I'm glad I missed combat. I'm glad I did not kill anyone in Vietnam. Yet I also remember something playful and magical about that all male community in basic training. I'm glad I lived with those men under those harsh physical conditions. I wish there were more channels for the intimate connection among men which the military affords.
Shepherd Bliss, "Men, Poetry, and the Military"
i.
The rain was beating hard against the panoramic window which wrapped around the front of the bus. The road was narrow, climbing, winding around the side of Mount Triumph. Every few minutes a thread of lightning cut nervously through the sky, and as quickly its brilliant ganglia disappeared. And then the thunderous rumble sounded, the heavy stones of heaven rolled. The bus continued to climb and Vic our driver kept the bus on its course, whistling softly as he drove, as cool as if it were a balmy morning in spring.
I was in that happy state I'd thought I'd lost touch with forever, staring out the window into the dark looking at nothing and seeing the inside of my desire. Half asleep and warm with a soft erection I was in love with everything, especially Tom, the guy sitting asleep next to me, whom I had only just met when we embarked at the depot in Manhattan.
ii.
Last night's rain had given way to a beautifully clear day. The golden light of middle August shone over the earth and the blue dome of an endless sky gave to even temporal things the feeling of eternity and the breadth of infinity.
I was happy.
iii.
The rule of silence began. We all were in bed before daylight had been completely absorbed by the darkness. Everything will be different in the morning. Everything will begin. I lay still without moving, entirely calm. Without the time to be aware of it, I lost consciousness.
iv.
Tom is standing in his bikini in front of the group. We are all gathered. It is the third day of our silence. From what I can see we are all surprised at the depth of contact we have developed with each other despite the fact that we are not permitted to speak and thus cannot talk to each other. In fact, I realize, and my sense is that everyone else does, too, that we are probably prevented from deeply, intimately, lastingly knowing each other by speech.
We try to talk our way into each other, asserting ourselves, denying ourselves, explaining ourselves, always trying to be understood, always trying to figure out who somebody else is, what somebody else means. But when speech is blocked, contact does not come from words but by giving ourselves, serving each other, anticipating needs, being receptive and available, getting inside each other. We cannot give each other orders or excuses, or even ask each other questions. We have no choice but to become each other.
Now we are all gathered in the amphitheatre on the hillside, and Tom is standing in front of us in his bikini, a form against the glowing verdure shimmering in the golden sunshine on a distant mountainside. And above him is an infinite blue sky with wispy clouds of pearl scattered here and there about it.
We are all simply gazing at Tom. We are focused on Tom. My eyes have roamed over his entire body, over his muscular legs and along his arms hypnotized by the bronzed skin covering his beautiful muscles. I have stared with a hunger I did not know I had at his shoulders and torso and those two circles of nipples on his muscular breasts. But my eyes have settled, after a long time gazing into his, on his shining black bikini and the outline of his masculinity, powerful, wonderful masculinity, at the center of it, the crowing cock perched as the crowning pediment upon the gorgeous columns of his thighs.
v.
It is all so easy. Without a word said I was kneeling before him, circling my lips round and round, brushing his balls and the underside of his cock, and feeling it harden with vitality under the elastic of his bikini. Then I adored his thighs, losing myself entirely as I hungrily bestowed kisses on them. He raised me, taking me by the shoulders. I stood and we were drawn to kiss. His tongue possessed me and mine surrendered to him. Everything was being done by a force which had overpowered us and which we obeyed as our own.
I knelt before him again and took his cock into my mouth and threw every nerve and fiber of mine into lavishing myself upon it, grateful for its existence, in heaven because it was filling my mouth.
To be glad that things exist, that others exist, that is the marvel we are being taught. And, furthermore, to value them! And the way you value someone is to devote yourself to his service entirely. And that's what we were being taught, how to give ourselves to each other and how to be the recipients of each other.
As I melted into Tom's cock, I felt a palm encircle my scrotum and take hold of it, and then I felt my own hardened cock surrounded by the wet warm mouth of a man mad with desire for it.
vi.
Silence filled our ears and the sky around us, silence as pale as the moon and as diaphanous as the thin clouds that pass in front of it.
Finally we could speak again, but we hardly did. We knew each other better than that and it wasn't necessary. Our chests had met. Our legs had wrapped around each other. We had known each other through our eyes. We were bound to each other by lust.
My mind was as vacant as the heavens and I knew I was alive because of a sense of muscular coordination. I was the pull and push of forces moving through my body and which moved my body. I became the pulsation of my breath, no longer the conception of my brain.
And I knew I was alive because of the desire I felt for the men I lived among and the lust for me I felt radiating from them.
Thirty-seven men in their mid-twenties, fit, healthy, rugged, handsome, all of one mind, all submissive to the same authority, all devoted to the same master, all proud to serve, all dressing in the same uniforms, all proud of their bodies, thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, desiring the same things, responding to commands with the same obedience, bound together by one heart.
vii.
Of all the places for a man of my tastes to wind up the Triumphal Common was the last place anyone who'd known me, including myself would have imagined.
