Category: one fags story of growing up in San Francisco

One of the main reasons I chose to move to San Francisco in the first
place was to be close to a place where every touring rock and roll
band would play.  Where I grew up we usually had about 2 or 4 concerts
a year and that just wasn’t enough, and certainly wasn’t enough
variety.  The closest they ever got to punk rock in Medford Oregon was
The Cars.  Heart would play one show there every summer.  I saw only a
handful of bands in my teens and I can name them all, Blue Oyster
Cult, T. Rex, Golden Earring, Bachman Turner Overdrive, J. Geils Band,
Rush, The Doobie Brothers, KISS, Steve Miller Band, Boston, and Black
Oak Arkansas.  I think that’s it except for Led Zeppelin, but I ran
away from home to Seattle for that one in 1977 when I was 15.  That’s
sort of when I knew I would eventually end up where the music was, one
way or another, sitting on that greyhound bus reading a copy of
Rolling Stone and meeting lots of other people heading to seattle for
the very same concert. That trip really was a defining time for me and
my allegiance to music.  This was my passion and these were my people
and running away from home was a strong indication that something
changed and it was never going to change back.  Rock and Roll was a
major priority for me and that was established.  None of the other
kids at school ever ran away from home to see a band, and no one had
that Led Zeppelin tour shirt that I bought either let alone lost their
virginity  to side three of Physical Graffiti.  So at 15 I was already
a hardcore Rock Snob and I knew deep inside where this elitism would
eventually take me, a city with a rich rock and roll history, tons of
famous venues and lots of songs written about it.  But first I would
spend a year at the University of Oregon in Eugene, only to be drawn
away from higher education by the sirens of punk rock, post punk and
the well-developed musical inclinations of a college town.  Eugene had
a music scene to be reckoned with but still it wasn’t quite enough,
San Francisco was the place to go, and Eugene often served as a
stepping stone to the city by the bay.  A natural migration of
musicians and thrill-seekers seemed to trickle down with regularity so
I made the move with big plans to see all the cool bands I loved, as
all bands played San Francisco.
At first I lived in the town of Benicia in the east bay but SF was
merely a hitchhike and a BART ride away so I started right in with the
shows.  I believe the first live show I saw was a big favorite of
mine, The Psychedelic Furs at the Old Waldorf on Battery.  It was an
intimate venue and I was right up front in the dry ice fog close
enough to touch the crooning Richard Butler.  Shortly after that it
was Echo and the Bunnymen at the same place with a great local band
called B-Team opening.  Then I started catching some big acts at large
venues like the Greek theater or the civic center auditorium like The
Clash and the English Beat, The Talking Heads, The B52’s, Elvis
Costello, The Pretenders, Roxy Music, Prince and more.  I was
surprised at how effortless it was to see so many of my favorites so
easily.  I was indeed fully able to do exactly as I planned, see an
endless list of great shows almost all the time.  Life was too good.
Eventually I started shopping for music in the city’s best record
stores, most of which back then were in North Beach.  My favorite one
was Rough Trade where I  purchased some amazing local bands that I
read about in a  publication called Punk Globe (which still exists
online thanks to creator and R&R lifetime achiever Ginger Coyote who
fucking rocks).  One of these bands was called The Vktms and they had
the number one single of the week with the song “100% White Girl.”
The other was a group that came highly recommended called  Flipper,
their song was called “Ha ha ha”.  I bought both seven inch singles
and went mad for local bands.  “Ha ha ha” was about the most
blistering wrong little slab of punk rock I’d ever heard in my life,
snotty, abrasive, noisy and pure genius while “100% White Girl” was an
instant anthem of hard driving power punk with a great female vocalist
calling all white girls to arms, a true classic that had me searching
the papers for when and where The Vktms would play.  Thats how I
discovered The Mabuhay Gardens or The Fab Mab on Broadway, the
legendary punk rock venue with its finger on the pulse of all things
hardcore and intense musically.  I first saw the Vktms there on a
Halloween night and they quickly became a favorite with tough girl
Nyna Crawford spitting out lyrics about dating midgets, life downtown,
death on muni, being a teenage alcoholic and more.  On that night
between songs she yelled “Sluts on stage!” and three of the most
shocking outlandish go-go dancing drag creatures jumped up on the
monitors and exploded in lightning fast furiously filthy dance moves.
It was devestating.  That was my introduction to Sluts A-Go-Go—the
performance group led by Doris Fish and featuring Tippi and Miss X.
The Mab became my favorite place to go and I caught some amazing shows
there by Black Flag (new meaning to the words slam-pit etched in my
mind and scarred on my body forever) The Dead Kennedys, The Screamin
Sirens, The Lewd, Frightwig (who became my first pet band that I
followed religiously), The Butthole Surfers,and many many more.  Local
acts really began to take hold of me, like Romeo Void and Translator
and Yo and The Donner Party and The Offs and artsy experimental acts
like Tuxedomoon and Chrome and Esmerelda and Noh Mercy.  I saw X at
the Russian Center on their Wild Gift tour, another show that left
scars and was utterly fantastic.
I was so completely immersed in the music scene that I found little
time for much else, including one big feature of this city that
thousands flocked here for year after year, the Gayness.  Indeed this
was the Gay Mecca, but I could immerse myself in The Castro or Polk
Street and walk among them and blend in but I always felt to a certain
extent that I marched to an entirely different beat.  The music in my
head was not Donna Summer and The Village People and it never would
be. It was The Stooges, X, AC/DC, The Gun Club, the Cramps, Hole,
Patti Smith and more. I dwelled in the house of rock and roll forever
and this somehow set me apart from the majority of  disco and
dance-music loving gays, and I liked it that way frankly.  Then I
began to realize that my generalizations were unfair and inaccurate.
I discovered that more and more gays actually do like rock and roll
and that rock and roll in many ways is gay as the day is long.  So it
became my personal crusade to write about, promote, DJ and educate
people about the joys of the devils music in every way I can.  I’ve
been forcing Rock and Roll down the collective gay community throat
for over two decades now and you’d be surprised at the lack of gag
reflex I find.  You like it!

