“I suppose.” Wren took a long swallow of his V&T, which was getting weak as the ice melted. He wanted to advise Dave to “Tell it to the judge” but thought now was not the time to be a wiseass. Truthfully, he just wanted Dave to finish up so he could make a polite exit. Suddenly all this talk of money reminded him, imperatively, that he had more pressing concerns that overrode being a barfly, no matter how much he wanted to escape the reality of his world.
Dave took a sip of his club soda and went on. “Wren, I could set you up so you could meet lots of desirable men. Our clients are not what you’d imagine when you think of the term ‘escort service.’ The men who patronize À Louer are executives or professionals, most of them young and attractive. What they don’t have is time. They have very busy professional lives, working sixty- to eighty-hour weeks. If I had a nickel for every time one of them told me how they simply cannot spare the time to hunt for a potential suitor online or in the bars or even in some other form of social engagement—well—let’s just say I wouldn’t need to run this business.
“The men you will be meeting will be good-looking. Young. Intelligent. They will be catches. I promise. We screen our clientele very carefully. Not only do we interview every applicant, we do background checks. I have a private detective on retainer.”
Dave boldly invaded Wren’s personal space, putting his face so close to Wren’s that, for a moment, Wren feared the guy was moving in for a kiss. “That’s how much I care about my boys. They are like sons to me, and I want to be sure they go with only gentlemen, the kind any of them would be proud to bring home to Mother.” Dave licked his lips.
“So you’re safe, you’d meet lots of handsome, eligible men, and you’d make lots of money. How can you resist that? And, might I add, many of my boys have found ‘the one’ as they worked.”
Dave bowed his head, but Wren could see the proud grin playing about his lips. “I hate losing them, but it does my heart good when I see one of the boys and a client find love.” He sighed. “It’s magic.”
Wren thought
Oh brother
. “Why me?”
“Because you’re a beautiful boy. You don’t look, as so many here in Tricks do, like someone who’s been around the proverbial block. You look fresh. Unspoiled. You are the kind of young man my clients prize. And I can tell, just from our brief exchange here tonight, that you have a good head on your shoulders. But mainly I like the innocent aura you have about you, something you’re probably not even aware of, which only serves to make you more charming.” Dave smiled and laid a paternal hand on Wren’s knee.
Wren didn’t know how unsullied he was.
Looks
, he thought,
can be deceiving
. He hadn’t been a virgin since he was fifteen, when he gave up his ass to an older classmate on a camping trip to Wisconsin. The young Wren discovered he had an untapped capacity and taste for bottoming and had had no compunction about indulging that taste going forward. He knew he wasn’t a whore, but he was a bit of a slut—and felt no guilt about it.
Still. Let Dave see what he sees.
It was nice to be perceived as fresh and unspoiled. And these days, appearances were everything, right?
Dave tried another tack. “Young man, if you don’t mind my asking, how much do you make?”
Wren laughed. “That’s pretty personal, dude.”
“I know, but I just want a basis for comparison. Humor me.”
Wren debated. How much should he tell this man? Was it really any of his business? Yet there burned within him a curiosity. Having never been in such an odd situation, Wren was forced to admit to himself he was intrigued, even if he still wasn’t willing to entertain the idea of “selling it.” He preferred to give it away for free. Somehow that just seemed more civilized and less sleazy. It was what most of the world did, right?
But what would be the harm in talking a bit more to Dave? See if he would perhaps dangle some figures in front of him? “Actually, Dave, I just lost my job. I was working in customer service for an online retailer, one you’ve heard of.” Wren rolled his eyes. “They said I wasn’t meeting some insane quota for number of calls per hour.” Wren shrugged. “I like to help people, which is why I took the job in the first place. And helping takes time… more than they were willing to give. So I got called into my boss’s office this afternoon.” Wren grinned, but the smile didn’t extend to his eyes. “I knew it was over when he said to close the door and take a seat. So cliché.”
“See? I knew you were a person who cared,” Dave said. “Your obvious talent was going to waste at this enterprise.”
“Yeah, well…”
Wren rattled the ice in his empty glass. Dave called Chip over to order him another drink.
