A gay story: The Farmer Bill Cure I couldn’t be faulted for doing my best to fight off the depression from these urges that had clutched at me since high school. My parents, bless them, had done what they could to help me—my dad, especially, by guiding me through various sports programs, giving his all to the effort to give me the All-American sports hero life—using up all my time so I didn’t have much of a chance to get into trouble.
I’d enjoyed the sports, and they certainly had toughened me up, but any effect they had on my “walking on eggs” depression was all superficial. I couldn’t even begin to tell my parents what was really at the root of my problem. My dad would have curled up and died.
It was only when I was out of college—and beyond the consuming collegiate football and basketball programs—that I was able to seek help on my own terms, to give name to my urges and voice to how deeply they screwed with my life.
Dr. Shelton was the first one ever I told of my affliction. I just sat on the sofa in his office and looked into his sympathetic and nonjudgmental eyes and poured it all out. It did feel a little better to have it out in the open to someone beyond myself. But that didn’t get rid of the urges and of the guilty feelings they evoked.
I’d always thought that these shrinks didn’t really suggest anything of use, that they were trained to make you face it yourself and come up with your own answers. But Dr. Shelton came right out with what I latched onto as a brilliant idea: retreat; leave the hectic urban life for a while, where I was constantly brought into contact with other people. Retreat for a while. He even said he could arrange it for me.
The town of Hamburg, Pennsylvania, was just north and west of Philadelphia, along the highway a bit past Allentown. But it was a world removed from urban, sophisticated, and enticing Philadelphia, the “city of brotherly love.” The farm Dr. Shelton sent me to was north of Hamburg, right up against an eastern spur of the Appalachian Mountains. Amish country, for the most part. Quiet and remote; neighbors who kept to themselves and their own ways and showed little curiosity about anyone coming to retreat for just a spell—coming to get their head on straight and put a spike in these depressions over I had from the urges.
Farmer Bill was what Dr. Shelton called the man who owned the farm and worked it all by himself—and offered retreat and hard, honest work to some of Dr. Shelton’s patients. He indeed was a farmer, Dr. Shelton said, but he also was trained in working with young men with my problem. If anyone could help me with this depression, Dr. Shelton said, it certainly was Farmer Bill. He was a man close to the soil, an expert in the basics and rhythms of life.
For some reason the day I drove up the Northwest Extension to Allentown and turned west was a light traffic day and the farm was a lot easier to find than I thought it would be. I was more than an hour earlier than I’d been told to show up. When I pulled into the farm yard, I maneuvered my Mustang between a pickup truck with the farm’s name and logo on the driver’s door and a Saab convertible with Maryland tags. I had assumed that I’d probably have to wait in my car until the appointed time, that Farmer Bill would probably still be out doing farm chores. But maybe not if there were two vehicles here at the house.
I got out of the Mustang and climbed the stairs to the porch of the white-painted, somewhat ramshackle wood-framed farmhouse with a fieldstone foundation. I went to the door, walking around a couple of smart-looking tan suitcases nudged against each other at the top of the porch stairs. The screen door was closed, but the front door was wide open. I couldn’t see a bell, so I knocked on the door frame and called out whether anyone was home. Silence, although I heard what seemed to be a radio talk show mumbling from somewhere inside the house, not too close to the door.
This was the country, so I decided I wouldn’t be shot or lambasted if I waited inside rather than out in the car.
I went in and wandered for a few minutes around a sparsely, but cleanly appointed room—undoubtedly the living room—which had several windows on two sides letting in the sunshine of a temperate-zone summer. But I kept hearing sounds from somewhere down a hallway that led off behind the foyer stairs. Maybe Farmer Bill was back in his study or something and hadn’t heard me knock or call out at the door, I thought. I moved back through the dim hallway.
It wasn’t a radio I had heard. The two figures, both naked, were stretched out on a double bed in a room nearly all the way at the end of the hall. Both were men, although I could only see the one on his side fully facing the door. He was young, not any older than me, blond and nicely muscled, these muscles now tightly strained at the effort he was making. His arms were stretched over his head, his fists wrapped tightly around rungs of the bed’s brass headboard. His waist was lying on the arm of another man, who was stretched behind him and who had that ropy arm, bulging with veins, stretched around the young man, with a large hand wrapped around the young man’s engorged cock. The other hand of the man behind was holding the young man’s right leg up and away from his body. Focusing my shocked stare that the midsection of the young man, I could clearly see the churning base of the “behind” man’s thick, condomed dick buried between the young man’s butt cheeks.
