From: janus@greynet.net (janus znaiu)
Subject: Ch.4 "Barry's Best Idea" m/m, cons, teen, underwear.
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 03:59:07 GMT

Disclaimer: This reminiscence contains descriptions of consentual
sexual activity between teen males. Ironically, if you happen to be
one yourself, you're not allowed to read about it, so get back to your
homework.

Some of the sex isn't safe, but the events described happened in the
sixties.


BARRY'S BEST IDEA
by janus znaiu

"Alright... ALRIGHT!" bellowed Mr. Culpepper, wiping his
forehead with a rumpled hankie and tapping the podium briskly
with his battered baton. "Let's come out of the stratosphere,
group. Horns-- this AIN'T Harlem!" He said it to the whole
section, who'd been on some free-form journey of their
own. The rest of us were struggling through our third attempt
at rendering Tommy Dorsey's 'Opus One'. He might have been
addressing all the horns, but his stare was aimed right at
Barry. It was the final, aggressive blatts of Barry's reading
of the trombone break that had sent them to Birdland and
beyond.

"We'll all take a short pause while Mr. Llewelyn consults his
chart. You do see the notes in front of you, don't you Barry?
You'll play those when we resume, or you'll be playing fifty
solo choruses of 'Tiger Rag' for me at 3:30." It was
Culpepper's musical equivalent of assigning 'laps' for
misconduct. He had a different tune for each instrument. In a
childish gesture of defiance, Barry stuck his tongue out at the
back of Mr. Culpepper's head. 

A failed professional violinist and natural martinet, Culpepper
ran his band classes by the book, and the book was 'Mein
Kampf'. A coarse man for someone of his calling; he had a
tendency to quote Vince Lombardi and even dressed like a coach,
complete with sweatshirt and whistle under ratty, bargain-rack
tweed. Once he claimed, in an aside, that Napoleon had been a
'raving homo' on the strength of nothing other than the fact
that he'd been a short syphillitic and that he had a cream
pastry named after him.

The one class Barry and I had together was Band, and that only
because I'd been moved ahead. In some misguided spirit of
experimentation, our school would plunk us into more
challanging classes with older kids if it looked like we were
getting bored; 'enrichment' they called it. The results of all
those piano lessons and music history classes with our father
that my brother and I endured every Sunday afternoon made it
plain to my tenth grade music teacher that I didn't belong with
a bunch of kids who didn't know which end of a clarinet you
blew into. So they enriched my scrawny sophomore butt into one
of the reed chairs of the school concert band alongside a whole
bunch of juniors and seniors. It was a bit scary at first,
being the youngest kid in the class, but I'd been playing the
alto for over a year and was starting to get a feel for it; I
even liked it a little. Having Barry sitting nearby in the horn
section gave me all the extra confidence I needed. Unlike most
of us, he could really play. And a good thing too, because the
rest of his academic record was pretty dismal; he badly needed
the ninties he got in music and phys-ed to bring his average up
to a shaky C.

Barry flicked his sheet music with the backs of his fingertips
contemptuously."God, I hate all this cornball shit," he said to
the kid beside him. He glared at Culpepper and raising his
voice a little more with each word. "Why can't they give us
somethin' hot to play for once? Man, I want to BLOW!"

That particular choice of word, innocent and appropriate as it
might have been under the circumstances, caused me to snap my
head back and catch Barry's eye. When he finally picked up on
his unconscious double-entendre, he half-stood up, reached
between the music stands and bonked me on the top of the head
with the end of his slide. Then he shook his head and broke up
laughing. So did I.  That started a private, two-man giggle fit
that began anew every few minutes until the end of practice. As
the other kids filed out to go to their next class, I walked
over to where he was slipping the parts of his horn into the
crushed velvet indentations of its case.

"So you wanna blow, do ya'?" I was still tickled.

"Let's cut out this aft', Slim. I need some rack time. You
too?" Dumb question. It had been three days of being in close
proximity to him and little opportunity to touch him beyond a
quick grope. A suitable venue was the hitch, as it so often
was. "The housekeeper's home at my place." I said. 

He knew that.  Mrs. Kowalchuk always had Tuesdays and
Wednesdays off.  Sometimes we'd ditch our afternoon classes on
those days and go there to luxuriate in the rare freedom to
just lay around boned in each others' company.  We'd do each
other on the rec room sofa while the afternoon soaps and game
shows droned unheeded in the background. By the time the
Christmas holidays approached, I'd not only learned to
accomodate Barry's greatest treasure in my smallish mouth, I'd
become damned good at it. I knew from the first time I blew him
that I was never going to be able to throat that monster the
way Barry did mine. So I concentrated all my brainstorming
on making his big ol' dickhead real happy and let a good,
steady hand-jive up and down his shaft control the progress of
his climax.  I got so that I could tell exactly what stage of
excitement Barry was at almost all the time. It always turned
into a game of trying to see how many climaxes we could cram
into the few hours we had together before my older brother Nils
came home from the university.

