The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 14

  There were hardly any tropical boys there, as it turned out, because this was where the Ft Lauderdale college students who couldn’t afford spring break in Cancún went to spend their more meagre allowances, and not only did it look like a Mexican restaurant-with-disco in Ft Lauderdale, the management took care to keep all but the most dapper Méridans out lest the coeds be frightened by scruffy street boys. Scruffy street boys, of course, is just what Boyfriend had his eye out for, and at first the pickings looked slim; but we found one who had slipped past security, out to hustle nothing more spicy than a gig showing tourists around the warren of narrow streets near the town’s central plaza, stumbling instead onto us. Ten minutes later Boyfriend had his mouth wrapped around a meaty little bundle, with foreskin. Luis stuck close to us for several days, probably eating more regularly than usual, and wondering out loud whether all the women in America were like me, and would we take him back with us? Or at least send him a Mötley Crüe T-shirt when we went home?

  Boyfriend had brought Bob Damron’s gay travel guide, which listed for Mérida: a cruisy restaurant (it wasn’t) and a cruisy park bench in the Zocalo (it was, and one night Boyfriend stayed out most of the night looking for gay men, who, he said, would run the other way if they saw me coming, and found one, a slender boy who had to pull down the pantyhose he wore under his jeans so Boyfriend could get to his cock, and who expressed wonder because he had never seen anyone with so many condoms; in fact most people never had condoms at all. Boyfriend gave him his night’s supply and some little brochures, about el SIDA he’d brought from the AIDS Foundation, en español so even if our limited Spanish didn’t get through to our tricks, a pamphlet might).

  Damron’s also indicated that Mérida had a bathhouse.

  I had always wanted to go to a bathhouse, and of course there was not much chance it would ever happen back home. For one thing, they were all closed before I ever moved to San Francisco. For another, even if I dressed enough like a boy to pass, I wouldn’t look old enough to be let in. But in Mérida perhaps things were different.

  It was away from the town’s centre, but within walking distance of the Hotel Reforma. Through the tiny front window, grimy from the town’s blowing dust, I saw a huge papier-mâché figure of Pan, painted brightly and hung with jewellery, phallus high. It looked like something the Radical Faeries would carry in the Gay Day parade. Everything else about the lobby looked dingy, like the waiting room of a used-car dealership.

  Los Baños de Vapour would open at eight that evening. They had a central tub and rooms to rent; massage boys could be rented, too. I would be welcome.

  The papier-mâché Pan was at least seven feet tall and was indeed the only bright thing in the lobby. Passing through the courtyard, an overgrown jumble of vines pushing through cracked tiles, a slight smell of sulfur, a stagnant fountain, we were shown up a flight of concrete stairs to our room by Carlos, a solid, round-faced man in his mid-twenties, wrapped in a frayed white towel. The room was small and completely tiled, grout black from a losing fight with the wet tropical air. At one end was a shower and at the other a bench, a low, vinyl-covered bed and a massage table. There was a switch that, when flipped, filled the room with steam. Boyfriend flipped it and we shucked our clothes; as the pipes hissed and clanked, Carlos gestured to the massage table and then to me.

  Boyfriend answered for me, in Spanish, that I’d love to. I got on the table and Carlos set to work. Boyfriend danced around the table gleefully, sometimes stroking me, sometimes Carlos’s butt. “Hey, man, I’m working!” Carlos protested, not very insistently, and Boyfriend went for his cock, stroking it hard, then urged him up onto the table, and Carlos’s hands, still slick from the massage oil and warm from the friction of my skin, covered my breasts as Boyfriend rolled a condom onto Carlos’s cock and rubbed it up and down my labia a few times and finally let go, letting it sink in. He rode me slow and then hard while the table rocked dangerously and Boyfriend stood at my head, letting me tongue his cock while he played with Carlos’s tits. When Boyfriend was sure that we were having a good time, he put on a towel and slipped out the door. Carlos looked surprised. I had to figure out how to say, in Spanish “He’s going hunting,” and get him to go back to fucking me, solid body slick from oil and steam; if he kept it up, he would make me come, clutching his slippery back, legs in the air.

