In Search of Pretty Young Black Men Read online

  It didn’t matter—Nuts ’n’ Bolts, Serenity, anywhere, nowhere. She was not to see him again; only in her lonely dreams and her smoldering reminiscence melancholied by booze.

  It was times like these that made her realize how nice it is to have friends like Elaine, Arleta, and Lydia. These were the kinds of friends whose very existence sang “forget your troubles come on get happy.” These were women who did not need men. These were women who knew men, liked men, worked with men, played with men, tolerated them, used them, but need them? No.

  It was nice having friends like Elaine, Arleta, and Lydia. It was also maddening. For they did not love men. Maggie believed that from the bottom of her heart.

  But she did. She loved men in place of herself. She knew that now. She gave too much, for she feared she was too little. Was this why Dorian disappeared? Did she chase him away with too much caring, too much dependency? Even as Dorian pleased her and she paid him, she feared that she still owed him. Even as he lay nestled in her arms he needed more. She certainly did.

  She did not want that afternoon to end. And in her mind it had not. It was still somewhere up in the air, high above her heart. Infinite. A circle.

  Again they made love, then again and again. New positions were tried and new thrills were discovered. She then lay on her back like Juliet on the slab, and she beckoned him over to straddle her face. The sweet, moist, and pungent baby hairs of his tight ass crack met her mouth with a wisp of a kiss. And while his balls, full and fluffy, played round her nose she darted her tongue round the edge of his pucker, teasing his hole till it spasmed and spread. She buried her face deep inside his darkness where she truly found out what true boy pussy was.

  Her nose and her tongue and her fingers were in him. He rode her face gently but she wanted more. Her hunger was ravenous and greedy. The harder and deeper she tongue-fucked him the harder his dick got. And the beautiful dick weaved and bobbed with a rocking, and he moaned and groaned with each jab of her tongue. He found himself absently, whorishly, desperately, twisting his nipples. She had conquered his cool but she still was not through. Neither was he. With her tongue deep inside him, he kneeled down between her legs and his tongue found her pussy, and they feasted, perfect sixty-nine rhythm style.

  The moans and the slurping, the smacking and spanking went on and on until they both had tears in their eyes. He ate her so ferociously she had to come up for air. And while he worked on her pussy his beautiful ass stared back at her dizzied face with a smile. She grabbed his ass and licked it, then licked balls and sucked dick tucked through thighs taut with pleasure.

  She hoisted him up for the best view of it all. She had never seen an ass, balls, and dick so perfectly formed, and for the first time she noticed the two tiny marks on his left inner thigh.

  Matching teardrops.

  The last thing she remembered was freezing in place and all going blank.

  “Remember Dorian Moore?”

  “Who?”

  “Dorian Moore. Remember? One of my young men on call.”

  “You mean boy on call.”

  “You remember him, Maggie.”

  “She’s drunk and she’s out of it.”

  “Let her sleep it off.”

  “Now who was this again?”

  “You remember. Dorian Moore. I saved him for my top drawer clients. The one they found dead about a year ago up on Mount Vernon Drive. Bullet right through that beautiful little birthmark.”

  “Oh yes. The teardrop murder. I remember him. The Sentinel ran a picture on the front page, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “And Gertrude mentioned him in her column.”

  “That’s right, I remember.”

  “And whoever did it cut his balls off and stuffed them down his throat.”

  “Oh yes, I remember!”

  “What would make you remember a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know. I was sitting here thinking how fine he was with his pretty young black self, how valuable he was. What a waste.”

  “What do you mean ‘a waste’?”

  “What I said, that’s what I mean. What a waste.”

  “You mean a waste of money? What do you mean?”

  “I mean a waste of a pretty young black man. As if things aren’t bad enough. Pretty young black men are delicacies. That’s what they are. A rare and disappearing piece of can’t get-enough satisfaction. Many a dark diva went hungry this past winter. Many were saddened by his untimely and grisly demise. He was one pretty young black man, all the glorious ‘else’ aside. What a bargain he was. He was better than flowers. I charged a fortune for him, but he was such a steal.”

