13 Reasons Why/Tape 6: Nick

“This is the most ridiculous thing ever,” I tell Nick as he pads in from the kitchen. He’s got an bowl in his hands. It’s set on a plate. A single spoon rests on the rim.

“But you’ve been busy.” His tone is teasing. He sits down on the side of his bed, and leans over. I’m naked, beneath the covers, and surrounded by the several pillows he’s fluffed to prop me up. “You need to save your hands for better things. Like . . . fucking me again. Now, open wide.”

Nick dips his spoon into the bowl and produces an Italian meatball, microwaved and covered with brown gravy. I’m still protesting, but more and more weakly. “I’m not a baby bird.”

“Open wide,” he whispers, and brings the spoon in for a landing. My last defenses break down, and I part my mouth. The spoon penetrates between my lips; he tips the utensil to deliver the piping-hot meatball onto my tongue. “Now chew,” he says, staring me in the eyes. I obey. “Good boy.”

A shiver passes over my body. It’s an intimate, surprisingly erotic moment. No one else has ever fed me meatballs in bed, before.

Have you ever had an encounter with someone who initially comes off as a fucking lunatic, but turns out to be surprisingly sweet in person . . . and then morphs into a lunatic again? That would be my history with Nick, the Greek escort. Welcome, Nick, to your tape.

Nick came more or less out of nowhere (and ultimately disappeared just as quickly) to give me one of the sweetest, and most baffling, encounters of last year. I was at home one evening folding laundry when I checked BBRT, which I’d had running in the background, to see if anyone was looking for sex. It’s rare that anyone is, in my sleepy suburb. I had one message from a guy from New Haven with a profile name of GiorgioSaint. I checked his profile first, something I always do unless I know the guy. No photos. Nothing in the description. No stats. Every field said ‘ask me,’ which is the hallmark of someone who either has just created the profile, or worse, never bothered to fill it out.

Hi, I’m Giorgio. Send me your email, said the guy’s message.

Ordinarily I would’ve just ignored the request. That evening, though, I must’ve felt cranky and contentious. (Hey, it happens.) Why in the world would I send you my email? I don’t know you, and your profile tells me nothing.

Send me your email. I’m out of messages and I want to tell you something.

Somehow I was pretty sure that the something this anonymous guy wanted to tell me was that if I logged into www.camtacularboyz.com I could chat with him for the low rate of twenty dollars for ten minutes, or that he had a surefire way to battle erectile dysfunction. Apparently I was mystified as well as cranky and contentious, though, because after a moment’s hesitation, I gave him my address. Then I prepared for the spam that was to follow.

About five minutes later I got the guy’s email.

Hey Mr. Steed! I am going to be upfront with you right from the start. I am NOT Giorgio Saint. I had to come up with an alias if I was to come onto the site in peace! I did NOT want to bother with blocking people or attitudes. Who I really am is Nick Basil Pappas. If you do a "Search" and put in my name, there you will find me. Those are my pics and they are current. I recognize you from your blog and I liked your writing and your attitude.

(And no, that wasn’t the name he actually gave me.)

I mentioned in last week’s entry in this series that I don’t use search engines to research my tricks. I don’t peep at their Facebook accounts, if I know their last names. I don’t hunt for them on (as my dad calls it), The Tweeter. In my opinion, it’s rude. It’s invasive. Just because one can do it, doesn’t mean one should.

Sure, I’ll occasionally look up old college classmates on social media when I’m feeling nostalgic, or if I want to see how much older than myself they look. But potential tricks or guys I’m fucking? Nope, not unless they invite me to. It’s such an solid plank in my sexual belief system that hopping online to research a person doesn’t even occur to me, and I usually become exasperated when I find someone’s done it to me.

When invited, though, particularly in these trying circumstances, I’ll bite. I copied the guy’s name and pasted it into my browser bar, and a moment later I had a pageful of results. Problem was, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. After a moment, I typed out another email. So you're telling me you're a bipolar unarmed man from San Diego who attempted to rob and assault a senior citizen in her home and was shot by police and taken into custody? Because that's what's at the top of the list when I search for Nick Basil Pappas.

What? No.

