The Second Moon of Adonis

Jason and I walked a mile or two down the road to a motel near the center of town. Neither of us wanted to spend that night in the house with Mark. We checked in, and after getting to the room turned the air conditioner as high as it would go.

Neither of us spoke for a while; we just sat on the bed and waited for the air conditioner to cool the room. Both of us seemed stunned by what had just happened back at RJ’s. Then Jason pushed me back onto the bed and kissed me.

For a brief moment I was all his, feeling his weight pressed down on me and wanting nothing more than for him to keep kissing me. Then I thought of David, and how upset he’d been as he drove away from RJ’s. Somewhat reluctantly, I pushed Jason gently away from me.

“Jason, I can’t,” I told him.

Jason sat up on the bed.”Well, that sucks.”

I smiled. “Yeah, it does.”

“Well, it’s nice that you’re loyal, I guess,” Jason said. “I should probably go before I do something you’ll hate me for.”

I tried to assure him that there was no way I could hate him, and that if I wasn’t already in a relationship with David I would be all over him.

“Give me a call if anything ever happens,” he said. He wrote a phone number on the notepad by the telephone, hugged me, and I felt a blast of hot air as he opened the door and walked out into the courtyard.

After he left, I used the phone to call Santos. When I started telling him what had happened, he already knew. David had called him, and had left a phone number with him to give me in case I called. I thanked Santos, and called the number.

David was sitting near a payphone at a cafe down the road. I told him about the room I’d rented, and he told me he’d be right over. After he arrived, we decided to spend the night there at the motel — the room was already paid for, after all — and then we would head back toward Orange County in the morning. Neither of us could see any good coming from our staying in Chico any longer.

Not long after the sun came up the next day we were on the road back. Two days later, with nothing but our two tip jars, the clothes we had been wearing, and David’s car, we arrived back in Orange County.

–

Sometime during the trip, I lost the piece of paper with Jason’s phone number on it. I left several messages with Santos trying to get it, but he never returned my calls.

Roderic’s interest in getting me back waned quickly once the distance between us was gone. We’re still good friends.

David and I broke up within a month of our move back home. I haven’t spoken to him since.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

The heat the day after Jason arrived was intense, as it often could be in Chico. The thermometer hanging on the patio outside RJ’s read 115, and it was still 10:00 in the morning.

When I had left that morning to get ready to start the early bartending shift, David was still sleeping, or at least pretending to be. Jason had come with me to the bar; he had arrived late the night before and hadn’t seen the place yet. I gave him a quick tour, and he helped me with slicing limes, wiping down the bar, and all the other usual tasks I’d do before opening for the lunch crowd.

We talked as went about the chores, and I soon found myself liking Jason for more than just his excruciatingly good looks. He had a sarcastic sense of humor like mine, and before long we were throwing barbs like we’d known each other since long before last night. When I teased him for being such a slut he hadn’t even flinched when I’d topped him the night before, he threw back that it was because he didn’t feel it. I’d call him a big, dumb jock and he’d call me a short little geek. He genuinely seemed to like me, and I found myself very pleasantly surprised the he had turned out to be a lot more than just a gorgeous lay.

He kept himself busy around the bar after the customers started arriving. Being the new guy in town and as good-looking as he was, he didn’t have a hard time finding new people willing to keep him company. I was glad he seemed to be having a good time.

David showed up a few hours later, and to my surprise he didn’t appear to be upset. Instead, he came behind the bar, gave me a kiss, and appeared to me to be in a genuinely good mood.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I got weird.”

I hugged him again, gave him a kiss on the neck, and let him know it was OK. “I guess we won’t be doing that again, huh?” I asked, and he laughed, nodding.

As the day went on the temperature inside the bar rose, the swamp coolers on the roof insufficient to keep out the heat. By the time Mark arrived it had become so bad that the customers were coming up the bar with requests to be hosed down with the soda gun.

Mark was visibly angry about something, and signaled to David that he wanted to speak to him in the back office. I glanced at David, and he obviously had no idea what was going on as he followed Mark to the back of the bar. I heard a door slam, and then nothing for nearly a half hour.

When David came back, he was pale. When I asked him what happened, he told me Mark had fired him.

I was incredulous. “Why the hell would he do that?”

“Because he wanted Jason.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Look, I’m getting out of here before he comes back out. I’ll talk to you later.”

I was furious. I stormed back into Mark’s office, demanding to know why he’d fired David. He glared at me. “That’s between him and me. It’s done. Go back to work.”

I kept at him. “If you fire Dave, you’re firing me, too. I’m not staying here without him.”

“Fine,” he hissed, and stood up from behind his desk. He stormed out of the office, and out to the bar area, where he picked up the small knife we used to cut fruit for the drinks. He then grabbed the inflatable sheep from above my tip jar and stabbed it with the knife several times. As he threw down Becky’s deflated vinyl remains, he turned to me. “Get the fuck out.”

