The Cold, Part Two

Yes, the rest of this hot story for a cold night

The author in the midst of the miseries of this too-cold winter.

Here is the rest of The Cold, originally published in Advocate Men, in that “Golden Age” of gay pornography when so many of my fellow queer writers wrote what we affectionately called “porn,” but still took amazingly serious as literature. It was our literature, too. In my porn stories written for the most part in the late 1970s into the early 1990s, I wanted to integrate sex into the stories so that it became a natural part of the action of the stories.

I was encouraged to do this by a number of editors, most notably Stan Leventhal at the Mavety magazines (Honcho, Torso, and Inches); Stuart Kellogg at Advocate Men; and the late Lou Thomas at FirstHand. Lou really loved my stories which I published under the name “Smoky George.” The idea that I was a poet who wrote porn titillated a lot of people—that I could go from the sensitivity of poetry to the red-meat frankness of porn. But this was very much a part of the gay ethos of this period when so many queer men like myself “played” in both high culture (remember when gay men went to the Metropolitan Opera in full leather?) and “low sex,” as in backroom bars, sex clubs, and venues like the notorious Mine Shaft.

I was abetted in this by other writers, like my friends the novelist and essayist Felice Picano and T. R. Witomski, who wrote 2,000 porn stories. It was a wild and wooley time, and being a gay writer was like belonging to a marvelous club. I miss it.

As you may remember, the unnamed narrator of The Cold has been loaned an isolated cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, in a freezing corner of Upstate New York by his friend Mike. The narrator has been burned out by the city (New York in its own wild and wooley experiences in the 1970s) and wants to spend time in a quiet, peaceful, though, at times, very lonely place.

One night, experiencing the loneliness in a terrible way, he becomes aware that someone else is now close to the cabin—could it be someone trying to rob these cabins out in the dark cold woods? He is ready to fight the interloper when he hears:

The Cold, Part Two

“Mike?” a deep voice called.

I exhaled, purely relieved. I unbolted and opened the door. He was already covered in snow and looked blue-chilled even in the dark. I asked him in, although there as no light in the cabin.

“You must’ve been asleep, Mike. I’m sorry I woke you,” he said, as he lumbered in to the dark cabin.

I told him I wasn’t Mike, and lit a kerosene lamp and then took a look at him. He went back over to the door, put his rifle up, and told me that his name was Rich Barnsworth. He was an old high school buddy of Mike’s. He knew Mike’s family had the camp, so he stopped by—he came out this way for the beginning of hunting season. He spoke slowly, measuring his words. Legally, he said, he could shoot one elk, if he found one. His family used a hunting camp twenty miles away, and he was on his way to it, but he hadn’t figured on so much snow coming down that night.

“When I saw the Jeep, I knew somebody had to be home,” he said. He was certainly a large, almost hulking guy, about thirty-two, with lots of thick, dark, silky hair on his head. His hair was shiny—really beautiful—and it reminded me of the Indians I’d seen at the store. He had high cheekbones, but he also had a heavy winter beard, something the Indians never seemed to have. His beard was coal black, with just a few stray gray hairs at the sides. I noticed that his beard was also silky, and glowed like the freshly brushed coat of an Irish setter. It wasn’t crinkly or curly.

“I didn’t realize you’d be asleep so early,” he said to me, without really looking at my boots. He told me he didn’t have to stay, he could go. He didn’t want to be a bother. I told him no, that I was very happy to have some company. It was just—I was embarrassed to have to confess this—I wasn’t used to being alone in the woods.

“You’re from New York?” I told him I was, and he confessed to me that the City scared him more than anything in the woods. I offered him some tea, and he took his coat off and slowly sat down. I was sure his body must have been stiff and creaky from the cold. I opened up another can of Campbell’s Soup—this time split pea—poured some water from the water bucket into my soup pot, and put it on top of the cast iron stove.

“That’s a good stove,” he told me, and he showed me how to control the damper to get even more heat out of it. I was sitting close to the stove, and when he walked over to me, and then bent down next to me, I noticed that he did move slowly, as if his very largeness needed more time. I was used to crazy people in New York darting around me like little bullets. Suddenly, I knew I liked this man. I decided I definitely didn’t want him to leave for a while.

When he finished the soup, cleaning the bowl with a piece of white bread, I took out what was left of the cheap Canadian whiskey, and we drank several cups of it, first with and then without the tea. I could tell he was relaxing. He started telling me about life in the woods. Some of the stories went back to his father and grandfather. He had lots of stories about the Indians, how smart they had once been, before everything had been taken away from them. His own family had been up by the Canadian border since the Civil War. He’d been married once, but his wife ran away with another man—who’d actually been a friend of his. He closed his eyes and told me that it had all happened right under his nose. Now he lived alone a lot, and had little to do with most people, except his large family that was scattered all over these parts.

I got up my courage. “You look part Indian,” I said to him. He smiled at me, and nodded his head. He poured some more of the Canadian whiskey and told me that his great grandmother had been an Indian, and so had his ex-wife.

