Detroit, 1998
The so-called screen of the bathhouse movie room is nothing more than a sheet of white canvas hanging from ceiling hooks. Three colored lenses from the projector in back pierce the darkness to cast a blurry, too-bright image upon it. Not that focus much matters in a space where the porn onscreen is supposed to be secondary to the action taking place below.
Nine or ten men occupy the benches spanning the room’s three risers. Only in the front row, bathing in the illumination from the ‘80s William Higgins film, do two elders lean toward each other, hands outstretched to dive and surface between the other’s thighs. The rest of us slouch scattered around the perimeter, naked save for towels around our waists, side-eyeing our fellow occupants. Spontaneous orgies often break out in the movie room. It is a gay bathhouse, after all, and pretty much anything goes. For now, this medium-sized area is where men have come to take a break from the more heated—literally and metaphorically—play spaces of the sauna and steam room. It’s where we rest to cool down, dry off, fiddle with our dicks, and contemplate our next moves.
There won’t be any action here in the immediate future. From the hall clatters a rolling mop bucket with an errant wheel. A thick paw flicks on the fluorescent bulbs overhead, immediately transforming what had been a dark and even comforting cruising space into a dirty cinderblock cell. “Apologies, gentleman.” The bored janitor flicks on and off the lights to make his point. “Kindly vacate the premises. I need to clean up your fucking messes.”
He delivers the speech with the weary, practiced expertise of someone who’s delivered it hundreds of times. I watch as my fellow bathhouse denizens stand, fasten their towels more firmly around their waists, and wander into the hallway beyond. The projector continues playing, but in the brightness, its image is a washed out square. Within the space of a minute, the room is empty save for the janitor and myself. I plant a foot on the plasterboard partition before me and watch as he lifts the mop from its bucket, gives it half a wring, then splats it on the floor. A smell of bleach permeates the air.
I suspect to most patrons, the daytime janitor looks like the sort of lowlife whose last resort is mopping up rancid seed from a bathhouse floor. Yet I find him irresistible. He’s a compact king, all of five-six or so. Beefy. Muscular, even. We’re probably about the same age—thirty-four, maybe thirty-five. Today he’s wearing a pair of denim shorts and a grimy wife beater, both of which pair well with the scuffed pair of Timberlands that wade through the slop water. He sports a thick beard in a year when men are clean-shaven like myself, or at most sport a wan fringe of goatee.
Most notable of all, his dark blond hair is a long, straight cascade that hangs over his shoulders to the middle of his back. He looks like a biker. No, with that snub nose and the face of a belligerent pug, with the tattoo on his bicep of a dagger through a beating heart, the janitor could be a biker gang leader. That unrepentant masculinity makes him look as if he’s done time. A felon, even. Why else would he be working here? I am not supposed to be attracted to this type of man—this baddest of bad boys. Yet, even when he's grasping an ordinary mop, even in a venue of desirable naked men fucking and sucking on any and every flat surface, he is the only one who makes my insides flop and squirm. I want him in the worst way.
And oh, god. How that excites me.
I don’t mind being exposed to the movie room’s unflattering overheads, so long as I can admire the janitor as he slops water over the linoleum. He ignores me as he goes about wringing the mop’s tendrils and attacking the dirt. Occasionally he’ll grumble to himself as, long tresses hanging around his face, he’ll lean over to scrub at a caked-on cum stain. Otherwise, he angles his face away as he works his way up the tiers.
Dirty droplets splash onto my calf when the bulldog steps onto the third and highest riser. I’m slouched down on my bench, head resting against the wall behind me, left foot still planted on the divider in front. He pays me no mind as each semi-circular sweep of his mop brings him closer. There’s no acknowledgment that I’m even here.
Not until he’s directly in front of me, his denim shorts scraping my leg, does he pause and stare into my eyes. “You’re in my way, sir.” His voice resonates, deep and gruff as his appearance. My heart thuds.
“Sorry,” I tell him. I’m not sorry. In fact, I raise my other foot and plant it onto the plasterboard. He’s trapped on both sides.
His expression doesn’t change. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to lift your legs.”
Our eye contact doesn’t break as I obey. I remove my feet from the partition and instead rest my heels on its top, at my chest level. He's still contained within my oustretched limbs, so it’s malicious compliance, at best. Between my thighs, my hard dick bounces out of the draped, skimpy towel, plainly visible. The janitor still stands between my outstretched limbs, staring me down. “Sir,” he says, so low that even if anyone else were in the room, they’d have to strain to hear. “I need you to comply.”
