Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction (7 page)

We had, Dimitri and I, against the odds, gotten together again, in my apartment, for several sessions of superheated body-to-body contact mixed with gobs of oral sex and kissing. We did not fuck. We talked, a little, after we both came, but still our association constituted more of a fuck buddy situation than a boyfriend relationship.

I wanted more.

I started calling him, almost daily. Even if he hadn’t returned my call from the previous day, I found myself dialing his number. That last time I called him was New Year’s Eve; he wasn’t where he had said he would be or we got our signals crossed or something. I felt disappointed, even humiliated, and decided not to call again. He didn’t call either.

To make myself feel better, I went over in my mind the details of his previous visit, and then I extrapolated and envisioned a whole story from that point on.

The last time we had gotten together in my apartment, he had been extremely gloomy. About his job. About his best friend at that job leaving under unhappy circumstances. About other things as well. I could only get a few sentences out of him, actually. We had sex as therapy that time.

I thought maybe he had quit his job. Maybe he had fallen into a serious depression. Maybe he was embarrassed, ashamed. Broke. It happens. I would have helped, but I didn’t want to rescue any more boyfriends. Or fuck buddies. Doesn’t work anyway.

I also don’t want to be the only one pushing the relationship rock up the hill. We’re both in it, or I’m letting it roll right back down into the valley, and walking away.

So in my mind, I walked away from Dimitri.

In the fantasyland in my head, he quit Master J’s Leather Store and fell into a deep dark well, similar to the ones that have claimed other boyfriends, lovers, fuck buddies. I erased how happy I had felt with him; erased the memory of sex that had been on the verge of lovemaking; erased the feeling of muscles and skin, eyes and lips that contained the air of home…all the things the most sizzling sex with the hottest stranger in the city cannot provide.

 

This is how I could be so surprised to see Dimitri in a store where I knew he worked.

Far from depressed, embarrassed, or broke, Dimitri looks amazingly eager to take care of me.

“Hey, Dimitri.”

“Greg. Good to see you.”

I grin.

He smolders. In a good way.

“I got an extra fat tip last night, so I came back for those latex shorts.”

“Oh, yeah. The ones with the wraparound zippers.”

The quick smile I got made my balls tingle.

“They’re over here.”

We take a short walk. He doesn’t even look at the stock on the rack, just sticks his hand out, lifts the hanger from its little hook, and presents.

“These are the ones,” he assures me. “You know where the dressing room is. Try them on again, and I’ll be back there in a minute.”

It’s just like the first time, only better.

 

With a bottle of water in my hand and sporting the rock ’n’ roll look that still gets guys thinking with their cocks, I hit the patio-cum-back room of one of the seediest gay bars in the world, and hit the jackpot. A buddy’s there, a guy I know even though I can’t remember his name, and he’s already working his crotch, just waiting for one green light, which I am more than happy to provide. Both of our dicks are out in minutes, and they are not alone. Guys stroll over and start blowing him, me, whomever. Guys are pulling on our tits, tickling our balls, licking our butts. He and I are staring each other down, making good old-fashioned porno faces.

Neither one of us is a
Yeah, work that shaft, cocksucker
dirty-talk kind of guy; we do it with our energy, which by now is bouncing off the grimy wooden slats which pass for walls around here.

I shoot; some guy takes it on the chin. The guy licking my ass backs away to watch. My friend a few feet away comes all over a chesty dude’s shoulder and we are all of us gone to seed.

“Hey, motherfuckers…” the bartender shouts through a tiny, barred window near his ice machine. “The sex club is down the street, you assholes. They charge twenty-five dollars; why the hell should I let you guys do the same shit here for free?”

We smirk, or chuckle quietly, or act all sheepish; we were starting to buckle up anyway. The questions was rhetorical and the lecture was halfhearted at best. The T-shirts for this bar carry a legend that reads: RUINING REPUTATIONS FOR FIFTEEN YEARS.

They know which side of their toast has the butter. People don’t come through the door of this bar for just a drink. They come to get their cocks sucked, or to watch someone else get his cock or ass worked over.