He was still holding the knife, and I wasn’t going to wait to see what would happen if I stayed. I grabbed my tip jar and David’s, and left the bar as quickly as I could, stopping only for a moment so that Jason could follow me out into the parking lot.

David had already driven away by the time we got outside; he obviously hadn’t been expecting me to be following him. Jason and I did the only thing we could do: we walked quickly down Cherry Street away from RJ’s into the choking heat of the Chico summer. Jason looked back a few times to see if Mark was following us, but I never did.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Aside: Christ, I’ve gone and made it into the double digits. And a warning… the following is a bit more explicit in parts than the earlier chapters. My recollection of the events is particularly vivid today for various reasons.

Things were very tense between David and I for a while. My violent outburst had scared both him and me, and it took both of us time to readjust and feel comfortable with each other again.

I was feeling very isolated during that time. We were in a small town, far from anywhere I’d ever called home. I didn’t feel like I could talk to Mark about relationship problems with the man I’d stolen away from him, and Santos had never been anyone with whom I had ever had any kind of serious conversation. Since it’s really bad form for a bartender to start crying over his problems with the clients, that didn’t leave many places to find a sympathetic ear.

One afternoon during this silent period, as I was walking down the main street downtown killing time before my shift, I came across a pay phone. Without thinking much about it, I picked up the phone and started dialing one of the few numbers I had memorized: the one for Roderic’s house. I was half-hoping he wouldn’t answer; just the act of dialing his number was a comfort to me, and gave me a feeling that there was someone out there I could reach out to if I ever needed someone.

“Hello?” It was Roderic’s voice. Suddenly I realized I had no idea what I wanted to say to him. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to speak to him.

“Hello,” I answered after a moment. “I was just calling to see how you were doing.”

“I miss you.” Roderic’s voice was more somber and sincere than I think I’ve ever heard it. There was a sadness in it that I wasn’t expecting. I felt like my heart was being constricted, and noticed it was getting harder to breathe.

Without waiting for a reply from me, he continued. “I didn’t realize it before you moved so far away, but I never should have broken up with you. I love you, and I want you to come back.”

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream, to hang up. I wanted to go home.

I chuckled half-heartedly, sure Roderic would see through it. “Kid, your timing has always sucked. Couldn’t you have maybe mentioned that before I moved a thousand miles away with some other guy?”

His tone changed a bit, and the conversation turned to small talk about how our respective lives were going. On the surface it very mundane, but the undercurrent of longing was there throughout. When I finally said goodbye and hung up the phone, promising to call him again soon, I felt drained.

I shook off the feeling by the time I started my shift, as I always did. It didn’t pay to be gloomy when people were counting on you to pour them drinks, keep them entertained, and make them feel like you were always just one more tip away from sleeping with them.

–

Time heals all wounds, and spackle works for the holes in the drywall. It took several days, but eventually things between David and I returned to normal. He promised to tone down the jealousy, and I promised to be more understanding. The make-up sex was some of the best ever.

By the time Santos’ cousin Jason came up for a weekend visit, we were a happy couple again. Jason was gorgeous. He was about six feet tall, with an athletic body and a beautiful face. Mark was obviously smitten with him right away. “Back off, boys,” he exclaimed when Jay arrived, “This one’s mine.”

Jason blushed, which only made him that much more attractive. “Hey, Pat,” David said. “Could you help me set up a place for Jason to sleep? I don’t know where you hid the pillows.” The look I was getting from David told me that it was a ruse; that he was trying to get me to follow him into the bedroom so we could talk privately. I did, and we closed the door behind us.

“He’s hot, huh?” David asked.

“Yeah, he is,” I agreed. David obviously had more to say on the matter, so I waited for him to say it.

“Ummm… Do you want him?” David’s look didn’t seem to contain any jealousy, but I felt like I was treading on dangerous ground.

“Why?” I asked. “Do you?”

David was obviously nervous talking about this, and hesitated for a few moments. “Yeah. I think it could be fun.”

I agreed, reluctantly. My reluctance wasn’t so much because I wouldn’t have loved a chance to fuck Jason, but because I didn’t want to appear to eager to David, who’d already shown his capacity for jealousy. Still, I felt safer knowing that, if anything happened, it had been David’s idea.

That night Mark invited Jason to sleep in his bed, but he politely declined. “If it’s OK with you,” he said, “I’ll just sleep on the floor in the bedroom.” Mark obviously felt rejected, but shrugged it off.

Jason, David and I stayed up late that night, talking about what it was like to work at RJ’s, things Santos and Jason had done growing up together. After a while we ran out of things to talk about, and decided to turn in for the night. We each claimed a spot on the two mattresses we’d pushed together on the floor, and said goodnight before turning off the lights.

I wasn’t able to fall asleep that night. I was in the middle, and having David on one side of me and our beautiful visitor on the other had my pulse racing. Then Jason rolled under his blanket, his leg crossing mine, and it sent a jolt through me. I prodded David lightly with my elbow. he was still awake, and when he looked at me I tipped my head toward Jason. David nodded.

