Chapter Two
WORK, NEWS & MEMORIES
June 31, 2010
Garrison, N.Y.
Six
texts received over a 60-minute period, after the initial phone call from Scott
in Philadelphia, requesting a massage booking at 8 p.m. that evening.
8:15
“Hi Steve was great talking with you and I look forward to this evening. I
really do enjoy lots of touching and even to have my massage therapist give
lots of body to body contact!! Anything goes if it’s hard and oiled up feel
free to slide inside ; -)
I
am a 35 year old white male athlete , 5’11”, 165 lbs. Versatile bottom with
juicy bubble butt; -)
9X6
cock
Mild
to very wild : )
8:25
I love edging, seducing and passion! Negative here as well. Love to take the
pleasure of the massage and all of the sudden have your cock inside me-so
bonding and connecting…
8:27
I got your address, do you penetrate bare?”
Text
received about 60 minutes later;
“I
will not be able to make it tonight. It’s my birthday weekend and I just got a
surprise message that a few friends are taking me out to dinner. Sorry for the
inconvenience.”
Steve was a participant in a five-day Buddhist
retreat at the Garrison Institute in upstate New York. What a relief it was to
get away from the clients with their endless calls, texts, emails and inquiries
about his massage services. The past week alone he’d given out the password for
his private pictures on one particular M4M massage site at least a dozen times
without even one booking. Damn collector jerk offs! After more than twenty
years of doing the work, a slow week or worse yet, a “no-show” still aggravated
the hell out of him. “It comes with the territory” his Foot Slave would say,
his voice braying with that thick, New Jersey accent; and a little slurry from
the vodka and grass that made up their typical Sunday evening foot worship
sessions. Yes it was even nice to be away from the Foot Slave. After some 14
years of seeing him, Steve had recently come to understand this was a fetish-based
relationship only and that a fetish does not a friendship make. He needed a moratorium from the short,
studly cleaning man from 12th Street between A & B, who
was both erotic and stone-cold. He realized he would miss having his feet worshipped, and even more, so miss those free,
heavenly, immaculate pedicures provided by the Foot Slave during their ongoing
weekly Sunday night ritual.
He was relishing the peace. It was a blazing
summer day. He sat on bench high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, on a
break from the retreat. A large, luscious sailboat was heading away from
Manhattan. He imagined a
crew of hot, muscled men in Speedos at the helm. He could almost touch an achingly fluffy cloud
passing overhead. He wanted to float up to it and escape these humorless, fucking
Buddhists with their constant dullness. He imagined for a second breaking down
the heavily enclosed shrine of the Garrison Institute by attacking the
drawbridge-like wooden doors with a flamethrower. He also knew that his
participation in the retreat was a good thing, a soul-strengthening thing.
Formerly a Christian monastery, this
week the main alter held a giant statue of Buddha; next week it might contain
the image of another deity, maybe a totem to Thor, or a macramé effigy of Gaia.
The religion of the week changed according to what higher power retreat participants were worshipping this week. It felt so good to be outside, after the long, monotonous
hours indoors meditating, back stiff and straight, tail bone glued to the
thick, red cushions, listening to endless lectures from Yongey Mingyur, one of
the latest, young, guru stars from Tibet. Yongey was wise and funny with a
nervous habit of raggedly clearing his throat between every other sentence he
uttered. It was difficult for Steve to assimilate the words of enlightenment
spewing forth from the slim, be-speckled Buddhist star when punctuated by so
many throat clearings, coughs and endless retching. Did they indicate a certain
nervousness or discomfort on Yongey's part? Maybe he was just vocally tired
from so many retreats and so many talks, teachings and tours on the lecture
circuit of this Buddhist sect. Promotion of any new cult must be hard work. Why
even Ellen, everyone’s warmest, nicest, funniest, talk-show host had her bevy
of gatekeepers, caretakers, gofers and personal assistants. Yongey’s staff was
limited to two or three assistants only. Steve saw his own aversion to the Guru’s
harsh coughing and a-hem staccato stuttering as a weakness in himself or at
least that was the tacit message he gleaned from his fellow retreat
participants, who ignored Yongey’s vocal eruptions. He felt
he wasn’t as hard core as most of the Buddhists here, hence, his preference to
label himself a California Buddhist.
Today’s afternoon lecture was on joy.