In nearly any other circumstance, I’d never get in the way of a man and his work. I’m not that kind of asshole. The janitor and I have a history, though. This is a liberty I know I can take. My cock betrays my excitement with another jerk. “What if I don’t?”
The janitor doesn’t speak. Very slowly, though, he lifts his mop so that it rests parallel along his forearm, the wet twists suspended over his shoulder. They drip grey rivulets upon the partition. With deliberation, the janitor uses the rounded end of the mop handle to lift my towel, then presses the tip against my hole. My eyebrows furrow; I gasp slightly and bite my bottom lip. Any erotic defiance in my eye has completely vanished, replaced by an expression that’s half silent pleading, half capitulation. He applies pressure to the handle, shoving the wood deeper. The mop head drips more as he moves with circular force around my entrance. “I need you to move, sir,” he says with mock courtesy.
I murmur apologies and stand, unable to conceal the erection bobbing like a dowsing rod. I’m about to edge past him and his bucket when the janitor grabs me by the bicep. “I’ve got something for you, if you stick around a couple of hours.” I can scarcely hear his growl over the blood racing through my veins, but I manage to nod. Then the man grabs the back of my head and pulls me in close, grinding his beard against my smooth face as his tongue spears into my mouth. Unexpectedly, he tastes of Wrigley’s. “Get moving,” he orders, slapping me on the ass to send me on my way.
Off I scamper, minding the wet floor, wondering what I can do to kill time.
***
The TNT Men’s Health Club sits on a bleak and grimy stretch of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, the border of asphalt and concrete that separates the city from its northern suburbs. The building was originally built as a Jewish men’s gymnasium. By the late seventies, it had transitioned into a gay bathhouse. At the time, Detroit’s biggest disco sat next door—the fabled Cheeks, exclusive enough to have its own Studio 54-type bouncers to keep the rabble from mixing with the queer and stylish. Cheeks is long gone, though. By the nineties, this stretch of 8 Mile is little more than vast, rubble-strewn empty lots, peppered by cinderblock shops worn down and gray from time and car exhaust.
Forbidding at it might look from the outside, though, the TNT makes a better impression inside its rear entrance. After presenting one’s membership card at the desk and being buzzed in, a visitor would see on the right through plate glass the old gymnasium’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, still impeccably maintained, where one or two older men might be doing laps. On a landing above sits a massive tiled hot tub that could easily seat twelve; a small mirrored poolside dance floor delineated by mylar streamers and a shimmering disco ball seems to be salvaged from the Cheeks days. Beyond the pool is an outdoors sun deck where in warm weather dozens of men bask naked on lounge chairs to soak up rays. Holidays, the club management might set up a poolside buffet for patrons—steaks and wieners for July fourth, turkey and sides for Thanksgiving. I’ve been to the club for New Year’s Eve and eaten plates of mostaccioli and toasted with champagne at midnight.
On the left sits a small area crowded with gym equipment; a locker room where clients store their clothes and belongings and change into their towels waits beyond. Once stripped and ready to explore the club’s innermost depths, the men pass by a laminated sheet of paper declaring that no sexual activity is permitted upon the premises. Violators will be ejected.
No one pays any attention to that sign. In fact, beneath it on a ledge sits a bowl overflowing with packaged condoms.
The pool and gym might be the TNT’s outward-facing semblance of good health and spa-aspiring demeanor. It’s past that warning sign and into the building’s recesses that the real action takes place. A hallway to the the left takes one past a dozen private cells, where men have paid an extra twenty to so they can lounge in darkened rooms with their doors ajar, hoping to lure in the perfect partner. The movie room lies at the end of this hallway, playing non-stop porn.
To the right of the warning sign lies the club’s wet area—the toilets, showers, and pool entrance. A steam room and sauna sit opposite each other. Men shuffle from one to the other, not bothering to conceal their arousal. Sometimes these rooms are packed with male flesh and the sounds of groans and pleas, the action barely perceptible through the vapor in the steam room or the sauna’s darkness. Now, though, as I shuffle across the wet tiles, not much is going on. The club’s resident troll—a repellant man whom everyone avoids, covered from head to toe with what look like oversized warts—rinses himself off in one of the uncurtained showers as he gauges the foot traffic. The sauna is empty, probably because the temperature within has been cranked up so high that it sears away my nostril hairs. I settle instead in the steam room. The air there is warm, but not oppressive. Two gentlemen trade dispirited blow jobs at the room’s other end, yet there’s just enough steam to make me feel solitary. I settle on the top shelf, my back against the lit glass blocks, and wait.
