Summer with the Art Dealers

I took turns with Ergun in manning the reception desk, phones, and computer connections at the front of the gallery while Chambers worked the prospective buyers through the gallery. To shop here, one had to be wealthy in addition to having a good understanding of art. Most men who would come to Tangier, with its long reputation as a playground for gay men, to buy their art were often looking for other pleasures too. They knew that Chambers dealt in young, male works of art as well.

It was through these connections—me being there, on display, and Chambers being amenable to selling various forms of art—that most of my brief encounters and coupling with men were set up. I was still thinking of this as a summer-only adventure. I maintained the attitude that I could get on a plane with the summer was over and return to the States and college. I was not hurting for cash.

It was thus that an assignation was set up with the desert chieftain Issa Tahiri.

The first I saw of Issa Tahiri was when he and two of his bodyguards entered the gallery, the guards peeling off in different directions when they came through the entrance, their scrutiny darting to all corners of the room and their hands hidden under the lapels of their shark-skin suit jackets. Tahiri, big, heavy, very Arab in a pristine white thawb robe and headdress, and glowering under heavy eyebrows with black, piercing eyes, was advancing on the reception desk, when he stopped, gave me an "undressing" assessment, and switched from a scowl to a smile.

Duncan must have seen him coming, because he was there instantly. He knew who the man was, and obviously the man was important to him.

"Issa, so good to see you. I have a selection of those paintings you were interested in. Come into the back gallery and we'll look at them together."

The back gallery was where Duncan kept his fetish art for special clients. One instant the four of them—Tahiri, his goons, and Duncan—were there and the next they had vanished to the back of the gallery. Shortly, though, Ergun showed up at the desk.

"He wants you there. Something about seeing how the art stands up to you."

"Who is 'he?'" I asked. "Duncan?"

"No, the sheik. He lives in a fortified palace out in the desert. You made quite an impression on him. He and Duncan are already talking a deal."

"A deal for me?"

"What do you think?" Ergun was always a bit short with me. I didn't see getting attention from Duncan as a competition. Ergun clearly did.

This was the first moment that I had any fear that I wasn't fully in control of going with a man or not. This man looked like he expected to get what he wanted and he brought enough muscle with him to ensure that. Even though Spencer was cruel to me in sex, I'd always had the belief that I could just walk away from him or Duncan and get on a plane to Boston if I wanted to, if I'd had enough of the demands levied on me here.

"I don't think I want—"

"I don't think you have a choice, Neal," Ergun said. I quickly decided he was right.

When I went to the back gallery, Duncan was pulling out oil paintings and sketches of young male nudes.

"Stand over here, Neal," Duncan directed. "Issa wants to see how the paintings he's considering do in capturing reality."

So, I must be thought of as real in some way. I gathered that this was some sort of compliment the Arab was making to me. He was giving me an intense scrutiny. But I was leery. The man was big—and a bit gross in his heaviness. He filled the room. And he commanded the room. He moved as a man who deserved to have—and got—whatever he wanted.

"Strip down, Neal," Duncan said.

"Strip down? Why?" I asked.

"As the man said, he wants to compare the painted art to a real young man. Do it."

I did it, standing there and going into various demanded poses, while the men ogled me and the paintings—more me than the paintings, I wagered.

After Duncan had shown the man what he had and the sheik had requested a few canvasses to be brought out again, Duncan said, "That will be fine, Neal. I think Issa has seen what he needs to see now. You may go back to the front." It wasn't lost on me that the canvases that had been brought out again were all of young, blond Westerners—like me. I dressed again, with the men watching me do so, and went back to the reception desk.

After Issa and his goons had left the gallery in a swirl of activity, with both Duncan and Ergun standing at the door, nearly genuflecting, I asked Duncan, "Did he buy anything?"

"Not yet. He didn't see anything he just had to have."

"So, that's that."

"No, not really," Duncan said. "He says he'll be back. He has an artist he wants to bring—Harold Black. I know him. He's good—and expensive. He wants Black to paint him what he wants. We'll get a commission, of course."

"So, the artist will come and view the paintings the Arab looked at to see what aspects this Issa Tahiri wants included?"

"No, the artist is coming to have a look at you and, after discussing it with Tahiri, decide how to paint you. Tahiri wants the paintings to be of you."

Oh. "And this Arab wants more from me than paintings, maybe?"

"We're still discussing that, but yes. He wants more from you."

They were discussing it, and this time Duncan wasn't asking me how willing I was to go with a man he was pimping me to. No doubt he didn't ask me this time because he was afraid that I would say no and that was an unacceptable answer.

