There is no Santa Claus

I have a Dirty Email Address. It’s the address I use when I’m forced to register for a porn site. It’s the address I use whenever I have chatted online with some strange guy. I won’t tell you what it is, but I assure you it involves both wit and double entendre. Surf any gay website and you will have a good idea what it may be. Most guys online are GUYWITH9INCHES or HOT4UNOW. Mine is equally dorky. I simply don’t want every porn site in Malaysia sending spam to my regular address, filling my inbox with suggestions that I need Viagra or that I should visit “Tammy” at her cam site right now because she is waiting for me. And even though no one has my Dirty Email Address (DEA) it is always mildly exciting when I open it. Perhaps there will be a message from the perfect porn site, or a correspondence from that fling from days gone by, begging to meet just one more time, or maybe The Hooker with a Heart of Gold will have called on me, eloquent and romantic, signaling the next round in our torid affair. When I invented my DEA, I never imagined that I would actually use it for correspondence with anyone but it seems I was wrong because HHG has only ever had my DEA. He has used it several times to ask me important things like:

“what are you doing tonight?”
-HHG

or

“Free tonight?”
-HHG

or my favorite

“You online now?”
-HHG

The answers have generally been “you” “yes” and “no” in that order. I usually check my DEA about once a week or two just to clean out the spam and make sure it stays active. Today was the day for that, and I typed in my dirty password like a child on Christmas morning, wondering what would be under the tree. The inbox screen appeared and HHG had sent me an email. This time though, it wasn’t a veiled invitation to his massage table or a virtual love letter filled with missives about his undying hunger for my body, it was a forward, warning me and 25 other people not to lick stamps or envelopes because “CNN reported that a woman in an envelope factory licked an envelope, cut her tongue, was infected with cockroach eggs and subsequently gave ‘birth’ to live roaches via her tongue when a doctor inspected the ‘infection’ only days later.”

Thanks God for that email. I was about to start a day working for the Kerry campaign licking envelopes and mailing them out. HHG is the most considerate fuck buddy I have ever had.

As I contemplated what to do about this public service announcement, I calculated the number of days that had passed since I last heard from HHG. It turns out that it has been 18 days. 18 days since we were in very pleasing, if compromising, positions with each other, 18 days that included two unreturned phone calls from yours truly, 18 days that included no activity with my DEA until this. A cockroach egg warning. Don’t lick stamps lest you get infected with roaches. This is the gay equivalent of buying your wife a toaster for her birthday. The minute you begin sending your gay fuck buddy email warnings about urban myths, all the air has gone out of your relationship. I should say that for a microsecond, before I opened the email, I was actually glad to hear from him. I figured it would be one of his regular warm, wordy messages inviting me in for an exciting evening:

“Fuck tonight? Call me.”
-HHG

But no. Sadly, I was given a toaster on my birthday. At this point he might as well be some old college friend on the east coast that I never see. He could be my Jewish grandmother who is tech savvy and warns me about everything, if I had one. He might as well be any one of you, with my regular email address. There was nothing sexy, or enticing about warning me about roaches. That email was the kind of gift that needs no wrapping, the kind you hand over in the bag it came in, tag still attached. The PRACTICAL gift. “This is something useful, something you can put to use.” That was the email that made me realize there is no Santa Claus.