by Pat Henshaw
“Don’t really care unless it turns into a problem for me,” I assured him. “I don’t need any more problems from power.”
He thought about what I said for a minute.
“Yeah, okay, I get it. He won’t be a problem.”
I remembered the guy’s hand on Joel’s shoulder as they walked in and the rapt way he was talking to Joel. I wasn’t convinced there wasn’t or at least wouldn’t be a problem. Who’d broken off with whom? How much shouting had there been?
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Of course, I’ll want something in return.”
Now his focus was totally on me.
“Yeah? What?”
“A wall,” I answered.
“A wall?”
“Somewhere public. A big wall,” I repeated.
“A big wall somewhere public. I don’t get it.”
“My life’s dream is to be a muralist. A muralist needs a wall. Simple tit for tat,” I explained.
He shook his head.
“The department doesn’t have walls,” he started to explain.
“Got it. But Greenbriar does have a wall. Hundreds of them all over the city. Talk it over with him since he probably knows why you’re here talking to me. See what he says.” I looked at my sandwich, at the brown banana, at the soggy bread. So much for my break.
“I gotta get back to work,” I told him. “Let’s talk tomorrow, maybe go for coffee or something. What do you think?”
“I think you’re being nicer than I expected.” He stood and headed for the door. “I’ll text you in the morning.”
“I’m sure you have my number,” I nodded.
His somber smile and nod said it all.
As he went to open the door, I waylaid him.
“One other thing.”
He stopped and looked back at me. “Yeah?”
“What’s your real name? It’s not Joel is it? Are you really gay? Or is it just your cover?”
He shook his head and gave a little laugh.
“Of all the things to ask.” He sighed. “No, it’s Randy Yarrow. You can call the department and check. And, yeah, I’m really gay. One other thing. You’re really hot.”
Then he left.
Right. I was hot? News to me. And was he randy Joel? I certainly hoped so.
* * * *
I accepted the offer. I told myself it was because of the free room and board the department gave me and the possibility of my own wall, not the hot body I’d be living with. We all have to tell ourselves little lies in order to get through the day, and that was my lie at the moment.
* * * *
The next class we walked in together talking about the assigned reading. Well, arguing really. We’d read Murray Ross’ “Football Red, Baseball Green.” Ross compares football to ancient gladiator battles and baseball to epic quests to get home. Far as I was concerned, it was a bunch a bull.
Joel thought it was poetic and went on and on about how both represented America and our always striving for something, to get ahead and to make a home for ourselves. We were deep into our conversation, okay, argument when the student who’d stopped me on Wednesday sidled up to us as we squeezed into side by side desks and continued arguing.
“I agree with Joel,” the guy said. He turned to Joel and whispered loudly, “I got a little surprise for you, baby.”
I may have smirked, but I held back from rolling my eyes.
Joel, however, looked interested.
“Yeah?” Then he turned to me. “Tommy, Eric. Eric, Tommy.”
“My main man asked me to bring you round,” Tommy said, running a finger down Joel’s arm and ignoring me.
“I don’t know.” Joel turned to me with a questioning look.
“No, he’s definitely not invited.” Tommy slapped the arm he’d just been petting.
“What? Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you like me?”
I grinned at him, but he turned around, flouncing off back to his desk. I guess I wasn’t his type.
The instructor walked in and plopped down a bunch of books and papers. Class had started and Tommy’s invite to my pseudo-boyfriend hung dead in the air. I figured Joel’d follow up on it after class. Really, I didn’t care. He had a job to do, just like I did.
* * * *
Joel and I were given one of the downtown lofts right off the Light Rail near the Central Library. It was great. Tall floor to ceiling windows along the wall facing the street with three other brick walls encasing a huge space.
At one end there was a sleeping platform with a couple of closets tucked into the corner.
An open stairway led to the platform.
A kitchen was tucked under the sleeping platform with the rest of the loft left empty.
I figured with a few really good mats and some equipment, we could have our own private gym. Fortunately, Joel agreed, and we scrounged second hand sports stores to find a weight set and other essentials. We even made a mini climbing wall on the shorter brick face with some screw-in hand holds.
It was a perfect setup for study breaks and for those nights I came home from work at the bar disgusted with people when John Q. Public was not only queer but quarrelsome, too.
We’d gotten the attraction part of our arrangement settled pretty quickly. We’d kissed, fucked, and then decided we’d hit a crossroads.
Either we could fixate on sex and to hell with the world, or we could become friends with benefits. If we’d been in our late teens or early twenties, the first would have been our choice.
But I was nearly thirty while he was thirty-two. We’d been working too hard for too long to get where we wanted to be in life, and we both had goals that were important to us, so we chose door number two.
My bonus besides a great place and great pseudo-boyfriend was he gave me my wall.
“I got some walls for you,” Joel announced one night after dinner.
He said it like it was nothing, but my heart started beating like I was a teenager and going into my first bar.
“Oh, yeah?”
“An old pumping station in the middle of Greenbriar Park.”
“Sweet.”
