I was at Pony the other night and—after managing to give myself a blister playing Ms. PacMan with the husband—I flipped through an ancient (1984) copy of Drummer, a defunct porn-and-personals mag for gay men into leather and SM, that Pony's management had thoughtfully set out on the bar. I flipped back to the classifieds to see if there were any ads from Washington State. There were three: one from a 29-year-old Master seeking a slave/lover, one from a leather daddy seeking a "personal cuntslave," and one from a novice slave seeking his first Master. The last ad included a 329 phone number. You can see it there in the above image—click to enlarge—although I've blurred the last four digits out.

"This is a business phone now, sorry," said the man who answered when I called. "We are an engineering firm in Eastlake."

When I asked if there are any kinky novices at that number looking to get "broken in," the man who owns the number laughed and said, "No, no, we're an engineering firm."

There are no kinky engineers.

I didn't expect to reach the same person who placed that ad in Drummer more than 26 years ago—a man who would be pushing sixty today, if he was lucky enough to survive the plague years—but I did kinda hope I would. People do sometimes manage to hold on to phone numbers for years and years. And if the W/M Novice held on through the plague years, and had managed to hold on to the same phone number, I would've asked him how that personal ad worked out for him. Did he find the man he was looking for? Was he satisfied with his breaking in? Is he still out there kinking it up or has he worked all of his kinks out?

Anyway, that's an engineering firm's number now, not a kinky gay man's, so we'll never know what went down. But here's hoping that the W/M Novice 30—wherever he is—found the Master he was looking for and got the breaking in he desired.