Steve knew joy, he didn’t need to hear this little bald-headed geek with speech
ticks lecture him on it. Beautiful sounds constantly inspired joy in him, the
purring of a kitten, the sound of rain, waves, or the wind. Music brought joy
whether it be from the sounds of a hot, pulsing, bass underneath the sensual arpeggiations
of a good Progressive House dance track or a melody by Bach. Music could inspire him to
laugh out loud, dance or mime any feeling. It awakened him, physically and
emotionally. His body breathed it in like air, letting the rhythm take control
of his feet and hips and inspired him to dance. Smells could also bring joy. Oh, that heady sensuality of mixing
frankincense with ylang
ylang and
loosing himself as he closed his eyes and breathed in the delicious vapors
wafting from a golden, candle-lit diffuser. There were visions to see in the
patterns of bubbles, oil, water and flame. He could float away in the ancient,
magic, world of pure scent, the miniature threads of steam massaging his
nostrils and brain, the vapors washing over him so that he forgot all pain and
worry and was transported far away from the mediocre drudgery of day-to-day
existence within the four walls of his, dim, East Village man-cave.
There was also the joy of his actor
self. Was it narcissistic to want to be seen? Yes, and all the better to be
uplifted while performing on camera or on the stage. Of course the endless
auditions to find work that paid were tortuous and even more painful was the
fact that the pay, when you found it never matched the work.
But the greatest joy in life was the
deeply, erotic and sensual world of touching and being touched by a well oiled,
well muscled man. Touching muscle was like emerging from the Arctic cold,
and immersing himself in the liquid, crystal, churning of a hot tub; for with
the touch of a muscular man’s body, the pain of loneliness dissolved like
bubbles in the air.
It was a picture perfect day and his
Mother was dying. Now, he was on the phone with her. She was calling from
Tucson. She’d been in pain for more than a week and had just broken the news
that the MRI came back abnormal and further tests were needed. He had a bad
feeling in his gut, the way one senses the coming of a hurricane.
"They have to take a CAT-scan today
and I have to drink a second bottle of some crap" she said. Some crap he
repeated silently. She was such a dour Scot, like always. Except now her voice
was slower and a bit dopey. It was the Vicodin. Miraculously,
it seemed to be massaging away her usual rigid warnings and anxiety. If
only she had started some sort of meds for her bi-polar tendencies years
ago, she would have been so much less volatile. But now her spaciness also
worried him, for it seemed a dire portend of things to come.
"It's probably nothing Mom, just a
muscle sprain" he said reassuring her. He saw another large sailboat
passing by far below on the river. Maybe it was a Beneteau from the gay sailing club he
used to belong to until the yearly dues got too expensive. "Are you in
pain now? he said, “How’s the Vicodin working? How much are you taking?"
"The prescription's for 200 mg. a
day” she was slowly reading the label on the bottle, “As needed for
pain. Annette said that's what everybody here takes when they're in pain."
Annette was her best friend. Everybody obviously meant the residents of Far
Horizons East in Tucson, Arizona. He thought it funny that there was one main
drug and one general dosage that all the residents took when they were in pain.
“Mom, I really think it’s nothing serious. But
call me as soon as you know anything else, Okay? I love you.”
“I love you son.”
He sat for a while pondering the call.
His thoughts morphed into feelings of sadness and anxiety, followed by the
playback of memories of growing up with her. His mother-lover memories started with the “June Cleaver 50's Mom,” tall and perfect in tight, baby blue slacks making meatloaf in
the kitchen. This mental picture segued into a giant, nude, prickly-haired,
hugging monster. Both were the same creature that had attached itself to him
one summer night in the frigid, dark Best Western motel room. In this memory he
was engulfed and suffocated by her, her form now transformed into a terrifying
female colossus right out of “Attack of the Giant Fifty-Foot Woman.” Here she
was that sensual, towering thing, causing him to fight, kick and rage against
her grip on him. Or hang on and hug her until he felt the
carnival-ride-tickle-worm feeling traveling down from his head to his cock.
“Mom what are you doing? Wake up,
WAKE-UP!” But this scene only existed in his revisionist memory. In his memory
of the actual incident, he squelched his voice, stopped his breathing and
tightened his throat so no sound could escape. Then he recalled going limp as a
Raggedy Ann doll and being sucked into that awful, hot, stinking place between
her legs. The black-hole, vagina place, where he was transformed from boy to
invisible, powerless, ghost thing. This is where he dissolved into flitty ashes blowing in the wind like a dying
vampire in a B-horror movie, caving in and crumbling with the light of dawn, albeit with a slight afterglow of dying warmth between his legs. He must have been
four that first time.
Now, here he looked up at the sky. The
cloud was gone and the sun massaged his skin with its rays. There was a soft
wind forming dancing white caps far out and down below on the Hudson. The first
time, he thought, staring down to the river.
