Inside the Mind of A Writer: My Characters Are Real

Mitch Reborn

I told you about my brief but powerful relationship with a meth head named Mitch. Years later, I gave Mitch a rebirth as a secondary character – by the same name – in my novella “Buy Guys,” available on Amazon.com. “Buy Guys” is the story of two Jersey drifters, Pete and Blaze, who go down to Fort Lauderdale to lead free and breezy lives as male hustlers; the title “Buy Guys” refers to the fictional website on which they post their escort ad. But Blaze, the wilder of the duo, has a more sinister scheme in mind: to extort a drug smuggling ring operating through the funeral home he worked at while back in Jersey that uses South Florida as its base. In this scene, Blaze is out serving a client while Pete checks out La Bella’s, modeled after an actual restaurant-bar in Lauderdale where wealthy old men pair off with younger guys looking for a “daddy” to support them. It is here where he encounters just such an unlikely pairing that he and Blaze had seen on the beach …

Pete was there for twenty minutes, nursing his screwdriver, and was about to check his phone a second time to make sure he hadn’t missed a message from Blaze when he saw them. Or, more like, they saw him. That dynamic duo from Sebastian, the tall old guy and his younger fuzzy companion. The old man stared at him expressionless but Fuzzy gave Pete a smirky grin and gestured to join them in their booth.

What the fuck thought Pete as he smiled broadly, nodded, and walked over.

“So where’s your partner in crime? We haven’t seen the two of you on the beach in a while,” said Fuzzy in strong New Yorkese. He looked older close-up, probably pushing forty. Balding, he had the rough, tough face of a boxer, with a big ethnic nose and a dark, neatly trimmed beard.

“Blaze’s coming a bit later. He had something he had to do but I thought he’d be here by now.”

“I’m Mitch,” said Fuzzy, shaking Pete’s hand, “and this is Randall.” Mitch’s palm was sweaty.
Randall looked late sixties, maybe seventy, blotchy complexion, thin bloodless lips, dead gray eyes, short steely gray hair slicked down and parted down the middle, and a large mole smack in the middle of his forehead. Unlike Mitch who wore an open purple polo shirt with plenty of dark chest hair peeking out, Randall was dressed all formal like, green sports jacket, white dress shirt and a gold tie.

“You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” asked Randall in a low, polished voice.

“No, again I was waiting for…”

“Well, have dinner with us. When your friend, what’s his name again?”

“Blaze.”

“Yes, when Blaze gets here, he can always catch up.”

Mitch, who kept fidgeting in his seat and tapping his fingers on the table like a drummer, held up his empty water glass, then looked at Randall’s. ”Mind if I drink yours till that damn waiter comes with more? I’m dyin’ here.”

Randall nodded.

“So what part of Jersey you from?” said Mitch all smiles again after guzzling down half the glass. There was sweat on his forehead.

“Bergen County. But how did you guess?”

“Hey I’m grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn. But our high school wrestling team competed tri-state and I had a lot of buddies from Jersey. You can take the guy out of New York or Jersey but you can’t take the New York or Jersey out of the guy.”

“You and Blaze seem to be newcomers to Sebastian,” said Randall. “The two of you been here in Fort Lauderdale long?”

“Just over a month. We decided to say goodbye to the cold and lead the good life down here.”

“Doing what?” said Randall matter-of-factly. “I mean, did you have jobs lined up before you left?”

“No, not exactly.” said Pete, a bit defensive.

“Quit grilling the guy, Ran,” said Mitch, a tinge annoyed. “You think everyone has a family business like you to just fall into?”

“Family business?” said Pete.

“Yes, I’m a fourth generation mortician. My family owns a chain of over twenty funeral homes across the Northeast and a few down South.”

“Actually, my buddy worked for a Forest Rest Funeral Home back in Fair Lawn.”

“That’s one of ours,” said Randall, reaching for a roll.

“In other words, Pete,” cracked Mitch, “modest Randall here is trying to tell you he’s loaded.”

“You didn’t complain when I renewed the lease on your Cooper convertible, did you?”

“Let me see if I can find that fucken waiter,” grumbled Mitch who bolted up out of the booth.

Randall sat back and took a sip of his martini. “Such an impatient boy.”

“You don’t by chance have a home of your family’s down here that could use two young able bodied men, huh?” laughed Pete.

For a second Pete wondered if Randall, with his connection with Blaze’s old place and knowing what Blaze had told him about the drug smuggling shit really going on, might be more than just a retired body snatcher. But the thought went out of his head as quickly as it had come in.

“Well, we do have a home in West Palm Beach, but I don’t have a clue what’s going on there. I’ve been out of the active side of the business for almost ten years now, leading the good life as you call it.”

Pete smiled politely, glancing down at his phone. It was almost eight. And nothing from Blaze.

“You know, I do have a suggestion how you can make some money very quickly, in fact, tonight that is, if you’re up for it.”

Didn’t Mitch give him enough to earn the Cooper, thought Pete.

“And what do you have in mind?”

“Nothing very elaborate. I’d just like you to come back with us and fuck my partner here while I watch.”

So that was their game, thought Pete.

“Well, if you think I’m the man for the job.”

“Oh, I’m certain, in fact, I know Mitch would enjoy it very much. He’s told me countless times how he found the two of you, but especially you, shall we say, arousable material. Not that I keep Mitch on a short leash. I turned 71 in March and I’m a realist. But I’d rather settle for being a silent observer than have him off on his wild ways unchaperoned.”

“I assume I’ll be paid in more than just a prime ribs dinner,” said Pete.

“One thousand dollars. In cash of course. That’s more than fair for an hour’s work by a prime specimen of manhood like you, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yep,” said Pete, playing it cool. He took another sip of his screwdriver. “And what if Blaze shows or I hear from him?”

“He can always join in and I’ll double my remittance.”

“Fine by me.”

“Good, we can leave now if you like. Unless, of course, you’re hungry…”

“No, but what about Mitch. Maybe he’d like to have his dinner first?” said Pete. Mitch was still nowhere in sight.

“The only thing Mitch wants right now besides a nice butch guy like you fucking him is another hit of his beloved meth which he’s probably mainlining in the restroom or the car as we speak.”

