Confessions of a Straight Chaser

CONFESSIONS OF A STRAIGHT-CHASER

by Bambino

Part I: "JACKING OFF THE COOK"

Author's disclaimer: The following is an autobiographical account of real events that occurred. However, the names of the persons involved have been substituted with fictitious ones.

I am a first-generation American, born of Italian parents, and as most of my family is still overseas, I cross the Atlantic frequently and have spent a good deal of my life in Italy. Some, if not most, of the hottest encounters of my experience took place in "the Boot." It may be a prejudice, but I never feel hornier than when I'm in Italy, especially in southern Italy. I've never been to Puerto Rico, or to Cuba, or to Brazil, or to Greece, or to many of the places on earth that heat-seekers go to bring back tales and memories, but I can certainly avouch that the Mediterranean climate, both mentally and physically, seems to bring the eroticism of humanity out from under the surface and put it right in your face.

Excuse the previous and any forthcoming digressions. I admit I'm prone to them. I'll try to leave out inchoate background information as much as possible, and focus on the subject of the experience I've set out to describe. I just want to "impress upon the gentle reader" that particular heightened atmosphere of sensuality often ascribed to the Mediterranean people, especially to Italians with their frank body language, their ease and directness in confronting that most basic of human purposes and mysteries, sex. Italian society isn't puritanically rootbound as Anglo society is, and no matter what you might say about the Church (and you wouldn't offend me if you said it), people tend to deal with religion differently there than in Protestant cultures. I guess it could be summed up by saying that the institution of confession is both more convenient and more amenable to sinners than the work ethic!

This story takes place about five years ago, when I spent an uninterrupted year in my father's native town, somewhat outside of Rome in the Castelli Romani region of Lazio. The town is very small -- almost a village, really, with a population still under a thousand. My father was the first of four brothers to expatriate; now only one remains: my eldest living uncle, who owns and maintains a fairly prosperous local restaurant business. I went on my own business, but took at least one meal a day in the restaurant and had spent a good deal helping out in various capacities as waiter, kitchen assistant, and general gopher. From previous visits I was already on terms with the staff, although turnover was frequent in the kitchen and there were always new characters to meet. On the long drive up from the airport into the hills my aunt informed me that there had been some recent turnover: a couple new waiters and some additional kitchen help, and most importantly they had brought in a new chef, since the previous had married a Danish girl and moved off to Copenhagen.

Village life in my father's town was still fairly bucolic when I spent this particular year there. The restaurant and its adjoining time-share complex straddled a hillside overlooking the lake, a quarter-mile or so down the winding road that had existed, in one form or another, since Roman antiquity. My uncle's residence was along the main thoroughfare: a tall, narrow building of three storeys wedged between the post office and a café-bar. My uncle and aunt owned the whole building, but occupied only the lower floor. The middle was let to an elderly couple without children; the upper was a suite of two bedrooms, one of which had been cleared for my use.

As we mounted the narrow old corkscrew staircase my aunt dropped that I would be sharing the apartment with their cook, whose lodging was included in his terms of compensation. She added that the only communal part of the arrangement would be the bathroom and the kitchen, the latter of which we would hardly need to use at all, except on days off, on account of our proximity to the restaurant. "In other words don't worry," she heartened me, "you'll have plenty of space and privacy to work at home, especially during the day when the cook is with us."

The freshness of my surroundings and the excitement of personal freedom had already played hob with my hormones, which ordinarily would have raged regardless. The few specimens of maleness I had seen around town so far reminded me of how long it had been since my last sojourn, and in astonishment I recognized several young men whom I hadn't seen since they'd been in puberty, and who had grown into full-fledged knockouts. But it wasn't until my aunt took me upstairs to my lodging and I met my roommate-to-be that the full force of lust gripped me.

It wasn't that he was gorgeous in the conventional sense, nor that he was even exceptionally handsome by photogenic measures. I've always maintained that men don't have to be pretty to be hot. Had I taken a photograph of him as he appeared at first impression, it would probably fail to convey those qualities which aroused my lust, a lust which, while immediate and forceful, grew and deepened over the ensuing weeks until I was totally consumed by a physical and psychic obsession for his absolute masculinity. The words "manhood" and "manliness" can only begin to describe this inner quality, which was as native to his bones and to the fiber of his mind and spirit as manifest in his outward traits.

These latter, I should add, did not detract from this inner charisma. My first glimpse of him was from the midway landing: I looked up to see him standing there, framed by the open doorway. He was swarthy, an attribute amplified by his being backlit by the interior sunlight streaming down into the dark stairwell. He was maybe an inch or two above average height -- it's hard for me to think of his exact stature in terms of feet and inches, because he gave the impression of being taller and bigger than he probably was. His build was solid and mesomorphic: a well-formed specimen of a man with broad shoulders tapering to a firm waist, with sturdy limbs and big bones. His off-day attire -- jeans and a sweatshirt -- was neutral, and neither revealed nor concealed his physique, which might have been anywhere from stocky to compact. Later, as I watched him walk and move about, the way his clothing strained and bulged to the twist of his limbs told me that he was, in fact, compactly stocky -- naturally brawny, with enough muscle to offset the slightest of overall padding. An attractive physique, but he was so unconscious of the fact that he took few pains to show it off.

Even before my aunt introduced us and I heard his name for the first time, I knew right away he wasn't Italian. His features and outward configuration told me little by themselves: a close-cropped pelt of thickly curling coal-black hair, burning black eyes set deep under heavy black brows, a pale olive complexion were commonplace traits from Parma to Palermo. He dressed, as I've described, like everyone else in the world, so this likewise gave me no personal information. But something else, a nameless aggregate of qualities -- the softly caustic manner of his gaze, the firm set of his mouth, the general accent of his body language -- told me that he was of a heritage even more southern than Sicilian. And so when my aunt presented him to me and pronounced his name -- Nasser -- I knew that my hunch had been right: he was Arab.

It turned out he was from Egypt. That first afternoon of our acquaintance I found out three things I commonly make it my business to know when getting to know a man I find appealing: his age (thirty-one, though when he shaved he looked twenty-one); his orientation (brusquely straight, or at least married); and his disposition (somber, impenetrable, but tempered by a good sense of humor). I draw a distinction between sexual orientation and what I call sexual disposition. I needn't belabor the point with explicit definitions; let's just say that the latter is an affective property, or a set of affective properties, which to the susceptible and intuitive watcher can disclose how prone or yielding a man is to... well, if you allow me, the fluidity of life experience. In Nasser's case this disclosure was quiet, and long in coming. At first I was discouraged: he let on immediately that he was a Muslim, apparently strict in his faith (he practiced Ramadan even while alone far from home, and he totally abstained from drink). He spoke frequently of his wife and two young children, a boy and a girl aged three and six respectively. When a religious man prattles on easily about his wife and family it sets up a little bit of an obstacle for the homosexual pervert who wishes to jack him off. The obstacle is all the more reinforced when the religion in question is fundamental Islam. Oh well, I thought, after that first interview -- I'll try to work on him, and see what happens.

It's often said in proverbs that the most rigid reed breaks the easiest. As it happened, Nasser never really broke -- he swayed, touched briefly over the boundary and bounced back, and in the end he turned out to be made of more resilient stuff than I expected. I've often wondered if I was truly his first experience dallying with another man, as he insisted I was, because I've heard so many tales about homosexual play in Arab culture (even from Arabs themselves). The old myth goes something like this: growing up in a sexually segregated society, the young Muslim often turns to his same-sex peers to vent his repressed urges until, at marriageable age, he finds a wife and, entering the sanctioned union, channels his urges into the proper course, forever putting away his childish things. For the rest of his life, whatever happened before he became a man and married is a closed book, known only to himself, and locked away in the vault of his memory. All very well, but does it truly always stay put? My experience tells me that the demons unleashed from Pandora's box, once opened, tend to linger. So even if I was Nasser's first, I'm even less sure that I'll be his last.

We sat talking, as we did so often after that, on the sunny terrace of the upstairs apartment. The avid daylight penetrated his black eyes and showed them to be in reality a lambent chestnut color, like the eyes of certain mongrel dogs. Their lashes were extraordinarily long and sooty, so that when they were downcast they lent his face a kind of boyish sweetness. I should add that this softening quality his eyes brought to his face was in contrast with the rugged jaw, the resolute mouth, the slightly snub nose, and this contraposition of the sweet and the tough, the gentle and the pugnacious brought a complexity to his looks that played maddening tricks on my endocrine system as I stared at him. Returning my gaze, though somewhat less urgently, he spoke in his low staccato voice and squinted in the afternoon blaze, furrowing his furry brows, before eventually cursing in his broken Italian, momentarily withdrawing into the apartment and returning with a pair of sunglasses. When he donned them the illusion of boyishness wrought by his eyes evaporated from his face; now he looked dangerously sexy. He hadn't shaved this morning, on his day off, and having a tough beard myself I immediately empathized with his reasons why. The perfect sandpapery stubble that darkened his boxy jaw and meaty, dimpled chin surely would have given me an instant mania for five-o'-clock shadows if I hadn't already had one. On account of his serious temperament he didn't smile as much as he should. Because when he did, the ridges of muscle in his cheeks dimpled and his lips curled over the whitest teeth I had ever seen in a slightly crooked cupid's bow. I could describe the rakish allure of his smile ad nauseum, but it would make the reader, well, nauseous....

