Gianni (3 page)

He probably sent this ten or so minutes ago. He never sent a second message. Maybe someone else picked him up in the time it took me to get here. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened to me — or to someone expecting to get it on with me. New York City is a speed dating event that never ends. If you hesitate for even a second, you’ll miss out as a quicker, slightly earlier bird swoops in and grabs the thick worm you were scoping. This metropolis is a meat market where the daily special isn’t on the display plate long enough to leave a drop of juice behind.

There he is.

Danny has his back to the glass doors I’m on the other side of. Damn him. Was this intentional? There’s only one table that facilitates him sitting this way. What does he have to hide? His photos were cute, but Danny could have gotten into a horrible, disfiguring car accident since then. Or maybe they were taken during the Clinton administration. Despite the innovations made in gay online dating in the past few years, the one pitfall we haven’t fixed is the crafty unattractive person. Thanks to the way he’s sitting, it will be near-impossible to size him up without allowing him to size me up simultaneously, and I prefer having the advantage.

I am so horny. My splattering of Mr. Sunglasses was purely a vengeful physical release — it didn’t satisfy the deeper, more primal itch only a hot hookup can scratch. And there’s something about this elongated digital courtship that makes sex with Danny a more enticing possibility than sex with any other guy in this bar — or on my VGL gay hookup app, for that matter. His innocent demeanor, smiley photos, and apparent ignorance of how gay men in the Tri-State area behave are making me thirsty. I guess I’m going for this.

I pull my skullcap down just above my eyes and head straight to the bathroom at the back of the bar. I don’t look back. That way he won’t see my face. He’s seen it on the daily for the past month any time he opens up Grindr. I’m sure he’d recognize me at first sight.

The bar is packed with older guys. Anyone who can see me is already staring — for multiple reasons, I’m sure. I may have fucked a few. A few may have imagined doing so while jacking off to my latest hijinks on LostBoyz. And a few, believe it or not, may have no idea who I am — they’re simply attracted to me. (Though that final segment becomes a rarer occurrence with every video.) Just before I get to the little girls’ room, an attractive, built, fiftyish dude gets up and blocks my way.

“That’s a really nice hat you’ve got there…”

“Two hundred and fifty bucks to suck my cock right now in the bathroom, take it or leave it.”

The man blinks a few times, trying to determine if I’m serious. I take this brief moment to sneak a peek over my shoulder. Danny is thoroughly engrossed in a coal gray Kindle eBook reader, his phone on the table in front of him.

He looks up.

Instantaneously I swing my head back around, cracking my neck painfully in the process. Fuck!

“You okay?” the man asks.

“Going in five, four, three…” I say, beginning to walk past him.

“But… I – I just wanted to talk…”

I turn back, a toothless smile on my face. “About hats? Then I suggest you head to the nearest haberdashery.” I silently applaud myself for remembering the word “haberdashery” in time for this zinger, a vocab word from middle school that stuck in my memory because it was so funny. “Excuse me, I really have to take a piss.”

I walk past the man, who is still flabbergasted, looking back at his friends and trying to figure out how he’s going to explain our interaction.

I select a single occupancy bathroom and latch the door behind me. The room is the cleanest I’ve ever seen in a gay bar, no doubt due to the early hour. By the end of the night, it will reek of piss, puke, and poppers and there’ll be discarded coke baggies and maybe a condom or two in the corner by the wastebasket. Right now, I am able to enjoy the smell of Lysol and fresh urinal cakes. I stuff my hat in my back pocket and do whatever emergency work I can to resurrect the former spirit of my sodden hair. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do.

When I finally get out of the bathroom, there are two boys waiting to get in. One’s blonde, the other’s not. Both work out — a lot. They head toward the single occupancy door. It’s astoundingly early for bathroom shenanigans, but maybe the dark clouds blocking out the mid-afternoon sun have put everyone in a naughty nocturnal mood.

“You wanna come in, too?” the black-haired boy asks me. Decisions, decisions. I look to the front of the room to check on Danny. He’s still sitting there, drinking something bright pink out of a glass mug, reading his Kindle. He has brown hair, spiked out in all directions.

He looks up.

And… holy fuck… his eyes… they’re just…

My ears fill with the White Sound. My God. That takes me back.

