(by Edward Zeusgany and Alex Anders,
© copyright 2001, all rights reserved)

It wasn’t really a madhouse where Justin grew up, it just seemed that way. Crazy people were in charge, indeed there was no one in residence who was mentally stable. Yelling and screaming was the norm, that and people getting whacked, specially the smaller ones.

Three kids were younger than Justin, and three older. The mother was almost always at home. Thankfully, the father of the last three children and titular man of the house, was not. When he was present he was high on booze or pills or grass or something else, or several of these at once. This was fine if he was mellow, but if he got angry all hell broke loose.

Eventually he would become enraged and the police would be called. He might clear out before they arrived or not, but either way he wouldn’t be back for a while. During those periods, temporary daddies would show up, for a week, a month or more. Some of them were as bad as their real father, some were perhaps overly friendly. Most would just ignore the youngsters as long as they kept out of the man’s way.

Justin learned that he didn’t get hit when he didn’t get noticed, so he tried to be invisible. He also figured out that it helped some, if he did whatever anyone told him, no matter how stupid or how much he didn’t want to. Beside that, it was better not to let on that anything they ever did hurt him. When it didn’t seem to bother him any, they got bored with thumping on him or whatever other punishment or humiliation had been thought up.

With these good rules he should have no trouble. But there were situations that were impossible to avoid. The adults adopted the rule of hitting the nearest child whenever anything went wrong. So you didn’t have to be the culprit to have the sentence executed. The only real safety was to get out of the house and stay away for as long as possible.

Sometimes Justin forgot the rules. If he was hiding out in his sisters’ room, he would give in to the urge to try on their clothes. This often got him into trouble. Sometimes he wanted someone to discern his existance even if it meant a licking or being made to kneel, bare-ass, in the corner on a floor so dirty that the grit cut into him.

As soon as he was old enough, he spent as much time as he could outside in the wider world. Of course, on the streets of Shreveport, Justin sometimes ran into people who were not very nice to him, often these were bigger kids. But his rules worked quite well; better, in fact, than at home. The great majority of the citizenry ignored him without his making any effort at all.

He loved the park, the thinly populated quiet of it compared with the tumultuous mob at the mad house. But there were some people there, even so. One man cornered Justin near the public toilet, blocking his way unless he had chosen to retreat by diving under some heavy shrubbery. The fellow stared at him as though he despised him, it was a menacing look. They stood there locked like that for about a minute, saying nothing.

The man came closer, put his hands on Justin’s shoulders and pushed him down onto his knees. Then the fellow opened his pants and took out an erect penis. He opened the boy’s mouth with his left hand and guided his erection into the kid’s mouth with the other. The youngster gagged, but the man held him firmly in place. In a minute the semen flooded his mouth and ran down his chin.

The fellow put himself back together, reached into his pocket and gave Justin a handful of change. Then he turned, never having spoken a word, and left. When the lad checked the amount, he found that it came to a dollar twenty three. The boy bought himself an ice cream.

Justin didn’t look for men, but they found him. What they saw in him at the beginning can’t have been more than availability. When he first started going to the park on his own, he was a short, scrawny, pasty-faced, snot-nosed seven year old with light red hair and freckles.

He would come home as late as he dared and wait outside until someone else, preferably bigger, was about to make their entrance into his mother’s apartment. Then he could slip in behind them and hope that the unwanted attention would fall on them. As time went on his return was further delayed, and his appearance changed as well.

His hair darkened to a rich red brown. The extra food he acquired with money from strangers, filled out his body enough to no longer be thought of as skinny. Although his adult teeth came in with gaps between them, they were otherwise strong and straight. The freckles almost vanished. An older sister, who was studying to be a hair stylist, cut his hair once a week. It didn’t look too bad, in an androgynous way that suited Justin to a T.

He chose the simplest, fewest and lightest clothes it was possible to wear, given the weather of the moment. Then he got his ears pierced, both lobes and in two other places on the upper edge. He wore inexpensive studs in the holes above and loops below, sometimes only on the left side, sometimes on the other, seldom both at once. He had a collection of cheap necklaces that just circled his throat. He wore them in sets of five or so.

