Mr. Akers

Mr. Akers

          Mr. Akers lived across the street from me when I was ten years old. My friend Max and I loved to visit Mr. Akers. We would sit on the front porch with him and he would tell us stories about the early European immigrants to America, and about Native Americans. Mr. Akers always had an impressive perspective on the European immigration, especially for a working class man. Though he was proud of being able to trace his ancestry to early European settlers, he had a deep respect for the Native Americans and did not shy away from telling of the atrocities that these settlers committed against them. I think that Mr. Akers's wife might have been Native American. She had dark yet reddish skin, and a fierce yet tender look in her eyes as she drove away to go to work wearing the smart uniform of a security officer, complete with militaristic cap, gold pins, and navy blue skirt. The times when we would talk to Mr. Akers were usually times when his wife was away at work, and she seemed to leave for work in the late afternoon.

         My relationship with Mr. Akers was one that seemed very natural and smooth, and, though it sounds simplistic and trite, what I remember feeling most about it was its rightness. My time with Mr. Akers felt like my entree into the world of adult discussions and pleasures, and with him I felt accepted as an adult. He never treated me like a child, and this was immensely satisfying. Our many discussions were long and intelligent, and Mr. Akers was a wonderful teacher of history. In this world of comfort and adulthood there sometimes intruded a danger in the form of my father, who seemed to come looking for me and summoning me too often when I was in my happy world of escape with Mr. Akers, attempting to bring me back to a world of punition and control. I was jealous of my friend Max since he was able to spend more time with Mr. Akers than was I, since he had successfully managed to live that more enchanted and forbidden adult life that seemed so much more right and so smooth, partly by virtue of the fact that his parents were less obtrusive than mine. Even when Max's parents did try to rein him in, he insulted them angrily and refused. Max seemed to be less afraid of punishment by his parents than I was. I remember feeling that my father's coming to take me away from the company of Mr. Akers felt so wrong.

         Our three way relationship seemed to settle into the roles of friend and sage on the part of Mr. Akers and lieutenant of the sage for Max. I played the most junior role in the relationship, and Max would regale me with stories of his times spent with Mr. Akers when I could not be there, and hold special stories back from me, making me implore, cajole, and practice some subterfuge to get them out of him. I remember that once Max told me that Mr. Akers had given him a splendid resume of his attractive, masculine, and mysterious wife, singing her praises and also telling him that he thought she was a lesbian. I was very excited by this but also chagrined and jealous not to be a senior confidant of Mr. Akers and not to be able to spend as much time with him as Max. His wife was also, to my consciousness, another wonderful and mysterious asset of the world of Mr. Akers, one that we might one day be able to discover more directly.

          Most of our time with Mr. Akers was spent on the front porch of his duplex. The porch sat well above the lawn level, and Mr. Akers would sit in an old-fashioned metal lawn chair while Max and I would usually sit on the ground or on the concrete ledge of the porch, talking, listening, and observing the neighborhood. Sometimes though, we would spend time inside Mr. Akers's house, which always seemed dark. Going inside felt especially exciting, and when we first spent time inside Mr. Akers's house, I felt that I had reached a new level of privilege. The house contained quite a few objets d'art and wall hangings and mementos of travels and careers, and Mr. Akers would take down objects and show them to us, telling stories about them and their provenance. I remember being both eager for the stamp of adulthood and adult seriousness that these stories and questions represented, and yet also impatient with a vague energy and a vague yet strong desire for more. I felt that I wanted to live every adventure and every kind of life represented in these humble objects, and my impatience and energy often spilled over into silliness and lines of questioning derailed by my hyperromanticism, which then seemed to solidify my place as junior in the relationship's rank order, as Max and Mr. Akers were always more serious and more reasoned in their conversation than I could manage to be.

          The excitement and feeling of moving upward in knowledge and adult experience were partly the result of the fact that Mr. Akers never seemed too eager or too fast in the growth of the relationship, but would rather gradually reveal new and more hidden, more adult things to us. Mr. Akers himself, though having no airs of magicianship or mysticality, and in fact being very unpretentious and understated in his manner and attire (he wore a crew cut and black frame glasses, and dressed simply, yet with class, always buttoning his shirts all the way up and wearing a t-shirt underneath), allowed for the magic of discovery, and he seemed to be a master of allowing the process of becoming more privy to the freedoms and pleasures of adult life to be a paced one. One of the next steps into the exciting realm of freedoms and possibilities that Mr. Akers brought to our lives was his going into the tops and backs of closets to pull out objects, often wrapped in cloth or tissue to further indicate their special status. He showed us statues that were acquired in the course of a life that seemed like a grand adventure, even if it had been the not-too-unusual life of a man of modest means. The grand adventure was really the forbidden privileges of adult life. I remember being moved and almost frightened by the mysteriousness of the some of the wooden statues in the closets that Mr. Akers would pull down and unwrap, pacing his words as he did so, creating anticipation, and putting my already hungry and romantic mind into a dither.

