by Aiden Bates
If Vinny hears one of Lance’s fantasies after the show, when Vinny’s back to counting the days, and the paychecks, and the time before he’ll start starving again, he’ll appreciate the pep talk, but then he usually drags Lance to bed, to essentially fuck out the stress.
It’s the kind of stuff that would look ridiculous from the outside, but with Vinny so hard-up and desperate for a sense of control, and Lance so in control of himself that he can take the most absurd orders and follow them to the T, that always goes smoothly. If Vinny says strip, Lance does it, and if Vinny says kneel, he does that too, and if Vinny says jump, Lance says “how high?” but only mid-leap because he said jump, he didn’t say ask questions, did he?
It’s the night before their last week at the Corner Cabana, and nothing has popped up to keep them in show business next week. They’re scheduled to start their old jobs up again, only because they’re such crappy gigs that there’s plenty of turn-over; guys like them are a dime a dozen, they come and go. Oh, our bouncer can sing, isn’t that neat? Our waiter’s pretty funny, good with crowds, what luck! It makes Vinny feel sick to be so unrecognized, because he’s always sure the final decision is right around the corner: you’re just not that special, Vinny, so go home.
He doesn’t want to think about it tonight, he wants to experience this last week as an opening act, just in case it really is the last week he’ll have as a professional act. He wants to enjoy Lance as his partner, not just the guy he’s shacked up with in the city, a boyfriend just like the last who’s better than being alone, but nothing to write home about. His life doesn’t have to be that life until this week is over, and so in the meantime, he must enjoy himself.
“Hey, baby,” he says after dinner, when he’s done washing and Lance is still drying the dishes. “Can you do a cartwheel?”
“Not in here,” he says, “but yeah, I can do a lot of springing around, cartwheels, handstands, I can juggle, are you thinking about something for a sort of finale on the last night?”
“No,” Vinny says, though now he certainly is, in a different part of his brain, the cogs underneath his conscious mind are turning: cartwheels, yeah, just like that. Could he tumble on or off the stage? Could he do something that Vinny can step in and catch him during? They’ve still got that dervish-and-dour dynamic, it might be nice to have Lance running around and fall into Vinny’s arms to be put right, but that’s all something that can keep him awake later. Right now, Vinny has another idea for Lance’s talents.
“I used to be able to do handstands on my father’s shoulders, though that was a long time ago. I mean, I’m out of practice and I’m also quite a bit bigger than I used to be, I don’t think either you or Dad could support that sort of thing anymore.”
“I’m not thinking of the act right now,” Vinny says. A hand stand on someone else’s shoulders is some Cirque du Soleil shit, Vinny would want to see something like that, but to his own amusement.
“What a miracle!” Lance throws his hands up in mock praise, and Vinny leans back with just the hint of a smile. He’s in a spectacular mood, that’s good.
“I want to see you do something naked,” Vinny says. “Something acrobatic and naked, if you can manage anything impressive.”
“Is that a challenge, then? A dare?”
“I don’t remember saying anything about back-talking. Get creative, but do it quietly.”
Lance rolls his eyes, but makes a locking motion over his lips and throws the key over his shoulder. Then he looks around the tiny kitchen for furniture that might double as gymnastic equipment. The table he tests by rocking it, but it’s too rickety to hold him up, and his chair is too rusty to want to chance getting cut on. Instead Lance uses it as a garment rack and strips down, which sends a light kick to Vinny’s loins, just seeing him so shamelessly nude while Vinny is still wearing a full outfit. Lance clears a wall so he can do a handstand against it, and then carefully frees one hand so he can stroke himself upside down.
He’s got blood rushing to both heads, that’s obvious, and Vinny looks around now to see if he can’t find something to work with; Lance is like the perfect toy, so fun to play with.
“Let go of that, hands on the floor,” Vinny says. “Spread your legs, knees straight like you’re doing a split.”