"I told you I don't want to jack off in the theatre again." I
reminded him glumly, "We're bound to get caught doing that. And
there's nowhere else."

"Oh yes there is... " Barry said in a teasing voice. He shook a
set of keys at me and grinned, "...Andy's apartment." Andy was
Barry's oldest sister, Andrea. She'd gone skiing for a couple
days and left it to Barry to feed her cat. Theatrically
shifty-eyed, he slipped into a thick, conspiratorial whisper,
tinged with a vaguely Eastern European accent, "You. Me.
Parking lot. Ten minutes. Get it?"

"Got it."

"Good." he said.


A penchant for Danny Kaye routines wasn't all we'd shared over
the past four months. We'd also confessed our love for each
other, a very, very big step for us both. Oh, we hadn't said it
in so many words exactly; it was as if we both knew that to
verbalize it would somehow take us to territory neither of us
was prepared to explore. I knew how Barry felt about me more
by what he didn't say-- by the little flaws in my character he
was willing to overlook, by the way I'd catch him beaming at me
when he thought I was occupied with something else. But what
spoke most eloquently about how he felt about me was the fire
in his kiss. In my head, at those times, I felt like we'd
become halves of a whole.

Since the beginning of the school year we'd fallen into
something of a pattern, Barry and I. We did something together
most weekends-- went to the movies, visited at each others'
houses, even did some of our homework together. Every Saturday
that we could, we'd drive into Toronto to go to The Colonial
Tavern for the matinee show. They had a mezzanine floor
overlooking the stage that was 'dry', so under-agers could see
the show, usually some headline blues or R&B act, up from the
US. I was captivated by the horny innuendo of the lyrics (and
the not-so-subtle beat) of the Chicago blues; the best of it
came through Toronto in those days-- Muddy Waters, Lowell
Fulson, Howlin' Wolf. Barry dug it too, but less so, unless the
featured band had a hot horn section.  The day we saw the Ike
and Tina Turner Revue, he had to be restrained or he would have
surely jumped the railing and rushed the stage. It was
wonderful to see him so happy. We had a lot of times like that.

At school, to our other friends and classmates, we were just
two buddies who lived near each other and rode to school
together because one of them had a car. Ostensibly, there was
little else going on between us than a casual friendship. It
wasn't an impression that we consciously tried to palm off on
the world, it's just the way it turned out. Both of us kept
more or less the same friends we'd had before we started 
hanging out. Barry had little in common with most of my other 
school buddies and I thought his, the silver-spooned scions 
of the country club set, were a bunch of over-dressed phonies. 
So we just naturally moved in separate orbits during the week. 
I'd see him in the hallways between classes and he'd shoot me 
a sly grin or lick his bottom lip a certain way if he was with 
what I called his Tennis Friends.  

If we happened to run into each other on our own, we'd chat for
a few minutes and very, very rarely we'd cop a feel or risk a
quick buss, but doing that sort of thing was like playing
Russian roulette with our reputations and we kept it to a
minimum. I used to dream endlessly about some torrid
broom-closet encounter, flash on scenes where we'd be blowing
each other in some out-of-the-way corner of the school, but it
never happened. We were both far too circumspect and
justifiably paranoid to try anything like that. If we'd had the
same lunch periods we might have snuck off to the ravine behind
the school, but even there the risk of discovery would have
been high; it was a popular spot for more traditional trysting.

The opportunities for privacy and convenience that I'd
envisioned Barry's car affording us didn't pan out in reality
either. I thought we'd be able to use it as makeout-mobile,
much like our more conformist contemporaries did with their
cars. But there were serious, unforeseen flaws in this teen
idyll. Barry's car was a '61 Beetle. Thrashing about its
cramped interior guaranteed us regular charley-horses and
localized paralysis for our best exertions. And that was the
least of it. Once the temperature began to drop with the
passing of autumn, the real down-side of Barry's proletarian
wheels began to make itself known: Volkswagon Bugs had an
air-cooled engine, which meant we no heater to speak of.
Compounding that was the fact that it was also a convertable.
You can take my word for it-- nothing quashes the ardor of
youth quite like pulling a sticky prong out of one's drawers in
a cold, draughty car during a Canadian winter. Generally
speaking, if it's cold enough out that you have to scrape the
frost off the rear-view mirror, the one INSIDE the car, you
don't want to be pulling your willie out unless you're actually
in danger of pissing yourself.

