Inside The Mind Of a Writer: Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe: II

I had smoked or snorted crystal meth a few times with so-so tricks who wooed me with their stash (as I would woo guys years later) and who were transformed into the loves of my life when we got high. Again, our dicks became useless, but unlike coke or poppers, the high was smooth and sustainable, and made your entire body one highly sensual organ. But I never sought out the stuff until I met Shaw.

Shaw was that hairy stud who I based my character Gil in “The Czar of Wilton Drive” on, the guy with the incredibly handsome black Irish looks and a smile and personality that could convince you to jump off a bridge, who I met on one of the hook-up sites. That first night, he mainlined right in my bedroom, and by the time we met again, I was ready. Here I had silently laughed at my beach buddy Trig for shooting up heroin and here I was, a former Sunday school teacher, hospital executive and college prof, trusting a guy who was virtually a complete stranger to “dart” me, mesmerized both by his male beauty, his infectious smile, and what I had seen slamming Lady M had done for him.

“You got good veins,” he complemented me as he tightened a belt around my forearm.

“I guess working out does have its virtues,” I laughed.

He instructed me to make a fist for a second, then relax.

The immediate reaction was intensive heat running throughout my body, then a total tsunami of utter euphoria. In fact, I shouted “Fuck!” so loud that first time, Shaw gently cautioned me to lower my voice so I wouldn’t wake up the people in the apartment next door. (“These bedroom walls are paper thin,” he quipped.)

Smoking was like kindergarten, slamming like getting your Ph.D.

Now picture this scene: two hairy naked men, high on one another and now high on junk. So what if he was a bottom and I was a top and my Daddy Dick was making an exit?

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said and I honestly think he meant it. The pure sensuality of the moment as he oh so very, very slowly rubbed his black kid gloves across my chest and we kissed was worth a thousand erections.

At about one that night, after two hours of sensual sex like I had never had in my life, Shaw abruptly left, saying he needed to pick up a buddy at the airport flying in from Australia. Trolling the websites a bit later, I found he had changed his post to “Two total bottoms looking for hot tops,” but no matter. I had had my fun.

After futilely trying to cum, then to sleep (I learned later Benadryl would knock you out), I spent the day cleaning my house and going to the gym. I was still grinding my teeth at six o’clock that night and drinking bottled water like I had been on the Mohave Desert.

Shaw and I got together a few more times – including a once-in-a-lifetime threesome – then lost touch, which strangely is something I’m actually grateful for. He easily could have been my Satan in the wilderness. And I’m no Jesus. In fact, the last time we slammed, he was surprised how relatively calm I was compared to that first wild time.

Was I getting hooked too?

Then again every time since I’ve smoked the shit with another guy, it’s been my feeble attempt to replicate that first time with Shaw, one of the truly handsomest men I’ve ever known in my checkered gay life.

Now, for all its evils, and there are plenty – that you can google – about the only good thing I can say about meth besides the high is that unlike alcohol whose effects you can’t mask, intellectually you can alter your behavior with Lady M if you need to: talk slower, watch your speed and be extra attentive to the road when driving….

But also being, I think, a rational pragmatist, I can see how it can be, ah, so addictive, equating it with total hot sex, though ironically, when you’re on it, you rarely end up cumming.

Crazy, ain’t it?

And at the cost of two hundred fifty bucks for a glassine envelope the size of a packet of Splenda, M can take you down the primrose path of self-ruination quicker than the Titanic sunk. That’s why I’ve met several guys over the last few years who boasted dealing the shit and making three to five thousand dollars a week, only to end up totally broke, living in some flophouse, and looking for another puff from my pipe.

I remember once at his place, Shaw pulled out a Glad bag of junk you could stuff a steak in. There had to be as much as five grand’s worth sitting there conveniently by his bed.

Today, while I have a small stash hidden away in one of the tiny thread drawers of my grandmother’s antique Singer sewing machine, I’ve convinced myself it’s there for that occasional hairy hottie who needs a bit of an extra incentive to come over.

Hey, if anybody could become a meth head, it’s me. I’m retired, have no job I have to go to, am financially comfortable and so have plenty of play money for candy.

But I know better.

Right?

Next: My Favorite Locales

Inside The Mind of a Writer: Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

Drugs, not in a good way, play a pivotal role in two of my books, my novel, “The Czar of Wilton Drive,” and my  novella, “Buy Guys.” So like just about everything else I write about, I needed to experience the drug world for myself. Of all of my walks on the wild side, this was, no doubt, my most dangerous.

But some history first.

Unlike many members of my generation, the generation of Vietnam and LSD, I was pretty much a virgin when it came to drugs. About the only thing I remember using during my college days were “black beauties,” a form of speed to keep guys like me going who were doing school full time while working through school part time. Hell, I never even smoked grass, all the rage, and, in fact, felt a bit left out I hadn’t.

