"Yes, I would like that," I answered, not really sure. I had enough experience now to discern the Congolese baritone's interestâthe nature of itâbut not enough experience in these matters to be either quick or glib in response. There was no reason not to say noâHal Horton, the conductor for the D.C. Gay Men's Chorus, had asked that we all be welcoming and accommodating to the needs of the visiting soloistâso I didn't say no.
"We can go to my hotel. It's nearby. There's a bar there. Ethan is it? Your name is Ethan?"
"Yes, of course," I said, watching the slim, but muscular dusty-blackâblack, not brownâman move away from me as I stood up from the piano bench. As he movedâI'd almost say glidedâaway he was talking with other members of the choir, full of self-confidence, fully aware that he was in the spotlight. He was a handsome man. I'd almost call him majestic. I certainly thought of him as majestic after having heard him sing through the Broadway Show program we had been rehearsing. He moved gracefully, like a dancer, and I couldn't help looking at the movement of his bubble butt as he walked away and before others descended on me to talk about issues with the program the choir was singing. I was the choir's new accompanist.
I was still feeling my way around with relationships with men, and my exposure to that was slowly evolving. At twenty-four and in a new body, I had moved to Washington, D.C., a totally new manâliterallyâto work as a practice accompanist at the Kennedy Center, the city's premier performance arts center hovering over the Potomac River between Georgetown and the Mall area. I was working too, voluntarily, as the accompanist for the D.C. Gay Men's Chorus. This put me in direct contact with openly gay men. I was much too much of a novice in a world I'd long watched from the sidelines to be able to identify a gay guy in the general population, and, in my new life, these were men who not only were gay but also who noticed me and came on to me. This was a new world to me.
I was a child prodigy, graduating from high school at fifteen and from collegeâin the music program at DePauw University in the sleepy little Indiana town of Greencastle, southwest of Indianapolisâat nineteen. From there I'd gone into a dull life of mediocrity, teaching piano in Greencastle, the most unusual aspect of my life being that I lived with an older man, who kept me. I did my teaching in a room in his large house, which meant I didn't go out much. We did have a sex life, in a limited sense, but we were both undesirables to others at that point in life and did little more than mutual hand jobs and quick, awkward fumblings of oral and anal. We both were fat. I had always been heavy and geeky, my nose always in studies, always too young for the other boys my age, never into sports. Clayton Snyder, an elderly dentist, was fat and ugly, but he kept me safe and in the isolation I sought and was very good to me, as a companion, until the day he dropped dead of a heart attack when I was twenty-one and he was sixty-four.
I hadn't realized that he was a millionaire several times overâor that he had no one to inherit other than me. His death came as a life-altering shock to me. I could have remained withdrawn, except now financially secure. The unexpected acceptance to study performance piano at Julliard in New York City abruptly changed all of that, sweeping me up in a whirlwind of opportunity that moved too fast for me to defend myself against it.
In those years in New York, now financially secure and becoming aware of the world and of my own sexuality, I spent almost three years coming out of my cocoon and morphing into a butterfly. I shed seventy pounds, put myself into the hands of an expensive personal trainer and groomer, became an accomplished pianist and a body-beautiful, model-class twenty-three-year old. When I had become a butterfly, the personal trainer taught me to take cock and to want to give cock as well. He was much more interested in oral, however, and taught me to give expert blow jobsâwithout giving much in return. But my interest in music had taken center stage and my experience with men was still very limited.
Then, barely twenty-four and having learned all I could at Julliard and having developed and stylized my body to perfection, I took the job in Washington, D.C., and started to try my butterfly wingsâwith the innocence of a much younger man and in a whole new life that gave no one reference to my sad past.
We were practicing at the Theater of the Performing Arts on Connecticut Avenue, near the Van Ness Center, and the Congolese soloist, Beno Kayembe, was being roomed at the Days Inn by Wyndham several blocks north of the theater. We walked, him moving gracefully, like a panther, a hand on my buttocks to guide me, me like a lamb to the slaughter. He was confident. I was trembling, emotionally willing but also an emotional basket case. This was something I'd come to a new life in Washington to pursueâa new, riskier, sexier life.
I was trying my best to hide my nervousness and inexperience in this from Kayembe, embarrassed by my almost total naivete in gay matters. I was avoiding accepting this "let's go for a drink" idea as being more than just that. I had zero confidence in my ability to attract men, even though I now did so. I had every reason to believe that this was just normal life for a hunk like Kayembeâthat he could casually pick up and bed willing men.
What if this wasn't an assignation, I wondered. Was I being stupid and completely inexperienced? And what if it was?
While we were moving, he admitted that the Days Inn didn't have a bar. "I was just checking on whether you'd go to my hotel with me," he said, with a full white-toothed grin.
I smiled back, not wanting to admit to him that I hadn't caught the signal at all, let alone the meaning of it.
"By that I mean my hotel room," he clarified. I still didn't do more than smile. He took it as acquiescence, I'm sureâthat I was as much into casual sex as he was. It was actually a result of not knowing what to say. His hand went possessively to my butt as we walked.
We stopped at a bar on Connecticut Avenue and had a drink, although I couldn't have told you later what either of us had to drink. But we didn't stay long, exchanging chit chat on how each of us had arrived at today's rehearsalâhis life in the Congo and the difficulty of growing up gayânot openly, of courseâand as a singer, also not that openly, being expected to be something else, which, in his case was being a personal trainer in a gym. I told him he certainly looked like a personal trainer and he was pleased. I told I'd had a personal training before I came to D.C., but I didn't tell him just how much work it had required to get me fit. He said nothing about my new, trim self, but then he had no idea what I had looked like three years ago. I got the definite impression that he was much more about himself than any guy he was trying to make. It was pretty obvious that he didn't have to try that hard to make a guy. All of his conversation indicated that he was confident he was going to fuck me and that I had been in synch with that from the moment we met and I agreed to go with him.
There was no question whether I was gay and a submissive. I was working with the gay men's chorus and I had accepted his invitation to go with himâand he quite obviously was a top.
I was more sketchy about my background, not thinking that he'd be impressed to hear I had once been 230 pounds, painfully shy and unsocial, and dull as a bedpost. He'd obviously been drawn to the new, butterfly, version of me, and I decided to leave it like that, dwelling on having been a child prodigy and thus more secluded from a normal life than most boys and that I had recently finished my studies at the Julliard in New York and come to D.C. to start a new lifeâto start life itself, actually. Late.
"You mean it was late when you started letting men screw you?"
"Yes." His bluntness went straight to my cock, making me harden. In many ways he was primitive, raw surface honesty. I found it arousing. "Not that it has happened much," I added. I was so afraid he'd find me too inexperienced for him. I was on the edge. Did I want to or didn't I? He was far beyond me on that issue. It was like he already was laying me on top of the table in this barâby right of his beautiful body and his raging self-confidence.