A Dangerous Mind

END of BLOG

2007-08-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm ending this blog. It's gotten to the point where my various endeavors leave me not enough time to write things that go frequently onto the blog, leaving large gaps of time in between postings. This is not desirable, so I'd rather leave the blog ended, but unended, than to just let it wither away.

I may start a new one sometime when I have writing that I want to post again. Right now I'm working on things that take longer to germinate and also working on sending some things off to publishers in hopes that there is a publisher in this country as crazy as I am.

Thanks to all who read and especially those who gave me feedback.

Best of luck to all.
Mark

THERAPY AND SUPPORT

2007-08-04T18:53:00.000-07:00

I made a woman cry today. I didn't do it on purpose and I tried to make up for it by softening the verbal blows that started it, but it really comes down to whether I was there to give her therapy or support and what she was expecting.

I facilitate a support group for people with depression and bipolar disorder. I am not a professional and there are no professionals in the room. It is a peer group self-help support group. It is as good as it's members - and as bad. As the facilitator I am in charge of keeping the room in order so that everyone who wants to speak about how they are doing and what is going on in their lives gets a chance and any crosstalk stays on point and brief. The people in my group are really good and sometimes police each other before I feel a need to do anything, so my job is relatively easy on that front. I direct traffic. But they also rely on me to try and keep abreast of developments on the depression/bipolar front - and while they know it is an impossible task, I do try to bring in news from time to time and articles of general interest. The group as a whole is a working dictionary of psychopharmacalogic medications - if I don't know it somebody else does. Somebody has either tried it, been on it, is on it, knows 7 people who are on it, something that we can give you as feedback. But we do not diagnose. We'll tell you, "This is our experience with that drug or that doctor or that hospital or that treatment, but we're a small sample, so make your own judgment and talk to your doctors or whoever helps you make these decisions because we can't make them for you." And I swear I and others in the group have said that or something like it to numerous people who have come through wanting us to give them the magic drugs and the right doctor and what daily regimen they should follow to not ever have another manic or depressive episode again. If I knew that I'd write a book, not facilitate a group of 9 people on Saturday morning.

Anyway, this group and others like it meet every day all over the country. And some people use them as a major part of their therapy plan for dealing with their mental health problem. Why? Because most of them are free. My group is. So if you can't afford a therapist or don't want to spend the money, go to a group instead. Right? Wrong.

For someone with serious mental illness: unipolar depression, biploar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. a support group is only one part of a comprehensive plan. First you need a good psychiatrist, and then you need to take any medication that is prescribed and work through medication issues until you find satisfactory meds. Then you need weekly therapy with a qualified therapist. A support group can then help you on a peer level to see that other people struggle with the same issues that you do and exchange and learn ways to cope with and conquer problems that are part of your illness. While therapy helps you to see and understand yourself, a support group is much more concerned with teaching you to order a taco tomorrow if you are having trouble ordering tacos because of some weird taco experience while manic or depressed two years ago. They don't care if you ever figure out why you have this problem, they will give you a 5 step battle plan for ordering a taco and surviving the experience. And they'll cry with you when you come back next week and describe how you did it. So it has a therapeutic aspect to it - or cathartic at least - but it also has that quality of peers pushing each other to get it together and be better.

Of course, getting better is what we're there for. It isn't a pity party, although we sometimes drag out our old stories of the worst day I ever had when some newcomer stops in to tell us they're the sickest weenie in the valley. Bull. I know I'm not the sickest - I go to the stupid meeting.

So this woman today. I think she expected the pity party - or therapy - for us to help her see her soul. Well, she's been coming for several weeks now and she's very depressed and she's also very angry and she's a lot to put up with. But everyone has put up with her and I've been making positive suggestions - she lost her job and had no health care so I directed her to the County clinic and I and others have suggested a couple of other things. And now she's applying for disability. And somebody at the disability office irritated her. So she got huffy with them and she's decided to file 3 complaints about the person and about the disability office in general. I suggested that she should not file complaints about an office that she was hoping would rule on her side in a disability appeal. Didn't seem smart to me. She started to argue with me about it. I reiterated that it wasn't smart to insult people who were reviewing a case you wanted to win. At that point someone else jumped in and said she should listen to me and that's when the tears flowed - so maybe I didn't make her cry, he did. There.

But I tried to tell her I understood how frustrated and angry she got dealing with the bureaucracy, but she had to reconcile herself to it that some of this frustration would happen and she had to just grin say yes I'll send that form or whatever. We ended up suggesting that she find a friend or get a case worker to put between her and any official of a governmental agency. She's too volatile. I just hope she comes back. The fact is everybody will have a rough day in a group now and then - at least you will if you're actually working on anything - and it is easy to disappear and never show up again. You can even blame the idiots in the group for not understanding you or getting what you're about. It is harder to have the bad day and go back in and participate as usual in the group.

I've met people who think it is admirable of us to have this group without professional guidance. And I've met people who think is it foolhardy of us to have this group without professional guidance. I don't think it is admirable for US to have this group. We've inherited it. I think it was admirable for those who put it together and talked their way into a senior citizens center to host it. Is it foolhardy to have peer support? Probably. But it has some benefit and you have to allow the mentally ill some latitude to go to a group and sort out what is worthwhile for them and what is not. You can't watch over us all the time and sort out information for us. The fact is, we're gonna talk to each other - might as well be in a clean, well-lit place.

GETTING LAID

2007-08-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

GETTING LAID

The problem with being inwardly shy and awkward while being outwardly confident is that people don’t know how to really react to you. They assume you’ve got it all together when in fact you’re missing major pieces of the puzzle.

I had the work thing together – I had the school thing together – I did not have any clue about meeting, dating, having sex with other guys. I was now living in a city of several hundred thousand people, on a college campus of about 20,000, and I still couldn’t find another gay person – not even to have coffee with.

My first gay event was a lecture by Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet. This was in the days when he was putting the book together, and he was earning money by taking a show around to campuses and giving a lecture with slides and film clips about how the film industry had treated homosexual actors and homosexual themes. I’d never been to an event where homosexuality was discussed in public before – I went by myself and it was interesting and exciting. I didn’t recognize anyone there, but as I was leaving, a couple of guys came up to me and asked if I was Tim Rice’s brother. I said yes, and told them my name. They gave me their names and said that they had known Tim. That was it – they didn’t want to get to know me or anything, they just wanted to verify that Tim Rice had a gay brother that they’d caught him at this event. It would make good gossip.

I was identified as Tim’s brother a number of times while at the University. We had a close resemblance to one another, and I got used to people asking if I was related to him. Sometimes I was mistaken for him, something that proved a bit unnerving the first time I walked into the major gay disco in town.

I was, of course, nervous about going into a gay bar for the first time. It was the first time I’d been in any bar, I’d just turned 21 and could now go legally. It never occurred to me to try and get a fake ID and go illegally. Anyway, I’m like six steps into this dark and smoky bar with disco music blaring and I’m trying to scope out where would be a safe place for me to go and stand and try to figure out what to do next when this huge drag queen comes flying across the room shouting, “Tim, Tim, Tim!” and I am enveloped in feathers and a cape while trying to explain that I’m not Tim.

The drag queen had gone to high school with Tim – Lady Michelle (Michael). Michael became my gay bar friend and protector. I found out that everyone in Tim’s high school class thought he was gay – I thought he was gay – but I told Michael that I had told Tim some time ago that I’m gay and he did not reciprocate with similar information, so I guess he’s not or he’s just holding out on me. I later found out that Tim was in such deep denial that he didn’t discover that he was gay for several more years – even though he was living in Manhattan, capital of homosexual culture in America.

Anyway, I soon found out that Gallup High was a major source of drag queens for the bars in Albuquerque. It seems that Gallup is so repressive that when people finally do come out they don’t stop until they’ve got a feather boa wrapped around their shoulders. I didn’t seem to have that urge – I just wanted a man wrapped around my shoulders – and one who would throw me on my back and help me make footprints on the ceiling.

I went to the disco a couple of times, but it didn’t seem to have the atmosphere I needed to connect with anyone. So I traveled further out on Central Avenue to a sleazy dive called Foxes, which was more of a regular bar, although it did have a small dance floor, with an older crowd – more mid 30’s to flirting with death kind of guys.

I was 21, 6’, 150 lbs, more or less attractive, blonde, and as obviously available as I could make myself. I got picked up by a guy in his 30’s, Hispanic, nice. He’d had several drinks when he introduced himself to me, and he had several more before we left the bar. When we got to his place he had another couple of drinks and then we went to bed and we kissed and fondled and he asked me to go down on him. My first actual sex act. So I did and I didn’t know how well I was doing it, but I thought it was going OK. And then his erection seemed to be flagging and then it wasn’t erect anymore and I looked up at him and he was asleep. Passed out, actually. Drunk.

I was embarrassed – sucking on a drunk guy’s dick. I was mad – I was – I don’t know – I was very pissed off. I got dressed and left. He called me the next day. I told him that it was nice of him to call, but I really didn’t think we should get together again. End of my first romance.

My second romance came from the same source – about the same thing. Hispanic guy in his 30’s at Foxes. He came up to me and asked if we could talk – I said sure. We talked, he asked me home. I asked if he was drunk – he said no. I said, “Sorry, I have to ask, I went home with a guy once who was drunk and it was a really bad experience.” He smiled and said he understood and he knew that sex was usually bad when somebody was drunk.

We went to his house – which he shared with his mother – but she was fine with his sexuality. We had great sex – or it was the best sex I’d ever had – and he seemed to be happy about it. He asked me to spend the night, which I did. We took a shower and he had the munchies, so we went to the kitchen. There was a rhubarb pie. He said his mother was always making rhubarb pie because she has arthritis and likes marijuana for the pain. But she doesn’t like to smoke it, so she puts it in the pie. I’d never had marijuana, but he talked me into sharing a piece of pie with him. We stood there in the kitchen and shared a piece of marijuana laced rhubarb pie and got a buzz on. We went back to bed and had sex again – very different being stoned. I felt like I was covering a lot of bases in one night for a virgin. But it was great and he held me afterwards.

He wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, but he did like having me visit now and then. I saw him a number of times, met his mother who would scramble eggs for us in the morning. We didn’t always have rhubarb pie, but often enough. We never officially ended, we just stopped – I guess he didn’t call and I didn’t call and ask if I could come by.

He gave me a lot of confidence about myself – a lot of lessons about sex – and a real appreciation for the magic of rhubarb. The kind of guy every virgin needs to find.

BEATRICE BONNER HOPKINS (DEC'D).

2007-07-31T07:22:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Robert Fischer

Sunday, July 29, 2007 – Special to the New York Times

By Mark Rice

B.B. Hopkins, 81, a fashion presence who was a model, actress, designer, and writer, died on July 24 at her home in Manhattan. She died from complications of lung cancer, said her son, Dixon Ryan. In addition to Dixon, she is survived by another son, Beau Ryan.

Ms. Hopkins was a fixture on the Manhattan social circuit. She was born Beatrice Bonner Hopkins, the daughter of John and Miriam Hopkins, in Paramus, New Jersey on May 14, 1926. Her father was a construction worker and her mother took care of Beatrice and her two brothers and three sisters.

After graduating from high school Ms. Hopkins moved to New York to attend a modeling and acting academy for young women. She lived in a residential hotel for women and worked part-time at secretarial and clerical jobs while training and looking for work as a model or actress. There was plenty of work as the nation was at the height of World War II when Ms. Hopkins moved to New York. The shortage of men to fill positions meant that young women like Ms. Hopkins had opportunities they might not have otherwise have had.

Ms. Hopkins caught on as a model with the Thomas Agency and worked steadily in the New York fashion world throughout the balance of the forties and into the fifties.

In 1954 Ms. Hopkins married Eric Ryan, an actor who was moving up from supporting roles on Broadway to supporting roles in the movies. They met when Ms. Hopkins got a small part in Mr. Ryan’s last theatrical performance, “Come One, Come All.” They married at City Hall and moved to Hollywood where Mr. Ryan had become a contract player with MGM. He was featured in such films as “Over There,” “My Son John,” and “Three Flags for Freedom.” Ms. Hopkins meanwhile settled down to have two children and keep a household for her husband.

While at home Ms. Hopkins began designing and making clothes for herself. Her trademark gowns were loose, layered, and flowed from shoulder to floor, lending elegance and a pleasing shape to almost any woman’s body. Lively prints or black and white designs made these elegant gowns crowd pleasers. After several appearances at Hollywood functions with her husband, Ms. Hopkins began to field requests for gowns especially designed for the wives of other actors and for several notable actresses.

The business eventually became big enough that Ms. Hopkins hired a nanny for the children and set up a shop in Hollywood, “B B’s Designs.” The shop was a success and the money came just as Mr. Ryan’s career was beginning to suffer. The post war pot boilers that he specialized in were losing favor with the public and MGM had terminated his contract.

In 1965, Ms. Hopkins returned to New York with the children to do the costumes for a new musical by Barry Lindon. It was a very modern piece and the men would be in business suits and the director wanted the women to be in gowns designed by BB. Mr. Ryan stayed behind in Hollywood. Officially he was up for a part in a new movie. Unofficially, he had become a drunk while unsuccessfully looking for work after MGM terminated him. While BB was in New York working on “Casino,” the Barry Lindon musical, Mr. Ryan died in an accident at a shooting range out in the desert near Morongo, California. His remains were cremated with a small memorial service being held after Ms. Hopkins returned to California from New York.

Her return was brief. Just long enough to sell the house and shop and move everything she wanted to take with her to New York. She signed on there as an assistant to the designer, J. Dobe Halprin, whose real name was Robert Froliech. She was responsible for some of the major design achievements of his studio during the late sixties and into the seventies. She became a fixture at Broadway theatres, New York super clubs, and the nightclubs that the glitterati patronized. She was a gracious and welcoming figure, but always aware that she was a woman on her own and needed to be careful to make friends and avoid enemies if she was to make her way and provide for her children.

Providing for her children meant sending them to the private schools that would put them in touch with the children of the best of the best.

At the home of a friend in Nyack during a long holiday weekend in 1976, Ms. Hopkins met J. Dinsmore Adams, Jr. (Dinny), who was then 71 and a former captain of the Harvard squash team and a partner in the New York law firm of Custis, Maillot-Provost, Colt and Kennerly. He was divorced and head of the estates and trusts division.

The Adams family had been prominent in New York City for over 200 years and Dinny had inherited a 14 room Park Avenue apartment. BB married Dinny forthwith and moved into his apartment. Her children visited when not in school, and BB set about redecorating the apartment which hadn’t had a major facelift in two or three generations of the Adams family.

As a mature woman she was asked to model again. But this time they wanted her to model her own designs, licensed by Halprin. She enjoyed this resurgence in her career and impressed upscale New York with her ability to design elegant dresses, model them for the magazines, redo old Dinny’s apartment and become a hostess to be reckoned with. This last was accomplished when she was asked to help out with the Harold Arlen musical, “House of Flowers,” for which Truman Capote had written the book. She designed some of the costumes herself and supervised the design of others. Through Capote she met Diana Vreeland, who was already a fan of her designs but had never met their creator. Capote and Vreeland brought the crème de la crème of 1970’s New York society with them when they answered the call to a cocktail party at BB’s. Dinny suffered the redecorating and the parties. He would have preferred to be drafting someone’s will to listening to Truman Capote lisp some gossipy story at him, but he put up with it for BB’s sake.

Dinny died in 1980 and left BB nothing. That is, he left her nothing outright. He was in estates and trusts, and what he left her he left in a trust. The apartment was hers until she died. It was held in something called a life estate. The money was all in a trust and it paid her a monthly income. It was generous enough that she didn’t have to worry, but not so generous that she could do anything she wanted. If she wanted a trip to Europe she had to beg the trustee – one of Dinny’s law partners who thought BB was beneath him and not a guy who was anxious to dole out anything more than the trust required. He left $100,000 to each of the children. Since she couldn’t leave them anything from the trust when she died that was all they would get out of the Adams family.

Ms. Hopkins is perhaps best known among New Yorkers and others as the woman who was the creator of the famous children’s book “Sparkle Plenty Gets Put Down.” It explains in loving terms how a pet is put to sleep when it gets old and pees on the rug. The idea came to her from a story told by Ellen Wright, the cabaret singer. She used to amuse her friends with the story of how her favorite pet mysteriously disappeared one day when she was a child and the confusion over the term “put down” when her parents finally said something about the missing pet. BB wrote the story and got an old friend, Zoë Sallinger, to do the drawings. The book was a children’s bestseller for years and prompted many sequels. The success of this book gave BB an estate of her own.

Over the years BB assisted or collaborated with people like Avedon, Noriega, Vargas, Triandos, and many others. Her sense of style, shape, and color influenced the look of many plays and musicals over the years.

Beatrice Bonner Hopkins Ryan Adams’ life will be celebrated in a memorial service at the Chapel of St. Theresa of Avila, who’s most famous utterance, was that “Love is as hard and unbending as Hell.” The Chapel is on Fashion Avenue at Broadway. The service will be at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 1, 2007. All who are fans of Sparkle Plenty or elegant design are invited to pass through the chapel and view the remains prior to the service. The chapel opens at 9:00 a.m. No floral tributes please.

COLLEGE

2007-07-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

COLLEGE

I didn’t go to college right away. I didn’t know how. I mean, I had no way of paying for it and it was never discussed with my parents. I never applied to a university for admission or applied for scholarships or did anything to get into a school, even though it was expected that I would go. Sounds stupid, no?

I think my parents were afraid that if they talked to me about it, I would expect them to participate in paying for it. Perish the thought. They never took me to a college night at the high school and I never went on my own. Despite all the acting out and bluster about not going to school and taking responsibility for my siblings and being a good employee and stuff, I was, for the most part, still a terrified and withdrawn kid who knew he was vitally different from his peers and knew no other similarly situated kids. My isolation was profound. I was unable to confront most usual teenage life situations, which is why I fled them and lived in a largely adult world – a junior adult – I didn’t particularly belong there either, but I was treated better there and I had more confidence about what I was doing.

So I stayed home for a year after graduating from high school. I took some courses at the local branch of the University of New Mexico and I worked full time at the photo shop. The next summer I drove to California to visit my grandmother. I was there for a few days when my parents called and said they were coming out with the rest of the kids. I didn’t want to see them. I left the morning of the day they were due to arrive. I was headed east between Yuma, Arizona and Phoenix. I saw their car headed west – my brother, Greg, was driving. I had escaped.

I went to Albuquerque while they were in California and applied for a job at Albuquerque National Bank. I decided my father and his connections must be good for something. My father was by now president of the bank that he worked for in Gallup. That bank was affiliated with Albuquerque National, and the Chairman of the Gallup bank, Mr. Guest, was the largest individual shareholder of the holding company. I knew Mr. Guest and he liked me – we talked politics and had amicable disagreements since he was a staunch Republican and I was a liberal Democrat.

Anyway, I was as subtle as a brick through a window. I listed Mr. Guest as a reference on my application. The personnel guy asked how I knew Mr. Guest. I explained my connection, which I think the guy doubted, but he apparently checked it out and I was offered a job forthwith. Albuquerque National, I would later find out, was filled with people who had gained jobs through nepotism and favoritism. My little job – a teller – was pretty minor in the web of people who were foisted off on the bank through connections to directors and officers.

I found a furnished efficiency apartment on a bus line that would take me downtown to work and by the time my parents got back from California, I was ready to move. I quit my job in Gallup, my parents took me and my stuff to my new apartment in Albuquerque. My father was pleased that I was going to work for a bank. Nobody seemed to care that I wasn’t going to college. I was out of the house and taking care of myself.

So I was 19 and living on my own – no car – Dad wasn’t contributing a car to my independent living arrangement. I bought a motorcycle after a few months. I started hanging out with a cousin who was my age who lived at home with his parents in Albuquerque. These were the only family that we had ever had any real contact with and I got used to seeing them – I’d go over on Sunday’s and hang around and talk to my aunt and uncle. They seemed like normal people with normal kids. I was gratified to learn some years down the road that all of this normalcy was just as screwed up as my family’s obvious dysfunction. All of their kids hated them and acted out in one way or another. Nonetheless, I remember them with affection.

Joe, my cousin, had a friend, whose name I forget. The three of us hung around together. We’d go out to eat or whatever three 19 year olds did in Albuquerque at the time. One night we were out and ended up back at my apartment. We started listening to music and talking and they stayed until around two in the morning. The next day I went over to my aunt and uncle’s house. My aunt was upset. She didn’t like it that Joe had been out until after two. She wanted to know why I didn’t send him home. I told her that Joe was as old as I was and he could go home any time he wanted. I wasn’t his mother. A couple of weeks later I went over and the other guy’s parents were there. My aunt introduced me to them and the father looked at me and said, “Oh, the one with the apartment.”

My aunt and uncle actually thought it was terrible of my parents to let me live on my own and earn my own living at my age. The whole thing scandalized them. None of their kids left the house until after they graduated from college – some of them not even then. Anyway, it was clear I was a danger to society – having an apartment and providing a haven to the wayward youth of Albuquerque.

During my year as a teller I was treated for anxiety and depression and made the discovery that I really wanted to be in school. I applied to the University of New Mexico and was accepted and applied with the bank for a part-time evening job in the credit card department, basically being a telephone operator taking calls from merchants and putting information into a computer to get approvals for purchases. This was before purchases were approved by automatic gizmos at point of purchase sites. I also applied for a student loan through my father’s bank. He was minimally helpful. Every year of my college life he would postpone processing my loan until the very last minute when I would call up and scream that if I didn’t get the money I’d have to drop out. Then he’d process it. So helpful.

I moved when I started school. My sister, Mary, was starting school too. My parents didn’t want her living alone in the big city. I agreed to share a two bedroom apartment near campus with her. It would make the whole thing more affordable. I worked and paid my expenses. Dad paid Mary’s expenses, but she worked during the summers as a waitress to help pay for food and miscellaneous stuff.

At one point, my mother, who was teaching now – she’d started teaching when Katy had started going to school – offered to give Mary and I $50 a month for groceries. She did, one time. Then my father found out that she was giving me money. All hell broke loose and he ordered her to stop.

Mary and I lived together for two years. It was fine. We got along alright and there were no major problems that I remember. The major problem was that I was gay and not out to family and I wanted to have my own place again just in case I ever met a guy and actually had sex.

So after two years I told Mary I wanted to move to a small apartment about four blocks away. But I found her a responsible and friendly young woman roommate that she found acceptable and we had the whole thing worked out. Oh – by the way – when Mary came to school, so did a car. I used the car to go to work at night. Mary used it other times.

My father was pissed. He thought I was leaving Mary vulnerable to all the thieves and rapists in Albuquerque. He and my mother came over one Sunday to announce that if I left Mary I would no longer be allowed to use his car. I had found out I really wasn’t a motorcycle kind of guy and had given it to my brother, Philip. Without the car I couldn’t work at night. No work at night, no money to go to school.

I was near tears, but I was also in a rage. The injustice of it all. I work and work and work and take care of everybody in sight and just because I want some privacy to have sex that I’m not having anyway I get this shit. Well, I know where my father lives, and it’s his pride. So I announced, as calmly as possible, that my father could take his car and stick it. I would quit the night job and find a day job. I would quit school. I would save money until I had enough to leave Albuquerque. When I left I would not tell them where I was and they would not hear from me again. We were finished. Oh, and I’ll let them know at the bank that the reason I need a day job again is because my father took away my car so I can’t work nights anymore. I asked him to leave my apartment.

He refused to leave the apartment because he paid half the rent. So I left. Went to my friend Theresa’s house. Theresa was a woman in her 50’s who had returned to school after a hectic and varied life of marriages and divorces and raising children and having jobs and we had become friends in Sociology classes and I went there and cried and she made me tea and calmed me down and I stayed there for several hours. When I eventually went back to the apartment, my parents were gone and Mary said, “You can use the car.” I was numb. I wasn’t even happy about it.

HIGH SCHOOL MISCELLANY

2007-07-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

MY FAMILY

All during the time I was in high school I had two other jobs. One was working in the photo shop – which I loved. I worked with Nello, the owner, and Jim, the manager. They both treated me well, praised me for doing a good job and taught me to do more things as I learned.

I also liked many of the customers, and being a small town you develop relationships with customers that go beyond just giving friendly service. One of my junior high school teachers was an artist. She was always a favorite of mine. She came in sometimes to buy art supplies, which we carried in addition to photo supplies. One day I told her that if she ever needed something and wasn’t able to come in, just call me and I’d bring it to her. This became a routine. She’d phone in orders and I’d take them to her house. I’d call her in advance with the total and she’d have a check for me. Other people would call and I’d get their orders ready so that they would just stop by and pay and pick them up.

At work I was always confident and at ease. Very different from school. I liked adults. Adults responded well to my efforts, and I could talk to them. Even when I was younger I could talk to adults. I remember babysitting for a couple when I was in Junior High School – they had two very young children. I’d always get there a few minutes early and the wife would be getting ready and the husband and I would sit and chat. He loved politics and I remember us talking about Cuba and Castro and he hated Castro and I was not a Castro hater. I was in Jr. High and I told him the U.S. had screwed up in Cuba and we made Castro a commie, and he thought I was wrong – but fun to talk with. So it was always beyond, here’s your watercolors, I talked to some of these people about other things, and they treated me like a real person.

The other job was Mother. And Katy. Katy was 6 when I was 16. I remember spending lots of time with her around that age. 6, 7, 8 – somebody had to spend time with her. Mother wasn’t. Dad wasn’t. Philip – closest in age to her, tormented her.

Mother was unraveling. More migraines. More depressions. More doctor visits. Hospitalizations. Lots of drugs. I took her to the doctor a lot. I took her to the hospital emergency room several times. Dad wasn’t around to do it. Tim was in college. Dennis was gone. I didn’t mind taking her, except when she’d start in on her parents. She’d start complaining about her childhood and how her parents had treated her badly.

Basically her story was that her younger sister, Ruth, had developed paralytic polio as a small child. Her parents had to work with her constantly to give her exercises and baths and whatever. It was a drain for them to focus so much on her and take care of my mother too. My great-grandmother didn’t like my grandmother, mainly because grandmother was Catholic, so she urged my grandfather to send mother away to live with non-Catholic relatives in California. Eventually my grandmother stopped resisting this and let it happen. So mother went to live with people who denigrated her faith and her mother. At some point she was moved to a Catholic boarding school in Oklahoma City and then when her father thought she was in danger of becoming a nun, he yanked her out of there and she came home for her high school years.

At any rate, my mother thought she had been treated badly in growing up away from her mother and father and in the hands of these evil relatives – and I’m sure it was difficult. But to me, grandmother Cafky was a kind and loving woman who was always good to me and who I did not want to think anything bad of. I bought Christmas presents every year for her, my aunt Ruth, and my great-aunt, Sr. Mary Alexine O’Shea. From the time I was 16 I drove to San Diego to see them at least twice a year and wrote steady correspondence and talked on the phone with grandmother. I was pretty sure that if grandmother had put a stake through mother’s heart as a child there would be a good reason for it and I could forgive her. Somehow I could see my grandmother trying to cope with the needs of a disabled child, a depressed child, a drunk husband, and the mother-in-law from hell, and just having to give in on something. I was sorry that mother got hurt in the whole thing, but considering what I had been through to that point, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. But I did behave as gently as possible and get her to her doctors and get her her medicine. I suppose that in some ways, I was a major enabler of her habit – but I really didn’t know what else to do. I thought a doctor – or all the doctors she saw were doing what was best for her.

One spectacular time, Mom and Dad managed to be hospitalized at the same time. Tim was in college and Dennis was out of the house. I was the oldest child at home. It would have been my job anyway. Tim didn’t drive. Unless you count pressing on the gas and screaming as driving.

Anyway, Mother had a migraine that wouldn’t respond to medication that could be given out of the hospital so I took her to the hospital and they admitted her and put her on some IV meds. Dad proceeded to have a heart attack at the bank the next morning, and so he was on a different floor of the hospital. Where is a car stuck on a railway track and a speeding locomotive when you need one? Not for me – for them.

Dad’s heart attack was a surprise, but if one had been possessed of rational thought it wouldn’t have been. He’d been drinking and smoking since he was 15. There was some weird right of passage to manhood in his family that dictated that his grandfather give the boys a jar of moonshine and a package of cigarettes on their 15^th birthday. He and his brothers all became alcoholics and they all smoked like chimneys. My dad was the only one to live past 60, and he only made it to 66. Four packs a day and all that liquor will do you in.

So I had school, work, and four children to take care of. I needed groceries. I went to the hospital after Dad was stabilized and asked him how to get money for groceries. He told me to go to his secretary and he’d call and arrange it. So I went to the bank and his secretary let me cash a check on his account so I could get food for my children. We made it through this incident. But I was really exasperated. I didn’t mind taking care of my brothers and sisters – and really, everyone but Katy was getting to the point where they were either helpful or somewhat self sufficient. But if I had to take care of Mom and Dad too, well, the car, the railroad track and the speeding locomotive was something that would have to be looked into more. My recurring fantasy about being an orphan was surfacing again.

I guess I should stop and give my father credit for one thing. Although he never bought me any clothing, or paid for any medical care, or gave me an allowance, or spent a nickel on me other than shelter and food after I started working, he did make sure I had a car. Of course I had to have a car so I could go to work so I didn’t cost him any more money than absolutely necessary. And the medical care thing – his insurance paid for most of my medical care, but if it was out of pocket, it was out of my pocket, not his.

MISCELLANY

One time when I was a senior in high school a girl in the band came up to me and asked what was wrong with me – why had I been sick during the summer? I told her I had some kidney problems and a back problem, mentioning that one leg is a little shorter than the other. She asked, “Oh! Is that why you walk that way?” She was immediately embarrassed, and so was I. I had never realized that anyone took note of the way that I walked, but now knew that people thought I walked with a swish – another sign of my faggotry. I wanted to find a hole and crawl in it. Over 1200 kids had been watching me swish through the halls for three years and now I needed to put a sign on that says – “back problem, left leg shorter than right leg, does not swish.” Not that that would help. Denying that you swish is no good. If you know the word you must do it.

GRADUATION

My high school graduation was the same as practically every high school graduation in middle America. Unremarkable and totally forgettable. I mention it only because it puts the cap on my relationship as a child of Mr. and Mrs. Rice.

I drove to the graduation in my car. Mom and Dad were coming separately. I didn’t see them before the commencement exercises began, so I didn’t know where they were in the crowd. There were over 400 graduating seniors and their families and friends. I didn’t have any family or friends attending, just my parents. I didn’t send out announcements. I didn’t know most of my relatives owing to long estrangements from my father’s brother’s and sisters and I didn’t want to send them to my grandmother and aunt because it seemed like a cheesy way to say, “hi, give me a present.” I mean kids were sending them to hundreds of people who were frat brothers of their fathers that no one had spoken to in 20 years in the search for great presents and I just couldn’t do that, so I didn’t send out any.

