IGW-V3-8p3

The Independent Gay Writer is proud to present a new contributor to our magazine.

Matt Rauscher is already an established voice in the greater Illni area—by his own admission, a sometimes raucus voice—and with his first article about online dating, he continues to raise eyebrows.

Following his piece on online dating, he has given IGW permission to reprint the first chapter of his new book, The Unborn Spouse Situation. He will send a review copy to a reviewer for the October issue of IGW. And we'll get him to sign it.

But I Hardly Know You…
One Man’s Decent Into Friendster Hell

By Matt Rauscher

I’ve never been an online dater. After all, who’s to say the youthful, smiling face on the other end of the terminal isn’t really John Wayne Gacy without the clown makeup? When I log on, it’s ax murderers I think of, and believe me my real life dating problems are frightening enough as it is. My friend told me he used to see Jeffery Dahmer pick up guys at this club we hang out at in Chicago. Then, Jeffery would drive them back to Milwaukee and chop off their heads. I suppose it’s only good luck that I don’t tend to date blonds.
    I want to look into someone’s eyes when I meet them (the real ones), and shake their hands, and hear their voices. I planned to stick to my policy of being introduced to people only through mutual friends. But then I was tricked. I answered the invitation to join Friendster.com.
    It seemed so innocent. You’re connected only to your friends’ friends, and as my friends are all a bunch of smarmy smart asses, everyone in my network turned out to be a bunch of smarmy smart asses, too. I just didn’t know them yet. Some of them were definite showoffs: There was a burlesque queen, and a clown (who was her husband), and a guy in an alien mask with his dick hanging out named Umkashur-Ur 4300. I added Sandra Bernhard to my network, and Mr. Rork and Tattoo, and Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I put up a photo of myself hula hooping at a barbecue. I described myself as equally at home watching PBS as I was at a club.
    Before long, messages started coming in. I found out really fast that though the gay guys were much less irreverent, they were a lot more sexy. In one day, three guys wrote me just to tell me I was cute. It was all too good to be true. I met a Brazilian filmmaker in New York City, a skiing instructor in Utah, and a DJ in Chicago. Lost in my new virtual bliss, seduced by these stunning photos and smooth email pick-up lines, I somehow managed to ignore the most evil thing about these online Casanovas. Now they can dump you before they’ve even met you.
    How could I not have realized this? I’d have walked to New York to meet that Brazilian guy. I thought I was opening a new chapter in my life. I was now connected to the rest of the world. I was meeting people I’d never have met otherwise. They’d know the true me, rather than brush past me at a bar with their noses in the air.
    My biggest pet peeve, my horror of horrors, had now been realized. Who can stand being on a date when someone tries to let you down easy, and you realize you’re being dumped by someone who’s name you can’t remember? Who can forget the episode of Queer as Folk when Emmet and that guy went through all the stages of a long-term relationship in an hour and forty-five minutes?
    Yes, you bad gay guys, it’s you I’m talking about. And I’m taking names.
    Ah, the dreamy Brazilian. Let’s call him Marcelo. We chatted online; we exchanged more, um, recent pictures; we promised to call each other. We ended up talking on the phone, and we got along great, but this was long distance. Two weeks later he appeared online in the arms of some dopey guy in an Abercrombie T shirt.
    I felt like I’d been dumped. But I wasn’t sure by who.
    If the Big Apple didn’t want me, then I had to stay local. I phoned the DJ, let’s call him Roger, and everything went swimmingly. We liked the same bands. We liked the same movies. He lived in a cool neighborhood. He was cute. We talked for three hours. He wanted to meet me in person. What could be wrong?
    The next conversation was different. As it turned out, he was a total pothead who lived in his mom’s basement. He said, “I don’t, like, have a job.” Also, he had met someone else—a drug addict, really—three weeks before me, and they were planning to meet in person. They had been having five-hour-long conversations. Foolish me thought that three hours was long, but I guess I’m short-winded. The next day, on his profile, he wrote in the “Who I want to meet” column, “No stupid nerds, I know that much.”
    Though it may seem that it was no loss on my part, I still had the uncomfortable thought that I was being left for someone else by a man I had never met.
    All right maybe it’s not just us. My friend Sarah met a guy who eventually asked her to talk on the phone. She called and left a message, and then he returned it by saying, “Sarah, I just don’t think we have that much chemistry. I’m sorry.”
    “I guess he didn’t like the sound of my voice,” she told me.
    Still, for a group of relationship-wary men, the Internet has given us the opportunity to not only meet people more easily, but dump them more easily, too. As I move into my thirties watching my group of friends be just as single as they were for the last ten years, I wonder if that’s such a great thing. Opinionated and independent as always, gay men are getting sick of each other before they’ve even shook hands.
    I never saw the DJ again. I mean, I never met him in the first place. I did end up going to New York to visit friends, but I still managed to schedule a Friendster date. I met him on the street in the Village, and he had that “Boy, he looks different from his pictures,” kind of squint on his face. We went to lunch, didn’t talk much, and then the next day he canceled our second date.
    Now that’s more like real life.

