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An Eclectic Collection of Very Short Stories from the World Over

Jesse Archer

Bunny Boy Takes the Carrot

Ludovic Duboc had a name as strong as his body. He was the biggest, beefiest hunk in all of Paris. By day he carried a gun, patrolling the streets as a French gendarme. On weekends he strutted another weapon—his indefatigable erection—onstage at the sex club Le Depot. Soon he would become porn star Virgil Sainclair, but on Thursday nights near the end of the last century, I was his bunny boy.

On Thursdays, the waiters at Le Krokodil hurriedly set up the tables, anticipating who we knew would be arriving. Virgil promoted the “Bunny Boy” night at Le Krokodil, and if we had finished our chores by the time he entered, like Cinderella attending the ball, we could follow him upstairs to watch him change. Virgil was an exhibitionist, and for good reason. His erect cock was said to be as big and hard as a day-old baguette.

Upstairs, Virgil stripped naked and I casually admired his manhood hanging soft, a forearm between bulging thighs. I daresay I knew one day I would feverishly need that cock, but for now I only admired it as I would a painting at the Louvre. He had asked me many times to go home with him, but I always laughed him off. I was too tight to consider taking that, too innocent to be a size queen.

Virgil smiled in the mirror as we watched him slather up his incredible torso with baby oil. He then lifted and dropped his mighty meat into the pouch of a G-string, zipped up his leather pants, buckled into a pair of black boots, and grabbed a stack of “Bunny Boy” flyers.

The other waiters pleaded to accompany Virgil in the flyer distribution, but I put on my ears and we left together, as always. All of the young Bunny Boy waiters had to wear white fluffy bunny ears. But because I was Virgil’s chosen bunny, I got the only battery-operated pair. My ears lit up and blinked.

Together we promenaded the Marais district of Paris, handing out flyers to passersby and to the competition: the Banana Café, L’Amazonial. Tourists giggled and Parisians stopped in their tracks to stare at the blinking bunny-eared boy beside the chiseled chest of Hercules. “C’est rigolo” (It’s funny), chuckled Virgil.

“C’est rigolo,” I copied. I was his bunny boy, I didn’t have to think. I looked up to Virgil’s pectoral perfection glistening in the summer sun as we strode arm in arm past the Pompidou Centre and on to the Open Café. Alone, I might have felt awkward but with Virgil I was as electrified as my ears.

The promotion paid off, and Thursday night at Le Krokodil was the most popular in Paris. A DJ spun behind a tyrannical transsexual, Galia, who cackled obscenities into her microphone; the ringmaster in a Fellini circus. In the kitchen below, we bunny boys snorted lines of cocaine before surfacing to serve the savage crowds a menu of rubbery meat brochettes slopped over with a gloppy white sauce. French cuisine be damned—nobody was there for the food.

My ears twinkled as the lights dimmed and Galia’s spotlight swung around to illuminate a pink and white six-foot-tall tiered cake. The full house buzzed, remixed Dalida blared from the speakers, and crowds formed in the street outside jockeying for a glimpse.

I helped roll the wooden cake to the center of the room.

Out of the cake popped lubed up go-go boys. The ensuing table top extravaganza incited the raving patrons to near riot, some so out of control they tried to stick wine bottles up the asses of the gyrating dancers. But they never manhandled the biggest go-go, the gendarme, the god among men: Virgil. He inspired some kind of reverence.

With an arrogant smile, Virgil swiped champagne bottles from the hands of patrons, and provocatively poured them down his broad chest. Gaping mouths shamelessly threw themselves between his legs to catch the bubbly flow careening through his overstuffed G-string.

“I’m moving to Los Angeles,” thrilled Virgil at the end of that summer. “I’ve been contracted as a Falcon exclusive porn star!” he said in French. His enthusiasm was not contagious and one bunny boy actually cried. The others swooned. I swung into action. That night when he once again suggested I accompany him home, I accepted. The rabbit was finally ready for his carrot.