The last time I heard it was my final session with The Doc, before I revealed myself to Mommy and Daddy. He loved the white sound. He said it created a safe, neutral space for sharing my deepest feelings. It also may have been because he had two young sons in the house connected to his office and didn’t want his patients to be interrupted by their manic screaming.

The white sound. That’s the best he could name it: white. It always sounded like what you’d hear if you got dragged up into the top of the largest wave in the ocean. The last thing a surfer would hear before the undertow dragged him down forever.

I close my eyes and all around me, there’s just white. Swirling jets of vanilla and milk and cotton. Like the sound you hear in that split second when you drive out of a tunnel and back into the open air, but it lasts so much longer. It’s sweet and soft and thick, entering me and filling me up.

I cum.

Fuck.

“You okay, queen?” The black-haired boy looks at me like I just got hit by a car… I don’t even know how long I’ve been standing here doing nothing.

“I’m fine. Have fun, boys.”

“Maybe next time, eh, Gianni?”

Spotted. Like I said, that happens a lot.

“Sure,” I say, leaving them for a cluster of guys up against the bar.

I blew a pretty sizable load in my pants, which is shocking considering the one I shot less than an hour ago. My pants stick to my leg. What the fuck was that? My head swims for just a second. I’ve only ever done acid once, months ago, but that experience is the closest thing I can compare to this. A friend told me that once you do acid, it stays in you forever… you can have an acid flashback at any point in time. Is that what this was?

Maybe I’m just hungry. I don’t tend to eat on the day of a shoot — or the night before. It helps with the cleaning out process and keeps my abs looking Grecian. I know my priorities.

There’s no visible stain on my pants. Fate must be smiling down on me. My legs shake — whether or not they’ll hold me up when I walk across the bar is going to be the mystery of the day.

And Danny just sits there. Drinking his cosmo or whatever it is. He’s been sucking at that straw for an hour, but he’s not running out of booze. Or maybe he ordered a second, third, and fourth cocktail, packing them away like he’s sponsored by Stoli. He’s cute. Cuter than his photos, thank God. Not cute in the way I’d traditionally find attractive. He’s got a relatively large head. He has a mustache. A mustache! I thought only Burt Reynolds and 1980s porn stars were allowed to pull that sort of thing. His big eyes and naturally attractive eyebrows keep drawing my attention to the upper eyes-to-nose triangle on his face.

There’s something very baby about this boy. He can’t be much older than eighteen… and his push broom ‘stache does nothing to age his looks beyond twenty or so.

Some other guy walks over and speaks to him. Danny shakes his head violently, as if coming out of a trance. All the while his eyes just seem to grow and grow. The man tries to sit down and finally the kid asserts himself, shaking his head definitively. The guy humbly accepts his shoot-down and heads for the exit.

Nice try, cowpoke. This one’s mine.

“Hi,” I say before Danny even has a chance to look up.

He’s dumbstruck. Off-guard.

“You’re Danny, right?”

“S-sorry,” he stutters. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“And yet you’re still here?” I smile.

“Well, the trains at this hour are insane, and my book was getting good.”

“What are you reading?
Game of Thrones
?
Harry Potter
?”

“
Faggots
?” he asks timidly.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh! No. The book is called
Faggots
, it’s by—”

“Don’t care,” I interrupt. “I’m not big into reading, more into drinking. So let’s talk about that. What are you drinking?”

“A cranberry vodka.”

Shit. I hate when people call it that. It makes them sound like nursery schoolers asking for chocolate milk. It tempts me to ask if they’d like some crayons so they can scribble on their napkins while the grown-ups talk.

“Anyway, I’m Danny.”

“Obviously. And I’m Gianni,” I say, eyeing some cute guy walking by before realizing he’s the one who just invited me into the bathroom. I’m already regretting the decision to turn him down. Danny probably would have waited here reading his gay book while I took care of business.

“Yeah… can I get you something to drink?”

“Maybe. What are you drinking?”

“Cranberry vodka,” he repeats.

“I’ll take a
vodka cranberry
.”

“Okay. I can open a tab, if—”

“On second thought, let me try it first to make sure I like it.” I seat myself opposite him and drink intently out of his straw. His ears turn red. I stare right into his eyes and curve my eyebrows up and out. I can see the self-control draining out from under him, splashing onto the floor. He really is as innocent as I thought. Is this the first time he’s ever been hit on? In five seconds I’ve consumed more of this beverage than Danny did over the past hour.

