Badly Drawing Boy

Part of the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong

===

While Matt Strickson's PowerPoint presentation was unremittingly dreary, the way his arse flexed and rippled in the back of his tight grey trousers every time he turned towards the whiteboard was more than enough to keep me entertained.

Most people betray at least some signs of nervousness when they're giving a presentation -- especially when they're standing up in front of their own colleagues, who can be among the most critical of audiences. Not Matt. He breezed through his talk like he was chatting casually with his mates in the pub. If he was aware of how dull his slides were, he didn't seem to give a toss. He just stood there, strutting his stuff, wiggling his arse and flaunting the bulge of his crotch, like he was loving the attention.

Which he probably was.

He kept flashing smirks over at me as if he knew full well how hot I thought he was.

Perhaps he could read my mind.

Now there was a thought.

What if he could peer into my head and was able to see what I was imagining him doing: his cock poking out of his fly hammering back and forth as I bent down in front of him with my trousers yanked down? Or squatting over my eager face, slamming that firm round butt of his down onto my eager and outstretched tongue.

I smiled back at him, wondering if he would like what his mind was able to discern.

And wondering how big his erection would grow as he bucked his hips up and down against my face. Whether his balls would hang low enough to slap against my throat every time he --

"Do you agree, Rob?" someone was saying.

"Er... what?"

"Do you agree that we need a rear guard action?" It was the MD. He was staring at me over the top of his specs.

"A rear guard... what..?"

"A rear guard action. Clearly we need to do something now that the bottom has fallen out of the market."

I glanced around. Everyone seemed to be looking at me.

"Bottom... oh... er... absolutely."

What the fuck was he talking about?

Matt was just grinning at me, offering no clue. The slide on the screen behind him was equally unhelpful: just a bullet-pointed list in the most boring of fonts -- Death by PowerPoint.

The MD went on, "I assume, Rob, that you'd like to get behind Matt in --"

At that moment the door opened and Alison, one of the least squawky of the secretaries, apologised for the interruption and told me she'd just received a call from my son's college and I was needed there immediately. Fearing some kind of accident had befallen Jake, I must have blanched in horror because she assured me that it was "just a bit of trouble". I quickly got to my feet and grabbed my jacket.

"You know how young men can be," she said with a smirk.

Not as much as I would like to, I thought, smiling over at Matt as I headed for the door.

===

The receptionist offered me a chair in a small foyer outside of the Assistant Principal's office door. Jake was already sitting there, looking as exaggeratedly glum as only an eighteen-year-old can. He barely acknowledged me as I sat down and just stared at the floor with a thunderous demeanour.

I said, as calmly as I could muster, "It's okay, Jake. Whatever it is, we'll get it sorted."

He kept staring at the floor, his eyes blank and his lips tight, and I tried to figure out if he was more angry or more upset. His expression at such times was difficult to read, rather like his mother's.

I tried, as reassuring as I could muster, "Come on, son. Nothing's unfixable."

He muttered, "He's going on about my university place. Saying he has a 'duty' to tell them."

He glazed the word 'duty' with a heavy coating of ridicule.

I asked, quietly, "What is it you've done? Is somebody dead?"

He looked up at me and his eyes betrayed momentarily that he was more upset than angry.

"They didn't tell you?"

I shook my head. "They just said I had to come to the college. That there'd been some trouble that they needed to talk to me about."

He countered, with adolescent huffiness, "It's not that serious. It's just them making a big deal of everything, like they always do."

I threw him a small sympathetic smile even though I knew that, officially at least, I had to be seen to support the college in censuring whatever misdemeanour he'd apparently committed.

I said, "It's serious enough for them to pull me out of work, Jake. They haven't done that in quite a while."

I said it like I couldn't remember exactly when they last had, but I knew full well that Jake had been at primary school, just after his mother had walked out on the two of us. He'd lost his temper with another boy during a maths lesson and had attacked him with a compass. Although I'd joined the headmaster in giving my son a strong telling-off heavily laden with threats and warnings, given Jake's emotional fragility at the time and the cruel things that the other boy had said to him, I'd privately thought that his adversary had actually come out of it rather lightly.

