Boulevard

by Jim Grimsley

  In the disco one night, a man asked him to dance, a handsome man in good-quality trousers and a starched shirt, a sweater tied around his shoulders, and Newell started to say no, but the song was something he liked, Oh, let me run let me run let me run, a long, low moaning voice, Donna Summer sounding like a high wind, and a beat that coursed through him, so he let the man lead him onto the floor. Soon he was moving among the others, thankful for the music. When the song changed, the man kept dancing, and they stayed on the floor till late, the floor crowded by then, bodies pulsing against each other. Newell could feel it in himself, the change that was coming, that he was nearly ready now, that something would happen soon. So he kept dancing, till the beat was one long wave passing through his bones. When the man finally got tired, he tried to lead Newell to the bar, but Newell got his jacket instead and headed outside, and he never saw that man again.

  He was falling toward that place in himself, he could feel his descent. The process was compounded by the movies he watched at the bookstore, the dreams he made up to stimulate himself in the dark. Now that he was used to the bookstore he could feel the furtiveness of the customers, their awe as they entered, their perusing of the magazines as if they simply happened to be glancing in that direction, the hand drawn slowly to touch one of the covers, to look at the back. A certain look on the face indicated whether the man would buy or not; a certain slackness came to the jaw and a keenness to the eye. The grip of the hand on the magazine would change. Men chose their movies with the same silence, the same fixedness, and Newell could feel them, drifting from booth to booth the same way bodies had drifted back and forth in the warehouses along the riverfront.

  But he had never gone back to the booths for any reason other than the job. He had stopped buying magazines for himself. He felt himself drifting nearer and nearer a place in himself that would open out like a flower and cause the rest of him to be transformed, but the pictures and the movies were no longer what he wanted.

  When he studied Mac, he wondered what the old man was like when he climbed the stairs, when Dixie or Starla or one of the other girls met him and took him into a room for a long, careful massage. He wondered what sounds Mac made, what his body looked like, moving with the flow of pleasure through his nerves. By now, Newell had seen enough pictures, enough movies, so that he could imagine almost anything, even Mac’s white, soft body, his thin legs, and flat ass.

  “This business will make you think about fucking all the time,” Mac said one day, “to where you can’t even stand it, to where you don’t even want to think about a naked woman.” But that same day, after hiring a new guy with a face like a rat for the night shift, Mac crept up the back steps to the massage rooms and disappeared for an hour and a half.

  Louise said to Newell one evening, while they were having a drink, while he was licking the foam off the lip of the bottle, “You do know that I like women, don’t you?”

  “You like them?”

  “Oh yes. I like them very much.” She had flushed a bit and seemed suddenly younger.

  “Well, I did see you with a woman in here, once.”

  “Oh, you’re telling a fib.”

  “Yes, I did. But I couldn’t tell who it was.”

  She blinked, then shrugged.

  “Did you always like women?”

  “Oh, yes. Even when I had a husband. But he was a very nice man, for a man.”

  Later in his room, alone, he spoke to himself in a quiet voice, and even though he was alone the words unsettled him, “I like men. Did you know I like men?” He said them aloud a couple of times and sat on the new chair he had bought, beside the window, where he could watch the street below.

  He dressed carefully, imitating styles he had seen on the streets and in the bars. He wore a tight, white sleeveless T-shirt, tight jeans, and a flannel shirt. He inspected himself in the mirror and thought he had nice shoulders, nice arms. He combed his hair the way Chris, his barber, had taught him. He touched behind his ears with the cologne that smelled like cut clover, and he stuffed some bills in his pocket and locked his door. He thought he was good looking; he carried that with him down the steps.

