SoMa Literary Review - Visions of Neal

Visions of Neal

By Rob Beeston

They drove down Market Street, turned off at Valencia and somewhere joined the freeway. He knew they were in completely the wrong direction for his hotel but he only minded insofar as the trick seemed to take great delight in pointing out how he hadn’t a clue where they were. He said his name was Neal and asked straight away if he was hustling, which had him worried for a minute that he was finally starting to look like rent, though it was less likely rent per se than nearly a year without love, he’d seen it himself in the mirror, a sort of soulless hole about his face - like the song said, it’s a real big place. He played along and said hustling helped with the plane fare, secretly thrilled at the presumption, let alone the thought of being paid to fuck around with legs like those.

He was no match for Neal’s gregariousness but he did have him all figured out in about ten seconds flat. He was loathed to even mention his PhD but when Neal asked what he was doing in San Francisco he couldn’t think what else to say. Predictably the very idea made him at once more attractive and threatening, which was true of his Englishness as well, as if he had a direct line to the Queen, or Diana. He would have been keen to downplay his own mystique had Neal not been so obviously adept at over-compensating all by himself. Thus began a spontaneous, meandering treatise on how Neal too could have studied if he’d wanted, if it had been the right time back then, which it wasn’t because his life was on a different path (or some such) and he wouldn’t be where he was now had he taken the time out before, although he was thinking about going back to school when things were more settled because he thought he’d be quite good at it. Yeah, he flourished, now I think about it I’d be really good because, you know, I’ve got that sort of mind. You know, that sort of, yeah, mind.

Neal’s legs were very sexy. He tried not to look too much but his eyes kept drifting back down into the seat well. Olive calves on the pedals, thighs spread firm on the leather. He nodded and said yes, study - or whatever - had a lot to offer but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all (unsure if he was being deferential to Neal or critical of himself). Neal talked about maybe going back to school once his salon was expanded; he said he had a salon and spa and then spoke wildly and demonstratively about Vidal Sassoon, before asking if he knew where South of Market was. He said, yes, SoMa, all that history. Neal said well anyway he was based there for now but he had plans to expand, and then the non sequitur, how old are you? because I’m thirty-two. The radio flared and jumped a station.

Neal’s shorts were very short. They rode up even more against the seat and clung tight around the upper inner thighs. The socks were white and the skin was olive. They really were beautiful legs, like pistons on the pedals as their custodian chatted away, slender but muscled, only hairless until you got up close, he imagined.

Neal said how he used to hustle once himself; he hadn’t for a while and he didn’t do it for long but he used to. Surprisingly though he didn’t say anything about how he wouldn’t normally pick guys up like this, or that it was just because he was so busy and the opportunity had presented itself, that it wasn’t planned at all. He didn’t say any of this, only that he used to hustle himself, once. He looked down again, thinking with legs as beautiful as those he could have charged the world.

About twenty minutes later they pulled up with a jolt outside a recently renovated nineteenth century warehouse, corner aspect all glass and rich dark wood, in what he knew was a pretty flash part of town these days. Neal was watching him to make sure he was looking at all the right things. He could tell, and so he refused all the more adamantly to notice either the affluence or the pretence, and anyway he’d been distracted by the street signs since passing the intersection at Second and Brannan, too preoccupied with the books he knew many of these street names from to be anything like what Neal obviously needed him to be. He was, it is true, being a touch pedantic in this – rote rehearsing fragments of fifty-year old prose to blot out the vulgarity - but he was also really spun out by some of the names he seemed to know a fraction of a second before the signs. He spun around, cocked his ear, and exclaimed, listen! - the boom-crash of truck traffic towards the glorious girders of the Oakland Bay Bridge !

Neal planted a first kiss primarily to shut him up. It landed like a slap back into the present, where his heart was glass and his knees turned all too easily to mush. They went inside through a keypad entry door to the left and immediately on through another to the right. He found himself in the middle of a hall of sinks and mirrors and framed posters of franchised product. Another door led off into various other rooms while the reception desk was over by the front door beneath a metal spiral staircase up to who knows where. The shop space along the front windows was sparsely furnished with light wood shelving and glass-topped tables of product and artfully arranged brochures. The structural walls were bare brick and the partition ones white, while the original warehouse pillars - great hefts of sandblasted redwood - piled down into the tiled floor and up through the lowered ceiling. There were only a few of them but they dominated the space as if they’d never been chopped down.

