Page 14 of A Long Con

Early morning commotion rose from the bar below me.

For decades I’d been on a regimented sleep schedule. Since leaving wrestling, all bets were off. The guys I guarded had very late nights some of the time, and then we were expected to rise at the buttcrack of dawn to haul their weary bodies somewhere. Or sometimes, just bodies.

It messed with my sleep hygiene. Then you added copious amounts of Oxy that I had to take for my chronic back and knee pain, and you had one sad sack of a moke, a shell of my former self. Sure, I still worked out, usually with Ormond, Bond, and Harte and lately, that new priest turned exorcist, Antonio. Now there was a character with many stories to tell.

But Bent Zealots clamoring in the pool hall at eight in the morning? That was unheard of, unless there was some dramatic reason for an early chapel. That’s what they called their closed-door meetings. But it sounded like chairs were scraping around by the pool tables, and bikers talked in joyous, carefree shouts.

Gulping my bitter homemade coffee, I tried to listen in. I heard Hobie Cleminshaw say, “Open that blind! I want natural light.” And Anson Dineyazzie, of all people, responding, “Okay. So we’re going with a mixture of natural and incandescent lighting?”

I frowned. Were they staging a photo shoot? When Twinkletoes said, “I brought my own bottle of linseed oil,” I was completely stumped. It could still be a photo shoot, but of an erotic nature. Now I was intrigued.

I did a major spit take, though, when Berkeley Moynihan’s voice rang out like a string of fireworks. For a moment there, I leaned over the sink, afraid I’d vomit.

Is that what Berkeley did to me, make me want to puke? Just as I asked myself that, the answer was plain. No, Berkeley Moynihan broke da mouth like delicious grinds. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since that night a week ago when I’d just voluntarily dropped to my knees like some kind of subservient bottom, taken his cock into my mouth, and serviced him like a—well, like a true submissive.

That’s what made me feel ill. I was coming to the realization that, although I was a buff musclehead, at heart I wanted nothing more than to pleasure another man. Especially if that meant taking his cock into my mouth—or someday even up the ass. That was my distant dream that I’d never dared to enact, not in all three of the feeble gay scenes I’d been involved in. In one of them, truth be told, I serviced a fully-dressed WWE executive in his office. He was an older, foul-mouthed guy who tore handfuls of my hair, and it was like acting out one of my scripts as he growled at me to “swallow my man chowder” and “take a load of my snake spray.”

It was an idiotic script, if it even was one, but I was massively turned on by the idea of satisfying an older white-haired dude, a daddy if you will. I didn’t even care if that meant I had daddy issues. It was just supremely gratifying to see this in-command man who yelled at everyone completely at my mercy. With every stroke of my tongue he became putty in my hands. He could shout at me to “eat my cum gun” all he wanted, but it was me who was truly in control. When he collapsed back in his chair gasping, pushing me away from him, I knew I had really won, not him. His eyes shined with helplessness and a sort of adoration when he gazed at me. Sure, my own dick was stretching the seams of my jeans, but I had won.

The unexpected scene with Berkeley threw me for a loop because he was a younger, lithe, slick-haired guy. But when he grabbed me by the back of the neck and ordered me to suck him, I knew I would. I’d had hundreds, maybe thousands, of gay offers in my time. I’d only succumbed to now four of them. And this fourth one really put the hook in me.

That was why I’d stayed away from Berkeley.

I was sort of glad when that ginger hippie guy in the Baja hoodie interrupted us. I wouldn’t have known how to remove myself from that scene, because I was weak when it came to that. For such a giant brute of a man, I was a softie if you treated me right. Berkeley forcing me to my knees to slobber on his big limb of a penis, well, that was treating me right.

That black Irish bastard had really gotten to me. We were brain injury brahs in blood, tried and true. We could understand the strange workings of each other’s damaged brains. When I laid eyes on his walls of inner self-expressions, I was thunderstruck. This was a man with many layers, and I was just dying to peel them off, examining each one. This was a man I could study, or live with, forever. He would never be dull because some new persona of his would always capture my attention. In an instant, I knew that was what I’d been looking for. A man of many dimensions. The paintings of hallways, doors, and windows showed me this.

And now, downstairs, I heard Berkeley Moynihan saying, “Okay, does everyone have their easels set up?”

Easels! Were they painting a nude woman? A nude man? This I had to see.

By going in the back door of the alley where we parked our rides, I could be sneaky and not interrupt Berkeley. If he was giving a class, I wouldn’t have to talk to him. I could just lean against a column with my thumbs tucked into my jean pockets—so enhancing the girth of my package—without communicating a word with that Apollo.

Excellent plan.

The Prospect Pothole was behind the bar pouring water into a coffeemaker. He nodded to acknowledge me, and I continued into the gaming area.

The sight before me would never be repeated in the history of bikerdom.

Two rows of thugs were arranged facing the jukebox. Each man had his own cocktail table, but the napkin dispensers and saltshakers had been removed to make room for little easels. Some men set them up vertically like laptops while others hovered over them protectively while looking side to side, as if someone would steal their idea. Twinkletoes flipped a pencil like a cigar between his fingers, his scrawny legs stretched out, his high-top sneakers like boats. Particularly intent was Anson Dineyazzie, his obsidian laser-sharp eyes focused on the teacher. He was always that way, but even more so today. It was like he was determined to be the best damned painter since de Kooning.

Berkeley Moynihan shocked me with the impact of his beauty. He was far, far more gorgeous than I’d remembered, almost too hot to exist. Better than a nude man or woman model, he stood alone by the jukebox in a tight black T-shirt, his only prop one of his paintings. Colored charcoal on black board, it depicted a screaming person in the throes of psychosis. One of those electrode hats either zapped or withdrew brain waves from the screamer. Covering this image, benevolently or like a demon, another wire-haired person had eyes of different colors. Fact, the whole face was bisected—two separate colors, shapes, emotions. But the overall effect was that this person, too, was suffering greatly.

Berkeley didn’t appear to see me.

“I had a stroke while in a coma,” he told the class. “It almost killed me. I still might have only five or ten years to live with this metal clip in my brain.”

Kokami!My heart pinged with a bolt of pain. Why did I care whether or not Berkeley lived another ten, twenty years?

“My personality changed. I felt this sudden urge to make art. I couldn’t recognize my mother, but she saw what I was doing to the walls” —everyone chuckled except Anson, who took it dead serious— “and gave me a giant canvas notebook like you guys have. The drawings continued on the walls, but I learned to funnel, to focus them onto the smaller paper. That’s what I want you to do. You might want to draw a buffalo, but I want you to focus it onto the canvas. All this art may be pouring from your brain, and you need to move on and live life to its fullest.”

“I think most of us want to draw naked men,” said Rover. I was surprised he was there, and not sleeping off a flakka hangover.

Berkeley said, “Naked men are fine. You can play with form and materials, line and color. It will show the struggle of your mind to make sense of the world.”

Anson frowned. “Make sense of dicks?”

“In a way, yes. You’ll see. You’ll be reborn like I was. You’ll realize you’re just like babies exploring the world around you. Creating art from the image in your mind, opening doors. . . “