The Southwest—Late Summer 1953

That day’s leg of the Minotaurs’ run ended a couple hours before nightfall, and their fire found welcome in the far-out dark of the last campground before the unbroken woods. A few motorcycles still ripped around the lumpy, bumpy tree-dotted stretch around the campsite. The young bucks tried to climb different rises, playing king of the mountain up the walls of a nearby washout. The washout grew into a deep ravine, like an unstitched cut in the flesh of the earth, away from where the men would eventually fall, passed out on pills and liquor, or drop face-first from raw-dicked exhaustion, so the young bucks went further and further out, seeking challenges. Some were Minotaurs and some wanted to be—taking the opportunity now to try and impress the motorcycle club officers.

When they circled back, their ripping bikes sent up dust and an engine buzzroar that nearly doused the crackle of the high flames, lifting the raucous free-for-all to a new height. Pie-eyed men stood in small groups drinking beer or whiskey and placing bets on which of two bottoms could take the most men in two-ended fuckings, up the ass and down the throat, before passing out from the tireds or a bad cum-to-air ratio.

Beug had put a good drunk on with a club couple officers at The Waterfront, had taken up an invitation to ride with them, and they’d liked him. He was a handsome young man whose gray eyes warmed when he smiled at you, he was a mechanic, and, apparently the angst of Old Man Gilbey and Dead Level Road had some divine purpose, because they certainly liked the way could handle a bike. It was all a pile of luck. He’d tired of the rough trade at the Waterfront—yearning for something better than one night stands, but still not anxious to “forget Sterns” as he put it. The Minotaurs was a gay motocycle club, and he’d been in its brotherhood for the past six months. Their initiation—which required, at various points, that the initiate prove he could jack-off and come while riding a minimum of sixty miles per hour, that he be able to take his bike completely apart and put it together again, that he be covered from head to toe in engine grease and wrestle whomever the Minotaurs chose—had reminded him fondly of the day he earned his shellback certificate.

The record books say that the Satyrs, formed in 1957, is the oldest surviving homosexual motorcycle club, but the Minotaurs were founded in 1949 after Animal and Spartacus were kicked out of another MC for being exclusively gay and would have a good run until about 1965. To hear Animal tell it, their first club had betrayed them. In fact, while any thrill, any diversion, anything that got your rocks off was thumbs-up, and while some of the guys would punk for each other if they hadn’t found any women, when there were girls around, the old MC had decided that the queer guys skewed the mix—hurting their chances at scoring. The club voted them out and the president asked them to turn in their colors. Over a beer and a campfire, Animal had once told Beug with a grin, “Well, I tore their fuckin’ patch off the back of my fuckin’ vest, threw it on the ground and pissed on it. Fucking assholes. So their president is completely fuckin’ dumbstruck. He’s like—” Animal’s broad face slackened so that he looked stupid and zombified. “—and he says, ‘You’re monsters! You guys are fucking monsters!’ So me and Spartacus, we thought about monsters and decided that Minotaurs are pretty fucking cool—I mean, all the tough guys in the myths are afraid of the monster in the maze.”

That had been at the beginning of spring. Now as the fingers of summer were loosening their grip, Beug spied One-Eyed Onaly leaned back against a tree-trunk with some friendly little fucker sucking him off. Three or so others had made a kind of love fort in a clump of bushes and would be covered with chigger bites come morning, while Spartacus—known for his Roman-style leather armor, complete with the sky-brushing bristles on his helm—tottered from place to place showering the guys with colorful handfuls of pills. Spartacus the Oddity had a tendency to call these runs “sabbaticals;” the booze and pills, likewise, were known as “sacraments.”

Beug stood just at the edge of firelight looking loose, buzzed on whiskey but still slightly too serious for his mid-twenties, his thumbs in his back pockets, jeans soft with wear and dust, squinting out as someone on a white bike spun out on one side, catching the ’cycle’s fall with a last-minute kicked-out leg. The rider hooted out his thrill to the others and took off into the dark again. Though the noise of cycle engines came from all directions and distances, the majority had kicked down for the night; the machines nodded off in quiet, precise rows, chrome gleaming icily when the moon peered between clouds. Beug shivered as the wind hit the sweat under his heavy leather jacket; a brief chill in the pleasantly warm night made him dread the eventual end of summer.

From the bikes came a jingling man—Vic—stumbling under the weight of some heavy chain. A scarred gash angling out from the outer edge of Vic’s eyebrow to the edge of his receding hairline seemed to flicker and pulse with the firelight. He grinned at Beug as he approached, his iron-colored curls wind-twisted and sticking wildly out from his leathering, wind-cut face. “Hey, c’mon. Animal’s at it again.”

