Chapter 7

Hampton Budd reached New York just three days after Wiffie did. As he carried his two suitcases through the crowded main concourse of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, his feelings were mixed; he rejoiced in the freedom he now enjoyed, but in the back of his mind there lurked a trace of fear. This was a world new to him-a world of millions of people packed into concrete canyons and subterranean catacombs of commuters and subway trains; it was a city not known for kindness to strangers, and newcomers, and Hampton couldn't help but wonder if he had been wise to leave home in the middle of the night in an effort to break the chains of fundamentalist morality and to find a new and more exciting way of life.

And perhaps he could find Wiffie. He had called her parents, disguising his youthful voice in an effort to get past her mother to Wiffie herself.

"Hello. I'd like to speak to Wiffie Gilford, please," he had said. "I'm doing a survey on girls who have been expelled unfairly from schools and colleges."

Her mother had replied, somewhat crisply, that her daughter was no longer living at home, but had gone to New York. New York! He had started to ask for Wiffie's current address, but Mrs. Gilford had hung up on him before he could finish the question.

God, he felt ashamed of himself for the way he'd treated Wiffie! But at the time, it had seemed the most sensible thing to do. If he wasn't there to testify at the committee hearing, they couldn't force him to say anything incriminating about her, could they? Of course, his departure had been incriminating in itself; what an emotional and thoughtless dummy he'd been not to realize that! In any case, it probably wouldn't have mattered either way. And now, perhaps he could find her somehow, and explain that it had all been a mistake.

Before he could do anything, he had to find a place to live; and so he got into a taxicab and asked the driver to take him to a cheap hotel. "In Greenwich Village," he added. The driver, a former would-be bohemian poet who had married a nice girl from Flatbush and traded his Village pad for a flat in Brooklyn and three ornery kids, winked into the rear-view mirror and did as he was told. "I know a place just west of Washington Square," he said. "It's a real dump, but you can get a single for seventeen a week, and I've heard the place swings."

The hotel-The Armitage Arms, it was called-was indeed a dump; paint was peeling from the walls of the entrance foyer, and the proprietor was a shifty-eyed little man with garlic on his breath. "Seventeen dollars in advance," he said. Plus eighty-five cents city hotel tax." When the man had stuffed the seventeen eighty-five in his pocket and watched Hamp fill out the registration form, he took the lad up to room 304. "The bath's down the hall," he said after depositing Hamp in the room. "When you flush in the toilet, don't pull too hard on the chain. The lever came loose last week. And try not to piss on the floor. Also, I don't care what you do in your room as long as you pay the rent, but don't make too much noise." The room was depressing. Its linoleum floor was dirty and cracked in several places, and when Hamp opened the built-in wardrobe he saw a roach scurry into a pile of old newspapers. The chest of drawers was painted a sickly light green, and the desk was small and rickety and held a dirty glass. The bedsprings squeaked. Still, it was home, and it was nice to know that he had a place to stay. Now there was only one thing to worry about-a job.

He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed. Worrying could wait; right now he needed a nap.

Hamp's first job was that of a theater usher. The Regency, a musical house on West 44th, was in need of someone to fill in for an usher who had been busted on a pot charge. After four fruitless days of trying to get a job in an advertising agency, Hamp heard about the opening from the hotel proprietor, whose brother worked in the theater's box office. "You need a job, right? Look, this is the world's greatest opportunity. This is how a lot of guys break into show business. Who knows? You could become a playwright, an actor, a producer ... And in the meantime you'll make enough to pay next week's rent."

And so Hamp took the subway uptown to Times Square, where he located the stage entrance and wandered up and down dusty staircases till at last a man in janitor's coveralls asked him what he was doing and directed him to a dressing room. There Hamp found the head usher, a kid of twenty-three or so with the muscles of a discus thrower (you could see through his T-shirt) and the poise of a ballet dancer. His name was Ernie, and he looked Hamp over carefully, arching his eyebrows and finally shrugging his shoulders and rendering his verdict. "You'll do fine. Have you ever ushered?"

