Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 23:03:27 EDT
From: Tony Malone <B.Ricchone@verizon.net>
Subject: The Golden Ass

I fell in love with Tim the minute he walked through the door on
the first day of Rush Week. As secretary of the recruitment
committee I knew the names of all the rushees who were due that
afternoon. To some of those names I had associated mental images
based on hometown, high school attended and in some cases on
sentences I remembered from letters of recommendation.  Tim had gone
from Grosse Pointe to a fancy prep school where he had rowed on the
crew that won a league championship. That much I knew. So he was big
and would be probably be well dressed. Tim was also a direct legacy.
His father had been a member of our chapter. He would have to be very
obnoxious for us not to give him a bid, but one of his father's
classmates had written us anyway. He said he had known Tim since Tim
was a baby. The word from his letter that stuck in my mind was
"deep," a word did not help much with my mental picture. Then a
tall fellow stood at the door, rocking back and forth slightly, and
said "Hello. I'm Tim Anderson. I hope I haven't kept you waiting."
As I greeted him my mind was furiously recomputing his image. He was
big, with very wide, sloping shoulders, long arms and the posture of
a powerful athlete. His handshake was warm, dry and confident. He was
not particularly well dressed; in fact, a little later, I said "I'll
have to lend you a tie." He wasn't wearing one and they were de
rigueur at dinner. He was also not particularly good-looking.  He
had short-cropped, dark hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over
his nose. The nose was short with a slight crook, as if it had been
broken and not completely correctly set. His wide smile showed large
and irregular teeth. His eyes were yellow, a very unusual and not
very lovely color. But one look from those eyes and I understood
what the letter-writer had meant. They conveyed a deep, but calm and
friendly intelligence. And along with it a shyness and vulnerability
that made me want to reach out and hug him, right there, still on
the doorstep in the first minute of his first day in my life.

I lived over in the X-wing, not too far from the front door. I asked
him to wait a moment while I went to get a tie. I sped to my room
and came back with my favorite, and watched with interest and
pleasure as he awkwardly but competently knotted it under his
collar. Then the two of us walked up the stairs to the main floor. I
introduced him to the rest of the recruitment committee and went off
to get him a drink. Part of the excitement of Rush Week is that you
are not just choosing compatible people to live in the house, but
you are choosing people who have a good chance of becoming your
friends for the rest of your life. Just those few minutes of contact
with Tim had convinced me that I wanted him as a friend. He was
certain to be invited to join. If he accepted (and why not, it was
his father's fraternity) it meant that he and I would be living in
the same house for the next two years, until I graduated, plenty of
time to build a solid and lasting friendship.

Our custom was that all the Freshman we had bid were invited to a
picnic down at Point Martha, where one of the alumni had a beach
house he let us use. The upperclassmen often brought dates. Besides
giving us a chance to impress on the Freshmen what good sports we
were, what good times we had and what terrific girls we knew (the
implication being that if they signed up they would get girls just
as nice as these) it got them away from the campus and out of the
reach of competing fraternities. Tim had been bid and came along. I
brought Suzie Parkinson, a very smart, very sweet and very pretty
girl I was seeing. I had told her how much I wanted Tim to join, so
she sat next to him on the way down and did her best to make him feel
comfortable and welcome.

