(While I'm visiting my dad this week, I've put up a couple of reposts to keep you occupied in my absence. This one is from 2010.)
His name is Steve; he prefers that I address him as Son, or Daddy’s Boy.
Steve moved from the eastern seaboard to accept a job at a big hospital here in town. A friend of mine gave him my email address when he found out we lived only ten minutes apart; we’ve seen each other irregularly for a year, since, when his busy hospital schedule can accommodate a meeting. Much of his furniture’s still in storage, making his apartment a little sparse.
I’m not there to see the furniture, though.
The moment the door’s closed, he’s on me, moving my hands into his loose clothing. “Oh fuck, daddy,” he tells me. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too, son,” I whisper when I manage to tear my mouth from his.
“Do I look okay, daddy?" He's not pretending, with this question. He's earnest, and even worried a little. "I want to look good for you. I want to make you proud of me.”
Steve always looks great. His face has the strong chin, easy grin, and jock-like good features of a sportswear model. Sometimes he’ll greet me wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and tight underwear, or a tank top and some slack sweatpants. Sometimes he'll be wearing nothing. Today he's greeted me in a black jock and a tight-fitting wife-beater. “Oh yes,” I hiss, pushing him in the direction of the air mattress lying on his bedroom floor. He's still not managed to take the time to buy a bed. “You look very, very good, boy. I want you to show me how good you look.”
It’s ridiculous, this roleplay. He’s almost the same age as I. With his salt and pepper hair and dark brown eyes, he might even look older. No matter. He insinuates himself into my lap and has me slap his ass until it’s red, and snap the elastic of his jock to raise angry welts across his butt as he moans and writhes.
It would take only one word to break the illusion we sharing together. One word, one refusal, one mistimed snort of disbelief. “I want to make my daddy feel good,” he tells me, pushing me onto my back and straddling my hips. “I want to be daddy’s best boy.”
“Oh, you are daddy’s best boy,” I say. His hole is already lubed, loose, and ready. I wrap my fist around my cock and support it as he lowers himself down. Then I sigh as I sink deep into his warm, soft flesh. “You are making your daddy very proud, son.”
His eyes widen as they stare into mine, then close entirely. His mouth drops into a gasp. His head jerks backwards, and he says nothing more. Not for a long, long while. This is the payoff, for me. I wear the daddy mask just for this moment, when I see him so lost in the bliss of his fantasy, beyond words and the cares of the everyday, that his body shakes with pleasure.
After our long lovemaking, yesterday afternoon, I was drinking cold water from a glass mug as I looked at the largest of the photographs sitting atop his dresser. They're the only decoration I've ever seen in his spartan apartment; he must have dug them out fairly recently. The photo was of a young man with medium-length blond hair, handsome as hell, standing in a park with a hound at his side. The dog’s silky coat was glistening in the sunlight, falling around the dog's body like a pair of shaggy, bell-bottomed pajamas. There were matching glints in the young man’s wire-rimmed spectacles. “Is that you?” I asked Steve, letting the water soothe my raw and ragged throat.
“That’s me,” he replied, settling down by my side on the air mattress. He picked up the frame and studied the photograph. His face wore the somewhat sad, somewhat wistful expression of a man looking at the picture of an old friend he once loved but hadn’t seen in some time.
“The dog’s beautiful,” I told him.
“She really was,” he said. “She really was.” He paused, lost in thought, while I waited for more. “Sally was her name. She was an afghan. I had two afghans, once. Both were beautiful dogs. Total couch hogs. If they wanted up next to you when you were watching TV, they got their way. But they were my babies. Then I had to have one of them put to sleep because she had cancer.”
“I’m really sorry.” I waited a moment. “How old were you in that photo?”
“Twenty. . . .” He calculated on his fingers. “Between twenty-four and twenty-six. I forget exactly. Almost twenty years ago. Yeah, the first dog died of cancer just as I was at the end of my relationship with my first serious boyfriend. He was twenty years older than me. A librarian. We were living in Texas and he had two job opportunities—one in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, you know, and the other in Seattle. So I went to Seattle with him and I realized . . . well, it was kind of strange. I realized I didn’t want to be with him any more. He was so settled and I was just young, you know. I wanted to travel and see things. I thought that's what it would mean to live my life. Going to Seattle to his home, with his furniture and his paintings and decorations—none of it mine—made me realize how much I was missing.
“So I told him that I was sorry, but I wanted to move out and see the world. He didn’t realize at first what I was saying. He thought he could kind of keep the home fires burning and that when I was tired of going new places, I’d come back and we’d live happily ever after. I kept telling him that I wouldn’t be coming back, but I don’t think he ever really believed me.
“When I'd left Texas to join my boyfriend, I’d boarded Sally with a woman I knew, just for a little bit until I could ship her to Seattle. When I picked her up, she told me, ‘Hey, your girl is a sweetheart and a real beauty. If you ever want to sell, I know just the guy who would love to have her.’ She named a name and I said, ‘Hey, I know Tom!’ He was a guy I knew pretty well who had an afghan already. So I knew he’d take really good care of her. I couldn’t leave Sally with my boyfriend, you see. He didn’t like dogs. He never remembered to feed them when I was out late at school or anything. The afghans were totally my babies. So I called Tom, my friend, and we talked, and he was thrilled to buy Sally from me. It gave me just a little cash, you know, for moving expenses, and I knew he’d love her just as much as I did."
He was silent for a while. At last I rested my hand atop his. When he spoke again, it was with a shaky tremolo.
“So I said goodbye, and saw her off. That night my boyfriend came home. ‘Where’s the dog?’ he asked, and I told him Sally was gone.” Steve got quiet for a moment. “He was just standing there with his briefcase, and then he dropped it to the floor. It fell open and all his papers fell out. Then he burst into tears. Because it hit him right then, for the first time, that I was leaving and wasn’t coming back and that our relationship was really . . . over.”
I reached out and pulled Steve close to me, until his head rested on my shoulder. I was afraid to speak, but after a moment of respectful hush I murmured, “How did you feel, giving up your baby?”
“I knew Sally was going to a good home, and there was just no way I could take her with me, so. . . .” His voice trailed off into silence. “I still miss that dog.” He draped his arm over my chest, and kissed my nipple. “I don’t know why I told you that story. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about my baby, before.”
I kissed the daddy’s boy on the head, and held him close while we both stared at the photograph in the darkening room.
Showing posts with label reflections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reflections. Show all posts
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Monday, October 3, 2011
Downward Spiral
The first time I saw him, he was attractive. Desirable. Hot, even.
The last time I heard about him, this previous week, he was in a fucking mess. At first I heard he was being investigated for murder, and then accidental death. One source said that he'd attempted to kill himself. The newspapers tried to play up the more sensational aspects of what happened. Wild gay sex and crystal meth party, some of them called it—though from what I could tell, it was a simple one-on-one, or possibly a three-way, gone wrong. It's a damned mess, and I pity the guy and his part in whatever happened.
But like I said, he was hot the first time we met. It would've been back in the very late nineteen-nineties, or possibly the year two thousand. I was shopping the local upscale mall with a friend and stopped into the upstairs restroom—which was wildly cruisy from the day it opened to the day I moved. He was in one of the stalls, stroking his dick and looking from action. I don't remember exactly how it went down, but within five minutes he showed me a trick that I employed for several years following, when he led me off to the Nieman-Marcus at the mall's east end and took me to the second floor washrooms, where the men's room stalls were miniature rooms with a locking regular door. I fucked his face and his hole in there, and emerged a few minutes later to find my friend still waiting (and rolling his eyes).
But I had a phone number, and a new buddy.
I saw the guy a few times at his place, after that. We'd fuck under the sloping eaves of his upstairs bungalow bedroom. I liked his muscular build and his face, which was handsome and bright-eyed. He was the first person I'd known to wear no facial hair other than a soul patch, and he was one of the few on whom it looked anything other than affected. I got a kick out of his profession, which was one of the careers that traditionally isn't supposed to be trolling for anonymous sex in men's rooms. We weren't lovers, in the sense I think of the word; we didn't see each other that often. But we were friendly enough that he offered me the use of his home for fucking, if I never needed a place to play. I never took him up on it, though.
When he found a boyfriend and went off the market for a while, I forgot about him for a couple of years. The boyfriend was supposed to be a big deal—the two were united very publicly and with a lot of fanfare and talk about the sacred nature of monogamy and commitment. All of which apparently went out the window within a couple of years, when he was back on the market and craving even more and kinkier sex than he was before. He looked for guys to tie him up, to humiliate him. He wanted poz guys to bareback and convert him. He gained an alarming amount of weight, and let his good looks grow ragged around the edges.
When I was fucking him in the mid-two-thousands, he was really big guy hiding the remains of a former good-looker under a thick layer. Our times together got progressively less enjoyable not because of that, but because he stopped cleaning out when we'd meet . . . and nothing turns me off more quickly than that. I'd make excuses not to see him, because he just wasn't taking the good care I expected, beforehand.
The last time I saw him was probably about three years ago, when I let him talk me into accompanying him to a sling party on the far side of town. The other men present were fairly hot, but my erstwhile friend embarrassed himself by climbing into a sling and, mid-fuck, letting loose a tremendous amount of what we'll generously call 'anal leakage' onto the floor underneath. It was one of those scenes that, erase it as I try from my memory, I can't eradicate. The noise, the multiple cries of panic from everyone in the room, the shock and dismay that followed. Thank god there was a large plastic tarp on the floor.
Plead as he might for me to have fun with him after that, I didn't. I couldn't face any of the other guys from that party ever again, either. I simply didn't want to be reminded.
It would be convenient if I could point to the moment of decline and say, with a wry shake of my head, that I told him to get his life back in order or things would come to a bitter end. I can't, and I couldn't, though. I've seen meth ruin lives in very short order. I knew a couple who went from responsible management jobs in a bank and a great house in an expensive suburb, to fired, strung-out junkies literally living out of a motel on one of the nastiest streets in Detroit because of the stuff. I knew one former fuckbuddy who lost his health, his lover, and his home because of the stuff, as he entered rehab again and again to attempt to rid himself of the habit. I knew a real estate agent with a huge reputation end up sleeping in an old station wagon during Michigan's worst winter months, after he lost everything to the habit.
Then there were guys like this, who managed to keep his meth usage relatively under wraps. Was he using when I knew him, in the later years? It could be. It'd make a certain kind of sense, though he didn't exhibit any of the twitchy habits I associated with other users I'd avoid. Yet this last week, when I ran across the item in the Detroit paper that outlined in lurid detail the guy's downfall, I can't say I was exactly surprised. All I know is that the man invited over another guy from an online hookup site. The trick brought over some meth, which my former friend dissolved in water and injected in the trick's chest, and then in his own. A couple of hours later, the trick was dead and my old fuckbuddy was having to explain it to the police.
Like I said. A mess.
I was shocked for the space of an evening. By the next day, I was poring through the web for more information. The guy lost his jobs. Headlines about gay sex and meth parties will do that, when you have a sensitive position like his. I read that he'd chosen to go to rehab, but I'd also read that he hadn't. His online hookup profile has been registering as online twenty-four/seven, since.
