The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  There was a certain category of man on Grindr, in his forties or fifties, who was looking for the validation of youth, no strings attached, but was not an official daddy, would not expect to buy me or control me. Men who wanted a golden hour with a young man so that they could remember something about themselves. So that they could feel a way they used to feel. And who couldn’t understand that? Far from being the kind of person who requires his conquests to be physical perfection, I was instantly reassured by their sagging bellies, their imperfect mouths and receding hairlines. I preferred to be the beautiful one in these fragmentary encounters.

  Some of them were acting out something in their own lives that caused them to be casually mean to me. “You should go to the gym more,” one guy said when we were done. “Your hips make you look like a fucking woman.” All of that hate and abuse heaped on young gay boys, where does it go but into the gay boy? Where it stays, and becomes a kind of pattern, like a crystal, causing other psychic material around it to conform to its structure. No one has ever said things as casually cruel to me as gay men, online or in person. That is how I, too, learned to be cruel, and while I try to contain those impulses, to quarantine those patterns, I can feel them growing in there in the dark.

  But for the most part my lovers were kind, if somewhat detached. Sometimes they even claimed to love me. When I broke up with dear Ed of the tiny penis, he told me I was breaking his heart, and the idea that his heart had ever been involved struck me as so absurd I accidentally laughed.

  But that summer I began to see someone seriously. The relationship was obviously doomed; he was forty-five, I was seventeen. I could not imagine what his life was like or how I fit into it. I suspected he was married because he wore a ring, but whether to a man or a woman I wasn’t sure, and I was hesitant to ask too many questions for fear of puncturing the flimsy skin of whatever dream contained our goings-on.

  His name was Anthony, and he was long-limbed with shinbones so bony and unpadded they looked like the bottoms of canoes. His hair was already mostly silver gray and he wore it in a late-Pierce-Brosnan quiff. Honestly, he was a snack in a dad-core way, radiating the confidence of a man who knows how to bandage a skinned knee. He was easy to smile, quick to compliment, as un-coy as it is possible to be.

  He said he dreamed about me, that he couldn’t wait to see me again, that I was perfection. He called me Adonis, he called me Butterfly, such ridiculous and extravagant pet names that I blushed. He wore jeans from Costco. He was wild about wiener dogs and would cry out whenever he saw one. He loved sports and was always asking me if I had caught a particular football or basketball game, and when I told him I didn’t like those things, he was never offended, in fact, my lack of interest seemed to delight him, and he would say, “Of course you don’t, of course.” He was a corny, corny man, and he appalled me, and I loved him, the deal clinched in my heart before I could object.

  We first met at a park, at night, the big one in the center of town, where the baseball and soccer fields were. Even though it was full dark out, the stadium lights of the fields kept the park weirdly bright, and as I walked to meet him, my shadow followed me in triplicate. I didn’t normally meet dates in North Shore. I liked to meet up in a neighboring town where there was less chance of being seen. But I also liked the safety of a public space and being within walking distance of home, so when he proposed meeting at the park, I said yes. He was already there, sitting on a bench, and I recognized him from the pictures he had sent me.

  The first thing he said to me was: “I am so nervous to meet you, I don’t think I’ve been this nervous in years and years.”

  “Oh?” I said, sitting down next to him, not too close, but not too far either.

  “So I have to thank you for that much already. What an experience. To meet a beautiful young man at night in a park. I mean, wow.”

  I laughed. “You not get out much?”

  “No,” he said, and smiled at me. “I do not get out much.”

  I think that was when I noticed the wedding ring, or maybe I only noticed it later. The memory has become so romanticized and blurred in my mind that I tend to remember him as I knew him later. But at the time, I think I worried he was somehow deranged. He smiled so much. He was wearing a truly ugly sweater, color-blocked cashmere in shades of dog poop and amber.

  “Are you nervous to meet me?” he asked. “You probably do this all the time. I don’t mean to say—well, not all the time! But you have done this before, this internet dating.”

  “Of course,” I said. I thought of telling him about the time I met up with a date only to realize we had already fucked each other once before and not liked each other much. “Oh, it’s you!” we said. And then we fooled around, even though we didn’t really want to.

  “It feels like it’s happening completely outside the bounds of normal life,” he said, excited. “I had no idea they kept the park this bright at night! I think that may be adding to the surreality of this encounter for me, if you will forgive me for going on and on like this. I’m so sorry. How do these things normally go?”

  “There’s no script,” I said.

  “See? No script!”

  “None!” I laughed.

  “You could say anything to me. I could say anything to you.”

  “You could,” I admitted.

  He screwed up his face like he was thinking hard, an eight-year-old in a spelling bee. “Oh, man, I can’t think of anything good,” he said. “Wait, did you know there are different sizes of infinity?”

  “Isn’t that impossible?”

  “Precisely not. Okay, imagine the first infinity, the regular one, just one, two, three, four, and on and on to infinity.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now, in your head, circle all the prime numbers. If your first list goes on infinitely, then your list of primes would also go on infinitely, even though it is a smaller infinity than the infinity of the original set.”

