R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 3

Medical Marijuana Anyone? Knox Dispensary Here I Come!

Medical Marijuana Anyone? Knox Dispensary Here I Come!

For those of you too young to remember or give a shit, there was this sadistic senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who led a Witch Hunt in the early fifties to make a name for himself. It was just after World War II and the Red Scare had gripped the country – now Russia tries to infiltrate us not with spies but through our modems – and McCarthy started accusing names in our society, mostly concentrated in the entertainment industry and Hollywood, as ”card-carrying members of the Communist Party.” A mere whisper from the McCarthy camp and you were blacklisted. Your career was over and for many their lives.

Well, a week ago this past Monday, thanks to the Florida Department of Health and the U.S. Post Office, I became a card-carrying member of the Medical Marijuana Society of America.

Yes folks, I got my official Medical Marijuana card, allowing me to purchase the stuff, and the very next day I made my field trip to Lake Worth, north of Fort Lauderdale in Palm Beach County and the Knox MM Dispensary. I preferred hiking it up to Palm Beach than entering the Manhattan style traffic of Miami, site of the only other dispensaries in south Florida. Broward County where I live has too many school zones – I guess despite all us gay folk, people are fucking like rabbits – but rumor has it one should be opening soon.

Knox was conveniently located just minutes from IS 95 in a bright sleek modern medical office building right on the main drive. True there was a security door to enter – the receptionist had to buzz you in – and a sign on the door stated no firearms inside but I guess this was for all the crazies – conservatives who think MM is the work of the devil, and potheads who would like to clean the place out.

While reviews on the web spoke of long waiting times, there were only half a dozen people before me,I guess, because it was a weekday afternoon. I checked in at the front desk, showed my card, the receptionist looked me up on the state registry and after only a ten minute wait I was whisked inside by one of their young, very Irish, very freckled sales reps who, glancing at my records, said l had an “open order.” That means l could buy just about anything l damn well pleased from capsules to edibles to the concentrated oil cartridges which you smoke in one of those vapo-cigs which is what I chose given my recent past experience with my friend’s stuff.

I made my usual editorial comment how modern medicine had failed me in the pain department. All traditionalists prescribed were pills that knocked you out, made you sleepy, made you dizzy, got you hooked, or left you with a limp dick.

Not MM, my cheerful, forever smiling sales rep said, “All it does is make you happy, make you giggle and give you an attack of the munchies.”

She went on to explain there are about 10 varieties or strains – much like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream – each with a slightly different effect. She recommended I start with Baldor for daytime use which gives you a boost (my testosterone doc told me it was also good for sex) and use Gemma at night when I want to relax and get to sleep. Each came in the form of an concentrated oil cartridge that screwed onto the vapo-cig. I expected the stuff to be a high ticket item but each oil cartridge was just ninety bucks. A few minutes later, I left with my stuff secured discreetly in a little white bag. (Did the white symbolize hope?)

Gemma lives up to its reputation. Three drags about an hour before you go to sleep and its nighty night. No more getting up two or three times in the night to shift from the bed to the sofa where my trusty heating pads await me to ease my chronic lower back and neck pain, the result of my collapsed spine. Plus unlike Advil PM that leaves you with a dopey feeling the next morning, MM has no such lingering effect. Baldor, the daytime stuff however does, so I’ve been taking just a drag along with my Advil daytime, and Bayer Back and Body.

So what’s the verdict you ask? Is MM better than all those pharmaceutical answers? Hopefully, but I still need more time and experience to make a final judgement.

But one thing is certain. Medical marijuana is the only option I got left.

What It Means To Me To Have A Lover

What It Means To Me To Have A Lover



In two weeks I turn 71 – please, my FB friends, no silly birthday greetings, I find that practice infantile – and in my fifty years as an openly gay man I never had reciprocal love from another guy until now, until HE came along. Yea, over the years I had my crushes and infatuations and one sided love affairs that were all in my head like some Harlequin novel addict, but not even with my long term partner who was as conservative as a Presbyterian minister, and as romantic as an unflushed toilet, no, not until now did someone come into my life suddenly – isn’t that always the way – and show me what it’s like to have a man feel the same way about you as you feel about him.

