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“That’s all there is to it,” he explained. “Easiest thing in the world. The first ad said that we were available separately or together. We got so many calls after that that I took that line out because we had enough business without it. So we only hustle as a couple.”

“Which we really dig,” Glory said.

“Which we really dig. Also it got rid of my one worry, which was that somebody could turn violent to Glory and I wouldn’t be able to help her, but this way we’re always together. And it’s not walking streets and working cars for ten dollars at a time. The price is a bill and that’s for all night if they want because we won’t take more than one gig a night. I don’t think there’s been a week we haven’t made five bills. And with no taxes to pay. So you see what I mean when I say bread is no problem.”

I asked what kind of clients they were getting.

“About sixty percent single men. I mean single in that they come alone. Sometimes they want to get involved with both of us. Sometimes they want to watch me with Glory and then ball her.”

“They all have different things,” Glory said.

“Maybe twenty, twenty-five percent couples. Married couples, I suppose. Some of them not too much older than we are but most of them a lot older. In their forties and fifties. One time it was an older couple who had been swinging, oh, for years. With other couples who were more or less their own age. And they had been trying to swing with a really young couple but couldn’t find one willing, and a hundred dollars to them was like a dollar to us. Other times it’s couples who want to get into swinging but are nervous about it, and if they’re paying they can back out at anytime.”

“We also get some single women,” Glory said.

“Right, and that surprised me. I didn’t think it would happen. Not that often. I wouldn’t know if they’re married or single.”

“One of them said she was married.”

“Yeah, but you never know. The thing is, Jack, we’re into a very good thing. And it’s not just that it really pays but that we are really getting into it. With the two of us together, it really doesn’t feel like hustling. It’s a thing we do together and really get involved in and then have it to share afterward. I suppose eventually there will be a lot of other couples getting into the same hustle, but for the time being we have so much action we can’t even start to handle it all. The phone’s turned off right now, for example. Otherwise it would be like ringing constantly. Of course everybody who calls is ready to come up with a hundred bucks, but enough of them are so that we have the phone turned off most of the time.”

“And we’re saving money,” Glory said.

“Saving a lot of money. Isn’t that unreal? But we want to have some money set aside in case we need it. In case we decide to take time off and have a kid, or something.

Glory beamed.

Greg

“Most of my friends — my straight friends and my gay friends as well, they have no idea that I hustle guys for money. This is a part of my life that I keep secret. I would have to admit that one reason for this, one definite reason for it, is that I am ashamed of it. Ashamed of it to a certain extent. Not so ashamed of it that I don’t do it, but to the extent that I don’t want people I know socially to know about it. But it’s not just that I feel that what I do is necessarily bad or degrading. I feel that way part of the time but other times I have different feelings about it.

“But the subject of hustlers will come up in conversations. Particularly with gay friends, because naturally people who are gay themselves are more likely to know about the scene and more likely to talk about it. But if I’m with people who are straight and we pass some very obvious hustler on the street or if somebody is talking about Midnight Cowboy the subject may come up.

“The average person, whether he’s straight or gay, is inclined to be very contemptuous of the hustler. My gay friends always say that they would never pick up a boy on the street and can’t understand why anyone else would. I don’t know if this is true or not. I can see where they would say so in any case, because otherwise it sounds as though they had to pick up a hustler because they couldn’t make it in any other way. And some of them do pay for their sex in another way. They’ll connect with somebody at a bar, and it’s understood by both parties that they’ll pay for drinks and dinner, that they’ll be the one to give expensive presents and so on. It’s like a man who sets a girl up in an apartment and she costs him quite a bit of money, but he doesn’t feel that he’s literally paying for sex and she doesn’t feel like a whore.

“To get back to the subject of how other people think about hustlers, the thing is that they often think it’s a way for a guy to have gay sex without admitting to himself that he’s gay. And they also think that it’s an indication of a terrible weakness to be a hustler. Just as a lot of straight types think it’s an indication of a weakness to be gay. I’m talking about some of the hipper straights, incidentally. The square straights think only completely gay people have homosexual desires. The ones I’m talking about tend to think that yes, everybody has a certain amount of homosexual desire, but that you ought to be able to rise above this...

“What lots of people don’t realize is that for some guys it’s almost impossible not to hustle, the same as it’s almost impossible not to start having sexual relations, and this is because they happen to be the physical type that really turns on homosexuals. A man may pride himself in never having had a homosexual experience, not once ever, and it may very well be that nobody ever asked him, for Christ’s sake. It’s like a virgin priding herself on never giving into temptation, and what it comes down to is that nobody ever made a pass at her, so where was the temptation to give into?

“I know it sounds very dramatic to say I never had a chance. It sounds like I’m saying that here I am, this fantastic sex symbol that every faggot drools over the minute he looks at me. Well, no matter how it sounds, that’s about what it comes down to. It isn’t just that it’s a matter of being good-looking. There are many very good-looking men who are of a type that they may never have homosexuals coming on to them, and there are others who are the type that really appeal to homosexuals. With my particular face and my particular build I was always attractive to them.

“When this happens, you do one of two things. Either you try it or you turn completely in the other direction. There are certain straight men who have a really violent hatred for homosexuals. I think it’s common knowledge that they do this because they’re fighting something in themselves. They may or may not be aware of it, but that’s why they have this hatred.

“Now I would bet that most of the time these are men who are of the type I’m speaking of that they’re very attractive to homosexuals and have been getting constantly propositioned in one way or another over the years. And that bothers them, not only because they have to wonder if these queers know something, you know, and also because it would be very aggravating to anyone to get constantly solicited to do something that’s distasteful to you. A man who doesn’t have this problem may say that he doesn’t mind faggots because they don’t bother him and he doesn’t bother them. But when it’s a case of faggots bothering him all the time, that’s something else, and either he’s going to go along with it or he’s going to want to beat the shit out of anybody who makes a grab for his cock.

“In my case I had this happening all the time. I’m talking from the time I was fourteen, fifteen years old. I would have older guys trying to get to me. I would be on the subway or at a movie or anything and a guy would put his hand on my leg. So I would change my seat or something. I don’t want to make it sound like this was something that happened every single time I left the house. That I couldn’t go around the corner for a quart of milk without getting cruised. But it was a very frequent thing.