And old mutual friends keep contacting me. Did you have any idea? they ask. Did you know the other guy? No, I didn't. Should we have been able to tell? Maybe we should, but we didn't. Could we even have done anything if we'd tried?
It's a valid question. Meth is one of those drugs that becomes to world to some of its users—it means more than family, more than friends, more than any warning that anyone can possibly give. I admire anyone who can claw his way back to life from its clutches. I doubt anything we'd said, if we'd said it, would have carried any force in the terrible tug-of-war that meth has with an addict's life. The best that any of us can do at this point is to do what he must be doing: cleaning up and taking stock and trying to get on as best as we can.
Though it's going to be more difficult for him than the rest of us. There but for the grace of god, and sometimes mere chance, go any of us; it's best to remember how fortunate we really are, at the end of the day.
The last time I heard about him, this previous week, he was in a fucking mess. At first I heard he was being investigated for murder, and then accidental death. One source said that he'd attempted to kill himself. The newspapers tried to play up the more sensational aspects of what happened. Wild gay sex and crystal meth party, some of them called it—though from what I could tell, it was a simple one-on-one, or possibly a three-way, gone wrong. It's a damned mess, and I pity the guy and his part in whatever happened.
But like I said, he was hot the first time we met. It would've been back in the very late nineteen-nineties, or possibly the year two thousand. I was shopping the local upscale mall with a friend and stopped into the upstairs restroom—which was wildly cruisy from the day it opened to the day I moved. He was in one of the stalls, stroking his dick and looking from action. I don't remember exactly how it went down, but within five minutes he showed me a trick that I employed for several years following, when he led me off to the Nieman-Marcus at the mall's east end and took me to the second floor washrooms, where the men's room stalls were miniature rooms with a locking regular door. I fucked his face and his hole in there, and emerged a few minutes later to find my friend still waiting (and rolling his eyes).
But I had a phone number, and a new buddy.
I saw the guy a few times at his place, after that. We'd fuck under the sloping eaves of his upstairs bungalow bedroom. I liked his muscular build and his face, which was handsome and bright-eyed. He was the first person I'd known to wear no facial hair other than a soul patch, and he was one of the few on whom it looked anything other than affected. I got a kick out of his profession, which was one of the careers that traditionally isn't supposed to be trolling for anonymous sex in men's rooms. We weren't lovers, in the sense I think of the word; we didn't see each other that often. But we were friendly enough that he offered me the use of his home for fucking, if I never needed a place to play. I never took him up on it, though.
When he found a boyfriend and went off the market for a while, I forgot about him for a couple of years. The boyfriend was supposed to be a big deal—the two were united very publicly and with a lot of fanfare and talk about the sacred nature of monogamy and commitment. All of which apparently went out the window within a couple of years, when he was back on the market and craving even more and kinkier sex than he was before. He looked for guys to tie him up, to humiliate him. He wanted poz guys to bareback and convert him. He gained an alarming amount of weight, and let his good looks grow ragged around the edges.
When I was fucking him in the mid-two-thousands, he was really big guy hiding the remains of a former good-looker under a thick layer. Our times together got progressively less enjoyable not because of that, but because he stopped cleaning out when we'd meet . . . and nothing turns me off more quickly than that. I'd make excuses not to see him, because he just wasn't taking the good care I expected, beforehand.
The last time I saw him was probably about three years ago, when I let him talk me into accompanying him to a sling party on the far side of town. The other men present were fairly hot, but my erstwhile friend embarrassed himself by climbing into a sling and, mid-fuck, letting loose a tremendous amount of what we'll generously call 'anal leakage' onto the floor underneath. It was one of those scenes that, erase it as I try from my memory, I can't eradicate. The noise, the multiple cries of panic from everyone in the room, the shock and dismay that followed. Thank god there was a large plastic tarp on the floor.
Plead as he might for me to have fun with him after that, I didn't. I couldn't face any of the other guys from that party ever again, either. I simply didn't want to be reminded.
It would be convenient if I could point to the moment of decline and say, with a wry shake of my head, that I told him to get his life back in order or things would come to a bitter end. I can't, and I couldn't, though. I've seen meth ruin lives in very short order. I knew a couple who went from responsible management jobs in a bank and a great house in an expensive suburb, to fired, strung-out junkies literally living out of a motel on one of the nastiest streets in Detroit because of the stuff. I knew one former fuckbuddy who lost his health, his lover, and his home because of the stuff, as he entered rehab again and again to attempt to rid himself of the habit. I knew a real estate agent with a huge reputation end up sleeping in an old station wagon during Michigan's worst winter months, after he lost everything to the habit.
Then there were guys like this, who managed to keep his meth usage relatively under wraps. Was he using when I knew him, in the later years? It could be. It'd make a certain kind of sense, though he didn't exhibit any of the twitchy habits I associated with other users I'd avoid. Yet this last week, when I ran across the item in the Detroit paper that outlined in lurid detail the guy's downfall, I can't say I was exactly surprised. All I know is that the man invited over another guy from an online hookup site. The trick brought over some meth, which my former friend dissolved in water and injected in the trick's chest, and then in his own. A couple of hours later, the trick was dead and my old fuckbuddy was having to explain it to the police.
Like I said. A mess.
I was shocked for the space of an evening. By the next day, I was poring through the web for more information. The guy lost his jobs. Headlines about gay sex and meth parties will do that, when you have a sensitive position like his. I read that he'd chosen to go to rehab, but I'd also read that he hadn't. His online hookup profile has been registering as online twenty-four/seven, since.
And old mutual friends keep contacting me. Did you have any idea? they ask. Did you know the other guy? No, I didn't. Should we have been able to tell? Maybe we should, but we didn't. Could we even have done anything if we'd tried?
It's a valid question. Meth is one of those drugs that becomes to world to some of its users—it means more than family, more than friends, more than any warning that anyone can possibly give. I admire anyone who can claw his way back to life from its clutches. I doubt anything we'd said, if we'd said it, would have carried any force in the terrible tug-of-war that meth has with an addict's life. The best that any of us can do at this point is to do what he must be doing: cleaning up and taking stock and trying to get on as best as we can.
Though it's going to be more difficult for him than the rest of us. There but for the grace of god, and sometimes mere chance, go any of us; it's best to remember how fortunate we really are, at the end of the day.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Open Forum Monday: The Beard
There are times in our lives in which everything snaps into focus. They're rare moments, precious and few, in which everything aligns; it's the twist of a key as the tumblers into place. It's the satisfying snap of the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, the last resonant chord that lingers on long after the orchestra players have packed their cases. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, you know. There's no mistaking it for anything else.
For me and my self-image, that moment came several years ago when I grew a beard.
I've written before about how much time I spent—wasted, truth be told—not liking my face. For years and years I honestly never enjoyed looking at myself. I hated taking photographs, and generally would assume a rictus of absolute fear and loathing when someone pointed a camera my way.
My eyes always danced away when I walked by mirrors; if I absolutely had to assess myself in a reflective surface—after a haircut, say, or when combing my hair in the morning or seeing how a new pair of pants might fit—it was with the defeated attitude of, oh well, guess that’s the best it’ll ever get. I pissed away precious years worrying about piddly stuff no one really noticed—thinking my eyes were too small, my nose too big, my forehead too high, my skin too uneven, my lips too thin . . . the list could be endless, in the old days.
And it was a waste, of course, because now, when I look back at old photos of myself (grimacing, looking panic-stricken), all I do is shake my head and think what a babe I was. Attractive enough, sure. The number of guys chasing after me in the old days should have told me that. But a babe in a more literal sense, too. I was smooth-faced and bright-eyed and oh, so young. And stupid. Stupid that I frittered away time and energy hating my looks.
The turning point for me came several years ago when I grew a beard. Oh, I'd sported facial hair before. In college I walked around for a few weeks with an embarrassment of a moustache. It was so white and peach-fuzzy that it looked as if I'd bent over to sniff a dandelion and come away with it all over my upper lip. In the very early nineteen-nineties, long before they became ubiquitous in the midwest, I grew a goatee, kept it for a year, and after being teased relentlessly about it by all the same people who grew the very same configuration of facial hair three years later when it was popular, finally decided it didn't suit me.
When I left my full-time job at the university a half-dozen years ago, though, one of the first things I decided to do was grow a beard. Now, this was in the days (again!) before beards became the ubiquitous hipster recession accessory that they are now. I'd never considered having one before. I only knew about two people who weren't collecting social security checks who had one.
I waited until I'd taken the big step to stop working at an office job because growing facial hair when you're working full time is annoying, for one thing. One has to put up with jibes from co-workers who first want to know if you forgot to wash that first morning, then who have to put in their opinion on how your face is looking every day after. When I was working at home in my office and studio most of the day, no one was going to care if I looked a little scruffy.
So I did what I'd been advised to do, which was simply not to shave for four weeks. At the end of that time I cleaned up my neck, used my clippers to trim my Unabomber face down to a neat, trim, short beard, and looked into the mirror at the blond fur that was left.
And I just knew. Everything clicked; the camera came into sharp focus, the tumblers fell, the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. I stared at myself in the mirror that day, eyes wide, and realized that I should've had that damned beard all along.
The change has really meant a lot to me. I can't say I'm a total Narcissus. But my friends and family might. These days I'm thrusting myself into photographs when I'm not wanted, grinning like a fool. There are Japanese tourists at this moment reviewing their digital photos from Times Square last week and wondering who is that enormously tall white guy stooping down to smile along with them in their family poses. I can't walk around a Restoration Hardware or a Bed, Bath, and Beyond without checking myself out in every mirror in the damned place. Is my hair lookin' fly? Oh, it totally is. Is my face rockin’? Oh yeah, baby! And when I do a self-inspection, I’m practically winking at myself, cocking finger guns, and firing them at my reflection while leering, “Lookin’ good, handsome!”
Apparently having a beard makes me change my -ings to -in's, too.
I’m not one of those guys whose interest in someone is directly proportional to the amount of facial hair the chap is sporting. On other guys, I can take the stuff or leave it. On myself, though, it's simply right. It feels as if I've found a look that on the outside matches the way I feel inside, when I'm at my best.
Although I've had the beard for years now, I spent enough of my life in self loathing that getting a look at a handsome face in the mirror (and I'm talking about mine, of course) is still a nice, novel feeling. I’m happy finally to be living at least a part of my life without fearing the mirror and what I’ll see there.
I'm curious about the experiences of others. I know that a lot of us here have expressed our struggles with how we see ourselves. Was there ever a moment when everything suddenly shifted from wrong to right for you? What was it?
For me and my self-image, that moment came several years ago when I grew a beard.
I've written before about how much time I spent—wasted, truth be told—not liking my face. For years and years I honestly never enjoyed looking at myself. I hated taking photographs, and generally would assume a rictus of absolute fear and loathing when someone pointed a camera my way.
