New York City

Infinite and Forever: In Memory of Days of Endless Orgies

Discerning Daddy

This is an excerpt from a new book I am working on. Everything happens just as I say. Mostly. Photo Credit: Tom Bianchi.

When I was 18 I spent a few weeks in Fire Island at my friend Patrick’s father’s house. Patrick’s dad was gay. He was an art dealer, but there were rumors he was also a thief, or a gangster, I once heard he was smuggling guns for revolutionaries or cartels.

Patrick wasn’t my boyfriend but we used to fuck. We were young and horny and if we weren’t getting high or drunk or sticking our dicks in each other we were fighting over books and Heidegger, Marxist theory and how magic manifests in our lives.

Patrick was tall and athletic, curly black hair and green eyes, he had a long fat uncut dick and a fat ass from soccer and swimming. To this day I still jerk off thinking about Patrick.

I loved lying in bed with him, or sneaking out to the pool in the early dawn, still high as fuck and wanting more, or onto the beach, talking all night, holding each other, taking turns fucking each other, making out and telling each other our dreams.

We both wanted so much back then.

At 18 I wanted to fall in love, to fuck the world, to rise as high as I could, and then to freefall as deep as possible.

I never told Patrick that one night, while he was out dancing, I stayed up drinking beers with his father. I never told him that I ended up on my knees, on that kitchen floor, sucking his father off, and that once in a while, when we were alone, his dad would sneak into my room and fuck me, whispering in my ear that he owned me and that my ass belonged to him, and that I was right where I was supposed to be: pinned to the earth by his big dick.

One Saturday night I had stayed out at the club after Patrick had gone home. The night was beautiful: warm and balmy, the sky that endless sparkling brilliance that only happens in my memories, the world lit up in fire.
I was high and drunk and all around me men danced and laughed. They grabbed me and kissed me, holding me tight, whispering I love you and I need you. We fucked right there on the dance floor, stomping our feet and howling up into the sky: screaming out our names as loud as we could.

It was 1987 and we were dying: all around us, our friends and lovers, our community, were getting sick and dying.

But on that night, for those few minutes we raged against the inevitable, against the loss and the fear and the despair: we danced, and we fucked, and we howled until there was nothing left: just the ecstasy piercing the night, elevating us, reminding us that we were human, that we were alive: on that night the world was full of magic and possibility: and we were full of love.
I decided to walk home along the beach. At one point I cut through a path, through a grove of trees and dunes. In the dark I heard men laughing and moaning and I stepped off the path, into the trees, in search of adventure.

It was like stumbling into a magical ceremony: a coven of witches: a circle of warlocks. In the trees, hidden from the walk way, a group of 20 or so guys stood around passing joints and bottles of wine, taking turns fucking this stunning muscle guy bent over a large tree trunk that must have found its way to the shore from the depths of the ocean.

Sitting alone on a rock was a dark-haired boy with a thick beard. He couldn’t stop watching as men took turns pounding themselves into the muscle guy.
I sat on the rock next to him. He told me his name was Adam. He was getting his PH’d in Theoretical Physics and was on the Island for a wedding.

I offered to split a tiny blue pill I found in my pocket with him.

“What is it?” he asked me.

“I have no clue,” I laughed. “But it makes everything really fucking beautiful.”

We made out on that rock and he told me how the world was not how it looked: that the physical world was a deception, a lie, but that the truth was there, hiding, playing a game with us: calling out to us.

“You can see it if you really look. Out of the corners of your eyes. Reflecting in the surfaces all around us.” He took my hands in his, his lips brushing my lips: I felt my heart quicken, my dick was so hard it hurt. “You and me. This separation: it’s a lie. There is nothing between us. You and me, we are connected.”

We ended up leaving the coven of fucking magicians and walked to the edges of the world, the ocean dark and stunning, the moon a sliver of gold. He kissed me and told me that he believed that we were endless beings: infinite and forever.
He kept saying those words to me: “We are infinite and forever.”

When the sun began to rise he told me he had somewhere to be.

When we kissed goodbye I felt what he had said to me: infinity and connectedness: I felt forever.

Later that day Ryan and I walked home along the beach from the gym. Ahead of us was a wedding: a man and a woman standing on the edges of the ocean. When we got closer I saw the man was Adam.

For a moment our eyes connected, and in his were a kind of pain and sadness I didn’t understand at the time: they were full of loss. And then he looked away, to the woman he would marry.

When I told Ryan he said,

“Everyone is so fucked up.” He took my hand in his, leading me away from the Ocean and Adam. “Fucked up and beautiful. We’re all locked in this crazy madhouse together and the only way out is through it. Till the fucking end.”

“Yeah. Till the fucking end.”

I still can’t escape that feeling of magic. Of something larger than life happening to me. Those moments, our bodies pressed together, the taste of his breath, the smell of him: I can’t escape that feeling that we knew each other. For who we really were.

At least for a few moments.

“We are infinite and forever,” he said to me.

I feel it. 32 years later. I can feel the way those words became a part of me. Defined me.

32 years later I can feel what it was he was saying to me: that there is a magic in this world, a purpose and a meaning, it is burning right here in front of us. It is ours if we choose it.

Infinite and forever. Burning bright and strong.

I can close my eyes in this moment, here and now, and still taste him: I can feel the warmth of his skin, the timbre of his voice.

And I can feel every man I have ever loved. Every man I have ever fucked. Every man who has ever been inside me: I can feel us all, in these moments, howling like mad men at the night, raging against the future, running full speed from the past, desperate and mad and in love.

