Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  Johnny Wells walked in trying to hide the fact that he was scared stiff. Act like you own the place, he thought. Walk tall. Be cool.

  There were two women sitting alone at the bar toward the rear. The bartender, a portly man wearing a red cutaway jacket, was polishing a glass. The sound system played I’ll Take Manhattan. He ignored the two women and took a stool in the middle of the bar. The barman came to him and he ordered bourbon and plain water.

  He didn’t want bourbon and water. What he wanted was milk, but he wasn’t silly enough to order it. The bourbon came, the barman mixed the drink, and Johnny sipped it. He didn’t like the taste. It was something he could put up with but he didn’t care for it. Eventually he would learn about drinking. He’d find something that it was right to order and that tasted good to him. For the time being bourbon seemed safe enough.

  He took a cigarette from his pack and scratched a match, dragging smoke into his lungs. That was another thing, he thought. He ought to have a cigarette case. And a lighter. Plain silver and very thin, both of them. They didn’t have to cost too much to look good. But they might be important status symbols.

  He smoked and sipped his drink. He listened to the music. The sound system changed to You’re The Top. He looked up and saw the barman standing in front of him.

  “The one at the end,” the man said. Then he moved off.

  Johnny looked down at the end. The woman was about thirty-five, trying to look twenty and managing to look thirty, which wasn’t too bad. She was dressed expensively and made up expensively. She was looking at him, and when he caught her eye she smiled.

  That was his cue.

  He picked up his drink, got up from his stool and walked toward her. Without a word he sat down on the stool next to her. He looked at her again, smiled.

  She returned the smile.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I think you can buy me quite a few drinks.”

  He gestured to the bartender, indicating her empty glass with a toss of his head. The bartender came and began to prepare a rather complicated cocktail for her.

  Then he felt something touch his hand. He turned his hand palm up and felt her slip a bill into it. His fingers closed around the bill. It was a ten. He paid for the drinks with it and left the change on the top of the bar. He knew there was going to be more where that had come from.

  “You’re a nice-looking young man,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Johnny,” she said. “That’s a nice name. I think we’ll have a good time, Johnny.”

  Chapter Five

  THE SALESMAN DID NOT recognize the young man who walked into Brinsley’s at 2:30 in the afternoon that Wednesday. He smiled his usual smile and asked if he could be of service. The young man grinned back at him.

  “Don’t you remember me?”

  The salesman looked blank. There was something definitely familiar about the polished young man but the salesman couldn’t make all the connections in his mind. He tried to cover his embarrassment.

  “About two months ago,” the young man said, “a fellow entered your store wearing denim trousers and a black leather jacket. You outfitted him with a complete wardrobe. Now do you remember?”

  The salesman’s jaw fell. He remembered now. But he didn’t believe it was possible. The young hood playing Hell’s Kitchen Goes To College had changed magically into a young man who could have come only from a good family, who could have gone only to an Ivy League college, who could work only on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. The transformation was astounding.

  “My speech is better now,” Johnny Wells said. “I use the right words and I know what they mean. And the hungry look is gone. I had a way of looking at people, adding them up, so to speak. I don’t do that any more.”

  The salesman closed his eyes. He remembered Shaw’s Pygmalion and his brain reeled.

  “I need two more suits,” Johnny Wells said. “I think a brown tweed and a dark blue Continental would be good, but any suggestions are welcome. And I can use three or four pairs of slacks and two sport jackets. Plus a pair of brown shoes and several pairs of socks and undershorts. And shirts. The striped broadcloths in the window looked rather nice.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” the salesman said.

  Johnny just grinned.

  “How high do you want to go?”

  “It doesn’t really matter.” Johnny said. “I want good clothes. That’s all.”

  The salesman took a step forward. He was a little more sure of himself now. He remembered Johnny very well, remembered that he had liked the boy, and decided that he liked the present young man even more. His hand went to Johnny’s tie.

  “I see you still wear fifty-cent ties.”

  “A dollar,” Johnny said. “But I thought you told me nobody can tell the difference.”

  “Not many people can. I’m in the trade. I have to be able to tell the difference.”

  Johnny sighed. “I guess you’d better sell me a dozen ties,” he said.

  It had been one hell of a two months.

  He was sitting now in a small bar on West 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison. He was alone and intended to remain alone. A small glass of cognac rested in front of him on the top of the bar.

  It had taken him a few weeks to discover that cognac was the right drink for him. It tasted fine, for one thing. It was a good drink to order — dignified and not at all trite. And most important of all, the proper way to drink it was to sip it very slowly, a little at a time, with plenty of time between sips. A single drink lasted close to an hour. This was very important because he did not like to get drunk. He had become drunk once when he was trying to see whether or not he liked dry martinis. He hadn’t liked them and he’d lost the fine edge of his control. He did not want that to happen again. The idea of giving up just a small portion of his self-control was galling. Cognac solved that problem for him.

