TBoaTYO

By B.J. Freedman

TBoatYo lifts the covers off the 1980s boy-love scene in the Philippines, with a cast of bumbling boylovers, lovable boys, and a few opposing forces. Breezily written with nods to Burroughs and Proust, TBoaTYO is, finally, a love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: B.J. Freedman
• Release date: Sep 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301329502

B.J. Freedman

Now an elderly and frail gentleman residing in a far-off hill station, BJ Freedman has spent his life avoiding finishing the great boy-love novels of his generation. But he's just finished TBoaTYO, and it's worth the wait. A third installment of the Bernie Boyle saga is expected within the decade. Contact the author (with positive thoughts) through his website at https://bjfreedman.com

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TBoaTYO

B.J. Freedman

Copyright © 2013 B.J. Freedman

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This novel is a work of fiction. The characters, places and events are all products of the author's imagination, including real historical figures, contemporary celebrities, and named locations.

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Long may they wave.

Bernie’s Choice

September 1984, Los Angeles, midnight: Bernie Boyle, lately a taxi driver, waited for Filipino Denis in a smoke-filled Asian gay bar on the ratty eastern end of Sunset Boulevard. Denis, as always, was late, and Bernie, as usual, was annoyed. He stood at the crowded bar and watched a white-haired Anglo guy blow smoke and chat up a Chinese half his age. No way, Bernie insisted to himself, I will not end up like that. But he worried that at thirty-four and counting, he was well on his way.

Denis sailed into the bar at one-thirty, giggling with an entourage of queeny Thais, downtown dress designers in half drag of tight jeans, blouse, makeup and heels. Denis introduced his Thai pals but their names dissolved into the remixed Donna Summer. Hi-ee, the Thais all squealed in unison, flirting with Bernie as if he were half a foot taller and three shades blonder. He offered a half-smile and money for drinks.

As they danced on the dark and smoke-filled mezzanine floor to music Bernie hated, Denis complained that Bernie didn’t like his friends.

But I don’t like anybody.

Oh, so.

Oh, you, you’re different. Denis was slender, short, with deep brown eyes and black hair that tumbled around his islander’s face like a carefree girl’s. A fashion design student with a special talent for bias-cut wool gabardine, Denis at twenty was close, but no cigarillo.

Bernie’s mind wandered from the crowded dance floor to sunny naked-at-the-pond days at the hippie commune, to the junior high gym, to sixth grade bathrooms, his depressing sexual history. Over the last few years Bernie had struggled over a draft of The Body of a Ten-Year-Old, making every one of his humiliating failures into a hundred glorious successes. Nick Craner, the novel’s hero, was romping, locked in second cousin Joe the agent’s drawer, while Bernie was stuck carting drunks from bar to condo in his taxi and making do with someone of legal age, hairy under the arms, and old enough to insist, daily, that Bernie grow up and deal with their relationship. Fat chance.

They drove back, drunk and sweaty, to Bernie’s rent-controlled one-bedroom on the edge of Santa Monica. It was three-thirty in the morning. Denis rushed to the bathroom to throw up and then conked out on the bed fully dressed. Bernie peeled off Denis’s black silk shirt and gabardine trousers, pausing to lick here and there, admiring the flat stomach and smooth, unblemished skin, as well as the expert tailoring of the waistband and pleats. He tweaked the quarter-sized nipples and kissed Denis’s sweaty cock goodnight, imagining it for a moment as it might have been eight years before, smaller, pokier, surrounded by smooth skin instead of a mass of wiry black hair. He got up to piss, brushed his teeth, then sat on the edge of the bed, reaching beside it for the answering machine. He was thinking about ditching Denis the next day so he could hang out on Venice Beach ogling shirtless Mexican boys in drooping jeans.

