I was the baby of the family and my father died when I was nine. My brothers and sisters were all getting married and having children while I was still at school and living with my mam, and when I left school at sixteen I got a job locally in a big factory. I’m still there after 27 years, only my mam died when I was 20, leaving me on my own but not far from my elder brothers and sisters.
After mam died I had my job and my brothers and sisters to keep me going and I had affairs with lots of local girls. They were always willing to come back for more. I saved up to buy my own house and the girls came and went but I never stopped wanking. In fact, if I’m honest, I’d have to admit I often preferred wanking to having sex with girls. During the week I would wank most nights when I went to bed (or sometimes in the bath before I went to bed) and then I’d have sex with the girl friend at the weekend. I was always careful to take precautions because I’d seen how my brother had come to grief when his girlfriend got pregnant and he had to marry her. It was not a happy marriage. She told me once that she had caught my brother wanking and she thought it was disgusting. I didn’t tell her I still did it too.
Anyway, time went on and by the time I was approaching forty, my family and friends were teasing me about not getting married and one of them said “You’re not queer, are you ?” This set me thinking. I had only ever wanted to marry one of my girlfriends and she had turned me down for a mate of mine. After that I did even more wanking and I wondered how much others did it too, married men as well as single.
One day at work my mates were laughing at the personal ads in a local paper so I discovered for the first time the Men Seeking Men columns. There were lots of ads and there were two that caught my eye because they were for the right age (35 – 45) and mentioned “inexperience”. You had to phone a Voicebox number and hear a recorded message. Well I listened to these messages, which asked me to leave my phone number so that the guy could phone me. To begin with, I just put the phone down. But the idea wouldn’t go away. I had a girlfriend who came round at weekends. She was 35 (three years younger than me) and wanted a baby. She wanted to marry me too, but I didn’t feel ready for that and I decided that I wanted to try out sex with a man first – just to see what I might be missing. So I dialled the Voicebox number of the guy who had advertised himself as “ Bi, sincere & caring” and listened again to his message. He had a nice voice. He said he was self-employed, couldn’t accommodate but could travel, especially in the afternoons.” This was ideal for me as I work the early shift and am home by 2.30 pm, so I gave him my number and prepared to wait quite a long time for him to reply.
I was amazed when the phone went just two days later, and very embarrassed, because my sister had called round to see me just as he came on the phone. I don’t know what she thought when I made an arrangement to see him the following the afternoon but I expect she thought I was meeting a new girlfriend.
The next day I was a bag of nerves. He had said he would call at about 3 o’clock and I had given him directions for finding my house. From 2.30 onwards I paced up and down, checking that the house was clean and tidy, wondering what he would say and how I would reply and what we would actually DO. And then he never came. After all the nervous waiting I felt let down but after all the thinking and worrying about it I decided to phone his Voicebox once more and ask him to fix another day for coming. He phoned the next day, saying how sorry he was. He said he had been unavoidably held up by a sudden business commitment but if it was all right with me, he would come over without fail the following Monday afternoon.
On the Monday I again spent a nervous hour pacing up and down, wondering whether he would come, and when there was a knock on the door it came almost as a surprise. I opened it and there he was, shaking my hand and saying “I’m Bernard. You must be Darren.” He seemed really nice, with the air of someone who is in charge of his life. He told me later that he was nervous too, but it didn’t show. I offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted, and he sat on my sofa while he drank it and we chatted a bit about our lives and I was able to take a closer look at him. He was easy to talk with, about six foot, well built and good looking. He told me his wife had left him out of the blue for another guy after nearly 20 years of marriage and that he was a single parent, looking after a teenage son. He had had “feelings” for other men but not done anything about it To my great relief he said he wasn’t interested in anything anal but that he would like to lie on a bed with me so that we could caress each other. It sounded quite natural when, after he had finished his coffee, he said casually “Shall we go upstairs, then ?”
