The Coming of the Night

  What pants? Everyone wore jeans. He had never owned a pair, finding the material coarse. He did have some black slacks. He slipped them on. Cruising pants were supposed to be tight. He had kept the hiking boots he'd bought when he began a regimen of walking. He hadn't liked the men and women in the group he joined. They kept counting every step and then adding “hup.” “One-hup.” “Two-hup.” “Three-hup.” They drove him crazy, and he wrote a letter of resignation.

  He tucked the pants into the boots he had slipped on. His hair was no problem. Some of it was gone, yes, but not much, and he'd seen very sensual models in fashion magazines who were losing just enough of their hair to emphasize their masculinity How had that one model worn it? Defiantly back—like this—not like that terrifying Herbert, who combed over his pate the few hairs he had left—awful, awful—but, he, Thomas, was too much of a gentleman to point it out.

  Sipping his freshened scotch, Thomas Watkins faced himself in his full-length mirror, standing tall. If Herbert could see him now—

  He would laugh.

  Orville

  AFTERNOON

  In a cove of leafy branches and vines, Orville waited for the muscular guy he had been cruising. He'd been able to keep his cowboy hat on easily because the cove rejected the wind, though he did hear its murmur through the twisted limbs of trees—and, now, he heard the crunch of footsteps. The muscular guy entered the cove and stood there. He was even more muscular—a real bodybuilder—than Orville had thought from a distance. His cock hardened in anticipation.

  The two men faced each other, fingers cocked into their belt loops, like triggermen in a duel. The muscular guy drew first. He touched Orville's hard cock, groped.

  Orville's hand advanced, about to do the same on the muscular guy. He stopped. “I'm not into white guys.” The words he had been repeating over and over with no intention of saying them, reciting them only to hear them in his mind, how they might sound, reversing everything—those words shot out of his mouth in fury.

  The muscular man rushed out of the cove.

  The surge of vindication Orville had felt dissipated, adding more depression to his mood. He had really wanted that guy. This often happened when you had a bad encounter, like the earlier one at home with that fucking Bruce. It made you determined to make up for it in any way, even a mean way. So you kept on hunting—and it might all turn hellish, and even then you couldn't stop yourself.

  He left the cove. Hearing footsteps, he turned. A black man was cruising him.

  Paul

  AFTERNOON

  “Hello,” Paul answered the telephone on the first ring.

  “Uh, who—?”

  “Stanley, it's Paul. Didn't you recognize me when I answered? I mean, after all, you're calling me.”

  “Sure. It's just that you sounded different, and I thought I got the wrong number. Uh—I just called to let you know I'm thinking about you.”

  This had never happened before—Stanley calling him during one of his trips. Regretting having left? Yes! There was something different about his voice, hesitant, almost breathy Because he was afraid he'd meant what he'd said this morning. Paul held the telephone close to his ear, closer to Stanley. “I'm thinking about you, too, Stanley You sure you were thinking about me?” Paul wanted to hear Stanley say that again, and that he was coming back now.

  “You know it, babe. I called earlier but you were out. I kept calling from my room. The operator rang me back just now to tell me she'd reached the number—I'd told her it was urgent.”

  Paul felt even guiltier for having picked up that man on the beach. Thank God nothing had happened or they might have been together when Stanley called. Now everything would change, Paul was sure of it. He'd gambled by threatening Stanley, and the gamble had paid off!

  “I'd better go now—”

  “No, Stanley, wait, I want to tell you how much I love you.” Why wasn't he letting him know what time he'd arrive back?

  “Tell me—later—yeah, babe—me, too—later—uh—yeah—great—”

  It was as if he'd stopped listening, anxious to put down the phone. Paul was aware that Stanley had covered the mouthpiece, might have whispered something away from it. Why did people think they could disguise that? “You covered the phone.” He wished he hadn't said that.

  “Just—uh—-just holding it against my neck—I'm in bed—relaxing—callya later.”

  “Don't hang up, Stanley!” Paul's voice was harsh, commanding.

