by J. M. Snyder
This rib from Bone Lickers was far and away the best barbecue he’d ever eaten.
* * * *
“You know what? I hope I do go to Hell for being gay. In fact, I’d kinda like to go right now, cuz I know it ain’t this hot.”
“Are you saying you’d like a break from the grill?” Spencer asked. Carter did insist on being a drama queen.
“I need to rehydrate,” Carter said, stepping away from the smoking slab of flaming meat. He wiped his hands on the carpenter’s apron that doubled around his minute waist like an over-pocketed mini-skirt, then stuck an open palm out to Spencer, who’d been manning the cash box. “Beer money, please.”
“‘Bout time,” Claudia chimed in. She’d been standing in the puddle of shade under the umbrella that kept the sun from cooking the meat while she prepped it for the grill, but she also clocked in at two-ninety-five—she would have been hot even if she wasn’t slaving away in a barbecue pit at one-thirty in the afternoon on the Hottest Sunday in History.
“Fine,” Spencer said, fishing a twenty out of the front pocket of his own apron and slapping it into Carter’s eager mitt. “But bring big ones.”
Carter tsked. “You and that one-track mind.”
Spencer affixed a faux scowl to his face and pointed over Carter’s head, across the park to the beer booth. “Go. When you come back, I’ll take the grill for a while.”
“Thanks, Boss.” And off Carter flounced. He bopped through the crowd, his bottle-blond Mohawk rotating like a radar dish as he ogled every male of the species that crossed his path. Out of the corner of his eye, Spencer was pretty sure he saw the middle-aged bald dude at the rib joint across the path flailing his hands and twisting his hips in an unflattering impression of Carter, but he let it slide. It was Pride, for one thing; he could have been mocking any one of a hundred mincing passersby. More to the point, Spencer realized he had probably imagined the rudeness, merely one of several unseemly qualities he had attributed to the oaf since he’d started setting up his annoyingly competitive stall that morning. It’s not like Spencer thought he was the only grizzled prospector who’d ever set out to find his fortune grilling meat for money in the summertime, and he knew his secret-recipe ribs were unbeatable, but it would have been nice if the Pride planning committee could have separated the two barbecue booths by more than the length of a side of beef.
Plus Spencer thought it was kind of weird that, according to the numerous banners hanging from the booth’s white tent, Adam’s Rib seemed to be affiliated with a church. He was from here; naturally he knew that Colorado Springs was an aggressively conservative burg, and one peppered with “proudly Christian” businesses. You just didn’t see a ton of them hawking their inventory—or their ideology—at Pride.
He knew, too, that, while they were often conflated in contemporary gay-rights dialogue, “Christian” and “homophobic” weren’t synonyms. Some of my best friends are Christians, he mused with a smirk. And while the middle-aged bald dude who seemed to be the boss/dad/owner across the way gave the distinct impression of being uncomfortable in the midst of all this unharnessed gayness, Spencer suspected the hot fatty he had manning his grill was right at home among homos.
Father and son, Spencer figured. The kid outweighed Daddy Dearest by an easy buck and a half, and had a gorgeous head of sunshiny hair, but otherwise they looked exactly alike. Same sleepy eyes, same turned-up nose. Same square shoulders, but where the dad tapered in, Sonny spread out just the way Spencer liked ‘em. On the right guy, sure, the bowling-ball gut had its charms, but this guy was all gooey melted middle. His heavy spare tire overflowed his wide, wobbly hips, but the globular shelf of his ass jutted rather than slumped—it had been a while, but once upon a time he’d been a jock. Baseball, Spencer guessed, gauging the solidity of his stout thighs. His T-shirt—triple XL, Spencer’s practiced eye assumed—hugged his pendulous, pointed chest, the sleeves snug against the padded pink of his triceps; he probably didn’t even know about the thick slab of pudge slung across his lower back…
Spencer jumped when Carter, giggling, tapped his elbow with a plastic cup of cold beer. “Whatcha lookin’ at, Boss?”
