WHERE THE DAY TAKES YOU
2.
Max, in his Hawaiian shirt and broad brim fedora and Jamal, weedy and tall in a tee shirt that was always too big and some jeans that hung to him for dear life were a strange but appropriate duo as they walked into the too bright shop where fluorescent beams mercilessly shone down on handcuffs, dildos, inflatable fuck bodies, cases of poppers, boner pills and walls hung with corsets, crotchless panties and jockstraps.
“Hello!” Max called.
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
“Hullo!
“Hullo, I say!”
“Wat wat. Hullo!
“Cherrio fruit loop hello!”
They had got so carried away in their British routine that Max had to remember his aversion to spending money he really didn’t have, and he took Jamal by the hand and led him through the store and through a curtain into darkness.
“Where the fuck was the guy who keeping the store?”
“Damned if I know,” Max said. “But we’re not going to stick around and pay him fifteen dollars a pop if we don’t have to.”
“Agreed.”
Beyond, they followed a stairway up to a second floor and blinked a while before it came into focus. Television screens, sofas, partitions, and as their eyes cleared, men, some milling about the room and going through mazes, looking confused, one on his hands and knees, getting fucked on a sofa, another reclined against the wall getting a blowjob from a naked man with an enthusiastically swiveling neck.
“Well?” Max said.
“Excuse me,” someone behind them said, and walked around to approach a man who was leaning against a wall. Just like that, the man against the wall unbuttoned his jeans, his trousers dropped and the man got down on his knees before him.
“This place is magical!” Jamal said in earnest. “I’m so glad you brought me here.”
Max shaved his head every two days, and his hat was discreetly tipped on the edge of a chair ten feet away. His shirt was open and his keys and beads hung on his chest while he fucked the mouth of the old man who was slurping away on his cock. Behind him another man, murmuring and kissing him up and down his back, had taken down his shorts and was rubbing his ass, slipping a finger in him while Max moaned and the man reached around, tweaking his nipples.
Beside him Jamal leaned into the mouth sucking away on him and lifted his shirt for that man on his knees who was moving his hand up his chest. The man who was caressing Max was running his hand up and down Jamal too, had taken his pants down long ago and was thrusting a hand up and down between his thighs.
“Holy fuck,” Jamal moaned in the blue lit room, “I’m gonna bust.”
“Bust in my mouth,” the man who was sucking him said.
“Done and done,” Jamal said and he gripped Max’s shoulder while he grunted and his face seized as he rose up on his tiptoes and unloaded in the man’s mouth.
“Fuck,” he whispered, winded, while the man still slurped on his penis and swallowed his semen. His grip on Max’s shoulder lightened while Max fucked the old man’s mouth harder, gripping his head and pressing himself deep in.
“This place is awesome,” Jamal murmured, winded out of himself, his penis sensitive in the man’s mouth.
He pulled up his jeans and pulled down his tee shirt to go be high on the couch and sit in the shadows watching Max still slowly pumping the man’s mouth. He was invested in Max’s coming. He wanted to see him shoot the same way Jamal had just felt himself, but instead, Max murmured something, pulled up his shorts and went to sit down beside Jamal. They sat there together, watching the colors change and the walls stretch. Max was never in a hurry.
Whenever he went someplace like this, Max always had a checklist and a prayer list. For ten or fifteen dollars to be worthwhile he had to:
1. see the sex
2. be the sex, aka get a blowjob
3. be the sex, aka give a great blowjob to someone’s dick he really wanted to suck
4. have one or both of these things happen multiple times
5. be shocked and surprised by his behavior before the night was over.
All five were a ten out of ten score. Most of the five was an eight, and so far the night was nearing a five when a man in denim, a work shirt and feed cap walked in and he couldn’t say what he liked about him, but that he sort of looked like Kayla’s dad, one of those men gone to early grey, and fit looking, and when he saw him around a corner he thought, well, wait a moment, and he would definitely attend to him. He waited a moment, maybe two moments, and there he was, well made, jeans down, thick cock out and someone in a chair was sucking on him and Max sat in the chair across from him and simply waited. He had learned that simply waiting, was powerful, that there was some psychic way in which, once he had decided to have a man, the man would turn to him, as this one did, and then he was taking that sausage of a cock into his mouth and he was sucking on him, sucking on him. But this was one of those men with a wife or a church or a girlfriend or a desire for heterosexuality that he’d left in the parking lot, one of those, I don’t want to feel too good for too long dudes who said, thank you thank you and put his dick back in his pants. When he got up and went to the sofas where Max had already been sitting, Max followed. He walked past the sofa where Jamal was quietly vaping, blowing candy flavored smoke from his mouth while he stared at the ceiling.
