Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 18:51:56 +0000 (GMT)
From: Robert Furlong <robert.furlong@rocketmail.com>
Subject: Badly Drawing Boy

BADLY DRAWING BOY
Part of the 'Butt Monkey' series of stories by Robert Furlong
robert.furlong@rocketmail.com
Find my older stories at screeve.org

===

While Matt Strickson's PowerPoint presentation was unremittingly dreary,
the way his arse flexed and rippled in the back of his tight grey trousers
every time he turned towards the whiteboard was more than enough to keep me
entertained.

Most people betray at least some signs of nervousness when they're giving a
presentation – especially when they're standing up in front of their own
colleagues, who can be among the most critical of audiences.  Not Matt.  He
breezed through his talk like he was chatting casually with his mates in
the pub.  If he was aware of how dull his slides were, he didn't seem to
give a toss.  He just stood there, strutting his stuff, wiggling his arse
and flaunting the bulge of his crotch, like he was loving the attention.

Which he probably was.

He kept flashing smirks over at me as if he knew full well how hot I
thought he was.

Perhaps he could read my mind.

Now there was a thought.

What if he could peer into my head and was able to see what I was imagining
him doing: his cock poking out of his fly hammering back and forth as I
bent down in front of him with my trousers yanked down?  Or squatting over
my eager face, slamming that firm round butt of his down onto my eager and
outstretched tongue.

I smiled back at him, wondering if he would like what his mind was able to
discern.

And wondering how big his erection would grow as he bucked his hips up and
down against my face.  Whether his balls would hang low enough to slap
against my throat every time he –

"Do you agree, Rob?" someone was saying.

"Er... what?"

"Do you agree that we need a rear guard action?"  It was the MD.  He was
staring at me over the top of his specs.

"A rear guard... what..?"

"A rear guard action.  Clearly we need to do something now that the bottom
has fallen out of the market."

I glanced around.  Everyone seemed to be looking at me.

"Bottom... oh... er... absolutely."

What the fuck was he talking about?

Matt was just grinning at me, offering no clue.  The slide on the screen
behind him was equally unhelpful: just a bullet-pointed list in the most
boring of fonts – Death by PowerPoint.

The MD went on, "I assume, Rob, that you'd like to get behind Matt in –"

At that moment the door opened and Alison, one of the least squawky of the
secretaries, apologised for the interruption and told me she'd just
received a call from my son's college and I was needed there immediately.
Fearing some kind of accident had befallen Jake, I must have blanched in
horror because she assured me that it was "just a bit of trouble".  I
quickly got to my feet and grabbed my jacket.

"You know how young men can be," she said with a smirk.

Not as much as I would like to, I thought, smiling over at Matt as I headed
for the door.

===

The receptionist offered me a chair in a small foyer outside of the
Assistant Principal's office door.  Jake was already sitting there, looking
as exaggeratedly glum as only an eighteen-year-old can.  He barely
acknowledged me as I sat down and just stared at the floor with a
thunderous demeanour.

I said, as calmly as I could muster, "It's okay, Jake.  Whatever it is,
we'll get it sorted."

He kept staring at the floor, his eyes blank and his lips tight, and I
tried to figure out if he was more angry or more upset.  His expression at
such times was difficult to read, rather like his mother's.

I tried, as reassuring as I could muster, "Come on, son.  Nothing's
unfixable."

He muttered, "He's going on about my university place.  Saying he has a
'duty' to tell them."

He glazed the word 'duty' with a heavy coating of ridicule.

I asked, quietly, "What is it you've done?  Is somebody dead?"

He looked up at me and his eyes betrayed momentarily that he was more upset
than angry.

"They didn't tell you?"

I shook my head.  "They just said I had to come to the college.  That
there'd been some trouble that they needed to talk to me about."

He countered, with adolescent huffiness, "It's not that serious.  It's just
them making a big deal of everything, like they always do."

I threw him a small sympathetic smile even though I knew that, officially
at least, I had to be seen to support the college in censuring whatever
misdemeanour he'd apparently committed.

I said, "It's serious enough for them to pull me out of work, Jake.  They
haven't done that in quite a while."

I said it like I couldn't remember exactly when they last had, but I knew
full well that Jake had been at primary school, just after his mother had
walked out on the two of us.  He'd lost his temper with another boy during
a maths lesson and had attacked him with a compass.  Although I'd joined
the headmaster in giving my son a strong telling-off heavily laden with
threats and warnings, given Jake's emotional fragility at the time and the
cruel things that the other boy had said to him, I'd privately thought that
his adversary had actually come out of it rather lightly.

He said, "They found a drawing I'd done.  Someone must've put it up on the
noticeboard."

"What kind of drawing?"

Jake shrugged.  "You know... the rude kind."

