Rod of Iron

ROD OF IRON by Joe Gillis

Part One: The Pirate

"Picture Arnie, on his back, manacled, blindfolded, naked, while six blond twinks apply torture by.... firing rubber bands at his tenderest parts, and removing his chest hair with an adhesive lint roller..."

If the idea ever got past the bankers, it might even save the man's career. As it is, all it would do is ruin mine. I am starting to get riled. "Let's not go there, Jed", I mutter, and delete the paragraph.

To recap (stop me if you've heard this before): Arnie doesn't know if he's dreaming or not. He's just woken up in an abandonned factory in a city that looks like Detroit, and he seems to be armed to the teeth, but he's convinced he's an insurance salesman called Arnold Ziffel from Duluth. However, he has just extracted a small, vaguely disgusting alien creature from his left ear, and it has told him that he is in reality an inter-stellar spy with top secret microfilm encoded into his DNA, or something. Which has also given him the physique of a giant sack of potatoes.

And now the bad guys are bearing down on him, armed to the teeth, aimed with some sort of new night-scope that uses a blue laser instead of a red one. Bang, bang, bang. They may be trained assassins, but they're pathologically incapable of hitting a target, and Arnie manages to kill them all by....

...Tying them to the railway tracks and running them down with locomotives? Drowning them in a giant vat of chocolate syrup? Chaining them between two bullocks and fucking them to death? Dialling 111?

Well don't fucking ask me, there's just a yawning great gap here in the original. "After Arnie escapes from the factory, he catches a shuttle to Rigil 9".

It's one of those oppressive Angelino days when the sun is like a black hole, sucking the city into the depths of its heat. The airco in my apartment is humming and dripping to itself, but the brownout means that it's only going through the motions. The apartment-house may look like adobe, but it's purest Hollywood stucco, ca. 1935. The walls get so hot on the inside that you could fry an egg on them, although gravity might provide some problems, even in L.A. It is ten in the morning, I've been sitting staring at my screen since six, and now the sweat is starting to run down between my shoulderblades.

Gimmicks. I'm good at gimmicks. I have a sick mind. Arnie's there, in the dark old mill, about to be attacked by goons. And he escapes by.... use your fucking brain, Jedediah, THINK. The bad guys capture Arnie and subject him to hideous bio-sexual experiments or the kind I can only hint at because it would shock the viewers, and probably me as well ...

There are limits, even for Super-Hack That killer combination of heat and too much bullshit. My mind is starting to wander.

I am trying to finish a synopsis in a hurry. I am ALWAYS trying to finish a synopsis in a hurry. That's my trade. I used to be a writer, but now I'm a hack. I've cut myself a nice little corner writing synopses and treatments, short summaries of stories that producers use to raise money. I take the original script, the re-write, the re-write of the re-write, sneak in a few ideas of my own, and Bob's-your-uncle - instant sequel. The bank executive reads the synopsis, and decides what America shall see. And for some reason that I really don't want to think about, I seem to have an infallible mainline into the soul of the average bank executive.

I'm pushing forty, I'm single, $75,000 a year pays my gym subscription and keeps me in hooch; if I want a new car, I grab a disease from the Reader's Digest and write a TV-movie. What can I say? It's a living.

But Arnie is still stuck in the old mill. And I am stuck in Garden Apartments.

Arnie resolves to chuck it in and become an eighteenth-century German composer. His catchphrase: "I'll be Bach"...

I am a consummate writing professional. Meaning I know when it is time to throw in the towel. Right after the time when I've thrown the Mexican ashtray across the room, and it has punched yet another hole thorugh the wallpaper.

I haul on a vest and some shorts, and risk running to the gym - don't quite need oxygen by the time I get there, but by the time I've ineffectually heaved some iron around the place and sprinted home, I'm ready for the proverbial pipe-of-tea-and-a-lie-down.

I manage to locate the pipe, and my stash, but the ashtray is something of a mystery, until I remember the new hole in the living-room wall. The damned ashtray has gone right through, punching a hole in the lining. Cautiously, I start picking at the plaster - Hollywood is suffering a tarantula plague, and not only in the front offices.

Now this, kids, is where the going gets trippy. If you thought that this was some sort of nice slambam fantasy in which young Jedediah ends up in the sack with Arnie, you might as well go home now. (I mean the idea. I never fuck Republicans.)

