 |
| Part 1 by Castgimp |
|
| Maybe you can relate to this. I don't think many people can. Let me start by saying I'm just a boy from Ohio who gets hard when he sees a guy with his leg in a cast. It's always been that way-ever since I was a wee tot. Every once in a while I wonder with some consternation why that is, but usually I don't sweat it. I just try to enjoy it. When I can. This is my big secret in life-the one I carry around in my head and don't share with anyone, and it's always sort of made me feel like an outsider. But I'm thinking that maybe you'll understand. I don't know what gives me that impression. Just a hunch I guess. But maybe I'm wrong. If this doesn't make any sense to you, maybe you'd better just stop reading now. I mean if you are already thinking this is pretty weird and it's making you uncomfortable, then you're just not going to enjoy the rest of what I have to say. On the other hand, if there is for you even a glimmer of recognition in this rambling of mine, then read on. Perhaps we are not strangers to each other after all. And if you need any further motivation to keep reading, I can tell you this. There is a happy ending. You know-boy meets boy with a cast on his leg. I think I can tell you that up front without giving it all away before we even get started. But frankly, let's be honest, there were lots and lots of times when I thought it would never happen. I mean, the whole thing is so unlikely. I think you would probably agree that there is a certain frustration and futility in fixating the way we do on guys with casts. I guess a fetish is never an easy thing. Can we even say that word? I wish I hadn't. That's one of those words that takes the starch right out of my hard-on every time. I don't really want to be a man with a fetish. But I digress. So here's my biggest frustration with this obsession-all of the near misses! You know what I mean. All of those glimpses of a man with a cast and crutches caught in your peripheral vision-all of the guys with broken ankles you've ever passed on the street that you haven't had the guts or good fortune to actually meet. Don't get me wrong. A cast sighting is always a good thing, no matter how brief. For me anyhow it always produces a little electrical jolt. It's a little mini-high of some sort. I don't know. Maybe it's endorphins or something. Maybe we have some little gland buried deep in our brain-stem that spits out a funny shaped molecule that makes its way to a fancy receptor hidden somewhere else in our bodies every time we see a man with his foot and ankle wrapped in hard plaster. I can't say for sure. This is just one theory of mine. But anyhow I think you know what I mean by frustration. I, for one, was beginning to despair. Every morning in the mirror I was like, hello, is it too much to ask for a quality cast sighting today? I mean, you know, some sustained contact with a guy with his leg in a cast? Like how about putting me in the airplane seat next to some hunky athlete with a broken ankle in the cramped quarters of the economy section on a long flight from Boston to Seattle? That would give me some time to really look at his cast, and his lovely long toes sticking out of the cast, and to ask him, feigning absolute boredom, just what he'd done to himself to end up in a big old cast like that. Instead what I usually get is a distant view of some adorable Italian man with his leg in a cast boarding a flight to Rome all the way across the concourse as I'm racing to catch the shuttle to Washington. These are the fleeting images that begin to drive you crazy after a while. You hardly have time to take it all in and store it away for fantasizing about later in the privacy of your own home, when he disappears from sight. I mean we all have our laundry list of the one's who got away. I know I certainly do. Where to even begin? I think in terms of frustration that the drive-by is the absolute worst. You know, there you are in the car driving along minding your own business when all of the sudden you see this guy walking along on crutches with his leg in a cast. Your first impulse is to slam on the brakes but there is another car right behind you and you don't want to wreck. So you whip your head around to get a second glimpse and the car swerves and you realize you're risking everything just to get a better view of this man with a broken ankle. And then suddenly you're too far past him to see anymore and your mind is racing trying to think of a way to see him again. So in a flash you decide to go around the block as fast as you can so you can come up on him again and maybe get a second look. But traffic and the lights conspire against you and by the time you come around the corner he is long gone. There's two or three of those in my life that really stick out in my memory. Like the time I was driving by the local neighborhood community hospital. Climbing awkwardly out of the passenger side of a beat up car was this wiry looking guy-kind of skinny with a scrappy beard, but kind of good looking in a rough sort of way-and he's got this long fiber cast on his leg. You could tell he'd been wearing it for a while-it was dirty and worn looking, but still rigid, bent at the knee, holding his leg in its grip from his toes all the way up to his hip. He was wearing shorts, with a work boot on his good foot, so I could see the whole expanse of the thing. He was balancing on a beat-up pair of wooden crutches as he got out of the car. I did the