That’s why I was surprised, yes even shocked, when decades later lying on the beach, a guy I met through another beach buddy – I’ll call him Trig – who had been a white upper middle class Jewish boy from the Jersey burbs, boasted he had done heroin – heroin! – while in college, and that even losing a few friends to OD’s hadn’t stopped him from trolling the streets of Harlem for horse. By the time I met him, he was a barely functioning alcoholic, but I wondered if his walk on the wild side in his youth was at least partially responsible for his early dementia now at 62.

If you could label poppers a drug, then my next step into that world came at Man’s Country in the early seventies, a now defunct bath house on the lower West side in Manhattan, where for two bucks on a Tuesday night you could rent a locker and have fun. It was there I was introduced to the little brown bottle which I forever after psychologically equated with good sex. A guy I had made it with it that night taught me to drink plenty of water afterwards to avoid a headache. But once AIDS hit and it was thought bad bottles of poppers were the culprit (we wish), the formulas changed and the high was never quite the same. Sales of poppers also went underground like buying liquor during Prohibition, and the code term, “video head cleaner” was born.

In the late eighties, working professionally in New York, with a stuck-in-the-mud partner who preferred his Mets over sex, I developed my own stable of fuck buddies, mostly former playmates from the East Side Baths. One of them, Doug, a cameraman for NBC’s Today Show, lived in North Jersey about 40 minutes from me on Staten Island. I remember visiting his place after work where we’d first have a round of beers, then smoke a joint, nothing like the medical marijuana Vinny, my wheelchair lover in PA would share with me decades later that was almost as good as meth without killing your erection. Then we’d go upstairs to the bedroom and snort a few lines of coke. That was my first experience with the white stuff which I equated with the high I got from poppers: a quick spike, then a drop off and a need to do more. Even though we were still in our early forties, by the time Doug and I were done with the coke, our dicks were virtually useless.

By the nineties I was through with most of my international traveling to Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, even Australia, and was snowbirding more and more in Fort Lauderdale which was just coming into its own as a major gay mecca. I eventually bought a one bedroom condo for twenty thousand dollars in Wilton Manors which at the time was a shit hole. (The place was later valued at over one hundred and seventy fifty thousand dollars.)

I’ll never forget Rick, my six foot five Texan from Austin who I made back in the New York baths, visiting me one snowbird vacation, and how we rolled around on my outside terrace in the dark, high on cocaine he had brought, our dicks as soft as putty.

Ah, but it took early retirement and my permanent move to Lauderdale from NYC, to ride me to the top of the drug shit pile with Lady M by my side.

Next: Part II of My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art

This Hand Belongs in the Fisters Hall of Fame – And More

The first time I fisted a guy was in the Clubhouse II baths in Lauderdale on one of my snowbird visits in the nineties. The guy, a lean and mean, lightly furry, handsome fucker, all of thirty, was obviously strung out on something when he gave me the eye as I passed his open room door. Even if I wasn’t quite as versed in the ins and outs of gay sex as I am today, I knew the can of Crisco on his bed stand wasn’t there for frying chicken.

That night I also learned I was a born fister. I had the strong but tightly built hand of a musician and, in fact, had been a concert pianist by the age of 8 but gave it all up when my piano teacher moved to another town. It took very little effort for me to slide first two fingers, then three, then my tapered fist, and finally my whole hand half way to my elbow up his stretched hole. He was a clean machine – you know what I’m saying – and all I felt was wet, warm tissue enveloping my arm. Frankly, I wasn’t sexually turned on by the experience, but neither was I turned off – just curious. My buddy, on the other hand, was in Fistee Heaven. I’m sure whatever he was on certainly helped the cause.

I thought guys who loved getting fisted may have gotten bored with conventional dick fucking or even super-sized dildos. I also knew from that first night that it had to be far more than massaging the guy’s prostate since the prostate is only a few inches up the rectum while your hand feels like you could grab the guy by the throat from inside. But as a seasoned fister buddy explained to me, the anal sphincter is another erogenous zone which becomes so sensitive after a fisting experience, just touching it continues to drive the guy wild and even more hungry for a hard cock to enter next.

OK, I’ll buy that, but I still think there’s also something of a mind game going on here, the fact the guys knows that once you’ve got half your arm up his butt, you have complete dominion over his life. And his soul.
Over the years I had my fair share of asses, but increasingly I found the experience, well, a little boring. While I knew that the guy I was doing it to was obviously enjoying it – I could tell by the level of his grunts – my mind would often wander to my weekly food shopping list.

That is, until I met my fisting brothers from LA, Tim and Tom; they made such an impression on me I used them as secondary characters in my new novella, “Buy Guys” to be published early 2016 by Wilde City Press. “Buy Guys” is about two young Jersey drifters who go to Fort Lauderdale to play hustlers and encounter my two fistees who are known as the “Bimbo Boys” in my book.