He said, "They found a drawing I'd done. Someone must've put it up on the noticeboard."

"What kind of drawing?"

Jake shrugged. "You know... the rude kind."

I was rather surprised by that because, although Jake was a prolific cartoonist and used his art to document much of what went on in his life, his cartoons these days -- or at least the ones I spotted among the papers on his desk -- weren't usually explicitly sexual but tended to be more humorous in the choice of subject matter.

He'd gone through a phase, a couple of years earlier, of drawing cartoons which had verged on being pornographic. Perhaps he'd had a hormonal surge or it had suddenly dawned on him why girls and boys were different; whatever the reason, for a few months at least, he'd been compelled to express his sexual feelings as explicitly as he could within the artwork he'd had a talent for since childhood.

For a short time his desk had become littered with page after page of female figures: grinning caricatures of voluptuous femininity with ballooning breasts and splayed legs revealing surprisingly accurate, albeit ludicrously exaggerated, sexual anatomy. Soon they were joined by their male counterparts whose grossly inflated musculature and implausibly chiselled physiques were matched in their absurdity by the sheer scale of the erections they so proudly sported.

At first I had simply accepted that he'd found a creative outlet for the sexual cravings which were, if my own tumultuous puberty had been any indicator, tormenting him as they increased in intensity. His talents were undeniably admirable: the women always looked so aroused and enticing with their nipples poking outward like bullets and the suggestion of an alluring wetness between their legs. The men, for their part, were always grotesquely endowed with pumped-up phalluses looking almost painfully excited. Their impossibly thickened shafts were criss-crossed with prominent knotted veins and they flaunted huge shiny helmets slick with the ooze that always seemed to be dribbling from the slits. Their distended testicles hung low in their stretched scrotums, heavy and over-ripe, like bloated fruits dangling pendulously between their tree-trunk thighs.

"You haven't drawn that kind of stuff for quite a while, Jake," I observed.

He nodded, still looking down. "The drawing was meant to be satirical. I mean, it was pretty sexual... yeah... but it wasn't really about that."

"Who was in it?" I asked, expecting that it would be one of the girls in his year-group or a woman from television.

"The Principal and Assistant Principal," Jake replied quietly.

"Ah..." I said, as the nature of the drawing began to dawn on me. "They're both men, aren't they?"

Jake nodded.

"And, in the drawing, these two men were... well... doing something intimate?"

Jake glanced up at me, his eyes telling me all I needed to know.

"Oh God," I said quietly. "And now we're going to have to face one of them..."

I wasn't especially worried about sitting across from some jumped-up teacher listening to him doling out his threats and punishments: I was more worried that, given that he'd likely be waving around Jake's drawing in all its gritty realism as he did so, I might laugh.

And I knew full well that some of Jake's drawings could be extremely realistic.

One day, towards the end of his period of drawing naked figures, while I was putting his clothes away in his room I noticed that some of the figures in his cartoons had started coupling up. When I saw how vividly Jake had portrayed the intertwining bodies of the men and women in his drawings, I decided that my son and I should have words.

As we'd leafed through the cartoons that evening sitting alongside each other at his desk, I'd asked him if he found it exciting to draw such caricatured figures engaged in sexual acts. I knew that he could tell that I was infinitely more embarrassed than he was to be having this conversation and he'd smiled at me almost sympathetically before agreeing that he did.

I'd asked him, as I glanced at each cartoon in turn, if it was the process of drawing the sketches which he enjoyed most, or whether he mainly liked to look at them afterward. He'd replied that he mainly enjoyed himself while he was drawing them and from my blushes and his salacious grin it was patently clear that we both understood their purpose. I'd coughed and muttered that in that case he should hide them away privately after he'd finished with them.

"You could make a scrapbook," I'd started suggesting, "Or maybe --"

My words were cut short when I came across a drawing which was spectacularly different from the others. This drawing had two men in it, both graphically muscular and obscenely well-hung like the other male figures Jake had drawn. However, what I had momentarily assumed to be a wrestling hold, with one man behind the other, transpired to be something surprisingly more intimate.

