It takes a long time to build up a proper “stable” of guys one wants to fuck.  Not just guys one wants to fuck, but also guys one wants to fuck whom are reliable to fuck.  It takes work.  It takes some serious weeding out.

I had used OkCupid to build up a nice group of regulars whom I was fucking.  OkCupid and Twitter.  I’m all about social fuckworking.  I had gone through a period of meeting a lot of new guys via these venues.  It wasn’t always directly; I met Ramon via Twitter who introduced me to a number of guys, including Charles.

Charles is Charles Gatewood.  I know he’s fine with me “outing” him as one of the guys I fuck.  I’d never heard of Charles until Ramona told me about him at the Zine Fest back in 2009.  She and I had met initially via Twitter, and I’d fucked one of her, uh, suggestions, before we met in person at Dolores Park for a picnic.  I do like picnics.

When we met she told me she had children, which I tried heartily to not hold against her.  She said she had a 17-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son.  She said her daughter didn’t live with her but her son did.  I figured neither child was all that present in her life.  I figured that based solely on our first meeting, which happened to be when her son was visiting her mother.

Because of my silly assumption, it was kind of a surprise when we met to go to the Zine Fest and she had her son with her.  We met at the Van Ness Muni station.  There was Ramona with a small man.  He was cute; he had a blue faux hawk on what was otherwise blond hair, twinkly bright blue eyes, and a very outgoing personality.

We took Muni to the San Francisco County Fair Building.  I’d never been to anything in the building before, and every other county fair building to which I’d been was huge.  San Francisco’s county fair building, at the edge of Golden Gate Park, is a modest affair; from the front door of the building we could see every exhibitor.

Ramona told her son that he had $5 to spend, which, sadly, was significantly more than I had.  I wasn’t really sure what a zine fest was, but I figured it’d be just a bunch of people selling their angsty, anarchist, homemade magazines.  I was wrong.  There was a variety of exhibitors, from yo-yo demonstrations, to hand-drawn sexy comic books, to notebooks, to collages with found papers, to photography books.  It was so cool; I was sorry I didn’t have any money to spend.

The yo-yo demonstrator I’d blown in the past.  I wasn’t sure he remembered me, and it certainly would have been awkward to say hi if he didn’t, so I avoided him.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Vegan was also there, though I didn’t realize until later.  There was a strong vegan contingent; I think there might have been a vegan food demonstration some time over the course of the two day fest.

Ramona, her son, and I walked around, looking at the various exhibitors.  When we got to the Flash Publications table, Ramona went nuts.  She said that Charles Gatewood was the reason she was at the Zine Fest.  She said she had wanted to meet him for a long time.  She began talking to an older man behind the table.  I had no idea who he was.

As Ramona was talking, and clearly wanting to get into a deeper conversation about photography, her son was getting impatient.  I offered to take him outside for a bit.

I am not a kid person.  I do not foresee having children, ever.  I did in the past, but no longer.  I’ve not been around children for the most part.  I didn’t live with my younger step-brother until he was seven, and since I was a kid at the time, it was a whole lot of teasing him and scaring him.  A few years ago he told me he was still angry at me for the scaring part.

So when Ramona’s son and I went outside I wasn’t sure what to do.  We used sticks to “fight” each other.  For a bit I thought it was cute that he kept changing the rules that governed the battles.  Then I got tired and bored.  He was not tired, and if I had kept playing, he would not have been bored.  Finally, he walked back into the building and screamed for his mother.

While not a parent, I know that a screaming child in a public place is extremely inappropriate.  I grabbed him and brought him back outside.  We then had a battle of wills.  I held his wrists so he didn’t run back in the building; he screamed that I was hurting him.  I made it clear that as soon as he calmed the fuck down and behaved in a civilized manner that we’d go back in to see his mother.  The calming down took a while.

Eventually Ramona came outside with the older man to whom she’d been talking, the one she called Charles Gatewood.  He had his camera.  He said he was doing a story for Skin & Ink Magazine about the local tattoo scene.  Ramona has a lot of tattoos.  Charles thought a good photo for the piece would be to show that heavily tattooed people in the Bay Area are parents, too.

He took a few photos of Ramona’s son with her tattooed arms on his shoulders.  I asked about adjusting the lighting later on the computer, and he said he still took pictures on film.  Even my father, a semi-professional photographer, crossed over to digital a few years ago.

He seemed like a nice guy, but it wasn’t until later that he and I would connect.

To be continued …

I swear.  True story.

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