Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  “Straight through,” “Dave” said, as if annoyed. Jesse arrived in a dark front room, more like a den. It was early evening but the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by floor lamps and candles burning among all the scattered flammable articles. The heating was on and it was stiflingly hot, prickling sweat out onto Jesse’s forehead.

  “Doesn’t it say six two on your profile?” “Dave” had said, twitchily.

  “Do you want me to go?” Jesse said, surprising himself with his aggression.

  “At least you’re on time,” “Dave” said, snidely, then changed his tone. “Drink? I’ve got beer, wine, whisky, vodka, rum, Coke, Diet Coke, Red Bull…” He rocked his head from side to side as if reading the name of each product from the ceiling, while a thick white foam started to collect at the corners of his mouth. Jesse wondered why “Dave,” who probably wouldn’t look so bad with naturally grey hair, had bothered to dye it such an ugly orangey-brown. His body odour, in the intense heat, quickly began to sicken Jesse.

  “Water’s fine,” he said, taking off his rucksack, his upper lip tightening with disgust.

  “Get your clothes off, then,” “Dave” said as he turned out of the room.

  The red sofa cushions had been arranged on the floor to make a bed over which was spread a clear plastic sheet, and a frameless mirror lay flat on a wooden footstool to the side in front of the closed curtains, with two lines of what looked like cocaine racked up ready. There was a smoky smell about the place, underneath the stale sweat, from something other than cigarettes and weed; a blackened glass pipe and a lighter rested on a small box underneath the table. “Dave” had looked perfectly normal in his pictures, but there were warning signs, Jesse was beginning to realise, in his overcomplicated phone directions (“Last flat on the ground floor” would have sufficed).

  From the sitting-room doorway Jesse watched “Dave” take a pint glass down from a cupboard and fill it with cloudy water straight from the tap without running it first; he came back in and spilled some down Jesse’s fingers as he handed it over. Jesse put it down on the floor while he removed his trainers and tracksuit. “Dave” stepped onto the middle of the makeshift bed in front of him, as if it was a stage.

  “Now, I’ve got some coke, do you want some coke? I’ve got some G, some T, as well, and some grass as well, if you want some. Poppers, obviously. You can do whatever you want, or you don’t have to do anything, just make yourself at home. Over there in that bag are some paddles, belts, canes, whatever you think. Have you ever caned someone before? Can’t remember if I asked you. Well, I want you to cane me if you want. Then you can fuck me. Do you want some Viagra? I’ve got some Viagra, if you need anything just say. Fuck me, your cock looks much more massive than in your pictures! How big is it? Nine? Ten? Does it stay hard? You should get some better pictures done, mate. Do you want me to take you some pictures? I’ve got a camera…Anyway, later. Do you want me to do anything? Where do you want me? Do you want me to suck you off first or do you just want to go straight in and fuck me? Do you want me naked? You can fuck me bareback and come in me if you want. I really want you to come in me, actually.”

  He was fidgeting and gurning, and kept trying to shove fingers up his own arse. Before Jesse could answer, he just peeled the shorts off altogether, almost falling over, got on all fours in front of him, pressed his face into the plastic sheet and spread his arse cheeks. “Please! Please!” was his muffled cry, and Jesse felt relieved he’d decided not to stop off at McDonald’s for a super-size Double Quarter Pounder Cheese Meal with nine chicken nuggets and a strawberry milkshake on the way.

  He said, “Sorry, I can’t do this,” and started putting his tracksuit back on.

  “Dave” flipped himself over like a beetle and stared up at Jesse in shock.

  “What? Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not feeling well,” Jesse said, which wasn’t a lie. “I feel sick, actually. I have to go.”

  “No! Why? What happened? Is it me? What did I do? Don’t go!” He got up and Jesse shot him a don’t touch me look. “We can just relax and take it slow! Do you want a line and just sit and watch some porn? I’ve got ghetto guys fucking white daddies if you want, I know you like that! Please! What can I do?”

  But as soon as he’d slipped his trainers back on, he grabbed the rest of his things in his arms and left “Dave” shouting after him, calling him a time-waster and threatening to write him a career-ending, blacklisting review.