         I was feeling such natural and excited feelings about the relationship between Mr. Akers and Max and myself, and I remember that when these feelings came to occur within the sexualization of the relationship, it seemed that I already knew that this was to come, yet I could not articulate it. This movement seemed so natural and right, and I already knew somehow inside that all of my desire was imbued with sexuality and sexual energy. I remember that one day Max brought up in our discussions, by way of continuing to secure his rank in the trio, a fact that had come up naturally in a discussion between Max and myself, and this was the fact that, while Max could already ejaculate, I could not (Max was almost a year older than I).  I had already been having orgasms by this time, but without ejaculation, and I was happy and not too surprised to have learned from Max that he was having orgasms also. I did, however, feel worried and inferior when Max described the semen coming out of his penis during these orgasms, calling it a "male period". I thought that there was something wrong with me perhaps because I was not yet getting my male period, and I was eager for this further indication of adulthood. Mr. Akers received this news about my deficiency as smoothly as he received anything else that we brought up, and told me, without making humor of it, that this event would come in time, and that there was nothing wrong with me.

         Sometime after this Mr. Akers began to sometimes walk around the house in our company with his fly unzipped. I felt no fear from this directly and it was not at all off-putting to me, yet I felt anticipation and uncertainty as to what it meant and as to how I should behave - my fear was of not seeming to know what I should do. Max of course, much more outwardly sexual and mature than I, superciliously told me to just do the same as Mr. Akers was doing, and not to tell anyone about our private freeform style. Max began to strut his stuff around Mr. Akers's house with his fly open also, but I remember feeling shy about doing so, and then further foolish because of my reluctance. Somehow though, in spite of my unwillingness to walk around with my fly open, I was much less afraid to pee with the bathroom door open, which was Mr. Akers's next suggestion, though he made it at a later date. I remember that as I stood peeing at the toilet in Mr. Akers's bathroom with the bathroom door open and Mr. Akers and Max as my audience, my attitude turned from one of reluctance and shyness to one of pride and acceptance as Mr. Akers and Max complimented my body. I started to feel like I wanted to stay there and continue to show them my assets, but they seemed to be interested mainly insofar as this was an exercise in getting me to relax and come to their level of sexual knowledge and comfort, and presently told me to pull my pants up and come into the kitchen to have some Kool-Aid.

        As our friendship with Mr. Akers continued, my father's interruptions seemed more and more importunate, and I felt more distanced from the relationship as a result, while Max seemed to be able to spend more time than ever in the company of Mr. Akers. One day when Max and I were together without Mr. Akers, Max told me that he wanted to try something with me, something that he had been talking to Mr. Akers about. Max described our getting into certain body positions in relation to one another. I understood that I was to get onto all fours and move my buttocks downward and backward in a certain fashion, with Max behind me, but I didn't completely understand the positioning, and I told Max that I did not see the point of getting into these positions. There had already by this time been placed into my head a heteronormative idea of lovemaking that involved a man and a woman facing one another, though in my mind at that time, the man-and-woman position somehow involved both facing one another and kneeling. I had been told by my mother that men and women make love because it feels very, very good, and I understood for whatever reason that this lovemaking and feeling very, very good, looked different than what Max was proposing, though I also felt somehow that he was proposing lovemaking. I had no objection whatsoever to being naked and in certain positions with Max, I merely felt that this would not achieve very, very good feelings because I had been told that that which did so was something different. Although I felt indifferent to women sexually, I simply thought that this mixed sex positioning that my mother had described to me was the correct procedure for producing the very, very good feeling. Max didn't make too big a deal of my lack of comprehension and lack of desire to get into the Akers position, but he did, as might be expected from a senior lieutenant, show his feeling that I was not yet advanced enough in the Akers Mysteries to rise in rank in the relationship.

