He was the son of the hotel owner. He was twenty, the same age as myself at the time, and he was a knockout -- lean and sculpted, with his olive, lazy eyes that nailed me with every glance. His name was Acung.
Perhaps this story will seem strange, but it could not be stranger to you than it was to me at the time, an innocent making my seminal voyage away from the tedium of my known world. My parents tried to send me to Europe, even going so far as to book a ticket for me. But I had my mind set on Java. I booked another ticket from Amsterdam, via Abu Dhabi and a two-night stopover in Singapore -- in the late seventies, getting to Jakarta was not as direct as it is now. The other circumstances of that trip are not as important as the underpinning of delicious guilt that my global subterfuge induced in me, a permanent field of butterflies that took to flying about on the slightest provocation, be it the sight of a father and son, or a policeman, or even a beautiful young man like Acung.
From Jakarta, I made my way to Bandung in West Java (Sunda), a few hours away by car and considerably elevated in Java's volcanic central spine. The place I chose as home was called the Hotel Garuda. It was a sprawling, one-story affair with roughly one guest for every five or six rooms. I took a pale green, dank room in the far back, on the opposite end of the hotel from the entrance which faced on the Medan Merdeka (Freedom Field). This rather expansive, if spare and empty, room had its own porch and it own kamar mandi(bathroom). Indeed, I had my own overgrown garden clogging the outdoor path around the building back to the office. When I closed the door, I was quite alone and out of earshot from the proprietor, Amad, who was Acung's older brother.
Acung did my custodial work. He arrived the first morning of my visit with hot tea and a dish of that greasy cold porridge callednasi goreng(fried rice) about which travelogues so often duplicitously wax eloquent. We did not speak a common language. When I rose directly from bed and went for the food, he bodily forced me into thekamar mandi, mimicking the action of dousing myself with the frigid mountain water. Indonesians don't like dirty people, and they pointedly don't trust Euros to bathe themselves properly. I feigned ignorance of his meaning, so he entered the room, closed the door, and set about stripping me -- not sensually, at that point, but in a businesslike manner, perhaps more like a stern nanny than a potential lover He grabbed the dipper (a metal kitchen pot, actually), plunged it into the bak mandi(a deep, tiled water basin) and pitched upon me therefrom a gallon of the coldest water that had ever stroked my flesh. All this in a trice! I was naked, wet, cold while Acung smiled. I guess my prick stood on up, although I must admit that I don't remember, because Acung grabbed it, felt it, made it warm. I melted at his gaze. From that moment, I had no secrets from him, despite our lack of any common medium of verbal communication. Perhaps I had one secret -- I was still a virgin up to that moment.
What ensued was a three-week affair, almost entirely wordless. I hired Acung daily as a guide, for what amounted to a quarter -- I had to hire him, or his _d_a_m_n_ed brother who ran the hotel wouldn't have let him leave. He took me everywhere, and everywhere we went we made love. We visited an abattoir one day, and I blew him between a pair of doors that led from a dark hallway to an open, unused courtyard. The place reeked of flesh. Another day, we visited the dilapidated zoo outside town. He found some bushes on the far side of the perimeter fence where he _f_u_c_k_ed me after lunch. I _f_u_c_k_ed him too, that day, after we got back to the hotel. I went to the desk and told his brother that thebak mandiwas empty. So, Acung had to come out to my room. I was so _d_a_m_n_ed horny; I grabbed him after he turned the water on, yanked his pants past that silken, round ass of his, and pressed him into the bed. I screwed him hard and direct -- this was before condoms, remember! -- and blew my load just as the water started to overflow. All this without a word.
Oh yeah, that "silken, round ass" -- there is a quality to the density of perfect flesh for which English does not have a word. Is it this linguistic oversight which causes me ever to need to press upon it, to cup it, to keep contact with it as if letting it go will release both the touch and that ineluctable density. Acung's ass is the template for all asses.
