The Gold Diggers (18 page)

He dressed sexy, tucked an unopened bourbon under his arm, and headed east on Sunset to Hollywood. He'd
thought
he was going to go west, to Beverly Hills, so as to walk up and down Rodeo, looking in the windows until he'd discovered the silliest overpriced figurine dancers and bud vases. It must have been the dope, he would have said, that steered him wrong. He didn't think he was going to cruise Hollywood until he started to, the MG snuggling in among the Cadillacs creeping along the curbs. The silver-haired men with multiple rings and garish shirts leaned over to the passenger's window and haggled for blow jobs with fifteen-year-olds. Sam was a stranger here now. He liked all kinds, it was true, but he'd never developed a taste for chicken sex. Not that the Hollywood version wasn't lovely. Boys like high school lettermen, skateboards under their arms, luminous from so much sun. But the come-on pose as they leaned on the streetlamps was oddly androgynous—part wanton, part without meaning or balance, like a child playing dress-up in oversize clothes. They all looked the same. Do
we
all look the same, too, Sam asked himself—but as a joke, shaking his head no even as he asked it.

It didn't really matter which one he got. He pulled out from behind a Rolls where three boys were clustered at the window arguing among themselves about who was better hung. Sam stopped at the curb just ahead. He noticed a boy sitting on the sidewalk away from the curbside hustle, his back against a storefront, arms around his knees. The luncheonette sign directly above him, “JUST LIKE HOME,” threw down on him a pale green light. He was smoking a cigarette. Sam stared until he stared back, kept on staring when he looked away. Finally, the boy got up, crushed the cigarette under his shoe, and ambled over to the MG. All of it reluctantly. It was a way of being tough without having to be aggressive. He was too shy to be tough in the usual way. Sam knew it backward and forward.

“What do
you
want?” the boy asked suspiciously, acknowledging the difference between Sam and his own regular trade. He may have thought Sam was a pimp. He wasn't seventeen, or he hadn't been on the street long, one or the other. His clothes, an army shirt with sergeant's stripes and green fatigues, were tidy, as if his mother still did them up.

“What do you like to do?” Sam asked. Rule one: Get it all out on the table.

“For twenty-five, you can blow me and I'll fuck your ass. For thirty-five I'll come.”

How many times does a man say that, Sam wondered, before it sounds like nothing at all? This boy still liked the rawness of the bargaining—talking dirty, calling a spade a spade. About six months, Sam thought, narrowing his assessment of the time the boy had done.

“What about the other way around?”

“I don't
do
it the other way around,” the boy said tightly, drawing back a fraction from the car. He took offense, as if Sam had said point-blank that he was queer. Oh yes, Sam remembered, this was the crowd that planned to live happily ever after, as soon as they had the down payment.

“Why don't you get in?” Sam said easily. “We'll work something out.”

The boy climbed over the side and sank down into the seat. He leaned against the door as if to keep his distance, turned sideways to face Sam, and then spread his legs wide as the MG allowed. He was full of crossed messages. He had jet eyes and, what was a turn-on because he was so young, the shadow of a heavy beard along his jaw. He called himself Eddie when Sam asked, though he seemed unused to the name. He changed it too often, Sam decided, driven still by the panic that he'd be found out, traced, turned in to his father or his parish priest. No, he didn't have a room they could go make it in, and when Sam said his own place was off limits because he shared a bed there with someone jealous, Eddie wanted out.

“Unless you want to spring for a motel, too,” he said. “I won't do
shit
in a car.”

“Why don't we just drive around for a while,” Sam said. He decided suddenly he wanted nothing. What sent him to Hollywood, he supposed, was a busman's holiday. Men in the trade had pointed out to him classy old call girls, still in shape in their fifties, hearts like hard candy, who'd bankrolled enough to keep a young buck in residence to service them. Once again, Sam loved the idea of the cash flow. He didn't expect a good fuck out of any of these kids, but for a change, at least, he thought he'd enjoy the double hustle. His power in the scene would lie in irony, as it did for the powdered whores with gigolos. For him and a man like Eddie, he'd had an image in his head of two mirrors set face-to-face. Two hustlers together, the fantasy went, could turn a workout into a pitting of athletes. But as he drove up Franklin and went left and into the hills, he saw that what he'd wanted most was to hear a hustler's story. That's not like me at all, he thought, glad that for the moment they'd both shut up. It was as if, courting a kid for an hour, he'd wanted to learn where it all began. He'd never got caught before in the seethe of sentiment, and he took it as a warning. He'd been right, after all, to always cut himself off from anyone younger than himself. It was enough to go through it yourself. Watching someone else go through it could only slow you down.

