This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously; any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Dennis Milholland – All rights reserved. Other than for private, not-for-profit use, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or by any means, other than that intended by the author, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Careful! This is a work of fiction containing graphic descriptions of sex between males and critiques of religion and governments. And last but not least, Nifty would like your donations.

Farewell, Uncle Ho

by Dennis Milholland

questions and comments are welcome. www.milholland.eu / dennis@milholland.eu

Chapter 46 (Fri., March 3)

We booked a room at Hotel President and had to go walk around until the room was ready at 12 noon, which gave us two hours. However, before we left, I did make reservations for eight this evening at Le Chanteclair, over on East 49th Street, an excellent French restaurant, owned and operated by a Formula-1 racing driver. I told Gerry and Moffett that it was to celebrate their belated birthdays, Moffett's having been at the end of January.

But my real reason was to use some of the three hundred dollars from Bat to indulge my own nostalgia. The last time I'd been there was with my father, the evening before I left for France to attend university. My mother had had something else to do, so it was just Dad and me; one of the only times we'd ever done anything together, just the two of us.

Although today was promising to be bright and sunny, a gust of ice-cold wind caught us when we turned onto Broadway and into the shadows. "Come on." I ordered, increasing my pace. "I know just the place to warm up."

The minute I opened the door to Howard Johnson's at the corner of 46th, the smell of frying bacon, mixed with that of maple syrup and fresh coffee greeted us. The waitress, Maxine, carrying a spherical, glass coffee pot, motioned for us to sit in her section. When I took off my cunt cap, Maxine's eyes brightened. "Good morning, Ben," My jaw dropped that she remembered my name from when Lonnie and I were in here just shy of two months ago. After all, at this Howard Johnson's, she served probably several hundred people a day, and she remembered me. "didn't know you were a soldier boy. If I had known that…" Her laugh was good-naturedly naughty with just the hint of playfulness, that probably made her well liked by all her male patrons and loathed by all their wives.

I chuckled at her suggestiveness. "Good morning, Maxine," Her smile surged, but still suggested some covered-up melancholy, when I called her by name, without first having to look at her nametag. "good to see you again."

Moffett and Gerry were smiling with raised eyebrows at the exchange. Then Maxine revealed all: "Ben was in here several weeks ago, and I was on early, just like today." She turned to set the coffee pot back onto the dripolator's hotplate. "Anyway, Ben and his friend were kind enough to listen to my woes." She ran her index finger down my cheek. "You're a good kid, Ben." She sniffed, pulled out her order pad and readjusted her prescribed smile. "So, fellas, what'll it be?"

And believing that some things never change, for a buck twenty five each, we got a decent bacon-egg-hash-brown breakfast with endless cups of coffee. But I did notice that Moffett divided up his bacon between Gerry and me. And since Army chow had been leaving something to be desired, we indulged in various combinations of the famous 28 flavors.

While we were spooning the ice cream, Moffett seemed to go off into his own world, like he had at the Reception Center. "Hey, Alvin, a penny for your thoughts." Gerry didn't know about his bouts with sadness.

"Wen--" Embarrassed when his voice cracked, he started again. "Wendell came down to see me the weekend before they killed him, and we ate lunch here."

"Hold on." Gerry was trying to piece things together. "Who's Wendell, who killed him and why?"

Since Moffett was just about to lose it, I butted in and gave Gerry a short summary of what he'd related to me in the barracks about what had happened to his forest-ranger boyfriend. My best buddy sat up straight and tried to control his breathing. His eyes became moist, but he managed to blink back the tears. "Don't know what I'd do, if..." His voice left a lot unsaid and his left hand squeezed my right leg under the table.

"So," Moffett wiped his eyes. "on a brighter note," He laughed dryly. "Pierson told me that you two have been assigned to Vietnam. Is that true?"

"Yeah," I nodded and squeezed Gerry back. "we cut a deal with the Judge Advocate General Corps, and are going to be stationed in Saigon."

"Well, at least, you won't be in the war zone." Moffett licked the last of his ice cream off the long-handled spoon.

Maxine must have overheard our conversation of death and war; she appeared with four small glasses of something called Slivovitz. Maxine raised her glass. "Some say it's too early. But that's better than bein' too fuckin' late. 'Specially when someone's going off to war, l'chaim."

"L'chaim." we repeated, and Gerry even covered his head with his left hand, as he drank with his right.

"Oy, you a landsman, Blondie?" Maxine looked surprised, along with Moffett and me.

"Shver tsu zogn," Gerry laughed. "meglekh a bisele."

Maxine laughed kindly and shook her head. Of course, curiosity got the better of me. "And what did he say?" I wanted to know if she'd understood it, and if Gerry actually spoke Yiddish.

"He said: 'Hard to say, maybe a little.'." Maxine laughed again with a naughty gleam in her eye, looking at Gerry. As she took the empty glasses back to the bar, her laughter became downright baudy. "Being just a little Jewish is like being just a little pregnant."

***

We checked into the hotel at exactly twelve noon. They'd given us a room with two double beds and a view of 48th Street. Standing at the window, undressing, I was looking over at Mamma Leone's lunchtime crowd milling about under the green, arched awning, I was thinking about why Lon was no longer my best friend, when Moffett broke my contemplation. He was berating Gerry. "If you're Jewish, why aren't you circumcised?"

I turned to get the hanger off the chair. The uniform was going to have to serve as dinner dress, and shouldn't be wrinkled. Gerry was blushing, as he was prone to do. "Being a Jew and a German are not mutually exclusive terms, Alvin, But, be that as it may, I am not a Jew."

