“Your brother told me you had a big dick,” said the man. My jeans were half-off , the waist clinging to my thighs just above the knee. I had a pair of black trunks on. Their elastic band still clung to my left hip. He’d pulled down the right side, though, exposing my cock. “He was right.”
I was still stiff from the last half-hour, during which we’d wrestled for dominance on his bed. We’d kissed, and pinned down each other’s arms and attacked each other’s necks and lobes and chins with our mouths and tongues. We’d ground our privates against each other until they hurt. I’d been pumping out precum during that entire time. I could feel the cold wet patch against the skin of my leg. “My brother’s not a liar,” I said, by way of not seeming to want to be big-headed and agree with him.
“Fuck,” he said, going down on me. His mouth was full of my dick for several long moments before he came up for air again. “I’m glad he told me to get in touch with you.” He was about to go down on me again, but he paused. “Does he pimp you out like this often?”
One of the things that Mikey will do, from time to time, is to run across some guy online that he thinks of as absolutely perfect for my tastes. After all, who knows me better? There’ve been a few occasions when he’ll simply give me a profile name to look at and leave it at that. But most of the time, he seems to know that I prefer to be the pursued than the pursuer, and he’ll go straight to the guy and extol my virtues. I haven’t had the privilege of actually reading any of these missives, but I kind of imagine they’re a lot like my agent writes when she’s trying to sell one of my works. Fantastic strength! Broad appeal! Available cheap!
I know it’s happened when I get an email out of the blue. Hey, it’ll be titled, or I know this sounds weird. Then the first line will be, Your brother contacted me on here and he said you and I should get together.
Yeah. Mikey pimps me out pretty often.
He has a good eye, too. He’s hooked me up with slutty boys who haven’t yet outgrown their abuse of Axe body spray, and sexy silver foxes who make me weak the knees. He’s hooked me up with piggy bears I’ve found super-attractive, and handsome muscle gods whose attentions made me nervous, but who were so turned on by one brother pimping another that they couldn’t resist giving me a try.
When they contact me, these men, I always feel obligated to apologize first. Oh jeez, I’m sorry, I’ll say. He really shouldn’t do that. He’s just trying to look out for me, especially now that we’re a thousand miles apart. Apologies seem to be unnecessary, really. Most men find it perversely hot, or at least don’t mind that Mikey’s pointed them in my direction.
An agent would take her fifteen percent, of course. When I lived in Michigan, close to Mikey, his cut would be the pleasure of hearing me replay the encounter for him in person, when we were alone and exchanging confidences. If he could, he’d try to get into the guy’s pants himself. This year, though, he has to be content with chatting to me about it online, or remotely, or hearing about it from the guy himself, if I’ve been busy.
This guy was one of the silver foxes—a tall and handsome older guy who lived with his lover in a big house not far from me. He turned out to be a good lovemaker, once I got him to shut up talking about taking down his Christmas decorations and the weather. I fucked him three times and was in an almost-unconscious bliss for a half-hour when he treated me to a back and neck rub. Then I went down on my knees, right before I left, and sucked him off—start to finish, in less than two minutes.
“Holy shit,” he said, staggering back into the wall so hard that his tchotchkes leapt alarmingly on the ornamental shelves behind him. “Your brother didn’t tell me you could do that.”
Apparently I need to get Mikey to write some better agent letters.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Sunday Morning Questions: Subtlety Edition
I know, subtle, ain't it? My birthday's a week from tomorrow. Don't worry, I'm not hinting for expensive gifts! (Though if you were in that kind of mood, I've got an Amazon wish list you can always browse.) I'm not demanding that a porn star give me the fuck of a lifetime. I'm a low-maintenance kind of guy.
You know what I would like, though? Photos of you all, if you wish to share 'em. Male, female, young, old. I don't care. Just take a pic of your sexy body with a sheet of paper on which you've scrawled a birthday wish. Or take a snapshot of your face and your pretty smile while you're holding up your phone to show me you've typed out a birthday greeting in big bold type. Make a really short movie in which you're yelling happy birthday! at me. Be creative! Email them to the address in my sidebar! Seriously, nothing would make me happier.
I won't share them with anyone. Honest. I will bask in a glow warmer than any of my impending for-mmph-mmph birthday candles could create, though.
Let's get to some questions from formspring.me , shall we? For those of you who made an effort this week and last to come up with some truly unique questions for me, I'm grateful. They were interesting!
Your first time: with a man vs woman. Which was better / more memorable?
My first time with a man was special. It was with someone I knew and adored, and scary though it was, I trusted him enough to guide the situation and not let me come to harm.
My first time with a woman I've written about in my blog. It was supervised by someone I trusted, but involved a couple I didn't know, neither of whom had inviting personalities. I might've gotten the job done, but it was an act more of corruption than of pleasure.
Have you ever eaten anything special or different in an attempt to make your cum taste better?
I have not, though I once had someone try to make me experiment with pineapple juice to see if it made my loads sweeter, as it was suggested it would.
I did used to take zinc supplements to see if it would give my loads more volume, but I found that simply keeping well hydrated did that trick.
And I have consumed beer, which I don't particularly like, in order to make my piss taste different, for some men.
What do you do when you can't sleep?
When I played World of Warcraft, I would get up from bed and work on my fishing. That was such a dull and tranquil experience that I'd be ready to go to sleep in no time.
I no longer play, though. So usually I will get up and either browse web pages, or I'll lie in bed and read on my iPad. I find that if I just do something for an hour other than think about sleeping, I'll fall back to sleep. And if I don't . . . well, it's only a night.
Blindfolded, butt up, door unlocked. Hot, or not? And should the blindfold stay on until you leave?
That's very, very hot to me. If the blindfold stays on, even better. I love that scenario.
Open Relationships, are you a fan or do you disagree with them? Why?
Everyone in a relationship should feel not only the freedom to be able to express himself to his partner, but with his partner to set the course of the relationship. For some couples, that will mean a sexually open relationship. For others, it'll mean monogamy. Both of those—and every variation between—can be good options.
I'm a big fan of people taking control of their own lives and relationships and working with their partners to make life not only agreeable, but fulfilling. No matter what the details happen to be.
If you only had one night in Toronto, (Say, for instance, on a Thursday) where would you go to find a hole or three?
Steamworks. It's clean enough, centrally located, and attracts not only a good number of guys, but a good quality of men as well.
Years ago I would've suggested the Bijou or The Barracks, but sadly, they are long gone. I loved those spots.
How close has lightning ever struck near you? Were you outdoors or in?
I once had lightning strike the electrical transformer behind the garage of my previous house—about thirty feet from where I was inside. It shorted out all the electronics (except for those I'd unplugged because of the storm) and set off the house's alarm system in a way that it couldn't be turned off. Fun.
Whenever you read a profile on A4A or other hook-up sites that says "I'm just looking to make friends," do you ever mentally add "...with my cock/ass"?
Quite a lot. I also look at the ads that say 'I'm not here to hook up!' and mentally add, '...unless I'm horny.'
Do you ever have a hook up turn into a meanful active friendship?
Quite often. When I lived in Michigan, I had active and meaningful friendships (and continuing sexual relationships, in many cases) with several guys whom I originally met for a hookup. My intense relationship with Spencer, which I documented in my journal in the latter part of 2010 and early 2011 and which lasted for the better part of a year, until I moved, began as a hookup.
The longest-lasting relationship of my life started as a one-night stand. I'm pretty adept at making friends with my fucks.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Runt
This kid is hot. He’s a runt—small and skinny. But he’s a beautiful runt. His eyebrows are dark and thick, and give the impression he’s got a long way to go, to grow into them. His hair’s a mess, but only because I’ve been running my hands through it, just to enjoy the sensations of its length flicking across the sensitive webs of my fingers. His features are dark. He’s told me his mother was Brazilian. But his skin is pale and white, almost ghostly in the dark.
When he kisses, he keeps his eyes closed. He looks like he’s dreaming.
We’re in the back of my car. It’s not night, but it’s dark. Pitch black before six in the evening. I’ve been to this parking lot before with the Latin boy in the truck, last autumn. There’s almost no traffic coming in and out of the entrance from the sleepy neighborhood street nearby. That suits my purposes just fine.
I’m driving into his hole. He’s kicked off his pants, but he still has on a pair of thick, woolen socks. His thin legs wave helplessly in the air as I enter his hole. He’s tight, but I can tell from the way his chute opens and cedes to my stiff meat that he’s been used before. “That’s it,” I whisper to him.
He sighs. He’s happy. His legs crook and clasp around my back. His eyes are still closed as he surrenders his mouth to mine. My perch on the back seat is tenuous at best, but I make the best of it, and push in as hard as I can, until he gasps, and opens those big, brown eyes.
When he looks at me, it’s through a haze of lust and sensation. He probably doesn’t even remember my name. I don’t really give a shit. “You like that?” I ask. The words seem obscenely out of place as they break the stillness.
“Yes,” he says. He licks his lips and swallows. “Dude, don’t stop.”
I have no intentions of stopping.
I’ve complained before about Grindr in my area—that app that’s become the ubiquitous hookup tool for gay men with smartphones and GPS has never really worked for me. Once I get into Manhattan, I’m barraged by hookup requests. But out in the ‘burbs, where I live, it’s not of much use. I’ve had more hookups through Instagram, a photo-sharing app, than I have through Grindr. (And it’s not like the arty snapshots I post on Instagram are racy in tone, either.) But this guy contacted me through Grindr only a couple of hours before. He had no photo. He told me he had no place to fuck. And no car. It was the trifecta of loserishness, basically—and then he sent me his photos.
The first was of himself sitting on a sofa, head bowed to show off his thick dark hair. He wore nothing but a red plaid shirt and a pair of tighty-whities. His pale legs were crossed, and made even whiter by the proximity of the flash. Then he sent me a photo of his face. He’s a beautiful boy. So I said yes.
Fucking in the back seat of a car is the compromise we’re making. He doesn’t care. He just wants the cock. My cords are around my ankles, my boots still on. I’ve got my flannel shirt unbuttoned. It hangs around his hips and chest, as he jerks and twitches and pulls every bottom’s trick in the book to get my shaft deeper into his hole. Every once in a while the angle at which I’m hitting him will shift. He’ll grunt with pain. I’ll see it flicker across his face, feel his body flinch. But he doesn’t stop. Even when it hurts, he still wants to be filled. He needs to be used.
The knowledge makes me stab him hard. My dick seems to double in size. “So why can’t you host?” I ask him. “Think how hot this would be in a bed.”
The runt’s head is lolling like a broken doll. With every thrust, it bangs against the door. He’s panting slightly. His little dick, uncut and definitely a bottom’s cock, is oozing a snail’s trail across his hoodie. “I . . . live . . . with . . . people,” he pants out, a little at a time.
Lives with his fucking parents, I’m thinking to myself, but I don’t say anything. It’s not like I really give a crap. All I really care about is keeping the screw going. The car was warm mere minutes before, all the way from where I’d picked him up downtown and on the drive here, but with the motor off, its interior was growing steadily chillier and damper from our heavy breathing. The windows are fogging up, around the bottoms.
“God, you’re so . . . big!” he grunts. He looks like he’s in pain. I like that look on his face. Because no matter how much distress is causing him, he still wants more and more of it. He’s got one hand on the back of the driver’s seat, and the other helplessly clutching a seatbelt. He uses the leverage to lift up his hips and drive them against me, trying to get more dick, more sensation, more pain. His face contorts when I shove my cold fingers up beneath his clothing and twist his nipples. He looks like he needs a bullet to bit, or a wad of leather to shove between his teeth to cope with the pain. He wants it though. Every twist of his hips tells me that, every gasp and labored breath writes that story plain.
To an observer, it might look as if he’s trying to wrestle me off. He’s still trying to get me in deeper, though. His hands shove at me, but it’s so he can position me in a way he can lie more on his back. His skinny hips buck me, but not to shove me away. He’s not in control, though. I am. I drive home and hold it there, sadistically swelling my meat to make him gasp.
Too much. He’s shooting. There’s no warning. One moment he’s trying to cope with my big dick, the next he’s spilling a load all over his sweatshirt. The sensation of his ass contorting around my dick makes me decide it’s time. I’m close. “You want the load?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, eyes closed. There’s need in his voice.
“Where do you want it?” I ask. He doesn’t have much of an option. I just want to hear him say the words.
“In my ass,” he whimpers. “Please. Come in me.”
I’m closer still. “If you want this load, tell me who you live with,” I say.
"I—"
"Tell me," I growl.
“With my folks,” he admits. “I still live with my folks.”
The information’s irrelevant by now. I don’t care. All I know is that my dick’s on fire. My load gushes out almost painfully, filling the boy’s ass. He welcomes it with a smile and a half-laugh, as if he can’t believe he got exactly what he wanted. I feel his fingers scrabbling around the outside of his hole, where my dick is slopping him up. “Fuck yes,” he whispers. “Fuck yes.” Then he says the words over and over, in a soft, appreciative sigh. Fuckyesfuckyesfuckyes, until his lips make the words without sound.
The car smells like semen when I drive him home. I feel something on my shoulder. His head rests on me. His beautiful eyes are closed, dreaming again. He’s soft, and seems to weigh no more than a feather.
I let him doze. He stays there almost all the way home.
When he kisses, he keeps his eyes closed. He looks like he’s dreaming.
We’re in the back of my car. It’s not night, but it’s dark. Pitch black before six in the evening. I’ve been to this parking lot before with the Latin boy in the truck, last autumn. There’s almost no traffic coming in and out of the entrance from the sleepy neighborhood street nearby. That suits my purposes just fine.
I’m driving into his hole. He’s kicked off his pants, but he still has on a pair of thick, woolen socks. His thin legs wave helplessly in the air as I enter his hole. He’s tight, but I can tell from the way his chute opens and cedes to my stiff meat that he’s been used before. “That’s it,” I whisper to him.
He sighs. He’s happy. His legs crook and clasp around my back. His eyes are still closed as he surrenders his mouth to mine. My perch on the back seat is tenuous at best, but I make the best of it, and push in as hard as I can, until he gasps, and opens those big, brown eyes.
When he looks at me, it’s through a haze of lust and sensation. He probably doesn’t even remember my name. I don’t really give a shit. “You like that?” I ask. The words seem obscenely out of place as they break the stillness.
“Yes,” he says. He licks his lips and swallows. “Dude, don’t stop.”
I have no intentions of stopping.
I’ve complained before about Grindr in my area—that app that’s become the ubiquitous hookup tool for gay men with smartphones and GPS has never really worked for me. Once I get into Manhattan, I’m barraged by hookup requests. But out in the ‘burbs, where I live, it’s not of much use. I’ve had more hookups through Instagram, a photo-sharing app, than I have through Grindr. (And it’s not like the arty snapshots I post on Instagram are racy in tone, either.) But this guy contacted me through Grindr only a couple of hours before. He had no photo. He told me he had no place to fuck. And no car. It was the trifecta of loserishness, basically—and then he sent me his photos.
The first was of himself sitting on a sofa, head bowed to show off his thick dark hair. He wore nothing but a red plaid shirt and a pair of tighty-whities. His pale legs were crossed, and made even whiter by the proximity of the flash. Then he sent me a photo of his face. He’s a beautiful boy. So I said yes.
Fucking in the back seat of a car is the compromise we’re making. He doesn’t care. He just wants the cock. My cords are around my ankles, my boots still on. I’ve got my flannel shirt unbuttoned. It hangs around his hips and chest, as he jerks and twitches and pulls every bottom’s trick in the book to get my shaft deeper into his hole. Every once in a while the angle at which I’m hitting him will shift. He’ll grunt with pain. I’ll see it flicker across his face, feel his body flinch. But he doesn’t stop. Even when it hurts, he still wants to be filled. He needs to be used.
The knowledge makes me stab him hard. My dick seems to double in size. “So why can’t you host?” I ask him. “Think how hot this would be in a bed.”
The runt’s head is lolling like a broken doll. With every thrust, it bangs against the door. He’s panting slightly. His little dick, uncut and definitely a bottom’s cock, is oozing a snail’s trail across his hoodie. “I . . . live . . . with . . . people,” he pants out, a little at a time.
Lives with his fucking parents, I’m thinking to myself, but I don’t say anything. It’s not like I really give a crap. All I really care about is keeping the screw going. The car was warm mere minutes before, all the way from where I’d picked him up downtown and on the drive here, but with the motor off, its interior was growing steadily chillier and damper from our heavy breathing. The windows are fogging up, around the bottoms.
“God, you’re so . . . big!” he grunts. He looks like he’s in pain. I like that look on his face. Because no matter how much distress is causing him, he still wants more and more of it. He’s got one hand on the back of the driver’s seat, and the other helplessly clutching a seatbelt. He uses the leverage to lift up his hips and drive them against me, trying to get more dick, more sensation, more pain. His face contorts when I shove my cold fingers up beneath his clothing and twist his nipples. He looks like he needs a bullet to bit, or a wad of leather to shove between his teeth to cope with the pain. He wants it though. Every twist of his hips tells me that, every gasp and labored breath writes that story plain.
To an observer, it might look as if he’s trying to wrestle me off. He’s still trying to get me in deeper, though. His hands shove at me, but it’s so he can position me in a way he can lie more on his back. His skinny hips buck me, but not to shove me away. He’s not in control, though. I am. I drive home and hold it there, sadistically swelling my meat to make him gasp.