  There was another sound on Stanley's side of the line, a smothered moan—Stanley's—a sound Paul was familiar with, had heard hundreds of times, over the years, this morning. “You're with someone right now, aren't you, Stanley?”

  “Hell—no!”

  “Someone is blowing you while you're calling me, and you're actually getting off on it.”

  “You—think I—call—while—,” Stanley started. Paul heard Stanley's groaning, muffled, a long moan—“yeah”—that he knew so well.

  Paul hung up. Stanley had been concerned—no, his vanity had been concerned—that he would go out on him. So he'd called to make sure he hadn't, had become agitated to find he was out, and then even forgot he'd asked the operator to keep trying the number, and by then he was with someone else. He had dared—

  The phone rang again.

  Paul's hand reached for it.

  He let it ring.

  Outside, hot wind dried his tears. He tasted them, salty, mixed with stray ashes. Tonight he would do it finally—free himself from Stanley.

  Nick

  AFTERNOON

  “Eres bendito, un hijo de Dios, mijo!”

  “What?”

  “Mijo, tu eres el hijo de Dios, un ser sagrado.”

  The woman standing before him was Mexican—something like that—wearing a shawl, black, over her head. The shawl—maybe it was a long black coat—flapped in the wind. It wrapped around her, then unwrapped like dark wings.

  Nick recognized the woman he'd seen earlier, in the distance. He was back on his corner after the encounter with the man who had wanted to see his back and then had turned angry, weird, scary. “I don't know what you're sayin’, lady.”

  “You're blessed, a child of God, a sacred soul—and you're my son.” She spoke in English now, heavily accented. Her eyes were darkened into black by the shawl shading her face.

  Nick started to move away.

  The woman reached out for his bare shoulder, restraining him.

  Nick twisted away from her. “I ain't your son. Leave me alone, you crazy”

  “You are my child, among God's children on this street. He's looking for you. Let Him find you!”

  “I'm Methodist, lady!” He needed to say something, anything, before he pulled away. He crossed the street, looked back.

  The woman hurried on, stopping to talk to someone else—another hustler? Then she faded along the street, a dark frightening figure in the wind.

  Nick was grateful that a car stopped for him right after that. The woman had spooked him, man. A crazy for sure. Lots of them on the fuckin’ streets.

  “How much?” the driver asked.

  He was no cop, not as out of shape as he was—although some cops were very out of shape. “Fifty bucks, and I don't get fucked.”

  “You're a cute-looking guy, got a nice body—thirty bucks and you won't get fucked.”

  “Okay, thirty bucks and you blow me,” he clarified.

  “Get in.”

  Nick hesitated. Too easy? He got in, keeping the door ajar. He was reassured when the man felt his cock.

  “Nice,” the man complimented.

  “Never had no complaints,” Nick said. “You mind turnin’ the radio on to the Western station, man? Maybe they're playing ‘Cheatin’ Heart,’” he thought aloud.

  “Not much chance of that happening,” the man said.

  “I know it,” Nick said. Of course, he did, although, one time, hitching a ride with a trucker, he'd got in and it was playing. Right now, he'd just wanted the
man to ask him if that was his favorite song, and he would have said, oh, yeah, with Hank Williams singing.

  “I don't like hokey-pokey music,” the man said, and left the radio off.

  They drove to the man's place, a small, not entirely neat apartment a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. Nick hated it when the guy paying him didn't have a good place. He liked to go to pretty homes and apartments, liked to feel “rich” by the contact.

  “Let's see the rest of that gorgeous body.” The man was sitting on his bed, staring at Nick as if at a performance.

  Nick had only to lower his pants and he was naked. He wasn't self-conscious about that, proud of his body.

  “Everything.”

  He meant the socks. Some guys wanted him to keep them on-damned if he knew why. Whatever. This was going to be easy

  “Really nice,” the man said.

  Nick wanted to ask for the money first, a lot of times he did, sometimes he didn't—one man he'd gone with said that when a hustler asked for money first, he'd think up an excuse to split, feeling the hustler wasn't going to be any good. This guy was complimenting him, and that felt good.