Although he didn’t fully appreciate it himself, by the age of thirteen he was attractive in a particularly provocative and sexy way. That was when he met Foster, a man heavy set but baby faced, well off but without ambition, a mere thirty five. After finishing with Justin’s mouth and having a gregarious and friendly nature, the fellow invited the teenager to have pizza with him.

Once settled in the booth, facing each other, Foster asked the boy a lot of questions, at first, simply as a way of making conversation. The man was intrigued by the answers and the information that the youth volunteered about his home life, mainly in the form of complaints. Foster knew he wanted to see the youngster again even before the half pepperoni, half mushroom pizza arrived. So he switched to inquiries about the lad’s habits with regard to visiting the park.

“Almost every day after school and on weekends,” Justin said.

“What time of day do you get there?”

“Depends. Sometimes I run into something to do on the way.”

“I see.”

“But I get there almost every day. Eventually.”

“You probably sleep late on weekends.”

“No way,” the boy emphasized. “I get out of there early.”

“And go back late,” Foster added, already having that knowledge. “So are you in the park in the evening?”

“Yeah, sometimes. When it gets dark, I stay near the edges where the street lights reach. There are nuts in the park at night, doing all sorts of stuff.”

“I’m sure.”

Foster didn’t want to try to make a date to meet. It was too soon for that and he had his doubts about the teenager’s ability to remember an appointment, much less the resolve to keep it. Most probably, the kid was forgetful and easily distracted by anything that might catch his attention. So at the end of the meal they went their separate ways.

*****

It was three days later, on a Saturday morning, when Foster ran into Justin again in the park. He waved from a distance and the boy came to him, a good sign. He led the teenager to a secluded section of the park where a thicket served to screen them from view. After they were done, the fellow invited Justin to come home with him.

From experience, the lad knew that this usually meant that the man wanted to fuck him. The first time had been a surprise. The guy had been quite rough, forcibly undressing him, hauling him by the arm up the stairs to his bedroom and entering him quickly. At least he had used lubricant and fortunately did not enjoy an enormous endowment, though he certainly enjoyed what he had.

These engagements generally produced greater rewards, so Justin accepted the offer. From the moment they entered Foster’s apartment, the man almost never took his hands off the boy. They were on him somewhere, doing something, however lazily and without apparent purpose. The youth, of course, simply accepted whatever was happening to him, as was his custom.

They made lunch together in the man’s kitchen, side by side. It was only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, corn chips and soft drinks, but Justin assisted none the less. His primary responsibility was to search out ingredients from the overstuffed refrigerator and packed cupboards that were so unlike the state of affairs at his own home. It was this overabundance that created the challenge.

In between foraging expeditions, the man played with his hair or his ears or his clothing. Eventually the fellow did undress the youth and look him all over, but Justin didn’t get screwed. Not that time, anyway. Rather, Foster talked to the teenager incessantly, trying to draw him further out concerning his home situation and his feelings about it.

*****

In the next few weeks they had numerous other encounters and near the end of that period, actual dates. Suddenly, so it seemed to Justin, the man proposed that they run off.

“That way we can be together all the time,” Foster argued. “There’s no way you could just move in with me here. Someone would be sure to find out.”

For the teenager, getting away from his horrible home had definite appeal. He raised the expected questions: how, when, where. The man had answers ready. They would take a plane to Puerto Rico, Justin would travel as his son, he could get some ID made up for him.

They went to a photographer and got a snap shot to give to a guy who created a very convincing, high school identification card for the youth. That was really all they would need. There would be no record of anyone called Justin Foreman taking a plane trip, in fact he traveled with a different first name as well. Because there was no one to connect him to Foster, they felt safe in traveling under his family name.

Everything had been arranged from Shreveport. They changed planes in Miami and San Juan, ending their flight in Ponce. A few days were spent there while Foster purchased a car. This was followed by a drive to Caña Gorda, where a small house, one of a handful of similar homes in their own little cluster, had been rented.

