boystown (3 page)
Authors: marshall thornton
* * *
I let him go at it for a while, then said fuck it and threw back the covers so I could get a good look at what he was doing. It was cold for a moment or two, but I forgot about that quickly. My boxers were down around my knees, and Ross’ head bobbed up and down along my shaft.
There was nothing timid about the way Ross sucked a cock. He didn’t hold the base of my dick with one hand. He didn’t nibble at the tip. Without even a moment’s hesitation, he bobbed his head all the way down until my pubic hair was tickling his nose. After he did that enough times, I started to moan.
Ross let my cock drop out of his mouth and smiled up at me. “Good morning,” he said, then slipped my right testicle into his mouth. He rolled it around gently, let it drop out of his mouth.
and switched to the left. With his fingers he rubbed the spot behind my balls. Anxiously, I reached down and started jerking myself. Ross reached up and brushed my hand away.
Then he was sucking on the end of my dick, letting it pop in and out of his mouth. He ran his tongue up and down my shaft before he went back to deep-throating me.
“Yeah, that’s it. Suck my dick.” I knew Ross liked it when I talked. “Take it. Take it all the way.”
I grabbed him by the back of the head and tried to get my prick in even deeper. Ross had his hand wrapped tight around my balls. Pulling them, twisting gently. I was close. It wasn’t going to take much more before I--
With a spasm that shook my whole body, I came in three heavy spurts deep in the back of Ross’s throat.
Crawling up the bed, Ross tucked himself in next to me. I held on to him while he jacked himself off. It didn’t take long. I think he was almost there when I came in his throat. Barely a minute later he was coming all over his belly.
I suppose I could have returned the favor and sucked him off. But, for one thing, I was not as good at it and it was embarrassing to risk comparison. For another, he was technically someone else’s boyfriend. If he really wanted a blowjob, he could go ask his boyfriend.
Boystown - 15
Well, maybe boyfriend’s not such a good word. Earl Silver was in his mid-forties and locally famous as a social columnist for the
Daily Herald
. He spent weeknights with Ross in the city and weekends in Naperville with the wife and kids. I figured if Ross was dumb enough to get in a situation like that, he deserved to miss out on the occasional blowjob.
I went into the bathroom and cleaned myself up. I wet a washrag and brought it back to Ross. It was not the first time I’d ended up in bed with Ross. Given his situation, he was frequently at loose ends on Fridays and Saturdays when I happened to also be at loose ends.
After he finished wiping off his abs, Ross said, “That kid in the picture you showed me, he’s just your type.”
“I don’t have a type.”
“Yeah, you do. I see the guys you look at. Small, blond, they don’t have to be young, but it helps.”
“So, what’s this about?” I wagged a finger back and forth between us. “You’re not my type.”
“Which you kindly overlook because I’m a really nice guy and a great fuck,” he said. I wasn’t going to let him know it, but he wasn’t far off.
“How’s the boyfriend?” I asked to change the subject.
“Earl is writing a book about our lady mayor. He says it’s going to be scandalous. I think he’s making half of it up.”
“Sounds like a great guy.”
He shrugged and said, “I love him,” as though that made up for everything.
When Ross left, it was nearly noon. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to get much done. I zipped out and found a place that would make twenty-five copies of Brian’s graduation photo in an hour. I grabbed a gyros for breakfast, then trudged over to the El. It was freezing on the platform, but I ate my gyros, which was nice and hot. Finally, a train came, and I took it down to LaSalle. I don’t normally go to my office on Saturday, but I was curious about something and wanted to check it out.
My building, which is pretty quiet to begin with, is a morgue on weekends. I unlocked my office and went directly to my filing cabinet. I pulled out all my case files for the last year and a half.
Actually, they were all my cases files, since that’s how long I’d been on my own. I made a list of my clients and then sat staring at it. There were thirty-three names, and one of them had recommended me to Walt Paddington.
Boystown - 16
First, I crossed out all the names of people I was pretty sure had no idea I was queer. That left seven names. None of them lived in Carbondale. In fact, all but one lived here in Chicago. Allan Grimley had recently moved to Springfield.