  The guy lowered his own pants, and Nick looked away from the flabby flesh, shut his eyes. He preferred it when old guys didn't even take off their clothes, man.

  He felt the man's cock poking at his ass.

  Nick's eyes flashed open. He pushed the man away. “What the hell? I told you I don't get fucked.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Didn'ya hear me out there? I told you all I do is get blown. Now you go ahead and blow me.”

  “Shit, and what do I get?”

  “You get to suck my dick. I told you out there, man. Didn'ya hear me? You can jerk off while you blow me. Go ahead now, blow me—that's all, just fuckin’ blow me.”

  The man's head bent down and sucked Nick's cock. He stopped. “You can't even get hard.”

  “You fixed that with your bullshit,” Nick said.

  “Okay, just relax. There. Umm. That's better. Ummm. Yeah, get it hard in my mouth. Ummmm.” He stopped again. “Will you fuck me now that I've made you hard?”

  Nick began to get soft again. The thought of putting his dick inside the man's saggy ass disgusted him. “I told you out there, man, didn'ya understand?”

  “Okay. Come in my mouth.”

  “Not for thirty bucks. I gotta save up my cum so I can go out and make some good bread.”

  The man sucked him insistently. Closing his eyes, Nick was able to get a semi-hard-on, but that wouldn't last long because the guy didn't suck that good, used his teeth a lot. “You better come soon,” Nick said.

  “Will you, in my mouth?”

  “I told you—”

  “Okay.” He blew Nick's softening cock some more, jerking himself off, coming loudly, convulsing.

  When people came that loud and shaking, it sometimes scared Nick, thinking they might have a heart attack. But the guy was all right now, wiping himself off with a towel. Nick dressed. Held out his hand.

  “Here's twenty—you didn't do anything.”

  “Motherfucker, you give me what I asked for or I'll—Listen, I'm not eighteen yet, did you know that?” he used a lie that had worked other times when things went bad. “You could get busted, man, so you'd better pay me what we agreed.”

  The man studied him. “Here.” He gave him the ten more dollars he had already prepared.

  “Now drive me back.”

  “Get yourself back. Now you get out, you cheating queer punk.”

  “Queer! Hey, man! You're the fuckin’ queer, not me.”

  “Didn'ya hear me? I said get the fuck out, you punk queer.”

  The man's voice was tough, and he was big. From other hustlers Nick had heard about guys who picked them up, seemed pushovers, and then turned rough. It wasn't far from here to the Boulevard anyway, he estimated. He started to walk out. His anger rose. At the door, he paused, glancing around. Then he kicked over a small table that had a vase of ugly artificial flowers on it. They fell intact to the floor.

  He ran until he was back on his corner.

  “How big is your dick?” A car paused.

  Nobody had ever complained about his cock. Some johns measured it with their hands, length and around, just before going down on it. Still, that question always made Nick nervous. You never knew what people expected.

  “At least seven inches?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much bigger than that?”

  “Uh—well—”

  “Come over here and let me feel it, press yourself against the car, I'll hold my hand out like this—”

  The guy's hand dangled out the window. But where would the other one be? Getting himself ready to pop probably. Then the guy would drive off after copping a good feel. “Uh-uh,” Nick rejected.

  “How do I know you're not lying? How do I know you haven't got a tiny dick?”

  “Cause I haven't, that's how.” Shit, no way he'd go with this guy, already acting like he was going to pull something fast. Nick would bet on it. Johns who started out like that ended up feeling you up in the car and then saying you weren't big enough, and they'd say that even if you had a fuckin’ foot-long dick, man, just to humiliate you. People sure could get shitty on the streets, like you weren't even a person. Fuck that shit, man. He'd get this motherfucker first. “I got ten hot inches right here, man.” He groped his crotch with both hands.

  “Get in and we'll go—”

  “I ain't ready to go nowhere.” Nick walked away. Man, that felt good, to walk away from the son of a bitch—whatever he'd been planning—and leave him behind, thinking he'd let a ten-incher get away from him.

