DONNY
Dad and mom took us all to Disney World for three days over Christmas break. Kenny and his friend, Jimmy had their own room, which meant mid day naps. PJ and Karen shared a room with one bed which mom pretended didn’t happen. Mom wasn’t a prude, but sometimes ignorance is bliss. Donny and I shared a room. On the first night Donny accidentally spilled a glass of water on his bed. He ended up sleeping with me. In the morning after breakfast I had to return to our room for my forgotten phone. I made certain Donny’s bed wouldn’t dry out until we checked out.
***
In early June of 2007 we moved back to Ann Arbor. Dad had accepted the position as head of the philosophy department. But the main reason for the move was mom. She never warmed to Columbus. Its Christian Science church was in decline, and the teachers at her school were clickish. She loved our secluded 14 acre estate three miles west from the Michigan campus.
***
In August and again In October I took Kenny, Jimmy, and Donny cave exploring near Monticello close to the the Kentucky Tennessee border. PJ who was taking classes at Columbia wanted daily updates. The trip seemed doomed, because Kenny’s friend was too afraid to cross a dangerous crevasse ten minutes from the entrance. Fortune was with us. We found an even better cave with an unpromising entrance closer to the highway. All four of us shared a hotel room which meant I got little sleep. I envied Donny’s rock like sleeping habits.
***
Two years after Kenny’s stay at Wexner I received a text from Donny. All it said was, “I’m 170. Let’s do it.” I called PJ.
“Mike, You two need to talk face to face. Last month he and I had a ‘birds and bees’ talk. I told him I can swing both ways and told him about some of the experiences I had. He wanted to know if you and I had ever done it. When I said no, he wanted to know if you were gay. I said he’d have to ask you himself. Mike, I asked him what he thinks about when he’s jerks off. He said girls.”
I was upset and relieved at the same time.
“Donny idolizes you big time. He didn’t come right out and say so, but I can read him like a book. Here’s where I need your help. He told me he’s confused. He has an obsession about wrestling you, and he looks forward to sleeping with you. He knows about you pouring water on his bed at Disneyland. Hell, he was going to do it himself. You two need to talk.”
“I’ll give you a call in a little while. I want to mull this over.” Several hours later I was on the phone. “I’m his authority figure. I’m you, your mom, and dad all rolled into one.” I could tell PJ thought there was more.
I was asleep when the phone rang. “Mike, he just wants to be around you, because he idolizes you. The wrestling is something you two have in common. And as for you, you bask in his idolization. Even if the other stuff is true, the bottom line is you like being around each other. I’m not saying there isn’t a sexual attraction, but it’s not essential to your friendship is it? And you know he’s a little over 160 dripping wet, not 170.”
A warm misty rain was falling as I pulled up next to Donny’s truck at the edge of the mossy hill. He went to the center, turned and stood there his arms folded across his chest staring at me. Not a word. Not even a wave. The moment I stepped onto the moss he began stalking me.
His attacks were furious, almost manic. A pure attempt to dominate me physically. We wrestled until submission, rested, and went at it again. No smack talk. No bantering. He got a couple of submissions, but he couldn’t overcome my twenty pound weight advantage. Things changed during one of our rest periods. We were laying on our backs when Donny said, “I’m sorry I lied about my weight. You’re not mad at me are you?”
“Mad? No. But it’s not like you to exaggerate. Why did you do it?”
“PJ said we needed to talk face to face, and well, I couldn’t get wrestling you out of my mind.”
“What does he want us to talk about?”
“You and me.”
“Can it wait til tonight?”
He couldn’t hide his relief. “Why? What do you want to do now?”
“Are you kidding? I want to wrestle some more. Let’s alternate: one submission, one Free Style. The winner gets a rub down.” I started having fun, bantering and smack talking. Wrestling turned into horsing around. The rubdowns turned into conversations about everything and nothing.
