I got past all that and back to Prague in my old apartment to find that the millionaire heir to the Kodak fortune to whom I’d rented my flat for a month (for a cheap 850 USD) had allowed rent boys to spend the night with him and they had stolen my printer, broken my washing machine and damaged my parquet floors (there went my security deposit), as well as damaging the lock to my front door so that it had to be replaced. Did I get an apology or any compensation from this guy? No. He didn’t even buy me a beer when a bunch of gay expats went out for pivos the next time he was in town.

But anyway I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is actually the third blog I’ve begun while living abroad. The first one, called The Rent Boys of Prague, documented in detail my adventures among the young male prostitutes here in the City of a Thousand Spires. It was well-received but is now offline because I’m making a book out of it: Doing Biznis: Lost Among the Rent Boys of Prague.

I continued writing while I was back in the States but because nothing interesting really happens to me there the blog was filled with movie and music reviews and some personal crap. It wasn’t until I returned to Prague in September 2004, exactly one year to the day when I’d arrived the first time, that the liveliness of the writing and of my life took over the blog again. Once again, if you searched for “Prague rent boys,” or any combination thereof, on Google I was number one. And number two. And number three, usually.

Because of the theft in Romania, however, and the subsequent loss of my Powerbook (I tell everyone I lost it in a bet but actually it went to an electronics bazaar so I could pay my rent; where it went after that will have to wait for the second book.), and the crushing theft of my external hard drive containing 20 years of music collecting along with all my programs, back-ups of my blogs and web sites, digital photos, prose and poetry and pretty much everything else I owned that could be stored digitally, I was unable to maintain the second blog having no money to pay for hosting nor any debit card with which to pay. I’ve been running for my life ever since, hopping from one apartment to another without fully paying rent, teaching English, taking gay tourists on tours, and yes, even pimping a little – anything to subsist until I finish the fucking first book and hopefully get it published. Or until my friends open that fucking bar and hire me. Or until I’m deported.

So much has happened since I stopped posting on the first blog that a lot of background will have to be filled in as I go along. I’ve been through, um, let’s see, about five young men, not all of them for pay, one of the originals is now back with me and helping me out and I’m meeting a young gypsy or Romany guy tonight at a bar for drinks. He’s a nice guy but I’ve generally found that sex is better with rent boys than with your average Czech or Slovak gay boy. In addition, I’m four months behind on rent although somehow have not been kicked out. I’m anxious to find out what happens next.

Before the diagnosis I should say first that I was worried mostly because the sores appeared shortly after a night of relative debauchery in a local bar/sex club. After being stood up by the young Slovakian guy I’ve been fucking around with (I’ve actually done more spanking than fucking but that’s another posting) I drank myself silly at my current favorite pub U Rudolfa, a low-rent Czech dive in Prague’s Centrum frequented by older guys with beer bellies and shaved heads, a smattering of rent boys – often the spillover from the train station, hlavní nádraží – as well as young studs looking for experienced dick but not selling themselves necessarily: With Czechs there’s not a clear line between the two, especially if they know you’re a foreigner. At any rate, I feel comfortable there even though few people speak English. Nevertheless, communicating in my best Czechlish, I’ve managed to slowly cultivate some fun pub friendships and certainly all the bar staff know me well. This particular night I managed to close the bar, something I hadn’t done before, and as the rest of the bar staff was cleaning up one of the servers – a tall, thin, young and pixieish Czech boy who had been eyeing me not-so surreptitiously the past couple weeks – bent over to whisper an invitation in my ear: “Go for one more drink with us? Is sex club… Ok?” His normal smile is quite tiny: seeming only to affect the far corners of his lips and no other area of his face. Ok, I must have said, because a few minutes later I was stumbling up the stairs following the three bartenders out the door and into a cab bound for Zižkov, a very urban, traditionally working class neighborhood in Prague known for its clubs and its gypsies.

