Jay

JACKIN' AT JAY'S HOUSE by janus znaiu

Jay Katz simply would not be told. I knew it wasn't really his idea to badger me this way; his girlfriend Shelly was always trying to set me up with 'just the right girl'. Over the past year or so, I'd gone out with no less than a dozen of them.

"But Julie's PERFECT for you, Jens!" he pleaded. "She's pretty, she's smart, she plays the guitar-- AND she's got titties like a pair of Cadillac bumper-bullets." Jay dropped his hands from his chest where they'd been approximating Julie's supposed endowment. He pulled his jockstrap on over his jockeys, snapped it tight and stepped into his gym shorts.

I slammed my locker closed and shot him my best supercillious scowl. "Perfect? You must think I have amnesia. You always say they're perfect. You even said it about that tall one who looked like Fred MacMurray in a dress. Man, that chick had a face like a boot!"

"I know, I know, but I've SEEN this one, Jens. I'm tellin' you-- she's hot shit. God strike me dead!" I side-stepped a good few feet away and looked upwards expectantly. Jay rolled his eyes and grabbed my forearm with both hands. "Please... don't make me beg you." I shook him off and led the way to the gym, but he clung to me like a fart. "Come on man, Shelly's been up my ass about this since last weekend. Julie really liked your yearbook picture," Jay said with a sudden, hopeful expression, "says you're 'a FOX'!" He ruffled my hair playfully as we walked along the corridor towards the cavernous echo of squeaking sneakers and two dozen thumping basketballs.

I felt myself getting sucked in again. I resolved to be firm. "Jay, look at me. For the last time-- no." I told him plainly. "I'm going to be doing stuff for my pop at the deli Friday night." That was true, in a way. I'd begun to apply myself to the catering side of the family business, was even rewarded for it with a Chevy station wagon of my own for my seventeenth birthday. But what I told Jay was also a lie. I knew full well that I'd be finished work in plenty of time to go home and clean up for a date.

A piercing whistle silenced the basketballs and presently fifty identically-clad seniors shuffled, drone-like, to stand under their assigned numbers on the wall for the taking of attendance. Even there I wasn't exempt from Jay's pestering. Owing to the alphabetical proximity of our surnames, his wall number was the one after mine. He leaned towards me and nudged my shoulder with his, but he remained facing forward as the coach walked by noting absentees on his clipboard. At the least opportune moment imaginable, when our gym teacher stood mere meters away, Jay half-shouted, half-whispered, "C'mon, Jens, do it for an old jackoff buddy."

My first panicked reaction was to look around frantically to see if anyone, especially our teacher, had heard him. Apparently not, but I was breaking out in a cold sweat just the same. I jabbed Jay hard with my elbow. "Okay, okay! I'll go! Now just shut UP!" I whispered urgently, through clenched teeth.

I could see the relief unfurl across his face. I knew Shelly Margolis. The nascent yente in her labored away at matchmaking like she was pursuing a merit badge in it. Jay always managed to get caught in the crossfire. I knew she'd be much kinder to him now that he'd secured me as a date for yet another one of her between-boyfriends pals. He was thanking me with a fusillade of appreciative murmurings, shaking my hand even. I didn't hear a word of it, but I sure felt his hand.

I was helplessly transported back to the one and only time we'd jacked off together. It had been Jay, his cousin Kevin, and Barry and me, celebrating the end of the school year out at Watson's Pit. It was a scene I'd relived often in the privacy of my room, but anytime Jay and I were actually together, it was as if it had never happened, as if I couldn't or wouldn't make the connection with the Jay I saw at school every day and the Jay I'd masturbated with nearly two years before. Though my cock tingled happily inside my jock from the recollection, Jay's bringing it up there, in the all-male bastion of the school gym, struck me as an unnecessarily perverse way to call my attention to it. For the most part, I'd managed to put the homosexual side of my nature on a bit of a back-burner.

Truth to tell, I put it on a portable hotplate that I kept under my bed. I'd haul it out and reheat a stew of my favorite memories whenever I lay down to go to sleep, without fail. Predictably, my one-handed reveries consisted of Barry; mostly Barry, and little else besides. Hardly surprising. We'd been intimate for nearly a year before he had to move away and I had limited experience with other guys-- certainly nothing to the degree of intimacy that Barry and I had progressed to-- and none at all since he'd left. The months that followed his departure were hell, but gradually, day by day, I grew to miss him less, just as he'd predicted. Eventually I learned to be able to relive our randier times together in my mind without having to stop wanking because it was all too sad. I was even able to look at the three sexy pictures I'd taken of him, but very quickly they proved themselves inconsequential. I had no interest in them as objects and lost track of them soon after the images they contained etched themselves into memory.

Barry proved unable or disinclined to keep up our correspondence. Before long my letters to him consisted of little more than multi-page exhortations to write more often. I knew it was stupid even while I was doing it; he never did respond very well to guilt trips. We spoke briefly on the telephone three or four times, but there were always other people in the room, huddled around extension phones, awaiting their turn to speak, to say Merry Christmas or Happy Birthday or whatever occasioned the call. When the phone was passed to us, Barry and I acted shy with each other, like distant cousins who knew something embarrassing about the other. I recall wracking my brain, desperately trying to remember all the stuff I'd rehearsed. But in the end, there was no way to say anything that would mean something special, something only we'd understand. All our codes had become obsolete. He never called me Slim anymore.

