Raleigh L. Dibble was in his third-floor apartment in east Hollywood, getting ready for the part-time job he was doing that evening on the only day off from his regular work. It paid chump change, but it helped with the rent and the car payment on his nine-year-old Toyota Corolla, which needed tires and a tune-up. He stood before the mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, a real one, not one of those crappy clip-ons that everyone wore nowadays. He fastened the black cummerbund over his starched dress shirt and slipped into his tuxedo jacket for a big dinner party in the Hollywood Hills celebrating the release of a third-rate movie by some hack he had never heard of.
All Raleigh knew about the homeowner tonight was that the guy was a junior partner in a Century City law firm who needed an experienced man like Raleigh to augment his hired caterers and make sure that things ran smoothly. Raleigh’s past life as the owner of a West Los Angeles catering business had qualified him for these quasi-butler jobs where nouveaus could pretend they knew their ass from corned beef. Raleigh had met a lot of wealthy people and earned a good reputation, which brought him a small but steady income and had kept him from drinking the Kool-Aid after his business had gone belly-up.
He thought he didn’t look too bad in the tux. Mother Nature, the pitiless cunt, had put macaroni-and-cheese handles around his middle, and it was getting scary. At only five foot seven he wasn’t tall enough to carry the blubber overload. Though he didn’t have much hair left, what he had was nutmeg brown with the help of Grecian Formula. And his jawline was holding up, but only because the extra fat had puffed his cheeks like a goddamn woodchuck. Now he had a double chin-no, make it a triple. If he could ever earn enough money, he hoped to get a quarter of his body siphoned into the garbage can by one of the zillion cosmetic surgeons plying their trade on the west side of Los Angeles. Then maybe a hair transplant and even an eye lift to complete the overhaul, because his eyes, the color of faded denim, were shrinking from the encroachment of the upper lids. Enough money could rectify all of that.
Before he left the apartment for that night’s gig, he figured he’d better call Julius Hampton, his full-time boss for the past six months. The old man had just turned eighty-nine years of age when he’d hired Raleigh, who was thirty-one years younger almost to the day. Raleigh had been hired the month after Barack Obama took office, and it was an okay job being a live-in butler/chef and all-around caretaker six days a week for the old coot. He was being paid by a downtown lawyer who administered the Hampton trust fund, but the lawyer was a tight ass who acted like it was his money, and Raleigh had had to practically beg for a wage increase in early summer.
Julius Hampton had been an indefatigable and flamboyant cruiser of Santa Monica Boulevard in his day, but he’d never made any kind of pass at Raleigh even before learning that his new employee was straight. Raleigh figured that gay or straight, it wouldn’t matter to the old man anyway, since Raleigh was no George Clooney, and the geezer was through with sex. Julius Hampton was left only with fantasies stoked by their weekly visits to west Hollywood gay bars, more out of nostalgia than anything else.
This boss had been a longtime friend of a lot of other rich old men on the west side, not all of them gay by any means. Raleigh had driven Julius Hampton to many dinner parties where Raleigh would hang around the kitchen with the other help until the party was over or his boss got tired. On nights when the old man’s phlebitis was bothering him, Raleigh would bring the collapsible wheelchair from the car and wheel him out to the old Cadillac sedan that his boss loved and Raleigh hated. Raleigh figured that in his day, Julius Hampton probably had a lot of boy sex in that Cadillac, back when his plumbing still worked. Maybe sitting on those beat-up leather seats brought him delicious memories. In any case, his boss had dismissed the suggestion every time Raleigh urged him to junk the Cadillac and buy a new car.
Raleigh L. Dibble had been in the catering business almost continually since his high school days in San Pedro, the third child and only son of a longshoreman and a hairdresser. As a young man he’d begun concentrating on using good diction while he was on a job, any job. He’d read a self-improvement book stressing that good diction could trump a poor education, and Raleigh had never gone to college. All he’d ever known was working for inadequate wages in food service until he went into business as a working partner with Nellie Foster of Culver City, who made the best hors d’oeuvres and gave the best blow jobs he’d ever known. They’d done pretty well in the catering business when times were good, working out of a storefront on Pico Boulevard. But they’d gotten into some “difficulties,” as he always described his fall from grace.
Raleigh had been forced by circumstance to write several NSF checks, and after that was straightened out, the IRS got on them like a swarm of leeches, sucking their blood and tormenting them for over a year until a criminal case for fraud and tax evasion was filed in federal court. Raleigh had done the manly thing at that time and taken the bullet for both himself and Nellie, claiming to authorities that she knew nothing about the “edgy paperwork” that had helped to keep them afloat temporarily.
He’d been sentenced to one year in prison to be served at the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, and the night before he had to report to federal marshals, Nellie gave him a tearful good-bye and thanked him for saving her ass. She promised to write and to visit him often. But she’d seldom written and never visited, and she married a house painter two months after Raleigh was behind bars. And he didn’t even get a farewell blow job.
Raleigh had served eight months of his sentence, gotten paroled, rented a cheap apartment in a risky gang neighborhood in east Hollywood, and lived by hiring out as a waiter to various caterers he’d known when he was in the business. Then he’d stumbled into the position with Julius Hampton as what the old man called his “gentleman’s gentleman.” Julius had seen too many English movies, Raleigh figured, but he made sure his diction was always up to par when he was in his boss’s presence.
The dinner party in the Hollywood Hills that night turned out to be disastrous because the lawyer homeowner had hired a Mexican caterer to serve what was supposed to be Asian fusion. As far as Raleigh was concerned, there was nothing more dangerous than a Mexican with a saltshaker, and everything tasted of sea salt. Raleigh played his role to the hilt, but Stephen Fry as Jeeves the butler couldn’t have saved this one. His feet and knees were killing him when the night finally ended and he could get home to bed.
The next morning Raleigh was up early and on his way to pick up Julius Hampton to take him to Cedars-Sinai for a checkup with his cardiologist. After that, they went back to the Hampton house, where the old man had his afternoon nap, and he was raring to go again when he woke up and remembered that it was the night for his weekly lobster dinner at the Palm. Raleigh had never been crazy about lobster but he could have a rib eye and a couple of Jack Daniel’s to get him through the rest of the evening at one of the west Hollywood gay bars that the old man still liked to frequent at least one night a week.
By the time they’d finished dining and arrived at the gay bar, it was filling up with other customers also arriving after dinner, and they were lucky to get a small table. The sweating waiters couldn’t deliver drinks to the customers fast enough. Raleigh and his elderly boss were sipping martinis close enough to the three-deep bar patrons for the old letch to gawk at all the muscular buns in tight pants, some of which Raleigh figured were butt-pad inserts. Many of the younger hustlers wore tight Ralph Lauren jerseys with jeans or shorts, and the old boy gazed at them with melancholy. Raleigh was certain that their crotch mounds were from stuffing socks in their Calvins. He figured the youthful hustlers must buy socks by the gross at Costco.