Somewhere across the Tracks
from Tennessee Williams’
Desire for the Black Masseur…
Goodbye, Saigon
Some SOB’s you never forget. I can still remember what the big-hung bastard looked like and exactly what happened. The sounds, tastes, and smells come prousting back sometimes when I least expect. Sometimes, while jerking off, I can even feel the way it was, because this experience is true and really happened.
Fall 1969. Hippies. Yippies. Vietnam. Student protests. Green recruits leaving. Seasoned vets returning amid green body bags. Redneck State Troopers. County jails in the south. All familiar to an 18-year old college freshman born, bred, and raised in Columbia, South Carolina: home of the University of South Carolina and of Fort Jackson, a major processor of returning Viet vets.
Picture me picturing myself: one of those young Southern blond boys, ripe as a peach, lean and hard and hung, eight inches long, thick, virtually virgin, tired of jerking off, tired of fast glances at upper classmen standing in the shower or at the row of urinals, wanting forbidden sex. Hardon thinking about men’s dicks and balls. Tentative with tent pants. Got to try it. Finally: got to find dick! Reading coded classifieds in an underground copy of the LA Free Press. Jerking off. Sniffing around a similar ad in the college paper for “swinging roommate.” Hardon. Answering ad. Making arrangements to meet. Nervous. Turned on. Stiff dick running down the leg of well-worn Levi’s. Throwing on OD Army shirt with protest buttons. Running hands through cool hair. Sweat. Stiff cock. Ready. Yeah. I was ready.
Scheduled to meet at 10 PM, but arrive half hour early. Man, about forty, answers door and invites me in. Two young soldiers in creased khaki lounge on couch. They glare at my hippie appearance. Both chug Southern Comfort from pint bottles. Legs kicked up. Crotches aimed like rifle-sites at me from between well-polished boots. Older man winks at me and says he’s going out for more booze. Takes one soldier with him. They split.
I pull out a joint, sit cross-legged hippie-style on floor, my eyes at level of one remaining soldier’s crotch. He’s no more than twenty-one. Start talk. Pass joint. Soldier hands me nearly empty pint. Drink. Smoke. Watch crotch. Hardon. Soldier grabs his crotch and plays with it through stiff khaki.
“You want this, don’t you, boy? You want this cock, huh?” Soldier stands up and walks toward me. His dick hard against his uniform. He reaches down and grabs me by the OD Army shirt and pulls me up and pushes me into the wall. “Fuckin’ hippie puke!”
Crack! His free hand crashes against the side of my face. Blood. Pain. I taste salt. More blood comes from nose. Surprising: no pain. Not much any way. Another slug. I fall to the floor. One hand up for some protection. Maybe this is the way it is. I watch his face. Fuck. Just stoned and ripped enough to be sort of outside myself watching this drunken fucker stomp me. Blood taste. Surprise. My shirt gets shredded off. I feel his strength as he knocks me back on the floor. This ain’t half bad! He is brute handsome. I start to say something. No time. His polished boot pushes heavily on my balls. Harder and harder.
“Fuckin’ hippie puke’s gonna get it and get it good.”
Boot crashes against my crotch. Hard. Real pain now. Blood taste. Fear. I roll over moaning. No chance to move. He’s on me. His weight pins me to the hard wood floor. He rips my teeshirt off. Hesitates. Then starts banging my head against a small pillow on the floor. The pillow slips. My head hits the hard wood floor. Head throbs. Vision blurs. Sounds stop.
Wake up. Feel okay. Can’t move. Hands tied behind my back. Propped up against wall with my ripped teeshirt in my mouth. Can’t talk. Can barely breathe. Soldier walks toward me. His shirt unbuttoned exposing impressive chest, tattoos, dog tags, bandages red with fresh blood from straining. He gropes his big box as he drains his whiskey pint. Tosses bottle across room.
Soldier stares at me. Unclips his belt. Reaches inside his fly to pull out his cock. Big stiff cock. He stands for a moment looking at me, watching me react to the sight of him, stroking his cock with one hand. His other hand brushes against his bandages and his chest.
“See these, fucker?” He points out older scars as well as the fresh blood on his bandages. He is no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. “I got these…so assholes like you…can run around and be college…assholes and hippies. Now it’s your turn, asshole. You’re gonna see what pain feels like and how to hurt.” He reaches down. Grabs me by my long hair. Pulls me up. Face to face. Wow. He glares at me with thick white teeth clenched. The scars are angry red weals on his hard young body.
“Look at ’em, asshole!”
He pushes my face into his side. This is heavy. Almost fucking religious. His enormous cock stands at rigid attention. I smell his sweat and the Southern Comfort on his raunchy breath. He’s alien like nothing I’ve ever seen. I want to take his prick down my throat. I want to swallow his seed. He holds my cheek against his tight belly close to his scars.
“Look at ’em good. You see ’em? Take a good look. Fuckin’ hippie puke.”
