100% Clean

This isn't what normal people do—especially not people in their mid-20s.

Jan 12, 2025

This is a chapter from I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia.

But you can jump in here! The “previously on” will get you up to speed.

Previously on I Hear You Watching…
While masturbating, Alex heard a voice mock him out his apartment window, which made him consider his loneliness and the “perversity” of his animal instincts. He discussed the incident with his friends Gavin and Eli. Gavin suggested he try to socialize and meet someone, possibly online. Eli suggested that’s only for creeps.

A black line drawing of Alex Porter, the protagonist of "I Hear You Watching." He is white, short messy parted hair, glasses. He stares straight at you, unsmiling. Behind him is a grid of gray, anonymous female avatars.

At home, Gavin’s words echo in my mind—the internet’s a big place. Lot of people in the same boat.

Los Angeles is a gigantic boat, carrying four million passengers. I can’t be the only lonely person among them.

They’re all fifty-year-old married men, butts in imaginary Eli.

Looking up dating sites, I think, this isn’t what normal people do—especially not people in their mid-20s—search the internet for a partner. I feel like a creep in a sea of creeps.

I remember the stranger’s laugh out my window.

Between me doing something in my own home, and my neighbor watching me do it, who is the real creep?

Imaginary Gavin says, Your neighbor’s a perv.

But I was the one masturbating. If I’d just been cooking dinner or reading a book while they watched, the question of “which one of us is the perv” wouldn’t come up at all.

I once watched a clip of a woman on a couch having sex with a standing man, and I couldn’t stop staring at his legs. I masturbated in the opportune intervals: closeups of the penetration, faces and sounds she made in time with the movements, the way her breasts bounced and her nipples traced circles like the eyes of a cartoon character after a blow to the head. Then I’d see a wide shot of him standing there. His belly didn’t bulge but clearly gathered at the bottom. His thighs were round like hairy hog backs, and his calves curved like fish bellies to the shifting egg sacs of his ankles. His feet settled flat on the floor like fistfuls of dough.

These visions triggered words: homunculus, hominid, biped, organism…

His legs tensed, almost breathed, muscles and tendons boiling as he pumped fertilizer into the receptive female, and I imagined the narration of an old science newsreel: Behold man’s strongest link to the rest of the animal kingdom, Porno erectus. Here we see a specimen in the act of procreation.

The thing pulled itself out of the woman, and its genital wand bobbed the way a parade horse’s does when it pisses on the street. Then it squished its doughy pads on the hardwood floor to position itself at the other end of the couch and held the woman’s head. The tendons moving in its hands looked like bat wings, and I stopped the video.

Most people don’t see it this way.

I am not a “porno erectus,” I’m just human. My desire for sex doesn’t make me gross or a pervert or a bad person. Everybody pees. Everyone masturbates. Why am I ashamed of these things?

I thought of signing up myself, imaginary Gavin says. He’s my age, and this is something people our age are doing now.

But I need to find a place where sexual interest is stated up front, so I can get out of my head and meet someone eye-to-eye.

Where are all the open, honest people on the internet?

After more research and hesitation, I choose AdultXXXPlaydate.com. The membership fee is discounted for the first six months with a money-back guarantee: “If you don’t get laid, we don’t get paid!” I don’t bother to read the fine print on how they handle those claims.

A popup asks if I’m 18. Then I enter my email address—one I created for use on this site—and another popup interrupts to tell me “Sherri” is waiting for me on her webcam and is “lonely and ready to party,” along with a video image of a woman using a green vibrator that I don’t watch long enough to know if it’s an animated GIF, prerecorded, or piped in from somewhere else. Maybe Sherri’s really there, but she definitely isn’t waiting for me.

Login opens a welcome marquee, followed by two banner ads for “sexy singles in the area” and a website for discounted sex toys—the image is a whip on display behind multicolored butt plugs lined up in a rainbow.

Below that is the real content: rows and rows of profiles and a number of ways to filter, categorize, and search. It’s a gridwork wilderness of fanning feathers, distending vocal sacs, poses and dances, the human animal expressing its completely natural desire for physical companionship.

Some profiles are just a photo of breasts bubbling from a wet tank top and sprinkled with glitter. Many are body shots in varying levels of nakedness—bikini, nothing at all, open robe, electrical tape Xes on nipples, mix-and-matched pieces of cheap Halloween costumes. One woman with full sleeve tattoos taped leaves to herself and poses like a statue in a small yard with a Weber grill behind her.

Most of the photos were taken in fluorescent-lit bathroom mirrors, or yellow bedroom light through murky lo-fi webcams. A few are grainy, ghostly faces or breasts in dark rooms, dusted with the chalky blue glow of the computer screen.

One woman fills her lingerie like sandbags stacked for a flash flood and her smile burns with confidence.

I open an older couple’s profile. In the first photo the man is just a pair of thick, pasty legs the woman straddles. In the next he’s a large gut and droopy knees edging into frame behind her while she arches her back, her own gut nearly grazing the rumpled floral-print comforter like a milk-full udder.

I marvel at their boldness.

In another profile a woman pushes things into herself while seated on her apartment balcony. I wonder if her neighbors saw her. And I wonder if she knew.

All the couples I see are heterosexual (or labeled bisexual, but the photos are invariably of a man and woman). I wonder whether lesbians were driven away by messages from guys requesting threesomes or offering to “turn them straight.”

