Dating Confessions by You "I'm wearing sexy underwear while talking to you online so that I feel confident enough to tell you that I'm into you."
Scanner by Emily Farris Today on Nerve's culture blog: We bring you more Dita Von Teese from the German Playboy.
Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
On this, my most recent trip to Europe in search of male brothels, I decided to bypass Amsterdam's chilly liberalism for a more central European experience. Budapest, I fantasized, could bring back the vanished world of Venus in Furs: abject nudity on a bearskin rug by a blinding fire, marble commands or submissions in ecstatic whispers. The plan was to grope my way through the city by sheer instinct and horniness, with little knowledge of its history or
present. My libido would be enough to carry me into the unconscious of that place.
From the start, it looked as if my hunch would pan out, though I didn't know what I'd bargained for. The hotel I chose by accident was called the Gellért, after a saint who'd been slaughtered on the hill above. It was a medieval-looking monstrosity crouched at the foot of the Citadella Fortress, near the Erzsébet Bridge on the Buda side of the city. In the bowels of the Gellért is an enormous complex of baths among statues of Aphrodite and faux-Byzantine columns, gloomily lit by skylights in turquoise-tiled ceilings. These baths include world-renowned curative pools featuring gnarled old men attached to monstrous tackle-and-pulley machines getting water therapy to correct skeletal misalignments. Burly, sometimes contemptuous, masseurs offer inexpensive half-hour maulings, once one's muscles have been softened in the near-scalding steam room. Their hands were my first contact with Hungarian flesh.
An hour later, I sat in the hotel restaurant eating the mixed grill — seven kinds of meat overlapped like logs at a campfire — washing it down with a strong Hungarian wine known as bull's blood, enjoying the pleasurable smart of my skin. Then I set out on my first walk across the Danube by way of the bridge. Hardly anyone else braved the cold that night, and the few introverted faces I passed were disembodied against the tar-colored sky. I zigzagged recklessly without a map, playing with my own fatigue, using the river as a thread of orientation.
Deep into the night, I found myself on the Pest waterfront, where the chilly air was fragmenting lights into shards on the forbidding water. Through wind-teared eyes, I saw a figure in black separate from the blackness. He had an enormous, epic nose — like a shield — and a strong Slavic jaw, subtended by almost Asian cheekbones. Since he was obviously cruising, I boldly studied his scowling face and sharp features. He glided closer until,
astonishingly, his dry hand encircled my wrist, while I stayed still as an animal handled by a trainer.
This is the sex I'd been looking for, it occurred to me, letting myself go limp.
We sneaked along the streetcar tracks, enveloped by the sound of lapping waves and humming cars on the bridge above. A match flared in his face, bringing out his distrustful eyes with their stagy melancholy. He lit his cigarette, a gesture made more melodramatic by his long neck and wiry limbs.
"I am Romanian," he said. "It is not my fault that I was born there." It's been an especially bad period for Romanians; he explained how month to month he moved rootlessly, then kept returning home, where his mother begged him not to leave. "But each time, I leave!" he said with relish. The last time was to Italy for the purpose of "making money going with men," and there he'd found the "ultimate girlfriend." To impress her he'd "borrowed a car," which in Italy is "no big deal," but he was caught and escorted to the border "just because I am Romanian!" And thus he came to Budapest, where he found another girl, a Hungarian, who ended up in a whorehouse for Chinese men (and who would be
stabbed by a client shortly after I left Budapest). "When I see a Chinese man on the street, what do you think I want to do?" My mind jumped perversely into a fantasy of a threesome. "I want to kill him."
He suffered the hostility of Hungarians with an exaggerated dignity. Hungarians deeply resented Romanian suppression of the thousands of ethnic Hungarians living in Romania and thus had little empathy for those unskilled Romanian immigrants who sought refuge in Hungary, which has a much higher standard of living. The average salary in Romania is less than a hundred dollars a month. But visas from Romania to the job-rich West cost a year's worth of bribes.
