1. TRI
Richard Charlton Pharris Jones
In The Beginning
ou die the first day you live. And memories cease to be memorable. In life, we do
Y not remember days, we remember moments. In death, we remember the things we
tried to forget.
Somehow, I had been left in the dust of history, nothing more than a vague memory
in a high school scrapbook. It all seems very strange to me now. Tomorrow and yesterday
were days that are often confused in time. Yesterday has gone and sure it has some
patterns for me to see now.
Yesterday can be a doctor, you know. He can put on a clean, crisp smock and try to
fool you. He will try to prescribe all kinds of stuff about what you should do and how you
should feel and tell you about taking a big ‘today’ pill. He will give you a shot of guilt
and shame. I never have been able to figure out why yesterday has so many demons.
I’ve known the greatest tragedy in life. My heartbreak. And I’ve known the greatest
joy. My heartbeat. I can pinpoint the exact moment my whole world changed. And that
has set off a sequence of events that caused that world to collapse.
I know you won’t feel sorry for me. You’ll probably think I brought all this misery
upon myself. If I hadn’t been so blinded by love and haunted by disappointment, maybe I
would have made better decisions. Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting in a cold, damp, jail cell.
Maybe people wouldn’t be dead. My grandmother used to always say what you seed, you
crop.
Loneliness is a situation where you meet yourself. If we don’t have anyone to stop
our tears only sorrow can fill the vacancy of isolation. According to Robert Louis
Stevenson “The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves
and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.”
My name is Tierre Thomas Tisdale. I was born thirty-three years ago to my mother,
my closest stranger. She was twenty-four when she had me, and my father was thirty-one.
My mother barely had enough tits to feed me, and I was a preemie, which required me to
2. extend my stay two weeks after my fashionably early entrance into the world at St.
Elizabeth’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.
Whatever the cause, I know my mother should have never lain down with my father.
She always said that a little voice told her not to, but she didn’t listen. I am the result of
her having a hard head. Sex is an entirely new level of shame. This could also explain
why I am so fucked up today. Or maybe it’s why I like sucking dick now.
I thought Moms was a semi-demented woman. She had subtle ways of emotionally
torturing me. I guess my mother never fed me. I mean, look at me. I’m slender, bordering
on model anorexic. My legs are chicken thin, although I run like a mad man. At least I
used to when I was attending one of the nation’s leading private colleges for African
American men. My ass could fit in the palm of a man’s hand, and it has. I have a twenty-
seven-and-half-inch waist, which guys like to hold on to while they are fucking me.
My tiny waist is like a beacon to anonymous men and their imaginations. I could see
in their eyes when they looked at me that they were imagining what my body looked like
without any clothes on. I’m petite, standing only five-foot-five off the ground and
weighing only a hundred and forty pounds. For years, I was forced to feel ashamed of my
body, to cover it up, and fear my own sexuality.
Pretending I was perfectly normal was the lie I lived to survive and I lived it one day
at a time. I was merely a shell of my former self, going through the daily routines of
surviving, but not ever really living. Guilt and fear are awful things. When they are mixed
together, they can dull your mind so that you hardly know the world exists.
As my body developed, so did my desires. But I had also developed a false sense of
power. And in the maelstrom of sexual highs I sometimes thought I was in love with men
I didn’t even know. But I also felt a deep sense of shame, and it would set a precedent
that I would never really escape, as if each of these strangers had reached in and
permanently bent something in my heart, and twisted it to suit their own selfish and
perverted desires. I sometimes felt used or manipulated. And I accept responsibility for
my active participation. My words may seem callous and calculating, but they’re the truth
my heart speaks. I had been feeling simultaneously tainted and sexually confused, which
had me bounce into unknown beds and ricocheting out of relationships like a human
pinball. The combination of secrecy and repressed sexuality can lead to perversion.
