I was having one of those days. Only the need for the Whirlwind to make an appearance could have made things any worse. So naturally…
I was occupied with my least favorite part of my job: Client Relations. It’s a euphemism for smoothing the ruffled feathers of the wealthy but touchy old queens that make up the bulk of our business. I had a second call on hold, and I could hear a third line ringing out in the reception area, when my secretary, Randy Whitethorn, flounced into my office in his usual cloud of drama.
“Quick, Alec, hang up! Hang up!”
I winced. If you looked up the word “fey” in the dictionary, you’d find Randy’s picture. His most impressive skill was the ability to lisp his way through a sentence which did not contain a single sibilant.
I covered the mouthpiece to mask my exasperation from the client on the other end of the line.
“I’m on with Irving Tressman. You sent him another brunette? How many times do I have to tell you…?”
Randy’s excitement was instantly replaced by the contrivance of being deeply wounded. He pressed splayed fingers to the center of his chest to make sure I knew how horribly put off he was that anyone would dare question his competence.
“I assure you, dearie, I never make the same mistake twice! I sent him the new boy. What’s his name? Gary! Blond as a California beach boy with a surfboard stomach to match.”
“That’s wash board, you nit.”
“You can surf it if you want,” he said archly. “I’ll wash. A little soap and all those lovely abs…”
He smacked his lips and fluttered his eyelash extensions. More than once, I’d been tempted to rip them from his eyelids.
“Did you bother to check the drapes to see if they matched the carpet?”
I uncovered the receiver and verbally trampled over Tressman’s complaining.
“I know, Irving, I know. I apologize profusely and I swear to you, it will not happen again.”
I glared at Randy to let him know I was speaking to him as much as to the client. All the while, a torrent of moral outrage poured across the telephone wires. Irving Tressman is one of those people who believe that volume is the secret to getting what they want. When he called on his cell, he was sometimes so loud that the tower couldn’t keep his voice from distorting. Unfortunately, he was calling from a land line at the moment, and I was clearly able to discern the phrases “dissatisfied customer,” “entitled to compensation,” and “over-rated reputation,” all hurled across the wires at several thousand decibels.
My temper bristled at that last bit. Given the nature of my business, I can be prickly when someone calls my reputation into question. Even though Mayor Richie Banterly had legalized prostitution, there were still people who looked down their noses at the Archer Agency. Fortunately, Marilyn Cramer over at Boy Toys took most of the heat from the religious types, probably because she ran women as well as boys. A lot of people find the idea of male hookers to be glamorous. You’d be surprised how many bored housewives and frustrated career women are titillated by the prospect of a hot stud paid to indulge their every sexual whim, while many unattractive men thrill to the fantasy that only a few extra pounds and a gym membership stand in the way of their career as a professional gigolo.
Where male prostitutes are concerned, both sexes have delusions of glamor.
But when it comes to female sex workers, people get touchy, partly because the media loves to highlight sex slavery and kiddie porn. The last time I had lunch with Marilyn, she wanted my advice on how to make sure her clients understood that her girls were in the business voluntarily, and that they were handsomely paid. Short of posting copies of her employees’ 1099s, I couldn’t come up with anything.
But that’s not the reason the Archer Agency’s employees are all male. It has nothing to do with the moral backlash. On the contrary, on the Kinsey Scale, which only goes up to six, I’m an eight. Even the thought of accidentally seeing a pair of bare titties makes me break out into a cold sweat.
Speaking of sweating, Tressman’s bitching was making me more than a little hot under the collar. Though a dozen archly vitriolic comebacks were on the tip of my tongue, I wrestled my temper into control. Notwithstanding his many personality flaws, and his lack of interpersonal skills, Irving Tressman was still one of my best clients. I took a deep, steadying breath and forced myself to be politic.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do for you, Irving…”
I continued to glare at Randy while I spoke. Obviously, I couldn’t voice any of the more creative threats I had in mind, not while Tressman was able to overhear; they might turn him on. On the other hand, I was doing my best to silently communicate that, as soon as I hung up on the old poof, adding bleach to Randy’s high-colonic rinse was not entirely out of the question.
