The eponymous Perry Brass shared the link to Death on the Beach, and wrote:
My friend Michael Ampersant's story "Death on the Beach" has just been published at a site called Transnational Queer Underground. Michael's work—his original language is German—has often reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov—they both have a pristine functionality to their English that opens up amazing vistas and places where forbidden desires become reality. Well, hope springs eternally.
By Michael Ampersant We have a new story out in TRANSNATIONAL QUEER UNDERGROUND (whatever that means). And like so many of our shorts, it's almost true (only the punch "line" is fiction). Serious first-time material, folks. NSFW. Here's how it starts:
Zeeland is a collection of islands nestled in the delta of the Rhine river. There are beaches, and the nearest one from our house is-—or was-—ten minutes on the bike. Zeeland was famously gereformeerd then-—prudish-Calvinistic-—and there was no animo for the naked beaches they had up north near Amsterdam. So, our seashore had changing facilities, clapboard cabins with a fore room, closet hooks, doors, locks, and a plank running along the wall of the main room serving as a bench.
I had just turned twelve. Something had happened to me during the winter, and when I went for the first swim of the new season, something had happened to the dude--not always the same one--that was hanging out there. You would show up, he’d gaze at you, conspicuously, then disappear into the dunes. In previous years I had ignored him, but this time I couldn’t fail to pay attention. His gaze did something to me. It was like a loopy ditty in my ear that followed me as I biked home. And I knew I wouldn’t tell Mom.
Luigi took me aside this morning and said that, however much he enjoys our leetle get-togethers, he can no longer—-despite his best efforts and my best efforts—-hide the absence of any payments towards Room 312 from the all-knowing reservation system of the Savoy Palace Hotel. He fussed with a drawer, and held up a credit card. Here, he said under his breath, go to the Via Tornabuoni, buy yourself a new outfit, and take up position on the steps of the Loggia della Signoria…that should solve your leetle problems, pretty boy that you are. But don’t forget to return the credit card first.
He then looked left and right the way Italian hotel managers look left and right before getting a blow job, waved me to his side of the reception counter, and there we went again: me squatting in the hollow space under the desk accommodating his Italian dick, while he accommodated a new guest, a Contessa, apparently. I’m a slut, fortunately, I can handle this.
So, that’s why I’m here on the steps of the Loggia sitting next to the marble statue of Cellini’s Perseus, me a wannabe hustler with a boyfriend who, suddenly, last month, discovered his passion for the Tuscan Renaissance and begged me to take him to Florence where he would study with a certain Professore Pellegrini, a mysterious art historian...
Jamie & Dex, the almost-underage duo, have just been presented with a strange contraption, something that holds the middle between a copy of Michelangelo's David and--- yes---what? Hint: a remote control comes with it:
Jamie wouldn’t get physical unless all thought experiments fail, so he hands the clicker to me. And I, I’m not particularly bright (as you know), and I’m also the only person in the world scared by too many buttons on remote controls. So, I put the thing aside and feel hungry. I don’t know what time it is, but dusk is advancing, and I call room service to order the few items on the room menu that Google Translate understands.
It takes forever, of course, but around witching hour there’s the din of a trolley outside, accompanied by the young, Italian voices of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the two cutest pages of this establishment, them always on the night shift on special orders of the all-knowing Luigi. I know this because we know them, and there has been certain camaraderie growing between us, due to the fact, oddly, that we can’t tip them with our comatose credit cards. As usual, Michelangelo and Leonardo enter with a sense of splash (“Ecco qua”), and, like their famous namesakes, they’ve perfected the Mona Lisa smile---how do grownups say, the art of ambiguity, they say---always leaving in the middle whether their eccoes refer to the food or to themselves. If it wouldn’t be so difficult between Jamie and me, we’d have possibly agreed long ago that the pages are---or would be---much tastier that the food, but there’s no time for further reflection since Daviddo is still the elephant in the room. “Que cos’è questo?” Michelangelo asks, and I, glad to get rid of it, grab the clicker and hand it to him: “You find out.”
