Made some changes. Moved the blog over here. Come on by. Or hang on and go for a ride.
3:23 PM | link
Friday, October 13, 2006
Of all the things to be told over the phone, "Your dog has collapsed and is on the way to the hospital," ranks up there as one of the least appealing, if not the most memorable. Especially when those words are expressed through tears and with a tone of outright despair.
"I"ll meet you there," I told my Ex, who'd had custody of Louie last week. I pressed "End," laced up my shoes, threw on a baseball cap, and drove down to the SPCA, all the while gently putting the idea of my dog's mortality "on hold," if only for the next ten minutes.
Four hours, two vet clinics, a couple of waiting rooms, no food, and one thousand dollars later, Louie had an appointment with a surgeon first thing Monday. Over time my little rugrat had apparently developed larangeal paralysis, in which the two little flaps at his voicebox, which open and close with normal breathing, had closed up and stubbornly refused to open again. Which meant he wasn't getting enough oxygen. My poor boy had been slowly, silently suffocating while I sat slack-jawed in front of the television, watching yet another Project Runway marathon.
We left Louie with the vets for observation. At home I crashed. Sitting in the two waiting rooms, nursing a dangerously low, breakfast-free blood sugar level, had worn me out, and reminded me uncomfortably of my waiting room experiences during my mother's illness, as did the surgeon's too-casual mention of a tracheostomy, in the event the surgery didn't go as planned. The odds of having two family members with holes in their throats were preposterous, and I decided not to dwell there.
Forty-four hours and two thousand dollars later, Louie came home. Getting him there was a bit of an ordeal, as my 70-pound ball of furry love was heavily sedated. The cute vet tech with the bullet plug earrings, who'd told me Louie was anxious to go home, walked him out on a leash, with a sort of padded sling holding up Louie's wobbly back end. The leash crossed over Louie's chest, in order to protect his throat, which was shaved and heavily bandaged. His front right leg was wrapped in a purple bandage which covered his IV incision. His back left leg was wrapped in a white bandage which covered a patch of transdermal pain medication.
"You look like a Flashdance casualty," I told him.
He regarded me groggily from the back seat, and tried to pull himself up into a seated position.
"Lie down, you're not missing anything" I said, and turned my attention back to the road. I took the corners at 3 mph.
My Ex, who actually works for a living, agreed that I'd be a better candidate for home nurse, what with my rather flexible schedule. I carried Louie from the car to my bed, where he promptly passed out for the rest of the day.
"How's he doing?" The Ex asked when he called.
I described the various medications and instructions he'd been sent home with. "He's got one of those lampshades."
"What's that?"
"You know, the E-collar."
"What's an E-collar?"
"Elizabethan. Keeps him from licking at his wounds."
"Oh!" the Ex said. "One of those lampshades."
"Right," I said. "He got the ghetto version. It's made out of floppy blue vinyl."
"Sounds pretty."
"Very. I'm thinking of wearing it as a skirt. With a pair of saucy slingbacks."
Silence.
"There's something wrong with you," the Ex said.
But Louie, as it turned out, needed the lampshade. The next night, after I'd left him alone for a couple of hours, I came home to find that the purple bandage around his front leg was missing. As in, nowhere to be seen.
"Where did you put it?" I asked him. He gave me a blank look. "Did you eat it?"
My dog, just as sensitive as his daddy, bowed his head in shame.
"Oh, honey," I said. "I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at your illness."
He'd also scratched at his scar; his throat bandage hung open, and I could see for the first time the dozen staples holding his skin together. "Shit." I sighed and looked away, surveying my room. "Oh my God," I said. "You've been eating my jade plant. You're delirious," I sat down next to him. "And I'm a horrible father."
The white bandage on his back leg was coming unglued as well. I searched through my closet and pulled out a roll of duct tape. "Good boy," I said, as I gently wrapped his leg. He gave me a look of vulnerability and absolute trust, and at that moment the sense of tenderness and responsibility I felt for him nearly broke my heart. I understood then the difference between my mother's illness and my dog's illness. With my mother I felt no sense of control; her disease decided the course of events, and the various minor surgeries (the tracheostomy, the stomach feeding tube) were merely speed bumps on the road to the inevitable end.
Louie was different. I'd had him for eleven years, since he was twelve weeks old, and he wasn't a puppy anymore. Someday I'd have to make a decision of enormous power; and the power felt like both a burden and a gift. I couldn't keep him alive, but I could spare him pain: a lopsided compromise with fate.
And like every other time I'd imagined that day, I quickly put the thought out of my head. The only decision to make that night was when to fasten the lampshade around his neck, which I did before lights out.