And with that, Randall slugged down the rest of his martini, threw a twenty on the table and gestured for Pete to follow him.

The sweaty palms, the tapping fingers, the insatiable thirst. Pete should have figured it out. After all, he had been there more than a few times himself.

And Randall obviously knew his boy well. When they got to the lot, Mitch was sitting in the Acura, the ac on full blast, with a broad grin on his face, giving Pete his full attention.

Merry Fucken Christmas, Fuzzy, thought Pete to himself.

Pete followed Randall’s Acura to their place, Ran’s place, in one of those high rises right off the beach. The condo, on the twenty-first floor, was warehouse huge with a wrap-round terrace on all sides and a view of twinkling Lauderdale on one side and the infinite dark of the ocean on the other.

“Let me change into something more comfortable while you boys get better acquainted,” said Ran who disappeared into the rear of the apartment as Mitch gestured Pete to follow him to his bedroom which faced the ocean side.

The first thing Mitch reached for after stripping down to nothing was his glass pipe on the bed stand. He crouched down on his mattress.

“Want some?” he asked searching for his butane lighter.

It had been more than a year since Pete had had a hit. There wasn’t a day since then that he hadn’t wanted it and he was actually happy there was no one around he could get it from to start him down that endless road to nowhere again. But now…

“Not yet,” said Pete. ”In a little while, it’s just I want to make sure my cock is hard and happy for you.”

“How thoughtful of you,” laughed Mitch. “Now get your fucken clothes off. I wanna get high right now on all that fur.”

With the two of them naked, Pete could see how they could be taken for brothers. About the same height, both stocky and covered with dark, luxurious hair, only ten years and Mitch’s receding hairline separated them.

“I always said if I found my clone I’d tie him up and never leave the bedroom,” said Mitch having sex with Pete’s burly body with his brown eyes. “But I know damn well Ran has no rope in the place. ‘Fraid he might hang himself.”

“Where is he anyway?” asked Pete. “He’s the one who said he wanted to watch.”

“Oh, he’s probably baking in his sauna right now. Soothes his old man arthritis.”

“Sauna? He’s got his own sauna?”

“Oh, yea, in the guest room. All the comforts of home. And more. In the morning, he’ll spend fifteen or twenty minutes in his little isolation booth while I’m still snoozing to de-crick all those aging bones. Otherwise, he’d practically be in a wheel chair.”

Mitch flicked on the lighter.

“But fuck him. We don’t need an audience to have fun, do we?” He dropped the magic crystal in the pipe and held the lighter beneath the globe till it had turned to molten magic, then took a deep drag and exhaled.

“Ah,” he moaned, “after a good hit, everything else in life is a flopped TV pilot.”

“Is this you?” said Pete pointing to a cover of New York magazine. It was dated 1994, and on it was a younger Mitch with a healthy manicured mop. Across read the banner, “Meet one of New York’s sexiest guys.”

“Yea, you know, they’d run that spread every year about the sexiest men in the City and I was still at NYU and one of their scouts spotted me, so…” He rubbed his hand playfully over his balding head. “Even without all this, I still look good, don’t I?” he quipped.

“Can’t you tell?” said Pete looking down at his own stiff seven inches. He could see Mitch’s tool was one of those fat beer can cocks but with the Tina streaming through his veins, it just lay there between his legs like a newborn kitten.

Pete crawled up on the bed so the two of them were crouched on their knees almost nose to nose.

“Hey, here’s a bonus even before I test how good that tool of yours is,” said Mitch and he reached into a drawer in the bed stand, pulled out a pair of aviator sunglasses and stuck them on Pete.

Pete glanced over to the bureau mirror.

“Cool.”

“I used to sell these back in Chelsea on line for a hundred and fifty bucks apiece.”

Pete took them off and placed them gently back on the bed stand like they were a piece of fragile china.

“A hundred and fifty bucks? People actually paid you that?”

“Sure,” said Mitch, taking another drag on the pipe. This time, Pete took his turn.

“Just one puff,” he said, “like I need to get any hornier.”

“We do wanna put on a good show for the old man, don’t we?”

“So how did you meet him?”

“Well, like I was saying, I was selling those sunglasses on line making twenty five G’s a month…”

“Fuck!”

“Yep, living the high life of an upscale faggot in Chelsea when it was still a solid gay ghetto. And snorting or smoking most of it away. I mean my good Jewish parents—you Jewish?”

“No, German and Irish,” said Pete.

“Well, you look like you could be, Jewish I mean,” rattled on Mitch. “As I was saying, my good Jewish parents sent me to NYU, where I got my CPA, but after practicing a couple of years I was bored out of my gore, and by that time I was on the Meth Express, looking for an easy way to make money. Online retail was getting big, so first I sold slinky lingerie and underwear, then knock-off watches, and finally hit pay dirt with the shades.”

“Okay, and… ”

“And, just before everything crashed with the bust, I was on a RSVP cruise solo out of Miami where I met Ran who was retired and already down here looking for a companion. I was just about broke and ready to move back with my folks in fucken Marine Park, but where the hell is a Manhattan meth head gonna get his candy in shit’s heaven? And all Ran really wanted was a trophy boy. He tells me he had been something of a stud till just a few years ago but, after his prostate surgery, sex for him became a spectator sport. I wasn’t joking about him not having any rope in the place. If he didn’t have me and my playmates to watch I think he would have done himself in.”

Mitch lowered himself on his stomach so his firm, hairy butt was in Pete’s sighting and Pete’s crotch in his face as he ever so lovingly began to kiss his stiff cock.

And you, handsome?”

“Me, just a drifter with shit to show for it. It was Blaze who came up with the idea of coming down here and us living off horny, rich retired old men.”

“Which is why you were at Bella’s tonight, prospecting, huh, buddy?”

“Something like that,” said Pete.

“You guys lovers?”

Pete thought a second on how to answer, but said nothing.

Suddenly, Mitch started tonguing the back of Pete’s shaft. “Curtain going up. Ran’s coming.”

A moment later, Ran emerged in an open silk bath robe and a martini in his hand. His thin, pale body fit his age and his cock, a thick one that hung halfway down his thigh, was as soft as butter. He said nothing and planted himself in a corner chair just across from the bed.