Jamal’s shirt was balled up beside him, and his legs were wipe open while a dark shadow of a figure on hands and knees buried his head between his legs, slurping on him, and in wide mouthed, drug induced ecstasy, he watched the holes in the ceiling tiles inhale and exhale, watched the smoke from his mouth swirl into curlicues and patterns, half watched Max sit behind the salt and pepper handsome man in his work shirt and feet cap, watched the man open up his jeans again and pull out his thick penis, watched Max disappear into darkness on his hands and knees.
They’d taken two gummies on their way here and slid into a an almost holy state of bliss. Max longed, more than anything, to live in a drug tripping night where a cock became the size of the world, and swallowing it became the most important thing in creation, but again this guilty man could only take so much pleasure, and so Max sat down next to him while he zipped himself up again. The man began talking to Max.
While a tongue like a serpent’s curled around his swelling penis, Jamal’s eyes opened and closed, and in something that was at once like sleep and total wakefulness, he listened to the conversation.
“Do women ever come here?”
Max gave a sharp laugh and said, “No. But I feel like you knew that before you asked it.”
“I really didn’t,” the man said, after a while. “If you go to Charlie’s—have you ever been out there?”
“Nope.”
“Women come there.”
“That does not interest me at all. And you can fuck them there?”
“Yeah,” said the man.
“How?”
To be sure, you could fuck someone in this room of chairs and tables and partitions, but it would be a challenge.
“They have theatres. And booths.”
“Ah,” Max said. “Okay.”
Jamal wanted to laugh. The difference between being drunk and being high is you never really lost your wits high. Jamal knew this voice well, the voice of Max when he knew someone was lying and couldn’t be bothered to catch them out.
Jamal took a great puff and through a white cloud of vape smoke, watched the very attractive man get up and give his goodbye.
“He was hot,” Jamal said as Max sat down beside him.
“He was sixty-eight years old.”
“For fucking real?”
“Some of these old men got it going on. I had no idea. He looked amazing. I mean, what we saw, But he couldn’t let himself be too happy so he had to go. I guess go be straight again.”
“Uh,” Jamal said.
Neither one of them said anything. Max thought it was bad form to talk too much when your friend was getting a blowjob. Jamal sank down lower so the man could take more of him in, and he handed his vape to Max while he thrusts his hands into the man’s hair. It seemed to Jamal, at the age of twenty, that being sixty-eight was far too old to be confused about your sexuality.
“What time is it?” Max wondered on the El platform.
“Time to watch the world bend.”
It wasn’t a bad answer. Not only time, but the importance of time seemed to melt away tonight. Max wasn’t sure how long they’d been waiting for the El and he didn’t really care.
“I’m hungry as fuck,” he decided. “Not hungry like I have to eat right now, but hungry like I can anticipate the hunger and the desire to eat when the sun comes up.
“Pancakes?”
“Fuck pancakes,” Max said negligently, taking a pull from his vape and exhaling strawberry air.
“Omelettes. Something savory.”
They had passed a giant mural of a woman in a white gown or a blue gown, hands out, walking across the water, and her hair was long and black and there was a star on her brow.
“Who is that?” Jamal asked. “Mary?”
“That’s too sexy for Mary,” Max said, noting the hips, the cleavage. “That’s Mama Yemaya. That’s the Lady of the Sea.”
Even as he said it, he could hear the water coming onto the shore, sucking itself back out. But they weren’t close enough to the beach for that, not quite.
“I have an idea,” Max said as a train approached, heading north from the loop. “We just have to decide what stores to go to, and which train we want to catch. Are you sleepy?”
“On this shit?” Jamal said. “There won’t be any sleeping till tomorrow.”
“But it is tomorrow.”
As the brightly lit train squealed toward them and stopped, a row of silver cars, Jamal said.
“Tut. Tut. Tomorrow never comes.”
