by John Rechy
“Can I sit down or you wanna be alone?—you look so moody.” Billy went over to the youngman with dark hair.
A smile broke Stud's scowl. He had a chipped tooth on one side of his mouth. Maybe that's why he smiled crookedly, to disguise it. Whatever—it made him look very sexy. “You really make a thousand bucks a week?” he asked Billy.
“No!” Billy said. “That woman made me say that—and she knew it was a lie. What's your name?”
“Stud,” Stud said—he called himself that now; the man he'd gone with last night had called out to him, “Hey, stud!” “I figured she tried to get you to say that so the cop could say what he said,” Stud said knowledgably.
“Thank you.” Billy was grateful for the understanding.
An effiminate young waiter breezed over. “Well, aren't we everywhere!” he said to Billy. “First we were over there with the sugar daddy, and now we're over here with the macho man. And, honey, you haven't made a thousand bucks since you began hustling your buns at the age of ten.”
“Leave her alone!” Stud barked.
Billy lowered his head toward the table.
So Stud strengthened his defense. “Fuck,” he said to the waiter, “you would've done the same thing—I would've.”
“Take your order, sir?” the waiter frosted over. Stud ordered a hamburger and fries—double hamburger for the protein to keep his muscles firm. He looked at Billy, expecting to be thanked for his defense.
Instead, Billy said quietly, “I'm not a ‘she,’ Stud. I'm a ‘he'—just like you.”
Stud was flustered. When he saw Billy on television, he'd thought Billy was a girl—not because he was effeminate—he wasn't—but because he was so beautiful. Within his experience, he couldn't think of anyone being that beautiful and not a girl. Sorry, he wanted to say. Sony, he tried to say. But he couldn't.
Billy brightened. “Where you staying, Stud?” he thickened his Southern accent.
U’
“Here and there,” Stud said.
“I—we—got an apartment around the corner. Have a recent vacancy, too. Everybody gives a few bucks.”
“Sounds good,” Stud said. Billy's eyes were actually as greenish gold as they had appeared on colored television!
Outside, darkness was inking the sky. Billy suggested they walk to the apartment. Stud said he didn't want to leave his bike there. The bike leaned forlornly against a pipe at the edge of the coffee shop. Even the chain with which he had secured it looked weary. It was a skinny motorcycle, eager to give up. Billy told Stud where the apartment was. Stud suggested Billy ride there with him.
Billy's heart leapt—but he also eyed the motorcycle and wondered whether it would hold them both even that short distance. Stud was undoing the chain, making motions that would flex his biceps. Showily, he removed his shirt. Billy decided he would ride with him even if the rickety machine collapsed.
Stud stood up, ready to mount his bike. He and Billy were the same height; then he noticed Billy was wearing sandals and he was wearing cowboy boots. He straddled the machine, hopped down on it. The machine made not the slightest announcement it intended to start. “Motherfucker.” Stud tried to control his anger.
Billy wanted to reassure him, but he felt that might aggravate the situation.
Pumping away at the silent machine, Stud was sweating rivulets. He was becoming angry. “Fuckiri cocksucker!”
Billy's agate eyes shot a reproving look at him.
Stud pumped more—and with one foot he kicked at the side of the machine as if spurring a horse. The machine jangled to life. “Quick!” he called to Billy, who hopped on.
The machine bucked, bucked once more, and then rolled on as smoothly as it ever would again. Billy put his arm on Stud's moist stomach, and he leaned his head against Stud's shoulders; only the blond, golden-streaked hair touched the brown-tanned skin.
The machine made it around the block. In front of the apartment building, it died, died—they both knew—forever. Stud looked down at it. “It brought me all the way from Montana.”
“You can chain it in the courtyard,” Billy said.
Carrying his satchel, Stud started pushing and pulling it toward the building, thinking he might be able to sell it as scrap.
The building was the last on the block. Two others had been abandoned. The one on the corner was only slabs of concrete like upright pieces of discarded jigsaw puzzles. The other had not yet been demolished, but its windows had been knocked out. That emphasized the desolation of the building left standing.