After coughing up two rambling messages from Denis and a couple of hang-ups, the answering machine suddenly exploded with a gurgling, strangled cry. Bernie thought he saw the machine jump an inch off the night table. Aaaauuugh! For Christ’s sake! Bernie! You fucking moron! Where the fuck are you? Jesus Christ! Bernie, help me! Oh, God, I’m – someone, please– followed by choking noises, theatrical strangled cries, a loud, thunderous crack, then the same voice, but distant, crawling toward the phone – "Oh, please please please ah ah ah (more crashing noises, fumbling, a bell and a thunk as the phone falls to the floor), Oh God Oh God ah ah I’m Oh God–" and then silence and a decisive, final click from the answering machine tape. Denis sat up.

Serge, they both said.

I told him to stop smoking.

They threw on clothes and ran out of the apartment.

Serge had a Forties bungalow in Reseda, a half hour’s drive at four in the morning. It was still dark when they arrived. The bungalow’s living room lamps were on, streaming light from half-closed curtains across the mangy lawn and dusty rose bushes. Bernie tried the front door; strangely, it wasn’t locked. Had Serge come home, then keeled over so fast he hadn’t turned around to lock the door? Or had someone else followed him in?

Tiptoeing into the living room, they saw Serge, all give or take three hundred pounds of him, lying in an impossibly twisted position in front of his black leather sofa, beneath an oversized black-and-white poster of the haughty transvestite Divine in tacky plastic drag. Serge was stuffed into his after-hours bar gear – tight black leather pants and a white silk shirt. His sharp lizard skin boots were still on. A mound of chunky vomit had settled near his face, which was, mercifully, mostly buried in the white nylon shag. The faux antique telephone, unhooked, lay upside-down and silent by the side of the sofa.

Don’t touch him, Denis squealed. Is he dead?

I wasn’t planning to. God, this is really pitiful.

It really stinks. Denis turned away, held his hand to his mouth, and started crying, sniffling at first and then breaking into rolling, choking sobs as he fell to his knees.

Be quiet, Bernie said, grabbing his arm and pulling him up. It’s four in the morning, for Christ’s sake.

Oh God God God, Denis sobbed.

Get in here. Bernie pulled him through teak saloon doors into the kitchen, a renovated white-and-black-tile setup. Serge had been a professional chef. Calm down, will you?

You’re not even upset, your friend is lying there dead. Denis sat on a high stool at the polished marble breakfast bar, elbows on the bar, his head between his fists. He sobbed and sniffed.

Of course I’m upset, it’s just – I’m just thinking what we should do. It’s no use calling the emergency room or anything. You know, I don’t know any of Serge’s relatives, if he has any. He never mentioned parents that I can remember.

Denis sniffled. Everybody’s got a mother.

Yeah, and I’ll bet she’s probably still around. Can you imagine what she must look like?

Let’s at least find an address. They went back to the living room. Bernie was hoping he’d be confronted by an apologetic Serge sitting on the sofa wiping his mouth, but the fat man was still on the floor. Is that his mother? Denis pointed to the Divine poster.

Bernie reached down and slipped Serge’s thick wallet out of the back pocket of the leather pants.

What are you doing?

What does it look like? I’m looking for some kind of address for his parents. Maybe it’s on his driver’s license.

Bernie eased into Serge’s lumpy black Barcalounger and examined the wallet’s contents while Denis slumped on the floor at his feet. There was an apparently truthful driver’s license (five years older than Serge had been claiming, Bernie noted), two hundred and forty dollars in cash, three Visa cards with three different names, Amex Gold, a gold Diner’s Club card, driver’s licenses with three different names matching the Visas, but all with the same address, phone number and face in the photo – Serge’s, a gay lawyer’s business card, an expired membership card for a West Hollywood Health Club, one condom and a small, thin key taped to the inside flap of an empty coin pocket.

Bernie jumped up, suddenly possessed, raising the wallet above his head like Liberty’s torch. Boyo, check this – the thing is full of genuine credit cards in other people’s names. Do you realize what that means?

No. What? You’re going to steal his wallet?