“So, to answer your question, I make zilch, zero, nada.” Once the new drink was set down before him, Wren took it up and gulped half of it down in one go. “I’ll get unemployment, I’m sure, and something else will come along eventually. It always does.”
“Don’t you see?” Dave wondered. “It already has. Opportunity has come knocking, my friend. Aren’t you going to answer the door?”
Wren took another swallow. “So how much we talkin’ here?” The alcohol emboldened him.
Let’s cut to the chase.
“I wish I had one of my boys here with me so I could give you a concrete example. But you’ll just have to use your imagination. The last boy I hired, who, of course, is still with me, came to me nine months ago. At that time he was a mess. Drinking too much, promiscuous, and riddled with unsavory diseases. He was all of twenty-one years old and on the fast track to an early death. I found him outside Ann Sather’s restaurant, just a few blocks from here. He was panhandling.” Dave engaged and held Wren’s gaze. “And do you know that boy offered to perform oral congress on me for ten bucks?” Dave shook his head.
“Hey. That’s a bargain you won’t find at T.J.Maxx,” Wren quipped.
Dave let the remark pass. “Long story short, I took him in. I got him sorted out. Got him going to AA, where he admitted, finally, to himself that he had a problem that was ruining his life and controlling him. I got him eating right. I had him start a running regimen, and today he runs five or six miles along the lakefront with ease, thanks to no more hangovers and no more cancer sticks.”
Wren fingered the pack of Marlboros in his pocket, feeling heat rise to his face. What would Dave think if he knew?
Dave groped in his rear pocket and pulled out his wallet once more. From it he extracted a photograph showing a gorgeous young man with thick black hair, glowing olive skin, and the bright eyes of an abstainer. “This is Evan. If you could see him when I met him, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Wren stared down at the photo. “Woof,” he whispered. The guy was smokin’ hot.
Hell
, Wren thought,
even I’d consider paying him
.
“Evan lives on his own now. Over on Roscoe, just off the Inner Drive, in a nice one-bedroom in a vintage building. Small, tasteful, and elegant. A place that would have been far out of his reach a year ago at this time, but now it’s his. He’s looking for a condo to buy and easily affords the $2,000 a month rent he’s paying. He has beautiful clothes and drives a late-model Lexus.” Dave shrugged. “He’s no billionaire, but he’s comfortable and far better off than most of his peers.”
Wren’s mother had a saying: “Honeybunch, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Wren had heard her use the expression a hundred times at least, usually when she was watching yet another infomercial late at night on HGTV or the Food Network.
She was usually right.
So, if I just peddle my ass, I could drive a Lexus and live in a fancy neighborhood? Why not? I mean, I’m giving it away anyway, and if this guy thinks he can get me set up, where’s the harm?
Where indeed? What about your self-respect? And who knows what strings this Dave would attach to such an enterprise?
Wren was sure Dave took his cut, in cash and perhaps even in trade. The thought of being forced to be sexual with Dave made Wren’s stomach churn. Clean and wholesome-looking as he was, there was something off about the man, something creepy Wren had yet to put his finger on.
“I don’t know,” Wren said. Suddenly the dancers seemed sleazy, and the drinks sat uncomfortably within him, igniting a headache behind his right eye. All at once he’d had enough of Dave and his pipe dreams, for he was certain that’s what they were.
Dave probably didn’t even know the young man in the picture he showed him. His Prada wallet was most likely a fake. And all this here tonight was just a line of carefully crafted bullshit to get Wren into bed.
Well, he wasn’t that naïve.
And even if this character did run some sort of escort business, he doubted very much it delivered the kind of champagne lifestyle Dave wanted him to believe it did.
“I can see you doubt me,” Dave said, somber for once. “It’s written all over that stunning face.”
Wren shifted uncomfortably on his stool. “It’s not that,” he lied. “I’m just so, so tired. And it’s been a rotten day. It’s all catchin’ up with me, you know?”
Dave nodded, picking his card up from the bar, and pressed it into Wren’s hand. “Well, you think about what we’ve talked about. And please, hang on to the card for a while. You may find that you want to give me a call after all.” He leaned closer. “There’s no obligation to talk further, Wren, or I can more fully outline your options. Will you do me the favor of at least thinking things over?”