It was the best possible thing, probably, to have had that more or less clean break from him. It was the kick in the ass I needed to get out there and be Jens-- a different one. And if that new Jens wasn't actually the real one, then at least it would be one who didn't need to see his reflection in Barry's eyes to know he was alive. Cliches only get to be cliches because there's a kernal of truth to them. In my case, time was healing all wounds.

Jay got kept back in eleventh grade the year Barry moved out west and we found ourselves in several classes together. We got to be pretty good friends. Almost immediately after resumption of classes though, he began trying to get me to go out with this or that girl. Jay and Shelly had been an item since ninth grade. They thought everyone should be as joined-at-the-hip as they were. For most of that year I'd managed to stave him off. The idea of being alone in the company of a female my age filled me with mortal dread. I invented distant, ailing relatives, pretended I had a girlfriend in another town and generally fibbed my way out of all their best efforts to pair me up, but towards prom season I simply ran out of plausable excuses. Jay (via Shelly) finally just refused to take no for an answer. Thus began my mercurial association with public heterosexuality.

It was awkward at first, but since the girls with whom I was being set up, at least initially, were ones whose reputations were unblemished by the damning epithet 'easy', there was far less performance anxiety than I'd feared. Gradually, I began to actually look forward to that obligatory good-night kiss, if only to be able to hold onto another human being for a while and feel the comfort of falling into synch with someone else's breathing. Then, at some point near the middle of my senior year a kind of situational libido began to make itself known; I found myself wishing that some of the girls I saw more than once would go further than simple necking. A few of them seemed to expect something more out of me too. The logical next step was petting, though I never did understand where so-called 'light' petting ended and 'heavy' petting began. Neither did anyone else I knew-- we just understood it as a catch-all euphemism for mutual masturbation, hetero-style. Having a girl tugging away roughly at my prick of a Saturday night wasn't nearly as liberating for me as say, a leisurely, starlight sixty-nine with Barry might have been, but it was preferable to beating off by myself and it carried with it the added bonus of being more or less sanctioned societally, if not parentally.

Soon I began to line up dates of my own. To my astonishment, and without any great effort on my part, it turned out girls found me attractive. Apparently, I was the kind of guy girls want to mother. I'd have been a boob not to play along. Rarely was I interested in the girl's mind, her hopes or her fears. I always went into these 'romances' hoping for the payoff of a handjob somewhere down the line. If that meant that I had to compliment a girl on whatever bizarre, architechtural tonsure she'd constructed, or hold a door or two open for her, so be it. In that regard, I was the same as most of the other guys at my school. Where we differed was my uneasiness with the female sexual anatomy.

I liked breasts alright, in a prematurely-weaned sort of way. When I first began dating, daunted by the technical side of brassieres and not knowing just how rough my groping felt from the girl's point of view, I must have made a fool of myself rather a lot. Since then, I'd learned I really enjoyed fondling tits. I marveled at the seemingly infinite varieties of them. When we progressed to the point where the next natural thing to do seemed to be to suck them, I did, and with genuine gusto, but I was never able to voice my profound desire to have a bit of that myself. Guys didn't have tits in those days.

I didn't much like the appearance of pussy, but you rarely ever got a clean look at your dates' genitalia anyway, given the darkened places we usually petted. Handling female nether regions, well, it just didn't feel right somehow. There wasn't anything substantial there, nothing dick-like that you could really hold onto. The clitoris, difficult to locate at first, especially for someone as inexperienced as I was, when I found it, usually forbidden territory. I didn't understand why this little nub-- this sad parody of a penis-- could be so tender that the lightest fingering of it would so often put an abrupt end to our play. It seemed as though God had played a cruel trick on women. It was as though He'd originally thought to give them a dick, but then changed his mind halfway into it and hurredly gave them tits to compensate.

Girls' scents were different down there too; not bad necessarily-- not at all fishy like the cliche-- just fecund and mysterious, and not particularly frightening. It just didn't turn me on anything like guy-funk did. Indeed, I found my own scent more appealing, sexually, than that of any girl I'd known. Lockerroom banter dictated that I ought to be chasing that female aroma, like a bull seeks out a fresh heifer in a herd, but the heady concentration of male scents in the lockerroom easily over-rode that nugget of conventional wisdom. Still, if diddling an amicable female in a darkened theatre balcony or the back seat of my car netted digital release from a hand other than my own, however unskilled, it seemed a small enough price to pay to return the favor. However uneasy it might have made me feel at the time, I honestly gave it a chance. Mutual masturbation was about as far as I got with any girl I took out, but I took comfort in the fact that most of my friends weren't actually getting much more than that, despite all the incessant lockerroom braggadocio.

