Where The Boys Are (22 page)

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Authors: William J. Mann

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The First Week of March, A Skyscraper Downtown
Henry
O
nce again I’m carrying a case full of goodies—the same things, in fact, I would’ve taken to Mardi Gras had I left with Jeff, Anthony, Shane, and Brent this morning as I’d originally planned, on a nine
A.M.
flight to New Orleans. It was to be a two-city circuit extravaganza, with a first stop at Mardi Gras, then on to the Winter Party in Miami. We couldn’t choose between them, so we decided to do both. Except then I backed out altogether.
I was sorry to cancel. I’d had a great time last year, and I know Jeff is disappointed. He says I’ve been neglecting him lately, and maybe I have. But he’s got
Anthony
to keep him company now, hasn’t he? Why go and watch the two of them nuzzle on the dance floor for four and a half days? Anthony’s time is soon to be up; Jeff is going to tire of him soon. I know the routine very well. Jeff’s last few infatuations—Alexei and Zed and that kid from Missouri—had been all over him, barely allowing me a word in edgewise. Until, of course, they overstayed their welcomes and Jeff bid them so
long, farewell, auf Wiedershen, good-bye.
Of course,
then
Jeff was all too glad to have me back in his life.
So, no, I wasn’t
that
upset about not going to New Orleans and Miami. This is one romance of Jeff O’Brien’s where I’m not going to play voyeur. Besides, Kenneth promised me a much better time. With Kenneth, I’m never on the sidelines.
I take the elevator up to his penthouse. This is a repeat visit. Actually, it’s my
third
time with Kenneth, probably the wealthiest of all my clients. And this is to be my first overnight job. A cool
grand.
Even before I get to his door, I can hear the music. The low, steady, throbbing bass beat coming through the walls. I knock. It takes a few times before Kenneth hears me.
When the door opens, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
The penthouse has been transformed. It’s dark, with all the furniture pushed up against the walls. A revolving disco ball has replaced the usual chandelier, and dry ice on the floor sends fog throughout the room. Donna Summer is playing in stereophonic sound. Her comeback club hit cover of Bocelli’s Con
Te Partirs.
“I Will Go With You.”
“
Do not be afraid, afraid,”
Kenneth’s singing along to the lyrics, holding out his hand to draw me inside.
I do my best to suppress a little gasp. Kenneth is shirtless, and he’s shaved off all his gray chest hair, making his tits look even longer and floppier than usual. His skin shines bright pink, and above his tight black Lycra pants a tire tube of flesh bounces as he gyrates to the music.
Can you guess Kenneth’s fetish? You got it. He has a thing for circuit boys. When he discovered I was one of them, it all came tumbling out. How once, years ago, he’d done the scene, but felt he couldn’t keep up: graying, balding, putting on weight. But instead of railing against body fascism and the obsession on youth, Kenneth has turned it all into a fantasy. He picks up
In Newsweekly
and
Genre
just to drool over the photos of shirtless boys at the clubs. He subscribes to
Circuit Noize
and keeps track of every party on his calendar—when it’s happening, where it’s held, and how many boys are there—even though he no longer attends. From
International Male
and
California Muscle
he orders sexy little numbers like the Lycra pants he’s wearing, putting them on as soon as they arrive and jacking off to his image in the mirror. He might not be a part of the scene, but he knows it very well.
“I fantasize about wearing spandex in a huddle of manflesh on a dance floor,” he confided to me. “I fantasize about getting a tribal tattoo around my bicep. I fantasize about taking Ecstasy and Special K and getting really twisted listening to Cher sing ‘Believe’ over and over again.”
He’s not being ironic. That’s the thing. You’re probably laughing and shaking your head at him, but Kenneth is
sincere
about this. He’s totally, completely serious. Believe me, he makes me want to crack up even more than the guy with the shoe fetish. Kenneth is Brent raised to the nth degree, Brent gone bald and fat and completely crazy, locked away in a penthouse at age fifty.
I don’t mean to make light of it. Please don’t take it that way. Kenneth is an affluent corporate exec, a pillar of the business community, and not an unattractive guy. The times just passed him by before he’d had his fill. Married until he was thirty-five, the father of two girls, Kenneth spent the last decade chasing young muscle boys, desperately trying to prove he could still keep up. Jeff and I have seen him around for years, at Buzz or Machine on Saturday nights, after hours at Rise, or at Tea Dance at the Boatslip in Provincetown. He would be there shaking his tush, swinging his love beads or whatever jewelry happened to be in fashion that year, licking boys’ armpits in an Ecstasy haze. He was, in a word,
tragic,
I remember once Jeff pulled me aside and made me promise never,
ever
to let him get to that point.
But you know what? There’s always been something about Kenneth that I admired. True, he cut a sad figure, a lost and lonely ghost dancing by himself with his eyes closed.