So there was the ceremony and they didn’t really give us the diploma, they gave us a fake and we had to go to the library after the ceremony to get the real thing. So, everybody is getting hugged and kissed and taking pictures and stuff, but me – I can’t find my parents anywhere – so I go to the library and I’m the first one there and I get my diploma and I turn around to leave the way I came and I get to the door and the woman says, “You can’t leave this way. The principal is over there and wants to shake your hand.”

I said, “I don’t want to shake his hand. I don’t go to school here anymore. I’ll leave through whatever door I want. Get out of my way.” I pushed by her and walked down the hall. I saw a girl named Barbara Lebeck. We were never close, but she had always been nice to me. She was a little off her rocker too. She hugged me and congratulated me. It was weird karma. A few years later her mother would marry my father after they both got divorced and we’d be step siblings.

I went down to the gym again – where the graduation had taken place. No sign of my parents. I went home. There they were. I asked if they had even bothered to attend. They insisted that they had been there, but they didn’t want to get caught in traffic, so they left after I had walked across the stage – they didn’t think I’d miss them. I just turned around and walked out. I didn’t know where I was going, but I didn’t think they’d miss me.

PORN ANTICS YOU SHOULD NOT EMBRACE

2007-07-15T17:09:00.000-07:00

Even I, one as dedicated to the art of porn as I am, and to free expression and all of that stuff, have found recent trends in porn that are objectionable. These are things that should be discouraged, if not outlawed altogether. You should certainly avoid embracing these things and allowing them into your daily life. It is just this that I am concerned about: THAT GROSS ACTS SEEN ON OTHERWISE UNOBJECTIONABLE PORNOGRAPHIC FILMS WILL LEAD YOU DOWN THE ROAD TO DEGRADATION AND RUIN. As Meredith Wilson put it, "Oh we got trouble, right here in River City."

SPIT KISS. This is the kind of kiss that one gets when you and your partner rare back from each other and hawk a noogie at the other one's mouth. It's meant to be affectionate. It just strikes me as being eleven years old and spitting at your boyfriend's mouth 'cause you weren't going to kiss him until you were twelve - it was a religious thing. It's also disgusting when you're eleven, much less any other age. And it does not connote affection, it connotes, "I suspect you have gangrenous puss sores in your mouth and I'd rather not be anywhere near it." Not exactly indicating strong relationship ties.

SPIT AT THE COCK BLOW JOB MOVE. This is just disgusting. In this move we have someone sucking on a cock - or in some cases, preparing to suck on a cock - and they pull away from the cock and (pretend its someone's mouth?) hawk a big noogie in it's direction. Now, aside from the fact that I find spitting to be kind of low class, it's hardly a pinpoint activity. I've seen them spit everywhere from thigh to bedpost. I know we'd all be happier if that extra saliva had been applied to the dick for lubrication lovingly, traditionally, from mouth to dick on an organ to organ basis.

DOUBLE SUCKING. This is the place in the program where a guy or a girl is called upon to try and suck two cocks at once. Of course it cannot be effectively done; particularly at porn star dick sizes, but that doesn't prevent them from jamming two dick heads uselessly at some poor guy or gal's mouth and pretending that they're all getting so much out of it It's really boring footage and looks really uncomfortable so it takes the sex drive out of the films.

SPITTING AT A VAGINA. See my previous complaint about spitting at cocks. But really, we just come back to the fact that spitting at one another's genitals is so low class. I don't think we even have footage of Monkeys doing it. They have standards that rise above those we have now descended to in making porn.

FLUTTER KISS. This is really only mildly objectionable compared to all that spit, but I really dislike the flutter kiss. This is where two people don't kiss, they stick out their tongues and flutter them in the direction of each other. I think Kristen Bjorn thought this was cute in some movie and it caught on. I have many loves for Kristen Bjorn, but he deserves 90 days in Riker's for this one.

There are probably other things I'd change in porn - but these are at the top of my "I wish I could watch porn and never see these things happen again" list. Oh well, just thought I'd share. If you have a favorite porn trick you love or hate, leave a comment.

BECKY AND SANDY - HIGH SCHOOL

2007-07-11T12:49:00.000-07:00

BECKY AND SANDY

The saviors of my time in Gallup were two sisters named Becky and Sandy. Becky was my age and Sandy was a year older. They were the Carlsons. Their parents were nice people. Mrs. Carlson was a homemaker and Mr. Carlson worked on the railroad and would sometimes be gone for a couple of days.

Becky was pretty and popular, but her parents had brought her up to be a regular person and not get carried away by things like that. She was also smart and I think she liked me because I was strange and smart and was a boy who wasn’t after her because of her looks and her big tits. Sandy had little tits and suffered the way small breasted women with big breasted sisters have always suffered. She didn’t date much until she left for college and then she found a guy whose family owned a big chunk of Sears Roebuck and settled down to be rich and raise some kids of her own. At least I think that’s what happened, but don’t quote me, I lost track of them a long time ago.

Becky and I were close. I spent so much time at the Carlson’s that I practically was adopted there. They didn’t ask much about the horrors of my household and why I didn’t go home, they just let me stay as much as I wanted to. I ate there and spent weekends there, except I had to go home to sleep. Becky and I palled around with her girlfriends. I remember one Saturday one of her friends came by in a pickup truck and they were going around picking up everybody in the gang and before you knew it there were 9 girls and me in the cab of this pickup truck. It was noticed too. Somebody said something to my father in the bank the next Monday about seeing his son, Mark, riding around in a pickup with a bunch of girls. My father was so proud.

Becky started using me strategically on dates. Since I was there a lot, I was often there when a date arrived to pick her up. I’d open the door and say hi and let the guy in and he’d ask what I was doing there and I’d say I’m just a friend of Becky’s and we were just spending the afternoon together and she’ll be ready in a minute – sit down – and this never went over well that I spent more time with his date than he was going to. But what really frosted them was when Becky would come out and say, “Mark’s coming with us.” That was the death knell for the dating thing. When Becky started taking me on dates with her, she was finished with the guy and he just had to get used to the idea that it was over. I got a few good dates out of it, but never a goodnight kiss.

Some people got so used to seeing me and Becky around town that they thought we were brother and sister. Somebody actually asked us in a drugstore one time if we were related. I – always ready to lie rather than tell the truth – said that my mom and Becky’s dad had been married and divorced and I stayed with mom and Becky stayed with dad and then they got remarried and had other kids but Becky and I were always close. That disposed of, we went home and told Becky’s mother about our little story.

I told my mother later.

Becky’s mother was very straight laced. In high school we got hold of a copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth. Mrs. Carlson found out that we had it. She made us tear it up and burn it in the back yard. Luckily we’d finished it.

Becky saved me during high school. She was my best – and often my only – friend. More than that, her family saved me. They let me be in their family without questioning why I was fleeing my own. Maybe it was well known why I would flee my own, I’m not sure.

When I got to college and decided to come out officially, Becky is the one person I was sure would understand. I mean, she had to know. So I wrote a letter to her and told her I was gay and how happy I was to be out and feel free and blah blah blah – and I never heard another word from Becky again. Never. Some years later, when I was living in New Orleans with my partner, Ken, I was still exchanging Christmas cards with Becky’s mother. “Mrs. C.” wrote me a note in her card telling me where Becky was living (she was divorced by then) and said she was sure that she’d love to hear from me. I wrote to Becky and said, “Your mother said you’d love to hear from me, but then, what do Mother’s know.” And I told her where I was and what I was doing and that I had a person in my life and I was happy and I never heard back from her. It has always hurt that Becky dropped me. I’ve been dropped by lots of people for lots of reasons and most of the time it has not bothered me or I’ve gotten over it quickly. But Becky has always been a little sore spot. We were so close and had so much fun together in high school. I didn’t see how Becky could not have seen me or understood me and supported me.

EARLY WRITING

I’ve always been good at writing essays for English classes and doing papers for sociology or political science or whatever. But creatively, my two early successes came when I was a senior in high school.

In my senior English class we were assigned to write a “local color story.” This puzzled most everyone and even when the teacher explained it, they didn’t really get it. I went to the library and read the little bit that there was on Gallup history to see if I could find some hook for a story. I came across the story of an uprising in a part of town called Chiuquita, a Hispanic neighborhood. In the 1920’s there had been an uprising against the local police force which was accused of abusing the Spanish speaking citizens and specifically having killed a couple of guys being sought for relatively minor crimes. The uprising went on for several days. I wrote a story based on the uprising and the English teacher was thrilled; so thrilled that she used it as an example of how to write a local color story for years. My youngest sister, Katy, is ten years behind me, but when she took senior English she had to hear about how the great writer, Mark Rice, had licked the local color story problem.

My other victory that year in the field of literature was to win a poetry contest. I don’t remember the poem and don’t have a copy of it. Probably just as well. I find that it is better to remember juvenile prizes won and not have the evidence of the juvenile effort. Anyway, the poem was published on the front page of the town newspaper. My father was so happy you would have thought he actually read poetry. And he forgot for a moment that only sissies write poetry. Whatever, I got a few minutes of approval from him – something I was always desperately looking for and seldom achieving.

I think my father got more congratulations for my poetry win than I did. I don’t remember anybody at school saying anything about it. But Dad told about all the customers in the bank who said that they’d read my poem in the paper and congratulated him.

Anyway, I’m a lousy poet – unless you like really bad poems about impending suicide. I used to write those for my psychiatrist in Washington, D.C. I can only explain my high school poetry win by noting that the event took place in Gallup, N.M. and I don’t believe the competition was fierce.

I graduated from high school in 1972. Even though I was widely regarded as a fag, I was also given a certain grudging respect for being smart and for having stood up to the school administration on several matters of student’s rights during the two years I was on the Student Council. For these and some weird band politics reasons, I was elected “Band King” my senior year. I forget who the “Band Queen” was, but we got all dressed up one day and the year book photographer took our pictures. When the year book came out I opened mine and looked for the band pictures and where the band king and queen were supposed to be there were two blank pages with the words “photo not available” stuck in the middle of them. Kind of expressed the tenor of my entire academic career. Just when I thought I was about to be memorialized as a person who mattered in high school – even though it was not really true – it crashed and burned into a laughingstock. I was humiliated – crushed. I didn’t have anyone sign my yearbook. I took it home and hid it. It didn’t occur to me to find the editor of the yearbook and kill him – or to find the faculty advisor and kill him or her – or to do anything the least bit homicidally constructive. I just disappeared, the way the picture had disappeared, hid the book and never showed it to my parents. I left the annual in my mother’s house when I moved away. She disposed of it at some point. It’s unfortunate that I have lost my short-term memory and my long-term memory is intact. I can see that horrible blank page, the words “photo not available” and my name underneath it. Even now the words come across as some kind of accusation. It is as if we – the band – were at fault. That we did not make the photos available – when it was the yearbook’s own photographer who took them. Who knows what happened? And after it was printed, it didn’t matter. It couldn’t be made right.

OTHER MISCELLANEOUS HIGH SCHOOL SHIT

My grades in high school were not as good as they should have been. They kept lowering the grades I earned because I didn’t come to school. I hated school and I didn’t need to be there to make good grades so I didn’t understand why I should show up if I could make A’s without showing up.

I had a deal with the band director. Band was first period. If I wasn’t there I’d tell him I was absent and he’d mark me as absent and I’d do band practice and then go home, put my feet up and read until it was time for me to go to work. I worked from the time I was 15 and could drive. First, I had a job as a busboy at a cafeteria and then as a clerk in a photo shop.

I think I must have gone to school a lot my sophomore year – I didn’t figure out how not to go until my junior year. I missed over 30 days my junior year. My senior year, well, it was complicated. I had back and kidney problems during the summer. I got out of the hospital and home two days before school started my senior year. I started school with a letter from the doctor giving me carte blanche to miss school at will for myriad health problems and a bottle of 300 pain killers, refillable 4 times. This was my mother’s doctor – he believed in medication above all things.

So I didn’t go to school when I didn’t want to. Well – I kept my promise to the band director and went to band. The other teachers lowered my grades. I protested – all of my absences were excused. I practically died during the summer. They all had a copy of the letter from my doctor attesting to my frail health. They didn’t care, they lowered my grades. So I decided I really wasn’t going to go to school.

I went to the principal and told him that I had enough credits to graduate after the first semester was over and I would only come to school for the first half of the day and then I wanted to go to work. He told me that in order to go to work I had to be in the distributive education program. This was where they teach borderline retarded kids how to work a cash register and stock shelves. A worthy program, but it didn’t offer me anything.

I told the guy I wasn’t doing distributive education and I wasn’t coming to school for a full day after the first semester. He said I had no choice. I asked him if he would like to give me a GED test and have me drop out – if more drop outs would look good for his statistics. At that point he asked what my father thought about this. I told him my father didn’t care what I did as long as I had a high school diploma. Of course I had never discussed this with my father. He asked about my mother. My mother had an extensive reputation for getting offended by something that had happened at a school that one of her children was in and rallying a group of parents and showing up with four or five mad mothers and a lawyer. He knew this. I asked him if he really wanted to involve her. He looked down and said he thought maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. We agreed that I would take three classes the next semester and then go to work. I agreed to make a bigger effort to attend school regularly – my frail health notwithstanding. They had to create a special parking pass for me to get out of the locked parking lot in the middle of the day. I was loathed and admired for bullying my way out of school – and especially for using my depressed, drug addicted, wildly unpredictable mother as my tool.

But before that second semester came I also got a reputation as a drug addict. Undeserved but I find undeserved reputations can sometimes be handy. I carried around my huge bottle of pain pills all the time. I rarely took one, even though I did have regular back pain. I’ve always had back pain and have just gotten used to living with a certain level of it. But one day I was particularly annoyed with it and decided to take one of Dr. Good Time’s pills. I rarely ate anything while at school. The cafeteria was an experience I enjoyed only once or twice in the three years I was there. I just went without.

I started feeling dizzy in the hour after I took the pill, and by the time I was going to my English class I was feeling ready to fall down. I weaved my way down the hall, got into the English class and grabbed the teacher’s desk and looked at her as well as I could and told her I wasn’t feeling very well and thought I should go to the nurse’s office. She probably saw that my pupils were the size of an office building and quickly agreed to let me go.

I got to the nurse’s office and told her I needed to lie down. She looked at me and let me lay down and then asked what I had taken. I showed her the bottle. It was the painkiller, Demerol. She asked what I was doing with so many of them. I told her the doctor prescribed them – “I’m sick.” She asked if I’d eaten. I told her no. She gave me a lecture about needing to eat before taking these. She asked how I was getting home. I told her I drive. She thought that wasn’t going to work, so she called the assistant principal. Well, my sister was in school, and we drove with a friend of hers, so the assistant principal went off to find them to come take me home.

I was laying there – nobody around. The last bell went off. I decided to go to the car and wait. A few minutes later they came running out – assistant principal, nurse, Mary, her friend – they all were afraid I’d gotten tired of waiting and had decided to drive off alone. I waved at them from the back seat where I was waiting like a little prince to be taken home.

I was a suspected druggie after that. I wish I’d had enough sense to plug into the real druggies. With four refills on that Demerol prescription I could have made some money selling them. I think I took less than half a dozen out of the 300 in the bottle.

I hated high school. The rewards from achieving academically in a town like Gallup, New Mexico aren't enough to make up for the torture of being an isolated homosexual teenager in a dysfunctional and bizarre family like mine. And of course the record shows that I wasn't all that great academically anyway - because they kept lowering my grades since I wouldn't go to school. Becky and Sandy provided some relief from the awfulness of my existence. I think it was a good thing that we'd moved to Gallup from Texhoma. Gallup seemed like a step up. If we'd moved to Gallup from a real place I'd probably have really gone crazy - a lot earlier than I ended up doing it.

EXPOSE YOURSELF TO ART

2007-07-11T12:20:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Robert Fischer

We were on our way to breakfast this morning when we saw this big "RENT OR BUY ME" sign up on a crane of some kind. Never ones to pass up a photographic opportunity. . .

Expose yourselves to art.

ANOTHER PICTURE POST FROM SAN FRANCISCO

2007-07-07T16:56:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Mark I. Chester

This photo is of me with the Superstar Porn Performer, Director and Producer, Michael Lucas. Well, it's actually a likeness of Michael Lucas. Not all of him. But the part most people focus on when they see his movies. It was the only part I could find on sale and I was looking for a porn star to pose with for $50 or under. That seemed unlikely in a city as money grubbing and unfeeling as San Francisco during a private celebrity dungeon party where most of the city's leaders are chained to dog kennels or begging for one thing or another from a latrine or a sling. No milk of human kindness to be found. I asked one supervisor to help me find a porn star to pose with and all I got back was, "Piss on me, dammit, I don't give a fuck about your porn star," and his head lowered into the mush of a urinal cake.

Bright lights. Big city.

YOUR BLOGGER IN SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 2007

2007-07-02T08:45:00.001-07:00

I decided to have my picture taken again by Mark Chester in San Francisco. I'd lost weight since last year, I was speaking more clearly thanks to some speech therapy, my mood was more stable, and I was just feeling better. Went out and had a manicure and a pedicure - not that you can see them. Had my haircut - yes, that shaggy do is on purpose. Got out some of my best silver jewelry and went out and bought some leather high tops from Guess. Just in the right mood to have my picture taken. Mark will send more as he finishes with them. I'll post another one or two here if I think they're interesting. I just thought you'd like to know what your fearless blogger looks like these days. (YES, that is MY hair color. I bought it.)

"MANDINGO" PARTIES

2007-06-27T15:34:00.001-07:00

I don’t suppose there is any point in decrying the level to which our culture has succeeded in creating an environment where anything is for sale. Sex is for sale – any kind of sex. Want to see a degrading act with a prepubescent boy? It can be arranged in the right location for the right money. How about a little girl and a large dog? I think I know someone who distributes those on the East Coast. Want to see a woman gang-banged by 50 guys? That’s easy – there have to be 100 or more DVD’s out on that theme.

Death is for sale. I’m not sure how you go about finding a killer for hire, but they’re out there. I would only want one in the event I want to contract out for my own death – you know, suicide by contract killer? But I’m afraid they’d arrest me and put me in jail for conspiracy to kill myself. But if you want to watch someone else die, look up “snuff film” and then start sniffing out your local distributor.

Love is for sale. Or an approximation of love is for sale. In Palm Springs we have many couples who are together for pecuniary reasons, but they profess love. And sometimes they revive the act, like an old soft shoe, and for a moment you believe the play is still on the boards. And then there are the younger guys who fall in love with an older man, who can tutor them, guide them, take them on trips, and buy them expensive clothes, and cars with ragtops. In these relationships love is being bandied about, but it actually isn’t part of the negotiations. You might call these talks the “Booty access for time in Amsterdam” negotiations. If concluded successfully, they determine the monthly allowance and vacation time allowances for the boy. They also determine what parts of the year the boy will be at the primary residence in Palm Springs or at any other residence or traveling, at the discretion of the old man. Normally, the old man gets 9 or 10 months and the boy gets 2 or 3. The old man can always let him go an extra couple of weeks and be a special old guy if he’s feeling magnanimous (or tired), but he doesn’t have to.

Now within these not very dramatic illustrations we have only a few of the horror stories of love, sex, and death portrayed on TV and in the movies. I could start writing various gruesome plots that I remember and not stop for pages, but I wouldn’t really be telling you anything you don’t already know. Very few people living in America during the last quarter century could have missed the deluge of profanity, sex, death, violence, and degrading act followed by more degrading act, as the writers and producers of shows stretched ever farther to be the most outrageous in grossing us out. They didn’t limit the degradation to the ways in which they killed people, they constantly presented us with new ways in which people would sell themselves (or be sold by others) for bizarre sexual exploitation. Alright, I have to admit, I picked up an idea or two, but the world would have been just as safe if I’d been left to find those things on my own (and I would have).

The most astounding thing in TV is that CBS actually got fined for showing Janet Jackson’s breast for a millisecond and nothing that has been shown on a crime drama or horror show has ever been challenged as too gross for TV.

But I wanted to tell you about one variation on the sex for money plot that recently came to my attention and was so unnerving that I thought I would share it with you. The reason it astounded me is that the whole thing revolves around a racist stereotype, and everybody acknowledges that. And racism is the one thing that TV almost always stays away from (with a few notable exceptions on Law and Order). However, for sure no one has looked at a racist “plot” in this way before.

It’s also interesting to me because for fourteen years I had a Black partner, and I had dated other Black men before getting involved with him. I frequently had to answer the question, “Do you have a thing for Black guys?” Or it’s moral equivalent, “You don’t like white guys, huh?” Neither was true. I liked Black, white, brown, and other colors of guys. It just so happened that I was open to dating Black guys in an environment where there were Black guys who were interested in cross racial dating and not many white guys were. And there was the whole Castro Clone thing happening and I wasn’t a Clone and the Black guys weren’t into the Clones, so the Clones didn’t want me and I’m one of those guys who goes where he’s wanted. Hello Black guys. Hello Mandingo legend.

So, I’ve been acquainted with Mandingo for along time. And like any legend – gay men having style, lesbians being butch and ugly, straight people cling hopelessly to out of date hairstyles – there is an element of truth to it. That is, I’ve certainly slept with Black men who had cocks that were bigger than your average bear. But not everyone was. However I did have the truly odd experience one time of having sex with a Black man and then having him apologize that his cock was not of Mandingo like proportions. He had an entirely normal sized penis and the sex was quite good, but he felt that he was not representing his race well. This is a case of the Mandingo legend causing psychological problems for a poor man who feels inadequate because he doesn’t live up to a myth.

MANDINGO is an evening of consenting adults.

In this case, I’ll describe a gay MANDINGO event, but they happen in heterosexual groups also. Actually I’d say they probably happen more in heterosexual events.

In a Mandingo event, something between 10 and 15 white men will gather at a house provided by a host who has organized the party and will supervise it to make sure everything goes according to the rules. Each of the white men will have paid between $500 and $700 for the evening. The amount varies depending upon how many playmates show up.

Playmates for this event are African-American men. They are supposed to have larger than average cocks, since that is the myth of Mandingo, and what the white guys are looking for. Mandingo is the origin of the old “Once you’ve had Black you can never go back.”

Optimally, there would be one playmate for each guy, but it looks like its going to be 8 playmates for 12 guys. That should work out alright. Start time is 8 p.m. and they have until 4:00 a.m. to play.

Most of the white guys want the Black guys to dominate them sexually, mostly by being the dominate partner in anal intercourse. Sometimes a white guy will be into something like water sports and he’ll want a guy to piss on him. It’s not a thing that Black guys tend to be into much, but they’ll do it in a commercial situation.

Anyway, this one is regular – twice a month. There are some others that float around and post on the internet.

The heterosexual parties are more controversial since it is white women paying Black men to have sex with them and debase them. That’s one of the white man’s biggest bugaboos – his woman would find out what sex with a Black man was like and would reject him ever after. Of course that is another aspect of the Mandingo legend; the almost miraculous potency of his seed, and the way that having been made love to by him spoils a woman for being held by anyone else.

Now, I think it must be made clear that it is still racist and inappropriate to desire a Black man because of some presumed sexual prowess related to his race unless you have first paid him to let you treat him that way. It’s really just another form of prostitution organized as a house party.

Who was it sang “Come on’a my house…” OH! Rosemary Clooney.

Note: Reverse Mandingo

I’ve seen advertised on the net a party for Black men, who pay several hundred dollars each for food, drinks, and one young, white (20’s), in shape, good looking, bottom, upstairs in a room for eight hours. The guy in the room is theirs for any reasonable sex. He can take two thirty minute breaks during the eight hours. Otherwise, he belongs to the guys. The guy in the room isn’t paid – he’s a volunteer. They do this once a month and apparently have no problem getting volunteers.

Bon appetite

JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

2007-06-27T15:15:00.001-07:00

JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

We moved to Gallup when I was in Jr. High School. I had completed the 7^th grade in Oklahoma. I had good grades. Mostly A’s. But in New Mexico they don’t get fooled by an Okie with A’s. They put me in the slow classes.

I was practically teaching the slow classes. I was helping the teachers, like a teacher’s aide. I was doing my work and then helping the really slow kids with their work and it was clear to the teachers that I didn’t belong in the slow classes, but when they asked the principal about it the only answer was that I was from Oklahoma and my good grades there were discounted and I was judged to be slow. Oddly enough this did not happen to any of my brothers and sisters – not even to my sister, Mary, who was in the same school. What’s the saying? Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.

Finally, my life is cursed and blessed with people who drink, a teacher who sipped Geritol all day long, took me to the principal’s office and said that I was not in the least bit slow and I belonged in accelerated classes and she was staying there until they either transferred me or tested me.

They transferred me and so I ended up in the accelerated classes, where I also made A’s. But everybody hated me. I came in at the middle of the year and friends and alliances had already been made and there was no room for me – especially not for an Okie transfer from the slow classes. To seal my fate, the speech teacher came to typing class and had everyone read a list of words. We went to a private office to read the list, but then she came out to read the list of people who would be required to take speech therapy. Out of the entire 8^th grade – and then the 9^th grade after that, the list consisted of one name, “Rice.”

You see, I had a lisp. I had a lisp so severe that when I was a child only people in my family knew what I said. Well, my family and Mrs. Wyatt. I was marked for speech therapy every year of my academic life. From first grade through ninth. They didn’t give speech therapy in high school on the theory that you’d be over it by then. My sister, Mary, even had to have four years of speech therapy because she learned to talk by listening to me. Poor thing.

I didn’t mind the speech therapy – I minded the laughing about it when she called my name. I got to miss English class once a week. We did neat stuff like visit a bread factory and watch them bake bread. We went to a bottling company and watch them bottle soda. We did other stuff that you would think didn’t have anything to do with speech, but then we had to talk about it. There were only four or five kids in speech therapy. One of them was a beautiful boy a year behind me. He sulked and was depressed because he didn’t speak clearly. I wished I had money. I would have taken him and run away with him and we could have lisped together forever and been happy. Nobody cares if you lisp if you’re flashing millions of dollars and ordering a yacht.

I was also in the band. The band was a geek haven for those of us who didn’t play sports. I had learned to play trombone back in Oklahoma and started playing trombone in the band at my junior high school in New Mexico, John F. Kennedy Jr. High School. But the music teacher needed a bass player and he switched me to bass and soon I was playing Sousaphone for marching season and concert bass for the concert season. I was happy enough. I was an OK trombone player but a better than average bass player. In high school I would become a bass soloist and a sort of king of the nerds – briefly. But we’re not there yet.

There was this kid, I don’t remember his name. He was big enough to be an athlete and mean enough to be an athlete but he wasn’t. He was in the band. I suppose because band nerds were easier pickings than athletes. Anyway, he terrorized us. He liked to threaten to kill one or the other of us for looking at him the wrong way. The wrong way being with lust in our hearts. He was taller than most of us, filled out in his body, with hair on his face and a deeper voice, he had dark hair and while not really cute he had this look that I would later identify as trailer park trash and to die for. One day he walked up to me and he “knuckled” my horn. He just banged his knuckles into the bell and left indentations in it. Just showing me who was on top. I actually protested to the band director. He was ordered to pay to have it fixed. Of course I would have to pay to have it fixed and then confront him to get the money, which was unthinkable. It was never fixed.

One night he called me at around 10:30 p.m. He wanted me to come over and baby-sit his little sister. I was pretty well known in the neighborhood as a baby sitter. But 10:30 was pretty late in my sheltered little world. He tried to talk me into it. I knew he probably had some hot chick waiting to give him sex and his mother was out getting some and his father didn’t exist, but I just couldn’t see braving the dangers of his household to go do this, so I said no. Years later I made up a story where I said yes and then he came back unsatisfied because his girlfriend hadn’t come across with the sex and he let me satisfy him and it led to a months long affair where he was the trade and I was the queer and it was so gratifying to get him, even on that level.

Then there was the art teacher. I don’t know why I was taking art. I guess I had to. I hate art. I have no talent and I don’t like doing things that I have no talent for. Anyway, I’m in this art class and the teacher hates me – not because I have no talent, but because I’m gay. I mean, everybody in school knows I’m gay, except maybe me who keeps believing my mother who says I’m just sensitive, but even then I know I’m a sensitive boy who wants to sleep with other sensitive and not so sensitive boys. The art teacher is also sensitive. With a big load of swish behind it. I mean if you thought I had a lisp – this guy had a lisp that he put on every morning and then swished his way to school and hated me for being that way too.

There was a big Hispanic kid who liked doing art but hated the art teacher. He threatened to disembowel the art teacher anytime the guy would touch him. After class one day the teacher caught the Hispanic guy doing something forbidden in the hallway – what, I do not know. Anyway, the art teacher reached out to restrain the Hispanic kid and the Hispanic kid decked the art teacher. Just bang, down on the floor, bloody face, out for the count, kid takes off down the hall. Authorities come running from everywhere. Who saw what? Nobody saw nothing. Art teacher must have slipped. See – worn tile over there. I wasn’t about to tell. They did figure out who did it and suspended the kid. Pity. He was my hero for a minute. I realize he was homophobic and I should not like that, but he was homophobic against a guy who was homophobic against me. Homophobia running downhill. I was glad for my tormentor to take one in the face.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE GAY WHEN

I spent a lot of time alone when I was in the 8^th and 9^th grades. I think this must have happened in the 8^th grade. Now I shared a room with 3 brothers. My parents had converted the garage into a big bedroom with a bathroom. There were two sets of bunk-beds and so 4 of us slept in there. But I was the only one in there that night. Probably because of what I was watching on TV. LIVE, FROM THE PALADIUM: MISS MARLENE DIETRICH (WILD APPLAUSE). Well, how many 13 year old boys do you know who sit on the floor in rapture in front of an old black and white TV to see Marlene Dietrich? And are straight?

I’ll never forget, she came out and did a husky version of “Falling in Love Again,” with white Chinchilla draped over her shoulders and following six feet behind her. At the end of the song she shrugged her shoulders and the Chinchilla fell to the stage floor and she stepped out of it and began her next number. I wanted nothing more than to be stripped naked and wallow in that Chinchilla while Marlene sang. You know your gay when …

GROWING UP

2007-06-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

The first house I remember living in was an old rambler on the edge of Texhoma. I lived there before I had memories. The first thing I’ll tell you comes from a pre-memory time. It is the time my father tried to drown me. Mother told me about it.

I’ve been in therapy for years. Before I was in therapy as a steady adjunct to my bipolar treatment, I was in and out of therapy for anxiety and depression over the years. Twice I have been asked by therapists if I have any knowledge of being abused as a child. I don’t. Certain personality characteristics that I have are consistent with those displayed by adults who were abused as children. Not that it is a necessary prerequisite to be abused to have this type of personality, but whatever. Anyway, the answer is still, no, I don’t have any knowledge of being abused as a child.