Killing time in a bathhouse isn’t my favorite activity. There’s always down periods between bursts of action, with little to do. I can sit in the steam room like I am now, eyes closed, unwinding and sometimes half-slumbering in the warmth. I might do the same in the hot tub. At some point I’ll take a shower, dry off in the sauna, and wander again. I haven’t rented a private room today, so lying down isn’t an option. And the movie room is off limits while it’s being cleaned. Best to clear my mind, settle in, and wait.
***
Until maybe three years ago, I’d never visited a gay bathhouse. I’d not even known of them until the mid to late eighties, when I'd read news reports of how the AIDS pandemic forced many cities to shut them down. In my imagination, they’d loomed large as a place where sexual predators lurked, or as loci of disease. At the beginning of the crisis, so many of our own—even Randy Shilts in the well-regarded And the Band Played On—divided us into the good and bad gays. Good gays chastely held hands. Under extreme provocation, they might lie in the dark with a committed partner and masturbate themselves without touching the other. They never swapped semen. Good gays of the late eighties were monogam-ish, well-behaved, and proponents of safe sex.
Bad gays fucked. Bad gays shunned protection and took risks with multiple, often anonymous, partners. The worst of them, like Shilts’ villified Patient Zero, lurked in bathhouses draped in nothing but towels, waiting to spring from the shadows upon innocents and force them into depraved, unsafe acts. This outsized fear of diseased predators is why, when I’d visited the TNT for the first time in 1995, I’d spent most of my visit afraid to step outside the safe confines of the room in which I was a guest.
Back then, my boyfriend had an acquaintance who used to make me uncomfortable, out in public, by the way he’d stare in my direction. My boyfriend and I were, at the time, slowly opening our relationship, so I was flattered to learn that the friend wanted me in a big way. “But just your nose,” my boyfriend explained.
“What do you mean, just my nose?”
“He’s into your nose,” said my boyfriend. Then he chose to tread dangerously close to becoming my ex. “Because it’s so big.”
My nose is not and never has been big. It’s round at the end, but it’s neither disproportionate nor a prominent feature. While I absorbed the news that someone might be more interested in my proboscis than other, more prominent parts, my boyfriend explained that his friend had offered to sponsor us for memberships at the TNT. We’d meet there for a three-way, so the friend could have his way with my nose. Somehow the news that my schnoz was outlandishly huge stunned me to a point I didn’t even notice where the assignation would be taking place.
On the appointed afternoon, we showed up at the club and were met at the front desk by the friend, who was already in his towel. Staring at my nose. After recommending us for membership to the desk clerk and paying our entry fee, the friend instructed us to park our clothes in the lockers we’d rented, then to join him in his room on the back hallway. Although no one was looking my way or even in the vicinity, I’d clutched my towel about my slender body as if I were a naked nun among the randy monks, terrified of being ravished.
The three-way itself was memorable, though perhaps not in the good way. While I lay naked on the acquaintance’s thin mattress, he had straddled my ribcage, hovered over me, then affixed his mouth around my nose. He sucked at it for close to forty-five minutes, furiously stroking himself the entire time, while my boyfriend sat at the foot of the bed, masturbating. It wasn’t unpleasant, but I can’t say I was getting a lot of enjoyment from the act. Finally, with a splat, he’d climaxed onto my clavicle. Only then did he dismount to allow me up. “Go out and explore a bit,” he suggested, indicating that he and my boyfriend were going to hang out in the room and chat for a bit.
At the time, it felt a bit like being thrown to the wolves. My nose had survived the onslaught, and even though I’d had to breathe through my mouth for most of the previous hour, I didn’t seem to be any the worse for wear. I’d stumbled around the club that first afternoon, flinching whenever anyone looked my way, convinced that at any moment, some snarling carnivore would spring upon me.
Only—of course—that didn’t happen. The club was populated with polite, well-heeled gentlemen, mostly older than myself. Many had impressive physiques. Some not. Most smelled good, as I passed them in the hallways. My nervousness began to lessen as a trail of these hopeful, handsome gentlemen began to form behind me. By the time I reached the steam room and assumed a position atop the uppermost tier, only to have a dozen hands slither in my direction, I relaxed into the steam and let happen what may.
