by Chris Kenry
“Perfect!” he cried, giving me a high five.
“Let’s do the Greeks next,” I said, rummaging excitedly in the next bag of costumes.
Ray, being slender and dark-skinned, looked better than I as an Egyptian. He also looked better as Mercury when we moved onto the gods, his naked body painted gold, a winged hat, winged shoes, and a gold lightning bolt his only accessories. He was a natural for Dionysus, vine leaves in his hair, a stream of liquid flowing into his mouth from a wineskin held overhead, and we successfully transformed him into a lusty satyr by fusing a picture of the upper half of his body with an elk torso he borrowed from one of his friends in the taxidermy trade.
I myself did much better as a Greek, posing as Atlas, a large inflatable globe resting on my outstretched shoulders, and as Prometheus, struggling in vain to unchain myself from the rock.
We traveled up through the ages, mimicking the poses of several Roman and then Renaissance statues. We both looked best as Roman soldiers, so we did several poses together in these costumes, always engaged in suggestive swordplay, and decided to use one of these photos for the duo ad. On my own, I tried posing as Michelangelo’s David, and the bound slave, while Ray became an anguished Saint Sebastian, tied to the stake, arrows piercing his flesh.
It was all great fun, and as you can tell we got more than a little carried away with it. In the end we had spent over a week of evenings on the project, and gone through thirty-seven rolls of film and much more money than we’d intended, but in time it proved worthwhile, as the monetary return on our investment exceeded all expectations. More than that, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was an event I would add to my album of nostalgia. One I’d look back on as fondly as I look back on the trip to Italy with Paul.
When it came to actually placing the ads, we decided that since we had made so many and hated to eliminate any of them, we would put them on a rotation, changing them every month or so, and tracking which were the most effective. We also placed them in several different publications and tracked the number of responses we got from each one, pulling our ads from the papers that gave us little business.
And the business took off! Skyrocketed, as they say. The first day my Prometheus appeared in print I got over forty calls. Granted at least half of these were cranks—people calling and hanging up or people trying to engage me in phone sex—but the other half were legitimate, and I struggled to schedule them all in. After the first hour of calls I left the phone off the hook and drove down to an office supply store, where I bought a large, sleek, aluminum Day-Timer and transferred all the new appointments, which I’d written on scrap bits of paper, to its neatly columned pages.
For the next two weeks I was booked solid. From ten A.M. to three P.M. and from five P.M. usually on through the night, I seemed to do nothing but entertain clients, but surprisingly I felt alive and energized by all the entertaining and running around. I was making around eight hundred dollars a day, and often more, but it was hectic trying to juggle all the time for clients and the work I needed to do for the business class, and still budget time to work out.
As with any job, a routine developed, and for a short while I managed my time and clients well. For a very short while. Then we ran multiple ads in multiple papers and it all started getting out of hand. I had too much business and seemed to do nothing but entertain clients, answer the phone, schedule appointments, and, of course, change sheets.
Ray was just as busy, and the only time we saw each other was when we were doing three-ways. This was, on average, once a day, but although these sessions were intimate (in that we were both naked together), there was never really any chance to talk privately during them, and as soon as they were over, we both hurried off to other appointments. We did develop a sort of Sunday-night ritual, however, in which we’d meet up at his house at around seven or eight, and would sit and talk shop for ten minutes while our crab shampoo did its work. (Crabs were an occupational hazard, and one we safeguarded against twice a week just to be sure. Oh, there were other, graver hazards, this being the nineties, but more about those later.) For these ten minutes each week we sat naked together, Day-Timers open on our knees, and talked about scheduling and how much money we’d made, expenses we’d had, etc.... After that we’d shut the Day-Timers, turn off our pagers, and wash all business seriousness down the drain with the crab shampoo and order Chinese food. We’d loll around, reading or playing cards, or just listen to music and talk in Ray’s big white bed. Eventually, and usually quite early, we’d fall into exhausted sleep.
I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to these Sunday nights, and was glad that Ray maintained his apartment as a sanctuary from the working world, especially since my own apartment, with its piles of dirty laundry and endless parade of clients, had become such a place of business that I felt as at home there as most people would feel in their office cubicle. I found myself wanting to spend more and more of my leisure hours with Ray, and less and less with my friends and family. Part of this was due to the fact that prostitution, like all illegal activities, does have a somewhat desocializing effect, making you feel odd and cagey around people who don’t know what you’re up to. The other reason was that in the relatively brief time Ray and I had known each other we’d developed an odd closeness. We were intimate in a sexual way that most friends are not, and yet this intimacy was almost neutralized by the fact that there was always a third person between us. We could be naked and gyrating and moaning in bed together but the presence of someone else always made it safe. We were working. Perhaps that’s why, on our Sunday nights together, we were both more ... careful, I guess. There was a definite line over which we did not cross. We slept together, yes, but we never crossed the line. We were physically intimate, yes, but in a high school athletic sort of way: headlocks, shadowboxing, sporting smacks on the butt. Aw, shucks. I’d lie there in bed next to him, hard-on raging, wanting him, but at the same time knowing that if we crossed the line, it just might muck up the friendship, and I definitely didn’t want to do that. Everything was going great, so I figured why rock the boat.
