Something is wrong. From moment David* hops into my car, I can tell that something has happened—something extreme. He doesn’t seem depressed or upset, just…affected. I’ve never seen him this quiet. He’s my best friend, and I’m actually having to force small talk. “So, how’s it going?” I ask.

His usually jaunty favorite response falls flat from his lips: “Stellar.”

My mind races during the awkward drive to 24-Hour Fitness. Typically, I’m trying to shut him up; today, he might as well be made of stone.

“So, is everything all right?” I ask as we pull into the parking lot.

“Great. Everything’s just great.” But I knew it was anything but.

In the locker room, things go from bad to worse. Retrieving a pair of sweats from his gym bag, David says, “I’ll be back,” then retreats to change in a nearby stall. Something is VERY wrong. No way this is the same guy who can’t walk past a mirror without checking himself out’ the same guy who boldly struts around naked at the drop of a towel. What the hell has happened?

“Would you tell me already?” I shout, frustrated.

“I’ll tell you on the Stairmaster,” he sighs.

Apparently, David had taken a new part-time job. A month ago, he’d been hired by a man to have sex with his wife while he watched. Having difficulty making ends meet, my friend welcomed the three hundred dollars a week with open arms. “He had a thing for seeing black dudes fuck his wife,” David recalls. “I don’t get it, but it worked for me.” He was being paid to have sex with a woman who was actually attractive, living the fantasy of most straight men. “I thought I’d struck gold,” he says, laughing at his attitude in retrospect.

“The first time was really cool. The guy’s wife was hot, and all he wanted to do was jack off while watching us get down.” Concentrating on the task at hand, David pretended the husband wasn’t in the room. However, by the second session, the cuckold became impossible to ignore. “He got more comfortable… He wanted to ‘clean me up,’ ” David told me.

Drawing a blank, I’d never felt more naïve. “What do mean, ‘clean you up’?” I asked. (I honestly imagined a washcloth and soap.)

Struggling to find the right words, David explained: “Pretty much, right after I was done, he wanted to go down on me. Right after fucking her bareback.”

I almost fell off the Stairmaster!

No wonder he’d been acting strange. “That’s a lot to get over,” I sympathized. “No wonder you’ve been acting strange.”

But from his ironic, wistful expression, I could see that there was more to the story.

A little history on my friend Dave. Ever since he’d been discharged from the Marines, he’d been having a tough time. A lot of the skills he’d learned in the military simply didn’t translate to civilian life. What happens to men that are unemployed and beautiful? Many slowly become hustlers. David did a couple of solo films, but this was his first outing as a sex worker. Well-built and well hung, it seemed like an appropriate job change.

“I felt like I was on the set all over again,” he recalls. “The husband started to direct me. ‘Fuck her missionary! Fuck her doggy-style!’ He was totally getting on my nerves!”

From what I’ve been able to gather on the kink of cuckolding is that, normally, the husband is submissive and the wife is dominant. I saw a film once, where the wife kept telling her lover how much better he was than her husband, noting how much bigger he was as her husband watched. David’s story blew my understanding wide open.

A text message flashes on his cell: “Wanna make double? $600 = Two wives?” Instantly, David’s head fills with what he could do with six hundred dollars: Furniture. A laptop. Pay a security deposit on an apartment. The idea of having his own place gives him an erection.

“Which room?” he texts back.

The answer is immediate: “807.”

Arriving at the hotel room, he can smell the 420 from the hallway. Walking in, the newcomer squeals, “Is this him?”

Both women look as if they’ve come off the same soccer mom assembly line—one blonde, one a redhead. Keeping his eyes on the new meat taking off her top, David manages to shake the husbands’ hands without looking at them.

The redhead has so much energy. “Let’s get a look him!” she chirps. Taking his hand, she directs him to stand up on one of the full sized beds. Unbuttoning his shirt, she gropes his pecs, “We gotta a strong one!” she leers, rushing to take off his shirt.

Naked save for a neon pink thong, the blonde joins in, unbuckling his belt. “I told you,” she gushes, “he’s a BIG black man!”

Pulling down his jeans and underwear simultaneously, the blonde reveals David’s thick 10 inches.

“You’re right!” the redhead gasps.

“Step back,” the blonde suggests. “You have to get a good look at him.” David is left standing on the bed, his jeans twisted around his ankles. “He’s beautiful, ain’t he?”

To David, their dialogue sounds as if it’s been scripted for them by a porno studio.

“He sure is,” Red agrees. “Six pack abs, and I love the tattoos.”

“He should work out on his calves more though,” notes the blonde.

“Yeah, why is it most black guys have skinny legs?” Red wants to know.

“You’re right! They always have little chicken legs!” the blonde continues, groping his muscles and moving on to his penis, assessing the merchandise as if he weren’t even in the room. They discuss the gap in his teeth, how his ears poke out, his muscular backside. “Look at his ass,” Blondie crows. “Except for those stretch marks, it’s perfect! He has little dimples!” (Red would agree if her jaws weren’t already extended to its limits.)

All the touching has made the women horny. They start to handle David with more purpose...and lust. He feels a strange conflict between pleasure and pride. “Look how low his balls drop,” purrs the blonde, fondling them. “I love it!”

David is flooded with an ancestral memory of being paraded and priced on an auction block. Watching the witnessing husbands whisper back and forth between one another stirs contempt in his heart.

A voice from the back commands: “We don’t have all day.” And so the three-way begins….

That was the last time David responded to their text messages. Even rigorous military training and two tours in Iraq had never left him feeling so mechanical, so mindless. The emptiness was overwhelming. “It was as if I’d accidently sold my soul along with my cock,” he admits. But the deeper disappointment was that he’d surrendered himself into slavery so casually. The irony of so offhandedly subjecting himself to what his ancestors had endured with no choice was crushing. While the master-slave relationship is a key element of sadomasochism, this was an entirely different equation—one that centered on money, rather than mutual understanding and informed consent.

What erotic force is strong enough to convert jealousy to joy, shame to sexual stimulation? For the men who get off on their wives having sex with other men—or women—the arousal boils down to power and perspective. Despite David’s physical and sexual superiority, the cuckolds had power over him, and although it might appear that the wives were being used merely to act out a scene for the pleasure of their husbands, they were still in control.

Were the husbands submissive to their wives, or the other way around? Who’s to say? But no matter who was ultimately the top, David was merely an object to them—a living, breathing, humping machine with dark skin and a 10-inch cock. Still, as Eleanor Roosevelt once so sagely pointed out: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

“I let that happen,” Dave laments. “I threw away everything my forefathers went through for a lousy $600 dollars.” It’s a bitter lesson, and one piece of history he has no interest repeating. If the cuckolds come calling again, David says he won’t be home.

*Name has been changed.