J Wells - The Male Hustler

“You’re a real prince,” I said, approximately .

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Jack. Actually I think I played quite fair. Suppose I never said anything, just excused myself and vanished? Suppose you took this luscious little number to dinner? And suppose she went right on being Brenda, and you didn’t get to the moment of truth until the two of you were in bed?

“Christ,” I said.

“Must run,” said my friend. ( Friend? ) “Have fun, boys and girls. Have a pleasant interview. And Jack, you should enjoy pretending that she doesn’t turn you on any more now that you know the awful truth...”

Later Brendan told me that my friend had originally wanted to let me make the discovery in bed. “But I told him absolutely no. I’m not the masochistic type. I don’t enjoy having some uptight latent beat the living shit out of me because he doesn’t want to face uncertain things about himself. I had that happen once, and the stories I’ve heard. You can imagine. But I like running the number we did today. Attracting a man, getting him to commit himself, and then letting the cock out of the bag, so to speak.”

“What usually happens?”

“Shock. Disbelief. More shock. A lot of the time we wind up laughing, like today. It’s a great way to deal with something that’s hard to handle.” A significant pause. “You’d be surprised how often a man who never went that route before will decide that my cock is no reason to stop wanting to get me in bed.”

The full treatment with the eyes again. A soft, knowing smile.

“Interested?”

“I had a childhood that was so classic it seems positively banal. Mother was a repressed mouse of a girl who managed to preserve her maidenhead for almost thirty years, perhaps because nobody was interested enough to contend with all that shyness and churchiness. This was in a little town in Schoharie County in upstate New York. The only county in the state with less population now than during the Civil War, so you can imagine what a swinging cosmopolitan place it is.

“Then someone seduced the poor woman, evidently with a promise of marriage, and left town around the time that she began not having periods. God knows who he may have been. A proverbial traveling salesman, I suspect. I grew up thinking my father had died in the war, then learned by accident more or less what had happened. I spent a long time wondering about my father, who he was, if he’s still alive, all of that. The standard fixation on the unknown father, the standard love-hate thing. Like he’s a bastard for having left me, but also he’s out there somewhere, the father who will take care of me and make me a whole and secure person. I think I’ve largely outgrown that bullshit by now.

“Except that I still find myself wondering if I might ever have made it with him, without either of us knowing who the other one was. Of course I’ve always been promiscuous, and I went through a stage shortly after I came to New York where I really played the numbers game. I had to prove to myself that I was attractive, and I wanted quantitative proof. I’ve serviced as many as thirty men in a night. Forgive the crudeness, but sucking doesn’t really tire one out, you know, and you can just go on as long as you want. So it’s not inconceivable that one of the men I balled at one time or another was my long-lost Papa.

“Pointless to brood about it. Or to go on Freudian trips about how my whole sex life represents a search for my father and an attempt to possess him sexually. That kind of thing is worth considering but not worth dwelling on forever...

“After she was pregnant and deserted, my mother moved in with my Aunt Alma. Alma was her older sister, a good dozen years older and a childless widow. It surprises me that she ever got married in the first place. I never met a woman who had less use for men. It wasn’t so much that she hated them as that she was totally incapable of relating to them. I’m sure she was fundamentally a dyke, but that her orientation was such that the possibility of female homosexuality never once occurred to her. She would have the inclinations but would never recognize them, never even suspect them.

“That was the house I grew up in. Huge old house in this dying town with these two cloistered sexless ladies. Alma absolutely dominated Mother, treated her more like a child than a sibling. And mother learned her lesson, never looked at another man. I think she would have grown her hymen back if she could have found a way.

“Classic faggot background, isn’t it? I had the whole bit, played with dolls, was coddled, all of that. And I was physically right for the part. Small and dainty and neat and all the rest of it. It wasn’t a bad time, you must understand. I enjoyed childhood. It only becomes unpleasant in retrospect.

“I’m not sure when I first realized that I was different. That I was a boy who was not like other boys. It sometimes seems as though it was something I always knew...

“My first sexual experience came when I was twelve years old. At this stage I had not yet learned how to masturbate. Although there was a thing I had started doing. I would lie in bed at night and stroke my body, sometimes with my hand but more often with a piece of fur or a silk stocking. But I didn’t concentrate on my genitals. I would just stroke myself all over. I didn’t identify this as a sexual thing at the time, nor did I have orgasm. I just liked the feeling of it and the whole process made me feel, oh, admirable, attractive.

“I was in seventh grade. For the past few years other kids had made fun of me, called me Brenda, that sort of thing. Imitated me. As best as I can remember, I didn’t hate this as much as you would expect. There was something about the teasing that I enjoyed. I think it must have made me feel important. And I don’t think it bothered me that I didn’t have friends. I felt so different from everyone, from both the boys and the girls, that it must have seemed logical to me that I would be alone most of the time.

“I was on my way home from school one afternoon and these two high school boys, I suppose they were fifteen or sixteen, started walking along with me and talking about me. ‘Isn’t it cute? Is it a boy or a girl?’ Obviously I wasn’t cross-dressing or making up, but I was naturally effeminate in behavior and, hell, I looked like a girl. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ They knew my name, but I said it was Brendan, and of course they called me Brenda.

“I was excited that they were paying attention to me.

“Then one of them told the other that they could have some fun with me, that I was the same thing as a girl. I was totally ignorant about sex at the time, just incredibly ignorant. But I was wildly excited without knowing what I was excited about. They asked me to come for a walk with them and I did. We walked on out of town and they went on teasing me and talking about blow jobs, which was an expression I had heard, but didn’t begin to understand.

“We wound up in a wooded area on the edge of town. They told me to take my clothes off and I refused. If I knew nothing else, I knew nudity was taboo. They forced me. I put up a token struggle, but, actually I was thrilled to the core and enjoyed being forced this way. That element of masochism, incidentally, has long since vanished. I like a man to be masculine but I don’t enjoy being overpowered. As a matter of fact, it’s very important to me that I be the one who does the seducing...

“They made a big thing about my penis. ‘Look, he’s got one after all! I guess he’s a boy after all! But it’s so small it hardly counts.’ That kind of thing. Of course it was small, I was twelve years old and undeveloped and hairless. It’s grown somewhat since then, lover, in case you were wondering.