"What's this, Jake?" I'd asked.

He'd laughed at the drawing and said, "Oh, that's just funny!"

I'd asked him what they were doing, even though it was explicitly clear from the way Jake had angled one guy's backside that the gratuitously thickened shaft of the other's erection was deeply penetrating his bowels.

"Come on, dad," he'd giggled. "You can see what they're doing!"

I'd looked at the next of his drawings which showed another two men, again both inconceivably muscular, in the characteristic pose of doggy-style anal sex: one guy on all fours with the other kneeling upright behind him, his hands grabbing his partner's hips. I noticed that in this cartoon the man being penetrated had a long, curving erection with a finely-drawn mushroom-shaped head which was issuing a copious spray of seed into a thick, gloopy puddle.

I'd asked him, "Are they doing what I think they're doing?"

He'd laughed and said, "They're having bum sex!"

I must have stared blankly at him because he went on to explain, with much amusement, "The guy behind is doing the guy in front! That's how it works when it's two men, dad! They don't have a woman's hole to do it in, so one guy has to push his dick up the other guy's butt!"

He grinned at me as if he expected me to suddenly get it and then laugh.

But I just threw him a quizzical look and said, "I know how it works, Jake. I just don't understand why you're drawing it."

"Like I said, it's funny! I mean, why would anyone want to do that? Use another guy's butthole for sex?!"

Without venturing an answer, I looked at the next drawing. In this one the two men were standing up, once again one behind the other. The man in front had one leg raised with his foot on a barrel, the outline of which was only loosely sketched in comparison with the sinewy detail of the men's bodies. By raising the leg of the man being penetrated, Jake was able to flaunt his large erection and heavy nuts which would otherwise have been hidden behind his thigh; however, I suspected its main purpose was to reveal in graphic detail the act of anal sex which the men were enjoying.

And enjoying it they were! Their arms were ravenously grabbing at other's sweat-soaked bodies, their postures contorted to suggest passion and movement, while their faces were turned so they could grin towards one another as they revelled in their pleasure.

"How did you know that men could do this kind of stuff with each other, Jake?"

"Come on, dad... I'm not a kid anymore!"

"Okay... so how are able to draw it so clearly? Don't you normally only draw stuff you've seen?"

He'd nodded and grinned: "I have seen it!"

Before I could ask him why he'd been looking up this kind of stuff online, he laughed and went on, "I told you ages ago! Me, Dan and Craig saw a couple of the older lads at the scout hostel doing it one night. I thought it was a joke -- that they were just having us on and once they knew we were watching they'd burst out laughing or something. But they kept doing it, deadly serious, one lad on top of the other and sort of grabbing him around the chest. They got faster and faster until the top guy started whimpering and the bottom guy spunked up."

I remembered him coming out with that story on his return from camp. I hadn't really believed it -- I'd presumed Jake was elaborating some tale his mates had made up or was just trying to elicit shock from me as he often did -- and even now I was sceptical.

"Dan said they were bumming," he grinned, emphasizing the word 'bumming' which he knew I didn't like. It was true that he'd brought that word home from scout camp with him: I'd had words with him about its inappropriate usage on several occasions.

"If that actually happened," I'd said, emphasizing the word 'if' which I knew he wouldn't like, "then what those young men were doing was just a natural expression of their curiosity."

"Well, that's all these pictures show," he retorted with a shrug. "A natural expression of these guys' curiosity."

"Hmm..." I'd said, looking again at the very cleverly drawn picture of the two men enjoying a carnal moment together in a standing position. I wondered how long it had taken Jake to sketch the two of them in such an animated pose: probably not long given how confident he was with a pen.

I'd turned to the last of his cartoons and found that it also depicted a well-muscled male couple. This time their bodies were drawn from the front, with one man, wide-eyed and broadly grinning, squatting his backside down onto the other's upright and once again preposterously large organ. The man being penetrated was gripping his own exaggerated erection, which was so swollen by his arousal that he could barely get his fingers around it, and motion lines above and below his bulging forearm showed how frantically he was rubbing it in his almost uncontrolled excitement.

