THOSE LIPS, THOSE EYES, THOSE GLUTES
By M.E.Daley Author of Attack of the Movie Stars
Kindle Ed.
Ted was a sometimes bartender and a sometimes personal trainer. But bodybuilding, which he referred to as body shaping among female clients, was his mission and livelihood.
If I watched him flexing before our full-length mirror he would ask me how his back and ass looked. Poor dear, we didn't own a three-way so he could see for himself. I yearned for a certain antique cheval mirror that preyed on my mind like a lost lover, but Ted said it was too gussied up with carvings on the frame and, anyway, it was still just a plain full-length mirror even if you could flip it over. So, instead of going to Crate & Barrel, or even Cost Plus for a cheap Asian import that would also serve as a three-panel screen, I let him have his way and left the original old unframed shard
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on our bedroom door, which meant he had to scrooge around to view his hallowed body parts.
During today's flexing ritual, I tried to interest him in what the Tolliver twins had wrought in the way of roof gardening, and he asked if his penis seemed smaller, perhaps it was over-shadowed by newer musculature? Were his muscles now competing with the organ, reducing it to a Michaelangelo afterthought?
When I was finally able to convey a tidbit, I told him the Tolliver pricks had landscaped their adjoining condo roofs, one in the manner of Provance, the other, early Tuscan, featuring a pergola awash in wisteria, and a border of diminutive lemon trees that perfumed our morning air. His answer was that our over-flowing kitchen trash thingie perfumed the air, too. He was so outrageously butch that, at times, I found myself in the role of hand-wringing woman. Other times, he was my sword and my shield. This day, he started mechanically jerking off in front of the mirror, followed by the usual contortions trying to see if a full erection, in profile, could hold its own with his ever-burgeoning glutes. .
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Looking back, Ted had arrived in my life like the welcome Spring rain. I was walking my little dog, Mitzi--despite the weather--.for if I failed to take her out, the little turd would punish me by pissing on the very center of the white flokati that, I might add, I brought to my predestined union with Ted.
At the corner where I usually turn back, a BMW had pulled over to the curb, don't know if it was new or old or what, never pay attention to models. But it was still a gleaming and expensive sedan. The driver leaned out the window and said, "Hey, kid, you have curb appeal. Hop in."
God, but he was a handsome bastard. I did indeed hop in without another thought, and smiled winningly from somewhere deep in the upholstery. He didn't say a word for ten blocks, just gave me the benefit of his bella figura profile.
After a while he realized that I was holding my shivering rat-like dog. "Are that animal's paws wet?" he asked, not looking over.
"No, but mine are." I said.
Ted laughed and took his eyes off the wheel for the first time.
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The fuck was as if choreographed, a melting each unto the other, a pas de deux, if you will,-- for only my meager French can describe the elegance of our coupling.
End of story? I wish.
***
When Ted wanted to hit the late night trenches in West Hollywood, I went along. Unthrilled is hardly the word. I had already lived that life and thought of my new one with Ted as blessed sanctuary. Picking up wet towels, cooking dinner, setting a lovely, candlelit table, keeping his condo immaculate, and filled with fresh flowers was my joy. Even putting up the antique flocked paper in the dining alcove, for which I had to bargain like an Arab, in our local design Casbah was love made visible. Robertson or La Brea, who gives a shit? All in all, my life with Ted amounted to a never-ending round of chores, all of them acquitted with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Be that as it may, this night we ended up in a blatant sump on a side street where Ted is the relief bartender. The regular man greeted him with a half-
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bear hug across the bar. "Teddy, my lad," he said. "Where the hell have you been? Haven't seen you in at least four hours."
Ted was gassed, and gave the reg a big mouth kiss. The Tolliver twins down at the far end of the encrusted bar went OOOOOO in shrieking unison. Men we know, and men we've seen a thousand times in a thousand places, looked up from their drinks, or momentarily pulled back from their embraces. Ted is a symbol of masculinity to these bums, as opposed to femmes like the Tolliver fucks. Thus, he is much in demand in the area's moldier environs where they like to pretend that I do not exist. Of course, they are jealous of me, of my sexual access, and my life with Ted in an architecturally designed condo in West Hollywood.