I thought that such feelings were impossible, that they had been blowtorched out of me as I earned my Ph.D. in the Gay School of Hard Knocks.

I was wrong.

True, what turns him on and makes him complete is not what the average boyishly handsome, intelligent and athletic 43 year old guy looks for – HE likes his men older, usually much older than him so though he could be my younger son, and my usual longings are for guys closer to my mythical age – I’ll get to that in a second – not a day goes by that I don’t thank the Gay God for having him. And, right up front, there’s no money or drugs and other inducements involved. All he wants is me. In fact, sorry Just For Men, he even likes the gray in my beard. He’s the one with the naturally manly lean and mean body like it was sculpted in clay and I the guy in fair shape and stretch marks, but he’s the one who keeps telling me I’m the perfect man for him.

On the other hand, in my defense, I ain’t your typical seventy year old either. Most people take me for my fifties – I know that’s still old but seventy sounds like pre-nursing home material – thanks to good genes, not abusing myself when I was young, and keeping my shit together and mind fresh when most guys over 50 – gay or str8 – are train wrecks.

And we’re both fur lovers so it doesn’t take much more than a glance or even just a text to give one another raging hard-ons. Totally compatible in bed from Day One, we also are creative types both in and out of it – I write with words, he writes with music and digital images – and we share the same minimalistic views on life and living.

Most of all, I’ve done things with him that I never did before with any other man like – yes, hold hands. Christ, you would think if you had reached the seventh decade of your gay life holding hands with a guy would have been old hat by now, but not for me. He’ll grab my hand if we’re out and about or lying naked side by side in bed as of it were the most natural thing for two men so into one another could do. And while I’ve kissed guys, no one kisses like he does. Christ, we could probably kiss the afternoon away without even knowing we’ve cum.

After all these years of watching other couples display their affection for one another openly, and feeling a mixture of jealousy and loneliness, it has finally happened to me.

Just the other day I painstakingly went through all our text messages to find out when this all started – it was two years ago come this fall – and I saw we both recognized the chemistry between one another almost immediately.

No, we have not pledged oaths of monogamy, though at my age promiscuity does not hold the glamour it once did, and we both cherish our time apart, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he will go down as the love of my life.

What do they say – better late than never? And if it all ends tomorrow and my tomorrows are reaching their expiration date, I can at least say I had it once in my life.

Thanks, Gay God. I’m a believer again.

“Online Solicitations Require No Reply.”

“Online Solicitations Require No Reply.”

This was the headline of a recent advice column from Miss Manners, today’s Etiquette Guru.

A guy who used online dating sites was complaining that he often never received a response from women to whom he had sent a “personalized letter … five to eight sentences long … pointing out some of our common interests … and suggesting we meet for coffee and conversation.”

He felt their ignoring his little missiles was rude and uncouth. He continued:

“Even if there is no interest on their part, what is so difficult in a response, something like, ‘Thank you for your interest. While l enjoyed reading your profile, l do not see us as a couple. Best of luck in your search.’

Miss Manners’ assessment of the guy’s dilemma went on for six paragraphs (maybe she’s paid by the word like Charles Dickens was. His profuse prose had its reasons, all financial). She ended with:

“Although your tactful wording could serve as a model for rejecting an acquaintance, there is really no charming way, other than silence, to express, ‘l can’t imagine that it would be worth my while to meet you.’

How would l have answered the guy?

What fucken planet did you land from?

I akin hits on the web to cold sales calls, which means if l ain’t interested in your product – which in this case is you – l don’t have to do anything, especially if telling you l’m not interested is going to eat away at my data usage.

Hell, if l hit up a guy l dig and whose profile sounds like we should be compatible once, maybe twice if l just came home from the bar and l’m drunk, and he doesn’t respond, l MOVE ON. I don’t expect shit if he ain’t interested. Like l say, if they don’t want you, they don’t want you.