“You can't get it up,” Eddie said at last. It was an everyday remark. Where he hung out in LA, there was a sex therapist behind every tree. “I'm right, aren't I? A good-looking guy like you, you ought to be able to get it free. But something's happened to your confidence, hasn't it?”

“Mmm,” Sam said, and his pride remained intact. Eddie's diagnosis, smug and impertinent, didn't even break the skin. Sam put his holiday away like a suitcase in the attic, and he threw his mind ahead a couple of hours, waiting on Selma for the start of the first dance. He only felt the slightest annoyance still about the unspent money. As for Eddie, he couldn't believe how dull it was.

“When you drove up,” Eddie went on, “I thought you must be real kinky. Why are we stopping here?”

“Just for a minute. Then I'll take you back. You know what I'd like to do?”

“What?” Eddie said guardedly. The kink might be coming, after all.

“Make out.”

“Meaning what?”

“Kiss.”

“I don't kiss,” Eddie said, throwing it out as if Sam were a tourist, used to the customs of a simpler country.

“Neither do I,” Sam assured him. “But you know whose house that is?” He pointed at a bungalow, pale in the darkness, undistinguished. They were parked high on a hill in a cluster of houses, the nose of the MG headed down at a steep angle. Two invisible, penned-in dogs barked back and forth across the street. “Marilyn Monroe's.”

“No shit. Is that where she killed herself?”

“It's where she died,” Sam said, putting the best face on things. “So you see, it's a holy spot. When I want to go parking, I like to do better than Mulholland Drive.”

“You're weird.” But he said it without malice. Even in six months, apparently, he'd seen worse. “Why don't you take me back to the Boulevard, and we'll call it even. I don't use my mouth except to eat.”

“Why don't we make it fifty?” Sam said. “You don't have to come. You don't even have to breathe heavy.”

So it was agreed. For fifteen minutes, as if it were a taxi and they had a meter running. Sam leaned forward, and their open mouths met. The boy's tongue was dead like a slice of meat, and he held it close to the front of his mouth as if he were licking a stamp. Sam paid no mind to his delicacy. His own tongue probed and jabbed. He sucked the wind up out of the boy's throat, bit at his lips, and honeyed his whole lower face with saliva. It must have seemed to Eddie that Sam had developed a sudden obsession for him, and, scrupled or not about what passed his lips, he must have felt he was coming into the full range of his sexual powers. His kisses were going for about a dollar apiece. He didn't have to do anything. Pretty soon, he must have figured, they'd pay to just look. And that, as anyone on Hollywood Boulevard would have told you, was
their
dividing line between the stars and the suckers who worked.

But as the minutes passed, he must have wondered if it was really such a bargain. Because Sam ate him up. He tongued the corners of Eddie's mouth and clicked their teeth together till a shiver went up their spines. He didn't stop to breathe and didn't seem to need it, and Eddie must have wondered for a bit if he would suffocate. Sam leapt into this scene on the spur of the moment and for reasons he couldn't entirely separate, though none of them sprang from a passion for a sixteen-year-old boy. And not that he attached anything innocent to a kiss, either, since he tore through the virginal, light-lipped stages to get to the fevers and bruises. He didn't do it to kill his hundred and seventy-five. He did it instead of yelling and screaming. He did it to prove that Eddie had only scratched the surface of sex, and he intimated he could have done it just as well by just holding Eddie's hand or humping him through his clothes. Part of it he seemed to do for Marilyn, who didn't mean a thing to Eddie. Who hadn't ever lived in the little Spanish bungalow, either, but that was not the point. She'd lived
somewhere
around here, Sam knew, and she was the class item. She wasn't ever a punk fifteen, and she didn't have to pay for it at fifty.

