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  There were Latin boys of such devastating beauty I could get off just touching their flawless skin. Hairy Italians who all wanted you to think they were tops, and, okay, some of them were. Asians who set off every nerve in my body with their fingertips. And a black man once, a model in need of some emergency cash, who didn’t want me even for money I was so fat at the time, but who got so turned on backstage when I went to work on his nipples he came when I did.

  And there were special cases, too, boys I’d fall in love with just at the moment I shot a load all over the floor behind the screen wishing I had drenched them in that special way I have of spewing a load so big even the professionals gasp (and I’m not just bragging), and I’d visit them time after time.

  Luis, or whatever his name was, a Puerto Rican from New Jersey who was working his way through landscape design courses at Rutgers, I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget the curving angle of his enormous rock-hard dick as he kneeled over my head at the Paramount Hotel (before the chichi renovation), or watching him shower, or his smile, or seeing him again in L.A. and taking him to dinner, and wanting him so bad through my pants I could feel them dampen. If I still had his phone number, I’d call him right now and dump a load anywhere he’d take it.

  And there was Vladimir, of course, who got famous on late-night cable TV, Vladimir who was named after the vampire in a Dracula movie his mother saw once, who came home with me one night-before-Gay-Pride-Parade-Day and waved to his fans along Christopher Street (I was so proud), and then stripped in my bedroom and made leisurely, reasonable love with his bulked up body for an hour or more. And Rocky, who got famous for a minute or two, too, when he teamed up with Madonna for a book and a video, but whose real name he told me when he came to clean my apartment—fully dressed—which was his legit day-job way of making money. Told me once in a hotel room he’d never been fucked (like that surprised me) or ever even fucked a man, which did take me aback—I mean, what with his muscles and dick and tattoos and dazzling smile and all, not to mention his profession, I’d have thought there’d be men around with enough cash to cajole him into it. And what was the most amazing thing to me was how he just seemed amazed that gay men could like it, not that he thought it was disgusting or anything, just outside his experience (which extended to war).

  There was, of course, Brazilian Julio (in Portuguese, you pronounce the J, as in Juliet), who was, as I was, born in July, a real dancer, with career potential. “You are so big,” he said to me that first night we met, the night of the hotel that overlooked Lincoln Center’s Christmas tree, “You are so big you can do anything to me,” he said. So I did. I fucked him—again and again. I fucked him in hotel rooms and I fucked him in my apartment when I finally moved to New York and I even fucked him behind the screen at the Gaiety Burlesk, which ran strictly counter to the dancers’ code.

  “You are crazy,” Julio said once while I was fucking him off the floor by the emergency exit, alternating my dick and half a hand so I wouldn’t come too soon. “Do you really think so?” I asked, wondering if it was true. “But it’s okay,” he smiled, “because I’m crazy too—I love it.” And he did, this sweet and generous boy/man who was as beautiful as any many I’ve ever desired, even in Carmen Miranda drag, which he wore to the Gay Parade for years. He was beautiful beside me at the ballet, too. He was the tiniest man I ever had and I wish I had him again now, to toss in the air and catch on my dick like a game of quoits.

  Yes, those were the glory days, when sex was encouraged right smack on the premises, like a cut-rate brothel. But the Gaiety is not the scene it was before the Gulf War (not, strictly speaking, named for the oil company, but obviously fought on its behalf). So…what? You think the bust at the Gaiety was related to the war at all or just a coincidence? Or the parade where you have to be an RC het-breeder to be Irish? Or are the war and the parade somehow linked to this crack-down on grease-smeared ass-cracks just by the general, you know, ethos of the time, the odor of facismo on the rise numbing its prey like a giant water beetle?

  So, I told myself the first night I turned up at the Gaiety after the “No Sex, Please, We’re Busted” message went out, “Well, you might as well tie a yellow ribbon around Rocky’s cock since you’re not gonna get your lips around it, not tonight.” So I stuck my middle finger straight up for those shit-Mick douche bags who booed and spat on the Irish queens in the city’s lousy St. Pat-my-ass Parade. I stuck it straight up the fuckhole of a new dancer named Daniel in his room at the Milford Plaza, which cost me a whole lot more than backstage folderol but turned out to be worth it.

