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  “Fuck all y’all”

  ACT I

  ARMY OF LOVERS

  IN THE MORNING

  I WOKE UP ALARMED. I didn’t know where I was at first. It was that feeling of waking up someplace foreign and being like, “What the fuck?!” But then you look to the left and you’re like, “Oh, wait, that handsome guy.”

  It’s comforting to wake up with someone this attractive, and I’m sure he was thinking the same thing, but I also couldn’t go back to sleep because his sun-spanked disco ball was flashing high beams all over the room.

  His body was covered in them; even the cast on his leg was spotted with light.

  Now, I had come in his room the afternoon before. His roommate was having an after-kiki at their house. She was shit-faced and said, “Let’s meet my roommate, y’all are probably gonna fuck.”

  We got high as fuck and covered every subject from nu jazz to childhood trauma.

  I got in his bed and he motioned me closer and put me in a bear hug; I was taken aback because it had been a very long time since someone had touched me like this, let alone a really hot person in a cast.

  “I’m going to leave you guys alone a second,” my friend said, cocaine ring on her nose. He pulled me in tighter and I pulled off my glasses. His arms around me, I felt my dick get hard and went with the first action in my head.

  “I should probably go now,” I said.

  “I’ll be here all night,” he said.

  I made it home but—Oh shit. I left my glasses.

  “Come back, please—now,” he said when I called to see if they were there.

  I was quickly back in his arms and this time he was on painkillers. He pushed my head down. I know for a fact that the night before, when I was in the midst of a cocaine and vodka–induced tirade, I explained that I don’t like sucking dick. But I guess he changed my mind. I heard his voice. It was like an angel sighing. Or maybe like a dude on painkillers getting a blow job? All these vowel-dominant (though otherwise unintelligible) moaning sounds, punctuated with “yeah,” “more,” and “that feels good, dude.” After half an hour or so, I left to attend a reading on the other side of town.

  “Come back after?” he asked.

  “Again?” I said, beginning to feel like someone actually needed me.

  “Yes, again,” he answered.

  I went home and rinsed my ass out and then went to the reading and beelined to his door, to my knees, straddled over him.

  “Get it in there,” he said, followed by more vowel-dominant (yet otherwise unintelligible) moaning.

  After he came, I dismounted and asked if he wanted to eat fried chicken. “Yes. Whiskey, too,” he demanded.

  Painkillers and whiskey—I liked his style.

  “You’re my boyfriend now—go get the food.”

  “I’m broke, and I don’t feel like walking, plus it’s cold outside and the fog just rolled in,” I said, thinking that I had just successfully sidestepped my first duty as a fake boyfriend.

  “Look in the closet, take the vintage blue Patagonia jacket—you can have it, in fact. My debit card is in my wallet. Take it, the PIN is five-six-nine-eight, then go to the basement and grab my bike. It’s the chrome Bianchi Pista … and hurry the fuck up,” he said, giggling.

  I followed all his orders and was cruising down the street in his jacket, on his bike, with his money. I was gagged over the bike, as I am a vintage-bike junkie and Bianchi doesn’t even make chrome Pistas anymore—I was gliding through the foggy nighttime feeling like the Silver Surfer, only on a bike.

  The fried chicken place was a ten-minute ride away but first things first: How much money did this fool have in his checking account?

  I stopped at the ATM and typed in his PIN, five-six-nine-eight, and pressed Balance: $80,690.78. Like wait, what the fuck?! After the transaction ended, I put the card back in the machine again and did it all over to make sure I had seen it right—and I had.

  I pedaled onward to the restaurant, thinking in my head, Like, what the fuck does that dude DO?

  A litany of questions sprang to mind. Why does he live in that crappy room? Why does he live in that crappy apartment? If I stole twenty bucks from his account would he even notice or be bummed? Like, did he break his leg skiing in Tahoe or doing some other rich people shit? And most importantly, Should I try to marry him?

  I could not recall the last time my bank account or the bank account of anyone I knew closely held more than, say, four thousand bucks—and this was his checking, no less. What the fuck did his savings look like?

  I quickly put it out of my head because thinking about money is gross and also the variables seemed too vast. You can’t make any guesstimates about someone else’s life without knowing them, and honestly I didn’t know my fake boyfriend at all.

  I biked past a storefront and caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the glass window. I looked like boyfriend material, or at the very least like some asshole who graduated from some WASP-ass college on the East Coast. But I knew I was an impostor underneath, which also turned me on because crime is sexy. But this was his expensive vintage Patagonia, his expensive vintage Bianchi, and his debit card. Dear god, was this how he felt every day? Like a capable, normal adult?

  The woman at the restaurant who took my order asked for my ID when I presented his debit card, and I said, cool as a cucumber, “Oh, it’s not my card, it’s my boyfriend’s, he broke his leg and I have to do, like, everything for him now.” She didn’t even blink before she let me sign the check. Did she notice how much I was glowing inside when I said “my boyfriend”? Fake or not, something about saying “my boyfriend” just felt good.