“I know it can’t begin to make up for the mistake…”
Even to myself, I sounded as unctuous as a television evangelist. But Irving wouldn’t give a damn about my insincerity as soon as he understood that he might get something for nothing.
“…perhaps you’ll accept a gift? To apologize for any inconvenience we caused you.”
I imagined Irving’s ears tilting forward like a mangy, obese hound who had caught the scent of a rabbit– preferably already stewed so that he wouldn’t have to exert himself by running it down. Sure enough, Tressman quieted enough to listen.
“I see you have Matthew booked for tomorrow night. How would you feel about us sending you both Matthew and…?”
I paused to heighten Tressman’s anticipation. Though I’d never admit it to Randy’s face, there are a few useful techniques I’ve picked up from my secretary’s dramatics.
“…David.”
There was an involuntary gasp from the other end of the phone which Tressman was not quite able to suppress. I added, as if the question wasn’t rhetorical, “You do remember him, I hope?”
When Tressman began to gush about exactly how he remembered David, including some intimate details I could have happily ended my days without ever hearing, I knew we were out of the weeds without too much damage. I refrained from retching, and made appreciative noises, while Irving boasted of his sexual prowess. In the meantime, Randy tried to get my attention by waving his arms like an over-sexed peacock parading its feathers for a whole harem of hens.
“You don’t say?” I crooned. “Three times! At your age? Irving, you old stud! I never would have guessed it.”
Admittedly, Randy croons better than I do but I’m working on it.
“I want to make absolutely certain that David will…ahem…fill your needs. I know he’s shorter than you normally like. Since we don’t want to make another mistake, if you’d rather have someone taller…?”
Tressman hastened to assure me that there was no need to dwell on past mistakes, and that he’d be just fine spending the evening with the pair.
Matthew wouldn’t be a problem. The kid would hump an ostrich in Macy’s window if it paid well enough. David, though, was another matter. He’d been less than thrilled with Tressman on their first date, and it was going to be a chore to get him to accept the assignment. Apparently, though it boggled the mind to imagine it, Irving Tressman was even more difficult when he was naked than he was when he was fully clothed. Rather than admit to his own impotence, the balding jeweler liked to take his frustrations out on the hired help. Even though my employees, of necessity, are trained to handle that kind of thing, I don’t expect them to tolerate abuse from an old queen who expects someone else to take the blame for his inability to get it up.
Luckily, one of my guys had discovered that Tressman had a foot fetish. Sucking the old poof’s toes was good for half an erection at least. I’d dutifully written the information down. If any of the boys fails to review the notes in a client’s file before a date, they have no one to blame but themselves.
With Randy’s gesticulations growing grander by the minute, I assured the jeweler that, come Friday night, I could guarantee a two-for-one special that would blow, if not his mind, than at least something. With that, I rang off and turned my attention to Little Miss Drama Queen.
“I had no idea it was a dye job!” he protested in high dudgeon. “I must find out who he uses. It was that good.”
“You didn’t check.”
Randy’s swarthy, attractive features were twisted into a mask of outrage worse than if I’d accused him of having had Botox treatments. Though he claimed that his mother was one half Cherokee, and though his skin was certainly bronzed enough to suggest Native American blood, I had always suspected that he was actually Puerto Rican.
“You honestly don’t expect me to get close enough to go over them with a magnifying glass, do you?”
I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d confessed to doing just that as part of the standard interview process.
“I expect you to make sure that a blond is a blond is a blond. Especially when the guy is booked by Irving Tressman. You make them strip during the interview, right? At least to the waist?”
“I have them do more than that,” Randy’s eyes glazed at some choice memory. “In this business, size matters after all.”
“After taking all that care,” I asked sarcastically, “how did you manage to miss this?”
