MY ELVISH BOYFRIEND (6)
By Dolphin Dan
My high school exchange student boyfriend, Ernemion (Ernie) Maundelow, had to return home to his country of Varandikar unexpectedly in late April, 1993, because his father had a series of strokes and he was basically dying. Although Ernie was gone I hoped against hope this would not be the end of our relationship. We had so many good times, and Ernie had fucked me into such utter submission so many times that I couldn't imagine life without him. But those weeks after he left were very difficult for me. I felt very lonely and abandoned. This was the bad time.
I took the AP US History test the day Ernie left. I was stunned that I got a 5 on it (the highest score). I got a 4 on AP European History, the next week, and 5 on AP Government, which was a class Ernie had been in before he left. Then prom happened. Ernie had been expected to be elected prom king, along with his (pseudo) girlfriend Jenna, who in reality was fucking a 25 year old graduate student from the local university. After Ernie left, the race for prom king and queen was wide open. It was eventually won by a cheerleader, Laura, and a football jock, Steve, who was dumb as a box of rocks, though I admit he did look nice with his shirt off, which I had seen in P.E. class, and I had seen him in his underwear too, which honestly wasn't bad. But I was dejected because my boyfriend was now thousands of miles away in Eastern Europe and I had no idea when I would see him again.
I went to the prom myself, and, believe it or not, my date was Leigh, who was Ernie's foster sister when he was living with her family. In January she had broken up with Trevor, the football jock she was dating up until then. I knew that she really wanted Ernie and was frustrated that she couldn't get him. (She had no idea he was gay). After Ernie left, Leigh called me up and said, "We might as well go to the prom together. Ernie was my foster brother and you were his best friend. It'd be weird if we didn't go." I had no sexual interest in Leigh and she clearly had no interest in me. But on prom night our parents both gushed and took pictures as if they were so proud. If they only knew the truth!
There was a tender moment at the prom, though. In one of the final slow dances, the DJ played a song, "Right Here Waiting" by Richard Marx. This is a really beautiful song and its lyrics are about longing for someone you love who is very far away. Leigh and I danced to this song but both of us were crying by the end of it, and for the same reason: to us, the lyrics were about Ernie. I never loved or wanted Ernie more than I did in that moment, and I never felt more lonely in my young life.
Prom was in mid-May, graduation was in late May, but there was still the summer before I left Washington (state) for University of Texas Austin which was where I got into college. To build up spending money I had to get a job that summer. It was humiliating, but I went to work flipping burgers and pushing the lever on the milkshake machine at Arctic Circle, a fast food chain in the Northwest at that time. Sometimes I imagined that Ernie was there and he had gotten a job alongside me. I could imagine him wearing the dumb orange and blue uniform, with his pointed ears sticking up above the rim of the Arctic Circle ball cap he would have had to wear. I could almost hear his voice over the intercom: "Yah, here is your burger. You vant fries? How about a shake?"
I did meet a boy at Arctic Circle. His name was also Daniel, and people also called him Danny, like me. He was 15. People on staff called me "Danny Sr." and him "Danny Jr." as if we were related. Danny Jr. was cute but very odd looking. His brown eyes were so incredibly dark that when he looked at you all you could see in his eyes were what looked like plain black circles. He wore black framed glasses. And he had eyebrows that were dark, thick and perfectly half-moon shaped. Basically he looked like a comic strip character. I got a vibe from him early on that he liked men. One evening in late June we were working late to close the store and clean up. It was just us, no one else around, and we started joking around and trading dirty insults. I totally didn't mean it but jokingly at one point I demanded that he suck my dick. Danny Jr. put his broom down, turned his ball cap backwards, got on his knees and started moving toward me. I was like, "Woah, dude, I was joking, can't you take a joke?" He was like, I'm not sure you were joking. I told him, if you're serious, meet me out at my car in 15 minutes. He picked up the broom, continued sweeping, and we cleaned up the store and locked it up without saying another word.
