A week after the Assateague camping trip, I flew out to California for ten days to visit friends but also for San Francisco gay pride, including my first (and still biggest ever) gay pride parade. But I wasn’t going to watch the parade but to be in it, marching with friends in their group. The parade turned out to be huge, much bigger than I had imagined. It took a long route, over two miles up the long hill of Market Street toward the Castro. Two miles doesn’t sound all that long, but it is at parade speed.
About half-way through visiting my friends I began to feel very tired, just exhausted. It wasn’t for lack of sleep but more like how any minor effort just drained the life right out of me. Also, I had a low but steady fever which I tried to ignore or treat with aspirin. This was odd because I was usually in good health and fairly energetic, so I just assumed I had a cold coming on.
By the day of the parade, all I really wanted to do was sit unmoving at my friends’ house. But I also really wanted to be in the parade, so I pushed myself to get up and march. I probably would have skipped the parade entirely if I had known the route was THAT LONG. After the parade I went back my friends’ place and collapsed. Somehow I made it through the rest of my visit and flew home.
On my first day home and back to work, I suddenly felt even worse. I took off work and went to my doctor who said I had mono. Mono! I thought mononucleosis was that thing (straight) people get when they reach the age when they begin kissing and dating: a teenage coming-of-age badge.
Wait. When they begin kissing. If you’ve been paying attention, that “when” is just about where I was in my social life at the time. I mean, over the past couple of years I had started kissing a lot of different men. It was now just my turn for mono. Mono can’t be cured but fortunately it runs its course all by itself which, for me, was a six-month period during which I couldn’t drink.
After that realization, which I have to say was not entirely without some pride at hitting a normal, social-disease milestone, I wondered if I might have picked up mono from Leif. Leif at Assateague a few weeks ago was the only man I had kissed a lot right around the time that would have allowed the disease to incubate.
I tried to call Leif to ask him if he too had been sick but like before, he never called back. Was this why he had repeatedly rejected my advances? To spare me? Couldn’t he have said something?
Whatever. I spent the next four weeks home sick from work, not able to do much more than get out of bed and go lie on the couch, eat chocolate frozen yoghurt (a recent discovery), and avoid the horrors of daytime television except The Rosie O'Donnell Show. (I loved your show, Ms. O’Donnell; you helped me make it through the long days.) I asked friends to pick up a few things from the grocery store for me; later and to my surprise, I actually had to explain I would pay them for my groceries, that I wasn’t looking for begrudging gifts of food.
In the meantime, the most wonderful boss in the world let me (a friend drove me) borrow my office computer and a telephone modem. I passed the days at home playing games or compiling an impressive long-distance phone bill by dialing into gay bulletin boards around the country. (Remember, this was on my work computer, but long before employers monitoring “appropriate use” became a thing. Don’t tell!)
One thing I did was join CompuServe, a large online system that included email, bulletin boards, and other resources. I pretty quickly discovered the human sexuality chat forums (fora). One evening I was on (still my work computer) CompuServe for a while, on a flirty, sexy gay group chat (read: typing frantically before the thread moved on), then logged off, not giving the chat another thought.
A day or so after that, I got a private message from Brian, one of the guys who was also on that group chat. Because messages and email were still kind of new (beside email at work) and Brian was someone I knew only online, it was fun and new and different to have someone gay to email with. Brian and I had yet to exchange pictures so I could only imagine how handsome he might be.
Being home these weeks with mono and having nothing to do every day besides wait for Rosie to come on, I logged into CompuServe often and especially to write to Brian. He patiently wrote back, understanding I was sick and very much helping me keep from getting too bored.
Brian was an assertive but also imaginative email pal, and at one point he suggested we collaborate on a porn story by taking turns writing the next paragraph of the story. We wrote mainly about having sex with each other but also tried a scene in which Brian tied and suspended me naked from the ceiling. (I’ve long since lost that story, alas.)
We stayed in touch long after I recovered from mono and in the meantime, bought my first home computer (a Dell, which I loved).
Eventually Brian and I traded phone numbers and when we finally talked, Oh! He had a slow, sensual, Southern drawl and I felt rather seduced by his velvety voice. One night I felt really horny and impulsively called him. We had once emailed about what phone sex might be like and he, being a smart guy, picked up right away on why I was calling.
Brian took charge immediately. Following his instructions, I laid down on my bed and tugged my pants down, obediently trying to stroke my cock while balancing the phone on my shoulder. He ordered me to play slowly with my cock until I was close to cumming, and to describe every inch of flesh as I stroked. Then he had me roll over onto my knees and lift my ass high into the air. I complained but-but-but how difficult it was to hold both the phone and my ass up while jerking my cock, but he said I’d just have to figure it out and obey.
I was starting again to get close to cumming. Brian told me to just keep jerking and that I had to hold my cum in. I gasped that I couldn’t, but he said only that I had to keep jerking slowly and had to obey and hold my cum until he said I could cum. After only another minute, I started to get even more desperate, wanting to obey but knowing I was not going to be able to contain myself much longer. My cum started to rise and straining hard, I begged into the phone, I can’t hold it! May I please cum?
He paused, silent for just a moment, then said to let it go. I relaxed, feeling my unleashed, hot cum rise slowly every inch up my swollen dick until it gushed out in one, long stream into a massive puddle on the bed. It was like I turned on a faucet. Brian made me describe the faucet feeling and the mess on the bed in as much detail as I could. After a few minutes, we said good night and hung up.
We tried phone sex again awhile later, during which I tried to follow Brian’s orders to get down on the floor and tie myself up. But that didn’t work very well and gave me a rug burn.
We were email and phone pals for a while a couple of years more but suddenly all emails and calls from Brian ceased and I never found out why. And as best I can recall, we never even traded photos.