The Hunger

Williamsburg, Virginia: 1981

I see the man’s eyes light up from the park’s far end, as my feet kick up whorls of dust from runnels of wheat-colored gravel alongside the road.

One moment, he’s just some anonymous fellow in tight jeans and a checkered jacket, relaxing on one of the park's two benches. Mid-thirties, sandy-haired, mustached, his jaw soft and his hairline receding, though in the back it hangs to his shoulders. The next, after he recognizes me loping toward him, he’s sitting up straighter, taller, crossing one denimed leg over the other. He smiles in my direction. Nods slightly. Fingers tapping with impatience, he observes as I dodge a tourist family on the sidewalk and sidle past the wooden fence into the rectangle enclosure.

Another man I don’t recognize occupies the bench at the park’s western end. He’s probably an out-of-towner, a balding, stolid suburban type trying to appear younger in sneakers a little too new and white and a puffy down vest that’s a little too orange. When I pass, the stranger leans forward, alert,, hoping I’ll choose him.

My friend waits for me, though. He pretends otherwise, left arm stretched with practiced casualness across the bench’s back, legs crossed, head turned slightly away. Yet his eyes dart my way as I approach. I sit down not next to him, but at the bench’s far end, where I too can angle my body slightly away from his. We say nothing. No greeting, no remark on the weather. We don’t acknowledge the other with a glance or nod.

It’s long past the peak of this Saturday. Though the Colonial Williamsburg bus still roars to a stop at the corner not too far away, few visitors alight from its steps. In the golden light of this Virginia late autumn afternoon, diminishing numbers of tourists walk along Duke of Gloucester Street. DoG Street, we students abbreviate it. Some families straggle from the heart of the colonial village, worn from so much history and walking and in search of something for dinner. A young couple, bathed in a honeymoon glow, strolls hand in hand, unable to take their eyes off the other.

The two of us watch in silence at the newlywed pair entranced in their young love, clasped hands swinging lightly between them, until they vanish. I extend my right arm across the bench’s top. My hand dangles behind. My benchfellow shifts slightly, imperceptibly leaning closer. Behind the bench, I feel an electric shock when his skin brushes against mine. I clear my throat and look away from the man, but my long middle finger tickles one of his knuckles. From DoG Street, no one can spy how we touch, or how our fingers nuzzle and entwine. The thrill of caressing him so publicly remains our secret.

At least, it’s a secret until the stranger on the other bench leans back as if stretching. He cranes his neck to spy how my friend and I stroke the other’s fingertips. His lips compress into an annoyed moue; he lets out a sigh so exaggerated that a DoG Street jogger turns her head in concern. Upset at being excluded, he shoves his hands into his jeans and exits the park, striding in the direction of the squat brick construction at the corner.

He’ll find the action he seeks there. The men’s room there is the town’s cruisiest, active from early in the morning until it’s closed after dark. Cocksuckers crowd the three stalls that look directly onto a line of unpartitioned urinals, waiting for the next bus drop-off of Williamsburg tourists, directly outside the restroom doors. Daddies and grandpas will stream into the tiled chamber, unzip and whip out their dicks, and pee, observed through the cracks by cock-hungry cruisers. Once the tide recedes and those who merely needed to evacuate their bladders wash their hands and leave the enclosure, one or two might remain. At the urinal, they stand and stroke themselves to hardness, hoping that someone will open both their stall door and mouth to accommodate them. Come dark, the tourists are few and the restroom occupied only by those looking for action; when the Williamsburg custodians padlock the doors at nine or ten in the evening, the action moves behind the brick building, to this handkerchief-sized park behind.

Though we’re alone, my seated companion still looks away. I gaze at my sneakers. Two of his fingers tug at me, secretly, behind the bench. “You hungry?” I hear him ask nobody specific.

“Yeah,” I reply, to no one in particular.

A last squeeze. “Let’s go,” he suggests before he stands.

***

I am forever hungry. I’m six-foot-three and one hundred and five pounds, a beanpole lingering in that phase of adolescence in which my stomach is always growling. No amount of food seems to sate it. For much of high school, my mother half-wondered if I had a tapeworm.