Yet l get guys who l’m not interested in who have been hitting me up off and on FOR YEARS. If l didn’t respond to your fifth fucken “You’re hot!“ or your tenth, “Breed me,” do you really think haranguing me will work??

Or may be you’re a MORON ( which by the way was a psychiatric clinical term) and don’t get it.

Some of you may consider me tight assed and egocentric to not at least graciously thank a guy who gives a “You’re hot!” compliment but l find if l do, the guy often interprets this as an entree for more extended conservation. Exactly what l don’t want. Sorry guys, l’m on these pick-up sites to get picked up, not chat.

The worse are those guys who you have to insult by clearly stating, “l”m not interested. I’m into fur and you’re not furry. Sorry.” (l don’t have to give a reason why but l do so that the guy sees there’s a very concrete black and white reason why we wouldn’t click) who two weeks later hits me up again with another “Be my baby daddy.”

If there was ever a reason for a mercy killing, this is it.

 

Lauderdale’ s Wilton Manors Stonewall Festival: Oceans of Diversity

Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors Stonewall Festival:

Oceans of Diversity

For the first time in my life as a gay man I wasn’t just an observer but a participant in a gay pride event, and Fort Lauderdale’s, held this past Saturday in the heart of America’s current gay capital, Wilton Manors, was one that could even give NYC’s a run for its money. I had a table hustling my novels of gay erotica under my pen name, RP Andrews, (http://hardcoregayeroticabyrpandrews) shared with my buddy Mike who publicly debuted for the first time his work as a digital artist, even selling some pieces. (You can find his stuff at  http://ttablewheymontage.blogspot.com.)

Yes, there was us vendors and the now traditional parade, and yes even a glorious hot and sweat South Florida afternoon to shine on us – what is a Gay Pride celebration without sweat – but what struck me most were the oceans of diversity that passed by our table. It was if no two people were quite alike, and it was then that I came to my own private conclusion that our people, the gay people of the world, are by far the most diverse people of humanity. Yes, there were those of us who conformed to our subculture’s’s niches, the drags and the leather men and the jockstrapped exhibitionists and butch cut girls, but so many, so many others projected our own “this is me, damn it!” attitude that made this day – our day – particularly special.

As an exhibitor I had the rare opportunity to chat with some young guys and gals (one twenty something young man thought I was sexy – thank you gay God) and to all of them I remarked that, despite Trump, this was a great time to be gay.

True, as a child of the late sixties, I was a part of the gay liberation movement that followed Stonewall, but I still lived and worked for the most part in a world where being homosexual was a stigma. Today, even the highest in our society can be chastised, even banished for making a mere homophobic remark. But my young people, as happy and excited as they were, the joy of the day lighting up their faces, didn’t quite see it that way, and intimated they wanted more.

Damn right we do. Yea, we’ve come a long way baby, but we ain’t quite there yet. But numbers speak louder than words and if the thirty five thousand people who came to Wilton Drive on Saturday are any indication, getting there is just a heartbeat away.

Happy Pride, not just on our day, but everyday of our lives.

 

Those That Shout Don’t Get Ulcers

Those That Shout Don’t Get Ulcers

My good friend Donnie is a genuinely nice guy. But sometimes being too nice and holding it all in with people you should not be nice to can lead to a terrible case of ulcers which were uncovered during his last colonoscopy.

Now it’s true his sixty hour a week job as a high powered ad executive, has its moments. But there are other stress points Donnie can easily eliminate.

Just a month ago I witnessed some obnoxious jerks at Donnie’s pool party, who kept grabbing at his tits and crouch when he repeatedly told them to cool it. After they left he vowed they would never be invited again, but in hindsight he should have told them to “get the fuck out” the day of the party.

Or what about the meth head cutie and buddy of Donnie’s from Georgia who was invited to stay the weekend but ended up barricaded in his guest bedroom getting high instead of mingling. Had I been the host I would have told him that if he wanted to get high all alone he could do that much better – at home.

