DONUTS TO DEMONS

horehound stillpoint

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cruising craigslist, I’ve got my dick in hand, more than half hard, playing with my balls, tickling, working, getting that feeling going, you know, the urge mixed with the tingle, just loving the fact that I’ve got a cock, that it works, it gets hard; it’s lickable, fleshy, thick enough and sturdy enough to get the salivary glands going for all the boys, men, studs, geniuses, and lovable losers I end up kissing, licking, sniffing, sucking, et cetera, et cetera.

Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve seen every single cocksucker’s picture on here a hundred thousand times already. Fuck this shit. There’s nobody here for me. At least a third of these guys are just looking for pics, more than half will only reply to a specific, professional, porno-worthy image, and another third don’t have a firm grip on reality.

Bad math. No solution.

Still, my cock swells heavy with hope. My balls don’t rule my life, but when they’re this full, this heavy, this alive, they run the show for a few hours, I guess. My butt has needs, too. And my nipples. My tongue. My mouth. My big ol’ bicycle-built thighs. Hell, even my toes want to rub up against some guy’s calves. My whole body feels like a sex organ sometimes.

I want some bruiser licking my armpits.

A meaty, musty ass on my face…on my chest, while I blow him…then his ass sitting down on my dick, riding my pole while I push up to heaven…wraparound legs…nips to suck on and play with…shoulders that can pick up and carry the world…a chest to rest on afterward.

I want…

Great. Another fifty-four-year-old advertising for somebody under twenty-five. And another UB2-spouting manbot. More breed-my-hole, BB, anonymous-pounding, door-open, no-talking, greedy, mindless assholes. No fucking thanks.

Excuse me, but I want a guy with a mind, ’cause it’s sexy when a man can talk about real things. It’s sexy when he can laugh at himself, at conditions on Spaceship Earth. To me, it’s a turn-on when a man can talk about his spirituality and not come off as a loser-idiot. It’s hot when he doesn’t have to get drunk, or fucked up, to get on his knees and show what he can do, with no hesitation and completely shameless. Hairy or smooth, muscular or wiry, geeky or cool, young and tight or mature and comfortable with imperfections: I want—not to coin a phrase or anything—a man.

Wait a minute: what have we here?

The Fortress. San Francisco’s finest dungeon is having a Dark Night, as in lights out, allowing our inner monsters to come out and play?

Fan-fucking-tastic!

Ah shit, shit, goddammit. It’s not tonight; it’s February 16, four nights from now. Fuck.

Crap.

Screw it.

Breathe.

Okay, it’s okay, but craigslist, you and I are done. For now.

Bye-bye, Internet. Funkadelic on the stereo. Chair into reclining position. It’s beatin’ off time.

Which folder tonight: Creamrising, or Dreamangels, or…

Picsajerks, let’s go.

You, college wrestler, with your semihard cock showing in your singlet. You’re up. You, trucker, standing there in your underwear, getting a blow job in the shadows, with your buns looking tight and your back as broad as all outdoors. Yep. You too, drunken frat boy with your floppy balls and fat snake cock falling out of your boxers, with that smirky grin on your face, knowing goddamn well what we want. Mechanic, yeah, you too, with your hard-on in one hand and a monkey wrench in the other, major tools. Phone repairman, in someone’s backyard, talking to a supervisor or something while getting sloppily sucked off by a customer who doesn’t give a shit about his reputation or his neighbors. Swimmer, squeezing the boner in your swim trunks. Locker room guy, adjusting your jockstrap. Other locker room guy, bending over and giving everyone your ass. You guys make me feel like the whole world is hot, horny and ready to blast off. You convince me the wave that’s coming to bury us all is not Armageddon, not Global Warming, not war and racism and voracious corporations and jingoistic nation/religions; no, the wave that’s coming is Come, a Kingdom of Come, an ocean, a cosmic sea, an eternal moment of supremely satisfying joy. I don’t have to come right now because I will drink it all in and swallow and swim and drown and die of Come and be reborn in Come and reside in the source, the original waters, where there is nothing to desire and everything is one.

Plus, it’s fun to edge with my two-dimensional heroes.

Thanks, guys. You let your pictures be taken and we are grateful. We needed you and you stepped forward. You guys have given rise to thousands of boners and gallons of splooge, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

Wait.

Friday night will be here in two shakes of a tail feather and the wink of an eye.