  He glanced at his watch, a fat gold timepiece with a stretch-link band that he’d received as a gift from a woman whose name he could not recall at the moment. It was a good watch. It looked good and kept perfect time. It told him now that it was precisely 4:27. He glanced at the wall clock over the bar and saw that the wall clock agreed with him.

  In an hour he was supposed to pick up Moira for dinner. They wouldn’t eat until seven or eight at the earliest, but she wanted him there at five-thirty on the dot. He decided that he would be ten or fifteen minutes late. He had discovered that it was almost a point of honor never to arrive anywhere on time.

  He had upwards of half an hour to sit in the bar before it would be time to head for the hotel and change for dinner. It had taken less time to pick out clothes than he’d thought it would take. He decided to use the half hour to review the past two months. It was something he did frequently. He liked to check just where he stood and see just what it had taken to get him there.

  He remembered all the way back to the first woman, the one he’d latched onto in the Vermillion Room. If she hadn’t been the first she would have been easier to forget. There was nothing special about the evening — a few more drinks at the bar, then a cab ride to her apartment and a trip to bed. But she had wanted him to stay the night so that he would be around in the morning, and that was fine with him.

  He couldn’t sleep, so he got up and went into the living room and prowled through the bookcases. There was a large blue book on etiquette and he went through the entire book in less than four hours. This was easy enough. Most of it, he decided, was baloney. He skipped how to answer wedding invitations and what to wear to a funeral and all that sort of nonsense, but a surprising amount of information soaked into his mind and stayed there. The most important point, far more valuable than How To Shake Hands With A Duchess, was a fact which the book did not state at all but which was its underlying premise. It ran something like this —

  There were two kinds of men in the world. There were gentlemen and t
here were bums. You were one kind or the other because there was no room in-between. You could work forty hours a week at an honest job, live in a house with wife and kiddies, and still be a bum. You could lie and cheat and steal and be a total bastard to everybody who walked into your line of vision and still be a gentleman. Neither Amy Vanderbilt nor Emily Post would have thought of phrasing it so succinctly, but there it was.

  Period.

  When you were a gentleman you got the right kind of attention from waiters and bartenders and salesmen and clerks. When you were a gentleman the cops gave you a wide berth. They wouldn’t bug you because they knew you were out of their class. When you were a gentleman all the doors were open for you and everybody in the world was ready to accept you as an equal.

  It wasn’t strictly a question of money although that never hurt. You could be a millionaire ten times over and still be a bum. Or you could be a gentleman without a large roll at all, just so long as you dressed well and had a certain amount of leisure time. What made you a gentleman or a bum was less what you were than what kind of an effect you had on people. You could be a gigolo and a gentleman at the same time, because there was no contradiction in terms there.

  Most of the other pretty boys who’d been in the Vermillion Room that night weren’t gentlemen. They were bums, no matter how nicely they were dressed or how well they spoke. They fawned over their women and acted as a sort of cross between a butler and a puppy dog. The result was disgusting. And Johnny was fairly certain that this only cramped their style.

  The next morning he made love to the woman, then had breakfast with her. He left her apartment without making any attempt for another date with her, and he didn’t look in his wallet until he was back in his own room at the Ruskin.

  There was a fifty dollar bill in his billfold that hadn’t been there before.

  The next three weeks were devoted strictly to the pursuit of the status of gentleman. For the first time in his life he became a compulsive reader. Before, a comic book or a men’s magazine had been an occasional time killer at best. Now, however, he settled down to a steady routine that placed reading at the very top of the list.

  He awoke every morning at nine or ten. If he was in his room at the Ruskin, as was generally the case, since most of the women wanted him to be gone when they woke up, he had a quick breakfast at the luncheonette a block away and then went directly to the main public library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. If he awoke in a woman’s apartment, which happened occasionally, he got away as quickly after breakfast as he could and went back to his own room to shower and shave and change clothes — then he hurried over to the library.

  He never bothered with lunch. He read continuously from the time he arrived until five-thirty or six. He read everything. He concentrated at first on art and literature, racing through several general works on the subject to give himself a good background. He found out that he could remember everything of importance from what he read and that his reading speed was very high. He learned who had written what books and what in general they had to say. He found out what pictures belonged in which schools of art, and learned how to tell who had painted a certain picture. He soaked up a presentable background in these subjects in a very brief amount of time.

  There was one problem. Frequently he came across words that he didn’t understand. At first he would get the meaning from context, but he quickly saw that wasn’t doing his vocabulary much good. Next he tried looking up each unfamiliar word as he came across it, checking meaning and pronunciation. That was a help, but it cut his reading speed to the bone and slowed him down, killing his comprehension as well. He would lose the whole thread of a paragraph or page or chapter if he had to stop and thumb through the dictionary.