I grunted, and rolled over, throwing my arm across Jason’s chest, my face barely an inch from his. When he opened his eyes, I kissed him lightly. He responded by pressing his face into mine and sliding his tongue between my lips.

I grabbed David’s arm and pulled him toward us, signaling him to move to a position where Jason would be sandwiched between the two of us. Jason then turned and began tonguing David, while I kissed and nibbled on his neck and shoulders from the back. Before much longer each of us had another’s dick in his mouth.

After running through every variation of who was sucking whom, Jason moaned the he needed to be fucked. David and I looked at each other, and he nodded at me again. I moved to a position behind Jason as he moved onto his hands and knees while he sucked David.

I watched Jason taking David into his mouth as I pushed into him from behind, and was a bit surprised that I didn’t just blow my load immediately. I was somewhat proud of myself as I managed to contain my excitement and thrust in and out of him for several minutes, reaching under to stroke his cock as David pumped in and out of his mouth. David’s eyes were locked on mine, with a look of… something. Something I couldn’t read.

Then, suddenly, David moved backward, away from Jason. He moved back to his side of the mattresses, threw the blanket over himself, and declared that he was tired, and that he was going to sleep. That’s when I realized what the look in David’s eyes had meant. He couldn’t stand the sight of me fucking another guy, even if he was involved in the act. Things were different now than they had been when we’d both been involved in the pool table orgy at Dreams. He was no longer willing to share me.

I should have stopped it then, but I couldn’t. I kept fucking Jason and stroking his cock with my hand until about 15 minutes later when we both came, loudly and simultaneously. Not long after that I fell asleep, feeling Jason’s breath on my neck as he pressed against my back with his arm draped over my shoulder.

David was at least a couple feet away, at the far edge of the mattress. I don’t know if he ever really slept that night. I suspect he didn’t.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Business was good at RJ’s right from the start. It surprised me that, for such a small town, there was such a large bunch of regulars willing to come in several times a week for drinks. We also got quite a few customers from the local university, since we were the only gay bar within nearly 100 miles.

For the most part it was a very fun place to work, though there were rough nights. Sometimes the local fraternities would bring new pledges through as a sort of initiation, and things could occasionally turned violent when a young, good-looking straight guy would realize he was being ogled by a barful of men. In the one of the worst incidents, someone drove by and fired a shotgun into a car parked out in the lot; that made people a little nervous for quite some time after.

Most nights, though, it was a lot like working at Dreams had been. The tips were just as good if not better, the customers were friendly, and I was enjoying the small town atmosphere. Also, unlike at Dreams where I started bartending long after David, and where I had always been in his shadow, at RJ’s we started on equal footing and I had more than my share of guys who preferred hanging out at my end of the bar on the nights we both worked.

One couple in particular, Mark and Peter, was always trying to talk me into going hope with them after closing. I would always politely decline, letting them know that I belonged to David, though if I’d been single I would have done it in a heartbeat. Peter in particular was very good-looking, and had a smile that made my knees weak. Though they never gave up trying, after a while we became friends and the come-ons became more of a joke than anything else, at least as far as I was concerned.

On the weekend of Chico’s first gay pride festival I had the day off, but I came by the bar as I usually did to be with David. Peter and Mark were there as well. They were stopping by for a drink before they went to the festival, and asked if I’d like to tag along. I’d been wanting to go anyway, so I stopped on our way out to let David know where I was going.

The look on his face when I told him was one I’d never seen before. He was angry at me. I started feeling a little anger bubble up in me as well, at the idea that he didn’t trust me to be away from him with a couple other guys for a few hours. After a few tense words were exchanged — David telling me he didn’t want me to go with “those two sluts,” and me accusing him of not wanting me to have any friends — I left the bar with the two of them.

I’ve never been one to deal with jealousy well. Despite all my stories about three-ways, homewrecking and billiard table orgies, I’m a loyal guy. If given a long leash I’ll take it, but I’m not the type to go off and fuck a couple guys while my boyfriend’s at work. The accusing tone from David had really irritated me, though, and it may have been partially out of spite that I went with Mark and Peter.

When we returned to the bar for the start of my shift, David didn’t speak a word to me before going home; he was obviously still upset. It gnawed at the back of my head all night, and when I finally got home after the bar closed he was still awake, standing in the center of the room waiting for me.

“You slept with them, didn’t you?” he accused me as soon as I came into the room.

The anger boiled right back up. “No, I didn’t. Why can’t you trust me?”

“It’s OK. You can tell me.” As he slumped back against the wall, the look he gave me told me it wasn’t OK, and that he thought I was lying to him.

I felt sorry for him. I had never seen him this insecure, and this sad. I walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Look, David,” I told him. “I love you. I don’t want those guys; all I want is you. I need you to believe me.”

The look he gave me back was pure venom. “Whatever. I hope you had a good time.”

The anger exploded again inside me. Without realizing I was doing it, I balled my hands into fists. Why wouldn’t he believe me? Couldn’t he see I loved him? What kind of asshole did he think I was?

