I sit on my bed with my laptop, my back against the wall so nobody can see what I’m doing. The website I’m signing up for is called Adam4Adam. The margins are mosaics of gay porn links. Bareback Twinks. Broke Straight Boyz. His First Silver Daddy. BiLatin Men. The variety distracts me from my goal momentarily, but I go on to fill out the application to become a member.
Name: Sergio (this will remain anonymous, the site explains). Age: 19. User Name: ShyOne90. Dick Size: Seven inches (I’ve never really measured, but that sounds big enough). Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latin. Height: five foot ten. Weight: One forty.
My little brother enters the room, and I slam my laptop shut. He looks at me, raises his thick black eyebrow, and proceeds to enter the bathroom. As he closes the door, I open the laptop. I add a picture to my profile, a flattering one in which I don’t even look like myself, and my eyes look honey brown rather than black. The site encourages naked pictures. The only time I ever took a nude photograph was with my laptop on a day I had the house to myself, but I deleted it after admiring the naked boy on my screen for a few lonely hours. Remembering the act still makes me giddy.
“Sergio, what are you doing?” My mom calls from the kitchen in Spanish, and my reflexes slam the laptop shut again, though she couldn’t possibly see me.
“¡Nada, mamá!” I yell back, “I’m busy!”
I close my room’s door and open the laptop again. I proceed to finish the application by agreeing to the “terms and conditions” that nobody ever reads. Now I browse other people’s profiles. Most of the pictures are dicks or nude torsos. A few faces pop up here and there: usually just the ones belonging to handsome White men. After two minutes of dick watching, I click on the black and white face of a longhaired man. His user name is GuruGod. Enlarged, his picture looks like Kurt Cobain if he were alive – older, tired, and a dirty kind of handsome.
I write him a message: Hey
He replies: What’s up?
I don’t know what to say: Not much.
Wanna grab a beer?
I stare at his question as if it could answer itself, and after four minutes, I finally type four letters: Sure.
I tell GuruGod to pick me up at the Starbucks eight blocks away from my house.
“I’m going out!” I yell as I run for my house’s front door.
“Where?” my mom looks at me like I’m from Mars, “You never go out!”
“Just gonna grab a coffee!”
“You don’t like coffee,” she raises her eyebrow.
“You don’t know everything I like, mamá!” I guarantee as I slam the door shut.
I get to the Starbucks and I notice GuruGod’s blue Prius had just finished parking. He walks out, about six inches taller than me, and older-looking than in his picture.
“Hi,” he says in a raspy voice, no expression on his face.
“Hey,” I say, feeling my voice shaking the one syllable.
“Shall we?” He points to his car casually.
“Yeah, sure. I mean, unless you wanna grab a coffee or something.”
He scowls, “I hate the stuff. Especially from big chains.”
“Yeah. Me too, actually!” I say, and go into his car after he doesn’t respond.
“What’s your real name anyway?” I ask while he drives.
He doesn’t respond, focusing intently on his driving as if he were a surgeon.
“I’m Sergio,” I offer, but he still doesn’t respond.
The inside of his car is impeccably clean, and from his rearview mirror hang rosary beads of some sort, though instead of a crucifix, a picture of a man with an elephant’s head hangs at the bottom.
After two eternal minutes of silence he says, “Ray.”
“Huh?” I utter, confused.
“That’s my name, stupid,” he says with a scowl.
“Oh, sorry,” I catch myself apologizing for nothing. “So what do you do, Ray?”
After a long pause he finally says, “You should’ve read my profile, stupid. It’s there for a reason. I’m not doing all the work for you.”
I glare at the asshole and wish I had the nerve to jump off his moving car.
He turns on the radio to a Latino station and the rhythmic music fills the car.
“Do you speak Spanish?” I ask Ray.
“No. I wish I did though,” he confesses as he turns off the radio.
“It’s a beautiful language,” I say with a prideful smile.
“Yeah, but only the kind they speak in Spain. Not the shit your people spew.”
Instead of telling him to fuck off, I give him the silent treatment. He keeps driving to God-knows-where quietly. After five minutes of unbreathable silence, he finally looks at me and smiles at the prideful scorn on my face, “You’re really cute by the way.”
I don’t trust his compliment and mumble as disingenuously as possible, “Thanks.”
We arrive to the parking lot of a bar named The Fault Line. It’s 6:30pm on a Thursday, so there are only about eight more cars in the place.
“What’s your drink?” he asks as he gets out of the car.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you – I don’t really drink,” I say as I shiver and rub my arms with my hands to warm up because the twilight air is colder than I had expected.
“How fucking boring are you!” Ray accuses me as he goes back to his car.