He repeated that he wanted me to Google the name, and I reiterated that I’d done exactly that . . . and come up with Nick B. Pappas’ rap sheet and a bunch of incredibly unflattering mug shots for photos. By now I was laughing at this idiot, and continuing the conversation merely because it amused me. The fact that he seemed totally unaware that a West Coast bipolar granny robber had hijacked the top spot in Google searches of his name seemed the cherry on the sundae.

At last Nick sent me an actual web page to check out, which I did. The link took me to a site where interested customers could solicit local male escorts. Suddenly, the conversation lost its fun.

Hey thanks, I told him, trying to stay polite for what was going to be my final email. I appreciate it, but I don’t pay for sex. Before I hit send, I spent a moment looking at the escort's photos. This Nick guy was handsome—handsome as hell, in fact, with his dark Mediterranean movie star looks and deep, soulful eyes. His eyebrows were dark, dense, and brooding. And the body. Shit. That body. Even though he was obviously in his forties or early fifties, Nick looked like he belonged on the cover of Men’s Health.

His photos were so professionally done that I suspected they’d been promo shots for porn films. When I did a more refined search for Nick Pappas gay porn (hey . . . he’d invited me to do it) I indeed found a slew of video clips from porn studios of Nick performing with stars I’d actually heard of.

Still. Paying for sex isn’t something I do. I closed the browser and sent off my reply.

But no, no, no. That’s not what the East Coast Nick Basil Pappas was asking for. He assured me in a series of emails accompanied by even more photos from his porn career that he wasn’t trying to solicit my business, but my expertise. (The choice of word was his.) He’d read my blog for several months. He wanted me.

He had very strict rules about what his clients could do with him. They could suck his dick. They could bend over and he would fuck them. He would give them massages, but he would not kiss them. He'd never be submissive, and encounters with his clients would never be at all romantic.

The photos he’d offered, I should mention, had me licking my chops. Nick was a bodybuilder, and the porn films he’d done unanimously played to his strengths. He sent shots from a film he’d done were he was the big buff prize straight guy at the gym all the queers were trying to attract. He’d played an Olympic athlete who’d fucked all the other athletes in the village. He’s played another type of Olympian entirely when he’d been draped in laurels and a sheet and some gold sandals for the part of Horny Zeus. There was a shot of him wearing nothing but a yellow hard hat and a skimpy tool belt, for a production where he’d been a horny dumb construction worker tricked into topping a man's hole for the first time by the boss’ smart-assed son. The guy was the kind of beefcake that are the bread and butter of porn, and I confess, I was a little surprised he was soliciting me in such an eccentric way.

Yet Nick said he wanted to meet because he intuited from my blog that I would take good care of him. He found me attractive. He liked my dick. In fact, he wanted to suck it. He wanted it to fuck him bareback, and to breed him. He wanted to be kissed. He wanted someone to take control and make love to him, because he hadn’t experienced any tenderness in his life for a long time. Because he trusted me, and because he liked me from my blog, he’d decided I was the man he wanted to do all these things.

After such an oddball start, I was touched by his rapid-fire confessions. And flattered, of course. If anything is illuminated by this particular series, it’s that I am too much of a sucker for a man who compliments both my dick and my writing, even though I know, I know that losing all perspective for a pretty compliment never turns out well.

Yes, I told him. I’ll be that man.

So I’ve driven a long way to see Nick. Over an hour and a half, it turns out, because the town where Nick lives has the same relationship to New Haven that Flint, Michigan has to Detroit—they’re sometimes referred to in the same sentence, but they’re not very close at all. When I arrive at his apartment building, I knock on his door. It opens. He’s standing on the other side, completely naked. Exposed. He seems, to my expert eyes, a little vulnerable. “You came,” he says.

“Of course I did.” I step through and into the gloom of his apartment. He’s got blackout shades drawn over every window, so it’s difficult to see. Not that there’s much decor to look at. Nick’s apartment has the spartan quality of a home that’s barely been moved into, much less lived in. Nothing hangs on the walls; the surfaces clear of clutter. Even the furniture speaks of a bare minimum. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

He laughs. “I’m nervous,” he says. Even in the dark I can tell how very handsome he is. He’s exactly what his photos advertise—the porn pics, that is. Not the mugshots of the granny robber. Five foot five inches of sheer bulk. What’s funny is that this object of fantasy for so many men—the brawny lumberjack, the construction worker, the alpha musclebound literal god of all, in one film at least—is nervous of me. Of me.

