Memoir: Queer God Worship: Confessions of a Part-Time Bear, Vol. 1
“It was a metallic, animal taste, a musk”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
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This is what I remember:
This one night, I’m hanging out with my friend Joe at his apartment in Eugene. It’s about two or three in the morning and it’s time for me to walk back to my place. It’s winter and it’s cold and I’m wearing my standard uniform in those days: gray cowboy boots, tight, 28-inch waist white Levi’s, that left almost nothing to the imagination, a random band t-shirt and a long, flowing, mohair overcoat, to go with my long, flowing, brown frolet. So, yeah, it was the late eighties.
I’m walking home, and I’ve gotten maybe two blocks from Joe’s place, and it’s cold and raining. Well, it’s not really raining. It’s just doing that light, Oregon misty-pissing drizzle, that rain that makes you feel like your walking through a cloud on top of a mountain someplace way better than Eugene in February. And I’m walking home, wearing an overcoat that provides little to no insulation and those tight-white Levi’s, and I have seventeen or so blocks to go and I’m miserable in that way that eighteen-year-olds manage so effortlessly. I’m pondering this misery in time with the sound of my boots on the deserted sidewalk, trying to get into the rhythm of the walk, when this 280Z pulls up alongside me and slows down.
I look over, and the windows are tinted, and I can’t see who’s in the car, and I don’t know anyone who drives a 280Z. So when the car pulls away and turns left at the block behind me, I think nothing of it and keep walking.
As I’m approaching the next intersection, the same 280Z pulls in front of me on the side street. I stop at the corner, and the driver’s side window of the car comes down. The guy in the driver’s seat looks every bit the picture of Freddy Mercury, save for the receding hairline he’s trying to disguise by growing his bangs long and combing them straight back. And he asks me if I want a ride. Again, it’s sixteen or so blocks to my place and it’s approaching three a.m. and I’m wet and cold and miserable already. So I say yes. He unlocks the passenger door and swings it open for me as I run around the back of the car.
I get in the car with the guy, and I tell him where I live and he puts the Z in gear and we take off down the road. We’re making chit chat, like strangers alone in a car at 3am in Eugene do, and he asks me what I’ve been doing this evening, and I tell him playing cards at my friend Joe’s house. To be polite, I ask him what he’s been up to, and he tells me he’s been hanging out at this bar, and have I ever heard of this bar.
I couldn’t tell you the name of the bar now, but I did know it then, because it was the one and only bar I’d ever hung out in at that point in my eighteen-years on the planet. On a night about three months previous to the night I met the Freddy Mercury look-alike in the 280Z, I’d been hanging out in a twenty-four hour coffee shop with my friend Ryan, when he asks me if I want to go check out this bar, “we can totally get in to,” with him.
Ryan, in contrast to my description of my eighteen-year-old self, was every bit the spitting image of a young, slightly obese, George Michael, from his frosted tips, to his fringed, white leather jacket, tight blue Levi’s and gray cowboy boots. We were young, and fashion-conscious in our own ways and we hung out in coffee shops most of the time. I say to him, “Sure, we can check it out.”
So Ryan leans in close and says to me, “It’s a gay bar.” And I tell him that I figured as much, him being bi and all, even though the thought hadn’t occurred to me at all. I tell him that I’m fine with it. So we get in his mom’s Porsche and we head to the gay bar, my first bar.
I didn’t drink at all in those days, so I could describe the place in vivid detail from the wall-mounted mirrors, to the black vinyl cushion along the front of the bar. But, the physical context of the bar doesn’t matter. The context that matters is what happened at the gay bar, my first bar.
There were about ten or fifteen men in the bar when we arrived. They ranged in age from their early twenties to what seemed impossibly old, and they all turned to stare at us when we walked in.
I stood around feeling awkward and uncomfortable in the way that some eighteen-year-olds manage so effortlessly, while Ryan worked the room, looking for crystal. One of the bar patrons suggested I take off my coat and, “stay awhile.” So, I took off my long mohair coat and hung it up. And I turned back around and I noticed that I had attracted a bit more attention from the men at the bar.
It felt strange. I had never in my life, to that point, felt desired. I’d never felt what it was like to be an object of desire. I’d had girlfriends prior to this experience. I’d had sex, multiple times, with a handful of girls and young women. So, I guess I knew what it was like to be desired. But, I’d never felt desired in that way, to feel it on your body, to have it be palpable in the way they looked at you. And, it felt amazing. And, I didn’t care at all that it wasn’t reciprocal. I didn’t give a shit that I wasn’t interested in them. Just to feel wanted like that, was intoxicating in its own way.
So, I tell a very abridged version of that story to Freddy Mercury in the 280Z. I say, “Yeah I know the place; I’ve been there.” And his eyes light up; and he waits for me to elaborate. I say, “Yeah, we were there after hours, this one night.”
