Fur, Feathers, and Claws

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

As Tucker took off after RJ—“When did you come up with that stupid name?” he wondered—despite the proclamation made mere moments ago, he couldn’t help but feel something other than anger. He’d once had affection for the guy. “Different time, different life,” he fumed, and he vowed to shove it aside.

Tucker was distracted then, by Penny, who started flapping and prancing wildly.

“It’s Roy! Tucker was in love with Roy, not his sister, Savannah! That’s what you’re implying, Paul?”

Olivia shook her head. “Simmer down. You’re worrying Tucker. If he thinks we’re upset, he won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. I will tell you all about his love life in the proper order. Yes, Tucker loved the showers, beyond efficiency and ease of getting the bathing job done, beyond the wonderful feel of pulsating warmth and the relaxing sound of trickling wetness that touched him like his mother and daddy used to at bath time, because the school shower offered something else Tucker enjoyed—quick glances at other naked boys. Sure, their chattering and goofball antics took away from the ambient noise he found so enthralling, but the visual was worth the tradeoff.”

With everyone seemingly settled by Lovely Livvie, Tucker picked up the hunt. “You’re headed right back over that wall, RJ,” he swore. “Maybe the easy way or maybe the hard one.”

It hadn’t registered, at first, the fact that seeing other boy parts, particularly Roy’s, got Tucker sexually excited. He didn’t really know what that implied at seventeen, back in 1968. Tucker was fully committed to being in love with Savannah. They even picked out furniture from that year’s Aldens fall and winter catalog. Tucker designed his entire home out of it—their home—where they would someday raise three kids: two boys and a girl.

Among everything else there was at the Bishop house, Tucker often found interesting books to read or leaf through. He had looked up “v****a” only once in each of three “V” encyclopedias. Conversely, he had looked up “p***s” a dozen times. The underwear models in the JC Penney catalog were better than the labeled black-and-white drawing of the detached, flaccid organ in the reference book, though. Tucker named the catalog models after his teammates. The hunkiest blond, he called Roy. JC-Penney Roy wore blue briefs and a sleeveless white T-shirt exposing a nice explosion of armpit hair. Eventually, while looking for more catalogs, Tucker found something better. It was an art book, with a fully-nude male model just standing there full-on. He had already found tons of dirty magazines with naked women by that point, and even one with a naked woman with a naked man. Tucker named him Tony, because he looked like a younger version of one of his teachers, Mr. Picard, the French teacher, who was called Antoine “Tony” Picard in the yearbooks. Tony was only on two pages, and Tucker folded one of them, so all he could see was him: all tall, tan, and hairy, with his massive manhood standing at full attention, and not the woman, with big breasts and a finger between her legs. The hair around Tony’s erection was black, thick, and curly, and the organ itself a light tan, with a big, fat, brownish-pink tip. Tony was about to shove into the blonde woman’s p***y. Sometimes Tucker would rub his finger over the glossy page, circling the slit, as if he could feel it for real before she did. Tucker named her Beth. He had no idea why he’d bothered naming her at all, since she was always folded under, so she couldn’t look at him while he jerked off with Tony. Beth waited, he knew, spread-eagle on red, satin sheets for Tony to f**k her, but that was never going to happen, because now she was invisible. On the previous page, Beth was on her knees, sucking on Tony’s huge peter with an expression of joy on her face. There’d been no way to fold her out without losing Tony too. Tucker tried, and was kind of pissed at Beth, because with Tony’s d**k in her mouth, he couldn’t see most of it. He could see Tony’s ass in that pic, though. It was really pale compared to the rest of his suntanned body. Tucker would continue to imagine Tony for many months after he first saw him. That’s all he could do after only a few days, because within that short amount of time, the pages with full-frontal Tony and half-hidden Tony had become forever stuck together.

Tucker continued to search for more girlie magazines with at least one man inside. The art book was nice, but he still wanted more. He found another hardback one day with a promising cover—an outline of a man turned to the side, with the nice shape of an exposed p***s in silhouette. It turned out to be more educational, though, and Tucker became quite interested in a story about The s****l Offenses Act of 1967.

The Parliament in Great Britain had decriminalized homosexuality, stating that it was no longer illegal for two men over the age of twenty-one to engage in s****l relations in the privacy of their own home. Tucker was rather surprised it ever was illegal, even after reading more about what “homosexuality” actually was. Though he still hadn’t really given much thought to his own leanings, still not following the clues to their logical revelation, he couldn’t imagine why a man couldn’t kiss another man or suck him if he wanted. Why should the government care? What gave them the right to want to stop it? Tucker also couldn’t fully comprehend what “sodomy” was, even after reading the definition in that book and in the huge unabridged Webster’s. It didn’t seem to make sense—how that would go in there—but homosexuals in England supposedly found a way, and the year before the present one, it was finally legal for them to do it at home.

Turned on, Tucker tossed the history book away, digging through a couple more boxes until he finally came up with a beefcake magazine called “Tomorrow’s Man.” There were no nudes, but some of the men that posed together, with a little imagination, could be about to kiss or touch each other’s bodies. Tucker spent a lot of time in his room or the bathroom, with the collected images spread out on the bed or across the bathroom counter, so he could watch himself and look at them in the mirror. “Tomorrow’s Man,” the art photo of the naked model, JC-Penney Roy: those were all he had for visual stimulation for a while, except for memories of Tony, and his gym mates in the shower, which he sometimes used in bed in the dark. Tucker always chose Roy then, in his underwear or out of them, bringing the quick glances he’d taken to the foreground of his mind. Roy’s hair trail, his pubes, Roy’s d**k that was every bit as enticing as Tony’s, though way, way smaller. Tucker imagined “engaging in s****l relations” with Roy, and as soon as he did, as soon as he imagined kissing Roy, stroking him, maybe sucking him like Beth did Tony, or putting it in his backside somehow, he shot his load much faster than planned, up his gut, over his shoulder, and all on his pillow, some twenty-some nights in a row.

