Sail to the Sun

Hoagie kept me close. I had a windowless room in the basement of the inn, across from the room Hoagie kept for himself down the corridor off the wings of the small stage in the club room. Hoagie's room—and mine—were beyond the six small cells, three to a side, off the corridor.

The room was fine with me—it was no worse, and better in most respects—than the space I had been given by the men who owned me in Thailand—with the exception of the small apartment the young pilot had taken me to. I could be alone there, and I counted it a blessing and a favor that Hoagie didn't make me bring patrons back to my private space. The six cells between mine and the backstage area were where we gave the customers individual attention—for those times when someone didn't spring loose to "treat the room."

It was the activity called "treating the room" that I hated the worst. When some miner was willing to pay the price for this, Hoagie would call one or more of the dancers out on the stage, and the spot wouldn't be extinguished when we had stripped down. We'd dance, naked, until the crowd could take no more, and then men would hop up on the stage with us and, if we were lucky, would take us right there, on stage, with the crowd satisfied with looking. When we were unlucky, we would be body surfed out into the crowd until we landed on a tabletop on our backs, and the crowd would descend on us and pull our legs apart and hold us down as customer after customer fucked us.

Hoagie would just stand there beside the bar and smile. The profit he received when some drunken patron treated the room would make him smile.

I was the only one of Hoagie's boys who roomed at the inn. The other guys had more freedom than I did. They could live on their own and came and went as they pleased to work their shifts as waiters in the inn and then later at night as dancers in the club. If a diner at the inn hooked up with them, they could go anywhere they wanted to do their business and keep whatever they made above the set commission for Hoagie.

But Hoagie kept me on a much tighter rein. I never saw any of the money I earned—it all went to Hoagie, because, as he continually said, he owned me; he'd bought and paid for me.

I slept in my windowless room in the basement of the inn, locked in at night by Hoagie. He always knew where I was and what I was doing. And he beat me and fucked me just, as he often said, so that I wouldn't forget that I was all his. I knew one of these days he would kill me, because his favorite fetish was to choke me during sex, to keep me on the edge of consciousness while he satisfied himself.

The other waiter/dancers I befriended often asked me how I could live like this. But how could I not? I had known nothing else all of my life. This life was one of luxury compared to my existence back in Udon Thani. Just having a room of my own was paradise, even if it came with a lock on the outside of the door. And I had almost never had time alone, to myself—at least until Estaban came. My life had always been one of waking-to-sleep servitude.

Perhaps the more meaningful question was why did Hoagie think he needed to lock me in at night—or why anyone would think he should share any of the money I brought in with me.

Where was I going to go? A young Thai man of mixed blood transported to the mountains of West Virginia. Unique. One of a kind in this community. No one to talk to in terms I knew; no place to go except where Hoagie placed me. And food enough in my belly to quench the growls of hunger as well as a roof over my head—a room of my own. I could not have hoped to provide for myself back in Udon Thani as Hoagie provided for me.

Hoagie's demands and cruelty weren't even more of an imposition than I had lived with all of my life in rural Thailand.

But when I said as much to Hoagie, he accused me of trying to manipulate him, of trying to gain some slight glimmer of control over my life—and he beat me so badly that I could not leave my room for a week, giving me, he said, something to think about should I ever dream again of breaking free.

But I wasn't thinking of breaking free—even though I had, all of my life, dreamed—in the abstract—of sailing to the sun. I had no concept of this freedom Hoagie seemed to think I was reaching for. My dreams were only something I used to pull myself through the small inconveniences of life.

I didn't even dream of sailing to the sun anymore. Not really. Except maybe when Hoagie was choking me while he was fucking me. I wasn't a fool. In comparison with the wooden hole in the wall I had been raised in back in Udon Thani, I had already sailed to the sun. My horizons in my childhood were more than fulfilled in the life Hoagie gave me here in America.

It was in that week that I was too banged up to fuck that Estaban arrived. He was even younger than I was and had traveled up from Mexico with a band of men who seemed to be trying to keep a step ahead of the immigration authorities. They were stopping here and there on the way, they said, to Canada and would do seasonal or temporary worker jobs in the fields or on construction crews until they had enough money to push on north or until the local authorities became suspicious. When they had come by the inn looking for work, Hoagie had jumped at the opportunity to have the outside repainted at a cut price.

Estaban was small and prettier than most girls. And it was clear that he was being used by the men he was with. I was well enough to hobble around the inn and help prepare food and clean up even if I was too bruised to serve at table, and thus I was able to see that Hoagie was attracted to Estaban.

He seemed to be even more interested when the men Estaban were with showed a willingness to discuss selling the young man. I knew then that part of Hoagie's attraction to me was the sense of physical ownership—that I was just an object that he owned and could use any way he saw fit.

I heard Estaban moaning in Hoagie's office one evening and then crying out but almost immediately going silent in a cut-off gurgling sound. I involuntarily lifted my fingers to my neck in the darkness of my room, knowing what was happening across the corridor from me, and wondering if Hoagie had crossed the line at last. But the next day I saw Estaban walking with Hoagie out among the storage buildings at the edge of the parking lot. Hoagie was showing Estaban a small shed.

The next day, the painting completed, the band of workers had moved on. But Estaban was still here, working small menial jobs around the grounds and in the kitchen. In the early afternoon, I saw Hoagie take him by the wrist and lead him out to the shed, and I heard them having sex.

I came closer and peeked in the shed's window and saw that Estaban was on his tailbone on a stack of mulch sacks and Hoagie was standing between Estaban's thighs, his bare rump undulating in out in a very familiar act. Hoagie was holding Estaban up with hands around the young man's throat and Estaban was gripping Hoagie's biceps with his hands to keep from slumping down into Hoagie's choke hold. Just as I was wondering if the cruelty was too much for him, I saw Estaban encircle Hoagi's waist with his legs and start to put his own pelvis into a countermotion with Hoagie's thrusts. The young man's hands went to the back of Hoagie's head and pulled Hoagie's face down into his for a kiss. The long, low moan I heard coming out of Estaban's mouth. At least for now the Hispanic workman was accepting what he was getting.

So, Estaban was even lower than I was. Hoagie owned him too, but he wasn't even given his own room to retreat too—nor was he allowed to serve table as I was yet. Of course he wasn't put on stage as a dancer either, but Hoagie had him inside the club bar, doing menial work, at night, and on more than one occasion, I saw a patron paying Hoagie and leading the young Hispanic toward the cells behind the stage.

Thereafter Hoagie didn't make as many demands on me as before, but I also sensed that his interest in me was waning, and I began to worry about what would happen to me if Estaban was elevated to my place with Hoagie.