Beug pushed his elbows out once and relaxed. “Lesson time?”

Vic kept walking, stabbed his head toward a beer stash. “Hell-yeah. Grab you a beer and come on.”

Beug pulled out a couple beers from an iced bucket sitting on the seat of an overturned picnic table. In the table’s hollow sprawled a fallen-out man, naked but still in his biker boots, one meaty hand cupping his balls and his mouth wide open. He must have been the first to nod off—someone had fingerpainted TOILET across his chest with engine grease and he reeked of beer and piss. Pig in mud, Beug thought.

Vic stopped, turned back to find the hold up, suddenly calling out, “Hey, d’jya look at these?”

Beug sauntered up with the wet, cold bottles. “Chains, right?” Since it was Animal they were talking about, he figured they were for a beating.

“Manacles. Wrist-size.” Vic held the heavy pile of chain out so Beug could notice the ironwork. The cuffs closed with a hex bolt and nut, but Vic could yank those out and use a padlock if he wanted. He beamed as Beug fingered the cuffs, stewing over the possibilities, and when Beug looked up again, Vic added, “Fully adjustable. Had ’em made long enough so we’d’n loop ’em over a branch and lock ’em tight.”

Beug nodded and they walked on, quiet themselves—Beug carrying the beers, Vic with his new toys—surrounded with far off laughing and engines running and all different intimate moans and smacks and slaps and glocking noises. A series of four dark figures raced through the bushes. Beug squinted as he asked Vic, “So—where the hell’d you get those?” It looked like a wolf-chase, three howlers after some quiet, desperate, and definitely going-to-be-had piece of ass.

Vic bumbled over the uneven ground, turning his face sidelong to the younger fellow as he came to a halt. “Member how me and Minnow had to bust ass to catch up with y’all? Well, that foundry guy fixed ’em up for me.” Vic tossed his head to the west where they’d come from. “Said he’d make a collar and some leg irons, and I can get ‘em next time through.”

Beug nodded at the chains again—it was strange to see Vic humping his own shit—and asked, “So where’s your boy?”

Vic nodded toward the bikes. “Sent ’im after Mad Hettie.”

Off in the distance, they heard one of the younger guys call out an abrupt, “Jumpin’ Jesu—” that rose and fell sharply, punctuated with a “SHIT!” as he spilled, his bike’s engine snarling as it went down. They both peered out, then Beug said, “Sounds like you’re gonna have another boy, next time through.” If someone really busted up, they’d find out soon enough.

“Eager to please, ain’t ’e?” Vic laughed.

“Minnow’ll have to learn some Daddy tricks and act like a big boy.” Beug took a few steps and Vic dragged along.

“Shit, he’s already pissy ’cause I haven’t used these on him, and here I’m letting Animal use ’em on his own little tribulation. I told that jealous little fucker he best learn to serve and not worry ’bout what’s fair. Told ’im I’ll tell him what’s fair, all right and to bust his heart a while over my boots, right? To worry a little more about my hard-on and less about his own.”

Beug shook his head. “It’s hard bringing these boys up right.”

“Well, Minnow wadn’t in the Army or nothing. He just missed The War, so that’s part of the problem. No discipline.”

They skirted around a clump of young trees and undergrowth to find a second smaller fire and a growing cluster of men in a small clearing. The surrounding trees leaned in such a way as to make any neighboring society seem remote. Animal, a huge man with an equally broad head, whose belly warped his wide black belt—had to be in his early forties, stood smoking a fat cigar. The new novice, twenty-two years old—“Mr. Anything” they were calling him—knelt naked and blindfolded at Animal’s hip, hands clasped behind his head. Mr. Anything was already half-hard, crouching over to hide it, but Animal bent a little, grabbed a fistful of hair, and pulled him up again, easy as scruffing a wayward kitten, and growled, “Get those knees apart, boy. Don’t make me tell you again.”

“Yes, sir.”

Animal spied the chains and nodded at Vic, the half-smoked cigar pushing his lips into a semi-permanent snarl. Then he leaned down, his thick, black brows tangling over his bullish nose. “What’d you say?”

“Sir-yes-sir.”

Animal pulled up on Anything’s hair: “Get up!” He gave the kid a shove against a large tree, keeping a hand on him to “set” him there and told him to stay put.

