The End of Billy Knight

by Ty Jacob

  Jerry said nothing. His eyes peered out from just under the rim of the cap.

  Mike reached for his bag, which he’d kept at his feet. “Is this Hillsboro?”

  “Yes. This is Hillsboro.”

  “How long have we been parked here?”

  “A little while.”

  “So this is as far as you go?”

  There was no response.

  “Well, uh, how about the bus station?” Mike said. “Can you drop me off there?”

  Jerry looked down, then turned and stared out the window, toward some traffic lights. He lifted his hand and slowly scratched the back of his neck, pushing his cap forward as he did, then straightening it out again. There was a long pause while Mike watched him, wondering what would happen next. It was probably three in the morning. The parking lot spread out in all directions in the darkness. Jerry kept staring out the window.

  Mike was tired and suddenly afraid. He leaned forward and tilted his head, pretending to be more sure of himself than he really was. He smiled. “Tell me about Hillsboro.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Jerry looked confused. “It’s all right.”

  “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Well, how many kids do you have?”

  “Two girls.”

  “How old?”

  “What is this, twenty questions?”

  “You have pictures?”

  Only when Mike leaned in further did Jerry reach into his back pocket for his wallet.

  “This is Michelle,” he said. “She’s eight.” Already his voice was changing, becoming softer. “This is Jenny.” There, in Jerry’s hands, were two cute girls, both with blond hair and braids, smiling brightly.

  “Jenny,” Mike said. “Sounds like Jerry.”

  “She was supposed to be a boy, Jerry Junior, so we settled on calling her Jenny.”

  “They look happy. You’re a lucky dad.”

  Jerry nodded slowly.

  Mike leaned back now. “So, what about the bus station. Would you take me there?”

  Jerry put the pictures away, tucked his wallet into his back pocket again, and let out a deep sigh. “Yeah, sure kid,” he said, looking out the window. He reached forward and started the car.

  4. The Lucky Pony

  BY THE SUMMER of 1981, Dale had been living in Los Angeles for almost fourteen years. He stood backstage at the Lucky Pony getting ready, and he remembered that Halloween when he was sixteen, that silver lamé. He was thankful Nebraska was long ago and far away. He’d always felt like a strange, alien creature back there, living on a planet where the air was just a little too thin for him. He’d escaped as soon as he could.

  He stepped out of the dressing room, not yet fully made up, and peeked through the silver streamers that hung down behind the stage. He was scanning the audience in the bar. The disco ball turned above the dance floor, throwing stars around the room. A small group of muscular young men standing in front of the stage were calling out, “Sasha! Sasha!” These were his fans, and he loved them. There was magic in the fact these young men were calling out so eagerly for a fat, ugly, prematurely balding man in a skirt. Dale was thirty-two, but when those who didn’t know it was uncouth to ask a drag queen her age actually did the unthinkable, he would give them a brazen smile and say, “Why, I’m nineteen, of course.” Sometimes he’d bat his eyes shamelessly and add, “Barely legal.” It always made them smile.

  He went back into the dressing room, with its stuffed chair smelling of spilled beer and cigarette smoke, and sat in front of the cracked mirror. He did the last fixes to his makeup and then – finally, always the last touch – he put on his wig. Tonight it was a beautiful set of brunette curls. Suddenly Dale was no longer Dale. He was Sasha. Sasha Zahore. Glamorous and truly fabulous.

  As Sasha stepped out onto the stage, the rhinestones on her Western-style blouse sparkled like diamonds. The very short denim skirt she wore was her own handiwork, and she’d given considerable thought to the mother-of-pearl snaps that went up the back. Her plaid scarf was tied charmingly at the side of her throat (carefully obscuring her double chin), and her red cowgirl boots were graced with an expensive pair of comet-shaped spurs in iridescent blued steel, which jingled every time she took a step. She’d saved for those boots for months, and wore them proudly. Her red cowgirl hat was tipped at a jaunty angle. As Patsy Cline crooned “Crazy” over the cheap sound system, Sasha lip-synched in perfect time, gesturing melodramatically, twirling her finger around her ear and rolling her eyes each time the word “crazy” passed through her pouting, perfectly lipsticked mouth.

