Punish Me with Kisses (40 page)

Gently he shakes his head. "Not yet, Kay. I still enjoy it. The people." He laughs. "Well, most of them. The adventure too, not knowing what'll happen, who I'll meet. It's like an addiction—the money, being desired so much, people pay big-time just to touch me. And it's fun playing diamond-in-the-rough." He shows me his sweetest grin. "Or rhinestone, as the case may be."

Clever boy!

Yet even as I'm appalled by his casual disregard for my warnings—that sooner or later he'll fall into the clutches of a sociopath or be infected with HIV—I'm still beguiled by his glamour. Street hustler as psychic explorer—that has emerged as my theme. In my pictures I want to capture the lives of those who, by offering their bodies to danger and to lust, risk all and by so doing achieve a kind of stature.

"So," I ask him, "when you retire what will you do?"

"Live the good life," he says softly. He's got it all figured out. He'll move down to Mexico, a town called San Miguel de
Allende
. Already, he tells me, he's picked out the house.

"
Yo
! You there! You for sale?"

It's Tim's friend Crawford, a lean, blond Minnesotan hunk who somehow manages to maintain a permanent tan.

Crawf
beams. "You look really hot there, Bug. If I had some bucks I'd buy you in a flash."

Hustler's banter . . . yet to be thirty-five and female and told one is attractive in a milieu where maleness and youth are the sole components of allure—I'm flattered.

"Waiting for Tim," I tell him.

"Saw him last night. Not since."

"If you do, tell him I'm here, okay?"

Crawf
nods, smiles, tells me again how hot I look, then saunters off like a panther.

In fact, I've discovered, hustlers sometimes do purchase one another's services. Tim says it's fun to play the john once in a while, and that he's always flattered when another street kid wants to pay him for sex. When that happens, he tells me, street etiquette requires he approach the kid a few days later and reciprocate.

I
t's a quarter to eight and I'm getting impatient. I've never known Tim to be late. I decide to cruise the Gulch awhile, then check back. I slide over to the intersection, turn the corner, become part of the stream.

Silver-haired businessmen hauling briefcases, sweaty evening joggers in Lycra workout suits, frugal shoppers, doting couples, apprehensive tourists—we all run the gauntlet here, never certain what the street people will do.

An old Asian lady, Mao-era haircut and crazed eyes, gesticulates angrily at my camera. Stepping toward a storefront to avoid her, I nearly trip over a street vendor in swami position presiding over a display of flashlight batteries and tattered paperbacks.

"Watch it, Bub!"

Is he mispronouncing my
streetname
, or does he think I'm a guy? No matter, I hurry on.

Nearly everyone here under twenty-five displays a piercing. I note ringed eyebrows, lips, tacked tongues. If this is what they show, I wonder, what baubles must dangle beneath their clothes?

I'm fascinated by the hustling scene, though it was fear and revulsion that originally drew me. Last spring, Maddy Yamada, my photography coach, suggested I get out of the studio, go into the street, start photographing what I feared. Struck by her advice, I realized that for years I feared the Gulch . . . and so decided to take it on.

At first I didn't know what I was after. It's easy and glib to document commercial sex. But on the Gulch, I became aware those early weeks, there were more interesting images to be captured. Meeting hustlers, I discovered unexpected qualities—gentleness, courage, love of adventure, even a desire to heal—which gave the lie to the view that those who sell their bodies must be desperate or hold themselves cheap.

With Maddy's help, her critiques of my proof sheets, I began to sharpen my vision. It wasn't, I understood, just the hustlers I should shoot, but the reactions to them in other strollers' eyes. Not just apprehension or fear . . . also cunning, avarice, lust. So, I asked myself:
 
Who here really are the stalkers and the prey? And I thought:
 
Perhaps with my camera I'll find out.

I
spot Knob at the corner of Polk and Bush. He's talking to a middle-aged bald guy in a cashmere turtleneck. Knob's nearly thirty, old for the Gulch, sports a goatee, has close-cropped hair and a husky fireplug build. Tonight he wears tight jeans, dark T-shirt, leather vest. Occasionally, I've heard, he'll do a session himself, but more often he acts as broker, negotiating deals for kids whom chicken hawks, fearful of jailbait, are too timid to approach.

Knob gestures, Baldy nods, the conversation appears intense. Then Baldy thrusts something into Knob's hand and moves away, casting down his eyes as I approach.

"Knob!"

"Bug!"" Knob furtively sticks whatever into his pocket. I figure I've been witness to a drug deal.

"Negotiating?"

Knob sneers. "Cheap guy. Too cheap to close."

"What'd he want?"

"The usual." Knob turns away. He's wary of me, thinks I'm a do-gooder, perhaps even an undercover cop.

I change the subject:
 
"Seen Tim?"

He shakes his head.

"Well, if you do..."

He makes an imaginary pistol with his hand, aims it at me, squeezes off a shot and winks.

E
ight-fifteen. Tim's more than an hour late. I'm worried—he's never stood me up before. I go to a pay phone outside the Wing Mai, call up my answering machine. No messages. Perhaps he lucked into a score. He couldn't have forgotten; his tone was too urgent. I feel something's wrong, but can't wait longer. I'm cold and hungry. I decide to get something to eat.

Two blocks south there's a Korean barbecue place I like, but tonight the smell out of the Wing Mai is good. I peer through the window, spot Alyson sitting with Doreen. The tables are linoleum and the lighting's fluorescent, which hurts my eyes, but the girls are fun. I slip on a pair of shades, enter, present myself.

"Hey, Bug !" Doreen gestures me to a chair. "We'll have a real girlie dinner now."

They're pecking with chopsticks at a whole cooked bass. I summon the waiter, order a bowl of hot-and-sour soup. As usual Alyson and Doreen are dressed hot. They have slim figures, nice breasts, wear makeup. In most ways they're more femme than I.

