Bittersweet Tales of Gay Book Two

By Robert Mahoney

19 more stories of the gay experience in various time periods. Many settings are military, universities, and high schools, and some overlap. All active characters are at least 18 years old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Mahoney
• Release date: Jul 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301763566

Robert Mahoney

Take the Irish stew I mixed for Tommy Fitz in BTOG Book One, add a half cup of German and you have my bloodlines. Half of my working career was in high schools and universities, other half in business and industry. Hobby (when I still afford it) was collecting old cars.

Book preview

Bittersweet Tales of Gay

19 More Stories of the Gay Experience

Book Two

R E Mahoney

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 R E Mahoney

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Table of Contents

1. Into Each Life

2. The Candy Randy

3. Once With An Older Man

4. Food For Thought

5. Why Me, Lord?

6. Homeless in Carolina

7. Country Bumpkin

8. Coming Together

9. A Cabin By a Lake

10. Smoky Joe

11. Baltimore Meat Rack, A Love Story

12. Smut Peddler

13. Quirky & Murkey

14. Felix, But Not The Cat

15. Emerging Poet

16. Missing Person

17. Max The Spook

18. Not The Sins Of The Father

19. Thorzin's Other Mates

1. Into Each Life

The setting of this story is in the state below Lake Michigan between Ohio and Illinois in your Rand McNally. If I need me to spell out the name you might be happier with a comic book. It was a time when there was no need for a late adolescent boy's forehead to be stamped with the disclaimer, Warning! Under 18. Jail Bait.

Why do I dwell in youth? My guess is when I was about 16 my Object of Affection meter began to sputter between my age and about 20, or maybe a tick or three to the right. My friend Bucky and I have pretty much the same focus. We've tried to analyze why in our prayer meetings but so far have come up empty. He and I were university roommates in the vicinity of 20 years ago. The reason we never had sex with each other back then was because we could never hold eye contact with all the distractions, and not later because we had aged beyond our parameters.

Bucky calls me Sister, which he knows pisses me off. Butch was the name I preferred to answer to in grade school. I took it seriously then and still do. Bucky and I now draw paychecks from a former teachers college jumped up to university in parallel with grade inflation. He's an associate professor and I'm a number cruncher but a notch above him on the salary scale, which ticks him off royally since he's a PhD and I'm just your garden variety MBA.

In those days academia was still rebounding from the whacked out decade that began with the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, was abetted by Good Ole Boy Lyndon Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin fraud, and ended with Tricky Dick Nixon's sly exit from Vietnam. In between, assorted universities and colleges were beset with riots, bombings, arsons, a student massacre, and the demise of loco parentis. In the year of this story our school hosted its first LGBT Halloween dance in the Hall of Honor. Bucky and I were on voyeur patrol in the balcony that night hoping to penetrate the costumes and masks of students we knew to disguise themselves. A not surprising number of the guys wore fishnet codpieces with nothing underneath. Hey, Bucko. Check out that number. He's surely got a Chiquita banana under that flimsy.

That was my year for love. Bucky was on sabbatical from affairs of the heart. He was still mooning over his most recent, a grad student moved on but promising to write (Good luck with that!) Three months separate Bucky and me, him the older. We're both dwelling in 40 and reading daddy parts. Bucky's not a big factor in this story but he's my crutch and I need him to lean on. For me, the paternal role is vaguely incestuous and I'm still not used to it. Never mind what my mirror tells me, in my head I'm still a 20s jock and ready to go at the whistle. What sport? You name it, I warmed the bench in three of them.

I reside in an open plan beach cottage I bought in the late 60s for 40% off list when the lake shore market in our part of the state was depressed due to changing demographics, which is statistic speak for the invasion of the unbleached. On a clear day I can see the Chicago skyline and even better at night. It was in that city's New Town neighborhood that I stumbled on Donny. I mean literally. He was sitting on a curb with his head in his hands It was dark and my thoughts were in the clouds and I bowled him over. While I was apologizing I took a closer look at him. What's wrong with this picture? I wondered. Why is this kid who's wearing a letterman's jacket, with a salon haircut and blinding pearly whites, squatting on a curb where a bus could cream him looking suicidally forlorn? Was he a tourist who'd made a wrong turn or a hustler? It would turn out that he was both.

I don't rehearse for these situations, I play it by ear and trust in ad lib. I peered into the kid's eyes, which I guessed had been decorated with tears a few moments earlier, and said, "You don't belong here. His answer caught me by surprise, I don't belong anywhere. I figured he might be willing to talk about it so I tossed him my patented food feeler, You hungry?" He shrugged, which I took to mean yes. With kids his age you got to know body language. Given the time of year I estimated he was, or should be, a senior. In the coffee shop I noticed a swimmer emblem with two hash marks signifying repeat awards on his monogram that gave me an opening gambit.

Sprinter or distance?

Sprints and relays, he answered but didn't seem inclined to add to that.

After he did justice to a Denver omelet what he said surprised me, as much for its content as for its timing.

