by Rager, Bob
“For me, his eyes were mine, all mine, me! Who had only the merest attention from my own family, me an automaton, obedient and loyal, the maker of disguises and servant of hiding and secrets.
“I glimpsed another universe of the bold and unblinking, the direct gaze without fear, without subterfuge.
“And he took my hands. At first I snatched them away, so afraid was I,” Gentleman said looking at his hands with a frown. “And then I understood: he was so brave.
“And when my fear had gone he shook me side to side with the music.
“Me-- his eyes on me!” Gentleman sighed.
“But I knew that his grasping of my hand before all these perfect careless creatures was a gesture; and having seen the vision of what life could be I gently released my hand because I knew he longed to join his own kind.
“But I had no second thoughts as I watched him stride into the joyous crowd, I knew happiness in his happiness, had never felt the ecstasy, the hope I felt knowing that I could feel the pleasure that was someone else’s joy.
“Oh we danced under the glow of the great sprawling City of Angels.
“Yes, a City of Angels! All before me,” Gentleman stopped and took a breath; he seemed to be running down, a clock whose mainspring had unwound.
Then he rallied and as his chest filled with each breath, his head bent down rose again.
“I am seeing better these days,” he said.
“Oh you seem puzzled-- but I am passing from one place in my life to another, a transit as bumpy and rough as a passage around Cape Horn. And when I’m in one of these phases, my eye sight grows keen and I see the past before me as bright and close as I see you now.
“I see him again and I reach out to touch him and there is… nothing there.” Lines again crisscrossed between his eyebrows.
“What use, you may ask is hindsight when the past can’t be charged and the future can’t be known?
“Yet I want to see, to see him again in the golden twilight of the beach, to see his sleeping smile, to see his long thighs and hard calves.
“At times I’m desperate that I might forget, that he will fade you see already I forget… oh bits and pieces, I lay down a book and I can’t remember where I put it, I can’t remember entire decades. And yet what I want to forget, the unspeakable evil I endured so long ago returns again and again. When I am unaware, I’m suddenly plunged again into the darkness of my tormented body, I feel his heavy legs, press my cheeks holding me still as he stole pleasure from me, as he stole what was meant to be a happy time for me. In its place he left a lump of coal that became my fear, my uncertainty, and my rage.
“Oh yes, you can look at this frail shattered body held together by my wheel chair and dismiss my right to strength. My rage burned in me: an enduring, steady flame that hardened me, that drove me to climb heights that the mainstream can only dream about, that they see on their sad little screens.
“And no matter how big the television is, it’s still television, it’s still small people desperately lunging for attention, for fame. Their tiny faces in the dark watch in hunger, starving for something they can’t name, to fill the emptiness that yawns around them, waking the next morning feeling satisfied, afraid, afraid of their anger, afraid of themselves, afraid of the water cooler!
“Life isn’t pretty… did I say that or did someone else before me? But what else is there?” Gentleman said with a shrug.
“My anger burned a path to my escape, the television sets, the tiny people who made their houses and lives around them, to flee my tormentor and I climbed, climbed.
“And there I was flying first class over the fly over people-- the millions carelessly with their children, clinging to conventions, living on hope, hating me and my kind.
“And I had escaped… but one can’t escape oneself… like a dog chasing its tail I frantically pursued what I thought was my salvation not seeing that my running in circles was only keeping me in one place--yet I had forged my a soul for my soul as hard and thick as armor.
“Until I met my fabulous creature in the City of Angeles, a lion with wings, a creature from the most ancient of times…” Gentleman stopped and taking a handkerchief from a pocket he wiped his brow shining with sweat.
He stared into the fire this time, too absorbed by what he saw there, too absorbed to smile at his friends around him. They too seemed to grow still and waiting in the silence.
“I left as I had to leave the life of the City of Angeles and return to my responsibilities waiting for me in the underground tunnels below great buildings on the banks of the Potomac. My Prince was Life, but I chose safety. Having taken a step on the path in the unknown I again returned a slave to my fears…” he said quietly. He had sunk into his chair looking down at his hands in his lap.
“ ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ Roosevelt said. So easy to say but so hard to escape fear.”
“It didn’t of a sudden change; but a change did come over him. He was so happy at first, or content so I thought; as dark as my world was before now everything was bright a springtime of the good, of a happy tomorrow.
“He drove his truck to the best parts to houses in the canyons and hills above Malibu; past gated walls in the Hollywood Hills into a world that slowly began to change him.
“At first it was small things. He wore long pants instead of his beach shorts, he changed his sandals for street shoes. The magic was fading but I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe it. Until I heard the rumors, the talk in certain places, certain establishments.
“My Prince was seen around town, late at night in bars along Sunset Boulevard in the company of young men, very young men that he sent on to clean pools but might be persuaded to perform other favors…
“He was running a call boy ring! But the boys were said to be startlingly young. Dark rumors crawled out of poisoned mouths that the boys were ‘too young to be legal,’ even if they were old enough to have working papers.