  He avoided places where he would have found Henry, visiting a couple of bars he had never seen before, then spent the late part of the evening in a bar called Blacksmith’s. Men were coming up to him that night and talking to him, he had been talking to them, he felt easy about it, and he wondered what the change was about, though he had his suspicions. In Blacksmith’s he had been sitting alone for while when a dark-skinned man approached him and started talking to him, and something about the moment made Newell aware of the man in a particular way, as though taking his scent. A strong face with a heavy shadow of beard, his nappy hair tinged with red, cut close to his head. He had a thick body, wide round shoulders. He was as old as Jesse, Flora’s boyfriend, or maybe a few years younger than that, but his body was hard and lean, and there was something familiar about him, Newell figured he must have seen the guy before. He eased next to Newell at the bar to speak to him in deep whispers, drawing closer as he spoke. What stuff he said! You’re about the prettiest thing in this bar. You got the prettiest mouth. Do you know how pretty you are? I come into town looking for something just like you. Can’t believe there’s a handsome thing like you sitting in here all by yourself. Can’t believe you don’t belong to one of these men in here, can’t believe somebody doesn’t already own you, body and soul. I’d be the one to take care of you if I lived around here. Don’t you want to come with me? Don’t you have somewhere we can go? Do you want another drink?

  They drank another drink and another, and Newell stopped drinking after that, and listened, kept the man close, felt himself wanting to get up from the stool to go with the man, while the night deepened and the bar filled. His name was Jerry Thibodeaux, and he was an off-shoreman home for a few days. His wife wanted him to stay home and kiss her ass, but he had to go out. His wife probably knew exactly where he was, but he had no choice, he had to find out if there was somebody waiting, and now he knew. By now Jerry was pressed close against Newell, and when Jerry talked he sometimes leaned in so that his lips brushed against Newell’s ear. The sensation was transfixing, worse than any alcohol, and when Newell laid his hands on Jerry’s chest, Jerry sagged and sighed and Newell felt a force binding them, and when he moved his hands Jerry’s eyes glazed, the power of it, all that power flowing in Newell’s hands.

  He had come to the point, and now he moved. They would not go anywhere, they would stay here. He unbuttoned Jerry’s flannel shirt and slid his hands inside to ease it open, and it was like a movie as he moved, one of the good ones, his hands easing open the shirt, the tight shot of the hard brown body, the corded stomach, the thick, hairy chest, and then Jerry gripping him hard at the back and Newell relaxing, like it was being filmed and he knew what to do. He knew it really was a movie now because a space was clearing around them at the bar, as Newell opened Jerry’s shirt and reached his hands in Jerry’s pants; the movie was about the hard, lean, older man and his need for the tender, choice, young one in front of him, and Newell saw the scenes in his head, everything coming together, the man’s ginger kisses and Newell descending along the lean body, sliding down Jerry’s pants, taking his dark tender tongue of meat from inside, kissing it till it grew and everybody was watching, and in the middle of the action Newell saw himself as though he were one of the people watching, and he was amazed to see how much he had learned on the job at the bookstore, because he copied the motions perfectly. Jerry was sagging back against the bar with his hips going up and down, that tension so perfect, so urgent, the cock rigid in Newell’s mouth, Newell moving on it, people watching and some of them starting to grope each other, but most simply rapt. Only when Newell had to swallow the stuff, or try to, did he falter, choking some and pulling back, then drying his mouth afterward with a napkin the bartender handed him. Jerry hung onto the bar while some friendly men moved affectionately close to him and ran their hands
along his body, as if to thank him for what he had done. The bartender brought Newell a drink on the house. Newell washed away the peppery taste in his mouth. He sipped the drink, but felt his head clear, completely sober.

  They would talk about the kid who gave the blow job at Blacksmith’s last night, did you see that? Maybe some of them knew him from the bookstore. They were still staring at him now to see what he would do next.

  There, in the shadows, even his boyfriend was watching, the boy he would meet soon, whose name was Mark.

  Jerry was surrounded by his own admirers now, and Newell walked away without saying good-bye, without responding to anybody. He walked outside, rubbing a spot of drying semen from the corner of his mouth, sipping the liquor and walking to the Moonwalk, where he listened to the ships’ horns till nearly morning.

