Daniel Surtin took a last, disgusted draw on his hardly-smoked cigar. Then he put it down. The ashtray was a capacious amber-toned glass thing, with fashioned glass swerving around its edge. It had a twenties look. He let the cigar burn itself out there. The smell of the smoke would permanently permeate the air of the room and mark it indelibly and irrevocably with his presence.
But that would hardly do. It was not good enough. The influence he needed to exert now was not ethereal. The force he needed to release now could not achieve itself in the imagination. Fulfillment was not something intangible.
It was hard, subservient flesh. It was a definite look in the eyes of surrender and devotion. It was the power of the man who had conquered another man. Those things added up to fulfillment. To be fulfilled he needed to have possession of another man, so that he could shape his life as he willed.
That's what he wanted. He wanted to fill the insides of another man and dominate him. He bit his teeth and felt the fibers of his muscles insisting.
He stripped to his jock and his boots and did a hundred push ups. He was made of iron. He held the chinning bar and did fifty on that. His abs were like rocks, his cock a powerful fist that ached to connect.
He showered and admired himself in the bathroom mirror. He was a splendid animal.
He pulled his leather jeans over his bare body, snapped on his leather bracelets and armbands, slicked his thick, dark hair back, checked the diamond stud in his left ear, and admired his powerful naked chest in the bedroom mirror.
In the hallway he smelled it. The rich residue of his cigar hung in the air the way that the perfume of a woman who knows how to get men to do what she wants remains in an elevator even after she's gone.
He turned the key in the lock and walked down the steps into the summer street still hot at midnight.
It was a hot night in New York City, a hot night in July. In the street it felt like you were in a closed room, stuffy beyond endurance, and you just had to open the window. Except there was no window to open. The air shut against you like the walls of a closed room. You were outside and there was nothing to open. It was like a brick wall.
David had not seen Roque for over a week. He had declined to give him his cellphone number and David did not know where he lived. He often still pictured his feet and how he had lost himself in kissing them.
The heat drew crowds on to the streets all over.
David stopped into Benny's for an iced daiquiri and stood at the bar flirting with Wally.
It was cool inside Benny's, but not so cool as to make it uncomfortable for Wally and the other bartenders to be shirtless, or any of the clientele who so chose also.
David was wearing a short-sleeve black shirt, sleeves rolled high revealing his beautiful slim, muscled bare arms. The shirt was unbuttoned revealing a chest he was proud of, that had taken several years' work, but was not overdeveloped. Lean and muscular were the words that turned him on and that described him. He was tanned and sleek and smooth. Every now and then his nipples peeked out from behind the curtain of his open shirt.
Wally reached over and touched one. He nodded and winked. David felt like he was going into a trance. He caught himself, smiled, waited a beat, and winked back.
Wally looked away for a moment and gestured to Daniel with a tilt of his head. Daniel was sandwiched between the jukebox and an old telephone booth that hadn't been torn out, even though cellphones had made telephone booths obsolete. At Benny's this one had gotten new life. Guys went inside together, stripped off their shirts, and became supermen.
Daniel was watching a couple pressed shirtless outside the booth, chest to shirtless chest, embracing and surrendering to a kiss the way lovers in the nineteen forties might stand in front of a row of phone booths at the old art nouveau glass and steel Pennsylvania Station taking a long goodbye from each other, the heartbreak of separation momentarily vanquished by this tangible conjunction of spirit.
Daniel saw Wally's nod and walked up to the bar.
You two ought to know each other, Wally said.
I'm afraid you wouldn't understand even if I could tell you, David said, sipping his third daiquiri and gazing at Daniel with longing as they stood at the bar. You're...I don't know how to say it.
What? I'm what?
You're...well-balanced. You're whole. Me, I'm a collection of ill-fitting fragments which are at odds with each other and are always compromising themselves and each other.
Daniel shook his head.
What's in that stuff you are drinking, lover?
I know what I'm talking about, David said gently, imploring. That's what's at the root of my fascination with sado-masochism and domination and submission. I have trouble understanding it completely. I mean...
Daniel smiled.
I've never understood what that's about, myself, he said.
That's what I was trying to say before, David said, misunderstanding him. It's just not in your bones. Me, it's who I am. One part of me is always dominating another part of me. I'm always being dominated by another part of me. I am enslaved to myself. So I want to be free of myself. It's simple. That's what's behind my lust to surrender to a master. That way I can defeat the part of myself that's making me do what it wants. But I'm also myself. And myself doesn't want to. So I got all kinds of currents running around me ^Ö domination, humiliation, pain, discipline, shaping myself into an ideal object, hating myself, loving myself, hating loving myself, getting off on hating myself.
