THIS OLD FREAK WANTS A YOUNG THOT

Dr. Martin Reeves launched the Boston Center for Democratic Progress in 1994. An old Marxist, he had suffered a mental breakdown after the fall of Communism and from ‘89 to ‘94, he floated around New England on an extended bender. Some time in this period, he lost his tenured position at NYU. He didn’t remember if the reason they put was not teaching his classes or showing up to them drunk and/or high.

Despite being jobless and often homeless during this period. He never depended on the welfare of the state. “I would be taking it from those who needed it” he said. So instead, he depended on the welfare for friends, colleagues, and above all, what he truly “needed”, women. Reeves wasn’t handsome. He was a Norwood 4 at the age of 40, and stood at 5’6” and 120 lbs. Still, he has his old bag of tricks, which worked for his class of women. In those days, it didn’t take much more than a compliment and an old sonnet. Mid-30s and a knitted turtleneck was the type. He secretly hoped for unmarried women (he wouldn’t admit to himself that it was a cock lodging maneuver), but he found out that Married women are often lonelier than single ones.

In ‘94, he was cocklodging with an analyst or a data scientist in Boston. He couldn’t quite remember. She had been asking him for months to look for a job, and he was pretending ot look for one. Then, he saw on TV that Apartheid was ending. He rushed into the kitchen and kissed… Was it “Maggie” or “Maddie”?

Reeves, exultant after the kiss, said, “Did you hear the news? Apartheid is over!”

Trying to share in his joy, but acknowledging that she was cooking dinner for a jobless man while she paid the bills, she said, “Yay. Does this mean you’ll get a job?”

And Reeves did. A month later, he had acquired a position at BU. Though he wasn’t tenured, he was on a track for it, and within a few years was assured a tenured position. It was in this euphoria that he would he started the Center for Democratic Progress. Attaining a new hope in the mechanisms of democracy to effect change.

This hope would last only a year. In ‘95, he would pen an essay in defense of Slobodan Milosevic's “even-handed handling of ethnic tensions” amid siege from NATO. If this didn’t leave him enough on thin ice, the horrors of Srebrenica would become public months later and he would kindly be asked to resign. The Center for Democratic Progress, which was always a glorified book club, lost all its “respectability” after that, and the few fellow professors and grad students who had joined him had left. He wouldn’t ever get another job in academia.

The Center would linger on inertia, save for a few activism booms like Occupy and the Bernie Movement. The natural state of the Center was just him, and maybe 1 - 2 students who had found his pamphlet on their campus. October 7th would result in another mini renaissance for the Center. It held gatherings of around 10 people each session, and increased the frequency from once every 2 weeks to once a week. Ingrid and Clara found the group around this time and would really be the ones who made sure this boom wouldn’t fizzle out. They launched a clean website, created pamphleting schedules for volunteers, and made sure to shame people who hadn’t done the reading.

In mid-2025, Ingrid stepped back due to work responsibilities, but Clara remained a devoted member. She wasn’t a Marxist or even really a leftist, but she found a kindred spirit in Reeves. She knew what it felt like to push against the world for what she believed, what she knew was right, without any reward. She would come to every session half an hour early, help Reeves set up the chairs, and also get some time alone with him to discuss the reading. Despite its growth, they were still holding sessions in the basement of “Jane Addams Used Books”. Reeves considered moving it as the group got bigger, but knew Clara, ever the feminist and admirer of Protestant Reformers, wouldn’t have it. And either way, it was Clara who had to duck her head to get under the small door frame.

This time, the book was “Eminent Victorians” by Lytton Strachey, particularly the last biography of Gordon of Khartoum. Clara had taken the group off of 19th-century socialists, 20th-century post-colonialists, and 21st-century critical theorists. Clara knew this made the group less palatable to boilerplate DSA types. She rationalized this by saying that leftists (which again she really wasn’t) needed to diversify their points of view. That there are hundreds of leftist book clubs in America reading Marx, Fanon, and Kendi, and that they needed to pick up different perspectives to sharpen their theory. It just so happened that “those different perspectives” were usually Anglo ones.

