Daddies

Lamb ♣ 23 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction | ALL EPISODES now available in audio

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ALL EPISODES are now available in AUDIO - Start from the beginning.

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We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01

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Daddies

♣ ♣ ♣ 23 ♣ ♣ ♣

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After I got the notice from Wolcott Academy that Lamb had died—yes, I remember now it was February, 2004—and I had no luck trying to get in touch with his parents, I decided I better let his friends know what happened. There were surprisingly few calls to be made. His disappearing act had severed ties pretty neatly at The Club, the bar where he worked, and it had a new owner anyway.

His old roommates were nice, and seemed genuinely sorry to hear it, but only one showed up to the memorial gathering I arranged at my house on the weekend Lindsey was going to be in town. She was seven months pregnant and coming to visit her parents. We decided to do it on a Saturday afternoon.

Fugie had a hysterical crying fit on the phone when I called him, which sounded genuine enough, I suppose, but I had to draw the line when he started pressing for all sorts of special rituals he wanted to plan for the gathering. He wanted me to call Wolcott (again) and get a forwarding address or phone number for Lamb’s parents so we could determine the exact day he had died. He was on a Buddhist kick, and planned to invite some monks to chant over an altar he wanted to put together in my house—it was important that it be done on the seventh day—and he wanted everyone to wear white and I don’t know what all.

I told him I wasn’t chasing down Lamb’s parents—and no, I wouldn’t give him the number to the Wolcott alumni office so he could do it, fuck sake, I’d already tried. It had definitely been far longer than seven days by that time, probably a few months. No random Buddhist monks, thank you, but I did ultimately let him put together a little altar on a table with some pictures, candles and incense. Of course he went overboard and had about twenty sticks of incense going at one time. I had to put a stop to it and open up all the windows because everyone was choking and he kept shushing us while he was trying to chant. 

In the end there were only about ten of us, including Lindsey’s mom, Hazel, who had met Lamb a few times and said she always wished Lindsey might have married him. Lindsey didn’t entirely disagree, but she was no dummy and had opted to take a sisterly approach with him from the get-go.

We did a little candle pass and said a few words each—three guesses who went on and on for twenty minutes—and then after a toast to his memory, people started to drift out when the whole chanting/incense ridiculousness started, despite Fugie yelling that no one could leave until he’d finished. Finally, I had to push him out the door under the pretense that Lindsey wasn’t feeling well and needed to lie down for some peace and quiet. Once everyone else was gone and her mom was in the kitchen washing up, we had a chance to talk for a bit.

“Well, you know, I didn’t want to say anything after he took off because it wasn’t my business to tell tales,” she said. “But now that he’s gone, it won’t hurt for you to know the truth.”

I always thought Lindsey was this incredibly sweet but tough chick, no nonsense, but also she knew how to have fun—she is the one who dragged him up to Burning Man, after all. She was kinda gorgeous with this dark auburn hair and cute little bangs, a smattering of freckles, just a little lipstick-and-go kind of gal. Her mom brought us two mugs of chamomile tea; we sat on the sofa and she told me what had happened during Lamb’s last days in San Francisco.

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If you spend any amount of time on the party and dating scene in SF, eventually you are going to come face to face with someone offering you crystal meth. Cocaine was also big with the restaurant crowd and bartenders. Apparently Lamb had been dabbling with some of his coworkers, and it was just a hop, skip and a jump from coke to crystal, which was generally cheaper and more powerful, or so I’m told. Thank God I never got into it. I had a friend early on in our party days that I had a big crush on and lent some money very stupidly, and it turned out he was already caught up in a pretty bad meth addiction and I never saw the money again, or him.

It’s always good to have a cautionary tale before you even get going with something like that. I’m sure I told Lamb about it, and I think it might have also warned him off it at first, but that might also be why he never talked to me about it once he started using. As I dropped away from partying and started focusing more on my career and normal stuff, Lamb was inching his way down the white brick road. Maybe it’s hard to resist when it’s front and center all the time. 