Connected.

Thanks for reading. If you want to read more, go check out my book, Accidental Warlocks, on Amazon. Support queer artists!

Thoughts on Travel and Sex and Love Part Two

Discerning Daddy

In my early 20’s I was lost in a dark and violent heroin addiction. My life was narrow and small, without hope. I was lonely and sad, broke, the only relief was getting high. I remember snorting bags of China White in my Court Street Brooklyn apartment at night and then going for long walks through Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights ending up at the Promenade, the Manhattan Skyline like some far-off fairy tale land of kings and magicians, a land where anything could happen: a land of endless possibility.

I would stand there, high as fuck, and dream of the life I wanted: a life where I was a writer, where I wasn’t alone: I had friends and a boyfriend who loved me, family who could stand to be around me, a life where I didn’t steal and lie just to get by.

I could feel that fantasy life in me, burning through the darkness, trying to get my attention: like a coded message in the sky, or in the flamed lights of New York City, flickering in the neon, trying to remind me of who I really was.

During this time I read a book called Martin and John by Dale Peck. It’s a small book, a first-time novel by a gay writer my age who lived in New York City and in London. I remember sitting in café’s in the East Village reading that book and crying. Every word connected to me. In the acknowledgments he wrote a thank you to a café in London where he would sit and write.

I must have been 25 when I read that. I remember so clearly thinking, I want to be that guy. That writer sitting in a café in London. I want to sit in café’s all over the world writing.

I didn’t get sober until I was 42 years old.

It wasn’t till I was 49 years old, sitting at the Bach, a café on Hoxton Street in London where I would go to work on my book, that I realized: holy fuck! I got exactly what I wanted.

That’s the thing about life, I spent so much time running, so much time trying to hide from the pain and the fear, that I couldn’t see that life was pushing me in a direction, trying to send me down the path of who I really was. The only obstacle to that path was me.

This has been true for most of my life. The more I try to control and orchestrate, the more I try to force something, or to hide from pain, the more I allow fear to cloud my thoughts, the further I get from who I am supposed to be.

I am now, at 50, in a process of learning to allow who I am to unfold. Sometimes I wonder, what if I had gotten sober younger, or if I had been more focused, or if I had always worn condoms when I fucked (would I still be HIV negative?), or if I’d never used heroin, or stolen all those cars and money from my dad, or lied to my friends, what if I had never been any of the things I spent most of my life being: would I be famous now? Would I be successful? Or would I still be wandering down the lost path? Maybe all those things are the things that have brought me closer to myself.

I spent a year travelling back and forth from LA to London visiting my boyfriend Noah. Every morning we would wake up and he would go to work, and I would walk across the street to the Bach, books and computer in my backpack, and I would order a flat white and sit there and write. I started a journal called “Thoughts on Travel and Love and Life” and I wrote in it every day.

During the afternoons I would walk over to the Glory, and down to the canal and make my way slowly to Broadway Market and London Fields. I would sit in that park and watch people, strangers, as they went about their lives. I created elaborate stories about who they were and the lives they were living.

I also spent a lot of time worrying. About money. About Noah, about sex and being in a long distance relationship, about work, about all the endless things our brains find to latch on to and obsess over.

But I didn’t let those worries stop me. I would just start walking again, exploring a new city and a new people. Finding book stores and cafes, wandering through parks and museums, stumbling upon London Bridge and Big Ben and that Ferris wheel that still seems like a mystery to me: what Is that fucking Ferris wheel all about?, never really knowing what anything was until, while telling Noah about what I had done that day, he would tell me what each and everything I saw was, giving me history and context to my day.

I am a clueless tourist. I just walk, letting it all be out of context. I probably should have bought a guide book, or at least asked Siri, but I wasn’t there to see the “sights” I was there to experience myself somewhere new, somewhere so far out of context that the only thing recognizable would be me.
That is what travel is all about for me. When everything recognizable falls away, and the only thing left is yourself. You can’t hide anymore. Some days the loneliness was unbearable, the fear so out of control I felt stunned by it, but other days there was hope and joy and love. And I just kept walking my way through all of it, coming out the other side: because there is always an other side to walk out of.

I’m still afraid a lot of the time. I don’t always know where the money will come from to keep traveling, my boyfriend, who now lives in Berlin, is still 6000 miles away. I wonder how we will make it work, I wonder if I will succeed or fail. I’m 50 now. It is easy to believe life is no longer beginning, instead it is ending. It would be easy to get lost in these thoughts, to turn from my path.

But then I remember that day, sitting at a café in the East Village, reading Martin and John. I remember how badly I wanted Dale Peck’s life, to be that writer in some café in London, or Paris, or Amsterdam, writing. I remember going into the bathroom and snorting a line of heroin. I remember the sadness, the since of hopelessness. I remember thinking that I would never escape.
But I did escape. And somewhere out there somebody is sitting alone, feeling like they will never be able to have the life they want: they feel trapped: hopeless.

I don’t give a fuck if this sounds corny, I don’t give a fuck if I’m the cheesiest guy in the whole world, I just want to say this: we are never trapped. We are never without hope.

I am 50 years old. I am 6.5 years sober from a brutal 23 year fight with drugs and alcohol. I am HIV Positive. I should not even be alive. And yet here I am. Living the exact life I wanted at 23.

Think about that. What kind of fucking miracle is that?

And Hey! Go check out my book, Accidental Warlocks, on Amazon! Your Support Would be Amazing!