The young man’s head was thrown back and facing up at the ceiling and he was burbling with exclamations of passion and highly pleasured taking. Groaning and moaning and grunting out for more, deeper.
I only caught a glimpse of the tableau before I withdrew back down the hall, but I couldn’t get the image of the young man’s beautiful body, undulating and glistening with a light sweat of being well-exercised. And of that cock root churning in his channel.
The urges. This was exactly what I had been fleeing from for over half a decade. All of the enticements and spurned opportunities in the big city. The mental images of being in the place of that young man in the bedroom down that hall. And here, where I had retreated to escape all of that, here it was happening before my own eyes. I could only wonder, as I silently as possible stole back through the living room and out onto the porch, what Farmer Bill would do if he stumbled onto that scene.
I knew I didn’t want to be here when that happened. I nearly stumbled over the two suitcases as I slipped down the porch stairs to my car.
I had arrived much earlier than expected. I’d just get in the Mustang and drive back to Hamburg and see if I could find someplace that sold smokes or could sell me a beer. I needed to calm down. I’d come back at the appointed time and just pretend I hadn’t seen anything, and take my cue from whatever Farmer Bill had discovered—or not. But I had seen it—all that I had been running from. I needed a smoke. Or a drink. I needed both.
I had managed to find a tavern in Hamburg and both the smokes and a beer, and it was with calmer demeanor that I showed back up at the farm ten minutes after the originally designated time.
A middling tall, rangy man in, perhaps, his late forties was leaning languidly against a wooden column at the top of farmhouse porch when I pulled into the farmyard. He was giving me a friendly smile, telling me I was expected. A handsome, square-jawed, if darkly tanned and weather-beaten, face on a spare, wiry frame. He was wearing a denim shirt and faded jeans over well-used, obviously serviceable work boots. Big feet for his frame and big, veiny, hard-worked hands too. A look of a no-nonsense, highly efficient and competent, close-to-the-soil working man. Without at doubt Farmer Bill. And he was looking much at ease, so I doubted that he had discovered what I’d seen in the farmhouse not much more than an hour earlier.
We were exchanging initial introductions and he was asking about the journey and the traffic on the highway as I walked up the porch steps to his level, my duffel bag hanging off my back. As I shifted the weight of that, I realized that the suitcases were gone from the porch. The Saab with the Maryland plates wasn’t in the farmyard either, although the farm truck was there, parked in the same place it had been earlier.
“Come on it,” he was saying. “I’ll show you to your room.”
I followed him back, through the foyer, beyond the staircase and into the hallway going into the back of the house. He turned near the end of the hall, into “the” room, and my heart leaped into my throat and I got all sweaty and trembly.
“I hope this will be OK,” he said, ushering me around him and into the room. The bedspread was pulled tight now over the brass headboarded bed. No evidence of what had been going on there just a little more than an hour ago.
“This is where Dr. Shelton’s referrals usually stay. Just had a guy from Maryland in here, but he was finished up earlier today and has gone home. Nice kid. Was glad to be able to help him.”
I was listening to what Farmer Bill was saying—at least half way, enough to absorb what he was saying—but my eyes had latched on the strong, sinewy, vein-streaked hand he was gripping the knob of the bedroom door with as he leaned back against the door frame. Those hands, those ropy, tightly muscled, vein-bulging forearms. The man “behind.”
Dr. Shelton was certainly right. Farmer Bill was an expert in his field, in every sense. He treated me just like he would a skittish colt, and he took it slow and easy.
At dinner, in talking the theory of farming.
“It’s all about sewing your seed in fertile soil, Ron. Knowing just where and when and how deep to plow. Respecting the soil, preparing it well, letting it run through your fingers. Winnowing and sowing and then being joyful in the harvest. Bringing it into season and plowing and seeding and harvesting. Making love to it, uniting with it, harmonizing with nature. Can you see it?”
