Chapter 8
OF MEN…AND FEET
June 1996—July 2010
January 2009
For the happy ending on the famous, Grammy-award winning, ancient, music mogul, the nude masseur stroked the old man's soft, worm-like cock, while “the musical mummy” unabashedly groped him. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the sickly worm sputtered to its anticlimactic climax. For the payment, the client came up with five twenty-dollar bills and a fistful of nickels, dimes and even pennies. As he clumsily dumped the coins into Steve’s open palm, his old and ailing pet cocker spaniel sniffed at Steve’s feet, made a hacking sound and vomited on one of his shoes.
Besides Billie, and his Mother, the only other continuous relationship in Steve’s life was the Foot Slave. The Foot Slave cleaned apartments for a living and lived nearby in a small studio on 12th St. between Avenues A and B. He was five years older than Steve, short and stocky with massive biceps that he loved to flex, show off, and have worshipped. He had lost the love of his life during one of many waves of AIDS deaths in the late 80’s; and shortly thereafter, determined that he was into feet. He called up Steve a few years before 9-11-2001 and invited him over one Sunday night for a free foot massage. It was pre-Grinder days when men still advertised for sexscapades via the personals in such weekly rags as the Village Voice or Homo-Extra, and thus began their weekly fetish-based foot fuck tryst.
For some fourteen years, every Sunday night at 10 P.M., Steve biked over to Foot Slave’s small studio. When Foot Slave opened the door there was always a light kiss on the lips. In public their contact was extremely reserved, cold even. But every Sunday night, came that little love peck. Next, came the preliminary opening act, the getting-current-conversation with Foot Slave opening a bottle of cheap red wine from Trader Joe’s. This went on for about a half hour. A large towel or dark sheet always covered the dank, ancient carpet. Then Foot Slave prepared the spa. The spa was a small, rectangular foot soak container (really a deep, plastic dishpan) that held an aromatic foot product. The water was steaming, like a Japanese bath. Steve tried easing his feet in.
“Is it too hot?” said Foot Slave with that snarky smile enjoying Steve’s pain.
“Ow, just a little,” said Steve grimacing and gingerly getting his feet used to the water.
“Good” said the Foot Slave. After a short soak, he worked Steve’s feet, first with a pumice stone, then with another soapy, rough foot sponge. Next, he carefully cleaned and gently clipped the toenails. Then he took up the tub and emptied it into the bathroom toilet where the crumpled, deteriorating photograph of a fabulous Lucille Ball from Mame hung on one wall, encased in an oily, fingerprint-stained, cracked and slightly crooked, plastic frame. On the back of the toilet were a few old samples of ancient, stale, bottles of men’s cologne. The floor of the tiny bathroom was covered with another musty, rancid, deteriorating carpet. A miniature window, behind the toilet, set at eye level, looked out on a slum-like courtyard, filled with garbage cans, a tangle of bicycles, odd, assorted recyclables and a resident team of restless rats. A huge ventilation fan constantly blew smoky food and cooking smells into the courtyard from the latest over-priced and over-cool hipster restaurant that occupied the front portion of Foot Slave’s building. The main ingredients there were expensive, forgettable wine and loud, manic N.Y.U. students, freely wining and dining with Mommy and Daddy’s credit cards while playing at being grown-ups out on the town.
A second rinse soak came next. At this point in their ritual, the Foot Slave lit candles and produced a powerful joint from Lynn the neighborhood dealer. By the end of their tryst, the quality of pot got better and better, as Foot Slave began paying top dollar for the good stuff. “I’m worth it” he would say. Steve loved the rush of pot on top of the cheap, red wine. Soon, Steve in a smoky, stoned candlelit haze, he was reclining back on the couch with his feet up. Now, the kneeling Foot Slave was kneading his feet using grape seed oil. With his muscled forearms, striated with tendons, massive, bulging biceps and big, smooth working-man hands he had a single purpose, to work and massage Steve’s feet as if he loved them, as if he worshiped them, as if Steve was a king and he, the royal footman or slave. He touched with a unique harmony of tenderness and strength. Then came some gentle kissing and licking which grew into outright sucking. He would shrimp each toe, tasting and gently biting it individually, sometimes too hard. Steve got a rush when he sucked on the arch of the sole of his foot, for that was Steve’s favorite place for Foot Slave’s mouth and tongue to be. The sensations of mouth, lips and teeth on his arch were near orgasmic; with Foot Slave of course alternating one foot with the other. How fabulous to have two feet! Lastly, he attended orally to the ball and heel, like a starving connoisseur savoring the final tender morsels of a fine, filet mignon.
