“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“I got you a gift.”
Indeed, at the end of the bed sat a small box wrapped in blue- and green-striped paper. A white ribbon was tied around it in a clumsy bow.
“You shouldn’t have gotten me anything,” I said.
“Well, I saw it at the mall….”
Ollie worked at a Ritz Camera at a mall in Studio City. He’d worked there since he was eighteen. He was twenty-six now.
I opened the gift. It was a cinnamon-scented candle in a glass jar from Yankee Candle.
“I don’t know if you like cinnamon,” Ollie said. He remained propped against the pillows, turning the remote over and over in his hands.
“Oh, I do. I do like cinnamon.” I opened the lid and took a whiff to be polite. “It’s very nice. Thank you.”
He smiled.
I put the candle aside. There was never much small talk with Ollie. We didn’t have much in common, really, other than liking the way my cock felt in his ass. We had met online, on ManHunt, or maybe it was Adam4Adam. Or Connexion. One of them. That first night, he drove all the way down to Palm Springs in his ’04 Toyota Corolla, and Frank and I took turns fucking his scrumptious ass. Afterward, he fell asleep between us in our bed. The next morning Frank fried bacon and eggs, while I fucked Ollie one more time. And that, we thought, would be that. Sweet ass not withstanding, Ollie wasn’t one of our more memorable tricks. Awkward silences took the place of conversation. Ollie didn’t get our jokes and didn’t make any of his own. He was either painfully shy or incredibly dull, Frank deduced, and yet, for some reason, I was moved to stay in contact with him, getting his number and his e-mail. In the last year, Ollie had been back down to see us half a dozen more times, and I still didn’t know much more about him other than where he lived, where he worked, and that he liked getting plowed.
“Where’s Frank?” Ollie asked as I slid in next to him on the bed.
“He’s beat. He’s got to finish getting ready for his classes. You know they start this coming week. So he’s going to bed, and he told us to have fun out here.”
“Oh.”
I had a feeling Ollie wasn’t too disappointed. I knew the reason he kept coming back out to the desert had more to do with me than Frank. I wasn’t being arrogant. It was just obvious. Ollie would kiss Frank only if Frank made the first move. He would suck Frank only if Frank maneuvered his cock in the direction of his mouth. On the other hand, he was all over me. Frank and I had never discussed this. But I was sure if I’d noticed, Frank had noticed, too. I felt bad, and a little guilty. But I didn’t bring it up. There was, after all, the slightest chance that Frank hadn’t noticed.
Of course, Ollie’s apparent disinterest might have been the reason why Frank, the last few times, had chosen to drop out of the sex and simply play the voyeur. He’d sit at the foot of the bed, watching and wanking as Ollie and I sucked and fucked. I’d try to lure him back up, but he’d resist, staying right where he was, shooting his load before we did. When Ollie and I would shoot soon afterward, Frank would be right there, waiting with a towel, like a dutiful butler offering his young masters a cum rag. It broke my heart.
Frank was fourteen years older than I. In five years, he would be sixty. Once, age had mattered very little between us. But increasingly of late, the disparity in our ages had begun to weigh heavily on me. I saw myself becoming Frank a few years down the road, moving slower, my body settling, shrinking, withering. It frightened me.
I touched Ollie’s smooth, unlined face. He was handsome, in an all-American kind of way, with sandy hair and blue eyes. We kissed. His lips tasted like wintergreen breath mints, and his little tongue darted in and out of my mouth. I moved my hands up and down his back and over his arms. His was the typical body of a twentysomething white boy who never went to the gym. Not thin, not fat, though his waist was starting to get a tiny bit squishy. Largely hairless, except for a happy trail leading up from his crotch to his belly button. Too many hours spent laboring inside an air-conditioned shopping mall had left his skin pale and pasty. He tasted like deli meat—bologna, maybe, or a salty ham. Leaning back into the pillows as I kissed my way down his torso, Ollie let out an almost inaudible moan. Talking during sex was not for him. No “Yeah, that’s it” or “Fuck, man, that feels good.” I only knew he was enjoying himself by the rock-hard six-inch cock that stood straight up in the air, perpendicular to his groin, from start to finish.
