I heard them talking in the living room of the short-term rental apartment near Long Beach that my tutor and I had been sent to when my parent’s Malibu house was threatened by a brush fire. I really wanted to go to the ranch in the Moreno Valley, but I was told that hadn’t been opened up for the seasons yet. Both of my parents--my mother and self-stepfather--had been off filming and weren’t expected back until later this week. Maybe Roger, my tutor, would be able to take me there tomorrow.

But for tonight, he’d sent me to bed early, saying he had to go out for a while and that I should be asleep before he got back.

When he came back, though, he wasn’t alone. The other man sounded like Jack, one of the ranch hands at the Moreno Valley Ranch. Roger didn’t think I knew what he and Jack were doing--he thought I was just a protected, naïve fourteen-year-old kid. But I knew what they were doing. I’d known for some time that I wanted to do it too. And I wanted it from Jack as much as I knew Roger was getting it from Jack.

Jack was a real he-man--tall and muscular. Dark. I think he had some Mexican in him. But he was all man. Except that he liked to do it with men. I was pretty sure he’d like to do it with me too. When I was at the ranch, he’d give me looks--and I’d give them back. Roger, laughing, told me I wasn’t too young to have these feelings but I was too young to actually do anything about them. The looks Jack and I exchanged were pretty much the same looks that Roger gave Jack at the ranch.

But Jack wasn’t at the ranch tonight. He was here, in the apartment hotel, with Roger in the living room. They were drinking and every once in a while they’d get quiet and I knew I could hear Roger moaning. Then they moved to Roger’s bedroom and there was more moaning. And other sounds too. There was muffled thumping against the wall. I knew they must be on the bed and making the bed move, making the headboard rub against the wall--making sex that two men made together.

I couldn’t sleep. I felt strange, sensations that I increasing was become aware were sexual arousal. I was fourteen, but I was changing. I was becoming increasingly aware of myself. I knew I could make my dick big and to throb and to come. It was big and throbbing now. And I knew I wanted to do it with men--with men, not other boys--and that I wanted men to do it to me.

I got out of my bed and went out into the hall. The door to Roger’s bedroom was only half closed. I went to it and peeked in. As I had thought, Roger and Jack were on the bed. Jack was on top of Roger, fucking him. I knew what fucking was, and I knew what it looked like. Roger thought he hid his videos well, but I’d found them and found opportunities to watch them. Both Jack and Roger were naked. Roger looked small and boyish under Jack, who was large and muscular.

I couldn’t help but watch them, doing in real life what I’d seen on the screen. It was mesmerizing. I was just in my sleeping shorts, but my dick was engorged and was jutting out of my fly. I took it in my hand without thinking, and when I pulled on it, I had pleasurable feelings and felt the juices in me rising. And then I realized that, although Jack was on top of Roger, fucking him, Jack’s face was turned to me. He was looking at me and smiling. I turned and ran back to my room, climbed in bed, and turned my face to the wall.

I went to sleep, so I don’t know how long it was before he came for me, but I woke to Jack getting in my bed with me. He was still naked, and his dick was big and hard. He’d brought a belt with him and a scarf. He gagged me with the scarf and he tied my wrists together behind my back with the belt. I didn’t struggle with him; I just lay there, watching him with big eyes, and letting him do it.

I was both scared and aroused. He wasn’t doing anything that I hadn’t long wanted to be done. I wanted a man, like Jack, to do this to me and to get over with it--this not doing it yet was overwhelming me, becoming an obsession of “get it over with.”

I’d begged Roger to do it, but he’d just laughed and said that there would be no use because we both wanted the same thing from another man--and that he’d be fired in an instant by my parents. When I threatened to tell my self-stepfather that he’d done it to me anyway if he didn’t give me what I wanted and needed, he’d laughed and said something about hypocrisy and that everyone in Hollywood was doing it. He went on to say that I was only fourteen and not everyone who was fourteen was doing it by any means. He did say he understood and that if he was still around when I was eighteen, he’d help me get it done.