  Daniel’s American-born, but he’s one of those border-town Lone Star Latins with hair longer than a girl’s and crooked teeth in front. Couldn’t be more appealing (as at least one big deal photographer has discovered), though I could do without the safety-pin tattoos. His eyes are swimming in something he uses so his brain won’t see things the way his eyes do. He calls me Daddy Bear and has the usual gigantic uncut dick, which is nearly blue it’s so dark, but I don’t care, even if it does remind me of Roberto, dead and alive. I just want something up his ass. I’d use a shillelagh if I had one. He’ll take my dick if I’m willing to re-negotiate, and there is nothing I’d like better than to sink myself up to the ruby pubes in those fleshy buns of his, but I’m not making the bucks I was, so we settle on fingers, which I give him ’til we both come, simultaneously, which I take as an enormous compliment, since even at his age, he can’t afford to come with every trick, so most of them don’t ever. I’ve been lucky that way, since I don’t find a lot of pleasure in it unless I’m turning on my partner in the process.

  “It’s a gusher,” he drawls in his cutesy way when I geyser all over his too-fleshy middle. He eats a banana, chugs a politically responsible Bud Lite, belches real ladylike, and says, “I don’t know, I think everybody’s queer.” It’s a hustler’s perspective, sure, but you gotta admit there’s some truth in it. In the elevator, there’s a Chinese escort hostess in silver rhinestone shoes and fake leopard coat who clocks our number before we drop half a floor, and a little blond girl with brand-new breasts who’s here on a school trip from Virginia and who hasn’t got a clue and never will, unless, of course, she winds up working this same hotel. It can happen. Even in Newport News. She looks like she’s dressed for a junior prom sometime before the Beatles’ TV debut. It’d be a fun group to get stuck on an elevator with, but of course we don’t get stuck (that waits until I’m trapped with a hysterical sumo wrestler who hasn’t bathed since Tito died).

  We sashay out of the elevator, across the lobby, through the crisscrossed laser glares of the Jamaican security staff, their scrutiny thick as chemical warfare, but nobody says jack shit. That’s what business is all about: that smell of printer’s ink, of fine engraving and finesse. Which is why it’s so funny not long after when this rich Italian entrepreneur gets busted at the Milford Plaza for bringing a far younger and far more African young woman to his room for immoral congress (U.S. legislature take note). Only it turns out—big oops here—the young lady is not exactly working. She is exactly the Italian’s wife. Red faces everywhere and banner headlines in the Post.

  Speaking of which, I don’t think it’s all that much a coincidence that the Post does this giant cover story—right after the mayor of New York—the good one, not the one we have now—marches down Fifth Avenue with a clutch of lilting laddies and lasses of the Old Sod and Gomorrah persuasion—with this sensational big mother headline announcing that there are hustlers on Second Avenue at 53rd Street—a fact that every two- or four-legged sodomite has known since Cain set up shop on the northeast corner. Talk about your phenomenal scoop, right? Yeah, scoop of dog shit. Somehow it all comes down to Ireland. I used to like Ireland. Used to think the IRA was a righteous club, a kind of Black Panther Party with red hair and freckles.

  In London, once upon a time, before Ralph was dead or I’d ever fucked a man to sleep, I met a drunk in Russell Square, a beggar: Irish, beard/mustache, fingers stai
ned yellow from unfiltered cigarettes, Turkish when he could get them—and I bought him a whole pack near the poetry bookstore and the School of Economics. “Watch out for Ireland,” he said, as broad in the blarney, I thought, as he was in the brogue. “Another Vietnam, my son, as sure as I’m standing.” And he was, still standing, breathing the most fetid breath I’d ever smelled, being young. I was “Up the Irish” for years after—Yeats, O’Casey, Behan. Now I’m sick of it. Sick of blowing up the English just because they shop in Harrod’s. Sick of the prig English, their stiff lips and limp dicks, but mostly sick of every Roman Catholic country on earth.

