'Bay Guardian' forum
Under pen names and porn names, our writers tell tales

Hail to the King

I convinced some friends to accompany me to eXtreme Elvis's anti-eviction party by promising them a wide array of debaucherous activities, but being a total lightweight with alcohol and drugs, I declined bottles of beer, whip-it balloons, and sniffers filled with poppers. My friends didn't. Within a couple of hours they were totally wasted, and there I was, stranded and completely sober, in San Leandro. And as if that wasn't depressing enough, the boy I had been hardcore crushing on was making out with someone else. That's what convinced me to turn to the Jägermeister. Soon I was wrasslin' anyone who dared come near me. I saw a video camera shining its light on me, but I didn't care at the time. A moment later a friend was leading me into eXtreme Elvis's bedroom with a $20 bill. To raise the rent money to stay in their home, eE and his housemates had come up with a naughtier version of the kissing booth: a dollar a minute to be alone with Elvis. For 20 minutes he was to service me in any way I wished. Like a true professional, he took charge: after setting his timer, he strapped on a leather collar with a metal lead, asked me what music I wanted to hear (he chose Cannibal Corpse when I was too incoherent to answer), turned on the flashing lights, and licked and sucked my face, toes, and fingers until the alarm sounded. The promise had been that I'd be alone with the King, but I could hear and see people in the doorway (which was inefficiently covered by an Elvis rug) taking Polaroids, pointing, and laughing. Fuckers. I didn't know until days later that he had just performed a set and had peed himself and shit his own pants minutes earlier. Still, all in all it wasn't so unpleasant an experience. People who hear the story ask me what it was like to make out with Elvis, and I have to admit, he wasn't bad. (Cordelia Manpurse)

The big feeling

Back in college, during one of those all-night gab sessions in which you talk about everything but what might be on tomorrow's midterm, my housemate disclosed to me how she came to know orgasm in the fourth grade. One day while she and her friend were experimenting with Mr. Showerhead's various settings, they figured out that if you stuck it between your legs it felt especially good. Not yet knowing what an orgasm was or that it had anything to do with sex, they dubbed it "the Big Feeling" and made regular play dates with the nozzle after school. It occurred to me that the experience of orgasm removed from the connotations of sex (the emotional responsibility, sore pelvic muscles, conviction that your "oh" face looks dumb) or masturbation (the guilt incumbent on those indoctrinated into Catholicism, fear of getting caught, conviction that the rock stars and admired authors peering from your bedroom walls also think your "oh" face looks dumb) would be something quite sublime. Alas, it was too late for me: orgasm had already been intrinsically tied to sex – solo, duo, or otherwise. Not that I was complaining, but I envied my friend's uncomplicated pleasure. A year or so later I was awoken from a nap by that familiar and exquisite grip. I was very sure I hadn't been dreaming about doing it with the hot Lacanian in my semiotics class. It was more like I had entered a Jackson Pollock painting, all those splashes of energy rushing around me. I'm not sure what Mr. Freud or Ms. Beauvoir would have to say about all of that, but I'd like to think that I had come as close as my nonvirginal self could get to the essential meaning of the Big F. Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream. (Pepper Grove)

Lives of a nipple

Late on a March night in the 1980s, sleet rattling against the window of my tawdry studio apartment with the smelly, Martian green carpeting, Spandau Ballet on the radio, and me on the futon (bought for $84 some months earlier from the lesbian-run factory near the capitol building), snuggled against a medical student. Cozy. We have been talking, with the breathless enthusiasm of people who are attracted to each other and cannot get the words out fast enough. In a ritual invocation of heterosexual privilege, he has assured me that he is "straight," but somehow his shirt has flown off to the far side of the room, and I find that I am examining his right nipple with my tongue. It is a lovely nipple, lickable even, within its nimbus of blond hairs. I am curious about the left one, but it's too far away. I move to kiss him, but no. That is a boundary. He shifts away from me.