Sometime back in the late ‘80s I found myself in a situation that had become like a ritual or a regular occurrence a couple times a week.  I would meet up with some friends at the Stud Bar after work, namely rock journalist and provocateur Adam Block and photographer Marc Geller, and we would close the bar, jump into Marc’s car – a Citroen station wagon – cruise a few times down Ringold alley, then drive to North Beach Adam’s apartment on Grant Avenue.  He would often lure us up to his flat, a disheveled wonderland of literature, art, and piles upon piles of promo records and CD’s,  with promises of playing us some as-yet-unreleased album or a videotape of some important and exclusive nature, or drugs, of course, and we would have lively conversations till the wee hours of the morning.

On one such night, Adam read us a fascinating letter from a friend who was traveling in the south, specifically Tennessee.  This well written missive told of an adventure that completely captivated me.  Adam’s friend was in Nashville, Tennessee or a smaller town near there, where he had met a pretty punk rock boy with purple hair in a gay bar who took him home to some broken down tobacco farm where he lived with his barefoot and pregnant sister and had an upstairs room filled with posters of Adam Ant and giant Ankh symbols painted on the walls.  They had incredible sex and indulged in drugs, and he ended up staying with him for a few days.

I was fascinated with the juxtaposition of cultures, the fey punk rock boy on a white trash tobacco farm in rural Tennessee, but what really got me was the boy’s name, Bobo.  In a drunken willful way, when I heard that name I stated that I wanted Bobo to be my nickname.  It all sounded so cool.  I would live to regret this wish, for very soon after that Adam and Marc began calling me Bobo, and Adam even started referring to me as Bobo in print, as we wrote for the same gay weekly back then.  It bothered me when people started to refer to me as such, and I tried to downplay or stanch its widespread use. But I had to accept it from Adam and Marc, because it was, of course, my wish, and they applied my new nickname diligently.
Well, time rolled on. and only a small elite handful of folks called me Bobo due to my consistent damage control of denying that was my nickname and asking that it not be used whenever I heard it, or heard Booboo instead. which was worse.  Okay, so that is the set-up or background necessary for this particular tale.
One Sunday night I took a cab to the greatest club ever created in San Francisco, Club Uranus,  where I could be found every Sunday for about four years.   Uranus was hosted by The End Up, a clubland institution since before I ever hit this town, and I had several close friends who worked there; some still do.  Uranus was a magnificent turf for the angry new gay activists, the new breed of drag queens or shock drag, the hottest baby-dykes ever, members of the old-school drag who got it, and your basic pierced and tattooed art-fags and amphetamine friendly socialites.  It was the birthplace of the new subcultural elite and freaky sexy go-go creatures.  It was home.  That particular night as I got out of the cab, I spotted a small angelic punk rocker standing near the side door.  He was so beautiful he seemed to be glowing slightly, and when he smiled at me as I stared at him, I was drawn to him like a moth to a bug-light.  I said hi and asked him if he’d been inside yet. His smile was so warm, his manners somewhat formal and his soft voice had a lazy southern lilt to it. He frowned and said no, he had tried but he didnt have an ID.  I remembered occasionally assisting  young people enter the club by climbing over the back fence, but that was pretty risky, and he told me he had already tried that anyway.

