Downtown in 'Shit City'.

I’d posted an ad for a “discrete guy,” as everyone in town called it, and I received this message: “Have a lot of Siamese twins been writing to you? Discrete is singular and discreet is the closet, dickwad.” Not promising, but he had blond hair, which I liked. The auto-signature read “Ashley Conrad, Art Dept.” My reply went unanswered, so I answered an email from this Navy kid who came right over and played around till midnight, when he left for his submarine. At that point I wrote a new ad for a “discreet guy” and the first invitation came from Ashley.

I drove to a bungalow where a fey, asymmetrical man of about thirty lay on a couch, an empty martini glass in his hand. He motioned sloppily for me to sit; when I did, he closed his eyes, having already passed out. The blond in his hair had come from a dye. I headed home to sleep. The next morning, when I awoke, he’d written, “I had a good time with you. Will you meet me at Domo at seven?”

It was half past six when I headed downtown. While I waited I used my phone to look Ashley up and learn that he was a performance artist trying to raise awareness of “the fight for gay civil rights.” In one project he’d taken photos of men as they left certain down-low bars and then he’d posted the pictures. That made me nervous, and I was relieved to realize after a while that he was standing me up. I wandered to the river and watched sludge float by. The sailors’ name for this place was Shit City, which is why I was here. Out west I’d read it was the ugliest place in America. The aspen groves had made me feel like I was choking. A phone call woke me out of my daydream. “Change of plans,” Ashley told me; “Meet me at the corner of Monticello and Market.”

The Norva. photo Jeffrey Diener

“I’ve never eaten there,” I said.

“It’s Buju Banton tonight at the Norva.”

“Like I said, I’ve never been.”

“Are you retarded? Do you live in a cave? We’re protesting the concert. Are you straight? Haven’t you heard of ‘Boom Bye Bye?’”

After he hung up, I searched for it on my phone and was soon listening to a catchy reggae song sung in a deep, throaty voice. Boom bye bye to di batty bwoy head! Rude bwoy no promote no nasty man dem haffi dead! I skimmed through an article; apparently these lyrics were the object of some controversy. I called Ashley back and said, “We had a date.”

“Do you hate yourself? This could be huge for me, and I have a flask.”

I considered what I’d learned about his art and decided this had been his plan all along. It was time to leave. On the way back to my car, I had to pass the protest, a sad little crowd of old men and lesbians who stood meekly along the sidewalk holding rainbow flags. I walked faster, but suddenly Ashley was jogging across the street toward me. “New plan,” he said after kissing my cheek. “I’ll get Buju high, thus convincing him he likes us. It’ll make me famous!”

“You think a reggae singer doesn’t have weed?”

“Crack, dumbass.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’ll say, hey Buju, wanna smoke crack?”

“Buju,” I repeated, noticing that none of the media was around to cover the protesters.

“It’s Jamaican for ‘breadfruit,’” he said admiringly. “There’s this dealer back in Coinjock I used to fuck, this straight guy I owe money to.”

Inside the theater there was a roar from the audience. Ashley took a swig from his flask, grimaced, and wiped his mouth. “Wallace will cut your balls off if he thinks we’re dating. Is this a date?”

“I thought we were meeting for dinner.”

“Oh, have you eaten? Crack works better when you’re hungry. Me, I was dumb enough to get a burger.”

He offered me the flask again, then tipped it bottoms-up and let the last dregs drip into his mouth. “Ashley, I might leave,” I said. He shook his head and presented me with his bank card.

“The PIN’s 7777. Withdraw the maximum daily limit, then drive it to the Bier Garten in Portsmouth.”

“Through the tunnel.”

“Babe, I promised him five hundred bucks, and I’ll be working Buju.”

Maybe the babe was what did it, I thought as I drove home. The rest of it had been bad enough, but I doubt I’d have stolen his debit card if he hadn’t rubbed it in by calling me babe. I guess he’d perceived my dream of having someone to come home to. I figured this was what artists did. I withdrew five hundred dollars of his money, went home, and offered three escorts a hundred apiece to come over. Each was content in his body and none was ashamed of himself. Here is what I hate about cities: people are so open that to hide makes me appear weak rather than strong. The notion that I should be out, however, makes sense only if other out men are real. Usually their self-righteousness gives them away. There’s a subtlety to real people. Take Wendy: her reality was why I was so afraid of her. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the world existed before I arrived in it, or let me put it this way: when I was sixteen, after my folks died, a shirtless kid in a Camaro passed me on the highway as if I wasn’t there. I had to make him notice. I sped up to a hundred, drew even. He glanced over, grinning, then looked ahead of us, where I was about to hit an RV. That RV was God yelling You fag. Careening toward the jersey wall, I promised to believe in him if he let me live. I hit the concrete, coasted to a stop. When I got out, trembling, there wasn’t a scratch. Not for years would I learn the meaning of the word solipsist. Apparently, others who suffer from the belief are as ashamed of it as I. Life goes badly enough sooner or later that most lose faith. Ashley’s calling me babe should have had that effect on me, but it only heightened my sense of why the world had been made: to taunt me, to make me feel as demeaned as possible.

