Noah
Noah
I have a secret.
And the secret ain’t the fact that I’m gay. I came out of the closet when I was fifteen years old. I’m thirty-six now. You do the math.
I’m talking ass-switching, wrist-snapping, eye-rolling, will-cut-you-till-you-bleed-with-my-tongue-trashing, one hundred percent homo and proud of it!
So that’s where the dilemma comes in. You see, recently…okay, over the past few months, I’ve found myself in a precarious predicament.
What is it, you ask?
Well, calm down. I’m about to tell you, but I have to whisper it.
I’m on the down low.
What! How can you be? you scream in disbelief.
Well, not the type of down low that you all are familiar with. No, no. I’m not into animals. You and your filthy, filthy minds!
I’m talking about the pum-pum, the punany, the cat, the snatch: you know, pussy!
And you know where there’s a pussy, there’s a woman attached to it.
So what’s wrong with me?
I’ve been happily homosexual for more than twenty years now, and one day I woke up with a taste for pussy and a craving for titties!
It’s disgusting, I know.
It’s that damn Beyoncé Knowles who done it to me.
I mean, did you see her in that Sean Paul video or any of the others?
She is a sexy bitch! I didn’t want to believe that watching her was giving me a hard-on.
I mean, I tried to fool myself into thinking that it was whatever man happened to be in the video.
But the whole time I was jerking off, it was Beyoncé I was seeing dancing across my mind’s eye!
Oh, just talking about it gets me hot!
Is there a group out there for this particular problem?
My therapist says, “Maybe you’re not really gay?” But I say, “What the hell do you know?” One hundred and fifty fucking dollars an hour, and that’s what he has to offer?
This obsession is taking over my life.
I’m sneaking into straight bars, plying beautiful women with alcohol until they look at me and no longer see my processed hair, glossy lips, or perfectly manicured fingernails.
All of a sudden, their hands are on my thigh or their heads are resting against my shoulder—in any case they’re all up in my face, telling me how cute I am and saying, “When you first sat down, I thought you were gay!”
I laugh along and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot.”
Up until a few months ago, I’d been able to walk away from the temptation. But one March evening I found myself sitting at Night of the Cookers on Fulton Street, enjoying an apple martini and the live band that was playing that Friday night.
I’d had a ballbuster of a day. Back-to-back meetings with factory presidents who spoke very little English, after which my boss practically got down on his knees and begged me to take this young, hip new designer that Women’s Wear Daily hailed as the Second Coming to lunch in the hopes that she would come and work for VQ.
WWD may have hailed her as the Second Coming, but they failed to mention that the French talent had no table etiquette whatsoever and had no idea that there was a pecking order where her silverware was concerned, because she used her entrée fork for her salad and her salad fork for her entrée.
Yes, those things bother me.
And finally, my train ride home was disrupted by a lunatic preaching wannabe evangelist who marched up and down the aisle of the car screaming, “All child molesters, fornicators, and gays are going to hell!”
Why do they always group us with child molesters?
Anyway, I needed a drink after having a day like that.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the woman that had sidled up next to me ask if the stool beside me was taken, and so I was a bit startled when she touched my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she barely uttered above the music, and when I turned to look at her, I almost fell off my stool.
“B-Beyoncé?” I whispered, everything in me going to mush.
“Sorry?” she said, leaning in with a puzzled expression.
Well, at first sight she did look like Beyoncé. The flawless skin and long gold-blond hair that framed a beautiful set of eyes.
I swallowed hard, and my eyes traveled down her body to see if she only resembled Beyoncé in the face. And lo and behold, wrapped snugly in the cream-colored lightweight wool skirt she wore, were Beyoncé thighs, hips, and, best of all—the famed Beyoncé bottom!
A wide grin slowly inched across my face.
“Someone sitting here?” Beyoncé’s look-alike inquired.
“N-no,” I mumbled, recovered enough to feel embarrassed about my reaction.
I returned my attention to my drink. She ordered a glass of the Shiraz, and for a good ten minutes we said nothing to each other, while I seized every opportunity to snatch glances at her in the wall-length mirror behind the bar.
She was quite magnificent, and so when she drained her glass of wine, I quickly offered to buy her another.
She accepted, seemingly without thought, and we fell into a conversation that took us through two of the band’s sets, three apple martinis, and a glass and a half more of Shiraz.
Her name was Merriwether Beacon, and yes, she had been told on a number of occasions that she resembled Beyoncé, but Merriwether considered herself to be better-looking.
Merriwether Beacon would be the beginning of my descent into heterosexual hell.
She asked me to walk her home. “I’m just around the corner,” she purred, and she took my hand before I could even decline.
She lived in a two-bedroom brownstone apartment that sat on the corner of South Oxford and Dekalb and smelled of cheap candles and a long-neglected litter box. This woman had taken shabby chic to a new level. Her furniture didn’t even look secondhand; it looked more like third- and fourth-hand.
An invitation for a late-night cup of coffee, which I would learn later as I descended into my addiction was nothing more than a thinly disguised prelude to sex.
I waited anxiously on her overworn green and yellow brocade sofa as she stole off to her bedroom to slip into something more comfortable. While waiting I amused myself by mentally rearranging her furniture, tossing out the pieces that not even Goodwill would take. And that was most everything.
It occurred to me quite quickly that the only thing this Merriwether had going for her was her good looks. As a straight man, I would need a woman who knew how to decorate!