Vic passed one of the long chains to Animal, then pointed to two trees that seemed about the right distance apart, indicating that he and Animal should throw an end over each of the lowest crotches, then showed the padlocks for hooking them in place. So they each threw an end over like a lazy lasso that hit with a metal-on-wood clatter. Vic waited while Animal pulled Anything over and fitted the cuffs on the kid’s wrists and kicked his feet apart so that he went from the shape of a human Y to that of a human X in two blinks of an eye. They pulled the free ends till the chains stretched taut, and instead of tying knots, each stuck a lock in his respective end link, each chain locked to itself in a long loop that kept the novice’s arms stretched tight as telegraph cables. Animal gave each one a tug to make sure it was good and fast.

Vic dropped out, taking one of the beers as Beug leaned in and whispered, “Those are some nice chains you got yourself.”

“Can’t wait to get the whole set,” Vic whispered back.

Minnow sidled up behind his topman smiling like a dog as Vic cut him out the corner of his eyes. If Minnow’d took much longer with Mad Hettie, he could forget wearing the brown cuffs he’d made the boy. He’d’ve beat the shit out of the son-of-a-bitch and let him find his own way back. Vic raised two connected fingers, caught the burly guy’s eye, and nodded toward Minnow. Animal jutted a chin out and Minnow started to move forward, but Vic yanked him back, hissing, “Not yet, you sonofabitch—just watch. He’ll let you know, and when he does, you go, give it to him, and traipse your ass right back. No bullshit.”

Animal signaled for Anything’s boots, and someone brought them over from the pile of neatly folded clothes and the bedroll. He quickly, gingerly put them on the young man, then proceeded to rope his ankles apart, this time tying them off at the base of the trees, to anchor him spread-eagled facing the crowd. Anything was answering reveille, hard as he was, and there wasn’t any hiding it.

“Now, just to be clear,” Animal said to his fledgling novice, pulling out the tobacco stump as he sized up the crowd, his face serious, even as he stumped and showcased, “You told me I could do anything I wanted, anything at all, that right?”

The blindfolded man’s chest seemed to swell. “Sir, yessir!”

Animal sucked his teeth and nodded, waddling slowly to the kid’s other side, the men giving him a wide, wide berth. “When I asked what you wanted from me, you told me, ‘You can do anything you want to do to me Mr. Animal, sir.’ That right?”

There was a clear ring this time as young man bellowed, “Sir, yes sir!”

Coming up close, Animal put a hand on the boy’s ass, giving it a rough little rub. The men on the ends of the great crescent saw the boy’s prick visibly jump at the contact. “And when I asked you what you wouldn’t allow, you said, ‘No limits, Mr. Animal, sir, anything you want. Anything at all.’ That right?”

“Sir, yessir!” The kid nodded.

Animal mugged a holy shit for the crowd then, having established that “anything goes,” returned his attention to the pale carcass that had so readily thrown itself into his big meaty paws. Still, the men could hear just about every word Animal said as he frowned up into the boughs of the tree. “Now see, I’m of a mind to use you as my ashtray. You ever been burnt by a cee-gar?”

The kid went shock rigid. “No sir.”

Animal nodded, pacing a little, until he spoke in the kid’s other ear. “Real-ly?” He stepped under one of the outstretched arms and pressed his whole body against the kid’s back, the hand with the cigar—hot end out—around the kid’s middle. “Now, how come you lay yourself out for old Animal, hmm?” He eased quietly to the boy’s other ear, stage-whispering “Why you think they call ’im Animal?” then stepped back out between the boy and the crowd.

Beug closed his eyes. He could imagine how the kid must feel Animal enveloping him like a voice in the fog, Animal’s voice coming from all blind directions.

“Your mama know you’re out here in the woods,” Animal called, “all naked and tied up, playing cowboy and injun with these ol’ perverts?”

Beug opened his eyes. Animal had stepped behind the boy again, his free hand rubbed the kid’s ass slowly and firmly, until the boy eased back against him, leaning back as much as the bonds allowed as the big man growled into his left ear. “What on earth did you think ’ould happen—you’d get your ass fucked a little bit? Oh, well—that could happen.”

Animal patted the other asscheek, leaning to the right now. “On the other hand, I could rent your ass out—penny a throw—till I got a hundred dollars in my pocket. These boys is plenty horny, lookin’ at you.” He paused and suddenly the crickets and tree frogs sang clear and free above everything. No one could say when the motorcycles had stopped.

Animal laid a palm across the boy’s belly. “And I’ll bet don’t nobody knows you can guess where you’re at.”

The kid seemed relaxed, turned on to the talk, loosening against Animal’s touch, waxing to it, more pliable all the time. Animal put the cigar back between his lips and pulled out the knife he carried on his belt, and, holding the kid tightly from behind so he couldn’t jump, laid it cold and flat against the kid’s chest. “What is that? What is it? Ew-wee, that’s cold, ain’t it?” Animal traced over the skin lightly with the dull side of the blade, resting the point against a pale nipple, pressing flesh against blade with his thumb. “Oo-oo, sharp! What’ll you say?—I think it’s a knife!”