The walls are so close that Lance is able to place the bottom of each foot on one, which gives him extra stability for what Vinny wants to do. He was thinking of arranging a bouquet of objects in Lance’s hole until he asked for mercy—smooth pens and the backs of utensils and the handle of a hammer if he could fit it, that would have been quite a sight—but he decides with how much his dick is aching that gathering objects will take too long in and out, and besides, Lance can’t hold himself up forever either. Vinny goes a different route, goes to the freezer and pulls out a Popsicle, still wrapped, but left over from the previous tenant. It’s got a lot of freezer burn under the clear wrapper, so much icy buildup you can barely see that it’s an orange Popsicle. Vinny shows it to Lance, and then shows Lance what he’ll do to make sure it goes in easy.
First he opens the Popsicle and runs it under warm water to get the freezer burn melted away. Then he starts sucking on the thing himself, the candy orange fake flavor of it a reminder of childhood that he’s very happy to repurpose for something better. There was no fun in the sun when Vinny was growing up, he’d only get Popsicles to keep him from passing out when he mowed the lawn. He walks over to Lance with this treat in his mouth, and reaches down with a wet hand to start opening Lance up, preparing him for this. Lance is watching him go about this casually, enjoying his Popsicle as he dunks his fingers into Lance’s hole and strokes the membranes of his insides. The inside of the boy is so hot, and this popsicle is so cold—is he ready for this?
“Say you’ll take this,” Vinny says, and then starts negotiating. “If you let me put this inside of you, I’ll lick it out myself, every last drop, baby, I promise. Let me do it.”
“Go ahead, pal,” Lance says, his voice thick and quiet. Vinny will have to be quick about this, before Lance collapses. “Do it.”
Vinny does. He takes the Popsicle out of his mouth and turns it over so the now pointed tip can drip into Lance’s hole. Vinny doesn’t press too hard, in case the pop will fall apart, but he does keep an even pressure on the stick so that it sinks at least halfway into his baby.
Lance winces when the cold touches him, but Vinny starts to tug on his cock, to distract him from the sensation of it. Vinny can’t believe someone would let another fella do this to him, it’s making him rock hard. Only when the Popsicle starts to melt and drool down Lance’s ass crack and his belly does Vinny remove the thing and chuck it into the sink. Before Lance comes down from his handstand, Vinny rushes to get his arms under Lance’s thighs and lifts him up himself. Lance sighs when the pressure’s off of him, and Vinny lifts Lance’s backside to his face, getting melted orange and whatever’s leaking from Lance all over the front of his shirt with no care for it at all. He kisses Lance’s hole, probes it with his tongue seeking the taste of orange, but then decides he wants to do something else while parts of Lance’s interior are still cold. He wants to fuck him.
“Lay down, face down,” Vinny says, his voice low with need as he lowers Lance onto the kitchen floor and starts undoing his pants. He can’t spring his cock out of his shorts for even a second without pressing it into Lance. The sensation is new and familiar at once, sticky, cool, but there’s warmth the deeper he plunges, and Lance moans as he does this, throws his whole weight behind his shaft and its quest for the depths of his baby.
The new feel of strange tackiness and unpredictable parts of warm and chill is a quick stimulant, it finishes Vinny fast. When he’s done, knowing that Lance is filled with this strange new mixture, Vinny pulls out and turns Lance over to cradle and kiss him, kiss all the way down his torso to apply his sticky mouth to Lance’s shaft. For as rough as Vinny likes to be, Lance never pays him back for it, never pulls his hair when he
does this or tries to cram himself deep into Vinny’s throat (when Vinny loves doing that to him). No, instead Lance combs his fingers through Vinny’s hair and brings the hand that tweaks his nipple up to his lips to kiss the fingertips, and when he finishes he doesn’t even demand that Vinny swallow, just lets his essence drool back down with all the other fluids that coat his ass crack, and he lays on the bare ground, spent and content.
“I have something to tell you,” Lance says, and Vinny kneels over his chest, practically sits on his stomach, and rubs his hands over Lance.
“What? You’re pregnant, the legends are true? Is some big wig coming to the show?”
