by Greg Herren
We climbed into the front seat and he started fumbling with his zipper. I’d worked enough of them in my life to know what to do, so I took over. When I was finished, he was panting for air, thin lines of sweat dripping down his cheeks. “Damn, you’re good,” he said.
“Worth every penny of the fifty bucks,” I said.
“Fifty bucks!” he said. “What do you mean!”
I reached over and caressed his limp dick, then grabbed hold and squeezed. “I mean you owe me fifty bucks.”
The dude was strong for a fat fuck. He grabbed my arm and twisted, and I yelped in pain. “Wrong move, dude,” I said. I flipped open my knife, and with a quick movement I’d slit his fancy blue shirt from neck to waist. “Next move you make is to your wallet.”
“Take it,” he said, pulling it out and thrusting it at me. “Here, take the watch, too. Just don’t cut me.”
I’d only expected the fifty bucks I’d asked for, but I wasn’t in any position to turn down a gift. I opened the wallet and pulled out the cash, then shoved it back at him. I kept the watch, though.
I scrambled out of his car. “I got your license plate, bud, so don’t even think about calling the cops. I’ll find out where you live, where you work. You don’t want to mess with me.”
“No, sir,” he said, and he backed that car out so fast you’d think he was in training for the Indy 500. I liked the way he called me sir.
It scared me, too. I’d come to Miami to live out in the open, to give up the kind of soul-draining truck stop sex I’d been having in Albany. But here I was blowing a guy in his car. This wasn’t the way I’d intended to start my new life. I started walking around, keeping to the shadowy side streets, thinking about what I could do.
After ten or fifteen blocks, my head cleared and the adrenaline rush dissipated, and I realized that I needed to get a real job. In quick succession, I found a pawn shop, where I got a few hundred bucks for the Rolex, and then a bus stop.
Back across the causeway, I rented myself a room for a week in a run-down fifties motel on Biscayne Boulevard. The next day was Sunday, and I went through the classified ads, looking for construction work. Monday morning I made the rounds, following the line of cranes down Biscayne Boulevard. Every place I got the same story, though. No Spanish, no job.
“Got to be able to speak to the rest of the crew,” one foreman told me. “They got jobs up in Lauderdale, everybody speaks English. Try up there.”
The last place I went, I walked out of the trailer in disgust, then stood behind it to smoke a cigarette. “Damn!” I said out loud. “Who does a faggot have to blow to get a job in this town?”
The superintendent, Cuban guy who’d been nice enough but had nothing for me, stuck his head out the window above my head. “I hear you right?” he said.
I looked up at him and licked my lips. “You heard me right, brother,” I said.
He ducked back inside, and then a moment later appeared again, this time holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Fill these out and give them to the girl out front,” he said. “Be here tomorrow morning, seven thirty.” After I took the papers he said, “You better know how to hang drywall, too.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
The next couple of days, I felt him watching me. His name was Alberto, though the guys all called him Señor Berto. I did my best to work hard, keep my nose to the grindstone and all that. We were building out some office space in a new high-rise, a warren of small cubicles framed out with studs. The electricians were working one bay ahead of us, running their wires through the walls, and then our crew would come in and drywall. The painters were right on our asses, and there wasn’t much time to fool around.
Friday afternoon, Señor Berto asked me to stick around for a few minutes after the rest of the guys took off, and I knew what was coming.
But that’s the way it is in this world. You take your breaks where you can get them, and you pay what you have to. When the rest of the guys left, I found Berto on his cell phone, standing in the lobby of the building, in front of this marble desk where I guessed the receptionist was going to sit. He waved at me and I stood there, my eyes zeroed in on his crotch.
He saw me looking there, and his dick began to stiffen against the denim. Finally he finished his call, and I moved over and put my hand on his crotch. It was warm down there, and I figured I’d drop to my knees right there, blow him, and then get on with my weekend.