"No." Hamp tried to keep his eyes off the young man's tight jeans, where a prominent bulge revealed a more than adequate endowment of masculine equipage.

"No sweat. I'll personally keep an eye on you till you learn the ropes." Ernie placed a warm hand on Hamp's left shoulder and guided him into a larger dressing room next door, where Hamp saw a half-dozen young men-all of them slim, and most with carefully tended hair-standing about in various stages of undress. One was wearing Jockey shorts and a T-shirt; another wore nothing but tight stretch bikini briefs in red and white stripes. A third was bare from the waist up and was busy stuffing a handkerchief into the fly of his excessively tight uniform pants.

"Welcome to the Latin Quarter," one of the boys said. "Or are you dressing with the fellows down the hall?"

"I thought we'd keep him here with us." Ernie smiled, and several of the boys laughed. Turning to a rack of uniforms, he studied Hamp carefully and pursed his lips. "We'll find you something to wear," he said. "I'll bet I can guess your exact size."

Hamp jumped when, after the performance, a hand slapped his underwear-clad buttocks as he was taking off his uniform in the dressing room.

"Cut it out," he said.

"Not another bore!" the young man who had accosted him pouted.

"Leave him alone, for Christ's sake," Ernie said. "He's only here till Sammy gets out of jail."

"If Sammy gets out of jail."

"Sammy'll get off; just wait and see. I heard they only found the stuff on his body. He'll get off somehow."

Hamp was almost dressed, and as he tied his shoelaces he looked up and asked Ernie how much longer the job would last.

"A couple weeks, maybe. I don't know. But don't worry about it. You ought to be able to find something else before Sammy gets back. Wednesday and Saturday are the only matinee days, so you can go job-hunting the rest of the time."

When Hamp got up to put his coat on, Ernie grasped him by the arm. "Stick around a while," the young man told him, nodding to another of the ushers who immediately went over and shut the door.

Hamp looked puzzled, so Ernie smiled at him and explained. "You're straight, aren't you?"

"You mean.. .not a queer?"

"Gay, baby," another usher insisted.

"I'm sorry. Yes, I'm straight. And if you don't mind, I think I'd better get home."

"Oh, hang around for a few minutes," Ernie argued. "Nobody's going to force you to do anything. We just thought you should see how the other half lives." He chuckled, and was joined in his laughter by the two other ushers who were still in the room.

One of the young men was standing in front of the dressing table studying his eyebrows in the mirror and plucking stray hairs out with tweezers. Now he turned around and smiled at Hamp, puffing up his bare, well-muscled chest and putting his arms behind his head in Mr. Universe style. "You like?"

"I'm sorry," Hamp answered. "That's not my thing."

The queen shrieked with laughter. "That's beautiful!" he said. "What a really sweet double entendre!"

He turned back to the mirror, admired himself for a moment, then stripped completely, to reveal an uncircumcised member surrounded by wiry black hair. He let his right hand move down to his prick and almost absent-mindedly began to massage its underside. The organ began to expand, and Hamp couldn't help noticing how the knob-like tip swelled forth from its sheath. The youth stroked it more purposefully now, and drew back the foreskin to reveal the ruddy head.

Jim, a well-built Negro of at least six-four, dropped his uniform trousers and drew them off. He hung them carefully over the back of a chair, and removed his T-shirt and Jockey shorts. "You just stand right there, Bill baby," he drawled softly to the nude queen as he straightened up and turned around so Hamp could see his massive purple-black cock.

"You sure you don't want to join the action, fella?" he asked, his eyes boring into Hamp's.

Hamp only shook his head. He knew he should leave, but curiosity and an odd sense of courtesy made it impossible.