He fixed me with another arch look, tilting his head back and gazing at me down the length of his pseudo-aristocratic little nose. “As I just said…size matters. I was distracted by my examination of other things.”
He plucked a tissue from the holder on my desk and dabbed delicately at the corner of his mouth. The gesture was calculated to get under my skin. Though I sometimes found Randy’s incessant verbal innuendos amusing, he knew I drew the line at outright crudeness.
Even all those years ago when Richie Banterly and I were working the same street corners, I always tried to keep things classy. The two of us had reputations for being clean, and not just because we bathed regularly. We obeyed informal rules, which we set for ourselves, which dictated that we avoid drugs, and never drank anything stronger than a single cocktail or a beer or two while we were working. When you’re hooking on the street, you never know when you might need to rely on a friend if a trick turns sour. You want to make sure your lifeline isn’t someone who’s tweaked to the tits or falling down drunk. Richie and I had a pact to watch each other’s backs.
Most people snickered when Richie decided to run for mayor. To his advantage, he was young, passionate, intelligent, and committed. He brought a fresh vibrancy to Centerport’s political scene and, I guess, the citizens figured that if they were going to have a whore in the Mayor’s office, it might as well be someone who was up front about it. The incumbent, whose tenure as mayor had been riddled with corruption, was as surprised as anyone else when Richie won by a wide margin.
One of Richie’s first orders of business had been to “clean up” the red-light district, not because he had a moral problem with it, but because he was tired of seeing young people like us being exploited. He had cracked down on the drugs, the pimps, and the violence. He’d gotten the under-aged kids off the streets and into facilities that could help make sure they stayed off. But he knew he couldn’t eliminate the trade entirely, so he’d done the next best thing.
He legalized it.
Then, he taxed it and regulated it. And, finally, he’d reached out to a few people he trusted to help legitimize it. If hookers were a fact of life, Richie wanted to make sure that the hookers in his town would be well paid, protected, healthy and, above all, safe. Richie figured that escort agencies, set up as legitimate businesses, were the way to go.
I was one of the first people he’d approached to help him out. To be honest, I was hesitant at first. What did I know about running a business? At the time, I had enough regular clients to keep me in “cigarettes and nylons” as the drag queen friend of mine used to say. I also had a somewhat unusual inheritance from my late parents, so I didn’t have to worry about making rent. In short, I was perfectly content to have worked my way up from a street hooker into a fairly high-priced call boy.
I had also just met Peter.
Pete knew what I did for a living. In fact, that was how we met. He’d been steadily climbing the corporate ladder at Greene Genes and when he finally nailed a position on the Board, a few of his friends decided to rent him a professional to celebrate. That professional was me. And I can happily state that the nailing went on for a great many more hours than his friends had paid for. It never bodes well for a prostitute to fall for a client; at the Archer Agency I have strict rules against it. With Peter though, it was a magic, once in a lifetime, love at first sight kind of thing. We’ve been together ever since.
Even so, Peter and I were both aware that it wasn’t a great idea for a rising corporate wunderkind to be married to a hooker. If I were a businessman, however, I could pass as respectable. At least on the surface. Fortunately, between the cash and properties I’d inherited, launching the Archer Agency was a do-able next step. Peter wasn’t thrilled that I’d embarked on a new career as a male Madam, but he reluctantly accepted it. To my surprise, I discovered I had a pretty good head for business. In a remarkably short period of time, the Archer Agency was a big success.
That’s not to say that my profession wasn’t sometimes a burden on our relationship. Peter steadfastly refused to come out at work. Though some of his colleagues must have known he was gay and simply chose not to make a big deal out of it, the fact that he was married to the owner of a brothel wouldn’t be quite as easy to ignore. The need for secrecy rankled with me, but it’s amazing the things you can put up with when you truly care about someone.
“If you’ve completely finished berating me…”
Randy’s comment snapped me out of my reverie and erased the sappy look from my face, the one that I got whenever I was thinking about my husband.
