New York trip 2004: Sleepless on Sunday

To make sure I’m in the New York office bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Monday morning I always fly out late afternoon on Sunday. After an uneventful flight I check in to my New York hotel in Midtown. It’s around 9pm, which means it’s 2am London time, so I need to try and stay awake until at least 11pm New York time or later to give myself a reasonable chance of getting a good night’s sleep.

So what’s a gay guy going to do for a few hours in New York City? Well there was no point preparing my gay.com profile yesterday if I’m not going to use it. I set up my laptop and log-on. And an important benefit of finding another guy for fun is that afterwards it’s easier to get to sleep, so it helps beat the jet lag.

The Manhattan chat room on gay.com is segregated into sub-rooms, with 100 guys in each sub-room. There are over 4oo guys logged and I get shoved into the 5th room, which has much fewer guys in it. I exit and re-enter a few times and eventually someone leaves one of the crowded chat rooms making room for me to get in.

I’ve got some preparatory work to do for the office tomorrow, so I use the laptop to read various documents and e-mails, while logged into gay.com so that other guys on the system can see that I’m looking for some fun.

As the evening wears on I have a few chats with a few guys but no fun materialises, so around 11pm I decide to risk going to bed. The danger is that I’ll wake up at 3am or 4am, feeling tired but unable to get back to sleep.

But it’s worse that I expected. I get a couple of hours of very light sleep, but around 1am I find myself awake. 1am in New York is 6am in London, and this is around the time I usually get up, so I reckon my London oriented body clock has kicked in. I decide that I need to do something to try and tire myself out, and having another go looking for fun on gay.com seems like a good idea. So I log on to gay.com again.

The chat rooms seem to be just as busy as they were around 9am. Amazing, New York really is the metropolis that never sleeps. Within 5 minutes a nice looking Latin American guy contacts me. Perhaps he’s talking to someone else too because his responses are slow, but gradually we start chatting. It’s now 1:30am, I’m due in the office by 9am at the latest, and he’s suggested that I visit him at his apartment on the Upper West Side. I get his phone number and his name and call him.

“Hi is that D”, I start.

“Yes”, he says with a lovely sweet voice, “would you like to visit me, it won’t take you more than 10 minutes by cab at this time of night”.

I decide to go for it. He looks lovely in his photos so I really can’t resist the idea of a cuddle with him. At least after I’ve had some fun, I should be able to get some sleep.