Tarpid Behavior

Calling it “The Eagle in Exile” is no joke. Fueling suspicion that the Puritans actually landed at Port Everglades rather than Plymouth Rock, I need to drive out of town to get to this improper twice-a-week sex romp that had once been located in Fort Lauderdale proper.

It’s ten exits and ten minutes up Route 95 at the edge of Pompano. (Yes, that very same Route 95 that runs through New York and New England, making the difference between here and there an easily memorized handful of left turns barely more complex than the placement of a message in a bottle into the Atlantic which follows the path established by this interstate.)

“The Eagle in Exile” is located in a tired single-tiered failing concrete strip mall (as is literally everything in Florida). I feel nothing but affection for these malls, emptied of their original pizzazz and blemished with consignment shops, tattoo parlors, check cashing venues and those similar businesses that move in once the owners surrender any hope of better-paying tenants.

The cheerful man (think retired Princeton language scholar with two grown daughters) inside the door is the same fellow who greeted me a year ago when this club had been located on Sunrise Boulevard. His gracious welcome and a blast of chilled air erase the dreariness of the spongy parking lot and I am launched within.

In its glory days, this might have been an Anne Francis Swimwear Shoppe, a Denny’s, a GNC Health Food store or maybe a Radio Shack. Now it is a collection of tarpaulins covering any surface likely to be defiled by the attendees and hung from the mullions of the dropped ceiling to create “rooms” (interestingly employing the exact same aesthetic rules used by Edith Wharton in the establishment of her formal outdoor garden “rooms”). Some of the tarps are duct-taped to the carpet under the seven sofas draped with white sheets that act as navigation points in the dim light.

There are also three port-a-slings (identical to that owned by a certain celebrity blogger who shall remain nameless) set up to facilitate the watching as well as the pounding. Sure enough (and this is always the unfortunate case), some toad set himself up in one of those slings and spent the entire evening with his eyes closed, head turned to one side and legs splayed in the air, gently swinging and available to any and all comers, of which there were none.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself and made the place seem horrid which it is not, so let me rewind a bit in order to establish its terrain.

Once inside, you are in a lengthy room that looks like most any gay bar in America. The bar itself is roughly fifty feet long (I use the length of a seventy-five foot swimming pool to calculate this) with a dozen stools and four tables each attended by four more stools and governed by overhead video screens giving forth the recommended activities (not the Food Channel). A very friendly, well-tanned and handsome bartender in black briefs offers to check my clothing and wants to give me a drink (admission gets you three coupons redeemable for beer, wine or spirits, with soft drinks for the asking), reaffirming my decision that my next career really ought to be one in which I can work in my underwear.

According to their website, the place opens at 8PM, and given that this is a Wednesday night, I have arrived at a respectable 8:30 with hope that I’ll be back home with a book in bed by midnight. Unfortunately, it is immediately clear to me that I am among the earliest arrivals. (Don’t arrive until 10:30) There are but a dozen naked men wandering about and watching the door hungrily. I chat up the bartender and then wander into the farther two recesses which are a step or two up and around corners. These contain the aforementioned furnishings and I am pleased with the lighting, good enough to inspect the details of the occupants but weak enough to erase a few years from anyone’s age.

A slim young guy with short black hair and goatee has followed me into an empty area set up to accommodate several dozen men. He is Ricardo, Puerto Rican, the comptroller of a real estate company and owner of the expressive and impressive dick poking at my belly button as would a third person attempting to crash our conversation. We eventually give in to the insistence of his dick which I introduce to my own, as would two gentlemen walking dogs in Central Park let their pets play with each other while continuing their conversation. We are soon joined by a short man with a silvery brush cut and a powerful gym-built chest who unleashes from his white jeans (not everyone is naked) a pit bull of a dick that is not as well trained as our own. The game changes when he announces to us that he can cum simply by our biting his chest. He demonstrates the truth of this and heads off to the bathroom. He is one of those men who paces himself through several such climaxes in the course of a night. We were the recipients of his “first up at bat” and I saw him prove his stamina at least three more times in the course of the evening.

Back at the bar, I meet a very tall and magnificently proportioned black man wearing a t-shirt remembering Barcelona. He has been on one of those Atlantis Mediterranean cruises that include some Greek islands, and he highly recommends it. We share our affection for the beauty of Barcelona and end our conversation without needing to verbalize our mutual decision to get frisky with each other later in the evening. This commences several minutes later, when, sprawled next to each other on one of the sofas, with one of his long and powerful arms yoked behind my neck and over my shoulder, we take note of the various men who kneel in front of us, sometimes lifting a head out of one of our crotches and applying it to the other’s as if to say “This guy’s real good. Try this one.”

Back at the bar, I introduce Ricardo to Barcelona and the evening develops a fine pattern. The three of us would convene wordlessly in the play areas, create a tableau vivant and then escape back to the bar whenever the press of the onlookers became too frenzied.

In the course of the night, I cannot imagine that the attendance exceeded seventy-five, that being a dismal number, but I had a convivial time of it, and was glad for the good company what with C, and everyone else I know, up north. Tonight I will attend a special meeting of our condominium association called to decide whether or not to replace the carpeting of the party room with tile. I’m going to suggest tarps.