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[no sex]
Ketch
Truman Capote, probably fueled by a few gin-and-tonics, asked the elderly E. M. Forster if it ever stopped. "It," Forster realized, was the insistent search, the glance at every man, to see if he were the One, the Ideal Other. No such luck of course.
This episode in my own ultimately fruitless search happened years ago, before AIDS, when an ordinary fellow could afford an apartment, when San Francisco was still pink and welcoming to us seekers.
There were three of us that summer, Rob, Ginger, and me, C. T. We all worked in bars and had our days pretty much free. It was a hot summer, for a change, and we spent many days at Kirby Cove, a little slip of a beach on the Golden Gate just outside the bridge. Most days, we were alone on the beach; it was a steep half-mile climb down a red-rock dirt road. Once in a while, the park ranger would come over to us and, on his haunches, explain at length what we couldn't be naked. Very California, instead of just yelling "Put your pants on!" Off went our swimsuits as soon as he drove away.
We were a triad, us three, that summer. Our feelings deepened for each other as the days went rolling warmly over us. Ginger worked in a tiki bar: Hawaiian prints and wicked mai-tais, and we hung with her on our nights off. Our affections were warm, but unfocussed. We slept together often, sexlessly, tangled in Ginger's sheets, all of us smelling of Bain de Soliel. On this day we were all a little hung over from the night before at Panama Phil's. Our beers had gotten to the near side of warm, and the char sui bao were delicious.
A ketch pulled silently into our cove. The heavily-patched maroon sails were dropped. A flash, then a splash. A man swam strongly towards. We sat up.
Salt water dripped off his patterned hair. He was perfect, but perfection demands some explanation, some way of consuming his handsomeness and making it ours. He was naked of course. I remember everything; is hair was long, messy, probably some shade of russet, with wide blond sun streaks. He was heavily tanned, almost brown, He raised his arms and waved them lazily at the ketch. He turned to us, still semaphoring his arms, to dry off, I guess. His armpit hair was thick and a little darker. He lowered his arms and he pointed at one of our towels, which I tossed to him. He rubbed himself dry, bending down to do his legs, then his arms, golden, golden bleach-golden hair. His chest and stomach were heavily furred, and the hair had bleached out into a pattern of whorls and curls.. His bush was very large, almost hiding his dick and balls.
He walked up to me, dropped the towel, and made the pantomime gesture of lighting a cigarette. I handed him my pack of Lucky Strikes and my lighter. He lit up and inhaled like a starving man. He slowly let the smoke drift out around his head. He sucked in another lungful. He didn't say a word, nor did we. As he smoked, he turned on his axis, pulled up one foot to examine the cracked sole. He rested in a perfect contraposta pose, moving slightly as if responding to the breeze. His stomach hair picked up and ruffled. The line of beauty. The stroke of curving muscles, growing thick and thin like an animated Bernini, back muscled and sturdy (he turned), then he turned back to us. The line of beauty, the sensual S, was broken by his dick. It was bigger now, a perfect erection, and the dick stuck straight out from the pile of hair. The shining red head of his dick popped out past his brown foreskin. A coup de rouge that drew the eye toward his dick, his perfection, pulled perpendicular by gravity, the red skin shining.
He turned and tossed the cigarette butt onto the sand. A quick wave, and he jogged across the beach, his red dickhead bouncing before him. He turned into the soft surf and dived in; giving us a last flash of his golden ass-hair. Sails up, off they slowly went.
I've fucked, I've been fucked. I've loved. I've had a nice long life, and now I look back on it with a sense of pleasure and completion, for most events in a crowded existence.
But there is something missing. There is a masterful portrait painted by Christen Kobke in 1832 of his best friend, his young fellow-painter Frederik Hansen Sodring. Kobke has just fucked Sodring, as I figure it. Sodring's pallette is hooked into the crook of his arm, a brush in his other hand, ready to start. His red-cheeked face opens up in visible love towards the invisible painter. His clothes are rumpled. Across the room, on a crowded able, a vermillion match-box sticks up. No, no red erection here, except perhaps in memory.