Tricks Of The Trade

by Ben Tyler

  Invariably, Michael choked on Rod’s mouthful and then vomited his guts out. “Something go down the wrong way?” Rod chided as he kicked Michael with his steel-toed work boots, sending him rolling across the floor to an aluminum bucket, where he retched and called Rod a fucking freak faggot. Same routine. Week in. Week out.

  “I’m the fuckin’ freak, eh? Who has his head in a bucket of vomit of piss and chunks of his own lunch?”

  Finally, Mitch made his way around the pool to where Jim was holding court. Betty White had wandered off with a cute caterer and his tray of miniquiches. “Jimbo,” Mitch cried as the trio neared the master of the manse. “Here’s the number I wanted you to meet. Bart Cain, meet Jim Fallon.”

  “Bart?” a female voice cried with indignation as she turned away from her conversation with Jim.

  “Shari!” Bart stammered, startled to see his boss out of context from the studio. He turned to Mitch and whispered harshly, “Why didn’t you tell me she’d be here!”

  “You’d never have come. Oh, Shari, back off!” Mitch rolled his eyes. “It’s a party, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Shari demanded of Bart, her nostrils flaring and her eyes moving up and down him as though he were a toxic odor.

  For the moment, Bart ignored her as he extended his hand to Jim. “I’m an ardent admirer,” he lied. “Do you know Rodrigo Dominguez, the screenwriter?” he said, trying to introduce Rod to the famous Jim Fallon.

  Rod burst into a wide smile when he heard Bart’s generous introduction.

  “Screenwriter?” Jim’s watery eyes met Rod’s. “Do you have anything I could look at?” His words were a double entendre and not lost on Rod or the small coterie pretending to pay homage to Jim. In fact, even though the infamous video had been reduced so many generations that nothing was clear on the tape, the overwhelming collective thought was that Rod was one of the gang bangers on the tape.

  “Thanks for inviting us,” Rod said, holding out his hand.

  “You’re welcome. Anytime. I’m sure.” Jim showed a wry smile. He was obviously drunk. He slurred his words and couldn’t make an effort to stand and greet his guests. He kept staring at Rod as if not knowing exactly whether they had ever met before. So many gangstas had been at the house.

  Mitch piped in. “Jimmy, Bart’s the one I mentioned. The publicist at Sterling? Dimples?”

  “Right,” Jim pretended to recall. “Guess I could use a good publicist right about now, couldn’t I, Brad? Heh. Heh. Heh.”

  “It’s Bart. And I think you’ll do just fine, Jim.”

  “Brad…Bart, what’s the difference,” Jim bellowed. “Just so long as you’re cute.”

  Mortified by Jim’s inappropriate behavior, he was suddenly on shifting ground. Grasping for something to hold on to, he caught Shari’s eye. “And this,” Bart said, looking at Jim and presenting Shari, “is ‘the boss lady.’ The lovely woman personally responsible for all the hits we have at Sterling Studios.”

  “We know each other, Bart,” Shari said. “We go back, don’t we, Jim?”

  “If she’s responsible for the hits, she must also be responsible for the bombs.” Mitch laughed.

  “Shari, I just love your dress,” Bart said, trying to deflect her hostility and dissociate himself from Mitch and his bitchiness. There was something about being with his boss outside the studio environment that emboldened him.

  “Hmmm,” she said coldly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Oh, I get out from behind my desk now and again. ‘On festive occasions,’ as Auntie Mame would say.”

  “But his heart belongs to daddy,” Mitch sang. “Meaning his job, of course. Bart gives Sterling his 100 percent undivided attention, don’t you, Bart? Just like Auntie Shari asked, or shall I say, threatened, you to do.”

  Shari groaned. Looking over at Rod, she immediately summed him up and determined he would be a hot fuck, even though if he was with Bart, he was probably gay. Still, she thought she recognized him. Could she have actually fucked him herself, in a galaxy far, far away, she wondered.

  Noticing her flute was nearly empty, Bart asked in an overly courtly tone, “May I refill your glass, Shari?”

  “I’ll get my own, thank you,” she said dismissively, and wandered off into the crowd.

