Coc-Sucer: Desperate Measures

I don't want to write this. I avoided having to begin writing it down. But there are things that need to be said, and no-one else to say them.

It starts with the boy. I say 'How old are you?' He says 'Nineteen, sir.' I say 'Are you sure?' He says 'Yes sir, thank you sir.' We are in the Motel room, me, him... and Mr McMasters, his manager, agent, or whatever title's he's chosen to adopt. In the bedroom, through the doorway, they're setting up the equipment.

I'd told him to get naked, and he's embarrassingly eager to comply, shrugging his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt up and off. His skinny chest is hairless smooth. Then he unfastens his belt, shoots the zip, and shoves his jeans down. He's ready, no underwear. His pants get tangled around his ankles and he stoops to free himself, then straightens warily, as if there's an impulse to use his hands to cup and conceal, but he forces them down by his side for my critical appraisal. He gives a weak apologetic smile. He's uncut, with an estimated five-inches hanging coyly over small tight balls. A modest little peach-fuzz of hair in and around. Yes, some guys go for that sort of thing. A rounded girlish bottom too. He'll do fine.

'Do you suck cock?'

He grins. 'I grew up with three older brothers, sir. I know all about sucking cock.'

I laugh. 'It might be best not to mention that too much, kid. You'll be sucking cock today. Are you fine with that?'

'Yes, sir, thank you sir.'

'And to make it visual, you suck him, and when he's about to cum, you draw back, so he shoots over your face, right? But then - most important, once he's finished spurting on you, you don't wipe, you just take that spunk-messy cock back into your mouth and you suck it clean.' I'm deliberately making it graphic, laying it on for his benefit. So he's got the chance to back out.

I lean forward. 'You understand what's happening today? You are here of your own volition. You are not acting under any compulsion or coercion. On behalf of you, and Mr McMasters, we commit to produce a high-quality Test Video of you going through various sex acts. You will pay us for this service and will receive copies for your own personal use, while we undertake to circulate copies through our industry contacts in order that you will be seen by potential clients. Although our obligation extends no further. You agree to this?'

'Yes, sir, thank you sir.'

'Do you take it up the ass?'

He looks around nervously at his 'agent'. 'Only with Mr McMasters so far.'

'Well, you'll expand your circle of friends today.' I lean across, so close that I'm speaking directly into his ear, so no-one else can hear. 'You can get out. You still have chance to say 'no'.'

His face takes on an expression of unexpected strength of will. His eyes blaze. 'Do you know what it's like to be the small-town misfit? The outcast? To feel hurt, isolated and alone? When other guys are out hunting pussy I'm sat at home yearning for the man of my dreams? Do you know what that is like, how much it hurts? Then I meet Mr McMasters online. Catch a Greyhound into LA. He meets me off the coach. And it feels so... right, like I've arrived home at last. He makes me feel good about myself. He takes away the fear and shame and makes me proud to be myself, to be comfortable in my own skin. Can you understand what that means?'

I ease back. Yes. I understand. I understand it only too well. I shrug, 'so be it.'

I stand up and cross to the door where they're about done. 'Rollo.' He comes out with a big leery grin on his face. Ugly as fuck. But his face seldom figures. His prodigious talents lie at groin-level.

'This is Rollo. He's the gentleman who will be fucking you today.'

Rollo reaches out, in friendly greeting. The kid's little cock nods attractively as they shake hands. Is it my imagination or is it firming? Standing out bravely in anticipation of what's to come? It's impossible to control your physical reactions. The body has its own agenda.

This is stupid. I no longer want to write this. It leaves a bad taste in my mind, and I'm sick of the flavour. It was never meant to be this way. We are not swindling them. We are not going to rip off this dubious McMasters and his compliant bum-boy. As far as it goes, we'll deliver on this sleazoid deal. Although it will likely lead to nothing more than a hole in his bank balance. This is where the industry has brought us. These are the alternatives left open to us.

Yesterday it was some perv who wanted film of two black guys fucking his wife. So we set it up on his behalf. The heavy-duty kit and sound-boom are not strictly necessary, digital tech makes it all lightweight and mobile. But it serves to impress gullible clients that this is the real deal. She was a frumpy creature with a weight-watchers membership card, a shy little mouse at first. I felt this same unease. But once she was naked and on the bed, it was all so different. She got progressively bolder more confident, more adventurous. Afterwards she was purringly content pacing around nude, fussing and making us coffee with streaks of spunk still on her face and fat tits. Like she didn't want to put her clothes back on. Like she'd found it all liberating, enjoying the freedom and attention.