“Have you seen that painting of Gordon? Calmly standing on top of the stairs, as if he were in a heavenly dimension above the writhing brown mass below? ” Clara said

“Yes, I have. It’s a great painting. If only the content weren’t so grotesque.”

Clara leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. “It also makes Gordon so tall? I thought he was well over 6 feet. I was surprised to find out that he was short.”

“Of course, the Victorians made him taller in their imagination than he actually was. They associated height with moral virtue.”

Clara smirked, “And our society doesn’t?”

Reaves played in “Don’t count us short guys out. Napoleon, Gordon, Stalin.” Reeves stood up and looked Clara dead in the eyes, “For better and for worse, we do always impose ourselves on the world.”

Clara chuckled, and Reeves sat back down. They enjoyed a comfortable silence as Clara got up and looked at the bookshelf in the corner. Reeves really saw Clara as a friend and, in a self-flattering way, as her mentor. Of course, it helped that she was a beautiful woman. But Reeves was no more infatuated with Clara than she suspected. She was a pleasant presence in his life, and largely because she was beautiful, but he didn’t expect or want anything else from her.

Still, a woman is still a woman, and a man, even at his advanced age, is still a man. Clara reached for the highest shelf, and her skirt rode up. A zoomer man would’ve wished for a glimpse of ass, but Reeves preferred legs and was delighted with the sight of her upper thigh. It made him recall the summer of ‘80 and old Josephine Bauer.

***

Reeves was once a stranger in a strange land, like Gordon. After finishing his PhD at Fordham, he decided to take a sabbatical and discover the “real America”. He stopped in Des Moines and in the Marriott bar. She was a few inches shorter than Clara, though thicker in the legs and wider in the hips and shoulders. Where Clara was lithe, Josie was robust. Reeves might’ve had the chance to overpower Clara in his heyday, but he was hopeless against Josie, and he knew it. Perhaps this is why he was so bold as to grab her thigh under the table. He knew he was no real threat to her.

Josie took the hint, and they made their way to his hotel room. It just seemed like a routine thing, a one-night stand in a bar. But Reeves was different; instead of waiting for her to take off her pants for her performance. He took it upon himself to take off her clothes himself. Then, pushing her on the bed, Josie gracefully pretended that his push had any effect on her. And then started eating her out. Reaves recalled that was all it took for a little guy like me to become Don Juan in those days. He still remembered the taste. The Sam Adams was still lingering, but the broad tone was toil, sweat, with undertones of Bratwurst, Sourdough, and Sauerkraut. When she reached her first climax, her thighs closed around his neck. As blood flow to his brain stopped, he forgot where he was and what he was doing. Perhaps Des Moines was all some dream. But as they say, “when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do what you know”, so he kept eating, and eventually her grip loosened. That wouldn’t save him in the second climax. This time, her thighs constricted even tighter and, not knowing when he had stopped, dropped his unconscious body when her grip loosened. Having been out for only a few seconds, Reeves, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t die.

“I’m so sorry,” Josie cried, “I didn’t notice.”

“Don’t worry about it, there are worse ways to die,” Reeves quipped

“Let me at least pay it back to you.”

It was not difficult for Reeves back then, even on a few drinks, to get hard. And he wasn’t short where it mattered. Josie then got on top, starting slowly, simply, up and down every few seconds. Then, picking up speed and ferociousness. Within a few minutes, she was going 100 BPM, and each stroke was a vicious thunderclap. To stabilize the blitzkrieg on his pelvis, she anchored her hands on his ribs, each a suffocating column. He wasn’t sure if he came, and it didn’t matter because he was sure he’d come again anyway. He was again running out of breath and on the verge of unconsciousness. Either she sensed it, or he got lucky because she slowed down before he could pass out. But instead of stopping, she slowed down the strokes, bent down, and engaged in a sloppy, continuous kiss. She went for minutes on end without a breath, after the stamina act of before. What lungs! Reeves tried to kiss back but had no idea if it had an effect.

