Underappreciation

Oak Sapling

 

Tender shoots, virginal leaves,

uncurling to the sky above,

the sun, the wind, the storm, the rain,

whatever was to be . . . trusting, open, vulnerable.

 

The sun filters in, penetrating, opening, invading, possessing.

The wind stirs, whips, buffets.

The storm has its way, the rain delivering

The essence of its mastery.

 

The oak sapling initiated, completed, and ready for steady.

 

 

“No, that’s not quite it. I’ll have to check out how it is with oaks. I don’t think the imagery is sexy enough. Maybe I have to turn it around to make the sapling the shaft.”

Tim McGown was sitting behind the steering wheel of Hadley’s Mercedes when the inspiration hit of what he wanted to write, and he’d pulled his duffel bag from the backseat and retrieved a pad of paper and a pen. He was accustomed to being inspired to jot his thoughts down in poetic form at the most peculiar times and places. It was still dark outside the professor’s house as he waited for him to come to the car, and the young man opened the driver’s door so the dome light would come on and give him illumination to write by. Maybe he needed to approach this from another direction. Usually when he was keyed up like this, he could express it on paper.

What was it like to be a young man, developing like an oak sapling, having been covered and initiated for the first time by an older man—a man experienced in how to seduce and possess? And to have opened so fully and quickly to that that he now couldn’t get enough of it—and from more than that one man. His image was of some sort of plant—a flower, he thought—opening to the elements and being fully used. He wished he knew enough about botany to capture this in a poem.

Tim had been told about the weekend and his role and he hadn’t shied away. It had sexed him up—put him in arousal. Did that make him a slut? Could guys be sluts? Was he way beyond wondering about that in relationship to himself? Did he care or was he feeling alive at what life had opened up to him? He knew now he was desirable to older men seeking younger men, and he was ready to serve their needs. Did they appreciate that enough?

Tim was keyed up for this weekend. “All of these men are important in the field you wish to attain, Tim,” the professor had said. While he was saying this, they were stretched out along each other’s bodies, in bed, sexually satiated, and the professor was stroking and fondling Tim’s body with the long, elegant fingers of his hand.

It was the first inkling Tim had been given that the professor was pimp as well as lover. He didn’t want Tim’s body all to himself. He wanted to share it with other men—most probably for his own personal gain.

“It’s important that you network and draw these men to you. The men who will be there have shared desires and needs. You can put that to your advantage.” Hadley had been more explicit than that when Tim had pressed him. It had been made clear what Tim would have to provide to be given this opportunity.

“Yes, to impress these men, you’ll have to let them fuck you. To be creative and to fire up all of your sensations to take advantage of, you have to have experiences and adventure, Tim,” Hadley had said.

And here he was, ready to drive Professor Hadley out to the seminar at the lake.

He reread what he’d written, having wanted to pen something to capture his first time and maybe having now made a connection to the nature writings of Walt Whitman, the subject of the weekend’s seminar. The poem wasn’t right yet. That wasn’t quite it—it wasn’t even nearly “it”—but it had the essence of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to image it—how he had experienced it himself—like petal opening to pollinating penetration and the flow of the rain. And not that long ago. Was this why Professor Hadley had asked him to attend the weekend writers’ retreat northwest of Lafayette at Lake Manitou—to drive him there and sit with the group discussing the poems and impact of Walt Whitman and, Professor Hadley said, to absorb some of what they had to say about Whitman and thus, perhaps, to use in his own development?

Or was he being invited there as Hadley’s offering—a young man to fuck—to his colleagues for some gain by Hadley himself? In any case, did Tim really care? He had an image of himself, lying, naked, on his back, legs open and bent, and a succession of middle-aged men, all reciting poetry, all erections in hand, moving in between his thighs, penetrating and fucking him. Each one a little different in technique and equipment. Each one overcome with the need to be inside him. Did he really care? He was here, wasn’t he, outside Hadley’s house, preparing to drive him to this “conference.” And the thought of several men, in succession, fucking him was arousing to him.

