Big Sky Country Ch. 06

"What do you mean you are staying in New York?"

They had just had sex in the bed in in Manhattan in one of the Roosevelt Hotel's cheaper rooms, convenient to Madison Square Garden, where the Rocky Marciano-Archie Moore championship prizefight would occur that evening, on September 21st, 1955. Gabe—once again Gabe, as the New York gangster he was escorting to the fight would like that better than Gabriel—had dressed and was combing his hair. He peered at Adrian Ames through the reflection in the bureau mirror. Adrian, still naked, still half hard and fondling his cock with one hand and smoking a Camel with the other after having plowed Gabe, was lying on his back, propped up on pillows, legs bent and spread, and watching Gabe finishing dressing.

They had both been brought into New York from Los Angeles by a Broadway show producer who was trying to woo a mafia don into backing his new play. Through the Apollo Entertainment escort service, Adrian had topped for the stage producer when he came to Los Angeles. When he wanted a submissive escort to match up with the New York gangster he was cultivating, Adrian had suggested Gabe.

Gabe had given the green light to Julio Martinez to give Jay Jones the part he wanted in the movie filming down on the Baja Peninsula, and Jay had then unceremoniously rousted Gabe out of his pool cottage, but that hadn't meant that Gabe had taken Martinez up on his offer to change sugar daddies. Instead, he'd tracked down Adrian, hooked up with him in bed again, and moved in with him in a studio apartment. Gabe had thought he could make it on his own as movie background fodder, but he couldn't—he'd lost the patronage of both Jay Jones and Julio Martinez. Martinez had, in fact, shown a vindictiveness toward Gabe's getting work in the studio, for Gabe having turned his offer of a kept boy toy down. He'd stopped short of ruining Gabe, though, as Gabe was now a headache to him—and mostly to Jay Jones—because of what he could tell the world if he was pushed too far. Gabe hadn't wanted to get into that sort of mud, though. Adrian had gotten him set up with Apollo Entertainment as an escort/male whore.

"But the movies. You wanted to make a try at getting into the movies," Gabe said.

"That hasn't happened. Tony says he'll get me some stage work and an Equity card. You have your Equity card; I don't. And he says he'll pay for acting lessons. In the meantime he'll hook me up with an escort service in New York that pays better than Apollo does."

"But where will you live?"

"Tony says the escort service provides the apartment—something snazzy. They go for a high-class clientele, so they give the guys and women good digs. But Tony says if I don't want to do it that way, I can live with him. He's on the hook, Gabe. He can't get enough of me. He's even going to take me with him to play openings. He's known to the queer set in New York. They think that's intellectual and chic here. He's going to acknowledge me openly. That's something no one will do in Los Angeles."

"But your apartment—our apartment—in L.A. . . ."

"The lease is up at the end of October. I'll pay my share until then. You can keep it or get another roommate—I doubt, though, if you can find one who fucks you as good as I do." He laughed at that, but Gabe didn't join him. "Come into the escort business with me. You can make enough at Apollo and you've got your foot in the door in the movies."

Gabe didn't respond to that. He knew that the doors were being slammed on his foot in the movies. He knew that Martinez had put the word out on him—quietly, of course, not knowing that the word would get back to him. Martinez still wanted him and was using his power to get Gabe to knuckle under to him, but Gabe knew that the man would be even more possessive and dominating knowing that Gabe had resisted him and failed. Maybe if the man weren't such a big lump. And his cocking—once he got into it, he could be really rough.

"Or you could stay here," Adrian said. "You have your card and something on your résumé. You could do stage work. And you could, I'm sure, work for the same escort agency Tony will get me in with."

"And I could live with you? We could stay together?"

"We could fuck occasionally. But Tony's my meal ticket here. I'll do what Tony wants me to do. I don't think he wants me living with another guy and not being his totally eventually. You could get established on your own fast enough, though. So, what do you think?"

"What does it matter what I think, Adrian? You said this guy I'll be with tonight is a bruiser and a gangster?"

"He's probably a teddy bear," Adrian said, rolling over the edge of the bed and sitting up, ready now to prepare for the night at the fights himself. "Tony says the guy can't stop giggling that his name is Rocky and he's going to a Rocky Marciano fight."