"I know," I said. "It's a pain in the ass."
He sulked while I stroked his head and murmured in his ear, "I love you, Jennifer Beals."
10:09 PM | link
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Apocalypse Now, or Whenever You Might Have a Spare Moment
I've always been soft-spoken. Even in bed. "Are you having a good time?" is a question I've heard a dozen times by various men, always with the most disappointing timing, such as immediately following a bout of what I think are obvious noises of my approval. I go through life speaking, and groaning, at volume level 9, while the world hears me at 3.
If ever there was a case of opposites attract, it's the Workout Partner and I. Talking, and volume, are not a problem for my hot, manly fireplug. Even with his mouth shut Joe's communicating, like the first time I saw him, sitting across a crowded room from me, wearing a t-shirt that read: "I Make Boys Cry."
That was four years ago. Frankly the t-shirt scared the shit out of me, and led me, in a burst of self-protection, to mentally cross him out as candidate for My Next Husband. But still I found him, and the t-shirt, and what the t-shirt implied, compelling. My attraction ran hand-in-hand with my fear, skipping and careening through the landscape of dirty daydreams. Some of us are simply cursed with a need for Bad Boys, God help us.
Three years ago my barber died, and I started taking my buzzcut compulsion to Joe. Every two weeks I'd sit in his chair, where he'd manhandle my skull and whisper in my ear sweet prescriptions for my current love ailments. "You just need to get fucked," was one of his favorites. "Really hard."
It was a good set-up; I could flirt safely with him, (he had a boyfriend, after all) for a good thirty minutes, and then run back to my quiet, reserved life. Of course my idea of flirting with Joe was to simply turn red for a good twenty minutes; I never came out and told him any of the things I pictured us doing together, because, well, that just wasn't me.
Then I went to New York, and grad school. Joe opened his own shop, and mailed me an invitation to his Grand Opening. I stuck the invitation on the fridge, where it remained for my entire two-year stint in Manhattan. Three months ago I came back to San Francisco, and to his barber's chair. Both of us were now single. We started hitting the gym together several times a week, where we exchanged playful, sick banter. Sometimes, emboldened by my time in New York, or my years at school, or some strange alchemy of both, I could match his filthy talk, both of us engaged in a kind of extended foreplay that only delayed the inevitable.
He challenges my reserve. A few weeks ago, in bed, he said, "What do you WANT?"
"Huh?" I said. "What? What do you mean?"
"What do you want?"
"What? When? Now?"
"Yeah"
"In sex?"
"Yeah."
And for a moment I couldn't say anything, couldn't say what I wanted aloud. I hemmed and hawed. I blushed.
"This," I finally said. "I want this." Meaning he and I, together, and what we were doing.
"Good," he said. "What else?"
Again I stalled. We already had our clothes off, but his questions, and the answers I couldn't give, stripped away more of my cover. We don't raise our voices. We don't say certain things aloud. We are taught modesty, and humility, and prudence.
"Fuck that," he said. "Tell me something sick."
I stammered, scarlet, for a second or two, before I revealed a long-held, deeply private fantasy. "Well," I said. "picture us on a boat. And I'm the cabin boy..."
And that seemed to work, for both of us.
But his challenge was not confined to sex. Later, after dinner, after the plates and silverware had been tucked into the dishwasher, we stood necking in his kitchen. And he asked the question again; "What do you want?"
"What?" I asked. "In sex?"
"In life."
My eyes focused on his chest. I don't say my ambitions out loud. We are taught humility, and superstition; to say dreams out loud is to lose them. So I keep mine modest.
"I want to make a living doing what I love," I finally said, mumbling against his neck.
"Fuck that," he said. "You want to be famous."
"Um..."
"You want to go on all of the talk shows." He grabbed my chin and locked his eyes with mine.
"Um..."
"You want Matt Lauer to fawn."
"Um," I said. "Um...yeah."
And in my head strange things happened; I heard my voice crack open walls, which crumbled to the ground.
He kissed me. "Good. Keep going."
"I want to change people's lives," I said, before I had time to think. The sky darkened, and a hurricane swept through a city.
"Good." Kiss.
"I want to matter." A string of cars exploded.
"Good!" Kiss.
"I want people to say, Finally, someone put that into words!"
"Yeah!" he growled.
"I want to make money." A stadium full of innocent people, all of them screaming in fear, trembled.
"Yeah!"
"I want more money than those assholes who walk around the gym like they own the place." Tsunami, thunder, terror.
"Fuck yeah!"
"I want to be invited to parties."
"Yeah!"
"And say, No!"
"Oh my God," he said, and stuck his tongue down my throat.
