brooklyn bound

a rainy Sunday

This morning, alone in bed, Jacob gone for work, a day off, raining outside, horny. I texted this boy I had chatted with on Grindr a few times, asking him if he wanted to come over. He said he had just jerked off. We texted back and forth. He said he was hard again. He came over. We got naked pretty quickly, me a bit stoned and feeling awkward, unable to make conversation. Sex is easier, is what we wanted anyways. He had a really nice body. We sucked each other's dicks and made out. I didn't like making eye contact with him. He was a cute, nice boy and I wanted to have dirty, anonymous sex. Looking at his eyes would kill a bit of that, remind me that this was a person, a neighbor. I tried not to look him in the eyes much, tried to not have my eyes open that much, just wanted to melt into my bed, into his body, into physical experience.

I ate his asshole for a long time and he moaned in a way that said something, said this was what this person liked. I put a finger inside him, moans again telling me yes. I asked him if I could fuck him. He said yes. My air conditioning was off and we soon worked up a sweat. We sniffed some poppers and I got a little more lost, loved the feeling of his body even more. He wrapped his legs around me, placing his dry feet on my sweaty ass, and that touch turned me on more than anything else.

I pulled out, took off the condom, and came all over my sheets. I wiped up the mess with a towel and threw away the condom while he got dressed. We made awkward talk about how close we lived to each other. He told me to call him again some time. I kissed him goodbye as he left, locked the door, and went back to sleep.

Tête blanche et rose

I was sitting on a bench at the 14th Street station, waiting for the E train to take me to MoMA. I was reading The New Yorker and was stoned. I looked up for a second. Nearly past me now at this point, I saw G walking past. I wondered if he saw me and had wanted to keep on walking, to not say hello, wondered if I would have done the same thing if we hadn't made eye contact. I thought about saying hello for a second, but squashed the thought, it seeming pointless.

There was a time in our friendship, which was a very intense thing for a couple years, this a person I was in love with in many senses, when we had had a fight, not an infrequent thing, but were making up and got stoned and went to the Met together to look at art. I remember in one of the galleries there was a pair of old ladies, seemingly very good friends, and they were talking about the art together, really enjoying the art and each other. I wanted to reach that state with G, feared I wouldn't. I remember thinking this when I saw them and telling him about this after, how I was really sad at the idea that we might not get to be those old ladies, that our friendship might not make it that long, but how I really hoped it would, how much I would love that. It still breaks my heart a bit each time I see this person and realize what was lost, however it does so much less than it used to. We haven't been close in a really long time, a year, maybe two. I started this year by letting it go, realized I needed to stop trying with this person, that there was too much baggage, too much ill will that would forever rear its head.

And so I decided not to say hello, went back to reading the article about Iran I had been reading and tried, unsuccessfully, not to pick at this emotional scab. I went to MoMA, alone as I had intended to, but now aware of that in a weird way. I listened to music and floated through the Matisse show, few things grabbing me like I had hoped, for some reason most of his work in this show, his entire body really, failing to wow me. There were a few images that I really enjoyed though, images that stirred something inside of me, unsure as to what these things are that were stirred, but surer than anything that these stirrings are what establish meaning. The one painting that I spent the longest in front of was Tete blanche et rose, a painting of his daughter. There is something really magical about this painting, hints about fashion's relation to the body, the geometric patterns of the dress, as well as its colors, bleeding on to to the subject's face. And the presence of that jeweled choker, an exclamation point. What the sentence is before that bit of punctuation, I'm not really sure. I get hints of it, but it's in a language I don't entirely understand, one that I am not sure yet how to translate into English.

Q35 to B44 to to Q54

We were on the Q35 bus, riding back from Riis Beach. Diego and I had rushed on to the bus and managed to get seats. Nick was forced to stand, no seats left. The sun was on its way down behind me, it close to 8 o'clock, the entire day spent at the beach, riding waves, diving underneath them, rubbing the dick of some Italian underneath the water, him telling me to be discreet, that this his sister was in the water nearby. We had gone through a bottle of vodka, and that along with all the sun had exhausted me, but in a spent, beautiful way, feeling relaxed and content, a nice meal of a day. As we drove parellel to the beach, the sun was doing amazing things as it neared the horizon, and filling up the bus with a warm, orange glow, making the experience seem magical.

