Ode to Lata (28 page)

We were driving to the Hollywood Spa.  There, with a sterile white towel wrapped around the waist and a key ring fastened around the wrist, we hoped to find sexual mates for the night.  Although bathhouses usually made me feel uncomfortable with the expected bodily exhibition, I’d drunk enough to override the inhibition.

As the car trudged along the traffic of onward-bound nocturnes, I leaned up to hug the front seat, my wrists nuzzling in the back of Kitty’s neck, and looked out restlessly at the trade of hustlers.  Some of them stood chatting in little coteries, others in deliberate solitude to appear more accessible, and a couple of them leaned into windows of cars before being extended the invitation to hop in. It was a particularly busy summer night.  Outside the air conditioning of the car was a warm and slothful breeze that enabled many to dress scantily and to properly display their wares.  As my eyes drifted over them I thought, how easy would it be to just pluck out one of these men and buy my sex tonight instead of enlisting in that scour at the bathhouse.  What’s the difference?  We’re still doling out cash to taste human flesh.  We still end up paying if not in currency then, in time with guilt.  The morning after, popping antioxidants and painkillers to assuage the previous night’s drunkenness, the three or four men became a mental sludge.  Looking out through my kitchen window with a cup of coffee, the sun harsh and unforgiving only seems to accentuate my feeling begrimed in the night.  So much easier to just invite one of these men back home or to flip through the pages of the
Frontiers
squashed between me and Adrian in the backseat and summon one of them.

“They oly givin’ massage, no the sex, you silly!” Kitty said when I vocalized this.

“Don’t be stupid, Kitty,” I said.  “Massage and sex are like fish and chips.  You don’t buy one without the other!”

“Hmm,” said Adrian.  “I’m going to have to tell Burke Williams that the next time I’m there!”

“Ooh,” said Kitty, delighted.  “I have gif’ certificates from there.  Now I tell them, after massage, before you kicks my ass out, to play with it!”

As we made out trek I even thought about Nelson, something that I rarely did anymore.  Of what it would’ve been like to still have him on nights like this.  The comfort of knowing, even while rollicking around town with my so-called sistahs, that there was someone at home to take me in his arms and feed my hunger with his flesh.  I wondered, despite the integrity that burned even brighter since that faithlessness, if it was not perhaps better to go back to him.  If the consolation of having someone was not ultimately worth the assaults on dignity.

It was during the custody of these thoughts that my eyes fell upon Bill.  He was standing in the middle of the block with an orbit of space around him.  At either ends of the same block were other workers, but he had chosen to stand apart from all of them, in the center no less.  Our eyes locked gazes and he smiled at me – a smile I’m sure was paraded for the benefit of all driving by him – and I was so undone by his beauty, so flummoxed by the juxtaposition of a man who looked like him standing there on that street, that all rationale flew out of me.  It was an irrevocable moment. One where, while drinking in this vision of him in a nimbus of lamp light, everything around me dissolved.  Suddenly, I had to look again into those eyes.  To touch him.  To make contact with him.  A kind of feeling tantamount only to the rapture I felt at hearing brief strains of a music score.

“Let me out of the car!” I demanded.  “I have to get out!”

“We no there yet!” Kitty said.

“You okay? You want to throw up or something?” Adrian said.

“No, no, I’ve got to talk to that guy!” I said, pointing out the car.

They shot me an appalled look.

Despite our intentions to renew memberships and rent lockers and rooms in which to lure strangers to fuck us, an interest in picking up a prostitute was heresy.  When I was undeterred, they began to moan about how it was already past two-thirty in the morning and that we should’ve been there long before now.

“Ali, we have to get there now, before all those stupid queens from WeHo file up,” said Frankie, one of the new recruits to our group.

“Yeah, and then it takin’ forevers to get in!” added Kitty.

“Sweetie,” said Adrian gently.  “Why waste your time with this when there are all those other men waiting there?”

