Shuck (14 page)

He cums into his own face.

End credits.

A burst of applause and the pop of Möet and Chandon, one of those giant magnums only a rich gay couple would buy. Ted and JohnSilas handed out rolls of hundreds and slow-danced with each other. Someone put on the Pet Shop Boys' “Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money).”

My Viagra fever had by then turned into this weird kind of ecstasy flush. I took my plastic champagne flute into the tanning bed and flipped the mauve lights on, hoping to decompress and stop shaking. I stuffed my cash into the dick sock so it wouldn't get burned, closed my eyes, and retreated to a place where people weren't constantly fucking each other in the presence of money. I had to imagine that I was alone.

Now, with
Homework Hard-on 101
in my repertoire, I don't have to answer code 0020s or code 0099s anymore, and especially not code 0013s.

Maybe Derek was right. Maybe I
have
moved up in the food chain.

Having a sex life is a full-time job. I haven't written in forever. Between you and me, have I had the time?

It doesn't feel as bad as I thought it would. Yes, I had gone too far with Trey, but I could sense him conspiring with me to rewrite the boundaries of what was acceptable. If I hadn't felt him surrender his body to its own undoing, I might've held myself back, reconsidered
my brutality, or pulled out altogether.

Just so you know.

A typical entrance. I walked into the loft and was greeted by Derek's back.

I figured that he was either painting or ignoring me. He had been acting distant lately, limiting his half of our conversations to a few perfunctory words, sometimes pretending I wasn't even there. He started to cook smaller and smaller meals until the leftovers I usually reheated disappeared altogether.

We'd worked out an unspoken agreement. He'd buy me anything I wanted, and I'd leave my latest story lying around somewhere for him to suck inspiration from. It had to have a young male protagonist experiencing some sort of beautiful agony. It had to be visceral and well written. I thought about buying him a stack of Dennis Cooper novels instead.

“Hey,” I said.

No answer. Wink and Nod hadn't drawn in a while and had gone into semi-retirement. They smiled their ageless smiles at me, huddled against the outside walls of their TraceBox™, a structure they apparently couldn't bear to leave.

I heard a streaming sound, the sound of piss landing in a plastic bottle.

“You're just in time to see the birth of a new color, Booger. Now what would you call it?”

I peeked over his shoulder and squinted at the cloudy yellow.

“It looks like rancid honey.”

He looked pleased by that, wrote it on a strip of masking tape, and labeled the half-quart Poland Spring water bottle.

“It's part of the collection. Go on, have a look at my latest before they go bad.”

“What are you doing with these?”

“I've realized that there are colors, great ones, actually, that've yet to be invented. And I have every reason to believe that my kidneys are involved in this.”

The brick wall under the factory windows had grown thick with piss-filled plastic bottles, each of them a slightly different tint of Derek. The color experiments were impressive:

Sometimes when Derek left the apartment to go off on one of his art adventures, to scour the city for a color he knew had gone out of stock years ago, I would be left alone with his wall of piss. I'd scan these traces of him to analyze if he'd been eating properly, or drinking too much coffee, or getting enough iron.

On pathetic days, I'd try to match up a particular pissing to a particular day when we had argued, to see if the contents of his bladder could help me win the argument retroactively.

Other days, I'd hold the bottles up to the sunlight and look for
answers to the tough questions:

Why was he so hard to reach after all this time? Why was he protecting the distance between us? Did jealousy actually run through him like poison when I told him about the guys I fucked for money? Where was this relationship going? What did we get from each other that we couldn't get on our own? Our relationship bred these questions prolifically.

In the bed that we would always magically end up in, like a fairy tale, I turned to Derek.

“What?” he said.

“Have you ever wondered why we don't have sex?”

Wink and Nod were silent, though I wanted them to make some noise right then, some bumps, anything.

“We don't have to,” he said.

He kissed me on the forehead.

“Jaeven, I worry about you. You've been acting strange these days ... Distant.”

One afternoon, a bottle of murky pee gave me some insight: maybe only the purest relationships were able to survive without the element of sex.

I've seen unions defined by fucking, where marathon sessions were stand-in weddings, where torn condoms meant broken hearts. Maybe Derek and I have something pure enough to keep us floating above these body politics, immune to what sex can do to two people.

Or maybe I'm just crazy.

Our innocence is still frustrating. I can hardly stand his dry kisses,
our hand-holding, our makeshift pajamas, but it's too late to replace this tenderness with desperate gropes in the dark.

The noise would destroy the silence, our bond.

“When you page me excessively,” I say to Phil on the phone, “the massages become less and less inspired.”

“I'm not calling for a massage. Congratulations.”

“What for.”

“Are you ready for this, Jaeven?”

“Yeah, what?”

“Word on the street is ... you're the new Boy New York.”

I stare at the receiver.

“Well, fuck me,” I say.

“You know that's not what we do,” Phil says and hangs up.

Definition of a New York City hustler: A young man who undresses, looks pretty, and performs sexual favors for money. Typically callous, jaded, and rough around the edges. Torn jeans a plus. Not supposed to get affectionate, no matter how gooey he feels on the inside. Is usually available at all hours of the night but never before noon, leads a double life, and does whatever drugs his consorts want to see him do. Loathes other hustlers with unbounded passion.

He's paid $100-$700 (no tax) for a session from one to four hours, plus the following perks: anonymity, free taxi or limo service, free booze, free food, free drugs, and referrals.

A week in the life of one such professional, after being anointed Boy New York:

Wore Jack Nicholson sunglasses. Stopped by the Gem Spa newsstand to see which of my covers had come out.
Inches
was a keeper, especially with my head (hope it doesn't get too big) blocking out the N-C-H, and the caption “10 Inches of Monster Meat.” The dangling cigarette made me look terminally sexy, but why did they have to exaggerate? I took twelve copies to autograph in clubs and make money with, but the guy at the cash only charged me for eleven, giving me that leering stare I've come to know. I signed his copy and bounced out.

Popped in on the Toilet Böys' webcast talk show to drool over Sean (meow). Phil was there, too, and he gave me some ridiculous leather duds to wear. He's so out of touch sometimes, thinking that people could see us on Internet radio. Sean grilled me about my body and it gave me a boner. I imagined him plowing my ass, churning me inside out and coating my guts with cum.

I was there to sign copies of the
Honcho
cover (hence the leather). They were auctioning them off to listeners who could answer questions about my life, and I got fancy by sticking a pen in my foreskin and autographing with my dick. One lucky winner of a signature was a guy who emailed in a description of what my shit looked like when I forgot to flush. Asshole. I think I know who it was, too.