What he did do, though, was that sometimes he’d come into my bedroom at night and hold me and pet me. And sometimes, holding me close, he’d hold my dick in his fist and beat me off so that the sexual tension of need flowed out of me. When he’d done that, though, he made me agree that I wouldn’t tell anyone that he’d done it. I was to pretend nothing at all had been done for me. I agreed. Both of my parents were actors. I could act innocent too if that would keep us out of trouble--and if Roger would continue to beat me off when I really needed it.

He didn’t let me beat him off, though--not yet. “Not until you’re older,” he said. I wouldn’t let me do it even though I knew he moaned for it too now and then. And when it really got bad for him, he go out and bring a guy home to beat him off--and more. Like he’d gone to the ranch and brought Jack back tonight. When I begged Roger to do more, he’d just say that we were too much alike and I was only fourteen.

But I was only fourteen now, tonight, and Jack was in bed with me now, getting it done now.

He had his face in my crack and was slobbering all over it and then he had fingers up in there while he was jacking my dick with the other hand. I was writhing under his attentions, it feeling really strange, making me really hard and wanting to come in having another guy doing it, not just myself. And it was different that Jack was doing it from when Roger did it. With Roger, I knew that was all there was going to be. But, with Jack, I knew it was going to be more. He whispered to me that it was going to be more. And the more he said he was going to do with me, to me, was enough to have me leaking and ready to blow.

I wanted him to do it, though, so I didn’t fight him. And if he’d taken the gag off and untied me, I would have lain there and taken it anyway. I had wanted this to be over and done with for some time.

If I hadn’t had the gag in, though, I know I would have screamed out from the pain and surprise of it when he stuck it in me--and Roger would have come running. There’s nothing Roger could have done to Jack about it, though. Jack was a strong, seasoned ranch hand, and Roger was just a soft teacher. But then Roger would have known. I wanted it done, but I didn’t necessarily, at fourteen, want Roger--and certainly my parents--to know I no longer was a virgin.

And I most definitely no longer was a virgin. Jack was on top of me, covering my back, and was breathing heavily in my ear. That big dick of his was inside me, moving deeper as I opened to him. It hurt like hell, but I knew that the more I let a dick inside me, the less it would hurt the next time and that there must be pleasure in it--and a satisfaction that would make me feel sexy too and to come.

I felt totally stuffed. I thought he had the world’s biggest dick. I later was to find he was just average, but I’d never been so filled and stretched before, even when I needed to take a bigger dump than my passage wanted to pass. But the thought that there was a man inside me because he couldn’t help it--that I turned him on enough to make him have to be inside me--turned me on too. All my thoughts went to that big club inside me, throbbing and moving, and his big, calloused hands moving all over my body, even though it hurt like mad, I knew I wanted to have this feeling of being wanted and having power over a man like this again and again and again.

So, I took it. I lay there and took Jack pushing his hard dick up inside me and moving it in and out and his hands feeling all over me, his murmurs of “Nice, baby, open to me, baby,” and his lips kissing me in the hollow of my throat and on my chest--him feeling up my nipples and pinching them and kissing them and all the time his dick was moving in and out inside me, until I felt the juice rising in me and couldn’t help but exploding. And then he tensed and jerked and came inside me too.

And so now I had been fucked for the first time.

He was whispering in my ear, “If you’ll be quiet, I’ll take the gag off and untie you. If yes, nod your head.”

I nodded my head. He freed me, and I just laid there looking at him with wide-open eyes and panting hard.

“You gonna be OK?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “It’s OK. I wanted it,” I said.

“That wasn’t your first time, was it?” he asked. “You’ve been flouncing around and making eyes at me, so I knew you wanted me to fuck you. Right?”

“Uh, right,” I answered. He didn’t press the question about it being the first time, so I just didn’t let him know that it was.

“We don’t have to tell anyone about this, though, do we?” he asked. “You were nice and tight, by the way. A really nice lay.”

“I won’t tell anybody if you don’t,” I said. “It hurt a little bit, but I wanted it. And I wanted it from you.”