“God damn it!” I yelled, and punched the wall next to his head, leaving a large hole. David’s expression changed from accusation to fear, and I was suddenly disgusted with myself. The man I loved was afraid of me. There was no way I’d ever hit him, but how could he believe that? At that moment, I was sure I’d ruined everything.

“Oh God, David, I’m so sorry.” I tried to hug him. He pulled away, and left to go sleep on the living room couch. It was the first night I’d go to sleep without holding him since I’d moved in to the house in Anaheim.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

The next morning, we got to work doing the final cleanup before we’d open RJ’s. We cleaned the bar until it sparkled, mopped down the floors, and took things we wanted to store away down to the basement.

The basement at RJ’s was a dark and cramped place, filled with cobwebs and the kinds of assorted junk you’d expect to find in the storage room of a bar that had been around as long as RJ’s had. There were decorations for every major holiday and several minor ones, a couple of old signs that had once been outside where the “RJ’s” sign now hung, and box after box of old pictures. After we’d carried down all of the things we needed to stash away, David and I started flipping through those pictures.

It was an interesting look at the history of the place we were about to reopen. There were decades of drag queens, drunks, and shirtless dancers; other than the haircuts and clothing styles, most of them could have been snapshots of almost any gay bar I’ve ever been in.

After going through what must have been hundreds of those photos, David stopped. “Oh my God,” he gasped. “That’s him.”

“That’s who?” I asked, looking at the picture I held in his hand. It was a young man, probably in his early twenties, and appeared to have been taken some time in the 80’s.

“It’s the guy I saw in the mirror.”

Thoroughly freaked out, suddenly neither of us wanted to stay down in a dark, musty basement any longer. We grabbed the picture and ran back upstairs into the bar.

We spent the next few hours making sure the place looked perfect, and before long we were ready to open the doors. As my final personalizing touch, I pulled Becky from the box we’d brought her up in, reinflated her and placed over the bar just above my virgin tip jar.

The previous owner (whose name I have now forgotten, so I’ll call him Frank) dropped by about a half-hour before the time we were due to open to wish us luck, and Mark cracked open a bottle of champagne and poured rounds for all of us. After a toast to our own success at the new RJ’s, David pulled out the picture he’d found in the basement and showed it to Frank, asking “Do you know who this guy is?”

Frank took the picture from David and looked at it. An expression of sorrow crossed his face. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “That’s Donny.”

“Was he a customer here?” David asked.

“Yeah,” Frank answered, without looking up from the photo. “He was. Used to come here a lot until he committed suicide. Right out there in the parking lot, as a matter of fact.”

David, a bit shaken, explained what he’d seen the night before in the mirrors over the bar. I’m sure he expected Frank to think he was insane, but instead Frank’s expression changed from sorrow to something like amusement as David told his story.

“Really? That’d be just like Donny to mess with you like that. He was a real joker, always screwing with everybody,” Frank laughed. “You know, you’re not the first person to say he’s still here, either. People have told me sometimes that they come by after we close and they can see the lights on in the game room and hear someone shooting pool. That was Donny’s thing. He could be quite the hustler when there were new guys in town. He loved messing with the out-of-towners. Looks like maybe he still does.”

Whether he was there or not — and I’m not really prepared to pass judgment either way — Donny became a constant presence at RJ’s after that. Whenever anything later happened in the bar that we couldn’t explain, like when something went missing, there was a strange noise, or we’d come into the bar in the morning to find the pool table had been used after we could swear we’d put away the queue sticks and balls the night before, we blamed it on Donny. There was even a time when we were closing up that I could have sworn I saw him standing by the ice machine watching me out of the corner of my eye, only to vanish when I turned to look at him… but I’ve been known to see things that aren’t there when I’m extremely tired. In any case, just before we opened, our final toast was to Donny. When you might have a restless spirit wandering your bar, it can’t hurt to stay on his good side.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

I just did some fairly exhaustive searching, and was a little sad to find that, apparently, RJ’s doesn’t exist any more, at least not by that name, and not as a gay bar. It was almost like going back to look at the house you grew up to find it’s been replaced with a strip mall.

It was here.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Not long before Dreams had been shut down, Mark had been telling me about a bar named RJ’s he’d seen for sale in Chico, a small college town in northern California. At the time I had just thought it was a subject brought up to spark conversation, but later I came to believe that Mark had seen the end of Dreams coming.

The subject came up again the day after the raid. Mark made a few calls, getting all the details and negotiating a sale price. After several days, he came to me. He’d been able to negotiate a very good deal on the bar, but didn’t have the money. He was going to need an investor to come up with all the cash he’d need to be able to purchase RJ’s. He knew David and Santos didn’t have that kind of cash, and asked me if I knew anyone who might be interested.

Have I mentioned that my grandmother had set up a trust fund in her will that would become available to me when I became 25 years old? Less than a week later we had packed all of our belongings into the biggest truck we could rent from U-Haul and were headed north on I-5 toward Chico to get a look at the bar I now half-owned.

