Mister Steeeeeeeed

At least the sex was good. Right?

Right?

As I stumble out into the rain and orient myself, I repeat the question again and again. Not willing to linger on the man’s doorstep, I merge into the throng of rush-hour pedestrians strolling with purpose, while I contemplate how to cleanse myself. A quick dinner? A stiff drink? Should I just head home? My brain feels dirty. It needs a scouring.

But at least the sex was good. Maybe. I suppose. Or could I be merely suffering from post-nut melancholia?

After this encounter, I don’t know what to think any more.

It had started in the man’s fourth story walk-up Hell’s Kitchen apartment, where he’d prostrated himself the moment the door closed behind us. “Ssssssteeeeeeed,” he’d murmured from the floor, as he’d nuzzled my boots. Snow boots, that is. Not the usual objects of fetishization. “What big feet you have, Mister Steeeeeeeed.” Throughout the afternoon, he’ll drawl out my screen name with deliberation. I’m never quite certain whether or not he’s somehow mocking me. “Please allow me.”

So I sit in a rickety kitchen chair in the man’s cramped two-room home and allow him to remove my boots and socks. While he’s engaged with that, I look around the abode. Even with a big window overlooking the street, it’s a dark space; he’s painted the walls black and covered them with framed photographs and the kind of mid-century amateur oil paintings one might find in the tag or estate sale of an advanced senior citizen. “How long have you lived here?” I ask.

He’s rubbing my right sole over the bristles of his chin. “Fifty years this month,” he tells me. Between broad licks, he tells me a tale of how he’d moved to New York City from Buttfuck, Indiana and stumbled into this place his first week, thanks to a classifieds ad. I’m trying to relax and ruminate about whether or not today’s children even know what a classifieds ad might be, when it strikes me: this dude and I are supposed to be the same age. Would he seriously have me believe he moved to the Big Apple and rented his first digs as a ten-year-old?

Admittedly, he might pass as my age. I guess. Kind of. In a dim and forgiving light. He’s a short and hairy fellow, his arms covered with tattoos that once might have been finely etched, though the decades have caused the ink to bleed out and blur. Good shape. But that face, if it’s supposed to be my age, is rough. Handsome, but it’s not a face worn by any but the most haggard of my contemporaries.

Fine. Whatever. I don’t mind men older than myself, but I resent the dishonesty. I’m out there, throwing myself to the wolves with my real age on display. Seems to me that other men could pay me the same courtesy. But sure. My feet feel good on the guy’s face, and while he works he’s reaching up to grope the bulge of my crotch. Yeah, so he told a white lie. It’s not going to propel me out the door.

“I want to get you naked, Mister Steed,” he whispers, clambering to his feet and extending his hand. He’s all of five-six, this furry little devil. I tower over him when I follow him through a door into a bedroom. “Gotta get you undressed,” he says, tugging at my tee. I’d already shed my winter jacket and flannel shirt in the other room; he makes short work of divesting my jeans and shorts, until I’m standing there naked, erection bobbing. Then he shoves me onto the bed, and watches me squeeze my cock while he sheds his clothing like a snake its skin. “Damn, Mister Steed. Looking good.”

I’ve told this guy my name, I’m one hundred percent convinced. I mean, I’m pretty certain. Didn’t I? No, I absolutely did, because he’d reciprocated with his, after. He’s probably forgotten it. Unless he has a fetish for calling men by their screen names. Should I remind him, or would that be too embarrassing? Should I reciprocate in kind? Nah, I’m surely not planning to call him Mister HKbubblebutt.

I’d told him in advance he could gobble on my knob as long as he liked—and he does. His technique isn’t exceptional, but it’s getting the job done, especially after I convince him not to grip it like it’s his last handhold before he falls into a bottomless canyon, and to slow down on the friction. After a while we settle into a mutually pleasurable rhythm, as he slobbers up and down my length and I reach down to savage his nipples with my fingertips. It’s a nice little positive feedback loop we’ve got going, as he reinforce each other’s good stuff by twisting or slurping in the way the other likes.

“Gotta get you in my hole, bud,” he hisses when at last he comes up for air. Saliva drips down his face; his eyes stream tears. I nod. Sniffing deeply, he climbs up and straddles me, hanging for dear life to the top of the bed frame. For the first time I notice the four-poster on which we’ve been wrestling. It’s built to survive a bombing, this bed. Hewn out of solid wood. Thing must weigh a literal ton. Old pull handles, the kind that graced the old screen door in the house where I grew up, have been spaced every twelve inches around the inner perimeter of the upper frame. Hand grips, all of them. On the posts above my head are spaced several hooks at different heights—presumably for hogtying a willing submissive.

All right, HK. Kinky little shit, I see.

I don’t get an opportunity to ask about the setup. Already he’s impaled himself on me; he’s using the handles to winch himself up and down. “Damn, Mister Steed,” he breathes. “I can see how you got your name. Hung like a horse.” That’s not how I got my name, but given the circumstances, I’m not going to commence a lecture about the UK TV spy shows I grew up on.

By this point, the whole Mister Steed business is starting to wear a little. I’m so sure I’ve told this guy how I prefer to be addressed. “You feel good, Harold,” I grunt. The timing of one of his thrusts makes me emphasize his name a little more than I intended, but hopefully it gets the point across.

“Big ol’ Mister Steed.” Nope, I guess not. “Mister Steed is gonna make babies up this pussy. Fucking me with that big ol’ Steed dick. That’s right, Mister Steed. Just lay back and let me take care of everything, Mister Steed.”

He’s really ramping up the Mister Steed thing to ridiculous proportions, but hey. How am I supposed to protest when the shit he’s doing feels great? “Is that what you want?” I growl. “You want me to knock you up good?”

“Fuck yeah.” The button I’ve pushed sends him into turbo mode. He grabs my wrists and pins them to the mattress, leaning into me and weighing me down. My dick swells to what feels like twice its usual size. I love this shit, and he notices. “Oh, damn yes. You know what I oughta do? Tie up Mister Steed to this bed. It’s built for it, you know. Get Mister Steed roped up and hog-tied down so he can’t move, while I climb on top of Li’l Steed and ride and ride and ride. Just use Mister Steed as a human dildo. Fuck. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

All I can do is nod rapidly. I’d like that very, very much. Being restrained and used that way is, in fact, the one frontier I’ve never explored, much as I’ve fantasized about it. For years I’ve been publicly opining that someone should volunteer to fulfill my fantasy—just getting it out into the universe to see if it manifests, you know? Yet, nothing. I’ve had guys tell me they’ll set it up for me, as a treat, but it’s never happened.

So yes, I’d like it very, very much. I’d love two (or more) bottoms competing to use me in a helpless state, but I’ll take a solo adventurer, no question. “Please.” I test how firmly he’s gripping me by struggling a little. Small a man as he is, he’s got a firm grasp on my wrists. Even this modicum of hindrance arouses me. The harder he presses me into the mattress, the closer I get.

“Just fuckin’ using you.” He’s in his own world now, eyes clenched shut, his cock slapping on my belly. “For my own pleasure. Big ol’ Steed dick up my guts. Digging me out. Riding Steed like a stallion.”

“Crap,” I say loudly. His fantasy aligns so directly with mine that I can’t help but get carried away. “Make that dick belong to you.”

“Mister Steed’s dick is my dick. Mine to ride. Mine to use. Mine to control.” I’m dangerously close. “I’m gonna fuckin’ own Mister Steed and his Steed meat. You coming, buddy? Come on. Shoot it in me.”

I can’t help but obey. While he pins me down, I buck and thrash and growl and let out a series of feral moans. He hasn’t exactly fulfilled my fantasy—not yet, anyway—but it’s close enough that I shudder and shake. And still the rock solid bed frame doesn’t give an inch. Is it bolted to the floor or something?

Harold lifts himself off me using a couple of the handles at the top of the frame. My cock slips out with a squelch. “All right,” he says in a matter-of-fact manner, as if we’d merely been watching TV. “Time to meet the pooch.” I’d known he’d locked away his dog, one of those smallish hybrids with a breed name that ends in -doodle, so that it wouldn’t bother us during sex. “He’s going to bark and bark, but he’s a good boy.”

I’m a little stiff and my wrists ache, but I pull myself onto one of the pillows. I can’t quite sit up yet, not after that orgasm. “Nah. Dogs like me. He won’t bark.”

My prediction is correct. Dogs adore me. The -doodle races up a little ramp I hadn’t seen before at the bed’s side, wags his tail in delight at the sight of me, then flops down, buries his nose in my armpit, and cuddles up as if we’ve been buddies for years.

Harold says, “Well, would you look at that,” and flops down on my other side.

Dog under one arm and furry man under the other, I breathe deeply and relax. That had been some wild sex. Somehow I’d completely flipped my watch around, stretchy strap and all, so that the glass face is lying against my wrist and the sensors are exposed to the air. I fix it and listen to my host make small talk.

Which is my big mistake.

Without preamble, he launches into a diatribe about the sorry state of the nation, overrun by right wing extremists. Which—fine. I don’t disagree. When you’re raised by a mom, though, who always reminded you that complaining about shit, no matter how loudly, isn’t the same as trying to fix shit, and who backed it up with grassroots organizing and running for offices and founding nonprofits, you start to recognize that griping is just useless hot air. You tune it out. So, at first, I play with the dog’s floppy ears and let Harold have his say, only half listening in my exhaustion.

