Homeward Bound Ch. 04

"It is just a play. Something that popped into my head and I wanted to set to paper before it vanished. It's rough, not good at all, I'm afraid."

"I'll be the judge of that," he cried out. And before I could prevent it, he had swept the paper off the table and was poring over what I'd written. All the while, I cringed on the spot, deeply regretful that I had decided to write the scene faithfully—just for me.

But now this magnificent man was reading of things never spoken in Asheville—although, no one being able to attest to it as well as I could—not undone in Asheville.

"This is good, very good, lad. You write well. I am surprised—and delighted. Of course it could never be staged; the boards would go up in passionate flames."

I was undone and could not reply. It was not the reaction I had expected at all. In his augmenting comments, he said nothing about the content—only about the delivery of the story and how well the characters were drawn.

"I am Stanford Dane," he declared, saying it as if I should know who he was. And somewhere in the back of my mind there was a glimmer that I had, indeed, heard or read the name somewhere before. "And you are?"

"Charles. Charles Bairr . . . with two Rs," I sputtered out. I have no idea why I spoke of my surname to him, let alone spoke the name at all. It was something in him, something commanding full attention to his needs and a natural desire to do whatever he wanted.

"Well, Mr. Bairr with two Rs, as I said, you write very well. I may need your services, if you will indulge me."

It came out of my mouth, as by instinct, more than half wanting the experience of him, and once out I could not take it back. "I lay for two dollars and seventy-five cents by the two hours or five dollars by the night with unlimited privileges—but you would have to contract with Mrs.—"

I stopped dead at that point, though, seeing the expression on his face as it turned from confusion, to awareness, and then—to my utter dismay and embarrassment—to amusement. And then he roared with laughter.

"I mean not that, my good young man—my very good young man, apparently—if your writing isn't more than half fantasy," he boomed forth with a laugh. "I do not pay for what I want. I merely take it and receive undying gratitude in response. No, what I meant is that I am having trouble with the polishing of the play I am directing here for the festival. And I may need help from you, if you are capable of fresh ideas and wield a strong pen. And from this writing, I can tell that you may have such talents."

Of course. Now I knew where I'd heard that name. He was the famous stage director the mayor had brought to town to open the new playhouse. But what was he doing here, at Mrs. Childress's? Surely the town would be putting him up in the Battery Park Hotel.

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I would be honored, but what brings you—?"

"Why am I on the porch of this establishment?" he interjected. "Why, because as I passed I espied an angel with knitted brow and deep concentration. I was en route from the theater to my hotel. But now learning that this more convenient location is a boarding house, I think perhaps I may . . . Ah, would this be the proprietress you were speaking of mincing up the walk toward us?"

"Yes, sir. That's Mrs. Childress."

I could almost both see and sense him ratcheting up the charm—and I was thoroughly surprised that he had higher gears for that than I'd already seen and experienced—as he turned to face the approaching Mrs. Childress.

She was completely defenseless—and almost senseless—before the full force of his charm. She was undone and open to him for anything he wanted from the moment he opened his mouth and addressed her in courtly style with his rich, enveloping baritone voice.

Yes, of course, she would be delighted to have the visiting, famous stage director staying with her for the duration of the run of his play opening. What was the name of his play? Oh, Bound for Home? How intriguing; she must see it. As his guest? Opening night? She would be delighted.

Her simpering was something I'd never heard come out of her before. Thus, I was just surprised, not drop-down flabbergasted, when she asked him if two dollars a week would be satisfying for the room—her best room, of course. I was flabbergasted, however, when she said certainly, she'd be very pleased, if I would be permitted to help him as an assistant in the preparation of his play. The most flabbergasting part was that he made no offer of remuneration for my time—and neither did she set a price.

"No, thank you, Mrs. Childress, I wouldn't dream of inconveniencing you further—young Mr. Bairr with two Rs can show me to my room, I'm sure. And he can go to the Battery Park for my trunk later, if that's equally convenient."

Mrs. Childress nearly stepped on her tongue in expressing how totally convenient all of this would be for her.

"It's upstairs and to the left and down at the end of the long corridor, after a slight jog to the left, Mr. Dane," I said as I led him up toward the second-floor landing. "Here, I'll just turn on the hall light."