  He smelled like clean laundry. “You could make, actually, an infinity of subset infinities,” he said.

  I felt then this wild, jerking, insane hope that manifested as an intense desire to get his pants off, to press him into me, to seal the cosmic deal, but really it was some buried healthy part of me that saw that he was kind and good and smart and thought he could save me.

  “I like your nose ring,” he said. “Very brutal looking.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Do you want to go to your car?” I asked. A jogger ran past.

  “Well, that had been my plan insofar as I had a plan,” he said, “but now that I’ve met you, I think we need a new plan.”

  “Oh,” I said, stung. It was a measure of my inexperience that I had never been turned down before, and my first reaction was not sadness but rage that fizzed behind my closed mouth as though I were a shaken soda can.

  “You are so young, and I knew that, but I just, you know, twenty looks a lot younger than I remember it being.”

  “I’m not some innocent,” I said.

  “I realize, I realize,” he said. “I just want to take my time. I want to replace everything I imagine about you with something real that I know about you,” he said. He thought for a moment. “That’s what I want.”

  “Okay,” I said. And maybe if I were the me I am today, I wouldn’t have found that so compelling. But the idea of someone wanting to know me, to know the real me, to see me as I was when I was so invisible and so dedicated to my own invisibility—it was everything I’d ever wanted and always assumed I would never have.

  “Can I take you on a date?” he asked. “A real one?”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, I called in sick to Rite Aid. Anthony picked me up in his Porsche and took me to a lunch place in Santa Monica so fancy it made me queasy. I didn’t know what to order, I felt I had waited a beat too long to remember to put my napk
in in my lap, I was having a full out-of-body experience, I squeezed lemon in my water and it squirted in my eye, blinding me. Anthony laughed and laughed. “Now you’re the one who’s nervous! Oh, I am so sorry. This was the wrong place. I don’t know why I thought this was the place to take you.”

  I had my cloth napkin, which I had dipped in my water glass, pressed to my eye, but the pain was not abating. “This place is lovely. This place is like a dream of where a guy would take me.”

  “That’s what I was going for!” he cried, and after that the lunch was easier. When we had finished and were driving back to North Shore, he asked if I had anyplace that we could go. Aunt Deedee would be at home sleeping before her bartending shift. But Bunny had given me the key to her house. While Ray was hardly ever home except late at night, and while Bunny’s whereabouts were dependably easy to track, she was at that volleyball intensive from seven to seven, there was always the risk that Ray, who spent his days going from house tour to house tour, from meeting to meeting, might swing by for something he needed or had forgotten, and it was a measure of my insanity that I took such a risk so confidently.

  I let Anthony into Bunny’s house and showed him around. I did not mention that the house was not mine. I wanted Anthony to think I came from a place like this. “This is the living room,” I said. “This is the kitchen.”

  “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at a picture of Bunny.

  “My sister.”

  I led him to the spare bedroom, or as I liked to think of it, the “Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite,” and I jumped on him and pushed him down on the bed. I loved how large his rib cage was, and I could feel his big lungs inflating and deflating in his chest, his big heart hammering inside him. I wanted to get his shirt off, so I could get as close to his skin as I could.

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said, “I want to look at you.” He slipped my T-shirt over my head. He unbuttoned my pants, and I shimmied off my jeans. He marveled at my calves as he peeled off my socks. “Every inch of you is perfection,” he said.

  “Stop,” I said, laughing, because the idea that I was perfection was ludicrous. My leg hair was thin and weird-looking, my skin Mariana-Trench-pale. His chest hair was a sparse constellation of tight little curls and he had two small moles on his neck, and I liked to rub my cheek on them. His skin smelled yeasty and good, and I wanted to drag my face across every inch of him.

  The most disconcerting part of it for me was that I had never had the experience of being both sexually turned on and happy at the same time. I kept thinking something was wrong. I kept breaking out giggling. “What?” he would ask.

  “I just can’t believe we get to do this,” I would say. “I can’t believe it is allowed for something so wonderful to happen.”

  When we had tired each other out, and I was lying cuddled up to his chest, and he was running his fingers up and down my biceps lazily, he said, “Whose house is this?”

  “Mine,” I said.

  “I don’t think it is,” he said. “You’re telling me you picked out this bedspread?”

  There was no way I could claim I had picked out this bedspread. It was maybe the first lie in my life that I had decided I couldn’t possibly sell. I didn’t know what to say and could only blush.

  “It’s okay!” he said. “It’s okay.”

  I think he realized I was going to cry before I did. “Oh, Michael,” he said.

  I was so embarrassed. Embarrassed to have lied, embarrassed to be crying. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said.

  “Not a thing is wrong with you,” he said.

  And then the truth spilled out, and I found it was all easy to say. That this was my friend’s house, that I lived next door, that I lived with my aunt because my mother had been to prison.