But it takes a turn, because next he’s complaining about the Democratic Party. How they don’t have their shit together. How they don’t recognize the real talent in their ranks. How they keep trying to put unelectable minorities up for the Presidency, instead of good candidates. He says that no one is going to elect, and I quote, “the Blacks.”

Hackles up, I venture, “But you know, Obama was elected for two consecutive…”

Nah. He’s already on to his next topic, which has to do with a play he wrote about a Narcotics Anonymous group and its inner dynamics, and how at a read-through he received feedback that it seemed unlikely that all the members of any NA group would consist entirely of white males…which leads to a screed about the current production of Gypsy and how the casting of Black actors as actual historical figures who were white has made the show unwatchable.

I’m still game to put my money where my mouth is, though. “I saw the current production and thought it was stunning. Audra McDonald is a four-time Tony winner, and we are at enough of a cultural remove from the historical Gypsy Rose Lee figure that Gypsy, the show, can exist as its own self-contained…”

Nope. He’s already built up steam and won’t be stopping his momentum anytime soon. I start sitting up and searching for my clothes while he rants about Hamilton and how none of the Founding Fathers were people of color. I pull on my socks and undies while having to hear about how rap music is an abomination and should never have been allowed south of 125th Street. I hoist on my snow boots and coat while he’s still going on about Lin Manuel Miranda getting opportunities at the expense of people who are actually talented and good at what they do. Even when I’m letting myself out, he’s leaning against a pillar in the kitchen and beginning to froth at the mouth about Abbott Elementary being over-represented during awards season. I tug at the locks on his door and let myself out, feeling dirty and defeated.

I could have stayed. I could have stood my ground. But this old asshole didn’t want debate. He didn’t have opinions that were mildly contrarian, that he wanted to toss around with a potential friend.

No, this idiot wanted to harangue. He wanted an audience while he shouted at clouds. Maybe he wanted someone who’d nod and silently agree and occasionally throw in something like, “Yes, Audra is a talentless hack.” But you know, that someone isn’t going to be me.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m thinking, as I stomp my way down the creaky staircase, if you’ve got some opinions that sound an awful lot like those of our oppressors—like hey, genocide’s great! or LGB without the T!—or maybe if you’re just a run-of-the-mill racist old bastard, maybe consider keeping those opinions to yourself? Perhaps don’t spill them willy-nilly to the guy you’ve been riding like a rodeo clown for the past couple of hours? Maybe don’t tease a guy by stumbling upon his one unfulfilled fantasy, then dash all hopes by revealing yourself as a supervillain.

Christ.

On the other hand, maybe I’ve had a lucky break. Best to get it all out in the open, right up front, more or less. Now I don’t have to set aside time for future visits. I’ll save on transit fares. What if I’d made friends with this guy, only to find out later the ugly bigot lurking within? What if I’d invited him to drinks with friends, and he’d started spewing to them the foulness corroding his brain? I’d had a close call, but at least at this point it's easy to cut ties. I don't ever have to see the idiot again.

I’m halfway down when from above, I hear, “Hey!” I look up to see Harold hanging over the banister, staring down the well. He gives me a hearty wave and a smile, as if he hadn't noticed the huff in which I'd left. “Come back soon, _____!”

Asshole knew my name the whole time, after all.

Motherfucker.

***

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Bachelor Night

July 2023

It’s late and I’m sitting on my front porch after dark.

The porch is my warm weather retreat. A massive blue spruce obscures the left side of the house; a dogwood and liberal plantings of shrubbery block the other. A dining table where I eat all my warm weather meals occupies one end; the rest is covered with comfortable chairs and loungers. Mornings, the cats bask in what sunlight streams in from the east. Summer afternoons, I’ll sprawl across one of the cushioned recliners, Kindle in hand and cool drink on a coaster, to read for long, lazy hours. Hot nights like this, long after the sun has set and the street’s traffic dwindled to only the occasional car, the nearest streetlight is over a block away, and the neighbors have long gone to sleep. Darkness covers me like a blanket. It’s one of those rare nights I’m a bachelor, and I’m looking to connect.

You look real close, says the guy on Grindr. Only 800 feet.

That’s close all right. He’s probably up the street, past the intersection a couple of blocks away and up past the wooded area to the north. There’s a city park near my home where men cruise sometimes. Late at night, they sit in the parking lot and blink their headlights at each other, hoping someone will join them in their cars. I’m sitting on my front porch, stroking. You should stop by.

The guy’s Grindr photos are pretty attractive, actually. He seems to be in his mid-thirties and sports the build of a former college athlete; his handsome face beams in a welcoming way. He looks like one of those married, closeted dads that litter my stretch of suburbia. What’d you have in mind? he asks. Would love to suck that big dick.

I live on a very dark street, I tap out, cock swelling beneath my terrycloth shorts. Drive on down, park in front of my house, then join me on the front porch. It’s a sexy scenario, right? No one can see on my front porch during the day, much less when darkness enshrouds the neighborhood. It’s better than the park. Fewer mosquitos on a screened porch, for one thing.

It’s real dark huh. I like the sound of that. Is your wife/bf/family home and are they gonna interrupt us?

I assure him, No one’s home. I just want to keep it to the porch. You coming by?

Yeah, he says. Especially with you so close. I need to suck. Address? I give it to him. Street number, street name, zip code even. All right then.

I figure I’ve got about five minutes before he’ll pull up. A man can get a lot done in five minutes. I rush inside to rinse and spit with mouthwash, then grab a cock ring and a towel. I turn off all the lights. I shut and lock the front door behind me as I step onto the porch again—no sense in not taking precautions—and I hide my keys in a lantern on the table. Then, heart pounding with excitement, I settle down on a chair and wait.

And I wait.

And wait.

Okay, so I’m being ghosted, I guess. I check back at the time stamps of our conversation. His all right then had arrived at 11:15. It’s now 11:42. Not quite a half hour, but almost. To walk from my house to the park only takes a brisk ten minutes. I mean, if he’d found someone to blink their headlights at him immediately after we’d exchanged messages and he’d decided to climb in to that guy’s Toyota instead, fine, whatever. At least he could’ve told me. At the same time, I’m unwilling simply to hang it up: the guy’s got my address. If I go indoors and to bed and he decides to come banging at the door, it’ll cause a ruckus I’d rather avoid. So I stare at my phone a little longer, feeling tired and vexed.

It’s 11:50 when he messages. I’m at the address you gave me but it’s an apartment building and it doesn’t have a porch and all the lights are on and I don’t know what apartment you’re in.

What the actual fuck, dude.

You are not at the address I gave you, I tell him. It never occurs to me to cut my losses, to be grateful that this stranger thinks I live in some strange apartment building, But I’m angry now, and I don’t think straight when my dander is up.

He replies back with an address that’s similar to mine, but isn’t mine. The street number is correct. The one-word street name is correct. Instead of an avenue, however, he’s on a lane. I live on the avenue. And the address on the lane to which he’s navigated, I see when I quickly map it on my phone, is fourteen miles away.

Now I’m fuming. Did you not notice, I ask him with what I think is commendable restraint, that instead of driving 800 feet from the park that you were driving 14 miles?

I just kind of plugged it in to the gps and drove. I feel kind of stupid now I guess.

Kind of stupid? Kind of? I mean, sure, it’s easy to type a partial address into your phone and get the wrong location. But how obtuse does one have to be not to a difference between 800 feet and 14 miles? How dense does one have to be not to question the disparity? Do I really want to get a blow job from anyone that witless? Hey, let’s just call it a night then. No hard feelings, I say, lying about the ‘no hard feelings’ part.

It’s cool. I’m already on the way. Be there in 20.

Fuck.

Once again I’m stuck sitting on a wicker divan, legs crossed at the knee, mouth in an angry moue, staring at my phone in the dark for long, silent minutes. At last, nearly a half-hour later, I see a car pull slowly in front of the house. The motor idles a moment more. My phone buzzes with a Grindr message. Should I park in front or what.

I’ve already told the fucker to park in front, over an hour ago. Just park where you are and get the fuck up here already, asshole, I type out. Before I send, however, I deleted everything but the first five words.

This is when I get the second shock of the night. The guy heaving himself up my front walk is not an athletic man in his thirties. No, he’s a guy in his fifties or sixties who’s approaching 300 pounds. Even in the dark I can tell he no longer looks a thing like whatever twenty-year-old photos he’s using.

I’m not one of those guys with hard and fast rules about the types of men I meet. I enjoy big guys. I enjoy older dudes. What I don’t like, though, are guys who misrepresent themselves so egregiously. This guy is wheezing like he’s about to have a coronary as he hauls himself up my front steps, “Whew!” he says loudly. “Sure is dark here!”

I shush him. It’s a dark street, yes. I’d like to keep it that way, without neighbors flipping on porch lamps at his braying. “You know,” I say, trying to sound reasonable. “It’s late…”

“Yeah, sorry about the mixup. Could happen to anyone, though.”

I don’t think that’s quite true, but I let it pass. “Maybe we should just…”

Now that he’s on the porch and the door’s shut behind him, he feels free to grab at my crotch. My dick’s only half-hard, but it stiffens under the pressure. “Here’s what I came for. Any chance we can turn on the lights?”

I feel nothing but contempt for the man. “If we turn on the lights,” I point out, “Everyone will be able to see us.”

“Oh. But you said you don’t have any neighbors.”

“I never said I don’t have neighbors.” It’s true that the lots on either side of mine are empty, but I gesture to the houses across the street. “It’s obvious I have neighbors.”

