“Minnesota’s got more than its share of queers. You didn’t have to come all this way to lie down with a man.”
“No, I did. I had to break away first.”
“Any regrets?”
A few seconds passed.
“Maybe one.”
“What’s that?”
“That I never really did everything with you. You know.”
“I never fucked you, you mean.”
He nodded, almost solemnly, and a moment passed before he spoke again.
“Maybe we could spend just one more night together, Ben.”
“Maybe.”
“How about tonight?”
“You’re sure you want to go all the way, Peter? It’s not always a lot of fun the first time out.”
“I know you’ll treat me OK, that you won’t hurt me.”
“We’ll have to be careful.”
“You told me you’d been tested, that you’re negative. Same as me. Plus, we can use a condom, right?”
“I insist on it.”
“In the documentary you’re writing, some of the people we interview say it’s wrong to have sex like we’re having. You know, what they call promiscuous. Just for pleasure.”
“It doesn’t feel wrong to me. And it feels like more than just pleasure.”
He smiled, just as his eyes met mine.
“Yeah, for me too.”
Then he looked away, out to the yard again.
“I read that magazine article about you. The one Alexandra wrote.”
“You and a lot of other people.”
“I guess it’s true, about what happened between you and your old man.”
“That I killed him? Yes, it’s true.”
“I’m sorry about what he did to your little sister. If somebody did that to my little sister, I’d probably do the same.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I enjoyed killing him, Peter. I’d wanted to do it for a long time. Catching him with Elizabeth Jane just gave me an excuse, lit the fuse.”
“I’m still sorry. About what happened to your sister and mom and all.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Not all of it.” He glanced up at the apartment over the garage. “That apartment was the one your lover lived in before he died. Jacques.”
“Yes, he lived there, for quite a few years.”
“The bed I’m sleeping in now—that was his bed?”
I nodded.
“Maybe that’s where you and me could be together tonight. In the bed you used to share with him. If that’s OK with you.”
“Sure, Peter. That’s fine.”
He raised my hand to his face, rubbed the back of it against his cheek. Maybe it was because he knew how much I enjoyed the feel of his beard, so blond, so invisible until the sudden roughness of it surprised. Or maybe because he simply liked having my hand there, for unspoken reasons of his own. Either way, it felt just fine.
At half past midnight, as Peter slept in the big bed in my apartment, I pulled the sheet up over him, kissed him without waking him, and went quietly down to the house.
I used Maurice’s copy of the Gay & Lesbian Community Yellow Pages to look up the phone number of the Reptile Den, and found it under Private Clubs, between Printing and Psychologists. When I called, a man answered on the first ring. I asked for Charlie Gitt.
“I’m afraid Charlie’s inaccessible at the moment.”
“He’s not there?”
“He’s always here on Saturdays, after midnight, when the action gets hot. That’s why he’s not accessible. The bodies are packed pretty tight in here.”
“And Charlie could be doing just about anything.”
“I have a pretty good idea what Charlie’s doing, and he’s not the one on the bottom.” I heard another line ring. “Why don’t I take a message?”
“Why don’t I come down and see if I can find him?”
“You a member?”
“Not currently.”
The other line rang again; he asked me to hold while he took the call. When he came back on, he told me it would cost me twenty-five bucks to join for six months, and fifteen to get in on Saturday nights after nine o’clock, when the ten-dollar discount rate ended.
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Dress code is leather or jeans and T-shirt. No exceptions. Required footwear is boots or athletic shoes. Underwear optional.”
“Any other rules?”
“As long as you’re reasonably butch, you’ll get in. I guess you know this is a private club with a special clientele. You’re welcome to bring toys if you want.”
“How about condoms?”
“You can bring ’em, but you won’t find anybody to use ’em with. You got a name? I’ll pass it along to Charlie if I see him.”
“Benjamin Justice. The writer who’s finishing the documentary Tommy Callahan started, now that Callahan’s out of the picture.”
“The one on riding bareback?”
“That one, yes.”
“You picked the right man when you interviewed Charlie.”
“I guess we did.”
“Benjamin Justice. I’ll tell him.”
Half an hour later, I found the Reptile Den on a dark side street lined with cars, which was unusual for that part of town at that time of day. The address was in east Hollywood, just off Santa Monica Boulevard as it angles up toward Sunset, on the edge of Silverlake, what some people call a mixed neighborhood. Warehouses and body shops shared space with gay and Latino bars and low-rent taco stands, along with musty-smelling boutiques that specialized in selling used gowns to budget-conscious Latinas getting ready for their first proms and cross-dressing men trying to look like the Good Witch of the West.
