Inn Leather is a men-only, leather-oriented guest house in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.  It is clothing-optional – nothing beats tanning by the pool in the buff – and each of the dozen or so rooms features a sling (and a small kitchenette).

I stayed at Inn Leather for several days in June 2001, taking a vacation break after a country-western dance hoedown and before returning to Seattle to start job hunting in earnest (something which I really should have started a month before, when I was laid off, but that’s another tale).  I stayed at Inn Leather again in March 2005, again during and after a hoedown.

One night, at about 3:30 am, I was awakened by the sound of a helicopter overhead.  Once I came fully awake, I realized that it was right overhead, and it was playing a searchlight over the compound, indeed, right outside the door to my room.  Poking my head out the door and looking around, I saw a dark figure run between two of the buildings, followed a few seconds later by two others.  Then a cop told me “Get back in your room, and lock the door.”  An escaped fugitive had jumped over the wall into the compound and they were looking for him.  After about 20 minutes, the helicopter left, but I think I must have sat on the floor under the window almost until dawn, jumping at every noise, before I could get back to sleep.

(Fantasies about cops and robbers are all well and good, but real life can scare the crap out of you.  To this day, I’m pretty sensitive to noises at night, and I get a bit paranoid when helicopters come anywhere near my house when it’s dark out.)

The rest of that trip was eventful in more pleasurable ways, such as having clothespins attached up the crack of my ass, or going to Gay Days at Disney World between two night sessions of the Rainmakers of South Florida’s watersports and fisting run at the Sawmill Campground (where I broke a sling while I was in it: picture me suddenly hanging upside-down, holding the dangling chain by one arm, while the top says “I’m almost in!  I’m almost in!”), or seeing lightning strikes and forest fires 100 yards off the highway, or driving across the Everglades in the middle of a zero-visibility rain storm, rolling into the gas station on the Seminole Reservation on fumes.