 

Well, slap my ass and call me Lucky. I did not think that table was going to double tip me. The people there looked at the check for a long time. I try to be a decent waiter and play by the rules, so I put two stars beside the word SERVICE on the check and then underlined the amount of the tip (since we are allowed to add gratuity to any table of six or more). How can anyone miss that? If a customer fails to pay the slightest attention to the bill, it is not my fault. And if I end up with an extra fifty dollars tonight, I know right where it’s going.

Master J’s Leather Store.

For those latex shorts.

With the wraparound zippers.

The men at the Fortress are going to see me coming around the corner Friday night, now that I can justify spending money on something as unnecessary as latex shorts that make me look like I’m hung like a horse. They’re so tight, they feel like part of my skin, so that when the zipper gets pulled open and air hits flesh, it feels as though it’s me who is being opened up. It feels as though this body has brand new holes that need to be fiddled with, wetted down, and filled up. And when the zipper is opened in the back, well, it feels as though the foundation of the Universe might be cracking open. And that Monster Wave of Come I imagine flipping me over like the Poseidon—I can practically feel it already, only it ends up lapping gently at my port side, because I am free, I am not separate, I am made of Come, and I am that big, I can take loads and loads and loads, I can take it all.

I can take everything laid at my doorstep.

 

Lord have mercy, there’s Dimitri. I did not expect to see him here at Master J’s Leather Store, which proves what an idiot I am. He works here. Fuck, he looks good. He plants himself so straight and tall, so upright, everything about him looks to be standing at attention. Including his nipples. And the bulge in his jeans. His long, strong legs. He’s African-American but something about his face puts me in mind of Egyptian nobility. I don’t know what to call his haircut, but he’s so sleek and finished, he might as well be a statue come to life.

He’s a real gentleman, extremely intelligent, sexy as hell, with an intact sense of humor, and capable of listening as well as talking. Plus, he volunteers to do important, selfless, good works on the other side of the world. I know all this because we dated for a few weeks a couple of months ago.

It was December of last year when I met Dimitri for the first time. I had gone into Master J’s Leather Store to buy a cock ring. Backtracking—again—for a moment: my old one had been removed by a wannabe-porn star at an underwear party. This bad boy, in the sheerest bikinis ever, said we could exchange rings even though we both had hard-ons. I judged that to be pretty near impossible. But he put my hands behind my head, leaned me up against a wall, and carefully proceeded to remove the donut—my superthick, neoprene cock ring—not by easing my balls out, but by bending my dick gently, gently, and working the shaft out first. Then he really scared me. He told me he could put his steel cock ring on me, balls first, then smush my cockhead in and massage the rest of it all the way down in, and through. Yikes. But I kept my hands where he had put them, stuck my chest out, and let him go to town. It took about six minutes, I was so hard. He was too; our dicks were pointing straight up to the ceiling in the bar. Then he wanted me to do the same to him. Put my neoprene donut on him, balls first. His cock was about the same size as mine, a little thicker maybe; he said it would work fine, if I just had the patience. So I cupped his balls, lifted the neoprene, bent his dick a bit because it had to be done and he swore I would not hurt him, pointed the head into the donut hole, and spent the next ten minutes making a minor miracle happen.

Voila!

We laughed and joked about exchanging marriage vows now that we had put rings on each other. He told me he wanted to dance at a local porn theater on amateur night, and if I came to support him, he would treat me real good, and we could trade cock rings again. He promised to email me the next day about when and where to show up, and what fun we would have!

Of course I never got an email from him.

I can’t say anything, though. Ninety percent of the time, I don’t call the guys I say I’m going to call either. I want to, when I get the number. I mean to. Then, I don’t. For one reason or another, I give up, or lose hope, or wait so long it would be awkward.

Hence, the visit to Master J’s Leather Store, for another neoprene donut. I’m just not that fond of three-dollar steel cock rings. If you’re going to be cheap, which I am, neoprene is the way to go.

The staff at Master J’s lets you try on the cock rings, thank god. They didn’t have the full-on donuts, but they did have nice thick neoprene rings of one-and-three-quarter-inch diameter.

So I made my nine-dollar purchase and guess who was at the cash register? He asked me if I wanted a small bag or did I intend to wear the cock ring out. I laughed and stuck my hands inside my loose heavy sweatpants and fumbled with the damn thing while I looked into this studly, beautiful, multi-ethnic leatherman’s eyes.

“You need some help with that?”

