by Rager, Bob
And like a Greek chorus, the chess payers hunched across their tables over their game of war.
He understood that his recent appearance on the scene meant he was being watched, and so he made the same lazy circuits, now and then lingering at a bench where an older man, alone, sat. Inevitably, sooner or later came the words, “I’ve got,” naming the day’s going rate, the price carefully adjusted for the weather – discounted when it was raining because a place to get out of the wet is part of the deal, or more, if that urgency needs satisfaction immediately, or even more if the goods were especially desirable; blondes commanded a premium, pale, golden, surfer blondes with true tones in their hair and gleaming white teeth were always in demand by the Johns who were pale and bald and buttoned up in their suite and white shirts – desperate for fresh air blowing in their faces.
He was still surprised by the offers that came his way for he was closer in age to his clients than he was in age to his competition. He didn’t know when he started to look at the hustlers as the competition but one evening, one of the giddy laughing boys had let his eyes linger too long in his direction. He hunched his head down and with curled lip shot the giggling shinny faggot a threatening look.
The giggling stopped with a sniff and a smartly executed about face while an older man watched from a nearby bench. He looked up in time to catch his eye.
And again, came the overtures “I haven’t seen you before…where ya’ from…new to town…I gotta place…I can make it worth your while…got a light?”
He saw Cal now and then, though they did not exchange greetings. Cal seemed busy, he was a real blonde and his face and skin were still finely textured and unlined, and he had the slim build of an adolescent.
One night he saw Cal at his usual spot across the traffic lanes from the metro entrance. He was talking to two kids, one pushing around a skateboard and the other smaller, lighter, his hair a tussled heap of auburn. Even as they pushed each other around, Cal watched something off in the distance. The small boy snapped his head around and nodded along with his two other friends. They seemed to know each other. Then the older boy followed Cal’s gaze, and watched for a moment. The little boy watched the other two, he had to look up to see them, and his small size and quick movements, the sudden turns from here to there, from Cal to the boy on the skateboard, were the eager attention of a puppy.
Wary that he might startle them making them scurry away, he crossed the street, then doubled back on another one of the traffic circle’s many pedestrian crossings in time to see Cal and the two others slowly walk off toward a corner, Cal and the taller kid talking over something as Cal put his hand on the little boy’s head and said something to him.
A chill crept along the back of his neck. This was not a neighborhood of family houses with children coming and going to and from school, to music lessons and tutoring. Any child here was probably lost, but the little merry band slowly moved toward a black sedan at the end of a side street. Cal messed the little boy’s hair, and the next moment the passenger side door yawned open to gather up the two brothers.
He memorized the plate number, then looked with rising panic for a cab; just when he was about to give up, a yellow and gold taxi turned the corner. “I’m following that town car,” he said.
Chapter 21
The District is compact, its neighborhood dense and contiguous; housing projects on 14th street are a walk light away from a lobbyist’s penthouse, the wildly-painted entrances in Adams Morgan flash by in minutes to be replaced by Kalorama’s gated driveway. If you know which turns to take, which street goes one way in the direction you’re going, if the cab driver knows how fast to drive to see that all the lights are green, if the commuters have already gone home, all these things came to be just so, for the black sedan turned into the driveway across the street from the hovering trees of Rock Creek Park.
He told the driver to return to the circle and to make a U-turn, and a block away he left the cabbie and walked the rest of the way, careful to go around the donut shop and come out at the metro entrance and its walk light, where he crossed back under the canopy of trees.
Chapter 22
He was startled to see the black sedan standing already at the corner. The streets are clogged with sedans the same color and make, and he thought it’s just another one of the District’s fleet of sober transportation, but a quick glance at the plate numbers told him it is the same car. He felt another chill across his neck. He forced himself to walk without turning, without changing his pace past the fountain and its empty stained basin while he watched with intense interest the park’s usual cast of milling denizens. The ageless young men gathered before they assaulted on the bars and clubs, the Queens wobbled in discount high heels in their promenade of bitter defiance, the older men sat on benches, the chess players in the confines within their battle ground, theirs the only place the light of the street lamps reached through the dark, the whole crazy circus of want and betrayal and the battered hope that the next time would be different, how different in what way, was anybody’s guess but please God, don’t let this be it for the rest of my life. Such were the jagged bolts of despair unleashed by the sight of that strange car.
Instead he turned away and he walked past a window full of diners sitting in a roomful of booths; a cheese store only as wide as the door that opened into it; a chain coffee shop, another coffee shop; and when his breath returned to an even, steady rhythm, he turned around and started walking back to where he had just been only moments ago.
Cal sat on a bench; the black car was gone.
“Evenin’,” he said in greeting imitating Cal’s southern style formality. “
“Evenin’,” Cal returned. He nodded gravely his full lower lip and chin pushed out. He was thinking, the wheels turning. “I seen you watching over here,” Cal said, “Seen you walk by,” he paused.
“I thought you didn’t go in for that kind of stuff.”
“What stuff, man? What, that little kid?!” Cal sounded almost hurt.
“No way, that’s not my scene.”
