2001 Nights: Past Imperfect 12


by 7th Son <Jihanr@hotmail.com>

Brad's Diary

Friday

Two months short of the anniversary of Jeff's escape, the FBI would return some good news for a change. Coutts and Stoner, Jeff's abductors, had been arrested in New Jersey. Their lair had been strafed, and everything in it, including the pornographic movies and photographs, seized as evidence. Stephen and Keith were already taking legal proceedings to order a caveat on the sale of the videos.

"They confessed to everything," Stephen had told me on the phone from his office. "The night Jeff disappeared, they were prowling the streets picking up urchins to aggrandize their spoils. They found Jeff wandering outside the university. They followed him till he passed out and brought him back to their house."

I thanked Steve. I relayed to Jeff the news of the men's arrest. He was, however, oddly ambivalent; any fear he had left of them was now in the humus past.

Saturday

Jeff had been missing our friends. He hadn't seen them for nearly three months, since before we departed for our long vacation in Long Island. I set up an outing for us all, inviting Keith, Stephen, Todd and Dylan for a day in the city. It was going to be like old times.

The day had dawned with a slight overcast. Nevertheless, Jeff and I got to an early start, arranging to meet the guys at the Country Club. I was approving of the white cotton Polo T-shirt he had picked to wear over cream-colored stretch cotton pants. He had also casually thrown an argyle-print sweater over his shoulders, in case the weather got worse. In the annals of good style, he would receive plaudits for assembling his attire – the dignified standard issue club whites and leather loafers and the flattering enbrossed hair – in a way that exalted his beauty.

"You look so darned cute," I told him. "I should take you over my knees and spank you right now."

He laughed.

He had displayed a broad palette of positive emotions during the drive to the club. He was noticeably excited about the opportunity to catch up with the guys. I was, too, grateful that he had initiated the idea. In the well-kept time of Americans, Todd and Dylan were already there when we arrived, waiting near the parking pediment, and Steve and Keith were following closely behind us.

I'd known Keith since high school and we'd gone on to law school together. We were fraternity brothers. He'd met Steve during the hazing season, when Steve, a year older, had taken the paddle to his backside. Keith found being spanked with a brisk paddle more intimate than any other form of endearment and so began dating Steve. After college, they'd pooled together their limited resources to set up a law firm in Manhattan. Now, they not only worked together; they also lived, played and slept together. The wooden paddle, the badge of manhood that had brought them together thirteen years ago, remains an enduring symbol of their relationship. Both Steve and Keith are spanking and spanked men.

I first met Todd during a fashion shoot. We were both modeling while attending college. Todd had no choice but work to finance his own architectural studies. Shortly after, we became acquainted with Dylan at a go-see for a fashion designer. A budding writer hoping to break into show business, Dylan was making some pocket money from fashion reporting while waiting for news from the TV networks to which he'd submitted his screenplays. Two years later, he and Todd met up again at a party where, blame it on the Ecstasy or the PCP-laced Pina Colada, whatever, a group of revelers initiated a _s_e_x_ orgy.

It seemed that Dylan had been too inebriated to participate but was watching from the wings, and Todd never got close enough to the body robotics. But they had found an attraction for each other when one would throw the other a glance and the other sail it back, and then back and forth again, across the room. They quit the party together.

Dylan accepted Todd's ride home. On the way, the Pina Colada threw its mockers on what could have been their idyll, Dylan being the obnoxious barf that had been sick all over the dashboard of Todd's Mustang. Todd took Dylan back to his own apartment and committed him to bed. The next day, Todd ripped off Dylan's clothes, nearly drowned him in the bath water he'd drawn for him, and, after that, while Dylan remained naked, his long limbs embracing the edge of the tub, administered to him an enema treatment. During the enema, Todd made him swear off substances for good.

When Dylan sobered up, Todd gave him a princely spanking over the bed. He'd used a long cane, a relic left over from his childhood. Dylan's bottom held up impressively during the spanking. He'd also experienced the most awesome orgasm of his life. The following week, Todd called Dylan on the phone and they arranged a tryst.

Todd and Dylan have been together for almost ten years now. These days, you'd be able to find a number of Todd's award-winning ergonomically-crafted buildings among the meaningless symmetry and inane repetition of the houses that jam the Greenwich Village area. As for Dylan, he works as a screenwriter for an important TV station in NYC. He also has aspirations to make major films.

