Badly Drawing Boy

Pausing on the drawing of the men in the standing position, I marvelled at the anatomical detail Jake had invested in these caricatured men. They had a certain indefinable appeal, with their grotesquely bulging musculature and disproportioned genitals. Their unbridled virility was vividly overstated, beyond the point of excess, and yet I was drawn into the intrigue that Jake obviously felt that their rampant sexual energies were directed towards each another rather than being targeted at their natural opposites.

There wasn't a shred of femininity in any of the drawings -- the parading figures were all unequivocally male with oversized phalluses and heavily swollen testicles -- and yet in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, the drawings were surging with lust and desire. I found this recurrent subtext of the drawings -- this male-focussed yearning which fed so hungrily on its own kind -- interesting although I wasn't sure why.

I looked again and the most graphic of the drawings: the one showing the man ardently masturbating as he squatted his backside down onto another man's erection. Again the emphasis of the drawing was towards the male extreme, with both men looking as aroused and as full of testosterone as it was possible to be. The sexual activity they were so flagrantly sharing was a brazen expression of this unrestrained masculinity: confident, physical and unashamedly rough.

These guys were fucking: there was no other way of putting it. They weren't making love or enjoying relations or hiding behind any of the other euphemisms we're used to couching sex in. The two of them were fucking -- two men intimately joined as one -- and their faces showed that they were revelling in that fact.

The guy on top, for all he was being penetrated by the other, seemed very much in control of his situation: he was the one dictating the pace and rhythm of their sex as he thrust his bowels up and down the length of his companion's thick shaft. His partner, despite being the man whose organ was being anally pleasured and who one might automatically assume to be the more dominant of the pair, was reduced to the role of the passive participant; his enjoyment determined completely by the man he was inside.

It had never occurred to me that homosexual sex could be expressed in such terms and, just as Jake evidently had when he'd dedicated so much thought in creating the drawing, I found the concept intriguing.

I felt myself being drawn into the cartoon as I stared at it, becoming more and more captivated by the two men it portrayed. I could almost smell the sharpness of their sweat and testosterone; for some reason, the sheer macho passion of the drawings, both in how these guys looked together and how I was imagining their scent might be, was starting to excite me. As I stared at the two men enjoying their sexual union -- at the slickened shaft of one guy's cock sliding upwards into the straining ring of the other's arsehole -- and imagined the heady, musky odour they were exuding, I touched my own steadily growing organ through my work trousers.

I couldn't understand why I was getting turned on by the drawing; why this exclusively male version of sex sketched in my son's heavy pen-strokes was so arousing me. I moved my face closer to the drawing -- towards the enticing place where the two men were joined together -- and inhaled their imagined scent. I could almost smell their cocks; sharp suggestions of piss and precum, more cloying traces of sweat and semen. The thick, clammy musk of their hairy balls as they bobbed up and down. And behind those strongly male pheromones there'd be a fuller, richer and coarser odour: the heavy, earthy hints of the cock pumping in and out of the arse; the stark, pungent odour of their frenzied intercourse.

I rubbed myself through my trousers as the smell of their sex seemed to fill my nostrils. My cock was growing thicker and longer at the intoxicating aroma I was revelling in: crude and animalistic; a heady mixture of lust and squalor.

Abruptly, I realised that the strongly male odour which was arousing me so intensely wasn't just in my imagination: it was the powerful whiff of Jake's dirty socks and recently-discarded underwear which were lying on his bed, next to the drawings and just inches from my face. A glance at the least-attractive stains on his boxer-briefs made it clear where the more piquant odours were coming from. Horrified that I had been a very short step from masturbating at the smell of my son's heavily-discoloured undershorts, I quickly stuffed the drawings back under the bed and hurried downstairs to fill the washer.

My reverie was broken by the Assistant Principal coming out of his office and apologising for having to call me at work.

"We should be able to deal with this matter quickly," he anticipated, gesturing for the two of us to enter his office, "so we won't need to detain you any longer than is necessary."

I felt rather like a schoolboy myself, entering the teacher's office to hear the telling off he had in store for us. I wondered for a moment if we'd be made to stand in front of his desk looking at our feet while we waited for our punishments to be doled out.

