Broken Rainbows

by Rager, Bob

  He wandered past blocks of overly designed condos; stone and brittle glass that was Dupont circle’s own version of freeze-dried pretense. The numbness came creeping back, bony fingers that chilled feeling. Oh please he begged that the numbness smother the terror that sprang and danced about him, a man burning at the stake called life. And then he returned to the only home his soul had ever had, the baths.

  Chapter 30

  The new hustler had come on the scene a few months ago and worked it hard; couldn’t remember the name, but the look was dead on: basic man, white t-shirt, dark blue jeans, sneakers, a leather jacket, cropped hair, a square jaw, clean forehead. He walked with his thumbs hooked into the loops of his jeans.

  He was hitting all the spots on the circuit, working the circuit, showing up, hooking up, then off – a regular schedule like any other working guy.

  A woman sitting on the hood of Jaguar stretched one leg straight out, the other knee up bent; she leaned back and heaved her double D’s into the cool air.

  No! They are real! But it didn’t matter – nothing was supposed to be real here, nobody came here to find reality.

  Goddamn!

  The kid was back peddling her ass as the cars moved by a trolling speed.

  “Hey you! Ginger!” Madame X covered the distance in three strides.

  “What the fuck you doing back here bitch?”

  “Oh,” Ginger wailed, “I need the money, please.” She stopped in midsentence drooping as gears shifted in her head.

  “Go ahead,” Ginger said, her voice suddenly flat and her eyes clouded and distant. “Go ahead and hit me, it doesn’t matter anyway.” She was flat like a worn out balloon.

  ‘No way,’ thought Madame X, ‘No use in getting her further into that scene. That’s how it begins, slumming for laughs, for extra dough, a few hits, a couple bills, better than – what? Better than nothing…that’s all they think they got, nothing. A slap here and there, the boyfriend who’s a John, the great sex after the beatings, or “I need money” for school, the baby, the electric bill, for my mother’s birthday; There were all kinds of excuses for money, for laughs, it was all the same, excuses, excuses; but what was the reason, where was the place it all started?

  Madame X searched the kid’s face looking hard for an explanation that might reveal itself. But there was nothing there to see.

  The Europeans were regulars on the street. The Germans and the French visited the strip to wag their heads at the spectacle of American degeneracy. Sometimes they had manners and knew how to treat a lady and they paid.

  The Arabs were coarse; they haggled over the money and they groped the goods. The sheikh, he might wear a gold and diamond watch, but their hands were clumsy with fat fingers and varnished nails. ‘Gross me out…a man shouldn’t have painted nails…that was only for the Queens.’

  The Asians, the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Koreans kept their hands to themselves until the deal was made, mostly they liked looking like teenagers at the zoo; too bewildered by these outsize, fabulous creatures to do anything but gape in wonder.

  Oh and it’s not true about Asian men; some were really hung. The Northern Chinese were tall and rugged as any lumberjack, and they had mustaches and beards too.

  The hustler was now getting into a dark sedan. ‘Interesting.’

  A white man walked by. Instantly heads turned at the sight of this “white boy from Virginia” in a blue shirt with a collar, the tails hanging out, they stared at the unpressed cotton pants. He instantly became Fred.

  “Uh oh,” says Madame X to no one in particular. Fred was wobbling and looking for mugging, begging for it, hanging out of his pants already. Anybody could roll him, shake him down, even that kid. Even Ginger. Give her enough time and she’d have fingers as light as the bubbles she’s blowing with her nasty pink gum.

  Any of them could, would if they had to. Some of them made a habit of it.

  An alley and the trembling light from a crooked street lamp cut out a giant triangle of black in the next alley.

  The white man paused a few feet away. A pinpoint of light flickered as a cigarette was lit, a beacon to the strange ships in the night.

  Boys hung out in the darkness. They were straight but they were available for the right money in the dark. Only their junk was part of the deal; they didn’t suck, they didn’t get it in the ass, and they didn’t piss, take it or leave it.