One side of a double swinging iron gate had become unhinged, so loose now that even a breeze threatened to topple it. The grass was a bristly mat of yellow. A fountain in the courtyard was a dry pool of debris. Trees still struggled for life. Valiant flowers—gray—managed to grow.
To the side of the courtyard, several open stairways led up to the second and third storeys of the building so decrepit no one cared who moved in or out—mostly hustlers. Before the new season, concrete demolition balls would attack the morose structure.
Stud chained his dead bike around a tree. He followed Billy up one flight of squeezed steps. They walked along a corridor that would be dark no matter what time of day it was.
Billy didn't even think to wonder how Stud was reacting to the crumbling building. The hustlers who took their nightly posts along the boulevard slept from place to place, or in garages, parks—jumping over wired gates and past warning signs. Sometimes they slept in doorways. Having a place of your own—a rented room, an apartment—that was something!
The door was unlocked. Stud and Billy walked into a two-room apartment littered with hamburger wrappers, fried-chicken boxes, cans of soft drinks, beer, milk. There was one large window—and a small one in the open bathroom. Several mattresses were scattered about the floor. Doorless closets revealed shaggy clothes. A small color television—on—was chained, tightly chained, to an exposed pipe. A stunted stove, a refrigerator with coils. Heat squatted in the bare rooms.
Billy extended his hand, welcoming Stud.
“Looks just fine.” Stud meant it. He put down his satchel and looked at the others in the room—two youngmen and a girl, all about his age.
“This is Dianne from— …God knows where,” Billy introduced. “She just appears.” He hugged Dianne fondly; she let him.
“Like a mushroom, overnight,” Dianne growled in a surprisingly rough voice. She was a small, frail girl with an acne problem.
“Gary from— …” Billy was proceeding.
“Sedalia, Missouri; know where that is?” Gary had just turned seventeen—a veteran of two weeks and still making it, a slim tough-looking youngman with the angular features popular on his type; he had a flowery tattoo too large for his biceps. He lay on a mattress and in his shorts with Valentine hearts. His eyes were tied to the television set.
“Tim from Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Tim announced himself. He was pretty and more than slightly effeminate. He wore subtle makeup. Unlike Billy's, it was not the sun that had bleached his hair.
“And this is Stud from— …”
“Bozeman, Montana,” Stud smiled crookedly.
“Stud?!” Dianne blurted incredulously, clearly hinting she might just laugh aloud. “Stud!” she rasped in her tough voice.
Stud almost retreated to his real name. Instead, he dug the heels of his boots firmly into the mushy wood of the floor and challenged, “Yeah, Stud!”
“Shee-it.” Dianne swigged from her beer can. She straddled a chair and leaned her elbows on its back. “You gonna tell me you're straight?” she tossed. No one knew where she came from or what she did. Almost every day she'd just turn up from nowhere in her old Toyota and go back wherever. Though she never stayed, she brought food. If, especially on weekends, someone had left without paying a part of the rent, she'd contribute a few bucks. She was just there among exiles.
“I am straight,” Stud said.
Gary looked away from the television screen, Tim blinked. Dianne
said, “Shee-it!”
“I've never kissed a guy or done stuff like that. I never wanted to do a guy or get fucked,” Stud offered in evidence. “I never fucked a guy, but I fucked lots and lots of girls in Bozeman.” Two. “And that's how it's gonna stay.”
“Straight as a bow—sorry, arrow,” Dianne derided. “And what's so fuckin’ good about that?”
“Leave him alone, Dianne,” Billy defended softly—but he felt a pang of apprehension about Stud. “He's just Stud. Period.”
Gary said, “Hell, man, as long as you charge, what difference does it make what you fuck?”
“Or get fucked by,” Tim extended.
Ernie, a Mexican youngman, older than the others, maybe nineteen, with dreamy soft eyes and brown velvety skin, walked into the apartment. “You the new tenant?” he asked Stud.
Stud nodded. Ernie walked over and kissed Dianne, who turned her cheek: “Ugh!” Then he kissed Billy on the lips. Stud frowned. “Hey, you looked beautiful on TV,” Ernie told Billy. He opened himself a beer. “You contribute yet?” he asked Stud. He went to a drawer, took out a box with some concealed rolled joints he'd come back for.
