Page 39 of Torn
AT CLOSEto midnight on a Thursday night, the Cell was hopping when I walked in. The front bar was crowded with leather guys, and I was glad I’d opted to wear what I did that night. My bare chest was glazed—fetchingly, I hoped—with a light sheen of sweat. Typical for Chicago, the closest parking I could find was at least six blocks away and I’d had to hoof it from there.
After showing the doorman my ID, I looked up and grinned. Several heads had swiveled around to check me out, and some were already smiling, come-hither looks in their naughty eyes. Part of me wanted to glide through the crowd and head straight for the back room. It had been a long night, and I was starting to feel a bit of fatigue, especially after my urban hike in what had to be ninety degrees and 100 percent humidity.
I’d walked into that back room many a night, lowered my drawers, gotten a blow job from a stranger, and headed home, relieved of my burden. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was utilitarian, right?
As I made my way through the crowd, making eye contact here and veering away from an inappropriate grope there, I was beginning to think, to hell with getting a beer—why not just act on my libido’s imperative.
“It wouldn’t be the first time, darling,” I could hear Boutros saying in my head. “Nor the last.”
“You look just like Butch Andros,” someone said as I hurried by him.
Someone grabbed my back pocket, halting me in my tracks. “Hey, handsome, I’m talking to you.”
What? I thought.Another rough-trade purveyor?I turned to glare at the person who’d accosted me and was greeted with one of the sweetest faces I’d ever seen. My outrage vanished like that ghost I told you about earlier.
I quickly rearranged my features into a questioning smile (shifting from the “what the fuck?” expression I’d had on a second before). “What did you say?”
The guy was adorable, but in a burly truck driver sort of way. As it seemed every other man in the world was, he too wore a leather bar vest and faded jeans. The bar vest exposed a very hairy chest, the fur so thick you could barely see his nipples (I would later find out he had three of them, just like Mark Wahlberg). He wore a thick studded armband around his right bicep, which was alluringly large, defined, and decorated with a Celtic circle tattoo—and which also indicated he leaned toward bottom, which was A-OK with me, at least at the moment. His whole body, all six foot two of it I’d guessed (correctly), had about it a kind of coiled sensuality, from his mahogany and thickly curled hair, close-cropped, down to his scuffed and stained construction-worker boots.
But it was his face that really drew me. Sure, it was handsome—nice smile, incredible topaz eyes, a thick little goatee surrounding full lips—but what really hit me was the sweetness there. It was as though he expected the world to return the good he saw in it, the joy he found in other people. Now, you might ask, how could you know, in a single moment, how he felt about the world and how he was inclined toward it? To which I would answer, I don’t know, but it was simplythere. And it made me feel good, happy.
I wanted to know him better, not only sexually (that was standard operating procedure for me in my thirties, and you know it was foryoutoo—come on, admit it!), but as a person.
“I said you look just like my favorite porn star, Butch Andros. He was in a bunch of old Falcon movies back in the day. Hot, hot, hot.” He grinned, revealing a small gap is his front teeth that ratcheted my lust up another notch.
I looked down shyly at the floor and then back up at him. I leaned in close and said in a soft, but growlingly deep voice, “IamButch Andros. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
He sat back and stiffened a little, stunned. His jaw dropped. “Really?” he asked, with a kind of childlike wonder. A blush rose to his cheeks.
I had been all set to continue the story with something about how I was going incognito tonight and that my real name was Elmer Goldstein, but when I saw that he actually believed me and didn’t realize I was kidding, I quickly decided not to be cruel.
I waved his “really?” away with a hand. “No, not really. But I’m flattered that you thought so.” Although I didn’t know who Butch Andros was, I figured if he was a porn star in the late seventies/early eighties, he was probably pretty hot in a Tom of FinlandandTom Selleck sort of way.
His smile wavered, and I could tell he was both a little disappointed but maybe also (at least I hoped) relieved I wasn’t, in fact, his favorite adult star. I would imagine that certain expectations would come along with successfully hooking up with a porn star. But to date I had no real-life experience with such expectations, so I was just guessing.
He swiveled on his bar stool and motioned the bartender over with a smile. They seemed to be acquainted.
He swiveled back to me. “What are you havin’, handsome?”
“Oh, I can get it.”
“Get outta here. I’m buyin’.”
“A Bud Lite, I guess. Thank you.”
He ordered the beer for me and another Jack and Coke for himself.
Once we were settled in with our drinks, me leaning toward him because there were no other empty bar stools going wanting, we exchanged names and talked briefly about the heat outside.
Which led Tom Green to motion toward the back with a little nod of his head. “I hear it’s cooler in the back.” Light twinkled in his eyes, and his grin was that of a little boy with a squirt gun in his hand.
“Oh? I’ve never been back there.”
“Really?” he gasped.
I could see I wouldn’t be kidding around a lot with Tom. “No, no. I’ve been back there.” My mind honestly addeda lotwhile my lips added, “A few times.”
He touched my chest. “You wanna head back there for a bit? Get to know each other a little better?”