I should mention the brother, Amad, because this story is as much about him as either Acung or myself. He was around thirty, a few years out of the army. He had three or four inches on Acung, and he was built. He liked very tight clothes, and often lounged in the afternoon heat without a shirt. His chest was haughty and, this above all, hard as steel. It was almost painful to look at his nipples -- I thought they might be sharpened, the better to accord with his physical power. His hair was cut in an Indonesian military, micro flat-top. He spoke some English, and did all the business arrangements at the hotel. He annoyed me, actually; he always stared at me with an open leer. He even winked a few times. But, somehow, he also got to that field of butterflies within me. The sight of him made my stomach pull up and my nuts pull in. I didn't know if he knew about Acung and me, but I felt guilty just being in his presence. Guilt turns to pleasure. As the days wore on, increasingly I would find myself thinking of him when I jerked off, or especially when I was taking Acung up the ass. Keep the brother in mind.
Towards the end of my stay, I hired Acung to accompany me toTangkuban Perahu(Upturned Boat), the great mountain above Bandung. We took a hotel room in Lembang, in a little guest house designed for the occasional Dutch returnee; the place was very clean, in a way utterly inconsistent with the local idea of clean. By night, we had to confine ourselves to _c_o_c_k_sucking, lest any thrusting movement be broadcast the length of the corridors by means of the squeaky-spring broadcast system. The first night, we performed an immobilized scissor grip 69 on each other that lasted halfway to dawn. I have never since experienced anything so sublime as his velvet thighs hammerlocking my mouth on the shaft of his penis. I could hold back my own load only by focusing entirely on sucking him, by pretending that his legs had fused into my face, and that we would spend all eternity, ensnared like statuary, pleasuring ourselves thus.
But that's not the story here, even though that was the first 69 I'd ever done.
Nor is it the story that the next day, midway through our walk through the forest to the top ofTangkuban Perahu, we played take the maiden. I got to be maiden first. We figured this game out, wordlessly as I've mentioned, because I tried to pull my ass away from his touch. His lips curled in amusement before he pursed them together in a mock, come-hither-maiden kiss. I struggled against him, made him rape me right in the middle of the path. The wet, red mud coated my balls as he plowed me. I struggled as if to cry out in mock protest, but my mouth was full of mud as well. He even pulled my T-shirt up to my neck so that my chest would be muddied -- and, all the while, still _f_u_c_k_in' me. He was my first lay, and still the best.
I made him play maiden a little way further down the path. Since I was bigger, if perhaps not stronger, than he, the fantasy was more formal. I made him strip naked while I held a stick-knife at his throat. He thought that was funny, and laughed as he squeezed out of his pants. I bent him over a large log so I could examine his ass; I pulled at his cheeks so I could tongue him where I would love him. The cheeks of his ass glistened with sweat. His head was down to the ground on the far side of the log, his ass was pointed skywards, his feet on tippy-toes barely made contact with the earth as I stood behind him delighting zt the sight of what I would have. And then I dove into him slowly, triumphantly, stiff-arming his torso so as to thrust my body up with each dive into him. Even now, I have to sit back and sigh. When I was finished, we fell together in the mud by the log, embracing, rolling, covering our naked bodies in mud.
Later we washed our clothes in a stream, and laid them out to dry in the blazing noon sun of West Java. We slept in the shade; I made him kiss me. I held his tongue deep in my throat with my teeth. I wanted to swallow him.
When we got back, we told the would-be Dutch hoteliers that we'd fallen into a mud hole. Much amusement. The proprietor cuffed Acung on the back of his head and said something sharp to him.
We returned to Bandung a few days later, arriving in the late afternoon. It was my last night in town; I had train reservations the next day for Yogyakarta in Central Java. When we arrived, Amad, the brother, was angry. He had expected us the previous day. He yelled at Acung in front of me; he cuffed him on the back of the head just like the hotelier in Lembang had done, sent him running away from my presence.