  Finding an opening in the awkward small talk, Mitch turned to Michael and said, “You big important agent, you. I had no idea that you and Rod here were friends—almost family—from eons back.”

  Turning to Rod, Mitch said, “Where again did you say you two studs got aquatinted? Oh, yes, that B&D place on S/M. I always used to think that B&D stood for Black and Decker. Ya know, the power tools?” Mitch laughed at his own joke. “I know B&B is bed and breakfast. But what’s S/M?” he asked for the crowd’s benefit. “Oh, that’s right, sadomasochism. I always wondered what went on in those dark holes.”

  Michael was demonstrably upset. In a sociopathic talent agent, that can be lethal. The few guests who were still standing beside him—all people he knew from the industry—were looking from Rod to him and clearly wondering how well the two knew each other.

  Except for the tuxedo, Rod was the antithesis of everybody else at the party. Although he was more polished than anyone in his own family, there was no getting away from the fact that he was a newcomer to this circle of Hollywood players. And it showed. You could pick him out even in this dense crowd. His discomfort among those who had been there, done that—or at least could pretend to have been around—was obvious. Whereas Bart was effortless in his comportment and knew how to plant an air kiss on anyone he hardly knew, Rod stayed behind Bart and tried to remain anonymous. If spoken to, he merely nodded his head to acknowledge the person.

  Nobody other than Mitch or Bart made any effort to make Rod feel comfortable or accepted. The emotional high Rod had felt only a short time ago, after reading the coverage on his script and anticipating meeting the rich and famous in Hollywood, had vanished. In its place was the unsettling feeling that he was a party crasher. He wasn’t a Hollywood player, and his discomfort and self-consciousness were compounded by the fact that he knew he was a diamond in the rough at best, with the emphasis on “rough.” After all, at some level, he would always be the personification of a dangerous Latin homeboy.

  Not only had he little in the way of social graces; Rod knew he would never have been admitted into this rarefied circle on his own. He couldn’t help feeling as though Bart were displaying him as a trophy. Rod grabbed the next flute of champagne that passed his way.

  Somewhere between meeting Jim Fallon and downing his second glass of Cristal, he lost Bart and Mitch in the crowd. Now Rod stood by the edge of the estate and looked out upon the view below. He wanted desperately to get away from this superficial hellhole. He knew he didn’t belong with these cultured, successful, talented people. Even if they were as synthetic as Styrofoam.

  “The others are starting to go into the screening,” a woman’s voice behind Rod spoke in a little girl’s whispery tone. Rod turned around. The woman was an attractive sixty-something Barbie doll dressed in a gold lamé outfit that stretched over her tight butt and revealed lovely long legs. She made Rod think of Connie Stevens, whom he’d seen on infomercials. She brushed a hand over Rod’s round ass. “Or would you rather stay outside in the dark?” she purred, pouring half her glass of champagne into Rod’s empty flute.

  “Caught the perp, did you?” another female voice coming out of the shadows asked.

  “If it’s not the police woman herself,” the woman beside Rod stated, brushing her glistening lips against Angie Dickinson’s cheek. “Sergeant Pepper, wasn’t it?”

  “Mmmm. Like the Beatles album. I was wondering for the past hour which of the old leather tits at this cheesy affair would bag Antonio first,” she said, as if Rod were invisible.

  Ordinarily, Rod would have flirted with these aging beauties. He was a master tease, not just of cocks but of pussy, too. However, th
is was not a good night for taking advantage of old but definitely attractive ladies. He was too upset about the way the evening had disintegrated. All his previous joie de vivre had gone the way of an amyl nitrite high. The rush was over in a flash.

  At that moment, one of the catering crew interrupted and announced that The Grass Is Always Greener was about to begin. The guests should all find a seat in the screening room.

  Rod left the two coiffed and well-dressed women without a word, not knowing both were celebrities dating back to prehistoric sixties and seventies television shows. He went in search of Bart.

  “Where’ve you been, man,” Bart said when the two finally met up in the living room.

  “Get me outta here,” Rod demanded.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Now, man! I wanna go—now!”

  “Yeah, sure. I should just say good-bye to a few people.”

  “Now, goddamn it!” Rod cried defiantly.