My eyes always danced away when I walked by mirrors; if I absolutely had to assess myself in a reflective surface—after a haircut, say, or when combing my hair in the morning or seeing how a new pair of pants might fit—it was with the defeated attitude of, oh well, guess that’s the best it’ll ever get. I pissed away precious years worrying about piddly stuff no one really noticed—thinking my eyes were too small, my nose too big, my forehead too high, my skin too uneven, my lips too thin . . . the list could be endless, in the old days.
And it was a waste, of course, because now, when I look back at old photos of myself (grimacing, looking panic-stricken), all I do is shake my head and think what a babe I was. Attractive enough, sure. The number of guys chasing after me in the old days should have told me that. But a babe in a more literal sense, too. I was smooth-faced and bright-eyed and oh, so young. And stupid. Stupid that I frittered away time and energy hating my looks.
The turning point for me came several years ago when I grew a beard. Oh, I'd sported facial hair before. In college I walked around for a few weeks with an embarrassment of a moustache. It was so white and peach-fuzzy that it looked as if I'd bent over to sniff a dandelion and come away with it all over my upper lip. In the very early nineteen-nineties, long before they became ubiquitous in the midwest, I grew a goatee, kept it for a year, and after being teased relentlessly about it by all the same people who grew the very same configuration of facial hair three years later when it was popular, finally decided it didn't suit me.
When I left my full-time job at the university a half-dozen years ago, though, one of the first things I decided to do was grow a beard. Now, this was in the days (again!) before beards became the ubiquitous hipster recession accessory that they are now. I'd never considered having one before. I only knew about two people who weren't collecting social security checks who had one.
I waited until I'd taken the big step to stop working at an office job because growing facial hair when you're working full time is annoying, for one thing. One has to put up with jibes from co-workers who first want to know if you forgot to wash that first morning, then who have to put in their opinion on how your face is looking every day after. When I was working at home in my office and studio most of the day, no one was going to care if I looked a little scruffy.
So I did what I'd been advised to do, which was simply not to shave for four weeks. At the end of that time I cleaned up my neck, used my clippers to trim my Unabomber face down to a neat, trim, short beard, and looked into the mirror at the blond fur that was left.
And I just knew. Everything clicked; the camera came into sharp focus, the tumblers fell, the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. I stared at myself in the mirror that day, eyes wide, and realized that I should've had that damned beard all along.
The change has really meant a lot to me. I can't say I'm a total Narcissus. But my friends and family might. These days I'm thrusting myself into photographs when I'm not wanted, grinning like a fool. There are Japanese tourists at this moment reviewing their digital photos from Times Square last week and wondering who is that enormously tall white guy stooping down to smile along with them in their family poses. I can't walk around a Restoration Hardware or a Bed, Bath, and Beyond without checking myself out in every mirror in the damned place. Is my hair lookin' fly? Oh, it totally is. Is my face rockin’? Oh yeah, baby! And when I do a self-inspection, I’m practically winking at myself, cocking finger guns, and firing them at my reflection while leering, “Lookin’ good, handsome!”
Apparently having a beard makes me change my -ings to -in's, too.
I’m not one of those guys whose interest in someone is directly proportional to the amount of facial hair the chap is sporting. On other guys, I can take the stuff or leave it. On myself, though, it's simply right. It feels as if I've found a look that on the outside matches the way I feel inside, when I'm at my best.
Although I've had the beard for years now, I spent enough of my life in self loathing that getting a look at a handsome face in the mirror (and I'm talking about mine, of course) is still a nice, novel feeling. I’m happy finally to be living at least a part of my life without fearing the mirror and what I’ll see there.
I'm curious about the experiences of others. I know that a lot of us here have expressed our struggles with how we see ourselves. Was there ever a moment when everything suddenly shifted from wrong to right for you? What was it?
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Planet of the Joannes
There were a couple of years in the late nineteen-eighties, as my desire to finish a doctorate in grad school fizzled, in which I took a clerical job to pay the bills. It wasn't a spectacularly high-paying position, nor was it all that dignified—it primarily involved sitting in a dank windowless room off a lost corridor, and transcribing dictaphone tapes made by various faculty at the university.
The cramped office stunk of tobacco, thanks to my alcoholic, bat-shit-crazy boss, a man of little education and even less couth. When he wasn't sitting in his desk chair blatantly reading Playboy and Hustler, he was making passes at secretaries in the building and then, when they'd scatter in fear at his approach, would proclaim them "goddamn lesbians." It was a tedious existence. I needed the money, though. And in the weeks after my sexual assault, my instinct was to shut out the world as much as possible, to wall myself away. That dark, smelly room was my cloister, and the mind-numbing droning of the faculty whenever I clamped on those headphones felt like sanctuary.
For a couple of months I worked alone, but then my tiny office was rearranged one day to accommodate another desk. Soon another transcriber invaded my monastic solitude. His name was Geoffrey. He was a narrow-shouldered guy who came up to my sternum, with a head full of strawberry-blond hair. On a big, bulbous nose rested a pair of very geeky horn-rimmed glasses. Elvis Costello glasses, they were. He was skittish of me at first and I of him. I had a paranoid few days in which I imagined our boss had planted him in there in order to keep an eye on me. I began to relax, though, when I realized that Geoffrey was gay; I heard him talk to what I had to assume was a significant other on the phone, a few times a day. I understood from his guarded, non-gendered references and carefully-neutral words that he was trying not to give away that he was seeing another man.
After that realization, I opened up and Geoffrey and I rapidly became friends. We were both the same age, and both had a particular disdain for our boss. "Fucking asshole," Geoffrey would mutter under his breath, whenever that Marlboro-scented storm cloud would loom on the horizon. We bonded over the strange bureaucracy of our division, too. The vice-president of our school was guarded by two administrative assistants and an academic services officer, all three of whom were named Joanne, and all three of whom were joined at the hip. They lunched together. They gossiped together during work hours. They all chattered in high-pitched, rapid voices. "Planet of the Joannes," I nicknamed the fourth floor one day, and Geoffrey started to laugh so hard that he had to slump against the wall with tears in his eyes.
After that we were constant work friends. We lunched outdoors, munching on sandwiches even in the coldest weather, to rid ourselves of the tobacco stink. "I have something to tell you," he said one day over our meal, perhaps a month into our acquaintance. "I'm into guys."
"I am too," I replied.
He seemed relieved, and commented that he'd thought so, but that he'd really had no way of telling. "And another thing," he said. And I remember the very formal way in which he said these following words, because the defensiveness and awkwardness of them struck me in a way that made me wonder how many times he'd said them before, and how badly they'd been received. "I have unfortunately been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus."
“That’s okay,” I told him. “Thanks for telling me.”
Hearing him say the words was something of a shock. Yet I wasn’t surprised. Geoffrey and I sat close enough that even over the stink of cigarettes in that office I knew his smell. I’d grown up with a mother whose odor changed with every new pharmaceutical regimen. I knew how medicines change a person’s scent. Geoffrey’s pores exuded a sharp tang that I can only describe as being like the metallic overtones of a diarrhea smell, but without its organic nastiness. It wasn’t vile; it was merely sharp, and distinguishable. I knew he was taking pills for something. It didn’t surprise me that it was for HIV.
These were still the sad and early days of the AIDS crisis. Geoffrey was a novelty. Not for having HIV, but for admitting it. I’d known a couple of people by that point who’d died, but they’d gone off to New York or San Francisco and met their demises offstage, so to speak. I’d never known anyone living with it, day to day, before him.
I got to know Geoffrey’s daily routine with his pills. It seemed as if there were dozens of them that he’d take throughout the day when the timer on his watch would beep. By that point in our friendship he’d tell me what each of them was and what it was for, as he’d down them without water in our little back room. “Down you go,” he’d say, over and over again. “Do your dirty work!”
By that point we were seeing less and less of our boss. The university had instituted a no-smoking rule in its buildings, and he was spending a lot of time ‘working from home,’ which meant that Geoffrey and I were largely unsupervised. We’d do our tasks in the mornings, then sit in the back room and listen to alternative radio while we talked in the afternoons, or visit the Planet of the Joannes so that we could laugh at them later. Sometimes we’d just head out into the sunshine and wile away the hours. Our super-sneaky boss liked to throw in a phone call to the office at five minutes to five, on the days he worked at home, just to make sure we were still there; we’d creep back in the office just under the wire and pretend to have been good boys all the day long.
It was on one of our afternoon trips that Geoffrey gravely informed me that some singer we both liked—I think it might have been Annie Lennox, but I’m shaky on that point—had HIV. She’d announced it to the press and everything he told me. “Oh no,” I said. “Not her. She’s too good for that!”
He turned beet red. “So do you think that only bad people get the disease?” he snapped.
I never made that mental mistake again, ever.
Because Geoffrey was a sweet and good soul. He dearly loved his boyfriend, a man in Chicago who lacked the means to help him move there, and longed for the days they could finally be together. He had a gentle good humor and a prankster’s sense of fun that made our ventures to the Planet of the Joannes infinitely less painful than they could have been.
At the same time, he had a deep, voracious sexuality. At some point we began to compare sexual experiences and it came out that we both were fans of one of the restrooms on campus—a men’s room so notorious that researchers had installed one-way mirrors in it during the nineteen-fifties so they could study cruising behaviors (it was assumed by then that no one was watching through them, but who knew?). And gradually, on occasion, on our unsupervised afternoon tours around campus, we’d walk to the other end of the university and down into the basement together, and I’d watch him go hog wild.
The restroom was one of those places in the remote bowels of the building where very few people ventured. Anyone down there was looking for sex, plain and simple. I’d act as lookout so that Geoffrey could suck dick until he’d had his fill. Often he’d undo his shirt and kneel there on the floor with a cock in his mouth and another waiting nearby, its owner stroking and watching, while Geoffrey played with his own meat, stiffened by a cock ring. He had skin as pale as mine and the very lightest covering of blond hair on his body. When he sucked, it was with total abandon. His glasses would end up askew on his face. He’d have cum and sweat and saliva dripping down his neck and chest, and spattering his work shirt. He’d particularly go wild over black men, gargling and strangling over their tools with a gusto I haven’t seen outside of porn.
Then, when he was done, or there were no more cocks to service, he’d straighten his spectacles, wipe off his face with a damp paper towel, grin and thank me, and then catch up on whatever pills he’d missed during the session.
We never had sex. Geoffrey was more of a brother to me than anything, and though I didn’t mind being his lookout or even his pimp in the restroom, I never wanted anything more of him. I’m not sure I could have, even. I wasn’t so ignorant that I considered him off-limits or untouchable because of his medical condition, but I hadn’t yet made my peace with those risks. It was probably fortunate for us both that the attraction simply wasn’t there.
I didn’t know at the time how very badly off Geoffrey really was. Daytimes he was lucid and intelligent, creative and chatty. Nighttimes, when I didn’t see him, were apparently when things went south for him. I visited his house once and discovered that it was a maze of Post-It notes and scrawled reminders; apparently he had an advanced-enough case of dementia, combined with the effects of the drugs he was taking, that he would lose track of time, or which of his regimented tasks he was supposed to be doing. If he didn’t stick to a very strict schedule on his own, he could get stuck in a loop for hours.
