Mr. LaFleur was much more magnanimous about my leaving than I thought he would be. If I'd known he would take it so well—and not only that but help me find another position, albeit temporary—I would have built up the courage to part with him months earlier.
It was the morning that he flogged me while riding me like a horse that I decided I could stay no longer. It was the twenty-first century and yet he ran his Louisiana plantation as if the Civil War and emancipation had never happened. I had come from Jamaica with my family, drawn by his promises of good housing and income if my father would improve the quality of the rum he produced on his plantation.
But Mr. LaFleur had been taken with me unnaturally—drawn, he said, by my small stature, well-formed body, and a face that many told me was more pretty than handsome. And perhaps my one vanity contributed to the androgynous look that attracted Mr. LaFleur so—as I also like to wear my hair long in dreadlocks.
When I was eighteen and could work to help my family, Mr. LaFleur took me into his big plantation house as a house servant. I helped in the kitchen and the laundry, and I served in the formal dinner parties Mr. LaFleur held for New Orleans society—at least one per season—and I drove guests of Mr. LaFleur in his big shiny Rolls Royce. And I valeted for Mr. LaFleur, and at night after the household had retired, Mr. and Mrs. LaFleur to their separate bedrooms, Mr. LaFleur would call me to his room to help prepare him for the night.
Part of Mr. LaFleur's preparation for the night was to fuck me in that big four-poster bed of his. And he was a cruel lover. He would beat me if I was slow to open my legs for him or if I resisted any of his demands. And he liked to use the riding crop and beat my flanks as he fucked me from behind and used my dreadlocks as reins. He treated me just like his black slave.
I was only able to endure this for a few months, and then I had to tell him that I must leave, that I didn't want to work on the plantation anymore. My father was so important to the rum distillery that Mr. LaFleur didn't make a fuss or try to hold me against my will.
"But where will you go?" he asked.
"I am not sure," I answered. I was from Jamaica and had been brought directly to Mr. LaFleur's plantation as a child. I had no skills beyond the keeping of a large house—and the skills Mr. LaFleur had taught me of taking a cock. In my desperation to get out of his bed and away from his cruel riding crop, I had even contemplated offering myself into service in a male brothel up in New Orleans. I knew I was of a type that excited some men. I might as well be paid good money for what Mr. LaFleur was taking from me for free.
"Perhaps I can be of assistance," Mr. LaFleur had said. And then he had given me the benign smile that he turned on the public to maintain his status as one of the first citizens of Louisiana. "It may be only for a few weeks, but you are trained to house service and I have a share in an offshore oil operation. How would you like serving on an oil rig out in the Gulf as a house boy—temporarily, as I know they are short of staff. If you do well and like it, perhaps you can be taken on more permanently."
I was very grateful for Mr. LaFleur's help, appreciating the chance to have a job while I tried to gather my thoughts about what I wanted to do—no, that I might be able to do—next in life. This unusual consideration Mr. LaFleur was showing to me, though, did not extend to his bed. That night, the last one I spent at the plantation, he nearly choked me to death by squeezing his hands around my neck as he pushed his pelvis between my thighs and relentless thrust his cock in and out of me until I had fainted.
I was so anxious to get as far away from Mr. LaFleur's plantation as possible—with an oil platform isolated in the Gulf of Mexico waters seeming an ideal escape—that I paid little attention to what the oil drilling company personnel man said after declaring that I could be taken on temporarily as a houseboy on one of the platforms.
Immediately upon being tendered out to the platform on its regular supply boat, I was taken under the wing of Pete, who was head of housekeeping and the kitchen.
"Ah, you'll be popular here, Mano," he said as he was showing me around the kitchen and laundry. "But perhaps not in the way you might wish. My first advice to you—and probably my best advice to you—is to have as little to do with Oilman Jim, the head of the pumping crew, as possible."
"OK," I responded. I was responding to an agreeable OK to anything Pete was saying, so happy was I to be here and not back on the plantation.
"You didn't ask, but you'd best check out Oilman Jim's Internet Web site and blog. It's so lonely out here that Internet blogs have become quite popular and some are very elaborate and full of activities. You really should check out Oilman Jim's Web site before he catches sight of you."
"OK, I will," I chirped back at him. But, of course, I was only half listening to what he was saying.
The next night I was helping to serve dinner for the men who had worked a hard day on the oil rig. They were a rowdy crew, which I expected, and they also were a hearty crew, with hard bulky bodies, which was also to be expected. Pumping oil up from the Gulf floor literally was back-breaking work for a man who didn't develop the muscles for it quickly.
When I came back in the kitchen after making a round with a towering platter of biscuits that disappeared when I was no more than half way through the dining room, Pete came up to me with a worried expression.
"You've caught his eye. Oilman Jim's. That isn't good. I've told personnel more than once not to send me a pretty boy like you, but they never seem to pay attention to me. Listen, stay away from the half of the room you haven't served. I'll serve them myself."
"OK, thanks, Pete," I said. I still had no idea who he was talking about—who I should stay away from.
"And for god's sake, look at that Web site I gave you the URL for. I don't think you understand what I'm talking about yet."
"Yes, thanks, Pete. I'll do that. Soon as I go off duty tonight." How was I to tell Pete that I didn't own a computer and had little notion what a Web site or URL were?
My shift finished, I headed for the lowest level of crew quarters on the oil platform superstructure, when one of the men I'd seen in the dining hall—one that seemed to have the respect and attention of all the rest—stopped me in the passageway. He, in fact, clogged up the passageway so effectively that I couldn't have passed him if I'd wanted to.
He was a monster of a man—arms like tree trunks and bulging biceps and chest muscles, although tapering down significantly in the waist. Bulging thighs, hardly contained in his jeans—and that big mound at his crotch too. I could well understand why the men working the rig gave him respect and attention. He commanded it by his sheer bulk.
"So, you're the new service guy," he said.