The usual disclaimers apply. And this is copyright material.

It's Cambridge in the very early morning of November 24, 1956. And you are there. Enjoy and thanks for the helpful remarks. It may be a couple of weeks before the next episode, but it'll get there. Sweet dreams. And what was in that little pill, anyway?

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CUMMING OF AGE AT HARVARD. PART SEVEN.

Outside Sam's place, I pulled on my gloves and checked the time. 3:20. Earlier than I'd thought. Cold as a cob. I didn't feel like rushing back to Kirkland, so I walked slowly along the empty street, sucking that fragrant pastille, thinking it all over. Sore balls, and I knew there'd be sore muscles tomorrow. Later today, that is. Damn. This afternoon there'd be The Game. Thank God I didn't have a date. Just planned to get together with roomie Jorge and Steve the hot Greek from the swim group and a guy from French class I'd hit it off with, have lunch and a beer at Cronin's and head across the river for a sporting afternoon. Not, frankly, that I give a hoot about the rah-rah stuff.

Oh, man. If those guys knew I'd been shooting hot cum all over the good professor and vice versa. Not that I'd mind doing the same with Steve or Ari, the dark kid from French. Whoops. Naughty thoughts. Plus a slimy guilt tendril creeping up my spine. I'd hoped and dreamt about mansex dozens of times, and now I'd done it. For sure, my dreams were liable to be in Technicolor now that I'd been queered.

Had I been queered? Wasn't this just a one-shot deal? Oh, yes. I could go back to dating that sad Norwegian who'd decided to flunk out of the 'Cliffe so she could go home to Ohio and feel sorry for herself. Would that ever be normal and fun and depressing. I mean normal, right? So I could tell my parents and chums and myself that I had a girlfriend. I'm just fine, thanks. Don't worry about me. Here's her picture. Cute, huh? Well, yes. Maybe she's a little sad. Maybe I am, too. But basically normal.

Sure. Basically normal. Who was I kidding? I hadn't been queered. I'd just been found out, like the time in high school when I was trying on suits and the cute Hispanic salesman groped me in the fitting room. I'd blushed and felt flattered. Or like last August in Juarez when instead of the usual cabbie's whisper, "Wanna meet my sister," one guy had leered, "Wanna go where the boys are?" And I did wanna go.

I knew I wasn't a swish or anything like that. My football-hero dad would have beat hell

out of me if I were. (Although, come to think of it, the one time he'd caught me jacking off, the next day he'd asked what--or who--I was thinking about when I was doing it. Did he really expect me to tell him it was the center on the guys' basketball team?) But Sam had figured me out. And brought me out, I guess. Part way, anyhow. Should I thank him or hate him? How could I hate the guy when he'd made me look in the mirror?

Looking, looking, looking. There'd been a lot of that tonight. Mirrors, images, secret places. Looking around now, I thought I saw even everyday stuff in a new way. The bare trees in the Yard moved in the wind like they were signalling. What message? To whom? The buildings--University Hall, Harvard Hall, Boylston--bulked huge and alive. My footsteps echoed loud in the still, cold night, and the lights in the Square were brighter than I'd ever seen them.. I felt warm inside and a little afraid. Sam had hinted that I could be changed. So was it already happening?

I sure wasn't ready to turn in. Hayes-Bicks beckoned, so I walked across Mass Avenue to get a coffee and a stale Danish. Bleak, bleak, bleak. "Silent Night" on the Muzak, for God's sake. At four o'clock in the morning H-B would even give Edward Hopper the willies. The place was deserted except for a couple of lonely drunks and the inevitable love-shattered couple sitting by a window up front. And me? I had plenty of frets to keep me company.

I wasn't concentrating very well. Little wonder. For no apparent reason my thoughts drifted off to a paper on Huck Finn I'd had to write for an American lit class last week. Not returned yet, dammit. Anyway. I'd talked about the passage where Huck writes that letter sending Nigger Jim back to society and civilization and good old slavery. Huck finishes, feels all clean and fine and holy inside. He's being a good boy just like the rest of those upright respectable slave-holders back home. Yessir. They're gonna be mighty proud of him. Then, wham, he just rips that letter right up: "Nope. I ain't selling Jim out. Screw society. Screw my conscience. I'll just go to Hell." And that's when Huck finds out who he really is, and he doesn't care squat for whatever society thinks or doesn't think about it.