He looked around as Neal went about his business, admonishing the staff for not having done this and that before they left. Only the lights at the back were on. He stood in the dark looking out onto the street; surprisingly quiet, he thought. He brushed at the steel of the spiral staircase and looked dizzyingly up to the cool white ceiling of whatever room it spiralled up to. The reception desk was neat and tidy with a glass vase of flamboyant flowers at the far end, one of many elaborate floral displays dotted about. He kept catching glimpses of himself in the mirrors, tanned and wide-eyed, dishevelled, but ok.

Neal stopped writing and checking and went over to the big fridge at the back, gesticulating away about the staff and the busyness of the day, then brandishing a bottle of white wine so big it looked like it wouldn’t fit back in. He offered it and without waiting for an answer poured just the one glass. He wished Neal was joining him but he took it anyway and spent the next five minutes trying to disguise the size of his sips. Neal said to help himself, so when he nipped back out to the car to fetch something he drank the rest of his glass, re-filled it to just above the rim, and slugged half as much again. The huge fridge was empty of anything but cheese and wine, lots and lots of wine in very big bottles. He closed the door as Neal blustered back in the side door shouting ideas of all the things they could do together while he was in town. He was still talking and shimmying as he came back into the salon, took his wine off him and pushed him down hard onto one of the luxuriously austere chairs.

They kissed fast and he finally got his hands on Neal’s legs inside and out the bottom of his shorts. Neal watched as he struggled to get lower and reach further round, first one way then the other. He had to wriggle and stretch because Neal refused to move. He kicked his trainers off and felt around with his feet as Neal pushed down ever harder. One leg free he managed to run his foot right up to the inside thigh and back. His sock slid along on olive skin until Neal caught it and trapped it back down against the couch. He stopped struggling and felt around where he was, the shorts so small he couldn’t reach far, although he could have had all the room in the world and it wouldn’t have been enough. His jaw turned to jelly and shivers radiated behind his ears clawing his balls and nipples in a single frigid wave. He clenched his teeth and grabbed hard. He came to a stop with his hands slid tightly back-to-back between Neal’s buttocks, jaw in a big pulsating cramp. When he opened his eyes Neal was still in the same position, head a little back, chest thrust down staring straight into him.

Neal stood back up and yanked his trousers down without bothering with the plastic clip-buckle. He stood over him tugging hard on the foreskin; they spoke briefly about foreskin. He stepped back, watched, reached in and tugged some more then let go and grabbed the balls and did exactly the same again. He reached over to a sink for a water bottle and sprayed between his legs and up and down his thighs in a cool sparkling mist. He watched it settle, and glisten, and then he pushed his legs further open over either side of the couch. Neal told him to stay put as he watched himself in the mirror, ruffling his dark curly hair and re-adjusting the waistband of his shorts. He moved to the head end of the couch, looked straight in his eyes and kissed him upside down while yanking his shirt up over his head. He tied him down with towels before getting undressed himself and rubbing up against the chair. He covered him chest to thighs in an oily lotion from a slim tan bottle and kicked a footstool over that scraped the tiles and went right through the building and he stood on it and leaned in and he shoved his cock to the back of his throat. Prone, his jaw again turned to jelly and exploded behind his ears as he craned his head to the side shifting great slabs of air back and forth through his nose. The towels started coming loose but he pretended they didn’t and stayed in place as best he could, looking straight up to Neal at the top glaring all the long way down.

Neal pulled out, kissed his gaping wet mouth, climbed down, tried his trousers on, modelled them in the mirror saying how cute they were and how fierce he looked in them, then ran out through the door at the back, and disappeared.

In the chair, he didn’t move. He stared straight up in front, wondering, where Neal might have gone, how long he might be gone for. There was a window directly in front of him. Floor to ceiling with a dark brown steel girder diagonally across it, next to it a corrugated roll-top door in the same deep chocolate brown. Two of the redwood pillars were just behind him, trussed either side at the top into massive Y-shapes through the ceiling. The grain ran deep and the wood was old. Perfectly still, he lay there wondering what condition the pillars were in before the renovations (Stanley Saitowitz/Natoma Architects Inc) of 1993.

