The Male Hustler Read online

  “So we went on talking. I did this whole routine about how she liked me to pet her and she lets me play with her tits and suck them and even get a finger into her snatch, but that’s as far as it goes. She won’t put out. And he says I must be frustrated, and I say damn right I’m frustrated, and he says it’s bad for you physically, an experience like that. Well, I more or less intended to jerk off when I got home, but I wasn’t going to come out and tell him this, so I said I would just have to live with it, and he said maybe he could do me some good.

  “‘I know a lot of girls,’ he said. ‘Look, Cary, I have an apartment not far from here. Why don’t you come up to my place and we can both have a couple of drinks and unwind, and maybe everything’ll work out for you.’

  “You may not believe me, but I still don’t know what he was driving at. I still didn’t think of him as a queer, see. I got the impression that he was going to call up some girls. I don’t know if I really believed that some girl would come over and I would get to screw her, but he was a nice guy and I had nothing better to do, and even the idea of a drink sounded pretty good. Besides, I knew that strange things could happen. There was a guy at school who had a steady thing going with a married woman, and the way it happened was that a guy got to talking to him the same way this guy had started with me, and brought him back home and had the kid screw his wife. That was his thing, he liked to have his wife get fucked by a young kid while he watched. I guess he would jerk off while he watched the two of them, or maybe he would fuck the wife afterward himself. Whatever it was, at least according to the story I heard, the guy never touched him or anything, just wanted him to fuck the wife. And the way he told it the wife was good looking and great in bed, she would do everything, suck him off, fuck him in all these different positions, and he was going back for more just about every day. So for all I knew this was going to turn out to be something along those lines and I didn’t have anything better to do than go along for the ride and see what happened.

  “He had a very nice apartment. We had a few drinks and I felt myself loosening up. Then he gave me a batch of pictures and said I might find them interesting. I had seen dirty pictures before, but never like this. These were in color and well photographed and the girl in the series was really great looking. Really beautiful. A blonde with a fantastic figure.

  “I can still remember what she looked like.

  “Of course I got a hard-on immediately. All the excitement with the baby-sitter and now these pictures, and I was having to reach and straighten my cock because it was cramped up in my pants, and he made a remark and said I sure seemed to like the pictures, and he sat next to me on the couch and put his hand on my cock just for a minute, just a quick feel, and he said it was obvious I was getting hot over the pictures, which must have been obvious, I guess.

  “I felt a little funny about him touching my cock, but the way he did it made it seem natural enough.

  “He asked me which of the pictures I liked the best. About half of them were pictures of the girl blowing this guy, licking it or taking it in her mouth, you know. And the expression on her face, you could see she really loved what she was doing.

  “So I told him I really liked those pictures.

  “‘Won’t your girl do that for you?’

  “‘Listen,’ I said, ‘are you kidding? She won’t even jerk me off!’ Which was true, but actually I never really tried to get her to jerk me off. I was just set on getting her to let me screw her and hadn’t really made a point of suggesting the other thing, so whether or not she would have done it I don’t know.

  “‘Well,’ he says, ‘you must have had blow jobs before?’

  “I told him I never did.

  “‘The problem is that most girls don’t like to do it. But you’re really missing something. It’s a wonderful feeling.’

  “I said I could imagine.

  “He asked if I had ever been laid, and I told him about that and told him it was great. I made it sound better than it actually was, not telling him about the parts of it that weren’t so terrific. He said a blow job was better, and then he patted my cock again and said it was a shame I never had one, and that it would be the perfect thing for me now to relax me and get rid of all the tension.

  “I don’t remember just how the conversation went from there. By now I knew he wanted to blow me and by now I guess I wanted him to. I still didn’t think of him as a queer but as a guy who liked me and wanted to do something to make me feel better.

  “He opened my pants and took my cock out and gave me a long elaborate blow job. When he first went down on me I thought it would be like with the girl, that I would go off instantly, but it was just the reverse. Maybe the drinks had something to do with it. I don’t know. It lasted a long time and felt incredible. Really great. And then I came, and it was dynamite.

  “Right after I came it occurred to me that he would want me to blow him in return, which I knew I didn’t want to do. But he never even suggested it, and I have the feeling that he came in his pants while he was going down on me.

  “Anyway, he took me right on home afterward, drove me right to my door. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I was ever in the mood again. That girls could give a guy a hard time, and there was no reason to go through life frustrated when there were people who would be glad to help a guy out.”

  I asked Cary how he felt about the experience after it was over.

  “I don’t know. Of course I got to realizing that he was a queer. That he got his kicks this way.”

  “Did this make you contemptuous of him?”

  “I don’t think so. See, I saw him as a guy first and later found out he was a fag. If it happened the other way around it might have been different. Like there have been guys who have said how they’ll go in a men’s room to take a leak and some man will come up out of the blue and make a grab for their cock. And if he did something like this I think it would have been a different story, like I might have hauled off and belted him because I was disgusted. But the way this guy got to me, I have to admit he was very smooth about it. He had my cock in his mouth before I really knew what the hell was coming off, and by that time I was in no mood to argue.”