"No need for that," he said, as he came up beside me and palmed a hand possessively in the small of my back, propelling me a little faster than I had intended to walk down the hall. I could hear his heavy breathing in my ear. All of a sudden I wanted to get to his room as quickly as possible. I knew what he wanted and I wanted it too. He was such a lion of a man.

We only made it to the turn in the hallway. He was ahead of me now, and fairly pulled me around the turn and slammed me up against the wall of the corridor, my cheek kissing the cool plaster of the wall and his pelvis pressing mine hard against the wainscoting. I could feel the power of him against the small of my back, ready for me.

I moaned as he rubbed his trouser-sheathed urgency on the small of my back.

"I did enjoy your writing, my young friend of the two Rs, and I especially enjoyed the content. I want to finish what you only got the start of in that scene, and I assure you I can give you full satisfaction and release."

"Oh, sir, your room is just there. The door is just there."

"Here is fine," he muttered. "More drama. I like to fuck to the dramatic. The danger of detection. The anticipation of momentary discovery is all the more enticing. You'll see."

He was already pushing my trousers and drawers down over my slim hips, forcing them down without bothering to unbuckle my belt.

"You'll want to step out of them," he hissed in my ear. "You'll want to stand as wide as you can. I promise you that." As I did so, he leaned down and retrieved my belt, and before I knew what had happened he had looped the belt over the metal of a light sconce above our heads and knotted both of my wrists in the dangling end.

I was spending more attention right after that, though, to his fingers at my channel. Invading and searching and widening. I almost cried out as his teeth closed on my neck. But I stifled the urge to scream.

He laughed, a low guttural laugh. "Exciting and invigorating, isn't it? Having to mind how you respond to the element of surprise."

I would have screamed then, despite any efforts not to, if he hadn't closed a hand over my mouth as his cock started forcing its way up into me between his extracting fingers.

My mind immediately went to Samuel. This man was as long and thick as Samuel was. And almost as cruel in his fucking. I could tell by his own gasps and groans that he enjoyed having his cock just a bit ahead of my ability to open to him—that my own whimpers and groans and moans excited him.

"I expected you to be slack, boy," he whispered in my ear. "But you're tight. Yielding to me, though. Like opening a flower bud."

When he was deep inside me, he stopped and held me there. "Under control, are we? No uncontrollable urge to cry out now?"

"No, sir, Oh, no sir. No need to cry. But you're so big. So very, very—"

"But you like them big, don't you, my boy? I read it in your play. Almost disappointment at finding the other man of average size. You loved the muscle, didn't you? But there was a slight disappointment. The cock was not equal to the muscle in proportion."

"You could read that?" I said, but then there was a catch in my voice, as I felt him push even deeper into me.

"Yes, and I shall not disappoint. You think I have bottomed, don't you?" My whimper was the answer he sought. "If you think you can remain quiet and want more of it, I will turn you now, and we will fuck. Do you want that?"

"Yes," I whispered.

With that, he raised my legs off the ground, with strong hands on my calves, splitting my legs out and up and wide from my body, and crouching his pelvis underneath me and pushing farther, shockingly farther up into my channel with his cock. I gasped and he laughed.

After pumping up into me like that until I felt like jelly, he released my bound hands and turned me on his cock to where I was facing him. He'd unbuttoned his shirt to expose his barrel chest, with curly black hair peeking out of his arm pits and running under his pecs and down his sternum. I encased the small of his back with my legs and panted hard and tried to control my breathing and my gasps and gulps as he impaled me a good three inches more—my imaginings seeing not only his height as being over six feet—and began to raise and lower me on his cock as his hips entered into a piston motion that grew in intensity—and amazingly in depth as well—as I lowered my mouth to his nipples and dreamed of the satisfaction he was provided from reading of the previous evening's strange aborting of consummation.

In a frenzy of a final moment, he spouted his seed deep inside me and then just let me slide down the wall and into a puddle at his feet. I looked up in amazement and through a haze of what seemed to be his cum swimming in my eye sockets, I moaned at seeing the size and girth of what he had been pumping up inside me.

