Monkey Suits

by Jim Provenzano

  Lee smiled, hoping a bit of Marcos’ cheer would rub off. “Well, I’d love to join you, but ...”

  “Well, I’d love to join you too, but if you wear those raggedy clothes, ye shall not be admitted to the boites I’m hittin’. And I would love to invite you over again to wear some of my gear, but I am not in the rental business.”

  “Thanks anyway, but I have to get up in the morning.” Lee had a job interview with a different catering company with less prestige, but a much more relaxed staff, he’d been told.

  The cab stopped at Horatio Street. Marcos was out in a flash and handed Lee a five-dollar bill.

  “Have fun!” Lee called out.

  “Oh, honey, I define fun!” With a snap and a wave, Marcos was off to “feature” at Boy Bar, followed by Cave Canem, followed by Save the Robots.

  Instead of taking the Christopher Street PATH station, Lee walked around Sheridan Square once, looking for trouble, but finding no one daring. At the #1 train stairwell, the warm gush of stale air coming from below meant that he might make the latest train and connect to the PATH at the World Trade Center stop. Something about that station’s cavernous immensity spooked him, but the trains ran more frequently down there, even late at night.

  A few others had raced past Lee to catch it, but he knew with his luck he’d trip all over himself, be tempted to jump the turnstile, only to get caught by a transit cop or lose a limb in a car door. He was too tired to rush, and actually wanted to quietly savor his last few minutes of that night in Manhattan.

  Despite being exhausted, frustrated, and hungry again, he rested easily, picked a free column, and scrunched down to sit against it on the dirty tiled floor. What did it matter how good he looked? Sometimes, all he had to do was tell himself, You’re not just miserable, you’re miserable in New York City.

  He settled down to the next day’s edition of the Post. The headline read: BRONX SHOOTING SPREE. Maybe somebody else’s grisly nightmare would amuse him.

  His eyes were distracted from the paper by a familiar tuxedo-clad figure; the recently admired video assistant, whose black overcoat gave him a debonair look. His bow tie was missing from his unbuttoned collar. Their eyes met. He grinned.

  “You look familiar,” Lee looked up, trying not to disclose his extreme enthusiasm.

  “Got any cherries?” the guy smiled. Walking up to the column, he stood close, enough for Lee to enjoy a face-to-groin view of his tux pants.

  Lee stood, dropping his newspaper into his bag. “I thought I might see you.”

  “Oh yeah?” The fluorescent light gave his cocoa skin a pallid cast.

  “Yeah, I saw you on the train before.”

  “What, here?”

  “No, the PATH. You going to World Trade?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.” He lived in Jersey? This was a sure bet, at least for a long train ride or two. Lee relaxed. No other guys would jostle their way between this potential suitor. Nobody else was taking a cab home in their direction.

  “Thought you were a musician,” Lee said. “Y’know. The monkey suit.”

  “I’m so obviously ‘the help?’”

  “Sorry, but there was a bit too much worker’s fatigue around your eyes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Very unmistakable,” Lee said. “Besides, you didn’t look drunk.”

  “Wonder what night that was?”

  Lee blushed. The guy’s deep voice wasn’t just sexy, but casually masculine, with only a slight hint of urbane sarcasm. “Does it pay good?”

  “What? Shooting weddings? Oh, yeah. It’s alright.”

  He looked into Lee’s eyes with more interest than a straight man would, and at much closer range. A good sign, yet he seemed almost arrogant. Lee slowly planned his talk, but something silly came out instead.

  “I’m craving eggs.”

  “Huh?”

  “Eggs. This old man kept asking for eggs. ‘Veah’z da heggs? Veah’z da heggs?’ As if everybody had eggs with coffee and dessert at midnight.”

  The guy grunted half a laugh. “Yeah, they’re wild.” Lee watched him set down his shoulder bag. Relief. At least he wasn’t planning on walking away.

  Ask him about himself. Stop talking stupid. “You do a lot of weddings?”

  “About three a week.”

  “Must get pretty boring. I mean, how many times can you watch the bride throw the bouquet before you before you wish you could just run right up and catch it yourself!”

