Tangled Sheets Read online

  IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

  Putting down his beer, the man on the street crosses a few feet to the car, stopping when he is in front of the door. He kneels between his friend’s legs, one large booted foot on either side of him. Trying not to look his friend in the face, he puts a hand on each knee, his hands gripping them lightly.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” the man in the car growls. “Help me out a little bit like a good buddy.”

  A hand moves up to touch one bare thigh, hesitating momentarily as the fingers move from the rough blue jeans to the smooth feeling of flesh on flesh.

  With this new turn of events, I want to get a closer look. Climbing onto the windowsill, I crawl out onto my fire escape, making as little noise as possible. The night air surrounds my naked, sweating body as I sit on the stairs going up to the next floor and position myself so that I can see what is going on below me. The two men have not heard or seen me and I have a perfect view of the car and what is happening in it.

  The man in the car is gripping the other one’s neck firmly with both hands, pushing him down and then releasing him. He stands up and steps away from the car. For the first time, I see his face. He is very handsome. Not pretty like the men I see in the bars, but rugged and somehow more real.

  Bending down, he unties his boots and pulls them off, following with his pants. He stands barefoot and naked on the sidewalk beside the car.

  “Now you,” he says to the other man, who is leaning against the car, watching him. “Strip.”

  It is a command, not a request . . .

  —from Wednesday, 2:00 A.M.

  Books by Michael Thomas Ford

  LAST SUMMER

  LOOKING FOR IT

  TANGLED SHEETS

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  tales of erotica tangled sheets

  MICHAEL THOMAS FORD

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

  Also by

  Title Page

  Foreplay: My Life in Porn

  Wednesday, 2:00 A.M.

  Becoming Al

  Diving the Pit

  Memories of War

  Home-Court Advantage

  The Blue Dragon

  Turning the Tables

  A Winter’s Tale

  Going Down Under

  Back-Alley Ball

  The Checkup

  Varsity Meat

  Bacchanal

  The Burning of Leaves

  Riding the Rails

  The Boys of Summer

  Dirty Pictures

  Southern Comfort

  The Men’s Room

  A Perfect Game

  Washing Up

  The Confession

  Bachelor Party

  Conduct Unbecoming

  Jesus Loves You

  The Memories of Boys

  The Night Before Christmas

  Remembering

  Danger: Fast-Rising Water

  The Eye of the Beholder

  Pass Completed

  The Boxer

  Revelation

  The Perfect Man

  The Ways of the Father

  Three Wishes

  Downtown Train

  Paying the Tax Man

  Hitting Home

  Copyright Page

  Foreplay: My Life in Porn

  In the fall of 1993 I became a pornographer.

  don’t remember what prompted me to write that first stroke story—probably I was avoiding some other, less appealing, deadline—but I do remember receiving a letter a week or so after I mailed it off to the editor of Blueboy. He couldn’t, he apologized, pay me anything for the story, but he’d be happy to print it. Thrilled that someone actually liked my writing enough to publish it, I agreed (it would be the first and only time I worked for free).

  After that, writing porn became a regular part of my routine. Every week I’d crank out something and send it off to one of the many men’s magazines that published such things. Before long, copies of Honcho, Torso, Mandate, Indulge, Advocate Classifieds, Men, and Freshmen began appearing in my mailbox, each one featuring one of my stories amidst the pictorials of men with hard cocks and spread ass cheeks.

  The name I used on those early stories was Tom Caffrey. The Tom part is easy enough to figure out. Caffrey I stole from actor Stephen Caffrey, best known for his roles in the television show Tour of Duty and the film Longtime Companion, where he played the role of Fuzzy. Stephen, with his hairy body and rugged good looks, was a favorite fantasy of mine. I decided to model Tom after him, thus making it easier to describe Tom when he was one of the characters in a story.

  Why the pseudonym, or nom de porn as I called it? At the time, I was primarily writing books for young readers. I’d recently published a book on AIDS for teenagers and was becoming well known in the world of children’s literature. I was already feeling some heat for being a writer who wrote about gay topics and who wrote for young readers, and I thought adding to that by putting my name on sex stories wouldn’t be the wisest career move. I suppose I could have used Mike Ford (which many people have said sounds like a porn star name anyway) but there was something intriguing about hiding behind a totally new identity.

  To my surprise, Tom quickly became a favorite with readers of erotica. He was helped, in part, by having his stories included in John Preston’s enormously successful Flesh and the Word series of anthologies and in one of Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica collections. He also became a regular in the pages of Advocate Men and Freshmen, thanks to then-editors Fred Goss and Gerry Kroll.