“I think I’ve made dinner four times,” he would say over the phone to me, some evenings. “But I don’t remember eating at all.” Or, “I had a note to call my mother tonight, but she told me I’d already called her twice before.”
“Do you need me to come over?” I’d ask.
“No,” he’d say in a tiny voice, sometimes. Or sometimes he’d say nothing, and I’d drive up Woodward to his small home, and sit with him on the sofa watching television, until it was time for him to go to bed.
During the daytime he was funny and sweet and lucid. At night, though, with his hairy ankles sticking out of the feet of his pajamas, he looked like a little, lost boy.
We worked together for less than a year. Geoffrey’s symptoms were far enough along that they’d begun shaving away at his life. He had to give him up a beloved cat because of a toxoplasmosis scare. His good hours during the day became fewer, and out of fear of blackouts he had to leave earlier in the afternoons to drive home safely. Soon he stopped working altogether; his boyfriend in Chicago finally found the means to help him move. I got a letter from him the month after he left—a silly, bitchy breath of fresh air in which he asked me about the Planet of the Joannes and wished me sincere luck in coping with the alcoholic boss.
Then a few weeks after that, I heard he was gone. A twinkling little light in my life, extinguished, off stage.
I’m writing this memory of Geoffrey in the very small hours of the morning. I’ve been unable to sleep; the medicine the doctor prescribed for me last week doesn’t seem to be working.
All this restless night I’ve been thinking about Geoffrey, and his sweet and gentle presence, and how much I liked him as a friend. Both of us were wandering and a little alone, back there in that dim office in the building’s lost corridor. How could we have ended up there, else? And yet, for a time, I like to hope our companionship elevated us both—helping me step back into the sunshine again with tentative steps, and keeping him a few steps ahead of a darkness that at every turn threatened to swallow him whole.
I remember you, Geoffrey. It pains me to the core to think about your loss. But I remember.
The cramped office stunk of tobacco, thanks to my alcoholic, bat-shit-crazy boss, a man of little education and even less couth. When he wasn't sitting in his desk chair blatantly reading Playboy and Hustler, he was making passes at secretaries in the building and then, when they'd scatter in fear at his approach, would proclaim them "goddamn lesbians." It was a tedious existence. I needed the money, though. And in the weeks after my sexual assault, my instinct was to shut out the world as much as possible, to wall myself away. That dark, smelly room was my cloister, and the mind-numbing droning of the faculty whenever I clamped on those headphones felt like sanctuary.
For a couple of months I worked alone, but then my tiny office was rearranged one day to accommodate another desk. Soon another transcriber invaded my monastic solitude. His name was Geoffrey. He was a narrow-shouldered guy who came up to my sternum, with a head full of strawberry-blond hair. On a big, bulbous nose rested a pair of very geeky horn-rimmed glasses. Elvis Costello glasses, they were. He was skittish of me at first and I of him. I had a paranoid few days in which I imagined our boss had planted him in there in order to keep an eye on me. I began to relax, though, when I realized that Geoffrey was gay; I heard him talk to what I had to assume was a significant other on the phone, a few times a day. I understood from his guarded, non-gendered references and carefully-neutral words that he was trying not to give away that he was seeing another man.
After that realization, I opened up and Geoffrey and I rapidly became friends. We were both the same age, and both had a particular disdain for our boss. "Fucking asshole," Geoffrey would mutter under his breath, whenever that Marlboro-scented storm cloud would loom on the horizon. We bonded over the strange bureaucracy of our division, too. The vice-president of our school was guarded by two administrative assistants and an academic services officer, all three of whom were named Joanne, and all three of whom were joined at the hip. They lunched together. They gossiped together during work hours. They all chattered in high-pitched, rapid voices. "Planet of the Joannes," I nicknamed the fourth floor one day, and Geoffrey started to laugh so hard that he had to slump against the wall with tears in his eyes.
After that we were constant work friends. We lunched outdoors, munching on sandwiches even in the coldest weather, to rid ourselves of the tobacco stink. "I have something to tell you," he said one day over our meal, perhaps a month into our acquaintance. "I'm into guys."
"I am too," I replied.
He seemed relieved, and commented that he'd thought so, but that he'd really had no way of telling. "And another thing," he said. And I remember the very formal way in which he said these following words, because the defensiveness and awkwardness of them struck me in a way that made me wonder how many times he'd said them before, and how badly they'd been received. "I have unfortunately been infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus."
“That’s okay,” I told him. “Thanks for telling me.”
Hearing him say the words was something of a shock. Yet I wasn’t surprised. Geoffrey and I sat close enough that even over the stink of cigarettes in that office I knew his smell. I’d grown up with a mother whose odor changed with every new pharmaceutical regimen. I knew how medicines change a person’s scent. Geoffrey’s pores exuded a sharp tang that I can only describe as being like the metallic overtones of a diarrhea smell, but without its organic nastiness. It wasn’t vile; it was merely sharp, and distinguishable. I knew he was taking pills for something. It didn’t surprise me that it was for HIV.
These were still the sad and early days of the AIDS crisis. Geoffrey was a novelty. Not for having HIV, but for admitting it. I’d known a couple of people by that point who’d died, but they’d gone off to New York or San Francisco and met their demises offstage, so to speak. I’d never known anyone living with it, day to day, before him.
I got to know Geoffrey’s daily routine with his pills. It seemed as if there were dozens of them that he’d take throughout the day when the timer on his watch would beep. By that point in our friendship he’d tell me what each of them was and what it was for, as he’d down them without water in our little back room. “Down you go,” he’d say, over and over again. “Do your dirty work!”
By that point we were seeing less and less of our boss. The university had instituted a no-smoking rule in its buildings, and he was spending a lot of time ‘working from home,’ which meant that Geoffrey and I were largely unsupervised. We’d do our tasks in the mornings, then sit in the back room and listen to alternative radio while we talked in the afternoons, or visit the Planet of the Joannes so that we could laugh at them later. Sometimes we’d just head out into the sunshine and wile away the hours. Our super-sneaky boss liked to throw in a phone call to the office at five minutes to five, on the days he worked at home, just to make sure we were still there; we’d creep back in the office just under the wire and pretend to have been good boys all the day long.
It was on one of our afternoon trips that Geoffrey gravely informed me that some singer we both liked—I think it might have been Annie Lennox, but I’m shaky on that point—had HIV. She’d announced it to the press and everything he told me. “Oh no,” I said. “Not her. She’s too good for that!”
He turned beet red. “So do you think that only bad people get the disease?” he snapped.
I never made that mental mistake again, ever.
Because Geoffrey was a sweet and good soul. He dearly loved his boyfriend, a man in Chicago who lacked the means to help him move there, and longed for the days they could finally be together. He had a gentle good humor and a prankster’s sense of fun that made our ventures to the Planet of the Joannes infinitely less painful than they could have been.
At the same time, he had a deep, voracious sexuality. At some point we began to compare sexual experiences and it came out that we both were fans of one of the restrooms on campus—a men’s room so notorious that researchers had installed one-way mirrors in it during the nineteen-fifties so they could study cruising behaviors (it was assumed by then that no one was watching through them, but who knew?). And gradually, on occasion, on our unsupervised afternoon tours around campus, we’d walk to the other end of the university and down into the basement together, and I’d watch him go hog wild.
The restroom was one of those places in the remote bowels of the building where very few people ventured. Anyone down there was looking for sex, plain and simple. I’d act as lookout so that Geoffrey could suck dick until he’d had his fill. Often he’d undo his shirt and kneel there on the floor with a cock in his mouth and another waiting nearby, its owner stroking and watching, while Geoffrey played with his own meat, stiffened by a cock ring. He had skin as pale as mine and the very lightest covering of blond hair on his body. When he sucked, it was with total abandon. His glasses would end up askew on his face. He’d have cum and sweat and saliva dripping down his neck and chest, and spattering his work shirt. He’d particularly go wild over black men, gargling and strangling over their tools with a gusto I haven’t seen outside of porn.
Then, when he was done, or there were no more cocks to service, he’d straighten his spectacles, wipe off his face with a damp paper towel, grin and thank me, and then catch up on whatever pills he’d missed during the session.
We never had sex. Geoffrey was more of a brother to me than anything, and though I didn’t mind being his lookout or even his pimp in the restroom, I never wanted anything more of him. I’m not sure I could have, even. I wasn’t so ignorant that I considered him off-limits or untouchable because of his medical condition, but I hadn’t yet made my peace with those risks. It was probably fortunate for us both that the attraction simply wasn’t there.
I didn’t know at the time how very badly off Geoffrey really was. Daytimes he was lucid and intelligent, creative and chatty. Nighttimes, when I didn’t see him, were apparently when things went south for him. I visited his house once and discovered that it was a maze of Post-It notes and scrawled reminders; apparently he had an advanced-enough case of dementia, combined with the effects of the drugs he was taking, that he would lose track of time, or which of his regimented tasks he was supposed to be doing. If he didn’t stick to a very strict schedule on his own, he could get stuck in a loop for hours.
“I think I’ve made dinner four times,” he would say over the phone to me, some evenings. “But I don’t remember eating at all.” Or, “I had a note to call my mother tonight, but she told me I’d already called her twice before.”
“Do you need me to come over?” I’d ask.
“No,” he’d say in a tiny voice, sometimes. Or sometimes he’d say nothing, and I’d drive up Woodward to his small home, and sit with him on the sofa watching television, until it was time for him to go to bed.
During the daytime he was funny and sweet and lucid. At night, though, with his hairy ankles sticking out of the feet of his pajamas, he looked like a little, lost boy.
We worked together for less than a year. Geoffrey’s symptoms were far enough along that they’d begun shaving away at his life. He had to give him up a beloved cat because of a toxoplasmosis scare. His good hours during the day became fewer, and out of fear of blackouts he had to leave earlier in the afternoons to drive home safely. Soon he stopped working altogether; his boyfriend in Chicago finally found the means to help him move. I got a letter from him the month after he left—a silly, bitchy breath of fresh air in which he asked me about the Planet of the Joannes and wished me sincere luck in coping with the alcoholic boss.
Then a few weeks after that, I heard he was gone. A twinkling little light in my life, extinguished, off stage.
I’m writing this memory of Geoffrey in the very small hours of the morning. I’ve been unable to sleep; the medicine the doctor prescribed for me last week doesn’t seem to be working.
All this restless night I’ve been thinking about Geoffrey, and his sweet and gentle presence, and how much I liked him as a friend. Both of us were wandering and a little alone, back there in that dim office in the building’s lost corridor. How could we have ended up there, else? And yet, for a time, I like to hope our companionship elevated us both—helping me step back into the sunshine again with tentative steps, and keeping him a few steps ahead of a darkness that at every turn threatened to swallow him whole.
I remember you, Geoffrey. It pains me to the core to think about your loss. But I remember.
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Game
Those of you who also follow me on Twitter might have picked up from my desperate tweets (Somebody please make these fifth-graders stop farting!) that I’ve been spending a lot of my last couple of weeks playing piano for kids.
