The Lair of Carlo de la Paz




Carlo is seventy-two. He comes to the club on Wednesdays, chats up a couple of boys he finds interesting, invites them to his place to fight each other. In his basement he’s set up a 20x20 pro wrestling ring, with canvas mat and vinyl-padded turnbuckles. Carlo never enters the match. He sits in the shadows and smokes Tareytons. He doesn’t video the match, he doesn’t cheer the fighters on, he doesn’t request particular holds or moves or punches. On the whole he seems to favor actual fighting, but he doesn’t complain when two guys simply pose and flex in skimpy trunks and clown around. At the end of the evening he pays each guy 25 twenty-dollar bills wrapped in a pink rubber band.

I know these details because some of these same guys come home with me from time to time, to fuck or to fight or to fuck and fight, and they tell me things. The guys tend to be young, with slim waists and tight, defined muscle.

Tonight Carlo is talking with someone a bit older. Guy looks like he’s in his mid-thirties. Tan, solid, 5-10 or 5-11, a jawline that throbs as he grinds his teeth. A bright generous smile. Dark chest hair peeks out at the collar of his v-neck T, and his arms are sinewy and covered with hair. Carlo buys the man a drink—a whiskey, neat. He laughs at something the guy says. From where I sit, the man looks incredibly handsome: masculine, unaffected, comfortable in his skin.

Then, unexpectedly, Carlo makes eye contact with me. He smiles. Tips his glass to me. I’m 45 in two months, sturdy and rectangular, with a startup spare tire round my waist, not at all Carlo’s usual type. He signals for me to join them. As far as I know, Carlo doesn’t know me from Adam, but as I approach, he calls me by name—let’s say it is Adam—and introduces me to Robert.

With an ease that belies the oddness of his request, he asks Robert and me if we’d be interested in beating each other up. Why not? we answer, smiling with our teeth, locking eyes, and nervously downing the rest of our drinks.

Everything at Carlo’s place is pretty much as I imagined it. Under his piss-elegant manse, furnished in Italian and Chinese antiques, with the odd Mbunda mask thrown in as punctuation, a carpeted stairwell leads to the fight lair, the ring garishly lit with bright spots and the whitewashed cinder-block walls decorated with boxing and pro wrestling posters from the Eisenhower years.

Robert and I strip and slip on the boots and old-fashioned knit trunks Carlo hands us—Robert in baby blue, me in cocoa brown. We climb up into the ring, test the ropes, look into the lights sheepishly, then back into opposite corners. Carlo sits nearby on an overstuffed leather chair, legs crossed at the knees, Tareyton in hand.

I spread my arms, gripping the top ring rope, and size up my opponent. Robert is muscular, a blanket of hair across his chest that tapers attractively down to his navel. His legs too are hairy, proportionate to his strong torso, striated thighs and dense, rock-hard calves. I bend at the waist, stretching to loosen up and make myself relax. I’m taller by an inch or so. My muscle is bigger but not so well defined. I’ve got more profuse and more unruly body hair. I’d say our butch factors are evenly matched, but Robert’s visible toughness intimidates me, especially now that he’s no longer smiling.

Magically the startup bell sounds. I shake myself loose of the turnbuckle and bounce towards the center of the ring, rolling my shoulders. Robert charges straight at me, brows down, eyes blazing. He slugs me cross the mouth with a hard right, then jabs me in the gut with his left. I fold in half. Robert wedges my head between his arm and ribcage and flips me over his shoulders. My back crashes to the canvas. OK, so we’re not going to clown around.

Robert backs off, bouncing from one foot to the other, his pecs loosely flexing, his fists poised right over his belly.

I roll over and jump back up on my feet. No sooner done than Robert is right there at me. He slaps me cross the face and shoves me back to the turnbuckle. Drives his knee to my abs. Three times. The guy’s face is serious as a car bomb. Clenches his forearms at the back of my skull and smashes my face to his chest.

My hands grope at his shoulders. I throw blind punches to his lats. Finally I get my hands up at his face, jam them hard against his mouth and nostrils. Manage to push my way out of the corner and shove him to the ring ropes. I punish his inner thigh with my knee, to tenderize the muscle. My whole weight presses his body to the ropes, while his chest hair burns my face.

Under the lights our bodies glisten with sweat. Our groans and the sounds of flesh smacking flesh echo cross the cinder-block walls.