I was rather surprised by that because, although Jake was a prolific
cartoonist and used his art to document much of what went on in his life,
his cartoons these days – or at least the ones I spotted among the
papers on his desk – weren't usually explicitly sexual but tended to be
more humorous in the choice of subject matter.

He'd gone through a phase, a couple of years earlier, of drawing cartoons
which had verged on being pornographic.  Perhaps he'd had a hormonal surge
or it had suddenly dawned on him why girls and boys were different;
whatever the reason, for a few months at least, he'd been compelled to
express his sexual feelings as explicitly as he could within the artwork
he'd had a talent for since childhood.

For a short time his desk had become littered with page after page of
female figures: grinning caricatures of voluptuous femininity with
ballooning breasts and splayed legs revealing surprisingly accurate, albeit
ludicrously exaggerated, sexual anatomy.  Soon they were joined by their
male counterparts whose grossly inflated musculature and implausibly
chiselled physiques were matched in their absurdity by the sheer scale of
the erections they so proudly sported.

At first I had simply accepted that he'd found a creative outlet for the
sexual cravings which were, if my own tumultuous puberty had been any
indicator, tormenting him as they increased in intensity.  His talents were
undeniably admirable: the women always looked so aroused and enticing with
their nipples poking outward like bullets and the suggestion of an alluring
wetness between their legs.  The men, for their part, were always
grotesquely endowed with pumped-up phalluses looking almost painfully
excited.  Their impossibly thickened shafts were criss-crossed with
prominent knotted veins and they flaunted huge shiny helmets slick with the
ooze that always seemed to be dribbling from the slits.  Their distended
testicles hung low in their stretched scrotums, heavy and over-ripe, like
bloated fruits dangling pendulously between their tree-trunk thighs.

"You haven't drawn that kind of stuff for quite a while, Jake," I observed.

He nodded, still looking down.  "The drawing was meant to be satirical.  I
mean, it was pretty sexual... yeah... but it wasn't really about that."

"Who was in it?" I asked, expecting that it would be one of the girls in
his year-group or a woman from television.

"The Principal and Assistant Principal," Jake replied quietly.

"Ah..." I said, as the nature of the drawing began to dawn on me.  "They're
both men, aren't they?"

Jake nodded.

"And, in the drawing, these two men were... well... doing something
intimate?"

Jake glanced up at me, his eyes telling me all I needed to know.

"Oh God," I said quietly.  "And now we're going to have to face one of
them..."

I wasn't especially worried about sitting across from some jumped-up
teacher listening to him doling out his threats and punishments: I was more
worried that, given that he'd likely be waving around Jake's drawing in all
its gritty realism as he did so, I might laugh.

And I knew full well that some of Jake's drawings could be extremely
realistic.

One day, towards the end of his period of drawing naked figures, while I
was putting his clothes away in his room I noticed that some of the figures
in his cartoons had started coupling up.  When I saw how vividly Jake had
portrayed the intertwining bodies of the men and women in his drawings, I
decided that my son and I should have words.

As we'd leafed through the cartoons that evening sitting alongside each
other at his desk, I'd asked him if he found it exciting to draw such
caricatured figures engaged in sexual acts.  I knew that he could tell that
I was infinitely more embarrassed than he was to be having this
conversation and he'd smiled at me almost sympathetically before agreeing
that he did.

I'd asked him, as I glanced at each cartoon in turn, if it was the process
of drawing the sketches which he enjoyed most, or whether he mainly liked
to look at them afterward.  He'd replied that he mainly enjoyed himself
while he was drawing them and from my blushes and his salacious grin it was
patently clear that we both understood their purpose.  I'd coughed and
muttered that in that case he should hide them away privately after he'd
finished with them.

"You could make a scrapbook," I'd started suggesting, "Or maybe –"

My words were cut short when I came across a drawing which was
spectacularly different from the others.  This drawing had two men in it,
both graphically muscular and obscenely well-hung like the other male
figures Jake had drawn.  However, what I had momentarily assumed to be a
wrestling hold, with one man behind the other, transpired to be something
surprisingly more intimate.

"What's this, Jake?" I'd asked.

He'd laughed at the drawing and said, "Oh, that's just funny!"

I'd asked him what they were doing, even though it was explicitly clear
from the way Jake had angled one guy's backside that the gratuitously
thickened shaft of the other's erection was deeply penetrating his bowels.

"Come on, dad," he'd giggled.  "You can see what they're doing!"

I'd looked at the next of his drawings which showed another two men, again
both inconceivably muscular, in the characteristic pose of doggy-style anal
sex: one guy on all fours with the other kneeling upright behind him, his
hands grabbing his partner's hips.  I noticed that in this cartoon the man
being penetrated had a long, curving erection with a finely-drawn
mushroom-shaped head which was issuing a copious spray of seed into a
thick, gloopy puddle.