An excerpt from

The Unborn Spouse Situation
by Matt Rauscher

Paperback: 320 pages, $16.00
Publisher: Lulu Press (July, 2005)
ISBN: 1411629205

Book One

It sounded as if the Streets were running
And then—the Streets stood still—
Eclipse—was all we could see at the Window
And awe—was all we could feel.

            -Emily Dickinson

1.
“You’re the only faggot in the house,” Victor said. “Do you think you can handle it?”
    He undid his belt and took off his pants. My stomach turned with excitement; I’d never seen an Indian guy nude before. “I can handle a lot of things,” I said, hoping to sound nonchalant. We were staying at the Harley Hutt. There was not an ounce of sanity in the place, or a fragment of normalcy. There wasn’t even an air conditioner in a window. I’d just moved in.

    “Will you exchange boxers with me?” he asked, standing before me in a baggy pair of blue and white striped shorts, his skin the color of almonds, his nipples surrounded by hair. I wanted to shout, “Yes!” at the top of my lungs and hear it ring out from the Harley Hutt’s third floor window and reverberate around campus. Instead I asked, “Why?”
    “Why not?” He smiled and ran his hand through his hair. It was blue-black and silky, parted in the middle, and down to his jawbone. He widened his face into a come hither grin and then smirked, as if this scene was an old cliché or taken from a bad movie. His droopy eyes looked amused.
    I stripped off my clothes in a second and a half and glanced nervously toward the open window. Anyone could see in, but Victor said, “Don’t let that bother you.” I tried to obey. I stood across from him in my Valentine’s Day boxers, replete with big red hearts, and Victor slipped down his shorts to reveal an enormously haphazard mass of black pubic hair and a horsey, light brown dick. It was disproportionately large, in just the slightest way, like his nose, which was just slightly disproportionately phallic. I thought I might end up with the boner of my life, so I quickly yanked down my shorts and handed them to Victor.
    He examined my penis for longer than I would’ve liked and said, “They’re about the same size, don’t you think?”
    I thought he was a blatant liar, but appreciated the charity, and I grabbed his boxers and pulled them on. They were so baggy on me that I had to hold them up by the waistband. Victor slowly tried to ease mine up over his privates, but the shorts were too small. He turned around and desperately yanked them up but they wouldn’t go over his ass, which was big and brown and shaped so perfectly I thought it was worthy of accolades, of commemoration, of statues. My mind began to wander. I felt lust so strong that I wasn’t focused on anything but the fine, barely visible, black hairs sprouting from his ass cheeks and the shouts of joy pouring in the window from the partiers on the street.
    Eventually, Victor gave up on the boxers and remained naked. I sat down on the bed and grinned, thinking of the coming year, the coming night, the naked man leaning out the window yelling to friends. For I, Augie Schoenberg, 22, fag, aspiring filmmaker at a school without a film school, had been stuck in this mess of a Midwestern college town for four years, and was horribly, utterly single. But all of the sudden in late August with my new roommate Victor Radhakrishna, naked three stories above campus, at one with the obscenity of it, at one with the intimate absurdity of it, at one with each other’s cock and balls (and bare, hairy asses), my mind became flooded with so many gorgeous, heady images that I thought I could start planning my movie, my chef d’oeuvre, my entrance into the artistic world. After college, I was going to film the story of my life on this sun-rotted Illinois campus and show everyone what it felt like to experience such debauchery, such anticipation, and such freedom. And the sight of Victor’s naked body in front of me was freedom. It was absolute salvation.