The club (its name was either Fist or Fisk, I can’t actually recall: that’s how bad off I was) was small with only one bar and one bartender. On that night it was fairly empty. You could enter other, back rooms from either side of the front bar and circle around, passing benches, televisions with looping porn, private cabins for sex, a wobbly, makeshift bondage cross in a cubby hole lit by ultraviolet light, a toilet with no doors and an open cubicle, etc., until you came around to the front again. Shortly after arriving and taking my first sip of Krušovice, which I hadn’t really wanted but which appeared immediately upon our buzzed entry into the club, I took the little circuit, came back the other side and then backtracked. I was followed by a cute, chubby dude in glasses and a buzzcut who was stumbling even more than I was. He was sufficiently coordinated to use both hands to pull me into the backlit cubbyhole and indicate with droll hand gestures that he wanted a blow job. What the hell? I thought, I’d had plenty of my Slovakian fuck buddy’s short ‘n’ slim so I got down on my knees hoping for a long, fat one for a change. This guy ended up having a somewhat short, fat dick with a pinched bit of foreskin that looked like the tied end of a balloon. He was already hard and began aggressively fucking my mouth before I was ready, making me choke (and, I was to discover later, creating an abrasion on the inside of my mouth). He tried to get even more aggressive by inexpertly slapping my head around a couple times so I cut our little session short and just rolled my eyes and turned my head away when he tried to kiss me.

I went back to the bar and started chatting up a semi-sweet-chocolate-skinned, moderately buff, twenty-something in a muscle tee.  [I found out years later that he was on the Czech version of American Idol.] His English was good and I seem to remember covering all the bases of job, education, origination, orientation. He kissed me on the lips and told me he had to take over for the current barman because the barman’s boyfriend had just come in and the couple needed to retire to the back for a quickie. So I resigned myself to watching porn in one of the back rooms. I took my dick out but couldn’t get hard. Then another one of U Rudolfa’s waiters (by this time I had lost track of the pixieish boy) walked by briskly shooting me a come-hither look. He was an older guy, about my age (43) I imagine, with a short mohawk and a closely-clipped I followed.

Somehow I lost track of him, even in that small space, and when I located him he was watching porn on one of the corner-mounted televisions in a room full of benches. I came up behind him and put my hand on his leg near his crotch and that’s all it took. He turned around quickly and laid into me with his whole body and face, and he did it so fast and he kissed me with so much gasping and non-verbal encouragement that it seemed like he’d been waiting for me to do something all night.

After a little heated and rough mutual grinding up against the wall he pulled me into a nearby cabin and dropped his pants and pulled mine down before I could get the door completely latched. Our movements kept bouncing the door open. Finally he reached around me and slammed it shut and slid the lock closed. Then he turned around and put his ass in my face. Now I love rimming but really I was still looking for that big dick to fill my mouth up; but, I went with it. His hole was shaved, and I discovered as I reached around to fondle his balls, so was his crotch. This is an instant turn-off for me. It’s getting harder and harder to find gay men and rent boys in this country who don’t shave their privates just like women in straight porn. I hear all sorts of reasons ranging from hygiene (when a rent boy says that I figure he just got over a case of crabs) to “it makes my dick look bigger.” What a loada crap. What it does is make your crotch look like a plucked chicken or worse, a pre-pubescent boy’s. People complain of pubic hairs in their teeth but what’s worse to me is razor burn from someone’s pale, puffy, follicle-inflamed pubis.

Anyway the lack of bush on this guy was definitely preventing any eager growth spurts on my part; and the 12 pivos weren’t helping. Despite his enthusiastic moans, he wasn’t getting fully hard either. So I worked on his ass like I thought a big bottom boy would like: sticking my tongue in and swirling, spitting on the pucker and then rubbing my somewhat stubbly cheeks and chin all around and in that hole. (Now you see the connection to the sores on my chin and neck.) He seemed to particularly like that bit, raising up suddenly and then collapsing underneath me onto the vinyl covered bench. I could tell he wanted me to fuck him and normally that would not have been a problem; but, my cock was not cooperating. After a few minutes of almost frantically trying to get each other up we both started chuckling and he said: “Is no problem. We are both bottoms and so…” What?! Now what the fuck made him think that? Silly that I was insulted but I remembered two days before I had fucked Jirka for an hour, pulling and pushing and turning him around on the bed for better positions like he was a blow-up doll, eventually, roughly, tossing his legs over my shoulders and sinking it in until Jirka was hoarsely whispering “Sperma! sperma!” to make me stop. Ha!