So, with the onset of winter we began to live for the
occasional sleep-overs we had at my house. At first a charming
convention left over from my milk-and-cookies childhood, they
had more recently become a very useful dodge. But sleep-overs
were something that I was finding it harder and harder to
rationalize to my folks, who thought I should have outgrown
what my older brother Nils derisively termed 'pajama parties'.
Eight people lived at Barry's house and he shared a room with
his younger brother. Our few sleep-overs there were studies in
frustration. Not only did we have to do it in the dark,
something neither of us prefered, we also had to wait until
everyone in the house was asleep and Barry's brother could have
awakened at any moment.

My brother had more than an inkling of what had developed
between Barry and I and he spared no opportunity to meddle and
judge. Nils, always prone to a certain pettiness, had recently
taken to wearing his fundamentalist self-righteousness like a suit
of armor. His trivialities voiced themselves from behind it in
terse, veiled comments at the dinner table designed to put me
(and Barry, if he was eating with us) in a panic, while leaving
my parents scratching their heads, but in the dark. Both my 
parents were smokers, so allusions to 'fags' abounded; that 
sort of thing. When my folks weren't around, his comments got 
more pointed and cruel. Even when he varnished them with 
badly-feigned concern for our immortal souls, it was 
transparent that he was enjoying himself. I began to hate him.

The way he treated me was bad enough, but I could more than
hold my own in the offensive banter department. Nils saved his
most cutting remarks for Barry, who was too nice a guy to have
developed a sense of the swift comeback. That always made me
far angrier than anything Nils said to me, caused something hot
and bilious to rise in my throat where it would burn for hours.
It seemed unimaginable to me that they'd been best buddies at
one time.  It was almost as though Nils were punishing us
somehow for having found each other and for being joyful in it.

Implicit in any interaction with Nils was always THE THREAT. 
That he might tell my parents what he knew hung over me like a 
sword of Damocles. In my favor was the fact that sex, especially 
abnormal sex, wasn't the kind of subject that was frankly 
discussed in our household. In fact, nothing uncomfortable was 
ever discussed that could be conveniently tucked away and 
forgotten about. 

Our family life was full of secrets within secrets-- secrets we
kept from each other and secrets we kept from ourselves. The
few times I'd been discovered masturbating, it was difficult to
say who was the more embarrassed, me or the parent who
accidently caught me. It always ended with a stilted lecture
designed to appeal to my sense of hygiene, with the threat of
possible insanity and eyesight damage thrown in for lack of
another better reason why one shouldn't abuse oneself. At our
house, at least when our parents were in the room, absurd
attention was paid to politeness and good taste, so I doubted
Nils could find a way to broach the subject with them in the
first place. And as Barry pointed out, to do so would have put
an end to whatever depraved pleasure he derived from riding us.
Fortunately for Barry and I, Nils graduated the year before or
I'm sure he would have had us squirming at school too.



We cranked up the heat and stripped to our underwear as soon as
we got inside Andy's tiny student walk-up. The cat got fed and
watered and we poked around Andy's apartment for a while like
horny secret agents. Barry held a couple pairs of Andy's
panties in front of his boned fly-fronts and he explained what
a diaphragm was for when we found one.

"It's to keep your cum from going where babies get made. The
girl puts it inside her, like."

"Like a rubber, only backwards," I giggled.

"Wanna try one on?" Barry asked.

"A diaphragm? No fuckin' thanks!"

"Not a diphragm, dough-head, a rubber. Andy's got plenty of
those, look." He opened the drawer of the bedside table and
pulled out a twelve-pack of what we used to call 'safes'.

"Okay," I was game. I'd never had the nerve to buy any to try,
though I'd thought about it often. I pulled my almost-hard cock
out a leghole of my briefs. My balls tumbled out behind. Barry
ripped the cellophane wrapper with grinning teeth while I
pumped up to full erection.

"Gotta peel your skin right back first, Slim," Barry instructed
as he poised the rolled latex doughnut over my cockhead. His
fingers tickled along my shaft as he unfurled it to the pubes.
Satisfied that it fit properly, Barry bent over and swallowed
the talc-dusted rubber whole, tugging at my sac the way he used
to when he wanted to make my dick jump. My cockhead felt
strange in Barry's mouth-- a little less sensitive than if it
were bared, yet not so muted in tactility as it was when my
foreskin covered it. His slurping and popping on my dick
sounded a bit different than usual and he was attacking me with
an atypical vigor.

