I was the only person invited to my cousin Rowdy's birthday party. His name isn't really Rowdy, but being big and noisy it's what he gets called. He's been that way – noisy and big – since day one. They say at birth, pissing, puking, shitting and screaming blue murder, he weighed in a few ounces shy of fifteen pounds, and the wise-ass doctor said this was the first kid he'd delivered who needed a shave.

That's my cousin Rowdy for you in a nutshell.

Actually, he's not my true cousin. His dad and mine had been bosom buddies all through their school days, even going off to Vietnam together. They were from this small town in Texas, and after the war Dad moved east and Rowdy's dad went back to the small town to be a ranch hand. For a long while they kept pretty much in touch, going on camping trips, attending one another's weddings, stuff like that. Then our moms got pregnant with Rowdy and me at about the same time, and when we were born – me first by three days – they seemed to think it cute to call us brand-new baby cousins.

After that, while I stayed an only child, Rowdy's mom kept on dropping kids on an annual basis. The family friendship gradually fizzled out over the years so I never got to actually meet Rowdy until we were twelve. Somehow, someone got the bright idea it would be neat for "the cousins" to get to know each other. With much pomp and circumstance, I was packed off to Texas, anticipating the time of my life.

I have never set foot on a farm before and looked forward to the adventure with youthful naiveté. Being small for my age, overprotected, and not having any close friends, my expectations were sky high – a farm and a friend, it was really too much.

But the minute I arrived at their rundown, ramshackle ranch my dream was shattered. It was the worst week of my life. In the heat and dust, everywhere I turned I was under attack — scrawny flapping chickens, blood-sucking flies, whining snotty-nosed kids and snapping mangy dogs. And from word go, Rowdy made it clear he hated my guts.

No sooner had I stepped up onto the rickety front porch than what seemed like a mountain of flesh rose up from a ruined wicker chaise and bore down on me

My cousin? It looked more like a bear.

"I'm Rowdy," the lumbering animal snarled, spitting a cigarette butt from between twisted lips into my face, "and I can't fuckin' stand queers." That's all I remember; I got punched hard in the stomach and went out like a light.

So how did I come to be invited, you might reasonably ask, to this mean and nasty dude's birthday party? Well, there was no what-you'd-call formal invitation, and I suppose you'd have to stretch the imagination quite a bit to call it a party.

Frankly, it was by sheer coincidence that on my way to start my first year at Texas Tech, I drove into that same small hot dusty town the day before Rowdy's birthday. Six and a half years had gone by since I was last there, getting the shit kicked out of me. Now with its fancy shopping mall and suchlike I didn't even recognize the place.

It was Rowdy, believe it or not, who recognized me.

Feeling pretty parched with all that Texas grit in my mouth, I pulled over to a diner called Harv's Hash House for a Doctor Pepper. At the counter, Texans being super-friendly types, the old geezer a few seats from me started to get chatty.

We were shooting the breeze – weather, taxes, the usual dull shit old farts need to talk about – when in came this big, hulking kid in cowboy boots, skintight jeans, and a black leather vest that didn't do much to conceal acres of sun bronzed, muscle. Except for the Houston Astros cap atop a scraggle of dirty blond curls, he could have been the bad guy in an X-rated Wild West movie.

He threw me a glance like I was covered in pox sores, sneered at the old timer, and seated himself at the far end of the place with his back to us. Putting his booted feet up on the table, he yelled, "Service here's for shit, as per fuckin' usual."

"He's a tough-looking customer," I whispered to grandpa.

"Ain't that the truth," he grimaced. "Why only last week I seen him eat a chunk of two-by-four in here to win a bet."

"That a fact?"

"Swear on the Bible," he said, thumping his fist to his heart. "But the bastards wouldn't pay up. Said he cheated."

"Cheated?" I asked. "How come?"

"Coz he put whipped cream on it first."

"Gee willickers, wasn't he pissed they didn't pay him?"

"Naw, nothing fazes him," the old fella chuckled, "He's just an itty-bitty pussycat at heart. Called for the ambulance himself he did, and rode shotgun for 'em all the way to the hospital."