  * * *

  —

  Yeah, don’t do what we did. We went to Thailand last year and she really, really wanted to stay. That was weird but I said, no, sorry I can’t. / Oh. / I said to her, when we booked Brazil…/ I was trying to say to her…/ She didn’t get it…/ Why don’t you sublet your room? /…She could’ve saved all that money…/…Is that what you really want?

  “ ’Scuse me,” said Jesse, getting up.

  “Oh, sorry,” said the brunette, as if she’d only just seen him.

  He got off the bus where instructed in the text, crossed the road, found the three-digit number and crunched along the driveway with the silver Audi on it. His client, Thurston, lived in a gold-brick semi on a quiet Dulwich street lined with sticky lime trees. There were accessibility bars drilled into the walls, either side of the black front door with its stained-glass inserts. Jesse took a deep breath as he pressed the bell, lit in orange, which trilled high, and for a stupid second, he panicked that he didn’t have copies of the Watchtower and Awake! with him ready to present to the householder, and that he wasn’t wearing a tie. Don’t fuck this up, he thought to himself, mindful of the £18.33 he had left to his name, and hungry for that next gram of coke. A big-sounding dog barked twice, but didn’t seem to be coming to the door, as if it understood its job was merely to chime with the ring. Even the dogs here are restrained, Jesse thought, unlike the feral Alsatians back home that would sprint barking from the bottom of the garden straight through the house and smash themselves against the inside of the door until their owners appeared and locked them away.

  The hallway light came on. They’d exchanged lots of messages on Gaydar. Jesse had wanted to close the deal straight away but Thurston slowed him down with his respectful tone. He was looking for someone to get to know and see for some periodic, safe and sensual attention. He was fifty-one, tall, slim and passive. His pictures were all of him smiling, with paintings behind him in a gallery, or in a fancy restaurant or bar, where someone else had been cropped out. They found that they were both born in the Black Country, Thurston in the semi-rural village of Tettenhall, outside Wolverhampton; Jesse in the industrial village of Wordsley, outside Dudley. Both had been honest about their real names. Thurston had a partner of thirty years, his senior, with advanced multiple sclerosis, and they couldn’t have sex like they used to. As Jesse’s heartbeat escalated, Thurston approached behind the coloured glass, opened the door and slipped Jesse in, smiling almost coyly in white and grey linen, barefoot on the black-and-white mosaic floor, looking as if he’d just showered, shaved and neatly combed his hair, a little bit older than his pictures suggested but not dishonestly so, as were too many desperate men, ten or twenty years older—wrinklier, looser and fatter—the lie, not the age, being the turn-off. The cackle of a TV gameshow audience came from behind one of the closed white interior doors. Jesse could smell fresh flowers, clean laundry, a clean body—talc, which he’d not smelled since swimming lessons at his infant school, where the teachers were reluctant to put it on him because of its chalky effect on black skin.

  Jesse took off his rucksack and hung it on the corner of the bannister behind him. Long arms slid around his body, reeling him in. Thurston was even lovelier and more handsome in the flesh than in his photos and clearly getting better with age. Slow, full-lipped kisses tickled Jesse’s forehead, moved down his nose and found his mouth. As Thurston held him closer and tighter, Jesse filled his hands with T
hurston’s firm arse and felt the nudge of a growing erection against him. Painted portraits hung on the walls, leaning in like an expectant audience.

  “Hello,” said Thurston, still dotting Jesse’s lips with kisses.

  “Hello,” said Jesse. They took to each other immediately, smiled and laughed discreetly. Straight away, it felt, to Jesse, different from other clients. Thurston led the way upstairs, allowing Jesse a second to kick off his trainers to join those lined up against the wall, his socked feet sinking half a luxurious inch into the near-white carpet. He watched Thurston’s arse and feet as he climbed, copying the exactness of his gait, already hard and excited to taste him. As the staircase veered right, a painting was revealed of a black male nude, his dick lazing across his thigh, clutching a large blood-red flower in his hand, the red paint dripping down his forearm as if he’d stigmatised himself on a thorn. It stung Jesse immediately, as if he had driven a pin right into the centre of his own palm. He thought about that picture of Jesus and the thief in The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, their ribs showing, blood draining down their stretched-up arms, thick pins driven through their palms into stakes. It looked like the man in the painting was falling back through the sky, grey-blue like Thurston’s eyes.