As if Duncan read my mind, he added, "Tahiri is a powerful man in this region. He isn't a man you say no too and are permitted to continue to live and work in Tangier."

* * * *

Duncan had the decency to warn me the day that Tahiri's thugs came for me. I had my bag packed. I didn't see any point in resisting, and I was intrigued. The sheik wasn't a good-looking or fit man, but to my knowledge I hadn't been fucked by a sheik before or been painted in the nude before and this was meant to be my summer of exploration. I didn't plan on being a prostitute when I returned to the States. My plan was to get that experience over during my summer travels—but to pack in as much experience as I could now.

I'd been living out of a suitcase and carryon since I'd arrived in Gloucester nearly two months earlier to perform in the festival there. It seemed like much more than two months earlier, though. I was told that Black wanted four days of my modeling for him. He'd paint more than one canvas. He had come to the gallery, looked at me at every angle, naked, and had declared me worthy of painting. I could tell that he thought me worthy of much more, and I can't say I wasn't intrigued. It wasn't just his name that was Black. He was a dark-chocolate brown, with a jet-black cock and purple mushroom cap. Yes, he liked to do his painting in the nude. He had a British accent and claimed to be from somewhere in the Caribbean. He was handsome and muscular. I'd let him fuck me, if that's what he wanted to do, and, as he was assessing me for the paintings, he hardly was able to keep his hands off me. There was always one of the sheik's bodyguards watching us and I got the impression that Black didn't have permission to cover me before the sheik did.

I packed up all of my stuff. I had a premonition I might not be coming back. I think that Duncan's partner, Burton Spencer, had the same premonition, because he was standing at the gallery door as Tahiri's two thugs put me in the Land Rover, and he reiterated the standing offer that I could enroll in his performing arts school and cover the tuition by signing on in the male brothel that went with it.

"You'll get half on top of the education, room, and board. You'll be in high demand here in Tangier," he assured me.

"Something to think about," I said as one of the bodyguards pushed me into the backseat of the Land Rover. I saw no reason to burn any bridges unnecessarily.

* * * *

The sheik's remote palace compound wasn't exactly in the desert, but it was on an isolated ridge well to the east of Tangier and not far south of the Mediterranean coast, near the village of Zurar Khanadeeq. Once there and hearing the gates to the fortress slam shut behind the Land Rover I was being transported in, I knew that I wasn't going to be leaving until and unless Issa Tahiri let me. Duncan Chambers wasn't accompanying me here. He hadn't even appeared to see me off in Tangier.

The painting sessions were more of an entertainment production with me—and perhaps the painter, Harold Black—as the centerpiece. There were six sessions over a four-day period. I have no idea how many artworks Black produced in that time. A different set of Arab men—all paying, I assumed—were invited to each session, and sat around in a semicircle facing the velvet-draped couch on a platform that I was posed, naked, on, while Black, near naked himself in only a loincloth, danced around me, choosing his desired angle of the session, and painting, while, tongues hanging out, the paying voyeurs watched. Issa Tahiri himself was at each session.

As the painting phase of each session was drawing to a close, more than tongues were hanging out. Black, whose muscular brown body was magnificent, dropped his paint brushes and his loincloth, and climbed up on the couch with me. He obviously gotten permission to have me before the sheik did. Maybe it was part of his fee. Maybe the sheik enjoyed being a voyeur and watching another man fuck me.

Each time Black approached and used me from a different angle, a different position, and a different sexual taking. But each time he entertained the paying guests by taking me effectively and fully. Issa Tahiri's thugs stood by, cameras in hand, recording it all. And the guests unbuttoned or unzipped the fronts of their thawb robes, freed themselves, and stroked off while watching me being taken. Few of them let themselves come there, though, as there was greater entertainment to follow.

From the painting studio, we moved on to the subterranean vault of the sheik's private baths, with its central pool, painted columns, and mosaic terrazzo flooring. Here I was laid out on yet another couch and hashish pipes were passed around. When I was mellow enough from the drugs and I had positioned myself open and vulnerable, lying on my back, with legs bent and spread, feet flat on the surface of the couch, and pelvis elevated, the paying guests, one after the other, moved between my thighs, mounted and penetrated me, and fucked me to their ejaculation.

It occurred to me that this was how the sheik was covering his brothel and painting costs.

Issa Tahiri was always first, the most cruel, and the hardest to take. He was obese and ugly and cruel, but he had the cock of an elephant and he could use his shaft inside me to move me to the heights where, regardless of how hard it was to position myself to accommodate his rolls of fat and to breathe with his beefy hands clutching my throat and making me gasp, I found myself clinging to him, hugging his hips with my knees, and the muscles of my passage walls undulating over his mastering cock. Just the concept of being fucked by a desert sheik aroused me.

