When I moved to New York City a whole new world opened up to me. My first tentative step into this world was Halloween on the first year I moved to New York. I didn’t know anyone, and I went to The Lure in the Meatpacking district. Although I now know that even then it was nothing like what it was in its heyday, it was an experience that really opened my eyes. Not only was it that leathermen were all around but to physically experience and see a world that existed previously in magazines and stories was stunning and life changing.
During this period, I cautiously sought out experiences with the types of men I was most drawn to: older leathermen, military men, and bears. There have been a few that have remained in my memory. One was the Marine in the Bronx that took me a good two hours to reach by public transportation that I met online, and started me down the road to realizing that most Marines are better in literature and fantasy than in reality. Then there was the leather top in Wayne, NJ whose house I must have circled a dozen times before getting enough gumption to go ring the doorbell. That experience showed me that things can happen too fast and understanding limits, and trusting a partner are all critical. While I now know that what I experienced was in retrospect light and hot, I was not at all prepared and I was freaked out for weeks afterwards.
Then there was Roger in Staten Island, a leather top that is a wonderful person. He and I had a brief relationship, but I was not ready yet to be in one. The idea was frightening, and particularly with some one so close to home. I introduced him to pup play, and we explored the scene and learned a lot together (among which most dog food is not really THAT good, and that milk bones are intensely dry).
Through these experiences, I began to establish what I liked and what I was looking for, almost always in a submissive role or as a bear cub, and I began to look more specifically for a daddy-type bear or leather top on the limited number of sites that existed at the time on the internet. I met my first steady top, Jeff, on Bear411. Jeff is an older man, with a beard, a solid beer gut, and is fairly solidly built. On his profile at the time he had a hat on to hide his balding hair and his glasses off though he almost always wore them. He was close to where I was and yet just far enough away for my comfort.
My first visit with him started with him taking control right from the outset. It was clear that I was the submissive and the pup and by the time I had left, I had been tasked to watch an instructional video on massage techniques and to report back to him within the next few days. He has a demeanor and voice that has a way of making you do what he wants, and despite being somewhat shocked at his appearance, and also having a first experience that was different than what I expected, I came back.
That is how my relationship with Jeff grew. I came to know him quite well, and would end up seeing him several times a week. I tried to be the best submissive pup for him that I could. I would do as asked, including chores around the house, and of course sexual service. I also took my punishment when it was meted out, though I often felt it was unjustified. In many ways, he was a good Master, and would often taking me to shows, and expanding my education in the arts and opera and in many areas of gay life that I did not know about.
Yet there were problems with this relationship. Not having been in any kind of lasting relationship, and certainly not having been in a top / submissive relationship, I did not know what was wrong or see any signs of danger. As a submissive, I spent a long time learning what I didn’t enjoy about our relationship, what was not right for me, and that a lot of it was not because of me but rather from a disconnect in what Jeff wanted and what I was really looking for. I spent a longer time anxiously working up a voice to talk to him about things.
At first I thought that it was because he treated me as a slave rather than as a pup. Leading a full workday in a job that does sap my energy, I just could not do the chores he required of me. In the end, I realized that it was not something that I enjoyed and that I had become his slave more than his dog. So I sat with him and talked to him about this, and he agreed that I should not be his slave but rather just his dog. After this I thought things would be alright, but I did not realize that the underlying issues had not gone away, just the chores.
The mechanics of love and affection can be rife with complications and it took another year or more before I realized Jeff was not the man I wanted or needed in my life and even then a long time after that to be able to break up with him. By the end, I was so unhappy that it seemed like a chore to go see him, and that the events and entertainments we went to increasingly seemed like bribes and carrots to keep me on the hook. During these years, I excused much of his behavior because he was the Master and that what I had was the natural lot of the submissive. He seemed self-centered, distant and unemotional, and manipulative things that I came to think of as what a submissive should expect from a Master. Worse yet, I came to realize that Jeff and I never made love. It was not a matter of physical compatibility, despite physical limitations he had that I almost always overcame, but rather that it was a matter of us not really love so much as marathon sessions of me bringing him climax, after which I was left to get off however I could without his involvement. All of these factors continued to grow and accumulate and eventually I became very much weighed down with them. When it eventually got to be too much to bear alone, those I shared my troubles labeled the relationship as abusive. I am still not convinced that this was the case... but I will never know for sure.