“They – they have a two-for-one Happy Hour thingy, if you’re interested,” he says as he starts to get up.

“No.” I grab ahold of his forearm and pull him back down into his seat. “I’m fine with this. Here, you finish it.”

I slide the watery cocktail across the table, back to him. He stares at the straw like it’s pleading with him to reconsider taking the last few sips. Then he realizes how hypnotized he looks and feigns nonchalance as he stoops his head down and draws the remainder of the drink out of the glass.

“Thanks,” he says as he finishes what’s left.

“Thanks for what? It’s your drink.”

He pauses for a second, then laughs at himself. Apparently the hours of practice that went into his date persona are proving ineffective.

“I… have no idea. I was really nervous about meeting you, and…”

Oh boy. “I need a cigarette,” I confess, since it’s suddenly so true. I get up and head for the door without looking back… though I’d love to catch the ten iterations of confusion that flash across his face as I walk away. Finally I toss my head over my shoulder and stare back as I reach the exit. His jaw is almost on the table, his eyes wide and full of hurt. “Well? Aren’t you going to come out with me?”

He brightens. It’s like his entire life has just regained its meaning.

“Sure. Let me just get my…” He grabs his charcoal jacket and drapes it over his broad shoulders as he rises. Damn. This boy looks like a top if I ever did see one. Suddenly all I can see is what he would look like curled over me with my legs wrapped around his neck. I almost laugh. Has this kid ever been naked with another boy? Maybe a mutual jack-off in his junior high locker room showers. Maybe. I don’t think he’s gone much further than that. If we end up messing around, it’ll be pure fat-free vanilla Baskin Robbins, I’m sure. If I even let him peek at my kinkier side, he’d run screaming from the city and never come back. Whatever. He’s in my crosshairs now. I am helpless but to fuck the hell out of him.

It seems to have gotten a trillion degrees colder outside, but not cold enough to turn the rain into snow. The drops collect just beyond the edge of the sidewalk in dirty little puddles that slowly ebb their way toward the sewer. Using my hands as an all-purpose shield, I light my cigarette and look at Danny.

“You smoke?” I ask him, the cigarette bouncing between my lips.

“Yeah.” His eyes follow my cigarette like it’s the ball in one of those sing-along videos for kids.

I hold my pack in the air. “You want one?”

“Sure? Yeah. Thanks.”

I hand him my pack of Camel Crush and watch as his shaking hand finally flips the top and produces one. He sticks it in his mouth. As I hand him the lighter, he laughs and the cigarette almost drops out.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well… I usually have my friends light them for me.” More nervous laughter.

“What does that mean?”

“I mean,” he gestures oddly. “I mean they, like, light the cigarette in their mouths and then give it to me.”

This is going to be a riot. An over-dramatic sigh escapes my lips as I hand him my lit cigarette and take the one from his mouth to light and smoke for myself. One puff and the kid barely stifles his cough.

“You don’t smoke.”

“No,” he defends himself desperately. “No, I do. I’m just used to lights.”

“Gotcha,” I say, reaching over and crushing the center of the cigarette, popping the flavor packet thing and filling his mouth with the minty taste of menthol.

“Oh, wow. That was unexpected.”

“You’ve smoked, like, half a cigarette in your life, haven’t you?”

“No, really. I smoke more than that. Why is it such a big deal to you?”

I don’t answer, because it isn’t.

“So now what?” I ask as I blow cigarette smoke into his face.

“Now what, what?” He’s holding the cigarette awkwardly between his middle and pointer fingers. It’s ashing really quickly. “I thought we were smoking.”

“And when we finish with that, where do we go from here?”

“Well, I get a free drink, since I bought one while I was waiting for you…”

Wrong answer. This is going my way and it’s going my way now. I’m not sticking around at some has-been gay bar all night just to go home without getting my rocks off. That’s wasted time. I can take two clients in an evening and head to Vegas with the earnings, if I so choose. If Danny’s chastity belt ends up being too tight to get off tonight, I want enough evening left to explore other options. I throw my cigarette into the dirty puddle beyond the sidewalk and snatch his out of his mouth to finish it off.