Are you trying to pick me up?

That thought crossed my mind.

Do you hurt people?

Never physically except in self-defense. Never emotionally if I can help it.

I'm so tired.

He must have been because he slept the whole trip to my place and another seven hours on my couch. When he finally woke up the first thing he said was, I need a shower.

I pointed him in the direction of the bathroom. Soap and shampoo are in the rack back of the stall. You don't look like you need a shave. The towels are fresh. Use the robe hanging inside the door. Leave your clothes on the floor and I'll toss everything but your jacket in the washer. I never use more words than I need to to get my point across. Bucky, on the other hand, is heavy into adjectives, adverbs, and subordinate clauses, which is why I tell him his tricks tend to fall asleep before he can get them into the sack. I'm a Hemingway guy, Bucky's big on the 19th Century romantics.

When the boy reappeared in my line of sight he asked, You want sex now?

I told him that could wait, that I would like to hear his story or as much of it he was willing to share. The name the kid gave me when he agreed to come home with me was Donny, which his father told him was okay when he was younger but the time had come to use the name he was baptized with, Donald. I corrected the name I had given him and said I formally answered to Richard, but friends called me Rich. He said he understood the why of my original deceit.

I barbecued a couple of fat burgers on the deck, and after we wiped our chins we laid back on the aluminum chairs and started in on an overdue conversation. Donny Erickson told me he just turned 18. He said when his folks found he was gay his dad went ballistic and his mom frantically searched the yellow pages for shrinks. The next few days the guilt trip they laid on me was so heavy I told them to fuck themselves. That's when I split. I didn't know where to go but I'd been to Chicago so that's where I headed. I stepped off the Greyhound from Grand Rapids into five days of Hell. I was robbed of my suitcase the first night and my money the next. The first guy I let pick me up was pretty nice and gave me $10, but the next guy beat me up because I wouldn't him screw me. The one between you and him wasn't rough but he treated me like scum after he got what he wanted.

Your folks must be worried. Have you tried to contact them?

I called once collect when I knew my dad would be in his office. I talked to my mom. I didn't tell her where I was but said I'd call again when I had time to work things out.

You can call from here.

But what'll I say?

That you're okay and will keep in touch.

Do you have kids?

No, why?

Too bad. You'd make a good dad.

You've only known me a few hours.

Yeah, but you're concerned about me and I bet you hug nice.

Donny's story was about what I expected. He told me that his father was a banker and his mother stayed at home. They lived in a suburban neighborhood of larger older homes, the type too expensive to buy and maintain for most younger families so there weren't many kids to play with.

I joined the Cub Scouts and that was fun but when it came time to move up to Boy Scouts I'd lost interest and was confused about my feelings toward other boys. By the time I was 14, I had a pretty good idea what my problem was but not what to do about it. I'm not sure I would have recognized a kid like me unless he knelt down in front of me and pulled down my zipper. I took refuge in sports, swimming and track. But I was out of it socially. It was like I was on the outside looking in. I jacked off a lot. On my 16th birthday my dad bought me an old Ford Falcon, which he probably figured was too underpowered to get me in trouble.

From what your saying, Donny, it sounds like your dad cares for you.

I guess he does in his own way. But he's narrow minded and has fixed notions about everything. I never seemed able to get through to him. I can't remember the last time he hugged me. His idea of intimacy is a formal hand shake.

What happened that caused you to leave home?

"I'll get to that in a minute. My mom is obsessive about order. Every time she saw on wrinkle in my bedspread she'd rush in and smooth it out, and when I was in school she'd reorganize the top of my desk. Not even a paper clip was out of alignment. There was some old furniture in the room over the garage, just odds and ends but enough to make a cozy nest. I moved in my desk and portable TV and only went into the house for meals. I will say this about my father. He knows a boy wants privacy and he told my mom to keep her broom and dust cloths out of my space.

In January our next door neighbor's grandson moved in with them. He said he needed to take a time out", but actually Cory had flunked out after one semester at Michigan State. His grandparents terms told him he could stay with them while he attended the community college to get his grades up. Since we were about the same age it didn't take long for us to get together, and it didn't take a whole lot longer for Cory and I to discover that sexually we were on the same wave length. The difference was, he seemed to have plenty of experience. I had exactly one, and that was more than a year ago. I let a guy who looked like he was about 24 or 25 pick me up at a book store. I had read an article in the Free Press about old gay novels and was looking in the Used Books section for The City and the Pillar and Finisterre and whatever else I could find of that type. I found the Gore Vidal novel and the guy saw me looking it over, which led to us talking and eventually to his motel room. I don't guess I have to draw you a picture of what happened. The suitcases on the bench told me he was from out of town so it was pretty obvious he was just looking for a one-night stand. I was always too chicken to go looking for sex, but that time it came to me."

And then you found Cory in your backyard and told him about your tree hut.

Donny laughed. "Yeah, I guess it was something like that. A big part of the reason Cory flunked out of MSU was he linked up with some