Conversely, when I toggle the filter there’s an avalanche of gay men. Pages upon pages of sculpted pecs and abs, erect penises both shaven and bushy, selfies on motorcycles or sailboats, on black leather couches in boxer briefs, older men with bodies like bruised pears, young men with shy smiles aimed next to or below their webcams. Some photos have the faces blurred out.

Whether heterosexual or homosexual, almost all of the men who show small penises look to be over fifty, and are either rail-thin or buddha-round.

But despite all this apparent honesty, I now realize there must be as many lies here as on a regular dating site. The pretty, girl-next-door-looking women feel like catfish profiles created by older men.

Lots of profiles make a point of specifying that the person is “clean.” If a woman shows her vagina in a photo, why do I assume she’s more or less likely to have an STD? Sure, the pose implies heightened promiscuity and therefore a higher possibility of having contracted a disease, but if a woman holds her breasts, or is fully clothed and smiling, or smooches at the camera, couldn’t she be hiding visible indications of disease? It’s easy to take a photo between outbreaks. Some diseases are invisible.

The more I look at these people—into these people—the less I know about them.

After an hour and a half looking at photos of naked people reflected in smudgy mirrors, opening their legs on unmade beds, standing in apartments with time-stained walls or stacks of boxes in the corner or a cat tree with torn carpet and sisal cord unraveling from its pillars, a lethargy comes like hot molasses behind my eyes.

My mind buzzes from the sheer amount of work on display: the putting forth of one’s assets to attract a sexual partner, the effort to wear something revealing or titillating, the care taken to arrange oneself, to set the timer on the camera and pose quickly, or to have someone else take the photo.

Paradoxically, there’s a complete lack of awareness about dried toothpaste specks on the mirror, half-empty plastic bottles of cloudy liquid standing around the sink, clumps of hair trailing from a brush in a puddle on the bathroom counter. These are human animals in all their glory, captured in their various caves and hovels. Brazen.

I can learn from them.

In my desk chair next to my unmade bed, wearing only a T-shirt and boxers, I examine my own cave. The walls are the typical off-white of low-rent apartments, and they’re bare, which makes the room feel small. Then there are the sheets of aluminum foil I put over the bedroom window to help me sleep during the day. They crackle now in the breeze, as if acknowledging my attention. The intermittent whir of a tool from the nearby auto body shop seeps through the foil, trailed by the smell of hot rubber.

I’m heavy in my chair. I feel lived-in.

My username is “ZekeJones1986”—fake name, real birth year—and my profile has three photos.

1: I stand in my living room smiling. Pomade in my hair for the first time in a while, parted on the right but mussed to avoid looking too square. I have a two-week beard, the edges of which I trimmed on my cheeks and neck. I clipped the nose hair curling out my nostrils. I’m wearing my glasses. I have contacts, but I haven’t used them since I started working nights, so wearing them in a profile photo would feel dishonest.

I’m only slightly sucking in my stomach.

I’m wearing my favorite T-shirt—a pen-and-ink portrait by the cartoonist Robert Crumb of the blues musician Robert Johnson holding his guitar, a cigarette at a slant in his mouth.

Visible on the shelf behind me were dusty books from college—East Asian Ethical Thought, L.A. the Fiction, The Foundations of Screenwriting, Beowulf, etc.—not the collection of a real reader, so I switched them around with my eyes closed to keep from consciously forcing an agenda. Kafka and Vonnegut wound up next to each other, which I worried might look pretentious or cliché, but I left them that way to avoid overthinking it.

I hope I appear kind, respectable, and intelligent, with eclectic interests.

I was careful to turn my vertical blinds to let in ambient light but block the neighbors’ view of me taking pictures of myself. The site’s emphasis on “singles in your area” means there’s a small chance the stranger who saw me masturbating could have a profile on here too, and could recognize me.

2: Next is a shot I took while camping. I’m sitting against a tree. My jeans have holes in the knees, my black T-shirt is lightly sweat-dampened, and my floppy hat hangs on the back of my neck. There’s no pomade in my hair, but repeated force and natural oils provide my right-handed part. The canopy behind me is mottled green with bursts of light.

I hope I look like someone who exercises, enjoys escaping into nature, and doesn’t buy into the 24-hour preening vanity of L.A.

3: The third photo is intended to round out my presentation of self.

I’m in the driveway at Eli’s birthday party wearing an orange-and-brown plaid collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Pomade in my hair. The side of Eli’s house is light blue behind me, so I look like a maple tree on a clear fall day. Eli’s arm reaches into frame as if to snatch the beer bottle nearing my mouth. I don’t see this because I’m raising an eyebrow at the camera.

I hope people see a guy with a silly side, who likes drinks with friends.

That night at work I draft my bio. When I get home in the morning and read it a few more times it says:

Hello!

I’m new to this kind of thing. The site, I mean—haha. Interested in meeting people and seeing what happens. Feel free to send me a message.

I am 100% clean, always use protection.

You can see I like hiking and reading. I work nights, so I’m available during the day and on weekends.

I look forward to meeting you!

When that long-ago fish grew legs and crawled from the sludge, did it have any inkling of this moment? Was there a twinkle in the patch of photosensitive cells on its head that saw its descendant millions of years in the future, hunched and sweating in front of an electronic screen, transmitting black-and-white squiggles to negotiate sexual congress with other members of the species?

I have no idea what I’m doing.