Wandering

After concerts, when the band returned to their hotel, Lorelei, or Lora as most called her, if she didn't stay in her room for sanctuary, she went to the closest thing to it for company, which was Trac's room. Trac for Tractor. Tractor from John Doer, pronounced Deer, thus John Deere tractors. Trac was gay and thus not interested in the company of groupies. Not that he was any less promiscuous as any of the other band members. Any day off they might have in the city, he trolled where the gay horde hung out, and sometimes after a concert when he was particularly randy. By 1980 it had become somewhat easier to find such places in some of the cities than it had been a few years before. Bars and clubs filled with men on the prowl for each other.

Five years older than any of the other band, Trac had been bassist for a few local Cleveland bands, bar bands of highest repute, though none had travelled much past the area of Ohio, Kentucky or Toronto. Leo Hauser recruited him into his band, Leo and the Lions, because Trac's bass playing tended to give a driving force to whatever group which had been lucky enough to have him. Leo wanted his band to rock!

Trac had a gruff presence that matched the rough handsomeness of his long slim face, which matched his tall slim body. But Lorelei soon found out quietness had been mistaken for gruffness, and he actually had a sweet nature, with a touch of meanness in his wit. When he'd slip out a rare word or quip, he'd reveal his cleverness. In small company, he could occasionally become loquacious. Lorelei found Trac to be quite an interesting fellow.

Another meaning of Trac might be tracks: the line of scars, of puncture marks following a vein from the inner elbow down the arm. His hidden somewhat by an elaborate, colorful tattoo of a snake wrapped around the arm with a face at his bicep of an androgynous man with fangs dripping blood. Trac liked junk, especially mixed with coke for speedballs. Sometimes he'd be generous with the extra coke.

Which he was that night in San Francisco when Lorelei gently tapped at his door, having heard guitar and not wanting to disturb him. She'd showered and changed out of her black leather pants and vest, her performance uniform, and into gray sweat pants and a black tank top, much cooler and more comfortable. Despite her cautious knock, he opened the door for her. The guitar playing continued, and she found the source, a scruffy looking man with long brunette hair which tended to grow out rather than down, like a mane, and the beard continued the motif, if not as long, maybe a few weeks growth, just as unkempt. Jutting out the middle was a substantial nose, though on the slim side. A mix of ethnicities: East European Jew and Scotch/Irish.

"Couple lines left on the mirror," Trac told her, nodding towards the table which the stranger sat beside. A portable mirror with a handle which Trac used for the preparation and arrangement of cocaine. Definitely not to examine himself, since Trac was the least vain of any of the band. Even being the only girl in the band, Lorelei considered herself the second least. Make-up only necessary for the stage as far as she was concerned, although she tended to care a great deal about her hair. A dark auburn, neither too thick nor too thin, cut just to her shoulders, with bangs just above her eyebrows, even with the brief shower, she gently blow-dried and brushed a lot before she felt presentable. And she brought her own shampoo and conditioner; only the best would do, and nothing destructive like coloring would ever get close. She considered herself lucky with its natural coloring.

Two smallish lines of white powder remained on the mirror. A rolled up hundred dollar bill rested beside the mirror, which she picked up. "Go ahead and finish it," the stranger said. "Right Trac?"

"Go for it," Trac said.

A line for each nostril she inhaled, then dampened her forefinger to collect anything remaining and brought it to her mouth, coating her gums.

"Joe Solomon," said the stranger once she'd finished.

"Lorelei Leigh," said Lorelei.

"No shit?" Joe asked.

"My mom's a fan of Marilyn Monroe," Lorelei shrugged.

"Not your dad?"

"Don't know. Probably."

"Divorce?"

"Ran away."

"Sorry."

"You didn't know."

"I guess not."

Suddenly it struck her. Joseph Solomon, folksinger. She looked again, beyond the beard, and sort of recognized him. He'd always had that mane, but his face had always been clean shaven. A handsome face bordering on pretty. She'd thought him cute. Not so much anymore. Even if he couldn't have been that old, in his thirties at most, age had cut into his face. Or something. He looked gaunt, any softness gone. But still handsome somehow. Tragically handsome. She sat on the other chair in the room.

"Where have you been Joseph Solomon?" she asked.

He stopped playing. "Heard of me?"

"Obviously," Trac chuckled. Rising off the bed, he knelt and opened a guitar case, pulling out his Gibson acoustic. "Why don't you grab your guitar, Lorelei?"