No, I’m going to leave the wallet. But I’m taking the credit cards and the extra IDs. He started pacing the floor, his hands clasped behind his back. Someday I’ll be lying in my own pool of vomit, or worse, he thought. And what will I have done? Looking at the lifeless hulk on the floor Bernie reflected on his life. Serge, the peripatetic chef, might have been bored with life’s daily specials, but he’d done something about it, cooked up something tasty. Inside that overweight hulk lived a crafty, patient dreamer, a great soul of vision and daring. Bernie knew he’d never have done anything like this himself. It was as if Serge had done it for him, and the credit cards were challenging him to take them, to live a life Serge would never live, a life full of money and possibilities, fulfilled dreams, actions taken.

What? Denis stood up. What are you thinking?

I’m thinking that these cards are like Serge’s child, his dream, a beautiful dream.

His dream was using fake credit cards?

No, you don’t get it. The cards are just a means to an end. An end, he was beginning to understand, he wouldn’t be sharing with young Denis.

Well, anyway – is his mother’s address there? Denis flopped into the Barcalounger. Notifying the next of kin was now the farthest thing from Bernie’s mind. Morning light was seeping around the edges of the thick velvet curtains. No time to lose. Bernie went through the wallet’s contents again.

And what’s this key for? We’ve got to check it out. And then – look at these – I mean, check this out, he’s got three different names, Visas, American Express Gold, it would be criminal not to, you know, at least run up a tab for a couple of days. Believe me, Serge would have wanted us to do it. We’d be honoring him, I swear, carrying on a great tradition. Denis was looking at him like he’d sucked off the Devil and swallowed the wad. But he couldn’t stop. Look, this must be it – this key, the key, Denis, look for a safe or something. He surveyed the room like a thief. He got up to look behind pictures, underneath Serge’s collection of Boy Scout calendars from the nineteen-fifties, inside Chinese enamelware cabinets.

Denis slid to the floor and cried.

Oh, don’t get boo-hooey again. Tears won’t bring him back. Hurry up. Come on – I’ll buy you some clothes as soon as the stores open. Find the safe, it must be a safe or a drawer, something with this key.

There was no safe behind the Mapplethorpe prints, under the Persian hallway runner, in the kitchen behind the espresso machine. Bernie wished he’d brought a van – some of the stuff was priceless. He searched the kitchen for a good vegetable knife – he could slip it in his pocket.

I found it! Denis yelled from the bedroom.

The antique footlocker was ponderously heavy, iron and oak and scuffed brown leather, with a new, cheap padlock. Bernie opened it with the wallet key. This treasure chest held no pirate’s doubloons – it was loaded to the top with three decades’ worth of carefully collected international boy porn, Serge’s famous stash. European photo books, German films, American naturist magazines, cheap novels from the glory days of the Fifties. Coach’s Playbook. Little Dick’s Birthday Surprise. And from a net attached to the inside of the lid, Bernie pulled a sandwich-sized Ziploc containing three virgin United States passports, in three different names, all with the same blurry photograph of a much younger Serge.

Take the whole trunk. Come on, just the trunk, and let’s get out of here.

We can’t take stuff! Someone’ll see us! He’s dead!

Oh, crap, no one’s looking. Besides, no one knows he’s dead. By the time they find him–

Our fingerprints are all over the house! Bee, this isn’t TV. We can’t just walk out with somebody’s stuff. Someone’ll find out.

You mean about the cards? No one knows. Did you know? Did I know? No way. And all this lovely chicken porn – you want his old grieving mother to walk in here and have a heart attack when she sees it?

Well, it’s, you know – risky.

Life is full of risky choices. Bernie knew he’d taken few of them. I’m tired of beating my dead horse against the wall. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. Anyone can see he dropped dead by himself. Maybe we visited him five hours ago, came with him from the bar or something. No one’ll even ask, I guarantee it. We didn’t touch him, after all. Look, I’ll leave some things in the wallet, no one knows about the other IDs.

Denis looked like he was about to collapse again. Bernie put a gentle hand on Denis’s shoulder. Trust me, sweetie. Here. Lift.

A Fax in the Night

The two of them were in bed, fumbling around in the dark in Joe’s toasty little New York apartment, four in the morning, dirty snow falling outside. Joe Lester, nè Listrowicz, hung over as usual from a half-dozen vodka tonics, sat up too quickly when the phone rang.

"If you would please get your ouch finger out of my butt, I have to answer the phone."

