"Lou," I said, helpless to reply. "Lou. Fuck off. "
His eyes had the light again. "Careful, Rich. "
"Lou. We are with you guys twenty-two hours a day. Can you really not do without us for the other two? What is wrong with a little privacy, Lou?"
"There is no privacy here," he said. "The cameras pick up just about every word. Now look. I took on a responsibility. I took on the responsibility of getting all of us through this together, show that there is a place in the revolution for good gay men. I have to know what is going on in the Station. I don't know what you guys are saying to each other up there, I don't know what the cameras are hearing. Now you lied to me, Rich. You didn't know Royce before he came here, did you. We don't know who he is, what he is. Rich, is Royce even gay?"
"Yes! Of course!"
"Then how does he fuck?"
"That's none of your business. "
"Everything here is my business. You don't fuck him, he doesn't fuck you, so what goes on?"
I was too horrified to speak.
"Look," said Lou, relenting. "I can understand it. You love the guy. You think I don't feel that pull, too, that pull to save them? We wouldn't be gay if we didn't. So you see him on the platform, and he is very nice, and you think, Dear God, why does he have to die?"
"Yes. "
"I feel it! I feel it too!" Lou made a good show of doing so. "It's not the people themselves, but what they are that we have to hold onto. Remember, Rich, this is just a program of containment. What we get here are the worst, Rich, the very worst — the sex criminals, the transsexuals, the media freaks. So what you have to ask yourself, Rich, is this: what was Royce doing on that train?"
"Same thing I was. He got pulled in by mistake. "
Lou looked at me with a kind of blank pity. Then he looked down at the ground. "there are no mistakes, Rich. They've got the police files. "
"Then what was I doing on the train?"
Lou looked back up at me and sighed. "I think you probably got some of the women very angry with you. There's a lot of infighting, particularly where gay men fit in. I don't like it. It's why I got you out. It may be something similar with Royce. "
"On the train because I disagreed with them?" Everything felt weak, my knees, my stomach.
"It's possible, only possible. This is a revolution, Rich. Things are pretty fluid. "
"Oh God, Lou, what's happening?"
"You see why we have to be careful? People have been burned in this station, Rich. Not lately, because I've been in charge. And I intend to stay in charge. Look. "
Lou took me in his arms. "this must be really terrible for you, I know. All of us were really happy for you, when you and Royce started. But we have to protect ourselves. Now let's just go back in, and ask Royce who and what he is. "
"What do you mean?"
"Just ask him. In front of the others. What he was. And not take no for an answer. " He was stroking my hair.
"He'll hate me if I do that!" I tried to push him away. He grabbed hold of my hair, and pulled it, smiling, almost as if he were still being sexy and affectionate.
"Then he'll just have to get over that kind of mentality. What has he got to hide if he needs privacy? Come on, Rich. Let's just get it over with. " He pulled me back, into the waiting room.
Royce took one look at us together as we came in, and his face went still, as if to say, "Uh-huh. This is coming now, is it? “His eyes looked hard into mine, and said, "Are you going to put up with it?" I was ashamed. I was powerless.
"Rich has a confession to make," said Lou, a friendly hand still on the back of my neck. "Don't you, Rich?"
They all seemed to sit up and close in, an inquisition, and I stood there thinking, Dear God, what do I do? What do I do?
"Rich," Lou reminded me. "We have to go through this. We need to talk this through. "
Royce sat there, on our bed, reclining, waiting.
Well, I had lied. "I don't really know who Royce is. We weren't lovers before. We are lovers now. "
"But you don't know what he was doing, or who he was, do you, Rich?"
I just shook my head.
"Don't you want to know that, Rich? Don't you want to know who your lover was? Doesn't it seem strange to you that he's never told you?"
"No," I replied. "We all did what we had to do before the revolution. What we did back then is not who we are. " See, I wanted to say to Royce, I'm fighting, see I'm fighting.
"But there are different ways of knuckling under, aren't there, Rich? You taught history. You showed people where the old system had gone wrong. You were a good, gay man. "
Royce stood up, abruptly, and said, "I was a prison guard. "
The room went cold and Lou's eyes gleamed.
"And there are different ways of being a prison guard. It was a detention center for juveniles, young guys who might have had a chance. Not surprisingly, most of them were black. I don't suppose you know what happens to black juvenile prisoners now, do you? I'd like to know. "
"Their records are looked at," said Lou. "So. You were a gay prison guard in charge of young men. "
"Is that so impossible?"
"So, you were a closet case for a start. "
"No. I told my immediate superior. "
"Immediate superior. You went along with the hierarchy. Patriarchy, I should say. Did you have a good time with the boys?"
"This camp is a hierarchy, in case you hadn't noticed. And no, I kept my hands off the boys. I was there to help them, not make things worse. "
"Helping them to be gay would be worse?" Every word was a trap door that could fall open. The latch was hatred. "Did you ever beat one of the boys up? Did you deal dope on the side?"
Royce was still for a moment, his eyes narrow. Then he spoke.
"About four years ago, me and the kids put on a show. We put on a show for the girls' center. The girls came in a bus, and they'd all put their hair in ringlets, and they walked into the gym with too much make-up on, holding each other's hands, clutching each other's forearms, like this, because they were so nervous. And the kids, the boys, they'd been rehearsing, oh, for weeks. They'd built and painted a set. It was a street, with lights in the windows, and a big yellow moon. There was this one kid, Jonesy. Jonesy kept sticking his head through the curtain before we started. ‘Hey everybody! I'm a star!'"
Royce said it again, softly. "Hey everybody, I'm a star. And I had to yell at him, Jonesy, get your ass off that stage. The girls sat on one side of the gym, and the boys on the other, and they smiled and waved and threw things at each other, like gum wrappers. It was all they had. "
Royce started to cry. He glared at Lou and let the tears slide down his face. "they didn't have anything else to give each other. The show started and one of the kids did his announcing routine. He'd made a bow tie out of a white paper napkin, and it looked so sharp. And then the music came up and one of the girls just shouted. ‘Oh, they're going to dance!' And those girls screamed. They just screamed. The boys did their dance on the stage, no mistaking what those moves meant. The record was ‘It's a Shame. '"
His face contorted suddenly, perhaps with anger. "And I had to keep this god-damned aisle between them, the whole time. "
"So?" said Lou, unmoved.
"So," said Royce, and gathered himself in. He wiped the moisture from his face. "So I know a lot about prisons. So, some of those kids are dead now. The boys and the girls wanted each other. That must be an ideological quandary for you, Lou. Here's a big bad guard stopping people doing what they want, but what they want to do is het-ero-sex-u-ality. " He turned it into a mock dirty word, his eyes round.