It must have been all the meditation
he’d been doing, the mother
lover memories were achingly clear and they were hard-wired to
more feelings of being blocked, helpless and hypersensitive to all women.
Masking his anger with indifference was the safest way to deal with most New
York City women. Most were hard as nails from the “click click click” of their
high-heeled shoes to the cold-as-steel way they nearly sideswiped him, plunging
themselves through the narrow downtown sidewalks of the East Village. Annoying
and uncomfortable yes. But true terror was being hit by a car or a speeding
bike flying down some grimy street going the wrong way. Delivery people could
kill with their speed, or break your back with their weight if they rear-ended
you. There were worse things than abuse. He knew so well the pulse of the
downtown bike-street-world, for he had three and rode everywhere, even during
the tortuous snows and black ice of winter.
*
* * * *
He was in fifth grade. They were living in St.
Paul Park, a suburb of St. Paul. The neighborhood was made up of blocks and
blocks of tan or aqua, two-tone, ranch-style houses. He had a best friend,
Roger Brown. They were inseparable. Steve was intoxicated by everything from
Roger’s voice, to his brown eyes, to his slightly dimpled chin, to his soft,
fine, babyish brown hair with that crazy cowlick on the top of his head, like a
single, alien antennae. One day they were climbing trees on the outskirts of
the suburb where the monotonous line of houses met a newly plowed farmer’s
field bordered by a single line of pine trees. Steve climbed up one tree with
Roger right behind him. High up, he stopped climbing and just hugged the trunk,
then grabbed onto a higher branch and hung, kicking his legs.
“Help me, help me Roger, I’m stuck, and I’m
gonna fall, I’m gonna fall!” He screamed. He loved playing the helpless female
to Roger’s boy-man hero.
“Just hang on, it’s alright, it’s alright,” Roger
said, climbing until his head was level with Steve’s waistline. Steve imagined
he and Roger were hugging each other. How could he make this happen?
“I’m gonna fall, I’m gonna fall.”
“No you won’t, I won’t let you. I’ve got you.
There.” Roger reached up and put his arms around Steve. Steve could feel
Roger’s head burrowing into him, the hot breath of the boy’s mouth against his
stomach.
“I love you, Roger Brown,” said Steve. They
stared at each other.
“I love you” Roger said “And I would never let
you fall, you know that. You know I’m your best friend.” Oh the smell of him!
That soapy, clean, boy’s smell excited him so and made him feel hard and hot
and good between his legs. He pulled himself up onto a branch away from Roger
and sat, slightly above him. Then, flexing both his legs and extending them out
to rest on Roger’s shoulders, he playfully squeezed the other boy’s head with
his ankles and feet.
“I’ve got you now” he said smiling, laughing.
Roger, staring straight back at him put his hands on both Steve’s ankles.
“No, I’ve got you” he said. The pine tree was
swaying slightly in the wind, as a faint, autumn wind rocked them together.
Roger’s house was far away, the last line of cookie cutter houses blocks and
blocks away, stretching out and disappearing into the dark crimson Minnesota sunset.
“We should get going back” said Roger, letting go of Steve’s ankles.
In the same moment, Steve’s legs went soft as
he dropped them. He climbed down a few feet until he was even with the other
boy, sitting across from the limb that Roger was perched on. “I want to hug
you,” he said. “OK” said Roger. Steve put his arms around the other boy and his
body was flooded with fire and feelings like hot stars. He felt alive, he felt
safe. He wanted to keep holding onto Roger forever. He wanted to fly with him
up to the top of the pine tree and leap up into the grey, green, dusky sky
where the stars were beginning to appear. He wanted to stay frozen in this
moment with this boy, forever.
“I love you”. “No, I love you” “No—I love
you.” This went on and on until they were both laughing, drunk on their own
silliness and the smell of pine boughs and the cool air in the dusky sky and
the stars glittering even stronger now. Climbing down the tree practically
together, they both jumped off the lower branches and onto the soft earth of
rusty needles that felt like fleshy bodies underneath their feet. On the black
loam of the ground where the needles were bare and the earth showed through,
they both stood facing each other. Steve played with Roger’s hand, then Roger
moved his hand in response, touching Steve’s stomach. Steve moved his hand to
touch Roger’s cheek. It was soft, soft as the fur of a cat, soft as his Grandmother’s
white, silk slips. He fantasized wearing a slip, playing dress up with Roger and
just twirling and twirling until he fell into Roger’s arms. He wanted to run away
and pretend scream as Roger the “dangerous monster” ran after him. Then, he
would let Rober catch him and they would fall together, struggling and
wrestling onto the ground. All this went through his mind as they kept holding
hands and started back through the plowed cornfield. Their feet sank slightly
into the soft, rich dirt of the earth, as they walked on the plowed, soft
furrows of the field. Carefree, they kept holding hands and swung them in time
as they walked. It was safe to touch, they were all alone. There was nothing
and no one else to separate them.