I manage to thrust myself loose of him. His eyes bore into mine, his face frozen in a determined grimace. He attacks me with a pair of roundhouse punches at the center of the ring. I fire back to the chin, and he drops to one knee. I grab his ears and ram my kneecap to his lips. The knee comes back bloody, and Robert collapses on his side, stars and spirals spinning over his head.

I back away. See his shining belly contract and expand. His diaphragm quivers. One of his knees arched unsteadily to the spotlights.

I look over at Carlo. The man is motionless, silent, without expression in the dark.

I climb up to the top rung of the turnbuckle, something I always wanted to try out. I leap and land on Robert’s torso like a waffle iron. He grunts. His body thrashes. My chest bearing down hard on his, I grab his raised knee and pull it up to my armpit. With my free arm I pound on the canvas … one … two … but Robert powers out of the pin, pushes me off, and stiffly backhands me cross the jaw.

We get up on our knees, knee to knee, and slug it out. The glint in Robert’s eye tells me he’s liking this—punching no more or less than getting punched. I feel myself getting hard. We nearly exhaust ourselves, and in a matter of a minute we are propping our bodies up against each other.

Carlo intervenes. He rings the bell and orders us back to our corners. He tosses us each a towel to wipe ourselves down.

I fix my eyes on Robert at the opposite corner. Like mine, his towel is pink with blood. His glistening skin spotted with flecks of dirt off the canvas. He breathes deeply in and out. His eyes return my gaze. He nods respectfully, but with a hard glaze over his expression that means he won’t give an inch.

Carlo lets us cool down. After ten minutes, the bell rings in round two.

The blood pounds in my veins. Robert and I meet in the center and lock hands, my right and his left. The spotlights burn down on our shoulders. We test our strength. Push, pull, twist, squeeze. Then we lock our free hands together. Stretch our arms wide, bump chests and bellies, breathe through our teeth.

Robert bends my arms back, forcing me back three or four steps. I anchor my left heel to the canvas and stand firm, manage to push my arms back to an even position.

We break and circle each other. I reach over and slap Robert on the side of his head. He reciprocates. We lock arms and shove our shoulders together. Our heads and necks brace each other. Robert’s hot breaths on my strained traps. Our boots kick against each other’s legs, a kind of dance for testing for weakness and angling for dominance.

Robert hooks his leg to my left knee and knocks me off balance. I roll on my back, and he spins into a leg lock and falls on his butt. Pain explodes up from my knee to the sides of my head. I try to drive my right leg to his face, but he intercepts it and forces it to the mat.

It’s a classic figure-four submission hold, but I don’t give in. Instead I savor the pain, silently pray it toughens me. Robert smiles. He stretches back to add pressure to my joints. The skin shimmering against his ribs. The agony is exquisite, like lightning surging through my veins, my bones crumpling like breadsticks, or so it seems. I drum my elbows against the canvas, my throat too tight to scream. Robert rocks us back and forth, to pound in the last ounce of hurt.

My skin goes clammy, my legs numb. My temples throb. My dick stiffens in the knitted trunks, pushing upwards to the elastic waistband. Blindly I stretch out, feel the bottom ring rope against my knuckles, and manage to grip it. Robert breaks the hold and backs up to his corner.

The hold released, I feel a new wave of pain, almost as if the pressure of the hold had somehow been blocking part of the hurt below my knees. I hold on to the ring rope like a lifeline. I pull myself up to it, thrust my shoulder over it, inhale and exhale in deep gasps, greedy for oxygen. My whole body tingles.

Robert approaches. At first he just hovers, his eyes examining every detail of my helplessness. Then he grabs my boots and tries to pull me clear of the ropes. I hold on. He straddles my back and begins clawing at my fingers.

“Let go,” he growls. “Time to do this.”

My grip weakens. Robert drives his leg to my ribs. Five times. I pull my knees to my chest and roll over on my back. Robert stands and leans down, slapping and punching my arms and head. I drive my heel straight to his nads. He howls and stumbles backwards, bent over.

Reluctant to let go of the ropes, I just stare at him for several seconds. Then I pull myself to my feet. I charge at him and kick him in the face. He flies back and crashes to the canvas. I kneel down on his chest, grab his curly black hair in my left fist, and start pummeling his face with my right.

The bell sounds. Heedlessly, I sneak in two more punches before retreating to my corner.

Slowly, Robert rolls over on his side, crawls to the ring ropes to pull himself up, and then parks his butt against the opposite turnbuckle. He looks up at me, his face is meat, his gaze stiletto-sharp.