I knew the park, named for the soccer team owner’s grandfather’s grandfather or whoever had settled the area back in the day. It was a nice little patch of grass and trees with a jogging path and a small play area for kids along the side of the river.
The old pumping station building, a one-story brick cube at one end of the park, used to house equipment for bringing river water to the city. It’d been closed for as long as I could remember, but it still looked solid and the ground around it kept up. It was perfect for murals.
“Thanks,” I added casually as if I didn’t want to run to my desk, clear off all the damn schoolwork, and start designing my masterpiece.
“No problem. You can have all the sides and Bill Greenbriar’ll pay for the paint and materials,” he answered just as casually.
Overcome, I went to the weight bench and started doing sit-ups as I pictured the site.
The next morning I walked over there and took pictures of all four sides of the building with my phone, downloaded them onto a school library computer, and printed them out, one side each on letter-sized paper.
Then I photocopied the pictures a couple of times. I repeated the process around noon, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Now I knew what my canvas looked like at this time of year.
I’d have preferred to see what the changing seasons would do to it, but knew if I didn’t come up with a design and get it down quickly, my chance at legitimate public art would be gone.
Diego Rivera and Robert Wyland, here I come, I thought as I taped the photocopies to the smallest loft wall. The longest, biggest wall was my exercise space, so I couldn’t clutter it up.
Joel came in taking off his tie and looking like hell. He stopped and stared at the photos, then grinned.
Above the photos I’d written a sign on a piece of scrap paper saying “All MINE!” with a big arro
w pointing to the side of the building. I’d meant to take the embarrassing sign down before he came home.
“So what are you going to put on your walls?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“No idea. It’ll come to me.” I gestured toward the rumpled tie in his fist. “Bad day?”
“Yeah. Fist of steel to the chest. C’mere and give me a hug. I need to hold somebody.”
If anybody wanted to know what kind of friendship with benefits we’d established, me holding him in the middle of our loft and him hugging me as if the ship were going down around us would pretty much answer the question.
* * * *
The next day after helping Joel relax through the night, I started sketching my murals. So far in the loft, I’d made footprints walking over one of the walls, a footprint rainbow arching on the longer side like a multi-colored bridge.
It looked okay, but didn’t have the pizzazz I was going for. Joel loved it and made me switch sides of the table when we ate so he could look at it.
“I mean, it’s clever without being too much,” he said over toast one morning.
“Huh?” I wasn’t awake, not being a morning person.
“The rainbow.” He pointed with the toast, the jam sliding down onto his arm. He licked his wrist, and I pushed his head away. I licked his wrist clean.
His eyes lit up as I licked some more, his eyes slowly closed, his head went back, and his wrist came closer.
“Ah, baby.” He sighed when I was done. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Back at ya,” I answered with my own sigh.
I really, really didn’t want to go to class today.
“Wanna stay home and play sick?” I asked.
With both elbows on the table, the toast on his plate, and his head in his hands, he studied me.
“God, you’re tempting.” Another sigh. “If only.”
We sat staring at each other like a couple of loons, then he gave the last sigh.
“We should be wrapping up the case today. I can’t wait to get out of it. The only thing, and I mean the only thing, making City College tolerable is you.”
“What happens when the case is closed?” A shiver of doom had slithered up my spine and settled near my heart. It was hard to breathe.
He stared at me for a couple more seconds, but I couldn’t read his face. Five minutes ago I’d thought we were in love. Now I was looking at a cop. Shit. I really was doomed.
“Let’s talk about it when this is all over,” he said softly.
What could I do? I nodded.
* * * *
Class was a bitch with him so close and Tommy so excited, talking a mile a minute about stuff I had no context to understand.
Tommy smirked and acted out the entire time before class started, then smirked again as he bore Joel off after the hour ended.
I’d gotten a “See me” at the top of my essay. The instructor asked me to type my essays and use spellcheck religiously from now on.
When I asked what my grade was on the first essay, she said I’d find out when she could read it.
I carried the essay to work with me and keyed it into Charlie’s computer on my break. I sent it to the instructor’s dropbox like she’d requested. I guess I’d missed her instructions before.
Most of all I was feeling like a failure. Maybe I was just wasting my money at City and should be working on the mural fulltime, especially if this whole idyll was about to end.
Charlie bitched at me for only having half a mind as I worked. When I apologized, he backed off.
“You never apologize, Eric. What’s up?” he asked. “Is that bum Joel not treating you right?”
Now I felt even worse since I couldn’t talk about why Joel and I were really together and how it was about to come to an end.
Whether he was Joel or Randy, I’d fallen for him. I knew it was stupid. But no one had ever called me an overly bright guy.
* * * *
The day finally over, I trudged up the stairs, trying not to dwell on a worse case scenario for our talk. In my heart of hearts, I knew whatever he had to say wasn’t going to be good news.
I wanted to believe in a happy ending. Maybe he’d figured out a way we could be together after this was all over. I couldn’t see why not. It wasn’t like I’d be holding him back professionally or anything. Of course, I wasn’t an asset like Greenbriar was either.