“I thought so.” He looked pleased. “You’re a sweet kid,” he said. “I wish, well...”

“If you want to do it again,” I said, “You don’t have to tie me up or gag me. I’ll lay down and take it from you again ... now ... if you want.”

He wanted. And this time it was much more like I was thinking it would be, and I relaxed more and thus it was less painful. He turned me on my back, ran his hands inside my thighs, coaxing them open for him, and he knelt between my thighs, pushing his knees under my butt. He encircled my waist with an arm and lifted my pelvis to him, letting my torso recline back, with my weight on my shoulder blades.

He worked his dick inside me slowly and when he was in deep he started to slowly pump me. He stretched and filled me like I’d never felt before. He was more inside me than he’d been able to get the first time, because I wasn’t relaxed then. He leaned over me, touching his forehead to mine and looking intently into my eyes, saying he wanted to experience what I was through my expressions of being fucked by him.

I thought that was poetic and romantic. I hadn’t expected that from a rough ranch hand. But he was young and built and hard bodied and handsome. I ran my hands through his blond hair and didn’t hold back on letting him see that I was both taxed and being pleasured by the dick inside me, and his occasional kisses on my lips, cheeks, through, and nipples while he fucked me.

Feeling I was open to him and hearing my whimpers change to moans and sighs, he became bolder, thrusting harder and deeper. My hands went to his shoulder blades, my fingernails digging in when he thrust forward. My joining in with the rhythm that way turned him on more. He grabbed one of my butt cheeks and pulled me into to him with each thrust. Getting the message, I worked my hips with him, and we were fully into a coordinated motion in the fuck. I zoomed up into the heavens in the sensations and pain-pleasure I was getting. I wanted it to go on forever.

He fucked me and fucked me and fucked me, while I moaned and we both groaned and we both panted. He worked my dick while he fucked me. I came and then he came and then he left me and went back to Roger, who must have slept through it all, because he didn’t mention anything about it the next morning. He decided, apparently on his own, that we could go on to the ranch, so packing and checking out of the Long Beach apartment hotel occupied our thoughts and our actions.

A stud had visited me in the night and popped my male cherry. I was fourteen. I was glad it happened, though, and that second time--that convinced me I wanted more of that. But I wasn’t going to tell anyone I’d already been fucked when they fucked me too, thinking they were popping the male cherry of a boy.

“Now, don’t go barging in there, Eddie,” Roger said as we drove under the bar of the Moreno Valley ranch and were approaching the main house. “In fact, I probably should go in first.”

But I was young and hadn’t seen my parents in more than a month, and, more than that, I was on a high from being freed from my sexual anxiety and excited about the brush fire that had driven us away from the Malibu house three days before I was to come back to the ranch. So, as soon as Roger stopped the car in front of the house, I was out and racing for the door.

“Wait, Eddie,” my tutor--and primary companion and guardian--called out as I took the front steps two at a time. “They have visitors.”

And, indeed, I could see that they did. There were two automobiles in the drive, both sleek sports cars--and I remember at the time being surprised to see two of those unusual gull-winged sports coupes together like that, a silver Mercedes, which wasn’t familiar to me, and the sand-brown Bricklin I knew that costume designer who was here so much drove.

So, what happened then was in no way Roger’s fault. He was blamed for so much after that--and of much more serious failings--but this one was wholly on me. He’d had little choice but to bring me to the ranch early. We’d been everything but hauled out of the Malibu house on short notice--without even any time to telephone ahead to the Moreno Valley ranch--because of the encroaching fire. They didn’t think it would get to our house--we were in a line of beachfront houses that the L.A. fire chief would probably have called out the National Guard to save--but there was every reason to believe that the Pacific Highway would be breached by the fire in both directions, and this would have cut us off from civilization. It was quite natural that we would have come straight back to the ranch when we could. It had been Roger’s decision to spend a few nights in an apartment hotel.

And Roger had tried to stop me--to warn me off--probably knowing all too well what the two automobiles in front of the ranch house meant. If there had been more cars, he probably wouldn’t have worried.

