supplicium post mortem

I was looking through the archives, as you do when you wish there was something new to read, and I thought it was probably time to re-post this story. It is the first tgi story I ever wrote, penned before I met M, and before I had ever played. Thus, although I had done plenty of scenes in the theater, I had never done a scene like this, and never felt a whack since childhood. Even though this story is overwritten and naive in many ways, I like it as a portrait of who I was in the summer of 1995, weeks before I met the man who would become my husband. It has all the markers of a new-at-this 26-year-old: the over-intellectualization, the bravado, the over-estimation of how much it might hurt, etc.

Some bio for those who like that kind of thing: I did do summer stock in Boston, and during college I had a roommate with a wild sex life and a predilection for TMI (which at the time I wistfully considered liberated). Andrew is loosely based on a guy I knew in college, but we never roomed together and nothing ever happened between us. In fact, once, just before he graduated, he asked if he could kiss me. I froze in terror because I had never actually kissed anyone [can you believe it??]. “Er, I don’t really do kisses,” I lamely said. He accepted this, sadly. He probably went away thinking I hated him or was a lesbian. LOL! Poor guy!

When I first started emailing with M, there was such an instant connection that I thought we already knew each other. I accused him of being the guy who had inspired Andrew. Not true, of course. But in role-play he wound up sounding a lot like Andrew sounds here.

I started acting at the age of six. I did a lot of directing in college. The acting stuff here is all taken from experience. It was one of the ways I was able to get my head around role-play then, and in retrospect, I find it still true, maybe more true than I knew when I wrote this piece.

A last remark – it’s odd for me to read this story and see “Casey” as this adult character, basically me with a pseudonym, whereas for most of her existence, Casey has been a kid. I suppose that’s because when I wrote this story, she was still evolving.

Equity Day Off

© Casey Morgan 1995

1.

It was ten o’clock at night in early June and the air felt like breath for the first time that year. When you went outside and walked around, it smelled like Florida. I had spent my first Equity day-off getting high with my roommate Judy. We took blankets out to Walden Pond and lay around in the sun from about ten a.m. until three thirty, at which time Judy had gone home and packed for her great-aunt’s funeral. I’d smoked pot before but never got high until that day. I’m not generally into drugs. Maybe I’m a goodie-goodie, but I was always afraid they’d fry my brain cells or make me do something I regret. On this occasion, though, Judy talked me into it.

“You can’t expect me to spend two days in Fairfield County Connecticut and not get stoned first,” she told me. I agreed because I knew going home was horrible for her. Though there might have been something else working in the decision. It was the first summer I’d had an apartment (albeit with my college roommate and her cousin). We were all part of a summer stock company. Judy was the designer, I was a director, and our third roommate, Andrew, was one of the actors. My play was up first, and after a week of eight-hour rehearsals I could barely think. Still, the legitimacy, the sense of adulthood intoxicated me. Maybe that’s why I agreed to get high. I don’t know. The point is I had.

And I was regretting it by ten o’clock. After Walden Pond, I’d gone to Quincy Market and gorged on chocolate ice-cream smush-ins. By the time the pot wore off, my stomach ache had set in. When I got home, Judy had left, and Andrew was nowhere to be found, so I crashed on the couch. When I awoke, I remembered what I’d done. That was when my stomach really started to hurt. I thought the best remedy would be work, so I sat down at my desk and got out my script. The play was Cloud 9, and I had to finish blocking the first act the next day. The harder I concentrated, though, the more I heard in my head awful snatches of my conversation with Judy.

“How was it seeing Klaus again?” I had asked her. Her German boyfriend had just arrived in Boston for a three-week visit, and I knew she’d missed him.

“It was…different,” she said.

“Different?”

“Fantastic, but different.” She took another drag on the joint, and so did I.

“What do you mean?” Judy usually took no prompting to go into the most intimate details of her sex life. She simply refused to be ashamed of anything she did. I admired this and hoped I might someday become as liberated as she was. Today, though, she turned over onto her stomach and squinted at me, as if I’d irritated her.

“You’re a real piece of work,” she told me. “You’ve been listening to me tell about my lovers for two years and you’ve never once told anything in return.”

“There’s nothing to tell. You heard all about my aborted kiss with Justin.” My virginity and pathetic lack of experience was something Judy accepted, even if she did vigorously encourage me to Go For It.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “There’s always something to tell. You must have fantasies.”

“I dream about making out with Hugh Grant, if that’s what you mean.”