I am twenty-seven years old, five ten sandy hair which the sun has streaked blond, hazel eyes, a good body -- square shoulders, great clavicles, eight pack, button nipples, sculpted. I've worked at it. I'm shaved smooth -- legs and chest, pubic hair trimmed. I look great in Armani suits, shirtless in tight leather pants and boots, in a little black t-shirt with hardly any sleeve and faded jeans, in posing gear and harness, or just in nothing at all. I'm friendly, not a snob. If you wanna make it with me, hey, I'm set to make it with you.
At seventeen I went to Silicon Valley. I had no reason to go to college when I was being offered a fifteen year contract beginning at sixty-thousand a year. I was, I confess, astonished when I first got a phone call one Sunday evening from a gentleman who had seen my website and wanted to talk with me. I admit I was less than suave. Is this some kind of a joke, I said stupidly.
He assured me it wasn't, made an appointment with me and kept it. The rest was history. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the rest was prologue.
I was a nerd. I did not look like the guy I just described. I lived in my brain. I tolerated my body, paid it no mind, and I appeased it because it was always making demands on me, and I just kind of wanted it to shut up and be good, leave me alone and let me work. So I neglected it and spoiled it, got it fat and out of shape because I found the easiest way to silence my body was to feed it. But I certainly didn't cultivate it, didn't train it, exercise it, groom it, present it as a worthy object. And I certainly did not subordinate myself to it or honor it with ritual homage. It was something like a chair I sat in. I did not know then that the highest honor we can do the body is bring it to orgasm, to let the leaves of being burst into disappearing flowers.
In other words my body was degenerating and my mind was serving an abstraction, mathematics and a corporate agenda, but I was lucky, luckier than some who have to wait more than half their lives to find out they aren't who they think they are and that they aren't doing what's theirs to do. In your twenties the body can still regenerate.
viii.
But your mind has to get itself together first. Or somebody has to get it together for you.
I did not have the language then. I did not have the understanding I have now. I never, then, could have put these things into words as I am now.
But I was lucky.
I was a scruffy guy, shaggy and unkempt. I lived in a virtual world and nothing mattered except the circuits through which information moved, and I was lost in a heaven of mathematics programming them.
Until I began talking to a guy on line, not talking, actually -- writing e-mails back and forth. Before I knew it I had clothed myself in an identity that really wasn't mine, but felt very authentic, more authentic than the identity I thought was mine.
I became very passive and obedient. I waited for his messages, and thrilled when I saw them in my inbox and shuddered when I read them and then sent back messages telling him how frightened I was of the depth of my devotion and the extent of my need for him.
He told me to light a candle and to gaze into the flame and put myself under, hypnotize myself and repeat to myself when I was in my trance that I was his, that I belonged to him and was only waiting for him to come and claim me physically, for he already possessed me spiritually. I began to meditate on the idea that I had an absolute need for him no matter what, whether he accepted me or not and that the only reason there was for me to do anything was in order to please him. My full self would only be expressed by serving him.
It came to pass as I was hoping it would: he invited me to meet him. When I did he was standing at the bar of the Cedar Tavern on Bay Street. I knew it was him not just because of the diamond glinting in his right ear that he'd told me about. There was authority embedded in his entire person. I saw that a handsome stud only in jeans and boots, no shirt, was gazing at him. I approached.
Sir? I said making a nervous inquiry to make sure I had chosen right.
He looked at me. I don't think I could say which of the two impressions I got of his face was the stronger -- its powerful beauty or the stern displeasure it showed.
He shook his head. You are not ready, he said. Go home. Wait for instructions.
I looked amazed and began to voice some kind of incoherent protest, but I was so thrown that I did not know what to say. I was hurt. I was angry. I was confused. I did not know what was going on. I wanted to say all that. But before I could say anything I heard his words again with the same flat sternness with which they were first spoken. You are not ready. Go home. Wait. But he sat quietly, not having said anything now, not even noticing me anymore. His words were only reechoing echoes in my mind.
I turned back downcast and obedient and went home.
In the mirror in front of me as I went up the few steps and out of the bar, I saw the stud move to where I had been standing and my master put his hand around his bicep.
ix.
I took a sick day Monday, and half in paralysis waited for a message from my master. Every time I clicked away from g-mail I'd click back in to see if maybe in that interval he had sent me something. Or I paced back and forth in my apartment like a caged animal with no creative mind, unable to transcend cage and no outlet for merely corporal energy.
x.
Finally on Monday night, like a mother's goodnight kiss without which the child cannot go to sleep, his message appeared in my inbox.
He said it was impossible to see me as I was at present, that I would have to undergo strong discipline, particularly I would have to learn self-discipline and I'd have to learn to respect the power of punishment and become addicted to the thrills of obedience.
I said I would undertake whatever measures he deemed necessary. I no longer even knew towards what end. But it didn't matter. I just wanted to do whatever he wanted me to do. That was all.
And he said we would see, but first I had to join a gym and get in good physical shape.
It's funny, I did not grimace. It is only now from this distance as I relate the incident that I realize but several months earlier I would have taken it as an absurd idea.
I simply typed back, yes, Sir. I will, Sir.
