After she’d placed them in a bowl, I leaned over the counter, my mouth to her ear. “Please say you’ve got a minute,” I whispered. “We have to talk.”
Wendy’s boss had left for the night, and the customers looked sated for the time being. She followed me to the table nearest the counter and pushed me into a chair. “What did you do now?” Her tone of voice hadn’t changed since she’d lectured me years ago, when I’d first started hustling in Carey Park.
My mouth opened twice, but nothing came out. On the third try, I said, “I’ve been at Rounds. It’s a hustler bar on the Upper East. I’ve been hustling.”
Wendy’s expression looked like a special effect. Anger registered somewhere within it. She checked the counter, saw no customers, turned back to me. “Do you think I haven’t figured out what you’ve been doing? Where you’ve been at night, dressed like a goddamn teenage executive, or where you’ve been getting money for beer? It’s been part of you for years, did you think I’d believe you’d stop now? Especially now, in a city where you can make thousands doing it? No, I’m not that stupid, whether you think so or not.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to think you are.” She paused, took a breath, looked me in the eye. “Do I want to hear this? Okay, fire away.”
I started to pretend I’d been hurt by her comment; decided it was no use. “I’ve been making money,” I said, “and things have been cool, actually. Nothing unsafe at all, nothing that could bother me. You always said during the Carey Park stuff that whenever something bothered me, I should stop.”
Wendy swabbed her thumb over the table’s semicircular coffee stain. “And tonight something’s bothered you.”
I told her the whole story. I described the cab ride, the hotel, the room, his body, his skin. “After the massage, all I did was stand at the side of the room, jerking off. That’s what he wanted. There it was, this surreal mixture of the hotel’s decor and this guy’s obvious disease. He just sprawled out on the bed, watching me, jerking off until he came.” I refrained from detailing the dainty pattern of white come/purple blotches on Zeke’s chest.
Wendy’s foot touched mine. “You just jerked off. That’s all?”
“That’s all.” Her foot moved away, then came back and stayed. I could tell she wanted to touch and soothe me with her hand-a typical sympathetic Wendy Peterson gesture in this situation-but her overriding anger only allowed me the comfort of her foot. “You’re mad at me,” I said.
“Maybe. You just have to be so, so careful,” Wendy said. “You have to know that things are different for you now. This isn’t Kansas.” I’d heard that line so many times, but never from her.
The blue trapezoid shapes on the table’s Formica surface resembled ugly, swollen purplish brown blotches. I wanted to say something more. I could tell Wendy about Brian, but that seemed too complicated, beyond any explanation my confused state could offer. “For the first time in my life,” I told her, “I’m bothered by it. Sex. After tonight, everything just feels fucked up.”
A postcard from Eric arrived the first week of December. Not a postcard, exactly, but an old paperback book’s ripped cover-a romance titled Gay Deceiver, which I knew he’d stolen from United Methodist Thrift. On the other side was his trademark scrawl.
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Hope all is swell in New York. Hope you’re making enough money, having a good time, etc. Life here is the same as always. Brian and I are trying to kill the boredom. Your mom took us watermelon hunting. She actually chased a raccoon. She claims she’s got pickles ready for me. She’s so cool. She says she’s sending your plane ticket. Can’t wait to see you over Christmas, birth date of baby Jesus ha ha ha. And Brian’s dying to meet you. He says you have a lot to talk about. That’s an understatement from what I can guess. If you wrote back sometime it would be earth-shattering. Anyway I’ll see you at the end of the month-
Eric
“Brian,” I said aloud. “Damn.” The idea of him meeting my mom seemed appalling. I wondered again what he truly knew about me, about Coach. Whatever he’d remembered, I hoped he hadn’t blabbed to Eric, or, god forbid, Mom. Why was this happening now?
Wendy had taped a calendar to the refrigerator. I stared at it, counting the days until my flight, until Kansas, until Brian. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.”
After Zeke, I avoided East Fifty-third. I sat in the apartment, watching TV, numbed by boredom. But that couldn’t continue. Two days before Christmas, I contemplated the return trip to Kansas, my flight the following morning. I hadn’t the foggiest what to buy for Christmas gifts; besides, I didn’t have the dough. One hundred and twenty dollars can be yours tonight, I announced in a game show host’s bray. Wendy was at work, oblivious to my combed and slicked hair, my ironed shirt, my shoes that shone under the bathroom light. “This just isn’t me,” I said. Oh well. I had to go back.
The piano chanteuse remained as bawdy as ever, substituting nasty lyrics into Christmas standbys. “Jingle Bells” became “Jingle Balls.” “Chet’s nuts,” not “chestnuts,” were roasting on her open fire. I shouldered my way through the crowd, which consisted of three times as many hustlers as johns. The hustlers avoided one another: we were all competition.
“Merry Christmas.” I turned to see a kid named Stan, one of the few hustlers I’d chosen to befriend. His sense of humor made him my favorite, and I’d often chatted with him before getting down to business. He reminded me of Eric, thanks to his skinniness and dyed hair. When he spoke, he sounded truly prissy, enunciating vowels for utmost effect. He’d fabricated nicknames for some of the regular johns. My favorites: Special Friend (who got his name due to a line he apparently always used), Snooty Tooty (a man who wore headbands, brooches, and garish, flouncy clothes), and Funnel of Love (a troll notorious for lying on the floor, popping a funnel between his lips, and asking tricks to piss into it).
I listened to Stan until he strolled toward a john who’d been ogling him. Minutes passed. I downed a beer, then another. No one seemed interested. As I finished a third, Stan stepped back to my corner and pulled me aside.
“No luck?” I asked. The singer wailed away, abandoning her sleazy carols for a tune from Gyp?? y or Guys and Dolls or some other musical. When I moved my head to hear Stan better, the dizzy feeling proved I was swimming toward drunkenness.
“This guy wants a three-way,” Stan said. “He’s been watching you. He thinks you’re ideal for fucking him while he sucks me off, all that. He’s willing to give us seventy-five each.”
“No way,” I said. I didn’t even think about it. My answer just popped out. And the reason I’d said no wasn’t because the seventy-five bucks was less than my usual hundred twenty. I said no because the three-way possibility reminded me of Brian. This person I didn’t know, this boy I’d shared with Coach, had managed to infect me somehow, to ruin my once-beautiful memories. I realized this now, as I stood in my hustler’s stance in Rounds, both drunk and unwanted. I turned away, swallowed the last of the beer, headed for the door.
The walk from Second Avenue to Third felt more like a run. After a while I noticed a red car behind me, slowly following. Before I reached the subway stop, the car inched forward to idle at curbside. The passenger window slid down. A Kewpie doll face hovered inside the shadows. The face leaned forward into the light; I saw the driver wasn’t a doll at all, but a man sporting a buzz haircut and a pink polo shirt. “Hop in,” he said.
I half-remembered Stan lecturing me about trolls who preyed outside Rounds, men waiting for hustlers who hadn’t snagged a trick for the night, attempting to get reduced rates. Stan had explained how a typical cheapskate john would drive toward the river, park in this or that discreet shadow, unzip, push the hustler’s head toward a stubby dick, and hand over two or three twenties. Stan apparently had done this once and regretted it. “It’s not worth it.” I hadn’t asked why. But now, I didn’t care. I didn’t bother setting terms or getting acquainted first. I opened the door and crawled in.