Doseone’s show began with a freestyle battle where Sage Francis and Pedestrian abandoned their “conscious and experimental” rap style to imitate the homophobic remarks of ignorant rappers. At that time I was too stunned by the literal homophobia in it to register that it was also obviously racist. Then Doseone did “Spin Classes” and “innovation in the field of breath” and her verse from the second side of cLOUDDEAD apt. A, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d heard in my life. He was combining the dark, bleak insanity of early Tricky, the insular self-sustained inventiveness of De La Soul’s first albums, and raw Freestyle Fellowship improvisational shit straight out of the old Good Life Café open mike in South Central Los Angeles. He took these and infused them with his own particular experiences, creating something I’d never heard before. His delivery was completely inconsistent and unpredictable. He sounded so vulnerable and effeminate, performing the exact queer rap style I’d been cultivating. But then Dose free-styled in this weird mannish voice: “I’ve been to college / did my four years / it’s like a penitentiary / except no queers….” I mean, he actually said that.
There are queers at colleges. I’ve had sex with them in the bathroom at Cal, right up the street from where Adam “Doseone” Drucker works.
Up Telegraph from Amoeba Records, go through Sather Gate across the bridge, and on your left stands Dwinelle Hall. Downstairs in the men’s bathroom there’s a stall from which one can see anyone entering the bathroom. There’s a flood of human masturbation material making its way to the basement between classes. It’s funny to speculate which people have the weakest alibi for coming into this particular remote bathroom. There are two or three bathrooms on every floor of Dwinelle. Can this many obvious faggots all have to pee here at the same time? And these girls are not closet cases, but, like, straight-up Queer As Folk wannabes. They give something away in their overdetermined attempt to identify as casual when peeing. Once, I saw a very proper queen wearing a tear-away snap-up sweats athletic ensemble, pretending to be jockish. I cruised her with no subtlety at all. But I didn’t allow her any space for pretense, so she lost sexual interest. She had her long, permed hair in a bob. And she had a fat cock with a thick head. I didn’t get a chance to taste it.
Another time, I saw spiky, dark-haired twins with really beautiful eyes and pretty, reddish pink lips. Nothing makes me cum harder than boys’ lips. I have an early memory of being repulsed by a kiss on the cheek from some random matron at my church. That repulsion swelled when my next-door neighbor (and best friend), a white boy named Steven, tried to kiss me on his front lawn. I pushed him away. His family moved to Taiwan shortly afterward and I never saw him again. I’ve spent the rest of my life overcompensating. Maybe I’ll find him, and his lips, here. My ex-boyfriend Jo-ey had really full lips that would engorge when he was aroused; when I masturbate, thinking about the sex we used to have, I recall the soft fleshy cushion of his lips as we kissed and jerked each other off. So I fantasize kissing and jerking off with these twins, whose lips are delicate and shaped like a dove’s wings. Actually, I don’t think they were cruising, but that doesn’t stop me from imagining that their erect cocks are the same color as their lips, and I want to watch them 69-ing each other.
Time passes. Enough time for the smallest details to become exaggerated to manic-depressive extremes. Feelings of rejection seem like a well-grounded justification for suicide. Why am I participating in this hunting range of masculinity? But then a stern, frumpy white boy stands at the urinal with his eyes fixed on mine, through the crack in my stall door. I stand up to get a better look, with my cock in my hand as the blood that was trapped in my thighs by the toilet seat circulates from toes to head once more. I open the door with my pants unzipped so that my hard cock juts out, and I walk over to a urinal a couple down from this boy’s. His face is pale and his lips are pink-rose colored and fixed at an attitude that’s a mixture of pride and bewilderment. His thick glasses stand on the end of a pointy nose. His cock is of a compulsive-masturbating-nerd thickness, with a beautiful veiny shaft, and his cockhead is throbbing. I’m in love. I move to stand next to him and we start jerking each other off.
