"Are you sure?" Guido asked me.
"Yes, I'm hard in anticipation of it," I answered.
"Then I will get the drinks."
We were sitting in a booth at a gay bar near the docks in Marseille, France, that Guido knew about. Guido seemed to know where all of the adventures were to be had in the Mediterranean as I crewed from him in a summer yachting sail around the rim of the sea.
I looked around the dimly lit bar as Guido got the two glasses of beer. I looked at the men, some rent-boys I could tell, but more of them the rough-looking dock workers at the busy French port who we'd come to try out. One, in particular, a dusky-skinned muscle man with a mean look about him, covered in tattoos, including a spider web on the side of his neck and a couple of swirls on his cheeks, kept looking at me. I looked back. He wasn't European. Algerian? Moroccan? He looked like sexy trouble to me. He was wearing worn jeans and a black-mesh athletic shirt that made clear that his torso was covered in tattoos. I'm sure I looked like the other rent-boys to him. That's the role I was playing here. I was on the make for experienceāsomething to write about.
He didn't seem to be alone. There was a big, black guy with him, even bigger and more muscular than he was. They seemed to be discussing me, taking furtive looks in my direction and whispering to each other as they leaned into the long bar and drank beer. The black guy didn't appear to be tattooed. His ebony black skin glistened under the beam of the pin lights hanging down over the bar in the darkened room. He was bald, with a bullet head and an all-white toothed smile when he flashed one.
This was what I was doing for the summer between my college freshman and sophomore year. Guido called it just fucking around the Mediterranean. To me it was that, but more. This was a research year for meāfinding coming out big time sexually and writing about it. And it was all with the encouragement of my creative writing professor, Mark Upton. He'd taken me under his wing and into his bed. He wrote gay novels and got them published and he said that I had the writing talent and the attraction of men that would enable me to do so tooāunder his mentorship. He knew Guido, an Italian, who was obscenely rich and took a young man on as crew for his yacht every summer for a sex cruise around the Mediterranean.
Guido was a submissive, just as I was, nine years older than I was, good-looking, dark, slender, liking to cross-dress, and as wanton as could be. We didn't do anal with each other, both being submissives, but, as we sailed, we could kiss, fondle, take the sun in the nude together, jack each other off, and, when we were really horny, give each other blow jobs. But what we really liked to do, and what Mark had sent me to the Mediterranean to experience so that I could write about it, was to go to bars like this at ports around the Mediterranean, and collect experiences of hooking up and being fucked.
Guido, who had done this several summers already, knew how to do it. This was his idea. He told me it would really be wild, though, and kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to do this. He knew that they did the roofie routine hereādrugging rent-boys and talking them off and working them over totally while they were incapacitated.
"Sound like it would make a great story," I said, "except I wouldn't be awake to know the details of having the experience."
"There are ways," he'd said. "If you didn't take it allājust enough to slow you down and make him think you were more out of it than you were. It's tricky managing, though."
"Sure, let's try it," I said.
So, we were here trying it. Guido came back with two glasses of beer and slid into the curved booth, both of us facing the bar. He put one in front of me and one in front of him. The booth bench was backed by a planter with fake foliage in it. We'd sat here on purpose. When the AlgerianāI found out subsequently that that was what Youcef wasāand the big black weren't looking, I moved one of the beers to behind me, behind a fake plant and slid the other one in front of me. Guido moved out of the booth at the same time and went to the bar, saddling up to a French dockworker he had picked out for himself.
Not long after he left, the Algerian slid into the booth beside me. His black friend remained at the bar, watching us.
"
Tu es mignon. Je ne t'ai pas vu ici avant
," he said, his voice a low baritone.
"Sorry. I don't speak French," I answered. He was sitting closer to me than Guido had done. I'd drunk most of the beer I had in front of me before he arrived. I took this opportunity to drain the glass.
"Ah, English. You are English then," he said. His English was hesitant but sufficient.
"American," I answered, flashing him my idea of a shy smile.
"Nice. Good," he said. "I said you were cute. I said I have not seen you in here before."
"No, I'm new here," I said. I fiddled with the beer glass so that he'd catch on that it was empty.