  “Did you worry that what you had done was abnormal?”

  “No. I mean, I didn’t do anything, I just sat there. If he wanted me to blow him it would of been something else, but that never came up. He just wanted to blow me, and if you stop and think about it, what’s the difference between getting a blow job from a guy or a girl? Either way you sit there with your eyes closed and let your cock enjoy itself.”

  “So there’s no difference between a blow job from a man or a woman?”

  “Actually there is.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, here I’m going to sound as though I’m queer myself, what I’m going to say, so you can think what you want to think. It doesn’t matter to me, just so I know what I am, and I don’t have any worries.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s better with a guy.”

  “It’s better to be blown by a male?”

  “Yeah. The act itself is. See, this is hard to explain. Since then a couple of times I’ve had girls blow me. As a matter of fact I ultimately got that girl, the baby-sitter, I got her to do it. I went on seeing her over a period of time and I eventually got her to jerk me off and finally to blow me, and she didn’t know what she was doing. And other girls who have done it to me, even the ones who enjoyed doing it, which the baby-sitter never enjoyed it, even then they don’t really know how to do it well.”

  “I see.”

  “The point is, there’s a lot of technique to it. There’s a tremendous difference between a good blow job and a bad blow job. Listen to me, the way I’m talking, like I’m the fucking king of the faggots the way it sounds. But it’s different from fucking.”

  “How?”

  “When you fuck a girl, maybe she’s good at it and maybe not, but either way you move arou
nd in her cunt and that’s enough to get you off. Even if she’s a lousy lay, even if she’s the next thing to unconscious, it can work out all right. But there’s more variation in blow jobs. There just is. And you get faggots who for them this is their whole thing, this is the big source of kicks for them, and they become experts at it.

  “But at the same time, it’s more exciting for me to be blown by a girl because there’s a sense of accomplishment, getting a girl to do this. So the act itself isn’t as good, but the feeling you have about it is better. I don’t know if you can make head or tail out of it, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

  • • •

  Whatever guilt feelings may have arisen from the experience, they don’t seem to have affected Cary’s subsequent behavior to any extent. He telephoned the man who had fellated him on several occasions and enjoyed a repeat performance at the man’s apartment. Through his contact with this man, he began to learn a great deal about the homosexual underground and the way he could play a role in it.

  “He told me that guys like me are known among faggots as rough trade. In other words, guys who aren’t queer themselves but who will let faggots blow them when they want to get relaxed sexually. He said that certain faggots preferred rough trade and would actually pay money to blow a guy.

  “I suppose it was from what I learned from him that it first came to me to make the Times Square scene. Although I had gone to Times Square in the past, it was as if I didn’t know what was going on. Nobody ever came on to me there; I would just see a movie, maybe have a frank over at Grant’s or a slice of pizza . . . Maybe hang around a little. I would see the real queen types there but I didn’t know that the other guys who were hanging around were looking to get picked up by fags. But I got the message from what he told me, so later on when I went to Times Square I saw it in a different light, and I was able to stand around in such a way as to get myself picked up.

  “Before that, though, I had learned you could score right there in Queens if you wanted to hitchhike around. I would ride a few blocks and then get out and catch another ride if nothing came up. I didn’t always score, but a lot of the time. Not for money, just to relieve myself after making out, or any time when I was feeling horny, because from that time on I almost never jerked off. I was able to give it up more or less completely because I could find a faggot to blow me, or sometimes to jerk me off, which is what a large number of them like to do.

  “Some of the guys I hitched rides with also wanted to be blown in return, which I never did. I didn’t get mad when they wanted it because I expected they would ask me to, but I said I wouldn’t do it. I would jerk them off if they wanted me to. I mean, just using your hand on somebody for a few minutes, that’s usually not such a big deal.

  “I did get money that way once, actually. This guy had blown me in a parked car and wanted me to blow him, and of course I refused, and he said how about jerking him off, and I hadn’t yet done this and I refused. He actually begged me, and I was going to do it just so he would shut up, but before I could agree he offered me five bucks to do it, so I thought, hell, why not? So I jerked him off onto a Kleenex and he gave me the five bucks, which is the first money I ever earned hustling, if you could call it hustling, just jerking a guy off in a car.”

  • • •

  Cary found the Times Square scene perfectly natural. Initial experiences there were pleasant ones, and he was gratified to receive money for his favors. Rather than set a price, he will tell a prospective John that he is low on money and will wait to see what sum is offered. He rarely haggles, generally accepting the sum offered, which may be as little as five dollars or as much as twenty.

  Unlike some rough trade hustlers, he is not inclined to be contemptuous of his Johns, nor is he unwilling to see them as people. Often he will accept a dinner invitation in lieu of cash.

