"BOB"
A Han Solo Story

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It was my first day on campus. I'd checked into my dorm and met my three
roommates, and was now getting in one of the registration lines which
ended outside the library in the bright summer sunshine of June. I
hadn't yet seen anyone I knew, and everything had the extra charge of
adventure.  I knew it was going to be a good semester.

Once in line, I began to pay closer attention to the people around me.
I couldn't miss the most impressive, the obviously upperclass jock ahead
of me. He had his back to me, and I relished what I saw.  If this was a
sample, this campus life was gonna be alright!  I'm 5'9", and his shirt
collar was at my forehead level.  I was eyeballing one of the most
perfect backs I had ever seen, and up close! He wore a faded olive polo
shirt, and his shoulders were so wide they seemed to block out the
entire view. His thick hair was almost pure black and in a short cut,
and when I looked up at his neck muscles, their definition was obvious.
These big shoulders tapered down an incredibly long back to a waist no
larger than 32". The proportions were perfect! This guy was like a
clothed David standing in front of me. He wore levis new enough to be
dark, but old enough to be soft and to drape over a narrow, jutting butt
I could easily have rubbed my belt buckle against, and the creases in
the material kept shifting as he moved his weight from one foot to the
other.  His legs!  His legs extended about a mile down from his butt and
were proportioned perfectly so that his thighs and calfs just filled the
material out to fullness but didn't spoil the lean effect of his back by
being too short or chunky.  I was lost in this assessment when he turned
to me, smiled and put out a ham of a hand.

"My name's Bob" he said.  "From Binghamton, N.Y. and it's my first day
here.  You too?" He smiled the most charming Irish smile imaginable...
with dimples in his muscled cheeks!  Long lashes and green eyes didn't
soften the impression this guy made.  If I were going to imagine the
ultimate college quarterback, Bob would be the perfect model.  He looked
like the "draw me" guy in the artists school ads; he looked like
Superman ought to have looked.  He looked great!  You've gotta
understand, I had just had my first male sex earlier that summer,
letting a pretty effeminate guy my age suck me off a couple of times in
the bathroom of the lunch counter his mom ran near our house.  I'd
fantasized for years, of course, and had had the usual high school
passions, all unrequited.  I'm your basic guy-next-door type, and at
that point hadn't learned just how good looking I could be with a little
attention.  And I hadn't played sports at all, holding the jocks in a
mixture of scorn and lustful admiration.  Yet here I was getting a
friendly overture from the archetypal jock, up-close and larger than
life.  Little Abner with grace and a twinkle in his eye.  Brothers, I
was in love!

We began to chat--I have no idea about what, and probably didn't then!
It was apparent we were becoming friendly and he was taking an interest
in what I had to say.  The long-haired girl ahead of him joined the
conversation and it was obvious that she was feeling exactly the
emotions I was.  This guy showed her the same charm.  Hell, he had charm
enough for the whole crowd, and I saw others looking at us with a little
envy.  The sunlight turned to honey and the clocks stood still.

Eventually, we split up in the building and went to our respective major
advisers.  The rest of the day passed in book-buying and a hundred other
chores, and I eventually let Bob slip out of my mind.

The days passed, and I saw Bob around pretty often, since he was rooming
on my floor, but I was involved in doing things with my roommates and my
friends, even working on a relationship with a girl who seemed very
interested.

One Sunday night towards the end of the term however--and this is the
part I really want you to understand if you can, even though I'm not
sure that I understand it myself--I was saying one Sunday night I was in
my room with my roommates when there was a loud knocking at the door.
One of the others went and opened it, and from the other room in the
suite I could hear a loud noise as someone half stumbled and half fell
into our study room. "Is Han here?  I wanna talk to Han!"  I went out,
and there was my olympian, leaning against my roommate and swaying,
stone drunk. "Hi, Han!" he half bellowed. From what I could figure
out, he'd been on one helluva a tear that night.  I knew the noise would
bring the resident assistant, and I knew that drinking and raising hell
could get Bob in a lot of trouble.  The other guys were in complete
consternation.  I decided the best thing was to get Bob to his room and
calm him down.  Then I'd take it from there.