I noticed that Barry had his hand jammed far down into the
front of his briefs; his agitated, downy forearm showed through
at the fly. I reached for his dick and he accomodated
me by pulling his briefs down to the middle of his thighs, his
waistband spanning the gap between them them so tautly that the
letters of its logo became elongated and illegible. It was only
then that I realized he'd been fingering his asshole for the
whole time he'd been mouthing my cock. He laid a big tongueful
of spit on his two middle fingers and reached behind and
beneath him again.

The last several times we'd been together like this, Barry had
been getting progressively more inclined to try things that
involved our assholes in some way. It started the time he
slipped off that nub of flesh behind my balls and accidently
tongued my anus for several whole minutes. I was ambivalent
about being on the receiving end, but leaned pretty heavily
towards liking it. I never requested it, but I was always happy
when he thought of it himself. Predictably, I was horrified
that Barry might want me to eat his ass too, but he never
brought it up. What he did ask for, and receive, was my
sticking a finger in his ass. I reckoned that fingering his
hole was the least I could do for him if he was willing to
tickle mine with his mouth. And I learned to get pretty good at
poking him too. I liked how the ass of his briefs would be
rubbing against the backs of my knuckles while I did it. And I
loved the way his cheeks would clench when he came like that,
entrapping my hand, his sphincter contracting around my knuckle
in time with the twitches of his spurting cock.


Surrounded by the Beatle posters and the carnival bric-a-brac
of a fledgling coed, trying to avoid eye contact with the cat,
I jacked Barry's dick while he continued jamming his hole and
sucking me off. I wanted a snack too. I tugged on the waistband
of his briefs to get his attention and he came off my cock with
a loud champagne pop. "My turn," I announced. Barry slipped his
Stanfields off one leg but left them on the other. He straddled
my chest and brought his half-hooded knob to my lips, but instead
of attacking his fat, steamy drooler, I let it hang there and
went straight for his nuts. He let out a quiet whimper and he
thrust downward a little to bring his bag directly over my
mouth. The salt of recent sweat woke up my taste buds when I
engulfed the first testicle I encountered. Beneath the
perspiration there was the slight taste of hand soap and the
faintest smell of urine. Barry's knuckles caught my chin from
time to time as he stabbed his fingers into his hole; his other
hand bumped my nose and forehead from the pounding he was
laying on his cock. I gave my condomed dick a few tugs and
continued to mouth Barry's jiggling balls, both at the same
time. When they began to retract spasmotically in my mouth, I
knew he was getting ready to spunk. His sudden lack of
vocalization confirmed it.

I eased off his nuts and Barry slid backwards along my torso
with his ass, forcing my boner to a standing position against
his lower back. He wanked himself furiously, precum and spit
blending into a noisy white froth. His face had already twisted
into that curious, contorted sneer that always preceeded his
orgasm. Barry bent forward and, with three explosive groans,
deposited three thick jets of hot goo into the hollow below my
breastbone. He scooped his load up as best he could and reached
behind him to apply it to my latex-encased dick. Still leaning
forward, he backed up a bit more until my cock stood in the
very crack of his ass, bent uncomfortably downwards. Barry's
back-and-forth rocking put even more pressure on my dick, but
the heat of his crack felt incredible. He leaned forward and,
involving me in a wet, wild-tongued kiss, shot his legs back.
Presently he clamped my dick with his meaty thighs, its knob
enfolded by his clenched crack. I thigh-humped Barry for
several minutes with slippery upward thrusts that had us both
moaning. Without warning, he spread his legs during one of my
jabs and I found the head of my dick at the very nub of his
hole. He half-sat up, looked down at me with a devilish grin
and reached behind him to grab my cock. Still grinning, he
clenched his asscheeks again and drew me further into his
cleft.

The tip of my cock pulsed happily at the contractions of
Barry's anal ring, but I had no inclination to do what he
wanted. As if he could see my objection forming, he quickly
lowered himself onto my poker with a determined shimmy, his
eyes clamped shut in concentration, his lower lip sucked in
behind his upper teeth. I could feel his sphincter beginning to
yield. I grabbed his flanks.

"No." I told him. He stopped bearing down.

"No, not ever? Or no, not now?" Barry asked, pulling off me
slightly, disappointment thick in his voice.

I couldn't look at him. "Not now," I waffled, unwilling
disappoint him further.

I wondered if he'd used this occasion to let me fuck him
because my dick was conveniently condomed. Maybe he'd suggested
my wearing it to prevent me from balking on the grounds that I
might get some of his shit on me. Once, when I was finished
fingering his ass, I detected a fleck of his poo on my finger
and kind of freaked out, running for the bathroom in disgust.
Lately, I'd learned not to look until after he came and *walk*
to the bathroom.