    I needed sex badly. A day passed. My mind was a muddled, pornographic slur; my body was constantly clammy and full of sweat. I’d been single for three and a half long, bone-dry years, and was starting to feel so lonely and so incredibly cynical about my prospects that I was drinking too much, hoping to ease the urge in my body for sex and to neutralize the longing I felt for someone to just touch me. I thought I could try to push Victor a little further but, as he said, I was the only faggot in the house, and there was no guarantee of anything substantial happening. It seemed useless to set my sights on an admittedly heterosexual guy, but the nude ritual in his bedroom had sparked a gleaming streak of hope in me that I knew I wouldn’t shake. I prayed there was more ahead than just homoerotic hijinks: what may be fun and games at the Harley Hutt was real life for me, and it was getting so real I wasn’t sure I could stand it. The sight of Victor’s massive black bush and huge penis had kept me constantly hard. I had an enormous wet dream that night and woke up sticky the next morning. Victor kept smiling at me mischievously; we shared a secret. I wanted so badly to reach out and grab him by the penis and fuck him against the windowsill. I wanted to lose myself in his powerful arms. I wanted to suck his dick till he shouted. I could almost taste it, his penis; I could almost taste his nut sack as I dreamed of licking it up and down.
    Summer would not end. It was hot as hell. My four other roommates looked at me with curious interest, wondering why I was so dazed. I thought I might go insane and become an invalid. I thought I might break.

