Michael Tolliver Lives

  “Better get a move on,” Ben said. “He’ll be here in five minutes.”

  But half an hour later, after I’d shaved and showered and squeezed into my finest brushed stainless-steel groin jewelry, Ben and I were still perched tentatively on the edge of the bed, awkward as wallflowers at an ROTC ball. The lamp we’d left burning to lend a sultry glow to the room was already—thanks to the Viagra—blazing with a brilliant blue-white intensity. Meanwhile, my growing hard-on was growing superfluous.

  “You sure you told him the room number?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And he seemed…amenable?”

  Ben was amused by my wording. “Yes, he seemed amenable.”

  “So…what? He got cold feet?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe he just lost interest. Or got a better offer.”

  Ben shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “So what’s wrong with us? I’d fuck us in a second.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m serious. Don’t you feel abandoned?”

  “It’s a three-way, honey. I don’t think two people can be abandoned.”

  “Can’t they?”

  “He might just be late, you know.”

  I looked at the clock again. “Twenty-five minutes. Only hustlers can get away with that.” I considered that for a moment. “He’s not a hustler, is he? You’re not withholding something, are you?”

  Ben turned and looked at me in amazement. “You think I bought us a hustler and didn’t tell you?”

  “Well…”

  “How pathetic do you think I think we are?”

  I smiled. “Some people would see that as thoughtful.”

  He looked at me again. “Why would you think he’s a hustler, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. It sorta felt like he’d…targeted us. Like he’d been watching for a while before he jumped into the conversation.”

  “I didn’t get that sense,” said Ben.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, then.”

  Ben smiled sympathetically. “Poor baby. You’re disappointed.”

  “No,” I said. “Just annoyed.”

  He gazed down at my tented sweatpants, then pulled down the waistband and stooped to give me a friendly lick.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t need a mercy suck.”

  He looked up, chuckling. “Mercy suck?”

  “Well…whatever…”

  Undeterred, Ben got down to business.

  “Mercy,” I said, making him laugh with his mouth full.

  And that, of course, was when Mr. Johnson knocked on the door.

  I should stop calling him Mr. Johnson, I guess, since you may have figured it out by now. Ben and I certainly hadn’t. To us he was still what Quentin Crisp used to call—without reference to race, of course—The Great Dark Man: a mythical (and therefore slightly two-dimensional) object of desire. Which is probably why we jumped to attention like a pair of guilty schoolboys when we heard his sturdy knock at the door.

  “Jesus,” I murmured, tucking the incriminating evidence under the band of my sweatpants.

  “Well…better late,” said Ben, heading for the door.

  “Wait!” I whispered. “Let this go down first.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It seems rude.”

  Ben widened his eyes at me. “Did you learn that from Miss Manners?” He reached for the doorknob, so I sank to the bed again, hiding myself in the folds of the sweatpants. This probably made me look a little grand, like some pompous old top awaiting service, but that somehow seemed preferable to greeting him upright with flag already flying.

  Ben opened the door. The guy was standing there looking mortified, still wearing those camouflage fatigues. “I’m sorry, fellas.”

  “No sweat,” said Ben. “C’mon in.”

  Our visitor, I noticed, shot a quick glance at Ben’s boxer briefs before following him into the room. “Can we get you something to drink?” I asked, remaining graciously seated like a dowager hostess. “There’s a soda machine on the landing.”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  “Did you have a hard time finding us?” I asked.

  The guy just shook his head.

  “I’m Michael,” I said, finally standing at half-mast, “and this is Ben.”

  He shook our hands sheepishly, seeming, for some reason, far less comfortable than he had in the bar. “I’m Patreese,” he said. The name was exotic enough to have rung a bell immediately—or set off a whole carillon of recognition—but it didn’t.

