Boulevard (14 page)

When Henry came to the bookstore during the day, he would stay in the booths for a long time and come out and tell Newell exactly what he had done, and with whom, and often enough Newell could match Henry's description with someone for whom he had made change. Henry liked to do almost everything you could do with another man, including things he called rimming and going around the world, which had to do with sticking his tongue into someone's butthole, and he described it graphically for Newell one afternoon while Mac was upstairs with the girls.

“But doesn't it stink?”

Henry rolled his eyes. “That smell is heaven on earth, honey, you don't know what you're talking about.”

“You're making this up. Nobody would do that.”

“I'm not making anything up.” Henry always spoke mildly, regardless of what he was describing or the effect the description had on Newell. “It's fun. You'll see. You'll end up with your tongue up somebody's asshole one of these days. We all do.”

“Do you brush your teeth afterward or something?”

“Don't be stupid.”

“I mean it. It sounds so gross. I would have to brush my teeth a hundred times.”

Henry shook his head and shivered. “You'll find out.”

He leaned against the shelf where the tallest of the dildos stood, and he looked Newell up and down for a moment, as though he wanted to talk about something else, then thought better of it, and instead said good afternoon.

In the disco one night, a man asked him to dance, a handsome man in good-quality trousers and a starched shirt, a sweater tied around his shoulders, and Newell started to say no, but the song was something he liked,
Oh
,
let me run let me run let me run
, a long, low moaning voice, Donna Summer sounding like a high wind, and a beat that coursed through him, so he let the man lead him onto the floor. Soon he was moving among the others, thankful for the music. When the song changed, the man kept dancing, and they stayed on the floor till late, the floor crowded by then, bodies pulsing against each other. Newell could feel it in himself, the change that was coming, that he was nearly ready now, that something would happen soon. So he kept dancing, till the beat was one long wave passing through his bones. When the man finally got tired, he tried to lead Newell to the bar, but Newell got his jacket instead and headed outside, and he never saw that man again.

He was falling toward that place in himself, he could feel his descent. The process was compounded by the movies he watched at the bookstore, the dreams he made up to stimulate himself in the dark. Now that he was used to the bookstore he could feel the furtiveness of the
customers, their awe as they entered, their perusing of the magazines as if they simply happened to be glancing in that direction, the hand drawn slowly to touch one of the covers, to look at the back. A certain look on the face indicated whether the man would buy or not; a certain slackness came to the jaw and a keenness to the eye. The grip of the hand on the magazine would change. Men chose their movies with the same silence, the same fixedness, and Newell could feel them, drifting from booth to booth the same way bodies had drifted back and forth in the warehouses along the riverfront.

But he had never gone back to the booths for any reason other than the job. He had stopped buying magazines for himself. He felt himself drifting nearer and nearer a place in himself that would open out like a flower and cause the rest of him to be transformed, but the pictures and the movies were no longer what he wanted.

When he studied Mac, he wondered what the old man was like when he climbed the stairs, when Dixie or Starla or one of the other girls met him and took him into a room for a long, careful massage. He wondered what sounds Mac made, what his body looked like, moving with the flow of pleasure through his nerves. By now, Newell had seen enough pictures, enough movies, so that he could imagine almost anything, even Mac's white, soft body, his thin legs, and flat ass.

“This business will make you think about fucking all the time,” Mac said one day, “to where you can't even stand it, to where you don't even want to think about a
naked woman.” But that same day, after hiring a new guy with a face like a rat for the night shift, Mac crept up the back steps to the massage rooms and disappeared for an hour and a half.

Louise said to Newell one evening, while they were having a drink, while he was licking the foam off the lip of the bottle, “You do know that I like women, don't you?”

“You like them?”

“Oh yes. I like them very much.” She had flushed a bit and seemed suddenly younger.

“Well, I did see you with a woman in here, once.”

“Oh, you're telling a fib.”

“Yes, I did. But I couldn't tell who it was.”

She blinked, then shrugged.

“Did you always like women?”

“Oh, yes. Even when I had a husband. But he was a very nice man, for a man.”

Later in his room, alone, he spoke to himself in a quiet voice, and even though he was alone the words unsettled him, “I like men. Did you know I like men?” He said them aloud a couple of times and sat on the new chair he had bought, beside the window, where he could watch the street below.

He dressed carefully, imitating styles he had seen on the streets and in the bars. He wore a tight, white sleeveless T-shirt, tight jeans, and a flannel shirt. He inspected himself in the mirror and thought he had nice shoulders, nice arms. He combed his hair the way Chris, his barber,
had taught him. He touched behind his ears with the cologne that smelled like cut clover, and he stuffed some bills in his pocket and locked his door. He thought he was good looking; he carried that with him down the steps.

He avoided places where he would have found Henry, visiting a couple of bars he had never seen before, then spent the late part of the evening in a bar called Blacksmith's. Men were coming up to him that night and talking to him, he had been talking to them, he felt easy about it, and he wondered what the change was about, though he had his suspicions. In Blacksmith's he had been sitting alone for while when a dark-skinned man approached him and started talking to him, and something about the moment made Newell aware of the man in a particular way, as though taking his scent. A strong face with a heavy shadow of beard, his nappy hair tinged with red, cut close to his head. He had a thick body, wide round shoulders. He was as old as Jesse, Flora's boyfriend, or maybe a few years younger than that, but his body was hard and lean, and there was something familiar about him, Newell figured he must have seen the guy before. He eased next to Newell at the bar to speak to him in deep whispers, drawing closer as he spoke. What stuff he said! You're about the prettiest thing in this bar. You got the prettiest mouth. Do you know how pretty you are? I come into town looking for something just like you. Can't believe there's a handsome thing like you sitting in here all by yourself. Can't believe you don't belong to one of these men in here, can't believe somebody
doesn't already own you, body and soul. I'd be the one to take care of you if I lived around here. Don't you want to come with me? Don't you have somewhere we can go? Do you want another drink?