Big scars up and down his well-developed side. I see them. Old wounds. New wounds. Shrapnel frags. The red bandages. The bandages coming undone in the sweat and roughhousing. Fresh battle scars. Stitches. Fuck! It’s only twenty-four hours from Saigon to here.
“Fuckin’ hippie puke.” He keeps saying it like a mantra that keeps him alive. “Fuckin’ hippie puke.”
He pulls my head up to his face. He is handsome. I don’t want him to stop. He rips the teeshirt out of my mouth. Grabs me by the throat.
“You gonna take care of me, ain’t you, asshole!”
More fear. Mouth dry. Iron taste of blood-caked lips. My blood. His blood. Can say nothing. Just afraid. Just real fear. As long as his huge cock stays hard, I figure I’m more the subject of his lust than his violence.
“Lick these fuckin’ scars, asshole.”
He pushes my face back down to his wounded side. I taste his sweat and blood around the rough scar tissue.
“That’s right, fucker, lick ’em good.”
His cock still hard. His other hand pumping it. Huge mushroom head topping thick shaft. He forces my face harder into his side. He hesitates. Stumbles. Too much booze. Falls against the wall holding his side. I’ve worked my hands loose from behind my back. Scared. I watch him glare at me through his pain.
He recovers. He walks toward me. His eyes narrow with the hard-boiled intent of a mean face-fucker. His cock thrust forward. Full attention. Grabs my neck. Forces me down on my knees. His big hands tightening around my throat.
“Suck me, asshole! Suck me good.”
He shoves his cock into my mouth. I choke and pull back. He hits me with his fist. Kicks me with his fucking heavy combat boots. Intense pain. Fear. He stops as I fall on the floor, bleeding, breathing hard. He stoops to one knee, checks out my eyes, unfastens my belt, pulls my Levi’s down around my knees. He half drags me across the room.
“Roll over.” He commands the order.
Face down, both hands protecting my balls, I shake. Several long minutes pass. I watch him, sore as hell. He holds his side. Pulls off his khakis. He sees me watching him. He spits a hawker in my direction. I stick out my tongue but I miss the phlegm. He laughs. He throws his boots at me as hard as he can. One hits the back of my head. The other, my side and ribs.
He walks over, stripped but for the dog tags and the white bandages hanging loose off his side, bobbling his huge dick, cantilevered over his hairy balls up past his navel. No noise except for heavy breathing and the jingle of his dog tags.
“You’re gonna take care of me, fucker. You’re gonna have to take care of me.”
He swings his dick. His bone. Like a club. A gun.
“You assholes owe me!”
He grabs the cheeks of my ass. Spreads them. Spits on my virgin hole. He holds me down and starts to take my asshole. The power of his big weight, his hard muscle, his sweat, his cool dog tags against my back. My asshole resists. He shoves harder. Intense pain. His cock getting harder and harder inching its way up into my unwilling asshole. He starts pumping.
I struggle under him to get away. Can barely move under his weight and strength and anger.
He starts hitting me with his fist as he bangs his cock up my asshole. He stops long enough to hold the bandages falling from his side. His hot wet blood runs with sweat down his belly to my butt, blood-fucking me, juicing my ass, easing the pain, driving in deep all the way. He’s breathing heavy. Hitting me with his fists. Cursing. “Fuckin’ hippie puke.” Then shoots his load and falls motionless on top of me. My asshole pushes his rigid dog-soldier cock out. He raises a few inches up off me. The blood causes our two skins to stick together. Fused so tight, it’s almost the sound of ripping flesh as he pulls his belly from my back, stands up, and stumbles a few feet to pass out on the couch.
I try to stand up. My head, side, asshole throb. Finally up, I wipe the load of his cum into the blood running down my back, butt, legs. His blood. My blood. Our blood. Not sure. I dress fast and beat it, hoping he won’t wake up. He lays passed out, holding his side, his young face relaxed down in sleep, the violence numbed, drifting in a certain, separate peace, burned like a flashbulb snapshot into my brain of a wounded naked soldier crashed out on a couch in a living room that exists now only in memory.
Mine. And maybe his.
Back at school, I ended up in the infirmary with two bruised ribs, a slight concussion, three loose teeth, and a story about getting beat up by some pro-war rednecks. A likely story in South Carolina in the late Sixties. I never mentioned my bruised asshole. After a couple days, I no longer had to hold onto the walls in the john.
Of course, I’m no longer a hippie. Who is anything they used to be? But I’d sure like to get in touch with that 1969 Viet vet from Fort Jackson. I wasn’t very willing then, but that experience and those memories have kept me pulling my meat nights when nothing else but memory will get me off.
Maybe I’m a sick fucker, but sometimes what seems the worst of times is the best of times after all. Maybe we exorcized each other’s demons. Maybe I was that “welcome home” parade he expected but never got.