Chapter 4 #2
Although when they do care, it’s harder.
And the very worst is when they actively seek your pleasure, a thing that is near impossible to achieve with a john.
I can count the number of times I’ve orgasmed with one on a single hand, and that was years ago—back when I was first starting out.
It was new and exciting and dangerous. Back when danger was exciting.
On some occasions they’d pay just to suck my dick, and what a miserable experience that was, trying to conjure up some image in my mind so that I could at least get hard and give them something to play with.
Coming was basically impossible. And then they’d take offense, like they couldn’t believe a hustler would struggle to achieve orgasm with their subpar head.
As if I haven’t seen and done and felt it all by now, to the point of numbness.
Sex has become so rote to me that it has long lost its titillation and excitement. Now I feel nothing at all.
It was thrilling though, once. Back when I started at the tender age of seventeen, after I ran away from home; it’d felt like a superpower, almost. And men have an appetite for the young: disgusting and sad, but true. The younger you are, or look, the better money you can make.
Five years of it has worn on me, though. Worn me out. Made my sexuality and sensuality inaccessible to myself. Now all I have to offer is manufactured, one size fits all. Faked for your pleasure, but damn convincing. It would almost be funny if it didn’t get so dangerous.
It’s worse for women, though, so who am I to complain? I’ve heard stories from some girls I’ve known that made me sicker than anything I ever experienced. And I sat with my roommate Mike, who is trans, through more than one abortion when men hadn’t followed the damn rules.
But none of us have had the best time of it.
We wear encounters gone wrong like badges of war: the bruises and abrasions and the fat lips and the black eyes.
At least in Rhode Island, where prostitution is only sort of legal thanks to strange loopholes, you can go to the cops.
You have some measure of protection. If a trick fucks you up, they can get fucked up back. Not always—but sometimes.
I was so happy when Ben got out.
And then he died anyway.
Miami was his dream. A queer paradise, he’d called it in those postcards and letters he sent me, along with pictures of himself and his boyfriend Jamie down at the clubs on Ocean Drive.
I still have them all, bound together by rubber band in my backpack.
All bidding me to come join him. Neither of us knowing, then, that death already had him in a chokehold.
That’s how all this shit started: when I got the letter saying he was dead.
Not a phone call, and for that I am sort of grateful.
I wouldn’t have wanted to hear Jamie’s voice then.
Wouldn’t have known what to say or do with a phone in my hand, hearing the words spoken aloud: Ben is dead. It was AIDS.
I remember, with a preternatural sort of clarity, exactly where I was and what I was doing when I got that letter last December.
Standing in the tiny kitchen in front of the fridge that stood catty-corner to the stove, so close that you couldn’t open the oven door all the way.
Scratching the back of my leg with my other foot as I tore open the envelope.
Knowing, in the way that you do in situations like that, the news will be bad.
A sense of impending doom, the foreboding, the foreshadowing.
In this case it was the fact that the boyfriend himself sent me that letter, and I knew it was him from the handwriting alone.
Neat and tidy, unlike Ben’s, whose own hand was jagged and overlarge and required several more pages than necessary to convey his meaning. But I liked that about him.
So I opened that letter with a heart already sunk, and I scanned its contents in the precise script and even more precise language, and learned my best friend was gone.
They had only found out he had it a few months before, when he started getting really bad.
He hadn’t told me in any of his letters or calls. They simply stopped coming.
It’s fucking crazy to me that it can be true. That he’s gone. From AIDS, of all things. When he had gotten out and had made a new life and found a partner who loved him. No ghost from the past should’ve menaced him anymore. Except that it had—the biggest and baddest one of them all.
Another number. Another statistic. If another gay man gets HIV, does he make a sound?
Leaving a life of prostitution just to die of AIDS anyway.
It’s just so fucking unfair. And now I’m doing the same thing—am I next?
Maybe (and this is a stupid thought, I guess, paranoid and ritualistic) every single one of us that tries to leave are destined for failure.
Is there just one path for people like us, and to diverge from it is as good as suicide?
Ben always did remark on what he considered gentleness, praised it even as he condemned it—you can assert yourself and keep the sweetness for later.
But I never felt gentle or sweet. Only brittle, fragile, ever on the verge of breaking.
I never fought back against anything in my life.
I am the definition of rolling with the punches, sometimes literally.
Until now, I guess.
And what exactly is it that makes a person deviate? What is it that makes a person, at long last, say fuck this?
Sam throws open the car door, tossing a newspaper in my lap. “Here you go,” he announces. He’s balancing a paper coffee cup in his other hand, cigarette between two fingers. “One Boston Globe.”
“Thanks,” I say absently, snapping it open. “Keep the change.”
He dumps said change into one of the cupholders before he takes one last drag of the cigarette, tossing the butt into the parking lot—which is a move so recklessly stupid at a fucking gas station that it defies comprehension, but I’m too busy scanning headlines to check him on it.