Someone comes in and we snap back into place apart from each other and pretend to finish peeing. The intruder is in his mid-forties, dressed like she’s getting ready for a hiking trip through leather country with the Sierra Club; she’s a regular whom I recognize immediately. The frumpy white boy zips his hard-on away, a huge and conspicuous bulge in the crotch of his pants, and leaves the bathroom in embarrassment. The way he knew precisely where to look into my stall convinces me that he’s only pretending to be embarrassed. I follow her out of the bathroom and can’t figure out which way she went, so I guess. I leave Dwinelle and I spot the boy by the library. I trail him past the clock tower and toward buildings I don’t recognize, while maintaining what I feel to be a discreet distance. I assure myself that I’m not stalking her. She’s going to show me another cruise spot and then we’ll have the most amazing sex of our lives. But I lose her in some kind of science faculty building. On this occasion I don’t feel suicidal because I’m not really depressed, since she hasn’t actually rejected me. Just to be sure, I check every bathroom in this new building. I convince myself that this guy’s locked away in his professor’s office, leaking semen from his pulsing fire extinguisher cock while surfing porn online at an old wooden desk, and shooting all over his own face and lips. I wonder if he takes his glasses off first.
Back at Dwinelle, the air is calm, at a nearly in utero temperature. The fluorescent lights buzz dream-like, and there’s all that tile. When you get a stranger’s grooming habits, moisture, and intent stuck under your skin, it’s really hard to shake loose. I’m sitting in a stall trying to either meditate or go into hibernation when the stall door next to me opens and closes. I peer through the hole where a bolt once held the toilet paper dispenser in place, and see a hot, skinny gay boy, wearing sports vintage, furiously stroking his cock. His arms are lean and toned and I think I see a couple of circuit tats peeking gingerly from under the sleeve of his off-yellow T-shirt. I get on the floor and stick my hard pre-cum-slicked cock underneath the stall partition and he starts sucking me off—just above par. I fuck his mouth but someone enters the bathroom and we both hop onto our respective thrones until it’s clear, and then start again, until he stands and strokes his fat cock while watching someone else enter. After they leave he continues to stand, and I can see from his shadow that he’s stroking his cock wistfully. This strikes me as forlorn.
I look under the partition at him to let him know that I want to suck him off. His petite features suggest to me that he’s mixed race, perhaps with a little black somewhere, who knows, also thick eyebrows and a very blank gay lifestyle expression on his young face. He crouches and begins to lay his cock on my lips when someone else enters the bathroom. This happens several times. I spot drool below the partition of the stall wall. It registers that it’s mine. Or maybe his? I look through the bolt hole and see him dabbing spit on his cock, or maybe tasting his own pre-cum; I can’t tell which. She stands up again, stroking her cock, watching someone who’s now at the far urinal. I sit back on my toilet seat and try to see who it is. It’s another gay boy, Latino I think, with extremely present thick-lashed brown eyes that are intensely affecting innocence. She has full, florid lips parted in a lascivious attitude, lips that she alternately licks and bites in a roller-coaster-riding fashion. He has a crew cut and strikes me as beefy but in a jock sort of way and she’s also wearing a bright red long-sleeved T-shirt that says, “I’m a Pepper!” between erect nipples across her broad chest. She stands back and starts stroking a surface-to-air missile-shaped dick with a bright red tip shooting from the fly of her unbuckled jeans after we—that is, the gay boy in the stall next to me, and I myself—simultaneously open our doors so that he can see us stroking our cocks. I notice that his cockhead is pinker than his lips, more the color of his tongue. And then someone else enters the bathroom.
Busy afternoon. I slam my door as the new person walks to the sink.
I peek through the crack. It’s another gay boy, brown hair and blue eyes, with maybe freckles and an abrupt set of lips. He has a patient look. He’s wearing a blue lacrosse jersey. I’m not sure how I know at first that it’s a lacrosse jersey, but then I realize everybody is wearing Abercrombie. The gay boy with the red Abercrombie shirt is cruising the gay boy with the blue Abercrombie shirt, who starts rubbing a bulge in the baggy crotch of his Abercrombie cargo shorts. I open my stall door and find that my neighbor, with her yellow Abercrombie tee, has opened hers too.
