Pursuing Douglas Ames

When I reached what must have been Ames’s bedchamber, I was arrested by what I saw on the walls there. It wasn’t just that they were all sketches of late teenagers stretched out and looking dazed from having just been fucked. Two of the sketches were of me at eighteen, looking as dazed and dreamy–and stretched out and vulnerable–as any of the others. I hadn’t realized at the time that he sketched the young men he fucked. One was drawn from after he had fisted me and focused on how stretched open I was afterward. Another was posed after he flogged me for the first time, in the hayloft of his stables. I reached up to touch the marks he had left on my buttocks and back. The sensation of the pain and ecstasy they had caused me at the time–the guilt and arousal I felt when I realized that the beating lifted me to higher realms of sexual pleasure–came flooding back into my mind and I had to turn and leave the room.

When I’d done the house tour, I found Soe Pyne waiting for me on the front porch, and he took me around to several ancient temples within sight of the cottage. They all were attended by berry-brown, bare-chested young men, wearing cotton sarongs at their waists. I recognized both the temples and the youths from some of the artwork in Ames’s house.

“Much of his setting subject matter is within walking distance of the house,” Soe Pyne told me as we entered a temple and a young, beautiful Burmese man came forward to greet us. He hardly need have told me, as I readily recognized this temple from paintings in the cottage’s front rooms and the young man coming forward as a subject of several artworks in the cottage’s more private rooms. “Douglas has managed to arrange for the temple attendants in the vicinity all to be in their eighteenth year,” he said. That I hadn’t figured out, and I wondered what Ames had had to pay for the local authorities to agree to that. Pagan was remote enough and Burma was under British administration, so I could understand how they would be accommodating to Ames–for a price. I was sure that the accommodated whatever else Ames wanted to do with an eighteen-year-old male.