RJ’s was, at the time, the only gay bar in Chico. It may still be. It was a large, old, wooden box of a building on the corner of Cherry Street in an industrial section of town. It had been converted from a gas station some time in the 50’s, if I remember correctly. It had a fairly large seating area, a game room, a dance floor, and a fenced-in outside patio area. I loved the place immediately.

The first morning after we arrived David and I began cleaning the place up, overhauling the sound and lighting system, painting the walls, and getting ready for a grand reopening under new management, while Mark and Santos worked on the house next door that came with the property. At night they stayed at the house while David and I slept in two joined sleeping bags we’d unrolled on the floor. Fortunately, by this time Mark had fully given up his stake in our relationship, and we were free to cuddle together at night and into the morning without fear of giving him a heart attack.

During the day, we’d occasionally get visits from some of RJ’s regulars, who wanted to see what all these Southern Californians were doing to the bar. Many volunteered to help out, and in addition to letting us get to know some of the people who’d soon be our customers, the work went much more quickly that we’d anticipated at the cost of only a few free beers.

The night before the bar was to open, David and I were curled up together in a naked, post-coital knot on top of the sleeping bags. He had to use the bathroom, so I reluctantly let go of him so he could make the run down the hall to the men’s room. I sprawled out on the sleeping bags, smoking a cigarette. I remember thinking that it would be the last night David and I would be able to have this much time alone together for the foreseeable future. Once the bar opened, one or both of us was always going to be working on any particular night, and private time for just the two of us would become a very rare thing.

When David came back, he was visibly pale. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he stumbled over and collapsed into me. I held him, and could feel he was shaking, and he was staring off in the direction of the bar. “David? What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

He didn’t say anything for a while, but just held on to me, trembling, and looking at the bar. Finally, he half-whispered, “The mirror.”

“What? What about the mirror?” I was starting to feel afraid.

He finally tore his gaze from the bar and looked at me. After several seconds he started to relax a little, then shuddered and seemed to shake off a lot of whatever it was that had been affecting him.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” he said, a look of embarrassment starting to mix with the now-fading look of fear on his face.

“I know you’re crazy, David. You’ve got the papers to prove it.” It was a running joke with David, referring to some counseling he’d been in a few years before. “Just tell me what happened.”

“I saw a face in the mirror when I walked by. It was staring right at me.” He started shaking again.

I held him a while longer, and after a short time he started to laugh. “Maybe I am crazy.” A few minutes later we both walked over to the bar together, and I stood there with him while we both looked into the mirrors over the bar. I held him, occasionally kissing his neck and cheek until the fear left him and he was convinced he was safe.

We both crawled into our sleeping bag, and I held him tight against me until I could tell he was asleep. It would be at least a couple of hours later before I would finally drift off. I couldn’t take my eyes off the mirrors over the bar.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

All of us were a bit dejected and shaken up when we got home the night Dreams was raided. David, Santos and I had come in David’s car, while Mark had been held back by the police and ATF agents who, understandably, had several questions they wanted to ask him. Not many words were spoken among us; we were all worried that Mark might not be coming back.

At around 1:00am, though, he arrived. While he looked a bit tired, otherwise he appeared to be handling the situation much better than we were. I was so glad to see him back, and apparently well, that it took me a moment to realize he was carrying the pink cake box I had seen the strippers holding.

We tried asking him what happened after we left, but he held up a hand. “Not tonight. We have a birthday to celebrate.”

He opened up the box, and pulled out a cake. When I saw it, all of the tension and fear remaining from earlier in the evening faded away in an instant. The cake was shaped like a pool table. “Happy birthday, Eight Ball,” Mark smiled, using the new nickname I’d earned after the billiard orgy of the week before. “Somebody light this thing.”

David fished out a lighter from his pocket and lit the candles, and Mark told me to make a wish. It was the only birthday wish I’d ever made that I still remember: I wished that I would always have friends who cared about me as much as the people I was with that night; people who could ignore that something awful had just happened, and pretend nothing was wrong so that my birthday wouldn’t be ruined. It was the second time that night that I almost started crying. It’s not something I do often, and while it was somewhat embarrassing it was a very good feeling.

I blew out the candles, and then was handed gifts by Mark, David and Santos. I opened David’s first: a new pair of bike shorts. “You look great in mine,” he told me, “But so do I. I want them back.”

Next was Santos. He had given me a peanut butter grinder. Santos was a foot fetishist, and I had known him since before I started going to Dreams. We hadn’t been good friends, but we ran into each other fairly frequently. Santos had a long-standing crush on me, or at least on my feet. For a very long time, Santos had been telling me how he’d like to spread peanut butter all over them and lick it off. “Just think about it,” he’d say, and he said it again with a huge grin when I opened his gift.

Last was Mark’s gift: an inflatable, anatomically correct female sheep we would later christen “Becky.” I feel the need right now to dispel a vicious rumor perpetuated by people who only know parts of this story. I was not the person responsible for the traces of lubricant that people were always horrified to find near Becky’s rear orifice. It was Mark, and it happened approximately ten minutes after she was first inflated.

