"Are you sure?" Guido asked me.
"Yes, I'm hard in anticipation of it," I answered.
"Then I will get the drinks."
We were sitting in a booth at a gay bar near the docks in Marseille, France, that Guido knew about. Guido seemed to know where all of the adventures were to be had in the Mediterranean as I crewed from him in a summer yachting sail around the rim of the sea.
I looked around the dimly lit bar as Guido got the two glasses of beer. I looked at the men, some rent-boys I could tell, but more of them the rough-looking dock workers at the busy French port who we'd come to try out. One, in particular, a dusky-skinned muscle man with a mean look about him, covered in tattoos, including a spider web on the side of his neck and a couple of swirls on his cheeks, kept looking at me. I looked back. He wasn't European. Algerian? Moroccan? He looked like sexy trouble to me. He was wearing worn jeans and a black-mesh athletic shirt that made clear that his torso was covered in tattoos. I'm sure I looked like the other rent-boys to him. That's the role I was playing here. I was on the make for experience—something to write about.
He didn't seem to be alone. There was a big, black guy with him, even bigger and more muscular than he was. They seemed to be discussing me, taking furtive looks in my direction and whispering to each other as they leaned into the long bar and drank beer. The black guy didn't appear to be tattooed. His ebony black skin glistened under the beam of the pin lights hanging down over the bar in the darkened room. He was bald, with a bullet head and an all-white toothed smile when he flashed one.
This was what I was doing for the summer between my college freshman and sophomore year. Guido called it just fucking around the Mediterranean. To me it was that, but more. This was a research year for me—finding coming out big time sexually and writing about it. And it was all with the encouragement of my creative writing professor, Mark Upton. He'd taken me under his wing and into his bed. He wrote gay novels and got them published and he said that I had the writing talent and the attraction of men that would enable me to do so too—under his mentorship. He knew Guido, an Italian, who was obscenely rich and took a young man on as crew for his yacht every summer for a sex cruise around the Mediterranean.
Guido was a submissive, just as I was, nine years older than I was, good-looking, dark, slender, liking to cross-dress, and as wanton as could be. We didn't do anal with each other, both being submissives, but, as we sailed, we could kiss, fondle, take the sun in the nude together, jack each other off, and, when we were really horny, give each other blow jobs. But what we really liked to do, and what Mark had sent me to the Mediterranean to experience so that I could write about it, was to go to bars like this at ports around the Mediterranean, and collect experiences of hooking up and being fucked.
Guido, who had done this several summers already, knew how to do it. This was his idea. He told me it would really be wild, though, and kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to do this. He knew that they did the roofie routine here—drugging rent-boys and talking them off and working them over totally while they were incapacitated.
"Sound like it would make a great story," I said, "except I wouldn't be awake to know the details of having the experience."
"There are ways," he'd said. "If you didn't take it all—just enough to slow you down and make him think you were more out of it than you were. It's tricky managing, though."
"Sure, let's try it," I said.
So, we were here trying it. Guido came back with two glasses of beer and slid into the curved booth, both of us facing the bar. He put one in front of me and one in front of him. The booth bench was backed by a planter with fake foliage in it. We'd sat here on purpose. When the Algerian—I found out subsequently that that was what Youcef was—and the big black weren't looking, I moved one of the beers to behind me, behind a fake plant and slid the other one in front of me. Guido moved out of the booth at the same time and went to the bar, saddling up to a French dockworker he had picked out for himself.
Not long after he left, the Algerian slid into the booth beside me. His black friend remained at the bar, watching us.
"
Tu es mignon. Je ne t'ai pas vu ici avant
," he said, his voice a low baritone.
"Sorry. I don't speak French," I answered. He was sitting closer to me than Guido had done. I'd drunk most of the beer I had in front of me before he arrived. I took this opportunity to drain the glass.
"Ah, English. You are English then," he said. His English was hesitant but sufficient.
"American," I answered, flashing him my idea of a shy smile.
"Nice. Good," he said. "I said you were cute. I said I have not seen you in here before."
"No, I'm new here," I said. I fiddled with the beer glass so that he'd catch on that it was empty.
He did. "My name is Youcef," he said, and I answered that I was Todd—for that day, at least. "I buy you another beer and maybe you go with me then?" he said. To back that up, he'd brought out a wad of cash and laid it on the table in front of me. Under the cash I saw a condom packet too. This was a hookup bar. I was dressed like a rent-boy, with white linen trousers, a tight red T-shirt, and open-toed sandals. There was no surprise that he'd assume I was there for a quick body sale.
"Yes," I answered.
He slid out of the booth, taking my empty glass, and went to the bar. I turned my attention to Guido standing down the bar from where the Algerian and black guy were huddling while my glass was refilled. I couldn't see my glass, but Guido could. His nod told me that they had put a drug into the beer.
When he came back with two beers, carefully putting one in front of me. He watched attentively as I took a sip. This was when the tricky part had arrived. Guido spoke up sharply at the bar, momentarily turning attention in the area to him. That included Youcef at the booth and the black guy at the bar. As quickly and secretly as I could, I brought out the glass of beer from behind the fake plant, tipped the drugged beer into the planter, and hid the empty glass behind the plant.
When Youcef looked back at me, I was taking another drag on the glass of beer he thought was drugged. He smiled at me. I smiled back. He reached around to the back of my head and released my hair, letting the blond curls descend to my shoulders. He came in for a kiss and I let him possess my mouth. A hand went to my chest and he brushed his knuckles against my nipples, one after the other, playing with the rings in my nipples he knew were there because my T-shirt was tight on my chest. I emitted a low moan for him, and his hand went to the inside of my thigh, high up, and moved up to my basket while the kiss continued. I opened the stance of my legs and rolled my pelvis up to give him a good feel.
He pulled back, laughed, and took a big gulp of his beer. He gestured at my glass, and I took a big gulp too. I reached my hand over under the surface of the table, going right for his crotch, and felt him up good. He expressed surprise, but obviously pleasure as well. We were on the beam on intentions. I could tell his was hung—and hard. He'd found that I was hard too.
I gave him a bit of a glassy stare and shook my head slightly, hoping I was giving him the impression that the drug was taking effect. I did, in fact, feel a little hazy, so just the little I'd taken in was helping me show how I should be feeling about now.
"Come. Drink up," he said. "Put the money away," he said, pointing out the wad of bills he'd put down on the table and making a display of lifting up the condom packet for me to clearly see as well. "That is your 'yes.' I take you someplace. Fuck you good. OK?" I reached for the wad of money and he took the condom packet back. We both finished off the beer. Youcef slid out of the booth, gesturing with his head to the black guy at the bar.
I was a bit unsteady on my feet between the booth and the exit, but most of it was for show. I saw that Guido was being guided toward the back of the room, where there was a doorway covered with a beaded curtain. The guy who was guiding him was doing so with the palm of his hand on Guido's butt.
Youcef had an arm around me and was both supporting me and guiding me. As we neared the exit, the black guy pushed off the bar and followed us.
* * * *