* * * *

It was a bloody fight, and Marciano went down, in the second round, to a four count, and then, miraculously, was up again. He persisted, the two muscled warriors whaling away at each other, landing blows, dancing around, going into the clutch. Gabe thought he'd hate it, but it fascinated him. He found it sensual and arousing. The men had beautiful bodies and they almost seemed to be making love as they battered each other and went into sweaty clinches, each man fighting for dominance, trying to force the other man into submission, pounded down to the mat, with the victor standing over the panting vanquished, each bloodied and bruised, each giving his all.

They had good seats—out of the spatter of blood and sweat but close enough to see the expression on the men's faces. Both men were in a state of ecstasy. They'd both been made for this, this struggle for domination and control.

The reactions of the four men in Tony's party were very different. Tony was only here to impress Rocky. He was a submissive himself, bordering on feminine. His world was one of beauty and pretense and deception. It was the opposite of what was happening in the ring. There was a very real fight for dominance and victory in the ring. And it was raw and, in Tony's perceptions, ugly. There wasn't anything beautiful in Tony's eyes in what was going on in the ring. So he spent the fight looking down into his lap or across the audience, his eyes picking out men who he'd like to cover him.

For his part, Adrian was just bored. He saw no purpose to these two men with beautiful bodies messing each other up just for a gold metal championship belt that was too bulky to wear anywhere. He'd been told there was good money involved, but he'd responded that the fighters themselves wouldn't see much of that, and I couldn't disagree with that assessment. Both fighters were tops; he was a top. They were bruisers; he kept his body toned in movie star trim—waiting to become one at any moment. They were in droopy, sweat-stained shorts. He dressed to impress and had done so this evening. His mind kept going back to what he was going to have to do with Tony later that night and whether he could go hard enough to do it. He could see that the fight was bringing out Tony's need to be manhandled.

Adrian wasn't aroused by pansies. That's why he liked fucking Gabe. Gabe had a beautiful, muscular body and, though he went totally submissive, he retained the sense that he was a man. That a man would give in completely to another man like Gabe did was why men, including Adrian, liked to fuck Gabe. Tony was a pansy. And, as far as Adrian could see, he was going to have to manage to get it up for Tony for the foreseeable future. His eyes went to the ring occasionally, but his mind was skipping two years ahead. Where would he be then? What would he be doing? Who would be doing it with? Tony had asked him earlier to move his things from the Roosevelt after the fight—to go ahead and move in with him. Adrian was undecided on whether to come under Tony's sway that fast.

Rocky was in heaven. Tony had guessed perfectly in wanting to get at Rocky's interest and pocketbook. Rocky's gofer had screwed up in getting tickets to the fight, the fight of the century, as far as Rocky was concerned. He hadn't gotten them seats close enough to the action to be "in" the fight themselves. Archie Moore was the world light heavyweight champion and Rocky Marciano, who had won all of his professional matches thus far, all forty-eight of them, lusted for the forty-ninth win. Rocky, cheering for Marciano simply because they had the same name, lusted for a fight to bloody subjugation, mentally putting himself in the position of a superior fighter beating down a young opponent. He lusted after men sexually too. He lusted after the young man he'd been set up with for the evening. It wasn't lost on him that Gabe was sexually aroused by the fight too. Rocky's hand went from Gabe's knee to his basket, finding the young man hard. Gabe's gaze at the ring was hard too, his eyes glittering. Rocky could hardly wait to get Gabe alone in the hotel suite Tony had booked for them near Madison Square Garden.

Rocky Marciano knocked Archie Moore out in the ninth round, winning the forty-ninth of his forty-nine professional fights—and retired before fighting in the professional ring again.

The two couples split at the end of the fight, Rocky so anxious to get Gabe to the suite Tony had gotten him at the Hotel Pennsylvania at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street that he barely acknowledged Tony and Adrian when they left. Gabe was so keyed up for sex that he went with the all-hands hustle the short distance to the hotel and up to the suite.

Once in the suite, the fuck became very different to any Gabe had had before. The two men went into a standing clutch just inside the door, tearing at each other's clothes, their mouths in a lip lock and their hands exploring and grabbing. Gabe almost hyperventilated when he discovered that Rocky was carrying—that he had a shoulder holster under his suit coat and a nasty-looking hand gun. That became a worry for later, though, when, basically stripped down except for the holster, with its chest harness, on Rocky's bare, meaty, and heavily hirsute chest, Rocky punched Gabe in the gut and then caught him on the chin with an upper cut to the jaw. They were going to have a prize fight right here in the hotel room, and Gabe was not expected to win.

