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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Guilty Pleasures



I’m going to lay it all out for you.  About 2 years ago, I was about as miserable as I’ve ever been.  I was working in a great position for a great company, but my day-to-day life was a tedious hell.  The office always had some plot festering, some bruised ego exacting revenge, some shortsighted passion going on and I was left to figure out how to control it, deflect it, or eat it. 

That January I decided enough was enough and I booked a quick flight out of Newark to Puerto Rico.  Literally the moment I got out of the plane, my phone started to ring.  It was the office again.  Again.  I don’t specifically remember the ‘crisis’ I needed to be brought in on, but by the time I hung up the phone, I felt physically ill.

So I left the airport and in minutes I was in downtown San Juan.  I had that tourist-white skin on.  I walked beneath a ceiling of cloud puffed blue and signs atop buildings that read For Rent or For Sale.  At that moment, I thought, why not?  Why not move to PR for part of the year and live the other half in the NE at my farm?  Others managed to do it.  I only had my needs to meet, no others.  Why not?

That evening, there was a festival in the Colonial portion of the town.  Within the tight streets, the balustrades above, revelers danced while loud music pulsed.  I followed the group from a distance for a while before plunging in.  The music and singing were so loud that it drummed through me. I felt exorcised.  I remember a wave of happiness and release mounting over top of me.  I felt inundated with air.

That night, I walked slower and more contentedly.  I found a bar, noted for it’s male hooker trade, off the beaten path of the more popular Condado.  As soon as I sat at the bar, I noticed a beautiful, exotic man sitting to my left who within seconds dropped some pocket change that we both tried to retrieve.  It was a great opening to a conversation.  His voice was beautiful.  He had a Middle Eastern accent and he was putting together mannered sentences that were free of the typical snarking we Westerners trade back and forth.  Soon we were very close, our mouths bent around the other’s ear so we could talk and be heard against the music.  He had thick black hair that I remember feeling beneath my hand as I pulled his head closer to my mouth.  He had the face of a ball player.  Looked like he could have handled a chew in that full mouth of his. Looked like line drives and home runs.  Like SMACK, right in the old catcher’s mitt.

We went back to his apartment and he presented a cocoa colored, perfectly round, hairless ass.  I remember he tilted his pelvis up a bit so that it lifted off the mattress slightly.  He was drunk and I mounted him like I’d hired a whore.

I didn’t stay the night yet somehow, and I can’t remember how it happened, we found a way to reconnect the following day.  We went out on a proper date, but before we did, we made love again.  He was over-the-top insistent that I wear a condom when fucking him.  At the time, I did not know my HIV status, but had been dabbling in unprotected sex as a top here and there.  I had gotten through so many instances without catching anything, that I assumed the risk as a top was low…so here’s what I did.

I tore a hole in the condom before putting it on.  He liked to get fucked from behind, so I would grab the condom that he insisted I wear, open the pack with my teeth, but before putting it on, take another bite out of it and put a hole in the top.  Then when I slipped it on, the head of my dick popped through and I could experience the feeling of fucking him bare back.  Because he faced away, he never knew.

Hate me now?  Well, that’s what I did.  What’s life without honesty, right?  And I didn’t just do it that way once, I did it several times.  We were hot for each other and it wasn’t uncommon for us to fuck 4 times in one day.  I didn’t think I was giving him HIV (or the Hi Five as my friend in LA calls it), because I was convinced I was negative.  And I didn’t think I was doing any harm to myself, because I assumed that such a prig couldn’t possibly be positive.

Well I was wrong.  We had an overblown romance.  The kind you can only have while on vacation.  No obligations, only recreation and cocktails and scenery and new love.  I left after a few days, but as soon as I got back to NY, I called him and we spoke every night for the next few weeks.

His name was Ibrahim.  Did I mention that?  He was an Egyptian who worked for the American University in Cairo and for reasons he never quite made clear, he was working for a month in Puerto Rico.  Something to do with finance, but he kept his business life a little on the murky side.  Later when I told this story to my friends, they told me it was because he had a wife and kids back at home and wanted to make sure that there was a certain distance kept.  I talked to him about my concern that he was ‘keeping something from me’, but he insisted that I was the reason why he kept himself secret.  When he felt he could trust me, that my affection for him was real, he would reveal all.

I decided I would return to PR and see him again.  This was about 3 or 4 weeks later.  I booked another flight and almost from the moment I landed, I started to get a headache.  It was sick headache, like the kind you get when you’re coming down with something.  It wasn’t unmanageable, but it was present and at times insistent, like a hand grabbing me from the back of my head and holding onto me. 