“All right, all right,” the man says in the placating tones of someone who recognizes a snarling dog when he sees it. “How about we go…” He nods towards the front door.

“No.” Absolutely not.

“Guess I’ll just have to do it here, then,” he says, as if that hadn’t been the deal from the start. He lowers my pants around my ankles and kneels.

I’m in a rotten mood by now and aware that I should have sent him home before he’d maneuvered his way onto the porch, but whatever. His mouth is on my cock and it seems that letting him go at it is probably the easiest way to get rid of him. I resent the fact he’ll take away the message that he can get away with catfishing guys like me, using decades-old photos of himself on his Grindr profile. But I don’t want him making a scene. Keeping him quiet with a mouthful of my dick seems the simplest answer to all my problems.

The blowjob, though, is substandard. C minus at best. There’s too much teeth. He tries to get away with wrapping his fist around the shaft and fellating only the top couple of inches, but I’m not having any of that. I sit on the divan, spread my legs, and try to enjoy the paltry amount of pleasure he’s meting out, but ugh. I hate the fact that I’m having sex with this man just to get rid of him. My anger at last takes over.

I stand up and pull my dick from his mouth, then beat it. He thinks he’s excited me. “Yeah baby,” he whispers. “I knew you’d like my wet mouth. You gonna cum for me?” I try to ignore his talk as he clings onto my thighs. “Load up my mouth.”

I consider faking it—dark as it is, I could probably get away with some grunts and groans and then pretending I’d shot all over the porch floor—but in the end I finally shoot a load. It doesn’t feel great, but it’s a release, I guess. The seed falls into my cupped hand. I wipe it off on the towel and with both hands haul the guy to his feet. His mouth dives for mine, but I jerk back and escort him to the screen door. “Thanks buddy.”

“But…that’s it? Don’t you want to fuck my ass?”

Ugh. No. “Hope you get home safe.” I steer him through the door and put his hand on the rail, so he can navigate the steps.

“I thought we could…”

Whatever he thinks, I no longer care. I shut the screen door. He turns and huffs and puffs his way down the walk. I wait until I see his lights move away, down the dark street, before I retrieve my keys and let myself into the house.

After a shower, I plop into bed. There’s a badge on my Grindr app. I open it up to see a message from the guy. Is that really all you wanted? I was hoping we could be fuckbuddies.

I allow the message to remain unanswered. I will never be fuckbuddies with this guy. Tomorrow, I’ll fire up the app once more and hit the block button. After that, I’ll think twice, on a bachelor night, before inviting anyone for a round of anonymous dark room sex on my front porch.

Return to Room 155

“Dude. That was the best sex I’ve ever had. In my life. Ever.”

I’m not tooting my horn here, but I’ve heard the sentiment before. Often, honestly. I believe the words every time—it’s not a compliment most men toss off lightly, is it? I mean, sure. I consider the source. Sometimes I know it’s coming from an inexperienced twink who’s had maybe, what? Ten men in his hole? Or from a married guy who grants himself the luxury of having man-to-man sex once a year. I get it from guys whose weekly sex life consists of tame mutual masturbation sessions with their equally vanilla boyfriends, who’ve snuck out for a ride on the wild side. Honest to god, if I don’t hear that I’m giving someone the best sex of his life, I feel like it’s my fault for not putting in my best: after all, if you’re not giving your all when you hook up with a guy, what’s the point of fucking?

Hearing that you’ve given someone their best sexual experience—hearing it from anyone—is a huge compliment. Hearing it from a little bareback slut like this one, though? Fucking priceless.

This kid had hit me up before my journey South to visit my dad. He was cute—a bearded little Latin furball in his mid-twenties with a hairy butthole liberally photographed accommodating dicks in a Whitman’s Sampler of shades and sizes. He was friendly, attractive, and available most of the nights of my stay. I don’t usually plan extensively with guys in the weeks prior to a trip; the effort always backfires. Guys disappear, schedules change. This kid, though, seemed sincere about meeting. I gave him my phone number. He texted me on my drive down to see if I was still interested. We set a tentative date to fuck the second night of my stay.

I was mildly surprised when he actually followed through and hit me up that Tuesday evening while I was out to dinner with my dad. We still on, I hope? he wanted to know.

I’ll be back at the hotel at 9:30, I told him.

Do you have poppers?

I did not, I told him. He’d have to bring his own if he wanted those.

You have lube? What kind?

My tickle of annoyance (what, me providing the hotel room and the big dick wasn’t enough?) grew into an itch when it turned out the lube I’d brought with me—a small squeeze tube of water-based stuff, easily packable—apparently wasn’t good enough for him. There was a specific silicone-based brand he wanted, and he suggested I head to a CVS to find it. Now, admittedly, there was a 24-hour CVS a half-mile up the street and over a hill from the hotel. But it was an extra trip I’d have to make before heading back to the hotel to shower and get ready. I agreed to it, anyway. But it’ll have to be 9:45, now, I warned him.

The CVS excursion was more of an adventure than I cared to have. I couldn’t find the specific lube the kid wanted, though he’d sworn the drugstore carried it. In fact, I could only find one silicone-based lube, and another lube container had leaked all over it. When I and my sticky hands got to the front counters, a homeless and/or mentally ill man was screaming at the two female cashiers because they’d dared to ask him if he wanted to contribute a dollar for whatever the heck charitable cause for which they were raising money that week. He stopped yelling at my approach—the fact I’m six-foot-three probably had something to do with that—and scrambled to the parking lot to yell at the sky. I volunteered to stick around to wait for the police to arrive after the cashiers rang me up, as it was clear they were both uncomfortable about being there by themselves with the crazy guy on the other side of the sliding doors.

It was not, to summarize, a quick trip to the druggist. I got back to Room 155 only about a minute and a half before the Latin furball showed up. I apologized for being harried, and told him that the store hadn’t carried his preferred lube. He looked at what I’d bought instead and curled his lip, but that was the last we talked about that before fucking like dogs.

Afterward, at three in the morning, when the kid said that the sex was the best he’d ever had in his life, my opinion wasn’t that far behind. The sex had been phenomenal. It had started slow and romantic, making out and getting to know each other’s bodies. I’d propped his hips up on a pillow and gone to town eating his hole. The first fuck lasted for close to forty-five minutes as I kept driving into him in position after position, tossing him around like a furry little rag doll on the cheap hotel mattress. He’d shot spontaneously, without touching, as I bred his tight little ass. Then we kept going.

Two loads, three, four loads, before I took a break at one in the morning. Every time I banged one into him, he’d shoot. The second time he jacked onto his stomach as I pile-drove him into the headboard. The third and fourth loads, he shot again without touching—something he said he’d never before done. We talked for a while, then he climbed on me, kissed me until I was hard again, and sat down on my cock to milk out a fifth load. That’s the point when he told me he’d never had better sex.

The sixth load was unplanned; I was trying to get him up and dressed and out of there, but he was so fucking cute I couldn’t help but force him down on the mattress so he could take the last breeding of the night. He was too spent to attempt to match my donation. Finally, close to four, I managed to get him out the door. I had to take my dad to the dentist at 10, I told him. I needed at least a couple of hours of sleep.

He extracted a promise from me to meet him Wednesday night. He didn’t have to ask me twice. My dick was still three-quarters hard from having so much good ass when I crawled into bed and turned out the lights that I couldn’t wait for the upcoming day to be over.

And this is where my trouble began.

The kid’s texts that afternoon reeked of puppy love. He wanted me, he said. He needed more of my sperm. He loved my dick. He couldn’t wait to see me again. I was the best. Did I already have a boyfriend? Did I want a houseboy, LOL, because fuck, I was perfect and he needed me all the time. His chatter was all very sweet. Tired as I was, and even though I had very serious worries that maybe I’d worn out my dick the night before, I was genuinely looking forward to that night.

I was back from dinner with my dad and sitting in his living room, tapping on my phone and watching him mutter in agreement with MSNBC, when the kid texted again. I don’t have a car and don’t have any way to get to your hotel tonight.

I asked him what happened to his car. He’d had one the night before. He’d even mentioned something about stopping to get gas.

That was my work car. I only had it last night. I guess I can Uber to you.

Don’t be silly, I told him. I was going to leave my dad’s at nine-thirty again; I could make a detour and pick him up.

That would be great! I guess I could walk home after. It’s only two and a half miles.

I’ll drive you home after, too, I wrote. Okay, so now I was playing chauffeur. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but the sex had been a-fucking-mazing, and a little informal livery service didn’t seem like a bad trade. Honestly? I thought I was doing a nice thing in offering. He accepted.

It’s going to cut into our time together, though, I warned him. My dad has an early appointment in the morning and I REALLY need to get some sleep, since I didn’t have any last night. So with the driving we’ll probably only have an hour and a half for sex.

It was about nine when he finally texted again. I blinked at the message. I don’t have any poppers, he said. Sorry, I guess the sex tonight is canceled.

It was at that moment that all the good feelings I’d had about the kid, all the warm and fuzzy lingering memories, evaporated. The pickiness about the lube should’ve been the first red flag, honestly. I know some guys feel that water-based lubes get sticky and dry . . . but they can be replenished, and frankly, I’ve never had anyone complain about lube during the actual sex with me. Lube is the last thing on my mind. My dick produces plenty of lube on its own, thank you very much.

