Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger Read online

I felt weird. Two Sundays before I’d had dinner with him and his friends, my “other uncles” as he referred to them, and he specifically told me not to sleep with “Uncle Mike”—his best friend. I began to understand why. Uncle Mike waited until my real uncle was out of earshot, then began to tell me this other eighties (and current?) story of how he would put coke on the end of his dick (unbeknownst to the bottom) to numb the bottom so they could fuck longer. I kept it secret from my uncle that we had been fucking like crazy the past two weeks.

  I got to dinner at my uncle’s and that shit turned into a full-on character assault. My uncle asked me eight times during the course of dinner why I didn’t have a boyfriend yet, and didn’t I know that I wasn’t getting any younger? I already had answers. Money. Time. My drinking problem. My fear of commitment. Also, I was already married—to my art. My gay uncle wasn’t having it. Nine fuck buddies and not a single boyfriend tsk tsk. I tried to explain to him, this was sexual progress, this was revolution (this was all high risk). My gay uncle stated calmly: “You need to wash your pussy out and go find a man.”

  My mission was clear now:

  1.Wash my pussy out.

  2.Go find a man.

  The last time I went on a date was 2006. This dude I was fucking invited me over to dinner with the other dude he was fucking and shit got blown to hell exponentially. The other kid had better musculature and liked to be called racial slurs when he was getting fucked. Like how the fuck was I supposed to compete with that? In an effort to outdo the other boy, I told my love interest he could fuck me in a Klansman outfit. We tried it for a couple of minutes, but my heart wasn’t in it and love is not spelled with three K’s; I learned the hard way. After that tawdry bullshit I decided to stop dating and just get fucked a lot. It was easier than trying.

  “You should find a man like your Uncle ____” (his husband).

  Tall, Polish. Dependable. Poland. Where the fuck is Poland?

  I didn’t have the heart to tell my uncle that I planned a future of gaining weight like my idol Aretha Franklin, owning twelve cats, and paying for sex with my disability checks. I’d be free to decide without some dude telling me what to do. Be it gym teacher, cop, or boyfriend, all authority figures bug the hell out of me. I wanted to be free of all the dumbness. FREE. DUMB. Freedom. “I give up on you,” he says. His husband pats me on the shoulder, “You’re at an impossible age to find a good husband. Just wait.” He gets up to go sit at the opposite end of the dining room where there’s a piano and plays (from memory no less) a forty-minute classical piece and actually cries in the middle of it, and maybe I do want to marry a man like my uncle. Where the fuck is Poland?

  POSITIVE RESULTS

  I was feeling rather AIDS-y. I had this recurring nightmare where I’d go to the STD clinic, say my name, and red lights would start flashing and a siren would go off. I sat there with my HIV counselor and told her my sexual history of the last year—and I swear to god she did this—she got up, rolled her eyes (hard), and said (valley girl accent) “Um, I think you might be HIV positive.” And she was right! “How do you think this happened?” she asked. I thought long and hard. It was probably one of the couple hundred guys I let nail me without a rubber, but I didn’t say that because even though I didn’t really know this bitch, I still, for some reason, didn’t want her to think I sleep around. “I caught it from a toilet seat.”

  She didn’t laugh. I sensed she was a dyke and there is no way you’re ever going to convince a lesbian that semen is cool. Unless she’s trying to get pregnant, that is. Nuh-uh, forget it! I did the same thing I always did when cornered, I lied through my fucking teeth. “I caught it from my monogamous boyfriend who was cheating on me (sniff, sniff).” Now she was ready to treat me like a human being. “Oh honey! Here’s some tissue! The world is so unfair! That monster!” I kinda hate this bitch, and how come there’s no sympathy for sluts? Like none? What if I had told the truth? “Oh, I just wanted to be liked.” She would have certainly labeled me a menace to society. “Here’s some condoms and lube,” she said. I took the lube. I was rather traumatized by the news. I mean, I didn’t wanna cry or throw things. To be honest, I mostly just wanted some orange juice. I wasn’t going to cry, but I was definitely gonna do some Oxycodone. I called my cousin back home in tears, “Roscoe, I have HIV (sniff, sniff),” to which he responded, “Oh, like Magic Johnson? Fuck it nigga! Just eat some vegetables!” I had to slow down his words in my head, “Fuck it nigga, just eat some vegetables.” Sound advice! But I never eat vegetables or drink water. I eat coffee. I’m definitely going to die. Or something. I remember sitting in the STD clinic and looking at a model of HIV. Ugly thing. It looked like something off of Star Trek. A glob-shaped thing with red dots all over it. Plugs itself into one of your cells and makes hella copies of itself. Despite my number of partners, I had a good idea of who did this to me. I didn’t let a lot of guys cum in me. (Just ones I thought were hot.)

