I had one of those birthdays last week. It wasn’t a milestone birthday in the traditional sense—that is, the year didn’t end with a zero. But it was one of those birthdays that’s ominous to gay men in general, because it’s a number at which time suddenly stands still and past which, mysteriously no gay man ever ages.
No, not 25. I can see your confusion, though. That’s the age that gay men ape in their dress habits, especially the fifty-somethings who stuff themselves into a Hollister T-shirt under the hope that the brand name will do a David Copperfield on their age and shave off twenty-five years before everyone’s marveling eyes. So no, not 25. The other number.
No, not 29. Yes, I know that’s the age that all women over 30 claim to be. That’s more of a female thing, though. Men over thirty claim they’re 32, all the way up until they’re my age. It doesn’t matter if they’re 39, or 42, or 46. If you look at their profile, or ask them in a bar late at night when the lights are low, they’re going to tell you they’re 32. But not either of those numbers.
And no, it’s not 43. Where’d that come from?
Look, I’ll just tell you. I turned 49. For-ty-niiiiine. It’s the last number to which gay men will admit. Men born in the year I was born—1964—are 49. Men born in the nineteen-fifties are 49. Guys who popped out of a Great Gatsby-era flapper wearing a shingled skirt and shouting twenty-three skiddoo! claim to be 49. Gay men hit 49 and then remain there until their deaths, thirty-five years later. It doesn’t matter that they’re hunched over and clutching a cane and looking like Young Mr. Grace on Are You Being Served?, who doddered around barely able to say his one line of the entire show. He’s 49, dammit, and 49 he’ll stay.
FOREVER.
I had an argument with my own brother about the age of 49 a couple of years ago. My brother has been 49 for almost a dozen years now, both in his online profiles and with new guys he meets. It made me more and more anxious about approaching the age myself—not because I feared the number itself. I don’t give a rip. It’s because I had this vision of my age matching his, then surpassing him. Then I’d be the older brother. And that’s a crime against nature. I’m too foxy to be the older brother.
So I nagged. And I pleaded. Finally he changed his age to 99, which in online profile land is basically a big fuck you to anyone who wants to get a general idea of how old someone is.
But it’s still older than 49.
I’d like to proclaim up front that my age will continue to change from year to year. Next February I will be 50. In 2015, I will be 51. Just you wait and see. Check in with in a decade and I’ll be 59. Still foxy, and 59.
I don’t like to let a number dictate how I feel about myself, see. I spent way too much of my early life doing that. It started the week I lost my virginity at 12, in my earliest encounter getting cruised in a men’s room toilet. The guy next to me, after peering through a gloryhole and looking at my smooth and hairless body, passed me a note written on toilet paper and wrapped around a Bic pen that read, How old are you???
Right away, I lied. 14, I wrote back. Because in my naive mind, there was a vast world of experiential difference between a callow youth of 12 and a seasoned sexual professional of 14, and I didn’t want to seem like a young newbie.
God, was I dumb. Not that the guy cared. He had his dick in me less than thirty seconds later.
I was always lying about my age to men in my teens. I added on three, four, five years to make men comfortable about fucking me. In college, because I’d skipped a year of high school and entered early, I added on a couple of years so that my classmates didn’t think I was contemptibly young. I had a baby face in grad school, where I the only 20-year-old surrounded by students in their late twenties, thirties, and forties—so I told everyone I was 25. I added on years until I reached 30, when I decided I’d had enough about apologizing for something as silly as how old I was.
And yes, at 49 I’ve had my share of rejection based on my age. Or more accurately, I’ve run across the guys to whom I’m invisible because I’m not 25 (or wearing that Hollister T to pretend I am). I’ve seen plenty of profiles of guys who absolutely positively will never ever meet anyone over 45 ever! You know what? Screw that. It’s easy to see the scores of those profiles and feel slighted. I don’t intend to waste my time bemoaning them. It seems to me the men who are missing out are those who sit on the sidelines and simply don’t try, because they’re too sensitive to rejection.
In the end, I’d rather be rejected arbitrarily so that I know someone’s a close-minded asshole, than magically accepted because I gave out a fictional number as my age. And that’s, as Edith Ann used to say (see, I’m dating myself), the truth.
So in this Monday’s open forum, I’m curious. Who out there has lied about his or her age in order to land a guy? For what reasons? Are you fibbing about your age now? Are you going older or, more likely, younger? How young do you dare to go—that is, how many years is it safe to shave off in the service of preserving one’s youth? And is there life after 49? I’d love to hear from you guys.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
The Winner
I know my faults. I’m competitive. Too competitive.
Monday mornings are when we meet. The place is a hotel by the interstate where the rates are hourly and the doors whisper-thin, the ceilings uneven from multiple refacings, the floors so iffy that we pile our discarded clothing onto the room’s only table. When I make him yell, I know that anyone passing can hear him. I don’t really give a shit. The only other places in this run-down hellhole are truckers looking to cut corners on their budgets, or men here for the same reason we are.
To fuck.
He’s got a boyfriend. I don’t give a shit about that, either. His hole’s up in the air, his knees spread apart as far as I can yank them. “You like that?” I snarl at him.
“I love it,” he gasps out.
“You love that dick, don’t you?” I’m pile driving him. Every stroke I take hammers home my shaft. His body shudders from every blow.
“I love your dick,” he gasps out, between gut punches.
“Is my dick bigger than your boyfriend’s?”
He’s reluctant to say. Like it’s a betrayal. Whoring his hole out in a seedy motel room, giving it up for the fourth Monday in a row to the married man who uses him as a cumdump—that’s A-okay. Admitting that my dick is bigger than his boyfriend’s? He acts like it’d be the Judas kiss to his relationship. “Sure,” he groans out, into the sandpapery pillow.
That kind of answer just enrages me. “Not . . . good . . . enough.” He lets out a sob as I pummel him with each word. “I asked you a question. Is my dick . . . bigger . . . than . . . your fucking . . . dumb-ass . . . boyfriend’s?”
“Yes!” he says. The admission is a wet explosion of need and embarrassment. “It’s so much bigger. You have no idea. He’s got nothing compared to you.”
I’m pleased, but not mollified. He’s wearing one of my jocks, a Nasty Pig black and white number. I’d made him slip it off me when I arrived, then don it right away so that he’d feel the warmth of my dick and nuts on it when it slipped onto his waist. I grabbed the waistband like reins. “And am I a better fuck than your boyfriend?”
“Yes!” he yells. This time there’s no hesitation. “Oh god yes. So much better.”
Inwardly, I sneer. This is too easy. And I’m still too damned competitive, if you ask me.
I yank out my dick. He groans like he’s being deprived. His hungry hole has swallowed down two of my loads already—snatched them out of my dick, if you want to know the truth. “So when you pussy up for me, you’re not thinking about him at all, are you?” I ask.
“No.” He’s whimpering. His hole is blindly squeezing out, opening and closing around air, trying to find the meat that’s radiating so much heat behind it.
“And when you’re home at night, in bed with him—“
“I’m thinking of you,” he says. He looks up at me over his shoulder. His eyes are wet with adoration and love. “I’m only thinking of you.”
I go back to my point. “Say it for me, and maybe I’ll give you more of my cock. When I’m home at night. . . .”
“Please,” he whispers. Then, realizing I mean it, he says, “When I’m at home at night.”
“In bed with my short-dicked boyfriend. . . .”
“Fuck.”
“Say it.”
“When I’m at home at night in bed . . . with my short-dicked boyfriend. . . .”
“. . . All I think about is you.”
He parrots the words. “All I think about is you.”
“And how you fill me up.”
“I love how you fill me up,” he breathes.
“And how you make my hole feel better than anything—anything—he could ever do.”
“Oh god,” he says. I let the tip of my dick nudge against him.
“Fucking say it.” My tone is flat. Commanding. I know he wants to.
“He could never fuck me the way you do,” he tells me. “He couldn’t. Nobody could fuck me the way you do.”
I thrust my cockhead inside him. He tries to shove back onto it for more. Nope. The head’s all he gets for that. “I get in deeper than he does.”
He’s writhing beneath me. His body is lean and lightly muscular. His hair is dark, with flecks of gray at the temple. He’s one of those suits, who lives in a fancy house in a fancy neighborhood. This flophouse is a come-down for his sort. But here he is, whoring himself for my dick in it, begging and gasping and squealing like any cheap piece of ass. “Yes,” he echoes. “You get in so much deeper.”
I give him another inch. “I stretch you out so that you ache after.”
“Yes,” he says. Then reality intrudes as he laughs a little. “It really hurts, after.”
“But you need it.”
“I need it.”
“And he doesn’t give it to you.”
“No,” he whispers. There’s no hesitation now. The betrayal slips fleetly from his lips. “He never did.”
“He never could.”
“Please.”
This time I’m merciful. I shove back into him so hard that he gasps. His eyelids open as wide as possible. His head drops backward. “Please, wreck my hole,” I instruct him to say.
“Please wreck my hole. Just fucking do with it whatever you want. Fuck it. Slam it. Make it hurt.”
“Whose hole is it?” I want to know. “It’s not his hole, is it?”
“It’s your hole,” he says. I start thrusting again. It’s his reward. He luxuriates into the fuck, purring. “It’s your hole. Your hole only. You own it. All I think about is you. When I’m at home at night. With my short-dicked boyfriend. All I think about is you.”
“So I win,” I announce. It’s not a question. It’s never a question.
“You win.”
“Damn right I do,” I say, before I shove his face into the flimsy pillows, and start opening him for load number three.
Too fucking competitive. That’s what I am.
But I don’t give a shit about that either, so long as I come out on top.
Monday mornings are when we meet. The place is a hotel by the interstate where the rates are hourly and the doors whisper-thin, the ceilings uneven from multiple refacings, the floors so iffy that we pile our discarded clothing onto the room’s only table. When I make him yell, I know that anyone passing can hear him. I don’t really give a shit. The only other places in this run-down hellhole are truckers looking to cut corners on their budgets, or men here for the same reason we are.
To fuck.
He’s got a boyfriend. I don’t give a shit about that, either. His hole’s up in the air, his knees spread apart as far as I can yank them. “You like that?” I snarl at him.
“I love it,” he gasps out.
“You love that dick, don’t you?” I’m pile driving him. Every stroke I take hammers home my shaft. His body shudders from every blow.
“I love your dick,” he gasps out, between gut punches.
“Is my dick bigger than your boyfriend’s?”
He’s reluctant to say. Like it’s a betrayal. Whoring his hole out in a seedy motel room, giving it up for the fourth Monday in a row to the married man who uses him as a cumdump—that’s A-okay. Admitting that my dick is bigger than his boyfriend’s? He acts like it’d be the Judas kiss to his relationship. “Sure,” he groans out, into the sandpapery pillow.
