Slurpee ©Tom Magliery. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.
Hell I don’t know. Barney’s gone. I just heard his car door slam. I stick a frozen pizza in, I go out on the patio, smoke while it nukes. There’s that March sky with cottage-cheese for clouds and bony trees around the half-frozen field and beyond that the backs of a McDonald’s and a Walgreen’s and the United Dairy Farmers where I work.
Barney’s Tercel is stopped at the stoplight by the bank.
It doesn’t matter. He told me upfront he wasn’t into me, and I kind of liked that. It took the pressure off, and when I needed him, he was there, bored and glassy-eyed, embarrassed by how much I felt.
The other day he said his wife wanted him back.
“So you’re not queer anymore?” I said.
“I guess not.” He laughed. “She said she’s pregnant.”
I laughed too.
This is one of those deluxe frozen pizzas. Not bad. I eat half the thing and I smoke some more on the patio, with the TV on in my living room. I can hear the wheel of fortune and the overemotional audience. This apartment has some pretty nice amenities for being so crappy—a fireplace I don’t use, brand new wall-to-wall carpet, this patio with sliding glass doors and vertical blinds. A washer-dryer combo in the bathroom. Too bad it doesn’t work.
There’s a knock on my door while I’m peeing. I yell that I’ll be there in a sec. And of course as I finish, I whip up a whole new fantasy of Barney’s Tercel doing a U-turn. Barney out there in the foyer next to the row of rusty robot-looking mailboxes.
I open it, and there’s Tiffany, the teenage girl from upstairs.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She wears a midriff, Britney-looking thing and thick mascara, purple streaks in her hair. You can kind of tell that she’s looking for something more out of life.
“Sorry for what?” I ask.
We don’t talk that much. One time I helped her carry groceries in, and her and her mom’s place was decorated with all kinds of funky shit, like a big cream-colored vinyl sectional sofa and ostrich feathers and an abstract painting with sparkling lights embedded in it they told me they got on vacation.
“I have a favor to ask.”
“Come on in.”
I am not in the mood, but there you go. My boyfriend of three months just left me. I am a forty-two-year-old homosexual who day-manages a convenience-store. I have a major bald spot. I bite the crap out of my fingernails.
Tiffany and I sit down in the living room with Entertainment Tonight on.
“I need a lift over to my boyfriend’s place. Mom’s gone, and I don’t have money for a cab, and it’s just I really need to see him. He’s been weird all day, calling me and begging me to come over, and I really think he’s completely depressed, you know? I’m afraid of what he might do.” She smiles, like it’s a joke but it’s not.
I do know “depressed.” Hell I know it intimately. I look right at her and I can feel tears starting in my own eyes, just because she asked me, and I notice how she has a gut on her, poking out from the bright orange T-shirt she’s chopped in two to make herself look like a star. That white little belly breaks my heart.
“Let me get my keys.”
She smiles great big. I’ve seen that boy before. Skinny as a rail with a wiry goatee and always in the same black T-shirt and pants hanging down so you can see the Old Navy label on his underwear.
“You really are nice,” she says.
I don’t answer. I saran my pizza, I get my keys, and we are off. It’s dark, and the little town is dead all around us, except for the drive-thrus. I look in at the convenience store I manage, and there’s Monique, that one woman I can’t stand, running register, frowning like a mental patient, which she happens to be sometimes I bet.
One time, Monique comes up to me at the change of shift and she says, “I saw that sticker on your car.” Her expression was so serious as to be comical.
“What sticker?”
“That gay sticker.” Monique frowned like a spy. She wasn’t a Bible-thumper either. Just pissed and on the prowl for a target.
“Yeah,” I said. It was a rainbow bumper-sticker Barney and me got when we went to Key West the month before.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get your brains bashed in? My cousin’s gay, and he lives in Indianapolis and he got beat up last year. Him and his little boyfriend. I told him you can’t be holding hands no matter what’s on TV, Will and Grace or not, people can’t take it.”
The pitch in her voice was going higher. There’s a certain kind of pleasure certain kind of people take in letting other people know how dangerous it is for them to be alive. Monique had that going on big-time.
“I’d peel that thing off if I was you. I mean. Come on.”
I let it pass. I laughed nervously, like I really was scared, and secretly I hoped she had a prescription in her purse for Zoloft. Which is what I used to be on, and I’ll probably go back on now.
Barney and me in fact met at the UDF. He was taking a second job to pay off credit-card bills, and that day he first came on I trained him. I didn’t hire him, the night manager did, but I always ended up having to train people. He came in dressed in a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved shirt and a wrinkled clip-on necktie and scuffed-up Nikes.
“Am I late?” he said.
“No,” I said, and right off I knew he was what I wanted. I saw his short dark hair, and the wrinkles in his tie, and the wetness of his sleepy eyes and I knew.
I tried not to show it at first. I showed him how to change register tape and how to do inventories in back, where the mop sinks were. He followed along, real tired, you could tell, and after about two hours of training he said, “Can you smoke in here?”
I was pulling night-shifts back then. I just got the day-management position two months back. So I had slept all day. I was okay.
“No. But you can go outside there and smoke if you need to. I’ll watch the register. I’m a smoker too.”
I grinned at him, and he nodded his head, went outside, lit up. I watched him from beside the Slurpee machine. He smoked like a little lost nobody, looking out at the parking lot as though he were staring out at his own future and just seeing litter and oil-stains.
He came back in, and he said, “So where’s the caffeine pills?”
“How about some extra strong black coffee?”
“Sure.”
So we drank French Roast and I showed him how to cut deli meats and how to arrange the donuts that came in and how to make sure you check inventory and the bank deposit, all that, and then it was time to go home. His wife had fallen asleep, though, and they only had one car and he called her five times to no avail.
“She sleeps like a corpse,” he said, ringing out the mop. He looked down at the floor as he mopped. There was a tiny piece of a candy wrapper floating in the mop water.
“I’ll take you home.”
Suddenly his face was full of hope—like an insomniac just discovering there are sleeping pills in a desk drawer.
At the stoplight just outside his apartment complex, Barney said he didn’t want to go home.
“You wanna go get something to eat?” he asked. It was 5 a.m.
“I guess.”