He was slowly accepting the fact that he wasn’t getting in to the club that night, and I really felt bad for him having to miss out on all that glorious fun.  I continued chatting with him, until it became clear that I wasn’t going in to the club either.  I was so taken by him that I invited him home.  On our way there he told me his name was Thomas and that he came to San Francisco from Georgia with his close friend named Bubba.  I laughed and asked if Bubba was his real name, and he said it was a nickname, but all his friends and family called him that.  I explained that I had a similar nickname, Bobo, which I was reluctantly stuck with by just a few friends.  He kind of froze for a second and said, “Thats my nickname back at home.”  I began to tingle as the coincidence began to hit me.  “Did you live on a tobacco farm in Tennessee with your pregnant sister?”

“Yes, Sir,” he replied.

“And did you have a room with a large Ankh painted on the ceiling, lots of Adam Ant posters, purple hair?”

“How do you know all this?” he asked, starting to look worried.

I couldn’t believe it.  I was sitting in a cab on my way to my place with the very same guy from whom my nickname was taken.  Bobo meets the real Bobo, several years after I mouthed off and ended up with that as my nickname.  I couldn’t believe it and quickly explained how this all happened. He was dumfounded and kind of delighted, being pretty new in town and not knowing many people here yet.  It pleased him that his name preceeded him to San Francisco.

We arrived to my apartment and got stoned and continued our conversation.  He started to tell me about his family.  When he got to his father you could tell he really didn’t get along with him, and he was likely driven from his home by this animosity,  not an uncommon story really.  He threw in that his father was a very powerful man in his home town, wealthy and successful.  I said he sounded like the opposite of my father, who was perpetually unemployed until he became the janitor at my grade school.  I laughed and added, “Plus he only had one leg!”

Thomas fixed me with an intense gaze and said, “My daddy only has one leg too!”

“No fucking way!” I was completely amazed by yet another coincidence.

“How’d your dad lose his leg?” I asked, tentatively but definitely wanting to know.  I seriously doubted  he had lost it due to a self-inflicted wound to get out of the Army during peace-time way before Viet Nam like my dad, but really needed to know.

“I shot it off with a shotgun,” Thomas said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know how many times I tried to kill my Daddy.”

Others may have worried about that last comment.  I didn’t.  I just grabbed him and kissed him deeply for the first of many times that night.  There’s just something about a guy who can handle a shotgun that I’ll always appreciate.

One night I was walking around in the Castro, too early to be officially cruising Collingwood Park, which started usually when the bars closed at 2am, but nonetheless deeply ingrained in that mode due mostly to a really good batch of meth in town. It was called ether-based sparkle and the stuff really had legs, meaning the high lasted a long time, but the extra added bonus was, on top of being real dick dope (figure it out), was this stuff had a very euphoric quality to it, like a side-order of upbeat unfettered joyousness added to the whole unstoppable amphetamine grind. You could cruise Collingwood whistling a happy tune with a big sparkling smile, or find a trick, fuck their brains out all night, make them French toast in bed, get dressed and tear out the door at 6am for dancing at the End Up.

Motivation was easy to find, as was adventure, as was the best, most magical dumpster full of treasures, as were others out there riding that same happy, horny wavelength. You could spot them from several blocks away, glowing with an aura of energy or walking with a spring in their step and eventually looking in their eyes, inviting and wide enough to fall into a conversation, ready to spill forward effortlessly and with animated wit.

Apparently this ether-based sparkle was very costly or smelly to manufacture, so it would only come around on occasion, then after a certain dealer was found bludgeoned to death and rolled up in a carpet, we never saw it again. Rumors flew around that he had 10 pounds of it stashed in some storage unit at the time of his demise, another speed freak urban legend, probably. On another downside, after being up for a weekend on it, everyone seemed to lose their voice. I’d walk up to my friends on a Sunday night at Club Uranus after a weekend up on the stuff, and say, “I’m a little hoarse,” and slap my foot to the dance floor twice like one of those horses that can answer simple math equations by tapping the answer with its hoof. We’d laugh, a few of us with a telltale rasp or miming that they’d lost their voice, too. It was a price to pay for a really good time.

If you couldn’t talk, you could at least still dance, and I did, dancing the heel right off of my boot one night to the slamming industrial and unpredictable tunes of DJs Lewis Walden and Michael Blue. They provided the renegade soundtrack, alternative attitude, and essentially a familial structure for freaks and young people forging their own identity and mythology and creative forces to a nightclub scene in the shadow of the devastating loss of an entire generation of gays to their fore from AIDS. Their music gave this city’s club scene an edge right when the nightlife was literally dying in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. They saved this city, and their music was playing in my head, maybe “Scarecrow” by Ministry or Front 242 or Nitzer Eb or “Human Fly” by the Cramps, as I strolled the Castro in full reptilian mode, looking for sexual adventure too early on that one night.