  Even with these rules, the alley was a busy place.

  Guided by the red glow of a lit cigarette, the white man walked ahead. The blackness shifted and moved, taking on a life of its own. The white man disappeared from view, and for a moment the alley shadows quivered taking him in.

  Madame X’s hair shifted “hmm, hmm”.

  Bodies were found in these alleys; more bodies than were reported in the past. More mugging too; the Johns weren’t too excited about having their names on the record; Fred wasn’t going to call the police and file a report that included his name, the location, the description of the alleged assailant. That was never gonna happen.

  The hustler kept popping up, kept pushing his way back, something, something.

  The bare forearms, lightly toned muscles but…not bulging, and clean, no tats! The hustler didn’t have tattoos. They all had tats, the escorts, the girls, the Johns, the boys, tattoos and miniature dumbbells in their tongues. Prince Alberts, hanging from the taint, and muscles from hours, days, weeks, months, years in the joint with nothing else to do but lift and ink tattoos to fight with the boredom.

  Everybody had tattoos, but not this hustler. But he had muscles. Now, what kind of guy builds muscle but never get inked?

  Chapter 31

  He had always found the dim light and shadows soothing, the expressionless faces like masks hiding the rawness of their hunger. In this gauze of faint light and open doors opening into even darker rooms, the lines in faces faded away, the stomachs that sagged with gravity became flat and hard. The silent men going round and round retracing their footsteps over and over were whatever one longed for. They were young soldiers in towels, cowboys in towels, street toughs in towels, the uniform of the day.

  He walked past the same changing room where the golden man had stood, his towel at his feet and had beckoned him to come in. The door was closed. He stared at it and with a deep sigh he walked away.

  A moment later he found his room and closed the door behind him. He fell into bed and curled up. He didn’t know if he was asleep or awake, his thoughts drifting, he remembered forgotten people, houses, rooms, a family, a kaleidoscope of gray shards and reflections and black mirrors.

  He guessed that once he had had a life, a childhood, a youth, but now all he had was a past. He remembered that summer spent at camp when he was learning multiplication tables. The man then had gray hair and towered above him. He remembered how important he had felt when the man, bigger than his own father, carried him half asleep from the campfire, with the other little boys who had sat frozen in terror as the camp director spun tales of homicidal maniacs with hook for a hand, of werewolves lurking in the dark forest, of little boys lost in the woods never to be found.

  He had felt safe in the shelter of the strong arms that lay him down on a cot. Later, though he had fallen asleep, he woke thinking that he was tangled in the sheets and pillows, but the pillows were long and hard and as he opened his eyes, half lidded and drowsy he realized that he was gripped between taut, powerful legs. He felt something choking him, shutting his throat, making him gasp for air, his cheek brushed against dark wiry hair. Tears welled up in his eyes from pain. He tried to wriggle free, tried to breath, then he heard a voice, a familiar voice in the night, saying “Doesn’t that feel good?” Then he fell back into a black pool and slept. The words drifted off to an echo that came and went through the years. After years of silence the echo would return without warning, a branch of the past that scraped on the door or at the window as he slept, that came back as nightmare, bathing him with in sweat.

  And thro
ugh that night, the campfire, the warm arms, the man’s sweat and the hardness in his throat remained clear, that night began to shift to another life, life that he knew by reading someone’s diary over his shoulder. A life that he had escaped from, leaving behind someone that he wanted to forget, that didn’t exist anymore. He had escaped, left someone else’s terror behind. But now came the crushing fear that had always been there, never gone, just growing and building a flood waiting behind a dam.

  In the soft dark he heard the whispers of men through the walls, whispered words he could almost hear and glad he didn’t hear. Now came a moan as a man escaped for a moment into ecstasy, like a bird calling as it suddenly takes wings and escapes into the sky in flight. The moans came faster and deeper then stopped only to return in a long slow baritone gasp. Somewhere from another direction came laughter then muffled words.