slam on the brake thing, but there was a line of cars behind me. I immediately wanted to know what he broke and how he broke it. I wondered if he was walking himself across the street to the hospital to have it looked at-maybe to have the cast removed-maybe to have a new one put on. I could barely see his toes as he swung through on those crutches, and then I was past him. I'm trying to find him in my rear view mirror, but it's not pointing the right way, and then I'm at the light and trying to switch lanes so I can go around the block and of course you know how it ends. By the time I get back in front of the hospital there's no sign of him. For a minute I actually consider parking the car and walking through the hospital to try to find him, but I'm already late for work and I don't really have a rational reason for being in the hospital. I briefly imagine asking the guard at the front desk if he saw a guy come in with a cast on his leg, and then I know for sure that I'm nuts on this matter. Certifiable. Or the time I'm driving down the Boulevard on my way to the gym when in the car right next to me, in the passenger seat, there's this guy with a cast on his ankle, and he has it propped up on the frame of the open passenger side window. It was like if I rolled down my window I could have touched his cast! That one really made me crazy. The way his leg was bent it looked like it had to be a short leg cast. He was a young guy-maybe early twenties. It was hard to see his face clearly in the car, but he looked unshaved, which I always like. Frankly, his face didn't matter to me all that much because his cast was sticking right up there on the edge of the windowsill for the whole world to see. So of course there's a truck in my lane, and his lane starts up fast and I lose sight of him right away. I'm battling traffic to get even with him again and the closest I can get is to switch lanes a couple of times and maneuver behind him. I'm completely frustrated that I can't really see his cast from that position. And then the guy driving the car he's in runs a light that's just turning red and I'm stuck on the wrong side of the intersection and I can see him fading fast ahead of me and I know I'll never catch up with him and I'm left with this sad erection in my pants and nothing more than a fleeting glance of a cast to blame for it. That's the sort of frustration I'm talking about. You get enough of those under your belt and you're ready to tear your hair out. But the drive-by is not the only cast frustration out there. In some ways, the closer you get to the guy in the cast, the higher the level of frustration. For instance, there's those man on the street encounters. Like when I was in New York City last year. I was walking and it was just about dusk and there coming toward me on the street is a totally handsome hunk of a man in a short leg cast, swinging along on crutches. It was Chelsea, so the chances of him being queer were enormous. And he was gorgeous-curly dark hair, broad shoulders, narrow waist, and a beautiful face. And the cast was perfect-fiber, nearly white, clean looking, perfectly shaped to his foot and ankle. It was not a walking cast, and he was moving swiftly and gracefully on his crutches, swinging the cast through with his knee bent, careful not to scrape his naked toes on the pavement or put any weight on the cast. And of course I was with a group of people and we were on our way to dinner and I could do no more than swing around and watch him crutch down the street away from me. I so wanted to know what he'd done to injure himself-wanted to have a chance to ask him about his cast and crutches and his ankle. Hell I wanted to touch his cast and play with his toes. But it wasn't meant to be. Another hunk in a cast passed all too quickly into and then back out of my life. My Chicago encounter was somewhat better, but in the end no less frustrating. At least I was alone, and the visual contact lasted longer, so I had the freedom to savor it a bit. It was one of those beastly hot sultry summer days in Chicago when there is no air moving. I was walking north on Michigan Avenue, thinking about work, and suddenly there he was. He was sitting up on a wall in front of some art school, talking to some friends and smoking a cigarette. He was kind of punky looking in my mind-long hair, kind of disheveled and sort of deliberately unkempt-scrappy little Van Dyke beard, soiled jeans with paint on them, torn T-shirt. And that cast. A beautiful red long leg cast with a gentle bend at the knee. The cast was kind of beat-up too-he had clearly been hard on it since it was put on. His crutches were leaning against the wall next to him. I immediately slowed my pace to take him in, and on impulse, turned once I was past him to walk by again. Immediately I was trying to imagine what he'd done to himself, and I decided he'd had his leg broken in a fight, or maybe in a motorcycle accident. I was pretty sure it didn't happen playing football or hockey-he didn't look like the college athlete type. Amazingly, just as I was passing for the second time, he flicked his cigarette butt into the street jumped down off the wall onto the sidewalk, landing forcefully but gracefully on one foot. I was impressed with the maneuver-he never for a moment lost his balance or hesitated, in spite of the fact that one leg was entirely rigid with fiber casing. I could tell he was an aggressive kid-the red color of his cast just confirmed it. I