So I’m already working on the “Doing A Ray” curriculum which is telling assholes exactly what you think of them, sometimes punctuated by lots of shouting and the use of colorful New York vernacular.

In the meantime I’ve asked Donnie to do a demo the next time he is on a plane for work. The first passenger that pisses him off gets a loud “Go fuck yourself!” If the female attendant attempts to intervene, he’s to tell her to go fuck herself. And If it is a male attendant he is to grab him, throw him in the john and savagely gang rape him.

How I know he will be successful is when I get that call from his partner that he was escorted off the plane by the feds.

Remembering Dad

Remembering Dad

While gay guys are supposed to identify more with their mothers and I guess that was true in my case too, my confidence in being the gay man I am today came from my Dad. Gone now twenty years.

No, I never had sex with my dad nor did my Dad want sex with me. But there were moments during my adolescence that I wish he had.

Though plain featured Eastern European in the looks department (my grandparents were from Slovakia), not a giant of man at 5-7, not very interested in sports, a high school drop-out, and not very demonstrative, he nonetheless impressed me with his naturally masculine demeanor and hirsute, stocky – not sloppy – physique in the days when gyms were reserved for bodybuilders.

It was that body – seeing my dad naked as he emerged from the shower – that awakened my sexuality and gave me my first hard-ons when I turned 12 and I began to see him emerging in me, particularly the fur. Then, I felt self-conscious, but years later as I entered gay life, I wore it like a badge of honor for it was my fur – much like my dad’s in texture and abundance – that separated me from other guys, taller guys, handsomer guys and, even as I got older, placed me in a sought after league of my own.

Again my father was not the sterotypical sports freak dad and I must lay blame for my disinterest in competitive sports at his doorstep. True, not having those skills so associated with being male in American society caused me grief in high school – had my high school featured gymnastics or wrestling I would have excelled – but that failing was more than compensated by other, far more important virtues he instilled and cultivated in me – patience and imagination.

From my slightly psychotic mother, Russian in background (yes, I’m a Slavic pedigree), I inherited my wildness, short temper, and, yes, cynicism about people and life. Ah, but from my father I learned that listening got you further than shouting, a trait that served me well in my decades in public relations where learning how to get and give was paramount to success.

And while he never graduated high school and was a factory laborer all his life, with a brief stint in the Air Force where he bailed out over Nazi Europe and became a World War II hero in the process, I think if he had had the benefit of an education, he would have become an architect or engineer, someone destined to build things. He often helped me with those “hands-on” school projects where that knack to think outside the box was needed, and my curiosity about things and visual sense ( I still assemble thinks looking at the pictures, not reading the directions) blended well with my interest in reading I inherited by osmosis from my mother, an avid reader all her life.

Unlike with my mother, I rarely quarreled with my father – he was just not the quarreling kind – and I often wonder if his patience and holding back his frustrations with his wife, an unsettled and unsettling personality who often berated him, led to his early demise at 74 from a stroke. I blamed her for his death throughout the thirteen years she survived him, but now both of them are gone, lying side by side for eternity, and there is no use in crying over spilled milk.

I never discussed being gay with either of them nor did they ever really bring the subject up despite my disinterest in women. But I often wonder to this day how he would have reacted had he known or I placed whatever he might have thought squarely on the table.

Maybe, he might have just listened.

All I can tell you, incestuous as it may sound, I still subliminally remember my first sexual awakenings with my Dad every time I kiss a man.

Join Us At Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors Stonewall Gay Pride Festival This Saturday, June 16

Join Us At Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors Stonewall Gay Pride Festival This Saturday, June 16

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If you shout back, “Fuck yea!” like you mean it, you’ll get a free USB with a sample chapter of the audiobook edition (narrated by me) of my latest work of gay erotica, “For The Love of Samuel.” It’s a story of love lost and love found, where an aging Manhattan gay man comes into possession of the dog tag of a long dead Civil War soldier which promises him eternal youth and a chance at meeting the live of his life. For more info and a free listen of some audiobook chapters,  check out:

Http:/hardcoregayeroticabyrpandrews.com

I will be joined by my buddy who goes by Ttable Whey and who’ll be displaying – and selling – some of his unique digitized photo montage art as well as playing electronic music he writes including a club music track incorporating sound bites from my Audiobook Edition.