But good for him, too
, I always thought.
Good for him for not going “gentle into that good night.
”
Turning the big five-oh, however, had finally put an end to Kenneth’s ventures onto the dance floor. Circuit culture might not be dominated by twinks, but there is an age limit, especially if you’ve committed the gay cardinal sin and allowed yourself to (horrors!)
look your age!
Now Kenneth lives only with memories and fantasies, and the wistful knowledge that the party’s still going on as gaily as ever—without him.
So what does he do? He turns his penthouse into his own private version of the Winter Party. His own—and mine.
“Come on, Hank, dance with me!” Kenneth exclaims. I smile. feeling a little silly, but I do my best.
Kenneth presses up against me. “Got to get rid of these clothes,” he says, pulling my sweater up over my head and then attacking the buttons of my flannel shirt. In moments I’m shirtless, hard and dry against Kenneth, who’s soft and wet.
“Dance for me,” he says suddenly, backing away. “Dance like you would at a circuit party. Come on, baby. Show me.”
I laugh. “It’s a little hard without the drugs.”
“Ah!” Kenneth dashes over to a side table. He comes back with a couple of small pills in his hand. “Let’s bump!”
My heart breaks at the man’s awkward eagerness. But if this scene is to be done right, a little X will help. Kenneth assures me he got the drug from a reputable source, that there’s no PCP or anything hidden in the pill. I trust him and accept his gift, as much as Jeff’s voice is scolding me in my head.
“And look,” Kenneth says, gesturing toward the wall. There’s a cooler filled with bottles of spring water. “Everything we need.”
So we dance. Donna Summer segues into Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger” and then some older stuff from the late eighties and early nineties, when Kenneth had been making the rounds: C&C Music Factory, Real McCoy, CeCe Peniston, Rozalla, and, reaching way back, that old classic “So Many Men, So Little Time.” The X gets me pumped and I do indeed start to dance as if I were with Jeff in New Orleans and not with some old fat guy in a Boston penthouse.
And you know what? It’s
just as good.
Somehow, it’s just as good. That’s important to understand.
I have just as much fun.
I look over into Kenneth’s eyes and see how happy he is. How ecstatic, really, and it’s not just the drug doing it. It’s the fantasy; it’s the illusion. I’ve made it real for him. I’ve made him happy.
See, Kenneth is a good guy. He gives money to AIDS and gay causes. He doesn’t speak ill of other people, and he’s a good dad to his girls. How can anyone begrudge him his fantasy?
I pull off my pants and open my carrying case. “How do you like this?” I ask, holding up a gold Jocko squarecut. I actually wore this at the Morning Party on Fire Island a few years ago, back when there still
was
a Morning Party.
“Oh, Hank, put it on!” Kenneth urges.
So Hank does. And then we dance some more. We dance all night, in fact, and well into the dawn, just as we would have at any circuit party, our hands in each other’s pants, our tongues in each other’s mouths. If not for the sun gradually illuminating the Boston skyline outside Kenneth’s window, we could be in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. As far as I’m concerned, we are.
The Next Day, the Real Mardi Gras
Jeff
Y
ou’re probably expecting me to describe all sorts of revelries here. Scenes of utter decadence. Crazed, mind-altering experiences. Hunky boys pulling down their pants to expose cocks and asses in exchange for strings of sparkly beads. Walking knee-deep through beer cans on Bourbon Street. Squeezing into Oz to dance to the awesome sounds of Manny Lehman until the sun is coming up and then stumbling outside to have sex in the street.
I can do that. I can tell you how we all immediately get shirtless and tweaked and parade through the streets, Shane in cutoff Lucky jeans, and Anthony and I in matching white Sauvage squarecuts. A week in the tanning booths in Boston has given our pale Northern skin enough of a healthy glow to pass under the Southern sun. Mardi Gras is all it’s supposed to be: loud, riotous, colorful, dissolute, profane, wicked, and utterly shameless.
But no. I’m not going to get into all that. Truth be told, my mind just isn’t on the scene. My mind is somewhere else, and that’s what I’m going to talk about now.
Anthony.
He’s become an obsession with me. Oh, not him, really. It’s the mystery of who he is, what he’s hiding, where he comes from, what he was doing all those years he claims to have been just drifting. As I watch him dancing, strings of beads swinging from around his neck, he’s oblivious to all the lustful stares around him. But I see him not as some sexy boy toy but rather as the subject of an article, a profile, an investigation. It’s as if he’s an assignment from the
Boston Globe
or
New York Times.
Ever since Lloyd’s visit on Valentine’s Day, when he’d pronounced it my obligation to discover whatever I could about Anthony (even if sanctimoniously declining the same for himself and Eva), I’ve become a man determined. Maybe because it rekindles my reporter’s instincts, three years dormant. Maybe because it simply takes my mind off Lloyd. Whatever it is, I’ve resolved to uncover Anthony’s past—whether he wants me to or not.
