Gay Erotic Stories

Call Me Kjære Written and translated from the original Dutch version by Henry Bayne I originally wrote this story in Dutch and entered it in a story-writing contest in “De Gay Krant” (a Dutch weekly newspaper for gays) in 1993, where it won second prize. This will be the first time it appears anywhere in English. The first two paragraphs are only a little different from the mandatory common opening for all of the stories submitted in that contest. Beginning with the third paragraph the story is entirely mine. (I will soon be entering the Dutch and German versions of the story in the appropriate foreign language sections.) It happened just yesterday [ a day in 1993], when Will had entered the pub after leaving a meeting at work that had gone on far too long. It looked pretty obvious to him, there in the pub, that the wink from the guy on the other end of the bar was meant as, well, let’s just say “a warm invitation.” But talking about “looking”, the guy himself looked one hell-of-a-lot like somebody Will had known long ago. The same dusky-colored hair, though now, to be sure, infused with a charming hint of gray at the temples. And the same bright, clear blue eyes, but now adorned with telling but equally charming crow’s-feet. “When was it?”, he thought, straining and stretching his memory. When was it? At least 25 years ago. No, now he remembered. It was 1965. May 1965. And the wink back then was just as charming, just as enticing as this one. But then again, it wasn’t even a wink. It was just a look that was clearly meant for Will. A look, a gaze coming from sparkling eyes… No! Sparkling’s not the right word. It was more like there were sparks emanating from those eyes. The sparks of a welding torch that could burn their way right through steel plating. What was that guy’s name? Charles? Carl? No, Kjære! That was his name! Kjære. It had been on the ferry boat between Oslo in Norway and Lübeck in northern Germany. Will was on his way home from a field trip to the Finmark region in Norway. Kjære, a Norwegian, was also a student. On his way to some place or other in Germany. He did have blue eyes, that he did. But he wasn’t by any means your stereotype Norwegian. He was dark-haired and tanned, just like this guy in the pub now. Dear Jesus, this guy had the same intriguing, glass-blue eyes, that felt like they could look directly into your body, into your very soul. And if that’s what the guy wanted to do, you felt he could look right through you. But Will knew the guy wasn’t looking through him, he was looking into him, looking through the outer shell into the very core of his heart, focussing like a laser beam on the mid-point of Will’s very being. He felt something happening inside him, in the vicinity of his heart. A burning sensation. Something that seemed to cause countless drops of molten steel to trickle over his viscera, down, down into the deepest extensions of his torso. Yes, back then Will had felt it too. From the first glance. He had felt it profoundly. But all the feelings that touched him were forbidden. Verboten! Interdit! With all his mental might he endeavored to suppress them, as he had done so often. There was only one feeling he knew that was strong enough to resist this repression. A feeling which had developed itself in the course of the preceding ten years, by virtue of abundant practice and experience, into a steel-clad giant: fear. Not that he had been afraid of Kjære. That wasn’t it at all. Bill was afraid of himself and of all that which had been brooding and brewing inside him for these ten years. And also afraid of the rivulet of molten metal which was wending its way like a swelling stream down his lower abdomen. And he feared the metal ingot too, which was forming and hardening in his loins. Back then he had tried to look the other way, but he found himself looking back as often as he looked away. He hadn’t wanted to get involved with those hypnotizing eyes and had bored his own eyes, as best he could, into a Norwegian newspaper, which he would not easily have been able to read, even if he had been able to concentrate. But it was all to no avail: like a maelstrom Kjære’s eyes had drawn him into the vortex. It was obvious that Kjære had chosen the spot where he was sitting with one purpose in mind. It was a seat in the corner, two or three tables away and directly opposite Will’s. There was nobody else in the vicinity, and even if there had been, Will wouldn’t have noticed it. Contrary to his own intentions, his whole mind, all his senses were absorbed by Kjære’s eyes and unable to even perceive anything or anybody else. Every time Will gazed up from his paper there was only one thing within his power to do: to peer hopelessly and , helplessly into the heart-rending beauty of that vortex. And yet, after a while Bill did become calmer. Fear had brought its ancient mechanism of defense into position: feigned though it was, a stern and steady coolness. Within, Will was still trembling, but eventually it was scarcely noticeable in his hands. Only when he turned the pages of the paper, could a perceptive listener hear the vibrations, amplified as they were by large sheets of newspaper. "Er du virkelig nordmann?", [Are you really Norwegian] asked Kjære all at once. Although he could undoubtedly tell by Will’s “foreign”clothing that he surely was not, even though the Norwegian paper, which Will was so intently “reading” seem to offer reasonable justification for the question. “Snakker du norsk?” [Do you speak Norwegian?] Kjære’s voice echoed mellifluously through the caverns in Will’s head. “Snakker du norsk? Snakker du norsk, norsk, norsk?” It was a warm voice. Both firm and gentle at the same time. Not velvety. Not artificial. Genuine, honest, boyish, masculine. “Mener du meg? [Do you mean me?] the coquet reply. “Nei. Jeg kommer ut Holland. Jeg snakker ikke så gott norsk.’’ [No. I’m from Holland. I don’t speak Norwegian very well.] Which was true, for he really didn’t speak Norwegian very well. “Then you speak probably good English, ikke sant? [don’t you?] flattered Kjære. Gone coolness! Gone cool. “Yes, I speak better English.” Now there was no more escape for Will. The ice was broken and the passage opened up. Tacking back and forth between the empty tables and chairs Kjære navigated over to the spot where Will was sitting and moored up opposite him. Oh, everybody knows the course of the ensuing conversation: What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do? A thousand times you have the same conversation. A thousand times you forget it all immediately. But this time was different. A thousand times during such conversations Will had had to struggle not to forget it all on the spot. But now, in accordance with his oh so proper upbringing, he asserted his every moral effort to do just that: forget it all on the spot, before he became entangled in the anchor line, which would pull him down with the anchor into the unknown depths. That upbringing, which was now shouting its warnings in Will’s ears, drew its strength from the silence, with which it had governed Will’s actions and non-actions in the past. As far back as Will could remember, neither command nor interdiction had ever been spoken aloud. Never had he been told: You must behave or feel this way or that way, be like this or be like that. But that he must not be like that, that was something he had understood from the moment that it began. And from the beginning, somewhere in between his tenth and his twelfth year, he had been fighting a desperate battle with himself, a battle--which was lost at the very outset. How often hadn’t he, when he was fourteen, lain in the dunes between Het Zwanewater and the beach. Hoping to be able to spy on some nude men. But with one frightening exception, he’d always been able to maintain his distance and go unnoticed. So it was his secret. There was just that one time, when a man walking along the edge of the dune, had come up behind him unnoticed, up to the spot where he was lying and watching two men with hypnotic fascination. Two men lying together on their backs side by side down in the dell. Right up against each other. Head to foot and foot to head. Each with his right hand in between the slightly raised thighs of the other. [Het Zwanewater is a nature preserve near the seacoast of North Holland. In translation one would call it: ”Swan Lake”. The dunes and the adjoining beach were long ago frequented by (gay) nudists and in the 70’s the beach became the first legal public nudist beach in Holland.] “G ’morning, me-boy!” said the man who’d come up behind him. “Nice view?” Startled, Will had turned his head around and looked up so suddenly that his neck threatened to go cramped on him. For a moment the fear, the shame and the pain had paralyzed Will and he could get a word out of his throat. The man, dressed in minimal-sized, thin speedo swim trunks was becoming visibly aroused. But it was not clear, whether that was a result of what he had seen Will doing or of that, which Will himself had been watching. “Ya don’ need a be afraid a me, me-boy. I ain’t gonna hurt ya.” Said the man in an attempt to assuage Will’s fright. He was now no more than two yards away from Will. At first Will froze up like a frightened hedgehog, even though he had turned his body halfway around in his first fright, so that he was exposing more of himself than he wanted to. And then, almost as suddenly as the man had appeared, Will jumped up and ran. He ran along the edge of the dune, nearly stumbling over some strands of blackberry vines, which scratched his now fright-numbed ankles severely. Ran back through the dunes to his bicycle. The intense images of the men in the dell below him, the moving magic wand in the other man’s swim trunks and his own excitement. They all flashed repeatedly in inexplicable and inimitable sequences before his mind’s eye. He wanted to go back. He wanted to see more. To know more. To feel more. But he didn’t dare. He felt the repercussions of his heartbeat in his head. The dust he and a sudden breeze had kicked up were forcing tears from his eyes and the hot, dry summer air was choking him. He bicycled back to Schagen [a small town in North Holland only a few miles from the coast and the aforementioned dunes], entered through the rear entrance of his father’s shop and ran up the stairs to his bedroom, which was in the tower above the street entrance. There he lay down on his bed and remained lying there for more than an hour, shivering and choking back as best he could the sobs which kept welling up from within him. Until ultimately his hands, as though manipulated by some dark force outside of him, stretched themselves out towards his groin and gently began to caress the bulge they found there. That week Will didn’t go to confession. And afterwards, when under the always unspoken pressure from his parents he did go, he answered the questions about “unclean thoughts and desires” as vaguely as possible. He never uttered a word to anyone about that afternoon in the dunes. And the question, “Or have you committed a worse sin?”, he answered with an unabashed “No, father.” Because that he couldn’t even confess to himself, much less to the priest. And although he repented again and again and had on countless occasions since forced himself to do penance, it was all to no avail. He could give himself no absolution. And