The bartender handed Ted a fresh rose from a bouquet behind the bar.
"One of her lovers sent the flowers. She won't miss it," he said, referring to the owner of the redoubt, a fag hag from the old school.
This brought both Tollivers flying around our heads like the fairies they were. One twisted the long stem of the rose in a circle until it met the bloom, and placed it on Ted's head. "Pouf, he said, "You are Mab, Queen of the May."
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"Queen of the Fairies," I muttered, ignored by the illiterate sex fiend.
When Ted got up to pee, I had to help him to the back. He was one demented drunk. In the bathroom, he rolled up the short sleeves of his tee as far as they would go, tied the bottom into a knot at one side and pulled it up, past his nipples, and let his pants fall to his hips and cinched them there. All of this whilst drunk as an ass-fucking hillbilly, apres a wallow in his own homemade.
Showtime! Ted elbowed me aside, adjusted the wreath on his head, and walked out, unaided, with a kind of rolling hip movement, forward and back and then sideways. Showing off his muscles, to be sure, but also stirring up the dank encampment. Was it all just too too deliberate? This shameless offering up? I am certain it was.
Wretched Tollivers marched in Ted's wake, humming and imitating humans. Soon, others joined in a conga line of drunks. As the lurching serpent came to the open poolroom door, it took both Tollivers to push Ted inside. But he brushed them away like houseflies, and lay down on the table, curling himself up like a sleeping baby. I think he really was asleep when the Tollivers managed to turn him on his back, and started pulling
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down his jeans. Or, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he let those two mutants from Outer Labia do it, just for the hell of it.
Once again, no underpants. Son of a bitch! I had told him, over and over, to put on underwear like a civilized person. But I think he likes the feel of the rough denim, especially the chaffing and, later, me rubbing Desitin on it.
A Tolliver--who knows which one--grabbed Ted's comatose dick and went to work. But he was soon out of business when a big guy from the front of the line picked him up and heaved him out the poolroom door. The other Tolliver ran screaming after him. I swear they act like one person. In fact, their heads are slightly flat in back, so my guess is they were once conjoined, and some gifted surgeon down in Brazil separated them.
Men were already in a line formed by the march around the room and they stalled that way at the door of the poolroom. Yet, within minutes, they began crowding in by twos and threes. At that point in the festivities, I went back to the empty bar and ordered a drink. The bartender, supposedly Ted's big buddy, kept on shining and re-shining glasses as if assigned to the job by God. For a full minute, there wasn't a sound from the back room, then a low, melancholy lowing like cattle in a field. After a couple of loud thuds, there was a burst of laughter, and a kind of nervous giggling, even scattered
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clapping of hands. But it soon changed to grunts and groans that signaled serious work was afoot, then a faint scream and another. I took my fingers out of my ears and begged the bartender to go in there and please for chrissakes break it up now, this very second. I almost tore a glass from his hand, but he dropped it when I lunged, and it shattered at his feet.
The guy sighed and bent over to pick up the pieces, some from the tops of his shoes. Down near the floor, he muttered. “Boys will be boys.”
I had a flash that we were about to re-make Suddenly Last Summer, only without the cannibalism and a traumatized Elizabeth Taylor.
Ted was smeared with blood, and I cleaned him up as best I could with cold water and paper towels and, though far from strong myself, held him around the waist as we went out the front door, escorted by dead silence. By the time we reached the car I was dragging him, and it took every ounce of mind and body to cram him into the passenger's seat. There was a trickle of blood from the wreath he still wore, and I wiped it with my handkerchief.
At home, in bed, cleaned up again by me, he didn't look all that bad and passed out immediately. I finally fell asleep beside him.
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In the morning, we were stuck together. I pulled away and tore out of a bed painted with Ted's blood. When I saw the nest of starchy organdy pillow shams and pristine white Chenille spread from the Forties dyed red--nay, more like a bright cerise mottled with maroon for it was already beginning to dry--I knew it was sans esperance.
Please forgive my snippet of French. It's my way of trying to play it cool, don't you know?
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