Out of the Blue

by Blue Blake

  “Are you crazy?” I ranted, “You’re going to look like some Swahili tribesman!”

  It was time to get out of San Francisco. We had a lot of regular clients, but if I got one more call from a guy asking me to shit on him . . . . Perhaps we would like L.A. and L.A. would like us. L.A. loved us!

  We arrived during a huge rainstorm. Even so, I already noticed a big difference from San Francisco. Everyone was tanned and cheerful.

  “I’m glad I didn’t put that bone through my nose,” said Gage sheepishly.

  Jim French’s assistant picked us up at the airport and drove us to a motel in the San Fernando Valley. This was the porn capitol of the world, which surprised me because it looked like such a normal town. I don’t know what I was expecting, huge neon signs of topless chicks twirling their boobs perhaps. Jim’s assistant told us there was a gym a few blocks away.

  Gold’s Gym of North Hollywood was great. Lots of massive straight bodybuilders and soap opera stars. Even so, we caused quite a stir. We dressed like superheroes: all spandex shorts from Hot Skins and flesh-baring cropped tops from Flash Dance. I even wore a do-rag, which was extremely fashionable in those days.

  One guy approached us with an interesting offer as we were leaving the gym. He told us that The Tom of Finland Company was going to be making its first XXX-rated film based on the erotic drawings of the famed Tom of Finland. Hugely popular, Tom of Finland was an artist who had indeed been born in Finland in 1920. Tom grew up in a time and place where men were either closeted or flaunted their homosexuality by being outrageously effeminate. Tom’s artwork portrayed a different world where super built, super masculine men flirted and had full on hardcore sex with each other. Every gay guy I knew who was into bodybuilders had at one time or another been profoundly affected by the work of Tom of Finland. By the time Tom died in 1991, he had greatly challenged gay stereotypes by showing well-built studs who were neither weak nor effeminate. One of the saddest aspects of my life was that I never got to meet this icon who, up until his death, had been living in Los Angeles.

  The guy who approached us was a talent scout and said we would make the perfect stars for the film. Of course there was only one problem. Gage had never fucked a bodybuilder before in his life. He certainly had-n’t fucked me, and he certainly wasn’t ready to do it on film. Details, details, I thought, as my mind whirled around with the possibilities of appearing in the film. I was positive I could convince Gage to star in the film with me. We were about to shoot for COLT, and we had been offered starring roles in Tom of Finland’s The Wild Ones. Could my head get any bloody bigger? I was going to have to grease it up like a pig to get it out of the door of the gym. I told the talent scout to give us a call when he knew more details about the shoot and slipped him our business card. I loved Los Angeles already!

  That night I could hardly sleep from excitement. We had been told there was full wardrobe at the COLT Studio, so we had to bring only ourselves. I couldn’t wait! Jim French was a genius, the Leonardo da Vinci of erotic photography. Well, Jim French was also . . . ENORMOUSLY FAT!!! and not incredibly pleasant either. Generally I’m extremely congenial and tend to get on with everybody but I have to admit Jim was a bloody trial. We had arrived at the studio and been led by an assistant through a warehouse full of merchandising—COLT t-shirts, videos, fridge magnets—into a large photo studio. There, under an umbrella, sat Jim French. You know how you can meet people you instinctively don’t get on with? That was Jim and I. I was shocked by how he looked, and I don’t think that he was crazy about me either. I was a little too Rubenesque for Jim’s tastes, whereas Gage was genetically ripped to the bone and covered in veins. Gage was always super vascular but big and healthy looking.

  “If only he didn’t have those ugly tattoos,” was the first thing out of Jim French’s mouth as he looked Gage up and down. I grabbed Gage by the arm fearful he would jump on Jim.

  I smiled, “It is such an honor and privilege to be working for you Mr. French.” I said.

  He completely ignored me and shouted, “WARDROBE!”

  Regardless of how Jim French looked and acted, he was a genius as a photographer. He photographed us both dressed as leather men and cowboys. His studio had a wardrobe like nothing I had ever seen before. It was packed to the rafters with all kinds of masculine costumes and outfits. Jockstraps hung everywhere and old pairs of sexy boots lined the walls. I recognized so many of the shirts and jackets from the magazines I had seen on the models from the COLT magazines when I was growing up. Now I was getting the opportunity to wear the same clothes that had graced the bodies of all the musclemen before me. I felt incredibly flattered.