A whole great chunk of plaster falls off, crashing on my bare feet, followed by the ashtray, which I narrowly manage to avoid. The wall is a mess; dangling shreds of 1950's wallpaper, and I can see the framing. I can even see daylight through holes in the outer cladding. Oh well. Bang goes the bond. But what's this? There's some junk stored in the wall. On one of the wall members (a noggin, a dwang, a joist? what the fuck do Americans call them?) there's an elongated lump of black metal. Oh great. A plutonium rod in my living room. ("That explains the mysterious glow in your urine, Carruthers".) I look a little closer, and gently blow off some of the dust and cigarette ash.

Then I burst out laughing, and pull the thing from inside the wall. Even someone as prudish as I can see that it is a dildo. It is black, about twelve inches long, about an inch-and-a-half through, with a big round cock-head on one end, and a bigger ribbed base to hold onto at the other. It's made from cast iron, and it's - well, how can I explain? It's made, not modelled. Jeff Stryker has not dipped his dick into molten iron to make the mould - the original was carefully designed by someone, maybe in the 1920's, maybe a little earlier. Kind of like a forerunner of Flash Gordon's spaceship. Amazing. It's probably been there for years, but there's no rust - it's not greasy to the touch, but it's obviously a souvenir from the Vaseline years. Holding it in my hand, I get a weird kind of a rush. It's always kind of weird to be reminded that gay sex was not invented by William Higgins.

There are a couple of other things lurking in the wall. A battered grey metal tin like grandma kept cake in. And a big old photo-album, with black paper pages. Those stupid photo-corners that would never sit straight, holding in place old, old photographs, big eight-by-tens. I don't recognise any of the guys in the pictures, but the style is obvious - Hollywood studio portraits. Movie stars, from the old days, doing old-fashioned movie-star things - a guy poised in what looks like a Roman chariot, whip raised behind him, a look of madness in his eyes. A pretty dimpled dark-haired guy in a dinner-jacket leaning on a silver art- deco pillar. That guy with the Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin. A kid in a fur coat with a ukulele.

Weird. Jedediah Lealand, your $64,0000 question: what do these two things have to do with eachother?

Fucked if I know. But the whip gives me an idea, and you know how it is for writers: like Holmes says, "Watson! The game is afoot!". Why does it take Windows and Word so long to load? Bloatware! My fingers thrash the keys like Oscar Petersen, and the "B" flies off several times. Yeah. It's fifteen years since Indiana Jones and the bullwhip - maybe I can recycle it in my Arnie picture. Using a live electric cable. I have the thing fixed and faxed in an hour. (It later turns up as a Meg Ryan / Tom Hanks romantic comedy set in an Ethiopian refugee camp.)

And now I'm done. I sit back in my chair and sip a beer. Other things to do. Shop. Go to the beach (a beach with houses virtually to the waterline is not a beach.) Mix with my many varied and interesting friends. (In California?) Phone my mother.

Open the strange metal tin from the wall cavity.

This, gentle reader, is where the going gets VERY trippy. There is a battered red cross on the top, and some barely legible words, handwritten in chinagraph: "First Aid Kit". The kit is sealed with wax, but I soon fix that with my trusty Stanley knife. Inside, no bandages or disinfectant. Just uniform grey waxed cartons, each about the size of a Twinkie. I consider for a moment. Some kind of explosive? Or something precious, protected with deadly nerve gas? Humbug. I have seen too many "B" movies. Nonetheless, I open a window, and a slow gale of heat billows in through the bars. I pull out one of the boxes and slit the covering at one end. A strong smell fills the room - nothing to make Schrodinger's cat worry, but something that makes me grin - HASH. Dry, black, crystalline, pungent. I look at the writing on the lid again.

Not "first aid kit", you idiot: "first aid KIF." Strictly medicinal, you understand.

The boxes were all the same, but the contents of each was slightly different. You do not think in situations like this. Your paranoid fantasies about poison gases dissipate rapidly as you pack a nice big pipeful and make like the vacuum cleaner.

For a moment I thought the stuff had lost its oomph. (For a moment, I thought it was some sort of mysterious Asian herb tea for menstrual cramps.) Then it was like Lenny Bruce and the airplane glue - "HEY now". Or like that thing in "Vertigo" when Jimmy Stewart looks down the stairwell. Or like...

An entirely adequate buzz, in other words. Yes, yes, I practise all forms of addictive behaviour, another toke and the ears were ringing slightly My head was starting to spin. Classic: "this stuff is stronger than I thought". I sat back on the couch, and picked up the album from the coffee table. Maybe these pix were worth some money. A friend of mine once found a dusty Porsche in abandonned warehouse in New York, with the keys in. (Tank was empty so we moved on.) What kind of a weird bastard walls up a dildo, a bundle of old photos, and a fortune in dak, and then moves off and leaves them? And doesn't come back in forty years?