But I knew with an amazing degree of conviction and clarity that there was no other man for me on that night.  I would be unable to bring myself to accept any other.  My desire for him felt absolute and unsubstitutable.  In a way that addicts have the singular craving for their drug or a prognosticator secures the essential ingredient for a forecast, I knew that for the kind of night I longed for, the quality of experience that I sought, this man was the indispensable component.

“I don’t care about those other men,” I said and started to shake Kitty’s shoulders until the car began to swerve and everyone became nervous. “I want to get out!  Let me out!”

Granting me just a few minutes, they pulled over to let me out.  I dodged cars to cross the street and stood breathlessly in front of him on the pavement.  Once there, I realized with an unmaskable look of nervousness, that there were no rehearsed words to deliver.  It was not a moment I had encountered before, nor one I could’ve prepared for.  In the bars, under a firmament of painted lights, the sound of thrumming beats and the cacophony of contrived conversation, where elixirs filled plastic cups and cigarette smoke whirled into the ceiling, I knew how to behave and what to say to the guy perched on the bar stool next to me, or the guy squeezing to get through to the bar.  Here, under an open sky of obscure stars, where I could actually hear my panting breath even above the disgruntled engines of cars inching forth, I had no script and no words.  It all felt too real.  I feared that the wit and composure that I’d been known for would betray me.

Up close, this handsome Latino looked even more startling.  He possessed all the attributes of physical beauty that gay men, at least in the poster-boy culture of L.A., pursue and adulate.  Bill’s poise and bemusement, instead of the impatience that a hustler anticipating trade might cast on an inexperienced, flippant procurer like myself, made it look like he didn’t belong on that street.  His unjaded demeanor – eyes looking at me without any contrived sexuality and an almost gentle smile that acknowledged my discomfort – was perhaps his unique talent.

Bill appeared as if he had accidentally stumbled onto that section of Santa Monica Boulevard instead of claiming that region for the sole purpose of his vending.  He made it look like I was nothing more than a friendly nocturnal visitor saying hello instead of a potential buyer.

Of course, the notion that just because he didn’t evince the shopworn aura of a boulevard hustler meant he didn’t belong there was preposterous.  As if the beautiful have no place in the realm of such self-diminishment.

When I opened my mouth to speak, I was almost incoherent with embarrassment.  Removed from the womb of the Mustang and slowly emerging from the inducement of alcohol, I began to feel awkward standing there. I managed to introduce myself, at which point he immediately put me at ease by saying, “Like Ali Baba?”

“Yeah,” I said with a laugh.  “And those in the car are my forty thieves.”

“Hi,” he said, accepting my handshake firmly.  “Name’s Bill.”

“I saw you from the car and I just… I just had to come over and talk to you.”

“That’s cool.”

“You know, I’ve never… done this before,” I said, unable to look him in the eye.

“Oh?  And what is it you think you’re doing?” he asked, amused.

“I don’t know.  What I mean is, I’ve never acted so impulsively, you know, jumping out of a car to talk to some stranger?  I’m not sure I know
what
I’m doing.”

“Hmm.  But you know what I’m doing, right?”

“Well, yeah.  I suppose I do.”

“I’m working,” he said, just in case.

I glanced around us, drinking in the whole scene, having looked onto it and never having stood within its vortex.  I crossed my arms across my chest, suddenly feeling conspicuous, as a voice inside my head (one that I would continue to ignore) said,
Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?

“So, what are you guys up to?”

“We’re actually on our way to some place else.”

“Where?” he asked and his voice lowered intimately.

“Oh…to some place called the Holiday Spa or something.”

“You mean the Hollywood Spa?”

I nodded as innocently as I could pretend to.  “Yeah, I think that’s the place.”

“No need to feel embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?  I’m not embarrassed!  Why would I be?”

He smiled, looking down at his feet.  “You just look a little embarrassed.”