He looked down at himself, loosely strapped and glistening in the tenebrous light. Still no Neal, not a sound, guessing he’d gone somewhere upstairs. The oil - whatever it was - was drying tingly on his skin. He looked over by the front door and the reception desk, the spiral staircase and the identikit lines of franchised product. He shook the towels off and rubbed his chest, tacky but soft, fragrant. He sat up and took his socks off but didn’t know where to put them because Neal had taken his clothes. He threw them at his bag by the fridge and swigged the rest of the wine. Still no sign of Neal he stood half-erect in the cold light of the fridge and poured another glass. He fetched his camera from his bag and padded around. Standing over the mess of bottles and towels he looked in the mirror above the chair. He framed himself in reflection, and took a picture. The flash rebounded around the mirrors and illuminated half the city.

The tiled floor was cool underfoot. He padded over by the main door, glass and frameless, uninterrupted save for a minimal handle, a thin strip across the middle, metal buffers top and bottom. He read Neal’s name in reverse in a frosted strip across the panel above, large double-aspect windows either side onto the street. He was naked in the centre of what tomorrow (as today) would be bustling with people. He stood right up against the glass, careful not to touch it, looking out onto the sidewalk only six inches away, and again became erect. He looked across the street and squeezed his toes. He padded back to the chair and thought of Neal, his likely tidying and preening upstairs. He waited, and thought just a little of what else he could be doing.

Twenty minutes later he was in a steel-clad elevator being whisked away upstairs. Neal had bounded back into the salon as though he’d never stopped talking all the while, grabbed him by the arm and hurried them through and out the back to the elevator in the hallway. Seconds later they opened on an unfurnished first floor lobby and what looked like an empty office unit with a blood red concrete floor and renovated bare brick walls, overlooking the main street. Neal pointed, said it was where they were expanding the spa. He nodded and said he wouldn’t mind a shower. The lobby floor was grey with beige plaster walls. There was no furniture. His skin tingled as he stepped out of the elevator.

Neal opened the door to the right, ushered him through, looked him up and down and punched his naked buttocks as he went past. The apartment was small and open plan with bare brick walls and white floor-to-ceiling blinds up against the street below. He’d forgotten Neal had run off in his trousers until he saw him in them in the gilt-framed landscape mirror at the far end, naked from just below the waist up, all pubis and pectorals - as sure as olives are ranged in groves.

Neal scurried round opening blinds and windows, fluffing cushions, delivering monologues and pointing to the bathroom round either side of a sort of slotted-in modular kitchen. They rounded on it at the same time. Neal ran the taps full pelt while going into great and slightly vacant detail about a variety of exfoliating, cleansing, toning, and moisturising products, firstly their purpose and then their place in both the range and the entire franchise. The bath was as everything else - simple, functional, brightly lit. He got in, and as if on cue took a glass of wine from Neal through a Himalayan range of the biggest bubbles his skin had ever known. Glass aloft he slid underwater and rubbed his face. When he surfaced Neal was there with a pill in one hand and wiping the bubbles from his eyes with the other, asking was there anything else he needed. He said no. Neal patted his short spiky hair and with the drawl of at least two r’s said he was adorable. He grinned, said he was fine and asked what the pill was. He just said it was good and passed him the tallest of the slim tan plastic bottles at the end of the bath, saying how long to leave it on as he scurried off again.

He laid back and stared at the alabastrine ceiling, cool tones against the reclaimed walls. He sipped at the wine – red now - and at last felt neither tired nor lonely just clean. He rested one leg over the side and watched the soapy wet hairs. Down-lighters in the ceiling twinkled silver with diamond flecks of lavender, or pearl. There were few ornaments, mainly just product. He didn’t know the brand; he gathered it was a big name but he wasn’t up on health and beauty. Neal had already corrected him as if his mispronunciation was a personal affront, launching then with extra gusto into a pitch about how everybody was using it and how Tracey from Everything But The Girl had liked it when he did her hair, in Italy or somewhere. He looked for the shampoo but couldn’t work out which one. There was a rubbery flannel in a clear plastic envelope, same tan colour as everything else. He rubbed his face with that, and sank languorously back under the water.

