His name was Roland and he was from Jamaica. I'm guessing he was about 30. He had deep ochre skin, eyes that were almost black, closely-cropped hair, and was tall, lean and very graceful. At one point in his life he'd been a dancer, but was now a set designer for one of the larger theater companies in Amsterdam. He was just a little bit effeminate, and overtly gay.
I'd come to Europe for the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I'd gotten to Amsterdam in week two of my grand tour and got stuck there—stuck because I was having too much fun. Somehow I landed in a small hotel in the high-class Red Light District.
The owner of the hotel was a crazy Dutch guy named Jan who rented cheap rooms and sold high quality hashish for absurdly low prices. I'd been there for a week when Jan offered me free room and board for a couple of weeks in exchange for helping paint the various bedrooms in the hotel—plus all I could smoke. I cancelled the next few weeks of my grand tour and got right to work.
I spent the next few days painting and my nights were a blur of drinking fresh Heineken, getting high, dancing, and partying with Jan and his friends. That's how I met Roland. He was one of Jan's best friends and hung out with us often.
I was nearing the end of my painting job in the hotel when Roland asked me to help him with a project.
"Jan says you're very good with a paint brush, mon," he said in that melodic islands accent of his. "Would you be willing to work for us on a set for a few nights? We're horribly behind and I need a good painter."
"Sure," I said. I'd been worrying that I needed to leave soon and had begun thinking about where else in Europe I should be visiting. Working with Roland would give me a good excuse to stay for a few more days at least. Plus, I'd done a little set work in my high school theater and enjoyed it.
"Brilliant," he said. "I'll come get you after dinner."
I spent four or five hours each of the next four nights working hard with his set crew to get everything ready for the dress rehearsal. The play was some sort of experimental drama that required lots and lots of blue paint in various shades and textures. I tried to follow the plot during the rehearsals but gave up after two nights.
Finally, on Saturday night around midnight we were done.
"Party time children," Roland called out to the set crew, clapping his hands. "Meet me at the Sing Singel," he continued, naming a local pub. "The drinks are on me."
Turning to me he said, "Come with me, Tommy. You can't go out dressed like that."
I was in my usual uniform of torn jeans and a t-shirt, and was covered in blue paint, so I had to agree.
Roland's apartment was only a few blocks from the theater. It was a large, open loft, painted something close to peach and had lots of bizarre art hung all around. The furniture seemed scattered in an entirely random fashion and books were piled up on almost every flat surface. For some reason I'd thought gay men were all neat freaks and good decorators. Roland was obviously an exception.
I stared at the room and tried to get my bearings amid the chaos. When my gaze finally got back to Roland, he was staring at me with a happy smile on his face.
"First things first," he said, taking some hash from a drawer in the kitchen area, positioning a chunk on a pin stuck through a playing card, and lighting it. He placed a wine glass over the smoking hash and when the glass was full of smoke, I took it from him, tilted the glass and inhaled. The two of us passed the card back and forth until the hash was all gone and we were both
very
high.
"Shower's over there," he said, pointing across the room, his eyes now black circles floating in a sea of bloodshot. "Clean up and I'll find you something to wear."
Showering quickly, I wondered what he'd pick out for me to wear—he was a flamboyant dresser after all. Whatever he picked would be something I would never choose for myself. All clean, I toweled off, wrapped the towel around my waist and stepped back into the main room. Roland had changed into party clothes—apparently he felt no need to shower—a pale green shirt over some loose fitting black linen pants.
He handed me a pair of deep brown leather pants. I'd seen him wearing them several times and had seen a couple of Jan's friends in leather too, so it wasn't too much of a surprise when he pushed them toward me. He was no more than an inch taller than me and only a little lighter, so I figured there was a good chance they'd fit.
I reached for my boxers, but he cackled, "Honey, you can't wear shorts under those. No way!"
"Okay," I said, dropping my towel and stepping into the pants. I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was naked in front of a very gay man. This made me just a bit nervous, to say the least, and I glanced up at him. Sure enough, he was staring at my crotch.
I've always been proud of my cock because it is larger than most I've seen around the locker rooms I've been in. Getting high always made me just a bit hard anyway, so my cock was looking just a bit larger than normal. I felt a sense of perverse satisfaction that I was putting on a good show for Roland. I knew that as a gay man he had to appreciate the size of my cock. I also found it surprisingly erotic to realize that he was ogling me, and that made me swell just a bit more.
Putting on leather pants, especially when you've just stepped out of the shower, was much more difficult than I had expected it to be! I squirmed. I pulled. I tugged. I danced around the room. The more I struggled, the more Roland giggled. By the time I finally got them all the way up, he was on his side on the sofa, laughing uproariously.
"That was worth the price of admission," he gasped.
Once I snapped the pants, my cock was uncomfortably squeezed down my thigh, so I reached down, pulled it up along my pelvis, and then zipped the zipper, being careful not to grab anything important in the teeth.
"Very nice," Roland said, staring openly at the bulge in my pants. This caused me to twitch just a bit more. Maybe it was because I was high, or because Roland seemed so at ease with his sexual orientation, but for whatever reason, I felt very comfortable at that moment and more than a little turned on.
He handed me a Western style denim shirt, "because you are
so
American," and some flip flops that were a full size too big, clapped his hands and shouted, "We're ready!"
At the bar the eight of us who had worked on the set drank, danced, smoked more hash mixed up in cigarettes, and drank some more. By 3:00 a.m., I was done, and said so.
"You are much too wasted to get home on your own," Roland said to me. "Come crash on my sofa."
I was too tired to argue and too buzzed to want to say no, so off we stumbled to his place. Amsterdam is one of those cities that is still as vibrant at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning as it is at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night. As we staggered along, I absorbed the sights, conscious of the fact that I'd be leaving in a day or two.
When we got up to the loft, Roland went to get blankets and a pillow for me and I started trying to get out of those damned leather pants. Either because I'd worked up a sweat on the dance floor, or because I was so buzzed, or both, I could not get them off!
By the time Roland returned from the closet, I'd only managed to get my ass and crotch out, but my thighs and the rest of my legs were firmly stuck. This left me standing there, my cock hanging out of the pants, brown leather bunched up under my ass cheeks, and a forlorn look on my face.
"What a sight you are, cowboy," Roland laughed, causing us both to dissolve into a fit of giggles.