Jake had drawn the man behind reaching around to grab his companion's large ball-sack, lifting his church bell testicles up from between his legs. I thought at first that he had drawn it like that to heighten the sense of intimacy between the two men. However, when I noticed how attentive Jake had been to what was going on between the man's legs, just below his raised balls, it dawned on me that his main motivation for moving the scrotum out of the way was to reveal the full extent of the sexual act which was taking place. He had fastidiously illustrated the thick, veined shaft of the cock sliding up into the stretched and yet delicately puckered ring of the anus in explicit -- and, to my eyes, rather sordid -- detail.

After putting the cartoons back on his desk, I'd concluded, "You know I'm open-minded about sexual stuff, Jake, but... these are... well... a bit graphic."

"I was only drawing what I saw!"

"Come on, Jake. I don't honestly think --"

"That's what it looks like, dad! Have you ever seen two men having sex together? One man doing it... you know... to the other's butt?"

I hesitated before lying, "No."

"Well, that's what it looks like! Believe me, I saw it!"

He turned back to one of the earlier cartoons and pointed at the thick spray of liquid squirting out from the man being buggered.

"That's what happened to the guy at the hostel; the one on the bottom. He shot his load without even touching himself! Can you believe that?"

Jake grinned at me, staring at my face to see my reaction. I think he expected me to be shocked -- which, actually, I was -- but I was loathe to show him anything but mild curiosity.

I asked him, "Even if that's true, Jake, it doesn't explain why you drew these. Did drawing them excite you like the other pictures?"

He laughed incredulously. "No! Of course not! I just think they're funny. I mean, why would anyone want to put his dick up another lad's shitter?! I mean -- God -- it's so rank!"

"Backside, Jake."

"Uh?"

"It's better to say, 'backside'. What you said was crude."

"Oh, right."

While I was uncomfortable about Jake drawing such lewd cartoons, whether straight-orientated or gay, I accepted that they were, for him, a way of diarising his life and observations the way that another boy might keep a daily journal. I conceded that it was healthy for him to have an outlet into which to direct his creative urges, even though I would have preferred that he restricted his artistic talents towards more fully clothed figures.

He agreed that he would, in future, keep the more lurid of his drawings hidden away from view and that it, if he felt he had to document sexual acts, it would serve as a more meaningful challenge to his abilities to focus on passion and movement rather than merely accentuating the anatomical mechanics of the act.

A few mornings later, just before I was going to leave to go to work, I came across the drawings of male figures again stashed away under Jake's bed as I was checking for absconded laundry. After retrieving a few unpleasant-looking socks and two or three pairs of scrunched up underwear which he must have kicked under there, I took another look at the drawings in the privacy of the quiet house.

As I leafed through them a second time, my scepticism that they had been inspired by something Jake had seen at scout camp increased further. There was no way that he could have witnessed sex between two males in the hostel in a way that was so frank and uninhibited.

I knew that Jake's generation took a far more liberal view of sex than mine had, but I also knew that attitudes hadn't developed to such a point that two young men at scout camp would feel able to flaunt their sexual curiosity with so little regard for who might be watching. Any such experimentation between the boys would surely, as in my day, have been furtive and concealed: a few quick thrusts and grunts under the cover of a shared sleeping bag; a rapid slapping of flesh against flesh behind the locked door of a shower stall. Even if the two of them, as shown in one of Jake's cartoons, had managed to wriggle into a doggy position during their escapades, their few moments of gasping buggery would still have been obscured among the folds of hastily yanked down underwear in the darkness of the room.

I'd be the first to admit that I don't know what goes on after lights out between the lads at scout camp, but the idea that anal sex between them would be paraded so unashamedly and enthusiastically by its older occupants was, to say the least, ridiculous.

If Jake really had seen homosexual activity at the hostel, he had through his artwork elaborated a few momentary glimpses into something far more lucid and expressive. He had obviously found himself fascinated by the idea that males could have sex together by using the anus for penetration and for some reason he'd been compelled to explore his interest by illustrating as unambiguously as he could the crude physicality of homosexual intercourse.