R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 53

“Honk Social Driving” – What the Fuck’s Left?

“Honk Social Driving” – What the Fuck’s Left?

What comes up on Growl’r the other day then a shout-out for a new free phone app called “Honk Social Driving,” which allows you to “meet men in traffic by inserting their license plate.”

Okay, it’s not enough there are so many hook-up sites, I think there’ll soon be one for guys who only dig uncut Eskimos, or that texting has become more infectious than Ebola. No, now we can lasso our fuck for the night by grabbing his license plate – while driving of course, silly.

So let me get this straight (that wasn’t a pun): My 2009 orange Honda Element has been behind this 2014 white Lexus convertible for about a mile when he and I pull up to the red light at a busy intersection. I casually gawk over and see he’s hot. Fortyish, bearded, tanned and from what I can see of his body from the window up, muscled. Hmmmm… As he makes his move in the turn lane, I memorize his plate and keep repeating it to myself until I can grab my Samsung Galaxy – the light has changed and the cars behind me are already honking – open up the “Honk Social Driving” app and feed in his number. That is, as I’m driving forty miles an hour down the crowded boulevard. It’s rush hour, silly.

So what is “Honk Social Driving” going to tell me about my mysterious, handsome, would be paramour? That he’s 5’9’ and 275 pounds, which means there’s either a lot of muscle from the window crack down or he’s been living in a refrigerator. I flick the “send” icon and keep eyeing for a response Instead, of course, stopping for the next red light which leads to a ten year old plebian Jeep ramming into me.

The next morning I wake up in the hospital to find my left leg in a cast, my car has been totaled, and about the only thing that’s intact is my Samsung, which lies on my bed stand.

With great pain, I stretch over to grab it, forever the curious, and check for messages. And there’s a message, yes, a message from HIM, FU 7777.

“Sorry we’re not a match. I prefer guys who drive Coopers.”

The Crystal Meth Playbook

The Crystal Meth Playbook

Remember the buzz you got when you took some over-the-counter cold med to get through work? Well, multiply that by a thousand and you have some idea what it’s like to be on that Big Bad Wolf, Meth.

As someone who’s done the shit every which way, who better to tell you the cold hard facts?

First, what’s meth’s allure?

It puts you in the most euphoric, sensual state you will ever experience in your life, and even if the guy you’re with looks like Woody Allen’s older brother, he’s the love of your life and a non-stop sex machine. And so are you. (Even if your dicks are going nowhere, but more on that later.)

And since it kills your appetite, meth’s great if you wanna lose those stubborn five pounds in two days, what I like to call the Tina Fuck Diet.

So what’s the problem?

If you’re a top, your dick may feel like you could fuck half the humpy guys in your town, but when you look down at it, it’s the size of your thumb. (And neither youth nor 300 mgs. of Viagra will make any difference.)

If you’re a bottom, your hole is insatiable and when you’ve run out of men, that plunger in the bathroom starts looking real interesting.

Because your dick feels so great, you keep pulling on it for hours, even days, til it’s raw. Cumming is almost impossible.

Despite all this talk of an epidemic, the shit is hard to get because most of the dealers and middlemen run things like amateur hour, not as a business. And I’m not even talking about getting arrested and fucking up your life, especially if you’re a professional and licensed. It’s no surprise that meth-related arrests are up here in South Florida, a hotbed of meth use.

Hundreds of dollars go up in smoke, up your nose or in your arm for one night of fun.

There’s no such thing as quality control. Some stuff sucks, other stuff smoked feels like you’re slamming. (And the difference between smoking it and shooting up with it is like the difference between kindergarten and graduate school.)

You are totally dehydrated for days, drink water non-stop, can’t take a shit, and your urine smells like a garbage dump.

You are wired for days and can’t sleep unless your buddy slips you some Xanax (yep, one drug leads to another). So what else is there to do at 4 a.m. in the morning when you realize after playing with it for two hours, your super sensitive cock ain’t gonna do anything, but vacuum your place twice, right? Or do a five hour work-out at the gym – if a heart attack doesn’t get you.

Til the shit wears off, you become increasingly paranoid. Either everyone’s looking at you because you’re the hottest motherfucker in the room. Or everyone’s looking at you because they know you’re tweaking.