  Eventually I had enough stories to make a collection of my own, and in 1994 Hitting Home & Other Stories was released by BadBoy Books. A second collection, Tales from the Men’s Room, followed in 1996. In addition to writing my own stories, I also began editing various anthologies under my real name. I approached Cleis Press about launching a series of Best Gay Erotica titles, the first of which I edited with my friend Scott Heim (the usual “artistic differences” between myself and the publisher led me to leave the series after that initial collection, and it is now edited by the wonderful and skilled Richard Labonte). I also edited two collections of erotic fairy tales, one for women (Once Upon A Time) and one for men (Happily Ever After), which were published by erotica champion and unforgettable character Richard Kasak of Richard Kasak Books. These collections featured work by some of the most innovative voices in queer literature, including Dorothy Allison, Francesca Lia Block, Carol Queen, Pat Califia, Jennifer Levin, Heather Lewis, Linda Smukler, Cecilia Tan, Laura Antoniou, Bruce Benderson, Michael Lassell, Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Roche, Lev Raphael, M. Christian, Larry Townsend, William J. Mann, and D. Travers Scott. To date they remain two of my favorite books, and I wish they were still available.

  Eventually I got a little bit bored with the Tom stories and began to branch out, trying my hand at stories featuring women. For these I used a variety of pseudonyms, the most frequent of which was Lily August. Like Tom before her, Lily also developed a large following, and like Tom she appeared in the pages of the Best American Erotica series. Sadly, the market for lesbian erotica is not nearly as large as that for men, so Lily’s output remained relatively small. But the experience of writing from that vantage point was a lot of fun, and the Lily stories are some of my favorites.

  Like all good things, my pornography career finally came to an end, mainly because I became more involved in writing the books that became the Trials of My Queer Life series. I put Tom, Lily, and my other alter egos behind me and moved on. But to my surprise, they continued to live full and happy lives all on th
eir own. When I started touring to promote my first essay collection, Alec Baldwin Doesn’t Love Me, I found one or two people at every reading who wanted me to sign copies of Hitting Home or Tales from the Men’s Room (word had gotten out about me and Tom being one and the same). When BadBoy ceased operations and the books went out of print, I received hundreds of e-mails to my website asking where copies could be purchased.

  So here, for the first time, I’ve collected my erotic stories. This book contains the material from those first two collections, as well as stories I wrote for other anthologies, stories written for magazines under the Tom Caffrey name and other pseudonyms, and pieces that haven’t been published anywhere at all.

  Ten years ago, when these first stories were written, the gay erotica field was just beginning to explode. Writers and editors such as M. Christian, Laura Antoniou, Thomas Roche, Michael Rowe, and Pat Califia were releasing wonderful, groundbreaking work. We all grew up together and saw the world of sex writing change, moving from magazines to books to websites and then back again. We saw the market become glutted with badly conceived, badly written, and badly edited material. Most of us went into hibernation for a time, waiting for it to get better. Some of us are still in hibernation. But none of us will ever forget the fun we had.

  I once received a fan letter, written to Tom Caffrey, that said, “I love your writing because it’s so much more literary than the other erotica out there. But when are you going to write a real novel?” Well, I have written real novels. And in most of them there’s sex. Why? Because writing is about capturing life on paper, and sex is a part of life. I started writing porn for fun and money. I kept writing porn because these stories gave me an opportunity to explore different types of writing, to play with creating scenes and moods and situations. I saw them as exercises of sorts, much as a pianist might practice scales or a pitcher might throw balls through an old tire hung from a tree branch. Some began with a single image I wanted to capture, while others were about confronting the characters with challenges and forcing them to make decisions. Yes, some of these stories are “just” about sex. But others are about much more.

  One final note: Everyone always wants to know how much of a pornographer’s work comes from real-life experiences. The answer is, not much, at least in my case. The majority of these stories are complete works of fiction, and even the ones that are based on real events or real people have been changed in some way. Tom is not Mike. Nor is he always the same Tom. (Although the fictional Mr. Caffrey, like his inspiration, tends to be dark-haired and hairy-chested, he has occasionally gone blond and shaved himself smooth when the plot has required it.) And the Mikes in the stories aren’t me, either. The fact is, there are only a handful of good porn names—Mike, Jack, Scott, Jake—and they all get used here, much as they get circulated among every new generation of porn stars. So please, don’t read too much into these. Just enjoy them.

  Wednesday, 2:00 A.M.

  My first apartment in New York was loud, hot, and situated on a street that saw a lot of action. Frequently I would wake up in the middle of a summer night, unable to sleep. Sometimes it would be because of the heat, and sometimes because people outside were talking. One night, when it was clear there was no way I was getting back to bed, I turned on the computer and came up with this.

  It’s the heat that wakes me up, sticky wet ribbons that flutter at my face and trouble my dreams until I rise up out of them into semiconsciousness. The night is uncommonly hot, simmering with the kind of heat that arrives only in the last days of summer when the fading season closes in and holds the city close in its grasp, refusing to let go. My hair is wet against my neck and my throat burns with thirst as I fumble for the glass of water on my bedside table. The rattling electric fan next to my bed provides only the slightest of breezes, and it has been barely three hours since I fell into a fitful sleep. Outside it is oddly silent, the usual summertime noises of sirens and sidewalk chatter absent.

