The Dowel

After Simenon…

All my clients, past and present, have idiosyncrasies, MO’s. This one might be a control-freak; that one a relentless groper; yet another a functioning alcoholic. Since I’m being paid for my sexual services, and am therefore merely an employee, I have no say in the matter. I just grin and bear it; roll with it. When in Rome…

The client I will call E was into dowels. The one E often carried around while I was cleaning house in the nude for him—my sideline biz—was about 48 inches’ long and, I’m guessing, 3/16th in diameter. Thick enough to pack a punch; thin enough to be limber—to bend as it whistled through the air, and bend further if it struck your flesh with sufficient force. Only to recoil—like the chamber of an automatic pistol upon firing. The dowel was made of blonde wood and each round end was painted dark blue. I wondered about this, and one time when I was in the cavernous hardware store near my apartment I made a point of checking out the dowels (aisle 28). They stood upright in a sectioned plexiglass container and ranged in size from very thick (about the diameter of a quarter, or a medium-sized cock) to whisper thin. The tips of each dowel size were painted a different color, and these colors corresponded to those on a hand-made chart posted above. Each color corresponding to a different price at the check-out counter. It made sense for all but the thickest of dowels; how could you apply a barcode label to a length of wood merely a quarter-inch in circuitference?

But enough about the etiology of dowel retailing. (I will only add that, based on my experiences with E, standing there in aisle 28 staring at all those variable dowels made me salivate; gave me a hidden erection.)

E didn’t even call it a dowel. He referred to it as his “switch.” I asked him what a switch was shortly after the first few times he popped his dowel across my bare buttocks and he replied, “It’s a country term. Old school.” He went on toSay that when he was a kid, “many moons ago” in what was then a rural part of north Florida (I’m guessing E was in his late sixties, early seventies), his mom used to cut off very thin, select branches from a backyard Florida cherry bush, strip them of their leaves and use the bare branches as a “switch” on him. E changed this to a verb and explained his mother used to “switch” him with the branches when he was naughty. Which he frequently was, apparently. He said she kept her switches on top of the “ice box.” And further explained that “ice box” was an old-fashioned term for refrigerator. E said his mother died about 20 years ago under mysterious circumstances in the very beachfront condo where he still resided, after moving her down from [deleted]. E was out of town at the time and she was alone on the balcony when, it was ambiguously ruled, she fell. When I told him I was sorry for his loss E said in reply: “Don’t worry about it.” (Whack!) “It was a long time ago.” (Whack!) “Were you even alive then? (Whack-whack!)

“Barely,” I remember smiling, as tears of pleasure-pain brimmed in my eyes.

Whack!

“Thank you.”

“Are you crying?”

“No!” I insisted, as I wiped contrasting tears on my bare shoulders. “It’s just that…I lost my own mother recently, and…”

“Oh,” E said, lowering his blue-tipped dowel. “I didn’t know. I’ll go easy on you today then…”

“No! It’s OK.”

“You sure?” switch rising.

“Really!”

“Well in that case…”

I can’t help but wonder if E using his dowel on me as I cleaned house in the nude for him was more than just the inexplicable desire some men (and women) have to play the role of sadist—of Dom—in counterpoint to other men’s desire (or women’s) to play the submissive role. In my case it’s more complicated. I no longer advertise myself as a submissive “son” looking for a Dominant “dad”; I’m now looking to gain more from my encounters than “gas money.” Hence my sideline vocation as an $11-an-hour (matching Walmart’s new minimum wage) plus travel expenses nude male housecleaner (tips appreciated). What my clients do to or with me, within reason, while I’m there for a minimum of three hours…that’s their business. Getting back to E…He just happened to enjoy playing the sadist. He had a framed picture of his mother on his mantel from when she was young. She was once quite attractive. It’s hard to imagine this pretty lady, switch in hand and frowning, taking her aggressions out on her son’s bare bottom. E claims she never dated—not once that he can remember—while he was growing up. And so you have, added into the mix, what must have been incredible levels of sexual frustration. To repeat, now I can’t help but wonder if E’s eagerness to “switch” the young man—me—he hired to clean his condo every other week…if that was not somehow, some way, his sadistic revenge on someone for something that was done to him. I’m a long way from grad school—if I ever get there; if the shady client of mine who has offered me a dubious future in “pictures” proves a bullshitter, as I suspect he will—I might just write a paper, a thesis, on this subject for my Masters In psychology, based on personal experiences. Or I might just sit down one day in the future and write a “true-life” story and submit it to one of those online “erotica” sites. Maybe someone, somewhere, would read it, offer to publish an expanded version in book-form; then someone else might buy up the rights, a screenplay would be written (by me) and a major motion picture made. I’d be rich! Famous! (Although perhaps in jail, as, performing sexual favors in return for cash remains, in 49 states, a crime. (Memo to self: Check the statute of limitations on sexual misdemeanors…)