Unlike alcohol which is a dead giveaway, you can control your outward appearance and behavior if you put your mind to it. Like slowing down on the smack speed talk or your driving on a local street.

And, of course, if you can’t deal with the inevitable crashes, hey, you just do some more. Chances are in six months your job’s gone, your apartment’s history, your dog is in the shelter, your teeth are getting loose because of lack of saliva, you look like shit, and you’re searching out a five hundred dollar a month room in some flophouse. I know of at least half a dozen guys who ended up this way if you think I’m bullshitting you. One beauty I knew fell asleep at the wheel after two weeks of non-stop partying and went into a canal. Dead of drowning at 42.

But hey, that’s the price for feeling good, REAL good, right buddy?

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe: II

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe: II

I had smoked or snorted crystal meth a few times with so-so tricks who wooed me with their stash (as I would woo guys years later) and who were transformed into the loves of my life when we got high. Again, our dicks became useless, but unlike coke or poppers, the high was smooth and sustainable, and made your entire body one highly sensual organ. But I never sought out the stuff until I met Shaw.

Shaw was that hairy stud who I based my character Gil in “The Czar of Wilton Drive” on, the guy with the incredibly handsome black Irish looks and a smile and personality that could convince you to jump off a bridge, who I met on one of the hook-up sites. That first night, he mainlined right in my bedroom, and by the time we met again, I was ready. Here I had silently laughed at my beach buddy Trig for shooting up heroin and here I was, a former Sunday school teacher, hospital executive and college prof, trusting a guy who was virtually a complete stranger to “dart” me, mesmerized both by his male beauty, his infectious smile, and what I had seen slamming Lady M had done for him.

“You got good veins,” he complemented me as he tightened a belt around my forearm.

“I guess working out does have its virtues,” I laughed.

He instructed me to make a fist for a second, then relax.

The immediate reaction was intensive heat running throughout my body, then a total tsunami of utter euphoria. In fact, I shouted “Fuck!” so loud that first time, Shaw gently cautioned me to lower my voice so I wouldn’t wake up the people in the apartment next door. (“These bedroom walls are paper thin,” he quipped.)

Smoking was like kindergarten, slamming like getting your Ph.D.

Now picture this scene: two hairy naked men, high on one another and now high on junk. So what if he was a bottom and I was a top and my Daddy Dick was making an exit?

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said and I honestly think he meant it. The pure sensuality of the moment as he oh so very, very slowly rubbed his black kid gloves across my chest and we kissed was worth a thousand erections.

At about one that night, after two hours of sensual sex like I had never had in my life, Shaw abruptly left, saying he needed to pick up a buddy at the airport flying in from Australia. Trolling the websites a bit later, I found he had changed his post to “Two total bottoms looking for hot tops,” but no matter. I had had my fun.

After futilely trying to cum, then to sleep (I learned later Benadryl would knock you out), I spent the day cleaning my house and going to the gym. I was still grinding my teeth at six o’clock that night and drinking bottled water like I had been on the Mohave Desert.

Shaw and I got together a few more times – including a once-in-a-lifetime threesome – then lost touch, which strangely is something I’m actually grateful for. He easily could have been my Satan in the wilderness. And I’m no Jesus. In fact, the last time we slammed, he was surprised how relatively calm I was compared to that first wild time.

Was I getting hooked too?

Then again every time since I’ve smoked the shit with another guy, it’s been my feeble attempt to replicate that first time with Shaw, one of the truly handsomest men I’ve ever known in my checkered gay life.

Now, for all its evils, and there are plenty – that you can google – about the only good thing I can say about meth besides the high is that unlike alcohol whose effects you can’t mask, intellectually you can alter your behavior with Lady M if you need to: talk slower, watch your speed and be extra attentive to the road when driving….

But also being, I think, a rational pragmatist, I can see how it can be, ah, so addictive, equating it with total hot sex, though ironically, when you’re on it, you rarely end up cumming.

Crazy, ain’t it?

And at the cost of two hundred fifty bucks for a glassine envelope the size of a packet of Splenda, M can take you down the primrose path of self-ruination quicker than the Titanic sunk. That’s why I’ve met several guys over the last few years who boasted dealing the shit and making three to five thousand dollars a week, only to end up totally broke, living in some flophouse, and looking for another puff from my pipe.

