“Mind going home with me?” the man asked. “No names. No bullshit. I’ll pay.” His baritone came in brief, hiccuped sentences, as if someone were regulating his speech through a control panel, one overzealous thumb pushing a button. I nodded, and his car tore downtown.
He looked fortyish, straight, slightly criminal. At that point it didn’t matter. We didn’t speak; I put my ear against the cold window. The sounds around us seemed slowed down, far away. Rev, zoom, honk-honk. The radio’s song droned on, a sugary voice repeating, “I guess I’ll have to love you in my favorite dream.” For some reason that sounded pretty. I dozed off at one point, due to the narcotic effects of the car heater and the beer.
I opened my eyes. The car was nearing my neighborhood, and I thought of Wendy. Sweet dreams, I almost said. We zoomed onto Delancey Street, then crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Things got incredibly quiet. Lights, brownstones, and storefronts blurred past. “Where are you taking me?”
“Brighton Beach,” he said. I’d seen those words on subway maps, and I knew Brighton Beach was miles from Manhattan. I opened my mouth to protest. “No more questions,” he spat. Surprise must have registered on my face, because he smirked and added a much calmer “I hope you’re horny.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I wanted to blurt, One hundred and twenty dollars horny, but it didn’t seem the time or place. My eyes closed again, and Zzzz.
When I woke, he was shutting off the ignition. He had parked beside an apartment complex. The world had hushed. I looked around, saw trees, residential houses, even a picket fence across the street. Only the orangy light from the nearby subway station remotely resembled New York. I wanted to be on that now, riding home. But I had work to do. He led the way into a claustrophobic elevator. His calloused finger touched the seven button. I noticed a black crescent on his thumbnail, a dark scar like a half-lidded eye. “Accident with a hammer?” I asked, my words slurring together. He didn’t answer.
We entered his apartment, number 703. He shuffled around, turning on lights, then dimming them. I fell into a couch as if it were a pool of warm water. Somewhere, romantic music was playing. Minutes passed. I fought the urge to close my eyes. When he entered the room, I sat up and took a good look at his face. He seemed emotionless, regular, the sort of average joe that crafty policemen might stick into a criminal line-up to help a victim identify a guilty felon. “The bedroom’s this way,” he said.
More dimmed lights. I saw a bed, a bookshelf without books, and a single poster on the wall advertising a jazz festival, its J shaped like a saxophone. The guy opened a drawer. His hands moved toward my face. One held a miniature plastic spoon, its yellow and red handle molded into the shape of Ronald McDonald’s grinning head. The other cupped a hill of white powder. “Snort this.” I didn’t want to, but I was already fucked up, and the coke looked cute, like glistening grains of sugar. I brought some to a nostril and breathed in. “Again,” he said. Again.
He snorted the rest. Then he began tearing off his clothes and throwing them, arms flailing. Buttons popped; fabric stretched and ripped. He was evidently emulating scenes from various butch pornos. The polo shirt sailed past my head like a pastel pterodactyl. “Strip,” he commanded. His dick had already hardened. It looked massive, an image from a joke’s unfunny punchline, and it curved upward like a giant accusing finger. “Go down there, boy.”
I figured I’d been lucky, considering most of the johns I’d tricked with had been older milquetoast types who hadn’t forced me to suck or get fucked. A few had simply held me in wrinkly arms, whispering crap like “You’re daddy’s little boy” or something equally embarrassing. Now, with me drunk and god-only-knew-how-many subway stops from home, those elementary acts had slipped away. I fell to my knees and took his dick in my mouth.
“You like that, don’t you?” he said. He fucked my face. “Swallow it deep. Moan for me, let me know how good it is.” That seemed sickening for some reason. He thrust it farther, its head tearing at the back of my throat. It choked me, and I winced. I let up a little, pulling my head back, and as his dick slid out I felt him spit on me. I heard the distinct pull of the phlegm from deep in his throat, the pause, and finally the cartoony “phew” as the spit hailed from his mouth. A thumb-sized blob hit my cheek.
I stood. For the first time, I was scared. For the first time, I was fathoms away from my usual helm of control.
He shoved me onto his waterbed, the sloshing as sudden and loud as if I’d been tossed into an ocean. He placed a knee on the bed, grabbed his dick, and slapped my face with it. It hit the blob of spit, and a tiny puddle splashed into my eye. “You’re not finished, slut,” he said, then slammed back into my mouth. I was drunk; this wasn’t supposed to be happening. I imagined corkscrewing his dick from his body and tossing it through the window, into his Brighton Beach garden, seven floors below. That image should have been funny, but it wasn’t.
His arm wrapped around my chest. He flipped me over in one motion, as if my body had been hollowed out. Slosh, slosh. “I’m going to give the slut what he needs.” His thumb wriggled around in my ass crack, then punctured the hole.
I pictured the black scar on his thumbnail, now fishing around in the place where only one other person had been, so many years before. I briefly drifted back there. “Tell me you like it, Neil, tell Coach how much you like it.” I’d told him so. Had that been truth, or just a stream of gibberish? “Tell me.”
“No,” I said. “It’s going too far.” My head reeled, and I hoped he could understand the garble. “This is what I don’t do.” I managed to squirm off the bed, my arm held out to keep him away. He lifted his knee and stood before me, eyes flashing.
The room grew quiet. In the outside hallway, I could hear footsteps, a walk breaking into a run. “You were at that place,” he said. “I know what you were there for. You’ll do what I tell you. That’s what a slut does.”
“I don’t know why I was there,” I said. “I really don’t.” The door to the adjoining room was cracked slightly, and when I peeked around his shoulder I could see a bathtub’s porcelain edge. “Just wait a minute,” I told him. “Let me piss. Then…I’ll be back in a second.”
I expected his meaty arm to shoot out and grab me, but it didn’t. I brushed past him, made it to the bathroom, slammed the door. It had one of those old-fashioned locks, a little hook-shaped latch that fit into a silver eyehole. I fastened it and sat on the tub’s edge, breathing. The drug’s grains exploded through my brain. In a matter of hours, I would land in Kansas again. Calm down, I told myself. Calm him down. Be careful, finish, get the money.
Then I heard him, trying to get in. I looked at the door. The john had wedged the end of a butter knife into the crack, and he wiggled it higher, toward the space where the latch connected door with frame. I actually felt my body tremble. The knife pushed higher, meddling closer to the latch until their silvers struck. The latch came loose, clicking back against the door. A second of silence passed. Then the door flew open, and the john came thundering in.
He’s going to kill me, I thought. I imagined the thin, pliable shape of the butter knife thudding against my skin over and over, at last breaking through to razor my heart. I held up one hand to stop him. But he wasn’t going to stab. Instead, he tossed the knife into the air. It made a half-revolution, and he caught it again, stepped toward me, and raised the thick handle. It smacked against my forehead. Snap.