"Don't worry, Jens," Barry said, using my given name instead of
'Slim'-- a signal that what was to follow was heartfelt. "I
wouldn't want do it to you," he said earnestly, "I mean, I
*want* to do it to you, but I know we can't. I know it would
hurt too much, 'cause of my size, like. But that doesn't mean you
can't...  you know."

"Another time, maybe" I told him, feeling creepy about giving
him false hope and feeling even creepier about not being able
to bring myself to give him what he so obviously wanted. I
tried to put it out of my mind. Citing his apparent inability
to use the word 'fuck', I comforted myself with the speculation
that Barry didn't really want to get fucked so much because HE
wanted it, but rather because he was, as ever, concerned with
my pleasure. He was always coming up with great ways to get me
off that I would never have thought of.

"Sure," Barry said, "another time... " But there was something
in his voice that told me he'd never bring it up again.

In hindsight, I can see that the act of penetrating Barry's ass
(or, God forbid, offering him mine) would have removed the last
claim I had on being 'not queer'. That chart-topper of the
queer stuff Hit Parade-- fucking-- was the only thing that we
hadn't done. It had to stay that way. I didn't think I had the
guts to face the final body of evidence afterwards.

"Okay!" Barry said with an unconvincing cheerfulness and
scooted back into a kneeling position between my splayed
thighs. He slipped my cock back into my Jockeys and began
mouthing it with abandon. I always loved the way he'd grate his
bared teeth along the length of my upturned rod when it was
cloth-bound like that and I took comfort in the fact that he
was doing the thing he enjoyed most. Barry ate cotton with all
the gusto and determination of a boll weevil. The condom made
my dick slide against the fabric in a novel way. It seemed like
the more saturated the front of my briefs got, the more my cock
rubbed against it. Without warning, Barry gobbled my dickhead
and as much of my shaft as stuck out my waistband. My breathing
quickened and I began banging Barry's shoulders with the
insides of my knees.

He pulled off me and watched himself jack my dick with
measured strokes, the sticky latex smacking as he pulled on it.
Inside the condom my foreskin seemed to have disappeared. My
entire dickhead was coated with preseminal fluid and it formed
tiny bubbles around the ring of my glans. The rubber slipped
easily along my shaft under Barry's hand and on every marvelous
downstroke, my entire glans shone, mis-shapen under the
stretched latex and the pressure of Barry's grip. I usually
managed to keep the advance my climax a quiet affair, but this
time I couldn't help myself. A series of throaty grunts, in
time with Barry's strokes, gave over to loud, percussive OHs as
the tension built.

"You gonna cum soon?" he asked rhetorically in his Goofy voice,
grinning at me like the village idiot.

My laugh cut the urgency, but only for a second. "You BASTARD!"
I gasped, and fell back to less intelligible sounds. My cock
was already beginning to pulse its warning and Barry ripped the
sticky condom off, painfully yanking out more than a few pubes
in the process. He gripped my cock, vice-like, just behind the
glans. As if the accumulated pressure of my wad was too much
for him to hold back, Barry abruptly unclamped my cock and held
it lightly, letting it spurt where it would. One long white
banner caught Barry's neck and chest. The next one, just as
long and creamy, flew in a graceful arc that laid a bead of
jizz from my left tit to my navel. Everything that followed
burbled over Barry's knuckles. My cream-coated, unhooded glans
looked like a badly-iced cupcake. Barry slurped the white off
it with a noisy, ticklish vengence.


Andy's shower was one of those ones where a curtain goes all
the way around a small tub, from a circular pipe hung from the
ceiling. There was little enough room for one person in it, but
Barry pulled me in behind him nevertheless. I was hard as hell
but I had to piss from all the soda we'd drunk. I bent forward
and tried to pee, bending my turgid pole downwards and bearing
down on my bladder. It came out in a split stream, half of
which splattered Barry's instep.

"Asshole," Barry carped good-naturedly, "You just PISSED right
on my fuckin' foot!" He prodded my shoulder and my stream
stopped for a few seconds, then reappeared as a faltering
yellow flow.

"Sorry, it's kinda hard to tell where it's gonna go when it's
hard like this." My piss stopped altogether.