I’d let myself in and thrown my keys on the table by the door before it registered that everything wasn’t all right.
Joel was duct taped to a chair in the middle of the room. Standing in front of him was a guy holding a gun.
“What the fuck?” The gloved man turned the gun on me.
Rather than echo him, I slowly raised my hands. What the fuck?
As he gestured for me to walk toward him, I started to take off my backpack.
“I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” he said. “I’ll shoot.”
Again, what the fuck?
“Just taking off my backpack.”
“Okay, nice and easy. Just drop it right there.”
I nodded. He was walking toward me, pointing to the wall.
I suppressed my grin. All right. I’d been practicing here and was ready for a scene just like this. If I was going to die, I was prepared to go out in style.
“Okay, up against the wall. Put your hands behind your back.”
I took a little curved step and then headed for the wall. One foot up and flipped. I didn’t stick the landing, but ended up rolling into the gunman. He was standing with his mouth hanging open, the gun hanging loosely in his hand.
I kicked the gun away and zapped him with one sneaker in his abdomen and the other in his junk, rolling away from him when we both went down.
I heard something of his crack, his skull, maybe, on the concrete floor.
I stood, backed up, and watched him a moment. He was out, but not gone.
Joel was making little noises around the tape over his mouth.
“What?” I asked as the gunman moved like he was about to get up.
I wasn’t sure what to do at that point, so I picked up the gun and shot out one of our tall, floor-to-ceiling windows. Probably a stupid thing to do, but I figured our neighbors would call the cops. Besides, I was the one holding the gun now. The gunman looked dazed and confused on the floor.
He was struggling to stand, so I aimed for his foot and fired. Okay, a gunman I’m not, but I did manage to wing the side of his knee. He went down heavy, yelling and groaning.
I looked at Joel, who was all but levitating from the chair he was taped to.
“What?” I asked again.
The gunman was bleeding all over the floor. I could faintly hear sirens in the distance, and I could tell by his panicked look he could, too.
I went into the kitchen, putting the gun in the refrigerator, thinking he’d have to do some extra work to get to it if he managed to quit bleeding and stand up before the cops arrived. I grabbed the kitchen scissors, ran over to Joel, and cut his arms and legs free.
In a real act of bravery, he ripped the tape from his mouth.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
He sounded like he was talking through a tin can. My ears were ringing so loud he was all but drowned out.
“What?” I asked as I handed him the scissors.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Huh?”
He gestured to the wall and his hand rolled over.
“Yeah, well, not the best wall flip I’ve ever done. But it did surprise him.” All I could hear were the ringing in my ears and the gunman’s curses. “Jeez, he’s really bleeding.”
Joel took over, telling me to sit on the couch and stay out of the way. As the night turned to dawn, the gunman hauled away, and the statements taken, my adrenalin faded as fast as I did.
“Then Eric walks in and does this ninja thing on the wall,” I heard him say for the hundredth time.
&
nbsp; “Parkour, Joel. I did a parkour wall flip. No big deal,” I muttered as I plumped one of the couch pillows and lay down. “I’ve been practicing them since we moved in here. This is a great place for wall flips.”
I was nearly asleep when I felt his hand on my head.
“You’re either the bravest motherfucker I know or the luckiest one,” he said as I slipped into a doze then a rock hard sleep.
* * * *
Joel wasn’t there when I woke, but there was a note on the table.
Eric, we’ve got to talk. You working tonight? See you later. Randy Okay, the Randy part took me a minute, but I got it. He was now another guy, not the guy I knew and was falling for. Fair enough.
I walked by the sketches of my walls, looking at the different pictures I’d drawn. None of them caught or held me. I had one more set of photos and one more idea.
School was a slow motion horror film with only a single shining moment. I got an A- on my first essay with the notation, “I knew you could do it.” Ego boost with sleep deprivation equals out of body experience.
Studying didn’t happen. I slept through it in the library. Fortunately, nobody threw me out, so I must not have been snoring.
Groggy, I headed to work, where Charlie’s initial comment was “You look like shit, boy.”
Shit happens, I almost answered, but why bother?
At break time, Charlie asked, “Someone steal your dog? Kill your cat? What’s going on?”
“Joel said we need to talk.”
Charlie’s face closed up with maybe a little anger peeping through.
“I’m sorry, kid.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“Yeah, thanks. Me, too.” I turned to draw a beer for a regular. Zombie work doesn’t make for a fast night, but it helps get you through the hours.
Charlie finally let me go early.
“Get some sleep, and don’t let him kick you in the balls,” was his advice. “See you tomorrow.”
* * * *
Joel was sitting on the couch flipping through the Ikea catalogue we’d gotten in the mail the week before. We’d been talking about getting furniture. Now he looked like he was just flipping pages to have something to do.
“Okay, I’m here.” I dropped my keys on the table next to the door just like the night before. The blood stains were still there, and I was really hoping my heartbreak wasn’t going to add more blood to the floor.