I connected with Tim and Tom on Manhunt; they were on vacation here in Lauderdale, staying at one of the overpriced guest houses by the beach, but they were willing to make it easy for me by coming to my place. Hairy, masculine, gym-built fuckers with thick uncut cocks, they looked like the types who would want to tie me up to a post and take turns fucking the shit out of my tight virgin ass. Tim, 44 had a shaved head, his younger brother, Tom, 40, sported a buzz. But no, instead it was I who took turns fisting their glorious furry butts, Tim’s first while Tom went down on my dick, then vs. versa, as they say. Reciprocation made all the difference for me, something that could only happen in a threesome arrangement. We took it slow but the more arm I gave them the more each of them wanted til I felt I could rip their hearts out if I willed it.

And when they had both gotten off, flaccid dicks spurting away, Tom twisted my nips while Tim went down on me and took my load like a pro. Then they packed up their stuff, in as organized a fashion as they had unpacked, slipped back into their jogging shorts and tight tanks, and thanked me for a good time. For once had by all.

A few years later, this studly bearded furry handsome Cuban named Marcos hit me up on Daddyhunt and invited me over to his Miami luxury condo. Marcos wanted one thing and one thing only: for me to pound his bull balls with a mallet or, when he was really warmed up, a baseball bat, while he lay there, those thick muscular, hairy legs spread. No touching, no kissing, just three hours of solid whacking while we smoked meth.

Ever wear one of those Israeli gas masks you can pick up cheap for twenty bucks on one of those online sex shops? The feel of confinement is over the top. A meth head buddy introduced me to his while he gave me a BJ and I watched through the mask goggles. Later a geek FB and I had loads of sensual sex with mine as he blew some poppers up the hose while he ever so slowly stroked my tool. He told me later his best hard-on was watching me go into some kind of trance. But, shit, this was child’s play compared to what that guy years ago in Columbus, Ohio, asked me to do to him.

I was on a drive vacation to Chicago and decided I’d stop along the way at lesser cities I’d never been. Columbus, Ohio, was among them. I’ve forgotten the name of the place but one glance said bear/leather/levi bar. It was August, hot and sticky (the bar had only ceiling fans) and when I saw a few other guys shirtless, I slipped off my T and strung it through my belt loops.

“So you gonna enter the contest?” asked the burly, bearded bartender as he handed me my Bud Lite.

“Contest?” I asked.

“The best hairy chest contest. We do it every Friday night. Winner gets fifty bucks.” Then he reached over the bar to stroke my chest. “Yep, you sure do qualify, mister, yum yum.”

Not exactly being shy, I signed up with the MC but knew that bars held these things to milk the crowd for more drinks, so that “Contest at Midnight” actually didn’t happen until closer to one.

I was on my second Bud when Gary strolled in. Tall, lanky and hippish with long flowing black hair and a long scruffy beard, he wore big horn rimmed glasses, a baggy, button down shirt that he had open to his navel to show off some lightly fuzzy flesh, and baggy black jeans. I was used to mentally stripping the superfluous off a guy, though, and could tell underneath his disguise that he had the bod and the looks. I was holding up the wall by the bar as he came over to stand directly across from me.

“Ten more minutes til we crown this week’s hairest chest!” announced the MC along with a drink special. Gary used the cue to open up.

“So I hope you entered buddy. I’m sure you’ll be the hands-down winner.”

“You never know,” I replied, moving over to him. “There’s always somebody better.”

“Hey man, I live here and I can tell you nobody I know has got you beat. Not by a long shot.”

I laughed. He groped. I told him about my trip. He told me about his life as a sometime employed graphic artist.

“Listen,” he went on more in a whisper,” If you win, will you come home with me? I live only a few blocks from here.”

“And if I lose?” I asked.

“Then I’ll come home with you.”

“Hotel, you mean.”

“Hotel, motel, convent – shit. As long as it’s got a bed.”

There were only three other guys up there competing with me and frankly, it was a slam dunk. Hell, I had more hair on my left shoulder than one of them had on his whole body. I collected my money and fifteen minutes later we were in Gary’s cramped cluttered apartment, naked on his waterbed, foreplaying away.

That’s when he sprang it on me.

“You into breath control?”

I tried to look and sound ecumenical.

“Never tried it but if you like me to do it to you …”

With that, Gary stood up, reached for his jeans he had flung on a chair and slipped off his wide leather belt. Then he lay back on the bed, tucked a pillow beneath his head, and handed me the belt as I sat down on his belly, straddling him.

“I want you to put it around my neck and pull it tight.”

As I did what he told me to do, I could see his chest first become more agitated, then his breath more labored. I stopped.

“No, no,” he said softly, grabbing my hand. “Keep going. Don’t worry, I’m okay.”

I hesitated a second, then continued my tug on the belt until his face turned blue and he appeared to fall into unconsciousness.