In my first weeks of college, the problem of keeping fed has only been forced into sharper relief, for one simple reason: I am on my own for the first time in my life, and stuff is so damned expensive. I’m fortunate that my parents have scrimped and sacrificed to pay my tuition to this state school. That three thousand a year is all they can afford, though. My paternal grandmother has coughed up enough to cover the cost of housing for my freshman year, and for this year only.

Everything else is up to me.

It’s the cost of the everything else giving me ulcers. I discovered days after my arrival that textbooks are eye-poppingly overpriced. Even when I settle for the most battered used copies that aren’t actually missing entire sewn signatures, I’m already into the hundreds of dollars. The piano lessons I’ve promised to keep up threaten to chew up a significant part of my budget. For the first time I’m having to buy my own toothpaste and saline solution and shampoo and soap, not to mention clothing.

Several little part time jobs are what pay for these necessities. Thanks to the pity of the college president’s wife, I’m playing the organ for a tiny congregation of Christian Scientists; from there I’ve wheedled my way into an afternoon position sorting books and papers in their reading room. I’m working a few hours a week in the admissions office. I take whatever odd jobs I hear about.

But meals are on my coin, too. The college requires freshmen to enroll for a food services plan. I’ve opted for the less expensive that allows me two meals a day in the school’s cafeterias. At breakfast I’ll gorge and assure myself that a big morning meal will allow me to skip lunch without consequences. My stomach begins to growl and protest before eleven, though, and continues throughout the afternoon until the cafeteria opens for dinner at five.

I’m usually the first in line.

To me it seems that I’m the only student in constant anxiety over food. Charlie, my roommate who hails from the elite halls of the Phillips Exeter Academy, has never stepped foot in either of the school’s dining halls. He spends his seemingly bottomless allowance on beer, pizza, and sandwiches hot from the deli ovens. My friends keep enviable caches of junk food in their dorm rooms. When I visit for study sessions, they inevitably suggest fortifying our late-night cramming with strombolis from Paul’s Deli. This notion of being able to spring for food without thought for a budget astounds me, every time. I have to demur, claiming fullness, then watch with stomach pangs while they chow down.

There could be two easy solutions to my money and food woes: I could make easy cash doing sex work. Or I could dip into the savings account where lies the ill-gotten goods of my sex work during high school. So far, I’ve refused to do either.

From several years of experience I know that even in a tourist town like Williamsburg a lanky youth might make money with his body. It’s a town of hotels for assignations. Corny a tourist attraction as it is, it still attracts horny men wanting to sully their sheets. If I didn’t care to ply my sex trade so close to campus, any of the former clients to whom I’d said goodbye two months before would be happy to shell out for a weekend reunion. A round-trip bus ticket from the ‘Burg to Richmond costs less than fifteen bucks. I could spend a single Friday night with a happy client or two and return with enough cash to pay for next semester’s textbooks. Easy.

I won’t, though. Fitting in on this campus has been difficult enough. After years as a racial minority in my public school system, then as the only white boy in my all-Black high school, the last few weeks have been a crash course on assimilation. In an environment where I’m not the only fair-skinned kid with blond hair, I feel like an alien. I don’t listen to the same music. When my dorm mates express wild enthusiasm for The Police, it takes me a full week to figure out they’re not talking about the law enforcement for whom I keep an eye, every time I cruise. Shortly before the semester commenced, I had to consult Lisa Birnbaum’s The Official Preppy Handbook for guidelines on how I should be dressing—even though I know it’s intended as a parody.

College is supposed to homogenize me. I want college to make me normal again. I am so, so tired of being the odd boy out. If any of these bright, shiny faces surrounding me were to discover my queerness, I’d probably have to drop out. If anyone were to discover that I scored easy cash from exploiting it—well, at that point I’m not sure my life would be worth living.

I’m equally stubborn about dipping into my sex work savings. A couple of hundred bucks a semester would hardly put a dent in the total sum, but I worked hard for that money and don’t want to diminish it with stupid practicalities. Even accessing the funds would be a pain in the ass: I’d have to make a trip home, get the bank book from its hiding place, visit the local branch, hide the book again, then return to campus. Too many steps, and parents would dog me questions the entire while.

