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H-U-S-T-L-I-N-G
By
Dustin Wells
San Francisco. Not the Castro. But near there. Just walk down Market and turn on 9th. Go a few blocks more. You’ll know it when you see it. Go ahead. Come in. There’s a couple of banged-up guys standing in the doorway, but ignore them. They don’t want help. We’ll get to them later. Or they’ll get to you. You’re almost here. One more step. It’s Thanksgiving. The long stretch of a bar is moderately populated with men. All men. Oh, what about the five women in glamorous dresses staring at you? Oh, well, they’re men too. Right now, they’re smiling, chins lowered to hide the lumps in their throats. They do their best. The woman with the blonde hair flaunts her long smooth legs. That’s Daphne. Another woman snarls at you like a tigress. Don’t be afraid. You can laugh or smile or wave. We’re just people. I’ll introduce you. Take a seat.
“I’ll push your stool in!” a woman with a raspy voice yells.
Don’t panic. It’s just Trish. Rough looking gal with a bad perm and the bad taste to wear high heels with cut-off shorts. Track marks show up and down her legs. She screams, “You ain’t a person ‘till you wake up with a dick in your ass and tits on your back!” She reaches out for me flirtatiously. I light her cigarette. This settles her. There’s no use hiding it. It’s a drag queen bar. And a drag queen prostitute bar at that. They’re staring at you because, well, you’re their business. But, hey, don’t be afraid. Let me get you a drink. I’m the bartender. It’s Thanksgiving. Lots of specials.
Ignore the guy sidling up to your side like a horse going to a trough. He’s shirtless and skinny but muscular. Over his heart is a badly done jailhouse tattoo of a guard in a watchtower pointing a gun. He brushes his naked belly against your elbow. You stare at me as if asking for help. I pour a beer and set it before him. If you pay for his beer, it’s a done deal. It’s how we communicate. Welcome to the world of rough trade.
The cheap perfume in the air burns your nostrils. Just over the whiff of stale beer, there’s the smell of ammonia, and you’re glad someone is disinfecting this place. When your brain realizes the smell is spilled semen, you almost gag. The shirtless boy leaning into you reeks of cologne.
I set a free drink before you. You reach into your pocket to pay me. I wave it away. You can pay me later, I say.
Another young man approaches you from the other side. He’s softer, not jailhouse hard, not yet. Do you like him more? He has hair that sticks up like he just rolled out of bed. He slouches onto a bar stool and asks where you’re from with a goofy high-school kid voice.
You can’t fuck either of them. They’re not gay. But you can suck either boy off. There’s a small price to pay. At least $40 cash. Yep, for a nominal fee you can suck off a musky, virile man. That’s the jailhouse dude. The kid on your left is different. He needs a place to stay. He needs dinner. Money is nice but it’s not what he’s looking for. You can get away with buying him a pair of sneakers or some new clothes. But he really wants to go home with you and stay awhile, a week, two, until another trick convinces him to rob you. Then he’ll be back begging for clemency.
Me? I’m your facilitator. Pimp? Hardly. I take no money. I listen. That’s my charm. I’m genuinely interested in you. And these are my friends.
Don’t be embarrassed. It’s okay. This place is notorious for its rough trade. So far, I’ve met Jimmy Page, John Cleese, David Lee Roth. No lie. They know how it’s done. Come in, don’t even order a drink, just ask the bartender who’s cool, who’s not, who’s an honest whore and who’s gonna roll you at the first chance. I’m not judging you, really, I’m beyond that. This is my world. It’s the mythic San Francisco, it’s what you’ve come for.
Oh, you want to know about me? Sorry, not for sale. But the short answer is I like working in black jeans. That’s it. I hate shirts. I hate underwear.
A man dangles a twenty-dollar bill from the other end of the bar and calls out, "It's yours if you put your dick in my drink.”
I lower my jeans and do it. When I reach out for the bill, he latches onto my wrist like a viper. I struggle away from his grip. He yells out banter loaded with innuendo. You laugh at our routine. It’s a good laugh you got there. But twenty bucks is twenty bucks. As I dry my dick on a bar towel, you turn away. But the patrons scare you a bit so you look behind the bar. The suit in a cellophane bag draped over the cash register intrigues you. Okay, we'll make small talk. You want to know about the suit. Sure, I work in the oldest and biggest law firm by day. Don’t look at me with such surprise. There’s no contradiction. Who in the hell do you think owns this institution, this bastion of glamour in the bowels of the SOMA? That’s right, old rich lawyers who thought it’d be fun to own a nasty dive in San Francisco. And that’s my suit for that job, which I just procured in a very strange way.
