Inside The Mind of A Writer: My Characters Are Real

Like most writers, I’ve based my characters either on alter egos of myself or composites of people I have known, and being an active gay man, I’ve known quite a few both socially and Biblically.

But there are a few characters who come to my books undiluted, and whom I used largely as I knew them in real life

So what I’d like to do over the next few weeks is to compare their real personas with their fictionalized ones: Danny, who I used as the basis for one of the protagonists in “Not In It for The Love,” and as a lead character in my short story, “Guilt Gift;”; Mitch, who became a secondary character in “Buy Guys”;  Tito, a secondary but very influential character in my novel, “The Czar of Wilton Drive,”; and Shaw, a pivotal character in the same book.

Let’s start with Danny – the real Danny.

“Lover” may be too strong a word to use with a guy I played with only a few times, but when we were together, Emotion eclipsed Physicality.

Not because Ironside – his screen name – alias Danny, a handsome 42 year old fucker, and a dead ringer for Christian Bale, was in a wheelchair, the result not of some accident but a degenerative viral spinal disease that left his legs useless appendages. For I soon discovered that all the stereotypical fallacies I had harbored about making it with a paralyzed guy were just that.

It was the summer of 2011 and I was up at my little getaway in rural Pennsylvania. With Rainbow Mountain Resort, our gay refuge, getting more straight with each season and some lousy bookstore miles away, the web and phone apps were my only hope for finding discrete dick. But I soon found that the listings were leaner than some Hollywood anorexic, though the guys were as picky and fucked up as everywhere else. Frauds, game players, or virtual sex buddies.

Then one night on bear 411 up popped Danny.

Though he was a good hour and a half away across the border in upstate New York, he was more than willing to meet me at a motel about half-way between him and me for a few hours one afternoon. Maybe distracted by his bearded face and muscular hairy chest pic, it wasn’t until I read his post a second time that I noticed the words “in a wheelchair but still agile and active.” I figured I’d beat him to the punch before he brought it up and e’d him as we finalized our plans: ”I see you’re disabled. NP.”

After all, I had had a Vietnam vet double amputee a couple of lifetimes ago in my youth and was not turned off by deformity, maybe because I had grown up with a grandfather who had lost his right arm in a factory mishap. But I was still curious how things would work with someone paralyzed, you know, down there. Even a guy who reassured me he took Cialis.

We rendezvoused in the motel parking lot, and from the driver’s side of his mini-van, he looked pretty much like his pics, a wavy, sexy salt and pepper mop of hair and scruffy beard to match. I got the room – wheelchair accessible – and went ahead to open the door when he appeared at the doorway in his chair with his service dog, a large black gentle Lab named Bosco, faithfully beside him, carrying his master’s bag in his teeth. I wished my three little mutts were half as well behaved as Bosco was.

Danny had mentioned in his message to me about being a little nervous meeting someone for sex and admitted now, as he used his massive arms and shoulders to position his body and withered rail legs onto the bed, that it had been awhile since he had been with a man. So, stripped down to my briefs, I opened the bottle of Merlot he had suggested I bring as he lit up some of his medical marijuana and shared a few drags with me. The grass was to soothe the pain of the occasional leg spasms he suffered despite or maybe because of his paralysis. I have to say the stuff was pretty potent and gave me a prolonged heavenly high without affecting me downstairs.

As we lay on the bed, me naked by now except for my sneakers and he, a good half Italian and half Irish boy in his white “Guinea” ( his word not mine) tank top, and black bikini underwear, I didn’t know what to do nor what to expect. Was he wearing a Depends, did he have a catheter up his cock? Should I attempt to grope his crotch?

But instead of continuing to dissect the situation, I just turned to him, enveloped his shoulders with my arms, and kissed him with a kiss that went on for the next ten minutes, as he stroked the hairs on my chest and I held his head ever closer to mine. I know he could feel my stirring cock against his chest, pre-cum drops wetting his tank.

Then he guided my hand down to his crotch. Yes, his dick was soft though still sensitive to my mouth – “Takes a while for my plumbing to work, but I don’t feel nervous anymore” – so I switched gears and began tonguing, then softly sucking his big hairy sac, something he found pleasurable.

As he turned to strip off his tank top, then his underwear, his naked butt came into view. His cheeks resembled two rotting melons, bruised and miss-shapenned, a reality of literally sitting on your ass too much he later explained.

But I quickly refocused on the good, not just what I saw – well-built shoulders, strong arms, great chest, handsome manly face – but also what I felt.

Was it the wine and the marijuana? Or just two guys with no agendas feeling good together?

He was a great cocksucker as I stood over and straddled him, working his small yet super sensitive nips with my fingers, and after we had licked and sucked and kissed and smoked for about an hour, all the while Bosco sprawled out peacefully on the adjoining twin bed, Danny reached down and began stroking his dick which was finally rising to the occasion. A smile crossed his face like a 13 year boy relishing his first erection.