  Ben moved next to the guy and slipped an arm around his waist, as if to reassure him. I’d worried that the first sight of my sweetie with a stranger might make me squirm, but I found this gesture so gently hospitable, so typically Ben, that it actually put me more at ease. “We’re glad you came,” Ben said, while his other hand slipped into those high-tech fatigues to work Patreese’s nipple. Patreese moaned a little, then kissed Ben voluptuously on the mouth before doing the same to me. “Y’all are sweet,” he said.

  Ben caught my eye with a private inaugural smile, then dropped to his knees and tugged Patreese’s cock out of the fatigues. He began to rearrange the voluminous foreskin with the tip of his tongue, but I caught only the briefest glimpse of this action since Patreese had responded to it by ramming his own tongue into my mouth. It stayed there for quite a while, so warm and invasive that it actually seemed to swell like an erection. When he removed it he said, “I hope it’s okay. I’m sort of a kiss pig.”

  “No problem,” I said as I caught my breath.

  Looking up at us, Ben removed Patreese’s cock from his mouth. “No problem here, either,” he reported, getting a big laugh from the troops.

  Patreese suddenly seemed distracted. “I should tell you something.”

  I’m used to this moment arising—what gay man isn’t?—so I tried to make it easier for him. “We always play safe,” I said, “if you mean that you’re positive.”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s something else…”

  We waited for the penny to drop.

  “…I do your mama’s hair.”

  This simply did not compute.

  Ben looked up at him, completely openmouthed—well, almost as openmouthed as he’d been a moment earlier. “What?” he murmured.

  “I do his mama’s hair,” Patreese repeated. “At the Gospel Palms.”

  In this moment of raw revelation, my mind raced back to my mother’s room at the rest home in Orlovista and the obvious pride she had shown in her smart new pastel do: “Patreese did it…my new hairdresser…black as the ace of spades but very talented.”

  Somehow I managed to keep from saying “I thought you were a woman” to a man whose proud sea horse was still prancing in the vicinity of my husband’s face.

  “How’d you know who we were?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Ben, rising to his feet in obvious fascination.

  “She’s got a picture in her room,” Patreese said. “Y’all by a waterfall. She talks about you all the time.”

  Ben and I swapped dumbfounded glances.

  “She said you were coming to visit, and I recognized you in the bar.”

  “Jesus,” said Ben. “What are the chances of this?”

  Patreese shrugged. “There’s not that many bars in Orlando.”

  I asked the obvious question. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “I wanted to suck some dick,” he said with a sleepy smile. “That ain’t gonna happen with your mama in the conversation. She takes too much explaining.”

  I liked the way he nailed that down. “That’s the truth,” I said.

  “I felt bad about it later. It wasn’t very sociable.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ben said.

  “I almost didn’t come,” said Patreese. “That’s why I was late. Then I thought, fuck that shit. I need a break from her, and it might as well be y’all.”

  Ben chuckled. “How often does she get her ha
ir done, anyway?”

  “I don’t just do her hair. I do her makeup, too.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You cover up the blue.”

  “It’s not that blue,” he said. “It’s not near as bad as she thinks it is. Somebody told her she was a blue bloater and…she got to worryin’ about it.”

  Lenore, I thought. It must have been Lenore.

  “She looks really good,” I said, since it seemed to matter to him.

  He nodded. “I like to work on old ladies. They appreciate it.”

  That was the worst possible segue for what happened next, but no one objected. Patreese knelt and nuzzled the mound of Ben’s briefs, while pulling me closer by the crotch of my sweatpants. Within seconds he had us both in hand, squeezing our dicks together like an eager child introducing her Barbie dolls to each other. Then he went down on both of us, one after the other, never neglecting either for long: a symphonic performance by a true multi-instrumentalist. Ben pulled my face into his and kissed me hungrily.