“Oh, my God!” Still breathing hard from his latest orgasm, The Smothers Brothers blaring from the two-year-old 1966 RCA console TV in the living room, like a slap-yourself-in-the-head-moment, as Tucker flipped his pillow to the clean side, the idea came. Tucker realized he never thought of Savannah as he shot his hot semen onto his belly, into the john, or into a gym sock. No matter who he was looking at on what page in which publication, he always thought of Roy. “Yup,” Tucker figured. “I guess I’m homosexual.” He wondered if men having s*x with each other was illegal in the United States, like it had been in England, and never slept that night, but obsessed instead, from midnight until dawn, about finding more information and maybe, if he was lucky, some more pictures, too.

As Tucker leafed through a magazine that not only mentioned homosexuality, but also featured several men in erotic poses—actually touching, though not quite as explicitly as Beth and Tony—he wondered if his father even knew what he was bringing in half the time. Obviously, he didn’t. Another publication was completely devoted to pictures of naked men, one of whom was climaxing, a perfect capture as his semen exploded from his manhood. “Dirty, man!” Tucker exclaimed out loud. There were no articles, no captions, no ads, and no title. The cover was a blank, gray page, and it was stuck in a religious book, like a bookmark, at the start of a chapter that condemned men who lay with other men. Tucker wondered if another homosexual teen forced to read one, somehow got his hands on the other. He wondered why they’d both ended up in someone’s trash, and imagined the teen running away to England, where homosexual s*x was legal and practiced openly all over the place. Once Tucker took off his pants, as stiff as the ejaculating stud he found quite homely, but with a nice body, he could not have cared less how it got to him. He was just glad it had. Page after page of sepia-tone photographs, man after man, all naked, in a variety of shapes and sizes and s****l arousal enthralled him. Some pages had one guy, some had two. One page had five naked men standing in a row for army physicals, one bent over, showing a part of his anatomy Tucker never knew was supposed to be s****l, but somehow suddenly was. Within an hour, that page was stuck to the next one—the guy shooting sperm. “f**k!” Tucker got them apart, but both tore a little.

Between self-pleasuring, Tucker read everything he could find on the subject of homosexuality: the sensual and erotic, the historical, the psychological, the scientific, the religious. There was no doubt he was “gay.” That word came up once in a while, though he preferred “homosexual,” which sounded more scientific, like a biological genus or anthropological class. Whatever one called it, Tucker was one, whether he wanted to be or not, whether God liked it or not, whether 1950s doctors thought it was natural or an illness, whether or not it was against the law. f**k! Just when he had finally been accepted by his peers, there was something else to make him not fit in. Once again, something that felt normal, even ever-so-briefly, Tucker learned through reading, would most likely make him an outcast again.

So Tucker kept it all to himself, though pretending he wasn’t homosexual didn’t make Tucker’s urges go away. He was picked on a little bit by his track team buddies, but not in a mean way, and not about being “gay.” It was good-natured ribbing, camaraderie amongst pals, mostly about his hairiness. Sparse, dark sprouts had become lush coverage rather quickly. He was definitely way ahead of the others when it came to body hair. He had whiskers on his chin and an enviable thatch between his pecs, whereas most of the other boys, other than on their limbs, where even that hair seemed lighter and more thinly spread than Tucker’s, were only thickly-furred in two specific places, under their pits and over their d***s. Roy was mostly blond, head to toe, even the curly thicket smack in between that he’d flashed the first day in gym. The hair was a deep wheat color that got darker when wet. Tucker still wondered why it didn’t match the stripe down his middle, why it was darker, why Roy’s eyebrows were also so much more brunette than the hair on his head. Maybe that was how it worked with some towheads, Tucker figured. Another blond guy, Alfie, he had black pubes. In fact, Tucker’s teammates and classmates were all pretty different when it came to hair color and amount. Chad Burke, he was a redhead, with long lashes like the wisps of a feather. Tucker hadn’t seen him nude. There were five or six guys who showered in swim trunks. Chad was one of them. The guys were all different when it came to d**k size, too. Some were small, like Roy. Roy’s stuck out straight, even soft. Not that Tucker had seen it hard, except in his imagination. Roy’s little d**k shimmied when he laughed and acted goofy in the shower. Roy didn’t seem at all self-conscious or uptight about it. Even though some other guy’s d***s, like Tucker’s and Chad’s, obvious even beneath his swimwear, were way bigger, Roy strutted and acted like the c**k of the walk. He let it all hang out, and Tucker took it in, not just quick glances anymore, but whenever he could, as long as he could, without being noticed. Roy invited him over for a whole week in the summer, but Tucker lied, and said he’d be spending the summer at his Uncle Walter’s. Then, so he wouldn’t get caught, he did, all ten weeks. No swimming in the McKenna’s pool, no new dirty books—though he brought one with him—and no Savannah and no Roy.