I had visited Master J’s infrequently but occasionally for some twenty-odd years, waiting and hoping and doing everything I could to get some guy to say those words…and then, when I least expected to hear them…

“Yeah! That’d be great,” I enthused.

“Over here,” he said, leading the way. He walked me to the dressing rooms. I ducked into one.

“This one,” he suggested, pulling a large leather curtain to the side and opening the way into a double-sized changing room.

I pulled my sweats down, and my dick went: boing! Yep, already hard. He put the cock ring on, the regular way, then he bent over, to work my balls in, and put my dick in his mouth. He got down on his knees and got serious, reaching up to tease, flick, and pinch my nipples, god love him. I always think that’s such a generous thing to do. I reached down and returned the favor. We got busy, changing positions, trading blow jobs, and just having a blast.

Then, he said, “Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Good timing: I needed to catch my breath. He had probably done this once or twice before (I even saw lube up on the ledge, along with a roll of paper towels), but I’d been waiting for this for two decades.

He returned right before I could get bored or uncomfortable.

“Try these on,” he encouraged.

And he handed me the aforementioned latex shorts.

“I think these will fit you.”

You have to work to get those fuckers on, but man, it is absolutely worth the effort.

“Now see, the zipper goes all the way from the front to the back. Plus, you got four tabs. So you can unzip the front and close it back up from the top, while you—or somebody else—does the same in the back. That wide flap of latex inside keeps your little hairs from getting caught in the zipper. Let me show you.”

He put me on this small round pedestal in the dressing room, turned me around, and opened the zipper in the dead center of my butt, whereupon I nearly swooned, especially when his tongue got to licking and darting around my asscheeks and then in between. He went to work on my crack and got my asshole so wet, I had to bite my tongue to keep from begging him to fuck me right then and there.

Truth is, orally, I’m superslut, whereas anally, I’m a scared schoolmarm.

I have to be partially or at least somewhat in love, to fuck. Top or bottom. I mean, we don’t have to be forking over the down payment on a wedding cake or anything, but love has to be on the table. It has to be in the room as a possibility, the sparkling glittery promise of love, a relationship, a slim chance at least that we might conceivably have a future. I have fucked exactly three guys in the last fifteen years and they were all extremely talented bottoms, charming, lovable, and determined. None of these turned out to be my next husband, however. One, unbeknownst to me, already had a husband: groan. One lived on the other side of the planet: sigh. And one did not share a single interest in my rock ’n’ roll-artfag-into-Eastern-spirituality-world: alas.

Exactly one guy has fucked me in the past fifteen years and he was a top who turned out to be as patient and gifted and generous as he advertised on Craigslist. That was an experiment, to see if I could still take a dick up my butt after so much time. Love was not in the room in that instance, and had no chance of appearing since Mr. Top, as good as he was at sex, was that bad at the art of conversation. I just wanted to get fucked because… well, just because. It did not make my toes curl with pleasure, but it wasn’t horrible either, nor particularly painful.

That had happened three years before Dimitri escorted me into the dressing room, and I had not sought to repeat the event. So when Dimitri and his tongue and those latex shorts all conspired to make me feel like my asshole had suddenly turned into a pussy, my sirens went off. Which made me come before I could even send up a flare to let Dimitri know what was in the works. Our clothes were all over the floor so I aimed for my belly, which made me arch my back and that did signal my new buddy…but by the time he stood up and came around to face front, the show was over.

He dipped his finger into the pool of jizz that covered my abs, swirled it around and then popped that gooey finger into his mouth, just like a boy getting the last of the pudding.

Dimitri kissed me, stroked his cock for about twenty seconds, and creamed my already sticky belly while moaning into my open mouth. Now that just about made my toes curl, although I was standing on them at the time.

Obviously, we traded phone numbers before I left the store.

Not that I thought we would ever see each other again.

I did not buy the shorts at that time. Fun but too expensive. I left with my new neoprene cock ring, a wet spot forming in my briefs, and a smile I could not get off my face.

All of this, however, transpired three months ago, and in my world, in the gay world, hell, in any world, a lot can happen in three months.

We had, Dimitri and I, against the odds, gotten together again, in my apartment, for several sessions of superheated body-to-body contact mixed with gobs of oral sex and kissing. We did not fuck. We talked, a little, after we both came, but still our association constituted more of a fuck buddy situation than a boyfriend relationship.

I wanted more.

