All Of Me (Can You Take All of Me?)

By Dirk Vanden

On his sixtieth birthday, Sacramento Real Estate Broker, Rick Vernor, receives in the mail—along with birthday cards and assorted advertisements—a note accusing him of being “An abomination in the sight of God,” who is next to die for his “sins” for writing “dirty books” forty years ago. Rick soon learns that at least two other Gay men have received similar threats from the same killer, but no one has any idea who the murderer might be. The mystery deepens as two handsome Sheriff’s Homicide Detectives visit Rick, investigating a recent murder, where a page from one of his novels, Too Big, was attached to the dead man’s genitals. As Rick and his new friend search for clues, romance starts to blossom between them but is frustrated by the fact that David is young enough to be Rick’s son. The relationship dwindles, then rekindles as they almost die for their love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dirk Vanden
• Release date: Aug 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301377039

Dirk Vanden

Dirk Vanden, AKA Richard “Dirk” Fullmer, was born May 7, 1933, in a one-room cabin on his grandfather’s farm in Roosevelt, Utah, his parents married in the Mormon Temple, labeled a “Miracle” by his grandmother, but treated like a bastard by his supposed father, he grew up “the best little Mormon boy in the whole wide world” until puberty. At age 16, his attraction to other boys prompted a crisis of faith and a test of his religion, and his religion lost. He has spent the time since then ruminating on those and other events of his life and writing 12 books about the process. (9 of them published.)He has lived in Carmichael, CA, a suburb of Sacramento, in a two bedroom duplex on a quiet, tree-lined street, for 16 years, now with his eighth dog: Buddy III, an adopted 5-year old Australian Shepherd / Springer Spaniel mix. He is working on several projects, including a television series based on his stage play Gone Are The Days.His autobiography It Was Too Soon Before... from Lethe Press, won the prestigious Elisa Rolle Rainbow Award for Best Gay Biography or Memoir, 2012, and tied for third place in the Best Gay Book of the Year, 2012.All Together won a “Lammy” from The Lambda Literary Foundation, as Best Gay Erotica, 2011.

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ALL OF ME

(Can You Take All of Me?)

A coda to All Together (The All Trilogy)

DIRK VANDEN

All Of Me (Can You Take All of Me?)

Copyright © 2013

Richard Fullmer

Smashwords edition

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from

the author.

ALL OF ME - (Can You Take All Of Me?) is a work of fiction. The characters, events, addresses, situations, and references to any city, business, armed-force, or law-enforcement group, or personnel, are the inventions of the author, strictly for the purposes of this story. Any resemblance to actual persons, situations, or institutions,

is purely coincidental.

ALSO BY DIRK VANDEN

Who Killed Queen Tom? — 1969

Leather — 1969

The Leather Queens — 1969

Twin Orbs — 1969

I Want It All — 1969

All or Nothing — 1970

All Is Well — 1971

I Want It All - Revised — 1995

Down The Rabbit Hole (originally Leather) — 2011

All Together (The All Trilogy) - 2011

Exile in Paradise (originally Twin Orbs) — 2011

It Was Too Soon Before... — 2012

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR’S EARLIER NOVELS

Dirk Vanden is an exceptionally talented writer who produces literature on a level comparable to that of Genet, Forster, Joyce, White, and even Faulkner.

J.C. Thomas, Amazon.com Customer Review, 2010

I Want It All, All Or Nothing, All Is Well

Vanden writes beautifully, and his stories are always extremely readable...

Ralph Collins, THE VOICE, Issue #108, circa 1970

I Want It All

"Always written in a style and with smoothly structured syntax that rival those of our top-flight novelists.... (Dirk Vanden) does reach a new height for a homosexual novelist.... Of its genre, (All or Nothing) has to be the best book ever written.

Victor DeStefano, CALIFORNIA SCENE, February 1971

"All Is Well is, to date, the best work of fiction of the new gay literature...Suspenseful and phantasmagoric, swift-moving yet entirely thorough in all its revelation of a metamorphosis that could be Everyman’s....

All Is Well is a novel of, for and about sex, with some astoundingly erotic scenes that are as profound a manifesto of the right to discover and be one’s total self as any rhetoric on the essential subject that I’ve heard or read. I recommend it wholeheartedly as a must to today’s – or tomorrow’s – American male homosexual."

John Francis Hunter, GAY Magazine, 1971

The New Erotica: All Is Well!

All Is Well is Vanden’s best work to date, which makes it a very good book indeed. (It is) pro sex, pro-love, pro-life; the real enemy, as Vanden sees it, is the desiccated Puritanism of a dead and dying culture, no matter what form it might take, straight or gay. Right on, brother!"

