by Ty Jacob
It was only in leaving Cincinnati that he realized there was no one to say goodbye to. He wondered how he could spend so long in one place and have nobody. There must be something wrong with him. Most of his time was spent alone, and when he was with somebody he was usually being paid. Sometimes guys wanted more than sex. Some wanted to go out to dinner beforehand, or see a movie together. They wanted companionship. So did Mike.
The only people he could think of who would miss him were his regulars. A couple of them were a little in love with him. They said nice things and bought him presents. He thought again about Freddy, the only john he’d ever stopped charging for his time. He wished Freddy was still around.
Toby might miss him. Or at least he’d wonder why Mike wasn’t showing up at the Spares ‘n’ Strikes. Maybe he’d call Mike’s place to find the line disconnected. Mike had left what second-hand furniture he owned in the apartment. The landlord could have it.
Driving past a wheat farm with three grey silos in a row, he began to wonder: if he had died alone in his apartment, how long would it have taken for someone to figure it out? Who would come looking for him? Would anyone realize he was dead before a neighbor noticed the smell?
In the past eight years he’d called his sister in Cleveland once a year or so, usually around Christmas, and never again to ask for money. The last time they talked she was dating a guy from work and talking about getting married. Mike had moved quite a few times in Cincinnati, each time a new phone number, so she was never really able to call him back. He hadn’t spoken to his dad since leaving Brewerton.
He leaned to the right and looked at his eye in the rearview mirror. Although it was no longer swollen shut, it was still bulging and purple. It looked like a rotten, bruised fruit. He tried to concentrate on the road. It was January and the fields were brown, but there was no snow.
Forty miles outside Cincinnati he saw a hitchhiker – boots, jeans, a down jacket. He thought he should pick the guy up. He owed it to somebody. But he was afraid, and he kept driving.
It took almost two hours to get to Louisville. He stopped at a McDonald’s just off the interstate to eat lunch, then hopped right back in the car and followed I-64 west across Indiana and Illinois. It was snowing when he pulled into a K-Mart parking lot in St. Louis that night. He flipped up the collar of the black wool pea coat he’d bought at the Army Navy Surplus, then curled up under the same green blanket he’d had on his bed back in Cincinnati.
In the morning his breath came out like grey feathers in the cold air. He stopped at a gas station to fill up, use the bathroom and get hot coffee. He had to make the money last. He went to a tiny grocery store and stocked up on food. The fruits and vegetables in wooden bins made him think of his dad, and he quickly looked away. It was still early when he pulled onto I-70 and began driving across Missouri. It felt good to have distance behind him, like waking up from a kind of bad dream. He put in his favorite cassette tape, The Pretenders, turned up the volume and sang along to “Stop Your Sobbing” in such a loud voice that he was almost yelling. Things were going to be different now.
He ate lunch and dinner as he was driving – ham and cheese sandwiches he made when he stopped for gas. He snacked on potato chips and apples. The flatlands and rolling prairies of Kansas were filled with wind and snow. He drove all day and into evening to get to Denver, where he stopped the car in a dark parking lot in front of the Mile High Motor Lodge. The room was twenty-five bucks. He took it, happy to have a warm bed and a bathroom and to be nowhere. It was good to be out of the car.
He showered right away. Drops of water were still clinging to his shoulders when he jumped naked onto the bed and turned on the TV. There was an adult pay channel, but it was all straight. It didn’t matter. He used the remote to order a movie and jacked off to a hairy-chested guy fucking a brunette from behind. He pushed away thoughts of what had happened. He imagined being there, taking that brunette’s place.
This was what he had decided to do. He would do gay porn. It was such an obvious next step that he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it years ago. The only thing he was really good at was sex. He knew how to fuck, knew how to please people, and knew how to look like he was having a good time even if he wasn’t, which was rare because he liked it so much. There were times when sex felt like real work, but only when he was hard up for money and had to suck off the old, fat guys. But in porn all the guys were hot, so the sex would be easy and fun all the time. And he’d never have to be alone with a guy he didn’t know and couldn’t trust. There would be other people around him, looking after him, directors and cameramen. It would feel safe.