Sexual adventure came in the form of a cute Italian boy named Matt who drove up in a large old model American car. He had those wide eyes that said we shared a friend in common, which made us instantly familiar, like we actually knew each other but we didn’t. I got in the car without a single worry, not even glancing to see if the inside door handle was removed. I was more focused on the fact that Matt was clad entirely in leather, chaps, cod-piece and vest with a smooth and perfect muscularly ripped stomach and chest. He seemed much younger than most men I usually saw sporting full leather, but he filled the uniform well and I was excited. We began driving towards my home South of Market, and he explained to me that he got all dressed up tonight because he was in the mood for leather sex. I asked what the difference between sex and leather sex was, suspecting that I wasn’t what he was after since I wasn’t dressed like an extra from the movie Cruising or the Eagle’s Sunday beer bust. “Am I the wrong guy for you tonight?”

“Not at all,” he said excitedly and sincerely, “I’ll teach you all about it!”

“I’ve never shyed away from lessons, and I’m a very good student,” I said.

Then Matt started asking me if I knew this person and that person, as one does when they are getting to know you, and he asked me if I knew this particularly notorious guy, a familiar low-life always being shady and telling lies and stealing things and selling bad dope, that sort of thing. I said I knew him, and he said, “Then maybe you can help me figure something out. Earlier tonight I saw him and I got this strange feeling that he was trying to lure me into a trap, like kidnap me or something. Am I possibly just being paranoid? It was a weird situation and I just kind of felt danger and bolted.” He explained more of the details to me, and I told him that maybe he was a bit wound up on drugs at that moment, which does happen to all of us from time to time, because the guy in question was really annoying and petty, but not that ambitious or tough to pull of something like imprisonment or abduction. He was too busy stealing from friends and working any dealers he could for product. Anything else was way out of his league, so it must have been Matt was tripping on the paranoiac tip. “You gotta keep that in check, Matt, or should I say Sir?” We laughed and I sensed he fully understood. We got to my place, which was a flat directly above a bar called My Place, and went in for a good long lesson.

We explored the concept of leather sex thoroughly, even trading roles and uniforms in that perfect accelerated and charged amphetamine fervor that does happen from time to time where you are both inspired to exhaust every known sexual activity possible between two people, no act too difficult, every option approached with zeal, every mountain climbed. We were having such a good time we decided to share the magic and invite another person to join us.

We were trying to decide who we knew that would be game for such an impromptu romp at a moment’s notice in the wee hours. I immediately thought of Pride, because, after all, he took me on my last sordid adventure, and I thought he might like Matt. We put in a call and he was soon there and wanted to get high before we started going again. For this, I knew he would need a syringe or rig.

He asked me, “Do you have a wig for me?” because that’s what we called them, rigs were “wigs,” the needle exchange was the “wig exchange.” I promptly went to ask my roommate for one. While I was out of the room, Matt asked, “What do you need a wig for?” to which Pride coyly and simply responded, “I always have to wear a wig every time I do a hit.” I returned with the apparatus and saw that Matt was dressing hurriedly. I asked him where he was going, and he told me he had to feed the parking meter and would be right back.

This sounded logical to me; he’d been there a long time. Pride said, “He’s not coming back. ” I looked at him incredulously and said, “Yes he is,” fully believing it. He never returned, and he left a fancy cock ring behind, too! I was really bummed that he left, grilling Pride about it. “What did you do or say to him while I was out of the room? Did you act all nelly or something, you evil bitch!” He stuck to his story. We couldn’t figure it out, then a few hours later another friend called us and said that Matt had fled our place and come to his saying he had narrowly escaped being killed by some queen who was gonna put on a wig and kill him, Mafia hit man style. That friend tried to calm the confused guy down, but he was inconsolable and apparently was sent back home to Mom and Dad in New Jersey in a matter of 48 hours. That poor, poor delusional leather instructor. He taught me a lot.

One night after an extensive, loud, indoor/outdoor, even physical altercation with my boyfriend, a misguided actor and casualty of that old familiar downward spiral into the abyss of substance abuse, I found myself knocking on Pride’s door seeking refuge and a bit of peace and quiet. Pride’s apartment was an illegal sister-in-law apartment or red-headed-step-child-apartment, as I liked to call it, located down a long weird hall beside a garage and behind an opulent house near Alamo Square. It had a relatively hidden entrance, and I felt safe and protected there. When I arrived that morning he saw that I had been in a scuffle with the boyfriend. “Did he hit you?” he asked with his eyes narrowing, and he made a very heroic and touching promise that the boyfriend was never allowed there again and if he came there he would kick his ass. Sweet.

Pride was obviously fresh from a bath and getting ready to go somewhere, so I offered to leave. He said, “No way girl. You’re coming with me on an adventure.”