  The Green Tree

  Miss Sophia was glad when Mac moved Newell to the night shift, after the shiftless Ratboy was finally gone for good, because, of course, Miss Sophia cleaned the bookstore on that shift, and she had liked Newell from the first time she met him, although she never said so to him or to anybody else. For the most part she had very little to say to people. But Newell she liked, because of the look in his eyes when he stood at the cash register making change, while Miss Sophia wielded mop, broom, and sponge. She had hated Ratboy worse than anything, even worse than Louis, but she liked Newell. She studied him the first few evenings, and the very first night she noticed a difference in the way he held his body from the times she had seem him on the day shift. She thought to herself, he is getting ripe. He is starting to look nice.

  Miss Sophia had the mop wringer to worry with and paid no more mind to Newell for a while, till that fat friend of his came in, the one with the swishy walk and the pot belly, thin hair at the top, which was often attractive on a man, but not on this man, who was far from a hunk or a stud in Miss Sophia’s book. Right away Henry Carlton started in on Newell. Miss Sophia learned his name when Newell said it, and from that time on she thought of him as both names, Henry Carlton, a pale woodchuck, she thought, or even worse, a mole, a flat one, tunneling under the dirt looking for grubs.

  Henry said to Newell—and he was actually moving his puffy white hands like he was digging, and Miss Sophia happened to be wringing out the mop nearby and listened—“I was looking for you at the Corral last night. Did you stay home?”

  “Oh no,” Newell said, “I went out,” and told the story of what he had done, and Miss Sophia was nodding as he told the story of the big hunk in the Blacksmith’s bar. All the men in the Blacksmith’s bar were big hunks as far as Miss Sophia was concerned. She walked by there, in the way that she walked by many places, and at Blacksmith’s men were hanging all out the doors all hours of the day and night. So she was hardly surprised Newell would go there and do what he had done, find a complete stranger and have sex with him right in the bar. Miss Sophia had seen this kind of thing happen very often in that bar and in other bars. But neither was she surprised when Henry Carlton became instantly jealous. Henry’s brow furrowed and he started to grind his jaw. “We never go to Blacksmith’s. You must have been drunk.”

  “No, I didn’t have that much to drink.”

  “You knew I was waiting for you.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You liar. You know I’m always at the Corral waiting for you. And you went to Blacksmith’s and sucked somebody’s cock. Jesus.”

  “Henry, you do it all the time.”

  He fell silent, staring fixedly into the glass counter. “Who was it?”

  “Some old man.”

  “Old?”

  “Not as old as you are. But really nice. He was really nice.”

  “You sucked his dick out in the middle of the bar?”

  “I sure did.”

  “You’re trash,” Henry shook his head. “I guess I ought to remember that. You’re exactly the kind of trash that comes here from Alabama.”

  “You do the same thing in the bathroom nearly every night we go out.”

  “Well, at least, I’m in the bathroom.”

  Newell shrugged. He was writing the prices on the stickers for the new magazines like Cock Lust, Babes Away, Mama’s Got More, and Big Juicy, for the corner with the big-breasted-women magazines that Miss Sophia found to be distasteful, though she cleaned that part of the store as carefully as any other.

  “Alabama is a very nice state,” Miss Sophia said, “though it was not one of the original thirteen colonies of the United States.”

  “That’s right,” Newell said, “there’s nothing wrong with coming from Alabama, is there, Miss Sophia? You tell him.”

  But she already had. Henry Carlton was giving her such an ugly look, too, as though she were not welcome, when she knew perfectly well that she was, because she worked here, after all, and she had been working here for many years, so many years that really, she had no idea of the number, or when she had started the job, who had been the president at the time, or any of the questions they would use to interrogate her when they took her in, and this confused her, but the mop handle was heavy in her hand and it led her back to the floor, where she started mopping again, saying, “Franklin Roosevelt was the president,” she said, “when I started working here. Franklin Delaney Roosevelt.”

  They were laughing, but she knew what she knew.

  “That was the year I was Queen of Carnival,” she said.