It was only when I was alone in my room that the imminence of my departure dawned upon me. I fretted lest Acung would not visit me that night, lest the brother had divined our relationship, lest we wouldn't even have the opportunity to say good-bye. Thus frozen in my fears, I lay on my bed waiting.
Was it a minute or an hour before Acung stole silently through the door? He'd been crying; I gathered the lecture had continued after my departure from the lobby. Silently, he took me in his arms and kissed me without my prompting. Silently, too, we slid out of our sweaty clothes. I went down on him, but that was not enough; he swung his body around and we snapped back into our velvet, hammerlock 69 as if the memory of the position had been cast permanently into our minds. As I sucked on him, the butterflies were in riot in my gut -- the lecture, the stealth, the necessary and ineluctable departure of the next day.
And then the door flew open. And then Amad stood, pulled up to his full height and build, at the foot of the bed, arms akimbo, a sneer more joyful than contemptuous shouting from his lips. He watched for a measured moment, before turning back to the door and slamming it shut with such force that it pulled the top hinge out of the tropical wood. He wheeled once more and stared again at us. We were so frozen that we each still held the other's penis in our mouths. But, now, our penises were soft. And the pit of my stomach had dropped to my ankles.
Amad grabbed Acung and made him stand facing the wall. Oh, his butt, I thought, how beautiful his butt. Then Amad grabbed me, and stood me beside Acung. He ordered us to turn around by speaking the command to Acung who grabbed me to indicate to me what Amad wanted. And then, as the smile on his lips bloomed into a laugh, Amad pointedly, aggressively, slowly snaked his thick, black belt off his trousers; he folded it in half and snapped it repeatedly against his thighs. I had no stomach at that point; I could barely pull a breath.
Still snapping the belt, he grabbed the upper lobe of my ear and threw me into thekamar mandi. Before he closed the door, he threw my towel out of the room so I would have to emerge wet. As I doused myself in cold water, I heard him lecture Acung in hard words, yelling and cursing. When I emerged, he threw Acung into thekamar mandi. I made for my towel, but he kicked it away, threatened me with the belt. He grabbed my ear again, and lined me against the wall, this time face out so I could see.
Acung came out of thekamar mandi. Amad grabbed him again by the ear, and led him to the end of the bed. Amad grabbed the pillows, and piled them at the edge of the bed, and then he forced Acung to bend over. There was the same ass, bent the same way as it had been in the forest, wet with cold water as it had been then with warm, delicious, desiring sweat. His feet strained tippy-toes to hold position, just as they had in the forest. If I drew a breath in the several minutes that Amad waited after drawing Acung into that position, I did not know it. The only sound was my stomach, the drips of water down the drain in thekamar mandi, some birds chirping in my wild garden. How long did we wait?
Without warning, Amad picked up his belt arm, and brought the doubled army belt square, hard, sharp against Acung's perfect ass. Acung's face plunged into the bed, but his ass did not move; he did not cry out. A dark stripe emerged on his ass; then a second stripe. I heard his gasp. A third stripe. His arms flew out to grab the sides of the bed. A fourth stripe. Amad raised his arm, as if on a count, and hurled each stroke with precision and force. A fifth stripe. Acung's ass was a range of goose bumps except for the dark band in the middle where he took his punishment. A sixth stripe, a seventh, an eighth.
There was a silence as Amad switched sides. I could hear Acung's low sobs. Amad screamed something, and the sobs ceased. Even as the last breathy protest stilled, Amad raised his arm again. The first stripe, the second. By the third, Acung could no longer withhold his sobs. The fourth, the fifth. Acung's ass quivered, but did not move. The sixth, the seventh. Amad paused, glanced at me, pursed his lips and blew me a kiss before, without hesitation, landing the eighth stripe perfectly, squarely, right across the middle highway where every one of the previous strokes had come to rest. Acung's body released; he slumped into his position, the sobs unrestrained, until Amad pulled him up and tossed him in my direction.
