Loathing and Crushing

I could kick myself for missing Andy’s show last night. According to him and him, it was fabulous. Unfortunately, I can’t go to the next performance, which is next Friday night, because I’ll be in D.C. for a college friend’s wedding. Andy, I hope you do even more performances, so I can see you for myself.

It’s been a weekend of random blogger encounters. I ran into Sparky not once but twice — at the Phoenix on Friday night and then at Hole (formerly the Fat Cock) last night. I also saw Julian at the Phoenix, cowboy-hatted, and I saw Andy, fresh off his performance, at Hole, as well as Michael.

Before going to Hole last night, I had dinner with my friend Arch and a few other people at Cookies and Cous Cous, a small Middle Eastern restaurant on Thompson Street, north of Bleecker. It was a great meal, for so many reasons. Five articulate gay men, a meal at a late hour, a cozy corner table, and one of the best burgers I’d ever had — on a squishy homemade roll.

One of my dinner companions was this friend of Arch’s whom I’d met two or three times before, and I’ve decided I have a full-fledged crush on him. Physically, he’s the guy I’ve always dreamed of marrying: totally clean-cut, short conservative hair, glasses, cute teeth. At UVA I had a longtime crush on a guy with a similar look. Unfortunately, this guy is kind of a space cadet and it doesn’t seem like we have much in common. I told Arch that I had a crush on him, and Arch discouraged me from pursuing it, for the same reasons I’ve just mentioned.

We left the restaurant and walked over to Hole, where, as planned, we ran into Sean. Sean, you may or may not recall, is the guy with whom Wes was flirting on that now-legendary (to me) night at the Phoenix two months ago, the night that was the beginning of the end for us. As I wrote the other night, he and Wes eventually wound up meeting, and hooking up, and Wes told me that the guy has a really weird dick.

Last night was the first time I’d seen Sean since that night. I knew I was going to see him at some point last night, and I tried to prepare myself for it. I didn’t know what I was going to feel. But I told myself I’d play it totally cool and happy.

You know, I don’t usually loathe people. But I really think I loathe Sean. He’s a queeny, flirty airhead. It’s not that a purse falls out when he opens his mouth. It’s that a really stupid purse falls out when he opens his mouth. I think I should call him Bubbles. I hate listening to him speak, I don’t like how he dresses, I don’t like the fact that he flirted with my date right in front me when he knew we were on a date, I don’t like the fact that he gave my date his phone number, right in front of me. I just really can’t stand the guy. We all need someone to loathe, right? I think I’ll use him as my golem and just pile all my frustrations onto him. Yeah.

Anyway, I pretty much avoided him last night. I did have an enjoyable moment when I looked at him and thought to myself, there you are, Sean, standing there, acting all cool, but I know your secret: you’ve got a really weird dick.

I also got to point him out to Sparky and Andy, without him knowing it, which was kind of fun.

If he only knew he were a blog celebrity.

My cute bespectacled crush guy wound up leaving the bar a bit early, and eventually I left as well. I would up going over to the Phoenix for about five minutes, and then I came home. Not a thrilling night. But it’s always best to focus on the good things, and I did have a really terrific dinner with some nice people.

So now here I am, it’s 5:00 on a Sunday afternoon and I’ve done nothing today except get up late, read most (not even all yet) of the Sunday New York Times, and do some grocery shopping, and blog, and now it’s practically dark. I have tomorrow off for Veteran’s Day (yay being a government employee), but I can already feel the weekend slipping away. I’m going shopping with my mom tomorrow to buy stuff for my apartment. I think I’m going to go out tonight, although I’m not sure where. But the last time I went out on a Sunday night of a three-day weekend, I met Piano Man, so you never know what can happen.

There are moments when I feel like I’m sitting at home wasting time when I could be out and about. At some of those times, I ask myself, “Where would I really like to be right now?” and if it’s at all practical, I’ll go there. Unfortunately, right now I’d like to be visiting the Panorama of the City of New York, which is at the Queens Museum of Art out in Flushing, but it closes at 5 and I wouldn’t be able to make it out there in time. Really, I didn’t plan my Sunday very well.

Last year — around this same weekend, in fact — I took the 7 train out to the QMA in Flushing Meadows Park and saw the Panorama, which I’d always wanted to see. It’s a scale model of the ENTIRE city, all five boroughs, in great detail: skyscrapers, other buildings, bridges, streets, parks, airports, and so on. It’s amazing, it’s beyond words. If you’ve never seen it, you should.