However, one time I did ask my mother if there had been any traumatic event that happened that I might not remember, but might have left a psychological impression on me. My dad was already dead – and they had been divorced for years anyway. Mother told me that one time when she was giving me, Dennis and Tim a bath together, my father, who of course had been drinking, heard me crying in the bathtub and came into the bathroom and ordered me to shutup. Being an uncooperative little bastard, I did not. My father decided to shut me up and reached past my mother, who was trying to get him to leave, and pushed my head under the water and held it there. Mother was finally successful in getting him off of me, and got him out of the room.

I actually doubt that this caused any lasting psychological scars. I do think it tells you something about life with my father.

My other clear memory about that house is the lima beans incident. I hate lima beans and I have always hated lima beans. Mother served them one night and I refused to eat them. After several warnings, my father ordered me away from the table to a chair at the side of the kitchen. He took a yardstick and started spanking me with it – on my bottom and my legs. He finally broke the wooden yardstick in half – but didn’t stop. He picked up a piece of it and continued hitting me until my mother told him that it was enough. I don’t know why he used a yardstick. Usually he used his belt. I suppose I was covered with welts and bruises. I don’t remember. I was returned to the table and told to eat the cold horrible beans left on my plate. I refused. I guess they felt that another beating wouldn’t change my mind and I was banished to my room for the evening. A victory of sorts.

Now, having painted this picture of domestic terror, I have to restore some balance. Mother was, at this time, a loving woman who more often that not was sweet and caring toward her children, baked cookies and biscuits and did the best with what she had. My father was a nice enough man – distant most of the time but not mean unless he’d been drinking and even when drinking he was OK until he got past the first two scotches. Then watch out.

We were technically middle class because my father had a middle class job – he was an officer in a bank – a respected position in a little town like ours. But we were really poor. Poor because bank jobs paid little – high on respectability and low on money and my parents had a lot of mouths to feed and bodies to clothe. They pretty much kept it from us that we were poor and we didn’t really care much except when Christmas came and we got underwear and socks and pencil boxes for school and crap like that and “useful” stuff instead of the Christmas stuff we imagined we would be getting. That was always a letdown.

Still, day to day was not much different from most of the other kids in our town. Some had a lot and some had less than we did and a lot had about the same and nobody paid a lot of attention.

Might as well explain grandfather since he’s in his rescue mode. Nice guy. Except when he was drunk. Which was every night. Very grandfatherly. When he came to visit he’d stop at a grocery store and load his Oldsmobile 98 with food. I mean tons of meat and canned goods and flour and sugar and everything you could think of – and then candy – enough candy to keep the good ship lollipop afloat – and up he’d come with all this stuff and it would be transported into the house and mom would put it away and we’d get a ration of candy and sit down around the table with dad and granddad while granddad started telling jokes and stories and he and dad started drinking, because he always brought lots of fresh liquor too. After a couple of drinks, we were dismissed. But not emptyhanded. We got traveling money. My grandfather always carried huge wads of bills in his baggy pants. He’d pull out a roll and start peeling off bills. We’d usually get $5 or $10 each just to get lost for a few hours so he and dad could get drunk. Of course when they did get drunk they’d end up having a fight and my grandfather would leave in a snit and we wouldn’t see him again for six months.

One time we went to see him – it was a makeup session between my parents and him. That time we all got $100 bills and mom and dad got $500 for not calling him names.

My grandfather and my grandmother were divorced because he was an alcoholic and my grandmother couldn’t stand it – at last. My father’s parents were divorced also. My grandfather Rice was a drunk, but the reason for the divorce was that he ran around on my grandmother Rice who was a good Catholic woman and she wouldn’t stand for that. It was unusual to be born in 1954 and have no grandparents who were married. My parents were married for 29 years before divorcing. 28 years too late in my opinion.

Sometimes I think I paint an overly bleak picture of life in my household. There were certainly good days. My father didn’t hit me everyday – didn’t even hit me the majority of days. But I was afraid of him everyday and I think living in an atmosphere of fear is what makes it seem bleak. Mother had good days and she was a good cook and an intelligent and interesting person. But just as there was a fear of my father, there was this fear that mother would be gone into her room – for a day, or days, and we would have to be very careful not to bother her or be too noisy.

OTHER EXPERIENCE

My grandmothers came to visit sometimes. Grandmother Cafky was a slender woman who seemed sophisticated and slick. She smoked and my father didn’t mess with her. He gave her a respect he didn’t give my mother. Grandma Cafky was angel food cake and crème anglais. She made them from the time she arrived until the time she left. I don’t remember her ever cooking dinner or anything else – but as soon as the angel food cake started to disappear she was on it, making another one. She was my favorite grandmother. We always talked and I wrote her letters and later, when I had my own place, I called her. When I had a driver’s license I drove to California to visit her, more than once. By then we lived in New Mexico and she was in San Diego, CA and I was 16 and I’d call her and tell her I wanted to visit and she’d say “come on” and I’d hop in my car and go. Before I had my driver’s license I wanted to go one summer and my grandfather, in a show of goodwill, paid for my sister, Mary, and I to take the train out to California to see Grandmother.

My Grandmother Rice was a sweet old lady. I loved her, but we didn’t have much in common except for her being a sweet grandmother. She was cinnamon rolls. Huge cinnamon rolls with lots of icing. If we didn’t know which grandmother was coming, we’d just ask, angel food cake or cinnamon rolls? Grandmother Rice was huge – a fat old lady who was simple and kind and had been done wrong by her lousy husband. She lived in a duplex house near a school in Oklahoma City. We visited now and then.

My Grandfather Rice is the enigma. I met him only twice and never spoke a word to him – I wasn’t allowed to. The first time, he and his second wife were coming through Texhoma. They stopped to see my parents. We (the kids) were sent away as soon as they got there. We had money to go eat and were told not to be back before whatever time, and when we got back they were gone. We saw them, but no words were exchanged. The second time was a few years later. We were visiting Minco and my father decided to spend a couple of hours with his father. We were there and could not easily be gotten rid of. He told us to just keep our mouths shut and behave. We went to a soda fountain and got drinks and he and his father talked and we drank our sodas slowly. When the confab was over we went one way and he went the other. My father hated him. He had left my father’s mother for another woman. Who knows what other reasons there might have been? Most of my father’s brothers and sisters hated him. When he died they had the funeral and then they went to his house and got drunk and argued over his guns. Typical. If only they had loaded them and pulled the triggers. But it was too late – they had all procreated by that time.

IN THE KITCHEN

This story probably speaks more to how crazy living in this house was making me than it does to the truth of the incident I’m going to describe.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was. It was in the second house in Texhoma, so I was probably 8 or 9. My Grandmother Rice was visiting and I was sitting on a stool in the kitchen. Mother was cooking and grandmother was sitting on a stool at the counter talking to mother. At some point mother asked me to walk to the store to get something – I don’t know what. The store was just 4 blocks away and it was common for me to walk there.

So, off I go, but something was wrong and when I got there I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to get. I got very agitated and was sure that mother would be angry and/or ridicule me for not remembering. I was fearful all the way home for not remembering what I was supposed to get at the store. But I got home and mother asked where the stuff was and I was near tears and told her I didn’t remember what she wanted and she said it was no big deal, just forget it and sit down, so I did and I thought I’d dodged a bullet but as I sat there and listened to the two women talk I kept hearing them being nasty to each other. I mean they weren’t screaming at each other but they were sharp and sounded mean. I started to cry and mother came over and asked what was wrong and I said “I don’t like it when you and grandmother are mean to each other.” They both denied that they were angry and I was sent off to take a nap. Maybe they weren’t angry. Maybe it was just my anxiety. Whatever. This is one of those events that my mind has never let go of.

THE NANNY

My baby sister, Katy, was born when I was ten. But before she was born, my mother had to be in bed for months of bed rest in order to carry her long enough for a healthy birth. Even then, Katy was way premature and almost didn’t make it. After Katy’s delivery Mother almost died and ended up in bed for many more months.

Through all those months in bed, somebody had to take care of the other six children. That was Wanda. Wanda was from heaven. She also gave us the most normal time we ever had. Wanda cooked and cleaned and did all of the regular household stuff, but she also showed an interest in us. She would take us on walks around town – just down odd streets and alleys and it was like being on a little adventure being with Wanda. And she showed an interest. I remember always feeling special with Wanda, even when in the crowd of my other brothers and sisters. Everybody was singled out for attention. She didn’t leave anyone out. And she laughed and thought we were all fun and our stories about school were all interesting and what we were doing was important. Like I said, it was the most normal period of growing up that I experienced in my life and it came from somebody that I wasn’t related to and who was paid to be there.

I refer to Wanda as a nanny, but I don't remember for an instant what we really called her. Nobody in Oklahoma has nannies. I mean, in Oklahoma a nanny is a piece a white trash that takes care a yore kids 'cause you are white trash that can afford to go out without 'em. Kids roll down hill in a white trash neighborhood.

Anyway, Wanda was a blessing for the months that she was there to take care of us. When she was gone I noticed more and more how things in our house were not the way they seemed to be with other kids.

You might think that would have been noticeable to me and my siblings a long time before this, but we were isolated in this town in a fairly profound way. Texhoma was a Bible Belt town. It may have had only a few hundred souls living there, but it had a dozen brands of fundamentalist churches for you to pick from. And we were Roman Catholic. Not welcome in those churches, unless it was to repent and convert.

It wasn't just a matter of not being welcome in their churches; but several of them launched campaigns of harrassment against the Catholic children at the public school. That would be my family, the doctors two boys, and kids from two Mexican families that worked on farms in the area.

I was told several times that I would go to hell unless I left the Catholic church and became a real Christian. I was doomed for calling the priest "father," for worshiping the virgin mary, for any number of errors of faith that these kids parents had told them about and had instructed them to go share with me. One of the teachers in the high school even got into a debate with several Catholic students about the "truthfulness" of their beliefs. And the thing is, that at the time, the troublemaker would have been any of us complaining about this. The fact that a Christian teacher told a Catholic student that she or he was going to hell would not have been thought noteworthy - other than perhaps to think that it should be posted on the walls.

KATY

I remember Katy’s birth. She was so fragile and pink. She wiggled all the time and within hours had wiggled all the skin off of her and left just this bright pink stuff that was under her skin. She was in one of those things that they keep premature babies in and we just stood at the window of the nursery at the hospital and watched her wiggle and wondered if she’d ever get to come home. Mom had had an operation. She was too sick to see. But Mom and Katy came home eventually and we had Wanda and it was a happy time for us. The sad time came when Wanda had to leave.

Mom’s pill use started to increase after Katy was born. Not immediately maybe – I don’t mean she looked at Katy and thought jeez I think I’ll take a lot more pills, but she did start taking more pills in the years after Katy. And that was about the time we moved to New Mexico.

So we moved to Gallup, NM. Gallup is on the far western border of NM. About 20 miles from Arizona, 135 miles west of Albuquerque, on a high arid plateau, uglier than shit on a shingle, the entry to the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni Indian reservations, home of Fort Wingate, a military ammunition depot, and saved from being a total piss hole by the fact that if you drove 20 or 30 miles in the right direction you could be up high in national forests with lakes and trees and beautiful scenery – or out in the canyon country of the reservations with canyons that make the Grand Canyon look like just a big ditch. But Gallup itself was awful.

Gallup was not only physically awful; it was awful in its population. It was primarily Italian and Slavic, not that there was anything wrong with the Italians and Slavs, except that they were racists. They looked down on the Mexicans and the Indians and any other non-whites. We were German-Irish and so we didn’t belong to any of the predominate ethnic groups but were suitably white. Basically it was a white supremacist town. One of the leading forms of recreation for white high school students was going downtown and rolling drunken Indians – stealing from them and leaving them in snow banks. An unfortunately large number of them would freeze to death every winter. The police didn’t particularly care to rescue them from the snow – the police were mostly Hispanic and another drunken Indian to them meant very little.

I am glad to say that I never had anything to do with this. Not because I wouldn’t have, I was just so out of the loop in terms of the social structure that I would never have been invited along to do anything like this anyway. Also, I was always more interested in why this was happening. I mean, I actually delved in to why all these Indians came to town to get drunk. And I found the answer.

When the reservations were set up by the government they banned – for the good of the Indians – alcohol. And the Indians accepted that ban and incorporated it into their traditions – that alcohol was not good and was forbidden in their homes. But there was alcohol in all of the white townships surrounding the reservations – principally Gallup, the largest town near the Navajo reservation, the largest reservation in the country. So the Indians would come to Gallup to sell their goods and would buy alcohol. They couldn’t take it back home with them – both because it wasn’t allowed across the tribal border and it wasn’t allowed in their homes even if they smuggled it across the tribal border, so they drank it all – at one sitting. And it became communal. If there were three guys and they had a couple of bottles, they shared until the bottles were gone. Then they were drunk and had to sleep it off on a sidewalk, in a gutter, in the river (usually dry, but sometimes a thunderstorm came along and then we lost a few Indians who were sleeping in the river). And they were targets for thieves. Teenage thieves if nothing else.

I remember once some guys had been released from the drunk tank. It was usual practice to pick them up and hold them until they were sober and then just release them. They must have walked through our neighborhood, which was kind of a straight shot from the jail. Two or three guys broke into our house – everyone was at school or work. They drank a bottle of my father’s best scotch and took a big jar of pennies and left – nothing else was disturbed. It was all pretty funny – except for my father’s reaction to his best scotch being gone. Middle class outrage at a bunch of poor alcoholic Indians – from a middle class alcoholic.

Oh well.

COLORED WORDS - ADULTS AND FIRST MEMORY

2007-06-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

Mom was a pretty regular mom for some years. She cooked and cleaned and took care of the growing family and was a loving person. I always remember my mom, in the early years, as a person I loved and hugged and went to. But as time went on and babies came there was less time and mom had more pressure and she started taking pills and having migraines. I didn’t know much about the pills at the time, probably because there wasn’t any distinction between a bad pill day and a bad migraine day. Anyway, there were more and more days when she wasn’t available. I guess she did the basics – cooked something for us to eat and then went back to bed. We had to be quiet because making noise upset her. Tim often led us in outside games, his major contribution to child care that I remember.

So as I reconstruct this period of time – say when I’m 7 and 8 years old, mom was increasingly on pills and having migraines and dad was drunk every night and it wasn’t a friendly place to live. I remember that sometimes they went out – to church functions or to something to do with the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club. I’d lie in bed and have fantasies. I had two major fantasies that I remember. The first one was that they’d have a car accident on the way home and be killed instantly. Then the state would send us to nice people who would adopt us and not be drunk and scream at us. My other fantasy was that I was a young prince in olden times and had been carried off by mean people. A handsome knight would come and carry me away. He didn’t return me to my home – he just carried me away. This is the pedophilia fantasy of child rescue from mean parents.

When I was in the third grade I came home one day to find that the younger kids weren’t there. Nobody was there. I was in the third fuckin’ grade – somebody was supposed to be there! I wandered around the house crying for a while and then one of the neighbors came over and got me. My father had called. He apparently had tried to have me intercepted at school, but had missed. He had Tim and Dennis.

Mother had had a particularly nasty fit that morning. Crying, screaming at Dad, saying she wanted a divorce, etc. etc. Sounds like she was finally getting sane to me. But Dad called my grandfather (my mother’s father) – 80 miles away – and granddad came over and took mother and Mary, Greg, and Philip (the three youngest) up to Taos, NM for a two week cool down period. When this was explained to me, all I could think was, “that bitch left me with the drunk.” Or some 8 year old version of that. I was pissed beyond belief. Mad at her for leaving me behind and mad at him because I couldn’t stand him – and I was terrified of him. To me he was just the guy who gets drunk and hits me. Daddy dearest.

Two weeks in the mountains and mother came back with the other kids and life resumed its normal course – regrettably. But after a few months, my father went on a major bender and was on the verge of a breakdown. My grandfather came back and took him to the mountains for two weeks. I’m not sure exactly what good it did for two alcoholics to go off together, but they did, and Dad came back calmer and life resumed its precarious course.

One time we went to see him – it was a makeup session between my parents and him. That time we all got $100 bills and mom and dad got $500 for not calling him names. Of course, something happened and we didn’t see him again for months.

FIRST MEMORY

My very first memory shouldn’t exist. I was too young to form memories according to the experts. I was probably about two. I don’t remember. The actual memory is simple. I wake up at night in a place I don’t know and there is light shining on huge scary animals beside the bed and I start screaming.

What happened is that I had been left with my grandmother and grandfather Cafky – my mother’s parents. My parents had taken my older brothers to a hospital in Oklahoma City because they had both come down with polio and needed to be treated right away. They also took my sister, Mary, because she was an infant and my mother wouldn’t leave her with my grandmother. This kind of became a pattern with me – being expendable in some way. Anyway, it is only one of two times in my life that I was ever in the presence of my grandparents at the same time. They divorced shortly after this episode.

The animals were, of course, stuffed. Grandmother comforted me and got me back to sleep. I don’t have any other memory or knowledge of the time I spent there. My brothers recovered – they did not have paralytic polio, which had afflicted my mother’s younger sister and affected her health all of her life.

COLORED WORDS - THE DOGS

2007-06-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

This will necessarily be only vaguely truthful. I was very young. We – my brothers and I – and the kids at the end of the block – there was nothing in between our house and theirs – had accumulated a large number of stray dogs as “pets” over a period of months. The dogs weren’t wild, they were just stray. We fed them and played with them and we had this pack of dogs that we regarded as ours. Apparently other people in the neighborhood regarded this pack of semi-wild animals as dangerous to them and their dogs and approached my father and the father of the other kids about dealing with it.

There wasn’t an animal control shelter in the town, the only thing there was, was a slaughter house – where you took a cow to be slaughtered and prepared for meat. Well, Dad and the other guy contacted the slaughter house and arranged for them to come pick up the dogs. They locked us in the house one morning and these guys came in trucks and rounded up our dogs and took them away to the slaughter house and we stood there at the screen door crying and wailing, begging them to leave our dogs alone. Dad had gone to work and my mother had to deal with this alone. I couldn’t believe that they had taken our dogs away from us. The dogs were the most friendly things in my life. And they killed them.

Then we moved to the bigger house near the school near the center of town. It had a basement, which is where my room was. I shared it with two of my brothers. It had a number of advantages. It was in the basement and was cool. It was also away from my parent’s room on the ground floor, and the beds were on three platforms built on three sides of the room with big storage areas under them.

I used to like to go into the storage area under my bed and nap. But then I’d nap in just about any enclosed area. We had a coffee table in the living room, and although you could clearly see me, for some reason it felt hidden and I’d wiggle under there with my blanket and fall asleep. If I could fit into a closet I would. Or in the summer, there was a space in the hedge in the backyard I could wiggle into and fall asleep against the fence. Once I was asleep in the storage area beneath the bed, but I had pushed a bunch of stuff in front of me so I was well hidden in the back. They looked for me for hours before finding me back there behind my toys and coats and stuff. I didn’t used to wake up all that easily, and just calling for me rarely roused me.

Hiding and going to sleep was only one of my ways of avoiding the chaos of my household. Another one was to go see Mrs. Wyatt. Mrs. Wyatt was a lady who became a surrogate grandmother to me – and to a lesser extent to my brothers and sisters – but she and I were closer than any of the others. She was a devout Christian. This was something I would never be, but if being around her meant putting up with bible stories and Jesus loves you, then I was willing to pay the price. She was also a historian and a first rate story teller. She talked to me like a person and spent time with me – time that wasn’t available in a family the size of mine. I also helped her do things like strip her floors with ammonia so she could wax them, and put her laundry through her old fashioned washing machine – the kind with separate tubs for washing and rinsing and you had to feed the clothes through rollers when it moved from tub to tub. This was so exotic and I loved doing it.

Mrs. Wyatt also introduced me to the wonders of cemeteries. She had a lot of family buried out at the town cemetery and would regularly visit to clip the grass and put some flowers out and just visit and see how things were. I went with her sometimes and she told me all about the various relatives and which one got struck by lightening and which one died of cancer and which one died of consumption, and who died in childbirth and the poor dead child there beside her. It wasn’t gruesome at all. It was just the facts of Mrs. Wyatt’s life and that of her family. She never cried because they were all with Jesus in heaven. I stayed in touch with Mrs. Wyatt until I was out of college and living in Texas. She told me one time that her only fear was that her body would outlive her mind, and that is exactly what happened. She got Alzheimer’s and she didn’t know me anymore.

2007-06-05T07:38:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Robert Fischer

One day Robert decided to paint my head. Another day he decided to paint my body - I'll show you that one soon. Anyway, I thought it was a good picture to use to start "Colored Words" with. So here it is.

COLORED WORDS - FIRST SEX

2007-06-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

I did have one sexual encounter as a kid – with another kid. You have to understand the family dynamic. My oldest brother was phenomenally bright. So bright that he was usually viewed as not having time to be responsible for taking care of younger siblings – he must concentrate on his studies and his other activities. Dennis, the second brother, was such a fuck-up that he couldn’t be trusted to take care of anybody. Dennis was probably a fuck-up in response to being constantly compared to Tim, the bright one. My parents pitted them against each other in a contest Dennis had no chance of winning so he dropped out and became the biggest loser he could be.

Then there was me. Third and who gave a shit. I was responsible. I was smart and made good grades. But not like Tim was smart. I could take care of younger kids, who came with great regularity. Mary – I mentioned – born in Kansas. Then Greg, and then Philip, the last child. Then four years later, the accident – Katy – the actual last child. Seven children in all.

So I was responsible and could take care of younger children and being responsible also got me my one and only youthful sex experience.

There was an old lady who owed the town newspaper, which was published once a week. She died and my father was executor of the estate. The main asset of her estate was the newspaper. There was a guy who edited the paper and put it out. My father got in the habit of hanging around and helping put out the paper on Friday and he recruited me and my older brothers to work on folding papers and cleaning the place up – and the guy who worked on the paper had two sons, one a teenager and the other a year younger than me. I was in the 7^th grade. It was kind of fun watching the press run and smelling the ink and hanging around with a bunch of guys doing something as manly as putting a paper “to bed.”

Anyway, the guy who did the paper was divorced and a bit of a drunk and a bit of a ladies man. Probably why my father liked him. My father wasn’t a bit of a drunk. He was a big drunk. Dad came home every night after work and had a couple of scotches before dinner, then we had dinner, and then dad settled down in his favorite chair and watched TV and drank until he passed out. Every night. On weekends it was beer all afternoon until he switched to scotch in the evening.

I don’t think my dad cheated on my mom, but I think he liked the idea of it. So he liked this guy for having different girl friends and getting laid by different women all the time.

So, one Saturday night the guy had a hot date and his teenage son had a hot date and there wasn’t anybody to stay with his son who was in the 6^th grade. My father offered to have me stay over with him on a sleep over since I was such a responsible little son of a bitch and even though I wasn’t that much older, I could call home for help if anything bad should happen. After all, I took care of my younger brothers and sisters all the time when my parents went out.

That was all agreed to and I went for the sleep over and I don’t remember the kid’s name, but I remember everything else. We took a shower – not together but one at a time with us both in the bathroom, one of us showering and the other one brushing teeth and we were talking. The kid had a big dick for a 6^th grader. I didn’t say anything about it, but he did. And then he told me about his older brother’s and how big it was – much bigger than his. And his father’s – apparently the Moby Dick of dicks. Of course all of this is turning me on and yet I’m trying to go, “uh huh, well sure that’s interesting.”

Let me pause for a station break. I had a fairly large knowledge base of sex for someone my age. My best friend was the son of the town doctor. The doctor had taught his two boys everything he thought they should know about sex and they had passed it on to me during late night sleep over conversations. We would be in their basement, lying in sleeping bags, the top of the bag pushed back and our pajamas pushed down, beating away while Gary (my friend) would give clinical details of vulva, hymen, penis, testes, semen, everything from medical texts and sooner or later he’d abandon the clinical stuff and talk about putting his penis in Debbie Goodman’s pussy and we’d all blow a load over our stomachs. The secret lives of boys who know the sons of doctors.

Anyway, me and the kid went to bed in just our underwear and I had a vivid description of all the cocks in his family. He was running on at the mouth about how his brother couldn’t babysit that night because his girlfriend was going to blow him, and maybe let him fuck her. And his dad was sure to get fucked because once his girlfriends see the size of his dick they just can’t resist. We had pushed down our underwear and were pumping away at our hard dicks and he was talking and I’m just in rapture.

Then he suggested that we do each other. That is, that we swap dicks and he masturbates me and me him. So we do. And I cannot tell you how exciting it was to actually touch another human being in a sexual way for the first time. If I’d known how to speak in tongues I would have.

That was all we did. No sucking on each other. No fucking. It never happened again. But I had touched another boy in a sexual way and it was better than being confirmed in the Catholic faith. Because while I didn’t believe in anything the Catholic faith had to say, I believed in everything the faith of the flesh had to say.

COLORED WORDS - BORN

2007-06-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

I’m back where memoirs are supposed to start. I was born on March 2, 1954 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The third child and third son of Mary Ella Cafky Rice and Frank Edward Rice. Mother was a full time housekeeper and father was an officer in a bank. We lived in Minco, Oklahoma, a farming community some 35 miles outside of Oklahoma City. The family is Roman Catholic. Mother did not have syphilis at the time of my birth. This is noted on my birth certificate. I guess in Oklahoma there is a good chance that your mother would have syphilis at the time of your birth so they make sure to check. Thanks mom. I developed my own relationship with sexually transmitted diseases later.

Mother was the oldest daughter of John and Mary Cafky. John was a banker of Austrian or Austrian empire descent. He claimed to be descended from Catholics, whom he hated. My aunt, Ruth, my mother’s younger sister, said he was descended from Jews and the name had been Kafka. He hated Jews more than he hated Catholics so he had elected a Catholic background. His mother practiced various strange Protestant religions that involved faith healing, speaking in tongues and snake handling. His father had founded two small banks in the Oklahoma panhandle and he ran one of them and his brother, George, ran the other one. His mother was the power behind the thrown and was on the Board of Regents for Oklahoma College for Woman and the National Democratic Committeewoman for Oklahoma to boot. She left her snakes at home when she went to meetings.

My mother’s mother was Mary O’Shea, and was born in Jerome, Arizona to a prominent family of merchants and minor owners of mining interests in the town, famous for its copper mines. Grandmother’s mother died in the flue epidemic of 1918 and her father took a new wife and sold the clan’s interests in Jerome and moved the family to southern California where they invested in orange groves. My grandmother was, at some point, banished by the wicked stepmother. The story goes that she was literally thrown out at night with a suitcase of wet clothes and put on a train to a convent school in Arizona, where she was kept until she was of age. Her sister, whom I always knew as Sr. Mary Alexine O’Shea, did become a nun.

My father was German on both sides of his family. It’s always been unclear where the name Rice came from. Some think it’s an Americanization of the French, Royce, but there don’t appear to be any real French relatives as far back as the eye can see, and Grandmother was clearly German, Ratterman.

So, I’ve always referred to myself as German-Irish, or Irish-German, either way I felt doomed to mood disorders. The German side to being didactic and bossy and depressed without the ability to recognize or deal with it and the Irish to being depressed without the will to deal with it. You know, the kind of genetic makeup that just begs for a tall building and a bottle of scotch. Anyway, on with my story.

Within a year after my birth we moved to a little town in Kansas and a sister was born there. Her name is Mary. By the way, the two older brothers are Tim, the oldest, and Dennis, the second boy. We didn’t stay in Kansas for long and I have no memories of either Minco or Kansas, and then moved back to Oklahoma, but this time to the far western edge of the state, in the Panhandle.

There is a town in the Panhandle of Oklahoma that straddles the border with Texas. It is called, originally enough, Texhoma. We lived on the Oklahoma side which was larger and generally more prosperous than the Texas side. The town must have had about 2000 people in it at its peak and I doubt that we lived there at its peak. My brother, Tim, once commented that he never saw the movie “The Last Picture Show” because we lived in the last picture show. And indeed there was a movie theater in town that showed serial westerns on Saturdays before the main feature and in which I saw the first movie that made me want to be held by a man.

I don’t remember how old I was. Very young, I’m sure. It was a Charlton Heston film and that is embarrassing enough considering what a right wing pig he turned out to be, but he was tall and muscled and handsome and practically naked in many of his early films. I wasn’t much into politics at the time. I don’t remember the name of the film. The set-up was that he was the warlord of some ancient fortress that would soon be under attack from some creepy bunch of bad guys. He had brought a beautiful bride home and had slept with her in his bed chamber at the top of the round castle. She was restless and couldn’t sleep and had wandered out onto the balcony or whatever and he had rolled over to find her and get another piece and she was gone and he pulled a robe around himself and went looking for his woman and found her staring into the distance. He came up behind her and opened his robe and took his strong hands and in the guise of wrapping her body in his robe he cupped her breasts in his hands and pulled her back against him. I could only imagine what she must have felt when she moved back against his body. I know what I felt. My young body wanting to be held in the hands of Mr. Heston. I all but screamed, “take me Charlton, take me!”

Except for a few moments like that in Texhoma, life there was pretty much like living in alternating realities. Small towns are pretty good for kids. You’re reasonably safe. Everybody knows you and watches out for you. You can go all over town at a young age and nobody thinks much of it. School is good if you’re into it – and I was into it. I even ran track and got some medals and stuff. I was liked and fit in and had a great time. Until puberty.

At puberty I became acutely aware that I was not like other boys. Charlton and other fantasies came rushing back at me, more real than ever. I started to identify the boys in my classes that I wanted to do more than run track with. But I also became painfully shy and embarrassed because I knew I was different. It is amazing how society manages to communicate that these sexual urges are different and wrong without ever talking about them or explaining them or giving you any information about them. It is as if there is an atmospheric phenomenon that occurs – you’re eleven and the wind carries messages telling you that looking at other boys in certain ways is a sure fire way to burn in hell for all time and you’d better keep it to yourself.

So I became awkward and unsure of myself. The only place where I was confident was in academic pursuits.

I did have one sexual encounter as a kid – with another kid. You have to understand the family dynamic. My oldest brother was phenomenally bright. So bright that he was usually viewed as not having time to be responsible for taking care of younger siblings – he must concentrate on his studies and his other activities. Dennis, the second brother, was such a fuck-up that he could not be trusted to take care of anybody. Dennis was probably a fuck-up in response to being constantly compared to Tim, the bright one. My parents pitted them against each other in a contest Dennis had no chance of winning so he dropped out and became the biggest loser he could be.

So I was responsible and could take care of younger children and being responsible also got me my one and only youthful sex experience.