Chris Christian, Joe’s young lover, glared unseen at the old man and yanked his pinkie out with an audible shlup. Joe, the ancient New Yorker, and Chris from Lauderdale, not particularly attractive opposites, couldn’t even make love without arguing, and now this predawn ringing renewed a contentious mood left over from their visit to an especially boring literary gathering the night before. At the reading even Davis Lovitt’s unusually frank homoerotic story had brought on yawns; frank homoeroticism, Joe whispered into his drink, had shot its wad last season. As soon as the poetry began, Joe and Chris had retreated to a small, smoky jazz club, where neither liked the odd honking music but where Joe, fifty-six years old with the sagging body, as he often joked, of a sixty-year-old, felt comfortable in his literary agent drag – single silver Star of David earring, black silk turtleneck, and Air Huaraches.

Chris’s freckled face was the picture of simple gay contentment as he diddled with the ice cubes in a rum-and-Coke while Joe whined and lectured through his vodka tonics. Chris was focused, not on his bloodshot-eyed Hebrew lover, but beyond Joe’s sloping shoulder on the bulging crotch of the half-black saxophonist, whose bleeps and blats drowned out Joe’s complaints about the only writer on his list who had been at the reading – Max Stocklotz, the Midwestern academic whose little easy-listening novels featured strong, sensitive men tangled up with beautiful, politically naive women. Without a word about who pays for anything, they chase each other to some exotic locale, Burundi or the Maldives or Kazakhstan, and have video-quality sex in the middle of a peacekeeping operation. Joe had never read all the way through any of the books, but the stuff kept selling, keeping him stocked with Stoli and the kid comfy in French underwear. Joe had noticed that Max had been drinking doubles but was still wide awake for the angry gay poetry – was he hiding something?

Answer it for Criminy’s sake, Chris said, and old Joe rolled like a half-asleep bear across the heaped quilt to grab the phone.

The cold plastic rubbed against the fuzz on his ear as a pinging noise, that mystical, repeated peep, announced a long distance, possibly overseas, call. Joe calculated it was afternoon in Europe and cleared his throat, but he had nowhere to spit. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the pack of Kents on his night table. Yeah? he said, but the peeps were suddenly drowned in a wave of annoying static.

Joe? The voice was a man’s, but thin and reedy, distant, desperate, surrounded by a rush of cold electronic wind. Then nothing, emptiness, gone – a struggling swimmer crying out one last time before the invisible current drags him under. Joe wedged the receiver between shoulder and cheek and listened to the breathy emptiness while he lit up.

Who is it so early? Chris sat cross-legged playing with his half-wilted hard-on.

It’s nobody, yet. Joe put down the cigarette and picked up a coffee mug from his night table, half-full of last night’s nightcap. A bloated lime wedge floated face down on top. Joe took a sip, watching as Chris leaned back on the bed, a Southern string bean, straw-haired and sweet. As he listened patiently to the hollow line, Joe followed the sparse blond hair flowing from Chris’s freckled chest down to the reddish puff below. After another minute he slapped the receiver down.

Wrong number? Chris stretched an arm to reach for his cigarettes, rebellious unfiltered Camels.

Bad line, I guess. I lost him. Maybe the satellite exploded. Sounded like Europe. Eastern Europe.

Maybe one of those Checkoslomanians. D’you ever get back to him – whatsisname?

Oh, yeah, I did, as a matter of fact. I sent a fax, I think. Joe swallowed the rest of the stale drink in one gulp.

Honey, I wish you wouldn’t drink first thing in the morning. Chris stubbed out his smoke and sat up to kiss Joe’s gray-stubbled cheek.

I wish you wouldn’t hock me first thing in the morning. Besides, it’s last night’s drink.

Still.

You I could drink, you’d approve of that.

Be my guest, shugah, Chris said, lying back on the bed, I wonder who that was on the phone? Joe tossed his cigarette and exhaled on the meaty pink tip of Chris’s thin, remarkably upright shaft.

