nobody likes you when you're twenty-three
in my teenage years, blink-182 became an unavoidable force in pop culture. “what’s my age again?” crept up the charts, carrying a mantra that would come back to haunt me a few years later: nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three. at the time, it sounded like a joke. then i turned twenty-three and discovered it was less a lyric than a proverb—and, in my case, a remarkably accurate one.
the internet wasn’t in its infancy by then. it had entered its awkward adolescent phase—old enough to know what it was doing, young enough to let the rest of us pretend there were no consequences. anonymity still existed. or at least we believed it did. i hid behind a nameless, faceless livejournal account and documented my sexual encounters with the shameless precision of someone convinced nobody would ever connect the stories back to him. craigslist meetups. strangers with vague descriptions and worse intentions. questionable things happening inside fast-food bathrooms, or in the dimly lit parking lots behind them, where the dumpsters offered more privacy than the internet eventually would.
through livejournal, i somehow managed to infiltrate a local group with a locked message board. the place treated membership like entry into a minor intelligence agency. you needed a username, a password, and photographic evidence of yourself holding a slip of paper with that username written across it.
the group consisted mostly of men in their forties and beyond. balding men. greying men. hairy men with thick bodies and the comfortable sexual confidence of people who had already survived being young. they interacted privately among themselves, trading stories, pictures, and invitations.
at twenty-three, i felt completely out of place. young, thin, hairless, and still carrying the vague suspicion that everyone older than me knew something i didn’t. lo and behold, they made room for me anyway. before long, i felt like one of the guys.
they shared nudes. heavy bellies covered in hair. thick thighs. fat, hairy cocks photographed beneath bedroom lamps or reflected in bathroom mirrors. then there was me, smooth and narrow, looking almost unfinished by comparison.
nature had at least blessed me with seven inches, which gave the older gentlemen something to appreciate. many of them appreciated it enthusiastically.
after a few months, i learned the group was organizing a clandestine new year’s eve meetup, appropriately titled nude year’s eve. the location was a rundown hotel somewhere in boston. maybe a howard johnson. the exact brand has been lost to time, though the aggressively patterned carpet and faint smell of industrial cleaner remain vivid. they had booked two adjoining rooms, creating what amounted to a temporary, poorly ventilated sexual compound.
the festivities were scheduled to begin at seven, but i checked into my own room around two that afternoon. i wanted time to prepare. i arranged the lube and condoms on the nightstand, adjusted the temperature, tested the lamps, and experimented with every possible combination of curtains and overhead lighting. fluorescent bulbs were unacceptable. nobody wants to discover themselves under the same lighting used to inspect a crime scene. by late afternoon, the room had been transformed into what i considered an appropriate setting for the cavalcade of sex i fully intended to participate in.
at precisely seven, i knocked on the door of the assigned room. a large, hairy man wearing nothing but a towel answered and waved me inside. before i could properly introduce myself, he directed me toward the bathroom and explained the evening’s first rule: nudity was mandatory.
i stepped inside, removed my clothes, folded them neatly, and placed them in the closet across from the bathroom. even while preparing to enter a hotel room filled with naked strangers, some part of me remained concerned about wrinkles.
then i ventured deeper into the cavern. several men had already arrived. they stood around completely naked, drinking beer and mixed drinks, carrying on with the casual ease of coworkers at an office christmas party. a few had gathered around a small table to play cards, as though exposed genitals were simply part of the dress code and the night’s real purpose was determining who had the better hand.
it turned out to be less of an orgy and more of a naked cocktail party, which immediately disappointed me. i had not spent an afternoon arranging condoms by size and testing hotel lamps so i could stand around discussing work, traffic, and whatever card game had broken out near the window.
it also didn’t help that i weighed one hundred forty pounds soaking wet and had barely enough body hair to suggest puberty had finished the job. i had expected my twink credentials to make me the evening’s main attraction. in my imagination, i would be passed around the room like a party favor, admired for my youth and handled with very little ceremony. instead, these men—and i call them men because that is, in fact, what they were—seemed hardly interested in me at all. apparently, i had entered the one room in boston where being twenty-three was not considered an advantage.
i barely lasted until ten o’clock before calling a few friends who were partying down the street at the cask ’n flagon, one of the more popular bars on landsdowne street.
i slipped out of the hotel without announcing my departure, relieved to discover nobody appeared to notice. ten minutes later, i was surrounded by my friends—mostly girls—on a crowded dance floor, moving to ja rule or whoever else had been assigned responsibility for popular music that year. i had abandoned a room full of naked men for a bar where everyone had clothes on, and somehow my chances of getting laid immediately felt better.
well after midnight, i made my way back to the hotel, exhausted and ready to collapse into bed. as i walked down the hallway toward my room, i ran into one of the men i remembered from the party. he was fully dressed now, because wandering the corridors of a moderately priced boston hotel with your cock out was, even on nude year’s eve, considered a breach of etiquette. we recognized each other immediately. there was a brief, awkward pause while both of us tried to determine whether we were supposed to acknowledge the fact that we had already seen each other naked.
“we missed you at midnight,” he said.
“sorry. i had other plans.”
this was technically true, though the implication behind it was not.
“there was a lot of kissing.”
“too bad i missed it.”
he glanced toward my room. “we could have our own make-up party.”
i considered pretending not to understand him, but the hour seemed too late for subtlety.
i shrugged. “sure.”
i don’t remember his name. i remember his cock, though. thick as a beer can and not especially long, almost exactly the length of my hand. my jaw ached from going down on him. my ass burned when he fucked me. those are the details that survived. but i also remember the morning. the first light pushing through the hotel curtains. his arm around me. my fingers moving slowly through the hair on his chest, luxuriant and warm beneath my palm.
i had spent the entire night wanting to be desired by a room full of men. instead, i ended up there with one of them, holding on to his gloriously furry chest and wishing, with the desperate sincerity only a twenty-three-year-old can manage, that the moment might last forever.
then he got up, wiped himself off with one of the hotel towels, pulled on his clothes, and left my room. i never saw him again. never heard from him. i still don’t remember his name. by then, the sun had fully risen, and the room had begun to look like what it was: a cheap hotel room after a long night. used towels. empty glasses. condoms and lube still arranged on the nightstand with all the optimism of the afternoon before.
i lay there for a while, sore, tired, and completely satisfied. 2004 was going to be a good year, i thought.