“Hé, hé, hé,” the page coughs, and pushes one of its buttons. It must have been either the right or the wrong button because the Daviddo springs to life, a bit too forcefully, but then he removes the golden loin leaf from his crotch with a smooth, experienced gesture, and now he activates his right hand---somewhat oversized, his paw, like on David’s original sculpture---and undertakes to touch himself in unmistakable ways. And the organ in question, it obliges with an unmistakable reaction, something never seen before on Renaissance statuary.
“That’s why his hand is so big,” Michelangelo exclaims, whose English is better than Leo's. He grabs the remote and pushes a different button, some sort of volume control looks like, since Daviddo accelerates his jerking (“up”), decelerates it (“down”), then pauses. Michelangelo shoots a questioning look at Jamie: red lines need to be crossed, or not, who knows. Leo, the more forthcoming of the two, reclaims the remote and says, “Mi chiedo se può venire.” He looks expectantly at his polyglot partner, who shakes his head, but then confides, with a charming blush on his cheeks: “Micco wonders if he can cum.”
The food is getting cold, but we wonder too. Even little Jamie does. Isn’t this what you read in the math books, how sex puppets change your life? Leonardo hands the control to my partner. Jamie, the resident genius, pushes a red button, and the thing halts its jerking.
“No-no,” Micco cries, “we want to know.” So, Jamie pushes a different button, and Daviddo’s tool resumes its improbable expansion. The days of tiny willies are gone. In its original state his little thing wasn’t even two inches, but now it balloons to, what, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen inches and counting, projecting from his torso like the improbable phallus of any of these mythological satires you see on LustSpiel (the internet mag that won this porn prize last year).
The numbering is off, though, we're no. 58 on the list. At least, they didn't misspell our name. Anything we have to add to this? Yes, it inspired a new "quote-unquote" pic, this one:
I have no idea how long I slept, but now I’m awake, risen by the bed-side phone. These phones have stopped ringing a long time ago unless it’s from the reception desk, meaning a visitor is calling whose name is something like Shah Ruk Khan. He has an Indian accent and informs me that he’s ordered “on the highest authority to present a gift to the young sirs-—a bestowal from His Serene Highness.” Three minutes later a midget with a turban enters the room, ushered in by manager Luigi himself, and followed by a nerdy-looking porter pushing a dolly. On the dolly sits a very large box, wrapped cross-wise in silky red ribbon, looking like an over-sized Christmas present. Jamie raises his eyes from his math book. Luigi exits with some ado.
"The statue is bound to live an interesting life of its own."
You're
possibly expecting a followup to the last "Yellow Parrot" teaser, but
we are misbehaving as usual and have switched channels, and so we are working on a novella about Jamie & Dex, the heroes of a somewhat discordant series of short stories. In its present form, and mutatis mutandis, the manuscript uses our contribution to Rob Rosen's anthology "Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Vol. IV" as a point of departure, and continues with Jamie and Dex holed up in their unaffordable Florence hotel room. We've just had a flagrante delivered by Jamie, with Dex and Uume on the receiving end, and now...Dex narrating...
I skip a few details.
Jamie—-well, he knows I’m a slut. We fart in each other’s presence, there aren’t many secrets between us. And his mathematical mind will have figured out that Luigi’s pecuniary lenience---how would Jamie say this---is a dependent variable in any equation explaining our staggering Savoy bill. But one can go too far.
Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure
Uume has redressed, pretty unfazed, and blown air-kisses in departure, at both of us-—this wasn’t his first flagrante, you can tell. And Jamie, tidy Jamie has collected my Tornabuoni outfit from the floor, briefs, T, and shorts, and stacked them away. He sits next to me on the bed and stares at these damned Archlight trainers from Louis Vuitton still loitering on the carpet as silent witnesses of my recent past. I’m stark naked (another silent witness). Jamie-—I steal a sideways glance-—is pale, dead pale. Well, he’s always pale, even under the Californian sun he was, when we fell in love, or I fell in love with him. But he’s beautiful, so beautiful with his androgynous face: the fine, low-bridged nose, a nanosecond too long, the blue, expressionless eyes (each time I look at him I have to check whether the color hasn’t changed), or his perfect chin lines framing the sensitive, always questioning lips. Not to mention the angelic forehead capped by a ginger brush of fine, shiny, honey-scented hair---the perfect hair of a truly-young person.
You and I are ex-Marxists, and neo-Marxists (whence the pluralis maiestatis). And if there's a clear message in Marx (Karl Marx, that is, we don't mean Lenin or Stalin or acolytes), it's about class. His notion of class is close to Noam Chomky's, especially when it comes to the present ruling class. Said class, he holds, is capable of assuming the identity of a coherent subject ("THE capitalist class DOES", "THE capitalist class WANTS"), and they are used to getting their way---until they are overthrown by a revolution, that is. There is not much political theory in Marx (if you disagree, send me a letter with references), but the class thing really stands, and it extends top down to the bottom...
...so let's hope that Marx was right (he was wrong in many other respects)...because he had a bit more to say about them, the LUMPENPROLETARIAT (in his terminology). Them are not good for anything, them are just lazy, depraved, hopeless (Marx predates Sigmund Freud and political correctness). And, yes, one more thing, you can't rely on them. I'm just trying to find this quote where Marx explicates that Donald Trump will ultimately fail because he's relying on the Lumpenproletariat as his principal basis of political support...something must have gone wrong with my time-machine...sorry...apologies... I'll be back. Tjüüs.
We got a new (four-star) review of the GREEN EYES (by Becca, on LoveBytesReviews). Here it is: Whew. This book. I am at such a loss with this book. It was good. The main character is bipolar, and I’m like borderline with severe depression and ADD, so I could understand the running commentary. This book is from the perspective of the main character John. My biggest problem with this book, though, is that I felt incredibly stupid because some of the vocabulary. I had to stop and go look some words up. That kind of threw me off. Maybe I need to go read the dictionary next. Shew.
John. John. John. John is a French teacher that teaches in Georgia schools. He is out for the summer. He decides to go walking along the beach in the gay section and ends up in a sexual encounter in the dunes. With a man with the most incredible green eyes ever. Then a third comes along. After the encounter, John tries to help the third man find his shorts and ends up looking for a towel to steal to lend the third man. He gets busted and is late to the third man. The third man is gone. Later he ventures to a bar to chill be for a party next door when the third man, known as Maurice, comes in and tells a story that is shocking. Maurice ends up in the hospital and now everyone is trying to figure out how to stop a psycho killer before being killed themselves. All the while, having sexual encounters at almost every turn it seems. During this the man he loves, Alex, has come up with a plan of his own, and it causes him to have amnesia. All kinds of twists and turns in this story. And hopefully it will bring a happy ending.
Reading the GREEN EYES
I’m not going to lie here. I kinda had a hard time keeping up at times. Sometimes I felt like I was reading out of my own head lol. But sometimes it was really hard for me to keep up. It’s a good book, don’t misunderstand me.I just feel like I need to be smarter or something to appreciate it the right way. I liked John. He was a complex character. They all kinda were. Each had a depth to them you didn’t quite expect. But what I loved about John, is even with all the crap going on around him, he was worried for his friends and their safety. He would pile them all up in his tiny apartment, just to make sure everyone was safe and no one was getting hurt or come after. He was trying his best to take care of them all. I felt bad at times for him, because it seemed like a never-ending circle you couldn’t step out of, but he stuck with it. Even when it came to taking out a killer. That was stupid beyond belief, that they thought they could do or even try, but they felt if they didn’t fix it somehow, it would never stop or change.
Sometimes situations call for drastic measures. There seemed to be quite a few of those in this book. But the things you do for friends and loved ones…..