Stud grandly pulled out a ten. “This enough?”
Dianne collected it. “The man's been coming round,” she rasped.
Ernie said it casually to Gary in order not to sound uncool: “Heard you got real low on downs yesterday. That shit's a killer, especially when you switch to uppers.” Then quickly: “I'm on a roll,” he said, combing his slick hair, “gotta keep it going when it's hot.” He groped his groin.
Gary had lowered his head when Ernie mentioned the pills. Now he reached up playfully and grabbed Ernie's ass. “That, too?”
“Whatever's hot,” Ernie said.
Dianne mimed the word: Shee-it.
That night Stud went out with Billy into the world they called “the street.”
It was another world, ugly and beautiful. Like no other. When things went right for Billy, he would not trade it for any other. When no one but the cops and “queerbashers” stopped, he did wish there were something else. There wasn't.
Most of the hustlers on the street could do nothing else, with hardly any education or skill, families relieved by their disappearance, some with records of petty truancy, options all but shut at a time when they were just opening for others their age. Most abandoned their brief turbulent pasts when they came to Los Angeles. Some on the street were there because they had to be, and resented it—those were mainly the ones who robbed, beat up clients; others came to love that world—at times—because it contained a tacky glamor available to them in no other way.
Otherwise thrown away, discarded, they had only their youth and beauty—sometimes only their youth—to unlock doors to worlds they would never peek into otherwise except for those moments of sexual importance when they shone like stars.
They did not know it, of course, except as a shapeless anger mixed with fear, which recurred without pattern, that they were doomed; youngmen who would live out most of their lives as ghosts of what they had been, briefly, one summer, one season.
With variations in between, there are two main types of malehustlers: the overtly masculine and the pretty-boyish. Like Stud, there were those who claimed to be “straight” and “did nothing”—just got blown, masturbated for or were masturbated by someone; posed, flexed. Just as masculine, the self-proclaimed “bi's” might allow themselves to be fucked but would not go down or would go down but not get fucked—or do any or all of the variations, depending on price and the client. Most of the customers of these youngmen were middle-aged homosexuals (although there do exist the young exceptions); men, often married, discovering their homosexuality probably latently.
The pretty-boyish hustlers were not necessarily effeminate; like Billy, very often not at all. In others, the boyishness might veer toward girlishness, finally painted effeminacy—or they might turn toughly masculine. Usually they got fucked or they sucked the client. Like Ed, most of their clients were married and, quite probably, heterosexuals who had problems with the women they would have preferred and so turned to unthreatening youngmen.
The hustling strip along Santa Monica Boulevard was created a few years ago when developers decided that the then-hustling area on Hollywood Boulevard and the side streets off it was ripe for profitable “renovation.” And so began the vast raids against “undesirables.” The lucrative real estate campaign was pushed as a campaign for morality. Daily, the police rounded up the loitering young people—cruising or hustling homosexuals, Negroes, Mexicans, and others who came to the crushed boulevard because there was nowhere else to go. As repeated arrests bludgeoned the area, the survivors of that powerless army scattered to Santa Monica Boulevard, the blocks at the end of Hollywood, the beginning of West Hollywood. This new strip had one clear advantage—on this street hustlers could linger, pretending to hitchhike, while the clutter of Hollywood Boulevard had not allowed that pose. The bruising “clean-up” accomplished, the renovation of Hollywood Boulevard proved more costly than profitable to the politicians and building interests, and so it was abandoned. Especially on warm afternoons, some of its earlier inhabitants still return in desultory bands; but late at night, the long famous street dies, a few feeble arcades remaining doggedly open, in mourning.
The hustling area on Santa Monica Boulevard is one of the ugliest stretches in the city—one of the few where, for blocks, there are no vines or flowers, just weeds; row after row of mostly one-storey moribund buildings; warehouses, garages, spotty bars, auto-body shops, second-hand furniture stores, a mortuary, abandoned stores with no vestiges of identity, a sloppy food stand—and one small park commemorating a historical incident long forgotten. The street is flanked by dark electrical posts, the remains of a streetcar system. Thick black wires linking one post to the next enclose the shabby street.
