Every autumn, San Francisco is one of the cities that hosts a "Fleet Week". The Navy invades the town. The Blue Angels fly in tight formation under the Golden Gate then roar out over the Bay and the City. Aircraft Carriers and Destroyers dock at the piers along the Embarcadero. During the day crowds of families take tours of the ships. And at night the waterfront is flooded with sailors in their summer whites.

Every year during Fleet Week I'm down on the Embarcadero a lot — military men are such an easy passion. Last year, one night during Fleet Week, I walked down Folsom to a favorite sex spot of mine, a bookstore with glory holes in the booths. Many of my friends wouldn't be caught dead there: too filthy, too sleazy, too depressing. I go there all the time so I can suck cock without any complications or conversation. Just serious and anonymous cock sucking, period. But sucking guys through glory holes in San Francisco is probably different from anyplace else: the opportunities are so plentiful that everyone gets a little jaded. They let you suck them a little, then they go on to another booth and get sucked by someone else, and then again to someone else. It's weird: I like it because you end up tasting — sampling — a lot of cock, and I hate it because you rarely connect as completely as two men can through that hole.

On this particular night as I got close to the bookstore I passed a group of sailors, most of them dressed in street clothes. If you know military men, you know they have a particular way of dressing when they go ashore out of uniform. The clothes fit a little too well, are always well pressed, and are usually either a little too fashionable or look like they've been ordered from a catalog. Think "International Male": gay men from Fresno and straight sailors love the stuff. This group of young men was amped-up on puppy-energy, all horny and excited. They were going to the Covered Wagon, a working-class straight bar on Folsom near 5th where boozy young women hang out. I walked past them and turned into the bookstore. I bought three bucks worth of tokens and headed back to the booths. The place was unusually empty so I went into one of the back booths and watched porn for a while, switching through the video channels. Predictably, a lot weren't working at all. Most of the other channels were either distorted or showing material not to my taste: women pissing into cups; sad looking men fucking a fat and heavily tattooed woman. I finally settled on something with Vince Bandero pretending to be a wrestler, feeding some lucky guy that big fat uncut Italian cock of his.

A few minutes into it I heard someone walk into the next booth. I went down on my knees and peered through the glory hole. I rarely look up at faces: there's usually more than enough information for me in the region of a man's crotch. And what I saw through the hole was enough to tell me this was one of the men from the group outside, a sailor who had come in either to watch a movie and jack off, or to get sucked off. I watched his hands. He unzipped his pants and reached inside. He played with himself slowly for a long while, feeding quarters into the slot. I looked up and got a glimpse of his video