My parents entertained pretty much nonstop when they were back in Hollywood. It was more or less expected of them. The presence of many cars would have been safer--but probably not much. Because, regardless of what Roger might have thought, I wasn’t wholly oblivious to how my parent lived, what they did--indeed what the whole, narcissistic, hedonist world of Hollywood in the late 1980s--or any other decade, for that matter--was like.

I was already half way up the stairs to the second level of the house before Roger had gotten the Chrysler wagon out of gear, so there was little he could have done. And he wasn’t the last line of defense. Rosalie, our housekeeper, met me on the stairs and put out a restraining hand.

“No, Master Eddie. Do not come up here. I have something for you in the kitchen. Come tell me why you are home early while I find you something to eat and drink. It must have been a long, slow ride through the city traffic.”

All of the time she had her hands on my arms and was trying to coax me back downstairs, she also was shushing me, imploring me to be silent. But she, herself, was speaking loudly--as if she wanted to be heard on the level above.

And of all that, the only thing I took in and heeded was the admonishment to be quiet. This I understood. My parents--my mother and stepfather--could be boisterous and have raucous friends, but I was always to be quiet and withdrawn--usually someplace else. It wasn’t that they weren’t loving parents--not that I’d have any idea what loving parents were, of course. They were just so busy and hands-off that parenting wasn’t something that came easily to their minds or figured centrally in their priorities unless there was a family magazine article in the offing.

Thus, my mother didn’t even know I was there when I entered her room and found her in her bed with Elena, the costume designer who seemed always to be around my parents somewhere. Nor did my step-dad notice I was there when I stumbled upon him and that young actor, Nathan Sands, in the room at the back of the hall that he used as a study and to memorize his movie scripts. My first thought was that he and Mr. Sands were practicing for a motion picture, but as I got a clearer picture of what they were doing--and at the age of fourteen and having just been fucked myself, I was not a backward child by any means in what one person would do with another in the heat of passion--I saw less of a possibility that they were practicing for the sort of motion pictures my parents starred in.

My parents were stars--both of them. Glittering stars at the moment in Hollywood’s firmament. They often worked together in a duet that was an automatic box office draw, though, more often of late, they also worked apart from each other. My stepfather, the swashbuckling romantic lead, Howard Hatton, held down leading men roles into his mature years by moving into the more suave roles. And my mother was the mysterious and gorgeous Jessica Landon, who was one of the most celebrated dramatic actresses of the decade--and indeed of the decade before that as well.

Howard Hatton and Jessica Landon. And, the meaningfulness of it increasingly occurring to me in later years, me, their son/stepson--probably a surprise to my mother when I arrived and somehow had to be fitted into her filming and carousing schedule and then just another burden my stepfather had to take on to acquire my mother. My name was Eddie James--my mother’s real surname. I can appreciate the irony of the three different names now--clearly delineating the largely separate lives of the three. And me being the only down-to-earth one, the one going by a legal birth name, while my parents, the ones who were supposed to be the adults, both living a separate fantasy--as separate from me as they were from each other.

And today, which marked the start of the death to my innocence, my mother was living her fantasy with a female costumer hanger-on ten years her junior while my step-dad was living his with the foremost heartthrob supporting actor of the day who was twenty years his junior. Not too much older than I was.

I wasn’t completely surprised. There had been hints and signals earlier--and there had been open sex aplenty at my parents’ almost continuous pool parties at the ranch. And the private separation of my parents in contrast to their public “can’t get enough of each other” pretense was something I fully understood.

I can’t say I was shocked by it at all. Mine had been an unusual upbringing in an unusual circumstance. Nothing that I had experienced in life instilled the sort of moral foundation that would see hedonist sex as shocking. But this was the day--my day rather than my parents’ because I tip-toed away from both trysts unseen and unheard and never mentioned my early homecoming to either of them ever--all self-denial was at an end. And this was what I marked as the beginning of death to my innocence.

Roger was standing in the foyer, running his hand over the brim of his hat and looking hangdog and devastated when I came down the stairs.