I met Grimley when he ran for the general assembly. He hoped to be the first gay member of the assembly. Instead he got five death threats a day for six weeks. His campaign hired me to consult on security and check out the death threats, since the general consensus was that the police wouldn’t bother. It was a nice gig. I got paid a lot of money and managed to keep the guy alive.
When he lost, he got a cushy job lobbying the state for the Chicago Entertainment Association, a group made up largely of bars and restaurants, and ended up moving to Springfield anyway. I put in a call to see if he’d made the recommendation, but ended up talking to his lover, a Cuban boy named Juan who had to be having a rough time in Springfield. He decided to take his anger out on me. I barely got to ask to have Allan call before Juan hung up.
Just for the hell of it, I called the other six names on my list. None of them had recommended me. Two of them pretended not to even remember me.
I headed back up to the north side, picked up the photos, and had coffee and a piece of pie at the Melrose Diner. A cigarette would have been perfect with my coffee, but I had to content myself with watching the other diners smoke. When I was on the job, I could justify the cigarettes with the thought that I risked getting shot every day on the street. I could end up dead anyway, so why worry about cancer? Plus, nicotine helped with the occasional stresses of the street. As a PI, I had fewer justifications.
While I ate my Dutch apple pie à la mode, I re-read Walt’s note about Brian and tried to decide if it was any help. The kid liked to drink, so he was probably a regular somewhere. Eugene mentioned The Closet. I put that down as my first stop after I finished my pie. What else? He liked old movies. If I didn’t made any progress by Monday I could ask Walt for a list of Brian’s favorites, then check them against a Parkway schedule. It was a long shot, but maybe I’d get lucky. Other than that, Walt’s note wasn’t much use.
The waitress cleared my empty dish, and I asked for a refill on my coffee. I turned Walt’s note over and started to make a list of questions I should ask him when he called on Monday. Where did Brian grow up? What’s the deal with his parents? Is there a reason he doesn’t want Walt to know where he is? How long were they together? How did their relationship start? I began to think there was a whole lot more I didn’t know about this kid than I did.
I walked down to The Closet, a tiny bar on Broadway near Buckingham. The dark club held little more than its bar and a space in the back where drinkers milled about. It reminded me of a place from the fifties, when people were serious about their drinking. After showing Brian’s picture around to most everyone in the place, I was getting nowhere. I left and decided to hit a few more bars in the area before I headed home to get ready for my shift at Paradise Isle.
The sun set a couple hours before I made it home. I had forty minutes before I needed to get to the club. As I unlocked my door, my mind was working over the whole problem of Brian
Boystown - 17
Peerson. Everything about the case felt wrong. The phone call was funky. The package was weird. Red flags were going up--
When I got to my living room, I saw that the stack of albums that usually sat on the floor next to the stereo was all messed up. As though someone had rifled through them. And, of course, my Thorens turntable and Marantz receiver were gone. The desk where I did my personal bills and worked when I felt like avoiding the office had been rifled, and half my personal files were now on the floor.
I un-holstered my gun, flipped the safety, and went to check out the rest of the apartment. The bedroom was empty, closet door open, clothes thrown about. In the kitchen, the back door stood open. The molding was hanging loose. It opened onto a covered walkway between the sidewalk and the backside of the building. Enjoying their privacy, someone had used a crowbar to pry the door open, and I was going to need both a carpenter and a locksmith to get it working again.
Now that I knew I was alone, I went through the apartment and inventoried what was missing.
All my electronics: stereo of course, portable electric typewriter, clock radio, even the freaking toaster. They’d taken some of my clothes. A leather jacket I didn’t much like. A couple pairs of pants. Maybe a shirt or two. Nearly fifty bucks I had lying around. The only thing that was going to be a real problem was that they got my spare gun. The Sig is a great gun for walking around.
It’s small and easy to conceal. But when you know you’re going into a bad situation, it’s nice to have something a little bigger. Which is why I kept a Smith & Wesson Model 28 with a six-inch barrel in the top drawer of my dresser.