Until that afternoon, I’d mentally tarred all bathhouses with the same brush; I’d imagined them to be populated only by Bad Gays; I’d pictured Patient Zeros lurking around every recess. I’d imagined the facilities to be nasty in appearance and dangerous to visit. And true—some of them are. In the next couple of years I visit a bathhouse in downtown LA that seems about to collapse upon itself and is so grimy I keep my hands clutched to my chest. A second bath of sorts opens in Detroit, in what recently had been a family steak house, a few miles down 8 Mile Road. There are no individual rooms, no towels, no steam room or showers or sauna or facilities to speak of. No porn. Just a dark building in which clothed men stumble around, free to connect in kitchen spaces where exposed appliance wires hang from the walls, or among the faux leather banquettes. It’s bizarre, and seems calculated to appeal to the tiny demographic of men who’ve always longed to get it on in a Sizzler. I never return, and it shuts down fairly quickly.
But most of the facilities I visit in months and years to follow are clean. Clean enough, anyway. Some, like the newer baths in Toronto, even feel luxurious. They don’t all have wet facilities; in the Bijou theaters in both Chicago and Toronto, clients keep their clothing mostly on as they mill about dark rooms and themed play spaces. A bathhouse isn’t its own genre of sex. It’s not to eroticism what horror is to film. By and large, they’re just spaces. A place for men to meet, more or less legitimately, away from prying eyes.
The gentlemen I encounter in the baths are no different from those I meet at the bars. There’s even a large degree of overlap. Some are hot, some aren’t. Some I think are way out of my league, only to find them sidling next to me or standing in the door my changing room. Others I’ll pursue like a kid in puppy love, never to get so much as a glance.
But then there’s Vito, the janitor at the TNT. Vito is in a class of his own.
***
Men around the club assume Vito is straight. Something about that biker demeanor gives that impression, or maybe the surly way he shuffles around public areas with his mop or with a rag and a bottle of Lysol hooked over his belt. Why they’d assume any straight fellow would subject himself to cleaning up the emissions of men fucking indiscriminately across an entire facility, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a sexual thrill of sorts, imagining he’s an outsider. He rarely engages with any of the club’s patrons.
But he always notices me. Every time his head turns my way, every time those inky pupils bore into mine, I feel seen. Receiving one of his slow and deliberate nods thrills me more than a hundred Christmas mornings.
That’s why, as I pad around the TNT’s environs after my encounter with the janitor, my insides quiver at any sign he might be approaching. When the sauna door opens, I sit up straight—but it’s only another cruiser, eyeing me with provocation as he inches by. By the pool, my cock involuntarily jumps whenever someone enters from the shower area, only to be disappointed when it’s inevitably an older guy on his way to the pool. Once again I’m imagining a predator lurching from the shadows to grab and have his way with me. Only this time, I want it.
Finally, I catch up to Vito after he’s clocked out, in the hallway leading to the movie room. He ambles my way with the bow-legged gait of a rodeo rider, his long hair a curtain hanging nearly to his navel. Gone are his boots, his ratty denim shorts, the stained tank top, all replaced by a single towel wrapped carelessly around his waist. I pause in the doorway by the bowl of condoms, hoping he still intends to follow through. I’m gratified when, at the sight of me, his pace quickens. He seizes my wrist in a strong grip and tugs me behind him, deeper into the club. Once we’re clear of the bright lights of the hallway and he entwines his fingers with mine, I begin to glow.
“I need to blow up in your guts,” he mutters, as he guides me into the depths of Tent City. Pure poetry, those words, sending my heart into a flutter.
Tent City occupies the largest area of the TNT. Once it had been a maze of small individual changing rooms, each with a locker and mattress thrown upon a wooden shelf. Six years ago, a fire had consumed the area; management hasn’t yet considered rebuilding. Now, it’s a vast and warehouse-like open space, though management has attempted to divide it into different areas by hanging mylar streamers and parachute material from the high ceilings. They can’t leave the largest area in the bathhouse completely empty, however. Across the expanse of varnished concrete they’ve scattered dozens of camping tents. Unlike the rooms on the building’s other side, which are keyed and cost extra to rent for a few hours, the tents are free for anyone to use.
