Every autumn, San Francisco is one of the cities that hosts a “Fleet Week”. The US Navy invades the City by the Bay. The Blue Angels fly in tight formation under the Golden Gate then roar out over the Bay and the City. Aircraft Carriers and Destroyers dock at the piers along the Embarcadero. During the day crowds of families take tours of the ships, meeting the sailors. And at night the waterfront is flooded with sailors in their summer dress whites. Every year during Fleet Week I’m down on the Embarcadero a lot — for me military men are a lifelong passion.
A few years ago, one night during Fleet Week, I walked down Folsom to a favorite sex spot of mine, a bookstore with gloryholes in the backroom booths. Some of my more fastidious friends wouldn’t be caught dead there: it’s too filthy, too sleazy, too dark. They’re bothered by the overwhelming smell of testosterone-rich sweat, dried semen, cheap disinfectant. But I love all of these things, and I go there to suck cock without complications or conversation.
But cocksucking through gloryholes in San Francisco is different from anyplace else: the hungry cocksuckers are so plentiful that some men get a little jaded. A man will let you suck his dick for a
while, then suddenly pull out, go to another booth to sample the expertise or technique of another mouth, then abruptly move on to yet someone else. Yes, you end up tasting a lot of cock, but you can end an evening having only sampled, with nary a hint of the profound and defining connection two men can create through a simple round hole in a cheap plywood wall.
On this particular warm night as I approached the gloryhole storefront, I passed a rowdy group of sailors, most of them dressed in street clothes. If you know military men, you know they have a particular way of dressing when they go ashore out of uniform. The clothes fit a little too well, are always well pressed, and betray a fashion sense that’s more self-conscious than cosmopolitan. Think of the old “International Male” style: gay men from Fresno and straight sailors love the stuff.
This group of young men was amped-up on puppy-energy, loud and laughing and excited. They were clearly headed to the Covered Wagon, a working-class straight bar on Folsom near 5th where boozy and available women are found. I thought about following them just to watch the spectacle, but I was hungry to suck cock. So I turned into the bookstore, bought a few bucks worth of tokens and headed back to the deep darkness of the booths.
The place was empty so I went into one of the back booths and watched porn for a while, switching through the video channels. Predictably, most weren’t working. And the ones that were working were either more video noise than image or they were showing material not to my taste: women pissing on each other; sad looking men fucking a fat and heavily tattooed woman. I finally settled on something with a “wrestler” forcing his fat uncut Italian cock into the mouth of the “loser” of the faux match.
A few minutes into it I heard someone walk into the next booth. I went down on my knees and peered through the gloryhole. I’ll admit it: I rarely look up at faces: there’s more than enough information and wonder for me in the region of a man’s crotch. And what I saw through the hole was enough to tell me that this was one of the men from the group outside, a sailor who had come in either to watch a movie and jack off, or to get sucked off.
I said a quick silent prayer to the phallic god and the saint-protectors of cocksuckers. I know for a fact that wanting something with too much raw intent can keep it from happening. So I tried to keep my hungry excitement controlled, but my heart was beating fast and I felt the saliva flow in my suddenly achingly empty mouth.
I watched his hands. It was like watching the best movie ever made, every move and every moment had my unalloyed attention. He unzipped his pants and reached inside. His hand moved slowly for a long while. It would stop after a few minutes as he fed another token into the slot. I looked up and got a glimpse of his video screen: he was watching the sad guys fucking the fat woman.
And then everything went right: he bent over just enough to see if anyone was in the next booth. And apparently he saw enough of me in a kneeling position to know that he could get what he needed. He fished his cock out of his pants–fat, veined, beautiful–and he did it in a way that told me that this was need-driven, not a showing-off for my benefit. His dick needed to be out of those pants, and its needs were at this moment more important than either the sailor who held it or the cocksucker who was longing for it.
He turned toward the hole and I put one finger discretely on the rim of the hole to seal the deal. He moved closer and I opened my mouth to the hole and felt the warmth of him just before we actually made contact. You could tell that he had had this done before–there was no hesitation–and you could tell that it had been a long while since the last time. The most intimate things about a man become obvious when you have his cock in your mouth, and what I felt was that this sailor needed this right now as much as he’d ever needed anything in his life.
I kept my head still as he slid in, slow and steady, his cock recognizing and savoring the feel of a warm experienced mouth. It was a fat cock and it grew fatter, pulsing heavily with his young-buck heartbeat. It grew until it was hard, curving upward a bit, with veins so prominent that I could easily follow them with my tongue. I had to adjust my position to accommodate all of him.
When you get a chance like this–one of those defining opportunities that will be a lifelong memory–the meaning and joy of being a cocksucker, of being able to “service” a man, becomes radiantly clear. The most intimate connection in the world is between a man who needs to suck cock and a man who really needs to get sucked. When it’s right, it takes several steps toward the spiritual side of sex. Even when — or maybe especially when — there’s a plywood wall separating the two men, focusing their work.
I nursed on his cock, I sucked and tasted it and gave it the best I had. Sometimes he’d move in and out of my mouth a little, but mostly he just held there pressed against the hole: giving me everything I wanted, letting me worship and love this young sailor’s pure virility. When I was sure I had him for the duration, I paused and gently reached through and hauled his heavy sweaty ballsac through the hole. As I worshiped him with my mouth and hands, I kept having fleeting images of him at sea, a young man aboard an aircraft carrier, surrounded by the sea, on a long tour of duty, intimate with nothing but work, routine and loneliness.
