The muscle car jammed to a stop, pavement ripping into tires, making a shriek only slightly louder than, say, a 13-inch masonry blade tearing through highway concrete. Choking slightly as acrid smoke of burning rubber washed over me, I ran to the driver's window and quickly negotiated a ride.
Even behind his opaque sunglasses, I could feel on my exposed skin the heat of his hungry gaze; it was sensation to which I'd become accustomed. His eyebrows arched upward as my slim, bare belly filled the frame of his window. I decided to chalk this up to couture shock.
I was dressed - if you could call it that - in yeoman's beret and striped French sailor shirt. The top had shortie sleeves cut just below my shoulders and hem cropped just at my waist. Although low-slung bell bottom pants were fashionable back then, in the late-hippie early '70s, my pale blue, light cotton pair evidently were designed for a clotheshorse with modesty of a boy-hustler. Cut outrageously low, a crescent of my pubic hair was exposed in front, and in back, the pants showed off at least an inch of buttcrack. There was no fly, only a single brass button that barely cinched the pants on my lower hips. The ensemble of short top and impossibly low-slung pants left bare an unnervingly wide swath of my lower torso all the way around -- tawny, almost hairless skin punctuated only by the insouciant socket of my pronounced navel.
As we spun through the marina area, I quickly filled my new benefactor in on my predicament.
I'd come to California from comparatively repressed Arizona, where I'd been going to school in Tucson. In Marina del Rey, I started a busboy job at a bar near the docks; it was owned by a friend of mine.
After a few days, I accepted an offer of a regular at the bar for an afternoon on his boat. He told me he was a doctor in San Diego. A large man, he staggered a little when he walked and his black mustache was huge and bushy.
I noticed his eyes lapped at my body as he spoke. Skinny and tan in those days, I was described by an ex-girlfriend as just this side of feminine -- not effeminate. I had fine features and high cheekbones; my naturally blond hair blended into my skin what little body hair I had.
Oddly excited by his attention, I accepted his invitation for sunbathing on deck. Once there, and enjoying the enticing effect I had on him, I methodically stripped down to T-shirt, then string bikini underwear, then nothing at all. He almost drooled staring at me as I lolled in the sun and sipped his expensive Riesling.
After falling asleep, I awakened in the late afternoon to him gently rubbing my bare shoulders. He began telling me how attractive was my suntan. He talked of something called a referred sensation, a feeling in one part of the body that registers in another. To illustrate, he pressed his finger in midway in the center of my back. As an almost electric bolt shot through me, I moaned involuntarily; it was as if his finger was sticking all the way through my body and out my abdomen. A little intrusively, he corkscrewed his fingertip mercilessly as I wiggled in unavoidable pleasure.
A little shaken I stumbled down to my cabin and took a shower. When I came out, my clothes were gone, and my abbreviated sailor suit was dumped in my arms by the good doctor and his beefy first mate. I was told I would spend some time as shanghaied cabin boy and drink waiter. Then, if I was cooperative, I'd be turned loose.
Just like that. I spent weeks on the boat, following orders, trying to avoid a very randy crew. And, when it suited the doctor, stripping down for a sunbath he'd watch closely. For most of the voyage, no one molested me. But I could feel the pressure mounting.
Particularly dreadful were the parties, when I'd be directed to circulate drink trays through the all-male crowd of his geezer friends, and my half-naked body would become the object of leering attention. Although they were banned from actual contact on pain of being thrown overboard, the gentlemen would mentally maul me; my nipples metaphorically would be squeezed as would my bare buttocks. Rarely, furtive fingers actually would poke into the crack of my bottom and stroke down as far as they could go into my pants. Fearing for the fate of these ballsy but foolish coots, I would gasp and keep quiet about such violations.
On restroom breaks, I'd study myself in the mirror, trying to see what my assailants saw. And... I had to admit, it was easy to see how my "uniform" would render anyone irresistible to horney attention. With my belly and bottom so bared and proffered, I was agonizingly aware of a bizarre, vulnerable feeling I'd never experienced before - a feeling that was as exciting as it was unfamiliar.
I noticed the hillocks of my butt had something of a sheen, a glow that foolishly resembled browned, buttered dinner rolls. It occurred to me that my geezer fans had groomed my bottom skin to almost high polish, or at least my mind amused itself going there. Aside from rubbing my butt, they left an occasional kiss of red circle on my moist flesh, evidence of excited but gentle pinches with which they pantingly assailed me.
My nipples protruded from the surface of my tight shirt, nubs sensitive and aching, practically begging to be teased. The smooth flesh of my abdomen seemed unnaturally long and appetizing in my revealing get-up. An inch or two below the hem of my cropped T-shirt, my belly made a gentle dip at its upper center into the oval of my vulnerably prominent navel. So brazenly exposed by my voyaging doctor, the enticing cavity was marked in its concave recess by a split kernel of flesh that seemed a tender knot set for undoing.