by Paul Burston
Just then Neil reappeared. “Who’s your friend?” he said, handing Martin a pint glass of lager. “Darth Vader?”
“Oh, nobody,” Martin shrugged, watching Matthew melt into the crowd. “Just someone I used to know, that’s all.”
“It seems to be filling up a bit,” Neil said as a fat man in fishing waders squeezed by. “Shall we move over there? I think there’s a bit more room.”
Clutching their drinks in their hands, they made their way over to an empty space toward the back of the room. High above them, on a metal grate that served as a viewing gallery, a few people milled about in search of sexual partners.
“Feel free to wander off and have fun if you want,” Martin said, taking a gulp of his beer and looking around to check that Matthew and his gas mask weren’t hovering nearby. “l’ll be okay on my own.”
Neil grinned. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want any harm to come to you.”
“Very funny!” Martin laughed. “Really, I’m fine. There’s nothing here I can’t handle.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, something appeared in the air directly above his head, fell down in front of his eyes, and landed with a gentle splash in his glass.
Martin stared in horror at the white suspension floating in his beer. “Some bastard just spit in my drink!” he said, looking up at the gallery for the culprit and spotting two men huddled together in what looked like a fairly compromising position.
Neil peered into Martin’s glass and clasped his hand to his mouth. “I hate to tell you this,” he said, stifling a laugh. “But I don’t think that’s spit.”
Seventeen
Ben hadn’t called by the time Martin arrived home alone from the Hoist and eased himself out of Neil’s leather chaps. Nor had he called by the time he arrived back from work the following evening and rushed eagerly into the living room to check the answering machine. Martin dialed 1471 and felt his heart sink as the automated voice confirmed that the last incoming call matched the only message on the machine, left by John at 11:23 A.M. precisely, inviting both him and Neil to “a small, surprise party” at his place on Saturday night. Martin could tell from the tone of John’s voice that he had something to celebrate, although his words gave little away. He simply said that there was going to be an announcement of some kind and requested that they each bring along a bottle of something bubbly. Maybe John had finally been given that promotion he was always talking about, Martin thought, and tried not to feel too resentful at the prospect. John already cleared a couple of thousand a month. Then there were the various bonuses the airline awarded to him in the form of premiums and free flights, not to mention the other little extras Fernando gave him in the form of free drugs and, if John was to be believed, sex more or less on demand. It wasn’t as if John actually wanted for anything these days. He already had it all—the smart flat, the hot boyfriend, the invitations to celebrity parties, the place on the guest list, the free-drinks tickets, the complimentary drugs, everything. In fact, the only thing Martin could imagine John regularly paying for was food, and since his diet appeared to consist mainly of pills and powders supplemented by the occasional takeout, it seemed pretty safe to assume that his monthly food bill wasn’t about to break the bank.
Martin’s mind had been on money all day. Since collecting the post this morning and making the mistake of opening his bank statement, he had been trying to come to grips with the sorry state of his personal finances. Try as he might, he couldn’t work out where all his money went each month. It wasn’t as if he squandered his earnings on fancy clothes or flashy restaurants. He rarely went to the cinema, never visited the theater, and hardly ever went to clubs where he couldn’t bluff his way in without paying or count on a free lift home afterward with Neil. He didn’t smoke particularly heavily and only did the bars once or twice a week at most, which he thought showed remarkable restraint for a single gay man in pursuit of a boyfriend. At home he drank cheap, supermarket-label vodka, and when he was out clubbing, he tended to last the night on a single bottle of water, which he refilled at regular intervals from the tap, unless John was feeling especially generous with his drinks tickets, in which case he might treat himself to the odd vodka and Red Bull. Unlike John, he was usually required to pay for his drugs. But a couple of E’s and the odd gram of coke could hardly account for him being overdrawn by the middle of each month, could it?
Despite having no money in the bank and two weeks to go until his next pay check, he arrived home this evening with another dent in his credit card and his hands weighed down by three bags full of groceries, the contents of which were intended for tonight’s dinner with Caroline. For the first course, he planned to make a salad of spinach, pecorino cheese and almonds, served with a sherry vinegar dressing. For the main course, he had bought some lean sirloin steaks, new potatoes and sugar snap peas. For dessert, he had fresh blueberries and frozen yogurt. This would be followed by freshly ground coffee, and the whole lot washed down with a bottle of red wine and as many vodka and tonics as seemed appropriate. The bill for this orgy of culinary delights had come to just over forty pounds. When push came to shove, Martin’s attitude toward debt was rather like Quentin Crisp’s attitude toward dusting—once a certain amount piles up, you might as well ignore it completely because, relatively speaking, it doesn’t get any worse. And besides, it was ages since he had entertained anyone at home, and while Caroline would be eaten up with guilt if she thought for one moment that he was feeding her with food he really couldn’t afford, the truth was that she was hardly the kind of person you could invite over for dinner and present with a bowl of pasta smothered in a cheap, ready-made sauce. Caroline had what Martin’s mother would describe as “champagne tastes.” The fact that his income barely seemed to stretch to beer was beside the point.
