Going Down For The Count

by David Stukas

  “Half went to Siegfreid’s old lover, a Hans Sattler. The rest went to Heino, his business partner. And that’s it,” Monette sighed.

  “That’s it, huh?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “I’m not happy,” I reported.

  “How do you think I feel?” Monette whined. “I was hoping you’d be a rich widow so you could give Monette, your soul mate and good buddy, a huge chunk of your inheritance.”

  “I’m tired of playing the widow,” I responded. “So you also found out that the servant who had the videotapes in his room was a Man-something.”

  “Manfred. Manfred Weber. They’re going to find him and question him—along with all the other servants. I’m sorry I can’t tell you much more right now. But Inspector Taucher said he could have a lot of answers by tomorrow morning. So you’ll just have to live with the dread hanging over your head in the morning.”

  “Morning?” I replied. “The dread will be hanging over my head tonight—Michael’s taking me out to a bar.”

  Much later that night, Michael dragged me out to a bar near the palace. I don’t even remember the name, but Michael assured me it translated to “Lick My Boots” or something like that. I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Michael was dressed similarly—that is, until he dragged me into a nearby hotel and up to a room where he pulled out a key and opened the door, telling me to step in for a minute.

  “Michael, where the fuck are we, and why are you opening a suitcase and putting on a California Highway Patrol uniform with tall black police boots?”

  “This is my room, oh limited one!”

  “What do you mean your room?”

  “Just what I said. You know, Robert, no wonder you always get the short stick in life. You don’t know how to think outside the box. You’re so Midwestern in your thinking. You need to think like a New Yorker. You know, to be more devious. Whenever I travel with my mother, I always have a second room at another hotel to store my stuff and,” he said, moving aside a tub of body lube large enough to indeed be a tub, “I had some of my more incriminating stuff shipped ahead to Monaco, then to here when I knew I was coming this way.”

  “You didn’t want your mother to see you brought your fetish gear, huh?”

  “No, but the main reason is this gives me the perfect place to bring my men, without anyone at the palace knowing about it.”

  I knew the answer to the question I was about to propose, but I had to ask it anyway. “So have things been busy here?”

  “More than you will have in a lifetime, Robert. Let me translate: at least a dozen times.”

  “But the count is barely cold!” I said, completely astounded. “At least a dozen times?”

  “The count was not my boyfriend, Mr. Count Stealer! And to answer your question, of course I had sex here dozens of times, Robert! But I didn’t do them one at a time! I couldn’t rack up numbers like that unless I did a few twos and threes. Listen, I wasn’t about to sit around that dreary palace all day under my mother’s thumb. My motor was running and my wheels needed to hit the pavement!”

  “So the polizei in the servant’s room in the basement wasn’t enough for you?”

  “One man? You’ve got to be kidding, Robert! I think in powers of ten when it comes to men. You and Pat Boone must be the only people in America who think monogamy is the answer. Now, would you stop with the questions and help me get these handcuffs into the cuff case on the back of my utility belt?”

  “You’re going to wear this out to the bar, aren’t you?”

  “No, Robert, I’m just trying this on in Europe because this outfit needs some taking in and the tailors are so much better here. Of course I’m wearing this! You just watch how many guys will come crawling up to me with this on. Literally.”

  “I’m sure your family is pretty much used to having people crawling up to them, pleading. Your mother probably enjoys it immensely.”

  “Oh, shut up, Robert, and let’s get going. The night is slipping away.”

  Michael gathered up his police search gloves and flashlight and hustled me out of the door, through the lobby, and out into the street.

  “Michael, people are staring at you.”

  “Yeah, what about it?” he replied, pulling out a gigantic cigar and lighting it.

  “They’re probably thinking I’m under arrest from Interpol or something.”

  “So?” was Michael’s reply.

  “Well, isn’t it illegal to wear a uniform in a foreign country?” I added, worrying I would end up in even more trouble with the polizei than I was already. “The police are probably following us right now.”

