Best Gay Erotica 2001, page 6
dreaming once in this way, i entered through the turnstile into the murky recesses of the eros and was bought to my senses by out-of-focus hardcore images and muffled grunts of pleasure, or pain. the seats, once salacious red velvet, were now dulled, faded and broken, inhabited by silent sheepish figures, some hand in motion, some asleep, all somebody’s husband. hands grabbed at me and i realized i was being hustled and propositioned by two or three latin boys in matching briefs and bruises, red and purple, and stained with baby oil. they wanted to take me downstairs to a place probably even darker and murkier, past a broken toilet to a dressing room. they wanted dollars, and far too many dollars, because these weren’t the little latin cat-boy extras from a madonna video—these were hustler trash that even the show palace rejected. one of them checked his watch and said to his friend, “one more dance and then i’m going to the video booths.”
(the video booths, if you’re wondering, are beneath the show palace, in the basement of a sex shop, a line of male video booths showing pornographic movies, outside the booths, waiting, a line of black and latin hustlers. hustlers circle the customers and the crack dealers circle the hustlers. the monitor dishing out tokens for booths is paid a couple of dollars to turn a blind eye, “keep it moving, guys, get in them booths now,” he keeps shouting and the procession keeps shuffling. customer and hustler would disappear into a booth, and five minutes later the hustler would emerge and slope around a corner to buy some coke or crack. this went on all night and all day and got packed around 18: 00 in the evening when business around times square finished.)
the film suddenly stops mid-orgasm, the lights dim and the boys half-heartedly gyrate to some muffled disco music, taking only a small pause before fleecing the audience of any loose change. but that was then. the eros has now had something of a revamp, a coat of paint, a dash of sparkle. the 1950s-style eros sign looks braver and bluer than ever and shouts down decimated eighth avenue, “i’m still here.” outside, a sign proclaims “tonight—chi chi la rue.” porn director, performer, personality and all-round priestess of porn has brought glamour and tease back to the eros, and as i enter the theater i am dazzled by a mirror ball and blinded by the sequins on chi chi’s frock as she paces back and forth, lights exploding christmas all over the stage. burlesque is back as chi chi brandishes porno magazines (featuring her celluloid stud muffins), turns the air blue with cracks, jokes and the cheapest asides of the filthiest tints. she introduces a selection of porno princes to tease us and delight our jaded palates. the stage resembles a pierre et gilles set, with shades of pink and twinkling fairy lights (well, not quite pierre et gilles, but those cheaper imitations who aspire to be them), and it feels good to be sleazy again.
chi chi calls us all naughty boys and slaps us with porno mags and we quake in our seats as this thundering, sequined dynamo storms up and down the aisles. the porno playmates form a fetching tableau while a misplaced attendant, standing self-consciously at the edge of the fraying lurex curtain, eyes us all suspiciously for signs of overexcitement. we dare not be too excited or chi chi will come at us, her boobs like sequined battleships, and slap us over our heads with a shiny, unthumbed copy of inches. yes, i can dream of bike boys in togas, posing-pouched centurians, discus-throwing tony curtis lookalikes and sailors on fur rugs and almost…for a moment…almost feel innocent again.
Just Another Night at the World’s Greatest Gay Diner
Dimitri Apessos
“I want a chocolate shake with that.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yes, please.”
“Here you go!”
And with that, Durrell does his ridiculous little Chocolate Shake dance. He always does this when people order chocolate shakes; he positions his arms outward, bent at the elbows as if he’s doing the Twist, and shakes his ass around in a belly-dance motion. It’s a joke, of course. Durrell’s black. Chocolate shake, get it? But, as always, the hapless tourist does not get it and sits at the counter, staring, confused.
Durrell sighs.
“I’ll get your shake, sir,” he concedes, disappointed and defeated.
With that, the hungry tourist turns back to his USA Today and Durrell walks over to the ice cream machine, which happens to be positioned right by where you’re sitting. In response to his failed joke, you smile widely and shake your head at him in disbelief.