Beug felt a nudge in his ribs, saw Vic smirking at him, and grinning, nodded back. They watched as the boy started to squirm, then thought better of it and went still, breathing hard through his nose. Animal traced a line down the flat stomach and into the pubes, leaning heavily now to one side, his massive arm bringing the knife up gently under the kid’s ball sac.

Vic and Beug looked at each other, Vic sucking in his cheeks and rolling his eyes. Beug, mouthing, “Vi-car-i-ous,” nodded toward Minnow who frowned intently at the unfolding scene. Vic checked his boy, then rolled his eyes and snorted.

“Tell me, now, son,” Animal poured out, slow as blackstrap molasses, “Did you ever stop to think about the possibilities?”

The kid kept his body rigidly still, all of it, except his hard no-shaking head.

Animal let the knife down, put it away, and pulled the cigar out of his mouth again, exhaling a smoky halo around the boy’s head, calling out over his shoulder: “Anything! You promised me complete power over you!” Animal brought the cigar around to hover over the boy’s chest, saying, “Well, get ready, boy, ’cause I got me a whole heap of things I want to do to you.”

Animal waited, standing very still. There was a long pause until finally the boy broke the quiet. “Sir?”

The hot tip of the cigar quickly touched the boy’s chest—long enough for him to jump—then just as quickly came away, Animal rubbing the boy’s belly with his other hand.

“Yeah!” he whispered, watching the young body flex and release as the boy eased down off his toes. “Yeah, you’re still hard—that’s it.” Animal laughed softly, pushing the hard lump in the crotch of his jeans against the boy’s backside. “I do like a boy who gives himself completely.”

He stepped around to the front and nodded to Minnow, who brought up Mad Hettie. There was a sudden stir in the crowd. The hardcocks grinned. Boys shook their heads in disbelief, jumpy with lightning, thinking, It ain’t me. The less reliable few imagined someone’d call the cops, landing the whole lot—meaning themselves—in prison. They kept up secret contingencies to hightail it on bike, and if there wasn’t time—screw everyone, each for himself—race for the woods on foot.

Animal took the chainsaw—Mad Hettie, a tequila-crazed perversion of the word machete—and raised her high with both hands as he spoke around the butt of his cigar.

“Now, son, I have looked for you all my life: an altruist so selfless, so giving, he don’t hold nothing back, but I never had the fortune of anyone to tell me I could do anything I wanted, anything ’thout bounds, till you came along. So I just want to thank you, last of all, sweet boy, for offering yourself up as, well—a very human sac’rfice, an’ allowing this bit o’ magnificence we’re about right now.”

Beug saw the kid, pecker hard, grinning below the blindfold, his lips between his teeth in a blind effort to contain the pour-over pride of having won Animal’s words of gratitude. But then Animal took a couple steps back and gave Mad Hettie’s cord a terrible, quick pull and she sang out much like a ’cycle engine, only with a higher, more nasally tone. The smile washed out to a yawp of disbelieving horror as the kid heard what it was.

Animal gave a whoop and someone hollered, “Skin him alive!”

The kid panicked, hanging all his weight forward on the chains, digging in with balls of his feet, arching his back, flinging himself backward with all his weight. Tightly tied, he got little momentum, but it didn’t keep him from trying again and again, working up into a wild foamy frenzy.

“A-HAHAHAHAHahahaha!” Animal crackled. “Buckets of blood for everyone! I’m gonna have me a big old bath in it!”

Beug whooped and yelled out, “Yeah!” and fancied he heard it answered from somewhere around the other end of the crowd’s swollen crescent. Had to give it to the tough little bastard, he wasn’t crying yet. Most of the others in the Anything clan had cried by this point, started pissing and shitting themselves by now—this’d be something worth remembering

Animal stepped in closer to the boy, eyeballing him narrowly, keeping the chainsaw out and away, as if trying to decide on which cut to take before getting into the mess of his work. Mad Hettie was heavy, but he held her carefully in one fist while reaching down to wrap his other hand around the boy’s meat and give it a rough tug. “Your ears first, then this!” he shouted, “—you keep dead still—maybe you live longer, got it? Maybe savor you a while.”

Both hands on the saw again, Animal watched how the sweat welled so suddenly on the kid’s upper lip and down his ribcage. He admired the musculature as it gave show to the bone below, watched how the kid panted, his dick still hard but looking doubtful now—going down to half-mast as his lips pressed and twisted together in an effort not to shriek.