Further out on this peninsular of land, there was a public beach with parking for the bathers, very near that an upscale tourist hotel, and miles of undeveloped beaches. At the very end, a nature preserve was situated containing many unusual plants, particularly the many varieties of cactus that grew on this, the dry corner, of the island.

*****

It wasn’t long before Justin was lamenting that there was nothing for him to do when Foster was out on business or errands. Nearly every day the man went off by himself in the car for several hours. What he did, other than shopping, the teenager had no idea. Anyway, on one of these expeditions the man bought him a second hand bicycle to use. Then he could at least get around to the beaches where other youngsters could sometimes be found in smallish groups.

When the man was home, the youngster had no such complaint. As it was during the times he had been at the fellow’s house back in Louisiana, Foster never let him alone when they were together. If the man was using his computer, he would have Justin standing beside him or on his lap, sometimes dressed sometimes not. Alternating with whatever he was doing on the net, he would be playing with his boy. Of course, Foster had gotten around to fucking him too.

Justin sometimes used the computer by himself when the fellow was out. He went to the chat rooms and discovered that he was “a sub,” for submissive, and Foster was “a dom,” for dominate. Related to these categories were those of slave and master. There were rooms just for them. Links were given that led to pages the youngster visited where he learned about B&D, CBT and other specialties of S&M.

But the internet, fascinating though it was, could hold his interest for only so long. Then the lad would get out his bicycle and ride off in search of something else to do. There was little of that to be found.

He couldn’t hang about the tourist hotel to the point where he became too well known. It would become obvious that he wasn’t the child of one of the guests. Of course he was aided by his habit of unobtrusiveness. But this proclivity that assisted him at the hotel defeated him at the beach. All the kids there spoke Spanish and no English, and were seldom the same ones any two times that he was present. It isn’t that they shunned him, but for the most part he was ignored.

For the first month, with everything being new and strange, it didn’t matter. But gradually, Justin felt bored. He missed the options and activity that a city offered.

Back at the computer terminal the youth began to suggest to certain men he met in chat rooms, that he might be looking to move. There was some interest, particularly by a few of the masters. If he had to be a slave in order to get to a city, then he would consider it. There were things about it that attracted him anyway, although he wasn’t quite sure what or why.

Negotiations would get to a certain point with a guy and then fall apart. There were too many problems, the greatest of them being neither party knowing if the other were either serious or genuine. He was too young to travel by himself and didn’t have any money anyway. There wasn’t even any way for him to get to the airport, not like the regular buses that left from the sort of bus stations that were familiar to him. Instead there were publicos, vans that went from town to town, easy for the local folk, hard for an inexperienced, teenage stranger.

*****

Justin was already feeling somewhat trapped and downcast when an employee of the tourist hotel finally got on to him.

“So what are you up to?” the young man asked him. “I see you here a lot these days.”

The guy didn’t seem angry with him, but still the youth knew he shouldn’t be there. He must have paled because the fellow immediately continued. “Don’t look so worried, I’m not going to toss you out so long as you talk to me. You’re trying to hustle a few bucks from dirty old men, huh?” the man suggested with a grin that indicated that he knew, understood, and didn’t particularly mind.

Even though this was not quite the situation, Justin grinned back knowing that the guy would take this as his answer. It was true that the youngster had the vague idea he might find a man at the hotel who would want him. Perhaps the fellow would take him to some city where he would be happier than in this barren place. So he chatted with Jake and began the process of telling him his story.

In his turn, Jake revealed that he was a bartender. He was there for the busy season, winter in Puerto Rico. Every spring he returned to the states and worked at a summer tourist area there. He liked it better there because the whole town that was gay.

The bartender offered to cover for Justin, so that he would have a legitimate reason for being at the hotel. Jake would say that he had persuaded his aunt to come to the area for the winter and that Justin was her son, thus his cousin. But the kid would have to agree to spend some time visiting with him whenever he came and not be a pest and not to spend too much time either.

This seemed like a good idea to the kid. Of course it occurred to the youngster that the man might want to fool around with him. The truth of this notion did not manifest itself immediately.

*****

Justin spent somewhat more time at the tourist hotel and on each occasion talking with Jake. The man probed for more of the youth’s story, his history and his intentions. The kid eventually let it nearly all slip out and what he didn’t the fellow could guess.

