Can't Buy Me Love

by Chris Kenry

  “Exactly.”

  And thus she was off on her next campaign, through which my father and Mr. Matsumoto suffered terribly. She decided to sell something for which there was clearly a high demand and came to the conclusion that the market was crying out for mastiff puppies. A fact she was well aware of, having paid almost one thousand dollars each for hers.

  Although my parents were more or less satisfied with my facade, Andre and my sister were less gullible.

  “Girl, I know you’re up to something tricky,” Andre said one day as I picked up the check from lunch. “But as long as you’re paying ...”

  And paying I was! The microbusiness class was teaching me all about personal finance, and I made up a budget and payment plan to get myself out of debt. I made huge monthly payments to credit card companies, slowly punching down the balances, and one day I even released my cards from their icy prisons, only to execute them, once and forever, with scissors, although I did spare one, my very first Visa, to which I had a sentimental attachment, but for emergency use only, of course.

  17

  MY OWN PRIVATE MADISON AVENUE

  After I’d been working steadily for about two months, business began to drop off. Although most of the clients Ray had sent my way were very happy with my services, they also wanted variety, and after two months I was no longer a novelty. They would visit me three or four times, sample what I had to offer, but then, like travelers on a ten-day tour of Europe, were eager to see the next city. Not all clients were so fickle, thank God. These more conservative and loyal men had reached a level of comfort with me and saw no reason to look elsewhere. It’s not that they didn’t like variety, but that they liked the intimacy that developed between us over time, and in that intimacy there was a different type of variety. After a few visits, I knew what they liked and how they liked it, and they came to appreciate my memory and my techniques. There were probably ten or so of these loyal clients, who came at least once every two weeks, and though I was grateful for their patronage, they were not enough to pay my bills.

  Three-ways with Ray were another good source of income, and we did them as often as possible now that I was less inhibited, but they too were becoming fewer and farther between. What we needed was a steady stream of new business to augment the regulars. What we came up with, Ray and I, was an elaborate plan to start marketing ourselves.

  Contrary to what I had told my father at dinner, word of mouth was not an effective means of advertising sex for sale. Somehow it seemed implausible that Suburban Joe, pausing in his weekend lawn mowing, would lean over the fence and tell Suburban Bob about the great cock he’d sucked the other day.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, it was just perfect, not too long but ample, ya know, satisfying, and the price was really reasonable.”

  And thank God these conversations didn’t take place, because if Suburban Joe ever realizes that Suburban Bob is after the same thing, then they’ll probably just service each other, and that certainly wouldn’t be good for business. No, our marketing would have to be less oral.

  Since moving to Denver two years ago, Ray had advertised only twice, each time placing small, pictureless ads in one of the local gay papers offering escort services. From these, he had established a relatively loyal clientele, but he too saw the need for an aggressive marketing plan, as his taxidermy was eating up more money, and the good turn he’d done me by sending several of his clients my way was not doing much for his wallet.

  In the microbusiness class we had spent several weeks discussing and developing different advertising and marketing strategies, so I knew all about the importance of finding my target market and researching the competition.

  “Don’t be shy about calling up your competitors and pretending you’re a client,” Tina said one day in class. “If you become successful, I guarantee they’ll be calling you. And be sure and call more than one and compare their prices; that way you can do a better job deciding what you’re going to charge.”

  Until then, I had thought that picking Ray’s brain on the subject of pricing was all the research I needed to do, but as our services became more specialized and unique, even he would sometimes shrug his shoulders and admit that he really wasn’t sure how much we should charge. With that in mind, we decided to follow Tina’s advice and do some research, which was not as easy as it sounds. Since pricing in our line of business is by nature vague and fluid, I couldn’t really call up other hustlers and ask them outright how much they charged for a blow job or an hour of sex. If they were anything like me they charged more to people they didn’t particularly like or who wanted them to do things they were not really keen to do. On the other hand, if they had a sentimental streak, they probably charged less to the really cute ones, or the ones they felt sorry for. With this in mind, I decided not to call other hustlers but to study their ads closely, and to interview my clients about their experiences with them.

  Scanning the classifieds in the gay papers I noticed that ads for prostitution fell under three categories: massage, model, and escort. Some of the massage ads were clearly legitimate, picturing the face of the masseuse and using specific technical terms like Reiki, or shiatsu, or deep-tissue reflexology, none of which sounded very sexual to me. Other ads, those with headless pictures, or no pictures at all, offered massage in the nude, and listed the physical dimensions of the masseuse. These ads were obviously offering prostitution, and the fact that there were pages and pages of them indicated that they were an effective way to generate business. But I knew nothing about massage, except that I liked getting one and hated giving one, so that didn’t seem the way to go.