It was the best seat in the house.

Pete petted the hairy cheeks of Mitch’s butt, as Mitch sucked his cock, making sure as much of it was visible for Ran’s private viewing. Ran sat expressionless, occasionally sipping his drink, saying nothing, and not even touching himself. But his dead gray eyes never wandered a millimeter from the main event.

Mitch got up, then lay back, propped a pillow under his back and another under his head, his furry muscular legs outspread, and his furry hole a few inches off the bed, aimed in Pete’s direction.

Pete glanced around for some lube. Just then, Ran reached under his chair into a box, pulled out a small plastic bottle of K-Y and threw it on the bed just inches from Pete. Pete nodded, lathered up his cock, still happy and hard, and shoved it deep into Mitch’s butthole.

“Shit,” he murmured, moving closer till his ass cheeks hit Pete’s pubes. “Now that’s what I call a good fuck.”
Mitch reached up, pulling on Pete’s nips as Pete reached over and pulled on Mitch’s, all the while thrusting his cock back and forth in rhythm with the loud click of the Grandfather clock in the living room.

Ran remained motionless.

Mitch flipped over and Pete continued to fuck him from behind, stroking the rich fur on his cheeks as he shoved himself deep and high inside his hairy buddy, Again and again and again.

Without breaking Pete’s beat, Mitch reached over for his pipe and lighter, took another heavy drag, then, exhaling, delicately handed it up to Pete who sucked in the smoke Mitch had just let out, and took two more drags of his own.

By now, he had no doubt that the drug had taken over his body. And his mind. Here he was, fucking his twin brother who loved every inch of his big hard cock. Pete knelt down, his dick still deep inside Mitch, and began to savagely kiss him.

And when the meth had eventually done its dirty deed, and Pete could see his dick going limp, though it felt like he could fuck half the guys on Sebastian Beach at high noon, Ran again, playing stage manager, pulled out a thick black, veiny dildo from the magic box beneath his chair. Pete used it on Mitch in between shoving his own dick in Mitch’s hole.

Exhausted and showered in his own sweat and Mitch’s, Pete fell to the bed as Mitch turned over on his side.

“Your money’s on the table in the foyer,” Ron said quietly as he got up and left the room.

It was after two. Mitch had drifted into sleep but Pete, his sensitive dick limp, wanted to cum but he knew, having spent many a meth-saturated night back South of Market, that that would be mission impossible.

Just then, it hit him. His phone, which had been sitting in the back pocket of his jeans on the floor beside the bed, hadn’t made a peep the whole night.

Where the fuck was Blaze?

Next – My Characters Are Real: Shaw

Inside The Mind of a Writer: My Characters Are Real

The Real Mitch

I only knew Mitch a few weeks out of my petty life but I know I will never forget him. In fact, I think of him more times without thinking than I wish I did.

One Saturday night at 2606, the leather bar in Tampa, I was stalked by a dissipated, bloated guy, probably younger than me. I tried to be polite with some non-committal small talk but each time I delicately got some distance between us, he popped up again to leer. Finally, inevitably, he went in for the kill.

“So buddy, what exactly are you waiting for?” he asked in a guttural, butchy tone.

Without hesitating, I blurted straight out: “Me.”

Well, Mitch, my sturdy little furry New York City Jew boy, was the closest “me” I think I’ll ever meet in my life.

I don’t quite remember who came on to whom on Manhunt that late Tuesday night, but there was no doubt his rough-hewn bearded face and naturally muscular, slightly stocky hairy body donned only in 501’s and a profile that emphasized, “looking for older, masculine hairy guys only – facial hair a must” caught the attention of my dick. That and the fact that, despite measurements that read “9 inches,” his screen name was “beefyhairybottom.”

I mapquested his address to a non-descript house off dingy 13th Street just a few blocks from Lauderdale’s leather hangout, the Ramrod, and drove over. Wishing to make a good first impression, I threw my tank top on my car seat and followed his instructions to walk to the rear to a small dilapidated guest house. I knocked on the splintered wooden door.

“Who is it?” shouted out a deep voice with that distinct New Yorkeese accent I knew so well, having spoken it myself most of my years.

I announced myself.

“It’s open,” he shouted back.

I walked through the foyer, if you could call the three feet that separated the door from the rest of his space a foyer, and parted the plastic shower curtains.

There he stood, naked except for a pair of leather boots, designer boots he would tell me later, a relic from his fat cat Manhattan days, holding a mini- blow torch of a butane lighter beneath the end of a glass pipe. He took a deep drag, blew the smoke out just as quickly, then reached out and carefully handed it to me. He had said nothing about partying either in his profile or in our e-mails but I grabbed onto it anyway. Our eyes – both cat eyes, green but with a flash of blue in the right light – met as I clutched the pipe tightly so not to drop it while he held the lighter beneath the bowl end and gestured for me to gently shift it back and forth.

“Suck it in but don’t hold it – the shit can crystallize in your lungs,” he cautioned, still staring into my soul. “Not a good thing.”

I dropped my shorts and stood naked, our faint six pack abs almost touching.

“Leave your boots on,” he whispered. “I like that.”

Except for the fact he was a bit taller than me at 5 foot eight and younger, I could have been staring at myself in the mirror. Buzzed cut, balding, scruffy beard, broad hairy shoulders, tight muscular arms, hairy chest and abs, thick thighs and calves, again all covered in fur, he was the idealization of manhood in my mind.

My brother.

My clone.

Even though he was Jewish and I was a Lutheran, we were both, I learned later, Slovak/Russian mutts with that hint of Mongolian in the slant of our eyes. We had the kind of bodies my so-called friends would chide me were made to lay down railroad ties until I retorted I made three times the money they did.

About the only obvious difference besides age was Mitch’s huge fat cock (versus my more conventional six and a half) and his super erratic behavior. He was jumping around and rambling on as if someone had shot a tube of Ben Gay up his beautifully furry, manly butt.

“You want another hit?” he asked.

I never searched out for the stuff but if a trick had some to share, well…

“Yea, but I want Mr. Peter to cooperate,” I replied, grabbing my semi-erect cock. “You know junk and hard dicks are alien enemies.”

“Don’t worry. I got Viagra. Want one?”

