The Last Go-Go Boy

Wall Street judges prosperity according to the Dow Jones. This economic barometer responded the 5% growth in GNP with a series of swaying openings and closings. Most financial investors and bankers are more concerned with their bonuses than the lot of the common worker. For that large segment of the US population the rise in GNP means less employees once more producing more profit for their companies without compensation and no one protests for fear of losing their job.

After all a recession is when a friend loses a job and depression is when you lose yours.

The economy is still in the shitter and I have to ask myself what jobs are available for a 57 year-old man. My friend Bruce Benderson took me to dinner as thanks for selling his rings. The Asia-fusion restaurant was crowded with young people. My competition for a job. I explained my fears to Bruce and he suggested that I lose ten pounds and apply for a job as a go-go boy at a gay retirement home.

"They want someone young." I felt my age more and more, although my wife kept reminding me I wasn't 17 anymore. She's 25 and my son is one year old. I figure I have to work until I'm 80.

"You are young." Bruce had quit the stage after Mayor Giuliani closed the strip bars of Times Square. "Young for the old queens in the nursing homes. None of them have seen anyone young as you in decades. You could charge the homes $100 a visit. Has to be better for the old geezers than any other medicine."

"Thanks for the idea." My last visit to Boston had been to my father. He lives in a retirement village for Alzheimer patients. Mostly female. They smiled at me, as if i might be someone they knew. My father was the same. He thinks I'm his son still, but he's not sure why. None of these inmates need any erotic dancing.

"It's not a bad idea. Hell, you could franchise it in Florida. How many retirement homes you think are in the Sunshine State. Thousands. There has to be a market for it."

"Probably." I ordered scallop and seaweed noodles. A glass of wine. The waiter was thin and handsome. He had to be 30 years younger than me.

"And who knows? You might be able to sex them up." Bruce caressed the waiter's behind. He was a regular here. The waiter laughed walking away content to know he would be receiving a good tip. Bruce liked to pay for sex in any form. Love was another story.

"No way." I barely wanted to have sex with myself let alone.

"Why because you're too good to have sex with someone older than you. Like me." He frowned at this unintended insult. "What about the woman you had sex with in Palm beach? You said she was over 70."

"That was different." Helen was the publisher of a Florida magazine. We smoked reefer together. Her apartment overlooked Lake Worth. The address was in West Palm.

"How? She said she hadn't had cock in her mouth in ten years. She begged for it and you gave it to her."

"It was a mercy mission." The lights were off, the curtains filling with the gulf breeze, and Helen was wearing sheer lingerie and satin high heels. On her knees she did everything.

"Maybe the first time, but what about the second time?" Bruce sat back to let the waiter deliver our appetizers. Fried calamari for him. Raw bluepoints for me. "Gore Vidal said about orgies that once is experimentation, but twice is perversity."

"The second time was because I was drunk." Two bottles of wine and a joint. Helen had her way with me. I was her slave. "They was no third time."

"Only because you saw her with another man and found out she uses that 'haven't tasted cock' line with all the fresh meat in Palm Beach, so don't tell me you can't go-go boy anymore. You're the master of re-inventing yourself."

"I'd rather rob a bank." I sucked down an oyster. It tasted of the Atlantic. The boyhood border of my home in Maine.

"And end up a stick boy in prison." Bruce was enjoying himself. "You do what you have to do to survive. Believe me. I know."

"I know you do." Bruce was in his 60s. He was a well-known writer. His novels were in every bookstore. His tales of hustlers and go-go boys were cult classic within the gay community. His name in in Wikpedia. All that means almost nothing. Bruce is forever broke. Same as everyone in America, except for the very rich, and they have no use for an old go-go boy.