I climbed out of my dusty old Camaro and walked up to the door of the old bungalow on East Portland Street, just south of I-10, as it cut through downtown Phoenix. The door opened before I knocked on it.
"We don't want any," the young guy, who looked mostly Asian, but dark-skinned enough to be a mix, said, standing in the doorway, trying to block out a view into the house, but being too small and lean to pull that off. He was just in baggy athlete shorts and flip-flops. He looked good--trim, hard-bodied, and lightly muscled, everything in proportion, and the waistband of the shorts dipping to show a line of trimmed, curly pubic hair. He hadn't gotten all of his face makeup off, which identified him as able to play at something else. I knew makeup. I was a stripper in a Las Vegas gay club. I knew what to do with makeup. What I could see of what was left on him indicated he knew how to apply it as well. He just hadn't had a reason to wipe it all off.
"Hi, I'm Miguel Carillo," I introduced myself with a nonthreatening smile. "I'm not selling anything. I'm looking for my cousin, Hosea. He left this address as where he might be. Is he here, please?"
"No Hosea here," the Asian young man said, as he started to close the door in my face. He'd looked me up and down and I got the impression he wanted me out of the picture right fast.
"He's gone. A couple of weeks gone," a voice from behind the Asian guy, delivered from the shadows of the house interior, said. A hand pushed the Asian to the side and I saw a burly, balding guy, maybe in his early forties, sitting in a wheelchair with a fully cast leg propped up in front of him. He too was wearing shorts, but he had a drooping T-shirt on, with a deep neck slit and side slits that revealed the shortfall of hair was only on the head. He had a profusion of curly brown hair falling out of the slits at the neck and sides. He looked thuggish, but he hadn't been in the wheelchair long. He was muscular. His muscles had muscles. He couldn't have been in the cast for long. It hadn't been that long since half his day had gone to developing muscle.
"My, my, ain't you the looker?" he said. The look on the younger Asian guy's face told me why he had wanted me gone quickly.
"Gone?" I asked. "Do you know where?"
We--my extended family and I--hadn't heard from Hosea in Vegas since he'd taken a job from the Internet and left the family some six weeks earlier. We were a closeknit family. Six weeks was a long time without contact. His mother, my aunt, Maria, was worried about him, and, as I had some time off and knew about the job he'd left to take up--and Maria didn't--I volunteered to try to find him.
His mother didn't know he was actively gay. For that matter she didn't know I was actively gay, either. She was from a world that wouldn't know how to handle that. I knew that Hosea had gotten antsy about his short-order cook job in a fancy fusion restaurant and had wanted something more adventuresome. He'd pulled up a gay employment site on the Internet and we'd gone over the listings together. The one he'd applied for and gotten was at this address in Phoenix. It had advertised for a houseboy and companion. Everyone using the site knew what "companion" stood for. After the initial questions were over in site exchanges, this aspect got down to explicit photos and favorite positions.
"No, I don't know where he went. But he left some stuff in his room here. You're welcome to come in and get it to take it to him when you find him. Maybe take a load off and have a cold beer. It's a shittin' hot day today. Come on in. Stand aside and let the boy in, Lek." He'd wheeled to the door, putting the young Asian guy behind him, and was looking me over real well. "Hosea was a good looker, but you put him to shame. You Miguel, are you? I'm Carl. Lek here is Thai."
"Yes, sir, I'm Miguel," I answered. And, so, the other guy's version of Asian was Thai. I never could tell about Asians.
"He told me about you. Birds of a feather, he'd said. Good to see you. Come on in. You've driven all the way from Vegas?"
"Yes, sir." Just what kind of feathers had Miguel been talking about in relation to me, I wondered. Was this guy telling me he knew I was as actively gay as Miguel was?
"Must be really thirsty. Lek, get this man a beer. Me too." He rolled back from the doorway so I could enter, and I did so. The door opened right into a living area to the right and a dining table and chairs to the left. A kitchen ran back behind the dining room. A central hallway moved off straight ahead into the bowels of the house. The furniture was Spartan, but tidy and in good repair.
My gaze went to the Thai houseboy, Lek, as he moved away from me to the kitchen. His back was covered in red welts, some raised areas looking like old wounds but some others looking fresh. The backs of his legs were welted as well. I looked quickly away, disturbed, but not wanting to get into anything that might be going on here. The young man seemed happy enough. Some liked it that way, I knew. When you're a male stripper in Vegas, you've seen it all. I had no idea whether Lek liked it that way or not. There were situations in which I thought I might.
Lek certainly wasn't happy that I was here and getting attention from Carl.
My thoughts went back to Carl and him knowing my name and saying Hosea had told him about me. I wondered how much Hosea had told him. From what I knew of the job, the man must know that Hosea was gay and he probably had been fucking him while Hosea was here, working as the man's houseboy, a job clearly being filled now by the small Asian he'd called Lek. Had Hosea told the man I was gay too, I wondered again--and a stripper in a gay club?
"Hosea told me you were a stripper in a gay club in Vegas," he said. "My name's Carl, by the way," he repeated in case I hadn't picked up on that to begin with.
"Yes, that's right," I said as we settled in the living room with cans of beer Lek delivered. After Lek handed out the beer, Carl grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him into his lap, wrapping his arms around him and telling me that Lek was half Thai and half black American soldier and all sex. Carl's hand went to Lek's crotch and the young Thai relaxed into the big man's lap, looking at me with dreamy "he does me good" eyes. Carl's hand went under Lek's waistband and I could see that he was slow-jacking the small guy inside his shorts. Carl didn't seem to be the least embarrassed that I could see that. But then, he probably was doing it to get my attention, establishing himself as a cocky guy who I'd melt for and want to open my legs for.
"And he said you work for an escort agency and do tricks with men on the side."
"Yes, I said." Damn that Hosea and his big mouth, I thought. But I also thought that, as thuggish as he looked, Carl was a pretty sexy man. I wondered how he'd broken his leg. I also wondered why Hosea left his employment so quickly and where he went. I needed to find out what this man knew about where Hosea had gone from here. Being nice to him and at least pretending he could do me would seem the quickest way to get the information on Hosea I needed.
