The Male Hustler Read online

  “Even if I was working, if I had a good job, that’s a lot of dough to put out just for a place to stay. And I have to say I’ve got a good deal where I am. My old lady is a great cook, you know, and the house is always clean, and it’s really very convenient for me. The only hassle is the subway but I’m never on it in rush hour so it’s no big deal, just that it’s a waste of time. But one thing I got is time. More time than I need, time all over the place.

  “Another thing, my folks don’t hassle me lately. It used to be a hassle. While I was in high school, and the first couple years I was out. Where were you, what were you doing, who were you with, all of that shit. And then after I graduated it was a whole lot of what are you going to do with yourself, when are you going to start looking for a job. I can’t see spending my life like the old man, busting my hump with a pick and shovel. I just can’t see it. He makes decent dough, I guess, but he comes home every night beat as hell and just puts himself in front of the television set and pours the beer down. I don’t think he even knows what he’s watching, unless it’s a sports program. He watches the Mets in the summer and football in the fall and the Knicks in the winter, the few games that they broadcast, and the rest of the time he just puts on one channel and watches it until it’s time for him to hit the rack. Whatever comes up on that one channel, that’s what he watches. And pours the beer down. I suppose it’s a life, but I can’t see it.

  “I figured I would just hang loose and see what happened with the draft. Some buddies of mine enlisted right after school, figured on getting it out of the way. I thought about it and I said to myself, no, let them come for me, I ain’t going out looking for them. And then when they finally called me I got out. Never expected it, but I went out for freshman football in high school and a knee went on me, and it turned out to be enough of a permanent injury to keep me out of the service. Never even thought of it until about two days before my physical. This cat was telling me how a back injury kept him out, a nothing back injury, and I remembered my knee would still go on me every now and then and I brought this up during my physical, and it was no question, 4F all the way. Talk about beautiful breaks . . .

  “So I’ll get up in the morning and have something to eat, then maybe go on down the block for an egg cream, see who’s hanging around, shoot the shit a little. And maybe I run into somebody who says there’s a party that night, or something to do, or I’ll ask some girl I know if she wants to catch a movie. See, the point is that if anything comes up, I don’t make the Times Square thing. It’s more something I do when there’s nothing else to do.

  “A couple of nights ago, for instance, you know, like I went home and had dinner with the folks, and my sister rapped a little about school and some boy who didn’t ask her to this party that she was hoping he would, and my mother said something about me looking for work, but no major hassle, because the way the unemployment is now, I mean everybody knows it’s impossible to find anything and the old man has been worrying himself about getting laid off after they finish the job he’s on now. And there was nothing to do, nothing happening, so I got on the phone and called Phillie.

  “Usual conversation. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ ‘Hey, nothing much. What’s happening with you?’ ‘Oh, nothing happening.’ ‘Want to go catch a flick, see what’s doing?’ ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’

  “Phillie’s the same age as me. I guess he’s a couple of months older, he’ll be twenty-one in May. We been friends for years. What’s funny is we were both coming to Times Square off and on with neither of us knowing about the other, and then I met him in front of a movie house and we got to talking, and neither of us is quite ready to say what we’re doing, and then it comes out and we laugh about it. We’re real close, you know, so going to Times Square with him is no hassle. We ride in together and catch a movie and stand around together, and if either of us scores an overnight it’s no sweat, and if not we’ll ride back out to Queens together. He just lives two blocks away from me.

  “Not that I always go in with Phillie. Sometimes he’ll have something on, a chick or something, or he’s not in the mood, and I’ll go in alone. Either way it’s something to do, pass the time and pick up a couple of bucks.”

  • • •

  Cary is twenty years old. He stands just under six feet tall. His shoulders are broad, his waist narrow. His arms and legs are large and well muscled. His walk, unhampered by the trick knee that kept him out of the service, is a firm aggressive stride.

  His black hair is worn longish, combed straight back from his broad forehead. He has long sideburns, and several months ago grew a moustache and goatee, which he has since shaved off. “I liked the look of it but the itching drove me out of my mind. It’s supposed to stop itching after the first couple of weeks but it never did, and finally I said the hell with it and shaved it off.”

  Cary’s habitual costume, on or off Times Square, consists of tight dungarees and a black leather motorcycle jacket. At one time he had a motorcycle to go with it, but tired of it and sold it. “I loved the feeling of riding, all that power under you, but there’s so much hassle connected with a bike in this fucking city. You have to chain it up all the time or some son of a bitch steals it. And even with the chains it’s no guarantee. They’ll have a couple of guys with a truck and a pair of bolt cutters, and they’ll just cut right through the chains and toss the bike in the back of the truck and you’re fucked. And riding it in traffic is a pain in the ass. I like to go to bike pictures, and of course Easy Rider; which was totally out of sight. I saw that picture five times, I got totally wasted watching it. The whole idea of riding in open spaces. If I ever got out of the city I could see getting a bike and just taking off. Just grooving on the whole thing. But not around here.”