We stopped and saluted an armed guard as we drove into the gendarmerie where he lived. Virgil held my hand the whole time, he didn’t care what his comrades thought of his sexuality. Once inside his apartment, I scanned his walls stocked with gay porn.

“I love ass,” Virgil proclaimed. I was shocked, not only because my own ass quivered in panic, but because Virgil had spoken the sentence in English—a first. He was going to be a porn star in Los Angeles, he explained, so he must learn English. I didn’t see the point, but I let it drop with my pants.

Virgil ate my ass for what seemed like an eternity. It was the first time someone had eaten me out like that, and I found it both curious and exhilarating to discover he really did love ass. Finally he tossed on a Magnum and pushed slowly into me. All my nerve endings screamed. I wasn’t a virgin, but Virgil was not a man, he was a tripod. Ouch. Out.

I started to pull away, to make him stop. Then I thought of all those who dreamed of being in my position. So what if my asshole was going to self-destruct? Everybody wants to fuck a porn star. I would hold on magnanimously for the men who ogled Virgil, who masturbated to his image, for the die-hard fans who would soon be able to buy the plastic dildo replica of the 11-inch power cock now battering its way inside of me.

I gritted my teeth and bore him. I was the little bunny that could.

Two years later, in a dingy sex theater in South America, I looked up onto the screen to see the familiar face and chiseled torso that had walked Paris by my side. And the dick, that weapon of ass destruction, was now pumping into his costar, who took it with a grateful purr.

How I had changed in two years. I was no longer a bunny boy, no longer an innocent. I wished I could trade places with myself in time as I recalled the night I convinced myself I was taking his monster cock for all those who didn’t have the opportunity.

Watching Virgil on-screen, I jerked off knowing full well I endured that painful fuck for nobody else at all. I took it all for me, selfishly.

The Great Repression

Escalades and Mercedes crowd the laneless chaos of Beirut, and the elite pay thirty dollars to sit at the beach beside their Christian Dior clutches. On Rue Monot, the showy chic center of nightlife, they speak French over native Arabic and claim their heritage not to be Arabic, but Phoenician.

Beirut wants to forget, and fifteen years of war seem to have vanished. My best friend Dan has to drive around to look for the evidence of destruction beneath a patina of decadence. At last we stumble upon the gutted remnants of a shelled-out facade.

“Take a picture of my childhood,” says Dan.

The war isn’t the only thing glossed over. Despite being filled with homosexuals, Acid is not a gay club because homosexuality is illegal. The dance floor is monitored, and if gay activity is reported, the police will shut down the club. When I danced with Dan, a guard warned me not to touch him. He put his finger to his lips to explain: shhhh.

Cultural sensitivity is not my strong suit. I mocked his hush-up and circulated the dance floor to provoke anyone I could, just because I couldn’t. The gay boys resisted my advances. They knew the rules.

“Don’t cause trouble,” one said when I put my arms around his waist.

“Trouble is the only way to change things.”

“Don’t do us any favors,” he said, retreating.

Two bouncers kicked me out, literally with their feet to my chest. “Fucking Middle Easterners!” I yelled to lump them in with other oppressors and terrorists, with Osama, Iran, Syria. “All you know is violence!”

The bouncers returned with handcuffs. “You see why I left this country,” Dan said as we ran to the car. I saw. I had already seen.

Dan’s family owned a condo at the beach community Samaya, right on the Mediterranean. Every day I walked to the pool with a beach towel wrapped over my suit, around my waist. And every day the pool security insisted I remove the towel from my waist and carry it. “Why?” I demanded to know. “Only girls are allowed to wear a towel like that,” Dan translated their Arabic. Fucking Phoenicians.

The morning after my ejection from Acid, Dan left for breakfast with his parents. I headed to the pool alone but this time I carried my towel, unable to muster the energy to defy the rules and create another poolside scandal. I was beginning to understand why the boys at the club didn’t want to “cause trouble.” Forcing change was exhausting and futile.