We had a great few days together.  A rented car, a day at a beautiful nearly-deserted spa, a trip through the interior of the island, early dinners and whole evenings where we were wrapped up together in bed.  By the time I left him on the fourth day, we both had felt as though we had gone too far, too fast.  Still we must have called each other a dozen or so more times…in the taxi on the way to the airport, while checking my luggage, while waiting at the airport.  Over and over again.  The same professions, the same promises.  I arrived back in NY to a frigid landscape that had recently been buried (once again) in blizzard-proportions of snow.  The headaches continued and there were times when I felt light headed and dizzy.

For the next 2 to 3 months, I flirted with mononucleosis-like symptoms.  I was in fact experiencing my worse dream come true.  I was sero-converting.  The thought of it turned me off to Ibrahim and I stopped calling him.  This was the secret that he had held off telling me and because of my selfish behavior, of choosing to lie to him and screw him unprotected without his permission, I infected MYSELF with HIV.  One year later, I was sick enough to go to a doctor and finally get the bad news.  After an adjustment period, I contacted Ibrahim on Yahoo and told him everything.  He corroborated my story, but unsurprisingly wanted nothing to do with someone as selfish as me.  I live with regret for it.  Not because of my HIV status, which thanks to the inroads of the countless dead before all of us is manageable.  No, I regret what my experience proved me to be: an animal, a coward.

There has been a reprieve of a kind.  I am no longer saddled with fear and I experience sex with all the abandon that got us into this mess to begin with.  I am part of a bigger psychological orgy that I am made more and more aware of every day.  Other HIV positive men and younger negative men who crave no-holds barred sex, sex to the point of self-abuse, invite me to their lairs.  I am privy to a world that seems at times to take its cue from Vampires, a world in which the innocent are drawn to a relationship that puts their lives at risk.  Since admitting to the world that I am HIV positive, I have had many people ask me to put my ‘pos’ load up their ass, invite me to make them ‘pos’.  I have also experienced the more desperate love of the marginalized.  Both given it and received it.  My status has brought me to a very basic part of my and all of our existences: raw need.  I am now part of a group that is stripped down to the bone, that gives itself over to love or romance or sex as though lying before an altar.  Whatever we are giving ourselves over to; we are giving it as though our life depended on it.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Best Thanksgiving Day Turkey Ever!

I just wanted to share a great way to cook a turkey.  I bought a Murray's Turkey from Ira over on 20th street; brought that bitch home and deboned it.  Deboned it?  That's right.  I got me one motherfucking sharp ass knife...any sharper and I could have turned it on at the handle and cut off Luke Skywalker's arm with it.  I cut down the center of the breast and pulled the meat away from the keel like opening up a dinner jacket.  When I got to the leg, I made a cut running from where the thigh socket inserts into the pelvis, all the way to the little bird's foot.  Again, I peeled the meat away, this time as though it's pants had been sliced down the front and then opened up the meat like curtains to a show.

I skipped doing the wings similarly to the legs because it was too much work for two little return.  I just ripped them out of the socket and saved them for stock.  Finally, I cut the meat away from the spine and Voila! (as Julia Child might say), I had deboned the turkey.

Because of the turkey's size, I chose to cut the 'dinner jacket' in two  from top to bottom so that each side was comprised of a breast and and a leg all attached together with the skin.  Then I beat the living daylights out of the breast with a meat tenderizing hammer to flatten it out, sprinkled the inside of the 'jacket' with salt and pepper, then lathered the whole inside of the turkey with a stuffing mixture.  I froze the other portion for later use.

Next I rolled that bitch up and tied her together with string, buttered the skin, salt and peppered the whole thing and threw her in the oven till the thermometer registered 170.

Fantastic.  Once the bird comes out, you just slice it down.  It looks like a perfect rollatine.  Roasted potatoes on the side with a nice pumpkin/squash puree and some gravy...delish!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Daffodils, blue moons and balls.

I put in another 260 daffodil bulbs this fall.  A hundred last week and another 160 today.  Two varieties, Juanita and King Alfred, the bulbs of which are as big as a Cuban’s balls. I have a hillside sloping down from the house and I figure if I put in about 200 or so every fall, one day, I’ll have a whole mountain of spring flowers leading up to the house.

Here’s a story for you:

I grew up in a small town in Pa…real blue collar…coal town, railroads…like that.  I didn’t know WHAT I was going to do with myself.  I knew, as best I could have known at the time, that I was queer, but what to do?

There was a program at the time that got kids out of high school early so they could go to college.  This was during the Reagan years, and those of us that could get out of high school  and enroll in college by the start of the next year, could maintain their social security benefits (my father was a veteran and killed so me and my brother received a check).  Any way, I applied, and then next thing I knew, I got to spend my senior year of high school as a freshman at Penn State University.

