other than that, mrs. alvarez, how did you like the neighborhood?

johnnie lives with his mother in the westlake district of los angeles, a once-grand neighborhood near downtown that today would be described as sketchy at best. on the way to my place, i asked him by way of conversation how he and his mother liked living there, and he said, "it's not bad--we've been there a long time."

and then he told me by way of conversation about how back when he was in high school, a gang in the neighborhood sent a rival gang member a message by shooting and then garotting the guy's kid brother--a classmate of johnnie's--and then hanging the kid's splayed body by the neck from the front doorknob of their apartment for his mother to find when she came home from work.

"this happened near you?" i asked. "oh yeah," he said. "the building next door."

i thought about that a long minute, asked about the kid's mother. he said, "oh, she moved after that." that wasn't what i meant, but i let it go.

on the drive home after dropping johnnie off, i thought about his ordinary-looking building, the ordinary-looking building next door, the dozens of times i had walked those self-same ordinary streets at all hours secure in the knowledge that my white, middle-class bubble of immunity followed me everywhere.

and it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that after twenty-three years here, i still don't know shit about this city.

well, duh

i remember one night several years ago--pre-obama--the subject of LA's illustrious mayor came up, and i went off, citing a litany of reasons to back up my contention that he was the dumbest, most clearly unfit major officeholder in america (an opinion which, btw, has only been reinforced over the ensuing years).  so caught up was i in my rant that i failed to pick up on the cues from my audience--in this case, a really smart latino with whom i was having an interesting conversation--to which i am usually so attuned, and was thus surprised when, all tight-faced and angry, he cut me off in mid-sentence with

"you know what? you may be right--villaraigosa may be a fool, but he's our fool, and i'm really not comfortable discussing him with your smug white ass, so i'd appreciate it if you'd just shut the fuck up."

oh.

it was a light-bulb moment for my smug, white ass, and i walked away from that little encounter resolved never to make that mistake again (oh, and thankful that i'd saved the talking until after the fucking).

when, a few years later, obama rose to prominence, i looked him over and dismissed him as a lightweight who'd ridden the affirmative-action bullet train straight from high-school slacker to presidential contender with very few stops in between (an opinion which, btw, has only been reinforced over the ensuing years); but, having learned my lesson, have wisely confined the airing of my views on the subject to those of my own kind.

because here's a little hard truth i learned the hard way, bitchez:  deny it as you might, we humans are a very tribal species--it's baked deep into our genes--and the emphasis on that particular human trait tends to rise in any given tribe in direct proportion to the degree of threat or sense of oppression it perceives at the hands of another.

this explains why, among so many blacks and latinos in this PC-benighted country, the emphasis on race first, last and always is seen not only as natural, but healthy--and also why any members of the perceived dominant tribe (i.e., me) who exhibit the same equally-natural impulses are condemned as racist.

or, as one of the sources quoted for the article from which the above headline derives puts it,

It goes both ways. There is racial bias amongst whites, and there is racial bias amongst blacks. But as far as the press is concerned, it only goes one way.

do i begrudge the black folk their fealty to their president?  hell, no--it's been a long time coming, and if i were black, i'd probably suspend my critical faculties and support him too.  objectivity may or may not come in time--or, as a black law professor so succinctly and honestly puts it in that same article,

There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president. If we get to the fifth one, I'll be with you.

yeah?  we'll see.

since you asked--the sober version

[and the navel-gazing continues . . .]


not satisfied with my answer, huh?  well, i'm not really, either, so lemme try again.

as you know, back when i first hit town i began my gay career by attending the wednesday-night group rap sessions at the LA gay & lesbian center.  in retrospect, probably a mistake--mostly a buncha lonely misfit-types sitting around talking about their misfit loneliness, interspersed with a few clueless newbies like myself.  not exactly the best introduction to the life, but what the hell did i know?  i had no steve kuzi to guide me this time.

anyway, that very first night, in response to my introduction, one of the guys--a fat, loud, outspoken mid-fifties new-yorker named art, cut through all the murmured greetings and socializing suggestions by saying, "screw these guys--if i were your age and looked like you, i'd be out sucking and fucking every goddam night."  i tucked this little pearl of wisdom away for future examination.

a couple weeks later, i hooked up for the very first time with one of the guys in the group, a shy, sweet latin boy who told me afterwards, "i'm so glad i caught you now."  when i asked what he meant, he said, "you know--you're all new, at the height of your studliness (i never forgot that phrase).  you've got your whole gay life in front of you.  you're gonna play around for a little while with a lotta cute guys, and then you're gonna meet the one, settle down and make some lucky guy a great husband."

didn't quite turn out that way, did it?

i spend a lot of time second-guessing the choices i've made in my life--for instance, i wonder sometimes how differently things mighta turned out for me if my first gay housemates had been a couple high-minded ph.d's instead of royce and paul--but for the most part, and in the end, i think destiny wins out, and we end up who we were meant to be.

