Maimed Beauty

By Mark I. Chester

Kink is where you find it. And so is beauty. But sometimes it is a hard road to travel.

Back before leather covered dicks raging and laden with metal, back before I understood that others had passions for ropes, I had a dream. Sometime in the early morning darkness, I felt myself spinning downward, being sucked into a whirling maelstrom. When I awoke, I was standing in front of the house that I grew up in.

I walked up to the door and opened it, only to reveal a giant Nubian. Her rounded muscles and glittering skin were encased by leather straps and belts that crisscrossed his monstrous physique. And then I saw them. Terrifying scarifications slashing across her face and chest, a jewel in his ear and a metal bar piercing one nipple. But it was the single cyclopsian eye in the middle of her forehead that knowingly cut right through me. I slammed the door to the house, hoping that no one had seen what was standing proudly and defiantly within.

I had always known that I was different, but sharing that difference with the world was like taking a step into the black void. You see, some people want to be indistinguishable from the crowd. They work at blending into the shadows. At being just like everyone else. While others stand out no matter what they do. Brilliant flames against a darkened sky. It's not a matter of desire. They simply have no choice.

In my teens, I read a news story about a man who was born without arms. He shaved, brushed his teeth and typed with his toes. I sliced his image from the paper. He was angelically handsome. Soft shimmering hair, framing Ricky Nelson eyes, and bare toes lightly fingering a typewriter keyboard. More than once I jerked off wondering what else he could do with his wondrous toes. I was truly taken by this vision of beauty maimed. Then I realized, that he did not see himself as maimed. He saw himself as different.

I have always been fascinated by people who are different. Men whose skin shimmers in tones from amber to dark dark chocolate. Men with piercings and tattoos. Scars or deformities. Men with legs crippled by polio. Missing a leg. An arm. Or a couple of fingers. This is a scary thing to talk about in public. Even for me. I have written about bondage and multiple personalities. Pain and intense psychological connections. But this is something else.

We are a white bread society. Homogeneity reigns. Even images of men into leather and rough sex are rigid and narrow. Their bodies are the stuff of sexual fantasy – pumped up and glistening with oil. Tightly muscled or fleshy. Two from column A and one from column B. And please, nothing unusual. No huskies. Or someone with glasses. Let alone someone without an arm or in a wheelchair. It might ruin the fantasy.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I love fantasy. Sometimes it is my stock in trade. But reality creates its own path. Real people have radical sex. And some real people have scars. Some wear glasses. And some walk with a limp or an artificial leg.

People who are different wear their pain on the outside. It's there for everyone to see. There's nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. You either curl up in a ball and fade away or you survive. It is just that simple. Survive and you discover that there's something on the other side. Self-respect. Self-worth. Self-love. Beauty radiates from the inside out.

You see, the story goes that he was a mean top. He made his bottoms beg to be dominated. Beg to have him teach them something about the world. And he knew something special about the world. He had been crippled by polio but there was a fragile beauty to his weakened leg and one nearly wasted arm. For a long time I watched him. And then one night I had to tell him that I was turned on by the eros in his convoluted walk.

You see, the story goes that he used to tie his bottoms severely. Tight and painfully. Forcing them to walk as if they had a weakened leg and nearly wasted arm. Duplicating his own labored patterns. He made them serve him. Kiss his boots. Worship his cock and balls. Lick his achingly thin leg. And sometimes when the rowdy excitement had kept him dickhard, he would have them make him dinner. And watch as they struggled in their debilitating ropes.

And what bottom could complain that it was too much. Too hard. Or too painful. "Welcome to my world," he would smile, while the tears rolled down their cheeks. For he understood that difference is what you make it.

And what do we make of differences? Whispers. Carnival sideshows. Embarrassed silences. Finger-pointing when you think that no one is looking. We don't know what to do or what to say. Frankly, we wish that they would just go away. Their losses are far too close for comfort. I mean, they're fucking blinking neon signs. They declare, reality is such an ephemeral thing. Just one careless roll of the dice and anyone can wake up with broken wings.

But there was nothing broken about Jeff; a little twisted maybe, but nothing broken. I met Jeff one night at the South of the Slot Hotel, a South of Market gay bathhouse. Tall and slender, I watched as he fistfucked a man who was on all fours. Now, I usually don't watch fisting, but there was something piston-like about his arm pumping in and out of that ass riding high in the air. When he pulled his arm out, there was no hand attached. For a second, I fantasized that his hand was still exploring, somewhere up that quivering ass.

Later we talked and Jeff told me that he had lost his hand in an accident. I never asked him how and it didn't matter. After the accident, he flipped out over his loss, that is until people started coming up to him and begging him to stick his "stump up their butts." Flip/Flop. His loss became his gain.

