Swish Page 4

  “What, no underwear?” he chuckled. “My, my, aren’t we excited?”

  “No,” I wanted to say, “the washing machines in our building are broken and so we’re out of clean boxer briefs and on rent strike,” but I was so relieved to be able once more to draw breath that I couldn’t get the words out. He leaned in to kiss me again; to avoid this, I executed a horizontal triple lutz at a velocity Michelle Kwan would have envied, and landed prone among the tasteful pillows. He responded by lifting me up chivalrously and carrying me—I am pleased to note here that I was light enough to cause no unseemly grunting on his part—into the bedroom, where he subjected me to the most tedious twenty minutes I had experienced since I could remember.

  This is not to say that I derived no pleasure from our congress; certainly I felt the physical gratification that usually attends the activity in which we were engaged. But still, between occasional winces of discomfort, I wondered: Where was the subtlety? Where was the ritardando, the crescendo, the subito piano? Where was the lube?

  Finally, after I had composed the B section to the song I was working on and remembered where I’d left my copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, he started screwing his face up, letting his tongue loll out of his mouth, and grunting incomprehensibly. I delightedly understood this to be the universal sign for “I’m coming!” and released the psychic and physical restraint in which I’d been holding myself. I screwed up my face and lolled and grunted right along with him, because I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t having a good time, and we were done, if not exactly at the same moment—the Holy Grail of casual sex—then close enough at least to feel that we’d made a good show of it.

  We lay on our backs, breathing deeply, and I basked in the feeling of being connected, however haphazardly and for however brief a time, to another human soul. After a quarter of an hour I got out of bed and pulled my clothes on. A quick kiss goodbye and a vague “See you around” and I was gone.

  I waited a long time for the subway back home. How had this happened? For years I’d heard gays described in the most salacious terms as fornicators hungry for nothing but spiritually empty sins of the flesh. How then could the practice of those sins have turned out to be such a workaday event? Where was the glamour and glitz and laughter? Why wasn’t I now a jaded but secretly wise and joyful roué?

  And why, most of all, was there a bounce in my step? I felt just as unfulfilled as I had two hours before. Shouldn’t I have been moping about not having gotten what I wanted?

  And then it occurred to me that perhaps I had gotten something else instead.

  The first gay book I ever bought, in the summer after eighth grade, was a slim volume called I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away. I found it in a New Age bookstore in Los Angeles called the Bodhi Tree, and in order to camouflage my purchase I also bought copies of The Journeyman’s Tarot and Your Inner Child of the Past. The clerk saw through my ruse, however, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “I’M LOOKING FOR MR. RIGHT BUT I’LL SETTLE FOR MR. RIGHT AWAY—NOPE, NO SIR, THAT’S NOT THE WAY TO GO, YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR MR. RIGHT!” None of the other customers batted a dharma-laden eyelash, but I hurled my cash on the counter and fled as if the Nazis were coming. Eventually, having reached a safe distance from the store and from any human population, I began to read. The thrust of I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away was that fleeting, anonymous sex filled no spiritual or emotional void at all.

  And I was like, well, duh.

  But, as I reflected on the subway back uptown, spiritual and emotional fulfillment weren’t what I had been after here. It wasn’t as if I had thought casual sex with somebody I had never met would fill the gaping chasms that two and a half years of a bad relationship had gouged irreparably into my spirit, or give me the sense of deep intimacy I had not felt since The Golden Girls ended its run. No, I had just wanted to reinvent myself again, but with sex instead of Snickers. I had wanted to break the mold in which my boyfriend had cast me and to assume instead a shape of my own choosing.

  And to that end I had embraced the risks and wonders offered by the anonymity of a casual encounter. I had put all my faith in myself and in my own potential, I had celebrated the holiness of my sexuality. True, I had spent much of the previous hour with somebody who had lifted half his last show’s choreography from Michael Jackson videos; still, I had been bold enough to go in search of that somebody, to whose name I would never have given a face but for an accident of fate, and ask him to skewer me.