I'd asked him, "Are they doing what I think they're doing?"

He'd laughed and said, "They're having bum sex!"

I must have stared blankly at him because he went on to explain, with much
amusement, "The guy behind is doing the guy in front!  That's how it works
when it's two men, dad!  They don't have a woman's hole to do it in, so one
guy has to push his dick up the other guy's butt!"

He grinned at me as if he expected me to suddenly get it and then laugh.

But I just threw him a quizzical look and said, "I know how it works, Jake.
I just don't understand why you're drawing it."

"Like I said, it's funny!  I mean, why would anyone want to do that?  Use
another guy's butthole for sex?!"

Without venturing an answer, I looked at the next drawing.  In this one the
two men were standing up, once again one behind the other.  The man in
front had one leg raised with his foot on a barrel, the outline of which
was only loosely sketched in comparison with the sinewy detail of the men's
bodies.  By raising the leg of the man being penetrated, Jake was able to
flaunt his large erection and heavy nuts which would otherwise have been
hidden behind his thigh; however, I suspected its main purpose was to
reveal in graphic detail the act of anal sex which the men were enjoying.

And enjoying it they were!  Their arms were ravenously grabbing at other's
sweat-soaked bodies, their postures contorted to suggest passion and
movement, while their faces were turned so they could grin towards one
another as they revelled in their pleasure.

"How did you know that men could do this kind of stuff with each other,
Jake?"

"Come on, dad... I'm not a kid anymore!"

"Okay... so how are able to draw it so clearly?  Don't you normally only
draw stuff you've seen?"

He'd nodded and grinned: "I have seen it!"

Before I could ask him why he'd been looking up this kind of stuff online,
he laughed and went on, "I told you ages ago!  Me, Dan and Craig saw a
couple of the older lads at the scout hostel doing it one night.  I thought
it was a joke – that they were just having us on and once they knew we
were watching they'd burst out laughing or something.  But they kept doing
it, deadly serious, one lad on top of the other and sort of grabbing him
around the chest.  They got faster and faster until the top guy started
whimpering and the bottom guy spunked up."

I remembered him coming out with that story on his return from camp.  I
hadn't really believed it – I'd presumed Jake was elaborating some tale
his mates had made up or was just trying to elicit shock from me as he
often did – and even now I was sceptical.

"Dan said they were bumming," he grinned, emphasizing the word 'bumming'
which he knew I didn't like.  It was true that he'd brought that word home
from scout camp with him: I'd had words with him about its inappropriate
usage on several occasions.

"If that actually happened," I'd said, emphasizing the word 'if' which I
knew he wouldn't like, "then what those young men were doing was just a
natural expression of their curiosity."

"Well, that's all these pictures show," he retorted with a shrug.  "A
natural expression of these guys' curiosity."

"Hmm..." I'd said, looking again at the very cleverly drawn picture of the
two men enjoying a carnal moment together in a standing position.  I
wondered how long it had taken Jake to sketch the two of them in such an
animated pose: probably not long given how confident he was with a pen.

I'd turned to the last of his cartoons and found that it also depicted a
well-muscled male couple.  This time their bodies were drawn from the
front, with one man, wide-eyed and broadly grinning, squatting his backside
down onto the other's upright and once again preposterously large organ.
The man being penetrated was gripping his own exaggerated erection, which
was so swollen by his arousal that he could barely get his fingers around
it, and motion lines above and below his bulging forearm showed how
frantically he was rubbing it in his almost uncontrolled excitement.

Jake had drawn the man behind reaching around to grab his companion's large
ball-sack, lifting his church bell testicles up from between his legs.  I
thought at first that he had drawn it like that to heighten the sense of
intimacy between the two men.  However, when I noticed how attentive Jake
had been to what was going on between the man's legs, just below his raised
balls, it dawned on me that his main motivation for moving the scrotum out
of the way was to reveal the full extent of the sexual act which was taking
place.  He had fastidiously illustrated the thick, veined shaft of the cock
sliding up into the stretched and yet delicately puckered ring of the anus
in explicit – and, to my eyes, rather sordid – detail.

After putting the cartoons back on his desk, I'd concluded, "You know I'm
open-minded about sexual stuff, Jake, but... these are... well... a bit
graphic."

"I was only drawing what I saw!"

"Come on, Jake.  I don't honestly think –"

"That's what it looks like, dad!  Have you ever seen two men having sex
together?  One man doing it... you know... to the other's butt?"

I hesitated before lying, "No."

"Well, that's what it looks like!  Believe me, I saw it!"

He turned back to one of the earlier cartoons and pointed at the thick
spray of liquid squirting out from the man being buggered.

"That's what happened to the guy at the hostel; the one on the bottom.  He
shot his load without even touching himself!  Can you believe that?"