  “I am so glad I’m a lesbian.”

  “I’m so glad you’re a lesbian too, baby. Men are too much drama.”

  “Not as much as the women who crave them.”

  And as was her drunken custom, Maggie Lester-Allegro sat back silently, listening to Elaine, Lydia, and Arleta go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, forth and back. And then…and then…and then it hit her, hit her like a ton of bricks. Her eyes bulged—BULGED!—and her lips stretched wide into some Ross-stricken madness that neither laughed nor cried, just stretched.

  Furiously she threw herself away from the table, knocking her chair backward. She stood straight up like a drag queen onstage. With head thrown back and weave shaking in the wind, she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and could not stop. Lydia, Arleta, and Elaine looked at her, slowly, as only black Baldwin Hills divas can. And they thought to themselves, separately and together, That’s right, girlfriend, let it all out. Ain’t nothin’ but a song.

  It was another perfect day in L.A. The warm afternoon breeze caused the palm trees to shimmy sensually and to rustle with a rhythm. Because the smog had been banished to the open sea, the basin stayed dry, comfortable, and livable. Snowcapped mountains miles in the background posed clear and clean and crisp.

  Margaret Arial Lester-Allegro stood out on the balcony of her Baldwin Hills bedroom and took a Baldwin Hills chance. She breathed in deeply. Yes. And it was truly—yes—a chance worth taking. What else would one do in L.A. on a beautiful smog-free day? The air was so clean and so pure. Maggie truly felt as pure and as clean and now cleansed of it all. Everything that needed to be clear was just that. Clear. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this good. She doubted whether she could ever feel this way again.

  She felt herself smiling—the new peace of mind did the trick—and then she puckered her lips, the kind of puckering that widens the eyes without asking a single question. And then she stuck it in her mouth, and while the breeze and the sunshine and the view from the balcony made her feel so good, she still thought of it as all three of them—all of them—in her mouth. Sadikifu. Lamont. Dorian. And while the birds sang in the nearby trees she regretted only the disturbing sound it would make. So she decided not to worry about the sound. She decided not to worry about a damn thang. She was already mellow, and it felt so good…so very, very good.

  And so she closed her eyes.

  And pulled the trigger.

  Lamont had tried everything—black women, white women, drag queens—but now he could no longer tolerate any of them: the white woman who killed herself, the black woman who followed suit.

  And now, although the house on Don Carlos Drive was all his to do with as he pleased, he did what had pleased him all the years he spent neglecting two women at the same time. He rented their favorite suite at the Century Plaza Hotel and kicked back with his coke and Courvoisier. He lay back on the bed, his blue silk boxers pulled down to his ankles, and stroked himself. He handled himself with a slow rhythmic gentleness while soft-focused videos of their sweet lovemaking played on and on and on….

  And he wondered. Would he? Could he ever get over Dorian Moore?

  It’s not the world that is my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourse
lf.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You need to leave them black women alone, Brothaman. They just too stubborn. They want everything their way. They don’t know how to appreciate black men.”

  “Maggie’s not like that.”

  “Then how come you always sneakin’ out the house late at night? And don’t tell me it’s to go get cigarettes. You know, Mercy was crazy for yo’ ass. Vera still ain’t been able to let it go. So tell me, who you got dyin’ over you now?”

  Lamont had seen enough drama in the operating room not to lose his cool over this small exposition of this new infidelity. And besides, it was Albee. Only Albee. Someone who would understand the need for such excursions. He could appreciate it. But would Albee understand the concept of him, Lamont Lester-Allegro, yesterday’s Negro, with a young man on the side?

  The church could not stand it. The silent sissies of the pew would have to call out and ’fess up and tithe extra. His father and a host of Lester-Allegros would be appalled.

  “Thank God your mother died in childbirth,” Doctor Abner Lester-Allegro would say anytime he was displeased with his son.