* *
* * *
His Father, who worked for the railroad, was
again transferred and so the family had to move from St. Paul Park to
Milwaukee. Roger was gone, all his fifth and sixth grade Minnesota friends,
gone. For the sake of economics, his Father rented the upper floor of a dull
but affordable two family house in a working-class suburb of Milwaukee called
Cudahy. As Shorewood, Fox Point and Whitefish Bay were the more white-collar suburbs,
poor, working-class Cudahy was more like an embarrassing armpit of one, a
dreary collection of corner taverns, all featuring Pabst Blue Ribbon or Schlitz
beer. Years ago Patrick Cudahy had founded a pig slaughterhouse that became a
million dollar meat packing plant. The plant’s sickening stench languished over
the town a few nights out of every week, depending on where you lived, year in
and year out.
It was seventh grade, 1967 and
Junior-fucking-horrible high. Moving from Minnesota with its endless array of
friendly kids to shadow-land Cudahy and its class system of hoods and jocks was
like moving to another universe. Steve had never experienced so many mean
bullies with Polish names; all ski this and ski that. And they were nasty. One
winter, near a frozen pond across from his house, a snot-nosed, red-faced boy named Clarence Rice
came up to him and starting beating the shit out of him for no reason. Steve
just cried and became his punching bag. Word got around that he didn’t know how
to fight back and it became open season on him. Boys in gangs would chase him
home after school trying to jump him, yelling “Faggot, fem, girl, homo.”
Throughout 7th and 8th grade, he was tortured daily by greasy-haired goons and
he was too paralyzed to fight back because he didn’t know how. He continued to hang-on
to his “anti-boy” streak, and hold dear all things girlish from his childhood.
This reluctance to fight was also a result of the crippling effects of his mother
lover experience, i.e., in crises, never fight back, just hold your breath, take
it, and “play dead.”
At the beginning of his first year of school
in Cudahy Junior High, his parents bought him glasses and he made a fetish of
continuously taking them on and off, using them as a prop. The simple black
frames made him feel like a brainy girl, a special, glamorous, sort of geek or
a bookworm. He began having problems falling asleep, for it was all but
impossible to filter noises. “Please turn down the T.V.” he kept complaining to
his parents, for his bedroom was right next to the living room. He could always
hear the sounds of the news and then the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and it’s
idiotic laugh track. Having a talent to amuse, during 8th grade he discovered
he could imitate Bobby Kennedy with ease. This went over big, he even had the
bullies laughing and it distracted them from torturing him in homeroom. Until
Kennedy was shot.
During this time, he learned how to masturbate
while taking a bath. The first time he came it was a sickening sensation, he
thought he was going to puke and his insides felt like he was going to shit
them out. But the pain quickly passed into a weird, wild, peppery pleasure and
pictures of boys and men added to the pleasure a thousand-fold. There were men
on tanning oil bottles, and occasionally pictures of nude men’s butts from the
underground newspaper ads (for forbidden, X-rated, Andy Warhol films). He procured
these on visits to downtown Milwaukee bookstores where radical publications
were taboo and readily available to 13-year-olds. Once he even found a page
from a nudist magazine and the power of seeing naked men’s cocks was unreal and
electric. Best of all were his brother’s bodybuilding magazines. In his
bedroom, he fashioned a self-screwing sex device by cutting off one end of a
plastic container of Coppertone Suntan cream. He could make himself cum with it
just by lining it with any kind of lubricant, inserting his dick in and turning
it round and round. Heaven. And the tube caught all the milky, spicy-smelling
sperm. He stored the thing in an eave spout outside his bedroom window.
Sometimes he felt the urge to work himself, and, longing for something
different and to be very dirty, he would lift his legs over his head shooting
his cum into his own mouth. It tasted like sea-foam and eggs. It was fun to
make a mess on his own face, aiming for his wide-open mouth. When he did this,
he imagined he was taking back his own power, and by eating his cum, recharging himself.