  “Right.” They both laughed, a bit loud. Two girls in tight skirts and short jackets looked at them. They both stopped talking a few seconds, each waiting for the other to speak.

  “Well, at least all those weddings give you ideas on how to do your own.”

  “Ha.” The handsome guy leaned against the column. The shift of the light increased the shadow of his nose. Lee noticed the slight stubble on his face as he said, “I’m not the marrying type.”

  “Oh,” Lee smiled. “I can’t say I’m disappointed to hear that.”

  With a great rumbling and squeaking of wheels, the train arrived.

  They walked up the stairs and around a construction project through the silent mini-mall, where they changed trains under the World Trade Center and toward the phalanx of escalators to New Jersey’s PATH.

  “Hold on, I gotta get some money.” He approached a bank machine, inserted his card, waited. “Use the bank in Jersey and they charge me a dollar.”

  “What a rip-off.”

  “This place. You come through here in the morning?”

  “Not much these days.”

  “Man, it’s amazing. Pouring with people.”

  “Yeah, now I mostly just see it like this. Empty.”

  He looked around with what Lee thought might be a mischievous glance. “Hey, is there a rest room somewhere? Man, I gotta piss.”

  “Closed.”

  “I’ll find a corner somewhere.”

  “Oh, they got cameras everywhere.”

  “Hmm. Oh well.” He smiled. “I’ll just have to hold it in.” He grinned mischievously, cupping his crotch. Lee blushed.

  The two men descended the escalator together, paid their fares and waited in the nearly empty PATH train, which rumbled toward starting a few times, faltered, then finally the doors closed with the loud ‘bing-bong’ that had long ago begun to annoy Lee. That night, he smiled at the tones.

  As they spoke, leaning close to hear above the rumbling, Lee learned that his name was Cal, short for Calvin Deason. They chatted about video, rich people, and work. As Lee leaned in, he looked down at Cal’s thighs. Once, the train lurched and Cal’s lips brushed his ear.

  “Do you have family?” Lee asked, hoping he wasn’t quizzing too much.

  “Uh, yeah, my parents live in Boston.”

  They approached Grove Street. “Well, I get off here.” Lee stood.

  “Me too.” Lee’s stomach did a small flip-flop. He distinctly remembered watching Cal stay on the train at the Grove Street stop, but he wasn’t about to question him. Maybe this was a really good thing. Maybe he wasn’t going home that time. Maybe he did want Lee to take him home. His thoughts jumped about distractedly as they strolled through the quiet Jersey City streets.

  Lee stopped at his corner. “Well, I go this way five more blocks. Think I’m gonna make some ‘heggs.’”

  “Sounds good. I always get hungry again by the time I get home.”

  Lee held his door keys tightly in his coat pocket. Cal’s brown eyes glistened in the street light. They stood looking at each other a moment. A car alarm screamed somewhere down the block.

  “Do you ... um ... are you hungry?” Lee took his hand out of his pocket and pointed to his apartment with his door key.

  “Yeah, sure.” For a moment Cal’s face lost its ruddy angular stance and became quite vulnerable. “Sure, that’d be nice.” He unzipped his tux fly and walked toward a corrugated metal shopfront gate. “But I have got to piss now or fall down doin’ it.”
/>
  Lee chuckled, stealing a glimpse as Cal unleashed against the wall.

  “It’s okay. You can watch!”

  “Why, thank you.”

  In his twenty-four years (the first nineteen of which were virginal), other than Brian, Lee had rarely slept with a guy who could truly make love. Many of them knew how to fuck, some could easily get off, but none stirred him with such grace and lyrical devotion. Cal’s lovemaking felt like warm molasses dripping over his body, and Lee couldn’t stop licking.

  Perhaps it was the mixture of tall black father and lithe pale mother that gave him such a charged combination. Lee pondered Cal’s heritage as he rubbed and licked his stomach muscles, and watched them contract and flex as he smoothly slid his cock in and out between Lee’s legs in a simulated fuck. There wasn’t an inch of Cal’s body that didn’t quiver with every grazing of Lee’s tongue or fingers. His rugged face betrayed a delicate sensitivity.