And he’s says, “Yeah? What’d you think?”
“It was cool.”
And, the Z has a manual transmission; and he’s been shifting gears during the conversation as we make our way through the side streets toward my apartment. But, the next time his hand comes off the stick, rather than it coming to rest on the console between us, it comes to rest on my thigh, just far enough north of the knee for the message to not be dismissible. And. I didn’t freak out. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t. But again, I felt desired, which was very powerful. I wasn’t attracted to this guy at all. But I was interested in feeling desired and seeing where that feeling might go.
His hand goes back to the stick, moves the stick, and then comes to rest a few inches farther up on my thigh. And I didn’t freak out. And then a few inches farther up. And then it’s in my crotch. And he’s stroking my cock through the fabric of my very tight, white Levi’s. I’m an eighteen-year-old boy and I don’t find this guy attractive. But, my cock doesn’t give a shit at this point.
So, back in those days I used to wear it off to the side, riding high across the top of my thigh, out toward my hip, taking advantage of how tight my pants were. And it’s growing out toward that weird little Levi’s coin pouch, or whatever the fuck it is. He’s rubbing on it and it’s getting harder and I don’t object at all, because it feels good.
So we pull up to my place, but instead of stopping we pull right past it, him still stroking my cock through my pants. He points the 280Z around the next corner and into the muddy alley halfway down the next block, coming to a stop behind someone’s garage. He leaves the car running, uses his left hand to shift into neutral, simultaneously unbuttoning my pants with his right.
And then he’s got my cock out. And then it’s in his mouth.
Now, my cock had been in other mouths before this night. But I can honestly say, that by comparison, I had never had a “blow job” before then. Because what he was doing, and this is a horrible fucking cliché, that whole “a man knows what a man wants” thing; what he was doing was fucking amazing. It was like a revelation. I mean, I had no idea that getting your dick sucked could feel like that.
Surprisingly enough for an eighteen-year-old, despite how good it felt, I didn’t cum. Primarily, because it didn’t last that long. Just long enough for the revelation, and then he comes up for air and says: “Can we go inside?”
And I say, “It’s a one-bedroom and I have a roommate.”
So he says, “Do you wanna go back to my place?”
And I pause, and say, “Yeah.”
So he puts the Z in gear, and we head off toward his place, his hand alternating between stroking my cock and shifting gears, all the way into the south hills of Eugene. And when we pull into his garage I’m still hard enough that it’s next to impossible for me to stuff myself back into my pants and get my button fly done. But I get it accomplished and walk into the kitchen of his condo right behind him.
We’re standing there, in between the glass-topped dining table and the breakfast bar and he’s looking up at me, and he’s all of five-foot-six. And, he’s rubbing my pulsing cock through the fabric of my pants again and looking up at me, practically on his tiptoes, and I realize that it must be time to kiss.
I had never kissed a man before, not like that anyway. And, I haven’t kissed a man in that way since. What I can report is that it was different than kissing a woman in that way. And, it’s not just different in the obvious, mustache and five o’clock shadow way. All mouths are different and have different, innate flavors. His mouth tasted unlike any of the others that I’ve ever tasted, before or since. There was a base note in there that I attributed, at the time, to his being a man. It was a metallic, animal taste, a musk that somewhat like the smell of burning plastic, but not in a wholly unpleasant way.
We stand there in the condo kitchen for a while kissing and then we head up the stairs to his bedroom, and then he tells me that we’re going to take a shower. Because, by this point he’s just leading me through the experience. And I don’t know why I’m letting him do it, but no alarm bells are going off and I’m just following along.
So we get undressed and we get in the shower. His short, dark, very hairy body, in contrast to my near-hairless, tall, thin eighteen-year-old body. We’re standing in the shower, the hot water coming down on us. He’s going to work with a bar of soap on a washcloth, getting the lather worked up. And I’m standing there, feeling awkward and naked and wet and still hard. He sets the bar of soap back on its little stand and turns back to me with this near-white washcloth that had been brown when he pulled it from the cabinet a couple minutes back. And he starts to wash me.
Now, I hadn’t been washed by another human being at that point since I was a toddler. And when I say he washed me; I mean he really washed me, head to toe, putting special effort into my cock and balls and ass area. And when we got out of the shower I felt cleaner than I had ever felt. It wasn’t until years later, reading And the Band Played On, while volunteering for the Cascade Aids Project, that I realized maybe why he had washed me so well. Not that either of us thought about using a condom that night in February of 1987.
He dries me and we hit the bed and he’s going down on me again. My dick has been hard for quite some time now and I’m not feeling like I’m getting any closer to orgasm. And he’s working it like it’s his job to suck some understanding into me and I’m enjoying it but just not advancing. And then he’s off me and he’s rolled over onto his back and, apparently it’s my turn.