  He lived up the street. When I biked up to meet him and told him, he said “Well, this is going to be hard now that I’m seeing someone I actually care about . . .” And what was I, chopped liver? But wait, I was chopped liver. We met online and his pic was of him naked with his bare ass up in the air; and I’m certain that if there really is a hell, all us gay boys are going for how carelessly we treat each other. Perhaps. After I tell him, we sit on his bed crying and holding each other for forty minutes, and it strikes me that even though we’ve been fucking for months this here is the most intimate thing we’ve ever done with one another. I take a long look at him. Big ol’ white boy, Scandinavian descent (I could never quite pronounce his last name right). Six foot four, 220 pounds (all muscle), blond hair, blue eyes. Looked like he had sailed over from Scandinavia that day on a Viking boat with twenty of his horny cousins. I get a hard on and ask if he wants to fuck one last time. I had already exhausted my risk, like, why the fuck not? He laughs and kicks me out and calls his new boyfriend to inform him that he might have quite possibly ruined his life. I biked away knowing I would never see him again, and despite everything, I know this is not some great tragedy. (“I don’t believe that!” says a boy in writing class. “I don’t believe it when you say it was no great tragedy!” I assure him that that particular day, it indeed wasn’t.)

  I snort some Oxycodone and then take a shit. There’s something totally shamanistic about taking a shit on drugs. I sat on the toilet all itchy and sweaty, and my mind went to dark places. I caught visions of my last two t-cells sitting on a couch in my bloodstream smoking crack, when all of a sudden one of them looks at the other and is like “Dude, fuck this place,” and they both shoot themselves in the head! The rope attaching me to Earth is cut, and I go flying UP UP UP above the world. I high-five my dead great-grandmother (“Welcome,” she says lovingly). I’m really high. I willfully switch the vision. I know I want to be an old man. I picture myself on the seven acres of land my father leaves for me in Alabama. I’m sitting on my big plantation-house porch in a rocking chair, long white/gray hair, smoking weed, house full of hot young boys—and old ones too—growing organic watermelons and shit. Yes. I get up to wipe, and I’m so high I stare at my shit on the toilet paper for like, two hours. When that wears off, I go and cook myself some vegetables.

  SHIT, POOP DICK, VOMIT, AND OTHER UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES

  There was shit everywhere in the city. “I don’t mind it if it’s on my dick!” as the saying goes, but it was everywhere. This junkie took a shit by my doorstep, not in polite little logs, but in one huge ominous bulb that rounded at the top and sides like a three-pound mushroom. To add insult to injury, the culprit took a toy candy dispenser (called “The Sweet Machine”) and (strategically?) stuck it down in the center of the shit. I cleaned it on my way to work and all day I could fell the heavy shit stank fume in my lungs. I put the shit-covered Sweet Machine in a bag by the garbage cans on the street. It disappeared for two hours and then someone brought it right back. What horrible thing had I done to deserve this? I got
to the restaurant late. Again. The only customer was a junkie too. I didn’t know this until he passed out at the table for thirty minutes. I walked by and caught a whiff of him and he had totally shit himself. I moved to a safer place in the restaurant, and from afar saw him wake up, knock over his water, reach his finger in the back of his pants, SMELL IT, freak out, and run to the restroom. He stayed in the restroom for thirty more minutes, and when he came out (doing that whole “I’m on heroin” nod off thing) the toilet and sink were completely covered in feces. (He hands me ten dollars for his milkshake—which I immediately soak in alcohol.) Later that day in writing class the teacher asks us to write about unpleasant things and I title mine “Shit, Poop Dick, Vomit, and Other Unfortunate Circumstances.”

  1. I brought this one asshole home from the bar and we fucked like drunk people. Then, of course, I had to pay the toll. I pulled out of him, dick dirty, and the room filled with the smell of curried vegetables. He almost threw up and I tried to say soothing and attentive top things like “Don’t worry baby, it’s human—it’s natural” (even though I wanted to fucking die). I wiped my dick on a dirty sock and threw it under my bed. The weird part: three months later, when I cleaned my room, I couldn’t find the poop sock anywhere. What happened?