Still, it’s an interesting question. Money aside, why don’t we go to the neighborhood sex club?

Sex in a sex club: nothing could be more predictable. Sex in the back room of a bar—even a really seedy bar—that’s bad-boy behavior, outlaw activity, rebel stuff. It practically takes us back to prehistoric, preverbal, good ol’ days, as if me and my boyhood pal had just outrun a dangerous predator. We beat the beast and lived to tell the tale. How many times do we get to feel like that in the fucked-up America of the Twenty-first Century?

This is what I’m thinking while I put myself back together again. Zipping up, finishing my water, saying good-bye, grabbbing my backpack.

I get on my bike and start riding home, and it’s a whole three or four minutes before I start thinking about Dimitri again.

He has disappeared. Again.

Every time I start to fall for him, he vanishes in a puff of smoke. Stops calling. Stops emailing.

Everything comes to a grinding halt, only there is no memo announcing the fact. I have to figure it out for myself.

Slowly.

As the days go by.

On top of it all, those stupid, goddamn, black latex shorts apparently carry some kind of fucking curse. I didn’t get to wear them to the Fortress, because those Dark Nights are for Women Only. Some joker put it up on craigslist in the M4M category, who knows why. I also didn’t get to wear them to a leatherman’s soiree because I came down with pneumonia. When I recovered from that, I went back onto craigslist, but my year-old G-rated pics were not working for me. Coincidentally, a newly professional photographer had posted an offer for a free session in which someone could get hot new pics in two hours flat. He said he was just doing it to get more practice, working with various guys in random situations. When we met, he turned out to be quite a stud. Of course, the fucker insisted there would be no touching between us, which I agreed to, but then he put his hands in his pants, showing me what he wanted me to do, and asked if he could see the base of my cock, maybe I could pull my briefs down a bit, just a little more? He mentioned how I was giving him a hard-on, grabbing his jeans and proving his point. I got harder and harder and he asked me what I wanted to do, and before I knew it, I was beating off. He ended up taking seven hundred photos. He gave me a CD of them, swore up and down that they would not be used for anything…but I can’t believe those pics will not end up in a magazine or on a website somewhere.

Especially since he got me to put on those motherfucking latex shorts. He got enough good shots to put a real layout together; didn’t seem to me like he needed any practice, but what do I know.

Shit.

I have still never worn those shorts and played with anyone but Dimitri. They don’t even make me feel horny anymore. They make me feel sad. Foolish. And alone.

Yes, loneliness has been creeping in. I like my apartment. I like being alone in my apartment, when I get home from the seedy bar with the dark, smoky patio. I’ve got all kinds of crazy shit to keep me company:
Cheap Thrills, The Idiot, Radio Ethiopia, Abraxas, Young Americans, Volunteers, Damned Damned Damned, To Bring You My Love, Born to Run, Sheer Heart Attack, Computer World, Too Much Too Soon, Todd, Mental Notes, Rattus Norvegicus, Entertainment!, The Grand Wazoo, Southern Nights, London Calling, Songs the Lord Taught Us,
and
Let’s Get It On.
(Not to mention stuff like
Tweedles, Giant Robot, Black Acetate,
and
Opera Tuna Teen Ox)
.

I’ve got paintings on practically every square foot of wall space; it’s a riot of color, my cozy downtown studio. I’ve got homemade coleslaw, organic potato chips, Dubliner cheese, homemade tuna salad (chunky white tuna—dolphin safe—lemon mayo, oregano, parsley, garlic, celery, carrots, onion, apple—all finely diced, of course—a little mustard, and fresh ground pepper), plus seeded spelt crackers and coconut macaroons, all of which is thoroughly delicious to a health-food nut like me. The books on the shelves range from Genet to Anne Lamott, with plenty of room for Beckett, McMurtry, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Hornby, Vonnegut, sci-fi favorites Rudy Rucker and Robert J. Sawyer, and miraculously talented writer-friends like Michelle Tea, Lynn Breedlove, Kirk Read, Justin Chin, Carol Queen, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, and Daphne Gottlieb. I’ve got
Kill Bill
and
Funny Girl
,
Amadeus
and
Batman Begins
,
Shaun of the Dead
,
A Star Is Born
(the Judy Garland and James Mason version, thank you very much),
Spun
,
Priscilla
, and
Trick
.

