Three

After this new young man leaves, I finally get into my chair. At first I don’t read. I just breathe until I calm down.

I glance at the interloper surreptitiously. No one that beautiful has deigned to look at me since 1944.

Being despised was easy. I’m used to that. I’ve navigated the shoals of hate all my life. Being ignored takes a little more getting used to. I’ve had far too long to practice dealing with that.

I was a U.S. Marine once a long time ago. Then in the Merchant Marine for over half a century. Back then I had bronze skin and beauty and muscles in a thousand ports. Memories and masturbation in the midst of back alleys and fear.

The day I turned eighteen I was down at the recruiting office. No more baling hay with my seven older brothers. I won’t tell you the real story of those long farm summer nights, out among the corn with, well, even I can’t admit that.

My oldest brother was driving to town so he took me to the train station.

I took the train to town to the three stops away where they had a recruiting office. I signed a million things. They gave me a physical. They sent me to Parris Island, South Carolina.

I was thrilled. I was scared. All the different naked guys. Or dressed in their white boxers and briefs. Mostly boxers. No colors and swirls like today.

The smell of men in the tight quarters. That funky odor of bodies that didn’t wash enough, of crotches warm and moist with the sweat of hard days.

And danger every day with each new dawn a triumph.

Boot camp was great. I loved it. I was used to sharing a room. I could do all the physical stuff with ease, farm life made what they wanted easy for me to do. It also helped that I was tall and strong. Rangy, muscular, powerful, the other guys didn’t mess with me.

But nights in vast rooms with bunk beds with hot young men. Or in the woods during lonely hikes. There was always someone to find. I had to be careful. Some did get caught.

When we got leave, we’d get in bar fights or add to our count of stupid shit we did. Who knows why we fought. Fists were just better than reason. Stupid shit? I guess it was fun.

Then it all changed on my first sea voyage. I was a lowly asshole Marine on a boat on the way to die with all my buddies.

The first time I saw him! Does anyone ever forget that moment when beauty appears? We became the closest of friends, or as much as you could show in public that you were that close.

He was funny.

He said I made him laugh.

Bored to tears with not much to do on a crowded ship. Maybe card games late at night on deck. Bragging about our imagined prowess, or trading rumors about where we were actually headed. Did it really matter?

His bunk wasn’t that far from mine. Long after lights out, I’d creep over. I’d touch him in the dark in places he’d never let me touch in daylight, not in a thousand years. He never woke up. Never opened his eyes. Never acknowledged what I was doing. His legs would shudder a bit and twitch in that vast ship that was never really silent, in quarters that were never really private. He never said anything to me. On a good night, he’d be on his back, his shorts gaping open. I could reach in a finger, sometimes two, and touch his beautiful dick. Sometimes it got hard and poked out. I’d put my lips around as much of it as I could, and swirl my tongue all over it in an ecstasy of fear and triumph, and maybe love. I thought it was love.

After those forays, I’d look down at my own shorts. Between dim shadows, I could see a huge damp spot already spreading on them. Coming without touching myself. Those are the only times that’s ever happened.

During the days some exercise, more cards, more rumors. Anything to pass the time. We were all young men who were on our way to die.

When we were in Hawaii, stopping on our way to blood and death, he and I got drunk one night. Maybe something would have happened that we could at least acknowledge, admit to, or even talk about.

We were walking down a darkened street. We pulled each other into a drunken, giggling embrace. We slipped into a nearby alley. Then it got real quiet. His arms were around me. He was holding me, and he let his legs and chest lean against mine. Our lips were inches from each other.

But I was drunk, and needed to turn away to puke. He put his hand on my shoulder while I was sick.

The moment was over.

Was I in love? Yes. With a mad passionate crush on a kind and good man.

After that incident back on the ship again with nothing said, we were inseparable. His smile is seared into my memory.

Then it was that day. Our turn to assault some South Seas beach. We were scared shitless, some of us literally. It was like any battle scene in any war movie but ten million times worse. The screams, the sweat, the stink, the fear, the bullets, the bombs; any one of which could paralyze a guy’s heart. All that chaos collapsed into each painful second that seems eternal.

He and I were together as we leapt into the surf, but were separated in an instant. Training took over, and I kept moving forward. The guys behind me would have walked up my back.

As we neared the first lip of sand, the enemy firing started. I heard myself screaming. I got to the water’s edge and began sprinting up the beach.

I glanced back for an instant. I saw bodies falling, maimed, headless, armless, spurting their life onto those useless sands and surging ocean foam. I saw him for an instant. I saw his helmet jerk back and blood spurt from his face. Half still in the water, half on the sand, blood pouring out.