In the afternoon we took Kenny and two of his friends to the carnival. Donny was the main attraction now that PJ was taking summer classes at Columbia. I was surprised when he challenged me to a submission match, but I insisted on folk style. It went three falls.
We dropped Kenny off at his friend’s to spend the night. Donny brought in several pillows and we laid on the living room floor watching an ancient Three Stooges movie roughhousing and trading rubdowns during the never-ending commercials.
Donny was straddling my back massaging my shoulders when I asked, “Do you want to have that talk now?”
I could feel him tense up again. “OK, let’s save it til tomorrow. I figure you owe me another five minutes.” That’s when he Pearl Harbored me. He was massaging my left arm slowly forcing it up my back. “Do you give?” He asked innocently.
“What do you mean?”
“Say Uncle,”
I played along. “In your dreams.”
He forced it higher, still massaging it. “Kenny told us this is how you made PJ submit on the hill. It’s payback time. Say Uncle.” He forced my arm a little higher.
“You’re going to regret this, you know you’re playing with fire.”
“Oh, I’m so afraid of you I’m shaking. Say uncle,” he hissed.
“OK, I warned you. Uncle!”
Donny released my arm and slapped the back of my head several times before getting off me. “So, what are you going to do about it big guy?”
“We’re going to finish this in the bedroom. I’m going to tie you in so many knots you’re going to think you’re a pretzel.”
I made a side trip to the bathroom, and gurgled with mouth wash. I took the lid off a bottle of baby oil before rejecting the idea. I sprayed a hint of Right Guard under my arms.
From the bedroom Donny shouted, “What’s taking you so long? Are you scared?”
I banished my brain to the land of limbo, stripped to my shorts, and headed down the hall. I framed myself in the doorway expanding my chest and flaring my lats. Donny was kneeling in the middle of the bed, hands on hips, his eyes widened as he stared at me. I crawled onto the bed advancing towards him on my knees. We picked up where we had left off on the mossy hill earlier talking trash while exchanging long held holds more designed to maximize body contact than pain. I had done this once before with Ron, my hero. Except this time it was Donny wrestling his hero, not me. For more than a half hour we wrestled ‘give and take’ trash talking all the time. I was getting turned on and trying to do the same to him even if he wasn’t gay. I had him wrapped in a complicated hold where our entire bodies were intertwined. I lay there enjoying the sensation and slowly realized I was entering the danger zone of my fantasies. I added pressure to the hold and said, “Give”.
“Nope.” I increased the pressure. “Nope.” I lay there for a while. It felt so good, too good.
“You know, I could go to sleep, and you still couldn’t get out of this.”
“Go ahead. I don’t care.” He said it so fast he must have been thinking of the idea before I said it. Those words set my groin tingling.
I gave him an extended moment of pain, and released him. “We’ll finish this in the morning.” I rolled away from him, and assumed the sleeping position.
“You’re a wimp.”
“You’re not going to stop talking are you.”
“I’m still awake.”
“Roll over and I’ll give you a massage. No talking.” I slid next to him and started with his scalp, then moved to his face, even rubbing a finger across his lips. and ended at his waist. I alternated between massaging and caressing, hoping he was feeling relaxed and seduced. I patted his back a couple of times and moved away pretending to sleep. I had slept with Donny more than half a dozen times. He always put an arm around me. This time was different. He just laid there. I had never given him such a long and gentle massage. I secured my little boy between my legs and started to renew bodily contact, cementing our backs together, maneuvering the bed sheet out of the way so it wouldn’t come between our skin. After a while we both laid on our backs. He shifted his head to my pillow. I snuggled my head next to his and drifted off to a semi sleep. Every time we moved it was in slow motion as if reluctant to loose the contact we had. We were laying on our backs side by side with the entire length of our bodies touching when Donny rolled onto his side and laid his head on my chest, throwing an arm carelessly across my waist. I cuddled his head with my own arm. I would have maintained this blissful position for the rest of the night, but my left arm was in an awkward position and began aching. It became unbearable and I had to move it. He rolled onto his back. My body refused to accept this new arrangement. I moved my own head gently to his chest listening to his heartbeat. I woke when he moved and removed my head from his chest, hoping he’d find a new way for us to come together. But I was the impatient one. My body demanded contact. My feet searched for his until our souls became mated. Strange how erotic it felt. Later I broke apart and drew him into me so I could sync our breathing. At the same time I was hypersensitive to his space. I wanted us meeting in the middle of the bed in case he wanted to pull apart.