I’ve never claimed to be an especially great pianist. I can’t improvise. I’m not one of those musicians who can sit down and play anything by ear, though I might be able to plunk out the melody with an index finger and a whole lot of fumbling. I can’t transpose a piece from D to A-flat major, the way some of my friends can. But I can sit down in front of a piece of music and sight-read it well, and I’m fantastic at listening to a solo instrumentalist and following their musical instincts. Plus I don’t miss a whole lot of notes. Particularly on those occasions I’m present-minded enough actually to glance at the key signature at the beginning of the piece.
Certainly my skills are good enough to accompany a bunch of ten-year-old monkeys playing a three-part rendition of “We Will Rock You” written entirely in big fat quarter notes. Though inevitably there will be some little Suzuki savant who will want to play some spritely concerto that involves accidentals and sixteenth notes and other roadblocks that actually require me to pay attention.
I know a lot of music teachers in various school systems—all of them big ol’ lesbians. (Which is not so much a comment on their personal size, as on the sheer bulk of their lesbianism.) I’m not trying to imply that every female choral, orchestral, and band teacher in my metropolitan area happens to exhibit Sapphic tendencies . . . well, yeah, that’s totally what I’m saying. When Christmas and this time of year roll around, though, my piano-playing skills happen to be in demand. Those two periods are the height of the concert seasons, of the solo and ensemble festivals, and of the dreaded regionals, which are usually infinitely less exciting than they seem on Glee. So I get hired a lot.
The pay’s pretty good. But other than the noise and the smell of post-lunch farts and of gym socks and that vaguely horsey odor of the prepubescent, and other than the prospect of having to play the Boccherini Minuetto eleventy-billion times, the main reason I sometimes dread going into the schools where one of my friends is teaching is because I know I’m going to have to play The Game.
Ah, The Game. That’s the short version of an amusement my teacher friends leave with the unspoken title of Guess Which Of My Students Will Someday Be A Future Full-Fledged Card-Carrying Homosexual American Citizen? I first heard of it years ago, when the teachers would compare notes over dinner or drinks, like this:
I didn’t believe in The Game for a long time. In fact, at first I refused to play it when Marian, one of my teacher friends, cornered me after one of her choir rehearsals. Scarcely had I finished playing the last bars of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” than she shooed her charges from the classroom and beetled over. “So?” she asked.
“So what?” I wanted to know.
“So!” she said, impatient with my obliviousness. “Which ones?”
“Which ones what?” I was baffled.
“Which ones are going to be fam-i-ly?” she growled, sotto voce. “Play The Game!”
It was then that I remembered The Stupid Game. “Ohhhh,” I said, finally understanding. I looked around the room at the graceless homunculi loping in from the hall. “Marian, they’re ten,” I pointed out.
“Trust me,” she said, standing up to take control of the classroom once again. “You can tell. You. Can. Tell. You can pooh-pooh it now, but ask any teacher. All I need is a few minutes in any classroom and I can tell you exactly who, in eight years time, is going to be adding me on Facebook and will have a profile that reads ‘I am: A Man/Interested in: Men. You look at the next class. Then we’ll compare notes.”
Throughout the rest of the morning I studied the class when I wasn’t playing the piano, knowing that I was going to be grilled later on. Sure enough, the moment that the students began to file back to their homerooms, Marian shot over. “Well?” she asked.
“The little boy with that cowlick?” I replied, uncertainly.
“NO,” she said, in the same acid tone Anne Robinson employs when she tells someone that he is the Weakest Link—goodbye! “WRONG.”
“Jesus Christ, woman,” I said, peeling myself from the cinderblock wall against which she’d blasted me.
“Try again!”
I sighed. “These children are barely self-conscious yet. They’re bundles of impulse and reaction, still testing the world around them with hypotheses they can hardly express. That anything—anything—can be predicted about their futures and their potential is a fallacy in and of itself. Therefore—“
“Shut your fat trap and try again,” she growled.
“Fine. How about the little girl who was over on the left?” I asked weakly, pointing to the approximate area where she’d stood. Marian shook her head, needing more to go on. “She had on a white sweater? The one with the really, really short hair?” The girl in question had sported little more than a fine buzzed down on her head that made her look as if she were a nascent political protestor. She looked like Sinead O’Connor about to rip the Pope’s photo in half. If she wasn’t being raised by lesbian parents, there was at least a highly-militant mother somewhere in the background. "She looked all punk-y."
"Emily?" she asked, astonished. I shrugged. I didn't know the girl's name. “Oh sweetie.” Marian looked at me with pity in her eyes, then patted my leg with unsuppressed condescension. “Emily just got back to school last week. She's our little cancer survivor.”
Last night I was sitting in a stinking, stuffy gymnasium doubling as an auditorium, where an 88-piece orchestra of fifth-graders hopped up on, and farting from, their dinners bounced nervously in their chairs while their families waited for the concert to start. My teacher friend, who’d managed single-handedly to tune all the instruments while coping with the thousand student questions that pop up at these things, was busily trying to string a microphone cord between chairs so she could get the concert going.
Nearby, a kid sporting a violin tucked his instrument beneath his arm and ran his fingers through his Justin Bieber hair. “Hey JONAH!” he yelled out to a friend in the cello section. “Did you see the LADY GAGA VIDEO for ‘Judas’? It came out today!” His friend shouted out something I couldn’t hear through the hubbub. “I know, it was SUPPOSED to debut on Entertainment Weekly tonight but it leaked on YouTube earlier! I've watched it like, a hundred and seventy-four times after school. The dancing is SICK. I know, right? They're like...!” Then, still clutching his violin, he pulled out some of the moves that Gaga’s considerably buffer and less formally-dressed dancers typically execute. He looked a little like a hip-hop fiddler on the roof, but I have to hand it to the kid, he had all kinds of fabulous going on. “And she's like, I'm in love with Judas, Joooo-das! You just know Britney’s going to SPIT GLITTER!”
My teacher friend was regarding me steadily, with her eyebrows raised. “That one,” I said to her, discreetly pointing.
Her hand over the mic, she pulled her mouth into a wry moue. “Ya think?”
“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, making a pantomime of spitting on my hands and rubbing them together, “is how you play The Game.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She patted me on the back and adopted a baby-talk voice. “Helen Keller could’ve picked out that one. From thirty miles away. But you are awfully cute.”
“Whatever,” I grumbled.
She might have made me feel as if I’d only just managed to hit an extremely large inflatable beach ball with an equally outside child’s bat, but at least I was still in The Game.
I’ve never claimed to be an especially great pianist. I can’t improvise. I’m not one of those musicians who can sit down and play anything by ear, though I might be able to plunk out the melody with an index finger and a whole lot of fumbling. I can’t transpose a piece from D to A-flat major, the way some of my friends can. But I can sit down in front of a piece of music and sight-read it well, and I’m fantastic at listening to a solo instrumentalist and following their musical instincts. Plus I don’t miss a whole lot of notes. Particularly on those occasions I’m present-minded enough actually to glance at the key signature at the beginning of the piece.
Certainly my skills are good enough to accompany a bunch of ten-year-old monkeys playing a three-part rendition of “We Will Rock You” written entirely in big fat quarter notes. Though inevitably there will be some little Suzuki savant who will want to play some spritely concerto that involves accidentals and sixteenth notes and other roadblocks that actually require me to pay attention.
I know a lot of music teachers in various school systems—all of them big ol’ lesbians. (Which is not so much a comment on their personal size, as on the sheer bulk of their lesbianism.) I’m not trying to imply that every female choral, orchestral, and band teacher in my metropolitan area happens to exhibit Sapphic tendencies . . . well, yeah, that’s totally what I’m saying. When Christmas and this time of year roll around, though, my piano-playing skills happen to be in demand. Those two periods are the height of the concert seasons, of the solo and ensemble festivals, and of the dreaded regionals, which are usually infinitely less exciting than they seem on Glee. So I get hired a lot.
The pay’s pretty good. But other than the noise and the smell of post-lunch farts and of gym socks and that vaguely horsey odor of the prepubescent, and other than the prospect of having to play the Boccherini Minuetto eleventy-billion times, the main reason I sometimes dread going into the schools where one of my friends is teaching is because I know I’m going to have to play The Game.
Ah, The Game. That’s the short version of an amusement my teacher friends leave with the unspoken title of Guess Which Of My Students Will Someday Be A Future Full-Fledged Card-Carrying Homosexual American Citizen? I first heard of it years ago, when the teachers would compare notes over dinner or drinks, like this:
BAND TEACHER 1: That little short kid with the dark hair who wore the blue T-shirt. . . .
BAND TEACHER 2: Dale? Oh, you think so? Yeah, I could see it. But if so, he’ll be the closeted type with a twink boyfriend on the side and four kids in the minivan.
1: And that one with the curls. . . .
2: Justin? No way!
1: No, not Justin. The one with the blond curls.
2: Oh, Adam? Well duh! Totally! And let me tell you, that Bible-thumping mother of his is going to freak out when he comes popping out of the closet.
I didn’t believe in The Game for a long time. In fact, at first I refused to play it when Marian, one of my teacher friends, cornered me after one of her choir rehearsals. Scarcely had I finished playing the last bars of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” than she shooed her charges from the classroom and beetled over. “So?” she asked.
“So what?” I wanted to know.
“So!” she said, impatient with my obliviousness. “Which ones?”
“Which ones what?” I was baffled.
“Which ones are going to be fam-i-ly?” she growled, sotto voce. “Play The Game!”
It was then that I remembered The Stupid Game. “Ohhhh,” I said, finally understanding. I looked around the room at the graceless homunculi loping in from the hall. “Marian, they’re ten,” I pointed out.
“Trust me,” she said, standing up to take control of the classroom once again. “You can tell. You. Can. Tell. You can pooh-pooh it now, but ask any teacher. All I need is a few minutes in any classroom and I can tell you exactly who, in eight years time, is going to be adding me on Facebook and will have a profile that reads ‘I am: A Man/Interested in: Men. You look at the next class. Then we’ll compare notes.”
Throughout the rest of the morning I studied the class when I wasn’t playing the piano, knowing that I was going to be grilled later on. Sure enough, the moment that the students began to file back to their homerooms, Marian shot over. “Well?” she asked.
“The little boy with that cowlick?” I replied, uncertainly.
“NO,” she said, in the same acid tone Anne Robinson employs when she tells someone that he is the Weakest Link—goodbye! “WRONG.”
“Jesus Christ, woman,” I said, peeling myself from the cinderblock wall against which she’d blasted me.
“Try again!”
I sighed. “These children are barely self-conscious yet. They’re bundles of impulse and reaction, still testing the world around them with hypotheses they can hardly express. That anything—anything—can be predicted about their futures and their potential is a fallacy in and of itself. Therefore—“
“Shut your fat trap and try again,” she growled.
