Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)

This is the most recently completed story. In chronological order, it would be the twelfth of the nineteenth finished so far.

===============

Driving to the Great Smokies to Get Naked (March 1971)


The two-room apartment was spare but homey. It was actually half of a small house. The other half had a separate kitchen. Mine had a front room and a back room and a bathroom. The front room was the "living" room, the back was the bedroom and kitchen. And the bed was barely a bed, more a cot and not a good one at that. I had moved there with a roommate who had bunk beds but when his ultra-conservative parents found out he was gay, they drove up from Chattanooga to take him home for therapy and took the bunk beds with them. That left me with a very modest and worn twin bed, one Charlie has offered me when I moved out of his and Danny's apartment.

The rest of the furniture was not much to speak of either, but it was adequate for my needs.
But it wasn't a place to bring a trick home to. A trick might not pay attention to the ratty couch or what barely passed for a dining table, but the bed would be another matter. It's difficult enough for two people to share a twin bed, but this particular bed presented even more of a problem.

In my previous apartment, the one I rented the day I fled Atlanta for Knoxville, I could easily move the two parts of the sectional couch together. The enormous living room allowed for that. The current living room was too small to make that convenient.

This all became apparent one night shortly after my roommate had been abducted, er, had left.
I was up for a trick or at least an evening of hunting for one. You know how hunters say they really aren't in it for the kill, but for the thrill of the hunt and being out in nature. I was a hunter of tricks. If I didn't find one, there was still the thrill of the hunt and being out in gayville.
Knoxville hadn’t yet entered the age of the gay dance club. K-town gave gay boys a choice: either a dive of a beer bar located down a dark alley or a dive of a beer bar located near another dark alley a few blocks away.

I took the first choice. Both bars were run by lesbians (most gay bars were then), but I liked the, um, ambience of the one down the alley. All bars, gay or straight, had to close at midnight sharp and would begin shutting down around eleven-thirty to be sure to be in compliance with any Knoxville Beer Board inspectors who might be driving around at that hour. Beer only. No booze, no setups, no BYOB. And, of course, no dancing. Sounds grim, but it could be fun.

What was grim this particular night was the crowd. There was no crowd. The bar staff outnumbered the customers and there were only four people working.

I was about to head for the other bar but decided to stay long enough for a beer. The other place sort of scared me, unless I was there with some friends. And since I was trick hunting, I was flying solo.

In scanning the empty booths to decide where I would sit alone I realized one of the booths wasn't empty. It was occupied by someone I didn't know, but someone I realized I would like to know. At least for a night. So I grabbed my beer and headed for his booth.

I don't recall what tired cliché I must have used to explain why, with all the other booths empty, I chose to sit in the one he was already occupying. I guess I just assumed he was looking for someone to join him. This was a gay bar, after all. He must have known that. If I wasn't what he was looking for he would certainly let me know. But he apparently had no problem with my joining him and the hunt was on.

Whether I was hunting for him or he for me didn't matter. If we left together, if we tricked together, it didn't matter who had propositioned whom.

The conversation–what there was of it–was awkward at first. That wasn't so unusual then. In later years, in a crowded dance bar full of buff, mostly shirtless men, a guy could be more direct with a pickup line. We knew where we were (a gay club) and we knew what we wanted (a trick.) In a back alley neighborhood beer bar, however, you had to exercise some care. Maybe he was just there for a beer. Maybe he didn't know it was a gay club. We didn't have rainbows everywhere then. And the place was almost empty he might have just figured it a good place to grab a beer or two.

This guy was too young, too small-town to be part of the vice squad and those guys didn't hassle the bars anyway, just the restrooms in public buildings. And they did that during the daytime.
Back then I never gave much thought to the possibility of what we now call gay bashing. Maybe it was because I was usually drawn to guys not likely to overpower me or who were so likely queer as to fear that I might bash them.

This guy was tough to figure out though. Most pickup conversations avoid direct propositions but this one was indirect to the point of near obscurity. I began to think the night would end right there in the booth.

Yet somehow, I don't recall how, he left with me and followed me in his car to my house.
We were undressed and in bed within minutes, perhaps seconds.

And then a problem arose. Or, rather, didn't, um, rise.

No, it wasn't what would be today a Viagra moment, but neither of us somehow could get turned on enough to do anything.

It wasn't our hormones' fault.

It was the bed's fault.

Then I got an idea.

“Why don’t we drive to the Smokies?”

“Huh?”