  Rod was so agitated that Bart had no choice but to lead him to the foyer and out the front door. If anybody noticed them leaving the house, not a word was said. They slipped into the waiting Rolls and road down the hill. They waited in silence for the valet attendant to find Bart’s Mustang and drive it around. Bart tipped the guy five dollars and drove down to Mulholland without hearing another word from Rod.

  Chapter Nine

  “They’re just assholes. They don’t mean to be. It’s their DNA.”

  Bart finally broke the silence as they reached the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Cienega, nearing Rod’s place in West Hollywood. Rod was still sullen, despondent from what he viewed as a fiasco of an evening.

  “We didn’t meet any big agents,” Rod said. “Like an idiot, I passed out business cards to all the wrong people, including the lady washing dishes in the kitchen. She looked at me, then looked at the card, and looked at me again as if I was a retard. She shrugged her shoulders and put the card into her apron pocket. Then she said something under her breath in what sounded like Chinese and put her hands back in a sink full of soapy water. It was an evening of free champagne and grazing food, and that’s it. And I’m still hungry.”

  “That’s not all of ‘it,’” Bart retorted. “You should hear yourself. You’ve just been to a party that the whole town will be talking about for ages. You may even get into People magazine because you bumped into so many stars being photographed.”

  “Crashed into ’em, is more like it.”

  “It was crowded. You can’t be held responsible for colliding with Nell Carter. She takes up more than her share of the planet. There were journalists from Rolling Stone and Premiere and Out and the Advocate.”

  “I felt completely alone and out of place.”

  “You were far from alone. What makes you think most everybody at that party wasn’t as self-conscious as you? Most of the confident-looking ones have just found a way not to show their fear, or their egos are as big as Jeff Stryker’s dick.”

  “He’s not as big as me, so what’s your point?”

  “My point, ‘Mr. Big,’ is you’re unfairly comparing yourself with experts; people who have had more than their share of practice in the limelight and making entrances and idle chatter at parties. The most outgoing personalities are usually the most insecure. Look at that Carol Channing lady. Ya know why she’s so noisy?”

  “The tabloids said she hadn’t been fucked in forty years. I suppose that’d do it.”

  “That alone would make her desperate to be noticed.”

  Rod pouted. “I felt like everybody was staring at me. I didn’t fit in. I’m nothing but a stud who hasn’t got the social graces of a jackass.”

  “At least you give yourself credit for the stud part. Some pretty famous people were staring at you—in a good way. Even if you didn’t notice.”

  “Those two broads who looked like Barbie dolls?”

  “They happen to be famous Barbie dolls. And Julia Roberts dropped her stuffed mushroom when she got a load of you, stupid. And don’t tell me Bea Arthur holding you around the waist and resting her head on your shoulder wasn’t a neat thing.”

  “She just needed me to hold her up.” Rod managed a small smile. “God, her voice is deep. Three out of four Golden Girls at one party was kinda cool. Almost historical, I guess. Like a reunion.”

  “And what about Charles Nelson Reilly? He paid more than enough attention to you. I was watching from inside the house. You seemed stuck on each other.”

  “I didn’t even know who he was.”

  “He did some X-Files, and he used to be on game shows in the old days.”

  “Around the time that Lincoln was shot, I’d guess. I’m so stupid, I didn’t know how to get him to take his freakin’ hand off my ass without making a scene and having him accidentally on purpose fall in the pool. So I just stood there, frozen.”

  Bart patted Rod’s thigh. “What I’m trying to say is, this was just an initiation. I’ll bet growing up you never thought you’d find yourself at such a fancy affair.”

  “Sure I did. I always planned it. It just didn’t turn out exactly as I always imagined.”

  “Things seldom do. ‘Be careful what you wish for…you’ll get it,’ I always say.”

  Bart empathized with Rod’s situation. “When I first came to Hollywood and willed myself into the showbiz clique, I was as much of a hayseed as you seem to think yourself to be. Talk about lack of social graces. I once nodded off to sleep in front of Kathryn Grayson while I was sitting in a chair in her living room after a dinner party—as she was singing an aria from a pretend opera from one of her old movies.”