If we blow to smithereens, it will solve my problems in one go.
I wouldn’t even get the chance to thank him for it.
“Looking for news back home or something?” he asks me.
I don’t answer him right away. My hand flies up to cover my mouth and stifle the terrible noise that almost escapes me, because there it is, near the bottom of page one.
House Rep Found Dead In Providence Home.
And beneath that: Investigators suspect suicide.
I get out of the car. Sam calls after me with a startled exclamation but I ignore him, striding across the pavement towards the payphone.
I throw the crumpled Globe into the trash and with shaking fingers insert coins into the slot, dialing my old apartment number by heart.
As the phone rings and rings I stare at the soggy phonebook chained to the booth.
I do not look back. I do not look at Sam.
On what seems the billionth ring someone picks up. “Hello?” It’s the sleepy voice of Julian, though it’s hard to say if I’ve woken him up or not. He always sort of sounds like that, usually because he’s baked out of his mind.
“Julian. Jules. Hey.” I try to sound normal. “How’re things?”
“Ash!” He’s slightly more alert now. “Dude, like, where are you? You didn’t come home the other night, huh?”
“No, well, I—”
“Did you see about that congress guy or whatever? Dead up at his fancy ass mansion on the Hill, man. Bunch of money missing. Fucking crazy. Didn’t you just have a date with him?”
“Is Mike there?” Please be there.
“Nah, he’s out brunching with his man. Where are you? I haven’t seen you in like—” I can practically hear the rusty wheels turning. “Shit, two days? Where are you?”
I really, really wish Mike was home. As much as I love him, Julian is the last person I can talk to about this. “Listen, Jules. I’m not going to be back for…I don’t know how long. A while.”
That pricks up his ears. “Dude. You didn’t…you know, have something to do with it, did you? ‘Cause it kinda did just happen right after your date—”
“No!” I snap, and then I jerk my head around to see if anyone is looking or listening. The gas station is largely empty, though I have a clear line of sight to Sam as he drinks his coffee while eyeballing me. I turn away and lower my voice. “I didn’t kill him, Jules, Jesus.”
Or had I? Beneath the ebbing shock and adrenaline is, damn it all, the rising tide of guilt. I take a deep a breath and tamp it down for now because the guilt isn’t useful to me. It won’t help me survive this.
I say, “Something happened, okay? I can’t come home for little while.” Or ever. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” Now he’s quiet, too. “Okay. What should I tell Mike?”
“Only what I told you.”
A beat of silence. “Alright, I mean, yeah, okay. But, Ash—are you in trouble?” The first hint of worry creeps into his voice. Even he can make one plus one equal two. “I won’t say nothing, you know. To the cops or anyone.”
I feel like crying. Or throwing up. Or both. “Is anyone asking?”
“No, I don’t think so. I could call you back, if you—”
“Jules.”
He gets it. “Right. Yeah. That was stupid.”
“I’ve gotta go. I’ll try to call again when I can.”
“Lips are sealed, my dude.”
“Thank you.” I whisper it.
We hang up. I let my forehead touch the booth’s smudged plexiglass for just a second, the urge to scream welling up in my throat, but I swallow that.
I am good at swallowing things. And I’m good at not feeling much at all, usually.
This time is different, though. I have never fucked up this badly before.
And I try, with a desperation that borders on pathetic, to reconcile my part in this man’s death.
All I did was sleep with him for money (fine) and then steal a little more out of his safe (not fine). And he tried to murder me for that (definitely not fine)—pennies in the grand scheme of things, considering his net worth: public knowledge, self-reported somewhere in the millions.
He was the one who’d hired me time and again and fucked me in the same home he shared with his family.
He was the one with the secret, which he hid behind the pontification of family values and thoughts of the children and the war on drugs.
A secret apparently so shameful and ugly that he’d rather blow his own brains out instead of risking being outed, or being alive if it was outed.
That he engaged hustlers, and frequently.
Evading consequence, just like that.
Had he really thought I would say something? Or did he think the cops would find out, investigating the stolen money? (And the article had noted that—the missing cash from the safe, the incongruity of two rounds fired from the same gun used in Mr. Bigshot’s death.)
Fuck, I don’t love the guy, don’t even like him, didn’t give a fifth of a shit for him one way or another, but I wasn’t planning on outing him.
And I don’t want him dead, even after the bastard pulled a gun on me.
Even though his politicking made it clear that he believed society would be all the better if me and my kind should rot and die.
Yeah, I guess I have enough shreds of empathy to put together and still feel bad about an asshole like that.
I just want the money. I just want a new lease on life. I just want to start over again somewhere new and live for myself. That’s it. That’s all.
You didn’t make him kill himself.
In so much that I hadn’t put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger, sure.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Everything cool?” It’s Sam. He’s come to get me, standing back a foot or two as he studies me with something like concern.
I lift my head to look at him. “Fine,” I say. “Just got homesick for a minute.”