Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 11:00:07 -0700 From: Paul Landerman Subject: Wilfred chapter 4 Thank you for enjoying my story series. I had a wonderful adventure during the writing phase and am pleased to be able to share this with you. Be sure to add a donation to Nifty.org to your list- Nifty provides space for hundreds of authors and thousands of original articles for your free reading pleasure. The following is an original story and is copyright by the author and no distribution or replication may be made except with the written authorization of the copyright owner. If you are not of legal age to enter this website you must leave immediately. Please send any comments or questions concerning this story series to: pjwltx9@gmail.com Chapter Four: Trains Japan is famous for its trains. The foreign reputation is that the trains in Japan absolutely run on time. That's not the case, especially out in the little country towns. But it's charming to think about, and it's an anachronistic style of travel that helps to put life into perspective. A slower mode of travel, allowing the mind to catch up with the rest of the schedule. Turner and I spent a great deal of time on trains, and we spent the rides reading, watching the countryside out of the windows, sometimes chatting, sometimes talking with the other travelers, and sometimes sleeping and just being quiet. I spent some of the time writing in my journal. When I was not worrying about David. We still did not communicate frequently or deeply, just the postcards as usual. You cannot be intimate in a postcard. He told me he was getting ready to leave Japan, and so I convinced Turner we had to be back in Sendai before the end of the month of May. We had spent all of April travelling, and had covered nearly the entire mission territory, and I was eager to get off the road and to see David again one last time before he went back to Beikoku. We arrived in Sendai the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend; it is the most important day of the year for missionaries worldwide. They get to call home and speak to "Mom" on Mother's Day. After church on Sunday, we went directly back to the apartment of course, and drew straws to see what order the four of us got to call home. Turner was first, followed by Komatsu, then me and then Wagner. When I spoke to my parents, it seemed weird; it was like a bad movie, like these were people who thought they knew me but I was suffering some sort of amnesia, maybe, in this movie. I felt like I was supposed to know them, but somehow the connection was not there. Since I was going to be home at the end of August, it seemed a little distracting to be talking to them now. I explained how things had been going in my new training assignment, and then asked about the grandparents and then finally gave up and signed off. Late that night, falling asleep, I told Turner I wanted to go back up north the next week and start over again, and check on all of our little chicks from our prior training sessions. I felt like we were not making enough progress, I told him. I was lying. I wanted to try to get away from David after all, could not stand the thought of him leaving, and so could not face the prospect of having to actually say goodbye face to face. I would try to call him in the morning before we left for Aomori. David was groggy when he answered the phone. "Am I calling too early?" "No, not a problem, who is this?" "Elder Campbell." I drew a sharp breath. "Oh." "Umh, how are you?" I was hating that I had called. "OK, just about ready to leave, only a few days left you know, maybe ten days?" "I see. Well, gambatte, ne, good luck, you have my address." "Yeah, thanks, arigato." He hung up. I began to cry and quickly went outside and stood on the landing. I could not believe this was happening. I could not breathe. Turner came out, took a look at me, and returned inside. I went in a minute later, and he asked me how soon I wanted to go, and I said "Right freaking now". He looked perplexed, but did not say anything. God bless Turner. We were at the train station before noon, and bought one-way tickets to Aomori, and were there before dark. I do not remember having a cogent thought during the entire trip, nor do I remember saying a word to Turner. He must have thought I had lost my mind. Actually, I had. The remainder of May was a whirlwind, I do not remember any of it; we spent a few days in each branch, and covered the entire mission in three weeks. Turner truly questioned my sanity; he never said anything, just a side-long glance every day or so. I think he was checking my mental balance. He need not have bothered; I was crazy. I could not tell him why; I could not tell anyone why. There was a postcard waiting for me at the assistant's apartment when I returned from the road. It was dated May 31st. David had left that morning. He was returning to Utah, and promised to write. It was innocuous enough that no one questioned it. Just two old missionary companions keeping in touch. I took it outside and cried again. My God, I was getting tired of this. Three months to go. "Mom", I almost sobbed into the phone, "I want to go to BYU when I get home." "Paul, is there time to apply? Have you already applied? What's going on? Don't you want to take a little time off? Get back to the routine, before you jump into something?" "I am not sure, but yeah, I think the college thing might be good for a little while." "Well, Paul, whatever you decide, of course we will honor your decision." I wondered about