9:54 PM | link
Monday, September 11, 2006
Him: Look at those tattoos.
Me: Move your head, I can't see. Ah. Nice. Click on that one, his face.
Him: Eh, not so nice.
Me: Well...
Him: He's alright.
Me: Just alright. Where's he from?
Him: South Africa.
Me: Wants you to do him?
Him: Yeah. Wants to be my satanic slave.
Me: Oh. One of those.
Him: Yeah. Yawn.
1:11 AM | link
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Concerning the Workout Partner
Nick: I would be SO happy if you guys ended up falling deeply and irrevocably in love (and had a sex life that made headlines...)
Me: That would make you happy?
Nick: Absolutely. Honestly. I shit you not. I love to see true love. It's so infectious in its euphoria.
Me: We used the "L" word the other day.
Nick: Lesbian? Lipstick?
Me: Llama.
Nick: Ah.
Me: Though we've known each other for about four years now, so it's a complicated llama.
Nick: That's the beauty of it: its complexity, depth, and history. Not to mention your significant common ground.
Me: What? You mean sobriety?
Nick: That, plus everything else that emanates from it.
Me: Like the fact that I don't need poppers when he's fucking me.
Nick: Um. Yeah.
7:27 PM | link
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Tough Guys Watch Project Runway
12:06 AM | link
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
In my fevered rush of self-promotion, I neglected to mention that there are, well, a few other people involved in the creation of the anthology. Some of them even blog. Rob and Ted are the glamorous, highly-paid editors, and the stylish contributors include Alex Chee and Joe.My.God., so that's four more reasons to buy the anthology. If books by bloggers sell well, it stands to reason that the publishing industry will continue to troll through our backwaters for fresh meat. Which means your own inspired ramblings could get set down in a clean typeface for the masses, and soon David Sedaris will lose sleep at the mere mention of your name. So really, you're doing yourself a favor by getting the book. Remember, I'm always thinking of you.
In other news, my little brother just got engaged. My. Little. Brother. I got a bit choked-up when he called with the news, and my mind raced with thoughts of little nieces and nephews running underfoot, drooling, stumbling, and calling me Uncle Mike. Thank God someone in my family turned out straight.
I myself am a long ways from walking down the aisle dressed in white. The closest thing I have to a fiancé is my workout partner, with whom I've begun...well...something we're trying not label. It's an interesting experience, to say the least, and not so easy to put into words. It's easier to make art out of bad sex. Good sex just ends up sounding like porn. Let's just say that he challenges my rather tame conception of what a bad boy sex pig does behind closed doors. The word "scalpel," for example, has traditionally not made me think of hot, dirty sex. But life is full of learning experiences. And I've always found scars kinda sexy.
5:44 PM | link
Thursday, August 31, 2006
I care about you. I really do.
That's why, over the course of nearly five years of blogging, I've never exposed you to tacky, obnoxious advertising. You know what I'm talking about: flashing banners of half-naked boys, their button flies coyly popped open, hawking porn sites and lube. It was all for your sake.
So I hope you'll excuse the one little exception I'm about to make, and indulge my selfishness. My very first publication has been released; an essay in an anthology of gay memoir. And it would please me if those of you who have read my site over the weeks, months, or years, who've asked me over and over when I'm getting published, would shut up already and fork out eleven bucks. Because really, after five years of sacrifice, of giving and giving till I bled, of spilling my guts -GOD!- like TWICE A MONTH here- you totally owe me.
And if you click on this link and buy the book, I'll even earn a few pennies, which will support the lavish lifestyle I've grown accustomed to. Which might mean I'll grace these pages with, like, THREE posts a month. Purely out of gratitude.
5:57 PM | link
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Oh, the Places You'll Go
Horniness is a mean tyrant. One minute you're at home, sipping a protein shake, watching Bridezillas, and the next you're crawling across the floor of a loft in Potrero Hill, wearing nothing but a jock strap. Or following a hot yet ultimately tweaked-out, limp-dicked leather stud back to his house in the suburbs of Minneapolis, where in a moment of tender intimacy he reveals his deepest desire: to give you a buzz cut on a folding chair in his basement. Without a cosmetology license.
I've gone to great lengths for sex. Driven ninety minutes through a blizzard for a romp in a hot tub. Fallen asleep several split seconds on Florida's Tamiami Trail, driving home after a late-night-through-early-morning tryst in Tampa. Even drove all the way to San Jose.
This didn't strike me, at the time, as much of a sacrifice. After all, the poor suckers living outside gay mecca are expected to drive in for booty calls; how noble of me to deliver.