COLORED WORDS - THE MEMOIR OF A MAN WHO FAILED ART THERAPY

2007-05-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION:

I’ll explain the art therapy stuff later. Much later. It’s too traumatic
to launch into right away.

My name is Mark. As I start this I’m 52 years old and I have HIV. For
over 25 years I’ve had HIV and it hasn’t killed me yet. Probably won’t.
I’m a long-term non-progresser. I seem to live with the virus in a sort
of harmony – it doesn’t kill me and I don’t kill it. I don’t even take
medication anymore to threaten it. It is, at this point in my life, the
least of my problems.

I am bipolar 1, meaning I experience both deep suicidal depressions and
frank mania. I don’t mean I call my mania “Frank” as opposed to “Oscar,”
but it’s a medical term meaning I have real great all out there shaking
the rooftops mania as opposed to hypomania which is more a feeling of
being high and having a lot of energy and being somewhat impulsive but
not feeling that you’re Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic shouting out “I’m
the King of the World” and trying to buy the Vatican with your Visa –
cause its everywhere you want to be.

With appropriate medication and therapy I am prone to fewer really
dramatic depressions and manias, but I still get the lesser versions and
sometimes they escalate when I’m not looking, but usually for shorter
periods of time and usually I don’t try to buy the Vatican before I
figure out what is going on.

I’ve thought about suicide a lot. Spent days and weeks contemplating
killing myself. It seemed to be the only thing to do for a long time –
the only way out. I was on lithium and it helped, but all of the other
drugs they gave me to help the lithium push me up to a more balanced
place weren’t working or were making me sick. Not that I was just lying
around thinking about suicide.

I had a job and I was involved in volunteer activity and I had friends
and I did things and I looked to everyone like a normal human being and
then I went home and despaired of ever feeling like the normal person I
was playing in my life and I wanted to die. Long story – we’ll get
there. I’m out of order. Crazy people do that. I haven’t even told you
where I was born.

Well, as long as I was laying cards on the table about my various
problems, I might as well tell you that I have dementia. It is
technically categorized as “mild.” For me, it seems about as mild as
being run over by a freight train. That is, it is mild compared to
having the World Trade Center fall on you, but it isn’t exactly “mild.”

For me, dementia means that my ability to remember stuff is impaired –
short-term memory problems. Word recall is for shit. My working IQ went
from 128 to 100 – 100 is entirely normal and I don’t mean to insult
anyone with a normal IQ, but I was never there before and it’s not what
I am used to. My executive functioning ability – organizing stuff and
problem solving ability went from being in the ninety-eighth percentile
– meaning I did it better than 98 percent of the people on the planet,
to being in the second percentile. Meaning 98 percent of the people on
the planet can do it better than me. A humbling experience. That’s why
this story will be all out of order. Live with it – please.

OK, I have to take stock here – HIV, bipolar, dementia. OH – obvious and
annoying speech defect. A medicine I took for bipolar disorder made me
stutter and stammer. Not supposed to happen. Very rare. They offered to
take me off the medicine as soon as the side effect appeared. Problem
was, the medicine was the first thing that worked – with the lithium –
to improve my stability to the point where I was not constantly planning
my own death. So I had this enormous problem. Talk funny or be suicidal.
There wasn’t another drug to replace it with. Being a rational person, I
chose to talk funny – believing that when some other drug came along and
I could switch, the funny talk would go away.

Wrong. I was on the drug for so long before I was switched to more
modern medicines that the speech impediment became fixed and did not
stop when I stopped taking the medication. Now people think I’m retarded
because of the way I speak. Men won’t date me because I have this weird
communication thing going on that they can’t get sexed up about.

Alright, unless I get into my bad back, strange feet and three kidneys,
that is the tour of my abnormalities for now. To see me, you would think
I’m just another middle aged California guy – not too attractive and
probably not too interesting. The not too attractive thing would be
right. The not too interesting thing would be way off base. Hang on
kids, as Bette Davis said, “its going to be a bumpy night.”

PHARMACEUTICALS

2007-04-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

Photography by Robert Fischer

I take a lot of drugs. I don't know. To me it is a lot, but I know people who take a lot more, so it probably isn't a lot by their standards. Anyway, most of what I take is to quell the fire within - mania - and to keep me from disposing of myself when the fire within goes away and I'm left with only debilitating depression to suckle on.

But I moved from Washington, D.C., where bad laws are routinely made, to California, where fun laws are routinely made, and I've discovered new pharmaceuticals to make the day go nicer.

I take Lithium, an old standby for bipolar disorder (manic-depression). I take Seroquel, an anti-convulsant that is also used to manage manic episodes, and Topomax, another anti-convulsant used to manage manic episodes. The amounts of these I take vary with my condition. If I'm relatively OK, I take only 100 mg. of Seroquel. If I'm not OK, then I might take 600 to 800 mg. of it a day. Topomax can also be increased. Lithium is not a drug you vary. You find a good dosage for you and you stay on it.

I sometimes take respiridal, an anti-psychotic that some people use as a mood stabilizer, but it really makes people drowsy so it can interfere with your ability to drive and do errands and take care of yourself, so many just use it as needed. I keep it around for when I hear voices or noises.

I'm not a big psychotic kind of guy. Jesus or his minions do not come to me with instructions to kill anyone or lead a chosen people to the promised land. I've never seen a burning bush. I just tend to hear talk radio or jazz concerts when the radio isn't on and the sound seems to be coming from the back seat of the car or in the other room of the house where there isn't a radio or a band or anybody else. I drove around D.C. for awhile listening to the radio coming from the back seat of my car, until one night I noticed that I was not only hearing these noises, but I had dissociated - I was above myself on the passenger side of the car, watching me watch myself listen to the people in the backseat. This seemed to be a driving hazard, so I mentioned it to my psychiatrist. My medication was increased for awhile until they went away.

Other than music and voices, I tend to hear bugs. Especially locusts . I hear them all the time when I'm anxious or too tired, or depressed and manic (mixed mood state). I have bigger locust problems than Pharaoh did. At least he could get rid of them by letting the Jews go. I have no one under my control to set free. Oh, if I had only been a leather master!

Anyway, that's what the risperidal is for. I did have visual hallucinations for awhile. I saw dead people. I used to see dead bodies - hacked and bloodied - when elevator doors opened. And there were people who were trying to get into my car at stoplights and kill me. That was scary. And I was seeing the elevator bodies all over town - every elevator that opened I had to step around the bodies to get on. Finally, I saw a live presentation of a hallucination during a business meeting I was at. People were doing what they were doing - and then they were doing something else that made no sense, except to my hallucinating self. I was starting to play in their world.

I made it through the meeting and called my shrink. Went to see her expecting to be put in Knott's Berry Farm for a long long time, and she went over all my meds, called my HIV doctor and the answer was I was hallucinating because I was allergic to AZT. Rare, but true. Took me off the AZT and over a few weeks the hallucinations stopped.

I take Nexium because I have a precancerous condition in my esophagus that is basically the result of ruining my stomach over so many years of bad sleep and bad mental health.

I take ativan for anxiety. I try not to take this too much because you can become dependent on it and use it more and more frequently.

Wellbutrin is an antidepressant that I take. The latest word is that antidepressants probably do nothing for people with bipolar disorder. I came to that conclusion a long time ago, but this is my attempt at being a good patient. I like my doctor, and he knows that the chances of an antidepressant helping me are slim, but he thinks a slim chance should be tried, so I humor him and take the pill.

Rozerem is my sleeping pill. It seems to work at well as any other sleeping pill. That is, it helps, but it doesn't keep me asleep for 6-8 hours. It's been so many years since I've slept a full night that I wouldn't know how to act. Actually, the last time I got a full night's sleep, I was in a coma from a failed suicide attempt. And it was lovely. I came out of it, so refreshed and happy, the doctor's were very pissed that I wasn't remorseful or sad about my suicide attempt. I told them I was sad it hadn't worked, but otherwise feeling great, thanks for asking. Doctors think that people with seriously screwed up heads should feel remorseful for the things they do when they are seriously screwed up. It's kind of like taking a dog that is bread to bite and shaking your finger at it and shouting, "Bad dog, you should be sorry you bite." Duh - who be stupider?

I don't take anything for HIV - anymore. I've taken those drugs a couple of times, but have stopped. Me and HIV seem to have reached an agreement. I won't try to kill it, if it won't try to kill me. So far, its working out. My doctor believes I'm a "long-term non-progressor," somebody who is infected and has "X" amount of damage to their system but is now stable and nothing much is happening. I've been stable for a long time without any medication, so I'm not taking any.

They used to try to get me to take meds. for HIV because I have dementia, and they thought the HIV meds would help slow the progress of the dementia. That was spitting in the wind. The dementia progressed even while I was on the drugs. Further, there is no evidence my brain has ever had HIV in it - no viral load, no evidence of infection - HIV or any other type - and a completely normal brain scan. Although they presume my dementia is HIV related because I have HIV, I don't think they really know. At this point they know that a small number of people between 40 and 65 will develop dementia - called "early on-set" dementia. Most seem to believe that it is related to Alzheimer's, but that isn't especially clear - it may not be "early Alzheimer's" but an early form of another dementia type. Whatever, there are no drugs for it, and very little research.

So I don't take any medications for either HIV or dementia, one of them not a major problem, and the other one becoming a more serious problem as time passes.

So those are my FDA approved drugs, with, of course some over the counter medications to round things out. But I have California approved drugs that I like a lot better.

"Train Wreck" is my newest California drug. It was dispensed under California Health and Safety Code 11362.5. Every week or two I go to a Marijuana dispensary and get some medicine. Medical Marijuana is used, by me, mostly for general pain, agitation, and sleep. It has the added benefit of seeming to help my speech problem a bit.

I never know when I get there exactly what they will have. It's not exactly like going to the drug store. In a way it's all "lithium" but in a way it's not. Some of it is lithium light and some of it is lithium take your head off. So you ask. You'd be surprised at how informative the children behind the counter are at the various selections and which ones are best for your specific need. Since the various varieties don't come with one of those handy drug fact sheets, I assume that the clerks use a little of each type so they can accurately describe it to the customers. A knowledgeable salesperson is a valuable salesperson.

For people who don't like to smoke a pipe or a joint, they have the stuff in the form of consumables, brownies and rice krispies treats - so I got one of each of those, in addition to the grassier variety of medicine.

It had been years since I'd seen any dope, and I thought it came in a baggie and was all leaves and stems and shit. Not anymore. Now it is all buds, so you have to either have to have a pipe, or you have to process it in a way that makes it smoke able.

I've learned so much. And I finally have a use for that coffee grinder my brother gave me so many years ago.

I use a pipe alot, but sometimes I like a joint. My recommendation is that you take some loose tobacco and some medicine and grind them up in your coffee grinder. Now this is going to be quite concentrated and you won't need a lot to make a nice little medicine stick. The tobacco makes it burn better - I figured this out on my own, but it's probably on 937 Marijuana help pages if you looked it up. Cigarette papers are great for rolling - sometimes using two papers makes for a better, more stable joint - and in a pinch you can take the covers off tampons and use those - I know this because we burned all the covers off Charlotte's tampons one Mardi Gras when we couldn't find any papers. It was Charlotte's idea. Charlotte was the queen of pot before we knew it was medicine.

Somebody told me you could make Cannabis Tea and it was great for sleep. I looked up ten recipes on the Internet and they all said the same thing. Boiling the medicine in water removes the active ingredient. It is water soluble, and it boils away - you have water that smells like cannabis, and if you get off on the smell, power to you, but there ain't no there there. You can improve it by adding milk, honey, or alcohol to the water as those will tend to capture the cannabis rather than let it boil away. Seemed like a lot of effort when I had a pipe, some matches, and Law and Order was on.

In addition to Train Wreck, I've used Big Bud, Space Jill, and several others that I don't remember. Every dispensary has their own pet names for their product, so comparing across offerings is pretty hard. Also the feds. love to raid these places and try to keep them out of business, so just finding one that's open is a feat. However, the marijuana supply in this country is so vast that they get raided one day and open the next with a full inventory. Marijuana is estimated to be the largest cash crop in the country - but is untaxed because the farmers can't legally report it for fear of being arrested. If we would legalize marijuana, prostitution and lower the age of consent to 16, we could eliminate a lot of victimless crime and raise enough taxes to pay off Halliburton and give them a going away party when they leave for the United Arab Emirates.

The other thing I've found out about Medical Marijuana is that it makes TV much more interesting. I mean, I can watch "What Not to Wear" like I really care - it becomes so engrossing. And "Flip This House" becomes a life and death struggle for some yahoo to make money in a rapidly moving real estate market. And it makes porn a freaking form of art. Oh the beauty - the drama - if you've never seen somebody fisted while you've been medicated on Train Wreck, you've never lived. I cried, it was so beautiful. Medicare should forget all those statin drugs and cover this.

I have to go now. I forgot to call in my lithium script - so I guess I should take extra
"Train Wreck" today.

JOSHUA

2007-03-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hi. My name’s Joshua. You can call me Josh. Everybody does. I’m sixteen and my life is a total mess. Well, maybe that’s overstating it. I try not to be too dramatic about my situation. Maybe it’s just confused some.

I’m gay. I know it. I’ve felt that I was different – different from what I was supposed to be – since I was eleven or twelve. At first it was indefinable; I mean I had no word or even a clear feeling for what was different. I was just sorting our sex stuff. My Dad’s a doctor and he gave me some pamphlets and told me some stuff – basically the same stuff they told us in health class at school. This is California and we have sex education. If we lived in Alabama we’d learn about sex in the streets, like god intended. That’s a little sex education joke the teacher told us.

But they didn’t really give much information about how I felt. They mentioned homosexuality, but only to say that it existed, not to say how it felt or how homosexuals related to other people. Nobody said that there were any homosexuals anyplace where we could see them or talk to them – it was like they existed in New York and San Francisco, but not in Palm Springs. Which was pretty funny because later I found out that 40% of Palm Springs is homosexual, including the Mayor, who is Black too.

By the time I was fourteen I pretty much knew that I wanted to touch and hold other boys the way other boys were starting to talk about girls. It’s not that I don’t like girls. I have friends who are girls. But I don’t like girls that way – I don’t want to kiss and hug girls in a romantic or sexy way. I do want to do that with another boy.

But aside from working through any sexual confusion or figuring out who else in my world might have these feelings besides me – I mean do I have to go offer myself to the Mayor in order to get a hug from another male? There is the issue of my family.

My family is a major screw job.

I have this fourteen year old sister. She is into this ballerina thing that my parents are just all over. I mean, she can do no wrong. The way they act, she might as well be an only child. Me and my younger brother are just things they have to feed and clothe – she is the only one they actually care about. As long as she has her toe shoes and the tutu thing around they worship the ground she dances on. She is their hope for a successful child.

Then there is my little brother. He is eleven and they seem to have written him off. He is just a kid who wants to play with his friends and his soccer ball. He gets “B’s” which is probably why they regard his as a failure, and reads comics. He is the normal kind of kid I wish I had been. Instead I was – and am – moody and withdrawn.

It’s the moody and withdrawn that make them dislike me. Or, if not dislike, at least regard me with suspicion. I’ve heard them arguing a couple of times: Dad wants me to see a shrink and Mom thinks I’ll grow out of whatever makes me moody and withdrawn. They think I’m a Goth because over the last couple of years I’ve replaced almost all of my clothes with things that are black. I’m not a Goth, I’m just moody and withdrawn and black is the only color of shirt and pants that I want to wear. It’s also very easy to pick out an outfit if everything you own is black. Last month Mom took me shopping for underwear and I managed to get rid of the last vestiges of white in my wardrobe. Now even my jockey shorts and t-shirts are black.

My dad is this big deal pain management specialist. He’s actually rumored to be quite good. His patients love him, but hey – he’s handing out major narcotics so why wouldn’t they love him? But I have this feeling that I’d like him a lot too if he wasn’t my father. It’s this relationship that we’re in that strain our ability to like each other. He wants me to be things that I have no ability to be, and I am angered that he is disappointed in me. Which actually makes no sense because he doesn’t know what he’s disappointed about? Should I tell him? Does he care enough to really want to know?

He really lives for my mother. He’s about ten years older than her, and he’s - I’m trying to be an objective observer here – he’s a cute guy who would be plain except for nice eyes and a good mouth. He’s got this dorky haircut that accentuates the plain-ness of him, but in some way – god will strike me dead for this – makes him hot. You ever see guys like that? Kind of dorky in a way that is sexy? He’s like that. I figure that’s what got to my mother. That and him being a rich doctor kind of guy.

He’s also got taste. My mother is really very pretty. Petite with dark brown hair. Great face and eyes. Almost, but not quite a great beauty. And most of the time she’s fun and happy and not a bitch the way some of her friends are. You know, social climbing doctor’s wives – Bitch Slapping Women of America – it’s a club.

Other than having taste in my mother, he has taste in her clothes. She doesn’t pick out anything – not even her underwear. Or maybe especially not even her underwear. I know, sixteen year old boys should not know this about their parents, but my mother talks to me about this stuff when she takes me shopping. It is the one parental thing she does separately with each of us. We never go shopping for clothes in a herd – it is always one at a time. It is her form of having alone time with us. Alone and spending money.

She must know I’m gay, but not want to have it come into her waking thoughts. I mean, if a woman thought her son was straight would she discuss her husband’s selection of underwear for her with him? Maybe. But only if she was sleeping with the son as well as her husband. I mean, I think there would have to be incest or something – it couldn’t just be casual conversation. Ya know? Anyway, that’s my theory.

So, I’m gay but nobody knows it or acknowledges their knowledge or suspicions and I get all my black clothing while discussing which Victoria’s Secret items my father prefers for my mother. I’m beginning to thing I need a therapist because I need someone to pass this information along to. Maybe it’s time to start seeing the counselor at school. I have to download this stuff to someone – if she tells me she shaves the hairy taco for him I’ll scream.

Aside from the underwear, he buys her shoes, most of which walk more on his body than on the street if I get the innuendo right. And she brings home dresses on approval. His approval. He sends most things back. His idea of the perfect dress is a little black cocktail dress with a plunging back and a plunging front. She thinks you wear black shoes with a black dress. He has her wear red shoes with a black dress and gives her a red shawl to throw around her exposed shoulders – or better yet, the leopard stilettos with the black dress. She would never think of this – which is why he’s in charge of her outfits.

I looked in her closet once while they were out. You’ve never seen so many pair of Manolo Blancos – not even on Sex in the City. Shoes with rhinestones, fur trim, super high heels, leopard designs, you name it. Somehow I don’t think she’s ever had barefoot sex. You know, shoes on feet, feet in air. That kind of thing.

My Father, the shoe fetishist. And I’m officially the one who is screwed up.

The good news is that between her almost being beautiful and his being dorkily hot, all of us kids turned out good looking. I mean, my sister is the best looking, which is good because if she’s going to be a ballerina she should be very attractive. Even though I don’t like her, I hope she gets to be what she wants and gets the hell out of town.

My younger brother should be removed to a family that appreciates a normal kid who isn’t any trouble and just wants to do normal things and get along. I don’t understand my parents complete disdain for him. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a Menendez brother and blow them away after I’ve gone to San Francisco with my boyfriend, whomever that might turn out to be.

I, by the way, am 5’9” tall, 130 lbs., have brown hair, brown eyes, red lips on a cute mouth, not too big, but when I look in a mirror it looks like a mouth I would kiss so I’m hoping someone else will feel that way about it. My nose is OK. I worry that it is too wide, but I think that is an optical illusion thing brought on by the fact that I have these tiny little zits under the skin on either side of my nose. No amount of facial cleanser seems to be effective in getting rid of them. Neither does regular jacking off seem to help; although it helps me feel better in other ways.

My eyes are too close together, but my parents tell me it makes me adorable, not strange. My hair is cut into a modern variation of the Beatles mop-top. So all in all, I’m OK for a sixteen year old homosexual with adjustment problems and parents who like only one of their three children.

By the way, my mother’s problem isn’t that she doesn’t like us – really – it’s that she doesn’t have time to like anyone other than my father. Her life is about pleasing him. She pleased him by having us. And now that that’s out of the way, she’s moved on. My sister is important because the prospect of her being a ballerina pleases him – probably because of some uber femininity – I bet he’d like to buy her some shoes and some panties, but is restrained from doing that, so he drills my mother an extra time and applauds my sister.

Well, you get it. Living in my house is a little weird. I’ve been thinking about telling them I’m gay. Just to get it out in the open and stop feeling like I’m carrying around some toxic secret. They aren’t the kind of people to banish me from their home or send me to a Christian Youth Camp or something. I can see my dad having a hard time with it – so alien to his total immersion heterosexuality way of life. But they pride themselves on being cocktail party progressives so maybe I’ll be their progressive poster boy for awhile.

Probably they’ll just continue to ignore me the way they do now. Unless I start doing drag and get a tutu and learn to dance better than my sister – which is possible. Except I don’t feel any pull toward drag. Just looking for a boy to kiss right now. That would be enough.

USED FRIEND

2007-02-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Robert Fischer

When you've finished with a friend, it is rude to simply drop the person on the street or sidewalk where others will have to stumble across the person or walk around him or her, avoiding their pleading look, "Pick me up, I need a friend."

Most resale shops no longer accept used friends for donations. The backlog of unsold used friends is so great and the value of a used friend is so low. Used friends and VHS players are on the banned list for both Goodwill and The Salvation Army.

The IRS guideline for the value of a used friend for a charitable donation is $1.27, the current value of the chemical make-up of a person. No value is given for accumulated knowledge, education, experience, or the value of donatable organs due to the inability of a recipient or subsequent buyer to compel any performance or organ removal from the used friend. Legislation is being proposed that would permit a used friend to be compelled to perform certain acts and/or have non-essential organs removed for donation (second kidneys, partial liver for graft, etc.), increasing the value of a donated used friend to tens of thousands of dollars.

For now, it is suggested that when you are finished with a friend you dispose of him or her in a Big Bag (Bolsas Grandes), placing the bag out with your other refuse to be removed to a sanitary land fill near you - or barged out to the ocean for deep water refuse disposal. If your city has a recycling program for used friends please avail yourself of that option. Recycling is accomplished by putting your bagged used friend in a green plastic barrel on Thursday so that he or she may be picked up and taken to a Community Center where people looking for friends may attend workshops or support groups. Friends left over after those activities are mulched for community gardens.

Your support of our efforts to dispose of used friends in a responsible manner are appreciated.

MOOMBA NIGHT CLUB - NEW YORK CITY

2007-02-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

It was exciting to live in New York in the 1970’s. Gay people were liberated – or semi-liberated. The politics weren’t going so great, but the sex was fabulous. Fire Island in the summer was like an outdoor bathhouse, lubricated by cocaine, Quaaludes and poppers. The real bathhouses had lines going out the doors on Fridays, Saturdays and often on Sunday afternoons. Brunch or baths? This was the question faced by many gay New Yorkers after pulling themselves together from a night of dancing and drugs at the Saint, the Cock Ring, Studio 54, or some other club where the notorious and the famous came together to rub shoulders and mingle their vices together.

The really hardcore woke up in the morning soaking in piss in a tub at a leather bar, or maybe just being helped out of a sling after a long night of being fucked by everyone who came their way – or better yet, taking fist after fist while being fed drugs and affection.

Then there were the dark room bars. Just a friendly little establishment where you could get a drink and chat up your neighbors before going on to dance, or have dinner with friends, or maybe meet someone for a quiet evening of getting to know each other better. But if none of that seemed promising, there was a room in the back, a “dark room,” where you could go and get serviced – or service someone. Not much to speak about and nothing to write about in your memoirs, unless you’re Harvey Fierstein. Harvey described a dark room bar, “The International Stud” in his famous play – and later film – “Torch Song Trilogy.”

Except for Studio 54, the places I’ve mentioned were almost exclusively gay. Oh, the occasional straight tourist showed up, but pissing and fisting usually drove them off to safer places, and straight people might want casual sex, but dark room bars are far too threatening – they want to see who they’re fucking (a novel idea that only began to catch on in the mid-80’s in gay America).

But most of this is well known and well chronicled in many books – both history and fiction – about the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS period of gay culture. I’m here to share with you a story of a club that rose and fell like the Phoenix; that was welcoming to both gay and straight, and was less about orgasm than it was about titillation and playing at being bad than it was about actually being bad. It was this “bad but not quite” attitude that made The Moomba Room a haven for those who wanted to play, but not play in any way that could wreck their reputations or careers.

The Moomba Room was a nightclub – a supper club where the guests usually had reservations, but well known or well liked people could cruise by those waiting and claim tables. Those dissed by people who showed up in the fashion rags, gossip columns, or “Interview” didn’t really mind too much, as long as someone told them who it was that had just taken the table they’d been waiting for. “Darling, we’d been waiting for half an hour when Kitty Bensonhurst and her Chinese lover came in and took our table! She’s so thin; no wonder she fits in those clothes! She ordered a broiled tomato but the Chinese lover finished it and ate a piece of fish too. We never did get a table, but it was fun to watch the people who will be in next month’s Vanity Fair. It’s what you go to New York for!”

But the dining room at the Moomba Room was just a distraction. The folks from Iowa would eventually get a table and could have the other half of Kitty Bensonhurst’s broiled tomato if they wanted it. What they could never do is get into the back room of the Moomba. Not a “dark room,” the back room of the Moomba was filled with comfortable banquets, lovely chairs, sumptuous fabrics and all the beautiful people – rich, to be sure, but mere wealth was never a sure fire bet to get you in. The entry was jealously guarded by the owner of the Moomba, Ertran Bouian. Ertran was Israeli or Middle Eastern or from Indiana and had adopted a name. Darkly handsome he was rumored to have been in Vietnam – or Cambodia – or someplace no one should have been and he wasn’t there officially. His money didn’t come from anyplace Wall Street could have told you about, but he didn’t seem to have any problems with the government either. He was not a goon, but rather just a darkly handsome 5’10” guy who appeared to be rather muscular under his $1000 suits, and who had more than one guy around the place who looked like he could kill you without using a weapon of any sort.

The rumor about Ertran is that he’d have sex with a man, a woman, a child, or a well trained dog. The other rumor about Ertran was that if you pissed him off he could have you dispatched out of his club so that you’d find yourself unconscious until you woke up in the morning lying in a tub in a leather bar being pissed on by guys who couldn’t care less how you got there. Calling the police and saying “Hi, I just woke up at the Mineshaft in a piss tub with a bunch of leather guys peeing on me and I don’t know why,” makes an unconvincing complaint. The Mineshaft may be a little on the fringe of things, but no one outside of a guy playing a part in “Cruising” was ever forced to get pissed on there.

So the backroom of Moomba was for drugs in moderation, mixed with alcohol in moderation, mixed with conversation, in moderation, amongst the rich and famous and the notorious that made it all much more interesting than if it had only been rich and famous. Let’s say you’ve been arrested for some high profile murder – a society murder – and you are a member of society yourself. Shunned everywhere, you would find refuge at the Moomba Room. Or you are accused of bilking your parents of $50 million and can’t go home – come have a drink at the Moomba Room. As long as you drop some little tidbit of information or non-information. You have to be amusing. Only being a scoundrel isn’t sufficient.

One night at the Moomba Room, things were unusually quiet. There were some Rock Stars there, some kid millionaires, a few society women who were slumming while their husbands were golfing in Saudi Arabia on some business tour, but it was a bit staid. Out front, on the sidewalk, was a photographer. Paparazzi. Ertran had an idea. He told the photographer that he’d get him some interesting shots from the back room, only no faces. It would be a game. And he warned the photographer that if he broke the rules and took any face shots, his camera would be only the first fatality of the evening.

Ertran took the photographer to the back room, took him to the middle of the room, and got the attention of those drinking and politely doing their little drugs. He told them that the photographer would not take pictures of anyone’s face, but for those who dared, he would snap a nice candid of their groin.

At first there was laughter. But Ertran was serious and he proceeded to show the way. He said, “Like this.” And he undid his pants and let them drop, and then he pulled down his boxer shorts until there was an area exposed between his shirt and his boxers, and the photographer backed up, framed the shot and took “Ertran, Moomba Club, September 28, 1975.”

Ertran dressed and there was polite applause for the little show. Not just applause. One young lady was so impressed by Ertran’s expose, that she not only lifted up her dress and pulled down her panties and got “Anonymous pussy, Moomba Club, September 28, 1975,” but she then went up to Ertran and offered to let him try out the anonymous pussy and they retreated to his office up above the back room.

Meanwhile, the rock stars were the first to carry on, unzipping and unfolding flaps – no underwear to get in the way – more shots. “Rock star dick #1.” “Rock star dick #2.” Etc. A few socialites and models – even an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune. More than a dozen celebrity dick and pussy shots were taken that night. The crowd livened up – a lot of Champaign was ordered. Ertran finished with the woman and later had a rock star. It was the kind of night that gives a club its reputation. People come for ages afterwards in hopes of a repeat.

A few of the guys left the Moomba and traveled over to the Chelsea Hotel, where the photographer was staying. The Chelsea was rather run down, but it also had the élan of being a place where the chicly poor could stay and meet up with interesting people. Artists down on their luck might stay there for months. Writers who had forgotten how to spell might be there for years. It was the kind of place where a drug dealer, a drug user, and the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel from 15 years before might have a conversation in the lobby before deciding whether or not to share some takeout chicken and hire a call girl.

The photographer took the men who came with him from the Moomba and he photographed them – again, no heads or faces, just groins and asses – having sex with each other. Or with various props he happened to have. One guy he put on his stomach and placed a violin between his legs, contrasting the shape of the violin to the shape of the man’s ass and body. And so he made art that cannot be sold.

Well, could not be sold.

The photographer went on to become semi-successful. Not as a paparazzi, but as a legitimate photographer in Italy, his homeland. The Moomba photos never sold. They were just shots of dicks and pussies – they could not be authenticated. You could take a picture of any dick and say it was a rock star – who would know? And who would print them? No legitimate media. So they were stashed away in the photographer’s things.

The photographer died and a cache of his lesser works was consigned to a small time dealer in America. These Moomba and Chelsea Hotel works were offered as a group – unauthenticated, virtually worthless unless you believe that what I have told you is true – and I got it from the dealer and I don’t know where he got it – from the estate in Italy and how would they know? Did the photographer leave notes?

At any rate, I bought them. They are worthless, which means also that they are priceless. I have them in a binder with other small photos that I have collected – some with a value of a few dollars and some with values of hundreds of dollars.

I think the story of the Moomba Photos is true. Why make up such a story – it didn’t add any value to them. I didn’t offer any more for them than I would have anyway. When they came up for bid I was the only one crazy enough to bid on them, so I got them for the small opening bid that they were offered at.