The boy asked the experienced man the questions he couldn’t ask Foster without giving away his nascent plans. The fellow seemed to be knowledgeable on the topic of S&M. He encouraged the kid in that direction by telling him that a man very well might come all the way to Puerto Rico to get him if he thought he was getting a slave. Though these guys usually prefer someone with a little experience, he added. The neophyte is likely to run off at the first bit of rough stuff.

This made sense to Justin because the masters on chat always asked him what he had done. Sometimes he lied and pretended to adventures he never had, the most ordinary sorts of things, so his lack of knowledge wouldn’t give him away. These chats seemed to go better than when he admitted to being a rank beginner. They often referred to what they did as training the slave.

So he knew what Jake meant when he said, “I could begin your training, if you want. Then you wouldn’t be lying about it. You’d really have some.”

They discussed it. “If nothing works out for you sooner, I could take you back with me in the spring. I’m sure we could find the right sort of master for you before it was time for me to come back to PR.”

That was the clincher. A promise that he would get out of there before summer at the latest. Of course, he knew that the man could be saying all this just to get what he wanted, but for some reason the youngster didn’t think so. And even if he did, the bartender was right about his beginning training. If he could talk knowledgeably about these things, Justin was sure it would increase his chances of finding a guy who would want him. Someone who might be interested enough to come and get him.

They would have to limit themselves to doing things that Foster wouldn’t notice, Justin pointed out. There couldn’t be any marks left on his body. It would be better if he didn’t cum, so that if Foster wanted to get him off he would pop as quickly as usual. Jake said, not to worry, “There was plenty of other stuff they could try.”

*****

The kid came in the front door at Jake’s little rented house, where they now got together. It was located half way down the road to the tourist hotel, and in back of a dilapidated bar. The house was a typical Puerto Rican wooden house from the 1940’s. The owner of the bar had lived there once, but now had made enough money to buy a place in town. How that was possible given the looks of the building that housed the bar, Jake couldn’t really understand.

It was true that through the day a car would stop from time to time and the man would sell a few beers or some cigarettes. And there was a supply of deep fried, local specialties keeping warm under some light bulbs in a Plexiglas box. The overhead expenses had to be nil.

“Take everything off,” Jake told him.

After Justin stripped the fellow tied his hands behind his back, his ankles together and then at the knees. The boy stood patiently as the man got undressed. Then Jake picked him up and carried him into the bathroom.

There was a ten gallon pail full of water in the middle of the floor, the sort used when dunking for apples on Halloween back in Shreveport. But no apples floated on the surface. The man kneeled him down in front of the galvanized bucket anyway. Jake got on his own knees right behind the boy and up close almost surrounding him. Then he bent Justin at the waist and pushed his head under the water and held him there.

The boy waited to be let up, and waited some more. When he couldn’t stand it any longer he began to writhe forcefully. The man pulled him up out of the water and Justin had just enough time to take a breath before he was submerged once again. Over and over it went. Sometimes the kid didn’t get his mouth closed in time and sucked in some water, trashing about at once in distress. Jake would haul him up sputtering, only to plunge him in again.

He began to plead for the fellow to stop and a few minutes later he did. Then the man took off the ropes, lay the boy on the sopping floor and screwed him. Ordinarily getting fucked on a bare wooden floor would be very uncomfortable, but the teenager was so glad to be able to breathe that he didn’t care.

“Mmmm, just in, this is great, Just…in,” the man told him, laughing at his joke. And from then on he always called the boy, Just…in, even in front of people at the hotel, who thought it was cute and funny, specially because it embarrassed the youth.

On another day, the bartender said, “Take off everything except your briefs.”

When he had complied, he was told, “Pull the elastic band down in front and hook it under your balls.”

“Not this again,” Justin complained.

“Yes, this again,” Jake confirmed. “Get ready.”

The kid did as he was told and went into the bedroom. He saw the ropes in position under the bed. Justin lay himself down, his head below and not on the pillows and stretched his legs wide and his arms straight out from the sides.

