SUCKCESSPOOL: How The Horny Rat Became A Horny Otter

I had no idea how hot other men actually found me until my first year in New York City. That year I began dating Xander (yes, Xander), a rugby player 10 years my senior who had an encyclopedic knowledge of queer writers, great taste in 90s music videos, a fuzzy muscular torso and a thick cock. We’d smoke, make out, get naked, then I’d kiss his biceps then lick down his happy trail, my hands kneading his healthy butt while I swallowed his Coke can cock, priming him for a round of flip-fucking. One night after a session that lasted almost six hours, he told me, “You’re a hot little otter.” “What?” I asked, a bit self-conscious about my thin, hair-covered body. I liked otters — only Communists don’t — but I’d never been called one. Little did I know, I had just entered the bear taxonomy.

In 1991 one man jump-started the sex drive of countless homos everywhere: Marky Mark wearing CK undies in those now iconic ads. In one, he had a boyish smile, tousled hair, and devastatingly sculpted body. In the other he wore a backwards baseball cap and an arrogant sneer while grabbing his nuts as if to say, “Suck my dick, bitch.” It wasn’t an invitation, it was a taunt. He knew you wanted his cock, but you suck. If you even tried, Marky Mark and his Funky Bunch would knock your ass out then he’d go back to working out with cinder blocks and fucking in a do-rag. So tough, so butch — just like in his videos.

At age 14 I wanted a physique like Marky Mark’s; but instead I got an adolescent version of my father’s: a gangly 120-pound frame with a hair rash spreading from my belly to my groin, dark wire spirals making sunflowers out of my nipples. My swim coach made me wear an oversized lime green Speedo during meets and in it I looked like The Drowned Rat Boy of India. I always put my towel and shirt on immediately after the races I regularly lost. I liked swimming but positively sucked at it. In fact, I won my first medal for swimming 25 yards in a dress for a fundraiser — I told my dad I won it for the 200-meter freestyle — he didn’t seem to care.

All the other competitors in the locker room had beautiful upperclassmen bodies with muscles straight out of the Speedo catalog. As they slid their boxers over their hips, revealing a small tuft of pubic hair where their abdominals met their groins I hid my boner behind a wet towel, trying not to ogle too obviously — it was the closest I’d ever get to Marky Mark’s body, I thought. Then I’d go dry off near the showers where I could see them rinsing and scrubbing their slender bodies. At home, I imagined them rubbing their hard curved dicks together while kissing and grabbing each other’s asses. SIGH… it made me so fucking hard that my dick wept entire streams of precum, but I never entered these fantasies. Even if all the entire men’s swim team of Taft High School suddenly broke into a shower orgy, who’d wanna make out with the Wet Rat Boy of Istanbul?

I quit swimming sophomore year, got a beer gut in college and in my sister’s wedding photographs I have pancake face and bleached orange hair — definitely not CK or Speedo material. Only when I became a lifeguard my junior year did I start working out, put on some muscle, and started wearing tighter jeans, t-shirts, and a beard — my evolution from rodenthood to full otterdom.