Jake grinned at me, staring at my face to see my reaction.  I think he
expected me to be shocked – which, actually, I was – but I was loathe
to show him anything but mild curiosity.

I asked him, "Even if that's true, Jake, it doesn't explain why you drew
these.  Did drawing them excite you like the other pictures?"

He laughed incredulously.  "No!  Of course not!  I just think they're
funny.  I mean, why would anyone want to put his dick up another lad's
shitter?!  I mean – God – it's so rank!"

"Backside, Jake."

"Uh?"

"It's better to say, 'backside'.  What you said was crude."

"Oh, right."

While I was uncomfortable about Jake drawing such lewd cartoons, whether
straight-orientated or gay, I accepted that they were, for him, a way of
diarising his life and observations the way that another boy might keep a
daily journal.  I conceded that it was healthy for him to have an outlet
into which to direct his creative urges, even though I would have preferred
that he restricted his artistic talents towards more fully clothed figures.

He agreed that he would, in future, keep the more lurid of his drawings
hidden away from view and that it, if he felt he had to document sexual
acts, it would serve as a more meaningful challenge to his abilities to
focus on passion and movement rather than merely accentuating the
anatomical mechanics of the act.

A few mornings later, just before I was going to leave to go to work, I
came across the drawings of male figures again stashed away under Jake's
bed as I was checking for absconded laundry.  After retrieving a few
unpleasant-looking socks and two or three pairs of scrunched up underwear
which he must have kicked under there, I took another look at the drawings
in the privacy of the quiet house.

As I leafed through them a second time, my scepticism that they had been
inspired by something Jake had seen at scout camp increased further.  There
was no way that he could have witnessed sex between two males in the hostel
in a way that was so frank and uninhibited.

I knew that Jake's generation took a far more liberal view of sex than mine
had, but I also knew that attitudes hadn't developed to such a point that
two young men at scout camp would feel able to flaunt their sexual
curiosity with so little regard for who might be watching.  Any such
experimentation between the boys would surely, as in my day, have been
furtive and concealed: a few quick thrusts and grunts under the cover of a
shared sleeping bag; a rapid slapping of flesh against flesh behind the
locked door of a shower stall.  Even if the two of them, as shown in one of
Jake's cartoons, had managed to wriggle into a doggy position during their
escapades, their few moments of gasping buggery would still have been
obscured among the folds of hastily yanked down underwear in the darkness
of the room.

I'd be the first to admit that I don't know what goes on after lights out
between the lads at scout camp, but the idea that anal sex between them
would be paraded so unashamedly and enthusiastically by its older occupants
was, to say the least, ridiculous.

If Jake really had seen homosexual activity at the hostel, he had through
his artwork elaborated a few momentary glimpses into something far more
lucid and expressive.  He had obviously found himself fascinated by the
idea that males could have sex together by using the anus for penetration
and for some reason he'd been compelled to explore his interest by
illustrating as unambiguously as he could the crude physicality of
homosexual intercourse.

Pausing on the drawing of the men in the standing position, I marvelled at
the anatomical detail Jake had invested in these caricatured men.  They had
a certain indefinable appeal, with their grotesquely bulging musculature
and disproportioned genitals.  Their unbridled virility was vividly
overstated, beyond the point of excess, and yet I was drawn into the
intrigue that Jake obviously felt that their rampant sexual energies were
directed towards each another rather than being targeted at their natural
opposites.

There wasn't a shred of femininity in any of the drawings – the parading
figures were all unequivocally male with oversized phalluses and heavily
swollen testicles – and yet in spite of that, or perhaps because of
that, the drawings were surging with lust and desire.  I found this
recurrent subtext of the drawings – this male-focussed yearning which
fed so hungrily on its own kind – interesting although I wasn't sure
why.

I looked again and the most graphic of the drawings: the one showing the
man ardently masturbating as he squatted his backside down onto another
man's erection.  Again the emphasis of the drawing was towards the male
extreme, with both men looking as aroused and as full of testosterone as it
was possible to be.  The sexual activity they were so flagrantly sharing
was a brazen expression of this unrestrained masculinity: confident,
physical and unashamedly rough.

These guys were fucking: there was no other way of putting it.  They
weren't making love or enjoying relations or hiding behind any of the other
euphemisms we're used to couching sex in.  The two of them were fucking –
two men intimately joined as one – and their faces showed that they were
revelling in that fact.

The guy on top, for all he was being penetrated by the other, seemed very
much in control of his situation: he was the one dictating the pace and
rhythm of their sex as he thrust his bowels up and down the length of his
companion's thick shaft.  His partner, despite being the man whose organ
was being anally pleasured and who one might automatically assume to be the
more dominant of the pair, was reduced to the role of the passive
participant; his enjoyment determined completely by the man he was inside.

