Gay Erotic Stories

Arabesque (dedicated to Hubert Crackanthorpe) The sun covered everything in a thick layer of light and dust. In the morning when the streets were still cool, one could proceed outside without being subject to the merciless summer heat. But by the time the sun had reached its apex in the afternoon, the pavements and streets were turned into shimmering fields of heat haze. The market venders would strip to their waists, revealing tanned bodies with muscles toned by lives of hard labor. Everything was for sale in those markets, of course. Even the vendors themselves. This was Tangier. Tangier as I remember it. When I arrived, it seemed as though I already was familiar with the city. Maybe I saw it in one of the many dreams that had filled my school days, like bubbled images of fulfillment and longing, trailing along in the wintry dryness of Oxford. The only thing that broke my monotonous captivity-- my education, that is-- were the many hours I spent filling my mind with exotic images of beautiful men, toiling in black onyx waters in some impossible port of call. Those dreams were particularly like the delicate screens my mother had in her dressing room-- inlaid with mother of pearl, adorned with emerald geishas and young boy prostitutes whose red lamps were polished rubies. The swirls of gold and silver along the lacquered surface inspired so many strange fancies in me. Just a look at those screens was enough to send me far off, into quite another world, where I was the only one in the great rambling house of my father's ancestors. There, alone in the endless halls of light, I would run my fingers along the walls, and all the doors and windows would burst open and I would float on the suffocating summer breeze out into the endless greenery of an imagined country. I determined, after I had finished with Oxford, to leave England at once. My education had been too perfect-- it had convinced me that the only successful endeavor of English culture had been the brutal usurpation of other cultures by the process known to history as colonialism, and known to man's silent moral soul as terror. I had promised my father, at his deathbed, to become a barrister and take up the trade in London. But of course, my mother knew that I had made this promise only to placate my dying father, and give him a few last hours of peace. She knew that my spirit could not be confined to the island. She knew that I was like her, that in the twisting spiral helixes which make up our inheritance, I had the wanderlust that had plagued her early life and made her married life misery. She gave me money and a stern warning as to my extravagant ways, and in the typical British fashion, showed up to my departure in black; a black stole and black heels, black dress and black hose, with a fashionable hat overhung by a wisp of veil. She pressed my hand in hers, and smiled at me. There was nothing more she could do, really. She knew. She knew. Steam exploded. London vanished behind me, contracted into a circle of fire and smoke and ash that spewed from the locomotive steaming towards Bristol. And from Bristol to Tangier. I was an ex-patriot; I was an exile. I boldly tied a purple scarf around my neck as I stood on the deck of the ship, as it docked in Tangier. I stood there knowing at once what was to become of me. I had the sense at that moment of transcending history, and puncturing that veil of reality that seems to strangle every sensory perception into the harsh metaphors of rationality. I was beyond history, no longer in time, no longer projecting towards or away from a certain point. I tilted my head and let the breeze billow my scarf out before me. Could I be anything but who I was, then, there, knowing, that here I was, my name shattering in my ears like the deafening foghorn of the ship, sliding into the oleaginous waters of Tangier's port like a phallus into the mysteries of woman? No. I was on the deck there, all poetry ever written or thought streaming through my mind, which was no longer with me, nor anywhere, but in the empyrium somewhere, a long way away, in mere phosphorescence perhaps. The mere matters of taking a flat and organizing a domestic routine were nothing, they took no time, and soon I had established myself in grand style. To stave off inevitable boredom, I kept a steady stream of dancers, prostitutes, fellow ex-patriots, and friends from home proceeding through my part of Tangier. At first I could do nothing. I was paralyzed by the vast breadth of possibilities before me. Opium was as cheap as life in Tangier. Boys of every conceivable kind could be purveyed, for a night's entertainment or an hour's diversion, or a week's grand tour of the city. Every window in every ramshackle tenement was a slit into another state of being. Every eye reflected the deep knowledge of the Arabian world, coupled with the stunning emotional resonance of a people at once brilliant and subjugated. Five thousand years of vibrant, complex culture had been stamped into the dirt by eighty years of British ignorance. Oh yes. The boys, each with beauty so rare and so delicate, that I came to think of them all as fingerprints. So distinct, so unique, each of them. I could have ten of them at a time, and swim naked in my vast bath in the back room of my house like Tiberius, have them, my little fish, nibble me between my legs and bend over the edge of the tub and accept my wet, raging organ. Or have five of them in bed, or one of them as I