“I was mad with fury and anger and fear and confusion. Then one night he said he had a present for my birthday, a special surprise for me. I softened once again in anticipation.
“And in front of his friends, he stood behind me and put his hands across my eyes.
“ ‘Ready?!’ he said and pulled his hands up.
“And there before me surrounded by a crowd of the looking and whispering stood a… boy, a boy with sleepy eyes and flawless skin. The boy smiled and looked around, the attention sinking into his being like the rays of the sun.
“I couldn’t tell his age-- boys all seem the same age to me, the soft faces, the clear skin, the quick glances as their attention goes to this and then that. But I felt a cold chill that there might be truth in the rumors. And there was something more: my reputation, my career! -- And then even more as I thought of the dark acts, the proximity to evil.
“Yet all around me was laughter and smiles!
“Disgusted and feeling sick to my stomach, I fled the room, the laughter, the bright dazzling creatures that had once enchanted me now revealed as careless, heedless, uncaring.
“I had created a monster,” Gentleman said.
“I had taken a wild creature and tried to make him mine to transform him into something better not knowing that all I could do was tear him down.
“The truck, the presents, the vacations, my pride in the glances of others as we passed along the beach at Waikiki, or sat in a bar in town.
“My talent for disguise and secrecy came back to hide what was happening before me.
“But I didn’t want to see… didn’t want to see what was now the past.
“One day I told him I was never coming back to the City of Angeles.
“He looked at me then with his lustrous sapphire eyes and again with his half awake, half asleep smile and tipped his hat to me.
“I left without looking back, almost grateful for his seeming indifference. I detest emotional partings, tearful good byes because I’m afraid I might start sobbing and never stop, m
y heart broken, my mind, my pride useless in the face of emotion.
“And I grew a numbness that was my refuge, my escape when weakness tempted me, when someone, anyone threatened to awaken again the happiness I had known in the City of Angels.
“But really, a cold heart is practically standard issue in this town, loyalty a liability, friendship a convenience,” Gentleman peered around him at the faces, watching in flickering light.
“These are my friends now, and the guests that I permit to come to me.” Gentleman’s eyes lingered on his visitor.
“And protected by my armored suit of numbness I lost myself in my work, my pictures, my guests, in a predictable pleasant rhythm with a party now and then for my new boys, my special guests.
“And it was at one of these that as if in an opera that my most secret wish came true.
“There he was! Standing at my door. My Prince! Tall and regal brought by one of my friends of the moment.
“He looked again at me with his amazing sapphire eyes, again his half asleep smile. He was magnificent in black tie.
“My other guests again glanced with big rounded eyes as he walked by.
“This town is not known for its beauties, there are no astonishing men taking your breath away loitering in the halls of the Rayburn Building.
“My Prince was a god come down from Olympus. And again I felt the dazzling joy that his proximity had once brought me.
“My joyful reunion lasted briefly. The man escorted by my Prince was very close to the city’s most powerful men and that the Prince had come to know with very special gifts for a select few.
“My moment, my dream was dashed, crushed by the memory of last gift bestowed by the Prince.
“And here in my house, my refuge from a world of unspeakable terrors had been invaded by a nightmare from long, long ago, a ghost of the once forgotten past.
“I heard around me the casual laughter, saw the empty smiles, people who stepped on other people’s lives without a second thought leaving the damage for someone else to clean up.”
Chapter 27
Off a side street not far from the White House was a boarded up window of a bar sandwiched between an all-night tobacco stand run by pinched face Arabs and a Chinese carryout. Called the Nickel, its few blacked out windows tell passersby to mind their own business.
Outside past the long bar where men were bunched over bottles of beer and glasses of cheap wine. A flight of stairs lead to a rooftop bar. Chinese lanterns danced a glowing sig a light breeze.
He looked in the mirror behind the bar and saw himself and beside him a middle-aged man in a dark suit.
‘The suit looked “suburban”’, he thought watching at the reflection; the neatly cropped hair carelessly combed to one side, the face going to fat, the blank smile of a man chained to a mortgage and a pension plan.
The bartender returned with two drinks and put them down in front of the stray from somewhere across the river.
He paid with cash instead of a credit card and sloppily shoved the change into a wallet.
“Here you go fella,” he said pushing the highball glass to the man in the mirror.
“This one’s on me.” He was desperate to look like a bar happy conventioneer but his eyes darted nervously as he studied the others around him, then his eyes quickly come back.
Off to the side a not very tall man dressed like a fraternity boy from Georgetown in a pink polo shirt, choppy khakis and deck shoes stuck a cigarette in his mouth by holding one end between two fingers and slipping it between his glassy lips.
He approached the man in the suit steadying himself as he walked by holding on to the bar with one hand.
“Could I trouble you for a light?” the overage fraternity boy asked in a silvery voice. His eyes too dart about the room.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” the man in the suit said in a big hearty boom and pulled out a lighter, the kind that flips open and makes a flame with a flick of the thumb.
“Ooh, thank you sugah,” the pseudo fraternity boy gushed.