“You’re missing Henry, aren’t you, Jeff?”
“Huh?”
It’s Shane, leaning in toward me, all knowing eyes and self-satisfied smile. We’re standing on a side street. Someone’s puking into the gutter only a few yards away. “You seem so distracted this weekend,” Shane says, “and I know what it is.”
He has no clue. Sure, I’m annoyed at how absorbed Henry’s gotten with this escort shit. I never see him anymore. But it’s not Henry I’m thinking about at the moment.
Shane has his own ideas, however. He thinks because
he’s
preoccupied with Henry,
everybody
is. He has a little spiel he wants to deliver and nothing’s going to stop him.
“You’ve gotten pretty used to Henry tailing you around, haven’t you, Jeff?” He smiles nastily. “Now he’s found something on his own, and I think you’re having a hard time with that.”
I look at him impatiently. “Why are you harassing me?”
He smiles. “’Cuz you’re the type of guy who can
use
a little harassment. I think you get your own way far too often.”
I smile back at him. “You don’t like me, do you, Shane?”
“Aww,” he says, “let’s not have any hard feelings.” He grins. “Let’s be friends, okay? Shake?”
My look turns into bemusement. I shake his hand.
Zap!
“Yow!” I pull back my hand. There was a sting, a sharp prick of electricity. Shane’s cracking up.
His latest gimmick: a hand-zapper.
“Who are you,
Harpo Marx?”
I try to wave him away.
He reaches across me to place his palm against Anthony’s abs. “Whoa, baby!” Anthony laughs, the zapper tingling his stomach.
“Okay, enough!” I command. “Go back inside the bar and dance, you two.”
“You coming, Jeff?” Anthony asks.
“In a while.”
I stand off to the sidelines, watching him. The mystery’s unraveling, slowly, bit by bit. Back home, under lock and key, in the top drawer of my desk, is a print-out of several dozen names, followed by a social security number and place and date of death. All of the names are Robert Riley.
I showed it to Henry. It was the last time I’d seen Henry, in fact, and the first time we’d gotten together in over a week. Shane’s right about one thing: I had gotten used to Henry being a much more frequent presence in my life than he’s been of late.
“You
could
return my calls once in a while,” I said to him.
Henry smiled. “Sorry, Jeff. You know how it is.”
“Actually, I
don’t,
and hope I never do. Any more shoe fetishists?”
He laughed. “No, but I had a guy into clothespins.”
I leveled a look at him. “I don’t even
want
to know.”
Henry took the paper from my hands. “So tell me about this list. What is it? What does it tell you?”
I ran a hand through my hair, happy to move off the topic of his escorting. “It’s from the Social Security Death Index,” I explained. “You can get it online.” I’d already told him about the laminated newspaper photo in Anthony’s wallet and dating it to approximately 1985 to 1988. “I figured if it was in the newspaper, it was probably either an obituary or a news story. So I printed out all the Robert Rileys who died in those years. As you can see, there are quite a few—too many to narrow down. Even several in Illinois, which is where Anthony said he came from.”
“It’s a fairly common name,” Henry observed. “But maybe it wasn’t an obituary. Riley doesn’t have to be dead.”
“Exactly,” I continued, lifting the next sheet out of the folder. “But finding all the Robert Rileys living in the United States would have been useless. So this is a printout of all of the Robert Rileys living in Illinois, or at least listed in the white pages. You can get that online, too. Still quite a hefty number, as you can see.”
“But Anthony could have
moved,”
Henry pointed out. “He didn’t have to still be in Illinois. By the mid-eighties, he would have been—what? About fifteen or sixteen?”
I nodded again. “Yes. It really
is
the proverbial needle in the haystack. I just wish I could determine what newspaper the photo is from. If I could do that, I could check the index for Robert Riley, see why his photo had been in the paper. I seem to recognize the typeface, but it doesn’t match any of the papers I know, like the
Globe
or the
Herald
or
Bay Windows
or the
New York Times.
I could also probably recognize the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Washington Post,
but it’s not them, either. The clipping was very different in style.”
Henry rubbed his chin. “Well, how about the
Chicago Tribune?
You probably don’t know offhand what that looks like, and if Anthony was from a Chicago suburb—”
“Been there already. I went over to the library and checked the index to the
Tribune.
No Robert Riley for those years.”
“So who do you think Robert Riley was? His father? A lover?”
I sighed. “I considered the father angle, but the photograph’s too young. He looked to be in his thirties, which would have meant he’d had Anthony when he was a young teenager. Possible, but not likely. Of course, there’s the possibility that, if it
were
an obituary, they could’ve used a younger photo, which would mean Riley
could’ve
been his father—but the photo seemed very contemporary, very eighties. The hair, the tie. Plus, you have to factor in what Anthony has said about his father. That he was an asshole. Which seems to discount his carrying his photo around in his wallet all these years.”