It had never occurred to me that homosexual sex could be expressed in such
terms and, just as Jake evidently had when he'd dedicated so much thought
in creating the drawing, I found the concept intriguing.

I felt myself being drawn into the cartoon as I stared at it, becoming more
and more captivated by the two men it portrayed.  I could almost smell the
sharpness of their sweat and testosterone; for some reason, the sheer macho
passion of the drawings, both in how these guys looked together and how I
was imagining their scent might be, was starting to excite me.  As I stared
at the two men enjoying their sexual union – at the slickened shaft of
one guy's cock sliding upwards into the straining ring of the other's
arsehole – and imagined the heady, musky odour they were exuding, I
touched my own steadily growing organ through my work trousers.

I couldn't understand why I was getting turned on by the drawing; why this
exclusively male version of sex sketched in my son's heavy pen-strokes was
so arousing me.  I moved my face closer to the drawing – towards the
enticing place where the two men were joined together – and inhaled
their imagined scent.  I could almost smell their cocks; sharp suggestions
of piss and precum, more cloying traces of sweat and semen.  The thick,
clammy musk of their hairy balls as they bobbed up and down.  And behind
those strongly male pheromones there'd be a fuller, richer and coarser
odour: the heavy, earthy hints of the cock pumping in and out of the arse;
the stark, pungent odour of their frenzied intercourse.

I rubbed myself through my trousers as the smell of their sex seemed to
fill my nostrils.  My cock was growing thicker and longer at the
intoxicating aroma I was revelling in: crude and animalistic; a heady
mixture of lust and squalor.

Abruptly, I realised that the strongly male odour which was arousing me so
intensely wasn't just in my imagination: it was the powerful whiff of
Jake's dirty socks and recently-discarded underwear which were lying on his
bed, next to the drawings and just inches from my face.  A glance at the
least-attractive stains on his boxer-briefs made it clear where the more
piquant odours were coming from.  Horrified that I had been a very short
step from masturbating at the smell of my son's heavily-discoloured
undershorts, I quickly stuffed the drawings back under the bed and hurried
downstairs to fill the washer.

My reverie was broken by the Assistant Principal coming out of his office
and apologising for having to call me at work.

"We should be able to deal with this matter quickly," he anticipated,
gesturing for the two of us to enter his office, "so we won't need to
detain you any longer than is necessary."

I felt rather like a schoolboy myself, entering the teacher's office to
hear the telling off he had in store for us.  I wondered for a moment if
we'd be made to stand in front of his desk looking at our feet while we
waited for our punishments to be doled out.

But he motioned for us to be seated as he walked around and sat behind his
desk.

I vaguely knew Troy Barrowman from having seen him at various parents'
events I'd attended since Jake joined the college.  I thought he was
probably a slightly older than me, but he had a young face and a tall,
athletic physique which took quite a few years off him.  I noticed he was
wearing a wedding ring and there was a framed picture of three children of
various ages pushed slightly askew by his chaotic desk tidy.

I dreaded to think of what position Jake had drawn him and the Principal
in.  Assuming the subject matter to be satirical as well as sexual, my main
concern remained that I might not be able to maintain a straight face when
the cartoon was pushed under my nose.  I could imagine it showing the
Assistant Principal being comedically taken from behind by his boss, his
trousers yanked down at the back and his face melodramatically aghast in
the best traditions of Kenneth Williams.  I had seen Nick Clegg drawn in a
similar position as a way of depicting the inequitable arrangement he'd got
himself into with his own boss, David Cameron.

Barrowman sat down and apologised again for having to bring me in.

"Your call came during one of our strategic development meetings," I told
him.  "Believe me – I'm not missing much..."

He smiled politely, and explained, "I just wanted to show you in person, Mr
Furlong, what it was that one of the cleaners found pinned to the
notice-board in one of the students' common rooms."

"I gather it's one of Jake's cartoons," I said, glancing at Jake who
blushed and looked downward.

Mr Barrowman nodded.  "His choice of subject matter is deeply..."  He
paused to consider his choice of words before settling on: "inappropriate."

He took a sheet of lined file paper out of the file in front of him which I
assumed bore the offending cartoon.  Even though it was angled away from me
it seemed likely, from the deep indentations on the back of the paper, that
it was one of Jake's heavy-handed sketches.

He stared at the drawing, his face impassive, and said, "The drawing
depicts me and the College Principal, Graeme Hines.  You might know Mr
Hines?"

I nodded.  He was a youngish guy – a little too young to be running such
a large college, in my view – with dark red hair and an expensive taste
in cars.

"The drawing shows the two of us," Barrowman went on, "in a... shall we
say... intimate pose."

I glanced over at Jake who continued to look downward.

Barrowman made to pass me the drawing and then pulled back as if having
second thoughts.

"You're likely to find this cartoon extremely offensive, Mr Furlong."

