S I X
EXTENDED/ FAMILY
Logan Banford’s grandmother had been one of those tedious Christians whom, come to Jesus late in life, mixed with the dumb conviction of the old a convert’s zeal long after most women who had persisted in their religions were old enough and wise enough to mind their own business. She was always talking to him about knowing Jesus, about true salvation, about the real God, and part of him wondered if she wasn’t right. Of course he wasn’t right with God. She told him all about Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, the blinding light. He half way believed it. He’d been close to something like it. But suddenly he knew that if his grandmother wasn’t totally full of shit, then she must have been a little filled with shit because here, here was the blinding light, the road to Damascus, the vision that made him ask: where have I been all this time?
Brunhilde, sword raised, sang on and on and Logan didn’t need a translation. The moment George had said he was taking him to see Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Logan had studied the story, even seen clips of the opera. It wasn’t over until the fat lady sang. And now the fat lady was singing. It was over. Sigfried was being placed on the funeral pyre. The fire was leaping. Well, not real fire, but the opera had caught his mind so it might as well have been true fire. Brunhilde, face alight, was calling for a higher fire, now calling for her horse, Grane. Now she was on the horse, triumphantly singing “Hojitoho! Hojitoho!” She rode into the fire to be burnt to ashes and reunited with Sigfried. The Rhine overran its banks and washed the fire and ash away. The Rhine Maids had their ring. Hagen, greedy for the ring, leapt into the water and drowned. Where had this spectacle been Logan’s whole life?
“You really weren’t bored?” George said as everyone rose to their feet. The applause shook the floor of the opera house.
“No,” Logan said, amazed, clapping his hands, thinking that, in his amazement he probably looked like a rube. He didn’t care.
Out onto the stage came Gunther. He stood there, and with a mixture of humility and pride he received the applause.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Logan said. “I need more. I want more.”
Now came Sigfried and the crowd roared with delight.
“More? You’ve had four nights!”
“And I didn’t get tired of any of it,” Logan said. “Oh, I was such a dumb kid.”
Not the current Logan. At thirty-five he wasn’t a kid at all. He was a decade older than he looked, golden haired, fine faced, slim and beautiful in a tuxedo. He looked nothing like a high priced escort. Or maybe he looked exactly like a high priced escort. How many of him were here? This crowd whose hands shook the house and made the air vibrate could certainly afford them.
Out came Brunhilde. He was in love with this woman. He had been in love with her for three nights. He wanted to see it all over again, see her steal Sigeliende away, watch her run to her sisters for help, watch her sing with Sigfried of the Twilight of the Gods, not knowing it would be her twilight as well. Roses, bouquets of flowers went onto the stage. Whistling and clapping went up for her. Hojitoho! Logan wanted to say.
Those kids back in school: the theatre fags, the choir fags, the ones with the sticks in their asses who got shoved into lockers and whom no one really liked—who knew they were right? They must have known all about this world. And here he was coming to it just now.
“Les Troyens is next week,” George whispered to him. “Would you like to come with me?”
There were worse ways to make money, and this was only a side job in addition to running Guy McClintock’s company.
“Yes,” Logan told him. “Yes, I absolutely would.”
Logan Banford had been sixteen in the hey day of the chat room and discovered man after man who was much too old for him. He found himself, once, in a car with a forty year old who tried to rape him. He got away, but was stranded on a stretch of road between Rensselaer and Knox. Eventually he was able to call home and be rescued. He decided he’d have to be smarter, but he didn’t really know how to be. The Web was full of lonely men, most of them old, and not only old but married and socially awkward. The wrong attention was better than no attention. And then he hoped to get the right attention, to get the nineteen year old of his dreams who spoke to him in the right way. What he got was a lot of: “You’ve got a cute little butt, Sugar.”
He’d take it.