"Oh," I said.

"Yup, an' when he ain't fightin', he's fuckin'."

"He is?" I asked enthusiastically, having recently developed an active interest in hunky dudes' sex habits.

"Yassir! He's hornier'n a stud bull," he said with a dirty-old-man grin.

"You don't say," I said encouragingly, hoping to hear more. But our conversation was brought abruptly to an end by a terrible ruckus at the other end of the counter.

"Jesus" Crash! "Fuckin'" Crash! "Christ" Crash! "Harv!," the stud bull in question was yelling. Each crash was the coffee pot being smashed down on the countertop. "How the fuck long does it fuckin' take to fix a ham-fuckin'-burger?"

When a weedy little Chinese guy wearing rimless glasses and a flower-print apron sprang from the kitchen, waving aloft a very large meat cleaver, I slipped two dollars onto the counter and swiveled as inconspicuously as I could off my stool. Creeping on tippy-toe I made it all the way to the door, but no further.

"Well I'll be a monkey's fuckin' uncle," the voice boomed, freezing my hand to the knob, "that there's my fuckin' fag cousin."

And that's how Rowdy and I got back together for the second time in our lives, and how I got to party with my cousin on his birthday.

"You got wheels?" he asked outside on the heat-shimmering sidewalk, feeding Harv's triple-decker cheeseburger into his big fleshy face.

"Over there," I said, pointing to my spanking new Honda Civic, a combined birthday/graduation present from my folks. I thought, "Should I make a run for it?" But I stayed put. That had never worked in the past; it only made it worse when he caught me.

"Fucking classy," he whistled through the gap between his large rabbity front teeth, spraying lettuce shreds every which way. "Follow me. I'm that rust bucket your queer-mobile's sniffin' the ass of."

"Where are we going…" But he was already on his way, climbing into a wrecked Ford flatbed with dangling felt dice, a full gun rack, and "Buy American" stickers all over it.

I followed in the wake of oily smoke and red dust, feeling guilty because I was driving an import, and apprehensive because$hellip; well, because it was Rowdy I was following. He didn't head out of town for the ranch as I'd expected. After two blocks and two right hand turns – not even slowing down for stop signs – he parked in front of a dilapidated Victorian mansion with a "Rooms for Rent" sign out front.

"Missus Grady lets me stay rent free," he explained, as we made our way up the pot-holy, weed-filled front path, "coz of all the work an' shit I do 'round the place."

It didn't look to me like anything had been done to the house or the yard since before he was born. "That's cool," I said. "You decided to strike out on your own?"

"Fuck, no! My old man fuckin' gave me the boot two years ago," he said, spitting sideways, "after I run him down with the tractor."

"Gosh, he kicked you out? When you were only sixteen? Surely on farms, accidents…"

"Weren't no fuckin' accident," he said, putting his shoulder to the front door. "I was tryin' to kill the fucker."

"Oh," I said, trailing behind him into the dank gloom. We started climbing a creaky staircase. It was the house Norman Bates and his mother had lived in, I was sure of it.

But Rowdy's room was not as grim as I'd feared. Like Rowdy, it was big and noisy, but pleasantly cool and sort of homey in a cheap seedy way. An ancient air conditioner clacked and sputtered, and the Oak Ridge Boys droned from the K-Mart stereo next to a flickering TV. The odor of stale beer, tobacco, and unwashed socks all combined to make the place feel lived-in, even friendly.

With no furniture save for a king-sized waterbed and the jerry -built shelf that served as his entertainment center, Rowdy's room had an aura of comfortable chaos. Clothes that weren't on the floor were strung on nails hammered randomly into the imitation wood paneling. Empty beer and Coke cans were strewn here and there on the burnt orange shag carpet. Crusty potato chip shards, peanut shells, Cheerios, and other things less identifiable crunched underfoot. Scattered around the bed were piles of comic books, porn mags and assorted underwear of both the male and female variety.

I felt a flooding sense of relief, something akin to joy; maybe my cousin was a member of the human race after all.

