I joined MenSayHi about a month after I broke up with Mike, once the gonorrhea was completely gone. I’d been celibate since my diagnosis and the horniness was building up. The first guy I answered said his name was Lenny, and that he was a muscular top into dominating other well-built, well-hung men.
I flattered myself into thinking he’d believe I fit the bill, and e-mailed him a couple of digital photos, including one of me flexing with a hard-on. My face was always in shadow; because of my very public coming-out, I had a recognition factor in the gay community and I wasn’t eager to reveal myself to a total stranger.
Lenny responded a day later and we met up at his house in Mililani, where he had a variety of toys, including dildos, vibrators, and a sling. “I thought I recognized you from your photo,” he said, when I showed up.
We had some fun together, and when we were done he said he had a friend I might like to meet. I was noncommittal, and over the next few weeks I answered a number of ads and had a lot of sex. Some of it was good, and some was bad. By the time I heard from Lenny again, I was ready for somebody who knew what he was doing, and I agreed to meet up with him and his friend.
My first impression of Mr. Hu was that he was very ordinary. A middle-aged Chinese guy wearing a business suit, he looked more like he was ready to interview me for a job than to fuck me.
But fuck me he did, after watching Lenny do the same.
I couldn’t put my finger on it then-and even now, after months of encounters, it’s hard to quantify-but there was something about him that I connected to. It was as if he got me, in some very basic way, and I reacted to that.
It was similar, in a way, to what I felt for Mike. I loved Mike, and I didn’t love Mr. Hu at all, but I felt like they were able to see into me and accept what they saw.
I couldn’t explain all that to Ray; I barely understood it myself. So I simply said that I’d met Lenny online and then he’d introduced me to Mr. Hu a little later.
“You know anything about this Lenny?” Ray asked. “Maybe he could give us a line on Mr. Hu.”
I couldn’t remember the address of the house in Mililani, but I thought I’d recognize it again if I saw it. “Let’s take a drive,” I said.
We’d just thrown away our lunch trash when my cell phone rang. “Hey, brah,” Harry said. “Island Internet owns a couple of Web sites-looks like they’re all gay porn, gay hookups. The big one is called MenSayHi. com.”
“Thanks, brah. You have an address on them?”
“In Mililani.” He read it to me and I wrote it down.
It was another gorgeous day in paradise, so we rolled up the flaps on the Wrangler and hit the H1. We were surrounded by rental cars full of vacationing tourists, going slow, changing lanes without warning. I blasted my horn a couple of times, but it was a losing proposition.
After the third time I’d tailgated some clueless vacationer, Ray said, “I know this must be weird for you, getting your sex life dragged into a case.”
“Not so weird as you’d think. I wish it weren’t this way, but I have a habit of letting my dick get me into trouble.”
“Do tell.”
“Remember I told you about that case that dragged me out of the closet? I stumbled into it because I went to the Rod and Reel Club one night and I found a body behind the club. And then when I was undercover up on the North Shore, I fooled around with a guy who ended up getting killed.” I sighed. “Sampson gave me this big lecture then, how I had to learn to separate my personal life from my cases. But is it my fault that a guy I had sex with turns out to be a criminal?”
“Sampson might suggest you be more careful about who you have sex with.”
“And how do I do that? Require a background check from every guy before I get naked with him?”
“Come on, Kimo,” Ray said, grabbing onto the door frame as I took a fast curve merging onto the H2. “You knew there was something weird with Mr. Hu from day one. And then you said he admitted he paid that guy to fuck you. I’m not trying to bust your chops, you know, but those were red flags that you just ignored.”
“I know. I ought to be a monk.”
“No. You just need to find the right guy and settle down with him.” He looked over at me. “You think the right guy is the fireman?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. If he gets his shit together.”
I pulled off the H2 and started to navigate the local streets of Mililani, trying to find my way back to Lenny’s house. I spotted a car with a bumper sticker for MenSayHi and pulled up. “Here’s our address. And I think this is Lenny’s place.”
The house was a nondescript ranch, painted beige, with a couple of scraggly hibiscus bushes with big red blossoms in the front yard. Ray and I walked up to the front door and I rang the bell. It sounded like he had a herd of dogs inside, barking like crazy. It took a couple of minutes until Lenny answered, a pair of small, furry white Pekingese yapping at his feet. “Kimo,” Lenny said. “What’s up?”
I introduced Ray. “You mind if we come in and talk?” I asked.
“Sure.” He leaned down and picked up the two dogs. “This is Bette Davis, and this is Greta Garbo,” he said, showing them off. “I’ll put them in the bedroom.”
When he wasn’t wearing his leather chaps, with studded black straps crisscrossing his chest, Lenny looked like an ordinary guy. He was about six feet tall, broad shouldered, with a bit of a gut. He was barefoot, and wore a UH T-shirt and sweats. We followed him into the living room, and when he came back we all sat down. The furniture was a mix of styles, as if he’d inherited half of it and picked up the rest at a thrift shop. If I hadn’t had sex with him, I’d have doubted he was gay.
“What can you tell us about MenSayHi?” I asked. “What’s your connection?”
“I’m the webmaster. I’ve got a ProLiant DL380 G5 Server with quad-core processors and a smart array in my spare room, with a T1 fat pipe.”
“I didn’t understand anything you said,” I said. “But what I want to know is how you’re connected to Wah Shing Corporation?”
Lenny looked wary. “Wah Shing is our corporate parent. They provided the start-up funding.”
“Is Mr. Hu behind Wah Shing?”
“What’s this all about, Kimo?”
“That’s what we need you to tell us, Lenny. We’ve got this giant jigsaw puzzle, and we’re trying to fit the pieces together.”
Lenny looked from me to Ray and back. “I knew it was too good to last,” he said. “I met Richard Hu about two years ago, online, through another site. We hooked up, and after sex we started talking. I had this idea for a Web site, and Richard provided the money.”
He sat back against the sofa. “We launched about a year and a half ago. The main site is self-supporting through ads and basic memberships. Then there’s the private site, for premium members. Streaming video, live chat, exclusive photo galleries. You know, Kimo, it’s a class site.”
“Except for the prostitution in the background,” I said.
“Hey, I don’t get involved in any of that,” Lenny said, leaning forward. “Everything I do is completely legit. All I do is provide a venue for guys to hook up. What they do after they hook up is their business, and out of my control.”
“We’re not interested in you, Lenny. We’re interested in Richard Hu. What do you know about him besides the money he provided?”
“Should I have a lawyer?” Lenny asked.
I shrugged. “That depends. If you broke the law, then yeah, you should have an attorney to protect your rights and broker a deal. But if you didn’t, all you’re doing is giving us information, and nobody ever went to jail for that.”
Lenny shifted around uncomfortably on the sofa, then said, “I don’t know much. I never let him put cameras in here. Hell, I’m not interested in being somebody’s performing monkey. If I want to have sex, I want the only people watching to be people I invite.”
“But he filmed other people?” Lenny nodded. “And then he gave you the pictures to post, didn’t he?”
His face looked like he’d swallowed something nasty. “Come on, Lenny, I recognized myself.” I saw Ray looking at me. “I know I didn’t sign any release that said you could put naked pictures of me on your site.”
“You can’t see your face,” Lenny said. “It could be anybody.”