“See what you’re doin’ to me, you hot fucker,” Danny murmured as he continued to stroke his cock and motioned me to stick mine back in his mouth. A minute later I was down on his.

So a guy in a wheelchair could not only get a hard-on. He could enjoy it too.

I came like he wanted me to cum, my man juice dripping from his lips, and he climaxed too. I knew he had, not by what didn’t happen – an ejaculation – but by the way he suddenly griped me tightly for those moments as he wildly stroked his dick into some kind of oblivion, then lay back, exhausted. I felt happy, happy I had shot and happy to see my handsome, muscular buddy happy too.

Afterwards, we chatted about life. He had been a high school music teacher until a sudden onset spinal infection left him paralyzed in the space of a weekend. Now he tutored students at home and did occasional gigs as a musician.

We even talked about getting together again before I went back to Florida, and about him coming down to Fort Lauderdale. When traveling, Bosco accompanied him on the plane and his wheelchair neatly folded to fit under his seat.

The following day I e-mailed Danny (a) to let him know I had had a great time, and (b) to make sure he knew I hadn’t been turned off by his affliction as so many guys he told me were. He returned my e-mail with a one page litany of what he wanted “Boss,” his new nickname for me, to do to him next time we connected.

We met actually twice more that summer – he liked the Viagra I gave him, really liked it – and we played truck stop buddies, with the caps and the boots and the tight T’s, Danny lying on the bed stroking his cock as I stood in front of him, shoving my cock down his throat or my butt in his face. He especially liked it when I held his hands down or tied them behind his back so that he’d have no choice but to play my sub-pup.

And after we had both had our physical release, we just lay there, our sweaty bodies sandwiched together.

What I came to love most about Danny in the few hours we shared, besides his handsome face and masculine aura,was his total absence of self-pity. He was a pragmatic guy, like me; if he needed help with something, he’d ask for it, but for the most part, he just dealt with his problem without fanfare. He was always upbeat.

He didn’t take me up on that offer to come down South (maybe it was just as well – my three little dogs would drive his dog nuts), and the following summer when I tried to reconnect, he was gone. Had he sold his house and moved to the West Coast or NYC where there were more play gigs as he had mentioned once to me between sucks and kisses?
Whatever.

We had had our Kodak moments together and, after all, loving in the fast lane is better than never having loved at all.

As the months passed. maybe to keep his spirit alive within me, I used Danny as the model for the wheelchair bound protagonist in my m/m erotic romantic thriller, “Not In It For The Love,” and as a secondary character in my soon-to-be published novella, “Buy Guys,” about two young drifters who try to make it as hustlers in Fort Lauderdale and find their plans backfire big time.

Then, suddenly last summer, back up in PA as I pondered some guy from Dubai who wanted to exchange pics with me on one of the phone apps, who popped up than that handsome rugged face and the message: “Hey Boss, you bringin’ the cuffs next Thursday?”

We got together at a local motel where, out of my element in homophobic rural America, I passed Danny off as my handicapped half-brother. Bosco dutifully carried his bag into the motel room and then promptly found a corner to curl up in while I said “hey man” to his master with a kiss that lasted a good five minutes.

Yes, the magic was still there.

In fact, we kissed most of the next hour and forty-five minutes away, that is when “Boss” wasn’t playing rough just as his truck stop buddy likes it, holding his muscular arms (Danny had apparently been buffing up since I saw him last) behind his head while I force-fed him my stiff cock. And once we smoked some of his medicinal weed, things got real intense. Heavy nip play, sniffing armpits, him eating my hairy butt while I got his dick happy with some tough ball tugging. Then we kissed and embraced some more.

No, it wasn’t the sexiest hard-core sex I’ve ever had (Danny still has some problems with his plumbing), but it certainly ranked up there as some of the most sensual. As if only two days, not two years had passed since we last held one another tight, the AC intentionally off, so there was plenty of stench and sweat on our hairy bodies to savor, feel and taste.

Danny has another trip planned the beginning of September to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the epicenter of research into the rare spinal viral infection that left him paralyzed in the space of a weekend; in fact, he has become Johns Hopkins’ unofficial poster boy for the malady. And, yes, there is renewed hope that stem cell implantation may be the answer to nerve regeneration and his walking again.

Oh, besides hopefully getting together a few more times till Labor Day when I return to Fort Lauderdale, it looks like one of us will be taking a trip this fall – either Danny to my place (sliding glass doors open up to the patio area from every room of my house so he should be able to get around) or me to his, outside Poughkeepsie, upstate New York.

Hell, Jet Blue has non-stop flights between him and me, Danny likes to swim, and I got a nice heated in-ground pool in my screened in patio.

