Sensing Light Read Free Page B

student’s clipboard, as inscrutable to him as those in a horoscope he had acquired in 1968.
    When Larry got off the bus from Fort Worth, he was met by a middle-aged woman wearing dark eye shadow and a paisley caftan. She dangled a paper template of collapsing circles, radial lines, and arcane symbols. I’ll predictyour future for a pack of cigarettes, she offered. Just tell me exactly when and where you were born. Larry had liked this idea of a predestination absolving him of any responsibility for his own fate.
    By the time Larry arrived in San Francisco, the city’s “Summer of Love” was over. There was more “speed”—methamphetamine manufactured by local biker gangs—being sold on Haight Street than LSD. Larry soon sampled all the available drugs. One LSD trip was enough. He wanted to empower his self, not transcend it. Although the pleasure of heroin easily matched that of a good orgasm and lasted longer, he saw what it did to people—the scars and open sores, the degradation addicts were willing to submit to for another high. Speed, on the other hand, wasn’t overtly self-destructive. He could listen to music for hours, dance for hours, have sex for hours.
    Larry fell in with a tribe of homeless speed freaks, an honorable society compared to heroin addicts. However, surviving in the city with a drug habit required money. Occasionally, he resorted to petty theft, until he learned about the Castro.
    Larry discovered he was irresistible to the older, well-off, gay men who had settled in a neighborhood known by its main commercial street, Castro, at the end of World War II. He packaged his lean, six-foot frame into a tight pink tank top and blue jeans worn low to display his flat belly. His cheeks, chiseled by methamphetamine, and a scar on his chin completed the erotic bait. He set the hook with a cowboy persona, half vulnerable, half rugged, brazenly bootlegged from James Dean.
    As the gay scene grew exponentially, he graduated from doing tricks on the street to being a kept lover in an elegant furnished apartment. He usually had two or more sugar daddies, discretely scheduled so as not to meet one another. A few were married, had children, and lived in the suburbs. Collectively, their support covered his living expenses, including the upkeep for a pristine, white Thunderbird convertible.
    After the medical student left, Larry saw he was being scrutinized by a male nurse. Not examined objectively like a patient would be but sized up on a scale of desirability. The man’s layered, shoulder-length hair and thick mustache were familiar. Of course, Larry realized, the nurse was a regular in aCastro Street fern bar where he had done some higher-end hustling. The man had approached him once and suggested a tryst. When Larry explained what he charged, the man was furious. Must picture himself too hot to have to pay for it, Larry had thought.
    He watched the nurse amble to the central ER hub of telephones and chart racks and whisper to a butch-looking clerk he recognized from a down-scale, South of Market leather bar. The clerk’s mutton chop sideburns were the same. Just his suspenders and chains were missing. Larry recalled being hit on by him with a similar outcome.
    Larry had learned early on that such misunderstandings were a professional hazard. One had to cast a wide net in making seductive eye contact. Sometimes a potential client misread the situation. Thrilled that this young stud was attracted to him, the unsuspecting target would strike up a conversation and become hostile on finding out Larry was interested only in commercial transactions.
    The two men sneered at him. They seemed to be enjoying his misfortune. Larry was indifferent. His pretense of vulnerability had always been a bigger act than the ruggedness. He still lived the mantra he first heard as a homeless teen in the Haight— “Don’t let other people’s shit bum you out.”
    Though