I couldn't be faulted for doing my best to fight off the depression from these urges that had clutched at me since high school. My parents, bless them, had done what they could to help me—my dad, especially, by guiding me through various sports programs, giving his all to the effort to give me the All-American sports hero life—using up all my time so I didn't have much of a chance to get into trouble.
I'd enjoyed the sports, and they certainly had toughened me up, but any effect they had on my "walking on eggs" depression was all superficial. I couldn't even begin to tell my parents what was really at the root of my problem. My dad would have curled up and died.
It was only when I was out of college—and beyond the consuming collegiate football and basketball programs—that I was able to seek help on my own terms, to give name to my urges and voice to how deeply they screwed with my life.
Dr. Shelton was the first one ever I told of my affliction. I just sat on the sofa in his office and looked into his sympathetic and nonjudgmental eyes and poured it all out. It did feel a little better to have it out in the open to someone beyond myself. But that didn't get rid of the urges and of the guilty feelings they evoked.
I'd always thought that these shrinks didn't really suggest anything of use, that they were trained to make you face it yourself and come up with your own answers. But Dr. Shelton came right out with what I latched onto as a brilliant idea: retreat; leave the hectic urban life for a while, where I was constantly brought into contact with other people. Retreat for a while. He even said he could arrange it for me.
The town of Hamburg, Pennsylvania, was just north and west of Philadelphia, along the highway a bit past Allentown. But it was a world removed from urban, sophisticated, and enticing Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love." The farm Dr. Shelton sent me to was north of Hamburg, right up against an eastern spur of the Appalachian Mountains. Amish country, for the most part. Quiet and remote; neighbors who kept to themselves and their own ways and showed little curiosity about anyone coming to retreat for just a spell—coming to get their head on straight and put a spike in these depressions over I had from the urges.
Farmer Bill was what Dr. Shelton called the man who owned the farm and worked it all by himself—and offered retreat and hard, honest work to some of Dr. Shelton's patients. He indeed was a farmer, Dr. Shelton said, but he also was trained in working with young men with my problem. If anyone could help me with this depression, Dr. Shelton said, it certainly was Farmer Bill. He was a man close to the soil, an expert in the basics and rhythms of life.
For some reason the day I drove up the Northwest Extension to Allentown and turned west was a light traffic day and the farm was a lot easier to find than I thought it would be. I was more than an hour earlier than I'd been told to show up. When I pulled into the farm yard, I maneuvered my Mustang between a pickup truck with the farm's name and logo on the driver's door and a Saab convertible with Maryland tags. I had assumed that I'd probably have to wait in my car until the appointed time, that Farmer Bill would probably still be out doing farm chores. But maybe not if there were two vehicles here at the house.
I got out of the Mustang and climbed the stairs to the porch of the white-painted, somewhat ramshackle wood-framed farmhouse with a fieldstone foundation. I went to the door, walking around a couple of smart-looking tan suitcases nudged against each other at the top of the porch stairs. The screen door was closed, but the front door was wide open. I couldn't see a bell, so I knocked on the door frame and called out whether anyone was home. Silence, although I heard what seemed to be a radio talk show mumbling from somewhere inside the house, not too close to the door.
This was the country, so I decided I wouldn't be shot or lambasted if I waited inside rather than out in the car.
I went in and wandered for a few minutes around a sparsely, but cleanly appointed room—undoubtedly the living room—which had several windows on two sides letting in the sunshine of a temperate-zone summer. But I kept hearing sounds from somewhere down a hallway that led off behind the foyer stairs. Maybe Farmer Bill was back in his study or something and hadn't heard me knock or call out at the door, I thought. I moved back through the dim hallway.
It wasn't a radio I had heard. The two figures, both naked, were stretched out on a double bed in a room nearly all the way at the end of the hall. Both were men, although I could only see the one on his side fully facing the door. He was young, not any older than me, blond and nicely muscled, these muscles now tightly strained at the effort he was making. His arms were stretched over his head, his fists wrapped tightly around rungs of the bed's brass headboard. His waist was lying on the arm of another man, who was stretched behind him and who had that ropy arm, bulging with veins, stretched around the young man, with a large hand wrapped around the young man's engorged cock. The other hand of the man behind was holding the young man's right leg up and away from his body. Focusing my shocked stare that the midsection of the young man, I could clearly see the churning base of the "behind" man's thick, condomed dick buried between the young man's butt cheeks.
The young man's head was thrown back and facing up at the ceiling and he was burbling with exclamations of passion and highly pleasured taking. Groaning and moaning and grunting out for more, deeper.
I only caught a glimpse of the tableau before I withdrew back down the hall, but I couldn't get the image of the young man's beautiful body, undulating and glistening with a light sweat of being well-exercised. And of that cock root churning in his channel.
The urges. This was exactly what I had been fleeing from for over half a decade. All of the enticements and spurned opportunities in the big city. The mental images of being in the place of that young man in the bedroom down that hall. And here, where I had retreated to escape all of that, here it was happening before my own eyes. I could only wonder, as I silently as possible stole back through the living room and out onto the porch, what Farmer Bill would do if he stumbled onto that scene.
I knew I didn't want to be here when that happened. I nearly stumbled over the two suitcases as I slipped down the porch stairs to my car.
I had arrived much earlier than expected. I'd just get in the Mustang and drive back to Hamburg and see if I could find someplace that sold smokes or could sell me a beer. I needed to calm down. I'd come back at the appointed time and just pretend I hadn't seen anything, and take my cue from whatever Farmer Bill had discovered—or not. But I had seen it—all that I had been running from. I needed a smoke. Or a drink. I needed both.
I had managed to find a tavern in Hamburg and both the smokes and a beer, and it was with calmer demeanor that I showed back up at the farm ten minutes after the originally designated time.
A middling tall, rangy man in, perhaps, his late forties was leaning languidly against a wooden column at the top of farmhouse porch when I pulled into the farmyard. He was giving me a friendly smile, telling me I was expected. A handsome, square-jawed, if darkly tanned and weather-beaten, face on a spare, wiry frame. He was wearing a denim shirt and faded jeans over well-used, obviously serviceable work boots. Big feet for his frame and big, veiny, hard-worked hands too. A look of a no-nonsense, highly efficient and competent, close-to-the-soil working man. Without at doubt Farmer Bill. And he was looking much at ease, so I doubted that he had discovered what I'd seen in the farmhouse not much more than an hour earlier.
We were exchanging initial introductions and he was asking about the journey and the traffic on the highway as I walked up the porch steps to his level, my duffel bag hanging off my back. As I shifted the weight of that, I realized that the suitcases were gone from the porch. The Saab with the Maryland plates wasn't in the farmyard either, although the farm truck was there, parked in the same place it had been earlier.
"Come on it," he was saying. "I'll show you to your room."
I followed him back, through the foyer, beyond the staircase and into the hallway going into the back of the house. He turned near the end of the hall, into "the" room, and my heart leaped into my throat and I got all sweaty and trembly.
"I hope this will be OK," he said, ushering me around him and into the room. The bedspread was pulled tight now over the brass headboarded bed. No evidence of what had been going on there just a little more than an hour ago.