“I really just don’t want to see her,” he said over scrambled eggs at that one pancake house that used to be a Ponderosa, pig plagues and daisies on the wall.
I was drinking more coffee. I wouldn’t sleep a wink I knew and yet I felt him pulling me into his orbit just by being what he was: some sad-sack loser in a bad marriage having to work a second job to keep out of bankruptcy court. All his misery was giving him over to me.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said and he coughed, got his cigarettes out.
“So what’s so bad about home?”
“Everything.” He laughed and then his eyes were right on me.
“I have a couch,” I said.
But of course that night he slept in my bed with me, and I remember feeling like I had died and gone to some alternate universe, not heaven, but close—a place where I got what I wanted without a lot of struggle, and it wasn’t a perfect world but it was somehow fair. Love got reciprocated right away in this universe. Love got love. He was what I wanted and he didn’t pay a lot of attention to me while we did it, and when he got off it was like one single sad little pop and then he was unconscious beside me. I watched him breath for a long time. My eyes got hot while I watched.
Hell I think I actually cried from happiness.
Barney moved in with me a few days later, and every day my life got easier because he was there, blank and willing to be the object of my desire. I didn’t have to pretend that I could make it anymore. I realized what my main problem was, what had kept me in turmoil: just plain old run-of-the-mill loneliness. Of course, that realization would end up fucking me over in the end.
We’re inside this condo over by I-275, on a cul-de-sac of beat-up-looking townhouses and condos with toys in the grass and bags of garbage waiting to be picked up. This condo we’re in is completely gutted, no furniture or nothing, boxes on boxes, and part of the living room wall has been karate-kicked in.
Beside the biggest hole, on the floor, is Tiffany’s boyfriend, whose name is Kyle. Kyle has not had a good day either. He’s in sweatpants with no shirt and has the whitest skin like he was born and raised in a basement in the light of Nintendo games. He has a tattoo of a demonic sun on his back, big black combat boots on his feet with no socks, strings untied. He just sits there, Indian-style, with his eyes focused on the paperclip he has untangled, trying to clean out his one-hitter so he can smoke more pot.
“His brother moved out last week,” Tiffany whispers.
“Hey you okay?” I say. We just came in, the door being half open and a cat meowing beside the porch. The cat was in now, roaming the empty condo, smelling for its litter-box.
Kyle throws the used paperclip into the kicked-in hole in the wall. The hole is about the size of an open mouth on a billboard. That took a lot of karate kicks to do that. His goatee beard has grown into a long strand spilling out of his chin. When he looks up, his eyes are a glittery fake gold.
“I’m fine. I mean I’m getting fucking evicted tomorrow, but I am so goddamn fine.” He laughs a messed-up-boy-on-a-soap-opera laugh then lights the one-hitter and inhales like he is inhaling the Smoke of God.
Tiffany says, “Did you do that to the walls?”
“No,” he says, and he laughs again that way, and he looks her right in the eye, “Keanu Reeves did.” His fake gold eyes are contacts. They have to be.
Tiffany laughs too and goes over to him and sits down and he packs her a hit in the one-hitter and she does it and looks up to me.
“He’s gonna be homeless, Dwayne.” She smiles with tears starting.
“I’m sorry.”
Kyle stands and hands the one-hitter back to Tiffany. The only unboxed thing in the room is a boom-box on the floor, and he goes and turns it on. Hard rock with a whiny singing boy comes out. Kyle stands up and feels his left nipple, looks up at me.
“I get pissed off all the time. I can’t keep a job.” He stares down at the floor.
Tiffany says, “When he goes low, you know, like from bipolar, you know? I mean when he goes low he is the lowest of the low.” She stands up and sways a little. It looks like she’s proud of Kyle’s low status in a way.
I keep on smiling. I’m thinking of Barney. What he’s doing. Are they ordering a welcome-home pizza from Papa John’s? Are they talking about redecorating a room in their little house to turn into a nursery? Kyle steps closer and I can smell his bipolar body heat like an oven that’s been on too long without anything in it. He blows a wind past me and then turns into the Karate Kid, connecting with a part of the wall that’s not been demolished yet, his combat-booted foot going all the way through until half his body is in the adjacent kitchen and the rest of him is still with us. He lays there in the rubble.
Tiffany goes over to him, high as a kite now, but not laughing.
“Are you dead?” she says.
“No,” he says. “Help me up.”
He gets up, breathing real hard. The bottom part of him is covered in drywall dust. His chest is bleeding little red stars.
“I hate my landlord,” he says to me, like that might make me understand the whole thing, and I do for a second. And it happens right then of course that feeling of love busting out of its container, like 2% milk turning into a thundercloud. For a second I look at Tiff and feel sorry for her and sorry for me and just plain sorry for the whole damn world.
“You need a place to stay?” I ask.
He dusts off his sweatpants’ legs, stands up, smiles.
“Thank you Dwayne,” Tiffany says. She comes over and I smell that burnt-poinsettia smell of pot.
“Yeah,” Kyle says. “Thank you Dwayne.”
Kyle and me and Tiffany share three weeks together.
When she gets time, Tiffany’s mom comes down to get Tiff. She’s a skinny lady with hardly any hair in a pair of jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, glasses on a chain. She makes a lot of noise thumping down the stairs. She knocks on the door and yells Tiff’s name, me and Tiff and Kyle usually in the dark living room watching DVDs we rent. It’s almost like we’re a family in a way, we’re so quiet and disenchanted, and Kyle laughing too hard at Jim Carrey. We eat whatever we want to. Neapolitan ice cream and circus peanuts and beef jerky and Chinese food from a can, etc. At work I whip up decadent ideas in my head about what we’ll be eating and watching every night. It’s sick and yet it’s also like hope.
And so tonight, three weeks in, there’s the thunder of Tiff’s mom stomping down the stairs, and Tiff’s mom pounds on the door. We’re in the middle of The Sixth Sense, some very scary stuff.
“Tiffany,” her mom yells. “You are coming home.”
Tiffany yells back, “Mom! We’re watching a movie!”
She pounds more. This time it’s like she’s had it. I am about to get up to face the music, when Kyle pushes me back down, stands up, stops by the DVD player and puts it on pause, then half-stumbles to the door. He is in his underwear and nothing else. He opens the door.
