The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  As we sat down, she said, “I’m going back to Whitehall.”

  I stared at her and said nothing.

  She went on. “This is ridiculous. I’m a nice person. I think you could even say I’m a lady. And I think living with a gay guy and a transvestite in Chelsea is a very educational experience. But if I go on with this much longer, I’ll become a bohemian. I don’t want to become a bohemian. I want to do some kind of real work and earn some kind of real money.”

  I was thunderstruck. Belle-Mère was growing up faster than I was, that was for sure.

  I said, “But you are doing some kind of real work.”

  “Oh, come off it, Harry. I’m never going to dance professionally. I’ll always be a hanger-on in the world of ballet. I think Levoy is going to do something with the Joffrey company, and Afro is actually making a good bit of money at the club where she works.” She corrected herself, “Where he works. And the Jewel Box Revue has asked him to go out on tour with them, so I’m not leaving them in the lurch if I move out.”

  “You’re going to hate being back in Whitehall,” I said.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. I’m going to open a little ballet school and I think I can do fine. If I have to, I’ll open one in Muskegon, where there are more kids. But I know where tights and toe shoes come from now. I know how to teach beginners’ classes. I’m not going to ruin anybody’s body. And I’ve been out in the big world and seen a lot of famous dancers. I can talk a really good game now.”

  I was impressed, even jealous. Knowing she was leaving New York made me feel lonely. I realized that just knowing she was in the same city had made me feel that I wasn’t really all alone.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said. “And I worry about you going back there and then thinking it was a big mistake.”

  She said, “I can always come back, but I think the fact that I really love ballet will fill my days. I do love it, Harry, and it will be a pleasure getting those little girls started on something that might really go somewhere for them. Being a dancer is a great career for a woman. It’s one of the few where they get more respect than men. A girl can have a real career early, and if she becomes a star, she can go on and earn money and be important for a long time. If she doesn’t, she can get married, have children, and keep working her own hours to earn money as a teacher. And keep her figure. I think I’m going to be fine.”

  We talked a little bit about the new ballets I was going to be doing. I didn’t mention anything about Illy or Rex or my illicit and flamboyant sex life. I figured she didn’t really want to know.

  After she left I went to see a Joffrey concert at the YMHA on a Sunday afternoon. Levoy danced the Arthur Saint-Léon role in Robert Joffrey’s re-creation oí Les Déesses. He was good. His long-legged, slim figure had a real nineteenth-century quality to it, and he was dancing very cleanly. He had really gotten his tours en l’air down. In many ways he was doing better than I was, since he was doing truly classical ballet in a ballet company, small as it was.

  I went backstage to congratulate him and he was glad to see me. He said he would like to see me sometime and I promised him we would get together. But we never did.

  Sleeping with Rex Ames

  It was weird. Rex and I saw quite a lot of each other. He came home with me at least once a week, on evenings after a performance, if it wasn’t too late. Just to neck. It was bizarre. He always told me all about the other people he was sleeping with. About how he went to a party and the host said, “There’s someone in the bedroom you need to take care of.” When he was shown into the bedroom, there was a naked boy on the bed shouting, “Aren’t there any men here? I need taking care of and four guys aren’t enough!”

  According to Rex, after he took care of the kid, he wasn’t yelling for more.

  He also told me that one night he just couldn’t get enough. He called one friend to come over, who was staggering when he walked down the stairs. But Rex needed more, so he went out cruising and found someone else, fucked him, and still wasn’t happy. It was late by now, about midnight, but he went out again and brought home a Puerto Rican boy. “He was the best. He just lay there and let me go at it,” Rex said.

  Is there a name for this? I thought.

  We necked a lot and pressed our crotches together. I was more than ready and leaking very badly, but even though we’d been to bed together once, he wouldn’t even let me take his cock out of his pants. Kissing has always been my weakness, and Rex was a great kisser. He had a beautiful mouth and he really liked kissing. Not lots of tongue, but that hot, ripe, juicy mouth searching yours for some kind of answer got me all heated up. I was taller than Rex, so when he backed me against the kitchen counter and pressed that denim-covered crotch into my spread legs and kissed me for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, it definitely made me long to tear his clothes off. But no dice.