Driving an hour for sex requires rationalization, so that one's desperation becomes adequately, casually, cloaked. I have a new car, I told myself. I like to drive! What would I do with myself if I had to wait for him to drive to San Francisco? Crank out a few sets of push-ups on my bedroom carpet? Change my underwear? Floss? Much better to crack open the moon roof and count the REI outlets on Highway 101.
But the greatest rationalization was this: to fulfill my Latino Daddy fantasy.
Oh, please, like you don't have one.
Sure, call me racist. But I merely participated in a long tradition of interracial sexual fantasy complicated by power narratives. Colonization. Slavery. Mexican pool boys. If I typecast a man or two along the way, well, they're probably doing the same with me. And that's hot.
Carlos fit the bill. Mid-forties, butch, divorced. English as a second language, which led to hot online exchanges.
"Can we talk in the phone?" he asked.
But of course.
I offered to drive. To fulfill a Latino Daddy fantasy, you have to go to San Jose. It's part of the deal. He was delighted. "Nobody ever come to San Jose!" he said. "I can't wait to hold on you."
That made two of us. I hightailed it south, moon roof open, Sasha rockin' the Bose bass. I figured I was about half-way there when I glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten minutes had passed.
I remembered then the reason people generally don't drive an hour for sex. An hour is an awfully long time; plenty of time to examine your actions and their attendant motivations. Time to realize what most of us know about casual sex; it's an escape, and as long as you're engaged in the act of fucking, you can distract yourself from larger questions like Am I happy? or Did I really need a $200 pair of jeans? But during the commute, one's mind wanders. Maybe I should be volunteering for a worthy nonprofit. Which is fine if you're just bopping over the hill to Noe Valley. But San Jose is a different story. What if my dead mother is watching me, right now? Blushing. Wondering why I wasn't home working on my damn book. Or making a dentist appointment.
Apparently not trusting me to the twists and turns of South San Jose's mean streets, Carlos had me meet him at a bar near the freeway, where he stood waiting for me at the edge of the parking lot. I took him in with one quick glance: faded jeans, boots, a leather vest over his bare torso. The night was turning out well; Latino Daddy and Leather Daddy in one fell swoop! He waved me into a parking spot, and ushered me inside so he could finish his beer.
The bar was leatherish, with young bartenders just a few short months out of twinkdom, their plucked eyebrows throwing the rickety display of their rugged drag off-balance. Carlos introduced me to each of them while leisurely sipping his Bud. Frankly I wanted to split. Crossing the threshold of a bar with a potential trick meant crossing the border from private into public sex life, and for this I was unprepared. When Carlos leaned down and kissed me, my Midwestern modesty swelled up and I blushed crimson. What was I ashamed of? Carlos? Strangers with plucked eyebrows catching a glimpse of my sex life? Had we been, say, in his kitchen alone, a minute after walking through his front door, I would have gladly swapped spit with Carlos. But there in the bar, on display, I met his kiss with hesitation. Sensing this, Carlos grabbed my hand and pressed it against a length of warm iron pipe filling out his crotch.
"You look good to me," he said.
"Good," I answered. "Finish your beer."
Warm nights, rare in San Francisco, always make me horny. All that languid heat, the air warm as blood, feels somehow wasted without good sex. Inland San Jose ranked a good ten degrees warmer than home, and as I followed Carlos back to his place, the warm air poured in through the open windows, and my modesty faded.
His house, with a neatly manicured lawn out front, was decorated in Desert Gay; lots of pale earth tones, glass, and chrome, which clashed with the Leather Daddy fantasy; I barely glanced at his Ethan Allens. The respectable house fucked with my Latino Daddy fantasy as well; clearly Carlos was raking in the dough. Guess that made me the pool boy.
As if reading my mind, Carlos led me into his kitchen (glass of water), where he pushed me against the counter and planted a big fat wet one on me. This is the part in the movie where we would shove various pots, pans, and silverware from the counter onto the floor in our violent embrace. This did not happen. His kiss was all passionate exterior: growling and grinding against me, his hands gripping my waist. But the inner life of the kiss was missing, because he kept his tongue in his mouth. Without it our kiss was strangely chaste. Where was the damned thing? I tried teasing it out with my own, and sensed its reluctant presence just out of reach. Good sloppy kissing opens every other door. Everybody knows that, just as everybody thinks they're an amazing kisser. Without Carlos' tongue joining our party, I wondered how everything would fare once we hit the bedroom. Still, I had driven an hour.
In the bedroom Carlos began fiddling with a remote control, pointing it in the direction of an enormous television in the corner. My stomach sank. He's playing porn! For our first time together! He needs porn! As if I weren't enough of a hot package, all by myself! Sure enough, after what seemed like ten minutes of fiddling, a pair of shirtless ranch hands strolling across a green pasture filled the screen.
