1-900-THIS-SUX

Shortly after boyfriend #1, my old college friend that had introduced me to cruising the park introduced me to phone sex, but not the way you think. Of course, I had seen the ads for various phone services in First Hand, Honcho and other gay adult magazines of the time, but I had never really been tempted to call them. I was much more interested in the immediacy of real sex and that didn't usually involve keeping up my end of an erotic story, not to mention the per-minute charges. My friend had left college after the first year and joined the Army. He had gotten sent to the Gulf War at least once, but was stationed in Texas within reasonable driving distance when all this started. Since there were no gay bars near the base, he would come to see me, where he was reasonably assured a free place to crash plus there were 2 gay bars and the magnificent park where I lived now. When he first started visiting, he brought to my apartment his fold out foam coach like the one pictured below. We'd been friends for years, so I trusted him with a key to my place and he had a place to bring a trick if he needed it.



He'd been crashing at my place on weekends for several months and everything seemed to be going ok, but little did I know that he had started calling some of these phone sex lines from my apartment. The first inkling I had that something was going on was when I got a call from an obviously gay male looking for "Alex." My friend's name wasn't Alex and I didn't know anyone named Alex. When I tried to give a "wrong number" response, the caller tried to engage me in whatever fantasy that "Alex" had outlined in his voice post to the service. I should have hung up right then, but once the caller said a certain keyword, everything started falling into place. I knew who "Alex" was and I knew when he was expected back for a visit, so I told the caller when to try again.

In the meantime, I got a few more of these calls and one of the callers was very persistent that even if Alex wasn't available for the fetish chat, I would be sufficient. It's his dime, I don't have anything better to do and by now, I'm a little curious. It turns out this guy is in Fort Worth and claims that the bar scene in FW isn't very good. I had never been to FW, but I knew that Dallas is closer to FW than I was, so I naively suggested that he go to Dallas. He asserted that FW people do not go to Dallas and that it's just not done. I was kind of baffled that he wanted me to spend a few hours driving to FW when he can't drive a half-hour to get to Dallas. It was at this point that the conversation took a very bizarre turn. He's almost crying, "don't make me resort to the crisper drawer again." Huh? Crisper drawer? Ooo-kay, what have I gotten into here? Something about the way he said it made me ask what he meant, although the implication of vegetables seemed pretty clear. He started on this lecture about how you can't just take a vegetable out of the refrigerator and stick it in your ass, you have to warm it up first. Heating a cucumber or carrot wouldn't have occurred to me, but him saying it definitely made my asshole pucker at the thought of a cold cuke pressed up against it. I did my best to extract myself out of this very awkward conversation and made it clear I wasn't coming to Fort Worth to see him and that he really shouldn't call me back.

At some point, I had to call one of the lines myself and see if I could find someone for me. I was 23 or 24, 6 foot tall and about 235 pounds. Looking around, I seemed to be pretty chubby, so I mentioned that in my ad. Having seen plenty of the "no fats, no fems" type ads in print, I didn't want to misrepresent myself. I had played with a few husky guys from the park, so I thought I knew what I was getting into and could handle it. The one guy that answered my ad lived in the big city and knew I was a couple of hours away. He wanted some sort of assurance that I was interested in a bigger guy. I really couldn't imagine why that was a problem until he showed up at my apartment to take me out to dinner. He was a little shorter than me and only about 5 years older with a baby face, but he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than me. His body shape was rather different than what I'd seen on men before and trying to visualize sexual activity with him was really bothering me. We ended up having a couple of dates, but didn't really have much in common. He drove down to pick me up for the last date, drove us back to the city to go out for dinner and then drove me back home. He really had the expectation that we would have sex, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I know he left angry and frustrated while I was also a bit frustrated but mostly confused. Was there something about those other big guys I'd played with that appealed to me where this guy hadn't? Did I have a weight limit or were my "height/weight proportions" only so much more liberal than most? It would be several years before I started figuring out the answers to these questions and where I fit in.

Unfortunately, the next time Alex came to visit, it was to inform me that he was being shipped back to the Persian Gulf. Also, unfortunate for me, Alex did not delete his ads on the various services he had called nor did he let me know these would all be appearing on my phone bill after he'd left. A few weeks later, I got hit with a $200 phone bill and no easy way to contact Alex now. He did reimburse me eventually, but the whole experience left me with a very bad impression of the whole phone sex business.