  I biked the food back to his apartment.

  I did not steal twenty dollars from his well-endowed-ass bank account.

  I made it back to his house and soon after, the night got blurry. Morning was crisp yet hungover.

  I had stared at him so long he actually opened his eyes; about three beats later I asked, “Does this mean we’re boyfriends now?”

  “Yes, exactly,” he said, cracking the fuck up.

  I kissed him on the lips and got dressed quickly so that I could be late for work.

  “I like boys that are broken like you—you’re dependent and can’t get away,” I teased.

  He rolled his eyes, like, so hard. “What are you gonna do when my leg heals?”

  “Fuck if I know, break it again?” I said, trying to hold a straight face.

  Just then, whatever bastard cloud that was covering the sun lifted, and light shined through the window brighter than before. It hit the disco ball, and bright specks of light were everywhere again.

  There was the superstitious part of me that wanted to take it as a sign—This guy, this guy will be my new boyfriend—but immediately something in my head said, Probably not.

  I went with my second instinct and turned to leave.

  “I’ll be here
all day. Will you come back to me, please?” he asked, looking me dead in the eye.

  “Yes. I’ll come back whenever you want me to,” I said, and left.

  HOOKER BOYS (PART ONE)

  1

  My writer’s block had kicked my ass something terrible and I couldn’t break out of it. I watched each and every night disappear from under me in limitless fountains of vodka. One afternoon it felt like thunder had struck me.

  Vitamin C … I need a liter, I said to myself.

  I had woken up destroyed and feeling the sunlight. It was brutal, like nature was reminding me that I was a bad person. Truth told I wasn’t a bad person—I was just hungover. These feelings come up sometimes.

  Now, I admittedly was in a bad way. It was noticeable. Friends were having conversations about it. I had lost jobs. The only redeeming aspect was that most of my friends were as fallible as I was so I endured no menacing judgment, but I felt it. I knew it was happening without someone having to say it to me. My inner compass was at a very loud volume.

  Some friends had died and some were disappearing, having babies and going away, getting old and weary and going away, or simply going crazy in secret and going away—it all had the same effect. The climate felt colder.

  I, being sober for the first time in six hours, was feeling anxious. I needed relief. I wanted a hooker.

  I was still technically a handsome man—or, rather, my mother often told me I was handsome—but I wanted more control. I wanted to pay someone for a specific experience at a specific time and after we were done we would specifically know it was over. I wanted a hooker.

  I knew him from years before; he lived in Los Angeles now. He was Hollywood handsome yet not out of reach. He was on TV, he campaigned for Black Rights, and he also dressed like a hooker from outer space.

  “How much?” I texted.

  “Well, for you, just ’cause you’re you, 200 bucks,” he texted back.

  He came over in a leather jacket and cheetah-print bike shorts. I, though being what I considered a “groovy” person, winced a little. I wanted him to come over in straight-boy drag like I knew he did with all his other clients. I wanted him to pretend that his name was, like, Chad or Jonah, but instead he came in and looked at me with these warm eyes, a look that said, “I know I’m being paid to have sex with a friend.”

  His doggy-style game was so on point; his dick and technique were also of note, like, you could tell he fucked for a living. I bottomed like a porno bottom to impress him; I tried to impress him to the point where I was like, “Wait—I’m paying him, shouldn’t he be impressing me?”

  I came three times.

  I rolled over on the bed and looked him in the eye. It was that deep, weird, “You’re really pretty” look, like you’re looking at something both far away and right in front of you. He picked up on it.

  “You want a drink really bad, huh? I can tell,” he said.

  “The world is a lot clearer with alcohol,” I said. We both laughed, though the statement hit a bit closer to home than I wanted it to.

  We started kissing again.

  I asked him kindly not to tell any of our mutual friends that this had happened. I also asked if this would warp our friendship, like, from here on out to eternity would I have to pay him, or could there be a random tryst thrown in every once in a while?

  “Sure,” he said, though I couldn’t quite distinguish which part of the question he was saying “sure” to.

  2

  Mike was the first hooker R.J. had ever lived with. They were both nineteen and living in this warehouse in the Tenderloin. Various factors had brought both boys there, a dizzying mix of a general lust for adventure and troubled homelives that needed to be escaped from, and where else would one live in San Francisco for five hundred bucks? It was 2002 and both of their times had come to go big, make mistakes, and attempt adulthood.

  Mike was gay as fuck but for some reason was dating this girl who he lived with in a single-room occupancy in the warehouse. R.J. suspected the love was fueled by a mutual passion for methamphetamines, and he was right. Mike and R.J. were sharing their usual cup of stale coffee and splitting a croissant when Mike explained how the girl, Lisa, paid the rent and how he turned tricks to buy both of them speed. “It works out perfectly,” said Mike, and he hurried R.J. along out of the café and on to their next appointment.