"So, runt, howdya like my pit?" Rowdy asked, putting a hand on my shoulder, a smile broadening across his face.

I was flabbergasted. This was the first time I'd ever seen him smile And "runt," was something I'd forgotten; it was what he'd called me back when we were twelve. Now he seemed to be saying it with affection. "It's&hellp; it's pretty wonderful," I told him. And I meant it. I had the sudden urge to hug him and say, "And so are you." But I didn't; that was probably a quick way to get killed.

"Mi casa, su casa," he said, still smiling hugely. "So sit the fuck down."

I sat warily on the edge of the bed.

"Hang on, runt, an' I'll get us some cool brews." With that, Rowdy was out the door and thudding downstairs. I watched M*A*S*H and listened to Willy Nelson, thinking that until Rowdy smiled I hadn't even considered him good looking. His muscle packed body, was hot, sure, but not that surly face.

He returned, ripping apart a six pack of Lone Star. "Missus Grady lets me use her kitchen, but I mostly chow down at fuckin' Harv's or the Dairy Queen."

"Your landlady seems to be a generous person," I said, pulling the tab on the beer he'd rolled to me across the carpet. It fizzed up in my face.

"That's cuz I'm fuckin' generous to her," he grinned, running his hand down the front of his jeans, lewdly grabbing the bulge there. "If you catch my drift."

I laughed, taking advantage of the chance to ogle his crotch. "I hear tell you're quite the stud bull around these parts." Clearly, he was hung like one.

"I get all the nookie I need." Rowdy drained his beer, crushed the can in his fist and yanked two more out of the plastic holder. He popped both tops and slumped down beside me, offering me a foam-dribbling can. The one I had was still practically full.

"No thanks, really. I've got to be hitting the road…"

"Not today you fuckin' ain't."

I found myself with a beer in each hand. "But…"

"No fuckin' buts about it. Dontcha know what the fuck tomorrow is?"

"Well, yes. It's your birthday – mine was on Tuesday."

"Fuckin' right! I'm twenty tomorrow and we're havin' a party."

"Nineteen," I said, taking a token sip from each can.

"Whassat?"

"You'll be nineteen tomorrow, not twenty."

"Lookie here, runt," he poked a rigid finger into my chest, "don't get fuckin' smart with me else I'll punch your chickenshit head off. Around these parts I'm twenty, an' that's a plain fuckin' fact you an' me's gonna celebrate, starting as of right now."

I stayed. I drank – one can to his two or three. Not yet having acquired a taste for beer, I was soon pleasantly pie-eyed. Staying there began to seem like a good idea, especially when Rowdy stripped down to his undershorts and insisted, for coolness and comfort that I do the same. His threadbare Jockeys were stretched to the max, the outline of a huge dick and fat balls clearly visible.

I no longer felt shy about ogling.

My alcoholic haze was a new and rather agreeable experience. As well as bolstering confidence, it induced an unexpected horniness – an almost desperate need to be close to his body, now nearly naked, to touch his smooth tautly-muscled flesh.

And so, lulled by a false sense of security, and only vaguely comprehending that I was courting disaster, possibly death, I rose to my knees, unsteady, teetering, and let myself collapse into him. For a moment there was solid resistance, then slowly, like a great redwood felled, we toppled, rolling with limbs entangled to the center of the bed.

The stillness that followed must have resembled the stunned silence that followed the Gettysburg Address. Then all hell broke loose. In my fuzzy-brained condition it took me a while to realize that, while I was certainly suffering a brutal attack, the savaging of my body was of a sexual nature.

Rowdy was an animal. Not the lumbering bear from the ranch house porch, or the stud bull I'd seen today at Harv's, but a ravenous, meat-hungry wolf. A whole pack of wolves. His starved, slobbering mouth was a dozen mouths chewing every part of my body at once, slurping, sucking, gnawing at the tender flesh. It was as if I was being eaten alive, and I loved it.

It was certainly more than once or twice, but precisely how many times Rowdy's huge ever-ready dick entered me and unloaded – via mouth or butt-hole – I cannot say. When I came to, surfacing from a deep and sublime unconsciousness, it was morning: his nineteenth – I mean twentieth – birthday.