That’s when I panicked, slapped his face a few times, and getting no response, sprung up, grabbed my T and headed for the door.

“Where you’re gonna?” he shouted in a gruffed tone. “I’m not done yet.”

“I am,” I shouted back, slamming the door behind me.

But nothing quite beat going over the top than the time I was in a bath house in Montreal and a big brute of guy, J, asked me to punch fist him and was disappointed when no blood showed on my hand.

Now do you get why I can’t understand all the hoopla about “Fifty Shades?”

Next: My Life as a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

Inside The Mind of a Writer: Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art

Kinky Sex

While the long anticipated movie version of the BDSM erotic romance, “Fifty Shades of Grey” was largely panned by the critics as “insipid,” it made a mega-fortune off wives who drag their husbands to it in hopes its dirty tale inspires them. A sequel is even in the works. I didn’t read the book nor plan to see the movie. But from what I gleamed from the internet, my response is one big yawn.

I mean what’s the big fucken deal?

I can’t speak for str8’s, but unless you’re totally vanilla without sprinkles in the bedroom, most of us gay guys have “been there, done that” somewhere along our checkered careers. I know I certainly have as a seasoned leather man and used a lot of my experience in my books: I’ve been cuffed, had my balls tied up and weighed down with fish hooks, had hot wax dripped on my privates, have deep fisted and punched fisted at least a dozen men, tightened a belt around the neck of a guy who craved breath control till he passed out, had a young guy who looked as squeaky clean as a farmer’s son eat out my dirty asshole, wore a gas mask while a guy shot poppers up the hose and a third blew me, and get a hard-on in Home Depot and Office Depot when it comes to looking for new toys. That’s just for starters, and most of the time I wasn’t even high.

Take, for example, my introduction to electrical simulation or e-stim. The closest I came to being adopted by the Mafia, besides living and working on Staten Island, a borough of the Big Apple, and the most Italian American county in the U.S., was Peter, a short (like me), stocky, swarthy, hairy, Italian gorilla with a shaved head and thick black beard and a build that Tom of Finland would have used as a model. It was mutual lust the second we eyed one another in the Lure, NYC’s legendary leather bar. Pete said he was in “construction,” but at 47 was already retired, and living on Staten Island all those years taught me not to ask too many questions.

After screwing around at his Jersey mansion a few times, we rendezvoused at his other estate a bit closer to New York City in Caldwell, Jersey. I took the afternoon off from work to play, and this is where Peter introduced me to this new kink. With us squatting on the bed, face to face, he placed a long metal rod beneath our ball sacs wired to a large lantern battery and another wire around the base of each of our hard cocks, then flipped some switch and began slowly racketing up the voltage with a dial. It was the first time I shot without touching myself, and the sight of globs of cum spurting from our twitching cocks up onto our furry bellies and chests almost in unison would have been a ratings winner on xtube.com if it had existed then.

Peter actually wanted to keep me, but I was too self-reliant a person to be held down. Looking back now, thirty years later, I think I was plain stupid. Peter, who was almost twenty years my senior, might be dead by now, and I would have been set for the rest of my life like some jerk I met on the beach years later in Fort Lauderdale who after taking care of his “partner,” thirty years his senior, for fifteen years, and not working a day all those years, is now living off a trust fund. But, hell, at least Peter didn’t hire a hit man when I deserted him.

Next: This Hand Belongs in the Fisters Hall of Fame – And More

Inside The Mind of A Writer: Real Life Experiences That Shaped my Art

Sex Clubbing

In the days before the web and phone apps gave us at least the potential of hooking up almost anytime we wanted it (an art quickly disappearing as more and more guys use the web and apps for virtual sex), your chances for M2M contact, unless you had some scheduled fuck buddies, were either a bar on a weekend or one of those male whorehouses that, while most popular on Fridays and Saturdays, could still pull in a brisk crowd on half price locker or room weekdays. Most of the sex I include in my books, until the web afforded me more flexibility, was had there.

In fact, I’ve been a sex clubber and bath house goer for so long, I think I could buy a fully loaded Lexus outright for all the dough I dropped on rooms, lockers and three month memberships. Christ, just the other day I calculated that I go through $60 a week just visiting my local sexual haunts, as much as I’d like to fool myself into thinking
I’m above paying for sex (not quite yet, that is). But I guess that’s the price for non-committal, drive-by, hit-and-run, slam-bam-thank-you- ma’am penis romps.

You don’t even have to know his name.

So who hits up these places? Vacationers, bi-marrieds who can only do it after work or afternoons, guys with family or lovers and no place to take someone home, guys who don’t want to wait until “Last Call” at the bar to connect, or guys just looking for some fast, convenient, no-strings action. Occasionally, a good slam-bang can morph into a fuck buddy relationship, either when the two of you run into one another at “The Place” or outside. But though it’s nice to have some regulars to rely on on a slow night, most of us who are committed sex club/bath addicts go for one fantasy reason. We’re constantly on the prowl for fresh meat.