  In a three-way, of course, there’s always the danger that someone will feel left out, but Patreese didn’t let that happen. I’m pretty sure he saw Ben as the brass ring on this merry-go-round, but I never felt unwelcome on the ride. By the time we were naked on the bed and both of them (at Ben’s prompting) were sucking on my chest, I was feeling so generous that, once I’d shot my load, I grabbed a condom off the bedside table and rolled it onto Patreese’s cock. Ben realized this was meant for him, and gazed at me in tender appreciation before grabbing a bottle of lube and going to work. He came on all fours, the little spunk bucket, never even touching himself, while Patreese was fucking him. I know because I was underneath, catching the splash and offering kisses and feeling flat-out wonderful. Patreese more or less fucked him into my arms. Ben stayed there for some time, laughing from the pleasure, his heart beating hard against my chest.

  Then my cell phone rang in my suitcase. It’s programmed to ring like an old forties telephone—like Barbara Stanwyck’s, say, in Sorry, Wrong, Number—and that always lends a certain jangly melodrama to the moment.

  “Leave it,” said Ben from the middle of this panting stack of men.

  “Good idea,” I said from the bottom.

  “Nobody move,” said Ben.

  There was a brief silence, followed by the little groan Ben makes whenever someone pulls out of him. (Or at least when I do.)

  “Sorry,” said Patreese.

  “That’s okay,” said Ben.

  Patreese rolled off the pile and sat on the edge of the bed, skinning the condom off his cock. Then he took it to the bathroom and flicked it into the toilet.

  “What’s this?” he called.

  “What?” I asked.

  “In the toilet.”

  “Oh,” said Ben, grinning. His head was on my chest now, while his hand roamed the familiar volcanic slopes of my belly. “That’s an orchid.”

  “I got that much,” said Patreese.

  “They put one there every day,” Ben explained. “Sorta like a mint on the pillow. We flush it every night, but it keeps coming back.”

  “One of those little extra touches,” I added, “that mean so very much at Inn Among the Flowers.”

  Patreese stared down at this deeply Floridian floral offering. “It don’t look right somehow.”

  “I know,” I said. “Especially with a condom on it.”

  Patreese chortled and flushed the toilet and cleaned up at the sink. When he came back to the bedroom, he started gathering up his clothes.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hang with us for a while.” I wanted him to know he didn’t have to fuck and run on our account, that we weren’t that kind of couple.

  “Busy day tomorrow,” he said, pulling on a sock.

  “Not with my mother, I hope.”

  He chuckled. “My other job. A bachelorette party.”

  Ben sat up on one elbow. “They get their hair done for that?”

  “I strip for private parties,” Patreese explained. “That’s what this is for.” He was stepping into his fatigues now, stuffing all the goods back in. “Got a cop uniform, too.”

  “No shit,” said Ben, apparently impressed by the rich array of employment opportunities available to a hairdresser here in the sovereign state of Disney.

  Patreese grunted. “It ain’t worth the bus fare half the time.”

  “Why not?” asked Ben.

  Patreese shrugged. “I don’t care how big your dick is—if a sister’s got a plate of ribs in front of her, there ain’t no way you’re gonna hold her attention.”

  Ben and I laughed raucously.

  “I’m serious,” said Patreese, clearly tickled by our response and warming to his material. “I’m up there workin’ my ass off…just flangin’ my stuff around. And they’re sittin’ down there in their nasty-ass press-on nails, pickin’ meat outta their teeth.”

  Ben hooted again. “Tough crowd, eh?”

  “Oh, the sisters say they like the mens …” Patreese drew out the last word with a histrionic hiss, so we’d know it wasn’t his own particular vernacular. “But they don’t like the mens near as much as the mens like the mens.” He was tying his bootlaces, so he finished with a punctuating yank. “They don’t tip as good, either.”

  He came to the bed fully dressed and wriggled between us until we became his naked bookends. There was something strangely intimate and sweet about holding him in his clothes. He lay there for a while, sighing a little, then kissed us on our foreheads and got up again, heading out. “Be well, my brothers,” he said at the door.

  “You too,” we said in unison.

