“This particular pick-up wasn’t anything unusual. Wasn’t New York a lonely town? Yeah, it sure was. How about a drink? Great idea. Listen, I’ve got an idea, why pay bar prices for watered liquor when I’ve got a comfortable hotel room and a full bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label? Fine idea, great idea. But, I added, the only problem was that I myself was kind of broke, and I’d been planning on working a shift at a restaurant around the corner, and I needed the bread. No problem, he says, he’s got plenty of dough, and it’s worth a couple of bucks for him to have somebody to drink with. What the hell, if he went to a bar for company he’d spend twenty bucks before the night was over, so how would it be if he gave me the twenty and we drank his liquor in his room? It would be fine, I told him.
“Now, that sort of horseshit is something you often find yourself going through. Both you and the John will know where it’s at, but it’s often easier to play the game that this isn’t a straight sex-for-bread hustle. Easier on everybody’s ego is I guess what it comes down to. Part of it stems from genuine embarrassment on the part of the Johns, I think. Some of them will make the street scene once a month or once a week or however they schedule it, and all the time they try to pretend that they aren’t really gay, that they aren’t actually looking for sex with other males. If it’s just something that happens in the course of an evening of good companionship, they find the whole thing easier to handle emotionally. At the same time, these Johns will often make damned certain that money passes from them to you. I usually like to get that part straight in front, maybe because of hang-ups of my own, maybe because I don’t want them to think that I’m interested in anything but the money. I don’t know exactly.
“We went to his hotel room. He never said where he was from but it was obvious he was an out-of-towner, not a local New Yorker on the prowl. He was staying at a decent hotel instead of one of the holes in the neighborhood that make most of their money off hustling dates. He went on up ahead, and then I went up to the room he told me and he let me in.
“We had a couple of drinks and he put the television set on and we talked about one thing or another. I don’t remember the conversation itself. I generally turn myself off during conversations with someone like that. I’ll play my part and keep up my end of the conversation, but it’s as if I turn my mind off while it’s going on, as if I send it for a walk in the hallway, while my mouth goes on talking.
“Then he said something about how uncomfortable the chairs were, and why didn’t we sit on the bed, and we did, and I was already starting to pick up negative vibrations but this happens anyway a lot of the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. He groped me, and he played with me a little, and I stretched out and let him go down on me. After awhile I came. I was never excited. I honestly don’t think I ever get what you would call excitement or pleasure with a John. Getting erect and then having an orgasm, that’s a purely physical thing. It always happens for me. I don’t suppose I could prevent it if I tried. All that stimulation has to have an effect if you’re healthy, unless you can just turn yourself off entirely, which I can’t do. But I don’t put that in the same drawer with excitement or pleasure. Sometimes while it’s going on it’s as if I’m not in the room at all, as if my mind is not inside my body. A lot of the time, I guess it’s what you would call a schizophrenic reaction or mechanism, but a lot of the time it’s as if my mind is on the other side of the room watching what’s happening to my body, and not even watching very closely, for that matter.
“The bit of pretending the person with you is a girl, of closing your eyes and getting off on fantasies, I never do that. I’d rather just ignore the whole thing entirely, like it’s happening to somebody else, like it’s not really me that’s involved there.
“This time, though, the guy wanted me to return the favor. He wanted me to blow him. Now there’s a way to avoid bad scenes like that but I was very green at the time and had never come up against anybody like this. I had had Johns who wanted me to go down on them, or wanted to bugger me, the two things I won’t do. But they had always taken no for an answer, so before this particular John I had never found it necessary to spell out in advance what I would do or what I wouldn’t do. So I just told him, no, I don’t do that, and he went out of his mind. Called me a little cockteaser, told me I was going to put out whether I wanted to or not.
“He was a big guy, and I guess he figured this gave him a tremendous edge. I’m thin and not the muscle type at all, so he probably felt it wouldn’t be hard to rape me, and rape was definitely what he had in mind. ‘You’re gonna get fucked,’ he told me. ‘And you’re gonna like it.’ He really turned tremendously hostile.
“I got lucky. I kicked him square in the balls and picked up one of his shoes and beat him over the head with it. There was a point where I almost got carried away, I almost beat him to death. It still scares me to think of it. I was really furious, and churning inside, and I hit him once or twice with the shoe and was very close to just letting go and hitting him again and again until he was dead, but somehow I caught hold of myself and stopped. He was out cold. I found his wallet and took the twenty he owed me, and there was a couple hundred more in the wallet, and I stood there for what seemed like a long time trying to decide whether I should take the rest of his bread or not. I figured I might as well, and that I couldn’t get in worse trouble, but I wasn’t positive. I wound up taking an extra fifty, which seems pretty silly in retrospect. Then I got the hell out of there.
“I never did see him again.
“I was going to go straight home, but I wandered back to the street again, and that’s when I got to talking with this other hustler. I guess I had to tell somebody. In the story I made myself a lot cooler about the whole thing and didn’t let on that I was really terrified there for awhile. And this other guy, he rapped about how really obnoxious some of these faggots were, and how when he packed it in for a night he really had to have a girl to get the taste of it all out of his system. He said that he hardly ever came with his Johns, that he didn’t like to let himself come, and he would save it up for a girl and really get himself together that way.
“We rapped on about a lot of things, and he asked if I had an old lady. I said I knew a lot of chicks but had nothing steady at the time, which was more or less true. He said he had a chick who really dug balling and liked group scenes, and asked if I’d like to come up and take turns with her.
“I wasn’t sure it was a scene I could go for, but the thing is that this deal with the John had shaken me up quite a bit and I did feel I needed something to get it out of my head. I don’t know that I thought of it in these terms at the time, man, but looking back on it, I suppose I was having a lot of doubts about my own masculinity. It bugged me that the guy had taken it for granted that I would go for something like this, that I was gay and would go down on him or let him fuck me. And you know how your head will play with ideas and get insecure about it. Like, maybe he sensed something about me that I wasn’t aware of. Like, maybe I really wanted it, what he wanted, and I was fighting it within myself, and that was why I got so violent about it.
“When you get into your head that way and wind up in an anxiety state, the more that you try to think things through, the worse it all gets. So I figured, wow, maybe I can get out of it by balling this guy’s chick.