    The Harley Hutt was a campus institution: a ramshackle Victorian mansion, light blue with white trim, falling down and moldy, the wood expanded and warped from all the heat and all the bitter cold, standing smack in the middle of an old farm town as a relic from a time when, as Victor told me, you could stand on the third floor in one of the towers and gaze out at nothing but cornfields. Witness the old iron hitching post in the front yard in the shape of a horse’s head, or the remnants of the old well in the backyard. I sometimes stood in the living room, surrounded by turntables, by stereo equipment, by empty plastic cups formerly filled with cheap beer, desperately trying to imagine a turn-of-the-century family in heavy suits and dresses, gathered at a fine cherry wood dining room table, enjoying a holiday feast. It wasn’t easy, but Victor told me, “Augie, just look at the woodwork and its delicate shapes or the sculpted design of the banister. Look at the width of the stairway.” In Victor’s words, I was a believer. In his voice, deep and smooth, I could find anything, even the ability to transpose an old 19th century farmhouse into a dumping ground for intellectual misfits. Suddenly, the graffiti art on the dining room walls became wallpaper with roses; the DJ booth in the living room a wind-up phonograph.
    Originally a dorm for ROTC Marines, the house was taken over a decade or so ago by a group of misfit punks with highbrow minds and lowbrow social lives. In years past, no one knows when, someone dumped a pile of broken motorcycle parts in the backyard and had the big idea to turn the house in to a makeshift nightclub. Suddenly, the rambling old shack became the site of the university’s best parties. These were the parties where the white chicks had red hair spiked to the ceiling and the black chicks had dreadlocks down to their knees, where half the guys were mod and half the guys were punk, where you couldn’t tell who was gay and who was straight if you were paid to do it. Cheap cups of beer were in everyone’s hands, hallucinogens were on everyone’s tongues, and the music played till five a.m., sometimes on three different levels.
    People in our crowd clamored for years to live there, but you had to have some deep connections to be chosen. I’d been lucky: for years I’d gone to parties as a total nobody, but I finally met Ted Demetropoulos, a gay DJ who was my absolute idol and who had lived in the Hutt for three years. It was fast, and it was hurried, and it left my mind spinning, but Ted decided to move to Chicago in July and he promised his room to me. “I can get you in there,” he told me one night, and he meant it.
    The morning after I moved in, dreams of Victor’s boxer shorts stunt still heavy in my mind, I staggered down to the second-floor hallway and passed the modern exit sign above a door that led to a fire escape, left over from the days of the Marines. The bathroom, a vast sun-filled place that was perversely free of privacy, had been converted into a communal-style shower room, complete with a bench and lockers. There, in the sweltering heat of morning, I came across my roommates one by one, naked like it was the most natural thing in the world.
    I stumbled into the bathroom and found Paul Veracruz, a Mexican-American anthropology major who usually lived in overalls, standing at the mirror nude putting in his contacts. Jean-Claude Jolie, a Haitian dude in a punk rock band, stood in red crepe-paper-like shorts shaving his head. “Check it out, it’s Augie Schoenberg, the man himself,” Paul called out in his raucous, booming voice that ensured nobody’d sleep off a hangover with him around.
    “What’s up, what’s up,” I said, as if this scene was normal; that every day I walked into bathrooms littered with the occasional naked man.
    “Augie, did Jean-Claude ever tell you about the time we went through the Burger King drive-thru completely naked?” Paul asked, looking at me in the mirror. “I was on the passenger side, also nude, with my feet up on the dash.”
    “It’s the stuff of legends,” Jean-Claude added.
    My peripheral vision took in Paul’s smooth, hairless ass, the legs of a Greek statue, the powerful back covered in blue and green tattoos, the stubby feet. His hair had gone wild and was spiked up punk-rock style. There was a ring in his eyebrow and one in his lower lip. He was only threatening on first glance, though, and the night before, he’d backed me into a corner, over beers, and told me, “Dude, we like faggots.” It was a defining moment, for sure, that this Aztec Indiana Jones thought gay guys were fun to have around, that he was telling me, “Be yourself.”
    “So what’d you guys order?” I asked, hanging my towel on a peg, reeling from the realization that every morning would be a locker room peep show with the house faggot trying not to get hard.
    Jean-Claude ran the razor over the last bit of shaving cream on his skull and rinsed his razor under the faucet. The back of his head stuck out in such an exaggeratedly rounded way that his head looked incredibly fragile. I wanted to reach out and cup it in my hands so that it wouldn’t break. From the reflection in the mirror, I could see his bright, intelligent expression, his nose that angled down severely, making his face look long, and his eyes that curved up in almost an Asian way and made his face look wide. He walked toward the bench. “I ordered a double cheeseburger and onion rings. Paul ordered three packages of condoms.”
    I laughed and walked toward the showers, which were really just three nozzles sticking out of the wall with small, useless dividers on the sides. Under the water, I had a full view of Jean-Claude as he slipped down his red shorts and strode toward the stall next to me. I’d seen him in English classes and I’d seen him on stage playing bass guitar, but this was my favorite view of him. His chest had small rivets of black hair that looked pinched together in certain select spots, all the way down to his dick hair, which showcased a long, curved, brown stump of a dick that angled to the right and had a thin, fleshy foreskin. I wanted to laugh with delight when I saw it: it was hard to tell, but I thought underneath the foreskin the dickhead was bright pink.
    Paul walked by, his tiny, arrow-shaped dick flapping against his nuts, and scratched what little pubic hair he had. “The problem is,” he said, stopping in front of me, “there weren’t any chicks working. And the guys there refused to serve us.” He looked me right in the eye, as if we weren’t nude, like we were having beers. I could feel my dick perking up a little and I prayed for it to go down. “We were really quite hungry,” he told me. Mercifully, he moved along to the last shower stall. I turned around to face the wall.
    “And from what I understand,” Jean-Claude said, his face now drenched. “Paul actually was out of condoms, and was attempting to buy them in earnest.”
    “I was under the impression they carried those, but I guess I had been misinformed,” Paul replied.
    They were cracking me up, but they kept trying to make eye contact with me and I was trying not look at them below the waist. But how couldn’t I? It was ecstasy and torture all at once, and I was a willing participant. I made it through that morning without popping a boner, but the next day was even riskier.
    I stood in the shower thinking I had the place to myself, but no such luck. Mark Israel, a lusty, hairy Jewish guy from Evanston that I actually went to high school with but didn’t know, slowly strutted in. He wore a pair of old white briefs that were so holey and sagging so badly they must’ve been holdovers from the teenage years, his stomach hair spilling out the top and his ball hair leaking out the sides. Big-boned with a bulging stomach, he carried himself with an overwhelmingly dad-like swagger that made him look closer to thirty than twenty-three. Even his dark hair made him look old: he’d brushed it back like a TV newscaster. Cursed with a chronic sinus infection, he stood at the bench snorting. “Augie,” he said, finally, and nothing more. His face was slightly cocky, slightly pudgy, slightly confused, but with a swarthy, olive tone to it that rendered him alternatingly sexy and frightening.