“Okay,” I said. I could use an adventure to take my mind off of things.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

He was extra effervescent this morning I noticed and wondered why.

“Did you get fucked really hard by some mean guy last night or something?”

“Yeah, by an old ugly guy with a weird ugly dick,” he said proudly, “And I loved it! Now do that big line on the coffee table because the cab is on the way.” I rolled up a bill, anxious for that familiar burning sensation, followed by the sense that any form of fat clogging my veins and arteries was instantly melted away, allowing my blood to freely flow through at a new velocity, giving me a rush like that feeling you get when the roller coaster plummets from its highest point or there’s just been an earthquake. “Breakfast of idiots” I said aloud.

“No thanks, I’m not hungry.” The doorbell sounded. “Let’s go girl,” he said, swishing out the door in a most effeminate way. “Aren’t I Nellie?” he asked as he shook his hips down the hall. “But I can be butch, too, if I want.”

“Butch enough to kick my loser shithead boyfriend’s ass, right?” I interjected.

“Damn straight!”

We piled in the cab and it took us barely four blocks away. “We’re here,” he said, paying and tipping the driver extravagantly as we got out in front of a big apartment building. “Who lives here?”

“Some tore up fucking bag-chasing spunout fucking bitch,” he said smiling. “Not really. Just a big drug dealer who needs me to shoot him up because he can’t do it himself anymore. C’mon, he lives on the third floor,” he said, starting to ascend the stairs.

“Well, aren’t you just the little Florence Nightingale of the drug underworld,” I said.

“Oh yeah, butch it up will ya? Like this,” he said in a deep, low, macho voice as he applied his most manly gait to the first staircase. I was cracking up but followed his instructions. Upon hitting the next floors landing he squealed, “Okay now, Nellie!” and exploded in a flurry of effeminate gesture in his ladylike ascent. He was slaying me. “Okay now, butch,” he said in a low voice. He was way ahead of me.

We entered the apartment and the tone was much more somber in there than we were. I quickly stifled my giggly mood as I let Pride do all the talking. There was not just the one dealer present but also another even bigger and more notorious one in need of the same service. This puzzled me, how people who were most definitely experienced in their drug use for years eventually reach a point of helplessness in being able to administer their own hits.

I didn’t ask any questions about it and actually averted my eyes while nurse Pride did his duty, as such things have made me actually faint in the past. I heard cough number one and cough number two and knew it was safe to return my gaze in their direction. In the not-too-distant future, one of those men would die suddenly from HIV/AIDS complications, the other would be found bludgeoned to death and rolled up in a carpet at a place he just acquired to open a small business. Since the two men didn’t immediately rip off their clothes and initiate sex with us but rather prepared a package for Pride and handed it to him and called another cab, I knew this wasn’t the only stop we’d be making.

We exited then entered a waiting cab and headed to our next destination, a long cab ride to a weird place in the shadow of the freeway and SF General Hospital. It was a little red house with a fence and a very scary rottweiler guarding the place. a very handsome blond stocky guy in leather pants and a wife-beater had to subdue the dog before we could enter the gate. Pride had informed me prior that he was stopping here to do his service yet again to the boyfriend of another big drug dealer.

Once safely inside I took in the surroundings in this oddly out of place little cottage under the freeway. Just off the front room in a smaller room with no door lay the sleeping drug dealer, a gun in his hand on the bed next to his head. He was snoring loudly. I was immediately frightened and glanced at Pride with widening eyes that said, “Lets get out of here.” He just smiled. The blond guy said, “Oh don’t worry about him – he’s been up for five days and just fell out a bit ago. He’s down for the count. Come on back here,” and led us to a large back room. The cottage was kind of placed on a slope so the windows in this back room were high on the wall but right at ground level on the outside of the house, and I kept seeing the gigantic paws of the rottweiler bounding by each window again and again as if on patrol. Pride prepared the hit for the blond while I took in the room in all its sex dungeon glory, a big X-shaped wooden structure with a variety of belts and cuffs attached to it for restraint purposes, a leather sling attached to the low ceiling, a weird sort of combination gynecological exam/bondage platform, a video camera, video sputtering on the screen some indiscernible fleshy homemade blur, and from where I stood I could just barely see the gun in the sleeping lover’s hand.

Nurse Nightingale apparently ran into a bit of trouble giving Mrs. Dealer her injection, as I noticed that they had quickly found it necessary to wrap his arm in saran wrap and say a prayer to the patron saint of abscess. His first attempt had “missed,” and while I was curious about what that meant, whenever I looked over at them dealing with this complication I started feeling weak. I turned away and looked at the gun and the sleeping man’s hand laying on it and thought about things like, what if he decided to itch his nose in his sleep or something? What if he awoke slowly to the sounds of strangers talking in his house like for instance me and Pride or maybe just me? I started feeling more uneasy about being there, and turned to see the process of getting the blond high had reached another even less sightly complication. I turned to the video screen and finally realized it was something the happy couple had filmed of themselves. Boy, the sleeping one, certainly had a huge cock, probably ten inches at least.

