History: Trying to Cruise

 Once again, we return to my personal history from before the blog.

Timeline:  1985 -1991

I put off writing this when it was due last Saturday, as I was having a little trouble getting started with these years.  We are past a lot of the fun firsts…  

This time frame was more about work than sex.  We were getting ourselves established, but also needed to find additional venues to use our talents.  And we were very successful with that.  We still worked together, a lot.  Rob was beginning to work at other places a little more often than I was, for as resident director, I stayed on mostly at the dinner theatre until it was sold in the summer of 1985. 

We found nine months of work together up at the theatre where Rob had done his first summer gigs.  I was again resident director and occasional actor.  Living in a bigger city, made me more conscious on being on the prowl for men.  It was a small city—but not a village like where we’d been. 

Driving home from the grocery store, I drove down to the waterfront.  Lake Huron looked vast and beautiful.  There was an old pier here in the downtown area.  And cars were circling.  Round and round. I’d found the gay cruising ground without trying.

Of course, I went back.  At night.  Even more cars.  But I was too petrified of the cops to do anything.  I watched men disappear behind the old pier but wouldn’t go there myself.  I watched and waited for them to come back to their cars.  Sometimes 20 minutes.  More often less than seven.

But it wasn’t just the cops that had me scared.  We still knew so little about AIDS in late 1985 and early 1986.  Knowing so many gay men in the theatre, we’d hear through the grapevine that one was sick and no longer working or another had died.  In the coming years, I likely knew a couple dozen men who we lost far too young.  I waited to hear of one that I’d actually had sex with—and that never happened…

*

The other big change in my life around this time was that my brother and his partner had moved to a bedroom community in New Jersey as my brother was now working in New York.  He was a buyer for a major retail firm and doing a lot of traveling.  I missed the connection and the mentor aspect.  This was the 1980’s—I couldn’t just drop him a text.  Long distance took a huge chunk out of my meagre paycheck.  So I mostly waited until he and his partner came home for Christmas…and we caught up then.  Sort of…

*

Rob and I were still mostly doing each other after some late-night porn viewing.  I loved sucking him off.  He came fast and a lot.  He’d work on me, but even back then I took forever to shoot.  I had found edging—before I knew the name.

I mentioned last time how Rob loved those blond, big-dicked porn guys.  I was all about something new.  We found the films of Cadinot—and all those exotic men I’d never seen before, of every race and so many uncut.  (I still had not seen a foreskin in the flesh!) 

Rob and I had a game that if we were, say, driving to the grocery store and saw a good-looking guy on the street we’d talk about him—and what we’d like to do to him.  Rob was becoming rather indifferent to any man who didn’t look like me in 1978.  He liked them tall, blond (you’d never know I was blond now, but I was until I was 45!) and hung.  I was pretty omnivorous.  Age, body type, dick size didn’t matter.  With each year I aged, Rob still loved me…but was becoming more indifferent to me sexually…

1988.  I got a job, through a friend, down in Birmingham, Alabama.  There was both a dinner theatre and another that paid really good money.  We moved our base of operations south for nine months of the year, returning to Michigan, each year, for a summer theatre gig.  Birmingham was a true city.  And I found the bookstores.  Our evening jack and cum had sort of disappeared by now.  He was more interested in his video game on the television and a scotch or three to unwind.  I still watched porn in the bedroom—and was usually asleep as he came to bed.

Birmingham had a couple of porn video stores.  I told Rob I wanted to explore them—and he was fine with it.  I still wasn’t likely to do anything much in this bigger city.  The one I liked had the oddest set up.  You picked out a video tape, paid your admission and went to the back room.  There were four booths in the room but nothing like the traditional rooms and screens.  The ‘booths’ were large plastic capsules that were shaped like a hollow navy bean.  Each was a different color.  If I’d paid for the yellow pod, I knew to go there.  You sat inside of it on the far side, near one corner of the room and watched the cassette you had chosen.  I quickly learned the four pods could swivel.  If you turned the contraption to the right, and the guy in the blue pod swiveled left, you could see each other.  Many men saw, nodded and excused themselves to the lone restroom for a quick BJ.  I didn’t do that.  But I did pull out my cock and show it to anyone who wanted to see it as I stroked.

*

In 1991, lightning struck.  I was offered an almost fulltime job running a theatre in Michigan.  I accepted.  It meant Rob would job out most of the year all around the country, and I would be working by myself.

I was going to be 35 that year.  I looked at myself in the mirror.  I knew I needed to start playing with other men.  I was too old now, sexually for Rob, and was barely going to see him.  I knew enough about condoms at this point to buy Magnums.  I remember thinking this exact phrase:  “I better get some fun in now as no one will want me once I hit 40!”

That night, I ran it by Rob on a long-distance call.  I could hear the shrug in his voice as he said it sounded like a plan, provided the condoms happened.  I hung up and planned a trip to Chicago that coming weekend.  My brother had mentioned a place called Man’s Country…