“So a lover, then.”
I made a face. “Maybe. Except he’s also said he’s never had a relationship. None.”
“He could be lying.”
I shrugged. “Could be. I just don’t sense he is. I get the feeling whatever little bit he’s told me is true. It’s not lies I’m dealing with here—it’s the absence of information. But one thing is clear. Whoever this Riley was, he
mattered
to Anthony, for him to keep his picture around all this time.”
“A friend, then. An uncle.
A-teacher!”
“Any of those could be possible.” I let out a very long sigh. “He mentioned getting a two-year degree, but won’t say where. Says it’s not important. Nothing I’d know, or care to.” I looked over at Henry. “So tell me. What does a guy do between high school graduation and age twenty-nine? He has to do
something.
The only thing I can say for sure that he did during that time is work on his body, because you’re not
born
with a body like that. Abs like this take a lot of time and dedication.
Years.
So he had both the time, money, and—just as important—the
inclination
to pursue a fitness program.”
Henry was watching me keenly. “You know, you’re
glowing,
Jeff. You’re
into
this.”
I smiled. “Well, it is kind of like I’m back on the job, researching a piece.”
“But
why
the interest?” Henry drew close. “What’s the motivation? There’s no promise of a byline here.”
I considered the question. And standing here on the sidewalks of New Orleans, I consider it again, watching a procession of masked revelers sway around me. I still don’t know the answer. I just know I’m
hooked.
Yes, it’s about Anthony, about getting to know just who this guy is who’s sleeping on my couch—a guy I’ve grown very fond of over the past few weeks. But it’s about
me,
too—about Jeff O’Brien, who in another life won awards for his reporting, who was respected and admired, who boasted he could find out any story, anywhere, anytime. It is, perhaps, an exercise to see if I still have what it takes. To discover if, somewhere under my malaise and grief and disappointment, I’m still the same good reporter I’ve always been.
But I’m not sure what the next step is. I’ve hit a brick wall. Unless I can determine what newspaper that clipping comes from, I might never narrow the list of Robert Rileys down to the right one. And never discover his connection to Anthony. Or anything about Anthony’s past. God, I wish I could talk about this with somebody.
I realize that Shane’s right about another thing: I do miss Henry like crazy. Even more right now than I miss Lloyd. This escort thing is out of control. I expected after a couple of tricks, he’d give it all up as a lark. But he’s seeing two, three guys a week now. Shane might think it’s all fine and dandy, but I fear getting a call that Henry’s been arrested. Or beaten up. Or killed. I worry that Henry might get raped, that he’ll se-roconvert, that he’ll turn jaded and cynical and hard.
Most of all, I just miss having Henry on the other end of the phone or sitting across from me at my apartment, listening to me ramble about whatever was happening in my life. Or
not
happening. But whenever I call Henry these days, I usually get his machine, or if I
do
manage to catch him at home, he’s either heading out to turn some trick or just too beat to talk.
His absence from my life has put a lot of things in sharp relief. I realize how alone I really am. I’m aware that since Javitz’s death I haven’t permitted myself to get close to too many people. Lloyd’s right when he says that I’ve distanced from our old friends. As much as I might value my extended gay family on the dance floor, there’s no denying that I haven’t let any of them in too deep.
But something changed with Henry. Somehow, I let him in, bit by bit. Henry isn’t like Brent or most of the other guys. He really
listens
when I talk. He’s
there
when I need him. He even knows stuff about me that I haven’t told him. He just figures it out, and Henry’s usually right, though I’m often reluctant to admit it.
Okay, Jeff, no more feeling sorry for yourself,
I think.
You’re at fucking Mardi Gras, and the boys here on the gay block are beautiful.
I consider going back inside to join Shane and Anthony on the dance floor. I’ve picked up on the first strains of Amber’s “Sexual” in the mix: all the boys are chanting, “Li-da-di, li-da-di, li-da-di, li-da-di.” But—and this just shows where my head’s at, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before—
I’m just not in the mood to dance
.
I watch as the boys swarm onto the floor to wiggle in with Shane and Anthony. Billy, Adam, Eliot, Oscar. I’d met them in Lauderdale a couple of years ago, and we’re all sharing a suite of rooms here in New Orleans. Billy and Adam live in D.C. and served as our hosts for the Cherry Ball last year. Eliot’s from San Diego, and Oscar’s from Atlanta. Each one in turn looks over at me, gesturing for me to join them. I blow a kiss but I don’t move.
“Jeff, come on, you love this song,” Anthony says, suddenly behind me, grabbing my arm.
“Let me just finish my beer.”
He looks at me with concern. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?” He places the palm of his hand on my chest.

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