Months later, when we spent his days off in the city or at the beach, I would beg him to leave his stubble intact, but he wouldn't hear of it. To go out in public without shaving was unthinkable to him. "You don't understand," I would beseech him, "how much that drives women crazy. You have no idea." He would switch off his electric razor, and say, "I know how much it drives you crazy. Women like a clean-shaven man." And he would turn the razor back on and resume shaving. I told him the five-o'-clock shadow brought out his attractive dark coloring. He would come back with "A smooth shave brings out my dimples, which are even more attractive." Damn his dimples! I got none and he got three.

This exchange was one of his rare concessions to vanity. In fact the few times I succeeded in scratching the surface of Nasser's obdurate psyche, I learned to my amazement that this man did not consider himself anything special. I would weaken and allow some effusive compliment to gush forth unchecked. I would tell him he was a stud, that he should have all the confidence in the world. The notion momentarily amused him, and he asked, "Do you really think so?" But then to my vehement reassurance he would scoff and shrug. "I'm all right. Eros Ramazzotti is a stud. I'm okay." Then it would occur to me that my reassurance was superfluous, that he lacked no confidence. He considered himself average but didn't care. "I have my wife, so it doesn't matter if any other woman wants me." Leave it to me to make a simple thing complicated.

It took me six months to get down Nasser's pants. The process was like grinding away at a mountain of granite with a small nail file. I had debauched married men before, and beguiled their dicks out of their flies by maneuvers that had been a source of private pride, but which now seemed elementary compared to the subtlety, the craftiness, the tenacity of purpose and sheer Machiavellian machinations that eventually won me a few whacks on Nasser's big swarthy prick. For all the time and energy I spent scheming and plotting, all the afternoons and evenings talking and listening and picking his brain, straining to unravel the tough knot of his mind, hoping that somehow I could soften and break down the barrier. In retrospect, I think I tried too hard at first; my strategies were too laborious. My approach had been to jump the hurdles by furious, inspired lunges. As a result I succeeded at first only in kicking the traces and falling on my face. So I recognized that the obstacles in my path were too high, too substantial, too deeply rooted in their turf, and too long-standing: the megaliths of Stonehenge. To hurdle them or knock them down were futile approaches; I had to become sufficiently acute to find ways between, then sufficiently supple to slip through.

I found that if I engaged Nasser in animated discussions by endorsing each of his own views as if they were my own hearty sentiments, then gently goading him onto topics which naturally found their way down to the core of sex that lies at the center of every man's thinking, then he himself might unwittingly reveal these secret passageways to me. I'm convinced now that he was never aware of my hidden agenda; that he considered our first transgression to be a spur-of-the-moment, freak occurrence. Surely it would have been a great breach of the trust I had gained over the prefatory six months, if he had known that I had connived and contrived the whole time. But Nasser was nothing if not sure of himself, and I'm certain the idea never crossed his mind that he acted on anything other than his own free will, or that this had been manipulated by cunning and artful ruses on my part. Even if I had confessed my wily ways to him, he wouldn't have believed it for a minute. He would have said, with characteristic blunt and final certainty, that I was flattering myself and that what had happened, happened on his own allowance.

There were several major breakthroughs leading up to the conquest. The first came in the form of a statement, of his own utterance, made offhand and without emphasis but extremely significant. This happened during a conversation that included, besides ourselves, the headwaiter and dishwasher of the restaurant, during the slump after the staff supper (in which I usually joined). It was customary for us to lounge around running our jaws as long as possible until my uncle arrived, which would be our cue to start working again. The topic of the moment was -- surprise! -- masturbation. Ironically enough, I hadn't brought it up myself. The headwaiter had, by way of a facetious remark to the dishwasher, an 18-year-old Moldavian kid who unfortunately suffered from a case of acne vulgaris. Italians can be especially prone to innocent fun-poking, especially when it comes to subjects they consider obvious and open ground. In this instance as the young Moldavian joined us at the table with his coffee, Paolo had greeted him with the heavily capricious remark: "Mamma, Maxim, you're becoming one big pimple." Maxim had the dignity to ignore him, but his blemished face flushed beet-red when Paolo went on with: "You must beat off a hell of a lot, to have so many pimples." He didn't really believe this, of course, but was as much making fun of the old wives' tale of masturbation causing acne as he was making fun of Maxim. The poor kid, however, didn't laugh, and merely sipped his coffee and looked off over the terrace, as if he hadn't understood Paolo's comments.

Paolo was ruthless. "Don't be ashamed, Maxim, there's nothing wrong with masturbating -- once in a while. But maybe you should cut back a little, for your skin's sake, eh?"

Both he and Nasser were laughing. I couldn't bring myself to participate, and feigned distraction. Then, to my surprise, Maxim looked directly at Paolo and said: "You masturbate. I don't. It's a sin."

Paolo made a loud flatulent noise with his tongue. "Maybe in Transylvania, where you guys still live in the Dark Ages."

"Moldavia."

"Same difference. It's not a sin here, at least not anymore."

"It is. God doesn't care what country you live in."

"So then, if you don't masturbate, what do you do when you get horny, and there are no girls around?"

"Take a cold shower."

Paolo burst out laughing. "You Orthodox are even more backwards than Protestants."

He turned to Nasser. "What about you? Your wife is a long way from here -- is jacking off a sin for Muslims too?"

Nasser was used to Paolo's forward humor, and in general was able to take the headwaiter's personality more in stride than was the morose young Moldavian, who at this point had only worked in the restaurant for a couple of weeks, and was probably going through culture shock. Nasser compressed his lips and turned down the corners as he formulated his reply; I knew him well enough already to anticipate a pontifical pronouncement in the offing. "It depends," he began. "If a boy masturbates for pleasure, it's a sin. But if he's nervous and needs a release, and masturbates to relieve himself, without taking pleasure in it, then it's not really a sin."

Paolo seemed to become quite intrigued by this line of thought. He rejoined, "Excuse me -- but can you come without taking pleasure in it? I can't."

"I think it's a skill if you can," I laughed, putting in my two cents' worth. I had become giddy by the pretty obvious lapse in the consistency of Nasser's religious zeal. It betokened possible entrée for future topics. I also found Paolo's rejoinder to be extremely hilarious in the moment.

Nasser was undaunted. "It's the way you look at it," he said obstinately, for this type of one-upmanship brought out his arrogance. "If I go to a hammam and get a massage in the steam room, it relaxes my body and mind. If I give in to the sensuality of the masseur's touch and get excited by it, then I'm inviting sinfulness."

"Excuse me," I interrupted. "You said, 'If a boy masturbates...' What about a man?"

"A grown man shouldn't masturbate. Not a married one, anyway."

"I see."

Paolo backtracked. "Wait a minute. I doubt there's anything written in the Koran about massage. But you're not allowed to drink wine, right? Or eat pork?"

"Correct."

"Under any circumstances?"

"Right."

"So... what if you drink wine, but for medicinal purposes, without taking pleasure in the effects of alcohol? Is it still a sin, then?"

Nasser was becoming agitated. I watched the play of his big, hammy hands on the table, the way the thick furry fingers drummed against the side of his coffee cup while he waited for Paolo to finish his train of thought, then blurted: "Of course it's a sin, the Koran is very explicit about that. But that's different, because the effects of alcohol are chemical and can't be averted by will."

"But eating pork has no such effect."

"That doesn't matter. Those things are different. A man can live just fine without drinking wine or eating pork. But he has to relieve his balls every once in a while, it's a necessity."

Maxim broke in: "Nature has its own way of taking care of that."

"It's not always enough," said Nasser, and on my honor I swear that he was not trying to be funny when he continued: "Some balls need more relief than other balls."

Maxim didn't pursue the point; he turned away once more.

"So in other words," I chanced, "it's okay to masturbate, as long as you masturbate for your balls and not for your dick."

Nasser approved of my analogy. "That's a good way to put it."

Paolo said delicately, "Didn't you just say a moment ago that a grown man shouldn't masturbate? Now you're saying he has to, especially if he has big balls. Is that what you're saying?"

"No!" barked Nasser. "That is, it's better to avoid masturbating if possible. I mean -- oh, damn this language! If we were speaking Arabic you would already understand my point and this discussion would have ended already! A man can masturbate if he hasn't had a natural release in a long time and his balls hurt. Then it's not for self-pleasure, it's for relief. Otherwise he gets nervous and bad tempered."