  2. What is extraordinary is that I had known this boy a full eight years before we boned. A precedent of sorts but then it still all turned to hell. He wanted to fuck in the morning. I hate morning sex. The morning is not a sexy time. It’s all about the beer shit, bad breath, that bloated gassy feeling, hunger pangs—couldn’t you just make love to my mind? “No way,” he says. I’d rather hate myself than fuck in the morning, but to make him happy I give in and bend over. Normally I just shut up and internalize my bottom role, but I couldn’t move past the rather pessimistic thought/fact that getting fucked in the ass when you’re not feeling it is so demeaning. Whatever. That’s when my lover (that big dick mule) pulled out and ow! It felt like he yanked out a kidney! I looked to see if I had left any guts on his dick and I had! This brownish-red crown “crowned” the head of his dick. It was like murder! Then he just sat there smiling no less! He carelessly plopped down on the bed and smeared the remnants of my lower intestines on the sheet, didn’t say a word and even checked his email with my shit still on his dick. I judged him, showered, and left. I mean, I guess it’s a bit hypocritical to be fecalphobic if you’re going to fuck people in the ass, but why did it all just seem so wrong to me? I knew we could never be together because he was too comfortable with my shit.

  3. At the end of the day I have to say my most impressive sex partners have always been druggy, straight punk boys ’cause they don’t give a fuck. I don’t want shaved butthole gay dude sex because I’m an (unapologetic) self-loathing gay. Just saying. Anywho, we smoked (yes smoked) half an eighth of shrooms, ate the other half, and he started fucking my face. Oops! Too much air! I threw up on the side of the bed and floor. He gently caressed my face and said “Awww, baby!” threw a towel over the vomit, and we started fucking again. Ew.

  4. I was fully engaged in sexual intercourse with a silver fox flight attendant thirty years my senior. Very suddenly my dick popped out of him, slapped against my stomach, and I could see (in the moonlight-drenched room) this huge angry shit-ball roll, sticky slow, down my stomach and onto the floor. When we turned the lights on I couldn’t see the shit-ball anywhere! I think the dog ate it.

  EXPERIMENTAL (PORNO), TRASH, AND NO STAR

  1. My first boyfriend in San Francisco was a total motherfucker. There I was in some random backyard, freezing, in a shit-ton of makeup, about to do my first unicorn porn. The question was not Why am I doing this? but rather Why am I doing this for free?! But wait. I know why. In my twenty-two-year-old reasoning, I was doing this because I wanted him to love me back. Buh-buh-buh-bullshit. Some people say love doesn’t cost a thing, but I equate love to a credit card or a loan from the mafia, i.e., you’ll always pay much more later. Getting fucked by a unicorn wasn’t so much morally taxing as physically taxing. The horn was pointy as fuck and it made me bleed. Years later, coked out in a bathroom stall, me and my director boyfriend argued over the physical logistics of getting fucked in the ass. “There should be that point where you don’t feel anything,” he said. The problem was that I felt everything, and that was the core of our disagreement. He was a power bottom; I was a power(less) bottom. We mutually didn’t get it. The day I left the set I called my mother and asked “Oh Mama! Was I exploited?” “Probably,” she said. “But think about it like this baby. There are some sick fucks in the world. Some people fuck animals. Some people fuck children. But fucking a unicorn . . . that’s art.” And with that well-placed advice I decided to chill the fuck out on it. I am still charmed and even bewitched when I see my old boyfriend, though we don’t spend much time talking about our old “art film.”

  2. I got picked to be in an indie-rock-boy skin flick. The plot concerned various boys in SF looking for love and there would be cum shots and boners—very avant-garde. I played a retail employee and a top (two things I despise more than anything, but I wanted a role that challenged me). The cast got together and had a meeting. We saw this movie as a political strategy. We wanted to challenge gay male body image bullshit, and all decided to grow our hair and gain thirty pounds each. Since we all had no body hair to speak of we defined ourselves as “cherubs” (i.e., chubby yet hairless or chubby wubby wasn’t fuzzy, was he?). Only time would tell if the bear community would accept us as their hairless cousins or if they were gonna be total stuck-up bitches about it (as bears usually are. Let’s face it).

  I showed up to the first day of shooting plump as fuck, looking like an indie-rock version of Rerun from What’s Happening!!, and the rest of those sluts were still skinny! Turns out they thought I was just joking. I could have killed those cunts, but their skinny bodies would just taste like macrobiotic food. Fuck that. I had no choice but to go on. At the movie premiere I was shocked to find out how fucking good I look on camera with thirty extra pounds. The extra weight filled in all my drug wrinkles! Not to mention the “weight” it added to my sex scenes. I sucked dick and ate ass like a hungry person and the audience applauded. After leaving the movie premiere I ate a whole bucket of fried chicken and highfived myself, thanking the Goddess that the world around me was perhaps ready for this jelly.