I unbuckled Ollie’s belt and slid down his jeans. Sure enough, his cock was spearheading his gray Hanes briefs. I got everything off him, jeans and underwear, then flipped him over to showcase his most impressive attribute, that incongruous bubble butt. I was quickly naked myself, dry humping the deep cleavage between those two delectable mounds. And in the process, I caught a glimpse of what we were doing in the mirrored closet doors. Absurd, really. Two grown men, naked, rubbing body parts all over each other like a couple of dogs in heat. I couldn’t help but smile.
That was a mistake.
Because in my smile, I saw what I no longer recognized. Myself. The man in the mirror looked nothing like me. I felt as if I were in a Twilight Zone episode, where the face looking back from the mirror was someone else’s, a doppelgänger from another world. What was it about my appearance that had changed over the last few years? I no longer looked like photographs of myself. I couldn’t put my finger on the difference. I hadn’t lost any more hair, and Just for Men had kept the gray at bay. There weren’t any new wrinkles on my forehead or around my eyes; Botox had taken care of that. So what was it that was different? Why did my face no longer look like me?
Ollie had wriggled out from under me and was now sucking on my cock. Leaning back into the pillows, I looked down at his body, so white, so soft, so unmarked by time or love or pain. A body not unlike the one I’d once had, before I’d started lifting weights and using creatine and protein and finally testosterone cream to replace what I was losing, a little bit more every year. Hair grew in my ears and fell out from my head, but my body remained hard and toned and supple. The skinny little boy who’d hated taking his shirt off in gym class had buffed up considerably by his late twenties, spending his thirties on the dance floor with friends, reveling in the glances of strangers, if never fully believing they were glancing at him. But, of course, they were: for an intoxicating nanosecond, I had actually been beautiful. And for an equally fleeting moment in time, I had believed it.
Ollie was moving up from my cock to my stomach, licking the outline of my abs. In a moment like that, I could close my eyes and believe that the years hadn’t moved so fast, that I still had a couple of decades ahead of me, that time wasn’t running out, that like the young man who had danced on the box in his thong, I still had plenty of time for sex, for love, for life. Plenty of time left to savor that necessary fiction of youth—that happiness was one’s due. But I didn’t close my eyes. Not that time. I kept them open and fixed on Ollie’s body, a body that I craved, that I needed, that I kept bringing back into this house even when Frank seemed indifferent to it. I grabbed Ollie’s butt with my hands so hard that I’m sure it hurt him. I hoped, in fact, that it did.
I flipped him over. Fumbling for a condom and lube on the floor beside the bed, I felt the blood surge to my cock. This was going to be fast. I felt the heat building up in my body, the pressure growing inside my head. I was going to have him—have every last bit of him—his body, his mind, his soul, his youth, his future. I pushed my cock inside him and clamped my lips over his. Above us the sun shone like a benevolent god, and the waves crashed against the sandy coast of Venice Beach. The brine of the sea was so strong, I tasted it on my tongue. Sand was creeping up my bare legs, scratching its way into my ass, but I didn’t care. I loved him—I loved him so much, I felt as if my whole body would explode, arms and legs strewn across the beach. I fucked him right there on the open sand, kissing him the whole time, our bodies entwined, two dogs in the surf. I finally unde
rstood what they meant when they talked about falling in love.
“Fuck!”
I pulled out in time to whip off the condom and shoot ropes of semen across Ollie’s chest. Breathing heavily, I steadied myself with one hand on the bed, accidentally hitting the remote control. America’s Next Top Model suddenly flashed once again on the screen behind me.
Ollie came himself then, a paltry dribble compared to my cannon shot. I was already out of bed, flicking off the TV, hunting for a towel in the bathroom.
“That was hot,” Ollie said as I returned, settling in beside him, pressing the towel against his chest.
“A quickie,” I said. “Maybe we’ll go a bit longer in the morning.” I smiled. “I’m a little drunk. Three martinis tonight.”