Gabe put up a fight of it—he wasn't a pushover—but Rocky had him by surprise, an initial getting ahead of the count, and a good fifty pounds. Keyed up by the prize fight they'd just seen and full of blood lust, Rocky pounded Gabe into submission. Gabe went to the mat in round one.

Rocky fucked him on the floor, covering him doggie style and ramming him hard. Gabe blacked out and when he came to, he was stretched out on the bed, his wrists bound by his leather belt and hooked on a decorative spike on the headboard. Rocky was fucking him in a missionary, and, seeing that Gabe was awake, he rammed the barrel of his gun under Gabe's chin and told him to take it. He continued to fuck him hard and Gabe took it. He almost tossed his dinner when he heard the click of the gun and Rocky's laugh. And then he passed out again while Rocky was choking him.

The next time he woke, he was in the hospital. He was told that he was found, thankfully with his trousers on, on the floor of an elevator when it opened in the hotel lobby. A policeman visited him in the hospital, but Gabe claimed to be hazy about anything that had happened after he'd left his room at the Roosevelt to check out Times Square. He had no illusions about how he would fare if he made any mention of Rocky and the mafia or led the police to Tony. Neither Adrian nor Tony showed up at the hospital.

He was in the hospital for three days.

Adrian didn't visit him in the hospital, but a lawyer representing the escort agency did.

"Don't worry. We've taken care of all of the hospital bills," he said.

"Terrific. Does this often happen with your agency?" Gabe asked.

"We pay very well," was the nonanswer, which Gabe took to be, in fact, an answer.

"And the john . . . the mafia guy . . . Rocky?" he asked.

"He's a mafia guy," was the oblique answer that Gabe also accepted as an answer. "He'll have to pay a lot more the next time," the lawyer added.

"That's just great," Gabe said.

When he got out of the hospital, he went to the Roosevelt, to be told that Adrian had checked out three days earlier and the hotel bill had been paid. They had kept Gabe's suitcase with the clothes he'd brought to New York in their holding room.

Gabe went from the hotel to the airport. He made a phone call and then turned in his return-flight ticket to Los Angeles, buying a ticket to another destination altogether.

* * * *

"God, Gabe, you look like you were run over by a dump truck. You OK?"

"Thanks for asking, Frank. So, you're not glad to see me unless I'm tied up in a pretty bow." Gabe was aware that Frank Doyle had been hopping up and down like a puppy dog and raced down from the observation deck of the Lubbock, Texas, airport to the baggage claim area the moment Gabe had climbed out of the plane.

"Of course I'm glad to see you. I'm been pissing myself with anxiety to see you ever since you called me from New York. Were you mugged there, or what? And I thought you had gone to Los Angeles—with Jay Jones. But about Jay Jones—"

"Yes, I'm OK, Frank. Good to see you too. I can carry my own bag, thanks. And thanks for coming into Lubbock to pick me up."

"I would have gone to New York to pick you up, Gabe. But about Jay Jones. I assume you've flown in because you heard he came back to finish off that movie being filmed at Brighton Ranch. But you should know—"

"No, I didn't come here for Jones, Frank," Gabe said. "A lot has happened since I was with Jay Jones. And that's a story best not picked apart."

"I'm glad to hear that," Frank answered. And, indeed, he looked very relieved. "Because I'm afraid Jones is dead. He roared out in the yellow Ford Sunliner we saw over there when you went to work there, and damned if he didn't wrap that around the same telephone pole that other actor, Collin Chisholm, hit with his motorcycle."

Gabe dropped his suitcase and stood still in his tracks. They were half way between the terminal doors and the parking lot. "Look at me Frank. I'm sorry Jay Jones is dead. But my thing with Jay Jones died some time ago. All of my fancy plans for what I thought I wanted to do with my life died a couple of nights ago. Jones was just a user. Nearly all of the men I've been with were just users—all but one. I had reality beat into me and I had time lying in a hospital bed to think about what I really wanted. What I really want, Frank, is you . . . and a life at Sunshine Ranch with you. If I haven't burnt my bridges with you. I know I treated you rotten. I know—"

"Shut up and get in the car, Gabe," Frank said, his voice choked up. "I can't wait to get you to the ranch. I can't wait to get you home."

"And into bed?"

"Well, we have a couple of new horses to break in, and you're the best one I've known to be able to do that."

"Oh," Gabe answered.

"Well, and, yes, to get you into bed."

Both men grinned.

- FINI -