But he motioned for us to be seated as he walked around and sat behind his desk.

I vaguely knew Troy Barrowman from having seen him at various parents' events I'd attended since Jake joined the college. I thought he was probably a slightly older than me, but he had a young face and a tall, athletic physique which took quite a few years off him. I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring and there was a framed picture of three children of various ages pushed slightly askew by his chaotic desk tidy.

I dreaded to think of what position Jake had drawn him and the Principal in. Assuming the subject matter to be satirical as well as sexual, my main concern remained that I might not be able to maintain a straight face when the cartoon was pushed under my nose. I could imagine it showing the Assistant Principal being comedically taken from behind by his boss, his trousers yanked down at the back and his face melodramatically aghast in the best traditions of Kenneth Williams. I had seen Nick Clegg drawn in a similar position as a way of depicting the inequitable arrangement he'd got himself into with his own boss, David Cameron.

Barrowman sat down and apologised again for having to bring me in.

"Your call came during one of our strategic development meetings," I told him. "Believe me -- I'm not missing much..."

He smiled politely, and explained, "I just wanted to show you in person, Mr Furlong, what it was that one of the cleaners found pinned to the notice-board in one of the students' common rooms."

"I gather it's one of Jake's cartoons," I said, glancing at Jake who blushed and looked downward.

Mr Barrowman nodded. "His choice of subject matter is deeply..." He paused to consider his choice of words before settling on: "inappropriate."

He took a sheet of lined file paper out of the file in front of him which I assumed bore the offending cartoon. Even though it was angled away from me it seemed likely, from the deep indentations on the back of the paper, that it was one of Jake's heavy-handed sketches.

He stared at the drawing, his face impassive, and said, "The drawing depicts me and the College Principal, Graeme Hines. You might know Mr Hines?"

I nodded. He was a youngish guy -- a little too young to be running such a large college, in my view -- with dark red hair and an expensive taste in cars.

"The drawing shows the two of us," Barrowman went on, "in a... shall we say... intimate pose."

I glanced over at Jake who continued to look downward.

Barrowman made to pass me the drawing and then pulled back as if having second thoughts.

"You're likely to find this cartoon extremely offensive, Mr Furlong."

"I've been around a bit, Mr Barrowman."

He glanced up at me, his eyes showing a flicker of interest, and then handed me the drawing across his desk.

I could immediately see that it was indeed one of Jake's. The anatomical style and caricatured facial features were recognisably his and it had his usual distinctive shading patterns.

The drawing showed Mr Barrowman and another man who I assumed to be Graeme Hines, the College Principal. Both men were dressed in what I assumed to be their typical work suits, with Hines drawn from behind, bending forwards with his trousers pulled down around his ankles and a pair of saggy white Y-fronts stretched between his knees. Barrowman was kneeling behind him with his eager face extended towards his boss's bared backside. A droplet of saliva twinkled from the outstretched end of Barrowman's tongue, tantalisingly close to the gaping hairy crack of Hines's arse. Hines was grinning, his face a parody of glee, as he prized his buttocks apart with his fingers to reveal a small delicately-drawn oval tucked away among the dark tangle between his cheeks.

I shifted in my seat uncomfortably and managed to say, "Ah."

This wasn't at all what I had expected.

In the drawing, the fly of Barrowman's trousers was open and his cock and balls, looking absurdly small in relation to the rest of his body, were exposed through the zip. His finger-sized erection was pointing straight upwards, while his tiny balls, like two hairy marbles, were barely visible within the folds of the material.

The bean-like head of Barrowman's cock was bared and glinting with a slick shininess, as a single rivulet of precum trickled from its slit. He was gripping its pencil stalk between his finger and thumb while motion marks above and below his wrist made it clear what he was supposed to be doing to himself as his tongue homed in on its forested prize.

The Principal's genitals were also visible through his open legs, and, in contrast to Barrowman's almost infantile proportions, they were grossly exaggerated in their sheer enormity. His tree-trunk cock, the shaft of it coursed with throbbing veins, was directed forwards, suspended in mid-air by its own aching hardness. Strings of gooey precum dangled from its fat, bloated head in thrilled anticipation of what the Assistant Principal was about to do. His hairy scrotum was drooping low by the weight of his balls, dangling comically between his knees and looking even more stretched and painfully heavy than mine often do.