Richard Amory, author of Song of the Loon

VECTOR Magazine, February 1971

This has got to be the best gay book on the scene today.... Buy, read, pass on All Is Well, by Dirk Vanden. You can’t help but feel good after reading this one.

Marc Williams, My View, MATTACHINE SOCIETY REVIEW, Christmas Edition, 1971

1What's amazing about (I Want It All) is that it isn't a period piece, though it is very much of a certain flower-power time. It reads today like a modern movie which, though set in the past, is still contemporary. We're still working through many of these issues, politically, psychologically, spiritually and in our physical health. Much has changed but much has not… For Vanden to produce a work like this in 1969, on stroke-book wages, is a singular achievement. The main character doesn't kill himself, he fucks his way across the West and falls in love. Wow!

1It’s amazing that Vanden came up with (All Is Well) in 1971. He’s a genius, a visionary, an artist. He loves Gay men, and knows our troubles, and brings us into a positive sexual place. The important thing is to come to self-acceptance. Personal integrity is a pearl of great price.

Josh Thomas –5-Star Customer Review, Amazon.com, 2008

Dirk Vanden’s books are listed in Cornell University’s Guide to the Gay men’s popular fiction collection, 1931-1992.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my dear friend Chico for his validation, encouragement, and help, in the final year of AOM’s production. What an adventure we’ve shared!

Many thanks to A.B.Gayle for her help and encouragement.

Also to Edmund Miller. Here it is! Your idea. After only ten years!

Thanks to Wayne Gunn for his continued encouragement, advice, interview and a quotable review!

To David Lennon, fellow Gay Author, of Brand Edge Creative, Thank you profoundly for my beautiful new logo, and for all your technical help and advice.

And last but not least, a sincere note of love and gratitude to my adopted son, Tom: Thanks for just being you.

DEDICATION

ALL OF ME ... is dedicated with much love to Buddy Jr., a black-white-and-tan Australian Shepherd mix. (1/1/97-2/6/2012)

B.J. looked enough like my original Buddy (1989-2002), to be the love-puppy of that wonderful purebred Australian Shepherd, and, I theorized, an Aussie Cattle Dog, a Queensland Heeler. He had tall, spiked ears and freckles.

He was adopted from a Rescue in Nevada City, soon after the original Buddy died, on 7/2/2003. He had a wonderful life with me and died peacefully 6/20/2012. He was the smartest, sweetest dog I had known. (He was #7.) Because of him, I have a new dog-motto: If you teach them, they will learn— how to control and manipulate you!

When adopted, he arrived with a bag of dog food: Nutro’s MAX. He ate it all his life— hence Max-the-Wonder-Dog. It’s BJ to the Max! This is his memorial.

"If you’ve never enjoyed the love of a dog,

you’ve never known love in its purest form."

Gabriel Horny

FOREWORD

ALL OF ME (Can You Take All Of Me?) is the end result of a project that has taken over twenty years to complete.

It began shortly after Herb Finger, my partner of 18 years, died of AIDS in 1988 – when I believed that I didn’t have much longer to live, myself, and needed to get things in order. I wasn’t sick; I just didn’t want to go on living without him, and had convinced myself I would probably die soon. I decided to write my Memoirs, which I started out calling On My Way Thru The Enchanted Forest, and later changed that to an Autobiography called Pissing In The Ocean. At the time, it seemed that the impact of my life upon the world had been about as much as taking a leak into the Pacific – which is mostly fish-piss anyway. Still, my story was interesting and I had an impulse to tell it – even if nobody was listening. After all, I had once been, briefly, a relatively-famous, best-selling Gay Author. 1969-1973 had been my allotted fifteen minutes of fame, per Andy Warhol.

In 1999, I finished a preliminary draft of my life saga, and sent a copy to Edmund Miller, who had written an appreciative notice of my All Trilogy in an article for The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, 1995, asking his advice about publication. Although he called my story delightful, he suggested it was not nearly ready for publication. He proposed that I think about turning various elements and episodes in my life into some kind of fiction, like a mystery. It was a challenge I couldn’t ignore.

ALL OF ME (Can You Take All Of Me?) is my story, disguised as a mystery – a fictionalized autobiography, including some of my philosophical musings regarding the nature of good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate, etc. – in the guise of Rick, David, and Joshua. More than anything, for me, it is a book of ideas and theories that I want the reader to consider, long after my little make-believe mystery is satisfactorily solved.

