I rolled over in the bed, reaching for Esteban, but he wasn't there, setting off in me a mild zing of irritation. He'd gone to sleep last night while I was fucking him and now he wasn't there at all in the morning. This brought the decision I had to make back to mind and was, perhaps, yet another nail in the decision—two decisions actually. I had an opportunity to head up the Radio y Televisión Martà radio transmission operations from Marathon Key targeting to Cuba what we called information and the Cuban government called American propaganda. So that was one decision. But another decision was whether to ask Esteban to go with me or to encourage him to stay in Miami. It's unlikely the
Miami Herald
would have anything for him to do on Marathon Key.
I smelled the coffee brewing out in the kitchen. That might have been what woke me up to begin with. Groaning, I crawled out of bed and stumbled toward the shower. I had a full day's work to wedge into a half day in the office before I started out driving from Miami down to Marathon Key and then on, the next day, down to Key West to check out our Cuban radio-monitoring activity down there. And I hadn't even packed yet.
I'd needed a good fuck last night or this morning. I was strung out, and I needed something to siphon off some of the tension. Esteban had let me down. Esteban had been letting me down a lot lately—not least by letting himself go. We'd been together, what, fifteen years now? And it had only been of late that he'd slowed down. And it was showing in his waistline and the effect of gravity on his face.
This was all bringing my decision to a head. Maybe I was in a rut. Maybe Esteban was getting too old and slow and uninteresting for me. Something to think about. This had a great deal to do with going down to see the operation at Marathon Key. I didn't really have to see that operation for a decision on whether I wanted the job there. It was the further trip down to Key West that was motivating me to take this exploratory journey. Key West was less than fifty miles from Marathon. I could live there and just do with the overnight facilities at the Marathon office when I couldn't be more than an hour from work. Sometimes it took me more than an hour through traffic just to drive to work across Miami from my apartment.
Key West was where it was at; Key West was where it was happening. Life was short, and I had a lot of delicious young men to go through yet.
I started to include that I wasn't getting any younger, but that gave me a twinge. I looked into the mirror over the bathroom sink and then at myself full length in the tall mirror on the bathroom side of the door, and I choked down those words. I looked damn good. And I worked hard to stay that way—unlike what Esteban had been doing of late, whenever he took the time to try to keep in shape.
Esteban was just pouring the OJ and coffee and setting out an omelet and toast when I got to the kitchen.
"Gotta gobble fast," I said as I sat down to it. "Gotta pack. I'll be leaving from the office."
"You're all packed," Esteban said, as he sat down in a chair across from me and looked at me. I hadn't told him anything about the Marathon Key operation offer, but I could tell that he sensed there was something going on. "I did that last evening while you were on the computer—you'd left most of what you'll need out on the chair in the bedroom. I packed after I got the Jag gassed up for your trip."
"I'm packed? I wanted the glen plaid suit—"
"I'd taken it to the cleaners," Esteban said. "You somehow struggled with some marinara sauce at the paper's annual banquet last weekend, so I took it out to have it cleaned. Got it back yesterday afternoon, though, and it's packed with all of that other stuff you put out. You're taking an awful lot of party clothes for a business trip, I must say."
"Have you seen the radio script I brought home last night for editing? I thought I left it by the computer, but when I looked for it—"
"It's in your briefcase. I edited it for you. It's a good piece, but you really should read those aloud more when you write them, Carlos. It's not like written essays. Certain words don't come out right in spoken form when they are put together."
"You're always saying that."
"Because it's always true. I've been editing your radio copy for what? More than fifteen years now. I edited your copy before we hooked up—before I left the station and went to the paper."
"Yeah, yeah. I picked you because of your editing abilities."
The kitchen went silent. Esteban gave me a hurt look and went to the kitchen stove, turning away from me, and moved pots around in meaningless patterns on the stove top.
Embarrassed at having said that, and not meaning it, of course—we'd really had something going, at least until late—I swallowed my coffee in big gulps and stood to gather everything I needed and hit the road. He was so sensitive, getting to be high maintenance.
He wasn't at the door when I left; he was still puttering and pouting at the stove, facing away from me. I was relieved, really. We had a rule that when either of us left the apartment, the other one would be at the door for a kiss. Esteban was pretty adamant about that ritual. The man he'd been living with before he had hooked up with me had left one morning without a kiss, was run over by a hit-and-run driver, and died without ever returning. Esteban always said we needed to treat even the most temporary good-bye as if it was our last. But I wasn't in the mood for that sort of contact this morning; I thought that maybe all he had to do was look into my eyes and he'd know where I really was going—and why.
At the door, not wanting to leave in silence, I called out. "I think we're out of red wine."
"I'll stop and get some more on the way home tonight," he answered without turning.
"Well, I'm off."
"Have a good trip."
It was almost as if he knew what I was thinking about our relationship and how this trip might end it.
There was no kiss at the door.