I looked up and saw Mr Barrowman staring at me, waiting for my reaction.

I said, "I can see why you called me in, Mr Barrowman. This is... well... quite something."

"You don't seem as shocked as I expected, Mr Furlong," he said, flatly.

I looked straight back at him and allowed him a small smile. "Like I said, I've been around a bit."

His eyes didn't flicker. "Indeed."

I looked back at the picture. Under different circumstances I might have found it erotic, such was the sexual fervour between the two men which Jake had managed to convey. Here was rimming at its most graphic and electric: a drooling tongue reaching towards its murky trophy, the recipient's massively pumped-up cock dribbling and throbbing with excitement, his bloated bollocks so swollen with semen that they looked about ready to burst.

My son had created an impressive homage to that most carnal of pleasures -- the thrill to be had by two men when tongue meets arse -- and had probably done so, knowing Jake's skill with a pen, in a matter of minutes. The exquisiteness of the pose and the attention to detail made me wonder, momentarily, if Jake perhaps shared my interest, albeit on some subconscious level, in the activity he'd depicted.

In spite of his protestations of disgust about the idea of two men doing such a thing together, was it possible that he had been aroused when he'd so graphically drawn the very same act taking place? There was simply too much passion in this cartoon to make it the work of a moment's boredom. Might Jake have fondled himself -- as I would have done -- when he'd drawn Hines's arse-crack, with its dark, thick hair bristling so coarsely around his tight, puckered hole? Had he masturbated when he'd drawn Barrowman's tongue, extending so keenly towards its pungent pleasures?

And yet, in spite of the obvious appeal of the cartoon, there was within it a more troubling subtext which was less about gratification and more about power. Both men were enjoying what they were about to do, that much was abundantly clear, but there was, behind the blatant sexual focus of the picture, darker connotations that were rather more disturbing.

Jake had drawn the Principal's body to be subtly larger than his colleague's, his genitals were colossal and his stance, flaunting the cheeks of his arse while using his hands to thrust his anus towards the other man's face, was depicted as dominating and authoritative. Barrowman, in the picture, was clearly eager to be the underling and to receive his master's offering: the desire on his face and the stiffness of his tiny phallus bore witness to that. And yet, there on the underwear which was stretched between Hines's ankles, what I'd initially taken to be sketched lines to suggest a fold or seam was more likely, on closer examination, to be the darker stain of something less innocent. And around Hines's crack, areas of shading which I'd at first taken to be hints at flabbiness, might have been intended as something rather more crude.

There was, it would seem, distinctly more to this sketch than originally met the eye.

Mr Barrowman broke the silence. "I can't understand why Jake would draw such a -- how can I best describe it -- monstrosity. He refuses to enlighten me about what on earth might have been going through his head. Perhaps you could ask him?"

I glanced over at Jake without repeating the question.

He kept looking down and eventually said, his voice quiet, "It was meant as a joke."

"Isn't it somewhat sick and twisted to be regarded as a joke?" Mr Barrowman retorted, raising his voice a little. "Perhaps I might see the funny side if I wasn't one of the participants in such a foul illustration, although I rather suspect not."

Jake remained silent and I felt for his shame. I was, to a rather large degree, complicit in this and I had to throw him a lifeline if I could.

"As I was telling Jake before you arrived, Mr Furlong," the teacher went on, "this isn't the sort of material that our universities want to have fluttering around their campuses and being daubed on their buildings."

"Let's not be too hasty about how we deal with this," I intervened. "There are a few... er... circumstances in Jake's favour."

Barrowman glanced up at me. "What circumstances? What an earth could have given him such a repulsive idea for a drawing?"

Jake looked over at me, his eyes burning. He'd never forgive me if I didn't speak out. Whatever defence I was going to make, I had to do it now.

"What I'm saying is, I don't think this is entirely his fault," I began. "It's his cartoon... yes... I mean, I don't dispute he drew it. But I've got to take at least some of the blame for the... er... subject matter."