Before I could say anything, I hear his car beeping as he unlocks the door to his Prius. He runs to it. The asshole’s trying to leave me, I think. But instead he goes to the car’s back seat, pulls out a brown leather jacket and throws it at me.
“Next time bring your own fucking sweater,” he winks maliciously at me as he walks to the bar. It is then that I remember I’m nineteen and can’t go into one.
“Ray, they won’t let me in,” I say, waiting for him to explode in rage.
“Relax,” he rolls his eyes. “You don’t look your age in my jacket. You look a bit older. And it’s early on a Thursday. They’ll let any-fucking-body in tonight.”
“Hi guys!” a smiling, rather fat Black guy greets us at the entrance with an effeminate voice. “How you all doing tonight?”
“Great,” I say, petrified under the jacket, trembling more than when I was cold. It’s my first time getting so close to a bar.
“Come here, honey,” Ray says as he pulls me to him in an awkward embrace.
I can’t say anything and simply blush as he puts his hand into the jacket. His fingers barely caress my torso and I can feel the beginning of an erection in my pants. But his intention is another. He pulls out a batch of stickers from the inside pocket of the jacket. They’re the anti-Prop-8 kind that read “No H8”. He shows them to the man.
“I just wanted to stop for a drink with my boyfriend and drop these off for folks to pick up if they like,” he explains as smoothly as if we were really boyfriends. “I’m campaigning against Prop 8, you know, fighting for our rights and shit.”
“Ooh, they’re the pretty ones, too!” the black dude says with a huge smile. “Yeah, just ask the bartender where to put them. You guys are a cute couple, by the way! And you’re in for a treat for coming tonight!”
“Oh yeah,” Ray smiles with a friendliness I thought him incapable of, and he puts his arm around me. “What’s goin’ on?”
“It’s Chubby-Chaser Night!” he says as he lets out an excited scream. “You guys are too thin, but we never know if you skinnies could use a bit more flesh on you!” He says this as he caresses the outline of his round body suggestively.
“Never hurts to try, right?” Ray winks at the charismatic ticket man and he hands him a twenty. “Keep the change, bud.”
As we walk inside side by side, I put my arm around Ray’s waist, as if I still needed to pretend to be his boyfriend.
“Whoa, hands to yourself, stupid,” he says as he returns to asshole mode and separates himself from me. “And you’re drinking tonight. No fucking excuses!”
The place is very dark and has whips, chains, dildos, and lewd posters hung on the walls – a masochist’s paradise. The small televisions hung everywhere are playing hardcore gay pornography instead of football. We sit at the bar, and at first I can’t take my eyes off the porn. Surprisingly after thirty seconds, a penis going into an ass loses its naughty allure being displayed so shamelessly. Ray orders two Blue Moons as I watch.
Handing me one of the beer bottles, he stares at me for a minute and finally says, “You really are very cute.”
This time I can see him face-to-face and notice his eyes are a bright green that is usually reserved for cats. He’s not lying, and I feel beautiful.
“Thanks,” I say almost screaming so he can hear me over the loud music, but I look down, hiding from his scary, feline eyes.
As we drink a few more beers, he gives the gorgeous Italian barman the batch of anti-Prop-8 stickers, which the Adonis places next to a few stacks of free gay publications near the entrance. Each magazine has beautiful white men on the cover.
“Where’s everyone?” I ask Ray after realizing we’re the only people at the bar.
“They’re probably in the patio,” he points behind the bar. “Shall we?”
He orders two more beers and we begin to walk to the real party, a patio with color lights flashing like rainbow police sirens. But Ray makes a quick stop at the restroom and I follow. He puts our beers on the floor next to the door, and we walk in to see a big tub full of ice on the ground instead of urinals on the wall.
He pulls out his penis and pees carelessly, looking up with eyes closed and sighing with relief, his blonde hair hanging back. I stare for a second, then quickly look away and feel my dick getting hard.
“I’m urinal shy,” I tell him.
He shakes his long floppy dick up and down a few times after peeing, and realizing I meant what I said, he says, “ Fine. I’ll watch the door.”
He guards, but I have a hard time peeing anyway. I wasn’t lying when I said I’m urinal shy, and a half-erect penis doesn’t help. I confess to him, “I can’t really pee.”
“Just relax. I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says without turning my way, still guarding.
I finally pee, wash my hands in seconds, and get my beer from the dirty bar floor.
We make it to the patio and I realize why it was Chubby-Chaser Night. About two-dozen chubby, fat, and morbidly obese men dance, talk, or discretely perform fellatio in dark corners. We are the only thin people there, and this makes me feel good about myself. We’re practically the default prom King and Queen.