The vision in his head was clear. He would be famous – not just some anonymous porn star. He’d be on the cover of the box. Gay guys would recognize him on the street and smile knowingly. They would want him.
He’d watched a lot of porn over the years and knew the names of all the big gay superstars like Jonathan Branch, Chris Dakota. His all-time favorite was Luke Champion, and his dream was to do a scene with him. That was what he wanted more than anything. If he could just do that, he would know he had made it.
Mike understood that the big stars were all tops – strong, aggressive men that dominated their partners. Guys who were bottoms were never famous. They just came and went, like interchangeable parts to a car. Mike had heard some of the gay superstars were in fact total bottoms off camera. They loved being fucked. But the studios paid them big money to pretend they were rugged, straight-acting tops. If they ever took it up the ass on screen it was a sure sign that they were at the end of their career, like a big Hollywood movie star doing a soap commercial.
Mike himself was a bottom, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid to admit he liked to be fucked. Even with Charlie, years ago, back in the Thompson’s hay shed, he’d always let Charlie do whatever he wanted. Now, on the bed in the Mile High Motor Lodge, he watched the hairy-chested guy shoot his load all over the brunette’s back, and he thought about how the women in straight porn were often the big-name stars, and got paid more. There were some notable exceptions, but in many cases the guys just provided the dick. Why couldn’t it be like that in gay porn? What was wrong with guys getting fucked? Mike suddenly became even more determined to make it big as a bottom, to become as legendary as all those tough, famous gay tops. He would be as popular as Luke Champion.
The next morning he felt good for the first time in nearly a week. His body was a little stiff from driving, but it was no longer so sore. His eye was back to its normal shape. A dark bruise still circled it. In the light of day the Rocky Mountains were amazing. He’d spent his entire life in the flat plains of the Midwest, and had never seen anything like these jagged ridges topped with snow. At the motel gift shop he bought a small Rocky Mountain pocket calendar with pictures. He marked down the day it happened, then counted out three months, to April 21st. There was a three-month period before the virus showed up, so he would have to wait until then to be tested. In spite of the beautiful images the calendar contained – Longs Peak, Shadow Mountain Lake – the pages between now and April 21st seemed to hold a kind of blank and empty terror.
He got back on I-70 and drove up into the Rockies and toward Utah. Big white snowflakes turned clear when they hit the windshield, melting into nothing. The road was full of curves and drop-offs. There were ramps for runaway trucks. He kept his eyes ahead of him and stopped only once, in Utah for gas and food. By nightfall he was driving into Las Vegas. He took off his pea coat and threw it on the back seat. Driving down the Vegas strip, he looked at all the bright neon signs he’d seen only in photographs and on TV.
Money was starting to worry him. Gas was expensive. If he ran out of cash before he got his first porn job, he’d have to work the street, but he really didn’t want to. He spent an hour walking up and down the strip but then went back to his car and slept there.
At around three in the morning he woke to a terrible banging sound, a machine-gun-like repetition of fists on the roof
of his car. He sat up quickly and looked around. His heart was pounding. A few dark shapes were running off down the street, laughing.
In the morning he headed out early. He drove for four hours and then, finally, on a bright Saturday afternoon, he was headed down the San Bernardino Freeway and into Los Angeles. He stopped to get gas and a local map, and then he went straight to West Hollywood, where he heard the gay guys lived, and where all the gay porn studios were. Driving along Santa Monica Boulevard, he saw one good-looking man after another. He thought every single one must be a porn star.
The sky was blue and there were palm trees and he imagined that even in the middle of LA he could smell the sea. There was something bright and shining about the place to him, so it wasn’t that hard to ignore the trash in the streets, and the graffiti. He looked only at the beautiful people, the stores full of fashionable clothes, the expensive cars. He was going to be a star.
