Repost from old blog, 2/23/2008

Around fifteen I realized that I could use the internet to order porn films. This had the advantage of bypassing the usual age verification at a store as well as saving myself the embarrassment of trying to purchase it face-to-face with an actual person.

I ordered a tape to my house and spent many queasy afternoons waiting to see if I could pluck it from the mailbox before my parents did. The anxiety was heady, but the tape came unlabeled, unremarkable – nobody took the slightest notice. However, the fear had been too intense, and I knew I couldn’t go through it again. I was ready to order more porn, and I needed a different plan.

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I was in elementary school – fourth grade?  Fifth?  Right on the cusp of those years when all insecurities manifest themselves, when we glom upon the perceived weaknesses of others to deflect attention from our own, when we’re at our worst.  Or maybe I’m just trying to justify what I did.

The Feist family lived across the alley from us.  They were pariahs, the perfect “others.”   The dad was qualifiably insane.  He had two sons, one a year older than me.  Both were low, trash in my eyes.  Bad kids.  Poor kids.  But they never did anything to me.

I can’t remember why we decided to do it.  It was me and my friend Timmy.  We were walking home from school, and the younger Feist boy was walking ahead of us, and one of us (I think it was Timmy) suggested we get him.  We walked up to him.  I had an umbrella.  We hit him with it.  I remember him trying to get away, and I was whacking him with this folded-up umbrella.

I’m glad I remember this.  It’s good to know I can be as awful as the rest of humanity.

I never started writing erotica for the money.  Pursuing any type of writing for the money would be, amongst many other attributes, hilarious.  I started writing erotica because it was what I was meant to do, and I started publishing it on Nifty (and eventually on this website) because I felt it was good, and that people might like it.  Then and now, that has been my chief motivation for writing erotica:  because I like it and hope others will like it too.

However, the market for erotica was once robust compared to the market for other fiction, and I came right on the tail end of a golden age.  When I was selling stories to Men and Freshmen I was making an astounding – but, at the time, pretty standard – $300 a story.  What’s more is that magazines were contacting me – me! – to write other things for them, and offering me money to do so.

I almost cried writing that last paragraph.  Those checks were a godsend.  Now – NEWS FLASH! – the writing/publishing industry is in the toilet.  About the only game left in town are the anthologies (like Best Gay Erotica) and let’s just say that while I appreciate the money they offer per story, it don’t even add up to a week’s worth of groceries.

I work a full-time job.  It’s a good job and I’m incredibly grateful for it.  The schedule is flexible, which gives me free time to work on my writing and my website.  The trade off for this flexibility is the fact that I don’t get paid a whole lot.

It’s never been easy for me to ask for money.  But it’s becoming clearer to me that if an artist (or even a porno writer) feels that their work is worth something, they need to ascribe a monetary value to it and encourage their audience to do the same.  That doesn’t mean I expect every reader of this site to donate something – I read and watch and listen to plenty of free things.  Nor do I knock writers who want to give their work away – I think finding and developing an audience is paramount.  But money is pretty necessary, too.

Consider this:  my web hosting costs come out to about six bucks a month. The yearly fee for my domain is around twenty bucks.  That’s small potatoes, but if you donated six bucks you’d be keeping my site alive for a month. For twenty you’d be sustaining it for a year. Either way you’d be supporting my writing (habit/disorder) in a tangible way.  That’s pretty cool, right?

Think about it and get back to me!

Not Me

It was Halloween of 2001 and I needed a costume.  I’d been growing out my hair for over a year and it was as big as it ever had been (and ever would be).  It was a total white-boy afro.

So I got an idea.  I brushed my hair out really big and sprayed it red.  I found this amazing yellow jumpsuit at the thrift store and some red and white striped tights.  Some pancake makeup and – poof! – I was Ronald McDonald.

The night before Halloween my friend had a party.  I passed out lollipops and everyone was impressed with my level of creepiness.

I got incredibly drunk.  I ended up wandering around campus with a non-costumed friend, getting attention from everyone we passed.  We stumbled into a random house party.  Nobody was wearing a costume except me.  They were having a fight club.  The living room was full of people crammed against the walls and along the staircase, all egging on two tough-looking girls who were boxing in the middle of the room.

There was a lull in the action and people started asking who was going to go next.  Somebody said, “Ronald McDonald!” and then others took up the chant.  Fifty people were demanding my presence in the ring – there was no getting out of it.  Fortunately I was trashed enough to put on my game face instead of running for my life.  I slipped on the boxing gloves and got in the middle with a tall, vaguely scary-looking dude.

I know that I threw at least two punches, and if memory serves, one of them actually landed.  As it was, though, I was mainly on the receiving end, and after a particularly potent hit right in the middle of my face, I went down.  Everyone cheered.

I stumbled home.  There was blood on my white clown gloves.  My friend said I’d done better he’d thought I would.  ”I thought it was going to end really badly,” he said.  ”That guy wanted to fuck you up.”