that. "Anyway, dear, I will talk with your father, maybe he will be able to get some help for the harvest season, but you should talk to him before you finalize anything." "Sure, Mom." It was usual for the assistants to the President to accompany the missionary leaving for home, to the airport. Instead, President and Sister Honda took me, as they were flying to Tokyo for a conference with some general authorities from Salt Lake City. I don't think I was very good company for them on the flight, and as soon as was socially acceptable, I said goodbye to them in Tokyo and found my way to Narita airport and my flight to San Francisco. It is twelve hours from Narita to SFO; I slept most of it. It was early morning when my flight landed, and it seemed so incongruous to hear English all around me. Mom and Dad were waiting in the lower level baggage lobby, and of course I was sheepish when hugging them; public affection is not our family style, but after two years, they expected it. The drive back to the farm was the slowest of my life; everything seemed new and different and foreign. They asked me a million questions all the way home, about two hours, and it seemed as though I was in a fog, did not know how to form the words in English, had a very slow comprehension of what they were saying, could not follow the conversation. Finally I fell asleep. At the farm, my little sister and brother were there, along with Grandma and Grandpa Campbell, and Grandma Woodruff. Guess where my middle name came from? The next week was equally blurry; I met with the stake president, the stake high council, the bishop, and went shopping for civilian clothes. Finally, at dinner on Saturday night, Mom brought up the two most horrible subjects. She asked me about my plan to go to Brigham Young University, and then she asked me about dating. "You know there are several darling girls in the church, and I am sure most of them are eager to meet you now that you are home." Oh God in Heaven, what next? I wondered. She had no idea. I had no idea. This was going to be horrible. This was going to be a train wreck. "Actually, I have been thinking, and maybe I am going to wait a while before I jump back into college. Maybe I can take a class or two this fall at American River College, or something like that. I think I want to see what all of my options are." My Dad responded, "Well, we can always use you here on the farm, and of course you are always welcome to stay here as long as you need, there is not a question about that. Have you thought about career options?" "Not really, maybe law." "Your Uncle James is a lawyer." "Yes, Dad, I remember. Maybe I can talk to him and get some ideas." I actually thought talking to Uncle James was a horrible idea, he was an old windbag, and I certainly never wanted to entertain the notion of going to work with him in his ambulance-chaser law firm in Roseville. "Woodruff and Campbell", how would that sound as a law firm? Nah. Just staying on the farm through the winter seemed to be the safest bet at the moment. Two weeks had flown by, and although several girls had called my mother to ask how I was doing, I did not remember any of them, and had no interest in dating at the moment; I used the excuse that I was a little tired from Japan, and just needed to get my feet under me for a couple more weeks before going out in public too much. There was no way I was going to be able to face the option of saying "Hey, Mom, Dad, please stop arranging dates for me unless the guy is six feet tall, blonde, blue eyed, and has a nice cock." I laughed at myself over that thought: what would the look on their faces be when we had that conversation? Well, I would never know, because we would never have that conversation. Ever. Freaking ever. Which brought me to my decision about Brigham Young University: not going to go there. I was going to stay in California, go to a state university, maybe Sacramento State, or even Sonoma State where I had spent two semesters before going to Japan. I decided that being gay was not the most important thing in my life, but I certainly was not ready to commit to some marriage-hungry girl at church, nor was I ready to commit to anyone, boy or girl, but just wanted to hibernate for a while as the process of thinking about "me" evolved. I did go to a church dance the end of the second week home from Japan, and it was just about as painful as I expected it to be: lots of really good-looking guys whom I did not dare approach, who were interested in chasing the girls, who were interested in playing as if they did not want to be chased. I was really depressed and decided to go home early, when I realized that would require an explanation when I got home, so I headed to downtown Sacramento instead. I had no special destination in mind, just wanted to drive around a while, clear my head, maybe go to an IHOP, and just be out of the house and alone. I passed a bookstore that seemed a little curious to me, I had not noticed it before, and it seemed a little out of the norm for bookstores in general. Having no other destination in mind, I stopped and went in just to see what was there. Never having encountered porn before tonight, it was a complete shock to me to see the store was an adult toys and videos store, and the toys were things I have never imagined. I wandered through the aisles for more than an hour, looking very intently at dildos, vibrators, lubes, condoms, and a thing called a "fleshlight", which it turns out, is for masturbation. I was informed of that by a store clerk, who happened