It was time to break the kid, turn him into human hamburger.

Animal swung the rumbling saw slowly in, watching the kid go deathly still with terror as the buzzing filled his ears and the oily smell of metallic friction bit at his nosehairs. “Keeeep still. Keeeeep still,” Animal soothed, “I only want your ears now…”

Keeping his head surprisingly still as the saw came within five inches of his head, Anything howled with terror, mouth yawning with the still-headed terror of a baby bird, spurring a couple of whoops and pockets of nervous laughter as he lost it. His cock shrank as he pissed down his leg, and his legs gave out

Animal suddenly stopped the saw. The kid hung limp and sobbing from the chains, so hopeless that he did not hear, or hearing, failed to recognize the cessation of the chainsaw’s roaring buzz.

Animal lay the silenced Mad Hettie down to sleep at the foot of a tree—on the far side of one of these pillars of this young Solomon, out of the boy’s view. He unlashed the ankle ropes and pulled off the boots, feeling the feet for that blue-cold of shock. Meanwhile, about half of the men cleared out—being too jazzed up to bother with how the boy came out, all wanting some little scene of their own, even a little handjob if they could get it.

Animal motioned to Vic and then, on second thought, to Beug as well. They came up, each to a side, and held up the heaving, sobbing, limp-dicked, and trembling kid as Animal loosed the wrist cuffs. They stood quiet, waiting for Animal’s mark. Minnow approached, his eye on the chains, wanting to be noticed, and Vic, pointedly ignoring Minnow, breathed, “Hey, where you want to put him down?”

Animal nodded toward the fire. “Over there. He’s in shock. Gotta warm him up.”

“Minnow,” Vic ordered, “get that bedroll and lay it out on that flat spot by the fire.”

Minnow skulked into the shadows, bringing the bedroll out, his hair sticking up noticeably in the firelight, making it look like he had a head full of needle-y meringue-peaks as he unrolled the blankets and smoothed them out. Vic noted the concern now come into Minnow’s hands as he felt over the bedding, pulling up a corner and throwing twigs into the fire, and thought maybe his boy wasn’t a complete good-for-nothing waste of time after all. Maybe he’d work the boy up a brown leather vest afterall.

They hauled the clammy, snot-dripping kid over and Minnow watched as the three masters eased him down. Beug sat behind pale, limp young man, legs wide, supporting him in a sitting position, Beug’s open jacket wrapped around the kid’s shoulders like protective wings—Beug’s heat against the kid’s clammy back. Animal squatted before the boy’s huddled legs and carefully lifted off the blindfold, sweat pulling his hair up into boyish spikes. The boy looked very much like a kid with a fever—when he peered through slit eyelids, his eyes and expression were feverdull and his lips shivered—though he’d stopped crying now.

“How you doin’?” Animal asked, eyes glinting from the deep creases in his face.

Mr. Anything turned his head and stared out dully at the fire.

Animal ignored the small slight, pulling up one limp hand then the other, inspecting the raw wrists, feeling the elbows and shoulders, telling him to bend this way, now that, the kid complying in the smallest, dullest of ways.

Animal turned to Vic, who’d silently gestured for Minnow to get the chains down quietly. “Bring that canteen?” Vic nodded to Minnow and Minnow hustled it over.

Animal took it, wet one of his kerchiefs, and washed the kid down lightly, paying close attention to the wrists before bathing that flat-expressioned face. Wiping the left ear softly then gently taking his damp chin, Animal turned the kid’s head away from the fire, watching the kid’s eyes pass calmly over his face and seeing the dim spark of wonder behind them, the curiosity regarding what he’d just experienced, the why of it. As the kid stared out into the cool dark, Animal wet the rag again and, holding the kid’s chin easily—this was the side he’d threatened with the chainsaw—wiped the right ear and the temple, smoothing back the hair.

That little acorn stayed calm. Tough nut to crack all the way around. The masters nodded to themselves and to one another. Beug eased out from behind the kid and together he, Vic, and Minnow left Animal and his charge alone. For better, for worse, they were bonded now—only the next crucial hours would tell if a trust might build up between them or if the kid would creep uncertainly away, disappearing, his return doubtful, as Animal slumbered. As it later turned out, the kid would be quiet for a few days, afraid of Animal, yet clinging to him.

Beug broke off from the others and headed toward his sleeping bag, alone, musing that the boy just might have the makings of a top somewhere in him, but that would be Animal’s call in the long run.

 

©2003 Deb Lewis - Contributor's Bio