So it was that I found myself in a booth with a skinny speed freak wearing too much gel in his spiky, bleached hair after 1:30 a.m. one night. We both pulled down our pants. He wore earrings in both ears and had bad tattoos, including a barbed wire armband around his right bicep. I’d been told that an armband of that type on the right arm signaled that its wearer prefers to be the receptive partner in sexual situations, which in this case proved to be accurate.
“You gonna fuck me?” the tweaker said. He was twitching, and he kept narrowing his eyes and then bulging them open as if being repeatedly shocked. “Can you just fuck me?”
Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind: Sex with an Alien
“I don’t do that out here,” I said. “I actually don’t do much out here at all.”
“You do too,” he said. “Come on. You can do whatever you want. I’m clean.”
“I just watch,” I said.
“You do not,” he said. “You do not just watch.”
The speed freak didn’t whisper the way everyone else at the arcade did. He spoke at a slightly-louder-than-normal volume, the arcade equivalent of shouting.
He appeared agitated and continued squinting and popping his eyes open.
“Come on,” he said, stepping closer to me. “Quit fucking around.”
I needed to exit the booth as quickly as possible. As I pulled myself together and began doing up my pants, he took his hand from around his member and, before I knew what was happening, reached up and ran his finger across my cheek, applying the kind of pressure you might use to test the ripeness of a pear. He stopped right at the corner of my eye. I understood instantly that he had just spread a snail streak of precum across my face. Whether he had actually made contact with the mucus membrane of my eyeball, I couldn’t tell.
I reached up to knock his hand away and wiped my face in the same motion. In the process I touched my eyeball myself, which wasn’t something one ever wished to do at the arcade, where it would be impossible to overestimate the multitudinous microbes, bacteria, and germs on every surface imaginable.
The tweaker backed away, and reached again for his penis, cracking a crazed and unhinged smile like one of the lunatics from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was rubbing my face, first with my hand and then with my t-shirt. I felt certain he was infected with something horrible and that, however ineffectual and bizarre the attempt, he had just tried to infect me too.
I reeled out of the booth without speaking another word to the man. I went straight to the counter and asked for the key to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my face with the pink liquid soap from the hot air balloon-shaped dispenser mounted on the wall. Afterwards, I raced home and showered for ages.
It turned out I had been lucky. I walked away without so much as conjunctivitis.
69
A SHORT LIVED PORN SERIES CALLED TRUE COUPLES FOCUSED on real-life masculine, older men and their much younger partners. Each sex scene in the True Couples series is preceded by an interview with the couple in question, in which they discuss how they met and ended up together.
A memorable moment unfolds in True Couples 2. Before their sex scene, fifty-three-year-old attorney, Dennis Mansfeld is interviewed with his twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, Eric Bell. Mansfeld explains that, before things between them went too far, he revealed to Eric that he was HIV positive. Mansfeld pauses to collect himself, then gets choked up as he recalls the occasion. Before he can continue, the attorney actually begins to cry.
“Aww, man,” his young boyfriend says comfortingly. “It’s okay.”
Mansfeld tearfully recounts Eric’s reaction to the news. “He said, ‘I’m not worried about that. That’s just part of life.’”
Eric hugs his aged attorney, and soon after, the two of them get naked and have impassioned, protected sex.
When young Eric enters him, Mansfeld, can be heard saying with the surfer inflection of Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Jeff Spicoli, “Dude, dude. You know what daddy likes.” They kiss and seem genuinely affectionate.
Googling Dennis Mansfeld, the fifty-something attorney from True Couples 2, one discovers claims that he’s a lunatic who spits when he speaks. Allegations that he talks so fast in court that some think he’s on speed. That he has appeared before at least one judge wearing wrinkled clothes and looking disheveled. That he’s frightening. Claims that he brags about his pornography career. Claims that he should be investigated and disbarred.
When I first saw True Couples 2, I thought he was probably a nice guy, a man caught up in an impulsive moment, deeply involved in one of those older/younger relationships that never work. I could imagine him saying, “Yeah, maybe I’ll regret it one day. But I love Eric, and I don’t care who knows it or who sees it, now or in the future.”
Dennis Mansfeld probably was a nice guy, actually. But also kind of an unstable nutcase. What I found when I looked him up bothered me. It bothered me that everything that seemed clear at first grew cloudy when exposed to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Mansfeld was the first thing I thought of when Malcolm told me he would be back in town for a week, and this time he really did want to meet. He said he wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“Seriously, stop being such a chickenshit about this. It’s ridiculous.”
“What’s the advantage of meeting in person?” I said. “Everything is perfectly nice the way it is.”
“You’re not at all curious to meet me after all this time?”
“I know you already. Maybe meeting would mess things up.”
“What could it possibly mess up?”
“Why do you need another friend, anyway? You’ve got your teenage bellhop. Aren’t you ever satisfied?”
“Don’t change the subject, Sam.”
“What if I meet you somewhere and you write down my license plate number and find out my real name and address and start stalking me and ruin my life?”
“Now that’s just fucking insulting. And don’t even remind me about the name thing at this point.”
“I’m kidding.”
“We’re meeting. I’ll be home for a week. I’m not going to tell Ron about it, obviously, so we’ll have to schedule it sometime when he won’t be around.”
“Does Ron know about me?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you’ll meet me?”
“No, just ‘Okay, Ron doesn’t know about me.’”
“Why do you have to make everything so difficult?”
“I have no idea, Malcolm.”
“Well, just stop then.”
“Maybe we can meet. But no promises.
“We’re meeting.”
70
IT WAS THE KID’S TWENTIETH BIRTHDAY, AND THE COP turned forty-three just two weeks later. They liked the way their birthdays were close together. They had the same astrological sign, which they took to mean they were a perfect match.
The cop ordered a slew of gifts for the kid. I watched in disbelief as the receipts came rolling in. It was a whole new way of thinking about the kid, seeing the video games he wanted to play, and the kinds of t-shirts he’d wear, and the gift certificates to Red Lobster and Golden Corral. Did he really like eating at those places? It was unimaginable.