Ladies' Man (31 page)

"Shit, Donny, where you taking me?"

"It's all bullshit, Kenny. Just hang in there."

Occasionally a low-flying taxi zoomed between the
highway pillars on the cobblestone street and rocked to a halt in front of a dimly lit doorway as anywhere from one to five guys in motorcycle leather erupted from the back seat and vanished behind a club door.

"This is the other end of the spectrum." Donny glanced around. "But it's not as scary as it looks."

"Oh, yeah? Tell it to the marines."

"I'm sure the marines already know." He ushered me into the Stockade. From the outside the place looked closed. The shades were drawn and I couldn't hear any noise from the street.

The minute we walked in I realized we'd landed on another planet. I started wigging. I was scared. No lie. The place was huge, high-ceilinged, cavernous, with a sinister glow as if the color black emitted its own tint of light. Music boomed, pounded, exploded. The place was mobbed with giants in leather, shades, chains, shaved heads, boots, Fu Manchus. It was a cocktail party in hell. Grim dudes with crook-necked vulture postures stood motionless against walls. Suspended from the ceiling were straps, harnesses and assorted metal and leather objects which looked like they might be used for either torture or training race horses. I felt like any second someone was going to come up and hurt me. Donny led me to a clear spot on the wall and we stood silent across from a forty-foot bar over which hung an enormous American flag at one end and an entire Harley Davidson at the other.

"Snort this." Donny passed me a gray metal inhaler, his thumb over the tip.

"What is it?"

"Just snort it."

"Hey, fuck you just snort it! What is it?" I was so tense I couldn't even look at him.

"It's amyl, man, it's lightweight."

"Everything's fuckin' lightweight with you, Donny. I'm startin' to think you're a little lightweight, you know?"

"You scared, Kenny?" He didn't take offense.

"No! No! I'm used to walking in on the Luftwaffe and the Hell's Angels, man. This is everyday shit for me!"

"Kenny." He touched my arm. "Just relax for a second, look around you, check out some of the people here." He nodded in the direction of a guy my size. "Take that dude. How much you think those threads set him back?"

The leather looked brand new, custom tailored. "A yard?"

"Try two. Two hundred dollars' worth of leather and chrome, man. Now who can afford that kind of dough? You get what I'm drivin' at?"

"I mean the guy's probably some lawyer, a professor. Whata you think, those are his everyday clothes? They get that shit in
boutiques
, man, joints that take Master Charge. Just look around you, man. Don't look at the leather; look at the faces. This is an upper-middle-class scene, Kenny. I guarantee you if everybody had to empty -out their wallets right now I'd have enough American Express cards to wallpaper my apartment." I scanned the joint. Some guys didn't look like they were bullshitting, but a lot did. Under a lot of motorcycle hats were a lot of kick-me faces, baby faces, scared faces, wrinkled faces. There were spindly legs and potbellied. It was as if the Junior Chamber of Commerce had dropped acid and threw a Walter Mitty party. But not all of them.

"So what we're saying here, Donny, is that half these guys are doing Disneyland in their heads."

"Shit, yeah, the tougher the front the bigger, the pussy."

"Yeah, but some of these dudes look like they'd be into sucking out your eyes through a flavor straw."

A short weightlifter wearing a gray Godspell T-shirt cruised by like a battleship on patrol.

"Well, that's the trick here. You got to figure out who's into what before it's too late. That's some of the kick, too, the danger. Just stay away from the loners, the guys who aren't so dressed up. Everybody's trying so hard to come on like street punk or working-class badass. It's all fantasy. I know one kid who ran into his father here, for Christ's sake." I leaned back trying to tell who was into what.

Donny was ducking and weaving, grooving with the music. I couldn't pick out any songs on the track. They all blended from one disco riff to another. Donny passed me the inhaler again. I took a five-second snort and the back of my head took off for California. The music took on echo chamber proportions and I couldn't hear myself laugh even though I knew I was halfway to hysteria. Donny held out his hand for a slap, grinning and grooving. The music was a bouncy bitch. My neck and ears were burning with piping hot cherry red blood.

"What the fuck is amyl anyhow?" I laughed.

"Heart attack medicine." He staggered backward clutching his heart in a mock seizure and I almost fell to the floor. We could hardly hear ourselves over the disco.

"You're a sick man, Donny."

"Ain't this place a groove?" We stared at a huge scary dude with a shaved head, shaved eyebrows, no shirt, riding pants, knee-high boots and a diagonal leather SS strap slashed across his naked outrageously pectoraled chest He slid a finger to his second knuckle up his nose. We started laughing so hard I began to retch.