The ersatz Don Juan in me was, like the rest of me, a Scandanavian capricorn and therefore, a helpless perfectionist. As such, I was bewildered by the vagaries of the female orgasm. It challanged everything I thought I knew about the nature of 'getting off'. My over-riding concern for the quality of my partner's pleasure, an easy enough thing to measure with another guy, came smack up against the results of millennia of patriarchy. A lot of the girls I went out with in highschool didn't even know they were supposed to get off. I doubt if they even discussed it among themselves very much back then. I figured out, early on, that it had to have something to do with the clit, but I got scant specific direction from the girls I knew. It was as if their motivation for petting was primarily one of reluctantly seeing to it that the guy spermed as quickly (and as neatly) as possible, so they could return to the party or the movie or whatever activity it was that got interrupted by the male partner's unremitting adolescent need. I really wanted the girl to like what I was doing with her; but it was hard to improve my technique when the girl seemed programmed to barely tolerate my advances at the very best. I began to feel more and more like the fraud that I was. At least that was the case until Jay and Shelly intoduced me to Julie Findlay.

A rare case of truth in advertising, Julie was every bit as pretty as Jay had made her out to be. It further turned out that she not only played the guitar, and very well, but that she had a wonderful singing voice too. She even had the large breasts Jay had played up so emphatically. But her most endearing quality was that she gave a shit about how I felt about things; that she actually listened to me. And when she spoke, she said things that made me want to listen to her too. It goes beyond my perceived scope of this memoir to go into the details of our sexual doings, but in short, she was the first woman I ever had real sex with.

We'd been necking, huddled together in a doubled-up sleeping bag on the pebbly western shore of Lake Ontario, going a good deal further than I had any reason to expect on a first date with a stranger. In the middle of a kiss, during the course of which she'd managed to extract my cock from my pants and underwear, she simply pulled off my mouth, disappeared into the sleeping bag and swallowed my boner whole. Having been the happy recipient of countless blowjobs from Barry, I realized instantly that she was no novice, despite her 'good girl' build-up. Before the sun came up the next morning and we made our way back to where Jay and Shelly had spent the night similarly occupied, Julie and I had done about ninety-five percent of what a man and a woman can do in a sleeping bag on a damp, chilly night.

Julie was the kind of girl/woman I'd always wanted to be with when I'd been fumbling around with the others. She was the first girl I'd known who seemed to approach sex, the theory of it anyway, with the same attitude I did. She had absolutely no trouble assuming responsibility for her own pleasure whenever she felt like it or whenever my technique was lacking. And, bless her, she never once commented on my flagrant virginity. Overnight, the female anatomy and the female sex-drive became a whole lot less mysterious. I knew I was swimming in the deep end, but woman, as embodied by Julie at least, was a force of nature I felt well inclined to experiment with just then. The four of us began to be known as a regular gang in no time at all.

Aside from that one time in the gym, Jay never mentioned our mutal wank at the quarry in public and I was glad of it. But as the four of us began to see more and more of each other, it followed that Jay and I would hang out together whenever Shelly and Julie went off to do some girl thing. It was on those occasions that he started bringing up that night at Watson's Pit again. At first, it was in a sort of, 'boy, weren't we young and stupid' context, as though we were a couple of porch-swing grandpas looking back on the caprices of our youth. But as time went by, Jay's references to it came to be tinged with an unmistakable nostalgia. It always seemed like he was giving me my cue to suggest doing it again. For that reason, I felt edgy whenever he brought it up.

It was nuts, really. There was no good reason not to go for it. Even so, I was more shy and nervous about things homoerotic then than at any other time in my life. Even before I met Barry, it had been nothing at all to 'whip it out, whip it up, wank it and wipe it' with another guy. Half the kids I knew growing up did as much, more or less at the drop of a hat, without making a very big deal out of it. Now, after so long out of the saddle, it seemed like I'd acquired a kind of retroactive virginity where masturbating with another guy was concerned. Maybe I feared falling as hard for the next person I jacked off with as I had for Barry. Maybe I feared facing, once again, all the complications and dodgeyness that came with that kind of attachment. I felt as though I had more to protect now than I had before I met Barry. With the recently-introduced element of regular intercourse with Julie, I was as close as I'd ever been to living the ideal North American teenhood. Aside from my idiosyncratic taste in music and my slightly-suspect hatred for all forms of organized sport, my public life reflected everything that was safe and straight and normal. Among my peers, I was regarded as acceptably quirky. I had a decent 'rep' and I meant to keep it off the chopping block.

I'd come so perilously close to being found out and labeled queer; I used to shudder whenever something new came up that made me realize how close. My parents, who I'd always considered pretty much out of it where my personal life was concerned, and whose reticence to discuss sexual matters bordered on the pathological-- even they let the odd private thought escape. When it became obvious I was finally becoming interested in girls at long last, Pop had said, with self-conscious mirth, that they'd been 'a little worried about me for a while there' in direct reference to my attachment to Barry. Another time, my mom mentioned that she used to think Barry 'had some kind of hold' over me. Well, of course he did; it had been the strongest kind of hold there is. I just hadn't realized how obvious all this had been to anyone but my brother Nils.

Now, with all my dubious Barry linen getting safe, nightly airings, I thought I could keep an even keel in the real world of school and the deli. In the lockerroom after phys-ed, the toughest, thrice-weekly test of my resolve, I trained myself to maneuver as though I were looking through inverse binoculars-- seeing only what I needed to see in order to move around, without seeing anything that was likely to cause me to embarrass myself. But Jay's repeated, wistful references to that night at Watson's Pit, and his other veiled appeals to what I considered my private domain, my queer side, were a constant menace to my shakey hold on normal.