  He soon found the best method. He read with pen and notebook at his side, and he wrote down each unfamiliar word in the notebook without looking it up. He bought a decent dictionary which he kept in his room at the Ruskin. When he was done studying each day he went home and went through the list of new words, looking up each in turn in the dictionary and memorizing the word and its spelling and pronunciation. He tried using each word in a sentence so that it would become a part of his vocabulary. That procedure worked best for him. At first the word lists for each day were very long. Gradually they became shorter and his vocabulary increased at a rapid pace.

  Gradually his reading interests spread to cover wider and wider areas. He raced through a basic text on Grecian civilization, another on the Roman world. This led him in two directions. He poured over two books on other ancient civilizations and several on medieval and renaissance history and culture. He found other books on more contemporary history, working his way right up to the present time.

  The more he learned, the more he found himself not knowing. A short history of colonial America made him realize that he had to know some economics in order to understand what he was reading about, and he burned his way through two fundamental economics texts and got the knowledge he wanted. Another history book led him into sociology.

  The sociological jargon was almost impenetrable until he discovered Thorstein Veblen and read all of Veblen in three days. The style was hard until he got used to it. Then it read quickly and he soaked up more theories and doctrines.

  At the same time he realized that he was learning in a vacuum. He took to checking through the Times every morning with his breakfast until he had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world. This helped round him out. It gave him a better picture of what people were doing, of what was happening, and his mental image of a gentleman was taking more solid shape.

  That’s how he spent his days. His nights, of course, were used to different purpose—that of survival. He stuck with 59th Street for a week, then switched his hunting grounds east to Lexington Avenue in the fifties. The women there seemed to have more polish and just as much money.

  He made the scene at the bars four and sometimes five times a week. There were occasions when no woman seemed interested in him, but those occasions were relatively few and far between. His appearance certainly didn’t hurt him, and neither, he was pleased to discover, did his increasing ability to converse intelligently. The women were not disappointed to find a young man who could find a more stimulating topic of discourse than clothes and food and sex.

  When he went looking for a woman he usually wound up with her at her apartment, or at a hotel which she chose. Once or twice the woman had insisted upon coming up to his apartment, which annoyed him. But the room was more than presentable and the hotel staff did not seem to object if he brought a woman to his room. He was an ideal tenant. He paid his rent before it was due, kept his room immaculate, and never was drunk or disorderly. And the women he brought with him always behaved themselves. They were not tramps.

  Some of the women had unusual tastes. One, whom he had been with twice, did not want him sexually at all. She was content to sit and talk with him, or merely to have him around. Her kick, he discovered, was simply to be seen in the company of a good-looking and intelligent young man. On their second date, which she had arranged over the telephone, he was only required to escort her to and from a party in a plush suite at a Park Avenue hotel. At the party he acted not like a domesticated gigolo but like a human being, which was what the woman wanted. He mingled with the other people there, used his newly-acquired knowledge in several enjoyable conversations, and enjoyed himself tremendously.

  Another woman liked to be skillfully and painstakingly seduced. Another was virtually insatiable and left him totally exhausted — he made love to her a staggering total of six times in a single night and felt that he had more than earned the hundred dollars she gave him. Such women he very carefully avoided in the future.

  There was one thing he had not done. He had not made anything resembling a permanent connection with a woman. Several of them knew his address and could call him on the phone if they wanted him for one reason or another, but no single woman was keeping him.

  H
e had received an offer or two, vague ones that he could and did pass up easily. He both wanted and didn’t want a permanent alliance. It was security, and more money generally, and a better introduction into the world of the gentleman. But something inside him made him pass up those offers that he’d had. He wasn’t sure what it was.

  Sometimes he thought that he was waiting for a better opportunity — either a proposal of marriage or a permanent association with a woman who was very rich and, at the same time, somewhat desirable. On other occasions he thought that he was simply resisting the notion of being tied to one woman, living with her constantly and being always at her beck and call. As what he privately termed a free-lance gigolo he retained a good measure of his independence. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to relinquish it.

  There was one other possibility that occurred to him from time to time. In two months he had come one hell of a long way from a one-room roach trap on 99th Street. He had changed both his way of life and his personality as well. From a two-bit punk without a pot he had metamorphosed into an intelligent young man with a savings and checking account. It only stood to reason that this process of change would continue. If he had come so far in two months, he would probably change still more in the following two months. There was no way to tell what sort of person he would become.

  And as far as he could see he would be tying himself off if he hooked up with a woman on a steady basis. He’d be putting himself in a backwater trading his potential for growth in exchange for a form of security which he did not really need. It wouldn’t hurt him to wait. He was young enough to bide his time and see what was going to happen to him.

  His watch told him it was five minutes past five when he downed the last drop of his cognac and put a bill on the bartop for the barman. He left the bar and caught a taxi back to his hotel. It was time to shower and shave and dress. Then it would be time to see Moira.

  Moira Hastings was something a little bit special.