“Oh, Nick,” I say, shaking my head. I step forward and place my hands on his narrow hips. Then I pull him close.

He falls into the embrace eagerly, resting his head on my chest. I feel the warmth of him radiating through the layers of my cotton clothing. Below my crotch, I can feel the heavy bulk of his soft cock as it swells with blood and begins to harden against me. “You’re what I want.” He utters the confession softly, as if afraid of breaking the solemn hush. “Can I belong to you tonight?”

For answer, I cup my hands beneath his chin and steer his lips to mine. He responds with a kiss . . . of sorts, anyway. It’s a peck on my lips, really. Is he being timid. I move in more aggressively for something deeper and more intimate. He responds by tightening his lips and pushing out his tongue so that it protrudes about a quarter of an inch, like the tip of a tiny pyramid.

And that’s just how he kisses, does Nick the Greek. About as lewdly as someone’s Victorian maiden aunt.

But that’s all right. He’s got other skills. After he leads me into the bedroom, he stands me by the high king-sized bed and kneels on the ground. His lips open to surround my hardened flesh; I feel the warmth and wetness of his tongue and mouth as he takes my inches to the balls. He groans contentedly to himself as, slowly, deliberately, he travels from tip to base to tip again, where lets the slick flesh rest against his nose and upper lip. It’s as good of a blow job I’ve had in some time, and I make sure to let him know it.

He’s anxious to proceed, though. “I so badly need to be fucked by you,” he says in a low and lyrical voice. “Am I fuckable?”

“Oh, Nick,” I laugh. “You are so very fuckable.”

“I really just want to be worthy of you,” he says, looking directly into my eyes. Maybe he uses these sugared words on his clients, I think to myself. Maybe not. But I’m not a paying customer, and when he’s looking at me in that liquid, trusting way, I have no reason to doubt anything he says. I let the good moment remain a good moment, free of doubt.

“Let me show you how worthy you are.” I say the words as I lie him face down on the bed, with a pillow propping up his hips. Then I start lapping his hole.

For long minutes he’s wordless as I lick and chew at him. He grunts. He moans. He raises his hips to give me deeper access. But he doesn’t speak until ten, fifteen, twenty minutes have passed. “Nobody ever gives me this pleasure.”

“Do you let them?” I wonder aloud.

He chuckles. “No. You know I’m selective about who gets to enter me.” Right then, right there, Nick makes a decision. “Fuck my hole.” Onto his back he flips, using the same pillow that’s nestled in his crotch to lift the small of his back.

“Are you ready for that?” I already know the answer. I just want to hear him say it.

“I’m ready.”

I kneel between his uplifted legs. Spit in my hand, rub it on my meat. Repeat with another handful of spit, for his ass. I position my cock at his hole. The head nudges his warm, pulsing flesh. Our eyes lock. He nods.

In I go.

It’s a sweet fuck. Every thrust yields new revelations, from the tightening of his nipples to the red blush that spreads across his chest and face, to the way his eyes bulge with pleasure. His hole opens wide for me. His cock, fully rigid for the first time since we’ve met in the flesh, swells into a fat nine inches. And when we kiss, his mouth opens slight. He still doesn’t admit my tongue, but it’s a start.

I fuck him for a full half hour in that same position, taking it slow, letting him enjoy long thrusts the entire length of my dick. His whimpers turn to utterances of satisfaction, then to pleas. “You want my cum?” I ask.

“Yes. God, yes. I want to belong to you. Make me yours.”

I let him have it. It’s an shuddering orgasm, intense enough to make my vision dim. My body is still shaking and jerking when he begins pounding furiously at his own dick. “Don’t pull out,” he begs. “Stay inside. Stay inside. Stay. . . .”

