(Author's important notes: In the 'Yin Anecdotes', the author departs from the usual themes in order to conceptualize his brooding psyche in fiction. The stories in this series contain nudity, _s_e_x_, violence and profanity, but not always all at once. The characters and plot are merely a synthesis of actual people and events, and should not be construed as otherwise. The author would like to state categorically that he does not condone acts of violence and terrorism of any form against the weak and helpless, particularly children, women, homo_s_e_x_uals and all minority groups.)
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Trey ignored the suspicious glances. It was becoming apparent to him that he was new amongst the club regulars. It was also becoming apparent the nature of Damon's work. Damon was already up on the stage performing, when Trey approached the main foyer. The foyer of the pub was living-room size, which accounted for the living-room manners and behavior-familiarity of the patrons. These were mostly respectable middle-aged men, who wore their ruddy faces atop business clothing, for they had come straight from the office. A small handful were in their thirties, and a number were cozying up to their older partners in an exaggerated parody of conventional coupling.
All of the men seemed ordinary but assumed a conspicuously hostile air towards the intruder. Many were also large men with protruding pot-bellies, their love hangers not quite snug within their trouser waistbands, but nudging the fabric of their shirts out of the hems of their waistcoats, and they were guzzling beer at the rate of two mugs a minute.
The ambience was typically pub-like - smoky and dark with just the few glaring blue and purple spotlights to help to illuminate their drinks. It was also very noisy with the usual shared bon mot about the weather, the lousy _s_e_x_ with the old lady, yet another business takeover. There was the requisite loud-mouthed raconteur who must throw in his two-cent worth of anecdotes, and these were often laced with racial innuendoes. There was also the lonely bully who believed that stridency was required to make himself heard and so was on the prowl for a fisticuff.
It was all completely alien to the more refined and unseasoned Trey. He remembered thinking that this was no place for Damon, certainly not an easy place or way to make a livelihood. He had known that Damon was having difficulty with tuition fees and this city was a tough place for an orphan to make ends meet, but surely there were other jobs. Even other clubs, if one looked hard enough.
Trey reconnoitered the huge landscape of the stage with a keen eye. Damon was at the center, nearly naked, except for the skimpy g-string that only served to emphasize his bulging crotch. Trey suddenly felt overcome by jealousy and a sense of possessiveness, even protectiveness. He was used to Damon's nakedness. He had seen that much of him in a very short time, but it bothered him that Damon was exposing himself for the enjoyment of the denizens of this renowned bear pit that flourished in the bowels, underneath the civilized city, on tainted money.
But you could not recognize Damon from his neck up. He was dolled up like a Halloween reveler - thick eyeliners, ruby lips, a mask as white as death. Trey however did not feel compensated.
For he was able to recognize the body below the grotesque mask. The porcelain skin was Damon's, as were the muscles, not disproportionately bulky and dangerous, just the muscles of a fit youth who happened to dance for a living. And the anklet on his left foot was Damon's without a doubt. Trey had become very familiar with the sight and design of it. He had seen it a hundred times before, even studied the intricately-set links in the chain, and could draw it from memory. Why, it was his job, after all, to keep abreast of new and unusual designs in jewelry and he was also the brightest and fastest-rising young star to be employed by the city's largest jewelers.
Tonight, Trey found Damon like a clone of the other dancers on the stage. Or they were clones of each other - half-naked, sinewy-limbed adolescents, still years away from manhood, hairless of body, armpits and legs. They all wore thickly painted masquerades with only a slight variation of heaviness of foundation and powder and not dissimilar blends of war paint. Only the hair on their heads and their g-thongs set them quite distinctly apart from each other.
Their physiques were all enviable: these dancers were proud owners of anatomies which were once an occlusion of puppy fat, but were now replete with pectoral definitions and abdominal tones that had been sculpted by hours of free training at the club gym. Each one appeared to be a favorite of someone in the audience for money constantly exchanged hands between the latter and the punters, who stood close by calling out the names of their baby-faced prodigies.
Yes, they were nearly clones of each other. But only Damon's form was unflawed by experience and a steady nourishment of cigarettes and alcohol that were the staple of the perpetually poor and starving dancers. Many of these boys had been plucked from the streets by the philanthropic club owner, who had secret aspirations to pederasty.
Damon's movements, now demonstrated on the platform, were magical. He stood out among the rest, not because he was a great dancer, in fact he was quite mediocre, but because ironically he seemed just a little out of place, almost lost, there, even though he moved as if he belonged there. He seemed frightened as if the stage or something else was terrifying him. Trey's intuition told him this, and then he thought to himself, no, Damon did not belong up there with the rest.
But he could not help staring transfixed at Damon. Neither could the others on the floor. The youthful dancer was now negotiating the elastic top of his red g-thong in order to discard it. He managed it with little show of the clumsiness of amateur performers untrained for the stage as Damon was. His hips effortlessly gyrated in synchrony with the amplified music. His powerful and shapely calves stomped fluidly and kept seamless time with the staccato beats. Losing his g-thong at last he threw it out seductively to the floor. Like ravenous wolves, some men pounded upon it as though it would be precious future memorabilia. Damon was now revealing the largest set of penis and testes among his peers as all together the boys wiggled their bare bottoms and wagged their nude genitals for the hungry crowd.
Before Trey had the inclination to be retroreactive, the show had ended. The shouts of encore and the keen applause awakened him from his rapture. The men were flinging single long-stemmed roses at the dancers; no - at Damon! And they were shouting for more.
