Black John

by Amy Lane

  John didn’t even have to think on that one. “Sex,” he said promptly, hopping into the car and turning the ignition. It had always been the point.

  Galen glared at him as he peeled out and headed for Broadway Bridge.

  “What?” he yelled over the wind.

  “Who in their right mind wants to have sex with me?” Galen shouted back.

  John scowled and kept his eyes on the road. “Well Jesus, man—nobody turns down a blowjob!”

  Traffic slowed and the wind calmed down, which was good, because Galen’s next words shouldn’t have to be shouted. “Do you know who came to visit me after the extent of my injuries got out?”

  “Your mother?” John asked, not facetious at least. “Because seriously, I just got out of rehab, and if she’d visited me there, I would have killed myself.”

  “That’s not funny,” Galen snarled, but John wasn’t laughing.

  “Do you think I don’t know that? I could hardly bear to have my friend visit. The only part of my family I wanted to see was the ghost of my dead grandmother.”

  Galen’s laugh was short. John had obviously surprised him. “Did she show?”

  John let a smile slip through. “Well, yeah, but only during detox.” He shivered, completely serious. “Bless her whoring old heart, she was looking out for me from the grave.” It was weird, really—he could remember her face over his bed when she’d been dead for three years. And even when he knew it had been a hallucination, he’d also known she was really there. “So who?” he asked, before they could segue into all of his many problems again. “And how many? How many people visited you in recovery.”

  “My boyfriend,” Galen said, his voice stony. “Twice. Once right after the accident, when he got the rundown of all the operations I’d need and the extent of the scarring. And once about two weeks later, when he told me he’d moved me out.”

  They were in Daytona proper now, passing the big mosaic of the flower embedded in the intersection, and their conversation was not much louder than it would have been with the top up.

  “What an asshole,” John said without heat. He was grateful for the traffic.

  The week before had been bike week, and the week before that had been the 500. That left a sleepy little resort town, not the tourist insanity he and Tory used to capitalize on in college. Ah, the bad old days of hotel bingo. Tory had insisted John participate the first year, and he’d enjoyed himself in a way. He topped, and a lot of guys bent over for him, and that was gratifying. But Tory—John had found him in a room, covered in come, fucked raw, and half-asleep, chanting, “Stop, don’t stop. Stop, don’t stop,” like he couldn’t remember the difference. John had talked him out of going after that unless John was there to film. They’d shot some great orgy footage, but John had always been there to step in and say, “Enough.”

  He hadn’t thought it earned him any prizes as a boyfriend, but then, Galen’s ex apparently was bent on making him look good.

  “We were perfect together,” Galen said with a laugh. “Both lawyers, both up-and-comers. I mean, we worked eighty-hour weeks, right? But when we had sex, it was awesome, and we had this great house out on the beach. We entertained and shit.” He shook his head and looked out over the strip of hotels near the arcade. “I don’t know. I thought we were real. I thought we had a house and friends and jobs—grown-up shit, right?”

  “Yeah,” John said, thinking about it dubiously. “I know you know I make porn for a living, right?”

  Even from the side, Galen’s dry smile was a treat. “Tory bought me a subscription. Johnnies is my go-to place on the net.”

  John cackled, suddenly so full of joy to be out of the apartment and away from the box. Oh God, he was outside in the fresh air, and his companion was dry and funny and interesting. Sex was still off the table, especially if Galen’s body hurt as much as he said it did. But forget sex for a minute. Oh holy shit, John could forget sex for a minute! No more editing porn for a few months. No more watching sex be cut up into its tiniest, most mechanical parts. John could have a taco!

  He got them both tacos at a kiosk by the arcade, as well as an extra-large soda for himself with two straws. “That way I can carry it but you can have some,” he said gallantly, feeling about twelve.