"Okay."

She tried to be cool, but essentially rushed out the door, returning a couple minutes later with her Ovation. For some reason she felt guilty about its pristine looks. Both Trac's Gibson and Joe's Martin looked like they'd been through hell and back, and both had the soulful sound that proved it.

"You should play him one of your songs," Trac insisted.

"I'd rather hear yours, Joe," Lorelei rebutted.

"Later?" Joe offered.

Lorelei sighed. She thought herself a decent songwriter having been writing for six years, since she was fifteen, and she felt shed found her voice, quirky and dark. But compared to Joseph Solomon...

She decided on one of her simpler ones with a chorus she thought they could join her on. The other two caught onto the chords for the verses fairly quickly, and one time through the chorus, they got that too. They also joined their voices with hers. Trac almost a baritone and Joe a sweet if roughened alto actually higher than her voice.

"Okay?" she asked when it ended.

"Good," Joe grinned. "One more?"

She sighed again and went for her newest song, which she thought was her best yet, although she often thought that of the new ones. It took longer for the two men to join in.

"Again," Joe insisted.

The two joined in, Joe even adding his voice to some of the lines of the verses. His memory impressed her.

"Now you," said Lorelei.

"How about we just jam," said Joe, and began plucking out a beautiful melody, and the other two strummed behind it. When he shifted things, they figured it out too. When he returned to the original melody, he began to sing. Not smooth enough to be from memory, sometimes pausing his words, it was obvious he was improvising.

After he shifted to what was obviously the chorus and improvised that, Lorelei stopped him.

"Wait!" she said. "Aren't you going to write it down?"

"Don't worry, Lorelei," Trac chuckled. "Joe's got perfect memory or something. He's his own recording machine. Even with all the shit he's done to his brain."

Joe started up again. "Want to give it a try?"

"It's not that easy for me to write," Lorelei protested.

"Just let it go. Whatever comes out. Don't even worry about rhyming."

She nodded and shut her eyes and thought about what Joe had been singing about. All about an iterant worker surviving from job to job. Why not reply to him, offering him a home for a while, a place he could stay and rest and everything that might entail?- Steady food. Steady shelter. Steady...love.

And Joe responded to her, why he thought it wasn't a good idea for her. Why he was nothing but trouble and would just break her heart when he finally ran off.

About then there was a knock on the door. Coded it sounded like. "You guys keep going," said Trac, setting aside his guitar and heading to the door and opening it a crack and slipping out.

"His connection?" Lorelei asked.

"Probably," said Joe. "Keep going?"

"Okay." And she argued back. He should stay for as long as he wants. She'd understand if he had to leave. But she'd be there for him if he returned or needed her wherever he was.

Again he argued against her. There were always others like her who he'd use for their company. Why pine for such a wanderer? Why not find someone who would stay and accept the comfort she offered? Who could love her the way she deserved to be loved.

"I'm just a wanderer. Wandering. Wandering. I'm just a wanderer wandering around," went the chorus.

She ended it with, "I could be wandering too, a wanderer wandering with you."

They laughed.

He set down his guitar and pulled out a smoke from his faded blue denim shirt. "Want one?" he asked.

"Sure." She normally didn't smoke except when she did coke.

He jerked the soft pack so that a cylinder of tobacco poked out. Pall Malls. Straights. A bit strong for her, but she'd manage.

After he lit her cigarette with his flip top lighter, he lit his. He finally told her, "Those lines were for me."

"Oh sorry."

"Trac would have snorted them. This here's my last vice. I guess I'll smoke pot if it's offered, but..."

"Then why did Trac offer?"

"I guess he didn't believe me."

"And the smack?"

"That's more serious isn't it? Coke's more recreational. But to me it's like what they say about pot being a gateway drug or something. That's like me with coke. It'd make we want a shot of junk."

"Trac mixes it for a speedball," Lorelei said.

"Exactly. Have you tried it?"

"Heroin? Just snorting once, which wasn't pleasant. It affected me, but probably not as much."

"Probably not."

"The guys got some opium when we were in New York. That was really nice."

"Yeah. Makes you understand what opium dens are all about."

"It does. Probably good that it's not all that available."

"Probably."

The conversation paused. "So where have you been?" she finally asked again.

He chuckled. "So you noticed."

"Of course."

