Date: Sat, 6 May 2006 09:59:00 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: The Half-life of Loss

Harold's body was wracked by a fit of coughing and he struggled for
breath between coughs. His head ached with fever pain, and his eyes
were glassy with illness. He was soaking wet and shivering.

Ben was at his bedside, one hand on his drenched forehead and the
other pressed against his back.

When Harry was calm enough, he let go of him.

He took the pair of dry pajamas and some fresh underwear from on top
of the dresser and put them on the table beside the bed.

Come on, kid. We gotta change you. You're soaked through. Could get
sick, you know.

He lifted the quilt and helped Harry sit up. He unbuttoned the tops,
pulled the snaps open at the waist and got Harry out of his pajamas.
His once well-knit and muscled torso was wasted.

Underwear, too.

He folded him naked inside a big fluffy towel and patted him dry,
folded him quickly but meaningfully in his arms, too. Then he helped
him into new socks, underwear, and flannel pajamas. Then he gently
toweled his head and combed his hair.

Now sit in the chair and don't move while I change the bedding, Ben
said. I don't know what I ever saw in you.

Harry was too weak to be irritated. Ben would always be Ben, cheap
jokes and all. He sat quietly; he did as he was told. Anyhow, he knew
why Ben was doing it and liked him all the more for that.

It felt wonderful to be propped against a fluffed up pillow in a dry
bed, in dry pajamas, half his face covered by a dry, fresh-smelling
quilt cover.

When Lorenzo came home, they brought him a tray with soup and soft,
dark bread and then a bowl of steamed organic vegetables and brown
rice.  He tried, but he could hardly eat any of it.

You guys have really been kind, he said to them. But I can't eat it.

Lorenzo kissed him on the forehead.

You're gonna get better. Don't get maudlin

But he didn't get better. In fact he died.

2

When Ben and Lorenzo had finally finished with the bureaucracy of
death, they collapsed under the weight of grief and spent many days
unable to concentrate on anything and broke down crying sometimes
alone and sometimes in each other's arms.

Bill Anders at the ad agency told Lorenzo he oughtn't feel obliged to
keep regular hours until he felt he could again.  But Lorenzo did not
believe in being self-indulgent, found it hard to go against the
discipline he prided himself on. So he thanked him and said he would
try to follow as much as he could his regular schedule.

Anders knew him, came round the desk and took him by the shoulders,
looked him in the eyes. Bill Anders knew he had power when he needed
it. Now he felt impelled by something in Lorenzo - no, by something in
himself regarding Lorenzo.

This is too important to tough it out, he said.  You do what I tell you.

His words had the power he unadmittedly wanted them to have. The
tension flashed out of Lorenzo and he collapsed into Anders' arms.

It would be wrong to have sexual feelings at a time like this, gross,
exploitative, blasphemous.

Nevertheless, Anders did and he was electrified by a high voltage jolt
of desire that sent pulses rushing through him. He kissed Lorenzo on
the cheek. Lorenzo had already sensed the force of his body, and their
magnetic fields directed them. Lorenzo answered his kiss with a more
daring kiss until they were tearing at each other with desperate
kisses proclaiming by their appropriation of each other that life
would not resign its appetite.

They looked at each other afterwards with the happy amazement that
follows deep understanding.

It wasn't fair to Ben, and best would be not to mention it, Lorenzo
suggested; Anders agreed.

They had touched each other. They were needy. They wanted each other.

Ben sensed something immediately the way a musician knows when a note
is going sharp or flat.

3

My best friend dies, my lover leaves me, my position at the school is
being defunded because of the economy. I'm overwhelmed. And Lorenzo
tells me life is a force that insists on living.

And what do you want me to do?

Put some quiet in my mind.

You want me to soothe you?

Try to, yes.

Ben, look at me.

Yes?

Do you think I have no feelings?

What are you talking about?

What do you think?

I don't know. What are you getting at?

If I let my tender feelings for you...

You're my friend, aren't you?

It won't stop there with me. I can't cut myself in two.

Where are you going with this?

Nowhere. I won't do it.

He was unable to say anything, but he knew what she was talking about.

He shrugged. Ok, he said.

He left soon after. It was rainy. He sat on the cross-town bus. What
in the world was he going to do? Everything was equally vacant.

4

He was diverted for a few minutes by the television. He had heard a
little about Todd Bishop. Despite the pugnacious jibes of the right
wing ideologue who was trying to undermine him, what he was saying now
about getting rid of the anti-marijuana laws made sense.

But all that was somewhere else, and here he was where he'd hoped he'd
never have to be again -- nowhere!

