Photogenic

My friend Milton is a weird mix of sexual insecurity and braggadocio. He likes to talk about how awesome he is in the sack, but he rarely ends up there. The last time he admitting to having sex, to my circle of friends, was something like a year back. He develops wild, insane crushes on men at the bars we visit, but he won’t speak to them, or approach them, or often even look at them for fear they might notice. It goes a long way, I figured out last night, toward explaining why he never recognizes the same guy during different bar visits. He only takes one fleeting glance before hulking down to the bar table and saying, “Oh my god, that guy is so gorgeous. Did he see me looking at him? Is he looking? Oh my god, I can’t look at him. He’s not looking, is he? Oh fuck, I hope he’s not looking. If he’s not looking, I’m going to sit up, but I’m not going to look at him. Is he looking? Okay, I’m not looking.”

Milton knows I have an active sex life. I don’t rub it in his face or boast about it to him, or indeed talk to him about it at all. There have been enough times, however, when he’s developed a crush on some guy in a bar and I’ve been able to whisper in his ear a complete rundown of what the fellow’s interested in, and whether he’s any good or not, while encouraging him to go talk to the guy. Milton’s reaction is always one of envy and disbelief. “Nuh-uh!” he’ll say, obviously stung at the fact that someone might’ve had sex with me instead of staring at Milton’s resolutely-turned back in the bar. “Did you? You didn’t. You did? With him? Nuh-uh! You did? You didn’t. Did you?”

Last night I was out with Milton and a couple of other people at the bar when a barrel-chested, masculine bruiser walked in with a friend. The guy was at the attractive height of his late fifties, and sported a set of worked-out arms and a deep, brawny chest that would make most of us feel like the 98-pound weakling about to get sand kicked in his face at the beach. “Oh man,” said Milton. “Look at him. No, don’t look at him. I can’t look at him. Did he see me looking at him?”

I paid about as much attention to Milton’s nattering as I usually do. Which is to say, none at all. I’d already raised my hand to the guy in greeting.

“You don’t know him,” said Milton. “Don’t try to play like you know him. You don’t know him. Do you know him?”

“Gentlemen!” boomed a voice. Bluto and friend had made his way over to our table. Our other friends were busy examining their cell phones, but the brawny guy slapped his hands on my shoulder and Milton’s. He gave them both a good, bruising squeeze. “How goes it this evening.”

Milton shrunk to approximately half his size. “Good,” I told the guy. “Nice to see you.”

“Nice to see you,” he said. “In the flesh.” Then he gave me a lascivious wink. “You know, I gotta tell you.” He continued talking in a booming, loud voice that carried over the noise of the bar, but his tone was intimate. “You have got the hardest and most fucking photogenic COCK, man!”

Milton’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.. “I know, right?” I agreed, trying not to laugh.

“I mean, that thing is. . . .” The muscle man lifted his hands up and made them into loose fists that he vibrated in the air, to indicate his speechlessness about it. “So fucking juicy, too. You seen it?” he asked Milton, who rapidly shook his head and tried to pretend he was in some other bar in some other city in a foreign country where they didn’t speak English or talk about each other’s dicks quite so loudly.

“Milton hasn’t seen a cock since 2005,” I said sadly.

The guy shook his head and sighed and clapped Milton on the back out of sympathy. “I mean both photographs and on cam. When you’re on cam, you’re there, brother. You’re out there, showing it big and hard, and I’m sitting on the other end, like, damn! I want me a piece of that. That is a photogenic cock. Other guys, they’re like, doing their homework and eating breakfast cereal.”

This odd, last detail perked Milton up into conversation. “Are you talking about Manhunt?” he asked, in a timid whisper.

“Milton,” I asked loudly. “Do you eat breakfast cereal on Manhunt?” He flushed and hung his head.

The bruiser leaned down and continued talking in what I think he thought was his version of quiet, but still could’ve been heard at the back of a good-sized opera house. “There’s this thing I like to do,” he announced. “Where I lay you down right on the floor on your back. Then I do my pushups over you. Only my dick is in my mouth.” He leaned the heels of both hands onto the table’s edge, then mimed doing some pushups, grunting between each one. He’d caught onto Milton’s mortification by that point—it was palpable, a deaf and blind man couldn’t have missed it—and was enjoying himself at Milton’s expense by this point. “That way you get to watch me do my workout and I get my dick sucked.” He did a couple more faux-exercises and threw in little handclaps at the apex.

“Oh nice,” I said. “Highly expedient.”

“I have to go have a smoke,” Milton announced to no one in particular.

When he attempted to rise, the man clapped a hand back down on his shoulder and pressed Milton back into his seat. “Then I go to town on your god-damned-fuckin’ beautiful prick of yours like I’ve always wanted to, and you eat out my ass until it’s real slippery. Then I’ll go to town on yours, and make it real sloppy with my spit. It’ll feel real good, I guarantee it. Then I’m going to lube you up, and when you’re all relaxed, boy? I’m gonna fuck the living daylights outta your hole. And I’m going to make it VICIOUS. You think about that,” he concluded.

“Oh, I definitely am!” My dick was hard in my shorts. “I definitely am.”

“You don’t even know him,” Milton growled at me when the guy went to pay attention to his friend, who’d kind of stood by pretending not to hear everything for the previous five minutes.

“Do I have to?” I pointed out.

It was a little later in the evening, after the brawny guy had left with a hug and a promise to drop me a note online, that Milton complained of a neck ache. “Massage my neck,” he asked. “Right here.” His hand grappled for a point below his right shoulder blade.

I pressed against the spot. There was a knot there the size of a plum. “Ouch,” I said, recoiling just from the feel of it.

“It’s so hard!” Milton said, leaning over to give me better access. “Can you feel it? It’s so hard, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed amiably. “But not as photogenic as I am.”

That’s when he whirled around and punched my bicep.