He waits patiently for me to understand this and to get into position and he either knows better or is kind enough not to start pulling my head down there. When I do get down there and get into position, I have that high-dive moment. That on-the-edge-of-something-scary thrill that I’ve trained myself to savor over the years. In that moment, when you are scared of doing something and know that you will do it, you are more alive, more beautiful inside, than at any other time.
I’ve only had one cock in my mouth, so I cannot speak for the feeling of cocks in mouths. What I can tell you is that, from the one experience, having a cock in your mouth feels different than having one in your hand. Though, I’ve only had two cocks in my hand. I realize that I’m a little naïve in this, but let’s presume that the one cock in my mouth, coupled with the two in my hands, gives me just enough real world data to extrapolate from.
We refer to cocks as either hard or soft, short or long, fat, girthy, if you will, or then, big or small, but they’re much more complicated than that. Having one in your mouth illustrates this in a way that looking at one or feeling one in your hand, cannot. So for the sheer sake of understanding, it may or may not be worth it for you to go out and get one in your mouth.
His cock was hard, unbendable hard, and yet pliant and pleasantly spongy, especially around the ridge and along the barrel on the underside. I can’t hope to have performed admirably in my first role as cocksucker, and I don’t believe that he ever came close to orgasm. But I gave it a good go, tried to keep my teeth off of it for the most part and in general just pretended that I had my lips around a giant clit. He didn’t complain, but after a while he tapped me out with the gentle pull on my shoulder.
The sensation of going from cock to mouth aligned the flavor of his saliva with the scent of his crotch in a way that sticks with me. We’d gone down on one another and we were kissing again and he had his hand on my cock and he was making it clear with firm but gentle pulling in a certain direction, what was next on the menu.
So I did what I thought gay sex was all about back in those days; I fucked a man in the ass.
He’s on his back, jerking his cock and he ends with coming into his belly hair. Which, being near hairless at the time, was a new visual experience for me, come in body hair. And I’m relieved. I’ve done my duty and gotten him off. And I can go home now with my hard cock that doesn’t seem like it’s interested in coming. But he’s not interested in me going home yet. He feels like it’s his job to make sure I have an orgasm my first time with a man. I know this because he tells me this.
And, I’m on my back again and he’s sucking on my cock again and I’m still about as hard as humanly possible; but I’m not going anywhere. He pulls up off my cock and goes down on my balls. Which, for some reason I hadn’t ever realized was even a possibility to that point. The sixteen and seventeen-year-old girls in my hometown had never sucked on my balls. It turns out I like having my balls sucked.
And then he’s got his hands under my thighs and he’s pushing them up and back, pointing my cock straight at my face and then his tongue is on my asshole. Having your asshole licked could be just about the greatest simple pleasure that life has to offer. That’s the thought that came into my head in that moment and I’ve experienced little since that has changed my opinion. And he can tell he’s onto something now and he gets into it and I have one of those sexual out-of-body experiences that normally, infrequently, only accompany very powerful orgasms, but still I don’t come.
He comes up for air, and still holding my thighs back, leans in to kiss me. And I’m a bit taken aback by the thought of him kissing me after sticking his tongue in my ass. But, it occurs to me that he just did me the major courtesy of sticking his tongue in my ass, and besides, I am cleaner than I’ve ever been before.
While we’re kissing again, I feel what I can soundly assume is the head of his cock rubbing up and down my ass crack and he pauses, right at my asshole, and looks me in the eyes. And I balk for the first time.
I don’t know why. I don’t know why everything else was cool and then the bell went off in my head when it came to receiving him. I’d had a long-standing sexual fascination with my asshole, dating back to early masturbatory experiments, when I would stand on the bathroom counter, one foot on either side of the sink and jerk off backwards, with my head between my legs so I could look at it in the mirror. But something about him putting his cock in there, was something I could not let happen. I may have felt what the girls who would make out with me and let me do anything but fuck them felt. I can’t be sure.
So, he seems disappointed. But, he’s committed to getting me off and so he rolls back onto the bed and tells me to get over him and fuck him in the mouth. Which I do. Forever. And I’m thinking about Jules Verne, this teenage girl I know from downtown, and I’m thinking about the time she made me feel her tits to see if they weren’t the “firmest tits I’d ever felt.” I’m thinking about fucking Jules Verne in her pussy when I finally, achingly, cum in this guy’s mouth.
He thanks me. I have no idea why. We get dressed. Apparently washing is for before, not after. We get back in the 280Z and head off into morning rush hour traffic, back to my apartment.
When we get there, he leans over the console and tries to kiss me. But I can see my roommate in there eating breakfast, at the kitchen table, by the window and I balk for the second time. Freddy Mercury reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a business card. His real name is on it, and his phone number, and his business address, and a rather beautiful illustration of a parrot. He’s a travel agent it seems, and he tells me to call him, you know, if I ever want to get out of town.
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