That kind of answer just enrages me. “Not . . . good . . . enough.” He lets out a sob as I pummel him with each word. “I asked you a question. Is my dick . . . bigger . . . than . . . your fucking . . . dumb-ass . . . boyfriend’s?”
“Yes!” he says. The admission is a wet explosion of need and embarrassment. “It’s so much bigger. You have no idea. He’s got nothing compared to you.”
I’m pleased, but not mollified. He’s wearing one of my jocks, a Nasty Pig black and white number. I’d made him slip it off me when I arrived, then don it right away so that he’d feel the warmth of my dick and nuts on it when it slipped onto his waist. I grabbed the waistband like reins. “And am I a better fuck than your boyfriend?”
“Yes!” he yells. This time there’s no hesitation. “Oh god yes. So much better.”
Inwardly, I sneer. This is too easy. And I’m still too damned competitive, if you ask me.
I yank out my dick. He groans like he’s being deprived. His hungry hole has swallowed down two of my loads already—snatched them out of my dick, if you want to know the truth. “So when you pussy up for me, you’re not thinking about him at all, are you?” I ask.
“No.” He’s whimpering. His hole is blindly squeezing out, opening and closing around air, trying to find the meat that’s radiating so much heat behind it.
“And when you’re home at night, in bed with him—“
“I’m thinking of you,” he says. He looks up at me over his shoulder. His eyes are wet with adoration and love. “I’m only thinking of you.”
I go back to my point. “Say it for me, and maybe I’ll give you more of my cock. When I’m home at night. . . .”
“Please,” he whispers. Then, realizing I mean it, he says, “When I’m at home at night.”
“In bed with my short-dicked boyfriend. . . .”
“Fuck.”
“Say it.”
“When I’m at home at night in bed . . . with my short-dicked boyfriend. . . .”
“. . . All I think about is you.”
He parrots the words. “All I think about is you.”
“And how you fill me up.”
“I love how you fill me up,” he breathes.
“And how you make my hole feel better than anything—anything—he could ever do.”
“Oh god,” he says. I let the tip of my dick nudge against him.
“Fucking say it.” My tone is flat. Commanding. I know he wants to.
“He could never fuck me the way you do,” he tells me. “He couldn’t. Nobody could fuck me the way you do.”
I thrust my cockhead inside him. He tries to shove back onto it for more. Nope. The head’s all he gets for that. “I get in deeper than he does.”
He’s writhing beneath me. His body is lean and lightly muscular. His hair is dark, with flecks of gray at the temple. He’s one of those suits, who lives in a fancy house in a fancy neighborhood. This flophouse is a come-down for his sort. But here he is, whoring himself for my dick in it, begging and gasping and squealing like any cheap piece of ass. “Yes,” he echoes. “You get in so much deeper.”
I give him another inch. “I stretch you out so that you ache after.”
“Yes,” he says. Then reality intrudes as he laughs a little. “It really hurts, after.”
“But you need it.”
“I need it.”
“And he doesn’t give it to you.”
“No,” he whispers. There’s no hesitation now. The betrayal slips fleetly from his lips. “He never did.”
“He never could.”
“Please.”
This time I’m merciful. I shove back into him so hard that he gasps. His eyelids open as wide as possible. His head drops backward. “Please, wreck my hole,” I instruct him to say.
“Please wreck my hole. Just fucking do with it whatever you want. Fuck it. Slam it. Make it hurt.”
“Whose hole is it?” I want to know. “It’s not his hole, is it?”
“It’s your hole,” he says. I start thrusting again. It’s his reward. He luxuriates into the fuck, purring. “It’s your hole. Your hole only. You own it. All I think about is you. When I’m at home at night. With my short-dicked boyfriend. All I think about is you.”
“So I win,” I announce. It’s not a question. It’s never a question.
“You win.”
“Damn right I do,” I say, before I shove his face into the flimsy pillows, and start opening him for load number three.
Too fucking competitive. That’s what I am.
But I don’t give a shit about that either, so long as I come out on top.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Phillip the Brazilian
The thing of it is: whenever I think about the guy, I remember the burst of excitement I got from the initial impression his photos made. Never mind what happened afterwards. When he pops into my head, I remember that curly short hair, the dazzling smile, the skin the color of teak. And I remember my instinctive reaction of Wow, that guy wants me? Okay then! Let's do it!
He was Brazilian. That’s even how he refers to himself when he texts me. Hi, this is Phillip the Brazilian. Come fuck me? I found it charming.
And I wasn’t really betrayed by false photos, either. He lived in a flat over the New York border, at the top of a three-story house that had been subdivided into private apartments. It was snowing out that morning, and when he padded around the house’s side to meet me and lead me upstairs, I was surprised at how handsome he was in person, too. He wore a pair of soccer shorts. made of that sleazy, drape-y fabric that shows every contour of a man’s cock if he’s not wearing underwear. Which he wasn’t. His dark and hairy legs were stuffed into a much-worn pair of gray sweatsocks, and his feet were girdled by sandals that slapped the wet pavement as he approached. He flashed me a smile—god damn, what a smile this fucker had—and asked if I’d found the address okay. Then he put his hand on the small of my back as he guided me into the house and up the stairwell to the top.
Once we were alone, and upstairs beneath the much-repaired plaster ceiling of his bedroom, he gave me another broad, toothy smile. I melted. “You are very, very handsome,” he told me. His words were warm and sweet, his voice like summer honey fresh from the comb. He pulled me down to his sofa and planted a kiss on my lips. His mouth was hot, and moist, and eager; when his tongue slipped between my lips and into my own mouth, I groaned and let him push me down on the cushions. “I’ve wanted you for a long time,” he told me, as he grapples with the buttons on my shirt. “I’ve kept looking at your profile and hoping you’d notice.”
“I wish I had,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He was making me feel so good.
“Oh fuck,” he breathed, when I reached out and started stroking the lump in his sleazy shorts. It was hard to miss that protrusion, that enormous mound of hardened flesh. He’s big, this guy. I wrestled with his waist band and yanked it down below his hips. His dick fell onto me like a tree branch. “You like it?”
“I sure as hell do,” I said. I pulled myself out from under him. I knelt down on the rag carpet and helped him to spread his legs.
It was a beautiful dick. A solid eight inches. Thicker than my own. Cut. Juicy. He drooled precum onto my tongue as he slid himself in. I sucked the upper few inches for a while, then engulfed the whole shaft to the base. He groaned as his head hit the back of my throat. “Don’t make me cum,” he begged. Then, after a moment more, he grabbed me by the ears and pulled my face off his meat. “Fuck me,” he said. “I need your big dick inside me.”
I had no problem with that.
We took ourselves into the bedroom, where he pushed me down onto the mattress, pulled down my pants so they hung around my ankles, and then slathered my dick with lube. “I’m gonna sit on it,” he promised, staring at me with those intense eyes of his. “I’m gonna sit on it and ride it all day.” His head lolled back when he lowered himself onto my shaft. He was tight, but he kept a hold on my cock until half of it was in, and then pushed himself onto the remaining inches.
We both groaned at the same time. It felt good. “I want to ride this all afternoon,” he promised. “Can we fuck all afternoon?”
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” I grinned at him.
“Good, because I want to make you my captive,” he said. “I’m gonna tie you up and keep you as my toy top. Just ride you all afternoon, baby. Take that big white dick up my hole all afternoon until—!”
And this is the point he painted my face with cum. Seriously. I didn’t see it coming. There was no announcement of it, no forewarning. No groaning or panting, no sudden rush of activity. I was just lying there, propping myself up on my elbows and egging him on, listening to him talk in a normal conversational sex voice, when suddenly my face was wet and dripping. I was vaguely aware that my shoulders were sopping, as well. Then he hopped up, hopped off, and scampered into the bathroom across the hallway as quickly as he could.
Now, I’m not exactly the slowest-witted of people, even when most of my body’s blood is concentrated below the waist in my engorged dick. But it really wasn’t until I heard him running the water that I realized what had just happened. My brain was stuck back in the Can we fuck all afternoon? part of the conversation to fully comprehend that I’d just had my face splattered with jism. Then he came back, smiled at me in his Brazilian way, and tossed me my shirt. “That was great!” he enthused.
And inwardly, I was lying there thinking . . . Wait. That’s it?
Whenever I write of these disappointing encounters, there’s always someone who says, “You should’ve just grabbed him and fucked him until you got your satisfaction, stud.” And in some circumstances, that’s pretty much exactly what I would’ve done. However, when your trick is studiously keeping himself out of arm’s length of you, it’s not all that easy. So I gathered my clothes, stuffed myself back in them, and let myself out. I looked at my watch when I got down to the bottom of the stairs.
I’d been there all of seven minutes.
More than a little ticked off, I took myself to lunch at a sandwich shop not a mile away. I’d barely gotten there and parked—it hadn’t been more than ten minutes since I’d exited—when Phillip the Brazilian started texting me again. Can you come back and fuck me again? he wanted to know. I’m horny. And, Can you come over this afternoon? Or maybe tonight? You could spend the night.
I had a vision of myself arriving at eight in the evening and spending the night until eight-o’-seven. I shook my head, thanked the attendant for delivering my sandwich, and just set down the phone.
He was Brazilian. That’s even how he refers to himself when he texts me. Hi, this is Phillip the Brazilian. Come fuck me? I found it charming.
And I wasn’t really betrayed by false photos, either. He lived in a flat over the New York border, at the top of a three-story house that had been subdivided into private apartments. It was snowing out that morning, and when he padded around the house’s side to meet me and lead me upstairs, I was surprised at how handsome he was in person, too. He wore a pair of soccer shorts. made of that sleazy, drape-y fabric that shows every contour of a man’s cock if he’s not wearing underwear. Which he wasn’t. His dark and hairy legs were stuffed into a much-worn pair of gray sweatsocks, and his feet were girdled by sandals that slapped the wet pavement as he approached. He flashed me a smile—god damn, what a smile this fucker had—and asked if I’d found the address okay. Then he put his hand on the small of my back as he guided me into the house and up the stairwell to the top.
Once we were alone, and upstairs beneath the much-repaired plaster ceiling of his bedroom, he gave me another broad, toothy smile. I melted. “You are very, very handsome,” he told me. His words were warm and sweet, his voice like summer honey fresh from the comb. He pulled me down to his sofa and planted a kiss on my lips. His mouth was hot, and moist, and eager; when his tongue slipped between my lips and into my own mouth, I groaned and let him push me down on the cushions. “I’ve wanted you for a long time,” he told me, as he grapples with the buttons on my shirt. “I’ve kept looking at your profile and hoping you’d notice.”
“I wish I had,” I said, trying to catch my breath. He was making me feel so good.
“Oh fuck,” he breathed, when I reached out and started stroking the lump in his sleazy shorts. It was hard to miss that protrusion, that enormous mound of hardened flesh. He’s big, this guy. I wrestled with his waist band and yanked it down below his hips. His dick fell onto me like a tree branch. “You like it?”
