The Hardest Thing

increased in the sky. It felt good to have someone beside me—another warm body, the chest rising and falling, the intimacy that could feel like love, if you closed your eyes and pretended that he was someone else…someone who cared…
    I didn’t hear him leave. I didn’t wake until someone banged on the door and yelled, “Hey! Housekeeping!” My head was pounding, my eyes felt like broken glass marbles and my guts were griping—too much drink, not enough food.
    “All right! Gimme a minute.”
    Jesus, the room must have stunk like a pigpen, if the pigs drank liquor and used poppers, that is. My dick was hard—I needed to piss—and the thick soft hair
around it was sticky with sperm. There was no sign of my new friend, Scott, the man I’d fucked to kingdom come and fallen asleep beside.
    I used the bathroom and collected my clothes from around the room.
    On the nightstand was forty bucks, two twenties neatly folded under the base of the lamp. Forty lousy bucks. Like I said, I’ll never make a hustler.
    I stuck it in my pocket and took the bus uptown.

The Job 2
    Some Friday night: got into a fight, lost my job, picked up some high-class tail who could have paid my rent for six months out of the loose change in his pocket and woke up with the worst hangover of my life, a sore dick and the grand sum of forty bucks.
    I spent Saturday staring at the fly shit on my bedroom ceiling on 109th Street, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the rest of my life. I could kill myself—nobody would care much. I’ve got a family, but they’re not so keen on their brave boy now that he got dismissed from the marines for inappropriate sexual relations. Who else would notice? A few of the regulars at the smelly little sweatbox I call a gym, the guys who like to watch me in the showers. Maybe the old Puerto Rican lady who lives downstairs and lets me carry her groceries sometimes. That’s about it. I can’t afford the gym anymore, and if I can’t come up with the rent I’ll be moving out of 109th Street, and that’s it. Dan Stagg has left the building. Hardly anyone knows my name.
    That changed on Sunday, when the papers carried a
story about a fight at a nightclub in the East Village in which a psychotic ex-marine had attacked a defenseless college football star, blah, blah, blah. There was my name for all the world to see. “Dan Stagg, 37, who was discharged from the military in 2009.” According to “eyewitness reports,” I’d picked my victim at random and started beating up on him; the reporter made it sound as if it was only luck that prevented me from having a firearm about my person. Boy, it must have been a slow news weekend if that kind of crap got into the papers. To make matters worse, it got picked up by the radio talk shows—what has New York come to, they asked, when the people who are supposed to be defending our citizens are the ones they need protecting from?
    So thank you, Blondie and Company, I am now out of a job, unemployable, and public enemy number one. I wondered if the French Foreign Legion was recruiting, or if anyone wanted a mercenary in, say, Rwanda.
    At least nobody got a photograph or published my address, so I can still walk around the streets without being attacked. But that’s about all I can do.
    I slept late on Monday morning, waking to feel the sun on my body. My mouth was dry and my eyes full of crud, and the hopelessness of my situation weighed so heavy I could barely haul my ass out of bed. I sleep naked, with just a sheet to cover me; the AC in my apartment is an antique window-mounted unit that’s so noisy I prefer the heat. So I lay there for a while, watching the bars of sunlight moving across my legs and torso, and I thought about that little prick of a college football star and just what I’d do to him if he was here right now.
Perhaps if I could come, I’d sleep again. I had nothing else to do with my day. No point in looking for a job. Recent experience, Mr. Stagg? Well, sir, just last Friday I nearly killed an innocent member of the public with my bare hands. Thank you and goodbye.
    I’d just spat into my palm and was slicking up my dick—it felt good enough to take my mind off the bad stuff—when there was a knock on the door. A knock: an actual physical rapping of knuckles on wood, not a phone call, not a letter, but a personal caller. Two minutes later and I’d have answered the door with cum dripping off my hairy belly; as it was I wrapped a