    Tony Valentine, an Italian-American soccer player who was the most clean-cut of the bunch, and who I longed to see naked, even more than Victor, walked in wrapped in a beach towel covered with tropical fish. He had curly brown hair cut short, a large crooked nose, lips that quivered, and beautifully shaped pectoral muscles whose hair made them look shaded rather than hairy. He twirled off his towel and hung it on a peg. His buns were so muscular they stuck almost straight out, but looked a little squishy when he walked. My dick began growing, and I turned around to face the wall. He was like one of those people in high school that everyone’s jealous of because they seem to have it all: looks, popularity, buckets of masculinity, and in this case, a huge dick. I told myself that this was getting to be a dangerous experience, but there was nothing I could do.
    “So, Augie,” Tony said, taking the stall next to me. “We heard Victor pulled the old boxer switcheroo on you.”
    I could hear Mark cackling a little. I was startled they’d been told. I glanced over at Tony, because I could feel he too was trying to make eye contact with me, and met his eyes just for a split second. Still, I could see his dick: bright white, weighty, uncircumcised, and one of the largest I’d seen in some time. If I’d looked longer, I might have never looked away.
    “Yeah, he did,” I said, confidently, as if it was a known rite of passage. “Unfortunately, mine didn’t fit him.”
    At the bench, Mark Israel pulled down his briefs, revealing a carpet of rampant, swirly ass hair dotted with lint and nearly hiding his dusky skin. He walked over to the last stall, and I dangerously watched him do it. I thought his dick might not be visible inside all the hair, but there it was, fat and bratwurst-like, with an abnormally prominent circumcision scar.
    “Ah, Victor’s a big pervert,” Mark said. “But he’s mainly harmless. Wouldn’t trust him with my kids, though.”
    With three shower nozzles going, it was hard to hear, but Tony shouted, “He’s getting fat, though. That’s why he does the boxer shorts thing. He wants to still believe that he’s the same size as everyone else, when it’s totally obvious he’s getting huge.”
    “Victor is not fat,” I stated, plainly, like I was his boyfriend and was defending his honor.
    “Oh, no, me neither,” Mark Israel, who clearly was, called over, his chest hair white-green with soap. “He also doesn’t eat like four frozen pizzas a day.”
    Maybe it was me, but I thought for a second I saw Tony’s dickhead starting to peek out of its shell casing, so slowly it moved by millimeters, like in time-lapse photography. As for his upper half, Tony grinned away and massaged his sudsy scalp. “Could be, though, that Victor likes ya,” he said, brightly. “Maybe you’ll be his new little buddy.”
    Tony laughed to himself, and I was about to ask what he meant, when Mark yelled out, “Hey, that’s it. Schoenberg is Victor’s new bitch.”
    I had been considering asking Mark what temple he went to, or what summer camp, but while Tony and Mark laughed together, I thought that last comment didn’t sound like it was all in fun. I tried to shake it off, but it stuck with me. I couldn’t tell if they meant Victor made a habit of exchanging underwear with guys or if they were mocking me for being gay. Anyway, we had half a year to sort it out: Mark was leaving for a semester in Israel in January. I could picture him in the Middle East, perhaps as an Israeli soldier: tall, sun-drenched, menacing, carrying a gun.
    Days passed, long, late-August days. I showered alone and enjoyed the feeling. The bathroom had three large windows that were always open, and there were no curtains. The second floor of Trailer Trash, a house full of Amazon-like women next door, had a prime view of us, but I was sure they’d already seen all there was to see at parties. I stood under the stream, feeling so out in the open I may as well have been in public.
    Then—Victor Radhakrishna padded in wearing plaid boxers. Victor, a South Asian from Downers Grove, which was suburban hell, had a family that went straight from Calcutta to the Chicago suburbs, where they promptly bought a minivan and a ranch house with a swimming pool. Caught between two fucked up worlds, Victor had become an idealist, and was the leader of the campus chapter of Amnesty International, which made him, at least for me, into a practical demi-god: a crusader for justice in skateboarding shoes. I was so intent on impressing him that I was playing it cool, trying not to be obnoxious and annoyingly immature; I’d never tell anyone that late at night I was writing his name over and over in my notebooks.
    Under the shower, Victor’s muscles rippled from underneath his skin in such a defined, glossy way that I was sure he’d been lifting weights. I could tell he was in no way overweight. It was torture not to be able to join him in his stall, to not hear him say, “Get in here with me.” He looked at me once with big, white and brown eyes, as if to say hello, but that was it. Afterwards, he sat on the bench on his towel, dripping wet with his legs spread, and I couldn’t help but stare. Starry-eyed, I must’ve looked like an absolute fool. He caught me looking and wrapped the towel around himself. Then, he disappeared.
    And then there was me, the sixth roommate, Augie Schoenberg, half French, half German, latently Jewish, and all faggot. Nude, with crappy well water cascading down my body, I must have looked like an overgrown teenager who hadn’t completely finished puberty. My ass was the ass of a fourteen year old boy, round and small, the crack so hairy it looked like I shit myself. My stomach was an oval pot belly, complemented by stick arms and an overly prominent rib cage. My hair, when dry, was black and curly and beginning to fall out. When it was hard, my dick could get reasonably big, but when small looked childish and weak against my oversized balls. When I walked through the bathroom nude, I wanted to slowly strut like Paul Veracruz and think people must be admiring my ass. I wanted to strut like Tony Valentine and feel my horse dick banging against my legs. I wanted to strut like Jean-Claude Jolie and hold my regal head as I high as I possibly could. I wanted to strut like Mark Israel in old underwear and still look like a Mediterranean recruit. I wanted to strut like Victor Radhakrishna and sit on a towel on the bench with my legs wide apart and my dick drawing stupefied gazes from onlookers. But, more than anything, I wanted Victor to be my boyfriend. But that was impossible. And that was my dilemma.