Yeah, lawyers. And this place is a designated criminal haven too. The cops installed cameras on the building across the street to watch who’s coming and going. And things have definitely gotten out of hand since I've been running this shift. Why? Because I like everybody. Crack-dealing transvestites, rough trade, hustlers, yep, they’re my best friends. I nurse them. I feed them and give them free booze and hook them up with good tricks, like you.
I’m not sure why. My pour count is way off and I’m about to be fired by the lawyers for giving away so much booze. They like me there on the nineteenth floor of 401 Market anyway. Suit and tie. Filing claims adjustments to insured oil tankers mysteriously arriving empty. During the day, they grab my ass when they think no one’s looking. It’s sexual harassment through and through. But I need this bar gig and that file clerk gig too.
Why? Well, the money, you know. $300 a night minimum. $100 skimming. $200 legit tips. Just so you know, johns throw me at least $20 for lining up a good trick.
And, well, I’m learning here without getting my hands too dirty, you know. See this bar. I never go over this bar. I’m not taking the tricks out back like the other bartenders. I’m just here to listen and learn, buddy, listen and learn. There’s a lesson I’m trying to figure out. And besides, here I’m king. I control the booze. I control the dealers and the hustlers and the jukebox. I’m telling you, before I stepped in, Folsom Street was wide open, begging to be organized. I know every guy’s history. His story. Her story. I know who does what for how much.
See Sarah over there, I said, hey, when you go to Wyoming to get the cheap tits, don’t go for the gazongas, go for something vaguely realistic, but no, she came back with basketballs.
That old guy, retired Federal judge, last in his line of an old Italian family here. You should see their mausoleum up near the Russian River. Nicer than most people’s houses. Beside him is the architect who designed the Denver airport. On the other side is a good friend of mine,
a top engineer for Bechtel. Good customers, all.
Oh, you like the Cuban chica there. Yeah, come here, I need to whisper. Don’t go that way. You’ll be back here in ten minutes without your wallet. I’ve been tempted by her myself, but see that guy at the other end of the bar, blond boy with the eloquent Spanish, yeah, he pretends to fly into a jealous rage whenever she tries to make any money. He'll pull a knife and you'll run. And payment happens first, so you see what I'm saying?
Oh, Saigon. Yeah, her. She’s not a trick. I say I’m not of this world, but, yeah, Saigon . . . okay, we made out a few times, over the bar that is, I can’t help it. She is subtle you know, subtle in a way that’s just not appreciated here. And she’s pretty and just nineteen. She’s a waitress at Blow Fish Sushi and I really don’t know what she’s doing here. I let her drink for free, maybe that’s why.
“Oh bar boy!” a voice sings out.
Yeah, that guy, he’s an ass. From New York. Some ex-stage actor. He’s in the opening shot of
The Way We Were and was a soldier in An Officer And A
Gentleman. He cruises by you on his roller-blades.
And Karen. Never, ever Karen. You want a black chick on a stick? Go with Bessie Mae, older sure, looks like a potato, okay she has a beard too, but hey, don’t listen to me, I’m just the expert, I’m just the one who sees these people in their natural habitat night after night, but go ahead, talk to Karen. You’re right, she looks like Donna Summer with a dick, but, hey, it’s not worth it.
Another voice cheerfully calls, “Mayor, oh mayor!”
I have to go. Why don’t you sit there? I like it when someone’s not trying to get me to take my pants off or trying to finagle a free drink. That’s why I like you. Okay, stop looking at me. I think I was pretty when I was eighteen, for like a second. Not like Saigon, yeah, watch her. Pretty girl. Those long eyelashes are real.
The voice cheerfully sings out again, “Mayor, oh mayor!” That’s Troy, the ex-priest who plays the bar like a piano and is on disability and never pays for his drinks aside from giving me cigarettes. He’s an island in this mess. He never alludes to sex with me and he’s smart. I love that. “Hello mayor,” he says. Okay, I’ll take the compliment. I’m the mayor. “Oh mayor, shall we play our songs?” he asks. I give him a buck from the cash register to play Frank Sinatra on the jukebox. Lends the place a kind of dignity, huh?