But enough of my amateur (for now) psychology (if that’s a word)…

What my client E really retired was when I was down on my knees wiping something sticky off his floor or…on his bathroom tiles cleaning his soiled toilet. In planned situations like that I’m down on my slender haunches, my ass-cheeks somewhat spread, the base of my crack (perhaps) visible, my low-hanging fruit, my tender balls, dangling…

When E whipped—caned—me with his dowel his strokes were always more-or-less horizontal. Whack! But when I was exposed and vulnerable on the floor like that his “switchings” turned vertical. He not only whipped my ass but between them: my crack. Paying particular attention to strategic strikes on my sticky anus—which some of my clients prefer to penetrate with their Viagra-enhanced cocks let me add. “Did I hit it?” E would ask. “Can you feel it?” These targeted strikes were relatively short-armed and gentle. For if E recovered back and tried to strike my crack—my hole—with the same force he hit my poor buttocks, he would invariably miss the dark bullseye altogether and errantly strike, say, the inside wall of my deep, Naired crack. It was like a socalled “smart bomb” in warfare. Nothingfucking smart about it. So he leaned over, “casting” his switch with the precision of a fly fisherman. Tap-tap-TAP.

“Feel it?”

Breathless: “Yes.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“A little,” I would lie.

“How’s that?”

“Good.”

“How’s THAT?”

He swung; he missed. He knew it.

An easier target, when he dipped lower, were my abnormally pendant balls. He tap-tapped them at first, like my hole. Then gave a half-swing, like a golfer with his wedge. Then, having found his target, the dowel’s limber end, the switch, would strike my balls with such a singing force that I cried out and would fall over, usually, onto my side, fetal-like in blissful age, all sorts of hallucinations passing across my mind’s eyes: mother; girls; male lovers; clients; dream-like demonstrations…

On my last visit to E’s, lying there on his bathroom floor in a fetal curl, clutching my abused, throbbing balls, E dropped his dowel in a tile clatter, took hold of his limp cock (another issue) and peed all over me in my helpless state.

Immediately afterwards he said: “Now you’ve got a big mess to clean up, son. You can show first,” pointing behind me at the stall. “I’ll go get some more paper towels. I want you to thoroughly disinfect this entire bathroom, understand? Don’t forget to wipe down the wall as well. I want the place pristine. It’s a big mess. I have company coming over tomorrow.” E turned back. The pain in my balls was lifting: “Look at you,” he sneered. “You’re pathetic. I should…”

E departed.

The best part about leaving E’s, after my three-hour gig, was the pain I felt from the back of my wait to the tops of my thighs. And in the core of my ball sack, of course: my testicles. I would heal up in a few days, before my next gig, the marks all but gone. $50 richer for now, or on that last occasion, considerably more, having emptied his wallet and riffled through his desk and dresser drawers for what they secretly held…

…I celebrated by stopping at a Taco shade, little more than a permanent food truck by the side of the road, and enjoyed a styrofoam plate of empanadas and a Corona. (And troublesome flies.) They didn’t card me. Some clients deposit their sperm in you; E left in me a deposit of pain. And cash. The pleasure of it all. The submissive thrill. However…

I have since then always Insisted to the police that…it was strictly nude housecleaning in return for payment.

“No touching?”

“None. I swear.”

“There was no sex? Money for sex?”

“I swear to you: none.”

“No favorites?”

“None. Aside from…cleaning for him.” Adding—mistake, “He could never get it up.”

“So you tried to have sex.”

“No! I’m just saying…

“There was a strong odor…in his bathroom, his guest bathroom, of…disinfectant when we arrived. Did you clean in there?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened there?”

“I cleaned, sir. He always wanted it…pristine.”

“So you’ve cleaned for him before? In the nude?”

“Yessir. Yes ma’am.”

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what a dowel is?”

“Is that what it is? I thought it was a stick.”

“It’s stained. Did he use it on you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about about.”

“Would you consent to be…examined?”

“For what?”

The two detectives, male and female, looked at one another. They were seated on my client’s—former client’s—couch. I was seated opposite them, leaning forward, intently. Eager to please. A model of cooperation. Had I not returned with them to the scene? Would the guy, or maybe both of them, when they took me back to my apartment, insist on pulling my pants down? Examined my recently—that day—abused ass?

Did they have a warrant? It was the weekend. Judges are off on weekends…

“Never mind.”

“So how would you describe your relationship with the…deceased?”

I shrugged. I wouldhave preferred to be naked. I was like Pavlov’s proverbial dog: once inside my former client’s condo I wanted to—

I maintained and will always maintain to the very end…The last time I saw my client, E, he was standing naked from the wait down (saggy ass) looking out over his balcony balustrade at the roiling Atlantic ocean, a storm brewing.