I had already taken 100 mgs, figuring I had to be up and ready to fuck the shit out of him, but accepted the generosity of this beautiful stranger and popped another. I wanted to make damn well sure I would keep “beefyhairybottom” happy.

His studio apartment was a penitentiary cell pigsty, furnished with thrift shop furniture rejects and littered with half empty Gatorade bottles and Twinky wrappers. He used the Gatorade to prepare some G for the both of us in a liquor glass – G was something new for even this seasoned boy – and after that, we moved to his air mattress, aimless music blaring from his pc perpetually set on his Manhunt inbox. I found it flattering that he had summoned me when, as he boasted later, he had gotten over 200 hits since arriving from New York just a few weeks before.

Lying there, slowly stroking his dark carpet of chest hair as he pulled incessantly on his fat, spongy dong, I felt myself slowing climbing that same staircase Mitch apparently had ascended hours before, to the top of Mount Perpetual Pleasure. There, hard dicks, the gold standard for so much of the less than satisfying sex I had had of late, were incidental.

Throughout all our carousing and stroking and kissing and licking one another’s armpits and sweaty matted bodies, Mitch continued to babble on almost incoherently, not so much because of the junk streaming through his veins but, as he admitted, because he suffered attention affective disorder and didn’t take his meds for fear they would fuck up his high. Yet despite his ungrammatical soundbites, I learned a lot that first night about my clone.

That he was 42, had grown up in Westchester – read comfortable – a graduate of NYU, with a CPA’s license he had never used, how his parents were snowbirds with a place in West Palm, and how he had avoided working at a real job like the plague while somehow living the highlife in a beautiful Chelsea duplex. He proudly pointed to the framed page hanging on his wall from New York magazine circa 1989 crowning him one of New York’s sexiest men (“I know had a lot more hair then, but I still look good, huh?”) and gloated how he had gone from one successful business venture to the next, his last selling designer sunglasses on line netting him an incredible $25,000 a month which, when he wasn’t smoking it away, he lost on the poker tables of Atlantic City. Bottom line: he had come down to South Florida with $300 to his name to be near mommy and daddy and their wallets, and where he could live cheap, as exemplified by his $500 a month apartment, the size of my walk-in closet, that, despite the hole in the wall, he prided himself in finding.

As far as men went, he liked them about his height (“tall guys are goofy looking – most of the porn stars are short like us, anyway”), hairy, with facial hair, and in-shape bods. It was as if he were reciting my own private wet dream. He tapped my hard earned six pack, then his own. “It has less to do with the gym than with genes, believe me,” he concluded smugly.

As predicted, Mr. Peter was rather shy that night, though I did succeed in fucking Mitch for awhile before my hard-on succumbed to the stuff. But it almost didn’t matter. We rolled around in our mutual sweat, mouthing our pretty but pretty useless genitals when we weren’t yanking on them like two adolescent boys exploring their puberty dicks.

Then came my moment of inspiration.

“You ever get fisted?” I asked, eyeing his toy box to the side of the bed with its eclectic collection of dildos and not wanting to disappoint that hairy, manly butt of his.

“Once, back in New York, but the guy was too rough, didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Well,” I boasted, holding up my right hand, “a cast of this hand is in the Fist Fuckers Hall of Fame.”

With that, as he lay there facing me, I gently entered him, and we were both elevated to a new level of Endless Ecstasy. In the past, I had found fisting a guy as exciting as doing my laundry but it was different with Mitch. As he groaned and gyrated on the bed and I slowly went ever deeper, we became one.

Brothers in spirit, brothers in flesh.

In the end, what I thought would be a 47 minute quickie turned out to be an all-nighter. With the heavy shades drawn on his single window, it was hard to tell morning had arrived, whether we liked it or not. My sole focus now was to get off, but with all the shit I had smoked and slugged down, it seemed a miracle to get my dick up enough to finally squirt, stroking the heavy fur on Mitch’s chest and abs as my erotica while he faded into blissful oblivion.

Sweaty and smeared with Elbow Grease, my boots still on, I stood up and slipped on my shorts.

“You are one beautiful man,” I said, scanning him slowly from head to toe, never expecting to see him again. He smiled faintly, turned over and fell almost instantly to sleep as I walked out.

Two nights later as I canvassed the websites to see if anybody loved me, Mitch beckoned me again on Manhunt with a

“Why don’t you come over?” I taught college and had an 8 a.m. class and Mitch mentioned he was starting his temporary Census job that same day but I followed his call like Odysseus and his men were wooed by the Sirens. Was it the drugs or was it Mitch seducing me?

Who knew?

Who cared?

He was out of Elbow Grease and we spent the next hour rambling from all-night drug stores to a 24/7 porn shop on Dixie Highway which only had some small canisters left.

Lighting up in the car, we began another trip to Arousaland and it was that night that Mitch – or was it the G? – confessed he hadn’t enjoyed being with a man as much as he had with me in a very long time.

This time neither of us came.

As we walked out from his place to my car together an eternity later, he gestured to his new little compact Cooper sitting in the front lot that his parents had leased for their 42 year old only child. By 42, I was a vice president with quarter of a million in the bank and two houses.

“I’m a little pissed at them, though,” he whined, “I really wanted a convertible. After all, this is South Florida.”

“You don’t sound very grateful,” I said.

“Hey,” replied Mitch not at all defensive. “They made me the egocentric fuck I am today. It was always Mitchy you’re so handsome, Mitchy, you’re so great, Mitchy, you’re so smart. So why shouldn’t they get their Mitchy, their little boy, a convertible, huh?”

The cynical former New Yorker slash former public relations exec in me knew it would happen sooner or later if I continued these liaisons with a meth-head, beautiful as he was to me. Sure enough, a week later, early on a Saturday afternoon, after inviting me on line to his lair, Mitch followed my, “yea, why not,” with, “I’m out of stuff. Got any $$ so I get some for us?”

Usually, the “I’m not going to fall for this shit” side of me would have responded, “thanks but no thanks.” But, hell, I had gotten high twice on his dime so, I rationalized, I owed him, right? I left the hundred bucks in twenties in my mailbox while he went to meet his dealer in Miami and I took a nap. Our plan was to rendezvous around 9. When I didn’t hear from him by ten I figured I had been taken but decided to call him anyway.