He smiles back, while pouring chocolate ice cream into the shake glass, and leans over to whisper: “I am so over this shit!”
You smile, understanding. Durrell is one of your best friends in New Orleans, and you can always rely on him for a free meal, but in return you have to listen to him bitch about all the ridiculous things drunken tourists say and do all day. You know he’s not really bitter about it; after all, drunk heterosexuals and testy homosexuals are the occupational hazards of working in any restaurant on Bourbon Street, let alone the Happy Leprechaun, the only gay diner you have encountered in your many travels throughout gay America. For every sleaze from Jackson, Mississippi, who comes in and tells him how good he would be to him as his “white daddy,” and for every straight frat boy who walks in accidentally looking for a burger who gets hostile once he puts two and Cher together to ascertain he is the only heterosexual in the entire restaurant, Durrell has the consolation of making and spending more money than any nineteen-year-old should know what to do with. French Quarter tourists may be obnoxious, but they tip well.
As if reading your thoughts, Durrell puts down the shake glass, uninterested in serving this poor tourist who didn’t get his joke, and sits on the counter to talk.
“You should have been here earlier,” he relates. “You know that hot blonde stripper from Procession? Claude, or whatever he’s calling himself today?”
“The hustler one?” you ask.
“Honey, they’re all hustlers,” he answers. “Anyway, he was here earlier with this big daddy from Florida or some shit, and we was packed, so service was slow, you know? Well, this daddy starts yelling at me that he wants his food, and he can’t believe the service is so bad. And the stripper knows me and comes here all the time, so he’s, like, whispering to him ‘sit down’ but this daddy won’t listen so he comes up to the counter and starts yelling in my face that he knows the owner and is gonna get me fired and all that.”
“Shit, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do nuttn’, I don’t deal with trash like that. But Mike, the cook, gets in the way and yells at him, ‘Look, just because you’re paying your hustler by the hour, it don’t mean you’ll get your food any faster! Now sit down and shut up, or get the fuck out!’ and this daddy just stands there wit’ nuttn’ to say but then the stripper gets up and starts yelling at Mike…”
“What was he yelling?”
“Oh, you know: ‘Watch what you say. You don’t know me!’ That kind of shit. As if there’s anyone in the Quarter who don’t know that he’s a hustler.”
“Right,” you agree.
“Right! So Mike says somethin’ like ‘I don’t need to know you’ and the hustler makes to come around the counter and Mike starts hitting him on the head with a frying pan!”
“No shit!”
“No shit! So there I am, twenty minutes after walking in, and I have Mike beating this hustler on the head with a frying pan while the hustler is trying to choke him to death and the daddy is trying to pull them apart, yelling at the hustler, ‘Remember, I can’t have the cops show up! My wife knows the sheriff!’ It was some funny shit!”
You smile.
“I can’t believe Mike lost it like that,” you say.
“Well, he’d been on for fourteen hours at that point,” Durrell explains. “Adam called in sick and Brad couldn’t get anyone to fill in, so Mike just stayed on for a double.”
Just another night at the Happy Leprechaun, you think to yourself before asking: “So what happened with the hustler and the daddy?”
“Oh, so the daddy pulls out this big wad o’ cash and yells at the hustler, ‘Stop choking him! I can’t have the police come here and see me! Just take this money and stop choking him!’ So the daddy gives the hustler this big wad o’ cash and runs out of the restaurant and the hustler stops choking Mike, gets his food to go, and leaves.”
“You gave him his food after all of that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? He got it in Styrofoam; it’s not like he was staying here to choke anyone else. And he tipped me, like, twenty bucks!”
Yup, just another night at the Happy Leprechaun.
“So, is Mike fired?” you ask.
“Why would he be fired?”
“Ummm…because he beat a customer on the head with a frying pan, maybe?”
Durrell gives a sneering giggle before saying, “Oh, please. Mike could drop his pants and piss on the grill and they wouldn’t fire him. Why, I can think of five or six guys who come in here every day to eat, just so they can hit on him…”
“Wait,” you interrupt. “I thought Mike was straight!”
