Tag: strippers

Louisiana Moon

As if you weren’t sick of my self-promotion already, now I get to start promoting Mississippi River Mischief!

It’s hard to believe that this is Scotty’s ninth adventure. Not bad for someone who was just supposed to be a one-off, a stand-alone comic madcap adventure that took place during Southern Decadence. The idea for it came to me at Southern Decadence in 1999; on Saturday afternoon I somehow managed to get a prime spot on the balcony at the Parade to watch the massive crowd of sweating shirtless men partying down below at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann. I noticed a really hot guy wearing sweats and carrying a gym bag fighting his way through the crowd to get to the Pub downstairs, and I recognized him as one of the dancers for the weekend. In that instant, I had a mental flash of a dancer being chased through a crowd of shirtless sweating men at the corner by bad guys with guns and the dancer only wearing a lime-green thong. I held that idea in my head, and sometime later that weekend Paul said to me, “you know, you should write a book set during Decadence,” and I grinned and replied, “I already have the idea.” I had started writing a short story called “Bourbon Street Blues” a year or so before this; but realized that would make a better title for the stripper crime caper during Southern Decadence, so I made a folder for it and kept it in my files and in the back of my mind. Several years later, when talking with an editor about something else when I worked at Lambda Book Report, I asked if that might be something he’d be interested in. He said send him a proposal, which I did–having no clue what I was doing–and they offered me a two book deal, turning my stand-alone into a series. Having no idea how to write the second book in such a series, the money was too good for me to say no or to quibble, figuring I’ll figure it out when I need to–which is really the motto of my career.

The Scotty series has always had a bit of a “pantser” feel to it for me because I’ve always pantsed it. I knew that the first adventure–Bourbon Street Blues–was going to be that Southern Decadence story, and I also knew I was going to fictionalize a governor race, basing it on a senate race that occurred when we first moved here and we couldn’t believe that one of the candidates was actually a serious candidate (sadly, he was just a harbinger of what was to come in Louisiana; now he’d seem like one of the fucking sane ones), and I kind of borrowed, a bit unconsciously, from the Stephen King character of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone. Bourbon Street Blues was a prescient novel in so many ways–and I had no idea of that at the time, seriously. There’s a scene where the Goddess shows Scotty the potential flooding of New Orleans after a levee failure (in the book it was deliberate though) and of course I predicted the Right’s move into full-bore hardcore neo-Nazism as well in that book…never dreaming it would become a reality.

Scotty has always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants series; I’ve never really outlined or planned the books or the series in any way, other than an amorphous idea that the love triangle situation I created in the first book would take three books to resolve. During the course of the third book I realized I needed at least one more book to resolve that story, and so it went from stand-alone to trilogy to quartet…and then Katrina happened. Katrina created an unplanned gap in the series, and I never really knew how to do Katrina from a Scotty perspective. It struck me that they wouldn’t have evacuated, but Scotty wouldn’t have ridden the storm out in his apartment, nor would his parents have done so at their place; they would have all gone to the Garden District where Papa and Maman Diderot have a generator. I just didn’t see how I could write a funny Scotty book about the levee failure and the city’s destruction. Also, we learned something about Scotty in the second book (Jackson Square Jazz) that I meant to deal with in the fourth book. By the time I was ready and able and willing to write that fourth book in the series…well, I forgot that I’d planned on dealing with that issue from Scotty’s past in it, and never did ever circle back around to that resolution of something from his youth.

I did remember when I decided to write Mississippi River Mischief, though. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with Royal Street Reveillon, in which something happened in Scotty’s personal life that was tied into the case, but I couldn’t write another book and pretend that never happened, even though it would be hard to deal with in the text of the book and story. But then, as I was trying to work it out in my head, I realized now you can circle around back to that issue from Scotty’s teen years because this is the right place and time for him to be reminded of it because of what happened to Taylor.

And you know what? I think it made for a better story now than it would have almost fourteen years ago.

Scotty has grown a lot over the twenty or so years (!!!) I’ve been writing him, but who he is at his core has never changed. Scotty is a good person, with a genuine sense of kindness, and is pretty level-headed and never really lets things get to him the way I let things get to me–and God knows, he’s dealt with a lot more shit than I have in life. I like his sense of humor, I like his spirituality, and I like his untrained, he-doesn’t-know-how-it-works psychic abilities, and of course, I love his family. His parents are amazing, his older brother and sister are also pretty cool characters, and of course Frank and Colin are also fun to write. I also never knew how subversive I was being by creating a throuple long before anyone ever talked about these kinds of relationships within the queer community–and it’s lasted all these years. There have been ups and downs, of course, but they always wind up coming back together again no matter what happens–and a lot has happened. Both Scotty and Frank have been shot a few times, not to mention all those car accidents–and he’s also helped cover up a crime (no spoilers here, no worries!).

You can order it here, if you were so inclined…

What You Need

Today is National HIV Testing Day, and I’ll be doing testing all day in the Carevan in the parking lot of my neighborhood Walgreens. A long day, to be sure, and I will most certainly be exhausted tonight when I am done. But at least I’ll only have a two block walk home.

The heat and humidity feels particularly crippling this year; maybe I’ve gotten too old to handle it, or something, but I find myself these days tired and drained all of the time; exhausted, and never hungry; I have to remind myself to eat something every day. Right now, it’s not as bright as it should be outside my windows; there is cloud cover blocking the sunlight but in the distance I can see blue skies. I’m on pace to finish the Scotty by the end of this weekend (thank the Lord) despite the fact the book is a sloppy mess; but a sloppy mess can be fixed.

I’ve also not been reading as much lately; I haven’t had the energy. I have started reading Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which the film Love Simon was based on, but I am not really getting into it very much. Maybe that will change the deeper I get into it, but what I really want to do is dive headfirst into Lou Berney’s November Road and Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita.

