The Male Hustler Read online

  “We had a couple of drinks and he put the television set on and we talked about one thing or another. I don’t remember the conversation itself. I generally turn myself off during conversations with someone like that. I’ll play my part and keep up my end of the conversation, but it’s as if I turn my mind off while it’s going on, as if I send it for a walk in the hallway, while my mouth goes on talking.

  “Then he said something about how uncomfortable the chairs were, and why didn’t we sit on the bed, and we did, and I was already starting to pick up negative vibrations but this happens anyway a lot of the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. He groped me, and he played with me a little, and I stretched out and let him go down on me. After awhile I came. I was never excited. I honestly don’t think I ever get what you would call excitement or pleasure with a John. Getting erect and then having an orgasm, that’s a purely physical thing. It always happens for me. I don’t suppose I could prevent it if I tried. All that stimulation has to have an effect if you’re healthy, unless you can just turn yourself off entirely, which I can’t do. But I don’t put that in the same drawer with excitement or pleasure. Sometimes while it’s going on it’s as if I’m not in the room at all, as if my mind is not inside my body. A lot of the time, I guess it’s what you would call a schizophrenic reaction or mechanism, but a lot of the time it’s as if my mind is on the other side of the room watching what’s happening to my body, and not even watching very closely, for that matter.

  “The bit of pretending the person with you is a girl, of closing your eyes and getting off on fantasies, I never do that. I’d rather just ignore the whole thing entirely, like it’s happening to somebody else, like it’s not really me that’s involved there.

  “This time, though, the guy wanted me to return the favor. He wanted me to blow him. Now there’s a way to avoid bad scenes like that but I was very green at the time and had never come up against anybody like this. I had had Johns who wanted me to go down on them, or wanted to bugger me, the two things I won’t do. But they had always taken no for an answer, so before this particular John I had never found it necessary to spell out in advance what I would do or what I wouldn’t do. So I just told him, no, I don’t do that, and he went out of his mind. Called me a little cockteaser, told me I was going to put out whether I wanted to or not.

  “He was a big guy, and I guess he figured this gave him a tremendous edge. I’m thin and not the muscle type at all, so he probably felt it wouldn’t be hard to rape me, and rape was definitely what he had in mind. ‘You’re gonna get fucked,’ he told me. ‘And you’re gonna like it.’ He really turned tremendously hostile.

  “I got lucky. I kicked him square in the balls and picked up one of his shoes and beat him over the head with it. There was a point where I almost got carried away, I almost beat him to death. It still scares me to think of it. I was really furious, and churning inside, and I hit him once or twice with the shoe and was very close to just letting go and hitting him again and again until he was dead, but somehow I caught hold of myself and stopped. He was out cold. I found his wallet and took the twenty he owed me, and there was a couple hundred more in the wallet, and I stood there for what seemed like a long time trying to decide whether I should take the rest of his bread or not. I figured I might as well, and that I couldn’t get in worse trouble, but I wasn’t positive. I wound up taking an extra fifty, which seems pretty silly in retrospect. Then I got the hell out of there.

  “I never did see him again.

  “I was going to go straight home, but I wandered back to the street again, and that’s when I got to talking with this other hustler. I guess I had to tell somebody. In the story I made myself a lot cooler about the whole thing and didn’t let on that I was really terrified there for awhile. And this other guy, he rapped about how really obnoxious some of these faggots were, and how when he packed it in for a night he really had to have a girl to get the taste of it all out of his system. He said that he hardly ever came with his Johns, that he didn’t like to let himself come, and he would save it up for a girl and really get himself together that way.

  “We rapped on about a lot of things, and he asked if I had an old lady. I said I knew a lot of chicks but had nothing steady at the time, which was more or less true. He said he had a chick who really dug balling and liked group scenes, and asked if I’d like to come up and take turns with her.

  “I wasn’t sure it was a scene I could go for, but the thing is that this deal with the John had shaken me up quite a bit and I did feel I needed something to get it out of my head. I don’t know that I thought of it in these terms at the time, man, but looking back on it, I suppose I was having a lot of doubts about my own masculinity. It bugged me that the guy had taken it for granted that I would go for something like this, that I was gay and would go down on him or let him fuck me. And you know how your head will play with ideas and get insecure about it. Like, maybe he sensed something about me that I wasn’t aware of. Like, maybe I really wanted it, what he wanted, and I was fighting it within myself, and that was why I got so violent about it.

  “When you get into your head that way and wind up in an anxiety state, the more that you try to think things through, the worse it all gets. So I figured, wow, maybe I can get out of it by balling this guy’s chick.

  “She turned out to be a pretty great-looking chick. She had a place over in the East Village. This other hustler was living with her. She was already totally stoned when we got there, and we all sat around smoking together. I didn’t smoke very much. I didn’t want to get stoned. High, but not completely wasted.

  “They must have made this kind of threesome scene on a fairly regular basis, because he never said anything to her and she just seemed to take it for granted that we were going to make it.

