Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 21:37:15 -0400
From: David Buffet <tightserve@hotmail.com>
Subject: Alpha Male - Chapter 36

Chapter 36: Cracking the Code
	The morning broke warm, dry, and clear.  It was Sunday, the weather was
delightful, and we had the afternoon off.  People were in a good mood.  When
I got to the dining hall for breakfast, the table was already half full.
Shmu and Matt entered together shortly thereafter, the latter whistling like
a Dwarf on his way to work.
	"Well," said Brad to Doug as I put my tray down and sat at the table,
"here's the gofer.  Maybe he can pick you up something."
	"What's up?" I asked.
	"It's Doug.  He's horny,"
	"Oh," agreed Doug moaning into his stack of pancakes, "I got it bad."
	"Well, it'll be a sacrifice," I said dramatically, "but anything to help a
friend."
	"No offense, guy, but you don't got what I need," Doug said plaintively.
	"And what would that be?"
	"Titties," said Brad.  "Dougy want him some titties."
	"Dougy want titties," Doug echoed.
	"I remember the first time I did a girl," I said.  "I was absolutely
fascinated by her breasts.  Unfortunately, that was pretty much all I was
fascinated by.  I started poking them to see if I could get a wave
interference pattern going.  When I suggested seeing how many pennies I
could stack up on them, she drew the line."
	"You been with a girl?" Doug asked, surprised.
	"Yeah, why?"
	"I thought you were gay."
	I shrugged.  "You're straight, right?"
	"Oh, yeah," he said.
	"But you've been with guys.  What's the diff?"
	Doug actually blushed, and there was suddenly an uncomfortable silence at
the table.  I started looking around at faces wondering what was up, but
Brad continued and the mood returned to lightheartedness.
	"First girl I was ever with was this chick named Tammy.  I'm a junior in
high school, right?  She's a senior, and she gets me over her house and does
the 'you want a massage?' thing.  I was fucking clueless.  The next thing I
know, she's bouncing on my dick like there's no tomorrow.  I came in about
eight seconds."
	"I didn't know you had to move," said Steven.
	"Huh?"
	"I was clueless too.  I was fifteen, and I didn't know you had to move.  I
never read anywhere that you had to move.  I just thought you just put it
in, and...I don't know...that was it."
	The boys laughed.  "'Well, son,'" Steve added, imitating, I assumed, his
father,  "'the daddy puts his penis in the mommy's vagina, and that's where
babies come from.'  So I put it in, you know?  But he never said, 'and then
you pump her like a piston.'  Definitely an important piece to leave out!"
The boys pounded on the table in hysterics.
	"And what about the first time you went down on a girl?" Drew added when
they were able, again, to catch their breath.
	"Now, *there's* an acquired taste!" Brad said.
	"I almost puked the first time," Drew continued.  "I actually spit when I
came up for air. I was totally grossed out."
	"Not me, man," said Doug.  "I loved pussy juice from the start."
	"My first time was great," said Corey.
	"Yeah?" asked Steve, incredulously, "how old were you?"
	"Twelve."
	"It doesn't count if you're alone, Corey," said Steve, to general laughter.
	"I wasn't alone," Corey returned, defensively.  "I was with Arlene Mancuso.
  She had these great big bazongas.  I got her up to my room and I did her."
	Everyone had something to say at once, from Doug's insistence that Corey
still had his cherry to Drew's mere "Bullshit," to Steve's suggestion that
Arlene was a blow-up doll.
	"Wait a minute," I said, trying to quiet them down, "wait a minute. I just
have one question...."  When the uproar subsided and I had the floor, I
turned, solemnly, to Corey, and said, in as appalled a voice as I could
manage, "'Bazongas?!'"
	The table exploded again with laughter and accusation.  Corey insisted that
he had lost his virginity at twelve while Doug, Brad, Steve, Matt and Drew
heaped abuse on him.  Finally, Steven hushed everyone to silence.