“Sorry, he wasn’t ready with the shit,” Mitch explained, all apologetic. “I’ll be over at your place by 11. Promise.”

Now, call me paranoid, but I wasn’t exactly comfortable about letting a confirmed druggie know where I lived but I had been getting increasingly claustrophobic about his place. Besides, he didn’t want me to use Crisco when I fist fucked him on his air mattress since he claimed it smelled up his humble abode. My house, with central air, eliminated that logistical problem.

Mitch made good on his promise and we spent the night and most of the next day in Druggie Heaven. And the Crisco helped me go in deeper, so that by the end of that night Mitch had become a full-fledged fistee graduate.

While I instructed my lawn man that morning about some new palm tree plantings, Mitch catnapped. But I noticed that when all the stuff we had been taking wore off, my usually very animated and boisterous stud, my butch Chatty Cathy doll with a knot in his cord, became very quiet and subdued, almost shy.

“My generation needs drugs to have sex,” he explained. His observation made me feel old and superior all in the same moment. And when later he was leaving and asked if I wanted to keep what crystal was left – “after all, you paid for it,” – and I told him no, he was surprised.

“You mean you don’t need all this shit?”

“No,” I repeated, very matter of factly.

“You know something,” he said, grinning. “I admire you.”

I didn’t hear from Mitch again for over a week and figured that was that. Maybe he was disappointed that his hypnotic hold on me had not quite succeeded as he had hoped. Translation: transform me into a crackhead fuckbuddy just like him. Then, one o’clock one night, out of the blue, he called, explaining he had taken advantage of a freebie in Key West, courtesy of a couple he had known from his NYC days who had fought most of the weekend but kept him amply supplied in stuff. He wanted to see me, said he missed me, and could I come over now?

His hair was a mess. Apparently he had tried to buzz cut himself but with no second mirror the back of his head still had uneven blotches of hair, making him look like a cross between a slightly deranged, homeless guy and an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. I pulled out his Oster and evened things out. Even then, just touching his head, my dick sprung to attention.

So how’s the Census job working out?” I asked.

“Oh, I gave that up – too much bullshit for too little dough. I’m on Rentboy.com now,” and he proceeded to pull up his ad.

“Italian Stallion?” I asked as I scanned it. “OK, but why are using Larry? That sounds so Brooklyn Jew. Why not Vito or Tony or Joey or something?”

“The name Larry worked for me back in New York,” he gloated. Then he opened his bureau and, reaching for his wallet, flashed a seemingly endless sea of bills.

“I could make a lot more back in NYC but there’s also a lot more competition. And hell, eight hundred bucks for one night ain’t bad, huh?”

We lit up again.

“You know,” he continued to ponder in one of his rare, less erratic moments, “I bet we could sell ourselves as a tag team and make some serious dough. There’s a lot of lonely guys out there looking for a dynamic duo like us. Hell, we could pass ourselves off as brothers. Shit, now that would be some gimmick.”

All I kept thinking was how I would make the Guinness Book of Records for the oldest guy to have the balls to attempt to sell his bod on Rentboy.

“Yea, but aren’t most of these guys looking to get fucked? I mean, how can you perform if you’re …?”

Mitch shrugged his usual arrogant Manhattan shrug.

“Oh, I’m a total top to my johns but I tell them that, after all, I am 42 and sometimes the Snake ain’t up for biting, and they’re content to get fingered fucked or have me shove a dildo up their ass just as long as I’m the one doin’ the shovin’ and they can feel all this fur of mine against them.”

He stroked himself, then seamlessly moved his hand ever so lightly up my abs to my chest and looked me straight in the eye. “That’s why I know we could be a winning team.”

A few days later a far more frantic Mitch called me.

“Can you do me a favor?” he pleaded. “Can you loan me $50 so I can get to my parents? They’ll give me some dough once I’m up there and I’ll pay you right back.”

“But what happened to all that money you showed me the other night?”

“Ah, those fuckin’ Indians stole it all,” referring to the poker tables at the casino the Seminole Indians ran in Hollywood, “and my last two johns were no-shows.”

Suddenly the Daddy in me crepped out.

“But Mitch, you gotta get your shit together. You’re an intelligent adult. You know that.”

“I know, I know – I will…” he replied, more to pacify me than attempt any moment of self-realization. “You’re beginning to sound like my father who keeps telling me to check out Gamblers Anonymous.”

I stuck twenty dollars in the mailbox, enough to fill the tank of his compact, and woke up to the reality that he was beyond redemption. That was about the only reason why I hadn’t fallen in love with him I kept telling myself, right?

I was just about ready to leave for L.A. Fitness the following afternoon when Mitch, unannounced, showed up in my driveway.

I told you I’d pay you back,” he said, laying the twenty dollar bill on my kitchen counter.

I never did get to the gym that day.

Memorial Day weekend was coming up, but while I looked forward to another all-nighter in High Land with Mitch, he had different plans –another escape to Key West and the battling lovers. But he was emphatic about connecting as soon as he got back and going to Sebastian, Lauderdale’s gay beach, that coming weekend.

I believed him.

That Thursday night, Mitch sent an e-mail – his last to me – on Manhunt. I had just posted some new provocative photos on my profile to show off my hard won gym body.

“Fucken awesome pics, bro.”

The following Tuesday came and went, Wednesday, Thursday. I e-mailed him on Manhunt, called his cell, even called his other cell number he used for Rentboy. No response. I passed his address twice, looking for his little car in the front lot. No car. In my gut I knew something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe he had had a confrontation with his warring friends or a drug dealer or a john. Maybe he had somehow O.D.’ed ….

Finally, that Thursday night driving home, slightly plastered courtesy of Alibi’s three dollar Long Island iced teas, I decided I would stop at his place and this time knock on his door.

A voice yelled out to me as I began to walk back to the guest house. It was the landlord or property manager, a tall, skinny, thirty something, pleasant enough looking guy with a faint goatee.

“Looking for Mitch?” he asked politely.

I nodded.

“You a friend of his?” the man asked.

“Something like that.”

“Well, sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Mitch is dead.”

“What – what happened?” I stammered, though surprised at myself that I was not entirely stunned by the news.