He didn’t know you can lock the doors of the booths, and once in a while someone would jerk his door open. He’d pull it closed, almost slamming it. And even though his cock would soften a bit when
this happened, it never left the hole, his hips stayed pressed against the wood, his perfect cock and ballsac had been given to me to worship and play with and savor to my satisfaction. He was mine, and to put it mildly, I had his undivided attention. He seriously needed this. Once in a while I’d hear him drop another token into the slot. My mouth, I realized at one point, was an expedient
substitute for a fat woman’s loose pussy. And I was fine with that. I was happy with that.
A generous ten minutes into it he suddenly got harder and grinding his hips against the plywood wall shot hard in my mouth, down my throat. Five or six hot jets that were the saltiest I’ve ever
tasted. And he kept spasming after he had shot, draining all of his urgency, his semen and solitude, into my hungry mouth. And then his orgasm was spent and he was done. He
stopped pushing and I felt him relax. For a good long while we stayed perfectly still — his cock inside me, my mouth around him, the taste and smell of him, the heat of his young flesh that was still steadily pulsing. I was breathing hard; I’m sure I moaned quietly from gratitude and fulfillment.
He pulled out slowly–very slowly–wetly unrooting himself, and then he stepped back. I swallowed and stared through the hole: this beautiful pendulous fat cock and heavy ballsac, hanging and
still dripping sperm and spit, luminous in the flickering glow of the cheap video. He knew I was looking and he gave me a good long gander–an ultimate gift from a proud and generous young man.
He slowly stroked it’s fat vein-laced length, milking out the last drops, wiping them on the booth wall. He was thinking about this, maybe feeling guilty, maybe feeling ashamed, maybe
feeling grateful, maybe just relieved. This may have meant a lot to him; it may have meant nothing. I’ll never know. But I loved watching his hand moving slowly as he thought about it. His cock’s need had been sated for now and the two men, the sailor and cocksucker, were once again becoming aware of themselves, two solitary strangers in filthy porn booths. I suddenly realized that the knees of my pants were wet, soaked with the spit and semen of other mens’ encounters.
He pulled open his pants, tucked the fat relaxed cock away, zipped up and adjusted his clothes perfectly. He’d been trained to be careful with his appearance. I put my fingers on the edge of the hole, a good-hearted whore saying thank you. But I doubt that he noticed: when I looked through the hole he’d already left the booth and I could hear his quick steps as he walked out of the bookstore.
Later, I walked down to the Covered Wagon and bought a beer. Sipping it I wandered through the crowded room until I recognized the pants and the shirt. I watched him for a while as he laughed and drank with his buddies. They were noisily hitting on the local floozies, hoping for a real score. I stayed long enough to memorize what I could about him and then I left, the bitter delicious taste of Anchor Steam mixed with the salty man-savor of a skinny ordinary-looking young man with big ears, a stern haircut and a wide unguarded smile.
San Francisco during Fleet Week can be a sentimental place, even for tough-minded sex-fiends like me. Before I’d left the gloryholes, before I walked to the bar and just after the sailor had fled his little booth, I stayed down on my knees. I stared at the now empty gloryhole for a while and felt lucky. Lucky and something else altogether. Fortunate to be who I am, what I am, where I am. But still again something else. Before I could put my finger on what I was feeling (before I could locate my heart), someone tried to open the locked door of my booth, jostling the cheap doorknob noisily and snapping me out of my revery. And then someone walked into the booth where the sailor had been.
I peered through the gloryhole, pushing my face close to the hole. And I smelled the warm smell of the sailor’s sex — a raw, complex and intimate smell. You know the smell. You remember it. The new guy in the booth quickly unbuttoned his jeans and shoved his soft cock through the hole. A nice enough dick, sure. Big, yes, but oddly cold. I sucked on it and it refused to get harder. This was a local, one of the guys who, like me, is regularly awash in easy constant sex. Jaded cock, jaded mouth. A colder reality of SF sexlife. Something was missing, but I felt the cocksucker’s lifelong hunger in me insisting
that this was, after all, an available dick in my hungry mouth. So I sucked and worked the big thing for a while, knowing that I could get it hard if I kept going.
And then I shocked myself: I felt a strange sense of faithfulness to the sailor, to the connection I’d felt. He was enough. I didn’t need to know him. After all, I’d only been a warm hole for him to shove
his big dick into…but he’d be enough for me this evening. I stopped sucking on the long soft dick, waited for it to disappear through the hole. I stood up, straightened my clothes and walked out of the booth.
The place had filled up. I recognized a bunch of regulars with their lizard-quick eyes, their competitive hunger (one lurched into the booth I’d just abandoned, bending to peer through the gloryhole before he pulled the door shut). But one or two of the men leaning against the walls were too well-groomed and nervous to be locals: more young sailors in need. I grinned, wiping my mouth with my hand, rubbing my beard and smelling the sailor’s sex again.
I could have stayed and kept the booth to myself, sucking off more men, hoping to get more men, more cocks and loads, more sailors from the fleet. But the walls were lined with men who needed what I’d just had, who needed the chance to be the easy whore for a warm-blooded young man on leave. And I wanted them to have their chance: this cocksucker had had a sailor and that sailor had been enough. Let the others fall in love now.
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