Tent City sees a lot of traffic. Couples who connect elsewhere in the club and crave privacy will take it to a tent. When they’re not using the wet areas to play, men will wander in the dark and cavernous area to listen for sounds of action, lifting flaps when they find some. Though each enclosure is made for no more than two people, three at most, many have been the nights when I’ve been inside one, busy with a companion, only to have five or six more men pile in for the fun.
The tents can be a gamble. Even though staff will occasionally drag as many as they can manage to the outside deck for a quick hosing, it’s quite possible—even probable—to crawl into them and land on a discarded poppers bottle or the rancid remains of a cigarette. Or worse, squelch into a puddle of someone’s cold cum.
You hope it’s cum, anyway.
Vito knows where he’s leading me: a tent in one of the more remote reaches of the City. He pushes me inside by the bum, snatching off my towel with playful dominance as I scuttle within. It’s one of the few tents with a working zipper, which he fastens behind us. The enclosure’s high enough that he can squat upright once we’re inside. Feeling the concrete’s chill through the thin floor padding, I lie on my back and stare at him through the artificial dusk. To me, Vito is everything. The long hair, the sullen attitude, the biker slouch, the tattoos—men with twice the muscle definition and good looks could sidle my way, yet I’d pick Vito over them all.
And though our paths cross only a few times a year, Vito picks me back, nearly every time. We’re not friends. I don’t have his phone number. We don’t hang. I don’t know his last name, or in which part of town he lives. When I am alone with him in a grimy tent, flat on my back as he positions himself over me, though, I know I’ll do anything he wants. Anything. The knowledge both excites and frightens me.
Staring at me with those glinting, narrow eyes, he begins playing with his own nipples, each round and thick and pink as a pencil eraser. I implore him with my eyes, begging silent permission to remove his towel. He nods. When I unhook the terry cloth at his waist, it slithers onto the floor. At the opposite hip, from where he’d tucked them into the tight fold, drop a small bottle of lube and a condom. A tiny container of poppers hits the padding with a thunk and rolls into a seam. Still kneeling, Vito reaches out to grab it. While I run my hands over his chest and down to his erect cock, he unscrews the brown bottle, presses closed one nostril, and inhales deeply through the other.
His cock swells. Like the rest of him, it’s a stubby dick—maybe five inches, but a fat six around. Its skin is dark and almost leathery from self-abuse. A tight pair of bull balls hug the base. Already he’s dripping pre-cum. “Suck it,” he growls.
No need to tell me twice. I crane my neck, open wide, and engulf him to the root. My tongue flicks out to tickle at his nuts, once I’ve taken him entirely. A pungent odor of bleach water fills my nostrils and sets my tear ducts weeping, but I don’t care. I’ve spent the last two hours waiting for this, my prize.
I don’t understand why I’ll do anything for this dick. It’s not the biggest. It’s certainly not the prettiest—but neither is the man to whom it’s attached. When this dick is pointed my direction, however, demanding attention, I feel compelled to worship. Through some maneuvering, the janitor manages to wheel me around onto my back, face between his thighs, so he can straddle me with his arms and fuck my mouth. With his body hovering over mine, I can allow my one free hand that’s not maneuvering his meat to roam; I take advantage to run my palm over his round butt, rounding his tight nuts, sliding home across his protruding belly.
Vito’s hair tickles my hips, where it dangles above. Is he going to sixty-nine with me? He’s in the right position for it. But no, I don’t think the man has once sucked me. In the past he’s grabbed my dick, mostly as something to hang onto while I’m taking care of him. Now and again he’s kissed me, grinding his beard against my smooth skin, pointed tongue probing as if it has a drilling quota to meet. But suck me? No. That’s not in his repertoire. Honestly, I don’t care.
“Nice.” His deep voice vibrates like a plucked bass, and I tremble in sympathetic resonance. He sticks two stubby fingers in his mouth to wet them. “Let’s get you open.”
I protest like a child denied its pacifier when he pulls himself from between my lips, but allow him to spin me back around within the tent’s narrow confines. The sensation of his stubby fingers probing me causes me to gasp. He’s not gentle. There’s no consideration on his part for my finer feelings. Vito doesn’t care that his hands are somewhat cold, or his approach is about as subtle as a wrecking ball.