	"So you did it at twelve, huh?" he asked.
	"Yeah," declared Corey.
	"Did you find her pooty?"
	Corey looked at him blankly.
	"You know," Steve said, "her pooty.  That hard thing inside her vagina
about half way in on the bottom - the one that rubs against the bottom of
your dick and makes it feel so good?"
	"Yeah," said Corey, dismissively.  "Of course.  I just didn't know what it
was called."
	"That's because I just made it up, dipwad," said Steven.  The boys exploded
again in derision.  The taunts went on for another minute.
	"That's enough," said Dan finally.  "If the boy said he lost his cherry at
twelve, then he lost his cherry at twelve."
	To my shock, the pack backed down.  Dan had said it was enough, so it was.
	On the way over to the gym after eating, Matt ran up next to me and draped
his arm over my shoulders.
	"Heya, amigo."
	"Howdy," I said.  "You're in a good mood this morning, huh?  Pleasant night
last night?"
	"Yeah," he giggled, "pretty pleasant.  Listen, wanted to thank you for
setting me up with Shmu."
	"That asshole!  He wasn't supposed to say anything!"
	Matt stopped walking, pulling me to a halt next to him.
	"He didn't," he said.
	"Then how did you know?"
	"I'm not stupid, you know."
	I looked at his face.  He was earnestness incarnate.  I smiled.
	"No, you're not," I allowed honestly.
	"Just pretty."
	I laughed.  "You're certainly that!"
	He started forward again, pulling me along with him.  Matt tended to bounce
when he walked,
Lifting up a little on the balls of his feet as he moved forward.  It was
like walking next to Tigger.  His arm across my shoulders fit comfortably,
despite the spring in his step.
	"You want to join us tonight?" he asked.
	How had I ever gotten myself into a situation where I might actually answer
no to a question like that?!  Yet I had.  My ass was so stretched out from
the frolic of the night before that I was seriously considering fasting for
a day just as a precaution.  And it was still sore from the pummeling of the
night before that, though the bruises had already faded to the point that it
had ceased to look like sunset over the Pacific.  And then there was the
question of appropriateness and, I supposed, permission.
	"I dunno, Matt," I said.  "Let's play it by ear, okay?"
	"Okay," he said, and we bounced on a few steps.
	"So what's up with Dan?" he asked.
	"What do you mean?"
	"Something's different," he said.  "That thing at breakfast was weird."
	My antennae were up instantly.  Had Matt noticed it too?
	"Weird?"
	"Yeah.  Don't you think?"
	"What did you find weird about it?" I asked.
	"Well, not just that he was defending Corey, which was pretty weird in
itself."
	"What then?"
	"I dunno," he said.  "There was something about him this morning.  It's
just...weird."
	"Like Adam weird?"
	He thought about it for a few steps.  "Yeah," he said.  "Kinda like that."
	He *had* noticed it.
	I spent my morning in the gym in serious work.  While the boys took their
Sunday practice with their usual grain of salt, I sat in the stands writing
furiously in my little green notebook.  Dan *was* different, and the
difference was both clinically noticeable and, more importantly, measurable.
  I pored back over my notes for instances of where I had transcribed Dan's
behaviors from earlier in the summer.  Yes.  They were different.  More
importantly - more tellingly - the boys were reacting to him differently.
It was subtle, but it was there.  I spent an hour and a half in
uninterrupted transcription of non-verbal behavioral moves - both Adam's and
Dan's, now - into my notes.
	By 10:30, I had been hunched over the notebook for so long I had difficulty
straightening up.  This was usually a good sign for me - it meant I had been
productive.  But even though I had a growing corpus of data, I was still
missing the key to how to interpret it.  I had the full five hundred pieces
of the five hundred-piece puzzle, and I knew what the picture on the box
looked like.  What was missing were the edges.  I couldn't seem to construct
the neat, straight-edged rectangle of outer pieces into which the rest of
the puzzle fit.
