The Return Home

Yes, I made it home safely.

My trip down to Virginia and back over the last week took a lot out of me. The drive is long, for one thing. (Though it's more bearable when it gets broken up by encounters such as the one I wrote about yesterday.) Plus, when I'm there, my dad puts me to work. I labored in his yard for three days straight, cutting down trees, trimming hedges, planting annuals, fixing the shutters on his house . . . that's me, the all-around general handyman.

My dad's punishing work schedule and the fact I was bone-tired a lot of the time didn't leave me much opportunity to hook up with anyone while I was there. Though I had my chances. I went out one night to one of the bars in town and met a few friendly guys—thank you, men of Barcode!

And then there were the online opportunities. Two in particular surprised me.

One was from a former college roommate. During the year and a quarter we roomed together, we went from friends to enemies when he started to read details of my sexual exploits in the notebook journals I kept hidden in my desk. (This is where I learned not to record sex in a notebook. Put it online for everyone to see!) I was popular, slutty, and out of the room a lot; he was deeply closeted, in denial, conservatively religious like you couldn't believe, and rarely emerged from the dorm except for classes and meals. We stopped talking after he attacked me one night and told me I was interfering with his 'personal relationship with Jesus.' Shortly after that, I moved out.

I'd discovered several years ago that he'd gotten up the courage to come out to his family as gay and had abandoned his religious roots in favor of an eastern religion. When I was home last week, though, he sent my (faceless) Adam4Adam profile a message that read, "Hey! Smokin' hot pics!" When I saw that familiar face, I just laughed. I wrote him a short note of thanks, but didn't offer to follow up with any action . . . tempting as it might have been to show up and see how he responded.

I've had a difficult time letting go of our animosity, although it's been twenty-five years. All it took was a little inadvertent flirtation to drive the final nail in the coffin of that old grudge.

The other Adam4Adam response was from my college boyfriend—basically the first guy I ever had sex with who wasn't at least fifteen years older than I. The two of us would slip away from our roommates and find places on campus to have sex; we knew the location of every classroom with a locking door on the entire campus. There was a sofa in the economics department lounge that was so soaked with our sweat and juices that I still pity any of the students who sat on it while legitimately studying there.

He had his issues, though. For one thing, he was so afraid that anyone on campus who saw us together would automatically assume we were lovers, that he made me walk twenty feet behind him whenever we went anywhere. There he'd be, galumphing along, and I'd be racing behind to keep up before I lost him altogether.

Well, eventually I tired of that and broke up with him, which started a cycle of him drunk-dialing me every three months to rant and rave about how we were destined to be together forever and that I couldn't deny that he was my one true love. Which was something I could deny pretty easily, actually. He'd been lousy in bed.

And there he was on Adam4Adam, looking just as tall and ungainly as ever, though gray and clearly older, messaging me with, "Hey stud, nice dick. Wanna ram it in me?"

That one was easy enough to ignore. I certainly didn't want to reignite the drunk dialing again. But jeez. It's like I said to my friends on Twitter—all I really needed was a free space and a former priest hitting on me and I could call out A4A bingo.

The best part of my travels, though, came from my readers. I received so many emails and comments from readers while I was on the road. One of my readers even offered me a place to stay on my return trip—an offer that I took, thank you very much. It was great to hear from my blog buddies and to hear from new people during a week when I felt very much like I was shut off from the world and buried in my dad's garden.

So for all of you who commented, or texted, or sent me emails and photos and pics, or who hit me up on Twitter . . . a special thanks to you. You're what makes keeping this blog a pleasure.