The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  Still, I must have been visibly perturbed because toward the end of my shift, Terrence put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed the muscles there and they twanged under his fingers like guitar strings. “You poor thing,” he murmured. “Do you want me to see if Lisa will close for you?”

  “Uh, no, it’s okay,” I said. I had already texted Bunny several times and she had not texted me back.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Just worried about my friend. But I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “You’re such a good guy,” Terrence said, and I knew he was more stoned than usual, and I felt like I was in a nightmare where everyone was on drugs but me. Except that it was not a nightmare, it was quasi-factual, because everyone present in that Rite Aid, every one of my coworkers and customers, was, if not already drunk or high, planning on becoming so within the next few hours.

  Was I a good guy? Was Terrence a good guy? In many ways he was the kindest person I knew, but I also was aware that he was nothing but a sad, doped-up manager at a small-town Rite Aid, and that if he was the best guy I knew then there was really no hope at all for anyone.

  “It’s fine,” I said. I wanted to work the extra hours. I needed the money.

  * * *

  —

  When I got home, there were no lights on in Bunny’s house. I knocked on their door, rang the bell. It had been a hot day, but now the air was cool and the wind was picking up. I texted her from her front porch. I was still sitting there when Ray Lampert suddenly materialized in the darkness, having evidently walked home instead of driving.

  “Michael, my man!” he cried. And I regretted all of my life choices leading up to that moment so intensely that I felt I was internally collapsing.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, fumbling with his keys.

  “That’s all right, sir,” I said, already standing and trying to edge past him down the steps to the sidewalk. He grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me like I was a dog toy. “Get in here,” he said. “Don’t make me spend the rest of the night alone. I’m not ready for it to be over! It can’t be over. You know why? Because we won’t let it be over!”

  And it was exactly like when Bunny would grab me in the pool like an alligator and pull me under, only now, instead of drowning, I was inside a gaudy living room, watching Ray Lampert fumble with his phone trying to put a Patsy Cline record on the Bluetooth sound system, as he told me about how it had been stand-up comedy night at the Blue Lagoon and some comics had come from L.A. and that was something he had always wanted to try: stand-up comedy. I could not imagine anything more horrible than Ray Lampert doing stand-up.

  “Where’s Bunny?” he asked, as he poured himself a glass of wine.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t answer my texts, so I’m guessing she’s asleep.” It was always best to sprinkle your lies with truths.

  “We’ll let her rest, then,” he said. “She’s so tuckered out from those practices. It’s a long day, she’s there from seven to seven just about.” His pride in her caused his face to become beautiful, and for several seconds I could see him as a younger man, the kind who would marry the prettiest, well-brought-up, good and sweet girl he could find, determined to earn her, to make a place for himself in this world, to build this house for her. The kind of man innocent enough to think that an all-black bathroom was compelling and chic. I had come to understand, somehow, over the years, that it was Ray and not his wife who had decorated their house. His touch was everywhere, in the grandiose marble and the gilt end tables, the oversize art reproductions in bold colors hung on every wall as though they were real paintings. He had tried, with a teenage boy’s imagination, to conjure a rich man’s house, and then he had made it a thrilling reality in every detail.

  “Hey,” he said, “you wanna see pictures of Bunny as a baby?”

  I had already mentally imagined at least a dozen ways this night could go, but I had not imagined Ray would suggest something I would actually want to do. “Of course!” I said.

  He paused, gave me a smirk I couldn’t interpret. “You want me to pour you a glass?” He gestured with the wine bottle.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I said.

  “C’mon,” he said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” And he got down another jumbo wineglass and poured enough red wine in it that a goldfish could have comfortably swum around in there. I felt ridiculous, though I accepted the glass. I had no intention of drinking any of it, but I did not wish to be rude. “That’ll put hair on your chest,” he said. Before I could think about it, I said, “What I’ve always wanted—chest hair.”

  I was worried this would offend him, but instead he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.

  He led me to his office, that wonderful wood-paneled room that no one ever seemed to spend time in, and pulled down from the shelf two fat black leather-bound photo albums. We sat, he on the big brown tufted chair, I on the ottoman, and he opened up what seemed to me another world. No one my age had printed photos, our childhoods were on memory cards, but Ray Lampert must have been a man who liked real cameras and developing film. The pictures were of an overexposed, brightly sunny, ’90s world I could hardly recognize. He skipped hurriedly past the photos that interested me most, which were the wedding photos and early pictures of Bunny’s mother before Bunny was born.

  There was one large photo of Bunny and her mother that hung in the upstairs hallway, a posed portrait with a black background that must have seemed modern at the time. The woman I saw there was a pretty ice bitch: small features, pearly skin, glossy brown hair, an oatmeal-colored sweater. Bunny was dressed in a white T-shirt, both of them were wearing jeans, and they stared at the camera with a certain smugness, like they were members of a select club. But these more candid photos showed Bunny’s mother, her name was Allison, to be silly, goofy even, mugging for the camera, making the west side sign with her fingers. She had a tattoo on her upper arm, though he flipped by too fast for me to properly see what it was; I thought a flower, something delicate and faded. In their wedding photo she was wearing a simple white cotton dress and holding a bouquet of Technicolor daisies, so happy she seemed delirious, and I had the overwhelming impression that she was some kind of white witch.