  Galen rolled his eyes. “Awesome,” he said dryly. That didn’t stop him from asking for a sip now and then as they walked down the beach from the Joe’s Crab Shack pier, down in front of the Regency, and beyond. Galen had worn sandals, and John could see the full extent of the scarring as he offered an elbow on the way down the stairs. Galen took the elbow reluctantly, and John wondered at pride—prickly thing, wasn’t it? John was pretty much a stranger, and Galen had nothing to prove, but he sure didn’t want help. And given that Galen’s foot was neatly cleaved off on the side, leaving only three toes, the man was going to need some help.

  But John didn’t say anything, just got them settled on the damp sand to make walking easier, and started an amble down the beach. Once he finished his taco, he slipped off his tennis shoes and tucked the socks inside so he could dangle them from one hand.

  For a moment they said nothing, and their ears filled with the rush of the waves. Well, it was soothing, right? That was why people liked the ocean. In fact, John had been disappointed when he realized that not all of California was less than an hour from the beach. When was the last time he’d gone to San Francisco? What was it, an hour and a half? God, he should go more often.

  A wash of tide chilled his feet, and he crinkled his toes in the sand, absolutely enjoying himself.

  “You are damned easy to please,” Galen said, startling him. It was the first time either of them had spoken since they’d gotten down the stairs.

  John’s smile felt completely unforced. “See, usually I’m sort of a workaholic,” he confessed. “But it just sort of hit me. I mean, the reason I’m here sucks, and I know that. And it’s going to keep on sucking, and you’re probably going to have a front-row seat, and I’m sorry.”

  “And you’re smiling because….”

  John smiled wider. “Man, I’m on vacation. Do you know, I built that business up for… God. Nine years? And I don’t think I’ve taken a vacation more than once or twice.” He shook his head. “Jesus, no wonder I ended up in rehab! What was I thinking? I mean, you’d think a guy going into making porn for a living would be aces at avoiding responsibility.”

  Galen shook his head like he was having trouble reconciling the idea of making porn with the idea of making a living. He swallowed his last bite of fish taco and said, “You never did tell me. How do you audition all of those pretty, pretty boys?”

  John smiled again, this time nostalgically. It was a memory untainted by bitterness, and that was a surprise as well as a joy. “Well, I started out with this multileveled questionnaire, right? But Dex—he’s my business partner now, but he was one of my main attractions for a while—”

  “I know Dex,” Galen said dryly, and John shot him a knowing smile. Yeah. People thought they knew Dex, but the guy who shoved John’s balking, needy ass on a plane was a far cry from the guy who used to come a gallon on camera.

  “Anyway, he said ‘how about just a conversation.’ So we started doing that. Just having conversations. And we weren’t looking for the guy who’d fuck a monkey into the ground—we wanted guys who wouldn’t break. So we came up with a standard list of attitudes we wanted. How they felt about their bodies, their sexuality, having sex on film. I mean, I’d taken the psych classes, right? I just wanted to make sure they had enough of an exhibitionistic streak to not freak out on film. I….” He gestured with the hand holding the soda and tried not to spill. “I mean, I know it sounds stupid, but I wanted them to have fun. Because when Tory and I first started, it was all about the fun. It was all about the ‘Hey, John, look! My body does this amazing thing, and don’t you want to capture that on film?’ And I did. And the things the body does during sex are amazing. I mean, look at the simple hand job. Yeah, every
boy can give himself one, right? But just change out the hand and look what happens! The eroticism intensifies by about a thousand, both for the people looking and the people giving and receiving. Even on film, if you’re nervous—and some guys find that a turn-on too—having two guys jack each other off while they’re having a conversation, man, that’s powerful, right?”

  Galen nodded, looking surprised, like he’d never thought about it before. But John had. John and Tory had spent hours talking about these things, talking about making them glorious on camera.

  “So I wanted them to get into it not thinking that it was dirty or that they were whores, but that they were doing something that came naturally and sharing it with the world.”

  “Wow,” Galen said, reaching for the soda. He took a sip.

  “Wow what?”

  “Wow, that’s… that’s really fucking idealistic. I mean… it’s porn. We look at it in the dark and get off.”