While Hamp was busy trying to keep his gaze from settling too obviously on the Negro's swollen, stallion-like prick, Ernie was undressing behind him, and before long Hamp was the only one of the four with clothes on. The others were now passing a tube of K-Y jelly back and forth as they lubricated their organs and took turns bending over to have the jelly rubbed into their asses.

Hamp's penis was hard, and he surreptitiously reached down to adjust the trousers so the erection would be less obvious. Fortunately, the others were busy touching each other tentatively and trying to settle on a course of action for the coming orgy.

They ended up with the Negro in the middle, Bill in front and Ernie behind. The Negro made the first move.

"Scream, baby," he snarled, throwing Bill against the dressing table and stabbing his enormous cock between the boy's willingly spread thighs. Bill stiffened and let out a shriek as the black cock was thrust into his anus.

"I'm going to fuck the shit out of you, you white mother-lickin' bastard," the big black snarled as he rammed his rod all the way into Bill's smooth-fleshed ass. Bill's eyes closed and his lips tightened in an ecstatic smile as Jim reached around with one arm and let his hand wrap around Bill's waiting cock. The two of them moved excitedly, Jim thrusting forward again and again as Bill responded with a rhythmic, slightly rotating motion accompanied by the steady squeezing and loosening of his fingers on Jim's fondling hand.

Ernie moved toward the two now, smearing another gob of K-Y on his hardened cock and gauging the angle of the hole between the black man's buttocks. Gently, he placed a hand on Jim's right hip; the Negro responded by bending slightly and opening his thighs. Ernie reached between the spread legs and felt around for a second, then put his penis in position and eased the slick member into the cavity. When he had buried the full length of it, he sighed happily, and Jim responded with an extended grunt of appreciation.

The three moved together, a well-disciplined team; Bill would push back as Jim thrust forward, and as the Negro backed off from Bill's ass-hole, Ernie would drive his organ more deeply into Jim. It was like some strangely obscene ballet, and Hamp could not help being aroused. Guiltily, he let a hand slip into his pocket, where he pressed the head of his penis with his fingertips.

The combination of his fingers' pressure and the texture of his underpants was almost too much. Unable to restrain himself, Hamp pushed his stiffened finger hard against the bottom of the pants pocket. Innumerable washings in the FBCC laundry had made the material weak, and it took relatively little effort for the fingers to break through the cloth, whence they could find the opening of his undershorts and touch the swollen penis inside. He let his index finger smear a dribble from the prick's tip down to its underside, where there was the greatest sensitivity; in a moment, semen began to pour from his penis, not in orgasmic twitching but in a steady stream, as though there had been an overflow from his glans, and his cock were" a safety valve to relieve the pressure. Hamp hurriedly withdrew his hand from the pocket, but it was too late; the stuff had made a sticky puddle in his shorts, and in a moment it would soak through the cotton and into the fabric of his trousers.

His eyes still on the three queers, Hamp walked to the clothes rack and took his knee-length surcoat from its hangers. Thank God it was long enough to cover the inevitable stain.

The fags were on the verge of climax now. Jim smashed Bill's torso against the dressing table and stabbed into his ass-hole as deep as possible; Ernie followed, embracing the Negro's torso and tightening his ass as he shoved his organ in to its full length. In a moment, Hamp witnessed a three-way orgasm accompanied by noisy gasps and groans, and when the three had finished their spasms of mutual delight, they slid into a heap on the floor, snuggling against each other and breathing heavily with exhaustion.

Ernie looked up lazily and saw Hamp fiddling with the lock of the dressing room door.

"You're coming back tomorrow night, aren't you?" he asked.

"I don't know," Hamp replied. He felt ashamed now; ashamed of watching, and ashamed of the semen which soaked the front of his pants.

"Look, come on back. You need the six bucks."

And indeed Hamp did. For an evening's work, it wasn't much, but it helped pay the rent. He would be back, embarrassing though it might be. But next time he would wear two pairs of undershorts-for greater protection and absorbency-just in case.

"Good night," he said, opening the door.

Ernie smiled and blew him a kiss.