Alex’s hometown had been just a few miles up the coastal road, but he didn’t make any remark about it. Instead, he waited until they were heading north on the 5 to say, “Feel like telling me how you learned to change license plates so fast?”
“One of my sister’s ex-boyfriends. Only good thing I ever got out of him.”
“Jerk?”
Not just a jerk. John thought. A supposedly recovered drunk who had been full of spiritual wisdom until he fell off the 12-step wagon and broke Patsy’s nose right in the middle of the living room. John said a silent prayer that that guy had, in a blackout, driven into a telephone pole. But he said none of these things to Alex.
Alex seemed to sense the omission because he shifted slightly in his seat and held the shit handle above the window as if the truck had suddenly accelerated to ninety miles an hour. They passed a series of eucalyptus-framed exit signs for Cathedral Beach, but Alex watched them fly by without any discernible reaction.
“That’s your hometown, right?”
“Notice I didn’t go there for assistance with this predicament I’m in.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
John waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Another long silence and then Alex said, “My grandmother’s sick,” and John heard the wet sound of tears in his voice. “Sorry. It just feels like I’m not going to see her again.”
You might not, John thought. If you stay stupid and don’t go to the authorities. But he kept his mouth shut, fought images of he and Alex living together in a hut in the mountains, all because John had fucked up and Mike had decided to save his life.
How far was he willing to go to repay this debt? Where was the line between honor and guilt? They were questions better answered by a man who was going to get a lot more sleep that night than John could reasonably hope for.
He was pulled from these thoughts when Alex started to speak with a sudden authority, as if the guy were delivering a lecture he had rehearsed for years, and drew John’s attention from the road. He didn’t check to make sure John was listening, didn’t seem remotely interested in the posture or body language John was displaying.
When he realized Alex was telling him the story of the night he met Mike for the first time, John knew he was being tested and resolved to listen to the entire thing in respectful silence.
7
Alex said he could tell the guy was a Marine the minute he sat down at the bar. These days every gay porn star went out in public sporting a set of dog tags, and given that San Diego was the unofficial gay porn capital of America, it was sometimes hard to spot the real servicemen. Starched collared shirts, khaki pants, and rigid poses they managed to hold for the ten minutes it took them to get phenomenally drunk—these were the markers of San Diego’s true gay fighting men.
The customer in question wore freshly ironed blue jeans. His broad shoulders stretched a blue and black plaid shirt. The bill of his baseball cap shaded an angular face, with thick black eyebrows and a Roman nose. When he ordered a bourbon and Coke, his eyes roamed Alex’s body in a cold and detached manner that suggested he was looking for weak spots.
On break, Alex pointed the guy out to Philip, warned him that he might be trouble. A few months before, two guys picked up a raver kid who worked at one of the espresso shops down the street, lured him into an alley, and beat him within an inch of his life. The kid had spent two days in a medically induced coma, and his jaw was still wired shut. People thought these things didn’t happen anymore, not in the days of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the Human Rights Campaign and gay marriage in Massachusetts. But they did happen. Mostly to young guys who couldn’t afford good lawyers and who were too ashamed to come forward because they had tried X that night or snorted a bump of something without asking what it was. This was something Alex had never learned in Cathedral Beach, or at Stanford, for that matter, where all things gay were couched in terms such as heteronormativity and third gender and discussed in hushed tones in empty dorm lounges by kids with multiple face piercings and trust funds.
Philip laughed at Alex when he tried to paint the guy in the baseball cap as some kind of threat. “He comes around all the time,” Philip explained. “If he gets shit-faced enough, he might go home with some little twink. Right now it looks like that twink might be you.” This last remark was said with just enough of a sharp edge.