The whole thing stunk of junkies. Professionals don’t bother with albums and clothes and small electronics. A professional wouldn’t have bothered with me at all. Sure, a garden apartment is easy pickings. But generally there’s not much worth picking.
Most people would have called the cops, but there was no way I was doing that. When I did my inventory, I noted that the junkie burglars had missed a half-smoked nickel bag I kept in an old gym shoe and three Quaaludes I had folded in paper and taped up under the bathroom sink.
They’d be heartsick if they knew.
And there was no way I was going to let anyone from the CPD wander around my apartment.
Sure, I could flush my little stash down the toilet. But that wasn’t any guarantee I wouldn’t get busted for dope anyway. When it came to Chicago cops, if they knew there was a party they always brought their own.
I’d go by the station on Halsted in a couple days and report the gun stolen. Just to make sure I didn’t catch hell if the junkies decided to do something stupid like rob a Walgreen’s. I stopped by my upstairs neighbor’s. Her name’s Sue, and since she’s butcher than I am, I figured she’d have a hammer and some nails. She did. I asked her if she’d heard anything during the afternoon, and she scratched her near crew cut and blushed. “I was occupied.”
Boystown - 18
“Well, good for you,” I said. I could hardly complain that she was too busy getting laid to hear my break-in. I went ahead and told her what had happened and what had been taken in case I ever needed corroboration.
I found a couple of two by fours in the utility room next to the laundry. It wouldn’t do much good, I knew, but I nailed them across my back door anyway. The worst part of it was thinking about the junkie burglars in my place. Looking at my stuff. Making cracks about my taste in music. Giggling over the jack-off magazines on the shelf in my closet. Cracking jokes about why a fag like me had such a cool gun. It felt shitty, and I wanted to punch somebody. Instead, I went to Paradise Isle and watched a couple hundred guys dance the night away.
* * *
Sunday Herald.
Making the kind of breakfast your mom made for you when you were a kid. Having lazy sex. I, unfortunately, had to find a carpenter.
Thumping my way out of bed, I put on a pot of coffee and called the company that managed my building. I left word with their service that it was an emergency, and they called me back around the time I was thinking of making a second pot of coffee. The woman, who gave me the impression that my burglary was a bigger problem for her than it was for me, finally gave me the number of a handyman who’d come out on a Sunday and fix my back door.
I was just out of the shower and free-balling it in a pair of gray sweats when the handyman arrived. He said his name was Burt. He stopped in my living room and looked around.
“The door’s in the back,” I said, not sure why he’d stopped.
“You don’t have a TV?”
I shook my head.
“Radio?” he asked.
“It got stolen.”
He nodded sympathetically. “Super Bowl today.”
Which I would have known, since every male member of the Nowak family lived for the day, except I was living in exile. Sometimes it seemed like a more important holiday than Christmas.
I could take football or leave it. I liked the tight uniforms and the quarterback feeling up the center at the start of every play. Other than that it was just a bunch of guys running around being pissed off. I preferred baseball, a game of patience and skill.
Boystown - 19
Burt headed into the kitchen, where he peeled off his parka and got ready to work. Probably in his early thirties, he wore a white thermal shirt and a pair of blue jean coveralls. He was a faded blond, balding a little, with a killer dimple in the middle of his chin. His body looked to be in great shape: long, ropy muscles covered in fine blond hair. He could probably lift anything in my apartment, including me.
The fact that he was nearly as tall as I was made Ross absolutely wrong about my having a type.
Yeah, I liked short, tight little blonds. But once in a while I also liked them tall. Not that I stood a chance with Burt. Even though I kept hanging around the kitchen, bouncing around in my sweats, he didn’t notice a thing.
I’m not one of those fags who think every man alive is do-able. This doesn’t prevent me from giving a lot of thought to certain unavailable men -- like Burt. But it does cut down on the amount of personal rejection I feel, as well as limiting the number of fistfights I end up in. I left Burt to resuscitate my back door and hung around in my living room. I flipped through my albums and made a list of which ones were missing.