I’m going to repeat that, just in case anyone missed it: I never fucked the sheep. Mark did it. He discovered at the same time that Becky had a particularly cruel sharp seam inside her, and the act of inflatable bestiality only lasted a few seconds. After that, there was no way I was going to ever put any sensitive part of my body inside that thing.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Aside: I knew when I started writing about this stuff that it would probably take at least a couple entries to get through, and here I am on part five and I haven’t even gotten to the official start of summer yet. If you’re one of the people I’ve accused of being long-winded lately, I take it back, Peter.

The night of June 7th, 1991, was my 25th birthday. When we unlocked the doors to the bar and walked in, I was overwhelmed. That afternoon, Mark, David and Santos, the bar’s manager, had decorated the place for my birthday. There were “Happy Birthday, Patrick” banners on the walls, balloons tied to the Tanqueray bottles, and a string of lights hanging over my tip jar. Almost everywhere I looked I saw something they’d put there for me, and I was touched to the point that tears started welling up in my eyes. Partially out of gratitude and partly to hide my face, I hugged and thanked each of them before we all started preparing to open the bar for the night.

Mark had arranged for a troupe of strippers to come in that Friday, which seemed to pull in a crowd even bigger than what we saw on a typical Friday. Even several hours before the strippers were due to arrive the place was packed, the tips were great, and every time I turned around someone was wishing me a happy birthday with words, a kiss, a slap on the ass, or a few dollars in my underwear. I was eating up all the attention.

Then Roderic arrived. You may remember me mentioning an ex-boyfriend I’d broken up with, triggering the depression that probably started me to go to Dreams in the first place. There he was at the bar, grinning at me and looking me up and down with those striking green eyes as I stood there in my briefs on the other side. The product of an Irish father and an Italian mother, Roderic had a combination of light and darkness in his looks, with his pale skin and dark hair, that I found incredibly attractive no matter how hard I tried not to. I signaled to David that I was going to take a short break, and got a suspicious look back from him. He didn’t know Roderic, but it was obvious that Roderic knew me, and I was sure I saw a small spark of jealousy in David’s eyes as I pulled on the pair of pants I’d stashed behind the bar and followed Roderic out.

“Happy birthday,” Roderic said when we got outside. “Have you got a smoke?”

I looked at him in mock horror. “What the hell?” I exclaimed. “I pretended to give up smoking for you, and now you’re bumming cigarettes off me?” When Roderic and I had been together, I’d used cans of Binaca and a lot of stealth to convince him I’d quit. He’d been very flattered I’d done it for him, and didn’t catch on that it was was a complete fraud until months later.

I gave him a cigarette, lit it, and we took a walk around the bar. It was a warm and clear night, and the late spring breeze on my chest and back as I walked with Roderic felt wonderful. We didn’t talk about anything particularly meaningful, sticking to small talk and what each of us had been doing recently. Still, being close to Roderic again for the first time in months brought back feelings for him that I’d thought were gone since I’d been with David. I was very happy to see him, and still felt the pull towards him that I had since I’d first met him, but he also brought with him the pain and sadness I’d felt for a long time after we’d broken up. It soon began to make me very uncomfortable. I mentioned that it was almost 11:00, when the strippers were due to start, and that I had to get back inside.

We had made it halfway around the bar at that point, and headed for the back door. The strippers were filing in, and I couldn’t help but notice one of them was carrying what was very obviously a pink cardboard cake box. I held back for a moment so I could pretend I hadn’t seen it, and then Roderic and I went back inside, and I quickly hugged him and got back to work. David never asked me about Roderic, saving me the discomfort of having to explain that I’d left him alone to watch over the bar so I could have some privacy to talk to a guy with whom I was relatively sure I was still in love.

A few minutes later the lights all went up, and suddenly men in police uniforms were everywhere. There was a small cheer at first, which quickly died down when everyone realized they weren’t strippers; they were real police. More men in windbreakers with “ATF” across the back poured in the room, and began yelling that the bar was closed, and for everyone to please quietly and calmly exit the building.

I would later find out that Mark has been denied a liquor license for Dreams, but rather than close it down he had just kept running it without one. Time and the law had finally caught up with him, and that night we cleaned up and closed Dreams for the last time.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

Fortunately, after a very tense several minutes that felt like several hours, Mark survived the shock of finding David and me in bed. In the days to follow, he actually seemed to resign himself to the fact that his role in our three-way relationship had been lessened. He let David and me know that it was OK with him if David and I did whatever we wanted with each other, but that he’d like it if we’d throw him a bone once in a while, so to speak. While it may seem like a strange situation, I was actually so relieved, and so grateful for Mark’s forgiveness after I’d essentially stolen his boyfriend away, that it seemed like the least I could do to oblige him once in a while.