5

He got a job as an insurance claims adjuster. It was ironic. He
couldn't get over it. Fate was a cynical bitch. He looked at wrecks,
then wrote reports describing them and estimated how much they were
worth.

It was deadly work and he needed the money.

At night he was tired. His brain was turned off and he became
incapable of thought.

He walked over to Crazy Benny's one Friday night and tried to recharge
himself with a brandy.

Chet introduced himself and wondered if he really liked that stuff and
Ben confessed he didn't but that his heart had grown cold and one fire
to warm it was as good as another and if he didn't like the taste,
anyway, he wouldn't miss it then when he didn't have it.

Chet just looked at him.

Even if there were no other reason than that to shut you up.

What?

But instead of answering he silenced Ben's lips with kisses and pushed
his tongue into his mouth as if it were his own domain.

Ben stiffened in response and pressed his tongue against Chet's.

Chet played with him and then withdrew his mouth.  I'll buy you
another brandy. It won't burn as much. I promise. He winked.

6

Ben was face down on the bed, naked, a leather cuff around each wrist
and ankle, and from each cuff stretched a chain to one of the four bed
posts.  A ball-gag in his mouth allowed him to breathe and make
sounds, but not to articulate words. Chet was twisting his cock inside
him as he teased his back gently with a short black whip.

You are proud to be my steed, my great stallion. You tremble when your
master rides you.

Ben threw his head back proudly like a stallion and whinnied.

His whole body shook and his bottom started going round at just the
same pace as his rider's swiveling cock circling inside him and he
bucked and bounded and each time met with his rider's confident
response and each time found himself more firmly ridden, more deeply
ploughed. Fingers dug into his nipples, and his master ripped the
ball-gag from his mouth and he shrieked as he got fucked, his ass
unable to grind his master's cock hard enough.

Thank you master, o, thank you master, thank you.

Chet whipped his muscled shoulders and pressing deeper inside him
planted his semen in Ben's bowels.

I own you now, he said, almost growling.

But in the morning Ben did not act as if he'd understood that. So Chet
was decidedly cold and explained that Ben would have to go since he
was busy the rest of the day.

When Ben asked if they might exchange numbers, Chet said, I don't think so.

Ben froze in the middle of asking if something was wrong as he felt
Chet's absence and his own confusion. He felt like a runner on air
between two mountain ledges in a cartoon, who is just looking down and
seeing that there is no ground beneath him.

He picked his leather jacket up, flung it over his shoulders.

Ciao, he tried to be friendly. Thanks for the ride.

Don't mention it.

7

Demons had entered his mind and were tomenting his consciousness with
a death-dance he couldn't get them to stop. It wasn't only a daytime
phenomenon. He had lost the ability to fall asleep.

Hypnosis, he thought. Hypnosis. The idea of being hypnotized became an
obsession. He brought up the subject whenever he could to see what
kind of response he might get.

So it wasn't surprising that he was standing beside a wrecked Toyota
on an oil stained dirt floor in the back lot of a gas station in
Astoria talking to a cute, tough, well-built, blond guy in garage
coveralls who'd been inspecting the car -- about hypnosis.

First they talked business. Clay needed the wreck for Urban Melodrama,
an installation a group of landscape artists was putting up on a
vacant lot off Houston and the Bowery.

The car was beyond salvation but it had some scrap value and Ben had
to determine what Clay could get it for.

As people do when they bargain, they began talking about other things.

One thing led to another or at least Ben made it. They went from the
driver of the other car's having fallen asleep at the wheel to how the
road can hypnotize you to have you ever been hypnotized?

But it was surprising that Clay said he had been and that he'd studied
it and had practiced on himself and friends.

No? Ben said, up to his ears in interest.

Yeah, Clay countered. As an artist, he said, who wanted to hold
people's attention with his work, and who wanted to get beneath their
conscious layers of perception, the knowledge of hypnosis was very
useful.

Could you hypnotize me?

Do you want to be? Clay said.

They finished negotiating the car. Clay got off easy. Just had to pay
for the towing to lower Manhattan.

Clay invited Ben to come over to his loft the following day, any time
after seven. They'd try it.

Tit for tat.

8

Clay had the top floor in an old industrial building that had stood
vacant for over a decade and then found new life when Soho started to
pop.

Ben rang the downstairs bell at eight and Clay buzzed him in and was
waiting by the elevator, a big open lumbering freight cage of wire
mesh.

He was wearing a pair of leather pants and no shirt. Ben felt weak
looking at him.

Clay led him through a twisting passage to a steel door. Beyond that
was another, and then a small vestibule opened into a grand space made
of several large rooms to the left and then a great open room with
windows on three sides that looked out over the city.

They smoked a joint and looked at the New York night skyline.