  3. Nudity. I got asked to be naked on the cover of one of the free weekly papers, and I said yes ’cause I’m that type of ride-or-die bitch. I also felt like someone had to represent for the uncircumcised community, plus no matter how much I try to be hard, I am in fact a total fucking hippie. Like in my head’s happy place I’m running around naked in a big-ass sunny field, with a sunflower in my ass, totally feeling it. It went to newsstands and it made this one sister I know react: “Why was the white dude’s dick bigger? Do you think it was a racial conspiracy?” (She was going hard with this.) And I was like “Naw dude. Genetics?” We dropped it and got high and went to Whole Foods.

  AN INTERVENTION

  I had moved from the graveyard to the morning shift. Seven a.m. I had to leave Oakland by 6:00 a.m. five days a week. I begin to notice this was equally as taxing as the graveyard in that damned if you do, damned if you don’t kinda way. This crazy old lady came in, hip as fuck, with a manicured ’do—how did a homeless woman have such fabulous hair? Is that classist to ask? Either way, she kept dumping quarters and breaking up cigarettes in her coffee and pouring it all over the table. Twenty minutes after kicking her out, I regretted it ’cause it left me alone in the restaurant with my acute depression, which had been going on for two and a half years.

  This depression had begun after I left the diner to go to Europe and came back to find that they had given my job away. I went to work at this pizzeria in Berkeley. Kinda sucked. I got hit on by weirdo, bisexual Berkeley soccer dads, and I hated being a dishwasher. The job was dangerous for a couple of reasons: it was close to a bar that gave discounted drinks to the employees of the pizza place an
d it was four blocks away from the bathhouse. I sometimes came to from blackouts walking around in there. One night I was so bored I snuck a fifth of Jack into work, got blackout drunk, got into an argument with the closing manager, and got fired. It was the third job I had lost to drinking—so I was used to it! Whatever. And whoever gave a fuck about washing dishes anyway? Losing the job didn’t break my heart—coming to at the bathhouse did though. I got to a point where even when not blackout (just slightly buzzed) I’d still let basically anyone fuck me, like that eighty-year-old who always wore the aviator goggles, Raphael the blind poet, and any number of bathhouse employees. It was before I was positive, and I felt like I was going to have to fight like hell to maintain my negative status ’cause either I liked fun too much or had a death wish (it was hard to discern). My therapist at the time told me to write a story about everything that happened to me while working at the pizzeria. “Pay close attention to the actions of the boy in that story,” she said. “Can you live with the boy in that story?”

  I couldn’t live with the boy in that story. I felt like I had failed myself. I countered by attending Barebackers Anonymous meetings. The meetings were usually full. We were all substance addicts of some sort. Junkies, drunks, tweekers, you name it. I regret to admit that, in the beginning, I had a slight prejudice against the tweekers. As the saying goes, a junkie will steal your shit. Period. A drunk will steal your shit and forget about it. But a tweeker will steal your shit and then help you look for it. I couldn’t always discern which was worst, but I let my guard down and learned to love my tweeker brothers. As we revealed our lives in stories, it turned out I had done waaaaay sketchier shit blackout drunk than most of them pulled being up for six days. Judge not, I learned. I also learned other useful things in Barebackers Anonymous, like how pulling out is, in fact, not a form of disease prevention, and how to turn down a piece of ass every once in a while. This drastic-ass old stunt queen had this awesome story about how in the midnineties in a sex club in Amsterdam, she stayed up on tweak and took 112 anonymous loads of cum up her butt in one four-hour “sitting” (she had been up for two weeks), and how, besides the speed part, she regretted nothing. 112 loads. Shit fuck Jesus Mary. Who was keeping count?! This story became no less compelling when she told it . . . every meeting. I remember thinking it wasn’t hot in a porny way, more like an Animal Channel kind of way. I remember this one time she told that story and it made me throw up my tuna fish sandwich. The only time I called bullshit was when this Financial District asshole talked for forty-five minutes straight (leaving five minutes in the session for the rest of the group) about his raging speed addiction and had the nerve to say “I’m too rich not to be happy . . .” (I almost barfed.) I too, being rich (if only in spirit), showed up stoned, crashed somewhere in the middle of this dude’s buh-buh-buh-bullshit soliloquy, and in the post-stoned sober haze realized “Wait a minute, that bitch is still tweaking!” The piece of shit psychology major intern that was facilitating hadn’t even caught that shit, and I was feeling judgmental (I had certainly been pushed), and wrote in the suggestion box to him at the end of group “You’re an asshole and you should kill yourself.” Then, just to be a total bitch, asked that selfsame asshole in the lobby outside group if I could borrow twenty dollars.