I hadn't been bumped out of a job because of the arrival of the corona virus in Florida in March—well, first noticed and acknowledged in March—but I suppose it would have happened anyway. I had been a masseur—and more—at Andy's Fit Gym on New Haven in Melbourne, with no problem in finding clientele, when the police shut us down right at the beginning of March. Two weeks later the other gyms were being closed down too because of the virus, so I've been saying that's what ended my employment. The unemployment office accepted that, but I wasn't a "sit and wait" kind of guy. I was out looking for another job right away.
I don't hide that I'm gay—it would be a little hard to do so anyway with the way I dress and the earing and the nipple rings that show through the tight, thin-material T-shirts I wear, not to mention the pink strands I run through my long, blond hair, which I usually have tied in a pony tail, but that I let down for sex. I do have muscles where they belong, but I pride myself in my tight, willowy figure. And on top of that is the way I walk—like a dancer, thanks to years of classical dance training before I did the practical and took courses in massage. Guys—well, a lot of tops—like the dancer look. I was turning tricks before I learned how to do massage.
My gay look was my advertisement into the fun life—or the life that was fun before this pandemic thing—a life that usually was pretty lucrative for me. I didn't suppress it.
I thought being obviously gay would make getting a job in the regular world harder, not that Melbourne was harder on being gay than anywhere else, but because everyone else was put out of work by the virus and was looking for a job too. The only new jobs opening up, something that just happened starting in May, were in the contact tracing field. In trying to get control of this virus thing, the public health people were hiring people to trace down the recent contacts of everyone going into the hospital with the virus so that they could be notified that they'd been exposed to covid-19 and given guidance on quarantining so that the spread could be stopped, or slowed down at least.
They were paying well and I had taken a lot of credit hours in hygiene in studying to be a masseur—I hadn't had to go to school to train now much further to take a massage if a guy wanted to and would pay for it, but that's neither here nor there—but I didn't really think they'd give the job to an openly gay guy. But I was wrong about that. It appeared that a lot of tracing that had to be done would be in the local gay community, which was large, and they jumped at the chance of me handling cases like that.
"Another gay guy would open to you better than to a normal person," the recruiter had said to me. I let that slide. I wanted the job.
All of that is to explain how I found myself on the front porch of a crowded-in bungalow on Ventura Circle, off Hollywood Boulevard, in South Melbourne on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, just a week after completing my contact tracing course.
A big bruiser of a hairy guy in just athletic shorts and flip-flops answered the door, gave me the full head-to-toes lookover, and smiled broadly. He was like six-foot-five big, and he was muscular, a real body builder. I could have melted on the spot.
He also looked a bit familiar, like maybe I'd seen him from afar now and then at Andy's Fit Gym. He certainly looked fit and like he spent time in gyms. He wasn't bad looking in the face, if a bit thuggish. All of the hair had migrated from his head down to his chest and belly, though, where it swirled, an auburn brown with a smattering of gray in it. I gauged him to be in his late forties—a guy I wouldn't mind asking me for post-massage special services. Not the guy I was trying to trace, a Clint Colburn, who would be in his mid-twenties—my age.
I was wearing a surgical mask. The guy answering the door was adjusting a regular cloth one on his face as he looked me over.
"Hi, I'm with the Public Health Department. Joshua Meadows." I flashed him my grand-spanking-new set of city credentials. "Does a Clint Colburn live here? I need to talk with him if he does. This is the last-known address we have for him."
"Clint isn't here now," the guy answered—a good, deep, resounding bass voice. "You want to come in, though? My name is Bill Buxton. You look familiar. Have we met before?"
"I really shouldn't. Social distancing and all. I could wait out here for him to return if you don't think he'll be gone long."
"Nonsense. I'm fine if you are. I've been sheltering since early March. Not too hard for me since I work at home and don't go out much at all—except to the gym. This isolation is starting to get old, even with me, though, and it's good to see another face. Well, part of another face."
We both laughed—not a belly laugh—more of an irritated "this is a new joke going around a couple of times too often" obligatory laugh.
"It drove Clint right up the wall—batty," the big guy continued. "Hey, that's where I've seen you, isn't it? You're the massage guy at Andy's Gym who uses the satin gloves, aren't you? Is that where you know Clint from?"
He'd pegged me. Well, he hadn't pegged me like some of my massage customer paid me to do. But it was clear now where we'd seen each other before.
"Umm, yes, I worked at Andy's Fit Gym," I said. "I'm not calling on Mr. Colburn as a friend—I've never met him—but because I need to talk with him. I'm working with the Public Health Department now. I'll just—"
"No, no. Come on in. As I said, if you're good, I'm good. I've been nowhere for months. I'm clean—in all ways. I got checked out since the last time I did it. It's all good. I really need someone to talk to for a few minutes. This. isolation is for the shits. And I get nothing back socially from designing the Internet cartoons. I get some jollies back, for sure, but no one who talks to me. Come in, come in. I'll spring you're a beer or too."
For an "I'm good alone" guy, he was gushing a good bit. I guess the isolation really was starting to get to him. It would really get to me if I hadn't found a job where I could be on the move like this.
He'd withdrawn into the darkness of the house's interior. I was compelled to follow him—down a hallway with a living room, dining room, and kitchen off doors to the right, and into a larger room on the back of the house, with a wall of glass doors overlooking a small, screened-in pool and a tiny yard packed with foliage that was enclosed by an eight-foot fence. All very private and confining. A desk complex covered the outer wall to the left, a door on the wall across from the glass overlooking the pool probably led into the back of the garage. Several computers, with displays pulsating on them, covered the long desk. No doubt the work Bill Buxton—I had remembered the big dude's name—did at home was done here. A gym bench and a set of barbells were set out in front of the glass wall.
"I heard they closed Andy's Gym," he said from the kitchen area beyond an island as he opened a refrigerator and took out a couple of beers. "As you can see, I've had to set up here at home. I stopped going to the gym early in March—before they closed it. I think all of the gyms are closed by the covid-19 thing now."
"Yes, they're all closed, but they're going to start a phased reopen soon, I understand. A couple of the braver and more resistant ones have already opened, with restrictions. Andy's won't open again, though."
"So, I heard," he said as he handed me a beer. He didn't let go of it for a long second and gave me a meaningful look. Normally at this point, if a guy was trying to make me, he'd make sure our fingers touched in the exchange of the can. Not here. We were both conscious of the social distancing thing. He even stood back and leaned forward to hand over the beer rather than use the opportunity to close the distance. Moving into a hookup in the age of the pandemic was coming with new rules in technique. "You didn't get arrested in the closing of the gym, did you?"