Then there’s something else. Maybe it won’t turn out to be a big thing. I’m probably complicating stuff in my own head again. But weekly, when I sit down in the campus library to pore over The Village Voice, I’ve been seeing rumors about a thing they’re calling gay cancer. I don’t live in Manhattan and the chances of me getting something like that are slim, but it’s still enough to give me pause.

So no. I won’t resort to sex work. Though it’s part of my past, I’m resolved no one will ever find out about it. I won’t trade sex for money again.

But hungry as I am, I might trade sex for food.

***

From his seat at my side, my friend watches me eat. “Good?” is all he says.

I nod with enthusiasm as I shovel grub into my mouth. The salisbury steak special—two hamburger patties and mashed potatoes smothered in brown gravy, with both green beans and applesauce as sides—has half-disappeared from my plate. I eat like a starved man. Or at least a starved kid who hasn’t had a bite to eat since seven-thirty that morning. My friend observes my frantic feeding with a smile. “How’s school?”

Again my head bobs up and down. He doesn’t need to hear about my woes with Charlie, or how painfully I’m sleep-deprived from living on a hall of kids who sleep during the day and party all night. I know better than to burden the guy with my insecurities about fitting in. He’s just making the kind of small talk murmured by everyone here in George’s Diner this evening.

Berk, his name is. At least, I think it might be. The first time we’d met in the park after dark, shortly after I started the semester, he’d told me that his name was Burke, but not spelled the usual way. Since he hasn’t told me exactly how it’s spelled, it could be Burk. Maybe it’s Burque, or an even more outlandish rendition. In my head, though, I think of him as Berk. We sit at the diner’s counter side by side like old friends, though there’s at least a two-decade gap in our ages. “How’s your mom?” I ask, remembering my manners in the midst of swallowing.

He lets out a barely audible grunt of frustration. “Gettin’ on my last nerve. The usual. You know how it is.”

The small talk over, I continue shoveling giant forkfuls into my piehole. This one dinner out will afford me an extra meal, one day this week. Already I’m strategizing: should I treat myself to lunch on Tuesday, when the cafeteria serves pizza? I love pizza, even a from a food services tray. Or should I save the punch on my card for a day when my midday hunger can’t contain itself? To my side, Berk chews his burger in deep meditation.

We don’t always eat at George’s, though I’m happy when we do. The portions here are large and the price he pays for my meal doesn’t strike me as an imposition. Sometimes he’ll drive me to a barbecue shack out near Waller Mill Reservoir. Others, we’ll hop in his pickup truck and drive up Richmond Road to the roast beef carvery, where we’ll sit camouflaged among seniors and tourists.

Once I’ve done inhaling what’s on my plate, he crosses fingers at the knuckles and smiles. “You want pie? Or should we get going?”

I want pie. But I don’t want to appear like I’m stalling, or that the food is my main reason for meeting him. “Your place?” I suggest. As if going back to my dorm room and roommate accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old man is really an option.

His blue eyes light up with pleasure. “Yeah,” he says. “My place.”

***

It’s not really his place. Berk lives in the basement of a ranch house, where worn shag carpet covers cold concrete. His furniture is castoffs—a sofa that looks comfortable but, when sat upon, seems to have been stuffed entirely with broken springs and old gears, a coffee table with one short leg propped up by a brick. Over by the washer, drier, and laundry tub is Berk’s bed, a twin made up with a chenille bedspread. Overhead, floor nails poke through exposed bare boards. Rather than use the bald overhead bulbs, Berk has turned on several smaller table lamps.

I sit in an old aluminum-framed chair from the fifties upon floral plastic cushions covered by with see-through plastic enclosures. Berk, his hands in his lap, perches cata-cornered next to me on the sofa, enduring his mother as she tousles her hair. “What are you boys doing tonight?” she asks in cheery tones.

Berk’s fair skin reddens. “Watching the game.”

“How nice.” Berk’s mom pushes a pair of thick spectacles up her nose and smooths down the polyester front of her housecoat. “Now, I’ve made some snacks for the two of you, and there’s juice and beer in the icebox upstairs.”