  “Well, we spent a couple of hours balling. Took turns with her, or he would get off in one part of her while I got off in another part of her.

  “I had never had any experience with more than one other person at a time. That added an exotic note to it that made it exciting. Also I hadn’t been with a girl in a long time, I guess it was a long time, and I was able really to get into it and let go, which I hadn’t done in a while.

  “But there was something that I realized, and that was that this other hustler was fundamentally gay.

  “Of course I never said anything to him. Christ, he would have had a shit fit, I mean, he went to great lengths to make sure that he and I never touched. When there are three of you in bed and you’re all involved sexually, it’s hard to be sure that two of the three never touch each other directly, but we were both conscious of this, of keeping that sort of distance between us.

  “The thing was, he was getting special pleasure out of the fact that I was there. He was relating to me through the girl. Maybe the two of them would ball a lot without a third party present but I’m sure my presence got him off in a way he usually didn’t have. I remember flashing on the idea that he was fucking me through the girl.

  “So afterward, I tended to avoid him. I would see him around and be friendly and all, and we would rap on the street, but when he suggested getting together with the chick or anything like that, I would always have something else that I had to do, something I would invent, and after awhile he stopped asking, and we gradually stopped rapping with each other.

  “The whole thing, when I thought about it, made me a little uncomfortable.”

  • • •

  Alan is twenty-three, medium height, slim. He has light brown hair, small hands and feet, hazel eyes and handsome regular features. In dress he favors bell-bottoms, boots, and boldly patterned shirts. Some hustlers, he mentioned, tend to dress to fit whatever image they are trying to project—rough male stud, leather boy, Ivy Leaguer, or whatever. He insists that he dresses to please himself, that he does not try to create any particular image to interest potential Johns.

  Alan’s hometown is the capital city of one of the Southeastern states. He went through high scho
ol there, then attended the state university for a year and a half before dropping out and coming to New York. He became interested in theater at college and originally came to New York with a theatrical career in mind. In the past three years he has had several small roles in short-lived off-Broadway productions.

  “It’s so damned difficult,” he says. “I never expected it to be easy, although every hopeful actor fantasizes about the one big break and all the rest of it. I’m beginning to think, though, that I’ll never make it. As an actor. I’m good looking and I have a certain amount of grace on stage, I move around well, but the world is full of actors who are as good as I am. You have to be very good, very goddamned good, and you also have to have a tremendous amount of drive. I think I might have had that drive at the beginning but somewhere along the way I think I lost it. You have to care tremendously, you see, and I don’t know that I care all that much.

  “Also, you have to be able to believe that you can make it completely, that you can be more than just another actor. Because being just another actor, even if you work fairly regularly, is a terrible life. It really is. You break your neck to get a part and break your neck again to be good in it, and even if the play runs you’re making less money than you would make in just about any other line of work. A friend of mine had the lead in a successful off-Broadway thing a year ago. The play was running, it was making decent money, and he was taking home something like eighty dollars a week. And he was the star. It just doesn’t make any sense. Then you’ll see other people, somebody who does commercials or some clown in a television Western, and they’re literally rich. Two years in a hit television series and you can literally retire. It doesn’t make sense that there’s such an enormous gulf between success and failure. Between success and near-success, actually.”

  Alan still goes to auditions, still thinks of himself as an aspiring actor, but admits privately that he does so largely for lack of anything else to do.

  “I don’t have any particular direction. Sometimes it bothers me, sometimes I can get enormously depressed about it. Part of it is my upbringing, I guess. The Protestant ethic, and no matter how liberated you are in this country it’s hard to escape that old Protestant ethic. That a person is here to work, to achieve. That you have to be pushing yourself in a particular direction and coming closer and closer to a particular goal. Well, my original goal, which is theater, is beginning to lose its luster, partly because I know I’m not really going to make it there. And I can’t just grab another goal and substitute it. I can’t just throw a switch and go out and become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. And there are a lot of things I could see myself doing for six months or a year, but so far there’s not really anything I can see myself getting into for the rest of my life.”

  “Sometimes this bugs me, and other times I’ll tell myself that after all I’m still pretty young, I’m just twenty-three years old, and I don’t have to be in a hell of a rush to decide where I’m going. Better to take it a day at a time and see what happens. There’s nothing wrong with keeping my options open.

  “I find I’ve been getting into myself a lot more lately, sitting in my own room and trying to get my own head together. Sometimes I’ll do some grass, other times I’ll just sit around straight, and I’ll work different ideas through my mind and see how I feel about things. I imagine myself getting into different life-styles and try to see what I would want. Like, do I want to really get involved with a girl, like living together, possibly even making it a permanent thing? I’m a little afraid of jumping into something like that as a reaction to the hustling, because it would be very easy to do, very easy to use some girl as a total escape from this gay scene, however much a part of the gay scene I actually am. Which is another thing I’m trying to figure out.

