THE SCARLET B

Things with Z didn’t work out.

It went something like this. Z: “I really like you and want us to live together.” Me: “We’ve known each other for five weeks.” Z: “And?” Me: “And, no.” He started crying, I started laughing, he grabbed his toothbrush that I’d begrudgingly allowed him to keep in the bathroom and walked, I grabbed the bottle of Veueve from the fridge I’d been saving for nothing special and popped it. With the first drink, I felt a quick jab of latent sadness followed by the cooling stillness of quiet and relief. Then I made a salad.

As I sipped the crisp vintage, sloshing it around in my mouth, slowly emptying the bottle, I thought about the look in Z’s eyes when I had said no. This 25 year-old’s dream of living off/with the well-to-do man he’d been shtupping dashed to bits on the jagged rocks of reality. Z’s mind had led him so quickly to coupling and cohabitating, while I seriously just saw him as another “one” in a long series of “ones,” albeit one with a very pretty cock, still just another guy deposited in front of me to do with as I wished. It was amazing to me just how easy it was to unravel the fantasy he’d so tightly wound around me with one little word.

I suddenly thought about something “Stud Can’t Understand Men” wrote me in an email last week (yes, you can write me). He posited the question, “Is it better to couple up out of fear of ultimately being alone, or should I continue to live in a perpetual state of hedonism because it feels so good today?” If you look around, it’s obvious that many people are coupled because they can’t bear to be alone, while others actually do it out of love or some fantasy of love, or the desire to have a partner and share everything life can throw in their path. But there are some of us, with whom a good book and the occasional piece of ass provides all the solace of a bicycle made for two.

Now, though, with gay marriage and gaybies and LOGO screaming monogamy in our faces, it seems almost sinister to not want to be coupled, especially at 35. My big brother, Jake, recently put it bluntly to me, “Sam, back in the day, men like us used to be called confirmed bachelors or playboys, now we’re sex addicts and predators.” Would it be better then, if I wore a scarlet letter ‘B’ to let all who date me know, up front, to not make wedding plans the minute we start playing hide the cannoli. To think of me as more like a ride at Disneyland: you ride, you laugh, you scream, then you move on to the next one, no shorties allowed.

Z couldn’t see the scarlet “B” so obviously emblazoned on my chiseled hairy chest and he suffered because of it. A fantasy, no matter how badly you might want it, is no match for the reality of the situation.

E-mail me your sex questions/conundrums/comments at: sextalksam@gmail.com.