"Kind of like you are now?" suggested Paolo, throwing his last barb.

"Ma vaffanculo," grumbled Nasser (which is to say "Fuck you!"), and the rest of us -- Maxim included -- burst out laughing.

I saw that as a breakthrough. I should add that this scene took place two months into my stay, during which time I had hoped in vain to catch Nasser jacking off or at least to determine whether he ever did so while I was home. To my frustration, I never intercepted any telltale sounds from his bedroom, such as moans, rhythmic creakings of the bed, nor were his showers or visits to the bathroom suspiciously prolonged. Since I was often out during the day, it was of course possible and likely that he took his "relief" during the midday siesta in my absence, and I can only hint at describing the titillation I felt trying to picture the gorgeous Arab, magnificent in his solitary nudity, sprawling in his bed or in a chair, big hairy legs wide apart, hastening what Maxim had called "nature" with the aid of his powerful right hand, and with lips compressed and every muscle clenched trying to suppress and deny any pleasure his nerves might attempt to transmit to his brain, concerned only with the disgorging of his overproductive balls in the most disinterested and purposeful fashion he could manage. Maybe he would slightly fail, wincing and making an involuntary choking sound as a disobedient nerve allowed a stray unwanted pang of gratification to override his bodily authority for one brief instant. In my prurient mind's eye I could see his firmly gripping fist, the hairy knuckles drenched with semen and curled snugly around the meaty, glistening shaft, which I could also picture: it would be thick, certainly -- it always is with types like him -- and it would be a couple shades darker than the rest of his skin, a deep purplish-brown tint. The balls would be baggy, warm, heavy, with plenty of thick wrinkly skin hanging in folds around the base of the cock. And he'd have a huge bush -- a luxuriant region of woolly black kinks that would cover his pelvic region and extend outward to the medial thighs, where it would gradually thin out and merge with the satyr-fur that carpeted his legs front and back all the way down to his ankles. How often I'd admired those muscular, magnificent legs! I thought to myself, "I wonder how old he was when he started to grow those tufts of hair on the knuckles of his toes -- eight? nine?" I was sure he'd been precocious, even by Mediterranean standards. Such over-ripe manhood couldn't have flourished in the ordinary span, without a significant head start!

How do I profess to have gathered all this forehand knowledge about Nasser's private parts, long before having the opportunity to verify it? I realize that I appear to credit myself with some kind of sixth sense, but I don't believe there's anything mystical about it. I suppose that after long experience with certain physical and somatic types one accumulates a kind of mental databank, although I'm not aware of any conscious calculation when I "size up" a man merely by studying his face and body structure. And it's not always in the hands and feet. Of course the faculty I boast may merely be bullshit -- a self-deceiving mixture of wishful thinking, lucky guesses and coincidence. I have been wrong in my guesses, of course, but less so as I grew more experienced. More often than not I'm dead on.

My second breakthrough happened just several weeks after the first. The discussion about masturbation had, at least for me and I think for Nasser as well, broken the ice on a hitherto tacit topic. Within just a few days, the tone of our relationship underwent a subtle change. We became more casual and easy with each other, especially with regard to hanging around the apartment shirtless or in underwear. The subject of masturbation was like a perverse imp which, once invoked, stubbornly refused to be dismissed. I admit that this was largely my doing; I doubt the theme would have arisen nearly so often if I were not the persistent instigator. Not to say that Nasser didn't do his fair share of bantering, but our styles were different.

Usually his references to masturbation and to sex in general took the form of jokes or lewd quips. It was as if he resonated with my own dirty mind to find obscene humor in innocent everyday situations. For instance, milk became something impossible to mention without exciting childish grins and salacious repartee. In the restaurant it was traditional to follow the staff's evening meal with an extended coffee break. The milk jokes started because, one day when I set down before Nasser a cup of the very weak and watery coffee he preferred to espresso, he asked for milk. I brought the carton and made a silly display of making the milk eject from the spout in quick jets, grunting and breathing hard as I did so. Nasser told me: "You're sick," but not without laughing.

On another occasion, at home, Nasser made coffee and asked me if I wanted milk. I couldn't resist. "Latte di mucca o latte di cazzo?" I said ("Cow's milk or cock's milk?").

Nasser returned, "Well if you want cock milk you'll have to provide it yourself."

I got daring. "But I want your milk!"

"That's not milk, it's cream."

"Even better."

"Frocio..." (Queer...) he snickered, without rancor, and so puckish was the humor that stole over his face that for a moment I found him quite irresistible.

This type of adolescent raillery became the norm between us. Although I goaded him more often than vice-versa, he took part in it no less than I, and frequently the jocular teasing so thinly disguised what resembled to me honest-to-goodness flirtation that I got hard in my pants and had to go off somewhere private to flog my throbber. But as I mentioned before, it seemed that this sort of badinage-bordering-on-courtship occurred between us in part because Nasser was buying into my own licentious nature, and I never witnessed any joking of this kind between him and other workfellows. To the contrary, the kitchen staff who worked under his rather iron rule considered him humorless and staid, since he presented them only with the brooding, dead-sober mask that I had seen during our first few weeks of acquaintance. He was not exactly adored by his underlings, and when I watched him at work in the kitchen I came to know why, if one were not consumed by lust for him as I was, little remained to be adored. This was especially so since he tended to reserve his rare moments of mischievous humor and lightness for break-times, and otherwise ran a tight and cheerless ship. There were two other Arabs who helped out in the kitchen during the busy weekends, and even they considered Nasser a heavy-handed and conservative fellow, odd for his generation. One of them, a Tunisian of considerably less dogmatic views, told me that Nasser had a tendency to preach Mohammed to them, and joked that he should found a mosque for local Muslims to vent his fervor.

However fervent his orthodoxy, it did not stop Nasser from playing grabass with me, several weeks after the masturbation debate, and surprising the hell out of me. The incident occurred as follows: I was standing at the espresso machine carrying out a mass request for coffee from the kitchen. The restaurant was empty, having just been opened for the day. Paolo was sweeping off the terrace, and I was alone on the floor. Nasser came out and told me to make his coffee stronger than usual. "Milk?" I asked, with a wry sideward grin.

"Not today, but if you want some for yourself you can have it straight from the spigot." And he cupped his hand over his crotch.

I felt faint as a girl asked to the prom by the class heartthrob, but I played it off casually. "If you're not careful," I said, "I just might take you up on that."

Since I hadn't responded with "Vaffanculo," he did instead, and hastened back into the kitchen with a nervous giggle. Having pushed a little more, he had seen that I yielded a little more, but that was as far as he wanted to push just yet. Until twenty minutes later, when I was once again at the coffee machine filling a cup for Paolo, who had moved on to the garden. Nasser came through the kitchen door (which was nearby), and slipped behind me, leaning forward to drop his empty cup in the sink catty-corner to the espresso bar. Doing so took him into a compromising position with me, since the space was tight. If I had backed up at that moment, it would have been right into his crotch. This was the closest I'd ever gotten to him -- I could feel his presence and warmth and the proximity was driving me wild. Then, as he withdrew, he reached up over my shoulder to take a glass from overhead and, simultaneously, rested his other hand on my ass. Actually, "rested" is the wrong word -- he cupped it and squeezed.

I assure you I stopped breathing, and tried to swallow but all my reflexes had momentarily forgotten their functions.

"Oh, excuse me!" he exclaimed with mock-innocence. "I almost lost my balance..."

"And I almost lost my load," I breathed.

He laughed his playful haha laugh and jumped back into the kitchen. For the rest of the day I half-wondered if I were suffering delusions. I couldn't believe what he had done -- it was too far out of character, there had to be some explanation which would prove the expression "too good to be true." Throughout the rest of the day I deliberately gave him several opportunities to venture another physical joke of this sort, but he never took advantage of it. So that evening, being hardly able to stand the tension, I ventured one myself. It was late, and we were watching the tiny TV in the living room. Nasser was dressed for bed, wearing loose white sweatpants and a tank top undershirt, an outfit which aggravated the most acute pining lust, by the way it at once revealed and concealed. Often I'd sit beside him on the sofa, surreptitiously stealing sidelong glances at his well-stuffed crotch, wondering if he ever noticed my own painfully erect state. Tonight, unable to restrain myself, I replayed his own prank. As he rose to change the channel, I reached out and grabbed his ass.

He didn't even flinch -- perhaps he'd expected it, or perhaps, even, he'd set me up for it. He merely said, still fumbling with the TV and without turning back, "Ah frocio." "Haha," I said and withdrew my hand. Joke over. He sat back down. Suddenly I became aware of our legs touching. "You like my ass, eh?" he said. There was no derision in his voice; if anything, there was encouragement, as if he were asking if I liked the taste of a wonderful food I had sampled for the first time.

"I like every part of you," I half-purred, half-giggled, and gently ran my hand up his hairy forearm.