the kid was half-right; i possessed one of the components for gay success--i was new, cute and studly--but i was sorely lacking in the other.  to put it bluntly, i was not, and am not, much fun to be around.  i don't care for most people, nor they for me.  crowds make me nervous, and i really don't enjoy going out and doing things.  i'm depressive and negative and overly-critical, i don't think like the herd, and most guys i meet aren't willing put up with me for more than about five minutes unless my dick is up their ass.

and don't tell me i'm wrong, rob--hell, even you, my best and oldest friend in LA, can only take me in small doses up-close-and-personal these days.  before guttermorality came along and revived our relationship, i saw you once a year for maybe an hour, tops--and that's if i was lucky.  now, thanks to the blog and email, we spend long stretches together like we did when we first met, if only at digital arms-length.  i've always appreciated the irony in that; i wonder if you ever do.

and speaking of this goddam blog, that's another thing.  what started out as a drunken lark very quickly became a personal daily referendum--a self-worth test, as it were.  if i couldn't suck people in with my personal magnetism, could i maybe do it with my words?  even as my writing has exponentially improved, the answer to that question, as has been clearly demonstrated by my stats and comment count over lo these past four-plus years, has remained a resounding and unmistakeable "fuck no."  i'm becoming bitter about this, it ain't a good look on me, it's starting to bleed into my writing, and if i don't get some interaction going here pretty soon, i'm taking this sucker private, extending invitations to the chosen few, and all the lurkers--and yeah, you know who you are--can go fuck themselves and feast on their trainwrecks elsewhere.

they say there's a lid out there for every pot, and for awhile i thought i'd found mine in v--he loved everything about me everybody else doesn't, he put up with my shit, he could keep up with me, and he stuck around through thick and thin.  and i loved him back as best i could, and i really tried (or so i tell myself), but in the end, i could never give my heart to an overgrown kid who'd joyously spend $200 on an authentic, george lucas-authorized light saber when he could barely make his rent.  he's gone now, who knows where--finally gave up on the lost cause, i guess.  the good half of me hopes he's found someone fun who deserves his sweet, sexy, eternally irresponsible ass--when the bad half isn't damning him to hell for abandoning me, that is.

so here i sit--crabby, middle-aged and alone.  is that the worst thing in the world?  i dunno; for me, probably not.

i had my shot, rob--i was a hot commodity there for a precious little while, and you would probably say that instead of investing my limited capital wisely for long-term growth, i blew it all on short-term, rapidly-depreciating assets.  and while that's probably true, even back in my glory days--when cute, hot, desirable guys were asking me for dates instead of just dick--i couldn't in my wildest dreams imagine myself being shackled to even the best of 'em.

i really don't know how to end this post except to fall back on those words my widowed, one-man-woman mother--and now i--live by:  the only thing worse than being alone is wishing you were.

as v would say if he were here, "true dat."

since you asked

the following is a long, rambling answer to a short, pointed question.  i'm posting it here because this is where i keep such things now, secure in the knowledge that nobody'll ever find 'em.

as for the old drivers license above, i found it when i was packing to move, remembered how much i hated that photo--the ugly boy with the w.c. fields nose.  god, we can be so dumb when we're young.



did i ever tell you about st. patrick's day 1985, rob?  i spent that evening at hall's in austin, steve kuzi by my side; by that time we were a fixture in the place--the buff, burly protector and the scared-wabbit newbie.  that night would be different, though; towards midnight, drunk off my ass, i broke away from kuzi for the first time ever, wandered off on my own, found a cute boy who had tried unsuccessfully for weeks to catch my eye, walked up to him and asked his disbelieving ass if he wanted to give me my first gay kiss.

the next two hours were a happy blur; word spread quickly that the new guy was off his leash--i must've gotten two or three dozen first gay kisses that night.  it was probably the most fun i've ever had in a gay crowd (with the possible exception of that time at sunset street fair when your friend jonathan and i drunkenly three-way made out with that really hot guy at detour that i ended up going home with--you remember that, right?).

next time i walked into halls, i was back to my usual sober, shut-down self, welded at the hip to kuzi, not looking left or right.  people eventually got the message, left me alone.

paulo murillo, that perennial weho man-about-town (check out his blog--it's a hoot), opines that there are basically two kindsa fags:  those who are invited to the party and those who aren't, and that most fag-bitchy bitterness originates from those who are wrecked to find themselves in the latter group.

while i think there is much truth there, being the social type that he is, ol' paulo could never understand someone who would trash his invitation unopened.