  He was also having sex for money, I found out. Sixty dollars an evening. That was excellent money. His picture was carried in one of the photo albums the call-boy services provided. He said he was in the book at Mulroney and Weaver, the smart men’s haberdasher on East Fifty-seventh Street. They called it “the Tie Catalog.” Supposedly, when someone came in and asked to see the Tie Catalog, he was shown this looseleaf binder of young men in a variety of ties. When the client made his choice, he asked for a delivery, and the young man would arrive wearing the same tie. So the client could be sure that the right person had arrived. Particularly good if one was meeting in public, I guess.

  “But you never wear ties,” I said.

  “I do when I’m working,” Rex said.

  I said, “Aren’t you at the opera almost every evening?”

  “There’s Sunday. A lot of these guys come in from out of town. So Sunday isn’t bad. I work during the day pretty often. Brunches and matinees. You know.

  “And there are lots of nights we’re not working. When they’re doing Butterfly or Cavalleria. And we’re out early lots of times, too.

  “The last guy I was with asked me how I could do this kind of work when I had so much going for me. I told him it was my way of earning back something for all those fucks I gave away free to people who didn’t care.”

  “I care,” I said.

  “That’s why you aren’t getting fucked,” he said, pushing me down on the bed and piling on top of me. “I don’t kiss anyone else,” he said when he pulled his mouth off me for a moment.

  ‘Oh, that’s great,” I said.

  “Would you rather I didn’t?” he said. I pulled him back down and ran my hands up under his T-shirt. He had very smooth skin and was hairless on his upper body except for a few hairs between his pectoral muscles.

  He often wanted to take a bath at my place, and liked to lie in the tub and kiss me as I knelt beside it. I used to run the bar of soap up and down his spare body. He had more of a gymnast’s build than a dancer’s. He didn’t have particularly heavy thighs, and his legs weren’t long, either. A little short if anything. Although his hair and eyes were very dark, his skin had a faintly ivory color. Not like mine. I’m really white. Too white. You look at me and you know that I’m made out of meat. Rex, I know it’s corny to say, had a kind of marble-ish quality to his body. You could understand why sculptors thought they had captured someone perfectly in marble. He actually looked like that.

  Looking at our naked bodies, you could see that my ancestors had been hidden away in the fogs of Northern Europe and that Rex’s forebears had obviously posed for those Greek kouroi. Very Mediterranean in the best sense. His nose wasn’t very large, and I found out later he had had it redone. He had wonderful white teeth. And he could place his voice at a certain pitch on the telephone that always gave me an erection.

  If beauty is the promise of happiness, Rex had a kind of cocky, taunting male presence that held the promise of sexual fulfillment. He eventually came through on that promise.

  We had kind of gotten into a routine where I would put on a cotton bathrobe over my Jockey shorts when we came in, and
we would tussle. One night he had to call someone and broke off our heavy necking to do so. Evidently the man on the other end of the line asked him who he was with, and he said, “I’ve got one here I haven’t even tried yet,” as he looked down at me. I guess that’s what he thought of our first abortive run-through. I crawled over and sank my teeth into the bulge in his blue jeans, and he looked down and smiled and patted me on the head. He was an expert at withholding.

  But later this night we were in a position that was the closest to sex we’d ever been in since that first fateful night. I had my legs up wrapped around his waist, and as he was kissing me, he was pressing into my upturned butt. He suddenly reached down and pulled my underpants off so my rear was exposed but my crotch was still caught in my Jockeys. I couldn’t really spread my legs very well trapped in my underpants like that, and I was about to suggest he get up and let me take them off when I felt his hand struggling with his fly and he had his penis out and was pushing it in me. It hurt. No grease, no saliva, no nothing.

  I said nothing. I knew if I made any suggestion, his penis was going to disappear right back behind those brass buttons, perhaps never to be seen again.