“Why don’t you fucking stop this shit?” He’s yelling like he’s on a reality TV show, like there’s cameras everywhere and he has to put on some kind of act or get booted off.
I see him yell and I can see parts of Tiff’s mom out in the corridor—this time it’s cutoffs and her uniform top from Target. I’m thinking I should disappear off the face of the earth. Her face is pale and tired and irate. She’s not ready for a fight. She does not even know if it’s worth it saving her daughter you can tell, but then again that’s all she’s been doing lately so it’s become sort of second-nature.
“Get some clothes on right now,” she says.
She tries to come into the apartment. Kyle won’t let her though. I look over at Tiff and she looks halfway between wanting to protect her mother and wanting to go back to the movie.
Tiffany looks at me and slumps her shoulders. “This is weird,” she whispers. “I love them both. It’s like a tug of war for my heart.”
Kyle keeps blocking the door like a goalie.
“Let me in. She’s my daughter goddammit,” Tiff’s mom grunts and growls almost. She goes from one side of the doorway to the other, but he’s fast and he keeps her out. Finally she gets down on all fours and crawls through, knocking him back with her head. She’s in and runs toward us. It’s dark except for the TV, so I turn on the lamp. Tiff’s mom is breathing real hard, standing beside the La-Z-Boy.
“I can’t believe this,” she says.
Kyle comes over to her and grabs her and slams into the chair.
“I am so sick of you,” he says.
“You’re crazy!” she screams.
He hovers over her like he has trapped her with his secret powers and she will never be free. I slowly get up.
“Hey you guys come on,” I say.
Kyle does not have his colored contacts in. His eyes are very brown, so brown as to be black and in his white Old Navy underwear he resembles a refugee from a nighttime tornado. He won’t take his eyes off Tiff’s mom. He has her targeted.
Tiff is standing up now.
“We just wanted to finish the movie Mom!” she screams.
Tiff is not in her underwear, but she might as well be—a halter-top-thing, skin-tight jeans. I’m in my sweats. I must look sixty years old by now, all the bad food and no-sleep for the past three weeks, that feeling of being held captive by Kyle because he never leaves the house even though he keeps telling me his brother is coming back to get him and they are going to pick up Tiffany at school and escape to Arizona.
Tiff’s mom is looking at me.
“You ought to be ashamed,” she says.
Kyle comes to my defense, “He’s a kind and gentle person.” He says that like it’s so true it’s downright embarrassing. Hell I love him but I can’t love him too.
I’ve fallen in love with the both of them in a way. It’s like they have come into my head and nested there, replacing normal life with their junk food comfort and pot-head slumber and always asking me to buy them beer and I do and we drink it and get drunk and they go into my bedroom and have their sex and I half-sleep out here and wake up and quietly get ready for work the next day, Tiff having slipped off upstairs after they did it and Kyle snoring like a cowboy with sleep apnea.
“Kind and gentle my ass,” Tiff’s mom says.
Kyle’s nostrils flare. “I will hit you, okay? I will fucking hit you you pick on Dwayne!”
Tiff’s mom looks away. “I just want my daughter.”
Tiff runs over to her mom, bawling now.
“I’m sorry Mom! He’s bipolar.”
Kyle starts crying too then. He goes over to the wall, and he makes a fist and he punches a hole right next to the TV. This is the first time he’s done that in here. The wall gives in like a piece of nothing.
“Time out,” I say. I go over to Tiff and her mom, and I say, “Tiff you go home with your mom. It’s time to take a break.”
Tiffany nods and gets up. Her mom stands up, looking all hateful at me. “I ought to call Children’s Services and the goddamn cops.”
She knows what I am, but I’m not that. I don’t love them like that. The love I do have for them is lazy and good-for-nothing, even possibly illegal. But it is not that.
“I’m not a pervert,” I tell her.
She and Tiffany just walk out. Kyle is on the floor, not crying, just staring into space.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I ask him.
“I took my meds, swear to God,” he says, still staring into space.
“I know you did. I’m the one that went and got them for you.”
I walk over to the couch and lay down. Eventually he gets up and comes over to me.
“That stuff about my brother?” he says in the dark.
“Yes.” I close my eyes.
“He never calls me. I made that thing up about Arizona. I’d like to go though. Maybe me and you and Tiff?”
Even with my eyes closed I can feel his smile. It’s got the sticky warmth of not being able to live right. He wants me to take that smile in like a pervert would, use it to make myself happier than I ever should be.
When he bends down and kisses me, I just let my lips fold into my mouth, and then I open my eyes.
“Go on to bed,” I say.
He stands there for a second or two, swaying.
“Whatever you say,” he whispers.
Monique comes in at the end of my shift that next day. She gives me the evil eye.
“You don’t look so good,” she says. She’s got the biggest ass in the tri-state area, wearing baggy sweatpants and a big smock to cover.
It’s close to 3:30 PM. While I am at work I try to do my job very well thank you. But my clothes are not clean. I haven’t gone to the laundromat in these three past weeks. Basically I rinse out stuff in the kitchen sink and then hang it out on the balcony to dry.
My shift is almost over, and there’s the smell of dirty bleach coming up from the floor I just sloppily mopped, the fake-butter in the popcorn machine, the waxy vapor of candy bars washed in sunlight.
“I feel okay,” I lie.
“Are you sick?” she says, smiling.
“No.”
“Well you look sick.” She stops smiling and she goes over to the mop bucket where I left it in front of the milk coolers.
“Is this the water you used to mop with?” she asks, pissy and judgmental.
“Yeah.”
“It looks like sewage water.” She laughs really loud.
Fuck you, I want to say. Fuck this whole fucking world.
He wasn’t who he is now, Barney, back when we went to Key West. We went there together a month into the relationship. I paid for everything. I paid for the plane tickets and I paid for the Super 8 Motel and I paid for the convertible we rode around in that one night, top down, humid as all get out. Barney and me drove next to the Gulf of Mexico, a beautiful storm riding in the orange sky like a jellyfish coming in for a smooch. It was so damn hot. We were drunk from going to some fancy place (all of this on my Visa remember). Shrimp and baked potatoes and white wine.