During the fiddling, I wasn't sure what to do with myself. I sat on the edge of the bed awkwardly, half undressed, running through my options. Look at him? The VCR? My reflection in his carefully-positioned mirrors? I spent five minutes taking off each sock. He turned back to me once the ranch hands snuck into the barn.
He was one of those tops whose idea of foreplay is to pat you on the shoulder before bending you over the edge of the bed.
"Uh, yeah," I said. "That's not going to work." Not after five years of near-celibacy. Fortunately he took requests, and once I managed to coax his tongue out from hiding, we had a pretty good time. Even when I glanced up and saw him watching the television screen. The trick to sex is to twist certain turn-offs around to their opposite. C'mon, It's fun to be reduced to a sexual object! At least for a half an hour or so. And the mirrors weren't half-bad, either.
Over our moans and grunts I heard noises down the hall. The roommate was getting an earful. Around the time a second pair of ranch hands began frolicking on a bale of hay, Carlos surprised me by initiating a leisurely round two. Later, catching my breath, I heard a click, and behind me some kind of machine kicked into life.
"Oh my God," I thought, "Power drill. Electric carving knife. This is where promiscuity gets me killed."
I glanced over my shoulder; Carlos had pulled a hand-held massage tool from out of nowhere. It looked like a padded grapefruit on the end of a flashlight, and it vibrated noisily over the television's quiet grunts. He ran it lightly over my shoulder blades.
Whatever floats your boat, I thought.
The tool drifted lower across my back.
Hmm, I thought. What a generous man, giving me a post-sex massage.
The grapefruit drifted further south...
"Ow!" I yelled. "Fucking A!"
"What?" he said.
"Dude, that thing is not going to fit there."
"Sorry," he said. "I get, um, excited..."
"I can see that," I said. Clearly he was used to power bottoms. A moment or two passed before my muscles relaxed, and the grapefruit rolled back and forth over my shoulder blades again before beating a hasty path south.
"FUCK!"
"Sorry..."
"Time for me to go."
"I'm sorry, please stay."
"No, really," I said. "I have a long drive. It's late. I'm tired." I yawned helpfully.
As I dressed he stood beside me, rapt by the action on the television.
"Next time," he said, nodding at the screen, "We do that?"
I glanced over. Cops had replaced ranch hands, and someone was getting penetrated by a nightstick.
"Sure," I said. "Next time."
He walked me to the bedroom door. I could hear footsteps in the hallway. Suddenly Carlos had a strange expression.
"Um..." he said.
"Roommate?" I asked.
"Um...no," he said. "My daughter."
I swallowed. "Your daughter."
"I thought...I thought she stay with her mother tonight," he said. "Un momento." He opened his closet door, and pulled out a shirt.
Their bedrooms, in fact, were separated by a single wall. As we passed her open doorway I caught a glimpse of the long-haired girl (fourteen? fifteen?), her back to us, sitting at her computer, the screen casting light around her silhouette. We skulked down the hallway to the front door, where he gave me a quiet, hasty kiss.
As I pulled away from the curb I glanced out the window. My Latino Daddy fantasy waved good-bye, and a moment later the porch light flicked off.
I took 280 home. That route, or at least a good twenty-mile stretch of it, has been called "the most beautiful freeway in the world." By whom, I've never known, but apparently it's won a few awards. It seemed a good choice for a quiet drive home. During daylight the road has views of the Santa Cruz mountains to the west, and gentle green hills to its east hides the suburban sprawl. The road traces the eastern rim of the San Andreas Fault, passing a reservoir that fills the fault's canyon.
But at midnight I could see none of this, only the dark shapes of hills against the star-lit sky. The only sign of its beauty was the scent of the valley through the moon roof; thick, floral, an unexpected gift for a late-night drive. It had been years since my last trip up that road, and I had forgotten about the darkness. There were few lights along the freeway: no neon-lit fast food joints, no pools of gas station fluorescence. I should have enjoyed it more had I not realized, a few minutes into my drive, that my fuel tank light was on. So stupid, I thought. So fucking stupid. Panic surged past reason; my foot pressed hard on the pedal. I passed clusters of cars and raced through long stretches of empty road. The sweet smell of the valley ran beside my fear. My pulse hammered in time with the stereo's bass, and I hurtled through the night along the edge of the fragile valley. I searched the horizon, expecting rescue over each hill, finding nothing but dark valleys, black groves of trees, and stars pin-pricking the sky.