  Rex was very vigorous and not quick to come. I clung to his neck and kept my legs around his waist so he wouldn’t suddenly change his mind. I held him very tightly when he came. It was exciting. His breath got shorter and shorter. Those last moments just before a man comes, he loses all self-awareness, and it’s one of those rare times when you know he’s really there. No pretense, no preplanning, no searching for an effect. He’s at the point of no return and there’s no turning back. He’s in the arms of the enemy and surrendering completely. Does that tell you something about me?

  I was in shock. I didn’t come, but it still felt like some kind of sound barrier had been passed. He didn’t stay in me and didn’t stay around very long. It was as though he had let himself down in some way. He never was really undressed. He said at the door as he kissed me good night, “Let’s see each other again tomorrow night. We’re not working. We can eat Chinese.”

  We saw each other at rehearsals the next morning. La Gioconda. The Dance of the Hours. The boys were doing double tours. Mine were passable. Many others’ weren’t.

  Rex didn’t pay any attention to me. He never did. I don’t think anyone in the company tipped to the fact that there was something going on between us.

  That night he showed up just after I was getting out of the tub. “Leave the water,” he said. “And don’t get dressed.” I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed to read The New Yorker while he finished his bath. I didn’t even want to watch him getting out of his clothes. I had seen him naked at the theater many times in the dressing rooms. I knew his penis was uncircumcised and ran off a bit to the left. Not oversized when relaxed.

  But this was different. A naked man in my little apartment was a bigger event. I didn’t want to start things out by sucking his cock in the bathtub before we even hit the bed.

  He was there, hardly dried off, his hair still very wet. He didn’t have an erection. A true professional. I couldn’t say the same thing.

  He fell on me, and pulled off my bathrobe as he was kissing me.

  I had Vaseline and a towel under my pillow. I reached for it as I rolled over on top of him and sat up, straddling him. I could feel his erection pressing up between my buttocks. I pulled the Vaseline out from under the pillow and greased him up thoroughly. He groaned as I did it. I greased myself, too, with a big gob of grease, so he could slip in without a struggle. He went in very deeply and groaned again, twisting his head on the pillow.

  It was something like fucking a fantasy. He was so beautiful there on the bed under me. His head turned. That perfect nose, his eyes closed with their long Tyrone Power eyelashes, his curving upper lip pulled back off those white teeth.

  His hands held my thighs and he raised his head off the pillow, his eyes still shut. His abdominal muscles and his pectorals were strained tight as he pushed up into me. He was driving upwards to get everything he could into me. Pulling in and out frantically. He came sooner than he had the night before. He groaned over and over again. I pushed down on him hard and leaned forward to kiss him. He hung on to me hard. I pulled myself off in a few seconds on his stomach. I’d been almost there since we started.

  I slipped myself off him and lay down on top of him, letting my full weight push him down into the mattress. I reached over and put out the light. He had a little smile on his mouth. I could see this in the shadows. Perhaps it was more beautiful than it would have been with the lights fully on. But no, in his slapdash biker way, he was perfectly beautiful, any way you looked at him.

  I thought of Romola Nijinsky, who felt she was sleeping with a god when she was made love to by her husband. Rex was like that. Like a faun or a satyr who had slipped out of a thicket, leaped out of a. mountain stream and into your bed.

  When I came back from the toilet in the hall, the light from the kitchen was falling into the bedroom and Rex was lying across the foot of the bed. One arm was covering his eyes, and his chest was lifted, his stomach concaving down to where his thighs lifted up on either side of his penis, half hidden between his legs. Here was a little godlet, fallen across my pale blue blanket.

  “Can I take another bath?” he said.

  “Do you want Chinese?” I said.

  “Yes, but I’m going to feel like something else a lot more, I think,” he said.

  “Well, let’s get the Chinese first,” I said. “You need your strength.” He laughed and ran his hand across my buttocks as he headed for the tub.

  When we’re in love, how lucky we are to be fulfilled by the sight of someone. This was one of those brief periods of my life when nothing was missing.

  Harry Thinks About Sex

  Before I drop the subject, I want to talk some more about being “in lust” with Illy. Because it’s important. Because Illy is here in the hospital. I can see the other end of that arching rainbow that began at the opera in the 1950s when he was so beautiful, he was known as the Handsomest Man in New York. I think they were right.