Instead he motioned me to follow him to the men’s room, where he leaned up against the vanity, no sinks installed yet, and unzipped his pants.
It became a regular routine, every Friday afternoon, kind of like some mobbed-up thug coming by every week to extract a payoff. But in the meantime, I was earning good money, cruising the gay bars on the weekend like a regular guy. I had a lot of sex, some of it good, and never collected a penny. If I didn’t like a guy’s looks, I just moved on to the next offer.
The office project finished, and one of the guys I worked with told me about a new crew I could join—one where I didn’t have to suck dick every Friday afternoon. I said good-bye to Señor Berto and what I’d come to think of as his weekly payoff. I was becoming a regular working stiff, living a clean life in the hooker motel, even saving up some cash to help in my transformation to a productive member of society.
The summer in Miami was hot. Up to the nineties most days, enough humidity to keep your shirt stuck to your back. I didn’t mind a bit, though a lot of the guys complained. There was plenty of hunky eye candy, though I kept my zipper closed and my nose clean.
I met Frank on a Friday night in July, jammed into a tight space on the dance floor at the very Lincoln Road club where I’d picked up the Range Rover jerk a few months before. Frank wasn’t the kind of guy I usually looked twice at, maybe ten years older than me, and losing his hair. He had a trim figure, though, and the guy had some moves on him.
We were dancing to some shitty Madonna remix, and I liked the way he was totally absorbed in the music, his hips swiveling to the beat. When the song was over he caught my eye and smiled, and when he headed to the tables out on Lincoln Road I followed him.
“I’m Francisco,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand, when we were far enough from the music to speak. “But everybody calls me Frank.”
“I’m Sean.”
“But I’ll bet everybody calls you sexy.” I liked the way his eyes smiled as much as his mouth did.
“Only the guys I think are sexy, too,” I said.
We sat outside and talked. I learned he’d come to Miami as a kid, part of the Mariel exodus from Cuba, worked his way through college and dental school. I told him a few things, all true, but there was certainly a lot I didn’t mention.
Around three in the morning, he yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “Had to get up early this morning for work.”
“Me too,” I said. I rubbed my foot against his leg. “I guess I’m ready for bed.”
“For sleep,” he said. “But I’d like to see you again. Can I buy you dinner tomorrow?”
It was the first time I’d been asked out on a date. Every other guy I’d gone to bed with was one I’d met in a club, sometimes fooled around with in a men’s room or an alley. Once in a while I’d end up at somebody’s place, even brought a couple back to my room at the hooker motel, too. But Frank was the first one who’d wanted to wait to get in my pants.
That got me hard, a guy who wanted me for something more than just a quickie. “Sure,” I said. We exchanged phone numbers, and he offered to pick me up at eight.
He was just the kind of guy I’d been hoping to meet. Stable but sexy. He worked at a dental clinic in Little Havana, making good money, and he already owned his own town house in Kendall, a nice suburb south of the city. “It’s nothing fancy,” he said. “I’m helping out my folks, and putting my little sister through graduate school in social work. But I’m hoping to get into a house soon.”
We had a great dinner at a nice restaurant on Ocean Drive, and afte
r we ate we walked along the sand. I wanted to hold his hand. Me, the biggest truck stop whore in Albany, New York. I was falling in love.
When he pulled up in front of the motel, I asked him if he’d like to come in. “I’d like that,” he said.
The next week, I met his dog, a chocolate Lab called Azucar, which he told me meant “sugar” in Spanish. I liked her immediately, and she was all over me with big slobbery kisses. “Azucar, no!” Frank said.
But I said, “I don’t mind. She’s a sweetheart.” When Frank and I went to bed, she sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed. I thought I’d fallen into the perfect situation.
A week later, I’d moved out of the motel and in with Frank. I bought a used truck and started working with a crew in Kendall, only a couple of miles from home. Frank walked Azucar in the morning before he left for work, and then I took her out in the afternoon when I got home. She and I were perfect pals, her trailing around after me while I hung out, surfed the Internet with Frank’s computer, and fixed dinner for him and me.