Jake followed him in. The man picked up one end of a rope and tied it to the teenager’s right ankle. Then he went to the other side, took the other end of the rope that passed under the bed, pulled the kid’s leg toward himself until it was taut and secured that ankle. The fellow bound Justin’s wrist with one end of another length of rope, returned to the opposite side of the bed and pulled the youth’s arm until it too was tightly drawn. He tied that wrist.

Then the man sat down just below the youngster’s waist. He felt the kid’s crotch just under the testicles. “Nice and tight?” he inquired.

“Yeah,” Justin half sighed.

Then the fellow caught the tip of his middle finger against the end of his thumb, the way a person does when he intends to flick a crumpled ball of paper or perhaps a crumb off a table top. Positioning his hand he let loose the stored energy of his finger tip sharply striking Justin’s right testicle with the finger nail.

“Ogh,” the slave in training groaned.

After a pause of ten seconds to let the pain subside, Jake struck the left testicle, evoking no sound from the boy this time. Then back to the right nut, hitting it in a different location, and so on.

The youth knew better than to begin to complain too soon. It wouldn’t be believed. After a while, he was unable to keep silent anymore. Then he let the man know when he began to feel sick to his stomach and was in danger of throwing up. Jake didn’t want vomit on his bed.

The follow stopped, got up and went into the kitchen. He got himself a can of soda and lit a cigarette. He smoked it slowly and only when he was finished did he return to the bedroom.

“Ready for round two?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Justin reluctantly agreed.

Jake tested the ropes. They always seemed to loosen, whether because the rope stretched or Justin’s ligaments he didn’t know. The boy was re-stretched and retied before the man took up his position once again. He readjusted the waist band under the kid’s testicles and fluffed his balls as one might a pillow.

“These must be the world’s smallest punching bags,” he chuckled. Then he struck. They kept it to three rounds. Jake said that was the limit for an amateur match.

*****

To Justin’s mild surprise, the fellow made good on his half promise to take the teenager back to Massachusetts with him in the spring. They pried apart the old, fake ID and used the picture for a new one with the bartender’s last name. This time the story was that Jake was his uncle and was escorting him to Cape Cod to spend the summer with his father, Jake’s brother. Like so many, his parents were divorced. No one asked though.

Like before, they just took off one morning. The man had a one way rental car he could leave off in San Juan. Foster returned home and waited and waited. He never knew, but he figured that something along the lines of what had happened, had happened. He consoled himself with the cute Puerto Rican kid he had met at a mall and had been secretly dating. This one would already be at home and not feel so out of place as Justin had. It was Foster who had leaned the language and become somewhat acculturated.

*****

The kid stood sideways to Jake, his left leg forward and the other back. He wasn’t bound. This was an obedience exercise, requiring him to stay still in place no matter how much he wanted to run. The fellow was sitting on a side chair patiently burning a star pattern onto Justin’s inner thigh with a lit cigarette. They didn’t need to avoid marking the youth’s body anymore.

“I’m being careful not to burn you too much, Just…in,” he informed the youngster. “Enough to raise blisters maybe, but not char you. Too much risk of infection. I’ll have to keep watch on these even so.” Jake knew a male nurse who would take care of his slave if necessary, and not be nosy.

“We don’t want scars. It would be a stupid master who damaged his own property. So we have to make sure we find you one that isn’t stupid.”

The youth looked at the marks being left on him and thought that tomorrow he would wear short shorts and sit on one of the town benches with his legs spread. The lower portion of the burns would show. Maybe some guy would spot them, figure out what was up and pause to talk to him. He knew, though, that the best chance for finding a master was though Jake. Bartenders were always being asked about what was available in town and the man worked at the most popular leather bar.

“I wish I could keep you for myself, Just…in,” his temporary master said wistfully. “You’re a wonderful boy and a great slave. But I know you hate it in PR and that’s where I’m going.” The youngster smiled though his tears. He had never received many complements and treasured them.

Eventually Jake met a dentist from New York who was looking for a fresh slave. The kid supposed that his new master might have paid the bartender the cost of his plane trip from San Juan. But that was only fair, really.

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