Ten years later–eight of which I spent in New York–I am back in the San Francisco Bay Area, driving up and down the El Camino Real as the newly crowned King of Sex. 

The El Camino Real has many names. Its direct translation from Spanish to English is “The Royal Road,” or “The King’s Highway.” Before it was the road that connected twenty-one Spanish missions on the West Coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was a Native American trade route. Legend has it, The Padres used to spread non-native, invasive mustard seeds along the road, creating a pathway of golden flowers. No one can definitively prove if that's true, but what is true is that when I was eighteen, I started cruising up and down a portion of the King’s Highway spreading my own seed.

The El Camino Real is one of three main traffic arteries connecting the North Bay to the South Bay. It is the one with all the stop lights, cutting through all the neighborhoods and towns, it runs parallel to the more expedient US-101 freeway. It extends further, ending somewhere six hundred miles south, near the California-Tijuana border. But the stretch I'm most familiar with is between San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south.

Now, I'm cruising along the roadways in a foolish looking blue Volkswagen Beetle convertible. My Bochito. It’s an old car with shitty speakers and I prefer to drive with a soundtrack. In my headphones, the guitar squeals, twangs and plucks as Tina Turner’s guttural voice roars defiance at the stalking worries and troubles she smells up ahead. 

I didn't want to return to The Bay, but the pandemic set off a chain reaction of events that forced me to make an unheralded return to My Hometown. If I am, indeed, the King of Sex, the El Camino Real and The Bay Area would be the undisputed territory of my origin story.

My Hometown can be found on the western shore of the San Francisco Bay, technically isochronic–if you take the freeway–from two of the three major cities in the area: San Francisco and San Jose. Since my return to The Bay, I’ve been underemployed and floundering, and the slow northbound cruise up the El Camino Real, passing by all the downtown neighborhoods that inevitably spit out into the thruway, is a decent way to pass the time. 

Shortly after graduating high school, I traded my virginity for HIV with an Indian man in the South Bay that I met on Craigslist–but, the first man that I would regularly fuck lived in an apartment on El Camino, at the northern border of My Hometown and the next. 

There, up on the right is a white Anglican church. That’s where I used to park my car. I’d cross the street and wait at the side gate of his apartment complex to be let in. I couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. He was a Married White Guy, somewhere past thirty who managed a burger spot at the mall. We always met in the middle of the night and he always led me to the gym of the apartment complex because his husband was sleeping upstairs. I can’t remember if they were open or not. I can remember that I didn’t care.

-The Story Continues in “Cruising Diaries by the King of Sex”…–