That was just happening when Boyfriend came back with David. He was pulling him in the door by his already stiff penis, and I suspected Boyfriend had wasted as little time getting him by the dick as he usually did. He had found David in the tub room, he announced, and he had a beautiful, long uncut cock. (Boyfriend always enunciated clearly when he said “uncut”.) David did have a beautiful cock, and he spoke English and was long and slim with startling blue eyes. It turned out he was Chicano, second generation, a senior Riverside High who spent school breaks with his grandmother in Mérida and worked at Los Baños de Vapor as a secret summer job. We found out all this about him as I was showering the sweat and oil off from my fuck with Carlos, and by the time I heard that he’d been working at the Baños since he turned sixteen, I was ready to start fucking again. David was the most quintessentiallly eighteen-year-old fuck I ever had, except Boyfriend’s presence made it unusual; he held David’s cock and balls and controlled the speed of the thrusting, until his mouth got preoccupied with Carlos’s dick. David told me, ardently, that I was beautiful, though at that point I didn’t care if I was beautiful or not, since I was finally in a bathhouse doing what I’d always wanted to do and I felt more like a faggot than a beautiful gringa. But David was saying he wished he had a girlfriend like me, even though I was thirty, shockingly old – this actually was what almost all of Boyfriend’s conquests said to me, though I suspected not every man could keep up with a girlfriend who was really a faggot, or a boyfriend who was really a woman, or whatever kind of fabulous anomaly I was.
Then someone knocked on the door and we untangled for a minute to answer it, and there were José and Gaspar, laughing and saying we were the most popular room in the Baños at the moment and would we like some more company? At least that’s how David translated the torrent of Spanish, for they were both speaking at once. Naturally we invited them in, and lo and behold, Gaspar was actually gay, and so while I lay sideways on the massage table with my head off the edge and my legs in the air so I could suck David while José fucked me, I could watch Boyfriend finally getting his cock sucked by Gaspar, whose black, glittering Mayan eyes closed in concentration, and I howled with not simply orgasm but the excitement, the splendid excitement of being in Mexico in a bathhouse with four uncut men and a maniac, a place no woman I knew had gone before. Steam swirled in the saturated air like superheated fog, beading like pearls in the web of a huge Yucatan spider in the corner; David’s cock, or was it José’s or Carlos’s again, I didn’t care, pounded my fully opened cunt rhythmically and I wished I had her view.
You know if you have ever been to a bathhouse that time stands still in the steamy, throbbing air, and so I had no idea how long it went on, only that sometimes I was on my back and sometimes on my knees, and once for a minute I was standing facing the wall, and when Boyfriend wasn’t sucking them or fucking me, he was taking snapshots of us, just like a tourist. The floor of the room was completely littered with condoms, which made us all laugh hysterically. Rubber-kneed, Gasper and David held me up with Carlos and José flanking them so Boyfriend could snap one last picture. Then he divided all the rest of the condoms among them – we had more at the hotel, I think that week we went through ten dozen – and got out his brochures. He was trying to explain in Spanish the little condoms he used for giving head – how great they were to use with uncut guys ’cause they disappeared under the foreskin – and I was asking David what it was like to live a double life, Riverside High to Los Baños, and who else came there – “Oh, everybody does,” he said – and did they ever want to fuck him – of course they wanted to – and did he ever fuck them well, sure – and how was that? He shrugged and said, as if there were only one possible response to my question, “It’s fucking.”
When we left, the moon was high, the Baños deserted, the warm night air almost cool after the steamy room. The place looked like a courtyard motel, the kind I used to stay in with my parents when we traveled in the early sixties, but overgrown and haunted. The Pan figure glittered in the low lobby light, and the man at the desk charged us $35 – seven for each massage boy, four each to get in, and six for the room. Hundreds of thousands of pesos – he looked anxious, as though he feared we’d think it was too much. We paid him, laughing. I wondered if this was how a Japanese businessman in Thailand felt. Was I contributing to the imperialist decline of the third world? Boyfriend didn’t give a shit about things like that, so I didn’t mention it. In my hand was a crumpled note from David: “Can I come visit you in your hotel room? No money.”
ALMOST TRANSPARENT BLUE by Ryu Murakami
Translated by Nancy Andrew
IN THE MIDDLE of Oscar’s room, nearly a fistful of hashish smoldered in an incense burner, and like it or not, the spreading smoke entered one’s chest with every breath. In less than thirty seconds I was completely stoned. I felt as if my insides were oozing out through every pore, and other people’s sweat and breath were flowing in.
Especially the lower half of my body felt heavy and sore, as if sunk into thick mud, and my mouth itched to hold somebody’s prick and drain it. While we ate the fruit piled on plates and drank wine, the whole room was raped by heat. I wanted my skin peeled off. I wanted to take in the greased, shiny bodies of the black men and rock them inside of me. Cherry cheesecake, grapes in black hands, steaming boiled crab legs breaking with a snap, clear sweet pale purple American wine, pickles like dead men’s wart-covered fingers, bacon sandwiches like the mouths of women, salad dripping pink mayonnaise.
Bob’s huge cock was stuffed all the way into Kei’s mouth.
Ah’m jes’ gonna see who’s got the biggest. She crawled around on the rug like a dog and did the same for everyone.
Discovering that the largest belonged to a half-Japanese named Saburō, she took a cosmos flower from an empty vermouth bottle and stuck it in as a trophy.
Hey, Ryū, his is twice the size of the one ya got.
Saburō raised his head and let out an Indian yell, then Kei seized the cosmos flower between her teeth and pulled it out, jumped on the table, and shook her hips, like a Spanish dancer. Flashing blue strobe lights circled the ceiling. The music was a luxuriant samba by Luiz Bon Fa. Kei shook her body violently, hot after seeing the wetness on the flower.
Somebody do it to me, do it to me quick, Kei yelled in English, and I don’t know how many black arms reached out to throw her on the sofa and tear off her slip, the little pieces of black translucent cloth fluttering to the floor. Hey, just like butterflies, said Reiko, taking a piece of the cloth and spreading butter on Durham’s prick. After Bob yelled and thrust his hand into Kei’s crotch, the room filled with shrieks and shrill laughter.
Looking around the room, watching the twisting bodies of the three Japanese girls, I drank peppermint wine and munched crackers spread with honey.
The penises of the black men were so long they looked slender. Even fully erect, Durham’s bent fairly far as Reiko twisted it. His legs trembled and he shot off suddenly, and everyone laughed at the sight of his come wetting the middle of Reiko’s face. Reiko laughed too and blinked, but as she looked around for some tissue paper to wipe her face, Saburō easily picked her up. He pulled her legs open, just as if he were helping a little girl to piss, and lifted her onto his belly. His huge left hand gripping her head and his right pinning her ankles together, he held her so that all her weight hung on his cock. Reiko yelled, That hurts, and struck out with her hands, trying to pull away, but she couldn’t grab on to anything.