I don't want to stay to watch this. It sticks in my craw, something I can't vomit up. This will either be a hard lesson for the kid, one that will shock him into awareness, and he'll get the hell out while he can. Or else, in six months time he'll be as brain-dead cynical and jaded as I am. Worn out and used up.

I get up. 'Good luck. I mean that.' I grudge a nod at the creepy McMasters on the way out. He looks unpleasantly predatory.

Shockingly, gulping in the fresh clean air, it's bright daylight when I step outside. As though these assignations should be carried out under cover of the night. The big neon Motel sign sways in the slight breeze with a dry rusty creak. There's no functioning light left in it, like a tired metaphor. The reception-desk guy is too bored to even care what goes on inside his rooms, so long as we pay upfront. Unless he's got the rooms wired and jacks-off to the CCTV playback? His crouchy dehydrated soul most likely trolls the Hispanic maids as they clean the vacated rooms too. As they crouch down, as they bend over. I've got an appointment for later, but in the meanwhile, I've got time. I need and deserve a break. I head towards the bar. Pogmore is in a corner alcove. I get a Bud and join him.

'What are you doing here, Pog?'

'That's the great existential question. What are we all doing here? I ask myself the same thing all the time.' He gives a weary smile, setting the glass with ponderous care on the polished table surface. 'You doing business?'

'You know what it's like.' We both know. Back then, when we started, Porn was a big deal. It was even trending. But things change. Technologies evolve. Who is gonna pay for DVDs when you can just download it direct, and file-share. That was the start. Then everyone's got cell-phones they use to make clips of their girlfriends giving blowjobs in jerky out-focus handheld blurs. Uploaded, with or without her consent, onto sites. We use professional equipment, state-of-the-art sound and vision, gooseflesh zoom-in for close focus of every detail. But suddenly that's not enough. As in some 'Blair Witch' scenario, amateur equates with authenticity. These free clips are real in ways that mainstream Porn is not. And there's so much of it there for gratis, just a click away, why pay? So they don't pay. Where do we go... into niche markets they can't get any other way. I'm not really into pissing or being pissed on, I don't do torture-bondage or being walked on with knife-point stilettos. But I can do Gay. Until even that gets out-sourced, and we're forced to come up with these scams. I ascribe to a code, do no harm. All I ask is a roof over my head and a modicum of dignity. And even that's denied.

'She's out to nail me, Al. The bitch wants it all,' says Pog. Dark sad eyes, coddling his gloom. He raises what's left of the whiskey sour, pauses, and lowers it again. His smile nothing more than a strained curling of the lip.

I make sympathetic noises. 'You want another drink?'

'She always was high-maintenance, you know that. Diane has a thing about shoes and designer handbags. How can you use more than you need? But she does. And I get them for her. I always do. She didn't know, or care how I meet the price-tag, she didn't know I was out cash-fucking. Of course, she was shallow and provincial and self-centred, I just happened to like her that way. But I got greedy, when the chance came, I had to cheat on her. You know, Maureen? We had a furtive thing going on, until I got scared Diane was gonna find out, so I try to end it, to let her down easy. She wasn't about to go quietly. After we split she emailed a film I'd done to Diane's phone. Vindictive backatcha bitch that she is. It was a regular poolside thing with me being spit-roast by two well-hung guys. I'd even forgotten I'd done it. But when she sees it, Diane goes nuclear. Calls me everything from a faggot to a queer. But you know what hurt most, Al, you know what that bitch did? She got our ten-year-old and she points at me and she says 'you want to know what a faggot queer is? A man ain't no man if he goes sucking other guy's cocks. That's what Daddy does. Take a good look.' I'll never forgive her for that. Never.'

When I look I see the tear of rage he's squeezing out the corner of his eye. He's a big man. He doesn't deserve this. There's not enough kindness in the world. There really isn't. So much more I want to say, but can't uncover the words. My brain cogs lack teeth. So I simply buy him another whiskey sour and we drink together in comradely silence. This is the irony of a destiny in which I can go right through life without really becoming intimate with another human, flesh and fucking, yes, I can do that, but not really touching their soul with mine. We are alone in the world. We must learn to be alone. We get smarter, we get harder. I hate this loneliness. But at least it's a clean and untainted thing. I hate that phony friendship where people you barely know high-five you in fake intimacy. The dark side of my mind knows better. In my apartment I touch nobody, and nobody touches me. Mixed with only this great strangeness and blackness within me.

