Wearing Black to the White Party

by David Stukas

  “Before I met you, Michael, I never would have given cops a second glance. But now I catch myself staring at them all the time. I guess something of you has rubbed off on me—and I don’t need a cream to treat it,” I said, laughing.

  “Very funny. See, if you listen to me you start expanding your sexual horizons. You need to stop being so literal about things. That’s why the most erotic encounter you had was with barnyard animals.”

  “It wasn’t about bestiality!” I exclaimed. “I had sex in a hayloft!”

  “But that proves my point exactly. You think a hayloft is way-out sexy? C’mon! When it comes to wild sex, you have to think outside the hayloft. Get your mind going. Have sex in a church, on top of a skyscraper, underwater, or tied up to a child’s merry-go-round at a public park—use your imagination!”

  “What was that last one?!” I demanded.

  “Nothing,” Michael said. “Could we change the subject?”

  “Can we leave Michael’s ‘Little Shop of Whores’ and get back to Rex and his problems?”

  “Oh, God!” Michael whined. “We all have to sit and listen to his problems again. This is not my idea of a fun vacation!”

  For once, I had to agree with Michael.

  Once the police and firemen left, we were all sitting around the table feeling lower than Death Valley.

  No one wanted to speak or cared to. But Colorado, never one to pass up the chance to twist the knife after it was already squarely between two ribs, started by lobbing a live grenade on the table, then lit a cigarette.

  “Well, I guess that someone has crashed the party and that someone’s name is Death.”

  Big strong, strapping Rex burst into loud sobs again. “I don’t want to die!” Rex wailed, turning the waterworks into a flood of biblical proportions.

  None of us knew quite what to do, so we looked down at our still-empty plates and wondered if Death had indeed taken his place at the lunch table, and if so, then he could’ve had the decency to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on the way.

  Just then, Death did indeed crash the party, when two meaty hands the size—and tanned color—of two hams landed on either side of Rex’s neck and looked like they were going for his neck.

  “DEATH!” Rex yelled so loudly and suddenly that Michael dropped his wineglass.

  Rex turned around to find that Death didn’t look like, well death, and that Death was actually quite healthy. In fact, Death seemed to lift weights on a daily basis.

  “Oh, Leo, thank God it’s you!” Rex said, began blubbering, then burst into tears again.

  “What is going on here?” Leo said like a person who had no idea what had gone on at the compound for the past hour. “You all look like you just came back from a funeral.”

  More bawling. I tried to be as understanding as I could. Rex was definitely hurting, but his crying was starting to annoy me a little bit, too. Was I becoming as shallow as Michael?

  Marc took Leo aside and explained the latest events at Casa Rex—or was it Casa Wrecks? I could see Marc pointing to various people around the table and then at the grill, his arms flying up in the air very similar to the way Bud’s had done to explain the explosion. Once Leo was brought up to date, they both returned to the table with weak smiles that they hoped would pass off onto the rest of us. But as Bud had commented earlier, this was one tough audience.

  Vince popped his head out of the house and told us that he’d have an improvised lunch ready in about twenty minutes. As my stomach prepared itself for lunch, my eyes were gazing at our newest arrival, Leo. Everything Vince had said about him was true. Leo’s polo shirt could barely contain his massive chest and arms, his neck was as big around as my thighs, and the shorts he was wearing were worn along the seams where his thighs rubbed together. The things that you have to put up with to have the body of Hercules.

  But after you got past staring at his oversize body, the next thing that struck you was his hair—and gold jewelry. Leo’s hair poofed up into some kind of one-piece pompadour that results from combing fine, black hair backwards and spraying it in place with tons of shellac. The jewelry was no better—he could have been a used-car salesman in a former life.

  Figuring that Michael’s bubble had been burst, I leaned over and offered my condolences.

  “Sorry about the hair and the jewelry, Michael. It’s like putting a polyester tube top that says ‘I’m with stupid’ on Michelangelo’s David.”

