Commitment Issues (2 page)

You can't imagine how gentle he was. He felt wonderful inside me, and it was nothing like some of the violent tricks I had had. He never tried to start a fire with friction. He didn't pound my ass, but his every move was strong and muscular and easy.

Nobody fucks like my angel. It was the smoothest lay of my life. He worked my ass like we had been lovers for a thousand years, and he knew every millimeter of my body.

I wanted to close my eyes and get lost in the feelings, but what I wanted more was to watch him as he made love to me. My angel's chest was trim and cut. The muscles of his pecs made it seem like his chest was smiling at me. His dark bronze nipples peered at me as I lay beneath them. When I reached around to touch his chest, my angel reached out to hold both of my wrists. He wanted to be in control, and I wanted him—I mean, fuck—I wanted him to do whatever he damn well wanted to do. I was in heaven with him calling the shots. He pressed my wrists into the mattress as his hip muscles worked all the action for my ass. He hummed a few times, and I saw him roll his eyes. About every fifth plunge came a sweet smile or grin that told me he liked my equipment.

When I tried to highlight the feeling for him by tightening my sphincter, my angel slowly wagged his finger in front of my face. He didn't want any help from me other than to provide the venue. I would have provided him almost anything he wanted.

If he showed me anything, he let me see how I could be an enjoyable experience. He wanted me, and he took me. I didn't have to do much of anything. I had to be willing, but that was it. My angel did everything else. He affirmed my value as a person and as a bottom.

After fifteen minutes, he groaned and slowly pulled out. I saw that the tip of his rubber was full of cum. He was so smooth that I didn't realize he shot.

He was my Labor Day miracle. He truly was an angel.

"Ummm,” he said as he leaned in to kiss me on the lips. When I started to grab him, he pushed back and told me that he had to go.

"You didn't tell me your name,” I said.

"You're right. I didn't,” he said as he walked into the living room. He put on his skimpy shorts and deck shoes, and he shook his head to toss his hair a little. He ran fingers along the sides of the nylon bag inside his shorts to make sure all the important equipment was safely tucked away. Mustn't have an angel making headlines after being busted for indecent exposure. Can you imagine the hassles he'd have gotten back at the office from his fellow angels, from the boss?

He opened my front door.

"Rafa,” he said as he stepped into the doorway. “They call me Rafa. You're a special person, Sean, and I really enjoyed being with you. Remember that you are a special person. Know that I love you. If you ever get in a jam, call me. You have my number."

He closed the door behind him. By the time I got my clothes on and raced outside, Rafa was gone. I saw somebody behind the apartment building, but he said nobody had come that way. I ran to the front of the apartment building, but it was empty. I looked up and down the street, and there was nothing other than a car or two.

He knew my first name, and I knew his. I looked for a piece of mail in the living room, but I found nothing with my first name. Then I realized he hadn't read it—he had known my name when we were by the back fence. When I checked the mailbox, no names were visible.

Not only had he known my name, but he knew that I was in an awful mood. He snapped me out of that, and I have never felt the least bit suicidal since.

My angel even knew that I was a bottom in bed. Either he was a natural top who could smell out bottoms, or he was an awesome actor. Either way, it was an amazing performance.

Rafa was my short and muscular angel with pale gray eyes and tossed black hair. He was the closest thing to perfect that I could imagine.

Rafa. I think that is short for Rafael, isn't it?
I looked around Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but I never saw him there. I asked some of the regulars, but they hadn't seen him. I never saw the name Rafael on the board of AA birthdays. Nobody ever claimed to know anybody with that name.

He just came to me on the bleakest day of my life, and he offered himself without reservation. He didn't want anything other than what I needed. He showed me tenderness and the kind of sex that I would draw out as my ultimate fantasy.

When I looked at the clock, it was after midnight. It was no longer Labor Day, and I made it through my fifth anniversary without killing myself or getting shit-faced.

It gets better. When I went back to that Chinese restaurant, I got a fortune: “You are a special person."