Too much. He’s shooting. There’s no warning. One moment he’s trying to cope with my big dick, the next he’s spilling a load all over his sweatshirt. The sensation of his ass contorting around my dick makes me decide it’s time. I’m close. “You want the load?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, eyes closed. There’s need in his voice.
“Where do you want it?” I ask. He doesn’t have much of an option. I just want to hear him say the words.
“In my ass,” he whimpers. “Please. Come in me.”
I’m closer still. “If you want this load, tell me who you live with,” I say.
"I—"
"Tell me," I growl.
“With my folks,” he admits. “I still live with my folks.”
The information’s irrelevant by now. I don’t care. All I know is that my dick’s on fire. My load gushes out almost painfully, filling the boy’s ass. He welcomes it with a smile and a half-laugh, as if he can’t believe he got exactly what he wanted. I feel his fingers scrabbling around the outside of his hole, where my dick is slopping him up. “Fuck yes,” he whispers. “Fuck yes.” Then he says the words over and over, in a soft, appreciative sigh. Fuckyesfuckyesfuckyes, until his lips make the words without sound.
The car smells like semen when I drive him home. I feel something on my shoulder. His head rests on me. His beautiful eyes are closed, dreaming again. He’s soft, and seems to weigh no more than a feather.
I let him doze. He stays there almost all the way home.
Monday, January 23, 2012
My Life in Porn
A couple of months ago I had an offer that I had no choice but to refuse. Oh, it was complimentary at the time, and slightly funny, and it gave me another story to tell at parties. Simply put, I was asked to be in porn.
“That makes twice this lifetime!” I joked with someone online. Later that day, though, I added it up in my head and realized how totally wrong I’d been. I’ve had four offers to appear naked and screwing on camera.
The first was from a handsome fellow who who wanted to make a living traveling around the country, taping random encounters of himself with all sorts of guys, and then editing them together and selling them. I saw one of his tapes and they’re just awful things, production-wise. Grainy, badly-lit, poorly shot. Sure, there’s hot sex going on somewhere in there, but when you’re too busy peering through a murky puddle of shadows to see it, or getting seasick at the hand-held camera, or staring at the guy’s luggage sitting open on the table and wondering why he stuffed his dirty socks with his neatly folded shirts, you’re not really noticing it.
Then a few years ago I was extended an invitation to appear a more professional production, but again I turned it down. Then I had two invitations this year to take roles in what I can only describe as professionally produced niche market porn, shall we say. A niche market of the sort that, were I to appear ever in a reality television show or run for office, would basically guarantee me a long-running front page spot on The Smoking Gun.
I turned them down. Yes, I turned them all down. There’s something immensely flattering about the offers. Who wouldn’t appreciate heroin for the ego like that? I seriously doubt, though, that anyone wants to see my pasty body on their television screens. It’s obvious to anyone who looks at me that I’m not the gym-obsessed, tanned, twinky boy type who usually appears in these productions, or even the hunky muscle daddy type that so many men seem to wish I were.
It’s been a long stretch between the latest offer to display my talents on film and the first time I was asked to star in porn. True story: I was seventeen and still blond. A freshman in my first semester of college. I was six feet and three inches tall and a beanpole who weighed between one hundred and one hundred and five pounds. When I stepped out even into weak sunlight, I turned a deep brown.
I was sitting on a grassy bank, studying, when a man approached me. He sported long, shaggy blond hair that would be fashionable now in some circles, but back then just looked unkempt. His shirt was open to his navel, exposing a chest so dense with hair that it resembled Velcro. When he smiled, his teeth were startlingly white. “Whatcha doing?” he asked me.
“Studying,” I said, trying not to stare down his shirt. He had squatted down in front of me so that we were at face level.
“I was hoping you’d rather be doing something else,” he said. “Like fucking.”
Of course I exerted every ounce of common sense I had at the time before deciding how I should respond to so audacious and blunt a suggestion from a total stranger who might be a psychopath, rapist, or worse.
In other words, I thought about it for about a millisecond and then said, “Okay!” and blithely hopped into his van and went back to his apartment. Hey, what can I say? I've always been a fan of the direct approach.
“Oooo, you’re so tight,” he hissed the moment the door was shut, once he’d stripped me down and jammed his fingers in me. “Have you been fucked before?”
I’d already lost my virginity several hundred times by that point. I probably could have pulled it off again, but for some reason I decided to be honest. “Oh yeah,” I told him. “Lots.”
“Mind if I take some photos, then?” he asked, pulling out a Polaroid. In answer, I just spread my legs, looked lazily at the camera, and then saw a flash and heard a whirr as the instant photo came spooling out. I let him take a lot of photographs of me that day and on the other days I’d meet him. Posed photos, photos of me in action, always nude photos. I just didn’t care. I'd let Earl and his buddies take photographs all the time. (Though I have to admit that today there’s always a certain trepidation when I’m faced with vintage porn snapshots, certain that one day I’m going to see my skinny teen ass appearing somewhere.)
A couple of weeks later, by which time I’d ascertained that the guy’s name was David, he climbed off me, huffing and puffing. “I’ve been showing your photos to a buddy of mine in L.A.,” he said. “He does porn and he’s interested in meeting you.”
I had never even seen a professional porn movie, back in 1981. “Okay,” I said.
“No seriously, look, he’s interested in you.” He opened up the porn drawer by his bed and pulled out some color promotional materials. “See? These are his. Hot guys, huh? You could be one of them.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, not really taking it seriously. I was a freshman and had a stunning career as a B student ahead of me. Besides, my parents would have absolutely killed me if they found out I dropped out of school to do porn.
“No, he’s really interested. You could just go out there for a couple of weeks, that’s all it would take.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I kept telling him.
Once when I arrived, David immediately started dialing the phone. “He’s here,” he said to the guy on the end of the line. “Talk to him.”
“This is William Higgins,” a voice announced. “I think my friend David’s told you about me. I make adult entertainment for men.”
The only reason I remembered his name so vividly is because for a moment I thought he called himself “Henry Higgins,” and the thought of Rex Harrison as a porn director just amused me. “Oh yeah,” I said in my most blasé manner.
“He tells me you’re a great fuck.”
“Yeah?” I replied, showing off my Advanced Placement English skills.
“I'm wondering if you'd be a good fit for one of my upcoming films,” said Mr. Higgins.
“Yeah? Well, nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “Thanks though.”
To be fair, I didn't really believe a word David was telling me. I didn't believe there was such a person—and if there were, I didn't believe David knew him, living as he did in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. I thought he'd gotten one of his buddies on the phone pretending to be a director, for some nefarious purpose. For all I know, that could've been the case. But most of all, I didn't believe I was porn-worthy.
I handed the phone back to David, who seemed mightily disappointed in me. He never had me back to his place again, after that day. I used to wonder if he was some sort of porn bounty hunter who lived on commission he earned by shipping boys west.
After a couple of weeks, the only reminder I had that I’d known him was a steady itching sensation below my waist. Baby’s first case of crabs.
I finally saw my first genuine porn film in 1987, when I finally had my own apartment and my own VCR and my own credit card to order one. I forget the title. It was some two-hour extravaganza that takes place mostly in a locker room after the big football game. When the words Directed by William Higgins flashed up on the tube, though, I was impressed—David and his friend had been for real, after all. Whenever I watched the movie after the first time, I stared at all the skinny blond twinks up on the screen and thought to myself, That could’ve been you, kiddo. That could’ve been you.
But I’m awfully glad it wasn’t.
“That makes twice this lifetime!” I joked with someone online. Later that day, though, I added it up in my head and realized how totally wrong I’d been. I’ve had four offers to appear naked and screwing on camera.
The first was from a handsome fellow who who wanted to make a living traveling around the country, taping random encounters of himself with all sorts of guys, and then editing them together and selling them. I saw one of his tapes and they’re just awful things, production-wise. Grainy, badly-lit, poorly shot. Sure, there’s hot sex going on somewhere in there, but when you’re too busy peering through a murky puddle of shadows to see it, or getting seasick at the hand-held camera, or staring at the guy’s luggage sitting open on the table and wondering why he stuffed his dirty socks with his neatly folded shirts, you’re not really noticing it.
Then a few years ago I was extended an invitation to appear a more professional production, but again I turned it down. Then I had two invitations this year to take roles in what I can only describe as professionally produced niche market porn, shall we say. A niche market of the sort that, were I to appear ever in a reality television show or run for office, would basically guarantee me a long-running front page spot on The Smoking Gun.
I turned them down. Yes, I turned them all down. There’s something immensely flattering about the offers. Who wouldn’t appreciate heroin for the ego like that? I seriously doubt, though, that anyone wants to see my pasty body on their television screens. It’s obvious to anyone who looks at me that I’m not the gym-obsessed, tanned, twinky boy type who usually appears in these productions, or even the hunky muscle daddy type that so many men seem to wish I were.
It’s been a long stretch between the latest offer to display my talents on film and the first time I was asked to star in porn. True story: I was seventeen and still blond. A freshman in my first semester of college. I was six feet and three inches tall and a beanpole who weighed between one hundred and one hundred and five pounds. When I stepped out even into weak sunlight, I turned a deep brown.
I was sitting on a grassy bank, studying, when a man approached me. He sported long, shaggy blond hair that would be fashionable now in some circles, but back then just looked unkempt. His shirt was open to his navel, exposing a chest so dense with hair that it resembled Velcro. When he smiled, his teeth were startlingly white. “Whatcha doing?” he asked me.
“Studying,” I said, trying not to stare down his shirt. He had squatted down in front of me so that we were at face level.
“I was hoping you’d rather be doing something else,” he said. “Like fucking.”
Of course I exerted every ounce of common sense I had at the time before deciding how I should respond to so audacious and blunt a suggestion from a total stranger who might be a psychopath, rapist, or worse.
In other words, I thought about it for about a millisecond and then said, “Okay!” and blithely hopped into his van and went back to his apartment. Hey, what can I say? I've always been a fan of the direct approach.
“Oooo, you’re so tight,” he hissed the moment the door was shut, once he’d stripped me down and jammed his fingers in me. “Have you been fucked before?”
I’d already lost my virginity several hundred times by that point. I probably could have pulled it off again, but for some reason I decided to be honest. “Oh yeah,” I told him. “Lots.”
“Mind if I take some photos, then?” he asked, pulling out a Polaroid. In answer, I just spread my legs, looked lazily at the camera, and then saw a flash and heard a whirr as the instant photo came spooling out. I let him take a lot of photographs of me that day and on the other days I’d meet him. Posed photos, photos of me in action, always nude photos. I just didn’t care. I'd let Earl and his buddies take photographs all the time. (Though I have to admit that today there’s always a certain trepidation when I’m faced with vintage porn snapshots, certain that one day I’m going to see my skinny teen ass appearing somewhere.)
A couple of weeks later, by which time I’d ascertained that the guy’s name was David, he climbed off me, huffing and puffing. “I’ve been showing your photos to a buddy of mine in L.A.,” he said. “He does porn and he’s interested in meeting you.”
I had never even seen a professional porn movie, back in 1981. “Okay,” I said.
“No seriously, look, he’s interested in you.” He opened up the porn drawer by his bed and pulled out some color promotional materials. “See? These are his. Hot guys, huh? You could be one of them.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, not really taking it seriously. I was a freshman and had a stunning career as a B student ahead of me. Besides, my parents would have absolutely killed me if they found out I dropped out of school to do porn.
“No, he’s really interested. You could just go out there for a couple of weeks, that’s all it would take.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I kept telling him.
Once when I arrived, David immediately started dialing the phone. “He’s here,” he said to the guy on the end of the line. “Talk to him.”
“This is William Higgins,” a voice announced. “I think my friend David’s told you about me. I make adult entertainment for men.”
The only reason I remembered his name so vividly is because for a moment I thought he called himself “Henry Higgins,” and the thought of Rex Harrison as a porn director just amused me. “Oh yeah,” I said in my most blasé manner.
“He tells me you’re a great fuck.”
“Yeah?” I replied, showing off my Advanced Placement English skills.
“I'm wondering if you'd be a good fit for one of my upcoming films,” said Mr. Higgins.
“Yeah? Well, nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “Thanks though.”
To be fair, I didn't really believe a word David was telling me. I didn't believe there was such a person—and if there were, I didn't believe David knew him, living as he did in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. I thought he'd gotten one of his buddies on the phone pretending to be a director, for some nefarious purpose. For all I know, that could've been the case. But most of all, I didn't believe I was porn-worthy.
I handed the phone back to David, who seemed mightily disappointed in me. He never had me back to his place again, after that day. I used to wonder if he was some sort of porn bounty hunter who lived on commission he earned by shipping boys west.
After a couple of weeks, the only reminder I had that I’d known him was a steady itching sensation below my waist. Baby’s first case of crabs.
I finally saw my first genuine porn film in 1987, when I finally had my own apartment and my own VCR and my own credit card to order one. I forget the title. It was some two-hour extravaganza that takes place mostly in a locker room after the big football game. When the words Directed by William Higgins flashed up on the tube, though, I was impressed—David and his friend had been for real, after all. Whenever I watched the movie after the first time, I stared at all the skinny blond twinks up on the screen and thought to myself, That could’ve been you, kiddo. That could’ve been you.
But I’m awfully glad it wasn’t.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Sunday Morning Questions: Thank-You Edition
One of the things I've learned from years of public blogging is that its moments of grace are exceedingly rare.
I'm at a stage in my life in which I've done enough self-examination to know myself pretty well. I know I'm not the smartest, or handsomest, or sexiest guy out there—and even more to my dismay, I'm not the kindest, or the most patient, or even the most honorable.
Yet I'm not one of those bloggers who adapts a tough, bad-ass persona to cover up my shortcomings and weaknesses. I often examine them right here, in front of you guys. On a regular basis I bare my lard-white underbelly—the softest and most tender spots exposed for everyone to see. Most people recognize the intent with which I offer these moments of self-reflection for what it is: my gift, so that through me, maybe someone out there might learn something about themselves.
There's always a snake in the internet Eden, however, that wants to strike when it sees someone at his most exposed, however. I've grown accustomed to knowing that when I post something particularly personal, a couple of the snakes will slither out to inject what venom they can into what they see as a weakened victim.
So this week, when I penned the entry called Flood, I found it a particularly vulnerable entry. Perhaps of all my entries, one of the rawest, in the kind of effect it had on me, both at the time and while I was writing it. I posted it with a lot of trepidation, and many second thoughts. I almost rewrote it, to edit out the parts that hit too close to home.
Instead, I made myself post it as an exercise in bravery. And I was astounded by the universal kindness with which my readers received it. Every comment I received, whether on the entry itself or via email or instant message or text, was unwaveringly supportive and sweet. In the down-time after my separation from Chester, after our second meeting (and I mean that in a couple of ways, as I was feeling quite blue and reflective, afterward), I couldn't have asked for a better reception to what was a highly personal and deeply felt entry.
So thank you, readers. Thank you very much indeed.
I showed the last part of that entry to Chester, to apologize for getting too heavy during our lovemaking. This is what he said to me in reply: I remember the moment you said that. I know the feeling. I didn't feel like I had enough arms to wrap you up in and comfort you.
I am a very fortunate man.
Let's get to some questions rounded up from formspring.me.
Can a bottom tell if a top is a shooter or a dribbler? Are the sensations different?
When I was a bottom in my younger years, the only way I could tell whether a guy was a shooter or a dribbler was to let it run out of my hole. Divorced of cues like grunting and heavy breathing and shouts of 'I'm coming!', I could usually have told when a guy was shooting, simply by the way his dick would spasm as he shot. But the size of the load? There's no way I could've told.
I've known some bottoms, however, who are remarkably good at judging the quantity of fluid that's gone into their hole. I think the lesson here is that it's different for some than others. It'd be interesting to hear from dedicated bottoms on the matter.
What would be the skimpiest Halloween costume you would be willing to wear out in public?
It's not the skimpiness issue. I've been naked around people before.
For me it's more an issue of temperature. There's nothing I dislike more than cold. Cold air on my naked skin makes me miserable, and in October, the weather can be dicey. So if it's a cold October night, I'll be the bastard in the dumpy full-body M&M costume, thank you very much.
Put your music player on shuffle. Give me the first 6 songs that pop up.
H & Claire, "Centre of My Heart," BWO, "Last Flight to San Francisco", Kate Bush, "Big Stripey Lie," Moloko, "Be Like You," Mark Ronson, "Missing Words," and Jamiroquai, "Cosmic Girl."
Trust me, it could've been a lot more embarrassing.
Has anyone ever walked in on you having sex?
Not by accident. By invitation, many times.
Ever had piss in your ass?
Nope. But I've certainly delivered it there many a time.
Has anyone ever induced an orgasm in you without directly stimulating your penis? How was it done? Have you ever done this to someone else?
No, but they've come close. I once had an astonishing finger-fucking that brought me so close to the edge of shooting that it only took one slight touch of my hand to bring me off. And much longer ago, I had a top buddy who could fuck me in a way that would make me shoot with just a couple of strokes.