  And then there was Bunny: a large, fat, potato-y baby, so big it looked like her mom was holding a Christmas turkey. She was often dressed in weirdly Victorian clothes, and even as a baby they had put black patent-leather Mary Janes on her tuberous little feet.

  “She was such a funny little girl,” he said. “You might think she was a tomboy, but no, it was princess princess princess.” There was Bunny in a pink swimsuit and clacking plastic Minnie Mouse high heels dripping water all over the foyer. There was Bunny frustratedly peeling an orange at some kind of picnic table. There were Bunny and her mother, safe and rocking in a big white hammock, some beautiful, exotic-looking locale in the background. I saw that her mother had been a gardener, and their yard, assuming it was the same house, which perhaps it was not, had been a wonderland of plants before the pool was put in. I saw Bunny, perhaps five, pulling a carrot from the ground. On her head was a hastily twined crown of wildflowers that clashed with her red T-shirt.

  The older Bunny got in the photos, the less interested I became. By the time she was in middle school the only photos of her were taken before, during, or after games. There were no images of her not in some uniform or another. But those early photos of her fascinated me, and I wished I could go back and really look at the divide in her life: before her mother’s death, and then after. When she ceased to be part of a scene that her father was documenting and began to be posed artificially, always on her own. Was I imagining the sadness I saw in her smile? Or was it an effect of the camera flash, the glossy way the photos had been printed, that made her seem trapped in those images, sealed in and suffocating behind the plastic sheeting of the photo album?

&n
bsp; “Thank you for showing these to me,” I said.

  “Aw, thank you for looking at them! I don’t have many people to share these with.” While I objected to almost everything about Ray Lampert, in that moment I was able to really like him, to feel I knew him. His skin had the clammy sweet smell of my own father’s when he was drunk, and for a moment I missed my dad so intensely I became light-headed. The night my mother had been arrested, they didn’t let us go to the ER with him, maybe because he was so drunk. The squad car, my mother handcuffed inside, drove off; the ambulance, my father recumbent inside, glided into the dark, sirens like the call of a robotic whooping crane; and I assumed that Gabby and I would stay in the house. We had been alone in the house so many times, I didn’t even think about it, and I was horrified when I understood that we were going to be taken, against our will, somewhere else.

  We were driven to some lady’s house in Torrance. She was a retired nurse with a mastiff named Cookie. We stayed with her for three days and no one came to get us. Why didn’t he come then? He could have waltzed in, flashed his photo ID, and legally claimed our lives. But he didn’t. What did he do during those days? Did he sit in our empty house and think about things? What did he decide?

  After the first seventy-two hours, we were moved to another house, this time in Inglewood, a house full of kids, the oldest of whom was named Renaldo and who stole my pajamas. I was involuntarily extremely attracted to him, and I can still viscerally recall what it felt like to be that mad and humiliated and turned on at the same time. I found out later that Aunt Deedee tried to come get us in those first three days, but she didn’t have the right paperwork to prove she was related to us, and she had to wait until our detention hearing. But at the detention hearing, dear old Dad suddenly showed up. And the judge had to decide who to put us with: him or Aunt Deedee.

  What did she say? What did she dare say in front of him, to his face? Had she seen the bruises on Viv’s neck? Had she noticed the way Gabby flinched when someone moved too quickly? I imagine him getting redder and redder—he was always angriest when he was ashamed—and blurting out, “This is bullshit, Your Honor, this is fucking bullshit.” He was like an eighteen-year-old who one day woke up in a thirty-five-year-old man’s completely fucked-up life. Whatever she said, it was enough. The judge awarded her custody, and set a jurisdictional hearing where my father would have a chance to defend himself and regain custody. But he never showed up at the court date they set, and I had not seen or heard from him since. I knew that if I did see him now, he would take one look at me and know that I was gay, and his shame and disgust would ignite in a whoosh, and all the love that had ever been there would be gone.

  Bunny was lucky to have Ray as a dad. That’s what I was thinking when Ray’s phone rang. He checked the number. “Shit, I gotta take this. Business.”

  I was surprised that business should take place at what must be past ten o’clock at night, but more surprised when he picked up the phone and began speaking in what I could only guess was Mandarin. He spoke a few phrases of greeting and then spoke in English again, all in a happy, reassuring, genial tone even as his face remained frighteningly blank and intense. The result was like bad dubbing in a movie.

  “Very soon, yes. So grateful for your business. As always. Yes, old friends. Hahaha, yes. No, I sent them to your office. Cassie sent them. I’ll double-check, but I’m certain she sent them. All right.” He followed this with a few more phrases in Mandarin, then hung up, and without looking at me dialed again.

  “Cassie, did you send Mr. Phong the blueprint files? Uh-huh. Did the wire transfer go through? Yeah, go ahead and send them, he’s waiting on them. Sorry to wake you up. All right. Catch you later, doll.”

