The Cold

A hot story for some very cold days.

This has truly been the “winter of our discontent.” It’s been a bitch. It has been, for us in the Northeast, the reason why God made Florida. Still, there are aspects of winter that make me smile—diamond-bright days of sharp sunlight; cozy nights, especially if you are not sleeping alone, or if you are happy snuggling under lots of covers by yourself.

This brings me to “The Cold,” one of my favorite stories from my collection Works and Other “Smoky George” Stories. “The Cold” originally appeared in the late 1980s in Advocate Men, published in Los Angeles. It was bought by a wonderful editor named Stuart Kellogg. He felt the story was atmospheric, tense, and beautiful. I have read it in performance several times. It’s about being alone in an isolated cabin in the cold, and what can happen when you are in such a place. The story is openly sexual, so if you blush at such things, then maybe it’s not for you. On the other hand, you might learn a couple of new things, and that’s never bad either.

It would make a great movie, so if you are looking for material to turn into film—well, at this point, I can work real cheap. I’m presenting it here in two parts—to give you a little suspense, and because I’m not sure how long any Substack should be.

THE COLD, Part 1.

The second week after I arrived in the camp in the Adirondacks, the cold set in. The camp belonged to my friend Mike in New York—actually to his parents who were away in Florida—and Mike loaned it to me because he knew I was burned out with the city and I needed a place that was quiet. This was quiet. You could hear every one of your thoughts. Sometimes I thought you could even hear the blood working its way into your finger tips. The blood made a noise like a small hole in an air hose: pss-pss-pss. It was that quiet in the camp, even during the day.

The camp was near Malone, New York, about a spit away from the Canadian border. There were several Indian settlements around there, and when I took the jeep over to the General Store eight miles down the road, I’d see Indians come in. They were friendly, but kept a distance from you, and they didn’t seem to notice the cold the way I did. It was mid-November, a pretty dicey time, Mike warned me, when one day you could walk outside in shirt sleeves and the next morning go out and feel the snot in your nose freeze and drop right under you. I complained about the cold to Pete, the French Canadian, and his wife Genevieve, who ran the store, but the Indians never bellyached about it. They seemed to me to be a silent group. They got what they wanted and left. Usually whites hardly said anything to the Indians, and I—out of a certain shyness—gave them an acceptable amount of distance and did the same.

The first day the real cold set in, I got kind of spooked by it, which was probably natural, being alone in this place—one of the coldest corners of America—in a cabin with no running water and no electricity. I did have a good wood burning stove and enough wood in the shed attached to keep me warm indefinitely. There was also a generous supply of canned “staples,” like deviled ham, peas-and-carrots, and Campbell’s Soups, and with the Jeep Mike had lent me, all I had to do was get in it and go down to the store for anything else I needed.

I’d never driven a Jeep before and I was a bit daunted by it. I’d lived in Manhattan long enough almost to forget how to put the key in and work the clutch. But it all came back quickly enough, and I soon learned how to get the damn thing going, although reverse still wasn’t easy. Luckily, everything around the camp seemed to be either uphill or downhill, with little in reverse. There was almost no traffic on the roads, but a few people in their pickup trucks waved at me. I enjoyed this sort of friendliness. It was brief and not very personal, but it made me feel that I wasn’t totally out of my skull here. There were a few others like me and there was something kind of daring about spending the winter in this part of the mountains. I’m sure people figured that if I was fool enough to spend the winter here, I was good enough to wave to. No questions asked.

But the Indians that I saw never waved, and after a while I started to get skittish about them.

Or maybe I was just skittish about the cold. Mike had warned me about that. Cabin fever was real in a long, hard winter. “If it gets too much for you—being alone and all—then just say fuck it and take the Jeep back to Malone and get a train back. Leave the Jeep at my parents’ house and I’ll pick it up in May.”

To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really understood then what he was talking about. But the cold came in so sharply and so suddenly that it was like being slapped about by a huge, faceless giant. It seemed to menace me, follow me even into the cabin, and become an enemy. Everything got harder to do. Everything took more energy than I thought it would. Even sleeping seemed to take more energy. Getting into one of the cabin’s two narrow, hard, cold twin beds; wrapping two Army blankets tightly around me, mummy fashion; waiting for the bed to warm up enough from my own body heat—none of that made hitting the sack alone each night inviting.

But sleeping was a way to conserve energy, so I started sleeping during the day—usually after I’d poured a half shot of whiskey into my tea to keep warm. The warm, boozy tea was a great sleep bringer.