"Very nice," he murmured. "None of this to that bitch of a woman, though. As I told you, I never pay for it. But you will come for it when I call for you, will you not?"

"Yes," I whimpered, my eyes still glued to his monster cock.

"You will come to me whenever I have need of you?"

"Yes."

"I think I will enjoy my stay here, then. I will see to the room myself. Go to the Battery Park for my trunk, please. And when you return, I want you to look at what is written for Bound for Home. We only have a few days to polish the script. And I also need a new Billy now. Nathan has not arrived. And I fear that he will not do so. Can you remember all of that?"

"Yes, yes, I think so, sir," I answered as I struggled off the floor of the corridor and gathered up my trousers and belt and drawers.

"And mornings," he answered as he opened the door to his room and turned to look at me. "I like to fuck in the morning. An invigorating start of the day. You may continue what you normally do in the evenings and at night. But I wish for you to be the one to bring me my breakfast tray."

* * * *

Stanford Dane made quite an imposition on Mrs. Childress's schedules and rules—much of it on purpose, I suspected, as a symbol of his disdain for the woman—but she happily accommodated it all. I kept wondering if he was fucking her too, but I never saw a glimpse of a possibility when that could happen. Except when I was performing my abbreviated housekeeping and special duties, I was with Dane almost constantly.

Not only did I help him tone up the script for Bound for Home, but within a few days of his arrival, Dane had decided that I would be perfect to play the part of Billy in his play as well. I was willing to do it because Seth had told me that I couldn't write well for the theater without having been on stage, and that had built in me a fear of my playwriting abilities that I wanted to overcome. I didn't have any interest otherwise in being the focus of attention on stage. My preferred focus was naked and privately for men.

I thought Mrs. Childress would crack at the point of me being away for rehearsals on top of all the other demands Dane was making on my time and would lower the boom on him. But, although she did have a few choice words for me on my declining worth to her establishment, she continued to smile worshipfully on Dane. To be fair, it was quite a plum in her cap to have the distinguished visitor move from the Battery Park Hotel to her boarding house, but there was no end in the disruption he caused there.

There was the decrease in revenue—not only in less coming in from my special services account but also the best room in the house was tied up to accommodate Dane for a ridiculously low sum for the entire season. Beyond that, Dane had his breakfast and supper delivered to him—and he required the supper on demand rather than at a scheduled hour. He also tied up the good parlor whenever he required it. It's where we worked together on "his" manuscript of Bound for Home, which increasingly was suspiciously closer to my own writing style and plot concepts than to his.

One element of the play was definitely his, however. He insisted on keeping what I thought was an overly dramatic ending—Billy preparing to shoot his lover to free him of the pain of a terminal disease in its advanced stage and then, by implication, turning the pistol on himself in what I called the Romeo and Juliet ending and for which, each time I mentioned it, I received a particularly sour look from Dane.

"It's unrealistic. The audience won't believe it," I insisted.

"It's the whole point of the play," Dane countered. "It is just the sort of ending I've always dreamed of—and the rest of the play is there to build to this very moment."

To give him credit, the audience loved the ending when we performed it, just as Dane insisted. But then, as I assured myself later in life, an Asheville audience isn't anything like a New York City audience.

In all other matters, however, I was enslaved to Dane in that month of preparation for the play opening—and for weeks beyond. He not only was bigger than life—certainly bigger than anything living in Asheville—in personality and command of attention and fulfillment of all his wants and whims, but he also was an inventive and consummate lover. As I've already alluded to, he had the biggest, most talented cock I've ever known on a man—with only two black lovers in my experience coming anywhere close. He also, though, while being totally focused on receiving his own pleasure, was supremely capable of giving me pleasure too—and often in inventive ways.

I have no idea what Mrs. Childress chose to convince herself of for that hour it took me to deliver Dane his breakfast tray on most mornings and how she could pretend not to hear my obvious vocalizations of the taking, but she could hardly miss the way I stumbled out of his room, bowlegged and not able to walk a straight line, and humming myself silly with my eyes swimming in cum and a sloppy grin on my face.

