Existential Temblors

Earthquakes as a metaphor for life–the big ones and the smaller shake-ups.

It wasn’t until Hutch experienced his first earthquake that he realized it was not the sentinel event he’d always assumed. The ground under his chair gave a sudden violent jolt during Introduction to Motor Vehicle Law. Hutch shot out of his seat, ready to evacuate, his heart hammering against his rib cage.

“Had a quake,” one of the other police academy cadets announced as if there was any way others in the room might not have noticed. Around him, cadets nodded.

The general public was not running into the streets. Buildings were not falling to ruins. In short, it was apparently nothing more than a common occurrence.

“Think it was a 3.9?” Starsky spoke up, waving Hutch back to his desk.

“Betcha a four,” John Colby said calmly. “Wasn’t fifteen seconds long.”

“Let’s get back to the main points,” Officer Derrick called out, establishing order. “When you observe a speeding vehicle…”

Hutch pressed his hands against the faux wood finish of his desk, not quite ready to take notes on the correct protocol for approaching a stopped car. The quake had altered his entire worldview. This was important, and sobering — his whole belief system had changed in less than fifteen seconds, and he needed to allow the transformation to soak into his cells.

He’d always been told he could not change what happened — that life (or as his Grandfather had intoned, God,) put humans on a specific path. One was obligated to follow that road to the end.

He’d bucked that rhetoric from the get-go. He didn’t play the sports his father had encouraged; gentlemanly things such as golf and polo. He’d pursued subjects his father felt were too sissy, like music and art. Both his parents had all but forced him into the study of law. He strived to become the man they desired him to be.

As status and family dictated, he’d married the beautiful Nancy, with her long flowing hair and green eyes. She had a taste for the finer, expensive things, which Hutch tried to emulate as they settled into domestic bliss.

The role chaffed, draining the happiness out of him. After a couple semesters of law courses that bored him past all endurance, Hutch had quietly withdrawn from the university in Minnesota. To redefine his self-worth, he and his new bride moved far from the privileged enclaves of his youth to what his mother had termed the “wilds of California.”

Even Nancy had originally protested the relocation from all that she knew. However, both of them soon found that being out on their own was freeing. Yet, the old ways persisted until Hutch took the final step. Instead of majoring in Criminal Law at UCLA, he turned to the side, enrolling in the Bay City Police Academy.

It very well could cost him his wife, and had widened the rift between he and his parents. Despite those stresses, he was thriving — best in his class, learning so many new and meaningful things. Meeting new friends such as Dave Starsky and John Colby felt so right.

Until today. That quarter of a minute long shaker had turned him on his head. He’d tried to study everything about California before the move; the climate, the names of different areas across the state, and best places to buy a house. He’d feared the prospect of an earthquake along the infamous San Andreas Fault. But hell, the Los Angeles basin was packed with cities, not a one of which had ever been as badly damaged as San Francisco was in 1906. So how often did those quakes happen, anyway? Southern California was safer than Northern California, right?

His cousin had cautioned him that he could die within a year of moving to the west coast. Hutch hadn’t believed him. Friends had warned that earthquakes were deadly forces that reduced towns to rubble in moments, not at all like the tornadoes he’d been through a few times in the past.

Now, he knew the truth. Or, at least, was beginning to undergo a cosmic shift of his own. He glanced at Starsky to his left.

Starsky gave him a lopsided grin, doodling cars in the margin of his mimeographed sheet on basic traffic laws instead of jotting down the pearls of Officer Derrick’s wisdom.

“Never felt one before?” Starsky asked sotto-voce while Know-it-All William MacDougall stood to recite what he’d memorized from the assigned reading.

Hutch shook his head.

“It gets easier,” Starsky assured with a wink.

That blue-eyed flutter of dark lashes skewered him in ways he couldn’t have explained in a thousand word essay. This whole day was full of surprises.

~~**~~

In the academy cafeteria, over sandwiches with Starsky, Hutch stuck a straw in his carton of orange juice, organizing his thoughts. Still felt like he was navigating treacherous waters, casting aside all the incorrect lessons of his youth for the wisdom of his twenties. Truly, this was not the only day he felt like that — seemed like every time he turned around, there was something new to assimilate into his consciousness.