  “A good meal and a couple of drinks in a nice place, that’s as good as five or ten bucks any time. As a matter of fact, I’ve had some really great conversations with faggots. Some of them are very interesting people, really educated. They’ve been to Europe, they’ve read all these books, but in spite of how much more they know, how much better educated they are than me, they’ll still take the trouble to have an intelligent conversation with me. A lot of what I know has come out of conversations with faggots.

  “Now when Phillie and I rap on the way home, we’ll generally make fun of the guys on the street if we talk about them at all. I don’t know if Phillie really feels that way or not. Sometimes I think he says it for the same reason I say it, so we can be proving to each other that we’re not like those guys, which I think we’re not, but we have to come on with each other to this extent.

  “Of course some of the faggots are a pain in the ass. You’ll get these snot-nose types who keep throwing it at you that they’re superior to you, that you’re just a dumb kid who’s only good in bed. And then you get a tremendous amount of uptight guys who don’t like to admit to themselves that they like to suck cock, and they won’t talk at all. Not a word after they make the arrangements, and then when they go down on you they seem to go into a trance, they get completely lost in it, and then afterward all they want to do is get out of the hotel room and go home without saying a word to you. They won’t even look at you. Which is fine with me, because they aren’t that much fun to be with.

  “But as far as just despising a guy because he’s gay, I can’t see it. I mean, if a guy happens to get his kicks by blowing another man, that’s just his particular scene. It’s what he likes. I mean, I eat meat, and some people are into vegetarianism, which is no reason why I should hate them or they should hate me. Or one guy’s a Catholic and another’s a Jew and so on, and each person is whatever he is and that’s no reason not to get along with each other.

  “The only thing that I wonder is if maybe I like it too much. I mean getting blown by faggots. Because I have to admit that I enjoy it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like it better than fucking a girl. If someone said you have to give up fucking girls I would say like forget it, man, I’m not about to.

  “But from time to time I wonder what would happen, you know, if I got something steady going with a girl. You know, some girl that I really dug and that I could get it together with her in an intense way. I was rapping before about Easy Rider, and I’ll think what a groove it would be, you know, me and a chick, with the two of us really digging each other completely, and each of us on a motorcycle and just cutting across all that space together. And being completely into each other, and never staying one place too long, going here and going there and hanging together, and like balling each other constantly.

  “I suppose if I had that and it worked out perfectly I would never want to go with a fag. But the way things are now, there’s nothing like that. I’ll see girls but I don’t spend that much time chasing them because it’s so much easier with the faggots. It really is.

  “The way things are now, if I had a girl I could screw any time I wanted, not that I was in love with but that it was always there for me, I’m tempted to say they would never see me on Times Square again. But I’m not positive that’s the truth. Not that it makes me queer, that I can dig it both ways. I don’t know. The thing is, when you learn to like something like that, how are you going to stop liking it?”

  Derek

  “You know, if I were inclined to be picky, and if I weren’t so egocentric as to take immeasurable delight in being interviewed, I’d have to take exception to this project. You want me as an interview subject for a work on homosexual prostitution, and according to my own lights I fail to qualify on either count.

  “I’m not a homosexual. I’m a bisexual. Though even the article is objectionable, don’t you think? A homosexual. A bisexual. These terms should be adjectives. They should describe rather than categorize. Human beings have such a compulsion to fit everyone into a drawer, and the more uptight one is, the greater the necessity . . .

  “I am a bisexual male. Or, as th
e unisex contingent prefers it, a bisexual human being who is genitally male. ACDC, if you will. Versatile. Select your own euphemism, it mattereth not.

  “But of course everyone is bisexual, you know. An infant scarcely cares whether the hand tickling its genitalia is attached to a body which is in turn equipped with a penis or a vagina. Which is not to say that there’s no difference between men and women. Of course there’s a difference. And vive la difference, as our French friends say.

  “As I see it, to describe a man or woman as bisexual is simply to state that he or she is open to the full range of human sexuality. When one is exclusively homosexual or heterosexual, on the other hand, one is the victim of a more or less damaging neurotic condition. A homosexual is a person who, because of various personal hang-ups to a greater or lesser extent induced by society and personal environment, is solely capable of responding sexually to members of his own sex. And a heterosexual individual is one who, because of personal hang-ups of another sort, is capable only of responding to members of the opposite sex.

  “Not that there’s anyone quite like that, however. I don’t think there’s ever been a faggot who hasn’t occasionally looked at a girl and found her attractive. And the straightest of heterosexual males will recognize others of their number as attractive. But hang-ups get in the way to the extent that these people may not even think of doing anything about it, let alone going through with it.

  “If this limitation makes either of these sets of people normal in any sense other than a purely statistical one, then a button’s a birdcage. The Gay Liberation people are doing very important work, but they insist that homosexuality is not neurotic, and I disagree. I think it is neurotic in precisely the same way that heterosexuality is. Life is short and life is beautiful and people who place limits on themselves are foolish.