He nodded listening, his head bobbing up and down.
“It’s not me, it’s that brother or whatever he calls himself. He pimps him out, man,” Call said in astonishment.
“The little kid likes my hat,” Cal said softly. “He thinks I’m a real cowboy.” He was now very quiet and still.
Their eyes met briefly and then, Cal stared ahead at nothing.
“So, what’s their story?”
“Damned if I know. They showed up a month ago, maybe. The big one says they’re brothers. They have been staying at one of those motels out on New York Avenue. The little kid seems okay though.”
Cal’s voice turned soft and still again, not wanting to disturb or alarm some nervous temperamental monster.
“The big one says they’re from Na’Leans. Why not? After the hurricane, who’d want to stay in a drowned city swimming with snakes? The big one says he has a good thing going with a gentleman,” Cal said.
“That’s what he called him – a gentleman, like Gone With The Wind…every week like a clock that black car shows up and they’re gone for a couple hours. Then, they come back here. That little boy should be in school.”
“You know, he asked if I wanted to go with him,” Cal nodded, the words coming slowly. “He said ‘the gentleman liked meeting new people; he has people visit him on account he can’t get out so much no mo’.”
“But,” Cal nodded, “I’m not into that kind of scene, too. Uh,” Cal groped a moment, “too complicated.”
Cal turned slowly, his eyes half-closed as he peered at him. “Maybe you’d be interested? You know he pays good money…I’d go myself, but I’m not good with that North West crowd, Kalorama, Georgetown,” Cal said, “I don’t have the right manners. He pays good money; I could work something out and you’d give me a cut. Whadd’ya think?”
“Yeah,” Cal went on, not waiting for him to answer, the wheels in his mind turning faster
closing in on something he could understand that you make’em pay and pay.
“The next time the car shows up, I’ll tell him about you.”
Chapter 23
He stood on a floor of parquet wood burnished to a gleaming rose gold. He had entered through a foyer as large as a split level after the car in the driveway paved with stones. Above his head rose a ceiling painted with billowing pink and pale blue clouds, some of the paint peeling, gaps making the wooden floors slightly uneven. Before him a staircase climbed u from the floor and coiled like a huge climbing vine into the floating clouds.
Another man was seated in a wheelchair that held him in a dark beetle’s carapace, black wheels and a harsh rigid back. Yet the man was narrow, only slightly wider at his shoulders; his glossy eyes were green or amber, depending on how he turned his head under the flickering wall sconces, a trick of the bulbs to imitate candlelight. He watched from a narrow, long face of finely cut features, a long straight nose, a sharp jawline, but it was his paleness, the barest suggestion of pink that made him appear startlingly young, like a school-boy. Only his hands with their drawn skin between thick knuckles hinted at his true, much older age.
“Won’t you join me for sherry…of course you will!” the man spoke in a pleasant baritone tainted with weariness.
He twisted himself around in the wheelchair to address the driver of the car without looking at him, but speaking to the air over his shoulders. “We’re having sherry in the library,” he said.
The driver pushed the ‘gentleman’ to double doors in the shadows, near the stairs.
“You’ve met my man already,” he said as he bumped ever so slightly across the uneven boards of the gleaming floor. There were no introductions with names, just the ‘gentleman’ and his ‘man’ in compressing time and circumstance into a familiarity that a certain kind of people cultivated, a careless, carefree friendliness that could vanish just as quickly as it came.
“I’m so delighted you could come. Your cowboy friend,” the gentleman said without a hint of irony, “said you might be busy.” The man lifted a hand and plunged at the air. “There, that’s the chair for you. I want you to sit close so we can have a little chat.” The man’s hand hung in hesitation in the air, he moved, even as little as he did in his wheelchair, as if he were fighting an oppressive weight.
The man returned carrying a tray holding a heavy decanter and two small wine glasses, almost toy-like miniatures.
“Yes, I can see why you would be busy,” the gentleman said. He poured from the decanter, again his hands shaking to fight for control. “There!” he said in triumph when he put the decanter down. He picked up a glass so small that it almost disappeared in his hand and leaned forward in his chair to offer it to his visitor.
Just as the glass was about to pass from his hand, he held it and gazed in as if his eyes were sighing, then he let loose his grip. There was a long silence.
“Yes, I can see why you’re so busy,” he said finally. His voice rumbled between gruffness and patience like a school teacher or a coach. “But you must make time for simple pleasures.” He watched his visitor sip the sherry.
“Oh, very good,” he said, “that’s right, small draughts, a little at a time is how it’s meant to be drunk. I can see you’re no stranger to this quaint custom,” he said with a burst of vigor.
“I learned it in school from an old teacher of mine.” He narrowed his eyes to see into the past.
“Yes, let’s make time for simple pleasures,” he said. “Now all I have is time.” He lifted his eyes again in that look of longing and expectation.
There followed moments of silence during which he thought it best not to say anything, in the manner of the aggressively masculine wanderers of the park. Whenever a top man walked by in jeans, t-shirt and motorcycle jacket, the queens and fitful young men sent up a chatter that scattered through the air.