On one such Sunday, as he sat on the toilet lid and I sat on the edge of the bathtub, our crotches covered in Rid, I was talking on and on about how I was now more than a third of the way out of debt and if it kept up I’d be back to zero in a few months.
“Can you believe it? And I was thinking I was going to have to file bankruptcy. I think we need to start charging more for the three-ways, though. I mean we don’t do as much work but they are getting twice as much. I think we should up it to two hundred dollars, maybe even two hundred and fifty. What do you think?” I asked.
He lit a cigarette and exhaled deeply, saying nothing, his head drooping between his shoulders.
“How many did we do this past week? Seven? Let’s see, seven times ... that’s more than fifteen hundred dollars we could have made instead of ...” His head was bobbing. “Ray? You all right?”
“Wha?” he said, coming out of his doze.
“Did you hear anything I said?”
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“Oh, Christ!” I looked at my watch and tried to remember what time we’d applied the shampoo. I could feel it burning so I figured it had, if anything, been on too long.
“Let’s get tired little guy showered and to bed,” I said, turning on the water.
He showered first and I followed. I always went second because I needed my shower to be as cold as possible before I got into bed. When I got out and dried off, he was already in bed, sitting up, smoking absently. I put on a pair of clean boxers and crawled in next to him. He seemed to be deep in thought, and I figured it would be best to wait for him to speak instead of asking what he was thinking.
“How long do you think you want to do this?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“Do what?” I asked, my pulse quickening. I wondered if he meant the hustling or our sleeping together, and I did not particularly want to discuss either
one. I was happy with both and didn’t want anything to change.
“The sex-for-money business.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. Definitely until I get out of debt. After that, I’ll have to see. Why, are you ... thinking ... of stopping?” I asked gingerly, not wanting to hear his response. I realized then that I was scared of going on alone. Oh, I was sure I could do it, but somehow I didn’t want to think about doing it without him. He was Beatrice to my Dante, Pocahontas to my John Smith, Huck to my Tom.
“Ahh, I don’t know,” he said wistfully. “I guess I’m just feeling overwhelmed. I haven’t even touched any of my artwork in almost a month.”
I said nothing. He went on.
“You’re doing it for the money, I know, and that’s cool, that’s fine, but I’m doing it for the time, and lately I’m feeling pretty shortchanged.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. I was doing it for the money, undeniably, but I was also doing it because it was fun. I liked that men found me so attractive they were willing to pay for my body. I liked that men found me interesting enough to pay just to talk to me (although this was probably more from loneliness than because I was interesting). I liked the fact that I was privy to sides of people they showed to no one else—the married man, the priest, the respectable businessman—who all let me see behind the facade of their everyday lives. But it did always come back to the money. More money than I’d ever made in my life. Granted, it was money made from literally selling myself, but this literal selling seemed better to me than the figurative selling that went along with so many other jobs. Selling your time and your mental faculties to answer a phone, or drive a truck, or underwrite mortgages, or sell insurance seemed much worse to me, much more mind-numbing and degrading. What I was doing hardly felt degrading. To me it was elevating. I felt more in control and more self-confident than I ever had, and it was all so exciting.
But as I looked over at Ray that night, his shoulders drooping dejectedly, he looked anything but excited. I put my arm around him and noogied his head, playfully. Aw, shucks.
“The money’s great now,” he said, pulling his head away, “better than it’s ever been, and I have enough that I could just quit for a while....” He trailed off.
“But?” I asked, afraid of where this was leading. Afraid he was going to say that he was quitting. My heart was really going now. Could Tom go on without Huck? I didn’t even want to consider the possibility.
He hesitated, thinking, and took a final drag on his cigarette before crushing it out in the choked ashtray.
“Don’t you have a dream?” he asked, turning to face me.
I lit my own cigarette. A dream, I thought to myself, a dream. I had one once, but I woke up. Ha ha ha. I tried to think up something funny and light to respond with, something to push all this seriousness back down the drain where it belonged, but I couldn’t. I could feel its presence in the room and felt it nudging the steering wheel of the conversation dangerously close to the cliff of self-examination.
“Remember that day in the rain?” Ray asked, trying to catch my eye. I nodded, but looked away.
“Well, I wasn’t joking about that gallery idea.”
I said nothing, but examined my palm intently, as if it held all the answers. Ray got out from under the covers and sat on the bed facing me. His drowsiness was replaced by excitement.
“Listen, I know we haven’t known each other all that long,” he said, “but I think you and I make a pretty good team. We’re both smart, we both work hard, we both love art, and I, well, I think together we could do it. I’m not so sure I could on my own—and I’m not so sure I’d want to, because I really love my artwork and I could see a business like that sucking up all my creative time.”
He was wide awake now, and his cheeks were flushed. He went on and on about how we could save up some money and scope out a place to rent or buy. He grabbed paper and pencil from the drawer of the bedside table and drew pictures and added figures and on and on and on.