There is an empty, elevated dance floor – likely meant for go-go boys – on which Ray sits and he invites me to join him. I am scared to dance, but he’s simply drinking his beer. He doesn’t even tap his foot or finger to the music, and I know I’m safe from the humiliation of having to show my shitty moves. I sit against a wall, and notice a plain fat guy with black hair walking our way and finally sitting a few feet away from Ray. He throws shy glances our way for about a minute and, when they’re not reciprocated, leaves.
“Fat boy wanted you,” Ray says. “You should go talk to him.”
By this time I’m a little tipsy and less afraid of him, “Right! Though I’m sure he was looking for someone closer to his age, pops!”
Ray puts his face in front of mine, his wry smile and cat eyes trying to scare me, but this time I don’t budge an inch, and I raise my chin arrogantly. His evil smile becomes a genuine smirk, but his eyes remain just as intense. He almost burns two holes right through me when he finally decides to kiss me. It’s a soft kiss, the type I expected to receive in adulthood when I was a child. After a few minutes of locking lips, he grabs me to embrace me affectionately from behind. I can’t see him, only the crowd going on with their fat celebration, but no one nearly as happy as I am.
“I didn’t think I’d be doing this tonight,” Ray confesses with a wistful sigh, holding my hand softly, caressing each finger like it holds a secret he wants to learn.
“Life surprises you sometimes,” I smiled at him as if I loved him.
“What the hell would you know?” he rolled his eyes. “When was the last time you did something you didn’t think you would ever do?”
“Well, I came into a bar being a teenager. That counts, no?” I giggled.
“I dragged your ass in,” he clarified with a lawyer’s tone.
“Fine. What’s my ass supposed to do to please ya, pops?”
“Quit calling me ‘pops’, unless you want me to spank your ass,” he warned me dryly. “In fact, I think that’s what I’m gonna do!”
He tries to turn me on my stomach so he can spank me, but I struggle and laugh at his silly attempt. I look at him, but something changes; his look is stern and cold again.
“Turn over so I can spank you,” he says as his eyes penetrate my soul. He’s serious.
“No,” I say as gravely as he. But my pride can’t beat his cruel stare.
“This is the last time I’ll tell you – turn over so I can spank you,” his eyes beat me, but I submit willingly. This is my choice.
He spanks me a few more times than I expected, hard, but it doesn’t hurt under my jeans. When he finishes, I simply laugh, sit straight and flip him off.
“Oh yeah?” Ray says with an offended voice. “Now we’re gonna do it with your pants pulled down. Gonna teach you a lesson!”
He tries to turn me over again, but this time I don’t let him. I stare back at him, eyes terrified and angry like a wounded animal’s, screaming no, but without human words. His eyes never change, though. They dare me, and I want their green strength for myself. They promise it to me. They force it on me. I can run back home or call my mom. But instead I let him do it.
He turns me over, pulls my pants and boxers down to my upper thigh, revealing my bare buttocks to the Chubby Chaser night attendees, their flashing color lights, and the stars above the patio’s sky. He spanks me hard, mercilessly, but I don’t feel it because my eyes are burning and melting with hot shame. I cannot tell if he’s been spanking me for ten seconds or two hours or two millennia. When he’s done I look at him with the bitterest contempt, and I see his eyes sad for the first time. My heart implodes and is now expanding like the big bang. It’s the loneliest moment of my life. My arms wrap themselves around him without my permission, and I weep uncontrollably. He holds me tenderly and consoles me like you would an infant, caressing my back with one hand and pulling my pants up with the other.
When the tears stop escaping my humiliated eyes, I finally look at Ray and tell him, whimpering, “I don’t know if this is the bravest thing I’ve ever done – or the most foolish.”
“And you’ll never know,” he smiles arrogantly. “But the funny thing is that nobody is looking at your ass. It’s all fatties in here; only way they’d look at your ass is if it had a chicken wing sticking out if it.”
I stop whimpering and chuckle. I look around and, indeed, the world continues spinning the same way, the flamboyant lights flashing in the same schizophrenic rhythms and colors. It was only my brain that was rotating against the current – counterclockwise.
Ray drops me home at around ten that night.
“¿Cómo estuvo el Estarbucks?” my mom asks me as I put my keys in my pocket.
“Starbucks was OK,” I lie, not looking her in the eye.
“I guess you do like that coffee stuff. Just not the one here at home,” she smiles knowingly. “Se te nota en la sonrisota, chamaco.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I answer smiling from some other place in my head.
“Just don’t get back home from coffee this late again,” she warns. “Or I’m gonna have to give you some good nalgadas!”
“No hace falta, mamá,” I shake my head. “I’m a big boy now, I don’t need spankings from you anymore.”