All I needed was creepy music in the background, and I'd have a science fiction story. Naw, nobody would believe it.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Hi, I'm Sean, and I'm an alcoholic. And I was clutched by an angel. It was so awesome and reassuring and reaffirming, but it didn't put food in my stomach. I needed to get a job.

Before I got sober, I made money with my mouth—my voice. Phrasing is learned. Intonation is learned. Baritone chops are inherited, and I had great genes for radio. Thanks, Mama!

I slurred so many newscasts that nobody would hire me. I cut spots (commercials) that were supposed to be thirty seconds so they fit inside a network show, but I just relaxed and recorded until I was finished. Somebody told me that one of my half-minute spots was almost two minutes. Oops, my bad.

One news director even gave me the famous “you'll never work in this town again” speech. He was almost right. Radio is such a tight little group that nobody needed any references. Everybody knew each other. Everybody knew about me and my antics.

It was hard to get back into broadcasting. It had been hard enough to break into the business the first time, but it was almost impossible to return to broadcasting after making such a colorful exit. A typical city will only have a handful of broadcasters and an even smaller number of radio stations. In a big city, like where I lived, everybody in the outlying area wanted to come to the city. They wanted to “make it” on the air. Dozens of good voice talents would apply for every opening. Big-city broadcasting is so competitive that they can get talent almost at minimum wage.

"You don't need money,” they might say. “We're going to make you a star."

Like being a star will buy a Big Mac or a cup of coffee. It was bad for me because of all the booze and dope. I couldn't hold down a job because I didn't know you couldn't really do broadcasting when you were so drunk that you slurred words or went into blackouts. After I got fired from a couple of radio stations, everybody in town knew about it. I was branded as unreliable and a pain in the ass to work with.

By the time I went to AA, I couldn't get a job in radio. I wrote obituaries for the newspaper, and I made pizza for a while. The newspaper made me nuts, and I really sucked at making pizza. Don't get me wrong, I was grateful for the work. If I hadn't had those jobs, I would have been on the street more than I already was. One apartment manager kept eviction papers handy because he was tired of my excuses.

Getting sober actually made things worse for a while because of the detox process. I knew that AA worked because I'd seen other radio guys going through it. They annoyed me because they were all so bubbly in the morning. I would be hung over when these electric personalities would pop in to tell me about their character flaws and how glorious it was to get beyond all that. I wanted to throw up.

The first few weeks I was sober, I had to walk through the neighborhood to collect soda cans to recycle. It was the only way to buy gas for my motorcycle. Those first few weeks were actually worse than being drunk. That isn't exactly true; it was equally bad, but I didn't have chemicals to blot out reality. Getting sober really sucked, but I knew that I had to stick with it. A radio guy can't make a living without being able to talk, and talking requires control of the muscles in the mouth.
I can do this thing. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.

I saw one of my old radio station buddies at AA one night. He had been sober for a number of years. We had worked together when he was first getting sober. He would bounce into the station and be happy with life. He would tell me how exciting his sobriety was. I wanted to throw things at him to get him to quit effervescing in my direction. It was hard to fight a bruising hangover around such disquieting displays of joy.

This guy was laying down a foundation for me, although he never said anything about my drinking. He only talked about himself and his sobriety, but it showed me that AA was a way to get sober. I wanted nothing to do with it back then, but I remembered watching him. When I needed to stop drinking, I remembered this newscaster.

So there he was, standing at the podium before a gay group and telling his story. He was talking about his wife and kids, which was okay. He was being effervescent and happy, and I still wanted to throw things at him, but he made it hard to be a curmudgeon.

He recognized me while he was giving his drunk-a-log, and he came up after the meeting to say hi.

My home group is known as the “gay group” in town. People who aren't gay can attend, but they usually don't.

He was one of the reasons that I knew AA would work for me, and I told him so.

"Did you know I was drinking?” I asked him.