Everything was going along smooth, until the super I was working for got transferred to another project, and the company brought a new guy in.
Señor Berto.
He talked to the crew for a few minutes on Monday morning, basically saying the same kind of shit supers always did, you work hard for me, I’ll take care of you. I knew what that meant. Berto expected me to start taking care of him again. But I was done with all that.
He kept giving me these looks whenever he saw me, and I’d try not to look back. But maybe there was something inside me that didn’t like the happy little suburban life I’d begun to build with Frank, and by Wednesday when he looked at me my dick started to spring to life.
I’d never told Frank about whoring around before I met him, and I’d certainly never told him how Señor Berto had given me my first break in construction in Miami, so I couldn’t tell him what I was feeling. He knew something was up, though. Thursday he said, “Is something wrong, Sean?”
“What do you mean?” We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating a roast chicken I’d picked up at Publix. Azucar was sprawled behind my chair, locking me in place. I started to feel like Frank was doing the same thing to me, locking me in someplace I didn’t really belong.
“You’ve been in a bad mood all week.”
I shrugged. “New super at work. He’s kind of an asshole.”
“Get another job, then. You’ve got skills. You can find work anywhere.”
“Not that easy,” I said. “No Español, remember? When I came to Miami I couldn’t get a job to save my life because I couldn’t speak the lingo. Only way I keep working is to follow the same crew around, guys that know what I can do.”
“I can teach you,” he said. “We’ll have a basic conversational Spanish class right here.” He smiled. “Starting with pinga. You know what that is, don’t you.”
“Yeah, dick,” I said. And I said it so he’d know I was calling him that. “I’m going out,” I said. I backed my chair up fast, startling Azucar, but I didn’t care.
I got in my truck and started driving. I got on the highway, heading for a truck stop I’d read about on the Internet. But halfway there, my interest faltered, and I turned around and went back to Frank. He was already lying in bed, reading a dental journal, when I came in.
He had the air-conditioning cranked up to frigid, something I hated, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I stood at the foot of the bed and stripped down, watching him watch me. Then I jumped him and we had ferocious sex.
The next day I was determined to resist Berto—but at the last minute my willpower evaporated. I followed him into another unfinished men’s room, just like the first place, and blew him. “Ay, coño, I miss you, Sean,” he said. “Nobody suck like you.”
After work, I drove out to that truck stop, and this time I didn’t turn around. I blew three truckers before I finally gave up and headed back to Frank.
I started to spiral out of control. I’d hit a straight bar after work, determined just to get shitfaced and then go home, but instead I’d end up at some sleazy bookstore or truck stop or men’s room, and by the time I got back to Frank’s I’d be drunk, stinking of sex and beer.
He finally confronted me one Friday night, after I’d blown Berto, drunk a six-pack in my truck, and let two different truckers fuck me. “Why are you doing this, Sean?” He stood in the living room, waiting for me to come through the front door.
“What?”
“This.” He waved his hand at me. “You’re drunk. And I’ll bet you’ve been fooling around, too. I think you ought to move out.”
“Come on, Papi,” I said, moving toward him. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you.”
“Get away from me.” He turned and stalked away, going into the bedroom. Even the dog followed him as he slammed the door.
I went into the guest bathroom, stripped down, and showered. I let the hot water stream over me until I felt my back burning. Then, naked, I walked to Frank’s bedroom door.
“Please, Papi,” I said. “I promise I’ll do better.”
There was no answer. Suddenly I saw everything I’d worked for going down the drain. I was never going to have this kind of life again, living in a nice place with a guy who loved me, a good job and a dog. I was damaged, broken. I started to cry, and I slumped down against the door.
It was freezing, too, the air-conditioning cranked up to high, but I couldn’t do anything—I couldn’t even get up to put some clothes on. I started shivering while I was crying, and after a while Frank opened the door and found me there.