I wanted to capture it. When there is so much beauty, I want to contain it, somehow give it a longer life than the transitory several second long nature of the thing. Sometimes I will try to write about it, capture the thing on paper. Other times, I want to/need to take a picture, try to document the thing. I pulled out my phone and was trying to capture this light on Diego's face, who was seated across from me, tried to frame the beauty I saw, the beauty that the huge window frames of the bus, wide and tall, enabled. I was in a hurry to do so, knowing that the light was going to shift once we turned over the bridge, need to do this quickly. I took one picture, the frame above, before the man on the edge of the picture put up his finger, wagged it at me, and told me not to take pictures. I was shocked. I was in a rush against time, eager to capture this beautiful moment of my friend and this man told me to stop, to not capture the beauty. I told him to chill out, that I wasn't taking a picture of him, and that I was well within my rights to take photographs of my friend. He told me he was warning me. Warning me for what, I said. Back and forth, the verbal volleys and threats went, bounced across the aisle. I took another picture, enraging him more. I started to yell obscenities, every other word a Fucking or an Asshole. It was really nearing the point of a fight, the entire bus looking at us, when the bus driver pulled over the bus, stood up to walk toward us, and told us both that he was going to kick us off the bus if we didn't behave. I am just taking a picture of my friend and this man is being insane, I tried to tell the bus driver. He wasn't having it, told us both to cool it, that we all just wanted to get home. While the bus driver was talking to the crazy man who had ruined these moments I wanted to document, I took another picture aimed in his direction to hopefully goad him on while the bus driver was there.

We both kept silent after our warning from the bus driver, the bus filled up with more people, thankfully blocking my view of this guy for the duration of the ride. When we arrived at the Flatbush subway stop, everyone exited, and he apologized to me. I accepted his apology, had thought the whole thing was now an absurd comical incident.

The glowing light of late afternoon in that early part of the bus ride was something I wanted to ruminate on, contemplate, tease out. I was pondering the beauty that this world will sometimes present to you, and the world, joker that it is, interrupted this rumination on beauty with the entrance of ugliness, with distraction. It's often how these things go though.

cell signals, smoke signals

It was just after four o’clock and earlier while I had been on the treadmill I had been watching CNN reflected in the mirror in front of me and their BREAKING NEWS or TOP NEWS STORY or whatever they call it, but was watching, not hearing, the news that California had lifted its stay on the performing of gay marriages, or had set a date for it a week from now. I had been jogging intensely, working up a sweat, but I wanted to hear this story since it was the top of the hour, hear it recounted as a news item, rather than coming in on the middle of a conversation of talking heads saying what this does or does not mean, the filling of airtime with overheated rhetoric that passes for journalism on cable news. So I grabbed my headphones and wandered over to an elliptical machine to listen to the story on my headphones. I worked up more of a sweat, listened to the story for ten minutes, and then was going to take a break from all these cardio activities I had been doing.

It was at this point that I remembered I had left my iPhone on the treadmill I had been on a while ago, that I had completely forgot about it in my haste to make it to the actual news summation on CNN. In my excitement about gay marriage, I had left my iPhone behind. I went back to the treadmill and it was gone. I looked around other machines, on the floor, wondering where it had gone, wondering if someone really stole it in that short amount of time I had left it there. I started to eye the few other people in the gym at that time, before the afterwork rush, wondering who it was that had taken it. I went up to the desk and asked the man working behind it if anyone had turned in a phone. He seemed bothered by my question and was quite unhelpful with a terse No. He had other things to do and some little gay boy’s lost phone was not high on his list of concerns. I imagined it was probably a frequent thing he dealt with. Normally I never bring my phone into the gym, normally leave it in my locker so I don’t have to worry about it, but had just gotten a call from Jacob and wanted to return it.