The wind whipped back Barney’s straight dark hair. He had a tan from earlier that day at the beach. He looked like what I wanted him to look like.
“Damn,” he’d said in the motel room right before we went out to eat that night, right after I sucked him off. “That was good. That was really good.”
I knew he loved me. I was electric inside, all my fuses exploding in secret. I tried to make it seem like nothing. I did not want to scare him too much.
So I stop by Barney’s house after work. He is out getting his mail. I sit in my car watching, half-camouflaged by the other cars and the sun light splashing through tree-limbs. But I get out. He’s opening some letter and smiling. He looks up. Their little house is cute in a way, painted yellow, in a so-so neighborhood.
“Hey,” I say.
His eyes go cold, and I go in closer. I must be smiling. Yes I took a few “magnums.” That’s what Kyle calls his speed pills. I took a few around one o’clock because I was about to go into a coma, and this is what love can do to you, I think right now, walking up to Barney, walking very slowly and my mouth hurts from how much I love him and now that he is gone it doesn’t hurt as much as burn all the time and yet I know how he can just leave without one thought about me and pick up where he left off.
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Dwayne. Don’t go Glenn Close on my ass.” He laughs, but he’s nervous you can tell. “You look a little tired,” he says.
“I’m very tired,” I say, and I laugh too, but then I get choked up and I stop.
“Come on,” Barney says. “Leave us alone.”
I stand there on the sidewalk, and when he turns to go into the house I still don’t move. He stops and looks back at me. He gets a little pissed.
“Go home,” he says. “Go on.”
“I can’t,” I say.
This is embarrassing to report to you, I know, me standing there in the sunshine on the sidewalk outside his yellow cottage and him in some uniform-type outfit, maybe UPS, I don’t know. I can’t move. There’s a kind of hypnosis that you can do to yourself when you’re so miserable you can barely stand it. It pushes you into the center of the freeze-ray, stubbornness sets in. You can do anything if you come to the understanding that you’ll never get your way.
“It’s over. Okay?” he is whispering, and he pulls my arm toward my car but I won’t move. There is just no goddamn way.
I shake him off. I walk backwards.
“Go on,” he says. “Get the hell out of here before someone sees you freak.”
Barney kind of laughs then, not a real laugh, a cover-up. He looks both hurt and pissed, like he just can’t understand this behavior of mine and it’s that look that only blows my heart up into the size of that ocean storm, that look that he doesn’t care but has let me love him, that look.
“Have some fucking self respect,” he says. Then he looks down the street both ways. “I mean come on.”
When I get home the door is wide open. And inside furniture has been turned over, the walls are busted out all over the place, walls like Swiss cheese.
I get panicky and call out Kyle’s name. There’s no response. For a second, I think I might pass out. There’s the familiar stomping down the stairs. When I turn around Tiff’s mom is standing in the doorway. She looks like she wishes she had a gun.
“He did it,” she says.
Right then I can’t talk.
“He beat the living shit out of my daughter,” she says. “I just took her to the hospital, buddy. Thank God I came home for lunch. She was beat to a pulp over some stupid movie they watched. She is in intensive care. I come back to get her some things.”
I still can’t talk. She shakes the bag of her daughter’s things in my face.
“He’s gone. That little fucker took off. I called the police. They know about you too buddy. What you were doing in there. It made me sick. Well he beat her good. I don’t have anything against gays I don’t, but I can’t take a child molester. I cannot. I shouldn’t have let it go on.”
She keeps shaking that bag. It’s clear plastic and inside it are a peach nightgown and some shampoo and socks and panties.
“I love Tiffany,” I say.
“I am going to puke,” she says, and glares at me like she would be the one at the front of the mob, the one who would start taking me apart limb by limb.
When Kyle comes back, he’s all apologetic. He’s coked up too I think. It’s around 8:30, and the police haven’t come yet. He has on his combat boots and sweat-pants and a suede jacket with fringes he told me his brother had got him. He stands in front of me in the kitchen.
“Write me a check,” he says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Please,” he says.
“No.”
“Please God just write me a check!”
I shake my head no. I look him in the face.
“Let’s go do laundry,” I say.
His contacts are in. They glitter like gold fish. He looks like he doesn’t understand.
“I don’t have anything to wear to work tomorrow,” I say.
“Everything I got smells,” he says.
We go around the apartment, picking up dirty clothes. We get like seven big black garbage bags full of clothes. It’s raining. The furniture is still overturned, the walls still botched. I don’t want to notice anything then, and somehow Kyle is obedient, caught up in the need for clean clothes, like the boy he’s supposed to be, vain and self-conscious. He carries four bags out to my car, and I carry the rest. I lock my door, and then we go by the Kroger’s for some Tide and dryer sheets. We turn the radio on to his station. The rain is almost pretty on the windshield.
The Laundromat is just down the street. We run the clothes into the little place, in a strip-mall next to a bar and a Radio Shack. There’s only one other person here tonight, and she’s reading a Harry Potter book in front of the dryers. There’s a hum and the smell of mildew and clean drying clothes. The chairs are orange and green plastic.
I give Kyle a five dollar bill and he gets change, standing in front of the machine like it’s a slot machine. There’s happiness on his face, and his eyes shielded with gold-drops. Maybe it’s the lighting, but he doesn’t look so ghoulish now. Like he has snapped out of something.
This needed to be done.
I sort and separate and Kyle puts quarters in. Pours detergent. We sit down after everything is loaded—five machines playing in unison like a country band. The woman with her book gets up and goes outside to smoke. The rain has stopped. The concrete and cars are glittery with it.
I turn toward Kyle, exhausted and for a second almost happy with this one accomplishment, all the machines going, the smell of detergent and hot water.
“Why did you hit her honey?” I ask him.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why?”
“I didn’t hit anybody, Dwayne.” His eyes are gold coins. He smiles. “Can I get a pop?”
I stand up and give him a dollar. He walks over to the pop machines and chooses Mountain Dew. The clock says 9:15 p.m. It’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Hell I don’t know.
Barney’s Tercel is stopped at the stoplight by the bank.
It doesn’t matter. He told me upfront he wasn’t into me, and I kind of liked that. It took the pressure off, and when I needed him, he was there, bored and glassy-eyed, embarrassed by how much I felt.
