Skipping Towards Gomorrah (41 page)

 

“D
ude, what gives?” Brad asked, breaking out of his pose.

What gives?

“You a cop, dude?”

This was the second time tonight that someone asked me if I was cop, and I laughed, further killing the mood Brad was trying to create. I had to explain to Brad that I laughed because I didn't think I looked much like a New York City cop.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “I'm just not sure what I was supposed to be doing. I've never done this muscle-worship stuff before.”

“Tell you what, dude,” Brad said. “I'll take the lead. I'll do what most guys like, all right?”

All right.

“I'm going to be a little rough with you, okay?”

Okay.

That's when Brad grabbed the back of my neck and began steering my face around his upper body and calling me faggot. (It was better than being called dude.) Brad's body hair must have been thick and black, like the hair on his head, because there was stubble all over his body, and after my face took a few spins around his torso, I had a nasty whisker burn.

“You know what I want you to do, faggot?” Brad said, pulling my face out of his armpit.

“Uh . . . no, what do you want me to do?”

Brad wrapped his arm around my head, and holding on to my hair pulled my face up to his while at the same time flexing his biceps, which pressed into my jaw.

“I want you to get down on the floor and kiss my feet.”

Okay . . .

“And I want you to call me a god, you faggot, while you kiss my fucking feet,” Brad said, still holding my face up to his.

“Okay,” I said, thinking, Okay . . . just . . . let . . . me . . . go . . . and . . . I'll . . . do . . . it. . . .

He pulled my face away from his and, keeping hold of the back of my neck, pushed me all the way down on the floor. I kissed his feet. I called him a god—ah, so this must be muscle
worship,
I thought to myself. Now I get it. Brad
was
aggressive, just like Emily liked her men. I wasn't embarrassed about worshiping Brad, or kissing his feet, although it's a little embarrassing to reread this story up to this point—and we're not even to the really weird stuff yet.

When I sat back on my legs and looked up at Brad, he had an erection, which was a lot more than I had. Brad looked down at me—way down—and smirked. Then he pulled his dick out of his underwear, whispered
faggot,
closed his eyes, and began to beat off.

This is some fucked-up shit, I thought to myself, and I was momentarily overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. It was less than a month since the attacks, and not fifty blocks away they were still pulling bodies out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center, and here I was goofing around in a hotel room with a big, straight, body-building, object-of-muscle-worship escort. It felt—oh, I dunno—somehow disrespectful. But all Brad was doing was what the president asked us all to do—go about our business. Maybe if this scene were turning me on, I thought, maybe if running my hands over the flesh of someone who looked like Brad were my favorite thing, I would've gotten turned on and, like all turned-on people, I might have forgotten about everything else in the world for the duration of our time together. If this scene with Brad represented “getting back to normal” to me, maybe it wouldn't feel so wrong.

But was it wrong? People all over the country were having “terror sex,” as the papers dubbed it, hooking up with strangers in bars and going back to their apartments. Churches also filled up in the days immediately after the attacks, but so did bars and nightclubs. (“I believe that Americans are a virtuous people,” wrote Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, in Reverend Moon's the
Washington Times
. “Our nation uniquely aspires to virtue. It is our national purpose and has been since its founding. This is why, since that terrible Tuesday morning, we Americans have returned to our foundational virtues [and] filled our churches.”) Two months later, however, church attendance was back down to its pre-September 11 levels, but terror sex was still roaring. In February of 2002,
USA Today
reported under the headline, SKIN AND SIN ARE IN! that floor shows featuring naked women were returning to the stages in Las Vegas. Clearly the triumphalism of the virtuecrats and the scolds and conservative pundits after September 11 was premature. We were at war, it was a just war, and we were winning that war. But the nation wasn't being remade in the image of the Family Research Council.