* * * *
It had been a good decision to drive my own car down—well, Esteban's and my Jaguar convertible. This was an encumbrance I guessed I might have to face—who got the Jaguar. But I was the one who had wanted to buy the Jag. I had the top down all the way down the key-hopping Route 1 from Marathon down to Key West, and every cute guy I passed coming into Key West was attracted by the Jag and then gave me the eye. I loved getting the eye; it told me I still had what it took. I'd have a ball here, I just knew I would if I could keep Ramon Famosa off the scent.
Ramon was the sole employee of our Key West outpost office. Its facilities included an office and a house on the government's Truman Annex at the very southeast tip of Key West—and thus also of the United States. He recorded and translated radio broadcasts from Havana and sent the transcripts up to Miami to our studios there, where we composed radio content that responded to what Havana was saying. He also somehow managed to get some regional Cuban newspapers down there that we didn't always get up in Miami.
I had been glad when the office sent Ramon down here. Otherwise I might have gotten into trouble. Ramon was quite the looker, and if he'd shown the slightest bit of interest in me, I think I would have gone off the deep end. Office romances were the kiss of death in Radio MartÃ, however—and there was Esteban. I don't know how it came about that Ramon was sent down here; it had seemed to have been an overnight "now you see him/now you don't" move at the time.
But as good looking as he was, he would be in the way of what I wanted to do in Key West. I wanted to party and to share all of this goodness I had in me—which included, I've always been told, a cock to die for. Key West was just the playground for this sort of death. And if—I was thinking more in terms of when now—I moved to the Marathon operation, I could Key West myself away. The more serious and conventional Ramon was sort of a waste down here, I thought. Although I had overshot the Key West position some time ago, there was a time when this would have been the perfect assignment for me. Key West was one of the gay male magnets of the world.
That evening, after pretending to be fascinated by Ramon's briefing on his operations—at least as fascinated as I was with seeing him, as two years away from Miami had just made him more attractive and arousing than I'd remembered him to be—I had the hardest time breaking away from him so that I could cruise the gay bars on and off Duval Street. Ramon said he wanted to show me the night life here. I assumed he was talking sedate jazz bars, as he seemed to be crazy for that music, and this wasn't how I wanted to spend my time.
So, I told him I was tired and wanted to go back to my hotel off Mallory Square, and, eventually, he'd reluctantly let me go. He'd offered to let me stay with him in the small house we provided for him on the Truman Annex, but I wanted to wake up in someone sweet's bed, and he surely would have been shocked if I'd brought a little honey back to his place for the night.
I was driving the Jag, so I took it out to Duval and parked it on the street in front of a gay bar I'd already researched as someplace I wanted to visit.
The Bourbon Street Pub was right on Duval, and the crowd around its entrance left no doubt that it was a gay bar. I got enough cat calls when I pulled myself out of the Jag before pushing through the crowd and entering the dimly lit bar area that I knew I wouldn't be lonely tonight unless I wanted to be. It was noisy and crowded. Soft-core porn films were flashing on screens on all four walls, and the shadows on three sides of the room enveloped booths offering some semblance of privacy, although I could see from the undulating bodies there that all forms of pleasure were being explored from smoking weed to blowing cocks and even more intimate pursuits.
This was what I was looking for and this is what I loved about Key West. Anything goes there; no need for inhibitions. One of the deep-side walls was fronted its entire length with a long bar, and along this at intervals rose shiny metal poles running up from the bar top to the high ceiling. Barely legal young men in thong bikinis were playing the poles to something close to the beat of the loud, heavy-metal music.
I saddled up to a bar stool and ordered a scotch on the rocks. It had barely arrived when a young blond, with a curl hanging down over a blue eye topped by long lashes and sparkly gold shadow paint on his eyelids, insinuated himself in beside me. He was dressed in white cotton trousers and shirt, which was opened to the waist, and had a filmy blue scarf around his neck that matched the shade of his eyes.
"Buy a girl a drink?" he asked.
"Sure," I said. He was very young. Just what I was in the mood for. Esteban no longer was any sort of young.
That done, he took a sip, primping like he thought he'd learned from Bette Davis, and pulled my face down to where he could whisper in my ear.
"If you take me someplace, I'll make you a very happy man," he whispered.
"Take you someplace, huh? But I just got here, and I understand there's something called The Pile downstairs."
"You drove up in the Jaguar convertible, didn't you?"
"You noticed."
"Drive me down to the beach in your car and I'll take you to heaven."
He gave me an expert and efficient blow job in the front seat of the Jag in the parking lot of a beach at the northeast end of the key not far from the airport. Esteban actually gave better—and longer-lasting—head, but the novelty of a new, young man doing it did, indeed, take me to heaven.
"I have a room at a hotel," I said when he was done.
"Maybe I'm interested," he said. "Maybe if you do something nice for me."
"What would that be?"
"Let my friends and me borrow your Jag for a day."
I paused for several seconds. There was no way I was going to let a stranger drive off in my car. "I'll take you back to the Bourbon Street Pub," I answered. "And we'll see what is what."
Well, what was what was that the young man disappeared into the crowd when he couldn't wheedle the keys to the Jag from me. And in his wake, I looked around the room. No one else even close to my age was in there, and I was suddenly feeling out of place. The music also was so loud I couldn't think. I hit the street.