  What really hooked Lee on Cal was his smooth caramel skin. He could loop his tongue on a non-stop trail from Cal’s lip to chin to Adam’s apple, down past his collar bone, take a sidetrack to an erect nipple, graze across the ridge of his sternum, ride up and down contracting belly muscles, lose some spit in his naval crevice and travel on down to rock hard pleasure, up and down, his mouth full. He could trail his wet tongue further down to his inner thigh and scrotum and down deep between his cheeks to a rosebud tang, all this in one ride without a pit stop to remove stray hairs from his teeth. Unlike Lee’s one-time attempt to shave down to smoothness like the much too influential porn stars, Cal was a complete natural bare beauty, save his underarms and pubic thatch. But to Lee, somehow those curls were easier to pull from his teeth than any white guy’s hair.

  His energy also surprised Lee. Cal vibrated, he shared at every moment. Lee thought New York men often paralleled their career motives with their bed habits; quick to pounce on opportunity, quicker still to get to the point, and very goal-oriented. Watching a man hurriedly finish himself off at his side didn’t do it. Despite his college appreciation of John Cage’s theories on music, he would never apply them to sex. Two solos occurring in the same space at the same time did not make a duet.

  Cal liked to stay stuck together after they spurted on each other, bodies commingling in the darkness. It was what Lee so desperately missed; the decrescendo. So many furtive post-orgasmic clutchings for the ever-ready cum towel led Lee to wonder if men didn’t secretly think HIV was transmitted by the mere proximity to sperm.

  Instead, Cal was quite comfortable with it, and had grunted a plea for Lee to bend the rules and aim his cock at Cal’s chest. A few spurts had flown up to Cal’s face, but he hadn’t panicked or even wiped it off.

  “Just keep talking,” Lee murmured as he lay atop Cal’s sweat-smeared chest, licking his chin and nose. Demurring to the much-debated rules, they’d agreed not to kiss until after cleaning up. “Your voice. It ...”

  “Oh, that. I get asked to do phone sex voiceovers all the time.”

  “But you haven’t?”

  “Not exactly my preferred subtle style.”

  “Like whipping your cock out on the street?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  Lee giggled through his last slurp before teasingly shoving the towel over Cal’s face.

  “Tell me what you like about me.”

  Maybe Cal needed a little reinforcement to get his battery recharged. Lee was already hard again.

  “Well, you’re just about the most handsome guy I’ve ever shared a bed with, and you taste good, so I guess that means you have good taste.”

  “I’ll forgive that atrocious wit,” Cal smirked. “What else?”

  “You’re, uh, very good in the give and take department. I like that.”

  “You like that?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You mean you’re not just looking for a nasty top?”

  “Oh, no.”

  Cal burrowed his tongue deep into Lee’s armpit, then lower, until his tongue tickled the back reaches between Lee’s legs.

  “Mmm...” Lee grunted as he raised his hips. “The only way you’re gonna get that tongue any further in me is to operate.”

  After a very late morning meal, Cal left, smiling at the door. Dazed and exhausted, Lee waltzed around his tiny apartment in his boxer shorts. He’d completely missed a job interview for the new catering company, but he was happy. His bed smelled of Cal, who’d left his underwear and T-shirt as a gift, and for the first time, through the entire night, Lee hadn’t once thought of Brian.

  15 Strains of crisp violin arpeggios echoed through the medieval altar at the Metropolitan Museum. Ritchie stood in the back behind the rows of two hundred seated guests. He watched as a young Asian woman fiercely attacked her instrument with sharp precision, accompanied by a delicate man at a black grand piano.

  After the last piece, the audience burst into applause. The museum rumbled with the sound. The young violinist bowed several times and left the stage.

  As the guests rose and broke into adulatory chatter, several left programs on the padded rental chairs. Ritchie deftly picked up a program and stuffed it into his inside tux pocket.

  Between serving drinks and getting underway with dinner, Ritchie set down his tray behind a screen and walked down a long corridor to where he thought the rest room was. He felt in his pocket and took out the program to discover that the performer’s name was Mai Ling.

  “Excuse me, is there a drinking fountain somewhere?” Ritchie turned to see the Asian violinist. Her pale white dress hung delicately on her small frame.

  “Um, I’m not sure where it is,” he stuttered.