Years earlier, in the months before Alex went off to begin his soon-aborted college career, when he was still living in his parents’ oceanfront mansion and using his fake ID to get into bars such as The Catch Trap, he and Philip had a one-night stand. Like so many gay boys just out of the closet who end up in bed together, they had developed a friendship defined by equal parts frustrated desire and sibling rivalry. It was Philip who had come to the rescue when Alex’s mother had discovered he was gay and strong-armed his weak-kneed father into cutting him off financially. It was Philip who had come to the rescue when Alex suddenly found himself without the means to continue at Stanford and nothing to live on, considering he had never worked a day in his life.
Just a few days after realizing he had no choice but to withdraw from Stanford—with a 3.8 GPA and the adoration of most of his professors—Alex moved into Philip’s apartment in University Heights and got a job tending bar at The Catch Trap, where the only hard-and-fast rule for bartenders was that they hit the gym at least six days a week, with the added suggestion that an appearance in one of the many porn films that were shot in the area would lead to a substantial increase in customer interest. Alex took the first suggestion and ignored the latter, and now he had enough definition to tend bar shirtless, like the rest of his tip-hungry co-workers.
Philip said, “Just because you’re too chicken to hit on him doesn’t mean he’s a gay basher.” Wounded by this hard pellet of truth, Alex returned to his bar, which was buried at the back of the club, past the crowded courtyard.
Alex asked the guy if he wanted another drink, and the guy said, “You and your co-worker were talking about me.” Alex waited for an indication that this was a question and not a statement of fact. None came, and Alex felt himself flush.
“How could you tell?”
“You have been staring at me since I sat down, and when you went to speak to him, he looked in my direction several times.” His answer sounded robotic, without the slightest hint of sarcasm or amusement. He had no discernible accent, which meant he was from west of the Rockies, and his aversion to using contractions suggested he was either a Marine or playing the part of one quite well.
“We have a bet going about you,” Alex lied.
The guy nodded and stared right into his eyes without any change of expression.
“Ten bucks says you’re a Marine.”
The guy licked his upper lip lightly with the tip of his tongue, the only indication that this statement had rattled him somewhat.
“What’s your money on?” the guy asked.
“Marine.”
The guy nodded impassively, finished off his drink, and pushed the empty rock glass toward Alex. Alex poured him another one. “You have good posture,” the guy said. “Your shoulders…you hold them well. Back. Not hunched over.” The guy demonstrated, slumping forward, but still staring right into Alex’s eyes with a blank expression.
Alex was tempted to tell the guy his heart had just melted into a pile of cheese, but he just smiled. As soon as he put a fresh cocktail in front of him, the Marine said, “There has never been an era except for ours that has condoned exclusive male homosexuality. Bisexuality, sure. Some of our greatest armies, some of our greatest soldiers had male companions—lovers. But they always maintained sexual relationships with women. It was always…in balance.”
Alex fought the urge to tell the Marine that if it was bisexuals he was looking for, he should try a high school drama club and not The Catch Trap. Sure, his lecture had been offensive, but something had entered his voice as he had delivered it: pain. The Marine’s tone said to Alex, “I don’t want to b
e here but I don’t know where else to go.” It was a pain Alex could identify with, even though everything else about the guy made Alex feel inadequate and desperate with desire. Alex wanted to be at Stanford, cashing in on all the golden promises that had been made to the children of Cathedral Beach, promises the world had broken because he was a fag. He wanted to be someplace where he didn’t have to pump up his chest to make up for the fact that his career path had been shit on by his mother’s homophobia.
“So you are a Marine,” Alex said.
But before the guy could respond, a shrill voice trilled, “Oh, Lordy mercy! A Muhreeeeene!” One of Alex’s least favorite customers had been standing just several feet away the entire time. But Alex had been so intently focused on the guy in the white baseball cap that he hadn’t seen the man with the blond pompadour and ten-pound Rolex who went by the name Stephen Royce. Although Alex had many loyal customers, Stephen had become increasingly irate after Alex had refused several invitations to take a cruise on his yacht, which was rumored not to exist.
