“An eighty-seven Malibu,” said Lenny. “My father’s car. Low mileage. Runs good. He died a year ago an’ I just haven’t gotten around to selling it. I’ll sign it over to you if you’ll show me how you did it. And let me videotape it all.”
Tape me?! Now that made me stop an’ think. It got Wayne goin’, too.
“Lenny, are you out of your fucking mind?” he sniped. “Do you have any idea how fucking illegal that is?”
“Only if you get caught,” Lenny said, right back him. “But if we play our cards right, we won’t.”
That brought a big “huh?” from me. “What d’ya mean? It’s one thing to do a guy in prison; the uniforms don’t give a fuck what happens to any of us. Or in some back-assed state like Texas, where it’s open season on fags. But grab a guy off the street in the community? In L-A? He’s gonna call th’ cops.”
“Curt’s right, Lenny. It’s better to leave that idea in fantasy land.”
“But what if he’s someone who wouldn’t go to the police?” Lenny asked. “What if, once it’s done, we give him a lot of money and he chalks the experience up to being part of his business?”
Wayne sat on the sofa’s arm an’ talked to Lenny like he was a kid that just got caught smokin’. “If you mean doing that to one of the boys down on Santa Monica, some night -- come on, they aren’t exactly what you’d call straight. And God only knows what sorts of diseases they carry -- AIDS, syphilis, herpes, you name it, they probably have it and have done it.”
“I know, Wayne. Will you at least try to give me some credit, for once? I’m talking about hiring an escort.”
“Which raises the same issue about whether or not they’re straight!”
“Doesn’t matter. Most of those guys swear they’re hetero. But even if he isn’t, if we hire him from one of those ads and we...well, hold him down and let Curt do his thing, it’d be a pretty damn good facsimile. And that’s all I really care about -- watching him do it to someone who doesn’t want to do it. And making him like it. All on tape.”
Wayne stood up, lookin’ kind of weird. “I can’t believe you’re suggesting such a thing.”
“I can’t fuckin’ believe you wanna tape it,” I chimed in, an’ not too happily, I’d say. But Lenny didn’t notice.
“It’s just for me, Curt,” he said. “A one time experiment to prove your point. Videotaped so I can look at it as many times as I want and -- .” He gave the international motion for jackin’ off.
“You’re fuckin’ sick,” I snarled.
Lenny looked at me, point blank, an’ got this expression on his face that...I dunno...seemed simple an’ natural an’ scary all at the same time. “No, Curt,” he said in a plain voice, “I’m fucking old. And I’m fucking tired. And the only way I can fuck, anymore, is to pay for it. As we saw, tonight, an’ that isn’t even what I’d really call fucking. And I’m so fucking weary of that. And I’m so fucking close to being broke because of it.”
“Lenny,” Wayne started, but he got cut off with a look.
“If you don’t want to be part of it, Wayne, don’t be. Tell you what, you go home to Kansas for a week, and we’ll do it then. You go back to a state where it’s okay to send queers to jail for making love, no matter what the Supreme Court says, and that happily tolerates a motherfucker who tells people to kill us. Go back to a place where the only way you can make contact with something male is to pick up a guy in the park who’ll only let you suck his dick, and then who’ll beat you up and take your money, knowing you won’t be able to go to the cops about it. Go back and try to remember why the hell you ran like crazy to get away from that kind of world. And why I did.”
He clenched his teeth then looked back at me. “Curt, most of my sexual contact now comes from my right hand. If that’s how the rest of my life’s going to be, fine. But I want something to make it worthwhile. And if that means messing with somebody who’s been messing with guys like me, even better. Now I’m offering you a car that’s in good running order. One that’s worth thousands of dollars. An’ all I want you to do is give me a little something back. You don’t really have to rape a nice straight heterosexual male; one of the fake ones will do. But I want to watch you do it. I want to watch you make one of those obnoxious pretty-boy fucks who’ve taken my money over and over and over into your bitch and love it, so I can withdraw into my own little world and fantasize about doing it, myself.”
“Fantasize?” I asked, believin’ his bullshit about as much as I believed in the tooth fairy.
“Of course,” he said. “Do I look like someone who could do something like that, himself. Not really. All I could ever do is jack off.”
He stood up an’ looked at me, face t’ face. An’ I knew he was right. He was weak. Nervous. Bitin’ the nail of his thumb, he was so