  R.J. had a profound respect for Mike; though they were the same age, Mike was way older in his heart. R.J. had just moved to San Francisco from some sleepy nowhere place in New England without prior access to things like drugs and sexual danger. He would walk through the city, and even on quiet days, his heart would pound with excitement.

  Anything could happen here, he would often say to himself.

  Mike had grown up just outside the city without much parental nagging about his whereabouts or activities. He had been whoring his way through S.F. since his early adolescence and was now bestowing his knowledge on his newfound brother R.J. That very morning, for instance, Mike instructed R.J. to not wear those short shorts with his ass and front pockets hanging out.

  “You have to dress like a boy, otherwise we won’t get money,” Mike said, rubbing an obscene amount of Old Spice deodorant under his armpits.

  The two had been walking through the Tenderloin asking any man who looked older than thirty for spare change and bus transfers. Mike was good at talking to people and getting things he wanted from them. R.J. let Mike do all the talking. They had some five bucks in change now and Mike explained to R.J., “You know what I like? Change! And, like, if I’m gonna have change, I want radical change, like, for everything to just do a hundred-eighty-degree turn all at once. It’s more exciting that way.”

  R.J. took everything Mike said as the honest-to-god truth, perhaps for no other reason than that he sounded convinced of it. He also marveled at how the gears in Mike’s head turned; his thoughts were what he imagined spark plugs to fire off like—that statement about the radical change business hadn’t been preceded by anything except a long silence.

  “We’re here,” said Mike, and the two made an abrupt stop.

  They had walked to one of the many secret porn studios south of Market. Mike had done some film work before and had caught wind of an ad in the back of the paper looking for bottoms to get fucked by this automated robotic dildo contraption called “The Butt Machine.” R.J. hadn’t bottomed a day in his life and the machine looked like the scariest fucking thing he had ever laid eyes on.

  The director who let them in led them down a hall past what looked to be a mock prison cell with chains attached to the walls. “You only have to get fucked by the machine for twenty minutes and you make a hundred and thirty-five dollars and we put it on the webcam. Can you boys get undressed?”

  They both took their clothes off and ten seconds later the director ordered them to put them back on.

  “You, call me back,” said the director, and handed his card to Mike.

  The two boys walked back to the warehouse where they lived together for about another six months, until Mike had a breakdown on speed and had to move away.

  Some years afterward, R.J. spotted Mike on the train, dressed very normal with two other normal gentlemen.

  R.J. proceeded to greet Mike. Mike hugged him, kissed him, stared deep into his eyes, and asked, “Sorry, it’s been so long, what’s your name again?”

  3

  He was a handsome older Black man. He had been some form of professional back in the eighties and nineties and had been retired for many, many years—that’s what he told me.

  He always made me meet him in the study part of his loft apartment. There were books, like, soooooo many books. Art on the wall and a desk with a computer and one black leather love seat, the one I always had to kneel down in front of and suck his dick while he was sitting naked in it. “You are the prettiest boy I’ve ever had. Be good to Daddy,” he said. I was twenty but I got the feeling he said this to all the boys. It still felt good to
hear.

  I was hooking ’cause all the other boys I knew were doing it too. I felt like I had to prove to them I could do it. Back when it was legal I put an ad in the back of the gay Castro newspaper that said “best blow job at a reasonable price.” He was my first repeat customer.

  The first time we met I was on my knees sucking him off and he saw the tattoo of a woman’s name on my chest. He asked, “Is that your girlfriend?”

  “No,” I replied, “it’s my mother.” His body visibly convulsed and he jizzed all over my tattoo. I was too young to know that I should have not made him a repeat customer.

  His body was round and smooth and warm. He would hold me after sometimes, and all the other boys told me I should charge more but I didn’t. He felt too good. Or maybe the attention felt good. I would let him have his way. I would feel the soft caress of a hand that pulled me away from control, and I was too young to know that all men who want to extract something from you generally have the sweetest touch. “You are the prettiest boy…” He said it so much I began to internalize it.

  I only charged fifty dollars for sessions that were supposed to be just a blow job and last an hour but instead would turn into much, much more and would go on until the sun came up.

  He had a wife and kids at some point; I surmised that much. There were older pictures of him hugging a woman and two young boys all over the apartment—in the hallway and the living room: besides the bathroom and study, the only parts of the house I was allowed to hang out in. My suspicions were confirmed when he finally said, “You know, I have sons about your age.”

  When I came over, though, he always led me to the study. I just knew that if I sucked his dick enough times in one month (he would call me over four times a month—only on the weekends) I would have enough money for weed or the new pair of Jordans I wanted. I loved him—or at least I thought that this was what love felt like.