Another shiver ran through my shoulders, and I wondered if I should put my jacket back on. I wondered if I should just sit here and see what attention I might snare, or if I should be out hunting more aggressively.
I had stumbled my way through the bar ritual before in Providence. The last time had been one night I had talked my way into the No Name. I ended up at a dorm room at Brown University, where my pickup convinced his roommate to go to his girlfriend’s room while I hid my face in the bathroom. We used condoms he’d gotten out of a candy dish in the bar. An hour later I was on my way home, all the while worrying his roommate recognized me from the two gigs we’d done on the campus. As I was leaving I saw two people I knew from the Copa in the hallway and never went back there again.
The man in the leather vest stood up, putting down his beer glass with a loud thump. His eyes passed over me like searchlights. He had the same mustache as the bartender. A pair of mirrored sunglasses rested at the center of his shirt collar, dragging it down to show a tuft of chest hair. He circled around behind me and I shivered again, feeling like a diver in a shark cage. He looked rough, gruff, and tough, like a drill sargent or a prison guard. If he touched me or spoke to me I wondered what I would say, or if I would just flee like the prey his attention made me feel like I was. Perhaps I would merely be transfixed by him, unable to refuse. The very thought made me want to get up and leave, but I didn’t.
Mr. Leather Vest passed back behind me again, his heavy boots sounding on the wooden floor. He gave a wave to the bartender and with a flash of blinding sunlight, was gone.
Unobserved, I put my denim jacket back on. I finished the club soda, put the glass down with a thunk, and stood up. I made a guess that the restroom would be in the back, and strode that way, letting my feet fall with the rhythm of the music. I felt the heads of the two pool players swivel as I went past. This early in the day, it seemed, the pickings were slim. I should be getting on a train, I thought, not hanging around hoping something will happen that probably won’t.
In the men’s room there were three cramped stalls, no urinals, which seemed odd. I went into the middle one and shut the door. It had no latch but stuck shut. There was someone in the stall on the right. I unzipped my fly.
“You gonna piss?” His voice came through a hole bored in the stall wall, about the size of the soundhole of the guitar.
“Excuse me?” My hand was on my dick and I was trying to figure out how I felt about some pervert watching me when he said:
“Put it through after you’re done.”
My hand trembled a little as I turned my attention back to the toilet. He was watching me through the hole; I could hear him breathing. I wasn’t having any luck getting started.
“You look nice,” he went on. “I like cut men.”
I wanted to say “excuse me?” again, because I wasn’t sure what he meant. Circumcised, I realized then, not sure where I’d heard it before. Maybe I’d seen something in that porno shop in Boston.
He kept talking like that, and I started to get hard as the first drops of piss began to fall. He was telling me about my dick, and about what he was going to do with it. I couldn’t piss much as I got harder. “Best blow in town,” he said. I could smell my own piss and knew he could, too. “Don’t shake it out! Give it here.”
I felt a drop fall from the tip. I was harder than I thought I could be from just listening to a stranger in a men’s room.
“Come on, man, you’re letting it get cold! Put it through!”
I felt then like an actor in a play, with no will to go against the stage direction, and I ‘put it through.’ I had to stand on tiptoe to clear the hole, and there was his mouth, hot and wet. My bare stomach pressed against the cold metal of the prefab wall as he sucked the rest of the piss out of me in expert fashion. For a while I wondered how he did what he did, but I began to lose my train of thought as the sensation built. My calves began to ache from holding myself up, and I gripped the top of the stall wall with both hands and moaned as he increased his pace. And then I stopped feeling my hands or feet as the heat spread through me from my cock on outward. I hung there, emptying into him, gasping, shuddering, and for a moment forgetting who I was, where I was.
By the time I had collected myself enough to say ‘thanks’ he had gone. I wasn’t sure who I thought was more pathetic, me for being desperate enough to stick my dick through a hole in a bathroom stall, or him, who sat there on the john waiting for someone like me to come along. Maybe the guys out there took turns in here. I didn’t want to know–the whole thing now seemed sick and twisted to me. Well, I thought, at least he sure as hell isn’t going to recognize me again someday. I sat there on the lid for a few minutes, catching my breath before I tucked myself back in and decided it was time to head home.
People Are Strange When You're A Stranger