More? Trey wondered. More what? More morsel for their fantasies? Did these men not realize that what they were condoning was only a degree more legal than child pornography and owing to antenatal complications and legal loopholes, they were protected from any indemnity that otherwise made them liable for the solicitation of nubile services?
The music had ebbed and was replaced by a mournful ballad. Damon and the other dancers had now disappeared backstage. Trey instantly followed. There he would spot his friend every now and again through the cracks between a score of strange heads. He overheard Damon arguing with a man who he guessed must be one of the bosses. The argument as far as Trey could discern audibly over the ruckus outside was about an encore performance that Damon was told he must give. Confused, Trey tried to reach Damon but the latter was being hurried back to the stage by a number of leather-clad heavy-busted men.
Trey quickly cornered another dancer who brusquely gave him a brief guide of club rules. It was customary, he heard, that after a performance a favored dancer would be re-called to the stage for a solo encore performance. The favored dancer was determined by the audience, that must have cast a unanimous vote for him and bade the highest price for him. The price was also the fee that the club would get to cash in its till for the night. The trade-off for the lucrative pay-off was that for an hour the audience was the custodian of the stage and dancer. They would define the encore and the dancer would reprise it on stage. The audience could demand any performance, there were no restrictions on the sleaziest, the most virtuoso but this was usually unlikely, the most sadistic and this was always likely, that the minds could conjure up, but _s_e_x_ual intercourse, copulating and ejaculating on stage were unequivocally forbidden.
Tonight's flavor was Damon. When the punters had tallied up the funds and announced that the bid for Damon had been the highest since the club opened three years ago, there were the usual bitching and graceless utterances of envy from the backstage and Damon could hear them from where he stood, guarded by the leather men.
Trey now heard being mapped out with the precision of an architect's blueprint what it was that the audience wished to see - Damon being whipped on his rear end by a blackjack. Not simulated whipping, they took pains to point out; it would have to be real. They wanted to see real pain tonight and they wanted to hear screams of real pain.
A hubbub slowly rose and filtered the small pub. Whether they were here for _s_e_x_ual, aesthetic or recreational reason, the men were nodding their heads, wildly stomping their feet and agreeing in unison, and that always was the cue to endorse the night's show finale as far as the club owners were concerned.
Trey started to fear for his friend and knew that the blackjack was not in any way simply going to leave welts on his bottom. He knew he could tolerate nudity on stage, to some extent, if it elucidated an aspect of the plot, but he made no apology for taking a Philistine interest in the staging of masochism as an art form.
On this conviction, Trey felt compelled to rescue his friend from the tyranny of the audience and the club's hosts. It was as much a moral, as an altruistic duty. For Trey had secretly loved Damon since they collided into each other a month ago, he in his BMW, and the latter on his BMX.
But now the lights were starting to dim. Trey retained his position very close to the stage and watched Damon being thrust into the spotlight. The spotlight poured over him at the same time that he was being disrobed naked again. The audience cheered and whistled with a predatory thirst. Gallons of beer were emptied from the kegs as the men elevated their desire to a frenzy. In the background the stagehands were rolling out a wooden frame on wobbly casters.
Pulled along but struggling to resist, Damon was led fully nude to the wooden pillory, his head and arms put through the three holes, his legs and buttock cheeks spread wide to betray a tight virgin anus now facing the audience. It was a humiliating stance. Someone from the audience leapt onto the stage and reaching the principal players, he held up a large rubber _d_i_l_d_o_ to the audience. The audience responded with raised hands, pounding their fists in the air in a united show of approbation for the creative improvisation of his extempore post script. Prying apart Damon's cheeks, the goateed man from the audience jubilantly thrust the device up the former's tightly clenched anus. Damon silenced his urge to cry out, imaging instead the meandering path up his anal canal that the device must navigate. Pleasure gradually replaced his pain when the _d_i_l_d_o_ was at last safely moored in place.
To see him exploited like this and made a public spectacle of, Trey could hear a prompting that tore at his conscience. Nor could he dismiss the moral onus on him to arbitrate a rescue plan, but what could a jewelry designer knee-deep in bank loans like himself do?
A sudden scream pervaded the atmosphere of the hall and arrested Trey's semi-lethargy. The beating had begun. A nervous plea followed, and this brought on grotesque laughter and then a chorus inciting the performers to liven up the drama that they were finding on the lee-side of interesting.
"Beat him harder, man," a voice was heard calling out.
"Yeah, man, beat the honey's ass good," another voice came to join the first.
"Give us what we've come here to see," said a third.
Blow after blow, the blackjacks were put to tyrannizing the young dancer's bottom. Welts were beginning to be visible. Confronted once more by his convictions, Trey found himself offering to outmatch the crowd's bid for the performance of his choice. But as he made the bid he realized that he would have some difficulty taking sponsorship for it, but that would have to be a problem for another time. Right now, Damon's safety took precedence over all else.
It seemed that greed would prove itself a powerful emotion and money a powerful tool once more this night. The club bosses accepted Trey's bid and drew a premature denouement for the plot that was just unfolding on the stage. Hisses and boos naturally followed when the audience discovered that there was not going to be a replacement performance. And there was now the question of his ruse. Responding to that, Trey drew on a business acumen inherited from his father, the proprietor of his employer, Harith & Sons, and signed away a small fraction of his deed to a two percent share of the holding.
Trey and Damon escaped the fractious crowd, that was turning into a mob, through the backstage, but seated now beside each other in the BMW, Damon turned angrily towards the older of them and snarled: "Why the bloody hell did you do that for?"
The dam seemed to have broken ....