Then it hit me. He was the same guy who relieved us of top duties that morning with the Italian guy who had all the taxidermed animals and assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charges to face as soon as he hopped out of the sling and headed for his sentencing that morning. “It’s a small, small world,” I thought to myself to the tune of the song featured in the popular ride at Disneyland with mechanized dolls representing every country of the world singing and being happy together. I started envisioning the same ride populated by different dolls, like knife-wielding ex-cons, leather clad gay men in slings getting fisted, skinny tweakers fan-dancing, Sylvester, animated syringes smiling and beckoning, bleachman running to the rescue, AIDS activists demonstrating loudly, bathhouses flourishing then closing, Harvey Milk, bottles of poppers, AZT tablets raining down from the sky, vicious drag queens. Ward 86, bareback parties, gay teen runaways, all bathed in the colors of the omnipresent rainbow flag. “It’s a gay-ass world.”

Finally I heard the familiar cough that means the hit worked and the toiling around with it had ended, and I could confidently look towards them again without getting lightheaded or nauseous. Pride lit a cigarette and smiled like an emergency intern who had just saved a life. The handsome blond ripped off his clothes and approached me, dropped to his knees and started undoing my pants. Pride said, “I’ll wait in the living room. Don’t take all day, alright.” He rolled his eyes.

I quickly found myself fucking the blond mercilessly hard against the wall, which I noticed had bullet holes in it, likely from the gun the jealous drug dealer boyfriend was sleeping with in his hand, the same guy who was slapping his ten inch cock across the blonde’s face on the video screen, the one who snored from the adjacent bedroom with no door, just over my shoulder, where I glanced nervously.

“Don’t worry about him; he won’t wake up. Just keep fucking me… harder… fuck me hard, man,” he panted and hissed far too loud for comfort, as if he wanted his mate to wake up and kill us both. “Fuck me like a bitch – make me your bitch, fucker.” I could see from the video that the blond seemed to like things a bit rougher than most, so I reached up and grabbed his hair and pulled his head back next to mine, my dumb mouth to his deaf ear and whispered harshly, “Make one more sound and I’m gone you little bitch,” and shoved my fingers in his mouth. At the window by our heads the rottweiler suddenly lunged at us snarling and butting at the glass so hard I thought it would certainly break. I thrust my hips so hard I heard bruises and shot my load into the condom , which I removed and threw down beside the blond and said, “Yeah, real safe.” I pulled my clothes back on quickly and headed out of the room, sneering at the sleeping guy. Pride looked up at me from the couch and smiled. “You ready?”

“Yep,” I said, sounding more like an ex-con or a cowboy than usual.

We both hit the front door at the same time and looked directly at each other, smiled and simultaneously screamed, “Okay, Nellie!” swishing our way to a waiting cab.

The one-night-a-week sexy homo rock and roll club that I DJ-ed for and my old friend Pride unexpectedly ended up go-go dancing at as the new boyfriend of the promoter, didn’t last as long as their relationship did, and during that period of time Pride actually seemed oddly tamed. I moved just a few blocks down the street from him, and I would see him and his boyfriend on occasion both dressed for work in crisp white shirts and black pants as waiters. This was highly uncharacteristic of Pride, both holding a job and living the partnered domestic existence, but it went on for some time, two or three years.

During that time I couldn’t help but notice that any time I was out and about meeting more and more people, doing more and more drugs, enjoying wild sex parties with people I had previously found too scary, bonafide residents of the darker side of life, invariably these people would bring up Pride. They all seemed familiar with him, like everyone knew Pride.

Like the night my boyfriend and I were cruising Collingwood together and got picked up by a short kind of menacing Italian guy in a Jaguar who took us to his home in the Castro which was filled with a huge collection of taxidermed animals of all sorts – hawks, mountain lions, raccoons, bearskin rugs, a fox – all staring at us from every direction. We were led to a back room with a sling and a wall of porn videos going where we were expected to endlessly fuck the Italian guy, who turned out to be the kind of bottom who was so voracious it eventually began to render him unattractive. We came to an impasse and he ordered breakfast for us from a nearby restaurant, making some comment about having to appear in court in the early morning.

