Rude Awaening

The most wonderful thing a lover has ever done for me was to give me my life. I didn't understand it at the time, but if he had loved me as I wanted him to—as I begged him to—I would be long dead today.

The days of my sexual coming of age in Bangkok, Thailand, during the mid seventies through the mid eighties were paradise followed by a rude awakening, a realization of how life can come back at you hard that I didn't fully realize until I had left the City of the Angels the first time I lived there. Bangkok was an open city with no sense of moral wrong. If you could afford it and enjoyed it, more power to you, and no one would pass judgment, let alone hassle you. It was the tail end of the "free love" hippy era, before the realization of the existence of AIDS or the widespread use of condoms. It was flesh on and in flesh and do whatever jacks you off.

I ached for David, who, along with the hairdresser lover he had finagled into the country with a diplomatic passport, lived in the same apartment compound I did. David was a U.S. diplomat, who made flights every other week in and out of Saigon to register and transport the bastard children of U.S. servicemen from the recent war who the Hanoi regime was permitting to leave the country for a high price. A price being quietly covered by the U.S. government.

David was a magnificent black man, solidly built and beautiful in every way. His lover had come over officially as the tutor of David's three children, but the children had returned to their mother in the States within two months and the hairdresser stayed on and became the darling of the international set—or at least the part of that set which wanted it's hair down to U.S. professional standards. David's wife was obviously one of the most understanding of human beings, but she never visited Bangkok while David was there as far as I knew.

The hairdresser, Tommy, was also nice to look at; a lithe blond, cute but submissive, with fluid moves and bent wrists. But it was David who I had my eyes on. I did everything I could to get myself close to David and to make him understand that he could have me any way he wanted me. And he was very friendly to me, and slowly let me enter his circle of friends, mostly local Thai gay boys, who didn't attract me all that much. But he didn't even touch me for the longest time.

I knew he could give good sex, because I walked in on him and the hairdresser doing the hot and heavy in their apartment one day and stayed around to watch. It was an inspiring and deeply sensual performance of coffee and cream. Both were naked. David was as beautiful in the nude as I could have imagined him to be in my wildest dreams. His cock was long and hard and thick, and when I walked in, he was slowly stroking it in and out of Tommy's ass in a languid, fluid motion. Tommy's back was flat on the bed, and David was standing below him and arched over his body. One of Tommy's legs ran up David's torso and David was holding the other one up and out. David was running his free hand over Tommy's chest, belly, thighs, cock, and balls. Occasionally he would take the root of his own cock in his hand and rotate it in Tommy's ass at great depth. Tommy would arch his back and rotate his hips in rhythm with David's moves and sigh and moan. I could tell that David was fully satisfying him. And I wanted David to fully satisfy me, as well—and, maybe, instead of Tommy, if the truth be known.

Right before David ejaculated inside Tommy; he brought his lips down to the hollow of Tommy's neck and kissed him deeply there. Tommy turned his face toward me. His eyes were droopy and hooded; he looked like they were swimming in David's semen, and I hated him for that. He gave me a satisfied "I've got what you want" smile and then David turned his head and they went into a long kiss during which Tommy continued to writhe in pleasure until his body jerked and he shot cum up onto David's belly. I turned and left the room in frustration and jealously.

I did eventually have sex with David, but it was nothing like the sex he had with Tommy. On several occasions we got into heavy petting on his pillow-strewn sofa, always when Tommy was off doing someone's hair. David would never touch me when Tommy was there.

Our first sexual encounter was in the southern peninsula district of Thailand where we had gone on an American Embassy cultural program. David had a magnificent baritone singing voice, and as I had been a professional tenor, we had been teamed up to give cultural exchange concerts around Southeast Asia. The hotel we were staying at was a small one on the beach across from some peculiar—and spectacular—outcroppings that arose from the sea just off the coast and that had figured in one of the then-recent James Bond films. The hotel was so small that David and I had to share a room. The setting was exotic and the twilight was so romantic that we found ourselves in each other's arms on a lounge chair we had found on the balcony outside our room. I atypically was the aggressor. I tried to kiss David on the lips, but he avoided that. He however allowed me to kiss his nipples and all around his torso until my lips dipped lower than his navel. He then brought my head back up to his chest and murmured that we could stroke each other off but no cocksucking, fucking, or even kissing on the lips.

I was extremely disappointed and angry at the hold that Tommy seemed to have on David, but I did come quickly to the magic touch of his hands stroking my cock, and he sighed and moaned satisfactorily at my own hand job on his dick.

On the occasions when David and I subsequently had sex, we would undress each other—which didn't take much effort as there never was much being worn in the tropics anyway. As in our initial coupling, he never let me kiss him on the lips or on the cock or asshole, and he wouldn't do that for me either, but kisses elsewhere and "feels" anywhere were permitted. Our cuddlings and pettings usually ended with David straddling me from behind, his cock dry fucking up from the small of my back and him running his hands over my chest and belly and thighs and stroking my cock until I came. He'd have his face buried in the hollow of my neck from behind, and when he jacked off up my back, he would murmur how nice my body was and how much he'd enjoyed our lovemaking as he carefully wiped his cum off my back. It didn't sound like much, but David was so beautiful that I think I could have cum just by us sitting there and looking at each other.

I had convinced myself that David had such a loyalty to Tommy that he would only be ultimately intimate with one lover, and I fought with myself for months to respect that loyalty. But I was thoroughly confused and angered one day when I walked in to find him pumping his Thai houseboy from behind across the back of a chair, with both of them screaming with joy as David came. The houseboy had immediately turned and kneeled and cleaned David's cock with his tongue. And David had let him do this and obviously had enjoyed it—so much for the loyalty theory.

The next day when Tommy left to puff up some ambassador's wife's beehive, I stormed into David's apartment and tried to force myself on him, to make him fuck me like he fucked Tommy and his houseboy. But David, considerably stronger than I was, pushed me to the door as gently as he could and, voicing his regrets that we needed to stop seeing each other, locked it behind me.

From that day forward, David's door was closed and locked to me. And I hadn't gotten over the frustration and anger on the day I left Bangkok for my next assignment.

Within a year both David and Tommy—and presumably the Thai houseboy and most of David's Thai gay crowd—were dead. They had contracted AIDS, something I knew nothing about until long after I had left Bangkok, something that no one openly acknowledged was stalking the gay community in Bangkok while I was there. I had loved freely and frequently while I was in Bangkok, and it was a miracle that I never contracted AIDS myself. But David had made sure that I wouldn't contract it from him. After he learned of the disease and that he had it and had received a death sentence, he very carefully never again exchanged body fluids with anyone he didn't know was as infected already as he was.

No lover before or since has given me what David did. He gave me my life.