nicotine ceiling
Sometimes when Derek left the apartment to go off on one of his art adventures, to scour the city for a color he knew had gone out of stock years ago, I would be left alone with his wall of piss. I’d scan these traces of him to analyze if he’d been eating properly, or drinking too much coffee, or getting enough iron.
On pathetic days, I’d try to match up a particular pissing to a particular day when we had argued, to see if the contents of his bladder could help me win the argument retroactively.
Other days, I’d hold the bottles up to the sunlight and look for answers to the tough questions:
Why was he so hard to reach after all this time? Why was he protecting the distance between us? Did jealousy actually run through him like poison when I told him about the guys I fucked for money? Where was this relationship going? What did we get from each other that we couldn’t get on our own? Our relationship bred these questions prolifically.
In the bed that we would always magically end up in, like a fairy tale, I turned to Derek.
“What?” he said.
“Have you ever wondered why we don’t have sex?”
Wink and Nod were silent, though I wanted them to make some noise right then, some bumps, anything.
“We don’t have to,” he said.
He kissed me on the forehead.
“Jaeven, I worry about you. You’ve been acting strange these days ... Distant.”
One afternoon, a bottle of murky pee gave me some insight: maybe only the purest relationships were able to survive without the element of sex.
I’ve seen unions defined by fucking, where marathon sessions were stand-in weddings, where torn condoms meant broken hearts. Maybe Derek and I have something pure enough to keep us floating above these body politics, immune to what sex can do to two people.
Or maybe I’m just crazy.
Our innocence is still frustrating. I can hardly stand his dry kisses, our hand-holding, our makeshift pajamas, but it’s too late to replace this tenderness with desperate gropes in the dark.
The noise would destroy the silence, our bond.
“When you page me excessively,” I say to Phil on the phone, “the massages become less and less inspired.”
“I’m not calling for a massage. Congratulations.”
“What for.”
“Are you ready for this, Jaeven?”
“Yeah, what?”
“Word on the street is ... you’re the new Boy New York.”
I stare at the receiver.
“Well, fuck me,” I say.
“You know that’s not what we do,” Phil says and hangs up.
Definition of a New York City hustler: A young man who undresses, looks pretty, and performs sexual favors for money. Typically callous, jaded, and rough around the edges. Torn jeans a plus. Not supposed to get affectionate, no matter how gooey he feels on the inside. Is usually available at all hours of the night but never before noon, leads a double life, and does whatever drugs his consorts want to see him do. Loathes other hustlers with unbounded passion.
He’s paid $100-$700 (no tax) for a session from one to four hours, plus the following perks: anonymity, free taxi or limo service, free booze, free food, free drugs, and referrals.
A week in the life of one such professional, after being anointed Boy New York:
Monday
Wore Jack Nicholson sunglasses. Stopped by the Gem Spa newsstand to see which of my covers had come out. Inches was a keeper, especially with my head (hope it doesn’t get too big) blocking out the N-C-H, and the caption “10 Inches of Monster Meat.” The dangling cigarette made me look terminally sexy, but why did they have to exaggerate? I took twelve copies to autograph in clubs and make money with, but the guy at the cash only charged me for eleven, giving me that leering stare I’ve come to know. I signed his copy and bounced out.
Tuesday
Popped in on the Toilet Böys’ webcast talk show to drool over Sean (meow). Phil was there, too, and he gave me some ridiculous leather duds to wear. He’s so out of touch sometimes, thinking that people could see us on Internet radio. Sean grilled me about my body and it gave me a boner. I imagined him plowing my ass, churning me inside out and coating my guts with cum.
I was there to sign copies of the Honcho cover (hence the leather). They were auctioning them off to listeners who could answer questions about my life, and I got fancy by sticking a pen in my foreskin and autographing with my dick. One lucky winner of a signature was a guy who emailed in a description of what my shit looked like when I forgot to flush. Asshole. I think I know who it was, too.
Wednesday
Went to a magazine casting for Blueboy. This clearly had nothing to do with Phil, because he avoided these antiseptic California magazines like they were West Nile virus. Ridiculous tan lines, shaved chest and pits. The war on hair is a travesty of the human body, and it’s what separates the East from the West.
This cheeseball Michael Lucas told me to take my clothes off and get hard. His Russian accent was so drippy, it had to be fake. He gave me three porn magazines to bone up to, all of which contained, incidentally, Michael Lucas oiled, naked, and giving soap opera faces. I left before His Smarminess could come back to check on me. I was not going to give him the satisfaction.
Thursday
Cruised into the New York premiere of Bruce LaBruce’s bisexual opus Skin Gang at the ultra-trendy Performance Space 122. I was Phil’s date for the night and laughed at all of his jokes, even when he forgot to make them funny.
Trey was there, looking jealous and giving us heat. At the urinals, he told me that one day he was going to be Boy New York and I’d be yesterday’s used condom. “Whatever, jealous bitch,” I said, then pissed on his leg.
Highlight of the film was when a hot skinhead jerked off while reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. LaBruce is such a genius. I respect subversive artists who focus on making you cum, but still manage to tick people off as a by-product. Some autograph hound asked me to sign a Homework Hard-on 101 box cover, but I just crumpled it and handed it back because I could tell the prick hadn’t even seen the film.