His operatic anecdotes dovetailed kinkily for me with descriptions I had heard of cloak-and-dagger human rights violations in his country — especially the hunting out of homosexuals in towns and small cities by means of police maneuvers worthy of villains in silent films. These strategies have been documented in detail by human rights organizations; often they involve the town's most flagrant queen given amnesty by the police in exchange for helping them hunt out more closeted homosexuals, who are then interrogated, beaten and made to sign prefabricated confessions. And even though the former law banning homosexual acts in Romania has been changed to outlaw only those that represent a "public nuisance" — to accommodate a disapproving European Council — the interpretation of the new terms is so vague that in some instances little more than an arm thrown around a shoulder has led to tragic complications. All of this has, of course, fostered the vision of homosexuality
as a gross abnormality, which was partly what he meant that night when he said that homosexuals in his country tended to be "almost like women."
When we arrived at my hotel, the taciturn desk clerk gazed groundward as we took our tête-à-tête toward the elevator. I'd forgotten how incredibly narrow my bed was. As I sat down on it, he began a grave striptease. Wiry and slight, satin-skinned and covered with fresh bruises and old scars from encounters in the street, he was nearly half the weight of my stocky, hairy, infinitely less wily body, which had been cultivated by the ingenuous values of Protestant, middle-class America. Then he undressed me, massaging each part of my body that he uncovered. With shrewdness and flexibility his fingers spun out my arousal, without once sacrificing the gentlemanly cover of his cherished masculinity. With proud narcissism he offered his body to be fondled and invited my tongue to play over every inch of it. This doesn't mean that he wasn't able to put my cock in his mouth. It only means that pleasure as he saw it is a game of honor and duplicity, which is perhaps better understood by the disinherited.
There are people who shed their persona with their clothes, leaving a warm, naked body with a wild pulse, offering a generic animal intimacy. Then there are those whose persona is only sharpened by nudity and for whom sex is merely another kind of finesse; he, of course, was of this latter sort. I sucked his cock for an unusually long time before he pulled it away and, through a drape of foreskin, sprayed droplets all over my chest. When he went into the bathroom, I locked the door from the inside and slid the key far under the
mattress. Only by overturning the mattress with my bulk sprawled on it could he have robbed me. He would have had to murder me first.
Several shifts of maids had knocked and gone before our interlocked arms and legs separated. We dressed quickly and I slipped him more than the agreed-upon fee. (He had wanted approximately forty dollars; I gave him about sixty.) He had to meet four other Romanians at Nugati Station. All were going to Slovakia for the day to renew their visas. They had to leave Hungary once a month in order to stay there. In transit, he offered me a tour of the train station, and as we walked through the underground shopping mall, he pointed out a gangly man sifting through the crowds. "He's Romanian," he said, " a pickpocket." Twenty minutes later, as I released him to his group of friends, I noticed the pickpocket standing among them, part of the party on their way to Slovakia.
We'd agreed to meet the next morning at eleven in the lobby of the Gellért, and when — predictably, I suppose — he didn't show up, the hysterical ecstasy of that first encounter fell flat. Deciding to take advantage of the free use of the baths, I changed robotically into a robe and headed for the cathedral-like antechamber. In my mood of rejection, the sullenness of the lumbering locker attendant seemed accusatory. This time the steam room was so hot that it was like walking through a house on fire. The masseur's hands were like an interrogation. Ceaselessly, he dug into the mottle of my flesh as if beating it into releasing all of its loathsome secrets.
Restless and impatient, I headed for the only male brothel in Budapest. It was a tiny establishment with barely enough room for a horseshoe-shaped bar and nine stools, three of which were taken up by the evening's trade. The two platinum-haired adolescents, wan and tubercularly elegant, as well as one darker, duller-looking hulk, fixed me in their sites. The more skeletal of the two blondes had a brutal effeminacy, a kind of deprived Dietrich quality, his bony features set off by a lovely, plush mouth. Nothing illuminated the underground chamber to which he led me but the red coils of a heater and American porn glaring idiotically from a TV monitor. When I came, I was instructed to shoot on the floor.
The next morning I awoke with the beginning of a large cold sore on my lower lip. I wandered through the chilly catacombs of the castle district on the Buda hillside, where the Soviet-style museum guards with steel-clamped expressions in black costumes and white gloves stood vigilant. I passed svelte and busty women who exuded Cold War chic like stewardess extras in From Russia with Love. Everyone seemed fiercely introverted. Late in the afternoon, passive with depression, I walked over the bridge to the stretch of waterfront where the black figure had separated from the black on that first
night. If I saw him, I would not stop to speak, I promised myself.