* *
* * *
One night his Mother, dressed in her usual
mannish slacks, and one of his Father’s short jackets, took their neurotic
Dachshund, Benji out for a walk. Steve was almost asleep but the barking of the
dog woke him up. It went on and on, getting louder and more agitated. He became
afraid thinking someone was attacking his Mother. He jumped out of bed, still
in his pajamas and plunged down the steps from their upstairs apartment,
running out onto the sidewalk. Images of her on the ground, bleeding were
running through his head. He would bend down, and hold her head in his arms. Oh
God where was she? Where was she? Then he saw her a few short yards away. She
was fine, standing fully erect, Benji greeting him with agitated barking. “Are
you alright?” he asked her, out of breath “I thought you were hurt, in an
accident maybe.” “Oh God Steve yes, I’m all right” his Mother retorted,
annoyed. She seemed disgusted by his girlish, dramatic arrival to rescue her
when nothing was wrong. “Benji was just barking at another dog. What are you
wearing? Get back in the house and get to bed you have school tomorrow.”
Crestfallen and hurt, he returned to his bedroom alone.
* *
* * *
Cudahy was as ugly as it’s name. He postured
and feigned being tough, though he hadn’t the slightest idea of what tough was.
He willed himself to have crushes on girls in a halfhearted attempt to fit in.
But he secretly desired boys and constantly, lustily daydreamed about certain
classmates from gym class with tight, wiry six-packs and spindly legs. Kurtis
Slovinsky, Mark Snowpeck, Daniel Delaney, they were all Greek boys beckoning
him with their bellies then coldly turning away in the showers, their bodies
glistening with jewels of water, so inviting yet forbidden. The jocks with
square jaws and hard-muscled bodies were always ridiculing him for his ugly, soft,
girlish, pear-shaped body. Their perfect bodies were always beckoning him in
spite of their cruelty, disdain and the constant, unwritten rule never to stare
openly at them when naked before or after traumatic gym class. Their bodies
shimmered in the showers with promises of taboo touch, calling out to him,
tempting him to get hard. He didn’t dare, but when he thought no one was
looking, he stole quick glances, gazing at the down of their pubic hair and
their dicks furtively, the ripped rawness of their stomachs magnetically riveting
his eyes and attention. One boy, a tall, beautifully proportioned, dark blond
named Keith looked like a surfer with a soft, downy moustache sprouting over
his thick, strawberry lips. Steve longed to kiss those lips and caress the
boy’s cleft chin, and dark gold, long, silky hair. He thought of velvet, and
the wild fur of a cat. He recalled the soft cheek of Roger Brown his best
friend. Steve remembered that clean, soapy smell of him and pressing him close
in the pine grove as they walked, hand in hand through that plowed cornfield
that twilight night back in Minnesota three or was it four or five years ago?
Where was Roger now?
Years later, in the 80’s, while he was back in
Minnesota visiting a friend, he located Roger’s number in the phone book and
called him. The dowdy, uptight, middle-aged man on the other end of the phone
sounded like something between a frightened rabbit and a perplexed curmudgeonly
uncle. Yes he vaguely remembered he had a friend in fifth grade in St. Paul Park and possibly they’d spent time together. In all of five minutes
Steve got it that that brown-eyed boy in the pine boughs with the fine, babyish
hair and the crazy cowlick like a single, alien antennae was long dead. Steve
apologized that it was probably a wrong number, and hung up.
* *
* * *
In the East Village, he sometimes imagined
that everyone who saw him knew he did sex massage. In reality people
passing on the street weren’t thinking of him at all. East Village New Yorkers
tended to be obsessively self-involved or attached to their iPhone as if it were
another appendage. As he aged, life in his neighborhood got tougher and the
cold distance between himself and people widened with their automated ways,
frenetic speed, and the overall death of cruising. Sometimes there were passing
smiles, mostly there was just manic passing. Kids traveled in drunken hordes
Friday and Saturday nights. Single men often passed him and spit as if to denigrate his open, searching eyes. Everyone was armored, hard, ready for a fight or a confrontation.
City life after so many years began having a grueling edge to it. As he aged, the
big break, the love of a lifetime, and the elusive dream of success, all took a back seat to the challenge of aging, maintaining health and living on a fixed income.
But he was a pirate, a renegade spirit, and
with that, came the perks of doing M4M massage. It felt hot to be used, and he
had developed a marvelous finesse to having sex with massage clients. He loved to receive that signal of a man’s
hand gently touching his cock, beckoning him to respond. Most of his
interactions with client’s involved mutual release. When a client didn’t “go
there” it was highly unusual. Most did, this was especially true with Kyle Jay
Down Low.
Kyle was a very athletic, thirty-something entrepreneur
seriously on the DL. When he first began booking with Steve, it was fabulous.
