Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2020 15:58:39 +0000 (UTC)
From: Brock Archer <brockarcher@yahoo.com>
Subject: Coming of Age in Texas Ch 34

Typography Note: Sentences in [brackets] represent the narrator's unspoken
thoughts.

Reminder: If you enjoy this story and others on Nifty, please contribute to
keep it going.

http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html
-----------------------------------

Coming of Age in Texas: Chapter 34: Epilogue

So much has passed under the bridge in the four years that have elapsed
since that summer after our high school graduation.

With Troy out of the house that fall, Sarah Mazure, his mother, accepted a
marriage proposal from Rob and moved to Switzerland with him.

Johnny's parents and mine remained in Hilldale, but Carlos took over
management of the day-to-day operations of the farm, and Sam took up
residence in the bunkhouse after his parents moved back to Philadelphia. He
replaced Johnny as first-string wide receiver and burnt up the field.

Johnny, Troy, and I went off to our respective colleges, Johnny to
Stanford, Troy to Julliard, and me to USC. When Johnny told me of his
intent to complete his degree in three years instead of four, I took it as
a challenge and pledged to beat him. For a fleeting moment I even
considered daring to graduate with a higher grade point average (GPA), but
I quickly realized that such a gamble would be foolish.

Johnny's college football career started off much like his high school
career. In high school he got put in the game when the starting wide
receiver got injured. At Stanford he got put in when the starting wide
receiver crapped out. The team was trailing 35-0 at the half, and even
though Stanford still lost to Oregon, Johnny was able to pull his team to
within 7 points, so he took over as the first-string wide receiver for the
rest of the season.

At USC, our starting halfback just mysteriously disappeared halfway through
the season.  He later turned up at a small Baptist college back east. I
never really knew what had happened, but practically every man on the team
congratulated me on becoming the starting halfback. Apparently, even though
the other guy was a pretty good player, for some reason he wasn't really
very well liked.

Johnny, Troy, and I used our Thanksgiving breaks to fulfill modeling and
recording commitments. About the same time, Troy released his first album,
Ben Cohen released his calendar, and Armando released his book Men of the
World just in time for Christmas gift shopping, and all of them broke sales
records. Armando told me later that whenever he would travel and see his
book on display, it was usually opened to my page, probably because I had
the biggest dick of all the models.

Troy was already a star and was well on his way to becoming a super
star. Johnny and I were not yet considered celebrities as far as the
advertising and marketing worlds were concerned, but that was about to
change.

When Armando's book came out and people started realizing that two of the
models were now freshmen football players at Stanford and USC, a group of
Baptist preachers went berserk. They demanded that we be removed from our
respective teams and even expelled. But when early sales of tickets for the
next season's home games spiked, the presidents of Stanford and USC issued
statements pointing out that their art departments often hired people to
pose nude for courses in sketching, painting, and photography. They also
said that they found nothing distasteful in Armando's work.  Finally, they
pointed out that Johnny and I were adults and fully capable of making our
own decisions about our modeling careers, and they implied that we had
demonstrated more maturity than the complaining preachers.

The protest from the preachers actually accelerated our drive toward
celebrity status.  Sports Illustrated featured us on its cover with the
heading "Big Men on Campus." Of course, that phrase is usually applied to
college men who are deemed to be very popular and perhaps even
influential. Much of the chatter on social media also suggested that the
term referred to the size of our dongs, especially mine.

With our newly emerging stardom, Mike went straight to work renegotiating
our modeling contracts. Volkswagen had initially intended to use me as an
extra in commercials for Volkswagen and basic Audi vehicles, but after the
release of Men of the World and our cover story in Sports Illustrated, they
decided to feature me in ads for top-of-the-line Audi models and even
Porsches.

Fiat rushed out a series of TV commercials featuring Johnny as a cowboy
promoting Ram trucks. (He's from Texas, so he must be a cowboy, right?) The
first series followed a basic format in four parts, what were called Work,
Motion, Play, and Emotion.

Work consisted of Johnny—shirtless—performing a variety of tasks on a
ranch (loading or unloading hay, firewood, fence posts, or other supplies
or gear).

Motion showed him driving a Ram truck over rough terrain, dirt roads, or
muddy trails or hauling a horse trailer. A segue flipped between shots of
another cowboy (played by Sam—also shirtless) washing down the truck and
Johnny showering—with the camera focusing alternately on close-ups of
Johnny's bare muscles and various features of the truck.

Play featured Johnny, now all cleaned up and dressed appropriately, picking
up his beautiful date and taking her in the now-shiny truck to a line
dance, the opera, a restaurant, a campground, or the beach.

Finally, Emotion showed Johnny retrieving a blanket from the truck and
wrapping it around his date on a cold night in front of a campfire, lying
in the bed of the truck looking up at the stars, or parking the truck in
front of her house and kissing her goodnight on the doorsteps.

The commercials all closed with the tag line:

      Whatever you want to do.
      Wherever you want to go.
      Whatever you want to be.
      Ram!

Initially, Fiat had intended to limit Johnny to Ram and Jeep
ads—especially since they already had Troy and Alessandro promoting
their Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, and Maserati lines—but then Armando came up
with another unique and creative idea.