In the end, of course, I think Mrs. Childress did profit well, because after Dane had left us, my clientele burgeoned and she realized she could raise her prices for the education I was giving many a simple quick-and-out-and-gone doggy-style taker in the many deeper pleasures and satisfaction that could be won with more sophisticated technique—most of which I learned from Dane. It didn't take her long to take notice that I was recording two and three chalk marks for clients who previously were one and out in twenty minutes. The time factor was not quite as satisfactory, as clients were now coming to the two-hour mark with me more often than before. But they were also showing up more often. And, although I did not reveal this to Mrs. Childress, they were leaving me bigger tips as well.

After he was gone, Mrs. Childress occasionally remarked on how much time I had lost her while he was here, but I never apologized or stood long to listen to her. I knew that she knew that Dane had taught me to become exponentially more valuable to her—and more pleasing to the so-inclined gentlemen of Asheville. Although some of the other boarding houses were catching on and providing extra services themselves, for as long as I served at the Swannanoa House, none other came close to Mrs. Childress's establishment in either reputation or revenue.

One might think from my earlier description of what happened on stage the night before the play opened, when Dane encouraged the other actor, Jim, to fuck me on the stage bed—or, rather, for me to ride his cock by my own effort, while Dane watched and built to an arousal to visit my room in the night, that Dane liked to share me with other men. But this event was an anomaly, no doubt brought on by the tension of the opening night of a play with Dane's name on it both as playwright and director. And I believe it had originated in a small tiff Dane and I had had earlier that day when I, nervous at the coming play opening, snapped back at him when he asked me to perform some mundane task for him.

Never before and not after that did Dane knowingly permit Jim to fuck me. That Jim did on occasion was something that I tried—successfully, I think—to hide from Dane. I was especially careful to do this, because Jim had let slip that Dane had totally cut his relationship with Nathan, the actor who was supposed to play Billy in the play, but who never arrived in Asheville, because Dane discovered Nathan had another, secret lover—a woman.

As for women, I have always suspected that Dane arranged for the redirection of Betsy's interest in me that she so openly expressed on the dress rehearsal night. After that night, I never found Betsy looking at me with awe and anticipation in her eyes. I did, though, see her gazing at the lighting man, Ed, with that aspect. I would not, in the least, be surprised to hear that, at Dane's instigation, Ed didn't take Betsy back to her boarding house that night but, rather, took her for a ride on his cock—and that she thoroughly warmed to him. In any event, there was no evidence that she was pursuing me from that point.

I must admit that, as enthralled as I was dancing my channel on Dane's master cock, I developed a side interest that almost equaled what he did to me. But it was an interest that never could have developed any farther than it did in the Asheville of that day, although, considering where I eventually centered my life, that, perhaps, is the most ironic observation I've ever made.

In simple terms, Abraham Jackson was the milkman on the boarding house's route. But nothing is quite as simple as it appears, even in Asheville on the cusp of the 1920s. Abe was the son of the man who owned and operated the dairy that supplied us our milk. And Abe was only helping out that winter because his father was shorthanded for help temporarily and Abe was able to take a semester off from his pre-law studies at Howard University in the faraway national capital of Washington, D.C., to help his father out.

Abe was a fine specimen of a young man, because he was on an athletic scholarship to Howard, where he excelled in his studies as much as he did in athletics. The most notable—and problematical aspect of Abe, however, was that he was black. He wasn't ebony black as Samuel had been, but was a rich, milk-chocolate color from the inevitable mixing of races that occurred in the American south. The shade of black was not an issue in Asheville, though. Black was black and white was white and the mixing of those two didn't occur in open society.

But Abe's father was not one for the whites of Asheville to disparage. He was a man that Asheville couldn't come to grips with—so they chose to politely ignore his circumstance. Even then, it could only have worked because he lived outside of the town, on a large farm, and because he provided the best milk available to those in Asheville—and because he was wealthy. But he had sinned. He was a white man who had lived with a black woman, calling her his wife. So, whereas Abe was half white, in Asheville he was wholly categorized as black—just like Samuel. Other than their classifications and how the white people of Asheville saw them, however, Abe and Samuel were worlds apart. Whereas Samuel was illiterate and crude, Abe was even more highly educated than I was—and most certainly from a richer family than I had been even when my father owned his mine—and more refined.