He hated working in the grocery store, but it was work, and he did want to get the fuck out of here. College was never a serious option. One of the men told him, “You’re such a cutie pie you’d make a good stripper.” So he headed to the strip club in town. There was no Chippendales. He would have loved to strip for women. He didn’t quite trust men. But he ended up at a club that was a plain white building. There was a long stretch of country road, the road that had preceded the toll way, that took one from South Bend to Chicago by strange back ways, and in one of these back ways was The Butt Hutt.
“Just take off your clothes, Sugar, and let us see whatcha got,” the man said. He wasn’t mean about it. Logan stripped and when he got to his underwear the man said, “That’s enough. Now dance for me.”
Logan did. It seemed like the man enjoyed the dancing a little too much. He asked Logan, “Can you start tonight?”
“Yes.”
“You’re eighteen, right?”
Logan nodded. “Um hum.”
At first he did his homework during the hours his parents thought he was at work. He did it in the public library. And then he stopped doing it because who cared? There was supposed to be no touching, but one night a lonely man—he looked so sad, men were always so sad, put his hands on Logan’s ass. He left them there while Logan danced and he made his first hundred. After that he began to get invitations to strip in private. Once men more rich than Logan believed lived in Indiana, invited him to a Saturday cook out. He couldn’t believe people like him, people as hillbilly as himself, had wealth like this. They had boats, planes, houses, and took it for granted. He couldn’t believe the people he met. He could afford his own place now and a decent car. He had no license, so he took back roads and took them slowly. He stripped for a sad faced Mormon who paid him more for the pleasure of pressing his face to Logan’s crotch. The money was good, but the men were so sad. He never said he catered only to men, but women never seemed to need what he had to offer.
When Logan moved to Miller at eighteen, he didn’t need the Butt Hutt anymore. He was stripping at a much nicer place in downtown Rossford. He was also very strong. He gave his days to working out. So when a man approached him on the way to his car, Logan wasn’t afraid.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“I will give you a thousand dollars if you let me get in this car with you and suck your cock.”
There wasn’t much to think about. Sex happened, and not always pleasantly. He had never been paid for it, though. Now, in the darkness of a parking lot off of South Birmingham, a well dressed, church going man, possibly with a lovely wife and two kids, was leaning over in the passenger’s seat, choking himself on Logan’s cock and, truthfully, giving him the best blowjob he’d ever received.
A week later the same man said, “I will give you two thousand if you take me back to your house and fuck me.”
And so it began. His grandmother had called him telling him he should come to her church and turn on this television because Jimmy Swaggart had a special Christmas message. In the living room, casting a bright blue light, Jimmy Swaggart’s large face wept for the sins of the world and the choir sang. But louder than that was the gasping, groaning and shouting of the business man he held by the hips as, with the snow falling outside his window, Logan fucked him.
NOW, IN A LIMOUSINE, Logan went up the Magnificent Mile on his way back to the elegant building where George, most gentle of men, stayed, and his eyes filled with tears the same way his grandmother’s would at a preacher going on about the Cross. None of that did anything for him. Jesus was the most underwhelming thing Logan had ever encountered. But not Brunhilde. Her notes, mind shattering, heartbreaking, were still in his head, shaking his body, and he heard her. Logan saw her mounting the horse, counterpoised to the ignorant boy fucking a forty year old man in his apartment on Christmas Eve who thought that this was all there was, who braced his face and felt his body tense while he came, thinking of the easy money the man he was ejaculating inside of. was giving him for this. He didn’t know anything. His world had been so small. He’d never known anything at all.
“This is the place I come when I need peace,” George told him. “This place is completely removed from the world. You’d almost think you weren’t in a city.”
They were in a night dark garden, and water was shooting from a fountain, tinkling back down into its pool. A gravel path led off into trees. It was hard to believe they were on the top of a high rise on the Gold Coast.
“When I was very little, I used to hear that people were the image of God,” George said as Logan sat down beside
him.
“My mother said that you had to be careful because if you entertained someone, you were entertaining angels unaware, that Jesus was in everyone, that people were the faces of God.”
Logan was about to say that he’d heard the same thing and nod sympathetically.