I parked two blocks away, around the corner, and walked back, keeping my eyes open for cruising teenagers looking for a faggot to bash. There was no name on the club, just a stenciled street number on the black warehouse façade and a big Hispanic security guy at the door who nodded but said nothing as I entered. Standing in line ahead of me were three men who looked to be in their thirties, one of whom had a well-starched preppy look and was turned away for improper dress. The man checking ID and taking money stood behind a makeshift window without glass and a counter constructed of cheap plywood painted black like the rest of the place. He was shirtless and skinny, but tight with sinewy muscles; he’d shaved his flat chest and a heavy silver ring hung from each of his well-distended nipples, while his biceps were encircled with barbed wire tattoos like warrior bands. Three more rings, much smaller, decorated the right side of his upper lip, and a pearl-shaped silver stud pierced his tongue near the tip. His goatee was dark and well trimmed, giving him, with his nose ring and buzz cut, a slightly devilish look.
He buzzed the other two men through a locked door one at a time; each time the door was opened, music with an insistent beat throbbed from inside. I stepped up to the counter, the man inside looked me over, then asked for identification and forty dollars. I passed them across and waited for my membership form. By then, several other men were in line behind me, mostly white, ranging in age from late teens to a graying couple, though the older men were exceedingly well muscled and fit. Both were in leather, with matching leather vests and openings in the rear of their shiny pants that showed their hairy butts. Everybody was sizing up everybody else, though some were more discreet than others.
The man behind the counter slid my entry form across, along with a pen. I filled in my name and address, signed and dated it, and passed it back.
“You called earlier, right?”
I nodded.
“Charlie still here?”
“Yeah, he’s here.” The voice wasn’t as friendly now. “I told him you were looking for him, that maybe you’d be in. I got the impression he’s been expecting you.”
“Is that so.”
He ran his hand down over his mouth and chin, smoothing out his goatee.
“He says you’ve been bothering people with questions, and he figured you’d get around to him sooner or later.”
“Maybe he’d like to meet me out here, away from the action. Or in the office, where it’s more private.”
“He told me to send you on in.”
“I guess I go in then.”
He raised his devilish eyebrows.
“Have fun.”
Between the admissions window and the door was a sign announcing that patrons were in a gay establishment and if they were offended by “consensual social activity between males” they should not proceed further. Another sign warned that drugs and alcohol were prohibited. Nowhere did I see the warnings about HIV transmission or mandates about safe sex, or the big bowls of free condoms and lube tubes that were customarily found in similar establishments.
I pulled open the buzzing door to the pounding music, and stepped inside.
Immediately in front of me was a small, dingy space filled with old couches, where a few men with spacey eyes lounged or dozed, or checked out the fresh meat making its entrance. The light was dim, but even darker beyond, where I could discern the outlines of wall-like partitions painted black, but not much more, except for bodies wandering about zombie-like, in and out of doorways in the partitions. The music continued to reverberate, without variation or letup, and I realized that the same tune had been playing since the first time the door opened a few minutes earlier. It wasn’t a song so much as a relentless synthetic rhythm with the same refrain repeated by a tough male voice over and over:
I want to fuck you in the ass
. The last time I’d been in a private club where lonely men went to find companionship and sexual relief with other men of similar desire, it had been a spanking-clean, three-tiered bathhouse replete with steam rooms, Jacuzzis, workout equipment, a snack bar, and fresh towels. Endless disco hits from the seventies and eighties had played on every floor, and in every private room, even in the sparkling, tiled showers. Times, and musical tastes, had obviously changed, at least with a certain crowd.
I Want to Fuck You in the Ass
made
Last Dance
seem almost like church music by comparison.
I stepped farther into the room and waited a minute while my eyes adjusted to the dimness. As they did, I spotted Charlie Gitt. He was standing in a doorway across the room to my left, and looked, from the waist up, exactly as he had in the video interview Tommy Callahan had shot several weeks earlier: muscular, black, abundantly tattooed and pierced, face fraught with anger, maybe violence. He was shirtless, exhibiting a mat of tightly curled chest hair and about as much body fat as a razor blade; from the waist down, he was clad in tight brown leather pants with an opening in the front that exposed his bulbous, uncircumcised cock. As I spotted him, a smile creased his face, showing even white teeth and making him, for a moment, quite handsome. A moment after that, he turned and disappeared.
I went after him, which seemed to be the idea.