“That is not what I mean.” Judy seemed pissed off at me. “You are my best friend, Casey, but I’ve got to say I’m sick and tired of being your tutor or your erotica supplier or your voyeurism satisfier, or whatever it is I am to you!” At first I’d thought she was joking, but now I thought she was weirded out on a combination of pot, funerals, and Klaus, and was taking it out on me.

“I know you’re not as pure and naive as you make yourself out to be,” she said. “It’s not possible. And I take your Nothing To Tell line as an insult to my intelligence. You must have fantasies that are a little bit smutty.”

“Well, sure.”

“So let’s hear one.”

“No way, Judy.”

“What do you mean, no way? Think of all the embarrassing stuff I’ve told you!”

“Look, it’s nothing personal, and I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of fantasies, but I am.” I saw her cock her guns for another attack against Shame. Words came from my chest, not my brain: “I hate myself. As much for the fantasies as for being ashamed of them.”

She shut up. We finished the joint, then went swimming. Afterwards we lit up another (the third, I think), and I asked Judy to reapply the sunscreen to my back. I was wearing a black, one-piece in the style of a 1930′s bathing suit, the kind that fit like Calvin Klein Boxer Briefs. It had a big scoop back. Judy’s hands were always soft and squeezy, and when she rubbed the lotion on my back she also gave me a little massage.

“That’s great,” I said. “A little higher.”

“Casey, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“Uh-huh.” I felt deliciously relaxed as Judy kneaded my back in the frying sun.

“I hate to think of you hating yourself.”

“I don’t usually,” I said, feeling a little dizzy.

“The thing is, I feel strange talking about what Klaus and I did last night. I mean embarrassed strange.”

“But you’re never embarrassed.” I couldn’t tell if it was the massage or the pot or what, but my body felt heavy and buzzing all over, like I was floating in humming water.

“Well, this particular incident embarrasses me. So here’s what I propose: I’ll tell you what Klaus and I did last night if you tell me your most embarrassing fantasy.”

“Come on Judy, I said I didn’t want to tell.”

“Please, Casey. It would mean a lot to me. See, it’s going to drive me crazy if I can’t talk to someone about last night, but if you don’t tell me something equally embarrassing then I’ll feel gross.”

“Oh I don’t know…” It was all starting to feel really dreamy. She was my best friend. She was genuinely asking for my help. “I’m afraid you’ll hate me, or think I’m sick.”

Judy burst out laughing. “That, I think, is impossible given my experiences. Please, Case. What good is it getting stoned if you don’t tell embarrassing secrets while doing it? Don’t be a Puritan.”

“I’m not a Puritan!” I’m as broad-minded as they come. I was directing Cloud 9!

“Prove it.”

“All right,” I told her. “If you promise not to think less of me.”

“Less of you? The smuttier it is the more highly I’ll think of you.”

read the rest of the story

When I happened upon an old thread on mmsa – about whether any writers there were secretly girls – I felt a combination of pleasure (there are more like me), surprise (wait, Wilvalkir‘s a girl?!), and bummed-out-ness (guess I’m not so special after all). Furthermore, I felt strangely embarrassed to read Wilvalkir’s rule-of-thumb for IDing girl authors:

If a story has a long and winding plot, lots of dialogue, lots of love, is about a gay relationship, yet doesn’t show much (if any) wild, animal-like sex, chances are high that it was written by a girl.

It’s embarrassing to realize that my gender is that obvious. There goes my fantasy of being mistaken for a boy.

Why should I want to be mistaken for a boy, I wonder? Guys looking exclusively for guys would ultimately blow me off, so why pretend? Do I just stubbornly want the respect and attention that the m/m world reserves for boys? Some of them are squeamish about the very idea of girls, and perhaps I want to foil them. In fact, I have played with men (jointly with M) who only played with boys, but who consented to (and enjoyed) playing with me because I was un-girly. My MO was always: I am a tomboyish girl who dresses as a boy and avoids all sexual reference during tgi play. I never went in for the “N-n-no Daddy, not my p-panties!” scenario. Marky, in fact, was scathing about that type of thing. Even to this day, I hate the word “panties” and never use it unless it’s sheathed in ironic quotation marks.