For a moment Nasser still showed no response to being touched; then he suddenly sprung up from the sofa with a guffaw. "Vaffanculo!" he cried, still laughing. He flung himself down in an armchair a few feet away from the sofa, covering his crotch with both hands. "You make my dick hard like a woman, frocio!"

I could only laugh back, though my laugh was now hollow and strained -- I wanted him so badly it was no laughing matter!

So it went. I considered the grabass episode to be the second "breakthrough." The third -- I said there were several, did I not? -- might be called the straw the broke the camel's back, no puns with reference to Egypt intended. It was simply that I started to give Nasser massages, or at least back-rubs. I'm not sure exactly when and how this started -- I think it was merely another passion crime. When one can't rub a man's dick, the only other acceptable parts of his body he can conceivably rub are his back and shoulders, and the nape of his neck. Like all of our other advances, this too began as a jest, when I clapped my hands on his shoulders, standing behind his chair after coffee, as a gesture of humorous bonhomie. He liked it, and encouraged me to go all the way. "Be a buddy, will you?" he said. "Go ahead and rub my shoulders. I'm sore and I could really use a massage."

I obliged, and before long we established a routine. I had found something to which he could afford to be responsive without risking any social, personal or religious transgression. In Mediterranean countries men are far more "touchy" with each other than they are in the United States, and nobody took issue with the occasional exchanged backrub at the staff table. Paolo cracked a goading comment once or twice, as I stood deeply and rhythmically kneading Nasser's meaty shoulders, eliciting deep guttural groans and sighs of gratification. There was something primitive and animal about Nasser and one of its manifestations was the way he gave himself so readily and unselfconsciously to the indulgence of a rubdown. For a man of such stern repressions he certainly expressed the pleasure of having the muscular tension worked out of him in an almost pornographically vocal fashion; in retrospect I can avouch that he purred more loudly getting a backrub than when getting a handjob! I suppose it boils down to which of the two pleasures he considered permissible. Sure, he was a hypocrite -- constantly he contradicted himself, and with great passion! But what did I care? All I wanted was his dick -- his wife could have all the rest.

It was a massage, as might be expected, that finally led to the first handjob. Ancient astronomers believed that certain things could happen only if celestial bodies converged into favorable conjunctions. In the case of Nasser the favorable conjunction was the convergence of all the "breakthrough" elements at the right time -- the specter of masturbation and "relief" which I had roused and refused to let subside; the homoerotic horseplay which had been established as a means of testing and pushing boundaries; the recent adjunct of backrubs, an obvious sublimation of libido which had added a new layer of sensuality and intimacy to our relations. And one night, after half of year of waiting and hoping and fantasizing and agonizing, the timing was right and it just happened.

We were watching TV, as usual, on the couch. It was late on the night of Nasser's day off, and he had spent the day playing soccer with his Arab buddies. I got up to get a drink of water, with the intention of going into my room to read. Crossing the living room I hesitated behind the couch, something on the TV having caught my eye. Then I became conscious of the exquisite hunk sitting beneath me. My hands dropped automatically to his shoulders; he was wearing his tank top, and this was the first time I'd touched them bare. I didn't move my hands, just rested them on his big smooth shoulders, as if it were a friendly good-night gesture. Nasser gave no response, but after a pause I felt awkward and reluctantly began to withdraw my hands. At that moment he shifted in his seat and once again the light bulb lit up over his head. "Hey -- how about a massage? Just a short one, come on..."

No words ever sounded sweeter. I went right to work, but with a sensuousness and care I'd never been able to luxuriate in before, when in public. I think he must have been aware of the difference, or at least felt it; he became languid and closed his eyes, lolling his head slowly from side to side as I massaged his neck. I ached something fierce to go whole-hog and run my fingers through his lush black hair, that glossy pelt of raven black curls that had so much to do with his studliness. I got bold a couple times and inched up from the nape of his neck to rub the back of his head. It was like petting sable!

The lights were dimmed; the only real illumination was the erratic flicker of TV. My slow, rhythmic rubbing had put both of us in a kind of hypnotic trance. It was all I could do to not let myself sink forward and fold myself around him, to hug his chest and nuzzle the crook of his neck with my lips against his ear. I felt almost willing to risk whatever disaster it would have incurred just for the momentary ecstasy of cuddling him. But somehow I managed to keep my decorum!

"Are you falling asleep?" I asked softly.

His eyes were closed; he smiled and purred, "Almost... You're good at this."

"Why don't you spread out on the couch so I can give you a real massage. If you think a neck-rub is good, wait till you try a body-rub."

He didn't need convincing; he slumped down as if his bones had turned to rubber and swung his legs up on the sofa. I moved to the other side and perched myself on the edge of the cushion. Nasser crossed his ankles and propped them up on one arm of the sofa, then crossed his arms and lay his head sideways over them, facing the TV. I resumed my work. After I moment, careful to keep the urgency from my voice, I said, "Take your undershirt off, so I can get at your lower back muscles. You have a lot of tension..."

He started to comply, and I helped him. I remember thinking, Ah, the thrill of undressing a man. This is what I live for. The broad golden-brown expanse of his back bare lay before me. How awesome, I thought to myself, is this force we call passion. You can go to the beach and see bare backs until your eyes burst, but when the one man you want takes off his shirt it moves you like a glimpse of God's glory.

"Wait," I said. "We need some oil for this." I started off to get the little bottle of baby oil I kept in my room for purposes that need no explication.

Nasser crooked his head. "Oil?"

"It'll make everything smoother," I said, settling once more over him. "Don't worry, I'll just use a little." I dispensed more than a little into my palm and began to work it into his back. Before long the muscles rippled and glistened like silk. Gradually I felt the knots turn to butter. As vocally enthusiastic as he was when I rubbed his shoulders at the restaurant, he was unwontedly silent now. Either he was uncomfortable and waging an internal battle with himself, or more likely he was engulfed by a state of deep relaxation. Whatever the case, I wasn't stopping until he told me to!

Over the course of a quarter-hour I worked myself down to the small of his back. His white sweatpants were riding low and once or twice I had to slip the tips of my fingers under the elastic rim of his white cotton briefs, in order to reach the coccygeal muscles. This excited no objection: was he asleep? No -- I looked up and saw that his eyes were open, and blurrily focused on the TV.

"Are your legs sore from playing today?" It was more a suggestion than a question.

After a pause he nodded assent. "Yes."

"Let me help you out of these." I started to pull off his sweatpants. He raised his hips to assist me, and a moment later, to my amazement, I was rubbing baby oil into the furry slabs of his leg muscles. I started at the bottom, first working his Achilles' heels, then the massive square calves, before venturing up between the backs of his wonderfully warm thighs.

"Spread your legs a little so I can get at the inner muscles," I said. How tame he'd become, almost docile, so that he answered every bidding with immediate acquiescence! As he parted his legs I could see his balls bulging between them, encased in white cotton. There they were, the procreant gonads he had already made legend. So close!

My patience lasted only another five minutes or so before I just had to flip him over. I hoped to disarm him with the justification that his frontal thigh and chest muscles must be tense, too. My voice caught once or twice in my throat as I stammered forth my request. I don't know whether or not my reasons did any disarming, but at any rate they worked: he turned over.

When he did so he draped one arm over his head, hiding his face. I found the gesture both tragic and sexually exciting in the extreme. It was as if to say, "I surrender -- take me and do with me what you will!"

The bulge across the front of his briefs was appropriately hefty, but still soft. I purposely tore my eyes away from it, because already I felt myself getting sucked down into his crotch as if it were a, irresistible vortex. "Just pretend it isn't there," I told myself silently. "It's private property -- off limits, no trespassing, hands off. It belongs to someone else and isn't yours, and never will be yours. So don't even think about it."

I forced myself to concentrate on what I could touch. His chest had wonderful natural definition, accentuated by sports and well-placed hair-soft fleecy dark swirls naturally close to the skin, as if it had been trimmed or cropped. These configured into twin fans of fur to either side of the upper pecs below the clavicle, joining below into a "treasure trail" which directed the eye down toward the navel, where it diffused again into a mat that grew increasingly thicker until it disappeared under the white briefs. Despite the hair on his chest and stomach his torso was relatively smooth compared to his extraordinarily hirsute lower body -- there was a definite demarcation at the waist, below which the thicket grew wild and truly reinforced the resemblance to a satyr. I took great pleasure in rubbing oil into his torso, testing the heft and firmness of his abdominals which gave way to the slightest of love handles -- Jesus, how a muscular man with a little soft-padding makes me drool. The best way to describe his body is to say that it invited me to cuddle up against him and fall asleep in his embrace. If only I could have fulfilled that urge!

I alternated between working Nasser's legs and his torso. I changed position to kneeling before the couch on a couple of the back cushions, and he joined his arms behind his head and lay blithely watching TV while I explored every inch of his body that was not still covered. I found that if I wanted to move or reposition some part of him I could do so myself, and he wouldn't move it back. I felt like a child playing with the world's most wonderful stuffed animal!