“Sure.” Wren nodded, getting down unsteadily from the stool. “I’ll give you a call if I’m interested.”
“You do that.”
Wren started to walk away, but Dave grabbed him by the wrist. Their eyes met.
Dave said, “You won’t be sorry.”
Wren smiled and walked out of Tricks.
DAVE STEPPED
outside Tricks. While he was in the bar, the day had wound down into dusk, and now the sky to the west was an amazing mélange of lavender, orange, and at the top, midnight blue. Just beneath the smell of exhaust and smoke in the air, he could detect a sweet, cool breeze hitting him from behind, pulling the smell of Lake Michigan off the surface of the water. Dave breathed in deeply, watching Wren’s progress west to the “L” stop at Belmont, Dave presumed.
The boy was a diamond in the rough. He was a delightful combination of bad boy and nurturing man, and he didn’t even know it. His lack of self-awareness made these charming qualities all the sweeter. Dave’s clientele would love someone like Wren. He knew several would want to treat the young man like a son. Others would want to flip the paradigm and have the boy treat the man like a thing to be dominated. It was all good. The one thing Dave knew with certainty was that Wren could quickly become a very popular option in his stable of young men, one that could earn Dave a lot of money.
Dave needed to infuse some fresh blood into the business. In spite of the line of bull he fed Wren, his customers weren’t looking for love. First they were seeking to fulfill baser needs, to have their semen worked out of them by someone good-looking and without an agenda. No strings, except perhaps for the one attached to a pair of metal balls some of his customers liked to have inserted up their bottoms.
Oh yes, Dave knew all the disgusting flavors his clientele favored. He’d made it his business to know; it was how one succeeded. And even though he acknowledged the business of sucking and fucking and the kink variations like water sports, scat, bondage, domination, pain, and more, he had no intimate—pun intended—knowledge of such things. No, Dave preferred to keep his soul as clean as his person. Sex was dirty, and not in a good way. It was also fraught with all manner of diseases—which Dave had also acquainted himself with, as Bette Midler once sang, from a distance—none of which he planned on acquiring.
At forty-seven years old, Dave Chillingsworth was still a virgin. He intended to keep it that way.
One thing Dave knew was that men—other men, not men like himself—tired quickly of the same old, same old. Which was why they cheated; which was why they were continually on the hunt. Not for him, of course, but for many men it was practically a biological imperative.
Variety was a very powerful and alluring spice.
Thus he needed to keep the stable of prospects at À Louer fresh and ever changing. He chuckled as he recalled telling little Wren that the name was French for some kind of love connection, when in fact it meant “For Rent.” Dave’s renters wanted options. Some of them wanted a different boy every time they called. And Dave worked hard to meet that demand.
Yet he would not meet the demand with cheap quantity like the boys who could be found in an establishment like Tricks. Those boys had a sleazy, brassy kind of sensuality that was unpalatable. They just were not up to À Louer’s standards, which required boys just like the one he watched disappear into the crowds moving west on Belmont Avenue.
“Wren, you little charmer, you will call me.” It had been a bonus to hear the boy had lost his job. Dave thought he had done enough to set the stage for feeling strapped for cash as he pulled the boy’s wallet from his own front pocket, flipped through it, and extracted a twenty and some ones. He thought it was good to have some older men on the payroll to handle jobs like discreetly picking the pockets of young men Dave wanted to feel destitute. It provided a good opening for Dave, allowing him to step in, in a small way, as a hero, a savior. Dave smiled.
He walked south for a bit on Broadway and handed Wren’s money to a homeless person in an apartment building doorway who asked for spare change. Today was that homeless woman’s lucky day.
“Thank you, baby,” she called after him.
He tossed the wallet into a trash bin and paused at the corner of Broadway and Diversey, pulling his cell phone out. He leaned against a wall as he listened to the ringing. He expected his calls to be picked up by his boys within two rings. Consequences would occur if that arrangement were breached.
Dave was not disappointed.
“Yes.”
A young man’s voice came through the line. Dave shuddered. He wished this one could get rid of that small trace of effeminacy that lingered in his speech. This one’s esses were too hissy, too prolonged. They would have to work on that. Dave’s clients were not paying top dollar for nancy boys. If not for this one’s ten-inch penis, he probably would have let him go.