took my lunch. I could tie them hand and foot, bind them however I liked, and take them in front of a crowd of street urchins I'd invited into my house for the express purpose of satisfying my voyeurism. The minarets and railings and yellow stone of the city mingled into an air that was like brick dust, and poured in from the street through the shutters of my flat. The city would spread itself luxuriously, sensuously, through my nostrils and lungs as I took my beautiful boy, felt my seed explode into the tight confines of his muscles in his rear. They would sometimes arch their back to accommodate me, or otherwise cry, with beautiful tears streaming down their angelic faces, at the sheer ecstasy of two bodies bonding totally, becoming one, in the city of heat. And then I met him. Of course, this is how it must go. I saw him one day from across a street, and, like Aschenbach (my hero, my God, oh dear Thomas how you did write!), I pursued him across the cluttered cityscape, braving beggars and peddlers and indigents. I found him entering a building in some decrepit little corner of Tangier. Decrepit, and forbidding. He entered a great four story structure and disappeared. I followed him. The inside of the structure was dominated by a series of long chambers, opened to the light of the sun by wide skylights on the ceiling. The rooms were supported by rows of elaborate columns, each buttressed in the Arabic fashion, resembling in detail the garden palaces of Moorish Spain. After a few moments of pacing these empty halls, I found Him in the furthest room of the place on the fourth story, seated with crossed legs on a dilapidated purple velvet pillow with fringe tassels. He sat by an opened window, and the weltering odors and lights of the city, distilled and baffled by shadow, fell on his face. Blond hair and blue eyes. I had not seen that since I left England. T. E. Lawrence, or something to that effect, so wrenchingly powerful was his jaw line, his acqualine nose, his character and the strength that rippled through him. He looked as though he knew something, and that look is the most powerful aphrodisiac I have ever encountered. He looked beautiful, young, untouched and in the very center of the lotus blossom unfolding that is youth. I saw through his skin into the pulsing desperation of his flesh, saw his fluids boiling and exploding through his veins, all belying his perfectly calm exterior. I could smell his fear and excitement, and at the same time, I saw on his face the expression of one who has lived for a hundred years, survived famines and sieges and revolutions, and knows everything that will transpire around him thereafter, only because he had learned to expect anything. And I knew I had found something that could hurt me. Everything else, after that moment, is nothing. The way he silently rose and padded across the room, began to follow me as I left the place and returned across town to my flat. the way, once we were inside, he peeled off his loincloth and let me touch his erect organ, thrusting through the damp nest of blond hair that crested around his groin. The way I touched his skin and felt nothing but muscles moving synchroniously beneath my touch. The way I enjoyed his mouth and his body for days after that, for untold hours, how even in sleep we unraveled the mystery of each other without ever saying a word. Long after every inch of his body became familiar, I could not stop craving it. I lived on him only, and food and water were only a distraction between myself and Him, my subsistence. It was utmost pain. My body was exhausted in the space of a few days, but my devotions continued. I kept hold over his body, I joined with it and punished it and rewarded it with kisses and jets of sperm that fell from me like opaline drops of love. I worshipped him, his urine and excrement, everything about him. I could not stop touching him, I wanted to eat him or become him or kill him, somehow totally assert myself into him and obliterate the wrenching passion in my loins in the process. Because, he was my angel. Golden boy, boy of light, illusion of the distance between myself and my heart. Mirage, beating faster in the air than either the spirit or mind. Rumi's poem coiling like opium smoke in the air, the Arab characters burning themselves into the drunken ecstasies of a midnight revery. How I ate you, consumed you, fed on every part of you. My desire only inflamed with every consummation of my love, every time you spilled your hot passion out of the tight corridors of your body into the floating world. Sanguine and olive and green and blue and so many colors that seemed to center around your eyes and wind around your naked body. Sweat and seed, everything became those two humors. I burned a candle and saw you inside the bluest essence of flame. My angel, my angel. When I draw my knife and pierce the fragile holdings of my heart, it will be my only surcease. Gabriel, Elijah, prophet and God and child and mortal, all in the same breath, the same kiss, the same lips that I had kissed four thousand years ago in dreams of ancient evenings. My angel my angel, I thank God I was given permission to die. Life lived in flames destroyed me, fulfillment destroyed me, the garden of your golden muscled body destroyed me, and I can only recreate in the quite oblivion. Next to you, this silence of my death is the only thing I have ever known that can even begin to express what unexpressables writhe in the darkness of life.