2006-10-14 - 11:58 p.m.
“I’m sorry – but who are you?”
The message popped up on my computer screen out of nowhere.
“Eh? What’s that?” I typed back.
“Your name is on my buddy list, and I can’t figure out why,” the Mysterious Buddy replied.
I looked at the name of the Buddy, someone whom I chatted with a little over three years ago. He was clearly someone who almost never used his AOL account and never deleted a single name on his buddy list.
“Well,” I typed. “Are you some place private? Are there other people in the room?”
The stranger returned, “I’m naked and in my bed. Can’t be more private than that!”
I wrote, “Here is how we know each other. I seem to recall that you and I used to chat about three years ago, when you were in college. And then, a while back, we hooked up and had some really awful sex.”
There was a pause.
“Wait, you’re the guy on Montana Ave?”
I replied that I was. He typed, “Hey! Yeah! Man, that was TORTUROUS. I remember you now. How’s it going?”
I noted that I was doing well. And I inquired after his well being.
“Eh, I’m feeling a little depressed tonight. But, damn, that was some GHASTLY sex. I don’t remember ever having sex that was so AWFUL. Oh my gawd, that sex was the stuff of nightmares. It was the stuff of years of therapy. It was Hell on Earth. I fell to my knees after having sex with you that time and had to wash my mouth out with lye and my cock off with a Brillo pad. It was DREADFUL.”
“Yes, yes,” I noted. “I get it. It wasn’t good for me, either.”
“I’m sorry I was so rude to you. I was going through a very bad time back then. I think that I had been out of work for three months!”
“Aww, that’s too bad,” I replied, preparing to end the conversation. But he continued to cyber-prattle at me, for reasons unclear.
“Do you ever start to think there should be more to life than this?” he typed. I remember his voice as being rather effeminate and nelly, so I could just imagine him saying this with a nasal lilt.
“Umm, yes, there should be, but the world is what it is,” I typed back.
“I want a boyfriend,” he squeaked. “I’m so lonely.”
“Yeah, too bad,” I typed back, biting into an Oreo cookie. And I shut down the computer with a loud click.
Oh, all right, I wasn’t that bad. I chatted with him for a while longer. Yes, I remembered him: He was a curly, red haired boy with a cute ass – and we didn’t click at all. In fact, we clearly did not click so badly that I just told him to head out. And he was so embarrassed that he dashed out of the house without his shirt, his jeans still unbuckled. But, as my mama said, you can’t expect to connect with everyone.
And some fellows are just not your type. It is just the weirdness of the whole Internet Hook Up thing that allows people to get together at these Logan Run-like speeds to get laid. It is all foolishness, as you know. Now, he tells me, he works as the executive assistant at the local mental hospital. I am not joking about that – that is exactly what he said.
Later on, I found myself chatting with ANOTHER young fellow with whom I had chatted quite often a year or two back. In those days, he was an 18 year old kid – a fresh faced, peppy, and innocent college freshman at University of California at Santa Barbara campus. I never had the good fortune to actually meet him – but his photos, available on his gay.com profile, were just adorable. He was a sweet and surprisingly elegant kid, a dapper dresser, and fond of poetry, music, and the occasional night out for underage drinking.
He always called me his “gay daddy,” but with absolute sincerity.
“You’re my gay daddy, you know,” he would chirp. “I think you are terrific. I love that you and I can talk about stuff!”
My silly gay son came from a home where his being gay was clearly a cause for angst and rage – so he always told me he was very happy to have someone older to talk to who was able to pepper him with avuncular advice and kind words. It was a case of some older man telling him that it was all right to like slurping on hose. It’s not as common as you think!
Mind you, the kid was always a total fuck up. I mean, he was a lousy student, would never do his homework, and instead would booze himself into unconsciousness almost every night. As I was often fond of telling him, chastising him good humoredly, “If you were REALLY my gay son, I would put you over my knee and paddle your pert young butt cheeks til they were pink!” The boy would respond like a real life son, deeply contrite over his bad grades or his drinking or whatever wicked teenage-like adolescent horror show he had been up to.
Later, he would check in with me every few weeks to chart the trajectory of a particularly horrific spiral and decline. One night, he might whine about how he hated his school. A few weeks later, he would pop up on my computer screen to tell me that he had transferred to a community college somewhere near his family’s home in the valley. I sort of thought all this was too bad, but he seemed to be fine with it.
After about a six month lapse of communication, he once again popped up on my computer screen to crow about how he had just returned from a trip to Guatemala, where he had met “Rodrigo,” the one true love of his life. Rodrigo was it – there would be no other man to love, he swore. It was to Rodrigo that my young gay son lost his virginity.
He spun me a whole Romance Novel-like tale of hiking out with Rodrigo someplace away from his parents, where they made love in the jungle or on the beach, with monkeys chattering or toucans screeching or something. Rodrigo was also quite wealthy, and seemed to adore keeping my young gay son in the manner he liked. So it sounded like a match made in heaven. I, naturally, wished my gay son well and returned to my business.
About six months after this, my young gay son again returned. Now he was heartbroken! It appeared that Rodrigo had vanished. Or had been driven off by my gay son’s parents, who had dragged my boy back to LA, seemingly against his will. Now my gay son was back at the community college and working at a Borders, which he loathed.
“I just want to go back to Guatemala. I just want to go home to Rodrigo. No one understands that, no one,” he pined.
It seemed rather sad to me. And a few weeks later, my gay son IMmed me once again.
“Guess what!” he squawked, cyberonically. “I’m a STREETWALKER!”
I figured he was joking, of course – almost every gay person jokes once or twice about being a slut, and it is a particularly amusing gag when you are in your early 20s and your sexuality is at its peak, driven by lust makes you feel like you are the sleaziest person in the world. But, in fact, he was not joking. During the intervening months between our last chats, my gay son had turned into a male prostitute – worse, he was a drag prostitute, hauling his ass up and down a particular neighborhood in Norwalk.
“And, dude,” my gay son crowed. “Let me tell you, I am HOT in drag!”
I was really very disturbed and I asked him just why he started doing this sort of thing. He replied, “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it. The money! It’s fantastic! I make hundreds of bucks a night.”
“Hmm, sounds creepy – isn’t it dangerous?”
“Well, kinda – I’ve been raped once or twice. But what the fuck – you know? What do I care. None of it matters at all. My heart is totally empty so it doesn’t really matter what I do.”
The picture of what was going on gradually became clear to me: It was obvious that the kid’s break up with Rodrigo – forced by his parents or otherwise – had caused him to have a sort of emotional breakdown. And this was the only way he could think of getting back at his Real Parents – by the mechanisms of sheer and utter self destruction. He was humiliating and debasing himself utterly, just so he could make the point that his parents could only control him to a certain extent. I had never heard anything quite as sad, really.
The next time I chatted with him, he didn’t mention his new life, but I brought it up. He noted, “Oh I wasn’t going to talk about it because you’d only lecture me about it. And I am tired of being lectured about it. I’m happy! I’m really, really, really happy in drag selling my ass on the boulevard. It’s what I like to do.”
My gay son will not wind up well, I fear. It is an odd and thing to know someone from when he was 18, to when he’s a hardened streetwalking ole whore. And it was strangely heartbreaking to see a young man following a personality arc that is likely to lead to his own despair and debasement.
But sadder still was how dismayed I was that I could not drive out to Norwalk and pose as a john to hire him off the street for a hot and torrid quickie. After all, I am not REALLY his gay daddy, right? Why COULDN’T I do such a thing? Right?