When she came back, she was dressed in a raunchy, crotchless leather and lace one-piece that looked as if she’d painted it on.
Merriwether took a seat at the far end of the couch and then began a slow, catlike, erotic inch-and-crawl across the cushions toward me.
I was scared and excited at the same time, and when her lips closed around my earlobe I heard myself yelp like a bitch in heat.
Her hands were everywhere: in my hair, pinching my nipples through my silk shirt, fumbling with the zipper of my khakis.
I told my hands to push her away, but they were defiant, clamping down on her waist and pulling her closer.
Her mouth was suddenly on mine, her tongue pushing at my tightly pinched lips until I lost all feeling in my face and my mouth dropped open.
A second later my air was cut off by the yard of tongue she’d stuck down my throat.
Everything seemed to be happening so fast. The room was spinning, and I lay there helpless as she wrangled my zipper down, slipped her hand inside the opening of my red silk boxers, and grabbed hold of my Johnson.
“Damn, baby, for a small guy, you carry a big stick.” Merriwether drooled, her eyes sparkling beneath the milky moonlight that spilled into the living room.
Was I supposed to say thank you?
In a flash she’d yanked khakis, boxers, and all down to my knees. I tried to object, but by then she was on her knees, yanking off my shoes and tossing them aside.
“Hey, hey, wait a minute!” I pleaded, but it was no use. She’d gotten to all of the buttons on my shirt and now we wrestled as she tried to get it off me and I tried in vain to keep it on.
She won, and my two-hundred-dollar silk shirt went flying over the arm of the sofa.
In no time, Merriwether had stepped out of her Frederick’s of Hollywood getup and demanded that I follow her to the bedroom. I didn’t want to, but my Johnson was like a magnet, and he pulled me along helplessly after Merriwether’s jiggling behind.
The bed was early IKEA, queen-size. When she tossed me down onto the mattress I could immediately tell that the sheets were less than two hundred count and knew that my body—which I faithfully treated to a ginger salt scrub every other Tuesday—would no doubt go into shock after the chafing from her cheap sheets.
Merriwether went for my nipples like a starving newborn, and just when I was about to tell her that no matter how hard she sucked, they would still be unable to produce milk, she shifted her mouth to my navel and then just above the space where Johnson waited at attention.
Her head popped up, and I looked down to see her staring amusedly up at me. “No hair, huh?”
“I—I like it smooth down there,” I uttered.
“I like it too.” She moaned as she licked and nibbled her way around Johnson, sending him into a trembling frenzy of excitement.
Me, I kept my hands at my side, and when I thought I would grab hold of her head and force her mouth, I resisted and brought my hands up, shoving them behind my head.
Her mouth closed over my scrotum sack, and I looked around for the cat that was mewing loudly from the corner of the room before I realized that I was making that sound and it was echoing back at me.
My leg bounced rapidly off the thin mattress as Merriwether finished up, rose, and sauntered over to her bureau, where she opened the top drawer and pulled out a box of condoms.
“Do you prefer ribbed, extra-lubricated, colored, or all three?” she asked as she flipped through the box.
“What-whatever suits you,” I said, being the gentleman that I am.
It was my last chance, so I looked down at my dick and mentally told him that what we were about to do was wrong and went against everything I’d ever believed in.
But that dick of mine just looked back at me and said, “Shut up, fool. I believe in it, so don’t block.
Put the condom on, ’cause I’m going in!”
What could I do?
I listened to my dick, because he’d been with me from the beginning, and in a relationship that spanned more than three decades, there had been plenty of compromises, plenty of give-and-take.
She was the freakiest sex partner I’d ever had. She had a closetful of sex toys! Vibrating plastic butterflies, leather whips, and even a strap-on penis, which I was thrilled to see, because after I did her from behind, she was able to return the favor!
Merriwether gave, and I took, and took and took until we both exploded. It was the nastiest, funkiest sexual encounter I’d ever experienced.
And in the end, when I exploded, it was Beyoncé’s name I screamed out, not Merriwether’s.
The disgust at what I’d done came not too long after Johnson had shriveled up and gone off to sleep. I poked him and said, “Hey, wake up. I need to talk.”
He just flinched, yawned, and said, “Nah, dawg. A brother’s got to get some shut-eye. We’ll talk in the morning, during the first piss of the day.”
“What happened to the compromise, the give-and-take, the respect?”
“Whatever,” he said and retreated further into his foreskin.
Bastard.
So off I went to the bathroom to wash off that female scent and to throw up.
“You okay?” she hollered from the bedroom.
“Yeah, just had some bad fish, I guess,” I said.
There was a moment of silence and then she said, “When did you have fish?”
A few minutes ago, stupid! I thought, but I said, “For lunch.”
I promised that I would call. But never did.
And then I promised myself that that was the first and last time.
I screamed down at my dick, “No more!” and then two nights later, there I was again at another straight bar, my tongue wagging for another hit of the pum-pum, looking for another unsuspecting victim.
You see my problem?
I need some professional help, and quick. If this goes on any longer, I’m going to get caught. You know everything you do in the dark comes to light sooner or later.
It’s so bad that I haven’t had the nerve to confide in my girlfriends. Lord only knows how Geneva, Crystal, or Chevy will feel about all of this.
You’ve met them already. An interesting group of women, don’t you think?
They’re the Grace to my Will, the hag to my fag.
You know what I’m saying?
But back to me. What the hell am I going to do?