Ode to Lata (30 page)

I circled around the drive-thru of the closed McDonald’s and realized that I was hungry.  With all the events that had transpired, we’d forgotten our ritualistic visit to the Del Taco by Fairfax.  I wondered what the guys were up to at the Spa.  I imagined Kitty trundling in a room with someone: Frankie, rubbing himself concentratedly with a sweat-drenched group in the steam room; and, with some satisfaction, Adrian, still meandering up and down the staircase.  In my mind, I could hear the dance music that would have been playing there.  Even after hours of it at the bars, there was always more dance music to be found in the next place.  Why didn’t they play more sensual music in a place like that?  Something more erotically conducive?  Who needed more dance music?  To fuck to?  Did they want everything that transpired between us, whether in nightclubs or sex clubs, to feel as frivolous and detached as the music that underscored our activities?  Why weren’t there any ballads played in gay dance clubs? Did they presume that we only wanted to cavort with one another?  That we didn’t want  (or need) to hold one another?  Why weren’t there any places where men could dress up in dark suits and listen to smoky jazz and have a martini and sway against one another tenderly?  Were there no more gay people like those? Like me?

But what made me think people wanted mushy music to roll around in bed to and classy joints to slow dance in when they could throw on a tank top and exhibit the rewards of their sun worship while shaking vigorously?  They all came out to forget their pain and to drink and sweat their loneliness onto the dance floor, not listen to stirring compositions of romance!  Imagine Heaven playing the kind of music I was listening to right now.  In two minutes half the queens would be fleeing from the bar as if an AA squad had come to gather them up, the other half slashing wrists over the sinks and sobbing inconsolably in the overcrowded bathroom.  

Perfect timing.  No sooner had I driven back into view of the bus shed than Bill ran back across the road and motioned to me.  Once in the car, he unfolded the little plastic bag and inspected the quality of his purchase like a seasoned connoisseur.  He nodded to himself.  “Good stuff,” he remarked with pleasure.  “Definitely good stuff.”

“It is?  How can you tell?”

He smiled at me as one would at an inquisitive child.  “Well, look here,” he said, fingering the mat of green in the palm of his hand.  “Lots of buds, see?  And that smell!” He took a whiff, closed his eyes and gave out an elated sigh.  “It smells fucking great!”

He slid it under my nose.  It smelt racy but I felt no desire for it.

In the silence that ensued between Bill and myself, a short period which felt surprisingly comfortable and undemanding as he busied himself with carefully rolling his joint, my mind wandered off to the last time I’d smoked pot. 

It was with Zul, who now lived in San Francisco.  Sadly, our friendship had become a casualty of distance. Even in Kenya he’d smoked pot regularly. Here I remembered his ritual of foraging Venice Beach for it.  The last time we’d spoken – it had been at least a few years – he’d mentioned that he’d been suffering from memory lapses. This was especially startling considering that Zul had always been a virtual compendium for as long as I’d known him.  He admitted how, memory lapses aside, it was the induced complacency that had screwed him up. In essence, it had done what was incumbent upon any great drug – it had suspended him from the mundane, softened the harshness of reality.

A drug, I thought, was like a lover auditioning for future visiting privileges.  Having been seduced, you discovered that with some you had compatibility, chemistry.  They understood you, your movement, your persona.  You decided to give them the key to your door so that they could come back in and fuck you again and again.

So we all ended up with a drug of choice, some of us promiscuously, with invitations extended to more than one to enter our bodies.  Any bartender in West Hollywood could vouch for my passion for at least one of them.  And there I was, an extoller of physical beauty, sitting right next to another.

And now what? I wondered.  Now that Bill had collected his pot and I was, without consulting him, driving back toward the Westside?  Would I find myself back at the Spa?  Sullen and unfulfilled, laying down in those rooms, the ceilings of which inexplicably made me think of concentration camps?  Or would I prolong my suffering until I surrendered to my bed and, conjuring up images of Bill and Nelson and perhaps Richard – no, definitely not Richard anymore – spur myself to a release?