Somehow I managed to explain my idea. The bed just wasn’t working and maybe what we needed was something radically different. Like sex in a car on a lonely road. Or sex in the woods. I told him I knew of several out-of-the-way places in the mountains – about an hour away – where we could get it on. How this would be more comfortable than an a bed indoors wasn’t really clear to either of us. But he bought into the idea and off we went to the Great Smoky Mountains.

Now where did I ever come up with such an idea? A few years earlier I had worked for a radio station in the Smokies that was a thirty-mile drive from Knoxville. And most of that thirty miles was very rural, although the road was a wide four-lane. One day, while rounding one of the road’s many curves, I saw a young guy standing by the side of the road hitchhiking. Only as I passed did I notice something unusual. He was wearing jockey shorts. Just jockey shorts. For some reason—maybe I was just in a hurry to get work or didn’t believe what I saw—I continued on without stopping. But I didn’t stop thinking about what I saw. Or letting what I saw develop into a fantasy.

No, it wasn’t a fantasy about being stranded on a lonely highway in only my jockeys. On that stretch of highway I wouldn't want to be stranded fully clothed – and armed.

Instead I imagined being with this hitchhiker somewhere in the Smokies, somewhere secluded and safe. Somehow the phrase, "sex in the Smokies" kept running through my horny mind.
Now the guy in my bed wasn't the hitchhiker and he wasn't wearing jockeys. Or anything else. But, hey, fantasies are flexible and he was flexible enough to agree with the idea. So off to the Smokies we went.

Where exactly we were going I wasn't sure. And I was the one driving. But the nearest place I had in mind was almost an hour away so I had time to think. Or so I thought.

But after we had passed through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge on the way to the mountain bypass around Gatlinburg, I still wasn't sure of a safe destination so I pulled over into an parking area - a scenic overlook they call it - with a view of Gatlinburg far below.

Trick - let's just call him Trick - apparently thought this was our final destination. He began undressing, although I was so occupied I didn't notice. Until he spoke.

"I am now completely naked," he announced.

I looked to my right. He sure was. Completely.

So let's review. It's a weeknight and I'm parked at an overlook above Gatlinburg in the Great Smoky Mountains after midnight.

With a naked guy in the passenger seat.

A naked guy whose name I did not know. His name? I didn't even know him, much less his name. (Thus I’ll call him Trick.)

So, I wondered, what do I do now?

Option one: get naked as well. Option two: pretend I hadn't heard Trick and visually confirmed his nakedness. Option three: Stay clothed but take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick.

I went with Option Four: Get naked and take sexual advantage of Mr. Naked Trick. Now that might have been easy if we’d been in the back seat of my Camaro, but we were in the front seat! In bucket seats. With a stick shift between us.

That configuration caused a number of problems. First of all, Trick had it easier getting undressed. He didn’t have a steering wheel to contend with. Or three pedals on the floor.
Second, even when I managed to get undressed without putting the car out of gear, I had that Hurst shifter between us. And the parking brake.

So, you say, why not get in the back seat? Let me draw you a picture.

We’re in a Camaro. It has two doors. To get from the front seat to the back seat you have to first, open the door nearest you and, second, step out of the car to move the seat forward in order to get in back.

Would you really want to do that naked?

(And, no, you wouldn't want to - or be able to - climb over the high-back bucket seats - either naked or clothed.)

True, there were no other cars parked on the overlook, probably because of the late hour on a weeknight in the fall. That was one of the reasons I chose the place. I certainly wouldn’t have done it in the heat of summer and the height of the tourist season. And there were likely not going to be any other cars, but how could we be sure?

The Camaro was becoming a much bigger challenge than my bed. Try as we might, there was no comfortable way to do, um, it, whatever “it” might be. The bucket seats, the stick shift, the parking brake, even the location conspired against us. Sure we could reach across the console and grab and grope each other, but what we both wanted was more than that; we wanted sex but we wanted full-body-contact sex. And that was just impossible in the front seat of a Camaro.

I signaled surrender by starting to get dressed. Trick followed my lead but only to the point of pulling up his underwear. We were halfway back to Knoxville before I convinced it might be a good idea - in the glare of city lights - to be a bit more clothed. He agreed.
We got back to my place just over two hours after we’d left it.

The hour was late, we both were tired, so we both made it back into my bed, but not to sleep. At least not right away.

Perhaps it was all that mountain air, but this time the bed didn’t cause us any problems.