His telling me this seemed to do something for me. I found myself getting looser than I’d been in ages. My coldness and loneliness started to melt away, and with them so did many of the uptight fears I brought with me from New York. Now I found it hard to control myself. His revelations stirred the desires in me—desires to be physically close to him. I wanted him badly. His dark, black eyes kept looking at me, as if he, too, wanted to ask a question that he couldn’t.

Suddenly, we stopped talking and I felt a blast of coldness enter the room.

“I think I’m gonna have to go,” he said to me. He got up very slowly. He didn’t even look back at me, and now I knew that I wanted him so badly that I felt suddenly like I was drowning as he was leaving me. I jumped up and grabbed his arm.

“No!” I said—the word shot right out of me. “I mean, you shouldn’t leave now, Rich. We had a lot to drink, and you might get lost out there.”

He bit his bottom lip. “It’s okay. I know these woods. I know the way in my sleep.” He smiled at me, and I realized that I had to do something, right there.

I made up a story about my Jeep. I wasn’t sure if it’d still run after so much snow, and I might need somebody to help me with it. He wasn’t going to just let this dumb New Yorker freeze in the snow, was he?

He smiled again nervously. “Listen,” he said, not looking at me at all. “I don’t know if I want to spend the night here.” He got up, and slowly put on his big parka.

I looked away from him. I felt very rejected. Hurt. It was a feeling like being slapped, like when the beautiful music inside you stops. Was it that obvious how much I wanted him? I felt that no matter how casual I tried to be, he could see right through me. I’d heard that the cold did strange things to people; perhaps he knew that already. He knew that loneliness would drive me to him, just as straight as desire would.

The door parted. Snow came in for a second, then he left and shut it behind him. No goodbye. Just gone. I swallowed my pain, and then ran after him. Ran—no coat—I would have gone barefoot. I ran up to him as we approached his Jeep. “Are you SURE you can DRIVE?!!” I shouted. Snow clung to my hair and the back of my neck. It covered the air. It made the air feel warmer, but muffled everything. You couldn’t hear much.

We got to his Jeep. He got in, and immediately I jumped in too, from the other side. He had his rifle between us. He turned over to me, and grabbed the rifle. His dark brow hardened. He looked tense. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

I felt myself let go of everything. Pride. Everything. I could barely breathe from the cold. “I don’t want you to leave,” I said. “I’m lonely.”

He turned away, and then looked at me like he couldn’t believe I’d said it. I had no idea what he’d do; what he was capable of doing. Then he smiled. The tension between us broke. He leaned over towards me so that I could smell the warm whiskey on his breath. I felt myself getting physically excited. He put his large, gloved hand on my head, and shook some of the snow out. “I understand,” he whispered. He opened the door and got out the Jeep. I had to hold myself back for a second—I was shaking from cold and nerves. He waited calmly by the Jeep, with the snow whirling around him, then I got out, and he followed me back into the cabin.

Silently, we had some more of the tea with whiskey. I felt very happy, although I still wasn’t sure what was going to happen. “Would you mind if I washed up a bit?” he finally asked. I poured some of the bucket of water into a small, enamel wash basin, then I added some boiling water from the kettle to warm it.

He took off his shirt, and then I took off mine. He was built very well, with big shoulders and large, dark pecs. He had thick nipples that looked hardened from the cold. There was a good dusting of silky, black hair on his chest. It triangled smartly down his taut stomach to his navel, where it got thicker and disappeared into his jeans. I handed him a wash rag, and he began to scrub his face and neck.

I took another rag and went over my face and neck. Then I warmed it again in the water, and began to stroke the back of his neck and shoulders with it. I felt him tighten up and then relax. I stroked deeper, and washed his back completely.

I started to wash his lower back, and followed the hard lines of his back muscles to where they tapered down to a firm waist. I wanted to dig into his jeans, and stroke his ass, wash each of his firm butt cheeks, and then follow the warm wash rag with my even warmer tongue. My hands started to roam around his front and I grabbed his stomach and held onto it with one hand, while I stroked the small of his strong back, just above his butt, with the other.

Suddenly, he unbuttoned his jeans and let them drop a bit, revealing his beautiful, hairy ass. I sank down slightly and started to stroke and caress it. His butt was round and firm, musky and exciting to me. My other hand reached down in front of him. I realized he had a near hard-on, large and very thick. My hand gently rubbed the head of his circumcised cock. It was blunt and thick, swelling and getting much hotter.

I got up, without letting go of his dick, and faced him and opened my mouth and kissed him. His body suddenly tightened. He jerked away from me; I felt him reel back. The warm moment had broken. The distance between us was back there again—with the cold that now seemed to rush in from outside. There was a moment of dead, backcountry quiet.

I looked right at him. I swear I could hear him breathing.

