Swish (4 page)

And eventually those fancies had brought me here, to the downtown subway headed toward the Financial District for sex, wondering where this new path in life would lead. Would I emerge from the Whitehall Street station into the world of glamour and glitz and laughter I had heretofore only glimpsed from afar through the pages of
XY Magazine
? Would I become the apparently jaded but secretly wise and joyful roué I had dreamed of being for so long? Or were these images merely myths created by the gay media working in concert with my own potent self-doubt? But I realized as I switched to the R train at Forty-second Street that there was no way to divine the answer. In fact, I thought as I knocked on a door I’d never seen before, wasn’t that the point of this whole exercise? To leap without looking?

So of course I totally knew him and we spent like half an hour gossiping about musical theater before we did anything else.

Okay, I didn’t
know
him, technically speaking, but I knew who he was (a prominent Broadway choreographer) and he knew who I was (a non-prominent non-Broadway composer). In person he fulfilled the promise of sexiness hinted at in his online photograph, and after we finished trading rumors about which shows were in trouble out of town a silence filled the room. Over the course of our conversation we’d maneuvered ourselves closer together on the couch; now he drew my head gently nearer to his, opened his lips sensually—oh, so sensually—and rammed his tongue into my mouth as if he were trying to bring down the gates of Masada.

The situation did not improve from there. I considered calling the whole thing off, but he seemed so enthusiastic I felt it would be churlish of me to leave. The only way to get him to stop Hoovering my mouth seemed therefore to be to start the 1 on 1 Sex as quickly as possible; I feigned such eagerness for this to happen as to be unable to restrain myself. Don’t get me wrong—I
was
eager. After all, there was always the chance that foreplay simply wasn’t his métier, and that what he lacked here he would more than make up for once we really got going. And so, without breaking the kiss (how could I, when the vacuum seal he’d created between our mouths was so strong as to be invulnerable to nuclear fission?), I took my jeans off.

“What, no underwear?” he chuckled. “My, my, aren’t we excited?”

“No,” I wanted to say, “the washing machines in our building are broken and so we’re out of clean boxer briefs and on rent strike,” but I was so relieved to be able once more to draw breath that I couldn’t get the words out. He leaned in to kiss me again; to avoid this, I executed a horizontal triple lutz at a velocity Michelle Kwan would have envied, and landed prone among the tasteful pillows. He responded by lifting me up chivalrously and carrying me—I am pleased to note here that I was light enough to cause no unseemly grunting on his part—into the bedroom, where he subjected me to the most tedious twenty minutes I had experienced since I could remember.

This is not to say that I derived no pleasure from our congress; certainly I felt the physical gratification that usually attends the activity in which we were engaged. But still, between occasional winces of discomfort, I wondered: Where was the subtlety? Where was the
ritardando,
the
crescendo,
the
subito piano
? Where was the lube?

Finally, after I had composed the B section to the song I was working on and remembered where I’d left my copy of
Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior,
he started screwing his face up, letting his tongue loll out of his mouth, and grunting incomprehensibly. I delightedly understood this to be the universal sign for “I’m coming!” and released the psychic and physical restraint in which I’d been holding myself. I screwed up my face and lolled and grunted right along with him, because I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t having a good time, and we were done, if not exactly at the same moment—the Holy Grail of casual sex—then close enough at least to feel that we’d made a good show of it.

We lay on our backs, breathing deeply, and I basked in the feeling of being connected, however haphazardly and for however brief a time, to another human soul. After a quarter of an hour I got out of bed and pulled my clothes on. A quick kiss goodbye and a vague “See you around” and I was gone.

I waited a long time for the subway back home. How had this happened? For years I’d heard gays described in the most salacious terms as fornicators hungry for nothing but spiritually empty sins of the flesh. How then could the practice of those sins have turned out to be such a workaday event? Where was the glamour and glitz and laughter? Why wasn’t I now a jaded but secretly wise and joyful roué?

And why, most of all, was there a bounce in my step? I felt just as unfulfilled as I had two hours before. Shouldn’t I have been moping about not having gotten what I wanted?

And then it occurred to me that perhaps I had gotten something else instead.

The first gay book I ever bought, in the summer after eighth grade, was a slim volume called
I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away.
I found it in a New Age bookstore in Los Angeles called the Bodhi Tree, and in order to camouflage my purchase I also bought copies of
The Journeyman’s Tarot
and
Your Inner Child of the Past.
The clerk saw through my ruse, however, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “I’M LOOKING FOR MR. RIGHT BUT I’LL SETTLE FOR MR. RIGHT AWAY—NOPE, NO SIR, THAT’S NOT THE WAY TO GO, YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR MR. RIGHT!” None of the other customers batted a dharma-laden eyelash, but I hurled my cash on the counter and fled as if the Nazis were coming. Eventually, having reached a safe distance from the store and from any human population, I began to read. The thrust of
I’m looking for Mr. Right but I’ll settle for Mr. Right Away
was that fleeting, anonymous sex filled no spiritual or emotional void at all.

And I was like, well,
duh.

But, as I reflected on the subway back uptown, spiritual and emotional fulfillment weren’t what I had been after here. It wasn’t as if I had thought casual sex with somebody I had never met would fill the gaping chasms that two and a half years of a bad relationship had gouged irreparably into my spirit, or give me the sense of deep intimacy I had not felt since
The Golden Girls
ended its run. No, I had just wanted to reinvent myself again, but with sex instead of Snickers. I had wanted to break the mold in which my boyfriend had cast me and to assume instead a shape of my own choosing.