It wasn’t, Tim wondered, because Professor Sands, Hadley’s colleague in the creative writing program at Purdue, had influence over Hugh Hadley that would make him invite the day student in one of Hadley’s seminars to a weekend retreat? It wasn’t so that Sands could pursue the conquest he’d already started—having invited Tim to his house for dinner, as he claimed he did with all students in the creative writing program, even though Tim could only afford to be in the fringe of that, and then drugging Tim and fucking him on the sofa.

But Tim had gone back to Peter Sands, hadn’t he? He’d gone back of his own will within two days and spent the night in Sands’s bed, his legs open and spread, his fingers pressing into Sands’s biceps, whispering, “Yes, yes, fuck me,” as the young professor did pushups between his thighs, rocking him forward and back in the cadence of his deep thrusts. It was the first time Tim realized that an older man could have experience and technique that made the men Tim’s age he’d been messing around with seem to be awkward underperformers. Tim had learned from Sands what a dominant was—and what a submissive was. That was Peter Sands and himself.

And then the insult of Sands paying him for the sex, with the demeaning comment, “You can’t be making much as a garbageman,” and telling him that there was another one of the assistant professors, Ron Davis, who wanted to fuck Tim too—and who would pay for it. And still, in spite of this demeaning treatment, Tim had come back to Sands again and, no drugs or liquor required, saddled himself on the Sands’s cock in a cowboy and ridden him to a mutual finish.

Again, Sands paid for the sex with the “garbagemen can’t be making much,” reducing Tim to a rent-boy. Tim could have told him that the sanitation work was mindless repetitive action that freed his mind for composing and that the early-morning short-time shifts of the work gave him time later in the day to write. For someone not afraid of manual work and not having pretentions of status, it suited a poet well, he thought. But why bother discussing any of this with Sands? He’d tried saying the proper title was sanitation worker, and Sands had just laughed at him. “Be what you are,” Sands had said. “What you are is a sexy young slut—a natural honeypot for an older man to use.” And, indeed, the many ways Tim had let Sands fuck him revealed the slut in him.

Would men consider male whore to be a less honorable job than the job of a sanitation worker that Tim was holding down, trying to claw his way up to paying for college—to becoming a poet in some way that could sustain his life?

When he’d gone to Professor Sands’s house for dinner, he had hopes that the man would, as Hadley was doing, read his poetry and not dismiss it. He’d had no interest in Tim’s poetry, though. Worse, he’d been dismissive of it, more impressed, he said, by Tim’s early scribblings than what time in Hugh Hadley’s writing class had changed the writing.

Not interested much in Tim’s poetry, all Sands wanted to do was fuck the handsome, twenty-one-year-old down-on-his-luck garbageman. All he’d wanted to do was to get his dick in Tim, and, half gone on whatever drug Sands had used, Tim had lain back on the sofa, opened his legs to the older man, cried out at the first mounting and penetration, but then had settled down to moving with the rhythm of the fuck—and had melded more completely with it when Sands fucked him a second time—and a third time, being younger and more virile than Professor Hadley was—with both of them more experienced and attentive than the young guys Tim had been mixing with.

Tim had known it was what he wanted. He hadn’t known this would be the first taking in a developing life to giving it to men for money.

He also hadn’t known that he had melted to it so much that he’d come back in two days for more of it—holding his legs open and raised all night, Big-cocked Sands fucking him again and again, changing positions, teaching Tim new ones. And even when Sands sneeringly put him in his subordinate place, going back to the man for a third time, this time not just lying there and docilely taking it, but putting Sands on his back and riding the cock hard, wantonly, knowing now that he wanted to ride men’s cocks.

“Ah, nothing like sweet, young tail,” Sands had said, which Tim hadn’t exactly expected a literature professor to come up with. But the cocking was good and instructional, so Tim just went with the flow. And, with Professor Sands, who was virile and fast reloading, there was a lot of flow involved.

Was that all that Professor Hadley wanted from him too? Was the professor just pretending to be interested in Tim’s poems to get into his pants? Did Hadley see him as even worse than a garbageman—just a piece of male meat—and only pretended to see a budding poet? Hadley must be near seventy. Could he even get it up anymore without those pills Tim had seen him take to manage it once each time?

Tim looked up from the driver’s seat of Professor Hadley’s stately old Mercedes salon car as the professor kissed his wife good-bye on the porch of their Purdue University near-campus Victorian house in Lafayette, Indiana, in preparation for Tim driving him to the writers’ retreat at Lake Manitou for a weekend of Whitman.

