(Originally published by SMUT! Magazine, and subsequently reprinted in Best Gay Erotica 2006, which you should all click through and buy, because it was edited by my hero/ine Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and it has some great stuff, including a story by Dennis Cooper).

Depression Halved Production Costs

by Sam J. Miller

We’re crouched in the bushes in Madison Square Park, which is nowhere near Madison Square Garden. Eventually I’ll have to ask Earl about it, about which one is the real Madison Square. He’s fifty-five and has lived like every day of it here in the City-point out any odd building or street name and he knows the back story. For the moment, though, all I want from him is the fingers down my throat, the face pressing into the back of my neck. I want us totally naked but it’s freezing. The cold air invigorates us, and we fuck as freely and noisily as anybody who had a bedroom. No cops come through.

“You tire an old man out,” he says, while we lie there balled up together. We breathe heavy, watching it steam in front of us.

“Whatever,” I say. “You big baby.” He’s more than three times my age and has about twice as much sex drive as me.

For two weeks I’ve been stuck to him like glue. For a month before that I’d been chasing him through Marcus Garvey Park, sharing cigarettes, always managing to sit next to him at the soup kitchens, making my advances more and more advanced. Now I’m trying to shake this sense of him as a conquest, as something I saw and wanted and went for. Because I’m starting to feel strongly about him and I want him to feel the same, and that might be a tougher proposition.

Afterwards we walk through the park a while, talk, smoke cigarettes, just like any other couple after sex. He points to the Empire State Building: “did you know they built that in like a year? It was all set to start in 1929, but then the Great Depression came, and cut the production costs in half.”

“Because they could pay people only half as much.”

“Exactly. The Depression was the beginning of New York’s homeless problem. Did you know six workers died in the course of building it?”

We sit on a bench on the north side of the park. It’s a Sunday night and 26th street is quiet, except for one building people keep going into.

“Must be a party,” Earl says, pointing up to the fifth floor where people are standing around smoking on a balcony.

More and more people go in, mostly young handsome men. I’m picturing something gay, a magazine launch or a men’s fashion show.

“Let’s crash it,” I say. “The party.”

“Are you kidding? Look at me, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Not only will I be the only black guy, I’ll be the only guy over forty.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think I just saw a South Asian guy go in. It might be more diverse than you think. And I bet there’s an open bar. It’ll be nice to get out of the cold for a while. Anyway what’ve we got to lose?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Good.” We get up, cross the street, join a straight couple going in.

“Fifth floor?” asks the girl when the elevator door shuts.

“Where else?” Earl asks, flashing her the smile that got my attention right off the bat. The elevator goes up slowly, no one says anything, the couple smells nice. When the doors swing open on the fifth floor there’s such a crush of people no one sees us slip in, hang up our coats, head for the table where booze and food wait.

Earl’s right; he can’t blend. I try not to leave him alone for too long but I’m enjoying the way I can move in and out of conversations, talk to people, fit in. The guy at the bar doesn’t card me when I ask for a martini. Boys cruise me. I’m tempted to try for some phone numbers, just to see if I can. Because I’m young enough, my ragged-runaway clothes scream Fashion, not Poverty.

“We could go all week and never get a chance to use a bathroom like that,” Earl says, when he comes out of it.  “They got breath mints and lube and condoms. And a bidet. I’m not joking about the bidet. Puts even Grand Central to shame.”

In the back are a series of offices. Earl scopes them out and beckons for me; we find the cushiest one. The office belongs to Luccia Stevenson, who’s the executive director of Krell & Stevenson, which presumably is the office we’re partying in. I sit Earl in Luccia’s expensive swivel chair. The room smells like money. I kneel between his legs, unzip him, pull both pairs of pants and his thermals and his boxer shorts down. As he strokes the top of my head I reach up to unbutton shirt after shirt.

“Wow, we’re really going all the way,” Earl says when I stand up and start taking my shirts off too. For a second I’m confused: we’ve already done everything imaginable. Then I realize we’ve never been naked together before. “Luccia could walk in at any moment.”

“Let her, it’s her office.”

I sit on him, my back to him, facing the door to the office and the hallway and the party. “Lean back,” he whispers, and I do, pushing him back, pushing my shoulder to his chin, floating in space in that fancy darkened office, in this ghost world of graphic designers and expensive hors d’oeuvres, where we don’t belong, where we’re the ghosts that haunt the house.

Earl asks: “What do you think she’d be madder about-that we crashed her party or that we got jizz all over her desk?” I’m wiping it up but I think some got in between the keys of her keyboard. In all the time it takes us to stop kissing and get all our clothes back on, no one comes through. I take my martini glass back into the crowd.

After a few more martinis and a lot more food, Earl is in the bathroom and I’m waiting for the elevator; I overhear a queeny boy in horn-rim glasses say to someone else, “who let the homeless guy in?” My face turns red with shame and then I realize they’re not talking about me.