And if you think I’m gonna to keep my central air on, think again.

Next – Danny in Fiction

Inside The Mind Of A Writer: Plotting “Buy Guys”

Okay, so l got these two handsome gay young guys from Jersey with nowhere jobs and nowhere futures who decide to drive down to sunny Fort Lauderdale to play male hustlers to frustrated locals, partying vacationers and wealthy retirees.

In my very first draft, l had one of them, methodical Pete, with a girlfriend who he doesn’t know he got pregnant until the end when he and cocky Blaze return from their adventures down South. But l soon dropped that storyline since l felt it was a distraction from the budding romance l wanted to develop between my two guys.

The “Buy Guys” in the title refers to the fictional male escort website on which they advertise their talents. (I wonder, are pimps a thing of the past? I mean don’t today’s ladies of the night use the web too?)

Now l can already predict your immediate knee jerk reaction to all this: pretty standard fare for male gay erotic fiction, huh?

But ripping off a technique from Alfred Hitchcock, famed movie director of such terror classics as “The Birds” and Psycho,” l came up with what Hitch called a “MacGuffin,” a plot device or hook. So what could have been a ho-hum boring fuckfest turned into a male version of “Thelma and Louise,” with my protagonists, who thought things would be easy, breezy, instead finding themselves running for their lives.

In the beginning when Blaze, who is trying to convince Pete to join him on this adventure, asks, “What have we got to lose?” the answer should have been “Everything.”

But if l told you more about my “MacGuffin” you wouldn’t buy my book now, would you?

BTW, most of the sex my two guys experience as dicks for hire is based on experiences l had as a private citizen, shall we say, and as a rentboy which l played a month, of course, to research my book.

Hey, anything for my art, right?

 

Inside The Mind of A Writer: Plotting “Not In For The Love”

“Not In It For The Love:”

” A brillant story you can’t help but inhale whole non-stop till you reach the end … this is not your everyday romance, this is not your everyday fiction either. This story is like taking a peek out there in the lives of real people in the real world.”

MM Good Book Reviews

Three events converged in my percolating writer’s mind as the inspiration behind my romantic novel, “Not In It for The Love,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble: a vacation in Key Largo, entry point to the Florida Keys; my loveship with my Upstate New York wheelchair bound buddy, Vinnie; and my personal experience with 9/11.

It was 2008 and my partner and I, down for the winter at my home in Fort Lauderdale, decided to spend a few days in the Keys and booked an inexpensive motel on the water in Key Largo. Watching the handsome men serving us in the motel’s outdoor restaurant that jutted out to the sea, l wondered if any of them had left nowhere existences and perhaps, straight or gay, used their good looks as “sex therapists” to the mostly str8 couples l saw at the motel who looked pretty bored with one another.

Thus my inspiration for my protagonist, Josh, who leaves his drug addicted trailer park parents in North Florida to work at his Uncle Cappy’s motel in – you guessed it – Key Largo. It is there that Josh, unsure of his sexuality, comes out of the closet, has a brief affair with one of the motel’s humpy young workers, and learns how to make some real money by spicing up the sex lives of motel guests. It is also there that he meets Bishop, a wealthy Wall Street player, canvassing motels for possible acquisition by hotel conglomerates he represents, who “adopts” him and brings him back to NYC to be his trophy boy. Bishop is modeled after my partner G who, like the character, is a Middle Eastern American who worked on “The Street” most of his professional life.

I met Vinnie, wheelchair bound as a result of a rare viral spinal infection, while spending a summer up at our home in northeast PA. We rendezvoused a few times at a motel equal distance from both us and I fell immediately in love with my handsome stranger, not out of pity, but instead deeply moved by his resiliency and determination to enjoy life whatever shit was thrown at him. Vinnie and l have stayed in touch over the years and, as of this writing, he plans to sell his home in Poughkeepsie, New York, and relocate to Fort Lauderdale.

In my book, Vinnie became Hylan, the young interracial musician with whom Josh, playing the field in the Big Apple, and up to that point in my story, an opportunist when it came to having sex with men (thus my title, “Not In It For The Love”), falls deeply in love. Despite the fact they are both broke, Josh is determined to make it happen when 9/11 intervenes, changing their lives and Bishop’s forever.

I was the PR director for a hospital on Staten Island, NYC’s forgotten borough at the time and was there in lower Manhattan that fateful Tuesday for a system-wide meeting at St. Vincent’s, Manhattan, who we had merged with the year before. The description of what happens to Josh who is thrown into the whirlwind is based largely on my experiences that day. And I made 9/11 as the critical plot twist in my book.

It was also because I wanted to use my 9/11 experience that I decided to place my story in the NYC of the late nineties. The gay scene l describe in the book is of that era, a scene that has now largely disappeared.

Next: Plotting my novella, “Buy Guys.”