Now, I’ve checked out sex clubs and baths across the country and, in fact, won’t visit a town without one, my own form of sex insurance you might say. (Bars today are chancy for picking up guys at best.) But while there are a handful, like some of the Club Baths, that are kept squeaky clean and mod, most look pretty seedy, with a retro 70’s look, the heyday of baths, and all that fantasy gay art, plus steam rooms and saunas that resemble a Centers for Disease Control lab for breeding Legionnaires Disease. P.S.: That’s why I always wear my boots, if nothing else.
Yes, even in the steam room.

Another peculiar commonality I find is that if a city is large enough to support two baths, invariably one, the spiffier of the two, caters to, and attracts a younger, body-boy crowd, while the other is filled with the dregs of gay society: the homely, the dwarfs (I kid you not), and guys so ancient they need a walker to get around. One look at their sagging asses and I don’t need any aversion therapy from the Religious Right to cure me of my kink. (God help me. Be merciful and let it just fall off when I get to that stage.)

However, now that I’ve slammed them, I have to confess I have my better successes at the Dreg Hang-outs, where the guys are more real or more desperate, and where you can find a few Rough and Ready Rebel Boys among the shit if you hit it right. A bi-married man who doesn’t have time for bullshit doesn’t hurt either. By contrast, the pretty boys at the The Squeaky Clean Places seem like they’re there to just stroll around and show off their steroids (We’re walking… and walking … and walking). Hell, guys, I can see more on the beach for nothing. One night I got so frustrated at a Club Bath loaded with these shaved, hairless mannequins that I yelled out, “Do it with somebody already!”

My biggest kick is those signs on the room doors, “Single Occupancy Only.” Huh? So, I guess guys are here to benefit from the medicinal, healing effects of the waters, like at Lourdes? Or, then again, maybe some guys actually take those signs seriously.

We all know that there’s no guarantee just because you’ve plunked down fifteen bucks, thirty bucks or more for a spell at a sex club or bath house that you’ll get any action. It all depends on the time of day, and day or night of the week, though some places like to drum up business on off nights with discounts for guys wearing leather or who show their gym membership tags. But as somebody who has played this game longer than I’d like to admit, the heyday of the baths and sex clubs was that pre-AIDS era where people didn’t know what lay around the corner. Back in the ‘70’s, there was a bathhouse in downtown Manhattan called Man’s Country where, on a Tuesday night, $2 would buy you a locker and four hours of almost nonstop fun. It was there that I was introduced to poppers which I have been psychologically addicted to, and associate with sex ever since.

Twenty years later, Wally, who owned the late beloved Lure, NYC’s premiere leather bar, turned a warehouse in the West 20’s into a whorehouse for men par excellence. There you could play on a Wednesday or Sunday evening (after hitting the Village bars) and leave ninety uncivilized minutes later like a choir boy with caked cum on your goatee.

I wrote about it fondly in one of my short stories, “Vanilla – No Sprinkles” in my Basic Butch short story collection:

It was still a little early—prime time didn’t begin until ten thirtyish—and there were only half a dozen or so guys ahead of him on the line to get in. Harry, as usual, was there himself to collect the ten bucks. Harry, a fat, suspendered Santa Claus-bearded six footer, looked more like a Minnesota farmer than the proprietor of a whore house for men. In minutes Zac was minus his money and his clothes, except for his jockey briefs and shoes, and through the old shower curtains that separated the “lobby” from the inner sanctum.

Dark and shadowy, the guts of the warehouse-like room were empty, lined with men on each of its perimeters. A few early birds were barebacking under the spotlights that crisscrossed the concrete and a token piece of smelly, gritty, semen-stained, lube-caked Salvation Army furniture. But for the most part, evenings always began like some high school dance with the “boys” on one side and the “girls” on another and ended like a scene out of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

Zac searched through the shadows for some fellow veterans. While every night had its share of new meat—after all, wasn’t that the draw?—80% of the guys were regulars like him. You could almost always predict whether a fellow regular you had had a decent time with before was willing to play again if he acknowledged you in some way. If he looked the other way when you passed, or barely nodded when you gave him a butchy “Hey,” you knew he was strictly out for new meat that night and you were just another competitor—at least for now.

Fifty or so men, naked or near naked men, old fucks with wrinkled asses and seasoned men with rugged looks and tight bodies were all there, along with the bubble-butt gym boys with their pregnant bellies and veiny legs that gave away their HIV status, extremos with their tattooed cracks, P.A.s and buzz cuts, and those hairless young boys with chicken chests. Milling around, window shopping, with that modest “Ain’t-I-hot-shit-OK-Mr-DeMille-I’m-ready-for-my-close-up” smirk on their faces, but with ever an eye to begin, at a moment’s notice, the dance.