  A CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONAL, Jim made sure that each shot he took was meticulously lit and staged. One shot could take an hour to set up and light correctly and I understood quickly why he was a legendary photographer. I learned more in those two days about looking sexy and provocative than I had learned in my entire life.

  At the end of the two days, Jim had been swayed by Gage’s masculinity and he told Gage he wanted to shoot a whole calendar of him in Hawaii for fifteen days. Gage wanted more than the paltry $300 a day payment. Jim counted on Gage’s ego winning out, but Gage was all about the cash. Jim gambled with Gage and lost. As we were leaving the studio, I noticed a magazine with Chris Dickerson in it. Chris had been Mr. Olympia in 1982, at forty-three years old. He was a Nubian god, and he had been one of the bodybuilders I had worshipped in those old bodybuilder magazines such as Flex and Muscle & Fitness, and here he was stark naked in a COLT magazine showing off his engorged, and I do mean ENGORGED, cock.

  “Hmmm . . . could I take one of these?” I asked Jim’s assistant.

  Gage and I returned to San Francisco and Casa Sanchez. Back home we started doing magazine shoots like crazy. A gay TV show about San Francisco had filmed us for their opening credits, and our film Twincest: The Blake Twins Raw and Uncut came out. We were mini-celebrities.

  After a few months, however, Gage grew restless and homesick for London. Our lease was running out, so I returned to London reluctantly with Gage. London wasn’t that bad, it was great to see all our old friends again. I knew I would never return to San Francisco again to live. Instead I had my eye on the bigger prize: Los Angeles . . . Hollywood . . . and I was pretty sure I could become a porn star. I had money in the bank and so at the end of my summer in London, I took the cash and jetted back to Los Angeles.

  Gage chose to stay in London. He had fallen in love with a girl named Stephanie who he had met in a hugely popular nightclub called Trade, which was owned by Lawrence Malice, a quasi-celebrity on the London club scene. I first met Lawrence when I was twenty-one and massaging at the Camden Tiger. He was a white Rastafarian with blonde dreadlocks. I thought Lawrence was the dog’s bollocks . . . I adored him . . . not sexually, just because he was so much fun to hang around with.

  Lawrence used to take me to a fetish club called La Maitresse. He would wear a latex leotard with fake breasts and 6-inch dominatrix stilettos and would suck off straight men in the club toilet. Jackie, the future singer from Bananarama worked in the cloakroom. I loved the place. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. One night, I saw a woman dressed as a pony with a bit in her mouth pulling around a guy in a horse buggy by leather straps which were attached to her vaginal lips. La Maitresse was full of masters, slaves and dominatrices and you could wear anything. I would always take hooker girlfriends of mine there because they enjoyed getting their chance to beat willing straight men who would kneel in front of them, proffer them riding crops and beg to be lashed. One night I took a South African hooker named Carol, who weighed 200 pounds of plumpy pleasure. She was a favorite of Arab clients because of how voluptuous she was. Her boobs were a double FF cup. We made her a mini dress out of safety pins and bin liners and nobody blinked an eye . . . not even when she got drunk on snakebites and ripped it off to gyrate in just her knickers on the dance floor.

  So I left Gage in London and returned to L.A. I
rented a two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, the gay section of Los Angeles. It was a modern building with a rooftop swimming pool. I had never in my life had a swimming pool before so I was incredibly impressed. In San Francisco there had been an old tennis court on the roof of Casa Sanchez so this was immeasurable improvement. The building’s supervisor was a hot twenty-five-year-old blonde girl named Stacy who seemed to possess an endless wardrobe of micro mini skirts and high heels. She was a total alcoholic and would come scratching at my apartment door at midnight for some love and affection. Where was Gage when I really needed him?