He seemed to think that was worth doing (looking back with a lot more
experience with inebriated Hibernians behind me, I'm sure he would have
thought just about anything was worth doing! This guy was roaring
drunk!)  I looped his arm around my neck and, shushing and cussing at
him to shut up, got him to his door.  After a confused search of several
pockets, he produced his key, which he couldn't quite get to the
keyhole.  I did, however, and soon had him in his room with the door
closed.  He roomed alone and slept on the bottom bunk: the other one
wasn't made.  He was leaning against the door, eyes closed and head
back, and I was reaching to turn on his desk lamp while trying to prop
him up.  Gravity won that struggle, however, and--hissing "Please! No
goddam lights!" he slipped to the floor on his back and parallel with
his bed.  There I was, warm white moonlight streaming into the dark room
like a spotlight, and the perfect man passed out--or passing--at my

If you had just taken the first uncertain steps towards coming out, if
you really liked this guy and craved his respect and friendship, if you
knew he could beat the shit out of you with his hands tied but had come
seeking you out in his raving drunkenness, if you were frozen in time in
that room, my brothers, what would be going through your mind just then?
All those thoughts and a thousand others, I assure you, went through my
own mind.  Even now, I remember every detail of those moments, and the
depth of my own confusion at being torn between the defenses and
rationalizations I had raised against what I felt and the amazing things
racing through my mind that I could do with and to him, and no one would
ever know. Time stood still in the moonlight and peered in the window,
waiting to see what my next action would be.

Finally I decided.  "Bob, can you hear me? I'm gonna try to get you on
your bed.  You can't just lie there on the hard linoleum, man! C'mon,
help me.  Let's get you up there!"  I'd made up my mind to make my
friend comfortable, then to walk away from everything else the darkness
held of deliciousness, discovery, and delight.

"I can't..." he whispered--so low I wasn't sure I hadn't made it up,
"get me outta these clothes first."

Had I really heard it? I wasn't sure; but I didn't think twice about
it, and though unpracticed, I was ready for the moment to happen.  I
slid off the shoes he was wearing, and I pulled off his white gym socks,
one at a time.  His large feet were damp, and smelled of soap and damp
canvas.  Dark hairs curled on the top of his feet and his toes, hair
that extended up the legs of his levis.  I wasn't ready for the belt
yet, so one-by-one I opened the buttons on his shirt and parted it. He
must have been tan, but in that light his skin glowed white.  There were
a few curly hairs around each nipple, and a dusting of black hair on his
stomach, but other than that, he looked like marble. I tugged the
shirttails out of his jeans and managed one arm at a time to get it off
of him. A shadow met his skin at the top of his trousers, and it looked
like the entrance to the tunnel of love: a promise of mystery and
delight.  "Bob? You wanna sleep in your trousers?" No response. Snores.
Well, I sure as hell didn't want him to sleep in his trousers! I
unbuckled his belt, then lowered the zipper and parted his fly. The
whiteness of his skin seemed tan compared to the gleaming white
briefs he was wearing.  Soft, worn.  I moved to his feet and tugged
at his cuffs, lifting his legs higher and higher yet to pull off his
jeans (they caught on the fullness of his majestic rump and I had
to lift him at the waist and push them from that end).  Finally, I
had them in my hands.  They were warm from his body and the
material felt in my hand like fleece must feel. Even then, my brothers,
Han appreciated a view of a guy in his underwear, and here was my secret
fantasy, lying at my feet, completely out of consciousness, and
completely open to my inspection and every act.

The pouch of his briefs had no exaggerated swelling, but the soft
material was clearly draped over a respectable set of equipment, quite
obviously flaccid and slack, caught in candid natural forma, and yet
fascinating. If I had been a Renaissance painter, I would probably have
had to cover that part of him with a bunch of purple grapes, ripe,
round, and so ready to burst that the delicious juices within actually
seeped through and lubricated the skin.  I took a long, head-to-toe
look at this seeming marble sculpture, monumental, powerful, and fully
open and vulnerable.  Then I knelt over him and took another, closer
inspection.  I gripped the waistband of his shorts and began to slip
them down. Did I ask "Nude, Bob?" and did he reply "nude"? I honestly
can't remember, but his briefs were soon over his legs and off, warmer
in my hand than his jeans.  I held them below my nose and inhaled.  Damp
scents of soaped male crotch, musky and starchy at the same time.  A
hint of beerpiss.  Warm in my hands, warmer even than his trousers.  I
threw them on his chair, and they were the whitest thing in the room.