I've made a lot of men shoot without touching through relentless pounding of their prostate. My dick seems to be just the right length for it, and I have a talent of being able to tell not only when I'm hitting it, but how to find it again and again.
Do u manscape? And if you do, how much time a day do you spend on doing it on average?
I trim my pubes and my nuts, perhaps every couple of weeks. Certainly not daily.
Whose the one porn actor you absolutely can't stand to see on camera and why?
There aren't any porn actors I find myself so turned off by on a physical level that I can't watch them—though like everyone, I have certain types that turn me on more than others.
There are some actors whose political views I find repellant that I'm not interested in hunting down their films, however.
What is your favorite kind of candy? Mine is jelly beans.
I like a good Charleston Chew. Frozen.
I'm at a stage in my life in which I've done enough self-examination to know myself pretty well. I know I'm not the smartest, or handsomest, or sexiest guy out there—and even more to my dismay, I'm not the kindest, or the most patient, or even the most honorable.
Yet I'm not one of those bloggers who adapts a tough, bad-ass persona to cover up my shortcomings and weaknesses. I often examine them right here, in front of you guys. On a regular basis I bare my lard-white underbelly—the softest and most tender spots exposed for everyone to see. Most people recognize the intent with which I offer these moments of self-reflection for what it is: my gift, so that through me, maybe someone out there might learn something about themselves.
There's always a snake in the internet Eden, however, that wants to strike when it sees someone at his most exposed, however. I've grown accustomed to knowing that when I post something particularly personal, a couple of the snakes will slither out to inject what venom they can into what they see as a weakened victim.
So this week, when I penned the entry called Flood, I found it a particularly vulnerable entry. Perhaps of all my entries, one of the rawest, in the kind of effect it had on me, both at the time and while I was writing it. I posted it with a lot of trepidation, and many second thoughts. I almost rewrote it, to edit out the parts that hit too close to home.
Instead, I made myself post it as an exercise in bravery. And I was astounded by the universal kindness with which my readers received it. Every comment I received, whether on the entry itself or via email or instant message or text, was unwaveringly supportive and sweet. In the down-time after my separation from Chester, after our second meeting (and I mean that in a couple of ways, as I was feeling quite blue and reflective, afterward), I couldn't have asked for a better reception to what was a highly personal and deeply felt entry.
So thank you, readers. Thank you very much indeed.
I showed the last part of that entry to Chester, to apologize for getting too heavy during our lovemaking. This is what he said to me in reply: I remember the moment you said that. I know the feeling. I didn't feel like I had enough arms to wrap you up in and comfort you.
I am a very fortunate man.
Let's get to some questions rounded up from formspring.me.
Can a bottom tell if a top is a shooter or a dribbler? Are the sensations different?
When I was a bottom in my younger years, the only way I could tell whether a guy was a shooter or a dribbler was to let it run out of my hole. Divorced of cues like grunting and heavy breathing and shouts of 'I'm coming!', I could usually have told when a guy was shooting, simply by the way his dick would spasm as he shot. But the size of the load? There's no way I could've told.
I've known some bottoms, however, who are remarkably good at judging the quantity of fluid that's gone into their hole. I think the lesson here is that it's different for some than others. It'd be interesting to hear from dedicated bottoms on the matter.
What would be the skimpiest Halloween costume you would be willing to wear out in public?
It's not the skimpiness issue. I've been naked around people before.
For me it's more an issue of temperature. There's nothing I dislike more than cold. Cold air on my naked skin makes me miserable, and in October, the weather can be dicey. So if it's a cold October night, I'll be the bastard in the dumpy full-body M&M costume, thank you very much.
Put your music player on shuffle. Give me the first 6 songs that pop up.
H & Claire, "Centre of My Heart," BWO, "Last Flight to San Francisco", Kate Bush, "Big Stripey Lie," Moloko, "Be Like You," Mark Ronson, "Missing Words," and Jamiroquai, "Cosmic Girl."
Trust me, it could've been a lot more embarrassing.
Has anyone ever walked in on you having sex?
Not by accident. By invitation, many times.
Ever had piss in your ass?
Nope. But I've certainly delivered it there many a time.
Has anyone ever induced an orgasm in you without directly stimulating your penis? How was it done? Have you ever done this to someone else?
No, but they've come close. I once had an astonishing finger-fucking that brought me so close to the edge of shooting that it only took one slight touch of my hand to bring me off. And much longer ago, I had a top buddy who could fuck me in a way that would make me shoot with just a couple of strokes.
I've made a lot of men shoot without touching through relentless pounding of their prostate. My dick seems to be just the right length for it, and I have a talent of being able to tell not only when I'm hitting it, but how to find it again and again.
Do u manscape? And if you do, how much time a day do you spend on doing it on average?
I trim my pubes and my nuts, perhaps every couple of weeks. Certainly not daily.
Whose the one porn actor you absolutely can't stand to see on camera and why?
There aren't any porn actors I find myself so turned off by on a physical level that I can't watch them—though like everyone, I have certain types that turn me on more than others.
There are some actors whose political views I find repellant that I'm not interested in hunting down their films, however.
What is your favorite kind of candy? Mine is jelly beans.
I like a good Charleston Chew. Frozen.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Flood
When it slides in, it’s because I push. That impasse where fear and the hole’s muscles conspire pulses, then vanishes. The dick eases in, all at once, disappearing into the lube-slick hole. We both look at each other, wearing identical expressions. Surprise. A trace of amusement. And a whole lot of lust.
“Fuck,” I say, even more astonished than he. I have to drop my head and pick it back up again, I’m so surprised. I repeat, “Fuck!”
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. Then I have to take a breath. Because this time, for the first time in over a decade, it’s my hole that’s been opened. I’m the one with his butt in the air, looking back over his shoulder. I’m the one who pushed back onto the dick that’s in me now, out of hunger, out of desire. Out of a need to be filled. Not filled. Used. In that split second, the animal in me had overtaken the rational being. I just wanted to be fucked.
Realizing what I’ve done makes me clench down for a moment. Instantly I regret it. “Hold still,” I beg him. “Just . . . hold still for me.”
He lowers himself so that his pecs are against my back. His knees spread my legs. His arms surround me. The only thing between us is a carpet of thick black chest fur. “As long as you need.”
The Friday night before, I’d fucked him for the first time in his life. I’d taken his virginity, savaging it twice. I’d teased him that he was my little cock whore, my slut. My cum bucket. The words had inflamed him, had given him the permission to relax, to loosen up, to ride my dick without inhibition or regret. Afterward, he’d flipped me over and rimmed me royally—and then he’d slipped his dick inside. I’d been equally surprised then that I’d been able to accommodate the man’s dick, which was not much shorter than my own. His thrusting had been too much for me, and I’d been paranoid about my hygiene, since we hadn’t discussed that particular variation in advance. I hadn't prepared for it.
I’d spent all weekend thinking about him, though. The warmth of his cock against my hole. His sweet breath against my neck. The words he told me, as his cock entered me. I’d be sitting in front of the television, with a project in my hands, and all I could think of were Chester’s handsome face, his smooth head shining in the hotel lights, his short frame bulging with muscles, his beefy legs tangled with mine. I’d pause in mid-sentence at home, thinking when I’d shoved my nose into his armpit and inhaled deeply, memorizing his own particular perfume.
Then I’d wake from my daze, try to recall what I’d been saying, and move on.
We’d already made a date to meet again before he had to return home to the midwest. Like a teen girl in a mid-century sitcom I’d fretted all Tuesday morning about my trip into the city to meet him again. I’d showered and put myself through the indignity of an enema (bottoms—again, I appreciate the hard work you do!). I made decisions. Did I want my hair to follow its natural center part, or should I push it to the side? Did I want to wear a hint of cologne? What clothes would show me off best? I’d put on a Nasty Pig jock that one of my readers had sent me as a Christmas gift, then removed it, then put it on again beneath a pair of different underwear.
But there we were now, in his hotel room, where we’d holed up after lunch. I have nowhere to be for hours, and hours. I can end this now, or I can make it last. So I think about it a moment—just for a quick moment. I think about the sensation of him inside me. It doesn’t hurt. He’s now moving back and forth, gently, mere millimeters. It’s not even uncomfortable. I’m afraid to move. I’m half on my stomach, half on my left side, with my right leg drawn slightly up. He’s raising himself, balancing his arms around me.
I breathe. I turn my head. I look at him, his head tilted like a curious bird. It’s been a decade since this last happened to me. More than an entire decade. “Do it,” I tell him, making the decision.
“Yeah?” he asks. “You’re sure?”
“You know this is what bottoms worry we tops do when we’re alone together, don’t you,” I gasp out. I’m stalling, though. We both know it. I nod. It’s okay. “Yeah,” I say. “Fuck me.”
I’m usually so facile with words. I like to be the observer in any situation, but it comes at a cost; to be an observer, one has to be at a very slight remove from the experience. One has to be on the outside, looking in. For this experience, though, there’s no remove. There’s no distancing myself. I’m in the middle of it. I am experience, and I can’t regard myself remotely. I can only feel, and not think.
I’ve no sense of time. I feel like I’m flotsam on the ocean, bobbing and floating in a warm tide. I hear his praises, and respond by arching my back and thrusting backward onto him. I hear him tell me he loves me, and that he loves me doing this special thing for him. When he pounds at me, close to orgasm, the sensations are so amazing that I’m not thinking about hurt any more. We’re as far away from hurt as we can be. I think about the warmth I feel spreading from my hole. I think about the sounds of his raspy breathing, his cursing. I shake as he shoots. I beg him not to pull out.
The second time around he calls me names. He calls me boy. I resent it when he calls me faggot, but I resent even more how automatically my body responds with pleasure at the epithet, opening wide to his invading dick and wanting more of his bad treatment. He pinches my nipples, slaps my ass. He fills me again.
My precum has pooled in the jock. He’s pulled it off, inhaled from it deeply, and stuffed it in my mouth, before shoving himself back in again. My dim eyesight fixes onto the clock-radio by the bed. We’d been at it for over ninety minutes, and I haven’t needed a break, I haven’t asked him to stop. I want it never to end.
The moments are tough to distinguish from one another for a very long time. They’re all sensation, raw and immediate. But there comes a moment late in the game of which I’m not especially proud. It’s when he’s close to his fourth orgasm inside me. I’m actually crying. He’s been thanking me over and over again. I’ve been thanking him. I’m trying to tell him something that seems vital, in that moment—that I knew from time to time I’d craved to be treated the way he was treating me, but that I didn’t know until then what I’d been missing.
“You’re a hot fuck. You don’t know how hot this is for me,” he says. And now he’s crying, too. Two top men, sniveling and sniffing while they fucked. “I just want to make it for you the way you made it for me.”
My mouth is dry. My lips are cracked. My throat is raspy. I want to tell him, as he pounds away at my hole, And I just want to be good for you. But what I say is, “And I just want to be good for something.”
He’s yelling outright, filling the room with the noise of another orgasm. I can barely hear it, though. In my head, I’m replaying that sentence, and listening to the raw admission it contains.
And I’m wondering if in that moment of absolute abandon, I’ve mined my way closer to truth than I ever, ever want to admit.
“Fuck,” I say, even more astonished than he. I have to drop my head and pick it back up again, I’m so surprised. I repeat, “Fuck!”
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod. Then I have to take a breath. Because this time, for the first time in over a decade, it’s my hole that’s been opened. I’m the one with his butt in the air, looking back over his shoulder. I’m the one who pushed back onto the dick that’s in me now, out of hunger, out of desire. Out of a need to be filled. Not filled. Used. In that split second, the animal in me had overtaken the rational being. I just wanted to be fucked.
Realizing what I’ve done makes me clench down for a moment. Instantly I regret it. “Hold still,” I beg him. “Just . . . hold still for me.”
He lowers himself so that his pecs are against my back. His knees spread my legs. His arms surround me. The only thing between us is a carpet of thick black chest fur. “As long as you need.”
The Friday night before, I’d fucked him for the first time in his life. I’d taken his virginity, savaging it twice. I’d teased him that he was my little cock whore, my slut. My cum bucket. The words had inflamed him, had given him the permission to relax, to loosen up, to ride my dick without inhibition or regret. Afterward, he’d flipped me over and rimmed me royally—and then he’d slipped his dick inside. I’d been equally surprised then that I’d been able to accommodate the man’s dick, which was not much shorter than my own. His thrusting had been too much for me, and I’d been paranoid about my hygiene, since we hadn’t discussed that particular variation in advance. I hadn't prepared for it.
I’d spent all weekend thinking about him, though. The warmth of his cock against my hole. His sweet breath against my neck. The words he told me, as his cock entered me. I’d be sitting in front of the television, with a project in my hands, and all I could think of were Chester’s handsome face, his smooth head shining in the hotel lights, his short frame bulging with muscles, his beefy legs tangled with mine. I’d pause in mid-sentence at home, thinking when I’d shoved my nose into his armpit and inhaled deeply, memorizing his own particular perfume.
Then I’d wake from my daze, try to recall what I’d been saying, and move on.
We’d already made a date to meet again before he had to return home to the midwest. Like a teen girl in a mid-century sitcom I’d fretted all Tuesday morning about my trip into the city to meet him again. I’d showered and put myself through the indignity of an enema (bottoms—again, I appreciate the hard work you do!). I made decisions. Did I want my hair to follow its natural center part, or should I push it to the side? Did I want to wear a hint of cologne? What clothes would show me off best? I’d put on a Nasty Pig jock that one of my readers had sent me as a Christmas gift, then removed it, then put it on again beneath a pair of different underwear.
But there we were now, in his hotel room, where we’d holed up after lunch. I have nowhere to be for hours, and hours. I can end this now, or I can make it last. So I think about it a moment—just for a quick moment. I think about the sensation of him inside me. It doesn’t hurt. He’s now moving back and forth, gently, mere millimeters. It’s not even uncomfortable. I’m afraid to move. I’m half on my stomach, half on my left side, with my right leg drawn slightly up. He’s raising himself, balancing his arms around me.
I breathe. I turn my head. I look at him, his head tilted like a curious bird. It’s been a decade since this last happened to me. More than an entire decade. “Do it,” I tell him, making the decision.
“Yeah?” he asks. “You’re sure?”
“You know this is what bottoms worry we tops do when we’re alone together, don’t you,” I gasp out. I’m stalling, though. We both know it. I nod. It’s okay. “Yeah,” I say. “Fuck me.”
I’m usually so facile with words. I like to be the observer in any situation, but it comes at a cost; to be an observer, one has to be at a very slight remove from the experience. One has to be on the outside, looking in. For this experience, though, there’s no remove. There’s no distancing myself. I’m in the middle of it. I am experience, and I can’t regard myself remotely. I can only feel, and not think.
I’ve no sense of time. I feel like I’m flotsam on the ocean, bobbing and floating in a warm tide. I hear his praises, and respond by arching my back and thrusting backward onto him. I hear him tell me he loves me, and that he loves me doing this special thing for him. When he pounds at me, close to orgasm, the sensations are so amazing that I’m not thinking about hurt any more. We’re as far away from hurt as we can be. I think about the warmth I feel spreading from my hole. I think about the sounds of his raspy breathing, his cursing. I shake as he shoots. I beg him not to pull out.
The second time around he calls me names. He calls me boy. I resent it when he calls me faggot, but I resent even more how automatically my body responds with pleasure at the epithet, opening wide to his invading dick and wanting more of his bad treatment. He pinches my nipples, slaps my ass. He fills me again.
My precum has pooled in the jock. He’s pulled it off, inhaled from it deeply, and stuffed it in my mouth, before shoving himself back in again. My dim eyesight fixes onto the clock-radio by the bed. We’d been at it for over ninety minutes, and I haven’t needed a break, I haven’t asked him to stop. I want it never to end.
The moments are tough to distinguish from one another for a very long time. They’re all sensation, raw and immediate. But there comes a moment late in the game of which I’m not especially proud. It’s when he’s close to his fourth orgasm inside me. I’m actually crying. He’s been thanking me over and over again. I’ve been thanking him. I’m trying to tell him something that seems vital, in that moment—that I knew from time to time I’d craved to be treated the way he was treating me, but that I didn’t know until then what I’d been missing.
“You’re a hot fuck. You don’t know how hot this is for me,” he says. And now he’s crying, too. Two top men, sniveling and sniffing while they fucked. “I just want to make it for you the way you made it for me.”
My mouth is dry. My lips are cracked. My throat is raspy. I want to tell him, as he pounds away at my hole, And I just want to be good for you. But what I say is, “And I just want to be good for something.”
He’s yelling outright, filling the room with the noise of another orgasm. I can barely hear it, though. In my head, I’m replaying that sentence, and listening to the raw admission it contains.
And I’m wondering if in that moment of absolute abandon, I’ve mined my way closer to truth than I ever, ever want to admit.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Cherry
We have all the lights on in our twenty-first floor hotel room, and the blinds drawn back. It wasn’t our intention to perform naked for anyone lingering late on a Friday night in the high-rise office building opposite. Twilight falls early in Manhattan, though, and in the blazing lights of the hotel room, we’re plainly on display.
The man slumped in his swivel chair at his windowside cubicle a few floors above us, almost exactly opposite, has been watching us make love for over an hour. His legs are spread, his knees pointed in opposite directions. His hand is down the front of his dark business slacks. A floor up, and over to the east, a torso in a white shirt has been appearing at the window from time to time, a pair of binoculars in his hand, pointed in our direction.