  The audience ate it up, as they did every Wednesday, laughing and smiling, some singing along. This was her art, her way of giving people pleasure, and she took it seriously, forever sewing costumes, combing the thrift shops in her tireless hunt for new inspiration, and diligently preparing for the next week by practicing what she called her ‘choreography’ in the tiny kitchen of her West Hollywood apartment. She lived, she hated to admit, in a shabby two-bedroom place, which she shared with a bartender who wanted to be an actor and a waiter who was a selfish, coke-snorting ass. The waiter slept on the couch. More than once she’d stumbled across him in flagrante with a guest. But none of that mattered in this moment. The bright spotlight followed her across the stage, shimmering in the waves of her synthetic hair, and every unglamorous thing outside the glow of that blue-white circle faded from view. She mouthed along with Patsy about feeling lonesome and so terribly blue.

  * * *

  When Sasha wasn’t on stage at the Lucky Pony, she worked at Stacked & Hung on Hollywood Boulevard. From noon until nine, five days a week, she poised herself in full drag behind a display case laden with dildos and fur-lined handcuffs, ringing up sales and taking five dollars from each customer who wanted to go into the video booths to watch the wide selection of gay and straight porn. They were almost always men alone, sometimes a couple, straight or gay. Once there was a dyke who said something about inverting the masculine paradigm as she handed over a five, but women alone were rare. It didn’t matter. Sasha didn’t care who came in. The job was easy. It allowed her to pay rent and buy clothes, and it didn’t exhaust her the way her first job in LA had, when she was frantically waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. The only slightly unpleasant task about working at Stacked & Hung was mopping up the gooey spunk the men left behind. Yet even that wasn’t so bad if you thought about it, since it was just cum after all.

  Between stage and work, Sasha made little videos, something she’d been doing ever since that day two years ago when she marched into Menken Electronics on Santa Monica Boulevard and rented a video portapak. It was a big machine, but you could carry it. There was a hand-held color video camera that connected to a portable videocassette recorder with a shoulder strap. The technology was amazing. She could record up to 30 minutes of video.

  That day she drove her green Plymouth to Venice Beach, the heavy portapak on the passenger seat beside her like a newfound friend. There, wearing a provocative white dress with a slit up the side, she stood near the beachside gym and filmed men in their shorts and tank tops as they lifted weights and sweated spectacularly in the bright California sun. She knew they didn’t believe she was a real woman. She was too fat in a mannish way, too large. But it didn’t matter. She had a newfangled video camera, and it made her desirable. Eventually she managed to coax one of the men home to film him working out. It took five or six guys and several months of trying before she finally found one who agreed to jack off on camera. What a fantastic day that was!

  After that she began branching out with her video experiments, making her first hardcore shorts. She couldn’t really pay her models much, but there was usually someone willing to do it for fifty bucks. When she could find hot guys, it was so much fun. They were amateur productions, but she didn’t min
d. She loved watching men having sex together, unashamed and unafraid.

  * * *

  Now Sasha spun on stage, ready for Patsy Cline to start the big wrap up. All through the song Sasha had been trying to find exactly the right young man. She loved the effect she had on them – not all of them, but some. She liked to find a slightly shy one, as cute as possible, and make him squirm as she heaped the last lines of the song directly on him.

  And there was the one – purple polo shirt and blond hair, adorable grin, standing right up front with a plain looking girl, obviously just a friend. Sasha didn’t know who this young man was, but it didn’t matter. There would be a different one the next time.

  She walked over to him, smiling lewdly, staring him down and mouthing the final words of the song, as though she really did love this particular stranger in the crowd. She bent over and pointed dead at him, smoldering all the sex she had, all the intimacy and desire and lust she held in the round folds of her abundant body. As the song ended she moved closer, held his head in her hands, and kissed him on the cheek. She took it as a mark of her success that his face turned several shades of pink.