“Shut up,” Spencer said. He gulped gratefully at the beer, then held the half-full cup against his forehead. “It is hot, huh?”
Carter laughed. They’d been closer than sisters for half their lives. He may not have shared Spencer’s ardent appreciation for the more malleable male physique, but he could certainly recognize his Rubenesque ideal when it waddled by. “Gee, yeah. I wonder why.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. It’s not like it’s a hundred and twenty degrees and I’m standing next to a pit of fire or anything.”
Carter took a slug of his beer. “That may be what’s got you hot, but it ain’t what’s got you bothered.”
“No. What’s got me ‘bothered’ is you work-shirking that grill.”
Carter pouted with a stomp of his dainty, huarached foot. “You promised!”
Spencer exaggerated his frown. “I was kind of hoping you’d forget that.”
Claudia slid a row of ribs off a huge cookie sheet onto the grill and slathered them with a coat of Spencer’s secret vinegar sauce, setting them a-sizzle in a huge burst of smoke.
“I know Spencer’s been keepin’ an eye on that big fella over there at Church Meat,” she said, quaffing from the beer Carter had brought her. “And I know this isn’t the kind of ‘bothered’ you’re talking about, but what bothers me?”
Spencer and Carter both gave her their attention, Carter with a little nod into his beer. Go on.
And so she did. “What bothers me is the way his daddy—don’t you think that’s probably his daddy? The boss-lookin’ guy over there? Like, how homophobic are you gonna act at Pride? Hate me, hate my money, I say. I’ve been watching him. Told this one couple to quit holding hands, keeps making these faces, like he can’t believe his eyes, right? ‘Everyone’s gay here!’ Like, did they make some kind of wrong turn trying to find the church picnic? Look. Look!”
She gestured with her beer to the rival booth, where the bald dude was fiddling with a hand-lettered sign. Claudia squinted to read it. “Buy Three, Get One Free,” she said, although Spencer and Carter could read it themselves easily enough. All day both barbecue booths had been selling their ribs three-for-six-bucks, which Spencer figured was reasonable. His food had nothing to fear from a little competition. But freebies were hard for festival-goers to resist. Claudia let fly a derisive snort and kept reading. “‘Save your money and your soul.’ And he even drew a little cross. Well, a big cross. Cuz what, you eat there, you get a ticket into Heaven? Admit One?”
“That does seem a little heavy-handed,” Spencer agreed. “And if I don’t get into Heaven? What if there is no Heaven? Can I get my money back?”
“I got this,” Carter assured them. He leaned out over the banner-bedecked folding table that served as their front counter and started calling into the crowd. “Step right up, hungry friends, and get your Bone Lickers barbecue. Your soul won’t need saving,” he hollered, gesturing towards Adam’s Rib and their flimsy 8½x11 promotional piece. “One bite of a Bone Licker and you’re in Heaven already.”
“I’d lick your bone!” some bro in a baseball cap called out as he passed by.
“Cash only,” Carter retorted, miming stuffing a cash tip into an imaginary bra.
He went on, like a tiny carnival barker, and a line began to form. The mob didn’t exactly swarm over the park to clamor for meat, but Carter was a born entertainer and an insatiable attention whore, and he easily managed to turn more than one hungry head.
“C’mon over here, boys,” he hollered to a passing bear/cub couple. “Hold hands all day long at Bone Lickers.” He waggled his eyebrows at the daddy bear. “Hey, if you want, you can hold my—”
“Carter!”
“Sorry, Boss. What’ll it be, boys?”
