Why, when the temple is finished,
must the God depart?
The Best Dirty-Blond
Contractor in Texas
Last summer, Kick was my general contractor. “They been callin’ me Kick since high school.” His drawl was West Texas. His build was blond brick shithouse. “One night after practice, the wrestlin’ coach hears all this commotion in the showers. So in he comes, voice first, shoutin’, ‘Hey! What’s the problem?”’
Kick stretched out the length of my couch. “There wasn’t no problem,” he said. “Just the wrestlin’ squad horsin’ around. You know? Wet towels snappin’ at wet butts.”
He looked good laid back on the canvas dropcloth. “The coach was a big fucker. Dark. Handsome. I remember him struttin’ into the shower half-stripped himself. Torn VMI tanktop. Big bulgin’ jockstrap. And a pair of sweaty gym socks that had worked their way down his hairy calves.”
Southern men take their old sweet time, lingering on every detail. Kick was no different. I handed him a beer. He was smiling a big grin at his reminiscence.
“All us guys freeze, see, right where he catches us. The noise dies down to the hiss of the showerheads. The squad’s all lathered up. Big ol’ healthy country boys! Soap runnin’ outta our pits, down our bellies, and off our crotches. The coach stops stock still. Big arms crossed on his big pecs. Legs spread. He had a mean streak, and a look-to-kill on his face. He studied us one by one. Tryin’ to find the rough-housers.”
Kick paused. He looked hot as hell himself in his jockstrap and his heavy, cotton plaid shirt. His sleeves, rolled up tight past his thick forearms, nearly split apart around his baseball biceps. “Anyway, all us wrestlers freeze where he nailed us. Me? I’m caught in the middle of the shower. Buck-ass naked. With him squared off at me directly. He checks out every face. When his eye meets mine, I kind of hit him with my best shot. You know: without changin’ my not-so-innocent expression, there I stand, this adolescent jock, sort of challengin’ this bodybuilder coach whose brother’s a fuckin’ Texas Ranger!”
Kick’s hands, square and hard from gripping his 28-pounder hammer day after day, lay palm down, with his callouses slowly stroking his peeled-open faded 501 crotch.
“Our eyes lock. Somethin’ flashes between us. He drops his eyes, real deliberate and slow, sizin’ me up as maybe the ringleader. Then he catches a load of my dick. Can y’all see it? His big arms unfold even slower. He rests his chalk-covered hands on the waistband of his jockstrap.” He imitated the coach’s redneck voice: “Jeezus H. Keerist!”
Kick enjoyed telling on himself.
“Then this fuckin’ coach, who’s got a rep as the biggest stud around town, lifts his eyes off my dick, and looks me straight in the face, like, maybe he’s noticin’ for the first time some homegrown competition that he’s gonna have to either put up with, or put down some.”
Kick stretched out his muscular left leg from his butt, then rocked his construction-booted foot slowly back and forth, snapping his ankle with cracks like far-off rifle fire. He slowly savored this part of the story. He dropped his left boot, topped by sweaty gray wool sock, down across his right foot.
“So the coach stands there in the middle of all the steaming water sizin’ me up. Not sure whether to buddy me up or punk me down. The whole wrestlin’ squad’s open-mouthed. Then, ‘Son,’ he says, ‘you shoulda been born a bicycle—hung with a kickstand like that!”’
Kick’s square jaw, covered with two-days’ growth of dirty-blond bristle, smiled. “So I been called Kick ever since.”
I walked toward him, knelt next to him on the couch, and buried my face on the warm manpack of his crotch. His hot balls hung big under his animal-size dick. He rubbed his hard hand soft across the back of my head, and flexed his butt, pushing his crotch up into my face. He smelled the way only a dirty-blond working man can smell: with the sweet raunch that comes naturally from hard, honest labor.
That summer, Kick was more than my general contractor.
I had hired him first for business, but we hung around each other for pleasure. He was my type. He was everybody’s type. He said he felt there was no bullshit between us. We kept life simple. Clear. In my nearly finished house, we slept in the same bed that we fucked in. We played sexual muscle games and fetish fantasies. We had free rein with each other and with any other men we wanted. We lived our days of heaven moving through a fraternity of tradesmen. We checked out the subcontractors Kick hired: beefy masons; tattooed young plumbers; smooth-skinned framing carpenters; muscular roofers, tanned and shirtless, jeans spattered with asphalt.