Sitting up slowly, I surveyed the scene. Rowdy, harmlessly asleep, was on his stomach at the edge of the bed, one arm and one leg draped to the floor. I let my eyes wander from the straggle of dirty-blond curls at the base of his thick neck, down his broad tapering back to the tan line where his bronzed skin changed to milk-white. Rowdy's football-shaped calves and tree trunk thighs were as pale as the full melon cheeks of his buttocks. The urge to pounce on him again was intense.

Surprisingly, I didn't feel the least bit hung over, though my asshole was sore and there was a sticky wetness there and all down my inner thighs. His Jockeys, I noticed, were in shreds by his left foot, but mine were nowhere to be seen; most likely they'd been chewed off and swallowed.

Although I had no recollection of how many loads Rowdy emptied into me, it must have been four at least. Hell, it might've been five or six. He never seemed to stop cumming. He was riding high, he said, shooting for the stars, calling me a cock-starved cunt, a prick-teasing, fancy-assed whore, the tightest, juiciest hole he'd ever been in, the primest of prime fucking. He called me names: fagboy, Missus Grady, baby, his own little runt, sweet pea, love-bunny, queer. Once he said my name; once he said, "You're the bestest and only buddy I ever had."

"My best buddy, dammit," he'd groaned as he shot in my face.

Rowdy grunted awake, shook his head, and moaned soulfully into the bedclothes, "Tell me it ain't fuckin' true" Rolling over, he looked at me like I was the first jagged scratch on his new truck, then rolled back, burying his face, moaning, "It fuckin' is true."

Time to make myself scarce, I thought, so I squirmed off the bed and climbed underpant-less into my jeans.

"What the fuck you doin'?" A raspy growl asked from the bed.

"Gotta hit the road," I laughed nervously. "Thanks for the¶hellip;ah, hospitality and…"

"Git them fuckin' things off." He was sitting up now, glaring at me. "And git yer skinny tail back 'ere." He slapped the waterbed so hard he made waves.

"I, um… I thought I'd worn out my welcome here."

"Only fuckin' things you're gonna wear out here is my dick an' your ass. Climb aboard, runt, an' give the birthday boy 'is present."

I took a deep breath, kicked off my jeans, and crawled bare-assed over to Rowdy, hoping that my "present," which was already feeling like much-used, secondhand merchandise, wouldn't wear out first.

But my fears were ungrounded. Last night's assault and battery was the warm-up, a sort of roping-the-steer, breaking-in ceremony for the Big Day itself. Rowdy had all day to make whoopee and he knew it. A big, noisy, Texas country boy he might've been, but he was no dummy. He knew about endurance and pacing yourself, about the athletics of good sex. When I rejoined him there on his birthday bed, he was more laid back, more civilized. Instead of just jumping my bones, he said, "Suck my dick, why dontcha?"

Rowdy didn't say "please," so I took it as a command, not a request. Being a well-brought-up boy who always did as he was told, I reached obligingly for his horse cock.

Rowdy's monstrous dong wasn't what you'd call elegant. Like most farm implements it was built for durability and hard work. The shaft, though broad, put me in mind of a hammer handle; the chunky blunt head I could see driving home nails. My mouth stretched wide as I sucked on it as best I could, risking a severe case of lockjaw.

Rowdy, however, was thrilled with the second-rate blow job he was getting. "Umph! Umph!" he grunted, and in a very short while grabbed my ears and mercifully pulled me off. "Damn near shot my wad," he explained. "Play with my nuts till I fuckin' cool down." Hanging in a generous sac of wrinkled, hair-prickled skin, Rowdy's balls were as full and juicy as ripe fruit. I balanced them, one cupped in each palm, and decided they were without doubt the biggest and weightiest I'd ever seen.

"Suck 'em," Rowdy suggested.

Dutifully, I slurped at the sac till it shone with saliva, then sucked one fat nut between my oval-stretched lips. It was more of a mouthful than I expected. Rolling it with my tongue, I sucked and savored for some time, ejecting it finally to take in its twin. A subsequent attempt to stuff them both into my mouth at the same time proved to be physically impossible. Though being persistent by nature, I kept on trying.