Friday
Made a cameo appearance at the Forsythe and White Gallery in Chelsea. Aaron Cobbett played the social butterfly quite well, flitting among fans who came to see his photos of pouty muscle boys in color-saturated sets. His shots, according to HX magazine, “are making new again the concept of Lost Boy as objèt-trouvé, diamonds in the rough polished up with Vaseline.”
In my photo, I was wearing a jock strap and enough pancake makeup to be a geisha girl. I made a few contacts (ahem) among admirers, raped the cheese platter of Roquefort, and skedaddled before Aaron got any funny ideas about shooting me again. On the way out, I bumped into his pornstar boyfriend Donnie Russo, who gave me a wink.
Saturday
Nothing. The way I like it. Watched Derek paint from my notebook.
When I went to bed, my eyes kept bouncing around and didn’t want to close, so I went out into the empty city and tweaked around for interesting shit and ephemera:
Detached prescription lenses, shit-smeared newspaper (not a favorite), wish-bone halves, still-breathing fish heads dumped on the street in front of Chinatown restaurants (a favorite), plane tickets for two, dead birds throbbing with maggots, cum-filled condoms, lipstick tubes, baby strollers hanging from barbed wire, Coke bottles filled with piss, fake Fiorucci shoes (I can tell the difference, motherfuckers), peach pits sucked bald.
Objects, in case you haven’t noticed, tell the parts of the story that people leave out.
Sunday
The Lord’s day. Shot a video with Donnie Russo called Brooklyn Meat Packers. It was pretty hot pissing into this cute guy’s mouth and wondering if he could taste the Red Bull and crystal meth. Getting artsy was the thing to do, ever since Terry Richardson had declared in Nerve magazine that the difference between art and porn had been erased forever. I had to play my part in the revolution, so I made a crude goble
t with my foreskin for pigboy to sip from. Yikes, the looks he was giving me. I had to keep my left hand behind his head so he wouldn’t slip a ring on it.
And that’s a hustler’s week in a New York minute.
Doormen with white gloves mean business.
At any residential building on the Upper East Side, they routinely chuck heads of state out by the scruff of their cheap Armani suits for the crime of not having an appointment.
But if you’re a rent boy like me (funny how that expression doesn’t seem to fit anymore), if you smell like sex and refer to tenants by their suite numbers, they’ll lead you through the royal gates and apologize for having asked you any questions in the first place. I’m serious.
If you have a convenient hole in the thigh of your jeans, the doormen will know that you have business there, even if it’s your first time. If they have any sense about them, they’ll realize that your customers are the ones who give them a fat cash tip every Christmas.
The universe takes care if itself.
And you can’t take any shit from them because they’ll sniff out weakness and make you sign the guest register.
I walked into the elevator, a polished brass space capsule that was shiny and claustrophobic. The doorman followed me in. He hovered a finger over the elevator buttons and lifted his eyebrows, waiting for me to tell him what floor.
“How the hell should I know.”
He nodded knowingly and pressed fourteen. His eyes. I could tell he’d been trained to use them to dilute embarrassment and make people feel better. Magnanimous prick.
“I’m going to fuck him,” I told the doorman. “Let’s just clear that up. Pick me up in half an hour.”
I got out on the fourteenth (he knew better than to expect a tip from my ass) and found the suite door open. I walked into a princess palace of white carpeting and kitschy crystal figurines, shelves crammed with priceless pieces of junk, and antique Chinese furniture sagging under sick wastes of money. Only the stacks of manuscripts seemed out of place.
“You must be the famous Jaeven. I’m Dennis.”
I gave him fifty-three, fifty-four, the type of daddy who took care of his boy. I gave my crotch a squeeze and made sure he saw it.
“Yeah. Vodka cranberry.”
“You’re good at this. Ice?”
“Why not.”
“Take your shoes off,” he said.
“How do I know you’re not going to steal them?”
A butler in a tuxedo (who I guess had been listening) served my drink on a mother-of-pearl tray—without meeting my eyes, of course.
The lights of New York City pulled me like tractor beams to the big bay window and I stood there transfixed, wondering how long I would own all this, how long my reign as Boy New York would last. Dennis reached over my shoulder and laid a stash of twenties in my hand.
I didn’t need to look to know that they were twenties. I can distinguish the smell of a twenty from a hundred from a single. They have different degrees of dirt on them. They’re born of different transactions. Hundreds have this sinister scent about them, because the more zeroes you tack on, the higher the stakes. They usually smell like puke, for some reason. Twenties smell like booze. Tens and fives smell alternately like crotch and ass, and that’s why I can never tell them apart.
The only thing I wasn’t sure about was whether or not he included a tip. I wasn’t about to count the money, because only debutantes do that.
I folded the bills into my pocket, the hustler signal that it’s a go. In any other part of town, he would’ve put the money on the nightstand and we’d both stare at it until the transaction was complete. This was the Upper East Side, however, and we both knew the rules were different.