  John grunted and, as much as he hated to do it, found himself quoting Dex. “Yeah, but it shows us what we want. I mean, no, I’m never gonna look like the guys I shoot. But you want your sex to feel a certain way. Hard and fast, or tender, or spontaneous or adventurous. You shouldn’t look at the porn vids and go, ‘I need to do this position and then this one and then this one’—’cause it’s not real. It takes us hours to shoot a vid, and it should realistically only take you twenty minutes or so to get off. But you can go, ‘Ooooh, that finger-sucking thing is hot, and maybe if I do that, it’ll be new, and my lover will like it.’ Or if you’ve both had a long day—you know, eighty hours a week?—you watch it and it jumpstarts your brain to the sex place, so instead of living with the bills and the job and the guy who cut you off in traffic, suddenly you’re right there with your lover and he’s right there with you, and you’re naked, and you can skip the argument you didn’t need to have anyway and get onto the good stuff. I mean, it shouldn’t be shameful. It doesn’t have to be, anyway. It doesn’t have to be about beating off in a dark room with a sticky floor, or bending over for a stranger.”

  “Or getting off with your buddies from Johnnies ’cause none of your old friends talk to you anymore.”

  The tone of his voice, the way it fell almost below the rush of the sea, spread an ache in John’s chest. “It could be about that,” John said quietly. “It could be about a lot of things. It just doesn’t have to be about shame and fear and feeling like shit because good-looking guys put their bodies on display.”

  A kick of breeze caught under his ugly hat then, and he trapped it on his head and smiled just from the joy of the released inmate. Galen looked sad and thoughtful, but John… God, John wanted to turn his face to the hazy sky and become one with the sun.

  Galen nodded. “You sound really enlightened,” he said, but it was clear the irony took effort.

  John shrugged. “I interviewed a lot of kids—and, you know. Eighteen—what the fuck do you know at eighteen? And some of them come in and grin shyly and go, ‘Duh-uh, money!’ But some of them come in and you can just see it. They want the world to see them. They’ve got it, sex, vibrating off of them, and they may go on to be something completely different once they’re over being young and stupid, but for the next few months or years, sex is what it’s all about. Sure, let’s make money off of that. But let’s make sure they walk away going, ‘I had fun, I got laid, I made some money—on to the next part of life!’”

  Galen didn’t say anything, just shook his head.

  “What?” John asked, pulling himself out of the euphoria of a walk on the beach.

  “You and Tory, man. You make it sound so reasonable. It’s like you didn’t get out of rehab like yesterday and….”

  John watched his throat working and fought against the crush of pain he’d been trying to avoid. “Yeah,” he said, suddenly feeling the chill of the day. The haze looked like it might be coalescing into rain. “Well, that doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t good. It just means….” He grimaced, thinking about Tory’s perfect body scarred with track marks, corroded with that spark of want that nothing could fill. “The vessels were flawed,” he said after a moment of thunderous quiet. “I wasn’t enough. I was never enough.”

  I was a watcher, and no rope I threw was enough.

  I was never strong enough to dive into the ocean and pull him out on my own.

  Oh Jesus, do I even know how to swim?

  “I’m sorry,” Galen murmured. “I’m… I mean, I just made it worse. Who the fuck am I to cast stones?”

  “Hey, I’m the one who showed up at your doorstep and crashed into your life. You could have been doing a thousand things today, but you’re keeping me company.”

  Galen turned his face to the dimming sun. “Got nothing to do, nothing to see, no place to be. Your little crisis is like a roller-coaster ride for me.” He seemed to shake himself. “Sorry—that’s fucking morbid.”

  John shrugged. “Hey, I’m an entertainer. I aim to please.”

  Galen turned a look on him that should have shriveled his pubes.

  John grinned back, purposefully manic, and nodded, until Galen had no choice but to laugh.

  “Okay, fine. You’re an entertainer. What’s next on the program?”

  John shrugged and turned around, steering them back to the pier. His pocket buzzed, and he figured it was Dex checking in. “Well.” He held up a finger and looked at the text. Faxing some papers for you to sign. Need them by tomorrow. Sorry about the rush. Turn on the fax when you’re home. “I may have to go home to work eventually. And you’re looking kind of tired.”

