Sometimes

It is late at night and I all dream about, desire, is Taco Bell.

Madonna - "Rain"

New York is a beautiful place. I left work tonight in midtown, walked across 42nd Street, walked down 5th Avenue, passed the stately NYPL, autumn night, things crisp, chilly but not too cold, and took in the sight of these buildings at night lit up, streets for the most part clear of the worker crowds that fill them during the day. And I walked and walked, taking it in, looking at shop windows selling sweatshirts and name license plates.

I am broke but happy. I bought a bottle of wine yesterday with quarters. Bought a dozen eggs with dimes. I don't get paid until the end of the month. I am trying to make it. New York in some ways has the same feel to it that it did a decade or so when I first moved here. I am hungry. I want it. Things seem possible, and in possibility there is beauty. Without that sense that something could happen, something new, you don't look at things the same way. You, in fact, don't really look at things. You just go through the motions. I am looking at things, at people, at the city, at buildings, at imagined futures. It's a new city to me. Everything is open, a potential path. I am trying to start again, to make a new life.

And I am drinking lots of coffee because it's free at work. And I am smoking lots of cigarettes, not that they are free, but they pair quite nicely with a caffeinated state.

And I am listening to music and dancing around my room, dancing in place at my desk at work, headphones on, feeling it, this thing called life that music does such an amazing job of making startlingly present.

Janet Jackson - "You Want This"

He shot his load on to the fogged glass shower divider separating our two showers.

I had left the steam room, delirious from the heat, from trying to sweat out everything bad in my body, had stumbled to a shower stall. I could hear someone else leaving the steam room behind me, and then saw that they, despite other open showers, had opted to go in the one next to mine. I knew what was coming.

For a straight gym, my gym has some of the most homoerotic gym showers I have ever been in. The shower stalls have fogged glass separating one from the other, so that you see the outline of the person showering next to you, see a blurry vision of a naked male next to you, one of those scrambled porn channels that you would try to unscramble mentally as a kid. I usually peek out of the side of my eyes, so as to be somewhat discreet, as I watch guys shower next to me.

There was the usual coyness of the two of us washing our cocks and our assholes for way too long, some way of saying that we were cruising. He would put his ass closer to the glass separating us. For a moment, the scrambled cable station, comes into view. For a second, I see a late night softcore movie, the volume turned down so my family doesn't know what I'm doing, trying my best to mentally hold on to the image, to save it for later, to eventually have enough of these snapshots to assemble into a short movie, one that will be projected on to the screen of my childhood sexual imagination in moments in locked bathrooms.

He turns around. I get a good view of him stroking his cock. I stand closer then, giving him a view of me near the glass, me stroking my cock.

I watch underneath the glass, the view of his sexy toes digging tighter and tighter into the floor tiles as he gets nearer and nearer orgasm. It's about to come. He puts the head of his cock against the glass and I watch with all the hunger in the world as his semen paints the glass between us. He towels off and leaves the stall, not bothering to clean this huge streak of cum from the wall, not bothering to rinse down the drain the drops of it on the floor. For a moment, I dream of how good it would feel, how good it would taste, to wipe up the drops on the floor and put them to my mouth, my tongue. I wish I could reach the streak of it on the glass between us. He has left to get dressed and I watch his cum slowly ooze down the glass in slow motion and am so turned on by this, by this now absent man, by his swagger, by his lack of care. Something in his failing to clean up his cum, to leave it there for whoever to see, his exhibitionist qualities, push me over the edge. I cum. I wash mine down the drain and watch his on that glass keep sliding down as someone else steps into that stall.

Eliades Ochoa - "El Carretero"

To tell you about my weekend, to tell myself about it, to tell whoever it is that these diary entries are written for, let me say this: both Friday and Saturday night, I found myself at bodegas shortly after four in the morning hoping that the folks working would still sell me beer, heading on my way to some impromptu after-party, and being successful in the attempt, purchasing it, raging, living, being up until seven or eight in the morning hanging out with folks, chatting, smoking way too many cigarettes, hooking up with folks, having fun as they say.

Both nights were filled with booze, with drugs, with dancing, with flirting, and with Metropolitan. Little sleep has been gotten, fun has been had. One night, Friday, ended in that way that sometimes nights will end when you are steered by the strong arm of horniness, a steady driver, but one that drives you places you probably would never venture to if your rational self was the one driving, hooking up with some dude from Scruff at seven in the morning, another person holding on to the last bits of the night, him hungry too, him not ready to say goodbye to anything yet, to even put it on pause for a few hours for sleep, another lonely person in the night still wanting to rage, and having sex in your bed, telling him not to ring your buzzer, to text when he gets there, so that you don't wake up your roommates, who, like most decent people of the world, are asleep at that hour. Not me. Instead, I gratified something that I wasn't sure I needed to as soon I came. Instead, I wanted him gone, and he left. I was left with the smell of his balls in my throat, which lingered well into the next day, way too long into the next day despite numerous tooth brushings. 

Saturday night, last night, was different. I hooked up with some cute boy that I wanted to sleep with, and which was the best part, this gorgeous body that held me throughout the night, that I I fit so nicely against. I wanted him to stay, to linger. I never wanted to leave my bed, stayed there until one or so, one of us in the other's arms, cuddling, and rubbing our bodies against each other.

My room smells like smoke, like the memories of sexual encounters, and like Fall, me having kept my windows open all day to try to air out these various smells. It will soon smell like Mexican food, as I am about to place in order for some, to try to fill the hungriness of a hangover, to try to squash it all with hot sauce, cheese, fried meat, and tortillas. They will all mingle together, these smells, and soon I will sleep underneath the fog of it all, getting ready for my first day of work together, dreaming of these things, of other things, of so, so many other things.