Joe was busy tonguing, enjoying the flavor of a twenty-year-old, amused by the faint freckles on Chris’s pale legs, when he heard clicking from the other bedroom, the office. Who’s sending a fax at four in the morning?

Do you want me to come or get the fax?

Ah, Christ. See what it is.

Chris returned, boyish boner flapping, with a single sheet. Maybe it got stuck yesterday and only just came through.

Joe found his glasses and read the fax. Then he jumped off the bed and started pacing the room Groucho style, leaning forward at the waist, the fax in both hands behind his back, muttering to himself.

Is this some kind of Jew thing or what?

Gotta be a joke, Joe said, but he knew it wasn’t. It’s from Warner, they want Bernie’s book.

Oh fuck me, you sent that to Warner’s?

Well, Christ Almighty, Joe tossed the fax to Chris and sat down, it was an afterthought. Who’d a thunk they’d go and buy it? Call L.A., will you? Bernie’ll shit a brick when he hears this. Joe had advised Bernie to add five years and at least a fringe of pubic hair to the boys, or forget the whole thing. Bernie, unrelenting, had called him every week and told him to send it around anyway. It’s too hot to handle, Joe kept telling him. I hope so, Bernie said. Why don’t you switch to guys of at least legal age? Joe suggested. Stuff is selling this year. No thanks. But, Bern, he’d say, no one wants to read about fucking twelve-year-olds. "Craner doesn’t only fuck them, Bernie explained. He’s a kind man, and there are a number of scenes where he listens caringly to their childish worries and buys them clothes, or lunch, or the latest electronic gadgets. It was a fucking adjective, for Christ’s sake. Look, no one’s gonna touch it. Well, I’ll just kill myself, Bernie had warned him, with a sob. Go to a mall, was Joe’s usual advice, and sit down. I’ll send it around tomorrow. I promise."

No answer at Bernie’s. And his machine’s not on, either.

No answer. Joe took the phone and sat listening to the lonely, rhythmic ringing. Then he got a sinking feeling as he recognized the distant drowning voice.

Flight

By the time L.A.’s morning haze rose to fight the dawn, Bernie had dropped Denis at his aunt’s place off Wilshire. He drove to a Denny’s next to the freeway and sat at the counter surrounded by truckers eating breakfast. It was a good place to think, and by the third cup of coffee he had the plan ready. As a test he used one of Serge’s Visa cards to pay the bill – it sailed through.

Coffeed up and drunk on the vision of his golden future, Bernie stopped at a Chinese travel agent Specialized in Asian Travel and bought tickets, using a different - but also valid - Visa card. He went into a couple of banks and bought a thousand dollars’ worth of American Express Traveler’s Cheques on the Gold Card, a thousand on the Diner’s, then another five thousand on the Visa and MasterCard. Back at the apartment, he packed a suitcase and a carry-on with a few essentials, and hit the road to meet Denis, with packed bags and Serge’s porno locker stashed in the trunk of his Toyota.

They hit three malls on the West Side. Denis forgot his grief in the face of free goodies, grabbing every Perry Ellis shirt he’d ever wanted and a lightweight Armani wool suit in gray herringbone. Bernie bought a Swiss Army knife, a Dodgers baseball cap, Nike hikers, Timberland loafers, and a Speedo bikini swimsuit - for that golden beach in the Promised Land. Then lunch at The Ivy on Robertson, a real splurge for the rent-control kid.

I don’t know yet, Bernie lied when Denis asked what was next. The whole thing is kind of too much. Why don’t you come over tonight at about seven and we’ll get toasted and decide what to do next?

What’ll you do in the meantime? I mean, now?

I gotta go to the library. Bernie picked the one place he knew Denis hated.

Pick me up later at my aunt’s?

No – ah, probably better if you take a bus over to Santa Monica. I don’t want to deal with the traffic.

You could buy me a car.

Maybe I will.

After dropping Denis, Bernie rented a storage space, just big enough for the trunk. He paid a year’s rent with a Visa card. He drove home, left an envelope for Denis with a note, the car keys, a signed pink slip, and five hundred dollars in cash. He called a taxi, took his bags, went to the airport and flew, using a MasterCard and