Similarly, some people with abnormal tendencies can be drawn to one another. I think I
had always been sensually attuned to catch the lusty eyes of men. I was forever searching
for the ultimate fleshy fix, the biggest dick and the deepest orgasm; yet the jagged tear in
my heart ripped asunder.
I don’t believe that I was ever a virgin, at least not in my mind I wasn’t. My real sex
life began at age twenty-one; I guess you could say I was a late bloomer. The first time, I
can still remember, how my taut body tingled at this older man’s touch and I lusted to
feel that way again. I had an unknown hunger for something, but I didn’t understand it
then. I just knew I wanted to be near someone who would love me.
I guess I was in middle school when the school janitor showed me his custodial
office. I never imagined in my wildest fantasies that dick could be as thick as a beer can
and just as delicious. The lust in my eyes must have shown itself because he seemed to
like me in a very special way. I gave him, and some of the more popular boys in school,
and a few members of the track team, as well as another janitor, sidelong glances, and
wondered what it was that I was really after. Not just flirting, for sure. The looks that
3. passed between us in those instances torched me to my core.
I was thirteen when a fourteen-year-old classmate and I snuck off to Possum’s Creek,
a local park. I remember us walking through the trails, resting near a small pond of water,
and how I began to suck his teenage, fat dick. There was satisfaction in knowing I could
willingly make another man ejaculate. Afterward, I was always ashamed, but I could
think of nothing else. Even in school I’d look at the boys or a male teacher and downright
demand them in my nastiest dreams. I think this was the only time in my life I was ever
in complete control.
My classmate had told one of his friends about his experience with me at the park. I
was mad as a muthafucka, but that didn’t keep me from rendezvousing with this ‘friend’
in the choir room at school. That was the first time I found real satisfaction. I went
completely wild, stripping down to my Saturday Night Fever-John Travolta-bikini-
inspired underwear, and he with his pants hanging around his ankles, and my mouth
greedily swallowing his teenage manhood. We acted like animals. As soon as we had
finished, I began all over again, teasing his sensitive balls, nipping his nut sack and
kissing the tip of his dick, running my slender fingers down his lean torso and the crack
of his ass. I had him gasping little, panting breaths. I seemingly made him want me more.
I was somewhat exhausted, but the inferno burning inside of me was only quenched
for a few moments. I then lay on my back, daring him to hover himself over me. Feeling
the heat and the strength of his body against me was like a missing part of me had
returned. I drew my knees behind me so he could rock back and forth his agile and
slender hips. I took a long breath like the trained runner I was who had just finished a
marathon.
He suggested, “Let’s get out of here.” His voice crackled with nervousness and
excitement at the same time.
I looked at his rigid male nakedness, so childlike in repose now, and I told him, “Not
just yet.” After a second go-round, he came again. He lasted longer than the first time
and, finally, as he reached his climax, it seemed that a million stars burst into my throat.
At sixteen, I went to bed with a married man and my conscience almost killed me
when I thought of his five children and his wife. I wished I could die. I was so full of self-
loathing I couldn’t bear my image in the mirror. The entire ordeal was cheapened when
he offered me money to keep my mouth shut and not destroy his perfect home life.
One night I knelt by my bed and prayed a ragged, tear-clogged prayer: Lord, why am
I like this? Help me control myself. I don’t want to be like this. Help me control my
emotions.
With my smoldering physique, I am every man’s dream sexually. I have a seemingly
defenseless intoxicating body. Most of the men I have been involved with were mostly
interested in my lips and ass. They had, at one point or another, while situated in the
library, one football player and track runner, who I think resides in South Carolina now,
told their group of friends that I had DSLs: dick sucking lips. They all fantasized about
domineering me, and that was the main reason I had decided a while ago, not to get
involved with any other men who could not see past my body to the person I was on the
inside. No man has ever truly loved me. They had loved using my body for their own
sexual gratification, but they never had taken the time, or ever wanted to take the time to
get to know me enough to fall in love with me.