Jeff enjoyed instant acceptance and notoriety as my new lover during his incipient introduction to my best buddies. My nine-year-old relationship with Tristan, as his bottom, had ended amicably. I was heeding my calling as a top and looking for a boy to share with me my proclivity for spanking, whereas Tristan had fallen in love with Sean, a common friend of ours from the spanking club who used to run in our circle. On the social scoreboard, Jeff's basic sweetness was a piece of mind-reeling frecklessness that was at odds with the superficiality of the New York persuasion.

I remembered one of our early conversations as I now watched Jeff preparing to hit the racquetball court with Keith.

"You're awful," Keith was saying in my idle retrospect. "It's a crime to be dating one so young. By the way, how old is he?"

"18, going on 30," I replied. "He's very mature in some ways, innocent in others. Just for the record, we've only just started dating and he's my legal charge."

"It's still a crime," he said, "twelve years between you. What can you possibly have in common?"

"Opposites attract," I said cryptically.

"I should be so lucky," Todd said. "Check out that tan."

"And those legs that don't quit," Keith said, "though he isn't especially tall."

"You don't quit either," I chided.

"So, you spank him?" Dylan asked.

I nodded.

"He spanks you?"

"He'd rather not."

"So it's purely a one-top-one-bottom relationship."

"Mm-hmm."

"I'll bet that's a nice bottom to spank."

I smiled, looking out into the lawn. I was amazed I allowed my pals to talk about Jeff like that.

Stephen was giving Jeff a crash course on tennis. My Jeff had hit the ball to the adjacent court.

"Oh, my Lord," Keith laughed, "he almost hit that woman's butt."

"Oy, Jeff, you're supposed to hit the ball back to Steve!" Todd yelled.

He had heard Todd and turned to us. He shrugged his shoulders coquettishly.

"Cute as a button," Todd said, turning back to me. "I hate you."

I felt a nudge all of a sudden. "He seems happy," Todd was saying to me, wrenching my mind back to the present.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Jeff," he said, "he looks happy."

I nodded. "He wanted to see you guys. This is for him."

The racquetball game drew to a close. We left the club after luncheon and since we had a few hours to kill before the movie for which we had bought tickets to watch, we drove to a mall. Nobody had any special designs for the day. We were simply going to let it run its course and deal with whatever came by. I'd had no intention of using the outing as a way of plying Jeff with more clues about his past. But as was the usual pattern, a part of his past returned with little warning.

We had sat down to enjoy the fete champetre bearing our leisure with flippancy while we sipped our lemon tea a trois. Meanwhile anthropomorphic characters from 'Pokemon' were handing out freebies and obliging harried kids with their autographs. I heard Jeff chuckle.

The distant church bells started tolling with the latitude of the hour. The tolls seemed to carry with them a twangy cadence of a medieval time. Jeff sprang up from his chair all of a sudden, startling Todd beside him. A scowl of alarm crossed his face. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to bristle, but I got up, took his hand and said, "It's only church bells, Jeff."

He sat back down. The tolling had stopped.

"Are you recalling something?" Steve asked him with a natural curiosity.

He seemed not to have heard. "Take me there," he said instead, almost assuming an offensive turn of mind. "Please, take me there."

"Where, sweetie?" I asked.

"The church," he said.

I turned to the others. "I'll look for you in the cinema later."

They nodded, politely refraining from intruding any further.

We drove up a gentle acclivity to the Community Church. We could see it like a standard cleft in the sky, clouds banked up against its spires. A ceremony had been scheduled, filling the courtyard with people in black or gray suits. Jeff wanted to alight from the car even before I had put on the brakes. I stopped him.

"It's a private ceremony. It won't be polite," I told him.

He got out just the same and ere I could prevent it, he was running in spate to the courtyard. I followed. What choice did I have?

A funeral service was proceeding to the leeward of the vestiarium. This was cast in a brightness that I felt was somewhat inappropriately theatrical. I searched the heads above the pews, spotted him in one of the back rows and joined him.

My gaze lingered steadily on him. He was sitting in a slightly hunched position, observing the proceedings as if in a trance. I knew from his aura that his mind was in some other place and time, seemingly caught in the vortex of an excursion to a past that was holding his concentration in its grasp. It induced in him a state of mild nerviness. Notwithstanding this, I didn't interrupt him.

I sat quietly beside him, turning a laic attention to the Eucharist. After an infinity, I heard the wake being concluded.