Americans and their possessions. Sheesh.

I was feeling pretty good, but the room suddenly seemed incredibly bright. I got up to close the window. And the drapes. If this stuff was rocket fuel, it had an incredibly long fuse - I was still on the way up. I sat down and had another toke. The room was darker now, darker and hot. But there were a lot of leaks around the drapes. And under the door. And through the hole in the wall. Little spikes of light played through the smokey room, catching twirling dust motes. It was still too bright, dammit, and my ears were ringing. I shut my eyes, just for a moment...

As one sense cuts out, the others escalate in strength. So, when I shut my eyes, after a moment, my sense of smell began to notice a change, and my skin began to get that tingling, sunburned feeling that's just plain lubricious. I lay back in my chair and ran my hands down over my chest towards my jockstrap. What was that smell? Slightly, slightly salty, slightly smokey - a good smell. A very human smell. My hands were groping my groin; from out of nowhere, my dick was going wild against the abrasive fabric. My eyes still closed, I slid my hands back up my chest and gave my nipples a firm twist. The sensation nearly blew me off the chair. I slid to the floor, lay on my back, twisted my tits a few more times, and then moved my hands southwards. That smell. Driving me crazy. I could almost taste it. My dick felt like it was going to split apart.

And this, gentle readers, is where things get truly and righteously trippy.

As my hands reached the base of my belly, my cock popped free from my jock and - into a hot, moist mouth, which simply swallowed me to the base. I opened my mouth to bellow, and my eyes as well; my mouth found itself pressed against a slick, tight, asshole, and my eyes found themselves surveying a pair of tanned muscular buns that God should have known about. What the fuck was going on here? A dream. I knew it was a dream. In the distance I could hear all the sounds of Garden Apartments - the rattle of air conditioners, Cambodian pop music, a couple of dogs...

I could wake up if I wanted to. I was dreaming, and I knew it. The tongue sliding up the underside of my dick was a dream. The asshole my tongue was jabbing at was a dream. That salty, slightly smokey smell of his skin was a dream. The room we were in was DEFINITELY a dream. I wasn't really terribly interested in architecture at this point, but in between this wild tongue's assaults, I registered that we were in some strange old room with low beams. And as he licked around and around the head of my dick, he was using the muscles in his ass to play with the tip of my tongue, opening his sphincter just a few millimetres and then constricting again. God this guy had good concentration... and then I lost my own for several seconds as he pulled off, grabbed with one hand, and rubbed the palm of the other around and around and around on the head of my cock.

He sat back on my face, hard, opening wide at last, and as my tongue sank slowly in the west, he grabbed my ankles, pulled my legs up under his arms, and began to suck on my own ass. I tried to repeat his clever winking-eye routine, but had to admit I was outclassed. So to make up the difference, I figured I'd give his tits some work. I discovered there were two leather bandoliers crossed over his chest, each filled with what felt like very large bullets. His nipples also felt like bullets, although somewhat smaller. I ventured a slight pinch on one of them, and for the first time he made a sound - so I ventured a slightly stronger pinch, and he ventured a slightly louder sound. I grabbed on with both hands, and began twisting. His sound effects increased in volume, frequency, and variety.

So did mine. It felt like his long, strong tongue was about to reach my tonsils (via the tradesmen's entrance). He wasn't rimming me - he was tongue-fucking me, and the room started to swim. Or rather, to rock slowly back and forth. Wherever we were, and whoever he was, this guy knew where all my buttons were and how to push them. And now that I was over the initial surprise, I was giving pretty much as good as I got. This sure beat the hell out of watching Ricki Lake. He straightened his legs a little, and I got a mouthful of nuts. I pushed him further, and licked my way along the length of his cock. Perhaps a little bigger than I was used to, and I was looking forward to gargling the thing.

But he seemed to be in some sort of hurry. He suddenly pushed my legs down to the ? floor? ?bed? where the fuck were we? I was lying on papers, on a some sort of table. There was a brass telescope and a sextant. We were in a chart-room on some sort of boat. Through the open door, I could see bluer sky than ever shone on Los Angeles.