“I sure as hell do,” I said. I pulled myself out from under him. I knelt down on the rag carpet and helped him to spread his legs.
It was a beautiful dick. A solid eight inches. Thicker than my own. Cut. Juicy. He drooled precum onto my tongue as he slid himself in. I sucked the upper few inches for a while, then engulfed the whole shaft to the base. He groaned as his head hit the back of my throat. “Don’t make me cum,” he begged. Then, after a moment more, he grabbed me by the ears and pulled my face off his meat. “Fuck me,” he said. “I need your big dick inside me.”
I had no problem with that.
We took ourselves into the bedroom, where he pushed me down onto the mattress, pulled down my pants so they hung around my ankles, and then slathered my dick with lube. “I’m gonna sit on it,” he promised, staring at me with those intense eyes of his. “I’m gonna sit on it and ride it all day.” His head lolled back when he lowered himself onto my shaft. He was tight, but he kept a hold on my cock until half of it was in, and then pushed himself onto the remaining inches.
We both groaned at the same time. It felt good. “I want to ride this all afternoon,” he promised. “Can we fuck all afternoon?”
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” I grinned at him.
“Good, because I want to make you my captive,” he said. “I’m gonna tie you up and keep you as my toy top. Just ride you all afternoon, baby. Take that big white dick up my hole all afternoon until—!”
And this is the point he painted my face with cum. Seriously. I didn’t see it coming. There was no announcement of it, no forewarning. No groaning or panting, no sudden rush of activity. I was just lying there, propping myself up on my elbows and egging him on, listening to him talk in a normal conversational sex voice, when suddenly my face was wet and dripping. I was vaguely aware that my shoulders were sopping, as well. Then he hopped up, hopped off, and scampered into the bathroom across the hallway as quickly as he could.
Now, I’m not exactly the slowest-witted of people, even when most of my body’s blood is concentrated below the waist in my engorged dick. But it really wasn’t until I heard him running the water that I realized what had just happened. My brain was stuck back in the Can we fuck all afternoon? part of the conversation to fully comprehend that I’d just had my face splattered with jism. Then he came back, smiled at me in his Brazilian way, and tossed me my shirt. “That was great!” he enthused.
And inwardly, I was lying there thinking . . . Wait. That’s it?
Whenever I write of these disappointing encounters, there’s always someone who says, “You should’ve just grabbed him and fucked him until you got your satisfaction, stud.” And in some circumstances, that’s pretty much exactly what I would’ve done. However, when your trick is studiously keeping himself out of arm’s length of you, it’s not all that easy. So I gathered my clothes, stuffed myself back in them, and let myself out. I looked at my watch when I got down to the bottom of the stairs.
I’d been there all of seven minutes.
More than a little ticked off, I took myself to lunch at a sandwich shop not a mile away. I’d barely gotten there and parked—it hadn’t been more than ten minutes since I’d exited—when Phillip the Brazilian started texting me again. Can you come back and fuck me again? he wanted to know. I’m horny. And, Can you come over this afternoon? Or maybe tonight? You could spend the night.
I had a vision of myself arriving at eight in the evening and spending the night until eight-o’-seven. I shook my head, thanked the attendant for delivering my sandwich, and just set down the phone.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Sunday Morning Questions: Rhymes with Sham4 Edition
Anyone who reads my blog knows I’m a big ol’ show-off, particularly when it comes to my dick. I like whipping it out, getting it hard, and displaying it for others to stare at.
And when I’m not on public transportation (kidding!), I like getting on a chat channel cam and stroking for strangers. It’s just the exhibitionist in me. He needs an airing, once in a while. Besides, my dick likes the compliments, and once it starts getting its way, there’s really no controlling it. So I play along.
Anyway, last night I was indulging myself on cam—I know a couple of my regular readers saw me—in a site where I often go. Let it remain nameless. I like the site because it’s free, attracts a number of decently hot folk, and because I’ve met several guys from it in the past.
I can also predict, though, from past experience that’s been sore and hard-won, the arc in which my natural zest for performing will wane, and leave me a grumpy, teeth-gnashing misanthrope who ends up yelling the sex cam equivalent of You kids get off my god-damned front lawn! at everyone watching.
Oh, it starts off innocently enough. For five or ten minutes I’ll only have a couple of viewers. Iluvsexydads will make compliments about my dick, and I’ll say, “Thank you, Iluvsexydads!” and carry on a conversation with the guy. I’ll have the leisure to watch a camera or two, and check my email on other sites. It’s dull, really.
Then about fifteen minutes in, I start getting a trickle of viewers. Ten. Fifteen. I’ll be thanking fluffystud602 and sexynuddistman and NYHotJockDud for their compliments, and answering their every question.
Twenty-five minutes in, I’ll have about fifty viewers. By now when NCSexxxxy and LilThug32022 and NastyAssFukka tell me I have a nice dick, I’m shortening their names and saying, “Thanks NC. Thanks Lil. Thanks Fukka.” I’m spending more time typing out No, I won’t show my feet. No, I’m not putting a dildo in my ass. No, I won’t get a pair of panties and put them in my mouth than I am touching myself.
Thirty-five minutes. I’m on the site’s front page. I have a hundred and twenty-five viewers. The chat in my broadcast room is whizzing by. I’m saying Thanks guys! generically to the compliments, every so often. Viewers are starting to get frustrated when I don’t answer their every question immediately, so they’ll type in all caps, over and over again: SO HAS UR WIFE EVER COME HOME AND CAUGHT U JACKING????? I’ll be getting a barrage of private messages, most of them urging me to cam2cam with them. I’m not even bothering to turn down the multiple requests to show my feet and masturbate with my son’s dirty jock that I stole from his gym bag after he was out all night with the football team watching sexy MILF porn and drinking Gatorade.
(Some of their fantasies are very specific.)
Forty-five minutes. There will be close to two hundred people watching. Most of them are arguing about whether or not I’m even paying attention to the conversation in my chat room. I’ll have PrinceAmir202 announcing, IF U WANT 2 SEE A CAM OF A GUY WHO IS YUNG + HOT INSTEAD OF OLD + UGLY LIKE THIS GUY CUM WATCH ME. I boot PrinceAmir202 from the room. Not all the viewers are shooting compliments my way. A few prefer to come in and say things like, His dick’s not THAT nice, or I’ve seen better. A small contingent of people start yelling in all caps TO DEMAND I SHOW MY FEET!!!!! My ardent defenders will start trying to shout down the rude people.
The whole thing very rapidly becomes about as conducive to a boner as watching a History Channel documentary about amputation techniques during the War of the Roses. So I’ll flip off my camera and whack off alone.
And people wonder why I don’t shoot on cam for them.
Let’s get to some questions from readers, courtesy of formspring.me.
What is one thing that you’d be happy if you never had to experience again for the rest of your life?
A kidney stone. Sweet Jesus.
Have you ever had phone sex or would you?
If by phone sex you mean feigning excitement over the phone line while pretending that a sexual encounter is happening between the two people talking, yes. I've done it a couple of times. I found it so fake and unerotic that I've never done it again, and refuse to.
If I'm talking to a friend or an acquaintance on the phone about sexual encounters we've had, that's an entirely different beast. I like someone telling me who he's fucked that week and how it went down, or I like sharing with someone some of my past experiences. Having a dialogue about likes and dislikes can also be very intimate and erotic.
Faking sex, though? It bores me.
Seeing as how a blog is a diary are you surprised at how many people myself included are so voyueristic?
Having been a lifelong exhibitionist, I'm not surprised in the least by how many people like to watch, or get a vicarious thrill out of someone else's sexual experience.
What does surprise me is how many people obsessively return to blogs on a regular basis, but do so solely in order to abuse the people who write them. If one doesn't respect the author of a blog or like the things they do, it's time for one to move on to something else. Coming back day after day to leave abusive comments on a sex blog or to sneer doesn't make a reader superior, or virginal, or more virtuous; it just means that he has an unhealthy fixation.
What actor should play you in the story of your life?
My first choice would be James McAvoy. His hair is darker than mine, and we're not twins or anything, but I think there's something about his face that's reminiscent of mine. Plus he's Scottish, and I'm of Scottish heritage. I have no doubt he could pull off my bland American accent, though. Probably even better than I.
But if he’s not available, go for Bradley Cooper. Why, he’s practically my twin.
What race/class is your main toon in WoW? Do you still play it or other games often, and have you ever used an online game as a means to hookup?
It's been a while since anyone asked me about my gaming habits. My WoW main for a half-dozen years was a feral night elf druid. My current main is a worgen balance druid.
I have been playing WoW again in the last couple of months. I originally started playing about five or six months after the game was originally released, and raided all the way through Burning Crusade and WotLK. I then took a year-and-a-half hiatus when Cataclysm came out. There were a number of reasons I disliked that expansion, and I essentially quit because people were rude to my healers in random dungeons. MoP has addressed and corrected most of my issues—though I haven't had the stomach to run randoms or to heal yet again. Still, I've been having a lot of fun!
One of the things i've figured out about my WoW time is that I need to be able to approach it without feeling like it's enforced labor. I like taking my time and pursuing the stuff in the game that I really love, like fishing (no, really) and archaeology (no, really!) and making money. If I feel like I'm being pressured to run raids and dungeons and to churn through reputation grinds on a hundred alts, I start to resent it. In this expansion there's been enough variety to keep me engaged and happy puttering around and doing the stuff I like to do.
And I love pet battling.
I've never hooked up off of WoW; I think when I'm playing, I'm too much focused on the game and my next little goal to think about that. Unlike a blog, or Instagram, or a sex site, all of which are passively engaging (you post something, then you wait for responses), WoW and other online games are usually demanding your attention and focus in the present tense. There's also enough disconnect between a real-life person and his online presence as a gnome warlock in WoW that I don't find myself lusting after anyone I've met through it.
I don't mind sharing my BattleTag with others—if anyone wants to add me to his or her friends list, email me.
When you're feeling under the weather, is there one thing that seems to make you feel better? if so, what is it?
Matzoh ball soup. I love it. Even when I'm not sick.
And when I’m not on public transportation (kidding!), I like getting on a chat channel cam and stroking for strangers. It’s just the exhibitionist in me. He needs an airing, once in a while. Besides, my dick likes the compliments, and once it starts getting its way, there’s really no controlling it. So I play along.
Anyway, last night I was indulging myself on cam—I know a couple of my regular readers saw me—in a site where I often go. Let it remain nameless. I like the site because it’s free, attracts a number of decently hot folk, and because I’ve met several guys from it in the past.
I can also predict, though, from past experience that’s been sore and hard-won, the arc in which my natural zest for performing will wane, and leave me a grumpy, teeth-gnashing misanthrope who ends up yelling the sex cam equivalent of You kids get off my god-damned front lawn! at everyone watching.