Daddy dug out his wallet, and cubby ordered up big. Spencer turned to the grill with
a shrug. If they were gonna line up to buy his barbecue, he figured he didn’t much care what went on across the aisle. He loaded flat-bottomed paper boats with ribs and laid heat-split sausages in their buttered buns as Carter called out order after order, and Claudia kept pace, sending up a wall of smoke with every slab she plopped on the grill. When Spencer turned to slide another pile of meat across the counter, he glanced across the way, just because Chubby on the grill was the hottest guy on hand and he had to look at something, but he didn’t see the need to worry about their churchy giveaway. He couldn’t shake the impression that the bald dude was mocking Carter’s mannerisms, but what could you do about a thing like that? Spencer certainly wasn’t going to meet the dude on the middle school playground where he’d apparently left his brain, and why should he? He’d never managed to take “You’re gay!” as an insult. Even when he was on the middle school playground it had confounded him; nobody ever snarled “You have brown hair,” which he figured was a quality over which he had about as much control. More, during his early days as a platinum blond. And ridiculing Carter for acting queeny seemed especially pointless—it was the kid’s stock in trade. If their fifteen-year friendship had taught him nothing else about Carter, he had certainly learned that the number of gay guys who were able to resist his impish allure was scant, regardless of what he was hawking.
But the dude—who had to be in his fifties, if his thirtysomething son had anything to say about it—was determined to kick sand in someone’s face. When this latest rush died down and it was Spencer’s turn to run for beer, the dude sneered at him, pretending to read his orange work T-shirt. “‘Bone Lickers’?” He struck that perfect bully balance between an I’m talking to myself tone and Yeah, I’m talking to you volume. “Might as well just call it ‘Pervs’ and be done with it. Or ‘Sickos.’ Least people’d know what they’re getting.”
Spencer counted to three. He was twenty-seven years old. He was a full grown man minding his business. There was nothing to be gained by engaging some creep on such a juvenile level. He understood this even as he whirled around. Feeling protective of his business, and protective of darling Carter—who could handle himself, Spencer knew from experience, but come on, it was like picking on a Smurf—he stalked up to the rival stall.
“Dude, what is your problem?!” The prick made an innocent-victim face and made a show of looking about. Moi? Now that he was fired up, though, Spencer was undeterred. “You know you’re at Gay Pride, right? What, did you sign up on accident?” Spencer wondered if the chubby son would step in, maybe help his dad realign his perspective, but it looked like maybe it was his break time, too—he was nowhere in sight. This pissed Spencer off even more: Now I have to do this when I could be hitting on the hottest guy here in the beer line? Unacceptable! “I notice you’re not too disgusted by these queers to take their money.”
The bald dude shrugged. “Everybody has the right to quality meat,” he said.
“Why don’t you leave that to me?” Spencer said. To the five or six people who’d gathered ‘round the early signs of an Us vs. Them conflict, Spencer said, “If it’s barbecue you’re looking for and you’d rather get it from a gay business than from this homophobe, go see my little buddy Carter over there at Bone Lickers. He’ll hook you up and I guarantee he’s the gayest guy here.”
“So what, you’re just gonna stand here and poach customers?” the bald dude asked. “So you’re a pervert and an enemy of the free market; why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Hey, I’m great with the free market,” Spencer said. “I’m gonna kick your economic ass in the free market today. Not everybody wants Weird Religious Guilt as their side order.”
“Yeah? Well, not everybody wants Tinkerbell in a tank top handling their meat, either.”
Spencer stifled a laugh, thinking, You’d be surprised. “Is that why you’re giving your shit away?” Spencer asked, gesturing to the magic markered Get One Free promotion. “Cuz your food’s so much better?”
A compact woman in a paisley-patterned jumpsuit lugging a giant canvas tote and next year’s iPad inserted herself bodily between Spencer and the bald dude, melodramatically sniffing the smoke-tinged air. “Is that a rivalry I smell?” she asked with a cheerleader lilt.
“What?” Spencer asked, startled. Where’d you come from?
“Who are you?” the bald dude barked, apparently taken equally unawares.
“Francesca Marconi-Hollenbeck,” she announced. Business cards had magically appeared at her fingertips, and she offered one to each agitated meat merchant.
“Yum!TV,” Spencer and the bald dude read aloud in confused unison. Spencer’s anger was not yet spent, and he felt it thrumming through his body in search of another outlet, Reading a Homophobe the Riot Act having been suddenly and somewhat oddly blocked off.
“Yeah, so?” the bald dude said.