"I'm intimidated by other guys' dicks," he says, introducing and dismissing the subject of dicks in one fell sentence. Of course, we are full of 25¢ beers from the White Horse Inn and are lucky to be speaking in sentences at all, let alone sentences about dicks, a subject in which I have a more than idle interest, especially as it pertains to him, or his.

I have met this man before, and I will meet him again, many times and in many places, though he will always have a different name, and sometimes his shirt will fly off and sometimes it won't, and sometimes there will be hair around his nipples and sometimes there won't be, but he will never kiss me and he will never show me his dick, nor will I show him mine, because that is the pattern, and sex is always a pattern of one kind or another – always a rehearsal or a revisiting or an attempt at redemption, except when it isn't, and I still have no idea what men mean when they tell me they are straight, or "straight," and I wonder if they have any idea either, but I have been down this rutted road to nowhere too many times and who, finally, cares? (Henry Goff)

18

It was fall 1988 and I met this girl over at my friend Mike's apartment. I think her name was Renee. She looked like what a girl named Renee would look like. Kind of skanky but kind of hot, by 1988 standards that is. (OK, sure I'm objectifying her, but I was 18 and I was a dude and that's what happens. You're young, you're stupid, and you don't know how to behave properly in public.) We got juiced up and split in my Toyota to an undisclosed parking lot.

There we were, steaming up the windows. She made some "I'm into it" sounds. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. I was pretty awesome with the chicks, man. Actually, at that point in my life I'd engaged in intercourse maybe four and a half times. There was a lot of front-seat foreplay. We were touching things, getting kind of sweaty, full-on parking lot paradise. Finally, it was time to commit to the whole transaction. I had no "protection" with me, and neither did she. I went for it anyway, and she said nothing to discourage me. Yeah, all right ... sex! For a second.

Now, I don't think I'm psychotic or anything, but sometimes I can be in the middle of something rather important and just kind of go away. In this instance, wherever I went to was inhabited by a cartoon dog wearing a trench coat (like the old McGruff "Take a Bite Out of Crime" guy) who looked at me and said, "Get out of here." So I did.

I dropped Renee off at her car and drove home, feeling as if I had averted some horrible accident.

The next time I heard from her, she was calling to let me know that my friend, who had hooked it up with her friend the same night, had hooked said friend up with a fertilized egg. I informed my friend, he slid me a few hundred dollars, which I in turn passed on to Renee, who then passed the money on to her friend, who eliminated the aforementioned situation.

What did I learn from all of this? Most likely nothing. I was 18 and I was a dude. (Phengren Oswald)

I remember every one

It starts to be a blur after a while. I don't really think about it – sex – in formative context too much anymore. Grappling with one anecdote leads me to others. Blow jobs in parking lots with some sexy-as-hell, confused frat boy ... old friends I got reacquainted with at the Lone Star (pre-bear days), who proceeded to tie me up ... trying out the sling ... knives, whips, chains.

It becomes a legacy: dead fuck buddies, lovers still alive despite all odds, clean-and-sober exes living in Europe, cute boys who are now college professors, beautiful fuckups who broke my heart and are still wrecks ... this could go on all day, for a long time.

It's unclear and unfair to say which of these experiences really formed me – which was my crucible. The best orgasm, the nicest body, the best smell, the true loves? Sometimes sex was just a part of the insanity. The Bernal Hill radio tower kind of stands out, but so does a really cold January night on Tank Hill, a hot day on the beach in the cove down the break-your-neck trail many wouldn't hazard.

Sometimes it's about being in love, and sometimes a fuck's a fuck. There's still a thrill to good sex with a stranger, and there's a lot of joy in getting off with my boyfriend three times in one day. It's a continuum to me, and I've been busy. In spite of some hard living, my body still feels pretty good – I had really good sex this morning, and I'm still hungry. (Nick Peters)

Kiss and tell

People never talk about sex, and I wish we did. I want us to talk about it for real, not like Cosmo's "five things that drive him wild in bed," or the hypermacho, I'm-not-gay, "Follow me to Hooters" bumper sticker I saw last night. Even among friends there's often a minefield of unspoken rules, codes of ethics, and invisible borders divorcing what is "juicy gossip" from what is simply "too much information."