“…I came in to tell you…”
He sashayed to the window behind my desk and opened the blinds. I couldn’t help reflecting that with his tight, gymnast build and that darkly brooding, handsome face, I could have made a fortune from him if only he wasn’t so damned nelly. With a sigh for lost business opportunities, I swiveled in my chair, looked out the window, and saw chaos reigning only a few blocks away.
Columns of oily black smoke partly obscured the view, pierced by a huge gout of flame that soared toward the sky and gave off spirals of sparks. Now that Tressman was no longer yelling in my ear, I could dimly hear sirens in the distance. A sharp shard of tension speared me in the pit of my stomach, even though I realized it was only my imagination that made it sound like people were screaming as well.
“It’s the Green Genes Special Projects Building. It’s all over the news,” he told me with ghoulish excitement. Then, legitimate concern flashed across his face and he asked, “Peter doesn’t…?”
“No,” I said.
Peter’s office was in the main corporate building several blocks further down on Overmeir Street. Besides, he’d planned to spend the afternoon at the hospital with his boss, Jackson Greene. Jackson and Peter had a strong relationship that transcended business; Jackson was his mentor as well as his boss. After the old man got the latest test results back, Peter wanted to be at his side to help him cope with the bad news.
“There are hundreds of worker bees still inside,” Randy continued. “Even worse…”
He lowered his voice to a somber whisper and shuddered to highlight the awfulness of the tragedy.
“…The parade!”
He gave me a knowing look, as if I should know what he was taking about.
“What parade?”
He feigned shock at my ignorance, even though he’d probably been expecting it, and barreled on, relishing every detail as only a man who has inherited the gossip chromosome from both parents can.
“My dear! Do you never pay attention to anything that happens in this town?”
If Randy only knew how much attention I was forced to pay…
“Today is the Founders Day parade. The biggest private sponsor is…” He paused for unnecessary dramatic impact, “…Green Genes!”
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through both nostrils, as if bracing himself against the horrors he felt compelled to describe with gruesome gusto.
“The parade route goes right through the courtyard of the Special Projects Building so the judges can get a good look at all the floats. There was an explosion and… Well, it’s all too, too horrible to think about!”
He fanned himself with a piece of paper he took from my desk. Sadly, there was no fainting couch on hand, or he’d have probably used it.
“The news says there are people still trapped in the building. Flaming furniture keeps falling down onto the crowd and…”
He opened his eyes to display pupils dilated with excitement. His cheeks had colored, and he kept punctuating each sentence with gasps of affected horror. It had the unpleasant effect of letting me know what he probably looked like when he was on the verge of an orgasm.
“Terrible, my dear. Just terrible.”
“You are one morbid queen, do you know that?”
Randy isn’t truly malicious, he’s simply the quintessential Drama Queen. While he can be as catty as hell, he’s also been known to burst into tears when he sees a TV commercial soliciting donations for starving orphans. The weeping builds to a crescendo, but after he’s wrung the last bit of sympathy for himself out of whoever’s watching television with him, he never fails to send a check to UNICEF. He’ll also keen like an Irishman at the tragic plight cinema heroines, especially when said heroine is played by Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, or one of the other mid-century divas he emulates. Of course, to disguise the fact that he actually has a heart, he’s spent years honing his tongue until it’s sharp enough to slash tires at fifty paces.
Words failing him–an occasion to celebrate in itself–he huffed to show he was above my insults, and he switched on the wall-mounted TV. Images of costumed revelers fleeing the area filled the screen. An announcer’s voice babbled incoherent details with thinly disguised panic. The camera panned upward to show flame spouting from broken windows eight stories above the street. Even as we watched, part of the brick facade of the building bulged outward and collapsed, raining more death onto the people below.
“Turn that off,” I snapped.
I had to get Randy out of my office. Quickly.
“How can you not be interested, Alec? It’s your husband’s company!”