I told my current partner that I had no trouble topping, it’s just it was usually with younger (and darker) men. He shrugged and laughed. “I sorry. I sorry. Ale I tought…I really like…this, you,” he tapped the tattoos on my forearm and shoulder; “This,” he rubbed my shaved head; “And…complete!” he gestured with his hand from my top to my bottom and then squeezed my balls. Wow, that actually made me feel good, but yet bad that neither one of us could perform for the other despite our attraction.

So we got dressed, sheepishly, the discomfort descending slowly but inevitably, and went back to the front bar where there was no one else for me. Such a slow night and I’d tried to make it with everyone that was still in the bar.

So that’s how I thought I might have caught something from the nice bartender at Rudolfa. The sores have gone away now (I’m writing this several weeks later). Although the big one on my chin left a faint pinkish circular scar, the little ones on my neck never got bigger nor pussy and they did not leave any marks. Their appearance and, uh, behavior didn’t match anything I read on WebMD nor did they look like any of these awful pictures. I can’t afford a 2000 Kc doctor visit and lab fees so I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope it was some sort of allergic reaction.

Strange.

I’ve had my dick in his ass, both with and without a condom, in his mouth, and his in mine; we’ve made out for a half hour or more (at least we used to), in public and at home; we’ve danced drunkenly to slow Czech dance music in U Rudolfa and Chameleon, held hands chatting and drinking Gambrinus in Club Stella while the gay boys all around talked about us, I’m sure thinking he was bought and paid for; and yet that tentative expression of intimacy this morning blushed my cheeks and subdued his usual early morning chatter.

I don’t know whether we’ve reached some turning point or what. He’s told me more than once that he considers me his family now that he’s estranged from his freeloading brother — his other brother’s in jail and he has no other family, according to him. He’s Romany so I never know when he’s telling stories. Regardless, we share expenses and distribute money when the other one needs it. I accompany him to Pinocchio’s (perhaps the best known hustler bar in Prague) because he says he feels more confident when I’m there. To people observing our developing friendship, not just to me, it appears that we are committed to one another.

On the other hand, he has a girlfriend now and it has curtailed our sex play. I’ve enjoyed up to now the very easy-going way he approaches sex. When he wants a blow job he just states: “Riki, please, go oral!” When he’s feeling like getting fucked him he asks: “Go sex?” and then giggles. I just have to say: “Jiři, I’m horny” and his response is usually to grin and head for the shower for a douche. The straightforward nature of our sex seems to be just another reinforcement of the friendship, as well as a very convenient way of relieving tension and getting affection, but it’s not at the top of his needs hierarchy. That is, he likes it but can live without it, especially now with consistent pussy in the picture. I don’t blame him. When your job is to have sex with strange men it has to have some effect on your other sexual relationships. For me, however… I’ve been telling myself for the last several months it was purely physical (he fulfills about 90% of the qualities in a lover I find attractive); however, that little hand-holding interlude this morning made me realize I’m in love with him.

I should have known already by the surprising jealousy that arose in me the other day at Rudolfa when a preening blond Czech boy at another table caught his eye. “Ty vole, Riki, looking this boy I have big penis,” and here he put his palm on his crotch and moved it up 20 cm. “Stoh percent I am bee-sexual.”

“I know that already, Jirka.”

And sure enough when I reached over to check out his bulge he had a hard-on. He then borrowed 5 crowns to go stand by the boy at the jukebox and chat him up; but not before readjusting his package. I wasn’t livid but it irrationally made me sad. I knew then exactly what his type was: younger feminine gay boys, transvestites and transsexuals, all of whom he’s said on numerous occasions he’s wanted to fuck; and I am anything but that type. I guess I should be grateful though because with me he’s an exclusive bottom.

