Horny & on meds

People always ask me, “Why didn’t Bryan… you know… get it?” They assume that our sex life must include a lot of hand jobs, rubbing and not much else. That couldn’t be less true.

What saved Bryan from picking up a nasty case of AIDS was his insistence on wrapping himself up in latex whenever the situation required. Since long before he met me there have always been latex gloves and condoms scattered around his bedroom like tiny plastic-covered throw pillows.

Before I met Bryan I had never bought a package of condoms, unless you count the ones you get with admission to most bathhouses. When I told him that, he looked at me like I was from Venus. “Where have you been for the past two decades?”

Sex has been easy for us except for one dry period back when I was sick and bald as an onion. For almost six months the condoms and lube were stuffed in the bottom of a drawer. We spent our time in bed reading kids’ books and hugging. The wildest it got during that time was during our in-bed wrestling sessions. I remember spending a lot of time hanging naked from Bryan’s torso while he walked on hands and knees grunting like an ape until we collapsed into laughter.

Disease had reduced me to sexless imbecile, and Bryan was more than willing to come along for the ride.

Like a rechargeable battery my dormant sex-bits regained their vim after I finished my chemo. Ever since we have been busy making the most of it, since there’s no telling how long it might last, what with all of the drugs running through my system.

I still remember the day I asked an AIDS treatment activist what I could expect once I started the cocktail. “You might not be able to get it up,” and “You might grow a tail,” were the ones that stood out in her long list of potential side effects.

Luckily I have experienced neither, yet.

Sometimes our sex life takes up so much space that it spills out into places it shouldn’t. We broke a bed and had security called to quiet us down in a Mexican hotel room. Our neighbour once burst into our apartment because he heard screaming.

To be honest I can’t pretend that a part of me isn’t thrilled by it all.

On our most recent escapade were staying with our friend Beth, who lives on the top floor of a beautiful house. The rest of the house has been divided up into several smaller units. After we left she got a nasty letter from her landlady demanding that she put the door back on her bedroom, and that in future she use it since her fellow tenants didn’t necessarily share her loose morals.

A few days later the eastern European couple in the apartment below her packed their things into boxes and hauled them into the back of a moving van. Beth made the connection and marched downstairs to ask what she could possibly have done that was bad enough that they had to move and rat on her to the landlady.

The couple could barely look at her. They weren’t interested in chatting with the loose girl from upstairs. Beth couldn’t have left the conversation feeling any worse if the nice couple had screamed the word “slut” at her, jumped in their van and driven off.

Anyone who knows Beth knows it had to be a misunderstanding. It has been more than a year since her last sexual encounter and that had been anything but ruckus. When she called me a week later, I confessed our sin. “We had sex in your stairwell while you were at work. On the banister.”

Knowing that the neighbours were listening made me laugh. For reasons I won’t go into, our safe-word, the one we use to keep things from getting out of hand, is “Beth.”

Since I’ve done it I can assure you that, while having sex on a banister in a strange house, you use your safe-word a lot.

Our sex probably sounded like this, “Oh yeah. Fuck me.” Then as the arm balancing us slipped down the wall. “Beth. Oh, I’m slipping off. Beth. Beth. Beth. Crash.”

I apologized and promised to never do it again.

“You two have had more sex in my apartment than I have.” She wasn’t mad. The new neighbour was attractive, male and single. They had already had tea.

“How could you have sex on a banister?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure. I guess after a few rounds of “I’m the baby monkey,” there just isn’t anything you won’t try.