"Oh, fuckin' Donny, you're in trouble." I gasped for air.

"Kenny, man, I think he likes you."

"Not me, man. You the Jew with the schnoz. He wants to fist-fuck your beak, man." The amyl was wearing off.

"Hey, later for this room. They're all posers in here. I want to show you the back room, you game?" Donny winked.

"Shit, let's go." I was still laughing as I followed Donny to the rear of the bar.

At the archway we were charged a buck to go any further. We rounded the arch into another bar with maybe a hundred and fifty guys standing in a twenty-by-thirty area—nominally a dance floor. The only light was reflected off a movie screen mounted overhead. In the movie two Boy Scouts crammed what looked like a five-pound salami up the ass of a tenderfoot. Donny bulled his way toward the center of the cluster. I didn't want to follow, but I wasn't hanging out by myself, so I moved through the crowd in a mild panic, my forearm clamped in front of my groin like a police bar. I kept my eyes trained on chests, found three square inches of space and planted myself.

I stood rigid, packed in on all sides, staring at the screen. The crowd was dead silent; faces were stony. There was some kind of movement in the crowd, but I couldn't figure out where. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed that some guys were jerking each other off. A few had slipped to their knees and were giving head. Fuck that. I wanted out. I couldn't move. The crowd had me hemmed in. Donny was nowhere to be seen. I started pushing. I felt like everybody suddenly decided to move in the opposite direction and I was bucking a tide. A hand brushed my cock. That was it. I was gone. I made it through a hundred guys in two seconds. I stood on the edge of the pack, sweating. Teeth and shirts glowed ghostlike under an ultraviolet light I hadn't noticed before. I stared into the mob. Donny emerged. "Kenny, Where'd you go?"

"Fuck you."

"Hey, relax, anybody grabs your joint, just push their hand away."

I flashed on a Jacques Cousteau film I once saw where a diver in a shark gage tapped the noses of inquisitive sharks. Donny plowed back in. Screw it. Back in I went. Somebody brushed my joint. I pushed his hand. He went away. I felt a rush of power. Pricks blossomed out of flies like speeded-up nature films. I started to gawk. A short bald guy was desperately grabbing at every cock in sight—getting slapped away, like some creep trying to grab a slow dance at a mixer and getting shot down by every girl.

Against a wall I saw Donny, his arms behind him, gazing at the screen. A big dude approached him, his broad back obscuring Donny from my view. I could see Donny's face over the guy's shoulder. Donny briefly glanced at him, then returned his attention to the movie. I had never noticed that look on Donny's face. It was one of power. Control. Hidden talents. Suddenly I Teal-ized I didn't know him. Donny Goof-off. There was a lake in his face, a deep lake of other things, other hungers, hardnesses. There was more to him than met the eye. More to everything than met the eye, and I didn't goddamn like it. The guy made some movements with his arms, then began jerking his elbow back and forth in short, rapid strokes. Donny looked down momentarily, then back at the movie. I shoved out of the crowd to the same wall I'd run for earlier.

I stood there staring into the snake pit and all I could think about was finding a caption for the picture. If the disco music hadn't drowned out the nonstop shuffling of feet and a few sporadic groans or grunts I probably would have jumped out of my skin.

"Hey, man, you keep getting lost." Donny reappeared.

"Nah, you know how I am at social gatherings. I'm shy."

"Unbelievable, right?"

"I saw some guy in there with his fly open. I would have passed him a note but I didn't want to embarrass him."

"Kenny the Riffer." Donny chuckled, wiping sweat from his eyebrow with the curl of his wrist.

"That's me." I smirked. "The grim riffer."

"Let's take a walk." We left the Stockade.

"You get done?" I tried to make the question sound casual. .

"I got done, I did somebody—the whole shot."

Getting lone didn't seem too bad, but doing somebody made me jump back. I imagined Donny on his knees in front of some guy. The image was too much and I changed channels. I no longer noticed the leather boys as we walked along the black street. They were there, but they didn't stand out so much anymore.

"How you doing, Kenny?"

"I'm good, I'm good. I got done, too."

"You did?" Donny stopped abruptly.

"Shit, yeah, I got blown by a one-legged dwarf in a motorcycle jacket. I never knew sex could be like that."

"Seriously, Kenny, how you doing?"

I didn't know how to answer that question. All I
could do was come up with one-liners. I wasn't tired anymore, and I wasn't shocked. Maybe numb, but the type of numb that came out as "oh yeah? what else is on this planet?"

