Chapter 6
Back by the pool, I stretched my long slim body out on a chaise lounge and just lay there, luxuriating in the soft foam-rubber pad and pillow, feeling comfortable, fulfilled-and remote. And I let my gaze wander skyward, into the momentary oblivion of the endless blue horizon. An echelon of five sea-gulls drifted by within my sight, none of them moving a wing, just sailing along on the currents of air, aloof, uncaring.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to do that, I thought. Not fly really, but just coast through life that way, going wherever you want, doing whatever you wish, and not having to lift a finger, or a wing, to do it-wouldn't that be the greatest? I must earnestly try to do just that!
Gradually, I became aware that the swish had saddled up to me like some malignant magnet. I shuddered inside, but at the same time I put down my instant repulsion. After all, I had to have a one-track mind since I was so determined to make my body no more than an instrument; I couldn't afford brains ... just the beef sale. The conscience was an uninvited and completely unwelcomed guest at my body's assignations of profitable perversions.
"Hi there," the swish simpered sweetly and sickly. "I'm Baden. Baden Barnes. And you are God's latest golden gift to the Sunshine State, so I've heard," he added with a grotesque giggle.
"Come off it," I growled. "What's your room number? Go on upstairs and I'll follow in three minutes."
"Oh ... don't be so stupid-silly! I want to dress you up first, doll."
"Dress me up?" I blinked.
"Yes!" he lightly lisped. "In a tantalizing tropical tux."
"Are you serious?" I asked pleasantly, then exploded, "Or out of your mind, with a sun stroke!"
Baden flicked a limp wrist at my knee. "I've just got a real thing for studs in tux. C'mon, doll. I'll take you to my seduction sanctum."
"How far away?" I inquired a bit warily.
"Right here in the hotel!" was the giggly answer. "I own the men's and ladies apparel shop on the lower lobby level. And it's all closed up today for inventory, the sign says, but really for my bestiality!"
Suddenly it was funny to me. I blinked repeatedly at the stick-thin slenderness of his body and chuckled aloud at the repetitious thought that Baden Barnes looked as much like a woman as I had ever seen. He was about forty-five, I thought, and his rather highfalutin', flowery English tickled me to no end.
"Lead onward, Christian soldier!" I guffawed, following him into the hotel where the shop's wide window and glass door were completely shrouded with a heavy muslin drape. And inside, Baden pushed the knob lock.
"Now we must dress you all up like a fashion plate, doll," he said in a practical business tone.
And screaming swish or fantastically mixed-up faggot-or God only knows what!-he immediately proceeded to outfit me, from head to toe, in formal wear that would have put Liberace's attire to shuddering shame!
"It's the berries," I had to admit, perhaps egotistically vainly, as I surveyed myself in the full length mirror that was attached to the dressing room door.
"You look divine, doll!" Baden tittered. "Now, let's go into my window display."
"Crazy," I muttered, standing in the middle of the display window and looking at the "dressing." For a second, I could imagine that I was in somebody's small living room, because the window was decorated with a sofa and chairs and tables and lamps ... replete with groupings of mannequins, dressed in Baden's own sunshine-fashion creations!
"Won't you sit down on the sofa?" he invited me. "And I'll serve the champagne!"
"Real crazy!" I decided. "Just what the hell is your story?"
Baden popped the champagne bottle's cork. "Well, I have an absolute compulsion to be a bit bizarre, now and then. Fort Lauderdale to me is the sort of place where tremendously exciting sexual things don't just happen, because the sub-tropical climate often makes people lazy-bones. Can you believe that?"
"From my experiences, not yet," I admitted, fatiguedly.
"Well, it's true." Baden made one of those formless gestures that meant nothing. "No one down here likes particularly to fornicate with a dazzling flair to the environment. People only consider getting their rocks off-if you'll pardon that tacky expression! Anyhow, I attempt to give sexual relations in Florida a little chic and flair. It's not impossible to combat indifference, you know."
I said, "I'll bet you came here from New York City, didn't you?"
