Still miss you, James

James Elliot Naughtin, a.k.a. Erik Rhodes, would have been 38 today if he hadn't exploded 8 years ago. For the last several years of his short life, James's blog was a wrenching testament to the depression and hopelessness he never even came close to conquering. Substance abuse surely exacerbated his woes.

The few times I met James—at porn events—he was gregarious and affable. He always seemed to be happily enjoying life in the public eye. I have never figured out whether that was pure facade or genuine, paradoxical happiness.

James left us a breathtaking body of porn work to enjoy. It's just a fucking shame he couldn't give us more of him. 

IT'S OVER TAKE IT—

—on second thought, you go ahead with that. I'm just gonna grab this smaller polka-dotted present. Don't mind me.

Diego my dreams

This is true.

I am in D.C. for a couplefew weeks for work and am staying at an AirB&B very near my office. I have one of two bedrooms on the second floor (American) in my host's house that have a shared bathroom between them, with the washroom (sink, counter, mirror, linen closet) located centrally between the two bedrooms and the toilet and separated from all three with pocket doors.
I've stayed in places with shared baths before, but they're typically "down the hall"; I've never had a room that adjoined a stranger's bedroom, by way of a bath. I'm torn as always between hippyish communal living ideals and an earned mistrust of strangers. There is no mechanism to keep the guest in the other bedroom from coming into my room. The room-to-bathroom pocket doors DO have little latches, but on the inside of the bathroom—to keep one's neighbor from barging in while... I dunno, while brushing one's teeth?
Anyway, the other bedroom was unrented the first two nights I stayed in this house; yesterday evening my host informed me that my neighbor, Diego, had checked in but had gone back out.
Ok, so I can't help myself. There is no typically masculine name that more securely ensures the hotness of its bearer then 'Diego'. Except, just possibly, Diogo. But to be honest, I still didn't give it much thought—who knows if we'll even meet each other, what with those pocket door latches.
So I went out to Clyde's to watch the first game of the "World" Series. Came home full of beer, got half-undressed and headed to the toilet.
Diego was home. Maybe he been out drinking as well, came home drunk, got fully undressed, and went to bed. Naked. With the light on. And the door to the bathroom wide open. Lying on his stomach with the end of a sheet haphazardly covering a few square inches of buttock.
Diego was indeed worthy of his name... 30ish, maybe younger, beautiful brown skin, slender but not twinky. I general, just a very lovely sight, one empire sofa or pastoral background shy of being a famous painting.
Diego woke when I walked past the door, so I gave him a noncommittal 'hello' wave, headed into the toilet room, and pulled the pocket door closed. When I reopened it, he hadn't moved much, hadn't closed the bedroom door or pulled sheets over him. I said 'Hello' and waved again, out of politeness, and to act like meeting a naked stranger isn't a little weird.
He said something like, "You are staying in this room...?" and pointed toward my room. I said "Yes" and then, again because one must be polite and normal, I walked into his room with my hand extended and said, "I'm Gordon". He rolled over enough to free his right hand and shake mine, in the process—again, with zero concern for covering up— freeing up his genitalia, which were, uh, ample. Not engorged but good and fleshy.
He said, "Good to meet you, Gordon" but did not tell me his name, so I said, "You are Diego?" and he confirmed. The business of neighborly meeting concluded, I went back to my room.
Thirty to 45 minutes later I was ready for bed, so I went into the bathroom again to brush my teeth. Diego still hadn't moved or closed his door. I guess he had fallen back asleep but again awoke as I walked past. This time he stood up, came to the door, and pointed toward the toilet with a vague "may I?" sort of utterance. "Oh, sure," I said, and he walked past into the toilet, sat down to pee, and did NOT close the door.
So here I am, brushing my teeth with a hot naked young Latino male human pissing behind me—PISSING, that is—directly in my view via the vanity mirror.
Anyway, Diego came out of the toilet just as I was finishing up at the sink, so I relinquished my position to him and said, "Well, good night". He replied "Good night" as well and I exited and went to bed.
As of this morning, he was latching my pocket door while he was in the bathroom and keeping his pocket door closed while he was in his room.
There was nothing overtly sexual about this encounter, and I thought to write off last night as non-American casualness re nudity among males. But the strict door-closing this morning makes me wonder whether he was actually drunk last night and potentially receptive to some fondling. Ah well: that is a knack I have surely lost with disuse.