Hopping into the pool, I noticed a young man in the shallow end, his dark hair and bushy eyebrows accenting a perfectly sculpted face. His chocolate eyes squinted in the sun as he looked my way. I waded toward him. His name was Karl.

Karl told me that he was eighteen, that he spent his summers here at Samaya, and that he really liked the way his roll-on deodorant felt up his butt when he masturbated. Karl knew he was gay at thirteen, he said, but had never been with man. He dreamed about countries where you aren’t arrested for kissing your boyfriend or dancing with your best friend. Places where you can wear your towel around your waist if you want to.

Sex in the condo with Karl was tempting, but I was expecting Dan and his parents back any second so we decided on lunch. Before getting out of the pool, Karl swam around for a few minutes to lose his erection. Heading to eat, I popped into the condo to grab my wallet. Karl entered behind me and let his swimsuit fall, scrunched and wet, to the floor. “What are you doing?” I freaked. Dan’s parents were returning, like, now.

The Lebanese are a very considerate culture. Dan is so considerate that he hasn’t even come out to his parents. I will not out him like this, but Karl is not helping, not being very considerate, not very Lebanese. His prick pokes up erect, a houseplant seeking the light.

Karl is nervous, too, but not about Dan’s parents. He trembles all over, anticipating his first time with a man. “Put your clothes on!” I beg, “We cannot do this here!” Karl just stares at me, naked, with those liquid black eyes. He says, “You only live once.”

Karl is still shaking uncontrollably when I penetrate his asshole. I hold his hands together above his head and pump into him, wondering how my cock compares to his roll-on deodorant. “Does that feel alright?” I ask, kissing him. He nods with a whimper.

Thankfully, Karl cums quickly. I pull up my pants to get out of there undiscovered. “I’m not leaving until you cum!” says Karl, shoving my dick in his mouth and sucking like a pro. Like he’s been dreaming about this since he was thirteen.

I am both terrified and proud. Karl is having his way despite the dangers. I find it ironic that the one person risking to live is not a survivor of war—he is too young to remember it, too young to need to forget it. But how long before Karl will start to cover up? I worry that if he stays in this country he will soon learn not to want any trouble at all.

I shoot a load of cum all over Karl’s tight, tanned, barely legal chest. Wiping him up, I lean into those big, hopeful eyes. “Leave Lebanon,” I wish for him. “As soon as possible.”

Big House, Big City

He was staring at me on the F train platform in Brooklyn. It was an inviting stare, but he wore those baggy pants that fell off his ass, some golden bling around his neck and a hideous gangster do-rag on his head. What did he want from me?

He couldn’t be gay. Nobody wearing a do-rag is gay. But then I remembered seeing a bearded Hasidic Jew breeze through an East Village gay bar in his yarmulke. Things aren’t always what they seem in New York City.

He came toward me. Great, I thought. He is totally going to ask me to buy candy for his basketball team. “Whazzup,” he said. “You gay?”

I may be in danger. “Yes,” I said defiantly. “You?”

He said he wasn’t.

So, what did he want? I told him I was going home to the Lower East Side. He said his name was Eddie and asked if I wanted company. “I thought you weren’t gay,” I responded.

“I love me a pussy. Pussy is pretty,” said Eddie.

“So, why do you want to come home with me?”

“’Cause you’re pretty, too.” I had never before been likened to a pussy.

I was new to New York, I didn’t know many people. I’d never been with a man in a do-rag. I had the time. We exited the F train at Delancy and walked toward my apartment on Rivington Street.

Eddie broke the awkward silence.

“I don’t mind walking around with a gay guy,” he blurted out.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Some people do though,” he went on.

I wasn’t convinced this was a good idea.

Inside my apartment, I asked him to leave on the do-rag as we undressed. His body was lean, and an even dark black. Eddie sucked my cock inquisitively—carefully, like he was taking an examination.