"Yo, right." Moffett put his uniform into the closet. "And you speak Yiddish, because?"

Gerry became nervous, glancing at me and back at Moffett. "Yiddish and German are virtually the same language. Only, they write Yiddish with the Hebrew alphabet and we write German with a variant Latin alphabet, called Fraktur."

My eyebrows were raised, since this was news to me. Moffett went a step further. "So, you can understand everything they talk about at the bakeries in Brooklyn?"

Gerry laughed. "Yeah, as long as they're not speaking Russian." He hung up his uniform and came over to get mine to hang up. "A couple of years ago, the old Jewish couple, who lives next to the Mortons, had their grandson from Israel over for the summer. So, Morton went out and bought a Yiddish newspaper, to make him feel more at home.

"Since the kid could read the Hebrew letters, he read us the newspaper, and Morton and I understood every word, but the kid didn't get anything, because he didn't understand Yiddish. I had to translate what he was reading into English, so he would know what he was telling us."

Moffett and I looked at one another, speechless, confused. Then Moffett shook his head. "Well, at least, Morton is circumcised, so I guess he should speak Yiddish." This was a connection that I failed to understand. Moffett was circumcised himself. But maybe, there was an aspect to Moffett's family he hadn't told us about. After all, he hadn't eaten his bacon.

Gerry laughed at our bewilderment. "No, Morton speaks German but can understand Yiddish."

Moffett went off into a daze, contemplating again. "How many other Negro Jews do you know?"

***

Gerry and I introduced Moffett to the concept of taking an enema. Then we told him about anal intercourse. He obviously knew about oral sex, since he'd given Gerry a blowjob on his birthday. But now it was his turn to introduce us to spanking.

Neither Gerry nor I had ever had a spanking during childhood. My parents were pinko liberals and I was far from a trouble maker. And Gerry's adopted father was, according to Gerry, such a Teddy Bear and his not-quite adopted mother was the German version of June Cleaver, who would always have freshly-baked brownies/cookies/cakes ready for him and Morton when they got home from school every day.

But apparently things had been different in Franklin County. Alvin Moffett was the youngest of seven kids. He had been beaten by anybody in authority, or anybody who had authority by proxy.

The list was long. His dad used a razor strap. His mom used a wooden spoon. His oldest sister used a brass ruler. Their priest used a cat-o-nine-tails. The nuns at his school had been the ones who'd supplied his sister with the brass rulers. Apparently, the Vatican spent inordinate amounts of money to obtain brass rulers on a world-wide basis. He showed us the injuries on his hands and forearms inflicted by nuns.

Gerry looked worried and a bit guilty that his own childhood appeared to have been literally a piece of cake. "But how can you like it, after what happened?"

"Don't know." Moffett offered a round of cigarettes and I got my Zippo off the nightstand and lit them. "The last time my dad spanked me was a nightmare for everyone, except for me." He braced his back against the headboard and drew his knees up to his chest and laughed. "I was fourteen, and about the same size I am now."

He thought about it for a second. "Naw, maybe I was just 6'2" but definitely weighed over 200 pounds." He took another deep drag and exhaled while talking. "Of course, the old pervert insisted that it had to be performed in front of the assembled family." Moffett exhaled the rest of the smoke and laughed. "It was his own fuckin' fault. He pulled down my pants and exposed my raging hard-on to my four sisters and to Mom. He tried to ignore it, laid me across his knee, but by the tenth time his short razor strap hit my bare butt, I groaned and shot hot jizz all over his dress pants."

"So, what do you want from us?" My question was met by someone with a mission. Moffett knew exactly what he wanted.

"Gerry and I should get into a sixty nine," He looked at Gerry for approval; he got a nod. "I'll be on top. So, while you fuck my ass, I want you to slap it as hard as you can." He looked at me for approval, and got a shrug, since I didn't have a clue as to how brutal I wanted to be with a friend, because I knew how brutal I could get, and it scared me.

Moffett and Gerry got into position, and I freed the small Crisco can from my overnight bag. Even if Moffett hadn't told me that he'd never been fucked, he showed all the signs. "Hey, Moffett, unclench your asshole. Take a couple of deep breaths." He did; it worked.

I got my three fingers in place and gave his left ass cheek a slap, which I was sure they could have heard on Times Square. But what can I say? His hole opened, like a purple rosebud going into full blossom in a time-lapse film, and I plunged into his warm insides.

With every stroke, I slapped an ass cheek, sometimes with a forehand and other times with a backhand. We were all on a short fuse, due to the monastic-style abstinence of basic training. On about the tenth stroke, I slapped his ass and then shot my load. Normally, I would have cum in him on a stroke and not a slap. This, I feared, had been excessively enjoyable.

The very second Moffett shot into Gerry's mouth, he disconnected from us and rushed to the bathroom. He was pumping my kids by the millions into the crapper and weeping with his head resting on his knees. Leaving Gerry to finish himself off by hand, I went to see what was wrong with Moffett. I thought I might have hurt him.

When I touched his shoulder, he cringed. "Please, don't Ben." He was now sobbing full tilt. "This is so wrong." He looked at me with virtually gushing eyes. "This is why they killed Wendell; this is such a sin."

I went back into the bedroom to lie with my man as I would with a woman, were I straight. I licked his cum off his belly. Slowly he turned to spoon with me. "Promise me, Ben, that we'll never take a stray puppy with us, ever again," His whisper was barely audible. "no matter how big his brown eyes?"

I nodded emphatically as I rolled over to face him. "What did his cum taste like?" My whisper was no louder than breathing.

"Pure sin." And at that, we nearly asphyxiated ourselves by trying not to laugh.