Gordon, his caretaker and housemate, laps the bar on roller-blades once again. He’s the ex-actor who calls me
oh bar boy. He scrunches up his nose as if smelling something terrible when he glides by the drag queen corner. I had Thanksgiving dinner in his house this afternoon before I came to work. Gordon spins around the pool table like a ballerina. He’s a funny guy. He made a Cajun-spiced turkey so hot no one could eat it. Dirty rice, which he said was really dirty. Instead of praying, we all smoked from the same joint. Then Gordon fucked some trick in the kitchen using olive oil as lube. And the hustler was crying because he wanted money, but Gordon, using his New England, almost British accent, which is all contrived of course, said, “I never pay for sex.” The boy came to me to plead his case.
“Jesus Christ, can’t I even get an afternoon off?” I asked.
That boy was so upset, as if he had been violated, as if he doesn’t have sex fifteen times a day on the street, in hotel rooms, in parks, in taxi cabs, in the ally.
Like a good mayor, I mediated until Gordon gave the kid a suit. And the kid came crying to me with a $300 Brooks Brothers suit in his hands. I say I’m not part of it, but this afternoon, just a few hours ago, on this Thanksgiving Day, I said, “I’ll give you ten bucks for that suit.” Ten bucks.
That kid just got off the bus from Texas a month ago with his pregnant girlfriend. That kid pays all his trick money to her so she can live in a rat-infested hotel in the Tenderloin. She hangs out at the bar sometimes. I give her orange juice. When they’re low, she turns tricks too. And that kid just got fucked for ten bucks. $10. Even by my seedy standards that’s wrong. But I need a good suit. And Gordon’s about my size. And the poor kid needs ten bucks. He’s all skin and bones, like a cooked turkey, the flesh just coming off the bone. “Thanks mayor,” the kid said to me with deep sincerity and honor, as if I’ve done him a big favor. That’s the suit right there in its sterile cellophane bag draped over my cash register. Okay, I can’t talk to you all day. I got a business to run.
While I sling drinks, I glance back to you, and the timid boy’s hand is around your waist. It’s hard not to love that one. He’s so dumb he’s innocent. I’m not surprised you like boys. Or maybe you're falling for his hard-luck story.
And then it happens like this, a few hours later. Karen reaches into her purse and pulls out a pair of scissors. I wish we could build up to this moment somehow. But dramatic tension is a myth in reality. Violence happens suddenly, like a car crash. You’re driving along. Then you open your eyes in twisted metal. Karen stabs the drag queen next to her, and calmly asks the next queen, “You want some of this?” She clicks down the line of the bar in her stiletto heels and stabs seven more people. I’m on the phone to the cops. “She just stabbed another one, come quick, to the Stud, on Harrison, oh shit, another one . . .” That’s what I say every time someone gets stabbed. It’s what I remember the most. Saying that over the phone.
She’s the cause of the two bleeding hustlers you passed outside. They refused ambulance help. You can’t make someone go to the hospital just because they’ve been stabbed in the stomach by a drag queen with a pair of scissors. Well, at least you can’t in this part of town.
The cops find the Donna Summer look-alike at a leather bar down the street. They drag her back, but no one will identify her as the assailant. So I do.
“I have people on the outside!” she screams, “You’re dead!”
“Hormones, crack, and cheap booze are a bad combination,” Gordon quips.
You can laugh. I did. I never went back. I quit that night without telling anyone goodbye.
I’m dying to go back to be the mayor again. I miss smoking cigarettes outside the place, sipping free whiskey and coffee, wearing only black jeans, watching the traffic pass. I miss my friends.
I put on the Brooks Brother’s suit and walk around my apartment. I mimic smoking a cigarette and can taste it in my lungs. I blow smoke. I write you into all this while wearing that $300 suit. I’m selling you myself right now. I’m fucking you. Or you’re fucking me. Whatever. I put my tongue in your ear. In your body somewhere. It’s work, for me, the way I fuck with you, the way I play with you, hustling you the way I do. It’s almost second nature to me. And, like a good hustler, the payment, of course, is to be determined later. And it will be far more than you ever expected. So, I’m going to stop time just before the violence. While I’m still there. And you’re picking who you want to rent. The options are enormous. I laugh. You should too. I’m going to stop time before I fuck you over. I’m going to stop time before you give me what you don’t want to give me.
Copyright © 2005 Dustin Wells
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