Yes, I could. And he was being ever so charming and friendly and fathering.
And in the fields, doing honest, hard work close beside each other.
“It’s going to be hot work, Ron, best we lay our shirts over there under that tree.”
“A lot of this work is just repetitive motion, Ron, leveraging your muscles against the load, finding a rhythm and taking control. Thrusting against it and thrusting against it and thrusting against it. And knowing what muscles to use. The chest and thigh muscles on this here post digger.”
And the graceful, repetitive undulation of his torso muscles against the fence post digger was poetry in motion. Sensuous, manly, overpowering. Each downward thrust of the thick post digger between his thrusting thighs into the hole and twist and retraction and repeated thrust both suggestive and enthralling.
“You’ve got to have passion in all you do out here, Ron. Whether you are digging a hole or filling a hole—digging, filling, digging—you’ve got to put muscle and passion behind it. You got to develop a rhythm. Understand?”
Yes, I did. And so did the urges.
Standing at the stockyard fence, big booted foot up on the first rail, side by side, both shirtless, Farmer Bill’s arm loosely around my shoulder, him pointing to the stud horse breeding a mare and the bull earning his keep with that big, veiny hand of his.
“Whatever is in nature is natural, Ron. You know? Whatever is in nature is good and right. And everything comes into its season and, when it knows it’s natural and right, then it’s OK, it’s good. You understand? Eventually, you’ve just got to let loose and let nature be nature. The great cycle of life. And you only live life once. You might as well get as much out of that life as you can, when you can. Preparing and plowing and seeding and enjoying the harvest.”
And at the end of the day, the rule of not entering the house dirty. The outdoor shower by the barn. Stripping down together, rinsing and soaping up and rinsing off again under the showerhead, together. And drying off with towels as we raced for the house, buck naked, together. Laughing. Him slapping me on the butt cheek; me blushing and trying to stay ahead of him, not wanting him to see the effect the shower ritual was having on me.
There wasn’t an ounce of fat on Farmer Bill—if you didn’t count his thick cock and heavy balls, of course. The hard work farming required was evident in his trimness and his sinewy musculature. Beauty in motion when he moved, however. And a master craftsman and every inch in charge.
When he first fucked me, I was ripe for the picking. We were out in the small vineyard he had on the first rise up toward the Appalachian ridge at the back of the farm property, well away from the rest of the world. He’d parked the truck in a depression below and let the tailgate down. After we’d picked several bushels of grapes and the shadows of the encroaching evening were quickly lengthening, Farmer Bill said he’d brought some wine from the last harvest out with us—and some cheese and bread.
We sat, side by side, leaning our butts against the truck’s tailgate, stripped to the waist, dribbles of grape juice dabbling our torsos. Drinking wine and chewing on whole-grained peasant bread and sharp, locally produced cheese. Silently watching the sun set off to the west down the ridge and the lights of a few isolated vacation homes along the ledge twinkle on.
“I love it out here,” I said. “So quiet. Silent. Lovely silence. Isolation.”
“You’re not alone, and it’s not silent out here, Ron,” Farmer Bill said in a low husky voice. “Listen again.”
I did, and he was right. I could hear low sounds. A twittering and the sound of a frog in the nearby pond. And crickets.
“The sounds of nature, Ron. You hear them now, don’t you? I don’t think you were able to hear them at all before you came. But you hear them now, I can tell.”
“Yes,” I murmured.
“And you know what those sounds are now, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. I knew where this was headed. I knew I was ready, but still the old reluctance, the twinge of guilt over the urges.
“Mating sounds. Nature coming into season. Doing what’s natural,” Farmer Bill murmured, his lips close to my ear, his arm around my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said, my voice low and hoarse now too.
“I think you’ve come into season, Ron.”
“Yes.”
He pulled me over, leaning me back into his lap. His arms went around me, and his lips buried themselves in the hollow of my neck. He unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them down my thighs. I pushed them the rest of the way myself, taking my briefs with them, and stepped out of them. His strong arms were squeezing me, and his broad-palmed, sinewy hands were roaming all over my chest and belly and down to my rising cock.