As an experiment I raised one of his legs so that it draped over the back of the sofa, and pulled the other so that it hung over the side. This way his legs were spread almost in a splits, with his cock and balls prominently displayed and the round firm cusps of his buttocks bulging beneath. He offered no objections to the position, which he seemed to find natural and comfortable enough, even though I had contrived it for him to my own advantage. I leaned forward and encircled the raised thigh with both hands, squeezing and kneading it between the palms and fingers. In doing so it happened that my left forearm lightly grazed the prominent fly of his briefs, so that for one enthralling instant I felt the fleshy warmth of his half-flaccid cock. My skin against his, if only for the thinnest barrier of cotton!

Again he didn't object; or if he did, he didn't let on. Emboldened, I let my forearm gently rest on top of that spongy wad of flesh the filled up the front of his briefs. It was nowhere near fully hard; it felt soft and springy and warm and cozy, like a hot water bottle!

The contact started to speed up the erection process. I continued to work both his legs and abdomen; when I rubbed downward on his midriff with the fingertips of my left hand, edging into the tangle of black hair under the band of his briefs, he gave a faint ticklish twitch. Then I made my boldest move yet: with the thumb and first two fingers of my right hand I gently pinched the firm and meaty muscle between his legs just under the scrotum. This was in fact the root of his cock: a musculature that holds considerable tension, especially sexual. It grew more stiffer and more prominent as I rubbed, probed, and felt it out. So did his entire cock.

Now I made no bones (forgive the pun) about watching his crotch, where a definite and visible stirring was taking place. I was surprised that he had held out as long as he had without pitching a hard-on. Now it was as if a floodgate had been released, and all the blood waiting to fill his dick rushed in at once. Before my eyes his briefs ballooned and rose; it was like watching a circus tent go up. My own dick was so hard I felt as if I might cum in my pants without touching myself.

Despite what was happening Nasser continued to stare at the TV. It was as if he had disconnected himself from his own body; whatever was going on below the neck was own of his hands. I was only too happy to take it into my own!

I somehow managed to graduate from maneuvers in my handiwork which afforded me quick, "accidental" touches with his cotton-sheathed erection, to direct, if gingerly proddings and probings with my hand. As his erection grew and filled up his briefs, stretching the fabric taught, I probed further up from the root muscle between his legs into the sub-scrotal area itself, along the hard shaft base. I rubbed back and forth this way for a while, up and down under his balls, each time sliding a little further up until the outer edge of my hand was nudging up against them. Then I hitched my thumb under the scrotum against the same root muscle, and with my two fingers probed into the shaft base in circular motions, as if I were pinching his tail-bone.

Still Nasser voiced no scruples. Here I was, in a kind of erotic limbo: brave enough to probe around the base of his cock but still too timid to climb up the trunk. From here I could go two ways: I could back down and preserve a fragile peace or I could march forward onto a potential land mine, and risk the wrong kind of explosion!

I risked it. I copped a feel of his dick. I still couldn't bring myself to grab it whole-hog -- instead I gingerly gauged the thickness of the now fully hard shaft between two fingers; the width was equal to three fingers of my other hand. I had not been wrong in my hunch.

I sensed I had gone as far as I could without offering some justification to go further. In hindsight, of course, I was a sissy -- he never would have let me go nine-tenths of the way only to object at the last tenth. But hindsight is always 20/20, while foresight is half-blind. So I hesitated, even then. I couldn't bring myself to take advantage of his dilemma. I had to ask permission.

It was now or never. It took me a moment to find my voice, but when I did, the words seemed to form of their own accord: "You need some relief, don't you?"

Without shifting his eyes from the TV screen, he nodded. "Yes." His voice was thick and unsteady, as if he, too, had trouble finding it.

"Do you want me to relieve you?" I asked. "I will if you want me to."

For a long time I wasn't sure he would answer. My fingernails grazed up and down the broad expanse of his hard-on.

"Okay. Go ahead."

Whatever was happening was part of an inexorable course, which neither of us could now stop. Gently, with light fingers, I lifted the elastic band from his waist and drew it down. I felt like a doctor examining a patient in a physical -- a role which, I must confess, tantalized me and enhanced the living fantasy I was so lucky to be realizing.

I know that all cocks in male erotic stories are big, just like all mythological heroes are handsome. If I can only stress to the reader that the story he is reading is not fiction, and that I've tried to describe my experience as faithfully to the vivid and detailed memory of it I keep. But God help me, Nasser's cock was big. Bigger than average, anyway, or should I say bigger than most of the cocks I've handled, by a significant measure. I'm not sure of its dimensions in inches or anything -- I can only tell you that it was a doughty and intimidating organ, a thing of mass and heft and formidability, sharing the same attributes of the rest of his build -- solidity, sturdiness, strength. The mahogany shaft was shaped more like a block than a tube, built up laterally by slabs of thickly sliced cock-meat that gave it its majestic width. There were two or three pencil-thick blood vessels protruding around the base and disappearing into the shaft midway; apart from these the cock was smooth. The glans was by no means small, but since the shaft widened in the middle the illusion was that it was disproportioned, the way a bodybuilder's head looks too small for his body. But as I said this was an illusion: when I encircled the shiny flesh helmet with my thumb and forefinger, it proved to have the circumference of a golf ball. Nasser's cock, notwithstanding its velvet-on-steel hardness, possessed ample loose, nervy skin skirting the flange of the head, especially in the cleft: the surgeon had dealt with him generously at his circumcision. In its fully engorged and excited state it was a wonderful, magnificent cock, a noble monument to Priapus, Roman god of procreation.

I stood up and slid Nasser's briefs down his legs and off. He finally turned his head away from the TV, as if his naked, erect condition had just hit home. He looked down his nose through half-sunken eyelids at what must have seemed to him an inconceivable wonder: his beautiful heterosexual hard-on in another man's hand. How had it ended up there? I'm sure at that moment neither of us had a clue... I couldn't tell from his expression -- or should I say lack of one -- whether he was appalled or contented by this state of affairs. But nothing was holding him down on that couch, and so far he hadn't stopped me. So once again I told myself: Keep going until he calls it quits!

I couldn't say how long it was that I knelt there just holding his cock without moving, just staring at it. It might have been ten seconds, it might have been a minute. I couldn't really say. Nasser turned back to watch the TV. Even with his dick in my hand he was inscrutable! His aloofness could have meant anything. Denial? Repugnance, forcing him to look away? Or did he feign nonchalance, when in fact he was in shock? Looking back, of course I know now and knew then (though in the moment one is apt to forget) that a free man is likely to give his dick to someone only if he wants to. After all, nobody was paying him to do this.

I couldn't wait to jack him off and make him cum. It was time to lube him up. I still couldn't believe it -- I was actually going to do it, I was going to jack Nasser off! It was really and truly happening. Any of you who have experienced this lightheaded feeling of delighted disbelief will know the true meaning of the expression "I almost had to pinch myself." Yet in spite of this dizzying sensation I felt in complete control -- each of my actions was definite, decisive, choreographed to a languid and sensuous rhythm. I strove to capture a sense of slowing down time so that this wondrous episode would last forever. I was almost sure (though I later proved wrong) that it would be the first and last time I'd ever see his dick. So I relished each instant before it passed, strained to extract the fullest savor from this fantasy made real.

With most guys I like to lube up my palm first and then slowly, with the most exquisite tenderness, start to stroke them off. The first stroke, given the right timing of anticipation and an almost ethereal pressure, never fails to elicit a visceral, and often vocal, reaction. But with Nasser, I didn't want to let go of his cock for an instant, once it was in my hand. I was afraid of giving it up -- somehow I imagined that once I let it out of my grasp, the spell would break and he would come to his senses, realize how far we'd gone and end both the encounter and our friendship with a spate of heated words, or even fisticuffs. But as long as I held it in my hand, and kept up the contact and stimulation, then his resistance would be suspended and I could carry on to the sweet end. I knew, of course, that this wasn't really true, but nevertheless I couldn't bring myself to let go of his cock. So instead of greasing my palm first, I pinned the base of his cock with my left fist, pulling the skin down tight so that the tip pointed skyward (there was no perceptible curve to the shaft). Then I took the squeeze-bottle in my right hand and drizzled baby oil down the streamlined head with as much lugubrious deliberation as I could, until the whole shaft glistened wet and the oily rivulets ran down to form a moat where my thumb and forefinger encircled the base. Some of the oil dribbled down into the dense black fuzz which carpeted his scrotum -- this, I should add, was the size of a tennis ball and housed gonads made for heavy breeding. Once I had emptied an obscene amount of oil all over his cock, I put the bottle aside and slowly, exquisitely, tenderly, wrapped my hand around it and, exerting the slightest pressure, brought it up in a smooth twist over the head. At the same time my left hand slid from the mossy thicket of his pubes down between his thighs to support his balls. The sheer tonnage of these sperm-tanks was simply amazing to feel -- I cradled them in my palm and gently rolled them around. It felt like two just-boiled eggs in a suede pouch!