We were sitting around Jay's rec room one Saturday afternoon with a few hours to kill before we had to pick the girls up from a fashion show or somesuch. I'd already rejected watching televised golf and a shooting a few games of pool as potential time-wasters. The weather was too foul for any activity outdoors to be very appealing.

"I know! Let's jam!" Jay suggested, reaching for the battered acoustic guitar hanging on the wall.

I didn't need to answer him; rolling my eyes back into my head said it all. There was a piano in the corner, but it hadn't been tuned since the Truman administration and Jay knew perfectly well that thrashing and rethrashing the kindergarten changes of "Hang On Sloopy" and "Louie, Louie", the only tunes he knew how to play, was not my idea of jamming.

"Christ, you're a tough man to please today," Jay griped.

"It's not your fault, Jay. I'm just a little bored, I guess."

His face suddenly lit up, "Hey! I know!" but he quickly resumed his normal expression, "Naw, you wouldn't wanna..."

I was slipping further into ennui by the minute. I just knew we were going to wind up just driving around aimlessly, as usual, listening to Detroit R&B radio and talking trash until it was time to pick the girls up. "I wouldn't wanna what?" I asked him, caring little what it was.

He grinned, like someone trying hard to be casual about something he's bursting to tell. Unable to contain himself, he blurted, "Wanna watch a some stag films?"

"Some what?"

"Stag films-- you know, real fuck movies,"

"Right," I snorted, "Where would you get anything like that?"

"They're my dad's. Well, actually he borrowed them from some guy at the office for my cousin's batchelor party, but he hasn't given them back yet. I hope he NEVER does. Wanna see 'em? They're really horny shit! I've watched them six times already." Jay was babbling like an idiot, a horny idiot. As if the chair he was in had suddenly become too hot to sit in, he shot up and stood at the edge of the sofa I was sprawled on. "It'll only take a second or two set it up and we'll be out of here before anybody comes home. The folks are at the community center watching my kid sister pretend to be a dancing daffodil or something."

"I dunno, Jay..." What I did know was that I was looking squarely at the baited hook of yet another ploy on Jay's part to orchestrate a two-man wank with me, just as I'd known it every single time he suggested showing me his collection of Playboy magazines; just as I'd known it when he took more than a minute to put his semi-hard dick away that time we stopped for a piss in the woods. He just kept fingering his dickhead until I finished pissing and, in vain, he'd flashed me a hopeful, lost puppy look. He nearly had me that time.

Jay was already pawing at the front of his jeans. "There's even a part where this girl takes on four guys on at once! Fuckin' wild, man!"

I'd never seen anything truly pornographic in my life and the scene, as Jay described it, pandered directly to some dreams I'd been having lately. I heard myself capitulating, "You can't mention this to anybody Jay; not even in fun."

"Mention what? That we watched a coupla' stag movies? Shit, every guy we know would, if they ever got a chance." Jay was clearly as amused by my reluctance as he was proud to have custody of such a treasure, however temporarily. Now that he was fairly certain I meant to play along, he didn't give me a second to recant. "C'mon, Jens. Time's a-wastin'," he said, leading the way to the third-floor attic where the projector was stored. I followed him, but he had to be made to see that he was missing my point.

"Not that we watched one," I told him, when we stopped on the second floor landing and he'd ducked into his parents' bedroom for the films."You can't tell anyone that we watched one together-- just the two of us. I mean it-- you keep that under your hat, Jay. And about Watson's Pit too, okay? I don't want anybody getting any funny ideas about you and me." Mostly, I didn't want HIM to get any funny ideas about him and me. That might have caused me to have some funny ideas about him too.

He shot me a fairly convincing 'who me?' look. "Put it outa' your mind, Jens. I won't even tell Shelly." he said. I cringed at that. I knew from previous experience that there was precious little those two didn't share.

Jay suspended a white sheet from some nails at one end of the long, narrow attic. While I closed the shutters on the windows at the other end of the room, he set the projector on an old end table next to a sagging, 1940s sofa that faced the improvised screen. I sat at the sofa's opposite end, reading the spines of the two plain white super-8 film cartons. The hand-lettered labels proclaimed: "Tinsletown Floozie" and "Millie on the Midway". I was disappointed to note that the running time for each was a little less than ten minutes. I wasn't expecting Ben Hur in terms of length, but ten minutes seemed like a very hasty piece of ass, even to a recently-deflowered seventeen yearold. I reckoned they must get down to business a lot faster than Julie and I did.

I watched as Jay threaded the first of the films through the cogged wheels and capstans of the projector. I couldn't help it-- as much as I tried to direct my mind's eye to speculation on the lewd scenes to come, my real eye kept interrupting with optic information. I was powerless to stop sneaking glances at Jay's crotch. His boner was about as obvious as boners got.

Our jeans brand of choice was T-Kays, a variously-hued Levis knock-off that were cut real tight at the crotch, even tighter than was the fashion of the day. But unlike the fashion of the day, they were cut straight-leg. Jay and I, and few others in our loose muster of musical outcasts and self-posessed eggheads, spurned the very concept of flared leg pants to the point of being ridiculed over our rejection of them. In retaliation, we made jokes among ourselves about how 'flares' were called that because the were meant to be set on fire. We awarded ourselves the No-Bell Prize through all the years between the British Invasion and the Summer Of Love.