  “What about your father?” he asked.

  “What about him? I mean, he didn’t even show up at the hearing to get us. I think that bridge is pretty well burned.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said. “A father’s love for his son—it’s not such an easy thing to throw away.”

  * * *

  —

  In retrospect, so much seems obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. I fell head over heels in love with Anthony. We saw each other twice a week. Sometimes more. I was in a fever.

  Anthony sent me a Frank O’Hara love poem in an email, and I mistakenly thought that he had written it, and that he loved me, but then he hadn’t written it, and I got embarrassed that I didn’t even know who Frank O’Hara was, and so I didn’t know if he did love me or if he was just sending me a beautiful poem.

  Anthony didn’t want to do anything dark sexually, and the one time I placed his hand on my throat, hoping he would choke me, he withdrew it as though I had burned him, and said, “I hope it’s all right with you, but I’m not that sort of fellow.” He was always saying old-fashioned things like that, and when he gave me presents they were usually novels. He gave me Giovanni’s Room and Maurice. He gave me Mrs. Dalloway and Sons and Lovers. I read these books in such a fever that I have feared to ever read them again, lest the golden, irradiating magic they held for me be replaced with dusty, actual words.

  Still, every time I saw Anthony, I was filled with dread. Dread that he would tell me we shouldn’t see each other anymore, dread that he would do something to hurt me, dread that I would accept it, dread that we would be discovered, dread that I was doing this at all, that I was so hungry, so desperate for love that I would do anything to continue to meet a grown man I knew nothing about and then treasure my memories of the encounter, playing and replaying them inside my mind, so I walked about my daily life as a zombie, there but not there, a hollow vessel filled with only the charmed air of potentiality those borrowed novels granted me. One night I killed seventeen flies, and Jason ripped the flyswatter from my hands, marched downstairs to the kitchen, and cut the swatting part right off it.

  * * *

  —

  It was also the summer that Donna Morse and her son, Spencer, were murdered. Surely there must have been other murders during the time I lived in North Shore, but those were the first and only ones that I was aware of, and for weeks it was all we could talk about, not just Bunny and I, but the whole town. Waiting for your drink to be made at a Starbucks, whoever was standing next to you would suddenly say: “What a shame about Donna Morse, eh?” And then you would be talking about it with someone you didn’t even know.

  Donna had gone to North Shore High, but several years ahead of me and Bunny, and we did not know her directly, though we knew of her, mostly in the sense of a negative example because she had gotten pregnant and then married and dropped out of community college. North Shore could have been a launching pad for her, but it was not, and like my aunt she was a vestige of a poorer past, clinging to the town like it could save her. She was overweight and her hair was dyed bright red, like a Raggedy Ann doll’s. Aunt Deedee told me that Donna Morse had been hooked on drugs, but got sober when she got pregnant with Spencer. Now she nannied around for families who didn’t mind if she brought Spencer along.

  Our main source of info about the murders besides the local paper was, of course, Ray Lampert, who, being a fixture at the Blue Lagoon, was a sponge for gossip. And so it came to be that we heard every detail of what happened from his gross lips as he sat hungover at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, trying to choke down a microwave burrito to keep from throwing up. That was something that happened during those high school years: Ray’s stomach started to go. He was always throwing up, and Bunny was always telling him to go to the doctor, but he never would make an appointment.

  According to Ray, Donna Morse had gotten a divorce from Spencer’s father, Luke, because of domestic violence. “He wasn’t so much a puncher as a grabber,” Ray said, wiping bean splatter from his chin with a paper towel. “He would just grab her and go. Smash her
into things, like bash her head into the microwave, wham, wham, wham. Her cousin said the worst was when he threw her against the furnace and one of those metal screws, like, cut her face open. That’s why she had that scar.”

  I did remember the scar. It ran down her cheek like a pink tear trail. I would see her and Spencer come into the Rite Aid all the time, and I remember I used to judge her because she would buy him full-size candy bars, even though he was only three.

  “Why was he even over there?” Bunny asked. “What the fuck was Spencer doing at Luke’s house if he was this violent turd?”

  “Court mandated,” Ray said. “Visitation.”

  “It makes me so mad!” Bunny shouted. “I hope whatever judge granted him visitation has nightmares for the rest of his fucking life.”

  “We’re all gonna be having nightmares for the rest of our lives,” I said. That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.

  On a Saturday night that August, on a weekend Spencer was court mandated to spend with Luke, Donna got a call from Luke’s cell phone. She heard Luke’s voice in the background, “Tell her.” And then her son’s shaky little voice, “I’m gonna die tonight, Mommy,” and then she heard the gunshot. But she didn’t believe Luke had killed their son. Many times in the past, Luke had baited her, pretending to kill himself on the phone in order to get her to come over. The idea, however, that he was firing a gun in the same room as her son made her blood run cold, and she called 911 as she set out on foot to his apartment complex, which was only a few blocks away. She did not own a car.