I now possess the Moomba and Chelsea Hotel Photos. And I’ve told you the story of them. I just kind of hope Ertran is in Baghdad. Or horny.

THE PENIS - A LENGTHY INVESTIGATION

2007-02-16T23:11:00.000-08:00

I became involved in this due to the lengthy dispute over who has the largest penis in gay porndom. (I know the answer, but we’ll get there in due time.) I do the research so you won’t have to.

First, the facts about the penis. The average flaccid penis is between 2 and 5 inches in length (all measurements are approximate as some people have trouble holding tape measures still when approaching the penis in the wild). Flaccid length is not an accurate indicator of length when erect. I.e., 2 could be 7 as easily as 5 could be 5.5. How? Well, that 2 inch penis could be short and fat, with lots of tissue around it to swell up and expand and lengthen when it thickens with blood, while the longer 5 inch penis is just about all there is and it lengthens only a little more when it thickens with blood. There is something to that “I’m a grower, not a shower,” line that we’ve all heard in the bathhouses over the years. I remember distinctly… (never mind).

Now, the problem with the above is that almost all data on the average penis comes from northern European men and Americans of Northern European ancestry. This leaves out, among others, Asians, Hispanics, the Indian Sub-Continent, Middle Eastern, and most dear to our little erotic hearts, Africans. All of these groups carry some kind of myth, legend or folklore about their penis size, none more so than Africans – and for those of us in the United States, African Americans and Mixed Race men of color.

Blacks – whether they are African, African American, or mixed race with other cultures like Hispanic have a reputation for having outsized sexual equipment. And while this, like any urban legend, is not always true and may not even be true at all, it is true enough to keep the myth alive. Old guy’s tale or no, the gay community clings to the idea that men of color are, on the whole, better hung than their pale counterparts. But there is no data to support it. What we need is a research grant.

You can’t go by what gets published in porn print and put on film in porn XXX DVD because models are selected for those qualities that the audience wants to see – attractiveness, muscles, big dicks, nice asses – if they didn’t look better than the average guy they probably wouldn’t be porn models.

I spent years doing a non-scientific investigation into the size of African-American dicks. My study concluded that a lot of them were bigger than the white guys I had sex with, but not enormously bigger. But many of them looked bigger because they tended to be thicker – bigger in circumference. A fat 7 inch dick coming at your asshole gives the impression of being larger than a medium sized 7 inch dick coming at your asshole. And it feels bigger too. At least in those first moments when butt and dick are learning how to communicate properly. After you’re speaking the same language it really is a matter of who’s driving. Personally, I’ll take a really good driver in an averaged sized vehicle over an idiot in a Hummer any day of the week.

But for the “large” dicks that I encountered in my time, I’d say that more of them were from ethnic guys – Blacks and mixed race – than from white guys. “Large” for my purposes being something 8 inches and over. However, a perusal through www.dudesnude.com will satisfy you that there are plenty of big dicked white guys running around – don’t cry for the Anglos, Argentina.

For my purposes, dicks break down like this. “Normal” erect is 5-7 inches. Big is 7-8. Large is 8-9. XL is 9-10. XXL is 10-12. “OH MY GOD” is 12+. I don’t have any measurements for circumference. It’s kind of the mouth test. Easy to suck is maybe slender or medium – you be the judge – more difficult to suck is thicker – hard to suck but cummon, I can do it, is good and thick and just think how it’s gonna feel when I sit on it – YIPPEE. Can’t really suck it in any adequate way – lick, suck the head and whatever part of the shaft I might be able to manage, do the balls, maybe rim him to death, but by all means get that thing inside of my butt and ride Sally ride. This is probably going to be something along the order of 7 inches in circumference and greater. Of course I know some of you can unhinge your jaw like a Python swallowing its prey so it would never occur to you that there is dick too big to suck, but for some of us mere mortals there are those mighty dicks that must just be worshipped orally as best we can and then we go bouncy bouncy or get plowed hard and deep until we renew our vows and find our lost faith.

When I was young I tended to date Black and mixed race men almost exclusively. This was not because I had a fetish or was not attracted to Anglos; it was because Anglos were not attracted to me, while darker men were. I had no racial hang-ups and dated the guys who wanted to date me, eventually forming a partnership with one of them that lasted for fourteen years (until he died).

It was the time of the Castro Clone. The Clone look demanded that you be somewhat muscled, dark hair, preferably with facial hair, and sport the uniform of a white t-shirt, 501 jeans, and either some kind of work boot or an approved tennis shoe. I was a blond, fair skin and green eyes, can’t grow facial hair, and while I could dress like a clone, it was not convincing. The Black guys weren’t into this Clone thing – that was an Anglo guy’s game – so a Black guy, who might be attracted to a blond, non-clone person, would find me. And I was willing.

This is how I met the biggest one I ever saw. Shay. Gamage Varlow de Shay. This is what he told me his name was. Like I wouldn’t know it was a stage name. Shay was a mixed race guy – not sure mixed what – Black and whatever, he was never specific. Anyway, he started dancing with me one night at a bar in Houston and didn’t stop until I was dancing on the end of a very long and very thick cock. I didn’t think to install a tape measure up my ass, so I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’d bet that Shay was in the 10-12” range. He claimed 12”, but Shay could exaggerate by an inch or two for public relations purposes. It was also in that circumference range of being too thick to properly suck – just do the head and an inch or two – feast on the balls – lick and slobber everywhere you could think of – and keep doing it until he pulled me up, flipped me on my back and spent hours exploring places even a proctoscope would never go.

What I found out the next day at brunch, with a group of people I regularly met with on Sundays, was that Shay was like the fabled origin of the Nile for Houston dinge queens. They all wanted him but most of them didn’t even know what he looked like, much less how to find him. The fact that I – a relative newcomer to the scene – had not only found him, but been bedded by him and had his number – enraged one of the members of the group who was on a personal mission to be fucked by every large Black cock in town, even though he was in a relationship with a man who had, from the appearance of his very tight jeans, a considerable Black cock right at home with him every night. Some people are never satisfied.

Shay was one of those who was never satisfied. We had an affair that lasted over a period of years – off and on – we liked each other but he was far too unreliable to be a lover, other than a sexual one. We had great sex and enjoyed talking to each other, and then it would be over until the next time. Sometimes we’d plan it and sometimes we’d just run into each other on the street and go, “You got time?” “Yeah, I got time.” And off we’d go.

Shay’s very thick and long dick started to be abused by pumping – those vacuum pump devices that say they will make you longer and fatter. Ugh! They will – I guess. But my experience is that they also make you unable to have a real erection – they make you squishy. The last time Shay and I fucked he had a bigger dick – he said it was 14 inches – again, my ass did not have a tape measure in it – but who cares? It was a squishy fuck. He lubed me up and forced enough of it up me to say it was there and then he just sort of pushed in and out so there was movement, but not a real fuck – very unpleasant. And that was the last of our affair. No squishy fucks for this boy.

Now, how big was Shay really? Before he ruined himself with pumping, I’d say he was in the 10 or 11” range – I discount the 12” thing as a little over-exaggeration. But it was very, very thick – like the wrist of a small man with a head on it – and then it got thicker as you went down on it. But Shay isn’t in the running for biggest dick because this is undocumented. I never measured and anything Shay claimed is strictly unreliable. But I give Shay credit for being the biggest one I ever had – so far – and those who know me know that there’s a lot of experience behind those words.

OK – now to those who have been – more or less – documented.

John Curtis Estes, also known as John Holmes, John C. Holmes and Johnny Wadd. He also worked under the names John Duval, Big John Fallus, Big John Holmes, Bigg John, John Rey, and Long John Wadd. During his life Holmes was widely advertised as possessing a dick that exceeded 13.5 inches in length. He appeared in over 2,500 adult loops, stag films and porn feature films in the 1970’s and 80’s, including a handful of gay loops and at least one gay feature.

However, the actual measurement of Holmes’ prodigious member was always the subject of controversy. Not quite as much a controversy as whether or not to pull out of Iraq, but for those who care about such things, this is important stuff.

Note: Prior to his porn career Holmes worked as a forklift operator at a meat packing warehouse. Ironic?

Holmes’ first wife, Sharon Gebenini, was quoted as saying that he measured himself as being 10 inches fully erect. However, he was publicized as having anywhere from 12.5 inches to 16 inches, numbers going from hyperbole to extreme exaggeration. Other sources for a measurement of Holmes’ member were 10-11 inches long (based on a study of video footage (http://www.john-holmes-penis-size.com.pssht.com/index2.html), another study comparing his penis to the estimated measurement of his other body parts led to the conclusion of 8 ¾ inches (http://www.bizarremag.com/ask_bizarre.php?id=395). However, Holmes’ longtime manager, Bill Amerson claimed that he saw John measure himself several times and “…it was 13 and a half inches.” Holmes’ last wife, Laurie “Misty Dawn” Rose agreed with his first wife, Sharon. She said that Holmes claimed his dick was 10” fully erect. Amerson may have been influenced by his income as Holmes manager in making his claims.

Various porn actresses were quoted as saying Holmes was “huge,” “scary,” and other non-specific descriptions of size. But it was also widely reported that Holmes was rarely, if ever, fully erect on the set. And from the few Holmes films I’ve seen, he was the master of the “squishy fuck.” He’d jam inches of dick into his leading lady and then push back and forth with the remaining inches being squished between his body and hers. The camera recorded this as his dick moving in and out of her, but in reality, it was mostly just semi hard dick squishing back and forth – nothing was really moving. Annette Haven, in the documentary, “Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes” said “It (having onscreen sex) was like doing it with a big, soft kind of luffa.”

Holmes died in 1988, and with him went the title of biggest dick in porn. Many big dicks came and went, but none so big as to be contending for a title.

Years passed with many big dicks coming and going, but no credible claims for biggest dick in porn. At this point I’m ignoring straight porn, more or less (you’ll understand this later). I don’t follow the news or the actors in straight porn. I can think of a couple of African American actors who are hugely hung in straight porn, but can only remember their parts, not their names and don’t recall either of them making a specific number of inches claim on their film boxes. (See “Screening Out the Pussy” for tips on watching straight porn.)

Then Chad Hunt came on the scene. In 2000 Chad Hunt made his first movie and appeared in “Inches” magazine. Since then he’s appeared on the cover of “Inches” six times. “Inches” regularly claims Chad’s endowment to be 14 inches. Chad’s latest cover for “Inches” advertises his 14” endowment on the cover as “America’s Biggest Boner!!!”

Chad, however, appears to report himself as being 11 inches long and 7 inches in circumference. He is promoted as having the largest and thickest dick of any current male porn star, gay or straight (takes care of the straight guys). And if Chad’s claim for 11 inches is true, that makes him larger than John Holmes with his self-reported 10 inches.

Chad’s dick dominance came into question in 2006 when newcomer, Ben Andrews, claimed to be larger than he. Ben was claiming 11 long and 9 circumference. Both models were under contract to Lucas’ Entertainment and Lucas fueled the controversy by setting up a website, www.whosisbigger.com to allow fans to vote based on their impressions and maybe which model they liked better. Andrews won with 71% of the vote. Hunt was furious at the lack of support he received from Lucas, viewing this whole stunt as a stab in the back. He had worked with Lucas for several years but promptly quit making films and intimated that he would retire. After a lot of porn ink was devoted to the question of who had the longer slong, there was a face-off of sorts. The two met in the offices of porn producer, Michael Lucas, dropped trou and worked them up. Reports are that Chad is longer then Ben, but Ben is 9 inches at the base, compared to Chad’s 7. God bless the child that’s got his own.

Hunt and Lucas kissed and made up and Hunt went back to work. Hunt and Andrews subsequently worked together in “Encounters 3: Flash Point” and “The Bigger The Better.”

Since Hunt works fairly steadily for Lucas (again) and he’s now started his own production company, Priapus, Inc., it looks like he will be around awhile to be a contender for the big dick title. I guess right now he possesses half the title – he’s got length and Ben Andrews has circumference. (When he’s not making porn, Hunt plans to teach high school history – he’s a graduate of Hunter College in New York City with a degree in Social Studies/Education. He’s bisexual and has been married and has a son, born in 1994.)

Well – that’s it. I can’t tell you much about Ben Andrews except that he’s 6’2” tall, weighs 165 lbs. and was born in Cleveland in 1985. Strangely, Ohio may be the state of big dicks. Chad Hunt is from Wadsworth, Ohio, born in 1973, is 5’10” tall and weighs 160 lbs.

Many facts provided by Wikipedia – others I just make up.

EVIL MARK

2007-02-13T05:24:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Robert Fischer

I'm not really evil. Well, there are a number of doctors at UCLA who would disagree, but I'm not usually evil. This photograph was taken at Bob's the other day. We were setting up lights in his studio for a portrait session with a guy who, ultimately, didn't show up. But we got the lights set up and Bob wanted to do some test shots and I was the testee. At one point he had the light coming at both sides of my face with a lot of intensity and they forced me to squint and it was hell trying to keep my eyes open and look at the camera. This is the result.

TRAVELING

2007-02-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

I'm at that awkward age. Not really old, but old anyway. I'll be 53 next month and while that isn't old, its beginning to feel like it. According to all the TV commercials I should be galluping around the globe from one luxurious spot to another - beaches, luxe hotels, fabulous restaurants, the pyramids, art museums with the treasures of the world - you know - everything the world has to offer is supposed to be mine to experience as a (mildly) successful American.

Then I found out this morning that the most likely place to have your purse stolen or your pocket picked is Vatican Square. They are aggressive there. A common ploy is for a young woman carrying a bundle looking like a baby in a blanket to walk toward you and trip - tossing the baby and blanket in your direction. You, of course, reach to keep the baby from plummeting to the pavement and the woman's accomplice quickly cuts the straps of the purse or backpack or whatever you are carrying and they're gone before you realize the bundle you've saved is nothing. They also like to simply cut off the bottom of your bag and remove its contents while you're taking a picture of something - a pedophile priest perhaps. Scratch the trip to the Holy See. Or go buy a bag that has a steel reinforced strap and base so it can't be cut away from you while you're playing catch the baby.

Paris is wonderful. A beautiful city with over 100 museums, some of them the best in the world. But have you been to the Louvre? With 20,000 other people - all wanting to see the Mona Lisa at the same time? You can't actually see the Mona Lisa. Even if you get close to it, which is doubtful, you can't see it. It is, for security purposes, in a plexiglass case. The case is cloudy and scratched. There is no way to properly look at the painting. The detail is not observable. You'd be better off buying a Mona Lisa puzzle, putting it together and looking at that - you'd see more detail and have a better idea of what it looks like.

The Louvre has become less of a museum than a place where thousands of people at a time get together to say that they were in the presence of famous pieces of art that they could not see because of all the other people. It is a money machine for the French government - it is not in their interest to limit attendance so that someone could see what is there - so people pour in and no one can see anything. It is among the most dreadful museum experiences I've ever had.

But it is not alone anymore - most great museums are becoming like this. We used to have the mega show - shows that drew so many people that you could go, but not really experience the work. Now the museums themselves are mega experiences that you can say you've been to without being able to see what is in them.

As I look back at my museum experiences over the years, the best days I've spent in museums were those that were ordinary - a Wednesday afternoon at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. with no big show going on - just looking at the permanent collection. Or a weekday at the Metropolitan in New York when there was no blockbuster drawing hoards of people. Or even a day at the museum here in Palm Springs discovering the few really nice things that form the corps of a small museum that might one day become a good museum. Why people wait for King Tut, or Vermeer, or some other blockbuster event to darken the doors of a museum I don't know. They will never have the depth of experience fighting to glimpse something in a blockbuster show that they would have just alone on a quiet day with a wonderful piece of art in a quiet gallery.

An example. The first time I went to New York - I'm an emotional person sometimes. I went to MOMA, when it was a museum and not an event. I was wandering around and came face to face with Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I love Van Gogh's work and Starry Night in particular -I confess both for the work and for the Don McLean song - and I stood in front of it and cried. Good way to get a little space. Stand in a museum in front of a picture and weep. People leave you alone. I composed myself and went on and saw other things, and then on an upper floor I came across the great Picasso, "Guernica." More crying. I guess I was weepy that day. But for different reasons. For Van Gogh I cried for his pain and his mental illness - for Picasso I cried for what was done to those poor people by the war - I have a sense of social justice and, like Bush, I detest the "evil doers," except I think Bush is the evil doer. It was just an ordinary day at MOMA, but I could spend all the time I wanted in front of any canvas I cared about without being shoved aside or trampled - and I communed with two great paintings. One of the best days in art I've ever had. No blockbuster and no ten thousand people all trying to see the same thing at the same time.

But this is about travel, and museums are only part of that.

I'm a suspected terrorist. Or whatever. I'm on the "Do Not Fly" list. Since this is the Bush administration they won't tell me how I got there or what facts they used to make the determination that I belong there. They gave me some forms that I have to fill out and provide a variety of information - mostly several ways of proving my identity - and then they will review the matter. However, even if they determine, upon review, that I'm not the person they suspect of being a problem, if my name and that person's name are the same or similar, they still won't take me off the list. "You're not who we want, but you have the same name so you stay on the list." The most they will do is give the airlines some additional information so that they can clear me through checkin a bit faster. But I'll never be able to use an automated checkin kiosk or checkin at the curb again.

Now, I'm paranoid. I flew without a problem in 2005. Then I went into a psychiatric ward for a few days because I was a little vermischt. OK, I was out of my mind. I found out later that one of the little things the Bush administration has done is make your hospital records private, except that the government can get your hospital records anytime it wants them. I have a feeling they've been getting the records of all of us who go into psychiatric wards. Then in 2006, I was on the do not fly list. Coinkydinky? I don't think so.

Airplanes. Is there anyone anymore who doesn't get on one and promptly take drugs to knock yourself out until you reach your destination? I mean airline travel used to be civilised. No more. It's only slightly better than a Greyhound bus and if Greyhound would clean up their terminals, I'd go that way.

I've been to Paris twice. There were good things about both visits, but on the whole I consider them both to be wastes of money. Paris is lovely, but (as everyone knows) it is marred by the Parisians. Parisians think they are superior because they speak French. And they have over 200 kinds of cheese. But they also smell and they've lost every war they've ever started - its a small miracle that there is a France left - their enemies should have partitioned them a long time ago - perhaps no one wanted the cheese. I think we all would be better off if we reverted to 1100, when France was a county about the size of the District of Columbia, and most of what is now France was owned by England and by the independent Duchy of Aquitaine.

The two best places I've ever been - and I haven't traveled extensively, I have to admit that - were Bruge, in Belgium, and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a friendly and easygoing city. It is just pleasant to be in, regardless of what you choose to do. We rented bikes one day and rode around just looking at things - and the city is very bicycle friendly.

Bruge is an old city with an ancient history that the English like to go to for holiday. The old part of the city is virtually unspoiled and just a great place to wander around and go in and out of historic buildings and little museums. We climbed a high bell tower and looked out over the landscape. It is a bit out of the way - but not at all difficult to get to - so not many people really go there - making it a great place to go.

But on the whole, I don't think I'll travel a lot anymore. I will make a trip now and then. But I'll have to gird my loins for hours in security lines and finding the right size shampoo bottles so I don't offend security regulations - 3 oz. not 4 oz. And I'll avoid going places where there are events - I've come to the realization that although I have not seen all there is to see - and even seen much less than many of my more affluent friends who have sailed the Rhine or hunted lizards in Bali - I've traveled more than most people in the world, seen more great art than most, experienced more of what the world has to offer - liking much of it and feeling that I would have been better off going to L.A. for a week or San Francisco or Seattle or Boston, all of which I have been to and should have gone back - let the smelly French and their smelly cheese feel superior to each other - I can be looked down at right here by my own government.

S&M THERAPY

2007-02-01T10:56:00.000-08:00

According to the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, Illinois, there were 214 issues of “Drummer” magazine published before it went out of business. At last count I had 161 of them.

For years I never collected “Drummer.” It chief reason for being did not appeal to me. I’ve never been into leather – except for its feel and smell – but not into the leather lifestyle – and not into those things that seem to accompany the leather lifestyle, sado masochism and bondage and discipline. However, in fairness, I collect a lot of stuff that doesn’t directly appeal to me, and yet I think it should be preserved.

I changed my mind about “Drummer” one day when I walked into a shop and found 83 copies of “Drummer” for sale. I made a deal with the store owner to take them all for about $2 each and walked out with them. The lord works in mysterious ways. Since then my collection has grown, and if I never nail down that last “Drummer,” I will still have a respectable collection.

And protestations to the contrary, I am not a leather s/m virgin.

Some months after my lover had died, I was terribly depressed and obsessed with all the things I should have done and all the signs I didn’t see early enough that I should have seen and just the grief at not having with me the man who had shared my bed for fourteen years. Friends consoled me of course and were a great help, but one friend, Max, offered consolation of a different sort. He offered to beat me. I was really depressed. Somehow the idea of hurting on the outside the way I did on the inside seemed logical. And I knew Max wouldn’t really hurt me – just make me feel pain I could endure, like the pain I was barely enduring anyway.

So one Saturday I went to Max’s townhouse and he greeted me in leather master mode, instructing me in how to follow his directions and when to speak and when to shut up. Mostly shut up. I stripped for Max and he examined my body. He told me what he would do and gave me a safety word in case things got too intense. Then Max took me to a room where there were all kinds of whips and chains and paddles, and a rack. He tied me to the rack with leather restraints, and chose a rather innocuous looking paddle – kind of like a ping pong paddle but made of leather.

Max rubbed the paddle over my body to let me feel it. He had on gloves and he felt me again with his gloved hands – especially my ass, which he pulled open with a gloved hand and slid the paddle up and down my crack. Max talked about how the paddle would help him take my mind off my sorrows and give me relief from my inner turmoil. I wondered if my psychiatrist might want to adopt some of Max’s techniques if they proved to be efficacious.

Max had wanted to get his hands on me for some time. I was tall and blond – or blond sometimes and right then I was blond – I had a naturally shaped body that required only the most modest effort to look like I cared enough to work out – and an ass that was not magnificent, but was not to be sneezed at by guys wanting ass. Max was short and professorial looking – a bit thick in the body, he was a perfect leather daddy – reassuring and commanding – definitely in charge.

The scene was simple. Max was going to spank me, play with my body, and when he was finished, he was going to take me down from the rack and take me to his bed and fuck me.

He talked to me while he punished me with the paddle. Most of the swats came across my ass and upper legs. He would pause now and then to check on how I was doing. It didn’t matter how much it hurt, I refused to use the safety word. I wasn’t going to wimp out on Max and end the scene unfinished.

After a time, Max was finished with the punishment. He praised me for taking it, and he untied me and took me to the bedroom. The whole thing had been cathartic to me. I started to cry, lying on Max’s bed. He held me and asked what was wrong. “I miss him so much,” is all I could get out, and of course he knew what I meant. Max didn’t fuck me, he just held me while I cried and told me it would get better. Eventually I pulled myself together.

As I got up Max looked at my ass and exclaimed that he’d really don’t some damage. He said I should have told him I bruise so easily. I looked behind me, and he was right, I was a mass of black and blue marks. But it didn’t hurt. I’ve always bruised easily, making any mark on me look like someone has tried to kill me.

Max watched me dress and told me to call him if I needed another treatment, or just a cup of tea.

IF LOOKS COULD KILL - PART 2

2007-01-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

Mick's girlfriend offered to set Keith up with some dates with her friends, but Keith had problems dating women and then fucking men for money the next day for work making a video or with a John for pay. So all of his sex was coming from men, but he wasn't comfortable with that - or didn't like it - or couldn't reconcile himself to what he was doing and make it just a job. He told Mick's girlfriend, Carmen, that he just hated their “lifestyle.” He called them “godless.”

Carmen asked him when was the last time he’d been to church and he said, “That’s not the point. You can believe and not go to church. I’m a Christian and what these people do demeans and desecrates the flesh.”

Carmen asked him if being a hustler and making porn movies didn’t demean and desecrate the flesh. “Why is it ok for you to do it? Because you’re revolted by it? Does that make it OK?”

“No, I’m not saying it’s OK – it’s not OK, I just have to earn a living right now and I’ll stop when I can. It’s wrong and I have to stop it.”

But he didn’t stop. He went on for over two years making porn films and hustling. And taking jobs as a waiter at catering gigs when he didn’t have porn or escort gigs to keep him busy.

It’s not unusual to be burned out after a couple of years of making porn films. If you’re ready and available for the work, you can make eight to ten films a year. Keith made 21 films in 26 months, appearing in only one scene in most of them. But he became a recognized body, dick and name, credited with solid performances and an always ready erection, a valuable asset in the porn business.

But at the end of shooting his last project – “On the Sand, Part VI” – Keith needed a break. He decided to go home and see his family. They thought he worked at a restaurant in L.A. and hadn’t had money or vacation time to visit. He told them something about a minor shoulder injury being the reason for his discharge from the Marines – he couldn’t fire a gun, but it was otherwise not serious.

So Keith took a break from the world of porn and went home to Colorado Springs. He just stayed at home for a week or so, resting and thinking about his next move. Did he want to go back to L.A. and do more porn work or did he want to find something else to do?

He went into Denver one day and found a coffee shop that had some local newspapers in it. One of them was a bar rag for the gay bars. There was an ad for a modeling agency, Maxelent Models Inc. Keith tore out the ad and kept it. He called the number later and made an appointment to see the owner of the agency.

Chris Tillman, the owner of Maxelent Models met Keith and wasn’t too impressed. Nice looking guy, but there are lots of nice looking guys. He asked Keith if he had any experience as a model. Keith told him he’d been in some magazines as a model, but was embarrassed to show Chris. Chris coaxed Keith into giving him the materials he had in his folder, and Keith pulled out the copies of his layouts from Torso and Playguy and Mandate.

Each layout started out with Keith in some kind of uniform or clothing and then gradually the photos became more revealing until he was nude and erect. And of course they named videos that Keith had been in. The name on all of these shoots was Tim Dickson.

Chris told Keith that he couldn’t place him in legit jobs as a model, but he did have an adult agency, MaXXX Models, that could use him. He could do both escort work and personal appearances in the Rocky Mountain region. If his video work was any good he could probably make two or three thousand a week, less the 40% that the agency gets.

Keith signed up, had his picture taken for the MaXXX website and within a few days started getting calls to go out on escort jobs. Shortly after that he started getting assignments to appear in gay clubs. His appearances in gay clubs were pretty much just to dance on a stage or runway, strip out of a small costume, beat off for the audience and cum, preferably on the audience. If he really wanted to maximize his tips, he would walk amongst the faithful and thank them for coming, greet them, hug and kiss them and take the money out of their hands as they offered it to him.

Keith loathed being touched by these men, but he wanted their money. Tips were not subject to a split with the agency, only his fees were. So the more he could make in tips the more he really had.

This is how he met Scott Holik. Scott was at one of his dance appearances at Backdoor Annie’s one night in Denver. Scott was in his early 40’s, a big handsome guy with a nice smile and a welcoming demeanor. He was a natural born salesman – which was good since he sold cars. Or his family sold cars. Scott had taken over management of his families car dealerships – all four of them: Holik Mazda, Holik Toyota, Holik Mercedes, and Holik Volvo. The dealerships had made the family rich. They had invested in real estate and stocks and built big houses and took great vacations. Scott was charged with keeping the good times rolling now that his father was older and had retired from the business.

Scott had built a big house for himself. He had a four story free standing town house. The bottom floor was arranged as two servant’s apartments, although there were no live-in servants. The maids, the pool boy, the yard man, the guy who takes care of the fish pond, they all come in to do their work and leave. The second floor is the game room. It has a home theatre, a pool table, video games, even slot machines. The top two floors are the residence – bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, etc.

When Scott met Keith – err Tim – he was drawn to him. Something about his butch act was not quite convincing. Scott saw through it and saw a guy he thought was wounded by the harsh life of a porn star – the hard life of a hustler – and wondered if he could throw him a lifeline. Scott had failed for years to find someone to be with him as a partner. He’d always viewed himself as a kind of big brother figure to the guys he dated, but didn’t figure out that that was the problem with his relationships – big brothers and lovers don’t really work out.

Anyway, he gave Keith/Tim a big tip - $100 – for his dancing and it was wrapped in his business card. He told him to call him. It wasn’t unusual for this to happen and Keith obliging said “Sure,” not meaning it, and moved on.

But when he got backstage and saw that the unwanted business card was wrapped up in a $100 bill, he though maybe he should call the guy. At the worst it might be good for a few more bucks.

So Keith called Scott and Scott asked Keith for a “date.” Keith told him he made all of his appointments through the agency, but Scott told him he’d pay him his usual rate, but he wouldn’t have to go through the agency and split his fee. Keith knew that guys did this, but if the agency found out they’d cut him loose and quit booking him. He took the chance.

Scott took him out to dinner and then back to his place where they had sex. Scott obviously wanted Keith to be more demonstrative – more romantic – but Keith couldn’t hold or kiss Scott – he just let Scott suck his dick and then he fucked him; the usual straight trade stuff that he was known for. But something about Keith’s little boy lost demeanor and his willingness to talk about himself when they were having dinner and before and after the sex made Scott like him.

Scott invited him out another couple of times, taking him to a gay bar once – the first time Keith had been in a gay bar as something other than a guy on a stage who went immediately to a back room after collecting his tips after his performance. He was really uncomfortable with the guys dancing and rubbing up against each other and all the kissing going on amongst the guys around the edges of the dance floor – and the groping and obvious sexual playing taking place in public. It disturbed Keith to have men behaving like this with each other. Some of these guys looked like real men – like military guys or guys who could be construction workers or cops or something. They didn’t fit his image of sissy boys nancing around with their wrists flapping. It bothered him that guys who looked like real men would come up to Scott and think that he, Keith, was gay because he was with Scott, and Scott wouldn’t correct them – wouldn’t say that he was just with him because he was being paid. And he couldn’t bring himself to speak to these guys to tell them that he wasn’t like them – that he just had sex with men for money, not because he wanted to be with men.

Scott wanted to save Keith from his life in the sex industry. He told him that he could learn to sell cars – or he could learn to work in the service part of the business – whatever he was interested in. Scott offered to let Keith live in one of the servant’s units in the basement of his house if he’d take a job at one of his dealerships. No strings – Keith didn’t have to give Scott sex or anything. Scott just wanted to help him.

Of course Scott was hoping that Keith would fall in love with him out of gratitude and by seeing what a great and kind fellow he was. But Keith was all about looking out for Keith. He did see this as an opportunity to go legit – and he took it.

Keith moved into Scott’s house and Scott got him a used car that he could pay for out of his commissions. He got him a job at the Toyota dealership, working with an experienced salesman to learn how to sell cars. He gave him some money to tide him over until he started earning – and he gave him the run of the house – wanting Keith to be a companion, if not a lover. And Keith and he did have sex from time to time. Not satisfying to Scott because there was no emotion – no kissing, no holding – but he got to feel Keith’s body on his and Keith’s dick inside of him – and Keith got the release of sex without having to go look for a woman and explain to her how he was living off of a man and what he had been doing in the past several years as a male “model.”