Jay's skin-tight, wheat-colored jeans and the way he twisted his torso to adjust the machine caused his dick to be acutely defined. It was plastered to the inside of his thigh in a position that couldn't have been anything other than painful-- it was plainly visible where his knob had poked its way out of his drawers. The pouch seam gripped his shaft behind the glans so tightly that it surely must have been interrupting his blood flow. I was mortified when Jay turned suddenly and caught my eyes roaming his basket. His grin, the way he rubbed his dick and his long, lingering look at my own crotch made me aware of how boned I was, and why. I hadn't been, not before I started checking him out. Terrified by the truth of it and by the fact that Jay knew it too, I was on the very edge of getting up and leaving. But I didn't. I leaned forward slightly and covered my basket with my forearms.

"I think... " I started to say. But before I had time to summon words to express my misgivings, Jay killed the lights and started the projector. He quickly set the focus and settled himself on a scatter rug near my feet, his back against the sofa nearest my end of it. He stretched his legs out before him, palming his crotch as the credits sputtered by. I sighed and settled back, still largely uncertain. I was unnerved by the fact that he sat so close, enough for his upper arm to be touching my shin. But I also felt relieved that I wasn't to be the subject of any gawking. On the contrary, Jay couldn't possibly have placed himself better, if he meant for me to watch him play with himself.

The first movie was a grainy black and white vignette about a girl who auditions for a part in a Hollywood movie. The 'producer' gets her to take her clothes off and dance for him. Soon she's rubbing up against him and massaging his dick through his pants. He takes off his jacket and she drops to her knees. She unzips his fly and pulls out a very long circumcised cock. After lapping at it for a few seconds she tosses back her long blond hair and engulfs the man's penis, all the way down to the root.

I peered down to where Jay lay sprawled out. He'd undone the top button of his pants and he'd opened the entire front of his green rayon shirt revealing a trim, solid chest and his hollow, lightly-furred belly. Still confined by beige denim, Jay's cock now formed a hefty cylinder across his upper thigh, which he rubbed absently with the tips of his fingers. As noiselessly as possible, I adjusted my dick so that it pointed upwards, the way it wanted to.

"That chick sure can suck a mean cock." Jay proclaimed with hollow authority, over the insistent clacking of the projector. Just then, abruptly turning around to check out my reaction to the actress' yeomanly blowjob, Jay caught me fingering my tented crotch. I drew my hand back, but too late to avoid Jay's seeing it there.

"Uh... yeah. She's really good at it..." I blushed. "I guess I'm getting a little turned on here."

Jay tittered at my embarrassment. "Fuck, who wouldn't? That's why they make these damn things! I'm wearin' a lighthouse too, but shit, you can see that for yourself." He looked down at his bone's outline and palmed it, arching his back slightly and thrusting his pelvis out to make sure I could see. I barely looked though, knowing that Jay was staring at me to gauge my reaction. I kept my eyes peeled on the couple on the screen and grimaced, as though I were slightly annoyed that Jay had broken my concentration. He glanced at the screen for the first time in nearly a minute, "Oh yeah! In just a second he sticks that big thing right in her cunt! Check it out."

As if on cue, the man in the movie mounts the woman from behind, penetrating her gaping pussy with what truly is a monstrous dick, at least in terms of length. He pulls it all the way out and then plunges it back into her, very slowly and sensuously as the camera dollies in for the close-up. Finally only his swinging, low-slung nuts remain visible in the shot.

"Oh baby!" cooed Jay. He shoved his hand down the front of his pants and continued to massage his bone as before, not wanking it exactly, just feeling himself up in a variety of different ways. As soon as I felt certain he'd settled back into watching the film again, I unzipped my fly as silently as I could and I snuck both hands inside, into my low-rise jockeys. One hand clutched my bag and rolled my balls around. The fingertips of the other smeared precum along the ridge of my unhooded glans.

Back on the screen things are heating up too. The man has the woman laid out on his desk with her legs in the air, holding onto her ankles as he pounds his swollen cock in and out of her pussy like a locomotive chugging at full bore. There's no sound of course, but you can just imagine the sounds of her puffing as she faces the camera, wide-eyed and full-cheeked with each thrust, as the fully-clothed male lead continues to pound her.

I found myself wishing the man would at least drop his pants. A tantalizing flash of white showed at the opening of the actor's fly, but so ambibiguously that it was impossible to say whether he wore boxers or briefs. Jay was getting fidgety. I found myself wishing he would show some drawers too. He shifted his legs in obvious frustration, apparently confounded that he couldn't make his hands do what his cock wanted them to do, not hampered by two layers of clothing. "Shit! I can't get comfortable like this!" Jay exclaimed. He leapt up like he'd been spring-loaded.

Stepping into the projector's beam, he yanked off his jeans. For a moment he had the movie, in distorted miniature, playing on the front of his very boinked white briefs. He plunked himself down on the opposite end of the sofa. Jamming his hand into the front of his jockeys, he began jerky upward tugs on his cock, which stood proud and thick-- a cotton-clad log, all lit up by the light shining down on it from the projector's louvered cooling vents. My throat felt parched and I had to force myself to look back at the screen again. "You don't look too comfortable yourself, Jens. Why not let it all hang out, man? You'll feel better." Whether he was actually engrossed in the film or whether he was merely giving me some modicum of privacy, Jay turned his eyes to the screen again and stared at it with a rapt expression.