2:48 PM | link
Friday, July 21, 2006
Sir Does Not Allow Me to Watch Project Runway
The porn star wanted me to meet him at Blow Buddies.
"Well," he said, "not exactly in Blow Buddies. Above it. There's a meeting room. You should come to the discussion group. It's pretty informal – you know, folding chairs and chit chat."
He told me this all over email; we'd met on a local BDSM-related personals site, where I was, you know, just checking things out.
The porn star had a bunch of hot pictures; he was a sexy little guy, and sexy little guys are often near the top of my list. Especially ones who act all tough and threaten to tie me up with rope. When I told him that I'd, like, hardly ever been tied up with rope, he suggested that I meet him at a discussion group for leather men, and sent me a link. I clicked:
Protocols in Dominant/Submissive Relationships: Master/Slave, Daddy/Boy, Dom/Sub...Power based relationships stimulate the mind and the libido. But how do we maintain that erotic charge through the scene and between scenes?
Cool, I thought, I can learn some hot, twisted shit to mutter during playtime. Besides, bad boy sex pigs aren't just born. A little education goes a long way.
The porn star seemed to agree. "This is the perfect topic if you're just starting out. And if we like each other, I live nearby."
Yeah, so, maybe certain bad boy sex pigs out there in my audience could face such a situation without qualms. But going to my first "official" leather event (I'm not talking one a.m. at the Loading Dock), where I wouldn't know anyone...when I owned hardly any leather...above a sex club...before dusk...to meet a porn star who wanted to tie me up with rope...
Okay, okay. Nobody twisted my arm.
Briefly I considered calling Joe to get his advice about whether this discussion group was worth my time, but decided that I needed to see some things for myself. This would be a test of my courage. A rite of passage.
Stomach in knots, I laced up my Wescos (my only leather) and drove The Blue Devil (my new car) to South of Market.
I hoped to find a room full of leather-clad Colt Studio models just salivating at the thought of a new boy in town.
God, where do I begin?
The porn star looked just like his pictures. They were absolutely true-to-life, and not the slightest bit misleading. But if the internet has taught us anything, it's this: it's all in how you carry yourself. He was nervous, and aloof, and totally lacking in charisma: the idea of letting him tie me up with rope made me giggle. As we chatted he kept looking over my shoulder at the door. Maybe it was mutual.
The next two hours were excruciating, and half my fault.
The panel consisted of three homely couples engaged in master/slave relationships. Yes, homely. Ordinarily on dogpoet I try to practice humility, but please. Don't even try to tell me that you've never sat in a crowded room and thought, "I am simply the hottest thing in here."
One couple were lesbians. All of the couples practiced their roles 24/7. None of this daddy/boy-for-an-hour-in-the-bedroom crap. No, these folks took their roles seriously. The submissives called their masters "Sir." Even the lesbians. Not "my master," or "my sir." Rather, "Sir likes his coffee with a teaspoon of cream and two lumps of sugar waiting for him at the crack of dawn."
There was a lot of this.
"Boy must walk on my left side, one half step behind me at all times."
"Sir does not allow me use of the living room furniture."
Then everyone argued for like, an hour, about whether these things were protocols or rituals. An hour. I wanted to throw my folding chair and scream, "Semantics! You're arguing fucking semantics! What about SEX?!?"
Yeah, what about it. Nobody talked about sex. Instead we learned that the slaves did the dishes, the shopping, and the cooking. One slave even managed Sir's goddamned CALENDAR. No, strike that; the slave managed several calendars because Sir kept filling the house up with new slaves, and the first slave had to manage ALL OF THEIR CALENDARS! The slaves, of course, could only have one queeny, nit-picking Sir, but Sir could have eight boys polishing the silverware in their thongs.
"What about the FUCKING?!?" I wanted to scream.
Beside me in his folding chair the porn star was chuckling at stories of new slaveboys forgetting which side of Sir to walk on at Safeway, or slaveboys forgetting that only Sir tells them when to take a piss.
I know everyone thinks they are open-minded. But honestly, when it comes to sex, I'm more progressive than most. What two consenting adults do is blah blah blah. But I'd found my limit. I wanted to run up and smack all of the "boys" silly.
"YOU HAVE A LIFE!" I'd scream, shaking them by their shoulders until their heads rocked back and forth on their little necks. "YOU HAVE A LIFE AND A MIND OF YOUR OWN! FUCK THIS QUEEN AND HIS GODDAMNED OUTLOOK EXPRESS!!!"
I wasn't getting it. Clearly, I'd reached the limits of my understanding. I didn't care how "spiritual" it felt for Sir to send boy back to the grocery store for the receipt he lost. Or how much confidence it gave boy to make Sir a BLT for lunch.