"You *could* turn away or somethin'. Sheesh!" Sudden
inspiration lit up his face. Presently an amber streamer began
to flow from Barry's crimson piss slit. He halfways smiled at
me and grabbed his meat backhand. He directed the hot stream to
my ankle and got it almost up to mid-thigh before I could get
out of the way, but in the confines of the tiny shower stall
there was nowhere to run; all I could do is turn my back to
him. I felt the stream flow along my the crack of my ass and
dribble off my bag to run down the inside of one leg. I
surprised myself and Barry both by turning to meet his spray
front-on. My cock twitched as Barry moved closer and the last
of his piss splashed off my balls.

I grabbed my dick and tried bear down enough to force more pee
out, straining to the point of farting. When the piss finally
flowed, it did so like cum, in rhythmic spurts of yellow that
came to eye-level and fell back hot on my belly and crotch. I
stuck out my tongue and was rewarded with a few drops from the
last of the diminishing jets that made it that high.

"Whoa! How did that taste?" Barry wanted to know.

"Like this," I told him, thrusting my tongue into his open
mouth, chortling at my own nastiness. Pissing on myself, much
less tasting it, was something I'd never even thought of trying
on my own. I doubt whether I would have considered it anywhere
but under a running shower.



"Any idea why my parents would be having dinner at your house
tonight?" Barry asked on the ride home.

"I didn't know they were,"

The Llewelyns were friends with my folks, but I wouldn't have
called them best pals. Half a dozen times a year they'd "double
date", usually to go to some concert or dance. Pop would join
Barry's dad for golf once in a while and our mothers had the
kind of relationship some women have when they have nothing
much in common, but for the fact that their husbands and
children are friends. Other than our annual July First
barbeque, I couldn't remember the Llewelyns ever breaking bread
at our house.

"Tis the season, I guess," Barry said brightly , clearly
shrugging it off.

But I sat with an uneasiness I couldn't shake for the life of
me. December was the busiest month of the year at the deli,
with all the extra catering and literally thousands of 
corporate gift baskets to prepare. Most nights it was ten or 
eleven pm before the folks got home in spite of all the extra 
help they took on. I couldn't imagine why anything as frivolous 
as seasonal socializing would interfere with putting cash in 
the till; it never had before. I was dogged by the fear that 
it could only have something to do with Barry and I.


I came in from doing chores that evening some time after the
Llewelyns arrived. The stink of Mr Llewelyn's cigar permeated
the downstairs of the house, even from behind the closed door
of the music room where both sets of parents could be heard
talking quietly in serious tones. I couldn't hear any of the
words spoken, but it seemed like Pop and Mr. Llewelyn were
doing most of the talking. I was getting really scared now. I'd
convinced myself that Barry and I had somehow been found out.
Unable to concentrate on my homework, I napped fitfully until I
heard Mrs. Kowalchuk calling everyone to the table.

If they'd found out about Barry and I, they were being
remarkably self-contained. Dinner conversation was restricted
to business-related matters-- the rising cost of wages, retail
sales taxes and the like. After dinner they all took their
coffee back into the music room, including Nils, which
ordinarily would have had me fretting, but I took stock of the
situation: They didn't close the door behind them again. This
time their voices were more animated and convivial, as if the
business they'd met to discuss had been put to rest. Somebody
played a Stan Getz album. The cognac came out. I went upstairs
feeling a hundred percent better.



I was in my room when Barry's parents left. Soon after their
car pulled out, Nils tapped on my bedroom door and let himself
in. He sat on the edge of my bed, flashed a self-satisfied
smile and gave me the news.

"The Llewelyns will be moving to British Columbia in April," he
said.

"Bullshit," I told him, but I knew from his gleeful sneer that
he was right

"But look on the bright side-- you'll be sharing a room with
Barry. Until he has to leave FOR GOOD at the end of school, 
that is." He was enjoying himself far too much.

"Go fuck yourself, Nils. You're making all this up." I said,
wishing I could believe that.

"Hey, behave yourself, little brother. You have ME to thank
for having him in here with you. They were going to put him in
MY room 'cause it's bigger. As if I'd have that faggot in there
with me. I'd never get any sleep worrying about him trying to
maul me.

"Maul you? Don't flatter yourself, chump."

"Say what you like, he's gone as of the end of June."

"Bullshit!" I stormed out to confront my parents.

My folks explained it differently, but the information was the
same. Mr. Llewelyn was going to open his own car dealership on
the west coast somewhere. In fact, he'd already bought a house
in their new community and the one they lived in here had been
sold privately only that week. Beginning mid-April, the three
highschool-aged Llewelyn kids would be staying at our house
until the end of the school year, when they'd fly out to B.C.
to join the rest of the family. Barry's older twin sisters,
Bronwyn and Gwen, were to occupy the guest room and Barry would
bunk on a roll-away cot in mine.