I was careful to monitor Nasser's face as I dealt the first stroke. I always watch a guy's face as much as possible while I masturbate him, and make it a point to see his reaction to that first dressing of lube, if I can help it. Some guys don't react at all -- it's all held in, until the very end and sometimes even then -- while others exaggerate their pleasure for the sheer pleasure of exaggerating their pleasure! Nasser's reaction was nearer the conservative side. He didn't make any sound, nor any pronounced body movements, but I noticed two very definite changes which took place immediately after I started stroking. His breathing audibly deepened and slowed, beginning with a first deep inhalation, and as he blinked his eyes appeared to slightly roll up into the sockets each time the lids lowered. This kind of slow, rolling blink is typical of a person who is very sleepy, but Nasser was wide awake -- I made sure of it by asking him a question.

"Feel good, big guy?"

He returned my admittedly gratuitous inquiry with the briefest of grunts, the sort of sound of half-grudging affirmation one makes by releasing a breath involuntarily held. It sounded like a very short: "Hm."

I continued stroking, keeping things slow and easy. I certainly did not want to rush this. He didn't object to my free hand roving -- as it had before -- all over his body, even though the quality of the touch was now unabashedly sensual rather than therapeutic, a true caress rather than a massage. I roamed his chest again, feeling my fingers ski through the hair on his abs and pecs, lingering at the nipples which were hard and stubby as pencil erasers. It took all my strength of will to resist running my hand all the way up his neck and face, to stroke his sandpapery cheek and the plush razorcut hair at his temples. Indescribable ecstasy would have been to kiss him, to lock lips and tongues with him, to suck on his neck or his ear, but this, alas, was the exclusive privilege of only one other person in the world, and that person wasn't me. So I contented myself by expressing all this pent passion and hunger manually, channeling the fierce-tender cravings that possessed me through my hands and hopefully transmitting them to his body. I concentrated my stroking on the upper third of the cock, sometimes grasping the base with my left hand and working the "neck" of the cock with slow-pulsing beats, sometimes drawing the cock back close to his navel and rotating my wrist for a figure-eight stroke while I tickled his bristly balls with light, feathery fingers. Now and then I went overhand, using a "revving" stroke which put direct friction across the back of the glans -- his legs expanded and his toes fanned apart when I did this, and his head rolled back.

"Oh, yes," I murmured. "You need relief real bad, don't you, boy?"

Again he snorted: "Hm."

"Well you're gonna get it. Hell yeah, you're gonna get just that."

I advantaged myself of his spread legs to palm-sled his inner thighs. How I wanted to snuggle down and lie between them -- I'd be safe there and nothing in the world could harm me! What was exposed of his buttocks as he lay on the couch with his legs spread apart I caressed too, along with the thick buttress of muscle that was his cock-root. His whole body swelled slightly when I did this, with an audible drawing of breath through slightly flared nostrils.

"When you feel yourself getting close," I said, "I want you to tell me. Okay?"

"Okay."

"That way I'll know to stay clear of the head. You know how sensitive that gets at the end."

"Okay."

For a few minutes the only sound in the room besides the soft drone of the TV was the steady, moist smack-smack-smack of our flesh-piston action. Then suddenly his head bobbed forward and he said, "Do you want to finish me off in the bathroom?"

I was taken aback. "In the bathroom? Why, are you close already?"

His head fell back and he relaxed somewhat. "No... not yet, it takes a while sometimes."

"Well if you're comfortable here just relax and when it's time just let loose. You'll want to take a shower afterwards anyway because of the oil."

"If we go into the bathroom then I'll stand up while you finish me and that way it won't make a mess."

The prospect of a standing cum was intriguing, but didn't appeal to me as much as simply getting him off lying on the couch. "Well don't worry about the couch, I'll clean up if anything gets on it."

"No, you don't understand," he said. "It's gonna go everywhere. When I cum it's a big deal."

Straight from his mouth! Just when I thought I couldn't get any harder in my pants, my dick doubled in size, or so it felt. My erection was so full it ached. "Well we can put down some towels under you, or a sheet or something. Let me get something."

I found an old queen-size wool duvet in the linen closet that hadn't been unfolded in years and Nasser -- Goddammit he looked glorious standing there naked and hard -- graciously got up long enough for me to drape it over the couch before plopping back down into his delicious recumbancy... My lust at this point was so intense that I was sure I'd cum in my pants when he did in my hand.

"Do you always shoot big loads? When was the last time you came?"

He was staring at the TV again while I started where I'd left off. "A long time ago."

"Really? How long is long?"

"Before I left Egypt."

"What?"

He didn't reply.

"You've got to be shitting me."

"No, it's true."

"You mean to tell me that the last time you relieved yourself was over six months ago?"

"I wasn't relieving myself. I was fucking my wife."

Damn the bitch to hell! "How can you last that long? I have to cum every other day at least or I crawl the walls..."

He shrugged as best he could under the circumstances. "It happens by itself... when I'm sleeping..."

"Wet dreams," I mused. "When was the last time you had one?"

At first I thought he wasn't going to answer, he was quiet so long. But he had been thinking. "About a month ago."

"Damn. No wonder you needed this relief." The Italian word we used -- sfogo -- has more meaning in it than the English word "relief." Sfogo means both relief and release -- it carries a train of contextual nuances such as "to let go of a burden" or "to discargo." Therefore the English colloquialism "drop a load" is really more apt a translation than "relief"!

Nasser said simply, "Yes I do need it." There was a matter-of-fact resignation in these words, as if he were acknowledging an unavoidable and not too virtuous necessity of life. I wondered where the issue of sin was in his mind, but I didn't wonder too hard.

His version of "a while" was precisely five minutes. I was surprised he held out even this long, considering it had been a month since his last ejaculation (could a wet dream really be considered an orgasm? I would know, never having had one). There were no overt gesticulations or tremors leading up to the climax -- only a marked increase in the force and speed of his exhalations (still through the nose, the lips pressed shut) and an in-and-out heaving of his chest and belly. His legs were stretched forward, the feet extended, toes clenched and pointed. There were strong grips of the abdominal musculature, so that the cuts stood out briefly -- then a sudden sharp exhalation, almost a snort.

I looked up at his face. His head was held stiffly back, the muscles of his neck frozen. "Gonna cum?"

"Hm," he grunted thickly. I could tell by his tone and the look in his face that things were getting serious.

"Okay," I said. "I'll take you through it, buddy. Just let yourself go. I'm gonna stroke all the tension out through your dick, every drop. Just let yourself go all the way and don't hold back. Let yourself get the relief you need, full relief."

My stroking pattern up till then had been a merciless, rhythmic wrist-twist back and forth over the upper shaft and glans ridge, approached by a gradual acceleration of tempo and corresponding increase in pressure. My left hand was clamped down at the base, the fingers pressing into the pubis where the sac had begun to pull up and tighten as he ascended the last sudden rise of the "plateau" which would carry him over the edge. Now I narrowed my strokes even more, without relenting in tempo, squeezing even harder for maximum friction and using a tight ring made of my thumb and forefinger. This way almost all of the stimulation was constricted around on the nerve bundle just under the head at the split -- and I knew from the restrained jerks of his body that this action was causing Nasser substantial physical joy.

"Let it go... just let it go, man," I urged him. My tone was one of encouragement and consent, since I knew that only a man with deep repressions (is there such a term as penile retentiveness?) could go six months without masturbating.

Whether in response to my egging or not, he came right on cue. Now try to imagine the ejaculation of a man, probably a heavy cummer as it is, who has stored up semen for over thirty days since his last nocturnal emission. If this doesn't give you a clear picture of what that means, let me describe it for you. There were no "ropes" or "streams" of sperm -- Nasser's anatomy evidently wasn't made to produce that kind of ejection. Instead, he came in a series of abrupt, rhythmic bursts which showered everything within a yard's radius with thousands of pattering, pearly droplets. I felt the violent, shuddering palpitations of his deep cock muscles that sent these rapid-fire rounds of spunk hurtling through the air like liquid confetti. It was chaos theory epitomized.

"Good man!" I exclaimed softly. "Just let it all out, Nasser, sfogati... sfogati..." ("Drain yourself, let yourself go...")

I kept lulling him like this while pummeling him through the last crucial kinks of what reverent Onanists call "the white ecstasy." My knuckles and fingers were dripping with the rain of cum, adding a thick sloppy note to the sweet music of stroking. His ejaculate was very warm and fluid, and as he had divulged in jest, quite creamy. And God, did it reek. The whole living room of the apartment was rank with the telltale mowed-grass odor of baby batter by the time I'd milked it all out of him. Jesus, I thought, this guy can breed. His toes gave their last convulsive cycle of clenching and spreading, and as I hand-hugged his balls I felt the iron-toned rigidity of his ass muscles beneath. He shuddered a little, wincing and knitting his brows.