Then again, I could be tired and drained and out of it this week because last weekend wasn’t a normal one; and I even was out on Monday night this week. My stay-cation built around the 4th of July cannot come soon enough, Constant Reader.

The next story up in Promises in Every Star and Other Stories is “Oh, What A Friend I Have in Jesus”:

I watched as the storm rolled in from the ocean into Acapulco Bay. The lightning flashes at the mouth of the horseshoe shaped inlet lit up the night sky In the distance, the black water below the jagged white strings turning green. I sat on the balcony of a beachfront highrise, smoking a cigarette, unable to sleep. It was about four o’clock in the morning, and I knew I was going to have to let myself out relatively soon to catch a cab back to the S. S. Adonis, which was setting sail for Mazatlan at promptly eight in the morning. Part of me was tempted to just go on to the airport and catch the next flight back to Los Angeles. I wasn’t enjoying the cruise, as I’d known I wouldn’t. It seemed now, as it had in the days before departure, like an incredible waste of time.

Inside the apartment, beyond the open sliding glass doors, Jesus mutttered something in his sleep and rolled over onto his back. I looked inside, noting the long thick brown cock resting off to the side of the large balls. His flat, perfectly smooth stomach rose and fell with every breath. I felt my own cock stir again inside my underwear, but ignored it and turned back to look out to sea. There wasn’t time for another round, and besides, he was asleep. When he woke, I would most likely be out to sea, on the cruise I regretted taking. It’s only five more days, I reminded myself. After Mazatlan, we turn back north and head straight back to LA. You can get through it, surely.

The cruise hadn’t been my idea. Whenever I thought about going on a cruise, my mind automatically returned to movies like The Poseidon Adventure and Titanic. It had been Mark’s idea, one of his harebrained schemes born out of his own boredom and need for change. Maybe that wasn’t quite fair—Mark was just more adventurous than I was, always had been, and I was usually more than happy to go along for the ride. It was Mark who’d dragged me to Gay Days at Disney, Southern Decadence in New Orleans, and IML in Chicago. I’d never regretted letting Mark serve as my vacation planner, having a great time every time I went anywhere with him. It was hard not to have fun with Mark; Mark drew people to him everywhere he went with his infectious big smile, sexy blue eyes and his ripped muscular body. Everyone always looked at Mark, everyone always wanted to meet him, everyone always wanted to fuck him. Maybe I was a little jealous of him, but he’d worked long and hard on his body, and the work showed. He was always prone to take his shirt off whenever he got the chance, displaying the huge mouth watering pecs and gigantic biceps that everyone wanted to touch, to see flexed. But I’d known Mark before he’d dedicated himself to turning himself, as he said, ‘into the hottest man over forty in Southern California.” When he suggested going on the Adonis cruise, I’d been more than happy to fork over the several thousand dollars, despite my aversion to being on the high seas.

Mark made everything more fun.

I flicked my cigarette over the edge of the balcony and watched the little glowing red ember tumble end over end down eleven stories before exploding into sparks on the marble walkway below. The wind was picking up as the storm crossed the bay towards land, and I shivered a little. I debated lighting another one; debated getting dressed and slipping out the elevator and heading back to the ship.

Instead, I went inside and got back into the bed, feeling Jesus’ warmth as he breathed shallowly in his sleep. There was a bedside lamp on, and as I drew on his body heat to warm my chilled skin, I looked back at the semi-hard cock with a little drop of liquid in the slit. It was a beautiful cock, purplish-brown and gigantic when flaccid. When erect, it was the stuff of pornographic dreams. I stared at it wonderingly. That thing was inside of me about an hour ago, I thought, resisting the urge to shake my head. It made me feel like no other cock ever had before. I came three times while he pounded into my ass—no one’s ever done that before. I came the first time without even touching my own cock.

Mark had been forced to cancel his cruise at the last minute—a medical emergency. He’d overdone it at the gym and created a rupture inside his own ball sack, and his doctor had insisted on operating on it right away. The surgery itself was minor and routine—an outpatient procedure I’d driven him to and home from—but the doctor forbade him to leave the country. And when I said I’d cancel, too—Mark wouldn’t hear of it. “NO, you go on without me,” my best friend had insisted. “I’d never forgive myself if you didn’t go because of me. You go on. You’ll have a blast, you’ll see.”

This story was clearly based on our trip to Acapulco in the summer of 2006; we rented a beautiful apartment in what was known as the “Mexican” part of the city–where the wealthy Mexicans vacationed, rather than the part where most Americans from the US went. The place was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous; there was a pool, the entire building was done in marble, the bedroom had a balcony that opened out to the bay, the pool was just above the beach with wooden steps down…it was wonderful, and it was our first real vacation in ten years. Jesus, the lovely Mexican local my main character has an adventurous evening in bed with, was actually based on a stripper at a local strip club Paul and I discovered called the Club Caliente; the downstairs had female strippers and the upstairs male. We were startled to discover a major cultural difference between American and Mexican strip clubs: in Acapulco, they are completely naked. My writer’s mind began to wander–this was also the first time I was ever in a strip club, and realized the attention I was getting from the strippers was probably triggered by oh, look, a bald old rich American gay man! (“Rich” being the only adjective that doesn’t fit.) So when I was asked to write an erotic story for an anthology of cruise stories, I decided to write about Acapulco and Jesus, the beautiful stripper I’d met. (I gave him a couple of dollars.) The title came about because the Christian nonsense in Virginia had resurfaced, and hey, if the evangelicals wanted to slander and smear me and destroy my career, well, I’m going to title a gay porn story the same name as one of their favorite hymns.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Acapulco, and the view from our balcony:

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