  The ads for models and escorts were less veiled. Again, the pictures were nearly always headless photos of well-defined, well-oiled torsos in skimpy underwear, or no underwear at all but with a large piece of black tape censoring the groin area. Some ads actually included the head of their subject, but these were rare, and when they did appear, the guy was usually pictured looking down or wearing sunglasses and a ball cap to conceal his identity. The ads that were the most explicit—those that showed the entire face, unadorned and promising impossibly large penises—were usually for escort agencies. These were easy to spot, as their graphics and lettering were always a little more sophisticated, and they often featured a recognizable porn star as their model. I asked some of my clients about their experiences with these agencies and was told they were notoriously disappointing, never delivering anything close to what they advertised (which explained why so many of the independent hustlers often included the urgent statement “This is me!” under their photos). The boys from the agencies (and they were almost always very young boys) were not very good-looking, were often drug addicted, and usually did not enjoy, or even pretend to enjoy, what they were doing. Their price was never less than a hundred dollars, and that amount was paid in full to the agency beforehand, leaving the client uncertain how much money the boy was actually getting. I later learned that they sometimes got forty percent, but more often than not it was thirty, or even twenty. Better than flipping burgers, but only just.

  “They almost always try to gouge more out of you,” one seasoned client told me wearily. “You’ve already paid the agency, but still the kid’ll try and nickel and dime you to death. ‘If you want to do this it will cost extra.’ ‘If you want to do that it will cost extra.’ Hell, it’s easier to troll the park or go to one of the bars on Broadway and pick up a street hustler. At least it cuts out the middleman.”

  Which brings up yet another class of prostitute, although one that caters to clients in a lower income bracket than mine. The street hustler is a guy who does no advertising, other than posing on a park bench or a bar stool, and has often turned to prostitution out of desperation. Not that I didn’t, too, but there are levels of desperation, and theirs is the lowest. They are always young, usually dirty, and very often not even gay. These are the Dickensian characters I’d expected to find at the food stamp office. The boys who run away from home, enter
a life of crime in the big city, and have been the subject of countless TV docudramas. You see them hitchhiking on the edge of the road, making hopeful eye contact with the cruising driver, or hanging around public rest rooms, never getting more than ten or twenty dollars for their services. Often they do it in trade for a meal and a place to stay, or, as Ray had done in the beginning, for drugs.

  The next category, my category, was the independent hustler: the guy who runs a small business with himself as the product/service. Within this category are several subcategories, catering to the many sexual whims and yens of the human male.

  One of the largest of these (judging by the number of ads) is for men who want older, larger, hairier men. The top men. The daddies. The bears. Rugged masculinity personified. The men you’d imagine hunting for big game in Africa or chopping down trees in the Pacific Northwest. Men who will take charge and tell you, the client, what to do, instead of vice versa. In their ads they wear ripped flannel shirts and denim jeans, or black leather chaps and body harnesses. Often they’re dressed in uniforms—as cops or firemen or construction workers—and their photos are usually no-nonsense frontal shots, emphasizing their size or body hair. The text underneath invariably promises to deliver all the masculinity and dominance that go along with their uniforms, and invariably they have the one-syllable names—Dirk or Jake or Hank—usually reserved for gas station attendants.

  Although my name was one syllable, I still had the peachy complexion and hairlessness of youth, which is what the men that called me wanted. I was the young, clean-cut, boy-next-door type. The college student. The young athlete. The Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement. With that in mind, I put the focus of my study on the ads featuring guys like me, of which there was, unfortunately, no shortage. I thumbed through page after page after page of provocative ads, all featuring young, hairless, well-oiled abdominals, each almost indistinguishable from the next. These pictures were each placed over a small box of text listing (somewhat redundantly, I thought) the physical dimensions of the boy pictured, his first name (usually Jimmy or Michael or Christopher), and a phone or pager number. I studied these ads closely and tried to think of ways to improve on them. It wasn’t hard.

  For the most part, the ads were straightforward—what you see is what you get, no surprises—which is, to a certain extent, what the majority of clients want. And yet, all of these “boy ads” seemed to be lacking something—a mystique, a fantasy, a gimmick, I guess—and for that reason they all blended together like a naughty collage. The daddies were not so monochromatic. They had gimmicks. They used props and costumes and words to great effect, but my competition seemed to think that youth and beauty, plain set, was enough of an enticement. I did not agree.

  When I’d finished studying the ads, I turned the focus on myself and made an assessment of what I had to offer. I looked in the mirror and was not disappointed to see a blond version of Robbie from My Three Sons looking back at me. I was young, square-jawed, wholesome, well built, educated, and athletic. What I needed was a way to convey all that information in one picture and a few words.

  Ray and I discussed all of this extensively, and, after doing some additional research into advertising rates for the local papers, decided to compose three of our own picture ads. He would do one, I would do one, and we would do one featuring the two of us.

  In preparation for our photo shoot, I led Ray, kicking and screaming all the way, to the gym for a few workouts. His body was fine—lean and taut—but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to firm it up a bit and give his muscles some definition. It was hardly worth it. One would think that someone who had, more than once, been under the tatooist’s needle, and who had also somehow endured the pain of having a bolt put through his tongue, would be able to take the pain of a little muscle strain, but for that week and the week following, he moved as slowly and whined as loudly as poor arthritic Hole ever had.

