[
Author's Note: This chaptered novel was originally tagged as running to 15 chapters, but a chapter of the original was split in two for Literotica postings, so there will be 16 chapters. Thus, this is not the final chapter that will post.
]
*
"Ricky? Is that really you?"
"Yes, Mom, it's me. I'd doin' fine, Mom. Trying to get settled. I want you to come out when I do."
"Settled? Where are you?"
"Albuquerque. Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'd told you I wanted to settle out here and work on cars. And that I wanted you to come out too."
Silence for several seconds.
"He's gone."
"Who's gone, Mom?"
No immediate response.
"Pete? Is Pete gone?"
"Yes, he left right after you did. Called me a silly old cow and cleared out."
"Mom, I tried to tell you." Rick, of course, wasn't surprised. This was the option he'd assumed Pete would take.
"Why'd you tell them all that, Ricky? The men came lookin' for Pete, but he was already gone. They said the most vile things. Why'd you tell them—?"
"Because it was true, Mom. I tried to tell you. You didn't want to see it or hear it. But Pete didn't leave because of you. He left because of me. You're better off without . . . but what did they say when they came lookin' for him? Are they lookin' for me too? Because I jumped probation?"
"No, one of them—I think he said he was your probation officer—seemed relieved that Pete was gone. And he told me that no one would pursue your case. That he was seein' to it. That as long as you kept your nose clean, it would go away. Only if you show up in the system again . . . Ricky you're not—?"
"I'm keepin' clean, Mom. And savin' money. It's nice out here. You'd like it. And there are medical jobs advertised in the papers all of the time. We could manage out here."
Silence.
"Mom?"
"We'll talk about that sometime. Thanks for callin' to tell me you ain't dead—although you took your time with it. Let me know when you've made your first million, and we'll talk about it again. Nice you got dreams still; mine ain't doin' so well. It's good to hear your voice, son. But it gets so lonely here . . . alone. I wish that Pete . . . but I gotta go now. I've got a shift to get to."
"I love you, Mom. And there's a place for you here with me."
"That's good to hear, son."
* * * *
Albuquerque was the first place in four months that put any sort of stability into Rick's life—the first place where men weren't almost constantly putting their hands on his hips and moving in real close and telling him how nice he was, how much they wanted him—and then taking him. It wasn't all their fault, of course. Rick liked to be wanted and he liked to be taken. It had become as much an obsession with him as with them. It was only now, though, when he'd gotten to Albuquerque and found a niche where the men swirling around him weren't constantly looking at him for what he could give them, how he could scratch their sexual itch, that Rick started to see what a normal life could be and began to settle in to what every other young man enjoyed from life.
Albuquerque was the first city justifying being called that since Rick had been through Dallas, which now seemed to be a lifetime ago. Certainly then he was much less world experienced and weary than he was now. Albuquerque had an old town plaza area as most of the towns in the region did, but, as one of the first railroad hubs in the West, it also had a new city and even a few high-rise buildings. More important for Rick, it had people and automobiles and freeways. Lots of automobiles. And it had car dealerships with large service departments and auto body shops. And, as he had been told in Santa Fe, it had a shortage of auto mechanics.
Rick was able, almost immediately, to find an assistant oil monkey position at a small body shop, which led, by way of a Mexican supervisor who saw that Rick knew more about what he was doing than most wanting work there, thanks to his auto mechanics classes in Baltimore—to Rick being recommended to the guy's cousin who worked in the service department of Miller's, a large GMC dealership on the east side of Albuquerque.
That cousin, Luis, a large-framed Mexican with a quick humor, a gift for teaching and for patience, and an encyclopedia knowledge of Chevrolets, Buicks, and Cadillacs, took Rick under his wing, and Rick began to blossom under the tutelage of the first man in his life who had no apparent sexual interests—in him or anyone else, it seemed. Luis's mistresses were all vintage automobiles, and the longer Rick worked with him, the more Rick was thusly inclined as well. The other mechanics were mostly Hispanics and mostly related to each other, but they were friendly to Rick—anyone all right with Luis being all right with them too. Although they mostly kept to themselves and rattled Spanish off to each other throughout the working day, Rick didn't feel like he was being frozen out of anything.