He had no idea of the time and he couldn’t see a clock. Two thick white pipes ran along the ceiling, above the windows and presumably the full length of the apartment, suspended at intervals by shiny double steel bands. He sat up and watched bath bubbles twinkle the same pearly white as the spotlights, more petroleum maybe than pearl (though Neal would beg to differ). The laundry basket overflowed against the back wall. Much of it had been there since moving in, but there was another layer strewn more hurriedly on top. He smiled, and stood up to rinse himself off.

There was a frosted pane of glass in the top of the kitchen partition. He steadied himself on it as he stood up, slippery and nobbly to the touch. He wrote his name in the condensation, watched it, listened a moment, and squeakily rubbed it out. He stretched up, brushed the bubbles down his legs and looked around for the extra-fluffy towels.

Neal arrived back just as he came out from the bathroom. He asked if he was ok, if he had everything he needed, then kissed him and whipped his towel off and sat on the back of the sofa to watch as he looked around for his wine. Neal cleared cushions from the bed behind the sofa at the far end of the room - just a mattress on the floor - and beckoned him over, then watched as he stretched out. They smiled. He turned onto his front. Neal crouched down and smacked his buttocks and got undressed again himself.

They lay naked together for a while. The sheets were crisp and Neal’s eyes were so brown his pupils didn’t stand a chance. They talked about earlier, in Safeway. Neal said he’d tried to get his attention one more time as he left but he seemed in a world of his own as he packed his little bag. He was surprised, he said he hadn’t heard at all and that it was lucky he pulled up in the car outside and tried again that one last time - or they might never have met. They kissed and looked into each other. They spoke only very little.

After a while Neal pulled him up off the bed and they ran hand in hand from the apartment out into the lobby and through the neighbouring empty unit. Neal led him through a doorway and into what he guessed were the offices above the salon. He was disoriented but the spiral staircase was over the way by a two-seater sofa so he knew they were somewhere above the front desk. Neal busied himself while offering snacks and drinks. He asked if he could check his email. There were at least four different coloured Apple Macs dotted about the office.

He sent two or three mails to friends telling them where he was. He was brief and to the point because he didn’t want Neal to know he was in the slightest excited and almost constantly in tears – the soulless hole about his face, a real big place. When he was done he turned to Neal, naked at the desk behind, and ran his hands greedily all over and down him and back up and between his legs and tight under his buttocks. He spun him around and straddled the swivel chair’s legs and dropped to his knees. He was so eager his fingers started to lock-and-snap as if he’d been underwater for too long. His need to be held and swallowed up himself was somehow coterminous with the unearthly need right now to devour the whole of Neal. His jaw was jelly and his teeth and lips stood on end as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He had to bite down on the base of the shaft as soon as he got there because the imploding feeling behind his ears and knees threatened to run out of control and around the world. He knew this type of ache came almost always in total disguise, so he wasn’t surprised to look up and see Neal looking as exactly helpless as he really felt himself. They watched each other through a haze, competing for pleasure, the give and take indissoluble eye to eye.

He used his hands only briefly before moving them to the side, and he used the weight of his head even less before gripping the chair’s legs and force-feeding the entire swivel. If he could have broken his nose on Neal’s pubis just then he would have. He stayed impaled, never wanting to leave; rheum from his eyes the quid pro quo of the parabola to come. That his vision wobbled in mercurial parentheses at either side came as no surprise given the greediness of his throat. But he knew also, somewhere, the drug was beginning its work.

The night ran in rivulets and figure-of-eights and became the morning of July 18 without either of them noticing.

It was on its way.

Also by Rob Beeston on SoMa Literary Review: The Last of England

Rob Beeston lives in Sheffield, England. He was born on Edie Sedgwick’s birthday in the year Elvis’s Aloha from Hawaii became the first global satellite broadcast of its kind and the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from DSM II. He is currently writing a novella about how all of these events are linked.