Tim wondered if it was significant that Whitman was gay—at least that there was every reason to believe he was actively gay. Wasn’t this really a conclave of gay men joining for the weekend at an upstate lake to feed upon a young, growing oak sapling—to have their way with Tim while he was still relatively fresh and innocent? Based on what Hadley had told him he would be called on to do at the lake, he had to believe they all were gay.

Was this some sort of old men’s sex club more than a literary conclave? And did Tim really care which it was?

At least Professor Hadley hadn’t offered to pay Tim for the weekend—hadn’t said anything about the poor lot of a sanitation worker—at least yet.

* * * *

The drive from Lafayette to Rochester, the town abutting Lake Manitou, lasted for an hour and a half. Hadley sat in the backseat and Tim, like he was a family chauffeur, was alone in the front. After the initial seduction, during which Hadley had been nearly worshipful and highly complimentary, the professor had treated the student almost like a servant. Once won, Tim was just another possession.

All of the conversation that transpired as they drove was initiated and determined by Hadley. They arrived midmorning, Professor Hadley wanting to get there before the others, as they were retreating at his family’s ancestral Victorian house on the north side of the lake. It was a large house, with six main bedrooms and smaller rooms in the attic, formerly servants’ quarters, for sleepers, as well. His grandmother, he said, had run the house as a boarding house after his grandfather had died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and no one had escaped the subsequent financial collapse. The other guests, besides Tim, who would be in one of the attic bedrooms, along with a housekeeper who came in whenever the Hadley’s occupied the house, were the three professors from Purdue, two from creative writing programs at other Midwestern universities, and an acquisitions editor from the University of Chicago Press.

Hadley had briefly, and only in passing, been apologetic about Tim being in the attic, but Tim, who was still unsure what his role was meant to be, said that was just fine. He was the only student being invited to the retreat and he wasn’t even a full-time student at Purdue. Was he a guest or a servant—and something more sexually connected—on this retreat? That hadn’t been made clear to him in words, but so much was revealed in actions. What was clear was that his duties would include pleasing the other attendees. Would he be welcomed at the table in the discussions on Whitman, or kept in the shadows or in service?

Even at the university, Tim’s status was ambiguous. He could only afford to be a day student, under one-class tuition per semester. This semester he was taking Hadley’s writing seminar on poetry. If he thought that sometime during the drive Hadley would come on to him or define that he was to be at the retreat to service the other men, he was disappointed. Hadley only was talking about poetry—mostly about Whitman and how Tim’s own poetry could be influenced by deeper study. Tim kept waiting for Hadley to note that Whitman was said to have had homosexual relationships as a segue into what would be expected from Tim, but he didn’t during the drive. He’d covered all of that earlier when he was seducing Tim and didn’t bring it up again now.

Tim didn’t give up on the idea that he was on the menu this weekend, though, because one of the other attendees, Professor Sands, had made clear he was, as far as Sands was concerned, and that the assistant professor interested in fucking Tim, Ron Davis, would be there that weekend as well.

They were the first ones to arrive, and, after getting their gear in the house and Hadley checking with the charter boat service at the waterfront lot next to the house about the retreaters being taken out onto the lake that afternoon in a flat-bottomed fishing boat, Hadley went in the house to ensure everything was ready and Tim walked out onto the house’s dock.

Tim had gone with Hadley to the charter boat service, where they had talked with a hunky young man there. The boat service employee gave Tim a close scrutiny that made Tim feel he was being stripped down but, at the same time, aroused him. The boat guy was sexy as hell. The guy, giving his name as Phil and as the one who would take them out on the lake that afternoon, was dark-skinned, quite possibly of mixed breed, but very muscular—stripped down to the waist and in shorts and sneakers—and quite handsome. Tim gravitated to him as another basic service guy, with grease on his hands, and he felt that he got very close interest in return. As Hadley was pontificating, Phil kept giving Tim a “we’re a different breed from that blowhard” looks.

