THUGLIT Issue Sixteen

by Devon Robbins

  The knocking went on, not only unabated but faster and harder. My sleep-addled brain rolled over the possibility that I'd forgotten to pay some bill, or even the rent, but none of that rang true.

  (Overzealous Mormons? Unlikely.)

  I rose from the sofa in my boxer briefs and stumbled for the door. Through the peephole I observed a woman who looked to be in her forties—possibly early fifties with Botox—with dirty blonde hairspray helmet hair and the bitchiest pantsuit I'd seen this side of the 700 Club. I had no idea who she was. So I repeated my earlier sentiment, for effect.

  "Fuck. Off."

  "My name is Rebecca Stockland," she said, her syrupy drawl typical to the Little Rock nouveau riche. "Please open the door."

  I envisioned her holding court in one of those West Little Rock McMansions where all the other attorneys and doctors and stockbrokers lived. Probably had the closets widened to accommodate her shoulder pads.

  "Don't know you," I barked—though naturally, I did. Or at least I knew who she was. "Sleeping. Go away."

  "You've failed in whatever it is you were hoping to achieve, young man," she went on, her voice loud and tone matronly. "My husband has friends everywhere, you know—and that includes the local papers. Nobody is going to take the bait."

  "Wrong door, lady," I said. "Last time—fuck off."

  She muttered something too indistinct to hear, and I was already walking away anyhow. Back to the bedroom, where I almost never slept. Not alone, at any rate.

  The next night was Friday so the strippers were in. They rarely went past their bikini briefs—technically it was against the law—but nobody was likely to call 911 if something popped out like a girl from a giant birthday cake. There were two of them and I knew one personally, a Puerto Rican kid called Marco with a lantern jaw and a bad methamphetamine habit. Marco's big browns were wide and watery as he got lost in the pulsing dance floor lights and ground his package against the air, no fewer than two dozen pairs of eyes fixed to it like flies on flypaper. When I went past the elevated stage where he did his thing, he gave me a wink and gestured with that perfect chin at the men's room. I didn't need some random, braindead twink to secure a boost that night, or any night. At Discovery there was always someone around to take care of me.

  I snagged a sidecar from Jules and hung close to the john, sipping and observing, while I waited for Marco to take a break. A fan club of about half a dozen mostly middle-aged guys had collected around him, gawping and licking their lips and stuffing bills into his too-tight skivvies. Grist for the mill. Marco rolled his eyes in full view and nobody gave a shit. They weren't looking at his eyes, anyway.

  The song ended and a new one ratcheted up while a fresh stripper took the stage, taking Marco's fan club along with it. Marco slithered, mostly naked, through a throng of whoopsie-daisy hands and inebriated kisses, to the men's room where I killed off my drink and guided him inside. All dark tan and Renaissance contours and oiled, hairless skin, Marco slid into a stall and pulled me in behind him. The vial came out from that pair of bikini briefs which hardly concealed what his mama gave him, never mind anything else, but I didn't ask. He wanted to play kinky Kreskin with his blow, that was his business. All I wanted was a bump to kick off my night.

  Instead I got total blackout and a wave of shouts and gasps to replace the pounding techno beat. Light and music gone, replaced with chaos and confusion and a lot of panicking, piss-drunk homos rushing headlong for the exits. I snickered and stuck out my hands, reaching for Marco—maybe feeling a little adventurous, but I grabbed at air and listened to the stall's hinges squeak. The little bastard popped smoke, taking the booger sugar with him and leaving me in the dark to fend for myself, much too sober and hornier than I wanted to be while all alone in a men's room during a power outage.

  Someone screamed, but it was more of a pleasure squeal than anything. I smirked, keeping my hands out to feel my way to freedom. There was one other gay bar in town, Backstreet, and I was betting that was where everyone was headed. I intended to follow the lemmings over that cliff, but a pungent fog of Chloe Chloé assaulted my nostrils and sent me reeling. I knew most of the drag queens that frequented Discovery, and none of them would stoop to that.

  I was in the presence of a phantom rich bitch. And I knew precisely who she was.