  That was just happening when Boyfriend came back with David. He was pulling him in the door by his already stiff penis, and I suspected Boyfriend had wasted as little time getting him by the dick as he usually did. He had found David in the tub room, he announced, and he had a beautiful, long uncut cock. (Boyfriend always enunciated clearly when he said “uncut”.) David did have a beautiful cock, and he spoke English and was long and slim with startling blue eyes. It turned out he was Chicano, second generation, a senior Riverside High who spent school breaks with his grandmother in Mérida and worked at Los Baños de Vapour as a secret summer job. We found out all this about him as I was showering the sweat and oil off from my fuck with Carlos, and by the time I heard that he’d been working at the Baños since he turned sixteen, I was ready to start fucking again. David was the most quintessentially eighteen-year-old fuck I ever had, except Boyfriend’s presence made it unusual; he held David’s cock and balls and controlled the speed of the thrusting, until his mouth got preoccupied with Carlos’s dick. David told me, ardently, that I was beautiful, though at that point I didn’t care if I was beautiful or not, since I was finally in a bathhouse doing what I’d always wanted to do and I felt more like a faggot than a beautiful gringa. But David was saying he wished he had a girlfriend like me, even though I was thirty, shockingly old – this actually was what almost all of Boyfriend’s conquests said to me, though I suspected not every man could keep up with a girlfriend who was really a faggot, or a boyfriend who was really a woman, or whatever kind of fabulous anomaly I was.

  Then someone knocked on the door and we untangled for a minute to answer it, and there were José and Gaspar, laughing and saying we were the most popular room in the Baños at the moment and would we like some more company? At least that’s how David translated the torrent of Spanish, for they were both speaking at once. Naturally we invited them in, and lo and behold, Gaspar was actually gay, and so while I lay sideways on the massage table with my head off the edge and my legs in the air so I could suck David while José fucked me, I could watch Boyfriend finally getting his cock sucked by Gaspar, whose black, glittering Mayan eyes closed in concentration, and I howled with not simply orgasm but the excitement, the splendid excitement of being in Mexico in a bathhouse with four uncut men and a maniac, a place no woman I knew had gone before. Steam swirled in the saturated air like superheated fog, beading like pearls in the web of a huge Yucatán spider in the corner; David’s cock, or was it José’s or Carlos’s again, I didn’t care, pounded my fully opened cunt rhythmically and I wished I had her view.

  You know if you have ever been to a bathhouse that time stands still in the steamy, throbbing air, and so I had no idea how long it went on, only that sometimes I was on my back and sometimes on my knees, and once for a minute I was standing facing the wall, and when Boyfriend wasn’t sucking them or fucking me, he was taking snapshots of us, just like a tourist. The floor of the room was completely littered with condoms, which made us all laugh hysterically. Rubber-kneed, Gaspar and David held me up with Carlos and José flanking them so Boyfriend could snap one last picture. Then he divided all the rest of the condoms among them – we had more at the hotel, I think that week we went through ten dozen – and got out his brochures. He was trying to explain in Spanish the little condoms he used for giving head – how great they were to use with uncut guys ’cause they disappeared under the foreskin – and I was asking David what it was like to live a double life, Riverside High to Los Baños, and who else came there – “Oh, everybody does,” he said – and did they ever want to fuck him – of course they wanted to – and did he ever fuck them – well, sure – and how was th
at? He shrugged and said, as if there were only one possible response to my question, “It’s fucking.”

  When we left, the moon was high, the Baños deserted, the warm night air almost cool after the steamy room. The place looked like a courtyard motel, the kind I used to stay in with my parents when we traveled in the early sixties, but overgrown and haunted. The Pan figure glittered in the low lobby light, and the man at the desk charged us $35 – seven for each massage boy, four each to get in, and six for the room. Hundreds of thousands of pesos – he looked anxious, as though he feared we’d think it was too much. We paid him, laughing. I wondered if this was how a Japanese businessman in Thailand felt. Was I contributing to the imperialist decline of the third world? Boyfriend didn’t give a shit about things like that, so I didn’t mention it. In my hand was a crumpled note from David: “Can I come visit you in your hotel room? No money.”