  Back in the high life, indeed.

  My career as a slut, so auspiciously begun, progressed apace. Some of the men I met were just as maladroit in bed as the choreographer; some were worse. A few were more technically accomplished, but handicapped themselves in other ways. Take, for example, the Scottish gentleman who, when not rutting with strangers, worked as a professional masseur. I arrived at his apartment one Sunday afternoon and was thrilled when he invited me onto his massage table and started oiling my body; clearly I was going to get sex and a back rub. But, sadly, it wasn’t to be. He stopped the massage far too early and soon enough he was plunging in and out of me, which was quite pleasant until he started grunting about how he loved to fuck my pussy. He used the word “pussy” forty-seven times. When we were done I went home and e-mailed the Scottish embassy in New York suggesting that they revamp their human anatomy curricula, but they never wrote back.

  Then there was the fellow whose (straight) wedding ring so scandalized me that I almost ripped his pants taking them off. His marriage to a woman notwithstanding, he was either an experienced sodomite or a natural genius. At some point during coitus, however, he switched from calling me “Peter Pan,” which I liked (especially after a brief fantasy of Johnny Depp as J. M. Barrie walking in and joining us), to calling me “little whore,” which I didn’t. But how to object? Any remonstrance would completely destroy the tone of the encounter, which was otherwise most agreeable. And I couldn’t meaningfully refuse him access to my inmost depths, as there was no part of my inmost depths he hadn’t already accessed. Then circumstances provided me with the perfect opportunity to defend my honor, and my mother wit was for once quick enough to take immediate advantage of it. And so, for the first time in my life, I spat instead of swallowing.

  A week later I e-mailed him asking whether he’d be interested in meeting again—disagreeable epithets aside, he had been a master of his craft—and he replied that he would. In my response to him I mentioned that I’d dyed my hair black, and I never heard from him again; if I was no longer a redhead, I suppose, he couldn’t imagine that he was fucking the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

  There were also the occasional (the very occasional) meetings that I found enjoyable on almost every level. There was Dan, for example, possessed of an extraordinary body and, it seemed, a personality to match. I arrived at his apartment to find not only that it was bursting with greenery but also that there was a dog-eared copy of Persuasion on the coffee table. Dan was great in bed, tender and rough by turns; all the plants made the sex feel that much more alive, and the Austen made me feel, as she always does, that there was still hope for civilization. Dan and I met once more and then he ruined everything by acquiring a boyfriend.

  But Dan was the exception rather than the rule. In the few moments each day that I wasn’t on my back mentally translating Top 40 hits from my childhood into French (“Only the Good Die Young” proved particularly insusceptible of idiomatic felicity), I wondered. Yes, my continual auto-reinvention was in essence a solitary activity, so it didn’t really matter whether my partners had awkward technique or discomfiting pillow talk or, in one frightening instance, a pet python. But still, how was it that the sex was so consistently wretched?

  And then it occurred to me that, if I was re-creating myself, maybe my partners were too. The waiter who slathered vile-tasting moisturizer all over his body five minutes before I showed up, the Streisand enthusiast who would
n’t shut up about organic produce, the bodybuilder whose user name was jimjones (I actually couldn’t bring myself to go through with that one, especially as I had a weird feeling when I read his e-mail and I checked the date and it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, so he may very well have been a sexual dynamo, but I’ll never know)—maybe they had joined men4sexnow.com for the same reasons I had: they were weary of who they had allowed themselves to become, and were making themselves over by boffing strangers. And if this was so then I was giving them as much as they were giving me.

  My pride swelled from liaison to liaison. Sure, I may have just had sex with a guy who wore a spiked collar and spanked me with something made out of leather and then pulled off the blindfold he’d insisted I wear only to reveal a room filled with Star Wars figures, Luke Skywalker in a different outfit everywhere I looked—but hadn’t I also just become a person who could dare to do such things? Wasn’t I exploring farther reaches of this new territory every day, erasing boundaries with every drop of my trousers? Wasn’t my character becoming measureless? And wasn’t his, too? Weren’t we both complicit in the collective expansion of the human soul?