“You were so good,” she said

Reeves was still too shaken to respond, and she kissed him on the cheek and went to bed.

It was through later rendezvous with Josie, a few weeks after having to trade in the Marriott for a Motel, that Reeves found out that she was a Middle School teacher and married. Her husband sold tractors, and so they were able to afford a McMansion in the suburbs and appeared to most as a respectable part of their community. Reeves wasn’t at all surprised; in fact, he expected that married life was inadequate for some, if not most, Midwestern Women. Nor did he have any juvenile jealousy of her husband, who Josie in passing had described as “6 '4” and “broad shoulders”. He suspected that she was hiding the details about his developing beer gut.

“He sells tractors,” she said, “and he asked me to do it, and I DID. He’s not a CEO why does he have to ‘offload responsibility’? How hard is it to sell tractors to rednecks?”

She was talking about a fetish that many powerful men are afflicted with. Of course, being femdom and pegging.

“He put on lingerie, not mine thankfully, and handed me a black strap-on dildo and asked me to fuck him with it.” She recalled further back. “I adored him early in our marriage. When he asked me for anal, I didn’t eat for three days and did enemas twice a day.” Contrasting with the reverse, “After two minutes, I couldn’t handle the smell. I pulled it out, and his ass just started spouting leaking shit. I knew it would leak through the cum towel, so I did the only thing I could do. I jammed it back in. He screamed, ‘You dumb bitch, keep fucking me’. I wouldn’t be talked to like that, so I just took the strapon off, and left with it in his ass as he raged for me to come back.”

Reeves, now cackling, said, “I hope this wasn’t the night we met.”

Josie smiled, “No, but I became a regular at the Marriott after that. A woman still has her needs, and my husband can’t fulfill them. If it makes you feel better, you have been the best of them.” Josie sat on the bed next to him. “He really just despises women. His idea of humiliation is being a woman. Being in lingerie and being fucked… I don’t feel humiliated when I’m with you.”

“I think I’m the one being fucked when I’m with you,” Reeves retorted

Josie caressed his thin, sallow face. “I’ll be gentler this time, I promise.”

Reeves told himself that he had stopped in Des Moines for so long because of the elite tail, but he couldn’t help but agonize about whether Josie really did love him. Would she ditch him when another New England Academic who ate pussy came to the provinces? Whatever she thought about him would be made irrelevant. Her husband had found the copy of D.H. Lawrence poems Reeves gifted to her with the Rumi quote “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”(He had started reading Persian poetry after reading about the Islamic Revolution). Josie came by taxi to relay the news.

“He will kill you, Martin. You need to leave.”

“Does he know where I’m staying?”

Josie looked at him, “No, but he will find out. You need to go”

“I wasn’t raised to run-” SMACK. Josie’s slap sent him to the floor.

The world was all 70s disco carpet for a few seconds. When Reeves came to his, he saw Josie pacing up and down the room like an SS officer. It took a few seconds for him to gain his bearings to comprehend anything but those marvelous thighs. Once he did, he heard her, now violently crying, “We shouldn’t have ever done this. He’ll kill you and we’ll both go to hell.”

Reeves, now mostly conscious, said, “Josie please, you’re too smart to believe in that.” He continued, “Did god care when you were miserable in your marriage? To live according to him would’ve meant sacrificing all of your happiness for what? For your husband, who’s probably cheating on you too.”