  Cary is physically well developed, although he does not have the extreme proportions of the muscle boys in homosexual “beefcake” magazines. His physique came to him naturally and he has made no particular effort to keep in shape. He owns a barbell and a set of weights, purchased from a friend who was entering the Army, but does not work out with them regularly. “Every once in awhile I’ll go on a kick and do a little lifting, but I don’t really stay with it. When you think about it it’s just boring, pick ’em up and put ’em down, like my old man out on the job but without even getting paid for it. And at least when he’s done there’s a building standing there. All you get this way is muscles so you can lift more weights so you can get more muscles. It’ll be something to do now and then but that’s about all.”

  Cary’s first homosexual experiences came in early adolescence, when a friend taught him to masturbate. “We were over in his yard shooting baskets, and he said something about jerking off and I didn’t know exactly what it was. I would get hard-ons and I would play with it because it felt good but I didn’t know anything about coming, that anything else happened except that you played with it for awhile and then stopped. I don’t remember what was said exactly but the outcome was that he was going to teach me to jerk off. We went in his room and first he jerked himself off while I watched. He came, and then he told me to try it. I practically wore it out but I couldn’t shoot, so he came over and did it for me, and I shot.

  “I can still remember how it felt, because here it was, you know, this fantastic feeling, and I hadn’t expected it. I had no idea what it was going to be like and it was really great.

  “After that I used to jerk off regularly. Sometimes I would decide it was a bad thing to do. You know the shit you hear about it being bad for you, weakening you. It’s funny, because since then, in all the years since then, I’ve read enough things about sex to know that there’s nothing wrong with it. That everybody does it, that men go on doing it now and then even after they grow up, that it probably does you a lot more harm not to do it than it does to do it. But even knowing all this I still to this day have a feeling inside me that there’s something wrong with jerking yourself off. I don’t know what’s wrong about it. I can’t pin it down, you know, what wou
ld be wrong about it. But even so I used to try then not to do it too often, and nowadays it’s very rare that I’ll do it. If I get the urge to come and I’m not seeing a girl or anything I can always find a faggot.”

  For several months Cary went on seeing the friend who had introduced him to masturbation, and mutual masturbation became a regular part of their meetings. Sometimes they merely manipulated themselves in each other’s presence, but more often each would masturbate the other.

  “What I would do, I would try not to do it by myself, to save it until we were together. I made this distinction in my mind between jerking off by myself, which I thought was bad, and jerking off with Eddie, which I don’t think I ever had any bad thoughts about. I knew it was something to keep a secret and I never told anybody about it, but if I ever felt guilty about it I never knew it.

  “Having this secret made a bond between us. We were friends before but this made us much closer. We would get together all the time, you know, not that we would always jerk off but that we spent loads of time together. Tossing a football around or shooting baskets or just sitting and talking about girls. The ones we knew from school and imagining what they looked like naked and how big their tits were and what we would like to do with them. Imagining what it would be like to fuck a girl. I guess we were thirteen or fourteen. No, it couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

  “We never thought of this as gay because we both would talk about girls all the time and concentrate on them. I would lie back with my eyes closed while Eddie had my joint in his hand, rubbing it, and he would talk about some girl and tell me to imagine I was sucking her tits or giving it to her, and I would just let my mind go with it, and it was good.”

  Eddie’s father was subsequently transferred to the West Coast and Cary never saw his friend again. “I wonder about him now and then. What sort of scene he’s into. And what would have happened if he hadn’t of moved away. Like would the two of us have stopped jerking off together or what. Sometimes I wonder if we would have gotten into it in a heavier way. The thing is, we never thought of ourselves as doing anything that was a homosexual thing, that was queer. We knew there was such a thing as fairies and that they dressed up like women and lisped, you know, all the typical things that are all a kid that age knows about the whole gay scene. And we knew that fairies were men who would kiss each other and suck each other off, or they would suck other men off.

  “The guys I used to hang out with, the guys in my neighborhood, this was a way of telling someone to go to hell. Like instead of saying Go to hell or Fuck off or Go screw yourself, you would say Eat it or Eat me or Blow me or Suck my cock or something like that. As a form of expressing contempt.

  “Eddie and I, I don’t think no matter how long we hung around together, that we would have gone down on each other. That it would have occurred to us. Or that either of us would have tried to cornhole the other, which I’m sure I never even heard of at that time. But blowing, that was something queers did, and we never thought what we were doing was queer. We thought of what we were doing as jerking off, that it was the same as doing it yourself but more enjoyable. That we were sharing the experience of jerking off. Not that we loved each other or had something sexual between us or thought of each other as girls or anything.”

  Did he, considering the question retrospectively, feel that his relationship with Eddie was homosexual?

  “Well, to be technical, anything sexual between two males is considered homosexual. If you want to be technical about the whole thing.”

  But as far as his own thinking was concerned?

  “Well, put it this way. If I had a scene like that now . . . like if Phillie and I were doing to each other what Eddie and I used to do, yes, I would think that what I was doing was a homosexual act. Not that I was necessarily a homosexual, but that it was a homosexual act. You follow me? Like a person will have a couple of drinks now and then without you calling him an alcoholic.