During this period of growing dissatisfaction, a period of my life that would end with enough anxiety to impact my performance at work, I tried to find satisfaction where none existed in my relationship, by looking for it outside our relationship. Despite my collar, and a good deal of guilt for doing it, as our relationship decayed I played around, and hoped to trade up when I finally found the right top. And even with this, despite my increasingly bold statements that signaled I had played or had stepped out of line given that I was collared, he seemed oblivious to it, as if all that mattered was that he got serviced.
So I continued to play, finding physical satisfaction at bear parties, and trying out the leather bars, a venue that proved to be low action for a shy sideliner who didn’t drink and who was poor in social situations. Then I met Rod on Bear411, and I thought I had finally found true love. Rod was the one, and he would be the one who would save me from the mess I had made for myself. Although, I don’t think I ever had a chance to tell him, Rod was my first love. He was the first man who made me daydream and who made me feel all stirred up inside. I would feel irrationally exuberant at irrational moments from the most tenuous thoughts that would somehow lead my mind back to him leaving me goofy grinned for no reason other than to have thought of him. It was wonderful. Here as a man my age that a great top into leather and pup play, that quite hot and interested in me and invested real time into developing our relationship. We would talk on the phone daily, and communicate via webcam almost as often. Rd became my virtual Master. Unlike Jeff who never even bothered to name me, Rod gave me my first pup name, bacchus, and gave me my first set of tags for my collar.
But this was not to last. After a few glorious months of knowing Rod, he disappeared just before Christmas, Rod disappeared. Suddenly I got no calls, no IMs and no other forms of communication to let me know what was going on – I didn’t know if he was dead or alive at all. Eventually, from my persistent calling, he picked up the phone once, but didn’t talk. I could tell he was there, and somehow I knew it was him and that he was alive and ok. We did not talk again and eventually I knew he didn’t want me anymore but I did not know why. All I could do was I leave him an e-mail saying I didn't know what I had done wrong, or if there was something wrong in his life that he could share that perhaps we could figure out together that he should call. I told him that I would always be there for him, but he never came back to me. It was more than a year or so till I saw him online again, and even then he could not share what had happened. Though he and are still friends, and I have stuck by my commitment and have been there for him when he has needed it, I doubt I will ever know what really happened.
So after a brief glimmer of hope I was back to where I was before, with Jeff. I recovered from Rod’s abandonment, licking my wounds and went back to being unhappy with Jeff, and playing around even managing to land my first (and only) titleholder playdate – Mr. Metrobear. Then one day in June, I happened on a nice pic of a guy on Bear411 or recon or PupZone. Originally, I wasn’t going to ping him at all. His pic seemed too handsome, out of my league and he was geographically undesirable being too many hours away to make a real relationship work. But for whatever reason, I did send him a note, and that is how I met Craig.
Craig would eventually be the man I would start a new life with, the man that would be my Master, my SIR – the man for whom I gladly let loose my inner dogslave, and in return loved me truly as well. One day, in February, after a weekend visit to my SIR, I went and saw Jeff, we played as usual, and as he went to get something in the other room, I realized I could no longer deny my feelings and thought of my SIR and found the courage and strength to remove my collar. When Jeff returned into the room, I told him we had to talk, and let him know we could no longer continue as Master and dog, but rather only as friends.
I am glad to say that Jeff and I are still friends, and I do believe that he never intended to hurt me, or make me feel the way I did. I believe that it was his conception of what a Master / slave or Master / pup relationship was that was very wrong. When I finally got the wherewithal to leave him was the only time I got the clear impression that he needed me at all, and then it was too late. That he loved me in his own way probably only was clear to me at that moment. Yet even now when we speak I still feel the pull of his personality, that feeling of obligation, or manipulated to agree, when he asks me for a favor, no matter how innocuous. At the end of the day, all I can say for sure is that I was much happier person after our relationship ended and I moved on to be Craig’s dogslave.
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A music video for this post:
Madonna, The Power of Goodbye
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