Then After a few years, however, Kyle’s sessions turned into real work with
Steve becoming a kind of fuck doll. When Kyle made an appointment, he insisted
on using the bed and not a table. Often, he loved to be under the covers with
Steve. In Steve’s mind, this was a violation for Steve hated sleeping on sheets
mussed with client’s fluids. Kyle would push Steve’s body around in bed if he
were a bag of potatoes. His demands were endless, but it was all faux fucking.
It was becoming harder and harder for Steve to stay hard. He couldn’t remember
the last time he’d even fucked Kyle; for now the honeymoon was definitely over.
When Kyle came, it was a relief. Thank God, the session was over. Once Kyle
even exclaimed “Isn’t this the best sex you’ve ever had?” He was too dumb to
recognize the pause that followed, followed by Steve responding with a
half-hearted “Yeah totally!” Kyle tended to book on the spur of the moment,
when his girlfriend left their apartment. There would be that quick phone call
or text and next Kyle would burst in like a tsunami, a ten-minute session on
the way to or from the airport or even ditching his controlling girlfriend
while they were out dining with friends and waiting to be seated! It wasn’t
important to Kyle that Steve even cum anymore. There was little solace to be
found in the fact that Kyle’s body was cut, sculpted and ripped like a lanky
Michelangelo’s David. Sex work was work. The straw that broke the camel’s back
was when Kyle visited Steve on two occasions without paying. His excuse was
that he didn’t “want to do anything but suck Steve’s dick” which Steve realized
was Kyle’s subtext for “I’m not going to pay.” Without the pay, the fireworks
were gone. Kyle began talking about loving him, loving him! To Steve this lame
phrase was a poor substitute for the missing C-note on the table. It was time
to fire the client, and oh what a relief it was to block his number.
The on-line world of gays was populated by
horny-men texting “What’s up?” followed by “Generous?” or skinny, uncut twinks
pursuing him like hungry jackals. A fair amount hated him instantly for his
preferences. Another minority despised him for being older; an annoying
reminder that youth faded and old age was inevitable.
He wasn’t a machine, he felt everything. And
he did it again and again, with each new man, with each new client, whenever he
was invited to. No matter how fat, old, young or hot, sometimes even no matter
how much the butt stench was ripe with dingleberries, no matter how he cringed
whenever his hands went over a blackhead, pimple, wart or boil; no matter how
many times he was ordered to “don’t touch the hair,” etc. However, after all
was said and done, he was grateful, for it was some form of human contact and
connection. The upside was that the sessions were limited to an hour, so
getting into other people’s shit was minimized. But sometimes, he pondered on
how the work was affecting him in the long term, through the years. How did make
him callous? Or steal his spontaneity and exacerbate his already strong
penchant for being a loner? At certain watermarks in his life, he felt
everything from angry hurt to lust to love. But after all the unspeakable acts
of whoring that he experienced in the bodywork, when he reached a quiet,
meditative place after all the activity, he forgave himself; and he forgave all
the men. For, after all it was just business wasn’t it? No need to take anything
at all personally. Being bitter was such a waste of energy.
Again, he pondered the first erotic memory of
his Mother, as the curse it was, and he wondered if, when she dies, would he be
free of these memories? He wanted to be more authentic in every aspect of his
life but sex and pleasure were a ride he couldn’t resist.
A blazing summer day and a dying Mother. Why
was it he was becoming more and more aware of contrasts? He'd first begun to
notice back in those furtive years of early East Village-hard-core-living that
nothing was perfect. But now this wisdom seemed to rule life itself. A little
touch of death, disease, and decay existed in everything, every moment. The
Buddha was spot-on about this. He named it even. Interdependence, the concept
that the living rose you see, so lush and red now, is also now withering and
dying—now. Lush and rot, pain and joy, peace and violence, hate and love,
always opposites in pairs; and opposites always together as one,
Interdependence.
She loved him too much, and his love for her
was far more complex than any simple son’s love for his Mother, for she was
much more; lover, older sister, secret friend, and tomboy compatriot. He was
the bent tree that grew from the twisted twig. Karma dictated that now he had
to serve her.
He reflected on the horror of watching her
suffer. He saw it too, as an opportunity for him to rise to his best in caring
for her. Death frightened him, but he could pretend, acting as if he was strong
and courageous. Besides, part of him was strong and courageous. He had been
massaging family members at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx one day a week for
more than three years now. There, the dying stayed upstairs; out of sight. You
seldom heard the sounds of grief, it didn't fit into Calvary’s business model
of a clean and neat death; something unseen and unheard. "Where life
begins" the commercials said. But in his massage room, in the Family Care
Center, his hands felt the ravaging, racking heaves of grief as family members
collapsed onto his table, their bodies hungry for some soothing touch of sanity
to counteract the malfeasance of death that stole away their loved ones on the
floor above.