I remember once at his place, Shaw pulled out a Glad bag of junk you could stuff a steak in. There had to be as much as five grand’s worth sitting there conveniently by his bed.

Today, while I have a small stash hidden away in one of the tiny thread drawers of my grandmother’s antique Singer sewing machine, I’ve convinced myself it’s there for that occasional hairy hottie who needs a bit of an extra incentive to come over.

Hey, if anybody could become a meth head, it’s me. I’m retired, have no job I have to go to, am financially comfortable and so have plenty of play money for candy.

But I know better.

Right?

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

Drugs, not in a good way, play a pivotal role in two of my books, my novel, “The Czar of Wilton Drive,” published last summer by Kokoro Press, and my upcoming novella, “Buy Guys” to be published in early 2016 by Wilde City Press. So like just about everything else I write about, I needed to experience the drug world for myself. Of all of my walks on the wild side, this was, no doubt, my most dangerous.

Hey, this blog is called “Confessions,” isn’t it?

Unlike many members of my generation, the generation of Vietnam and LSD, I was pretty much a virgin when it came to drugs. About the only thing I remember using during my college days were “black beauties,” a form of speed to keep guys like me going who were doing school full time while working through school part time. Hell, I never even smoked grass, all the rage, and, in fact, felt a bit left out I hadn’t.

That’s why I was surprised, yes even shocked, when decades later lying on the beach, a guy I met through another beach buddy – I’ll call him Trig – who had been a white upper middle class Jewish boy from the Jersey burbs, boasted he had done heroin – heroin! – while in college, and that even losing a few friends to OD’s hadn’t stopped him from trolling the streets of Harlem for horse. By the time I met him, he was a barely functioning alcoholic, but I wondered if his walk on the wild side in his youth was at least partially responsible for his early dementia now at 62.

If you could label poppers a drug, then my next step into that world came at Man’s Country in the early seventies, a now defunct bath house on the lower West side in Manhattan, where for two bucks on a Tuesday night you could rent a locker and have fun. It was there I was introduced to the little brown bottle which I forever after psychologically equated with good sex. A guy I had made it with it that night taught me to drink plenty of water afterwards to avoid a headache. But once AIDS hit and it was thought bad bottles of poppers were the culprit (we wish), the formulas changed and the high was never quite the same. Sales of poppers also went underground like buying liquor during Prohibition, and the code term, “video head cleaner” was born.

In the late eighties, working professionally in New York, with a stuck-in-the-mud partner who preferred his Mets over sex, I developed my own stable of fuck buddies, mostly former playmates from the East Side Baths. One of them, Doug, a cameraman for NBC’s Today Show, lived in North Jersey about 40 minutes from me on Staten Island. I remember visiting his place after work where we’d first have a round of beers, then smoke a joint, nothing like the medical marijuana Vinny, my wheelchair lover in PA would share with me decades later that was almost as good as meth without killing your erection. Then we’d go upstairs to the bedroom and snort a few lines of coke. That was my first experience with the white stuff which I equated with the high I got from poppers: a quick spike, then a drop off and a need to do more. Even though we were still in our early forties, by the time Doug and I were done with the coke, our dicks were virtually useless.

By the nineties I was through with most of my international traveling to Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, even Australia, and was snowbirding more and more in Fort Lauderdale which was just coming into its own as a major gay mecca. I eventually bought a one bedroom condo for twenty thousand dollars in Wilton Manors which at the time was a shit hole. (The place was later valued at over one hundred and seventy fifty thousand dollars.)

I’ll never forget Rick, my six foot five Texan from Austin who I made back in the New York baths, visiting me one snowbird vacation, and how we rolled around on my outside terrace in the dark, high on cocaine he had brought, our dicks as soft as putty.

Ah, but it took early retirement and my permanent move to Lauderdale from NYC, to ride me to the top of the drug shit pile with Lady M by my side.

Wednesday: Part II of My Sorry Life As a Druggie Kinda Wannabe

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good …

Look, I’ve said it before: I view our winning anti-discrimination laws in the workplace and all the rest even more important than winning the gay marriage fight. After all, you can’t live on love.