  Our first ads were relatively conservative and required little as far as props or costumes. In mine, my upper body appeared sweaty and speckled with mud, and was photographed in a twisting profile, captured in the act of catching a pass. I wore an impossibly tight pair of shorts (emblazoned with the insignia of an East Coast prep school), which accentuated both the bulge of my cock and the firmness of my ass, while at the same time exposing my abdominals, my pecs, and my biceps. In my right hand I clutched a weathered football. Under this picture, in block capitals, were the words COLLEGE JOCK, my first name, my cell phone number, and my pager number.

  Ray’s ad was more difficult to come up with. He wasn’t really rough trade, but wasn’t exactly the type you’d take home to meet Mother, either, so we decided to imitate one of the construction worker ads we’d seen in a magazine from L.A. First we dressed him in a pair of old cutoffs, leaving the top button suggestively undone. We covered his naked chest and arms in baby oil, to mimic sweat, and photographed him in the action of swinging a sledgehammer. His head was visible but his face was not, shielded by a bright yellow hard hat. It wasn’t completely original, but it looked okay.

  For the duo ad, we sat down and composed a list of all the famous male duos we could think of: Lewis and Clark, Laurel and Hardy, Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Siegfried and Roy ... but the duo we finally decided on, because they seemed the most emblematic of the “naughty boyishness” we felt we were trying to push, was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

  The costumes for this were quite simple—ripped cutoffs, ratty straw hats, corncob pipes clenched tightly in our teeth—and we posed in front of a quickly painted backdrop of the Mississippi. We faced forward, each with an arm affectionately around the other. In my free hand I held a wooden bucket of whitewash, while in his, Ray held a crude bamboo fishing pole.

  When we’d finished photographing these first three scenarios, Ray quickly took the film into his closet/darkroom for development. When he emerged sometime later, we excitedly spread out the finished products on his sewing table and assessed them critically. Alone, they looked fine. The messages they sent were clear and sufficiently titillating. Then Ray grabbed one of the papers and we set our ads in among all the others. The one featuring Tom and Huck was like nothing else on the page and caught the eye immediately, but our individual ads blended in seamlessly with all of the others, which was not good.

  “This sucks,” Ray said, looking down at the papers. “It’s like we put two new zebras in a herd of zebras.”

  And it was true. We were two sets of oiled abdominals in a sea of oiled abdominals. I lit a cigarette and Ray filled his corncob pipe with pot and we sat down and thought long and hard about what would convey the image of youthful masculinity in a striking, memorable way. Military uniforms came to mind—sailor suits, camouflage pants, flight coveralls—but we abandoned that idea when we perused the classifieds again and found representatives from all four branches of the armed forces already well represented. Similarly, the sports world had been mined for all it was worth with football, basketball, baseball, and hockey players all pictured in their appropriate costumes, clutching the appropriate props. We scratched our heads, feeling somewhat discouraged, and decided to sleep on it, which was a good idea because the next day it came to me.

  I was sitting in my apartment, killing time before the arrival of my one o’clock, idly thumbing through some of my old art books from college, wondering again if my degree was ever going to be of the slightest use to me. I opened one on Greek art and flipped through the pages until I got to the sculpture section. My eyes wandered across the pages and were drawn repeatedly to a statue of a discus thrower, all naked muscle and twisting motion. I felt myself becoming aroused. I turned the page and saw that there were several titillating statues—wrestlers and runners and gods in action—and each one jumping off the page crying for attention.

  Yes, I thought, maybe the answer to our dilemma can be found in the past.

  Excited, I quickly grabbed one of the gay papers and scanned the ads again. No,
nothing at all like that discus thrower! I ran to the kitchen, got some scissors from the drawer, and cut the picture out of the book. Then I positioned it in among the ads and I gasped. Even in grainy black-and-white, it stood out boldly. I immediately called Ray and arranged to meet him at a coffee shop later that afternoon. When the time came, I arrived with a big stack of art books under my arm. I showed him the discus thrower and again placed it in the ads and he too gave a little gasp.

  For the next two hours we stayed seated, excitedly flipping through the books and marking the pages of any and all possibilities with yellow Post-it notes. We then weeded through these choices and narrowed down the selections as best we could.

  The very next day we rescheduled or canceled several appointments and set out to acquire any costumes or props we’d need, most of which we were able to rent from a costume shop, and what we couldn’t rent we bought, figuring we’d use it eventually for fantasy purposes, especially if the ads were successful.

  The next morning we rescheduled or canceled appointments again, and got started. I dragged Ray to the gym one last time and made him do several reps to pump up his chest and biceps. After that, we ate a quick breakfast, returned to his house, and dug into our cache of Egyptian costumes, since we’d determined that the Ptolemaic era was the first really sexy period in history, and since we were, after all, working chronologically.

  We dressed as pharaohs and slaves, our faces made largely unrecognizable by large gold headdresses and the dark kohl we spread around our eyes, and posed in front of a backdrop of pyramids with a Blue Nile running through them. Our poses were appropriately rigid, which was good because it made it easier to flex our muscles.

  When we’d finished with Egypt, Ray removed his headdress and took the first roll of film into the darkroom, while I stood before the bathroom mirror and began the arduous and painful process of removing the kohl from around my eyes. When he emerged, there was a smile on his face as he rushed the dripping images over to the table where the gay paper lay open to the classifieds. He placed them in among the others and they immediately jumped out.