Oh, it starts off innocently enough. For five or ten minutes I’ll only have a couple of viewers. Iluvsexydads will make compliments about my dick, and I’ll say, “Thank you, Iluvsexydads!” and carry on a conversation with the guy. I’ll have the leisure to watch a camera or two, and check my email on other sites. It’s dull, really.
Then about fifteen minutes in, I start getting a trickle of viewers. Ten. Fifteen. I’ll be thanking fluffystud602 and sexynuddistman and NYHotJockDud for their compliments, and answering their every question.
Twenty-five minutes in, I’ll have about fifty viewers. By now when NCSexxxxy and LilThug32022 and NastyAssFukka tell me I have a nice dick, I’m shortening their names and saying, “Thanks NC. Thanks Lil. Thanks Fukka.” I’m spending more time typing out No, I won’t show my feet. No, I’m not putting a dildo in my ass. No, I won’t get a pair of panties and put them in my mouth than I am touching myself.
Thirty-five minutes. I’m on the site’s front page. I have a hundred and twenty-five viewers. The chat in my broadcast room is whizzing by. I’m saying Thanks guys! generically to the compliments, every so often. Viewers are starting to get frustrated when I don’t answer their every question immediately, so they’ll type in all caps, over and over again: SO HAS UR WIFE EVER COME HOME AND CAUGHT U JACKING????? I’ll be getting a barrage of private messages, most of them urging me to cam2cam with them. I’m not even bothering to turn down the multiple requests to show my feet and masturbate with my son’s dirty jock that I stole from his gym bag after he was out all night with the football team watching sexy MILF porn and drinking Gatorade.
(Some of their fantasies are very specific.)
Forty-five minutes. There will be close to two hundred people watching. Most of them are arguing about whether or not I’m even paying attention to the conversation in my chat room. I’ll have PrinceAmir202 announcing, IF U WANT 2 SEE A CAM OF A GUY WHO IS YUNG + HOT INSTEAD OF OLD + UGLY LIKE THIS GUY CUM WATCH ME. I boot PrinceAmir202 from the room. Not all the viewers are shooting compliments my way. A few prefer to come in and say things like, His dick’s not THAT nice, or I’ve seen better. A small contingent of people start yelling in all caps TO DEMAND I SHOW MY FEET!!!!! My ardent defenders will start trying to shout down the rude people.
The whole thing very rapidly becomes about as conducive to a boner as watching a History Channel documentary about amputation techniques during the War of the Roses. So I’ll flip off my camera and whack off alone.
And people wonder why I don’t shoot on cam for them.
Let’s get to some questions from readers, courtesy of formspring.me.
What is one thing that you’d be happy if you never had to experience again for the rest of your life?
A kidney stone. Sweet Jesus.
Have you ever had phone sex or would you?
If by phone sex you mean feigning excitement over the phone line while pretending that a sexual encounter is happening between the two people talking, yes. I've done it a couple of times. I found it so fake and unerotic that I've never done it again, and refuse to.
If I'm talking to a friend or an acquaintance on the phone about sexual encounters we've had, that's an entirely different beast. I like someone telling me who he's fucked that week and how it went down, or I like sharing with someone some of my past experiences. Having a dialogue about likes and dislikes can also be very intimate and erotic.
Faking sex, though? It bores me.
Seeing as how a blog is a diary are you surprised at how many people myself included are so voyueristic?
Having been a lifelong exhibitionist, I'm not surprised in the least by how many people like to watch, or get a vicarious thrill out of someone else's sexual experience.
What does surprise me is how many people obsessively return to blogs on a regular basis, but do so solely in order to abuse the people who write them. If one doesn't respect the author of a blog or like the things they do, it's time for one to move on to something else. Coming back day after day to leave abusive comments on a sex blog or to sneer doesn't make a reader superior, or virginal, or more virtuous; it just means that he has an unhealthy fixation.
What actor should play you in the story of your life?
My first choice would be James McAvoy. His hair is darker than mine, and we're not twins or anything, but I think there's something about his face that's reminiscent of mine. Plus he's Scottish, and I'm of Scottish heritage. I have no doubt he could pull off my bland American accent, though. Probably even better than I.
But if he’s not available, go for Bradley Cooper. Why, he’s practically my twin.
What race/class is your main toon in WoW? Do you still play it or other games often, and have you ever used an online game as a means to hookup?
It's been a while since anyone asked me about my gaming habits. My WoW main for a half-dozen years was a feral night elf druid. My current main is a worgen balance druid.
I have been playing WoW again in the last couple of months. I originally started playing about five or six months after the game was originally released, and raided all the way through Burning Crusade and WotLK. I then took a year-and-a-half hiatus when Cataclysm came out. There were a number of reasons I disliked that expansion, and I essentially quit because people were rude to my healers in random dungeons. MoP has addressed and corrected most of my issues—though I haven't had the stomach to run randoms or to heal yet again. Still, I've been having a lot of fun!
One of the things i've figured out about my WoW time is that I need to be able to approach it without feeling like it's enforced labor. I like taking my time and pursuing the stuff in the game that I really love, like fishing (no, really) and archaeology (no, really!) and making money. If I feel like I'm being pressured to run raids and dungeons and to churn through reputation grinds on a hundred alts, I start to resent it. In this expansion there's been enough variety to keep me engaged and happy puttering around and doing the stuff I like to do.
And I love pet battling.
I've never hooked up off of WoW; I think when I'm playing, I'm too much focused on the game and my next little goal to think about that. Unlike a blog, or Instagram, or a sex site, all of which are passively engaging (you post something, then you wait for responses), WoW and other online games are usually demanding your attention and focus in the present tense. There's also enough disconnect between a real-life person and his online presence as a gnome warlock in WoW that I don't find myself lusting after anyone I've met through it.
I don't mind sharing my BattleTag with others—if anyone wants to add me to his or her friends list, email me.
When you're feeling under the weather, is there one thing that seems to make you feel better? if so, what is it?
Matzoh ball soup. I love it. Even when I'm not sick.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Open Forum Friday: Selling It
After nearly three years of blogging about my sex life, I’ve developed a keen eye for the subjects that tend to be contentious. I know which topics are going to bring out the hateful comments and the howls of those who have a point to prove at someone else’s expense. I’ve learned the hard way which types of entries are going to elicit those little acid pools left by the dripping fangs of someone who only feels big when he’s anonymously venomous.
I almost wish I hadn’t figured it out. Because sometimes I’ll think about a topic, consider it for an entry, think about all the negative shit-storm that’ll follow, and just delete it from the list. And that’s no good, because it clearly causes me to write less.
But today I’m not so much here to write about the Negative Nancies and their desire to squelch anyone who thinks or lives differently from themselves, as I am to discuss a topic that inevitably raises their hackles. Because nothing brings out the irate and disparaging commenters as much as when I discuss the fact that sometimes I accept money for my sexual services.
It’s a taboo area of discussion or even contemplation for a lot of people. We have an cultivated knee-jerk reaction, as ‘nice people,’ automatically to assume a number of things about the people who get paid for sex. At best they think they’re hardened mercenaries who have no better way to earn money. They’re predators, out to make an easy buck. They can’t get a real job. They’re simply unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum, they see sex workers as wicked, and evil. Diseased. Untouchables. They’re taught to think these things from an early age and taught so strictly not to deviate from a single way of thinking about people who are sex workers that it almost prevents any serious and critical thought about it. Hell, those in the sex trade aren’t even people to most folk. They become in many minds an awful, dreaded other, a subhuman species that’s disposable and forgettable and which should be ignored.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why my selling sex enrages and disgusts a small handful of (vocal) readers. It’s not like I’m telling them to fork over a twenty to read my sexual encounters. I don’t post on my profiles phrases like, LQQKing 4 generou$ men. I don’t hot men up and then suggest they make it worth my while with cold cash. In my youth and adulthood both, I never demanded cash for cock; I just accepted it when it was given me. I don’t claim to be an escort. (Hardly. Escorts are much better looking and have way better bodies than I.) I never suggest anyone pay me, I never demand it. I don’t have only an eye for the bottom line, and choose sex for cash over just good old-fashioned fucking.
To be totally honest, when my libido’s running on overdrive and my dick is hard and my pants barely holding onto my waist, exchanging sperm for cash is about the last thing on my mind.
Yet earlier this week, when I was contemplating my 2012 reported annual income for my tax returns, one thing that kind of leapt out at me was that when I compared the amount I made last year from pushing my artistic work to the amount I made from selling my body . . . well, it kind of made me half-wonder for a moment or two if I was in the wrong business.
If we look at the amount of income I’ve generated over the years from sex work, my life would look like a reverse bell curve. The graph would be high in my teens, start declining in my mid-twenties, bottom out to nothing during my thirties, and then swing back up to a new peak in my forties. It’s not something I think is an awesome accomplishment of my life. But I’m not ashamed of selling sex, either; I’ll talk about my experiences pretty openly. Mostly I just think it’s kind of a hoot that I’m racing up a half-century and still rake in pretty good bucks for my body.
Yet when some butthole of a reader decides to be snide and to write in a comment saying something like Aren’t you ashamed of having been a prostitute when you were a teen?, it makes me sigh, swat the irritation off my shoulders like a bull would a swarm of flies, and ask right back, Are you ashamed of having been a babysitter when you were younger? Because frankly, if one removes the stigma of the sexual component from the equation, the economic transactions are about the same. And there’s less puke to clean.
Though frankly I don’t know many people who would rather babysit brats for three or four hours when they could make four times the money in a fraction of the time getting a blow job. Nor do I know many people who made their first house downpayment with their babysitting or lawn-mowing money. Just sayin’.
As as bad as the misconceptions I think we have about sex workers, however, are those we have about those who buy it. I get those in my comments as well—the sneering implications that anyone who would pay for my time must be ancient, decrepit, blind, desperate, or some combination of the above. And probably leprous. People believe that anyone who would pay for sex must be unattractive, past his prime, and unable to get it any other way than preying on young victims. (Or me, if he’s really desperate.)
These people would be dead wrong.
Over the years I’ve found that men who offer to pay for sex fall into three broad types.
1. The Fetishists: These men get off on the little extra kick that the exchange of money lends to a sexual situation. Whether they’ve bought into the notion that adding a financial component to something they already consider sordid and dirty makes it doubly so, or whether they get off on the notion of being controlled through the wallet in the same way that some men like to be controlled with blindfolds, or restraints, or verbal domination, the exchange of money is vital to their enjoyment.
The cash slaves I’ve had fall into this category—that is the men who give me money to degrade and control them, whether or not we’ve actually met or not. So does the Latin boy I wrote about in my last entry, who empties his billfold into my pocket to prove how thoroughly I control him before I skull-fuck him and pound his little hole. So do the married men who fork over folded bills for my time and then breathlessly get off on a dick that other men have paid for.