Well, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that existing federal law prohibits employment discrimination against federal workers based on sexual orientation. It’s hoped that this will trickle down to private employers, too, since history has shown that Commission rulings have been highly effective in influencing court decisions.

Still to be won is much broader anti-discrimination protection when it comes to housing, public accommodations, (example: restaurants) and education which could happen soon if Congress passes the Employment Non-discrimination Act which, despite its name, covers all bases.

The Bad …

Didn’t I tell you if gay marriage went legal, polygamists would be next in line? Well, it’s already happened in Montana where a man wants to be legally married to both his “wives.” Montana says no, claims the Supreme Court’s ruling did not expand the number of people in a marriage. Remember, not too long ago, states said two guys couldn’t marry either, so we shall se.

BTW, some exec as a joke put up on his Facebook page that he wanted to marry his male dog. His employer apparently didn’t find it that funny and fired him.

And the Ugly

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has become the butt of many jokes lately because of his numerous asshole remarks. Well, an enterprise sex toy store, Porn Pulse, has come out with the Donald Trump Butt Plug. Unfortunately he’s such a windbag you may get more gas than pleasure out of him up your ass.

My Two Davids

My Two Davids

At an age when most gay men are content to have their TV remotes in their crotches, I’ve enjoyed a second gay career as a Daddy. So I’d like to tell you about two younger guys I recently fucked, my two Davids. Both masculine and sports minded, they confessed to me they were sexually attracted to older guys since they were kids. Yet my two Davids couldn’t be more different if I had made them up for one of my books.

Only I didn’t.

David I, 38, a dead ringer for a young Kevin Cosner, is a Jersey boy whose parents moved to Fort Lauderdale when he was just a tot, and became HIV poz at eighteen in the early nineties when the word was long out what caused AIDS. He was just a junior in high school and living at home. Two years later, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma which had spread throughout his body. Yet after intensive chemo and radiation, he miraculously survived.

Others might have taken this as a sign to do something with their lives, but David instead became a flicker or gay nomad, first living in San Francisco, then San Diego and then moving back to Florida, where today he shares a condo with a sugar daddy, collects his disability check and works part-time as a clerk in a gay clothing store. Into sports since his teens, he used to play in the local gay softball league, but has since given it up. A chain smoker, furry David spends his off time now getting drunk, getting fucked by daddies like me, snorting coke and smoking meth, occasionally wondering out loud if things might have been different if he had gone back to school.

David II, who just turned 27 when I met him vacationing here in Lauderdale, is a chemist for one of the mega pharmaceutical companies back in Boston. A smooth red-haired boyish “ginger” jock who came from a family of jocks, David won a hockey scholarship to one of the East’s major universities and still plays in his spare time. That is when his furry butt, about the only hair on his swimmers build bod, isn’t getting fucked by his dads.

Unlike addict David I, my David II has no need for drugs or an LTR this time in his life, and loves role playing in bed. His game plan is to start buying up cheap real estate here as an investment so that someday he can retire early like his favorite Florida dad, Furry Daddy Ray who he’ll be visiting again this fall.

So who would you choose as your boy?

Huh?

Why?

This ad, published by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and based on stats from the federal Centers for Disease Control, ran nationally in all the major gay rags. Despite talking about the issue for over thirty years, the HIV infection rate is still going up. South Florida’s (where I live) is the highest in the nation.

Why?

Because young gay guys think it’s an old faggots disease. Know how many twenty somethings and thirty somethings I’ve encountered who are HIV positive?

Huh??

Because the pharmaceutical industry with its massive advertising budgets make it sound that just popping a pill once a day will solve all your problems. (“So let’s fuck till it’s 1999!”) Wanna know how many guys I’ve encountered in their forties and fifties who have been on the pill for twenty years since life-saving meds have been on the market, still look like train wrecks? Yea, the pill may save your life but it doesn’t stop the ravages of HIV on your body or the side effects of these powerful meds on your liver.