	My back hurt, so to stretch it out, I decided to take a break and walk over
to the dorm to retrieve the two large sacks of laundry from Dan and Adam's
room.  It had become clear to me that the two of them subscribed to the
straight male Hamper Theory, in which one actually believes that leaving
clothes that you've worn once too often in the hamper for a week somehow
makes them magically clean.  They weren't going to do their own laundry,
assuming, I suppose, that some little fairy would swoop in and do it for
them.  Walking back to the laundry room in the gym with the two overstuffed
bags, I laughed at this thought.  They had gotten their wish.
	The gym laundry had industrial sized machines.  I could do both boys' loads
at once.  I wound my way through the complex.  Down the hall, into the
locker room past the bathroom, where a sound stopped me dead in my tracks.
	From one of the stalls in the bathroom I heard easy, joyous, unmistakably
familiar, muffled hysterical laughter.
	When I got back to the stands after throwing the laundry in the machines,
Shmu was sitting there, still a little red-cheeked.
	"You are a dawg," I said.
	"What?!"
	"I heard you in there."
	"Oh," he said and smiled wickedly.
	"You're fucking unreal."
	"What?!  You say do Matt?  I do Matt!  Shmu follow orders good."
	I laughed.
	"You know, you shouldn't have said that about Doug this morning," Shmu
said.  His seriousness caught me off guard.
	"Huh?"
	"That he does guys."
	"Why not?  He did me a couple of times.  Everyone knows.  It's no big deal.
  I *said* he was straight, didn't I?"
	"It *is* a big deal," Shmu said.
	"What, that I blew him?  No it isn't.  I've blown half the team.  Like I
said.  They all know."
	"No, not that you blew him.  That you talked about it in front of the
team."
	"Why?  They all know."
	"Doesn't matter."
	"What?"
	"Look," Shmu said, taking a moment to figure out how to proceed, "I know
how guys think..."
	"I beg your pardon?"
	"Get over yourself," he said.  "You know how queers think.  I know how guys
think.  Now shut up and learn something."  I pursed my lips and stared at
him somewhat angrily.
	"It doesn't matter who you are, and it doesn't matter what you do.  You can
be gay, you can be a fucking ax murderer.  But when you're with the team,
there's an expectation about how you can and can't behave and what you can
and can't say."
	"The guys joke about doing each other all the time," I said dismissively.
	"You're not getting the point, Mark.  Listen.  They can joke about it.
Even you can joke about it with them.  But...like there's a difference
between joking about a guy having a small dick, and actually telling people
that he really does.  Does that make sense?"
	"Talk more."  It was starting to.
	"Guys can joke about screwing girls and they can joke about being in love
with girls.  But you never hear a guy on a team saying that he's really in
love - I mean, head over heels in love - with a girl.  Not in front of the
team.  They'll tell you that one-on-one, or with a small group of their
friends, but not in front of the whole team.  It's not what you talk about
when the team is together.  It's just a rule."
	"So the fact that Doug and I have talked about it in front of other guys
doesn't matter?"
	"Was it the whole team?"
	I thought back.  "It was Brad and Adam and Dan, I think."
	"They're his friends."
	"And the fact that I did Doug *with* Brad doesn't matter?"
	"Nope," he said, "but I'd love to hear about that."  I smiled and punched
him playfully in the arm.
	"I didn't write the rules," Shmu said.  "I just know 'em.  And rule number
one is on a team, you can *be* gay, you can *do* gay, but you can't *talk*
about doing gay."
	"That's bizarre."
	Shmu shrugged.  "It's the way it is.  Have any of them ever talked
seriously about messing around with you when the whole team was together?"
	"Yeah," I said, "I really think they have."
	"Seriously?  Not jokingly?"
	I thought back.  Hard.
	"Actually," I said, "No, I think they haven't.  Not seriously."
	"There you go, then."