And who was I, really? I knew what society would call me. A sleazy queer fairy faggot. And I'd loved that sleazy queer fairy faggot sex with Sam. Loved it. And hated it. Or my so-called conscience did. To hell with conscience, anyway. I'd given up on the church, hadn't I? Did my conscience bother me about that one? Nope. Oh, to hell with Hell, anyway. If fooling around with guys would send me there, that was the place for me. My cock wasn't bothered by conscience, so why should I be?

I couldn't answer that one, and besides Bicks was giving me the creeps, and I was tired of thinking, and I needed to get some sleep. So I headed down Dunster, that dim, dirty street vibrating around me, to Kirkland, H-entry, number 22, home at last.

I'd lucked out and won the toss for the suite's single bedroom. Snores from the other one, so Jorge was home. Rick was probably still down at the Crimson. I found the light switch--ow, too bright--killed the light, and, in the dark, jumped out of my clothes (for the second time that night, boyo). I knew how weary I had to be, but my body felt odd. Languid and light. Tingly. I headed naked to the john, peed and gave John Thomas a couple of extra shakes, performed the usual ablutions, and couldn't believe the face greeting me over the sink hadn't become a mask of depravity. Shouldn't my debauchery show?

Oh, well. I figured it probably would by morning, headed back to the bedroom and crawled into bed. Where my hand strayed experimentally to my left nipple. Wow. Sam had said one tit would turn out to be more sensitive. Bingo. A mere touch of the left nip, and the tingle I'd felt a couple of minutes before flared into an erotic burn that had me squirming on the sheets. So I gave it a good hard twist. And my body nearly arched right out of the sack. When the room and my senses settled down a bit, I knew something was up. Ever since I'd walked through the Yard, my perceptions had been more acute, my sensations more intense, my thoughts more vivid, and now, my needs more, whew, desperate. Uh oh. The penny dropped. Come on, Sam. What's in that brown pastille?

But for now, who cared? All that mattered was the body electric. While one hand continued its tit-play, slow and gentle, the other slowly, very slowly explored my belly, thighs, balls, and--finally--my leaking cock. For the fifth or sixth or seventh time that night, I forget, John Thomas pulsed hard and regular against my stomach, but with a difference. He didn't feel that yearning urgency for release that had been the big issue back at Sam's. Instead he and I lay back and floated in a warm bath of sensation. It's like we'd hit a high note and just stayed there. Or like when you see a dancer (it'd always been Jacques d'Amboise for me) who does a leap, a grand jeté, and at the top, seems to pause for an instant. Only now, at a sort of big-time erotic leap, I'd hit a place that lasted and lasted. It may have had something to do with my screwed-up sense of time, and for sure it had plenty to do with that little cough-drop, but I wasn't debating the issue. JT acted as lightning rod, and his charge played through my body like forever.

I could dabble in the precum spilling onto my belly, smear it on my cock, but I was barely touching him now. My forefinger tickled the frenulum and teased my tab of foreskin gently, idly, without approaching the point of no return and then the thrusting release that had always seemed the point of jacking off in the past. I'd reached some kind of orgasmic plateau where cumming wasn't the point. It was lazy there, and slow, and intense. A weird mental flash: I'll bet old Jannot's wearing a smug archaic smile.

My mind drifted away as the long wave of sensation possessed my body. My eyes had been unseeing for a while now, and they closed while I floated between consciousness and unconsciousness, then deeper into that world of sensuous darkness. And dreams.

Dreams with a difference. A big difference. Not a wet dream--it'd been years and years since I'd had one of those, what with the regular and frequent work-outs John Thomas demanded. But those dreams always lacked one essential thing. There'd been plenty of guys, hot guys, naked guys, friends and strangers, James Dean and Monty Clift, but never, never a cock could I ever see. Not one. I'd looked and looked, believe me, but it was always the same. Nothing between those guys' lovely legs except a fuzzy brown haze. Like in my dreams the dicks were all air-brushed out. Censored. Not for you, kid.