“I should not be here. I wasn’t expected,” was all I said through tight lips. I could not say more, because I was perplexed. When I had seen them, in their separate rooms and their separate embraces, something had stirred inside me--especially in the tableau in my step-dad’s study. I’m ashamed to note, now that I look back on it, that it wasn’t repulsive, just perplexing. What it had stirred inside me was an arousal, a sense of want. Even him. Even my stepfather aroused me.

“Yes,” Roger said in a low, said voice. “Perhaps we should--”

“Back into L.A., maybe. We can maybe check back into the apartment hotel or something until we were expected.”

“Yes, right. Back in the car, I guess. But I don’t think we can get in at the apartment house.”

Roger was a brick about the whole thing. We drove back toward the city, and he stopped at a motel that looked slightly on the seedy side to me.

“I thought the Belvedere,” I said as he pulled into the forecourt of the motel, which consisted of a series of early-50s style cottages in a semicircle around a small, empty concrete swimming pool in the center of a nearly grass-less square.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said tightly. “A man and a boy--here in the L.A. of the 1980s. And we wouldn’t want any place where you might be recognized and where there might be press.”

For the first time, the “big bad world” was beginning to descend on me, and I was becoming aware of the problem this was for Roger and the possible risks he was taking.

My mind started to work lickety-split, maturing and becoming more worldly wise by the second. That people “did it” was something I’d grown up with and had often seen the preliminaries for--and sometimes the act itself--as I quietly walked the perimeter of my parents’ lives. I had taken it as natural and for granted. Only now was I beginning to see how complicated and problematical it was--and how desperately I wanted to do it too.

I could see the implications of what Roger was taking responsibility for in the eyes of the desk clerk at the motel, as I sat in the car while Roger registered for a room and the clerk cast furtive, “knowing” glances through the plate glass window at me sitting in the Chrysler.

And hours later, as I watched Roger preparing for bed, having carefully gone through a ritual of making me choose one of the two lumpy-mattress twin beds and quite deliberately placing his small suitcase on the other bed, my quickened education in what was what in the world of people relating intimately with other people caught up to me. I had reached the point where I realized I was in love with my tutor, Roger Eagin--and probably had been for years. Or at least I thought of it as love at the time, only then beginning to open up to the existence of lust.

He had come into our lives when I was twelve and it had dawned on my parents that I was more than an occasional hanger-on in their entourages and that I was getting only the minimal amount of education--and thus wouldn’t be half as entertaining for their friends as I might be with better preparation. I was four, without a known stepfather, although there was speculation that Howard Hatton really was my stepfather, when the two were married. During my early years, my parents were establishing themselves as a “couple” in the cinema, churning out drama after comedy of “dashing him and clever her” movies that the public delighted in--and tucking me away somewhere in the entourage they traveled the movie studios and sets of the world with.

Apparently someone clued them into the fact that, as practical as my exposure was to their world, it didn’t provide the basics in an education that would lead to college or being celebrated as their offspring in mansion lounges. In response, they had hired Roger to be my live-in tutor.

Over the last two years, he had become so much more than my tutor. My parents were always around somewhere, no matter how vaguely their presence was to me, so Roger wasn’t, in my awareness, a parent figure for me. But he most certainly was my most constant companion, someone who had been there--focused on me as my parents weren’t--for almost as long as I could remember.

So, ultimately, it was natural for me to form an attachment to Roger and even, nothing about my life being convention, to become emotionally attached to him to the point of infatuation.

What I lacked was a compass, a sense of social barriers and limitations. I had grown up with the running joke that everyone in Hollywood was a Jew and/or queer--and there was no one in my life to suggest that there was anything questionable or wrong or limiting about that. Which, of course, there isn’t. I had seen men showing affection for men and women for women. And now, within the last few hours, I had seen how deeply that had seeped into my own family unit.

There was nothing in my upbringing that established any barriers or even second thoughts in this regard. When I saw my parents earlier in the day, I wasn’t shocked that they were having same-gender sex. What was new and shocking to me was the obvious separation--and the obvious mutual-consent separation--that existed between them.