The discussion made my dick limp. I took this as a sign.
And that's when it became my fault. Because there was a ten-minute break, and instead of bolting for the door I actually sat there in my folding chair, and waited for the whole thing to be over. Even when the porn star, who had promised in his emails to put me "at ease," slipped into the crowd and left me there alone.
"Maybe," I thought, "they hide all the sex in the second hour. There has GOT TO BE SEX at some point. Aren't there supposed to be demonstrations? Wait, do I want to see demonstrations with these people? Oh, dear God."
To be honest, I was still stuck in nice-guy mode. It would be rude to leave during the break, I thought. This is how nice guys finish last.
The second hour was the same as the first. Around this time Blow Buddies opened its doors for the evening, and disco music thumped through the floor. I longed to slip down there and find some real action.
Someone handed out a flier of "camps" around the country where boys could be trained in the art of "service." There weren't enough fliers to go around.
"Could I see that?" asked the porn star.
"Please," I said. "Take my copy."
When it was all over the porn star followed me to the door, and asked if we could play. If not tonight, then maybe Friday?
"Yeah," I said, "actually, this week ain't so good for me."
I clomped down the stairs in my boots, and sucked in a lungful of air when I hit the sidewalk. Sometimes, when figuring out what you want, you get to figure out what you don't.
12:10 AM | link
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Shortly before I left New York, I told Norman about my plans to retire from this long spell of unintentional celibacy, and to, well, embrace everything that San Francisco has to offer.
"Oh God," he said, "are you going to end up in the Bare Chest Calendar?"
As if being pictorially rewarded for your manly manliness was something to frown upon. Instead I did the next best thing, and went on a date with a Bare Chest Calendar model. We met at Cafe Flore, the default location of a million first dates.
"What do you do for a living?" I asked.
"I produce child pornography," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"Just kidding."
Inappropriate humor is a huge turn-on for me, so he'd just scored points. Later, when we discovered a mutual passion for Almodóvar films, he suggested that for our next date I bring my copy of Bad Education over to his place. Code for: let's screw around on the couch. Which we did. I had occasion to wonder at some of the innate differences between gay and straight foreplay while watching the movie. At one point, Gael García Bernal, clad in nothing but a pair of skimpy running shorts, is doing push-ups on the living room floor, his hips dipping and rocking to the salsa music coming from the television.
"Look at that chair," my date said. I was sort of lying in front of him on the couch: totally his idea. He was lying behind me, with his arm wrapped around my chest.
"What?"
"That chair."
"What chair?"
"Behind him."
I glanced at the screen. Indeed, behind Gael was some kind of wacky, multi-colored piece of furniture, as if Piet Mondrian had been let loose in Design Within Reach.
"Isn't it fabulous?" my date said.
"Whatever, dude," I said. "Go back to pinching my nipple."
2:05 PM | link
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
I first visited San Francisco in 1996, with my then-boyfriend, David. One night we ended up at the Powerhouse, in South of Market, on an off-night. Lamps fashioned from Crisco cans cast dim circles on the scarred surface of the bar, and on the video screens a disembodied fist entered a disembodied butt. We were two boys from the midwest, simultaneously thrilled and scared out of our minds. Around us prowled lone wolves in leather jackets, Rolling Rocks clutched in their fists. They leaned against walls, the bench, the pool table, and looked around like they wanted to kill you or eat you, probably both.
David leaned over and whispered in my ear, "What is this leather thing about, anyway?"
I'd been wondering the same thing. The Village People, and Al Pacino in "Cruising," was the extent of my BDSM education. My first reaction, when faced with my own ignorance, was to always feign cool. I shrugged and said, "Whatever."
But David was an entirely different creature. My stepsister once compared him to a sheepdog; big, goofy, lovable, and completely naive. When confronted with his own ignorance, he'd ask the closest person for an answer. Getting nothing from me, he leaned over to one of the lone wolves, who stood nearby, glowering and chomping on a cigar, and said, "Excuse me, sir, but what's the deal with leather?"
Was anyone ever so young? I'm here to tell you that we were.
I can't remember the answer to the question, relayed to me by David in another whisper. I do remember that Mr Cigar Daddy was quite generous and respectful with his answer, and I remember that, underneath my nonchalance, was a hunger for knowledge.