  Jesse followed Thurston into a lamp-lit room the blue of a midsummer evening, with a four-poster bed dressed in white and wine-red, the walls completely covered, from floor to ceiling, with paintings, photographic portraits and drawings, all, from what he could see, of men of various ages and colours in states of undress. With his back to Jesse, Thurston took off his top, and the waistband of his trousers sat perfectly under what Jesse saw as the most beautiful part of any man, the flat, tender patch right at the base of the spine. He thought of Graham, his white adoptive father, standing at the bathroom sink with the door open, shaving with his towel low round his waist.

  Quickly Jesse and Thurston were naked, their clothes on the floor, Thurston’s dick, neither big nor small, with an upward curve, straight into Jesse’s mouth as they met on the bed. Jesse pushed the foreskin back with his lips, making Thurston’s knob swell against the soft flesh at the back of his mouth, pushing his tongue down the piss-hole, licking up every flavour, rolling his balls around in his hand, his nutsack shaven, loose and thick-skinned. The murmur of a string quartet rose from the Bose clock radio. Incense burning, condoms, lube, poppers, bottles of water and Coca-Cola on the bedside table. The moment Jesse came up to breathe, Thurston pushed him round onto his back and took him in his mouth in turn, bending his arse right out for the triptych of mirrors on the dressing table opposite the bed. Jesse sat up, resting on his palms, watching himself being serviced.

  Thurston tried to suck Jesse’s dick the way Jesse had sucked his, but couldn’t deal with Jesse’s extra length and girth and repeatedly gagged. Soon he came back up to the bedhead—out of breath, blushing and with a wet, pink mouth—and rolled Jesse round on top of him. Jesse crept his fingers lightly over the contours of Thurston’s collarbone, neck and shoulders, and nibbled his nipples, which stood up prominently. There wasn’t a hair on his body until a fine, almost adolescent trail from just beneath his navel that spread to his trimmed pubes. As Thurston’s dick pulsed in his mouth, Jesse began to worry he might come too quickly, so he lifted Thurston’s legs over his shoulders to draw him more comfortably to the middle of the bed, and spread him open. He felt fresh guilt and ecstasy to observe such a man from that angle, where it had become boring and commonplace with more obvious, sluttier men. The underside of his tongue was still sore from the last guy. Thurston’s hole puckered, opened and closed. Jesse swirled around it, circling closer and closer until he touched the heart. He closed his eyes and concentrated, making Thurston gasp, levered up by the backs of his knees inside the crooks of his elbows, rotating his ankles and flexing his toes, open and vulnerable as Jesse reached in as far as he could go, then further. This was the best part about his new life. He looked up along Thurston’s body, at his hairless pink scrotum, at his dick twitching against his belly, then at the veins that were showing on his neck, his bottom lip caught between his teeth, eyes closed, voicing little gasps of satisfaction.

  Jesse came up for a moment and stared in, making the little fine hairs tremble with his breath. Thurston opened his eyes; the trust with which he was looking up at Jesse from his pillow aroused Jesse all the more, and he felt the notice of an orgasm pass through his body. This was the best part about his new life. He lifted himself up, anchored his feet in the bed and pushed himself inside.

  “Please, lube!” Thurston said, wincing as he stiffened and pushed Jesse out with his hands.

  “Sorry,” said Jesse, curling his tongue under and consoling the nip of rawness. He reached over to the bedside table and squirted some Liquid Silk onto his palm.

  “Condom?” Thurston’s elbows were locked open, keeping Jesse out.

  So Jesse reached for the packet of condoms on the side table, taking care not to spill the lube from his palm, but Thurston freed his legs and pulled himself up to sitting.