What fun!  I was young, hot, full of cum and off I went.  Still I didn’t really know anything about the gay world and I was intensely ashamed of being a homo.  Aside from a couple of hot dalliances, I floundered. 

Not in school though.  Free of the tight scrutiny of high school, my GPA soared.  I was on the dean’s list every semester.  During exams, in all the huge 101 courses, me and my friend Leah were surrounded by 6 or so students desperate to cheat off our papers.

Leah and I made a pact.  We were going to take this new found momentum and apply to Ivy League schools, get out of the Pa sticks, and find ourselves the Brave New World everyone talks about…   Actually, I wanted to find a place far enough from home that I could get laid and not feel like I was going to get caught.  I didn’t give a fuck about attending a University (since I already thought I knew it all), I just wanted to be free.

I never made it into an Ivy League (and Leah got pregnant so that put the cabash on her college goals) but I DID make it into William and Mary.  The day I opened that envelope was one of the happiest days of my life.  I had that hot summer to think about moving to Virginia and everything I was going to do.  By August, I packed up my car and drove south to Williamsburg.  I remember a big fight with my family a day or so before I left.  Nothing extraordinary, more of the usual bullshit and now of course when I look back on it I think to myself, could I have been any more of an asshole?  Anyway, the departure was one of those ripping-up-the-gravel-driveway departures.  Me and my four cylinder Ford EXP…a real tough guy all right (!)

Once at William and Mary, I made a lot of friends.  I was cocky and loved to party.  I could hit the bars with the best of them (the legal age to drink was 18) and since my floor thumped with one weekend frat party after the next, there was no shortage of mischief I could get into.  That’s where I met Joe.

Joe was like an alien from another world.  On my floor, I roomed with an Ambassador’s son, a nephew to the President of Chrysler Corporation and any number of Washington big wigs, but there were none that stood out like Joe.  He had been raised in Budapest, extensively traveled Europe, smoked Gitane cigarettes and had a mind like a cracking whip.  The boy completely swept me off my feet. 

Now I don’t know if you know this about William and Mary, but it is a HUGE dyke school.  Christ, step outside and all you smell is boxwood and progesterone.  Oh and clear off the sidewalk too, lest you’re overrun by a pack of brawny girls on their way to field hockey or softball or a game of cutthroat tennis.  But as far as faggots go, the only way you’re going to find a boy to sleep with is if you attend the closing night party for the theatre majors or get some poor fratboy drunk enough for him to pretend it all never happened.  So when I met Joe, it was like someone had slipped me the long lost brother I never had.  He took my hillbilly style and  rocketed me up to speed on fashion, discourse, behavior oh and the best part, he introduced me to the gay night life in Norfolk, Va.

Ever hear of it?  It’s a big US port.  Sailors and shipyards.  And if you dig deep enough into the dirtiest part of the wrong side of the tracks, you’ll find a couple of queer bars.  You know, I don’t think I can even remember their names, but that’s where Joe would take me and Jesus God did we have fun.

There were actual sailors in the joint.  Dressed up, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, sailors.  I think the first time he took me in the place, I must have practically passed out from the anticipation of just being in the same room as them.  Now don’t get me wrong, at some of the bar tables it would have taken four men to make a full set of teeth.  I mean, most of these guys were not going to win a beauty contest anytime soon,  but peppered throughout the crowd, you’d find a handful of eyes-out-of-your-head, slobber-down-your-chin studs and it was fantastic.

Dancing at that place, seeing Joe across the floor working some trick, me working one that I found… God that was fun.  I met this one black guy there.  Six something, built like a superhero with two big ass cheeks.  Looked like the back of his acid washed jeans were stuffed with two loafs of pizza dough.  Anyway, we started dancing together, then making out.  The next thing I know, I was driving down regularly to fuck him.  Those were my very first truly gay encounters.  Everything up to that point had been boyscout stuff.  But this was full on, cock up his sweet ass, gay sex.  We would cum four or five times a night.  No joke.  And I was so high on the experience, I felt as though my feet were no longer touching the ground.  In class, driving, at work, where ever, my head was not where it should have been, but  back with that boy in his crappy apartment, lying on that mattress he kept on the floor, fucking and making out.

Then I got so sick.  I could barely walk.  Took me two weeks to get over the illness and ontop of that, I discovered I had a raging case of crabs. Turns out that black guy wasn’t just giving me booty, he threw in the cooty as well. Well  with enough chicken soup and RID, I recovered, but it wasn’t long after that Joe pulled me aside on the Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag in the town,  to ask me if I had read about the new ‘gay cancer’. 

I had.  I remember the article buried deep in the Washington Post and I remember a growing anxiety in me that I had already become infected, an anxiety that would last me over 25 years. 

