During those weeks, he taught me a lot about sex. “You kiss me, and rub against me,” Tui said as we were lying on my bed. “No touch dick. Just rub.” I loved doing that, deep-tonguing Tui while I rubbed my hard dick against his thigh. Feeling his hot mouth clamped on mine as I came in hot spurts against his hairless skin.

That was frottage, I learned, reading about sex on the Internet after he’d gone. Sometimes when we met, he brought sex toys with him—once a big, black, double-headed dildo that we used to fuck ourselves with, both of us at the same time, my long, hairy legs intertwining with his bony hairless ones as we pulled closer together, then apart, then close again, pushing the dildo’s two big ribbed heads into both our asses at once. He wrapped his hand around my dick, and I did the same for him, and we jerked each other as we reamed our asses.

Once he brought handcuffs and a blindfold, and he cuffed me to the bedposts in the Prince Kuhio Hotel, face down, with a blindfold over my eyes. I was high on crystal then, and I think Tui brought at least three other guys into the room to fuck my ass while I lay spread-eagled on the bed. Maybe it was just Tui, three different times, or maybe it was just Tui with three different dildos, but I didn’t care. It felt so fucking awesome.

Finally I got tired of paying for hotel rooms and rented us an apartment a few blocks from campus, on a seedy street of pizza parlors and copy shops called Missionary Road. Neither of us lived there; we just met there for sex and to get high. First it was just a couple of times a week; then gradually Tui seemed to be staying there all the time, and I’d go over when I got through with class. Sometimes I wouldn’t go back to the dorm for a day or more at a time.

Eventually I stopped going to class and I didn’t go back to the dorm either. My money was in a trust, and I ran through that year’s allotment, but I called the trustee back in Chicago and explained how expensive everything was in Hawaii. He was just a bank officer and didn’t know me or really care how I spent the money, so he authorized another year’s allocation.

I was living in my dream. Sometimes Tui and I would go up to the roof of the building, get high, and then get naked. We’d lie and bake in the sun, and when the clouds came we’d stay out there and get soaked through, then go downstairs and warm up together in a hot shower. He’d cover my whole body in lather, massaging my shoulders, my tits, my ass, and everything in between, then he’d have me stick a soapy finger up his ass and get him all lubed up. Then I’d fuck him, holding him tight, feeling him slip and slide all over my lathered body.

I got off a lot more than Tui did. At first I figured it was because he was having sex with lots of different guys, saving his boners for the guys who wanted to be fucked or wanted to suck him. But even later, when we were holed up in the apartment together all the time, all he wanted to do was jerk me off, suck me, have me fuck his hairless ass. I thought I’d truly know Tui was my boyfriend, not just a prostitute who was with me for the money, when we started being more democratic about sex, blowing each other and fucking each other equally.

Tui would just laugh when I asked. “Kevin, you horny all the time,” he said. “Eighteen years, you get boners one after nother. Tui older, Tui’s dick work very hard last years. Sometimes Tui’s dick need a rest.”

I never asked Tui about his life as a prostitute, but occasionally he’d say something. I learned he was Thai, that he had grown up in Bangkok and learned English by fucking American GIs from the time he was twelve. He wasn’t my age, I figured out; he was almost thirty, but he was so skinny and had such soft, clear skin that he looked hardly over twenty. He had come to Honolulu on a tourist visa three years before, and decided never to go back. “Now I have you, Kevin,” he said, snuggling up against me in bed one night just before Halloween. “I never go nowhere.”

One day when we were feeling domestic, we went to Liberty House and charged up five hundred dollars’ worth of dishes, glasses, and silverware on my gold American Express card. We bought a $200 set of Japanese knives that the cute sales guy said were the best on the market. We bought a set of pots and pans, spatulas and colanders and all kinds of kitchen crap. Then when it showed up at the apartment on Missionary Road we left it boxed up in the kitchen.

I had these fantasies. We would get him a visa, and he would come to school at UH with me. That is, when I started going to classes again. We would get some furniture for the apartment, beyond the futon bed and the milk crates we used as tables. Maybe even a dog.

The days started to blur together, since I wasn’t going to classes. We hardly left the apartment, except for cash, food, and crystal. We didn’t need to do laundry much, because in the apartment we were always naked. We’d let the trash pile up for days, then go on cleaning binges, both of us wearing little frilly aprons and nothing else. We’d take the trash out to the dumpster, our naked asses sticking out, boners tenting the lightweight fabric, and laugh at anyone who gave us a dirty look. Then we’d come back and fuck all over the clean floor.

The crystal made me feel so good about my body—I thought I was the sexiest fucking stud in Honolulu. My boners lasted forever, and after coming I’d be ready for sex again almost immediately. Daydreaming in snowy Chicago, my hand working furiously as I salivated over some naked guy in a magazine, I’d never imagined sex could be this good.

One Saturday night in the middle of December, though, we had a fight. Tui was feeling cooped up in the apartment. He wanted to go back to Kalakaua, meet somebody new for a change. He would come back, he promised. Maybe he would find somebody to join us—three was better than two, he would show me.

I got paranoid. I was afraid that if he left, he’d never come back. I’d be all alone again, and I didn’t think I could take it. He went in to take a shower, and I knew I couldn’t let him leave the apartment. I went to the kitchen and opened up the knife set.

I found the biggest, sharpest knife and waited for Tui to come out of the shower. But when he did, he wasn’t scared at all. “You so funny, Kevin,” he said, walking past me, and I realized I couldn’t stab him. I was just what I’d been called in high school—a big fag. I couldn’t find a real boyfriend and I couldn’t even hold on to a prostitute I spent thousands of dollars on.

After Tui left I sat there on the futon holding the knife. I thought about killing myself. That would make Tui sorry, I thought. He’d feel really bad about leaving me. He’d probably cry, and the police would come to investigate, and he’d admit that it was all his fault. The police wouldn’t arrest him, but they would put him on a plane back to Bangkok, for sure.

Finally I just decided to go back to the dorm. I got up and got dressed—my clothes stunk, I realized; I’d have to do laundry back at the dorm. I was walking toward the campus when I saw President Bush coming toward me.

I thought I had to be high. I was totally freaked out; what if he had come to arrest me for having sex with a prostitute? Was sodomy illegal in Hawaii? I didn’t know. I couldn’t move; I just stood there as he came closer. Then I saw he was walking with Madonna and Snow White, and I realized they were just Halloween costumes. But what the fuck were they doing wearing Halloween costumes in December?

I decided I was really fucked up and needed to get back to the dorm fast, so I ran all the rest of the way there. When I reached the lobby, panting, my heart racing, I saw a sign for an end-of-term Christmas costume party. That made me feel a little better.

My roommate was out—probably at that costume party. I gathered up all my clothes and went down to the laundry room in the basement of the dorm, where I dumped them in a washer. I took off what I was wearing and threw that in, too.