The park two blocks to the south of me, Cheesman Park, is a major hub for male prostitution. The whores strip down to gym shorts and lie on the grass next to their parked cars, waiting for a john, probably both looking forward to the sex and the hit of heroin or crack it will provide them. I walked over there when I first moved here--I said to myself, "I live right next to such a large park, why don't I go for a walk through it?" I saw men with all sorts of body piercings walking from here to there, looking around--I saw a dozen lonely men, glancing at one another, each there alone, each looking for another to approach--the part of the park with the road that circles it, that grassy plain, was strewn with male hookers stretched out on their stomachs, in Speedo's and short shorts, waiting for someone to approach. I saw no women, I saw no dog walkers, I saw no one out with children. It really was not the place to take children. And then, two blocks to the north of me--that's where the female hookers seek johns. I think most of them have grown used to seeing me by now, and know that I only go there for a six-pack of beer or groceries--those junkies and crackheads, women with leather faces and herpes lips--they know I'm not a john by now. Walking back from the porn shop yesterday, back from downtown, the whole city seemed like a seething cauldron of loneliness & sexual desire, as if every one of the men in the city were sex-starved, repressed & about to explode--I thought of that Mexican or Arab or whatever he was, the drunk man who had pulled up and asked me to get in his car--everything seemed filled with every sort of sexual energy, none of it put into healthy channels, as if all these men had gone all their lives seeking sex in the bathrooms of gay bars & alleyways, unable to get girlfriends due to social ineptitude or homelessness or just because they weren't quite "quality people". All the sexual energy in the city was being channeled into the sewers, the gays sucking the dick of some whore in the back of a van, finding young men who had yet to lose innocence and luring them into their cars. Everyone was fucking female crackheads in the alleys off Colfax, refusing to hand over their $25 until they were allowed to do it with no condom. This whole city was filled with lonesome men making their way to the porn shop with their backpacks, ashamed of carrying their magazines in the black plastic bags they give you. Adolescent boys were doing pornographic searches on the internet as their parents were at work; lonely middle-aged men were on the internet looking for sadist porn, shit porn, beast porn. The penis wants, wants, wants--the eyes want to see, the hands want to feel--everything in this city was about to explode with the baser desires--no one could possibly conceive of standing it one second more without release. I wondered if it was any different out in the country, in the mountains, in small towns; if there were the same drunk Arabs that tried to get you in their cars, if there was the same overflowing desire, the same porn shops with the same signs out front, the same parks strewn with asses-for-hire--there are the same people, after all, only fewer of them, the same people with the same desires & probably the same perversions. How do they keep it from exploding into the meat markets of Cheesman Park and Colfax Avenue, how do they keep it from being channeled into the filthy alleyways and sewers of the body and world? Perhaps it was just me--perhaps it was just my own eyes, projecting everything internal, as I walked back from the porn shop, smut magazines hidden away in my backpack; as I walked on ashamed, excited, lusty.