  When we made love, Illy used to say, “It goes in like six and comes out like eight.” Meaning me. It’s so interesting how the pattern of the sex you have with people changes as you continue to sleep with them. You both change as people because of the sex you’re having together.

  I think it would be interesting to do an autobiography only in terms of your sex life. No details, no descriptions, and no identifications. Just what the other person was like and what you did together. They could be identified as A, B, and C. That would be best. I guess you’d have to include masturbation, too. Those fantasies are all part of the changing pattern.

  With Illy, we started out with him always wanting to fuck me, but it wasn’t always accomplishable because of his king-size equipment. Sometimes I just couldn’t handle it, it hurt too much. So we usually settled for me sucking him and masturbating him to orgasm. Which was, in fact, more monumental that way than when he just climbed aboard. He certainly liked it. I had to take care of my own orgasm. Sometimes I masturbated us together, holding them both in one hand. That was good.

  Then he wanted me, occasionally, to put it in him, without moving, while I masturbated him. And after we had been sleeping together for about six months, I regularly mounted him, face-to-face. He came to like that a lot. Although he never moved and we never kissed. Sometimes that passivity irritated me, and I would take his shoulders and shake him–hard–as I pounded in and out of him. He reacted only when he had his orgasm. Then those magnificent legs would open up and point to each side of the room, pushing himself up to me as hard as possible. He had a perfect turnout, Illy did, and he was big. So when those strong thighs and calves and the beautifully pointed feet reached out like a compass from the center of the bed, you had to make sure the sides of the bed were clear. If I didn’t prepare, he was knocking over lamps and chairs, right and left. It was actually quite magnificent to
see that muscled body pushing itself up to me, seeking the last little moments of pleasure from his orgasm. But it was always his orgasm. Never ours. When his body was drained of pleasure and drowsy he would sometimes want to put his arms around me and hold me, but I always felt there was something dutiful about it. Not dutiful, really, but a kind of shy effort to be loving, now the lovemaking was over. Curious, huh?

  The reason I tell you all this is to explain how love and lust are quite different but can be equally satisfying. There was a feeling of completion and accomplishment in having sex with Illy that had nothing at all to do with love. It was more primitive than that. It was something like worshiping at a shrine of beauty–the eternal male beauty that is at the source of procreation. Is that too fanciful? I don’t know. I do know that my feelings linked me in some way with the Greeks and the Romans. Pre-Christian. Did you ever see Satyricon? Fellini kind of got at that feeling there. There was no love in Satyricon, only fucking. Of course, in the films of that period there was no real fucking, but Fellini came close. You really felt the excitement of beauty they must have experienced and the feeling that this excitement brought them closer to the gods. Only with no hangover the next day or feeling bad because the one god didn’t really want them to do it. So strange, how Christianity has gotten such a stranglehold on the idea that sex is bad. Wonder where that came from? It isn’t in the Bible. All those old coots of monks sitting on their pillars in the desert trying to avoid temptation, thinking it kept them from finding God. What was good for them was good for everyone else, that goes without saying.

  Illy certainly was pagan. He was devoted to orgasms and that large penis of his. Sometimes when I was in the mood to have sex, he would say, “Oops, I just masturbated.” He would suddenly masturbate while taking a pee in somebody’s bathroom. He would have it out, it would look good, would stiffen, and he’d have it off. That’s what is so weird about looking at him in his hospital gown, the nurse rearranging him, the still sizable but somehow blackened and desiccated-looking cock hanging below the gown’s edge. Like an aged banana. Who would think of the splendor it had once been capable of? Large, violent, bursting with semen ready to jet forth. Illy was symbolic of sex. He was all that sex really is, and it was gratifying to share it with him. You didn’t get tired of it. It never became a routine experience, largely because he valued it so much. There was never the quickie in a darkened room that one could roll off and fall asleep, hardly aware of where your penis had been. That was all to come later for me. With Illy, it was like a ritual visit to the shrine of Priapus. Something you did regularly and necessarily. There was no reason to search for another sex object to make it interesting. The sex object of Illy was more than enough for fulfilling the ritual.