Calvary was an end of life hospital, a
ten-minute walk from the Parkchester subway stop on the Six train about an hour
from downtown Manhattan. A large aquarium marked the entrance to the Family
Care Center on the first floor. One day during his massage shift, he pressed
the button and waited for the regular elevator to take him down from the third
floor. Instead, the service elevator stopped. He glanced at the sign warning
people in big red letters that this elevator was for employees only, not for
regular passengers. When the door opened, he got on, for, he was an employee,
although a free-lance one. The two heavy-set, black female, nurse technicians
stepped back a few inches to give him space. They were accompanied by a coffin
canvas on top of a gurney. He knew underneath the canvas was the body of a
patient very recently expired, on its final journey to the basement morgue. He
smiled and nodded toward the two workers, who ignored him. He also noticed a
pile of file folders and some sheets and towels had been placed on top of the
canvas.
"--and so my cousin was there too, girl
can you imagine dat? She be hittin' on dat man like nobody's business any time
soon. We be laughin', da bof a us, so hard I could a done lost my shit in dat
place, you know what I'm saying? Sheeeit--I don't know when I done had so good
a time as dat!"
"Oh my God, my God girl, what’d she say when
she done found out he was married?" They both began to laugh explosively.
He was holding his breath, thinking that their behavior, not to mention the
stacking of the items on top of the canvas gurney was disrespectful, and
insensitive. He kept a blank expression, averting his face from their
ridiculous pink and blue floral print pajama uniforms and their animated faces.
He knew if he said anything, revealed any kind of disapproving twitch, in a
blink, the happy patter would stop and turn toxic toward him.
He thought about offering some ultra-gay,
queenly comment, this always seemed to integrate well into Afro-centric
interactions of high, guffaw, laughter-release sessions but passed on it. There
was something morbid about making a joke right next to a body with rigor mortis
setting in. He reflected that if he worked here full-time, day after day, he
would probably have a different coping mechanism in dealing with dying, the
featured product at Calvary. As it was, working only one day, one shift a week,
he felt more like a visitor or a guest than an employee and he preferred it
that way. He actually welcomed the formal atmosphere of the hospital too, for
it forced him to be aware of his persona at all times. Downtown M4M massage had
an element of chaos; it was easy to get sloppy. Here one always had to be
self-aware with the clients, patients and staff, for it was the real world of
real massage and giving comfort; not the helter-skelter, semi-serious, sensual
world of men’s ass-massage. There, every moment seemed to bleed toward the big
reveal of a cock in the hand, both his or his client's--or a fabulous blow job
by a client if he was lucky (on rare occasions, him giving).
In a few seconds, the elevator doors opened
and he arrived at the ground-floor level. Directly in front of him and across
the hallway there was a huge dais, and on top of it, a gigantic bible waited,
open and forbidden. To the right were automatic glass doors that swished open
for ambulance arrivals of patients only, over the door, a large, red "No
Exit" sign warned visitors away. How many times had he passed this
entrance and witnessed a patient's arrival? Often, it was an elderly woman with
dementia, a hopeless color of grey, looking terribly frail and pale; emaciated,
their eyes staring upward in a daze, riddled with trembling, or still as a
frozen cocoon, their toothless mouths extending open and back like Munch’s
"The Scream." They would be strapped into the stretcher for transport
to prevent them from falling, escaping or hurting themselves. "Where Life
begins, where life begins" the voice-over of the commercial was looping
through his head. He took a left and walked through the clean, bright,
institutional halls, pass the chapel. The smell was a combination of sanitizer
and library. "Quiet, please, service in progress" the square, little,
black and chrome sign with the tiny, white letters affixed to it, welcomed him
and reminded him to control himself. It always seemed to be there and always
had the same message, whether or not a service was actually in progress. It was
a warning to visitors, a reminder to speak in hushed tones and to please at all
costs, no laughing! He headed toward the fish tank, the landmark for the Family
Care Center. There, in the back room, his massage table waited for him and for
clients.
Jane, his boss for the past three years was a
sweet but tough, gentle, overweight, working-class Bronx Italian mama. She was
also a major fag-hag who loved to quote Mae West, talk “show business,” finding
inner peace, pain control or her family dramas. She’d also recently retired to
be replaced by Jill, a skinny, wiry, nervous, neurotic social worker with a
continually anxious-paranoid look on her face. Jill was also a close friend of
Debbie the head honcho at Calvary who was both a social worker and a lawyer.
