"Yes, honey, your Dad really bent over backwards to give me this opportunity," he was saying now, "because it's a very big survey."
"Hush-hush?" she inquired.
David nodded and sank deeper into the divan. "Between you and me and the katydids…"
"And your clients," she said, "mustn't forget them-although they really make me very cross, the way they've been getting you so fagged out lately."
He gave her a lazy grin. "Well, that's how it is when you deal in services."
"Ummm!" she agreed, and continued knitting. A small, definitive garment. But David was too fagged-out to notice.
And now his split-weeks flew by in a haze of integrated sperm and self-experimentation. David was inundated by a bevy of leather fetishists, sado-masochists and transvestites, as well as a surprising number of attractive young women who required his stout insertions in the good old-fashioned way. At times it felt as if he were operating a new kind of out-patient clinic, servicing many young, pretty career-girls and coeds who were too busy to hunt and didn't want to be talked about. He also tidied up the glands of an unending flow of teenagers, both boys and girls. Since they were under-age, where else could these youngsters make acceptable contacts? They couldn't go to bars, nor could they explain to parents if they cruised the streets late at night. After school in the late afternoon proved an ideal time for them.
David learned a great deal more about the ancient rites of sodomy through these importunate tots, discovering that it could be even more blessed to give than to receive. However, the girls at this age were by far the wildest, deepening his carnal education beyond belief. It was warming to know how many weeks they'd saved up their allowances, for him. Just think what he'd saved up for at their age: model airplanes!
Although there were many days when he saw only one client at a time, the group entanglements still abounded. The most popular request by far came from husbands who wanted urgently to see him mounting their wives. In such cases David served as effectively as a marriage-counsellor, particularly when the husband's interest had been on the wane. Somehow it sparked a whole new viewpoint of desire to see a strange young man pumping so zealously at something the husband had been taking for granted. The wives would naturally put on a tremendous performance, as if to say to her mate: Look what a wild ride I'm giving this young stud… see what you've been missing?
As January neared to a close, David's high-flying morale began to sag, to say nothing of certain parts of his overworked anatomy. It was a mortifying blow to his pride when he started getting complaints from his vast clientele. Some of these irate voluptuaries even accused him of false advertising: "Your ad in The Gash Gazette says you're 'well-endowed', which is true; but dammit, lately you can't keep a hard-on to save your soul!" Another elderly enthusiast hit this grievance right on the head: "What good's a big hunk of meat if you can't get it up?"
Still another admirer asked David if he were trying to kill himself, adding that Valerie never worked her other boys full-time because she knew they wouldn't last. David insisted that Valerie had more faith in him, although privately he began to think his lovely benefactress was trying to use him up fast, finding this an unsettling and sadistic idea. He was the only boy she'd ever permitted to work out of her apartment, which, until now, had seemed like a shining triumph. Was there something else behind that gesture… a motive he hadn't counted on, simply because he was so new at these games?
Many of his steady clients sympathized with his earnest efforts and tried to set him straight, advising him that a good stud should only handle one or two Johns a day, if he wanted to go on performing at his peak; adding that it was the cruelest of all frustrations to play with something as potentially exciting as a long plump prick that remained soft. They told him a girl could handle a whole crowd of tricks each day, since her success relied on the erections of her customers rather than her own. But? stud's whole career was built around the stiffening capabilities of his prick, so he had to cool it- lesson number one.
Although David appreciated their kind advice, the complaints increased and became a most shattering attack on his ego. "Play with it," he'd urge them, "that baby'll come up before you know it!.. just be patient…"
"At these prices?" they'd wail, and one could hardly blame them, in the going market.
Soon the boy grew plagued with such demoralizing pangs of inadequacy that he found himself indulging in even lewder practices in order to compensate for his deflated virility, bestowing feverish anal kisses as copiously as if they were handshakes, as well as honing up his crafty flair for cunnilingus. But, alas, even in mid-lick, he knew that mere lip-service would not be enough.
How he tossed and turned in his fresh-smelling Hillsborough bed at night, itemizing all his abortive encounters during the day. God, he'd been so ambitious!.. and he was getting ahead, he could feel it! He'd been so well-liked, everybody asking for him, and smiling so contentedly whenever they saw him, naked. Christ, he'd had the whole world in his arms just by taking off his pants. Public Acceptance! That's what he'd had. Oh man, he'd been at the top, scaled the heights… tongues hangin' out for him all over town. And now? He had tried so devoutly to belong to this world of the flesh, and it had been a while before he was convinced it was right for him. But now the bitterest of all ironies: It was rejecting him!
One day David's wounded vanity received its final blow, adding some righteous rage to his single-minded obsession for Valerie Hudson. During this particular interlude an indefatigable housewife, determined to render him rigid, had been mouthing his penis so long, she'd begun to wheeze asthmatically. Then she gave up the ghost and let him flap there.
"Help me up!" she squawked. David had been standing above her, muscular legs asprawl, hoping this Greek-God stance might spring him to action. It didn't. He helped her up. She gave him a piece of her mind. "I've licked your pony 'til I'm blue in the face, and it still won't gallop!"
David had adopted a rather pithy stock-answer for this: "We live in such a climate of Fear and Impotency that it touches everything we do! Nobody's safe… can't you feel it? Then, seeing that she was bleakly unmoved, he automatically wet his hand and started to jag it for her.
"Oh leave yourself alone!" she said. "There's nothing wrong with you that six months on a health-farm wouldn't cure." Then she glared at him rather curiously. "No wonder Valerie stopped showing you off like a prize heifer."
David dropped his lank rod and stared stupidly at her. "How do you mean, 'showing me off'?"
"Oh for heaven's sake, stop trying to act so innocent!" said the still-thirsty matron.
"But I'm serious!" David insisted. "I don't know what you're talking about."
The woman eyed him shrewdly for a few seconds, and then fully believed him. "Oh, that monstrous bitch!.. Don't tell me she's kept you in the dark about all this?" Why, she must have made a fortune on you, dear boy…" A moment later she had spilled out the whole story to him. He'd done six and seven shows a day in her two-way mirror.
"That mirror?" said David, going a little livid as he pointed at it.
"Yes, dear, let me show you." Since Valerie was not at home that day, she led him around to the other side of the wall and undraped his landlady's glistening secret. "When you were in top form she must have made as much as a thousand dollars a day on you. And you mean to say she didn't split a penny of that with you?"
Numbly, David stared through the glass into the bedroom, thinking of all his lusty entanglements of the past weeks that played to a sold-out house. "Not a penny," he muttered.