“Well, mercy me,” Stephen crooned and put his arm around the Marine. “I always suspected there was something a little off about you, Alexander. I mean, I know full well that you’re a castoff from the upper echelons of Cathedral Beach high society, but I must admit I had no idea you were a chaser.” The Marine in the baseball cap winced at this term, a term for a gay man who sexually pursued Marines.
The Marine said, “I need for you to move your arm, sir.”
Mouth agape, bushy eyebrows raised, Stephen Royce withdrew slowly, hands raised at the guy next to him as if heat were radiating off of him, which it practically was. “Well, excuse me. But given that I couldn’t help overhearing this little interlude between the two of you, I thought I should step in and warn Alex here that despite what you see in the videos, it’s the Marine who usually takes it up the ass.”
The Marine said, “You are being inappropriate, sir.” Alex heard the warning in the guy’s voice. If Stephen Royce heard it, too, it inspired only anger in him.
“Inappropriate? Young man, you sitting at my bar is inappropriate.”
“You are embarrassing this gentleman because he is not interested in you sexually. My sitting at this bar has nothing to do with that fact.”
Stephen Royce flinched as if a glass of ice water had been hurled in his face. For a split second, Alex thought Royce might have been frightened off.
“You sure talk smart for a baby killer.”
The Marine delivered a solid punch to the bridge of Stephen Royce’s nose without standing up all the way. Royce crumpled and hit the floor, red pulsing from both smeared nostrils. Alex was so busy marveling at the skill and efficiency of the guy’s strike that he hadn’t realized the implications, hadn’t noticed the fear that had taken over the guy’s face as soon as he realized what he had done. It wasn’t that he regretted drawing blood. The official policy was don’t ask, don’t tell, but if you got the cops called on you in a gay bar, that was as good as telling.
“With me,” Alex snapped, and grabbed the guy by one shoulder, dragging him out the side door and into the courtyard, then through a side door and into the alleyway. Alex kept shoving the guy forward toward the mouth of the alleyway, but suddenly the guy went down on both knees with the determination of someone falling into prayer and started vomiting. For a second Alex thought it was some aftereffect of violence, like the nosebleeds movie characters developed every time they used their powers of telekinesis. But the man kneeling in front of Alex didn’t have supernatural powers; he was just giving Alex an eyewitness glimpse of the amount of alcohol it took for him to sit comfortably in a gay bar. Without gasping or apologizing, the guy finished vomiting, got to his feet, and stared at Alex as if he had simply paused to tie his shoelaces.
“You need to go,” Alex said.
“He was being inappropriate.”
“I know. But you don’t want the cops called on you here. Not if you’re actually a Marine.”
Alex could he see the guy’s muted version of protest in his eyes, in the way the lines appeared at the bridge of his nose. Then he nodded and trotted off toward the mouth of the alleyway.
By the time he returned to his bar, a stone-faced Philip and the lesbian manager were waiting for him and told him that Stephen Royce was being tended to in the office, screaming about some Marine who had tried to gay-bash him right there in the middle of the club. When Alex told them he had tried to chase the Marine so the police could be called, Philip looked to the floor to keep from laughing, and the manager’s silence suggested that a mutual disdain for Stephen Royce and all his pretenses would keep this from going any farther.
After the relief of not having to tell bald-faced lies in front of Stephen Royce subsided, the disappointment set in, along with a kind of self-pity over the fact that he would probably never lay eyes on the baseball-cap-wearing Marine again. But half an hour later, as he was serving a drink, he pulled a napkin from the top of the stack, saw that there was something written on it, and paused. My name is Mike. I would like to know yours. [email protected]. The childish sincerity and the courtliness of it had Alex grinning like an idiot, as the customers he was ignoring cleared their throats and tapped their fingers on the bar.
Mike Recon was waiting in the shadows on the other side of the street when Alex emerged from the bar. Philip saw him first, pointed in his direction, and then sauntered off down the sidewalk, staring at Alex over his shoulder with a bitter grin. Given who Recon had already shown himself to be, Alex thought getting a note and an e-mail address out of the guy had been a major triumph, so by the time they were standing face-to-face across the street from the club and away from all prying eyes, Alex was speechless and red-faced.