"I'm just taking it all in, man. It's very bizarre, very bizarre. What time is it?"

"About two, two-thirty. You want to try one more place?"

"Why not." I had my immunity, and I knew I was going to shake Donny after the night anyhow.

Donny walked me over to a new place. The Garrison. We walked in and ba-boom! Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hundreds
of guys slammed and barraged by lights, jungle disco, nudity, heat, dungeons, come and sweat.

He pushed me through to the bar. Inches from our drinks and hands a young Spanish go-go boy, wearing construction boots and a gem-studded leather ring around his cock and balls, was strutting, prancing, mincing, twirling. Six of these nubile pubites danced around like that. Above their heads hung knotted, heavy ropes and wooden perches. They swung and flipped over the bar. They hung upside-down from the perches, flexing their assholes, the expression on their face pure Mae West. The disco pound was ear-shattering. A half-dozen large, dance-hall reflecting balls threw wild fragments of colored light like shrapnel against the floor, the walls, the paralyzed faces in the room and finally leapt up to the ceiling. The heat and packed flesh were unbelievable. On raised platforms, two ash-gray spades with the most finely chiseled musculature this side of the Alvin Ailey dancers twisted and contorted to music from outer space. One was nude except for a cowboy hat and a cock ring, the other was draped in chains. Above the pounding thunderlust shrieked a nonstop trill—a cross between a tropical bird and an ambulance siren. At first I thought it was coming from one of the go-go boys swinging wildly upside-down on his perch. I didn't know. I couldn't tell. Maybe it came from me. The walls.

Donny was standing next to me at the bar, ignoring the dancers but intensely scanning the mob.

"This is incredible, Kenny. This is the wildest! You gotta get into it! You gotta get into it! You can't
watch
it! You gotta get into it!" He was sweating like death and looked half-gone with excitement. Suddenly he grabbed my wrist and pulled me through the crowd.

"Feel the excitement, Kenny! Feel it! This is where it is!"

"This is where
what
is?" I tried to wrench my hand free but his grip was cemented with his intensity. I was stumped for a funny answer to my own question. I was riffed out. He scared me. Donny was gone in his eyes and wouldn't have heard me anyhow. Crazy son of a bitch. In a way I was .glad he was acting like this. With every moment I felt more and more distant from him and safer by myself.

He yanked me into the back room. Once again it was cluster-fuck-suck-snake-pit action under the flickering lights of two West Pointers reaming each other's assholes on a movie screen. The crowd was so tight I was gulping air. We plunged into a catacomb. Musty brick, crumbling, moldy, utter blackness. I could see shadows. People on their knees.

Donny had disappeared somewhere deeper into the darkness. I moved out into the back room. In front of me, a guy in Jockey shorts was getting blown. Older men clustered around the action, watching, heads to one side, hands behind their backs, as if they were observing a chess match in the park. In a corner an enormously fat middle-aged man masturbated—his face to the wall. A kid buried his head into somebody's buttocks and his glasses dangled on one ear. Cocks and mouths.

I moved into the crowd to break through to the front room and immediately got stuck. Movement was constant yet nobody went anywhere. I was dripping wet, stretching my throat for air, like a prehistoric animal trapped in a tar pit. I could see the dancers over by the bar spinning and swinging. On the fever-pitch disco track some spade chick came in waves, the heavy, relentless brass section stirring up images of pile-driver dicks. I was dying from the heat, drowning in invisible come. I was turned on. Motherfucker, I was turned on. I was thinking pussy but I couldn't exactly ignore where
I was. I tore through the crowd to the relatively free space of the front room. I cooled out, calmed down.

At the bar I grabbed a drink, then another. Staring at the go-go dancers, I tried to feel turned on again. Nothing. I felt pissed. Like a kid having a great time playing pinball then suddenly the machine jams. As my anger angled toward depression, I got hit with the absolute silence of the place. Despite the music, the trills, the lights, the dancers, the crotch violence, there was a total silence. I scanned the front room. Not one conversation. Eyes clicked and roamed like radar blips, but everyone was alone. La Donna. I wanted my baby. My mommy. I needed her. I loved her. Don't give me this
time
shit. There
was
no time. I was hugging myself. We could work it out. Hug-crush love blows away all the bad air. I wanted her so bad I would gladly cut it off in the morning for just one more night. Turn priest, nun, anything. Donny popped out of the crowd and crashed into me, laughing and panting.