We don’t care. My companion is returning from the bathroom, where he’s retrieved a small bottle of lube. He holds it out to me with both hands. His dark eyes are wide and liquid.
“You are so beautiful,” I tell him.
He truly is. Chester is one of those men so handsome and well-formed that I constantly find myself asking that eternal, nagging question, Why is he so attracted to me? He’s short in height, but perfectly proportioned—a muscular chest covered with a carpet of dark fur, a butt that’s round and gym-worked, a stout and dripping hard dick. His head is completely shaved. Beneath my palms and fingertips, it’s cue-ball smooth to the touch. A thick, briskly-trimmed beard adorns his chin, though. I grab it between my thumb and forefinger and pull him to me so that our mouth touch. Dry as the hotel room is, we both moisten each other’s lips with deep and sensual kisses.
“I love you,” he tell me. I’ve given him permission to say those words. There’s no one but the two of us in that moment, in that hotel room. I’ve forgotten about our spectators across the street, about the binoculars, the jerking office clerk, about anyone else who might be watching. He’s trembling as I take the small bottle of lube in my hands. He’s not cold. We’re both perfectly comfortable in that overheated room.
He’s frightened.
We’re standing in front of the window as I turn him around and kneel down behind him. I rub my chin and beard over his buttocks. He gasps at the shock of the bristles at first, and then moans as he accepts the sensations of them raking down his ass. My mouth and nose alone part his cheeks. When he bends over, clutching for the desk chair so that he won’t fall, the dark brown of his hole appears. It’s covered with fur that I slick down with my own spit. I can tell he’s resisting, though. His hands flail helplessly at his sides. He’s trying to stand upright again.
“Hey,” I say, in a soft, low voice. “Listen to me.” His head is hanging down. He stares at me with tear-filled eyes, upside down. “I give you permission to enjoy this,” I tell him. “You don’t have to do anything but enjoy it. Hear me?”
There’s a pause. He nods. “Okay,” he whispers.
On the bed, I rim him for a long time. A half-hour, forty-five minutes, perhaps. I lick. I suck the hole. I bite his ass cheeks. I get my tongue so deep in him that it seems almost part of his body. The entire time, he hugs one hotel pillow and lets out soft and incoherent pleas into another. There are times when he’s crying, actually letting loose tears. I’ve reduced him to utter dependence upon the sensations I’m providing for him: the constant gnawing at his hole. The warmth of my breath and my tongue in his most guarded of places. When I move my hands from his ass to pull at his distended nipples, his hard cock batters the mattress like an angered rapist. When I blow a column of cool air on his wet hole, he howls like a wolf at the moon.
And yes, he’s crying, because no one has done anything like this for him in a long, long time.
He’s a top, you see. He’s forty years old, one of the most handsome and well-built gentlemen it’s been my pleasure to bed, and he’s spent his lifetime topping. Not even once has he had a cock approach his butt, much less invade it.
But he wants mine.
He’s helpless when I roll him on top of me. I could shake him like a rag doll; his head would loll weakly if I did. His butt settles on my rock-hard dick. I’m not surprised when his hips grind against me.
We look at each other. “You have extraordinary eyes,” he tells me. “They’re the color of heather.” I say nothing. My cock stiffens in his crack. I can feel the heat pouring from him, as if someone has stoked a furnace and left open the door. We stare into each other’s eyes, heather and obsidian. “I really love you right now,” he tells me.
“And I love you,” I whisper.
His hands reach for mine. We lace our fingers together for a few moments, doing nothing more than grinding against each other. His eyes drift to my hair, spilling across his pillow. “I can’t believe that I’m being made love to by Lord Byron,” he says.
“I think that translates into This dude really needs a haircut,” I quip.
“No, no.” The way he stares at me, I know he truly means what he’s saying at the moment. “I just can’t believe you like me.”
“Oh, baby,” I whisper. It’s little more than an exhale. His confession is closer to my own thoughts than I dare to admit. “Listen to me. I don’t care if I fuck you tonight. I didn’t come here with an agenda,” I tell him. “I don’t care what goes where. I don’t care if I cum. I wouldn’t care if we did nothing but this all night, so long as you it made you feel good. Okay?”
“Okay,” he whispers back. Then, a moment later, he swallows hard and says, “Let me just feel the tip.”
I open the bottle of lube he’s given me and spread it on his hot, open hole. I put a little more on my dick, and let him raise his hips so that the two meet. His knees are on either side of me, clutching tight my rib cage, and we clasp hands again.
We don’t speak. We don’t say anything at all for a long time. He merely grinds, taking my head in his hole, bit by bit. I refrain from ramming it home, or from making my dick swell. Our hips don’t stop moving, as if we’re caught up in a sensual tango with no musicians.
“I’m sorry this is such an undertaking,” he says at last.
The words make me grin. “Dude,” I tell him. “I don’t think you realize how much of me you actually have in you.”
I make him reach behind and feel. I’m halfway in. The realization is a shock to him. His mouth forms an O; his nostrils flare. His eyebrows crunch together and his eyes grow very wide. And then, suddenly, I feel his muscles give way. He just slides down onto me.
It’s a shock. The sensation of his clenched asshole opening completely and allowing me in, all in one rush, makes me gasp and clutch at him. He seems equally astounded. His eyes open even more widely and fill with tears. Not, I realize, because he’s in pain. Quite the opposite. “Oh shit,” he says, and then repeats the words over and over again until they trail off into incoherence. I ask if he’s okay, if he’s in pain. He nods to the first question, and shakes his head to the other.
Then I notice his dick. It’s leaking precum over my belly. “You’re stone hard,” I say, astonished.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispers. “I might come. I don’t want to come yet.” He begins rocking back and forth on my dick. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I can’t believe it didn’t hurt at all. I can’t believe. . . .” Whatever he wants to say hangs in the air between us for a long, long time. When finally the words come out, they’re a whisper, like he’s praying. “I can’t believe I like it.”
I make sure he likes it. Tenderly, solicitously, I ask from time to time how his knees are holding out, how his ass feels. He’s lasting longer than many of the so-called bottoms I fuck. The entire time we fuck, one of my hands holds his. The other might roam over his body, or tweak his nipples, or reach behind to feel where my dick meets his stretched and wrecked hole, but the other connects itself to him, grasp to grasp. Our eyes rarely leave the other’s, though from time to time he gives in to the sensations and allows his lids to fall. Out the window, I can see the cubicle dweller still watching across the street. His hands are cupped and pressed against the window, and he’s leaning against them, blocking out the light and other distractions to watch us.
Idly I doubt he knows the enormity of what’s happening here.
When I shoot, it’s at his urging. He asks me to. He goads me on not with the hunger of a bottom, but like a top. I can picture what he’s like astride a boy’s hole, dicking it with a buddy from the Top’s Lounge. “Let it loose,” he commands me. “Juice me.”
The words push me over the edge. Beneath him I shudder and shake. My cock pulses. I’m too overpowered by my own orgasm to read the satisfaction in his eyes. But I do know that mere moments after my cum floods him, he’s splattering his load over my stomach, my chest, my forehead. It flies high and wide, landing on the pillow beside my head. I can tell he’s shocked by the strength of his orgasm. A worry line furrows his forehead for a few moments, deep and seemingly indelible. “Hold still,” I tell him.
He nods, breathing heavily. It’s several quiet moments later when he pulls off me, legs seeming to creak rustily. My cock makes a wet noise as it slides out of him. He’s shocked by that, too. For a moment, his eyes are wide once again. Then he laughs, and collapses on the bed beside me. “That was just what I wanted,” he says, curling next to me. “It was just what I needed. I’m so happy it was you.”
I can’t say anything. He’s given me a gift, by tracking me down and insisting I flip him. Hot as the fuck was—and it was damned hot—it is nothing in comparison to the tenderness and trust he's sharing. It pales in comparison to his passion and his sweetness, and in how willingly he unfolds to share himself at his most vulnerable. I pull him to me, and cradle that smooth head on my chest, while his breathing begins to settle. I stroke his skin, and press my lips to his forehead.
Across the street, where the man had been watching us from his office, the light blinks out.
The man slumped in his swivel chair at his windowside cubicle a few floors above us, almost exactly opposite, has been watching us make love for over an hour. His legs are spread, his knees pointed in opposite directions. His hand is down the front of his dark business slacks. A floor up, and over to the east, a torso in a white shirt has been appearing at the window from time to time, a pair of binoculars in his hand, pointed in our direction.
We don’t care. My companion is returning from the bathroom, where he’s retrieved a small bottle of lube. He holds it out to me with both hands. His dark eyes are wide and liquid.
“You are so beautiful,” I tell him.
He truly is. Chester is one of those men so handsome and well-formed that I constantly find myself asking that eternal, nagging question, Why is he so attracted to me? He’s short in height, but perfectly proportioned—a muscular chest covered with a carpet of dark fur, a butt that’s round and gym-worked, a stout and dripping hard dick. His head is completely shaved. Beneath my palms and fingertips, it’s cue-ball smooth to the touch. A thick, briskly-trimmed beard adorns his chin, though. I grab it between my thumb and forefinger and pull him to me so that our mouth touch. Dry as the hotel room is, we both moisten each other’s lips with deep and sensual kisses.
“I love you,” he tell me. I’ve given him permission to say those words. There’s no one but the two of us in that moment, in that hotel room. I’ve forgotten about our spectators across the street, about the binoculars, the jerking office clerk, about anyone else who might be watching. He’s trembling as I take the small bottle of lube in my hands. He’s not cold. We’re both perfectly comfortable in that overheated room.
He’s frightened.
We’re standing in front of the window as I turn him around and kneel down behind him. I rub my chin and beard over his buttocks. He gasps at the shock of the bristles at first, and then moans as he accepts the sensations of them raking down his ass. My mouth and nose alone part his cheeks. When he bends over, clutching for the desk chair so that he won’t fall, the dark brown of his hole appears. It’s covered with fur that I slick down with my own spit. I can tell he’s resisting, though. His hands flail helplessly at his sides. He’s trying to stand upright again.
“Hey,” I say, in a soft, low voice. “Listen to me.” His head is hanging down. He stares at me with tear-filled eyes, upside down. “I give you permission to enjoy this,” I tell him. “You don’t have to do anything but enjoy it. Hear me?”
There’s a pause. He nods. “Okay,” he whispers.
On the bed, I rim him for a long time. A half-hour, forty-five minutes, perhaps. I lick. I suck the hole. I bite his ass cheeks. I get my tongue so deep in him that it seems almost part of his body. The entire time, he hugs one hotel pillow and lets out soft and incoherent pleas into another. There are times when he’s crying, actually letting loose tears. I’ve reduced him to utter dependence upon the sensations I’m providing for him: the constant gnawing at his hole. The warmth of my breath and my tongue in his most guarded of places. When I move my hands from his ass to pull at his distended nipples, his hard cock batters the mattress like an angered rapist. When I blow a column of cool air on his wet hole, he howls like a wolf at the moon.
And yes, he’s crying, because no one has done anything like this for him in a long, long time.
He’s a top, you see. He’s forty years old, one of the most handsome and well-built gentlemen it’s been my pleasure to bed, and he’s spent his lifetime topping. Not even once has he had a cock approach his butt, much less invade it.
But he wants mine.
He’s helpless when I roll him on top of me. I could shake him like a rag doll; his head would loll weakly if I did. His butt settles on my rock-hard dick. I’m not surprised when his hips grind against me.
We look at each other. “You have extraordinary eyes,” he tells me. “They’re the color of heather.” I say nothing. My cock stiffens in his crack. I can feel the heat pouring from him, as if someone has stoked a furnace and left open the door. We stare into each other’s eyes, heather and obsidian. “I really love you right now,” he tells me.
“And I love you,” I whisper.
His hands reach for mine. We lace our fingers together for a few moments, doing nothing more than grinding against each other. His eyes drift to my hair, spilling across his pillow. “I can’t believe that I’m being made love to by Lord Byron,” he says.
“I think that translates into This dude really needs a haircut,” I quip.
“No, no.” The way he stares at me, I know he truly means what he’s saying at the moment. “I just can’t believe you like me.”
“Oh, baby,” I whisper. It’s little more than an exhale. His confession is closer to my own thoughts than I dare to admit. “Listen to me. I don’t care if I fuck you tonight. I didn’t come here with an agenda,” I tell him. “I don’t care what goes where. I don’t care if I cum. I wouldn’t care if we did nothing but this all night, so long as you it made you feel good. Okay?”
“Okay,” he whispers back. Then, a moment later, he swallows hard and says, “Let me just feel the tip.”
I open the bottle of lube he’s given me and spread it on his hot, open hole. I put a little more on my dick, and let him raise his hips so that the two meet. His knees are on either side of me, clutching tight my rib cage, and we clasp hands again.
We don’t speak. We don’t say anything at all for a long time. He merely grinds, taking my head in his hole, bit by bit. I refrain from ramming it home, or from making my dick swell. Our hips don’t stop moving, as if we’re caught up in a sensual tango with no musicians.
“I’m sorry this is such an undertaking,” he says at last.
The words make me grin. “Dude,” I tell him. “I don’t think you realize how much of me you actually have in you.”
I make him reach behind and feel. I’m halfway in. The realization is a shock to him. His mouth forms an O; his nostrils flare. His eyebrows crunch together and his eyes grow very wide. And then, suddenly, I feel his muscles give way. He just slides down onto me.
It’s a shock. The sensation of his clenched asshole opening completely and allowing me in, all in one rush, makes me gasp and clutch at him. He seems equally astounded. His eyes open even more widely and fill with tears. Not, I realize, because he’s in pain. Quite the opposite. “Oh shit,” he says, and then repeats the words over and over again until they trail off into incoherence. I ask if he’s okay, if he’s in pain. He nods to the first question, and shakes his head to the other.
Then I notice his dick. It’s leaking precum over my belly. “You’re stone hard,” I say, astonished.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispers. “I might come. I don’t want to come yet.” He begins rocking back and forth on my dick. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I can’t believe it didn’t hurt at all. I can’t believe. . . .” Whatever he wants to say hangs in the air between us for a long, long time. When finally the words come out, they’re a whisper, like he’s praying. “I can’t believe I like it.”
I make sure he likes it. Tenderly, solicitously, I ask from time to time how his knees are holding out, how his ass feels. He’s lasting longer than many of the so-called bottoms I fuck. The entire time we fuck, one of my hands holds his. The other might roam over his body, or tweak his nipples, or reach behind to feel where my dick meets his stretched and wrecked hole, but the other connects itself to him, grasp to grasp. Our eyes rarely leave the other’s, though from time to time he gives in to the sensations and allows his lids to fall. Out the window, I can see the cubicle dweller still watching across the street. His hands are cupped and pressed against the window, and he’s leaning against them, blocking out the light and other distractions to watch us.
Idly I doubt he knows the enormity of what’s happening here.
When I shoot, it’s at his urging. He asks me to. He goads me on not with the hunger of a bottom, but like a top. I can picture what he’s like astride a boy’s hole, dicking it with a buddy from the Top’s Lounge. “Let it loose,” he commands me. “Juice me.”
The words push me over the edge. Beneath him I shudder and shake. My cock pulses. I’m too overpowered by my own orgasm to read the satisfaction in his eyes. But I do know that mere moments after my cum floods him, he’s splattering his load over my stomach, my chest, my forehead. It flies high and wide, landing on the pillow beside my head. I can tell he’s shocked by the strength of his orgasm. A worry line furrows his forehead for a few moments, deep and seemingly indelible. “Hold still,” I tell him.
He nods, breathing heavily. It’s several quiet moments later when he pulls off me, legs seeming to creak rustily. My cock makes a wet noise as it slides out of him. He’s shocked by that, too. For a moment, his eyes are wide once again. Then he laughs, and collapses on the bed beside me. “That was just what I wanted,” he says, curling next to me. “It was just what I needed. I’m so happy it was you.”
I can’t say anything. He’s given me a gift, by tracking me down and insisting I flip him. Hot as the fuck was—and it was damned hot—it is nothing in comparison to the tenderness and trust he's sharing. It pales in comparison to his passion and his sweetness, and in how willingly he unfolds to share himself at his most vulnerable. I pull him to me, and cradle that smooth head on my chest, while his breathing begins to settle. I stroke his skin, and press my lips to his forehead.
Across the street, where the man had been watching us from his office, the light blinks out.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Sunday Morning Questions: Roundabout Story Edition
Some of my readers have poked up their heads to ask about the audio recording I promised of one of my entries, late last year. Valid question!
By way of answering it, let me explain a little something about my life right now.
When I moved to the east coast, last summer, I moved into a temporary residence. I packed up my family's three-bedroom, hundred-year-old Craftsman-style home (pardon me while I choke back my sobs) and into a very tiny, very compact apartment with only a portion of the bedrooms and space and at a much high rent than my mortgage used to be.
Something had to give. As a consequence, more than eighty percent of my possessions are still in storage, believe it or not. I have about half of my kitchen equipment unpacked (and if you think it's been fun to have only one cookie sheet for seven months, you're wrong). We have all of our clothes and computer equipment. My piano sits in my dining room. And that's really about all I've got unpacked—the rest is sitting either in boxes in the basement, or in a storage unit across town.