The other thing I remember was a boy my age behind the bar: bare-chested, two leather bands wrapped around his thick arms, a tattoo stretching across his broad back, packed tight into a pair of chaps. You could tell he'd worked there for a while; he could pour out a Foster's, ring up a shot, and swap spit with a muscle daddy all at the same time. He was on stage, in his element, and I watched the lone wolves watch him hungrily all night. Putting the cart before the horse (something I was good at) I figued that if I could ever get myself hired to tend bar at the Powerhouse, then I'd know for sure that I was hot. I don't mean cute, or handsome, I mean hot – attraction inextricably tied up with sexual magnetism. The kind, well..you get the picture.
Fast forward to 1999; I've been in San Francisco a couple of years. Tired of scooping cat shit at the animal shelter, and inspired by weekend ecstasy-fueled fantasies, I quit my job to "become a writer." A smarter boy would have lined up another job, but I was an idealist. A month later, my savings near depleted, I walked into the Powerhouse and asked for a job, thinking maybe I could start out as a barback, and work my way up the Ladder of Hotness. A half hour later I walked out a bartender, with no idea of the difference between a Rob Roy and a Seabreeze.
Thankfully the Powerhouse was a "leatherish" kind of bar. Guys ordered bottles of Bud and shots of tequila. I had every right to sneer at queens who wandered in and ordered a fucking cosmo. Yeah, sure I had a deck of flash cards with cocktail recipes at home, but nobody needed to know that. I worked South of Market; I could whip you up a cocksucker, a screaming orgasm, and a golden shower. I'd pound shots of Goldschlager with you and the other guys behind the bar, and if someone wanted a mudslide I could flash my endearing, entirely-believable, gosh-darn, I'm-just-the-new boy-smile, and the guy would tell me how to make his drink, squeeze my bicep, and leave me a ten dollar tip.
I wanted to be a bad boy, always had. I wanted to be a twisted, kinky motherfucker. And though I could throw in a tape of fisting highlights from Hot House on the bar's VCR, I couldn't walk into a video store in the Castro and rent porn for my own filthy enjoyment. I could serve MGD's to guys who had just ducked out of our notorious back room, but I myself never went back there. Truth was, I had some dirty, twisted fantasies, but I lacked the balls to say them out loud, so they stayed just that: fantasies. Worse, addiction made my innate fear of the world worse; the further I went with crystal meth, the more I wanted to stay home, alone, and hide from the world. Last thing I wanted was to get on stage behind the bar and take my shirt off for Pec Night.
When my mom got sick I quit the bar and left town, and led a quiet, monastic, miserable life in Minneapolis for a few months as she got worse. Then I came back, got worse, got sober, and started cleaning up my life. Since by now everyone in the world has written a couple of books about some kind of recovery, I'll spare you the details. I'll just say things got okay, then better, then I went to New York. And now I'm back.
Joe, my good friend and new workout partner, told me over lunch yesterday that it's a joy to see me transform from the old, passive, barely-audible Michael, to the new smart-ass who can push him back when he gets too bossy. Which is, like, every thirty seconds. A native East Coaster, he thinks it's all due to a couple of years in New York. Undoubtedly that helped. I think it also helped to hear from some great writers that I myself knew how to write, and that if I would just fucking keep writing, I'd get my book published. I also finally got frustrated with five years of near-celibacy, with fear of what my non-kinky friends would think, with needing to be a nice guy all the time. Whatever the case, I'm no longer a push-over, and thank God for that.
Joe's an International Mr Leather, from, like ages ago, and one of the most twisted, kinky fuckers I've ever known. Thus our work-outs are full of foul-mouthed banter, and my fantasies get aired in his company. He likes this new, smart-ass me. Of course, what I don't tell him is that I keep smarting off to him in the hopes that he'll eventually take it out on my ass.
Yeah, so the bad boy sex pig hath risen. If only in minor increments. Last week I fucked around with America's Favorite Horndog, as he indicated on his blog. A day later I got an email from a friend in New York, who took me to task for getting in bed with someone who held rather, er, controversial views on HIV, reinfection, condoms, and sex, some of which I share, some of which I don't. This friend also mistakenly believed that Geekslut had posted this without my permission, which wasn't the case. I told Geek I didn't care if he posted it, and that I was tired of the image people had of me. Which I told my friend, just before I told him to mind his own fucking business.
But after I sent that email I did a lot of talking, over a lot of coffee, with Jeff, and a lot of hard thinking on my own. It's hypocritical to agree to allow my sex life to be broadcast over the internet, and then to say that it's nobody's business. And my motives were disingenuous. It was a cop-out, letting Geek do the work to tarnish my reputation, rather than doing it in my own words, on my own blog. And where's the fun in that? It's one thing to associate yourself with a bad boy, it's another to admit I'm one out loud. Not that I assume anyone cares. Only that I have a lot more than books on my mind these days, and boy would I love to talk about it.
7:12 PM | link
