Underappreciation

Oak Sapling

Tender shoots, virginal leaves,
uncurling to the sky above,
the sun, the wind, the storm, the rain,
whatever was to be... trusting, open, vulnerable.

The sun filters in, penetrating, opening, invading, possessing.
The wind stirs, whips, buffets.
The storm has its way, the rain delivering
The essence of its mastery.

The oak sapling initiated, completed, and ready for steady.

"No, that's not quite it. I'll have to check out how it is with oaks. I don't think the imagery is sexy enough. Maybe I have to turn it around to make the sapling the shaft."

Tim McGown was sitting behind the steering wheel of Hadley's Mercedes when the inspiration hit of what he wanted to write, and he'd pulled his duffel bag from the backseat and retrieved a pad of paper and a pen. He was accustomed to being inspired to jot his thoughts down in poetic form at the most peculiar times and places. It was still dark outside the professor's house as he waited for him to come to the car, and the young man opened the driver's door so the dome light would come on and give him illumination to write by. Maybe he needed to approach this from another direction. Usually when he was keyed up like this, he could express it on paper.

What was it like to be a young man, developing like an oak sapling, having been covered and initiated for the first time by an older man--a man experienced in how to seduce and possess? And to have opened so fully and quickly to that that he now couldn't get enough of it--and from more than that one man. His image was of some sort of plant--a flower, he thought--opening to the elements and being fully used. He wished he knew enough about botany to capture this in a poem.

Tim had been told about the weekend and his role and he hadn't shied away. It had sexed him up--put him in arousal. Did that make him a slut? Could guys be sluts? Was he way beyond wondering about that in relationship to himself? Did he care or was he feeling alive at what life had opened up to him? He knew now he was desirable to older men seeking younger men, and he was ready to serve their needs. Did they appreciate that enough?

Tim was keyed up for this weekend. "All of these men are important in the field you wish to attain, Tim," the professor had said. While he was saying this, they were stretched out along each other's bodies, in bed, sexually satiated, and the professor was stroking and fondling Tim's body with the long, elegant fingers of his hand.

It was the first inkling Tim had been given that the professor was pimp as well as lover. He didn't want Tim's body all to himself. He wanted to share it with other men--most probably for his own personal gain.

"It's important that you network and draw these men to you. The men who will be there have shared desires and needs. You can put that to your advantage." Hadley had been more explicit than that when Tim had pressed him. It had been made clear what Tim would have to provide to be given this opportunity.

"Yes, to impress these men, you'll have to let them fuck you. To be creative and to fire up all of your sensations to take advantage of, you have to have experiences and adventure, Tim," Hadley had said.

And here he was, ready to drive Professor Hadley out to the seminar at the lake.

He reread what he'd written, having wanted to pen something to capture his first time and maybe having now made a connection to the nature writings of Walt Whitman, the subject of the weekend's seminar. The poem wasn't right yet. That wasn't quite it--it wasn't even nearly "it"--but it had the essence of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to image it--how he had experienced it himself--like petal opening to pollinating penetration and the flow of the rain. And not that long ago. Was this why Professor Hadley had asked him to attend the weekend writers' retreat northwest of Lafayette at Lake Manitou--to drive him there and sit with the group discussing the poems and impact of Walt Whitman and, Professor Hadley said, to absorb some of what they had to say about Whitman and thus, perhaps, to use in his own development?

Or was he being invited there as Hadley's offering--a young man to fuck--to his colleagues for some gain by Hadley himself? In any case, did Tim really care? He had an image of himself, lying, naked, on his back, legs open and bent, and a succession of middle-aged men, all reciting poetry, all erections in hand, moving in between his thighs, penetrating and fucking him. Each one a little different in technique and equipment. Each one overcome with the need to be inside him. Did he really care? He was here, wasn't he, outside Hadley's house, preparing to drive him to this "conference." And the thought of several men, in succession, fucking him was arousing to him.