"It's not like I was ever mainstream or anything."

"The album you did with the Furious Jokesters..."

"The Injurious Folksters? Poking the Bare?" he laughed.

"I thought it was called Sold Out."

"Sorry. Inside joke. When me and the guy from Shyte, Greg Collin, got together with the Jokesters, it started with us wanting to do a bunch of crude songs. Hence Poking the Bare, spelled B-A-R-E. But I guess we got over that idea because I started singing this song that they dug, and Greg and a couple Jokesters came up with some cool stuff, so we started taking it seriously. Sort of."

"Yeah. Seriously might not be the word. Except maybe seriously weird, but I found out that's kind of par for the course for you. I mean after I heard that, which was the last thing I found that you recorded, I tracked down all I could of your earlier stuff. Aliens and baseball and trickster coyotes and kangaroos and a paean to bleach? Crazy shit, Joe, but so fucking endearing. Like Tim Buckley without the seriousness."

"Poor Tim. But I do take my stuff seriously."

"I know. So him dying..."

"Yeah. Definitely a sign. Us sensitive sorts...No. I know it's a waste, all those causalities of free love and drugs and rock and roll. The seventies hangover from the sixties hippy shit. And I was like that, taking whatever was offered, and when you're...when you start accruing fans, the fans can offer a lot of drugs and a lot of sex. Even for us marginal stars. And the album did up the stakes a bit to the point I was getting strung out even if I couldn't really afford it. The slippery slope of fame when fame can get you too much of what you want, enough to kill you.

"But for me, the problem was what I wanted, what I seemed to need. A drink or a shot to feed the muse. Not the muse of creation, but the muse of performance. A shot of courage, you know? Becoming a need for more and more shots. Until getting me to stand alone on stage, or if there's a band, standing in front of them with the spotlight on me, it got to a point that I could barely stand at all. And all those poor sods going out of their way to see me, and seeing instead this coward too wasted to face them, just another fucked up alcoholic or fucked up junkie no better than the ones they probably ignored a million times on street corners looking pathetic and babbling nonsense, and they came to me to babble all that nonsense they avoided? Which made me worse than those desperate street corner bums, because I got their fucking money, didn't I? They didn't avoid me, did they?"

"You felt ashamed?" Lorelei asked.

"I guess I did."

"So you went cold turkey?"

"Yeah. I wasn't strung out enough to need methadone or some such. But I figured out I was an alcoholic, and couldn't replace my jones with drink, because that was just as bad or worse. So yeah, I went cold turkey. I actually went to my mom's place, because she's a nurse. I really had no one else. A bunch of people like Trac, you know? It was a desperate move because I didn't want her to know her son was a junkie. But it was kind of hard to hide, since I had tracks on my arms. But she was cool with it. She just wanted me to never do it again. And I just had to be honest with her. I owed her. I'll always owe her.

"Problem was I figured out I needed my fucking muse. My liquid courage since I was fifteen and singing in some talent thing in high school. One of the first times I drank I stole from my dad's liquor cabinet some scotch. And that's how it went."

"When you're composing?"

"When I'm straight, maybe a little hungover or a lot. Sometimes I'm singing about the DTs."

"Imaginary monsters."

"Something like that. So you managed to track my shit down?"

"Found some other girls into you. You know you tend to attract us girls."

He laughed. "So I've heard."

"So you haven't been performing, but..."

"Yeah, I've kept writing. I guess I just can't help myself."

"But you're not playing?"

"I busk. For some reason I'm cool with that. A natural bum. It keeps me in cigarettes and sometimes a place to crash."

"Like groupies?"

"Not really no. Sometimes. Somebody like Trac comes around from the old days, or someone like me who's got a pad. It's not like I smell so good, you know?"

"You want to clean up? You could borrow my shower, since when Trac gets back..."

He nodded, understanding the temptation implied. "You wouldn't mind?"

"Of course not. And I bet I got some big shirts you could wear, and some sweat pants like this. It's what I like to sleep in."

"Thanks."

Once in her room, he immediately dropped his well-traveled guitar case, matching the well-traveled guitar inside and went into the bathroom. "Probably needed to shit," she thought and whatever noises that made were lost in the sound of the fan in there. She sat at her desk and started writing some of the lines she remembered from the Wandering song into her notebook/journal.

He popped his head out a few minutes later. "Mind if I use your razor?" he asked.

