July 1999

Is it natural to outlive imagination? Are we only allotted a ration of years of imaginative musings? Do we dream less as we age, and have I already wasted my reserve?
The last time Wael and I met for dinner the food had been tasty, the conversation easy, but it was the parting kiss that never took place that left me feeling empty. He had merely said, "Give me a hug," which had hurt deeply, and strangely. A deeper than usual fog had encompassed the streets through which I had raced home.
The absent kiss had heralded my loneliness, which resurfaces like the disease that it is. Erotic longing replaced amorous hope. I cross The Bridge at night like a heavy animal in flight, in search, in labor.
When the bar closes I find myself refusing the kisses of a man twice my age. He looks into me with the desperation and longing of a man for whom there is no place in a culture that renounces anyone and thing that is no longer youthful, or beautiful. And the more he hesitates to speak what is already dripping off the tip of his tongue the longer I withhold. We dance gracelessly around in the parking lot until he says the words. "Can I suck you off?"
'No!' I snap, 'But you can jerk me off.'
I am merciless.
I pull my jeans to the floor of my car and his hand impatiently clasps my cock, and desire fills his eyes with hunger as sadness fills them with tears. Twice he attempts to place his mouth on my erection, but I pull him away. "Can I suck your balls, then?" he asks like a child who has run out of pleas.
I pause cruelly, then give him the nod.
I'm not ashamed to admit that my unexpressed desire for Wael, for everyone unattainable, vents itself in parking lots!
It is morning. I have just arrived home from yesterday.
Insatiable.
After closing Lunacy- Marin's lone gay bar- I joined a band of Latinos smoking in the parking lot. They were lively, fun, and flirtatious. It was my idea to go elsewhere and party more. Brian, the only white boy, suggested we go to his apartment in Larkspur. His was a filthy little apartment for which Brian kept apologizing. The bunch of us sat in a circle and bantered.
But the lighthearted spirit of our makeshift after-party suddenly turned grim when Rudie, an effeminate young man, complained that all gay men want is sex and nothing more. Brian, who'd been cuddling with Rudie, now turned to Carlo who affectionately rubbed Brian's hair.
Now Rudie looked even smaller and more alone than before. He rambled on in the bravest of ways of a string of confessions, suicide attempts, and years of endless appointments with ineffectual therapists. He looked so sorry and lost. I wanted so much to aid him, to say the most insightful things, to interrupt his speech and topple his sorrow.
Carlo offered his wisdom, spoke evenly as others rolled their eyes behind Rudie's back, shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
When we left I had felt the deepest sense of helplessness for not having done something to save the young queen.
But I have become shameless, flirtatious, dangerously confident. At Tony's apartment I immediately undressed and stretched out on his lonely bed, and when he came into the room he lay on top of me, pushing a solid, thick erection against mine. We kissed, our bodies grinding into each other. The stubble from his face burned my neck and made the already fervent kisses fiery. Brutal. In the darkness it was not a person I felt against me, with me, but nameless textures, ethereal aromas, sensations and reverberations of pleasure.
I found Tony's assertiveness in bed could not contain me. We were equally male, simultaneously deriving pleasure, sharing the eroticism and arousal.
And although Tony was "straight" in demeanor and behavior, he was not selfish, nor domineering. He seemed fixed on giving me pleasure, hosting me, and enjoying himself in the process.
He turned me over and rubbed his stout, firm, naked body against my anus, whose every nerve ending seemed to overlap like stars on a moonless night. It received his every curve, dent, breath; even his nipples seemed to be fucking me!
Again he flipped me over and looked into my eyes, and in the darkness recognized their beauty, and said so- their deep, brown, sultry beauty that I feel is wasted every time on strangers whose names I won't remember in a few days.
My beauty responds to the invitation of the men, but secretly waits in their ephemeral embrace for steadfast love…
He kissed my toes, took them hungrily into his mouth.
I twisted in unfamiliar sheets to familiar sensations.
We talked intermittently. He admitted he had wanted me from the moment he'd seen me at the bar. And I gave myself to him because in this there is inexplicable pleasure.
Again, no oral sex, no anal sex. Just kisses, nips, licks, masturbation, the presence of human flavors, and the feel of inhuman textures.