“I thought you weren’t gay,” I said when he came up for air.

“I love me a pussy. And you’re straight, too. Gay men are straight because they’re straight with themselves.”

Interesting perspective, Eddie.

He looked down at me with almost clinical interest when I sucked his dick.

“You really know how to do that, huh?”

“Mmhmm.” My mouth was full.

Eddie ruminated, “You remind me of this guy I knew who had this huge ass.”

At this point I pulled his dick out of my mouth because I absolutely do not have a huge ass.

“I remind you of a guy who had a huge ass?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said casually. “He’d wear G-strings and stuff, and when he walked by, everyone in the house would talk shit about him, about how gay and sissy he was. But all their dicks were hard. I know everybody in the house would’ve fucked him silly if they could only get him alone in the shower.”

“Which house are you talking about?”

“The house.” He said, aloof.

I didn’t get it.

“You know, prison,” he said, matter of fact. “You want to fuck me now?”

I made a mental note not to let him out of my sight. He is here to rob me. But what kind of thief asks to get fucked on a heist?

Eddie was on all fours, head down in concentration, as I angled into his smooth onyx ass. I barely slipped inside before he bawled, “Aww, that fucking hurts!”

He flew down on the bed, scrunched up his face and huffed in and out. Finally he opened his eyes. “That was my first time,” he said.

I tried to tell Eddie that doggy style was not the best position for beginners. I suggested he sit on top of me. “That fucking hurts,” he kept repeating, as if he didn’t believe it. So we jerked off together.

After he left I scoured my apartment for anything missing, but the only thing he took was my phone number. I was convinced he had ulterior motives. Why had he really come home with me?

I mean, maybe he was researching an acting role? A sociology paper? Or maybe he was just a friendly ex-convict not imprisoned by his sexuality.

Remembrance of Things Past

“Sex in the NYC subway bathrooms was the best, and you’ll never know it!”

A peerless eighty-year-old gay man named Maure opines the liberated days of gay sex in New York because that’s what old people do, it’s the only thing left they have to hang onto, their only card to play: making you feel like you missed out on the good old days of yore.

The boarded up bathrooms of the NYC subway system once served for a jerk before work and a head job on the commute home. The dedicated could stuff their pockets with peanuts and make a whole day of it. Maure says the hottest station was at 51st and Lex, on the 6 train, and as he speaks about those days gone by, I recall my first taste of public bathroom sex.

It was the train depot in Venice, Italy, where I first began to associate the dank smell of urine with anonymous action. I awkwardly shifted my heavy purple backpack at the toilet sink while in the mirror an Italian in a long camel hair overcoat gave me the glance. His eyes darted to his right where he turned into a stall, camel hair coat flipping in after him. I turned and followed, finding him inside the open stall door with that universal look of urgency that screamed Get in here now! And so I did.

I crouched impatiently amid the pungent odor of bleach and urine while he unzipped his pants and flopped out his vaguely sweaty uncut Italian dick. It smelled a little funky, like maybe there was some residue under the hood, but never mind.

My nose dived into his pubic hair as I set to work, his tumescence inside my mouth, and as quick as it began it was over. I wiped up the spilled sperm off the floor tiles because I’m not untidy, and when I turned around he was gone without so much as a grazie, which is probably the allure of bathroom sex—it leaves you hankering for more. Just always a little bit more.

The following year in Argentina I passed through Retiro train station and, recalling the camel hair overcoat, slipped into the restroom for a look-see, only to discover what would haunt me during my time in that country. A horse trough of a urinal, twenty feet long, packed with men—standing room only. They held their cocks in hand, as if weighing melons at the supermarket. And they could have been. I never saw anything to refute Argentina’s solid reputation for champion beef.

My penis was so stiff I had trouble bringing it out to jerk off in this chorus line of cock, but I did. And although I was on bike, Retiro station became a regular detour on my way home for the year I lived in Buenos Aires. I laid my bike against the wall in that room with the trough and stood with the others. Who knows how long they stood there—all day maybe. There was the smell of piss and pubic hair in the drain and all the other signs of a urinal, but what would happen if someone mistook this for a restroom?

