I was crashing in a community house of techies and entrepreneurs in San Francisco. I was the only one in this fourteen-person household who was an artist. I didn’t go to any Ivy League School. I didn’t make millions of dollars from a start-up. I didn’t talk about AI over lunch or go to weekly meetings with Elon Musk. I didn’t exactly fit in. But the people were sweet and good-natured. Coexisting was harmonious, and I liked our differences. They were all ambitious and motivating to be around.
One night, the Jewish people of the house threw a big dinner for Yom Kippur. Thirty of their friends came over to eat together, the kitchen and living room were warm and full of bodies.
The last few weeks in California, I felt almost a-sexual. American men seemed rigid and overworked, in too future-focus to enjoy the moment. They didn’t dance. They spoke loudly and they spoke too much.
I stood in the kitchen over a bowl of matzo ball soup and talked to a German lesbian about my potential a-sexuality. As I was speaking to her, I noticed a man behind her. He had large blue eyes that held a silent intelligence. This was the first faint feeling I had of desire, small but there. He approached us a few minutes later and offered us a bottle of red wine. We all shared it.
His name was Jakub, a Polish man visiting the Bay Area with his business partner. He didn’t talk about his job like everyone else did, but about his passions. In the summers he lived on his yacht and went spear fishing in the open ocean. I questioned him about the technique of spearfishing and where he traveled to on sea. He showed me videos of his free diving, and my attraction to him grew. He was earthy, but not a crunchy hippie.
For five weeks he traveled alone on his yacht and thought he would write a book. He imagined it would be like Hemmingway’s Fisherman and the Sea. It was not. He was horny and agitated. He daydreamed about parties and drugs and women. He needed stimulation.
I told Jakub about my friend’s dad in Russia who spent months alone out on the sea. I told him about the erotica I wrote based on my friend’s dad’s life. It was a short story about his sensual dreams and then waking up on the boat in the morning alone. It was more sad than erotic. The central message of the story was that humans have needs, and touch is a scarce resource for many. Loneliness is the greatest poverty of the modern man.
Thankfully, every day for me was cuddle puddles, naked sauna, and massages from friends, but still, I missed sex. The longing was aggravated by the red wine. Jakub invited me back to his house for a hot tub session. I said no, and he insisted. When he told me he'd get us a driverless car, I said yes. There are a few things I say yes to just for the experience itself.
We sat in a driverless Tesla and watched the wheel turn this way and that, like an invisible hand steering us toward the Mission. Jakub fidgeted with the radio and we decided on playing Latin hits. Every hits playlist seemed to be junk, and we turned down the volume to talk.
Jakub complained about Americans the same way I did, that they didn’t know how to relax, they didn't know how to let go and have fun. They didn't dance. Before visiting the states he was in Kyiv, and he said Ukrainian parties had never been so good. He claimed it was because of the war. He said partying in Beirut was similar, people want to celebrate life and live in joy with the firsthand experience of its fragility. I thought it strange to go to war zones to party, but at the same time, it made sense. It was also an experience. An unusual one.
Outside of living on his yacht in the summer and partying in Ukraine during the war, he was filled with worldly stories. Hiking the Himalayas and getting drunk with Indians off fermented goat milk in the night. Driving through Mexico as a teenage smuggler. Studying engineering at Cambridge and becoming a CEO in his early twenties. He was terribly alive. His life had little linearity and this unpredictability felt more real than all the brittleness I had witnessed the last few weeks. I was seduced by his wildness.
So, we had sex. He lasted ten minutes and we came together somehow. It was mediocre but with a possibility of becoming good over time. I was surprised that I had allowed myself to fuck him. So much of my sex life had been love-driven. I thought all other sex was vacant and empty.
This connection was interest-driven because we had similar lives of travel and risk. He was well-educated and charismatic. Still, I felt no love for him or yearning to build anything. It was for the experience itself. It was for spending that one night discussing our worldly adventures until 3am and falling asleep naked and entangled.
The next morning, I wondered aloud if this would be my first real one-night stand. Jakub said it depended on what we think of one another, and what we'd rate the experience. He gave it a 4.8 out of five stars. I was unsure. It didn’t seem to matter because we were both leaving the Bay soon to continue onward with our mad wild lives.
He called me an Uber and I said goodbye knowing it might be a real one.
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