  I began escorting in Los Angeles but the work was slow. L.A. was full of escorts, so it was a buyer’s market. Although I had an advert in the local gay magazine Frontiers , I needed something to supplement my income. I was used to turning up to ten tricks a day and, apart from the cash, I enjoyed staying occupied. I got a job as a bouncer at a bar called “The Spike” on Santa Monica Boulevard. I worked two nights there; then gave it up. I was too full of steroids and I had a really short temper because of them, so being a doorman definitely wasn’t the right profession for me. People would get drunk and rowdy and I would get VERY moody.

  While working at The Spike, I was chatted with a hooker who told me I should go check out a restaurant /bar on Sunset Boulevard called “Numbers.” Numbers was an institution in Los Angeles. Full of red velvet booths, it was packed every night with hookers and their clients eating dinner. It had a huge mirrored sweeping staircase you had to walk down as you entered. The minute I walked in the door I loved the place. The boys charged $200 an hour and you could easily turn two tricks a night—$400 a night and your days were free. I was in hog heaven. I met all kinds of interesting people and soon had my own booth where I would eat steak dinners every night before turning a couple of tricks. The food was excellent, and somebody always ended up buying me dinner. In return I was charming and hospitable and pretended not to notice they were older than dust. There was a high preponderance of older men there. On the slow nights the hookers would take each other home, but I rarely did this as I was all about business. This was 1992, and there was still very little Internet, so it was either wait by the phone or go to Numbers. I did both. Years later Numbers closed down and became the famous club now known as Hyde, which is frequented by such quasi celebrities as Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton. In fact, it’s the club where Britney Spears was photographed flashing her vagina to all and sundry whilst climbing out of her car. That club has definitely seen it all: my pecs and Britney Spears’ vagina.

  Frontiers magazine came out every two weeks and I picked up a copy to make sure my advert was in. It was like a ritual. The back of Frontiers was full of ads for escorts and masseurs, a lot of bodybuilders and a smattering of porn stars. Compared to London or San Francisco, the bodybuilding standard was high, and I quickly decided that if Gage came to Los Angeles, we could increase our visibility greatly with our old “Blake Twins” advert. I called him in London where he was languishing forlornly, having had a series of fights with his girlfriend Stephanie. He jumped at my invitation and literally caught the next plane to Los Angeles. Drunken Stacy accosted him upon arrival. By this time she was so consistently plastered that she kept forgetting to fill the roof top pool with water after it had been drained for cleaning. It was time for a new apartment, preferably furnished, as I was renting all the furniture and it was costing me a fortune. But where would I find one? My prayers were about to be answered.

  Unlike San Francisco’s gay ghetto, the Castro, West Hollywood was totally rent controlled. I was astonished that you could rent an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment with a pool for twelve hundred dollars a month.

  While riding my bike down Kings Road, a particularly attractive street in West Hollywood, I spied a glamorous redheaded female loading suitcases into a truck outside a luxurious apartment building called The Courtyards. On occasion I had seen the actress Bernadette Peters zipping in and out, so I knew the residents were of high caliber.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the redhead. “I don’t suppose you know if there are any apartments to rent here, do you?” “Well, what a coincidence. I’m looking to rent out my apartment, but there’s only one problem.”

  God, here we go, I thought.

  “I’m moving to Aspen with my new husband, and I have to rent it out furnished and it has two bedrooms.” Yet again my fat had been literally pulled out of the proverbial frying pan. I smiled my biggest ingratiating smile and said, “You’re the answer to my prayers.”

  Gage and I moved in the next day. Drunken Stacy begged us to stay because she hadn’t yet managed to get Gage to shag her. But I bought her a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream and the last we saw her she was sitting by the empty pool, crying and sucking the sickly sweet liquor straight from the bottle.

  The Courtyards was a glorious apartment building. There was a huge supermarket down the street and a big gay gym nearby. Gage would lounge by the pool of the apartment complex in a thong, which only he could get away with. There is something about thongs that make them extremely unsuitable for most men to wear unless they have buttocks of steel—and Gage, God bless him, looked better in a thong than supermodel Giselle Bund-chen. In weeks, everybody in the compound knew us. We became friendly with a porn star who lived in the building named Ted Matthews. I didn’t fancy Ted, although he was a good-looking guy. But he gave me some great advice. We were sitting by the pool one day and Ted was admiring Gage’s ass. Gage, as usual, was pretending to be oblivious.