“Okay, Ma.” Berk’s annoyance sounds more adolescent than I am, myself. She pauses for a moment, looking over the two of us. Uncomfortable as I am at her presence, at least there’s no trace of suspicion or concern on her face. She really seems to think that her darling Berk has brought home one of his little friends to watch the game.

Berk gives me a glance intended to imply apology, once his mother finally creaks up the basement steps and shuts the door behind her. We both wait a moment, heads cocked, to make sure she’s really gone. At his nod, I climb on his lap, plant my ass firmly on the bulge in those tight jeans, and grind. Our lips meet.

“Just keep it quiet,” he says in a whisper, as if I don’t already know. Through the floorboards, I hear his mother padding around in her slippers. Berk switches on the black and white portable TV sitting on the coffee table and lets the sound drown out her footsteps. I keep an eye overhead as I slide down between his outstretch legs and begin to unzip him.

I’ll suck him swiftly and silently, the way he likes, while he suppresses his grunts and groans. He’ll come with a sigh, then zip up while I swallow his tangy load and assume my previous position on the chair. In another hour, we’ll repeat the act, wary all the while of being interrupted.

After he shoots, we hear a creak above. Berk shoves me off and scrambles to close his open pants, while I scramble for my shirt. “MOM!” he howls with fury at the top of his voice. “MOM! Are you LISTENING?!”

Hooking up with a man only five years younger than my dad, who still lives in his mom’s basement, isn’t ideal. It’s not even something I want to repeat more than once every couple of weeks.

But I get a meal out of it. So for now, I make it work.

***

Mark the accountant looks like a thumb. Unfortunate, but true. Or maybe, if I’m being more generous, a Weeble—one of those rotund egg-shaped toys weighted at its bottom so it never topples over. Heft alone doesn’t lend that impression, though he is a stout man. Viewed face on, he gives the impression of something pink, squat and round stuffed into a short-sleeved dress shirt, tan slacks, and a tie, with a belt around his middle barely keeping it all together. He sits across the table from me at Morrison’s, the cafeteria chain with a branch on Richmond Road. Through thick spectacles he stares with astonishment as I shovel down forkfuls of meatloaf, boiled corn, and mashed potatoes, then wash it down with a mouthful of Coke.

“Whoa there,” he says in mild rebuke. “Slow down a little. That food’s not going anywhere.”

I swallow, chastened, and take a moment to retrieve a niblet with my tongue from an upper recess behind a molar. I know these table manners would shame my mom, but my hunger is extreme today. Eleven hours have elapsed since breakfast with no food in the interim. Trying not to eat, as my grandmother might say, like a wild savage takes some effort. But for Mark’s sake, I make the effort.

Morrison’s is one of those old-folk’s establishments I’d never choose on my own. I dislike the humid intensity of the steam trays and the wetness of the food as it’s slopped onto a plate by an attendant from watery depths. The slow indecision of the seniors as they push their trays down the chrome railings feels like being stuck forever in an attraction line in Hell’s amusement park. Morrison’s is the place my parents want to take me to dinner when they visit, because it’s cheap.

But Morrison’s with Mark is a free meal, and my companion is fairly generous in what he allows me to pile on my tray. I don’t push with two entrees, much as I’m tempted, but he allows a side salad covered with plastic wrap as well as the corn and green beans, and didn’t protest when I added an extra corn muffin or a dark brown dessert that straddles the conceptual divide between pudding and brownie.

I take an approach of taking a bite, swallowing, then holding my hands together beneath the shiny tabletop while I ask him a question. How’s work? That’s nice. Are you looking forward to Thanksgiving? Okay. Do you go anywhere? Oh, you stay at home. Oh, your wife cooks. That’s nice, too. How long have you been—? Wow, that’s a long time.

I can’t say it’s nice, this conversation. All I want to do is inhale my food before it cools. But it feels civilized, talking and eating, instead of trying to consume everything as quick as humanly possible. It feels like dating. Almost. In my mind, dating is something forbidden me; two men don’t date. Such a thing is unthinkable. But if I could date, this probably would be what it felt like. Dating is for the straight folk; it’s their prolonged and endless way station of conventionality between meeting and fucking.