My revulsion at being so breathlessly aroused by not just gay boys, but by gay boys wearing Abercrombie, starts fucking with my head. I find myself stroking and squeezing my cock just to continue appearing aroused. I start having a panic attack and faintly notice the sound of pants being ankle-dragged across the floor. I look down at the blue Abercrombie shirt gay boy’s shoes. I divert myself with objective class analysis, to cool my panic attack. The other gay boys’ shoes are new and sporty, but blue is going in the other direction—his couture is not as new or together as the other boys’ mall ensembles. I observe that she has the sensible yet unfortunately unkempt dark brown hair of someone who doesn’t like thinking about it. She’s dressed like someone would want to dress if they aspired to dress just like someone who’s part of the universal Caucasian-gay-person standard for the ruling class working at being working class—and therefore bound to a conservative utilitarianism that only hints at originality, because perhaps his resources aren’t adequate to acquire the correct brand of boring shoe, so she could only get that which was within reach, so that his shoes are only almost (but not yet completely) boring.
At last I admit to myself that nobody is paying attention to me, or my runaway class analysis. I leave the bathroom.
After I rapped with D/DC at Wesleyan, I went from Connecticut to Pittsburgh with DDT. I played Greenthink and cLOUDDEAD for her. She was a fag, and thought it sucked. Now she likes it and tells me she appreciates their playful and inventive dissonance. At that time, working with her did not go as planned. After she told me I had no rhythm, I wandered around an area of Pittsburgh called Oakland and went to a cruisy business school auditorium basement bathroom and saw a tag that read Dose-1 in blue marker. It was like Dwinelle, but even busier. I noticed that here too there were more gay boys than people who looked like they were in the closet. When you entered the bathroom there was an anteroom and another door. This door led around a bend to a row of urinals. Next to that was a row of toilet stalls in a corner of the bathroom that seemed intentionally to not be as well lit as the rest. I came through briefly and fell in love, like, six times, but had to hurry to go see a nice distracting Hollywood movie with DDT since I had abandoned any hope of collaborating with him.
However, I remembered the tag. True, it could’ve belonged to anyone. But I know that Dose went to business school. I wrote lyrics to it in the song I made with DDT right before he decided that I had no rhythm.
Bathrooms, bathrooms. So imagine my shock when Dose starts talking from behind me in the john.
“Is this an oblivion check?” I coo.
Okay, hold on a second….
I can tell you’re wondering if I’m going to fuck Doseone. Well, I’m not sure. I remember the time before this that I ran into him. Eric was there. Eric is white and in Gay Shame with me. Eric and I were standing in front of Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco after our Saturday Gay Shame meeting, and we were processing how she was upset about the Queer Anarchist People of Color group’s having a meeting at the same time as ours, and spreading too thin the identical group of people who do radical queer direct action, and not wanting to be in a group without people of color. Doseone walked up with his friend. He was wearing camouflage cargo shorts. I hate camouflage and I hate cargo shorts. He said hi, and I was so not in any kind of space to deal with Dose at that second because I was really concerned with the issues that Eric was raising. What was so striking about this moment was that symbols for everything in the world that I felt strongly about were intersecting and converging with astronomical intensity. So I was taken aback. Dose asked what was going on and I said that Eric and I had just come out of a Gay Shame meeting. Eric later scolded me for saying to Dose that Gay Shame is a radical queer direct action group that focuses on “homophobia and assimilation in the gay community,” when actually our focus is a lot broader than that, but I was panicking. As I fucked up my explanation of what Gay Shame was about, Dose interjected his opinions: when I said “homophobia,” he said “and nonhomophobia?” in an oddly contentious manner. This was as close to a freestyle battle as I’d ever want to get into with Doseone. So while talking, I was also thinking: Oh shit, Dose is going to serve me on this curb. But I didn’t have the presence of mind to turn to Doseone and say: “Dose, I was really annoyed about that song where you talk about the city—you appear to have no interest in the real systematic and historic dynamics that create divisions among people and cause tension in urban settings. I find it really problematic to suggest that all that oppressed and disenfranchised people in the city need to do is say, ‘Let it be said dead butterfly’ and ‘Where’s the love?’ and then all these larger issues will be solved. But you mention nothing about these larger issues. Like, never in your music. Anywhere. Why?”
I did have the presence of mind to notice that Dose had not introduced his friend, a woman. She watched our interaction with a staid but not unpleasant expression. I snatched the opportunity to introduce myself to her, in an attempt to expose what, in all fairness, could have been either social awkwardness or male chauvinism…or maybe male chauvinism masquerading as social awkwardness. Then Dose disappeared into the store with his female companion.