Now, if it's one of the boxes I packed myself, I can generally remember in what size box something is, and how it might be marked. When I really needed a reference book a couple of weeks ago, I knew it was in a medium-sized box labelled Bedroom Books. I ventured into the basement, banged my head on the water pipes, and managed to find it in one go.
If it's a box that the movers packed, though, god knows where it is. They just shoved things into cardboard, wrote Household on it, and called it day. I could go through the several score Household boxes and unwrap every object from the three miles of brown paper they used as padding. I spent an entire day doing that when I discovered they'd individually-wrapped every small jar of spice from my kitchen cupboard, early in the summer, and lost my taste not only for unwrapping things in general, but for Christmas presents as well.
My point—I really do have one!—is that my headphones with the microphone that plugs into my notebook's USB port is packed in some box somewhere. God knows where. Once I figure it out, you'll get that audio recording. I've picked out the essay I'll be reading, and I've had some ideas of how I'll do it. So give me a little more time and you'll get it, I promise.
Let's get to some questions from formspring.me. Thanks to those of you who sent in new questions this week—I always appreciate them.
Are any specific types of questions that you delete or ignore?
Absolutely. I tend not to answer any questions about my family members or my loved ones. I skip over questions I've been asked a million times before or which are of the mundane "what kind of sex do you like" variety.
And I definitely ignore questions that aren't really questions at all, but barely-disguised verbal traps that someone has constructed with the intent of putting me in my place, or pointing out how depraved I am.
What is the most you've ever spent on a meal in a restaurant?
$170 for two—for a dinner and two drinks.
I told my father and he fainted.
Do you think you would enjoy being tricked onto SyFy's Scare Tactics?
Fuck no. I don't like being tricked into anything, I don't like surprises, and I don't like being scared. I can't imagine a more miserable way to spend my time.
When you were a teenage boy had you ever been caught masturbating by your mother or other part of the family? What happened next?
No, I was never caught masturbating.
If I had been, in my household it wouldn't have been a cause for either shock, alarm, or even much notice. Proto-hippies that they were, my parents would have l-o-v-e-d the opportunity to be laid back and cool about it, and would've taken undisguised masturbation as an indication that their parenting techniques were as relaxed and hip and up-to-date as they thought they were.
Naturally, as a stubborn kid, I wasn't going to give them that satisfaction.
How many pillow and blankets do you use when you sleep?
I use one of each, and I sleep in the nude.
I never really heard of anyone using more than one pillow to sleep until I met Spencer last year. I had to round up every pillow in the household to satisfy him, on the many occasions he spent the night.
What does your latest text message from someone else say?
At the time of this question, it was, It's a good thing you made a big batch of those apple bars.
Have you ever used another guys cum as lube to fuck someone?
Often.
Which US city has the hottest guys to fuck?
Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., in my experience. Columbus, Ohio is another surprising little pig town, as is Dallas.
L.A. and NYC have a lot of beautiful men, but in L.A. especially, the men seem so worried that they'll miss out on something better if they agree to meet, that they postpone hooking up for hours on end.
Do you only have sex bareback?
I prefer it.
I see you read Big Shoe Diaries -- how much do you wanna bang Colby Keller?
Colby Keller—@colbykeller on Twitter— is one of the top sexiest porn actors it's my pleasure to watch, from time to time. He has a lot of qualities that really make me extremely attracted to him aside from his height and his amazing good looks. He's a talented artist and a good writer, has an admirable intellect, and seems like a genuinely good and pleasant guy.
So yes, he totally makes me want to do dirty things to him.
By way of answering it, let me explain a little something about my life right now.
When I moved to the east coast, last summer, I moved into a temporary residence. I packed up my family's three-bedroom, hundred-year-old Craftsman-style home (pardon me while I choke back my sobs) and into a very tiny, very compact apartment with only a portion of the bedrooms and space and at a much high rent than my mortgage used to be.
Something had to give. As a consequence, more than eighty percent of my possessions are still in storage, believe it or not. I have about half of my kitchen equipment unpacked (and if you think it's been fun to have only one cookie sheet for seven months, you're wrong). We have all of our clothes and computer equipment. My piano sits in my dining room. And that's really about all I've got unpacked—the rest is sitting either in boxes in the basement, or in a storage unit across town.
Now, if it's one of the boxes I packed myself, I can generally remember in what size box something is, and how it might be marked. When I really needed a reference book a couple of weeks ago, I knew it was in a medium-sized box labelled Bedroom Books. I ventured into the basement, banged my head on the water pipes, and managed to find it in one go.
If it's a box that the movers packed, though, god knows where it is. They just shoved things into cardboard, wrote Household on it, and called it day. I could go through the several score Household boxes and unwrap every object from the three miles of brown paper they used as padding. I spent an entire day doing that when I discovered they'd individually-wrapped every small jar of spice from my kitchen cupboard, early in the summer, and lost my taste not only for unwrapping things in general, but for Christmas presents as well.
My point—I really do have one!—is that my headphones with the microphone that plugs into my notebook's USB port is packed in some box somewhere. God knows where. Once I figure it out, you'll get that audio recording. I've picked out the essay I'll be reading, and I've had some ideas of how I'll do it. So give me a little more time and you'll get it, I promise.
Let's get to some questions from formspring.me. Thanks to those of you who sent in new questions this week—I always appreciate them.
Are any specific types of questions that you delete or ignore?
Absolutely. I tend not to answer any questions about my family members or my loved ones. I skip over questions I've been asked a million times before or which are of the mundane "what kind of sex do you like" variety.
And I definitely ignore questions that aren't really questions at all, but barely-disguised verbal traps that someone has constructed with the intent of putting me in my place, or pointing out how depraved I am.
What is the most you've ever spent on a meal in a restaurant?
$170 for two—for a dinner and two drinks.
I told my father and he fainted.
Do you think you would enjoy being tricked onto SyFy's Scare Tactics?
Fuck no. I don't like being tricked into anything, I don't like surprises, and I don't like being scared. I can't imagine a more miserable way to spend my time.
When you were a teenage boy had you ever been caught masturbating by your mother or other part of the family? What happened next?
No, I was never caught masturbating.
If I had been, in my household it wouldn't have been a cause for either shock, alarm, or even much notice. Proto-hippies that they were, my parents would have l-o-v-e-d the opportunity to be laid back and cool about it, and would've taken undisguised masturbation as an indication that their parenting techniques were as relaxed and hip and up-to-date as they thought they were.
Naturally, as a stubborn kid, I wasn't going to give them that satisfaction.
How many pillow and blankets do you use when you sleep?
I use one of each, and I sleep in the nude.
I never really heard of anyone using more than one pillow to sleep until I met Spencer last year. I had to round up every pillow in the household to satisfy him, on the many occasions he spent the night.
What does your latest text message from someone else say?
At the time of this question, it was, It's a good thing you made a big batch of those apple bars.
Have you ever used another guys cum as lube to fuck someone?
Often.
Which US city has the hottest guys to fuck?
Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., in my experience. Columbus, Ohio is another surprising little pig town, as is Dallas.
L.A. and NYC have a lot of beautiful men, but in L.A. especially, the men seem so worried that they'll miss out on something better if they agree to meet, that they postpone hooking up for hours on end.
Do you only have sex bareback?
I prefer it.
I see you read Big Shoe Diaries -- how much do you wanna bang Colby Keller?
Colby Keller—@colbykeller on Twitter— is one of the top sexiest porn actors it's my pleasure to watch, from time to time. He has a lot of qualities that really make me extremely attracted to him aside from his height and his amazing good looks. He's a talented artist and a good writer, has an admirable intellect, and seems like a genuinely good and pleasant guy.
So yes, he totally makes me want to do dirty things to him.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
10 Things You Might Want to Avoid Telling a Sex Blogger
Or any blogger. Even as a joke. Unless, of course, you actually enjoy being told Fuck you! in a fairly prompt way.
1. You are my seventh-favorite blog!
Because I'm going to want to hunt down and kill the six between myself and the highest spot, of course.
2. The metaphor you used in your blog yesterday didn’t work for me. Also I think you should’ve used ‘sprinkled with cum’ instead of ‘laced with cum’ because ejaculate doesn’t have holes.
Then you know what? When you write your own blog, please feel free to do just that.
3. Too much yadda-yadda-yadda. Get to the action already.
There are hundreds of similar blogs out there. Please feel free to find one that suits you better.
4. I love your blog! There are too many words but I like your picture at the top.
Gee, thanks bunches.
5. Did you ever have a hot and sex encounter where you visited a guy at home and got caught by his wife and she got really upset and stripped off her clothes and forced both of you to lick her feet while she called you nasty faggots and then used dildos on both your asses and made you fuck her husband while she laughed and played with herself? If so, can you write about it?
Thanks for your oddly-specific request. I’ll dig through the memory banks and see if I can recall such a happenstance.
6. Hi I love your blog link to mine at imanastyfratboycumslut.blogspot.com.
No.
7. I used to read your blog all the time, but kind of got out of the habit.
Thanks for telling me. Asshole.
8. You used to write that blog, didn’t you? So what’s been happening? Catch me up in two sentences or less.
You know what a blog is for, right?
9. I’ve read your blog before. What’s the address again?
Most modern browsers have this thing called a ‘bookmark.’ Would you like me to instruct you how to use it?
10. Do you still keep that blog thing?
Gee, thanks for sharing your disinterest. I feel all warm and smooshy inside now.
1. You are my seventh-favorite blog!
Because I'm going to want to hunt down and kill the six between myself and the highest spot, of course.
2. The metaphor you used in your blog yesterday didn’t work for me. Also I think you should’ve used ‘sprinkled with cum’ instead of ‘laced with cum’ because ejaculate doesn’t have holes.
Then you know what? When you write your own blog, please feel free to do just that.
3. Too much yadda-yadda-yadda. Get to the action already.
There are hundreds of similar blogs out there. Please feel free to find one that suits you better.
4. I love your blog! There are too many words but I like your picture at the top.
Gee, thanks bunches.
5. Did you ever have a hot and sex encounter where you visited a guy at home and got caught by his wife and she got really upset and stripped off her clothes and forced both of you to lick her feet while she called you nasty faggots and then used dildos on both your asses and made you fuck her husband while she laughed and played with herself? If so, can you write about it?
Thanks for your oddly-specific request. I’ll dig through the memory banks and see if I can recall such a happenstance.
6. Hi I love your blog link to mine at imanastyfratboycumslut.blogspot.com.
No.
7. I used to read your blog all the time, but kind of got out of the habit.
Thanks for telling me. Asshole.
8. You used to write that blog, didn’t you? So what’s been happening? Catch me up in two sentences or less.
You know what a blog is for, right?
9. I’ve read your blog before. What’s the address again?
Most modern browsers have this thing called a ‘bookmark.’ Would you like me to instruct you how to use it?
10. Do you still keep that blog thing?
Gee, thanks for sharing your disinterest. I feel all warm and smooshy inside now.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Architectural Digest
The apartment building in Stamford is pretty unassuming from the outside. The chalky white stucco exterior has either chipped away on its own through the years to reveal the red brick wall underneath, or else it’s been artistically distressed to make it look as if it has. I can’t tell, either way. I text the number I’ve been given. It’s only a couple of minutes before he emerges from one of the doors in the lowest level, beneath the fragile-looking black iron fire escapes that hang onto the building tenuously, like fallen eyelashes cling to a cheek.
He’s not as young as his photos, I notice with a little dismay, and he’s probably shaved a decade for his online age. It’s the fib that niggles at me, not his looks. He’s a handsome guy. He’s got a strong jawline, and blue eyes for which a movie star would kill. It’s not his age that bugs me, either, though he has to be pushing sixty. He and I are definitely not the exact same age, though, despite what he would have the world think.
He’s wearing a hoodie and a pair of loose and flowing basketball shorts. When I hop out of my car, his mouth spreads into a wide grin. He puts his hand on his narrow hips. I can see from the crown of his head loosely traced in his shorts that he’s wearing no underwear. “I like what I see,” he says, once I’m within earshot.
Those teeth of his are pearly white. I’m almost blinded by their brilliance. “That’s a good greeting,” I tell him, smiling. I offer my hand. We shake. His skin is leathery, but warm.
“Oh, I haven’t greeted you yet,” he chuckles to himself, as he swings open the apartment building door.
It seems a good promise to me.
We walk over cheap linoleum floors and up to the second landing. The difference between the hallway and the apartment’s interior couldn’t be greater. It’s obviously this guy has invested a fortune in upgrading his home. The floors are a shiny hardwood, the furniture polished and gleaming. There’s a collection of expensive crockery in a glass cupboard in the kitchen where we’re standing, and a gleaming countertop of pink stone. An aluminum hood covers the extra-wide six-element professional cooktop; the backsplash is a colorful mural of tomatoes and eggplants and a bowl of pasta. It’s a spread from Architectural Digest.
He’s got hold of my hand again, and gives it a squeeze. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this,” he says, “but you look way way better than your photographs.” At my raised eyebrows and parted lips, he hastily adds, “Not that your pics look bad or anything. You’re just . . . way sexier in person.”
“I’m not going to put up an argument, I tell him.” I pull him close to me. Our lips meet. He’s not a great kisser. He’s one of those men who feels that all he needs to do is press his lips against mine and open his jaw. There’s no spark, no push or pull, no greedy tongue or devouring mouth. I’m not going to be the one to teach him, either.
The kiss is aborted when I hear a click-clack against the floor. An Italian greyhound skitters into the room. Its legs are toothpicks, and its tail vibrates back and forth faster than a hummingbird’s wings.
“Hey there,” I coo, and kneel to greet the man’s pet.
“Let me put her in the bedroom,” he says, scooping up the little dog and making away with her. “She’ll be all into our business if I don’t.” I look around while he’s gone and wonder where he intends for us to fuck, if he’s ceding his pet the bedroom. It seems as if every bit of the apartment is unsuitable for sloppy lovemaking. Surely he’s not intending us to screw on the fine leather sofas of his living room, or for me to throw him down upon the spindly-looking, ornately-carved dining table. The sheer amount of wax alone would make one of us slide off of it. But he’s back, and guiding me from the kitchen by the hand into the living room, past the designer stereo system and the delicate bookcase filled with art and photography books, around the glass-topped coffee table.
He stops there, and lets go of his pants. They fall to the floor and pool around his ankles. “Is this what you wanted?” he asks, displaying his butt.
It’s a handsome ass. Like the rest of his body, it’s nicely muscled. It’s obvious he spends time in the gym, working on it. I nod, and lick my lips. My dick starts to stir when he unbuttons my jeans and lets them fall to my ankles, but he makes no move to remove my shoes or shirt. “Oh yeah,” he breathes, when he’s got my cock in his hand. He kisses the head. “I like it.”
“Suck it, then,” I whisper.
He goes to work. Long, swift strokes, more lips than tongue, no teeth. His eyes cross as he tries to look at the enormous dick he’s sucking, then return to normal as he looks up at me. I nod at him, letting him know he’s doing a good job.
I can’t really move much. He’s placed me between tightly-arranged furniture, so that I have a white leather sofa behind me, grazing my calves. There’s the big coffee table banging against my right shin. He’s crouched down between a leather arm chair, his chest extending over the coffee table’s glass top. I don’t want to flop down, not on the leather, not without his say-so. I stand there and let him do the work.
Then he’s up on his feet, licking his fingers, wetting his hole. He turns around and bends over. That muscular ass parts, exposing the pink hole hidden by the cheeks. My dick is still slick from his spit, but I add to it, and pull his hips back until we’re aligned.
I’m in, slowly, an inch at a time. I can feel that tight ass parting with every pound of pressure I put against it. He’s shaking. His hips are buckling. He’s got his jaw dropped, and a sound is emanating from deep within, wordless, without syllables, but I know every nuance of what he’s telling me. I continue to press in until I’ve reached the bottom of his shaft, and then I push forward a little more. “You’ve got it all, now,” I tell him.
He nods. He knows. Trust me, his body knows exactly how much of my dick it holds inside him.
The fucking is awkward. I can’t really move my feet any further apart than they already are; the table and sofa prevent that. I have visions of him losing his balance and crashing onto the table. His feet are firmly planted on the hardwood floor, though, and my hard wood seems to be keeping him firmly in place. My dick swells from branch to log as I begin to slide in and out of that slick wetness.
I can’t move, but he can. He grinds his hips and fucks himself onto me, tentatively at first, but then with increasing vigor. My hipbones begin rebounding from his thrusts. His hands clutch behind, at first to pull wide his ass cheeks, and then to grapple with my hips, to pull me in deeper, harder. The man’s eyes are closed. He’s lost in a world of sensation, adrift and blindly navigating. He knows the geography well, though. Every one of his thrusts is making me gasp and grunt, even as my shinbone knocks audibly against the table.
He comes first. I don’t even know it’s arriving until he lets out a mighty roar and I look down to see semen spattering the floor. There’s a hefty glob of it swinging from the head of his dick. On one of his thrusts—he doesn’t stop thrusting, not even as his ass is clenching onto my meat for dear life—it swings back and briefly clings to my nuts.
I shoot not long after that. My hands grab at him and hold him still, my dick plunged deep inside. He can’t be comfortable, but he holds the position until the tenseness eases. Then he pulls forward so that I slop out of him.