Eventually I look at my watch. Back in the motel room the kid will be down on his knees, Rollo's cock forcing his mouth out of shape. Or the cam'll be zooming in close to catch every whimper and grimace on his doggy-style face as Rollo eases that monster into his back-passage, that cute little down-dangling cock flipping and jerking as he's getting fucked. Damn. I shove the images away. It's my own anger, car-crash images in my own head, no concern of anyone else. Time I was going.

I cruise the hire-car up through the valley where the late-afternoon sunlight falls in languid horizontal strokes. The grey wind laments over rooftops, it smells of heat and melting asphalt. Overhead lights float like captive suns. I scan up and down the radio to kill the screaming silence, it's all hip-hop, EDM, Urban and Rap. Can't they even write proper songs anymore? Doesn't anyone play Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac any more? Music has gone to hell in this accursed present. Sat-Nav draws me towards a big white house set back from the hillside road. This is another profitable chore, more desperate measures in a time of extremes. I don't enjoy personal interfacing, trading off my slight reputation, but I'm in no position not to do it.

Jack Strider strides out to meet me as I draw up in his driveway. He's my age. Razored bald, but better preserved. As though he might still have hope. 'Wow, Al, it's really you. I can't believe you're actually here.' The back of his extended hand is stormed with wiry black hairs.

I force a smile and shake his proffered hand. 'My pleasure, Mr Strider.' Gritting my teeth and thinking of the cash-in-hand I'm getting for this, already wired into my account. 'Is all this yours?', pausing on the porch, stopping to look back, indicating the house and grounds, the lawn hissing to itself as the sprinklers lazily revolve, the surrounding walls lined with ornamental corkscrew bushes, and tall pines edged dark against the sky.

'I wish. No, the owner... went missing. His present location is unknown. He bequeathed us temporary use, until he... returns.' Perhaps that should have alerted me? But it didn't.

He has hypnotic eyes. Afterwards it seems strange that I should have consented to his invitation so readily. Did he use a little of the hypnotic power of his eyes to beat down my resistance? Looking back now, I believe he did. There's something electrically charged in his disturbing physicality, his erotic closeness.

And I get a strange sensation stepping over the threshold into the pleasantly air-conditioned interior. A different kind of warmth. An acute pain-joy of living that flares in the dark pool of sorrow. What was it the kid said? 'It feels so... right, like I've arrived home at last.' Psychic sensual energies swirl richly here. It's a nest, an occult coven. They get up to greet me. This is the four, the Club. Laslo Farmer and Jeffy 'Poet' Fander, they seem to form a duo. And Skhiva with Jack Strider, who form another. Skhiva, who wears only powder-blue shorts, welcomes me further in. He is slender, seems more apologetic, less assertive, carrying himself with neither self-assurance nor diffidence, but a sure sense of purpose. We are gathered around a low Scandinavian table. On the table there's an overflowing bowl of succulents, and beside it there's a tube of lube, and a pile of condoms. We will take advantage of the former, but don't use the latter.

Strider eases himself down onto the curved couch wearing an expression of detached amusement. 'You know how it is, when you're young and horny with a burning hunger, but girls are strange alien creatures, impossibly distant and out of reach?, achingly inaccessible, desired and lusted over, but unobtainable. Yet there's all that raging sense of physical urgency to expend. So what do you do... what other course is there but to experiment, if only tentatively, with each other? you form a jerk-off club with your friends. Compare and contrast. Watch me doing this. Touch and feel. What if I do this and you do that? What if I put this in here? What if I...? Sometimes three of us, once or twice it was five of us, but it settles down to a nucleus of the four of us. We circle-jerk, then we take turns jacking each other. Then sucking and fucking. It gets us through. Then we go off into our own lives. Until we get to that point where there's divorce, and wives hit menopause and they're no longer interested, some wives were never much interested in the first place. But we're horny again with that same burning hunger. So what do we do? We get the old band back together. The same four. Those same cocks and mutual easing.' He places his hands on the table, palm down, as if for emphasis.

