Simon Sheppard: Best Gay Erotica 2012

I would encourage you all to kick back with this book and the personal lubricant of your choice, and enjoy; but I am confident that you will reach that decision with no encouragement from me. You bought the book, after all.

Fap on, bros.

“Hey, look, Joe, it’s Ben Bohner!”

Randy was used to being recognized, and had learned to accept the usual adulation accorded porn stars with a cheerful nod, responding verbally only when required.

“Ben Dover? That’s not Ben Dover!”

“Not Ben Dover, Ben Bohner! You know, the top ! See, over there?”

“Yeah, right. Man he’s hot.”

“You gonna talk to him, Rock?”

“Sure as hell gonna try. I was jerking off to him since middle school!”

Walking through this particular Chicago hotel on Memorial Day Weekend, its lobby rank with leather and pheromones and crackling with sexual energy, Randy hoped that the presence of a plethora of more recently popular porn stars wouldn’t overshadow his ability to work. He hadn’t realized until recently that he was an icon, a remnant from a fabled golden age that younger men looked upon with romantic notions of the fight for freedoms that they now took for granted. Randy had been a Pioneer in Porn, one of a handful of stars that successfully made the transition to video in the 1980s. It surprised him to learn he was still admired for something he had done not for the fame but for the mere fun of being paid to fuck.

“Hey, Bohner? My name’s Rock, short for Rockland—don’t ask. Hey, I just wanted to say I think you’re the hottest man that ever did porn, man.”

Randy turned to the young man, barely more than a boy at first glance. Rock’s smile was genuine, shared with Randy as much out of respect for his elder as for the thrill of meeting the famous Ben Bohner. In his blond crew cut and neat moustache (worn without the irony with which he wore a Cub Scout cap backward on his head), the tailored blue T-shirt with FUCK DADDY.COM printed in yellow letters, his combat boots and Nasty Pig jeans, Rock was an homage to Randy’s misspent youth: the post-plague incarnation of the clone. Randy smiled, reached for the offered hand.

“Thanks, son. It feels good to be appreciated.”

“Okay, that gave me wood, Dad.”

“What did?”

“You called me son. Here, feel.”

Rock put Randy’s hand on his groin, where a substantial erection was forcing its way beneath the denim. Randy took a deep breath. He rarely found himself so well matched, and more rarely was he impressed with the girth and length of another man’s member.

“Damn, son. You’re as big as me.”

“Fuck, yeah, Dad. Gotta kiss you now, motherfucker.”

Randy’s career had been an accident, as these things frequently are. Having left his family’s farm in Nebraska, he headed to San Francisco on the strength of the Village People’s coded proclamation of the City’s alleged Freedom. His family embraced his departure with more relief than goodwill and Randy was freed of any of the familial restraints that had hindered his happiness. On the Greyhound he had sex for the first time, with a man some twenty years older who stank of mentholated cigarettes but was able to service Randy’s huge cock with more expertise than Randy would encounter for years to come. So wonderful was the pleasure afforded by the man, who removed his teeth before sucking, that Randy returned again and again to the toilet in the back of the bus to be brought to that same joyous conclusion. He waved to the older man when he got off at Bakersfield, leaving Randy to the ministrations of his own two hands.

When he arrived at the seedy Greyhound Station in San Francisco, he took what little money he had to the YMCA, and after a shower and a hand job from another resident, set out in the pursuit of a job. Fortune smiling on him, he was quickly hired (an able-bodied young man not strung out on drugs) washing dishes at the Zim’s on Market Street and Van Ness, a job he neither relished nor dreaded. From there he was promoted to busboy, enabling him to share a room in a residency club with a closeted Christian in his thirties, a man whose time was split between street preaching and sucking dick in Tenderloin peep shows. When the man was arrested for public lewdness, his disappearance from the club went unnoticed until someone came to remove his personal effects. What was not taken was a roll of bills hidden beneath the bathroom sink, the man’s life savings that were only discovered by Randy when the tape gave way and the bills spilled to the tiled floor. Randy now had enough money to get an apartment of his own, a flea-bitten furnished studio on Larkin Street that felt like the height of luxury to someone whose days were spent earning just enough money to live while getting laid as often as possible.

The truth was he was far from handsome. Only his smile, now emphasized by the required moustache, disguised his plainness and made him appealing to those who saw past the bent nose and irregular ears (now hidden by the ubiquitous shaggy haircut) to the laughing blue eyes and enthusiasm for fleshly pleasures.

It was when he decided to join the migration to the Castro that he took a second job in one of the many dirty bookstores situated along Polk Street. He worked from eleven in the evening until four in the morning, giving him twelve hours to sleep, eat and fuck before he was called back to Zim’s the next afternoon. It had been less than a year, but Randy had already become something of a fixture on the street, at the baths, or perched high atop the desk that looked over the narrow aisles crowded with pornography and silent strangers making furtive purchases. The neighborhood boys were less circumspect, asking loudly for dildos, poppers or cock rings with the kind of aplomb that came from liberty mistaken for license. These men he served cheerfully, just as he served the frightened suburbanites with discreet, judgment-free silence.

One of these furtive men, a frequent customer, hovered quietly near Randy’s perch until they were alone for some minutes before asking: “How much?”

“Which brand?”

“Uh, your brand.”

“I like Crypt.”

“No, not poppers. You. How much for you? I wanna…”

“Want to?”

“Suck it. How much to suck it?”

“I never…”

“Hey, I’ll give you fifty, but only ’cause I know how big it is. I seen it at the tubs. Fifty to let me suck it. Ten more if you cum.”

Fifty dollars was fifty dollars, a third of his current month’s rent, a quarter of the rent he’d pay in the Castro. Randy agreed to the transaction with a nod and led the man into the back. The man knelt like an acolyte and unbuttoned Randy’s Levi’s. Ten minutes later Randy had sixty dollars in his pocket and a satisfied smile on his face. It had never crossed his mind that he could sell what he frequently gave away, and new possibilities presented themselves.

Walking down Polk Street, he observed the boys working the street and saw them as largely effeminate, sad, almost lifeless; smiling only when potential customers appeared on the street, and then showing the ravages of dental neglect and chronic drug abuse. To succeed, Randy reasoned, he would have to be what they were not: strong, masculine, approachable and friendly. His smile, he had come to realize, was the reason for much of his success thus far, and that it would carry him farther he had no doubt.

At first his sex work was incidental. Wearing the tightest jeans possible, he smiled at the men passing in automobiles and was sometimes motioned over. The slight drawl he had tried to erase since his arrival in San Francisco, he now emphasized when negotiating fees, learning that an accent from the outer reaches made him both exotic and slightly threatening, an unknown quantity whose mystery was worth the risk.