Because the gay media speak with forked tongue, wailing about the high infection rate yet accepting millions of dollars in advertising from the pharms whose ads portray young smiling athletic – HIV poz- guys

Because the powers-to-be – the feds, state and local health agencies – are putting too much emphasis on condom use and safe sex (the use of condoms hasn’t changed much since the AIDS crisis of the eighties), testing (by that time the horse may be already out of the barn and half way to California), the new preventative or PrEP meds (where compliance can be spotty and non-verifiable and expense high), and gentle persuasion. (Give me a fucken break!)

What they should be doing is scaring the shit out of us with scare tactic ads that show guys who have been on the pill long-term and look twenty years older than they are, with blown-out joints, shot livers, early dementia, swollen bellies and pipe cleaner legs despite all the steroids and human growth hormone. What they also should be doing is shutting down websites that promote barebacking, and patrolling – yes patrolling – the bath houses and sex clubs for evidence of unsafe sex, all in the name of a true health epidemic. After all, San Francisco closed its bath houses in the eighties and never reopened them.

We all have a stake in this because your tax dollars and mine are being used to underwrite unsafe, irresponsible sexual behavior. Ever talk to a HIV poz guy about all the “perks” that come with contracting a preventable disease? And if they test positive for meth use, get them in rehab or cut off their aid. Period.

But enough said. Let’s start doing, really doing something about the issue. Otherwise it will be a self-perpetuating disaster.

“Ghosting” Gay Style

“Ghosting” Gay Style

When Charlize Theron recently broke off with Sean Penn, there were no tearful goodbyes or knock-down yelling matches. No, Charlize just stopped replying to Sean’s insistent e-mails, texts and voicemails. You know, the silent treatment, or what those in the dating/sex game call “ghosting.”

Well, we gay guys are painfully familiar of that form of the cold shoulder, and while modern technology may have put a new spin on it, “ghosting” has been going on for eons. Hell, when I was in my twenties, I had a hard-on for a guy in Manhattan who I screwed around with a few times and who gave me the impression he wanted to make something more of it. Well, a month into our “thing,” I called his number and all I got on the other end was Jeffrey feigning some phone problem as if he couldn’t hear me. After three tries over a space of several days, little naïve me got the message. That was one of my first entrees into the Gay School of Hard Knocks.

Today, if I see a guy on the web who’s looked at my profile more than twice and who I find interesting, I’ll message him, maybe twice, but if I get no response or a wishy-washy one like “visiting a sick aunt in Bosnia, but promise to connect in this lifetime…” I BLOCK HIM. If you don’t want the real me, you ain’t getting the virtual me.

“Ghosting” is also a great way to stop ex-lovers or cyber-stalkers who keep trying to mind fuck you in their tracks. You see, the worst thing you can do is tell them to fuck off because that shows they’ve gotten under your skin. No, instead get under their skin by using the Theron approach – no response.

But I must admit there have been times when you don’t expect it from the guy. Like with Tim, a sizzling fuck buddy of mine, broker than shit, who was hot to trot about coming over to my place for an all-dayer, but who was nowhere when I texted him repeatedly the morning of to confirm. I never heard from him again. All these scenarios ran through my mind. Had he gotten mugged? Arrested? Killed in an accident? Or, most likely, evicted from his apartment he hadn’t paid the rent on for three months? Who knows? Many a time, the hottest guys are the biggest losers.

Undoubtedly the cruelest “ghosting” that I experienced, and just recently in fact, was with Dean, a regular fuck buddy of mine with whom I had developed an emotional attachment, and I thought him with me. When I told him I would be taking a cab the morning of my sinus surgery because I had to be at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. and couldn’t expect anyone I knew to get up that early to drive me, Dean willingly volunteered. In fact, he insisted on it. “No one should go to a hospital for surgery alone in a cab,” he said as we parted the Friday night before my surgery. He promised he would touch base on Sunday, but my text to him on Saturday night and texts and call to him on Sunday produced absolutely no response. Finally, at about six Sunday night, I texted him one last time that I was booking the cab and did just that. The following morning at 5:15 a.m., I took the cab alone to the hospital. (No problem, it’s not the easy things in life that make you stronger – it’s the hard ones.)