"I've been around a bit, Mr Barrowman."

He glanced up at me, his eyes showing a flicker of interest, and then
handed me the drawing across his desk.

I could immediately see that it was indeed one of Jake's.  The anatomical
style and caricatured facial features were recognisably his and it had his
usual distinctive shading patterns.

The drawing showed Mr Barrowman and another man who I assumed to be Graeme
Hines, the College Principal.  Both men were dressed in what I assumed to
be their typical work suits, with Hines drawn from behind, bending forwards
with his trousers pulled down around his ankles and a pair of saggy white
Y-fronts stretched between his knees.  Barrowman was kneeling behind him
with his eager face extended towards his boss's bared backside.  A droplet
of saliva twinkled from the outstretched end of Barrowman's tongue,
tantalisingly close to the gaping hairy crack of Hines's arse.  Hines was
grinning, his face a parody of glee, as he prized his buttocks apart with
his fingers to reveal a small delicately-drawn oval tucked away among the
dark tangle between his cheeks.

I shifted in my seat uncomfortably and managed to say, "Ah."

This wasn't at all what I had expected.

In the drawing, the fly of Barrowman's trousers was open and his cock and
balls, looking absurdly small in relation to the rest of his body, were
exposed through the zip.  His finger-sized erection was pointing straight
upwards, while his tiny balls, like two hairy marbles, were barely visible
within the folds of the material.

The bean-like head of Barrowman's cock was bared and glinting with a slick
shininess, as a single rivulet of precum trickled from its slit.  He was
gripping its pencil stalk between his finger and thumb while motion marks
above and below his wrist made it clear what he was supposed to be doing to
himself as his tongue homed in on its forested prize.

The Principal's genitals were also visible through his open legs, and, in
contrast to Barrowman's almost infantile proportions, they were grossly
exaggerated in their sheer enormity.  His tree-trunk cock, the shaft of it
coursed with throbbing veins, was directed forwards, suspended in mid-air
by its own aching hardness.  Strings of gooey precum dangled from its fat,
bloated head in thrilled anticipation of what the Assistant Principal was
about to do.  His hairy scrotum was drooping low by the weight of his
balls, dangling comically between his knees and looking even more stretched
and painfully heavy than mine often do.

I looked up and saw Mr Barrowman staring at me, waiting for my reaction.

I said, "I can see why you called me in, Mr Barrowman.  This
is... well... quite something."

"You don't seem as shocked as I expected, Mr Furlong," he said, flatly.

I looked straight back at him and allowed him a small smile.  "Like I said,
I've been around a bit."

His eyes didn't flicker.  "Indeed."

I looked back at the picture.  Under different circumstances I might have
found it erotic, such was the sexual fervour between the two men which Jake
had managed to convey.  Here was rimming at its most graphic and electric:
a drooling tongue reaching towards its murky trophy, the recipient's
massively pumped-up cock dribbling and throbbing with excitement, his
bloated bollocks so swollen with semen that they looked about ready to
burst.

My son had created an impressive homage to that most carnal of pleasures –
the thrill to be had by two men when tongue meets arse – and had
probably done so, knowing Jake's skill with a pen, in a matter of minutes.
The exquisiteness of the pose and the attention to detail made me wonder,
momentarily, if Jake perhaps shared my interest, albeit on some
subconscious level, in the activity he'd depicted.

In spite of his protestations of disgust about the idea of two men doing
such a thing together, was it possible that he had been aroused when he'd
so graphically drawn the very same act taking place?  There was simply too
much passion in this cartoon to make it the work of a moment's boredom.
Might Jake have fondled himself – as I would have done – when he'd
drawn Hines's arse-crack, with its dark, thick hair bristling so coarsely
around his tight, puckered hole?  Had he masturbated when he'd drawn
Barrowman's tongue, extending so keenly towards its pungent pleasures?

And yet, in spite of the obvious appeal of the cartoon, there was within it
a more troubling subtext which was less about gratification and more about
power.  Both men were enjoying what they were about to do, that much was
abundantly clear, but there was, behind the blatant sexual focus of the
picture, darker connotations that were rather more disturbing.

Jake had drawn the Principal's body to be subtly larger than his
colleague's, his genitals were colossal and his stance, flaunting the
cheeks of his arse while using his hands to thrust his anus towards the
other man's face, was depicted as dominating and authoritative.  Barrowman,
in the picture, was clearly eager to be the underling and to receive his
master's offering: the desire on his face and the stiffness of his tiny
phallus bore witness to that.  And yet, there on the underwear which was
stretched between Hines's ankles, what I'd initially taken to be sketched
lines to suggest a fold or seam was more likely, on closer examination, to
be the darker stain of something less innocent.  And around Hines's crack,
areas of shading which I'd at first taken to be hints at flabbiness, might
have been intended as something rather more crude.