  Tarot

  Florence Dugas

  Noon was gently moving towards two o’clock. As it was already summertime, no one could tell: somewhere in the world it’s always noon. It was as if the sun had given her a sign, and she didn’t return to work.

  The sound of her heels against the stone of the road and the sidewalk is like a clamour of victory. She supplies a rhythm to the city, and her long, thin legs move, map, and order its topography, like a defiant army marching ahead under the newfound sun, celebrating the coming of spring. It is good to feel the heat spread across her skin, caressing her knees like two warm hands, even moving up between her thighs now no longer under the protection of nylon. The sun almost draws a crown of gold around her head, as if she were a chosen being. From time to time she even swings her head from side to side, like a racehorse in heat. Saying yes and no to her invisible mount while her heavy stream of hair undulates across her back. She straightens her back, holding her stomach in, and the flow of her hair swims gloriously in motion.

  She walks as if she were leading a victory parade. The very word echoes across her brain, to the rhythm of her heels, and it amuses her to invent more meanings for it. To parade is more than just to walk at random, no mere promenade where you never know where the next step leads. “ To parade is to move like God across his garden,” Brisset used to say. It even makes her look a little drunk, dizzy from her newfound freedom. Walking along, parading, as if she were about to become the heroine of some medieval ballad sung by a troubadour beneath the window of a captive king. So much sun is unusual. Walking as she is, head high, she can no longer hear Paris surrounding her, just the sound of her heels clicking along; nor can she see the cars and passers-by, just the winged Génie of the Bastille, flying high up there close to Icarus. She is on parade: she’s come out of her shell, the whole world is on offer, her steps are conquering space, taking her into a wholly new dimension.

  The clock on the Gare de Lyon betrays an impossible hour, which even the sun denies.

  “The next train? Well, you’ve got the Paris – Vintimille, in ten minutes. Seats? Oh, as many as you want. Non-smoking? Isn’t the weather lovely? The sky is so blue. Yes, I understand.”

  The railways guy sitting behind the immediate departures window is actually not bad-looking at all.

  It’s true, there are few people on the train. In her compartment, just five men: four of them are playing cards, while the fifth, further down, appears to be sleeping already, with just his neck and short, greying hair visible from her vantage point.

  With all those empty seats available, she chooses to sit on the right-hand side, so she can enjoy the sun for the rest of the afternoon.

  She feels blandly happy, sunny, watching all the cows outside pass.

  The train does not stop before Valence.

  She walks out onto the platform to move her legs. A two-minute stop. Up in the sky, the sun hasn’t moved at all, but the heat is now more oppressive, a sign they are further south, in the Midi. She can feel the sun rising ever so stealthily up her thighs, so much more aggressively than in Paris, and this metaphor first makes her smile, then makes her feel dreamy.

  She shakes her head. I’m getting delirious, she thinks. But on the other hand she feels ever so free. She returns to the compartment from the other end and walks down the rows of seats as the train begins speeding up again. She sways dizzily between the wooden seats.

  The man with grey hair is not sleeping. He is watching her navigate the passage, struggling against the train’s increasing motion, as if he were looking through her. The thought that somehow between Paris and Valence, on this stolen afternoon, she has physically dematerialized amuses her. Is the man not really looking at her? He is quite handsome, in a prematurely greying way. His eyes are the same colour as his hair, pale grey veined with black – a man of marble. As she passes him, she gazes at his hands, laid out flat on the table. Quite beautiful hands that, in her imagination, she is already placing within her intimate theatre, the hands of a pianist, or perhaps a surgeon’s hands ready to sew someone’s wound up, or even a pair of warm and dry hands alighting on her knees, sliding up her skirt, moving into her underwear and grabbing her butt cheeks, hands capable of measuring her ass so much more than the sun outside.