"But of course," Baden said flatly. "That's where all the gay flair and chic in the world is. And now I must try to rub some of it off on you all; I feel compelled to give people a little of the bizarre in their sexual environment."
He served and sipped champagne with me, and I had a sudden wild thought: This is the Mad Hatter's tea party! It was all so nonsensical, really ... yet hilarious, in a certain weird way.
Then Baden shifted his eyes away from me, and he frowned. "When you stop to think seriously about my effort though, it doesn't seem quite natural, does it? Do you suppose there's something wrong with me?"
"I suppose there's something wrong with all of us in one way or another," I answered evasively.
"That's exactly the conclusion I've come to all the times I've thought about it! There just doesn't seem to be any other conclusion to come to, so there's no use in thinking about it at all. Especially since I want to really surprise you! If you'll excuse me for several minutes...."
"You're excused," I grinned. "I'll finish my champagne-and hold my breath. I must admit this is pretty kicky, and it's obvious that you are going to top things ... so hurry the hell up!"
"Patience, patience!" he giggled. "You seem like a perceptive person, so please don't let your stud horniness overpower your genuine, shimmering, intense flair for the chic."
"Jesus, no," I smiled wryly. "I won't let that happen, believe me."
Baden lightly kissed my lips and murmured, "I want you to savor all this until you have taken everything from it, and the storm of your desire builds to such a complete turbulence that you will finally take me with power and violence."
"Jesus," I repeated, in a voice that barely rode on awed breath.
"Think chic!" he told me emphatically and wiggled out of the window display.
Watching his rump leaving made me suddenly excited carnally, and feeling carnally excited made me feel thirsty. I wanted more champagne, which would help me bide the time too, so I got up and went to the display bar-cart and poured some. Then, it was strange and irrational how another feeling came over me abruptly. One moment I was pouring the champagne and everything was all right and getting better, and the next moment everything was going wrong, and there didn't seem to be any reason for it except that I experienced the sudden creepy feeling that I was being watched. This was unnerving, of course, and even more so when the free-floating anxiety attached itself suddenly to the thick muslin that covered the large plate-glass window.
After drinking half the glass of champagne greedily and staring at the muslin-curtain un-blinkingly for several seconds, I tiptoed over to the window and peeked outside ... and peering right back at me with their round curious faces pressed practically against the glass were two middle-aged women window shoppers! All three of us gasped and stared, frozen in momentary disbelief. Then the one woman grabbed the other's pudgy arm, which she immediately shook to get the hand off, and her voice came dully to me as it was diluted through the window glass.
"What is the display of?" she asked me.
Nervously, I largely mouthed the words, "Go away."
The other woman pulled herself up into a huff. "Don't you dare be so fresh," she glared at me.
Her friend said firmly to her, "He must be a faggot."
And I said, "Go ... to ... hell!"
"Well, of all the-" She screamed, "I'll report you, you nasty queer!"
"My name is Baden Barnes," I said and thumbed my nose at them, and they glared furiously at me before stalking away.
There. I'm not usually such a son of a bitch, to tell the truth. I don't care to make a gesture that will get someone in dutch and might cost them business. But I reasoned calmly and rationally that Baden would certainly admit to himself later that this was bizarre when he was called on the carpet by the hotel management. At least, I figured that he would surely have to appreciate my flair, for the melodramatic. So I had no feelings of guilt as I sipped my drink and waited for him to return with his surprise. Commitment to guilt is one thing, and commitment to Baden's chic was another, I reasoned. If he wanted some real fun and games, two could play. This was only logical, I thought with a kind of chic-flair that the situation had strictly imposed upon me.
Baden's voice called, "Stud! Come and find me!"
I blinked. "Hide and seek?"
"Yes indeed!"
I let the champagne hit me, and ducking out of the display window, I stared around ... at emptiness! The entire shop consisted of only one large room, and it was completely deserted!
"You disappear through a trap door under the carpet?" I shouted.
Silence.
After a moment, I felt pretty miffed, then I remembered that lots of swishes like to dress in drag ... and a near blush heated my face as I began to tweak the even dozen mannequins standing silently and rigidly around the shop! And the more that turned out to be just plaster, the more furious I felt, like some foiled beast!