Was he referring to my embarrassment over the Hollywood Spa or my being there with him?  “Nah, I’m fine,” I assured.

Right then, a car careened around the corner and pulled up a few feet away from us. The driver, an older Caucasian man, stuck his head out of the window and cried out Bill’s name, cutting rudely into our world.

Bill raised his hands emphatically at him.  “Just leave me alone, okay?”

“Bill, come on, don’t do this to me, man!”

“Look, just leave me the fuck alone!  What part don’t you understand, man?  I don’t want to deal with this right now!”

“C’mon, Bill.  I’m begging you!  Just let’s… let’s just talk about this, okay?”

“Shit!  There’s nothing to talk about.  Just go!”  Bill said.  He turned his back on the driver and looked back at me in exasperation.  “I can’t believe this shit!”

“Who
is
that?”

He shook his head.  “He won’t leave me alone… ”

“But who is he?”

That’s when the driver turned feral. “Who the fuck is
that
you’re talking to?  Hey, who the fuck are you?” he screamed out at me.

Startled, I stepped back and Bill, infuriated, charged over to the car.  “Just fuck off, man!  I told you not to bother me!”

“Who is that fucker?  Are you thinking of going with him?”

“What if I am?  It’s none of your damn business, okay?”

“Who is he?”

“Just fuck off, man!”

“Bill, please,” he became plaintive.  “Just get in the car, okay?  We’ll work this out, man.”

“I don’t wanna’ work it out!”

Since this driver was holding up traffic, cars had piled up behind him and were honking, obviously aggravated.  Someone even shouted, “Move it, you goddamn drunk queen!”

“Bill, please, just get in the car.”

“No!  I’m not dealing with this!  Fuck, Andy, I’m so sick of this!” Bill said and walked back up to me.

Unwillingly, the driver started to roll away but only after emitting a heart-wrenching cry.  I felt flustered, not knowing what to make of the incident, and even felt a little sad for the driver, but I was not discouraged.  If anything, this episode in all its disturbing drama, only steeled my interest in Bill.

I felt sure that the driver hadn’t completely gone away just yet.  Such obsessive eruptions, I knew from experience, demanded much more to be tranquilized.  I would have to act fast.  Across the street, my friends became apprehensive about all the commotion.  They started honking at us impatiently, and Kitty sprouted out the window and threatened to leave me there, his voice struggling over the clamor of blaring music from other revving cars.

I turned to Bill with concern.  “Who was that?”

“Oh, man,” he said, shaking his head.  “Just some guy.”

“Just some guy?  That looked like more than ’just some guy’!”

“I work for him.”

“
Work
for him?”

“Yeah,” he replied.  “He runs a modeling agency.  Have you heard of Andy Jacobs?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the owner.  That’s Andy.  We were together once.”

“Together?”

“Yeah.”

“Not too long ago, it seems.”

Bill shrugged as if that was unimportant.  Such cruelty in him, even if justified by the nuisance of an embittered ex-lover, bothered me.  Maybe because I could relate to the driver.  Memories of Richard and the jealous fits that I’d felt driven to throw were still fresh in my mind.  Mingled with that faint perturbation, however, was also the perverse joy of being in the other position.  Of being the muscled blonde whom Richard had always forsaken me for. 

“The guy’s a psycho!” he said, his lips deforming into a sneer.

I smiled to myself thinking, Not one bigger than me, he isn’t.  “Well, that definitely makes him more than ’just some guy’!”

“Yeah.  Anyway, I told him it was over, you know? And now he just won’t let me be with anyone else.”

“But
this
,” I said. 
“This
is much more than just
being
with someone else.”

“Well, this is part of what we do at the modeling agency,” he said nonchalantly.  “We just don’t do it from the street, that’s the only difference.  Anyway, I wish he’d leave me alone.”

“Then maybe he likes having a say in whom you go with?”

“Who the fuck cares?  He doesn’t own me.  I’m not gonna be there much longer, anyway.”