Furthermore, I’d made what I thought was a very generous offer to transport him back and forth to his place, even though I really didn’t want to, and even though it was going to cut a good half-hour out of the roughly two I could afford to spend with him. The night before, this same kid had told me I was the life-changing sex he’d never experienced in his life. Now he was giving up a second shot at the Best Sex Ever because his poppers had run dry? Fuck that noise.

All right, I texted back. Take care then.

I was in my car at nine-thirty, driving back to the hotel when the kid texted again. You can pick me up and drive me to this bookstore where they sell poppers, he said, naming the vendor’s closest intersection. I recognized the cross-streets. This place was clear across town—a half-hour drive and a bridge toll. I didn’t reply.

He texted a couple of minutes later, when I was back at the hotel. I’m dressed and ready. When are you picking me up?

After wrestling for a minute with how politely to word my baffled response, I finally stabbed out on my phone, I’m kind of confused, because earlier you told me we weren’t meeting without your poppers, so I just came back to the hotel and got in bed..

No, I still want to meet, he said.

But you literally texted me, ‘I don’t have poppers, sorry, the sex tonight is canceled.’ Maybe you can understand why I thought that the sex tonight was, you know, canceled.

I thought you were going to offer to drive us to the bookstore where I could get poppers, he wrote back. Then we could have gone to your place and had fun.

There’s all sort of things I could’ve blasted at the kid at this point. Poppers aren’t what make good sex. Everything that had happened the night before ignited because the kid and I had seriously been into each other—the romance of it, the intimacy, none of that had poured out of a tiny brown bottle.
Sure, I was tired. My lack of sleep probably contributed to my short temper. But the honest-to-god truth that still to this day makes me shake my head with disbelief is that despite the kid’s obvious ecstasy the night before, despite his delight in the best sex he’d ever had in his twenty-six years, ultimately he wanted his poppers more than he wanted me. I’d made some nice gestures in order to see more of him, and any good will I’d intended vanished when he’d basically spat on them.

You told me tonight was canceled, I finally texted back. So tonight is canceled. I’m already in bed. Good night.

Throughout the following day the kid sent me message after mopey message.

I fucked up last night.

I guess you hate me.

I guess you never want to see me again.

You’ve probably found hotter boys to fuck.

It was great meeting you. I fell hard for you, but I guess I’m a loser who fucks everything up.

Don’t worry, I’ll pick up the pieces. I always do.

I was so busy with my last day of errands for my father, though, that I didn’t get a chance to reply until late in the day. You did fuck up last night, but mistakes don’t make you a loser. If we ever meet again, I hope that meeting me will get a higher priority over hunting for poppers.

He immediately sent back a hundred excuses. He has panic attacks. He suffers from anxiety. He thought I wouldn’t mind driving from the northern border of the city to its southern border at ten at night for poppers because I seemed like a nice guy. He’s used to feeling mistreated so he assumes everyone’s going to mistreat him. He wanted everything to be perfect. Poppers are his security blanket. He’s trying to learn to love himself. Oh god. Everything he said was a mess of contradictions and had very little to do with anything that actually had happened—outside of his own head, that is.

You know, all you really had to do, I told him eventually, when I was tired of the excuses, is say, I’m sorry. I made a bad judgment call. Those are the words I’m not hearing.

Nor was I likely to, without that kind of prompt. If my name were Rush and I’d been a bottle of poppers . . . maybe then I’d be high enough in the hierarchy to get an apology.

I don’t have any illusions about the sex I have. I don’t expect a random encounter in a hotel room—rambunctious as it might have been—to turn into an eternal love affair. I don’t cherish the illusion that good sex with me, or even fan-fucking-tastic sex with me, is going to win me a spot on the top shelf of someone’s bureau of cherished memories. The sex that two men (or three men, or thirty) can be life-altering. Eye-opening. It can pierce the soul and shake the foundations of one’s life. But it’s sex—and it’s ephemeral, and meant to be savored while it’s happening and honored in the days and years that follow. Sex is sweet. It’s important. Yet it’s delicate. Impermanent. Fleeting.

Anything that fragile can easily be damaged beyond repair. Trample on it, be too selfish with it, and watch those momentary good feelings dissolve like tissue in the rain.

13 Reasons Why/Tape 8: MrBipolarCockSucker

Let me take you back to an October night six years ago. I’m sitting in a karaoke bar with several friends, a second can of hard cider on the wooden counter in front of me. It’s a cold evening. We’re not far from the front door and I have to zipper my sweatshirt and tug the hood over my head, because guys keep the door ajar when they leave the bar to smoke. It’s amazing, how much chill three inches can admit. But my little group is laughing, and daring each other to sing certain songs when our turns come, and having a silly good time.

My phone buzzes in my jeans pocket. I pull it out. Check the screen. It’s from Blogspot. When someone comments on my blog, the site sends an email with the automatically-posted content.

Frequent comments not an unusual occurrence, then; my blog is at the height of its popularity and notoriety. One mention on a single website brought me over twenty thousand new visits on a single day, not long before this night. The blog has brought me several opportunities I wouldn’t have had, otherwise. I’ve been asked to contribute to a book; I’ve had one of my essays solicited for a quarterly of literary erotica. Sure, I’ve had a couple of run-ins with hostile passers-by who want to lecture me about having either too much sex or about celebrating sensuality without apology, but I’m still feeling the first flush of my notoriety, such as it is.

I might’ve encountered a couple of bumps along my road, but no potholes. Not until that night.

The email from Blogspot is a cold, wet slap to the face. You fucking asshole I am going to track you down motherfucker how dare you how dare you how dare you oh you just know I am going to get my revenge you have seen nothing yet, sssssnake.

The frost in my veins isn’t from the open doorway. It’s my own blood, freezing me where I sit. What the actual fuck is going on?

In my hand, my phone vibrates once more. Another mail arrives in my box, also from Blogspot. I know all your sssssnake sssssecrets and soon the world is going to know them and won’t that be a pretty picture, you shouldn’t have opened this door but it’s all your fault all your fault and you can’t run or hide because I know where you ssssslither, it reads.

Jesus Christ.

What’s happening on my phone, as I stare at the screen, unable to react or move, is like a scene from a bad techno-horror summer popcorn movie from the nineties starring Sandra Bullock as a programmer who has stumbled into a dangerous back alley of the internet on her Netscape browser and discovers Secrets She Shouldn’t Have Stumbled Upon. Email after email from Blogspot pops up on my screen at an accelerating pace, as if someone on the other end is pounding at the keys as fast they can and smashing the send button.

I can read the first lines in my mail program.

When your family finds out what a ssssslippery sssssnake you really are. . . .

I am going to find you and then you are going to pay. . . .

You are a missssserable sssssnake and I am going to. . . .

There’s nowhere you can hide from me because. . . .

Dimly, it occurs to me that every one of these horrible emails is at this moment visible as a comment on my blog.

Back in those innocent days, you see, I was so confident that the reception of my sexual adventures would be so uniformly positive and welcoming that of course I allowed my readers to post comments anonymously, without moderation. All someone had to do was to type in the box, hit the little button, and it would immediately appear.

This is the night that changed, if you haven’t yet figured it out.

My phone is fairly new by the standards of six years ago, but that night it seemed glacially slow as I use my smokin' hot 3G connection and a palm-sized browser to connect to Blogspot and manually delete the . . . holy fuck . . . fifteen threats! . . . from the same poison pen that have already been posted.

The problem is, however, that the guy is penning comments at a manic pace. I delete one, and two pop up in its place. I delete those only to find six more. They’re like poisonous little cyber Tribbles.

The poster catches on that I’m deleting comments, and soon he begins taunting me. Hahaha ssssssnake I can keep this up all night there is no ssssssilencing me, not after what you said about me. All your sssssssecrets are going to come tumbling out and you will be exposed and everyone will know what you really are, ssssssnake!

Not only is he now posting, but he’s doing so to multiple entries, all over the life of the blog, so that I have first to find the entry, let it load, and then delete it.

Motherfucker.

While I panic and stab at my little touchscreen with my thumbs, life is still going on around me. My friends are laughing and drinking, the karaoke is still blaring, people are trying to engage me in conversation. All I can do, however, is sit glued to my bar stool in a panic.

I know that there’s an option on Blogger to moderate comments—that is, to set it so that it won’t automatically post this guy’s unhinged stream of consciousness to the blog. The problem is, it takes me a while to find the right page . . . and then it takes my smokin’ hot 3G connection even longer to connect to the damned thing. Finally, though, I find the toggle deep in Blogspot’s recesses and flip it.

My phone keeps vibrating, but that I expect. Blogspot is still sending me every single email, which by now was in the forties or fifties. But at least the vicious taunts are no longer sullying my pages.
The phone is now buzzing so insistently that my friends ask if someone is trying to get in urgent touch with me. I laugh and make excuses while I expunge the last two dozen hateful remarks. Who could have such animus against me, so strongly and suddenly? Not after what you said about me, he’d said. So it wasn’t a random stranger. It had to be someone who knew my blog. Who in the world. . . ?

Then I know. I know beyond a doubt who has become unhinged. Welcome to your tape, Mr. BipolarCockSucker!

There used to be another blogger known as Mr. BipolarCockSucker. No, that wasn’t his actual name. It’ll do. Some of you might even remember him. Our blogs were both quite popular at roughly the same time. People still ask me about him today. Mr. BipolarCockSucker kept a very specialized sex blog that featured photos of men sucking dick in public. Each x-rated shot he’d accompany with a few paragraphs about his thoughts. Sometimes he’d speculate on when or where these men learned to suck; sometimes he’d get visceral about the sensations he himself experienced sucking dick, himself. Quite often he’d post video footage of him sucking—he had a busy XTube page at one time (though it seems to be gone now).