He’s running to get towels, and is back quickly, dabbing at my dick, rubbing at his own ass. He’s on the floor wiping up his own load, so that it doesn’t leave a mark. Then he’s checking the table, making sure there’s no trace of fluid.
I don’t have much to do to get dressed—just pull up my pants and go, really. “Next time I want to see if I can get two loads out of you,” he tells me.
“Next time,” I tell him, “we’re using the bed.”
He’s not as young as his photos, I notice with a little dismay, and he’s probably shaved a decade for his online age. It’s the fib that niggles at me, not his looks. He’s a handsome guy. He’s got a strong jawline, and blue eyes for which a movie star would kill. It’s not his age that bugs me, either, though he has to be pushing sixty. He and I are definitely not the exact same age, though, despite what he would have the world think.
He’s wearing a hoodie and a pair of loose and flowing basketball shorts. When I hop out of my car, his mouth spreads into a wide grin. He puts his hand on his narrow hips. I can see from the crown of his head loosely traced in his shorts that he’s wearing no underwear. “I like what I see,” he says, once I’m within earshot.
Those teeth of his are pearly white. I’m almost blinded by their brilliance. “That’s a good greeting,” I tell him, smiling. I offer my hand. We shake. His skin is leathery, but warm.
“Oh, I haven’t greeted you yet,” he chuckles to himself, as he swings open the apartment building door.
It seems a good promise to me.
We walk over cheap linoleum floors and up to the second landing. The difference between the hallway and the apartment’s interior couldn’t be greater. It’s obviously this guy has invested a fortune in upgrading his home. The floors are a shiny hardwood, the furniture polished and gleaming. There’s a collection of expensive crockery in a glass cupboard in the kitchen where we’re standing, and a gleaming countertop of pink stone. An aluminum hood covers the extra-wide six-element professional cooktop; the backsplash is a colorful mural of tomatoes and eggplants and a bowl of pasta. It’s a spread from Architectural Digest.
He’s got hold of my hand again, and gives it a squeeze. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this,” he says, “but you look way way better than your photographs.” At my raised eyebrows and parted lips, he hastily adds, “Not that your pics look bad or anything. You’re just . . . way sexier in person.”
“I’m not going to put up an argument, I tell him.” I pull him close to me. Our lips meet. He’s not a great kisser. He’s one of those men who feels that all he needs to do is press his lips against mine and open his jaw. There’s no spark, no push or pull, no greedy tongue or devouring mouth. I’m not going to be the one to teach him, either.
The kiss is aborted when I hear a click-clack against the floor. An Italian greyhound skitters into the room. Its legs are toothpicks, and its tail vibrates back and forth faster than a hummingbird’s wings.
“Hey there,” I coo, and kneel to greet the man’s pet.
“Let me put her in the bedroom,” he says, scooping up the little dog and making away with her. “She’ll be all into our business if I don’t.” I look around while he’s gone and wonder where he intends for us to fuck, if he’s ceding his pet the bedroom. It seems as if every bit of the apartment is unsuitable for sloppy lovemaking. Surely he’s not intending us to screw on the fine leather sofas of his living room, or for me to throw him down upon the spindly-looking, ornately-carved dining table. The sheer amount of wax alone would make one of us slide off of it. But he’s back, and guiding me from the kitchen by the hand into the living room, past the designer stereo system and the delicate bookcase filled with art and photography books, around the glass-topped coffee table.
He stops there, and lets go of his pants. They fall to the floor and pool around his ankles. “Is this what you wanted?” he asks, displaying his butt.
It’s a handsome ass. Like the rest of his body, it’s nicely muscled. It’s obvious he spends time in the gym, working on it. I nod, and lick my lips. My dick starts to stir when he unbuttons my jeans and lets them fall to my ankles, but he makes no move to remove my shoes or shirt. “Oh yeah,” he breathes, when he’s got my cock in his hand. He kisses the head. “I like it.”
“Suck it, then,” I whisper.
He goes to work. Long, swift strokes, more lips than tongue, no teeth. His eyes cross as he tries to look at the enormous dick he’s sucking, then return to normal as he looks up at me. I nod at him, letting him know he’s doing a good job.
I can’t really move much. He’s placed me between tightly-arranged furniture, so that I have a white leather sofa behind me, grazing my calves. There’s the big coffee table banging against my right shin. He’s crouched down between a leather arm chair, his chest extending over the coffee table’s glass top. I don’t want to flop down, not on the leather, not without his say-so. I stand there and let him do the work.
Then he’s up on his feet, licking his fingers, wetting his hole. He turns around and bends over. That muscular ass parts, exposing the pink hole hidden by the cheeks. My dick is still slick from his spit, but I add to it, and pull his hips back until we’re aligned.
I’m in, slowly, an inch at a time. I can feel that tight ass parting with every pound of pressure I put against it. He’s shaking. His hips are buckling. He’s got his jaw dropped, and a sound is emanating from deep within, wordless, without syllables, but I know every nuance of what he’s telling me. I continue to press in until I’ve reached the bottom of his shaft, and then I push forward a little more. “You’ve got it all, now,” I tell him.
He nods. He knows. Trust me, his body knows exactly how much of my dick it holds inside him.
The fucking is awkward. I can’t really move my feet any further apart than they already are; the table and sofa prevent that. I have visions of him losing his balance and crashing onto the table. His feet are firmly planted on the hardwood floor, though, and my hard wood seems to be keeping him firmly in place. My dick swells from branch to log as I begin to slide in and out of that slick wetness.
I can’t move, but he can. He grinds his hips and fucks himself onto me, tentatively at first, but then with increasing vigor. My hipbones begin rebounding from his thrusts. His hands clutch behind, at first to pull wide his ass cheeks, and then to grapple with my hips, to pull me in deeper, harder. The man’s eyes are closed. He’s lost in a world of sensation, adrift and blindly navigating. He knows the geography well, though. Every one of his thrusts is making me gasp and grunt, even as my shinbone knocks audibly against the table.
He comes first. I don’t even know it’s arriving until he lets out a mighty roar and I look down to see semen spattering the floor. There’s a hefty glob of it swinging from the head of his dick. On one of his thrusts—he doesn’t stop thrusting, not even as his ass is clenching onto my meat for dear life—it swings back and briefly clings to my nuts.
I shoot not long after that. My hands grab at him and hold him still, my dick plunged deep inside. He can’t be comfortable, but he holds the position until the tenseness eases. Then he pulls forward so that I slop out of him.
He’s running to get towels, and is back quickly, dabbing at my dick, rubbing at his own ass. He’s on the floor wiping up his own load, so that it doesn’t leave a mark. Then he’s checking the table, making sure there’s no trace of fluid.
I don’t have much to do to get dressed—just pull up my pants and go, really. “Next time I want to see if I can get two loads out of you,” he tells me.
“Next time,” I tell him, “we’re using the bed.”
Monday, January 9, 2012
Branded, Part 2
There’s two sides to every story. One of my least-liked phrases. It’s a nice sentiment in theory, I suppose. When it reminds people to look beyond the obvious, to dig a little deeper, it might even be valuable. But it seems to me that people drag out there’s two sides to every story only when they relish the thought of remaining loftily above it all—when they’re cherishing a glamorized view of themselves not as a neutral party, but as the ultimate judge of a situation, to whom everyone must defer. The phrase isn’t usually employed to open up conversation, but to shut it down. In other words, I tend to hear it whenever someone’s already made up his mind and doesn’t give a damn about listening any more.
And of course, sometimes there aren’t two sides to a story. Sometimes there’s what happened, and then there’s a damned lie.
Which is what I heard happening the night before Edvig moved out of our dorm room in the arts house, my sophomore year. Sleep was a pretty precious commodity, my first two years of college. As a freshman, I had the misfortune to be the one geeky kid on a floor of hardcore partiers. The only way I got to sleep at night was staying out studying until two in the morning, most nights, and then using earplugs when I returned to the dorm. Sophomore year wasn’t too much better. I had more friends in the dorm itself, but come on. It was a house for budding artists. They’d practically signed a contract to live their lives at peak drama for all of nineteen eighty-two and three. Not only were there the usual dorm noises keeping me awake past midnight and into the morning’s small hours—the laughter and card games and stereos played too loudly—but we had the impromptu cello performances, the theatrical declamations, the hey gang let’s put on a show in the showers! at three in the morning, the dramatic public breakups between girlfriend and boyfriend, and later in the year, the inevitable suicide attempt.
So there I was in bed, the night before Edvig was scheduled to move out forever, not really able to fall asleep all the way, but drifting between dozing and tossing restlessly. Two doors down, in my friend Scott’s room, a bunch of the arts house kids were having some kind of late-night rap session. I could recognize seven or eight distinct voices. I couldn’t always hear what they were saying, because some of them were softer than others. But I did hear Scott, very distinctly, crying out “He did what?” at one point, accompanied by cries of shock by several of the others there.
It was loud enough to rouse me fully. What really shocked me awake is that I heard Edvig’s moo-cow lowing responding to Scott’s question. He wasn’t speaking loudly or distinctly enough for me to hear from two rooms down, with the door to my room firmly closed. It was pretty clear, though, that he was the center of the conversation’s attention. “He actually did that?” Scott replied. He was a bass in the college chorus, and later had a starring role in the college’s production of Sweeney Todd. He projected well. “He actually did that?!”
I remember sitting bolt upright in bed. I knew they were talking about me. I knew that Edvig was in there spreading some kind of poison about me. But I had no clue of what to do. I must have considered putting on some clothing and walking down the hall to confront them all. I didn’t have the courage for it then, though. (I’m not sure I would now, either.) There was so much conversation going on that I couldn’t really distinguish anything from the babble of noise. At some point, I rose from my bed, crept over to the door, and opened it in the hope of hearing more clearly. I don’t know whether or not they heard me stealthily turn the knob and release the latch, but mere seconds after I cracked my own door, Scott’s door clicked shut.
What followed I recall as a miserable night. Whether or not I got any sleep, I don’t remember. I was taking computer science to fulfill a requirement that year, though, and it was a dull enough class on its own. Deprived of sleep, and fretting myself to death, made it even more of a slog. I managed somehow to make it through that and the rest of the morning, though. When I went back to the dorm, I didn’t get at all to enjoy the novelty of a newly half-empty room. All I did was wait for Scott to come back to the dorm. When he did, toward dinner, I pounced on him.
I told him that I heard Edvig talking the night before, and that I know he was talking about me. I demanded to know what he’d said I’d done. “I’m not going to tell you that,” Scott said, outraged that I’d even asked.
“But he was talking about me,” I protested. “I have a right to know.”
“No, you don’t,” said Scott. I noticed he didn’t deny the topic, though.
“I know he said something awful about me,” I emphasized. “I could tell by the way you reacted. I think I deserve to know what kinds of lies he was telling.”
“Well,” said Scott, turning away. “There are two sides to every story.”
Meaning: he had no intention of asking me about mine. He’d heard someone spin a tale, and it was enough for him. He didn’t care to hear a rebuttal. And this is what I don’t like about that phrase, when it’s usually applied as a non-negotiable aphorism: sometimes it tell s me the speaker doesn’t believe in truth. He only sees points of view, all equally valid. The phrase doesn’t allow for lies, for fabrication, for the self-delusions in which some wrap themselves like thick blankets. There’s just this view, and that view, and the truth is lost somewhere between.
I couldn’t wrangle out of anyone whose voice I’d heard that night what Edvig had told them. They all refused to tell me. I just knew that someone had said something that I couldn’t refute, because no one would tell me what the fuck it was. If such a thing happened to me now, I would’ve confronted Edvig. Or I might’ve gone to the hippie-dippy RAs. But I wasn’t then the person I am now. I was too wrapped up in fear to do anything other than pretend nothing was happening around me.
It was impossible not to notice that people had changed their attitudes toward me. Not my handful of close personal friends outside the dorm. They were the same, though I didn’t share my worries with them. But everyone on my hall clammed up when I’d walk into a room. There were awkward times when I’d be pretending everything was the same and attempt to invite people to dinner or to a campus activity, only to be met with a polite, but cold rebuff. The RAs posted vague notices on the bulletin board about being available for personal conversations, shortly after, which in a paranoid manner I took as referring to conversations about me.
I managed to stagger on for three weeks in this manner, keeping my head up and a smile plastered on my face while inwardly I felt miserable and scared and alone. Then late one night, one of the guys in the dorm knocked on my door and asked to talk. I didn’t know him well. He played clarinet in the college band, though, and had always been pleasant enough. He told me that someone would be arriving within the next week to take Edvig’s place, and that he wondered if I’d mind having him as a roommate instead of the new guy. The clarinet player wasn’t getting along with his roommate (who was a dick, I had to agree), and he viewed the vacancy in my room as a way of escaping a bad situation. I accepted; I’d rather have him than some stranger.
“Oh,” he said, before he left. “I have to ask. I hope you understand. Did you really rape Edvig?”
I felt a flush of rage that was quickly followed by the iciest sensation I’ve ever had in my life. I remember choking out something to the effect that no, I did not rape Edvig, and why would he even ask that question?
“Because that’s the reason he told people he had for moving out,” said the clarinet player. “Okay, bye!” And then with his curiosity sated, he was up and out of there to begin packing.
I have to give that guy credit. Because in all four years of college, out of all the people who heard that rumor, he was only person ever to ask me if it were true. He was the only person ever to ask me about it at all.
If Edvig had actually formally accused me of rape—if he’d been serious, or thought in his demented head that I’d actually raped him—my life in college would’ve been much different. He would have been required to report it to the campus police. There would’ve been an examination, a police report. There would have been evidence presented at a trial, or at least an honor court hearing. He would have had to present concrete evidence against me—and since there couldn’t have been evidence, I would’ve been vindicated.
What he did instead, though, was to plant insidious seeds of doubt in people’s minds. He made the rape unspeakable, save only in whispers. Those whispers spread like wildfire, throughout my college career. Everyone in the arts house knew them. They dogged me through all my theater classes. I knew girls in that department who would wrinkle their lips in disgust when they were forced to acknowledge me; there was one who was so vocal about her detestation about having to remain in the presence of a rapist that she refused to play in a group scene with me in an acting class. She and the teacher exchanged words about it in the hallway, and then the professor returned to the class and, without much comment, removed me from her group.
That really hurt. I wasn’t bold enough to confront the professor after class and ask why I’d been singled out that way, either. I merely joined another group, acted as if I didn’t care, and worked with them instead. It’s tough to erase from my memory the sight of that one girl’s face when she realized she’d have to speak lines with me, though. She had such anger, and moral outrage at even having to be near me.
In the dressing rooms for the plays in which I acted, some guys refused to change costumes in my presence. When I took art classes, students who thought they knew something about me would often during critiques claim that they could see bloodlust in the most serene of my still lives of bananas and a teapot, or a thirst for violence in an abstract. The roommate I had my junior and senior years, removed as he was from the arts, had heard the rumors about me, though he told me in the same breath that he’d dismissed them because I didn’t look the type. There were student servers in the cafeteria who refused to dish up food for me, and kids who’d change their paths to avoid having to pass me.
Whispers are soft, but they can carry so far. I won’t go so far as to say that the scarlet brand I seemed to bear on my forehead absolutely ruined my time in college, because I don’t like thinking of any of the years of my life as ruined beyond repair. I made some good friendships in college—and having them tested by this particular trial ensured that they were really good friendships, too. But throughout the rest of those three years, I felt very much on the periphery. I was falsely accused without ever being granted an opportunity to offer my own defense. It made me pretty miserable, much of the time.
What dismayed me most, in a lot of ways, is how easily people were swayed into believing I was a rapist. I was a tall, painfully skinny kid. I weighed between ninety-eight and a hundred and five pounds, in those days. The stick figure in a kid’s game of hangman weighed more than I. If I’d tried to rape a grown adult then, or a college-aged student, all they would’ve had to do was to blow hard to dislodge me. Plus, before the accusations started corroding everyone’s ears, I was a bright, funny, sunny kid. I was well-liked.
I had a very hard time understanding why anyone could believe those allegations against me. They should’ve been obviously ridiculous.
And yet, apparently they weren’t. People believed the whispers started by Edvig instead. Perhaps they were too juicy not to believe. Perhaps people didn’t think anyone would admit to anything as heinous as being raped, if it weren’t true. Perhaps it’s just that whoever plays the victim card first, and protests the loudest, wins.
Perhaps my problem is that I didn’t protest at all.
As I said, I didn’t have the skills to know what to do in this situation. I’m not sure I’d know what to do now, either. I think I’d do a lot more of it, though. And a lot sooner, before things got so out of hand. When I look back on the situation these days, I still have unresolved anger. I never got to say my piece. I never protested the accusations, never got to say The hell I did. I traveled under a cloud for the better part of three years while people I didn’t even know thought of me as something I wasn’t.
And Edvig. What a fucked-up kid he had to have been, then. I imagine the internal wars he must have had between his impulses and his religion, and think about how far pushed to the edge he must have been to come up with a lie that large, that damaging. Either he was so sheltered and naive that he had no idea how badly a little lie could fuck up someone’s life, or else he was callous and self-protective enough that he didn’t give a damn. Either way, these days, the rush of emotion I feel for him is more sympathy and pity than rage.