Josie marched towards him again, Reeves flinched, and Josie restrained herself. She sat on the desk chair and started weeping. She wept, head in hands, for 10 minutes, and then she left. No goodbye, not even a look back. Reeves knew her husband would come with a gun, but all he could find to defend himself was an old pipe on the bathroom floor. He then thought about how her husband would go first to the office and threaten Mr. Patel. He didn’t want Mr. Patel to sacrifice himself for him (which he thought he might), so he took out a notebook, paper, and wrote “I am Martin Reeves, I fucked your wife” and taped it outside the door. He stood atop the bed, like Gordon atop the stairs, and waited for the husband to arrive, standing there for 4 hours. At 4 AM, he was tired enough to take the chance to sleep, so he went to bed. A few days later, he found out that the husband had killed himself instead. Martin still waited for Josie, but a month passed, and no one came. Before packing his bag to go back to New York, he went to the Marriott to confirm that she was a whore, but he didn’t find her there either. As he entered LaGuardia, he pondered whether she never came back because she cared too much, or too little, about him.

He would never see the real America again.

***

“Reeves,” he heard. He opened his eyes. He was 73. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was of the age where he fell asleep in the middle of the day.

“Clara,” he hoped

“No, this is Kwame.”

Reeves tried to hide his disappointment. Kwame was the consummate activist. Black, trans, for a while, they even were a hijabi. At any critique, Kwame could launch ol’ reliable “I am a black trans non binary woman”, but also the fact that they “did the work”. And in fairness, they did. Kwame was enormously energetic, nearly as energetic as Clara. Along with seemingly always being at a soup kitchen or trans visibility event, they ran their own “mutual aid” cell (black panther cosplayers), which had about 20 members. It was part of why Kwame was willing to relent more often than not to Clara’s book recommendations; they had other coals on the fire. Still, Clara and Kwame were undoubtedly the two dominant forces in the book club, and Reeves had sensed that Kwame would pull out if Clara got her way so often. Which Reeves didn’t care much about in itself, but he knew Kwame would take half the group with them. So Reeves made sure to make the next book “Kwame-core”, knowing he’d have to fight Clara on it. He was able to make her settle for Malcolm X’s Biography after first suggesting “The Hate U Give”.

Reeves was aware that he was an anachronism and that all that he built would disappear after his death, which was fast approaching. The book club members did as well, half in pity, half in reverence, calling him “Professor Reeves”, even though he hadn’t been a professor for 30 years. Clara even jokingly called him “Father Reeves” from time to time. Kwame had, however, settled on “Reeves”.

The group got settled in, and Ingrid had even found the time to come. No one except for Clara, not even Reeves, really cared about Gordon of Khartoum, so the first 10 minutes were essentially her soliloquy about the madness at the end of empire, tinged with condemnation, but also admiration, which someone would’ve critiqued if they were listening. Then, as she was waxing, he came in, 6’3”, black, muscular. Clara recognized him instantly.

“Not this nig-” she flushed “n-nincompoop”. By the violent gaze of Kwame, the pitiful looks of Reeves and Ingrid, and the laughter of Malik, she knew what she had done. She pushed Malik out of the way and ran upstairs.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Ingrid yelled

Kwame interrupted, “villainizing a black man after he was racially abused. This is what I expected from this white supremacist group.”

Ingrid retorted, “Kwame, you don’t understand.”

“I understand good. I understand that white feelings come over black lives.”

Ingrid said again, “Kwame, this guy is Maga. He told us women shouldn’t have the right to vote in a coffee shop a few days ago. Now he’s stalking Clara.”

Malik interjected, “That word came real natural to her.”

Ingrid walked up to him, “Like you care. You were laughing right after she said it. As for her, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk about it, but I won’t let her apologize to your dumb ass.”

Malik chuckled again and said, “I’m with my brother here. Y’all are white supremacists, she called me a nigger, and I’m the villain.”

Ingrid responded, “She didn’t say the whole word. It was just a Freudian slip. I don’t know why she said it, maybe an ancestral memory.”

This got a laugh out of Malik and Reeves

Kwame said, “You all are crazy and racist. And my brother, you are lost.”

