went docile and obedient to him immediately. I knew that if I resisted or showed the least bit of spunk, it would go worse for me.

When he was ready—and having made sure I wasn’t yet—he pushed me onto my back on the platform bed in the center of the room, rammed himself roughly inside me, and fucked me hard. I made the sounds he wanted to hear—being chastised for not enthusiastically receiving him—and there was no way he could know that I was just grateful that I was servicing only one, when I had come so close to being gang banged out on the club floor in a melee that probably still was going on. He came quickly and couldn’t go hard a second time within the half hour, although he forced me to try to make him hard again. And then, at the end of the time, he was gone—having done no more but grunt and hiss orders at me. No thank-you, no tip. No surprise.

To be continued.