  Oh, fuck, that hustler over there—an older guy—still standing waiting to be picked up. He'd been there for hours. Must've been real good-looking when he was young, Nick bet, still was, but you could tell he was way up in his twenties. Some of the hustlers who bragged the most about how much money they always made—you'd see them still hanging around real late, looking scared. Fuck, what would that guy across the street do next year, and the next? Nick looked away from him, touching his own body.

  Clint

  AFTERNOON

  He stood by the window.

  Even from here, he could sense the exhilaration the strange day was creating on the street before the coming of this heated night, cars backed up honking, young people gathering before music clubs, their bodies twisting as if rehearsing their moves, pedestrians running against traffic.

  He closed his eyes.

  NEW YORK

  Last Weekend

  Within the dirty light of the Anvil, the performance on the platform held, frozen for seconds. The mouth on Clint's cock had been replaced by another.

  The leatherman on the improvised stage lowered the lit candle closer to the naked body.

  As if responding to a signal, the naked man lying prone before him turned over on the floor, face down, legs parted.

  “Do it, do it, do it!” men in the audience chanted at the leatherman.

  The leatherman knelt over the naked body.

  Growling, the naked man thrust his buttocks up. His cock remained unhardened.

  “Do it! Do it! Do it!”

  The leatherman held the unlit tip of the candle over the opening of the naked man's ass.

  Men shoved forth to watch more intently.

  As each drop of wax fell on his buttocks, the naked man arched his body and jerked his head back. His mouth remained open, a scream—or harsh laughter—throttled.

  “Push it in, push it in!”

  The leatherman held the unlit tip of the candle closer to the opening of the man's ass.

  “Do it, do it, do it!”

  The leatherman inserted the unlit tip into the naked man's ass.

  The silent scream, silent laughter, erupted from the naked man as wax melted on his flesh.

  The leatherman put out the flame with his spittle and stood up.

  The naked man's body
crumpled on the floor with an orgasmic gasp—his cock still unaroused.

  In the fringe of darkness about to become black, Clint pulled his cock away—-just before he would have come—from the mouth that had continued to suck at his groin.

  Beyond the window, where smoke had invaded the edge of the sky, the sun glowed deep orange. The only time the sun really looks as if it's on fire, Clint thought. Toppled fronds along the hotel driveway looked like tossed bodies in a mass suicide.

  What did that man feel!

  Trying to resist the weariness pulling at him, Clint knew that, this time, he had asked that pursuing question about the man lying on the floor as the candle melted on his flesh—no, it was the face of the man in leather. No, the man—

  The man who—

  A face he did not recognize had pushed away the image of the naked man, of the man in leather.

  Ernie

  AFTERNOON

  Motherfucking black bastard!

  He cruised me and then—

  Ernie stopped trying to figure out what had happened with the black guy. Sometimes it seemed that cruising was all about rejection. But, hey, you still managed to make out over and over, right?

  He walked back to the main road, past an unattractive man standing behind his car with his pants down to his knees. The guy had to be fifty years old. Ernie believed in respecting older gay guys, sure—they'd fought a lot of battles, right?—and he always went out of his way to say hello to them during the Gay Pride Parade. But they didn't belong in the park.

  “Say, shorty, is it true what they say about muscle queens’ dicks? Well, check this out.”

  Can you believe that motherfuckin’ old guy yelled that at him?—and shook his big thing up and down? Shit—Ernie didn't bother to answer.

  He moved on. A good-looking guy walking ahead of him turned back to give him a cruisy look before dodging under an arch of trees off the road.

  All right! So fuck the black guy—he wouldn't've made it with him anyway, he was sure now. In a cavity of branches, the good-looking guy opened Ernie's fly and pulled out his cock. Ernie always breathed with anxiety when that occurred so quickly. Nothing to worry about, the guy had already slid on his knees and was blowing him. Terrific!—standing out here, pants down, no shirt, even the hot Sant'Ana lickin’ at you—and this good-looking guy starin’ up at ya an’ suckin’.