Then one night in December, when everything seemed to be going well, Keith and Scott had been out to dinner and each of them had had a few drinks. Scott pressed Keith for sex and Keith resisted – at first. Then he gave in, but Scott pressed for more than the uninvolved fucking that Keith usually gave. Scott wanted to be held and kissed. Keith resisted, but he and Scott had more drinks at the house and Scott talked Keith into trying a kiss with another man – Keith admitted he had never actually tried one. They kissed and Keith let Scott hold him, and he relaxed, for a moment, in Scott’s arms. But then he tensed and pushed away and got up and Scott got up too and came after him, asking what was wrong. Keith didn’t say what was wrong, he just backed away and told Scott not to come near him. But Scott kept coming near and Keith picked up a two foot Balinese carving of a penis – made from wood – and started hitting Scott with it. He didn’t stop hitting Scott until Scott was dead. Blood and brain matter splattered all over the place, Keith had hit Scott way past the point where Scott had been unconscious and unable to defend himself.

Keith took a shower to wash the blood and brain material off of himself. He took his dirty clothes and the Balinese penis and put them in a garbage bag. He tried to clean up the mess in Scott’s living room as much as possible, cleaning up the glasses from their drinks and wiping away fingerprints. But of course his fingerprints in the room could be explained – he lived there. He took Scott’s wallet and jewelry. He took cash hidden in Scott’s bedroom and some other valuable items. He wanted this to look like a robbery.

He took the loot and a few items of clothing and put the stuff in his car and headed south, toward the Mexican border. On the way he disposed of the garbage bag with the bloody clothes and the Balinese penis in a garbage can outside a Denny’s in Tucumcari, N.M.

Scott’s body was found by a maid two days later. Attention soon turned to Keith when he didn’t show up for work and wasn’t around the house where he lived. He was stopped at the border at El Paso, trying to cross over to Juarez. He had Scott’s wallet and credit cards on him. He was arrested and sent back to Denver.

After a short interrogation Keith confessed, but explained that he had to kill Scott because Scott had kissed him and wanted to kiss him again – a classic gay panic defense. He reached for the first available weapon to prevent Scott from turning him into a faggot. As he told the cops, all the times he’d had sex with men it didn’t count as long as it was only fucking, but when Scott wanted him to kiss him and hold him, that was making him a queer and he wasn’t a queer and wasn’t going to let anybody make him one. It was disgusting.

The matter will go to trial. The Denver D.A. offered a reduced charge of manslaughter 1 and 20 years, but Keith wants not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect (gay panic syndrome), time in a mental institution and release.

The trial should start in a couple of months.

(Author’s note: Story suggested by the case of Timothy Boham, who performed under the name Marcus Allen.)

IF LOOKS COULD KILL - PART 1

2007-01-22T17:28:00.000-08:00

Keith was a good looking kid. Not real tall, but attractive in a boy next door, All-American kind of way. Dark brown hair and big brown eyes, he had creamy skin and a small mouth with nice pink lips. His body was that of a wrestler – powerful and compact.

Keith grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A suburb of Denver, Colorado Springs is the home of the United States Air Force Academy. Keith admired the cadets and always thought he’d like to join the Academy.

In high school Keith was a fair student. He made B’s and C’s – mostly C’s – and worked part-time at a pizza joint. His father worked in the body shop of the local Chevy dealer and his mother was a secretary at a branch of Bank West. Keith was the youngest of four children. His brother and two sisters were grown and gone by the time he was in high school. They married and established households in the Colorado Springs area.

Keith had a girlfriend in high school. Natalie was a pretty girl and very bright. She was a member of the student council and on the yearbook committee. Dating her gave Keith access to social circles that he would otherwise not belong to. This was both awkward for him and something that he was proud of. He was proud to crash social groups that wouldn’t otherwise welcome him, but felt weak as a man that he was riding on the coattails of a girl. Sometimes he’d get angry and fight with Natalie over little things, showing his frustration with being second class to his girlfriend.

Keith hung out with a group of guys who liked to drink and smoke pot. They also liked to cruise local spots where kids hung out and they taunted other kids. They weren’t much into physical fights, they just liked to call other kids names or make fun of kids they perceived as weak or different. Their favorite targets were kids they thought were gay – calling kids faggots or sissies or queers or fairies was a lot of fun – didn’t really matter whether they were or not – just fun to call some smaller, weaker kid the name and embarrass them or shame them. After the thrill of doing that to other kids wore off, they started driving up to Denver when they could to cruise the gay bars there and shout “faggot” at guys on the street, throw a beer bottle at them and zoom off before anyone could catch them.

One time a guy in their group said that he knew one of the faggots in school and thought he could talk the guy into giving him head. Well, what he did was talk the guy into giving him head one afternoon and then three more guys from the gang showed up and demanded that he blow them too. Keith was one of the three. So that was his first blowjob – from a guy he intimidated into servicing him. He was alternately disgusted and aroused.

Keith didn’t have anymore group sex with the guys, but he did keep seeking out gay guys from time to time for more blowjobs. And he continued to shout “faggot” and throw bottles at guys outside gay bars in Denver with his friends. He didn’t see the problem with the two behaviors – if some fag wanted to blow him he’d enjoy getting off – it took the pressure off his girlfriend to have sex – the guy was still a fag and still disgusting.

Keith applied to the Air Force Academy. But of course you don’t get into the Academy with C’s and he was turned down. He was disappointed, but turned his vague ambition about being a cadet into a decision to join the military. He enlisted in the Marines after graduating from High School.

He ended up at a Marine base near San Diego. After basic training he started to get liberty and would go into San Diego with a couple of buddies that he’d teamed up with during basic. They didn’t have much money but just hanging out in the city was fun for awhile.

Through the grapevine they heard there was a guy who would pay Marines to strip and jack off for his camera. They didn’t have to have sex with anybody, just jack off solo while the guy recorded it. He paid well and he liked getting Marines to do it for him.

Keith and his buddies found out how to contact the guy and one Saturday night they went to this motel in El Cajon and the guy played straight porn while they took turns beating off in front of the camera for $200 each. The guy really liked Keith, whose dark good looks, compact muscular body and bigger than average dick made him a good catch. He told Keith to come back sometime and told him he’d pay him $500 if he’d let him arrange for another guy to go down on Keith.

A couple of weeks later Keith called the porn guy, Sam, and set it up for him to go to the motel and get a blowjob for the camera. Before it was over, Keith made four films for the guy, including one where he fucked another guy while the camera rolled. This was his first time fucking anyone, but he didn’t tell them that.

A month after Keith did the fucking video his commanding officer called him in and asked him if he had been engaged in any outside business activity. At first Keith denied it, but then the officer pulled out a tape that was labeled “Solo Performances by Marines Joe, Bobby, Allen, and Pat.” Keith was Allen. The officer asked Keith if he wanted to watch it, and Keith said no. He admitted that he was Allen and had been paid by Sam, the guy who made the video, to jack off for the camera. But it was just jacking off, so it was no big deal, right? It seemed to violate about 93 different codes of military conduct, not to mention that the JO tapes were aimed at gay men and that shocked the conscience of the military, even if everything else had been alright.

Keith and the other guys were confined to their barracks until their discharges could be processed. The powers that be did not want to draw too much attention to this matter. It was suspected that dozens of Marines had been seduced into being filmed for these jack off videos – and worse – and a court martial would spotlight the problem and bring public attention to it. So the guys got a general discharge instead of a court martial and a dishonorable discharge.

Keith didn’t want to go home under these circumstances. Instead, he contacted Sam and made arrangements to crash with him for a couple of weeks, churning out a couple of more tapes of a Marine fucking another guy. He got $500 each for those and Sam sent him to Palm Springs to a clothing optional resort for gay men where he could spend another couple of weeks.

Sam’s company owned the resort and he liked to send hunky young guys – especially the Marines he adored so much – to hang out with the tourists and have sex with them. It improved the reputation of the resort and made business better. Guys from Indiana liked to come to Palm Springs and stay at a place where they were assured there would be a good number of hunky guys who were at the least eye candy and quite possibly more than that.

Keith understood that his two weeks at the resort were dependent upon him letting the paying customers blow him from time to time, and he occasionally found a guy that he didn’t mind fucking – as long as the guy would let him do it doggy style so he didn’t have to look him in the face. He didn’t mind fucking another guy much as long as he was just putting his dick in an anonymous hole, but he didn’t like looking at another guy’s face while he fucked him.

While he was at the resort Keith met another guy who was there as an “escort.” This guy lived in Los Angeles and worked as a waiter for a catering company and also made porn films. After he and Keith got to know each other he told Keith about doing porn films and hustling – which is where he made most of his money. Porn films only paid $1000 to $2000 per scene, depending upon what you did and whether or not you’re a name star or just another porn model. Some big porn stars get more, but not many. Guys do porn because it makes them worth more as hustlers or as entertainers doing personal appearances on the porn theatre circuit. They also like to get spreads in magazines, which only pay a few hundred dollars, but also give you exposure and increase your marketability in other venues.

The guy, Don, offered to let Keith crash on his couch for awhile if he wanted to try and get established in L.A. Keith decided that he’d do this – making up his mind one day while a guy from Grand Rapids blew him out behind a bush in the big yard of the resort. Keith pulled out of the guy’s mouth and gave him a facial just as he decided that his destiny was to become a porn star.

So Keith went to L.A. with Don and nobody cared that he wasn’t gay – by this time Keith was aware that a number of the guys working the resort had not been gay. “Gay for pay” was a phrase that had just entered Keith’s head. “It’s just fucking” was also something that Don said over and over when they talked about sex for money.

Don introduced Keith to his agent at Staxxx Talent Agency. It was a little easier to get signed on since Keith had some videos already in the market. They weren’t great, but his “talent” was obvious. Dean, his new agent, hooked him up with a gym and a trainer while Don introduced him to the catering manager that he worked for. Keith was able to get catering jobs, quickly got a part in a porn film where he just had to play one of several convicts in an orgy scene. He got blown by a couple of guys and then blew his load all over the face of the star bottom who was being ravaged by the mob. It was just one scene and he got $1000, but his XXX gay career had really started - this time as “Tim Dickson.”

As Tim, Keith started getting fairly regular jobs. He was a total top – didn’t suck dick and didn’t fuck – just got serviced and fucked other guys. He was used most frequently as a military guy of some kind or as a cop or as a college aged athlete, like the wrestler he reminded people of. He was known as a reliable, if not exactly dynamic, performer. He was easy to work with on the set, although it was noted that he only spoke to other performers who were also gay for pay – he rarely said anything to a gay performer unless it was necessary to doing the work.

Still photos were published in a couple of the skin magazines. Keith received a few hundred dollars for each of these. One of his photos was selected to be used by a phone sex line in an advertisement. This was great because once they pick one, these ads can run for years without changing photos. Keith got a couple of hundred dollars for the initial ad and then a fee each time the ad ran again – which ended up being two or three times a month in various publications. He had a small, but constant, stream of royalty income from the use of that photo.

He started running an ad in a couple of gay papers in L.A. He advertised himself as an escort, a total top with a military background, boy next door meets the Marine Corps. He got $200 an hour and had plenty of takers. Hustling really is where there’s money in the porn business.

He moved off of Don’s couch and into a two-bedroom apartment with another porn model named Mick Nicholas (Mike Weaver). Mick was also gay for pay, but unlike Keith, Mick would do anything. He’d suck dick and get fucked and take facials and even get hosed in a water sports scene – for him it was only fucking – and his girlfriend got off on seeing Mick’s videos before going in his bedroom to get royally fucked by him in his capacity as a straight boy.

DEONTAY

2007-01-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

Deontay and I met on my first visit to the baths in Washington. Deontay was lying on his cot, with the door open and I looked in and he invited me to join him. I did, and I blew him and he apologized for the size of his cock - it being too small. Deontay was African American and apparently had problems because he did not have the mythic huge dick African American men are supposed to have. Deontay's dick was entirely normal, but in a gay world obsessed with size, I guess it was hard to be normal and African American. He also wasn't thrilled with his name, and introduced himself as Deon. I didn't find out about the "tay" until later. Deontay comes from Dante, which means "lasting" or "enduring."

Deontay and I ended up having an extended discussion. I told him I had just moved to D.C. from New Orleans, and we discussed race relations there and he told me something about the black community in D.C. I hadn't seen much of the city, and Deontay offered to take me out the next day (Sunday) and show me the sights. I wasn't sure what to make of an offer like that in the middle of the night from an African American with cock size issues whom I had just blown.

But I accepted.

Deontay and I separated and I wandered around and got involved in a three way with a couple of guys who were representing gay white trash in America, and Deontay found us and watched. A little later Deontay found a guy - 22 years old - great big college football player with the requisite enormous black dick to go along with it, and brought me around to join them, except Deontay was mostly into watching while the big kid fucked me with his big black dick.

And a good time was had by all.

It was something like 3:00 a.m. and I showered and got dressed and was leaving. Deontay was holding court in the lobby with a couple of other guys and was surprised that I was going - apparently another wave of party goers was due in at about 4:00 a.m. so there would be fresh meat. I told him I really needed to sleep, and he said goodnight, but reminded me of our tour date - which I had not forgotten, but I thought it would be rude to ask him to tour me around Washington if he was staying for 4:00 a.m. meat. But he insisted that I come to his house at 1:00 the next afternoon - or actually that afternoon - and gave me directions and that was that.

Deontay gave me what was probably the most eccentric tour of Washington ever given. But first he toured me through his house. The house had belonged to Deontay's family for several generations. It had a sign on it, "The Polk - Lloyd Gallery." Deontay was a Polk, not a Lloyd, Deontay Givens Polk. I never did find out where the Givens came from.

Originally the house was bought by his great grandparents. His great grandmother was an opera singer, but mostly in Europe, there being little need for black opera singers in America. Deontay showed me family photos and they were obviously mixed-race and the men did what many dark skinned men did in those days, they married up to someone with lighter skin. Deontay was light, but not what we called in New Orleans, passé blanc - pass for white. Too many white genes were probably accountable for the small dick issue.

The house was filled with art by African Americans. Some of it was a part of Deontay's permanent family collection, and part of it was for sale - Deontay was a dealer in African American art.

He showed me the art, sometimes giving an extended explanation of a piece, and sometimes just saying this is this and moving on. The whole house was set up to further Deontay's business and collection activities, except for his bedroom - at the front of the house on the second story.

We left for our tour. I don't remember all of it. I remember Deontay taking me to L'Enfant Plaza - where I worked - and pointing out all of the architectural horrors that had been committed in building it. My impression of it was that it was ugly, but I had been loathe to insult Washingtonians on this major group of buildings during my first month in the place. Deontay validated my impression and pointed out why and what and wherefore it had gone from a plan that might have worked to a plan that was a disaster.

In front of the Plaza was Deontay's award for the worst building in D.C. The Forestall Building, home to the Department of Energy. I can't describe buildings and things - I can describe sex acts - but this building is truly loathsome. But the reason apparently is that it was designed by the Pentagon for some super secret computer installations, and then Jimmy Carter came to office and created the Energy Department and took the Pentagon's building away from them and there you have it - the Energy Department housed in a building meant for secret computers - all of it looking ugly and just a block away from our National Mall.

Deontay took me to a number of significant places - homes and churches and things - and explained things about African American history in the capital. It was an interesting day, if not your usual tour of Washington, and by the end of it I thought that I might have made a friend of Deontay, and would get to see him again. And I did.

Deontay and I saw each other sporadically - no particular rhyme or rhythm to it. I would call and leave a message and sometimes he would call back right away, and sometimes he would call back weeks later. Always with an interesting story of where he had been and what he had been doing. Deontay's stories were always half about looking for art and half about looking for men. He seemed to be connected to guys all up and down the east coast and inland to Atlanta.

I'm going to tell you about two events - both typically Deontay - who was as much matchmaker as he was hedonist.

I don't remember what order they occurred in, but I don't think it matters.

Deontay and I made a date for sex early one Saturday morning. I arrived at the appointed time, and Deontay came to the door like secret agent man - doing a hush, be quiet thing. We went to Deontay's office instead of his bedroom. We undressed and got on his big leather sofa and had sex - OK, I blew him. Then, after awhile, we went to the bathroom, in the middle of the hall, to wash up, pee, brush our teeth, whatever one does to get ready to face the world after an early morning bit of sex. Well, into the bathroom comes a very attractive young black man, who takes a long piss into the toilet while he stretches and I look at his nicely muscled body and his cock, which was the size of African American legend. Deontay introduced us, and he said hi, but nothing else, before heading back to Deontay's bedroom. I just looked at him leave and wondered about how one goes after your host's trick from last night. I didn't have to wonder for long, as Deontay just said "well, go ahead, he's waiting."

And indeed he was. He was naked on top of the sheets with his legs spread and his dick dangling over his balls. I climbed onto the bed, in between his legs, and went to work on his dick so that it didn't dangle anymore. It was large when it was flaccid, and it was huge when it was erect. We both enjoyed the oral work, but after awhile he asked me if I liked to get fucked. I replied in the affirmative and we switched places - me on the bed, face down, and him in between my spread legs working some lubricant into my ass and opening me up with his fingers so that dickzilla would fit.

Well, he made it fit and I was speaking in tongues as he raked my ass with that cock. Deontay kept coming and going from the room - sometimes watching for awhile and then going on with whatever it was he was doing. We had a good, hard, long, fuck and when it was over I thanked him, and he thanked me, and I went back to the bathroom to clean up again, and he pulled the sheet back over him to take a nap.

Deontay came in to talk to me while I washed up in his claw footed tub. He explained that his guest was the youngest male member of a very prominent Washington family. His grandfather was a prominent politician and promoter of black rights in the 40's and 50's. His father was a businessman in the African-American community. The family was not thrilled with having its scion turning out gay. So Deontay commiserated with him for awhile at the bar where they hooked up, and then Deontay brought him home and made better use of him than whining about people who don't like you being gay. And now I've met him - and isn't he wonderful? Indeed.

OK - end of that story - I never saw the guy again.

Deontay had several times eluded to a close friend of his that he thought I would like. He had a painted portrait of the friend that was a good picture, even though it showed his friend to be rough looking. The friend occasionally came to Washington from the dark recesses of rural Virginia where he lived on property that had been in his family for several generations. Other than telling me that we would like each other, Deontay never told me much about the guy.

David was an accomplished writer and lecturer, although if I had to tell you what he wrote and lectured about, I couldn't. He spoke French and had traveled to France a number of times and knew French literature. That much I know. I guess it would be easy to tell you he taught French literature. Maybe he did. And you wouldn't know the difference, but I don't like that. For all I know, the French stuff was just a sideline. He could have been a rocket scientist, faxing engineering plans from Virginia out to California where they build rockets at Edwards Air Force Base. Well, whatever, he was coming to Washington to take care of Deontay's house for a month while Deontay traveled, and it was arranged that we would meet.

At the appointed time I arrived at Deontay's and rang the bell and soon David appeared. He grabbed a jacket and said, "let's go for a walk." We started walking the neighborhood - once the finest black neighborhood in the city, and the home of Washington's black Broadway - theatres and clubs where plays and musicals were performed and where the top black acts - singers, bands, comedians - performed for sell out audiences. All of that was lost in the riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

But we walked the route of the old circuit and talked about what had gone on there and how it always seemed that when blacks rioted they took down their own neighborhoods and not the neighborhoods of the white oppressors - even though they were simply a few blocks over.

We talked about civil liberties and all deliberate speed, and we stopped at the local head shop and looked at some cloth from Africa, and some African caps, and David seemed to know the owner and they had a few words and then David introduced me as a new friend.

We ended our tour at Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcolm X Park. It was notorious for its drug dealing and for prostitutes of both sexes plying their trade - in addition to unpaid hookups in the bushes, which sometimes ended in a beating and a robbery instead of someone getting to suck cock.

Having toured and talked, David said we should head back home. I was under the impression that I had been auditioning for what I thought was a simple trick. David wanted to know if I was intelligent enough - interested enough - involved enough as a white man in the social and political history of blacks to be worthy of fucking.

We got back to Deontay's house and David led me upstairs to a room where files were kept. There was a large rug on the floor, and I guessed from the sheets and pillows piled on the file cabinets that David made a pallet on the rug to sleep on. (Deontay was leaving on his trip the next day, but was off running errands while I was there.) We covered the rug with a sheet and undressed and laid down.

I didn't tell you what David looked like. He was about 5'9", shorter than my 6', and kind of large - broad shoulders, broad at the hips, he had a thick waist but wasn't fat, and very large muscular legs. His face was not attractive, but it was interesting. Indeed, it looked rough as the picture portrayed it.

He kissed, at first, like he was bidding farewell to a dying comrade in arms - not with hesitation, but with infinite tenderness as he held my head in his hands and blessed my lips with his and then my eyes and my cheeks and then returned to my lips, and finding them open he pressed down harder and invaded my mouth with his tongue. Let me pause and tell you that I have no idea how old David was. He was older than me, but I couldn't tell you if that meant he was 2 years older or 20 years older. Until now, until writing this, I've never thought of age and David. He was a mature black male of a certain age.

We took a long time making love on that floor. We licked, sucked, kissed and touched every part of each other that we could reach, and at some point, David fucked me, on my back, which allowed me to touch his chest and feel the large, hard muscles, which got me off as much as the fucking did.

We rested - David holding me - and talked a little, but not of anything that I remember. And then we cleaned up, in the claw footed tub, and David took me downstairs - both of us nude - for a drink of water.

We went to the kitchen and David extracted from the refrigerator a large jar of water with mint leaves in it. He began to tell me that he always brings a jar of water from the family well down in southern Virginia, and crushes mint that grows around the well into the water, as having that water reminds him of his childhood and the joy of growing up in his large and happy family. He compared it to Proust's Madeleine's in "Remembrance of Things Past" and did a little riff on that which was both entertaining and scholarly.

We walked back into the dining room, and there was a chair - I'm not sure what you would call it - a captain's chair or a small throne - at any rate it was old and meant to be imposing, and David sat down in it and without hesitation or prompting, I kneeled before him and took his cock in my mouth and began to suck him. He made noises of approval and talked a little bit about what we were doing, but then he shut up and just enjoyed what I was doing, until he filled my mouth with semen, and we went back upstairs and lay on the floor and he held me.

I left and it was a very long time before I heard from David again. Or from Deontay. When I did hear, it was that David had been shot by a policeman one night as he was crossing the park. The policeman swore that David pulled a gun on him, although there was no gun - but these things don't matter because any black man in a park where drugs are regularly dealt is assumed to be a drug dealer - although no drugs were found either. David almost died and had many surgeries to repair the internal damage.

And Deontay was dying of AIDS - something that I knew from the first visit to his house - I recognized the drugs on his bed table.

I actually never saw Deontay again, although he lived another year or more. He negotiated the sale of his collection to a museum - well he gave them half of it and they purchased the other half giving him well over a million dollars to support himself - and to make his death without poverty possible.

I saw David, and he told me the story of his shooting - and he showed me the scars that traced back and forth across his abdomen - and we didn't make love, but we held each other naked on that floor talking softly.

After Deontay's death, David retreated to southern Virginia and we lost touch with each other.

A few months later, the Washington Post published a very long story about Deontay - about his life and his collection - about the deal with the museum - and finally about his death, the cause of which had never been revealed, but which was assumed to be AIDS. The Post alleged that Deontay had overdosed - accidentally - on a recreational drug used in the dance bars and for sex. Deontay, alone in his house, no one with him, dying of AIDS, looking for a high to take his mind off the aloneness. One step too far. He apparently was using the drug while he was in his whirlpool bath, passed out and drowned.

I miss these people in my life. The texture, the surprise, the things that make life more complete. I miss them.

MODERN ROMANCE - PALM SPRINGS STYLE

2007-01-12T06:57:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Dan. I’m 23, a graduate of the College of the Desert and the Desert Art Academy and an assistant at Fontera Art Gallery in El Galleria on Las Palmas in Palm Springs. We specialize in “desert modern” by artists who think they are channeling Maxine Schlagey, Noah Friedkin, Vernon Honeycut, and Chai Feldblum, all leaders in the western surrealist movement of the forties and fifties. Brilliant work that is prized by private collectors and museums. Our stuff matches the sofa and goes in a room that is mostly done in many shades of beige. Palm Springs designers palm it off on their clients at prices that used to make me ashamed to work here, but now I just view the whole thing as an inside joke. You see, I’ve only worked here a couple of years – I started part-time before I finished school. After I started full-time I found out what the whole story was.

I thought everyone at the gallery was deadly serious about this “art.” I mean, I was afraid they thought if might be good or something. But then I was told by another assistant that the gallery had been on the verge of failure when Mrs. Ford – Betty Ford – came in with her coterie of Secret Service agents – and looked around and bought one. Without a word. Just looked and whispered to an aide and the aide told the gallery director which one, and gave her a card and a bill was sent and it was paid and the painting was delivered.

The gallery director had the good sense to leak it to the papers that Mrs. Ford had visited Fontera Gallery and had ordered a large Braithewaite delivered to the compound at Rancho Mirage. And viola – everyone beat a path to Fontera’s door. Sell one piece of crap to the wife of a third rate president and the world is your oyster.

The funny part is – she didn’t keep the painting. It was a gift for Laura Bush. I kind of think she knew what she was giving. The Bushes were out to visit a couple of weeks later and they exchanged presents. The painting is in Crawford. How wonderful for it.

Anyway, so I’m a would be artist. I’m still learning. I paint my friends – and I take photographs of people on the street and I paint from that. My goal is not to make photo original paintings, but to do something between a deconstructionist thing like Picasso and photo original painting. I want to make people look like I see their emotional state – I guess I want to do psychological portraits. Anyway – its all still evolving. I’ve shown in some student shows and some group shows in small galleries. I haven’t been discovered and I’m not the kind of artist that one picks to go over the couch.

But it is all OK. I have a job – it pays poorly, but enough to get by. I have a roommate. He’s a bartender in a leather bar. Our schedules are completely different so we don’t see a lot of each other, but we get along. I like him. His name is Ernie – except at the bar, where it is Bear.

I’m kind of a little guy. I’m like 5’6”, 135 lbs. dirty blond hair, cute in an androgynous way. People think I’m effeminate because my looks are “delicate,” as my mother puts it. I’m not effeminate – I’m just what I am. A gay man with these looks that came from my mother’s pussy and my father’s dick and I did not concoct them to make a statement about anything. I’m male. As male as a gay man is. As male as a gay man who is a dedicated and proud bottom is. Yes, I like to get fucked. Where would the tops be without me? I’m not without muscles. I have this naturally lean muscular body – defined as they say. I go to a gym three times a week to maintain it because I read the book of how to be gay and it says I must go – otherwise I’d just lie on my stomach and wait for a top to come by. I have Sapphire eyes – the same as Elizabeth Taylor. She kept the diamonds.

I suppose that was a bit rude, but I get so tired of people assuming I’m a girl – or girlie because of my looks.

Ernie is very much the opposite. We met at College of the Desert – at a coffee house – he was cruising my ass in a very heated way and I was trying to decide whether or not to award it to him. I did.

Ernie is tall – 6’4”, hairy all over but not grotesque – I mean, he deserves the name “Bear” but he’s not Sasquatch. He’s cute in a rough way. Brown eyes – deep and a little sad sometimes. But he smiles a lot and its very disarming. Nice beard and mustache – thick but trimmed. He’s way strong. Big muscles and he works out a lot. He got an offer to be a porn model once. They film a lot of those things here in Palm Springs and a producer saw him in the bar. He’s exactly what they wanted for the movie they were making – you know – a big bear of a guy, real cute with tons of muscles – and he has all the right stuff between the legs too. But Bear didn’t want to be a porn god. He just thought it wasn’t the right career move for him. Or the thing to send home to his fundamentalist parents for Christmas. “Bear in Palm Springs Dungeon Weekend IV”

Bear and I share this little apartment – one bedroom in a group of eight units around a pool off Sunny Dunes. Bear can walk to the bar. I have a car to drive to work, and Bear can use it when I don’t need it. We’re very cooperative. Very.

Bear and I sleep together – well I sleep at night while he works and he sleeps during the day while I work – and sometimes one or the other of us strips the bed and washes the sheets. But usually, before the sheets get done, we mess ‘em up a little more. We get horny – and we don’t have boyfriends. So Bear will find me snoozing and propose a little nookie and its hard to say no to 6’4” of hairy cutie pie coming at you when you’re naked and you’re legs are open – ya know? Or I’ll find Bear asleep on his back and a big hard on protruding upwards and before you can say “lube it” I’m sitting on him and his hands are making me go up and down like a horsey on a carrosel. I remember masturbation – and I like this a whole lot more.

But I did want a boyfriend. Bear and I were friends – with privileges. But just friends nevertheless. Since I had the education and the paint set and the aspirations of one day being a much sought after artist, I wanted a person to share my life with. I know, I was only 23, but I felt like time was burning a hole in my pocket and I needed to do something about finding him.

I am not, by my nature, a bar person. I hate standing around in a bar waiting for someone to find me. Coffee houses are OK, but most people in coffee houses don’t understand that you’re there to be picked up, so they aren’t very efficient. Palm Springs lacks bath houses and backroom establishments – which are efficient and everyone knows why you’re there – not that I frequent such places, but I have a friend who has a friend and I read a book one time.

And then there is the internet. The pain. I’ve done the internet a little. In college. Most of them just want sex. OK – if that’s where you’re at – but now that I wanted somebody to date – somebody to date with intent (with the intention of maybe settling down) – just going to a sex joint wasn’t going to work. But maybe if I specified that I was looking to date with the possibility of a LTR (long term relationship), would that matter, or would they just lie to get into my well formed shorts? They would lie. But all I needed was one. I would chance it. For awhile. Then I would become a street walker. The chances of finding a good man while being a whore had to be as good as on the internet. Take them in order.

I perused a number of places on the internet. Adam4Adam, GayDotCom, ManUMale, BoysLikeUs, and other similarly wittily named intersections on the internet. After so many conversations that included things like, “can you come over now? I only have an hour,” and “I really want to fuck you with a bag over your head,” and “you have to be quiet while I screw you, my lover’s asleep downstairs,” and, my personal favorite, “don’t tell my your name – knowing a name really fucks it up for me – I just like to pretend you're Prince Harry when he was 12 – OK?” I was about ready to opt out and ask Bear to marry me in a union of convenience.