"God damnit!" I growled. "Cut out the teasing game, will you? I've just about had it up to here! Fun is fun ... but enough's enough! This is ... foolish!"
Yet, again-the almost sinister silence!
Furious, with my blood beating impatiently, I practically whacked at the store dummies now. Naturally, I was compelled by some frustration ... but mostly by acid annoyance. The swish was toying with me, to gain a certain superiority over my masculinity! And I felt that I was being reduced, inch by inch, to a used instrument of perverted pleasure. So, this was ugly!
"Here I am, doll," came the whispered giggle.
I whirled, crouching in massive readiness, and blinked at a svelte mannequin in a pale green gown of satin and silk, with a high-piled blonde wig ... and privately cursed the champagne that Baden had obviously planned would get to me. Otherwise, completely sober, the roughness of the quivering skin would have been an immediate give away.
Infuriated, I hooked my fingers into the deep front vee of Baden's gown ... and ripped it down to practically shreds with one powerful sweep of my arm!
"You filthy beast!" Baden wailed after an initial scream. "You horrible stud! This isn't a rape session! This gown sells for two hundred dollars! And you've absolutely ruined it!"
"Use it for dusting rags now," I snarled.
"Get out, get out, get out!"
"After you get what you really want," I laughed. "And I get my usual fee, plus tip!"
"No money!" came the sobbing insistence.
"What?!"
"I gave you an experience in chic and flair! That's a priceless gift in Florida! And that's all you get!"
"Wanta bet?" I growled.
"I don't keep five cents in cash in the cash register!"
"Poor you," I snarled, right after his pink and white nakedness as he scampered into the display window. "I'll take it out on you!"
"Oh, you haven't understood this! You have no appreciation."
"But you will," I corrected the wailing transvestite. "When you learn not to tease a trick without a treat!"
And it was irrational how the thought came to me, but as I covered Baden's body with my hot torso I suddenly wondered if the two window shoppers had maybe come back, and I wanted to rear up and rip off the muslin curtain and let them watch horrified as I beat down with my virility and mind pumping furiously to the struggles of the body under me.
Then abruptly, the strange perversion of Baden's nightmare-like fantasy seemed to seep into my mind and taint my sanity, and I had an incredible urge ... to make a reality of my own fancy, to completely submit to the distorted demands of insane passion and brutal lust!
In a nightmarish flash, the compulsion came over me ... to bite savagely into his neck! I could nearly taste blood, tangy on my lips, and one hand smothered the scream from Baden's lips. And I tried to imagine what it would be like to be unable to give up the fantasy-desire to tear his flesh with my teeth, to let my right hand go to the pulsating, scream tense throat and close my fingers hard and sharp around it, until his cries died and the intense struggle became more violent, more frenzied, which I imagined would only carnally excite me more until my teeth would rip the skin on the back of his neck while my hand constricted on the life left in his throat.
And in a final urgency, I might lean down and sink my teeth into Baden's rump, but from his throat would come the no-sound which told me that I had done it finally-played the fantasy to the absolute hilt of perversion.
"I'm going to die!" came the anguished insistence that snapped me right out of this momentary insanity. "You beastly rapist! Get out, get out, get out!"
"I'm out," I growled, shaking my head to completely dispel the still lingering horrors of my ... capability? "You just feel mighty lucky that it happened to me when it did! I might have ... killed you!"
In the hotel hallway, I leaned against the wall, submitting to the onrush of my tortured thoughts. In my whirling mind I couldn't determine a single cause for my near breakdown in a moment's analysis. I only knew that somehow the awful act of murder was perhaps not beyond my bounds during the ecstasy of insane passion! And I couldn't really blame it on the nature of the specific assignation with Baden. My own repressed desires had to contribute heavily ... and perhaps a sordid sort of craving to break the normal shackles that Shirley had hinted to impose upon me. I didn't actually know. But I did know surely that I would have to let my mind appraise any sexual act of brutal lust from now on. My desire to make my body only an instrument was sheer folly ... and definitely dangerous to my carefree career!