"Quit it, for fuck's sake," Rowdy complained. "Ain't nothin' more tender'n a fella's nuts." The message registered; I reluctantly let go. Rowdy, every-practical, offered an alternative: "May as well lick my bunghole while you're down there." To facilitate this operation he brought his knees to his chest and spread apart his downy ass cheeks.

All puckered up and partly hidden by gold fluffy curls, the tiny pink-skinned slit seemed much too shy and sweetly innocent to belong to my big, noisy cousin. Without being too brazen, I licked my way up one side of his hole and down the other, pasting fine hairs to pale skin. Then, being bolder, I licked up and down dead center.

Rowdy's ass lips responded to this stimulation by pulling in tightly. But when I kept prodding the pursed crack with my pointed tongue those sly little lips unclenched, pushed out, and opened up invitingly. Accepting the offer, I licked the spicy pink meat around the hole.

As Rowdy was making noises like a much-coddled house pet, I decided to see if that itty-bitty pussycat the oldtimer at Harv's said was inside him could be coaxed out for some playful frolicking and cuddlesome foreplay. Wriggling my way up through his raised legs, I laid a path of sloppy kisses along the flat plane of his belly to his broad muscular chest. Veering sharply to the right I located, kissed, nibbled and began giving suck to a big meaty nipple.

The response was immediate and violent. Instead of What's New Pussycat? I found myself in the middle of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Picking myself up off the shag carpet, I clambered back onto the bed, maintaining a respectable distance from the outraged beast until the tirade abated. It appeared that, while cock- ball- and asshole-sucking were okay pastimes for horny stud farm boys, kissing and tit-licking were strictly for faggots.

When I managed to get a word in edgeways, I defended my case. "What did you expect?" I complained. "From the moment you set eyes on me you've called me a faggot."

"So? Ain'tcha?"

"No! Yes! So what? That's not the point. Back then, the first time you called me that, I wasn't one. I wasn't anything. I didn't even know what the word meant."

"Me neither."

"You… you didn't?"

"Fuck no! It's what my old man hollered at me anytime I stepped into his line of vision. I was sixteen when I found out its meaning, an' hopped on the tractor to flatten the fucker."

"Oh, and I thought… "

"So, these days I'm pretty fuckin' fussy where I poke my pecker. Unner-stand?"

I couldn't follow his reasoning, but as he'd already poked his pecker into me several times, I wondered if I should take it as a compliment. Being unsure, I said nothing.

Rowdy scooted over to my side of the bed, his big cock bouncing, slapping his belly. It was still rock-hard and wet with my spit. "You sure growed up t'be fine-lookin;" he said, stroking my thigh the way cowboys in movies do to calm a skittish colt.

Certainly this was a compliment. Sort of. I didn't consider myself particularly good-looking. When we were kids he'd called me a runt and now at nineteen, I was five foot seven to his six two — still a runt! I was broad across the shoulders but nowhere else, a string bean on a coat hanger.

"Thanks," I said, "but my legs are skinny."

"So're a stallion's," he grinned, slippy-sliding his dribbling dick along my hip. The stroking hand had gone way up between my thighs, his fingers teasing my asshole, trying to get in. "Seein' as it's my birthday, how's about you givin' me a nice long ride?"

"You got it, cowboy," I drawled, hauling him on top of me and wrapping him up in my arms and legs like he was my birthday present.

During the course of the day, Rowdy and I went on several long rides together; he rode me like a buckin' bronco he just had to conquer. We took a lunch break at Harv's, and enjoyed a supper tray delivered bedside by the accommodating Missus Grady, who thought me "the cutest little honey-chile" she ever did see. When she offered to suck my "sweet little weenie," Rowdy got pissed off and possessive, shooed her out, and sucked it himself.

The morning after Rowdy's birthday I set out for Lubbock. I knew I'd be making this two-hour drive on a regular basis now, to be with the new buddy I'd found, the friend I'd been expecting to find when I first came to this hot dusty town.