I ceased all motion with my fingers and hand, clutching his wasted cock in a vise-grip. For ten seconds Nasser's body held stiff in prolonged rigor orgasmus, his face frozen in a kind of dumb deadpan stupefaction. In the weeks that followed I grew to know that face intimately. It was the faintly disoriented mask of post-orgasmic shellshock: the eyes vaguely misted, the forehead damp and beaded, the nostrils flared, the mouth compressed into a firm line and the jaw set, as if he were grinding his teeth. Then all at once his body went slack and he slumped back into the cushions, all limbs asprawl. His head rolled back and he puffed out a long, pent breath through his cheeks. Now he closed his eyes and a look of deep lassitude and utter depletion overspread his features.

"You needed that, didn't you?" I laughed, not in any hurry to let go of his cock, which had begun to deflate to a slippery, pulpy mass in my hand, as if I were holding onto a giant banana slug.

"Hm," he murmured.

He raised himself up on his elbows, somewhat stiffly as if his abdominals hurt, and surveyed the extraordinary mess of scattered sperm that covered both of us and our surroundings. There were puddles and splotches as far as his neck and the armrest of the couch, and later when I cleaned up I found traces of Nasser's astonishing fecundity on the floorboards near the coffee table: billions of little Arab babies, sinfully squandered!

"Christ almighty," I whistled. "I can't believe all of that came out of one guy. What do have in there, four extra testicles?"

Nasser gave a snort of laughter. "I told you I cum a lot," he said. "That's why I wanted to do it into the shower."

"Wow. I'm glad we covered up the couch."

"Yeah, but I still have to take another shower now."

"Sorry about that."

"It's okay."

My mind still tingled with the notion that he always came in such spectacular profusion. My next thought -- that he dumped such copious loads of his sweet spawn into his wife on a regular basis -- brought home that stabbing pang of jealousy and envy that every homosexual, no matter how manly or self-assured, has at one time in his life felt for the female of the species. Jesus Christ, I thought -- her pussy must leak cum for days after a fuck.

After Nasser took his shower and put on a fresh pair of briefs (which he always wore to bed), nothing more was said of the incident and, as I'd thrown the sperm-soaked duvet into the hamper and cleaned up all the evidence, it was as if it had never happened. His good-night exchanges were neither warmer nor cooler than usual, and it was my impression that he had totally dismissed the evening's event from mind. But just before closing his door and turning out the light, he said -- and there was no mistaking the mandate in his tone: "Don't tell anyone about what happened tonight."

"Who would I tell?" I said automatically, not so much defensive as placating.

"Whoever. You have gay friends. Just keep it to yourself."

"Of course," I said, not too ruffled. "I just gave you a massage, that's all that happened, right? It's not like I'm going to publicize it on the Internet or anything."

"Right. Buona notte." He closed the door.

The following day I worked in the restaurant, and all was as before. Nasser whisked here and there about the kitchen as usual, barking imperatives at the staff just as he did on every other day: "Maxim, turn down that flame." -- "Laura, stir that." -- (To me:) "Hand me the cognac." -- (Shouting:) "Paolo, the porcini crêpes are ready -- just take them out of the oven, please." -- "Laura, the spotted spoon please. And stir that, for the second time." -- (To me again:) "Go get the fillet from the meat fridge, the one on the hook. Run. Grazie."

All day I tried to curb my mind, to keep it from wandering where it naturally wanted to go -- back down Nasser's pants to his dick which I feared I had lost forever. But my thoughts refused to be leashed. Everything in his manner and behavior signified a return to the ordinary, suggesting that last night's affair had been a freak occurrence, never to be repeated or discussed. I vacillated back and forth between this dreaded conclusion and a more rational, level-headed one: "Oh, come on," I told myself. "What did you expect, that he'd divorce his wife, abandon his faith, turn gay and live happily ever after with you? For God's sake, the man's got a family and a home in Cairo! He's here to make some extra money so he can get his kids an education. You've already gotten more out of him than you ever dreamed possible before yesterday so stop pouting and get with the program."

For several hours, at least, I managed to clamp down on that part of myself that hoped, against all rationality, that he'd somehow pay special attention to me now, that somehow our relationship had changed because of what had happened. It had, of course, but it had changed differently for each of us.

Whatever his feelings were, I could hardly expect him to express them in any mode congruous with my American, cosmopolitan, godless, gay-tolerant upbringing. How could he? I knew I wasn't being fair, that my sulking was selfish: after all, he must be roiling inside with a dozen conflicting emotions, struggling to reconcile what he must necessarily see as a serious slip in conduct with the tenets and ideals of his creed and culture. If I knew what was good for me, I would take a step back and let him be for a while. I did.

Until, of course, he did something ambiguous which sent my mind careening back the other way. I was at the espresso machine -- a place where this sort of thing happened frequently, probably because it was an enclosed corner -- when he came out of the kitchen to take a breather. He asked me for a coffee and, in thanking me, put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. Instantly I turned hopeful again. Not the sort of gesture which said "Leave me alone"!

I found him taking a breather out on the back patio, sitting on a crate. I joined him and we sipped our coffee in silence for a couple minutes, enjoying the breeze.

"You look preoccupied," I offered.

"No," he said, "just tired."

"Ah." Then, cautiously, I added, "We were up late."

"Hm."

I took a slightly deeper plunge. "Are you still sore?"

"Always," he said, and rolled his shoulders as if becoming conscious of them again. "This work kills me," he said. "Standing there in the hot kitchen all day, all the stress... The massage you gave me last night wore off before lunch had even started. It's like I need another one all over again."

"Well," I drawled, mulling it over with my tongue in my cheek. "Okay. I guess I can give you another one during the siesta, if you really need one."

He smiled faintly. Then he gently kicked my shoe -- a gesture of facetious camaraderie. "But this time -- just a massage. The pants stay on."

"It's a deal."

Flash forward. When I flipped him over to do his legs, voilà -- he was pitching full-mast again.

He grinned quietly down at his ostensible condition. "I got hard," he confessed sheepishly. "Heh."

"So I see. I thought you only wanted a massage this time."

"I do. It'll go down after you stop touching me."

"If we don't take care of that, it might stay up all day."

"I'll take a cold shower afterwards."

"Well, it's up to you."

I went on working his legs, working my way down to his feet, then back up again.

"I think I need another release," he said finally. "But this time let's do it over the shower."

The shower occupied a small corner of the bathroom, sunken below the floor level, curtained off. I sat on the toilet lid while I administered the "release," with Nasser standing naked before me, leaning forward on his tip-toes, bracing himself against the curtain rod. With my free hand I held his leg, roamed his body... he didn't object to my clasping his rock-firm ass when he started to get the pre-orgasmic shakes. This time he said, "Eccolo," -- ("Here it is,") -- in a husky voice before thrusting his pelvis forward and spraying the shower cubicle with another salvo of hot spunk, which while nowhere near as prodigal as last night's splurge of thirty days' savings, was still enough to inseminate a harem and then some.

"Oh yeah, feel the orgasm... feel it as long as you can..."

"Hmmmmmm..."

Three weeks went by the handjobs became regular business -- an everyday routine. On the morning of his day off as I playfully reached for his briefs-packaged hardon -- and he playfully resisted me -- I planted the idea in his head that it was a good idea to get a load off before getting out of bed, to start the day off right. That way, I explained, he would feel more relaxed at work and be able to concentrate better.

"I know," he said. "At home I like to fuck my wife in the morning, that way I don't have to make her change her clothes again in the middle of the day."

"You fuck your wife twice a day?"

"If I can."

"What a stud. You tried to go from two cums a day to none, you fool."

"I can't masturbate."

"You can, you just won't. But you'll let me masturbate you."

"For some reason I don't mind if you do it for me. It doesn't feel like it's wrong because I'm not doing it. And since you're not a woman I'm not being unfaithful to my wife. But when I try to do it myself I feel lousy and have to stop. Then I usually have a wet dream the same night."

"You poor guy."

"It's true. But I need relief. Once a month isn't enough -- I'm a man, you know?"

"Do I ever."

"I just wish we could control our dicks, make them go hard when we want them to and stay down when we don't."

"Would be convenient," I said. "But we can't control them. They control us. It's the other way around."

"I know. Otherwise my dick wouldn't be hard right now like it is."

"Cat couldn't scratch a piece of meat this hard," I agreed, giving it a rough squeeze. "So let me tenderize it for you."

"All right, have it your way. But not in bed. Let's go into the bathroom."

"Fuck the bathroom. Look what I have here." I displayed a carton of condoms I had recently bought.

He looked up. "Rubbers?"