Kick was no handyman fixing up a remodel. He was a licensed general contractor building my new house. His eyes, the same steel blue as his tempered hammerhead, could size up a situation, or another man, fast. He could shoot the shit with the best; and he was as good as his word. His subs respected him. His construction crews idolized him. The ladies at the County Permit Office swooned for him. Me? I loved him.
“I want to build you a house,” he said, “that men look good in.”
Kick had taken his southern redneck look and turned his naturally athletic body, through heavy weight training, into handsome muscle-bulk, carved with definition and roped with vascularity. His blond body was hairy. He stored a clippers in the bathroom to trim back, but not fully shave, the pelt on his big pecs and washboard belly. Thick spun gold covered his forearms, the back of his hands, and his fingers. His barbered hair, clipped close on the nape of his neck, and shaved and snipped around his ears, ran the full blond spectrum from dark through dirty-blond to golden.
His jaw grew black-blond bristle fast. He kept his thick moustache clipped closer to classic regulation than a State Trooper. His blond moustache was a golden brush, trimmed straight across the precise line of his disciplined upper lip. Men, even straight men, read his construction-muscle look, and watched his handsome blond face break into a grin wide as Texas. His killer smile narrowed his focused eyes, and sent that blond moustache, that had become his trademark, spreading across the pickets of his perfect white teeth.
To clients and crew, Kick was as ideal a general contractor as he had been, back in high school that next season under that wrestling coach, a perfect senior varsity captain. The dark-haired coach, Kick confessed one night, had wrapped his big arms around Kick’s body; and Kick had hugged him back like he had always known the way two men use their big arms to pull their bodies tight together, muscle-to-muscle. The coach had rubbed off on Kick. It showed. Kick had grown up to be the way a man should be. He had achieved the look of a man in authority. He was born with the gift, coached further into it, and he learned how to present it. The Authority of Command Presence. Other men took to it, and because of it, to him, and because of him, to me, and all together for that year we had a hard-balling good time.
Kick and I were Hunters. We both loved men. Masculine men. We checked out the places where men move and talk and smell like men: building supply yards; construction diners; cop bars; truck stops; straight gyms; athletic events: collegiate wrestling and gymnastics, professional powerlifting, and physique competitions. At more than one bodybuilding contest, sitting in the audience with my left hand tucked under my right arm and resting on Kick’s massive guns, I knew that his build could have beaten any muscleman on stage. I savored what his big blond uncut muscle-dick tasted like in my mouth. We shared real personal secrets.
We were Fetishists. We got hard zooming in on the way men’s clothes rode their bodies: the collar on a faded flannel shirt, frayed by rubbing against a sun-leathered neck; tanktops, their white ribs stretched to a hole, then a run, tearing over the big full bulge of hard pecs; heavy cotton teeshirts, size-large, whose sleeves fit tight around pumped biceps, and whose massive shoulders stretched the cotton tight across chests, dropping it tentlike, full and loose, down over the tight abs; heavy wool socks and boots and sneakers on hard working calves; gymshorts exposing thick thunder-thighs; tight, bulging jock pouches with flat sweaty bands framing hard Dallas linebacker butt; the squared-off look of a motorcop’s helmet chinstrap, his reflective sunglasses, his wool shirt bulked out with Second-Chance body armor, his badge on his chest, his utility belt: cuffs and gun riding over his breeches and knee-high black boots, his thin black-leather gloves turned down from his gold watch band on his thick wrist.
Kick and I were Harvesters. We “found” men’s clothes: scouted, hunted, harvested, “borrowed” them, and fucked, jerking off wearing the stuff men had somehow carelessly “lost.” The Harvest List was long: a bodybuilder left his posing trunks dangling on a bench in the green room after the Mr. West Texas Contest; a framing carpenter forgot a pair of sweat-smooth leather gloves that tasted of his handsalt; a finishing carpenter left hanging on a nail the pit-soaked sweatshirt he’d stripped off in the heat of the day; a plumber, showering at the house before a date, changed to his sports clothes and forgot his white cotton jockey shorts with a single skidmark where the briefs had ridden up the crack of his sweet male butt.