  “But basically I’m a very private person. I can talk like this with you the same way a person could talk to a psychiatrist, in that you’re not involved, you and I don’t know each other. I don’t really have friends I can rap with at great length. I’m not good at relating to people. At one point I thought this hurt me as an actor, but I’m more inclined to think it helps me, in that I just get into a part and have no trouble becoming the role I play, because I’m nobody particular to begin with.

  “A very private person. I have an apartment on West 93rd that’s no more than a furnished room, but I really treasure it because it’s completely mine. I’ve never brought anyone there. It goes without saying that I would never bring a John there, but never anyone at all, not a friend, not a girl, no one at all. I guess I need a place that’s exclusively mine, that no one but me is ever inside of.”

  • • •

  Alan’s first homosexual experience took place while he was in high school. He describes himself as essentially a loner during those years. He was moderately active socially but had no close friends. He dated, and engaged in incomplete sexual relationships with a variety of girls, but says that he never really related to the girls and never enjoyed the essentially artificial sexual relations which took place on those dates.

  “You would go out, two couples, and you would park somewhere and neck. Even if you didn’t happen to feel like it, it was all part of the expected pattern. You had to try to screw a girl because she expected it, but she wouldn’t go all the way and everyone more or less took that for granted. From what I’ve read, this was standard American dating behavior about ten years ago. Well, the South is always at least ten years behind the times. When I talk to people my age who grew up in New York or California I feel as though I was cheated. They were into a semi-hippie thing all through high school and it was more than just that they smoked grass and let their hair grow and got into rock music. They were much more honest with each other, they opened up with each other. We didn’t, and I still haven’t learned how to do this in certain important ways.”

  After one such date, a friend told Alan that he knew a homosexual who would perform fellatio upon them and thus ease the frustrations caused by a night of necking. “He said it was better than jerking off. Of course I always jerked off after dates, but I felt very uptight about it and would never admit it to anyone, or be inclined to talk about it. And I would go through periods of time when I would try to give up masturbation, which I suppose everybody does, and probably with as little success as I had.

  “I told him I wasn’t queer, and he said of course not, neither was he, that the guy who did the blowing was the queer. He said the guy was always good for a couple of bucks, and that it was a way to get rid of your frustration and pay for the cost of the date at the same time. I said I wasn’t interested, but we doubled again about a week later and I asked him if he had gone to that queer that night, and he said yes, and he was going again. I said, well, I could use a couple of dollars, so why not.

  “There was this particular place where the queer—it’s funny, I never use that word nowadays, but that was how I always thought of this particular fellow—particular place where he would park his car. I guess he was in his thirties or forties. He would park his car in this one spot and anybody who wanted to get blown would go there. I don’t know if he paid everybody or just the guys who asked for it, but I gather that there were plenty of guys who went down there every Friday and Saturday night. He liked teenagers and he was a number freak, he wanted to suck as many guys as he possibly could. He didn’t touch any part of me but my penis, just opened my pants and went to work. It was all over in a couple of seconds. I told him I needed some money for gas, which was what my friend told me to say. He gave me two dollars.

  “I saw him another three or four times and it was always the same routine. I think one time he gave me five dollars, I’m not sure.”

  Alan still has trouble defining the experience. “I don’t think I enjoyed it. I remember thinking that it was really a big nothing. No real pleasure at all. That factually it was less fun than jerking off because there was something basically uncomfortable about the whole scene. There was another person involved but the
other person wasn’t appealing or interesting, he was just a device. Whereas when jerking off you could have fantasies, but here all I did was sit there while he went to work, and then I would come, but I would feel as though I hadn’t come at all . . .

  “But something made me go back a few times, and I suppose I ought to be able to figure out what it was. I can’t think it was the money, not then. On the New York scene it’s different, because I really do need the money. Not that I would starve without it, but that I would have to work without it, and I’m not ready for that right now.

  “Sometimes I think that I went to him because of the ego pleasure of being wanted, of being wanted by someone who got nothing out of it but the pleasure of using me as a love object. And who actually was willing to pay for that pleasure. But the thing that I’m not absolutely positive about was whether this motivated me or whether this is something I read about and I just think it might apply in my case. That’s the trouble with reading a great deal and tending to intellectualize a subject. You can’t really be sure whether something applies or whether you are just grabbing onto the idea.

  • • •

  Alan had no homosexual experiences while at college. He did have heterosexual relations there, once with a prostitute, several times with a girl with whom he thought himself in love.

  “I went to the whore to get it over with. I felt ridiculous being a virgin and I just wanted to get it over and done with. I did some drinking first to get my courage up. I was so afraid of making a fool of myself, and I was also scared of catching a disease. Naturally I couldn’t get erect at first, and she went down on me. I remember how I responded immediately when she did this, and how it flashed through my mind that she was doing just what the queer had done. I thought I could climax like that and it would be just what I had done in the past, except that before I got paid for it and now I was paying for it. And I felt that I would still be a virgin unless I succeeded in coming in her cunt. So I insisted that she stop and I got on top of her and screwed her in the usual fashion. It wasn’t very enjoyable.