Reason said: 'Get out of here now!' But my dick was just as emphatic: 'Gimme some air, asshole!' it chided. I honestly didn't know which I'd obey when I first stood up, but at the critical moment I made the fatal mistake of glancing down at Jay. He'd pulled his cock out the fly of his jockeys and was applying a spitty palm to it, his eyes steadfastly glued to the images on the screen. Jay's broad-headed, neatly-circumcised dick was much as I'd remembered it the last time I saw it erect, though it didn't seem as disproportionately large as it had that night at the quarry. He appeared to have grown into it, and a handsome package they made together too. A talent for gymnastics and a love for competative cycling kept Jay lean and hard. His mod, Prince Valiant haircut was always perfectly in place. His hair shone a sexy blue-black where the reflection of the movie caught it. I began to see a beauty in him that didn't occur to me even when he dripped, naked and unashamed, only a few feet away from me in the showers after phys-ed. Indeed, he suddenly seemed posessed of a beauty I didn't even ascribe to him when, in masturbatory reverie, I relived our earlier circle jerk with Barry and Kevin.

The air in the close and humid attic was infused with the smell of dick. I recognised my own scent in it, but thrilled at the subtle, unfamiliar blend of guy odors that the addition of Jay's made for. I realized then, at that moment, as I hovered between staying and going, that if I could summon the resolve to remain, I would get to see Jay spunk. I watched him pulling on his cock and tried to imagine how he was going to look when he started wanking faster and faster, how he'd look when great ropes of white shot from it. I'd gone too long without the sight another guy doing that. Far too long.

I stepped out of my jeans and resumed my position on the sofa. I left my underpants on, as Jay had, but I pulled them down to mid-thigh, brazenly exposing my need. I sat there for a few seconds, keeping my hands out of the way so Jay could look at my upstanding drooler if he liked, but I couldn't bring myself to check whether he did. I fell to pulling my meat, trying to concentrate on the fuck scene, or at least make it appear that I was concentrating on it. But the blurring motions Jay made at the edge of my peripheral vision kept drawing my eye. When I finally gritted myself sufficiently for a self-acknowledged look at what he was doing, I was shocked to discover that Jay wasn't looking anywhere near the screen, but was eying me, gaping at my own busy hand.

At that moment the film abruptly ran out. The room instantly filled with tragic incandescence as the naked projector bulb reflected off the bedsheet. Our eyes met, a tad self-consciously, as the film's leader slapped repeatedly against the take-up reel.

Jay swapped it with the empty one and began threading the other movie. Again, he stood directly in the glare of the lens. His dick still poked stiffly out of his jockeys' pee hole, seemingly weightless before him, swaying freely with the slightest movement of his lean torso. I was impatient for him to finish setting the next film up, caring not at all whether we actually viewed it or not, as if knowing, somehow, that it had become a mere catalyst for the next step. Jay pulled himself out of his briefs and lightheartedly tossed them at me. They bounced off my knee, but I felt his residual warmth in them in for that millisecond before they slipped to the floor at my feet. He hit the drive motor and dropped down on the sofa next to me, much closer than before; not against me exactly, but sitting so near that when we inhaled in unison, our shoulders and biceps touched. I imagined I could feel his heat even when we weren't touching.

The next flick was rendered in a scratchy, sepia monochrome and had a circus theme. Jay and I watched the fucking and sucking, pulling on our dicks with indolent tugs, but we spent almost as much time watching each other, more or less openly now. I returned to the action on screen only whenever it seemed to me as though my gaze had lingered a little too long on Jay, or whenever our eyes happened to meet.

"Oh yeah! Check this out, man!" Jay exclaimed. He settled into the back cushion of the sofa and began jacking his cock with both hands, his eyes glued to the screen. "This coming up is the best part!"

It's the final sequence. Four burly sideshow roustabouts stand around a naked woman, supposedly some high-wire walker or trapeze artist, judging from the bits of her glittery costume strewn about. She's spread-eagled on her back on a picnic table. The men are all standing on the seats, two to a side, jacking off really fast and hard. They cover the spectrum of penile possibilities, to the extent that any four random men could, but the youngest, a chesty guy with broad shoulders, built much like my brother Nils, is stroking the thickest, most uncircumcised cock I've ever seen-- it's shortish, but fat and mean-looking, with yards of extra skin.

Next to me, Jay was pumping his cock feverishly, in time with the men on the screen. I too, began pulling on my dick with increased vigor. "Oh, she's about to get a bath," Jay panted, "Oh yeah, man, here they go!" He stiffened his legs before him and flattened himself against the back of the sofa, redoubling his assault on his dick.

One of the men in the movie leans forward and ejaculates all over the woman's stomach and breasts, then another man comes, and then another. The last guy, the young one with the beercan cock, steps off the seat of the picnic table and crams his spurting organ right into the woman's eager mouth. The bounty of his ooze forms a narrow rill that follows the contour her sunken cheek and disappears off-camera.