  The sheets are soaked with sweat and wrap around me like the thin walls of a cocoon. I feel like a dead man trapped in a shroud and kick them off anxiously so that they fall onto the floor and I am lying naked on my bed. The room is only half-dark, the strange pale shine that always seems to rise from the city at night pouring in my curtainless window and filling it with a gloom that settles over everything like mist. I can see the outline of my body clearly, while the details are dim, the feet and hands disappearing in shadow. I have a hard-on, and it presses painfully against my belly as if it is too full of blood and my nuts are sore with the ache of holding too much cum. For some unknown reason I want terribly to jerk off, to feel the thick length of my cock slip beneath my fingers and then the shudder in my hand as my cum spatters across my belly.

  My hands move in and out of the pools of light as I run them over my chest lightly from my hips to my throat, shivering at the touch of my own fingers on my flushed skin, my breath drawing in sharply when I twist my tender nipples. Lifting my arm behind my head, I turn my face and press my nose into the wet patch of hair there. The smell is familiar and arousing, and my tongue slides lazily along the skin, soaking up the bitter taste and feeling the heavy muscle of my bicep rise and fall against my cheek.

  My hand wanders down my stomach to trace the curve of my balls and thighs while I think about the many rooms in the city around me where men are making love to one another, their bodies slick with sweat as they wrap each other in their arms and their mouths meet, tongues slipping between soft lips and hard teeth. The heat moves around me as my fingers caress my nuts like a lover’s lips, gently tugging and releasing. Drawing my feet up I spread my knees and my hand slips into the crack of my ass, the hair there damp with sweat as I finger my hole roughly, my wrist pressed tightly against my cock and ballsac as I imagine some unknown man sliding his prick deep inside me as my legs press against his sides.

  Before I can begin to stroke my prick, I hear a car turn down my street. Not an unusual occurrence by any means, but this one stops outside my building and the motor turns off. I hear a car door open, but do not hear it close. I close my eyes and try to jerk myself off, but my mind races from one image to another too quickly and I am not able to concentrate on any one long enough to bring myself off. Several times I feel the familiar rumbling in my groin begin to well up, only to have it recede back into stillness. Frustrated, I give up and lie back against the pillows. My prick lies against my skin, hard and unsatisfied.

  Rising from my bed, I go to the window and look out past the iron boundaries of my fourth-floor fire escape. At this hour the street is deserted, empty even of the usual inhabitants who come out after the rest of the world has gone to sleep to resume whatever business they are forced to end with the first shimmers of sunrise. A quiet babble of muted voices floats over the rooftops, and I think that probably they too have been driven by the heat into the cooler shadows of the park in the next block, where they can sit with their feet in the fountain while they reinvent their pasts for one another and anyone who will listen. Other than the rustle of their conversations, the city is dead.

  The car is parked directly under my window, its front half submerged in the pool of light created by the streetlight, the rear swallowed up in darkness. It is a big beast of a car, the kind driven by boys who learned at an early age how to service its engine themselves. The drivers of these cars are very often found in small towns where life is played out in factories and local pool halls, the supporting roles being assumed by girls with teased hair and red-lipsticked mouths who willingly give in to the men whose rough, grease-stained hands caress them in backseats on Saturday nights.

  My sister’s first boyfriend had a car very much like this one. He would roar up to the house after his shift on the construction crew ended and she would run out, laughing as she bent in the window to kiss him. On warm nights he would bring the hose from around back and spend an hour or two washing his prize, Led Zeppelin blaring from the 8-track tape deck as he lovingly went over the shiny metal skin fro
m top to bottom while my sister sat in the grass painting her nails. I would stand behind the curtains and watch him, mesmerized by the way the thick muscles of his shirtless chest and arms moved as he worked the sponge over the black paint. Once, when it was very hot and he was wearing only his boxer shorts, my sister turned the hose on him, soaking him so that the material clung to him and I could see the shadow of his bush and the outline of his cock as he chased after her. That night I jerked off into my hand, thinking about what I’d seen while I listened to the sound of his voice coming through the screen door from where they sat on the steps talking.

  The car door on the driver’s side is open, and a young man is sitting with his feet resting on the sidewalk while the rest of him remains inside the car. Another man is sitting on the sidewalk itself, his knees drawn up in front of him. He is holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette that sends threads of smoke into the air. While the face of the man in the car is hidden in shadow, I see that he is wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy work boots. The man seated on the sidewalk is dressed similarly in jeans and a white T-shirt, although he is wearing black motorcycle boots. He is dark haired, and his arms are well developed. I imagine him working in a warehouse, his hands encased in thick gloves as he carries boxes from one place to another, never thinking about what might be in them as his mind looks ahead to the time when he can fuck his girlfriend again.

  “I can’t believe we drove all over looking for those stupid bitches,” he says, his voice low. “Wasted all damn night and they’re probably sitting somewhere wondering why we never showed.”

  “Don’t really matter,” says the man inside the car. His accent is heavy with the flatness of someone who has spent a lot of time in southern New Jersey. It is a sound I hear often on the streets of my neighborhood on the weekends, when carloads of young men like this one come in to spend their paychecks in the local bars. “We got beer. We got the night to ourselves. Might as well enjoy it.”