I liked Mr. BipolarCockSucker’s blog. He was a wry writer with a sly sense of humor. All of his posts were sexy. Clearly he knew what he was talking about, when it came to dick and public cruising. Mr. BipolarCockSucker obviously was an educated man who had a lot of sex and relished sharing his experiences. Like me, he was unapologetic about his favorite hobby.

I commented on his blog frequently; sharp-eyed readers can still find his comments littering my earlier entries. We had a good back-and-forth rapport. Or so I thought.

However, Mr. BipolarCockSucker had a pattern that, repeated a half-dozen times, eventually annoyed me. He’d carry on with his blog at a brisk pace, posting half a dozen entries per day. Then, eventually, he’d start to complain. Why were readers commenting only on the posts with photos, he’d wonder?

And why, when he’d write a straight essay, did they complain MOAR PIX? Why wasn’t he getting more comments? Enough comments? If he didn’t get more comments, he’d grouse, he’d take down the blog altogether—and just how would his readers like that?

His concerns were valid, I think. But instead of either rolling with the punches or being grateful to the readers (myself included) who continued to post comments, Mr. BipolarCockSucker would eventually fly into a huff, write an ultimatum, then delete his blog entirely. The whole thing would vanish overnight, without a trace.

Then, months later, Mr. BipolarCockSucker would start up a new blog with the same themes with a slightly different name at a different site, as if nothing had ever happened.

As I said, I suffered through Mr. BipolarCockSucker repeating this pattern five or six times. The first couple of disappearances, I was sympathetic. I knew what it was like to have readers who were obnoxiously demanding, posts that received no comments, and followers who would get aggressive and demand less wordsmithing, more fucking and how about some goddamned pics?

Around the third time, though, my reaction was more along the lines of, Sheesh, not again. Then I actively started rolling my eyes when his hissy fit and subsequent disappearing act would happen, as it inevitably would.

Someone can fill me in on the details if I’m wrong, here, but there was also a really weird incident in which Mr. BipolarCockSucker’s blog vanished, then started up again a couple of months later, per usual, only to disappear after a good run—and then Mr. BipolarCockSucker basically showed up in its place and said something like, “Sorry guys, I don’t know who that last Mr. BipolarCockSucker was, but he was a fake! It wasn’t me. I’m back now!”

And I was supposed to believe, somehow, that the faux Mr. BipolarCockSucker wrote exactly like the real Mr. BipolarCockSucker, provided the same kind of content as the real Mr. BipolarCockSucker, and was indistinguishable in all ways from Mr. BipolarCockSucker, but wasn’t really Mr. BipolarCockSucker?

I lost patience. I mentioned something in my blog about him.

I didn’t write, as I’m doing now, an entire Mr. BipolarCockSucker expose. I barely mentioned him, in fact. In the entry in question, I recall complaining more bluntly about another, different, much more vile blogger, who recently had written a post in which he was rude and derogatory about one of his fucks. The blogger had called the poor anonymous guy a ‘fatty’ and made it sound like the guy was a charity fuck—despite the fact that the blogger himself was pretty chubby and a quite frankly horrible person. I’m not body shaming either man here—I was pissed at the time, and still am, that the blogger in question would ever betray and violate someone he slept with by calling the bottom names behind his back, just so the top blogger could feel more studly than he really was.

My feeling is that sex bloggers are already in a oddly precarious relationship with their sex partners. They rely on them for material—so they should honor them by treating them with a respect they’ve earned . . . if they’ve earned it. Sex partners deserve respect, and so do readers, I said, even when they aren’t one and the same.

Then, in passing, that I remarked somewhat vaguely that I thought other bloggers did their readers a disservice when they’d complain about reader comments and then make the entirety of their posts inaccessible.

That was it. That last fleeting sentence was all I said about Mr. BipolarCockSucker. I didn’t call him out by name. I didn’t say I thought any less of his blog. But less than twenty-four hours before the barrage of hate mails commenced, I’d made an allusion to him, and it seemed mighty coincidental that now I was receiving anonymous hate mail about it.

(I knew the blogger I’d really gone off on wasn’t the perpetrator. I’d have said the same things to his face—and I have.)

That night I received over two-hundred emails from Blogspot, all of them Mr. BipolarCockSucker’s increasingly insane comments on my latest post. Long after I turned off my phone so that it would stop buzzing, they kept coming; he must not have slept at all that night because the time stamps on the emails started shortly after ten in the evening and they were still coming in at two, three, five, eight, ten o’clock in the morning.

Ssssssssssssssssssnake ssssssssssssssssss, many of them read. I was freaked out by the onslaught. At this point in my blogging career, I’d never encountered anything like it.

It wasn’t as if I actually thought Mr. BipolarCockSucker was going to leap out of a closet with a knife. For one thing, he’d have to detach himself from his keyboard to make the journey from Illinois, and that didn’t seem likely. But the fact that one offhand remark could send someone on a fucking crazy bender of hate mail boggled me. If this was my first exposure to the drawbacks of internet ‘fame,’ it felt like someone chained me to the explosives of a building scheduled for implosion, and pushed the plunger.

As if there were any doubt to the identity of the poison pen, the very next day Mr. BipolarCockSucker made a post in his blog that I was his public enemy number one and that his readers should let me know what they think of me by boycotting me and sending me hate mail.
Oh yes. Really. It was fan-fuckin-tastic, man.

Only one of his lackeys followed his orders, however—a loyal Mr. BipolarCockSucker lapdog who, every day for months (until I figured out how to block his IP address), would post a blog comment along the lines of dude ur blog is a shitty ripoff of Mr. BipolarCockSucker and u are really ugly too lol. At least the stylistic difference between the two made it easy to tell, in the coming months, which poison pen was which.

That’s right. Mr. BipolarCockSucker did not desist. Not for a while. The two-hundred- posts-per-twelve-hours frequency decreased, but only gradually; I’d say—conservatively—during the first week after the incident I received a little over a fifteen hundred hate mails from the guy via Blogpost—none of which appeared on the multiple pages to which he posted, but all of which I had to read as I sent them, one by one, to the reject bin.

Day after day I had to read this trash. After a month, the messages trailed off. I thought I was in the clear. Then three weeks later they started again, five or ten or twenty at a time, for a week, followed by silence for another three weeks. This vaguely lunar cycle endured for a good couple of years until at last he ceased completely.

Now, I didn’t give Mr. BipolarCockSucker his soubriquet for no reason. It was clear to me the entire time that he was actively sending me hate mail that the guy was living with bipolar disorder, or something very like. I have life experience coping with people living with the condition. I know its signs and expressions. The lifetime of his blog followed a general cycle of posting during the up phases and retreating and deleting during the down. With me, he’d go through manic periods in which I was his persecutor and betrayer and enemy number one who had to be warded off through massive amounts of sinister and increasingly incomprehensible hate mail about sssssnakes—and then he’d retreat once the high wore off. There were times that clearly his meds were working less efficiently than others, and then his irrational hatred and feelings of persecution would flare up out of control.

I feel now, and I reluctantly felt back then, a certain degree of sympathy for Mr. BipolarCockSucker and his medical condition. It didn’t really excuse what he was doing, but at least it helped me understand the compulsions behind the hate mail. Oh, that poor old sod is off his meds again is easier to think, than to lie awake at night and wonder why, why someone out there would have an vendetta against me.

Honestly, though, the realization didn’t make receiving all those hundreds and hundreds of hate mails from both Mr. BipolarCockSucker and his one loyal puppy dog any easier. To a festering wound, it was the mildest of balms.

I’ve said before that I’ve been writing these entries all out of order. Chronologically, this essay perhaps should have been the first. Before Mr. BipolarCockSucker, writing in my sex blog had been sheer enjoyment. Sure, I ran into the occasional person determined to put me down—but I’d never encountered anyone so off-balance that I worried for my safety.

From Mr. BipolarCockSucker I learned that one offhand remark could result in years of undeserved harassment—and that if I wanted to avoid a repeat, all I had to do over the blog’s lifetime was to guess which one phrase out of the hundreds of thousands I crafted might be incendiary, and not write it. Thanks to Mr. BipolarCockSucker, quite early on in my blogging career I found myself overthinking every word I set down: judging it for possible offense, weighing its implications for my future peace and sanity. Instead of writing and expressing myself, he taught me that it was safer to keep my damned opinions to myself.

There have been times, looking back, when I think to myself that a wise man would simply have shut down his blog right then and there. Of expunging it, so it couldn’t be used against himself . . . as mine would, time and time again.

If I’d followed the wise man’s route, I’d have been guilty of disappointing my readers—the very thing I’d suggested that Mr. BipolarCockSucker did every time he closed and relocated. But I might have avoided every single disappointment yet to come.

But, I try to console myself, I would’ve avoided a lot of joy, too. The joys of meeting new people. The joys of self discovery through sex, and through writing. The joys of accomplishment.

None of those are inconsiderate happinesses.

Sometimes, in my darker hours, I wonder, though, if I might have found other ways to be happy. Because as much as I dread it, starting next week I’ll be writing about my darkest hours yet.



Afterword

During my hiatus, I’ve received from readers a lot of very sweet emails wishing me well. Most of them have recognized the amount of work I’ve poured into my blog and have expressed their thanks. I’m so grateful for those sentiments.