Sam kissed Eddie with his eyes and his mouth wide open. But he kept his hands to himself without even trying. For a quarter of an hour, he mauled that face with the single muscle of his tongue, which in its way was as versatile, as rife with moods, as his usual tool. In one long moment he worked Eddie over as if he could spit out the whole pack of lies men carried to his bed day in and day out. And when the time drew to a close he was ready. He had a built-in clock that could time a fuck like a football game. It would have been pretty, perhaps, if in the end he'd softened Eddie up. That is how Peter and Rita and Nick would have imagined it—that Eddie kissed him back. For all the gulf between them when it started, fire and ice, wouldn't it be fitting if the final kiss turned out to be Romeo and Juliet? But it didn't. When the meter ran out, Sam stopped, drew back, and wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Peter and Rita and Nick, revising their opinion, would have called the look in his eyes hatred. But it wasn't. It was nothing, which was the very thing he'd come to want out of this.

At first, Eddie didn't even close his mouth. He didn't move a muscle, and it looked like the lull before a counterattack. Sam wasn't sure. Completely as he felt he understood the way the boy worked, he hadn't given him a thought in the fifteen minutes. They might have to wrestle it out now, pull each other from the car and roll in the street, egged on by the pacing dogs. But it went another way, and Eddie's face fell sad. He wasn't going to cry, though, because hustling and tears excluded each other. Unless there was pain, and Sam didn't hurt people, even when they wanted him to. Hustling didn't exclude anything else but love, Sam thought, the Tom Sawyer smile on his face, and then he couldn't wait to be alone. It was the grief that follows knowledge in these naked matters that Eddie got a dose of, as if he were not old enough a half hour before. Sam hadn't himself had a case of the sorrows since he was eighteen, so he knew it wasn't terminal. Sad was the least of their worries.

“You should ask to see cash first, you know,” Sam said, “especially if someone offers you too much.” He leaned back against the seat and threw his hips out so that he could reach into his pocket. He disentangled a fifty from the bills. “And you're right to keep it clean in cars.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie said, plucking the bill out of Sam's hand. He spread it on his knee and smoothed it as Sam started the car.

“You must be a real terror when you get off. I mean, if you get all sullen and guilty from a kiss.”

“I'm not anything, baby. I don't feel a thing,” he said. He took a billfold from his back pocket and slipped in the fifty.

“Really? Well, you may go places, after all.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence, and they looked from the side of the road as nice as brothers. If we're both as free of feeling as we say, Sam thought, it's a wonder we don't get along a little better. Himself, he didn't care if he never saw Eddie again. He'd have the same rush of pleasure passing him on the street and looking through him as he might have had meeting an old friend, if he'd had such a thing. He could have concluded from his fifty-dollar session that the men in this game were all alike, but it didn't come through that way. The nothing Eddie said he felt was different from the one Sam felt. Sam understood as he never had in the past that Rusty Varda wouldn't have let it go so far with just any hustler. He had probably brought a hundred other boys before Sam up to Crook House to swim and eat lunch, and they must have been as stiff and coarse as Eddie. Some of them, perhaps, stayed on and took steam. But only Sam—

“You don't have to take me all the way,” Eddie said. “I can get a bus anywhere along here.” Suddenly mild, his mind turned to the route he was traveling. He sounded as if he'd hitched a ride with Sam a couple of blocks back. “I'm through for the night, anyway.”

“It's early.”

“Yeah, but I promised my girl I wouldn't be late.”

It would have taken a chemist to isolate the blizzard of elements in that remark. The slightest heavier stress on “girl” drew a line around him as powerful and impenetrable as a witch's circle. But he was no better than the Johns who sucked his cock, Sam thought bitterly. When Sam went home, he didn't shed a disguise or resume it. He was as content in his room as a Greek philosopher living in a square with a crockery cup and a straw mat. He rested and drifted and kept to himself, no needs to speak of outside of the mirror to watch himself in, until it was time to go out again. The client class, by contrast, tended to Jekyll-and-Hyde their lives. Down on their knees, doing dark acts in public toilets. Upright in the dining room, carving the roast at a supper for eight. It had been that way forever, for all Sam knew, but he had it as a fact that his father at least taxied back and forth for years between a wife and a whore. It wasn't right. Sam was unbending about these things—Eddie had slipped beneath contempt, because he didn't have a right to live two lives if his girl was living only one.