I also wasn't the only tourist in New York City checking out the men on the weekend of October 5 through 7. While I cavorted in New York with Emily and Brad, 972 tourists from Oregon were in New York to show their support for the city. Nancy and Ken Bush (no relation to the Bushes of D.C., Maine, Florida, and Texas) came to New York on the “Flight for Freedom” tour organized by an Oregon travel agency, and they didn't sit around their hotel room feeling glum—that wasn't what Mayor Giuliani and Senator Schumer wanted them to do.

“We were frustrated by the attacks and wanted to do something to help,” Nancy Bush told a reporter from the
New York Daily News
. What did they do? Nancy went shopping, went out to dinner, and caught a performance of
The Full Monty,
the Broadway musical about a troupe of male strippers. If Nancy Bush could come to New York to check out a half a dozen naked guys and feel patriotic about it, why shouldn't I feel patriotic about renting Brad?

“Kiss my feet, faggot,” Brad said, bringing his right foot up to my neck, and using it to push my head down to his left foot. “Kiss my fucking feet, faggot. Faggot. Faggot.”

I can take a hint. I went back to kissing Brad's feet. I was fully clothed, but Brad wasn't, having kicked off his underwear by this point. You notice strange things when you're waiting for someone else to finish up. While I was kissing Brad's feet, I noticed that there were little copper-colored dots in the royal-blue carpet. Then I noticed a quarter on the floor under the desk. Kissing Brad's right foot, I noticed he had stubble on his big toe. Apparently he shaved his toes, just like he shaved his chest, arms, and stomach. Then I kissed his left foot and—hey, what do you know!—his right big toe had about three dozen long, black hairs on it. One shaved toe, one nonshaved toe. Weird.

“Faggot,” Brad said, breathing pretty heavily. “You're a faggot. What are you, faggot?”

“I'm a faggot?” I said, thinking, You're the one beating off, and I'm the faggot?

“That's right, you're a faggot. And what am I?”

“You're a god.” You're beating off, and you're a god.

“That's right, I'm a—”

And Brad came.

There was an awkward pause. Brad stood there, breathing and shivering. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Could I get up now? Or was I supposed to wait for permission to stop kissing his feet? Since Brad was so much bigger than I was, I decided to stay down on the floor until he gave me further orders.

“Hey, dude, thanks,” Brad finally said, stepping back and pulling his foot out from under my face. “You can get up.”

I walked to the bathroom and got Brad a towel so he could clean off his abs. Brad asked if I wanted to get off, and I took a pass. What I wanted to do, I said, was ask him a few quick questions.

“Fire away, dude.”

First, what's with the unshaved right toe? Brad laughed and explained that he has a client who pays him for the honor of shaving his body. This particular client likes to leave the hair on one of Brad's toes so that he can fantasize about how different Brad's body would look if it wasn't kept shaved.

Listening to this, I had a you've-got-to-be-kidding look on my face.

“Dude, I know, it's freaky. But it pays the rent. That's not even the strangest guy I see,” he said. “My next-door neighbor used to pay me to let him do my laundry. I see another guy who pays me to watch his TV and ignore him and drink his beer, only he wants me to walk up to him every once in a while and punch him in the stomach as hard as I can. This is a freaky business.”

Okay, speaking of freaky: I'm the gay client, you're the straight escort. You had an orgasm, I didn't. Why were you turned on by what we were doing?

“It's a trip, dude.” Brad laughed. “I didn't dig it at first, guys worshiping me. Ninety percent of the guys I see want me to call 'em fags and kiss my feet and call me a god. After a while, I don't know, it started to turn me on. I mean, there's another man kissing my feet. Some other guy is so intimidated by my body that he'll do whatever I tell him to. I guess humiliating other guys makes me horny.”

Brad suddenly reminded me of Jim, the man in the bar the night before, the alpha male who tried to pick up Emily right in front of me. He was definitely straight, but he seemed to enjoy humiliating other men. Renting Emily allowed me to commit two of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and greed, and I had planned on renting Brad so that I could commit the sin of lust. It seemed ironic that it was Brad, a man who is about ten thousand times better looking than I am, who committed the sin of lust in my hotel room. Oh, I had sinned; by kissing Brad's feet and calling him a god, I had inspired a kind of semidetached lust in his heart, making myself the occasion of sin. He didn't lust after me; he was straight, after all. What turned him on, what he lusted after, wasn't who I was but what I was doing.