  A well-known COLT model, who also lived in the building, walked by with his Doberman.

  “He’s a COLT model,” said Ted. Gage looked up. “So are we,” Gage shrugged. “Not that it did us any good; I made $600 . . . that Jim French can fuck off.”

  “Wow . . . COLT models,” said Ted. “Have your pictures come out yet?”

  “No,” I said, “but if you pick up a copy of Drummer Magazine you can see our movie, The Blake Twins: Twincest Raw and Uncut advertised in the back.”

  “Who else have you worked for?” Ted was unimpressed.

  “Nobody.” I replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, we only just arrived in Los Angeles. I really don’t know anybody in the porn business here.”

  “Look in the back of Frontiers magazine. They always have ads looking for porn actors.”

  I had glanced at these adverts before as they were placed alongside my escort ad.

  “Well, I did study drama for three years.”

  “I thought you were marines.”

  “Yes . . . marines,” I fumbled. “Well, that was after I left drama school.”

  Ted looked at me strangely then shrugged.

  “Anyway . . . check out Frontiers in the jobs offered column. Tell them you won’t work for less than a thousand dollars a scene. That’s the going rate for bodybuilders.” Ted stood up, kissed me, winked at Gage (who didn’t like being kissed) and left the pool.

  I ran upstairs to our apartment and grabbed my copy of Frontiers. I brought it back down to the pool. Gage leaned over my shoulder as I thumbed through the want ads.

  “Fucking hell!” Gage shouted.

  “What?!” I yelled back, jumping out of my skin.

  “Look . . . in that personal training ad . . . it’s Chris Duffy!” He pointed to a picture of an enormous bodybuilder. Chris Duffy was a god amongst men. He had won the American bodybuilding championships and was always on the cover of Flex magazine and Muscle and Fitness. He was married to a female bodybuilder named Joanie. For years I had seen him in magazines and thought he was the hottest guy on the planet. He was hugely famous in the bodybuilding world. What the hell was he doing advertising in Frontiers? In the ad he reclined against a wall in a pair of posing trunks, all 300 pounds and 6-foot-3 delicious inches of him.

  “I’m going to call him,” I told Gage.

  “You don’t need a personal trainer,” Gage scoffed.

  “No, but I need Chris Duffy’s knob stuffed
in my gob.”

  I had no problem paying for sex. I had never done it before, but I had been in the escort business long enough to know that everybody paid for a shag in one way or another. Whether you were buying your girlfriend a diamond bracelet or taking your boyfriend out for dinner, it was all in hopes of a booty call.

  “He’s advertising as a personal trainer and he’s married,” Gage protested.

  “He’s advertising personal training dressed in a thong.”

  “I wear a thong,” said Gage.

  Why did I get involved in these ridiculous conversations with Gage?

  “Just shut up and pass me the damn phone,” I snapped. “I have a date with destiny.”

  My sweaty little fingers punched in Chris’s number. The phone rang and then picked up almost immediately.

  “This is Chris,” said a handsome, sexy voice.

  “Hello,” I started, not even being able to conceive of the fact that I was talking to Chris Duffy. I was in heaven.

  “My name’s Blue Blake . . . I saw your ad in Frontiers . I was interested in a little . . . personal training.”

  “Have you worked out before?” asked the handsome voice.

  “Hmmm . . . only for a year,” I lied. “I thought perhaps you could come round and give me some advice. My glutes are extremely undeveloped and need work.” Was I really saying this crap? I had a huge round ass, but I would say anything to lure my straight quarry.

  Chris arranged to meet me at my apartment the following Monday night. I was a nervous wreck. I ran out and bought protein drinks, tuna, bananas . . . everything I thought a professional bodybuilder would eat to keep up his 300 pounds of studliness for an hour. I threw Gage out and told him to go bother the transvestites on the corner of the street and changed into an all-in-one wrestling suit. It had blue and white stripes and accentuated my man bosom the way I imagined a straight pro bodybuilder would appreciate.