I sat listening and thinking, mostly about possible ways to change the subject, but also about why I was so afraid of this topic. And afraid I was! I could feel my stomach churning and my hands growing cold, but I couldn’t find the reason for it. When he finished talking, he looked up at me expectantly. I smiled weakly and said, with strained enthusiasm, that it was definitely worth some thought, and I would think about it seriously, but now we were both tired; we should sleep on it, and could talk about it in the morning, when we were both clearheaded (knowing full well that we would not, since we were both booked solid all the next day).
“You’re probably right.” He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. He set his papers on the bedside table, turned out the light, and crawled into bed, giving my head a little pat.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night,” I said.
And yet, long after he’d fallen asleep, his face so close to my shoulder that I could feel his breath, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. All my life I felt like I’d been playing childish games; I’d played house with Paul, and I’d played at various jobs, never taking any of it very seriously because I never really had a stake in any of it. Paul’s house was always Paul’s house, and our partnership was hardly equal. But with Ray, and the life that he was proposing, I felt for the first time like I was on the threshold of the adult world. Unfortunately, I was not quite confident enough to enter and could feel myself backing away.
The next morning I got up quietly at eight o’clock, and sneaked out without waking Ray. I stopped for a bagel and ate it while I drove to the gym. While I worked out (legs and shoulders) I thought again about the night before, and my head felt cloudy, the way it does when I’m hungover. I was confused about Ray, yes, but also about what I was doing and why. Was it really the money? And if so, was it worth it? And how long would it last? And what about all that gallery bullshit? It was ridiculous. A pipe dream, but Ray had seemed serious about it. Didn’t he see how farfetched it was? It’s not like you just go out and open a gallery. It would take planning and money and brains and connections. There were all sorts of hoops to jump through, I felt sure. Bars to clear. Hoops other people were surely more adept at jumping through, bars ... other ... people ... I dropped the dumbbells to my sides and stared at my reflection in the mirror. The tiny specter of Sister Melanie had somehow floated in and perched smugly on my shoulder, and I almost had one of those rare moments of insight that make you see your folly and change your course. Almost.
Buzzz, buzzz, buzzz.
The feel of my pager vibrating made her vanish. I reracked the weights, got a quick drink of water, and spent the next ten minutes on the phone in the locker room. When I was finished, I showered, dressed, and headed to my first appointment, all those annoying insights washed right back down the drain.
18
FRO THE PAGES OF THE LITTLE SILVER BOOK
To give you an indication of just how busy we were then, let me take you on a trip through an average day via my Day-Timer, which was only recently returned to me by the police, who had been keeping it as Exhibit A in the criminal trial against me. It would have been of no legal or historical importance whatsoever if I had not, when it became apparent that we were going to be caught, erased the computer hard drive containing all of the detailed client records. But erase them I did, and so the little silver book took center stage.
It was dubbed “the little silver book” by a columnist for the Denver Post (it’s really aluminum, but it looks silver and “little silver book” sounds so much more original than “little black book”), and was much sought after by members of the news media, who hoped it would be chock-full of the names and perverse proclivities of Denver’s elite. It wasn’t. But that didn’t stop the press from dissecting its contents, making wild speculations as to the identities of the names I had listed. It was easy for them to speculate wildly because I wrote all of my entries in my own version of shorthand, which the press dubbed “the silver code,” and spe
nt weeks trying to decipher. They saw an entry like Bob @ Cap 210, dildo 150 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Bob was none other than Bob the prominent sports figure, or Bob the community leader, or Bob the senator, and that @ Cap 210 clearly meant that we had had sex in room 210 of the state capitol building. Never mind that there are probably ten thousand Bobs in the state, or that room 210 of the capitol building is nonexistent.
The truth was, as the truth usually is in tabloid cases such as this, much less exciting: most of my clients were plain-vanilla suburban husbands who, more than likely, used an alias with me, making speculation by the press as to identities doubly inaccurate, and creating a lot of potential business for some clever libel lawyers.
Even more perplexing than the silver code were the witty little “silver epigrams” Ray and I had first seen at the Art Museum and which we were constantly volleying back and forth, in a sort of endless contest. I took to penciling them in the margins of the little silver book as I thought them up, so I wouldn’t forget them and could share them with Ray on Sunday evenings. As I said, it was an endless game, so the pages of my Day-Timer were peppered with filthy sentences like “Sperm Inside Larry Vacated Evan’s Ramrod” or “Sixteen Incoherent Lesbians Violate Edward’s Rectum.” You would scarcely believe the conclusions people can draw from something like that.
I bought the little silver book not because I wanted to keep track of famous clients, and not for blackmail purposes, and not because I wanted to have a trump card in case I got arrested, because God knows it didn’t work if those were the goals. No, I got the book, as I said before, because when the business took off I realized I would have to get organized if I was going to keep things under control. I wanted to avoid double bookings and to make sure I didn’t miss appointments. There was no secret code or scheming intrigue. The most extensive plotting I ever did was as I sat each night at the kitchen table, usually at about three A.M., and wearily penciled in my schedule for the following day. By so doing, I could flip open the book first thing in the morning, look to the appropriate time, and see where I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to meet, and what accessories I needed to have with me. No different from any traveling salesman, although I guess my appointments were a little more tawdry than those of, say, someone selling encyclopedias.