But why should I want to be mistaken for a boy? Would it make me feel more respected? More seen? More taken seriously? Or is it that I imagine that I’m drawn to men who think they prefer m/m? When I met M (are all these initials getting confusing?) through email, he was writing fully m/m stories, and in fact asked if I was m or f. I ruefully admitted f, saying “I hope you don’t hate me.” He was fine with me being a girl; it didn’t seem to make a difference to him. That said, he was firmly ensconced in the m/m world. He had once played with a female, bottoming to Miss Singleton (a.k.a. Miss Martindale of Aristasia, before she got famous and eschewed boys).  That scene, plus one we did together with Debbie Ann, were the only times he played with any girl besides me. I don’t think he corresponded much with girls, if at all. All his online friends and chat-buddies were male, into m/m tgi and sex. I found this hot and not really threatening. And, despite all his m/m interest (and to a lesser extent activity), he was massively attracted to me, wanted me to deal with marky, and very much wanted to take care of cdm. In his mind, there were guys and there was me; guys were friends, but I was what he lived for.

Do I want to pass as a boy online because I imagine in some crazy part of my brain that it will lead me back to him? Do I imagine that I’ll find another husband in that world? Clearly, I need a knock upside the head. And at any rate, by Wilvalkir’s rule, my writing just screams GIRL GIRL GIRL to anyone who reads it, earning the scorn of men worldwide.

I use the WassUp wordpress plugin to track visitors. Every week or so I manually track visitors using WassUp and Xcel. This is a low-traffic blog. I’m fairly sure it will never be an internet sensation. Here’s a pretty visual of how visitors found me. It includes both referring sources and search terms. I made it on wordle. Click on image for bigger version.

I did this once. It must have been the second summer of M living here. My mother had rented a cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania for a month. He and I were up there alone with my dog, isolated and surrounded by trees. Makes you long for the birch, it does. We cut a whole bunch of rods and marky was made to sit on the porch and fashion birch rods out of them (i.e. strip them to an appropriate shape and bunch them together, binding the grip with string, which became duct tape because it held better). It took all afternoon, it seemed. We were both wearing denim overalls and white t-shirts, not from any particular plan, but because it made us happy. Like a lot of cabin-type houses, this one had a double storey “great room” with double fire places. Unfortunately, from an aesthetic point of view, it was carpeted. But there was a cellar. So a scene developed in response to all these birches (there were 12-15 of them, I think), and the house: Orphanage, with me as a mean prefect-type boy in charge of birching marky.

Night falls. Costumes: both of us still in overalls and white t-shirts. Me, boots. Marky, bare feet. At this time I had short hair. I tucked M’s packet of Marlboro’s (he still smoked one or two in those days) in my t-shirt sleeve, matches in my pocket. Before we started, we realized we wanted to get pictures. It was such a great setup in the basement, dark, a long row of birches against the wall. We didn’t have a camera, so I decided to drive to the gas-station 10 minutes away for a disposable camera. Marky went to prepare and wait in the basement. It was dark, remote, mist streaking across the road. I started to get scared, though I can’t remember exactly why now. Axe murderers? What if I had an accident? Ghosts? It was just very dark, misty, creepy, and ominous. I drove as fast as I could, bought the camera, and sped home. The house was deserted (marky in basement). I felt a deep dread – fear from the drive combined with fear about the scene I was about to do. Objectively, there was nothing to fear about the scene. I wasn’t going to harm him, or he me. I guess it was a kind of stage fright, and also the beginnings of the alchemy that elaborate scenes always brought.

We had both worked in the theater, me since I was five. For both of us, scenes (whether in private or on stage) were reality. We both entered the play with a commitment that created the reality. So, in actuality, I was about to become this sadistic guy in an orphanage. I was afraid of the atmosphere, and I think I wished I didn’t actually have to go through with it. Before going downstairs, I took off my overalls and put on the strap-on with the flesh-colored dildo. In my pocket with the matches, I slipped a tube of KY. Tucking my new cock into my white boxer-briefs, I pulled up the overalls, braced myself, and clumped downstairs to the cellar.

Cement floors, lit by a dim overhead light. Along one raw wall stood all the birches, arranged in descending size. Overalls down, marky bent over – what was it? Not an actual A-frame, but something like it? In his hands, I knew he held some keys. We had never played with a safeword, but since he wanted me to pull out the stops with the birches, and as I’d never wielded them, we decided to use the keys as a safeword (if he dropped them, it meant stop).