  And then he hung up and looked at me and giggled like a teenager. “I cannot possibly begin to tell you, Michael, how deeply fucked I am.”

  “Is that right?” I asked, so nervous that when I crossed my legs, I sloshed some of the wine onto the Oriental carpet. “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” I said, leaping up, the red wine dripping down my hand and along my arm to the elbow.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right, I spill wine on it all the time,” Ray said, but he looked tired suddenly, and I knew that the night was over. I brought him a roll of paper towels, and I tried to help him sop up the mess, but he shooed me away, and I left him there, crouched in the dim office on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the rug.

  Really, it was a confusing summer. I was working full-time at the Rite Aid, or as close to full-time as Terrence could manage for me. Bunny was always gone at her volleyball intensive. I began hunting flies in my aunt’s house. The screens were torn, but we would have baked without the windows open since there was no air-conditioning. My aunt said daily that she needed to go by the hardware store and order new screens, and the problem was always framed as a scarcity of time and wherewithal, but I knew it was a scarcity of money. I was unwilling to spend my own hard-earned cash to have new screens fitted, but I was willing to spend two dollars on a flyswatter and spend hours a day hunting flies. To narrow the scope of my mental activities to the tracking of a single aerial point in three-dimensional space was deeply soothing to me. I drove Jason half-insane. “You need to stop,” he would say, “you’ve been killing flies for like an hour.”

  But I couldn’t stop because I was profoundly anxious, not because of Bunny’s weird Ecstasy date, for which she apologized the next day, assuring me that nothing terrible had come of it except that she’d had to feign flu and miss a day of volleyball. She was excited, thinking that now this boy Ryan would be her boyfriend, but the relationship did not materialize. Ryan returned her texts with one-word answers and then not at all, creating a sticky wound that eventually crusted over with bitter acceptance and shame. I could hardly bring myself to pay attention to this, so consumed was I by what was transpiring in my own life.

  By the time I was sixteen and I got my first phone, I switched from Craigslist to Grindr, lying about my birthday and claiming to be eighteen. But as I aged, so did my Grindr profile, and now that I was seventeen, my digital representation was almost twenty. I tended to steer clear of younger men, afraid they would ask me questions about college, or notice cultural points of reference I did not share with them. A young man can tell the difference between a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-year-old in a second. But to a man in his forties, all the young are awash in a golden haze.

  On Craigslist, the ads tended to spell out what the encounter would entail: “You come to my clean apartment and fuck my hairy ass. We watch porn and j/o with some edging, no kissing.” The ads were insanely specific, age, height, weight, dick length, cut or uncut; these statistics were displaced from sentences and laid out cold, separated only by the tiny knives of commas. They were clear about what they wanted in return: “You can have a small dick if you have a bubble butt, but if you have no butt, you must have monster cock. You must be 18–23 ONLY!!!” People advertised that they were “neg” and “on prep.” If they were offering massage, they were prostitutes. If they said they just wanted a friend, they were ugly. It became easy to navigate, and an ad that I was willing to respond to was practically a unicorn. I did not have a computer of my own, nor did I have a phone back then, so I was mostly browsing on my aunt’s computer after everyone went to bed. In short, Craigslist was like a massive yard sale, a flea market of sexual opportunities, most of which you definitely didn’t want, but you always knew what they were. Do you want this fat hairy man to fill you with cum? Do you want to stroke it with this insanely buff Nigerian dude at precisely 2:15 in his garage?

  But then I got a phone, and the very first week I owned it, I got on Grindr, where there was less to go on. Almost all profile pictures were headless torsos, almost all profile descriptions were half a sentence of acronyms. Creating my own profile was terrifying. I had never had to for Craigslist, had always been an anonymous stroller through the bazaar. Realizing I would have to be
come one of these headless torsos, I took the bus to the mall, where I camped out in the dressing room of a Zara with a men’s section for forty minutes trying to find a good angle in the full-length mirror. With a little editing and cropping, I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can’t host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don’t murder me.

  Honestly, I was afraid of most of them, these floating photographs of dicks and hard-bodied torsos. Hey cutie, hey sexy, you ready to bend over? It was not a place where I expected to find love. Indeed, I was not allowed to have a boyfriend, even if I had somehow managed to find one. My aunt had once stopped me in the hallway and said, haltingly, “I don’t think I need to say this, but I’m saying it: No boys. No boys in the house.”

  At bottom, I thought she was right. It wasn’t even because I was gay that my love, my body, my touches, needed to be contained. It was because I had been born of a woman who could stab a man in the chest with a fruit knife at three in the morning because she had run out of other ideas for how to make it stop. Maybe there were some truly clean people in the town. There seemed to be. But I suspected most were like me, were like Ray Lampert, were like my aunt even, chasing after a middle-class dream that would have spit her out like a seed. To live in North Shore was to be committed to pretense. Committed to this beautiful, fake, wholesome dream, because even though it was a dream, it was so much better than anything else.