Still with his back to me, he shuffled along my body and - without further ado, lubrication, or rubbergoods, impaled himself on my dick and began to fuck himself. (This is a dream, I reminded myself, but my presence of mind was rapidly deserting me.) If his well-trained butt muscles had worked havoc on my tongue, they drove my dick berserk. He had this knack of slamming down quickly, and then sliding up slowly, clenching my dick like he was shucking corn. As he squatted up and down, I could tell a little more about him from his back - he was not a big guy, but muscular and beautifully proportioned. And he was no chicken - in California, where everyone wants to be 17 for ever, you come to crave adult company. This was definitely a grown-up who enjoyed being a grown-up - his skin felt slightly tough and lived-in, and there were a few scars to shop-soil him. Dark curls dripped out from under his bandana; there was a large golden ring in one ear; he looked like Central Casting's idea of a pirate. His skin tasted of salt.

I reached up his back, ran slid my hands under his armpits, grabbed his shoulders, and started doing chin-ups, hauling my cock up into him. He squatted, quite still, and in this unlikely position, I proceded to jackhammer him - not a sustainable activity, but by God it was fun while it lasted.

After a half-an-orgasm's worth of this, he stopped me and, without disengaging, turned around to face me - the boat chose that moment to heel, and he near to ripped my dick off. But pretty quickly, he was back to his business, and I finally got a chance to look at the man I was fucking. He was no slouch. A flat, round, tanned face; a pencil-line moustache which somehow avoided looking silly, and lively grey eyes. He was enjoying this, and not taking it too seriously at all - periodically, he would wince a little, growl "Goddam", and grin at me.

"You having fun yet?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Can you shoot twice?"

"No problem." Well, not to date, anyway.

"Then fuck me on my back."

The ceiling in the cabin was plenty low, but we managed to flip him onto his back without disengaging. I'd been almost immobile through the procedings so far; now it was time to earn my keep. With his calves on my shoulders, and his hands grasping my butt-cheeks, I started jabbing it to him; he was alternately moaning and chuckling as I touched the spot no other beer reaches. We were looking in eachother's eyes, communicating; I had no idea who this guy was, but we were having fun together, and we were both getting off on doing a decent job of it. We both getting off, that's for sure - his moans had become loud, animal squealing, and his chuckles were now gasps of laughter. And periodically he'd urgfe me on in a soft, slightly nasal Boston accent: "Come on, old sport, give it to me."

I was getting pretty close, and so was he; I could feel his dick jabbing into my chest. And then, out of nowhere, a cool, damp tongue slid into my butt, and that was it. With a yell that would have made Pavarotti proud, my dick began to buck and clench inside the guy's asshole, and he was yelling "aw yeah, aw yeah" as his own cum squirted over our stomachs. From behind me, I heard a sigh, and cum squirted on my back, up to the back of my neck, and over my head onto the map-table. I turned to look. And immediately regretted my earlier rude remarks about chicken. I mean, this one would be bobbing along the age of consent in most countries. And if I had just broken the law by having his tongue up my ass, it was probably worth it. He was blonde, tanned, lean, muscular, and stark naked. The perfect California beach bimbo.

"Can I be next?" he asked.

The guy underneath me ducked his head to one side to check out the interloper, and sighed. "God, Dougie, you just can't stand being left out, can you."

The boy looked down, slightly despondent.

"But you always have these really hot guys. I mean, look at his butt. " He slid his hands over my rear.

"You find your own."

"Yes, Daddy."

Daddy? Wide-eyed, I looked down at my paramour. Who hooked his arms around my neck, pulled himself up, kissed me, and said "one, he's older than he looks, and two, he started it." He pulled me down on top of him, and kissed me again. "Honest. "

There was a muffled rumble in the distance, and the ship shuddered. The pirate ruffled my hair.

"Hey, do you have a name?"

"Jedediah"

He disengaged my cock. "Well, Jedediah, I'm Doug, this is Doug Junior, and it's high time we were off this ship. That was the forard magazine blowing. Did you find a boat, Dougie?"

He bounded off the table, hauling on a pair of dark-red harem pants, and tying them up with what looked like a boxer's prize belt. I didn't appear to have any clothes at all, apart from a thick belt with a knife on one hip - neither of them seemed bothered. I followed them out onto the deck. We were on an old, three-masted sailing ship, or the ruins of one: one of the masts was splintered in the middle, and the deck was littered with yards and ropes and timber - but strangely enough, no bodies. Towards the bow, a fire was blazing through a large hole the deck. The boy led us through the wreckage, to the smallest rowboat I had ever seen. Doug cut some ropes, and we lowered the boat down to the water. I looked around - no other boats, no land. And long, dark-grey shapes swimming ominously through the water.

Even though it was inevitable that he should end up in the dinghy, Dougie put up a bit of resistance.

"It's supposed to be "Casabianca". I'm supposed to stand on the burning deck whence all but I had fled. And then we get burned to death together."

Doug senior was all at once the parent.