But then at night, when I really wanted to sleep, I couldn’t. Thoughts raced through me. I’d start to think about all the people I knew back in New York. I would see their faces. My own loneliness would start to hit me; really pinch me hard.

Somewhere in this procession of faces, I’d see Clark. He was this younger, twerpy guy I’d been—you know, I really hate to admit this! Okay, I’d been in love with him. It was hard for me to believe I’d actually been in love with this guy, and he’d occupied so much of my thoughts. But I had been—and when I started to think about him, I’d start to beat off. I’d grab my dick at the base, just above my warm, slightly furry balls, as my cock started to get stiff.

I noticed that in the warm bed, under the blankets—but with the cold air in the cabin—if I grabbed my cock just a bit harder (and I will admit that I have big balls), even the hairs on my ball sack would feel prickly. Like there was electricity running through them. The hairs would stand up and salute a bit, and everything around my genitals, including me, would get hotter. I’d feel the warmth flowing through me. The warmth from the tea, the whiskey, the creaky bed, and the cast iron stove that had a way of going out and leaving the cabin like a refrigerator.

That warmth would make me think even more about Clark—this skinny, “sensitive” young man (who was always telling me how insensitive I was)—who worked in a bank and wore snappy little ties that he bought on sale at Brooks Brothers. I’d think, for an instance, about his suits and his ties, but mostly I thought about him in the middle of hot sex, with his business clothes scattered all over my apartment. He had fine, pale skin and small teeth. Long fingers and long toes. Of course I thought about his lips, and his nice, small mouth. His smooth, narrow chest and boyish body; skinny hips and legs—and his hard, skinny cock that always seemed so much longer than I expected it to be, with its really sensitive, large head.

I thought a lot about the head of his cock. I liked the head of his cock a lot more than I liked his head. He was spacey and dizzy, but his cock—it was a wonder. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like a part of him. It was separate. I could play with it for hours, even while he read a book. Or was he just pretending to read?

The fact that he was such a little banker straight-arrow and I was such a fuck-up probably kept us going. It added just the right amount of tension and interest to what we had between us. So maybe he was only pretending to read. Maybe it was just a game, while I played with his dick. But even thinking about his cock made being in that cabin warmer and more bearable. His cock would get me going, running my fingers over my own shaft, working myself out of my coldness. My loneliness.

Boy, did I want Clark to be there—just then—and I wanted the head of his dick in my mouth.

But after I’d made a whole handful of jism, after it had spurted fresh out of my dick and I was trying like hell to figure out what to do with it (Mental Note: buy Kleenex at General Store), I was glad Clark wasn’t there. Then I would have had to hear about his yuppie job at the fucking bank, and I didn’t want to hear about that.

Sometimes I thought about ingesting my own cum. I know, you’re thinking this is a sick story, but if you’ve ever been stuck some place where there’s nothing around you but cold—anyway, two days with Clark and I know I would have ended up chasing him around the cabin with the wood ax just to shut him up.

When you’re alone, you start to think about really basic things and I wondered how I’d ever fallen for someone like Clark, and how useless love was, really, and then—strangely enough—I started to miss it. I started to miss love the way you can miss good food or real warmth in the midst of the coming of too much cold. Then I started to think about the Indians and the trees.

Somewhere out there in the middle of all those hardwood trees, there had to be a young, hot Indian who was looking for male companionship of a more interesting nature than you usually got at the General Store. This became quite a fantasy of mine, and I’d hitch a ride on it and start to see him: his dark eyes flashing between the bare trees. Thick, black hair glistening in the moonlight. Broad shoulders. Huge hands and feet. I would meet him and we’d follow each other deeper into the woods, then we’d both get naked very quickly. We’d end up greasing each other with bear fat—the type Pete sold that you could use for almost anything—I could imagine myself sucking at his tits, his navel, his fat balls. We’d be so hot and ready for pleasure that the cold would never bother us.

I jerked off an awful lot thinking about that, but every time I went out, the fantasy instantly disappeared. The Indians would keep their distance, and so would I. Often, they’d ignore me completely. Inside, I felt frozen. It was like the cold had set in between me and the world. Then, when I left Pete’s and I got back into my Jeep, I’d realize how lonely I’d be back at the camp. By the time I unloaded the groceries and stoked up the fire, and had my tea with whiskey, all I wanted to do was jerk off again—while Clark and my Indians came back to see me—and then I just wanted to fall asleep to block out the loneliness and the cold.