They drank another drink and another, and Newell stopped drinking after that, and listened, kept the man close, felt himself wanting to get up from the stool to go with the man, while the night deepened and the bar filled. His name was Jerry Thibodeaux, and he was an off-shoreman home for a few days. His wife wanted him to stay home and kiss her ass, but he had to go out. His wife probably knew exactly where he was, but he had no choice, he had to find out if there was somebody waiting, and now he knew. By now Jerry was pressed close against Newell, and when Jerry talked he sometimes leaned in so that his lips brushed against Newell's ear. The sensation was transfixing, worse than any alcohol, and when Newell laid his hands on Jerry's chest, Jerry sagged and sighed and Newell felt a force binding them, and when he moved his hands Jerry's eyes glazed, the power of it, all that power flowing in Newell's hands.

He had come to the point, and now he moved. They would not go anywhere, they would stay here. He unbuttoned Jerry's flannel shirt and slid his hands inside to ease it open, and it was like a movie as he moved, one of the good ones, his hands easing open the shirt, the tight shot of the hard brown body, the corded stomach, the thick, hairy chest, and then Jerry gripping him hard at the back and Newell relaxing, like it was being filmed and he
knew what to do. He knew it really was a movie now because a space was clearing around them at the bar, as Newell opened Jerry's shirt and reached his hands in Jerry's pants; the movie was about the hard, lean, older man and his need for the tender, choice, young one in front of him, and Newell saw the scenes in his head, everything coming together, the man's ginger kisses and Newell descending along the lean body, sliding down Jerry's pants, taking his dark tender tongue of meat from inside, kissing it till it grew and everybody was watching, and in the middle of the action Newell saw himself as though he were one of the people watching, and he was amazed to see how much he had learned on the job at the bookstore, because he copied the motions perfectly. Jerry was sagging back against the bar with his hips going up and down, that tension so perfect, so urgent, the cock rigid in Newell's mouth, Newell moving on it, people watching and some of them starting to grope each other, but most simply rapt. Only when Newell had to swallow the stuff, or try to, did he falter, choking some and pulling back, then drying his mouth afterward with a napkin the bartender handed him. Jerry hung onto the bar while some friendly men moved affectionately close to him and ran their hands along his body, as if to thank him for what he had done. The bartender brought Newell a drink on the house. Newell washed away the peppery taste in his mouth. He sipped the drink, but felt his head clear, completely sober.

They would talk about the kid who gave the blow job at Blacksmith's last night, did you see that? Maybe some
of them knew him from the bookstore. They were still staring at him now to see what he would do next.

There, in the shadows, even his boyfriend was watching, the boy he would meet soon, whose name was Mark.

Jerry was surrounded by his own admirers now, and Newell walked away without saying good-bye, without responding to anybody. He walked outside, rubbing a spot of drying semen from the corner of his mouth, sipping the liquor and walking to the Moonwalk, where he listened to the ships' horns till nearly morning.

Miss Sophia was glad when Mac moved Newell to the night shift, after the shiftless Ratboy was finally gone for good, because, of course, Miss Sophia cleaned the bookstore on that shift, and she had liked Newell from the first time she met him, although she never said so to him or to anybody else. For the most part she had very little to say to people. But Newell she liked, because of the look in his eyes when he stood at the cash register making change, while Miss Sophia wielded mop, broom, and sponge. She had hated Ratboy worse than anything, even worse than Louis, but she liked Newell. She studied him the first few evenings, and the very first night she noticed a difference in the way he held his body
from the times she had seem him on the day shift. She thought to herself, he is getting ripe. He is starting to look nice.

Miss Sophia had the mop wringer to worry with and paid no more mind to Newell for a while, till that fat friend of his came in, the one with the swishy walk and the pot belly, thin hair at the top, which was often attractive on a man, but not on this man, who was far from a hunk or a stud in Miss Sophia's book. Right away Henry Carlton started in on Newell. Miss Sophia learned his name when Newell said it, and from that time on she thought of him as both names, Henry Carlton, a pale woodchuck, she thought, or even worse, a mole, a flat one, tunneling under the dirt looking for grubs.

Henry said to Newell—and he was actually moving his puffy white hands like he was digging, and Miss Sophia happened to be wringing out the mop nearby and listened—“I was looking for you at the Corral last night. Did you stay home?”

“Oh no,” Newell said, “I went out,” and told the story of what he had done, and Miss Sophia was nodding as he told the story of the big hunk in the Blacksmith's bar. All the men in the Blacksmith's bar were big hunks as far as Miss Sophia was concerned. She walked by there, in the way that she walked by many places, and at Blacksmith's men were hanging all out the doors all hours of the day and night. So she was hardly surprised Newell would go there and do what he had done, find a complete stranger and have sex with him right in the bar. Miss Sophia had
seen this kind of thing happen very often in that bar and in other bars. But neither was she surprised when Henry Carlton became instantly jealous. Henry's brow furrowed and he started to grind his jaw. “We never go to Blacksmith's. You must have been drunk.”