A Consumer's Guide to Male Hustlers (18 page)

Hustlers expect their clients to pick them up and return them to base, or pay cab fare. (Models without their own transportation will incorporate the cab expense into their fees.) A hustler who will commute to work for an hour by bus and streetcar nevertheless will insist that a client paying fifteen times his hourly wage also see to chauffeuring him to and fro.

I have employed more than one hustler to perform various jobs in my house. It has always been understood, without ever having been discussed, that if they performed an "ordinary" job for me, they would get to my place by taking public transportation. Only in their hustler capacity do they demand being chauffeured to and from their assignments.

It does not help that I am a compulsively punctual person and that many hustlers (not all) have problems with punctuality. Gabriel, for instance, had lost a number of jobs for being tardy. As with Jed, Gabriel and I had lots of fights over this issue. It was maddening for me to drive through rush-hour traffic, managing to be right on time in front of his own home, and then have to wait for him for ten minutes to come downstairs.

Just a year ago I finally solved the transportation problem. I pick up hustlers who do not have cars at a central Castro district location after they call me to tell me that they are there, waiting for me. This way, they have to wait the five minutes it takes me to drive there. This new arrangement works most of the time.

When I picked Gabriel up, he was almost always in a bad mood. He regularly fought with his co-workers and roommates, whom he referred to as "lowlifes." (Gabriel was a real snob. I suspect that this is the reason he gave up on public hustling.) Most of Gabriel's problems revolved around his inability to relate to other people, including the kind gentlemen who paid his bills. As a result, a gentleman assigned to a specific expense item would, in a fit of rage, resign his commission and plunge Gabriel into a financial crisis.

This is where I, with my paltry $30 per deed, came into the picture. I think that Paul had introduced us so I would provide a backup safety net, when the other ones failed.

When it came to money matters, Gabriel and I got along splendidly because our arrangement was straightforward. While I was flabbergasted by the magnitude of Gabriel's phone bills (some months close to $1,000), the gentleman who had to pay for them was furious. I was happy that I could remunerate Gabriel on a pay-as-you-go basis, rather than have nightmares about his next phone bill. It was, in fact, the cheapest way to have sex with Gabriel.

This "fee per deed" had one great advantage for Gabriel. The gentlemen who took care of Gabriel's expenses would be hit upon for loans that he never repaid. Eventually, they refused to lend him more money, which caused a lot of tension. In my case, Gabriel could borrow money from me without either of us worrying about repayment.

It worked very simply. He would borrow $100 which he would pay back in "deeds," in five installments of $20 each. I insisted that I pay him $10 per session. This arrangement allowed him to pay off his debt while still making some money every time we got together. These arrangements could become very complicated. I made sure that we kept books. As with other hustlers, I asked Gabriel to make the entries in his own handwriting. This way he knew that the information was accurate.

Non-itinerant hustlers are usually good credit risks, provided they are expected to pay off through sex sessions. I have been burned only once by a hustler. In one case, it took me a whole year to collect. The hustler had borrowed money from me and then, unexpectedly, left town. When he came back he called me and said that he wanted to repay his debt, and have me as a client again. While he did not have a cent to his name, he was able to discharge his debt and make some money in addition.
¹

¹
. The overall creditworthiness of individual hustlers varies even if, through services, they can repay the debt. I capped Gabriel at $100. I allowed other hustlers to borrow higher amounts.

Gabriel's bad humor could easily be mistaken for bitchiness. When I got to know him better I interpreted his moods as melancholy. He had had a very unhappy childhood. In spite of his vibrant sexuality and imperiousness, he was a very sad human being. Typical of my relationships with other hustlers, Gabriel's moods never once were reflected in the quality of his sexual performance. This is how you separate the sheep from the goats. Gabriel was a professional hustler, who provided services when the client wanted them, not when he was in the proper frame of mind.

After we became comfortable with each other, he often stayed at my place to watch TV because he did not have a set of his own (too practical an outlay for him, and too cumbersome to move when he fell out with the people he lived with!) and his roommates did not watch the programs he liked.

Clients often complain that hustlers do not spend enough time with them. On occasion, I have felt that hustlers spend too much time with me, or, conversely, that I waste too much time consorting with them. Since hustlers sell their time, they are unwilling, initially, to give the client a lot of time before or after the sex act itself. But it was in Gabriel's interest to spend time at my house. He had no friends at all, except for Wolfgang, the German schoolteacher to whom he talked endlessly on the phone. The various gentlemen who helped support him insisted on having sex with him every time he visited them. Gabriel wanted them to beg for it, and doled it out parsimoniously.

With me, each sex act was paid for regardless of whether he spent an hour or the whole night (which happened quite often).
²
Most important, we did not play games with each other. He offered superb sex and, as time progressed, a friendship of sorts developed between us. I became Gabriel's confidant and confessor. I grew to like him but his melancholy and alcoholism made socializing difficult. Curiously, even though Gabriel's assignment was to amuse and pleasure me, it always fell to me to cheer him up and comfort him.

²
. A hustler who asks to stay the night, after having had sex, should be treated as a guest and not as a sex partner. If you feel that you will want to have sex with him again during the night or the following morning, it should be made abundantly clear to him
beforehand
that he will have to provide sex in return for lodgings.

Sometimes Gabriel worked a sixty-hour week. He saw me once or twice a week, and had to visit his two gentlemen with some regularity. In addition, he spent a considerable amount of time in bars, meeting sexual partners he fancied for one-night stands. Where did all this time and sexual energy come from?