  “Oh, of course,” she said apologetically, assuming he was a guest.

  “I think it’s down this hall. I’m going that way.” He walked with her. “That was absolutely wonderful playing,” he said.

  “Oh, thank you. Could you hear?”

  “Well, the acoustics weren’t worthy of your artistry.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, really, I mean it. I’ll look forward to hearing you play in a proper hall sometime.”

  “I hope you can come.”

  He stopped at the hallway marked Rest Rooms. “Well, here we are.”

  “Thank you. Your name?”

  “Rich- Richard.”

  “Thank you, Richard.”

  She slipped into the bathroom. After sipping water from the fountain, he practically skipped back to work with a subdued joy.

  When Lee was pulled aside from the breakdown labors by Philipe, he first thought someone had ratted on him for taking a guzzle of champagne in the back kitchen. Then he thought he was about to be fired. But Philipe pulled two others up to the top of the steps of the dining room with him, Andrew Spears, the unpretentious crewcut captain, and Mandy, a strong-featured brunette with whom he’d occasionally worked. He realized there was a simpler mission underway.

  Philipe stood the three in front of him. They stared out at the forming crowd of waiters, who giggled mischievously.

  “Are we ready?” Philipe called out. “One, two, sree.”

  “Happy birthday to you,” the workers sang out. “Happy birthday to you ...” All farcically jumbled their three names on “Happy birthday, dear ...”

  Lee flushed with embarrassment and joy. He’d almost forgotten, or rather tried to forget that he’d not celebrated his birthday.

  The crowd broke into applause. Mandy leaned in to him. “Is yours today?” she asked.

  “Last Sunday. Yours?”

  “Yesterday. Did you do something special?”

  Someone special, he said to himself, thinking of Calvin as Andrew gave him a hug.

  “I’ll take a day off.”

  “Good, maybe I’ll do that too.”

  “Take it when you can,” Andrew said. “But take the work first.”

  “Right,” Lee nodded, as they stepped back into the crowd. Ritchie and a few others offered jovial pats on the back before re
turning to work.

  “Happy birthday, baby,” Brian kissed Lee on the lips. It took him by surprise.

  “Well,” Lee said. “Glad you remembered.”

  “I didn’t. But how ’bout a drink after work?”

  Lee thought a moment. Did it mean just a drink? Would the pleasure be worth the pain?

  “Sure. Meet me at the coat racks?”

  “Right.” Despite his exhaustion, despite his foul mood, Lee felt better. Perhaps this company was human after all. He felt bad for Ed, knowing Brian might easily be convinced to stop over for one more little fling. He didn’t know Ed very well, but he did know Brian. Every inch of him.

  “I can’t wait ’til I don’t have to cater anymore. Then I can grow my hair long,” Brian said to Kevin Rook as the two finished changing, the last in the men’s room. He’d always thought Kevin was especially cute, but seemed to constantly be in one or another serious boyfriend relationship.

  “Yeah, it’s very fashionable now, in a way.”

  “Either really long or really short.”

  “A sort of sixties resurgence,” added Kevin, as he slipped on his black leather jacket, the back layered with peeling ACT UP stickers. His closely cropped blond hair, contrasted by the black leather and his strikingly angular features, created an almost cartoon streetwise look that Brian envied. Kevin had lived in Europe. It almost seemed as if he were catering merely for amusement.

  “You’d probably get some modeling jobs with longer hair,” Kevin said to Brian.

  “I wish. I’m too short.” Brian looked into the mirror, combing his hair.

  “You should go to Europe,” Kevin suggested. “They don’t care out there at some places, as long as you’re pretty.” He patted his ass.

  “Europe? Me? Never.”

  “Yes, you. Call me. I have a few friends in Paris.”

  “Paris?”

  Brian had studied French for one year in college. He’d even gone on a student trip to Montreal. But after three days of churches, museums, and being hounded by several girls and a few of the wispy boys, one night he simply left the hotel room. Using a saved travel article, he found the gay district within minutes. A hundred Canadian dollars later, he’d discovered the joy of private shows at a male strip club, which gave him an intimate affection for French-Canadian culture. One he learned how to have sex in French, for the rest of the year, he got A’s on all his tests.