Hey, it's no picnic being a dirty old man.
There is, for one thing, the nasty little problem of dealing with unquenchable desire. It's not that I go around looking for guys to be attracted to. They're everywhere-supermarkets, theme parks, the audiences of readings I give. And they're beautiful, so many of them are beautiful. It's weird that lots of straight guys can't figure out how queer men can find each other hot; I'm no bisexual rocket scientist, but I can sure understand what het men see in women. Women, a lot of them, are gorgeous in one way or another, or maybe a lot of ways. Well, it's the same with guys, especially with-and here I am being a Dirty Old Man to the max-guys who are younger, often a lot younger, than I am. I suppose it makes me sound like a romantic fool, but there are boys out there who leave me faint with desire. As in: to flog them and fuck them would be, for some damn reason, heaven on Earth.
If you're going to go cruising with me, you might as well know out front that I have quirky tastes. I can understand the appeal of thoroughly handsome muscle gods, but I feel about hunks pretty much the way I feel about women: I can understand their objective appeal but often as not, what I can understand is "attractive" doesn't hit me in the crotch. It's mostly the odd boys who do it for me: skinny boys, chunky boys, nerdy guys, needy guys. At least a boy's ears can stick out or something, y'know? I have a taste for the thoroughly disreputable, too, for young men not so much "Rough Trade" as "Trouble."
A couple of years ago I had the most humongous crush on this speedfreak in his 20s. I would go over to his apartment whenever he'd let me, which was generally somewhere around 3 am. He'd meet me at the door looking tired and drawn, mostly, wearing jeans and an old T-shirt and, if I was lucky fetish-wise, a baseball cap. Like a lot of tweakers, he mumbled, so everything beyond "Hi" was in doubt. He was, objectively, good-looking in a boyish way and if his rail-thin body looked a bit undernourished, that only made my dick ache with desire. We'd go into his bedroom, both barren and cluttered in that way you'd recognize if you've ever hung around with young guys with drug problems. I would lie back on his unmade bed, avoiding the unsprung springs, while he sucked toxic smoke from his well-used glass pipe. Then, still rushing, he'd get on his knees, unbutton my fly, and suck my dick. It was all very lower depths.
Somewhere along the line, in the vicinity of middling middle age, I became a Daddy. I hadn't planned on it, but there I was, being invited to stroke and abuse desirable young men, and who was I to say no? Since I'm both a sadist and a relatively sweet guy, I could never take the role of Impervious Leathertop Master to heart, but the nasty Dad schtick suited me just fine. I became, on occasion, both punisher and protector, like Jehovah with a goatee and rope. I'd learned the power of all this a good while back, when I bottomed for one of my first SM tops. His nasty leather slapper on my tenderized ass brought me to tears, which he then stroked away. As he held me in his strong arms, the arms that had, just moments before, made my aching ass bright red, I realized that something magical was happening. I'm not even sure if he felt it: one of the many lessons sex has taught me is the mystery of subjectivity, which is to say the difficulty of knowing just what the fuck the other person is feeling, much less what's actually going on.
Let's see, where was I? Ah yes, getting blown by a skinny young cutie on drugs. So vulnerable, so desirable, so fucked up. I'd usually manage to get him out of his T-shirt, but he almost always kept his jeans on. I wish I could come up with some telling reason why he did, but it was as puzzling as it was irritating, since on the rare occasions I got to see him stripped, his ass struck me as a thing of particular beauty-unfuckable as it happened, but supremely edible. I got my tongue in his hole every chance I could, but mostly I ended up sucking his limpish dick as it stuck out through his fly, or watching him jack endlessly off, dipping his thin, nervous fingers into a family-sized jar of Vaseline.
Over months of sporadic meetings, the cute young druggie and I did in fact explore some pretty kinky shit. I'd tie up his dick, keeping it stiffer than meth would ordinarily allow. I slapped him around, pissed on him, fell a little bit in love with him. But playing dominant with someone so lost, so druggily at sea, often seemed superfluous. What does it mean to take power over of someone so perfectly out of control? Why bother?
Being sadoDaddy to him, as with other younger men, was a pretty complicated role. When I lay there with him after he'd crashed, watching him sleep, feeling his breath on my cheek, I felt, in part, triumphant. There he was, the worthless object of my desire, napping like a babe in my arms. I could project whatever I wanted onto his unlined face: trust, affection, even love. But then the question arose: what the hell was such a cute young guy doing with me? The obvious answer, that he was totally fucked up, was less than flattering to me. I was a happy-as-shit mercy fuck, but a mercy fuck nonetheless.
This, when I allowed myself to think about it, was a little unnerving. We all want to punish those who, through their beauty, make us vulnerable. And if, for some reason, they let us share a piece of their light, we want to destroy them for being such thorough fools. It's the stuff that doesn't make it to Hallmark cards, but it's real nonetheless. One time I grabbed hold of his wrists, pinned them roughly to the broken-down mattress as he struggled to consciousness and smiled sleepily at me. If thoughts of doing him real harm flitted briefly through my head, who could have blamed me? But then, when it came to harm, he was doing a pretty good job on himself. The stupid little fuck. When I spit in his face, his smile vanished, he looked confused for a moment, and then he stuck out his tongue and licked up some of the spittle as it dripped down his beautiful, lost visage.
For once, his dick was rock-hard.
Each journal will be updated weekly.
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Simon Sheppard is the author of Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories and the forthcoming Kinkorama: Dispatches From the Frontlines of Perversion. He's also the coeditor, with M. Christian, of Rough Stuff and Roughed Up: More Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power. He loiters shamelessly at www.simonsheppard.com.
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