When they went back to the Hadley lot and the professor went into the house, Tim didn’t think about it, but he probably was drawn out to the house’s dock, because he could watch Phil at work on the next dock over. Phil was quite aware that Tim was watching him and appeared to be posing to maintain Tim’s attention. Tim had no trouble giving him attention. Phil was a real hunk, with hard-working-man’s body. Since he’d been covered in every conceivable position by Peter Sands, Tim had become very much aware of every good-looking, built guy around him and with considering possibilities with them. The possibilities with Phil seemed quite possible for Phil as well, considering how often he looked over at Tim on the other dock.

* * * *

“But why do we work so hard to pull explicit homosexuality themes out of Whitman’s poems?” This was what the young poetry acquisitions editor from the University of Chicago Press, Clifton Wane, asked during the first roundtable meeting of the academics on the screened porch of the Lake Manitou vacation house. “Why didn’t he declare himself more directly?”

“Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are,” Professor Hadley recited from “Calamus.” “That seems quite clear to me. Death, you know, is a metaphor for sexual orgasm in literature—La Petite Mort. But, of course, society was so hazy about homosexuality then that I’ll bet they didn’t catch the import of Whitman’s homosexual references that we can see today in his work.”

“That is repressed verbiage, though,” Wane objected. “Why couldn’t he have written something as explicit as ‘Give me yourself, lie under me, and open yourself to my penetration and full, inseparable possession’?”

“Yes, well, in his day he had to repress anything like that—not just in his personal life but in his writing as well. In Whitman’s day a man went to prison for voicing his preferences that directly.” Peter Sands had risen to respond to this question from the circle of six men sitting around the table on the porch. Tim was there, but he was sitting behind Professor Hadley, backed against the screened wall overlooking the lake.

Although Tim was absorbing what he could, he accepted he was there to fetch whatever the men needed while they talked and to provide them with eye candy and entertainment, as required.

“Not something our young poets of today need worry about, eh, Tim?” Sands continued, bringing Tim in to the discussion for the first time. “A young poet can write about being laid today, can’t he? What was in that poem you showed me the other day—about the flaring of the petals and the penetration and pollination by the bee? Quite a stinger your bee had. A stinger by any other name . . . mot yet good poetry, but your need for lustful expression was clear.”

He did not stop his jab there. “I admit that I much prefer your earlier, if down-class, work such as ‘I could not but weep, and express my alarm, as you thrust inside me deep, and my nails dug into your arms.’ Crude, but honest. It starts well, but the ‘arms’ is a bit off and flat. I’d suggest something meaty like ‘biceps’ instead. This more veiled work you are writing now must be someone’s misguided influence.”

All three of them—Sands, Tim, and Hadley—knew this was directed at Hadley and was just more of the interdepartmental jousting at Purdue. Still, Tim was both flattered that Peter Sands remembered anything he’d written and embarrassed to have his early attempts trotted out to these academics. Sands was truly putting him in his place. It faithfully reflected the man’s style. He wanted to subjugate and demean his prey before devouring it. Later, with Tim under him and Sands doing pushups on the younger man’s body, the professor would recite Tim’s poetic attempts back at him, suggesting better word usage. He would do so in the vocal cadence of his thrusts into the young man’s ass channel.

The attention on the porch shifted to Tim, outside the circle, and he blushed at the sudden centering of the focus on him. There had been tension in the air throughout this first discussion session. Perhaps until now only Sands and Hadley had realized there was an undercurrent of a struggle over dominating Tim in their participation in this discussion, but now, as it flared out into the open with Sands’s challenge, all six men realized that something was playing out under the surface here and that it had something to do with the handsome and sexy young man sitting behind Professor Hadley.

All six of the men were gay, which was what brought them together in seminars like this, and all six had been intrigued with the young man who had been introduced merely as one of Professor Hadley’s students. All had assumed that Hadley was fucking him and had entertained pleasant images of doing the same themselves—indeed, Hadley had intimated that he was bringing the entertainment for them all. Until now they didn’t have an inkling that Peter Sands was fucking the young man too and that there was a struggle playing out among the creative writing faculty at Purdue University. Was the other Purdue attendee, Ron Davis, fucking him as well, the three other professors now wondered. A glance at him—the way he looked at Tim—showed that he at least wanted to if he wasn’t.