In the beginning, for Steve (being a former dancer and completely addicted to any kind of massage and bodywork), the experience was an erotic, cornucopia of the senses. It seemed the ultimate sensuous and forbidden fruit, to give his feet over to this man. Foot Slave’s face as Steve watched it at certain angles through stoned, half-closed eyes, resembled a Japanese warrior. It was an ageless face; a masculine, rugged, and hairless mask with a square, German chin, full head of black hair and worshipping, wet mouth, focused only on it’s treasure chest of pleasure—feet. His eyes never looked at Steve, they were always glued to the foot he was possessing. Once, during a session, Steve said, “I love you.” Foot Slave only moaned in reply, sucking and slurping all the while.
This was a true fetish, austere and exacting, almost to the point of being Zen in it’s nakedly essential elements of form and content. Love was irrelevant here. Any time Steve tried to reciprocate with touching the Foot Slave’s body or even his feet, he could almost feel the other man palpably cringe with repulsion and indifference. That was an unwelcomed deviation from the main event. The climax of this ritual went one way, Foot Slave on his master’s feet; with the rest of his master’s person being irrelevant noise. Occasionally Foot Slave produced a pair of old-school Speedos for Steve to model.
After more than a decade, the formerly fresh thrill of having his feet worshipped began to wain and it began to feel strange that Foot Slave never touched the rest of his body. Steve began to doubt his role as a foot master. Foot Slave’s intimacy issues were also becoming a tremendous bore. He was constantly reminding Steve “We are not a regular thing” and “You want a boyfriend and that’s not me. I’m into your feet, period.” It was also frustrating for Steve to constantly hear about Foot Slave’s chronic lack of money and dead end life, yet his stubborn refusal to take any positive action to initiate change. Steve began to see that Foot Slave wasn’t a happy man and that he had a tendency to wallow in it. Interestingly, with his stable of steady cleaning clients, (including the legacy client whom Foot Slave referred to as “Connecticut” a straight, intensely overweight, billionaire Jewish businessman who dabbled in printmaking and who’d been using Foot Slave for years as his cleaning man/assistant/Guy Friday) Foot Slave’s income probably surpassed Steve’s, for cleaning men were needed on a steady, regular basis and were paid less than masseurs. People didn’t need massage, but always needed their apartments cleaned, for New York dirt never stopped. Foot Slave also figured porminently in a handful of rich, old queen’s wills, some of them leaving him as anywhere from $15 to 50 thousand dollars. When the grim reaper began stealing Foot Slave’s regulars away, he would be set for life between these gifts and his naval pension.
Foot Slave had plenty of other fuck buddies, but was secretive about what his did with them. While Steve was enthusiastic about sharing details of his encounters with men (both paid and unpaid), finding joy in the fact that he could be so open with another man about his sexploits, Foot Slave only spoke in vague generalities about his sexual practices, his canned response to any specific question was “We fooled around.” This was technique Foot Slave used to stay private and intimacy.