2. The Justifiers: Some men, like the Landscaper, can only settle their consciences by rationalizing what they do in what is—let’s face it—a self-deluding way. They approach their sex not as a physical act, but as a financial transaction. To them, sex is best when it’s drained of all its implications of desire and need, and reduced to an entry in their Quicken ledger or the writing of a check. Everyone buys stuff. To these guys, paying a couple of hundred dollars to suck a dick is about as free of guilt and shame as a trip for groceries to Trader Joe’s. (In my opinion, the two are already equally shameless, but not everyone is as sexually liberal as I.)
3. The Businessmen: Some of these guys actually do have careers in business, but I use the phrase loosely. These are guys who feel their time is valuable; they’d rather pay someone to give them exactly what they want, than have to waste time hunting fruitlessly for it. They’re willing to pay a guy who has the look they want, or the dick size they want, or who can perform the specific act they crave. The money’s not a sticking point. Nor do they get off on paying a professional for his services any more than they might get off on hiring a guy to clean out the gutters on their houses in the autumn after the leaves have fallen. It’s simply a matter of expediency and guaranteed performance, for them. They get what they want, for a guaranteed period of time, with a minimum of fuss and complication.
I’d venture to say that the vast majority of men who’ve paid me for sex fall into this last category. The Texas department store magnate who forks over hundreds of dollars for three hours of my time in his hotel whenever he’s in the city is a handsome, virile, and surprisingly young man—but he’d rather have me come back time after time because I give him what he wants, and then some. The college professor in New Haven who could easily have just about any man he wanted, but who reads my blog and enjoys talking to me after the sex, pays me because I understand what makes him tick in bed and he’d rather not have to answer Craigslist ads for hours. The out-of-towners who contact me before their visits, pay ask me to reserve nights for them weeks in advance, pay me for the courtesy of arranging my calendar for them (and for the fucking).
Whatever it is, I have something all these men want. They consider it worth their money. So I pocket it, keep in mind the reasons they pay for sex, and attempt to exceed their expectations. They get what they need, and I have a little extra spending money for books and music and household expenses. Are they men unattractive? Lord, no. Not by a long shot. A handful of them are pictures of physical perfection. Are they old and senile? Most are mature enough to be earning a comfortable living, but some are young and barely scraping by, but need the thrill that saving up for a really good fuck can give them. Are they desperate?
Desperate for my dick, surely. But not desperate in the general sense of the word.
I know that many of my readers—probably more than most would suspect— have had experience with the sex trade. I’m curious to hear from those who have, in today’s open forum. If you’ve bought sex before, in what category would you consider yourself to be—or would you create a new category for yourself? If you’d sold it, how have you experiences compared to mine, with the types of men who pay for yourself?
I just ask that your comments be thoughtful and nonjudgmental. It’s not necessary automatically to preface your comments with a phrase like I’ve never paid for sex and never would, but. . . . I’ll probably delete comments like those. That kind of phrasing isn’t thoughtful. It’s just a way to to establish guiltlessness—which implies guilt for those who have paid, or received money, for sexual acts.
But insightful dialogue about money for sex? Bring it on, people. And enjoy your weekends.
I almost wish I hadn’t figured it out. Because sometimes I’ll think about a topic, consider it for an entry, think about all the negative shit-storm that’ll follow, and just delete it from the list. And that’s no good, because it clearly causes me to write less.
But today I’m not so much here to write about the Negative Nancies and their desire to squelch anyone who thinks or lives differently from themselves, as I am to discuss a topic that inevitably raises their hackles. Because nothing brings out the irate and disparaging commenters as much as when I discuss the fact that sometimes I accept money for my sexual services.
It’s a taboo area of discussion or even contemplation for a lot of people. We have an cultivated knee-jerk reaction, as ‘nice people,’ automatically to assume a number of things about the people who get paid for sex. At best they think they’re hardened mercenaries who have no better way to earn money. They’re predators, out to make an easy buck. They can’t get a real job. They’re simply unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum, they see sex workers as wicked, and evil. Diseased. Untouchables. They’re taught to think these things from an early age and taught so strictly not to deviate from a single way of thinking about people who are sex workers that it almost prevents any serious and critical thought about it. Hell, those in the sex trade aren’t even people to most folk. They become in many minds an awful, dreaded other, a subhuman species that’s disposable and forgettable and which should be ignored.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why my selling sex enrages and disgusts a small handful of (vocal) readers. It’s not like I’m telling them to fork over a twenty to read my sexual encounters. I don’t post on my profiles phrases like, LQQKing 4 generou$ men. I don’t hot men up and then suggest they make it worth my while with cold cash. In my youth and adulthood both, I never demanded cash for cock; I just accepted it when it was given me. I don’t claim to be an escort. (Hardly. Escorts are much better looking and have way better bodies than I.) I never suggest anyone pay me, I never demand it. I don’t have only an eye for the bottom line, and choose sex for cash over just good old-fashioned fucking.
To be totally honest, when my libido’s running on overdrive and my dick is hard and my pants barely holding onto my waist, exchanging sperm for cash is about the last thing on my mind.
Yet earlier this week, when I was contemplating my 2012 reported annual income for my tax returns, one thing that kind of leapt out at me was that when I compared the amount I made last year from pushing my artistic work to the amount I made from selling my body . . . well, it kind of made me half-wonder for a moment or two if I was in the wrong business.
If we look at the amount of income I’ve generated over the years from sex work, my life would look like a reverse bell curve. The graph would be high in my teens, start declining in my mid-twenties, bottom out to nothing during my thirties, and then swing back up to a new peak in my forties. It’s not something I think is an awesome accomplishment of my life. But I’m not ashamed of selling sex, either; I’ll talk about my experiences pretty openly. Mostly I just think it’s kind of a hoot that I’m racing up a half-century and still rake in pretty good bucks for my body.
Yet when some butthole of a reader decides to be snide and to write in a comment saying something like Aren’t you ashamed of having been a prostitute when you were a teen?, it makes me sigh, swat the irritation off my shoulders like a bull would a swarm of flies, and ask right back, Are you ashamed of having been a babysitter when you were younger? Because frankly, if one removes the stigma of the sexual component from the equation, the economic transactions are about the same. And there’s less puke to clean.
Though frankly I don’t know many people who would rather babysit brats for three or four hours when they could make four times the money in a fraction of the time getting a blow job. Nor do I know many people who made their first house downpayment with their babysitting or lawn-mowing money. Just sayin’.
As as bad as the misconceptions I think we have about sex workers, however, are those we have about those who buy it. I get those in my comments as well—the sneering implications that anyone who would pay for my time must be ancient, decrepit, blind, desperate, or some combination of the above. And probably leprous. People believe that anyone who would pay for sex must be unattractive, past his prime, and unable to get it any other way than preying on young victims. (Or me, if he’s really desperate.)
These people would be dead wrong.
Over the years I’ve found that men who offer to pay for sex fall into three broad types.
1. The Fetishists: These men get off on the little extra kick that the exchange of money lends to a sexual situation. Whether they’ve bought into the notion that adding a financial component to something they already consider sordid and dirty makes it doubly so, or whether they get off on the notion of being controlled through the wallet in the same way that some men like to be controlled with blindfolds, or restraints, or verbal domination, the exchange of money is vital to their enjoyment.
The cash slaves I’ve had fall into this category—that is the men who give me money to degrade and control them, whether or not we’ve actually met or not. So does the Latin boy I wrote about in my last entry, who empties his billfold into my pocket to prove how thoroughly I control him before I skull-fuck him and pound his little hole. So do the married men who fork over folded bills for my time and then breathlessly get off on a dick that other men have paid for.
2. The Justifiers: Some men, like the Landscaper, can only settle their consciences by rationalizing what they do in what is—let’s face it—a self-deluding way. They approach their sex not as a physical act, but as a financial transaction. To them, sex is best when it’s drained of all its implications of desire and need, and reduced to an entry in their Quicken ledger or the writing of a check. Everyone buys stuff. To these guys, paying a couple of hundred dollars to suck a dick is about as free of guilt and shame as a trip for groceries to Trader Joe’s. (In my opinion, the two are already equally shameless, but not everyone is as sexually liberal as I.)
3. The Businessmen: Some of these guys actually do have careers in business, but I use the phrase loosely. These are guys who feel their time is valuable; they’d rather pay someone to give them exactly what they want, than have to waste time hunting fruitlessly for it. They’re willing to pay a guy who has the look they want, or the dick size they want, or who can perform the specific act they crave. The money’s not a sticking point. Nor do they get off on paying a professional for his services any more than they might get off on hiring a guy to clean out the gutters on their houses in the autumn after the leaves have fallen. It’s simply a matter of expediency and guaranteed performance, for them. They get what they want, for a guaranteed period of time, with a minimum of fuss and complication.
I’d venture to say that the vast majority of men who’ve paid me for sex fall into this last category. The Texas department store magnate who forks over hundreds of dollars for three hours of my time in his hotel whenever he’s in the city is a handsome, virile, and surprisingly young man—but he’d rather have me come back time after time because I give him what he wants, and then some. The college professor in New Haven who could easily have just about any man he wanted, but who reads my blog and enjoys talking to me after the sex, pays me because I understand what makes him tick in bed and he’d rather not have to answer Craigslist ads for hours. The out-of-towners who contact me before their visits, pay ask me to reserve nights for them weeks in advance, pay me for the courtesy of arranging my calendar for them (and for the fucking).
Whatever it is, I have something all these men want. They consider it worth their money. So I pocket it, keep in mind the reasons they pay for sex, and attempt to exceed their expectations. They get what they need, and I have a little extra spending money for books and music and household expenses. Are they men unattractive? Lord, no. Not by a long shot. A handful of them are pictures of physical perfection. Are they old and senile? Most are mature enough to be earning a comfortable living, but some are young and barely scraping by, but need the thrill that saving up for a really good fuck can give them. Are they desperate?
Desperate for my dick, surely. But not desperate in the general sense of the word.
I know that many of my readers—probably more than most would suspect— have had experience with the sex trade. I’m curious to hear from those who have, in today’s open forum. If you’ve bought sex before, in what category would you consider yourself to be—or would you create a new category for yourself? If you’d sold it, how have you experiences compared to mine, with the types of men who pay for yourself?
I just ask that your comments be thoughtful and nonjudgmental. It’s not necessary automatically to preface your comments with a phrase like I’ve never paid for sex and never would, but. . . . I’ll probably delete comments like those. That kind of phrasing isn’t thoughtful. It’s just a way to to establish guiltlessness—which implies guilt for those who have paid, or received money, for sexual acts.
But insightful dialogue about money for sex? Bring it on, people. And enjoy your weekends.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Stupid Faggot
“Do I look like a stupid faggot, sir?” he asks. The boy is looking up at me from waist level. My cock is distending his left cheek. He’s got his yap wide open, his lips wrapped around my shaft. When he speaks around the inches, his syllables come out thick, slurred, and heavy, like he’s slow. Drool is trickling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, dark as the night sky, stare up at me. They’re imploring me for an honest answer.