I later learned first hand, that Jeff also wielded his stump like a club, seriously beating ass or making tits ache and throb. And in an inspired bit of theater, he used his stump as a gag while his other hand teased and tormented whatever was within reach.

About the same time, I saw another man, born with arms that stopped short of the elbows and minus one leg (and maybe minus more). Small and tight, he did as much with two half arms as most men did with all of theirs. He would remove his prostheses and lay in the darkened hallways of the Slot, in leather vest and jock strap; underfoot. Waiting to be played with. To be literally thrown over someone's shoulders and carried away. I always wanted to suspend him in a harness and let him fly. Blindfold him and send him floating away through darkness and space. At peace. Not bound by the harsh earth and his complex physical realities.

Put a hot man in tall, supple, black leather boots and see how many mouths drop to the ground to worship them. But pull a stump and prosthesis from that same intoxicating boot and see how many worshippers disappear. Why? Both the boot and the stump can be symbols of power and strength. A black leather boot enhances the inherent power, the possibilities within us all. And a stump? It is a signal, a sign of the strength of will to survive. To overcome. A symbol of experience and endurance.

Beauty is its own reward. Sometimes handed out on a silver platter. But maimed beauty is always earned. With every rivulet of sweat. Every anguished tear. And every ounce of pain. I know.

Keloided scar tissue and graft run from my thumb and forefinger to my elbow covering 40% of my forearm. I neither loved it nor hated it. It was just there. That is until a man in tattered jeans and beard and scuffed leather hiking boots looked at my scar, wet his lips and begged to lick it.

So with the boy between my legs, one boot planted firmly against his crotch, and a hand tightly entangled in his hair, he made love to that expanse of scarred flesh. He nibbled, sucked and lovingly kissed the bumps and ridges of built up hardened tissue. Memories of pain melted into sensual pools, traced by his swirling tongue. And then my dick got hard.

We have a lot to learn from maimed beauty. Our activities are a litany that maimed beauty understands. Blindfolds and hoods take away sight. Gags take away speech. And ropes and restraints, of every shape, make and style, bind the body so that it moves only as directed or not at all. There is much to be learned from such a state of grace. Trust. Letting go. Opening doorways that were previously unknown.

It was with doorways in mind that I did it. It was audacious, but there was nothing left to do. After he spent three days and nights in bondage, I wanted to take him out to dinner, but I didn't want to break my hold on him. So I did it. Rope harness under a three piece suit. Eyes bandaged with gauze. Sequestered in a wheel chair. Taxied to a fine restaurant. A stranger in a strange place in a strange city with someone who was very strange, namely, me.

I wanted to increase his dependence on me. I wanted him to need me. To be his only light in a world of darkness. So I read him the menu, and later fed him his dinner, bite by bite. An indirectly sexual trip. But hard-on city. And in closing doorways that he was accustomed to, he opened doorways that he didn't even know existed.

And there are others. Like Steve, who called me from Los Angeles, to tell me of a full body brace of gleaming metal that he has had made for himself. And at 6'3", special boots that make him 6'6" tall – designed to make him look like one foot is shorter than the other. He is strong and muscular, and yet maimed beauty has a strong pull on him. And others, who purposely court maimed beauty, intentionally altering and changing their bodies.

Like John. Somehow he found my number and called on the phone. He said, "I've got something to show you, something that you should see." Tall, slender man. He pulls out his dick and shows me that the head has been cut down the middle, leaving him with two disconnected segments. He pulls it apart so I can look right down into the urethra. My panic buttons are buried deep. But this comes very close. His turn-ons? An electric drill in his urethra, hitting his cock with a hammer and having his cock slammed in a car door.

And then there is Fakir Musafar, with piercings in his nipples, large enough to stick your finger through. He is a shaman, a born-again Indian, practicing Indian rituals from long ago. So in search of the Great White Spirit he travels to still undeveloped areas, finds a special cottonwood tree, pierces the skin on his chest shallowly with a needle, connects himself to the tree and then dances. He dances, pulling back away from the tree, until hours later, with sage for a head band and an eagle feather in his teeth, the skin breaks open and he is set free.

But that's not all. Through deep piercings behind his pectoral muscles, he is attached to a branch on another tree and that branch is slowly wound around and around until he is hanging off the ground by the piercings in his chest. The Mandan Indian O-Kee-Pa Ceremony, first done in a former life, now done many years later. He floats off through his own uncharted doorways. As far as his mind can take him.

Sexuality is such a dark and mysterious thing. But there is a thread that connects us all, one to the next. Maimed beauty travels the same path as beauty, although it can travel. And me? I wait for the night when I will meet my Nubian once again. To open the door for all the world to see.

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