I don't remember anything about the rest of that night other
than being told it was too late to phone the Llewelyns to talk
to Barry. I don't remember how I got to sleep, or even if I got
to sleep. The next morning when Barry came to pick me up for
school he was his usual bubbly self. He emphasized how cool it
was going to be to be roomies and downplayed the reason for it.
That was typical Barry. Of the two of us, I was the one more
likely to say the glass was half empty. It seemed unendurably
cruel of fate to give us the proximity we'd longed for so much,
only to put a time limit on our enjoyment of it. To him, moving
to the west coast was an adventure to look forward to; for me,
it was like having a close relative with a terminal illness. It
peeved me that he wasn't as torn up by developments as I. It
was as if part of him were already someplace else, as if he'd
already begun to make the break between us, in his head. So it
was that I started losing Barry, began grieving him three
months before he even came to stay with us.


Christmas came and went. It was never much of an occasion at
our house, despite all the decorations, the exotic foods and
the orgy of paper-tearing. Few people ever came by over the two
days the deli was closed, knowing that my parents would be
exhausted and that they'd have to throw themselves into
preparations for their extensive New Year's catering after only
a short respite with the family. Barry came over Christmas Day
though, and we exchanged gifts; I got him a Swiss Army knife
and he got me a silver-colored ID bracelet with 'SLIM' engraved
on it. We hung out in my room, necking, glancing warily at the 
door whenever we dared, and making plans for New Year's Eve.

My folks had an annual tradition of going to the city overnight
for a black-tie ball at one of the big hotels. They'd take
their party clothes to work with them and made a point of
leaving the deli by midafternoon, leaving the last of the
catering to the staff. Nils would be out of town as well, at
some suitably supervised, non-alcoholic overnighter for
wholesome young moderns. He'd be with Sheila the She-weasel,
who was carrying herself more like fiancee material every day.
That gave Barry and I the joint to ourselves for the whole
night, something that had never happened before. Putting my
sadness on vacation for the moment, I wracked my brain for
something we could do that would make our night memorable. I
didn't know that Barry had already taken care of that.



On New Year's Eve, I called Barry the minute I was alone in the
house and he came right over. "I didn't think you were moving
in until April. Bring your laundry or somethin'?" I asked, when
he let himself into the entryway, commenting on the leatherette
attache case and the bulging gym bag he carried.

"Hey, this ain't the only party in town, Slim. Let's see a bit
of gratitude," Barry chided. But I knew he was happy to see
that I'd greeted him already undressed to the briefs and socks.

"You mean like this?" I asked. I grabbed his ass and ground my
crotch into his. He dropped his bags and pulled me still closer
to him. I remember the cool of his nylon parka's sleeves on my
back as he enfolded me. We kissed for a long time like that and
I felt his dick fatten against my leg. I stifled the urge to
drop to my knees; for once we had time.

"Want a soda?" I asked Barry as he dumped roughly half the
contents of his gym bag onto the center of the music room
floor. Out tumbled many items: a spare pair of jeans, a
paperback book, a couple pairs of briefs, a bottle of baby oil,
a balled-up pair of wool socks.

"Got anything stronger?"

"Well, my pop said we could each have *one* beer, but I thought
we'd open it at midnight," I told him.

"Grab 'em right now-- we'll have 'em as a chaser for THIS,"
Barry extracted a tall bottle of greenish liquid from his
seemingly bottomless gymbag and held it out for me to see.

"What's...  Char-treuse?" I read off the label. "I thought that
was a color. That must be the color." It looked like used paint
thinner to me.

"I dunno, it's some kinda booze one my dad's friends gave him
at Christmas. He won't miss it though. I heard him tell my mom
to pitch it in the trash." I couldn't imagine what sort of
alcohol such an inveterate tippler as Jack Llewellyn would
commit to the garbage, but it didn't bode well.

"Smells like the woods, kinda," Barry said before taking a long
pull off the bottle. He came up sputtering. "Wow! That'll put
hair on your chest!"

I was all for that. He passed me the bottle and I took a
tentative sip. "You sure this isn't cough syrup?" I asked. But
I got us our beers and a pair of shot glasses anyway, assuming
that you tossed small hits of the liquor back, like pop did
with with his aquavit.

By the time the bottle was a third gone, our lips stuck
together-- to our own and to each others-- from the thick,
sweet concoction. My head and spirits were light, but my body
felt like leaden putty. I would have prefered to just lounge as
we were, me in my jockeys and Barry in the bottom half of a
pair of his thermal long underwear. These ones had a long rent
along the inseam at mid-thigh that was safety-pinned in half.
I was just about to reach inside it when Barry suddenly sprang
off the sofa and began fiddling with the clasps of the attache
case.