And they'd watch my clips to set the mood. I get it. Farmer and Jeffy Fander go into the back room to get drinks, when they return they're naked. The heavy shapes of their swaying cocks penduluming as they walk. My eyes quietly appraise their dark good looks, more attractive than threatening.

Skhiva slips off his shorts, he has a long thin shaved cock, he takes over the story, his features cultured, his words coming fast, their tone and intonation suffice to identify him as an aesthetic. 'Jack is the instigator. He usually gets his way. He always has. We'd stopped doing that circle-jerk stuff abruptly when we realised, it was not just 'cock-fun', it was homosexual behaviour, that's what it says, it says 'Queer'. It says 'Homo'. That's the conclusion to draw, the only possible conclusion to draw - isn't it? At the time we'd have been - what, nineteen years old, and we knew no better? And we've never even mentioned it since. Ever. Until now. I was thinking, why is Jack obliquely referring to those long-ago incidents now? Why now? Does Jack want a replay? Just to expend energies. The four of us. Just like it used to be. How would we react? Would we... could he... even now? That down-dangling dick of his had been in my mouth before. And more disturbing than that, I'd actually not disliked the sensation of its being there. That's the most unsettling part. Not so much the doing. More the pleasurable aspect of it. What does that mean? What does arousal mean if it's induced by another person of the same gender? The problem is that arousal. The hard-on response. Surely the regular hetero reaction should be disgust? Repulsion? And when that repulsion doesn't happen - in fact, when the reverse happens. And when it feels so incredibly good. So it happens again, and again. The four of us, just like it used to be. As Jack's power grows, the gravity of the four of us together is more powerful than we are apart.'

The alcohol burns my throat. My head swims. Farmer and Jeffy Fander are easing each other back onto the couch, falling naturally into the sixty-nine position, sucking hungrily. I reach out and run my finger down the length of Skhiva's cock. It stirs under my touch. 'Seems to me you've got something here which is unique... and enviable,' I tell him. It feels good. More than that, it feels natural.

'Have you heard of that Science Fiction idea of the gestalt? A single organism, made up of separate parts. A future-evolution that grows into a composite entity. That is what we are.' I assumed he was talking in metaphor. It's only later I learn he was not talking in metaphor. 'We always had that special bond that brought us together, more than that, something powerful that united us. We are individual atoms that form a single collective molecule. Above and beyond our parallel lives. Sustained and energised by an occasional compatible otherness.' He pauses. Then resumes. 'The problem now, if problem it is, is that Jack has done some online searches, and found this other Club across the Bay. Another four guys who've come to the identical conclusion, with the same circle-jerk solution that we did. Jack feels that we should all meet up and... trade.'

'And you don't consider that a good idea?' I curl my fingers around his cock, feeling it firm and swell in response. Jack Strider is getting undressed. Farmer and Jeffy Fander are enthusiastically sucking each other's cocks.

'He intends today, and this very pleasant visit of yours to be a trial, a try-out for adding future components to our Gestalt.' He seems preoccupied.

'Never allow yourself to be pressurised or coerced into doing something you're not comfortable with' I urge.

'The four of us go way back. We know and trust each other. We work well together. I don't see why we need to bring others into the arrangement. We don't know them. There's the possibility of STDs, loss of confidences, and just the weirdness of bringing strangers into it.' His eyes meet mine, and burn into me. 'With you, of course, it's different.'

'Go with caution' I suggest, 'but go. To touch and be touched is so very special. Regardless of gender or gender orientation. We are human and we need that connection.'

My words seem to act like a trigger. The pack instinct takes over. They circle me like wolves, sniffing me out. They help ease me out of my clothes, until we are all naked. Skin to skin. Cock to cock. Cock to mouth. Mouth to cock. Falling together in a tangle of limbs in a pleasing blur of warm flesh and firm erections, I'm submerging myself in the four-way testosterone pulse. I'm sucking Skhiva's slender cock, his fat balls pressed up against my chin, while someone is sucking mine. If its Farmer, he's playing my cock like a piano maestro plays Chopin. There are hands crawling across my body, my buttocks, my scrotum, I'm enveloped in sensual intimacy, islands of flesh linking into an archipelago of neural connections. As we squirm around into new configurations, a new cock invades me, bigger and on fire with urgency as it slips into my mouth, looking up I see it's Strider, his supernaturally-compelling eyes burn with a ravenous appetite. I take it deep and suck with ferocious energy.