Steve smelled fear coming off Jill the first moment they met. She was
intolerable as a supervisor when they were alone, with the tiniest details
setting her off to a near state of panic. But with family members, her monstrous
persona transformed into a plastic, sticky-soft mask of warmth and ooey-gooey
compassion. She knew how to sooth the visitors coming to escape the horror of
death playing out in the rooms of the dying upstairs. But she loved to
micro-manage him incessantly, with talons as sharp as straight-edged razors,
and thousands of magnifying-glass eyes like a human fly, just the opposite of
Jane who was very chill and hands-off. Jill controlled or ignored him and when
she wasn’t being whiny or controlling, her cold shoulder clearly expressed her
disapproval of him. He detected it just beneath her fake smile. He didn’t know
why there was such tension between them. He suspected she was homophobic or,
possibly she was jealous, for though she was his supervisor he must have made
five times her salary.
Jill wasn't pretty. But she had an odd beauty
with one hazel eye slightly lighter than the other one; and her nose a bit too
big for her face. Then there was a strange tomboyish quality that both turned
Steve on, and distracted him. Jill’s hint of naughtiness was like the dark side
of the moon, shrouded with coldness and distance. One morning, Steve was
prepping the massage room, while Jill sat at her desk, a few feet away in the
next room, playing through her voice mail messages and swearing like a drunken
sailor. Many of the voices sounded elderly and spoke slowly, with lots of
pauses and questions. Jill’s responses rivaled a ribald drag queen’s opening
monologue on a Saturday evening at a tacky roadside club outside a truck stop
somewhere in the outer reaches of New Jersey. She played through the litany of
voice mail messages on high volume and responded rakishly to each one.
Jill: (Beep) “OK, OK, Mrs. Harvey, what the
fuck is your fucking number?”
Steve was laughing to himself and as she
continued playing messages. He felt as if she knew she was making him laugh;
and she was enjoying doing it.
(Beep) “Jesus fucking Christ when are you
coming Mr. Donaldson—when—the fuck—are—you—coming? I got it, I got it that your
wife is sick you asshole but when the fuck are you checking her into this
fucking place?”
It was during these private moments when Jill
showed her naughty side that Steve was triggered by her for she could be funny
as hell. But Steve knew that joining in and sharing with
After he finished a massage, and when the
client emerged from the room, Jill was full of florid exclamations of "How
was it? How do you feel? Was it fabulous?” This was always aimed directly at
the family member while totally ignoring him. He felt like the anonymous pair
of hands that made the magic happen, although never acknowledged for his part
in the transformation of his clients from feeling like burned out and exhausted
caregivers to feeling halfway human again. She treated him like a service with
a pair of hands. It wasn’t that much different than downtown, where
essentially, he was a tool for the male clients’ pleasures. As time went on,
friction grew in their every interaction, as if they were allergic to each
other. He felt he was too powerful for her to supervise; and being his
supervisor, this was fatal; he knew his days were numbered. He was sure she
would get him fired and replace him with a friend, for that was the way all
people in power worked.
That was so far away now. Seemed like miles,
though only an easy hour away on the train. Here and now, the summer was so
brilliant on this bluff, with the river below. What did his Mother’s pain
portend? Was death coming to be with him now, like a silent companion? What was
that prayer his Grandmother had said? The word Christ could so easily be
replaced by death;
"Death is the head of this house, the
unspoken guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.
Amen."
It was time to go back inside the dark
monolith of the Garrison Institute. Steve got up from the bench. It was time to
sit again, inside. To affix himself bolt upright on the pillows and reflect
past the numbing throat-clearing of the guru, beyond that aversion, and below
it to the deeper meaning of the words being spoken. Detachment from clinging.
Isn't that what he was here to study? But wasn't that what he did already when
he dealt with death and dying and yes, sensual work? He was in a retreat to
step back, to reflect on it all.
But whereas death before was only dealt with
in a second hand at a part-time job, now it would be in his face, up front and
personal all the time, while taking care of her. Now, there was a new
companion, a new presence in his life. He could no longer, wittily refer to
himself as being a feral, commitment-phobe. For now, there was a new
manage-a-trois, himself, his Mother and death. He put his phone and journal
away, stood up from the bench, stretched and walked the grassy bank down the
bluff, back toward Garrison Institute. The grass felt moist and alive under his
feet. Here were the cool, temple-like steps built into the ground that led up
to the main entrance. The huge wooden door was open, and inviting like the
lowered drawbridge of a castle. He left the birds, the wisps of lavender in the
air, and the sparkling river with its sailboat of tanned bodybuilders in
Speedos behind. Inside was the key. Inside he could at least try to be a little
better and a little wiser before his time came.