O.K., so much for Gay Nostalgia and a Walk Down Memory Lane. You need it NOW, RIGHT NOW. So, where do you play and how do you play today’s sex club/bath house scene?

Well, my vote for the best bath house in the country is, hands down, Chicago’s Steamworks. Located in funky Halstead, north of downtown, Steamworks is a modern phallic temple with three floors, dozens of rooms and almost as many booths and glory holes, all sorts of nooks and crannies, all dedicated to the glory of dick. Clean and popular, it’s what makes Chicago for me.

And when it comes to sex clubs, nothing beats the efficiency of Slammers which, as a bi-coastal enterprise, maintains a whorehouse in L.A. and one right here in Lauderdale that has given the bath houses a run for their money and has even put a dent in the bar scene. Hey, you can walk in in street clothes, don’t have to strip, stroll around till the rhythm is right, then grab a first come, first served booth with a latch for privacy (unless you’re an exhibitionist and prefer the few with peepholes in the doors). And for those into oral games, there’s the two level suck-a-rarium, lined on all sides with gloryholes.

So, bath house or sex club, what works and doesn’t work?

First, you need a critical mass of men for stuff to start happening. Too few a universe of men, and guys wait for the next best man to walk in before they “commit” themselves; too many, even the lowly are waiting for God, that is until their time or patience or Viagra has almost run out. Then they’d do a pursy lipped Lutheran minister to get their rocks off.

Time of day and day or night of the week also has a lot to do with success and size and quality of the crowd. Though nights, especially Fridays and Saturdays, are traditional hotbeds, mid or late weekday afternoons can witness some brisk business from bi-marrieds, college kids, or retirees, in-shape or otherwise. Thursday nights at Slammers where you get a few bucks off if you wear leather are surprisingly lively with non-nonsense hot men.

Being in the right spot at the right time is also part of the game. Sometimes everything’s in sync and you and your soon-to-be paramour for the next seventeen minutes fall all over one another. Other times it’s a waiting game, to a point you feel more frustrated at 3 a.m. when you leave than at 10 p.m. when you came in.

I also find the guys, solo or paired, who keep passing your room at the bath house with your door wide open time after time after time for half the night, staring right at you each time they pass, never close the deal. The best guys are the direct ones who just walk right in, grab your cock and take it from there.

And, of course, the baths, in particular, have a silent language all their own. If you grab a room (I do whenever I can though it costs more; you, in theory, have a better chance of netting a catch), the position of the body is all important: ass up or dick up. A can of Crisco on the end table. A whip at the foot of the bed. All can speak volumes to you or your would-be suitor.

One big advantage that clubs and baths have over picking somebody up in the bar is that, if after ten seconds you realize it ain’t gonna work, he wants to fuck and so do you, well no hard feelings, you or he just move on. Not like picking up the love of your life in a bar when you and/or he have had a trio of $3 Long Island iced teas and find that great chest in his T becomes two mounds of jello when he takes it off. In your bedroom. And, as we all know, that can be just the start of a string of unpleasant surprises. Even if you go over the check list on likes and dislikes before the two of you exit the bar, it’s funny how suddenly he has amnesia and changes his mind in midstream after you’ve gone through the trouble of unlacing your damn boots.

But the one hard (no pun intended) fact of sex club/bath life you have to accept is that it’s all about “The Bod.” Personality, torn, piss-stained jockstraps, and material success in the outside world (unless you discreetly have a hundred dollar bill tucked between the cheeks of your ass) are all secondary to “The Bod.” And I’ll take an ugly, pock-marked guy with a terrif tight bod any day of the week over a pretty boy who’s either ironing board thin or The Blob. But whatever you got, whether it’s a hairy chest, great legs, a tight ass, or a dong to the floor, sell it.

Me? I lay in my room stark naked, propped up on my pancake of a pillow, dick Viagra hard, with only my work boots on. You know: the porny look. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but, hey, it at least puts ME in the mood.

In the sex club where guys tend to keep their jeans or shorts on, strip off the shirt if you got something to show off, and don’t bother with underwear. It gets in the way when a quickie is available for the price of a lascivious grin. And please! No cologne. He wants to smell your sweat, not the Calvin Klein.

No bod? No looks? No youth? No dick? Just the urge? Well, that’s why the Gay God created dark orgy rooms or glory holes. I chuckle when guys look on the other side of the wall to see who may be waiting to suck their cock. Does it matter? Some of the homeliest guys are the best cocksuckers.

Me? I just pretend he’s Brad Pitt or my heart throb of the night and let it all hang out for his, and my pleasure.

After all, guys, isn’t sex seventy percent fantasy anyway?