He’s been on my dick for a half-hour at this point, sucking it. He’s been curled up in a fetal position, lying on his side, nursing at it as deeply as he can get it into his throat. I lift my foot and kick him back so that he rolls over so heavily that the mattress shivers. “What the hell do you think?” I snarl at him. “Yeah, you look like a stupid faggot. Because you are a stupid faggot.”
“Yes sir,” he whimpers, looking at me adoringly.
“What are you?”
“A stupid faggot, sir,” he whispers.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask, irritated. “I didn’t hear that.”
“A stupid faggot, sir,” he says. This time it’s louder. More aggressive. “I’m a stupid faggot.”
“Yeah? And what are stupid faggots like you made for?”
“For superior dick,” he tells me. His fingers instinctively clutch for his own dick. It’s triangular in shape, wider at the base, short, and narrowing toward the tip. I use my foot to kick away his arm. “For superior white dick like yours.”
“That’s right,” I tell him. “Now go get me a glass of water.” I scarcely let a second pass before I roll my head with impatience. “Jesus Christ,” I snap. “Do I have to tell you twice?”
The boy hops up. His skin is the color of manila paper. He has a long ponytail pulled back into a rope that hangs to the small of his back. It ends just above his butt, which is small and muscular. He is a beautiful, beautiful young man. If I’d seen him in a bar, or supermarket, or walking along the street in his everyday work clothes, I would have stared at him in frank admiration. In fact, I do that now, as his egress sets those miniature globes of his ass revolving around an invisible axis. I hear water splashing in the sink of his miniature kitchen. A moment later he’s back, his naked body strolling toward me, then dipping as he approaches his bedside. He kneels on the floor and, holding the glass out with both hands, offers it to me.
I take the cheap tumbler and swig down the water. I need it, after all the talking I’ve been doing. The water’s cold and delicious. I let it cool the ache in my throat. But I have a point to make. “What the fuck?” I ask as I stare at him and then the drink in disbelief. “Don’t they teach you people what the fuck ice is, in Puerto Rico?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll fix it, sir,” he says, grabbing back the glass. He can’t take his eyes off me. He wears the grateful expression of a man who has gotten exactly what he’s wanted, and then some.
“Don’t you worry, papi. I’ll fix it for you, just the way you like it.”
Men don’t like to talk about this particular ghetto of sex, this shadowy neighborhood where so many dwell or wish they could play tourist. We don’t talk about it because of our aspirations to middle-class respectability, and this isn’t a nice place to visit. These racial and sexual extremes not how we like to think of ourselves by light of day.
Humiliation is a very real part of many people’s sex lives and fantasies, however. Pretending it’s not—just because it doesn’t fit in with a narrow and homogenized vision of the tame activities to which gay men should constrict themselves—does everyone a disservice. To do so propounds a limited vision of what we are, as sexual creatures.
Banishing humiliation to the shadows makes it only more mysterious, though. More desirable. If it’s something that only dirty men do, it’s where men will scuttle like roaches when they need to feel dirty.
Most people don’t realize how many men need to be treated like dirt, when the apartment doors are closed and the clothes come off. Upstanding businessmen can crawl on cold concrete for the privilege of being splattered with piss and called faggot. Black men can gasp and sink into ecstasy when a white man snarls the word nigger at them. Latin boys like this one can become submissive when vilified as a spic.
There’s a certain subset of so-called good people that becomes outraged by this sort of play, though. They clutch their pearls and declare they’ve never heard the like. It’s not the sort of thing respectable folk do. The people involved must be full of self-loathing. Or they’re mentally ill. They’re certainly not normal. Never mind that there are conservative forces out there who’d be happy to outlaw any kind of man-on-man sex—even the tamest—in the name of purging it from the earth. We’re all too happy to tell each other what kinds of sex we can’t have, too.
Fuck that shit. Men come to me with these fantasies because they know I’m not going to be one of the stick-in-the-ass naysayers. They know they’re safe with me. What’s more, they know that this kind of sex is play—and that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. These men craving my foot planted on their foreheads aren’t freaks. They’re not sick, or crazy.
They’re our brothers.
“You know you’re just a hole to me,” I tell him, after I’ve sprayed my load in his ass. “Just a fucking hole. And what is a hole, baby?”
I’m eight deep in him, and his cunt is stretched to capacity. I fucked him on all fours—like the animal he is, I told him. He’s on his back now, his hands on his dick, tugging himself to a climax. I’m twisted behind him, my hips glued to his, as my meat gently slides in and out of his slick wet hole. He’s resting on me like a comfortable sofa; his head lolls back against my face, so I can whisper in his ear. “I am, sir. I’m a hole.”
“That’s not what I asked, you dumb piece of shit.” He groans. I can see the tip of his penis glisten with a new dime-sized glob of pre-cum. “I said what is a hole. What. Qué. You understand that, right? Qué?”
We’re both sweaty from the long afternoon of sex. His Harlem apartment is a tiny little hotbox. The radiator’s been hissing with steam the entire time I’ve been there. He’s gasping for air. His eyes are slits, behind which glisten obsidian. “I understand,” he gasps. “I don’t know. What is a hole, sir?”
“A hole’s an absence. It’s nothing.”
“I’m nothing,” he says, in an almost-echo.
“Good boy. That’s right,” I say, sounding almost proud of him. “You’re nothing. A hole only becomes something when it’s filled, baby. It’s only worth something when it’s filled. Just like you,” I say into his ear. My beard is brushing against his lobe. He’s shivering and sweating at the same time. “You get it now?”
“Oh god,” he’s saying softly, over and over. Beneath the thin layer of fur on his chest, his nipples are hard and pointed. “I’m a hole, sir. A hole. A fucking hole.”
“A nasty, worthless, faggot hole,” I tell him in a normal voice. “Say it.”
“I’m a nasty, worthless, faggot hole,” he repeats obediently. “I’m a nasty faggot hole, sir.”
He’s beating himself off furiously. His hand is flying over his dick so hard that his balls are flying in the air. “Shoot that pathetic thing you call a dick, you cheap little piece of shit,” I order.
“Oh god,” he says, as he melts back into my arms. His dick erupts and spews his load all they way up to his chin. He shudders against me, becoming heavier with every spasm. My mouth is full of his hair. His hands drift away from his cock and down to my thighs, where they rest lightly. His eyes are closed; his chest rises and falls, each breath almost imperceptibly slower than the one before. “Oh, papi,” he breathes in barely a whisper. “Thank you.”
And then he relaxes completely into me, like I’m a feather bed.
The world’s a scary place. People say and do ugly things. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes not. I understand why people hear the words involved in humiliation play and recoil—it’s because they’ve been taught from childhood how bad they are, how hurtful. What aren’t ripe old Anglo-Saxonisms are derogatory, even taboo. What kind of sane person would ask to have those flung at them?
Brave men, I tell you.
They’re men who choose to confront invective, to hear those derogatory phrases and refuse to run. Fuck, they don’t hear the words and slink away—they invite the slurs into their bedrooms. They face them down. They denature the ugliness and the abuse into something powerful and sexual, something pleasurable—what’s coarse and disgusting becomes, through their grace, something beautiful.
Something transformative.
Moreover, they’re doing so in a context that’s entirely different from where they might ordinarily hear those phrases. There’s a world of difference between being the skinny kid who walks down the hall of his high school and is forced to pass by a crowd of jocks snickering fucking faggot among themselves, and the adult who spreads his legs and looks lovingly into another man’s eyes as the top whispers the same words into his ear. Hearing stupid spic under the breath of a man who signs the paychecks is a world apart from choosing the man who’ll say it when you’re skin to skin with your limbs tangled among sweat-soaked sheets.
Someone who invites these powerful incivilities into his life is brave. He’s facing down those slurs on his own terms. He’s choosing when and how he hears them, who will say them to him. Not only is he saying I am what and who I am, but he’s adding a defiant cry of And even these supposed worst of words will only bring me joy.
How can anyone say that’s not courageous? That it’s not beautiful? Because it is. When someone wants to share that side of himself with me, it’s a gift of unimaginable magnitude.
I treat such gifts with the respect they deserve.
As for the nay-sayers, the clutch-my-pearls, those who turn up their nose and sneer: the names they call those men—crazy, self-loathing, sick—are as bad as any of the epithets. The urge to squelch everyone into their vision of correctness makes them condescending; it makes them as hurtful as anyone casually spewing a deliberate taunt. They reduce men of complexity into objects of derision. It’s fear that makes them do it—but when the result is the same as slapping them with invective, to what end?
There’s nothing to fear here. Nothing that any of us experience, or for which we dream, is truly unimaginable to anyone else. We’re all brothers, beneath the skin.
All men are equal in their slumber.
We nap together for the better part of an hour. I’m grateful for the steam from that radiator as our bodies cool. We’re glued together by sweat and spit and semen. My arms are curled around his shoulders and chest, my legs wrapped around his knees. In his sleep, he lifts his hand and lets his fingertips rest against the back of my wrist. From time to time they pulse, as if in his doze he’s typing, or playing piano.
He’s beautiful, this boy. The thin beard on his jaw grazes my own as he sighs and shifts and painfully peels apart a few inches of our flesh. There’s a smile on his face that makes him glow. When I look at it, I yearn to be the one of whom he’s dreaming.
Perhaps I am.
My own eyelids droop. I pull this boy closer in, holding him to keep the world at bay. It’s my unspoken promise to him. He’s known it from the start. Down, down into the gentle rise and fall of our breathing I drift, until I, too, am sleeping once again.
He’s been on my dick for a half-hour at this point, sucking it. He’s been curled up in a fetal position, lying on his side, nursing at it as deeply as he can get it into his throat. I lift my foot and kick him back so that he rolls over so heavily that the mattress shivers. “What the hell do you think?” I snarl at him. “Yeah, you look like a stupid faggot. Because you are a stupid faggot.”
“Yes sir,” he whimpers, looking at me adoringly.
“What are you?”
“A stupid faggot, sir,” he whispers.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask, irritated. “I didn’t hear that.”
“A stupid faggot, sir,” he says. This time it’s louder. More aggressive. “I’m a stupid faggot.”
“Yeah? And what are stupid faggots like you made for?”
“For superior dick,” he tells me. His fingers instinctively clutch for his own dick. It’s triangular in shape, wider at the base, short, and narrowing toward the tip. I use my foot to kick away his arm. “For superior white dick like yours.”
“That’s right,” I tell him. “Now go get me a glass of water.” I scarcely let a second pass before I roll my head with impatience. “Jesus Christ,” I snap. “Do I have to tell you twice?”