As I passed through the doorway, I found myself in an unlighted room crowded with bodies, most of them moving. The smells of sweat, sex, poppers, and excrement mingled in the humid air, and grunts and cries punctuated the pounding music. Hands found me in the darkness as I passed, touching my chest, arms, butt, crotch, measuring me for muscularity, firmness, hairiness, size. I reached out in turn, trying to find a body that felt like it might belong to Charlie Gitt. Gradually, my eyes adjusted, and I could make out shapes and sizes, shades of skin. In a corner, a group was gathered tightly around a muscular black guy who was bent over with his legs spread and his face turned away while a tall, lean blond man screwed him from behind; everyone else touched each other in a frenzy of groping, and a vial of poppers was passed from nose to nose. I pushed my way into the circle of bodies and ran my hand over the black man’s chest. No nipple rings, no chest hair. It wasn’t Gitt.
I moved on, found an exit, went out of the room into a narrow corridor, past cubicles with locked doors, ignoring anyone who wasn’t Gitt’s shape and color. Then I saw him ahead of me in the muted light, turning a corner. I moved faster, pushing past sauntering men, hungry eyes, groping hands. When I got to the corner, Gitt glanced back, then stepped through another doorway.
Through the door was another room. Inside the room was a cage, and inside the cage were several men, taking turns slapping, pinching, and twisting the nipples of their object of desire, a well-built Asian man with a nearly hairless body, on his back in a hammock-like sling with his arms and legs splayed and upraised, his wrists and ankles bound to the straps of the hammock. Someone waved a vial of poppers under his nose while a beefy Hispanic man with a sizable erection stepped forward to penetrate him. None of them was Charlie Gitt.
I found another doorway, in a far corner beyond the cage, the only one from which Gitt could have escaped. It opened up to a corridor so narrow my shoulders scraped the walls as I moved forward. I squinted in the shadowy light, and as I reached a corner, I saw Gitt again, waiting at yet another corner, grinning. Then he was gone, and I was chasing him, pulled along by the game, driven by the curiosity and fear that were working inside me like a drug. He led me through a maze of claustrophobic corridors, allowing me just a glimpse of him, before disappearing again into a labyrinth that drew me deeper and deeper toward the unknown, toward the dark center of Charlie Gitt’s universe, where I wanted to be, if only long enough to better know and understand him, and to challenge his manhood by daring him to tell me the truth about what had happened fifteen years ago.
Finally, with the same tape pounding so loud I could hear nothing else, I found myself going through a narrow doorway into a room that was pitch black.
“Gitt!”
I screamed to be heard above the maddening refrain:
I want to fuck you in the ass. I want to fuck you in the ass. I want to fuck you in the ass. I want to fuck you in the ass…
“Gitt!”
Then, in one well-orchestrated movement, I was seized by several pairs of hands coming from the shadows. I was dragged to the center of the room, forced to my knees, shoved face down on the sticky floor. I felt my pants being ripped open, and began to fight ferociously. The hands on me tightened everywhere.
“No!”
My pants were pulled down around my ankles.
“Gitt! Don’t!”
My arms were twisted and stretched perpendicular to my sides, my face flattened to the filthy floor, my legs pried apart. I felt a body on top of me, a rock-hard body, with two nipple rings digging into my back just below the shoulder blades.
Gitt screamed into my ear.
“Here I am, Justice! Just like you wanted!”
“No!”
I clenched my ass tight, felt his fingers trying to pry me apart, cursed him, then begged him to stop. Then I was pleading with him at least to use a condom, and I heard his laughter cutting through the pulsating noise. Suddenly, the laughter stopped, and I felt a fist, fast and hard to my right kidney; for ten or fifteen seconds my body went slack, as if paralyzed. Within the all-consuming pain caused by the punch was an even more excruciating pain, and I knew Gitt was inside me. By the time my body started to come back to me, it was too late to stop him, too late to bother fighting anymore.
Then he was finished with me and I was alone, while the refrain of the one-line song continued, flailing me with humiliation.
*
I had no idea what time it was when I staggered from the Reptile Den clutching my jeans to keep them up. I said nothing to the man behind the window, or to the guard outside. There was no point. No point in complaining, or calling anyone, or reporting anything. I had willingly gone to a commercial sex club, purchased a membership, paid my admission. To cry rape now would be a joke.
Besides, I didn’t want anyone to know. I felt overwhelmed with fear that I might have been infected with the virus; I shook with the fright of it, was on the verge of throwing up as I reached the Mustang, my stomach was in such turmoil.
More than that, though, I didn’t want a single soul to know.