One of Foot Slave’s regular worshipers was “Nuts-For-Nuts” a seventy-something queen who had once been an agent at William Morris, representing Loretta Young. Nuts for Nuts worshipped Foot Slaves’ big balls, and they were huge. Their ritual night was during the week. But Foot Slave’s main squeeze was Paul whom he always saw on Saturday nights. When times were flush, “Paulie” (as Steven referred to him) and Foot Slave frequently went out to dinner. Paul’s fetishes were extremely specific; he had a thing for white socks, calves and Foot Slave’s biceps. Sometimes he forced Foot Slave to do so many bicep curls during their Saturday night pump and pose ritual, that Foot Slave got tendonitis in his elbows. One Saturday evening all three men attempted triangulation, going out together for dinner, but Steve found Paul’s anal retentiveness stulifying. Upon their return to the Foot Slave’s den for play, it was quickly determined there was a lack of chemistry and Steve decided to call it a night. Afterward, through the years they all three remained cordial. When Foot Slave and Paul went to the Load sex party in Brooklyn once, a man went down on Paul as Paul nonchalantly ignored him and carried on an intimate conversation with Foot Slave. When Foot Slave told Steve about this, Steve found it absurdly comic that Paul could be so cold and detached from sex that his multitasking skills included carrying on a conversation while getting blown.
Foot Slave hated having his cock touched, but with Steve he didn’t mind getting sucked. And once Steve started to suck on that hot, big-balled and semi-hard piece, Foot Slave worked Steve’s mouth like a machine. As time passed, the novelty of the foot thing began feeling old, Steve started to feel violated with the way Foot Slave mechanically rutted his mouth, plunging his dick deeply in and out, indifferent to Steve’s choking from lack of air. It was as if Foot Slave was a fuck machine. Was it the vodka that made Foot Slave insensitive to Steve’s gagging sounds? Obviously it affected his erection. More than once, Steve felt he was being suffocated or raped by the Foot Slave’s mindless, insensitive pounding in and out, without any feelings or emotion. It was a moronic, mechanical action, devoid of tenderness, sweetness or affection. Steve countered this by stabilizing Foot Slave’s cock with one with one hand so it wasn’t gagging him, and so that he could exert more control. Then he could also cum with less effort by jerking himself off with his other hand. The positive side of this somewhat insensitive sex was that it was also a feverish turn on to just suck with all nicities aside. Being totally dominated and force fed that fat, semi-hard, vodka-drenched cock it was a sheer delight to suck on the fine, cut head and lush, big balls, while just staring up helplessly and wondrously at the studly body of the man he was servicing. It was role-play reversal and true muscle worship, as Foot Slave became the ultra macho man, superman bodybuilder and Steve the happily, hungrily obliging and worshiping cocksucker. A few times Steve took Foot Slave’s load, swallowing it whole; but most of the time, Foot Slave would shoot after Steve, still on his knees, sucking, smooching and greedily noshing on Steve’s feet. Steve simultaneously (and oh so tenderly) would be caressing Foot Slave’s cheeks, chin, mouth, head and hair with both soles of his feet and toes. With his eyes closed, Foot Slave would busily work his own cock and balls into an explosive and exhaustive orgasm.
Afterward, there was no affection. Sometimes Foot Slave would play a favorite Barbara Streisand song. Besides feet, she was his other obsession. Sometimes he got so wasted; he began to slur his words. Upon occasion, he would ask Steve’s permission to take one of Steve’s feet up his ass.
“Are you up for it?” he would ask. Silly question, Steve reflected, for how could he not be? A foot, after all, was always hard. Using Vaseline, that old school lube of choice, Foot Slave then carefully greased up his own hole and Steve’s chosen foot with Vaseline and slowly, carefully sat/kneeled on the well-greased foot. Foot Slave was always immaculately clean and well prepared. Sometimes Steve would go so deeply with his foot, that it went in, up, and well beyond the ball, and almost past the arch of his foot penetrating into the Foot Slave’s asshole. To compound Foot Slave’s pleasure, Steve would occasionally wiggle his big toe on or near what he imagined to be Foot Slave’s prostate (driving Foot Slave nuts) while Foot Slave worked his own cock until he exploded. Then Steve pulled out as Foot Slave disengaged and collapsed into a heap of afterglow on the floor. Then, Steve lay back on the couch, the candles flickering, and soft exotic world music of MoGlo, their fav late night DJ wafting from Foot Slave’s small portable radio in the corner.