Reeves mediated, “I’m sure she’s tearing herself up, up there. She wants to apologize. I can even tell her she needs to include you two in it, looking at Kwame and the new member.”

“What’s your Name?” Reeves asked

“Malik”

Ingrid argued, “She needs to apologize, but not to Malik. He came in here to irk her, and he got what he wanted. He shouldn’t be rewarded for that.”

“It’s her decision,” Malik retorted

“You are such a piece of shit, Malik.”

Kwame, irked by Malik's misgendering them, and more aware of what he is. Didn’t push for an apology for Malik, and the group settled on an apology to the black community and Kwame. It fell to Ingrid and Reeves to fetch Clara from upstairs.

They found her clasped in the owner’s, Ms. Wilson’s, arms at the register. Clara was still crying into her chest. Reeves had cocklodged with Ms. Wilson sometime around 1997, pretending to be looking for a job. Wilson looked at Reeves contemptuously.

“Why did you do this to her?”

Reeves, understanding that Clara hadn’t articulated a sentence yet said, “Clara made a mistake. She said the N word.”

Clara sniffled, “He made me do it.” breathing heavily before continuing the thought, “He followed me, pushed me until I was broken.”

“Yes, but you still said it.”

Ingrid sighed at Reeves. She asked Miss Wilson if she had any candy in her purse. When she said no, Ingrid said, “Aren’t all old ladies supposed to have candy in their purses, for when the kids get sad?”

Reeves Responded, “Clara is 27, Ingrid.”

Ingrid quipped, “She may as well be a kid for you, Martin. I’m saying it can help”.

Clara, now in a calmer but more somber mood, wiped her face and said, “What do you two want?

Ingrid and Reeves looked at each other. Neither wanted to hand her the agreement they had come to. Reeves broke first.

“Uhhh, Clara, we all make mistakes. None of us is perfect. What matters is that we own up to them. So the group had decided that you should apologize to Kwame and the black community.

“And what about him?”

Ingrid explained, “Everyone knows he’s just an obnoxious troll. We decided you don’t have to apologize to him.”

“Why not? Is that word any less hurtful to him because he’s a troll?”

Ingrid sighed and sat down next to her. “Clara, please. And yes, it does make it less hurtful. He got exactly what he wanted out of you. It would just add insult to injury to force you to apologize to him. Anyway, they’re all down there and ready to forgive.”

Clara washed her face in the bathroom and then went back down the stairs. She stood in the middle of the chairs to give her apology

“Dear members, the black community, and Kwame X. I am deeply sorry about my lapse in speech. I will dedicate myself to educating and regulating myself so that it will not happen again. If any member of the black comm-”

“Racist BIIIITCH” Malik interrupted

This time, she didn’t take it. She jumped to Malik’s seat, and before he had a chance to react, she lunged towards his seat, her tackle flipping it backwards, and went for his throat. She held a choke for a few seconds, until Malik caught his bearings and pushed her off. Ingrid and Reeves came in to hold her back. Clara convulsed, but both were able to maintain their grip until the rest of the members came to help them.

“Get out of here, asshole,” Reeves said bluntly to Malik

Malik crossed his arms smugly. “Are you forgetting that she attacked me?” smirking, and expecting another crisis of faith in the club

No one was on his side. Kwame and Karim, a Palestinian member of the club, were the two biggest members at 6’2“and 6’1”, respectively, and well built. They both gestured to the exit for Malik. Trying to retain some power, he said

“Even you brutha” Malik laughed

Kwame hit him on the upside of the head, “ Dumbass nigga.”

Reeves ended the book club early. Clara was still shaken by the session. Ingrid was, as always, eager to lend her bed to her, which Clara, as always, accepted. Despite all that had transpired, Clara still went to bed at 10 PM. Ingrid, looking over her once again late at night, thought, “That idiot will come for her again”.