In the morning I felt no remorse, maybe because I had been level, safe, and natural. And I felt I fully deserved this rare reprieve. The silence. The peace.
I sat on the edge of his bed and placed my socks and shoes back on my feet, and watched Tony dress for work. I saw something very lonely in him- this El Salvadorian in his late thirties, father of a nine-year-old girl, working day in and day out in a local hotel, living with a single parakeet. He dressed quickly and unceremoniously, and I glimpsed no magic, no desire for the impossible, no dream. And when he tucked his dress shirt into his underpants before pulling his trousers up, I thought I would guffaw and fall into the bed once more. I had to turn away, and suppress the laughter.
Hurried home, showered, washed away the memory, the sexual hysteria, the lost night, got back into the car and drove off into the sun to Berkeley, where I was to meet Wael.
I had intended to bring up the subject of my attraction for him, at least casually, if such a thing is at all possible, clear up the nebulous nature of our yet undefined relationship, and to verbalize with utmost simplicity my romantic interest in him. But the day turned out to be so startlingly beautiful and breezy, sunny and mellow, everyone around us smiling and cheery as Wael and I strolled carelessly, drank our coffee slowly, and talked easily about so many other things that I never found the right moment, the will, and the necessity for serious disclosures, and vulnerability. My frustration with the great unknown had suddenly vanished in the lazy afternoon streets, fallen somewhere amidst the flowers and the yards of the charming homes we admired.
We stepped into an overstocked bookstore on Telegraph where I finally purchased the much talked about "Koolaids" by the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine. Wael, who is friends with the queer writer and distantly related, promises to introduce me to him.
From "Koolaids":
In America, I fit, but I do not belong.
In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit.
Night in July.
And I am caught in moon's path.
Overcome with the many textures of then, now, and tomorrow. I am tactile. Alive.
My heart skips beats, is forgetful of its rigidities. It bursts when it ought to beat. I am new. I have just opened my eyes, for the first time it seems, to desire, to myself, to the erotic undertones of the Bay, of the World, without feeling like I have committed a crime.
Sexuality is every person's destiny.
And right!
Tonight I am in many places at once- in the present and in the past, simultaneously catering to the many whims of two lovers, two moons.
Here and now and I am rendered weightless, nameless by the completeness that is not asphyxiating but liberating, spacious. I dance at a roofless ball, in diaphanous attire, to soundless music whose composer has mastered gravity.
And I find that I am the composer and the score!
Will this unexpected sense of freedom, so sudden and miraculous, survive the rest of the night and accompany me into morning, where the light may be unforgiving, or will it disappear like so many things, fade with the strange sounds of night in the hills?
Better not ask…
Have I at least cracked the code, the misconception that male sexuality should linger in death? Am I free at last from the bullying fear that lures me each night into the fire that is ice, the silence that is booming, the bed that is nails?
Am I really natural again, free, and naked again in man's world, in woman's world, in God's world?
I have been having sex, listening to my body, on the street, in the car, at work, in class. I have been the accomplice to my own cells' whims and fancies. I have survived frantic divisions, explosive mutations, electric urges, masturbating regularly but spontaneously in unlikely places. My orgasms are more earthly and physical, immediate and forceful than ever. I am discovering my penis really for the first time. New pleasures. My autoerotic experience flowers dramatically like a carnivorous tropical plant, in a distant summer. I have met pleasure as though pleasure were famous. My arousal does not spring from other places, past experiences, or unreal expectations; it stems from the well of youth and sex, anticipation and laughter, from the garden within, in the desert of self, over the body of being human and imperfect.
I am a planet that implodes tonight, hurdling haplessly across the tableau of timeless emotions… and space.
I am living.
Fully living.
Without remorse, without fear, without and within.
My heart skips like a child.
My body shifts like a continent.
My face turns to face the sun like a rare flower.
I am eternal.
I am in love with life.
After sitting in the sand, near the water, retaining the horizon and the sound, I walk on San Francisco streets, my body burning with desire. I climb the stairs, pass the mirrored walls in which I glimpse the glow, to The Metro. I order a drink and take it to the balcony that overlooks intersecting avenues, bustling sidewalks. Here I strike up a conversation with two friends sitting to my left, and we end up going for a slice of pizza, getting along famously, talking about family, hometowns, past affairs. When it came time to part I would not have the two take a bus home, and we climbed into my car.
