“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” And went on eating.
It sounded like a pretty equivocal answer. And since we’d all been laughing about the other stuff, it was even hard to tell if he’d really heard me or not. Later, I decided I wasn’t going to give him a hard time that evening; and went back and finished washing the tub.
The next evening, when he came in, black again, again I went to run the water. When he came out, drying his hair with the towel, I said: “Good to see you looking clean — but if that tub looks like it has for the last two days, it’s going to be you and me!” I had half a smile. But I hadn’t heard anything like extra scrubbing going on — and I’d been listening for it, with a kind of disgruntled, put-upon feeling.
But Bob was smiling too. “Come on.” More wet than not, he put his arm around my shoulder. (Marilyn, whom I’d asked to go down and pick up a couple of large bottles of cream soda about fifteen minutes before, now came back in through the apartment door with a brown paper bag in her arms, and said: “Hello!”) “Come on, now,” Bob went on. “Let’s go — ” and to Marilyn: “Hello.”
Still holding a large kitchen spoon, red with spaghetti sauce, I let Bob take me back into the bathroom. “There,” he said, as we stood on the tile, him barefoot, me in the orange construction shoes I’d bought at Hudson’s three months back.
The tub was gleaming white.
“See, I ain’t deaf, you know.” He gave me a squeeze. “I heard what you said last night.”
I grinned. “Okay.” I gave him a hug back. “I just wasn’t sure. Thanks.”
“You better pick up some more scouring powder, though. We’re about out.”
From the kitchen, Marilyn called: “What are you guys doing in there?”
Bob (naked, yes) still stood with his arm around my shoulder. But he called back, “Why don’t you come in and watch. Maybe it’ll turn you on.”
That night we had spaghetti for dinner. And Bob, in his jeans again and under Marilyn’s direction, made a pretty passable salad — with a volunteer to do chili, sometime on the weekend when he wasn’t working. I don’t remember if he ever got around to it.
51.6. Irregular as Artie’s calls were, both Bob and I thought they’d peter out — especially after Bob said no to a few of them. (The johns paid Artie directly for the setups — then paid Bob.) But soon it seemed that the opposite was the case. Even while working at the die shop, Bob went out on a number of Artie’s jobs. One night when Artie phoned, Bob said, after a moment, “Well, he’s biggr’n me.” And a moment later, he put his hand over the mouthpiece, turned to me, and asked: “You wanna work tonight?”
“What’s the matter,” I asked, “You don’t want to go?”
“No,” Bob explained, “he’s got two jobs. He said you can have one, if you want.”
On half a dozen occasions, I went out — once to do a joint job with Bob in Westchester, where we tried — ineffectually — to sell an album of pornographic pictures the three of us had taken of each other and developed and printed up in our bathroom, and several times around Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own. And at least once Marilyn, not to be outdone by the boys, went out when Artie asked Bob if he knew any women who were working.
I think she wanted to know what Bob was going through. What we learned was much the lesson I’d learned at the Endicott. It turned out to be neither the most awful and degrading thing in the world, nor was it the most exciting and depraved of experiences.
Like Sonny had said: It’s just work.
“You mind me goin’ out and hustlin’?” Bob asked Marilyn, one evening.
“No, of course I don’t,” she said. “Though don’t you think it’s a little late to ask me?”
“I’m just doin’ it for the money,” Bob said.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “You’ve got a job that pays you over a hundred a week. You’re doing it because you like it.”
“Well,” Bob said, “I’m always hornier when I get back anyway. Ain’t I?”
“Yes,” she said. “You are. Besides, I already noticed that about Chip when he just went out cruising on his own.”
“A couple of days ago,” Bob said, “I was in this real fancy apartment on Park Avenue. The guy was an asshole. But the apartment — man, I ain’t never seen a place like it before in my life! Maybe in a movie somewhere, but not for real!”
“That’s what I mean,” Marilyn said.
“Yeah!” Bob said. “That’s really funny, now. I wonder why it makes you hornier? Since it’s just work.”
51.61. Marilyn wrote:
51.7. Big Dave had carried his bike up all four nights one weekend afternoon to stop by and say hello. In the course of it, while all of us were sitting around, there was a call for Bob. “It’s Artie,” Marilyn said.
Bob moved over by the kitchen window and took the receiver: “… Okay … yeah … okay. …Naw, I don’t like to take it up the ass. … Okay. … He can blow me if he wants … Yeah, I’ll blow him if I have to, but I’d rather save it for home, you know …?”
Dave frowned at Marilyn, at me, then inclined his head toward Bob with a curious look. He looked at Marilyn again and mouthed without sound: “What’s he doing?”
Marilyn looked back at Dave and just shrugged.
“Okay,” Bob said, “tell him I’ll be there at eight. … Yeah, I got the address: No, not twenty — thirty-five, if that’s what he wants me to do. All right? … Okay, thanks.”
Later, Dave walked his bike along with me while I went down to the supermarket. “What’s Bob doing, huh? I mean that stuff he was setting up on the phone?”
“Hustling,” I said, “actually.”
“Yeah?” Dave said. “That’s sure what it sounded like.” Dave asked more questions. I gave the best answers I could.
“Both you guys are sleeping with him,” Dave said, at last and carefully, “and you don’t mind?”
I shrugged.
Dave narrowed his eyes. “You ever do it? Hustle, I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said, in my most noncommittal manner. “Yeah, I guess I have.”
“Mmm,” Dave said. “I wonder if I could.”
Which rather surprised me.
“I mean,” Dave said, “I’ve known — or known of — a couple of guys who’ve done it. And I’ve thought about it. But I guess I just wouldn’t really know how to start. Still. I always kind of wondered about that, you know?”
“Well,” I said. “We could always give your name to Artie.”
Dave considered. “Naw, I don’t think I’d want to do that. Going with somebody who was a complete stranger — maybe if it was somebody I knew. Or at least somebody who somebody I knew knew — you know what I mean?”
“I do know,” I said. “But basically, it’s business. You just can’t be all that picky.”
“I guess so. Probably that means it’s not the business for me, then.”
“Probably,” I said. As far as I knew — and we’d discussed it pretty openly — Dave’s only sexual experiences with males had been at ten or eleven when, once, out of curiosity he’d masturbated his dog.