The other day he said his wife wanted him back.
“So you’re not queer anymore?” I said.
“I guess not.” He laughed. “She said she’s pregnant.”
I laughed too.
This is one of those deluxe frozen pizzas. Not bad. I eat half the thing and I smoke some more on the patio, with the TV on in my living room. I can hear the wheel of fortune and the overemotional audience. This apartment has some pretty nice amenities for being so crappy—a fireplace I don’t use, brand new wall-to-wall carpet, this patio with sliding glass doors and vertical blinds. A washer-dryer combo in the bathroom. Too bad it doesn’t work.
There’s a knock on my door while I’m peeing. I yell that I’ll be there in a sec. And of course as I finish, I whip up a whole new fantasy of Barney’s Tercel doing a U-turn. Barney out there in the foyer next to the row of rusty robot-looking mailboxes.
I open it, and there’s Tiffany, the teenage girl from upstairs.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She wears a midriff, Britney-looking thing and thick mascara, purple streaks in her hair. You can kind of tell that she’s looking for something more out of life.
“Sorry for what?” I ask.
We don’t talk that much. One time I helped her carry groceries in, and her and her mom’s place was decorated with all kinds of funky shit, like a big cream-colored vinyl sectional sofa and ostrich feathers and an abstract painting with sparkling lights embedded in it they told me they got on vacation.
“I have a favor to ask.”
“Come on in.”
I am not in the mood, but there you go. My boyfriend of three months just left me. I am a forty-two-year-old homosexual who day-manages a convenience-store. I have a major bald spot. I bite the crap out of my fingernails.
Tiffany and I sit down in the living room with Entertainment Tonight on.
“I need a lift over to my boyfriend’s place. Mom’s gone, and I don’t have money for a cab, and it’s just I really need to see him. He’s been weird all day, calling me and begging me to come over, and I really think he’s completely depressed, you know? I’m afraid of what he might do.” She smiles, like it’s a joke but it’s not.
I do know “depressed.” Hell I know it intimately. I look right at her and I can feel tears starting in my own eyes, just because she asked me, and I notice how she has a gut on her, poking out from the bright orange T-shirt she’s chopped in two to make herself look like a star. That white little belly breaks my heart.
“Let me get my keys.”
She smiles great big. I’ve seen that boy before. Skinny as a rail with a wiry goatee and always in the same black T-shirt and pants hanging down so you can see the Old Navy label on his underwear.
“You really are nice,” she says.
I don’t answer. I saran my pizza, I get my keys, and we are off. It’s dark, and the little town is dead all around us, except for the drive-thrus. I look in at the convenience store I manage, and there’s Monique, that one woman I can’t stand, running register, frowning like a mental patient, which she happens to be sometimes I bet.
One time, Monique comes up to me at the change of shift and she says, “I saw that sticker on your car.” Her expression was so serious as to be comical.
“What sticker?”
“That gay sticker.” Monique frowned like a spy. She wasn’t a Bible-thumper either. Just pissed and on the prowl for a target.
“Yeah,” I said. It was a rainbow bumper-sticker Barney and me got when we went to Key West the month before.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get your brains bashed in? My cousin’s gay, and he lives in Indianapolis and he got beat up last year. Him and his little boyfriend. I told him you can’t be holding hands no matter what’s on TV, Will and Grace or not, people can’t take it.”
The pitch in her voice was going higher. There’s a certain kind of pleasure certain kind of people take in letting other people know how dangerous it is for them to be alive. Monique had that going on big-time.
“I’d peel that thing off if I was you. I mean. Come on.”
I let it pass. I laughed nervously, like I really was scared, and secretly I hoped she had a prescription in her purse for Zoloft. Which is what I used to be on, and I’ll probably go back on now.
Barney and me in fact met at the UDF. He was taking a second job to pay off credit-card bills, and that day he first came on I trained him. I didn’t hire him, the night manager did, but I always ended up having to train people. He came in dressed in a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved shirt and a wrinkled clip-on necktie and scuffed-up Nikes.
“Am I late?” he said.
“No,” I said, and right off I knew he was what I wanted. I saw his short dark hair, and the wrinkles in his tie, and the wetness of his sleepy eyes and I knew.
I tried not to show it at first. I showed him how to change register tape and how to do inventories in back, where the mop sinks were. He followed along, real tired, you could tell, and after about two hours of training he said, “Can you smoke in here?”
I was pulling night-shifts back then. I just got the day-management position two months back. So I had slept all day. I was okay.
“No. But you can go outside there and smoke if you need to. I’ll watch the register. I’m a smoker too.”
I grinned at him, and he nodded his head, went outside, lit up. I watched him from beside the Slurpee machine. He smoked like a little lost nobody, looking out at the parking lot as though he were staring out at his own future and just seeing litter and oil-stains.
He came back in, and he said, “So where’s the caffeine pills?”
“How about some extra strong black coffee?”
“Sure.”
So we drank French Roast and I showed him how to cut deli meats and how to arrange the donuts that came in and how to make sure you check inventory and the bank deposit, all that, and then it was time to go home. His wife had fallen asleep, though, and they only had one car and he called her five times to no avail.
“She sleeps like a corpse,” he said, ringing out the mop. He looked down at the floor as he mopped. There was a tiny piece of a candy wrapper floating in the mop water.
“I’ll take you home.”
Suddenly his face was full of hope—like an insomniac just discovering there are sleeping pills in a desk drawer.
At the stoplight just outside his apartment complex, Barney said he didn’t want to go home.
“You wanna go get something to eat?” he asked. It was 5 a.m.
“I guess.”
“I really just don’t want to see her,” he said over scrambled eggs at that one pancake house that used to be a Ponderosa, pig plagues and daisies on the wall.
I was drinking more coffee. I wouldn’t sleep a wink I knew and yet I felt him pulling me into his orbit just by being what he was: some sad-sack loser in a bad marriage having to work a second job to keep out of bankruptcy court. All his misery was giving him over to me.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said and he coughed, got his cigarettes out.
“So what’s so bad about home?”
“Everything.” He laughed and then his eyes were right on me.
“I have a couch,” I said.