  “So?” Michael repeated.

  There was no getting through to Michael, so I remained silent—and at least a few paces behind him—on the rest of the walk to the bar.

  The bar was situated in a fairly genteel neighborhood and looked quite innocent on the outside. But once you got inside, it looked like a gay steel mill, with perfectly placed metal I-beams and bolts jutting out of walls, presenting handy places to suspend all sorts of items, from slings to handcuffs. Most of the clientele were dressed in typical skinhead outfits: black knee-high boots with white shoelaces, short-sleeved knit shirts that buttoned up like a polo shirt, and tiny suspenders.

  “Isn’t this a great place?” he said, elbowing me to validate his taste in bars. “Now, I know that from upstairs this place doesn’t look like much, but you should see the downstairs. Let me rephrase that: you should feel the downstairs.”

  “Feel?”

  “It’s totally dark down there. You just walk around the maze of rooms and people grab you and you can have sex with anyone you like! All the leather bars in Germany are like this. It’s great!”

  “Michael, you didn’t tell me this was a leather bar!” I whispered in a voice that almost shouted.

  “What did you think it was with a name like Lick My Boots?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it might be a country-western bar.”

  “Robert, I don’t think you’ll find a lot of gay men two-stepping in Germany. Look, it’s not a heavy leather bar, but there are a few guys here who will do things to you you’re probably afraid to even fantasize about.”

  “Michael, getting groped in the basement of a bar is not my idea of a fantasy. Plus,” I added, kicking in the side of my mind that spent its days wringing its hands, “did you ever think that these basements are probably horrible firetraps? I’ll bet they don’t even have emergency exit lights.”

  “Robert, only you would put exit signs before a good blow job. Did you want to check the outlets down there to make sure they’re properly grounded? Hmm?”

  “You can go downstairs, but I think I’ll stay up here. I’d leave, but I don’t know my way home. I’m afraid I’ll take the wrong turn and end up in Poland.”

  “Fine,” Michael replied, rubbing his hands together with delight. “I’ll be back in an hour. Have fun!”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’m going to have a rockin’ good time! Make sure you have some protection,” I said, like a good mother would.

  “I never go out without condoms.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that kind of protection. Judging from this tribe, I’d carry a knife.”

  “Why don’t you break a bottle on the bar counter and stand in a corner, threatening anyone who comes within twenty feet of you? That ought to get you some pretty hot dates.”

  “Michael, I would think doing so would make me the most popular guy in the place.”

  “Have it your way,” Michael announced, then disappeared into the back of the bar and presumably into the bowels of the building—pun intended.

  If it wasn’t enough that I was stuck in a foreign country and a prime suspect in the murder of a high-profile gay man with a title, I also found myself standing in a German leather bar without the slightest idea of what to do. So I did what any red-blooded gay man would do: I drank.

  As I was standing in the darkest corner I could find near t
he entrance (for a fast getaway), a handsome man came up to me and said something in German. I answered back in the only complete sentence I could muster: “Ich sprechen wenig Deutsche.”

  “Then it is English that you speak?” the man said. “I speak good English, pretty much so, you see? My name is Christian.”

  I felt it wasn’t worth quarreling with Christian’s grammar, since I was happy I could converse with someone here. At least it would make the time go faster until Michael returned.

  We struck up a conversation that wobbled and staggered like a drunk on roller skates, with each of us asking the usual bar-talk questions: how do you like living in Germany/the United States, what do you do for a living, is the weather always this beautiful here, and do you live around here? The answers to these questions were pretty mundane, but I wasn’t prepared for Christian’s response when I told him I was staying at the palace of Count Siegfreid von Schmidt.

  “He is the dildo up the rear of a much dirty pig, you know!” Christian said, the corners of his mouth turning down in disgust.

  I didn’t quite know what to say, fearing something had gotten lost in the translation. “I’m sorry, Christian. Could you repeat that?”