“Exactly!” Durrell responds with a smile. “Well, he calls himself bi, but I don’t think he’s ever even been with a guy…”
“I am so over everyone in this damn town calling themselves bi,” you squeal. “I swear to God they should get with the program!”
“Well,” Durrell continues, refusing to acknowledge your interruption, “you know how the queens down here go nuts for straight boys…”
“That’s sick,” you say, and you mean it. Of all the sleazy things that have bothered you about New Orleans in the three months since you moved from Indiana—and there are many—this is probably the worst. The weekly visitors from Mississippi and Alabama, coming in to stock up over the weekend for a week’s worth of sex before going home to their closeted lives; the huge turnover of staff in every bar and restaurant, which allows every manager to treat their employees like dirt; waiting in line for hours to use the bathroom at the clubs because there’s always more than one person to a stall: All these things bother you, but you laugh at them anyway. But the obsession that every gay man in New Orleans has with hooking up with “straight boys” reveals so much self-hatred—so much denial—that just thinking about it brings you down.
The phone rings and Durrell answers. It’s his on-again/off-again boyfriend, as you can tell immediately by the way his face prepares itself for a long conversation. Balancing the phone between his shoulder and cheek, Durrell reaches into his tip jar and hands you a dollar, motioning with his eyes a plea for you to play something on the jukebox. You find the motion kind of rude and play three songs from the Lulu CD just to punish him. When you come back to your seat at the counter, he is hanging up the phone.
“Bitch,” he calls you, as Lulu’s version of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” starts to play. “By the way, your roommate was here earlier and he got in a fight, too.”
“What about?” you ask, not sure you really want to know.
“There was some guy from Miami here who started yelling at him about his T-shirt. Started calling him a Communist and stuff, and your roommate freaked out and went off on him.”
“What T-shirt was he wearing?” you ask, although you know the answer, to see if Durrell knows, too.
“I dunno,” he answers. “The red one he always wears with the guy from Evita.”
You have no time to educate him on the history of Latin American Communism, because the door opens and in stumble—drunk and probably sleepless for more than forty-eight hours—four “ladies” you know well: Bianca, Autumn, Michèle, and Sabrina. Ranging from “drag-for-pay” to “heavy hormone treatment,” the four of them have become something of a menace around town, going in and out of bars and restaurants all night—every night—scaring the straight tourists with their bitchy catcalls and loud, androgynous laughter. With them, tonight, they have a boy no older than 20, who seems to enjoy being taken along for a confusing ride.
“Have you heard from Nicole?” Durrell asks you, realizing that within a few seconds all opportunity for serious conversation will be gone.
“We’ve been playing phone tag,” you barely have time to answer before the four “ladies” reach your spot on the counter and, without a break in their loud laughter, kiss you and Durrell hello.
“Hello, girls,” Durrell greets them, switching instantaneously from butch to queeny. “Where’s Miss Derrick?”
“Oh, girl,” Bianca starts, “you wouldn’t even believe what Miss Derrick got into! We were at La Ho-Down, when…”
You start to listen to the story when the stumbling boy who is escorting the “ladies” around town sits—or rather lands—on the counter seat next to you and extends a hand in your direction.
“Wassup, dude,” he sputters with a huge chemical grin on his face. “I’m Andrew.”
You look at him, unsure of what to make of his greeting. From up close you see that he is probably only 18 or 19 years old, visibly rolling his ass off on ecstasy and God-knows-what-else, and incredibly good looking. Underneath his curved baseball cap you see two steely, smiling gray eyes, the focus of a gorgeous, chiseled young face. He is wearing a tank top and baggy jeans and has a perfectly formed upper body—through nature, rather than exercise. Everything about him, from his outfit to his way of speaking, screams “straight boy.”
“Hello,” you answer, shaking his hand. “I’m Lawrence.”
“Wassup,” he asks rhetorically as he takes your hand and transforms your handshake into some kind of strange, brotherhood clasp. “You work here?”