I want us to talk about how sex transcends the dingy little room you're fucking in, how you forget the futon pad thrown on the floor, the Styrofoam takeout boxes making the room smell like curry, and the dusty grime on the floor. This place is nothing like the one you're in when you're fucking.

It's not like masturbating, where you can soften the fantasy, pretend that being fucked up the ass actually feels like something soft and warm and rubbing. That it doesn't fill you up, rip you open, and make you feel terribly empty all at once. When you're actually fucking, you have to deal with the things you blurred out when you were only thinking about doing what you're doing. You notice that he breathes on your shoulder when he's pressed very close to you, that his lips and teeth are touching your bone, the humidity that collects and condenses on your skin there. You notice the wetness of your pussy hair touching the top of your leg. You feel the short bristle at the nape of his neck and taste the sweat and sex on your own breath.

Later you go home. You collect your damp and itchy underwear, shove them in your pocket or ball them up in your fist with your keys. You wish you had your toothbrush. Your skin feels dry and tired, and you go home. You talk to your roommate, or you call up your friends. They ask, "So did you get laid?" and you shrug your shoulders and say, "Yeah," as if it weren't a big deal. As if it were a phone call, or a mediocre movie. (Jane Love)

Sex and the single boy

Sending a child to an all-boys boarding school is as grievous – and overlooked – a form of child abuse as exists. Did you ever wonder why England is such a weird country? Why the decision making of many American leaders seems shaped by twisted psychosexual impulses? Look no further than the Exeters, Andovers, and Choates – upper-class hellholes festering in the New England countryside.

I'm not sure if all-boys schools still exist – I hope not – but they flourished in my day, and the experience triggered behavior that is, even years later, unspeakable. Let it just be said that 15-year-old boys were not meant to weather the hormonal storms for months on end while caged with their own.

And so it was that, one spring break, I was a guest at my Aunt Sophie's house in Maine. My father and stepmother (number four, but by then who was counting?) were vacationing elsewhere, and I – spiritually adrift – was left to brave bitter March winds while wandering the shorelines of picturesque coves. I spent considerable time outdoors, because inside I had little to do but take to my bed and masturbate. I reached orgasm 18 times in one afternoon, and – sure I'd pay a price for so much pleasure – had vowed to curb my appetites.

One gray afternoon I leaned out over a rock to better observe a lobster crawling along the bottom, lost my balance, and fell into the frigid water. I dragged myself out and, as best I could in 30 pounds of waterlogged clothes, ran back to Auntie S.'s well-kept 11-bedroom, three-servant hideaway. She spotted me as I ran up the stairs to the bathroom and was waiting with a towel when I emerged from the shower 10 minutes (and two orgasms – I couldn't help myself) later.

Although we barely knew each other – or perhaps because of that – she stepped forward and began vigorously patting me down with a towel. I could not, despite my best efforts, keep my mind from a third go-around, and my penis quickly betrayed my interest. Sophie concentrated her attention in that direction, and within a matter of seconds my legs were trembling and another orgasm swept through my 14-year-old body.

As Sophie patted away traces of the encounter with the thick towel – I still remember the SPM monogram after all these years – I felt my cheeks begin to burn with embarrassment, although truth be told, I had little to do with what had happened. Sophie, sensing my discomfort, faced me and told me not to worry about a thing.

"I know it's difficult," she said in a motherly tone, "being away at school all those months."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, my voice shaking.

"I heard you playing with yourself yesterday," she said. "Don't worry, I understand."

I couldn't have said a word if I'd been able to talk.

"How many times did you do it?" she asked.

"18," I managed to whisper.

"That's nice," she said, leading me by the hand into the bedroom. (Andrew Zerman)