Broken Rainbows

by Rager, Bob

  He saw the foot hanging from the edge of a dumpster jammed against the brick, maybe the other foot was inside; he could use a pair. Walking through broken pavement and glass grind down the soles pretty fast. Thing is when he grabbed the fancy boot, there was still a foot in it.

  He had to sit down and puzzle his way through this. He was a methodical patient man.

  He figured the other boot was inside the dumpster but probably so was the rest of the man. Did he have the wherewithal to climb into the dumpster along with whoever, whatever was still inside and get the other boot?

  Sayin’ he got the other boot; however he had to get it, so now he had two boots but he still had a mayun in the dumpster. He’s guessin’ it’s a man. Oh my Lord, he wouldn’t think too much about that one way or the other now.

  So he had a pair of good boots and a body in the dumpster. He could slap chair and go on and, and that was it.

  But what if somebody recognized the boots, pretty flashy ones, with a lot of cutwork and heavy stitching. Usually all was back here was the cans, cigarette buds, funny broken little bottles, jeans sometimes. He had once found a wallet but it was empty, empty of money the credit cards and driver’s license gone.

  They might think he’d done it! He’d been in the joint once, wasn’t going through that again not for a pair of old boots once belonging to one these ole cocksuckers.

  He thought of putting the boot back on the foot but he didn’t want to climb back up the side of the dumpster and wrangle the foot and God knows what was up there. He put the boot down and without looking back pushed his cart with its billowing plastic bags of cans, containers and interesting stuff through the alleyway to the cut out to the street.

  He’d go up to Capitol Street and before long a metropolitan DC police cruiser come by and he would wave it down and point to alley and he’d go this way while the cruiser went that way.

  Chapter 39

  The scene as he makes it out is a world of male power. The cement platform of a freight loading dock is a stage for muscle, and authority, and bare chested labor. Shadows play and soar up and across the back walls of the abandoned warehouse against an orange hellish glow thrown about by fires burning in old oil drums.

  A man crosses at an angle. The skin tight leather jeans gleans across his bubble butt, his cock springing out from the crotchless pants. Men are strewn about in groups in twos and threes. There could be a hundred or more men lost in nooks and crevasses; and there are no words, no voices, even whispers, all contact arranged by glance and nods, a shift of a leg, a turn of the chin, distances crossed inch by inch.

  In the alley earlier this night, the men called to each other in exchanges accomplished in low voices. But here the silence is supreme, the voice is forbidden, a vow observed with strict discipline.

  A uniformed policeman bulges out in deep profile from a niche in a brick wall. He is an uncommonly handsome man, a square chin, broad face, a high brow, full soft lips. Was there some fountain of manly beauties, an island off Key West, caves in the Rockets, sacred depths that bore men said to be too beautiful to be straight.

  There was a price to pay for the gift of male beauty. The heterosexual men were suspicious, the gay men jealous and afraid to approach, leaving the giant angel policeman standing alone in the bright orange glow. Now there is sound, murmurs, and throat breaths, gasps, whisper of “yeah man, that’s it, don’t stop, harder, deeper.” The pleas for more, more, tighter and harder, men’s muscles can be big and bigger, men seem to enjoy handing that others might think is rough.

  The time seems quick to sort into simple categories and so what he sees, other say is erotic or sex or sadomasochistic, a label or a name and it is explained and understood and once understood it is no longer feared. But calling these sex seems to miss the whole point, the balance of strength and surrender; men seeking to overpower, men seeking to surrender; the unions in the warehouse mutual arguments, there is no war here, only negotiations, and rituals of sacrifice and communion.

  After a popping sound form the crushing of a vial of nitrate, comes a sudden flash of alertness. A hand waves the poppers in an arch, freezing the fumes to float and curl away.