Ollie shrugged. “Didn’t affect the performance.”
“Thanks.”
We were quiet, sitting shoulder to shoulder against the pillows. Outside the wind had picked up. The glass in the windows rattled almost imperceptibly, but I could hear it.
I had begun to nod off when Ollie spoke again.
“I’m getting a new job.”
I opened my eyes and turned to face him.
“I’m going to be the manager of Spencer’s Gifts,” he said. “It’s in the mall, too.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“I figured Ritz Camera was pretty much a dead-end job, you know? How many people still take pictures on film to be developed? Even though we’ve started selling digital cameras and webcams and stuff, I really think I’ve gone as far there as I ever can. But people will always need to buy gifts, you know?”
I nodded, closing my eyes again. Yes, people would always need to buy glow-in-the-dark posters of heavy metal bands and mugs made in the shape of women’s breasts.
I felt immediately guilty for being judgmental. How different was I, really, from this kid? I’d never gone to college; I’d never had any great-paying job. But I was different from him. I’d had one very important thing that he didn’t have.
Ambition.
Even if it had almost killed me.
We dozed off, but I woke up quickly; the lights were still on, and Ollie had slumped forward onto my chest. I gently moved him down into a more comfortable sleeping position and got up to switch off the lamp. Climbing back into bed beside him, I lay facing the ceiling, eyes wide open. Ollie began to snore, a nervous little whistle tickling my ear. I turned on my side, willing sleep to come. But even as I tried, I knew it was futile. I wasn’t going to fall asleep. Not here. Not tonight.
I waited until Ollie’s snoring had reached a steady rhythm. Then I slipped out of the casita, padding naked past the swimming pool, the pungent fragrance of rosemary hanging in the dry night air. Through the glass sliders, I stepped into the dining room. The clock on the mantel was ticking off the seconds with a fierceness undetectable during the day. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth and washed my hands and applied a hot, wet cloth to my cock. That would have to do for washing up after sex. I was exhausted. In our room, Frank was sound asleep. His own snoring was far deeper, far more profound than Ollie’s tremulous whistle. Pulling back the sheet, I climbed in beside him, pressing my chest against his back, my lips against the soft white fur on his shoulders. I snaked an arm around him. He stirred.
“Baby,” he mumbled.
“I’m here,” I told him.
In moments, we were both asleep.
WEST HOLLYWOOD
Twenty-One Years Earlier
Out of the hundred or so men gathered around me, I noticed him right away. He was an older guy, maybe even thirty. Well preserved for his age, as Randall would say, with big shoulders packed into a tight white T-shirt. Randall liked older men. He said their receding hairlines were more than compensated for by the expanding bulk of their bank accounts. Whether this guy in the tight T-shirt had money or not, I couldn’t tell. He wasn’t part of the mob pressing in around me, waving their Hamiltons and Jacksons as I gyrated on my box to Kim Wilde’s “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Instead, he was leaning against the far wall, sipping a Rolling Rock, watching, but not watching me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“Hey, Benny,” I said, leaning down, grabbing the barback by the shoulder as he loaded empties onto his tray, “go get Carlos to take over for me for a while.”
Benny yanked himself away from my grip. He was still pissed at me for breaking up with him a couple of weeks ago. “Carlos isn’t ready yet,” he said icily.
I knew what that meant. Carlos wasn’t yet high enough to get up on the box. Carlos, a good Catholic boy from Mexico, had to do a couple lines of coke before finding the courage to take off his clothes and dance. So much for hoping I might get a reprieve to hop off my box and introduce myself to Mr. Tight Tee. It was probably just as well. That one was far too put together for me. He wasn’t like these guys up front, slobbering all over a skinny kid just because he’d taken his clothes off. No doubt Mr. Tight Tee was here to meet a friend, a friend with a real job, a real life. A friend who was somebody.
“Come on, hot stuff, give it to us,” someone shouted from the crowd. Kim Wilde was mixing into the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin,” and I shook my ass and tightened my abs to prove just how sinful it really was. A large black man with very cold fingers was stuffing several dollars into my thong. By the end of the night, I’d probably bring home about three hundred in tips.