“Fine. How about the little girl who was over on the left?” I asked weakly, pointing to the approximate area where she’d stood. Marian shook her head, needing more to go on. “She had on a white sweater? The one with the really, really short hair?” The girl in question had sported little more than a fine buzzed down on her head that made her look as if she were a nascent political protestor. She looked like Sinead O’Connor about to rip the Pope’s photo in half. If she wasn’t being raised by lesbian parents, there was at least a highly-militant mother somewhere in the background. "She looked all punk-y."
"Emily?" she asked, astonished. I shrugged. I didn't know the girl's name. “Oh sweetie.” Marian looked at me with pity in her eyes, then patted my leg with unsuppressed condescension. “Emily just got back to school last week. She's our little cancer survivor.”
Last night I was sitting in a stinking, stuffy gymnasium doubling as an auditorium, where an 88-piece orchestra of fifth-graders hopped up on, and farting from, their dinners bounced nervously in their chairs while their families waited for the concert to start. My teacher friend, who’d managed single-handedly to tune all the instruments while coping with the thousand student questions that pop up at these things, was busily trying to string a microphone cord between chairs so she could get the concert going.
Nearby, a kid sporting a violin tucked his instrument beneath his arm and ran his fingers through his Justin Bieber hair. “Hey JONAH!” he yelled out to a friend in the cello section. “Did you see the LADY GAGA VIDEO for ‘Judas’? It came out today!” His friend shouted out something I couldn’t hear through the hubbub. “I know, it was SUPPOSED to debut on Entertainment Weekly tonight but it leaked on YouTube earlier! I've watched it like, a hundred and seventy-four times after school. The dancing is SICK. I know, right? They're like...!” Then, still clutching his violin, he pulled out some of the moves that Gaga’s considerably buffer and less formally-dressed dancers typically execute. He looked a little like a hip-hop fiddler on the roof, but I have to hand it to the kid, he had all kinds of fabulous going on. “And she's like, I'm in love with Judas, Joooo-das! You just know Britney’s going to SPIT GLITTER!”
My teacher friend was regarding me steadily, with her eyebrows raised. “That one,” I said to her, discreetly pointing.
Her hand over the mic, she pulled her mouth into a wry moue. “Ya think?”
“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, making a pantomime of spitting on my hands and rubbing them together, “is how you play The Game.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She patted me on the back and adopted a baby-talk voice. “Helen Keller could’ve picked out that one. From thirty miles away. But you are awfully cute.”
“Whatever,” I grumbled.
She might have made me feel as if I’d only just managed to hit an extremely large inflatable beach ball with an equally outside child’s bat, but at least I was still in The Game.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Open Forum Friday: To Shave or Not to Shave?
I’ve been hooking up online since my college years in the early-to-mid nineteen-eighties, when I used the school’s mainframe mail system to make advances to guys. I was on the so-archaic-it-hurts Prodigy network when it was first released, surfing its message boards with a 1200-baud modem (and scoring anonymous dick the afternoon I made my account). I cruised through AOL and eWorld and local freenets and dial-in bulletin boards until the advent of the world-wide web. Then lived through gay.com during its heyday and its myriad successors since.
And I still think I’ve never seen a stranger fad than the no-baldies craze of the early nineties.
Oh, fads in looks come and go. But during my America Online days, back around 1993 or so, the in-look for men involved hair. Lots of hair. Guys wanted other guys with big, lush, New Kids on the Block ‘dos. Do you have all your hair? would be the most common question I’d get then. These days, it’s an odd enough question that one would suspect the person asking it of being some kind of fetishist—but no, back then it was common enough that it would be asked with all the usual interrogatory questions. Age? Weight? Location? You got all your hair?
The question was one of those that would make me shake my head and mentally classify the guy asking it as an assmunch of the highest degree—the kind of man who was looking for the most spurious of reasons not to meet people, whether it was scaling in a pound over his absolute weight limit, or being 37 in a room full of under-twenties, or having skin that was too dark or a forehead that was too high.
And then all of a sudden that criterion vanished. Movie stars started to crop their hair very, very close, or shave their heads altogether. The shaved head became macho, sexy, accepted. By the late nineties, I never heard anyone asking about hair again.
Atop one’s head, anyway. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of men commenting about each other’s pubes online. And it ain’t always pretty.
The push for manscaping has swung from one extreme to the other in my lifetime. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I never heard of anyone taking a razor to their pubes. It simply wasn’t done, not even by the most depraved of sex hounds—in my parts of the country, at least. It wasn’t until the nineties that it even occurred to me that such a thing could be done, and it wasn’t until the first decade of the new millennium that I was trimming myself regularly.
Part of the change, of course, I think can be attributed to porn. Cheap, easily-distributed porn that could be viewed at home, whether on a VHS machine or a DVD player or on the net, made a lot of things more popular, and manscaping was one of them. Trimmed sacs show up more cleanly on camera; it’s easier to see how big a dick is when it isn’t surrounded by a thick thatch. I think trimming reached a critical mass in the public consciousness in the Queer Eye days, when a squadron of gay guys would tell their straighter brethren that cleaning up body hair was perfectly acceptable.
Now it seems that a shorn crotch is de rigueur in certain circles; I’ve read cries of disgust online when guys present photos of a perfectly normal bush, almost as if someone had pooped on their Papis.. To listen to this crowd, you’d think man’s natural state was to look like a bunch of prepubescent boys, and any hirsute display is some kind of throwback to abnormality, if not to Neanderthal man.
I’m curious about what my readers think and do with their body hair. Do you trim? Leave it natural? Or do something in between? And what do you use to do it?
I tend to fall in the latter camp. I often like the feel of my nuts when they’re smooth; I like to keep my bush present, but trimmed low. In the past I’ve used a regular razor to keep everything in check. Once (and never again, after a light burn that left me walking bow-legged for four days) I used a chemical exfoliant. But these days I have an electric body hair trimmer that’s easy to use and keep clean, and which denudes my sac without nicks or abrasions.
I think my dick looks better in photographs when I’ve trimmed the pubes down some—but I have no desire whatsoever to eradicate them altogether.
Let me know what you do in the comments—and more importantly, what you prefer on another guy. Does body hair make as much of a difference to you as it seems to for so many?
And I still think I’ve never seen a stranger fad than the no-baldies craze of the early nineties.
Oh, fads in looks come and go. But during my America Online days, back around 1993 or so, the in-look for men involved hair. Lots of hair. Guys wanted other guys with big, lush, New Kids on the Block ‘dos. Do you have all your hair? would be the most common question I’d get then. These days, it’s an odd enough question that one would suspect the person asking it of being some kind of fetishist—but no, back then it was common enough that it would be asked with all the usual interrogatory questions. Age? Weight? Location? You got all your hair?
The question was one of those that would make me shake my head and mentally classify the guy asking it as an assmunch of the highest degree—the kind of man who was looking for the most spurious of reasons not to meet people, whether it was scaling in a pound over his absolute weight limit, or being 37 in a room full of under-twenties, or having skin that was too dark or a forehead that was too high.
And then all of a sudden that criterion vanished. Movie stars started to crop their hair very, very close, or shave their heads altogether. The shaved head became macho, sexy, accepted. By the late nineties, I never heard anyone asking about hair again.
Atop one’s head, anyway. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of men commenting about each other’s pubes online. And it ain’t always pretty.
The push for manscaping has swung from one extreme to the other in my lifetime. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I never heard of anyone taking a razor to their pubes. It simply wasn’t done, not even by the most depraved of sex hounds—in my parts of the country, at least. It wasn’t until the nineties that it even occurred to me that such a thing could be done, and it wasn’t until the first decade of the new millennium that I was trimming myself regularly.
Part of the change, of course, I think can be attributed to porn. Cheap, easily-distributed porn that could be viewed at home, whether on a VHS machine or a DVD player or on the net, made a lot of things more popular, and manscaping was one of them. Trimmed sacs show up more cleanly on camera; it’s easier to see how big a dick is when it isn’t surrounded by a thick thatch. I think trimming reached a critical mass in the public consciousness in the Queer Eye days, when a squadron of gay guys would tell their straighter brethren that cleaning up body hair was perfectly acceptable.
Now it seems that a shorn crotch is de rigueur in certain circles; I’ve read cries of disgust online when guys present photos of a perfectly normal bush, almost as if someone had pooped on their Papis.. To listen to this crowd, you’d think man’s natural state was to look like a bunch of prepubescent boys, and any hirsute display is some kind of throwback to abnormality, if not to Neanderthal man.
I’m curious about what my readers think and do with their body hair. Do you trim? Leave it natural? Or do something in between? And what do you use to do it?
I tend to fall in the latter camp. I often like the feel of my nuts when they’re smooth; I like to keep my bush present, but trimmed low. In the past I’ve used a regular razor to keep everything in check. Once (and never again, after a light burn that left me walking bow-legged for four days) I used a chemical exfoliant. But these days I have an electric body hair trimmer that’s easy to use and keep clean, and which denudes my sac without nicks or abrasions.
I think my dick looks better in photographs when I’ve trimmed the pubes down some—but I have no desire whatsoever to eradicate them altogether.
Let me know what you do in the comments—and more importantly, what you prefer on another guy. Does body hair make as much of a difference to you as it seems to for so many?
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Daddy's Best Boy
His name is Steve; he prefers that I address him as Son, or Daddy’s Boy.
Steve moved from the eastern seaboard to accept a job at a big hospital here in town. A friend of mine gave him my email address when he found out we lived only ten minutes apart; we’ve seen each other irregularly for a year, since, when his busy hospital schedule can accommodate a meeting. Much of his furniture’s still in storage, making his apartment a little sparse.
I’m not there to see the furniture, though.
The moment the door’s closed, he’s on me, moving my hands into his loose clothing. “Oh fuck, daddy,” he tells me. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too, son,” I whisper when I manage to tear my mouth from his.
“Do I look okay, daddy?" He's not pretending, with this question. He's earnest, and even worried a little. "I want to look good for you. I want to make you proud of me.”
Steve always looks great. His face has the strong chin, easy grin, and jock-like good features of a sportswear model. Sometimes he’ll greet me wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and tight underwear, or a tank top and some slack sweatpants. Sometimes he'll be wearing nothing. Today he's greeted me in a black jock and a tight-fitting wife-beater. “Oh yes,” I hiss, pushing him in the direction of the air mattress lying on his bedroom floor. He's still not managed to take the time to buy a bed. “You look very, very good, boy. I want you to show me how good you look.”
It’s ridiculous, this roleplay. He’s almost the same age as I. With his salt and pepper hair and dark brown eyes, he might even look older. No matter. He insinuates himself into my lap and has me slap his ass until it’s red, and snap the elastic of his jock to raise angry welts across his butt as he moans and writhes.
It would take only one word to break the illusion we sharing together. One word, one refusal, one mistimed snort of disbelief. “I want to make my daddy feel good,” he tells me, pushing me onto my back and straddling my hips. “I want to be daddy’s best boy.”
“Oh, you are daddy’s best boy,” I say. His hole is already lubed, loose, and ready. I wrap my fist around my cock and support it as he lowers himself down. Then I sigh as I sink deep into his warm, soft flesh. “You are making your daddy very proud, son.”