But here his silence was met by his host’s eyes roving over him, an explorer studying a map of an exciting if distant coast line.
And then, “You’re welcome to remove your jacket. You’re not in a rush, I hope?” the gentleman said. He pursed his lips again, looking like a small wizened boy in his enormous wheelchair.
Although he wore only a t-shirt underneath after taking off his jacket, he felt a flush of warmth, ‘the sherry’, he thought.
“Isn’t that better? I can see that you work out,” the gentleman said. He smiled and his eyes flashed brighter in the glistening light of the wall lamps.
Around them, pictures and drawings stood in easels and on the floor; daubings of bright color shimmered in frames hung with garlands of carved gilt; drawings in heavy paper mounts were lined up on a picture rail. He recognized a painting of a sailor with tumultuously inflated pectorals and bell bottoms stretched tissue thin across cartoonish wide thighs as the style of an artist who concentrated on square-jawed life guards, sailors, soldiers, and policemen.
One drawing in ink and wash captured three or maybe four young men posed limb against groin and buttocks, standing or bending over. He recognized this artist too, long dead but a master from the far away time before the last World War. He also knew that the same artist had pictures in the White House of circus tents and clowns.
The men in their uniforms, or naked and erect, and figures of adolescents sunbathing beside an azure pool, portraits of singularly beautiful men, photographs of haunting faces surrounded them, the silent inhabitants of a lost world, watching, waiting men frozen in a spell waiting to be released from the prisons of canvas and paper and mountings and carved frames, and this candlelit room.
“They’re my friends,” the gentleman said, “You see them too, don’t you?”
How long he had stared at the pictures he didn’t know, but for the first time since he had stood at the door to this peculiar pile of a house he felt his shoulders relax and hang freely instead of bunched up almost to his ears.
“Yeah,” he said, letting himself speak only one word. He was here to listen, to be an audience for this strange, helpless man. And truly masculine men in this half-lit world didn’t tell of their admiration of a painter’s color palette or the subtleties of pen and ink washes.
“They’re all dead now,” the gentleman said, “all gone.” He shook his head in disbelief, in amazement at the vagaries of fate.
“I was once like them,” said the gentleman, “Well, not like those men,” he said, pushing a finger through the air to the massively muscled sailor. “But I was favored with my share of good looks; please excuse my boast, and I walked with them until my accident. Fate works its mysteries without apologies or reason. But my accident, the injuries that ended one life for me spared me to live another.”
There was a knock at the door, then it opened before the gentleman finished saying “enter”.
With a gait that was part glide, part double time parade march, a short brown man approached with a tray bearing a vial, surgical dressing, and a hypodermic syringe.
“My nurse,” the gentleman said.
With a pushed in nose and skull like cheek bones nurse looked Asian, Filipino. He held his chin up in the manner of put upon hauteur, the pose of someone who has descended with a struggle to carrying a tray. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the visitor.
“It’s time for your medicine,” he sing-songed in a thin voice, then putting the tray down on a small table beside Gentleman, he waited.
“It’s alright, my visitor can stay, if you like. I hope needles don’t make you, what’s the word, squeamish. Oh, but he’s not a man, like you.”
The nurse’s eyes darted across the room at the visitor; the little brown muse held his arms across his stomach. Was he about to turn on his heel and storm out? Or snap at his social inferior? He muttered something, then picked up a cotton swab.
Gentleman slipped an arm out of a sleeve of his blazer and pulled himself out of his shirt with little effort because the shirt was large and roomy. His frail thin arm was an exposed thin branch of bir
ch across his lap.
“I don’t understand the science,” the gentleman said a moment later after the injection. “But my doctors prescribe it and it doesn’t seem to hurt.” He spoke with half closed eyes.
Nurse seemed in no hurry, slowly cleaning the syringe and arranging the tray.
“That’s fine now,” the gentleman said to the nurse in dismissal.
Stung by the words, the nurse went rigid and was engulfed in a halo of immediate if passing rage: wordlessly he picked up his tray and retreated with the same quick step glide of his entrance.
“You mustn’t mind him,” the gentleman said, his words coming slowly with lingering breaths. “He’s very devoted in his own way.”
“Devotion is so rare, perhaps even rarer than love. Where does one find loyalty anymore? No one speaks of loyalty today. It’s all about opportunity or things. People crave the material so very much. Perhaps it’s because a car or a house is something they can see and touch, they can hold up against their neighbor’s cars and houses. People come and go, they’re there one moment, and leave without a look back, without a good-bye.
Gentleman turned away and glanced at the door; in the sliver of light beneath the door, a shadow quivered as someone on the other side pressed against the door.
“But, I want to know about you,” the gentleman said. “Could I ask you a small favor, one you have the power to give?” Gentleman paused, “Could you stand up?”
“Yes, just like that.”
He rose from the ornate chair and stood up, his arms falling to his side, his fingers touching his upper thighs.
“You’re about a 38” chest,” Gentleman said. “Please don’t misunderstand you’re just fine with your waist so small. The proportions are perfect,” he sighed.