The answer lay in Gabriel's sexual prowess. On one evening, after work, and interspersed with a lot of alcohol, he would have sex with me, later on with one of his gentlemen, and much later still pick up a one-night stand in a bar. I am certain that, sexually, he acquitted himself well with my successors. The next day he would go to work in a very foul mood, and pick a serious fight with a co-worker. He was fired, or forced to resign, from numerous jobs. But he was very good at what he did at work and, as a rule, had no major problems finding another job.

Life as a gay person would have been considerably easier for me had I developed a liking for alcohol. I would have been one of the boys. Unfortunately, it does absolutely nothing for me. I used to have a perfunctory drink when I went to gay bars as the price of admittance—before AIDS only alcoholics and patients recovering from hepatitis ordered soft drinks. At home, I would keep some beer and sherry for guests. I have never in my life even come close to getting drunk. My tolerance for happy drunks is minimal. It is zero for morose drunks. Gabriel fit into the latter category.

By rights, I should have withheld all alcohol from Gabriel. But nothing in life is black or white. When he was tipsy, Gabriel transformed himself from a professional hustler to an insatiable sex machine. At this stage, our sex ascended to a higher plane.

I tried limiting the number of beers he could drink by not having more than two on hand. This did not make him very happy with me. Since this also controlled the intensity of his sexual output, I was punishing myself.

Things finally came to a head. Gabriel wanted to watch a program on public television on a Saturday evening. I had an engagement at the same time. I told him that he could watch the program by himself and, when I came back, we would do a deed.

Since the deed was not the main event of the evening, Gabriel was gracious enough to take the bus, rather than have me pick him up. He arrived just before I left. He made a cup of tea for himself, and installed himself in front of the TV. By that time, I trusted Gabriel fully and had no qualms about leaving him by himself.

When I came back, Gabriel was lying stark naked on the floor of the living room. In front of him were arrayed five empty beer bottles. He was polishing off the sixth. On the floor was also an empty six-pack container. I wondered where all these bottles had come from, but was given little time to solve this puzzle. Gabriel was in heat and pounced on me.

That night he even performed the one sexual act he had reserved exclusively for Wolfgang—he started blowing me. Experience had taught me that when hustlers perform, or let the clients perform, a sexual act they reserve for a special person, they feel very guilty about something. In the midst of Gabriel's overwhelming passion, I wondered why he felt so guilty. I knew it was not because he had gotten drunk. So what could it be?

As he was blowing me—lucky Wolfgang!—the answer popped into my head. Gabriel had arrived at my home without beer and there was none in the house. He must have gone out to buy the booze. Since he did not have the keys to my house he must have left the door unlocked so he could get back in. This meant that he left the door unlocked to go shopping. This would have taken him some fifteen minutes!

I asked him about it. Disengaging my penis, he mumbled that I was right but he had been out only very briefly. I was very angry. I stopped his blowing and told him to get dressed. That sobered him up. It had probably never happened to him before that a client he blew stopped him in mid-act. "I am very disappointed in you and I want you to go home now."

"You mean we are not going to do a deed?"

"Correct."

"But I don't have any money."

"Tough."

"How the hell am I supposed to get home?"

I had to drive him home. In the car he alternated between maudlin and abusive, all the time trying to excite me sexually. When we reached his apartment house he asked, "When are you going to see me again?"

"I don't know. Maybe in a month."

"Do you know anyone who'll give you better sex?"

"No."

"Is there anyone who'll do it for less money?"

"No."

"So there," he said, as he got out of my car.

I had ignored completely my own hustler-management principles. I had known almost from the very beginning of my consorting with hustlers that I could not depend on one supplier. Not only because of the unreliability factor, but also because it would give the sole hustler a psychological advantage. With Gabriel, the situation was atypical. For one, though he was habitually late he never stood me up. For another, he was by far the best hustler I knew. And he was affordable.

All of these considerations did not justify having no backup system in place. I knew that Gabriel was going to Germany—it had just taken him a very long time to get organized—and a replacement would have to be found.

I did not see Gabriel for the next four months. My first visit to the baths after suspending Gabriel bore fruit. Sporadically, I dated someone I had met there. I also recalled into service a hustler I used to see, and recruited a new one. None of them compared to Gabriel.

When my mini-affair with my bathhouse acquaintance came to an end, I called Gabriel. I told him that we could do deeds again, provided that there would be no drinking on his part at all in the house. He was delighted. His trip to Germany had to be postponed because his telephone-paying gentleman was out of the picture. At this crucial moment, when calls to Germany were a must, the penny- pinching phone company was going to pull the rug out from under him for the measly $567 he owed. This was also the time when he needed to prepare his wardrobe for his grand appearance in Wiesbaden to be presented to Wolfgang's friends.

I got rid of all the alcohol I had in the house. We fell into the same groove as before, with one difference. I did not see Gabriel exclusively. I would have preferred to spend all my sex money on him but did not want to put all my eggs into one basket.

Ever so slowly Gabriel's trip took shape. Obtaining a passport took many months. When he finally saved enough money for his ticket, it immediately disappeared into thin air and had to be reissued (this time sent to my address), delaying Gabriel's departure by many weeks. But, finally, in January of 1986 Gabriel was ready. We scheduled "The Last Deed." By the time I picked him up in the Castro district, he had already had a few drinks too many. Well, I thought to myself, let's celebrate in
his
style. Gabriel gave the session his all.

The next time I heard from him was in November of the same year. He made a non-collect call from his mother's home near Chicago.
³
Without a preamble explaining how he came to be with his mother in Illinois, he asked whether I would do him a favor. He wanted to know whether he could give my address and phone number as his residence once he returned to San Francisco. Gabriel and I had a psychic thing between us. We always read each other's thoughts. The suggestion that he would become my roommate panicked me. "Joseph," he said just as I was about to tell him that I would never live with him, "I am
not
going to stay with you. I just need to tell these people that I live with you."