Everyone else got up to leave. He didn't follow, but as soon as the hall had emptied out, he turned to me. His head fell idly on my shoulder. Quietly, he said, "My brother died. He drowned."

I nodded. His voice had been as a kind of mourning, but of a quality beyond requiem or tears.

"Dad had attached blame on himself," he continued. "He said it was his own fault, for humiliating Jan-Michael in front of his friends.

"Jan-Michael had been accepted to college. He was 17 years old. I was 7. He was smart, popular with everybody and a regular jock, had blond hair and blue eyes like our mother, Felicity. He was over 6 feet tall, the result of our father's good genes. He was gorgeous, like our father, Dawson, had been. It was the excessive 80s and, despite the non-sectarian horrors of AIDS, my brother had felt no aversion for the sowing of wild oats. He was a closet bi_s_e_x_ual who had found himself in the epicenter of the cyclonic turbulence of this new plague.

"Unbeknownst to our parents, he'd gone to a gay party to celebrate going to college and rummied out in less than an hour. The police brought him home caroused on his stomach. They were going to have to book him on a drunk driving charge, they told Dawson. Jan-Michael wasn't arrested; however, he was slapped with a work order to do community service for a month.

"Dawson was furious and ashamed. It was as much over my brother's breaking the law as his exposed _s_e_x_uality. I believe he feared his homo_s_e_x_ual activities and the casualties of this lifestyle, and so he'd been emaciated of logic and reasoning. In a moment of anger and powerlessness, he had gathered together my brother's friends and their parents the next day to witness his punishment.

"Dawson stripped him of all his clothes and manhandled him over his knees. He ensured that his legs were flayed and his private parts were of course exposed to all of us standing behind them. But, in hindsight, I doubt if any particular homily had been intended by this act.

"Dawson had spanked us before but not usually naked. This time he'd taken off all of Jan-Michael's clothes, even his socks and underwear. He spanked him first with his hand, taking his time about it as if he were leafing meticulously through the layers of my brother's buttocks with each smack. Afterward, he caned his bottom over the back of the sofa. He administered eight lashes, each with the same uneconomic precision of timing and rhythm.

"My brother had decried the indignation, invoking his age and the right to be treated as an adult, but he received an additional three lashes from the cane for his audacity. Dawson said he hadn't acted his age the previous night, the night he went arsefirst, instead of headfirst, to the punchbowl.

"People would later say that Jan-Michael had felt completely humiliated by the spanking. But I knew him better. Jan-Michael always used to laugh at being spanked at his age! No, my brother wasn't humiliated by the spanking; he was humiliated because they had derided his _s_e_x_uality.

"So feeling guilty about disappointing our parents – I think – he took off in Dawson's sailboat in the night while we were all asleep. While out at sea, he ran into some difficulties. His body was found two days later, washed off the coast of Chesapeake Bay. This was what we found difficult to fathom. Jan-Michael was an outstanding sailor, and an excellent swimmer.

"I couldn't stop crying at the funeral. Dad was also crying. Mom was hushing me but I couldn't be hushed. The relatives were also consoling Dad, saying it was an accident, Jan-Michael's death was not his fault, but he couldn't stop appropriating blame on himself.

"Dad was never himself after that. A year later, he disappeared, never to return. Mom started drinking from that day. She was a basket case.

"Mom and I moved to New York to live with my aunt, Vanessa. But Vanessa was advanced in age and illness and died two years later. Mom packed me away to a boarding school when I started high school.

"From the time I remembered Ms. Hathaway, you know my old schoolteacher, I've felt traces of trauma concerning my high school life. I thought she was the factor, but it wasn't her at all. I realize now that it was Mom. I always felt throughout my boarding school years that Mom sent me away because she couldn't stand me anymore.

"It was rough – my first year. I had cried on the first day because all the kids, the ones that mattered in the school, had hazed me. I thought the initiation was only child's play but it was to have significant ramifications for my school life.

"Some of the older boys, proclaiming themselves as the authority on correct boarding school deportment, had made me remove my shorts and underwear during recess. While I bent over gripping my ankles in their tightly formed circle around me, they took turns to switch my bared bottom. I was 12 years old; I couldn't have stood the pain! But my tears were seen as defiance and contemptuous of their oppression, so that didn't go over with their leader. Their rejection established me as a coward and 'misfit' became my posthyphen name through high school.