  Without taking his eyes off Leo’s arms, Michael muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “You think I’m going to let a little tackiness get between me and those muscles? You gotta be crazy! I can always have him take the Sarah Coventry off.”

  “Yeah, but what about the hair-don’t?”

  “I’ll just put a hood on him.”

  “You’re joking!” I muttered back.

  “No, I always carry one. I run into a lot of guys with great bodies but with faces straight from a kennel club....”

  “... or the hair is French poodle,” I said, pointing at Leo.

  “Exactly,” Michael continued. “I put a hood on them and I can go on imagining that they’re gorgeous.”

  As with most of the stunts that Michael pulled in this world, I should not have been surprised—but I was. Maybe that was my attraction to Michael—there was something new all the time. “Your dates actually let you do this and they don’t complain?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure; in fact, some of them don’t want me to take it off of them—usually the ones who don’t want me to put it on them at first.”

  “Michael, if you don’t mind, I’m going to hitch a ride on the mother ship and get back to reality. Plus, I’ve got my sights set on Marc, so don’t get any ideas.”

  Michael’s ego seemed to give off a malevolent aura, as if I had just asked him to wear something from the Liz Claiborne collection for men. “Robert, you can rest your pretty little head. I am not the least bit interested in Marc—he reminds me too much of you.”

  Yes, dear reader, I was used to Michael insulting me to my face, but I decided to let his comment slide for two reasons. One, I was head over heels in love with Marc and didn’t care about anything Michael said, and two, as I often did, I would put Michael’s transgression on the huge tote board inside my brain, to be given the appropriate penalty when the opportunity presented itself.

  “You know,” Michael whispered in confidence to me, “this place is getting me down—and hungry. I’m going to take Rex’s car and get something to eat downtown. You know any place good to eat in this town?”

  Fate, like many things in this world, is a very tricky thing. Sometimes Fate is so against you that you just have to bend over and take it like a man. But every once in a while, she smiles down on you and tosses you a bone. This was one such moment.

  I leaned over and took one tick mark off Michael’s tote board.

  “Bathsheba. I hear the food is great!” I whispered excitedly to Michael.

  5

  That’s the Great Thing About Wearing Red—It Doesn’t Show Blood!

  Lunch was uneventful, if you don’t count the fact that Rex fought back tears most of his way through the meal, Colorado got off a few more parting shots throughout the meal, and Leo threatened to knock Colorado’s front teeth “so far back in your head, you’ll have to stick a toothbrush up your ass to brush your teeth.” Other than that, it was just your ordinary, everyday lunch.

  After lunch I called Monette, but she wasn’t there, so I left a message.

  “Monette, I’ve landed right in the middle of a mystery here, entitled Death By Barbecuing—no, make that Martha Stewart Serves Up Death. I’ll tell you the details later. Call me.”

  Leo was throwing a party at his house later that night, so in the meantime, I decided to spend the afternoon walking through downtown Palm Springs. Rex’s house wasn’t that far from all the action, so to avoid running over errant dildoes, I walked.

  The temperature was hovering around eighty-eight degrees, but the ai
r was drier than a gin martini, so it didn’t have the oppressive humidity (and the aromas) of New York summers. The town (you couldn’t really call it a city) was filling up fast with circuit boys. The desert was in bloom with brightly colored outfits stretched tightly over gym bodies, carefully tanned by countless hours spent in ultraviolet-ray cancer boxes. All this artifice was why I hadn’t wanted to come to the Red Party, and I began to wonder why I had let Michael talk me into this. But moments later, I realized that I wouldn’t have met Marc if I had stayed back in the city.

