Rough Trade (33 page)

I got out one of my cards and handed it to him. “If you ever get to New Orleans—”

“You’re from New Orleans?” A big grin split his face.

“Yeah. Why?”

He started to laugh. “I’m from Baton Rouge. I get down there, I don’t know, four or five times a year.”

I laughed. “Well, you’d better fucking call me, then!”

He kissed me again, long and hard and slow. “Count on it, stud.”

The door shut behind him and I lay back down on the bed. I had about an hour before I had to get ready to meet my friends. The bed sheets were still damp from his sweat, and I buried my face in them, to drink in his smell. I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.

Well, definitely have something to look forward to the next time I come to Manhattan,
I thought.
Chase, in a ring? Man, oh man.

And I wondered when I could arrange another trip.

Blueboy

Kelly McQuain

Sometimes he thinks the ringing exists in his ears—a lingering symptom. But shrill waves of sound rise above engines idling outside. The noise billows yellowed curtains and cracks the plaster walls of this third-story walk-up. As the pay phone rings on the street corner below, Michael cradles his own phone against his ear and knows he is haunted.

The old rotary receiver in his hand is heavy and hard enough to crack a skull. Once, years ago, Michael considered using it for that purpose. A trick from the Bike Stop had gotten too rough—biting Michael’s back, drawing blood. Michael lay pressed face-down against the mattress, hands pinned hard against his spine, helpless beneath the weight from above. As the trick rode him harder, Michael fought to free himself. He wanted to grab the phone off the nightstand and clobber the creep. Wanted to smash the son-of-a-bitch’s brains, kick him out the door and down the stairs till his sorry ass spilled into the street.

But Michael’s wrists were locked; he couldn’t. Compliance lay embedded deep inside him, a wanting to let go that he muffled like a scream. His struggling slackened. As the trick bit flesh, Michael bit his own tongue, and pictured his father standing in the room watching with disgust.

Later, it grew hard for Michael to pick up tricks from bars, even second-choice psychos, so he invited home hustlers from the corner. Never mind that sex was no longer transformative—a means of forgetting himself, and existing only as a body. Each tryst ground him down like a face ground into a mattress. Still the urge remained.

When a hustler tried to make off with his weed and rent money, Michael lashed out with rage long-held, his fists as fierce as any man-made weapon. For days he nursed bloody knuckles, fantasized about knocking the hustler’s teeth in with the phone receiver, twisting the cord around the guy’s neck and teaching him a lesson—until the fantasy produced such a hard-on that Michael grew sick of himself.

At least the Blueboy had never ripped him off. The Blueboy, with his chipped front tooth and stained T-shirt—a cornflower hue matching his eyes, fabric loose on a frame not yet full. The boy was slim-shouldered but large-footed, his body unsure what part should surge first to adulthood. He stood nervous and shivering beneath a white-blue circle of streetlight, kicking the curb in a pair of dirty Air Jordans that Michael would have thought stolen had the kid been any other hustler. But this one hadn’t been on the street long enough for his home clothes to wear out—just long enough for the Indian summer to turn, and him without a coat.

Michael had been walking home from a twenty-four-hour convenience store that October night. Across from his building at Seventeenth and Pine, traffic slowed past a parking lot where hustlers gathered, their lean forms illuminated by the red blink of the E-Z Lot sign flashing overhead. Michael watched the young men preen, teasing the cars that circled the asphalt island. Middle-aged men sizing up aging kids. Lost boys leaning toward open windows. Sharks and prey, but which was which?

As the hustlers bartered feigned innocence, the new kid standing off a ways had caught Michael’s eye. The boy studied the stance of the regulars, trying to figure out what to do, looking as scared of the cars as in need of them.

Michael shifted the bag of groceries in his arms and passed the young man slowly. The kid latched on to Michael’s unsubtle once-over, returned it. Asked to bum a smoke, his voice straining to produce a huskiness Michael knew wouldn’t last into the next sentence.