I paid my visitors, saw them out, and returned to the Norva, where protesters were being overwhelmed by concertgoers who poured out of the venue dressed in the colors of Jamaica’s flag. Ashley stood at the curb with a tall Caribbean man nearly twice my size. As I approached him, an older gay couple did too and said, “He’s not part of the tour.”

“You mean Major?” said Ashley.

“He didn’t get off the bus.”

“Should we beat these people up?” asked Ashley, grinning, before breaking into song: Boom bye bye to di batty bwoy head! Then he motioned for Major to join in, which Major did, and the couple turned away, giving up. That was when Ashley spotted me. “Finally,” he said, “let’s get high.”

“I don’t have the stuff.”

“You left it in your car?”

“The guy went back home for it.”

Ashley gurgled like he was choking. “You gave Wallace my money?” he said to Major, as if he wanted Major to beat me with a bat. Maybe that was where batty boy came from.

“Let’s go talk to Buju,” said Major, pointing to a bus whose nose was peeking out from behind the Norva. “Just us, not your friend.” Ashley nodded. As he prepared to prance happily away, I asked myself why I’d pinned hopes on him. The answer was simple: to make myself known. There was no discretion in him, only discreteness. But that lack of discretion was what made him unbearable, I realized now. Boom bye bye to my dream. Five sailors in their dress whites were coming down the road, and they must have heard my next words, which told Ashley he was a worthless piece of shit.

“You said you owed him the money,” I went on. He didn’t or couldn’t respond. The Navy guys stood in a broken star watching me tell him he was a faggot who ought to die. He believed I’d really paid his friend. People believed me when I lied. Boom bye bye, I said, punching him. He fell backward into Major’s arms. “Get away,” he shrieked up at me, and I said I’d be glad to, and said “Have fun with Breadfruit” and crossed the street to my car.

At home I lay in bed trying to count the men I’d been with. A cook at work had recently asked how many chicks have you fucked? When I said three hundred, he threw a baguette at me as if that was a high number, but change girls to people and it was in the thousands. I’d never had so much as a second date. I fell asleep and dreamed I lived in a cabin in Colorado, but the wife and child there weren’t mine. Those had died of AIDS-related pneumonia. These new ones knew could see I’d done to the old ones, so they kept me locked inside a bubble. Through it I could see an aspen grove, and I asked if I could go walking there. My wife shook her head. Aspens were connected by their roots, she said, and if I infected one, it would destroy them all. I clawed at the oily sheen of my bubble until I was overheating. This set off an alarm, which was my phone. I bolted awake and answered it, and Ashley said, “Wallace will kill me if you don’t drive to Coinjock with another five hundred.”

“Don’t ever call me again. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Babe, he’s high on crystal with a gun to my head.”

He was having himself yet another laugh, I told myself. Maybe he wanted to watch the Jamaicans gang up on me for revenge. “Don’t call me babe.”

“You’ve got my card,” he sobbed, after which I heard a lash fall on someone’s skin. A man in the distance screamed in pain. I reached to the nightstand for my wallet: there was Ashley’s ATM card, and there he was telling me, in a timbre between a wail and a whisper, “If you do it I’ll be your boyfriend.”

After that the line went dead, and I started hearing a lot of voices telling me a lot of things. I heard that I’d killed plenty of people already, that one more wouldn’t hurt, and then I heard Ashley repeat his last wish. I gathered my clothes and heard that all desire is born of suffering, which Buddhists believe is the other way around. I heard my wife ask what I hated about romance. Nothing, I told her, there’s nothing I hate. She knew I felt sorry. I heard her tell me a long time ago that belief can be transformative, that prayers have power, that that’s what it means to stand porter at the door of your thoughts.

photo Katie King

I got in my car and headed for the tunnel. I sped south through it and followed the signs onto the Chesapeake Expressway. It was one in the morning, and a crescent moon was hooking itself at both ends into a black cloud. Just past the North Carolina line I pulled off at a gas station with a neon ATM sign. Inside it a decrepit clerk stood watching some black teenagers shop for beer. I put the card in the ATM and asked for five hundred. Over the whirring I heard the kids whispering, and then one gestured toward me while the clerk stood motionless like a wax doll. “He won’t care,” said one, which was when I knew they were on their way home from the Buju Banton show and needed a batty boy to beat up.