“No,” you answer. “I bartend across the street. Just getting a snack before I have to be at work in twenty minutes.”
“Cool, cool,” he nods a little too expressively, revealing just how hard he is rolling at this moment. “Man, this is a crazy town…”
“Yes,” you agree. “Where are you from?”
“Michigan,” he answers. “I just got in this morning, and I’ve been drunk since I stepped off the train. My girlfriend’s coming down to meet me tomorrow, so I’m getting in as much partying as I can, ya’ know?”
“Yeah,” you answer, trying to avoid his beautiful, inebriated stare. A less-experienced man would have asked how he—a straight boy from Michigan—ended up escorting a group of trannies and drag queens on his first night in town, but your time here has taught you not to ask such questions. Anyway, you’re pretty sure he’ll tell you, regardless.
“So, right when I got off the train I asked this kid that was hanging out at the station where I could get some rolls—ya know?—” he starts recounting, meeting your expectations. “He told me I had to hit the gay bars on Bourbon if I wanted to find good shit. I mean, I don’t care; I was in the rave scene back home so I got lotsa’ gay friends. Are you gay?”
“Ummm,” you falter. “No, I just like to get my cock sucked by young boys.”
“Right on,” he nods, completely missing your joke. “So I’m waiting outside this club, Narnia—you know it? And these dudes here come by, and they were, like, ‘Oh, you’re so cute!’ so they gave me two rolls for free and I’ve been hanging out with them since.”
There’s a lot that you find funny about this story, but nothing amuses you quite as much as the fact that he just referred to Bianca, Autumn, Michèle, and Sabrina as dudes. You look over to see if they noticed, but sadly they did not. (They are too busy, still relating to Durrell what happened to Miss Derrick and pretending to ignore the obvious fact that every pair of eyes in the entire restaurant is staring at them.) Dudes, he calls them, despite the fact that they are all in dresses and three of them are wearing fake breasts.
Just another night at the Happy Leprechaun.
“So,” you say, to keep this boy talking and to keep the laughs coming. (You don’t have to be at work for another fifteen minutes, anyway.) “Are you rolling right now?”
Instead of answering verbally, he leans over, putting his face within two or three inches of yours, so that you can observe his dilated pupils. The proximity makes you nervous and excited. This boy is beautiful. Fucking straight boy! Fucking trannies, bringing him here!
“I see,” you respond to his pupils, looking away awkwardly.
Impervious to your discomfort, or perhaps because of it, he puts one toned, tanned arm around your shoulders and whispers in your ear: “So, dude, is this place as fucking gay as it seems?”
“Gayer,” you answer.
“Since I’ve been in town, all I’ve seen is gay bars and dudes in dresses,” he confides in you. “I mean, when I was thinking of New Orleans, I was thinking of chicks showing their tits for beads, ya’ know?”
This boy is so far gone that all sarcasm is wasted on him, but it makes you feel better anyway, so you agree: “Yeah, I’m pretty upset about the lack of tits, myself.”
“I mean, nothing wrong with gay people!” he interrupts.
“No, of course not!” you say to support him, with mocking jovial tolerance.
Suddenly he leans over even closer and squints, trying to concentrate on your face, from within a haze of ecstasy, as he asks, in all seriousness, as if he just processed your comment from several minutes ago: “So, you get your dick sucked by dudes, huh? What’s that like?”
“It’s OK,” you answer, nodding, and trying to stop yourself from bursting out laughing. You can’t wait to tell your roommate about this. “It’s not bad, you know?”
“But,” he prompts you further, “is it better than a chick?”
“Depends, you know?” you lie, as if you’ve ever had an interest in receiving oral sex from a girl. Then, in your best Donnie Brasco voice: “Depends on the dude and the chick, ya’ know?”
The gravity of this response is too much for straight rolling-boy Andrew. He withdraws his arm from around you, in confusion, takes his baseball cap off, rubs his short brown hair, then puts his hands on the counter and looks at nothing in the distance, emphasizing with: “Wow, dude…”