But the second whitest lay spread out below me, fully exposed.  Come in
close, my brothers, and share with me the fascination I felt looking
with complete impunity at my first fully naked beautiful male partner.
His chest rose and fell regularly but silently.  His muscles, though
slack, were still defined under the pale glowing skin. A pulse throbbed
at his neck and in a vein showing blue across his stomach. His penis lay
to one side on a thick bed of the darkest, densest pubes I have seen.
I remember clearly how that cock looked: stark white in contrast to the
hairs around it, with a definite redness in the skin above his darker
circumcision line, and a glans almost lavender in the silver light.  It
would fit comfortably across my palm if I grasped it.  His ballsac hung
down away from it, resting as a grey pouch in the darker shadow at
the juncture of his spread legs.  The skin draped loosely, and in the
bottom of the bag, two chestnuts pushed the covering out in rounded,
shadowed shapes.  A dusting of hair on his bag made it seem darker than
his shaft.  How long did I stand there?  I stand there still, my
brothers, and often. More often these days when I enjoy my pleasures
mostly alone, and this vision plays in the theater of my closed eyes.
I stand there forever. You are welcome to stand with me.  A scene like
this in other times would have been credited to the passing of some god
who had laid down his favored mortal for a much-needed rest.  Bob's
raving was all fled, and blessings and calm had taken over.  How long
would you have stood there?  Me too. Every urging my mouth has had for
man's flesh has been secondary to the yearning I felt; every hand job I
have ever given is only a shadow of the one my hands performed in my
mind. I knew I must act-- everything in me demanded it and the moonlight
urged me to it--and I honestly did not know what that act would be.

But act I did.  Lean down with me, my fellow worshippers of the power of
men's form , and lift him with me.  Lift him! His lightness is
incredible! This masculine beauty is so much of the ideal that the
real weight of him has almost fallen away.  I don't know how I lifted
him--perhaps you truly were there, perhaps all gay men were there with
me at this moment I crossed the line to the irreversible acceptance of
who I am and what I want--but somehow I had him in my arms, one under
his back and one under his knees. His closer arm drops loosely. Smell
with me the scent that escapes from his armpit, where the large dark
tuft gives off its fragrant moistness. Savor with me the proximity of
his genitals, our first up-close whiff of the irresistible perfume of
our restless nights and days of dreams and hunting.  Feel the hot life
pulsing through him flesh: no cold stone Pieta this, but a pagan
burden, maybe even something other than gods' concern but completely the
reveling abandonment to full union with nature's most priceless matter:
living, adored flesh and kind.

Lean in around me, oh my brothers, and pay attention closest now,
because here is the heart of the mystery and the message that yet comes
rushing up on me to catch me unawares and stir me deeply down within to
the very roots of my groin. I would whisper this, because I can only
tell it in awe: I laid my companion gently on his bed.  I stood up.  I
covered him and backed away.

I returned to my room and have come forward in my life to the very hour
I tell you this. And of all the hours in which forces powerful and
male alone have taken me over and held me enthralled--and I have had
the gift of many--this was the first, and yes this was the finest.

                             *  *  *

Of course I saw Bob again... he came to apologize the next day "for
being an obnoxious shit."  The summer semester soon ended and in the
fall we were dormed in different parts of the large campus and saw each
other much less often. I saw the long-haired girl much more frequently
than I saw Bob that year, and then and always until I graduated she
would say "Have you seen Bob?  Tell him to call me." When I did see him,
we'd chat or have a quick beer, but we never again were alone in the
universe.

I saw him just before he flunked out.  He was going into the Marines, he
said, going to grow up a little, get his G.I. Bill, then come back and
do it right.  Then nothing. No word, no one to ask concerning him. A war
happened, fierce and full of danger, and my mind and heart frequently
went into that heat and sought among the dead for that wonderful load I
had held, but I never found it, either broken or bloodied. When I was in
my last year of graduate work, celebrating some friend's birthday in a
bar, I heard a voice in the booth behind me. I turned and saw that same
muscled neck, that same head of black Irish hair. "Bob?"

He turned. A strange Bob looked at me through eyes much clouded with
beer and burned with horrors he could never share. "Hey," he said,
recognition lighting his face and parting some of the cloud but
not all, "how the hell are ya!" and we talked briefly, exchanged
addresses and phone numbers, and were drawn back to our own booths'
worlds.  I never called, and neither did he.  He sent me a card at
Christmas and I did to him.  I'd see him on the street, always at night,
always staggering, usually with his arm around another young man who'd
grown old and thrown something central of his self into the same distant
cauldron.  I saw him one more time, again over a booth partition.  He
looked at me in mid conversation, and life and heat and that same first
twinkle I had seen returned to his eyes. "We've got to go drinking
together some time" he said with an odd earnestness.  "I'd like that" I
replied, sending with the words as best I could the urgency of just
how well I'd like that.  "I'd like that too," he said simply, and the
same urgency was returned to me, doubled.

The school year ended shortly after.  I never saw Bob again.  I have had
lovers, I have rutted in darkness and in light with men of beauty,
strength and grace.  I have opened many doors in the house that is me.
I have never had again what I had then.

                      * * *