"There should be some small clippers if you want to cut your beard down in that little black bag."

"Okay."

"And feel free to use my shampoo and conditioner. It's really good shit."

"Thanks."

She felt an urge to join him. He'd excited her before, his voice and songs and pictures. He excited her more being in his presence. He might not have been as beautiful as he once was, but he was still handsome and still had an attractiveness which bordered on charisma. She touched herself thinking about it. Just lightly stroking her nipples which engorged and made points against her shirt. Then a gentle pressure against her clit. "Fuck it," she murmured, and when she heard the shower, she stripped off the shirt and pants and panties and entered the bathroom naked. His body was a shadow in the fabric that served as an outer curtain. "Want your back cleaned?" she asked.

"Please," he replied.

He looked different naked. His long lean body all muscle and sinew. His shaved face looked even more gaunt and yet somehow quite handsome. Just a whisper of hair on his chest with a much more hair surrounding his cock, a cock which already began to grow longer and thicker while she watched, expanding with tiny bounces at the rate of a heartbeat.

He was studying her too. Her soft pale skin. Her full breasts that required a c cup but with a resilience which made her not wear bras all that often. They didn't work with her leathers on stage which showed all the cleavage and lower. Her full ass matched her breasts in both size and resilience, with a gradual curve to her waist giving them somewhat of a pear shape. She had some convexity at her belly, and some softness, but nothing that could be called fat. And beneath the softness lay a firmness, a muscled strength much like her thighs and her arms. Muscles hidden beneath a layer of femininity.

"You're beautiful," he breathed, looking into her emerald green eyes after finishing the traversing of her body. They were set in a pale rounded face that went to a softly pointed chin. Her nose, on the small side, upturned slightly at its end. A small scar on her right cheek near her eye somehow made her more beautiful or more special of something.

"I think you are too," she smiled, gazing into his expressive blue/gray eyes. "But you need to turn around if I'm washing your back."

He laughed and turned. "Nice butt," she couldn't help saying. And it was. Firm and small and well-shaped. She'd get to it. First a soapy washcloth washed his shoulders, which were broader than expected giving him an almost triangular shape. "You work out?"

"A combination of a starvation diet, working shit day work jobs, and swimming at the Y at least once a week."

"When you get around to showering," she snorted.

"Something like that," he chuckled.

When she finally reached his ass, felt the firmness within the two hemispheres, more urges came, and she knelt and reached between his sinuous slim thighs with one hand, capturing his completely erect cock, slim and long like the rest of him while, almost an afterthought, her other hand continued cleaning his cheeks.

"Fuck," he moaned.

She kept pulling on it while continuing to clean him, his thighs and calves. He braced himself against the wall of the shower with both hands as if surrendering. Her even strokes were driving him nuts. And filling his nuts with seed wanting to be released and impregnate.

Finally when done cleaning, she murmured, "Turn around." When he did, she took his cock and placed it between her lips.

"Fuck," he moaned again. He had nothing to hold onto so he held onto her, one hand on her shoulder and the other on her head, being careful not to guide her, though he was tempted.

Her eyes barely glanced up at him before returning to his cock as if concentrating at the task at hand. Both lips and tongue worked his knob, rubbing and polishing. When she let go of it with her mouth, she showed him her smile before filling it with his cock again. This time her lips sliding farther down his shaft before sliding back across the corona of his glans. Down and back. Down and back. Each time with a little more pressure. Bringing him ever closer to much needed relief. But it took her hand grasping the shaft towards the base and pulling and her other hand gently grasping his balls and squeezing to bring his release.

"Lora," he could only manage to say before his hips jutted forward. With her fist there and her mouth ready, she managed to keep from gagging while she worked even harder to bring forth his cum for the last couple seconds. Then feeling the expansion, the great first throb, she moved her mouth to just his knob and began to swallow the bittersweet liquid he filled it with. Her hand actually squeezed and pulled like he was a tube of toothpaste encouraging more filling and more swallowing.

Though unsteady, he managed to keep standing while his orgasm completely overwhelmed him. And just as things were getting too sensitive, she moved off him, stood and gazed up at his flushed face with a sexy little smirk. He lowered his face and kissed her. After several small kisses, their lips sealed, and his tongue tapped at her teeth and she opened them for him and he tasted his unpleasant pungency but didn't mind. The touch of tongue against tongue was too electric to mind. And he swore he could feel his cock harden again!