That was the world Billy and Stud inhabited.
“He wants you,” Billy said quickly when a man stopped around the corner after having eyed them where they stood on the street. Cockily, Stud began walking toward the man. The man shook his head. Stud felt awful. Billy knew it. “I don't think I wanna go with him. Probably just stopped ‘cause he recognized me from TV,” Billy said. “Go on,” Stud understood, ‘"I'll make out.”
Billy did not hop into the car, just chatted through the window while casting a spell over the man and sounding him out. If anyone was too immediate about stating a price and a sexual act—the two requirements for a prostitution bust—stay away. Reasonably assured otherwise, Billy would get in, wishing aloud that “there was some way you wouldn't have to be nervous about who's who on the streets these days,” inviting a signal—like having the man reach over and touch him intimately. Cops are forbidden to do that, although there are many stories otherwise.
Looking back now, Billy thanked God when he saw a man stop for Stud.
“You got a beautiful body,” the man said to Stud. The guy was okay, Stud determined. He laid it on the line: “Thirty-five dollars—and I don't do anything.” “Fine by me,” the man said, “but all I got is twenty dollars; maybe we can do something in the car and you'll be back soon enough for someone with thirty-five dollars,” he coaxed. Stud didn't want Billy to see him get out of the car. He figured he'd be ahead anyhow. In a parking lot surrounded by vacant cars, darkness, swirling wind, Stud lowered his pants to his knees and the man blew him and jerked himself off.
“First really slow night I've had,” Gary complained when Stud was back on what he was already thinking of as “his”—and sometimes Billy's—corner. “Had five rides up and down the street; everyone just wants to talk tonight.”
Nearby, that swarthy Ernie leaned so tough against a wall that Stud took off his shirt.
Stud was new, good-looking, muscular, and so he stood out; he made it again that night, for $30 this time. The man who picked him up took him home, dressed him in cowboy clothes and jockstrap.
When Stud returned to the apartment, Billy was back
, too; he was wearing only his cutoffs and getting ready for bed. On the mattress next to him, a barely covered velvety brown back and a heavy-haired, curved leg sprawled. Ernie! Billy reached over and pulled a small mattress, locating it closer to his than Ernie's was. Pretending to be choosing where to sleep, Stud chose that one.
On the street the next night, Tim, with bolder makeup, gasped at Stud, “Billy's talking to a pig around the corner. I saw him bust someone earlier.”
When Stud got there, Billy was leaning into the car window. The driver bent over and opened the door. Just as Billy would have got in, Stud yelled at the driver, “You trying to pick up my kid brother, huh? I'll punch you out for that, I oughtta call the cops!” He looked over at Billy and barked, “Get away!”
Understanding, Billy ran.
Stud looked at the man behind the wheel—a cop, for sure—and with deep anger Stud said, “Fucker, you goddamn fucker.” The frozen face stared at him.
Billy was ecstatic that Stud had saved him. He treated Stud to a steak at Coffee Andy's—and they started with a fresh, water-sequined salad. Stud treated Billy to a first-run movie.
Back at the apartment, Stud realized he hadn't gone hustling that night. Billy laughed—but it was suddenly very important to Stud that he go out.
Largely because of mutual—and rampant—threats and dangers on the streets, a close warmth may develop among hustlers. That is compounded by their being exiled exiles—shunned by “straight” homosexuals—the vast majority, pursuing careers and unpaid sex encounters and affairs, looking on hustlers as a puzzling blight on their horizon.
At night, hustlers band together, warn of that night's new danger—and always, always exaggerate their earnings even while cadging a cigarette. No one will ever admit to going for less than $35—but all will, and for much less in the deep, desperate hours of crawling nights.
Often, in the afternoons, especially in the lot next to the closed Bank of America building or near Big Boy's Hamburgers across the street—and when the cops don't run them out—the camaraderie overflows among the masculine youngmen and the pretty boys, all gathered, jostling each other, clowning, playing, wrestling showily.