But of course that night he slept in my bed with me, and I remember feeling like I had died and gone to some alternate universe, not heaven, but close—a place where I got what I wanted without a lot of struggle, and it wasn’t a perfect world but it was somehow fair. Love got reciprocated right away in this universe. Love got love. He was what I wanted and he didn’t pay a lot of attention to me while we did it, and when he got off it was like one single sad little pop and then he was unconscious beside me. I watched him breath for a long time. My eyes got hot while I watched.
Hell I think I actually cried from happiness.
Barney moved in with me a few days later, and every day my life got easier because he was there, blank and willing to be the object of my desire. I didn’t have to pretend that I could make it anymore. I realized what my main problem was, what had kept me in turmoil: just plain old run-of-the-mill loneliness. Of course, that realization would end up fucking me over in the end.
We’re inside this condo over by I-275, on a cul-de-sac of beat-up-looking townhouses and condos with toys in the grass and bags of garbage waiting to be picked up. This condo we’re in is completely gutted, no furniture or nothing, boxes on boxes, and part of the living room wall has been karate-kicked in.
Beside the biggest hole, on the floor, is Tiffany’s boyfriend, whose name is Kyle. Kyle has not had a good day either. He’s in sweatpants with no shirt and has the whitest skin like he was born and raised in a basement in the light of Nintendo games. He has a tattoo of a demonic sun on his back, big black combat boots on his feet with no socks, strings untied. He just sits there, Indian-style, with his eyes focused on the paperclip he has untangled, trying to clean out his one-hitter so he can smoke more pot.
“His brother moved out last week,” Tiffany whispers.
“Hey you okay?” I say. We just came in, the door being half open and a cat meowing beside the porch. The cat was in now, roaming the empty condo, smelling for its litter-box.
Kyle throws the used paperclip into the kicked-in hole in the wall. The hole is about the size of an open mouth on a billboard. That took a lot of karate kicks to do that. His goatee beard has grown into a long strand spilling out of his chin. When he looks up, his eyes are a glittery fake gold.
“I’m fine. I mean I’m getting fucking evicted tomorrow, but I am so goddamn fine.” He laughs a messed-up-boy-on-a-soap-opera laugh then lights the one-hitter and inhales like he is inhaling the Smoke of God.
Tiffany says, “Did you do that to the walls?”
“No,” he says, and he laughs again that way, and he looks her right in the eye, “Keanu Reeves did.” His fake gold eyes are contacts. They have to be.
Tiffany laughs too and goes over to him and sits down and he packs her a hit in the one-hitter and she does it and looks up to me.
“He’s gonna be homeless, Dwayne.” She smiles with tears starting.
“I’m sorry.”
Kyle stands and hands the one-hitter back to Tiffany. The only unboxed thing in the room is a boom-box on the floor, and he goes and turns it on. Hard rock with a whiny singing boy comes out. Kyle stands up and feels his left nipple, looks up at me.
“I get pissed off all the time. I can’t keep a job.” He stares down at the floor.
Tiffany says, “When he goes low, you know, like from bipolar, you know? I mean when he goes low he is the lowest of the low.” She stands up and sways a little. It looks like she’s proud of Kyle’s low status in a way.
I keep on smiling. I’m thinking of Barney. What he’s doing. Are they ordering a welcome-home pizza from Papa John’s? Are they talking about redecorating a room in their little house to turn into a nursery? Kyle steps closer and I can smell his bipolar body heat like an oven that’s been on too long without anything in it. He blows a wind past me and then turns into the Karate Kid, connecting with a part of the wall that’s not been demolished yet, his combat-booted foot going all the way through until half his body is in the adjacent kitchen and the rest of him is still with us. He lays there in the rubble.
Tiffany goes over to him, high as a kite now, but not laughing.
“Are you dead?” she says.
“No,” he says. “Help me up.”
He gets up, breathing real hard. The bottom part of him is covered in drywall dust. His chest is bleeding little red stars.
“I hate my landlord,” he says to me, like that might make me understand the whole thing, and I do for a second. And it happens right then of course that feeling of love busting out of its container, like 2% milk turning into a thundercloud. For a second I look at Tiff and feel sorry for her and sorry for me and just plain sorry for the whole damn world.
“You need a place to stay?” I ask.
He dusts off his sweatpants’ legs, stands up, smiles.
“Thank you Dwayne,” Tiffany says. She comes over and I smell that burnt-poinsettia smell of pot.
“Yeah,” Kyle says. “Thank you Dwayne.”
Kyle and me and Tiffany share three weeks together.
When she gets time, Tiffany’s mom comes down to get Tiff. She’s a skinny lady with hardly any hair in a pair of jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, glasses on a chain. She makes a lot of noise thumping down the stairs. She knocks on the door and yells Tiff’s name, me and Tiff and Kyle usually in the dark living room watching DVDs we rent. It’s almost like we’re a family in a way, we’re so quiet and disenchanted, and Kyle laughing too hard at Jim Carrey. We eat whatever we want to. Neapolitan ice cream and circus peanuts and beef jerky and Chinese food from a can, etc. At work I whip up decadent ideas in my head about what we’ll be eating and watching every night. It’s sick and yet it’s also like hope.
And so tonight, three weeks in, there’s the thunder of Tiff’s mom stomping down the stairs, and Tiff’s mom pounds on the door. We’re in the middle of The Sixth Sense, some very scary stuff.
“Tiffany,” her mom yells. “You are coming home.”
Tiffany yells back, “Mom! We’re watching a movie!”
She pounds more. This time it’s like she’s had it. I am about to get up to face the music, when Kyle pushes me back down, stands up, stops by the DVD player and puts it on pause, then half-stumbles to the door. He is in his underwear and nothing else. He opens the door.
“Why don’t you fucking stop this shit?” He’s yelling like he’s on a reality TV show, like there’s cameras everywhere and he has to put on some kind of act or get booted off.
I see him yell and I can see parts of Tiff’s mom out in the corridor—this time it’s cutoffs and her uniform top from Target. I’m thinking I should disappear off the face of the earth. Her face is pale and tired and irate. She’s not ready for a fight. She does not even know if it’s worth it saving her daughter you can tell, but then again that’s all she’s been doing lately so it’s become sort of second-nature.