I wasn’t prepared to make any monetary propositions to Bill, although time and time again, at the mention of the hustler culture of this city, I’d claimed to feel no reservations about paying for sex.  Such a hypocrite I was.  Or maybe just a little afraid that it would all start to feel so terribly easy, so very convenient.  That I might not ever want to bother with snaking through the bars, always demanding the instant gratification of mercantile sex.

That didn’t prevent me from guessing how much Bill must charge though.  A hundred?  Two hundred?  And just what would be include?  How much for everything?  Or did that ever depend on upon whom he was doing business?

How much for me?

And I want, dear Bill, more than just to suck your cock and to feel your fingers probing inside my bowels and have you splatter your sperm all over my face.  How much, Bill, to kiss me like you really mean it and to enter me with all your need and roam your hands over the curves of my twisting body like you were, by making love to me, recreating me from this mass of worthless putty that I’ve become? 

Can you make up, in one night, for not only all the neglect but also the nihilistic, cheap, meaningless sex I’ve been drowning myself in? 

Can you, Bill, do this?  Can you, with all those years of molding yourself in foreign beds with others, after supplying them with what’s been expected of you while your eyes surreptitiously eyed your wristwatch, make me feel all this?

I prayed that he would keep me from taking him back to wherever else he might want to go.  A decision had to be made or soon we’d be where I’d found him.  And I would have to return to the spa and find myself going up and down those unending stairs with their irritating little floor lights intended to create a celestial feeling, but which, in my drunkenness, would only strike me as microscopic alien heads sticking out their tongues.

“So, Bill,” I said carefully.  “What do you think you want to do now?  Did you want me to take you back or what?”

I felt him looking at me but didn’t look away from the road.  I could see the cars on Santa Monica Boulevard crisscrossing as we approached it.  Highland was minutes away.  My hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, and I think that for those few seconds I might even have stopped breathing.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

I glanced at him.  “Home?”

“Yeah,” he said flatly.  “Why don’t we go home and have sex?”

I swallowed. “There is one thing, though.  I… You know, I won’t pay you for it.  I mean, I don’t think…”

“I don’t want your money.  Let’s just go home, okay?”

I nodded.  “Yeah, okay.”

Thank you, dear, sweet, God.  Thank you…
 

This drive home offered us the opportunity – one not usually welcomed in a one-night stand – to converse.  Yes, we were to fuck each other, but we were also being afforded the rare opportunity to know
who
it was that we were fucking.

The alcohol had waned from my system.  What had seemed like a flurry of events blurring into one another started to unfold more systematically and to bring the discomforts of clarity.  It became more evident, as we neared my beach community, that we’d left all the madness of a Saturday night and its aftermath on the boulevard far behind.  That what was happening between us might be more substantial than what might have been under the army of flickering lights on a dance floor or the crowded sex clubs tonight.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, despite my gratitude for having him, lurked a concern.  I was going home with a hustler.  Whatever could he be carrying?  Could he be infected?  For that matter, God only knew what I might have been carrying!  Wouldn’t that be the clincher – the hooker contracts HIV from his procurer?

“So, Bill, why do you do it?” I asked him.  “Is that a stupid question?”

“Why do I do it?  You mean, this?”

“Yeah.  I mean, this can’t be what you really want to do for a living, right?  I mean, you know, if you had a choice.”

“No, it’s not a stupid question.”

“If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about it, I understand.”

“Nah, I’m cool with it,” he said, shrugging.  “There’s not much to say really.  I just don’t like to work.  Then again, this is work too,” he laughed, catching himself.  “I just don’t like working a regular job, you know, like a day job?”

What do you know!  A hustler by choice!  No sad stories about the unemployment rate and trying to survive or anything like that.  He simply likes being a hustler! 