Many people who’ve written, however, have made the assumption that the reason I have decided to take a break is because of the so-called haters—that is, the men who leave nasty comments on my blog, and those who go out of their way to make sure I understand how contemptible I am to them.
I’ve had plenty of haters over the years. They wear me down, yes. But more than anyone, the men who have sucked the joy out of my writing (and to a certain extent, my life) are those who meant well. They’re men who claimed to admire me, who wanted to meet me—and many of them did—and who then, whether out of clumsiness or fear or whatever, failed to recognize they’d gone too far. A man can only withstand so many successive blows to the ego (even an ego as Jericho-sturdy as mine) before it begins to tumble.

What’s more, every single one of these men read my blog. They’re men who subscribed to my point of view, who enjoyed my writing. Or read my writing, at least. Some of them wanted to be written about. Others never intended me to know they were blog fans.

Maybe one of these men is you.

If it is you? Although there’s a small and petty part of me that wants to flip a finger in your direction, I’m not going to. I’m moving on as I write this series. A friend of mine shared with me something his grandmother used to say that I truly believe: People do the best they can. If they could do better, they would.

My advice, if you think you recognize yourself . . . or even if you don’t: do better.

All of us could stand to do better.

13 Reasons Why/Tape 4: Antonio

“What’re you thinking?”

The guy straddling my hips has his hands hooked around the back of his neck, elbows angled upward to display twin Brillo-like patches of armpit hair. Little coils of chest fuzz spring from between his nipples; his eyes are a luminous white against skin the color of strong coffee. He’s had my cock buried in him for the better part of ten minutes, and he’s been milking it steadily the entire time. Our mingled juices flow down my shaft to make my pubes lie slick and flat against my skin.

“Hmmm,” I eventually say to his question. “I’m thinking my dick feels great inside you.”

“And?”

I like the way he’s leaning back against nothing, showing off his muscular body for me. The kid has a cocky grin on his face. Kid. He’s in his early thirties. Still a kid to me. “And I’m thinking you look good, too.”

“No. . . .” he says, and for a charmed moment I think he’s being shy or modest or some such shit. He ducks his face away from me, then looks slyly back. “I mean, what’re you thinking in your head?” For a confused second, I wonder if he’s assuming I’m able to do my thinking somewhere else? In an external portable thinking pod, maybe? “Don’t you write as we do this?” he goes on to clarify.

“Oh,” I said, comprehension finally dawning.

“You know. Tell me. What’s my entry going to say?”

Antonio . . . welcome to your tape.

I confess that when I hook up with someone—readers, regular fucks, doesn’t matter—I have a writer’s habit of attempting to memorize details. My eyes try to scan a fellow so I’ll remember his appearance, so later I can bring a sketch of him a bit to life when I write a journal entry. My ears listen for dialogue, picking up little quirks of speech and snatches of what men say when they're alone and unguarded; my other senses attempt to ferret out the meanings behind what’s left unsaid. Body language. Where a man’s eyes focus—or don’t. The passion he puts into his lovemaking.

I’m always drinking it all in, storing it all up until that time comes when at last I sit down with my notebook and try to put my thoughts back in order. That’s when I sort through the sense memories, reconnect the strands of dialogue, and attempt to link actions with intentions.

“I don’t really write it in my head as I go along,” I chuckle. In my head, though, I’m thinking . . . .
The boy looked shyly at me, his thick eyelashes almost batting like a Southern belle’s. “What’s my entry going to say?” he teased.

“I don’t really write it in my head as I go along,” I chuckled, thrusting more deeply into his hole to wipe the coquettish smile from his lips.

As an afterthought, I thrust more deeply into his hole. That action doesn’t, however, wipe anything. “C’mon,” Antonio wheedles. “Tell me what you’re going to say. Are you going to tell your readers I’m the sexiest boy you’ve fucked?”

I’m still in a good mood, and he’s keeping my dick hard, so I’m willing to play along. “Eh.”

It’s a tease, and he knows it. His ass clamps down like a vise, making me throb. “Fucker. Are you going to tell them I’m the best fuck you’ve had?”

“Are you going to be the best fuck I’ve had?” I ask, this time more serious.

“Damn straight.” His palms rest for a moment on my shoulders to press me down. Then he places them onto the mattress and leans over me. He’s got a handsome face. His facial hair is carefully trimmed and shaven close; his eyes are a deep brown. They stare at me with an intensity that makes me harder. Nearer and nearer he comes. I tilt my chin up to meet him in what I’m sure is going to be a passionate kiss.

“Your blogger buddy said I was ‘one of the hottest pieces of ass I’ve had in years,’” he instead informs me, breaking the momentary spell he’s cast.

I blink. I’m not really able to tell whether or not he’s teasing. When Antonio originally contacted me, he did with almost a letter of reference, suggesting I consult another sex blogger’s website to see what the guy had written about their encounter. I wasn’t really familiar with the other blogger, and if I may be blunt, I didn’t think much of his writing style, or the fact that his entries were a basic no-details format that all read along the lines of Met this guy on Grindr who said he wanted my big cock, so he came over to the apartment and got on his knees and took my cock and nut in him, fuck yeah! But the blogger in question had indeed said that Antonio was a hot piece of ass—which I guess at the time was good enough for me.

Antonio had come at me hard, too. I love your blog, been reading you since the beginning, he said, which I always take in with a grain of salt to mean that they’ve read maybe the last two entries before clicking on the links to one of my sex profiles. I’ve been fucked by the rest. I want to be fucked by best.

And if there’s a theme that readers should pick up on in this series of posts, it’s that I’m sadly susceptible to this line of flattery. Compliment me on my dick photos alone and I’m likely to be kindly disposed to you, sure. Compliment me on my dick and my writing? Like a bad habit, I’ll be handing out my phone number and a GPS location while shouting, LET’S FUCK, BABY.

“Don’t talk about my skin problems,” he says, pausing his gyrations on my cock. “When you write about me, I mean.”

“What skin problems?” I ask, baffled. I’m looking at his face for old scars or blemishes, but there are none.

He actually lifts up on his knees so that my dick falls out of his hole with a wet plop on my belly, and pivots around. “Right here,” he says, pointing to an area on his shoulder blades. All I really see is dark skin, but he indicates an area of imaginary acne with his fingers. “I get these breakouts. That’s why I wanted to sit on you, so you wouldn’t see it if you fucked me from behind.”

“That’s why I wanted to sit on you, so you wouldn’t see it if you fucked me from behind,” says the boy, craning his neck to see the imaginary spot over his right shoulder, I write, in my head.

“You know how else I wouldn’t have seen it?” I growl. “If you hadn’t stopped mid-fuck to FUCKING SHOW IT TO ME.”

I don’t follow that plot path, though. Instead, I try to get things back on track. “I have no intention of writing about your skin problems,” I assure him. I take him by the hips. My cock is rigid, standing straight up in the air. It would be so easy to sit him back down on it.

“When I was a teen, my mama used to have to take me in for shots, it got so bad.”

“Well, I can barely see anything now, so. . . .”

“Those shots hurt like a son of a bitch. And the pus. Used to leave stains.”

Readers, there’ve been many times I’ve set out what I think are some basic rules for bottoms to follow. Usually they run: show up when you say you’ll show up. Treat your top with respect, and he’ll pay you back in kind. Remember that even if getting the load is your goal, still make your top feel good; he might be inclined to see you more often that way.

Not once have I before felt compelled to lay down what I think should be one of the most fundamental laws of sexual interaction: Never, ever, go into lengthy discussions about pus while copulating.

“Sometimes it was greenish.” He shuddered, and readers, so did I. “It was nasty.”

I felt emboldened to speak up. “How about we not talk about pus?” I suggested. I’m pretty sure it was the first time ever I’ve had to speak that particular sentence aloud, during sex.

“You’re right,” he smiled. He went silent, and groped for my cock. A moment later, I was back in the warm confines of his ass.

So we’re fucking. He’s grinding. I’m moving my hips in a circular motion myself, pulsating in and out of his slick chute. For a moment, everything’s back on track, and I’m absolutely prepared to ignore the disgusting conversation we’d moved past, and enjoy the rest of the fuck.

“Aw, shit, I know a couple of people who are going to crap their pants when they find out I got you,” he says.

The fact I’m blinking my eyes rapidly at his remark is what clues me in to the fact that I’m irritated, long before the itchy effects of the emotion actually begin to register in my brain. There’ve been several times I’ve suspected that guys have bedded me more for the bragging rights than the actual sex. Once they get my notch on their belt, I never hear from them again.

“The Breeder. I’ve got the Breeder’s dick in my tail. I wonder how many loads the Breeder is going to shoot up my hot ass. Maybe I’m the Breeder’s hottest piece of ass.”

“Ssssshh,” I suggest, putting a finger on his lips. For a ridiculous moment I remind myself of Dianne Wiest in Bullets over Broadway, shushing the loquacious Jon Cusack with an imperious Don’t speak!
Silence falls yet again.

Something’s broken, though. My dick’s still hard, but at this point it’s more out of mechanical reflex than actual desire. I don’t really want to be here, with this guy, at this moment. I could’ve relished the fuck if he hadn’t kept talking about it—if he hadn’t kept trying to make me experience it as a finished piece of writing that, in his mind, apparently went I met this guy named Antonio who wanted my big cock and he came over to my place and got on his knees and took my cock and nut in him, and fuck, was he the hottest piece of ass the Breeder has ever had.