  Two men suddenly fall across each other, their bare chests crushed together, palettes of sweat shimmer as one buries his face in the armpit of the other’s raised grant arm. One is pale, a delicate color, almost blue in the moonlight; his adorer is a robust thug, a ring of white metal dangling from a thick nipple. He works his mouth across the pale hard chest, the muscle here a mealy slab and core, his penitent’s nipple with hot groping lips.

  A construction worker strides by wearing a torn plaid shirt and heavy leather belt and thick tan boots. His beard is a brushy frame for a still expressionless face, as he passes an arm reaches out from a cubicle and lightly pulls on the gaping shirt front revealing luxurious curls.

  Someone from the far end of a tunnel was talking to him.

  “Hey bud, are you coming?” The words are a warm husky buzz. The score wanted to leave.

  “How about…?” he said a number that’s twice the going rate.

  “I said I’d pay whatever you want.” The score didn’t look at him as he talks, again that certitude that’s a little irritating.

  When they walked out he looked up and down the street for the lighted beacon of a cab needing a fare.

  The score looked at him. “Oh we won’t need a cab. I’ve got a car right over here.” He jerked his head in the direction of a generic Sedan a drab dark color.

  “Hey whatsa matter?”

  “I don’t go across the river.”

  “What?!”

  “I don’t go to the suburbs.”

  “What makes you think…” The score looked again at the car. “Oh yeah, I see… we’re not going to Virginia… I’ve got a place near U Street.” The score mumbled the words, a voice thick and honeyed.

  And he got into the car with the score.

  They drove along lighted avenues across U Street past the Howard University campus. The street light grew further apart. The new condo blocks give way to blocks of small row houses. A tidy row of the identical house; with red brick fronts three floors high, a front porch that stretched across the entire block joining them all like a flotilla of ships anchored together.

  The score turned into a driveway cut into the base of a house at the same time the garage door opened up to swallow them.

  “Don’t worry,” the score said. He had the soothing voice, the quiet manner of someone well practiced in calming down people.

  After climbing a stair at a corner of the garage they came out into a kitchen. Recently heavily remodeled, the counters are gleaming stainless steel, the appliances bright chrome.

  He was puzzled by something he can’t quite put his finger on.

  “I know what you’re thinking…” the humming resonance interrupted his thoughts.

  “I’ll give you extra for cab fare.”

  The score had removed his jacket and left it hanging on the back of a chair. He opened the vault like door of the refrigerator.

  “Ice!” the score said brightly. He held up a glass bowl of ice cubes and a bottle of vodka glazed with a shimmer of frost. Reflections in the giant refrigerator and the enameled appliances bounce off each other like being inside a fucking ice cube, frozen and suspended in mid breath, but watching from the outside. He feels a little light headed, the floor suddenly tilted to one side.

  “Comin’ big boy,” the score said. “This way.”

  A sudden cold swept through him, a winter wind that licked at him, then the same dull ache returned. He tried to think, to latch onto something but he felt as if the entire world had just been blown away.

  The score stood a few feet away. He jerked his head to the side to a room of depthless ombre shadows, a magician practicing a spell.

  He looked around for the patron saint of this world, a plaster reproduction of The David for johns of a certain age; where was the refrigerator magnet of David with a
wardrobe of removable jeans? He glanced expectantly at the walls thinking he might find the blown up photos of hairy men in black leather harnesses, the contemporary reincarnation of David.

  But everywhere in mirrors were the reflections of two men, the score and another man that he at first didn’t recognize, a man in a motorcycle jacket, a three day stubble and dark staring eyes that with a start, he realized were his own.

  “You seem a little jumpy,” said the score. “Sit down, have one of these.”

  The score handed him a short tumbler of clear liquid tinged here and there with cerulean, a piece of a glacier.