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0 Then I went to Dudesnude. I know, it sounds like another one of the same stupid internet places - and it is - but you never know which one will pay off. Its like, have you ever been to one of those places where you pay $20 and you get to wander around a diamond mine and there are real diamonds there – not many and most of them aren’t very big and not very valuable – but once in awhile somebody finds one that’s worth a million bucks. I found the million dollar diamond in Dudesnude.

His name is Ric. I suppose it should be Rick, but he’s cheap on letters. Its OK, he’s an otherwise generous guy. He’s 27, originally from New York, Italian/German, with the dark good looks to prove it. My size man – 5’8” and 145 lbs. Slender and defined. Two day growth of beard and handsome in an offbeat, cute way – no fashion model – a little goofy – very endearing. I almost swooned when I first saw him he was so cuddly.

Great lips. Big mouth and thick kissable lips. Big strong hands and powerful arms and chest. Big dick. Not that this is important to me – really, its not – but this is an internet dating service called Dudesnude and nude pics are encouraged and he had several – including shots of his erection. Difficult not to notice that it was larger than the average – well yes – larger than the average.

I did have obvious problems – I mean I posted my profile and I’m scrupulously honest. I also had pictures – nude and otherwise. I am average in the dick department, but this is generally not an issue because I also make it a point of stating that I am a bottom. I do not say “versatile”. This worked out because Ric was a “top” – no versatile. Most tops are more interested in my posterior and it gets pretty good ratings, so I didn’t have any problems posting the pictures.

No, the problem was him – he made this big deal out of “Must be MASCULINE” and I’ve already told you about the issue there – I’m me – as masculine as I get. Also said, “extremely into Bi and straight guys.” Well, if he was serious about wanting to fuck bi and straight guys, I was not going to qualify to ride this ride.

I decided to go the nothing ventured, nothing gained route, and so I wrote to him. I asked him to look at my pictures and profile. And then I addressed him point blank.

“Look, your pictures are really cute – I like your look a lot – you are handsome in an off beat way and it attracts me – I like the way your body is slender but strong – I want to feel your hands and your arms as they touch my body. I like a guy who is a top and knows it. But you will know by looking at me that my looks are rather androgynous – I am not feminine, but I am not hyper masculine either – I am what I am (as the song goes). I don’t wear makeup and I don’t do anything to accentuate the feminine aspects of my appearance, but I can’t change the way that I look to make you feel more secure in your masculinity. I’m also not Bi or straight. I’m very gay and I love to get fucked and a number of other things that gay men like to do with other gay men. If we like each other you can have me – I am a willing bottom to a top who respects and guides him to the places he wants to go. I am looking to date someone who is open to the idea that we could find something besides a good fuck. I want to find a LTR – a person to give myself to – a person whose arms I will become accustomed to – and whose arms I will want to feel around me for years to come. I’m a romantic – I admit it – but I’m not boring. I want an exciting life – I just want to remember all of it with the same person. I know that dating someone doesn’t make that person it – I just want the possibility – I don’t want to meet someone who wants to put a bag over my head while he fucks me so that I am not really there. I want to be there. I want him to be there with me. It’s not too much to ask. If you’re up to finding out if you could be there, get back to me. It’s just a cup of coffee. It’s not a trip to the Outer Hebrides.”

He got back to me. He risked the cup of coffee. Starbucks. I hate Starbucks, but they are ubiquitous and therefore available. We met. Ric worked in a music store and promoted and produced a local band that he was hoping to get a contract for a recording that he would produce. He wanted to make a life out of music. I told him about my art and about the gallery and about the schlock we sold to rich matrons who thought they were mimicking the fine taste of Betty Ford. He thought that was pretty funny.

We talked for a long time. It was one of those things where neither of us really wanted to end it, but it would have been unseemly to say, “OK, let’s go fuck.” Instead we made a date for dinner on Friday – two days away and exchanged phone and email information so we could keep in touch until then.

Ric and I started seeing each other and, in gay terms, we took a long time before going to bed together. It was three weeks before I found myself on my back in his bed – I had resisted a whole week longer than I thought I could – it had been torture of the most extreme sort. I’m sure my parents would have branded me a slut of the worst kind. The sex was great – tender where it needed to be and all out screaming and flesh slapping flesh where it needed to be. After, we discussed all the things we liked to do. The list on both sides was fairly lengthy and we both agreed to try the things on each other’s lists that we hadn’t done yet. But first there would be a lot more of the basics –

I also made him talk to me about the bi and straight stuff. He admitted that he had this thing about fucking guys who thought of themselves as “not gay.” It was a gay domination thing, but it was juvenile and he did it for tricks and not, he thought, something that he needed in his real life. I was his real life, he said. I told him that if he found that that was not true, he had to be honest with me – no sneaking around to fuck straight men or whatever – I didn’t want that. And I wouldn’t sneak around to fuck sissy men. He laughed.

So it’s been like three years since I wrote the above. I’m still an undiscovered artist pushing bad paintings on unsuspecting people with money. He’s got a different band that he’s promoting now, and he’s manager of the record store. We bought a one-bedroom condo with a little alcove where I paint. Its great – all we need. We still fuck like bunnies – I told you I liked his hands – even more now. Sometimes he puts one of them inside of me and its like being transported somewhere – his voice takes me and the feel of him – and other things that we’ve learned to do for each other that increase the intimacy. I told him I’d let him take me wherever he wanted – and I will. We have that kind of trust. Why not? This could be my only chance. The love of a lifetime only happens once – that’s the theory, right? So I’ve given myself over to it. Come back in sixty years, I’ll let you know how it turned out.

WAR AND THE NAKED MAN

2007-01-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

World War II dramatically advanced the movement of America's population from farms and small towns into urban areas. Men and women who served in the armed forces or worked in defense industries or government, spending all or part of their service time in the cities, found freedoms and opportunities that did not exist in their hometowns in the midwest and south. How're you going to keep them down on the farm after they've been to a gay dive in San Francisco?

The boom in after war gay population in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and New York added to an already significant gay presence. This population brought about an increased demand for evidence of the gay culture, and for men this meant, in part, magazines and photographs depicting the male form. Not only was this material in demand from men who stayed in the cities - there was a demand from those guys who did go back to the farm. If you can't stay at least get some of the good stuff mailed to you.

These demands were met through magazines promoting health and fitness - using models in bathing suits and posing garments to demonstrate proper muscle development. Many of these magazines offered photo sets of popular models for sale. You could study, at length, the proper muscle development of your favorite model by ordering a set of 6 or 10 poses in various sizes.

If you were lucky enough to live in a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles you might be able to go to a photographer's studio and buy photo sets directly instead of through the mail. Anything through the mail would be clothed, to avoid the wrath of the Postal Inspector. But if you could get into the photographer's studio or convince a bookstore owner that you could be trusted and allowed to buy some "under the table" merchandise, you could get photo sets taken without the posing garments, maybe even with an erection.

Sellers of nude images had to be careful not to be entrapped into selling to an undercover FBI agent. Between the FBI and the Postal Inspectors, there was a government plot to keep photographs of naked men out of the hands of homosexuals in America. The U.S. government had deemed photographs of naked men to be per se obscene, and people who sold them were prosecuted as pornographers.

The Comstock Act of 1873 forbid the movement of obscene material through the mails, and Postal Inspectors not only viewed the nude male as obscene, but they were on the lookout for photos with "excessive genital dilineation." Too much of that could get a guy prosecuted.

Still, there was a fairly active under the table market for male nudes throughout the 50's and into the 60's. But by the 60's the challenges to the Postal Service regulations had grown more intense. More and more, photo sets were not even particularly linked to health and fitness magazines. They were simply advertised in physique magazines put out by photographers and studios hawking their products. The models were shown in a towel or posing strap, but photo sets were delivered with at least part of the set being of the model nude. Consumers quickly came to know those studios that would send out nude photos - the advertisements were in a not very well disguised code.

For example, you might see an ad that would offer 6 shots of a model named David for a price - or 10 shots (including his most exciting poses) for a somewhat higher price. Of course the higher price and more exciting poses would get you the nude shots. This is what you were supposed to understand. So studios did not advertise nude photos, they advertised exciting poses or "partial" sets of 6 versus the "full" sets of 10, and the full sets would have the nudes. This became so prevalent that the Postal Inspectors were unable to keep up. And the FBI was becoming disinterested in the problem of naked men photos.

It was 1966 and the Postal Service was being dragged through the courts - Dr. Lynn Womack was in jail for publishing the "Grecian Guild Pictorial" and other magazines featuring full frontal nudes. From his jail cell he directed his attorneys in a battle that went to the Supreme Court in opposing the Postal Service. The FBI was more concerned about anti-war demonstrators than it was about the morals of men who looked at indecent pictures of other men. And there was a nascent war on drugs that was starting to take up everyone's attention. Compared to Vietnam, marijuana and LSD, dick pictures weren't looking like the national plague they had appeared to be just a few years ago.

The Postal Service suffered a one-two punch. In 1965 it lost the case of "Manual Enterprises v. Day" when the Supreme Court decided that a magazine with full frontal nudity "lacked patent offensiveness" even though it was "unpleasant," "uncouth," and "tawdry." OK - but it wasn't obscene. Then in 1968 it lost again when Dr. Womack's appeal reached it and the Postal Service lost in the case of "Grecian Guild Pictorial." In that case the Supreme Court ruled that images of the nude male are not, per se, obscene.

The effect of these two cases was to free magazines and photographers to depict the nude male with virtual impunity. They even encouraged the development of the male porn film industry. Bob Mizer, a photographer and magazine publisher, started producing low budget films with hunky models and cheap sets intended to look like locker rooms or a military barracks around 1970, only a couple of years after the Womack case was decided. His success was followed by others and both erotic printed matter and video/DVD exploded in the marketplace in the 80's and 90's - continuing today.

So, why did I title this "War and the Naked Man?" Because World War II set the stage for the cultural changes that led to the demand for images of men in the 40's, 50's and 60's, and Vietnam helped get the FBI off the case in the mid-60's. It could also be argued that the Supreme Court in the 60's, after having ruled very conservatively in obscenity cases in the 50's, was reflecting a national change in culture that was reflective of the Vietnam era. Flower power, women's lib., civil rights ... the country was changing - a picture of a man and his dick wasn't such a big deal anymore. It seems rather quaint to be thinking about this as a matter for the Supreme Court - as a matter of importance for Postal Inspectors in an era when Postal Inspectors are looking for anthrax in the mail, not for photos of naked bodies.

Commemorate your freedoms - mail somebody a picture of a naked man today.

HOMECOMING PART TWO

2006-12-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

I never really knew who dreamed up the battle plan, but it was brilliant. The leaders of the gay student association wanted to fight, demonstrate, and sue the university for space to meet. The obvious things to do. And we’d all be graduated before anything was resolved. I wasn’t an officer of the association, but I was one of the more active students. We decided – for reasons of homophobic discretion, not to have a membership roster. People came to meetings and we got to know each other, but there were no records kept of a formal membership.

I went to meetings, I strategized and helped execute plans, but in the end, not having my name on anything would help me get into things that the official leaders couldn’t – and I became a quasi leader as time went by, with powers that I couldn’t have had if I’d taken an office. It was kind of like being a shadow official.

But someone who had a perverted sense of justice decided to try and take something away from the Greeks. Something they cherished and that had always been theirs. Homecoming. I never knew if the person was a member of the gay association or some other disaffected member of the student body who figured we’d climb on board the effort. Whoever launched the rocket, many people were soon firing their own mortars – many of them made up especially for this occasion.

When the candidates for Homecoming Queen registered, there was an entry for Shirley Gimmizah. Then there was a campaign. Shirley was unknown, but she had the support of the gay student association, and flyers endorsing her by such odd groups as “writers for peace and justice,” “take back the night,” “minority students for equality,” “the GUA scrabble tournament,” “Knights Templar, Georgia Division,” and other fringe groups that seemed to spring from nowhere. Shirley was a woman of the people – she was everything that a traditional Sorority babe was not. Feminist, but not an ideologue, for gay rights and for protecting women on campus at night, for minorities and not for compromising them with buyoffs so a few of them could live separate, but equal. The campus buzzed with word of Shirley, and the undergrad population was energized about the campaign for Homecoming Queen as it had not been in memory.

The Greeks ignored it all. It was just someone causing trouble. They had their campaign. It was fixed, as it always was. Alicia Turner, from Atlanta was going to be Homecoming Queen. It was her house’s turn and she was their candidate. She had also slept with the three most likely candidates for Homecoming King, and that tended to cement the operation. The only think in doubt was the order of the princesses, and they were only in doubt because nobody knew exactly who they were sleeping with or how many times they could go down on important football players between the nominations and the election.

Well, it didn’t matter. The numbers were all against them. The four thousand Greeks voted the way they were supposed to, but about seven thousand of the remaining undergraduates voted for Shirley, and Shirley was elected Homecoming Queen.

Turned out Shirley was a chicken. Gimmizah is a variety of chicken, and Shirley was the name of someone’s favorite Gimmizah. Everyone but the Greeks thought it was great fun. Even the Governor and the administration got into the humor and the chicken was crowned at the football game and ruled over the dance. Alicia was second in command.

The Greeks decided that this would not happen twice, and since they owned the Student Council they changed the rules to provide that the Homecoming Queen had to be a human being registered at the university. They were trying to take away our fun.

Of course, at the start of the next year the gay student association was once again denied meeting space. By this time, we knew we had to take something away from them in retaliation. But we couldn’t do the chicken joke again. So we nominated a man for homecoming queen. And they saw the handwriting on the wall.

We elected the man – actually a straight man – a very tall and lovely guy who was just a peace and freedom loving person and thought the Greeks should have ended about the time slavery did. So he had no problem cooperating with us in fucking with them. He even insisted on the Homecoming King, the captain of the Football Team, dancing with him at the Homecoming Dance. I mean he insisted. Stopped the freaking dance and humiliated the guy into doing his social duty to dance with him.

They changed the rules again and required the Homecoming Queen to be a female. I’ll bet you can guess what we did the next year. Yep. A lesbian. Not just any lesbian. The biggest most visible and political bull dyke on campus. Not an ugly lesbian – but she never wore makeup, had a severe haircut, was never seen out of a work shirt, jeans and train boots. Duffy, that was her name, and I were on a student constitutional charter committee together. We were like the odd couple – me all quiet and neat, she kind of messy and loud – and together we plotted subversion – I’d scribble out things to insert into the document the committee was drawing up – pass them to her and she’d double over laughing, which meant “yes,” and then I’d offer the amendment. Only a few people on the committee had any idea what they were doing so we got a lot of our stuff inserted.

So we elected Duffy and humiliated the Greeks, once again. I think the Homecoming King would rather have danced with the guy from the year before. The governor, who had crowned all of our other absurd Homecoming Queens, refused to crown her. He didn’t show up at the game – first time in the school’s history that the governor of the state didn’t crown the homecoming queen.

The Greeks were doomed. They couldn’t pass a rule against lesbians and we could make a tradition out of electing lesbians that would become entrenched. We were on the verge of creating folklore and songs with minstrels roaming the student union building. They had their houses and we could keep them there. We had taken Homecoming away from them – what would we go after next?

A delegation came to speak to us. Of course there was no “us.” The campaign wasn’t really the property of the gay student association, it was an amorphous band of people who didn’t mind spending $20 on flyers once a year with the name of some probable, or improbable student organization supporting the absurd candidate for Homecoming Queen that had been selected to rob the Greeks of their traditional fun. This more or less spontaneous group of the disaffected who would rise up year after year to get them – partly because some of us had a political grudge and partly because some of us just thought it was fun. We would pass this on to those who came after us.

But I was sitting with a group of other disaffected people who knew how to make copies and distribute them when the leaders of the frats came to the Student Union looking for peace. They were defeated and they didn’t put on any bluster. What would it take to get us to leave Homecoming alone in the future?

I guess that because I had been on the constitutional charter thing and I was known as an influential shadow official of the gay association, I was viewed as the political leader of this ragtag army and a good person to talk to.

By the way, that constitutional charter thing was a big mistake on somebody’s part. There was this clueless political sciences senior who was chairing the committee. He knew that I had really good poly sci grades and a high grade point and one of my professors recommended me to him when he asked about me – and then there was my big deal alumni father. So he thought I would tow the line – you know – be smart and helpful and cooperative. Wrongo. Almost from word one I hated the guy and everything he was trying to do. That’s why Duffy and I had such a great time plotting against him and getting stuff inserted into the charter that drove him nuts. Sometime when you have nothing else to do, read Sturgis. It’s like Robert’s Rules of Order, only harder. And if you know how to use it, you can get all kinds of neat things done on committee’s like that – especially when two-thirds of the committee is brain dead and will say “yea” just to move on and go to lunch.

So we talked. I lead the disaffected side and Robert Skinner, pre-law, now a big deal lawyer in Charleston, led the Greek side. He wanted to know what we wanted. I started off with, “Off hand, I can’t think of anything you have that we want. We don’t want your women, we don’t want your real estate, and we don’t even want your liquor. Why don’t you offer us something?”

Being frats, with their heads up their partying asses, they offered to throw a big party once a year and invite the whole campus – regardless of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation.

I said, “I don’t think the people we know want to party with you. No offense, but we have cultural differences that make you undesirable party partners.”

Robert and company caucused again – they were flummoxed. We didn’t want all that they held dear. He came back and pleaded with me to give him some way to solve this.

“I’m graduating, so of course I don’t care. You’re the ones who care about legacies and who gets to be on top of whom for the next 100 years – not me and not the rest of this group. But you could go a long way toward mitigating the feelings of social injustice on campus if meeting space for student groups was fairly available and budgets to support student groups fairly allocated.”

They looked at me like, “Huh?”

“Robert,” I said, “The gay student association has been denied a place to meet every year that I’ve been here. You – and your friends – are responsible for that. You want me to not fuck with your Homecoming – stop fucking with my association. You’re going to be a lawyer and in four years you’ve never been able to attach A to B. Now I’ve given you a map. Use it.”

He thanked me and made some comment about how stupid it was not to see that. Then he asked if he could ask me another question.

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Were you on the committee to approve nominations for Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities?”

I was surprised. That was another blunder somebody made and the membership is supposed to be a secret. But, hey, if he knew. “Yeah, but it’s a secret – how did you know?”

“My father made inquiries when my nomination didn’t pass. Did you blackball me?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t personal, I blackballed all the frats and sororities.”

“Then how did Hank Bishop get on.”

“Oh, well Hank has special qualities that overcome his defect of being in a frat.”

“What’s that?”

I pulled him aside so the other guys couldn’t hear. “Listen, I’m going to tell you this, but if you repeat it I’ll spread the vilest things about your relationship with me and I’ll make sure your father knows exactly how you like me to do you – understand?” He understood. “Hank’s a great kisser. A kisser like him belongs in a who’s who, and that’s the only one I could get him in.” Robert looked at me like he wasn’t quite sure. I said, “Handcuffs and dildos – then YOU get interesting.” He said he wasn’t going to say anything.

His group left. My group let it be known that if the gay student association got treated fairly we would not give a shit which sorority princess got to be Homecoming Queen anymore. And that’s the way it worked out.

It was good training for life. Sometimes you don’t argue with them over the topic at hand, you just take away something they like and wait for them to figure it out – or come and ask you why you won’t let them have their favorite toy. My partner and I got a kid. He’s almost five. We use this tactic with him and it works – much quicker than with frat guys.

HOMECOMING PART ONE

2006-12-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name’s Zeph. I’m working for the State Department in the mid-East section. I have a Masters Degree in Middle Eastern History and a bachelor’s in Arabic. I speak Arabic fluently and read and write it adequately. I also speak and read Farsi with some fluency. My writing skills in Farsi are weak. But I’m young, and I will improve. I just started last year, right out of college.

I went to college at one of those large state schools in the South. It’s strange to think of a southern school teaching Middle Eastern History and the languages of the area, but they do – or at least some of them do. You’ve got to keep up to survive. My school, one of those that had to be integrated with the National Guard standing at the school house door, and the governor of the state trying to face them down, is actually a very good school. It isn’t really known as such because white liberals from the north have never looked at it as anything but the home of the bigots. Which it is – it’s just the home of a bunch of very well educated bigots.

I guess before you think I’m an apologist for the bigots, I should tell you, I’m white and a homosexual. It’s probably the homosexual thing that kept me from becoming a bigot. I was so busy dodging bullets (metaphorically speaking) for being who I was that I didn’t have time to throw stones at anybody else, and really needed everybody who would have me in an alliance. That’s what I am going to tell you about; the alliance of the outsiders to take away something that the insiders held dear.

First, I went to this school because I lived in the state. It was an accident of birth. My family has lived in the south for generations. We’ve pretty much been on the wrong side of every argument that has ever occurred, historically speaking. We fought to keep slavery and we fought the integration of schools. My father still fights to keep the Confederate flag as a portion of the state flag – “heritage, not hate” – is the official explanation, but the guys who are so adamant about it have a history of segregationist politics that doesn’t quite square with their “heritage” argument. My father belongs to the Sons of the South, another historical society, but they helped Randolph Johnson University argue that it was proper to deny Blacks entry to the University on biblical grounds when the IRS wanted to deny their non-profit tax status, and that sounds like a white lobbying group, not a historical society. And the president, President Bush, that is, spoke to them and said, “Your values are my values,” and winked, so what does that tell you? That he likes the way they write about the Civil War? That he found one of them particularly attractive and was winking in hopes of a date later on? Or he likes the way they think about racial issues right here today, not so historically? My money is on door number three.

Their archives were recently unsealed after a war of many years, and low and behold, some of the biggest politicians and best families have been up to their eyeballs in the intrigue sponsored by the Sons of the South. Some of it involving physical intimidation over integration issues – some of it apparently involving murder. The U.S. Attorney’s office is still looking through all of it to see if there is anybody alive to prosecute.

I have nothing to do with that. Dad tried to get me interested, but I told him no. He pressed me, and when I was fifteen I sat he and my mother down and told them that I’m gay. I did it to take the pressure off on the dating front, and the white power front and just to get them to leave me alone.

Mother was shocked and upset and did her best southern belle, although she is not a southern belle. She could lead a forced March through Georgia if it meant getting a good price on water lilies for her ponds in the backyard or finding another Thai fountain. And she’d carry them home if she had to. Of course what really happens is what she orders comes on a truck and she screams at the guys to put it where she wants it until it is in exactly the right place, and then after badgering and heckling them she gives them a dollar a piece and acts like she is throwing silver pieces to the crowd from a parade.

Mother mostly worried that my proclivities would make it hard on her in society. She didn’t actually care about me.

Dad didn’t care too much about me either, but he did care that my lack of manhood (as he repeatedly put it) would reflect poorly on him. He kept asking if I was sure and how could I know. I kept saying yes and declining to give a demonstration. At one point I suggested that he and mother try again and maybe they could produce a more suitable son and I could just go on with my life. They eyed each other warily, as if to say that I was the only one they were going to have – with each other anyway. That look, that physical language between them explained why I was an only child.

Anyway, nothing was resolved, other than I was unsuitable. For what, I was unsure. But the next year, I found out that I would be going to my father’s alma mater or not going to college at all. No out of state school would be paid for. Maybe he thought a semi segregated university with a high tradition of upholding southern manhood would help me redeem myself. I don’t think he understood his own school.

Georgia University at Athens (GUA) was founded in 1848 and quickly became one of the pre-eminent institutions of the south. It was the place for the sons of wealthy white businessmen and planters to go both before and after the Civil War. It drew students from all over the south, and then increasingly from the Border States, and eventually from overseas, although its pull to students from the north has always been slight. Its pull to me was practical, it is the only school mom and dad would pay for me to attend.

It is a school of high academic achievement, owing much to the largess of the state in funding its programs as the premier institution of the state. However, it is also due to the large endowment that has been raised from benefactors and alumni over the years. Although the state and the school vociferously fought integration, losing that battle has actually been good for the academic reputation of the school. Professors who would not have considered working there before now gladly take jobs as professors, guest lecturers, even endowed chairs, improving dramatically the school’s standing in assessments of the quality of its faculty and research staff.

The undergraduate school has about 15 or 16 thousand people enrolled. There are another 4 thousand graduate students and then there is a medical school a few miles away, but that’s another world and it doesn’t count. There is also a law school, and that campus is in Chamblee, about 20 miles away. Chamblee is deep white suburbia, and when the school proposed to move the law school there, the Chamblites were torn – the prestige of a big law school, especially the GUA School of Law v. Black students who would be attending it. (About 20% of the law school is Black and other minorities, but all minorities are considered “Black” by the Chamblites. Japanese are considered “Black” in white, suburban Georgia). Chamblites saw brown skinned law students ravaging their daughters and luring their sons into terrible acts of sexual degradation before ripping them to shreds with hunting knives. Clearly these are people who watch too much Law and Order. But despite their concerns, the school was built and mayhem did not ensue in Chamblee.

Now while there were about sixteen thousand undergraduates on the main campus, only about four thousand of them mattered in a social sense. The “Greeks” ruled the school, as they had since the first fraternity was founded in 1849. The fraternities and sororities held sway over all of the institutions that involved undergraduate life. They, of course, ran the social schedule – any organized dances and parties. There were only a couple of events that were really open to the student body at large, those being the Homecoming Dance and the Senior Prom. Yes, GUA is so juvenile that it continues to have the same dances as your local high school, with the same high school politics, only played by children four years older.

Of course, for the most part the Greeks had activities that were exclusive to their groups only, and for that the rest of us were glad. I and most of my friends were just as happy to pretend the Greeks did not exist and go through our lives as if we were adults, or at least adults in waiting, rather than some puffed up version of high school juniors vying for most likely to succeed in the yearbook.

My father had been in a fraternity, but he understood that his faggot son would not be doing that. It was enough – or it would have to be enough – that I would become an alumnus of the same school that he had attended. That I would not be a member of his fraternity was a wound in his heart, but not, alas, a wound that would kill him.

Now, with the advent of desegregation, the Greeks had come upon a dilemma. The fraternities and sororities desperately wanted to maintain racial purity, but could not officially discriminate. A couple of them were even under some nominal pressure to rush Black students from their parent organizations. This was a matter of concern both to the current members of the Greek organizations and to their parents. A clever maneuver was made, one that allowed Black and other minority students to join Greek organizations, but maintained the racial purity of the existing fraternities and sororities.

It was discovered that minority students would be more comfortable in houses where, just by happenstance, all of the members were also minorities. Charters to traditional Black fraternities were applied for and financial support for the new houses was easily found. Anonymous donors, seeking only the good of the minority students, put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish these New Greek houses and make the minority students comfortable. Within a short period of time, everyone, black and white, had adopted the fiction that the separation was not something that was forced or even coerced; it was just a matter of cultural differences, not racism. They even looked like serious social scientists when they said it – a direct throwback to their forebears who would have told you at dinner a few decades back that the Negros were happy under slavery as the master was kind and gave them structure.

I remember having a conversation about this with a student from South Africa, a young Black man who had survived the townships and emerged to live in a multicultural government and come to school in America to study for a year. He was baffled that there could be such a chasm of cultural differences between upper middle class white Americans and upper middle class Black Americans as to make them unable to occupy the same fraternity. He told me that in South Africa there were eleven different languages and they didn’t have as much separation as we seemed to need here.

So that gives you an idea of the environment I found myself in. Racist, but in full denial. The homophobia was even worse. The university had denied a charter for a gay student association for years, and when it finally granted one, the student council – controlled by the Greeks, denied it any meeting space. That was my first year on campus. And it was a declaration of war. Such as war is at a university.

I'VE GOT A SPELL ON YOU - PART 2

2006-12-18T05:17:00.000-08:00

When they were seniors their English teacher asked the students to think of some interesting and unusual method of studying language - or the languages of non-English speakers. The boys decided that it would be fun to see if their language held up to the test. They created a spell giving their names, addresses, telephone number, and the names of their parents, siblings, other relatives, dates of birth, and the history of the earth from Genesis to present time. They ordered some parchment paper from a mail order stationary shop and wrote it on that. Then they weathered the parchment by wetting it and baking it and burying it and doing everything they could to make it seem very old without obliterating the writing. They concocted a story about having come across this artifact in an old barrel in a sod house that was going to be torn down. They sent it to the archeology department at the University of Texas and asked if they had an opinion about it.

Before you could say invasion of the body snatchers, the University of Texas had prevailed upon the Governor of Oklahoma to prevent the demolition of any sod houses in a six county area in the Panhandle - not that there were too many, but a few did exist and were used mostly to store canned goods. A convocation of Universities was joined together to decipher and date the odd language on the soiled bits of parchment. Researchers came and went. The boys were interviewed a couple of times, but quickly dismissed as dumb Okies who couldn't even remember which sod house they'd found this in. The boys wisely waited until a sod house had been blown up before sending the material, and then they tended to believe it was that one. No one thought to ask the boys or their families if they had ever seen anything like it before. Their parents might have recognized it as a highly evolved version of the scribblings stuck away in those baby books.

The boys had a problem. The assignment was to produce something - something other than a bunch of Texans trodding the sacred soil of Oklahoma. They certainly had the most intriguing start, but there was no end in sight - the research into this language and its meaning could take decades. And with luck, they’d never figure it out.

They didn't want to treat their work as a joke and just come out with it and read it to them and say "hey, we got you." They were proud to have created a language that was stumping experts and that could remain their secret forever. It seemed unlikely that anyone would ever crack the code. So they did something quickly about how one would go about translating the language of the Hitchiti band of Oklahoma Indians into English, if anybody gave a shit. Nobody actually does, and the teacher certainly didn’t. The paper was thrown together at the last minute, but they eked out a “C” and that was OK. They kept their mouths shut about Spell and as far as they knew, the Texans were still trying to figure it out when they left.

After graduation they worked summer jobs at a hamburger joint out by the feed yards. Carl opened, Carl and Caleb worked together in the middle of the day, and then Caleb closed. When Caleb got home at night he showered and climbed into bed with Carl where they spoke spells of love that they had written and memorized for each other.

No one expected them to go to college. No one really knew what to expect of them. Girls didn't want to date them because you had to date both of them to go out with one, and even an Okie girl who was ready to put out was seldom ready to put out for twin brothers - although Mary Sue Hale indicated that she'd go so far as to let one of them fuck her and she'd blow the other one simultaneously. All this got back to the boys through their friends and what didn't make them puke would only make them stronger.

Their grandparents, their Mom’s parents that is, had always given $500 as a graduation present. Their Dad's parents didn't have that kind of money. They had to split the $500, but they never split anything - the $500 was put away for what they both wanted - freedom. They saved as much money as possible over the summer, and when it was over and the fall was starting to settle its cold gray skies over the vast and ugly expanse of Oklahoma, they counted their worth, coming in just short of $1,000. It would have to do.

