Tuesday, April 2, 2013
she was nice, but she was watchin' me like a hawk
the following is from an email to a friend on sunday. i know i shouldn't be heading off in a new direction, considering all the hanging threads and unfinished business all over this blog at the moment--but what can i say, it was a helluva weekend, and i thought i'd tell you about a little of it.
read your post--hope you're having a great time with your family.
me? well, since you ask, last night i had fun in a bar for the first time in years. met up with adam and laura, and her cousin, the legendary porno joe (which is how he's known all over this dusty little town, i would find out--by the end of the weekend, i'd be calling him the marine whisperer), and he dragged us out to one of his recruiting grounds, this military dive bar on the main drag at the outskirts of town.
i was dreading it, tell you the truth, but it turned out great--everybody knew him there, so we had, like 80 instant friends, most of 'em smokin' hot. there were lots of women there too, of course, most of 'em dressed like, as laura put it, women who hang out at military dive bars, but they were really fun too. and all night long, young guy after young guy would come up to joe--this cheerful, bald, middle-aged, nondescript lookin' dude--drape their arm around him, and shoot the shit. he told me later, "mike, i swear, the more guys who find out who i am and what i do, the more they wanna be my friend." it was kinda surreal.
i spent most of my time out on the back patio where the music wasn't so loud, and--me, who never talks to strangers in bars--did interview after interview with these kids. there was the navy corpsman, nico, who i found mildly cute (until i spent half an hour with him, by which time i was half in love) who i got to open up about his field experience and training, and, eventually, all the lives he'd saved.
and there was bret, this tall, raw-boned marine IED specialist from kentucky, who, as he put it, "blows up shit in afghanistan". fourth-generation military, enlisted when he was 17, and at 25--after enduring three direct hits on armored vehicles in which he was riding, has wrecked knees, a wrecked back, partial deafness and god knows what else. i asked him what it was like in the aftermath of such an event--do you black out, do you just lay there, stunned, or what?--and he just said, matter-of-factly, "nah, you jump up, wipe the blood outta your ears, take care of the wounded and keep moving."
he's going back in ten days for his fourth deployment--which he anticipates will be the worst, seeing as how, since the current administration has thoughtfully announced our pull-out in 2014, the enemy will wanna make it look like they ran us out on a rail (i asked him what he thought would happen after that, and he said, casually, "oh, it'll all go to shit." yeah.).
his wife drifted over a couple times during our conversation--we talked about how she's struggling to budget in the face of recent news that washington is trying to cut their housing subsidy by half--and at some point i said to her, "this guy's really something, huh?", she just rolled her eyes, smacked him on the side of the head, and we laughed. it was really cute.
lemme tellya, after years in weho being surrounded by man-boys (myself included), it was really eye-opening hanging out with these boy-men last night. and now, if the time ever comes when i give up my boy-chasing ways, make my final selection and move to the checkout, it's gonna be very hard to settle for anything less.
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5 comments:
A lot of young men had to grow up really fast in life or death situations.
It kinda makes a lot of what we all do seem trivial by comparison.
As for your attraction to these guys, I suspect it might have been different if they were all over 40. I mean, common guttermorality, the fact they were all young was a major factor in your big attraction to so many of these fellas.
Age differences in gay men mean little or nothing to me if there is mutual attraction and both have no hangups on the matter. I've fucked boys thirty years younger than I and men twenty years older, and it was all fun and good times. What I enjoyed was the enthusiastic tone of your comments about the bar and its clientele. Will you go back there? -- sounds like you should -- this post was a pleasure to read.
My first thought is all these boy-men that grew up at war are going to be so, so broken. But then I think, who isn't broken?
" ... if the time ever comes when i give up my boy-chasing ways, make my final selection and move to the checkout, it's gonna be very hard to settle for anything less."
Make your finally selection ... I LOVED that. LOL!!!
Luv,
Me
victor: thank you, as always.
noblesavage: you continually underestimate me in certain areas--you really do.
will: i'm glad you enjoyed this one--and yeah, i will be going back.
mitch: you're right--a lot of 'em are. they come back to that bar and drink every goddam night (and then go home with my friend joe and do gay marine porn, but that's another story altogether).
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