A Starr is Born Read online

  A Starr is Born© 2019 Ryan Field

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

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  For more information contact:

  Riverdale Avenue Books/Magnus Imprint

  5676 Riverdale Avenue

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.riverdaleavebooks.com

  Design by www.formatting4U.com

  Cover design by Scott Carpenter

  Digital ISBN: 9781626015067

  Trade ISBN: 9781626015074

  First edition, June 2019

  

  Chapter One

  The long black SUV raced through the gleaming wet streets of Manhattan so fast Harrison had to hold on to the 21 year-old guy sitting on his lap with both hands. He had one hand on the guy’s slim smooth waist and the other on his hip because every time the driver hit a bump the poor guy kept sliding to the floor. And when he slid to the floor, he kept trying to force his head between Harrison’s legs and Harrison didn’t have time for that sort of thing.

  The guy’s name was Zee or Zak or something with a Z he couldn’t remember. It was something contrived and trendy like the names of the other young guys that followed him, but it didn’t really matter anyway because after tonight Harrison would never see him again. He’d never liked names or words with Z’s. Harrison had quirks. He’d always preferred the smoother sounds of Os and Rs. His mom’s name had been Olivia, his dad’s Randal, and he had two Rs in his name. Certain letters and sounds made him feel lucky.

  “C’mon, Harrison, we don’t have time to screw around,” Sam said. “We’re already late as it is. Get dressed.” He was trilling his fingers on the arm rest and gaping at his watch.

  Sam Wasserman was Harrison’s personal manager and he went everywhere with him. He’d always reminded Harrison of an unlikely cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Levine, with short dark hair, a larger than average nose and a medium sized body stuffed into a pair of skinny jeans a size too small. His voice tended to screech when he was anxious about something, and he was doing a good deal of screeching that night.

  Harrison’s voice remained low and smooth and even. He didn’t like to strain it before a concert. “Calm yourself, Sammy. It’s all good. You worry too much.”

  “You say that all the time,” Sam said. He was shaking his head now and taking deep breaths. “But this time you’re really pushing it. Get him off your lap and put on your pants. You don’t worry enough.”

  Harrison laughed. “I’m trying. I really am. But he keeps trying to slide his hands up my underwear every time I move. He can’t keep his hands off my junk. He says he loves hairy dad legs.” He’d seen his share of attractive young men in his time, but this one seemed needier than most. He couldn’t stop reaching into Harrison’s underwear, and he kept calling him “dad,” which was ironic because Harrison wasn’t even old enough to be his father. He’d just turned 35 and Zak or Zek or something with a Z was only 11 years younger. Apparently, anyone over 30 was now considered “dad” material for anyone under 30.

  “Well you’d better try harder,” Sam said. “We’re almost there.”

  The driver stopped for a red light and the SUV jerked hard. The young guy slipped off Harrison’s lap and wound up on the floor between Harrison and Sam.

  Sam rolled his eyes and shifted his gaze to the window.

  As the young guy rose to his knees and tried to climb back up on Harrison’s lap, Harrison grabbed him by the elbow and said, “You’d better go sit in the back now, baby. I need to put my pants on.”

  The guy pouted and remained still, as if he were terrified to let go of Harrison.

  “Just do as I say,” Harrison said. “Go on back there and you put on your clothes. If you’re good and you behave, I’ll do something special with you later tonight.” He knew that would work. The young cute ones always liked it when they thought there was a surprise coming their way, especially when Harrison used his sexy, authoritative dad voice.

  The guy smiled and turned toward the back row seats where he’d left his clothes, and Harrison reached down quickly and grabbed a worn pair of jeans so threadbare and ripped most people would have cut them up and used the leftover pieces as dust rags. These jeans were an important part of his act and he had a dozen more just like them. The people didn’t just come to hear him sing. They came to watch his long hairy legs move in these faded, ripped jeans, and to see his perfectly round buttocks jerk and swirl to the beat. This particular pair of jeans made the bulge between his legs even more prominent, and he knew it. There were no accidents in his business, and he made sure his audience got what they paid for.

  After he put on the jeans, he pulled a skin tight black V-neck T-shirt over his long dark hair. The V-neck was low cut, so low it exposed a good deal of his wide muscular chest. The black stretchy fabric was so sheer it hugged all the muscles in his abdomen, to the point where it almost looked as if someone had painted the shirt directly on to his body.

  The driver hit the gas and Sam took a deep breath and exhaled.

  The young guy in the backseat pulled up his zipper and tipped sideways.

  Harrison grabbed a pair of heavy black leather biker boots and put them on over his bare feet. Then he reached into a brown distressed leather bag next to his seat and pulled out a mirror the size of a hardcover novel. He held the mirror in his left hand and moved his hair around with the other. There wasn’t much to do. He had that thick, wavy dark hair that looked better messy than perfectly styled. The messier it was, the more his fans screamed for him. He didn’t have a set part and sometimes he pulled it back in a ponytail. That night he wore it down, and it fell to his shoulders in thick wavy clumps that suggested he might have just climbed out of bed, or out of a cave.