In fact, this isn’t me at all. I don’t consider myself a bottom. Before I started hooking up with Vito at the baths, sometimes, I hadn’t bottomed in…nearly a decade? Ever since I’d been—well, I know what happened to me and still refuse to think about it—well, not ever since then. I clench up and freeze whenever a hand strays into my cleft. Even when the gentlest of lovers cuddles me from behind, I break into a sweat. The handful of times I’ve tried being receptive, in the moment I’ve clamped myself down and frozen. Or worse, freaked out entirely.
Yet, here I am, allowing this dour specimen of manhood to part my legs, to raise my knees, to finger that hole as if he owns it. From the ground he grabs the foil packet. “Condom, right?”
I am a good boy during a health crisis, and during a health crisis good boys insist on condoms during sex. I know I’m following through on a charade, but meekly I say, “Yes, please.”
He unspools the rubber onto his thick rod, then crumples the foil into a ball and tosses it behind my head. No consideration for the next shift’s janitor, I guess. The first squirt of lube he spreads onto my hole, forcing it inside with two fingers. The next lends a wet shine to his latex-encased cock. “You ready?” he grunts.
My breath catches. I nod. I am so ready.
When he seizes one ankle in his grasp and turns me onto my side, my heart races once again. Vito straddles my right leg and bends the left upward. I feel his cock nudging my hole. Then he pushes—no, shoves—himself in. I let out a slight cry that arrests a pair of feet slapping across the Tent City floor, but I manage to suppress the deep keen that should follow. Instead, I revel in his invasion, in the expert way he opens me up and forces himself in, and then of the electric thrill when his cock head meets my prostate. It hurts. Oh god, it hurts. But I yearn to ache like this, at his onslaught.
There’s no warm-up. No sweet talk. I’m far from comfy, with my hip digging through the sparse layer of padding and into the ice-cold concrete. He’s wrenching my left leg into the air, using it as a counterbalance as immediately he begins pounding away at my ass. I silence any mild protests I might make so that I can relish his huffing and puffing as he fucks. His mild grumbles of pleasure are all I need to keep going. After a minute of adjusting, I find my hips joining his rhythm. I’m not only allowing him to sodomize me—I’m a willing accessory, meeting his strokes with my hole, urging him to plunge further, to open me wider, to dig me out as deep as he possibly can. I wrap a hand around my cock, but I don’t stroke myself. I let Vito’s steady pounding do the work.
I don’t know the exact moment it happens, but one moment my hole is feeling the tug and pull of latex against chute, then the next, I’m experiencing the smooth sensation of his bare skin against mine. I knew—I knew—this moment would arrive. Though it sends prickles of fear across my skin, I don’t interrupt the proceedings. I don’t wrestle the man off me, or make protest. I crave that he’ll continue, and thus make myself complicit in his crime.
I’m never totally certain if Vito slips off the condom himself, when we fuck—whether he’s using his fingers and thumbs to push it off a little with every thrust—or whether he’s just thick enough and hammers me hard enough that his cock naturally wrestles itself out of its restrictive covering. The first time we connected, realizing what had happened scared me shitless. After I’d stumbled into one of the showers, still glowing from having landed my infatuation, I’d noticed an unusual amount of stickiness back there. Moments later, I’d found myself tugging at the rolled rim of a wayward prophylactic and sliding it from the crevice where it had been deeply wedged.
At home that night, I convinced myself it must have been an accident. The rubber had slipped off during sex. Probably at the end. Maybe even afterward, when he’d been sliding out. Vito probably hadn’t even noticed. If it mattered, he would have thought to tell me, right? I probably hadn’t been exposed to anything. The days that followed were a torture, as obsessively I monitored myself for fevers and chills and lesions, or whatever I imagined to be the preliminary signs of infection. At night, I’d dig my fingers into my armpits, probing for swollen lymph nodes.
None of my fears are theoretical. I’ve lost people to this fucking disease. There are nights I feel I drift on the crest of a tidal wave of destruction, in my wake the lifeless bodies of men no longer in my life. There are drugs now that are supposed to save lives, sure. I appreciate that. Yet I’ve survived so far by being a very good gay and following all the guidelines I’m supposed to—only to have it all erased in one grimy coupling.
A few weeks later, I get myself tested at the university where I’m working. I’ve dodged a bullet: still negative. Somehow. I cannot put myself through this uncertainty again. I promise to be good.
Then I encounter Vito at the club one weekend afternoon, a month later, and I’m appalled at how easily my resolve crumbles. Jericho’s walls tumble down with one insolent look in my direction. The same business with the condom happens once more, and I have to admit to myself that it’s not a coincidence. Another fevered cycle of regret and bargaining; another resolution not to let it happen again.