So yes, there’s some anger lingering, but you know what? I mostly feel at peace about what happened my sophomore year.
I survived. I learned about endurance from those three years. I learned about how it’s possible to hold one’s head high and keep persevering, even when there doesn’t seem anything for which it’s worth holding out. I learned that it’s possible to make one’s way through any situation while pretending not to give a shit what anyone else thinks. Do that enough times, and eventually one no longer has to pretend. It becomes part of one’s very nature—and being able to recognize when it is and isn’t important to fret about how one appears to others is one of the best and most freeing lessons there is.
Whenever I hear someone use that phrase these days, it always makes me sit up and notice. Two sides to every story, they say.
But how many of us really listen to more than one?
And of course, sometimes there aren’t two sides to a story. Sometimes there’s what happened, and then there’s a damned lie.
Which is what I heard happening the night before Edvig moved out of our dorm room in the arts house, my sophomore year. Sleep was a pretty precious commodity, my first two years of college. As a freshman, I had the misfortune to be the one geeky kid on a floor of hardcore partiers. The only way I got to sleep at night was staying out studying until two in the morning, most nights, and then using earplugs when I returned to the dorm. Sophomore year wasn’t too much better. I had more friends in the dorm itself, but come on. It was a house for budding artists. They’d practically signed a contract to live their lives at peak drama for all of nineteen eighty-two and three. Not only were there the usual dorm noises keeping me awake past midnight and into the morning’s small hours—the laughter and card games and stereos played too loudly—but we had the impromptu cello performances, the theatrical declamations, the hey gang let’s put on a show in the showers! at three in the morning, the dramatic public breakups between girlfriend and boyfriend, and later in the year, the inevitable suicide attempt.
So there I was in bed, the night before Edvig was scheduled to move out forever, not really able to fall asleep all the way, but drifting between dozing and tossing restlessly. Two doors down, in my friend Scott’s room, a bunch of the arts house kids were having some kind of late-night rap session. I could recognize seven or eight distinct voices. I couldn’t always hear what they were saying, because some of them were softer than others. But I did hear Scott, very distinctly, crying out “He did what?” at one point, accompanied by cries of shock by several of the others there.
It was loud enough to rouse me fully. What really shocked me awake is that I heard Edvig’s moo-cow lowing responding to Scott’s question. He wasn’t speaking loudly or distinctly enough for me to hear from two rooms down, with the door to my room firmly closed. It was pretty clear, though, that he was the center of the conversation’s attention. “He actually did that?” Scott replied. He was a bass in the college chorus, and later had a starring role in the college’s production of Sweeney Todd. He projected well. “He actually did that?!”
I remember sitting bolt upright in bed. I knew they were talking about me. I knew that Edvig was in there spreading some kind of poison about me. But I had no clue of what to do. I must have considered putting on some clothing and walking down the hall to confront them all. I didn’t have the courage for it then, though. (I’m not sure I would now, either.) There was so much conversation going on that I couldn’t really distinguish anything from the babble of noise. At some point, I rose from my bed, crept over to the door, and opened it in the hope of hearing more clearly. I don’t know whether or not they heard me stealthily turn the knob and release the latch, but mere seconds after I cracked my own door, Scott’s door clicked shut.
What followed I recall as a miserable night. Whether or not I got any sleep, I don’t remember. I was taking computer science to fulfill a requirement that year, though, and it was a dull enough class on its own. Deprived of sleep, and fretting myself to death, made it even more of a slog. I managed somehow to make it through that and the rest of the morning, though. When I went back to the dorm, I didn’t get at all to enjoy the novelty of a newly half-empty room. All I did was wait for Scott to come back to the dorm. When he did, toward dinner, I pounced on him.
I told him that I heard Edvig talking the night before, and that I know he was talking about me. I demanded to know what he’d said I’d done. “I’m not going to tell you that,” Scott said, outraged that I’d even asked.
“But he was talking about me,” I protested. “I have a right to know.”
“No, you don’t,” said Scott. I noticed he didn’t deny the topic, though.
“I know he said something awful about me,” I emphasized. “I could tell by the way you reacted. I think I deserve to know what kinds of lies he was telling.”
“Well,” said Scott, turning away. “There are two sides to every story.”
Meaning: he had no intention of asking me about mine. He’d heard someone spin a tale, and it was enough for him. He didn’t care to hear a rebuttal. And this is what I don’t like about that phrase, when it’s usually applied as a non-negotiable aphorism: sometimes it tell s me the speaker doesn’t believe in truth. He only sees points of view, all equally valid. The phrase doesn’t allow for lies, for fabrication, for the self-delusions in which some wrap themselves like thick blankets. There’s just this view, and that view, and the truth is lost somewhere between.
I couldn’t wrangle out of anyone whose voice I’d heard that night what Edvig had told them. They all refused to tell me. I just knew that someone had said something that I couldn’t refute, because no one would tell me what the fuck it was. If such a thing happened to me now, I would’ve confronted Edvig. Or I might’ve gone to the hippie-dippy RAs. But I wasn’t then the person I am now. I was too wrapped up in fear to do anything other than pretend nothing was happening around me.
It was impossible not to notice that people had changed their attitudes toward me. Not my handful of close personal friends outside the dorm. They were the same, though I didn’t share my worries with them. But everyone on my hall clammed up when I’d walk into a room. There were awkward times when I’d be pretending everything was the same and attempt to invite people to dinner or to a campus activity, only to be met with a polite, but cold rebuff. The RAs posted vague notices on the bulletin board about being available for personal conversations, shortly after, which in a paranoid manner I took as referring to conversations about me.
I managed to stagger on for three weeks in this manner, keeping my head up and a smile plastered on my face while inwardly I felt miserable and scared and alone. Then late one night, one of the guys in the dorm knocked on my door and asked to talk. I didn’t know him well. He played clarinet in the college band, though, and had always been pleasant enough. He told me that someone would be arriving within the next week to take Edvig’s place, and that he wondered if I’d mind having him as a roommate instead of the new guy. The clarinet player wasn’t getting along with his roommate (who was a dick, I had to agree), and he viewed the vacancy in my room as a way of escaping a bad situation. I accepted; I’d rather have him than some stranger.
“Oh,” he said, before he left. “I have to ask. I hope you understand. Did you really rape Edvig?”
I felt a flush of rage that was quickly followed by the iciest sensation I’ve ever had in my life. I remember choking out something to the effect that no, I did not rape Edvig, and why would he even ask that question?
“Because that’s the reason he told people he had for moving out,” said the clarinet player. “Okay, bye!” And then with his curiosity sated, he was up and out of there to begin packing.
I have to give that guy credit. Because in all four years of college, out of all the people who heard that rumor, he was only person ever to ask me if it were true. He was the only person ever to ask me about it at all.
If Edvig had actually formally accused me of rape—if he’d been serious, or thought in his demented head that I’d actually raped him—my life in college would’ve been much different. He would have been required to report it to the campus police. There would’ve been an examination, a police report. There would have been evidence presented at a trial, or at least an honor court hearing. He would have had to present concrete evidence against me—and since there couldn’t have been evidence, I would’ve been vindicated.
What he did instead, though, was to plant insidious seeds of doubt in people’s minds. He made the rape unspeakable, save only in whispers. Those whispers spread like wildfire, throughout my college career. Everyone in the arts house knew them. They dogged me through all my theater classes. I knew girls in that department who would wrinkle their lips in disgust when they were forced to acknowledge me; there was one who was so vocal about her detestation about having to remain in the presence of a rapist that she refused to play in a group scene with me in an acting class. She and the teacher exchanged words about it in the hallway, and then the professor returned to the class and, without much comment, removed me from her group.
That really hurt. I wasn’t bold enough to confront the professor after class and ask why I’d been singled out that way, either. I merely joined another group, acted as if I didn’t care, and worked with them instead. It’s tough to erase from my memory the sight of that one girl’s face when she realized she’d have to speak lines with me, though. She had such anger, and moral outrage at even having to be near me.
In the dressing rooms for the plays in which I acted, some guys refused to change costumes in my presence. When I took art classes, students who thought they knew something about me would often during critiques claim that they could see bloodlust in the most serene of my still lives of bananas and a teapot, or a thirst for violence in an abstract. The roommate I had my junior and senior years, removed as he was from the arts, had heard the rumors about me, though he told me in the same breath that he’d dismissed them because I didn’t look the type. There were student servers in the cafeteria who refused to dish up food for me, and kids who’d change their paths to avoid having to pass me.
Whispers are soft, but they can carry so far. I won’t go so far as to say that the scarlet brand I seemed to bear on my forehead absolutely ruined my time in college, because I don’t like thinking of any of the years of my life as ruined beyond repair. I made some good friendships in college—and having them tested by this particular trial ensured that they were really good friendships, too. But throughout the rest of those three years, I felt very much on the periphery. I was falsely accused without ever being granted an opportunity to offer my own defense. It made me pretty miserable, much of the time.
What dismayed me most, in a lot of ways, is how easily people were swayed into believing I was a rapist. I was a tall, painfully skinny kid. I weighed between ninety-eight and a hundred and five pounds, in those days. The stick figure in a kid’s game of hangman weighed more than I. If I’d tried to rape a grown adult then, or a college-aged student, all they would’ve had to do was to blow hard to dislodge me. Plus, before the accusations started corroding everyone’s ears, I was a bright, funny, sunny kid. I was well-liked.
I had a very hard time understanding why anyone could believe those allegations against me. They should’ve been obviously ridiculous.
And yet, apparently they weren’t. People believed the whispers started by Edvig instead. Perhaps they were too juicy not to believe. Perhaps people didn’t think anyone would admit to anything as heinous as being raped, if it weren’t true. Perhaps it’s just that whoever plays the victim card first, and protests the loudest, wins.
Perhaps my problem is that I didn’t protest at all.
As I said, I didn’t have the skills to know what to do in this situation. I’m not sure I’d know what to do now, either. I think I’d do a lot more of it, though. And a lot sooner, before things got so out of hand. When I look back on the situation these days, I still have unresolved anger. I never got to say my piece. I never protested the accusations, never got to say The hell I did. I traveled under a cloud for the better part of three years while people I didn’t even know thought of me as something I wasn’t.
And Edvig. What a fucked-up kid he had to have been, then. I imagine the internal wars he must have had between his impulses and his religion, and think about how far pushed to the edge he must have been to come up with a lie that large, that damaging. Either he was so sheltered and naive that he had no idea how badly a little lie could fuck up someone’s life, or else he was callous and self-protective enough that he didn’t give a damn. Either way, these days, the rush of emotion I feel for him is more sympathy and pity than rage.
So yes, there’s some anger lingering, but you know what? I mostly feel at peace about what happened my sophomore year.
I survived. I learned about endurance from those three years. I learned about how it’s possible to hold one’s head high and keep persevering, even when there doesn’t seem anything for which it’s worth holding out. I learned that it’s possible to make one’s way through any situation while pretending not to give a shit what anyone else thinks. Do that enough times, and eventually one no longer has to pretend. It becomes part of one’s very nature—and being able to recognize when it is and isn’t important to fret about how one appears to others is one of the best and most freeing lessons there is.
Whenever I hear someone use that phrase these days, it always makes me sit up and notice. Two sides to every story, they say.
But how many of us really listen to more than one?
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Sunday Morning Questions: Happy 2012 Edition
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Friday, January 6, 2012
Branded, Part 1
I wrote a series of posts a couple of years about being the object of sexual assault, in my early twenties. (They can all be found under the Department of Bad Encounters tag, from the last week of July, 2010.) It was not an easy bunch of entries to write.
What I haven’t written about, I don’t think, was the flip side of that situation, in which I went through three of my college years saddled with a reputation I didn’t deserve. Of the two incidents, this one’s even more uncomfortable for me to write about. At least in my assault, there was guidance afterward to help me deal with as best I could. Not the greatest guidance, to be sure, but at least I knew the steps to take: counseling, reading, mending.
With this earlier low-tide event of my life, I didn’t have a clue of how to deal with what happened. There weren’t any websites or books to navigate one through the aftermath of being branded as a rapist.
The college I attended in Virginia was small and rather compact, although it seemed to take distressingly long to run from my cozy freshman dorm near the college gates to the one class I always seemed to have at eight in the morning at the campus’ far end. Because there weren’t enough dorm rooms to go around, the administration didn’t guarantee housing to every undergraduate. All of us who wanted to live on campus had to queue up every year for the school’s housing lottery, which was a lot like the Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery” except that almost everyone in the sophomore class got pummeled with heavy masonry at the end.
The next year’s seniors drew the lowest, choicest lottery numbers first. They got to sign up for the best dorms on campus—the ones with air conditioning, or the choice spots near the campus’ center, or the new suite-like apartments that had been built the year before. Aspiring juniors got the second tier of numbers; they overflowed into the hot dorms with poor air circulation, the dorms in the middle of nowhere, or the dorms rumored to be overflowing with roaches. (I know, nice, right?)
Finally those poor sods straggling through the last month of their freshman year got to pick. A few of them got whatever spots at which the juniors had found wanting and turned up their noses, but most either had to find their own accommodations off-campus for the year, or else resign themselves to the trek to the overflow dorms a couple of miles away from the campus’ far edge. Accessing those required either owning a car, loving walking long distances, or scheduling half-hour bus trips up and down a busy tourist road.
These remote dorms were rumored to be absolute hellholes. They weren’t, as I found out my senior year when I moved into one of them. They were peaceful, quiet, and I had my own single, which I loved. But I didn’t know any better at that point, so at the end of my freshman year I began looking for an alternative.
The only sure-fire way to remove oneself from the lottery system altogether and to guarantee oneself campus housing during one’s sophomore year was either to join a fraternity or sorority, or to sign up for what they called ‘special interest housing.’ I hadn’t rushed and didn’t have any interest in doing so. The special interest houses were mostly for the more common foreign languages, and were intended to be immersive environments in which only French or Italian or whatever the language in question was supposed to be. I was half-considering the Spanish House, since I at that point still spoke passable Español if the listener were prepared to excuse me for addressing him exclusively in the present tense, and enjoyed a lot of questions about where the biblioteca might be.
Then I heard that the university, inspired I think by the movie Fame, had decided to start a house for the creative arts. That seemed more like a fit for me. For the life of me, I cannot think for what particular art I declared an expertise—I hadn’t started on my career path yet, or really discovered any talent in that area. I played piano, though, and I acted (badly) in plays and was thinking about declaring theater as my second major, and that was enough for the people putting the house together. My application was accepted, and I drew a great sigh of relief that I’d still be on campus the following year.
Right near the end of my freshman year, the forty kids who’d been accepted into the arts house answered a summons to attend an organizational meeting. We met our RAs for the next year, a married couple who were deemed ideal for the job because they made their own hippie-dippy candles. There was a lot of talk that evening about the first-year goals for the house, and plans for some kind of dorm-wide showcase of resident talents, but the real purpose for the evening was for us to pick our roommates for the following year. It was a simple process. The twenty boys needed to form into pairs for the ten rooms. Same for the twenty girls, they told us. Go.
Well. I didn’t know any of the other boys. I knew one by reputation—he was the biggest asshole in the theater department who’d gotten so much praise after he’d been cast as a new freshman as the lead in Hamlet that I knew for sure that if I got stuck with the fatuous bastard, I’d have to spend the entire semester listening to him declaim Hamlet into the mirror, shirtless, as he carefully examined his pretty face for blemishes. (As it turned out, if I’d thought to add ‘and would get rip-roaring drunk on Saturday nights, climb out the window and stand on the dorm room to yell King Lear to the moon,’ I would’ve been right on the money.) A lot of the other guys intimidated me in one way or another. They were either too handsome—which scared me at the time, as I didn’t want people thinking I was gay for a good-looking roommate—or too popular-looking. A good number of the people seemed to know each other already, and were drifting off into pairs.
I was convinced I’d be stuck with either the gross mouth-breathing guy with the worst case of acne I’d ever seen (or have seen since) or the fatuous actor, when my friend Laverna came over to make a suggestion. Laverna and I had gone through high school together. We hadn’t been close during those four years, but when we’d found ourselves the only freshmen from our high school class at the college, we’d gotten pretty close. She was pledging Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the national African-American sororities. One of the other guys in the room was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the sorority’s brother fraternity. She didn’t know him, but she assured me that most of the A-Phi-A’s were decent guys, and suggested I ask him to room with me.
So I did. Edvig was the only black guy in the room, and didn’t seem to be overwhelmed with interest from any of the eighteen other white guys trying to pair up. I’d been the only white boy in my high school, so the race thing didn’t mean squat to me; I approached him with Laverna at my side, explained the connection between me and my high school friend, and suggested we be roomies. He agreed. We signed a piece of paper, and I didn’t see him again until the day we moved in together.
It wasn’t the best way to get a roommate, I’m just telling you now. I frankly would’ve been better off with either the actor or the pimpled geek (who ended up rooming together).
Edvig turned out to be . . . weird. That’s what everyone said when they met him. My parents thought he was weird. Everyone on the hall thought he was weird. Even Laverna, after she had a couple of conversations with him, came away and said, “I know it’s my fault he’s your roommate, but he’s a little on the odd side.”