Be quiet, Daniel said, putting his finger to David's lip. You're too wound up in your mind.
I know, David said. Sorry. It's the daiquiris.
Daniel smiled.
How 'bout another daiquiri? he said.
Daniel took two small key-rings from a wooden box on his desk.
He separated the wire strands, the way you do when you slide a key on or off a ring. He pulled them apart far enough to clamp each one on one of David's nipples.
It stung and almost felt good.
Look at yourself in the mirror, Daniel said.
I like how it looks, David said. It brings everything out.
David meant the definition of his pecs and abs pleased him.
The rings bit into his nipples and they became hot from the sensation.
Daniel told him to do fifty push ups. After the tenth David no longer felt a stinging sensation in his nipples. He was full of a dynamic energy that kept him going like a piston.
After the fiftieth push-up, David sprang to his feet and presented himself with hands cupped behind the neck and legs about eighteen inches apart.
He was happy, exposed like that, smooth shaven and being looked at.
He was proud.
And then he gasped from the pain when without warning Daniel tugged the rings off his nipples.
David did not like the pain, but he sensed his own feelings were unimportant. Discipline was achieved only through pain. Pain made it necessary to ignore and overcome your feelings. That's discipline.
Thank you, sir, David said with bowed head.
Daniel put the rings back on David's nipples. They bit when he let go. Then he twisted them.
It was burning, stinging pain.
But once again David said, Thank you, sir, and maintained his position.
It was not to stop. Repeatedly Daniel snapped the rings on, tormented David twisting them and tortured him tearing them off.
David wanted to say Yes, sir, thank you, sir. But he could do nothing but shout, No, No, please, stop. The pain. No. Please, Master, please.
He heard himself and was ashamed.
Daniel ignored him. He knew the resistance would pass. He continued to inflict pain.
David held himself tighter. His breathing was furious and he growled like an animal. But he held himself still, and still Daniel did not stop. And still David looked for someplace within him where he could want this pain. He wanted to want it, to be able to want it. It was a dear goal. But as much as he strove to desire the pain, it did not change: he did not want the pain.
It was that awareness of his failure to conform his will perfectly to Daniel's, more than the pain itself, that broke David's spirit and made David's sobs break out -- no matter how hard he resisted.
I can't. I can't. I can't. I want to and I can't.
For shame he sobbed and cried out. Not shame at being so used as he was by Daniel. Shame, rather, at failing to respond as he knew he ought to, as he wished he could, as he wanted to. Shame at his shameful weakness. Shame at the childish pleasure he felt at the outrush of his warm urine soaking his boxer briefs as he lost control of himself completely.
Come, Daniel said, as he guided David gently to the bathroom. In the shower, David soaped and scrubbed himself. Coming out, he allowed Daniel to wrap him in a thick terrycloth robe.
I'm sorry, David said.
Daniel took him in his arms and kissed his cheeks and eyelids and ears and neck and lips. David felt like a stone that was suffocating him had rolled off his chest.
Daniel opened David's robe and looked at his beautiful naked body and the steady tumescence of desire. He took the scrotum in his palm, brought his lips to David's and pressed kisses into him like he was returning to him something that had once belonged to him.
When Daniel's fingers gently touched David's sore nipples later, David felt the way a machine must feel when it is switched on and the electric current hums through it. He knew with a thrill he had never known before that he had no purpose other than what Daniel used him for.
In the morning, but not too early, Daniel took him to have his nipples pierced.
It may seem strange that a piece of silver inserted through the nipple can have a profound influence on the mind. It seems strange even to me, who have experienced the change and am making it a part of David's experience in this story. But it is real and it was exhilarating. Strange too that this mark of bondage should feel as it did to me and as it does to David now, so liberating.
David had often imagined having his nipples pierced, but something ^Ö modesty, shame, shyness, fear? ^Ö always had prevented him. But now the matter had been taken out of his hands. This man, whom he had met only the night before and who had so quickly taken control wished it to be done, and so it was done. He was transformed. The insertion of a tiny silver bar through each nipple seemed to pierce his mind, and -- how to say this? -- his mind seemed to collapse, like a balloon that's had all the air let out of it. It was a feeling of supreme emptiness, of buoyancy and lightness. Whereas he had always been weighted down with an awareness of himself, now he was so weightless, he floated like a dancer on a tightrope. He glowed like feathery, cotton candy clouds flooded with pink in a sunset like the one I saw tonight in the western sky.