The gears of the machine were still spinning as I gauged the distance to my car. I’d left it unlocked; I would jump in, turn the key. But before I could stuff the cash into my wallet, the tallest kid lumbered over, both hands in his pockets, and said, “Will you buy us beer?”

Confused, I stammered “I” and looked at the screen: Available balance $1.04. “I’m just eighteen,” he said, slipping me ten dollars.

I might have gushed forth with an apology, but he and his friends were already walking out. I watched them gather by the gas pumps at an old sedan, and then I bought a case of beer, took it to them along with their change, and hurried away.

The limited-access part of the highway ended after that, and I entered a town. At some point the road split and I took the right fork. Later I couldn’t recall having seen a road sign. My gas gauge was nearly on the ‘E,’ and I felt dumb for not filling up. I thought maybe I should turn around and look for a sign. This was supposed to be a peninsula on which a single highway headed south. It reminded me the time I’d driven out of St. Paul. I’d thought I was bound east out of St. Paul when I saw Canadian Border 50 Miles. I had sat beside the road staring at that sign, trying to weep, thinking my mistake made sense only if I could cry over it.

The next thing, I was waking out of sleep, my car stalled on the road shoulder. The dashboard said three o’clock and the engine was running. Only one headlight shone. I switched to my brights but it was the same. I checked my phone: no service. The last thing I recalled was wondering if I’d made a wrong turn. Maybe Ashley had roofied the flask, but had I even drunk from it? I couldn’t remember. The needle now touched the ‘E.’ I drove onto the road and turned the radio to seek. For a while the digits raced across my display, 87.5 to 107.9 and back in a loop. Just as I reached to switch the band to AM, the dial stopped. Through the static of 98.1 came a chorus of children’s voices singing their ABCs. It was odd, but better than nothing, I thought at first, but then I realized the children were off-key and out of tune and, more disturbingly, singing the wrong melody.

I slowed down to listen more carefully. There were more boys than girls, I decided, all singing heartily, with all their might. Just as they reached Z, a possum ran into the beam of my headlight, froze, and was crushed beneath my front wheel. The children wrapped their way back around to A. They sounded about eight or nine years old. I was still trying to place the tune. It was as familiar as if I’d just been singing it: a folk song, maybe, something from my childhood. I could smell the pungent odor of a salt marsh, and I rolled down the window. The bridge should have started by now. Soon I would drive straight off the edge of this spit of land. The kids were on their third time through the alphabet. There were no girls after all, I realized; it was a boys’ chorus or a chorus of eunuchs. On ‘M,’ at the height of a rising melody, it finally hit me: the song they sang was “Boom Bye Bye.”

photo flickr MacKensie Cornelius

I stepped hard on the gas, speeding past what I guessed were tobacco fields. “Em… en… OH/ PEE CUE ARR ess tee you vee.” Without a doubt it was that song; still, to be sure, I sang its title phrase along with the children’s “dubya ex WYE/ ZEE AY BEE” and found that they matched up perfectly.

The needle had dipped a millimeter below the ‘E.’ My only option now was to reach Ashley and siphon gas. I imagined a dungeon beneath a house where these children beckoned me with their voices. They moved into their one-two-threes. The tempo slowed as the count rose. There came to be more static. They had reached fifty-seven when the dial suddenly raced ahead to 101.3. Now a man was complaining angrily in a foreign tongue as a woman fussed back at him. They sounded eastern European, maybe Slavic. The fight reached a crescendo and died down; then the two made up and were soon soothing one another with soft syllables. There was a word like rikora I kept hearing. The man said something brief, in low tones, then suddenly the woman was shouting. I pictured her frothing at the mouth as she spoke that word rikora. She fell silent again. As my headlight dimmed, she gasped for air. The man’s hands were around her neck, I felt sure of it. I was hurtling down an empty highway in the dark, gripping the wheel, as she said, “Help me,” in English, like a mouse, just before the signal went to static.

Breathing hard, I put in a CD, but it whirred until the player spat it back out. The radio came on again. Now I heard exhausted breathing, as if the man had just sprinted around a track. When the breath calmed, he spoke, quiet but determined. It was obvious now that he wasn’t fluent in the language he was using. He sounded relieved, as if he was coming clean after long years on the run. Immediately I felt sure he knew everything. How I’d gotten a girl pregnant in Colorado. I had a ten-year-old son in Colorado I’d never seen, and this guy knew I’d done it again in St. Paul. I had a seven-year-old daughter in Detroit because her mother had moved there from St. Paul, and until yesterday I hadn’t known discrete from discreet. I’d believed Ashley could help me come out. I was trying to improve not for my own sake but because I pictured my daughter falling for one of me; or my son doing to girls as I’d done. The radio was teaching me how it felt to confess. This man had strangled his wife to prove a point, and he meant for me to absorb it. Just as he was about to speak in English, I changed the band. “The mandatory evacuation takes effect at sunrise,” said a woman on 540 AM with a lilting accent. “Contraflow has gone into effect on all area highways.”