  She shakes her head, both amused and annoyed by her own cliché fantasy.

  The four men are still busy with their card game. As she passes them, she sees it is a tarot deck, the same high numbers and cards, but something catches her attention: the images on the cards aren’t the ones she knows, the turn-of-the-century scenes so familiar to the tarot. She slows down imperceptibly, still moving ahead, and turns back to look again, not quite brave enough to stand still. She’s right: the characters on the cards are mostly naked, unlike the images she’s familiar with. The man nearest to her, an ebony-coloured African man, still holds four cards in his hand – two small squares as well as an eleven and a twelve. On the first one, the characters are sitting around a picnic scene imitating Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe; the seated woman is naked, but the man lying down is also, and another man, who is leaning towards her as if to bite her breasts, is getting undressed. She has difficulty seeing the other card, obscured as it is by the man’s thick black thumb, but again the woman in the boat is nude. On the twelve, she can see only the upper half of the card: a ball somewhere in the background, but on the right-hand side the image of a man seemingly offering his cock deferentially to two sitting women whose clothes have been partly pulled open. One of the women is thrusting her peach glove-covered hand towards the imposing virile member. The man whose cock it is has grey hair, and it makes her think right away of the silent passenger in the seat a few rows back.

  The black man throws the twelve down, and another of the men adds the twenty. She just has time to glimpse the image of four men sitting at a table playing cards, all in the buff, while a woman under the table is seemingly sucking off the player on the left. The illustrator had frozen the scene just as her mouth is about to devour his mushroom head and her cheeks are delicately deformed by the intrusion.

  She shrugs. Scenes from a brothel, she reckons, no doubt a belle époque set of cards.

  She walks back to her seat and distractedly watches the landscape roll by, sky moving between white and blue. The Rhône river flows heavily by, moving between nuclear power stations. At any rate, the stations do not affect the area’s luminosity.

  She senses a movement to her left and turns. The man with grey hair is there, looking over her shoulder. And like earlier, he has the same distant and detached look, as if his eyes are fixed on a point some ten centimetres behind her.

  “May I?” he says, sitting next to her. He has a vaguely English accent. He calmly pulls up the arm separating their two seats, deliberately abolishing all distance between them, or any form of misunderstanding.

  “May I . . .” These are the only words he says, and her quiet agreement, as she does not object, is all he needs for approval, as if those two words and the unspoken answer will justify all that will follow.

  The man’s right hand skims by her neck
while his left hand takes hold of her knee. His skin is just as she expected: warm and dry.

  He allows her just a few seconds to imagine what is about to happen. His fingers tread ever so lightly across her skin, as if he were caressing water without creating a stir across its surface.

  His fragrance is both pleasant and discreet. She doesn’t know why, but his smell reminds her of Louis XV furniture, burnished wood pieces.

  For a while he doesn’t move, his face just inches from hers, his hand almost motionless on her knee, his fingers delicately skimming her neck.

  The dark clouds inside his grey eyes make him look like a phantom. And finally he bends slowly over towards her and kisses her. She holds on to him, slides her own hands under the fashionable grey jacket he is wearing, takes hold of his shirt, grabs his tie . . . The hand on her knee begins a slow and deliberate journey upward along her thigh and cups her cunt, forcing itself against the already wet silk. The man pulls the thin panties to one side of her gash, his fingers lingering against the soft and delicate lips with assurance. “With a sense of contained violence,” she thinks aloud. And the mental image of her cunt in his grasp makes her smile and hold herself even more open. She allows her hand to slip under the man’s belt, and through the thin material of his trousers grabs hold of his hardening virility, an initial contact that surprises her by its brazenness. She pulls on the zip of his fly and extricates the jutting cock now pulsing against her fingers, just as she leans her own body slightly backward so that the man’s hands might have easier access to her stomach and, she hopes, her ass.