Then suddenly, into my second week there in the cold, I started to enjoy things. That sense of drifting in time—sleeping when I wanted to, drinking whenever I damn well felt like it, the silence, the wild nature around me—I started to like all of that. But the thing that still bothered me was being alone at night—especially when there were no moon or stars out and the blackness outside the camp overwhelmed me. Then I started feeling like I wasn’t just drifting along in nature, but I was being swallowed up by it. Isolated animal sounds, like the shrieking of a loon or the deer ambling through the woods—sounds from probably half a mile away—would shake the hell out of me.

I had two nights just like that, and on the third, I was wired to the teeth. I swigged a good bit of the fifth of cheap Canadian blended whiskey Pete had sold me at the store, ate some Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a half a loaf of stale white bread, and then I stripped down to bare skin to go to sleep.

The bed eventually got warm, after I’d settled into it. A small fire was going in the cast iron stove and I figured it would continue for most of the night. I closed my eyes, and told myself that I had to drift off. Then I realized I wasn’t going to be able to sleep again. It wasn’t just that I was seeing old faces from New York. There were no animal noises this time; but something was definitely keeping me awake.

I got up, bare-assed and barefooted, and stalked up to the window near the bed. There I saw the first snow since I’d arrived coming down. I felt some relief. Finally, this was a good sign. “Ees too cold t’ snow,” Pete had been telling me for a week. Now, I started to look forward to next day.

I remained stark naked, and got myself some more whiskey and put it into what was left of the lukewarm tea, and then carried the cup back to bed with me. I started thinking about the Jeep. I hoped it would be alright out in the snow. Mike had warned me that sometimes you got a drift that could literally lock the Jeep in.

I decided not to worry. I actually began to loosen up a bit, and felt my muscles and mind relax as my body warmed up inside and out. I drank some more of the tea, then something happened that tightened every nerve in me.

It was a sound like deep crunching coming from outside. It was distant at first, like it was coming from the narrow tractor trail off the main road that led to the camp. I hadn’t been expecting anyone. No one knew I was there, except Mike and his parents.

The sound got louder and deeper. Suddenly I realized that I was going to have visitors.

I couldn’t see anything further than a few feet from the cabin, because of the snow and the darkness. I made sure all the lights were out in the cabin, and I waited. I realized how vulnerable I was ... suppose there was someone, or a group of whatever out there: hoods, creeps, punks, lost serial murderers (???)—my worst fantasies started to take over. I could see them just drifting along, like I had been in the cold, robbing summer cabins. Doing anything they wanted to do.

Mike had warned me that vandalism was a problem. That was why his parents had been happy to have me stay there. But suppose this didn’t stop at vandalism? Suppose they weren’t going to stop. What was I going to do?

I knew I couldn’t just wait naked for the worst to happen. It wasn’t in me. I had to weigh the situation in my mind. I wondered if I should just go out there and meet whomever it was—let them know immediately I was there, and that I wasn’t just someone to fuck with. My eyes ran around the dark cabin. There was the heavy wood ax lying in front, near the door. I knew I could grab it, just to let them know that I was ready to use it.

I padded over, quietly, and got the ax. Then I brought it back to the freezing window, and crouched down as far as I could. I waited to see what was going to happen next.

Out of the thick snow, another Jeep pulled up beside mine. Then a large man, fully dressed for winter in boots and a parka, got out by himself. I saw that he was carrying a rifle. He walked slowly, carefully, over to the cabin. The snow started to blow in even heavier. I saw that it had already half covered Mike’s Jeep, and it would soon do the same for the one that had just parked.

Then it dawned on me: this guy could easily figure out that Mike’s cabin wasn’t empty. Even with the ax gripped in my hand, I became scared. An ax was no match for a rifle. I eased myself quietly into my jeans, managed to buckle my belt, and then went over to the door and made very sure that it was bolted from inside. My heart was pounding; I wondered what the hell I was going to do next. I looked around in the dark, then hurried to the table and grabbed a large butcher knife and put it inside the top of my right work boot. I put on my socks, laced up the boots, and threw on a flannel shirt.

There was a loud knock on the door. I waited.

“Mike?” a deep voice called.

The second and final section of The Cold will be published 2 weeks. so come back for it.

Ok, we know it’s cold, but why be alone all winter. My now-classic how to book THE MANLY ART OF SEDUCTION, How to Meet, Talk to, and Become Intimate with Anyone will keep the winter doldums away. You can get it from Amazon, excellent bookstores anyplace (they may have to order it!) or through my website, perrybrass.com.