Part of me felt as if he expected me to be taking fucking dictation while he took my fucking dick. Mostly, though, I feel shut down, shut up, backed into a corner. He'll wait months to read about himself before figuring out it's an entry that will never be coming. What have I got left to write about, when he’s yanking my words away from me, phrase by phrase?

Antonio is still staring up at the ceiling, absent and lost in his own little world as he bounces up and down. “Maybe I’ll be your next Spencer. What do you think about that?”

Oh, I think to myself. Maybe he did read more than two entries.

But I still think it’s as unlikely an outcome to this particular scenario as one can get.



Afterword

During my hiatus, I’ve received from readers a lot of very sweet emails wishing me well. Most of them have recognized the amount of work I’ve poured into my blog and have expressed their thanks. I’m so grateful for those sentiments.

Many people who’ve written, however, have made the assumption that the reason I have decided to take a break is because of the so-called haters—that is, the men who leave nasty comments on my blog, and those who go out of their way to make sure I understand how contemptible I am to them.
I’ve had plenty of haters over the years. They wear me down, yes. But more than anyone, the men who have sucked the joy out of my writing (and to a certain extent, my life) are those who meant well. They’re men who claimed to admire me, who wanted to meet me—and many of them did—and who then, whether out of clumsiness or fear or whatever, failed to recognize they’d gone too far. A man can only withstand so many successive blows to the ego (even an ego as Jericho-sturdy as mine) before it begins to tumble.

What’s more, every single one of these men read my blog. They’re men who subscribed to my point of view, who enjoyed my writing. Or read my writing, at least. Some of them wanted to be written about. Others never intended me to know they were blog fans.

Maybe one of these men is you.

If it is you? Although there’s a small and petty part of me that wants to flip a finger in your direction, I’m not going to. I’m moving on as I write this series. A friend of mine shared with me something his grandmother used to say that I truly believe: People do the best they can. If they could do better, they would.

My advice, if you think you recognize yourself . . . or even if you don’t: do better.

All of us could stand to do better.

13 Reasons Why/Tape 2: This Faggot

Some men seek sexual adventure. They love the thrill of the chase, the electricity of two men making eye contact across a crowded room; they relish the prickle across their skin when a man sprawled on a park bench lazily lets his finger drift across the hardened bulge in his jeans. I am one of these men. I enjoy sex. I’m good at it. I make it happen, enjoy it to the fullest, and gird up for the next exploit.

Many men—most men—only dream of sexual adventure. When the real thing presents itself, they retreat, snail-like, and hope that it goes away. This Faggot was one of those men . . . and This Faggot, welcome to your tape.

A month ago, our brief encounter happened. My April allergies were unusually severe, this year. My eyes had been so itchy and red that I couldn’t wear my contacts. My nose ran like a faucet. For about three weeks I stumbled around looking like a bespectacled professor who’d fallen face-first into a barrel of pollen. For most of that time I kept to myself. Spit, piss, and cum are acceptable bodily fluids for an encounter, but most men don’t care to be sneezed and snotted on.

Then came May, and relief—I could step outdoors again, and breathe fresh air, and sit on my front porch with my tablet in my hand and . . . of course, cruise for hole.

I was on the bareback site when a young fellow sent me a message there. Hi, this is out of the blue, Sir, and you don’t know me. But this faggot wanted to testify that you and your blog have changed its life. This faggot has to thank you for that. There are reasons why you are revered in the community of bloggers by faggots like this one, and converting this faggot from celibate into cum dump is just one of them. Also, if it’s not too presumptuous for it to say so, you are extremely, extremely handsome, Sir. Anyway, thank you, and this faggot will understand if it is not your type.

I checked out the kid’s profile. He was in his early thirties. Lightly-muscled body. Save for a patch of sparse fur between his pecs, he was mostly smooth. Fat dick, for a bottom. Lean and round ass. His face, though. When I get a message from a guy who says something along the lines of ‘I’ll understand if I’m not your type,’ I usually expect some kind of extreme—extreme scrawniness, extreme stockiness, or extreme butterface.

This Faggot—as he called himself—was starkly handsome: cheekbones like scalpels, wide green eyes, a sharp chin and the brow of a scholar. He lived in Manhattan, so he was local to me. In his photos he carried a certain air of entitlement—the good young professional looks and grooming of a stock broker, maybe, or a high-earning finance guy. I could’ve been reading into it, though; there’s only so much about a person’s character you can tell when in most of his pics he was kneeling on beds with an arched back, in obvious heat, while a series of black dicks stretched and gaped his holes.

Ivy League graduate gone wrong is totally my type, you know.

Like Wile E. Coyote over the Road Runner, I licked my chops over his photos for a moment. I sent a short reply, thanking him kindly for the copious compliments, then said, If I had anything to do with those amazing photos of yours, I’m happy to have been inspiration.

He wrote back within a minute. Oh Sir, just hearing from you makes this faggot so happy! Short history: this faggot used to be a condom nazi. This faggot even read your blog pretending to disapprove of it, but you just write so beautifully that I broke down. Your beautiful words made this faggot realize that it wasn’t having good sex at all the way it was. Or ANY sex. You made this faggot admit to itself that all the hating it was doing was a cover-up while it pretended to be committed to its boyfriend. All this faggot’s secret sexual fantasies were of being a cum whore who never refuses a load from ANYONE, Sir. So this faggot got itself on PrEP and started taking loads from strangers. This faggot guesses it was secretly trying to make you proud all along, Sir.

Now, I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t eating up his story. Friends, I was gulping it down like a pig at the trough. If there’s any trend you’ll notice in these entries, it’s that when a reader of mine throws down a few compliments and peppers them with some Sirs and Dads and some gestures of submission, this revered blogger’s response isn’t to keep the guy demurely at arm’s length. Fuck no.

If you want really to picture my reaction to that kind of approach, imagine me injecting a horse hypodermic of Viagra directly into my veins while I roar, BRING ME ANOTHER!

When This Faggot asked if there would ever, ever, ever be the slightest chance that a superior top like me might want to hook up with him, I gave the guy my cell phone number so we could take the conversation to text. He was a local, after all. I’ve hooked up with guys from BBRT with less interaction.

SIR, you are so beautiful in all your photos. This faggot has fantasized about you for years, he texted immediately. Jerked at your escapades. Admired your ability to communicate the emotions of your fucking along with the feelings in your body. This faggot only wants to please you and be your pig, if you give it the opportunity, Sir.

A faggot’s role is to please a man, I told him. You’re already pleasing me.

This faggot hopes to be a pig to make you proud, Sir. Right now it is just another basic faggot. It will do what you want it to do and wear what you want it to wear. This faggot prefers to keep its useless faggot cock covered so it does not lose focus on worshiping your beautiful breeder dick, Sir.

I was hard as he texted me. Shit, what top wouldn’t be? This hot little cunt wasn’t just striking the right notes . . . he was whacking them over and over again with an enormous Looney Tunes-sized cartoon mallet. What about that boyfriend of yours? I asked. Is he going to have a problem with a stranger dumping loads up your hole?

This faggot is a cheating faggot, Sir. It is its pleasure to help you release that cum into the world. And Sir, you are not a stranger! You are a man who helped a faggot find enlightenment. A teacher. A mentor. A man I've admired for so long.

Jesus, I texted. That’s humbling to hear. And from such a handsome boy.

Never be humbled, Sir. Your exploits have helped scores of faggots find themselves. That fact should make you swagger even more than that fucking huge and perfect breeding stick between your legs. And honestly, most guys don't even acknowledge this faggot. It did not expect a God like you to even respond to it, let alone show interest. This has already made this faggot’s day.

BRING ME ANOTHER!, roared my ego again.

I’m ashamed to admit that at this point I let the guy phone me. Ordinarily I don’t like talking on the telephone. From childhood it’s always seemed unnatural, listening to disembodied voices at the other end of a magic stick (or these days, at the other end of a square of glass). But this guy wanted to discuss when we could meet. When I warned him in a text that I wouldn’t be doing phone sex in any form, he said he completely understood and didn’t want that from me. He simply wanted to hear my voice and negotiate a fuck date.

This Faggot had a sexy voice, actually. I could tell he was nervous, when I called his number. “Oh god,” (or maybe O God, referring to my status with him), upon answering. “It’s really you. I—I mean, this faggot—didn’t think you would call for real, Sir.”

“Well, I wanted to arrange our first fuck.”

“Before we figure that out, Sir, please let this faggot express how sincerely attractive and hot it finds you. It has jacked off to your photos so many times, and even more times to the words you write so amazingly beautifully in your blog. This faggot messaged fifteen guys this morning before I—it—worked up the nerve to say hello to you, and you are the only one who responded.”

“Aw, shucks, son,” is what my mouth said, but inside my rampaging ego was brandishing the wad of compliments like a thick stack of dollar bills at a strip club and making it RAIN, baby. (On myself. Because I deserve it.)

We talked about the timing of our tryst, and decided that I’d come to his place two days following. I had a meeting that day near Chelsea, where he lived. “This faggot will do everything and anything you tell it, Sir. It will take your cum, your piss, even your snot, because it all comes from you, Sir, and it will all make this faggot stronger, better, complete.”

“Well sure,” I said, not wanting to argue with that caliber of offer. If only I’d gotten it during allergy season, right?