It opened to reveal a camera and flash equipment, all tucked
neatly into their own compartments. "If my old man knew I snuck
this out of the house, he'd lynch me. He just got it for
Christmas. You know what it is?"

The cover of the instruction booklet, tucked inside the lid of
the case read: Poloroid Automatic Land Camera "Sure looks like
a camera to me, Barry."

"But not just any camera-- this one gives you your pictures
without having to go to the drugstore for them."

"Convenient," I observed.

Barry sighed, "You're missing the point, Slim. It means that we
can take any kind of snaps we like, 'cause nobody'll ever see
them but us. ANY kind of picture. Even horny ones with no
clothes on, if we like." He let that sink in. He lit a menthol
cigarette and belted back another shot of Chartreuse. "See, if
you take pictures of naked people with regular cameras, the
developers call the cops on ya'. C'mere, I'll show you how it
works."

Despite a million misgivings, I got completely rigid over the
idea of taking dirty pictures of ourselves. I watched over
Barry's shoulder as he put the pieces of the camera together
and unfolded the accordion-like bellows. He attached the flash
and aimed the lens at the black Boesendorfer concert grand that
dominated the middle of the room. It was kind of a totem in our
house. The only thing, other than a few trunks, that my parents
had brought with them from the old country, it was the center
of pop's universe. The room lit up briefly from the flash and
Barry had me mark the time. He pulled a tabbed card out of the
camera's side and set it on the coffee table. A few minutes
later we were looking at a pretty acceptable likeness of my
father's piano.

"Cool!" I told him.

"Yeah, we have seven shots left. First let me take one of you.
Go sit on the sofa again."

"Are you sure nobody's gonna see them but us?"

"Not if we're careful where we keep them. We'll take four of
you, because I brought the camera and you can take three of me
to keep, along with the shot of the piano."

It suddenly dawned on me what was happening. Barry was
providing us with some sexy momentos of each other for later,
when we'd be on opposite ends of the country. He might not have
been too quick at schoolwork, but he was miles ahead of me in
resourcefulness. And I was touched that he wanted more shots of
me than he was willing to give me of himself.

I sat on the sofa with my legs out in front of me, unsure
whether to pose myself or wait for Barry to tell me what
position he prefered me in. He wasn't usually shy about
expressing that. I suddenly became aware of my semi-nakedness
and the long boner tenting my briefs. Beating back the notion
that some stranger might see the pictures, or worse, someone I
knew, I arranged my dick at a stance under the cotton I knew
Barry would find appealing and leaned back with a questioning
look.

"Yeah, that's good, Slim." He handed me another shotglassful of
the liqueur and stepped out of his longjohns. He straightened
out the folds of my pouch a bit and circled me a few times
looking through the viewer to find his best angle. There was a
loud pop and the flare of magnesium.

I took the next picture, a foreshortened shot of Barry lying on
the floor with the back of his head against the cushioned seat
of the sofa. He had his knob between his thumb and two
forefingers, his pinky delicately extended. The way I angled
the camera, it looked as though he were about to take a bite
out of his own exaggerated dickhead, though I didn't notice
that until we saw the developed picture. We spread the
picture-taking out over the course of the next several hours,
unwrapping and savoring the results like expensive bonbons. In
between, we made love, unhurredly and without the usual threat
of interruption.

Barry took two more of me boned in my briefs. His last shot,
one that he took painstaking care to pose me for, was of me
standing naked in front of shelves of records with one foot on
a low stool, my peeled cock throbbing free and upright in front
of me. For the first time, I got an inkling of what Barry might
see in me physically.

I only wanted to take pictures of his marvelous cock, but Barry
put one pair of the briefs he brought with him on, insisting
I take at least one of my allotment of pictures with him
wearing them. It turned out to be the hottest shot of them all.
Barry was only semi-erect in it, but he had his foreskin rolled
back and the edge of his glans showed in marvelous relief under
the fabric, which was utterly wet with my spit by that time.
The flash caught him just as he was glancing up at me, his
fingers just about to reach in past the waistband, which he'd
pulled outwards with his other hand, exposing the top of his
bush.


Barry and I hit the saturation point with the Chartreuse long 
before we got drunk enough to get sick from it. We gathered 
up the carnage and went up to my room, where we lay on my bed 
to watch the ball at Times Square and we listened to Guy 
Lombardo play 'Auld Lang's Syne' on my old black and white.

"Happy New Year, Jens," Barry said and leaned in to kiss me
again. I could only hope it would be.

END


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