Ugly and Classy Guy in 2011
A story from the world of the novel I wrote. Will be paid-only until November 13!
consider this a sort of teaser trailer? Also I edited it since I first posted. Paid subscribers get early drafts… because you are special enough to see the bad version
I can’t believe the balls on this guy.
He can’t really expect me to wear this and be sober the whole night.
I’ve unzipped the torso-shaped bag on the hanger and draped it all nice on the bed because he’d been like, “oh, please, Mac, don’t show up all crinkled, it’ll look like shit in the photos,” and it’s funny he says that because Georgia already said I’d look like shit in the photos anyway because of my face and all its blemishes. She even offered me time with the makeup artist like it wouldn’t make my skin crawl to be painted.
I told her, “aren’t you paying extra for him to photoshop your baby bump anyway?”
She didn’t like that, and I thought that Danny might, but he didn’t like it either.
I thought it would happen slowly, like how you gotta come off opiates, but no. He didn’t let me have that, even. He wrenched himself away all at once. I hate how this suit feels on my skin. I want to peel it off the second I finally have it all the way on and am no longer distracted by all the pieces. I leave the hotel room and once I’ve closed the door and am heading for the elevator I realize I am walking around the same way a dog who doesn’t understand its shoes does. Big, unwieldy steps that make all my soft parts wobble.
The lobby smells like maple syrup, and I push the front door too aggressively when I should have pulled. I almost tumble down the front stairs of the building, resist the urge to take another bump, and get in the car. Speed’s not really a wedding drug, I don’t think.
I hate the venue he chose. It’s one of those places in denial. They built big white walls around the whole perimeter so you can see the sky but not the desolation around it, all the dusty abandoned Targets and Panera Breads and desert stretching out around the highways. Inside, they spent astronomical amounts of money on a really sad-looking lawn and some choice succulents that look sort of like fat bushes from afar. It’s pathetic. Accept that the world is changing in a perhaps unpleasant way (FOR YOU) and adapt. We’re animals. That’s what we’re supposed to do.
When I drive in, I say aloud to no one, “This is not adaptation.”
The gate screeches shut behind me. The sound of my tires crunching on the gravel is awful, very sharp and scratching on the inside of my ribcage. The sun doesn’t usually bother me much but today it’s beaming down from the middle of the sky all laser-sharp, thick and hot and sludgy. My hair is thinning enough that it starts to feel like the heat is boring a hole in the top of my skull.
I’m already sweating, so I’m not mad about the central air inside, but I think that is a weakness in me. I should get used to the heat, to the oppressive sun. There will be more of it every day, I’m told. More dust, more sun, more heat, more dryness.
A sharp-looking woman with fat eyebrows and a long torso appears, stares for a half-second at the cyst above my eyebrow I’ve spent the last three days fucking with, then says, “Name?”
“Danzig, Malcolm. I’m with the groom.”
“Upstairs to the left, don’t touch anything.”
“Fuck you too, honeybun.”
She turns around and scoffs. She touches her earpiece like a Fed and says, “okay, we’re all here, let’s get this going.” Her heels click very neatly on the marble tile as she walks away to go harass a cater-waiter or whatever her job is.
I knock on the wrong door at first, and one of Georgia’s tight-faced sisters opens it. She looks me up and down, straightens out her hideous pink dress, and says, “Danny’s the next one down,” and closes the door. It locks. I hear her say, “not one of them is cute, what the fuck, G?”
Danny’s getting straightened out by his brother Peter, and Peter is fucking gigantic so Danny looks like a kid when they’re standing next to each other. Danny grew wider, Peter grew taller. Peter played half-court basketball in the neighborhood with the other tall boys and Danny joined the football team. I was never much of an athlete. Someone told me hockey might be just violent enough for my tastes but the look of hot blood steaming on an ice rink does nothing for me. Another person said I’d be a great wrestler. In retrospect I think they may have meant that as a vaguely homophobic insult I was too young to understand. Either way I don’t need to use sport as en excuse to touch other men. I’m not a pussy like the rest of us.