He was waiting as if on cue, chatting idly with a group of young hustlers. I stood like chattel some distance away. When the group dispersed he strode over to me, as if ready to pick a fight. He'd waited, he exclaimed cockily, almost an hour in front of the Gellért. "But we were supposed to meet in the lobby," I protested. Did I really expect him to brave walking past the doorman in the ridiculous gold braid? I enjoyed the debasement of being portrayed as a foolish tourist, blithely unaware of the class problems of a sex object.
Once again I was swept into his sphere of control, while he stayed grave and poised, and I followed him into a night growing blacker and more remote, as we wandered dreamlike from bar to bar. With sullen, weary, masochistic eyes, he gave a vague, amoral report of the possibility of his girlfriend's pregnancy, the opportunistic options for him in terms of bringing him closer to the European Common Market and the confused deadened affect produced in him by the idea of creating another life. This monologue was set off by numbed half-gestures of the hand that held his cigarette as the smoke curled beneath his luminously sallow skin.
My protracted gaze confused him at first, appearing too complicated for that of a john. In response, he was only able to say, "I know you are trying to read my thoughts. But the truth is, I myself do not know what I am thinking." Eventually, he recovered his mastery by saying, "I go with men, I think,
because of something to do with the father. You would be the father I would wish to have." "Stop," I cautioned. "You'll ruin the sex."
When we entered the hotel after three in the morning, the desk clerk had had enough. "Can I help you?" he suddenly shot out. When I explained that my friend was only going up to watch television with me for a few hours, he asked to see his passport, which he locked in a drawer, promising to return it when my friend left the hotel. I countered by asking to be changed to a double room, and the desk clerk instructed us to wait in my original room while he made arrangements. We spent twenty minutes pacing, wondering what kind of official intervention we were in store for in a country in which he was far from welcome, but a polite bellboy arrived and gingerly transferred my belongings to another room while we followed.
In the morning came the quick exit: me packing, the exchange of the money plus extra money, hasty plans to keep in touch, his rushing out to meet his girlfriend who would be emerging from her whorehouse.
The desk clerk, however, had a surprise in store. When I checked out, I discovered that the room we had been transferred to would, despite little difference from the previous room, cost four times as much — over 350 dollars.
An hour into the transfer at Paris that leaden feeling attacked me intolerably. Never before had I really understood the meaning of sinking heart. Erotic intensity rarely takes into account its own aftermath. Just before releasing their subjects from the trance that causes their irrational behavior, stage hypnotists tell them, you will remember nothing. My black despair had little to do with anything so banal as our physical separation. It was, instead, that sense of shame and helplessness that comes from having known a certain type of person. A few days later, he would call me in New York (collect) to tell me that his girlfriend had been stabbed. He'd ask me to wire money, and I'd do it, twice. Then he'd disappear, never getting on the train he claimed he was about to take back to Romania and for which he needed the money for a ticket.
There is a kind of life that is mostly a product of historical accident, which leads, paradoxically, to more and more messes of the person's own making. One glimpse into these dead-end trajectories can brand the heart of an outsider. Society is structured to prevent the toxic effect of any meaningful contact with the doomed. But once you have come close to them, there is no turning back from that reality. You must cherish it in horror for the rest of your life.
present. My libido would be enough to carry me into the unconscious of that place.
astonishingly, his dry hand encircled my wrist, while I stayed still as an animal handled by a trainer.
stabbed by a client shortly after I left Budapest). "When I see a Chinese man on the street, what do you think I want to do?" My mind jumped perversely into a fantasy of a threesome. "I want to kill him."
as a gross abnormality, which was partly what he meant that night when he said that homosexuals in his country tended to be "almost like women."
mattress. Only by overturning the mattress with my bulk sprawled on it could he have robbed me. He would have had to murder me first.
night. If I saw him, I would not stop to speak, I promised myself.
because of something to do with the father. You would be the father I would wish to have." "Stop," I cautioned. "You'll ruin the sex."
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