            My father's interruptions continued, and Mr. Akers's wife took a different job, one in which she worked both different and fewer hours, and thus my time with Mr. Akers was slowly diminished, and I felt like perhaps I had done something wrong. I was angry and I wanted to continue our relationship, but my father eventually discouraged my going to Mr. Akers's house to such a degree that it was an effective prohibition. Meanwhile, Max and I, in our energetic and eager adolescence, continued to explore the possibilities and freedoms of impending adult life.  Sometime after Mr. Akers was cut out of my life by the forces of heterosexual family security, Max and I began to get naked together. I remember watching Max's penis closely as he squeezed out globs of goo from it, always ready with tissues to clean it up. My junior lieutenancy in the Akersian Mysteries was thus continuing even though our mentor was no longer much in my life, since I continued to be more shy and unknowing than Max for a long time even as our naked adventures continued. We got naked more and more often, and Max made a container that he filled with cotton and into which he would stick his penis and move it until he ejaculated as I watched closely. Eventually Max asked to put his penis under my arm and between my thighs to see if this could produce an ejaculation, but I was still shy and reluctant. One night when I was spending the night at Max's house, and during a time when I had been getting more warm to our developing sexual relationship, even up to the point where, that night, I was on the verge of allowing anal penetration, Max's older brother walked into his room unannounced when Max and I were on his bed together naked and en flagrante. Hearing the door knob turning, I had jumped and flown through the air in an attempt to quickly get off of Max's bed and into my sleeping bag. Max's brother got an eyeful of me, naked and in mid-air, before I slid into my sleeping bag. Max's brother not only interrupted the Akersian rites but also took Max out of the room for what seemed like an interminable time. When Max returned from what was a long chiding and interrogation, he was sullen and distant, and we merely went to sleep. The heterosexist family police had struck again.

          Gradually, two things happened simultaneously after this. One was that Max got over the chiding and shaming by his brother. With his wild and defiant spirit, he led the resumption of the Akersian rites. As time went on however, my interest in the rites began to be less experimental and less a result of my yearning for adult mysteries, and more directly and purely a passion and lust. Some time fairly soon after this, I noticed that Max began to lose his interest in the Akersian rites, and eventually he even came to repudiate them. Max began to talk more about girls, and less about my body, and we began to be less and less physically close when we were naked together, eventually merely masturbating together but separately. As my interest in adult freedoms and mysteries turned to passion for the nude encounter itself, and then into unadulterated gay sexual lust, Max was turning outward. The first lieutenant was defecting, while the second remained loyal. Max was becoming a heterosexual.

         As time went on, I continued to pursue the exciting world of adult freedoms such as intelligent conversation and the development of a sexual persona, and Max and I continued to be friends, though more distantly, since my family had moved away. Mr. Akers was rather out of sight and out of mind with all of the new developments coming my way - junior high school, swimming team practices, working on getting straight A's and making honor rolls, smoking in the boys' room, and a growing sense of peer popularity and its value. I suppose that Mr. Akers settled into the pleasures that life with his wife and in the old lower middle class neighborhood afforded, perhaps with no one else to talk to about history and war and art. Max told me that he ceased to really see Mr. Akers, except to say hello, but Max and I would reminisce about Mr. Akers, always fondly and respectfully, though these reminiscences also included all of the aspects of the old neighborhood and its denizens. We were probably moved by the predominant culture of heterosexist disapproval to simply put Mr. Akers into a context in which he was merely another item of interest and amusement in life's rich pageant. 

          As I look back now on Mr. Akers and my time with him after having lived a fair stretch of adult life, I feel a longing for a closer relationship with him. I wish that I could have known that, with "adulthood" come not only freedoms, but also the constant harassment and policing of heteronormativity. I see Mr. Akers now as a wonderful man, a friend and mentor and educator, one with whom I would have like to have had a long and varied relationship. I somehow feel that if Mr. Akers, Max, and I had been able to continue our friendship without the intrusions of the security forces which try to corral "adulthood" into a conceptual admixture of cynicism and heteronormativity, and which try to make it the only proper place for sex, I would have benefited so much from having this intelligent and gentle man as a part of my life. Mr. Akers must be long since dead now, and Max has adopted the mantle of heteronormative life, though in one reunion as adults he did again admire my body suggestively. On this occasion, I decided not to take the opportunity to bring Max back to the Akersian mysteries one more time. I was too angered by what I felt was his treason, cowardice, and falsity. I felt he no longer deserved the Akersian imprimatur and ecstacies. I was angry at myself though, too, as I looked out over the landscape of life. Perhaps I could have changed things had I not been so accepting of heterosexist lies about life and sex and love. I loved Mr. Akers, and I love him even more now. I mean that in every way imaginable.

I love you Mr. Akers.

But I only wish I would have loved you better. 

If I had to do it over again Mr. Akers, I would have sucked your penis.

(The above is a true story from my life. Names have been changed to protect persons mentioned and their memories from the Family Values Police)