  "Mrs. Stockland, I presume."

  "There's a pistol pointed in the general direction of your torso right now," she hissed. "Maybe your chest, maybe your stomach. Either way, it's going to hurt if I decide to pull the trigger."

  "I'd imagine so," I said, having never been shot, but assuming people didn't grimace and fold over and die in movies because it was funny. "How about you don't?"

  "The Free Press," she growled. "The goddamned Free Press!"

  I stifled a laugh. I should have known. No big shot attorney was going to call in any favors with that nest of underpaid, left-wing social justice warriors. Of course they were going to print it.

  "That's the way the cocksucker crumbles," I said, shifting slowly and silently toward the farthest stall from the door.

  "Do you think I didn't know?"

  "You didn't really come into it much, to be honest."

  "It's a fucking arrangement, you nasty little shit! It happens every day!"

  "I'm sure of it."

  "You haven't got any skeletons in your closet?"

  "When I came out of it, I brought all my shit with me, skeletons and all. Sorry."

  "So now everybody has to live like you do? Snorting cocaine with rent boys in a public toilet while Larry enforces justice and order in a court of law?"

  My back touched the wall and I began a gradual crouch.

  "Probably not anymore," I said. "I don't reckon his usual clientele are going to be much interested in the traditionalist hero's services once Thursday rolls around and the new Freep drops. Hope you've been saving."

  Her heels clacked over the tiles, drawing her nearer.

  "You horrible little degenerate," she spat.

  "Get a good lawyer," I told her. "Not Larry Stockland, though. He's fucking finished."

  I said this with a smile I was sure she could hear, though neither of us heard anything apart from the high-pitched whine in our ears once the shot was fired. I'd never been anywhere near a gun being shot before, but in such close quarters the report was deafening, the flash blinding. Weirdly, these were the sensations that initially consumed me—not the bullet that had just ripped into my right bicep and lodged itself in the muscle. That occurred to me several long seconds later, when the delayed message reached my brain, informing me that holy cunting Christ on a pogo stick, that fucking hurts. Stockland's beard was sure as hell right about that.

  I passed out cold in a puddle of somebody's warm piss, my head an enormous balloon full of awful perfume and agony and regret that I hadn't gotten that bump from Marco to dull the pain a little.

  The only visit I got in the hospital was from Jules, which was a surprise since we weren't really friends or anything like that. Mostly he wanted to recount to me how Rebecca Stockland had to run in terror from the eight or ten guys who chased after her, among them Tall Jon Abernathy in his Cuban heels and a queen named Candy Apples in six-inch stilettos. Suffice to say, the beard got away.

  That was Wednesday that Jules came. I'd been laid up like that for the better part of a week, having developed a lovely infection and shattered a bone. Thursday came and went without incident, and when I asked a nurse about obtaining a copy of the Free Press for me, she said she wouldn't know where to get one. I took that to mean, I'm not your bitch. Which was fair enough.

  They released me Friday afternoon, a week after I was shot, my arm in a sling and carrying a plastic bag filled with all sorts of pharmaceutical party favors tucked into it. I decided it was a worthwhile tradeoff in the long run. They had to wheel me out like an invalid—hospital policy—and I climbed into a taxi at the curb.

  It took me something like eight minutes to manage unlocking my front door
when I got home, by which time the arm was on fire and my brow was pouring salty sweat into my eyes. I kicked the door shut, staggered into the kitchen, and fought a bottle of Oxy one-handed until I finally got the damned thing open. I swallowed four of them dry and waited for them to work, my eyes closed and breathing shallow, measured. That was when somebody farted in my bedroom.

  Now I'd be lying if I said I didn't squeak one out in the privacy and solitude of my own one-bedroom apartment from time to time, and there's really nothing at all wrong with that, but when I'm presumably alone and somebody sounds the ever-familiar klaxon of the holy butt-trumpet and it's not me…well, that's really rather worrisome.