Jay yelped and I felt something warm and wet land on my jacking forearm. I looked over to see cum squirting out of Jay's pisshole. He'd apparently let his cock go when he started spunking and it twitched and jerked blindly in front of him, spraying droplets of thin, nearly clear ejaculate all over the front of us. Jay raised his ass high, turned my way and then the white streamers began. He arched his whole body towards me, as if to propel his spunk at me more accurately, but still not directing the spray with his hand. The second and third jets fell across my lap. The third was the one that landed hot on my bouncing balls and the one that set me off. I felt like I was being wrenched inside out and was just about to just give myself over to the weightless feeling, but I caught myself and concentrated just enough to turn and direct my ejaculation at Jay. Multiple spurts of my jizz mixed with the last of Jay's on that fuzzy, spasming flatland that was his belly.

Seconds later, before we even had a chance to start to get our breath back, the screen went halide white again. Sperm glistened on our tummies in the glare. Jay swore, switched the projector off and presently we were plummeted into near-total darkness. The sound of the projector's cooling fan, to which we had grown accustomed as ambient noise along with the clatter of the machine's drive motor, fell quiet as well, making the darkness all the more stark. We sat quietly for a while, a little lost for words-- at least I was.

"Well, was that so bad then?" Jay asked finally, after some moments-- time I used to fret about how great it had felt to have another guy's cum splatter me after so long.

"No, that was a horny coupla' movies. Thanks."

"That's not what I meant and you know it." It wasn't like Jay to push a point without also making some sort of smart-assed remark that gave you an opening you could use to tell him to fuck off. That afternoon, it seemed like he meant to call me on my phoney sense of propriety once and for all. He'd been patient. He'd earned the right to needle me about it for a bit. I was grateful for the dark.

"I thought I'd outgrown this sort of thing," was all I could find to say. How I wished I could be as up front about my needs as Jay seemed to be, as up front Barry always was.

Jay's sperm was cooling rapidly as it trickled down the front of me. Safely masked by the profound lack of light, I gathered some of it up in the crook of my forefinger and brought it to my nose. It smelled different from mine and different again from the way I remembered Barry's smelling. I licked my finger clean as noiselessly as I could and my hand drifted back downwards, seeking more.

"Aw, you never outgrow it, not if you really dug it the first time. At least I hope I don't outgrow it. Shelly's a demon in the sack, but you know Jens, some of my best squoinks have been with guys like you and Barry and Kevin. I'm proud to say it too, but not to just anybody. I just like to spunk with a buddy. You know..." Jay nudged me. I knew.

"I guess I don't really have to tell you this Jens, but I had you figured out the minute I saw you put your hand around Barry's dick that time. I've been there. I know how horny Barry can get. You can't tell me you guys weren't playing pocket pool with each other long before that night."

"It was that obvious?" I asked him. I suddenly felt the need to know what else he might have been able to discern.

"I'll say! Like, when he was whackin' you off? He had this weird thing in his look when you came. Like he'd seen it before and everything, but like he'd never seen you spunk so much or so far or something. It was almost like he was proud of you for blastin' like that, or of proud of himself for being able to make you do it-- I don't know which, but you two came off as regular jackoff buddies to me. Kevin said so too."

"Kevin?" Of the two of them, Jay and his cousin, the one most likely to have been able to read the true nature of my relationship with Barry was Kevin. There had been sparks between Barry and him that night at the quarry. A chess game of lustful glances developed between Kevin and me even before anyone got naked and continued long after we'd finished wanking and we'd gotten dressed again. Barry noticed it, and what had started out as an uneasy mutual respect between them turned into something of an unuttered Popeye/Bluto rivalry, with me in the unlikely role of Olive Oyl. However bound to Barry I might have felt at the time, there was something about Kevin that had grabbed me by the balls, something dangerous and magnetic. Naturally, it scared me; almost everything that dealt with human relations did in those days. But Kevin's attention left me strangely flattered too, desirable even. I hadn't talked to him since that night at Watson's Pit, but I'd see his van around here and there. I knew he and Jay hung out sometimes.

"So, what did Kevin have to say about us, Jay?" I was trying to sound unruffled and only mildly curious, but I really had to know.

I could hear the gentle smacking of Jay handling his sticky cock, could feel the lazy, regular movements of his upper arm against mine. "Well, Kevin's kind of a nut-case about shit like that, so take this with a grain of salt: he said you guys were probably balling each other too."

"He said what?" I asked, in thunderstruck falsetto. Evidently, Kevin was able to read even more into my relationship with Barry than there had actually been.

"He said Barry and you were probably bungin' each other. But don't let it worry you, man. He thinks any two guys who are tight with each other gotta be queer, just because he is."

"He's WHAT?"

"Queer, like I just told ya'. He doesn't much care who knows either, but keep your mouth shut about it anyways." Jay warned, "His folks even turfed him out over it."

"No shit! Well, how come he doesn't act like a homo then?" I asked, playing it a bit naive, trying to keep Jay talking while I digested this latest bit of news, which wasn't so much news as it was confirmation.

Jay sniffed derisively in the darkness. "You don't know anything, man. They don't all prance around like Liberace you know. Some of 'em act just like us."