“Get some clothes on right now,” she says.
She tries to come into the apartment. Kyle won’t let her though. I look over at Tiff and she looks halfway between wanting to protect her mother and wanting to go back to the movie.
Tiffany looks at me and slumps her shoulders. “This is weird,” she whispers. “I love them both. It’s like a tug of war for my heart.”
Kyle keeps blocking the door like a goalie.
“Let me in. She’s my daughter goddammit,” Tiff’s mom grunts and growls almost. She goes from one side of the doorway to the other, but he’s fast and he keeps her out. Finally she gets down on all fours and crawls through, knocking him back with her head. She’s in and runs toward us. It’s dark except for the TV, so I turn on the lamp. Tiff’s mom is breathing real hard, standing beside the La-Z-Boy.
“I can’t believe this,” she says.
Kyle comes over to her and grabs her and slams into the chair.
“I am so sick of you,” he says.
“You’re crazy!” she screams.
He hovers over her like he has trapped her with his secret powers and she will never be free. I slowly get up.
“Hey you guys come on,” I say.
Kyle does not have his colored contacts in. His eyes are very brown, so brown as to be black and in his white Old Navy underwear he resembles a refugee from a nighttime tornado. He won’t take his eyes off Tiff’s mom. He has her targeted.
Tiff is standing up now.
“We just wanted to finish the movie Mom!” she screams.
Tiff is not in her underwear, but she might as well be—a halter-top-thing, skin-tight jeans. I’m in my sweats. I must look sixty years old by now, all the bad food and no-sleep for the past three weeks, that feeling of being held captive by Kyle because he never leaves the house even though he keeps telling me his brother is coming back to get him and they are going to pick up Tiffany at school and escape to Arizona.
Tiff’s mom is looking at me.
“You ought to be ashamed,” she says.
Kyle comes to my defense, “He’s a kind and gentle person.” He says that like it’s so true it’s downright embarrassing. Hell I love him but I can’t love him too.
I’ve fallen in love with the both of them in a way. It’s like they have come into my head and nested there, replacing normal life with their junk food comfort and pot-head slumber and always asking me to buy them beer and I do and we drink it and get drunk and they go into my bedroom and have their sex and I half-sleep out here and wake up and quietly get ready for work the next day, Tiff having slipped off upstairs after they did it and Kyle snoring like a cowboy with sleep apnea.
“Kind and gentle my ass,” Tiff’s mom says.
Kyle’s nostrils flare. “I will hit you, okay? I will fucking hit you you pick on Dwayne!”
Tiff’s mom looks away. “I just want my daughter.”
Tiff runs over to her mom, bawling now.
“I’m sorry Mom! He’s bipolar.”
Kyle starts crying too then. He goes over to the wall, and he makes a fist and he punches a hole right next to the TV. This is the first time he’s done that in here. The wall gives in like a piece of nothing.
“Time out,” I say. I go over to Tiff and her mom, and I say, “Tiff you go home with your mom. It’s time to take a break.”
Tiffany nods and gets up. Her mom stands up, looking all hateful at me. “I ought to call Children’s Services and the goddamn cops.”
She knows what I am, but I’m not that. I don’t love them like that. The love I do have for them is lazy and good-for-nothing, even possibly illegal. But it is not that.
“I’m not a pervert,” I tell her.
She and Tiffany just walk out. Kyle is on the floor, not crying, just staring into space.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I ask him.
“I took my meds, swear to God,” he says, still staring into space.
“I know you did. I’m the one that went and got them for you.”
I walk over to the couch and lay down. Eventually he gets up and comes over to me.
“That stuff about my brother?” he says in the dark.
“Yes.” I close my eyes.
“He never calls me. I made that thing up about Arizona. I’d like to go though. Maybe me and you and Tiff?”
Even with my eyes closed I can feel his smile. It’s got the sticky warmth of not being able to live right. He wants me to take that smile in like a pervert would, use it to make myself happier than I ever should be.
When he bends down and kisses me, I just let my lips fold into my mouth, and then I open my eyes.
“Go on to bed,” I say.
He stands there for a second or two, swaying.
“Whatever you say,” he whispers.
Monique comes in at the end of my shift that next day. She gives me the evil eye.
“You don’t look so good,” she says. She’s got the biggest ass in the tri-state area, wearing baggy sweatpants and a big smock to cover.
It’s close to 3:30 PM. While I am at work I try to do my job very well thank you. But my clothes are not clean. I haven’t gone to the laundromat in these three past weeks. Basically I rinse out stuff in the kitchen sink and then hang it out on the balcony to dry.
My shift is almost over, and there’s the smell of dirty bleach coming up from the floor I just sloppily mopped, the fake-butter in the popcorn machine, the waxy vapor of candy bars washed in sunlight.
“I feel okay,” I lie.
“Are you sick?” she says, smiling.
“No.”
“Well you look sick.” She stops smiling and she goes over to the mop bucket where I left it in front of the milk coolers.
“Is this the water you used to mop with?” she asks, pissy and judgmental.
“Yeah.”
“It looks like sewage water.” She laughs really loud.
Fuck you, I want to say. Fuck this whole fucking world.
He wasn’t who he is now, Barney, back when we went to Key West. We went there together a month into the relationship. I paid for everything. I paid for the plane tickets and I paid for the Super 8 Motel and I paid for the convertible we rode around in that one night, top down, humid as all get out. Barney and me drove next to the Gulf of Mexico, a beautiful storm riding in the orange sky like a jellyfish coming in for a smooch. It was so damn hot. We were drunk from going to some fancy place (all of this on my Visa remember). Shrimp and baked potatoes and white wine.
The wind whipped back Barney’s straight dark hair. He had a tan from earlier that day at the beach. He looked like what I wanted him to look like.
“Damn,” he’d said in the motel room right before we went out to eat that night, right after I sucked him off. “That was good. That was really good.”
I knew he loved me. I was electric inside, all my fuses exploding in secret. I tried to make it seem like nothing. I did not want to scare him too much.
So I stop by Barney’s house after work. He is out getting his mail. I sit in my car watching, half-camouflaged by the other cars and the sun light splashing through tree-limbs. But I get out. He’s opening some letter and smiling. He looks up. Their little house is cute in a way, painted yellow, in a so-so neighborhood.