When we got to the house we all changed into bathing suits and ran
out on the beach and into the water. After a while, Tim and one of
the upperclassmen were standing in the surf, tossing a football
and having a great time. I was sitting on the sand next to Suzie,
idly watching their game. It suddenly occurred to me that Tim had a
beautiful behind.  I had never before thought of a man's behind as a
thing to notice, let alone to admire. Your behind was what you sat
on. Women's behinds, of course, were something different. Their
roundness was part of the "curves" that made a woman desirable. But
Tim's behind  was beautiful in a different way. It was solid, for one
thing. His wet nylon trunks stuck close enough to his skin so you
could see the muscles inside flexing as he threw the ball or ran for
the pass. It was big, too, and stuck out just like the behind on a
major-league pitcher. Once I had noticed it I couldn't take my eyes
off it. I realized that I wanted to touch it, to grab those powerful
globes with my bare hands and ... and what? This was a kind of
thought I had had once or twice before, and I could tell from the tensing in
my peter that it was no idle thought, and that it was connected to
something deep inside me. Was I a queer? Maybe this was why my
emotional life had been so lousy. I had a very nice body and a kind
of cheap good looks, the kind that make it easy to get dates. But to
go from a few dates, even a few heavy dates, to something more
permament with a woman was beyond me. My relationships always
disintegrated in a matter of weeks. I like sex with females as much
as the next guy, I believe. There is nothing like kneeling between
the legs of a woman who's ready for you, with a nice erection that
you know she's going to like, reaching forward and kissing her
breasts while you slip it into her. There is nothing like the feeling
of your pubic hair grinding against hers as you work your penis
around inside her. There is nothing like feeling the fit, knowing
that "man is for the woman made" and that at the very same moment
several million couples are doing just what you two are doing,
rocking together in "the rythm that shakes the world." The problem
is what you say during and after the act, when a man and a woman are
supposed to open up to each other in the intimacy that comes with
sex. I could never think of anything, and I guess my girfriends
eventually would figure out that there was nothing there. That
afternoon, watching Tim cavorting in the surf, I thought that things
could be different with a man, and that in that way I probably was a
queer.

This realization did not change my social life drastically. Of
course not. To be a homosexual, a "pansy" as we called it, was
socially completely beyond the pale. I remember, after the picnic,
kissing Suzie good-night absent-mindedly but I still dated regularly
and enjoyed it. It did make a huge difference in my relation with
Tim. When I first met him I was all set for the start of a beautiful
friendship. But now I knew that I really wanted more from him than
friendship, and certainly much more than the bonds of brotherhood
would allow. In our fraternity we sang about brothers guiding "each
other's footsteps" and we took it seriously. We upperclassmen felt a
sacred moral duty to educate and nurture our younger brothers.
Cultivating a friendship with Tim while secretly coveting his body
would be more hypocritical than I could bear. And telling him how
much I wanted him, with the possible (and after all desired) effect
of making my wishes come true, would be a betrayal of all the ideals
of brotherhood that I believed in.

The only solution was for Tim to want me. If, unlikely as it was,
he were to take the initiative, if he were to attempt to seduce me,
then I could have him with no betrayal. But how could this come
about?  I am pretty good-looking, as I've mentioned before; the
best I could think of was to be around Tim a lot, so he would have
to notice me, and then maybe if he had any inclination in the
homosexual direction he would make a move. There was no evidence for
such an inclination except that he did not ask girls out unless
he absolutely had to have a date for some fraternity function.
But he was shy, most likely a virgin, and probably just waiting to
hit his stride. My plan was pretty far-fetched, I admit, but it was
the best I could think of.  So I hung around where he would be. I
started playing bridge because he played. That winter I went up to
the mountains almost every weekend because he loved to ski. I never
tried to talk to him one-on-one or to "get to know him;" that would
have been against my rules. I was just always there. I made sure he
got to see me ski (I grew up in Garmisch and I had raced as a
teen-ager) but I never rode up in the chairlift with him. The scheme
was bound to fail and it did. He never made the slightest gesture
in my direction. Instead my constantly being around him worked on
me. I was in a constant state of painful erotic awareness, and I
became more and more obsessed with Tim.  His soft and intelligent
look, his shy smile, his vulnerable attitude were like forbidden
fruit, all around me but just out of reach. That beautiful behind,
that praechtiges Po, seemed to be everywhere except where I
wanted it to be, cradled in my arms.

The next year was my last. My time was running out. I decided to be a
little more aggressive. Maybe if I showed him the merchandise he
would be tempted. In the Spring our shower was out of order so we
had to use the one down on Tim's floor. My plan was for him to see me
naked, but it had to be as if by accident. Once I had a glimmer of
hope: he was sitting on the stairs as I went back up to my room with
only a towel around me; but he looked away as I passed and it turned
out he was waiting to use the telephone. I finally had my chance. I
was going past his door after a shower when he called out: "Stef,
can you give me a hand with this problem?" He had been having some
trouble with a math course I had taken two years before. I
rearranged my towel so that I was holding the two ends together with
my right hand, and stood beside him at his desk. The problem was one
that had given me a lot of trouble; it concerned a subtle point that
was not covered in the text. Naturally I had to write some
equations, and equally naturally I had to let the towel fall to my
left side. Now I was naked right next to him. I noticed his eyes
dart over to my groin a couple of times (I have a really
good-looking peter and a nice set of balls) but the devil managed to
follow my argument and asked a question that showed me he had
understood the point perfectly. He thanked me and I went on my way,
feeling like an exhibitionsitic idiot, angry at myself for having
gotten into such a predicament and irritated at him even though he
could hardly be blamed.