  “But when I think back to what we did, what I think is this is something that happened like seven years ago with a couple of kids, that it was kid stuff, and that’s all I really think about it, and not considering whether it was homosexual or not.”

  • • •

  After Eddie moved away, Cary’s sex life was confined to solitary masturbation. Shortly before his sixteenth birthday he had coitus with a neighborhood girl. “There’s a couple of girls in every neighborhood that put out, and that everybody knows about. This girl was a couple of years older than us but was a year behind us in school because she wasn’t the brightest. A batch of guys would go off with her and she would pull a train. You know, a gang bang. I got in on it once and lost my cherry.

  “It was great, but it wasn’t as much as I thought it would be. We were in somebody’s garage and we took turns fucking her on a ping pong table. One guy would go and then another and everybody stood around watching and making comments. You know the kind of comments. There were about eight of us and I was fourth or fifth and with watching and all, the excitement of it, and also being nervous because anybody could of walked in on us. I remember one of the guys couldn’t get a hard-on because of it, the nervousness, and the girl made a remark and some of the guys rode him a little about it, and I was afraid it would happen with me, but as it turned out it was just the reverse. I was so hot and bothered that I just about got it in before I shot my load. One or two strokes and bang! and it was over. It felt wonderful, a girl’s cunt feels like nothing else in the entire world, but it was over so fast. Still, I got this feeling of satisfaction out of losing my cherry.

  “I was worried that I had the clap, because the first time I pissed after that it was a little painful, and I thought I must have a dose because I had heard it was a symptom, pain in urination. But I didn’t get a dose and it was just painful that first time, maybe out of worrying about it and expecting it.

  “I never fucked that particular girl again. Like I was glad it happened but I didn’t want to see her again. She was really a pig, you know, and also she didn’t seem to get anything at all out of it. She wasn’t even excited. She would fuck for anybody, ten guys one after the other, but she never even wiggled her ass, never even changed the expression on her face. What did she get out of it? I often wondered about that, about why she bothered to go through with it when it didn’t do a thing for her. Like what was she trying to prove?

  “I had always thought that a girl who would do that was, you know, a nymphomaniac. A girl who would get terribly excited so she couldn’t live without it, or else that she got hot but couldn’t come, that it took a fucking army to satisfy her. I never thought a girl like that would turn out to be one who didn’t feel anything at all.

  “As far as other girls, none of our crowd went out on dates too much. Nobody had a hell of a lot of money to spend. You might take a girl to the movies and do a little necking, or maybe go to her house when her parents were out for the evening, or keep her company if she was baby-sitting or something. I had this one girl who used to baby-sit and I would go over and keep her company. We would make out, but in all the months that I saw her off and on, I never fucked her once. This was common. All through high school, I don’t think hardly any of the guys I knew were getting fucked regular. Except for a couple that were going steady and it was fairly set that they were going to get married eventually. The girls I knew, I never found one I wanted to spend that much time with. For sex, and to have a good time, but not that I would want to see every night and not to spend the rest of your life with.

  “This particular girl, with the baby-sitting, we would make out for a while and I would finally walk out of there with my nuts ready to explode. I hated to jerk off afterwards because I felt, I don’t know, that I ought to be coming with her instead of by myself. That it was really settling for next to nothing to come alone in my bedroom. But if I didn’t jerk off it was painful. When you get all that hot and bothered and don’t shoot, your balls hurt. This is on top of being generally frustrated because it’s a defi
nite physical thing and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  “This more or less led to what happened one night, because I left her with my balls in an uproar and I was waiting for a bus. The people she was sitting for were a bus ride away, and generally I would wait and ride home with her, but for some reason I left early. I’m not sure if this is what it was this particular time, but occasionally we would have an argument, because she wouldn’t let me fuck her which was generally the cause of our arguments.

  “Anyway, I missed my bus and I’m standing there in the cold and this cat pulls up and offers me a lift. So I get in. It’s this guy, he must have been about thirty or forty, and he starts coming on to me right off the bat, although because this is the first time, I never knew what he was getting at. I never would have thought of him as a faggot because I had this picture in my mind that all faggots were the queen type and he was just an ordinary guy in appearance. Nowadays I would recognize him as a faggot from a block away. There are all these mannerisms and ways of looking at you that you learn to spot, but I didn’t know anything about them at the time.

  “So he says something like, ‘I remember what I was like at your age. I bet you have a lot of fun with girls.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh, I can take ’em or leave ’em.’

  “He says, ‘Do you have a girl?’

  “‘Well, I do and I don’t.’

  “‘What do you mean by that?’

  “‘Well, I’ve got a girl, I was just spending some hours with her, but I can’t get anyplace with her.’

  “See, right off the bat I’m laying a whole trip on the guy. Nowadays, knowing what I know, I don’t know if I would be ready to come on that strong. I mean, what it amounted to was that I was playing up to him, feeding him openings, without even being aware of what I’m doing.