Then the soldier man, his belt still in his hand, looked at me and said, "You brave like Acung? Hah!" "Oh, NO," I cried, and moved as if to flee -- as if to flee naked into Bandung!! Where could I go? What option did I have?
Amad grabbed my arm and said to me, in even, gentle tones, "You wann polisi?" How to answer? I couldn't think; I knew of no possible exit.I tensed my body hoping the absurdity of the moment would pass. Then he gathered me, pulled me to the execution spot, bent my body into the self-same position from which my Acung had so recently been released. Was Acung examining my crack as I had his? Was he desiring me as intensely as I had wanted him while he was being whipped? Could he even see through the tears?
And between me and the pillows, my _d_i_c_k_ stood up.
The first stripe was like a bolt from a flame-thrower. My ass leapt. It threw the wind out of me. The second stripe hurt so much that I no longer felt as if my ass was part of my body. The third brought us back together, the pain searing. The fourth excited every muscle in my body as if to rise and run. Amad paused, leaned over to me and said, in clear English, "Acung watching you. You man? You brave?" Then, as he drew away, he landed the fifth stripe. The sixth, the seventh, the pain growing with each contact. The eighth, harder than any, my head jerked back quite independently of any desire on my part.
I was quite broken. The final eight stripes from the other side were delivered to a beaten body. The pain was liquid. First stripe, I sobbed, second stripe, aware of the theater of my discomfiture, I heard my sob sound like Acung's. The third, the fourth, I no longer possessed the power to move myself. The fifth, I remember, reminded me of how much it hurt. The sixth, like cold steel, cut off thought. The seventh, and a pause. I saw his shadow pull up to full height. He landed the eighth stripe with all the force left in him. I, like Acung before me, collapsed into the pillows, sobbing, begging silently.
Amad pulled me up and threw me against the wall beside Acung. He glanced at my _d_i_c_k_, still hard. As he turned to leave, he flicked the belt across the shaft. It stung, but did not break my desire. We heard him laughing riotously as he walked down the path away from my room. He left the door open. He left us naked, punished, sobbing, but together.
Niether of us moved for moments counting. The wind rustled through the open door; themandistill dripped. I could hear my joints in the silence as I inched my hand across to caress his welts. With my first touch, his penis recovered its need for me. His first return to touching me was towards my face. He wiped the tear stains away, and then pulled our mouths together. As the violence of the belt had dried our asses, the pleasure of his kiss moistened us again. The door still open, we necked standing up, afraid to lie down lest we torment the burning on our hindquarters.
We made love all night. Amad had awakened our asses. We _f_u_c_k_ed each other by turns, the stab of our desire as painful as the stripes we had endured. Each thrust of his _f_u_c_k_ing me pounded on the stripes astride my ass; each thrust was agony; each thrust was a shot of sensation wherein pain and pleasure have no boundaries. As I _f_u_c_k_ed Acung, the hard of my lower stomach just north of my crotch was warmed, reddened by the stripes on his perfect, his ass.
We never slept. We made love to last for the rest of our lives. When dawn broke, we heard a tinkle of glasses, a light knock on the door. We emerged to the porch where our breakfast -- tea and greasynasi goreng-- awaited us, unattended by human hands. We bathed together, for the first time, I packed my bag as he watched. He carried my bag to the street, hailed a becak("trishaw") and loaded me in. He shook my hand, and shed a tear.
Amad watched this restrained leaving with a sneer, and a leer, and an occasional guffaw, on this morning after our mutual discipline. I tried not to look at our tormentor, but he'd left his mark on my psyche. I kept my eyes on Acung from around the cab of thebecakuntil it had turned a corner. Only then did I cry. My ass cried with every jolt of the vehicle. My ass burned for Acung. Why had Amad striped us? Did he know the bond he had forged? Was the whipping for him, or for us?
I did see Acung again; but that is for another story. Suffice for the moment to say that our bond, forged through Amad's belt, was untarnished by the passing of years. And suffice also to say that eventually I came to understand the motivation for Amad's whipping us.