“May it make a request, Sir? Will you wear your special metal BREEDER cock ring? This faggot wants to feel that BREEDER cock ring touch its teeth as it swallows your cock. It wants to lick the word BREEDER. Knowing how many men have seen it before this faggot when they kneel and worship you and take you inside them. It will remind you that you are this faggot’s God and its reason for being.”

I thought it over a moment. I mean, who am I to disagree with that kind of persuasion? “Yeah. I’ll do that,” I said. My voice might have been a little husky with lust.

“This humble faggot wishes you could fuck me today, Sir.”

“I wish I could too. But you’re a pretty boy, son,” I said. “Fucking handsome as hell. If you’re so horny, why don’t you get back on BBRT and find a dick to stretch your hole . . . just to cool you down until day after tomorrow? You want to do that for me?”

“Oh god yes, Sir,” he moaned. “It will do it right now. It will take all the piss and cum it can all DAY for you, Sir. It wants to make you proud!”

“Good boy. And then you’ll tell me about it.”

“Yes SIR. This faggot will tell you about every dick that unloads in its cumdump ass!”

“That’s what I like to hear. I’m hanging up now. Goodbye, son.”

“Goodbye, Sir. I love you, Sir.”

The last three words took me aback for a moment. During the trip from my porch to my desk, I thought about them. He hadn’t said the words automatically, the way someone might rattle them off to their talkative old dad at the end of a call. Nor had he alarmed me; he hadn’t made the declaration sound dangerous and stalker-like. It had come out sounding fairly unconscious, and sincere.

Thank you for letting me hear your voice, he texted as I sat back down at my desk.

I hesitated before typing my reply. Were you aware of what you said to me, when you said goodbye on the phone?

Yes, Dad, he replied. It slipped. This faggot hoped you had not heard it. It was excited.

Say the words now.

It said I love you, Sir.

Did you mean it in the moment?

Yes Sir. It meant it.

My boner raged. So you’ll say those words when I’m loading up your little faggot hole on Thursday?

Yes Sir. This faggot will say it and mean it. Thank you, Sir. You deserve to be loved more than anyone.

Yeah, I told myself. I did deserve to be loved.

I was in a good place. I had a commitment for Thursday. I had the guy’s phone. I had his address. He’d gotten my attention, and inflamed my dick, my interest, and my ego to equally grotesque proportions. This was going to be a good experience. I set down to work, hoping my raging erection would subside.

Then. Five minutes later. He texts me again. Your faggot sent messages to a bunch of tops, even ones with ads looking to just load holes. No responses.

Of course you’re not getting responses, I thought to myself. Jesus. It’s been five fucking minutes.

This faggot is sorry daddy. It told you it was not worthy of your attention. You deserve much better, and there are boys out there who always seem to be able to get cum in their holes…and this faggot promised it would do this for you. FUCK, it is such a failure.

I was a little taken aback by this weird, sudden temper tantrum of defeat. I mean, I’ve known, admired, and fucked some pretty successful sluts in my time, and I can’t think of one who would have thrown his hands in the air after ten minutes online (on a weekday morning, no less) and yelled, “SCREW IT, I’M OUTTA HERE.” I tried to sound conciliatory, though, when I texted him, Don’t put so much pressure on yourself. If it’s not going to happen, you can’t force it. It’s okay.

You don’t get it. You could spend you entire day going from hole to hole. Everyone wants a piece of you. I’m just a shit nobody that no one wants to fuck I guess. Plus I failed you. I told you I was a basic faggot.

I was considering the way I should respond to this dark and curious turn when he texted again, mere seconds after the last. Still no takers for my hole. I’ve given up and signed off. I'm sorry. I'm a failure. Nobody wants to use me. To be honest I was going to delete my profile this week. I might as well do it now.

I’m not attracted to failures, I told him. I’m attracted to you. Therefore you aren’t a failure.

I'm so average and you are a part of the top of one percent among gays. You gave me one easy assignment and I couldn't do it in a city like NYC of all places. I think that underscores I should give up on sex for good. And now you know why my boyfriend can't even bother to fuck me or look at me. I’m too average. Below average, even.

At this point, even I was starting to realize that his compliments about me were way too over-the-top to carry any water. Top one percent among gays? Pfff. Top three percent, maybe. Top one percent was just hyperbole. And once again—once again in a succession of many, many encounters with readers who claimed to admire me, claimed to want to meet me—I felt as if I were being punked. This Faggot was suddenly so baffling, so improbable, that I wondered if I’d been set up for inevitable disappointment from the very beginning.

For some god-knows-what reason, however, I decided to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Listen. There are plenty of times I can't find a fuck to save my life . . . and I'm a top. If you knew how difficult it was for me, with my big dick, to get laid sometimes, your opinion of me would do a one-eighty. Failure is not defined by the inability to arrange a hookup at a moment’s notice. Not for me, not for you.

His downward spiral continued, however. By this point, I noticed, he’d dropped the entire ‘this faggot’ schtick. I'm so embarrassed. I feel like if I can't even get regular guys into me how can I get one like you?

At this point, my confusion began turning to irritation. You don’t seem to realize you’ve already got one like me. You’ve GOT me. We’re still meeting day after tomorrow, right?

I sat at my desk, phone in my hand, waiting for a reply. Nothing. After a minute I fired up my browser, and checked the website where we’d met. When I looked in my mailbox, all the messages we’d exchanged had vanished. I searched for his user name there. Nothing.

You deleted your profile, I texted.

I told you I would. And right now I'm laying in bed stroking and reading your blog.

This is the point where I gave up. This faggot could have had me, the real person, in the flesh. Less than forty-eight hours from that moment, he could have enjoyed the fuck of his life. (I’m not so much exaggerating my own prowess, mind you, as marking how sorry his sex life used to be.) Yet there he was, alone, diddling himself in the cold blue light of the computer screen with a version of me that could never touch, taste, or enjoy him back.

My blog is not a real, living thing. He could have had the real me, so easily. It makes me sad you deleted your profile, I tapped out, wondering why I even bothered.

I'm sorry. I won’t bother you anymore.

I looked at my watch. Between the time of our phone call and the time of his last message, a mere quarter hour had elapsed. Over the course of less than ninety minutes, This Faggot had gone from courting me with compliments and promises, to setting up a first date, to promising me outrageous sexual satisfaction, to telling me he loved me, to circling the toilet in a puddle of his own self-despair, to breaking up with me.

I’d jumped all the hoops of a five-year relationship in less than an hour and a half. No wonder I was fucking exhausted.

This Faggot kept his promise. I haven’t heard from him since. On the day we were supposed to meet, I left a polite text saying that the ball was in his court and I’d let him decide what to do . . . but I suspect my number had been long blocked by that point.

Was he depressive? Could be. Was he feeling guilt at fooling around on this boyfriend of his, and decided to pull back? I guess it’s a possibility. Did he simply feel as if he’d bitten off more than he could chew, and that he couldn’t perform up to the the standards of a God who was among the top three percent of gays? (Oh, heck. Let’s make it the top two percent. No need to be over-modest.) Maybe? Or could it simply have been, as I often fear, that he simply didn’t find me attractive enough and needed a way to wriggle out of his commitment?

There’s no justification behind it. No matter what the answer, I’m the one left swinging in the wind when he vanished.

When readers approach me with compliments, and with stories of their own about how my writing has been a catalyst to their own sex lives, it feels to me that finally I’m reaping a little of the seed I’ve sown—pun firmly intended. It feels like I’m getting a little love back.

What leaves me so dispirited after encounters like these—and there have been many—with readers is that they’re so damned draining. When readers turn out to be like This Faggot, jerking the rug right out from under me, it leaves me bruised. Worn out. Sour. Men like This Faggot leave me unwilling to engage with any of my readers—even those who sound and behave like totally reasonable people.
I have been bruised so many times, now.

As a writer, and as a sex blogger who has put so much of his private life on display for everyone to enjoy, I find myself stupidly susceptible when one of my readers appears willing to give back to me—and I’m not simply talking about when they want to repay me with their holes. Even if just a little, and even if just once in a while, This Faggot was right about one thing: I do deserve to be loved.

Afterword

During my hiatus, I’ve received from readers a lot of very sweet emails wishing me well. Most of them have recognized the amount of work I’ve poured into my blog and have expressed their thanks. I’m so grateful for those sentiments.

Many people who’ve written, however, have made the assumption that the reason I have decided to take a break is because of the so-called haters—that is, the men who leave nasty comments on my blog, and those who go out of their way to make sure I understand how contemptible I am to them.
I’ve had plenty of haters over the years. They wear me down, yes. But more than anyone, the men who have sucked the joy out of my writing (and to a certain extent, my life) are those who meant well. They’re men who claimed to admire me, who wanted to meet me—and many of them did—and who then, whether out of clumsiness or fear or whatever, failed to recognize they’d gone too far. A man can only withstand so many successive blows to the ego (even an ego as Jericho-sturdy as mine) before it begins to tumble.

What’s more, every single one of these men read my blog. They’re men who subscribed to my point of view, who enjoyed my writing. Or read my writing, at least. Some of them wanted to be written about. Others never intended me to know they were blog fans.

Maybe one of these men is you.

If it is you? Although there’s a small and petty part of me that wants to flip a finger in your direction, I’m not going to. I’m moving on as I write this series. A friend of mine shared with me something his grandmother used to say that I truly believe: People do the best they can. If they could do better, they would.

My advice, if you think you recognize yourself . . . or even if you don’t: do better.

All of us could stand to do better.