decided it was definitely a fight that had led to his injury. He grabbed his crutches, jammed them under his arms, and swung forward with his friends. I was prepared to follow him wherever he might be headed, but to my enormous frustration after just a few feet the group turned and went up a short set of steps and into one of the school buildings, somewhere I clearly had no business following them. I considered posting a watch and waiting for him to exit, but once again I reluctantly came to my senses. Dejected, I turned myself around one more time and headed glumly on to my appointment downtown. The whole thing left me with an uncomfortable and nagging erection. Maybe the greatest sense of squandered opportunity comes with those very close encounters that you totally fuck up. I'm thinking of the guys you run into with casts on where you really do have the time and opportunity to engage them in conversation, but you totally screw up the whole encounter. This happened to me most recently at the gym. I live in the city but work in the suburbs, so I belong to this health club that is very family oriented-lots of kids and moms as well as the after work crowd. Which is not to say that there still isn't a lot of cruising in the showers, but that's a whole different story. Anyhow I swiped my card through the card reader at the door and rounded the corner to head down the stairs to the men's locker room, in a hurry as usual, and then bingo, there he was. I almost ran into him. Ahead of me on the stairs, making his way very gingerly down the stairs was this kid in a short leg cast. I say kid, but he was probably a high school senior. I can tell you that when I fantasize about him I always imagine that he is over eighteen. Anyhow the injury was obviously very recent because the crutches and cast were both brand new, and he was moving slowly and very cautiously, from which I gathered that the crutches were still awkward for him, and also that he was still in enough pain that he didn't want to risk banging his cast or losing his balance. Well as you can imagine, I was the picture of patience on that staircase that day. I was happy to stand there behind him and watch him go down those stairs for the rest of my life. He was wearing gray sweatpants, and on the leg he had the cast on, he had the pant leg pulled up high, so it was scrunched up around his knee and the whole cast was exposed. It was winter and plenty cold outside but he wasn't wearing a sock over the end of his cast, thank god, so his toes were exposed. I hate it when guys in leg casts wear socks over their toes. I don't care if they are cold. I want to see those toes. That is part of the charm. But never mind, this kid, as I say, had his toes right out there for me to look at. He'd managed to get rid of his coat somewhere, if he had one, which I imagine he did, which suggested to me that he'd been at the club for a while, and wasn't just coming in out of the parking lot. Query what the hell a kid with a brand new broken ankle was doing at the gym, but that was a question I didn't think to ask myself until later, after it was all over. I was just happy he was there and I was there to enjoy it. I wasn't about to question why he was there. Anyhow. (Can you tell I'm getting all wound up over this one, by the way my sentences are getting long and straggly and it's kind of hard to follow what I'm saying?) The point is, because he didn't have a coat on, I could see his shoulders and arms working hard to carry him down the stairs, and I could see his ass muscles working to hold his casted foot up off the floor. He had his butt cheeks clenched and a bit of the cotton fabric of his sweat pants was caught ever so fetchingly in the crack between those cheeks, and I can tell you my friend I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. (Now you know why it is I have to keep telling myself that surely this boy was over eighteen.) So finally we get to the bottom of the stairs and he pauses to rest and I am right there behind him, and this is it-my moment in the spotlight. This is my chance to talk to him. So what is my inspired question? As he rests heavily on his crutches catching his breath, I manage to choke out a big two-word question: "What happened?" Agghhhh! I admit it. I choked under pressure. Of all the inspired questions that might have flowed from my lips, those two words are the ones that I squeezed out. Meeting my challenge with equal bravado he replied "I busted it, man," as he turned on his crutches and headed off away from me and in the opposite direction of the men's locker room, where I inevitably, gym bag on my shoulder, had to head next. And that was that. I never saw him again-not later that night, not later that week. I never had another chance to ask him what happened, or how the healing process was coming along. How many times did I agonize over my own stupidity? How many other questions could I have asked him that would have required him to spit more than those four words back at me? How about, at the very least, how did you hurt yourself? That at least might have drawn out from him some detail about the process of the injury itself. I don't even know what he busted! It could have been a bone in his foot, or in his ankle, or both for all I know. And come on! How did you break it? Playing soccer? Basketball? Skateboarding? Skiing? Surely not swimming! Agghhhh! Oh well. We take our cast sightings where we can get them and we move on. So, onward. |
|