It wasn't, Tim wondered, because Professor Sands, Hadley's colleague in the creative writing program at Purdue, had influence over Hugh Hadley that would make him invite the day student in one of Hadley's seminars to a weekend retreat? It wasn't so that Sands could pursue the conquest he'd already started--having invited Tim to his house for dinner, as he claimed he did with all students in the creative writing program, even though Tim could only afford to be in the fringe of that, and then drugging Tim and fucking him on the sofa.

But Tim had gone back to Peter Sands, hadn't he? He'd gone back of his own will within two days and spent the night in Sands's bed, his legs open and spread, his fingers pressing into Sands's biceps, whispering, "Yes, yes, fuck me," as the young professor did pushups between his thighs, rocking him forward and back in the cadence of his deep thrusts. It was the first time Tim realized that an older man could have experience and technique that made the men Tim's age he'd been messing around with seem to be awkward underperformers. Tim had learned from Sands what a dominant was--and what a submissive was. That was Peter Sands and himself.

And then the insult of Sands paying him for the sex, with the demeaning comment, "You can't be making much as a garbageman," and telling him that there was another one of the assistant professors, Ron Davis, who wanted to fuck Tim too--and who would pay for it. And still, in spite of this demeaning treatment, Tim had come back to Sands again and, no drugs or liquor required, saddled himself on the Sands's cock in a cowboy and ridden him to a mutual finish.

Again, Sands paid for the sex with the "garbagemen can't be making much," reducing Tim to a rent-boy. Tim could have told him that the sanitation work was mindless repetitive action that freed his mind for composing and that the early-morning short-time shifts of the work gave him time later in the day to write. For someone not afraid of manual work and not having pretentions of status, it suited a poet well, he thought. But why bother discussing any of this with Sands? He'd tried saying the proper title was sanitation worker, and Sands had just laughed at him. "Be what you are," Sands had said. "What you are is a sexy young slut--a natural honeypot for an older man to use." And, indeed, the many ways Tim had let Sands fuck him revealed the slut in him.

Would men consider male whore to be a less honorable job than the job of a sanitation worker that Tim was holding down, trying to claw his way up to paying for college--to becoming a poet in some way that could sustain his life?

When he'd gone to Professor Sands's house for dinner, he had hopes that the man would, as Hadley was doing, read his poetry and not dismiss it. He'd had no interest in Tim's poetry, though. Worse, he'd been dismissive of it, more impressed, he said, by Tim's early scribblings than what time in Hugh Hadley's writing class had changed the writing.

Not interested much in Tim's poetry, all Sands wanted to do was fuck the handsome, twenty-one-year-old down-on-his-luck garbageman. All he'd wanted to do was to get his dick in Tim, and, half gone on whatever drug Sands had used, Tim had lain back on the sofa, opened his legs to the older man, cried out at the first mounting and penetration, but then had settled down to moving with the rhythm of the fuck--and had melded more completely with it when Sands fucked him a second time--and a third time, being younger and more virile than Professor Hadley was--with both of them more experienced and attentive than the young guys Tim had been mixing with.

Tim had known it was what he wanted. He hadn't known this would be the first taking in a developing life to giving it to men for money.

He also hadn't known that he had melted to it so much that he'd come back in two days for more of it--holding his legs open and raised all night, Big-cocked Sands fucking him again and again, changing positions, teaching Tim new ones. And even when Sands sneeringly put him in his subordinate place, going back to the man for a third time, this time not just lying there and docilely taking it, but putting Sands on his back and riding the cock hard, wantonly, knowing now that he wanted to ride men's cocks.

"Ah, nothing like sweet, young tail," Sands had said, which Tim hadn't exactly expected a literature professor to come up with. But the cocking was good and instructional, so Tim just went with the flow. And, with Professor Sands, who was virile and fast reloading, there was a lot of flow involved.

Was that all that Professor Hadley wanted from him too? Was the professor just pretending to be interested in Tim's poems to get into his pants? Did Hadley see him as even worse than a garbageman--just a piece of male meat--and only pretended to see a budding poet? Hadley must be near seventy. Could he even get it up anymore without those pills Tim had seen him take to manage it once each time?

Tim looked up from the driver's seat of Professor Hadley's stately old Mercedes salon car as the professor kissed his wife good-bye on the porch of their Purdue University near-campus Victorian house in Lafayette, Indiana, in preparation for Tim driving him to the writers' retreat at Lake Manitou for a weekend of Whitman.