Brad was dressed now and heading out to see another client.

“He's a regular,” Brad said.

Anything freaky?

“No,” Brad said, “not really. Pretty much what we just did.”

Brad walked to the door, snagging the money from the nightstand on his way. He tucked the money into a pocket on the side of his gym bag, and then turned to face me.

“Last chance for a feel, dude,” he said, holding his arms out, smiling.

I wish I could write something like, “I took a pass,” or, “Having learned so much about myself already, I didn't feel the need to further violate Brad,” or “I looked at Brad and said, ‘STOP CALLING ME “DUDE,” YOU FUCKING MEATHEAD!' ” Sad to say, I wanted my money's worth, and I figured I wasn't going to have the chance to run my hands over someone who looked like Brad ever again, so . . . I copped one last feel. It actually felt better to run my hands over his body with his clothes on; I couldn't feel the stubble on his chest and stomach, and he wasn't tensing his muscles, which made him feel a little more like a human being and less like an armoire.

I removed my hands from the nice man and thanked him for his time.

Brad opened he door and stepped into the hall. “See you around, faggot,” he said, winking. Then he turned and walked down the hall towards the elevators. After I shut the door, I lay down on the bed and looked at the clock. Brad had been in my room for almost two hours. I was touched. While Emily had insisted I pay her to eat dinner and watch a play, Brad was too much a gentleman to insist that I pay him to have an orgasm.

 

O
kay,
now
I was completely sinned out. I'd done my patriotic duty, and all I wanted now was a little legitimate room service. I found the menu in my room and ordered myself a bacon sandwich. As I lay in yet another hotel room looking out my window at yet another American Gomorrah, it occurred to me for the first time that there was a Bible in every hotel room I'd stayed in while I ran around sinning my brains out, thoughtfully provided by the Gideon Society.

Somehow despite the biblical reference in the title of this book and, of course, the book that inspired it
⁹
(I wanna give a shout out to my homey Bobby Bork), and despite all the reading I was doing while I worked on this book (I may be the only unreformed sinner in America who has plowed through the complete works of Messrs. Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan), I hadn't thought to sit down and reread the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I went to my nightstand, opened the drawer, and pulled out a familiar looking Gideon Bible, with its red cover and gold embossing.

The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, “the cities of the plain,” appears in Genesis chapters 18 and 19. Biblical scholars who aren't grinding the Bible-as-word-of-God ax theorize that the story of the destruction of two cities most likely derives from a pre-Israelite folk tale, perhaps recalling a volcanic catastrophe. Or, shit, maybe the same aliens who built the pyramids nuked the place. Who knows? In early Jewish and early Christian literature, Sodom and Gomorrah are held up as examples of sin and the destructive wrath of God. The story in Genesis takes place in the city of Sodom, but we never get to go inside Gomorrah, so we don't know if Gomorrah had a lot of trendy cafés, a lively performance art scene, and an alternative weekly newspaper—all features of our modern American Gomorrahs. The Bible doesn't have a lot to say about Sodom either, only that the city had “gates.”

So what exactly were the people of Gomorrah up to? We first hear about the rumors of their sinfulness in Genesis 18.20, when God says to Abraham, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin!” The Hebrew word translated as “sin” is
z'aqa
which implies violence or injustice, not sexual depravity.

Still, when two angels visit Lot in Sodom—Lot being Sodom's only stand-up guy—a crowd gathers outside Lot's home: “The men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house.” The men of Sodom wanted to “know” the angels, and Lot refused to hand God's messengers over to the men of Sodom. Instead Lot offered them his daughters: “I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men.” (Lot may have been the only decent guy in Sodom, but I can't imagine he was ever named Father of the Year.) The fact that
all
the men of Sodom demanded that Lot release the two angels to them emphasizes the collective guilt of the entire city.