8. Under the Disco Ball
AN ENORMOUS BRIGHT blue bouffant wig sat in the dressing room at the Lucky Pony. Dale looked at it as though it had just fallen out of the sky and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Tonight he did not want to perform. He was tired. He’d had way too much to drink the night before. But Sasha was supposed to do three numbers, and Carl, the manager of the bar, was counting on her. She always brought in crowds.
There were evenings when Dale, sitting alone at home and sipping Chardonnay, wished he could do it himself, wished he could do everything that Sasha did. He wanted to stand, as himself, at Venice Beach and film the men working out, wanted to invite them home – as Dale, as a man – but he couldn’t. It felt too dangerous. Without the dress people wouldn’t think it was funny. A man doing that would be threatening, or pathetic. A drag queen was amusing. When Sasha went out she got attention from everyone in the room. Dale got nothing.
He looked in the dressing room mirror, at the lines growing deeper around his eyes, at his bald head, and he wondered if he was doing it all wrong. He was thirty-nine years old. In his weaker moments, he thought he should stop the drag, work out, lose weight, go to the tanning booth, grow a mustache, get a hair transplant, and change his name to some testosterone-induced absurdity. Maybe then Steve Logan would decide he fit the mold. But it would never feel right. It would never feel as natural as being Sasha. It would feel like a costume.
In the mirror he saw Carl dart into the room behind him.
“You’re on in ten. Are you okay?”
He talked to Carl’s reflection. “Now, Carl, since when has Sasha ever been on time?”
“It’s just that there’s that new girl doing a quick number before Sasha. I’m not sure if I should stall her. She’s really anxious to go.”
“Uh!” Dale waved his hand in the air dismissively, like Sasha. “Who cares. Nobody’s here to see her. They’re all here to see Sasha.” He said the name with special panache.
“Of course they are. But this girl’s in the other room practically peeing her pants.”
Dale smiled. There were two dressing rooms at the Lucky Pony. One for Sasha, and one for everybody else.
“So please,” Carl said. “Get Sasha ready, would you?”
Carl left the room, and Dale picked up the foundation and began applying it, evening it out, hiding the shadow of his beard. He couldn’t help smiling a little, thinking about Sasha on stage. She was fearless, and he loved her for that. Underneath an occasional and fleeting jealousy, there was something deeper. He had to admit that he admired and respected Sasha. He was happy to be the one inside her.
As he put on the blush, the eye shadow, the eyeliner, the mascara and the lipstick, the fake nails, he slowly warmed inside. Here she was, peeking out at him, that old friend. He stood up and put on the padded bra, then the short, blue gingham dress which he’d made himself, with the bibbed front and the small, white, puffed sleeves. He picked up a pair of small, feathered wings. They were blue and sprinkled with silver glitter. He slid his arms through the two straps, so that the wings were suddenly sprouting from his back, and then he put his feet into the size twelve pumps covered with red sequins. Finally he sat down on the front edge of the chair, careful not to crush his wings, and reached over for the huge wig, pulling it down over his head like a new sovereign crowning herself.
Sasha positively beamed. She winked at the mirror and whispered in an airy voice, “You’re beautiful and I love you.”
When the silly new girl was done with the opening act, Sasha stepped out on stage and scanned the crowd, waiting for the spotlight to illuminate her. She was always looking for new talent, guys she could ask to be in her videos. She refused to let Steve get her down. He’d had the balls to steal her traffic cone idea and use it in Construction Worker Gang Bang 2, but even after years of hard work in Marketing and Distribution he still wouldn’t let her direct for Cougar.
She continued to direct her own films, on the side. She didn’t have the money for the production quality she dreamed of, but she did her best. She’d talked to her contacts at other leading studios about directing – Joe Butch over at Hard Bodies and Gavin Kennedy at Magnum Man – but nobody was interested in her. Still, even if her own videos just sat in a pile on her bedroom floor, she refused to stop making them. It was the thing she wanted to do more than anything else. How could she stop?