After Black had finished his painting, life changed for me in Tahiri's isolated palace fortress. Groups of men no longer visited to enjoy me in succession, although Tahiri did make me available to individual men he wished to impress or do business with and who enjoyed using younger Western men. I was held in confinement within the walls of the fortress but given free reign of the place otherwise. There was little chance I would escape the fortress. Where was there for me to go and how would I get there? Now it was only Tahiri who was visiting and using me at night. But being fucked regularly by the sheik was quite enough in itself in terms of being maintained. The man was gross but left me fully mastered and satisfied.

It was just as well he kept me well fucked, because there was little indication that I ever was going to be leaving this prison.

* * * *

I was standing at the window of what undoubtedly was the original harem of the palace, although I was the only one housed here now and I wasn't locked in there, and was looking down toward the sea, when I saw the huge wooden doors at the entrance of the compound open and a black Mercedes SUV with smoked windows enter. Surprisingly, it didn't stop in front of the main entrance to the palace but pulled away almost outside my vision down the length of the front façade of the palace and backed up to a door that led into the kitchen and service area of the building.

Ah, deliveries, I thought, but it was a little weird that an expensive Mercedes would be doing that. Two men came out of the front seat, though, went around to the back, and pulled out covered paintings. As they were doing this, I was surprised to see Malcolm Pederson, the young art dealer I'd met and happily gone under on the cruise ship down the coast of France and Spain as it was reaching Gibraltar. What was he doing here, I wondered. But, of course, he was peddling paintings to the sheik. He had no idea—or care—that I was here, I was sure.

He followed the men as they carried the covered paintings around to the front entrance. Why, I wondered, if they were entering at the front, did they park by the kitchen entrance?

The palace's front hall was large, with two curved staircases rising to the second floor and a balcony all around the entrance foyer above. Pederson and the paintings only made it as far as the front entrance when Issa Tahiri came out to greet him. The two men with Pederson and Tahiri's two goons who followed him everywhere were set to uncover and hold the paintings Pederson had brought up for Tahiri to inspect.

Pederson saw me on the atrium balcony, which I worked to happen—only him seeing me, not the others—and I had another surprise when he didn't register any surprise that I was there. He nodded his head, spoke to Tahiri, and moved off to a corridor where I knew there were guest restrooms. Tahiri remained in the entrance hall inspecting paintings of naked young men on velvet-covered couches. And, of course, the other men were stuck there holding the paintings for him to inspect.

Getting the signal, I went down back stairs and met Pederson in a hallway.

"Good, you can roam freely in the building," he said. "I was told you could."

"You knew I was here? Who told you I was here and that I could move about freely? What are you doing here? Just to sell paintings?"

"No time for that. Later, if you go with me."

"If I go with you?"

"You have choices. It's all your choice. You can stay if you wish. Or you can go. My van is parked by the door into the service areas."

"Yes, I saw it park."

"If you want to go, you can pull together anything you want to take—quickly please. I can only keep Tahiri and his men occupied with the paintings for so long. There's an empty tool chest behind the backseat in the Mercedes that can hold you comfortably enough until we got well past the gates of this place. You could hide in there. If you want to leave, you have two choices. I can take you back to Duncan Chambers and to Burton Spencer's brothel if you want that. Or I can take you back to New York. My gallery is in Montreal, but most of my business is in New York and I have an apartment there. In New York you have your choices too. You can just go back to your school, having had the summer fling you wanted—and maybe more than you thought you'd get. Or you can be with me—and still continue in school if you like."

"And what will you want from me if I go with you?"

"I'll want everything and nothing. I'll want you to give me maximum pleasure, but I only want you to give what you want to. You're a totally free man with me. If you only want to go as far as Tangier, we'll stop at a hotel for the weekend—the whole weekend. I'll bind you and whip you and use you totally. If you let me take you back to New York, I will use you—mercilessly and constantly—all the way there. Each time you will have given me permission to use you. I know you want it that way. And if you stay with me in New York, I will devour you with my want. You will give me everything and yet it will all be by your choice."

I shimmered in anticipation. He hadn't known me long, but he knew me so well.

Later, as I was being buffeted a bit within the confines of the tool box in the back of the Mercedes, I weighed how far I wanted to go. It had been quite a summer—invigorating, educational, and testing the boundaries of where I could go with my preferences and willingness.

I wondered how big this apartment of Pederson's in New York City was and how close it was to the performing arts college I was expected to return to in a couple of weeks.