A private show with a client could range from anything to dancing around to licking his toes. Treston always made it clear he only practiced safe sex and didn’t get into anything kinky. If they wanted kink, they had to go somewhere else. There were many things Treston wanted to experience in life, but being tied up and peed on was not one of them. In this case, all the gray-haired guy wanted Treston to do was sit on his lap and give him a hand job. When it was over, he gave Treston a fifty-dollar bill for being such a good sport and left the room without a backward glance. This didn’t always happen; the men usually paid Chickey up front and Chickey would give Treston his cut after the private session. And Chickey was decent about this; he never asked the guys for a cut of the tips the clients gave them in private. Chickey treated the guys with respect because he’d once been a male stripper himself—back when male strip clubs were not easy to find.
After he showered and dressed, Treston met Chickey up front near the bar and Chickey slipped three one-hundred-dollar bills into his back pocket. Though some of the other male strippers frowned on this, and they refused to do private shows for men, they never said a word aloud about it. Treston had said no to plenty of private shows himself when he didn’t feel like doing them. He liked to think of himself more as a dancer and a male model than a hooker. But once in a while he needed the extra cash, and he’d needed it more than ever. He was so thankful and so happy to get it, he hugged Chickey before he left and said, “Thanks, man. You’re the best.”
He felt so good he took a taxi home. He deserved it after all he’d been through that day. As he glanced out the back window at tourists and passersby on the strip, in their ill-fitted wrinkled clothes and their plastic flip-flops, and thought about his options. For now he was doing the only thing he knew how to do. He’d grown up with a mother who’d basically made a living doing the same things. After he’d dropped out of high school at seventeen to work at Chickey’s club, she moved to Texas with a trucker she’d met at work. She’d kissed him goodbye and said, “I love you and I know you can take care of yourself now. I’m getting too old to dance and I need to make a life. I’ll keep in touch.” At the time, she was forty years old. They kept in touch once or twice a year. He didn’t have any other living relatives and he couldn’t look for his father because his mother didn’t have a clue. The one thing that frightened him the most was he knew he would be too old to dance one day and he wasn’t sure what he would do when the time came. He’d always been realistic about his options and knew he would never be a nurse, a teacher, or a dental assistant. Real-estate agent might be an option, but even this seemed so far out of his reach. His only viable option was to find the right man and marry him while he was still young enough to do it. That’s what guys like him did, and they usually did it with older men who had more money than they did.
He’d laughed once when a female tourist passing through town told him he had “options” and he could do whatever he wanted to do. Oh, it was a precious little pep talk, indeed. She was a know-it-all “mom” from trendy San Francisco, in Vegas for the weekend. She had no idea Treston had just blown her so-called straight husband while she’d been playing slot machines at a casino on the strip. They were standing outside a smaller casino. Treston was looking for a breath mint. She was waiting for the husband to return from the men’s room. At first, Treston did not know she belonged to the man he’d just blown. She started talking to Treston and asked what he did. He told her he was a stripper and she frowned. She put her arm around him and said, “You can be anything you want to be. You have to have hope and believe in change. And I firmly believe in the power of prayer. Jesus loves you, honey.”
At the time, Treston smiled and said, “I see.” He actually prayed often. But deep down he wondered about how she would have handled the same circumstances. It was easy to tell people they have options when you’re being supported by a husband who’d do anything for you except tell you he liked guys to suck him off in public bathrooms. Then the husband came over to meet his wife, looking terrified when he saw Treston talking to her. Treston just smiled and walked away. He knew he could have floored her that day—rocked her world. But he’d never been a mean person. And he did take a certain amount of quiet satisfaction when he glanced back and the husband glanced back at the same time. The wife was still talking and not paying attention. The husband smiled and nodded at Treston, then turned and put his arm around his chattering wife.
When the taxi dropped him off at his apartment, he tipped the driver extra and thanked him. On the way inside, he wondered if maybe he should learn how to drive a taxi. That might be a viable option for him when he got too old to dance.
But he was so tired all he wanted to do was fall into bed. He hadn’t eaten all day and he still wasn’t hungry. As he crossed to the bed, he removed all his clothes. He climbed under the covers and reached for his phone on the nightstand. After he put the plugs into his ears, he switched off the light and closed his eyes. He reminded himself he had to go to the laundromat the next day, wash the sweatsuit Cooper Boon had loaned him, and return it to the ranger’s station at Lake Mead. Within moments he drifted into a deep sleep. And as You Are My Sunshine played on his phone, he tried as hard as he could not to think about what had happened with Harlan Rocks, a man he knew he would never see again.
Chapter Five
Before Treston went to work the following night, he took a cab to Lake Mead and he dropped off the sweatsuit Cooper Boon had let him borrow at the park ranger’s station. He’d taken the suit to the laundromat earlier that afternoon and used a special detergent and fabric softener to make it smell especially nice. Then he wrapped it in tissue paper, put it in a pale blue Tiffany’s bag someone had once given him a gift in that he’d been saving for the right occasion, and added a small box of expensive chocolate truffles. No one had ever done anything this nice for him and he wanted to repay Cooper with a small gesture to show he knew Cooper had gone out of his way and that he appreciated what Cooper had done for him.
But Cooper Boon wasn’t there. When Treston walked into the station, he found the same park ranger sitting behind the same desk eating a box of Oreos Hostess Twinkies instead of doughnuts. He gestured fast and said, “Please don’t get up. I just wanted to return the sweatsuit I borrowed yesterday from Mr. Boon. I have a taxi outside waiting. I can’t stay long.” Then he set the bag on the ranger’s desk and turned back toward the door.