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You can find his art at:

Ttablewheymontage.blogspot.com

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And his music which includes DJ tracks at:

Ttablewhey.bandcamp.com and djmikemcq.blogspot.com

It should be a fun afternoon. See you there!

The One Guy Who Did More For Me Than Anyone Else ln My Life

The One Guy Who Did More For Me Than Anyone Else ln My Life

His name is Lonnie and though I’ve known him less than a few years, he was the one person above all others, including my ex-partner of 46 years and my fair weather friends, who came through when I needed someone the most.

I met Lonnie, a nurse practitioner who travels across the U.S. monitoring drug trials for the phamas, through a mutual friend Billy Splenda. We hit it off instantly. Two nerds who have our shit together sexually with a twisted, sarcastic view on life. But Lonnie has also got caregiver in his DNA, and when he heard I was having shoulder surgery he instantly offered to re-arrange his work schedule so he would be free to stay with me, as he put it, “to drug you up so much I’ll pimp your ass out and you won’t even know it.” (Still waiting, Lonnie, still waiting.)

Seriously, he took me the morning of my surgery and stayed with me through Preop where, while everyone else was shitting bricks on what was going to happen to them next, we laughed and joked right to the moment they wheeled me into the OR.

And we had a lot to laugh about, like the swishy nurse assistant who remembered me from my back surgery two years before and shaved my left shoulder and upper chest area with a leering glimmer in his eyes (“I forgot how hairy you are..” ). If I ever entertained going for transgender surgery they’d have to tack on an extra five grand just to laser off all my gorilla fur.

Or when the intake nurse kept asking me about ailments I didn’t have, then realized she was looking for a woman.

Duh.

In recovery, I woke right up and, they tell me, entertained the staff like a standup comedian while Lonnie waited for me up in my room. If I had been able to get a private room which are at a premium, he would have even arranged to have a recliner brought to my room so he could be there all night just in case.

While I had had grave trepidations about the surgery, everything went like clockwork. But instead of taking me straight home the following day after I was discharged and putting me to bed with a hot tottie (or knocking me out like he promised so he could start pimping our my tight hairy hole), Lonnie swung through Wilton Manors, Lauderdale,’s gay ghetto, where we hit thrift shop row, I bought a six foot bright pink metal flamingo to add to my patio’s collection and we had lunch at a new trendy outdoor Greek restaurant. Later, without even a nap, we hit the Ramrod, our leather bar, shaking our booties on its tiny dance floor to the wee hours of the morning.

So much for convalescence. My surgeon, a cute guy who resembled Houdini, would have flipped out.

We repeated the party circuit Saturday, and Sunday hit Hunters, Lauderdale’s most popular dance bar frequented by gays and str8s alike, where we boogied to its Studio 54 disco tracks all night. Playing my bodyguard, Lonnie made sure people steered clear of my sling – the shoulder variety.

After all, I had just had major surgery 48 hours before.

A bamboo devotee with a virtual rain forest at his home in St. Augustine, Lonnie took me Monday to the largest bamboo nursery in South Florida located in Palm Beach where I bought a half dozen varieties that Lonnie planted around my house, his humble beginnings as a Texas farm boy pretty much in evidence.

While I enjoy living alone, I had so grown so use to Lonnie’s company, entertaining me with his one liners, funny patient/doctor tales and a totally warped sense of humor totally in sync with mine, that I didn’t need my Percocets, and when he finally left that Wednesday I was kinda lost.

Look up the word “friend” in the dictionary and you’ll find Lonnie’s ruggedly handsome face.

Smiling as always.

Attention Whores

Attention Whores

attention whore (noun): an individual with an exhibitionist streak often rooted in low self esteem who will do practically anything to attract the notice of others. While ideally that notice should generate a positive response, the main objective of an attention whore is to get noticed, positively or negatively.