There was, it would seem, distinctly more to this sketch than originally
met the eye.

Mr Barrowman broke the silence.  "I can't understand why Jake would draw
such a – how can I best describe it – monstrosity.  He refuses to
enlighten me about what on earth might have been going through his head.
Perhaps you could ask him?"

I glanced over at Jake without repeating the question.

He kept looking down and eventually said, his voice quiet, "It was meant as
a joke."

"Isn't it somewhat sick and twisted to be regarded as a joke?" Mr Barrowman
retorted, raising his voice a little.  "Perhaps I might see the funny side
if I wasn't one of the participants in such a foul illustration, although I
rather suspect not."

Jake remained silent and I felt for his shame.  I was, to a rather large
degree, complicit in this and I had to throw him a lifeline if I could.

"As I was telling Jake before you arrived, Mr Furlong," the teacher went
on, "this isn't the sort of material that our universities want to have
fluttering around their campuses and being daubed on their buildings."

"Let's not be too hasty about how we deal with this," I intervened.  "There
are a few... er... circumstances in Jake's favour."

Barrowman glanced up at me.  "What circumstances?  What an earth could have
given him such a repulsive idea for a drawing?"

Jake looked over at me, his eyes burning.  He'd never forgive me if I
didn't speak out.  Whatever defence I was going to make, I had to do it
now.

"What I'm saying is, I don't think this is entirely his fault," I began.
"It's his cartoon... yes... I mean, I don't dispute he drew it.  But I've
got to take at least some of the blame for the... er... subject matter."

Barrowman stared at me and I felt my face blush.  Now I really did feel
like a schoolboy in trouble.

"I have, I'm afraid, exposed Jake... purely accidentally, you
understand... to certain materials which he wouldn't otherwise have been
aware of..."

"Materials like this?" Barrowman asked, throwing a disdainful look at the
cartoon.

"Not exactly," I said, struggling find a way to couch my confession in
language which might make it sound as natural and reasonable as I could.
"But, I think, if it wasn't for an interest which I've recently developed,
Jake wouldn't have been aware that such things exist
between... er... men..."

"I'm not a little kid!" Jake snarled.

Barrowman continued to stare at me and I felt my cheeks burning.

"I should have been more careful," I went on, "to keep
my... well... curiosities, I suppose... discreet..."

"I think it would be helpful, Mr Furlong," the teacher suggested, "if you
and I could have a few moments to discuss this privately."

I nodded and glanced over at Jake who was glowering at me and seemed
oblivious to the hint.

"Jake," I said quietly.  "Do you want to give Mr Barrowman and me just a
few minutes to talk about this?"

He scowled at me.  "If you're going to talk about me, I think I have the
right –"

"Jake," I cut in, "seriously, it'll be better this way.  Believe me."

In spite of his qualms, he must have recognised that I might just have the
potential to be able to resolve this for him.  He stared at me for a
moment, his eyes still full of distrust, and then, after looking over at
his teacher, nodded and left the room.

When he'd closed the door, Barrowman looked over at me curiously.  I
decided I would tell him the whole story; otherwise, it wouldn't make a lot
of sense to him.

"A couple of months ago," I began, "Jake and I went to a football match
with a friend of his and his friend's dad.  To cut a long story short, the
act depicted on Jake's cartoon actually happened between me and the other
man in the hotel room."

I looked up at Barrowman, assuming he would be appalled by my revelation,
but he just stared at me, nodding slowly.

"Unbeknown to me," I went on, "my son overheard us from the next room.
That, coupled with a stupidly left browser history in the weeks afterward
when I was trying to figure out what I'd done and why I'd done it, led Jake
to find out far too much about stuff he really shouldn't know at his age.
And that's why you have that cartoon on your desk now."

Barrowman continued nodding slowly but didn't say anything.

I concluded, "I'm sorry for my part in it, and I sincerely hope we can keep
this between ourselves.  It really wouldn't be fair to punish Jake for
something which he... well... kind of found himself drawn into."

In the silence which followed, I wondered if Barrowman was going to tell me
that I was disgusting for doing such a thing to another man, accuse me of
being a bad father to Jake for exposing him to such material or curtly
inform me that it didn't matter what blame I was trying to take from my
son, Jake was still in deep trouble.

But he didn't.

He got up and walked around his desk and then came to sit alongside me in
the chair Jake had just vacated.

And he surprised me further by telling me, in a quiet voice, "The first
time I did it, I thought I was going mad."

What was he talking about?  The first time he'd found a lewd cartoon of
himself?  The first time he'd had to punish a student for drawing such a
thing?

"I couldn't get the excitement I'd felt out of my head... I couldn't figure
out why I'd felt that way."

It suddenly dawned on me what he meant.  I said, stupidly,
"You... er... rimmed a guy?"