After the Fire’s “Der Kommissar” ran through my head. Don’t turn around. Because if you do, he’s going to kiss you. These old men, in the end, want affection more than anything else.
You can never be sure, though. And things can get dangerous in soundproof buildings where you have to rely on doormen to let you out.
We went to the bedroom and I sat on the bed, waiting for him to make me shuck my pants. Instead, he pulled up a chair in front of me.
“Take off your socks, one at a time.”
So I ripped one off and dropped it on the carpet. He looked disappointed.
“Who sent you here, anyways?”
“Phil McDougall.”
“Didn’t he tell you anything about me? That I’m specific?”
I was confused so I asked for another drink. The butler brought it, left, and locked the door behind him. Dennis looked at me and wiped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief.
“I need you to do it s-l-o-w-l-y. Is that too difficult?”
“No, sure.”
“Okay, now continue.”
He knelt like a shoe salesman.
I slinked the other sock off slowly, like a condom I’d just blown a load into. It was weird but I was getting into it. I’d never thought the curly hairs around my ankle were sexy until now, until they were feeding someone’s desire through anticipation and deprivation. He was sweating contentedly a few feet away, happy to be without the object he wanted most in the world: my sock.
Now this was power, I thought. If only I could wield it in the other parts of my life.
The sock was halfway off my foot when the funk started to waft up—me in all my raunchy glory. He was trying his best not to sniff, and I could see in his face that holding back was getting him off. Just thinking about how I had a human puppet more than twice my age made my dick pudge out and poke through the hole in my jeans. My erection didn’t interest him in the least.
“Now take it off completely.”
“Slowly?”
“What do you think?”
So I did as he said, exposing dirty toenails, cracked and misshapen. I handed him the sock and he brought it up to his nose with both hands like it contained the last breath of oxygen in outer space. As he inhaled my funk for a solid minute (I shit you not), he turned away from me and gazed out the window at the twinkling lights of New York City.
He was gone.
Eyes tearing up, shirt drenched with sweat. It wasn’t my place to know why, even if I was the angel making it happen. It wasn’t about me anymore. I was witnessing a religious experience. It was intestinal.
It doesn’t mean I was used to feeling ignored in these situations.
I put my shoes on and the butler let me out. The doorman was waiting in the elevator to take me down and I pretended he wasn’t there. I walked out into the night, wondering where I was supposed to find a matching sock before going dancing at Jackie 60.
The sock fucker didn’t tip me.
I get pissed off when wealthy Manhattanites don’t tip, because the people around them have to pretend that everything happens by itself.
Valets have to pretend that cars park themselves, and security guards have to pretend that no unwanted guests ever try to sneak into the building.
I don’t hate doormen as much as you think I do.
They have it the hardest because they have to pretend that their building is immune to ice and snow in the winter. They also have to pretend that doors open by themselves, that clothes dry-clean themselves, that taxis hail themselves, that FedEx packages float up the stairs by themselves, that garbage bags are transported magically to the dumpster courtesy of fairy dust from Bloomingdale’s. They’re also dealers in kink, and masters of covering trails and keeping secrets. When you don’t see the doorman in the lobby, it’s because he’s manning the back door.
It sticks in my craw that there’s a whole network of underlings, me included, who are expected to conspire together to make sure that the world runs smoothly and that everything happens with the utmost discretion—for nothing more than the going rate.
Our charge is heavy, but a tip would somehow make it alright.
I sent out a new short story to eleven literary magazines today.
Here’s how it went down.
I was getting sick of two-faced editors who demand exclusive submissions but are quite content to reject the unpublished, hundreds at a time. Does that make sense? I decided to start playing by my own rules. I spent hours in Barnes and Noble, nosing out which magazines felt empty without my writing. Multiple submissions it was.
Since I don’t believe in karma—a philosophy that says I deserve the life I’ve had—the worst that could happen would be to get two acceptance letters for the same story.
I’m doing my best to stay positive, but I have to tell you that trying to get published (a word I’ve grown to hate) feels like buying raffle tickets for a prize that’s already been given out by a church that’s already burned down. Eventually, you’re going to stop trying.
Summer’s starting to fizzle out and the nights are getting cool. There are only a couple of months left in 1999 for me to make my mark in the world of writing, before the millennium sweeps in and changes things forever. I don’t want to think of what January 1 will be like if I’m in the same place I was the last time that date rolled around: a writer with no readers.
Writing guides and the crappy advice they give don’t work, so I don’t buy or steal them anymore. This latest story comes from inside me. I threw myself into it and laced it with venom. It’s probably the most mature thing I’ve written so far, and I think it reads reasonably well.
The story.
The kid wasn’t adapting well to reform school. He was an outcast from the moment he got there, but it was all for the better. If he was going to survive a place like that, he needed the resourcefulness of a lone wolf.
The school designed lessons to destroy his soul, one wisp at a time.
In Morals class, they taught him about the importance of family. He sat through slideshows of mother, father, daughter, son, image after image of the same perfect unit, but with different actors every time. They said that the family was the institution that kept the world from falling apart. It was the epicenter of nurturing love, and the foundation that held up the pillars of society. The kid noticed that none of the slides depicted his own family.
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