Upon dropping Jason off at his apartment I found myself alone with Mike, for whom my attraction was ingenuous and outspoken. I outlined what I desired. He was in accord.
We went to his small apartment off of Market- a space that was clean, charming, surprisingly intimate. Mike escorted me into his bedroom. There were fresh cut flowers in a vase next to his bed, beautiful flowers. And I undressed without shame and lay in the huge downy comforter, sank naked into the moment, settled with the feathers, lightly, naturally.
"Hey you sexy man," Mike growled playfully as he lay into me, placing many playful, erotic kisses in my mouth, on my face, and into my neck.
I suddenly became aware of his erection against my leg; the length and width of it took me completely by surprise. It was heavy, warm, complete.
He asked to suck my balls, and did so feverishly, complementing them, relishing them. Pure ecstasy.
A single white candle lighted the space around us. Earlier he'd drawn the heavy curtains across the windows, creating a warm, dark womb within which we could shift in a vertigo of wet kisses, primal sensations. He was gentlemanly and his graciousness made his passion comfortable to receive, warm. I've had enough of impersonal sex, lukewarm passion- which is not passion at all, but a planet without sun.
He cupped his own testicles, which were enormous and hairless, and offered them to me. I struggled to fit them both into my mouth. They slipped about, popping out of my lips, which made him sigh with pleasure.
More kisses.
My desire had escalated to heights beyond my fear of sex, people, life, and passion itself, higher than the bed itself, and us. I knew I wanted his monstrous cock inside me.
'Do you have condoms?' I whispered.
He seemed glad that I had asked and promptly fetched the small square package from a nearby drawer.
It arouses me to watch a man wear a condom, slip the rubber onto the head of his penis and roll it down his shaft. So much anticipation, eroticism.
"Do you want to ride it?" he asked.
'How do you like it?'
"With you on your back."
'Please be gentle. I have never been with anyone as big as you.'
I lay still in the cream colored sheets, in the sigh of the night, my legs up, breathing. The initial penetration was piercingly painful, even though Mike had been gentle, hovering over me, looking adoringly into my eyes, smiling. I winced. He bowed his head and kissed me on the mouth- a kiss I received thirstily.
Pain. Pleasure. A same creature with two faces!
He penetrated and began to move his pelvis closer, closer, closer. I watched his stomach meet the back of my thighs. I watched him watch himself fuck me, his face contorted.
"You're so tight," he repeated over and over as he fucked me. And when I flexed he moaned, which simply tickled me.
He slipped out.
We kissed more.
Then again, concentration, quietude, deep breathing.
When he'd found me and we'd once again slipped into that other state, we fell to our sides, my knees on either side of his head, looking into each other. Smiling.
This time he flexed and I felt his cock become swollen, stretching my own myriad nerve endings, stretching them to their hilt, until I couldn't help but whimper, my face flushed with new sensations. He flexed again. I looked at him with disbelief.
He held my leg in such a way so that he could fuck me with greater strides of motion, and watch himself slip in and out of me. He reached down with his hand and held one cheek open, and pressed his huge cock deeper into me.
He asked if I was o.k.
'Yes,' I whimpered.
And he found a rhythm that was faster than before and steady.
I sought mindlessness. A place in my head that was open and ecstatic.
I came.
Immediately Mike pulled out, discarded his condom, and came all over me.
Sighing, groaning, exhaling, sinking further into the feathers, entangled.
'The condom never broke?' I asked rather hesitantly.
"They never do if you use them correctly," Mike boasted.
I dressed. Fixed my hair with my fingers. Passed the framed photograph of Mike's twelve-year-old son. And held my breath for the remorse that never surfaced.
As I stepped out of Mike's apartment, onto the dark, cool, city street, Mike kissed me and reminded me, "Two weeks from today at The Metro, at seven…"
I can't escape it!
It follows me everywhere like a whisper, and when I try to name it, trace back its origins, I find that the contradictory clues all lead back to me. Desire begins in me. I am its incubator.
And I live in a space without gravity where each word, image, and thought shifts, turns, inverts, and wafts about backwards and forward, in and outward, against mirrors, mirrors, and further mirrors, and I don't have to dramatize what is already extreme, deep, wide, and thick!