  Galen shrugged, a vague flush traveling his cheeks. “Yeah, well, I should get out more.”

  “You really should,” John said sincerely. He pretended to duck when Galen threw him a glare. Suddenly he needed to take a page from Dex’s book, and plan. “Look, let me go get that box out of your front room—”

  “No, don’t.” He sounded a little panicked.

  “You want to watch a grown man come unglued?” John asked, suddenly daunted by the idea of grieving while Galen watched on.

  “I don’t want you to do it alone,” Galen said, looking resolved. Then he grimaced. “Hell, I don’t want to do it alone. I’m… I… I’ve been pissed. I had a neighbor and a friend and a guy who’d take out my trash and sit in my kitchen and drink beer and bullshit and—”

  “Give you a free hand job if you laughed at his jokes?” John asked, dead serious.

  Galen flushed. “He could make it so natural,” he rasped. “Like… like getting my paper or helping me down the stairs.”

  John fought against a surge of anger at them both. Seriously, John, where the fuck were you? “Yeah. He was good at that.”

  Galen raised his eyebrows. “Judgment. From you?”

  “When the cameras are off, it should be more,” John said with dignity. Right, Tory? Wasn’t I more? Didn’t I mean more than all those other guys? I never fucking knew. “There’s just a time when me and my camera aren’t enough. When it’s got to be the two people in the room together.”

  “Huh.” Galen turned toward the pier and trundled on, cane wielded carefully, body held at a careful angle so that it might not all hurt. “That’s really fucking wise.”

  John felt a stab of self-hatred, of hypocrisy, and suddenly all he wanted was to let the once-pretty man know he had no illusions. “Yeah, well, it’s like my job. I’m really only a hero when I can direct the scene.”

  Galen nodded and kept walking. “There’s something I should… I mean, I didn’t look inside your precious box, okay? But I added something to it.”

  John grunted and took another step, amazed that he could. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Someone sent an envelope to my place, with ATTN: John on it. I put that in the top.”

  “When?” John asked, and Galen’s hiss of breath told him when.

  “Was like getting a letter from a ghost,” he said, confirming.

  “Well, it’s official. No ice cream for me.” Jo
hn’s stomach felt sickly, and in spite of how spectacular the fish taco had tasted, he was no longer as excited about food and vacation.

  Galen concurred, and they walked back to the car in silence.

  HE REALLY did look tired by the time they got back to the apartment, and since Cypress Point was a good hour away, John thought it was probably time to start home anyway.

  “But I’m not done entertaining,” John threatened as he walked Galen to his door. “I promise, the next few weeks are going to be worth the fucking ticket.”

  Galen nodded and wiped his mouth and chin with a sweaty palm. “Man—he… he just never told me, you know? We’d sit and talk and….” He closed his eyes. “I haven’t taken my meds in too long,” he said like he was apologizing. “I can’t think. I can’t… it’s like everything hurts. But your friend—he was my friend too, and we had some of the same problems, and he….” Galen took a deep breath, and when he opened his eyes, they were wide and shadowed and red-rimmed.

  “I think he loved you. I blamed you for leaving. I thought you were a coward and an asshole, and I was all armored when you walked in, ready to hate you and smile, because, you known, corporate douche bag. I had practice.”

  John grunted because it felt like a smack in the stomach. He’d been ready to be friends. “Well, I can take the key to his place and the box and the—”

  “No.” Galen’s thin face contorted, and he reached his free hand out and touched John’s arm. “You… whatever you had with Tory, it was complicated. He kept trying to tell me it was, but I wasn’t ready to listen. You… you make it complicated.”

  John closed his eyes and squeezed that sweating hand. “You used to live on the beach?” he asked, knowing it seemed like a random question.

  “Yeah. Miami. Big house, lots of glass, private beach. Why?”

  “What was it like, moving to someplace like this?”