Get comfortable, Clay said.  Sit in this chair, and look at me. Watch
the pendant I'm holding. There. Do you see it begin to swing. Follow
the swing of the pendant as if your eye-strings were tied to it.

As Ben's eyes grew heavy, the focus of their attention shifted from
the swinging pendulum to the inescapable depths of Clay's eyes. Their
power overwhelmed him.  He felt a large space being carved out inside
him. Inside that hollow he felt a craving need for Clay. He wanted to
worship him.

He heard the sound of water rushing, and saw the shimmering surface of
a rushing brook, and felt its frosty waters washing over his naked
body until he was quite transformed.  Something he did not like about
himself, some filthy appendage that was not him but had come to define
or characterize him had been scrubbed away.  He was lying bronzed in
the blazing sun on a ledge of red rock on the edge of a broad-backed
lake.  He felt the bundles of his muscles stretched to their fullest
and the sleek garment of his flesh tightly covering them. Where his
mind had been now there was only a golden radiance and an inescapably
beautiful music that was always just beyond hearing.

9

When he woke up Clay was straddling him and all he could see was the
tunnel of his eyes. Clay had hold of his stiff cock and was pressing
it to his own. He lowered his head and kissed him on the mouth,
sucking his breath out of him.

10

Ben didn't want to see Lorenzo but Lorenzo spotted him on Mercer
Street before he could turn the corner.

What have you done to yourself? Lorenzo asked almost in awe.

What do you mean?

You look terrific.

Thanks, Ben said bitterly.

Hey don't be mad.

I gotta run.

Don't you have time for a coffee? I never see you anymore.

I gotta run, Ben said, and left Lorenzo standing there watching his
butt as he walked away from him.

 Ben wandered without direction for a while with a troubled mind,
unable to stop it from whirring, and unable to hold on to any thought.
He felt a crack, a fissure running through him, and through that
crack, he felt his spirit leaking away.

He punched Clay's number on his cell and Clay picked up.

Hey, I'm not sure why I called.  I was just...

Come over.

What?

Come over now.  Where are you?

On Wooster Street, near where the old firehouse used to be.

You're not far. Come over.  He hung up.

11

Clay had a cup of green tea waiting and told Ben to drink it, and then
said very quietly, I am here, and Ben lowered the cup onto its saucer,
his hand dropped into his lap and his head fell forward onto his
chest.

Breathe, deeply, Clay instructed. Let the in-breaths inflate you. Open
your eyes, strip down to your jock, stand up, straight, tall, proud. I
want to see your nipples stiff and pointy.

Take off your shirt.

Pose.

Stay like that.

12

Ben began to understand what Clay wanted from him, and the more he
did, the more he wanted to do what Clay wanted. He wanted to please
him.

Ben stopped assessing wrecks. He gave up his room in Park Slope. He
moved into the loft.

He became Clay's secretary, assistant, cook, body servant, and slut.

He wore black eye-liner and short black leather shorts with side
slits, and boots up to his knees. He shaved his chest and wore a black
leather collar and a triple-banded silver ring on his left middle
finger.

He found a chromium cock ring while going through Clay's jewelry box
once and asked if he might wear it.

Take your shorts off, Clay said, and the briefs.

Clay eased one testicle from inside Ben's naked scrotum through the
circle of the cock ring and then helped the one behind it through too.
No hard-on, he said sharply and licked Ben's cock so it was slippery
enough to worm through into the circle. He had to be quick because it
was beginning to stiffen, anyhow. Once the ring was secured at its
base, a tight cap around cock and balls, the cock stood hard as steel
and sharp as a blade.

Clay pushed him onto the bed so that he lay on his back, then cuffed
his hands together behind his head. Beginning at his arm pits he
scratched his nails across Ben's chest, teasing his nipples with
increasing pain, but it kept dissolving into ecstasy.

He took the stiff and starving cock into his mouth and tongued its
slot and took it all the way to the back of his throat. It felt like
he had enclosed it in the depths of himself and he kept sucking it
with his throat as his tongue stroked it.

13

Clay never did that again, and Ben never forgot it and always longed
for it, hoped for it, held himself back from begging for it for fear
of displeasing Clay.

But Ben did a lot of cock sucking himself after that.  Clay liked to
pick a stud up on the street and shoot him getting sucked.

GETTING SUCKED premiered at a loft on Prince Street. J. Hoberman from
The Voice jumped up and down about it and then David Denby wrote a
defense of it in The New Yorker and then Elvis Mitchel turned it into
a gold mine in The Sunday Times, where Susan Sontag said it was the
first thing she'd seen since Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" that had
anything to contribute to the archeology of sex.


[When you write to me, please type the story name in the subject
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