“Everything turn out all right?” Mike asked, sounding considerably more sober.
“You ran. I chased you. You got away.”
“Maybe we should get out of here then,” he said. When Alex met his stare, Mike flinched slightly and looked away, as if this forward a comment had taken all of his confidence. Alex pointed in the direction of his car, and they walked toward it.
Recon’s sudden silence suggested determination—a determination to get his dick sucked in Alex’s front seat. Since coming out, Alex had engaged in several one-night stands in backseats and seedy motel rooms, locations he probably wouldn’t have been ashamed to have sex in if he were having it with women. But one-way sex wasn’t his thing, even if the guy was a hot Marine. So when Mr. Recon slid his seat belt across his chest, stared straight forward, and placed his hands on his knees, Alex was relieved.
“Where should we go?” Alex asked.
“Someplace…not gay,” Mike said. Alex felt the sting of rejection from this comment, given that he lived close by, smack in the middle of a gay neighborhood. Mike seemed to sense the tension in Alex’s silence, because he met his eyes and said, “Someplace where we can just sit and talk. Like the beach, maybe.”
“The beach,” Alex said, and started the engine. He headed for Cathedral Beach. Stopping to consider which beach they should visit and which route they should take to get there would force him to consider things such as whether this guy’s determination to get him alone might mean he wanted to leave him with his jaw wired shut. This was a risk Alex had long ago learned to accept. He always went for the straight-acting guys, the guys Philip referred to derisively as either “no-necks” or “cavemen.”
They barely exchanged a word until they were driving down Adams Street, the main drag in the part of Cathedral Beach everyone referred to as the Village. They passed the darkened storefronts of designer furniture showrooms and the store that sold gourmet dog treats, where Alex had worked one summer. Alex realized how tired he was when he thought he glimpsed his mother rounding a street corner, her platinum blond hair cut in a perfect Jackie-O bob, holding her Louis Vuitton tightly to her hip, as if there were a small dog inside she was afraid of waking.
Now that he was cruising these streets, which had
been desolate for almost twelve hours since the town basically closed down at about nine o’clock, Alex realized that some subconscious desire, something other than haste, had driven him to bring this handsome stranger here. After all, the guy was a Marine: what better kind of husband could a fag bring home to Cathedral Beach?
Silenced by these thoughts, Alex drove toward the the spot where Adams Street dipped and met up with the coastal drive that snaked behind a crescent-shaped lawn dotted with absurdly tall palm trees. There the Alhambra Hotel’s lighted dome cast a pale glow down the seven-story pink adobe tower that supported it. They cruised past the lone high-rise condo that had gone up in the sixties, before outraged residents changed municipal codes and blocked anything over five stories from mucking up their view; then past a sandy beach formed by a concrete wall, where Alex’s father had taken him swimming as a young boy, before pods of seals had taken over the beach, beginning what had grown into a decades-long battle between environmentalists from the University of California, San Diego and wealthy residents who insisted that the seals brought disease and sharks.
It was a windy night, and whitecaps tore into the rocky shore. He parked next to a set of wooden steps that led down to a narrow crescent of sand that stretched between jagged outcroppings. Mike looked around for nosy neighbors or trolling cops; then he decided it was safe and took a seat on a bench. “You live here?” he asked.
“I used to live here.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I went away to school,” he said. My mother found out I was gay. She turned my father against me. Cut me off. He kept these statements to himself as he stepped from the car and led Mike down the set of wooden steps.
Once they reached the sand, Alex realized how far in the tide was, but by the time the cold water washed across his ankles, Mike had seized him by the back of his neck and was dragging him into the band of darkness that hugged the base of the seawall, where the glow of the streetlights high above couldn’t reach. Mike brought his gaping mouth to Alex’s, made a comic sputtering sound that almost broke the mood, and doused Alex in rancid bourbon breath.
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