None of this lessened the wish of any of the men around the table to be topping Tim McGown. This had been the pattern of previous off-site weekend seminars. A male prostitute had been brought in for previous gatherings for all of the men to enjoy, all of them understanding that the discussion of the work of a famous writer just covered a weekend of getting their wicks dipped. Previously, the male prostitute hadn’t been invited to attend the seminar itself, though, and no pretentions were made that he was anything but a rent-boy. The status of Tim here was unclear.

Seeing this uncertainty at work, Peter Sands, the one who had brought this to a head, gave a little chuckle. He wondered if the three non-Purdue attendees would be quite so interested in fucking Tim if they knew he basically was just a great-looking garbageman who took a few classes in night school, nowhere near the exalted halls these men inhabited. Sands didn’t think much about Tim’s poetry—he didn’t think of poetry at all in terms of Tim; he thought of Tim’s narrow hips and his pert buttocks and of getting his cock between those orbs. And he suspected Hadley thought the same.

“What say you, young man?” Clifton Wane said, addressing Tim for the first time that anyone had moved to bring him into the conversation, although he had, in fact, been the surreptitious point of interest of them all since they had gathered on the cottage’s porch. “Do you have trouble pulling actively practicing homosexual themes out of Whitman’s work?”

“I haven’t really tried,” Tim said in a low voice, tiptoeing on the sudden attention thrown his way. “I’m just a student—and a beginning one. I haven’t read that much of Whitman. I was hoping to learn more about him and about the subject this weekend.”

“You want to be able to pull homosexual images out of his poetry to titillate as you do in your own poetry, do you, Tim?” Sands asked. He was looking directly at Hadley, though, challenging the man to admit that his only interest in Tim’s poetry was its titillation value—how it made the old man lust for Tim himself. He wanted, in this struggle for the young man’s ass, Tim to realize that was Hadley’s sole interest in him. It was Sands’s sole interest in Tim too, but Sands was being honest about it—and Tim was just a piece of ass garbageman. He wanted Tim to realize that he liked being fucked. It didn’t have anything to do with his interest in being a poet. Sands wanted Tim to acknowledge that he loved having Sands’s cock inside him—that he’d happy come to the man for sex even if he didn’t get some poetry instruction in the bargain.

As for that old fool, Hadley, Sands thought. Didn’t he realize that he wanted Tim’s poetry to be crudely and graphically queer—that he was ruining its value even for him by trying to make its references flowery and opaque? Didn’t Hadley realize he wanted to fuck a crude young garbageman and not a Shakespearian bard?

“There’s far more than homosexual sex in Tim’s poetry,” Ron Davis spoke up in defense of the young man he was infatuated. “Tim’s poetry is meatier than that. And he’s developing well.”

“Oh, you’ve read his poetry and can recommend it?” Clifton Wane said, suddenly having a greater interest in the young man than just his sexuality.

“Yes,” Davis said, using an emphatic tone and looking to Tim to see if his defense was being looked at with favor. But Tim was looking a Wane and didn’t connect with Davis.

“Tim has a lot of talent for what he does well, doesn’t he, Hugh?” Sands said, with a snort, still trying to bring Hadley into the conversation, trying to force him to reveal to Tim that it wasn’t Tim’s poetry that had Hadley mentoring him.

“Yes, well, we should be having lunch in an hour and I promised that this would be a topic-light seminar, that there would be time for recreation and contemplation. So, perhaps this is a good place to break for the morning.” Professor Hadley wasn’t having any of Sands’s attempt to out Hadley’s real interest in Tim.

As they were rising from the table, Clifton Wane called out to Tim. “If you’ve brought any examples of your poetry, Tim, I would love to read them. Have you?”

“Yes, of course,” Tim said, with a smile. “I’ll just go up to my room and fetch them.”

“That would be wonderful,” Wane said. Hadley had already departed the porch, pleased that he’d made off without rising to Sands’s bait, fully realizing what Sands was up to. Ron Davis’s eyes remained glued on Tim in the hope that Tim would notice him, but Tim didn’t.

As Tim exited the porch, into the house, Sands gripped one of his wrists and said, “Perhaps you’ll take a walk with me before lunch. We need some time alone.” He used his “to be obeyed” voice, the tone that had worked so well with Tim when Sands wanted to lay him—Sands’s dominator-to-submissive voice. They both knew now that it wasn’t a walk Sands was proposing—that he was asserting a commanding position with the young man.