He bawled out my name in the cacophony of death. Then the guys behind me rammed into me and shouted and bellowed to run, to move, to get out of the way.

I kept running forward on that beach and didn’t go back.

The biggest mistake of my life.

The greatest regret of my life.

I should have died there with him.

The only mistake that comes close to being that big has been living this long to regret that I didn’t turn back.

I ran forward through a million bullets. I lived unscathed so I could slog through more days of mud, blood, and death on some stupid island.

I lived through the hell of a tropical jungle, and killed a lot of my fellow human beings. I found a few lonely guys to suck off in those rotten and rotting jungles. The good old days when guys had full, sweaty pubic bushes, worthy of sniffing.

Not like nowadays. I’ve seen pictures on occasion, but once a year, after saving enough every week, I splurge on my birthday. The past few years it’s been a very nice young man who is most pleasant about my wrinkles and sags and scars and scabs. He shaves almost everything.

Back then in the tropical forests of several Pacific islands, the danger and despair could never erase my perfidy. I didn’t even check to see if he lived. How could anyone forgive being abandoned?

I spent the rest of the war giving farewell blowjobs to men who would die in some remote hellhole the next day: on some island’s beaches, or in a foxhole next to me, or while fighting off a mad enemy charge. Too often, I saw despair in their faces. With their cum in my mouth, I’d given them relief from hell for a few minutes. Marines as skinny as me. Taut bodies, squirming or writhing. Why, they might even touch me. Sometimes when they did that, I came almost without touching myself. You might be surprised how many straight guys don’t care the night before they die what they do in the dark. Or at least are more willing to hold still for. Death can focus the mind.

Those five magic words every gay guy wants to hear from a straight guy, “I’ve let guys blow me.”

Or the three magic words from the same source, “Lick my balls.”

I was hideously reckless and horribly lucky. Mix those with a huge dose of lack of self-awareness, I never got caught, and nobody turned me in.

Straight guys. I know why I want them. They are so masculine. I love the ones who have fathered kids. I love having their cum inside me. I just do.

The day after I got my honorable discharge I vowed to never go home. From the Marines, I joined the Merchant Marine. A million ports, a million ships, and a million nights of daring, danger, and spurting cum.

A million ports and exotic sights and hot men of all ethnicities and shapes and sizes. I wasn’t particular as I drank and whored my way from continent to continent.

Then there were also the long ocean nights, the sea as calm as glass, the starlight reflecting on the world, moonlight gliding paths to other worlds, and with luck a man to share it with. If remarkably lucky, snuggle for a few seconds. Or fuck with.

Or storms during which we rattled into each other and the world around us.

Or, hell, a blow job while hidden on deck. Giving or taking, I wasn’t particular. Although the newest sailors were always the best. Their first blow job. Well, maybe their first good blow job. From a guy. They always seemed so surprised about how good it felt.

Some of the ones I settled for weren’t the prettiest. Then again, some of them settled for me. Mostly I was indifferent to who it was. During those thousands of incidents, my thoughts were mostly back in Hawaii on a night that wasn’t.

For those first years, I was still young and strong. My face wasn’t ugly. I knew how to avoid gossip. I gave good head. I got away with a life of abandon. Just never abandoned enough.

I knew I was never going home to live out that despair and loneliness. I would stay at sea. Forever if I could. With a body scarred by a few random Japanese shells, and torn by memories of regret.

I hung onto jobs on second-rate merchant ships most often registered in third world countries.

No one ever fell in love with me. Nor I with them.

I never turned back.

There were some pretty ones, some special ones. That boy in Singapore. Lost for years. Preserved in memory of gulping gallons of joy.

Once in a while, tricked again by the lure of love. Well not love really now. Of someone to talk to. Of someone who would acknowledge my existence when it wasn’t part of their own pleasure.

Even now I can be tricked by this. I hate the need.

I haven’t been at any holiday celebration with a blood relative in fifty years. I did a lot of drunken holiday making every night for years. Not anymore. I haven’t seen Iowa in over half a century.

I haven’t done birthdays, mine or anybody else’s in years. I don’t mind the passing of the years.

So many friends have died.

All my fear and all my paranoia has been justified.

I look up from my newspaper. The new, hot blond guy smiles at me. I drop my eyes and don’t respond. Three-quarters of a century and a hundred pounds ago I’d have worked up the nerve, maybe to blow him in the john.

Everybody used to say I should have a hobby. Well, I did have a hobby. Blowing straight guys in dark alleys in exotic ports all over the world. Now I’m lucky if I can totter down the street, and the bags aren’t big or thick enough to get over my head and my fat and my wrinkles for even the most desperate to want me to touch them.