I started calling him, almost daily. Even if he hadn’t returned my call from the previous day, I found myself dialing his number. That last time I called him was New Year’s Eve; he wasn’t where he had said he would be or we got our signals crossed or something. I felt disappointed, even humiliated, and decided not to call again. He didn’t call either.

To make myself feel better, I went over in my mind the details of his previous visit, and then I extrapolated and envisioned a whole story from that point on.

The last time we had gotten together in my apartment, he had been extremely gloomy. About his job. About his best friend at that job leaving under unhappy circumstances. About other things as well. I could only get a few sentences out of him, actually. We had sex as therapy that time.

I thought maybe he had quit his job. Maybe he had fallen into a serious depression. Maybe he was embarrassed, ashamed. Broke. It happens. I would have helped, but I didn’t want to rescue any more boyfriends. Or fuck buddies. Doesn’t work anyway.

I also don’t want to be the only one pushing the relationship rock up the hill. We’re both in it, or I’m letting it roll right back down into the valley, and walking away.

So in my mind, I walked away from Dimitri.

In the fantasyland in my head, he quit Master J’s Leather Store and fell into a deep dark well, similar to the ones that have claimed other boyfriends, lovers, fuck buddies. I erased how happy I had felt with him; erased the memory of sex that had been on the verge of lovemaking; erased the feeling of muscles and skin, eyes and lips that contained the air of home…all the things the most sizzling sex with the hottest stranger in the city cannot provide.

 

This is how I could be so surprised to see Dimitri in a store where I knew he worked.

Far from depressed, embarrassed, or broke, Dimitri looks amazingly eager to take care of me.

“Hey, Dimitri.”

“Greg. Good to see you.”

I grin.

He smolders. In a good way.

“I got an extra fat tip last night, so I came back for those latex shorts.”

“Oh, yeah. The ones with the wraparound zippers.”

The quick smile I got made my balls tingle.

“They’re over here.”

We take a short walk. He doesn’t even look at the stock on the rack, just sticks his hand out, lifts the hanger from its little hook, and presents.

“These are the ones,” he assures me. “You know where the dressing room is. Try them on again, and I’ll be back there in a minute.”

It’s just like the first time, only better.

 

With a bottle of water in my hand and sporting the rock ’n’ roll look that still gets guys thinking with their cocks, I hit the patio-cum-back room of one of the seediest gay bars in the world, and hit the jackpot. A buddy’s there, a guy I know even though I can’t remember his name, and he’s already working his crotch, just waiting for one green light, which I am more than happy to provide. Both of our dicks are out in minutes, and they are not alone. Guys stroll over and start blowing him, me, whomever. Guys are pulling on our tits, tickling our balls, licking our butts. He and I are staring each other down, making good old-fashioned porno faces.

Neither one of us is a Yeah, work that shaft, cocksucker dirty-talk kind of guy; we do it with our energy, which by now is bouncing off the grimy wooden slats which pass for walls around here.

I shoot; some guy takes it on the chin. The guy licking my ass backs away to watch. My friend a few feet away comes all over a chesty dude’s shoulder and we are all of us gone to seed.

“Hey, motherfuckers…” the bartender shouts through a tiny, barred window near his ice machine. “The sex club is down the street, you assholes. They charge twenty-five dollars; why the hell should I let you guys do the same shit here for free?”

We smirk, or chuckle quietly, or act all sheepish; we were starting to buckle up anyway. The questions was rhetorical and the lecture was halfhearted at best. The T-shirts for this bar carry a legend that reads: RUINING REPUTATIONS FOR FIFTEEN YEARS.

They know which side of their toast has the butter. People don’t come through the door of this bar for just a drink. They come to get their cocks sucked, or to watch someone else get his cock or ass worked over.

Still, it’s an interesting question. Money aside, why don’t we go to the neighborhood sex club?

Sex in a sex club: nothing could be more predictable. Sex in the back room of a bar—even a really seedy bar—that’s bad-boy behavior, outlaw activity, rebel stuff. It practically takes us back to prehistoric, preverbal, good ol’ days, as if me and my boyhood pal had just outrun a dangerous predator. We beat the beast and lived to tell the tale. How many times do we get to feel like that in the fucked-up America of the Twenty-first Century?

This is what I’m thinking while I put myself back together again. Zipping up, finishing my water, saying good-bye, grabbbing my backpack.

I get on my bike and start riding home, and it’s a whole three or four minutes before I start thinking about Dimitri again.