  He sipped, a chill running down inside him, a stream slightly thick like freezing blood. When he looked up the eyes of the score were fixed on him in a cool steady gaze that seemed to come out of nowhere, that seemed to belong to another man, to someone else, detachment now coming over the impatient disheveled office slave squeezing an hour or two of freedom between the downtown cubicle and routine of his life. The score was watching him in an unblinking appraisal, measuring him, none of the darting glances of most johns. Most johns were erratic, and tense, even afraid. Would the hustler steal something, take his wallet? Find out his telephone number at home? Would the wife, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, ask too many questions? Fear nipped them into a jittering state of exhaustion.

  But these eyes were anything but afraid. Sometimes the johns in the moments afterwards stared at him with eyes clear and calm, a burden for now lifted away. These weren’t the eyes of these other men, those other times.

  The john watched carefully, his face a mask without expression. But his eyes glistened with an icy keenness, studying him, weighing what he saw, assessing with a clinician’s casual efficiency.

  He looked down now at the john’s hands; the palms were narrow and long, the fingers slender and tapering, the nails burnished to a matte gloss by an expert. These were well kept hands, hands of a professional. He wondered if the score was a doctor, a surgeon. There was something tidy about him, a bit of a clean freak, from the room’s spare disinfected look. He thought again of the kitchen, the spotless countertops, the empty blueness inside the refrigerator, empty except for the icemaker and a bottle in the freezer door.

  There wasn’t anything to eat inside.

  No bottles of water, no takeout containers on the shelves, no eggs in the door.

  He stared at the upholstered arm of the sofa where he sat, the leather without creases. The unblemished paint on the walls, the high gloss of the hardwood floors.

  “You don’t really live here,” he said at last to the unblinking eyes.

  The john looked around the room and then he said “You catch on fast.” He cradled his glass with his long fingers and sipped, his Adam’s apple rising and falling.

  “It’s just a place,” he said “I keep for special nights.” As he spoke his eyes never wavered from their target.

  He was trying to place this block, the drive past Howard then across Georgia Avenue, the street lighted at one end but dark at the other, then a flash of sudden recognition. The Soldier’s Home, this street ended at the grounds of the Soldier’s Home, an eerily quiet and empty place during the day: after darkness fell, a lost and found of abandoned stolen cars, and overgrown graves that were as thick as any jungle. Even the police avoided the place.

  He searched out the pocket vestibule that would beyond its doors open out to the street. All the row houses had these antechambers to hold back the weather.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said the john. “It’s over there.”

  The john sounded a little disappointed, even tired; he sounded as if he had said these words before. The john’s gaze wavered, he seemed distracted, he seemed to be listening to something only he could hear. “All these old houses in town have the same whatchamacallit, that little room in front.”

  “Vestibule. It’s called a vestibule,” the john said impatiently. The john was watching him again; This time with the merest trace of a smile.

  They liked that, the johns, that the hustler was dumb, in need of an education, which it happened was what the johns had plenty of. It was all wound together, the johns wanting the young hustlers, buying a day of what the young still had, youth, even if it was someone else’s; to make fun of their absurd accents, vowels brought down from valleys lost in Appalachia or bussed from the states of the deep South that were only by legal technicalities part of the Union.

  The johns gave lessons in sipping wine, names of furniture styles, and of course the opera. It paid off being dumb. But as it can happen sometimes the hustler becomes more and more like one of them, the johns, the hustler amusing the john’s friends, sniffing the bouquet of goblets of wine, bring up the season’s hit musical, the johns friends marvel at “what you’ve done with him.” The john for once finds himself in the mood to listen. The work is done, there’s nothing left to do. And sooner than later he spots a diamond in the rough standing at Dupont Circle, a boy, a youth, thrown away like… what? A car that bores the owner, last year’s shoes, or maybe a boy fades away forgotten by his family, forgotten by life.

  Chapter 40

  “How would you like to serve your country?” The speaker was a middle aged man dressed in a sober, expensive gray suit. He was somewhere in his middle years. “He seemed almost old,” thought the young man in the room. He wondered vaguely about his own clothing.