By the way, I’m hopelessly behind on my novel. I haven’t touched it in five days, which means I’m about 10,000 words behind. I’ll never finish on time.

Anyway — if you go out tonight, maybe you’ll see me at a bar. I really wish more people had Veteran’s Day off.

And I wish I didn’t feel like time were slipping away.

Changing Your Algebra

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Close parentheses. Whew! That had been annoying me. You know I’m drunk when I forget to close the parentheses. Remember, kids, don’t drink and blog. This message brought to you by BADB (Bloggers Against Drunk Blogging).

So I’m home today, taking a sick day, because — well, because I was feeling sick this morning. Anyway, now that I’m sober, I can write about last night.

I’d called Wes a few days ago to see if he wanted to hang out some night this week. We decided on Wednesday. I wanted to do something low-key and inexpensive, so I suggested we just hang out and make some dinner and rent a movie. Okay, who am I kidding? I didn’t just want to do something low-key and inexpensive. I wanted to get into his pants.

We decided that we’d hang out at his place and use this coupon for a free Domino’s pizza, which was part of a welcome packet I got from the U.S. Postal Service after I moved into my new place.

So, after making sure I looked good — clean-shaven, wearing my contact lenses, my pull-over shirt tucked into my jeans — I walked over to his place, just five minutes away.

He came down to let me in to his apartment. He was wearing a white undershirt tucked into a pair of jeans. He looked great and totally sexy.

We went up to his apartment, and it was the first time I’d been there since the end of August. I can’t believe it had been that long.

From the get-go, he was plying me with alcohol. He offered me something to drink, so I had a beer. He did, too. We hung out for a while, talking and so forth. We wound up talking about porn for some reason. Wes told me he didn’t like porn. How could you not like porn, I asked? He said it’s because the guys are so ugly. “Yeah, in straight porn,” I said, “but not in gay porn.” It turned out he’d never seen gay porn before. Wes has never seen gay porn! Can you believe it?

I could feel sexual energy going on. I mean, we were talking about gay porn. But neither of us was really acknowledging it.

We ordered the pizza. He put on a long-sleeve shirt over his undershirt and we walked down to the local market and got some salad, then came back and turned on the TV. Soon the pizza came, and then he offered me another beer (which I took) and we settled in for an evening of pizza and salad and TV.

He has a two-person couch and an easy chair with a footstool. I went over to sit on the two-person couch, but he, disappointingly, sat in the easy chair across the room. Darn.

We watched “Dawson’s Creek” (or “Dawson’s Crack,” as Wes calls it). Jack the Gay Guy was having problems balancing his boyfriend with his fraternity pledge duties. After that, we watched “The West Wing,” which Wes had never seen before. He liked it.

By this point I think I was on my third beer.

Then we watched “South Park,” which neither of us had seen in a long time.

Now I was on either my fourth drink or my fifth drink. I think it was my fourth. It was a Jim Beam and ginger ale.

I knew where I wanted to take things.

“So, be honest,” I said to him. “Do you think I look better with the goatee or without the goatee?”

“Oh, no question, you definitely look better without it,” he said.

We were sitting in our respective seats again. “So what’s been going on in your life?” he said to me.

So I wound up telling him about the Piano Man and how I don’t think I’m really into him, and how I’ve decided that if I meet a guy that I want to date, that’s great, but in the meantime (hint, hint) I’m totally into just having fun with people. I said, “I mean, take you and me. You and I have decided we don’t really want to date each other, but like, I still think you’re totally hot.”

He told me he still thinks I’m attractive, too, and he said he’s decided he just wants to have to fun with people also. Actually, it turns out that he met someone in a bar a few weeks ago that he’s really into — they both like cars and sports and he’s cute and whatnot — but Wes isn’t sure he wants to be exclusive with someone yet. Wes, one must remember, has even less gay experience than I do. He’s 27, like me, but he really only started acknowledging his gayness in the last year or so. He had a fraternity brother whom he used to fool around with, but he’s never really had an extensive relationship with someone.

We got up so he could fix us some more drinks. He poured me my second Jim Beam and ginger ale and he poured himself his second vodka tonic.

We went to sit down again, but this time, instead of going over to the couch, I sat on the footstool, directly facing him on the easy chair. We continued to talk about his fraternity brother and our sexual pasts and so forth, and I oh-so-casually began easing my thigh up against his, and then resting it against his, and then nonchalantly putting my hand on his thigh, as if I didn’t even notice what I was doing. We were still talking, and as we talked, I really casually moved my hand up his thigh, and then it wound up underneath his long-sleeve shirt, stroking his chest all over, with only his undershirt in the way. The whole time we were still talking. It was so casual, like, “Hey, how’d my hand get there?” Kinda neat.