  After that, he hooked large silver feather earrings to each earlobe and checked his long, dark bushy beard to make sure it was even. The earrings gave him a softer look and set him apart from the derelicts on the streets. The black biker boots he wore offset the hipster beard and balanced the earrings. The last thing he put on were a pair of eyeglasses with black frames. The lenses were clear; he had 20/20 vision. He only wore them because it was part of his look that night… but not always… and he didn’t want to disappoint any of his fans. They were always mentioning how cute he looked in glasses on social media and some of them were starting to mimic him. He figured wearing fake eyeglasses once in a while was the least he could do for all those nice people who were paying good money to see him.

  The SUV came to a sudden stop and Harrison gazed in Sam’s direction. “Do I look okay?”

  Sam looked him up and down. “You look fantastic.” He was smiling now and he’d stopped taking deep breaths. “Looks like a big crowd out there.”

  Harrison glanced out the window and saw hoards of people standing on the sidelines waiting for him to exit the SUV. This time he took a deep breath and exhaled. He always got the odd feeling in his gut right before a concert, as if things were moving around inside his body and he couldn’t control them. He knew it would pass; it always did.

  “Are you ready?” Sam asked.

  Harrison nodded. “Let’s roll.”

  “What about me?” the young guy in the back row asked.

  “You follow Sam,” Harrison said. “He’ll take care of you backstage and we’ll meet up after the show. You be good and listen to everything Sam
tells you to do.”

  The young guy leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “Okay. I’ll be good.”

  As Harrison reached to open the door so he could climb out and greet the crowd, he thought he noticed Sam roll his eyes again, but he didn’t say a word. He knew exactly what Sam was thinking, and yet he simply could not control himself. He hated to be alone.

  He walked through the crowd of people fast, smiling and nodding the entire way. Sam and the young guy followed closely while the people cheered and called him by his name. He didn’t really hear anything at that point. He was already focused on his performance that night, and he’d just barely made it there on time. Nothing could have stopped him by then.

  The music began to play, growing louder as he walked toward the stage. When he reached the wings, someone from the band handed him a bottle of vodka and he kicked back two deep, hard swallows. He started bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He clenched his fists and took one more deep breath. Then the drummer started and he knew that was his cue to enter. When he took that first step forward and walked onto the stage, the audience started screaming and chanting so loudly it felt as though the entire building were about to come down. At that moment, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else with his life, and he bounded to the middle of the stage and grabbed a guitar. As the screams died down and the room went silent, he sang out the first line of his most popular song and everything else went blank. It was just Harrison and the audience and nothing else mattered.

  After the show, he signed a few autographs on the way out and stopped to take a few selfies with fans. He was still functioning on the high from the performance and reality hadn’t set in yet. It took time for him to come down, and then the exhaustion would set in. Sam was still behind him and so was the young guy with the Z name. Everyone backstage had been talking about going to some kind of a party after the show and Harrison didn’t feel like going. The party was being thrown by one of the band members and Sam kept telling him he had to at least make an appearance. But Harrison knew Sam too well by then and he knew it was really Sam who wanted to go to the party himself.

  When they reached the curb where the dark SUV was waiting for them, he signed a few more autographs and posed for a few more selfies with his fans. There were so many people screaming and calling his name he never could have handled each one alone, so he did the best he could, always feeling as if he hadn’t done enough.

  He turned to climb into the backseat of the SUV and Sam said, “So are we going to the party or not?”

  “You go without me,” he said. “You can catch a ride with the band, and take little what’s his name with you, please. And make sure he gets home safely.” He glanced over Sam’s shoulder and saw the young guy with the Z name flirting with one of the security guards.

  Sam looked into his eyes and shook his head. “Are you sure? The guys are going to be really disappointed you’re not there.”

  “They’ll live,” Harrison said. He knew his band well enough to know that even though there might be a moment of disappointment, they’d start partying and forget all about him. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  Then he shut the door fast and told the driver to pull away. Even though he knew the exhaustion would set in soon, which it always did, he didn’t feel like going home yet. He felt like doing something different, where he could simply be alone with himself.

  The driver stopped at a red light and asked, “Where would you like to go?”

  Harrison tapped his chin with his index finger and said, “Do you know where Mother’s Place is?” He hadn’t been there in years.

  “Yes.”

  “Take me there and you can drop me off out front,” he said.

  The light turned green and the driver hit the gas. Harrison removed his eyeglasses and earrings and reached into his bag for a black leather quarter coat he usually carried everywhere. The black leather coat was long enough to cover his bulge and the tight V-neck T-shirt so he could fit in with everyone else. Though his fan base was solid and those who loved him supported him completely, he also knew how to get around without being recognized or causing too much of a commotion. People didn’t expect him to go out in public. Besides, he was going to Mother’s Place, and no one really cared about celebrities or fame there. They were all still trying too hard to get famous themselves.