A couple weeks back he asked me if he thought that the sex biznis could make him gay. I said no, that I knew plenty of hetero rent boys that didn’t enjoy the sex per se and for whom it was just business. I named a couple of guys he knew.

“Ano, ano,” he nodded his head. “But I like the sex.”

“Yes, I know,” I replied.

“Občas,” he quickly added, meaning sometimes.

“Well, I’m gay and sometimes I don’t like it either. Depends on the boy.”

“Pravda (Truth),” he concluded.

So I know what I mean when I say I love him and when I hold his hand or kiss him good night or gasp in worship when I’m sucking on his soft brown foreskin; but, what does he mean and what was he trying to tell me today?

“Train yourself to let go of all you are afraid to lose.” (I’m paraphrasing and ignoring Yoda’s sometimes funny, sometimes annoying backwards syntax.)

She was thinking of romantic attachments but I was thinking of something more material. I’ve been attempting some detachment training for myself over the last couple years in Prague; and since I’ve placed myself in so many situations to get ripped off and now own basically nothing except a small suitcase full of clothes and some aging-rapidly IKEA furnishings (last week I sold my Olympus XA so I could eat that weekend) the Jedi philosophy has become as much a survival tactic as it was for me a rebellion against American consumerism, including the romantic kind. Also I left my friends and family behind; it looks like for good. Not that I’m any sort of Lucasfilmphile; I just found that little lecture from Yoda more resonant than the supposed topical parallels the film creates between the Iraq war and the star War.

Seeing Sith for the second time — as an escape from the 39 degree Celsius heat wave not because I loved it so much — just confirmed for me that as long as Star Wars‘ dominant moral paradigm is a binary opposition between two quasi-religious abstractions – the Dark and Light side of the Force – the Jedi Council is not going to be much help in solving our real problems. Sorry, Ms J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader. Lucas seems to know as much since his traditional textual preamble contains these lines: “There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.” Feels like papering the cracks to me. Nevertheless, this is the most enjoyable episode of the second trilogy, more capably edited and acted as well and it even has a little bit more soul than the others as well; however, this is just not an important film, no matter what sort of relevance some well-meaning critics would like to project upon it.

George wants to start a House Of Boys using my apartment. It’s an idea I toyed with several months ago even to the point of designing and distributing fliers, posters and business cards. Problem was the boys were hard to wrangle: they rarely showed up when they said they would; they never kept their mobile phones for long, always needing money and selling them back to the bazaars where they bought them, and so it was difficult to get hold of the boys when I needed them. I had a few phone calls from interested men and many regulars on the scene encouraged me to make it a weekly house party because so many of them were sick of Pinocchio’s. Also there are some men who find Prague’s rent boy bar scene a little more public than they’d like. Anyway my idea never got off the ground. My apartment in Vinohrady was simply too small anyway.

This new flat of mine is quite big with its two floors and, now that I’ve given one of my roommates notice, a free room available for sex. George has managed to convince both Petr and Martin that it would be in their interest to pool their resources, their combined sexual attractiveness and make another go of it. The boys would sleep downstairs and one room upstairs would always be available for clients. It’s not a bad set-up since George always manages to find tourists who either don’t want to or are not able to take boys back to their hotel rooms. And Pinocchio’s 1000 Kc rooms suck: their walls are paper-thin; the beds are hard and disgusting and haven’t been cleaned in years, I would imagine; plus the power’s always going out; and, oh yeah, there’s always the occasional police raid — raids not looking for clients but for runaway and underage boys. Not to mention I don’t feel the assholes that manage and the mafia that run the place really deserve any more gay money than they already get.

The boys have already managed to give me rent this month plus some pocket change for food, which is more than I can say for the Czech roommate whom I’m kicking out. We’ll see how it goes./rent boys/