“I think that’s a load of bullshit,” George said.
“If there is a God, the only time I believe in him is up here. Or by myself. The trees reflect God. The water. The birds. Nature. They don’t let themselves get in the way. God is in them perfectly. People?
“People are mean and vindictive. Weak and stupid.” George shook his head. “Tiresome too. Wear-ee-some. Small… Petty. That’s the reason you call a saint a saint, cause he’s the one that’s actually not getting in the way, actually showing God. That’s rare in human beings. That’s why you have to call it something. Holy. Saintly. You know, Logan, every blade of grass is a saint. Every wave. They don’t have to try. They just are.”
George talked like this a lot. It was one of the reasons Logan liked being around him. Logan didn’t usually say anything back. Not that George wouldn’t have let him. Only, George usually said things Logan actually wanted to hear, and his stupid chatter could get in the way of it. But he did speak tonight because the opera was so beautiful and it was still affecting him, because he saw the best in life right now and because he was a little offended by George’s words at the same time he thought they might be true.
“Tiresome? Wearisome? Small?” Logan asked. “What about you? Are you all of those things?”
“I’m the meanest, weakest and stupidest of them all,” the middle aged man, graying, balding a little at the top, declared. He threw up his hands. “They say that the powerful climb to the top, but I’m here at the top and it’s not because I’m so powerful. I did what I was told. I always did what I was told. It is why I am divorced and alone.”
Then there was that dark place. Every client had a dark place, hence the reason they hired companions. Logan knew he had a dark place too, or why would he be a companion? That’s what he said.
“No,” George disagreed, tenderly.
“There is a goodness in you. There’s a lightness in you. You don’t have to be here with me.”
“I’m paid to be here.”
“You ought to be. We ought to be paid for your work. But you do more than just fulfill the job description. You know that.”
The penthouse was so high above the city that it didn’t need curtains. It was a glass house, surrounded by trees and at the top of everything. While he lay on his back, his strong thighs wrapped around George, the older man fucked him. Logan’s hands went over George’s scalp and down his back while the older man pushed himself deep inside of Logan. They rested on his buttocks while George struggled inside of him making gasping, drowning noises. George was so urbane and cultured, so full of wisdom. Only when he fucked him did he realize that George was as weak and lonely as he said. But then Logan felt weak and lonely too.
The desperation of George, clinging to his shoulders, made Logan free to cry out. He hadn’t had a true love in years. His best clients took him to a place, he believed, most people went to with their best lovers. Together he and George moved in the night. George’s hand tugging expertly on Logan’s cock. With a staggered and synchronized scream they came together. It was like bucking up and down on hills, and when it was over the two men lay quiet, George collapsed between Logan’s legs, their mouth’s dry and open in wonder.
Slowly George rolled from Logan and lay on his back, pulling the condom off, put in on the dresser. He exhaled a long breath.
Logan lay on his side, in knees drawn to his chest, the better to feel the presence of George which remained long after his absence. Over time he’d urged George to slow down because he loved the size of him, loved having George inside of him. With George looking at him tenderly, the dark night of Chicago outside of the window, Logan drifted off peacefully, feeling the throb of George still deep in his ass. George’s hand caressed his ass and the older man pressed his body to him.
You cannot buy love, maybe, Logan reflected, as he fell asleep. But you can buy affection. Can’t you?
Hello, all, simply reposting what I already posted to readers of another story. And before I say anything, I would like to thank Dano67 for his generous contribution.
As you have surely seen, I have been trying to raise necessary aid for some time now at https://gofund.me/a9be72fc, and looking toward the goodwill and gratitude of the readers I have entertained for years. So far the grand total of all of that goodwill has led to 0. As in, everyone who had enjoyed my stories for years considered that their value and the value of the writer was worth, well, nothing. Therefore, this current run of stories will be the last posted here, and as of January 1st, I will begin moving my catalogue to other venues. Thank you for the last few years. They were a great deal of fun. C.L.G.