It still boggled my mind to think that guys would pay money to see me naked. Me, the kid Scott Wood had never even noticed in eighth grade, the pimply kid in the back row all through high school who had endured hundreds of paper airplanes bouncing off his head. I didn’t exist then, except to be a failure. But here, in West Hollywood, I was a star.
I glanced up, over the heads of the crowd, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the wall. The pulsing red and gold lights distorted my features, but still I could make out the contours of my body. A skinny little blond, barely any muscle, a stick figure in a bright yellow thong. In school I’d always been embarrassed by how thin I was, forever trying to lift weights to build muscle but always giving up after about a week and a half. In gym class I’d been mortified by my twig of a body. But when Edgar, the club manager, was considering whether to hire me, he’d asked me to strip to my underwear, and I’d noticed the tight smile that had slowly stretched across his face. “Perfect,” he’d purred, running his hands over my torso. “Not a hair anywhere. You look seventeen.”
But in fact I had just turned the ripe old age of twenty. Randall threw me a party for the occasion, my first since I was fourteen. I was in great spirits that night, filled with ambitious plans. I had come to L.A. to be an actor, and nothing was going to discourage me. “This time next year,” I’d announced at my birthday party, “I’ll be a regular on a TV series.” A few of my friends had laughed skeptically. “You just wait and see,” I’d told them. “I’m trying out for a part on Punky Brewster!”
I didn’t get the Punky job, and neither did I land parts on Who’s the Boss? or The Facts of Life, all of which I auditioned for. But I hadn’t given up yet. Randall thought working as a go-go boy might hurt my chances of getting on TV, but Randall was a fuddy-duddy when it came to things like that. He was such a serious young man—a med student at UCLA. He was always saying things like, “Consider all your options before you take a leap.”
Climbing up on my box in my thong three nights a week, I had no idea what Randall was talking about, nor did I really care to know. All I knew was that I was making good money for doing very little—and for this skinny little kid, all that hooting and whistling was kind of fun. Sure, the free booze and free blow that Edgar provided were nice perks, but the best part was simply getting up on the box.
“Hey, baby, give me a wink,” the large black man called out.
I obliged, turning around to moon the crowd and flex my butt hole. A scattering of guys up front hooted, and more dollars flew my way. I loved it. Who ever would have thought?
“I’m busy.”
“Fuck you, Benny.”
I glanced around for Randall. He was across the room, chatting up some guy in an oxford shirt and loosened tie. Leave it to Randall to spot the executive types. I motioned to him; he spotted me; I simulated drinking a bottle of water. Actually, it probably looked more as if I was asking to suck his cock, but those days, thank God, were over. Randall turned to Mr. Oxford Shirt and seemed to tell him that he’d be right back, and then he headed over to the bar. What would I do without Randall?
“What would you do without me?” he asked, handing me up the bottle of Evian.
I winked, unscrewed the top, and guzzled down about half the bottle. The rest I poured over my torso, sending a cheer up from the crowd.
“Show-off,” Randall said, smirking. He returned to his executive.
Once, I had been in love with Randall. It was right after I’d first arrived in L.A., a scared kid with big dreams. Randall was a native and not nearly as scared as I was, but he had dreams that matched my own. It was a very long time ago. Six months, in fact.
I’d responded to an ad he’d posted on the bulletin board at Pavilions, looking for a roommate. I called him, got his address, and walked the two miles to his place. It was one half of a pink stucco house just below Santa Monica Boulevard, near Fairfax, with a bunch of straggly birds-of-paradise growing out front. When Randall opened the door, he was wearing only a white terry-cloth towel around his waist, with shaving cream carefully applied to his cheeks and chin. As he showed me around the place, his towel kept slipping, and I couldn’t take my eyes off his broad, furry chest. By the time we got to the kitchen, the towel was gone and we were kissing over the sink. I found the taste of shaving cream to be surprisingly sweet and arousing.
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