Maybe it was the idea of Caroline and her champagne tastes that planted the thought in his head, but as he was rinsing the spinach for the salad, he suddenly remembered that he had half a gram of coke left over from last weekend. Turning off the tap and drying his hands with the tea towel, he headed into the bathroom. It was John who always said that a wise queen hides his drugs in the bathroom. That way, if the police ever came knocking at the door, you simply locked yourself in the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Martin had taken this advice to heart, and kept his drugs hidden inside an empty condom box in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet. But when he opened the drawer and took out the box, it was completely empty. Thinking this was odd, he went into the bedroom to check that he hadn’t accidentally left the wrap tucked safely inside his wallet, or lying open for all to see on the bedside cabinet. Again, nothing. It was then that an unpleasant thought began to form in the back of his mind. Could Neil have stolen his coke? Martin had left Neil at the Hoist last night, chatting away to some guy in a leather chest harness. Hours later he was half asleep in bed when he heard Neil arrive home, talking in muted tones with a man with a high voice and heavy boots. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that either Neil or his piece of trade had gone into the bathroom looking for some condoms, found the coke, and decided to help himself. At least that would help explain how they had managed to keep going for most of the night.
Remembering that Neil was working late and wouldn’t be back for hours, Martin decided to take a quick peek inside his bedroom. Opening the door, first he was struck by the smell of poppers. Living with Neil was a bit like sharing a flat with a teenager—you never knew what manner of disgusting surprises were in store for you when you ignored the warning signs and entered his bedroom unannounced. Looking around the room, his eye was drawn to a copy of QX lying on the floor next to the bed. The cover of the magazine showed a bare-chested black man with enormous nipples, but this wasn’t what caught his attention. Scattered across the man’s chest was a sprinkling of white crumbs and, lying next to the magazine, a screwed-up piece of paper. So, his suspicions had been right all along! Neil had stolen his coke! In fact, it looked as if there w
as barely a line left! First the toilet, and now this. He could see that he and Neil would have to have a serious talk.
Carefully lifting up the magazine so that none of the precious white powder fell onto the floor, Martin carried it gingerly into his own bedroom, where he arranged the crumbs into a surprisingly large line and quickly snorted it before returning to the kitchen and the task of rinsing his spinach.
John was having a Britney moment, dancing around his living room to an extended dance remix of “Oops! I Did It Again.” His body was still on New York time, and his mind was mulling over an incident that had taken place a few nights ago in the city that never slept, possibly because a fair number of its inhabitants were addicted to crystal meth. John had tried crystal once, three years ago at a gay club in Los Angeles. It was a bit like speed, only the effects were far stronger and it didn’t make his dick shrink. He took several lines and was awake for two days and horny as hell, which he quickly learned was the best way to enjoy West Hollywood. Every gay man John met in LA seemed to be permanently wired, whether they were on drugs or not. If they weren’t telling you how they planned to break into the movies, they were working the room in search of film producers, casting directors, talent scouts or anyone else who might be persuaded to help make them a star in return for a discreet blow job. Most claimed to know someone who knew someone who had slept with David Geffen and hadn’t looked back since. The name of a certain Hollywood heartthrob with short legs and a winning grin came up in conversation a lot.
John hadn’t arrived in New York on Monday evening planning to repeat the crystal experience. After a quick shower at the hotel, he headed straight for Splash, a bar in Chelsea, hoping to score some coke but quickly falling for the charms of one of the barboys, a beefy, corn-fed blond in a pair of black Calvin Klein trunks called Jamie. The bar staff at Splash were required to undress for work right down to their underwear, which helped explain why the bar was always full and why most of the customers were happy to throw in an extra dollar or two here and there as tips. John must have tipped Jamie twenty dollars in total that night, the tips becoming more generous the more drunk he became and the more Jamie dazzled him with his sweet white smile. One thing John had noticed during his many trips to New York was that the locals didn’t really drink in the way that Londoners did. Even on the gay scene, the excessive consumption of alcohol was generally frowned upon. So when he wandered off in search of the toilets and practically fell down the stairs, it was inevitable that he would attract attention. As luck would have it, attention came in the form of a slightly pudgy queen who was clearly accustomed to having to buy friends in gym-fit Chelsea, and who tried to win John over by offering him a line to help sober him up. John accepted his offer before quickly losing him in the crowd and returning to the bar to continue drooling over Jamie. It was only then that he realized that the line he had been given wasn’t coke but crystal meth.
John’s subsequent attempts to charm the Calvins off Jamie hadn’t met with much success. He quickly learned that Jamie didn’t have a boyfriend, which was good, only to be told an hour later that he did have a girlfriend, which obviously wasn’t so good. At one point, their conversation was interrupted by an older queen with his arm in plaster, who assured John that Jamie wasn’t quite as naive or quite as straight as he made out, insisting that the barboys at Splash were encouraged to invent girlfriends and pass themselves off as straight in much the same way that porn stars were required to butch it up in gay porn films. John didn’t find this the least bit comforting. By the time the bar closed and Jamie bade him a fond but firm farewell, he was high on crystal, fueled up on testosterone, and desperate for sex. He caught a cab and told the driver to take him to the meatpacking district, where he had been reliably informed there was an after-hours jack-off club.