He was pierced.
It's a reward, Daniel said. It's my mark of possession.
The temperature was in the nineties. They walked east on Bleecker Street and then turned left, heading towards one of the grand old apartment buildings forming the west margin of Washington Square Park.
David walked shirtless in the heat, proudly showing off his pierced nipples.
Daniel, he said, What is the virtue of obedience?
The answer is simple, Daniel said. You know it in your bones. It satisfies a fundamental desire, more fundamental than the desire for pleasure.
David knew he was right.
There's a desire for discipline, Daniel said. Discipline comes from learning to endure, and then to accept, and then to love pain.
Accepting pain is the mark of obedience. Obedience comes from discipline. Rebellion destroys discipline. Rebellion is the rampage of a mind that has not accepted and surrendered to a master.
Seeking pleasure, Daniel continued, is always the goal of rebellion. It is the sign that something's wrong, that something is not there that you wish were. Going after pleasure is rebellion against the way things are.
Accepting pain means you are sufficient in the present. It is the mark of submission and self-conquest, of obedience and strength.
Once someone has surrendered he can feel the much greater and much subtler, the mysteriously nuanced pleasure of inflicted pain. When you can feel the pleasure in pain, then everything is going to be filled with joy. You know that from your own experience.
David's mind was glowing with a white light.
I loathe having to animadvert to anything as vulgar as reality, but essentially, there was nothing else I could do. I needed, frankly, the money.
In the circle of mostly men gathered around him broke ripplets of laughter. The men were young, good-looking, confident, or they faked the attitudes of confidence skillfully drawing strength from their well-carved, tightly held bellies. And they all had success on their minds.
I'll be pulling them in in fewer than five years, Tom told Andy on the way over to Wellington's. Getting an invitation to Daryl Wellington's is something guys in my position would kill for. The contacts.
He didn't want to part from his cool, not-really-there, don't-really-care attitude, but something irresistible forced him to get a rush from Andy's excitement.
It means I'm getting somewhere.
You're always somewhere, Andy said, who had stars in his eyes when it came to Tom but was afraid to confess to it.
Everyone laughed when Wellington dropped the end of his sentence. They did not know how much, but everyone knew Wellington had shifted gears and driven himself into money.
Afraid he would no longer be taken seriously, he came to have a sharp critical eye for himself, and in pearl words strung together on the frail string of his on-going talk he mercilessly, savagely exposed and derided himself and his bundle of faults.
He had made, indeed, a felix culpa, he said winking when he'd unburden himself to his intimate friends in a conspiratorial voice.
Daniel, he cried as Daniel came through the grand arch to his living room, one arm slung over David's happy shoulder.
They had come directly from the gym. They had showered after their work-out. As they embraced in the shower stall with the needle points of hot water falling on them and their muscles, they felt, as they embraced, little particles of energy bouncing against each other and embracing too, until they achieved the heaven of relief and mutual surrender.
You've put on weight, Wellington, Daniel said facing his host and sipping a Rob Roy.
Don't rub it in, dear boy. I have not had the incentives recently to exercise. And I have developed, over the years, a fondness, you know, for greasy meats. You, on the other hand look like you have been eating your vegetables, he said, scanning David standing by Daniel's side, at ease, quietly.
What the hell are they talking about? Andy whispered to Tommy as they sat crammed on a leather sofa between a bohemian girl who kept taking pictures with her cell phone and a young Arab boy who was rolling joints on the low table in front of them and passing them around. An older woman in a black satiny long dress with a shimmering gold beaded yoke sitting cross-legged on the floor across the room was staring at them.
You don't get it? Tom said
What's there to get? Andy said sotto voce and confused.
I am going to Hollywood. It is true, Wellington drawled. I have sold out, my darling, big time, I'm happy to say. But all this talk and you have not introduced us, Daniel.
David, Daniel smiled, gesturing with a sweep of his arm, like an exhibitor presenting some marvel.
David, Wellington repeated the name. David, indeed! David as David as the David in the Academia di Belle Arti. Come here, David.
David looked at Daniel for permission, which Daniel quietly granted with a wry smile.
Yes, sir, David said.
Very well behaved, Wellington said approvingly. You have been well trained, haven't you, David?
Yes, sir, David responded.
May I touch? Wellington asked looking at Daniel.
But carefully, discretely, Daniel said, with a nod.
David stood unmovingly still. As if by magic he took on the aspect of marble. Wellington traced fingers along his torso and thighs. He traced the shape of his lips and marveled.
Extraordinary, he said smiling to Daniel as he returned David to him.
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