Once my hangover wore off I too could appreciate the fact that I’d gotten out of there alive.  And I figured I’d given the party a little extra jolt of fun and excitement.  I mean, who doesn’t want to see Ronald McDonald get his ass knocked to the floor?

I haven’t posted anything new on here in forever. I’m sure there are reasons for this, but damned if I know what they are. Mostly it’s that lately I feel like disappearing, like if I could go live underground with coffee and notebooks and pens away from everything and everyone for a good year, I would welcome that opportunity. This is also to explain my (still probably temporary) Facebook suicide.

I miss the energy of this blog, though. I’ve been posting shit on Tumblr, but using Tumblr is a very cursory, ephemeral thing: you post an image or a song and a few people hit a button that says “like” and then it disappears. Not that this blog is some paragon of permanence but when I’m going good on here and saying things that are on my mind, I feel more tuned in.

So I’m giving up trying to filter my ideas and I’m just going to post a bunch of random shit.  Expect some of this in the next few days.

Repost from old blog, 10/26/2006

I used to be a raver.

I think I went to my first party in May of 1999, at an Irish community center. The last party I went to was on February 11, 2001. I remember the date because in the wee hours of that morning, my head buzzy with acid, I witnessed the demolition of Pittsburgh’s old football stadium.

It wasn’t until another set of buildings fell to the ground, exactly seven months later, that I realized a new epoch was upon us.

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Repost from old blog, 9/26/2006

I just finished a book, The Girl in the Box by Ouida Sebestyen. I suppose it could be considered a teen novel, and from what I understand a lot of teen girls read and were freaked out by it around the time when it was published in 1988. The jacket is beautiful in its way [and the cover displayed above, though similar to the original design, is not the same. The original is an illustration, not a photograph, and is much darker and more expressionistic], perfect in its design, and it would fit comfortably on the shelf next to V.C. Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic and Morton Rue’s The Wave, though I’m not sure I could explain why (something to do with perfect cover designs, explosive subject matter, and nostalgia). It definitely runs laps around both of those books, writing-wise.

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My cat’s been missing for the past four days.  I let him out Wednesday morning and he just never came home.  It’s been hard cause he’s sort of my family’s mascot – he’s big and cuddly and will let you do whatever you want to him.

Anyway I’ve been posting about this on Facebook but I recently deactivated my profile.  It’s just temporary but I wanted to say something about it here just so any friends might know I didn’t “un-friend” them.  I just need a break, and the pleasurable feeling of exerting control.

***UPDATE:  Reggie returned home tonight!  (Sunday evening).  He’s hungry but no worse for the wear.  God only knows where he was for the past four and a half days.

My job sent me to L.A. for three days this week for a conference.  I stayed at a hostel in Venice Beach and I could see the ocean from my window.  Plus there were all these young international men getting shit-faced and walking around in their underwear.

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Repost from old blog, 1/28/2008

Breath shallow, feet taking me to my destination, I would enter the warm light of the bookstore and duck the imagined glare of the clerk. I might browse the science fiction section for a minute, but inevitably, I’d go to where I really wanted to be: the “Relationships” section.

There is one of these in every chain bookstore in every mall in America, so perhaps, right this instant, there is a pre-teen boy whose parents are shopping at K-mart, oblivious, while he leafs through the gauzy, vanilla-flavored naked bodies pictured in The New Kama Sutra, the book jacket worn and torn at the edges – a book for browsing only, a book that nobody buys.

I had discovered the motherload – over ten paperback volumes of the Letters to Penthouse anthology, some of which, crucially, contained a section of stories titled “Boy Meets Boy.”

I would read them crouched down low, my knees and ankles beginning to get sore, my palms sweaty, my quivering little hard-on pressing against the inside of my jeans, one eye always on the lookout. I didn’t know if I could get in trouble for looking at this stuff and I didn’t want to find out. Just the act of reading it was shameful enough.

On my second or third trip, I noticed the book displays at the entrance to the store, placed right at the threshold, so that one could pick up a book and browse it while standing, technically, outside of the store.

As much as I wanted to take home my favorite volume of Letters to Penthouse and get to understand it on a more intimate level, purchasing it was not an option. That would mean owning up to my desires, even if it were only to an anonymous Waldenbooks clerk.

Instead, I experimented with covertly carrying it around, inching ever closer to those exterior book displays. Soon I was standing outside of the store, the book still clutched in my hand. No alarms were going off. Nobody was watching me. Technically, I reasoned, I was already stealing, so why not just take a few more steps, down the hall, out of the mall, to my car where I’d be safe and free and full of the promise of porn.

I walked away without consequence. I did it on subsequent trips, again and again, until I had about five volumes of the series. I never got caught. I would walk through the mall with my heart racing and the paperback cupped in my sweaty palm, tucked underneath my sweatshirt – a pervert, a thief, a homo at the mercy of his dirty little secret.