One year later, nearly to the day that Joe had told me about the ‘gay cancer’, he was dead.  It was the same hot, stifling day; the same still air; the same sound of cicadas sawing in the trees.  My dearest friend, a man to this day, I still see as a laser light of energy and ideas, dead of AIDS at 20.  His mother flew in from Budapest, an imperial woman, cold and emotionless.  I mentioned to her that Joe and I were very good friends.  She sized me up and dismissed me…maybe as a hick, maybe as a fag, I don’t know.  I don’t even know what became of Joe's remains, if he was buried or cremated.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I don’t want to end on a downer.  I just remembered Joe for whatever reason and how much fun he was and all the Joes that all of us meet in our formulative gay years.  Those that extend that hand to us and pull us in and crack us up and make us feel as though we are finally a part of something.

And don’t ask me to tell you WHAT on earth this has to do with a hillside of daffodils.  I’d try to tie it all together for you, but you’d just vomit because it would sound so forced...but how about this:

Last night we had a full moon the size of Hooker’s Hole.  It was the ‘blue moon’ you’ve heard tell about.  The odd ball moon that turns a cycle of three full moons per season on it’s end and slips one more in for good measure.  So maybe that’s why I’m thinking of Joe.  He was the one that the world needed to make room for.  The one that barged into the order of things, shoved them aside and made his way forth.  My friend Joe, a Blue Moon, and only that once.

Monday, November 15, 2010

If you don't like Chemistry, skip this one and jump to the sexy part

I don't know if you know this, but wood ash is supposed to be a great fertilizer for plants.  I got to thinking about this and couldn't figure out what the ingredients to wood ash would be.  I figured that wood is mostly cellulose (which is really a complicated sugar) containing Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen and that when combined with Oxygen in the burning process would most likely form Carbon Dioxide and Water (both given off as gas)...I mean what else could the combustion reaction create, right?

Well I did a little online research and turns out that all those other elements important to healthy cellular life, Potassium, Phosphorous, Sodium and Chloride (though search me what the hell Chloride does in plants) form carbonates in the burning process.  This is what wood ash is made and if you look at a bag of fertilizer, you'll see that it's comprised of three things, a Nitrogen, a Phosphorous and a Potassium portion.  Though we don't get any Nitrogen left over in the burning process (it's gotta be combined with Oxygen in the burning process and given off as NO2) wood ash is all that Potassium and Phosphorous in the plant combined with Carbon and Oxygen.  So, when we dump our wood ashes on our plants, we're really giving them a big boost of two out of three essential 'vitamins' important to plant health (Potassium and Phosphorous).  

A word of warning.  The chemical formula for Potash (the carbonate formed from the reaction of Potassium and Carbon Dioxide in the burning process) is
K2CO3.  When this shit dissolves in water, you get Potassium Hydroxide KOH, a strong base.  That's why you want to make sure you don't add wood ashes to acid loving plants (like blueberries) unless you add a sulfur component with it (the sulfur combines with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid).

Jesus, it woulda been much better if I talked about sucking dick or something like that, right?

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Raunchy at the Farm

Hey Men,

I get lots of interest in my naked barnshots.  I think it's a real fantasy for a lot of people.  Truth is, it turns me on too...that's why I do it.

                                             

There's something about being outside all day, working, feeling your muscles tighten and fatten...then all the solitude and distance around you.  Maybe I catch a whiff of my own body oder, maybe I just get hard for no reason, whatever the impetus, I find myself pulling my fat cock out in the middle of the forest or taking pictures of myself in the barn jerking off.

I have fantasies that one of you out there will read this and come over...sneak up on me while I'm up in the hemlock jerking off and pull out your cock as well or I turn around in the field and find that you've been spying on me playing with my cock.

I'd love to find you sitting next to the stream.  I walk up to you, pull out my fat dick and push it into your mouth, your face flattened against the hair on my balls and stomach.
                                                                             

I'm not like this all the time.  In my non horny moments, I'm your regular gay farmer.  I lay patio stone on the terrace of my new house, I mulch the blueberry row, chop wood, drive the truck to the butcher to buy a chicken to roast at night.  At the gym I talk shop with a cattle farmer named Dave.  Every Friday, I talk to Jess and get tips on how to better care for my orchards.

                             

Today was the first real hard frost of the season, but a bright sun quickly burned it off leaving dew drops where minutes before there were sharp crystals of ice.  I'm looking across the patio now to a few of those drops hanging from the black cherry tree.  Because the sun is refracting through them, they're like lasers that change in color from red to green, blue, then back to red in an instant depending on how the light breeze moves them.

I'm going to be working alone in the house today in my shorts and socks.  I wish you could come over.