Kick and I were Hunters and Fetishists and Harvesters. Making love to each other in my nearly completed house, we made love to all men everywhere. Nightly in my bedroom, we both knew our moves to conjure on the clothes we “borrowed.”
Pulling on his harvested coconut-oil-stained posing trunks, Kick walked into the tracklight can-spot mounted in the raw-beamed ceiling of my bedroom. His cockring made his kickstand dick fill the tan nylon briefs like a raging hardon. He moved his massive muscular body through his posing routine with all the grace of a stud put out to show.
Kick radiated Command Presence.
His blond hair and moustache caught the intense pinpoint spot. His arms grew massive, as his fist pumped up his forearm, and his forearm leveraged his biceps to their knotted peak. The triceps and delts on the back of his upper arm popped alive.
We had these evenings, these special evenings, when together we stroked dick and pumped muscle and pushed out the bounds of the finite.
Kick was changing now, taking off on the male energy stored in the muscleman’s trunks. I knelt in close to him, feeling the heat of the spotlight mix with the heat of his sweating body. We locked our energies together. He nodded, and I squeezed pure olive oil into my hands and slicked up his hairy bodybuilder physique. Construction work had tanned his blond skin a deep brown in the Texas sun while intensifying the golden fur matting his legs, butt, belly, chest, and arms.
In the mirrors opposite us, I could see him changing, evolving, becoming, transcending.
The line of his jaw bit down as he flexed his shoulders, neck, pecs, lats, arms, and legs. His neck became a vascular, vein-popping column of muscle. Tense. His broad shoulders mounded like symmetrical scoops of bronzed ice cream. His pecs filled: lower and upper. He flexed and rolled them. Striations of muscle appeared through his paper-thin skin.
He nodded for a hit of popper. We shared it.
He moved into a right bicep shot, adding a left. His body quivered with excitement. His arms were his big guns. He dropped his left arm straight on down to a classic fist. He opened and closed his fist, pumping up the power in his forearm: the kind a man likes to sit on. The veins and cuts rose, wrist to elbow, and flowed, almost by his sheer willpower, to his upper arm into a lightening display of vascular muscle. He swung his right arm up, moving his inner right bicep close in toward his face, bending his elbow and dropping his forearm, wrapping his cupped hand around the back of his clipped blond hair. Now full profile, moustache and tongue first, he nosed deep into his armpit, hairy and sweaty and corded with the power of that private spot where arm and shoulder and back and chest muscles all converge and connect.
Our faces met in his muscle ’pit. I ran my nose and my own moustache across his moustache, breathing in his hot panting breath. He held the pose, generously, giving me luxurious time to nose down and tongue his ’pit, and lick and stroke my way closer into the mystery and manifestation of muscle than most men—even musclemen—ever get, because Kick knew all the secrets.
I worshiped muscle. I beat my meat with my right hand. I stroked his oily muscle with my left. We moved, flowed, from pose to pose, playing with the light, with the oil, with the mix of his muscle look and my worshiping look in the mirrors in the half-finished bedroom.
Kick stripped off the posing trunks. I wrung his sweat into my mouth. His huge dick, free of the briefs, sprang to hard life. I handed him the Crisco. He lubed up his hand and greased his throbbing dick with his fingertips. He smiled at me kneeling next to his cock, between his huge legs. I reached for the coke. He pulled open the head of his dirty-blond uncut meat. I dropped a line deep into his piss-slit. He dropped to his knees, opposite me, and tooted me up the same. Snowed in, a hard dick can be jerked for hours, sensitized to all the stroking, but somehow anesthetized from premature cuming.
Reflected in the mirror, we knelt knees to knees, face to face. Kick loved me and I loved him and we both loved muscle. The tracklight spot beamed down on us like energy from another star. He flexed body part after body part, inches from my face. Sweat rained on us. His muscles thickened, glistened, sweated, pumped, and filled: harder, more beautiful, more powerful, more brutal, more animal. His belly defined itself to bulky abs, then split to washboard definition deeper than the fingers I rubbed through the crevasses of his rippled gut. His championship arms had grown big enough to tear the sleeves off teeshirts. His shoulders hunkered down: broad, side to side, and thick, front to back.