Barrowman stared at me and I felt my face blush. Now I really did feel like a schoolboy in trouble.

"I have, I'm afraid, exposed Jake... purely accidentally, you understand... to certain materials which he wouldn't otherwise have been aware of..."

"Materials like this?" Barrowman asked, throwing a disdainful look at the cartoon.

"Not exactly," I said, struggling find a way to couch my confession in language which might make it sound as natural and reasonable as I could. "But, I think, if it wasn't for an interest which I've recently developed, Jake wouldn't have been aware that such things exist between... er... men..."

"I'm not a little kid!" Jake snarled.

Barrowman continued to stare at me and I felt my cheeks burning.

"I should have been more careful," I went on, "to keep my... well... curiosities, I suppose... discreet..."

"I think it would be helpful, Mr Furlong," the teacher suggested, "if you and I could have a few moments to discuss this privately."

I nodded and glanced over at Jake who was glowering at me and seemed oblivious to the hint.

"Jake," I said quietly. "Do you want to give Mr Barrowman and me just a few minutes to talk about this?"

He scowled at me. "If you're going to talk about me, I think I have the right --"

"Jake," I cut in, "seriously, it'll be better this way. Believe me."

In spite of his qualms, he must have recognised that I might just have the potential to be able to resolve this for him. He stared at me for a moment, his eyes still full of distrust, and then, after looking over at his teacher, nodded and left the room.

When he'd closed the door, Barrowman looked over at me curiously. I decided I would tell him the whole story; otherwise, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to him.

"A couple of months ago," I began, "Jake and I went to a football match with a friend of his and his friend's dad. To cut a long story short, the act depicted on Jake's cartoon actually happened between me and the other man in the hotel room."

I looked up at Barrowman, assuming he would be appalled by my revelation, but he just stared at me, nodding slowly.

"Unbeknown to me," I went on, "my son overheard us from the next room. That, coupled with a stupidly left browser history in the weeks afterward when I was trying to figure out what I'd done and why I'd done it, led Jake to find out far too much about stuff he really shouldn't know at his age. And that's why you have that cartoon on your desk now."

Barrowman continued nodding slowly but didn't say anything.

I concluded, "I'm sorry for my part in it, and I sincerely hope we can keep this between ourselves. It really wouldn't be fair to punish Jake for something which he... well... kind of found himself drawn into."

In the silence which followed, I wondered if Barrowman was going to tell me that I was disgusting for doing such a thing to another man, accuse me of being a bad father to Jake for exposing him to such material or curtly inform me that it didn't matter what blame I was trying to take from my son, Jake was still in deep trouble.

But he didn't.

He got up and walked around his desk and then came to sit alongside me in the chair Jake had just vacated.

And he surprised me further by telling me, in a quiet voice, "The first time I did it, I thought I was going mad."

What was he talking about? The first time he'd found a lewd cartoon of himself? The first time he'd had to punish a student for drawing such a thing?

"I couldn't get the excitement I'd felt out of my head... I couldn't figure out why I'd felt that way."

It suddenly dawned on me what he meant. I said, stupidly, "You... er... rimmed a guy?"

He nodded, his face a little sheepish from his admission.

After a moment, he said, empathically, "I know what you've been through, Robert. Or at least some part of it. Being married all these years -- always into girls and women since I was a kid -- and then... that. It knocked me for six."

I shrugged and threw him a nonchalant smile. "I've kind of got my head around it now. I'm dating a woman -- a very nice woman, actually -- but I've accepted that I have... well... other interests."

He smiled back at me and then asked, "How did it happen? Between you and this other guy?"

I told him of the night in the hotel room -- the story now almost becoming formulaic by repeated retellings -- and was careful not to mention who Jake's friend was so that Barrowman couldn't work out who I'd done the dirty with. Not that I suspected he would use the information maliciously, but it wouldn't have felt right to divulge Guy's identity in such a way.

"It must be incredibly embarrassing to have Jake know about this," Barrowman said after I'd finished my account.

I smiled. "Just the teeniest little bit, yes."