The visit to Mister, a men’s club and massage parlor, on Pho Le Thai To, an avenue running along the western bank of Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, Vietnam’s, old quarter, had done the trick—at least in relieving for now the frustration tension of the last couple of weeks. Nothing like an expertly edged hand and blow job by a soft-mouthed sixteen-year-old master to top off a deep-tissue sports massage, although it would have been even better if he’d been fourteen—and if I’d thought to pay to top him as well. It being my first time there, I didn’t know if that would be permitted. Clearly it would have been. There was always “the next time.”

My time in Milan had groomed me to the delights of fourteen-year-old boys without the risk I would have faced in the States. The age of consent in Italy was fourteen. Alas, in Vietnam, where I had been dispatched to prove my worth to the firm before I could claim a perfect assignment to Milan, it was eighteen. The adjustment had not been easy; the need to take risks here had been both challenging and frustrating. I was happy to have found an establishment like Mister that could take the risk because, despite a half century under communism, some old Third World corruption and protection chain practices continued to thrive here. I’d been promised the services of a fourteen-year-old the next time and something beyond the limited happy ending I’d just had.

After fruitless months of trying to get an appointment with Vietnam’s minister of industry and trade on behalf of the New York and Milan-based firm, Cross and Stewart, I worked for, I’d finally been guided to someone who might get me in the minister’s door. Going through someone obliquely was, I’d found, the way of business here. It also had gotten me into the closely guarded doors of Mister.

What had made me squeamish, though, in terms of my business mission, was both the means by which I’d gotten to the oblique approach man, through a sometimes translator I met and had become vulnerable to, and the indications of onerous demands the middle man, Vinh Nguyen Bao, owner of a Vietnamese export house, for his help. What Cross and Stewart wanted was cheap Vietnamese manufacturing of high-end clothes to be sold by Cross and Stewart’s Milan and New York fashion house labels at stratospheric prices. The huge profit margin would be worth the risk the firm would be taking. The firm had decided to establish a factory of its own rather than having to rely on negotiating with local factor owners. The sometimes translator, Can Chau Huy, had suggested I talk with Vinh, but he also was who I originally met at the GC Bar near the Mister club and subsequently bedded.

Can was an expert bottom and taught me a few inventive and satisfying positions I’d never known about before, but he wasn’t fourteen—he didn’t take me all the way in arousal and completion. We parted sexually on good terms, but he obviously sensed that I wanted something different. I could get what I wanted legally in Milan. I wanted to wrap up business here and move on to a position with the firm in Italy. The runaround here had become quite frustrating.

The “GC” of the gay bar’s name represented “golden cock” and now, in a repressive country, thanks to the willingness of Can to take my cock, a young man not only knew what my company wanted and what I was willing to do off the books to get that done, but he also had my number sexually. The hour I’d twice spent with—and in—him had truly been golden, even though, at twenty-two, not much younger than I was, he was appreciably older than my fetish desired. He had been small and willowy, and ever so willing, though. Sinking my cock inside him, listening to him moan, and feeling his legs wrapped around my thighs, holding me close to him, as he moved with me in the fuck, had aided me for a short time in closing my eyes and experiencing him as being much younger.

When Can had asked me if he’d pleased me, I’d been honest with him in everything that pleased me being there except for his age. He then had led me to the door of Mister and gained entrance for me to the delights of lying with teenage boys.

For Vinh Nguyen Bao’s part, what he said in preliminary messages we exchanged before we met that he wanted to have to help me was a conduit with Cross and Stewart for marketing his celadon products and porcelain elephant side tables to the Western market. My firm’s interest in going into that business was, I was quite sure, near zero. Thus, I was faced with careful handling in both directions if I wanted to maintain my position with Cross and Stewart—and, unfortunately, it looked like I was going to have to spend months, if not years, in Hanoi to get it done.

At least, thanks to Can, I’d now found a men’s club that could provide me happy ending experiences. And it was close to my hotel, the gay-owned Artisan Boutique Hotel, on Hang Hanh, also on the western side of Hoan Kiem Lake. Because this area was a premier, albeit deep underground, gay red light district in Hanoi, I had located here rather than by the office I’d opened for my firm across the river near Gia Lam Airport, the more convenient location for an export house and textile factory.

I had entered Cross and Stewart in New York after fashion design school, which I’d covered financially by modeling clothes in the Garment District and working for an escort agency in Manhattan, where I was the one who was young and willowy and yielding to older men with money, position, and desire for young men. It wasn’t until the firm sent me to Milan to intern in the business that I learned of my own fetish for young teenage boys, far younger than I had been when older men paid to initiate and train me in sexual pleasures.