Besides feet and Barbara Streisand, Foot Slave’s two other favorite obsessions were both attending bodybuilding competitions and collecting muscle videos. He had hundreds of old VCR tapes and magazines stashed throughout his space, hidden under cabinets, out in the open or stacked in piles reaching up to the ceiling. Muscle, muscle muscle. From his attendance to so many of these bodybuilding shows the last ten to fifteen years, he knew by heart the names of all the best male body building stars in the world; whether they were alive or dead, and still competing or retired.
In the last few years of their affair, Steve realized two things; one, Foot Slave really didn’t care about him at all, only his feet; and two, that he, Steve was actually the Foot Slave and that Foot Slave was the master, always in control and never allowing deviation from their set ritual. He manipulated Steve by leading him to believe he was in control.
Eventually, all the elements of the ritual (the foot care and massage, the wine, the pot, and the sex) began to loose their hold over Steve. This gradual chill down was also hastened by Foot Slave’s stifling propensity to live vicariously through his other male gay friends and clients. He was constantly repeating the same dull stories of rich retirees, grandiose theater queens, hoarding postal workers, or fat furry bears on a world cruise searching for hot little Latin men over and over again. Concerning “Connecticut” Foot Slave related hundreds of stories of the sumptuous estate, the extravagant dinner parties, and charity events ad nauseam. One of Foot Slave’s favorite activities was going on for hours in late night, vodka-laced phone gabbing sessions, repeating the latest gossip from his friends and their man adventures, or commenting about current news events or who was on the Tonight show or Saturday Night Live. In the beginning of their fourteen-year liaison, a favorite topic of his was how humanity was evolving. Toward the end, his opinions took on a more melancholy tone, often proclaiming the government, the whole country and the world at large was in a slow but inexorable state of decline. Looking back, Steve suspected a large part of Foot Slave’s overall mood shift was due to the fact that every year was it was becoming more and more difficult for him to get by financially.
At the end of their relationship, Steve felt constrained, and objectified, as if he was little more than a human dildo. He appeared every Sunday night, was stimulated, played with, and allowed to cum, then around 2 AM, or whenever the Foot Slave was finished with him, was put back in the drawer or in the cupboard along with the piles of old muscle magazines and VCR tapes. Living Steve would never, could never measure up to the one great love of Foot Slave’s life. Jeremy, Foot Slave’s lover who’d died of AIDS was a near mythic legend in the Foot Slave’s mind, untouchable, placed on a pedestal and shrouded in fond memories and clichés. “It is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all” was Foot Slave’s favorite phrase.
After the phase of idealizing him passed, Steve began to suspect that perhaps because of his fetish, the Foot Slave was more dead than alive. Steve had to stop, and had to let go, as the stagnation, the hangovers, the sheer lack of feeling, sensitivity and intimacy from this fetish non-friend was beginning to eat away at him. Their relationship which had once brought comfort, now felt stale. That blissful sensuality he felt in the beginning, was now a forced and lifeless thing. Throughout his life, Steve had had many fuck buddies, but with all of them, occasionally a tiny element of friendship would bloom; a trip to a restaurant, going to a movie, even a visit to a bar, a club or a walk in the park. Foot Slave disallowed anything of this nature to occur. And so in the fourteenth year of fetish play, Steve woke-up from the fetish trance that had kept him spellbound for so long, and decided to take a break from this non-friend, non-lover, sex-partner, fetish friend.
When he wasn’t worrying or whining, the Foot Slave had a witty and shrewd way of looking at the world and Steve loved listening to him pontificate, for he had innate Gay wisdom. Steve envied that Foot Slave seemed cool when he was out and about in the world. Foot Slave didn’t have to show the world he was gay and he was thick-skinned enough to accept most people in the world on their own terms. Perhaps because they were in N.Y., and in the East Village in particular (and what could possibly be more fabulous than that?). Foot Slave was sensitive to the heart chakas of people at large or the “cool factor” of people”, i.e., how “with it” they were or their ability to “work it.” This was amazing to Steve, for it reverberated with a gay kind of aesthetic and awareness of the beauty of people, along with an element of the wonderful kind of arch wit that was just beginning to bloom in gays as they came into their own Golden Age. That was an era in the mid to late seventies that Steve had just begun to experience upon his arrival in N.Y. in the summer of ’75, his “Breakfast at Tiffany’s years, as he referred to that time, shortly before AIDS ended the party in the mid-80’s.