The boy hops up. His skin is the color of manila paper. He has a long ponytail pulled back into a rope that hangs to the small of his back. It ends just above his butt, which is small and muscular. He is a beautiful, beautiful young man. If I’d seen him in a bar, or supermarket, or walking along the street in his everyday work clothes, I would have stared at him in frank admiration. In fact, I do that now, as his egress sets those miniature globes of his ass revolving around an invisible axis. I hear water splashing in the sink of his miniature kitchen. A moment later he’s back, his naked body strolling toward me, then dipping as he approaches his bedside. He kneels on the floor and, holding the glass out with both hands, offers it to me.
I take the cheap tumbler and swig down the water. I need it, after all the talking I’ve been doing. The water’s cold and delicious. I let it cool the ache in my throat. But I have a point to make. “What the fuck?” I ask as I stare at him and then the drink in disbelief. “Don’t they teach you people what the fuck ice is, in Puerto Rico?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll fix it, sir,” he says, grabbing back the glass. He can’t take his eyes off me. He wears the grateful expression of a man who has gotten exactly what he’s wanted, and then some.
“Don’t you worry, papi. I’ll fix it for you, just the way you like it.”
***
Men don’t like to talk about this particular ghetto of sex, this shadowy neighborhood where so many dwell or wish they could play tourist. We don’t talk about it because of our aspirations to middle-class respectability, and this isn’t a nice place to visit. These racial and sexual extremes not how we like to think of ourselves by light of day.
Humiliation is a very real part of many people’s sex lives and fantasies, however. Pretending it’s not—just because it doesn’t fit in with a narrow and homogenized vision of the tame activities to which gay men should constrict themselves—does everyone a disservice. To do so propounds a limited vision of what we are, as sexual creatures.
Banishing humiliation to the shadows makes it only more mysterious, though. More desirable. If it’s something that only dirty men do, it’s where men will scuttle like roaches when they need to feel dirty.
Most people don’t realize how many men need to be treated like dirt, when the apartment doors are closed and the clothes come off. Upstanding businessmen can crawl on cold concrete for the privilege of being splattered with piss and called faggot. Black men can gasp and sink into ecstasy when a white man snarls the word nigger at them. Latin boys like this one can become submissive when vilified as a spic.
There’s a certain subset of so-called good people that becomes outraged by this sort of play, though. They clutch their pearls and declare they’ve never heard the like. It’s not the sort of thing respectable folk do. The people involved must be full of self-loathing. Or they’re mentally ill. They’re certainly not normal. Never mind that there are conservative forces out there who’d be happy to outlaw any kind of man-on-man sex—even the tamest—in the name of purging it from the earth. We’re all too happy to tell each other what kinds of sex we can’t have, too.
Fuck that shit. Men come to me with these fantasies because they know I’m not going to be one of the stick-in-the-ass naysayers. They know they’re safe with me. What’s more, they know that this kind of sex is play—and that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. These men craving my foot planted on their foreheads aren’t freaks. They’re not sick, or crazy.
They’re our brothers.
***
“You know you’re just a hole to me,” I tell him, after I’ve sprayed my load in his ass. “Just a fucking hole. And what is a hole, baby?”
I’m eight deep in him, and his cunt is stretched to capacity. I fucked him on all fours—like the animal he is, I told him. He’s on his back now, his hands on his dick, tugging himself to a climax. I’m twisted behind him, my hips glued to his, as my meat gently slides in and out of his slick wet hole. He’s resting on me like a comfortable sofa; his head lolls back against my face, so I can whisper in his ear. “I am, sir. I’m a hole.”
“That’s not what I asked, you dumb piece of shit.” He groans. I can see the tip of his penis glisten with a new dime-sized glob of pre-cum. “I said what is a hole. What. Qué. You understand that, right? Qué?”
We’re both sweaty from the long afternoon of sex. His Harlem apartment is a tiny little hotbox. The radiator’s been hissing with steam the entire time I’ve been there. He’s gasping for air. His eyes are slits, behind which glisten obsidian. “I understand,” he gasps. “I don’t know. What is a hole, sir?”
“A hole’s an absence. It’s nothing.”
“I’m nothing,” he says, in an almost-echo.
“Good boy. That’s right,” I say, sounding almost proud of him. “You’re nothing. A hole only becomes something when it’s filled, baby. It’s only worth something when it’s filled. Just like you,” I say into his ear. My beard is brushing against his lobe. He’s shivering and sweating at the same time. “You get it now?”
“Oh god,” he’s saying softly, over and over. Beneath the thin layer of fur on his chest, his nipples are hard and pointed. “I’m a hole, sir. A hole. A fucking hole.”
“A nasty, worthless, faggot hole,” I tell him in a normal voice. “Say it.”
“I’m a nasty, worthless, faggot hole,” he repeats obediently. “I’m a nasty faggot hole, sir.”
He’s beating himself off furiously. His hand is flying over his dick so hard that his balls are flying in the air. “Shoot that pathetic thing you call a dick, you cheap little piece of shit,” I order.
“Oh god,” he says, as he melts back into my arms. His dick erupts and spews his load all they way up to his chin. He shudders against me, becoming heavier with every spasm. My mouth is full of his hair. His hands drift away from his cock and down to my thighs, where they rest lightly. His eyes are closed; his chest rises and falls, each breath almost imperceptibly slower than the one before. “Oh, papi,” he breathes in barely a whisper. “Thank you.”
And then he relaxes completely into me, like I’m a feather bed.
***
The world’s a scary place. People say and do ugly things. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes not. I understand why people hear the words involved in humiliation play and recoil—it’s because they’ve been taught from childhood how bad they are, how hurtful. What aren’t ripe old Anglo-Saxonisms are derogatory, even taboo. What kind of sane person would ask to have those flung at them?
Brave men, I tell you.
They’re men who choose to confront invective, to hear those derogatory phrases and refuse to run. Fuck, they don’t hear the words and slink away—they invite the slurs into their bedrooms. They face them down. They denature the ugliness and the abuse into something powerful and sexual, something pleasurable—what’s coarse and disgusting becomes, through their grace, something beautiful.
Something transformative.
Moreover, they’re doing so in a context that’s entirely different from where they might ordinarily hear those phrases. There’s a world of difference between being the skinny kid who walks down the hall of his high school and is forced to pass by a crowd of jocks snickering fucking faggot among themselves, and the adult who spreads his legs and looks lovingly into another man’s eyes as the top whispers the same words into his ear. Hearing stupid spic under the breath of a man who signs the paychecks is a world apart from choosing the man who’ll say it when you’re skin to skin with your limbs tangled among sweat-soaked sheets.
Someone who invites these powerful incivilities into his life is brave. He’s facing down those slurs on his own terms. He’s choosing when and how he hears them, who will say them to him. Not only is he saying I am what and who I am, but he’s adding a defiant cry of And even these supposed worst of words will only bring me joy.
How can anyone say that’s not courageous? That it’s not beautiful? Because it is. When someone wants to share that side of himself with me, it’s a gift of unimaginable magnitude.
I treat such gifts with the respect they deserve.
As for the nay-sayers, the clutch-my-pearls, those who turn up their nose and sneer: the names they call those men—crazy, self-loathing, sick—are as bad as any of the epithets. The urge to squelch everyone into their vision of correctness makes them condescending; it makes them as hurtful as anyone casually spewing a deliberate taunt. They reduce men of complexity into objects of derision. It’s fear that makes them do it—but when the result is the same as slapping them with invective, to what end?
There’s nothing to fear here. Nothing that any of us experience, or for which we dream, is truly unimaginable to anyone else. We’re all brothers, beneath the skin.
***
All men are equal in their slumber.
We nap together for the better part of an hour. I’m grateful for the steam from that radiator as our bodies cool. We’re glued together by sweat and spit and semen. My arms are curled around his shoulders and chest, my legs wrapped around his knees. In his sleep, he lifts his hand and lets his fingertips rest against the back of my wrist. From time to time they pulse, as if in his doze he’s typing, or playing piano.
He’s beautiful, this boy. The thin beard on his jaw grazes my own as he sighs and shifts and painfully peels apart a few inches of our flesh. There’s a smile on his face that makes him glow. When I look at it, I yearn to be the one of whom he’s dreaming.
Perhaps I am.
My own eyelids droop. I pull this boy closer in, holding him to keep the world at bay. It’s my unspoken promise to him. He’s known it from the start. Down, down into the gentle rise and fall of our breathing I drift, until I, too, am sleeping once again.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
M. J., Part Four
(This entry is a continuation of M.J., Part Three.)
After that trip in the early spring of 1983 which his car broke down outside a historic Virginia plantation, it didn’t take me long to figure out what made M. J. tick. The economics professor I’d been dating for most of one semester and the better part of another really only came to life sexually when I showed him contempt.
Unfortunately, we were at a stage of our relationship when that was all too easy for me to do.
For months we’d had a quiet, respectful, and timid relationship in which he’d given me gifts, taken me out to places where the menus hadn’t seen a refreshing since the nineteen-fifties, and subjected me to silent, boring sex under the covers of his bed with the lights off. When his car had ground to a stop and I’d had to handle matters because he was too preoccupied with fretting and fuming and stomping around his econo-box, I’d snapped at him. I’d stomped off to call a tow truck without consulting him. I’d mocked him in front of the tow truck driver. Probably most damning of all, I’d eaten his share of the sympathy cookies the nice lady with the telephone had given me. Right in front of his face. Without even a pretend offer to share.
The result? When we got back to his apartment, M. J. had practically assaulted me in the hallway, he was so overcome with desire and need. When I was easy and pliant, he’s been reserved and a bit clammy. The minute I showed him exactly how little I thought of him, he couldn’t get enough of me.
The following weekend he showed up with a box from the small department store in Merchant’s Square. He gave it to me with an air of expectation, as we sat in the parking lot of the gymnasium at the back of campus. I opened up the green cardboard lid, pulled back the tissue paper, and found myself staring at about three pounds of some of the ugliest wool ever knitted into a sweater. It was of a hue so grape-purple that if I ever pulled it over my head—and there was no way in hell I ever planned to—I would’ve been greeted with cries of Hey! Kool-Aid!
“What is this?” I asked him, appalled.
“It’s a sweater,” he said. “I thought you’d like it.”
“I’m not wearing this,” I told him. “Sorry.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because it’s hideous.”
He stared at me, then lunged. We ended up having sex in the back seat, right there in the parking lot.
For a couple more weeks we followed a similar pattern. I finally balked at going to the cafeteria for senior citizens on Richmond Road where all the food was boiled to within an inch of its life before being slopped into the steam trays, and we ended up banging like beasts parked behind the dumpster in back. I told him that if I had to listen to him talk about Reaganomics one more time, I’d fucking blow a gasket, and I ended up getting skull-fucked in a restroom along the Colonial Turnpike at eleven at night.