He nodded, his face a little sheepish from his admission.

After a moment, he said, empathically, "I know what you've been through,
Robert.  Or at least some part of it.  Being married all these years –
always into girls and women since I was a kid – and then... that.  It
knocked me for six."

I shrugged and threw him a nonchalant smile.  "I've kind of got my head
around it now.  I'm dating a woman – a very nice woman, actually –
but I've accepted that I have... well... other interests."

He smiled back at me and then asked, "How did it happen?  Between you and
this other guy?"

I told him of the night in the hotel room – the story now almost
becoming formulaic by repeated retellings – and was careful not to
mention who Jake's friend was so that Barrowman couldn't work out who I'd
done the dirty with.  Not that I suspected he would use the information
maliciously, but it wouldn't have felt right to divulge Guy's identity in
such a way.

"It must be incredibly embarrassing to have Jake know about this,"
Barrowman said after I'd finished my account.

I smiled.  "Just the teeniest little bit, yes."

He chuckled.  "Jake must have seen me staring at Graeme's backside one
day... I must admit, I do sometimes find myself looking at other men like
that.  Perhaps finding out about you somehow sensitised him to be able to
spot other men with the same interest."

"He's handled what has happened very well, considering," I observed.  "It
must have been difficult for him, but he's tried hard to be supportive and
not to show his disgust too openly.  Maybe the cartoon was his way of
unloading his true feelings."

"The drawing is surprisingly... er... graphic.  I was quite shocked by
it... slightly upset, if I'm honest."

I nodded.  "I am sorry for that.  It was, I suppose, inevitable that he'd
want to express himself in that way.  I should have expected it – should
have looked for it.  He documents just about everything with cartoons,
though normally they're not so explicit."

"I did find it troubling that he would depict one man licking another's bum
in such overtly sexual terms... it would not occur to most lads his age
that such an act could be in any way arousing."

"I'm glad you can relate to why this has happened.  How did you first find
out you enjoy doing this kind of stuff?"

He chuckled.  "That's quite a long story."  He looked over at his clock.
"Look... let's get Jake back in and wrap things up with him and then maybe
you and I can go and have a bite of lunch somewhere?  I've got some more
questions I'd like to ask you, if that's okay."

I glanced at my watch.  It wouldn't matter if I was a little late back:
they'd just think matters were taking a while to resolve over here.

So I nodded, getting to my feet to invite Jake back into the room.  "That'd
be good."

When we'd all sat down again, Barrowman resumed his hard-man routine with
Jake.  It was interesting to see how he could flip between his two
personas, almost like an actor call on to perform two roles in quick
succession.

He repeated how disappointed and appalled he was by the cartoon – not
only by its crude vulgarity but also by its "deeply unpleasant subtext of
subjugation".  It seemed as if he was talking himself into doling out a
serious punishment for my son.  However, in typical teacher fashion, after
painting the most damning of pictures, he abruptly veered back towards
leniency and declared that, "in view of your father's part in the matter
and the... er... transition he is currently going through, I can see there
are valid reasons behind why you felt the need to express yourself in such
an outrageous manner, although I would thank you never to draw me or any
other member of staff at the college in this way again."

He tore up the offending cartoon, which I think upset me more than it did
Jake, and scrunched up the shreds into his wastepaper basket.

And that was that.

Jake glanced over at me, as if waiting to be told what his punishment was
going to be and, when none was forthcoming, I stood up and thanked Mr
Barrowman for being so understanding about things.

When we got out of the room, Jake whispered, "How did you wangle that?"

I shrugged.  "I just told him about... well... what's been happening with
me and how maybe drawing the cartoon was your way of handling it."

"Yeah, well it was meant to show what an arse-licker that guy is to the
Principal – that was all.  I guess it suits him more to convince himself
that I have issues."  He said the word 'issues' like he was some
dope-smoking summer camp counsellor.

He turned to walk down the corridor, and then looked back at me when I
didn't follow him.

"Aren't you going back to work?  Now that you've swooped in and saved the
day?"

I smiled at his sarcasm.  "Actually, I'm going to grab of bite of lunch."

He looked confused.

I added, "With... er... Mr Barrowman."

His mouth broadened into a leer.

"Oh right... it's like that, is it?  He's into it too, is he?  Yeah... I
knew it!"

"Actually, it's not like that at all, Jake," I refuted.

"What is it with you guys?  Is it like some kind of brotherhood?  Have you
got a secret handshake?"

"I'm just being friendly with him and... you know... whatever I said to him
has kind of worked in your favour, hasn't it?"

He grinned.  "I'll leave you to it.  Enjoy your tossed salad, or whatever
it is you guys are gonna have together."

He wandered off down the corridor, chuckling at his own wit, and I went
back to see where Troy Barrowman was going to take me for lunch.

===

Next story: Troy Story

===