“I’m here from Richmond. I heard this was the place to look for a ma-yan,” he said, making into two words.
At a pool table men played a slow game, hardly speaking. They were muscular and broad, their t-shirts tight and short around their biceps.
They ignored the older narrow-eyed men at the bar but now and then a young man stretched showing off smoothly bulging arms.
“Ooh,” the fraternity boy gushed. He and the suit watched, the suit’s lips pursed to a neat crease.
Around in the booths and dark recesses stirred others, their embers of desire fanned by men around the pool table.
“Take a look at that one,” the man in the pink shirt said.
“Sugah,” the overage fraternity boy drawls to include Mr. Suit in. “Are those boys what I think they are?”
“And just what do you think they are?” the suit asks baiting the other.
“Well yal, they’re hustlers,” he answered. He spoke in an exaggerated shock. He was into his performance as the out of town innocent discovering the ways of the big city. He was slumming, a tourist visiting an inferior society for amusement but unlike a tourist he won’t go back to tell his stories to the folks back home. He can’t tell them about this place, he can’t tell anyone how he paid the natives for their favors.
The suit looked at the out-of-towner for a long moment.
“Really?” he said swinging around on the bar stool to get a better look at the young men around the pool table.
They stir; know they are being watched, a pack alerted to the scent of prey.
Both groups eyed each other warily. This went on for some time, the johns seeking out the right man for the night and the trade constantly arranging and re-arranging themselves against the far wall in a tableau.
One hustler leaned against a wall, his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. The jeans have slipped below the man’s navel to reveal a flat smooth stomach and mounds of pale muscle, the upper edge of his butt. His hair is black. He has dark lashes; luminous skin suggests a faraway country, anyways as far as the Caribbean or Central America.
Everyone watches as he re-positioned his legs and haunches against the wall.
“What about that one? Is he for sale?” The tourist asked.
The suit again took a long look at the bare arms raked by an overhead light, a diabolical figure of the black and the achingly pale.
Across the room the ache, the numbness and clouds of endless desire; the hustlers and the johns share it. The johns who came night after night, weekend after weekend. The satisfaction and relief of the night before already passing, bringing on again the aching of desire. The hustlers searched for another moment of the power that comes with the exchange of money for their bodies. And they fuel an aching too as they return to the streets and to places like the Nickel night after the night because there will never be… enough money to make them stop.
“Christ, he’s big!” the tourist said. And the hustler is indeed big, his massive across the chest and shoulders are accentuated by his small waist, yet he wasn’t a body builder who lives in front of the mirror in the gym. They wouldn’t be caught dead in the Nickel. They ran ads on the internet and accepted credit cards and called themselves fitness models.
From the street door came a high-pitched “Darling”; a gauntlet hurled into the room by Xtra Vaganza, Madame X when she’s appearing on stage. She stopped in the doorway to let everyone get a good look at her. In the broken rainbow of neon signs spelling out brands of beer she stood at her full height at eye level with the bouncer, a large man who gave Madame X a crooked smile and with a snap of his wrist waved her in.
She walked slowly along the bar nodding like a general inspecting her troops. She was here to wave the flag, to remind everyone that she and her tribe have battled for their right to be who they are and the men are silent under her inspection, are still, at attention.
She stopped in front of the suit and said “Anot
her night late at the office, dear, working over your… presentation?” Her voice is throaty and a low alto. A giggle popped here as she made a slow procession around the room, her head at a majestic angle. For a moment the aching tension is carried away by her effervescence, and then as suddenly as she had appeared, she was as quickly out the door and gone.
“She hates saying goodbye,” someone in the dark said, and murmurs stirred the air.
“Waiil,” says the man from Richmond, “I nevuh.”
The suit is quiet, he is red above his white collar and his eyes are narrowed almost to slits; was he angry about Madame X’s joke or angry at being singled out or embarrassed that his anonymity was shattered?
But the moment passed, and the aching came back, the desire goading them on.
“You interested in him?” the suit asks. He fished out a cigarette from the pack in front of him on the bar and with a snap a flame jumped from his lighter. He inhaled deeply waiting for an answer.
“I’m not syuah what you mean,” the tourist said trying to sound somewhere between shocked and bewildered.
“Come on, you know what I mean. You want that one?” He followed the gaze of the tourist, to the muscle man with the baby mouth and glossy dark hair. He looked back with an out-of-focus stare in his eyes as if searching a horizon, a thousand miles away.
The suit nodded and then lifted his drink, something deep amber, Scotch? Whiskey? In a highball glass and in a toast to the hustler, he beckoned him over.
He didn’t move; it’s some kind of rule, a custom of long forgotten origins, that a real man, a real hustler doesn’t respond to cat calls from the herd of Johns. He ignores them and turns instead to study the pack at the pool table. His casual interest seemed a little weary; how many games of pool had he watched, how many nights had he stood in shadows in practiced indifference?
The suit and the aging fraternity brother watched every move, every shift of the hustler’s haunches as he pressed against the wall.