Tim wondered if it was significant that Whitman was gay--at least that there was every reason to believe he was actively gay. Wasn't this really a conclave of gay men joining for the weekend at an upstate lake to feed upon a young, growing oak sapling--to have their way with Tim while he was still relatively fresh and innocent? Based on what Hadley had told him he would be called on to do at the lake, he had to believe they all were gay.

Was this some sort of old men's sex club more than a literary conclave? And did Tim really care which it was?

At least Professor Hadley hadn't offered to pay Tim for the weekend--hadn't said anything about the poor lot of a sanitation worker--at least yet.

* * * *

The drive from Lafayette to Rochester, the town abutting Lake Manitou, lasted for an hour and a half. Hadley sat in the backseat and Tim, like he was a family chauffeur, was alone in the front. After the initial seduction, during which Hadley had been nearly worshipful and highly complimentary, the professor had treated the student almost like a servant. Once won, Tim was just another possession.

All of the conversation that transpired as they drove was initiated and determined by Hadley. They arrived midmorning, Professor Hadley wanting to get there before the others, as they were retreating at his family's ancestral Victorian house on the north side of the lake. It was a large house, with six main bedrooms and smaller rooms in the attic, formerly servants' quarters, for sleepers, as well. His grandmother, he said, had run the house as a boarding house after his grandfather had died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and no one had escaped the subsequent financial collapse. The other guests, besides Tim, who would be in one of the attic bedrooms, along with a housekeeper who came in whenever the Hadley's occupied the house, were the three professors from Purdue, two from creative writing programs at other Midwestern universities, and an acquisitions editor from the University of Chicago Press.

Hadley had briefly, and only in passing, been apologetic about Tim being in the attic, but Tim, who was still unsure what his role was meant to be, said that was just fine. He was the only student being invited to the retreat and he wasn't even a full-time student at Purdue. Was he a guest or a servant--and something more sexually connected--on this retreat? That hadn't been made clear to him in words, but so much was revealed in actions. What was clear was that his duties would include pleasing the other attendees. Would he be welcomed at the table in the discussions on Whitman, or kept in the shadows or in service?

Even at the university, Tim's status was ambiguous. He could only afford to be a day student, under one-class tuition per semester. This semester he was taking Hadley's writing seminar on poetry. If he thought that sometime during the drive Hadley would come on to him or define that he was to be at the retreat to service the other men, he was disappointed. Hadley only was talking about poetry--mostly about Whitman and how Tim's own poetry could be influenced by deeper study. Tim kept waiting for Hadley to note that Whitman was said to have had homosexual relationships as a segue into what would be expected from Tim, but he didn't during the drive. He'd covered all of that earlier when he was seducing Tim and didn't bring it up again now.

Tim didn't give up on the idea that he was on the menu this weekend, though, because one of the other attendees, Professor Sands, had made clear he was, as far as Sands was concerned, and that the assistant professor interested in fucking Tim, Ron Davis, would be there that weekend as well.

They were the first ones to arrive, and, after getting their gear in the house and Hadley checking with the charter boat service at the waterfront lot next to the house about the retreaters being taken out onto the lake that afternoon in a flat-bottomed fishing boat, Hadley went in the house to ensure everything was ready and Tim walked out onto the house's dock.

Tim had gone with Hadley to the charter boat service, where they had talked with a hunky young man there. The boat service employee gave Tim a close scrutiny that made Tim feel he was being stripped down but, at the same time, aroused him. The boat guy was sexy as hell. The guy, giving his name as Phil and as the one who would take them out on the lake that afternoon, was dark-skinned, quite possibly of mixed breed, but very muscular--stripped down to the waist and in shorts and sneakers--and quite handsome. Tim gravitated to him as another basic service guy, with grease on his hands, and he felt that he got very close interest in return. As Hadley was pontificating, Phil kept giving Tim a "we're a different breed from that blowhard" looks.