  But Lamont needed men. He needed pretty young black men who understood the needs of a man from another time who had cheated himself out of the real satisfaction that had awaited him with open arms throughout his youth and young adulthood. He had needs he could not explain. He had unnatural natural needs that manifested themselves only in the closet when lovemaking with his wife was no longer making love or making sense. It had become a duty, a ritual, a blind allegiance to a belief in a family system that could not see the simple concept of love as a God-given gift in spite of the packaging.

  “Not that I’m spyin’ on you, Brothaman, but you know me. I’m up all hours of the night writin’. I’ve already done eighty pages on you.”

  Lamont held the gulp of his extra-dry Tanqueray martini in his throat, not for the sting of the booze, but to not flinch at the sting of his friend’s sly and unreadable revelation.

  “Don’t panic, Brothaman. Hell, it sho’ must be good when you gotta keep it a secret from your best friend.”

  And so in some strange way Lamont Lester-Allegro, having been in a torrid relationship with the sister-in-law of his good friend and neighbor, was assumed to have continued his acceptable clandestine mainstream deceits.

  Going out at night continued, even bettered, for now he could always be considered involved in a perfectly normal heterosexual illicit affair with a white woman while still enjoying the sweet penetration of throbbing young boy meat up an ass with a thirst that never seemed quenched.

  Dorian. He thought of him achingly. His mind and heart reeked of him, and it caught him short of breath, long on pain.

  Dorian. Lamont had not been quenched of the thirst. Dorian.

  Just the thought of young Dorian Moore’s sweet-grinding dick stuck so deep up his ass made Lamont whimper a bit, shed a tear, and mourn once again the life he had missed because Daddy had plans of his own.

  Daddy. Fuck Daddy.

  “You’ll grow to love it,” Abner Lester-Allegro had said when the opportunity of a marriage between Lamont and Margaret Arial Simpson presented itself. “You’ll have to love it. Pussy is the Christian thing for a man to love. You know what the Good Book says about that other mess.

  “You’re a doctor, Lamont. You’re good-looking and you’re not getting any younger. Most important of all, you’re a Lester-Allegro man. That legacy is the only reason people aren’t talking yet. Not that I know of, God forbid.

  “Hell, son, we’ve all been out in the field with a little piece of sheep ass, but it’s not something that you run around putting on the radio. Marry the girl. And I don’t need or want to know about anything else.

  “I know, I know. She’s a little dark for our taste, especially when you have kids. With you already dark—but that’s okay in a man—it might not get you past certain doors, but, hell, things are changing. Dark is beginning to have its say.”

  And so Lamont, in an effort to be as much of a Lester-Allegro man as possible, married Maggie Simpson, only to discover that his new bride was pregnant with another man’s baby. And so he felt like no man at all. Not even the affair with Mercy, a woman who loved the wild thing wild and often and inventive, ultimately did not seem to work for him. She no longer liked the fist upside her head, but a fist inside her pussy, which was just fine with Lamont since, on more than one occasion, he could not command his dick’s attention.

  And then there was that day, when full of too much cocaine and Courvoisier, he slipped. He told Maggie about the drag queen and the blow job she gave him before he realized she was a he. But he was a cum-too-quick college boy. What did he know? What he didn’t tell Maggie was that the drag queen had fucked him like the man he had always wanted to be, fucked him until the walls of his ass were raw. And oh how he loved getting fucked like that. Like he had loved all of those times when being with a man was being alive, only to then hate himself in the too lucid afterglow that always grew stark and accusing.

  Daddy. Fuck Daddy.

  “Don’t forget what happened to Larry Grayson,” Abner warned his son.

  Daddy. Fuck Daddy.