“Hey,” I say.
His eyes go cold, and I go in closer. I must be smiling. Yes I took a few “magnums.” That’s what Kyle calls his speed pills. I took a few around one o’clock because I was about to go into a coma, and this is what love can do to you, I think right now, walking up to Barney, walking very slowly and my mouth hurts from how much I love him and now that he is gone it doesn’t hurt as much as burn all the time and yet I know how he can just leave without one thought about me and pick up where he left off.
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Dwayne. Don’t go Glenn Close on my ass.” He laughs, but he’s nervous you can tell. “You look a little tired,” he says.
“I’m very tired,” I say, and I laugh too, but then I get choked up and I stop.
“Come on,” Barney says. “Leave us alone.”
I stand there on the sidewalk, and when he turns to go into the house I still don’t move. He stops and looks back at me. He gets a little pissed.
“Go home,” he says. “Go on.”
“I can’t,” I say.
This is embarrassing to report to you, I know, me standing there in the sunshine on the sidewalk outside his yellow cottage and him in some uniform-type outfit, maybe UPS, I don’t know. I can’t move. There’s a kind of hypnosis that you can do to yourself when you’re so miserable you can barely stand it. It pushes you into the center of the freeze-ray, stubbornness sets in. You can do anything if you come to the understanding that you’ll never get your way.
“It’s over. Okay?” he is whispering, and he pulls my arm toward my car but I won’t move. There is just no goddamn way.
I shake him off. I walk backwards.
“Go on,” he says. “Get the hell out of here before someone sees you freak.”
Barney kind of laughs then, not a real laugh, a cover-up. He looks both hurt and pissed, like he just can’t understand this behavior of mine and it’s that look that only blows my heart up into the size of that ocean storm, that look that he doesn’t care but has let me love him, that look.
“Have some fucking self respect,” he says. Then he looks down the street both ways. “I mean come on.”
When I get home the door is wide open. And inside furniture has been turned over, the walls are busted out all over the place, walls like Swiss cheese.
I get panicky and call out Kyle’s name. There’s no response. For a second, I think I might pass out. There’s the familiar stomping down the stairs. When I turn around Tiff’s mom is standing in the doorway. She looks like she wishes she had a gun.
“He did it,” she says.
Right then I can’t talk.
“He beat the living shit out of my daughter,” she says. “I just took her to the hospital, buddy. Thank God I came home for lunch. She was beat to a pulp over some stupid movie they watched. She is in intensive care. I come back to get her some things.”
I still can’t talk. She shakes the bag of her daughter’s things in my face.
“He’s gone. That little fucker took off. I called the police. They know about you too buddy. What you were doing in there. It made me sick. Well he beat her good. I don’t have anything against gays I don’t, but I can’t take a child molester. I cannot. I shouldn’t have let it go on.”
She keeps shaking that bag. It’s clear plastic and inside it are a peach nightgown and some shampoo and socks and panties.
“I love Tiffany,” I say.
“I am going to puke,” she says, and glares at me like she would be the one at the front of the mob, the one who would start taking me apart limb by limb.
When Kyle comes back, he’s all apologetic. He’s coked up too I think. It’s around 8:30, and the police haven’t come yet. He has on his combat boots and sweat-pants and a suede jacket with fringes he told me his brother had got him. He stands in front of me in the kitchen.
“Write me a check,” he says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Please,” he says.
“No.”
“Please God just write me a check!”
I shake my head no. I look him in the face.
“Let’s go do laundry,” I say.
His contacts are in. They glitter like gold fish. He looks like he doesn’t understand.
“I don’t have anything to wear to work tomorrow,” I say.
“Everything I got smells,” he says.
We go around the apartment, picking up dirty clothes. We get like seven big black garbage bags full of clothes. It’s raining. The furniture is still overturned, the walls still botched. I don’t want to notice anything then, and somehow Kyle is obedient, caught up in the need for clean clothes, like the boy he’s supposed to be, vain and self-conscious. He carries four bags out to my car, and I carry the rest. I lock my door, and then we go by the Kroger’s for some Tide and dryer sheets. We turn the radio on to his station. The rain is almost pretty on the windshield.
The Laundromat is just down the street. We run the clothes into the little place, in a strip-mall next to a bar and a Radio Shack. There’s only one other person here tonight, and she’s reading a Harry Potter book in front of the dryers. There’s a hum and the smell of mildew and clean drying clothes. The chairs are orange and green plastic.
I give Kyle a five dollar bill and he gets change, standing in front of the machine like it’s a slot machine. There’s happiness on his face, and his eyes shielded with gold-drops. Maybe it’s the lighting, but he doesn’t look so ghoulish now. Like he has snapped out of something.
This needed to be done.
I sort and separate and Kyle puts quarters in. Pours detergent. We sit down after everything is loaded—five machines playing in unison like a country band. The woman with her book gets up and goes outside to smoke. The rain has stopped. The concrete and cars are glittery with it.
I turn toward Kyle, exhausted and for a second almost happy with this one accomplishment, all the machines going, the smell of detergent and hot water.
“Why did you hit her honey?” I ask him.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why?”
“I didn’t hit anybody, Dwayne.” His eyes are gold coins. He smiles. “Can I get a pop?”
I stand up and give him a dollar. He walks over to the pop machines and chooses Mountain Dew. The clock says 9:15 p.m. It’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Hell I don’t know.
_______________________
Keith Banner’s novel, The Life I Lead, came out from Knopf in 1999, and Carnegie-Mellon University Press published his short-fiction collection, The Smallest People Alive, in 2004. His stories have also appeared in Kenyon Review, Washington Square, Third Coast, and Witness, among others, and have been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories 2000 (Anchor, 2000), Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve (Three Rivers Press, 2000), and Best American Gay Fiction 3 (Back Bay Books, 1998). He started his work life at thirteen as a carhop, running burgers out on little trays to cars parked in a gravel lot. After that, he moved on to Kentucky Fried Chicken and Ponderosa Steakhouse, just to name a few. He has also been a part-time telemarketer, library-book-shelver, group-home worker, janitor, and convenience-store cashier. Currently, he lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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