Lance grins. “Close! Some big wig already came to the show. I didn’t want to say anything before now, you’re better on stage when you aren’t outside of your own head with worrying about stuff like that. I wanted you to stay focused, but it’s over now, we already performed for him, and you did great; we were great. I don’t know if he thinks so yet, but we’re going to find out tomorrow night. He said he’d be bringing more people with him, and that could mean anything. That could mean, Hey, congratulations, meet the other king makers, we’re here to hand you the keys to the palace, or it could mean he’s on the fence about us and wants his buddies’ opinions before he can decide, who knows? But you can know now, he wouldn’t come back if we were nothing, and certainly Pringle wouldn’t have mentioned it at all if we’d been a disappointment, he just would have said, thanks for the effort, I’ll call you if I need you, and then he’d never need us.”
Vinny’s got his hands gently around Lance’s throat—he should strangle him for keeping this secret! But he won’t, he’s too blissful in this moment and too comforted by the news.
“We did good?” he asks. Really? No joke, they did good, and people are coming to tell them about it? Vinny can hardly believe it.
Lance nods. “We did really good. They love us, pally. We’re something.”
Vinny nods a few times, but it’s taking a long time to sink in. Something. Imagine! He’s always wanted to be something or somebody, and it’s looking like that’s really going to happen.
“Tomorrow night, they’ll be there?” Lance nods. “I’m not going to sleep at all, you know that, don’t you?”
Lance laughs, and his laugh vibrates up through the base of Vinny, then says, “Check the freezer under the ice, I hid something in there.” Vinny gets up to go look. “Smart of me, really, you certainly went digging for that Popsicle,” he says, getting up and going to the sink to rinse the remnants of it down and start to clean off his face and hands. He’ll need a shower for the rest of it, and Vinny will need to join him, but first he’s going to find this surprise.
It’s a bottle of gin! A tiny one, at the bottom of the ice holder, just enough for two to toast some good news.
“You know my brand!” Vinny says.
“Yeah I know your brand…cheap! The cheapest brand every time.”
“That won’t always be true though, for me or for you,” Vince says, opening the bottle and taking a swig. He hands the bottle over to Lance as he undresses the rest of the way then gathers their clothes into a wad for the top of the dirty laundry pile they build next to the jar of quarters for the laundromat (it can get pretty high before the jar is filled enough to go). “When we make it, our drinks will be champagne and our laundry picked up and brought back clean by couriers and our bath tub huge, like a swimming pool. Not Olympic-sized, no need to be ostentatious, baby, but big enough for two.”
“What about our sexy entourage, how will they fit?”
“The entourage will be ordered to the hot tub, or the pool full of diamonds, or the oil wrestling pit, whichever one they want, but they won’t be invited to our own tub—they’re gin and we’re champagne, and we’ll never forget that, okay?”
“You won’t ever forget it,” Lance says as he preps their down-and-out-in-Chi-town bath. “And you’ll remind me.”
“You bet I will,” Vinny says, kissing Lance and tasting gin and orange between them, quite a fruity little cocktail.
6. The City That Never Sleeps
Lance doesn’t know for sure, but he suspects he knows that this meeting before their final week of shows is good news, the best news, the break Vinny’s been waiting for. There’s a possibility he’s reading the situation wrong, but from growing up with his parents, he knows when the act’s about to get hired and when it’s about to get fired. This is not how you fire someone, bringing all your friends to the show, telling them one way or another before the curtain call. This is how you make a party out of it for everyone: Congrats boys, now do well up there like I know you can, I brought all my friends to see, don’t let us down. It’s good news and a bit of a test, to make sure that news doesn’t go straight to anyone’s head. Lance is ready for it; he hopes Vinny is too.
For Lance, it’s like watching a silent movie that he can touch. He shakes hands with the guy Mr. Pringle introduces them to, he waves at this man’s table of friends, he hears the man’s name (Lays—Lance can already think of a thousand dirty jokes for that guy’s name, and he’ll say them if the guy seems receptive to laughing at himself sometime), but after that all he really does is watch Vinny.