  “Y’all make a nice couple.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll see you on Thursday,” he said. “When we sign that thing for your mama.”

  It took me a while, but I gaped at him until I got it. “You’re the other witness?”

  Patreese nodded. “You be nice to her, you hear?”

  He opened the door and left, closing it behind him.

  Ben turned to me and dropped his jaw dramatically. “Jesus. What are the chances of this?”

  I told him he’d said that before.

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Do you think she put him up to it?”

  “Who? Your mother?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “For God’s sake, Michael. We were the ones who picked him up!”

  Were we? I wondered.

  Ben rolled over and nuzzled my neck. “You ascribe way too much power to her.”

  Do I? I thought, staring up at the floral-patterned ceiling.

  14

  Her Raggedy Soul

  The next morning Ben and I wolfed down a huge breakfast at the Denny’s across the street. A touch of gluttony seemed a fitting follow-up to our late-night pig-out with Patreese. Besides, I rather liked the idea of ordering the Biscuit and Gravy plate in what remained of my beloved Southern homeland. Until I actually ordered it, that is.

  “Will that be the Senior Biscuit and Gravy?”

  Our waitress, a hefty young gum-chewing black woman, could easily have been one of Patreese’s bachelorettes.

  “No,” I told her with a measured smile. “I don’t think I qualify quite yet.”

  “How old are you?”

  I hadn’t been asked this in a place of business since I was seventeen, when I tried, unsuccessfully, to buy a fifth of Jack Daniel’s at a liquor store across the highway from Mr. Grady’s gas station. It was just as unsettling to be carded at the other end of my life, for a fucking biscuit, no less, but I answered as civilly as possible.

  “I’m fifty-five.”

  The waitress nodded triumphantly, scribbling something on her pad, like she’d just guessed my weight at the country fair. “This is your lucky day, peaches.”

  Then she sashayed off, leaving me in the dust of her righteousness.

  Ben picked up the big plastic menu and read the fine print. “She’s right,” he said. “Fifty-five and ol
der.”

  I told him that was another reason not to live here.

  He smiled crookedly. “I think this applies at all Denny’s.”

  I took the menu from him and perused the Senior section: the Senior Omelette, the Senior Scramble, the Senior French Toast Slam. “Are the Senior meals any different from the regular ones?” I asked. “Do they come with a bib or something?”

  Ben rolled his eyes at this useless display of gerontophobia. “You know,” he said, “if it bothers you that much, you can always pay full price.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said, laughing it off, since I was certain it didn’t bother him. It probably turned him on, in fact, that I’d just been certified an old guy by a leading family restaurant. Such is the nature of my greatest blessing. I know not to mess with it.

  I reached across the table and took his hand. “That was so hot last night.”

  “Oh, man,” said Ben, squeezing my hand.

  “He was sweet, too.”

  Ben nodded with a sleepy smile. “Definitely the right choice.”

  “You’ll tell me when I start looking like a silly old fool, won’t you?”

  “Fuck, no,” said Ben.

  I grinned feebly. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, actually.”

  “You looked like a sexy daddy to me.”

  Two tables away, an obese white woman stopped wiping her obese child’s face long enough to stare us down. Ben smiled at her pleasantly, then returned his gaze to me, still holding my hand. “Did you ever check your cell, by the way?”

  I flashed on the night before and the phone call that had come just after we had. I fished the cell phone out of my jacket and checked the readout.

  “It’s from Anna,” I said.

  “Better check it,” he said.

  All he meant was that Anna was old enough to require our attentiveness, but I still felt a sudden shiver of anxiety. That’s usual for me when I’m away from home for any length of time whatsoever. I expect all hell to break loose.

  But Anna’s message was soothing: “Oh…uh…hello, dear, just sending my love. I hope you and Ben are having a lovely time. There’s no need to call unless you feel like it. Everything is fine here. Do give my love to your mother. Goodbye, dear.”