And my most poignant “ghosting” experience? That came with Mitch, a hot meth head buddy, who promised to connect after he got back from a Memorial Day weekend drug fest in Key West five years ago. When he didn’t respond to my voice mails or web messages or texts, I finally ventured to the flophouse he was living in to learn from the manager that the reason he hadn’t replied was because he was dead – a victim of his own habit. You see, driving back from that weekend, Mitch fell asleep at the wheel after having probably been wired for days, and drove his little car right into the water.

Dead at 42.

Now, you have to admit, that’s “ghosting” for real.

Is The Book Buying Public A Bunch of Naive Sops?

Is The Book Buying Public A Bunch of Naive Sops?

Well, reviewers and readers of Harper Lee’s new novel, “Go Set A Watchman,” actually written before her celebrated “To Kill a Mockingbird,” are horrified that their beloved Atticus Finch decades after “Mockingbird” takes place turned out to be a bigoted Southerner, not unlike many of his generation. I’ve also heard that the Finch in “Mockingbird” may have carried some of these same attributes had not Harper Lee’s editors sanitized her original manuscript.

So the lovers of “Mockingbird” are heartbroken to learn that Atticus acted like a real person of his times and not some fantasy of fiction. It reminds me of the chastising I’ve gotten from some of my editors and readers of my books who would rather read about some soft focused, romanticized gay world than the “rough around the edges” one I’ve lived and write about.

For example, Jonathan, the main character in my novel, “The Czar of Wilton Drive” was criticized for following the same sordid path his late uncle had taken, namely into the sewer of meth addiction. Like he was somehow supposed to be repulsed by the evils he had witnessed through the questionable friends of Uncle Charlie’s. Hell, what would you expect from a naïve kid from Staten Island who’s become a millionaire overnight?

Another one of my books was so sanitized by my editors that I am almost ashamed to have my name attached to it.

I’m told – and I believe it – that many readers – and writers – of serious male gay erotic fiction are – yes – women, and consequently I as an author of such a genre shouldn’t delve into some of the sordid aspects of gay life, like – God forbid – infidelity between men or kinky sex or drugs or barebacking, for fear I will offend my book-buying public. I guess they would rather read about wimpy guys in fairyland situations and not be immersed in my rough, real world based on the men I’ve known – and had.

On one of my guest blogs this spring, a reader who described herself as a “naive heterosexual woman” asked if the fascination by gay men with barebacking was due to the popularity of bareback porn.

“No,” I answered, “it’s all about hormones and lust.”

Which leaves a writer like me in a dilemma: write for a prissy audience – much like Harper Lee may have been convinced to do by the editor of her first book – or an audience ready for the truth, in my case, how many gay men really live?

Does Being Bullied in Your Teen Years Lead to Depression Later in Life?

Does Being Bullied in Your Teen Years Lead to Depression Later in Life?

A recent British study says it may. It found thirty percent of individuals who were bullied in some way when they were young suffered from depression as adults, twice the rate of the unbullied. The study defined bullying in multiple ways, from being ostracized to name called to out-and-out physical abuse.

This study perked my interest since as a teen in high school I definitely felt like an outsider. When I was ten, my family moved from one town where I had friends from childhood to another where I was treated like shit.

Nerdy and unathletic, and aware, though I wasn’t a sissy boy, that I was “different,” I was frequently picked on by my class’s social elite, you know, the jocks and hot chicks. Extemely self-conscious about my short stature and increasingly furry body certainly didn’t help matters. All this led to a terrible inferiority complex it has taken me a lifetime to deal with, though I don’t think I will ever get over it.

That’s why when I read about some of these outsiders coming to school and wiping out half their class with a semi-automatic, a part of me is actually sympathetic. Hell, in my day, the worse sin was smoking in the john; who knows what I would have done If I had gotten my hands on a weapon, that’s how frustrated and angry I became at times with people I realize in hindsight were plain shitheads.

Even years later, when I found acceptance as a gay man where my hirsute nature worked in my favor, and in my professional life as a successful healthcare executive, I always felt I lacked the essential social skills to feel comfortable around people which often triggered deep bouts of self- doubt. Today, I really don’t give a fuck what people think of me.

So, was all this angst a product of my shitty high school years? Who knows?

We all carry battle scars of one kind or another – the best way to overcome them is not to let them define us, but to rise above them.

Or, put another way, show the finger to the shit heads of our past.