“I don’t know much but from what this friend of his from New York, an ex-lover I think, Todd, told me – his number was on Mitch’s cell so the cops called him – Mitch was driving back from Key West late Monday night and fell asleep at the wheel.”

Mitch had mentioned to me more than once how he had gone without sleeping or eating for days when he was on a perpetual crack/G/jerk-off binge.

Forty-two fucken years old and he was gone.

“His – his parents know?”

“Yea, they asked me to clear out his apartment and box up his belongings but there was a lot of stuff, a leather harness, leather vest, toys, drug paraphernalia, you know, I didn’t think they should see. You’re welcome to take what you like …”

I smiled my bleak thank you, turned around and drove home, happy I was dead ass drunk, happy that I had at least learned what had happened to him, happy that the super hadn’t told me what the accident had done to that beautiful body and beautiful face.

And yes, strangely at peace knowing he hadn’t just abandoned me.

A few nights later, I responded to Mitch’s last e-mail to me on Manhunt with a “thx hot man.”

That Saturday, when I went to Sebastian, I made sure to park in space #42. A month later, I became Rentboy.com’s oldest toyboy. And believe it or not, my first trick, a retired dentist in town from Palm Springs, asked if I had a twin brother to play tag team with me on his butthole.

Imagine that.

In The Mind of a Writer: My Characters are Real

I showed you how I used Danny, my wheel-chair lover, as the basis for the character Hylan in my novella, “Not in It For the Love.” Well, I guess Danny made such an impression on me and was so unique of all the guys I’ve known in my life that I decided to use him again, this time in my upcoming novella, “Buy Guys” available on amazon.com. Wilde City Press. It’s about two Jersey drifters, Pete and Blaze, who go down to Fort Lauderdale to lead what they mistakenly think will be free and breezy lives as male hustlers; the title, “Buy Guys” is the fiction website on which they post their guys-for-hire ad. In this episode from the book, Pete has lined up a client who thinks is just another old or homey or lonely or whacked-out guy willing to pay for sex. Ah, but not so fast…

When Pete texted back Vinnie who lived in Plantation on what he was looking for, his response was simple but cryptic:
“Somebody who isn’t judgmental.”

Was the guy some troll or ninety year toothless fuck on Viagra? Whatever. Two hundred fifty bucks was two hundred fifty bucks, and Pete’s job was making the guy happy regardless.
Pete could hear the bark of a dog from Vinnie’s apartment even before he knocked. A minute later, Vinnie opened the door.

He was in a wheelchair.

“It’s okay, Sammy,” said the forty-something Christian Bale look-alike with a wavy salt and pepper mop of hair and scruffy beard to the lumbering black lab at his side. He was wearing a white tank and gym shorts and his smooth body was a portrait in contrasts, massive arms and shoulders and bony, withered legs.

He looked up at Pete.

“You okay with me?”

“Fine, buddy, fine,” said Pete, unsure how he felt.

“The bedroom’s back here.” Vinnie swung his chair around as Sammy parted company and made himself comfortable on the living room sofa.

“Your money’s in an envelope on top of the dresser. You can count it if you like.”

“That’s fine,” said Pete who slipped off his sneaks and red T and dropped his running shorts.

“I like the jockstrap,” said Vinnie, nervously scanning his near naked visitor. “Hot. Keep it on.”

Vinnie parked his little chariot on the side of the bed, then lifted himself onto the mattress, and propped himself up on some pillows positioning his legs like they were appendages on a puppet. Then he reached for what looked like some aluminum smoke pipe on the bed stand.

“Want some?”

“What is it?”

“Medical marijuana. Helps ease my leg spasms.” He lit the lighter.

“You can get it here in Florida?”

“No, but I got a buddy in Colorado who brings me a shit load whenever he’s in town.”

Vinnie handed the pipe to Pete who, by now, was straddling Vinnie on the bed. He took a deep drag. The rush reminded him of the meth he had so loved back South of Market. And that had taken him down the wrong road more than once.

“Good shit, right?” smiled Vinnie as he took his turn. Then he placed the pipe back down on the bed stand and exhaled.

“I haven’t been with a guy for six months now, since the accident. But I’ve played with myself some and I know the plumbing’s still working, even if it takes a while. I just didn’t wanna try it with somebody, you know, a trick, till I knew for sure…”

“Well, don’t worry, Vinnie, I’ll be patient.”

“Besides, you remind me so much of Cliff, as soon as I saw your profile, I figured if anybody was gonna get me gonna it would be somebody like you.”

“Cliff an ex of yours?” said Pete, massaging Vinnie’s shoulders.

“He—he was my partner. He was killed in the accident.”

Pete stopped.

“I’m sorry.”

“He was humpy hairy little fucker just like you. We were together five years, were ready to buy a house together even, when some kid on his cellphone went through the red light. He came out of it without even a scratch, but Cliff was killed instantly and me, well…”

“Life is of the moment, right?” said Pete. “Let’s enjoy the moment we’ve got.”

Vinnie began rubbing Pete’s stiffening cock beneath his jock, but Pete was unsure what to do next. Was the guy wearing a Depends, did he have a catheter up his cock? Should he even touch him down there?

Then, without thinking another second, Pete enveloped Vinnie’s shoulders with his arms and rubbed their beards together, then kissed him, as Vinnie stroked the hairs on Pete’s chest and held his head ever closer. Pete could feel Vinnie’s stirring dick on his abs, pre-cum drops wetting the hairs around his belly button. Vinnie guided Pete’s hand down to his crotch. Pete pulled back Vinnie’s shorts, knelt down and sucked his cock, still soft but growing, then began tonguing, then softly sucking his big hairy sac.

As Vinnie turned to strip off his tank top, then his underwear, his naked butt came into view. His cheeks resembled two rotting melons, bruised and miss-shapened, a reality, Pete guessed, of literally sitting on your ass too much.

But Pete quickly refocused on the good, not just what he saw. Well-built shoulders, strong arms, great chest, handsome, manly face. But also what he felt.

And he knew for sure it wasn’t pity.

Vinnie turned out to be a great cocksucker as Pete stood over and straddled him, working his small yet super sensitive nips with his fingers, and after they had licked and sucked and kissed and took a few more drags, Vinnie reached down and began stroking himself, his dick finally rising to the occasion. A smile crossed his face like a thirteen year boy relishing his first erection.