“My husband is safe and sound. Short of throwing on a yellow slicker and joining the fire brigade, there’s nothing I can do, is there?”
My callousness was complete pretense but, hopefully, Randy would latch onto the opportunity to be even more offended and flounce out of the office so I could do what I had to do.
“On the other hand, since it’s your fault that I had to double-book David for tomorrow night, if you don’t get to work straightening out the schedule, I swear I will put mentholated rub into that jar of personal lubricant you keep in the bottom drawer of your desk.”
“How did you…?” He acted appalled, as if I’d discovered his deepest secret.
“The Shadow knows,” I said. I fixed him with a steely glare and added in a tone that brooked no argument, “Next time, check the roots. All of them.”
Grumbling under his breath about how little I appreciated him, Randy traipsed out. As soon as he’d slammed the door, I reached under my desk and flipped the switch that was hidden there. My office door locked with a click. Simultaneously, the glass in the wall of windows behind my desk polarized. As soon as I was sure no one could see in, I shifted the desk blotter and pressed my palm to the scanner hidden underneath. A soft beep sounded and the wet bar on the far wall slid soundlessly behind the bookshelves to reveal a small elevator. Though a humble blotter might seem like a flimsy cover, I had no fear that my secret would be discovered. Randy was the only person allowed in my office when I wasn’t there, and he would rather sleep with a woman than lift a finger to clean anything. The thin layer of dust coating both the blotter and the desk were as much of a protection as they were an irritation.
The car descended swiftly into a basement which failed to appear on any of the building’s blueprints. Travis Buttrick might resemble a cross between a grizzly bear and a homeless person, but in spite of how intimidating he looks, he has a network of people eager to do him favors including, it seemed, cronies in Centerport’s Urban Planning department. He’s also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met when it comes to electronics and computers. He’s constantly creating new gadgets and concocting mysterious chemical substances to help me out. Unfortunately for me, he usually fails to take into account that there’s an actual person who has to operate his contraptions and wear his gadgets and, as a result, he doesn’t always design them with my comfort in mind. In fact, sometimes I think he makes things deliberately awkward for me, just to keep me on my toes.
Purely by happenstance, I discovered that even Travis’ genius can’t overcome a quart of Tom Kha Kai soup accidentally spilled on one of his inventions. In my defense, I never claimed to be graceful. Now though, whenever he summons me to help him “test out something new,” if at all possible, I stop by a Thai restaurant first and bring take-out into the lab.
Changing into the costume rarely takes more than a minute as getting dressed and undressed quickly is one of the skills I retained from my years as a fancy boy. Travis made the original outfit out of wool. The instant I began to perspire, it felt like my entire body had jock itch. Though I heal almost instantly from most things, it was horribly uncomfortable the entire time I wore the thing.
I complained. Travis told me I was being a baby and ignored me. I complained some more. Ditto. It was only after a reporter snapped a shot of me with my hands down the front of my tights, scratching the devil out of my crotch, that Travis relented. He brags that my current suit is some kind of scientific marvel. As far as I’m concerned, it’s virtually indistinguishable from Spandex.
The first time I put it on, I thought it lacked only a tutu and an orchestra playing Swan Lake to keep it from being completely ridiculous. But once I got used to it, I couldn’t help admiring the way it clung to me like a second skin and made my muscles look even better than they did when I stood, bare-chested, in front of the mirrors in the gym locker room. Unfortunately, I’d never be able to model it for Peter.
Travis assured me that the material is fireproof, tear proof, bullet proof, and could withstand a terrific amount of pressure which, I suppose, will come in handy if I’m ever in danger of being squeezed to death by a giant squid. From experience, I knew three of the other claims were true. As for the last one, Travis keeps nagging me to let him fire a gun, point blank, into my chest. He pretends to misunderstand when I make excuses.
All in all, the suit is really pretty nifty. It has only one minor drawback.
It triggered a minor fetish that I’d never known I had.
