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(Journey to Mirage is a fifteen-chapter gay male novel of a young man's journey into the totality of the gay male life as he crosses the United States from Baltimore to Arizona as a "star" of a "fantasy experiences" movie being filmed en route to a gay film festival in Mirage, Arizona. Chapters will post approximately every two days and will be completed within five weeks of posting of chapter 1 )

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Tony had been fidgety all afternoon while Rick and the others were working on stripping down the Mercedes. Tony had said it had been totaled in a wreck and they were to break it down for parts, but it didn't look to Rick like it was in that bad a shape. It was actually a honey of a car, and Rick cringed as he worked to strip the upholstery off the passenger seat?preserving as much of the leather in its original cut as he could.

Rick liked the feel of the leather. In fact, he liked every aspect of working in the auto shop. He thought maybe he'd finally found what he wanted to do in life. He'd known he'd never be a doctor or a lawyer or president of the United States?his family?his mother and him?scraping along in the smoldering inner residential area of Baltimore never had any thoughts of getting ahead that far. The most anyone had aspired to was to own a small pizza joint, like his Aunt Melda did.

His mom was probably as successful as any of them?working as a nurse's aide over at the hospital. And she wanted Rick to go into landscaping.

"An honest, hands-on job out in the fresh air," is the way she'd put it. That's about the best thing Rick could think of that job, though?although it also would help keep him in shape.

But it was cars he liked working with. And he was grateful that Tony had given him this job. At least he was grateful after he'd gotten used to what else Tony gave him, what else Tony wanted from him. It had taken time for Rick to accommodate to that, but now it was something he wanted too. And increasingly Rick thought about it and about Tony being there to satisfy him when he got what Tony called "the itch."

To get close to Tony and to the cars in the shop, Rick had had to close his eyes to some things. Tony obviously was running with some sort of neighborhood gang?in fact was leading it. But he hadn't pressured Rick so far to join with that and some of the things they were doing. Rick didn't know what he'd do if and when Tony came after him to be part of that. He supposed that if it was something Tony wanted him to do, though, that he'd do it. But he wouldn't want to do some of the things the gang was into?at least he'd resist doing it as long as possible.

Today Tony was antsy, bursa escort though. It had started when those two guys Rick had never seen before came into the auto shop. They looked out of place. They certainly weren't from Rick's mixed Italian and Hispanic neighborhood?the Hispanics pretty much moving in on the Italians, which was one reason there were gangs starting up. Tony was Italian, though, and Rick half Hispanic. This, Rick thought, was why Tony hadn't been quick on trying to bring Rick into the Rumblers.

The two guys who appeared at the garage door were entirely too smooth in Rick's view and were more interested in seeing all that was going on in the shop than was justified with any business they had with Tony.

Tony talked to them at the back of the shop, and from his stance, Rick could tell that Tony wasn't happy about something. The three jawed for about ten minutes and then the two guys left.

That had been a half hour previously. Rick had seen Tony send Marco to the front of the shop, outside the garage doors, which he shut after walking through the door beside them. The shop was in an old warehouse in a compound down by the docks beyond Fells Point that was largely deserted now.

Rick was so busy working on carefully slitting the lacings of the seat leather along the lines it had been already cut, his head down into the passenger compartment of what was quickly becoming a shell of the Mercedes, that he didn't initially notice all the guys around him?all members of the Rumblers and all Italian?putting their tools down and joining Tony at the back of the shop.

He certainly did notice, though, when he heard loud banging from the outside on the steel garage door nearest the door to the street and saw Marco race back into the door, crying out "Cops. Scatter."

Marco was moving fast and Tony and the other Rumblers were close enough to the back to scramble up into the loft of the building and through the hole they'd cut into the neighboring warehouse. None of them tried to leave by the back entrance, which was smart of them, because in short order guys with guns and blue vests started pouring in through that door in addition to the one at the front.

Rick froze?too long to join Tony and the other guys. The best he could do was to crawl into the backseat of the Mercedes shell and try to make himself as invisible as possible.

It was a booming, to be obeyed, voice. "Hey, I see you, kid. Come on out of there?with your hands empty and showin'."