  I poked in a few shops, then stopped at a Starbucks and had iced coffee outdoors under the spray of the outdoor cooling system. I gazed at passersby, amazed that gay men and women were everywhere. I was told by Rex that Palm Springs was becoming the number one place for gays to move to. I didn’t doubt that claim one bit, allowing for some overinflation by the deluge of lesbians already here for the Dinah Shore Classic, and the gay men pouring in for the White and Red Parties. As I sipped my coffee, a drag queen who announced herself as Petal Luma stopped in front of her captive audience at Starbucks and performed You Can’t Catch a Man with a Gun to the boom box she daintily placed on the sidewalk. She sashayed back and forth on the sidewalk, lipsynching and firing cap pistols into the air at appropriate moments during her song. All in all, it was a very professional number. When Petal Luma was finished, she took off her Sunday-church-testifying-for-Jesus hat and held it out for donations. I got up from my table and threw ten dollars into the hat, prompting a sly wink and a Marilyn Monroe airblown kiss from Petal. What could I say? I loved drag queens. Plus, her version of street entertainment had one small advantage over the kind I was familiar with in New York: it was better than another goddamn mime.

  I walked around town for an hour or so more and felt that it would be nice to take a swim and a nap before the party at Leo’s house that evening. Rex had gone with Vince to supervise the Red Party setup, so I had the house to myself.

  No one was in the pool, so I had an afternoon of complete luxury all to myself. I was lying on a float, with a gimlet in a martini glass sitting at the edge of the pool, under an improvised shade to keep it frosty cold. I was staring up past the surrounding palm-tree tops and into the endless blue sky when I felt that there was something that I was supposed to do. I closed my eyes and saw a photocopier floating in the sky and wondered what it meant. Perhaps it was one of those inexplicable mental images that floated in front of your eyes and you never knew why—like seeing an Airedale or an eggplant. Perhaps it was a portentous sign from the oracle at Delphi. Perhaps it just meant that I had had one too many gimlets.

  Then it occurred to me what I was supposed to be doing. Monette had asked me to rummage through Rex’s office to see if I could find anything suspicious. There wasn’t a better time, either. No one was around, so I could lock the door to Rex’s office and pretend that it was taking me a long time to change my clothes.

  I jumped out of the pool, dried off hurriedly, and ran to Rex’s office, where I locked the door and glanced around the room, wondering aloud that if tasked with rifling an office, where did one begin to rifle?

  I sat at Rex’s desk and started pulling the top drawers open but found little more than office supplies, an odd photo or two, and one condom. The bottom drawers were locked. The shelves above Rex’s desk were filled with row upon row of photo books of Rex’s past parties, trade magazines, and supplier catalogs. Nothing suspicious there. I scanned the room again. The computer! That was where Rex probably kept his correspondences, his accounts, and, perhaps, secret information.

  I pushed the on button on his powerful-looking computer, which welcomed me in a loud voice and roared to life. I cringed, worried that someone had come back to the house and heard me start the damn thing up, but the house remained silent. After the computer booted itself up, I sat there staring at the screen, looking at a multitude of files, wondering which to open first. I looked down the long list and then found one that said Jobs. I opened that folder and found another list of folders inside, but one was clearly marked Red Party. Now we were getting somewhere. I found a list of documents that probably would’ve taken a year to comb through, so I just double-clicked on one marked Catering. The document took its good old time to open, and when it finally presented its contents to me, the worst thing that could possibly happen, happened. The doorknob jiggled violently, and someone tried to open the door.

  Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! I was about to be caught red-handed.

  “Robert?” came the voice on the other side of the door.

  “Rex?” I said, hoping that it was not, in fact, Rex.

  “I’m sorry, Robert.” Without a shadow of a doubt, it was Rex’s distinctive voice. “I didn’t know you were in there. I need to get something from my desk.”

  Think fast. Say something stupid! “Ah, I’m changing. I’ll be out in a few minutes,” I managed to squeeze out of my hyperventilating lungs.

  “That’s fine,” Rex replied. “I’ll be out in the kitchen.”