"I believe my obsession for pain and spanking developed from this moment of my failure. In the quiet and solitude of my dorm I would sometimes throw off all my clothes, kneel on all fours and then take a crudely broken-off switch to my own backside. The self-abasement was an ablution for failing my initiation. It later graduated to punishment for every perceived personal failure and weakness, particularly for not being the son Mom had wanted. I was 15 when I orgasmed from the pleasure of self-flagellation. That confused me and I abnegated my punitive soliloquies post haste. But all that time, I never stopped longing for a spanking.

"Anyway, I finished high school and applied to NYU. I won a berth in the tough pre-med quota, but Mom couldn't afford to put me through that, and she was in some debt, so she sent me to work at that club instead.

"But you know this story. You told me the story yourself."

I nodded. Yes, I knew that story very well. As well as the one he'd just regaled about his brother's death that had led to his father's abandoning him and his family. Yet I had let him tell it again for me. Because I loved him, period.

"Mom died a year after I quit the club," he added.

I kissed his head. "We were already dating," I continued on his behalf. "I had persuaded you to quit the club and later move in with me. In the course of our relationship, when you'd tell me stories about your family, I discovered something incredible about your mother. Do you remember?"

He shook his head.

"Try, baby," I urged, "I know it's there, somewhere, in your memory."

He looked out into the Eucharist as I had earlier. It was now a deserted shadow-tattooed diorama. By and by, I heard him begin: "Something about Mom's maiden name had been familiar to you."

I nodded. "Go on."

"You remembered having come across the name 'Holland' – that was Mom's maiden name," he proceeded, still sounding tentative about the facts. "You had reviewed the client profile when you first joined the firm. Later, when we began seeing each other and I told you my Mom's name, you said you remembered your office in Washington DC having represented a client named Holland. It was my grandpa, Montgomery Holland. I think he left Jan-Michael and me a trust."

"That's right, precious," I affirmed. "But you told me you were not aware of anything concerning a testacy from Montgomery, or of his being a client of our firm. So I called our office in DC. They confirmed it. Montgomery Holland, of the famed Holland family from Somerset, had left you and your brother a trust each before he died. I never met him personally, I hadn't even joined the firm yet, but I'd heard that he was 93 when he died. Anyway, neither your brother nor you could access your bequests before you turned 21.

"After Jan-Michael died, Felicity Holland automatically inherited his trust but despite her calamitous life she chose not to take any of the money. Years later, when you were already in the boarding school, she would transfer the trust to your name. Your Mom wasn't a bad mother, honey, just very sick ...."

"I think you're being a tad tendentious, sir," he suddenly said. "Felicity nearly ruined my life selling me to that club. She should have just taken the money .... amortize her debts!"

"I'm not defending her, Jeff," I said, "but you must remember: she was drifting into a state of mental incompetence by this time. Her decisions had become extremely erratic. Yes, she could have used the money, but she knew giving it all to you would be your freedom in the end. She relinquished everything to you before she went into detox. Even you must appreciate her last redemptive plan."

"Yes, I did .... I mean, I do, really, but she lost the battle. I was now living in New York, so you had the trust immediately transferred to the firm here. You took over as my trustee. That's how I was able to afford college in the end."

I nodded. Then kissed him lightly on his head again as we finally rose from the pew.

We were reunited with our friends for the movie. We found them in the near vacant bioscope, a bit late and missing the opening scene. Jeff himself had insisted that we didn't waste the tickets. Needless to say, neither of us had been able to concentrate. I didn't have to be told what had been occupying his mind.

As for me, my own mind had been wandering ruminatively over the significance of his newest recollection.

It was a bittersweet recollection: In remembering his family, he had remembered a once loving brother who had perished senselessly before his prime, whose only flaw was a heart that brimmed over his youth. He had remembered a once feisty mother who, in the degeneracy of her reason, traded that for liquor, and finally laid herself out in a state of manic depression. He had remembered a once venerated father who had not been able to rise to the catastrophic death of a favorite son and destitute of his usual sagacity, had walked out, not just on another son who needed him, but also on an important job on Capitol Hill.

And so the past carries with it some hazards. Nevertheless, Jeff had notched up another personal triumph, hadn't he? He had penetrated some of the remaining few layered generations of his memory that had still been hidden from him. He had family, and with this knowledge, he had been restored to an identity. He had points of reference, and these were his pedigree.

Taken from a long view, it was indeed a triumph.

But it was a vague kind of triumph; vague because superseded by its own morbidity.

© 1998, 2001, JRK & BWK.

(Next: Past Imperfect 13)


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