  “Yes, you can be sure. He is the dildo up the rear of a much dirty pig.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  Christian took another swig of beer from his glass and scanned the bar for potential dates.

  “Christian?”

  “Yah?”

  “Why is the count like a dirty dildo in a pig?”

  “No, I said he is the dildo up the rear of a much dirty pig. It is much different.”

  Obviously I was missing some subtle spin on the words, but I did at least gather that Christian didn’t exactly like the count. “So why is the count such a bad man?” I inquired.

  “His head has much shit in it,” Christian continued. “He has sex with many men here all the time. One time, he has the sex with me and in morning, he tell me to leave his house with no breakfast. No thank you. Nothing! He sees me in the bar and never talks to me! He is always like that. Ask any man here. He has treated them all like swine.”

  In order to prove his point, Christian gathered several people he knew and asked them to tell me what a head of shit the count is.

  “Was,” I corrected Christian. “The count is dead. Someone killed him.”

  “Good! May I know the man who did this? I want to shake the hand of this man!” Christian said, without a shred of remorse. Several of the men standing around listening to Christian nodded their heads in agreement.

  Christian told me he was sorry “the count caught you in the web of his sexy fishnets,” and excused himself to go cruise a guy with a shaved head and a nose ring that could easily hold a hundred house keys.

  I stood there shell-shocked. Obviously, the count was on his best behavior for me, but was completely contemptuous of everyone else. Just as I was about to try and ponder what all of this meant, there was a loud commotion at the back of the bar. Michael came from behind a curtain that obscured the entrance to the basement and hurried to my side. He was followed by a huge queen who was holding out his handcuffed hands and bellowing words of love like the amorous cartoon character Peppy Le Pew hot on the trail of a voluptuous female skunk.

  “Where are you, my little Erik Estrada?” the BOQ (Big Old Queen) said, looking all over for Michael, who was cowering behind me. The BOQ soon spotted Michael behind me and was on him faster than a redneck on a six-pack of Budweiser.

  The BOQ was none other than Mad Queen Ludwig. Michael had most likely made himself available for anyone who cared to partake of him, and that person just happened to be Ludwig.

  “Michael, sir, why did you leave before I was done pleasing you, sir?” Ludwig whined, lifting his still-cuffed hands and running one down inside Michael’s shirt and feeling Michael’s rock-hard and surgically enhanced pectorals.

  “Ludwig, I just had to go ... to the bathroom,” Michael pleaded.

  “Then why didn’t you come back for me to finish?” Ludwig said as the clatter caused by umpteen necklaces and gold chains could be heard above the thumping German trance music. Also hanging around his neck on a purple chain was a pair of half-moon eyeglasses, presumably used to improve his vision in the dark.

  This was too good to be true. Michael’s streak of bad dates continued unabated. I decided not to count Michael’s encounter with the polizei in the basement. I would give that encounter an I for incomplete since Monette and I barged in on that one.

  Mad Ludwig went down on his knees and began kissing Michael’s boots in a pathetic attempt at eroticism.

  “This can’t be happening to me, Robert!” Michael said through gritted teeth. “If anyone gets wind of this in New York, I’ll be ruined!”

  “What happened downstairs?”

  “Well, I was standing down there waiting for someone to worship my uniform when out of the blue, I feel this pair of hands on my boots, and before you know it, they were working their way up my legs. I thought it was some hot guy, so I pulled out the cuffs and locked them on him ... keep licking the boots, Ludwig. Sorry for the interruption, Robert. Where was I? Oh yes, so I shine the flashlight in the guy’s face to make him know who was going to be in charge, and what do I see?”

  “The Merv Griffin of Germany?” I ventured.

  “Worse. Jabba the Hutt . . . with Sarah Coventry jewelry! Listen, Robert, you gotta get me out of this one!”

  “Get you out?” I snuffed. “You gotta be kidding me, Michael. As you constantly remind me, I don’t have much in the way of standards ... but at least I wouldn’t sink this low.”