    Victor smiled at me in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator. “We have shooting contests sometimes. You should come.”
    I thought he was talking about guns. “Do you go to a range?”
    He laughed. “Not that kind of shooting. You know, we jack off together and see who gets it the farthest. We have valuable prizes.”
    I was stunned. The thought of the five of them with their pants around their ankles, stroking their dicks, floored me. I couldn’t wait to see if it was true.
    “We do it in my bedroom,” he said.
    I could just picture myself joining in these insanely homoerotic antics only to find myself desperately, silently longing for more. But how could I not? I was young, I was full of homosexual lust, and I was hurting for a boyfriend. It could spell danger. I thought maybe I should fuck the whole thing and drop out of school and move to Chicago. I thought of Victor Radhakrishna’s naked copper body and imagined it all over me in bed, his doe eyes staring at me as I ran my hands in and out of his jet colored hair. Fuck it, I said to myself. The lease is signed. I’m not gonna break it.

    It’s the big downfall of living on a campus that everyone is constantly moving, everyone is in a continual state of transition. My friend Ted wasn’t there to introduce me around, and I was getting a little lost without him. I’d no idea Victor and I would get to know each other so intimately and, after that afternoon of the boxer switcheroo on the third floor, I realized things may be trickier in the Hutt than I’d anticipated. I longed for school to start, so I could take my mind off my body, and my brain, and my need for affection, which went beyond even the need for sex. I didn’t think the country could make me so hot; I didn’t think I’d meet people this intense, and this strange, and this sexy. I was terrified to think I’d be taunted by a year of rampant nudity and blurred sexuality and still wind up without a partner.
    I thought I was about to leave my years of stiff and wooden loneliness behind me and magically become the coolest cat on campus. But I was worried: my expectations were too high.
The anxiety I felt was not out of proportion: these guys were cool as rock stars, they drank Japanese beer and smoked opium, and when they got drunk they kissed each other on the lips. Considering where we were, it meant something: the Harley Hutt was on Cherry Street, just off the abandoned train tracks, in Normal. Normal, Illinois.

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