I should know. I’m an attention whore, always have been, rooted in a terrible adolescence where l was singled out as the class nerd, an experience that left being permanently emotionally scarred. To shove the shit right back in their face, I was a straight A student in high school and maintained a 4.0 average in college and graduate school, all while working part-time. I was a Type A all of my working years, driven by my determination to be lauded and recognized, and in gay life my need, no, my hunger for attention – more than the sex – led me to prance around wherever l could shirtless. For you see, l discovered early that the thick fur that enveloped my sturdy little frame and had caused me embarrassment in my high school locker room was my claim to fame in a world built on physicality.

A natural born iconoclast, l always went against the grain, doing papers in school on th atypical subjects, creating my own inhouse ad agency for the healthcare system l served at as its communications director when everybody else hired an agency instead; and when guys in the leather bars l frequented in the now gone West Village of the 1980’s-90’s New York, or in Chicago or L. A. or here in Fort Lauderdale would wear jeans and a harness on a Saturday night, l opted for a singlet, no shirt or designer underwear.

Just to be different, just to be noticed.

It was rather late in life – yes, not until my sixties –  that l got over my low self esteem and had confidence in myself and let the rest of the world be damned. Like one ex fuck buddy told me in a huff, “You’re the only guy I know that says it like it is and doesn’t give a fuck what people think.”

Yet old habits die hard, and l continue my exhitionist behavior long after it was “appropriate” (for a 70 year old faggot) because, well, once an attention whore, always an attention whore.

Just recently l was walking over to our local dance club, Hunters, in a  of pair of short shorts that showed off my muscular hairy legs, when l overheard a twink a few yards behind me say in a low voice to his cohorts, referring obviously to me: “l wouldn’t wear shorts that short in public.”

I slowed up just enough so they would catch up to me, then with a smile that would turn a pit in hell artic, l buzzed back, all folksy, “You think these are short? You should see the ones I wear when I go to the supermarket.”

Zap.

In my latest work of erotic fiction, “For The Love of Samuel,” my protagonist Billy Veleber, once an aging Manhattan gay man, now gradually becoming young again thanks to the magical powers of a long dead Civil War soldier’s dog tag, visits the new Eagle, what is left of the City’s once colorful leather scene. There he encounters…

“In between the groupies are some of the oldest members of our clan,The Old Guard, usually alone because most of their cronies are already dead,  and usually with enough keys hanging from their belts to rival a night watchman at the Chrysler Building, the fucken handkerchiefs hanging from their pockets, so Twentieth Century, or the best of them in faded, stretched out jock straps that should be on Antiques Road Show along with their owners. Yea it’s true, the older some of these guys got, the less they wore. For attention l guess.

Admired or ridiculed, it doesn’t matter; the greatest sin is to be ignored.”

 

 

 

The Supreme Court “Wedding Cake” Decision: We Dodged The Bullet

The Supreme Court “Wedding Cake” Decision:

We Dodged The Bullet

It could have turned out horribly different with the Court deciding to side on those who would use their religious beliefs to discriminate against us, as Trump’s people wanted, which could have brought an end to our fight for full civil rights.

But although the majority of the justices gave the narrow win to the baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because men getting married was against the Bible, they emphasized the importance that civil rights, the rights of everyone of us, usurp any one individual’s religious rights.

As Justice Kennedy wrote in the ruling, “such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”

So why did the Court rule in favor of baker then? Because when the case went before the liberal Colorado Civil Rights Commission, one commission member scolded the baker for rejecting the gay couple’s request for a wedding cake on religious grounds, an argument he said had been used to justify slavery, the Holocaust and all sorts of other discrimination.

Interesting enough this was the second ruling in which Gorsuch, the conservative justice appointed by Trump, sided with the liberal members of the Court.

But though we may have dodged the bullet, only a minority of the states – 22 – have laws forbidding businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation. Federal law does not.

And guess who runs the White House and Congress right now.