Tuesday: This Hand Belongs in the Fister Hall of Fame

Inside The Mind Of a Writer: Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art

My Second Gay Career As A Daddy

In my twenties and thirties, and even into my fortes, I was always somewhat the boyish type. Short, lightly muscular, with a beard I wore to look older. That’s why the first time a guy called me ”Daddy” in a bar, I was ready to walk in the middle of traffic and wait for the first bus to hit me. Did I choose the wrong shade of Just for Men? Should I have stopped putting off those botox shots?

I eventually went for those botox shots and my testosterone pellets, but I think they only enhanced my Daddy persona further and gave me a whole new second career as an older gay man.
Maybe because confidence in yourself is half the game.

Over the years, I’ve had many boys, but only two “sons” have stood out as happy memories. No ten minute wonders, but guys I could fall for – and who apparently fell for me.

Terry, 42, who I encountered on Bear411 one summer while I was at my vacation home in Pennsylvania, lives in Jacksonville and our first game plan was to find a middle of the road point on Florida’s East Coast and rendezvous sometime in the fall. But since I passed through Jax on my way home from PA to my home in Lauderdale, I asked if it might be possible to see him then. He agreed with open arms, offering to put me up for the night.

It was instant chemistry. My height, lightly furry, Italian, bearded, nice compact body, with boyish looks that belied his age, a stable, steady-as-you-go demeanor and a quiet, understated masculinity. Before we could finish our conversation about the golden oak furniture we both collected, we were in his secluded backyard hot tub and the rest as they say is for the history books or my next gay novel. His PA was a particularly nice surprise. But his fuzzy manly back and butt were to die for for this Dad and we got into the Father/Son act even before we hit the bedroom.

A few weeks later he came down and spent a weekend at my place, and while he was the curious tourist and loved hitting our gay beaches and the bars (apparently the Jax scene is tame by comparison), we went at it for six hours straight on his first day and got into a few more “training sessions” where “Papa,” as he called me, promised to make him a man before the weekend was done. A generation my junior, he applauded me for my stamina.

We even played Truck Stop Buddies where he was my rebel boy, both of us in baseball caps and work boots and nothing else, him spread eagle on the bed, that manly furry butt all mine.

Then there’s my other “son,” Jack, 36, half a country away who, like Terry, I met on Bear411, this time when I was planning a long weekend in Chicago. While he was very receptive when we chatted on line, he sounded somewhat hesitant when I called him on my arrival to see if our meeting would become real, and even when we met at the coffee shop across the street from my guesthouse on Halsted, (he lived 40 minutes away in the rural burbs). As we strolled over to a Middle Eastern café a few blocks away and had a quick dinner, I still wasn’t sure if our conversation about politics and The Life was just a form of delay tactics before he told me nicely that it wasn’t going to work out.

Back in my guesthouse room, however, everything changed as he teasingly pawed all over me telling me that I was the fantasy Dad of his coming out days. At 5-9, he actually got turned on by mature guys shorter than himself and had had a bodybuilder dad for thirteen years before the guy died of liver failure in his thirties, tragically the result of years of juicing up on steroids.

Jack owed his husky build and luxurious black body hair to his dynamic combo of ancestry – Italian, Greek and Egyptian – and he sported elaborate tats on his chest, back and legs that only added to his boyish mystique. We spent that Friday night together and that Sunday afternoon, the day before I was return to Lauderdale, Jack eager to hear what the leather scene had been back in the eighties and nineties, a time I sensed he wished he had been a part of now, in these waning days of the leather scene in America. We parted with his invite for me to be his Dad at next year’s IML event held in Chicago each Memorial Day.

But you know what excited me most about my two boys? Surprisingly, their maturity. After encountering so much shit back in Lauderdale where I run into fifty year old party boys with absolutely nothing, Terry and Jack were breaths of fresh air. Terry had a solid job at a top communications firm, owned his own home and had just purchased a four unit apartment house in downtown Jax which he was renovating almost totally on his own for use as an income property. Jack had built his log cabin in the sticks on which he had almost paid off the mortgage, had no credit card debt, and was moving up to a new, better paying job in bank finance.

I saw Terry one more time a few years, but while he still remained his boyish self, he had begun to develop a middle age pouch and was less interested in catching up on things than on getting my dick up his butt.

As for Jack, I has lost his screen name on Bear411 and tried finding it to take him up on his invite to accompany him at that May’s IML. But even after combing through the hundreds of listings three times, it seemed as if he had disappeared.

I guess you can’t go home again.

Even when it comes to your boys.

Next: Sex Clubbing

Inside The Mind of a Writer: Real Life Experiences that Have Shaped My Art

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame As a Porn Star

Now posing in the nude can be oh-so-artsy or down-and-dirty smutty depending on who’s doing it and for what. My first plunge in exhibitionistic immortality came oddly enough from a fine arts doctoral student who reached out to me on the hook-up site, Daddyhunt, to pose nude for his photo project called “Guys in Their Living Space.” The best of the shoot would be displayed, wall mural size, along with those of a dozen other men, at a gallery in Miami’s new Art District as part of his doctoral dissertation.