  My breath held and the Oxy firing its introductory salvo into my brain's pain receptors, I blinked and swallowed and went quickly to the bedroom door where I peered in at a half-naked man twisted up in my bedsheets. Snoring. Drooling. Mumbling incoherently under his boozy breath.

  Fucking Larry Stockland.

  "What the hell, Larry?" I said.

  He just farted again.

  I shouted his name. He didn't wake up.

  I grabbed one of the lavender-scented Pier 1 candles from atop the bookcase by the door and hurled it at his head.

  That did it.

  Stockland was still rubbing the knot on his skull and nursing a drink he'd made without asking clear permission to make use of my gin, sitting contritely on my loveseat in an offensively red Razorbacks tee shirt and a pair of gray boxers.

  "I'm not like you," he said, looking away. "Even though we're both…like this." As if saying 'gay' would somehow make him gayer, thereby exacerbating his situation exponentially.

  "This isn't 1950," I reminded him.

  "This is Arkansas," he countered. "Not Key West."

  It was a fair point. Though nowhere close to getting-shot-in-the-arm fair, which I elucidated for him while pathetically flapping my busted wing.

  "She's gone," he said of the soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Stockland. "Who knows where. She'll never get a dime out of me now, not after what she's done to you. So there's that, I suppose. And for what it's worth, I promise I had nothing to do with it."

  "It's not worth much," I said. "Anissa's still dead."

  "I didn't kill her," Stockland said. He still couldn't look me in the eye. "She did that on her own."

  "It didn't happen in a vacuum, Larry."

  He rotated his wrist, causing the ice cubes to clink obnoxiously in the glass. I snatched it out of his hand and threw it across the room, hoping it would smash dramatically against the wall, but it only thunked harmlessly on the carpet.

  "I'll pay for everything, retroactively. The funeral, everything. Start a college fund for the girls. There's two of them, right? Two girls?"

  I nodded, imagining their faces but not getting a clear image in my mind, since I hadn't seen them since we put their mother in the ground. I rarely even thought of them as my nieces so much as my dead sister's kids. I was a shitty uncle and I knew it.

  "And my hospital bill," I said. His eyes bulged, and I think mine did a little, too. I hadn't really expected to say it until I already had.

  "All right," he conceded. "That, too. Anything else?"

  "A public apology. In the Free Press. I want you to admit you were always just sucking up to the powers that be and hiding yourself behind a cloak of conservative respectability, and that you hurt people by doing it. Ruined families."

  "Christ," he whined. "Did you even see the article they published? They called me a self-loathing homosexual bent on punishing decent people because I saw myself in them. Christ Jesus."

  "And that's incorrect how?"

  "I was only doing my job."

  "That's what the Nazis said."

  "Give me a break," he said. "That's a hell of stretch."

  "My sister offed herself because of what you did. I might be a little sensitive about it."

  Stockland slumped where he sat. His pores emitted a sour alcoholic odor and he hadn't shaved in days. Always the perfect specimen, Larry Stockland looked like USDA Grade D shit.

  "I'm out of the firm," he said at length.

  "I got fucking shot."

  "My life is ruined. Fifteen years of building it to this point and it's gone. Poof."

  "I don't want to have a dick-measuring contest with you, Larry."

  He sighed.

  "I'm going to get another drink," he said. "Get me a pad and paper and I'll write whatever you want."

  "Look in the drawer under the coffee machine," I said.

  He stalked off to the kitchen, his arms hanging like wet noodles and his face so hangdog he looked like a cartoon. I felt like throwing something else at his head but managed to maintain my composure. I was at least somewhat edified that he picked that glass up off the floor rather than dirty a fresh one.

  For several minutes I listened to him futzing around in there, mixing his drink and gathering what he needed from my junk drawer, before calling out, "How the hell did you get in, anyway?"

  There came no answer, and by then the Oxy was getting down to brass tacks in my head anyway, so I didn't much care about the how or why of it. He was going to do what he needed to do, and though it wouldn't bring Anissa back or make her daughters' dad into less of a douchenozzle, there was some satisfaction in knowing that Stockland was effectively ruined, however pyrrhic a victory it may have been. It was enough, along with the frankly egregious dose of opioids in my system, to knock me out flat.