"I got the big ones to fit your dick. The big, oversize rubbers for your big, oversize dick, Nasser. I want to try stroking you off in a rubber. That way there's no mess."

"Yeah, but the rubber cuts down on the feeling. I never use them."

"I bet you never used one of these, either," I said, stepping out of the room and returning with a hand-held vibrator with a knob attachment.

"What the hell is that? Looks like it belongs in the kitchen."

"You'll see."

"No, I don't want that. I don't want the rubber either, it cuts the feeling in half."

"I thought you weren't doing this for the feeling, right? Just for the release, I thought."

For a second he was cornered. His evasion was flawless. "The feeling makes the release happen. Weak feeling, weak release."

"Don't worry," I reassured him, "I have a feeling that when I roll this condom over your monster the latex will be stretched so thin that you won't even know it's there. Besides, this vibe quivers really fast. You'd feel it even if you had a sock on your cock."

The rubber-vibe combo blew his mind -- I'm sure he had never imagined such a feeling before -- but we fell into the habit of using it only for his evening "releases." Mornings he preferred the standard handjob, for which I'd evolved the technique of aiming his load into a wide-mouthed plastic cup, to minimize mess. We kept that cup in the kitchen and gave it a quick rinse every time it was used, so it stayed for the most part on the dish rack and never made its way back to the cupboard. One day I came home to find my aunt drinking orange juice out of it, when she had come upstairs to hang our linens on the terrace!

I had taken Nasser up to two "releases" per day. This was an average -- sometimes more often, sometimes less. There was a stretch of about two weeks when he was particularly horny, which I like to call "The Fortnight of The Great Flood." He must have unloaded a gallon of cum during that interval. I jacked him off in his bedroom, in my bedroom, in the living room, in the kitchen (he half-sat on the edge of the sink, I mopped the floor afterwards), even on the terrace a couple times with the neighbors perfectly audible below. I myself had a special weakness for vibing him off in bed; I loved the way his legs writhed on the mattress, his heels scraping the sheets while the whirring knob glided along the length of his rubber-sheathed cock. At the end I would wiggle the knob back and forth against the nerve bundle just where the head cleaves -- his "joy-button" -- and groan along with him as the sperm rushed into the receptacle tip and flooded the entire condom. Those condoms were cum-balloons when he finished with them; they sagged heavy with juice when I slipped them carefully off, pinching the ends shut.

Often during the work-days I spent long bouts silently watching Nasser at work concocting ways to make him cum that I hadn't thought of before. Anal sex was out of the question -- the prospect never appealed to me. As far as I'm concerned, getting fucked is the province of women and what makes me tick personally is getting men off -- manually, for the most part, although now and again I've given my fair share of head. With Nasser fellatio might have been a line cross, or then again might not have, had I instigated it. But for some reason I never did, and he never suggested the idea, which was just as well. Because all I wanted to do was masturbate him, as frequently as he would let me. Sometimes that meant three times a day; at other times his resolve of old seemed to set in, and he would decline. But since the inception of the habit, he never held out longer than two or three days before he broke down and asked for my hand again. I began to suspect that his claims of previous long-term abstinence from solitary masturbation were exaggerated, or else totally fictitious. I just couldn't see such a hearty appetite for orgasm going unappeased for that long.

The orgasms I gave him using the vibrator were particularly hard-hitting; he actually gasped a couple times. Maybe he was "opening up" -- I couldn't say. His natural tendency toward reticence entered into sex: he was through-and-through the strong silent type. So I was lucky if I got a grunt or a curse-word out of him once in a while, when the cumming was especially good.

Over time I sought to scope out Nasser's mind, to discover his own feelings about his cock. I wanted to learn what he thought about its exceptional size, its thickness, its unscratchable hardness and enduring erectile power.

Not to mention its sheer beauty of form -- it had the streamlined splendor of a sportscar or a piece of architecture. What I learned, in the long run, was not much: he was aware of these things, but paid so little attention to them that, in effect, he took them for granted.

"I don't know," he said, scratching his head, awkwardly amused by my effusive curiosity. "I guess I never thought about it much."

"But you know your cock is big," I suggested, "don't you?"

He gazed down at it -- and once more I felt that inexpressible but genuine bond that a cock-worshipper shares with its owner. How I loved him at that moment!

He answered: "I didn't find out it was big until I got married. Before that I didn't really know. My wife says it's so big, but she's never seen another hard one before, and neither have I, so how can we judge?"

I was speechless. Never having compared himself to his peers, he was not even aware of his peerlessness! At thirty-one years of age he was like a naïve boy of twelve who, lacking a point of reference, believes his superb endowment to be merely normal. To me, that's like having a fortune in the bank and not knowing the value of the dollar!

"Well, take it from another guy," I said after a spell of inspecting the fine details of his priapic anatomy, "you're hung. You're so hung, it's an understatement to say you're hung. You have one of the most beautiful cocks I've ever seen, and you should be proud to be its owner. Any sensible man would be proud to have this thing between his legs and call it his own."

I spoke the truth. Other guys I've known who were as endowed as Nasser swaggered around with the most complacent sort of amour propre, content that very few others could outsize them. But Nasser had no such attitude; his total lack of physical conceit extended to every last inch of his body. To my subsequent amazement I would discover that his self-conception that he was in every way average also included his dick, whose size was of no more importance to him than the size of his thumbnail or the size of his knee. It was only toward the end of our interactions that he began to develop some sense of burgeoning phallic pride, and only because I planted the seed in his head and instilled the basic idea in him. One way I did this was, eventually, to show him my own dick, which while by no means small compared to the average was a pygmy compared to his giant. The experience made an impact on him -- I could see it on his face -- even though it was a little awkward; as often as I had seen and handled his cock, he had never seen or perhaps even thought about mine, until then.

"Well," he said, a little shyly as our cocks confronted each other for the first time, "yours doesn't look small, either."

"It isn't," I answered, "but I still could fit two of mine into yours and still have room."

He laughed. "Not quite!"

"I'm not complaining," I said. "I have a nice-sized Italian cock with a big head. It's nothing to laugh at. But yours is something to kneel before."

This nearly split his sides.

One day in the restaurant I wanted him so badly I could hardly see straight.

Several days previously he had refused my usual morning handjob. "Let's wait a few days," he said as if he had given the matter some thought. "I've been cumming too much lately, I've had low energy at work."

I pled like a child. "But you're hard now!"

"I know. It will go down later. Or even if it doesn't, I'll resist. It will be hard but I'll stick it through for the rest of the week. Then when I cum it will be a lot stronger."

He sold me on this prospect, because I was always searching for ways to give him bigger, more powerful orgasms. It was almost as if I'd sublimated my own masturbatory life into his own -- as if I were vicariously meeting my own bodily needs through his body, channeling my own dick through his dick. If only I really could feel exactly what he feels when he cums! This was a regular fantasy -- that somehow, the nerves in our cocks could be linked so that I would feel his orgasms along with him, simultaneously and identically. If only it were possible!

At last the end of the week arrived. That day at work I confronted him in the scullery closet, while he changed back into his work clothes after siesta.

"Tonight I'm going to slow-stroke you," I told him, looking him dead in the eye. "I'm going to use a lot of oil and a really tight grip, and stroke all the up way from base so slowly you'll be able to count 'one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand' before I reach the tip. Then back down. Over and over, and I'll never speed up. I'm going to drive you crazy and even if you beg me to go faster I'll just keep my lazy sweet time no matter how long it takes you to cum. And when you get close I'm going to stop and pull you back, and then start up again. Then I'll let you get close again and pull you back again. Over and over. Over and over. You'll be crying to cum. And when you can't take it anymore I'll let you go all the way. When you cum it will be the damnedest thing that ever went through you."

Nasser stared back with his serious brown orbs, and I think that on some level he must have been shocked by the open smuttiness of my proposal. All he said was: "Go back into the kitchen. Light the grill and fill the big pasta pot with water. Don't make me get hard here." I complied without argument.

That night I gave him the slow-motion handjob I had promised. It took him an hour and forty-five minutes to cum. When I finished with this treatment his body hung lax as a wet leaf after a storm, a thunderstruck expression on his face.

"Let me get you a glass of water," I said. "After getting rid of a load like that you're probably dehydrated."

When I returned to the States my contact with Nasser was sporadic. We exchanged a couple postcards, and when I called the restaurant the following Christmas we spoke briefly on the phone. I was hoping to make an excursion to Italy for several weeks in the spring, and he said he was looking forward to seeing me. He said, "We can be roomies again, just like old times." We both laughed, and the undertones of the remark scintillated in our laughter.

Several months later I was delayed with my plans. I called the restaurant and spoke to my uncle and aunt, and when I asked for Nasser to say hello, they told me he had quit shortly after New Year and had gone back to Egypt, leaving no address. That was the last news I heard of him.

Copright (c) 2000 by Bambino