  Silence. Thank God he left. Or was he standing there with one ear to the door, wondering why his computer was on? Had he heard the guilty tone in my voice? He was a savvy businessman, so did his list of management skills include smelling bullshit from thieving employees and cheating suppliers? There was no time to shut down his computer the proper way, so I dove underneath his desk and tore at the spaghetti-mess of wires that connected his computer to the surge protector. It was the old horror-movie cliché. The hero, being chased by a killer, finds himself at a locked door with the key. In the excitement, he acts like a virgin groom on his wedding night: no matter how frantically he tries, he just can’t get his key in the hole. I got so flustered, I had to go back to the computer and retrace the power cord until I could find the plug. Four hours later—or so it seemed—I yanked the plug from the surge protector. I waited a few seconds and was about to plug the computer back in when I noticed a folder that had fallen behind Rex’s desk and probably been forgotten long ago. I pulled it out and stared at it. It was marked A.D.—after death. This was important. Inside was just one piece of paper. It was a drawing of a building—an extraordinary building in the shape of a pyramid. Below the exotic building were just two words: Butia A.D.

  I had no idea what the drawing was for, but it seemed significant to me by the way it practically vibrated in my hand. Maybe it was a prop for a party Rex had handled or was proposing, but there was no time to figure that out. I plugged the computer back in and hustled it over to Rex’s copier and copied the drawing, intending to put the drawing back in its graveyard of forgotten documents. I did do one smart thing: I turned on the clock radio and set it to a station where festive music played.

  The doorknob jangled again. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

  “You’re still in there, Robert?”

  No, asshole, I thought. I let all of the air out of me like a cartoon character and slipped under the doorway, leaving the door locked with no one inside. What I said was something different altogether. “Sorry it’s taking me so long. Just a second.” I grabbed the photocopy of the drawing, threw the original behind the desk, and slipped on a pair of underwear. I then walked leisurely to the door so that I wouldn’t be out of breath when I opened it, not wanting it to look like I had been helping Mr. Happy throw up via my right hand and a porno tape from Rex’s collection.

  Rex smiled when he entered the room, carrying a very large briefcase. He walked over to his desk, which made me shiver at the thought that I had left some telltale clue of my clumsy investigation.

  Nothing yet. So far, so good.

  Then, however, my alibi started coming apart faster than the Enron Corporation. The tune that the clock radio had been humming stopped, and an obnoxious announcer started screaming like a baritone banshee, “Sabado, sabado, sabado . . .”

  I was too scared to concentrate on what was being said, but I did manage to catch the words “desfile” and “Santo Louis.”

 
Rex looked at me strangely. I wondered why.

  “You understand Spanish?” he probed.

  “Oh, yes,” I said mistakenly. “I just wanted get a taste of the culture,” I said, beaming with international enthusiasm.

  “I speak a little bit, too. Let me hear you translate,” Rex asked, with eyes that said, “you liar.”

  “Well, I’m a little rusty. He seems to be talking about El Salvador and all the problems they’re having there. Some woman has been having these feelings, you know, like seeing a vision of Saint Louis—no, the woman who saw the vision is from Saint Louis.”

  Rex waited until I had dug my grave deeper, jumped in, and pulled the dirt in on top of me. “I guess you understand the Castilian Spanish, because the announcer said that there’s a parade this Saturday at Saint Louis Church.”

  I turned the radio off, explaining that I’d “had enough music right now.”

  Cher could not have felt more exposed. Rex looked at me without saying a word, expecting me to break down in a torrent of confessions. But none came, just a silence that was so profound, I could hear the blood pounding through the veins in my head—which, coincidentally, were about to explode. He continued to look straight into my eyes, then turned his head toward a sound that was coming from behind him. It was the fan on the copier, still whirring from one goddamn photocopy. I hadn’t noticed it before, when the radio was on.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck! Think fast again—how did spies do it?

  “Oh, you’re probably wondering why I was using your copier—I hope you don’t mind!” I said with a politeness that would have charmed the pants off a celibate eunuch. “I was making a photocopy of my ass, you see. My friend Monette and I play these practical jokes on each other—just ask Michael—and I was going to sit on the glass, copy my ass—hey, that rhymes—and fax it to Monette, who is staying here in Palm Springs. She would really get a kick out of it.”

  I finished my story, but Rex didn’t seem like he was buying it. Just when I thought he was about to order the Gestapo to come in and arrest me, Vince stuck his head in the door and announced that dinner was ready.