Darlene came out, a tough, forty-year-old cocktail waitress type, and everyone crowded around the wooden stage. There was room for everyone to get right up close. Darlene stripped, which I managed to survive, until she came to the part that drew people to fairs like this one, the only part I really remember. She had everything off and had worked up a good sweat, and now she went to each of us in turn and grabbed our heads and stuck our noses …
That was the scene I flashed to as I walked in the door of this place—but I walked in. The room had a very high ceiling, black walls that were only flimsy partitions set up on the huge warehouse floor. There was a filthy carpet, worn bare, some ultraviolet lights, some unlit ’spotlights that looked like stage equipment, and one beat-up legless couch on the floor to my right. Two boys were sitting on the couch, one ugly and faggoty, talking on the phone, the other blond and normal-looking, looking up to see who had come in.
I asked for Randy, the name of the boy in the ad. The blond boy said Randy was out on a call and that he was Billy. Would he do? I stammered that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but that I had read the ad in the paper and that I just wanted to talk to someone and here is twenty dollars, I said, putting a crisp twenty on the arm of the couch. Their eyebrows lifted a bit.
The other boy was off the phone. I was sure it was he, and not Billy, who was wearing the perfume I smelled. It wasn’t a sweet smell, but rather an unpleasant mildewy kind of smell. I was trying to avoid his eyes.
It must have been obvious to both of them that I was not a routine client. The faggoty one asked whether I wouldn’t be more comfortable if Billy and I went into one of the private rooms. Private rooms? I sort of shrugged assent. Billy led me through a canvas-covered door that looked as though it had come from a stage set and into a cubbyhole off the main room. The cubbyhole was entirely bare. The same “carpet” covered the floor; but it looked even worse, and there were stains on it.
Billy sat with his back against the wall, and I followed. I assumed that ordinarily what happened in that cubbyhole was that the customer “had sex” with Billy, just how I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t feel like it. Billy, though about nineteen and blond, which were two steps in the direction of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was sending out the wrong kinds of vibrations. Billy’s fingernails were bitten to the limit, and his fingers were strangely red and pulpy, almost as though he had just soaked them for two days in a bucket of water. He just didn’t look healthy. Well, if nothing else, he looked as though he had been sitting inside a dimly ultravi-lit warehouse too long.
Still, I was not sure I didn’t like him, and I was determined to make progress. He listened to my story and did not believe it. I suppose if at age nineteen this boy had already done everything there is to do, COD, no less, then it would be a little hard for him to imagine a twenty-three-year-old (I had just turned twenty-three, seconds are ticking, seconds are ticking) who had never slept with anybody, of either sex, ever. He had met, aged nineteen, guys who liked to get fucked with their heads in the freezer, guys who wanted him to piss on them, guys who wanted him to take them over his knee and spank them, guys who wanted to lie down and jerk off with the heel of his boot in their stomachs—but I am not sure he had ever had anyone come up to his “office” with a story like mine. Innocence was not his field.
But for twenty bucks he was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. He said I should relax, it was easy to come out, and that I would do very well on Christopher Street. Is it possible that that was the first time I had ever thought about the expression “come out”? I suddenly had frightening visions of some sort of coming-out party where everyone got dressed up in drag, God forbid. Or at least where I was the center of attention and everyone would be introduced to me, and I would have to make a little speech or tap dance or something. In any case, Billy didn’t mind my not wanting to do whatever you do in a cubbyhole like that and offered instead to show me all the bars, like Danny’s, on Christopher Street. I should come back that evening.
I said I would, said good-bye and thanks, and went home. I spent a busy Sunday afternoon trying frantically to decide whether I should really do it. I kept trying to figure out what it was about Billy that bothered me. I kept worrying that I might meet someone down there that I knew from the real world. There was really nothing to think about, of course; I was just scared.
I decided to call Billy and ask some more questions, like whether I would have to talk to people and what I would have to do—just to get some more assurance from Billy that I should really go through with it and “come out,” which somehow seemed to preclude “turning back.” You only do it once. This Sunday night with Billy the Kid?
Billy answered the phone, or at least I thought it was he. “Is this Billy?” No, he said, it was Randy, Billy would be back in a little while. I called back in a little while and Billy answered the phone, or at least I thought it was he, and he said, yeah, this was Billy. I said it was Neil calling about tonight. (That was the name I had used.) Who? Neil, remember? I was down there this afternoon? Oh, Neil! Yes, Randy had told him about me. Randy? But I was there with Billy, I said. No! I’m Billy, he explained. You were with Randy, with the blond hair.
I hung up. I was certain that I had been there with a blond boy who said Randy wasn’t around but he was Billy and would he do—and now they were doing some kind of strange schizoid superwhammy on my fragile head. I changed my plans. This Sunday night I would watch Bonanza. Maybe next Sunday I would come out.
Several evenings thereafter, on my own, I went down to Christopher Street, which is not the easiest place in the world to find if you don’t ask anybody—and you don’t for a minute imagine that I would have asked anybody, do you? I walked up and down the length of that street, past Danny’s every time, but I did not see many people. The ones I did see were like as not gay, but not the kind of guest you would want at your coming-out party—emaciated or emasculated or bizarre or forty-five trying for twenty.