I had no defenses to the realization--or belief, genuine or mistaken--that I loved, or, more precisely, lusted for my tutor. And there were no barriers to believing that if it was OK with my step-dad, there was no reason why it shouldn’t be OK with me.

Nothing new happened that night--well, not to any great extent. Roger shrank from me and carefully kept his distance until lights were out and we both were tossing and turning in the bed. It was weeks before he could acknowledge that the attraction was mutual. And even then nothing sexually intimate--other than an exploratory kiss and a couple of times of him stroking me off--happened between us--at least from his side--because although I soon was looking for the same satisfaction my step-dad did and Roger also sought that satisfaction, we both were looking for the same experience. We didn’t fit each other.

But I’d finally had sex with a man. I wasn’t real sure that Roger didn’t know that. Whatever, he was concerned enough not to turn me away when I entered his bed. And this time when he encased my dick in his hand and stroked me off, he permitted me to do the same with him.

As I was leaving his bed and going back to mine, Roger whispered, “We shouldn’t mention this to anyone.”

“Of course not; it didn’t happen,” I answered. As long as I was finding ways to get it, I saw no reason to upset the applecart.

The third morning after that Roger called the ranch and was told that it was just fine if we arrived there that day. My parents apparently had no idea I’d been there already, and the housekeeper didn’t tell them.

For Roger and me the end of a life was quickly approaching--and just at the time that we were awakening to each other. It all began to unravel after those three nights I spent with Roger in the motel rather than disappoint my parents’ plans by returning to the ranch early from Malibu.

The proximity of Roger to me in those three nights and the inevitability of seeing his body in the close confines of the motel room as I never had seen him before--on top of the shock of seeing both of my parents in flagrante delicto with same-sex partners and within moaning distance of each other--had opened the floodgates of feelings and desires that I had being keeping tucked inside my unconsciousness for years. It didn’t help that I kept having flashes of Jack fucking me and because that had happened because Jack had come to the apartment to fuck Roger, I couldn’t help but see Roger as in the way of my access to Jack.

I had always known that I was attracted to men--to men, not to other boys my age. And there were no mechanisms in the social makeup of my family or my greater experience--there not having been much greater experience because of the sheltered, yet “few values” life I’d led--to call me off from that direction.

But there also had been no flame, nothing to unleash what I, in my loose upbringing, hadn’t seen as any more passionate a desire than my love for chocolate chip ice cream or Lord Titan. Lord Titan was the horse my parents had bought me the year they’d bought Heaven Ranch, the Moreno Valley ranch that had been developed into a showplace by a famous and now-moldering director of early talkies--and later near porn. Such a desire not having been instilled in me as a shameful taboo, it’s power of titillation hadn’t been built up in me either.

And, more important perhaps, there had never been an opportunity to develop such an arousal.

My parents had kept me almost completely isolated, with only Roger as a man in my life. And I’m sure they didn’t realize that Roger was gay and was susceptible to understanding my own urges and dilemmas.

But that was all going to change--drastically--in the fourteenth summer of my life. And the change started to come, like the breaching of a dam, during that three-night exile with Roger following having seen my parents “in the act.”

Roger had been sublimating his feelings and desires for me for so long that he wasn’t, I’m sure, purposely trying to arouse me and move our relationship to a different, more dangerous level when he was stripped down to his sleeping pants and I first saw him leaning over the basin in the motel room’s bathroom and brushing his teeth.

There had been male skin magazines lying about our houses for years. Not having any moral compass available for such things, I had never even thought about whose they were and why they weren’t under lock and key. I suppose at the time, I subconsciously assumed they were my mothers. Now, of course, I assume they were my step-dad’s.

But Hollywood is the center of narcissism and exhibitionism. Both of my parents were self-consciously beautiful people--with beautiful bodies--and they surrounded themselves with beautiful, narcissistic people. I’d seen both in various stages of undress on the silver screen and thought nothing of it. I’d seen them in sex scenes on the screen and hadn’t been disturbed by the concept that they might have been genuine sex scenes. I accepted what they might have been doing as natural.