Please note that I capitalize the word Gay when it refers to homosexuals and homosexuality, to distinguish it from the adjective gay which means merry, bubbly, carefree, cheerful, chirpy, exhilarated, euphoric, jubilant, etc. I’ve been Gay, i.e. Queer/ Homosexual, for over fifty years, but have rarely been gay, i.e., carefree, elated, rapturous, and never-ever bubbly or flamboyant! Some are, but I’m not. For a few capricious minutes, now and then, at times, perhaps, I have been giddy enough to be called gay – but not for long. The small-g gay doesn’t fit me. But, if Mormons and Catholics and Slavic Fundamentalists, etc., etc. – the whole damned bunch of them – can capitalize their names as proper nouns, then so can I, because Homosexuality has essentially become my religion.

And furthermore I truly believe that my religion is going to save the world!

Dirk Vanden /Richard Fullmer ~ 2013

All I can give you is me;

I’m all I’ve got.

Love, Dirk

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 - THE LETTER

Chapter 2 - DAVID

Chapter 3 - LAW & ORDER

Chapter 4 - GABRIEL HORNY

Chapter 5 - JOSHUA

Chapter 6 - HOME ALONE

Chapter 7 - TELEPHONE SEX?

Chapter 8 - MAX

Chapter 9 - UP, UP, AND AWAY

Chapter 10 - HIGH IN THE HILLS

Chapter 11 - TWO DICKS HANGING OUT

Chapter 12 - MATTHEW

Chapter 13 - ANOTHER NEW ROOMMATE

Chapter 14 - MORE CHANGES

Chapter 15 - OFFICER SMILEY COMES AROUND

Chapter 16 - STEVE COMES HOME

Chapter 17 - THE NEXT SHOE

Chapter 18 - THE LAST STRAW

Chapter 19 - CUMS THE DAWN

Appendix – GAY MESSIAH

THE LETTER

MY SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY began badly, like an omen. The letter arrived in the mail along with several envelopes that looked like birthday cards, plus the usual assortment of advertising brochures and catalogs. It was an innocent-looking, plain white 9x12 envelope, like they sell in office-supply stores – like millions of people send to each other in the mail every day – but it had my own return address on a computer-printed label, up in the left-hand corner and a matching label, perfectly centered on the front of the envelope.

Richard Vernor

aka Jake Vance

aka Hank O’Toole

#1 Winding Way Circle,

Fair Oaks, CA 95628

I placed it, unopened, on the kitchen table, then sat and studied it for several minutes, with all sorts of wild ideas bubbling up in my head. I was quite sure I hadn’t sent it to myself – unless I was going crazy! That didn’t seem likely – although I wasn’t sure I’d know I was crazy, if I was crazy. Was it a joke? Could it be some kind of terrorist thing? I tried to think of some logical reason why anyone like me would be getting a mail-bomb or Anthrax, and decided I was being far too paranoid. I laughed and opened the envelope – very carefully, I’ll admit. But no explosion, no white powder. Worse! My heart started pounding the instant I realized what the envelope contained.

It was a page ripped from one of my novels, with an angry, blood-red message, hand-printed with a marking-pen, in the bottom margin. I recognized the page almost immediately, even though I hadn’t seen it in, what, forty years? Page 29/30 of Too Big, my third published novel, written more than forty years ago, and long-since out of print – as far as I knew. Page 30 was the last few lines of Chapter 1:

-30-

I began to wonder what would happen if he didn’t pull his enormous piece of meat out of my throat and let me breathe.

Suddenly he swallowed my cock all the way down and plunged his own cock up to its hairy hilt and made a sound like a strangled bull, as his huge prick pulsed and I could feel his hot cum squirting down my throat as my own cock exploded into him!

Cumming, I wondered if you could cum in the afterlife?

? ? ?

ITS TIME TO FIND OUT!

PREPARE FOR JUDGMENT!!

JESUS HATES COCKSUCKERS!!!

Too Big had been the third in a series of seven novels, published in the late sixties and early seventies, about Gay Mystery Sleuth Hank O’Toole, Private Dick! Every novel began with the same first paragraph: My name is Henry, which is long for Hank, and I‘m a licensed Private Detective, hence the moniker ‘Private Dick!’ on my business cards. And, yes, I always use the exclamation mark!

The New York Native reviewer wrote: "Hank’s initials spell H.0.T. and HOT he is! Hank O’Toole is a dream come true for some of us who are queer for men, not queens! No offence! Hank O’Toole definitely is not a queen, but he deigns to bed one or two, now and then, here and there, in his endless search for Truth and Right! As Hank says in Too Much: ‘To each his own. There’s room on the planet for all kinds of us.’ Ah-men, Hank! Ah-men!"