“See what you’re doin’ to me, you hot fucker,” Vinnie murmured as he continued to stroke his cock and motioned Pete to stick his back in his mouth. A minute later Pete was down on his.

So a guy in a wheelchair could not only get a hard-on, thought Pete. He could even enjoy it.

Pete came like Vinnie wanted him to cum, Pete’s man juice dripping from his lips, and, seconds later, he climaxed too. Pete knew he had, not by what didn’t happen – some heavy duty spurting – but by the way he suddenly griped Pete tightly for those moments as he wildly stroked his dick into some kind of oblivion, then lay back, exhausted.

“Thanks buddy, thanks a lot,” said Vinnie, smiling broadly.

“See,” said Pete, as he hopped off the bed. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

“Don’t forget your money,” said Vinnie gesturing to the envelope on top of the bureau as Pete got dressed.

“Forget it. Consider it compliments of the management.”

Pete was happy he was able to hold it together till he got back into the Bronco. Then he started crying, the first time in a very long time, and didn’t stop till he got back to the motel. It was almost ten.

“Was yours as bad as mine?” said Blaze, lying on the bed, naked, his wet hair glistening from the shower. “Shit, all the guy wanted to do was to blow me which would have been fine if he knew what he was doing. Hell, I think I got bite marks all over my dick. Don’t these backward married guys from Des Moines ever watch porn?”

“Mine was okay,” replied Pete, who was anxious to wash the day away too. “Nothing special.”

Tuesday: My Characters re Real – Mitch

Inside The Mind of A Writer: My Characters Are Real

I told you about my experiences, actually my on-again-off-again romance with Danny, a wheel-chair bound guy I met while summering in Pennsylvania. He made such an impression on me I used him in both one of my short stories, and as Hylan, one of the protagonists in my novella, “Not in it for the Love.” One major difference from the real Danny is that I made Hylan biracial.

So let me set-up the scene were Josh and Hylan first meet. Josh is a young, handsome Florida drifter and part-time hustler who is adopted by Bishop, a successful Wall Street investments broker, on one of his trips to the Keys, scouting motels for acquisition. He takes Josh back with him to New York to be his trophy boy, but allows him to bunk hop in the West Village gay scene of the late ’90s. For Josh, it’s all about the sex and the occasional money, that is, until one fateful Sunday night …

It was a hot, steamy Sunday afternoon in August. Perfect for strutting the Village’s Christopher Street catwalk. Bishop had fallen asleep on the sofa watching “From Here to Eternity” on TCM, and a couple of prospective hot web dates ended up going nowhere. Even my usually reliable “port in a storm” fuck buddies weren’t responding to my “hey, got some time?” e-mails. The guys down in the Village for the Dugout’s weekly beerbust would be spilling out onto the sidewalk and street soon, shirtless, sweaty and hungry for one last screw for the weekend, even if they tried to hide their appetites behind smug “don’t give a fuck” expressions.

I usually rode the subway down, less of a hassle with traffic and all, but I opted that night instead to take Bishop’s just leased new BMW out for a spin. It was parked in the basement garage in a space that cost more than most people’s rents. Although parking in the Village on Sundays was tight with all those out-of-town suburbies wanting to experience the City, I came to know the side streets where I could still find a space if I moved my ass.

I had made good time coming down the Westside Highway. At the first red light off the highway in the Village, I weaseled out of my sleeveless open shirt and was snaking through the Meat Market District when, a half a block from the Lure, that leather bar, this shirtless guy in a wheelchair sailed out of nowhere and sideswiped me.
My first reaction was – shit – Bishop was gonna kill me for banging up his precious car. Then I saw in the rear view mirror that the guy had been knocked out of his chariot onto the street and looked like he was pretty banged up. So I parked the car illegally by a pump and trotted over.

Even in his scruffed -up condition – he was dressed only in army fatigue shorts and sneaks, and his shoulder, knee, and forehead were all scrapped and bloody – even messed up as all that, I found him – well – beautiful, a word that, frankly, had never come into my head before about any guy. His body fur was thick and wiry like steel wool, and his tangled, scrambled hair and beard stuck out like one of those African natives in those old copies of National Geographic people threw out at the trailer park. Even laying there on the street, his body reminded me of that bronze statue of Zeus I had seen in the lobby at the U.N. on one of Bishop’s attempts to show me some big city culture. Not overblown like a gym bunny, he was built more like some primitive hunter, with muscles that meant something. Even if his withered legs didn’t quite match his bulked-up upper torso.

“I’m sorry, man, didn’t see you coming,” I tried to explain as I knelt down and stared into those ocean blue eyes. He had the strong, rugged features of a Midwestern white boy but I knew his coco tan didn’t come from a week in San Juan. A half breed as Momma would politely put it when she was sober. Like the kind of models I kept seeing in those store circulars and on TV, not white, not black, so they kinda fit everybody.

“Hey, don’t sweat it. I wasn’t looking,” he replied with the same kind of nerdy yet sexy voice I had heard on a few TV car commercials. “Could you help me get back to my place – I live just a few blocks from here – I’ll be OK.”

And that, folks, is how Hylan Jonathan Demarest, Ironsides as he called himself, sailed into my shitty two-by-four life.

I folded up his dented wheelchair in the trunk – Bishop’s baby had suffered only a minor scratch – draped a blanket left over from this past weekend’s beach outing at Riis Park onto the front passenger seat so no blood would get on the leather, and ever so gently lifted this hunk of man in. Even then, I was getting hard.

His chair, though a bit banged up, was still usable. I folded it up and once we got to his address, I placed him back in it and wheeled him to the commercial elevator of the warehouse building off Jane Street where his loft was.

Scratching at his door to greet us was Hylan’s big black lumbering motherfucker of a dog, Bosco, as furry as his master, who helped him, as he told me later, live. He sniffed the dry blood on Hylan’s knee and wimped a little but accepted me in a second. Guess he realized I was here to help, not hurt his handsome buddy.