And to that end I had embraced the risks and wonders offered by the anonymity of a casual encounter. I had put all my faith in myself and in my own potential, I had celebrated the holiness of my sexuality. True, I had spent much of the previous hour with somebody who had lifted half his last show’s choreography from Michael Jackson videos; still, I had been bold enough to go in search of that somebody, to whose name I would never have given a face but for an accident of fate, and ask him to skewer me.

Back in the high life, indeed.

My career as a slut, so auspiciously begun, progressed apace. Some of the men I met were just as maladroit in bed as the choreographer; some were worse. A few were more technically accomplished, but handicapped themselves in other ways. Take, for example, the Scottish gentleman who, when not rutting with strangers, worked as a professional masseur. I arrived at his apartment one Sunday afternoon and was thrilled when he invited me onto his massage table and started oiling my body; clearly I was going to get sex
and
a back rub. But, sadly, it wasn’t to be. He stopped the massage far too early and soon enough he was plunging in and out of me, which was quite pleasant until he started grunting about how he loved to fuck my pussy. He used the word “pussy” forty-seven times. When we were done I went home and e-mailed the Scottish embassy in New York suggesting that they revamp their human anatomy curricula, but they never wrote back.

Then there was the fellow whose (straight) wedding ring so scandalized me that I almost ripped his pants taking them off. His marriage to a woman notwithstanding, he was either an experienced sodomite or a natural genius. At some point during coitus, however, he switched from calling me “Peter Pan,” which I liked (especially after a brief fantasy of Johnny Depp as J. M. Barrie walking in and joining us), to calling me “little whore,” which I didn’t. But how to object? Any remonstrance would completely destroy the tone of the encounter, which was otherwise most agreeable. And I couldn’t meaningfully refuse him access to my inmost depths, as there was no part of my inmost depths he hadn’t already accessed. Then circumstances provided me with the perfect opportunity to defend my honor, and my mother wit was for once quick enough to take immediate advantage of it. And so, for the first time in my life, I spat instead of swallowing.

A week later I e-mailed him asking whether he’d be interested in meeting again—disagreeable epithets aside, he had been a master of his craft—and he replied that he would. In my response to him I mentioned that I’d dyed my hair black, and I never heard from him again; if I was no longer a redhead, I suppose, he couldn’t imagine that he was fucking the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

There were also the occasional (the
very
occasional) meetings that I found enjoyable on almost every level. There was Dan, for example, possessed of an extraordinary body and, it seemed, a personality to match. I arrived at his apartment to find not only that it was bursting with greenery but also that there was a dog-eared copy of
Persuasion
on the coffee table. Dan was great in bed, tender and rough by turns; all the plants made the sex feel that much more alive, and the Austen made me feel, as she always does, that there was still hope for civilization. Dan and I met once more and then he ruined everything by acquiring a boyfriend.

But Dan was the exception rather than the rule. In the few moments each day that I wasn’t on my back mentally translating Top 40 hits from my childhood into French (“Only the Good Die Young” proved particularly insusceptible of idiomatic felicity), I wondered. Yes, my continual auto-reinvention was in essence a solitary activity, so it didn’t really matter whether my partners had awkward technique or discomfiting pillow talk or, in one frightening instance, a pet python. But still, how was it that the sex was so consistently wretched?

And then it occurred to me that, if I was re-creating myself, maybe my partners were too. The waiter who slathered vile-tasting moisturizer all over his body five minutes before I showed up, the Streisand enthusiast who wouldn’t shut up about organic produce, the bodybuilder whose user name was jimjones (I actually couldn’t bring myself to go through with that one, especially as I had a weird feeling when I read his e-mail and I checked the date and it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, so he may very well have been a sexual dynamo, but I’ll never know)—maybe they had joined
men4sexnow.com
for the same reasons I had: they were weary of who they had allowed themselves to become, and were making themselves over by boffing strangers. And if this was so then I was giving them as much as they were giving me.

My pride swelled from liaison to liaison. Sure, I may have just had sex with a guy who wore a spiked collar and spanked me with something made out of leather and then pulled off the blindfold he’d insisted I wear only to reveal a room filled with
Star Wars
figures, Luke Skywalker in a different outfit everywhere I looked—but hadn’t I also just become a person who could dare to do such things? Wasn’t I exploring farther reaches of this new territory every day, erasing boundaries with every drop of my trousers? Wasn’t my character becoming measureless? And wasn’t his, too? Weren’t we both complicit in the collective expansion of the human soul?

Inevitably this led to orgies.

Repeated viewings of
Gang Bang Cadet
and
The Dicks of Hazzard
had convinced me that to participate in group sex was to reach the zenith of fleshly delights. The writhing mass of groaning, grunting, grasping carnality on my television screen promised a bacchanalian unity of spirit not otherwise seen outside of a Kylie Minogue concert. Come on, I thought: twelve or so well-proportioned (or so the hosts vowed) men reveling in one another’s bodies, laughing at the antiquated inhibitions we had discarded at the door along with our clothing. What could possibly keep such an event from being epiphanic?

The answer, of course, is elbows. What
Gang Bang Cadet
and
The Dicks of Hazzard
fail to disclose is that group sex is among the most physically uncomfortable businesses in which it is possible for a human being to engage. At one point during my first orgy I found myself lying diagonally across a bed, tenuously attached to somebody whose technique was hampered by his being tenuously attached in turn to somebody else; he kept going too far in one direction or the other and accidentally detaching himself from one or the other of us. The fellow on my right was reaching for the fellow on his right, who was unfortunately too far away for him to get to without removing his tongue from where it was already delighting a third fellow I couldn’t see.