His own climax is even noisier and more violent than mine. He thrashes like a bucking bronco, sending me sprawling to the side. Juice oozes from his hole and onto the top sheet as his own semen jets into the air into a perfect arc. It splatters on his face. Pretty good for a dude his age, I’m thinking to myself.

I lie next to him, and wait for him to come to. He smiles at me, and laughs, aware he’s caused a commotion. “I made you miss dinner,” he says. It's probably the most unexpected thing he could say, in the moment.

“I’m fine.” I really am. Whipped, but fine.

“No, no, you need to eat.” It’s not usually what I hear from my fucks, but he nestles me beneath the sheets and a comforter, props pillows around me, and ambles off in the direction of his kitchen to see what he can whip up.

It seems fitting, in this barely-furnished abode, that a box of frozen meatballs and some canned gravy is all he can produce. But as he feeds me, ball by microwaved ball, I find myself enchanted by the sweet unlikeliness of this encounter. Nick’s not a kisser—that’s for sure. But there’s a honest, endearing quality to Nick’s naked need for affection and love that makes my heart reach out to him.

When we parted that night, several hours and loads later, Nick said to me, “I’d like you to come back.”

I confess to having felt a glow at the words. I hadn’t been sure if this was a one-time physical connection, or whether he wanted it to lead to a regular round of good sex. “I’d like that too.”

“Will I be reading about this in your blog?” He still held my hand as he asked the question.

“You tell me,” I said. “Do you want me to write about it?”

He seemed to think over the question, but only for a mere split second. “Yes. Write what you want. I’ll look forward to reading it.”

Fair enough. I let him give me another couple of his ladylike pecks on the lips, and then we parted.

Sweet, right? I drove back home feeling like I'd hit the jackpot.

But then.

You know there has to be a but then, right? It usually takes a lot for me to lose my temper with a guy. It’d be pretty unlikely I’d be stomping around writing a burn list post and growling, That guy totally pissed me off by giving me sweet good sex and feeding me meatballs in bed! God DAMN him!

No, the initial encounter with Nick over the internet had been awkward as hell. In person, he was attractive, and kind, and loving in bed. It really was a highlight to make love to a guy who’s been the object of so much lust, whether through porn vids or escort ads. You’d think that after we met, everything would have been smooth sailing.

You’d be wrong, because the minute we weren’t face-to-face any longer, all our communications went straight to hell.

When are you writing about me? he started asking, basically the minute I got home. What are you going to say? I told him I didn’t know when I’d be writing about him, and that it probably would be after I’d let the encounter gestate a little bit. Don’t use my real name, please, he begged.

The inquiries continued daily, several times a day, for the better part of a week. Are you writing about me yet? When will it come out? Will it be tomorrow?

Listen, I eventually told him, over the course of several texts. I intend to write about you. I really do. We had a great time, and I was hoping it would be the first of many great times. I’d like to celebrate the night that we had. But when you’re so overeager to see your entry (this was my attempt at tact, by the way, and trying not to say ‘When you bug the shit out of me about your entry. . .”), it makes me anxious, and the anxiety prevents me from sitting down and writing it. If you give me a little space, and time, you’ll see it.

Oh. Space and time. You don’t want to see me again.

That’s not what I’d been telling him, I tried to make clear. All I really wanted was a little freedom from the constant inquiries into when he’d see the entry about himself.

I thought we’d reached an understanding. I mean, when someone says, Okay, I understand, you’re justified in thinking you’ve reached an understanding, right? A couple of blissfully text-free days later, though, he sent me: Is your post up yet? I’ve been waiting a week to see it.

I didn’t lose my temper. Honestly, I didn’t. I did reply, carefully choosing my words, that I thought I’d made it clear that the pressure he was putting on me to sit down at my laptop and pound out an essay about pounding him out, wasn’t exactly conducive to my creative process.

This is bullshit, he wrote back.

Well, what’s there to say to that? I said nothing, in fact. I thought I was being generous in overlooking it.

Two hours later, though: So I guess you’re not talking to me now. I thought we had a good night together. I guess I was fooling myself.