When they went back to the Hadley lot and the professor went into the house, Tim didn't think about it, but he probably was drawn out to the house's dock, because he could watch Phil at work on the next dock over. Phil was quite aware that Tim was watching him and appeared to be posing to maintain Tim's attention. Tim had no trouble giving him attention. Phil was a real hunk, with hard-working-man's body. Since he'd been covered in every conceivable position by Peter Sands, Tim had become very much aware of every good-looking, built guy around him and with considering possibilities with them. The possibilities with Phil seemed quite possible for Phil as well, considering how often he looked over at Tim on the other dock.

* * * *

"But why do we work so hard to pull explicit homosexuality themes out of Whitman's poems?" This was what the young poetry acquisitions editor from the University of Chicago Press, Clifton Wane, asked during the first roundtable meeting of the academics on the screened porch of the Lake Manitou vacation house. "Why didn't he declare himself more directly?"

"Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are," Professor Hadley recited from "Calamus." "That seems quite clear to me. Death, you know, is a metaphor for sexual orgasm in literature--La Petite Mort. But, of course, society was so hazy about homosexuality then that I'll bet they didn't catch the import of Whitman's homosexual references that we can see today in his work."

"That is repressed verbiage, though," Wane objected. "Why couldn't he have written something as explicit as 'Give me yourself, lie under me, and open yourself to my penetration and full, inseparable possession'?"

"Yes, well, in his day he had to repress anything like that--not just in his personal life but in his writing as well. In Whitman's day a man went to prison for voicing his preferences that directly." Peter Sands had risen to respond to this question from the circle of six men sitting around the table on the porch. Tim was there, but he was sitting behind Professor Hadley, backed against the screened wall overlooking the lake.

Although Tim was absorbing what he could, he accepted he was there to fetch whatever the men needed while they talked and to provide them with eye candy and entertainment, as required.

"Not something our young poets of today need worry about, eh, Tim?" Sands continued, bringing Tim in to the discussion for the first time. "A young poet can write about being laid today, can't he? What was in that poem you showed me the other day--about the flaring of the petals and the penetration and pollination by the bee? Quite a stinger your bee had. A stinger by any other name... mot yet good poetry, but your need for lustful expression was clear."

He did not stop his jab there. "I admit that I much prefer your earlier, if down-class, work such as 'I could not but weep, and express my alarm, as you thrust inside me deep, and my nails dug into your arms.' Crude, but honest. It starts well, but the 'arms' is a bit off and flat. I'd suggest something meaty like 'biceps' instead. This more veiled work you are writing now must be someone's misguided influence."

All three of them--Sands, Tim, and Hadley--knew this was directed at Hadley and was just more of the interdepartmental jousting at Purdue. Still, Tim was both flattered that Peter Sands remembered anything he'd written and embarrassed to have his early attempts trotted out to these academics. Sands was truly putting him in his place. It faithfully reflected the man's style. He wanted to subjugate and demean his prey before devouring it. Later, with Tim under him and Sands doing pushups on the younger man's body, the professor would recite Tim's poetic attempts back at him, suggesting better word usage. He would do so in the vocal cadence of his thrusts into the young man's ass channel.

The attention on the porch shifted to Tim, outside the circle, and he blushed at the sudden centering of the focus on him. There had been tension in the air throughout this first discussion session. Perhaps until now only Sands and Hadley had realized there was an undercurrent of a struggle over dominating Tim in their participation in this discussion, but now, as it flared out into the open with Sands's challenge, all six men realized that something was playing out under the surface here and that it had something to do with the handsome and sexy young man sitting behind Professor Hadley.

All six of the men were gay, which was what brought them together in seminars like this, and all six had been intrigued with the young man who had been introduced merely as one of Professor Hadley's students. All had assumed that Hadley was fucking him and had entertained pleasant images of doing the same themselves--indeed, Hadley had intimated that he was bringing the entertainment for them all. Until now they didn't have an inkling that Peter Sands was fucking the young man too and that there was a struggle playing out among the creative writing faculty at Purdue University. Was the other Purdue attendee, Ron Davis, fucking him as well, the three other professors now wondered. A glance at him--the way he looked at Tim--showed that he at least wanted to if he wasn't.