In that commercial, a parking valet pulled up to the front door of an
exclusive restaurant in a flashy Ferrari. When the valet stepped out of the
car and held up the key, Johnny and Alessandro, approaching from different
directions, reached out simultaneously for the key, which led to an
argument about whose car it really was. Then the conflict turned to who was
the better ball player and which food was better, Italian pasta or Texas
barbecue brisket. Finally, as the two athletes debated which country had
the most beautiful women, Troy walked up behind them, took the keys from
the valet, and drove off in the Ferrari. That ad proved highly popular not
only in Italy and the United States, but went viral on the Internet all
over the world.

Based on the success of that ad and Johnny's appearances on Silvana's TV
show as a knowledgeable person, if not an expert, on the intersection of
sports and the arts, Armando created a three-part TV ad series featuring
Johnny. The first ad showed Johnny pulling up to a museum at twilight in a
Maserati convertible with his beautiful date in the passenger seat. The
young couple sneaked into the museum after hours, and after Johnny showed
his lover various paintings and sculptures of couples in the throes of
romance, they began shedding their clothes. That commercial faded out on
that lustful scene and closed on a shot of security guards inspecting the
empty Maserati in the parking lot.

The second commercial in the series, which began airing about a month
later, picked up where the first one left off, with the security guards at
the museum questioning where the owner of the Maserati had disappeared
to. Security cameras spotted the nearly naked couple making out on the
floor behind a statue. When Johnny heard the guards approaching, now
completely naked, he urged his girlfriend to run to the Maserati and wait
for him there while he distracted the guards. The camera followed her to
the car and followed Johnny as he ran through the museum naked, evading the
guards by hiding behind nude sculptures, Roman columns, and draperies. At
the beginning of the chase, the bundle of clothes that he carried shielded
his jewels from the camera, but when he accidentally dropped them and had
to keep running, his junk was concealed only by the angle of his legs. That
scene closed with a shot of the girlfriend sitting in the Maserati and
looking nervously at her watch.

The third and final commercial in the series, appearing about a month after
the second one, picked up with the beautiful girl fretting in the Maserati
and then more shots of Johnny running naked through the museum to escape
the pursuing guards. Finally, he stormed through the exit and leaped (like
a football player) into the waiting Maserati, speeding away from the
scene. The series closed with the tag line, "Art Appreciation."

The series was so successful that the company decided to add a fourth
commercial. It starts out the same as the third commercial, but near the
end we see the beautiful young woman leaving the Maserati and re-entering
the museum to look for Johnny, who is still running naked through the
museum with a security guard hot on his heels. Then, the camera focuses on
a marble statue of a man and woman standing naked in a passionate
embrace. As the camera pans down to the sounds of rapturous love making, we
see two pairs of bare legs, one male and one female, sticking out from
behind the pedestal.  Finally, we see Johnny escaping in the Maserati with
one of the handsome security guards, shirt unbuttoned, seated next to him,
laughing and flying a pair of men's briefs in the wind.


By the end of spring semester, Johnny and I were millionaires with more
endorsement contracts than Mike had and almost as many as Troy. That
summer, we could barely keep up with the demands on our time. Of course,
Troy was always in demand, and we rarely got to see each other.

Between football classes and posing for magazine ads and making TV
commercials, I found the time to write a few short stories that received
critical acclaim if not much else.  All of that left little time for sexual
escapades, so I used my engagements with other models on photo shoots to
make up for lost time.

The spring of Johnny's third and final year at Stanford and my final year
at USC, was marked by several major announcements. Johnny was drafted in
the first round by the Dallas Cowboys, but he announced that he was going
to take a one-year leave to accept a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where he
planned to begin his pursuit of a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering.

It probably came as a surprise to everybody but those who really knew me
when I announced that I would not be entering the pros but would spend the
next year studying Irish literature and creative writing as a Fulbright
Scholar at Trinity College in Dublin.

And most shocking of all was Mike's announcement that he was retiring from
football to marry Maria, with whom he would be opening a talent agency for
entertainers and athletes, and that he would be enrolling in law school at
Columbia University.

A short time later, Johnny and I both graduated from college. I should have
bet him that I would graduate with a higher GPA because, much to my shock
and amazement, I actually did. I graduated with a perfect 4.0, but Johnny
fell just short because one professor gave him a B in a physics
course. Many people speculated that the professor had a grudge against
athletes because he had proven to be a poor one himself, but the
scuttlebutt around campus was that the professor retaliated against Johnny
because Johnny refused to have sex with the man and his wife.

During my year in Dublin, I wrote my first novel, which became a number one
best seller and won several prestigious literary awards. Mike negotiated
the rights to the movie, which won an Oscar for me for best screenplay and
three for Troy, one as best actor in a supporting role, in which he played
a sex-crazed night club singer, another one for the title song, which he
wrote and sang, and for best music score, which he shared with Maria. Sam
had a walk-on role and worked on the film crew.

When Troy graduated from Julliard the following year, he and I bought a
villa in Tuscany and a penthouse in Manhattan. Our walls are filled with
all sorts of honors, but the one that means the most to me, the one I will
always cherish is a box frame containing that very special blue bandana.

---------------END------------------------

Writer's Note: I wish to thank all the readers who have contacted me with
kind words and constructive criticisms on this story. I greatly appreciate
all of this feedback.

If you enjoyed this story ( or even if you didn't), I invite you to read my
other story on Nifty, "Contradictions"
(https://www.nifty.org/nifty/bisexual/beginnings/contradictions/), and to
Google my name, Brock Archer, for stories on other sites.

Final Thought: We all come of age through our experiences, not just with
sex but with all of our relationships. How we handle these relationships
defines what kind of person we are and what kind of person we grow up to
be—no matter our age.

Namaste,

Brock Archer