They bought tickets for a greyhound bus, but they didn't try to go directly to L.A. They went to Texas and wandered around Austin and San Antonio for awhile. Then they headed west and stopped in Phoenix before getting back on the bus and arriving in Palm Springs. They were afraid they'd be caught. By whom or for what, I’m not sure. I think they feared they'd be caught for who they were. They were 18. But they were homosexuals, living an illicit love expressed in copious writings in a secret language. With all they knew about incest, they didn’t realize that no one was going to bother them about incest between twin brothers – maybe think it was weird, possibly even disgusting, but not arrest them. They had just left their parents a note saying they had to leave. There was nothing for them there and they had to find something different. They’d be in touch.

So each boy carried the clothes they could stuff into a nylon duffle bag, and on their backs they had backpacks with the spells that they had written to each other. Carl had the spells that Caleb had written to him, and the other way around. If something happened to one of them, the survivor would have his brother's words.

I can only tell you that I got that information out of them because they were desperate for help and I reassured them over and over that I had no judgment toward any form of love or sexual practices that they might engage in with each other. I finally convinced them of that by taking them with me to get food, and then taking them to my little apartment, its walls covered with photographs of naked men and all of its closets stuffed with my enormous collection of male pornographic magazines, dildos and movies. In their poor undernourished minds, I was sitting on the mother ship and they had made it home.

I stashed their secret writings in a niche with ten years worth of “Torso” magazines and promised not to look at them. I put them in the shower and made them clean each other up and gave them old sweatpants - too short - and t-shirts - too bulky - to put on. I told them there were two choices. The couch made to a single bed, but if they wanted to sleep on top of each other they were welcome. My bed, a queen size, could sleep three if we were all cozy with each other and they could sleep together and I would just sleep beside them. I did not give them the option of putting me on my own couch. I'm a saint, sometimes a martyr, but I have never walked willingly away from the chance to sleep with two 18 year old boys as seriously fucked up in the head as these guys were. I told you I'm a romantic. We slept together.

My condominium has a large park-like area. During the next days, as they adjusted to their new circumstances - the boys ran and played. I gave them tennis rackets and balls from an ex who thought he was going to bring good health to my life. I bought them swimsuits and they swam in the pool and lounged in the hot tubs. A neighbor scarred up a pair of rollerblades left by a nephew, and so they had one pair of skates. Within days they had each learned to skate - the skate less one running after the other one and howling a Spell of joy. After a few days I couldn't tolerate it any longer and took them to buy the other set of skates.

My wealth was more than enough to satisfy our simple needs. We ate orange juice and cold cereal in the morning, soups and pasta at lunch and baked chicken and vegetables at night. Being from Oklahoma they did have driver's licenses so they could work. They went from place to place until they found two openings on the same shift - Lowe's, where they started to help people pick paint colors and mixed paint. They reported to me that there were a lot of single men painting their houses and sometimes they would give them a phone number and tell them to call and come over to see how it was going. What was that?

They had all that knowledge about ancient forbidden sexual practices and no information about cruising. We were all sleeping together - them clinging to each other while I was clinging to whichever one was left. I assumed they were having sex whenever I was gone and they were home alone. I guess I owed it to them to explain the world of gay men. They had considerable knowledge about homosexuality from their computer studies, but somehow had managed to completely miss chat rooms. I used a multi-media effort of gay bar rags, gleaned from locations around the valley, on line demonstrations, vast amounts of perusing porn magazines, not merely for their photographic content, but for the literature that dotted them, explaining all of the ways and places where gay American men get laid on a daily basis. I explained bath houses and glory hole shops, truck stops, and why grocery stores have loading docks. They took in all of this as if it were required to pass a senior seminar.

After inundating them with all of the emotionally numbing sexual practices of gay American males, we went to the video store and started renting stories of anguish - which they identified with - and love - which they identified with - and having to flee to be free. We took a tour through gay cinema - American, Canadian, Mexican, Spanish, French, and Turkish. And there were a few other places we found along the way.

So they understood. Homosexual love could be filled with careless gratification and no real alliances, or it could be tortured and hopeless. They wrote a spell to explain this to each other. And they read it to me one night.

I said, "No, that's not quite it. The media sells you careless gratification with no meaningful relationships and only shows the other side to be tortured and hopeless. But you can be something else. You two love each other and should manage your lives to hold onto that always. There are others who do the same - perhaps not as fervently or as obsessively - but you do no harm to yourselves or others, so why not love each other. Just don't expect you and you cat and your brother to be shown in a hit movie about two gay guys mixing paint at Lowe's. But, you can never isolate to the point of just being the two of you - you must always have others. What would you do if one of you got sick and died? Would the other one just live miserably reciting spells over and over until he was used up and died too? That's not good.”

So, they thought, and they worked, and I cooked soup and read and wrote and collected more porn. And one day they came in and they said they had a new spell to read to me. First we ate, and then I sat down and they read me the Spell of Mark, Eoh, 2005.

The spell of Mark is of a mentally ill person with HIV and a stutter. For no reason other than kindness, and a certain lecherous hopefulness, he told two young Okies where the road to Los Angeles was one evening, and when it was clear there was no way for them to get there from here, he fed them and took them home. He made no demands on them, except that they help clean, put the porn back where they found it, and get jobs to help buy food and clothes. He leaves them to play and talk together without asking what or why. He is old and will die before them. He will leave them his small condo and his small savings and his photographs and his pornography, and he will entrust them to friends who are too feeble to make inappropriate sexual demands on them. Everything will be done that can be done to ensure that they are safe and that they can continue together without fear. They even wrote of his great love – of the lover who died of AIDS years ago and left him to make his own way in the world.

I loved the spell they had written for me. Of course I’m not as innocent as they had written. I had had my motives, but I had put them aside and enjoyed being their guide and mentor and, if not exactly protector, at least the man who kept them from being harmed by the world while they learned what it was about.

I thought, for a long time, what to do about them – about this situation. Although I write, I thought this needed more than a short story – it needed a stage or a screen and I don’t do stage and screen. So, I sent a letter to a play write. I asked the play write if he would be interested in writing about twin gay lovers who had, from early childhood, communicated in a made-up secret language. A language that is real, but unknown to any but the two of them. I promised him that this is not only interesting, but that their letters and poems to each other are in many ways more intimate and beautiful than any English poet has ever imagined. I would have loved to write their story myself, but I’m not a play write and a short story or a novella would never gain the attention that their story deserved. It needed a play – or a movie – or at least a Lifetime Channel for Women Movie of the Week.

His answer was yes, but did I have the original material, did I have the key, and could it be authenticated or was it a hoax. I replied that I had it all, including the authors of the original language. Carl and Caleb allowed me to send him the Spell of Mark. I sent him a copy of the Spell, as they wrote it, and a copy of it, deciphered, and a copy of the key. If I had fucked up terribly, not much would be lost - none of their messages to each other were at risk. At worst, he would not believe me and it would drop.

“Spells, The Love of Carl and Caleb” opens in Los Angeles next season. If it’s a success, there is an option to move it to Broadway the following year. Tony Kushner wrote the book, from original material by Carl and Caleb. I get a credit as a “creative consultant.” Spielberg wants to option it for a movie. The lawyers are negotiating. It’s all a bit much for three Okies to contemplate.

I'VE GOT A SPELL ON YOU - PART 1

2006-12-18T05:12:00.000-08:00

I'm a man of independent means. For some that means great wealth, whether made or inherited. For me, it means I live on the largesse of the state. Not charity exactly. I did work at one time, and so in the nature of things, I've earned what I have; but it’s been some time since I worked and I've almost been able to psychologically divide the notion of work from my means.

My riches come monthly in the form of a disability check from Social Security, a check for a disability pension as a former federal employee, and a small distribution from an IRA. I am among the elite in America, I am well insured. I have Medicare and Blue Cross.

I live in a 600 square foot condominium which I was able to buy because the real estate bubble in Washington, D.C. was even more absurd than the real estate bubble in Palm Springs, where I now live. I even have a car, a luxury I could not afford in D.C., but one which is attainable - if not absolutely necessary - here in the west - unless the government is making war on oil states or the oil companies are making war on the rest of us.

Palm Springs, CA, either the eastern most suburb of Los Angeles or the dropping off point to the hell and strangeness of the greater Mojave Desert. Canadians and people from Iowa remember it as the resort of the stars, and flock here to spend the mild winter in the same streets trod by Mickey Rooney, Frank Gorshin, Ruta Lee (still alive and still a favorite), and Anna Maria Alberghetti (also still alive). The obscurity of some of our favorites makes it all the more endearing a town.

The city hawks its connections to Marilyn Monroe, but we’re forever grateful that the Kennedy's decided to murder her in Los Angeles. And of course there is the Rat Pack. Sinatra had a place in Palm Springs. He was the most talented of the Rats, until he reached that point in his career when he started stealing songs from Liza Minnelli, showing no respect at all for her mother, St. Judy. Then there were Martin and Lewis, both of them poster boys for being the product of a dysfunctional family. At least Martin had the decency to die. It appears that Lewis will have himself embalmed and make begging speeches once a year during a telethon for a worthy disease which is almost a national joke due to his self congratulatory hours on the set. And then there was Sammy Davis Junior. I never appreciated his talents. I didn't like his voice. His dancing was of a style that went out decades before Broadway started playing with Black idiom dancing in productions such as "Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk," and that fake eye. Has any rich person ever had a fake eye that looked that fake? I think it was a sexual thing. Sammy had a thing for willowy white girls. I like to think that all those willowy white girls let Sammy have them as long as they didn't have to look at that wild fake eye rolling around in his head. So Sammy forever pounded tall white pussy from behind. It’s just a theory.

My favorite local character was Loretta Young. She defined chic for decades. She did a number of movies that were not only successful, but well acted. When she moved to TV she starred for years in a drama series which she opened each week by sweeping down a flight of stairs in a new gown. No gown was ever worn twice. And despite having been married 3 times - apparently up each time – and having affairs with Spencer Tracey and Clark Gable (with whom she had an illegitimate daughter) - she portrayed herself, convincingly, as the most modest and upright of Catholics, even building a chapel, named for herself, at Desert Regional Hospital.

So now I lurk about Palm Springs observing the underbelly of it all - the questionable meat sold on a stick at the Downtown Fair on Thursday - the boys hanging around Circle-K looking for a ride. They don't care where the ride goes but they have to have $50 cash before the ride can start. The guys cruising up and down the streets of Warm Sands, looking for sex, meth, or first meth and then sex. I guess they don't have the price of a room at one of the "resorts" in the neighborhood. Just check in and surely meth, sex and all the riches of our kingdom will pass your way.

As you've gathered, I'm an optimist, and a hopeless romantic. I know you laugh, but it is actually true - I am a hopeless romantic who believes that things will work out for those who deserve it. And all too often for those who don’t.

One Friday night toward the end of the season, I had just stocked up on some of my favorite stroke material from a shop known far and wide for selling the tackiest disco wear in the western United States. There were two tall skinny boys of the Circle-K variety hanging onto a railing and looking over a map. Assuming my role of happy tour guide, I asked them where they were going and they said, "L.A." I looked at their map, and said "here you are, here's Indian Canyon, go up Indian Canyon, turn left where it says I-10, and sail on till morning."

They explained that they didn't have a car. I said, "And I suppose you don't have bus fare either?” Right. "Or a place to stay in L.A., or a job, or what next move you'll make if you actually get there." Right. "When did you get here?" "Two days ago," came the answer. I correctly guessed that what ever money they had they'd spent on hamburgers and Mountain Dew.

I volunteered to go buy them more Mountain Dew, and eventually a hamburger, in exchange for their story. I told them I needed to know more about them in order to be able to help them. I have no idea why they decided to trust me - aside from the fact that they were out of options - but they did.

I went into the convenience store and appeared with two large bottles of Mountain Dew and a bottle of water for myself. We sat down on the steps and watched the traffic flow by and they jointly poured forth their story.

They were twins, Carl and Caleb Richards, 18 years old and refugees from a family that wanted to kill them for their perversions. They were identical twins except that Caleb had a sleek haircut that accented his cheekbones and that could have passed for being styled, and Carl had a self-styled shock of hair that he'd apparently tried to change from its natural blond to black. Marilyn Manson has a bad day at the beauty parlor. They were from Beaver, Oklahoma a place they thought I would not believe existed except that I was forced to tell them, I did believe it because my great-grandfather Cafky founded the Bank of Beaver. They thought I was "shittin" them, but I assured them that one does not shit about having a past that includes being the last heir to the Bank of Beaver fortune (currently worth in the low 3 figures), not to mention having lived in Texhoma, Oklahoma, about 80 miles from Beaver. That really blew their minds as Texhoma is a worse hell hole than Beaver, and I described the entire Oklahoma Panhandle with an accuracy that only a native could possess. Only a native could tell you the contents of the Oklahoma Panhandle Museum at Goodwell; its most famous item being a two-headed calf stuffed and saying “moo” for eternity. Not to mention my Great-Uncle’s horse hair parlor chairs and settee. They weren’t sure whether to be comforted or run from this ghost of Christmas past.

In the end, this common bond made it easier for them to open up and tell me the rest of their story. After all, we were all brothers from a strange planet.

Generally, as twins often are, they were unusually close all of their lives. They have always slept in the same room, and even in the same bed. They talk for each other and finish each other's sentences. Their parents were what someone might expect. Father worked in a lumber yard, and during the season he combined wheat on the ranches in the area. Combining wheat is, for those not from the plains states, harvesting it - to harvest wheat you use a machine called a combine. These were more, little known, Oklahoma facts that I seldom had reason to use after moving to civilization.

The family was only moderately poor, and so was doing pretty good by the standards of things there. The oldest brother was a star football player and got a scholarship to study animal husbandry at Oklahoma State University. A girl came next and she was destined for a teacher's college when she got knocked up by her high school sweetheart. This was fortunate from her point of view as her parents were going to have a hard time paying for college, and unfortunate from the point of view of the boy's parents. The boy was from a family that didn't just farm land, they owned it. With enough money left over to be known as investors on Wall Street. That meant they had a couple of hundred thousand invested with a broker over in Denton, Texas who didn't know a NASDAQ from a SPIDER. Anyway, they were members of the First Baptist Church and the boys' sister was married there with a white wedding gown. She moved in with Chuck in an upstairs bedroom at his folk’s house and they remodeled the room next door into a nursery. Chuck just wanted to grow corn and wheat and run some cows anyway, so his hopes weren't demolished. And he liked having a ready supply of pussy, even enjoying it as his bride swelled with their child.

That left the boys at home, and they were 15, 12 months into having discovered the joys of mutual oral intercourse. They told me that they suspected their father knew they jacked off - after all - what boy didn't jack off. He would sometimes make some veiled reference to turning off the lights and eventually going to sleep, but they didn't think he knew that they had progressed to giving each other head and then 69ing. By the time they were 16 they knew all about anal sex, but had not tried it. The family had a computer and the boys often researched homework assignments together. They had started researching homosexuality, in between the mysteries of the dinosaurs and the treasures of the Nile. Whatever else they learned they got a riveting education in the uses for a boy's asshole. This did not, curiously, start them on a constant round of corn holing each other. Instead, it lead to a philosophical exploration into the many varied meanings and interpretations of the word incest. Indeed, with fervor the boys soon bypassed the taboo sexual practices of the northern hemisphere and were researching incest and other taboo practices all over the globe. One researched on the computer and the other catalogued their findings using an arcane scratch and scribble method that they had used to communicate with each other prior to being taught to read and write. While their parents thought they had tucked away in baby books these meaningless scribbles that they had spent hours over, the boys had never stopped communicating in their secret code - even elaborating it into something that had a 16 character alphabet and numerous shorthand symbols to mean entire words, and sometimes to convey entire thoughts. They just referred to their language as "spell" and wrote each other complex ruminations on the nature of their love and on the physical yearning for each other. Their writings were simply the multiple form of the word for their language, that is, “spells.” So they called their works things like "The Spell of Carl, Amoo 2003" and "The Spell of Caleb, Qib 2004." They accepted the calendar for denoting the years, but for little else. Every year, as their birthday approached on All Souls Day, they prepared a lengthy and joint Spell that set out where they were and what they wanted for each other and what they wanted as a couple.

They were rarely separated and then only unwillingly - not that they weren't social. Tall and skinny, they liked to play games like kick ball and volleyball, and even made a run-in at basketball, but blanched at the coach's continual screaming in the form of building team spirit. They exited the basketball team and told their parents the coach was a heathen who deserved to be devoured by apes in the seventh circle of doom. The parents assumed it was a computer game, but the boys had inadvertently blended a curse from Spell with English. They tried to be careful not to do that in the future.

So they made reasonably decent grades for boys who preferred to play kick-ball and research taboo sexual practices, and they slept peacefully in each other's arms almost every night of their lives. And they wrote their research guide to sodomy, banned and unusual sexual practices in a language called “Spell” that only they could read and write.

THE FASHION MODEL - PART TWO

2006-12-14T18:18:00.000-08:00

Adam was appearing early in the show, wearing an elegant man’s leather coat with a mink lining; just the thing to keep some guy warm on a winter night. He was carrying a purse, but of course it wasn’t a purse, it was a great leather tote bag designed for the man on the go, who had to have everything from his jock strap to his cell phone and appointment book. It could be slung over the shoulder or worn backpack style, however the man in the mink leather overcoat was feeling. And while it was old, old, old to wear a traditional hat in cold weather, it was tres chic to wear a stocking cap – but not just anything would work with leather and mink. And it would be too obvious to make a leather and mink cap for this show. So Papa went playful and had a knit cap made in all the colors of the rainbow and then in another twenty colors the rainbow had never thought of. It showed that the butch guy in all the dark clothing wasn’t taking himself all that seriously, and the crowd just loved it. Adam pulled it out of a pocket of the coat and pulled it on just so and moved in a way that let them know that this was for fun – you can be a big butch guy in a leather overcoat – but after all, it was lined in mink and here you were in a multicolored cap – so maybe you weren’t so butch after all. Maybe quite approachable.

Anyway, that was Adam’s first tour down the runway that night.

I guess I should tell you that designers are often very solicitous of their models. They want the models to be happy – they want them to do a good job out there showing off their stuff. But then they also will bellow and scream at them – cow them into submission if that is what it takes. Adam was very professional and was only screamed at if the designer was on a screaming binge – never, he says, over anything he did. And in the week leading up to the show, Leonardo and Adam had nothing but pleasant words between them. In fact, Adam thought Papa was paying somewhat more attention to him than might be warranted by the usual process of getting ready for a big show. But he didn’t think a lot about it – at least he didn’t think much more about it than a 25 year old model would when an oddly handsome, 6’5” hugely muscled Italian designer who never buttoned his shirt and strode around the work area checking this and commanding that and changing a piece of clothing or an accessory or doing whatever to make the show perfect was frequently stopping by to see that Adam was alright and everything was coming together.

Adam’s second stroll out the runway was in something casual. Casual and winter are hard to pull off for men, because men’s clothing tends to be suits or suits. But Leonardo had put together an outfit that even straight men could wear without feeling that their manhood had been drained away. The slacks were black and simple winter weight wool, but tailored to within an inch of your life – that is, Adam’s life. His package and his ass were on display to their greatest impact, something rarely done in a pair of wool slacks. Then there was a shirt with a high back collar that came around and buttoned down in the front so you weren’t in a neck brace. This gave a dramatic appearance, but didn’t require a tie. The front of the shirt could be buttoned up but leave an open neck – or more if you had a nice chest to show. And then there came the jacket, which wasn’t a jacket but a sweater in a fine thick wool. The back of the sweater met the back of the shirt collar at its bottom, so the sweater swept under the collar and the dramatic collar at the back was visible. Then the sweater was buttoned up over the shirt in a double breasted fashion to give it a dressier look than if you were buttoning one of Jimmy Carter’s cardigans, and of course it could be taken off or left unbuttoned below the shirt in the front. I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but believe me, it worked. It worked so well that it became a hit when the look was adapted for popular men’s stores at the retail level. Millions of those shirt and sweater combinations went after they were seen in the high fashion magazines and redesigned for mass market retail. It was actually Michael Douglas wearing it that made it big in New York and L.A., although Leonardo loathed the thought of that.

This was the outfit that was tinkered with the most during the week there. Including the belt and the shoes and whether Adam should carry a briefcase or a tote bag or an umbrella – he ended up carrying nothing.

The outfit didn’t bomb, but it got the weakest of the reviews in the collection. Papa did make money on it though.

Adam’s last trip down the runway – unusual for a model to walk three times, but Papa chose him for the last outfit. It was the simple, elegant winter suit. Nothing special to describe. Just a great piece of clothing. Two pieces – Papa didn’t do vests. The fabric was a beautiful dark gray with a medium gray running on top of that and both scarlet and violet threads running through that. Single breasted. Cut to be comfortable, wearable, and chic no matter where you end up in your day. Leonardo himself chose the shirt and tie and belt and cufflinks and shoes and socks – and changed all of it three times during the week.

But it didn’t matter. When the outfit was finished and Adam had it on, Leonardo was pleased, and terrified. The show had been good – he felt it was a success – but this suit – this last walk down the runway had to work – especially if what he and Adam had planned for after was going to work. He had pulled Adam aside just before the show to tell him what he wanted him to do, or at least the outline – Adam would have to improvise somewhat. There was no time to rehearse.

Adam was ready. He was cued and the announcer announced and the music came up and he walked and he picked up his briefcase and showed them the suit any businessman on any continent should be looking for if he was serious about being a success. The crowd liked it and Adam felt good about this. He did the walk – standard model stuff – nothing to show off because now it was time to bring out Leonardo. He turned to go back and the announcer called for the designer, Leonardo, to come out.

Adam cleared the stage just as Leonardo stepped onto it. Leonardo winked at him, and walked out with the audience applauding and cheering.

Adam ran to a corner and quickly stripped the suit off – kicking shoes and throwing the belt – he got rid of everything except a pair of electric purple bikini briefs that he had on. It is tradition for the models to join their master on stage if the applause is going well, and Adam, once almost naked, played the Pied Piper, and called to everyone to come – most of them in their last costume, waiting for this moment.

Adam waved his arms and led the models onto the stage, coming up in back of Leonardo, the audience both gasping to see Adam practically naked and also applauding the models and the models applauding Leonardo. Adam stayed in front and ran and skipped forward to get in front of Leonardo and gesture to the audience, “Isn’t he wonderful?” And he turned and applauded his master, bowing deeply – well not bowing but actually using a yoga position to prostrate himself before Leonardo. And then he went to the floor, and in a move even he did not expect, he kissed Leonardo’s feet.

After the kiss he fell limp in front of Leonardo, as if exhausted. He had no more in him. He didn’t, in fact, move. The audience wasn’t sure that this was part of the act or not. Leonardo took one more bow – the applause continued. Leonardo bent down and with his enormous arms, he scooped Adam up – dead weight in his arms – and turned to carry him back down the stage.

The other models didn’t know what was happening, and Leonardo just told them to move back, go back to their dressing rooms and let him through. So he pushed his way through and carried Adam back to his own space, ordering his assistant to get out and close the door.

He laid Adam on a daybed in the office and got a bottle of water out of a small refrigerator. He unscrewed the top and took a drink before offering it to Adam, who was coming around now. “Papa, how did I do?” Adam asked.

“Just fine, my beautiful love,” came the answer.

Adam didn’t speak a lot of Italian – just enough to work in a fashion show. His French was better and there was enough crossover to help him make some sense of things.

He sipped water for a moment while Leonardo looked at him. Leonardo kicked off his shoes and sat down on the edge of the daybed. His left hand touched Adam’s body and Adam knew that the touch was seeking permission for more than just a polite caress or kiss. They’d been building up to this all week – Leonardo spending more time than was necessary with Adam, being solicitous of Adam, asking Adam to lead the models out to the stage in just his underwear and to “be inventive” in acting out a little drama with him. Adam thought Leonardo wanted to be worshipped – don’t all designers. So he had come up with the idea to worship him – at his feet – and to faint at being so overwhelmed. That he actually had fainted had just worked out well.

Adam thought there was no point in being in the play through two acts and not seeing it through the third. Besides, he was highly attracted to Leonardo, even if this act was only a one night run. He sat up and let Leonardo hold him, and they kissed lightly. Then Adam whispered to Leonardo, “Make love to me, please, let me feel your body on mine, in me.”

Leonardo got up to undress, and Adam slipped off his underwear. They made love, and they made love again. And Leonardo was not so fickle as to just show Adam the door and wish him well. The affair lasted a couple of years. It was Adam who broke it off when it became clear that Leonardo would never commit, no matter how old he got. Leonardo moved on, from person to person, in 18 to 24 month cycles.

That is the problem with being beautiful and enchanting. The people who date you somehow suspect that there is another one just like you, but six years younger, just waiting; and if they will only be patient they will come across that person and they can trade you in. They put no value in the emotional ties between you – or maybe they’re incapable of having them and they fake them the way women in the society section of the Sunday paper fake their smiles at the benefits they had to attend on Saturday night. It looks good in the paper, but it’s just not real.

THE FASHION MODEL - PART ONE

2006-12-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

I have this friend who was a fashion model. Fashion models are always great sources of stories. If they’re successful they go all over the place to shoot, they attend great parties, hobnob with the wealthiest of the wealthy, get into the most fashionable of clubs, and, of course, have great clothes.

Women fashion models make a lot more money and suffer a lot more glamour than male fashion models, but the men are coming up. All male fashion models used to be suspected of homosexuality. They still are, but not many people care – at least not many people who pay attention to fashion. And when some male fashion model turns out to be heterosexual, it turns in to a cause celebre. He might not get more work, but he will definitely get a lot of the female fashion models. Nothing attracts a female fashion model like a hetero male fashion model. The poor things do get sick of having to go out with men who look like some variation of Donald Trump. Although in the end, it is better to marry a Trump look alike (with Trump like money) than be forced to face a life of work when the cameras have turned to the next face, body, hair, legs – the next girl; and they come along too fast. Or end up like poor Christie Brinkley; hawking makeup when you’re over 40 with your kids in tow and trying to look like it’s what you had planned.

My friend, a guy whose name I cannot tell you because as I write this he continues to cling to life despite the best efforts of the medical establishment to kill him, so I will call him Adam. Adam was a kind of standard issue model guy. I say “was” because illness and age have changed him so dramatically that who Adam was then and who Adam is now are visually unrelated, although Adam’s personality is very much intact – maybe a bit more bitter, but who wouldn’t be.

Anyway, Adam was 5’10” tall, a willowy kind of blond guy with some nice definition gained through the practice of Hatha Yoga and moderate weight training. His natural hair color was on the dark side of blond and it could easily take a lightener if a job required him to be blonder, or he could go darker if a client needed him to go really dark blond or even brown. This was helpful to him because even though everyone thinks blonds are so hot and sexy and desirable, the more successful male models are usually dark haired guys. It is the exception for a blond to make it real big as a male model. For women, blond is the thing.

Adam was blessed with two features that helped him get work. He had one of the best asses in the business. This natural pile of muscle that sat suspended, impervious it seemed, to the law of gravity; all perfectly shaped and making men and women pause, look, double-take and then impulsively start to reach out and touch. Only social norms prevented Adam from being fondled on a daily basis by strangers on the street.

His other natural virtue was that, while he did not have an enormous cock – not everyone does, even in the world of high fashion – everything he had was right there. I mean, he was seven inches hard and seven inches soft with nice sized nuts as supporting staff. So it didn’t get longer, it just puffed up and got stiff, like some sort of new pastry that you got from the freezer section. And in his underwear or a swimsuit his bulge was a lot bulgier than most guys of similar size. Casting and art directors loved this when they were looking for guys to wear next to nothing for some print ad or a billboard.

Adam started modeling when he was in college. He first did those awful catalogues that sell swimsuits, underwear and lounge things to gay men – you know I can’t mention them or they’ll sue me. He was studying interior design. After awhile, he decided he might as well wear design, and the modeling was getting in the way of school work anyway, so he finally dropped out and worked full time. This was in L.A. But after a year his agency told him to move to New York if he wanted to compete for the really big jobs.

This was the era of Marky Mark being naked, or nearly naked, on every Calvin Klein ad in Time’s Square. But it was the end of the Marky Mark run. Someone had to be found to appear next in his Calvin’s on a billboard in Time’s Square without looking like a poor substitute for Marky.

When Adam hit New York, his agency thought that his almost tall, willowy appearance, especially in a lighter blond look might be the thing to de-Marky Time’s Square. The hair was colored and shaped. His cut was left long, but in a little bit of a jagged and punkish cut. This was a boy who was not going to steal your car the way Marky would, he’d steal everything on your person except the valuables – your heart, your groin, and your reason and stomp on them, while wearing Calvins. It worked. Adam got the job and a huge billboard above Times Square, with full pages in all the great magazines of fashion America coming right behind.

Thus was Adam launched as the next great threat to men’s fashion in America, and to some extent, world-wide. While he mostly worked in the U.S., doing print ads and ads for expensive billboard campaigns, as well as the annual fashion shows, he occasionally found himself in a Paris fall fashion show or at Milan or Hamburg. It was fun to do these international shows as the competition amongst the designers led them to work much harder to throw their best work out to the audience, but also the drama of the shows was huge compared to the staid shows of old New York. I mean, Adam showed me pictures of some of the sets and the decoration of the seating areas – which were not seating areas at all, but were incorporated into the runways so that there was no practical division between the show and the audience.

Anyway, I only really want to tell you about one particular show that Adam did. It was in the early 90’s and he was pretty much at the top of his career. One of the top designers in the world at the time was an Italian named, Leonardo. He used only the one name, although those close to him also called him “Papa.” Papa was a huge man – imposing, but enormously handsome. He was like 6’5” tall, weighed well over 200 lbs., a dark Italian from the north, with dark, deep set eyes, and a nice mouth with big red lips. His head was large and oddly shaped – too much head at the top and too much chin at the bottom, but he had a lot of heavy cheekbones in between and those seemed to knit it altogether as something that worked. Handsome, like maybe the guy who stomps the grapes is handsome or a stevedore is handsome. And then he had a long neck which gave a patrician perch to the odd head and that made it work all the better. If he’d had a short neck I think it all would have been a failure – like a huge bow on the wrong gown.

During fashion week, he wore only jeans – tight jeans showing off a very large crotch that might have packed only him – or that might have packed dinner for eight. He favored bright white starched shirts that he never bothered to button. They exposed the marvelous bronze skin on his torso and his hard as rock abdomen, a wonder of the modern world. He had huge arms and shoulders – muscles packed everywhere. He wore plain peasant sandals that he could easily kick off or run out of if he needed to run to catch a model who was out of place or hadn’t tied something quite right. He was a fanatic about his show being perfect, but he didn’t scream as much as some people did; probably because he was older – in his 40’s by reputation, although he didn’t look any particular age – and he’d yelled enough already.