There’s something about the way the material clings to my skin, silky and smooth, sleek and shiny. It’s like being oiled up for the beach or competing in a wet T-shirt contest without having to go through the inconvenience of getting wet or oily. To be frank, wearing it is a turn on. And yet, I know it’s not cool for Centerport’s resident superhero to go around rescuing damsels in distress–or young knights in peril, for that matter–with a raging hard on. Luckily, most of the time I wear it, I’m much too busy staying alive to be aroused. It’s only when I’m en route to a crisis that I have to worry about the outline of my dick showing.
I quickly ducked my head under a machine that darkens my hair from reddish-gold to a dark chestnut. I keep telling Travis we could market it and corner the market on women’s hair coloring, but he refuses to listen. In the beginning, we experimented with a cowl, but it was more trouble than it was worth. My vision and hearing are completely normal; with the hood covering my ears, everything was muffled. Any chance of tricking a supervillain into revealing the details of his nefarious plans would be severely hampered if I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. As a finishing touch, I don a mask and my transformation into the Whirlwind is complete.
In spite of the many arguments we have, one thing Travis and I are in complete agreement about is the need to protect Peter.
No one knows what it is about Centerport that’s so attractive to arch villains but for decades it’s been a magnet for them to launch their evil schemes. Every year, the city sees its share of costumed crazies bent on world domination, or revenge, or garden variety psychosis. Some of them are in it for the money, some lust for power, and others have distinct goals that, while hard to fathom at first by normal standards, make perfect sense once you look at things from the bad guy’s warped point of view.
Some of them are simply bat-shit crazy. And vicious. And seeking revenge against anyone who has thwarted them in the past; anyone like the Whirlwind. They’d get a kick out of using Peter to get to me. Knowing what some of those loons are capable of, my mind balks at what could happen if they discovered the connection between us. Travis and I take every precaution to make sure that no one ever sees me exiting the Archer Agency’s building in my superhero drag. We’re even more careful about not letting any of the bad guys find out about Peter, so even in the direst emergencies, the Whirlwind rarely comes and goes from Ale Mary’s, the old nightclub where Peter and I live.
There’s an abandoned subway tunnel that runs underneath both my office building and the club. Roughly midway between the two lies a warehouse that Travis picked up cheap. It used to house the Drinky-Winks Soda Pop Company. Before that, it was the Dirty Doings Diaper Depot, a laundry that catered to new mothers in the days before disposables were invented. I’ve always suspected that the lingering odor might be the reason the soft drink company folded. The only thing worse than drinking overly sweet carbonated water might be drinking overly sweet carbonated water that tastes faintly of baby shit.
I darted through the tunnel and emerged from a concealed door in the side of the Drinky-Winks building that opens onto an alley. Even through the press of the tall buildings looming on both sides, I saw oily black smoke darkening the sky.
At a trot that was faster than most professional track athletes could run full-out, I was halfway across town in mere minutes. As I got closer to the disaster zone, I had to slow down in order to shoulder my way through the crowd of lookie-loos who were gathered behind the police barriers and pointing up at the building with unsuppressed excitement. The Whirlwind’s costume is bright turquoise with yellow piping; it’s pretty hard to miss. Yet even though most of the onlookers knew exactly who I was and, presumably, why I was there, they still refused to get out of the way. A few even had the gall to ask me for an autograph which just goes to prove that some people have absolutely no sense of occasion.
I finally pushed my way up to the police barrier. The days when I needed to alert Police Chief Gretchen Thatcher that I was on the scene were long behind me. One of her officers would have already spotted the flash of turquoise and let her know I was around.
I looked up at the conflagration, which was still going strong. Though the Special Projects building was certainly no skyscraper, it was still pretty high. I had no idea how I was going to put out a fire of this size and save any people who were trapped inside–especially if they were on the higher floors. But I didn’t let that bother me much. Once I got inside, I knew something would occur to me.
Something always does.
Well, almost always.