I looked around some more for the phone. I asked the guy if I could use the front desk’s phone to call mine. He pointed toward a phone for me to use. No one picked up. As it rang and rang, I looked at the people on the machines near me, wondering who had my phone. I was quite stressed out and was ready to give up, knew that I would not be able to exercise any further and that all I would do was think about my lost phone, my negative bank account balance as of now, my inability to buy a phone now or even when I get paid on Friday, or even probably my next paycheck as that needs to go toward rent and a birthday present for my mom and various bills, including a phone bill for a phone I no longer even had.

I put all these concerns on hold. I told myself that I would go sit in the steamroom for a long time and come back to the front desk one more time on my way out, check again, and leave an email address or something for them to contact me if it was turned in.

Even after a couple of minutes sitting in the steamroom, I felt much better, had temporarily forgotten my concerns. Muscles relaxed, sweat dripped down my skin, and I would occasionally let my hand slide across my penis. Steam would fill up the place and it would slowly dissipate, drift off to who knows where, people would come, people would go, more long bursts of steam would again make visibility zero, and I remained through several of these cycles, not wanting to leave the gym without a phone, to deal with that. Everyone had left except two men. They were in a corner and I could hear the noise that dick makes when a sweaty, eager hand is jerking it off, could hear the occasional moan. I went and sat closer to the two and watched this older man suck off this younger man, often how these situations play themselves out.

They then moved themselves and sat next to me, turned on by whatever it was they perceived I offered and the younger one told the older one to suck my dick and he did, and the scene was insanely hot and fairly naughty even for the standards of the gym that I go to. We heard someone walking toward the door and covered up, towels placed over dicks, mouths taken off of them. This insanely sexy man came and sat next to me. He knew what had been happening. It was why he sat so close. He took off his towel to hint at this, his comfort with the things, and so I took his signal and took my dick out from under my towel, started to jerk off again. The sexy man did as well and now it was this group of four. The sexy guy told me he wanted to see me cum. There was a lot of talking for a gym steam room where someone outside the steam room might hear. Normally there is none, just silent jerking off hidden in the steam. This added level of risk that this sexy guy brought to it really turned me on. He had a large uncut penis with a beautiful upward curve to it, a slightly hairy chest, and beautiful brown eyes. The three of them were all encouraging me to cum, it clear that I was close. I did. Sexy Guy told me to rub the semen all over my dick, to jerk off with it. I did for a bit, just to see him more and his penis and his chest hair.

I showered off and thought about how I would phrase this lost phone on Facebook, how I would have to write Jacob an email when I got home to let him know I was phoneless, thought about how I would set an alarm for work tomorrow since I don’t have an alarm clock and always just use my phone, thought through all these things, and then went down to the front desk again, this time encountering a different man. I asked him. He asked me what the background image looked like and then told me to have a seat. He brought out my phone, had me time in my password to unlock it to prove it was mine and I was so happy, connected again, not having to be phoneless for a few weeks, not having to shell out a few hundred dollars for a new phone.

I walked to the grocery store after the gym and, though happy to have a phone in some respects, felt slightly sad to again be encumbered, was looking forward to telling my mom, my boyfriend, whoever reads Facebook, that I was unreachable, to be so. The streets looked particularly beautiful today. I have been making eye contact with passing strangers, thinking they are beautiful, having so many small but lovely moments with residents of this city, with passerby on these streets of New York.

notes scribbled on tuesday night in my journal with the intention to write a long-form piece later concerning the subject

Watching Rocky Horror Picture Show, we stopped midway through, about the part where Susan Sarandon is being seduced by Tim Curry -

Jacob and I started to have sex and I had been horny and trying to get him to have sex with me even before the movie started, didn't know how to approach it, our life so domestic these days,slightly sexless, going to bed by ten stoned, me having to wake up everyday at six for work - feeling more and more like a fifties married office drone, wondering where my life went, where it's going, how I can derail this runaway train -

The sex was amazing and passionate, the type of sex we had when we were first seeing each other - dirty and done on whatever piece of furniture we happened to be near.

Afterwards, after showering off shit and lube and semen, he asked me I wanted to rewind it to where we missed. I said no, that I liked never seeing the whole thing.