	I looked out over the gym.  Steven, the reader, was spotting for Corey,
whom he'd tormented, on the vault.  He had just ripped the kid a new
asshole, but now was helping him with a move which, if Corey missed and
Steven wasn't there to catch him, could result in serious and irreversible
damage.  Matt and Adam were joking around together on the parallel bars -
the latter having done to me exactly what I had done to the former.  Except
it took me three weeks to figure out that Adam was setting me up with Dan,
and Matt only three days to figure out I was setting him up with Shmu.  Who
was it who had thought these boys universally shallow and stupid when he
first met them?  Oh, right.  That had been me.
	"So what's with all the scribbling?"  Shmu had my notebook open in his lap.
	"Research."
	"Right," he said, scoffing.  "What research?  How to get fucked by an
entire team?"
	"I have *not* been fucked by the entire team," I said indignantly, grabbing
the notebook from him.  Shmu raised his eyebrows at me.  "I have only been
fucked by *half* the team. And honey," I added, doing my best impersonation
of Tallulah Bankhead, "I was fabulous."  He laughed.
	Funny how I just naturally assumed the role of a bottom when I was with
him.  I had always fancied myself as entirely versatile, matching my sexual
practices to the partner I had been with.  With Alex I had always topped.
With John it had been 60-40, usually depending on his mood.  But with Shmu I
had only bottomed and when around him, I just naturally fell into the
excesses of Bottom Camp.
	"I told you about this," I said, returning to seriousness.  "It's for my
diss.  I'm studying power dynamics among men."
	"You didn't need to go all the way to the mountains for that," he said,
grabbing my crotch playfully.  "You got the Shmuster right in your own back
yard."
	I removed his hand from my crotch as if I found its presence there highly
insulting.  "I've had the Shmuster in my backyard," I said, haughtily.
"Been there, been done by that.  Yawn, yawn."
	He laughed.  "I don't remember any yawning.  Yelling?  Yes.  Yawning?  No."
	"If we were two different people," I said, "we'd be perfect for each
other."
	"Yeah," he said somewhat wistfully.  I all but saw his hair wave in the
breeze as the absurdity of my statement flew over his head.
	Would Shmu have been a good model for my research?  No.  He wasn't an
alpha.  He was truly charismatic, but not an alpha.  He was a great top to
be sure, but not an alpha.  What was the difference, I wondered, between a
Dan or an Adam and him?  I reacted to the three of them in similar ways -
ways that I never reacted to other men.  How curious that was.  What did it
mean?
	Shmu was talking, I realized.  He was airing his suspicions that the
majority of the team was really gay.  Shmu thought everyone was gay.  No,
that wasn't true.  Shmu thought everyone he thought was hot was gay.  This
was the first step in his adding them to his list of conquests.  The bitch
of it was that regardless of whether they were or weren't, he could usually
manage to hook up with them.  It was a gift.  I had never known how he did
it.
	"I can tell you, though," he was saying when I tuned into his words, "my
gaydar is going off big time."
	"Maybe you should have your pinger adjusted," I said.
	"That's what I'm *trying* to do!" he returned, smiling.
	"How does your gaydar work, anyway?  I mean, you pick up on guys I never
would, and I thought mine was pretty well developed."
	I didn't expect an intelligent response.  Real tops were never articulate
enough to be able to describe things.  It made little difference, though.
Self-awareness and the ability to articulate were not why they were put on
the earth.
	"You know how to do it," he said.  "Just watch who they're watching."
	In one, sudden, searing flash it came to me.  He kept talking but I was
instantly gone, blown completely out of the universe by my realization.
	"Jesus, Mark, are you okay?"
	"Huh?"
	"You just turned totally white."
	"I fucking know how they do it," I said in disbelief.
	"What the fuck are you talking about, man?"
	"Alphas," I whispered, my throat suddenly bone dry.  "I know how to break
the code.  I know what to look for."