  Chapter Two

  Harrison told the driver he didn’t have to come back for him later that night. He said he could find his own way home and the driver could take the rest of the night off. Although most of the time it was convenient to have someone drive him around, there were some days when it made Harrison feel confined and claustrophobic, especially when he knew exactly where he was.

  Back in his earliest days of struggle and hunger, when he could barely afford ramen noodles and water, he used to come to this neighborhood in Lower Manhattan and spend entire evenings at Mother’s Place. For one thing, it was safe, and back then Harrison had just come out of the closet and like most he wasn’t sure how to be gay. Even though it’s a little different for every gay man, Harrison often found himself wishing for a rule book, or some kind of book of instructions on being gay so that everything wasn’t always such a surprise. When he thought about the things he’d experienced so far, he could have avoided more than a few awkward situations if he’d seen them coming ahead of time. Like that time a good looking guy asked him if he was a top or a bottom and he didn’t know what the guy was talking about. To be polite he simply smiled and said, “I’m a bottom I guess.” He was young; he didn’t know what that meant in gay jargon. Unfortunately, he found out fast when he went home with the guy and the guy tried to bend him over the furniture. At least the guy was nice about it when Harrison declined and said he wanted to leave. And he never made that mistake again.

  Mother’s Place was also one of the most popular underground venues for new talent in the city, if not the entire world. Harrison had started going there to learn, and listen, and watch other amateur performers. It took him a full year before he finally worked up the courage to perform, and then it took another year to reach the point where the audience didn’t either fall asleep or boo him off the stage. But he’d learned a lot there, especially the difference between raw natural talent and staged rehearsed talent. He didn’t have raw natural talent. He’d worked hard to perfect his craft as a singer and a musician, and he knew he still wasn’t finished.

  On that particular night, though, he simply wanted to find a quiet table in the dark so he could just sit and listen. Even though Mother’s Place was mostly considered an LGBT venue, he wasn’t looking to hook up and the last thing he needed was someone to talk to. This would be his micro vacation from all the stress and reality he had to deal with on a daily basis, and it was long overdue.

  Mother’s Place was located in the middle of the block on one of those quaint little name streets in lower Manhattan. If you didn’t know it was there, or you hadn’t heard about it from someone else, the odds are you wouldn’t just walk in off the street. It had stood in the ground floor of a century-old brownstone for the last 30 years, sandwiched between a campy fortune teller with pink neon signs on the right and an erotic clothing store that boasted the largest selection of dildos in the east on the left. The entire block itself was that interesting blend of residential and commercial that seemed to be disappearing in Manhattan, without clinging to either one too closely. On one end of the block there was a vintage brick and mortar bookshop with rent controlled apartments above it, and on the other end there was a knitting store that specialized in felting.

  Harrison trudged through the ground floor entrance and blinked a few times to adjust his eyes to the darkness. He noticed nothing much had changed since the last time he’d been there. The floor was still cobblestone, the walls exposed brick. The dim lighting had red overtones, which created a somber mood without trying too hard. He walked over to a young guy with dark hair who was standing beside a podium and asked for a quiet
table in the back, and the moment the young guy looked up he blinked and said, “Aren’t you Harrison Parker, the Harrison Parker?”

  Harrison smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s me. But if we can keep that quiet I would appreciate it. I just want to sit quietly and watch the performers. Do you think we can find a table where that can happen?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Parker,” the guy said. “I’m one of your biggest fans and I’ll take good care of you. Follow me and don’t worry about a thing.”

  He led Harrison to a table for two in the middle of the main room, not far from the stage. It wasn’t what Harrison had been picturing when he’d mentioned he wanted a quiet table, but he didn’t feel like trying to explain at that point. Besides, he forgot all about it when he noticed the performer on stage at that moment. It was a drag act, with three men performing as women. The one in the middle seemed to be the star and the other two were backup singers. Although Harrison had never been the biggest fan of drag shows, he noticed this one was different from others he’d seen in the past. The two backup singers weren’t all that significant, but the lead singer, the one in the middle, was one of the most beautiful and natural female impersonators he’d ever come across. Nothing was overdone either, none of that layering of make-up, exaggerated eyebrows or glittery eyeshadow. It looked as though this performer had simply put on a long blond wig and applied the most basic make-up to pass as a woman. The costume was nothing more than a simple black dress with a circle pin, a pair of black pumps with four inch heels and rhinestone earrings that sparkled a little each time they threw their head back.

  It was the music that caught Harrison’s attention, however. This wasn’t just an ordinary drag show with generic performers lip-syncing the words to someone else’s song. Harrison didn’t mind that sort of thing as long as it was campy and entertaining, but he’d always wondered why some drag performers didn’t just sing with their own voices.