even though he did everything within his power to lock up those urges and desires in a steel-lined closet, they always escaped. They crept out through the keyholes. They lay in waiting like incubi under his bed. They oozed out the faucet under the shower. And here he was now, a student, twenty-four years old, far from home and far from everyone he knew and everyone who knew him. “Just call me Kjære”, began the Norwegian. [Kjære is a term of endearment in Norwegian, approximately equivalent to “dear” or “honey”. Will thinks it’s a real name.] “I’m Will.” The rest of the night they had talked and talked. In Engish. About themselves and their studies. About their pasts and their plans and hopes for the future. About God and the World. About the Body and the Soul. About Love and Death. Two students traveling deck-class from Oslo to Lübeck. And before the ferry reached the port of Lübeck in the morning, they had touched each other deeply and been touched. Of course they had to freshen up for the day ahead of them. So they went below deck at about five in the morning to take a shower. The other passengers were still sound asleep in their cabins, so they had the washrooms and showers all to themselves. Shivering shyly they got undressed and each of them took a shower stall for himself, and the room was soon enshrouded in a warm mist, which served to increase the feeling of secure isolation that the shower stalls already offered them. “Can you not scrub me the back?” resounded Kjære’s voice through Will’s head. “Back, back, back” it echoed on. “Okay. I come over to you.” Responded Will, his voice cracking, as if he were fourteen again. Will draped his towel, which had been hanging over the shower stall door, around his waist and after a quick, almost frightened glimpse through the changing room, he shot like a flash into Kjære’s shower stall. As Will entered the stall, he saw that Kjære was standing with his back towards him. But when Will turned around to hang his towel over the stall door, he felt wet-soapy, warm, smooth arms slide around his waist and the scraping of Kjære’s unshaven two-day beard on his back. Balancing between fear and desire, between intense shame and the most divine sensation of happiness he had ever known in reality, Will felt his legs trembling and he was scarcely able to keep on his feet. What happened then was no reality. I must have been a dream. Will couldn’t talk about it. Not then with Kjære. Neither while it was happening nor directly afterwards. And later not even with himself. When the ferry arrived in Lübeck, Kjære’s sister and brother-in-law were there to pick him up. Kjære’s and Will’s farewells were restrained, almost cool. But they did exchange addresses. And sure enough, shortly after returning to his home in Amsterdam, Will received a letter from Kjære. It consisted only of a poem. Equals underway we were. Just seeing one another, We made each other stir And rise and touch the ot-her. My fingers knocked upon your chest. The lid, it would not open. A letter on your lips I pre-ssed. You sent it back unopened. We've both gone now our se-parate ways, Since now your chest's still locked. I only hope you'll count the days, ‘Til once again I knock. Although Will had dreamt a thousand times of Kjære and his experience with him on the ferry boat, dreamt in waking and in sleep, he’d never got together the courage to write him back. He preferred to continue playing possum. After all, he didn’t even want to admit to himself what was going on inside him. Within two years Will was married. And it wasn’t a bad marriage. Within five years he had three daughters. (Thank God they were daughters, he sometimes thought.) And his life all went just fine. Happy family life. Good husband. Conscientious, loving father. Healthy life. Good citizen. Thoroughly proper existence. In the course of the last ten or fifteen years that undesired desire had cropped up from time to time and tried to get Will in its power. But now Will’s resistance was less cramped and convulsive. He had gotten a bit wiser, riper, milder. Through the media the tidal wave of the “sexual revolution” had reached even Will so that now he knew what had been going on inside him. He still suppressed it and still didn't like to call it by its name, but now it was no longer blind fear. It was a conscious, rational choice. Love and mutual trust between him and his wife. The feeling of responsibility towards his own family. These were now his motives. Not panic, not unbridled fear of his own dark feelings. Yes, and then yesterday evening in the pub. Coming in there and seeing that guy and getting that look from him and knowing what was happening. Recognizing the fluttery feeling inside him. Recognizing the feeling in both senses of the word. Knowing it and accepting it as valid. It was as if a fuse in the automatic security system had blown and suddenly he had heard himself almost audibly asking, “Why not?” And after taking one more drink to still the butterflies, which were congregating in his stomach, he had walked over to the guy and said in his best, though very rusty Norwegian, ‘’Er du kansje [maybe] nordmann? Snakker du norsk.” He was sure at the time, that the guy would think he was off his rocker. “Jamenn er jeg det!” [I sure-as-hell am!] answered the other and added. “Call me Kjære!” In an explosion of recognition, surprise and enthusiasm Will grabbed Kjære’s hand and began to shake it. But he had scarcely begun, when he dropped it and threw both his arms around Kjære’s neck. And while he looked into Kjære’s eyes with his own now sparkling eyes, Will said, “You come now with me! My chest is unlocked!” Comments very welcome: henrybayne@hotmail.com