  He was awake and wanted to shower; suddenly he felt unclean. In a towel draped loosely at his groin he walked down another hall, carefully avoiding the eyes of the others. He left behind the rows of dark almost black doorways.

  The door to the steam room was glass and clouded with steam and slow running trembling gobs of water. Seized by an impulse he turned away from the shower and opened the door and walked into a hot fog of steam. A blurry shape walked by, a hand brushed his crotch and was gone. He knew this room, knew the turns and alcoves even in the thickness of a cloud trapped on the second floor of an anonymous building on one of the city’s forgotten blocks. He felt the stirring of hope, the cloud pressing damp and warm, whispers chasing away the numbness. He walked across shallow puddles of warm water towards thick billows until through the mist a tableau of men grew solid and hard. In the tumbling clouds of steam was a man on his knees--then a tall big boned man, back arched his hand briskly jerking himself off, the mists coiled around their legs and torsos, nearby in a heap of thighs and shoulders was a threesome, the powerful legs of a man standing on a bench as another jerked his cock; a cheek pressed against the cock accepting its fleshy caress. Yet another figure had one leg on the bench, the other foot on the floor, opening wide his thighs to accommodate the broad shoulders of a fourth man who slurped at his crotch. He had seen this before, men sharing themselves with one another. He had seen this but what actually did he see he wondered?

  The heat, the softness of the cloud calmed him, blunted the fear and he sat down on the bench not far from the tableau of happy warriors. Or were they happy? “Maybe,” he thought happiness didn’t matter here. There was to be sure no sadness for these men; sadness brought men and their dicks down. But happiness?

  Again came the music of a man’s gasps mounting to a crescendo as he came and soared for a moment, only to come down again.

  “Thank you,” someone murmured between ragged breaths.

  Men had thanked him, the courtesy still surprised him. When had men of the night started thanking each other? He remembered the men at the restaurant, the laughing men, the men eating together, their laughter rising in flight above them. They probably held hands as they walked through aisles of the supermarket down the street. Had he ever held another man’s hand, the most visible part of man below the waist? He probed his thoughts of long ago when briefly he had a boyfriend in college, he couldn’t remember holding his hand, saying thank you. With impatience, he shook his head.

  Now and then came again song of gasps and moans. He knew this song. He had copied it, he had studied it, and when it suited his purpose he could sing his version of it, as he had for the golden man that night. Even that was phony; he had faked an orgasm when he couldn’t come, he had control this way. Holding back when he had sensed danger as he burned his cock deep into the man’s ass trying to reach his heart. He had sung a song he didn’t feel and pumped even when he felt numb because he had…

  The sadness was creeping back, trapping him between pain and fear. His thoughts or dreams were the same. He couldn’t tell the difference.

  Chapter 32

  Feeling hollow he sat at the bar in the Nickel. Everyone was talking but in the cacophony he heard words, a conversation that was becoming familiar. A young man, possibly in his 20’s still, he was so smooth and hairless, and a suit type, a middle aged man, stare past each other then exchange words. They had been living together meaning the other man was paying the rent and buying the groceries. In another place, a dining room, furnished with earnest reproductions of Chippendale, they would be a father scolding a son for running a red light and getting caught, but that vignette of a suburban crisis was an episode of a television comedy from the ancient world of the last century and was far long gone.

  The suit in clipped words is saying “I don’t know what to think.” He pushed a long narrow finger across a greying temple and pursed his thin lips. His hair is cropped close to distract attention away from his otherwise receding hairline. He is well into that stage that a certain world of men call “an older man” which is to say he is no longer young, certainly not pretty accepting that he must pay one way or the other for the company of the young and pretty. He is sometimes grateful that he is able to pay for now, because he is still not yet in that phase beyond older man; an oblivion that even money can’t escape, when the world stops knowing such a man even exists, when he becomes a parody, a man melting away into nothing.

  “I trusted you,” the older man said. “My grandmother’s silver, gone!”