Mark had his pride, however, and when we were at Dreams he made a very big show of portraying his two young bartenders as his personal sex toys. Considering we were working for him and living under his roof, we went along with Mark’s game, and I actually enjoyed hearing Mark’s friends express their admiration at his ability to keep both his two young studs happy.

At times we played our parts almost too well. One Underwear Night in late May, Mark had spent the entire night slapping our asses, kissing us as we walked past him, and generally showing us off to anyone who would pay attention from his usual spot at the end of the bar. As the night went on, Mark amassed a small crowd around him, creating a gauntlet we had to pass through every time we went out to clear empty glasses and ashtrays. Eventually there were about ten people there, and we’d be subjected to a flurry of groping hands any time we passed through. Never let it be said the Mark had bad taste, though; many of the guys were pretty damned cute, and I really didn’t mind getting felt up by them. I was in a state of at least semi-hardness for a good part of the night; a fact I couldn’t really hide given that I was wearing nothing but a tight pair of BVDs with nothing to hide my arousal other than the occasional wad of tip cash.

As closing time approached, I noticed that Mark’s little entourage wasn’t clearing. David and I went about cleaning up as we prepared to close, and as we counted out the night’s take from the register they still weren’t going anywhere. Even after we took the garbage out to the dumpster and locked the doors, there were still about a dozen people in the bar. I looked over at David, who just shrugged his shoulders; he obviously didn’t know what was going on. I looked over at Mark questioningly.

“Kiss him!” he commanded, glancing at David. Never let it be said that I’m not an obedient employee. I walked over to David and gave him a long, slow kiss, pulling him close to feel his nearly naked body against mine. The crowd was obviously enjoying it, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that more than one of them had their hands on their crotches. As I mentioned earlier, some of the guys were really good-looking, and the combination of kissing a mostly nude David and having several hot guys getting turned on by it was enough to bring on a full, completely unhideable hard-on.

The kissing went on for some time, and after a few more commands from Mark like “Lick his nipples!” and “Grab his cock!” all of which I eagerly complied with, it was becoming obvious why the crowd had stayed past closing. David guided me out onto the floor of the bar, and over to the pool table. He pushed me back onto the felt, pulled my underwear down to my ankles, and buried his face in my crotch.

At this point, the guys in the crowd started to strip down as well, and it started to become obvious that this wasn’t going to just be a show we were putting on for them; they fully intended to participate in it. What followed was a roughly dozen-man orgy, mostly on and around the pool table. While I’d had a few three-ways before, this was a whole new thing for me, and I have to admit I enjoyed having all those hands and mouths on me and my beautiful, naked David at the same time. It was around a couple hours later that everyone finally dressed and filed out of the bar, and I remember feeling completely spent as David, Mark and I drove the few blocks home in David’s car.

That was May 31, 1991. The next Underwear Night would be June 7th, my 25th birthday. It would also be the last.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

It was hot again today in San Francisco; a few records were set in parts of the city. It’s just starting to cool off as the sun goes down, which I really appreciate since there are few things I dislike more than spending all night sweating in my bed. Depending on circumstances, of course.

As May of 1991 rolled around I was moving into Mark and David’s Anaheim apartment. Mark didn’t waste any time laying down the rules: no drugs in the house, no visitors without letting them know first, and no fucking David unless Mark was there. They were rules I could live with.

We had a bit of a housewarming party in the living room that first night, and I finally got the shot at David I’d been fantasizing about for months. Though I was less than ecstatic about Mark’s participation, it was a small price to pay. David looked even better naked than I’d hoped. David was tall and slim, with a chest covered in thick, light brown hair that felt like heaven on my face. I still remember how it felt to nuzzle up against him and run my hand across his body that first night.

I won’t go into the sordid details of what happened that night, but I went to bed happy, even though the festivities involved my doing things to Mark I definitely would not have done had it not been for David. Far from being repulsed by that, though, I was grateful to finally have even half of David, and if it meant blowing a 60-year-old on occasion, that was a price I was mostly willing to pay.

I tried very hard to play by the rules. However, my lust for David knew no bounds, and I would sometimes entice him into the bedroom when Mark was away for one-on-one sessions. David didn’t need much convincing. He loved Mark, he’d tell me, but things had changed between them. Mark had been good to him, though, and David didn’t want to leave him. Mark made David feel wanted, but David needed something more. I was perfectly willing to provide that something more for David, as often as we could get away with it.

We did get away with it for several weeks, until the day Mark came home to find David in the master bedroom with his ankles up on my shoulders. I had my back to the door, and got in at least a couple strokes before I realized what the look on David’s face was telling me: we’d been caught. I pulled out and turned around just in time to see Mark’s back as he left the room.

I could hear him breathing heavily, which I took to be anger. Since Mark was a huge man, who even at 60 could probably snap me like a twig, I was afraid of what he would do. Then I noticed his breathing, while still heavy, was becoming a bit erratic, as if he was hyperventilating.