Oh my god, I almost forgot to include
Kung Fu Hustle
and
Angels in America
. Shoot me.

But goddamn, it gets quiet when a man has made his presence felt here and then suddenly stops visiting.

I wanted to share my stuff with Dimitri. I did get to read him something by my poetry brother Trebor Healey. No matter what it does to my poor prose, I need to quote the first few lines of “Krsna” to render a taste, else no one will believe Dimitri’s reaction.

Dimitri started breathing weird when he heard this, and he spoke in these broken phrases, like a man in shock from seeing something too bright for his eyes.

“How did he do that?

“Each line is like its own hard-on…

“But it’s transcendent, at the same time…

“I feel high just from hearing it.”

When he added, “Let’s read it again,” I took the first step on the path to falling in love with Dimitri. In spite of all my caution and past hurts and scar tissue and uber-fear, my heart opened up and experienced a feeling which in words could only be described as
At last.

It was not enough. Apparently. Unbelievably. Not enough.

He didn’t stick around. He went back into the woodwork.

I’m sure he has reasons, but that doesn’t do me much good.

I want a man with staying power.

I want a man who feels like home.

I want to fuck again and have it mean something.

I want all of me to be in bed with the guy, my guy, and I want all of him in there too. The good, the bad, the hard-core ugly, and the healing radiance of love. I want it all, with tons of laughter on top. Corny stuff. Beyond corny. The cliche that refreshes the whole world.

I want it.

I want Dimitri.

In our last conversation, Dimitri confesses, as casually as possible, that he has demons he must face before he and I… unfortunately, that sentence never gets finished.

“Yeah, well, I could probably name your demons right now.”

“Yes, you probably could.”

In the moment, I’m thinking of the usual suspects: ego, low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, guardedness. Later on, when I was alone, I got to reflecting that Dimitri might be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met, but he’s still only human, and that’s a demon or three right there.

He’s male. That’s at least one more.

He’s American.

Gay.

Black.

While we’re on this winning streak, let’s add in a violent childhood. Incest. Rape. Gangs. A shot in the chest before he even got to his teenage years (thank god it didn’t kill him, thank god it only left him with a totally butch scar that I would have been happy to kiss day after day). All of which Dimitri has mentioned previously, briefly, minimally, with the least amount of emotion possible.

It’s a miracle he didn’t turn into a criminal. Hell, he doesn’t even dress like a thug. He’s an upstanding, life-affirming, tax-paying, San Francisco leatherman.

I want to suck his dick till the day I die.

I’m not sure that’s how the story is going to end, though. I’m not sure I like my chances. Every day without a call or an email seems like a day in which this bright beautiful light of real happiness fades further and further into a dark forest.

I know these woods. This unhappy place.

The thicket and the brush of my stupid thoughts.

The dry twigs I smoke to forget. The smelly swamp of depression. The worm-riddled logs of negative self-esteem. The loneliness of the territory and the night. The rocks of anger picked up along the path. The isolation as the forest closes in.

Fuck yeah, I know it.

Pretty soon, it’s not so easy to see your way clear. You can’t recognize the most familiar landmarks.

You forget you were ever on a path.

A familiar fog settles in.

Quicksand everywhere.

Desperate days.

Last-ditch efforts.

I don’t know what to do…except the only thing I know how to do.

Write.

Get busy, get it down and send it out. All this.

Everything. (No, not everything, not really, not by a long shot; I left out some important bits and pieces. Like my failure in bed with Dimitri that one time. My health problems. The fact that I’m no longer clean and sober. I omitted as much of the buzz-kill stuff as possible. Neuroses. My neediness. The shit that doesn’t get anyone’s dick hard. I did my best soft-shoe razzle-dazzle around all the issues and baggage and fucked-up indelicacies that we log on to
craigslist.com
to forget about in the first place. And if I could have made my story cleaner and hotter and more suitable for pulling your putz, trust me, I would have.)