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This is chapter one of a completed four-chapter novella that will post within two weeks.
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I tend to index specific years in my life in terms of some significant event I was involved in during that year. The year 1978 should bring forth the first movie I had a part of,
The Deer Hunter
, but, although it's related, what I think about when 1978 is considered is the night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and having three-way sex with a couple of guys, including a forgettable movie actor, who, nevertheless, had a memorable cock. And I think about the motion of a train rumbling along on rough tracks, the train's motion being an equal partner in the fuck for the movie guy and me. I think about the rhythm of the fuck synchronizing with the rocking of the moving train and grinding of the train's wheels on the rails.
I forget what the actor's movie name was. I saw him in nothing else after
The Deer Hunter
and he was pushing the edge even then, appearing twenty years younger in the movie, more or less my age of twenty-five at the time, primarily though the magic of the manipulatable camera lens and angles. When a guy hits his forties, though, the cock, if he's used it right, holds firm for longer than the rest of the man's body, and the man I'll refer to as Craig Culver was certainly able to hold a nice erection.
I wasn't a slut in the mid-seventies, but I think all that saved me from being considered that was how hedonist Bangkok, Thailand, was in those days. In New York City I would have been considered promiscuous. In Richmond, Virginia, I would have been considered a whore.
I wasn't fucked every day, but I didn't miss many. I'd been innocent, so narcissistic that I was dumb about sex, and repressed before the State Department sent me to Thailand as a cultural affairs officer. But Bangkok was such a freeing cultural experience for me, letting me blossom my interests and talents in the theater, music, art, and writing and opening me up to pleasures I hadn't been aware of before.
I was what could be described as a pretty boy head turner in my youth and had kept most of that into my twenties, but I was so oblivious to what was being suggested and offered to me before arriving in Bangkok that I wasn't in the game. Once there, though, Bangkok was a whole different level of the game, and it took me by surprise and by storm. A black major at the American military liaison office, the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group--JUSMAG--understood what I wanted and needed when I didn't. He pursued me expertly, cornered me, took me hard, and had me royally fucked and his slave before I fully understood what was happening. He then passed me around at his convenience. Within months of arriving in Bangkok in 1976 at the age of twenty-three, I had acquired a taste for it. I had become a male whore even by Bangkok standards.
In my work, I met a lot of creative and "what the hell; whatever gives you pleasure" people in the arts, and I was able to work in any artistic medium I wished, from acting on the stage, to singing in and producing concerts, to arranging art exhibits, to writing drama reviews for the English-language newspapers. And I partied hard. It was the latter--the drama critic duties--that introduced me into working with movies as well as my embassy job, which was forgiving of my extracurricular activities as long as they increased my cultural skills and experience and I networked in ways that promoted U.S. interests.
The Deer Hunter
, the first movie I did some work on, was an American production and one that the Thai were quite pleased to be having scenes filmed in Bangkok. The movie was partially set in Vietnam, but that country was inaccessible then, so the film company had come to Bangkok.
When film companies came to Thailand to work, they typically brought only the minimum number of production crew needed to supervise filming and only the principal actors. Their scouts came to people like me, newspaper film critics, to recommend crew and extras to fill out their needs.
The Deer Hunter
was in the last stages of production and had come to Thailand to film a few scenes. They needed someone to clean up scripts in the evening for the next day of filming after the director had reviewed them and made changes. I wrote movie reviews for the English-language press, so the movie producers came to me for a recommendation of a script editor. They were fine with my showing interest in the job myself.
I convinced my superiors that such work would add to my job skills. I took that position. In that work, I came into contact with the actors, and the Bangkok segment of the movie, which transformed a closed U.S. military commissary on the Klong Toy docks into a military hospital set. The filming lasted long enough that the actors and crew filtered out into Bangkok society, which catered to any interest they would admit to. Being a premier hedonist, "anything goes" city, there was no prurient interest of movie folk that Bangkok couldn't--and didn't--cater to. What I could--and did--offer to them was quite tame at that time by Thai standards. As noted, though, it would get me called promiscuous in New York City and a male whore in Richmond, Virginia. Eventually, I reached that status even in Bangkok.
This is what led to the actor, Craig Culver. He was filling a small speaking role in the movie, having had better, beefcake heart-throb roles in his earlier career, and came to discover that I took cock and would happily take his. JUSMAG was dominated by muscular, cut, cocky military men who had gravitated to billets in that office in Bangkok because they preferred partying with men, many of them having a special affinity to young Thai youths, including transvestites. Thanks to the existence of a network of high-ranking gay male officers in the services, there were billets, like JUSMAG in Bangkok, that were protected for gay assignments, and, if assigned there, you either were part of the open gay lifestyle, or you moved on and kept your mouth shut. Good-looking soldiers who supposedly were straight but were deemed to be wavering were assigned there. They invariably left definitely bent. Male prostitution was an accepted and burgeoning institution in Bangkok and JUSMAG parties were a paradise for men seeking other men.
Craig Culver attended one of the Saturday pool parties at the JUSMAG compound and thus, having seen me a couple of times in the production trailers on
The Deer Hunter
set, caught sight of me naked and on my back on a pool lounge bed, with my major on top of and inside me and pumping away. Culver didn't say anything to me then, but he stayed nearby to watch for a while and he gave me interested looks before going off to find a playmate of his own--at least for that time.