  He wore a dark brown herringbone tweed suit with a matching vest. His mother in a gesture that both surprised and alarmed him had taken him to a haberdashery on Washington Street during the winter break from school. He called it school, although it was college; the words “college break” didn’t feel right in his mouth.

  He had wanted to look serious for this interview and this was the only suit he owned. After all, how many suits could a guy wear here on campus? The business school majors wore them all the time, but they weren’t to be trusted. And he felt a duty to wear his mother’s gift, although she and his father were somewhere in the air over the North Pole en route to a new post on the other side of the Pacific; he hadn’t paid much attention to his father’s announcement of where at the time; the destination could, would change several times. While his parents were abroad his only contact with them would be an occasional card or gift at his birthday and the monthly deposit to his account at school. Last birthday he received a pipe covered in suede which he thought was nifty, if a little awkward to carry around.

  The recruiter’s words rustled in his ears dry and sharp as leaves.

  “I’m not sure how I would be of use, sir.”

  The recruiter smiled tightly without parting his lips. He was pale, someone who stayed indoors even on warm, sunny days.

  “You’re being modest,” he said. He made a small sigh, his mind for a moment somewhere else. When he looked back, he spoke more gently.

  “Your grade point average isn’t what interests us, although it’s alright enough. You have a mind for patterns, you’re good at languages, and you’re on the swim team. That’s very interesting considering,” the recruiter paused, then said, “You really don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?” and he shook his head. He again looked grave.

  “Tell me what happened the year you were five years old.”

  He was confused now and the vest felt scratchy through his oxford cloth shirt.

  “Oh, you mean,” he began and unable to stop himself, he looked down at his shoes. He wore heavy wing tips, just like his father’s; the thick soles and broad instep reminded him of a duck’s webbed feet.

  “I was in the hospital,” he stumbled, struggling to find the briefest possible way to say what came next. “My legs weren’t growing right and I started swimming lessons to help with the, uh, problem.”

  “Is that right?” he asked, his eyes peering across the desk.

  “That’s all it was for a while, that’s all.” He wondered if he was sweating; the suit felt warm as well as scratchy now. There was something else, something pushed deep and awa
y in the dark, he was only dimly aware of it. Then just as quickly as its shadow had fallen across his mind it was gone.

  “What do you think of the work of an analyst? Professor Lawrence thinks you’d be good at it.”

  At the mention of the Professor’s name, he felt his face grow hot; he looked again at his shoes, remembering the days his father took him to Hahn’s downtown to buy them for him. He felt calm again thinking about his father, a man he knew as little about as his college professors. Although he remembered each visit by his father, his return made spectacular by visits to school, to the house near Mount Vernon, accompanied by presents and dinners in restaurants, visits to Rehoboth, and seats at the circus.

  “You would read a lot, write up what you read; we would train you for special projects,” again, the tight lipped smile.

  After extensive alterations the suit actually fit, something he appreciated because he was hard to fit off the rack. He was narrow across the chest, but he had a fair amount of muscle on his shoulders and arms and with his shirt on, he seemed even broader. He had a waist. It was his legs that threw everything off; his thighs and gluts were two sizes larger than the rest of him because of all the swimming and exercise. He had gone to an overseas American school that had no swimming pool, prompting his father to sign him up for soccer. Four years later when he graduated, he was one of three students who finished all four years at the same school. He also had a lower body so sturdy, he felt like a freak in the locker room after practice, surrounded by boys six inches taller and sleek as gazelles. There were other reasons he was skittish in the locker room, and other reasons he furtively glanced at his classmates’ bare torsos, but thinking he looked like a mutant unsettled him.

  But college was different; there were all kinds of people, different shapes and sizes, even Negros, which he was learning to call “blacks” instead of the smooth, sleek boys of his overseas school.

  Basically, all he had to do was watch the candy bars. He had a sweet tooth and he tended to chunk up rapidly, and he vowed to eat only the Swiss chocolate bars and toffees sent by his mother in care packages during finals week.