When he asked me what I did for a living, I instantly became an investment banker.  Just like that. What was I supposed to say?  New accounts rep? At least juggling with stocks and bonds sounded somewhat passionate, not to mention lucrative. I was relieved that I wasn’t driving my beat-up Pontiac, the model that has a reputation for spontaneous combustion.  In this city where every third car was a Mercedes or a Jaguar, driving the right car, a sumptuously expensive one, was the essential indicator of who and where one was on the economic ladder.  No longer the bored accounts officer that had to cross-sell a credit card with each account opening, I became the crucial person that deemed people’s fortunes.  I became Jerry Kovatch, the Armani-clad hotshot in his glass office across from my desk in the main room, for whom the Dow Jones and Nasdaq were daily chants.  I felt the need to impress Bill.  To make him think that he stood to benefit from me despite the fact that he’d waived his fees for me.

Dubious as I continued to feel about my own physical appeal in the presence of someone that attractive, I wanted him to feel that there were other possible compensations for his act of what I, at that moment, considered charity.  There was no money forthcoming on that night.  But that wasn’t to say that there wouldn’t be any in the nights to come.  It wasn’t to say that I couldn’t afford him.  Any hustler, I reasoned to myself, could benefit from an occasional dinner at a chic restaurant or a day of shopping at the mall.  That much, if need be, I could do and comfortably live with myself for doing.

My exaggerated career impressed him.  Bill felt the need to tell me about some of his own achievements, fractional but attempted endeavors nevertheless.  “I went to college for restaurant management,” he said.  “I was real good at it too.  Man, I can cook you almost anything.”

I smiled to myself.  Now there was a vision worth coming home to: Bill slaving over the stove, bare-chested with a ladle in hand, redolent hollandaise sauce dripping from it, and a rock-hard erection rearing through his boxers, maybe even catching some of the falling droplets for me to lap off.  Who wouldn’t be willing to pay to have that every night?

“The only thing I couldn’t do was that damn ice-sculpting shit, you know?”

“Ice sculpting?”

“Yeah, you know, sculpting herons and fishes and all those things for displays on the food table?  Presentation stuff?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“I couldn’t do that shit to save my life.  So, anyway, I dropped out.”

“You dropped out because you couldn’t sculpt?” I asked, doubtful.  “And those were the only two career choices?” 
Dad, I’m either going to be a chef at the Peninsula or a hooker on Santa Monica Boulevard when I grow up!

“I just lost interest after a while.  And no, those weren’t my only two choices.  I told you, this is what I enjoy doing.  Not everyone is cut out to be some banker. You can’t understand that, can you?”

“On the contrary,” I said.  “I admire very much that you do this out of choice.  It must take the pressure off your clients who think you’re with them just for the money.  In order to do any job well, the enthusiasm counts more than the desperation.  So, you must be very good at it.”

“Haven’t had any complaints so far.”

“Only repeat clients, huh?”

I felt his eyes assessing me.  Calculating the things he would do to me when we got home.  I had half a mind to pull over and let him fuck me right there and then.

“Anyway, I won’t be doing this shit for too long.”

“Careful,” I said.  “Your love for the profession is sounding shaky.”

“I met this guy a couple of months ago.  Older guy.  Wealthy guy.  He’s got a pad in Malibu.  He wants me to move in with him, and he says he’ll take care of everything and I won’t have to worry about a thing, you know?”

“You mean, like a sugar daddy?”

“I can even take my dog with me.  Oh, man, I can just work out all day and surf and live the good life, you know?” And then he punctuated his dreams with, “That is what everyone wants in the end, isn’t it?  I’m just taking a short cut.”

A short cut,
I thought grunting inaudibly under my breath.

It amazed me that even as a prostitute, Bill possessed such naiveté, such a vision of fulfillment in his future.  I would have thought that the acrid, fatalistic view on life’s imperfect constitution, its mandatory drills of suffering to even qualify for some happiness, would have come from him and not me.  He told me that he hoped someday to have his own business.  A little restaurant where they served healthy portions of culinary delights instead of the scrimping portions that most people expect fine cuisine to be served in.  The man in Malibu was going to help him attain this dream.  He asked me about my aspirations.