“Yes, of course,” Tim answered, casting his eyes down, and inclining his head a bit, signals of subservience. Tim was a total submissive. He responded to command. He was, in fact, in thrall to Peter Sands. And Sands wasn’t wrong that Tim lived to have a man’s cock inside him.

Twenty minutes later, Sands was fucking Tim on a picnic table in a grove of trees screened from view of the seminar vacation house by a line of bushes but not screened that well from the view from the dock of the charter boat service next door. Tim, shirt off, was on his back on the picnic table, arms stretched out, clutching the edges of the rough-wood table for stability, his ankles on Peter Sands’s shoulders, as Sands hunched over him between his thighs, Sands’s hand working the young man’s pecs, while he rocked forward and back, his cock splitting the orbs in those narrow hips he liked so much, and working Tim’s anal channel hard and deep.

Panting and arching his back, slave to Sands’s domination, Tim pressed his cheek to the surface of the table, his eyes cast off into the distance, toward the pier of the charter boat service, where the hunky boatman, Phil, stood, just in athletic shorts and sneakers, with the front of his shorts pulled down and a hand stroking his cock as he watched Sands fucking Tim.

Suddenly animated as Sands reached a climax, Tim grabbed for the back of the professor’s head, pulling the man’s face down to his chest for Sands’s teeth to latch onto a nipple, and put his hips into frenzied overdrive to bring on Sands’s ejaculation to merge with his own, the poetry of the fuck racing through his mind.

 

Bone me.

Own me.

Fuck me to heaven.

Bone me to hell.

 

Across the short stretch of water between lake shore and the charter boat pier, Phil joined them in shooting off. Then, laughing and stuffing his meaty cock back into his athletic shorts, he climbed into the back of the charter boat and, happily humming, went to work wiping the vessel down.

Gotta get me some of that, he was thinking while he scrubbed. Yep, gotta get my Johnny dipped in that honey trap.

* * * *

The upward thrusts of Phil as he held Tim in thrall to him, both men looking up into the ceiling of the cabin, with Tim suspended over Phil’s body in a crab position, rocked the boat, beating the hull against the dock in the cadence of the vigorous fuck.

 

Bone me.

Own me.

Fuck me to heaven.

Bone me to hell.

 

Faster, harder. Holding. Clutching. Moaning. Tensing, jerking, releasing. Tensing, jerking, releasing, filling out the bulb of the condom. With a shared cry of releasing, Phil propelled Tim off of him and over onto his side, facing the dock.

The academics had taken Phil’s charter boat out onto Lake Manitou in the early afternoon to fish and to continue their discussions of Whitman’s poetry. They had wanted to drop lines in to pretend they were fishing, but they didn’t have the foggiest notion how to go about anything or what to do with any fish they caught. Barely containing his fuming, Phil had been moving among them, trying to help them and to keep lines from tangling. At some point Tim came to the rescue and the men settled down in the stern of the boat. His eyes rolling to convey that he separated Tim from these fumbling old men, Phil motioned Tim to join him in the wheelhouse, where he broke out cans of beer and handed Tim one.

“Are you really with these clowns? Who is this Witless guy they keep talking about?” he asked Tim.

Tim laughed. “Walt Whitman. He was a poet. A gay one when being gay wasn’t accepted. And he was a solid, hands-on guy, braving a job of a volunteer nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War. These guys are all queer academics, meeting to worship one of theirs, although I don’t think any of them would be willing to get his hands dirty as Whitman did.”

“And you too? Not gay. I know you’re gay. Are you one of these academic queers too?”

“I’d like to be a poet, yes. But I’m not yet. I’m a garbageman. I can only afford to take one university class a semester.”

Phil laughed. “Ain’t nothing wrong about that—being a garbageman. It’s a necessary service to keep the nation ticking right. You’re sex on a stick too. I don’t see you with these clowns, except I saw you with one of them—that big blowhard over there.”

“Peter Sands?”

“Yes, him. I saw him fucking you on a picnic table.”

“And . . . ?”

“I wanted it to be me. You a kind of guy who can’t get enough cock?”

“Guilty as charged,” Tim confessed.