  Inevitably this led to orgies.

  Repeated viewings of Gang Bang Cadet and The Dicks of Hazzard had convinced me that to participate in group sex was to reach the zenith of fleshly delights. The writhing mass of groaning, grunting, grasping carnality on my television screen promised a bacchanalian unity of spirit not otherwise seen outside of a Kylie Minogue concert. Come on, I thought: twelve or so well-proportioned (or so the hosts vowed) men reveling in one another’s bodies, laughing at the antiquated inhibitions we had discarded at the door along with our clothing. What could possibly keep such an event from being epiphanic?

  The answer, of course, is elbows. What Gang Bang Cadet and The Dicks of Hazzard fail to disclose is that group sex is among the most physically uncomfortable businesses in which it is possible for a human being to engage. At one point during my first orgy I found myself lying diagonally across a bed, tenuously attached to somebody whose technique was hampered by his being tenuously attached in turn to somebody else; he kept going too far in one direction or the other and accidentally detaching himself from one or the other of us. The fellow on my right was reaching for the fellow on his right, who was unfortunately too far away for him to get to without removing his tongue from where it was already delighting a third fellow I couldn’t see.

  And the awkwardness wasn’t confined to the realm of the physical. One pudgy guy kept leaning over as if to do something to me with his mouth but hesitating; I couldn’t reassure him, since I didn’t know what he was scared of. Across the crowded room was a bleach blond with whom I kept making the kind of electrical eye contact that portended great sex, but during the entire evening we never had the matching body parts free at the same time. All of us were starting to reek, because we’d followed protocol and not worn deodorant, in case somebody wanted to lick our armpits, and all of us were clenching our abs the whole time for fear that somebody might notice halfway through that we were fat.

  But here was a unity of spirit all the same; it was simply collegial rather than bacchanalian. We all had our reasons for coming here, after all, self-transformational or otherwise, and we were all more than happy to help one another achieve our respective goals. The pudgy guy eventually did—very effectively—the thing he’d been working up the courage to do. I never did connect with the blond across the room, but the only thing that meant was that when the gathering ended I could leave trusting I hadn’t exhausted whatever promise the night held. This trust was borne out when on the subway home I started knitting what turned out to be a really great hat.

  After mastering orgies I thought it only natural to expand my repertoire to include sex clubs. These are venues at which one pays a modest entrance fee and takes one’s chances with the other patrons. A sex club is like an orgy to which everybody is invited—democracy taken to its logical extreme, the elitist monarchy overthrown in favor of the all-embracing Republic. Louis XVI would have an orgy; Robespierre would go to a sex club, though not, I hope, on a night I was there.

  There are two differences between an orgy and a sex club. First, at a sex club it’s considered bad form to introduce yourself to someone before you start putting parts of his body in your mouth. At an orgy you are allowed to offer your name as long as you do so with an obvious sense of irony.

  The second difference between an orgy and a sex club is that at a sex club the snacks are wrapped hard candies, while at an orgy they are cold cuts, or, if the hosts are really classy, canapés.

  During the period of Dionysiac frenzy I had entered I did not abandon the more intimate tête-à-têtes with which I had begun my journey, though these continued to be of a woefully inconsistent quality. There was the man with the fabulous apartment in the West Village who told me after we were done that I wasn’t enough of a top for him, a complaint that would have held more validity if the heading on my men4sexnow.com profile hadn’t read “Tight Bottom.” Then there was the man in the eerily familiar apartment; I realized halfway through our assignation that it was familiar because I had gone on an actual date date with its previous occupant disastrous enough to leave me in tears for hours (we made out for ten minutes and then he said, “Um, I’m not really into this” and kicked me out). The sex the second time around wasn’t particularly memorable but I felt I had conquered the genius of the place, and I left whistling. There was Biff, who made me call him Sir and whose harsh “I didn’t tell you to suck it” sent thrills down my spine surpassed only by the thrills sent down my spine by what he did when I did what he had told me to do.