Finally we stopped talking. I stood up and I leaned down and kissed him. Bam! Electricity. This was the first time we’d kissed in two months.

It continued. We wound up on the couch, enjoying ourselves, still kissing and doing whatever and talking. It turns out that he thinks TRHG is cute, but he feels bad because he hasn’t gotten around to calling him. An at another point he said to me, “I have sort of a confession.” It turns out that a few weeks ago, he wound up calling Sean, the guy whom he openly flirted with right in front of me at the Phoenix that horrible night. They met up and wound up hooking up. Now, I don’t know if this was before Wes and I had the talk about not dating each other anymore, or after we had the talk. If it was before, that somehow feels insidious, even though it’s not. But his word choice was interesting, wasn’t it: confession. That was his word, not mine…

Actually, I was surprised at how little the news bothered me. I think it failed to bother me because Wes happened to be hooking up with me at the moment. Isn’t this what I’d wanted? Obviously, even if he was hooking up with other guys, he was still into me.

And then it happened. I started to feel really ill. I’d had too much to drink, too quickly. I got up and went to Wes’s bathroom and shut the door and I leaned over the porcelain god. My gosh, it had been ages since I’d done something like this.

It wasn’t too bad, actually. There was only a tiny amount of toxin to get rid of. It could have been worse. It was really quick, and then I rinsed out my mouth nice and good.

I walked out of the bathroom and said, dizzily, “I feel really awful… I think I should go home now.”

He insisted on walking me home, which was nice of him.

So we put on our jackets and he walked me the five-minute walk back to my building. He wound up coming up to my apartment with me.

He gave me a hug, and then we were at it again.

Kissing. Me on my knees. Down with his pants. Over to my couch, off with his shirt, off with my shirt, off with everything. Then over to the bedroom.

It was DAMN fun.

As we were rolling around, we were still talking. He wanted me to tell him dirty stories. Well this was new! He’d never expressed interest in that before. So I was telling him things. As I look back, at first it seems like we weren’t on my bed for very long, but if we did all this talking, maybe it was longer than I’d thought.

And he told me something that made me feel great. He said that Sean had had a really weird dick, not a nice one at all. And then he was totally contrasting it with mine. Complimenting me on it over and over, calling it beautiful… wow.

I guess it’s totally worth it to find a good mohel. Whoever mine was, thank you thank you thank you! You don’t know how happy you’ve made me.

Okay, I can’t believe I’m writing about that.

What did make me uneasy was that he asked me, more than once, mind you, what TRHG’s dick looks like. Sigh… fine. So hook up, both of you, as long as I can still have dibs on both of you too.

Finally it ended. I was too woozy to reach any sort of completion, but he had no trouble. Afterwards I gave him a much-needed towel. Then we put our clothes back on and we said that this was really fun and that we’ll have to do this again. And then we kissed again and he went home. Today he’s off for a four-day Homecoming Weekend at his old college.

After he left, I went online and blogged and IM’d briefly with Queerscribe and with Choire, who apparently has quite the goods on me now!

You know, I really had a fun night with Wes. There’s a lot to be said for seduction. This was my most enjoyable sex with him since the night we met. There seemed to be all these undertones to everything. And I think he and I both totally needed this. It was, like, life-affirming sex. We both seemed so uninhibited, which didn’t really happen when we were still kind of dating each other. We knew beforehand that this didn’t have to Mean Anything. We knew we were just plain old enjoying ourselves, having fun. Damn good fun.

In writing and thinking about last night, I keep coming back to an entry I wrote during the early weeks of The Tin Man. I was thinking particularly about the latter half of that entry, but now that I’ve reread it, I see that the whole thing is relevant. Read for yourself.

Wow. Fun is so great.

Ugh

Alcohol… pizza… Wes… sex… too much alcohol… I think I’ll stay home tomorrow… feel really really bad… too much alcohol… Wes… hottie… sex… we both think the other is totally hot… I feel awful… not mentally, just physically, because of the alcohol… ugh… too much… it’s been a long time since I’ve had this much to drink… Wes walked me back to my place (four blocks from his place… we got naked… hottie… what a night… too much to drink… ugh…

Nite… I hope…