* * * *

The processing through the system was humiliating. As young as Rick looked, he was well past his eighteenth birthday, bursa escort so he was thrown into the adult system with no consideration of how bewildered he was by it all. He had never been arrested before and he could barely hold back the tears of his fear of how roughly he was being treated and the sniggers and whispered comments about being a pretty boy and of how welcome he'd been in the holding tank. As scared as he was, he knew?or hoped?that it was all just part of the conditioning to make him never want to be in this position again. They didn't have to use the scare tactics, though. Rick already knew he didn't ever want to be here again. He just didn't know how he could avoid it with the life he'd been dealt. He could say he didn't know what business Tony was in, but he couldn't say that, way down deep, he didn't know. There just weren't many choices for someone like Rick.

After the embarrassment of the booking and strip search, Rick found himself in the holding tank the cops had been sniggering about with some dozen rough-looking men, most of them big, black dudes with muscular bodies and attitude.

"Look guys, we got ourselves a young chicken," a guttural voice from the shadows at the far end of the cage boomed out. Rick had sunk down to a bench at the front of the holding pen, and as he did a couple of black toughs sat down close on either side of him. Both of them put arms around him and placed the hands of their other arms high on his thighs.

"Been fucked by big, black cock before, pretty boy?" one of them asked him menacingly.

If only they knew, Rick thought with a bit of bitterness. But he said nothing.

"Bet you sing real nice with it up your ass," the other one hissed.

Rick's eyes adjusted to the dimness as he trembled under the close hold of the two black men. It wasn't all fear, though. Rick had reason to be aroused by such men. He could see across the cage now. A big black bruiser of a man, maybe the largest, most muscular man in the holding cell was standing, leaning back against the back wall. A young white guy was knelt in front of him and was sucking the black man's cock. Another black man stood beside the kneeling white guy, a beefy hand on the white guy's shoulder, in an indication that the white guy was doing what he was doing under duress.

"You're next, chicken," the black hulk said, staring directly at Rick.

"Mind if we do him while we wait?" one of the black guys next to Rick asked.

"Damn right I mind. He looks like a special," the big guy against the wall answered back. "I want first dip." He must have had some authority bursa eskort in here, because the two dudes sandwiching Rick slowed down, but didn't completely stop, with the explorations of Rick's body with their hands.

Rick gave a shudder, not entirely out of fear. And one of the black guys beside him gave a laugh as he put his hand on Rick's basket and found that Rick was hardening.

"You in for the night, now, boy," one of them muttered. "Time nuff for all of us to do you."

Rick's thoughts went to Pete?and what he'd learned to take, and eventually want, from Pete.

The black guy who laughed was unzipping himself and had a hand cupping the back of Rick's neck, preparing to press Rick's head down to his lap when a door on the corridor outside the cage opened, light streamed into the area, and all of the men in the holding cell braced up, stopped doing whatever they were doing, and set into a pose of looking bored and unafraid.

"Rick Hernandez, step forward," a tired, but authoritative voice said.

Rick popped up between the two black men, who had shrunk away from him when the policeman and a middle-aged Hispanic man in a suit came into the corridor.

"That's me," Rick said in a breathy voice, both relieved and a bit hesitant at having been saved from whatever was about to happen in the holding cell.

"Your lawyer's here. Your bail has been posted."

"My lawyer?" Rick said in confusion. "I don't have?"

"We'll talk about it out on the street," the lawyer cut in.

"Later, sweet cheeks," the big, black man across the holding cell called out to Rick as he slipped through the open caged door. "You'll be back. We'll have our fun then. Chickens like you always come back."

When the lawyer and Rick reached the street, the lawyer merely said, as he got into his car, not offering Rick a ride. "Tony sent me to bail you out?so you wouldn't blab in there. You didn't, did you?"

"No one asked me anything," Rick answered. But when the lawyer gave him a piercing stare, he added, "But I wouldn't have said anything about Tony anyway."

"Good. Let's keep it that way. I'll talk to you again about what you can say before your case comes up. Now get lost. And you owe Tony one."

Rick knew that what he owed Tony was mounting up. And he was quite sure that Tony would be calling in that tab someday soon. He more than half expected what Tony would demand. He'd been after Rick for weeks now to put out for other guys in the gang. When he first let Tony fuck him, Rick had thought it was something romantic?that it would be just them, a couple. But after Tony had had his fun, he let Rick know it was just casual. Rick had seen it as a possible escape from what else was happening in his life. But he obviously had been wrong in that assumption as well.

Rick felt trapped by his life in Baltimore. He didn't see anywhere to go from here but down.