Carlo tosses us clean towels. The sweat and blood on my skin are now like grease. I rub the towel over my face, neck, chest, stomach. Between my thighs. Let the scuzzy rag drop to the ground. My cock presses hard against the brown trunks. All the more so when I catch a good look at Robert’s hard-on.

Robert pinches his pecs to massage them. He rubs the flat of his hand across his abs. He back-kicks the turnbuckle, impatient.

Round three: the bell no sooner sounds than Robert shouts, “Payback time, Adam.”

He thrusts his leg out from the waist, karate-style, and smashes my groin. The blow knocks me off my feet and flat on my face. Feels like I’ve got a wasps’ nest in my trunks.

Robert grabs me by the ears, pulls my head up, making sure my face brushes up the full length of his leg, over the firm bulge of his shaft, sliding up the skin of his belly, the thick hair of his chest, till he’s looking me square in the eye, not six inches away. He spits in my mouth, then butts his forehead to mine.

I see and hear all this more vividly than I feel it. The headbutt echoes emptily in my skull. Robert’s eyes are dead—bright but humorless. My body feels like a sack of shit. Everything’s like it’s under water.

Robert grinds my face to the top ring rope. Sliding my nose and lips a good four feet over the taut vinyl. I turn, my arms stretched out on the rope. Robert drives his knee to my chest, then thrashes my mouth with his forearm. I clasp the rope. He pulls me up by my boots and yanks me to the center of the ring, my shoulder blades smashing the canvas.

Groggily I open my eyes. Robert drives his knee to the back of my left thigh, then rests his right knee on my other thigh. His blue trunks clearly outline the engorged lump underneath. The tip, in fact, is nearly visible at his waistband, a bead of precum dampens the skin under his belly button.

He grabs my legs again and flips me over on my belly. My knees in his armpits, he drops his butt on my lower back. I pound the canvas with my hands and howl, tears streaking my face. He leans back, stretching my stomach and twisting my spine. His cock nudges the top of my ass. I stretch my arms to grab the ring rope, but it’s nearly a foot out of reach.

I start to tap out, but he leans back further. My tendons feel like they’re snapping now. I reach behind me and manage to grab a fistful of his hair and yank with everything I’ve got, pulling his head to the mat and forcing him to release one of my legs. I catch his neck in the crook of my right arm and choke him. He loses the hold on my other leg, and I pull up to him.

I try to rise up to my feet, but he grabs the bottom of my trunks and tugs them down. The elastic snags on my hard dick, but I know I’m showing crack and pubes right now. I kick his lower abdomen with my knee. Our bodies collapse together side by side. Our skin slippery and steaming hot under the lights.

I crawl on his back like a surfboard, my chest on his shoulderblades, my stiffy nestled teasingly between his firm, round cheeks. I brace my forearm between the bridge of his nose and his upper lip and jerk the back of his head to my throat. I wrench his head backward. He pounds the canvas with his hands and feet. I pound my hips to his butt, to hurt and to humiliate. His bucking only makes me harder.

“I give,” he groans. “Stop. Please. I submit.”

I let his head go. His forehead falls to his forearm. I ruffle his hair with my fingers.

Robert’s back heaves as he catches his breath. I grab the waistband of his blue trunks and pull them down off his muscular glutes, down his hard furry thighs, and let them rest below his knees. Robert keeps his face down to the mat and doesn’t move. I push my trunks down to my knees. Robert spreads his legs and raises his butt.

I dip into him, our bodies still slick and hot from the fight. Christ, he feels nice inside. Smooth interior muscle coils against the tender veins of my cock. Ass hairs drenched in sweat. I push and push. Skin soughing on skin. He moans. He reaches down and strokes his own cock, now glued to his stomach.

I pull out and rest my penis against his lower spine. I caress his head and pull it, gently now, to my chest. We roll on our sides. Robert shoots first, spattering cum up to the top of his hairy chest. I slide my shaft on his glistening skin. The inside of my skin seems to glow. I sense the vague dizziness of climax approach, and I shoot up to his shoulderblades.

We lie side by side. Not speaking.

I look up and see that Carlo has left the lair. On the leather cushion where he sat lie two green rolls of cash. My arms embrace Robert from behind, my forearms locked across his chest. My nose finds a place to settle between his ear and his dark curly hair. I whisper, “Can we do this again?”

He whispers, “Rematch, bossman. Definitely.”



This story was republished in 2010 in the anthology Muscle Men: Rock Hard Gay Erotica (Cleia Press)

Comments

  1. Mighty satisfaction. Hope there was more than 25 in that role.

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