"Later I did, but not when we were working together. I heard your interview with the Secretary of the Interior."

"Not my best work,” I said with a shrug. It was one of my last interviews in radio, and I was so drunk that the Secretary could barely understand my questions. I asked him why the country needed an interior designer, and he tried to explain his position to me. The interview ended when I passed out and fell out of the chair. The Secretary's bodyguards stopped the interview and got him away from me.

The newscaster also learned that I was probably gay because the gay group was my home group. It is possible that we have some non-gay members, but I've never met any. So he did the math, if he didn't already know. I don't hide it, but it isn't the typical conversation in a radio station. He didn't make a big deal about finding me at the gay group. If he had any issues, he kept them to himself.

My radio buddy gave me a card and wrote down a name on the back. It was the production director at his radio station. “Production” is a fancy word for commercials. The production director is the one who is responsible for getting all the in-house commercials recorded and put to music. He also would be the one to get station promos done. The radio guy seemed to think they might have some extra work to throw my way.

"Nobody will hire me,” I said.

"Maybe not,” he said, “but the answer's always no unless you ask."

I nodded and told him that I'd call.

"It isn't like a live gig,” he said. “Somebody who might not trust you with a live mic might take a chance on you in production."

When I called, the production director was expecting my call. He knew my work (which meant he also knew about my colorful fuck-ups). He didn't ask if I could do the work or what I might be looking to do. He just told me what he had available and asked if I was interested.

Interested? I wanted to turn back flips.

He gave me two six-hour shifts a week to start. There was a stack of copy (scripts) waiting for me each time. The station had a library of production music. Each tune was available in ten-, thirty-, and sixty-second edits, and I was able to pick what I wanted. We had hundreds of tunes of every genre you could imagine. I'd listen to the music and get an idea of where the natural musical breaks might be. Sometimes the client would already have music, and that made my job easier. One or two had jingles, so I got to learn how to be an expert editor and mixer. “Expert” is a relative term. I was more of an expert than I used to be, but some guys can make the software suite create artwork. Nobody complained, but I know my first few fancy edits sucked rusty storm water runoff.

"One-Take Sean,” they called me. I could scan through a spot on the monitor and just start talking. I would always get the finished version in one take. That would give me some time to brush up on my production skills. The time evened out because I would spend longer than others in getting the voice and music mixed.

There were always a few spots to do, and they gradually gave me more and more promos and station breaks. Radio stations have trouble getting promos cut because they want them done by a voice other than the disc jockey. I was the perfect one to do their promos because I didn't have a show. If you do station breaks, your voice is heard twenty-four hours a day. If you listened to this station, you'd trip over my voice.

I thought about my angel sometimes, and I even walked around the neighborhood looking for him. Nobody had ever seen anyone like Rafa.

When I jacked off, I usually got one or two flashes of him grinning a couple of inches above my head while he made love to me. It was going to be years of longing for a repeat of those magical moments.

Once or twice I thought about Rafa so much that I lost track of what I was doing. I just got satisfied and limp without shooting, and that's not like me.

I'm not a wild guy, and I don't go out hunting for sex. In the past, I always wanted to know the guy before we hit the sack. Rafa was the only time I had sex without knowing his name, and now all I had was the memory of our encounter.

Something really amazing happened one Thursday morning. The station's news director came into the production room. I had met him a few times but didn't really know him well. He said that the station had done some voice research on everybody on staff—including me. He said that a company in California hired a room full of people to come listen. Each person was wired to record perspiration and heart beat and breathing.

He said my voice was a complete flat-line with male listeners, and I was crushed to hear that. It couldn't be good for a gay announcer to get no reaction from men. The news director also told me that my voice spiked female perspiration, and he said it was a dramatic change. What was more, he told me that the company used perspiration level to measure the sexiness of a voice. Okay, the gay announcer could make women wet. It was too weird. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with a room full of sweaty women, and I didn't know why a news director—a perfectly good news director, I should add—would be telling me any of this.