  Dorian Moore. Oh how he missed his Dorian Moore. He remembered well their first encounter: 1988. It was happy hour at Jewel’s Room. Lamont had just ordered another double Tanqueray martini. When Marvin the bartender set it down in front of him, he thought he saw an unearthly vision—a beautiful dark vision—in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar. But he held back his startledness when he realized that the only face staring back at him that he even remotely found of sentimental interest was his own face. And what he had thought was an unearthly vision—a beautiful dark vision—was only his want, his fantasy of the pretty young black man he had craved all his life but was too afraid to reach out and touch. It was an untouchable want that flashed brightly in his sad eyes.

  But then he was there. Here. From a prayer. A man. A beautiful black-as-midnight man with beautiful black-as-midnight eyes and sparkling white teeth and thick black lashes languid enough and groomed enough to sweep stardust aside. And lips. Lips made full enough to tell a thousand lies.

  Lamont sipped softly at his drink and felt warmth deep down inside that place that made him blank to all that surrounded him. He was blank to the music and the madness and the hustlers and the hustled, blank to the vision even as it sat down beside him.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Lamont had to find more breath because breath became short when the beauty sat down. Lamont, being cool, answered “hey” in a register so deep that the bottom end of his vocal cords vibrated deep inside his bowel.

  The beautiful boy, with a cordial smile, acknowledged Lamont, who suddenly felt old when the boy turned away toward Marvin the bartender, who knew what was up.

  “Cranberry juice,” was the call as Marvin nodded and poured him a drink. He was then paid and tipped, and then walked away so nature could take its course.

  “You should put something in that,” Lamont volunteered out of nowhere, almost shocking himself.

  “Like what?”

  “I…I meant alcohol,” Lamont fumbled and blushed.

  “Of course you did. What else would you have meant?” asked the pretty young black man with a slyness and gaze that sparkled and burned as he took one more sip. It was a long, sensuous sip. His full lips took to the lip of the glass with a slight smacking. His Adam’s apple moved with each swallow. And nervous Lamont was now jealous. Jealous of the glass that the young man tongued. Jealous of the stool that the young man sat on, the pants that held the bulge that widened Lamont’s eyes.

  The pretty young black man just smiled even more. Lamont, realizing he was staring, pulled out of his trance and turned back to the bar and reburied himself in his double martini. Then the pretty young black man opened up to him.

  “My name is Dorian. Dorian M
oore”

  The introduction caught Lamont off guard. Suddenly the face of his father flashed before him. You’re a Lester-Allegro man, Lamont thought quickly, and then responded with a practiced cool, “Lamont Lester.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. Take Eddie Murphy’s ass. You know what can be done to an ass like that? You know what’s probably been done to an ass like that? I mean, hell, who could resist? Boy pussy of the highest order. That’s what he got. He should spend the rest of his life walking bent over and backward. And I bet he got dick for daze too.”

  A congenial butch queen, who usually frequented the Intermission on Adams near Crenshaw but was making a guest appearance here at Jewel’s Room, was holding court at the corner of the bar. Patti LaBelle was screaming from the distant speakers and liquor was in the happy hour revelers that now packed the room.

  Lamont and Dorian had much earlier moved from the bar to a table in the corner, away from the ruckus. They drank carefully. Their conversation was the conversation of two men curious, interested, attentive, and hot.

  Lamont could hardly believe he was actually sitting with this abstract, unreal person of unreal beauty and infinite attraction, this child-of-God statement.

  And then the young man touched his hand. “You’re a very handsome man, Lamont.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s something beautifully sad about your eyes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Dorian slowly leaned over to kiss him. Lamont felt himself leaning in too. Their lips met and brushed and held for a moment, gently. The tip of Dorian’s tongue probed Lamont’s quivering, parted lips with deferent ease and the beautifully sad eyes closed at the full touch of the kiss. His eyes stayed closed and unmoving, even after Dorian had pulled gently away.

  Lamont was lost in a nostalgic trance. He hadn’t been kissed like that in years. When finally he opened his eyes, Dorian was smiling at him. Dorian’s smile reminded him of Larry Grayson. And Lamont now remembered. Larry Grayson had kissed him that way.