The third time, I tell myself that at least it’s only with this one man.
The fourth, I begin admitting that maybe I hope for it to happen.
The fifth…well, I have to face the fact that maybe I am a bad gay, after all.
But if I’m going to be bad, this is the way to do it, cheekbone pressed into the concrete, legs splayed every which way, helpless under the weight and pressure of Vito’s thick trunk, his calloused hands possibly bruising me as easily as a soft peach while he pistons away. God, being bad feels good. There’s no disguising the scent of hot dick in soapy hole, the wet smacks of his relentless thrusts. Without words, the janitor has given me permission to let go of everything but what’s happening in the moment. I respond by putting myself in his hands. Shadows encircle the tent, trying to find a way in, but it’s just the two of us in here, bodies and limbs entangled. Fear has no place here. Not now.
He’s snarling as he fucks, murmuring filth, telling me to take it, telling me how amazing I feel. Telling me he needs this ass. I shoot midway through his litany of obscenity, overcome by the wildness of the scene, thrilling at what a bad boy I must be to consent to it, even tacitly. Though I’m not stroking, my grip is tight enough on my dick that his uncompromising thrusts send me over the edge, and my seed spills onto the floor. I clamp down on my cries of pleasure, letting out only a whimper of relief.
He’s not done, though. Nor do I want him to be. Marveling that I can keep going after my orgasm, I continue grinding my hips and clenching at him with my hole, hoping I please him. From time to time, his cock flops out and slaps—warm, wet, and uncovered—against my ass before he can shove it back inside. Our coupling is wrong. It’s bad. It’s everything I’m not supposed to do. But it’s what I hoped would happen from the moment Vito shuffled into the movie room. I relish every hard stab, every slur, every squelch.
He shoots with a deep rumble in his chest that rattles every inch of me when he presses his mouth against mine. At first, his lips remain closed, but as he empties himself inside me, they part so that poker-like tongue can pierce into my mouth. Vito is not what I would call a good or even satisfactory kisser, but it turns me on, knowing the man who struts about like an ex-con skipping a meeting with a parole officer has unbent enough to kiss me.
When he’s done, he plants his palms on either side of my body and looks down at the mess I’ve made on the mat. “You shot?” he asks, surprised.
“A while ago.”
“Oh fuck, dude. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“Nah, it was hot.” It’s weird that this is the longest post-coital conversation we’ve had, right?
“Love that ass.”
“Love that dick.”
The dick in question slithers out of me. Vito conceals nothing; I can see that he’s unsheathed, and know that in the shower I’ll have to go digging for the condom buried somewhere inside. But he doesn’t draw attention to it, either. “Gotta get going,” he says, gathering his towel, lube, and poppers. He gives my ass a slap. “Next time.”
My butt is still tingling when, a few minutes later, I manage to draw my stiff knees to my chest and consider what once more I have done. I’m in a bathhouse, hole sloppy with a near-stranger’s semen. I might have mouthed the words of a good boy and requested he use a condom, but my stinging anus proves I’m otherwise. It’s not my surroundings that have made me bad. I’ll never figure out why, but he stirs something, deep within. He makes me drop all my pretenses. I’m only bad with this one man. I’m only bad for the baddest.
But I’m bad, nonetheless.
It’s a mystery, why I choose to let go with the sort of man whose every slump and snarl raises red flags. I know what we do is wrong. Yet every transgression makes me want him all the more. No matter how many times I resolve not to repeat my error, no matter how much I bargain with an invisible arbiter in exchange for safety, I know the next time that long-haired biker man glares my way, I will be helpless to resist.
At heart I know how simplistic is the division I’m making. Simple good and bad are the stuff of children’s bedtime stories. All of us who wander under this roof are adults. Men with as many flaws as dreams and desires. We make our choices and hope for the best. None of us—at least, none I’ve met—harbor ill intentions for each other. There are no bogeymen here, no fairytale monsters lurking in the dark. Only humans, trying to navigate the risks as best we can.
I was all of seventeen at the start of this crisis. Not even twenty, when I began losing mentors and lovers. I’m thirty-four now. That’s another seventeen years I’ve lived with catastrophe. Half my life.
And I am exhausted.
All I can do for now is peel myself from the sticky mat, stumble my way to the showers, and attempt to retrieve what’s been lost.
***
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