* * * *
If Treston had been completely honest, he would have had to admit his unusual act was not completely original. He’d once seen a female stripper do something similar in an old movie and he’d been fascinated with it. It was one of those things that had remained alive in the back of his mind for years until he finally decided to try it himself. If there was one thing Treston had learned in the years he’d been stripping for money, it was that nothing, ever, was original. Everything was a gimmick that had been done before by someone else, then redone a hundred times again. His new act would probably be performed one day in the future by another stripper. Every move, costume, step, and turn had been used and reused. The originality came into play with how an old gimmick was orchestrated and executed in a different way.
When the Bessie Smith version of St. Louis Blues started to play, Treston strutted out on the stage twirling a baton in each hand, wearing an exaggerated costume of a male cheerleader. His top was nothing more than a tight white cotton T-shirt. But the tight shorts were white patent leather and hung so low on his small hips, about six inches of his abdomen remained exposed. He wore a large white cowboy hat and white leather cowboy boots with four-inch Western heels that had bright steel tips on each toe and real spurs at the heels.
As he strutted slowly to the beat of St. Louis Blues, twirling the batons and grinding his hips, the men who had never seen his act before sat and gaped at him. But the men who had seen his show and returned to see it again, started to bellow and cheer him on. He concentrated hard on the batons; he’d had to rehearse and watch YouTube for weeks in his apartment to learn how to twirl a baton the proper way. Each step he took had to complement each twirl and turn the batons made. He never thought he’d get throwing a baton right; he’d never realized how complicated it was to work with batons. He’d gone through three lamps, two plate glass windows, and one glass shower door while he’d been learning. His neighbors had complained to the landlord if they heard Bessie Smith singing St. Louis Blues one more time they’d wrap the batons around Treston’s neck.
But he’d continued in spite of all the complaints and casualties. He’d finally learned to throw a baton so high above his head it soared through the air while the men in the audience actually glanced up and followed it until it descended and he caught it. And learning to take off his pants and his shirt hadn’t been easy either. The only viable way to do this was to throw both batons up, rip off his pants, and catch the batons just in time.
He knew he had a good audience that night. When he wasn’t wearing anything but the g-string J.D. had just given him, the white cowboy boots, and the white hat, he slowly twirled his way to a raised platform covered in red velvet that had been set up on the stage ahead of time. As Bessie Smith continued to sing in the background, Treston set the batons on the floor and climbed up on the platform. With his back to the audience, he went down on all fours, spread his legs as wide as he could, and arched his back. While he pointed his ass in the air, he reached down to a long thin plastic contraption filled with ping-pong balls hidden behind the platform. He lifted it up, reached around, and shoved one end of the plastic contraption up his ass. And when Bessie sang, “Like I feel today,” and the men in the audience screamed out Treston’s name, he pulled the trigger and the ping-pong balls starting shooting over their heads.
Learning how to shoot ping-pong balls this way had been even more difficult than learning to throw a baton and strip at the same time. In fact, he’d almost given up completely at one point after the embarrassing trip to the emergency room to have one removed. He would never forget the way the poor young doctor had looked at him that night. And when the doctor put on the rubber gloves and Treston lifted his legs and spread them, Treston couldn’t look him in the eye. Not to mention the fact that Treston didn’t have health insurance, and retrieving a ping-pong ball from someone’s anal canal was not inexpensive. If he’d known it would cost him almost a thousand dollars to have it extracted he never would have inserted it in the first place. He was still paying twenty bucks a month for his mistake.
He finally figured out the only safe way to shoot ping-pong balls out of his ass was to buy a long thin ping-pong ball shooter on the Internet—there were several different kinds—and re-create the illusion of the women who shoot ping-pong balls out of their vaginas in Thailand. The customers didn’t seem to mind his minor exaggeration. He kept ten filled ping-pong ball shooters behind the red velvet platform and each time he pulled an empty one out and inserted one that was filled, the men in the front row pounded their fists on the stage and screamed, “Deeper, deeper.” What some men found so amusing about watching him stuff things up there passed him by. But he knew how to work the crowd and give those men what they wanted.
When the ping-pong ball show was over that night and he went backstage to change his clothes, the phone rang again and he stopped short in front of his locker. This time it was his cell phone, not the phone they kept backstage for the nightclub. Lyon was there changing his clothes. They exchanged a glance and Treston smiled as he reached into his bag for the phone. He was certain it was Harlan. No one else would call him that time of night. But when he glanced at the screen and saw it was one of those annoying marketing calls from somewhere in Oregon he’d been getting for a while, he kicked the bench, started to cry, and deleted every single photo he had taken of Harlan Rocks with his phone. He even removed the photo of Harlan wearing nothing but a bath towel. It had been his favorite because it was the only photo he had where Harlan hadn’t been wearing dark sunglasses.
Lyon walked over to him and put his arms around him. He patted Treston on the back and said, “He’s a fucking gonif, like J.D. said. You’re too good for him. Trust me, buddy. I’m straight and I can tell you that some guys are fucking assholes. You need to get yourself a nice older gay guy with a few bucks who’ll take good care of you and treat you right, because you’re not going to be able to get by shooting ping-pong balls out of your pretty little ass forever.”
Treston continued to sob. He rested his cheek on Lyon’s shoulder and said, “Oh, you are so right. I’m done with men. I don’t care if I never fall in love again.”
Chapter Six
For weeks after that, Treston went without intimate emotional contact with another man. After he stopped expecting Harlan to phone him, he realized he had to make a few changes in his life—otherwise he would continue to repeat the same mistakes until it was too late. So he stopped dating men, flirting with men, and connecting with men altogether. The only physical contact he had with men happened at work. This was all about money and survival and Treston didn’t consider it a threat to his emotional well-being or his future. He’d learned how to separate sex and love early in life, which in his line of work had always been extremely important. And in some ways it helped brace him for the changes he knew he had to make.