When he left us alone to go pick up the food, I started putting details together and realized that this guy was the guy who recently had stabbed one of Pride’s close drug dealer friends and that he was just a very insane, hot tempered ex-con. Of course, there were so many signs I should have recognized, one of which was the gothic lettering across his abdomen that said “Co Co County,” which I saw while fucking him. It didn’t occur to me what it stood for; I just thought it was a reference to Chanel and almost said that. On the contrary, it stood for Contra Costa County and was definitely a prison tattoo. We were definitely playing with fire, and soon would be sharing breakfast with the guy on his way to a sentencing for stabbing someone I vaguely knew. We ate quickly. Luckily another guy stopped by and the menacing Italian guy decided to get in one more fuck before his sentencing, allowing us the option to hightail it out of there while he was distracted by the new guy’s ten inch cock. Total bottom.

I ran into Pride shortly after that one evening when I saw him wandering by my house. He told me he had been with friends who shot him up with heroin, which he’d never done before and hated. He was feeling wobbly and thirsty and out of sorts, so I took him in and sat him down and let him gather himself for awhile.

I believe this act of concern always touched Pride, like he found it unusual that someone would care enough about his well-being, and after that I felt much closer to him. He told me he had broken up with his boyfriend a while back and felt all the better in the long run being single. Then he started telling me a bit about his childhood which was fascinating, how at 14 he was discovered having sex with another male, someone a great deal older than him, and at that point in time his family was going through a Jesus freak stage, so they promptly whisked him off to church where they presented him in front of the entire congregation to be saved. They ordered him to redeem himself by asking the Lord for forgiveness and to solemnly promise to never commit this sin again, to never give in to the perverse temptation of pleasures of the flesh. He refused to say he would never do it again, and the congregation began to pummel him with all that sinner, sinner, damnation, burn in hell’s fire for eternity stuff. So upon being handed an e-ticket straight to hell, Pride asked the sweaty speaking-in-tongues-type minister if the other members of the congregation that he had been enjoying those carnal pleasures with – like that man there and that one over there sitting with his wife and yet another few looking nervous in the pews – would be going to hell also. His family rushed him out of the church turned upside down by hypocrisy and lies and never once returned, to the building or the faith. I was astonished and fascinated and loved him immediately. He gave me a warm hug and thanked me, and was ready to head up the hill to his place.

After that I began visiting and hanging out with Pride far more frequently, meeting lots of his friends, buying really good drugs, and feeling like whenever I visited there I was stepping into a different world, a strange world that had little or nothing to do with what was normal and right and good. This was a world where people didn’t hold regular jobs, where youth and beauty were used like currency, and criminal activities were commonplace but always seemed oddly heroic to me. One time I walked in to find a tiny and pushy Filipino drag queen counting out tens of thousands of dollars in stacks of bills on the bed. Another time I interrupted a group of eight people who were all administering big hits of speed via syringe simultaneously while recording the event, or “group hit,” as an outgoing phone message for Pride’s answering machine. It ended with a lot of breathy exhales, some coughs and a female voice slurring out the words, “I’m on fire.”

You never knew what would happen every time the doorbell rang when you were at Pride’s place. Who would it be? A really hot married guy scoring drugs, getting high and wanting to get fucked in one quick efficient visit? One or two of the really tough dealer-types you were always afraid of but found fascinating and sexy and longed to be liked by them? A pair of concerned people walking their blue-lipped, over-dosed friend in for a clean-well-lighted place to be revived? Or an occasional rough-trade looking man who would walk in, notice Pride had company and say, “Get rid of ‘em,” then go into the bedroom while Pride quickly ushered us out saying, “Just never mind… GOODBYE!”

When you saw him next and asked him what that was all about he wouldn’t remember the incident or would say something like “Oh, I got him high and he fucked me really hard.” I’d look at him shocked, worry digging furrows in my brow, and he’d look back with that smile and his eyes sparkling and say, “Wha-it? I loved it.”

Shortly after my fateful first meeting with Pride outside of a Redwood City gay bar, I made the move to the big city, San Francisco, a place I had known would become my home since I was a small child growing up in southern Oregon. I found a place and a job as a cook and bought my first leather jacket, dyed my hair blonde, found a boyfriend, moved in with him, moved away from him, discovered speed, made some fabulous friends, immersed myself in all the punk rock music scene I ever dreamed of, even started writing a regular column in a local gay paper about rock music. In all, I carved myself a neat little adventurous sort of life in San Francisco.

Oddly enough, one of the main cornerstones of all my social interaction turned out to be The Stud Bar, the very place I was too afraid to go in prior to a chance meeting with a 16-year-old who had been there several times and liked it, and prompted me to brave it so as not to be outdone by a teenager. What I anticipated to be like a pit of gay vipers engaging in limitless sexual debauchery, severe drug abuse, danger and dancing, actually turned out to be a somewhat nurturing and friendly place, a place I would later describe as everyone’s living room or the bar where I “grew up.”