“Stick around after I’ve gotten these clowns back to land and off the boat and I’ll give you a good fucking.”

Tim did stick around, and Phil did give him a good fucking in the cabin of the boat, his thrusts sending the boat rhythmically bumping against the wooden dock, creating a rhythm for what beat in Tim’s brain.

 

Bone me.

Own me.

Fuck me to heaven.

Bone me to hell.

Fuck my lights out.

 

“You’re not like any of these guys you came here with,” Phil said as they were cooling down. “You’re no highfalutin’ college professor material. They’re just hoity-toity talk of love in words. You’re working class, like me. We don’t make love with words. We fuck. We get our dicks in them and make ’em squeal and beg for it. You’re one of us, not them.”

“Yeah, I’m just a garbageman,” Tim answered.

“You’re not just that. And being a garbageman isn’t a ‘just’ anyhow. It’s a necessary service. It’s more necessary to what people need than figuring out the poetry of some Witless dude from ages ago. You’re more than a garbageman, though.”

“Yeah, what more am I?”

“You’re sexy as hell. You’re the best lay I’ve ever had. Guys would pay big bucks to bone you.”

“OK, so I like to get fucked. But you can’t make a life off that, unless you go rent-boy.”

“You can for a while—while you still got it. And you can make enough then to put you on easy street from there on out. You could do it. You got the looks and body for it. You certainly have got the sexy moves for it.”

“Fantasy.”

“Not fantasy,” Phil said. “Listen, I got a stake in a male cat house in Rochester. A couple of guys have left and there’s more than enough interest for a new guy—a sexy guy like you. Think about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tim answered. “In the meantime . . .”

“You want the cock again, don’t you?”

 

Roll me over,

In the clover,

Roll me over,

And do it again, do it again.

 

He did it again. Phil fucked Tim hard again. He made him squeal and beg for it. They had a ball balling.

* * * *

At the end of that night’s Whitman seminar session, which Peter Sands was absence from—he hadn’t been at dinner either—Ron Davis finally had the courage to approach Tim as Tim was clearing away the empty beer and liquor bottles. He was about to say something to Tim, which Tim presumed was going to be the man’s claim on some time from him, when Professor Hadley interceded. Tim liked Davis and Davis was quite good-looking. It wasn’t Tim who was keeping the two from getting together.

“Sorry, Ron, I have something I want Tim to help me with in my room.”

Tim knew what that would be. He was sure that Ron knew what that would be too. “Tim should have some time—up in his room—for the rest of you in a couple of hours,” Hadley answered.

“Peter Sands isn’t here,” Tim said as they were walking to the stairs to the upper floors.

“No, he’s not. The department called and needed him back there to handle something.”

“I thought you were the department head,” Tim said.

“I am, but I said this was something that needed Peter’s delicate touch and he jumped at the chance to handle it. He wants my job in the worst way.”

“I’m just a student,” Tim said, “but it seems to me if that’s the case—”

Hadley laughed. “There isn’t really anything needing to be handled back at the department in Lafeyette. Peter was just getting insufferable here. I would think you’d be glad he was gone. He was being particularly sufferable with you.”

Yes, he was Tim knew. But Hadley didn’t seem to understand the power Sands had over Tim. Tim was already missing him. Tim didn’t want to get into that, though, so he said, “Yes, well, thanks.”

“You can thank me upstairs in my room.”

And Tim did demonstrate his thanks. Hadley didn’t like to exert himself too much, so he lay on his back on the bed in his room, and a naked Tim straddled his hips and rode his cock to Hadley’s ejaculation.

Afterward, Hadley said, “I wish . . . but it’s time, I think, for you to go up to your bedroom. The others . . .”

“I understand,” Tim said, but he understood more than Hadley meant him to understand. He was there to entertain all of the attendees tonight. That he understood. But he also understood that what Professor Hadley gave was all he could muster. Tim wanted more. So, Hadley wasn’t going to be the answer for him. If he stayed at Purdue, it would be a fight between Hadley and Sands until something gave. Realistically, Tim knew they wouldn’t destroy each other in the struggle. They’d just replace him and start all over again with some other young man.

So, he went upstairs and was visited by the three non-Purdue attendees. Ron Davis didn’t muster the courage to use his time. The third of the non-Purdue men was the Chicago Press acquisitions editor, Clifton Wane.