The shoot took a few hours and Doug, tall, all ass and geeky, was purely professional about the whole thing, doing the shoot with me sprawled naked in my living room. No erections here, more like Michelangelo’s soft-cocked Adam.

The night of Doug’s exhibit, I dragged along one of my buddies who still didn’t believe what I had done. After pondering myself up on a wall, bigger than life, ten feet by six feet, and, well, getting self-aroused, I stepped back and quietly observed the reactions of my admirers, mostly retro-hippy collegiate types, with a sprinkling of older couples and smartly dressed yuppies. Surprisingly, the only other gay men in the room were those up on the wall, all with friends or lovers.

Only one man, an older guy, dressed in a blazer and slacks, actually recognized me as the man in the picture and coming up to me at the refreshment table quipped, “Nice tan, young man.” If he only knew I was probably older than he was.

But it was my Rentboy gig that I can credit for giving me my fifteen minutes of fame in porn. Chris, a producer for San Francisco-based Pantheon Productions that specializes in older men, bear and daddy porn, was canvassing for potential new talent for some planned shooting dates in Lauderdale, saw my RB ad, and e-mailed me, asking if I might be interested.

I only hesitated for two reasons and not that my high school English teacher would ever see the results: would I be able to perform, i.e., keep Mr. Peter up for a four hour shoot, Viagra or no Viagra; and not so much how much I’d make but when I’d get paid.

You see, I had already been hustled by a local porn producer who when asked that question said payment would be forthcoming six to eight weeks after the shoot. Huh? And what if he snookered me? What was my recourse? Complain to the Better Business Bureau of Porn Distributors?

But Chris assured me I would be paid the day I did the shoot and that I could do a “solo” if I liked. I was still a bit gun shy til Chris added it would be just me and him and that he would provide all the arousal material I needed. With that he e-mailed over his pic. He was a youngish, tight bodied, handsome fucker complete with goatee, not some old, fat, leering troll as I imagined most porn directors to be. He apologized for not being hairy to which I replied, “Don’t worry, you’ll do.”

On the day of my junket into the world of virtual sex, I reported to one of the local guesthouses by the beach where Chris had rented a suite. He met me at the door wearing only a pair of cargo shorts and was obviously pleased with my furry, equally shirtless body.

“Yep, you’re definitely daddy material,” he said with a sly smile.

After I signed my life away or I should say my images into residual-free perpetuity, we bantered around a screen name. Randy which I used on rentboy was already taken so we decided on Ray Andrews, my real first name and Andrew my middle name. I asked where Ray Andrews would surface – either Pantheonbears.com or Hotoldermales.com. “Probably both,” he went on, stroking my crotch, “you fit ‘em both real well.” I wondered if guys still bought DVD’s with all the porn on the web, and Chris concurred that that end of the business had transitioned to streaming but there was still money to be made.

All that was left was the shoot.

We started with stills of me in a jockstrap and boots, first sprawled across a chair, my legs lasciviously spread, then posed against the wall. From all angles of course.

“Nice pouch, daddy,” Chris replied as he casually let his shorts drop to the floor in between snaps. He wasn’t wearing underwear.

Then came my own unveiling, and with this boyish 40 year old standing there naked in front of me, every so often pulling on his nice cut cock which was getting hard, I had no problems in the erection department. By the time we moved to the video, he was even coming over to give me an occasional lick or two in the right places. I knew it was all for the camera, but I can’t deny this aging faggot didn’t enjoy it.

It didn’t take much to get me close and I had to actually hold back a bit so Chris got his required ten minutes of footage, zooming in closer and closer, as cum finally cascaded over my dick and the camera lingered there like some photographer for National Geographic shooting a newly erupted volcano.

As I cleaned up, I asked Chris if he wanted me to give him some “relief” but he just gave me a kiss and said he was O.K. Spoken like a true porn coach.

“We usually pay by check but I was able get to the ATM. Cash OK?”

“No problem,” was my understated reply.

We parted cordially, he promised to look me up for a possible dynamic duo next time he was in town, and I didn’t bother to count the bills til I got back to my car. Because ATM’s only spit out twenties, he had actually overpaid me for the session – $260 instead of the $250 he had quoted when we were still in e negotiations.

I looked at my watch. I had been with Chris for exactly 57 minutes.

The easiest money I ever made in my life.

As a kid, I thought movie stars never grew old and today I still think film is the closest thing we have to immortality. So if I’m lucky enough to live to 97, I guess there just may be some young boy out there in cyberland still jerking off over my furry daddy bod, forever perpetualized in time one warm Lauderdale Tuesday afternoon in a room by the beach.

Tuesday: Real Life Experiences That Shaped My Art: My Second Gay Career as a Daddy