“Tricks Gone Bad” available now in paperback or ebook format
“Cunningly-told moments, moored in the misty suspension of consequences required for sex with strangers.”
In the high desert west of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a passionate interlude between two men goes off the tracks. A young journalist for The El Paso Times reports the crime but misses the key questions. Why would a man with a successful career, a home and loving family, risk everything for a casual encounter with a stranger? And why did he have to die?
After covering the Juarez murder, the young journalist is soon embroiled in his own trick gone bad; a betrayal which could cast a permanent shadow over his life. And it’s not the only time the reporter risks personal and professional ruin without asking important questions.
In five interlocking scenes that span 15 years and four cities, author David M. Hancock points a searing white light at a life of gay cruising and deadline reporting. It’s all about adrenalin in these vignettes, whether the reporter is covering a young woman’s murder in Coral Gables or making a 3 a.m. drug run with a Miami Beach go-go boy. Or debating whether to stab a shady character in New York City.
“Tricks Gone Bad” — An erotic tapestry of fact and fiction that begins and ends with a real-life murder in the Chihuahua desert.
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CIUDAD JUAREZ, 1985 – Back before the Internet siphoned off the mystery of human intercourse, men of a certain ilk had secret gathering places. Every city, town or two-horse hamlet had a place or two of convergence for men with an itch to scratch. Each acting to his nature: peacocks preening in the moonlight, coyotes lurking in the shadows. The setting might be a park or rest stop subtly enhanced by hovering spirits; a forest or isolated beach consecrated by lust. Maybe you got directions from runes scratched on a bathroom stall. Or some kneeling acolyte told you as you buttoned your jeans. Perhaps you stumbled upon it in your own restless rambles: an unremarkable locale unmasked by the telltale glimmer of fairy dust. The druid in you could smell the billowing sexual energy of a sacred grove. And when you returned later and saw the hungry animals prowling, beasts like yourself, you thought with satisfaction: Aha! I knew it!
Not all hijinks happen in the midnight hour, of course; or off the beaten trail. Male sexual energy is so irrepressible that it bubbles up right under the noses of unsuspecting citizens going about their daily rounds.
Libraries, in particular, are prone to attract adventurers with other than literary pursuits. Double agents posing with a prop book or magazine, watching the herd with wolf eyes.
It’s torn down now in the name of urban revitalization. But the old public library in Downtown El Paso, Texas, was a known venue – doubling as a source of archived knowledge and sexual connection.
The library was a modest building of no great account, built onto one side of a square park designed in the style of any number of Mexican municipal plazas.
A shabby building, really; but if its stacks could talk – what a tale it would be of lusty glances, hands accidentally brushing against asses, bathroom quickies and assignations taken off-site.
David is already intimately familiar with that particular library when its dual nature comes up in a tragic and scandalous news story he is reporting.