He has disappeared. Again.

Every time I start to fall for him, he vanishes in a puff of smoke. Stops calling. Stops emailing.

Everything comes to a grinding halt, only there is no memo announcing the fact. I have to figure it out for myself.

Slowly.

As the days go by.

On top of it all, those stupid, goddamn, black latex shorts apparently carry some kind of fucking curse. I didn’t get to wear them to the Fortress, because those Dark Nights are for Women Only. Some joker put it up on craigslist in the M4M category, who knows why. I also didn’t get to wear them to a leatherman’s soiree because I came down with pneumonia. When I recovered from that, I went back onto craigslist, but my year-old G-rated pics were not working for me. Coincidentally, a newly professional photographer had posted an offer for a free session in which someone could get hot new pics in two hours flat. He said he was just doing it to get more practice, working with various guys in random situations. When we met, he turned out to be quite a stud. Of course, the fucker insisted there would be no touching between us, which I agreed to, but then he put his hands in his pants, showing me what he wanted me to do, and asked if he could see the base of my cock, maybe I could pull my briefs down a bit, just a little more? He mentioned how I was giving him a hard-on, grabbing his jeans and proving his point. I got harder and harder and he asked me what I wanted to do, and before I knew it, I was beating off. He ended up taking seven hundred photos. He gave me a CD of them, swore up and down that they would not be used for anything…but I can’t believe those pics will not end up in a magazine or on a website somewhere.

Especially since he got me to put on those motherfucking latex shorts. He got enough good shots to put a real layout together; didn’t seem to me like he needed any practice, but what do I know.

Shit.

I have still never worn those shorts and played with anyone but Dimitri. They don’t even make me feel horny anymore. They make me feel sad. Foolish. And alone.

Yes, loneliness has been creeping in. I like my apartment. I like being alone in my apartment, when I get home from the seedy bar with the dark, smoky patio. I’ve got all kinds of crazy shit to keep me company: Cheap Thrills, The Idiot, Radio Ethiopia, Abraxas, Young Americans, Volunteers, Damned Damned Damned, To Bring You My Love, Born to Run, Sheer Heart Attack, Computer World, Too Much Too Soon, Todd, Mental Notes, Rattus Norvegicus, Entertainment!, The Grand Wazoo, Southern Nights, London Calling, Songs the Lord Taught Us, and Let’s Get It On. (Not to mention stuff like Tweedles, Giant Robot, Black Acetate, and Opera Tuna Teen Ox).

I’ve got paintings on practically every square foot of wall space; it’s a riot of color, my cozy downtown studio. I’ve got homemade coleslaw, organic potato chips, Dubliner cheese, homemade tuna salad (chunky white tuna—dolphin safe—lemon mayo, oregano, parsley, garlic, celery, carrots, onion, apple—all finely diced, of course—a little mustard, and fresh ground pepper), plus seeded spelt crackers and coconut macaroons, all of which is thoroughly delicious to a health-food nut like me. The books on the shelves range from Genet to Anne Lamott, with plenty of room for Beckett, McMurtry, Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Hornby, Vonnegut, sci-fi favorites Rudy Rucker and Robert J. Sawyer, and miraculously talented writer-friends like Michelle Tea, Lynn Breedlove, Kirk Read, Justin Chin, Carol Queen, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, and Daphne Gottlieb. I’ve got Kill Bill and Funny Girl, Amadeus and Batman Begins, Shaun of the Dead, A Star Is Born (the Judy Garland and James Mason version, thank you very much), Spun, Priscilla , and Trick.

Oh my god, I almost forgot to include Kung Fu Hustle and Angels in America. Shoot me.

But goddamn, it gets quiet when a man has made his presence felt here and then suddenly stops visiting.

I wanted to share my stuff with Dimitri. I did get to read him something by my poetry brother Trebor Healey. No matter what it does to my poor prose, I need to quote the first few lines of “Krsna” to render a taste, else no one will believe Dimitri’s reaction.

Cobalt-cocked blueboy

Gopi fucker

I wanna fuck you till you’re blue…

Dimitri started breathing weird when he heard this, and he spoke in these broken phrases, like a man in shock from seeing something too bright for his eyes.

“How did he do that?

“Each line is like its own hard-on…

“But it’s transcendent, at the same time…

“I feel high just from hearing it.”