I do not return phone calls.
Only glances. Sexual advances.
It is not the actual act of same-gender sex that preoccupies me. I seem to have no more inhibitions in sex. It is all that transpires afterward, or does not transpire, that torments me: the disconnection, and the feeling that I have misplaced something valuable.
The pangs, the pain, the shame, the fangs of self-contempt…
Before sex I am charming. And afterward, neurotic. Hypochondriacal. Schizophrenic! I am neither man nor woman about sex. Not human at all. But a wounded animal lashing out at mirrors, lunging at reflections. Shadow boxing.
I set the traps, circles of fear and fire, so that for days nothing gives me pleasure, and life, all of it, each part, day, and fiber of it, loses its appeal. I play games that are superstitious in nature. I make silent deals with God. I become all that I perceive and despise in my family: Passive, religious, mournful.
I am obsessed with unraveling my own mortality.
Damn youth! Transient and eternal.
I withdraw. I hate, but silently.
I am unhappy. But it is not the first time, nor the last.
At the Russian River with friends I drink too much and the sun bursts through the clouds and I strike up a conversation with the older man who passes with his small furry dog. He says he has owned a bar on Polk Street in the city for years, but that he retreated to the house just above where we drink and play on the edge of the river. He invites me up. We talk and smoke cigarettes, look out on the river, and I sense that he is deeply lonely here in the woods, living alone. I see so much of myself in him.
I return to my friends on the rocks where we lounge in the haze, listening to the river, playing in the sun.
After a few more drinks I tell my friends I have to use the restroom and return to the house up the embankment. The smell of summer in the air, on my skin, and in my hair.
I sit with the man on the sofa. I am aroused. I pull my shorts off. And although I am not attracted to him I am attracted to the idea that my youthfulness is gold to him. He has made no advances but I expose myself to him, nonetheless. My erection bounces in the quiet of the room, where I feel like I am mere words on the pages of a novel the moment writes. He strokes me. He licks my balls, gets them wet, pulls on them with his lips. Tongue. Teeth. When I am further aroused I slap his mouth with my erection. He sucks me off. I surrender. I come. I shoot profusely.
I join my friends in the sun and the intoxication again. They do not suspect. I do not confess.
But the day is not over, and neither am I. I am drunk and stirred, my imagination revved. There is something more out there and I don't want to be home. There is a world out there that wants me, a city, crowds of people, conversations, eroticism. In the last of the day's light I drive into the city.
At a bar I talk with a transsexual who says she had an Assyrian friend in college, back when she was still a man. We converse for a while. She is self-composed, not sarcastic or impudent like some drag queens. Her eyes are shy, and fall to the bottom of her martini.
At a different bar a tall fellow approaches me, the one who's been looking at me from the darkness across the room, whose gaze I have been meeting and holding. I am not attracted to him, or to his lover who joins us. But I accept their invitation to go to their home up the hill. What might it be like to live solely by erotic cravings, not only by what is right and what is wrong.
We step into their home, the three of us. It is clean, nice. And yet, I don't want to be there. We step into their bedroom. They want me more than I want them. They are white, have shaved heads, are perhaps in their mid-thirties. They look like twins, their cocks hard and bouncing in my face. They are smiling. But I cannot kiss them.
They offer me drugs. I decline.
They are friendly, nice even, and there is never any pressure for me to do what I do not want to. They say they've been together for many years, and yet with me in the room they treat each other so unemotionally. This is not a relationship. This is not love. This is not right. I do not want to live this way. They talk dirty to me. One bends the other before us on the edge of the bed, his anus up in the air, hairless, inviting in the dim light. He invites me to eat with him. I do not want to. I move away. I dress.
The tall one gives me his card and at the door urges me to call them some time. He sounds so earnest, even vehement, using words like "please". He kisses me on the mouth and I smile weakly, a false manipulation of facial muscles, but wipe the kiss from my mouth when I am in the car, driving away.
As always the lonely bridge home, the dark sea, distant lights belonging to a city I have fled without looking back, sneaking back into the village where I live and dream of something like love. I want to cry, but I can't. I am so profoundly disappointed. So angry that nothing is good enough for me, that I will never accept love, fidelity, happiness, and all the things that are made of delicate longings. I tire of dreaming and crash into nightmares and restless sleep, the sheets wrapping about my limbs like serpents from the depths of unanswered prayers.