That hit a little close to home, smeared as we were with one anothers' sperm. I tried to make light. "So what did Kevin do?" I asked Jay, "Did he just come down to breakfast one day and say, 'Hi mom, I'll have sausages with my eggs this morning, oh and by the way, I'm a fag'. Like that?"

"Of course not. Well, almost like that, now that you mention it. He got into a motorcycle accident. He was in Intensive Care for two days and nights and he just rambled on non-stop. Guess he didn't have too many secrets left after that. Soon as he was back in one piece and off the painkillers, my aunt and uncle-- mostly my uncle-- they told him to find a new place to hang his hat. He lived out his van for quite a while there."

My heart sank for Kevin at that moment. He seemed to be living the life of banishment and vilification that I feared so desperately when Barry and I were carrying on. And yet, in spite of the privation I imagined him living under, I envied him somewhat. He had the great luxury of was being who he was. That was more than I could say for myself. "Must be rough," I commiserated.

"Oh, not any more. My uncle split a few months ago and Kev's back home now, living with my aunt-- on and off, anyway. They're kinda like oil and water. But if you see him living out of his van these days, it's 'cause it's nice out, not 'cause he's got no place to go." Jay chuckled, mostly to himself, by the sound of it. "No, don't shed any tears for Kevvie. He's where he wants to be most of the time."

I began to get hints of the homosexual demimonde I knew existed, but couldn't see. "Did you ever meet any of his..." I groped for a suitable term.

"Boyfriends? Oh sure. Older guys mostly, guys who look like they have a few bucks, you know. Kev'll never starve. He always has gas money."

"He does it for money?" I was incredulous. It never occurred to me that such a thing as a prostitute for men who liked men even existed.

"He doesn't do it for money any more, but he used to when his folks first threw him out. He says it's better than givin' it away. Some of his friends do it."

I wanted to know how closely Jay tied into this world. If we were going to be more than just the kind of friends we'd been up until now, I had to know what his limits were. "I guess now that you know about Kevin and everything, you don't jack off with him anymore." I ventured.

I could hear, by the sound of Jay's voice, that he'd turned to face me. "Are you kidding? We're pals for life, man!" The direction of his voice changed again and it became softer. "He checked me out a couple of times, you know, in case it turned out I was a secret, double-agent homo or something. But like I said, he thinks that about almost everybody. Soon as I made it plain I wasn't into most of the stuff he wanted to do, we just went back to beatin' each other off like we have since we were baldies down there. Kev's no idiot, Jens. He knows a good handjob when he's gettin' one. And he gives as good as he gets too. Or don't you remember?"

I remembered. Regularly. Check his limits, Jens. "What about Shelly?" I pried, "I mean, when you wank with some guy, aren't you pissing away something that's kind of supposed to be for her?"

"Do you jack off, Jens?" he countered. "By yourself I mean, when you go to bed at night."

"You know I do. Who doesn't?"

"Exactly. Now, when you're painting the ceiling down there on the farm, shouldn't you be saving that up for Julie too? Isn't that supposed to be for her?"

"Not really, that's for me." Too late, I saw the garden path I was on.

"Uh-huh. And that wank with me just now-- that was for you too, right?"

"Well, yeah." I chuckled. It might have been for me, but Jay was wearing the better part of it, without complaint

"Okay then, if I jack off with you or my cousin or Joe Blow, that's for me. It's got fuck-all to do with Shelly or anybody else, except maybe the person I'm doin' it with. Hey Jens, if you don't want to be doin' this, just put your pants on and say so. Don't put your reasons not to on me. That ain't right."

"Sorry," I said.

"For what? Just roll with it, Jens. You know, we could both get a lot more fun out of this if you'd just get that pickle out of your ass and learn to relax a bit." Damned if he didn't sound just like...

He went on, "Listen, if what's worrying you is me runnin' my mouth, don't, okay? I really dig doing this shit-- way too much to fuck it up for myself, or for you. And just to prove it to ya', I'm NOT gonna tell you the names of the other three guys I whack off with sometimes." He let that sink in. "Spunkin' together don't make us homos Jens, it just makes us tighter buddies, like blood brothers, kinda."

I knew most of Jay's male friends. I wondered which three he meant. But mostly, I was bowled over by the way Jay was leveling with me, not so much with his revelations about Kevin, but with his straightforward approach to getting his nut on his own terms. It made me feel embarrassed for my earlier misgivings about him. As if to compensate, I reached over and grasped Jay's jacking hand by the wrist and pulled it off his cock, something I very much doubt I would have done had the lights been on. I drew his hand over to my crotch and placed it directly onto my nearly-erect cock. He grasped it gently, measured it with practiced fingers and skinned it exactly three times-- enough to convince me that he well understood the mechanics of foreskins. Then he let it go, allowing it to fall back onto my belly with a soft plop. I felt his hand draw away.

"I don't know, Jens." Jay said in a treacly tone that dripped with barely-disguised mirth, "I wouldn't want you to get the idea I'm some kind of fag."

Touche, Jay. Touche.

Less than two hours later, we were sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworth's, sipping Pepsi and sharing fries 'n' gravy with two of the more attractive girls in our town. It was never mentioned, but had Julie and Shelly been inclined to compare notes, they would have concurred that both Jay and I displayed an uncharacteristic reluctance to be amorous that evening. Three afternoon wads with a blood brother will have that effect on a guy.

END

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