Crushes hit Billy Sonic hard, even in his forties, when he felt his sexual drive waning, and white hairs began appearing in places on his body other than his scalp. Billy Sonic was partial to twenty-something men, but not muscled, athletic types, or beefy dudes. Billy liked skinny guys. While Billy was open to sex with Asian and Latino men, he generally preferred white men for his flings. Online and with friends, Billy pretended to be open to dating black men; his cock was secretly racist. Bad news for Billy! For every tic on his list (white, skinny, 21+) Billy’s prospect pool shrank. Focusing on twenty somethings took three quarters of the population out of play. Boston was not a large city, though the yearly influx of college students (and outflow of graduates) meant the queer population turned over at a rapid rate. This was good for Billy’s purposes; the inexorable march of time was bad. Every year that rolled up on his odometer (did the numbers in odometers still roll, Billy wondered, or were those computer generated like everything else?) meant another line, more distance, between Billy Sonic and one of the beautiful twenty something men who held his eyes as they walked, unaware, laughing, in afternoon sunlight. The number of boys who remained susceptible to Billy’s fast talk dwindled every year, with notable declines after he took the turns past thirty and forty. Still, every once in a while, a young guy came along who seemed interested in the whats and wheres Billy had on offer. Billy made a list of things not to do when young men like this appeared:

1. Do not profess your love during the first date or, alternately, after the object of your crush agrees to a first date.
2. Do not text the object of your crush multiple times to be sure he saw your original text.
3. Do not send the object of your crush checklists of preferred sexual positions and practices.
3a. Do not send follow-up email reminders if the checklist of preferred sexual positions and practices isn’t completed within twelve hours
4. Do not hand over a USB drive during your first date and casually request all the sexually explicit material the object of your crush has ever created

Naturally, Billy Sonic repeated each of these mistakes with every boy (21+) who expressed interest. When a crush was on him, Billy acted with the calculating rationality of a starving man confronted with a table piled high with flake, puff and choux pastries.

When the crush ebbed, temporarily, like a fever mitigated by a folded corner of a towel soaked in cold water, Billy Sonic wondered: what was in him, that wanted to bring these young men into his home and treat them with previously unknown pleasures? Some fragment of Billy’s own youth, a shadow, that ached for the company of young men with rude silhouettes? Fatherhood denied, transmuted via queer alchemy into solicitude for a subset of gangly young men not yet hardened and made hopeless by the atrocity exhibition of twenty-first century living?

More urgent (for Billy): why did he keep screwing up relationships with young men who seemed interested?