Once in his place, almost as large as Bishop’s penthouse but stripped down to the bare essentials, Hylan wheeled himself over to the bathroom and gestured for me to help him get his shorts, jockey underwear and sneakers off. No bag on his side or diapers like Old Man Shanahan who lived a couple of trailers away from ours in Shady Isles and who I took care of once when his daughter couldn’t make it. Bosco, meanwhile, had made himself comfortable on Hylan’s king size bed.

I was getting so hard so quick my dick hurt, cramped in the crotch of my super tight jeans I wore when I was out cruising so my package looked even bigger. Funny, I always thought gimps couldn’t get it up anymore, but as he maneuvered his body with those powerful biceps into a plastic stool that sat in the shower stall, I could see he was getting aroused, too, the head of his uncut cock beginning to make a surprise unveiling. He told me later that his plumbing didn’t always work so fast, so I must have been doing something right. And even if he couldn’t really stand, I figured he was about my height or even a little taller, and definitely bigger where it really counted. I figured his piece was 9, even 10 inches and thick like a flashlight. Then he turned on the shower and braced himself under the water.

I quickly undressed, my aching dick bouncing off my abs, and joined him, gently washing his cuts as my fingers slowly caressed his broad furry shoulders. We said nothing, but when he gestured me to stand in front of him I knew what he wanted and I surrendered my stiff pole to his mouth. For the next five minutes he worshiped my cock with his tongue and his lips, all while the shower beat down on us like a waterfall. Then, just as I spurted my manload down his throat, he started twisting back and forth like he was having a fit, rolled his eyes, then slumped back into the chair. Nothing had shot out of that beautiful cock of his but I could tell in his own alien way that he had cum too.

If this had been one of my usual hit-and-run man encounters, I’d be heading to the door by now. Instead, we slowly dried one another off and I carried him back to the bed and lay next to him, all quiet like, with Bosco still on the bed, making us some weird kind of threesome. His butt was black and blue and his furry cheeks looked like two rotting melons – he told me later that’s what happened when you sit on your ass all the time – but somehow it didn’t bother me.

Then, without thinking about it, I turned to Hylan. And began kissing him. First on the lips, then trailing down his hairy, massive chest and furry six pack to his cock that, even limp, I still gagged on.

As we finished for the moment, his banged up wheelchair, leaning against the bathroom door, caught the corner of my eye.

“I’ll- I’ll pay to get that fixed,” I whispered.

“You sure you wanna do that?’ said Hylan, “After all, it was my fuck-up as much as yours.”

“No,” I replied, stroking his chest softly, “I’m OK.”

“Well, considering what you drive and what you wear,” said Hylan, tugging at the Rolex on my wrist, “my first guess was you’re a lawyer, or doctor or own your own business maybe.”

Then he stared down at my still hard cock, then back at me.

“But looking at that handsome baby face of yours, I’d say you’re just being kept.”

“Hell,” I replied with the same stupid ass grin I used to charm the girls in high school, “I’m just a backwoods Florida country boy city slickin’.”

I had spied a diploma from the University of Chicago on the wall when we came in.

“Class of 1996,” I quipped.

Hylan crawled between my legs and lay his head on my dick.

“My parents wanted me to go into medicine. My father is a civil rights attorney back in Chicago, my mother counsels troubled kids, but I was in my second year at Chicago U when I decided to switch majors to music.”

“So what happened?” I asked, stroking one of his hairy legs, thin and railly but still with a kiss of muscle left to want him all the more.

“Everybody automatically thinks I was in a car accident or was some crazy biker boy who crashed his motorcycle into a wall, but I can thank a bug for my wonderful wheelchair existence.”

“Bug?”

“A virus that hit my spinal cord. I won’t bore you with all the medical jargon, but it’s been three years now, just after I moved from Chicago. One Thursday I was jogging on the old West Side Highway, by that Sunday my legs were useless. The emergency room docs at St. Vincent’s knew what it was but there was nothing they could do for me except give me pain killers til there was nothing left to feel.”

“How, how did you stand it, dude?” I asked, rubbing his leg as if by some fucken magic I could make him whole again.

“I felt like doing myself in in the beginning but there are worse things that can happen to you, right? And having been a high school music teacher, I’m at least able to continue making a few bucks as a tutor, in between doing gigs at clubs here in the Village – I play a mean guitar – where I can show off some of my stuff.”

“You mean you write songs?”

He asked me to bring his wheelchair to the edge of the bed, then hopped in, and led me to a side corner off the bathroom where a tower of computer equipment and a keyboard glowed in the shadows.

“Let me show you,” and he brought up on the pc screen a song he had written and began playing it. “That’s why I moved to New York in the first place. If I’m ever gonna make it.”

I couldn’t resist stroking his chest and abs as he fiddled around with all those keys and knobs.

“So where did you get all this fur?” I whispered in his ear. My mind was on other things than music.

“From my mother,” he quipped, then laughed. He had a funny kind of laugh, round tones and all stagey like, like one of those laugh tracks on TV. “She’s from Argentina, Spanish and Italian blood. My grandfather and uncle are gorillas.”

“And that fucken humpy body, too?”

“A mix of both sides. My father was a gymnast in college, one of the first black men to make the team at his school, and I competed in swimming when I was at Chicago U., if that counts,” he replied, snuggling closer. “Now it’s just some weightlifting” – he gestured to the barbells lying on a table a few yards from his bed – “and wheeling myself around.”

He didn’t bring up fucking that first night and neither did I.

After all, there was always another time for that.

And we both knew there would be.

Back in bed we made love, kissing almost every inch of one another’s bodies a thousand times over, then dozed off till around 5 when Hylan nudged my shoulder.

“I know you have to leave but I wanna show you something first.”

I helped Hylan dress, then got him into his magic chariot and, leaving Bosco behind slumbering on the bed, down we went in the freight elevator back to the street.

“This way,” said Hylan, pointing to the river and the piers just a block or so away.

And once we got onto the piers, we stayed there, just us, my Hylan in his chariot and me standing proudly behind him, my hands firmly on his strong shoulders, watching the tease of a sunrise begin to light the skies.

Hylan reached up and grabbed my hand.

“Where the fuck did you come from?” mumbled Hylan, his eyes still fixated on the horizon.

“Waiting for you to find me,” I whispered back in his ear.

Another side of Danny.