"How're tricks?" I ask.

Doreen moans. "You want war stories?" She's the more ironic of the two. She and Alyson refer to one another as "mates," room together, ply the same trade. I've been in their room at the Hampshire Arms—one huge bed, dirty windows, overstuffed closets, jumbles of clothes on the chairs. They rarely take clients home, prefer to perform out, or, as a last resort, in cars. The clients don't mistake them for women. She-males, girls-with-cocks, are what they want.

"There was this john two nights ago."

"Monday, Doreen," Alyson corrects.

"Whatever. It was a scene."

She describes an equestrian scenario they performed in a grand house on Tiburon Island:
 
pony saddles, reins, horsetails, the works.

"See, we're supposed to be mares," Alyson explains. "The props were pretty good."

"The john was the 'stallion'?"

They smile, exchange a look.

"More like a gelding," Doreen retorts.

Such stories fascinate me. I'm full of questions. Was it apparent that the Tiburon man had enacted the scene before, or did he strike them as a novice? And where did he get all those elaborate props?

My queries confuse them. They're not interested in the
hows
. It's the experience they savor, entering a client's madness, his fantasy.

"Actually, he was fine," Alyson concedes.

"If you like dead horse meat," Doreen adds.

Alyson breaks up. We share a sweet cooked banana dish for dessert. I ask if they've seen Tim.

"Yeah, yesterday," Doreen says. "He had attitude."

"How do you mean?"

"Like he was on the warpath or something. He pranced."

Alyson laughs. "That's what we did Monday—oh, Lord! we pranced! Till our tails switched up and down. 'Not side to side,' the john kept saying. Should have seen him, Bug—he was practically in tears. 'You're not flicking flies off your rumps, girls. You're horny
horsies
!' Eventually we got it right, made him happy."

T
en p.m. I decide to go home. I'd like to stay, perhaps take a few pictures, but because of the cold there's little going on. Also I'm feeling low. I thought Tim needed me, that confidences would be received. I was looking forward to playing the role of stand-in mom, since, until now, he and I have been mostly an older sister/ kid brother routine. He's rarely spoken of his family, mentioning only that they live back east and are estranged except for an outcast gay uncle in New York. Tim is decent, loyal, and soft-spoken. I'm sure there's an explanation, but I can't help but feel stood-up.

As I walk toward the Bay, I recognize a sports car, a silver Mercedes 600 SL, patrolling Polk. The driver guns his engine. He's a hawk, I know, one of the rich ones who often hang around. The car's flamboyant but the occupant thinks he's invisible in darkness behind the glass.

One little-known fact about us color-blind:
 
We can see through most camouflage. In World War II we were used as bombardiers, and many of us are good at spotting birds and snakes whose coloring conceals. The reason, of course, is that we're not distracted by color, concentrating instead on tonal values and shapes. So I'm able to make out the man in the Mercedes, not clearly but well enough to recognize him. It's Baldy, the guy I saw talking earlier with Knob.

Then, as he drives by, gunning his engine again to show off his power, I catch a glimpse of his profile and from that understand more:
 
I've not only seen him before, I've surreptitiously photographed him several times. I didn't recognize him at first because he wasn't wearing his toupee.

I
shiver as I climb the Chestnut Street steps. It's windy on Russian Hill. Too late now to safely venture across Sterling Park, so I follow Chestnut, turn right on Hyde, pass the crooked block of Lombard on my way up to Greenwich beside the cable car tracks and the endless cable that rumbles beneath the street.

My building's at the crest. Constructed in the 1920s, slim and elegant, it offers some of the city's finest views. The rent's high; I sacrifice to live here, but have never regretted it. If by some fluke I should someday strike it rich, I'll probably buy a few things but I won't move.

I let myself in through the gilded grille door, step into the elevator cab, push the button for the ninth floor. For me it's early. I adore the night; no photophobia, colors mean little, I don't feel caged in and my vision's at its best. I needn't blink, rarely have to squint. Horizons are limitless. It's a world of grays, a world I can roam and understand.

I enter my flat, go to the living room window. The whole city lies before me like a bejeweled carpet spread across the hills. The high-rises of the financial district glow against the inky sky. The Bay Bridge appears delicate.
Coit
Tower, illuminated, is a pillar of power sprouting from the peak of Telegraph Hill. Some say it resembles a giant nozzle, but I always see a phallus. The water in the Bay looks like roiling oil. Oakland, a distant galaxy, twinkles in the east.

I move to my telescope, still aimed at the penthouse. Now the living room lights over there are on.

So tell me, Judge, what are you doing tonight? Reading a brief, meditating over Justice, or perhaps bedding down some girl, young, slim and petite the way you like?

I
spend half an hour gazing through the telescope, swinging it slowly across the city. Strange how the windows lit up night after night are usually the same.

There's something comforting in this. I like checking on windows I know, seeing familiar furniture, lamps, flickering TVs . . . familiar people too, like the night-gowned lady on Leavenworth who putters endlessly in her kitchen, or the long-haired guy in the high-rise on Green who performs slow tai chi exercises on his terrace late at night. They're like friends, these stay-at-homes. I respect their privacy; I'm not looking to catch them in their
undies
. When I do stumble upon an intimate event, I usually turn my telescope away. It's not that I'm so high-principled; with a camera in hand I'm a mad-dog voyeur. But San Francisco is a city replete with telescopes, and since we must live together here, we observe a certain code.

T
he lens in the lighthouse tower on Alcatraz revolves. High-
masted
ships, tied down at the Hyde Street Pier, creak on gently lapping waves. On the street a car passes in low gear, emitting an expensive growl. Is it Baldy in his Mercedes, unable to score, grinding out his frustration on the hill?