Dad or Mom? Ch. 03

He put an arm across my shoulder as we walked.

"While I do claim my share of the magic dust, my young grasshopping friend- did I hear correctly, your name is Tommy? Yes? Well, my dear young Tommy, your conversation out there with the bespectacled body builder boasting his all-over tan and the tramlines on his delicious ass was delivered to my portals- word for word, with perfect clarity- not by legerdemain but a trick of those acoustics of beat-up, cheapjack old buildings of this type."

I gulped with fear. Fear- and a deep sense of predestination. Of augury. As if I might be falling under a spell.

"Yes, lying half awake on the benches behind you, after my own workout, I heard every word of your intimate exchange with...Eric? Yes, Eric. That would be Eric Boone, if my intelligence is correct."

I gulped and stumbled. His arm, corded with veins and sinewy muscle, rested on my shoulder.

"My name is Pastor Professor Remus T Corcoran and it is in your interests, Tommy, you get to share my hard-won insights."

He pushed open the large swinging door to the male change room.

My nostrils filled with the smell of damp tiles, stale sweat and liniment. It was empty, nobody in the showers or drying themselves on the benches, no athlete admiring his physique in the mirrors, surreptitiously flexing. Nobody taking a furtive look over his shoulder to check who had just come in.

There were no towels draped on the pegs outside the steam room with its growls and hisses. Towards its frosted glass door I was now being steered, the professor's hand- or was it the pastor's- on my ass, guiding me to this forbidden, dangerous cave, this young Christian sanctuary. He opened the door, releasing the acrid vapours. The steam stung my eyes.

"Sometimes I imagine we enter here a whole subterranean world that links St Paul YMCA with every steam room in every athletic club and Y across America, a veritable Dantesque underground from which we may mount stairs to the Everard- or "Ever-hard"- in Manhattan, or the Lafayette. Or turning West, up stairs to the Embarcadero YMCA in sight of the fabled Golden Gate."

His fingers spread over my left glute, firm and possessive. His calloused thumb strayed into my cleft, pressed at my hole. Under my bundled towel I was already erect.

We entered the steam.

It was my introduction to Remus Corcoran- pamphleteer and pornographer, author of The Indestructibility of the Erotic (banned in Boston in 1946) habitué of gyms and nudist colonies, food faddist and Yoga teacher, sexologist and Kinsey researcher, apostle of bisexuality, gifted spanker, cock-sucker and cunnilingist, seducer of wrinkle-breasted older ladies and muscly Physique Pictorial models, pioneer of the sexual uses of the male nipple, senior lecturer in observational astrophysics at Berkeley, one-time Birmingham, Alabama male prostitute specialising in "plantation sexuality," former Pullman porter and Caribbean traveller extraordinaire. Expelled with fanfare from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People because of "immoral behaviour." He purported to be a warlock and spiritual adviser and authored articles on Haitian voodoo for anthropological journals.

All this I would learn.

He would be the most important influence in my life.

As sexual mystic he would give Eric, my work-out buddy, a run for his money any day of the week.

The door of the steam room closed behind us.

The mephitic vapours tickled my skin.

I felt fingers touch my ribs, finding their way.