to be very helpful. Maybe too helpful. He wanted to assist me in selecting just the right toys for my collection. I told him I was not ready to start a collection, I was just new in the neighborhood, and had no idea as yet what I needed. He laughed, and I thought for a split second he was laughing at my naïveté, but he then said "Well, welcome to the neighborhood, Mr. Rogers." Funny man. At the rear of the store was a door that led to a series of closed booths, in a dimly lit corridor. I opened one of the doors, and discovered a TV screen, a chair, and a coin/bill acceptor, and a very small table with a box of Kleenex, and a partially full waste basket. The aroma of the booth began to settle in on me, and I slowly came to realize where I was: I inserted a dollar bill into the machine and a porn video popped up, with a dark haired naked woman getting her mouth stuffed by an over-sized black cock and her ass being violated by another, larger black cock. I was clearly not interested in what was hetero porn, but somehow could not tear myself from it. Then, the two men changed positions and stood side by side, while the woman sucked both of them. Wow. I returned to the corridor, and noticed that there was a display board I had not seen when I entered. The video channels were numbered with a small poster of the content of the video immediately above the channel number, and the last ten or so channels were gay. I shoved my hand in my pocket to see how many dollar bills I had. Three. Maybe that was enough to get a quick education into an area of life that had evaded me so far. In the booth, after inserting my three dollar bills, I changed the channel to 54, and was greeted by three young men, two white and a Latino, each sucking on a cock. The circle changed in a moment to one of them sucking on a cock, while he was also getting fucked by the third guy, the Latino. I changed the channel again, and saw a guy with a massive cock, jacking off; in a moment I changed the channel again, and found two men fucking, with one lying on his back on the bed while the other was above him, presumably with the cock of the lower one inside of his ass. In a moment the camera angle changed and it turned out I was correct: there was a pretty nice cock inside of his ass, and they both seemed to be enjoying it, from the sound track that was playing. In a minute or two it was obvious the sound track did not match the facial expressions, but I no longer cared, I was glued to that screen as it focused in on that cock and that ass- hole. Nothing else in my world existed at that moment. And then the screen went dark. I was out of dollar bills, and I was standing alone in a video booth with a raging erection, and had no idea what to do next. Then I realized what the box of Kleenex was for; well, having grown up as a Mormon boy on a farm, isolated to some degree from Western civilization and its delights, how could I know that men could masturbate in a public place such as this? It took me less than five minutes, and I added my tissue to the collection in the waste basket. Sitting in my car a few minutes later, after having endured the smiling clerk who wanted to help me select a vibrator, I was shaking. Wow. Not only had I hurdled over a very strange and unknown boundary into porn, and had seen things and experienced things I did not even ever dream about, I had committed an act of self-stimulation that I had never imagined before. As I sat there, I noticed a few other cars around me, each of them containing a male occupant, and most of them staring in my direction. I did not realize then, but found out a month or so later, that these men had all done what I had done, and perhaps more. When I returned to the bookstore about a month later, also on a Saturday night, this time purposefully, I went directly to the video booths, and had a wad of one dollar bills. I did not waste any time surfing through the channels, but went directly to the last five or six, and found a couple of channels that were playing the kinds of things I was questioning. How exactly do men have sex? I watched closely, feeling like a student, as the first video showed a man lubing and then entering another man with a very large cock. They worked on fucking in at least four positions, while I worked on very slowly masturbating. I turned to another channel, and this one had four men in it, two sucking each other, which I later learned was "69" and two fucking. They were sharing a long L-shaped sofa, and so the camera could catch all of the action of the two couples at the same time. The fucking couple finished first and changed positions with the 69 couple, and switched partners, and the man who had been penetrated was now fucking one of the 69-ers. Just as I was about to change channels, the newly sucking couple stopped, faced each other, jacked off, and came onto each other's chest. I lost it right then, and came all over the floor. No way was I going to clean that up; I cleaned myself up and headed home. When I got home and flopped onto my bed, I was exhausted, and realized sex is a lot more fun than I ever imagined, and I had to get my share of it. The next morning, on the way to church, I announced that I was ready to start college in January, and was going to attend Sacramento State, and live at home, and help out on the farm, and think about a career. I noticed Dad shoot me a glance in the rear-view mirror, and Mom just mumbled "That's nice dear. What kind of career?" "Probably law." Whatever career could get me into bed as regularly as possible.