Don't Read in the Closet volume one (68 page)

Words:
4,250

PHOTO BOOTH

By
Neil S. Plakcy

“Are you a real
cowboy?”

The cute, blond
twink leaned up against the bar next to me.

“Used to be,” I
said.

“Really? I
think cowboys are sexy as hell.” He arched his back and turned his head
sideways so I could see into his light green eyes. I had just two-stepped for
about an hour at this country and western bar in Montrose, the gay neighborhood
of Houston, and I was dying of thirst, but the only attention I could get was
from this twink, not from the bartender.

“Well, this
cowboy’s dry as a patch of west Texas desert,” I said. “Who do you have to blow
to get a beer in this joint?”

“You just have
to know how to ask.” The twink turned to the bar and waved his hand in a broad
gesture. “Yoo-hoo, Billy boy! Need a couple of beers down here.”

The bartender,
a buff guy in a tight t-shirt, looked our way and grimaced, but he shot two
unopened bottles of Bud down the bar. The twink caught them both neatly, and
passed one to me. “I’m Paul,” he said.

“Darren.” I
took the beer, twisted off the cap, and tapped it against Paul’s.

“If you used to
be a cowboy, but you aren’t now, what are you doing?” Paul asked.

“Looking for
work. But the only things I know how to do are work with cattle, and there
isn’t much call for that in the city.”

“I’ll bet you
know how to do a few other things.” Paul moved his leg in close to mine.

“Yeah, but I
don’t take money for that.”

He leaned over
and kissed me on the lips. His mouth tasted like cheap beer but I didn’t care.
I put my hand behind his head and pulled him close to me, then pried open his
lips with my tongue.

“Get a room!”
one of the old queers at the end of the bar called out.

Paul pulled
back off me and said, “I want to have my picture taken with a real cowboy. Come
on.”

He led me
across the dance floor to one of those photo booths, four pictures on a strip
for a buck. He fed two dollar bills in and tugged me inside, pulling the
curtain shut. We kissed and mugged for the camera-- me wearing my tan cowboy
hat, then Paul wearing it.

When the lights
went off, we stepped back out to the dance floor and Paul pulled the two strips
from the machine. He handed one to me and put the other in his pocket.

“Don’t go
anywhere, handsome,” he said. “I’ve got to take a wicked piss. But I’ll be
right back.”

I watched his
cute butt sashay across the dance floor toward the mens’ room, and then went
back to the bar, where I managed to order another beer without his help. By the
time I finished it, though, Paul still had not returned.

“Fucking silly
twink,” I grumbled. Why come on so strong to me, only to disappear? Had he
gotten a better offer in the mens’ room?

After another
hour, I gave up and went back to the Lone Star, the shabby motel where I’ve
been staying. If I’d had more notice before leaving the ranch, I might have
saved up some more money for this change of life-- but the issue was thrust
upon me rather than being one I prepared for. So I was stuck at this dump until
I could get a new job.

It was a creepy
place, an old home been converted to a rooming house. There had been at least
three different clerks on duty at the front desk since I checked in, and I
hadn’t seen the guy who rented me the room in the first place. I get the
feeling the place is more of a dirty sheets place for quick encounters rather
than long-term stays, but I got a pretty good rate by the week so I couldn’t
complain.

I spent the
first couple of days of the next week out looking for work.
It’s
tough when ranching was all I’d ever done from the time I was a kid. Couldn’t
operate a cash register or a deep fryer. Couldn’t type or operate a phone
switchboard. About the only thing I could do in the big bad city was
maintenance work, and there were too many folks a lot more desperate than I was
who were willing to work for peanuts.

On Wednesday I
spent another fruitless day filling out applications and getting nothing more
concrete than “We’ll get back to you.” It was a hot, humid afternoon and I was
sweating. I didn’t have a car, so I had to take the bus everywhere, and walk
six blocks in the scorching sun back to the Lone Star.

In the lobby
the clerk, a heavyset Mexican woman, was yelling in Spanish at a skinny drunk
with scraggly gray hair. He turned to me, but instead of saying anything, he
threw up. All over me.

“Fuck!” I said.
The guy looked at me,
then
darted back out the front
door, leaving me with his puke dribbling down my shirt and pants. The Mexican
woman disappeared behind the counter, and when she didn’t return I figured it
was up to me to get cleaned up. I pulled off my shirt,
then
kicked off my cowboy boots.

I shucked down
my puke-stained trousers. I held them in one hand, my shirt and jeans in the
other, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. When I got there, I saw the
door of my room was ajar. I thought at first the maid must be in there, but
there was no housekeeping cart anywhere. I looked inside to see a man of about
my age -- early forties, if you want to know the truth -- standing next to the
dresser, looking through my drawers.

Both kinds--
the dresser drawers, and my boxer shorts. “What the fuck are you doing?” I
asked.

“Ethan Owens?”
the guy said, looking up.

“That’s me. But
who the hell are you?”

“Agent Martin
Brice. FBI.” He held up a badge. I stepped into the grubby, dim room and had to
get up close to him to read it.

He smelled
good, that close. Looked good, too, if I have to admit. Close-cropped blond
hair, enough lines on his face to be interesting. But he got a whiff of the
vomit on me and backed away too fast.

“What’s this
about?” I asked. “They aren’t pressing charges against me, are they?”

“Who would that
be?” Agent Brice asked.