But back to the bathroom.
“Is this an oblivion check?” I coo.
Dose asks, “So, you’re still making music with Gay Shame?”
“Gay Shame doesn’t make music. That would be Deep Dickollective. And no. I do solo stuff. D/DC has no politics.”
I hate being black…. Dose senses my energy. I interpret something in the rhythm of his pauses and the direction of his attention as some type of contentious male competitive athlete drama. It’s a rapper thing. It’s a performance cue. Our interaction, my instincts tell me, is probably not going to be conducive to any preperformance preparation rituals Dose may have…. Searching his eyes, I find myself wondering about how I read paragraphs in The Brothers Karamazov and imagine that Dose has read the same shit. And I want to talk to him about the book for hours. Shrug and lie around devouring poetic discovery, holding each other, kissing in Ventura, or something….
“Yeah…they’re really liberal.”
“I guess you think I’m liberal, too,” Dose says.
“Yes, I do.”
My hands drop and I sputter.
“There’s no soap.”
“I think you’re supposed to just scald them, then.”
“Ah, c’mon. Don’t. That seems judgmental.”
“Of course it is. Judgment is a function of intelligence.”
“Why’re you so mad all the time?” Doseone says, and then I’m, like, well…. I do the thing I do when I turn tricks. I’m unexpectedly calm. It’s a new feature of my reasoning. I’m looking at the surface of Dose’s mouth, and I’m imagining something outside the arty white-trash-chic unseemliness of the press photos, or accidental passings on the sidewalk. His lips look like desiccated bus bumpers, I imagine from years of unchecked alcohol and ecstasy consumption. Suddenly his flesh is demystified and it’s just flesh. And then I start thinking about how something standing still can turn into something else. I want to vitiate the spirited message board claims—oh, there was quite an uproar on the Anticon message board, now defunct, on the subject of my outcry against the 26 Mix incident: claims that all my noise was nothing more than reaction to my spurned, star-crazed love for Doseone.
I’m watching for what Do
se decides to do, feeling not so much cornered as completely blank and ready. I mean, if there’s anything you want. If I give it to you, that doesn’t make you a thief. Does it become less interesting? The me-offering-it part? Examining the rest of his body, of nearly identical stature to mine, how it would look contorted in the act of coming, contorted like when he performs. “Yes, y’all. If you got the cock I got the balls.” I’m eager to be present for whatever happens in this bathroom at the LoBot Gallery in West Oakland. The idea gets me off. I do want to fuck Doseone. Out of spite for the bathroom in the basement of the David Lawrence Auditorium at Pittsburgh University where I saw Dose-1 tagged next to a glory hole. In the song I wrote with DDT, I confused Pittsburgh U with Carnegie Mellon U. Both are in Oakland, PA, not to be confused with Oakland, CA, where Anticon is now based. The Dose-1 tag struck me because there were no other tags next to it.
I wandered around the Pittsburgh campus using an online tip. Being from California and really bad at geography in general, I didn’t realize that Pennsylvania was sandwiched between Ohio and New Jersey. Doseone met up with Odd Nosdam and Why? in Cincinnati to collaborate on Greenthink and cLOUDDEAD. Doseone writes about growing up in New Jersey. I didn’t really realize where I was. I’ve always kind of wondered if the tag was really Dose’s. And what was he doing in that bathroom?
The bathroom in the basement of David Lawrence Auditorium was really busy when I first passed through, but when I came back it was dead. I was hurrying out the door from using the sink when a boy zipped past me, meeting my eyes. I paused before the stairs leading up into the main lobby of the auditorium. My eyes were drawn to a poster about something Islamic plastered on the fake wood paneling; my mind danced elsewhere, wondering about the boy. I returned to the bathroom, imagining that if I walked a certain way he wouldn’t know by the sound of my footsteps that I was the same person. He was alone in the toilet stall with the glory hole and Dose’s tag. I shuffled to the stall next to his. Through the glory hole, I could see his arm moving up and down and then stopping. I was crazy hard. I unzipped my fly and pulled out my cock. Its tip was shiny.
Best of Best Gay Erotica 3 Page 12