  “Sorry,” Jesse said, as Thurston dragged down one of the two small hand towels folded over the brass bedhead and gave it to Jesse to wipe his hands with, using the other to dab the droplets of sweat on his forehead and neck.

  “It’s okay. You were in the moment,” Thurston said as he used his towel to dry his slick arse, then in a mildly chastising tone: “You did say you practise safe sex.”

  “I do, usually,” Jesse said, unable now to make eye contact.

  “How many times have you had unprotected sex?”

  Jesse dried his hand of all the sticky lube and sat on his feet, watching his dick go down. He ogled the drinks on the bedside table.

  “Help yourself to whatever you want,” said Thurston.

  Jesse took down the bottle of Coca-Cola. He didn’t know how thirsty he was until he drank half of it in one go. He drank it so quickly the fizziness burned his throat. Some of it dribbled down his face and belly, and onto the bedcover.

  “Sorry,” he said, rubbing it into the towel.

  “Don’t worry,” said Thurston, now sitting up against the bedhead, with one leg bent and the other hanging over the edge of the mattress. His dick had retreated back within his thick foreskin, relaxed against the pink drape of his scrotum. His eyes searched Jesse. “Do your clients make you fuck them without a condom?”

  Jesse glanced at Thurston’s face, just to see if he might be judging. He saw concern.

  “Have any of your clients ever fucked you without a condom?”

  Jesse looked over his shoulder, as if he wanted to leave the room.

  “You’re a beautiful boy, and you have your whole life ahead of you. Have you been safe?”

  “Not always,” said Jesse, quietly. He drank another three gulps of Coca-Cola, which again, burned his throat.

  “Have you been tested?” asked Thurston.

  Jesse shook his head tightly, as if his neck was seized in limescale, and looked down at his dick, twitching up again as all the men and all the ways went through his mind.

  “Do you know where to go?”

  Jesse, again, shook his head.

  Chapter 2

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2001

  “Have we entered the Great Tribulation?”

  Brother Thomas Woodall, the congregation’s presiding overseer, a tall, broad, blue-eyed painter and decorator with dimples, white teeth and thick golden hair, spoke with a soft, low voice that refused to compete with a baby mythering, or an elderly Sister unwrapping a boiled sweet. A special meeting had been convened to deal with the congregation’s needs after watching the fall of the Twin Towers, and the deaths of three thousand people, live on TV. Tipton Kingdom Hall—hand-built by members of the congregation to a basic single-storey architectural model—was packed full of beatific smiles, white with black, old with young. Two extra rows of seats had been added. Fringe and erstw
hile members came in and sat on the back row, and were welcomed further forward. Disfellowshipped persons, shunned by the organisation for their unrepented sins, slipped in at the last and sat by the door, ready to disappear at the end of the closing prayer. Jesse’s mother, sullenly pulling her cardigan tighter and folding her arms over her chest, was in attendance for the first time in weeks. A group of Sisters, concerned by her latest bout of depression, had coddled her as soon as she’d arrived, telling her how well she looked and asking her if she’d lost weight.

  In the navy blue suit he’d bought for his son’s recent wedding, Brother Woodall introduced from the rostrum Mark 13:1–8, holding his Bible up and out on the palm of his hand, broadening his chest like the bearded Christ on the board illustrating the scripture of the year. In the gentlest of Tipton accents, Brother Woodall read slowly and deliberately, looking up to address a different member of the congregation with each phrase.

  “As he was going out of the temple one of his disciples said to him: ‘Teacher, see! What sort of stones and what sort of buildings!’ However Jesus said to him: ‘Do you behold these great buildings? By no means will a stone be left upon a stone and not be thrown down.’

  “And as he was sitting on the Mount of Olives with the temple in view, Peter and James and John and Andrew began to ask him privately: ‘Tell us, When will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are destined to come to a conclusion?’ So Jesus started to say to them: ‘Look out that nobody misleads you. Many will come on the basis of my name saying “I am he,” and will mislead many. Moreover, when you hear of wars and reports of wars, do not be terrified; these things must take place, but the end is not yet.’