Married man Mark and I will fuck. Once I’ve scraped my bowl clean of the brown dessert, Mark and I will exit Morrison’s and hop into his brown sedan. We’ll drive through town until we reach the pebbly stretch of empty road known as the Colonial Parkway, and choose in one of the several pull-offs between Williamsburg and Yorktown. Enshrouded in absolute darkness, we will strip to the waist. Mouth upon mouth, mouth on nipple, we’ll commune with each other, breaking the silence only with moans and hushed exhalations. The heat of our bodies and breath will paint the glass with vapor; he’ll have to blast the defroster to clear faint hieroglyphs of swipes and fingerprints from the windshield.

Afterward, I’ll feel dirty. During our drive back to campus, I’ll stew in a hot puddle of shame. Not because I’ve submitted myself to a man with the general proportions of Humpty Dumpty. Not because a wife sits at home thinking her cheating husband is at an Elks meeting. I sweat and shiver because I have stepped so close to my personal line of no long whoring myself out for cash—and because I know that I’ll do it again and again, whenever I’m hungry.

***

I’m not so naive that I can ignore the transactional nature of exchanging meals for sex. I’m fully aware of the pro quo I’m expected to provide for a plateful of quid. Hustling is something I’ve promised myself I won’t do, though. In my mind, I think of prostitution as the absolute last resort because I’m ashamed to have done it all through my adolescence. There’s no respect for sex work at this or any earlier point in my life. Everyone know it’s a service only the dregs of society provide. Whores, prostitutes, rent boys, hookers, hustlers, streetwalkers—upright folk spit these words with contempt. There’s no space for a culture of pride to develop around a collective of people who sell their bodies for cash.

Class bias is always a part of the condemnation. To sell one’s body for cash is to become part of the great unwashed, voluntarily to join an untouchable caste. It’s impossible for nice people to conceive of anything lower.

For four or five years I’ve played with fire, selling myself in the parks and on the Block and then taking on regular clients. In the moment I never felt shame. Yet being told so many times how terrible sex work is, how sinful those who do it, has made me internalize what apparently should be my humiliation. I’ve earned a pile of cash that I was never able to spend or enjoy for fear of attracting my parents’ attention. I’m ashamed to withdraw from the account where it sits. I’m ashamed to ask my parents for help. So I dance on this line, knowing deep down I’m whoring, yet telling myself I’m doing something adjacent to dating these men. Men who are married or who are mere children in adult bodies, men I convince myself are all I deserve because I can’t conceive of meriting better.

I cannot bring disgrace to my family with sex work. My secret life can’t be exposed at college. I’m a lower middle class white boy surrounded by my betters, desperately trying to fit in. Actual hustling could imperil this chance at a fresh new start.

So I prevaricate, and tell myself white lies about what I’m doing. And after each free meal, I swear it will be the last.

Tonight’s will be the last, in fact. Selling myself for Morrison’s Cafeteria is a new low.

I have to do better.

I have to reform.

***

A week later I’m sitting in the car with—I don’t remember this one’s name. Mike? Martin? He’s a Virginian Good Old Boy with only a few strands of fair, wispy hair left to comb over his pate. His stubby, moist hands paw my thighs and crotch all the way down I-64. “Can’t wait to get a taste of that,” he says with knowing certitude.

I smile and wait to shudder until I can turn my head and stare out the window. Whatever his name is, I don’t find this pickup from the park the least attractive. If anything, with his spit-slick lips and beady, almost sadistic eyes, he repels me. But he’s offered to take me to someplace called Chi-Chi’s in Hampton Roads, and I, who’ve never had any Mexican food beyond a Taco Bell Grande, am anxious to be fed.

So when he takes a hand off the steering wheel to twist my nipple savagely through my shirt and he mistakes my cry of surprise and pain for excitement, I don’t correct him. I deserve the hurt, for what I’m about to do for a meal.

Because my hunger has returned.

My hunger always returns.

***

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