I went too early. The New York bars don’t get going, by and large, until eleven or twelve, and I was going around nine or ten. Too eager. Danny’s was not crowded at that hour. I know, because it has huge glass picture windows where it should have had heavy gray don’t-notice-me walls. I didn’t go in. I just walked by like any tourist and glanced in each rime.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I hear you say. “You must be some kinda supershy wimp. Just go inna goddamn queer bar and see what happens. Worst thing, nothing happens. What’s ta lose?”
I hear you say that because, looking back on it all, I hear myself saying that. It’s becoming difficult for me to remember just how strong my feelings and fears were. One thing I do remember quite clearly: While I was shy, and paranoid on anything remotely connected to sex, I was no wimp. So watch it.
Why not just go in? Well, not counting the fact that there were huge picture windows, which had to be insane, there were more subtle reasons. Which of the two doors do you go in? Does it matter? If you go in the exit door, everyone will look at you and know that you don’t know what you’re doing. If you go in the right one, everyone will look at you, anyway: When was the last time a Yale sweat shirt and track shoes walked into a place like this? And that’s another thing. I wasn’t wearing a Yale sweat shirt and track shoes, but what do you wear to a gay bar? By and large, in New York, you wear jeans. I didn’t happen to own a pair of jeans, cowboy that I was, because I could never find jeans that fit, which was always a source of mild embarrassment. I had run so much cross country in high school that my calf muscles were larger than standard tapered jeans. Remember tapered jeans? So I was wearing some businessman-type slacks, and everyone would have looked at me as if I didn’t belong. Where would I put my hands if everyone looked at me? And where would I put my eyes? That was what it all boiled down to, I guess. I had a feeling that everyone would be looking at me from all sides, and where would I have looked? At the ceiling? Ridiculous. At the floor? Yes, but then why come in at all? Look back at them? God only knows what that
could invite. And I had this thing about not looking back at queers, because I didn’t want to be queer myself, I just wanted to pal around. You know.
I found and answered one of the East Village Other personals that sounded human. A student who was gay and looking to make new friends. An attractive student, the ad said, with a box number to write to. I wrote something about how I had never done anything like this before and asked him to give me a call. Unless he had connections, my phone number and first name alone would not enable him to trace me. I would have a chance when he called to think out my next move.
He did call, and suggested we meet at Googie’s, a mixed bar he liked in the Village. Mixed? I asked. Yes, some straight, some gay—that’s how the Village is. Oh. He sounded all right so I said okay. He would be carrying a black umbrella and wearing a black turtleneck, he said. What kind of person puts ads in the newspaper to make friends? I didn’t tell him what I would be wearing, just in case I wanted to call it off when I saw him coming.
Up came the black turtleneck, right on time. (I was early, of course.) He was a little on the heavy side, nondescript, not terribly gay-looking or -talking, and nothing to be afraid of, so I met his eyes and nodded when he asked whether I was Neil, and we went in for a couple of beers. Would I like to come back to the black turtleneck’s place for another drink? No.
As we had been talking, I had come to like him less. Of course, it was my fault, not his. He was polite, friendly, interested: a very nice homosexual theater student at NYU who wanted my tough young body. It just didn’t work.
I tried to be as polite as I could and said no thank you. He was upset. Partly, I think, because he wanted me or, worse, the part of me we simply never discuss. Partly, I imagine, because I had just finished telling him that I had never in my life had sex with any human being—so my refusal was as much as telling his turtleneck ego that even a lifelong horniness would not be enough to make me jump into bed with the likes of him. He said something very homosexual-sounding—“Oh, don’t I please you?”—which simply reaffirmed my resolve, and we walked in opposite directions: I back home to feel sorry for myself; he, no doubt, to Danny’s to find someone else for the night.
I bought a new issue of the East Village Other—all of a sudden I was a regular reader, though I had never been to the East Village in my life—and I spotted a new cluster of model ads with a common phone number. I had been working late, as usual, in my carpeted little midtown office, and was now sitting in my swivel seat of respectability and professionalism, touch-toning the number of a male hustler. Of course I had checked to see that no one else was in the office.
Mike answered the phone as advertised. I had become somewhat bolder through my succession of unsuccesses—at least no physical or emotional harm had come from those earlier attempts—and way down deep I am really a practical business type anyway, so I just said, “Look. I know this will sound strange, but I am gay, except that I haven’t been able to find anybody I like and I’ve never done anything. I don’t really know what to do. I’m twenty-three, and I’m pretty good-looking and I would just like to meet you for a beer or something to talk.”
Well, what do you know! I did it!
Mike was a little hesitant—hustlers have to be careful, or they may show up at the appointed place to find a small gang of faggot haters with short metal chains—but he agreed to meet me at ten o’clock outside Max’s Kansas City.