At that point, David’s expression changed. He grabbed his pants, pulling them on as he ran back to the bathroom. He came back with a small pill bottle and a glass of water, which he ran out to where Mark sat on the couch, his breathing now a thin wheeze. Something was obviously very wrong, so I ignored my fear of Mark and followed David out to the living room.

“It’s his heart,” David explained. “It’s happened a couple of times.”

That moment may be the guiltiest I’ve ever felt in my life.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

I really poured on the charm to Mark in an effort to convince him to hire me as the new bartender at Dreams. If you think I can be a flirt now, you should have seen me when I was 24 and had more to work with. I biked to Dreams every day that week making sure I looked as good as I possibly could, complimented Mark in every way I could think of, and worked desperately to convince him that I was a quick learner, and that bartending would be no problem for me.

Eventually, he gave in. He offered me the job, on the conditions that he could fire me at a moment’s notice if I didn’t do well, and that I’d only be working for tips. I accepted.

I surprised myself with how well I took to the job. Not only was a not bad at mixing drinks, but the other bartending skills came much more naturally to me than I thought they would. I’ve always had a tendency to be a little reserved around new people, but when I got behind that bar I became a complete extrovert. All my shyness would disappear, I could flirt with anyone, and the customers loved me. The tips were great, and on the weekends I could pull in a couple hundred dollars a night, a huge amount for me at that time.

David was a great teacher. He taught me how to mix drinks, encouraged me through all my screw-ups, and even loaned me clothes he thought I’d look good in to help my tips. A pair of his spandex shorts became a behind-the-bar staple; the nightly take jumped noticeably when I started wearing those. I dare say the tips weren’t the only things that jumped in response to the bulge in those shorts.

The only thing that paid off better was when David and I decided Friday nights should be Underwear Night. Those nights we’d tend bar in nothing but our briefs, and the tips were huge. The downside was that people were constantly asking me to come around the bar so they could stuff 20-dollar bills down my shorts and cop a cheap feel, but the upside was that I was young and horny and rather enjoyed having a few hundred hands on my dick every night. It also didn’t hurt that David looked absolutely amazing in his BVD’s, and I was always finding ways to accidentally bump into him behind the bar just to feel his skin brush against mine. These brushes would usually result in a state of semi-arousal that only pushed the tips higher.

The only major downside to my new job, as far as I was concerned, was that I was biking 28 miles a day to get to and from work. It kept me in great shape for underwear night, but I was constantly afraid that any of the nights I was pedaling home in the blackness of 4:00am, often at least a little drunk, could be my last. Mark and David shared my concern, and one night they came to me asking if I’d like to move in with them. Concern for my safety wasn’t the only reason they were asking. The look on their faces as the asked me told me they weren’t just giving me a couch to crash on. The look on David’s face, in particular, made the offer impossible for me to turn down.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.

location: 94803

mood: nostalgic

music: Parasites - Oh Oh I Love Her So

Damn, today was hot. I don’t think I’ve sweat this much since that thing in the steam room of the 1350 Club in Long Beach in ‘85.

A close second would be the summer of ‘91 in Chico, back when I was a bartender. When the year started I had somewhat recently broken up with the great love of my life. I had taken it very hard, and it was very difficult for me to feel motivated about much of anything. It being hard to hold a job when you can’t drag your broken-hearted ass out of bed in the morning, I found myself unemployed and living at my father’s house.

Every time I got the chance I’d head out at night on my bike and pedal to Dreams, the nearest gay bar, about 14 miles away in Anaheim. Part of the reason I liked the place so much was David, the head bartender. He was about six feet tall, with a boyish face framed by curly light brown hair that reminded me of an angel. He was outgoing and funny, and I developed a crush on him the first time I saw him.

However, my interest in David remained strictly platonic, since he was the boyfriend of the bar’s owner, Mark. Mark was a very big guy, with a build, personality and temper lot unlike Tony Soprano. If Mark liked you, he could be a giant teddy bear. If he didn’t… well, it was dark in the alley behind Dreams, and I wasn’t going to take my chances. It was worth it to me to bike the 14 miles just to hang out, have a few drinks, and try not to let it be too obvious that I was really there to stare at David.

I had a bit of a cover. Mark (who, as I remember, was around 60, but definitely didn’t look it) really liked younger guys. Most nights he would find the cutest guy in the bar, and ply him with alcohol all night to sit with him and keep him company. This, incidentally, explains how I could afford to hang out in a bar on a regular basis when I didn’t have a job. I was a pretty damned hot 25-year-old. No 60-year-old could resist me. At least Mark couldn’t; I never had to pay for a drink at Dreams, and the barstool next to him was the perfect vantage point from which to watch David.

Dreams was a new bar, and as the weeks passed business picked up, until it became apparent that they needed a second bartender. I had no experience in bartending, unless sucking down countless gin and tonics counts, but I wanted that job. Not only would it give me some spending money, but I’d get to work every night with Dave, and still get free drinks at my favorite bar.

I had to have that job, and I was willing to do almost anything to get it.

Published at blog.Adonis.net. You can comment here or there.