  But at some point I noticed with surprise that my energy had begun to flag, my enthusiasm to wane. I found myself inviting men to my apartment—something I had almost never done before, in case of serial killers—because I couldn’t bear the thought of the subway ride. There was Vlad, for example, who smelled bad but whom I slept with anyway simply so as to be able to make jokes to my friends about Vlad the Impaler. He left my apartment and instead of the joy I had learned to take in reshaping my character I found myself just feeling annoyed. Well, annoyed and smelly, but while a shower took care of the latter it left the former untouched. There were the orgy hosts who proved to be a hard-lived ten years older than they appeared in the photo they had sent me. I didn’t know how to excuse myself gracefully, so I threw myself into the festivities with as much gusto as I could manage. My discomfort increased considerably when I realized that the only other participants were going to be a man with a disfiguring birthmark and another man who kept up a running monologue about his wife, but by this time it was too late for me to leave, as I had already committed myself at both ends. And I spent the whole time wondering whether I was on row five or seven of my sweater pattern, and wanting ice cream, and wishing I were reading Pride and Prejudice. Not that this encounter was so materially different from earlier ones like it; but somehow I went home feeling not invigorated but exhausted.

  And then I actually started turning down sex. He lived too far away, I told myself, or it was late and I had to get up early the next day. Or it was early and I didn’t want to deal with the rush-hour crowd. Or I was tired.

  Tired? I asked myself. Tired of traversing a self I hadn’t even known existed? Tired of searching for the unknown and, once I had found it, letting it sit on my face?

  What was happening? Was my soul, until recently so expansive, shriveling and calcifying by the day? Was I losing the capacity to remake myself?

  Was I getting old?

  And then I stopped. I wish I could say it happened dramatically, one fateful day, but it was more a gentle dwindling. I canceled my subscription to men4sexnow.com. I stopped answering e-mails from men who had enjoyed the pleasure of my company and who wished to do so again. I stopped going to orgies and sex clubs. I went back into the low life.

  And I ached with loss—but loss of what, I didn’t know. I fought it
by filling my time with productive activity. I wrote more, I composed more, I worked more. At first such pursuits didn’t ease the ache at all but gradually, over the three or four years that have passed since then, it has subsided to the point at which I don’t notice it anymore.

  Mostly.

  Last week, though, my computer informed me that its memory banks were almost full and that, in order to avoid risking the integrity of my hard drive, I ought to divest myself of all unnecessary data. A cursory inventory of the largest files revealed several video clips the deletion of which would have been foolish given the frequency with which my boyfriend is on overnight call at the hospital, so I went in search of other potential jetsam.

  Further exploration led me to a number of folders the contents of which I hadn’t examined for years. Among the masterfully snide letters of complaint and the drafts of college papers I’d kept because they reminded me of the TA with the cute ass I came upon a file called ship.jpg and was suddenly overcome with nostalgia.

  During my gradual adieu to the fleshpots, I had deleted most of the pictures men had e-mailed me along with offers to have their way with me; since very few of these images showed their subjects’ faces they had been more or less indistinguishable anyway, with a few impressive exceptions. But ship.jpg, along with a handful of other photographs, had escaped its fellows’ fate. Though I hadn’t looked at the picture for years I did not have to open the file to remember it well: It depicted a young Latino man standing in some sort of festive gathering area, his hands grasping the lattice of the low ceiling above him, a wide enough gap on his left side between the hem of his shirt and the waist of his pants to reveal a small but tantalizing expanse of smooth skin stretched taut over cut muscle. The viewer had but a moment to consider this feature, however, before being practically blinded by the stunning face above it, upon which was fixed a smile of utter sweetness that yet managed to convey a sense of depravity the depths of which one is lucky to dream of encountering. I was not so naive as to pine for this gentleman as the One That Got Away, but I had spent an occasional moment or three over the years wishing that he and I might have enjoyed an afternoon together, or at least a lunch hour.