It's a movie that will always appear at some point in your life -

glimpses enough, that at one point all the pieces you've collected will add up to a whole.

VH1, Mary Miller, Jacob, and Netflix - so many times to walk in one part and gain another piece.

Star Wars, etc. - movies like that.

shark sightings

Some time last evening, I arrived back in New York at the Fung Wah curbside stop in Chinatown. Not quick enough later, I walked through my apartment door with Jacob, both of us happy to be home again. I had spent the previous week in Provincetown with him, getting brown, getting drunk, getting high, getting laid.

Unfortunately, our trip coincided with Family Week, the town overrun by gay parents with their rainbow children. Nothing against gay families or children, but it was definitely a different atmosphere than the circus-like oversexed atmosphere of the town I encountered last year. I am guessing most other people realized what week it was and avoided the town. There was still plenty of fun to be had at night though, the streets mainly stroller free and homos out and about cruising, Dick Dock still full of men copulating in the dark underneath a boardwalk.

Our days were spent on the beach or poolside at the Boatslip, taking in the sun and dunking ourselves in the water whenever we got too hot. I was reading Tennessee Williams’ Memoirs, it seeming an appropriate read for the location given Williams’ time spent in the town. I still have yet to finish it, which is not an explicit statement about the goodness of the book, more so about how it is hard to read when you are sitting in the sun surrounded by naked or half-naked men, one of them your boyfriend, that the mind already a little groggy from sun and alcohol is apt to wander.

I ate a lot of seafood, particularly oysters, the appeal of which has really grown with me over the last two years, something I had never eaten more than once or twice before a couple years ago, something I never enjoyed, to something which I now find one of the most enjoyable sensory and culinary experiences one can have. The mixture of lemon, brine, and a bit of grit really sets me back, makes me quite happy.

One of the afternoons, we spent whale watching, seeing numerous humpback whales come up for air several times, sometimes near our boat, before extending their large tail up in their air and descending down into ocean depths again. There was a brief glimpse of a humpback jumping entirely out of the water, and it was a second long, if even, the part I glimpsed, and yet that one second is one of the highlights of my trip, an image I cannot forget, don’t want to, taken totally aback, made breathless, by the majesty of such a large animal in the sea.

We ran into a few people we knew from New York there and one night hung out with L and A, hanging out on their back patio, smoking weed, watching the sunset, and eating cheese. There was touching of legs of people seated next to each other and I think every one wanted it to happen but I am not sure how it actually did, what the first steps were that brought it about, but soon the four of us when in their bed, naked and having sex. I remember eating out A’s ass for a long time, something that I don’t normally enjoy, unless I am in a dirty situation and it is with someone that I really, really desire in a unique way. The components were there and I all I wanted to do was eat his ass, took so much pleasure in it. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” was playing and it was already repeating for the second or third time. I read too much into it, at first had been thinking about The Wizard of Oz but soon started to think of my father, this his favorite band, many, many childhood memories of him blaring to the point where I had to cover my ears to protect them the music of Pink Floyd. Jacob got fucked by L and I lay next to them watching. After they got off, we went out on to the patio again. I mentioned the repeating music and A changed it to something else, a female pop singer I am pretty sure, but I cannot remember who and may not even be correct about that detail. A and I started going at it again on the patio, him sucking my dick. L told us that the two of us should go inside, that we shouldn’t do that on the patio where people on the street could see.

We went inside and with different music, I felt a lot better, and I fucked Andrew and he came again and I came for the first time. We rinsed off and went out to the patio where Jacob and L were fucking again, despite L warning us about people being able to see.

Other nights were spent dancing or lying in bed, tired from being in the sun all day and looking at Grindr and Facebook on our iPhones.

My back is warm, skin burnt from the sun, body temperature higher than usual. I am back in New York and I watched a story on the news today about shark sightings off the Jersey Shore and off Rockaway Beach. These reports made me want to go to the beach again, to be in water, to be high on drugs and running or swimming really fast and made delirious by sun and sights and tastes and bodies, human, whale, shark, or otherwise.