There was just some twisted part of M. J. that flared to life when I was nasty to him. That incident with the tow truck, though, had tipped him far enough out of my favor that really all I could see were his faults—the tasteful yet ridiculous and unwearable presents he gave me, the old lady kisses he gave me under normal circumstances, the clammy-fish touch of his skin against mine, the weird mole on his penis. The more I focused on those faults, the less I wanted to see of him, and the meaner I was.
Eventually I just stopped seeing him altogether.
That was the idea, anyway. He called one Friday night to tell me he’d be picking me up at our usual time, and I told him that I had something else to do. I didn’t feel compelled to make up a bullshit excuse. I didn’t feel I had to soften the blow that way. I just had something else to do, I said, and thanked him and hung up. The weekend after, I did the same thing. He didn’t even call the third week. I felt secure he’d got the message.
My big problem in my youth was an inability to conceive of confrontation. I’d do anything to avoid it. But here’s the thing: if I’d sat M. J. down and told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him any more, there would’ve been an argument and then a couple of days of hurt feelings, but very likely it would’ve been over and I could’ve moved on. My method of breaking-up-by-avoidance dragged out for the rest of the semester, and caused months of pain and annoyance and outright anger.
Because what M. J. started doing was to stalk me around campus. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he’d decided that me ignoring him was my attempt to fan the flames of his desire for me; the more he was denied and rebuffed, the more desperately he had to have me.
So when I would turn around and see him following me across the campus, I would roll my eyes and go back to my walking and pretend he wasn’t there—though it was hard to miss him following behind me like a sad, whipped puppy with a loyalty complex. I hoped he’d just ‘get the message.’ He seemed to interpret my scorn as a promise the most explosive sex of his entire life if he’d persist and stalk me harder.
Which he did, relentlessly. He followed me to classrooms at night where I was studying with friends, who would see his bearded face peeking in the door and announce that some weirdo kept looking in. He would follow me to the library on weekends, and stand in the stacks to stare at me mournfully until one of my study buddies would point him out to me. When I was working at the ice cream store where I earned my income, he’d sit in his car, parked in a space outside the big plate glass windows, staring holes through me while I pretended he wasn’t there.
I passed him off for a while as a friend of my parents—but it became pretty obvious, even to my oblivious companions, that no college kid really talked to his parents’ friend that much. They wanted to know why he was following me so much, all the time, all around the clock. They wondered if he was that way about me, a thought they’d usually accompany with titters and embarrassed glances. It had to end.
Eventually it did, in a hissing match outside the door of a classroom in the business building where I was studying right before final exam time. My friends had noted that ‘that weird guy’ was outside again, which caused me to slam shut my books and stomp outside to have it out with M. J. once and for all.
I didn’t want to see him again, I told him. He had to stop following me. He was embarrassing me. My friends all called him ‘that creepy old guy.’ My supervisor at work was on the verge of calling the cops because she thought he was a flasher. All the frustration of several weeks of stalking came spilling out of my lips.
M. J. looked up at me—he was a short man—and said in a plaintive voice, “But I love you!”
And I just shook my head at him, turned on my heel, and stomped away. That was the end of it, for real this time. I never spoke to him again, never saw him. I don’t know what happened to him, other than that his year-long position ended and he moved on to some other university.
When I look back on my life, there are plenty of incidents of which I’m not proud. That encounter nears the top of the list. Rather than hurt someone just a little, in a straight-forward way, I dragged out the pain and the suffering for weeks, and then topped it off as spectacularly as possible by packing in as much hurtfulness into a couple of minutes as I could muster. I still hear that cry of astonishment—But I love you!—in my nightmares. It haunts me.
M. J. didn’t love me. He might have convinced himself that he did, simply because it justified all the relentless pursuit in which he indulged when I started spurning him. Even when we had been dating and engaging in zestless sex, he’d never mentioned love, or any emotion stronger than a hunger for cafeteria fare or peanut soup. I didn’t love him, either. Toward the end, I didn’t even like him.
He still deserved better, though. If we learn more from the ways we err than the ways we succeed, my time with M. J. was an education. If I could, I’d tell him I was sorry. Sorry for being a know-it-all of eighteen; sorry for being so untaught about the ways people communicated outside of the bedroom. Sorry for being a total dick, certainly.
Neither of us were particularly what the other was looking for. We could have found some common ground, however, if I’d been a little less inept at meeting a challenge head-on. I wish I’d been man enough then to try it.
After that trip in the early spring of 1983 which his car broke down outside a historic Virginia plantation, it didn’t take me long to figure out what made M. J. tick. The economics professor I’d been dating for most of one semester and the better part of another really only came to life sexually when I showed him contempt.
Unfortunately, we were at a stage of our relationship when that was all too easy for me to do.
For months we’d had a quiet, respectful, and timid relationship in which he’d given me gifts, taken me out to places where the menus hadn’t seen a refreshing since the nineteen-fifties, and subjected me to silent, boring sex under the covers of his bed with the lights off. When his car had ground to a stop and I’d had to handle matters because he was too preoccupied with fretting and fuming and stomping around his econo-box, I’d snapped at him. I’d stomped off to call a tow truck without consulting him. I’d mocked him in front of the tow truck driver. Probably most damning of all, I’d eaten his share of the sympathy cookies the nice lady with the telephone had given me. Right in front of his face. Without even a pretend offer to share.
The result? When we got back to his apartment, M. J. had practically assaulted me in the hallway, he was so overcome with desire and need. When I was easy and pliant, he’s been reserved and a bit clammy. The minute I showed him exactly how little I thought of him, he couldn’t get enough of me.
The following weekend he showed up with a box from the small department store in Merchant’s Square. He gave it to me with an air of expectation, as we sat in the parking lot of the gymnasium at the back of campus. I opened up the green cardboard lid, pulled back the tissue paper, and found myself staring at about three pounds of some of the ugliest wool ever knitted into a sweater. It was of a hue so grape-purple that if I ever pulled it over my head—and there was no way in hell I ever planned to—I would’ve been greeted with cries of Hey! Kool-Aid!
“What is this?” I asked him, appalled.
“It’s a sweater,” he said. “I thought you’d like it.”
“I’m not wearing this,” I told him. “Sorry.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because it’s hideous.”
He stared at me, then lunged. We ended up having sex in the back seat, right there in the parking lot.
For a couple more weeks we followed a similar pattern. I finally balked at going to the cafeteria for senior citizens on Richmond Road where all the food was boiled to within an inch of its life before being slopped into the steam trays, and we ended up banging like beasts parked behind the dumpster in back. I told him that if I had to listen to him talk about Reaganomics one more time, I’d fucking blow a gasket, and I ended up getting skull-fucked in a restroom along the Colonial Turnpike at eleven at night.
There was just some twisted part of M. J. that flared to life when I was nasty to him. That incident with the tow truck, though, had tipped him far enough out of my favor that really all I could see were his faults—the tasteful yet ridiculous and unwearable presents he gave me, the old lady kisses he gave me under normal circumstances, the clammy-fish touch of his skin against mine, the weird mole on his penis. The more I focused on those faults, the less I wanted to see of him, and the meaner I was.
Eventually I just stopped seeing him altogether.
That was the idea, anyway. He called one Friday night to tell me he’d be picking me up at our usual time, and I told him that I had something else to do. I didn’t feel compelled to make up a bullshit excuse. I didn’t feel I had to soften the blow that way. I just had something else to do, I said, and thanked him and hung up. The weekend after, I did the same thing. He didn’t even call the third week. I felt secure he’d got the message.
My big problem in my youth was an inability to conceive of confrontation. I’d do anything to avoid it. But here’s the thing: if I’d sat M. J. down and told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him any more, there would’ve been an argument and then a couple of days of hurt feelings, but very likely it would’ve been over and I could’ve moved on. My method of breaking-up-by-avoidance dragged out for the rest of the semester, and caused months of pain and annoyance and outright anger.
Because what M. J. started doing was to stalk me around campus. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he’d decided that me ignoring him was my attempt to fan the flames of his desire for me; the more he was denied and rebuffed, the more desperately he had to have me.
So when I would turn around and see him following me across the campus, I would roll my eyes and go back to my walking and pretend he wasn’t there—though it was hard to miss him following behind me like a sad, whipped puppy with a loyalty complex. I hoped he’d just ‘get the message.’ He seemed to interpret my scorn as a promise the most explosive sex of his entire life if he’d persist and stalk me harder.
Which he did, relentlessly. He followed me to classrooms at night where I was studying with friends, who would see his bearded face peeking in the door and announce that some weirdo kept looking in. He would follow me to the library on weekends, and stand in the stacks to stare at me mournfully until one of my study buddies would point him out to me. When I was working at the ice cream store where I earned my income, he’d sit in his car, parked in a space outside the big plate glass windows, staring holes through me while I pretended he wasn’t there.
I passed him off for a while as a friend of my parents—but it became pretty obvious, even to my oblivious companions, that no college kid really talked to his parents’ friend that much. They wanted to know why he was following me so much, all the time, all around the clock. They wondered if he was that way about me, a thought they’d usually accompany with titters and embarrassed glances. It had to end.
Eventually it did, in a hissing match outside the door of a classroom in the business building where I was studying right before final exam time. My friends had noted that ‘that weird guy’ was outside again, which caused me to slam shut my books and stomp outside to have it out with M. J. once and for all.
I didn’t want to see him again, I told him. He had to stop following me. He was embarrassing me. My friends all called him ‘that creepy old guy.’ My supervisor at work was on the verge of calling the cops because she thought he was a flasher. All the frustration of several weeks of stalking came spilling out of my lips.
M. J. looked up at me—he was a short man—and said in a plaintive voice, “But I love you!”
And I just shook my head at him, turned on my heel, and stomped away. That was the end of it, for real this time. I never spoke to him again, never saw him. I don’t know what happened to him, other than that his year-long position ended and he moved on to some other university.
When I look back on my life, there are plenty of incidents of which I’m not proud. That encounter nears the top of the list. Rather than hurt someone just a little, in a straight-forward way, I dragged out the pain and the suffering for weeks, and then topped it off as spectacularly as possible by packing in as much hurtfulness into a couple of minutes as I could muster. I still hear that cry of astonishment—But I love you!—in my nightmares. It haunts me.
M. J. didn’t love me. He might have convinced himself that he did, simply because it justified all the relentless pursuit in which he indulged when I started spurning him. Even when we had been dating and engaging in zestless sex, he’d never mentioned love, or any emotion stronger than a hunger for cafeteria fare or peanut soup. I didn’t love him, either. Toward the end, I didn’t even like him.
He still deserved better, though. If we learn more from the ways we err than the ways we succeed, my time with M. J. was an education. If I could, I’d tell him I was sorry. Sorry for being a know-it-all of eighteen; sorry for being so untaught about the ways people communicated outside of the bedroom. Sorry for being a total dick, certainly.
Neither of us were particularly what the other was looking for. We could have found some common ground, however, if I’d been a little less inept at meeting a challenge head-on. I wish I’d been man enough then to try it.
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