“Sean,” he said. He stood over me for a minute. “Come on, get up.”
I just hunched over my knees, still crying. He squatted down next to me. “Come on.” He lifted me under the arms, and I let him. He led me into the bedroom and got me under the covers. Then he left.
I must have dozed off, but I woke up when he came into the bedroom later. He slipped in next to me, and I tried to cuddle up against him. I was still chilled, and I needed his warmth to help me get back to where I hoped I could be.
But he turned his back to me and scooted off to the edge of the bed.
A wave of despair swept through me. My life sucked, and there was nothing I could do to make things better. And Frank, the fucker, wouldn’t even help me warm up. Jesus, I’d moved to Miami to stay warm, not to live inside a goddamned air-conditioning unit.
I sat up in bed and looked over at him. He’d fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling, low snores ripping out of his mouth. Suddenly I couldn’t stand to hear him, to have him there next to me. I picked up my pillow and stuffed it over his face.
He started coughing and gasping for air, struggling against me, but I’d built up muscles manhandling those big sheets of drywall. He kicked and waved his arms, desperation fueling him, but I held on. I don’t know why I did it; it wasn’t Frank’s fault that I was so fucked up. It was just another stupid thing I did, after a lifetime of stupid things.
After a while, Frank stopped struggling, and then I pulled the pillow off his head and put it back under my own. I pulled his body close to mine. There was still some warmth there, though it was fading. I held him next to me, knowing I’d probably never feel warm enough again.
Miss Trial
Adam McCabe
Everyone expects a dick’s life to be exciting, but for the most part, my life’s been a litany of divorce cases and past due notices. That is, until this case walked into my office. This case had excitement and suspense, a little bit of something for everyone—except for me.
It had started with a phone call from a lawyer friend of mine, Jack Davis. We’d hooked up several years ago, and it must have been good for him. He sent clients my way whenever they had a problem that needed a detective. This case was a little different than most. It was murder.
Davis greeted me at my door with a kiss to the cheek. I was a bit startled by the move, as we normally shook hands with business de
alings. He smiled as I pulled away, surprised, and put out his hand. “How are you doing, Logan?”
I brushed off the intimacy and focused on the stack of file folders that he carried. I’d read about the case with some interest. The accused killer was Steve Duerr, a local businessman who had contributed heavily to gay causes in Cincinnati. That was not a popular stance here, and he’d made a fair number of enemies in the local elite and conservative groups that cover the city like a layer of manure. Rumor had it that Duerr was preparing a test case for the courts to overthrow Ohio’s draconian defense of marriage amendment. He had a partner and deep, deep pockets.
Duerr’s family had made their money in beer, literally. They had owned one of the local brands for nearly a century, until Duerr’s father had sold controlling interest to a national brand back in the 1950s. Duerr was the only child and last male heir in the family. Given his orientation, it wasn’t likely that there’d be another generation.
I’d only read about the case in the newspapers. I wasn’t in the rarified caste that Duerr ran in. I was merely a working stiff. Still, to the detective in me, the story just didn’t jibe. Duerr had been taking a shower when he’d heard their two dogs barking. He’d waited for his partner, Rick Lambert, to do something about the dogs, since Lambert had told Duerr that he thought he was developing a migraine.
The barking went on for a few more minutes before Duerr had stopped the shower and gone, naked, to the entryway, where the dogs stood over Lambert’s dead body. Duerr had put on some clothes, called the police, and been arrested for murder within the hour.
Duerr’s story had been that the front door was open and that the storm door was unlocked, two things that never happened in their house. There were no signs of a break-in, no signs that the dogs had tried to protect their owner. However, Duerr’s fingerprints had been found all over the handles of both doors. No other prints had been found. No shoe prints in the blood. No plausible motives had been produced. It seemed as though they had been alone, with only one person standing at the end of the encounter.