I thought of Pride on occasion, usually when being carded to get in. I had tried the number he gave me a few months after we met, but it had been disconnected. Many years later I learned that he was still around when I overheard a notorious chicken hawk, and one of my closer friends, who practically lived at the Stud as well talking about a beautiful boy named Pride. He saw my ears prick up and responded, “He said he knows you.” I asked a few questions about him and wondered why we hadn’t run into each other ever, but by that time I was probably pretty preoccupied with the third or fourth of my seven different boyfriends named Jeffery that I’d be involved with.

If I wasn’t preoccupied with a Jeff then I was often times fascinated with walking late at night around and around and around one block in the Castro with a school, a fenced in playing field, an AIDS Hospice, a Cala Foods and a street called Collingwood. This is where lots of people would go to cruise for dick, both on foot and in cars and only very late at night. It was an activity or ritual that not only addressed the reptilian man-hunt urge of the gay night prowlers, but for me also really spoke to the drugs I was doing and provided an activity to obsess on in a neat and contained way, marching around and around the block repeatedly with my eyes permanently opened wide like a shark taking in the possible prey that circled similarly around the block, seldom stopping, only slowing down for fear of drowning if stationary.

Other nights I likened the heated stroll to tigers running around the tree so fast they turned into butter, then worried if it was politically correct to even know that story. Or the one about the seven Chinese brothers, one of which swallowed the ocean while the others gathered gold and treasures from the ocean floor but they got too greedy and went too far and the skinny one who swallowed the ocean couldn’t hold it any longer and the greedy ones died, drowned in a wave of bulimic control issues and I wondered if the skinny brother was really a sister.

Then I saw a very pretty boy sitting in a parked car, so pretty I risked certain shark death by stopping my constant motion. I stared into the car and the boy almost pointedly ignored my doting presence. I was persistent with my focus, yet trying to look somewhat casual about it. Finally he looked over to me and smiled and I said hi. He reluctantly acknowledged me in a slightly cocky and totally bored manner, and I thought to myself, “Oh great, he’s gonna be an arrogant snot.” I approached the car and crouched down by the passenger window saying, “So what are you up to?”

“Nothing…sitting here.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I dunno. Maybe nothing,” he said in a somewhat curt manner, then stammered and qualified, “Dick, what do ya think I’m looking for? What is everyone here looking for?”

“I’m looking for a deep and meaningful love relationship with the man of my dreams,” I said.

He smiled over my comment and it shook the chill away from the snide and arrogant attitude he had served thus far. He kind of looked familiar for some reason.

“It seems like I’ve maybe met you before.”

He looked in my eyes and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“What’s your name?” I asked. “I’m Don.”

“Pride,” he said.

“Oh my god, we have met before then,” I said. “It was a long, long time ago.”

He looked at me more carefully and said, “I can’t remember. God, I hate it when this happens, when I can’t remember someone who I’ve been with but they remember me.”

“Well think back. It was outside of a gay bar in Redwood City,” I said, trying to jog his memory. He still couldn’t remember, so I wracked my brain trying to think of other associative details that would bring it back to him. “We just sat in a car and talked and blew each other,” I said. Still nothing. He began to stammer out an apology when it hit me. “I know what will make you remember, it was the night of your sixteenth birthday that we met.”
He paused for a moment and smiled and said, “Oh yeah…now I remember!” Then a look of shock came to his face and his eyes widened and he said, “That’s really weird, because tonight is my birthday.”

“Really? No lie? Wow, so that would make it seven years to the day that we first met. That’s incredible! Kind of eerie too, like it was supposed to happen.”

Pride agreed.

Well, I guess this means we have an anniversary to celebrate. Wanna go to my house and fuck?”

Pride agreed, and thus began our strange and wonderful friendship, but very slowly. After that night I probably didn’t run into him again for at least six months, and I found him to be rather aloof and not very forthcoming with information about himself. I got the feeling right away that he hung with a crowd of people who were pretty hardcore and that he had embraced the darker end of a hedonistic drug culture even more fully and shamelessly than myself.

Certain clues made this apparent, like the fact that he didn’t ever seem to work at a normal job like everyone else yet he never seemed for want of cash or clothes or a place to live. I later learned that in his teens he actually was a model and made two commercials that probably paid very well, as one was for Crest and the other was for Stridex medicated pads. That’s big money and I don’t know exactly where it would have all gone. Who knew?

Pride never really let anyone completely know all about him ever, at least not right away. It had been many months since I saw him last and I was DJ-ing at a new club in the Mission. One night he walked in with my partner in this venture and was announced as the new go go dancer, one of three we generally featured. He acted kind of stand-offish towards me then because he was involved with the club promoter, and I sensed there was a hint of jealousy over the fact that we knew each other previously, so we kept our distance, all the way around.