It’s no surprise why he likes to drink—when he’s on his first few drinks, he has the same look on his face as he does when he’s being praised. He smile is sweet, his eyes are bright, his brow unwrinkled, without a care in the world. When he’s drinking he hits a wall, he starts to remember his real life and tends to wallow, but right now, when reality’s going so well for him, he looks like he could dance all night, he looks so happy.
Lance isn’t even listening to the good news; he knows Vinny will hear it all and will be able to tell him about it later. Their eyes meet whenever Vinny looks around with shimmering wonder, and Lance only nods and smiles at him, reassuring him that it’s all true, though he doesn’t care much what it is that’s true. Mr. Lays points a thumb at Pringle, says they’ve been friends forever, trade talent whenever they find it, welcome to the family, kids, and Lance shakes hands with them both again, and then runs up the table of Lays’ friends and starts switching their plates around before putting them back again saying, “Wow, let me help you gentleman out, because if Lays is my friend then aloha, huh? You’re all my friends, gotta make sure you’re getting served right because it’s real hard to find good help around here, let me tell ya.” They laugh at him, Lays and Pringle beam at each other, they nod at Vinny as if congratulating him on making an act out of such a clown, and Lance returns to take Vinny away, saying, “Stop bothering these gentlemen, ya goddamn peacock, get to work!”
He gives the king makers a nod, a wink, and an OK symbol with his hand. They’re all shaking their heads and laughing. Something about Lance’s face, people like to see him go way over the top when they’d hate someone who didn’t look so funny and want him arrested right on the spot. It’s a gift and curse at times, when all he wants is to be taken seriously. Even Vinny can’t always see past how goofy Lance seems; he thinks Lance is as optimistic as a fool, but he’s really not, he’s just seen enough come and go and come back and come to ruin again on the road, he doesn’t make such a big deal about the vagaries of life anymore. It means lower highs, but it also means higher lows, and Lance would take his condition over Vinny’s. Nobody feels better than Vinny does right now, not a soul on Earth, but as good as he feels now, he might someday feel just as bad, and Lance does not look forward to that day, no he does not.
They get through that night’s show, the sweat on Vinny’s brow catching the lights like glitter, and the rest of the week goes just as well, in between their days spent packing. They’re not going back to their bottom-of-the-rung Chicago jobs, they’re going to New York! New York City, no suburb for them! They’re getting put to work on a sketch show, they’re going to start working with writers, thinking of skits, acting out the parts they’re handed—it’s going to be great! Friends in the biz, money coming in, time on TV, the dre
am! It’s fine with Lance, makes more sense than waiting tables, and might be able to find some work for his parents too; Vinny takes this gig like it’s the crown he always knew he was born to—and heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Now that he has what he wants, all he can really do next is lose it, he seems to think. Vinny doesn’t relax much as they close down this tiny apartment and get bus tickets for their new spot in New York. It’ll still be a tiny apartment, of course, but they’ll be making more money, and they’ll be in all the right circles for continued success. When they get off the bus on 7th Avenue after nearly a day cramped up and eating out of snack bags, Vinny stretches his legs and stands up tall and proud.
“You know you don’t own this city, right?” Lance asks, minding their bags as Vinny starts pacing back and forth, restless with pent-up energy.
“Not yet,” he says. “This is Manhattan, right? The island?”
“You saw we crossed a bridge coming in, this is the island.”
“What’s on this thing, Central Park right? You want to see Central Park? Times Square, you want to see Times Square? No, that’s too touristy, I’d feel like a Buckeye from Bumfuck. No we’re for sure not doing that, what should we do?”
“Let’s get a cab to where we really live,” Lance says, which means a cab to the Bronx. “Let’s set down our stuff and then get something to eat and think of something free we can do for fun.” Lance would vote stay in and fuck, but Vinny is definitely not going to have the patience for that, not while there’s still daylight in NYC.