That summer Tim and I were the only residents in the X-wing, me on
the upper floor and him on the lower. I used to lie awake and think
of that rangy body and that golden behind just a few feet away
from me but as unreachable as if they had been on Mars. One night I
heard his bare footsteps going up the steps to the main house, and
the door from us to the main house click softly shut. I stepped out
onto the landing and noticed that the street door had been left open.
I closed it, and went back to my room. After no more than three or
four minutes I heard something hit my window. I walked softly in the
dark into the room next door and looked out. There on the sidewalk
was Tim, naked as the day he was born, trying to wake me up, I
guess, by throwing pebbles at my window. I saw his behind totally
bare for the first time, and even more beautiful than I had imagined
it, when he stooped over to pick up some more debris from the
gutter. The harsh light from the street-lamp threw shadows into the
muscular dimples on each side. I felt my cock stirring as I
watched.

Suddenly I saw the flash of headlights coming down the street, and
I felt a pang of guilt that I had been savoring his nakedness rather
than going down to let him in. He crept over and hid behind the
garbage cans. I thought for sure he had been spotted because the car
slowed down as it passed, but it did not stop and disappeared around
the corner. Tim came back below my bedroom. He was rubbing his arms,
and his teeth seemed to be chattering. He had a larger piece of
debris that he was trying to pitch up to the window, but he wasn't
hitting the pane at all. Finally I saw him stop, address the window
like a basketball player, and toss the stone overhand. He gave a
little curtsey before the throw just like the guys on the team. It
was adorable.

Next thing I knew I heard breaking glass.  This would certainly
have woken me up! I ran into my room and looked out my window, as
angrily as I could. Tim was whispering something and pointing to
the door. Duh! I ran down and pulled the door open as soon as he
got to it. The poor kid was trembling and looked like he was going
to cry. This made me want him more than ever. I felt like taking him
into my arms, kissing him and comforting him, but that was forbidden.
"Get into your room!" I said. We stood by his bed. His behind shone
softly in the lamplight. The bastard in me took over. I would
punish him and his behind for the torment they had put me through.
I told him he had it coming. "Lie face down and hold on to the
bedposts!" I ordered. He was so shaken up that he obeyed without
protesting. I would have loved to spank that behind with my bare
palms, I would have loved, actually, to lie naked against that bare
body and hug it to mine, but that was not for me. I looked around
the room and spotted his belt. It was braided from thin strips of
leather and seemed perfect for the job. I held it by the buckle and
the free end and slapped it against my palm. It stung. I was
improvising: "Ten lashes should be enough. Hang onto those
bedposts!" and I cracked the belt across his behind. "One!" His
whole body bucked and I saw his knuckles whiten as he squeezed the
bedposts. "Two!" "Three!" "Four!" "Five!" I saw his shoulders
shaking and realized he was sobbing. Tears of remorse came to my own
eyes. I could easily have thrown the belt down and begged him to
forgive me. But sick as it sounds part of me was loving every minute
of it. The penis that had first let me know what Tim meant for me was
standing stiff in my boxer shorts. "Six!" I couldn't stop now, but
I tried to make the last five lashes as light as possible. After
"Ten!" I stepped back, feeling despicable. Whatever could have
happened between me and Tim was over now, and if he told the story
to the chapter authorities I would probably get thrown out of the
fraternity. Whipping a naked brother! They wouldn't know about the
hard-on but they might guess. And what if his father found out! Then
Tim stood up and faced me. Tears were running down his face and his
peter had totally retracted inside his groin. I was waiting to hear
him tell me exactly what kind of a slimy lowlife I was but instead,
to my amazement, he apologized, mumbled something about being a
virgin and not masturbating, and then said "I love you." Tim loved
me. Tim loved me! I took off my clothes and reached out to him. He
stumbled into my arms. I held him for a moment and then got into his
bed and patted the space beside me."Come on in," I said, "we'll
fix the window in the morning."