Nevertheless, sometimes even the mighty Sasha Zahore doubted herself. As she waited for the spotlight, she stood in the dark thinking about how quickly time was passing. The 1980s were almost over, and what had she really accomplished? What had she done with the decade? She would be forty soon.
A feeling rose up in her then. She couldn’t explain where it came from, but she felt it deeply. This year was going to be her year. 1989 would be fabulous. She was going to become the director she dreamed of, even if it killed her. She would have to double her efforts, but it could happen. She could make it happen. Couldn’t she? After all, it was only January, and the entire year lay in front of her like a wide-open road. She could do it before the decade was over.
Suddenly it seemed anything was possible. She might even find the love of her life this year. For all she knew, he was out there right now, waiting for her in the crowd, waiting for the spotlight to come up and illuminate her, for Sasha Zahore to come sashaying directly into his life. He could be here tonight. Couldn’t he?
Finally that bright circle of light came up and lit her face. “Oy!” she yelled. “A girl could grow old just waiting for a spotlight around here! Hello, boys and girls. Are you feeling good tonight?”
There was a faint murmur from the crowd.
“Oh my god, did that first tramp put you to sleep? Hello?! I said, ‘Are We Feeling Good Tonight?!’” She shouted out each word with a bounce and an increase in volume.
The audience yelled “Yes!” and some people whistled and hollered. Sasha loved it when they made noise.
“As many of you know, I’m Sasha Zahore.” She paused for some clapping. “You’ve probably heard a lot about me. But you know what they say. You should never believe what you read on the bathroom walls.”
She nodded to the DJ and the music started, an older Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ a raspy voice mellowed by drugs and age. Sasha gestured theatrically and sashayed around. She was a fat, comic Dorothy. She turned her back and flipped up her short skirt, showing the ruffles of her large white panties to the crowd. She jumped up and flapped her hands, tripped and stumbled like a tragic, elephantine bluebird trying to fly. Then, on the last word of the song, she pushed up her fake boobs to the sky, until they almost hit her chin, and she wiggled them around in circles. The audience cheered.
Carl came out on stage and did some raffle for an AIDS charity while Sasha changed into her Cher costume backstage – a long black wig and a black dress, a sparkling silver boa for her neck. It was while doing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” that she first noticed the exceptional young man standing directly under the disco ball. All the bright stars of the room seemed to r
evolve around him. There was a light shining down on him, and she could see him clearly. He had to be in his early twenties, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She was struck by the masculine line of his nose, his tousled hair, the way that T-shirt was clinging to his lean, slim body. She’d never seen him before. As she performed, he sipped a beer and watched her intently. Sometimes, she noticed, he nodded as if in agreement. She liked him. He had relaxed posture and a gentle smile. He seemed very much at ease.
For her last number, she pulled out her old standby, Patsy Cline. Putting on her red cowgirl boots in the dressing room, this time with a white cowgirl hat, she already knew who she’d target for the last line of the song.
Out on stage, she couldn’t help herself. She performed almost the entire number in his direction, twirling her finger at the word ‘crazy’ with a smile for him every time. She had a new denim skirt, which was long and spun out when she turned. She felt fantastic. It was only another silly performance, she knew, but there was something deep and strong twisting inside her as she mouthed the words.
In the middle of the number she realized that he was too far away from the stage to kiss him on the last line, so she pointed to him and gestured him forward. A couple of older guys and some straight girls turned around to see who she was pointing at. The crowd parted, and he stepped forward into the brightness that spilled out from the stage.
He was even more attractive up close. He could be a movie star. She reached down and held his chin in her hand. His dark brown eyes looked up at her. She suddenly knew that this one was different. This one was special. She wiggled his face back and forth gently, like he was a little boy, and people laughed.