“Where do you want me to—” Tim asked. He was stretched out on his bed, naked. The last visitor had wanted to sit in a straight chair that was in the corner of the room and for Tim to sit in his lap, facing him, and ride him.

“What I really want to do is discuss your poetry. The early work is rough, but it’s so much rawer and more visceral than the later poems. Maybe we could discuss the direction you really want to go in with your writing.”

“This is the time that was set aside for you guys to fuck me and you want to talk about my poetry?” Tim asked in disbelief. “Don’t you want to fuck me?”

“Sure, I want to bed you,” Wane answered. “But your poetry is important too. Maybe you’d like to take a break and talk about that for a while. Which did you want to do the most?”

There was really no question what Tim would prefer doing just now; he’d been fucked silly already. “Is there anything from the earlier works you think is salvageable?”

“All of it, with work. It’s raw, straightforward, and honest, as poetry about sex should be. Take this one for example.”

They spent the next forty-five minutes talking poetry.

“I wish . . . but that’s not possible,” Tim said eventually.

“What’s not possible?” Wane asked.

“You’ll be going back to Chicago tomorrow. But I wish there was time for me to learn more.”

“You can come to Chicago. We could work there. I could get you into the University of Chicago creative writing program. And I think I could slip some of your poems in anthologies the press does . . . to get you started.”

“I can’t afford to do that. I’m just a garbageman. I’m only able to take one class at Purdue a semester as it is.”

“They have need for sanitation workers in Chicago if that’s what you really want to do. Don’t look like that. Walt Whitman was an orderly in a hospital when he was developing his writing. There’s nothing dishonorable in doing honest work we need done. And I’m sure I can get you a scholarship to help with the classes.”

“And, for that, I’d have to let you fuck me regularly?”

“My impression is that Hadley and Sands bed you regularly now for the help they’re giving you. And, yes, I’d love to fuck you regularly—and I’d be happy to give you a room to live in while you’re in Chicago. But my interest in your poetry is genuine and isn’t connected with sex. To prove that, I’m going to my own room now. No sex while you think about what you want to do.”

“What if I want to have sex with you now?” Tim asked. “What if you’re good-looking and fit enough for me to want your cock?”

Wane stood up from the bed, where they both had been sitting. “Think about my offer first. We can do other things later, after you’ve decided on what future you want.”

Tim watched Wane leave the room and heard him go down the stairs. He wrapped himself in a sheet and thought, but what he was thinking about was that he’d never had a guy not jump at the chance of having sex with him. All he could think of for the moment was being fucked by Wane. He left his room, went down to the second floor, knocked gently on Wane’s door, and when he received permission to enter the bedroom, he dropped the sheet inside the doorway, mounted the bed and Wane’s hips, and rode the man’s cock into the night.

Wane hadn’t been lying when he said he wanted to fuck Tim. He was in full erection when Tim showed up, and he showed Tim that he could keep it up and get it off—repeatedly.

* * * *

In the early afternoon the next day, Sunday, as the seminar attendees were preparing to scatter to their separate lives, Tim carried his duffel bag over to the pier next door where Phil’s charter boat was docked. Phil was in the well of the boat sorting out fishing tackle.

“So, you’ve made a decision?” he asked when he saw Tim there, with his duffel bag on the ground beside him.

“Yes, I have,” Tim answered. “I don’t mind being a garbageman or working in some other service industry. And being a rent-boy for as long as I have an itch to fuck a lot of guys sounds just fine.”

“So . . . ,” Phil said, giving Tim a smile and holding a hand out to him.

“But I can’t give up the dream to be a poet, and I need a lot of help in developing into a decent one. One of these men is from Chicago and says he can help me. He’ll be paying me for sex too, so I’ll be a rent-boy. I’m not going back to Purdue. I’m going to Chicago today.”

Phil pulled his hand back and tried not to look disappointed. “I meant it when I said you were the best lay I’d ever had.”

“I won’t pretend that you don’t give it good. I’m going to Chicago today but we aren’t leaving for another couple of hours. I kinda thought . . . you and me.”

Phil smiled and extended out his hand again. “Only two hours? Guess we need to get down to the cabin and get to it then.”