x

In a hotel, rather than a hotel room, in San Francisco, I was and remain the immediate cause of extensive structural damage to a bunch of rooms. Nonetheless, while for commonsense but legally intricate reasons I am not really to blame for the damage, I am afraid guilt will find its way to my USPS-perplexing address. I have thus done my best to cover for the damage. It's still pretty obvious. In the current room, frinstance, the nightstand no longer fits into the floor. There are gaps around the jointure whither light and/or water leaks. The same damage occurs in the same bit of furniture/floor plan on all floors below and above. I did this and I am sorry but fuck you I'll lie to stay unjailed.

Simultaneously: someone in my intimate circle (who is not quite the muscle hippy dreads-up street fiddler I snapped outside The Mix, or whatever it was called in 1992, though my presence there informed or maybe assaults our narrative) is trying to get us to the right airport to depart SF in time. The geography is dreamfukt. We're in the west end of the imagined city (ignore parkland), and SFO is easternmost—I guess where AT&T field is. This rendition of SF does not involve the insanely high and broad overpass highways previously intrinsic to visiting SF.

So most of the time (what time?) this broken hotel room is my sole worry; I stay here and I need to fix it convincingly before I leave. Still, it is after some social event and one by one individuals just show up at my hotel room door. Damage is def not hidden.

It's dusk so I turn on two-three lights—but a moment later they are off again. The exterior natural light is nearly enough to mask the on-offness of the electrics. But someone else calls it; and seeing the lit lights outened, the same friend calls for diagnosis. Maintenance (the department) is now on they way; but the solution is a duh moment at hand (cf. my recent real-life inability to operate a hair dryer). In this case or any, I'm still not caught for the damage I have wrought.

The room has eventually filled and we're all rehearsing something, maybe a staged reading. Nobody has enjoyed working with the NPC blond bombshell diva—she's terrible and she doesn't know it. Cf. Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain but she in affect she is much more Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) in L.A. Confidential (so one must assume Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck are there somewhere—only OMG she has been pissing errbody off).

So we're all hushed and attendant when one of the actors, upon finishing a scene, hies him to whisper in the director's ear; and are all delighted when the director then turns to the disingenue and asks her to step out of the room with him. I notice there is now an armed guard behind them to ensure she departs peacefully. We hear "You gotta be kidding me" from her as she is made to leave. I sympathise with her enleashed dissent; I just don't like her, so she must suck, bye.

In the aftermath (I'm listening to the Law & Order dénouement while I'm *still* trying to fix the room damage up): the newspaper scuzzlebutt is that la disparue was undercover from the DA's office but was attached as a prostitute--i.e., a solicitor nabbed for solicitation.

In other news, "At night I walk through the park with a whip between the lines of the whispering Jesuits who are poisoning me against me" is still a way more interesting line than "At night I walk through the park with a whip between the lines of the whispering Jesuits who are poisoning you against me.

Searching for Kupopo

Too late to the dance came I?

I just ran across the work of the artist known as Kupopo, whose blog Beasts and Brutes hasn't been updated since September 2014 and whose contributions to Y! Gallery are at least thrice as long out of date. Beastsandbrutes AT blogspot has been removed. I've googled this and that and so far haven't been successful in finding any online activity by the artist more recently than last fall (he thanked a blog patron in November) or in finding any contact information. Minor sleuthing suggests he is from Fiji. That's about all I can find.

This is an artist I fain would patronize.