His eyes widen as they stare into mine, then close entirely. His mouth drops into a gasp. His head jerks backwards, and he says nothing more. Not for a long, long while. This is the payoff, for me. I wear the daddy mask just for this moment, when I see him so lost in the bliss of his fantasy, beyond words and the cares of the everyday, that his body shakes with pleasure.
After our long lovemaking, yesterday afternoon, I was drinking cold water from a glass mug as I looked at the largest of the photographs sitting atop his dresser. They're the only decoration I've ever seen in his spartan apartment; he must have dug them out fairly recently. The photo was of a young man with medium-length blond hair, handsome as hell, standing in a park with a hound at his side. The dog’s silky coat was glistening in the sunlight, falling around the dog's body like a pair of shaggy, bell-bottomed pajamas. There were matching glints in the young man’s wire-rimmed spectacles. “Is that you?” I asked Steve, letting the water soothe my raw and ragged throat.
“That’s me,” he replied, settling down by my side on the air mattress. He picked up the frame and studied the photograph. His face wore the somewhat sad, somewhat wistful expression of a man looking at the picture of an old friend he once loved but hadn’t seen in some time.
“The dog’s beautiful,” I told him.
“She really was,” he said. “She really was.” He paused, lost in thought, while I waited for more. “Sally was her name. She was an afghan. I had two afghans, once. Both were beautiful dogs. Total couch hogs. If they wanted up next to you when you were watching TV, they got their way. But they were my babies. Then I had to have one of them put to sleep because she had cancer.”
“I’m really sorry.” I waited a moment. “How old were you in that photo?”
“Twenty. . . .” He calculated on his fingers. “Between twenty-four and twenty-six. I forget exactly. Almost twenty years ago. Yeah, the first dog died of cancer just as I was at the end of my relationship with my first serious boyfriend. He was twenty years older than me. A librarian. We were living in Texas and he had two job opportunities—one in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, you know, and the other in Seattle. So I went to Seattle with him and I realized . . . well, it was kind of strange. I realized I didn’t want to be with him any more. He was so settled and I was just young, you know. I wanted to travel and see things. I thought that's what it would mean to live my life. Going to Seattle to his home, with his furniture and his paintings and decorations—none of it mine—made me realize how much I was missing.
“So I told him that I was sorry, but I wanted to move out and see the world. He didn’t realize at first what I was saying. He thought he could kind of keep the home fires burning and that when I was tired of going new places, I’d come back and we’d live happily ever after. I kept telling him that I wouldn’t be coming back, but I don’t think he ever really believed me.
“When I'd left Texas to join my boyfriend, I’d boarded Sally with a woman I knew, just for a little bit until I could ship her to Seattle. When I picked her up, she told me, ‘Hey, your girl is a sweetheart and a real beauty. If you ever want to sell, I know just the guy who would love to have her.’ She named a name and I said, ‘Hey, I know Tom!’ He was a guy I knew pretty well who had an afghan already. So I knew he’d take really good care of her. I couldn’t leave Sally with my boyfriend, you see. He didn’t like dogs. He never remembered to feed them when I was out late at school or anything. The afghans were totally my babies. So I called Tom, my friend, and we talked, and he was thrilled to buy Sally from me. It gave me just a little cash, you know, for moving expenses, and I knew he’d love her just as much as I did."
He was silent for a while. At last I rested my hand atop his. When he spoke again, it was with a shaky tremolo.
“So I said goodbye, and saw her off. That night my boyfriend came home. ‘Where’s the dog?’ he asked, and I told him Sally was gone.” Steve got quiet for a moment. “He was just standing there with his briefcase, and then he dropped it to the floor. It fell open and all his papers fell out. Then he burst into tears. Because it hit him right then, for the first time, that I was leaving and wasn’t coming back and that our relationship was really . . . over.”
I reached out and pulled Steve close to me, until his head rested on my shoulder. I was afraid to speak, but after a moment of respectful hush I murmured, “How did you feel, giving up your baby?”
“I knew Sally was going to a good home, and there was just no way I could take her with me, so. . . .” His voice trailed off into silence. “I still miss that dog.” He draped his arm over my chest, and kissed my nipple. “I don’t know why I told you that story. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about my baby, before.”
I kissed the daddy’s boy on the head, and held him close while we both stared at the photograph in the darkening room.
Steve moved from the eastern seaboard to accept a job at a big hospital here in town. A friend of mine gave him my email address when he found out we lived only ten minutes apart; we’ve seen each other irregularly for a year, since, when his busy hospital schedule can accommodate a meeting. Much of his furniture’s still in storage, making his apartment a little sparse.
I’m not there to see the furniture, though.
The moment the door’s closed, he’s on me, moving my hands into his loose clothing. “Oh fuck, daddy,” he tells me. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too, son,” I whisper when I manage to tear my mouth from his.
“Do I look okay, daddy?" He's not pretending, with this question. He's earnest, and even worried a little. "I want to look good for you. I want to make you proud of me.”
Steve always looks great. His face has the strong chin, easy grin, and jock-like good features of a sportswear model. Sometimes he’ll greet me wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and tight underwear, or a tank top and some slack sweatpants. Sometimes he'll be wearing nothing. Today he's greeted me in a black jock and a tight-fitting wife-beater. “Oh yes,” I hiss, pushing him in the direction of the air mattress lying on his bedroom floor. He's still not managed to take the time to buy a bed. “You look very, very good, boy. I want you to show me how good you look.”
It’s ridiculous, this roleplay. He’s almost the same age as I. With his salt and pepper hair and dark brown eyes, he might even look older. No matter. He insinuates himself into my lap and has me slap his ass until it’s red, and snap the elastic of his jock to raise angry welts across his butt as he moans and writhes.
It would take only one word to break the illusion we sharing together. One word, one refusal, one mistimed snort of disbelief. “I want to make my daddy feel good,” he tells me, pushing me onto my back and straddling my hips. “I want to be daddy’s best boy.”
“Oh, you are daddy’s best boy,” I say. His hole is already lubed, loose, and ready. I wrap my fist around my cock and support it as he lowers himself down. Then I sigh as I sink deep into his warm, soft flesh. “You are making your daddy very proud, son.”
His eyes widen as they stare into mine, then close entirely. His mouth drops into a gasp. His head jerks backwards, and he says nothing more. Not for a long, long while. This is the payoff, for me. I wear the daddy mask just for this moment, when I see him so lost in the bliss of his fantasy, beyond words and the cares of the everyday, that his body shakes with pleasure.
After our long lovemaking, yesterday afternoon, I was drinking cold water from a glass mug as I looked at the largest of the photographs sitting atop his dresser. They're the only decoration I've ever seen in his spartan apartment; he must have dug them out fairly recently. The photo was of a young man with medium-length blond hair, handsome as hell, standing in a park with a hound at his side. The dog’s silky coat was glistening in the sunlight, falling around the dog's body like a pair of shaggy, bell-bottomed pajamas. There were matching glints in the young man’s wire-rimmed spectacles. “Is that you?” I asked Steve, letting the water soothe my raw and ragged throat.
“That’s me,” he replied, settling down by my side on the air mattress. He picked up the frame and studied the photograph. His face wore the somewhat sad, somewhat wistful expression of a man looking at the picture of an old friend he once loved but hadn’t seen in some time.
“The dog’s beautiful,” I told him.
“She really was,” he said. “She really was.” He paused, lost in thought, while I waited for more. “Sally was her name. She was an afghan. I had two afghans, once. Both were beautiful dogs. Total couch hogs. If they wanted up next to you when you were watching TV, they got their way. But they were my babies. Then I had to have one of them put to sleep because she had cancer.”
“I’m really sorry.” I waited a moment. “How old were you in that photo?”
“Twenty. . . .” He calculated on his fingers. “Between twenty-four and twenty-six. I forget exactly. Almost twenty years ago. Yeah, the first dog died of cancer just as I was at the end of my relationship with my first serious boyfriend. He was twenty years older than me. A librarian. We were living in Texas and he had two job opportunities—one in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, you know, and the other in Seattle. So I went to Seattle with him and I realized . . . well, it was kind of strange. I realized I didn’t want to be with him any more. He was so settled and I was just young, you know. I wanted to travel and see things. I thought that's what it would mean to live my life. Going to Seattle to his home, with his furniture and his paintings and decorations—none of it mine—made me realize how much I was missing.
“So I told him that I was sorry, but I wanted to move out and see the world. He didn’t realize at first what I was saying. He thought he could kind of keep the home fires burning and that when I was tired of going new places, I’d come back and we’d live happily ever after. I kept telling him that I wouldn’t be coming back, but I don’t think he ever really believed me.
“When I'd left Texas to join my boyfriend, I’d boarded Sally with a woman I knew, just for a little bit until I could ship her to Seattle. When I picked her up, she told me, ‘Hey, your girl is a sweetheart and a real beauty. If you ever want to sell, I know just the guy who would love to have her.’ She named a name and I said, ‘Hey, I know Tom!’ He was a guy I knew pretty well who had an afghan already. So I knew he’d take really good care of her. I couldn’t leave Sally with my boyfriend, you see. He didn’t like dogs. He never remembered to feed them when I was out late at school or anything. The afghans were totally my babies. So I called Tom, my friend, and we talked, and he was thrilled to buy Sally from me. It gave me just a little cash, you know, for moving expenses, and I knew he’d love her just as much as I did."
He was silent for a while. At last I rested my hand atop his. When he spoke again, it was with a shaky tremolo.
“So I said goodbye, and saw her off. That night my boyfriend came home. ‘Where’s the dog?’ he asked, and I told him Sally was gone.” Steve got quiet for a moment. “He was just standing there with his briefcase, and then he dropped it to the floor. It fell open and all his papers fell out. Then he burst into tears. Because it hit him right then, for the first time, that I was leaving and wasn’t coming back and that our relationship was really . . . over.”
I reached out and pulled Steve close to me, until his head rested on my shoulder. I was afraid to speak, but after a moment of respectful hush I murmured, “How did you feel, giving up your baby?”
“I knew Sally was going to a good home, and there was just no way I could take her with me, so. . . .” His voice trailed off into silence. “I still miss that dog.” He draped his arm over my chest, and kissed my nipple. “I don’t know why I told you that story. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about my baby, before.”
I kissed the daddy’s boy on the head, and held him close while we both stared at the photograph in the darkening room.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
The Last Fantasy
Guys ask me about my fantasies a lot. I’m not quite sure what to tell them.
I tend not to fantasize about stuff I’ve done, or especially those things I’ve tried several times and know I’d probably do again given the opportunity. So while many men might reply, I want to get gang-banged! when they’re asked about a favorite fantasy, I’ve done that. Ditto sex while driving, or three-ways, or four-ways, or gyrating masses in a hotel room. I’ve had a lifelong tendency to act upon my sexual whims, instead of think about them and diddle myself. Even that cliched old straight-guy trope of watching two women get it on with each other and then with me? Been there, done that, in my past.