  They could think what they liked. Newell said, though, and she listened because she had already started to like him, “Miss Sophia, it don’t seem like you could be old enough to have worked here all the way since then.”

  She was walking the mop bucket across the store to the novelties section, which would have to be dusted soon. “I’m older than I look. It’s been that way all my life.”

  Henry Carlton left the store, but she had the feeling she would be seeing him again. He was one of them that looked at the ground while he walked, nearly slumped over. You had to have misgivings about a man like that, Miss Sophia thought.

  Sometimes she could see the future, sometimes she only thought she could. That night, looking across the store at Newell, so pretty in his blue sweater, that nice neck rising out of the collar so touchable, she had the feeling something was coming. She had the feeling Newell was coming onto the night shift to bring a change.

  All night she cleaned and watched Newell, his motion so neat, his hair combed just right, his slender fingers counting the quarters. The hunks and studs who came in the place to look at the dirty movies in the back, they were noticing Newell, too. “Where’s that guy with the snout usually works here at night,” one of the studs asked, or he might have been a hunk, “looks like a mouse.”

  “Ben didn’t show up,” Newell said, dripping quarters through his fingers, “so I’m on nights till we hire somebody. Six nights a week.”

  “You cute thing, you. Aren’t we the lucky ones?”

  Newell smiled and leaned on the cash register. “Next in line.” Holding out his hand, the tender palm lightly callused at the base of the fingers.

  She told Mac the next day, came in early to tell him, wearing her white chiffon with the satin bodice, a ribbon tied at the back. Wearing her soft white flats, pretty little things, and so comfortable. She told Mac, “I like that boy on nights. You keep him there.”

  “You mean Newell, Miss Sophia? I was thinking to hire somebody else for the nights and bring him back to days.”

  “Oh no, you leave him,” she said.

  “You ain’t getting any ideas about him, you dirty old man.”

  Miss Sophia waved her hand at him and headed away.

  She dusted the novelty counters that night, the long Caucasian-colored dildos, the chocolate ones, the fringed plastic pussies with hair, which she dusted with the same care as the men’s organs, because they were there and she was a professional. She dusted the novelties most of the night, each and every carton of French ticklers, every bottle of Rush, and the whole night she watched Newe
ll work, and so did Mac, who stayed late himself, smoking cigarettes in the carriageway and keeping an eye on things from the background.

  Late in the evening he introduced Newell to Gus and Stoney, the men who kept an eye on the passageways that led from the courtyard of this building to adjacent streets. Mac watched the customers perusing the books, lining up to get quarters, some of them lining up two or three times so they could flirt with Newell a moment, sometimes even the sad husbands and fathers who came to watch the titty movies, the lonely ones who could not get enough love at home, sometimes even one of the titty men would flirt with Newell a heartbeat or two. Miss Sophia saw, and Mac saw, or must have, since he announced to Lafayette, the man who looked after the girls upstairs during the evenings, “Newell is probably going to take over on nights from now on. You need to look after him when you’re here. Let him know where to find you if he gets any trouble.”

  “He been on days for a while,” Gus said.

  “Yep. He’s the most regular one I’ve had in a long time.”

  “Be nice to have somebody who can count.”

  “You’re fucking preaching to the choir here,” Mac pulling at a jet black nose hair. “That midget rat-head son of a bitch come up short in the register every goddamn night.”

  “Where you reckon he is?”

  “I hope the motherfucker is dead in the bayou, that’s what I hope. If he shows his Cajun ass around here, you need to hurt him pretty good.”

  It was a good thing Miss Sophia heard that part, too, because only a couple of nights later, Ratboy did show up, sauntering himself at the hips like he always did, like he even had anything to carry down there, and them jeans needing to be washed for a month. First he stood in the light near the dildo case and blinked like he could not believe his eyes, then he spit on the carpet like the common stuff he was. He went plunking across the carpet with that rabbit walk of his, that narrow ass riding against his tailbone; he stopped right behind the cash register and glared at Newell and said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”