Two hours later I presented myself at Mike's front desk and said I wanted to join the gym.
xi.
Mike looked me over and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He was half smiling. He knew something I didn't.
Finally he said, Are you serious?
Serious?
Serious.
Yes, sir, I said. I am serious.
We shall see, he said.
xii.
But I was serious, or at least there was a force in me that was serious and determined and kept me focused no matter how greatly I struggled to resist.
It was strange. I was breaking in half and each part of me was struggling with the other to become me entirely and leave the other to wither away. I was a cold intellectual mathematician involved in the intricacies of the virtual world disdainful of the flesh. But I was also an erotic narcissist, a passionate romantic with a longing to be free of my own mind's domination, to surrender my will and to exist as muscle and flesh and unite myself with the muscle, flesh, and breath of other men and conform to a power that could bend me to its will. I felt the pulse of my being and I longed for it to become part of a greater pulse, the pulse of other men with whom I could blend in, whom I would become a part of, be indistinguishable from. I wanted to be bound in an inseparable brotherhood.
xiii.
Mike winked at me. I was an old friend.
You're lookin' good, Danny, he said as I was finishing a workout. And it was true. I was. I'd worked. I was carved, sculpted.
Thanks, Mike. You, too, I said, and it was true, besides being the courtesy I liked to show. Just what I liked about myself I liked about Mike. The hard flatness of his belly and the washboard. Just like mine. I breathed in and felt the desire to press my body against his.
I want to show you something, he said putting his arm round my shoulder and leading me to the office.
Look at this, he said reaching into his desk for some pictures of me I did not know existed. He had caught me the first day I had gone there in a series of shots getting undressed in the locker room.
Who is that troll? I said in horror.
You, dear, he said gently kissing my lips and taking my nipples between his thumb and forefingers.
I can blackmail you with it someday, he laughed. I have you in my power and I can do with you whatever I want. Obey me or I'll let the world know who you really are. On your knees and worship me with your mouth or else.
There was nothing I could do but comply.
xiv.
What I learned first from my master was to endure pain, and not only endure it but realize that I enjoyed it, especially when it was administered by a beautiful man whom I adored and whose power dazzled me.
I felt the joy of enduring pain because I was able to bear it. I was superior to the pain, and it was only through subordination to the will of my master that I could achieve such superiority.
xv.
This time he took me home and led me to his den and had me strip and turned me this way and that, pushed me down and pulled me up, looked into my mouth, fingered my anus, pressed my nipples harshly and fastened a clamp on one.
I shrieked. He pinched down on the clamp and sent another wave of sensation through me. I writhed.
Don't think of it as pain, he whispered. Think of it as a gift for which you are grateful. Always say thank you.
And he twisted the clamp.
A yelp of pain caught in my throat and instead I bowed my head and said thank you sir, and he kissed me and without my willing it tears fell from my eyes.
With a shock I felt another jolt as he tortured my nipple. I could not feel it as anything but pain, but I knew it was not pain but an ecstatic pleasure, a sense of my master's power, the expression of my master's will. Thank you sir, I said breathlessly and felt the stirrings of a powerful joy in my cock as it began to harden.
He stood looking into my eyes, took hold of my extended cock and very softly brushed the tip slowly back and forth with his thumb and commanded me to remain rigidly still, my entire body. I did although I shuddered inside as he brushed the tip of my cockhead back and forth with the ball of his thumb.
All the pain I had felt exploded in a blazing transformation and what I felt was pride. I had become one of those guys whose physiques I had always secretly, surreptitiously admired, and the way I looked now pleased my master.
Pain had not been an end in itself. It had been a vehicle that took me out of myself, away from sexual and erotic numbness and revealed to me my profoundly erotic identity as a hot submissive gay male.
xvi.
You're on your own now.
He was more rugged and handsome than ever, dressed completely in black. I was so proud to be walking beside him. My heart was singing. He had just been inside me. Now we were on our way to dinner together. Or so I thought.
Sir, I said, indicating I did not understand what he was referring to.
He repeated it, taking my face in his hand and turning my eyes towards his. You're on your own now.
And I understood. He was leaving me, freeing me. I was on my own now. It was up to me who I was going to be. I wanted to be his. I did not want to be suspended in freedom. I wanted to be possessed. I wanted to be controlled. I wanted to be his. Then I knew: the only real indication that I was his was through my obedience to him. Obeying him now, accepting that I was not his was the only way I could remain his. I was his only by not being his. By being myself.
It is you you bring to a master. You offer yourself to him. There must be something worth offering.
I had to exist in order to surrender.
I bowed to my master.
We kissed lightly on the lips and parted.
He had filled me with his spirit and his light shone through me.
It was the beginning.
xvii.
The rain beat hard against the panoramic window which wrapped around the front of the bus. The road narrowed, climbed, wound around the side of Mount Triumph. Every few minutes a thread of lightning cut nervously through the sky, and as quickly its brilliant ganglia disappeared. Then the thunderous rumble sounded, the heavy stones of heaven were rolled. The bus continued to climb. Vic our driver kept the bus on its course. He whistled softly as he drove, as cool as if it were a balmy morning in spring.
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