Peter still hasn’t decided if he likes me or not, but that’s fair enough. When I first started hanging around he thought he could fuck with me because he was older and much bigger but I left a rat in his bed at least twice before I turned 14 and expanded vertically like a string bean. After that he never bothered. Mostly left the two of us alone to shoplift Vienna sausages from the gas station and beg the cute college girl at the counter for a pack of Marlboro 27’s. Peter did give me weed before Danny was ever brave enough to try it out, so I have to believe he doesn’t hate me too much. Though I suppose he’s never been chatty enough for me to have much of a sense of how he feels about my presence.
Peter’s face doesn’t change when he sees me, but Danny’s does. His mouth goes very flat and his ears turn red. I want to bite his earlobes when they’re all warm like this, but I’m not allowed to do that anymore. I have to exercise grown-up restraint, make sure my face and my body don’t erupt with the same liberty I’ve gotten used to.
Instead of anything going the way I hoped, all my carefully laid plans to behave tumble out the window onto the beige lawn outside.
Danny says, “Hey, Pete, would you mind giving me and Mac a minute, I gotta talk to him about something,” and Peter rolls his eyes because he’s always had a feeling, probably, but he knows it’s beyond his powers to do anything about. It’s beyond anyone’s powers. Danny is a force to be reckoned with. So Peter walks out with a cigarette in his mouth and when the door closes with a gentle, metallic ca-thunk Danny starts weeping and hyperventilating like he’s been holding it in for weeks. His breathing is wet, heavy. His mouth all full of saliva and anxiety.
“What the fuck?”
“Mac, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“What?”
Then in a move that knocks the wind out of me, he slams his whole body into mine and with his head shoved into the space between my shoulder and my clavicle he whispers, “I can’t do this without you,”
“I’m here, though, aren’t I? Come on, man, don’t be stupid.”
“No, I mean…” he sniffles.
I stare at the pile of flowers in the corner and try to peel my skin away from the fabric of my suit. I am not successful.
“What do you mean?”
“Can we still…”
He can never just say it. What a pussy.
“What? Still get each other off? Still fuck? You want to have your cake and eat it too?"
He doesn’t say anything, just digs the planes of his face harder into that soft part of my chest.
“You know I can’t fuckin’ stand her, but she’s not going to be your girlfriend anymore.”
“What difference does it make?”
“If that’s how you feel, why do all this?”
“She wants to do all this.”
“Oh, I know. But so do you.”
He doesn’t reply.
“I want kids, man.”
“You don’t need to be married to do that.”
“With her I do.”
“Right.”
He clenches my lapels in white-knuckled fists and I say, “don’t crinkle it, the photos,”
He kisses my neck. Says please let’s not change anything.
This time I don’t have anything to say about it.
He offers to suck me off like he’s signing a contract with it, but I tell him getting married with dickbreath suits him so he goes, “okay, maybe later.” I know he doesn’t mean it. It’ll happen when it happens. He just wants to be sure before he commits to anything that I am as morally bankrupt as I’ve always been, no matter how many times I’m pushed away. That if I hate him for this, I’ll eventually forget about it like I always do.
At the reception while Danny’s busy greeting ten thousand of Georgia’s equally redheaded relatives, Peter offers me some coke and to join him on the lawn for a spliff. I tell him yes, because a part of me feels like I owe him. I’m already decently drunk at this point, having bribed my way into triple pours on the lesser liquors I know the open bar has in abundance. I started off with Dubonnet and now I’m drinking what the 22-year-old bartender told me was a vermouth Long Island Iced Tea. I’m pretty sure she just made it up to get away with pouring six types of vermouth into a tall glass.
Peter and I sit at an ornate iron table outside, and while he pours his coke out into the mirror of a square compact he says, “Y’know, Mac, we’ve never talked about the elephant in the room. But I think between the three of us you’re probably the most likely to be open about it.”
I don’t have time to reply, because he goes, “You’re good at keeping his secrets. That’s important. Now more than ever.”
He dives into his line like a water buffalo diving into a lake. A slow-moving beast, a prey animal with a predatory body. If given the choice today, I’d probably try to fuck Peter instead. Something very attractive about a gentle giant. That’s not how it played out, though, and I don’t think he’s got even a mildly metrosexual bone in his body. He’s so straight he thinks Ryan Reynolds is hot. Some men just don’t have an eye for the real appeal of other men. It’s a shame.
He slides the compact across the table, presses his fingers against his nose cartilage, and digs in his breast pocket for his pack of cigarettes.