Disaster happened after we had become magnets. I was laying on my side facing him. He was on his back. My arm lay comfortably over his chest, with my hand cupping his shoulder. My leg drifted over his, and slid up his thigh, close to the groin. It remained there for a while. Almost by itself my leg began rubbing up and down. Suddenly, he shifted his body to face me. My little boy sprang to life. Alarmed, I turned my back to him so fast it could only mean one thing if he was awake: rejection. My brain asked me, “What have you done, you idiot?! I tucked my growing man between my legs and pushed myself into him which he welcomed with a firm arm encircling my ribs pulling me in closer. This time there was no mistake: Donny took a deep breath, exhaled, and caught the rhythm of my breathing. I was back into my fantasy world until morning. It came too soon.
I let him drive my Highlander into town when out of the blue he said, “I liked how we wrestled in our sleep.”
I struggled for something to say, “Whenever I sleep with anyone, I have to be touching them. Did I win?”
“I don’t know, I think it was a draw.”
On the way back to the house I said, “Donny, I think it’s time, you know, for us to have that talk we’ve been avoiding.”
He looked into his lap and said, “I know.” The silent ride back was unbearably tense. He got out and disappeared inside almost before I shut the engine off. I found him sitting on the couch. I sat down and hung my arm loosely around his back reminiscent of the time we talked about his mom. He slid down resting his head on my bicep. A minute or so passed before he spoke. “Mike,” He didn’t say anything more for a while, and then burst out: “Here’s the thing. I’m straight. I jerk off thinking about girls, only girls. But I want to sleep with you. What the Hell is this all about?”
My emotions were in a cement mixer. A sense of profound disappointment and relief mingled together. For a long time I said nothing. I got up and got a couple of sodas from the kitchen and returned handing one to Donny. “I think you idolize me like the way I idolize PJ. I want to believe it’s true, even if it isn’t. He started to say something, but I cut him off. “I’m not finished. PJ told me you might be gay. He even joked that he’d like having me as a brother-in-law. He told you I’m gay. I grinned to lighten the mood. “Don’t worry you can’t catch it. Donny listen. I wish I was straight like you. Maybe some day I’ll fall in love with someone who’s gay, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m in the closet, but not ashamed of it. It’s who I am. I look at guys and wonder what it would be like to wrestle them. That’s why I beached my canoe when I saw PJ. It’s the silver lining.”
“What’s that?”
“I never would have gotten to know you boys. Last night was incredible.”
Donny grinned, “Well, I had a great time too, because I knew I was turning you on. And there was a moment,… there was a moment when I,… when I…”
“When I started rubbing your leg with my knee?”
“Yeah, I started getting hard. Then you stopped.”
“Donny, PJ told me there’d be moments like last night. I wanted you to make the next move.”
“I did. I turned into you, but you turned away.”
“I know. I got scared. When I pushed myself into you it was my way of saying, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I figured that.”
“Donny, I jerk off about once a day, but I don’t think about you or PJ. You’re both special. I’ve tried to figure it out. Nothing seems to fit. PJ would just tell me not to overanalyze it. So I don’t.”
***
The distance between Ann Arbor and Delphi became an unsolvable problem. My visits to the boys became less frequent. Donny and I wrestled many more times, until he dominated me so easily the rush we both got from the thrill of the contest was gone. With the exception of Donny allowing me to live out my fantasy, neither of us could recapture the feeling of that night. For many years we went cave exploring in lower Kentucky and we still looked forward to sleeping together. Go figure.
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