  Fuckin’ Ireland. The country’s about as big as Staten Island and they can’t even figure out how to have two religions without killing each other (a lot like Israel, but don’t get me started). No doubt about it, religion has caused more evil in the world than every hooker put together. Religion is the process by which God is eliminated from matters of the spirit and replaced by human will, the empirically fallible will of a self-protective priesthood. Simple as that. And isn’t patriotism, like cannibalism, a form of religion, really?

  So I just eat an overpriced ham sandwich at Jerry’s on Prince and wonder if these really deep, shrewd news hounds at the Post know that black men sell dope in Washington Square or that there are rainbow-colored junkies in this city washing windshields for quarters to support minor children. I have a cousin who’s missing an eye for refusing one of these overzealous spot-removers. An oft-wed black sheep (son of an oft-wed black sheep), he was once married to one of the Rockettes, who used to dress up like nuns for the Easter show at Radio City Music Hall and carry white lilies up to this stage-set altar to form a giant cross (for which spectacle we’d wait outside on 50th Street for hours, me mesmerized by the stark naked Art Deco cement men above the entrance to Rockefeller Center, the first men I ever coveted in my heart, and still do).

  And I wonder if the Post boys know how heroic old Manhattan pissed on the potato-eaters who built the bridges and subways and City Hall, those same County Corkers who lynched escaped slaves from lampposts in the Village during the Civil War riots. Talk about casting a jaundiced eye. I guess that’s why they call it “yellow” journalism. Because of the cowardice.

  So I go to visit the folks on the Island, during the Gulf War, which turns out to be the usual mistake, and of course, masters of the mundane, they have a yellow ribbon tied around the trunk of a tree I grew up with and got to know fairly well. I even sat in that tree, and here it is hung with this hate-thing. Oh, the next-door neighbors have a bigger one, the Irish neighbors (no one’s speaking to the Polish neighbors because the old man, who used to sell Wise Potato Chips, has gone completely dotty), and a flag in the picture window that says These Colors Never Fade. Sweet, sweet as new corn. Catholics and politics. So this friend of mine in California, not, to be sure, a bastion of rigid news sourcing, tells me this rumor that’s being investigated in Europe that the pope, the Polish one, was in fact a collaborator with the Nazis during World War II, that he actually turned over the names of Jews to save his own skinless kielbasa. I believe it. Popes have been helping Nazis all along—take Pius XII, please! It is said, and by Roman Catholics themselves, mind you, that Pope John Paul I, whose pontificate was shorter than the Gulf War, that Johnny Paul Uno was actually murdered right there in the Vatican by an opposition claque of Machiavellian minions.

  Chris (for Christian, not Christopher) says he doesn’t believe any of it, but then Chris goes to Georgetown where Jesuits teach Skepticism 101 no matter what the curriculum is called. He admits, though, that the whole clergy is queer, including New York’s reigning necrophilic, Cardinal O’Connor (who likes his cock-swallowing acolytes dead, you see), that “We’re not in the business of saving lives, but of saving souls” anti-condom pro-lifer, that genocidal bog-hopper with a piss-shooter the size of a leprechaun’s. “Why didn’t someone try to kill him?” I can remember asking about Hitler, since he was so obviously evil. Same goes for O’Connor. How come he’s still alive?

  So somebody pistol-whipped a priest in Queens or Brooklyn or someplace to feed a wicked jones with the parish lucre and everybody’s all shocked and alarmed. Right. Fucking priests been pistol-whipping faggots for centuries. Kill ’em all, that’s what I say. Like cockroaches.

  So it’s Easter, and Passover, but I don’t miss chocolate bunnies under yellow and lilac cellophane. You know what I miss? Rubberless fucking, since fucking with a glove on is no fucking at all, as any man who has ever done both will tell you. Oh, it might be worth giving up “unprotected” sex to save a life, but what’s a life that only has protected sex in it? Rhetorical question. It’s like a bullfight where the sword stays in its sheath.

  Bullfights. They make me weep, they’re so inaccessibly beautiful. They are, of course, the ultimate symbolic entertainment: Either the matador will fuck the bull (with his sword), or el toro will fuck the toreador (goring him with one or more horns). It is, Carlos Fuentes assures us, the ritual of man’s supremacy over nature. But it’s really about fucking, which is to say about man’s total abandonment to, and submissiveness in the face of, nature.