He was already standing in a doorway next to Max’s when I showed up in the charcoal pinstriped suit I was still wearing from work. I had told him I would probably be the only one around wearing a suit, for which I apologized, so it would be easy to recognize me, and it was.
Mike and I were both relieved when we met and shook hands. He was a regular guy: about 160 pounds with a strong handshake, a rugged, handsome face, wearing a thick-knit crewneck sweater and jeans and boots, mid-twenties. He didn’t talk like a preppie, but he didn’t talk like a faggot, either. He talked like a bright, likable, regular guy. We went inside for a pitcher of beer.
The first thing he told me was that his real name was Dick Warren, that he just used Mike in the ads. I took the opportunity to explain that I had done the same thing and told him my real name. And then I told him everything else.
He had been worried about coming to meet me, he said, because the story sounded kind of strange over the phone. I told him I was really glad he had taken the chance. I asked him, well, essentially, I asked him what such a nice guy was doing in a job like this.
He had gone for a year of college, he said, but didn’t like it. He liked to be outdoors, to work with his hands. He had had some construction jobs and had worked up in Alaska for a while; but now he needed the money, and this line of work wasn’t as bad as I might think, though he was looking to make a change. He could take care of himself, he told me, and he didn’t mind having sex with older men. He just didn’t think about it much while it was happening, and he wouldn’t let them do things he didn’t want to do. Some of the guys he met were really attractive and successful. Dick had made some pretty good connections this way.
I had gotten only a few hours’ sleep the night before and had gone through my share of two pitchers of beer, but I had never been more awake and keyed up than I was that evening. Do you understand? I really liked Dick, and Dick liked me, and he was gay too! It had taken me a dozen years from conscious desire to expected fulfillment, but, more or less, I was there.
Hallelujah.
Dick asked whether I would like to go someplace, and since I had a friend staying with me for a couple of weeks, I said we could take a hotel room. I had my deck of credit cards, so we went to the Americana. Thirty bucks for the room? I would have paid five hundred. Which is not to say I was all smiles and eagerness at the check-in counter. It was that hotel in New Haven all over again, as far as paranoia was concerned. “No baggage, sir?” What was worse, I wonder: taking a hotel room alone to fool your roommates into thinking you poked little girls, or taking a hotel room to make it with a guy? I was sure the Americana desk clerk saw right through me (Dick was waiting in the lobby), but I got the key anyway. I realize now that the desk clerk would probably have given two bellhops to skip up to that room and jump into bed with us, but at the time I had not developed much skill in telling who liked what.
After some pausing and looking around the room and switching on the Zenith defense mechanism and looking to see whether there was a 25-cent vibrator machine under the bed and whether the door was securely bolted and everything else to delay actually doing it for the first time in my life, I sat down on the bed next to Dick, facing some asinine late movie. Dick really was a handsome guy, and I really was rather drunk, and with a little help from him we were soon hugging and rolling around and wrestling around and just feeling each other’s muscles and gradually getting our clothes off.
It was great. Really, there have been few times since when I have had such good sex. Partly, of course, because the first time is always best. Partly, Dick was hunkier than many of the men I’ve been to bed with since. Mainly, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I just did what came naturally: wrestling around the way I had in camp and in high school and with Brook. Only now it didn’t just last a couple of minutes, and now I didn’t have to feel paranoid, and now I knew I was with someone who liked it too, and now we had all our clothes off, and now we were doing some things I wouldn’t have done with Brook.
But not many things, and that, too, was what was so good about it. We weren’t kissing (cowboys don’t kiss!); we weren’t putting our cocks, God forbid, in each other’s mouths, or anywhere else, though we were touching places I had never touched or been touched on before, and touching so lightly as to drive my ticklish, nervous, hypertense body wild and into a vain attempt to pin Dick to get him to stop, and then wrestling around some more.
Perhaps the innocence of it all appealed to Dick. Being the rugged outdoors type, perhaps he didn’t go for kissing, either, though I am sure that this was the fi
rst time in ages, or ever, that he had had sex without doing anything, for crying out loud. Dick’s experience as a hustler had led him to be very flexible. A good hustler, I suppose, does whatever he thinks his customer wants, within reason.
The important thing was that it was not until later in my “development” that I realized Dick and I hadn’t been doing anything. We were doing everything I wanted to do. And not feeling that there were other things Dick wanted to do, I wasn’t self-conscious about just wrestling around.
We messed around for hours, and I wasn’t even aware of, or at least I was not thinking about, the fact that generally what happens is you reach an orgasm and then quit for a while. Neither of us reached an orgasm, as a matter of fact, and eventually we went to sleep, around five. I had to be at work at nine for a meeting I had called. I left Dick with my phone number, waking him long enough to say I had to go but would call him, and THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I would have been happy to pay him, but he said I was a friend, not a customer.
I got to my office, grungy as hell, exhausted, gravel under my eyelids, my varicocele aching just a little—I was feeling pretty good, all things considered. Hot damn! I walked from the elevator to my office too quickly for anyone to notice how awful I looked and then did my best with electric shaver and Wash’n Dri to come out looking like my normal presentable-but-overworked self.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 10