  “This is some kind of curse you put on me. I mean it. My love life has gone to shit ever since you started dating the count. I’ve had one hateful date after another! Did you put an Estonian curse on me? Please tell me if you did so I can get rid of this,” he said, pointing to Ludwig still kissing Michael’s boots, “so my sex life can return to normal. This is too perverse—even for me!”

  “Michael, first of all, the license plate on your car proudly says ‘DV8.’ There’s nothing normal about your sex life. Second, I’m Lithuanian, not Estonian. And third, I have not put a curse on your sex life.”

  “Well, someone is sending me a lot of bad luck! And Ludwig here is proof of it.”

  “Yes, it’s going to be tough getting rid of him,” I consented.

  “You have no idea how tough, Robert. I’ve lost the keys to the cuffs.”

  14

  I’m Just a Prisoner of Love

  Michael and I left the bar with Ludwig still handcuffed. I suggested we try to find the equivalent of an all-night German Ace Hardware store for a hacksaw, but Michael had a much simpler solution to our tricky problem: he told Ludwig he wanted him to wear the handcuffs for the next few days to teach him his role as submissive to his master. Plus, Master Stark (or Mr. Chips, as Ludwig took to calling him) was tired and wanted to go to sleep.

  This command from Michael produced magical results. Ludwig gleefully licked Michael’s boots one more time, then climbed into a cab, holding out his cuffed hands in a gesture of prayer that was, deep down, neither chaste nor pure.

  As the cab sped away with Ludwig staring out the back window at Michael and mouthing, “I will serve you, Meister ,” I turned to Michael and said, “You have no intention of ever following up on your promise to Ludwig, do you?”

  “About as much chance as Geena Davis being named Best Dressed Woman at the Academy Awards.”

  “What about the cuffs?”

  “He’s loaded. He’ll find someone to get them off. I’ve got better things to think about.”

  “So what’s next?” I asked. “We need to figure out a game plan to this whole murder thing. We need to be logical and stay objective.”

  “Right. That’s why I think that tomorrow morning we need to go see a psychic.”

  “A psychic? For God’s sake, Michael, what good is that going to do us? Actually,
I’ll go if he can help us out of this mess.”

  “She! Madame Lola Klingle is a she—and one of the most famous psychics in the world!”

  “Lola Klingle?” I said laughing. I pictured a buxom psychic with flowing blond hair, dressed in a cleavage-showing peasant dress and pouting her lips in a come-hither manner while running her hands seductively over a crystal ball.

  “I wouldn’t say that if I were you, Robert. Most psychics can hear what people say about them, and the one thing I wouldn’t want to do is make a psychic angry.”

  “You’re right, Michael. I wouldn’t want her to turn me into a toad or something. ”I’m sorry, Lola, wherever you are!” I shouted into the air.

  Michael ignored my skepticism and said he would make an appointment for ten a.m.

  Michael’s actions conclusively proved to me Lola was a fake. After all, if she were so perceptive, wouldn’t she just know we wanted to see her?

  The next morning, I conferred with Monette about where things stood and she brought me up to date.

  “It turns out when I called the attractive girl who gave me her business card back at your going-away party in New York, Margaret—that’s her name—didn’t even know who Siegfreid was. She and everyone there at the party was an actor, hired to act as extras and to fill up the party space.”

  “Act as extras?” I inquired. “Why would you have a party, then have people for fill-ins?”

  “It’s done all the time at big New York society parties, Robert—more often than you realize. People who are unacceptable new money or completely repulsive hire actors to fill in at a party no one in their right mind would show up for. In Margaret’s case, they were told to act like the count was well liked and to make the party a success. You know, laugh, cheer, and talk like they were having fun.”

  “That is too strange!” I replied to Monette’s report.

  “I think it’s the perfect solution the next time you throw a party, Robert. I love you dearly, but your parties are about as dull as watching paint dry.”

  “When did you find all this out?” I asked.