“Are you talking to me?” I cried out, as she kept on: “Follow the evacuation routes fifty miles inland. This is a volatile storm whose surge is expected to reach twenty feet, and anyone who lingers will be—”

I opened my mouth to scream, scream until my throat gave out, when I saw a mailbox glowing with the street number I’d written down. I had arrived. At that moment every blood vessel in me doubled in size, because I knew, turning onto the oyster road, that I was Ashley’s latest piece of art. I wasn’t sure how he’d manipulated the radio, but he had, and somewhere in my car a camera was filming me. A new exhibit would soon be online. Ashley can help me come out, I’d thought, and indeed such a thing would happen. I sat still, full of loathing, full of shame. Did he think my kids wished never to have been born? That his piece would climax when I pissed my pants in fear? That I would thank him?

A light at the end of the drive illuminated a jacked-up trailer with pussy-willows to either side. This was an isthmus between two marshes, a place isolated enough for me to exact some revenge. I parked and climbed three cinder-block steps to a porch, prepared for the men inside to be high and helpless. Pounding on the door, I planned the kick I’d land. When I noticed a camera rigged up on the roof, I shouted at it, “Open up.”

From the yard behind me came a creak: the door of a detached garage, swinging slowly open. A lanky, gray-haired man came toward me, staring at me with sunken eyes. “Where’s Ashley?” I called.

“In there.” He pointed at the trailer. “Got my money?”

“Open the door.”

“It’s unlocked. Do it yourself.”

I turned the knob and walked into a musty room in whose darkness I heard a man saying “If she’s alive, she’s safe… for a while.” It wasn’t Ashley, whose voice was unctuous, whiny; this voice sounded like John Wayne’s. The man I assumed was Wallace came up behind me and flicked a light switch, illuminating Ashley’s prone body. He lay on the floor, his cheek pressed against a rug that was soaked with blood. My first thought was that this was really too much. “Get up, you mother…” I began, but I trailed off. There was a crack pipe in his outstretched hand, which pointed toward a TV whose screen was filled with the face of John Wayne. “An Injun will chase a thing til he thinks he’s chased it enough,” said John Wayne, “and then he quits. Same when he—”

The TV went silent. Wallace was holding the remote. “Lucky my brother was the one killed him,” he said, his eyes looking in two directions. “Have to kill you too if it’d been me.”

One of the eyes perceived me gaping in sheer panic. “Don’t worry; Walt’s took off with that Haitian.” His other eye watched me vomit onto the pool of blood. “Told him on the phone what would happen, but he wanted to get high.”

“If you give me some gas I’ll leave,” I blurted. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Without a word he went back out to the garage, where he found a gas can and a hose. He dipped one end into the gas tank of his car, handed me the other, and said, “Let’s see how good you can suck.”

I got down on my knees and sucked. I figured I would die sucking that hose. Cameras were filming me, proving what I had come to, and soon an audience would see—but that made no sense. The gas trickled into my mouth and I spat it out, stopped the hose, and directed the flow into the can. “Thank you,” I said, gasping.

“Guess you wonder why my eyes look like this. Guess you think I’m high.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” I managed to say.

He held up some pepper spray. “Always figured this stuff would hurt, but I’ll tell you what, it woke me up.”

I staggered to my feet and poured the gas into my tank. “I charge two fifty a gallon,” he said, “and that was two gallons.”

I shoved five hundred dollars into his hands. “This is four,” he said without counting it.

“I swear it’s five.”

“You and Ashley are the same.”

“No, we’re not,” I begged, as he reached for a bulging pocket. “Please, I’ll find more. Take both our bank cards. They’re yours. Take everything. We’re different.”

My eyes were clenched shut as I promised him my pride, my money, whatever was wanted. He could bury the body; I swore never to tell. I didn’t care about Ashley. I cared only about myself. I swore as much to Wallace, and it was no lie. He hadn’t budged. With nothing more to promise, I sought through my mind for something to cherish: some past lover or friend, perhaps my daughter or son. I couldn’t die without holding something in mind. I squeezed my eyes shut and counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, on up to seven, when a mosquito bit me and I opened my eyes to see the trailer door closing shut. Beyond it a radian of blue light glowed in the east. “That was everything,” I said as the door latched, “I’m done. I don’t have anything else.”