I snort my line, and I can tell it’s nicer coke than anything I’ve ever had before, but I suppose that makes sense because while I’ve never understood his job I know Peter makes a delightfully stable amount of money and is in a union.
I finally think of something to say, “I mean. He’s a hard guy to say no to,”
“Yeah, that’s why he’s taking the Muroverde job. Pretty sure he just busted his way into the management offices and talked his way into it.”
“Sounds like Danny.”
“I know this is unlike me, but can I ask what he wanted to talk to you about?” He lights the spliff, blows the ashes off the end, and leans backwards into the chair.
I cough, sniff, meet his eyes. I assume I’ll find something angry, or disappointed, or pitying in his gaze, but the way he’s looking at me is suffused with a very intense, friendly neutrality. He’s digging for this information anthropologically. No value judgment, no emotional stakes. Like Danny and I are apes in a cage. Like our behavior is so foreign and fascinating that it deigns observation for the sake of science.
Because I find this unusual and comforting at the same time, it’s very easy for me to tell him, “It’s kind of a long story but he, uh. He’s not trying to change the nature of our, uh, partnership. Association. Whatever.”
“Hm,” Peter passes me the spliff, and closes the compact before returning it to his breast pocket with the rest of his libations.
“Like I said, he’s hard to say no to.”
“He’s a grown man, he makes his own choices.”
I hand Peter the spliff, exhaling smoke when I say, “He’s always just going to do what he wants.”
“Mac, just remember to live your own life, too. That’s the best advice I can give you. Find something that’s only yours.”
“Jeez, dude, that’s kinda intense,” I laugh, because the intensity has changed colors and feels less scientific. I wonder if this is what it feels like to have a family.
“Danny always used to take my shit until you moved into the neighborhood, did you know that?” I shake my head. Peter laughs, but not like he finds anything about this especially humorous, “Then you came along and I guess he started taking your stuff instead. I don’t know if I ever said thank you. That kid drove me nuts until you showed up.”
“Oh. You’re welcome, I guess.” I take a noisy sip of my drink, and it tastes better now that the ice has melted a bit.
“What I’m trying to say is that Danny takes. It’s just how he is. Make sure you don’t let him take too much. That’s all.”
“Well, cheers to that, Pete!” I hold up my glass, he slams it against mine, and we smoke in silence for a little while.
Then, Peter jumps in his seat and goes, “Wait! I just learned this terminology. Who’s the top?”
“The… top?”
“Yeah, like, who fucks who?”
I laugh, because what a question. What a guy. I don’t think he hates me. I think I might like him more than Danny does.
“Who do you think fucks who?” I smirk, and Peter plays along, which makes me love him all the more. I have never felt less like an only child than I do right now.
“You fuck him, obviously.”
I snort, kick my feet out a bit, “What, ‘cause I’m taller?”
“No! You just got that swagger, I don’t know.”
“Ugh, not swag!” I look out behind Pete’s head at the white wall.
A pause where Peter re-lights the spliff that had gone out, takes a hit, and sighs, “Well? Was I right?”
“No comment.”
And then we both laugh like brothers. Or at least like how I think brothers are supposed to laugh with each other.
Peter and I hang out for long enough that we both force ourselves to grumble about needing to be seen amongst the people, so we split up to cover different chunks of the reception.
While I’m waiting for an amaro, Georgia’s sister who opened the door earlier stumbles in my direction and says, already ferociously drunk, “Hey. What’s with your attitude?”
“My attitude?”
“Why are you so mean to my baby sister?”
“I don’t know, because it’s fun.”
“You better stop!” She wobbles in my direction, pressing a French-manicured finger into my sternum.
“Why don’t you make me?”
I fuck her in some weird closet with my amaro clutched in my left hand, and manage to spill only a tiny bit on the corseted back of her dress. She makes very curious, yelping sort of noises, and I ask her more than once if she’s exaggerating, but she doesn’t say anything. When we’re done, Danny sees me walk out with her.
He’s sat next to a very happy-looking, fluffy, white Georgia. The DJ puts on Pretty Girl Rock, and all the sisters run to the dance floor to do something choreographed that captures everyone’s attention for just long enough. Danny gets up, corners me in a side room where the old men are smoking cigars. He grabs me by the arm, digging his nails into the soft flesh above my elbow. He says, “I fucking hate you, Mac. I hate you so much.”