The first fucking was right there, like that, me being held into his lap, my butt cheeks nestled in his bush, as he leaned his buttocks against the tailgate of the truck. One of his hands on my chest, working my nipples and the other one on my belly, guiding the rise and fall of my hips on his buried, plowing cock until I’d taken the thickness of him inside me and had moved from pain to passion and gotten the rhythm of the fuck. Then that hand slowly descending to my tool, a maddening thumb latching onto the head of my knob and applying rhythmic pressure while the other fingers wrapped themselves and stroked me. Pent up as I was with years of unfulfilled urges and frustration, I spilled my seed on the ground twice before he shuddered and finished his studding of me for the first time.
Farmer Bill. Doing his job. Naturally. Studding me. Breeding me. And doing it masterfully; making me want it.
Then he turned me onto my back on the tailgate and hunched over me and licked the drabbles of grape juice off my torso and sucked me to a third spilling as he came into season for a second plowing and harvest. He wishboned my legs and nuzzled his pelvis between my hips and took me long and hard and deep, as I lay there, moaning and sighing, arching my back and writhing when he was riding me hard and lying back and languidly cooing as he took long, slow glides inside me, searching and exploring every crevice. Lying there, wondering why I had taken so long to give into the urges, and watching the stars flicker on over the Pennsylvania Dutch farm country.
And then again, later, as wisps of clouds scuttled across the early night sky, out between the rows of vine stands, studded like a horse, on my knees, buttocks lifted to him, my cheek on the soft moss, my fists grabbing at the soil, bunching up with each thrusting inside me of what he was breeding me with, a tool that would be the pride of any horse or bull—masterfully melting any mare or cow into burbling acquiescence. Smelling and tasting the rich soil of the farmland, doing what came naturally.
I stayed with Farmer Bill until I was fully comfortable fucking with a natural, joyful lust. But the day came when my Mustang was nuzzled out in the farmyard beside the farm truck, gassed up for the journey back to Philadelphia; my duffel bag was sitting at the top of the porch steps; and I was stretched out on my side on the bed in that bedroom for the last time, gripping the brass rungs of the headboard overhead for dear life, as Farmer Bill fucked me hard from behind in a farewell taking that put sealed to any reluctances or pangs of guilt I ever may have had. Exuberantly thrusting my hips back at his pistoning pelvis, while the knob of his master tool found my prostrate and rubbed me to new heights of ecstasy and lustful frenzy. The welling up and the release, followed briefly by murmurings and kissings and light tonguings across moist, hard flesh, and then the quiet, languid fuck of peace and mutual appreciation. Renewed passion and rhythmic fucking—and then farewell.
One of the first things I did when I got back to Philadelphia was to try to make an appointment to see Dr. Shelton.
“I’ve talked with Farmer Bill, Ron,” he responded to me down the telephone line. “In fact, I had a very long, interesting, conversation with Farmer Bill. You have no further need for my professional services. I can’t meet you as your therapist . . . but I could meet you as your friend, if you want to see me and talk about it.”
He scheduled me for after the last appointment of the day and waved his receptionist out the door as I entered his office.
“About Farmer Bill,” I began, when he’d settled in a chair across from the sofa where I sat.
“You came to me depressed about your urges, Ron,” he interrupted. “And you wanted relief. In our discussions of what was bothering you, I didn’t really get the feeling that you, deep down, rejected the urges. You were just trying to suppress your natural instincts. And that was what was causing your depression. It was the guilt and resulting depression you needed to be liberated from, not the urges. That, at least was my assessment, and that is the last thing I have to say in any remotely professional therapist capacity. Was I wrong, Ron?”
I chomped on that for a few minutes. I had to be honest. That’s one of the things Farmer Bill had taught me. To be honest with myself.
“No, you weren’t wrong, Dr. Shelton.”
“No, not Dr. Shelton. Hank. At this point, it needs to be your friend, Hank. And your depression? Did Farmer Bill help with that?”
“Gone,” I admitted. “Farmer Bill gave me a whole new perspective.”
“And in your perspective am I, your friend, not your therapist . . . attractive, Ron?”
ZING!
Well, I had to be honest. “No, Hank, you aren’t in the least unattractive.”
“If you’d like to just slip off those trousers, Ron, I think this would be a natural time to do a completely nonprofessional prostate exam.”