Oh, I'd seen stiff boycocks in my time, beginning with my eight-year-old cousin and me sitting on each other's little stiffies. Then in sixth grade the kid across the alley had showed me his hard dick, and, next thing, we were in his bedroom, he was pulling me off, and it felt just about like his playground-lingo description of an orgasm--like being way, way up high in a swing, only a lot better. So I, of course, introduced a couple of my pals to the art of the handjob, and on overnights we'd jerk happily away, stiff cocks and dry cums.

Then another little friend found a stash of Tijuana Bibles, so we could check out Dagwood's enormous dick, and Groucho's, and Smilin' Jack's. (Though even then, I wouldn't have minded seeing Groucho screw Harpo instead of some dumb blonde.) And yet another little friend poked around in Daddy's secret drawer and passed around some smutty, smeary photos of huge cocks entering hairy cunts. Plus the 100% hetero narratives to go with. So here's the point, finally: I'd been salivating over mancocks and jacking boycocks since I was ten years old.

But tonight, tonight, I'd got my first good look, and feel, of a bona fide hard, veiny, experienced, virile, available, amazing Samcock. And, whamo. That seems to have done the trick. Been the releasing mechanism. Pushed the button. Or whatever Dr. Joy might call it.

Because tonight, no more airbrush, no more crotch-haze. All those gorgeous dreamcocks swarmed through my pastille-addled brain. En masse. I'm telling you. Hairy pubes, low-hanging balls, purple helmets, thick dicks, skinny dicks, black cocks the size of a baby's arm, hard pink button heads, the works. Like when I was dreaming through a forest, every tree sported a woody. Then I'd be in a meadow, and those fairy circles weren't made out of mushrooms. Or in a cornfield where it wasn't ears of corn that those tall stalks bore. And then a narrative began to emerge from this crazy, cocked-up collage.

I was barefoot, wearing a pair of tight, bulging, beat-up Levi's and nothing else, wandering around a dark wood with no idea about why or how I'd got there. It was getting dark. Ugh. I could hear animal noises. Overhead I glimpsed a hazy moon through the arched branches of the forest. The prospect of bedding down for the night in a pile of fallen leaves? With all the snorts and growls in the background? Romantic maybe, but not attractive.

Then I heard it. A few notes played by a harmonica. A harmonica? In the forest? It seemed to be coming from my left, and ignoring serious misgivings, I moved in that direction. The sound came again: four notes, clear and distinct, not too far away. I headed for it. Nothing. I stopped. Then the four notes sounded again, closer maybe? And it wasn't a harmonica. More like a flute? No. But I was following the sound now, hearing a repetition every half-minute or so.

The next time the notes came, I knew. It was from pipes. Panpipes, yet. As I walked through the darkness, the forest thinned out, and I headed up a low, grassy hill. In the brightening moonlight I looked up. On the green hilltop, maybe thirty yards away, I saw a square--no a cubic--building. The music had stopped. The building came into sharp focus, a solid stone construction, maybe twenty feet tall with a flat roof, mostly covered with some sort of vine. No windows, only a heavy oaken door with a large metal knocker, recessed in a Romanesque arch.

Just then the moon slipped from behind a patch of mist. The vine obscured a series of stone bas-reliefs on the facade, but I could make out an inscription on the stained marble panel above the arched portal:

BE BOLD

BE BOLD

BE NOT TOO BOLD

Suddenly, I recognized the place. For some reason, deja vu all over again, I knew where I was. I'd always thought that the Chapel Perilous was only in books. But now I was standing in front of it, or someplace just like it. A place that you don't find. It finds you. And I knew what I had to do. I walked up to the door and grasped the knocker, a gargantuan bronze phallus. Circumcised. Again, holding that giant cock, I knew what I had to do. I struck the phallus against its strike-plate, an equally gigantic low-hanging scrotum. Three times. Then once more. At the fourth knock, the door flew open.



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