  The young boyman turned away to hide a smirk. He was silent. They have played this scene before. The last time it had been a television set and before that a watch.

  “I know you need the money,” the accuser said. “You just have to ask.” He was high on of the fumes of his indignation and the opportunity to display his higher feeling. He didn’t ask ‘why?’ of the boyman. He wanted this scene all to himself, he wanted an audience to play too. The boyman knew that in some way stealing is part of the unspoken compact between them. He knew that he will order another drink now, but the older man will get so drunk he will collapse into his solid big biceps, helpless and at the mercy of anyone passing by, in this case a handsome smooth blonde with a flat top and a beefy neck. He knew that he will insert the older man into the passenger seat of his expensive but discrete German sedan and drive them to a condo on the fringes of Chevy Chase or Georgetown or McLean.

  Once inside the older man’s impeccably furnished apartment, rooms that ached with the fear trapped in its closets, the john will flail helplessly and unsuccessfully to stand. The young man when he actually thought about the man he carried over his shoulders to the bedroom, was still a john. He dismissed the words said earlier; boyfriend, lover, husband bring again a smirk. Still he lay the john gently on top of the bed and pulled back the thick blanket to a gaping triangle of white. He carefully settled the john’s head on a pillow. The boyman has his own code, he doesn’t steal from the drunk.

  The john stirred flinging an arm around the boyman’s neck and pulled him close to his thin lips and smeared a kiss across the pale gold haired cheek. The boyman braced himself; he has been through this before, the warm spittle is yet another bodily fluid, the waste product of the ailing heart of this man. There were more flailings, again a floppy arm around his neck, the hot pulses of whisky-smelling breath, each puff weaker and weaker until the john began… to snore.

  Chapter 33

  A heavy man with an ordinary face, and an even larger man spoke earnestly to each other as they emerged from the nether reaches of the Nickel and as they talked they sipped their drinks, cheap vodka mixed with ice.

  He didn’t have a taste for vodka although gallons spill into glasses all night long. He watched the two large men. Do they qualify as bears, masculine men with big arms and abundant body hair? Or are they just large, the desire of chubby chasers?

  “Oh honey,” the larger of the two wailed. “I wanna go home.” The words were clear though the voice was like a little girl’s.

  Then the man looked at him. “Oh you! You’re just watching this like theatre!” And stomped off.


  Around him reeled a crowd that had suddenly mushroomed from nowhere, men shouting to each other above the roar, faces blurred in the moody light.

  He took himself to the bathroom and stood at a urinal so close to a stall that an arm reached around him to open the door. He didn’t turn around, someone said “Excuse me,” and brushed against him. He smiled but quelled a laugh.

  Another man walked in and stood in the wings of the next urinal. He wore walking shorts maybe two weeks ahead of the weather and a dark short sleeve shirt, freshly laundered and pressed. He had dressed up for someone, a stranger. His hair was brushed back, and he gave off a faint aroma of aftershave lotion.

  He reminded him… of his father, the cologne, the neat grooming, the softening skin of the face already showing lines, the optimism in the face of uncaring fate. This man was about the same age as his father when his son was in grade school learning his multiplication tables having worked his way through every digit up to nine. That summer. Then his father no longer young, already middle-aged like this stranger next to him. He wondered if this was a father, this man leaning into the maw of the urinal clamped by its great white jaws of porcelain.

  He felt a stab of pain in his cock when he pulled himself out from his jeans. Had he caught his foreskin in the teeth of the zipper? He felt around through the fly and found the narrow leather-bound and studs of his cock ring. In the numbness that had crept over him he had forgotten it until the edges had dug into the tender skin of his cock. He dug a finger under the band of leather and unsnapped it. He had to pull it a couple times to free the leather from his balls, then he leaned back with a sigh as the pain eased.

  He glanced at the tidy man next to him. He was staring straight ahead at his face grim with concentration. Then swiftly he pulled himself out of the urinal, quickly zipped up and fled.