There’s a certain stress doll—I don’t know what it’s called—but it’s basically a oblong shape with rounded edges, tiny eyes, a button nose, and little dish ears on the sides of its head. When you squeeze it hard, the eyes suddenly pop out of the head, the nose distends, and the ears swell up from the pressure. If you were to take one of those toys, dip it in a bucket of coal black paint, and then give it a good squeeze, that’s exactly what Edvig looked like.
He wasn’t attractive. He was all head, and big bulging eyes, and long schnozz, and radar ears. He didn’t walk so much as glide. J. Alexander from Top Model based his mannerisms on Edvig, I’m pretty sure; Edvig was fond of the tilted head, the raised eyebrow, the girl I’m gonna read you up and down look of disdain, and every other cheap and easy indicator that we’d today recognize as the mannerisms that white gay boys stole from African-American women, who’d long before appropriated them from their same-color gay brothers.
And yet he wasn’t gay. That’s what he said, anyway. Edvig could be seen dressed in a suit of cheap and shiny material every Sunday, clutching his Bible and railing against all kinds of sin, including fornication and homosexuality. He belonged to every religious organization on campus except for the Catholic Students Union and Hillel. He walked out of a dorm screening of some French art film—Diva, maybe?—because it had a brief glimpse of boobies.
That was the Edvig everyone knew, anyway. The Edvig I had to deal with behind closed doors was quite different.
Despite his holy roller image, Edvig was indeed gay. He first came onto me the second week of our sophomore year, when I woke up in my really tiny twin cot and discovered him pushing his way into bed with me. I was half-asleep and thoroughly confused and didn’t really realize what the hell was going on until I felt his erection, already wet-tipped and rock hard, poking against my backside. When I leapt up and asked him what the hell he was doing, Edvig burst into tears and told me it was all right if we had man-on-man sex, because he was in love with me.
Well. Flattering as that might’ve been coming from anyone else, the thought of sex with Edvig really grossed me out. I’m fairly ecumenical in my tastes, but at the time, my instinctive reaction to the thought of that particular act made my mouth pucker with distaste as if someone had shoved into it a lemon soaked in bitters.
I was pretty firm about the fact that I didn’t want to sleep with Edvig. I told him that I just wasn’t that way, and it was fine if he was, but it wasn’t going anywhere with me. It was a sorry strategy, but I didn’t really know better. At the time, when all of us gay boys were closeted and didn’t have any encouragement to come out, the strategy of, “I’m really not attracted to you, but thanks,” or even “I don’t think it’s smart for roommates to hook up” weren’t really in my vocabulary.
What followed was a fairly long couple of months of harassment. Between class and piano practice and the theater department I wasn’t in my room much. Partly it was because I dreaded returning to my room after dark. Edvig would be there, waiting for me. Once I was in the room, he’d lie there naked on his bed, where he’d masturbate loudly. He coated his dick with Vaseline so that it made the maximum amount of noise as he glided his hand back and forth over it—and it was a pretty sizable piece of meat, I’ll grant him that. While I tried to read, or sleep, all I’d hear was the slow and sloppy sound of his jacking, punctuated by tiny moans and come-hither whimpers that were supposed to indicate sexual temptation, but which actually sounded more like a dog with a stomachache.
What really added to my distaste of the shameless proceedings—and yes, I know you’re thinking, Say what, there, toilet whore?—was that Edvig smelled bad. He wore a lot of cheap cologne, but it never quite covered the dirty-laundry hamper odor that all undergraduate boys seemed to have in that decade, and it certainly didn’t hide the stink of smegma. Edvig was uncut and I’m guessing didn’t clean his foreskin very well. Whenever he’d masturbate, the rich, earthy smell of his dick cheese would permeate the room. It made my stomach turn.
I didn’t really have a lot of coping strategies at the time. I was young. Homosexuality was a scary subject, then. I’d had a lot of gay sex, but I’d had zero experience in being open about my sexuality. I didn’t know how to cope with other gay guys, except to spread my legs for them. All the people I’d fucked around with in my youth had been sex-crazed adults—not fucked-up youth. The weirdness with Edvig was less sexual than social, despite the masturbation and the clumsy passes. He wanted me to be something for him that I wasn’t, and I didn’t know how to keep saying no. I didn’t want to confront him and demand he stop, in a direct manner. I had no experience in that kind of thing. I honestly didn’t know how.
So I’d ignore him. We didn’t talk. I’d lie there in bed and pretend to snore while secretly I was fuming at the sex noises and the smell. Or I’d try to come back to the dorm room at one or two in the morning in the hope that he’d be asleep—though he’d wake up and start trying to entice me over with his self-ministrations.
I thought I hit on a good approach one night when Edvig started with the Vaseline, when I flounced out of bed, flipped on the lights to full, pulled open the door so hard that it bounced against the wall, then called down the hall, “Hey, anyone want to go for pizza?” I got a vicious schadenfreude from listening to him scramble to put on some clothing before anyone happened to walk by and see him. It was this strategy that seemed to work best. Each time I did it, he’d stop with his freakish attempts at seduction for a few days.
After the third or fourth time, he broke our mutually-determined silence and declared to me that he’d requested a room transfer. Inwardly, I leapt up and down at the news. It was about fucking time I was going to have this freak out of my life. My heart jumped up in the air, kicked its heels, and did a Snoopy dance as he made the announcement, his big saucer eyes mournful.
I should’ve said something conciliatory, maybe, like I’m sorry to hear that. Or, I wish you luck. Instead, I smirked and asked, “So how soon are you going?” On learning it would within two days, I all but skipped out of the door and down the yellow brick road to tell my friends the Wicked Witch was dead.
I shouldn’t have been so gleeful. I’m not sure if it was the cause of what was to come, or even if it was really visible in anything but my memory, but I definitely shouldn’t have smirked.. Because what I didn’t know was exactly how Edvig would take his revenge on me before he left, and how very badly he would mess up the rest of my college years.
What I haven’t written about, I don’t think, was the flip side of that situation, in which I went through three of my college years saddled with a reputation I didn’t deserve. Of the two incidents, this one’s even more uncomfortable for me to write about. At least in my assault, there was guidance afterward to help me deal with as best I could. Not the greatest guidance, to be sure, but at least I knew the steps to take: counseling, reading, mending.
With this earlier low-tide event of my life, I didn’t have a clue of how to deal with what happened. There weren’t any websites or books to navigate one through the aftermath of being branded as a rapist.
The college I attended in Virginia was small and rather compact, although it seemed to take distressingly long to run from my cozy freshman dorm near the college gates to the one class I always seemed to have at eight in the morning at the campus’ far end. Because there weren’t enough dorm rooms to go around, the administration didn’t guarantee housing to every undergraduate. All of us who wanted to live on campus had to queue up every year for the school’s housing lottery, which was a lot like the Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery” except that almost everyone in the sophomore class got pummeled with heavy masonry at the end.
The next year’s seniors drew the lowest, choicest lottery numbers first. They got to sign up for the best dorms on campus—the ones with air conditioning, or the choice spots near the campus’ center, or the new suite-like apartments that had been built the year before. Aspiring juniors got the second tier of numbers; they overflowed into the hot dorms with poor air circulation, the dorms in the middle of nowhere, or the dorms rumored to be overflowing with roaches. (I know, nice, right?)
Finally those poor sods straggling through the last month of their freshman year got to pick. A few of them got whatever spots at which the juniors had found wanting and turned up their noses, but most either had to find their own accommodations off-campus for the year, or else resign themselves to the trek to the overflow dorms a couple of miles away from the campus’ far edge. Accessing those required either owning a car, loving walking long distances, or scheduling half-hour bus trips up and down a busy tourist road.
These remote dorms were rumored to be absolute hellholes. They weren’t, as I found out my senior year when I moved into one of them. They were peaceful, quiet, and I had my own single, which I loved. But I didn’t know any better at that point, so at the end of my freshman year I began looking for an alternative.
The only sure-fire way to remove oneself from the lottery system altogether and to guarantee oneself campus housing during one’s sophomore year was either to join a fraternity or sorority, or to sign up for what they called ‘special interest housing.’ I hadn’t rushed and didn’t have any interest in doing so. The special interest houses were mostly for the more common foreign languages, and were intended to be immersive environments in which only French or Italian or whatever the language in question was supposed to be. I was half-considering the Spanish House, since I at that point still spoke passable Español if the listener were prepared to excuse me for addressing him exclusively in the present tense, and enjoyed a lot of questions about where the biblioteca might be.
Then I heard that the university, inspired I think by the movie Fame, had decided to start a house for the creative arts. That seemed more like a fit for me. For the life of me, I cannot think for what particular art I declared an expertise—I hadn’t started on my career path yet, or really discovered any talent in that area. I played piano, though, and I acted (badly) in plays and was thinking about declaring theater as my second major, and that was enough for the people putting the house together. My application was accepted, and I drew a great sigh of relief that I’d still be on campus the following year.
Right near the end of my freshman year, the forty kids who’d been accepted into the arts house answered a summons to attend an organizational meeting. We met our RAs for the next year, a married couple who were deemed ideal for the job because they made their own hippie-dippy candles. There was a lot of talk that evening about the first-year goals for the house, and plans for some kind of dorm-wide showcase of resident talents, but the real purpose for the evening was for us to pick our roommates for the following year. It was a simple process. The twenty boys needed to form into pairs for the ten rooms. Same for the twenty girls, they told us. Go.
Well. I didn’t know any of the other boys. I knew one by reputation—he was the biggest asshole in the theater department who’d gotten so much praise after he’d been cast as a new freshman as the lead in Hamlet that I knew for sure that if I got stuck with the fatuous bastard, I’d have to spend the entire semester listening to him declaim Hamlet into the mirror, shirtless, as he carefully examined his pretty face for blemishes. (As it turned out, if I’d thought to add ‘and would get rip-roaring drunk on Saturday nights, climb out the window and stand on the dorm room to yell King Lear to the moon,’ I would’ve been right on the money.) A lot of the other guys intimidated me in one way or another. They were either too handsome—which scared me at the time, as I didn’t want people thinking I was gay for a good-looking roommate—or too popular-looking. A good number of the people seemed to know each other already, and were drifting off into pairs.
I was convinced I’d be stuck with either the gross mouth-breathing guy with the worst case of acne I’d ever seen (or have seen since) or the fatuous actor, when my friend Laverna came over to make a suggestion. Laverna and I had gone through high school together. We hadn’t been close during those four years, but when we’d found ourselves the only freshmen from our high school class at the college, we’d gotten pretty close. She was pledging Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of the national African-American sororities. One of the other guys in the room was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the sorority’s brother fraternity. She didn’t know him, but she assured me that most of the A-Phi-A’s were decent guys, and suggested I ask him to room with me.
So I did. Edvig was the only black guy in the room, and didn’t seem to be overwhelmed with interest from any of the eighteen other white guys trying to pair up. I’d been the only white boy in my high school, so the race thing didn’t mean squat to me; I approached him with Laverna at my side, explained the connection between me and my high school friend, and suggested we be roomies. He agreed. We signed a piece of paper, and I didn’t see him again until the day we moved in together.
It wasn’t the best way to get a roommate, I’m just telling you now. I frankly would’ve been better off with either the actor or the pimpled geek (who ended up rooming together).
Edvig turned out to be . . . weird. That’s what everyone said when they met him. My parents thought he was weird. Everyone on the hall thought he was weird. Even Laverna, after she had a couple of conversations with him, came away and said, “I know it’s my fault he’s your roommate, but he’s a little on the odd side.”
There’s a certain stress doll—I don’t know what it’s called—but it’s basically a oblong shape with rounded edges, tiny eyes, a button nose, and little dish ears on the sides of its head. When you squeeze it hard, the eyes suddenly pop out of the head, the nose distends, and the ears swell up from the pressure. If you were to take one of those toys, dip it in a bucket of coal black paint, and then give it a good squeeze, that’s exactly what Edvig looked like.
He wasn’t attractive. He was all head, and big bulging eyes, and long schnozz, and radar ears. He didn’t walk so much as glide. J. Alexander from Top Model based his mannerisms on Edvig, I’m pretty sure; Edvig was fond of the tilted head, the raised eyebrow, the girl I’m gonna read you up and down look of disdain, and every other cheap and easy indicator that we’d today recognize as the mannerisms that white gay boys stole from African-American women, who’d long before appropriated them from their same-color gay brothers.
And yet he wasn’t gay. That’s what he said, anyway. Edvig could be seen dressed in a suit of cheap and shiny material every Sunday, clutching his Bible and railing against all kinds of sin, including fornication and homosexuality. He belonged to every religious organization on campus except for the Catholic Students Union and Hillel. He walked out of a dorm screening of some French art film—Diva, maybe?—because it had a brief glimpse of boobies.
That was the Edvig everyone knew, anyway. The Edvig I had to deal with behind closed doors was quite different.
Despite his holy roller image, Edvig was indeed gay. He first came onto me the second week of our sophomore year, when I woke up in my really tiny twin cot and discovered him pushing his way into bed with me. I was half-asleep and thoroughly confused and didn’t really realize what the hell was going on until I felt his erection, already wet-tipped and rock hard, poking against my backside. When I leapt up and asked him what the hell he was doing, Edvig burst into tears and told me it was all right if we had man-on-man sex, because he was in love with me.
Well. Flattering as that might’ve been coming from anyone else, the thought of sex with Edvig really grossed me out. I’m fairly ecumenical in my tastes, but at the time, my instinctive reaction to the thought of that particular act made my mouth pucker with distaste as if someone had shoved into it a lemon soaked in bitters.
I was pretty firm about the fact that I didn’t want to sleep with Edvig. I told him that I just wasn’t that way, and it was fine if he was, but it wasn’t going anywhere with me. It was a sorry strategy, but I didn’t really know better. At the time, when all of us gay boys were closeted and didn’t have any encouragement to come out, the strategy of, “I’m really not attracted to you, but thanks,” or even “I don’t think it’s smart for roommates to hook up” weren’t really in my vocabulary.
What followed was a fairly long couple of months of harassment. Between class and piano practice and the theater department I wasn’t in my room much. Partly it was because I dreaded returning to my room after dark. Edvig would be there, waiting for me. Once I was in the room, he’d lie there naked on his bed, where he’d masturbate loudly. He coated his dick with Vaseline so that it made the maximum amount of noise as he glided his hand back and forth over it—and it was a pretty sizable piece of meat, I’ll grant him that. While I tried to read, or sleep, all I’d hear was the slow and sloppy sound of his jacking, punctuated by tiny moans and come-hither whimpers that were supposed to indicate sexual temptation, but which actually sounded more like a dog with a stomachache.
What really added to my distaste of the shameless proceedings—and yes, I know you’re thinking, Say what, there, toilet whore?—was that Edvig smelled bad. He wore a lot of cheap cologne, but it never quite covered the dirty-laundry hamper odor that all undergraduate boys seemed to have in that decade, and it certainly didn’t hide the stink of smegma. Edvig was uncut and I’m guessing didn’t clean his foreskin very well. Whenever he’d masturbate, the rich, earthy smell of his dick cheese would permeate the room. It made my stomach turn.
I didn’t really have a lot of coping strategies at the time. I was young. Homosexuality was a scary subject, then. I’d had a lot of gay sex, but I’d had zero experience in being open about my sexuality. I didn’t know how to cope with other gay guys, except to spread my legs for them. All the people I’d fucked around with in my youth had been sex-crazed adults—not fucked-up youth. The weirdness with Edvig was less sexual than social, despite the masturbation and the clumsy passes. He wanted me to be something for him that I wasn’t, and I didn’t know how to keep saying no. I didn’t want to confront him and demand he stop, in a direct manner. I had no experience in that kind of thing. I honestly didn’t know how.
So I’d ignore him. We didn’t talk. I’d lie there in bed and pretend to snore while secretly I was fuming at the sex noises and the smell. Or I’d try to come back to the dorm room at one or two in the morning in the hope that he’d be asleep—though he’d wake up and start trying to entice me over with his self-ministrations.
I thought I hit on a good approach one night when Edvig started with the Vaseline, when I flounced out of bed, flipped on the lights to full, pulled open the door so hard that it bounced against the wall, then called down the hall, “Hey, anyone want to go for pizza?” I got a vicious schadenfreude from listening to him scramble to put on some clothing before anyone happened to walk by and see him. It was this strategy that seemed to work best. Each time I did it, he’d stop with his freakish attempts at seduction for a few days.
After the third or fourth time, he broke our mutually-determined silence and declared to me that he’d requested a room transfer. Inwardly, I leapt up and down at the news. It was about fucking time I was going to have this freak out of my life. My heart jumped up in the air, kicked its heels, and did a Snoopy dance as he made the announcement, his big saucer eyes mournful.
I should’ve said something conciliatory, maybe, like I’m sorry to hear that. Or, I wish you luck. Instead, I smirked and asked, “So how soon are you going?” On learning it would within two days, I all but skipped out of the door and down the yellow brick road to tell my friends the Wicked Witch was dead.
I shouldn’t have been so gleeful. I’m not sure if it was the cause of what was to come, or even if it was really visible in anything but my memory, but I definitely shouldn’t have smirked.. Because what I didn’t know was exactly how Edvig would take his revenge on me before he left, and how very badly he would mess up the rest of my college years.
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