Side-deal networking corruption wasn’t the only ancient Asian practice over half century of communism in Vietnam hadn’t ended. When I left the front door of Mister and looked out over Hoan Kiem Lake across the shore-hugging avenue, I was swamped by a swarm of boys wanting to sell me something or just out right receive money from me to escape their harassment. Before learning of Mister I had just once sunk to the level of finding out whether any of the street boys of Hanoi would sell me their bodies, but I realized I would have had to scrub them hard and take extreme precautions before I felt I could risk that. I had little doubt that I could buy a fourteen-year-old boy or two here in Hanoi, despite the regime’s claims of taking care of everyone, but precisely because the regime obviously wasn’t sustaining everyone equally, most of the boys were too emaciated and downtrodden for me to enjoy covering.

The one time I had succumbed to temptation, I wasn’t able to bring myself to full use of the boy from fear of disease. I scrubbed him down and had him on the bed, with him sucking me off, but I couldn’t go farther than finger fucking him close to fisting him. He just seemed too much a boy of long-term living on the streets for me to risk cock fucking him.

There were exceptions, though. There were boys who looked cleaner, more healthy who I thought I could risk it with. And, as I was surrounded outside the door to Mister by boys who wanted to sell me pirated Chinese pop song CDs or pornographic decks of cards or postcards or boxes of condoms or blow jobs or shoe shines, my eyes went to one young teenager who was cleaner, less emaciated, showing more spirit, and was more arousing than the others. I was smiling and shaking my head at one boy insistent on polishing my shoes even though I clearly was wearing sneakers, when the more alluring, decidedly handsome and cleanly dressed teenager caught my eye. He was standing a bit away from the others as if he lived in a different world from them—the impression that he did made all of the difference to me.

“You need guide in the city, master?” he asked, flashing sparkling dark eyes at me and shrugging a lock of black hair off his handsome face. “I’m a very good guide,” he said. He was looking up at the door of Mister, discreetly set into an otherwise blank wall, and I sensed that he knew exactly what could be had in the establishment I was exiting. “You want more than a guide? You want blow job and a fuck?” he asked. He was gesturing toward an alley running back from the side of the Mister building. But the thought of leaning against a wall in a dirty alley while he knelt before me and sucked me off didn’t appeal at all. I wanted to cover him on silken sheets in a bed and watch the expression in his eyes as I rode him hard and deep.

“How old are you?” I asked, the other boys surrounding me fading a bit into the background as I concentrated on this one boy. Sensing they’d lost, the others gave ground, although they remained in the background in case my attention shifted.

“Fourteen,” he answered. “You like fourteen? Or you want someone older or younger? I have friends. I can get you what you want.”

I had just come from a happy ending hand and blow job, which had been pleasant but incomplete. I was sorely tempted. But, as clean and as arousing as he looked, he was a Hanoi street boy. There was no telling how high the risk would be.

He held up a few packets of condoms. “All sizes, master. You are a big man, I’m sure. I have all sizes. I give you a blow job and you can fuck me. Cheap. I have rubbers. All sizes. I go with you, yes? And if you want guide for the city...”

His speech trailed off as he saw me smile but nod in regretted demur. He had named a ridiculously low price, though, and as it was common to pay off these street urchins just to keep them from following you around and pulling on your sleeves, I pulled out almost that much money and handed it to him. He obviously misjudged what I meant when I did that and later I was pleased that he had.

To keep the others at bay, because I intended on walking to my nearby hotel, where I had taken a suite of rooms rather than renting a flat near the airport and the firm’s office under the mistaken impression that my business in Hanoi would be short, rather than taking a pedicab, I spread coins around to them too.

I turned and smiled to the claimed fourteen-year-old boy as I walked off and he smiled wistfully back at me. All of the way back to the Artisan Boutique Hotel, I thought about him and his small, willowy body and of the sparkling dark eyes and the black curl of hair falling on his face. I sighed at what might have been—what surely would have been in Milan, where the legal age was fourteen and there was no risk of picking up and fucking such a boy.

When I got to my suite of rooms, I pulled off the clothes sticking to my body from the heat and humidity of the Vietnamese summer, showered, and went to my bed naked. I lay there, thinking of the Hanoi street boy and finding that I had recovered from my visit to Mister and was in erection again. Handing my cock, I stroked myself and dreamed.