Why had we not used safewords? They were and are stock-in-trade for the world of playing. Maybe in the first few scenes we did during his first visit to Gotham there was a safeword. But, if there was, I can’t remember it. Neither of us used it. I suppose it felt artificial, like a violation of the playing contract. How can you be inside a created reality and also be evaluating whether you want to stop the creation? Either you trust your partner or you don’t. Maybe that’s the issue – safewords are probably most useful when playing with someone you don’t entirely trust. By the time we met face-to-face, I knew him better than anyone I’d ever met in my life, including my family. So, for us, safewords, though we might have had them, were something external and extraneous. Did we use the keys in this scene because I was uneasy topping? Probably. At any rate, to spare you the suspense, he clutched the keys hard the whole time, desperate not to drop them. Ha ha.

birches looked rather like this one

So, in walks my character. There was some short dialogue, and then I picked up one of the birches and started in with it. Slowly, building strength with confidence. He marked well, then, and the little welts started to raise. I tried various birches and then took a break.

I came up behind him and felt his bottom. Then I unzipped the fly of my overalls and tried to take out my cock. It had come loose from the harness, though, and fell down my trouser leg to the floor. Undaunted, I picked it up, turned my back, and put it back in place.

“This is the point,” I said, “when most boys ask me to fuck them.”

“Please will you fuck me?” he said.

“Since you ask.”

It was awkward buggering him with a strap-on through the fly of overalls, but I managed it for a little while. Afterwards, I put it in my pocket and zipped up. Then I lit a cigarette and stage-smoked. I don’t remember if there was much more dialogue. I think the scene was fairly quiet. I’m pretty sure I told him he’d have to be punished further for letting someone bugger him.

I didn’t make it through all of the birches, but I used more of them until I was drawing some blood. By this time, my strength to sustain the character was waning. Marky had had a lot. I wrapped up the scene and went upstairs, leaving him bent over naked in the cellar.

He was ecstatic about the scene. Absolutely loved it. This was a relief, because there had been a scene early in our relationship, a big scene with me topping, that he hadn’t liked so much at the time. Maybe the ghost of that scene was still haunting me, making me anxious about this one. At any rate, I was very relieved that the scene was over and that he was so happy with it. Did it turn me on to do it? No. Did I hate doing it? No. It was interesting using the birches, and it was a theatrical challenge, but I wasn’t doing it because it excited me; I was doing it because it was a cool idea and I loved him.

A couple of moments lived on afterwards. One, the moment of my cock falling off. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized during the scene, but it turned out he had, and had struggled to keep a straight face. We laughed a lot about it afterwards – zip, clunk, o wait… He also adored the line “This is the point where most boys ask me to fuck them.” I don’t know where it had come from. It was spur of the moment. He quoted it for years afterwards, though, and he found it a big turn-on until the day he died.

The birches are still in our [my] basement, in black garbage bags. I said years ago we should throw them out, but he insisted we could just soak them and use them again. In fact, they got used again at another time with another top (this time I was a Victorian governess), another scene that went down in history for us, sans buggery, though.

He would probably hate me telling our secrets like this…

I dreamed Mark and Casey were curled up together under a sheet (like Cathy & Heathcliff) and someone was saying how they were made for each other.  Save me!

Later, M and I were in another country (Argentina?) and had been there for a long visit. The plane was going soon, very soon. We’d been apart for a while, but M was back and we were trying to get all our gear together. I took a last glance through the closet and found all his clothes there, most of them drying on the clothes horse. I pulled them out bunch by bunch and handed them to him, hoping he could fit them in his bag. I kept finding bits I hadn’t packed (chocolate, a frozen but un-refrigerated piece of meat, large, like a bag of firewood). My bag was small, like an overnight bag. I had to get my boots on. The tickets were buried in my bag… The stress of it all.

These dreams say the obvious: I miss Marky, and we were made for each other. I wasn’t packed or prepared for his death – our death. Neither of us was ready. His clothes are still in the closet. In the dream we were meant to go together on this trip, this return home, even though we’d been apart for a while at first. Traveling together was the plan.

Recently, driving upstate, I remembered the last time I drove that route – the weekend before he died.  He used to drive the car – our car – my car. Then I was remembering the month I spent with him in Englandland, before he moved to Gotham. Like the time we went to the movies in Staines and RP bought Casey a child price ticket. All that time there was pain – pain of uncertainty, pain of separation, pain of change – but all of it was within this enormous sea of love and good things and hope for life, of comfort at having found him of… – I don’t even know how to explain how life and the living of it changed just knowing he was in the world and that he loved me back. In some way it made anything seem possible.