“Earlier, you said that it gets easier?” Hutch prompted. David Starsky was a revelation to him. Here was a person who seemed to roll with whatever life threw at him. From the little he’d told Hutch; he’d lived through a murdered father, being sent from New York across the US to live with relatives in Bay City, and then the horrors of Viet Nam. Many a man would have caved under such pressure. Instead, Starsky seemed able to slot each experience into the whole, accepting and appreciating that each day held wonders to enjoy. Hutch wished he had that easy nature, but he knew his own temperament required order and control. Which were in short supply lately.

“I thought earthquakes were these dangerous natural disasters — buildings fell, citizens in peril, but…”

“We all joked about it and moved on?” Starsky separated his slices of bread, staring suspiciously at the glossy squares of bologna and Swiss cheese before reassembling the sandwich and taking a bite. “It’s a fact of life around here, Hutch. You either take ‘em in stride or you’ll twist yourself up in a pretzel of anxiety as my aunt useta say.”

“So they’re far more common than I was led to believe,” Hutch said more for his own edification than to glean information.

“Babe, there’s like a quake every other day in California. Most times, we don’t feel the temblors that register below a two.” Starsky munched a handful of Lay’s Potato Chips.

Temblor. A word he’d never heard before.

He could listen to Starsky expound on quakes all day long — or, frankly, on any subject. Starsky fascinated him and Hutch wanted to spend time with him. He was fun, he was genuine, and a nice guy who actually listened to what Hutch had to say.

His first real friend in years.

Nancy didn’t count. She was his wife, but Hutch was beginning to fear he didn’t really like her as a person.

He loved her, of course. They were married. He had to love her.

“You said that quake was a 3.9?” Hutch asked to get back to the fascinating study of earthquakes. He’d heard of the Richter scale but the knowledge never had such a significant impact on him before. How had Starsky been able to tell the magnitude with such ease?

“You’ll get the hang of ’em,” Starsky promised with a grin that was even more devastating than his earlier wink. “And you’ll know when it’s the Big One, I promise.”

Hutch was pretty sure this 3.9 on the Richter scale, a measurement that was proven correct that evening in the newspaper, would forever be the Big One for him.

~~**~~

Lying on his couch, buried up to his gonads in Starsky’s ass, Hutch rocked forward for his final thrust. He was this close to orgasm.

Starsky clamped both hands around Hutch’s thighs, eye closed with an expression of anguished ecstasy. He was panting like an expectant mother, obviously close to climaxing himself.

The tectonic plate under Venice, and a great swath of Southern California, shifted with a powerful thump, rattling the glass in the windows and causing the plants suspended in macramé hangers to swing wildly.

Starsky opened his eyes in surprise, his internal muscles clenching hard around Hutch’s cock.

Hutch came with such intensity he was sure his entire body had floated up into the air while still connected to his lover. “Did you feel it?” he laughed weakly.

“The earth moved,” Starsky confirmed, squirming to get out from under Hutch’s weight. “Literally and figuratively.”

It had indeed. And life went on in spite of the capricious fluctuations of the Earth’s crust. Not the big one, just one of the many small quakes that shook California.

Hutch had changed in so many ways since his first quake. He still yearned to control what happened, and how, which was an asset as a cop, but useless as a man. He’d let go of most expectations, allowing his inner self guide the direction — which had been into Starsky’s arms. His long ago fear that he didn’t like Nancy hadn’t been a seven-year-itch only two years into their marriage. It had been truth.

He loved Starsky.

Always had, always would. Acknowledging the veracity of a love for another man had shaken his world to the core. An earthquake of mythic proportions.

“Think you broke my Richter scale,” Hutch teased, trying to pull Starsky closer for a post-coital kiss.

Starsky yelped as his last wiggle to extricate himself overbalanced them both off the couch and onto the floor. “That’s my kind of aftershock!”

FIN