In the morning I discover that my penis is chafed. A piece of skin is torn away. I panic, and dwell for days on the dark idea that this time I have surely contracted something. I am the cowardly explorer.
So starts again the helical process. The questions. The doubts. The fears. The admonitions. The spiral descent into total insecurity.
Did I give myself willingly to the plague? Am I the victim or the deserving Jezebel? What drives me to seek the thrill and the danger? What mad loneliness am I trying to annihilate by self-destructive measures?
And the days pass. I go to work, I have lunch with my family, I make purchases at the market, I return others' greetings through the bones and bloodied veins of my steadfast desperation, wondering: Am I my worst enemy?
The future falls from their grip as they, the young homosexuals, scramble to find deeper meaning in shallow waters. Mud in their hands.
A friend tells me that it is my nature to dramatize and not to worry. If only I could be so easily assuaged.
I allow myself to resent life, and follow the last traces of comfort to uncertainty.
My very need for order and perfection seems to steer me against myself, and my need for safety and virginal clarity.
Cyclical suicides.
Sunday after work I went to The Metro, as Mike and I had planned to meet there in the evening. Two, three, four cocktails later and he never came, but I was drunk! I laughed to myself at the irony of it all- my sitting there alone, in a bar, in San Francisco, in the world, alone again. Drunk again. But I did not hate him for it. Instead, I went to Martuni's, the piano bar.
I sat at the baby grand with two hair stylists, a novice chorus girl, and a mortician. We drank and sang, laughed, and conversed in bits and inaudible pieces, dropping dollar bills into the swollen cognac glass atop the piano. The room was dark and spinning, shrinking and expanding. Was this dimly lit space a mere reflection of my own heart where we, lonely caricatures of an indolent night, congregated? I found the entire night ludicrous as the boisterous chorus girl, who looked much older and worn out than she acted, talked endlessly about her troupe's upcoming gig in Las Vegas. I sniggered to myself, reeling in the void and fumes of alcohol.
The French gypsy transsexual, with missing teeth, was there, but tonight she did not sit at the piano to play and sing. She was in the audience tonight, sitting in the shadows with a handsome young man, whispering, laughing wildly. She recognized me and smiled. I raised my glass. She raised hers. We drank. The last time I had been here I had approached her while we both smoked outside and complemented her on her performance. Now she winked at me.
Does everything lead to desire? I wondered, and caught a glimmer of the answer rippling in my martini.
I looked up and saw the toothless transsexual leaning closer into her young suitor, and noted how uncannily she looked like Ann Bancroft. Just as sleek, just as strangely attractive and affected. When she grabbed her pack of cigarettes and rose others followed her outside.
I left suddenly, shortly thereafter, surreptitiously, without finishing my drink, without bidding my temporary friends farewell, and stumbled up the cold, empty street to Baghdad Café where I ate a sandwich, watching others. I noticed that a young man sitting at a nearby table looked very much Assyrian- his gestures, his dress, the nuances of his face, and his voice. I caught him a number of times observing me, turning away as soon as I looked up. When we happened to be leaving the restaurant at the same time I asked him, 'Are you Assyrian?'
But he turned suddenly dark, stormy, and answered sharply, "No, I'm not!" There was so much tension in his voice it was as though I had accused him of something unthinkable. I stepped away stupefied by his violence.
Today? A sinking feeling. I try to enjoy the sun, the day, this so-called freedom, but find I am fettered. And I fear that this void may never pass, that this hollow rhythm will find a willing host in my heart and remain forever!
I masturbate- an attempt to reacquaint myself with my body, with a sense of pleasure. But where is the emotional ecstasy? Must one pleasure always be matched by a darker displeasure?
Guilt is a shark.
I exist in a whirlpool of whimsical experiences whose mercurial characters play emotional tricks on me.
I start my third short story!
With the passing days comes forgetfulness and I start to feel a little better. I ask no questions.
I take an afternoon drive into the country where the sun burns the hills a deeper gold, and feel soothed.
Out there, in the world, beyond these pages, I meet other lonely people. There are many of us. We huddle in the dark and wait.