Foot Slave had a knack for seeing things without judging them too, as Steve constantly was prone to do. Foot Slave was, of course, always commenting on men’s feet in particular, and how “that one had fabulous feet” or “that one didn’t get it—the feet weren’t happening”. Steve also found it delicious that Foot Slave could be bitchy and witty without actually putting any one down, for he had a marvelous kind of metro sexual point of view along with a sense of what was right and wrong. But Steve could never enlarge on any of this outside of the fetish foot jail of their Sunday night ritual. Eventually it was taking it’s tool on him, for fourteen years was a long time to be both interacting with someone and always having them hold you at arm’s length.
Foot Slave’s emotional vacuum was extremely and unequivocally expressed the last few months when, twice in a row, he texted Steve a few hours before their Sunday night date with “I’ve got plans tonight, take care.” It was maddening that he could be so on again, off again; one moment so alive pleasurable, and the next so cold, secretive indifferent. That was the German-Polish side of him.
That Sunday night before he flew out to Arizona, Steve got the second of those abrupt cancellations. The text came around 7 PM. “I’m busy tonight, take care.” Steve meditated for an hour, then texted back “I need a break from you, 30 days.” Within seconds, Foot Slave texted back “Make it 31.” Steve then texted “Make that 90.” Foot Slave then responded with “It’s the laugher, we will remember.” It was like communicating with a bitchy gay cartoon, or a five-year-old. In the fetish world, there was only the glorification of the object, in this case, feet; and a cool but total objectification of the person. It was like loving a black hole. Foot Slave’s heart had died with his lover. All his love from that moment on was locked in a tomb of the mind, and sublimated into feet as object of desire. The love went from him into the way he touched feet. And, at the end of every Sunday night ritual, the love disappeared down the toilet of that dark, claustrophobic little studio on 12 Street between A and B, along with toenail clippings and used leavings of tepid foot soak. All flushed away, once and for all. There it was again, the greatest lesson one man could ever learn from another; love doesn’t change us; it works us through and through, it uses us a little, or a lot, but it doesn’t change us. We change us; we change by going away, saying goodbye, taking a break, letting go or just getting tired. We change when we get tired of the dance with someone. Or in this case, maybe the fact that Foot Slave refused to dance was a huge red flag. To Steve, dancing was an intrinsic part of being gay and to not dance indicated something was dead or missing in a person. Steve needed to be free of this man who wouldn’t really allow him into his heart, yet lovingly gorged on his feet.
That last ambient music mix Steve produced for the Foot Slave was to be a farewell gift. It was fifty-four, seamlessly, unbroken minutes long, and that was also the same year Steve was born. It was a mix of all the best music he’d ever brought over to share with the Foot Slave throughout all their Sunday night rituals; fourteen years’ worth of luscious, foot-sucking, foot-love making and foot-massaging music. Steve had spent months putting it together, for he knew it would signal true closure with this fetish cohort, this man who was not lover and not friend and yet partly both. The final foot mix was, at last, the big finish. And it was so, so good when it came. He couldn’t have asked for a happier ending.
So, on one of their last nights together, Steve presented the foot music mix to his fetish non-friend. It signaled the inevitable end of their relationship. He never had a closure conversation with him. It was much easier to talk about this job or that client or what Connecticut was up to or the latest yummy special at Key Foods, all the endless, fabulous frivolity that made up two gay men’s talk of life in New York. He would miss that, but even more, he would miss the never, ever talking about hearts or feelings really, for Foot Slave loathed talking about such things.
The last text from him read, “There was this guy I knew, we hung out together and had some good times, then he stopped coming around.” Steve didn’t respond; he never had that closure conversation because he was too afraid he would just end up asking Foot Slave if he wanted to get together next Sunday night. It could go on until they died or until one or the other moved away. Better to stop it now that the thrill had cooled and the ride was over. For what a long and rich journey it had been. And truly, if he was so moved, there could be repeat visits but they would never be as good as their first few years.
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