A long time ago Michael had quit taking offense at hustlers’ assumption he needed to pay for sex. Now, with his recent layoff, it pleased him to look like he could still afford to. He stood up straighter, wedged his groceries under one arm, and gave the kid a cigarette. He set his bag at his feet and lit one for himself, cupped his hand around the flame as the kid leaned in close for a light, the match illuminating the near colorlessness of the boy’s hair and the clear skin of his features. Michael studied him—mouse-eared but sweet-lipped, nose a blunt, boyish wreck. The kind of face that would always look young, and for all the wrong reasons.

The boy drew hard, his cigarette finally catching as the match burned low against Michael’s fingertips. Michael quickly tossed the match away and blew a mouthful of air on his singed skin, feeling stupid.

Want to party?
The boy’s voice cracked.

Michael nearly laughed. But he had struck out earlier at two separate bars and wasn’t in the mood for any more bullshit. He sighed and confessed the truth.
I’m broke.
His gin-and-tonic grin did the apologizing for him. He shrugged and pointed across the street.
Live over there. Got a couple joints upstairs. Half a bottle of gin.
He picked up his groceries again.
Eggs, doughnuts, juice. Want to party? Be my guest.

Without waiting for an answer, Michael stepped into the street, his path a slanting beeline toward his door. A car honked, and Michael flicked his half-finished cigarette at the guy’s windshield. His key was in his lock when the Blueboy called out from behind.

Okay.

*

Unlike others, the Blueboy let Michael fuck him. That the kid went for that, even for no money, proved he wasn’t a typical hustler. Just a lonely gay kid like Michael had been years ago. Or maybe, thought Michael, he simply enjoyed charity work. Who cared, though, about what lay inside a hustler’s heart? The part Michael was interested in lay a few organs lower.

Michael knew to be careful, ever since the day the woman at the clinic confirmed his worst fear. The bad news had coiled in his gut, snaking up to bite his heart. The same mix of fear and helplessness he had known as a child when a bird had fallen from a tree into the sandbox where he drove his Matchbox cars. Creature’s wings gray and molting, eyes a milky white. Michael threw down his toys, gathered the trembling thing in cupped hands, ran for his mother. His mind already bedding a shoebox with soft cotton, seizing the tiny dropper used for his baby sister’s medicine, wondering what to fill it with to save so tiny a life. Hopes of rescue dashed when Michael’s mother knocked the bird from his hands, its hollow bones colliding against the porch steps. She shook Michael by the shoulders.
Look at your hands.
Crawling with tiny orange spiders from the diseased bird, the insects’ legs prickling pinpoints that moved over Michael’s skin. Inside, the water scalded as she made him scrub flesh pink then pinker. She pinned his wrists against the white porcelain and poured rubbing alcohol across the rawness, reddening fingers and palms to flames. Her worry his now. All afternoon, all evening, Michael afraid to touch his face, his hair, lest contamination creep into the parts of him he knew not how to protect.

But now, alone with the Blueboy, Michael pushed the memory away, rolled on a condom then rolled on top, letting his weight sink the kid’s shoulders deep into the bed. The Blueboy lifted his feet and locked them behind Michael’s head.

Michael tried to lose himself in their closeness. Inside the Blueboy, he felt powerful and sure. His hands skimmed the subtle scallop of the boy’s ribs, skin cool to the touch but warming as blood moved fast beneath. Michael liked the feel of the boy below, the tickle of leg hair along his sides, its silken floss. Michael pushed harder.

When Michael woke the next morning, the Blueboy was gone. Michael rose and latched his door, walked to the kitchen. An empty container of orange juice sat on the counter. A faint sprinkling of confectioner sugar snowflaked the cutting board by the sink. Michael opened his fridge to find his box of Pepperidge Farm donuts half empty. Eggs untouched, Stroehmann loaf twist-tied tight. Michael looked in his cookie jar for the last of his cash and his stash. Both still there.