*     *     *     *     *

i've always been that way;  while there are many things i would change about my high-school years if i could, joining a clique would not be one of 'em.  while in college, my idle fantasies about hanging with those intoxicatingly-cute fraternity boys in their polo shirts and tony lamas evaporated the first time i attended one of their parties.

and you remember my first and only circuit event--white party 1993, right?  i enjoyed the drive to palm springs with you, and throwing back a few with your friends in our suite, but as for the actual party itself, lemme just say that as soon as that godawful music started pounding and those shirtless, manicured, meth-addled faggots started writhing, i couldn't cut one outta the herd and drag his tweaking ass back to his room fast enough.

my heart has always been a lonely hunter, rob, and now here i find myself, having put in twenty-three boy-chasing years in a city that's never been home, sitting here by myself.

your question--why, at my age, i'm still "fetishizing youth"--misses the point; i could never fall in love with any of the boys i sleep with, nor most of 'em with me. my heart, if it ever falls, will fall for an equal.  i don't seek out the young; i seek out the unruined--which, in this town, anyway, seem to be one and the same.  i'd love to find a man who could challenge me to give it up for him, but i've never let myself learn how; in the solitary circles in which i run, most of the guys anywhere near my age are far more fucked up than i am.

i've often wondered how differently things might've turned out for the boy in that picture up there if the coin had landed tails instead of heads, and he had ended up on the east coast instead--maybe he'd have found that fabled faggot algonquin round table, which is the only clique to which he's ever wanted to belong.

or maybe that's just a cop-out--whatever; i gotta take my vitamins, catch some zzzzz's.  

it's gonna be a busy week.

luv, 

me

thanks as always, guys

so today, in sore need of a little no-questions-asked comfort, i turned to a couple old friends who've never let me down.

we met seven years ago during a cock-hunt from which they emerged the clear winners; while they couldn't hold a candle lookswise to some of the guys i sleep with routinely, their simple, unselfconscious cum-drenched enthusiasm won me over in a way that all the pretty boys in the world could never on their best day do.

they disappeared from my life for awhile; when i finally tracked 'em down, i made sure that this time they'd never get away from me again.  i gotta admit i myself have turned to other, lesser guys from time to time, but i always come back.  they don't mind; they never ask or expect anything of me--they just give without question.

decision made, the anticipation alone was enough to get me excited; by the time they made their actual appearance, i was hard and ready.  we fell into the practiced three-way dance we had shared so many times; i matched 'em stroke for stroke, coming close when one did and backing off, and then edging myself to near-climax with the other.  in the end, not able to hold it back any longer, we all came precisely together just as we always had, and then fell back, happy and spent.

as i wiped myself off, i wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to experience with a real human what i do with two guys who exist only in a 14-minute, 32-second video clip on my computer.

who knows, maybe one of these days i'll find out.  but i'm not holding my breath.

a little guttermorality post-debate analysis

i didn't watch the presidential debate last night; i never watch presidential debates.

ok, that's not strictly true--i did watch all of the mccain debates, on the off-chance that one of his opponents would say something sufficiently incendiary to send the good senator flying across the podium at him.  sadly, that didn't happen.

i didn't watch the debate last night because i knew it would tell me nothing i didn't already know about these two candidates.  there would be nothing spontaneous about the evening, because these are careful, disciplined, tightly-controlled men--perhaps the only thing they have in common.

but watching the aftermath today, i gotta say it's fascinating to see the left start to wake up to the reality i recognized about their messiah long ago.  basically, what you had last night was a grown-up version of the high-school valedictorian going head-to-head in a battle of wits with jeff spicoli, and apparently it wasn't pretty.

but, of course, before acceptance must come denial:

chris matthews opines with spittle flying that mr. obama just needs to get up to speed by watching more MSNBC, and he'll be fine.

bob woodward explains the president's poor performance by theorizing he must've been preoccupied with some weighty foreign-policy issue that prevented his full engagement.

but my favorite by far, from the aptly named charles blow--a new york times columnist, no less:

yeah, that's it, mr. blow--it's all part of his brilliant master plan.

the truth which is suddenly dawning, gentlemen--and which has been out there all along for anyone willing to look beyond the hype--is that your guy really isn't very engaged, very strong, or very smart.

(but in his defense, even cicero woulda had trouble debating his way outta the mess that obama has made of his presidency--that is a defense, right?)

will i watch the next debate?  oh yeah--there's blood in the water now, the pressure is on, and the potential entertainment value high.  perhaps an overly-smug mitt will stumble; or perhaps the president will surprise us, but i don't see how--i mean, how can you possibly hope to ace next week's SAT when you've only spent five minutes in each grade between kindergarten and high school?

my name for it is "gay stockholm syndrome"

he is that rarest of creatures on adam:  an underseller.  he lists his true age even though he could easily pass for years younger, posts nondescript photos that belie the true beauty of his body and face, and his simple description gives no indication of his accomplishments and charm.

the first time i saw that smile in person, i was so immediately bowled over that i picked him up, carried him off to his bedroom and did him semi-clothed.  it was hurried and hot, made all the more urgent by the knowledge that his boyfriend could come home at any time (they had an arrangement, he told me, but apparently it hadn't been tested).

in the two years since, we had managed to meet a couple times under similar circumstances, but saturday night was the first time he had come to my place, thus giving us time for both our first leisurely fuck and the long-delayed post-coital interview.

i led with the standard "tell me about your first time" question.  it had happened, he told me, when he was 24, fresh outta grad school, with his new weho roommate.

what he told me next would've shocked me back when i first started asking such questions; it doesn't anymore.

"he fucked me raw for a month before he told me he was positive," he said with a wry smile.

"what happened next?", i asked, although i already had a pretty good idea.

"oh, we were together for four years."

i don't care what you're hearing out there--a lot of our kind really aren't handling this disease very well.