  My guest did not bother to wake me, having taken his own preposterously colossal dosage of my meds—to wit: all of them—and died on the laminate floor while I dozed and dreamed of better days.

  The last thing he'd ever take from me. But upon discovering the bastard's corpse in the kitchen, it still pissed me off, though far less than what he'd written with austere, vaguely feminine handwriting on the notepad he left beside the Mr. Coffee:

  Go fuck yourself, fairy.

  Self-loathing, indeed. And good goddamned riddance.

  I attended the funeral out of morbid curiosity, largely to see who would bother to show, and how many of them there would be. The turnout was meager at best, and did not, as I suspected, include the Widow Stockland, who remained at large. (Surely a K-9 unit could chase the choking stench of her perfume, as I suggested to the boys in blue who answered my call the morning Larry cashed in his chips, but they did not appear to share my opinion on the matter.) No one came that I recognized, and no one had the first clue who I was. I left before the last amen, bored to tears and amply interested in putting an end to my sobriety for the day. It had been one bitch of a week and I didn't even have any party favors left to show for it. Poor me.

  Discovery was just opening their doors when I got there in the afternoon, and after Jules bought my first round, he slapped the Freep down on the bar in front of me before yanking off his tank top and wandering away. The article was short and acerbic, the accompanying photo the least blurry of the lot and with a small attribution to me just underneath. They even included the little C in a circle, as though I'd actually copyrighted the damn thing.

  "So begins your career in photojournalism," came a husky voice behind me, the stink of Chloe Chloé still present but cut down considerably. She was, after all, on the lam.

  "In the market for a new gay husband?" I asked without turning around. "You've sure come to the right place for it."

  I sipped my drink and tried not to think about whether or not a pistol was aimed at my back. I was much too tired and far too sober to deal with the notion of it just then.

  "One was enough for me, thanks," was all she said.

  Over the rim of the glass I could see Jules lingering near the deejay booth, motioning frantically and frequently turning to look directly at me. I raised my glass and grinned. He disappeared into the booth just as the music started—a throbbing chillwave track dripping with sound effects and synthesizers. Not exactly my cup of Grand Marnier, but a beat was a beat so I finally spun around on the barstool and beheld t
he late Stockland's beard in all her weary glory. She looked pale and gaunt, her hair no longer the stiff coif I'd seen before but rather a sad, tangled rat's nest. There was a hole in the arm of her Burberry coat and her hollow cheeks were streaked by the fading remnants of runny mascara. Her hands were both empty. I'd never seen anyone look so utterly defeated.

  "I've been sleeping outside," she said. "Outside. Like a tramp."

  At least you're still above ground, I thought. But what I said was, "You know, quite a lot of women come in here on the busier nights. You want to know why?"

  "I honestly don't care."

  Footsteps clopped in a rush somewhere near the front of the club. I reckoned it wouldn't be long now.

  "It's because they can dance with good looking guys who won't creep on them. A good deal for them, really. I'm surprised more don't wise up to it."

  Rebecca Stockland snorted.

  "Larry wasn't much of a dancer," she said.

  "I'm not winning any contests myself," I said, "but I'm not too terrible." I rose from the stool and offered my one good arm to her. She stood stock-still for a minute or more, one eyebrow arched with the utmost bitchiness, staring hard at me. "Come on."

  The bitch-brows receded and she shot a glance at the front of the place, where a shirtless Jules was now pacing.

  "I suppose they've called the police," she said.

  I nodded. "Yep."

  "How do you even dance to this shit?"

  "I just make it up as I go along," I said. "Plus you've got the advantage."

  I half-raised the elbow in its sling. She didn't look particularly remorseful.

  "I was aiming for your heart," she said.

  "I won't tell if you won't."

  With a wink I walked to the empty dance floor where I danced with that twink the night I saw Stockland at the bar. I remembered with a quiet laugh how Larry made off with my pretty little imbecile, and I resumed the dance I'd started with him when Rebecca moved up in front of me.