*

A month later, Michael saw the Blueboy again. The kid had shown up hours early for the night trade, and sat smoking cigarettes atop the low brick ledge that walled in the E-Z Lot across from Michael’s building. Michael was coming back from the pharmacy, a bag full of pills and herbal tea tucked into the pocket of his jacket. The headlights of a Saturn leaving the lot flickered across the kid’s features, leaving them aglow in the fading autumn light. The black and Bluebo
y
this time—the kid’s left eye a swollen shiner that made Michael wince in sympathy.

What the hell happened?
he asked.

The kid shrugged.

Michael sat down beside him.
I never got your name last time.

The kid twisted his mouth into a sneer.
What do you want it to be?
All pretense, though; tears welling up in his mismatched eyes.

Michael sighed.
Want some tea?

Michael got the kid’s story that night, though never his name. He remained the Blueboy, though with a few details sketched in: Since the death of his parents in an expressway car crash, he had lived with his older brother and sister-in-law in the family house in Devil’s Pocket, a rough ramshackle neighborhood in south Philadelphia tucked along the Schuylkill River. The kid had become homeless, however, at the end of summer when his brother found his journal. A guidance counselor had urged the Blueboy to use it to write out his feelings about his parents’ accident. But soon the journal became a reservoir for other things—drawings of a boy in English class, experimental sonnets. Each entry grew bolder than the last as plural pronouns gave way to “he’s” and “him’s,” incriminating words that signified a handsome jock the Blueboy had a crush on. The journal was the Blueboy’s soul until his brother discovered it, screaming how it pissed on the memory of their mother and father, a point he drummed in with fists.

He had no choice but to run away. For a while after the weather got cold, the Blueboy’s sister-in-law slipped him in the back door come nightfall, let him hide in the cellar behind the water heater. But two days ago the Blueboy’s brother had found out, gave them both a beating they wouldn’t soon forget.

Some iced part inside Michael cracked and slid free upon hearing the story. The stranger’s words awakened images of his own father. The last time Michael had seen him alive was the summer following his sophomore year of college. An older man Michael had met at a Jersey mall kept calling the house, prompting Michael’s father to ask point blank whether his only son was a faggot. Michael had snapped
yes,
the word blade-sharp on his tongue. The only thing that saved Michael from a trip to the emergency room that day was the sudden wail of his mother standing in his open bedroom door. Both Michael and his father froze as the small woman jerked her head forward then flung it back again and again against the wooden doorjamb in a vain effort to beat her son’s confession from her brain.

Now Michael’s father had lain dead two years from a burst coronary. At his sister’s request, Michael had gone to the funeral, held at the old Catholic church where he had once been an altar boy. He felt underdressed in his jeans and wool blazer, his general lack of sympathy. He was shocked to see how old his mother had grown since he walked out of her life, no light in her eyes as she stiffened inside his hug. When Michael’s sister invited him home after the service, Michael had nodded,
Sure.
But he had come by train and felt awkward asking relatives he hadn’t seen in years for a lift. No one offered. In the end he walked the half-mile back to the station alone and returned to the city without telling his mother and sister good-bye. In the month that followed, Michael’s sister called three times, offering Pollyanna clichés:
Time to heal, make a fresh start, let bygones be bygones.
But she and her husband now lived in Florida; what good would any truce do?

Michael pushed his family from his head, concentrated on the boy sitting on his bed blowing steam off his second cup of whiskeyed chamomile. Lamplight from the nightstand colored the boy’s bruised eye deep violet. Beautiful, Michael thought. He reached out, ran his finger across the wound. The boy flinched at the contact. Blue eyes skirted Michael’s own, tight black pupils dazed by clear sky, darkening to iced ultramarine.

The Blueboy exhaled slowly, fear of violence passing. He rubbed a drop of tea spilled on his denims. Michael sat down on the bed, fingertips brushing the hair above the kid’s ear. The bruise was a continent Michael could lose himself in, the boy a body welcoming comfort.

Michael wanted to weigh their needs against each other’s, but no scale existed for such things. Senses took over, bending him forward, brushing his lips over the boy’s smoother set. No need to explain himself, his father, the virus in his blood. His body its own obvious motive.