Too Big, Hank’s third sleuthing job, had him tracking down a serial-killer of Gay men, who was going around San Francisco, murdering cocksuckers by choking them to death with his very big cock down their throats. As Hank put it: So, I boned-up on deep-throating – practiced on Dobbin – and found, to my pleasant surprise – and his – that I could actually go all the way down and still breathe around one of the biggest! What can I say? I’m a big guy. Big throat too, I guess!

The book had been written as part of an explosion of Gay Porn, back in the late sixties and early seventies. I’d had seven books published by a company in San Diego called Figleaf Pleasure Readers: Too Bad, Too Good (To Be True), Too Big, Too Much, Too Far, Too Soon and Too Late, in what Figleaf cleverly called "The TOO Saga." In their ads, the double-O’s looked like testicles. All of the books featured Hank O’Toole looking for a different Gay murderer – or murderer of Gays – seducing every suspect until he found the bad guy in the last chapter.

Total J-O from beginning to end. Each chapter a gusher! So said B-A-R, The Gay Bar Newspaper in San Francisco, in 1972. No prize-winning prose here, but the TOO books are all very well-written. If you know what I mean.

Back in the mid-sixties, in college, I had written my first novel, To Themselves Unknown – a probing and sensitive story about a teenage Mormon boy, in Utah, realizing he was Gay and, after fighting it all through college, finally accepting his sexuality and leaving the church because of it – and in the end, finding love and happiness with his drama professor. A friend who read the manuscript suggested a publisher called Figleaf Pleasure Readers, which published mainly straight porn, like Emmanuel and The Story of O; they had published several Gay titles and might consider mine. So I sent it to them – and they sent it right back, with a note saying that while my novel had a literary feeling to it, it was not what they were looking for. They said they might reconsider publishing my book if I added what they called Fag-Hots:

Hot fag-sex on the first page and as often as the story permits, the kinkier the better.

Along with the returned manuscript, they sent four of their recent paperback publications to show me what they were looking for. The books were called Homo on The Range, Homo-Sweet-Homo, Homo Erectus, and Fagged Out! They were all infuriatingly bad – badly written by bad writers with bad attitudes. My guess was that they were composed by heterosexual hacks trying to imagine what it felt like to be Queer. Terrible things happened to their heroes in the end. They were all appropriately punished for their sins.

I was insulted and challenged. I knew I could write better fag-hots than those pieces of crap. And mine wouldn’t be put-downs. It was the Hippie Sixties and Flower Power was blossoming. Gay Lib was just budding, and there was a feeling of change in the air. A Gay author named Richard Amory had just published a ground-breaking novel called Song Of The Loon, about Queer Fur Trappers and well-hung Gay Indians! I decided to put To Themselves Unknown on the shelf and write a positive story about a Gay Private Detective named Hank O’Toole, (inspired, of course, by Peter – and by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, from my youth) and how he came to meet his on-and-off lover, Dobbin Dubinski.

That idea evolved into the possibility of doing a series, using the same characters, but in a different adventure for each episode. Like a young, Gay Sherlock and Watson. I resolved to write the best damned fag-hots on the market. Every chapter would be a sex-episode, with Hank or Dobbin or both, chasing male suspects, Gay and Straight, seducing every one until they found the bad guy in the final chapter. I also resolved that the books would end happily: After solving each mystery, Hank and Dobbin would go striding manfully, hand-in-hand, into a new sunset, together, at the end of each book.

The editor at Figleaf loved Too Bad – in which Hank worked his way through a gang of Gay Motorcyclists called "Hell’s Hobgoblins to find the killer – and met Dobbin Dubinski in the next-to-last chapter. The editor asked for another, then another, and another, until I finally ran out of ideas for sequels – and Figleaf went bankrupt in the early seventies. They wanted nothing deep except the penetrations, and that's what I gave them: Fag-Hots. Gay porn, Homo-Erotica." That’s all it was at the time. That’s all it had been for forty years.

Until now.

Of course, not all of my reviews had been glowing testimonials. Several accused me of advocating drugs! Some complained of Hank and Dobbin’s morality, as though they were breaking some kind of Gay Moral Code by having sex with all those guys. In those days, anything Gay was illegal! Nothing we did was moral. Drug-use – especially Pot and Acid – was as common in the seventies as Rock and Roll. One reviewer had called me, not favorably, "the lord of smut." Could someone like that be behind something like this?

What in the world had happened to trigger such an angry reaction to something long-gone, dead and buried?

ITS TIME TO FIND OUT!

PREPARE FOR JUDGMENT!!

JESUS HATES COCKSUCKERS!!!

Someone very religious was very angry with me for writing that book and was trying to scare me. Okay! Mission accomplished! I was scared! Someone who didn’t like me had my home address, my real name, and my old