  5. Bees to Honey

  IT WAS A Sunday afternoon, 1984. Mike sat at the bar at Thunderbird Bowling Lanes and looked at the clock on the wall. They usually started showing up around one.

  At the entryway from the bowling alley, a neon sign read, “Spares ‘n’ Strikes Bar,” one bright bowling pin blinking back and forth, perpetually falling and becoming upright again, ready for another fall. Below the neon a white piece of paper with large black handwriting stated, “Under 21 not admitted.”

  Mike was nineteen now, but that didn’t stop him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt, his black Converse tennis shoes. It was what he always worked in.

  Along the wall behind the bar, a series of large plaster bowling pins rose up from the counter to the ceiling like a row of Greek columns. A menu on the wall listed drinks like “The 300 Game” and “Strike-a-roo!” The bar was always noisy, with the sound of rolling balls and crashing pins coming in through the entry to the bowling alley, the video games in the corner beeping and chiming, the music over the speakers, country western and rock mostly. Throughout the bar the carpet was grey and dirty, dotted with black spots from cigarette burns or chewing gum. The round Formica tabletops were like white lily pads, floating over the muck of floor.

  The bartender walked over to Mike and said, “Hi, Bill.”

  “Hey, Frieda,” Mike answered.

  “The usual?” Frieda was a large-breasted older woman with a dyed red beehive hairdo and a smoker’s voice. She pretended not to notice what happened in the bar, as long as the customers tipped her well.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said. He’d shown Frieda his drivers’ license only once, when she asked him for ID his first time in the bar. She’d never forgotten his name. She had looked at it and said, “That picture don’t do you justice, Bill,” then handed it back with a wink.

  Mike had gotten the license when he picked up a guy named Bill in Clepper Park, solely because the guy was over twenty-one and they looked a bit alike. Mike went home with him and got him drunk by making a show of waiting on him, mixing drink after drink, gin and tonics – lots of gin in Bill’s and water in his own. He was hoping Bill would pass out quickly, but he didn’t. In the end Mike had to wear Bill out with sex until the guy finally collapsed. Mike didn’t mind. He liked sex. He found Bill’s wallet in the jeans on the floor, took his driver’s license and slipped out the front door.

  “There ya be, Bill.” Frieda set down a bottle of Miller Lite in front of him. “That’ll be a buck twenty five.”

  He paid and took a long drink, then looked around the bar. Ralph had come in and was sitting at a table in the corner. Mike hadn’t yet met Ralph, but Toby had talked about him. Mike had heard about the costume hidden in a suitcase in the back of Ralph’s car. He was old, but at least he wasn’t fat. That would be an easy one, he thought.

  When he’d first arrived in Cincinnati, Mike had gotten a bed at the Y.M.C.A. and began spending the money he’d stolen from his dad. He took taxicabs and bought expensive running shoes. The cash didn’t last as long as he thought it would. All of a sudden he realized he couldn’t even pay for his bed. The only person he could turn to for help was his sister, who’d left Brewerton herself years earlier, ending up in Cleveland. He called her from a pay phone on the street.

  When he said, “Hey sis,” she screamed “Mikey!” She was incredibly happy to hear from him. She started rambling on about this and that, the way she always had when they were kids. She tried to get him to go back to their dad, back to Brewerton, but he said, “No. No way.”

  “What happened the night you left home?” she asked. “Dad won’t talk about it.”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened. I just left.”

  She didn’t ask again. In the end she sent him $200 because, she said, “I don’t want you living on the street.” Before they hung up she added, “If you won’t go home, then get a job,” and he did.

  He started washing dishes at Luigi’s Tavern, and he worked there for over two years until one night a man approached him on McFarland Street, between 3rd and 4th, after the bars closed. He was walking down the sidewalk when the man pulled up next to him in a BMW and said, “How much?”