  The bullfighter is dressed magnificently in second-skin topaz satin, his asscheeks clenched tighter than fetal fists, his bundle of genitalia casting harsh shadows on his hard thighs. The bull comes equipped with a prick the size of the man’s arm, two horns, and a lolling tongue that looks like a dick and a tongue combined—one of those giant mollusks on display in Chinatown fish shops. Of course, the bull will die even if he manages to take down his tormentor in the process, immortality, like justice, being a fantasy.

  Two men fucking is like a bullfight, too, a ritual of man’s confrontation with the nature in himself. No illusions of sanctioned procreation to dilute the event, no easy retreat into the uncomprehending “otherness” of opposites, just man as he is, man doing to himself—and having done to himself—the thing the world has taught him will most surely damn him for all eternity. So, the bull dies, fucker or fuckee. And blood glistens in the parched sand of the arena. A man fucking a woman is beautiful, too, in its way, I suppose. But there is no mortality in it. It is, if ritual at all, an enactment of the myth of life. Queer sex is nature in the service of itself in the present, not the future.

  The greatest of all mysteries, The Mahabarata, tells us that every man must die, and yet each day lives his life as if he is immortal. In the face of such wisdom, such clarity, it hardly seems to matter if there is an eternity at all.

  Once upon a time when Easter and Passover happened on the same day, I was sitting in the administration building of the college I went to by mistake, along with a third of the student body, in protest over fraternity exclusion of Blacks and Jews. I remember a chevron of geese flying overhead and a balmy, spongy-earth day with daffodils blooming wild on green hills, and I remember hope. (That’s why preserving the hope of the young is so important, so it can be remembered later in life.)

  The upstate May-time sky was clear and blue, like Chip’s eyes as he veils his hair now over me and puts his tongue onto my tongue like the Host. The body and blood of Chip. As often as I do this…I remember all kinds of men. Most of them dead. Like the reed-thin corpses of the Holocaust (their exposed genitalia the first human penises I ever saw, enormous-looking, enticing even attached to dead men). Like the saints and disciples. Horrible deaths, most of them. Crucified, stoned, burned, quartered, fed to wild beasts—just the sort of thing the church has been doing to fairies forever.

  Now Magic Johnson has AIDS, which is sad I guess, but I can’t get all broken up about it. Arthur Ashe has been dropped as a crossword clue in the New York Times, so there’s some real impact on my life there. “Isn’t it awful about Arthur Ashe?” some twinkie in Lycra biker shorts gushed at the gym right after that news became public. To tell the truth, I didn’t actually give a shit about Arthur Ashe. Or any other heterosexual. They’ve had their millennia, and they’ve blown it (up). The world is better off without them. There
are too many people anyway. Too many people who hate. So I guess the world would be better off without me, too, since I have learned to hate so purely. But then, the world won’t have long to wait for that. I’ll be going one of these days, one of the ways we’re dying: bad blood, tainted blood, spilled blood. We’re all dying of the yellow anyway, of the Empire State Building piss yellow of religious holidays and patriotism, an oily yellow lost in a mist that looks like it should smell of subways, that bum-urine and burnt electric cordite smell of blue-white sparks on gleaming tracks. Instead it smells sweet. Like the licorice jelly beans my Polish Catholic godmother picked out of the Easter baskets she gave me before she died and went to burn in hell forever for marrying a Lutheran and loving her queer nephew without condition.

  So it’s late. The car alarm out front finally died after about six hours since the police don’t have the authority to do anything but beat up faggots who have the temerity to hail a yellow cab outside the Stage Deli. My fingers still smell like Chip, like the scented massage lotion he rubbed on my body and I rubbed on his, of my own semen and his, of Obsession for Men, and large, luminous eyes, of views of the Empire State Building from the floor-level mattress of a part-time hustler who’s moving south at the end of the month to pursue a career in music. It’s Easter already by the digital Bulova on my desk. It’s raining, which means the smeared diarrhetic dog shit is being washed from the sidewalk out front with the soot from chimneys a century old and more. The acid that turns copper green is washing out of the air onto the cobbled streets of lower Manhattan while a small rat forages under my sink for the poisoned oats an exterminator left there on Good Friday.