Rick was making good money and found a small studio apartment near the car dealership, within walking distance. Here too all he heard around him was Spanish from large Hispanic families crawling all over the neighborhood, jovially chattering to each other incessantly, hanging wash out on every available hook, and celebrating each sunset out in the courtyards with large family gatherings, guitar music, and laughter and food.
They were friendly to Rick but they more or less left him alone, and he liked it that way. He came home in the evening with service manuals under his arm and whatever else he could find on auto mechanics, and he spent his evenings poring over those. He didn't so much forget what had brought him this far from Baltimore as that he was replacing sex with the entirely different arousal of figuring out the mysteries under the hoods of automobiles.
His weekends were spent discovering Albuquerque on foot. He had been held prisoner for so long indoors, it felt good to be able to walk out into the open air, free, and able to make his own decisions and do things on whim and eat what he wanted when he wanted. He joined a gym and worked his body hard, using that to release tension. As chance would have it, the gym was on the fringes of the Central Avenue gay district, which he had also found early in his strolls and had had a little trouble resisting exploring further. At the gym he saw hookups that invariably gave him pause and twitched his butt in memory, but he was determined to take on a new life, revolving around cars that needed help, and he resisted. He was frequently hit on when he first started at the gym, but soon the regulars got the message and left him to himself.
The dealership—in addition to two others—was owned by three brothers. Rick almost never saw the oldest brother, Ted, who was running the Ford dealership. Roy, who managed this one, was the epitome of a used car salesman—at the door with a hand out and a big smile on his face whenever a potential customer was walking along the street. Behind the scenes he was a demanding boss who Luis and the other older guys in the service department continually warned would be a good one to stay the hell away from. That didn't pose a problem. Roy never came into the service department, and, the men joked, probably didn't know where the hood latch was on any of the cars he sold.
The younger brother, Jess, seemed to just float around from dealership to dealership, although Luis had told Rick that he managed the car empire's smaller, exclusively foreign sports car resales dealership on the better side of the town.
Jess was the "golden touch" brother from, Luis told Rick, a younger wife than the other two brothers. He was a lot better looking and much trimmer and significantly younger than the other two. He wore cowboy shirts and a ten-gallon hat much more convincingly than either of his two brothers did, and his smile was more convincing too. When he shook your hand he was looking into your eyes with pale blue ones of his own that made you happy and tingly all at once. He irritated Roy noticeably when he came around the GMC dealership in his vintage baby-blue Cadillac convertible, because he could glide through the showroom in those tooled cowboy boots of his and sell five cars effortlessly.
Everyone wanted to be his friend. He was a poster child for success, and he was always being asked when he was going to run for city council. He often brought his model-perfect blonde wife in with him, his three perfect tow-headed children following along like ducks in a row, and everyone in the dealership—except Roy—snapped to and brightened up in his wake. Every family visit was like a video commercial for him running for office.
And, unlike Roy, Jess didn't stint on the service department. Whenever he showed up, he'd end up in the service department, he and Luis peering under the hood of Jess's beloved Cadillac convertible and worshiping this and that in the engine compartment. He had time to talk to each of the guys in the service area, to ask about their families and to shake their hands. He was especially attentive to Rick and was happy discussing auto parts with him, careful not to rub it in that he knew more than Rick did, and each time leaving Rick knowing more about the automotive industry than he had before Jess had walked through. Once even, Luis had come into work early, as he always did, to find both Rick and Jess already there. Luis spied four legs under the chassis of a car, and both young men came out from underneath it with grease on their hands and their faces and flush from the celebration of, together, having located the source of an oil leak and stopping it up.
Everything was going just fine until Rick saw the quarter-page ad in the Sunday paper. It was for a film series showing at a local club. Sponsored by the local gay community, through an organization called Closet Cinema, the top-rated films of the year's Mirage gay film festival were going to be shown, with short film runs of each, over a two-week period. Without thinking, Rick looked at the list of films being shown.
Journey to Mirage
wasn't hard to find. As the festival grand winner, it was at the top of the list. There were more than a dozen showings he could catch at a local club called the Albuquerque Mining Company. Rick knew where it was—in the middle of the Central Avenue gay district. He hadn't gone inside ever, but he'd been tempted to.
He told himself he wasn't tempted to go see the film that had taken so much out of him and yet fulfilled so many fantasies of his. But even then he knew he would.