“I’m going to need some help,” he whispered to me, then he sat down again, at the table. I couldn’t let myself say anything. I was too afraid, afraid he was just going to walk away. He bent over slowly and began loosening his pants. He untied his right boot, and managed to pull his right leg out of his jeans. Then he started carefully to roll down his left pants leg and when it rolled down just below his knee, I realized his left leg was artificial.

“Can you help me get this off?” he asked. “I’m a little drunk, you see, and it’s hard to do this when I’m tight.”

I kneeled down and helped him unbuckle the artificial leg. It seemed horribly heavy and complicated. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but he just picked it up, like it weighed almost nothing, and put it next to him by the chair. He was now sitting naked. He still looked very beautiful to me. His lower body was paler than his chest, and I was overcome with longing for him. I took the washcloth again and started to wash his muscular thighs, his right leg down to his foot, and what was left of the other leg, which was amputated a little lower than mid-calf. I brought the wash basin over so that he was warmed as much as possible by the warm water and the cloth. And every place that the wash cloth went, my own tongue followed and I had his cock, his balls, his thighs, and even the sensitive curve of the stump of his left leg in my mouth at some point.

He liked all of this. He groaned. Closed his eyes, but did not really touch me, while I licked and sucked him. But when I finished washing him, he grabbed my neck and shoulders, and leaning on me, we got into the narrow bed that I slept in. By then, I had all my clothes off, and I had to be careful with my right boot, because the butcher knife was still in it, and I didn’t want him to see that.

In bed, I turned the kerosene lamp down to a needle point of light and then put my lips on his mouth again, and this time he opened his mouth up. We kissed for a long time, and then I ran my mouth down his chest, sucking on each of his hard, dark nipples, getting a lot of his silky chest hairs into my mouth.

I ran my tongue down further, licking at his navel until I reached his cock. It was fever hot and ready for me. I sucked him all the way down to his balls, and he groaned every time my mouth stroked him, but he made little effort to return any attention to me, and I started to jerk myself off while I sucked him.

Then, to my complete surprise, he looked up at me—I had my head buried between his large legs—and he said, “Do you want to fuck me?”

I’ll admit, I didn’t have to be convinced of this, but just accepted it as my own good fortune. He took some of his own spit to lube up his beautiful, muscled asshole. I got under him, and he sat on me. Since he had one leg less, he was much lighter. He grabbed my waist and for the first time really let go of himself. He became totally wild every time I pumped my cock into him—tearing at me, ramming his tongue into my mouth, holding me, while I bucked into him.

I was on the verge of coming, but I kept trying to hold back. He must have known this because he let go of me, and fell back on the bed, so that I could fuck him and work his cock with my hands at the same time. As we got closer and closer, I became totally uncontrollable and started grabbing, licking, even biting the sensitive stump of his left leg. I rolled my tongue around it, and watched his face register complete happiness, while I knew I was as excited by this as he was.

To hold on even more, I pulled out some, and we lay there for a moment, on the brink of complete release. It was hard to believe this man was a stranger, some one I had feared hardly more than an hour earlier. Now the silence between us seemed beautiful, the closeness wonderful. I listened. I could hear him breathing under his lush, silky beard, and I could hear the snow come down on the roof, and even the stars move above me. I kissed him some more, then edged my cock even deeper into him, so that I could pull him closer to me. I began wildly sucking his chest, his nipples, his neck and mouth—every part of him I could reach while fucking him. Then, as I could not hold back a second longer, I exploded inside of him—and as soon as I did, I took his fat, hard dick into my mouth, and sucked him off completely.

We lay for a moment on the bed, limper than the used wash rags. I had no idea what I would say to him, but he broke the silence. “I wasn’t sure I could spend the night with you,” he said, looking directly into my face with his soft eyes. “I feel so funny about having this bad leg. It’s like I don’t want to tell people about it, but I always feel that they know there’s something strange about me. A lot of people get scared off. I lost it after a hunting accident out here. I was alone then, like you.”

I pulled him closer to me and kissed him some more. I couldn’t keep my hands away from his silky, Indian hair. Or his beard, or the hair on his chest. A few minutes later, he fell asleep or passed out. I couldn’t sleep, but got out of bed and went over to the window. The snow had finally stopped and the moon—three-quarters full—came out. The light bouncing off the snow was sharp and clear. Soon, I knew, it would get even colder. I remembered that the cold had once scared everything out of me, but now I felt there was less to be scared of, and I couldn’t wait to get back into bed with him.

Note: The character of Rich Barnsworth was based on Dick Farnsworth, my first lover whom I met when I was 19. He had also lost a leg—in a motorcycle accident while he was in the Navy—and was very self conscious about it. I met Dick in New York, and we stayed in contact for about six years. Then he moved back Upstate where he had come from, from that area near the Canadian border that is one of the coldest areas of the U.S. I learned very recently that he had died two years ago.

For more information about me and my books: www.perrybrass.com. As a working writer, I am always happy to have people discover and read me, and also connect with me through Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.