The group jerk hardly paused when a fresh cock flipped out beside them. I daresay in my time at Retiro station I didn’t see one stream of urine, or maybe I’ve blocked it out. I did see cum and it stuck in globs, lodging on the porcelain, ornery as it is.

Just before leaving Argentina, I stepped into the station of Retiro to see an athletic young man in the lineup beside me. I stared down to spy a massive tube steak sprouting out of his pants and grabbed it. I had to touch it, to squeeze that fleshy, fluffy juicy meat. It wasn’t even hard. My mouth went slack with desire and I quite nearly sank to my knees right there (I’d nearly done it before), but instead I came, quickly, immediately, squirting in all directions like a sprinkler on a parched lawn.

Groans of desire came from the otherwise silent zombies all around and once again I was reminded of the insatiable draw of the public bathroom. It never satisfies all the way. But I needed all the way with this one perfect specimen, this one model cock. I got his number.

When I called the kid (I forget his name because it wasn’t important), he told me he lived in Ramos Mejia, which is a poor, dangerous suburb. Nature gives so generously with one hand as it ruthlessly strips with the other. As he lived in Ramos Mejia, I’d pay for our Teloh. (In Argentina, by-the-hour hotels are an anagram: “Teloh.”) Hell, I’d even buy him a beer.

He arrived at the appointed plaza clothed, so I had a chance to notice more about him. There was dirt under his fingernails and his clothes weren’t exactly threadbare but close as they clung to his stunning physique. I bought him that beer and a meal and a room for an hour that came with condoms and a cracked square of soap.

On the creaky bed, he pulled me to his face for a kiss. I hadn’t considered kissing this backstreet boy, and it took me by surprise. Why are big cocks are always attached to a man who wants to kiss? And worse: snuggle? I made out, of course I did—whatever it takes to access to the monster in act two. And what a throttle I gave it, idolizing the oversized dark cock with its throbbing, leaky pink head.

I refused to let him touch my own rock hard dick, because I wanted to savor his and not cave prematurely to the flood begging to burst forth. First I was going to saddle the steer, and it was with my mouth’s regret that I slathered my asshole for its introduction into adulthood.

I rocked and bounced on that joystick in a rhythm I’ve yet to reproduce until, picturing his trophy cock bucking deep into me, I came in a never ending gush of glory. Afterward, I dug into my bag and reached for the camera. “Can I take a photo of your poronga?” Click.

In Argentina, poronga is slang not for dick or cock, but something more, something meatier, something like the fable that exists between the legs of filthy truck drivers. I still have that photo and I still keep it because the last time I returned to Buenos Aires, I entered Retiro station hoping to find his poronga or a poronga of the same family, but they had renovated the place, changed everything, not a hint of action. It was now a restroom as sterile as any other.

So, when I pass locked restrooms in NYC subway stations and think about all the good times of yesteryear, all the erotic rendezvous I was too young to experience, I’m not too regretful. I’ll always have Retiro. And next time I’m in Buenos Aires, I might just tell some younger buck, “You’ll never know the good old days of Retiro station.” And feel lucky, somehow.

Devil and the Dumbbell

In Los Angeles, the only thing I pumped at the gym was my dick.

At brand name gyms, I winked my way through workouts, and afterward wasted precious water jerking off with that perfect specimen in the shower opposite. Instead of muscles, I developed a keen ability to perceive the size of bulges beneath towels. My physique was disappearing, with a puff of white vapor, into the steam room.

In New York, I vowed to workout more than just my forearm. I needed a gym where sex was not just unaccepted, but impossible. Along the East River, past the projects and the condemned boardwalk, just beyond the low income housing of Stuyvesant Town, I found my answer in an elegant building that was once a public bath. Asser Levy is a Parks Department recreational facility housing a spacious gym.