He raised up his shoulders and pecs, barreling out his chest, spreading his lats like angel’s wings from his waist up into his dripping ’pits. His pecs raised, rolled, locked: hard. He tilted his face up to the spot light. In the mirrors for himself, and from my angle between his spread thighs, Kick’s particular face became in the deep-shadowed spot, the Universal Essential Male Face. The general contractor he was disappeared behind the Blond Moustache that was no longer specifically his. He was the Universal Man. The Ultimate Blond Muscleman. From ancient god and warrior to classic athlete to contemporary male in authority.
From that Face, man-to-man, Kick’s voice said to me: “It’s all yours. It’s all ours.” We hit the popper, and, slowly, for my eyes only, he shot off pose after pose, with me licking, tonguing, sniffing, fingering, sucking, rimming, tasting, adoring, worshiping all the man-muscle that I always from my boyhood thought was possible, but thought would never happen.
I laid back on the floor. His thighs and hard dick straddled over my belly. My hand ran up across his pecs and out to his arms. My own dick, without the coke line to harden it against cuming, would have shot long before. Instead, I palmed his big balls and licked his muscle sweat from my hand. I ran my fuckfinger back between the tight crack of his ass and touched the tip to the hard bud of his hole. He flexed its circular rim. I felt the squeeze of juice and sweat soak my finger, and licked it clean.
In the heat of passion, in that light, on those nights in that house under construction, Kick was more than Kick.
I stared up at him straddling my belly. I beat my meat, adoring his man’s body with my eyes and hand and hard cock. He stared into the mirror, lord of the spotlight, kneeling across an adoring man’s body. He had traveled outside himself, posing, flexing, beating his own dick in total worship of Absolute Muscle.
Kick was more than Kick. He was Adam before the Fall.
He raised his right arm, flexed, and finger-combed the short clip of his dirty-blond, Brylcremed hair. He was no longer the general contractor who had arrived on my empty lot, wearing a large white cotton teeshirt that stretched, in crimson letters across his chest, the one word: TEXAS. He was no longer just one of those wild maverick young males who had grown to southern manhood listening to the Allman Brothers in the back seat of a red Mustang convertible.
His personal aura in the spotlight, in the mirror, across my belly, loomed up larger than life. He was heroic. He was the kind of leader soldiers gladly die for; the kind of champion athletes dream of becoming; the kind of lover I’d give the deed to my ranch.
Kick was a dirty-blond Muscle God.
Repeatedly he ran his callused right hand through the tracklight halo of his blond hair. He tucked his nose and moustache into his muscle ’pit. With his own man’s tongue he licked out the sweat of a god. His left hand took long, hard, powerful strokes on his dick: big dirty-blond dick, the tight big blond lip of uncut skin slapping back easy, exposing the rosey-blond flush so right, so singular to the head of a dirty-blond dick.
I could tell from his familiar rhythms that he was on target to shoot.
My style, each night, was to hold back innumerable chances for orgasm to wait to cum in concert with this transcendent god-manbeast straddling my body. His whole frame convulsed into the crab-pose—the most muscular pose that knocks physique audiences dead as the muscleman gathers, pumps, and hardens every single muscle in his body down to barbaric, fierce intensity. Kick’s head, jaw, eyes, all locked into midspace: between the mirrors and his mind’s eye, somewhere over my body.
His hand beat his meat intensely.
My hand pumped my dick against his swinging balls.
“All that muscle!” I said. “That fucking incredible muscle! I love your fucking muscle! All that dirty blond hairy animal muscle!”
His teeth grinned and gritted at the starting-trigger of my words. Guttural sounds escaped from his throat. Wild animal cries. He wanted my words. I worshiped his muscle. We worshiped all Muscle. From his cordoned neck, he roared.
Our heavy loads shot out together, primeval, volcanic, hitting his pecs and his arms, spraying my face, running down his abs, splashing my mouth.
Now that Kick has finished my house, we’re not together daily. Nor need we be. His specifically picked construction crews are gone to other jobs. My bedroom is complete with his work and his energy. Whatever entity we conjured for the year Kick lived with me among the 2x4s and power tools somehow remains. Sort of like we built this house, and created for it forever a manly spirit, a muscular ghost, that in all the years to come, will, at night, when I’m alone in my bed, overshadow me with a dream of manliness and muscle from which I hope I’ll never wake.