When he added, “Let’s read it again,” I took the first step on the path to falling in love with Dimitri. In spite of all my caution and past hurts and scar tissue and uber-fear, my heart opened up and experienced a feeling which in words could only be described as At last.

It was not enough. Apparently. Unbelievably. Not enough.

He didn’t stick around. He went back into the woodwork.

I’m sure he has reasons, but that doesn’t do me much good.

I want a man with staying power.

I want a man who feels like home.

I want to fuck again and have it mean something.

I want all of me to be in bed with the guy, my guy, and I want all of him in there too. The good, the bad, the hard-core ugly, and the healing radiance of love. I want it all, with tons of laughter on top. Corny stuff. Beyond corny. The cliche that refreshes the whole world.

I want it.

I want Dimitri.

In our last conversation, Dimitri confesses, as casually as possible, that he has demons he must face before he and I… unfortunately, that sentence never gets finished.

“Yeah, well, I could probably name your demons right now.”

“Yes, you probably could.”

In the moment, I’m thinking of the usual suspects: ego, low self-esteem, fear of intimacy, guardedness. Later on, when I was alone, I got to reflecting that Dimitri might be one of the best human beings I’ve ever met, but he’s still only human, and that’s a demon or three right there.

He’s male. That’s at least one more.

He’s American.

Gay.

Black.

While we’re on this winning streak, let’s add in a violent childhood. Incest. Rape. Gangs. A shot in the chest before he even got to his teenage years (thank god it didn’t kill him, thank god it only left him with a totally butch scar that I would have been happy to kiss day after day). All of which Dimitri has mentioned previously, briefly, minimally, with the least amount of emotion possible.

It’s a miracle he didn’t turn into a criminal. Hell, he doesn’t even dress like a thug. He’s an upstanding, life-affirming, tax-paying, San Francisco leatherman.

I want to suck his dick till the day I die.

I’m not sure that’s how the story is going to end, though. I’m not sure I like my chances. Every day without a call or an email seems like a day in which this bright beautiful light of real happiness fades further and further into a dark forest.

I know these woods. This unhappy place.

The thicket and the brush of my stupid thoughts.

The dry twigs I smoke to forget. The smelly swamp of depression. The worm-riddled logs of negative self-esteem. The loneliness of the territory and the night. The rocks of anger picked up along the path. The isolation as the forest closes in.

Fuck yeah, I know it.

Pretty soon, it’s not so easy to see your way clear. You can’t recognize the most familiar landmarks.

You forget you were ever on a path.

A familiar fog settles in.

Quicksand everywhere.

Desperate days.

Last-ditch efforts.

I don’t know what to do…except the only thing I know how to do.

Write.

Get busy, get it down and send it out. All this.

Everything. (No, not everything, not really, not by a long shot; I left out some important bits and pieces. Like my failure in bed with Dimitri that one time. My health problems. The fact that I’m no longer clean and sober. I omitted as much of the buzz-kill stuff as possible. Neuroses. My neediness. The shit that doesn’t get anyone’s dick hard. I did my best soft-shoe razzle-dazzle around all the issues and baggage and fucked-up indelicacies that we log on to craigslist.com to forget about in the first place. And if I could have made my story cleaner and hotter and more suitable for pulling your putz, trust me, I would have.)

Dimitri did say, freely and unequivocally, I could write about him. He said I didn’t have to change any details, or hide his identity or anything. He said he would be honored to have me write about him.

Okay.

Tomorrow I will do a copy and paste of this little document, and send it to him. I don’t know what else to do. I already used my second-to-last gambit: the invitation for him to join me at the Warfield for the Iggy and the Stooges reunion tour. He was momentarily speechless, then stoicly excited, when I originally told him I had two tickets for us to go. I reminded him of it, in an email, a few days ago.

Nothing. Not a word from the guy I wanted to call my man.

So I don’t have a lot of hope.

I mean, Iggy. Chance of a lifetime to see the original Stooges. On Iggy’s birthday. It’s gonna be crazy and it’s gonna be sublime.

Didn’t get a rise out of my buddy, though.

Anyhow, this is my story, this is my truth; this is all I’ve got, what I’m down to, my very last dime.

Come on, Dimitri. The forest is closing in on the path, demons are on the move, and night is gathering.

And if some other dear reader sees me a few months from now sucking some stranger’s cock, have a heart, will ya? Say hi, say something funny, put a hand on my shoulder, throw me a lifeline.

I might be drowning in an ocean of Come, after all.