  Bart continued. “I know you don’t know who Kathryn Grayson is. I didn’t, either, until this schmuck I was dating brought me to this fat woman’s house in Brentwood. But trust me, she was once a huge star at M-G-M. Now she’s just huge. I was forced to watch one of her old musicals. She was rail thin when she was famous. I heard she found Shirley Temple boning her husband one time and it made her start bingeing on Ding Dongs.”

  “Tyne Daly must’a used her recipe.”

  Bart grinned. “Here’s how I knew I didn’t fit in. During dinner I had to surreptitiously look out of the corner of my eyes to watch the other guests to see which fork to use for each course of the meal. I had no idea how to properly tear a roll and butter one piece at a time. I didn’t even know the correct position to place my utensils on my plate to indicate I was finished eating. I also didn’t know a wineglass from a water goblet. I was embarrassed as all hell. What you went through tonight was nothing. Think of it as your coming-out party. You got your feet wet. From here on, every time we go someplace ritzy, it’ll get easier. Trust me.”

  “You fell asleep while some famous singer was entertaining in her home?” Rod backtracked.

  “Yeah. She walked over and sang full blast into my ear to wake me up. Startled the hell out of me. The other guests laughed. I went home and cried.”

  “I probably missed a lot of big tips by not working tonight,” Rod complained.

  “Tips you can get every night for the rest of your life. How many people do you know had Kevin Spacey offering to get them another glass of champagne and asking where you work out and what supplements you’d recommend he take for a better-developed body? That doesn’t happen to many people. Unless, I suppose, they look like you. If it’ll make you feel any better, when I come in, I’ll put two twenties and a ten on the desk, just like the first time we did it.”

  Rod smiled, finally warming to Bart’s attempt to humor him.

  With his own seductive suggestion, Bart got an immediate hard-on. He reached over and picked up Rod’s hand from the seat beside him and placed it on his own crotch.

  Rod smiled. “That’s just what that old guy who once played a tough lawyer on that hit show from when I was a kid, did tonight.”

  “I think you’ll like mine a lot more than his old one.”

  “Yours is much bigger, too. Get around as much as me and you learn t
o size a guy up before he even pulls it out.”

  Bart made a left turn off Santa Monica Boulevard down to Rugby. Parking was still a bitch in Rod’s neighborhood, especially at this time of night on a Saturday. By the time they had found a spot and walked a block to the rear of the house where Rod lived, they were already smothering each other in deep kisses and unbuttoning each other’s tuxedo shirts. Studs dropped in the yard. “Never mind. I’ll find ’em in the morning,” Bart panted, anxious to shed his clothes and feel Rod’s hard, naked body against his own.

  Bart was vibrating with anticipation. Every nerve ending in his body pulsated. He was desperate to feel Rod’s chest, stomach, ass, and cock with his hands and tongue. His own cock and ass were aching. The moment they entered the house, Bart wrestled Rod to the mattress and stripped him of his remaining clothes. The two voracious animals were immediately engaged in heavy, hard-driving, man-to-man sex.

  By now Rod intuitively knew when Bart could hardly wait a moment longer or he might climax. Rod pulled out the last condom from a box beside the mattress. He tore it out of its cellophane packaging, added some lube to the inside, and squeezed out a copiousness amount of cold gel into Bart’s asshole.

  As Rod donned his condom, Bart rubbed the greasy lubricant in, coating the lining of his anus with the slick goo. Lying on his back, breathlessly looking up to the sight of what Michelangelo would have sculpted if he’d seen Rod before David, Bart was literally out of his mind inspecting every inch of Rod’s muscular chest, thick arms, tight abs, and his nine-inch steel shaft that was about to become a fixture in his own body. Bart was aching with desire to have Rod enter him. As Rod began to ease into Bart, Bart reached for Rod’s butt cheeks and pulled him forward. The pain at first was excruciating.

  “Deeper!” Bart sighed, gritting his teeth. Then a flood of rapture washed over him. “Harder! Yes! Oh, fuck!”

  Sometime during the night Rod got up to pee. In the pitch-black darkness of the room, he noticed the blinking red light on his answering machine, which he’d failed to notice when they returned in the heat of passion. Rod stopped to count. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.