Chapter 3 Be a Man
Shane got out of the car in the middle of a block on Santa Monica Boulevard without looking back at the driver or acknowledging him in any way. She'd seen Clive loitering on the sidewalk in front of a record store, and she asked the driver to stop. He'd jammed on the brakes and as soon as the car had slowed enough Shane popped the door and was out. She sauntered over to a trash can, dropped into it a pair of cheap latex gloves and a condom containing a fresh load of jism, and walked over to Clive. She parked her ass against the building, one leg hooked up behind her, and asked him, "Got a cigarette?" Clive gave her one.
"How much you get?" Clive asked.
"Twenty," Shane said, lighting the cigarette. That was the going price for a hand job, sometimes twenty-five if the traffic would bear it. "Motherfucker started groping me, almost got to my crotch before I shut him down."
"How'd you do that?"
"Told him I'd mace him."
Clive grunted.
In a sense, Shane and Clive were twins. They had both just turned nineteen. They were both effectively homeless. Shane and Clive both wore grungy clothes, but that was the grunge look -- indigent, drug-abusing street hustlers dressed pretty much the same as a lot of young people who shopped in upscale mall stores where jeans with holes in them sold for $200. Shane and Clive both had short, spikey hair, the only major difference being Shane was a natural brunette and Clive was a bleach blond. They were both thin and boney, neither one had tits, and neither had had anything like a square meal with a meat, a starch and a green vegetable in over a year. Both were pale and looked unhealthy. Both abused drugs on the occasions they could afford anything halfway decent; mostly they just smoked marijuana. They were smart enough to stay away from crack, because they'd seen what it did to some of their friends and anyway they couldn't afford it. In the upscale suburbs DIY meant "do-it-yourself" and power tools. In the world Shane and Clive lived in, it meant "dead in a year" and drug paraphernalia.
Shane and Clive earned their livings as faggot street hustlers servicing gay men who cruised Santa Monica Boulevard looking for something quick and a little different. They were both androgynous, what some people might called "gender confused," but the truth was neither one was confused at all. Both knew what genders they were, and had no doubts whatsoever about their orientations. They were both gay as the day is long, always were, always would be. The only significant difference between them was that Clive had a real dick while Shane packed a fake one. It was only other people who looked at them who might have gotten confused trying to figure out their gender, which was understandable. All the markers were ambiguous and neither one gave a rat's ass if they confounded other people. Too fucking bad.
When they'd first met six months ago, Clive was the only one who had a lump in his pants. They'd met in line at a shelter soup kitchen, a couple of runaways in a city of thousands upon thousands of such. They looked alike, and instead of taking offense at it or trying to mark their territories in some sort of macho pissing contest, Clive and Shane thought it was just kind of funny. Shane had gotten fired from a burger joint for stealing food for herself. Clive simply couldn't get hired to begin with. One cold, rainy night they'd decided to go to a shelter together. Like most homeless kids, they hated shelters: They were places to get robbed, beat up, abused, raped. Shelters, refuges of last resort, segregated clientèle into male and female dorms, which meant Shane and Clive would have to spend the night apart.
"Why don't you tell them you're a guy," Clive said, possibly the only really intelligent, creative idea he'd ever had. "Half the people we run into already think you're a guy anyhow. Might just as well tell the shelter people that, too. And that way we can stay together and watch out for each other."
So Shane became a man, and spent the night in the men's shelter, sleeping in the cot next to Clive. When they'd been asked to sign in, the man at the reception desk asked Shane her name.
"Tommi," Shane told him. "Tommi with an 'i' on the end."
The man was unimpressed. "Last name?"
"Hilfiger."
The man wrote it down, and Shane looked at the log book. There she was, Tommy Hellfinger. She didn't bother to argue.
They were hanging out on the street at their wits' end one day when a car pulled to the curb and the driver leaned over to talk out the passenger window. He sized up the two of them, and decided blonds have more fun.
"Wanna go for a ride?" the driver asked Clive. Clive looked at Shane, who shrugged. Clive got in the car and rode away. When he got back an hour and a blowjob later, he had twenty-five bucks in his pocket and a bad taste in his mouth. They walked to a Bob's Big Boy and got burgers.
They talked it over. God knows there were enough fags working the street, they could blend in easily enough. They didn't know much about pimps, but they knew enough not to want one. A pimp would immediately discover Shane's gender, and would also decide what kind of sex Shane would or wouldn't offer. That simply wasn't an option.
"Clive," Shane said. "I'm not blowing anybody."
"You don't have to, Shane. I mean, Tommi. Just give 'em hand jobs."
"Ewww. I'm not sure it's much better."
Clive shrugged. "That's your call. But you get yourself some latex gloves, you slide a rubber on 'em, you jerk away for a couple of minutes while they lie back enjoying the sun and the smog, they cum, you get your money and a ride back, and that's it."
"Suppose they don't like the latex glove or the Trojans," Shane asked.
"Fuck 'em," Clive said. "Don't get in the car. Tell 'em you're not catching AIDS for nobody. But, hell, Tommi, most of 'em won't care. They're all scared shitless of AIDS by now, too. But you'll see. All they want is a quick cum. Nobody wants dinner and a movie."
"You've done this before, haven't you?"
Clive just grinned and shrugged. They were suddenly self-employed.
Within a few weeks they were each doing three or four tricks a day. The money was coming in. As a rule, Clive made a little more per trick than Shane, since he'd do blowjobs and once in a while anal, while Shane only did handjobs. By the same token, though, Clive lacked Shane's work ethic; she was out there almost every day, seven days a week. Clive would do one or two tricks and then get lazy, wander off.
By unspoken agreement they shared what they had. Shane kept all her worldly possessions in a duffel bag -- three changes of clothes -- while Clive kept his in two backpacks. Clive knew a guy named Bobby who ran a gas station and garage/towing service that had lockers and a small shower room in the back off the service bays. For a blowjob every now and then from Clive or a handjob from Shane he let them keep their stuff in one of the lockers, and they could shower once in a while in privacy, something not available in the shelters. Bobby wouldn't let them live there, but they could hang out, especially if the weather was bad. He had a small black-and-white TV with a clothes hanger antenna, and some nights when business was slow they sat around the office watching. Some nights a call would come in for Bobby to go out with the tow truck, and Clive would stay behind to mind the store while Shane went along just for the ride and some air. It also helped Shane learn the geography of the city, since she was a relatively recent arrival and didn't know her way around very well.
Most Friday and Saturday nights they went to clubs, sometimes to the same club if it catered to both sexes, and sometimes Shane went to a lesbian club while Clive went to a gay men's hangout. Once Shane went to one of Clive's places just to see what it was like, but so many gay guys started hitting on her that she began to get worried.
"I'm getting out of here," Shane yelled into Clive's ear over the roar of the music. Clive, who had his hand inside the fly of a biker, nodded. Shane went to her club, and an hour later was out behind it in the alley happily fucking a legal secretary from Van Nuys up against a wall.
At the end of their third week Shane ran into her first piece of trouble when a guy started coming after her crotch, thinking he was going to find a dick there he could suck on. Shane fought him off and managed to get out of the car before the john discovered his mistake. He called her the usual names and then drove off without paying her for the handjob he'd gotten. Shane had had to walk and hitchhike 30 blocks back to her corner. When she got back she told Clive what had happened.
"Fuck, Shane, you gotta be careful. And you know what? I think some people can tell you haven't got anything down there. I think you better start stuffing something in there, or better yet why don't you start packing? Get yourself a strap-on dong, so at least you got a bulge, and if somebody gets his hand down there he'll feel something, at least from the outside."