I say these things not as braggadocio (though I fear it sounds that way) but as encouragement to anyone reading. Fantasies are supposed to be calls to action. They're your libido, springing to life. If the desires aren't hurting anyone, why shouldn’t you test the waters and indulge in those you’ve found intriguing? Fantasies are the call of the sexual muse, the spirit of sexual adventure stirring our souls. They should be honored.
Anyway. When men ask about my fantasies, I am sad to say that the things about which I daydream, because I’m unlikely ever to do them, lie outside the sexual realm. Like, sitting down with a bucket of chorizo mixed with melted queso blanco and eating it with a giant wooden spoon. Or finding a sugar daddy who’ll let me run free with his credit card in the Banana Republic. Sigh.
I do have one sexual fantasy, however, to which I admitted on formspring.me a couple of weeks back. It’s something I’ve never attempted. It’s something I probably wouldn’t attempt without the presence of someone familiar. Simply put, I’ve been restrained and used as a bottom, in my distant teen years. However, I’ve never been restrained and used as a top.
I think I’d like to try it.
I’d like to have my wrists and ankles bound and immobile, and my eyes blindfolded, and to find myself totally at the mercy of a hungry bottom. Or bottoms, plural. That issue I have with feeling guilty about receiving a really good rim job? I wouldn’t have much of a choice if I were restrained and being forced to accept it. I wouldn’t be able to control when and for how long he sits on my face and makes me eat his hole, or suck his dick.
I certainly wouldn’t have a say or be able to resist when the bottom uses all his abilities to get me hard, and sucks me for as long as he wants, or gets rough with my nipples and nuts. I couldn’t protest when he sat down on my dick and rode it relentlessly, milking the loads from me.
And quite honestly, I wouldn’t want to protest any of it.
Once I had a fuckbuddy who swore up and down that he was going to make the scenario happen for me—he planned to rent a cheap hotel room, round up a few bottoms, and let them all have a go at me anonymously. For some reason it never happened. Probably too much planning—and I can understand that. I admire those men with the patience to plan hotel gang-bangs, because I’ve given up on organizing them. Guys are way too flaky about it.
So my sole remaining fantasy, sadly, remains just that.
I think the attraction of the scenario lies in a desire to take a short vacation from setting the pace, from taking the lead. It’s a fantasy in which I experience stimulation without responsibility. Not that I mind taking charge of an encounter, mind you. It’s part of my nature to do so. Being prevented from following my natural impulses is what would push me off-center enough that I’d find every sensation arousing and strange, and would leave me both dreading and anticipating more.
Then again, I might find it easier to get lucky with the sugar daddy with the Banana Republic card.
I tend not to fantasize about stuff I’ve done, or especially those things I’ve tried several times and know I’d probably do again given the opportunity. So while many men might reply, I want to get gang-banged! when they’re asked about a favorite fantasy, I’ve done that. Ditto sex while driving, or three-ways, or four-ways, or gyrating masses in a hotel room. I’ve had a lifelong tendency to act upon my sexual whims, instead of think about them and diddle myself. Even that cliched old straight-guy trope of watching two women get it on with each other and then with me? Been there, done that, in my past.
I say these things not as braggadocio (though I fear it sounds that way) but as encouragement to anyone reading. Fantasies are supposed to be calls to action. They're your libido, springing to life. If the desires aren't hurting anyone, why shouldn’t you test the waters and indulge in those you’ve found intriguing? Fantasies are the call of the sexual muse, the spirit of sexual adventure stirring our souls. They should be honored.
Anyway. When men ask about my fantasies, I am sad to say that the things about which I daydream, because I’m unlikely ever to do them, lie outside the sexual realm. Like, sitting down with a bucket of chorizo mixed with melted queso blanco and eating it with a giant wooden spoon. Or finding a sugar daddy who’ll let me run free with his credit card in the Banana Republic. Sigh.
I do have one sexual fantasy, however, to which I admitted on formspring.me a couple of weeks back. It’s something I’ve never attempted. It’s something I probably wouldn’t attempt without the presence of someone familiar. Simply put, I’ve been restrained and used as a bottom, in my distant teen years. However, I’ve never been restrained and used as a top.
I think I’d like to try it.
I’d like to have my wrists and ankles bound and immobile, and my eyes blindfolded, and to find myself totally at the mercy of a hungry bottom. Or bottoms, plural. That issue I have with feeling guilty about receiving a really good rim job? I wouldn’t have much of a choice if I were restrained and being forced to accept it. I wouldn’t be able to control when and for how long he sits on my face and makes me eat his hole, or suck his dick.
I certainly wouldn’t have a say or be able to resist when the bottom uses all his abilities to get me hard, and sucks me for as long as he wants, or gets rough with my nipples and nuts. I couldn’t protest when he sat down on my dick and rode it relentlessly, milking the loads from me.
And quite honestly, I wouldn’t want to protest any of it.
Once I had a fuckbuddy who swore up and down that he was going to make the scenario happen for me—he planned to rent a cheap hotel room, round up a few bottoms, and let them all have a go at me anonymously. For some reason it never happened. Probably too much planning—and I can understand that. I admire those men with the patience to plan hotel gang-bangs, because I’ve given up on organizing them. Guys are way too flaky about it.
So my sole remaining fantasy, sadly, remains just that.
I think the attraction of the scenario lies in a desire to take a short vacation from setting the pace, from taking the lead. It’s a fantasy in which I experience stimulation without responsibility. Not that I mind taking charge of an encounter, mind you. It’s part of my nature to do so. Being prevented from following my natural impulses is what would push me off-center enough that I’d find every sensation arousing and strange, and would leave me both dreading and anticipating more.
Then again, I might find it easier to get lucky with the sugar daddy with the Banana Republic card.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Reflection
Over the last few weeks, as I’ve begun to disturb the layers of complacency that have settled into the furniture and cupboards of my house, I’ve run across some photos of myself from my teens and twenties. Usually when I look at old photographs someone has taken of me, I tend to look at everything except for the figure in the snapshot’s center. I’ll scan the background, and bring to my recollection. I’ll study the faces of the other people around me and remember them fondly. But when it has come to my own self, in the past my eyes have automatically glided over anything having to do with my body.
I suppose somewhere around the seventh grade, when boys are at about their least appealing to most—oily-faced, pimply, awkward, clumsy, slump-shouldered, self-conscious, and shy about their bodies—I stopped liking what I saw in the mirror. Though I’ve changed over the years—now, I’m dry-skinned, not-so-pimply, and just as clumsy, though my posture is infinitely better—a part of me has settled on that pimply seventh-grader as my self-image. For thirty years since, whenever I look in the mirror or see a photograph, that’s what I’ve tended to see.
Now, I can’t say that’s the way I feel about myself now. There came a point about four years ago when very suddenly I started to like very much the image in my reflection. I liked the way I looked in clothing. I grew a short beard and unexpectedly found myself liking my face. Instead of avoiding mirrors, I started to preen in them and to check myself out when walking past them in department stores. I liked posing for photographs, instead of hiding my face and trying to ease out of range of the lens.
Here’s the thing, though. Lately, as I’ve been finding old photos scattered around the place and have been collecting them to pack, I’ve realized how really cute I was in my youth. Some of them are embarrassing, admittedly. I’m not my proudest about the really old ones in which I’m sporting horn-rimmed glasses, braces, and a bowl cut. But those taken when I had more control over my appearance in my late teens and after? I’m fucking adorable. Everything I find I like about my face now, I find in those old pictures. I like my smile, my impossible leanness, the tautness of my skin. The things I don’t like . . . well, I know now how little it all matters, in the end. There’s much more to a person than his looks
What bothers me is that it took thirty years to reach peace with my appearance. Over the weekend I had two sexual encounters with men who very obviously were not aware of how very sexy they really were. (I’ll write about those this week.) It bothered me that both deflected the most sincere of my compliments almost without thinking. I know that, when they look into the mirror, they’re not really seeing themselves. They’re seeing some geeky boy, or some fat kid, or the picked-on youth who tried to blend in and become as invisible as possible. Like me, they settled on some vision of themselves formulated by thoughtless children and mean girls and maybe even the people closest to them, and that twisted vision is what they’ve seen ever since.
So much time we waste, with our eyes half-closed, don’t we?
So I’m curious. Readers, what do you see when you look at photographs of yourself, or when you pass the mirror? Is it your thirteen-year-old faults writ large? Is it the faulty and unattractive you from some other portion of your life, carried around as an unchanging burden for much of your life? Or are you blessed with clarity of sight, and appreciate yourself for what you are?
In other words, how different is your actual appearance from the mental image fashioned from your self-doubts and fears?
I’m curious to know, and would appreciate your comments on the matter.
I suppose somewhere around the seventh grade, when boys are at about their least appealing to most—oily-faced, pimply, awkward, clumsy, slump-shouldered, self-conscious, and shy about their bodies—I stopped liking what I saw in the mirror. Though I’ve changed over the years—now, I’m dry-skinned, not-so-pimply, and just as clumsy, though my posture is infinitely better—a part of me has settled on that pimply seventh-grader as my self-image. For thirty years since, whenever I look in the mirror or see a photograph, that’s what I’ve tended to see.
Now, I can’t say that’s the way I feel about myself now. There came a point about four years ago when very suddenly I started to like very much the image in my reflection. I liked the way I looked in clothing. I grew a short beard and unexpectedly found myself liking my face. Instead of avoiding mirrors, I started to preen in them and to check myself out when walking past them in department stores. I liked posing for photographs, instead of hiding my face and trying to ease out of range of the lens.
Here’s the thing, though. Lately, as I’ve been finding old photos scattered around the place and have been collecting them to pack, I’ve realized how really cute I was in my youth. Some of them are embarrassing, admittedly. I’m not my proudest about the really old ones in which I’m sporting horn-rimmed glasses, braces, and a bowl cut. But those taken when I had more control over my appearance in my late teens and after? I’m fucking adorable. Everything I find I like about my face now, I find in those old pictures. I like my smile, my impossible leanness, the tautness of my skin. The things I don’t like . . . well, I know now how little it all matters, in the end. There’s much more to a person than his looks
What bothers me is that it took thirty years to reach peace with my appearance. Over the weekend I had two sexual encounters with men who very obviously were not aware of how very sexy they really were. (I’ll write about those this week.) It bothered me that both deflected the most sincere of my compliments almost without thinking. I know that, when they look into the mirror, they’re not really seeing themselves. They’re seeing some geeky boy, or some fat kid, or the picked-on youth who tried to blend in and become as invisible as possible. Like me, they settled on some vision of themselves formulated by thoughtless children and mean girls and maybe even the people closest to them, and that twisted vision is what they’ve seen ever since.
So much time we waste, with our eyes half-closed, don’t we?
So I’m curious. Readers, what do you see when you look at photographs of yourself, or when you pass the mirror? Is it your thirteen-year-old faults writ large? Is it the faulty and unattractive you from some other portion of your life, carried around as an unchanging burden for much of your life? Or are you blessed with clarity of sight, and appreciate yourself for what you are?
In other words, how different is your actual appearance from the mental image fashioned from your self-doubts and fears?
I’m curious to know, and would appreciate your comments on the matter.
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