Until recently, annual dues were a suggested donation of twenty-five dollars. Of course there is no steam room and the homeless inhabit the showers to wash their clothes and bodies; open sores on bloated legs. The place is free of sexual temptation and without a gay boy in sight. I put on my iPod, pound out a workout, and run home in an hour. It’s more productive than a three-hour steam room circle jerk and my body stays tight.

Despite a failure to interact, I know and have named the inner city cast. Yosemite Sam has a white handlebar mustache and haunts the gym to make casual conversation with anything female. He adores the Birdwoman, who flutters her arms out laterally as she prances on the treadmill, her neck jutting out in time. Predator sports a pile of dreads reminiscent of the namesake in the Schwarzenegger film, and he generally works out with Grunter, who caterwauls with each power lift. The Clampets, a husband and wife team in coveralls, administer abdominal workouts to each other on the mats in the far corner.

Catatonic spends all day at the gym, sitting on the machines, staring blankly ahead and doing nothing in the way of exercise. He’s always around, idle and bothersome, like a utility bill. Of course old Catatonic was hogging the incline press last week, just when I needed it. There he was staring ahead, a human zucchini, cataloguing life’s missed opportunities. I decided to get a drink of water in the restroom that adjoins the gym.

Inside, someone was taking a leak. He turned around at my entrance and I saw he wasn’t a regular. I had seen him, though, just that day, on the military press. He had given me a curious look—making me aware that I was visibly grooving, rocking out to the remixed Debbie Gibson on my iPod. As he now turned back to finish pissing, I found myself in a psychological conundrum. The drinking spout is affixed to the sink just beside the urinal. Do I wait for him to finish or lean down and drink from the fountain beside his draining dick?

If I were just one of the boys, I thought, I would bend down and drink like it’s no big deal. So I bent down to drink. No big deal. Gulping water, I glanced left to see piss casually draining into the urinal from a big, black, downward drooping dick. “You like that?” a voice said.

This was happening—at Asser Levy? I kept drinking, playing opossum. Swiveling right, the penis swung into better view. A few final drops of urine dribbled down onto the floor by my foot, and the cock began to expand, inflating upward. It was mottled, like an Appaloosa. Could we get away with this? Looking up, I saw he was anxious, too. Everybody comes in here for a sip of water between sets.

I grabbed the burgeoning black erection with my hand, squeezed, and weighed the costs. An inappropriate environmental platitude empowered me: If not now, when? If not you, who? I plucked the headphones from my ears and they fell to the ground. I had to listen for the door. If it opened, I might have one second to make innocent.

Then I gagged my throat with that mottled cock, smothering my nose into a wild thatch of dank, sweaty pubic hair. Suctioning back and forth on his throbbing meat, I pulled down my shorts to jerk off. Quickly. Listening for the door, I heard the tinny voice of Debbie Gibson drift up from my headphones on the piss-stained tiles: Shake your love, I just can’t shake ... your love! Shake it!

I removed his erection from my mouth, both of us hurriedly beating off. I kept picturing Predator bursting in to give me a lesson from the school of hard knocks. “You gonna cum?” the man whispered. “Yeah,” I groaned. Stroking himself, he put his left hand out and I shot a sticky load of evidence into his palm. Almost immediately, he added his own grayish glob. “Thanks,” I said, mostly for the expeditious clean up.

I spun on my heel, exiting to find Catatonic still comatose at the incline press. I didn’t have the energy to rouse him from his regrets. So much for the incline press. Looking around, Birdwoman flapped on the treadmill. Beside her, I saw the butterfly machine was free. I could do that. Over there were the dumbbells, I could do arm curls. Or not.

The workout was finished, my motivation zapped. All I could think was, fucking hot. Like a weed that doesn’t need ideal conditions to flourish, lust had invaded this place. The sanctity of my ghetto gym was in jeopardy. Walking out, I could almost feel my muscles beginning to atrophy.