I had just gotten my car, it was an old VW Golf that I was going to drive down to Austin. Danny Jr. came up to it and knocked on the passenger window. He got in and I closed the door. I laid across the seats, unzipped my jeans, pulled down my underwear and held out my hard dick to him. Danny Jr. very carefully took of his glasses, folded them and put them on the dashboard of my car before he went down on me. To be honest it was not that great a blow. I came in his mouth and he swallowed my cum, but it felt kind of hollow and empty to me. After he did me I reached into Danny Jr.'s pants and found a small but hard throbbing penis. I unzipped the fly of his jeans but kept my hand in his briefs. I masturbated him until he came all over my hand. I wiped my hand off on his underwear and with some napkins from Arctic Circle. It was the least I could do to drive him home. As he got out of my car Danny Jr. reached over to kiss me lightly on the lips and he said, "Thanks, bro," and he got out and went into his house. My hand still smelled like his semen. When I got home I took a very long shower and scrubbed my groin and my hand very hard with soap. I was not sure how I felt about this experience.
About a week later a letter arrived at my house. It was from Ernie, sent from Varandikar; it took four weeks to reach me. Parts of it were in English, in childlike block letters, and other parts were in beautiful elvish calligraphy. His words were not sexual, but the look of the long loopy elvish script on the page gave me a boner. I wondered if he had somehow enchanted the letter to make it have this effect. He said he was back home in Varandikar and helping his family, but he missed the USA and the Northwest. The letter also reported sad news: Ernie's father had died on May 20, at 3:00 in the afternoon. It was a massive stroke that finished him off. Ernie was very precise about his father's date and time of death because he (Ernie) had predicted it. The envelope included a snapshot of Ernie that was taken the day of his father's funeral. He was wearing a black suit and tie and looked very dour. There was an elvish girl, a blonde with pointed ears and long braids, standing next to him; she was wearing a black dress that might have been out of the year 1890 or 1900. This, presumably, was one of Ernie's sisters (he had two). It amazed me how quaint they looked, like the 20th century never happened. They looked like the couple in that "American Gothic" painting, except young, and elvish.
On the last page of Ernie's letter there were several lines of elvish calligraphy. It looked like a poem. I recognized only a few of the words. I made a Xerox copy of this page and brought it to the city library, and for an hour or two before or after my shift at Arctic Circle I sat with a Varandi dictionary trying to translate it. After a couple of lines it became clear what it was. The lines of poetry that Ernie had written in elvish were the lyrics to Richard Marx's song "Right Here Waiting." It was as if he had heard me or been inside my head all the way across the world.
I had a few more encounters with Danny Jr., none of which I felt good about. A couple of times, in July and August, we jacked each other off in my car after closing up the restaurant. Much less often, I got my dick into his mouth. Only on one occasion did we attempt anal sex and it was the last time we were together. Danny Jr. was all for it, and he got into my back seat and took off his pants and his underwear, and he was like, "Don't you want to?" There were little packets of salad oil that came in boxes at the restaurant and he had brought several of these as lubricant. The idiocy of this high school sophomore rubbing salad oil on my penis in the back seat of a Volkwsagen Golf parked in back of a fast food restaurant finally hit home for me. I couldn't go through with it. I grabbed a napkin to wipe my dick off and told Danny Jr. to put his pants back on. I also said, "This is wrong. I didn't tell you, but I have a boyfriend. He lives in another country. He would be very angry if he knew we were doing this." Danny Jr. was very hurt. He said, why the fuck did you lead me on? He got out of the car and walked home. The next day I quit Arctic Circle. Danny Jr. quit the same day. Thankfully no one connected our abrupt terminations. I was two weeks from leaving for Austin anyway. I was ashamed I ever had anything to do with Danny Jr. and I never saw him again.
I left for UT Austin at the end of August. What happened to me there is not of any consequence. Yes, I had a few boyfriends, but they aren't important. Every few months, but less and less frequently as time went on, I received a letter from Ernie Maundelow. The letters were never sexual or amorous. He talked about running his family's farm in Varandikar. The references to the farm confused me because every time Ernie had previously talked about his background it sounded like he grew up in the city. Apparently now they lived in a rural area. After his father's death, Ernie's mother had become mentally unstable and his older brother was living in Russia and estranged from the family, so it was up to Ernie to run the farm and make ends meet, providing not only for himself and his mother but for his two younger sisters. I admired how brave and mature he was. He was making hard decisions every day that determined his family's survival. I couldn't have done what he did.
Then, in February 1996, nearly three years after we'd last seen each other, a letter arrived at my off-campus apartment in Austin. It had been eight months since I'd heard from Ernie. He had a very cheerful and startling proposition: "How would you like to come spend some time with me in Varandikar this summer? We would be honored to have you." This would be the next phase of our adventure.
More to come...
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