Francesca Marconi-Hollenbeck was unflustered, as if she busted up brouhahas on a fairly regular basis. “We’re a new cable food channel,” she said. “I’m the programming director,” she went on, oblivious to the evident lack of recognition, “and I’m the producer of a show called Crosstown Smackdown, which I basically just watched you two audition for. Spoiler alert: Nailed it!” She elbowed Spencer conspiratorially in the ribs and offered them both a grin as if their Hollywood dreams had just come true. “See, it’s pretty much a cook-off between two businesses from the same town, whose specialty of the house is the real sock-knocker? You know? We want to do a summertime show—exactly this sort of thing: festival-style barbecue, shoot it in a park, all very watermelon and Fourth of July. You know, lots of establishing shots of people pushing strollers and eating corn on the cob?
“I’ve been strolling around, I noticed you’re both pretty proud of your ribs. Then you put out your snarky little sign here, ‘Save your soul,’ obviously a dig at the Determined Gay Underdogs. Simultaneously campy and rude—pure gold! I’m telling you, you just wrote half my voice-over. And the whole Christians-versus-Gays thing is very now. Last summer it would have been very uncouth to put it on TV, next summer it’ll be Snooze City—I’m going to my cousin Marcia’s lesbian wedding next month. In Salt Lake City of all places,” she said with an eye roll. And I don’t have to tell you, her tone implied: once Cousin Marcia jumps on a trend, you can bet it’s on its last legs. “She’s marrying an electrician. Wendy. We love her. A huge step up from Carolyn, Lord knows.”
“Are you making a show about it?” Spencer found himself asking.
“I wish! We were going to, but the whole thing went off without a hitch. The cake, the caterer—nobody even flinched. It was all ‘Congratulations’ this and ‘half-price hydrangeas for the centerpiece’ that. Nobody’s gonna watch that. Oof, I’m bored just talking about it. But this,” she said, opening her arms, then snapping, bringing everybody’s focus back to the matter at hand. “Obvious yet organic conflict, dramatic setting, what with the purple mountains majesty…”
She fished around in her canvas tote, shortly withdrawing two clipboards, each with a small stack of papers fluttering under the clip. “Please say yes,” she said, handing a clipboard to each man.
“What, today?” Spencer asked. It was pushing three o’clock. They’d be done for the day in three hours; less, if they kept selling like they were. He had sauce all down the front of his shirt, and he hadn’t trimmed his beard in weeks. TV?
“No, no. Next Saturday. We’ve got a park all picked out, over by the Air Force Academy, visually arresting, all that. We’ll set it up—his booth, your booth, the judges in between, spectators in the bleachers, the wholesome families on this side, the boys in cheerleader skirts on the other. Can you just see it? Churchy’s an instigator, you get riled—it’s too perfect.”
“Let’s do it,” the bald dude crowed, making a point of signing with a flourish. “I’ll beat this guy’s gay meat any day, and I’d love to prove it on TV.”
“Wow.” Francesca’s eyes bugged in triumph. “The writers are gonn
a be able to go on vacation during this episode.”
“I don’t know…” Spencer was flummoxed. He did not ‘get riled.’ Okay, sometimes he did, but the bald dude had been acting like a tool. He’d had every right to get riled, but the link between that and two seconds later being coerced into signing on to an episode of a reality TV show he’d never heard of felt awfully tenuous. Francesca Marconi-Hollenbeck was waving pens around, eager to “Make this happen!” But Spencer felt too off-kilter to be signing anything.
“Carter,” he called out. “Come here for a sec?” He told Francesca, “I need to run this by my team.”
“Oh, is he your partner? That’s too adorable. He’s ratings dynamite!”
“Yeah, well…” He knew when she said ‘partner,’ she meant ‘romantic,’ which Carter had never been and, bless his little hummingbird metabolism, never would be. He wasn’t technically a ‘partner’ in the business, either, but he was vital to keeping it going—cheerfully volunteering to work without financial remuneration more frequently than Spencer wished was necessary, for example—and Spencer couldn’t remember any decision he’d made about Bone Lickers—starting with its name, Carter’s idea—without at least bouncing it off his oldest friend.