I’m not usually a fan of passive-aggressive behavior like this. It turns me off so much that usually I won’t acknowledge it, much less fall into its intended manipulation and re-enter a conversation on the defense. You and I had an incredible night together, I assured him. I’d really like to see you again. Maybe we can talk all this out the next time we meet? I think it’s easier that way than in text.

I realize that not everybody is a great communicator in writing. I disagree with the trope that emails and text automatically lack the nuance that in-person conversations can have; after all, over the years the great writers of the world have packed plenty of nuance into their sentences, paragraphs, and books. Not everybody’s adept at it, though, and I was beginning to realize that if I wanted a real conversation with Nick, without confusion, face-to-face was going to be the way to do it.

He didn’t reply, though. I wasn’t going to nag him.

Then, another two days later. I guess I wasn’t good enough to make your blog. Sorry I couldn’t make the cut.

Dude. Something was wrong, here. I sighed, and tried turning my mind to other things. I’m not suggesting that musclebound porn actors/escorts with the faces of movie stars can’t have insecurities. Everyone has insecurities. What I did know, however, was that however this man felt about himself, whatever self-perceived void he was trying to fill through me, neither I nor a blog post was going to make him complete. I might have a few sexual and writing skills, but I can’t heal all of that. I didn't deserve his hostility, either.

Nick made me sad. I'm sad right now, thinking and writing about him. I probably could have sat down and forced out a sketch of our night together—but it wouldn’t have felt right, nor would it have been enough for him. As I write this essay, enough time has passed that I can remember our time in the flesh with unalloyed fondness, separate from the annoyance he was immediately after. But that week when he was nagging me four, five, six, ten times a day to hurry up and write the post? All it really was doing was making me peevish.

I was still processing the last message from him when my phone vibrated again. Don’t bother texting me or trying to contact me any more. Goodbye.

Guys. Don’t go throwing around ultimatums you don’t intend to stick to. I’ve had this exact situation happen enough in my life to know that when someone tells me never to text or call again, the guy isn’t going to be happy when I actually follow his admonitions. Still, I hoped Nick would come around. I thought I’d give him some time to simmer down.

A day after his command not to text him, though, he texted a last time. I can’t believe you haven’t tried to apologize. This is fucking ridiculous.

And that, friends, was the point I’d had enough. Even the sweetest evening can’t counterbalance weeks of haranguing. Maybe our communication might have been better if we’d talked it out over coffee (or sex). But Nick wasn’t even giving me incentive to write a short essay about him, much less drive another hour and a half to iron out our differences.

So I file this one under Regrets, my friends. The incident makes me sad for what could have matured into something beautiful, but died stillborn.

Nick, if you’re reading this post—which I doubt, but who knows?—the entry you thought you deserved would’ve ended right before my But then. It would’ve been an entry worth a boner and a smile. It would’ve been romantic, even. Readers would have envied us both.

Here’s what I wish, though: I wish you’d loved the reality of what happened that night, and let that reality be. I wish you’d not let doubt or worry force you into pressuring me; I wish you hadn't needed constant reassurance of my sincerity. My blog doesn’t take faulty encounters and make them golden. It’s not my job to take a snapshot of an evening and then to soften the edges, erase the wrinkles, and make everything picture-perfect. If our evening of lovemaking and meatballs felt real to you, then it was real. If it felt good in the moment, it was good.

The next time you encounter someone who provides exactly what you want and need, love him for what he is and what he gives you. Don’t insist on dragging him into the crap, afterward.

Let good things be good. That’s a lesson we all can learn.



Afterword

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

Many people who’ve written, however, have made the assumption that the reason I have decided to take a break is because of the so-called haters—that is, the men who leave nasty comments on my blog, and those who go out of their way to make sure I understand how contemptible I am to them.

I’ve had plenty of haters over the years. They wear me down, yes. But more than anyone, the men who have sucked the joy out of my writing (and to a certain extent, my life) are those who meant well. They’re men who claimed to admire me, who wanted to meet me—and many of them did—and who then, whether out of clumsiness or fear or whatever, failed to recognize they’d gone too far. A man can only withstand so many successive blows to the ego (even an ego as Jericho-sturdy as mine) before it begins to tumble.

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

Maybe one of these men is you.

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

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

All of us could stand to do better.