"No-one is going to get burned to death. You know perfectly well that we return safe and well in the sequel. Now get your butt on the boat while I work out the finale."

Dougie climbed down the side, and pushed off. "How come you guys get to have all the fun?", he yelled.

"You can play with him next time, Dougie." Doug waved, and pulled me away from the side. "Come on. We don't have much time. The main magazine will blow at any moment."

I was not following any of this, really - I had heard of insouciance in the face of death, blah blah, but this was ridiculous. Whistling, Doug made his way towards the one remaining mast, looked up it speculatively, rummaged around on the deck a bit, and came up, chuckling, with a strange-looking canvas device. He played, quickly and cryptically, with some of the ropes from the mast, almost ignoring me. After securing the canvas gadget to the rigging, he looke up, took my hand, and grinned.

"I'd really like you to do this to me. But there's a knack to it that you have to be shown. If I fuck you this time, will you fuck me next time?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed like a fair enough deal to me. The canvas gadget was a bosun's chair, a kind of a harness for lowering the carpenters to check out the rudder gear and so on. But this one appeared to be upside down. Doug strapped it around my butt, and hauled me up into the air; I was bent forward, slightly uncomfortable, and feeling slightly ridiculous. Then tied my ankles to a plank, so that my legs were wide apart; he tied more ropes to the ends of the plank. Pulling off his pants, he stood on the plank behind me, and between my legs, and strapped our ankles together; I could feel his dick pressing betwen my cheeks. This was getting more intriguing by the moment. Then he hauled on a rope, and we lifted about ten feet off the deck, and I was swinging like a puppet, suspended face-down by my pelvis and my ankles. Doug grabbed the ropes suspending the bosun's chair, and pushed them forward down my torso, and up the outside of my arms, until I grasped them in my hands; I hauled myself up them, one hand at a time, until I was spreadeagled in the air.

"You catch on fast", Doug murmured, and I realised the head of his dick was already in my ass. I had been so busy getting my balance that I was completely oblivious to this invasion, which, given the size of the dick in question, was pretty remarkable. So here I was swinging in the air in a bizarre cat's cradle of rope and wood and canvas, on a burning boat in the middle of the ocean, with a total stranger's dick in my ass. It was swelling. And he was sliding in.

My hands momentarily lost purchase on the ropes, and I lost balance, slamming back onto his dick. My turn to howl. He didn't move, but the cat's cradle swung a little, and somehow the movement of the ropes sent shockwaves through the whole set-up, which were transmitted up Doug's dick and into my body. It was like someone drumming on my prostate. Wild. There was a muffled "boom" from beneath the decks, and, as the boat shook and pieces fell crashed to the deck, I could feel the explosion all the way into my bowels. That was Doug's cue; he grabbed my belt, and began to fuck me, nothing histrionic, just fine, long, steady strokes, and every so often another explosion would make him judder inside me. My own dick was hanging above the deck, twitching to itself. I couldn't touch it, and probably just as well. I was getting into hair-trigger country. And so was Doug, who was biting my ear.

"You like this?"

Words just couldn't do it. "I've never - never - never..."

I was cut off by a sequence of explosions, which seemed to run right along one side of the ship. We were veiled in smoke. I was dreaming. I was going to die. I was going to come. Which was going to happen first?

Doug's hand crept around my waist; he was pumping me a good deal harder, and i could feel him starting to sweat. I reckon his dick was still growing, not in length, but in breadth - it was like taking the Chrysler Building, and I was loving it. Doug's hand grazed across my hip, and I felt him fumble for my knife. Grunting in my ear, he slid it from its sheath, never breaking his stride, even though the cat's cradle was now swinging perilously. I saw the knife flash in front of me, and for a moment, I though he was going to cut my throat - but even as the adrenaline rose in my throat, his other hand grabbed my dick, and began to milk it. I wailed, and barely saw the knife flying through the air, severing a rope as it slammed into the mast. Doug's cum was shooting into my butt like bullets, and and then, with a wild rattle of pulleys, the whole cat's cradle screamed up the mast, out of the smoke and into the sunlight, and I could see the sides of the boat blow outwards, and the mast itself being propelled into the sky, taking us with it for a moment. As we reached the apogee, I clenched tight on Doug's cock, closed my eyes, and came.

I was in my living room, on the floor. The hundred air-conditioners were still humming. The dust motes were still swirling slowly in the light from outside. I ached all over. I was soaked in come. The carpet I was lying on was soaked with sweat.

I lay there, quite still.

In my hand, I could feel the handle cast iron dildo.