His recollection of what happened after that was pretty fragmented, but filled with moments of alarming clarity, the way memories of mad, drug-fucked nights often were. He remembered finding the club, paying his entrance fee, and ordering a diet Coke at the bar. He remembered someone grabbing him from behind and smothering him with beery kisses. He remembered leaving and being led across the street to an apartment building that looked like something out of the film Seven, but without the added attraction of Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. He remembered having clumsy, unsatisfying sex on a mattress on the floor with the daylight streaming in through a bare window and onto a bare Puerto Rican who looked far less appealing in the cold light of day than he had first appeared in the darkness of the club. He remembered waking up several hours later, discovering that the door was locked, and arguing with the Puerto Rican to let him out. He remembered suddenly feeling very, very afraid for his life and promising to come back later before finally being released and stumbling out of the building and into a cab.
John remembered all of this, and for the past three days all he had really wanted to do was to forget it all as quickly as possible. Guilt was not an emotion John was overly familiar with, but when he thought about Fernando and Jamie and the Puerto Rican, it was definitely guilt that he felt. Six months ago, what happened in New York wouldn’t have bothered John in the slightest. He would have joked about it with his friends, or written it off as one of those crazy things that happen from time to time, and which provide the raw material for entertaining anecdotes to be polished and trotted out at regular intervals for years to come. But if people had told John six months ago that he would be in a relationship that meant more to him than any he’d had before, he would probably have laughed in their faces. Something had definitely changed since he’d met Fernando, which was why he had arranged a little party on Saturday, where he planned to surprise everyone by demonstrating his commitment to the man who had brought him so much happiness and for whom he was willing to mend his ways once and for all.
Of course, when John promised faithfully to have sex with nobody except his boyfriend for the foreseeable future, he didn’t foresee cybersex as coming within the bounds of the agreement. Earlier this afternoon, he’d had a nice long session with “CuriousCute28.” If asked to justify his behavior, John would have insisted that he had only gone on-line in order to check his e-mails, and that he was as surprised as anyone when, half an hour later, he found himself sitting at his keyboard with his briefs around his ankles and a blob of semen drying on his thigh. The truth was, try as he might, John couldn’t give up these illicit meetings in cyberspace. In their own way, they fulfilled a need in him that wasn’t being met by his sexy, strong, but not very verbal boyfriend. He needed “CuriousCute28” almost as much as he needed Fernando, which was why he planned to continue his dangerous liaison after Fernando moved in.
But for now, it was just him and Britney. Pop music was the one thing guaranteed to lift his spirits at times like these. And what could be more appropriate than Britney making light of the fact that, oops, she did it again? Somehow, the contradiction of knowing that she was a self-proclaimed virgin, and that she was making excuses for the kind of bad behavior she had probably never even indulged in, made this particular dose of pop therapy all the more comforting. Turning up the volume on the CD player, John turned to face the mirror and sang along at the top of his voice: “I’m not that innocent!”
Caroline set down her dessert spoon, took a sip of wine, and stared at Martin across the table, trying to gauge his reaction to what she had just told him and not getting very far. “So,” she said finally. “What do you think?”
Martin frowned. “Let me get this straight. You saw Graham with another woman, which confirms what I said all along, that he is in fact heterosexual and not the closet case you always insisted he was. Then you bumped into him in the street, and he invited you for coffee, and you said no.”
“Yes,” Caroline said, already feeling guilty for editing out the part about Dylan and Phil and the fact that she had spent the past forty-eight hours smothered in Nix.
“Well, I don’t get it,” Martin said. “I thought you said you
wanted him back. So why say no?”
“It was a bit awkward at the time,” Caroline mumbled. “I was rushing to get to work. And he is seeing someone else.”
“He’s only seeing someone else because you drove him away with your wild accusations,” Martin said, and was immediately taken aback by how accusatory he sounded. There was a long pause.
“Yes, well, I fucked up,” Caroline said finally. “Anyway, what’s been happening with you? Met anyone nice recently?”
“There was this one guy . . . ,” Martin began, then trailed off. “Look, I’m sorry for snapping just now. I didn’t mean to sound so unsympathetic.”
Caroline smiled to show there were no hard feelings. “No, it’s okay, really. I was stupid. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.”
“Well, don’t kick yourself. Just call him and tell him you’d like to meet for a drink or something. What’s the worst that could happen?”
She shrugged. “He could tell me to piss off, I suppose. Anyway, enough about me. Tell me about this guy.”
So for the next ten minutes, Martin talked about Ben, and the night they had spent together, and how it was the closest thing to real intimacy he’d felt in a long time, and how he’d left several messages, and how Ben hadn’t returned any of them. When he finished, he poured himself another glass of wine and forced a smile. “And that’s about it,” he said, staring into his glass. “Another one bites the dust.”
“Well, it’s his loss,” Caroline said gently. “I think you’re really strong.”
He blushed. “Strong, why?”
“Because you don’t play games. Because you aren’t afraid to let your feelings show.”
He laughed. “Hang on a minute! This isn’t like you—the queen of denial! I thought hiding your feelings and playing hard to get was all par for the course.”