  “What for?” Mike asked, although not entirely naïve.

  “Blow job.”

  Mike paused, looked directly at the man. “You tell me. How much?”

  “Fifty.”

  At the time Mike was making minimum wage, $3.35 an hour. Although he was never very good at math, he later calculated that the money he made in twenty minutes in that deluxe BMW would have taken him over fourteen hours to make in the terrible heat of the tavern’s back kitchen. Plus it was cash in hand, no tax. He began walking down McFarland Street more regularly. Eventually he quit the tavern altogether.

  Mike stood now at his usual spot at the bar in the Spares ‘n’ Strikes. His back was to the room, one leg up on the footrest to show off the curve of his ass. His jeans were tight. One of his regulars once told him, “Your customers are like bees to honey when it comes to that rear end of yours, boy. Bees to honey.”

  Two straight couples walked in. They’d just finished bowling and didn’t seem to notice the number of men in the bar, drinking alone. Then an older, fat guy came in and started staring at Mike. Mike turned away. He didn’t like old, fat guys. Not if he didn’t have to. The problem was that in Cincinnati there were a lot of old, fat guys.

  A guy who called himself Tuck walked up to Mike and said, “Hi, Bill. Mind if I buy you a drink?”

  “No,” he answered, “I’m fine with this one.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tuck was stocky, with thick wrists.

  Mike turned and looked at him. “Last time, you gave me bruises. I don’t like bruises.”

  “Come on, don’t be sore.” Tuck nudged his arm.

  Mike turned his back on him and walked over to the jukebox. He stood staring at the song titles until he was sure Tuck wasn’t following him, then he walked over to Ralph’s table.

  “Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

  Ralph looked up nervously. “Oh, no. Not at all. Please do sit down.” He was almost entirely bald, with a grey comb over and a very shiny gold pinky ring.

  Mike smiled. “I thought you looked like you could use a little company.”

  “Why, yes, yes. I could. I can. Yes.”

  “I’m Bill,” Mike said.

  “Well, nice to meet you Bill. My name is Ralph. I’ve seen you here before, yes I have.”

  “Yeah, I think you know my friend Toby.”

  “Ah, yes Toby. I do. I have been acquainted with Toby. Toby’s not here today, is he?”

  “Nope. He’s not.” Mike finished his beer and set the empty bottle down on the table.

  “Oh, may I buy you another drink?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Ralph walked up to the b
ar and got them each another drink, then came back to the table. Tuck was watching them. They made small talk about the weather and the Red Sox and the plans to convert Union Terminal Station into a museum. Mike kept the conversation going. “So, what do you do, Ralph?” he asked.

  “Well, I sell insurance, you see. Home, auto, life, income protection. Yes. You see, I sell all kinds.”

  “Ah, that’s nice.”

  Ralph didn’t ask what Mike did.

  “Yes,” Ralph continued. “It’s very important to be insured.”

  Mike began looking around the room. He didn’t know if this was going anywhere. He looked over at Tuck, then at the old, fat guy.

  “Um,” Ralph said in a quiet voice. “I wonder, if you had the time just now, could you and I go someplace together?”

  Here it is, Mike thought, then asked, “What do you like to do?”

  “Oh, there’s that motel across the road. And, do you like costumes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I have a costume in my car, and I’d like to put it on.”

  “Hmm.” Mike said. “I don’t do kinky.” He was lying, driving up the price.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad, not really.”

  “I don’t know. What kind of costume is it?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  “Of course not.” Mike smiled. “I’m a professional.”

  “It’s a bunny costume. Pink with big fluffy ears. I take off all my clothes, put it on, and you spank me. There’s a little powder-puff tail. It’s not kinky. It’s very cute. Then you leave me alone and I take care of myself.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll pay you eighty.”

  “To spank you and leave you?”

  “Yes, in the bunny costume. Leave me lying on the bed in the bunny costume.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, one hundred.”

  “Oh, well. Okay.”