“At the Bar
None. The dude ranch where I worked until the foreman caught me getting a blow
job from one of the guests.”

“That what you
did with Christopher Graf? Give him a blow job?”

I didn’t like
the guy’s attitude, but all the same I felt myself getting hard. I just hoped
my dick wouldn’t pop through the slit in my boxers. “I don’t know anyone by
that name.”

“Sure you do.”
The agent held up the strip of pictures the blond twink and I had taken at the
bar. “Here he is.”

I shrugged.
“Didn’t get his name. We danced, we took the pictures,
then
he told me he had to go to the john. Never came back.”

The agent
pulled a spiral notepad from his pocket. “Details, please.”

I dropped my
boots by the closet, and balled up the puke-stained shirt and jeans. There was
a washing machine in the basement we could use. I’d have to pay a visit down
there when I got rid of the G-Man.

“Mind if I get
dressed first?” I asked.

“All the same
to me.”

Interesting
response. But I pulled on a pair of running shorts over my briefs, then told
him the name of the bar, the day and time, and repeated the story, what little
there was of it. When I finished, I said, “Are you going to tell me what this
is all about?”

“Mr. Graf is
missing,” Brice said. “And it looks like you were the last person to see him
alive.”

I stepped over
to the window and flipped the blinds, so the room was illuminated with the rays
of the afternoon sun. “Say that again, please.”

“Mr. Graf never
showed up at his office on Monday morning. I interviewed his roommates, who
said that he left home on Saturday evening to go to a bar called Southern
Nights, on Montrose. Bartender there recognized Mr. Graf, knew he was a
regular. He saw him dirty dancing with a cowboy.”

“They still
call it that?” I asked. “Thought that went out in the eighties.”

“Wouldn’t
know,” Brice said. “Asked around the bar, and someone gave me your name, said
you lived here at the Lone Star.”

“Don’t you need
a warrant to look through my things?”

Brice held a
piece of paper out to me. “Said warrant. Gives me the right to search your room
for evidence pertaining to the disappearance of Christopher Graf.”

I took the
paper from him and tried to read it, but it was just gibberish to me.

“You want to
change your story now?” Brice asked. “Maybe you and Graf came back here, things
got a little out of hand…”

“Only thing I
had in my hand that night was my dick,” I said. “Since this twink you call Graf
got me hot and bothered and then dumped me.”

“Why’d you keep
these pictures, then?”

I shrugged.
“Didn’t get around to throwing ‘em away. I’ve been looking for a job. Didn’t
have energy to focus on anything else.”

Brice made a
note on his little pad. Probably that I was homeless and unemployed. “Anyone
who can vouch for you Saturday night?” he asked.

“I got myself a
beer after Graf left for the men’s room. Stood around the bar for at least a
half hour by myself drinking it.”

Brice nodded.
“That’s what the bartender said.”

“Then I came on
back here. Don’t have a car, so I had to take the bus. You could probably track
my Metro card.” I dug it out of my pocket. “Can you just copy down the number?
I’m gonna need it tomorrow.”

He took the
card from me and wrote down the number. “And after you got back here?” he
asked. “Anybody see you?”

I shook my
head. “Not that I noticed. This place doesn’t go for a regular clientele.”

“Oh, they’re
regular, all right,” Brice said. “They just don’t stay for very long.” I
noticed there was something changed in his body language, like maybe he wasn’t
thinking of me as a serious suspect any more. Or maybe it was that I caught him
checking out my crotch.

“Yeah, I
figured that out. But it’s all I can afford.”

He pulled a
card from his wallet. “If you hear anything from Mr. Graf, or anyone who knows
him, give me a call.”

I took the
card, and our fingertips brushed. I felt a brief electric charge from that, and
looked up at him. He was smiling, a kind of half smile. “And even if I don’t
know anything, can I give you a call?” I asked.

“Let’s stick to
if you know anything,” he said. “Or if you decide for any reason that you need
to leave town.”

“If I don’t
find a job in another week, I’ll have to try someplace else.”

He put his
notebook away. “Well, good luck with that.”

I was blocking
his exit from the small room, and we did a little dance, me going one way and
him the same, then again, until he could get past me.

I treated
myself to a look at his ass as he walked through the parking lot to his car. It
was a damn fine one. Too bad I was such a loser that I couldn’t attract more
than a little bit of interest from him.

I’d never had
trouble getting men before. Not at the ranch, for the most part; I followed
that advice not to shit where you eat, that is, right up until that dude whose
dick I sucked made me an offer I just couldn’t refuse. It was part genetics and
part ranch work. I had a good-looking face, and my body was hard in all the
right places.

But Agent Brice
hadn’t cared a bit. And even Christopher Graf, whoever he was, hadn’t liked my
looks enough to come back out of the mens’ room.

I didn’t get
any luckier the rest of the week. I applied for job after job with no success,
and I didn’t know what I could do. I couldn’t go back to the Bar None, and I
was sure they’d spread the word to every ranch in the area. Saturday night I
was determined not to go back to Southern Nights. I couldn’t see spending any
of my dwindling capital on beer and the chance to get lucky.

But boredom
overtook me, and around eleven o’clock I hopped a bus to the bar. Just one
beer, I thought. I could make one beer last for a couple of hours. Maybe I’d
dance a little, if they had some line dancing going on. Maybe I’d even get
lucky. Though that was looking pretty dubious.