The Club had a reputation for being edgy—there was a backroom, and always at least one naked guy hanging out on full display—so it attracted a certain element, the PNP (party and play) crowd, which basically means let’s get high as fuck and have freaky sex. I suppose I should be more surprised that it took so long for Lamb to get sucked into all that than that he did.

According to Lindsey, Lamb was at a low ebb right around the time I left for Austin. He got dumped again, and he’d been depressed when he hooked up with this older couple who had a big house on Potrero Hill. Apparently they were both really good looking, and had successful careers as attorneys; the older one was retired, but the younger one was still practicing. They took a shine to Lamb and invited him up to their house one night, sort of dazzled him with their sex appeal and glamorous views, and they introduced him to smoking meth, which is even more messed up than crack and sort of the next step if you’re into no-holds-barred sex parties.

“Lamb’s not my only gay friend who got twisted up in that mess,” Lindsey said. “My one friend told me some hair-raising stories after he got clean. He was shooting up by the end, and he still goes to NA meetings every single day.”

Weed, alcohol, meth, Special K, and GHB —at least those are the ones Lamb told Lindsey about when she visited him in rehab. I told her I was surprised she let him sublet her place, knowing what was going on, and she said she initially said no but that she changed her mind when he mentioned that I was going to share the sublet with him and she knew how responsible I was.

Anyway, she said these guys were really into the Daddy/boy thing, and that they loved the idea of sharing Lamb as their own personal sex toy. They collared him, which is that little chain with a padlock you see around these guys’ necks sometimes, and it basically meant he was their property and they could do whatever they wanted with him. They called themselves a throuple, and wanted Lamb to move in with them. They had a full-on dungeon in their basement with the works—St. Andrews cross, restraints, sling, leather, floggers and all that.

Within just a couple months, Lamb was spending all his time with them, and they were having these wild parties with friends coming over with their boys and slaves too, and some puppies, which are basically these guys who wear dog masks and leather puppy paws and tails which I won’t tell you how they wear those. If they misbehaved (usually on purpose) they would get put into the crate as a punishment, this big metal cage, and forced to do humiliating things in order to get out.

And that’s where things went really wrong. They’d all been up for two days partying, and at some point Lamb blacked out, and when he woke up, he was locked in the crate in the pitch black basement alone and he completely freaked out. He started screaming and banging around, like a caged animal obviously, and he made such a ruckus that the neighbors heard and called the cops. By the time the Daddies got him out and calmed down, the police were already at the front door, and only by sheer bravado these two attorneys were able to talk themselves out of a search of their house which would have turned up who knows what kinds of drugs and paraphernalia.

Well they were pissed as hell after the cops left, but who could blame poor Lamb for being freaked after what happened to him in high school? They kicked him out, said they needed a boy that could handle himself, and that was that.

But that wasn’t that—Lamb was completely strung out, hadn’t been to his job in a while, and had been using heavily with them for several months. A few nights later, he got black out drunk and snuck into their house through an unlocked window to steal their drugs. The older one walked in on Lamb rifling through their stash, and a struggle ensued.

I guess the guy thought that because Lamb had been their boy and he had been playing submissive all that time that he could push him around and get him out of the house. But by virtue of six-feet-six inches, two-hundred-fifty-plus pounds, and enough vodka to anesthetize an elephant, Lamb beat him up pretty badly, not really even knowing what he was doing, like three black eyes and a dislocated funny bone—I joke, but it really was serious. So much for playing big bad Daddy to Lamb in a blackout.

It’s good that he didn’t get away with the drugs because they had a sizable stash that could have landed him in big trouble. As it was, they didn’t want to get the police involved and risk more scrutiny on their activities so they let it drop, but gave Lamb a good scare with threats about what would happen if he ever came near them again.

When he finally snapped out of it the next day and pieced together what he had done, it scared the shit out of him. He called his parents and told them he needed help, and they found him an in-patient rehab center up in wine country, which I always thought was totally cockamamie, but they supposedly have a good success rate, all things considered.

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Episode 24: To Lamb - The Final Episode

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