“You and Jackie still on the outs?” he asks.
“In and out since nineteen ninety. But it’s fine. Shit. She came around last night for dinner and had the gall to ask me if I’d made a will yet! I told her what she could do with my dead body. I don’t give two fucks about any of the rest of it. She says she’s done with me, but I don’t believe it.”
Jackie is too scared and too dumb to ever really leave me. And I don’t have to tell you how that feels. ABBA stops and so does the fun. I shove through sweaty men to get back to my stool and of course some tanned, twinky otter has slipped onto it.
“Clear out, pretty boy.” I reach over him to grab my drink and my Luckys and he smirks at me.
“Anything for you, beautiful.” That smirk. That one the white boys use like a billboard advertising their fucking God-given right to make you eat shit.
“You goddamn asshole.” I put my finger right in his face. “Just because your frat kicked you out for being a fag doesn’t give you the right to talk to me that way. This is my bar. You think I’m going to let you talk to me that way in my bar?”
“It’s nobody’s bar anymore, bitch.” He snickers and turns his shit-eating grin at his pretty friends to make sure they’re all in on the joke.
“Now, honey.” Corky flags the bartender and points at Goofus the pretty hairless boy wonder. “Let’s just all be quiet and drink. Everyone gets a round on me. Same with you, Cheryl. Nobody’s fighting tonight.”
“Shit.” I light a Lucky and sit on the warm stool. “Not enough gin in the world, Corky.”
“No, there isn’t. But we can pretend.” His tiny blue eyes twinkle as he gazes over my shoulder around the bar. The man’s been tossed into paddy wagons, watched half his friends die, fucked dozens of boys he doesn’t love, become old and invisible to the community he’s given everything to, and yet here he is, eyes twinkling. What an asshole.
“Just what did you tell Jackie she could do with your dead body, Cheryl?” he asks, and there’s that damn twinkle. What the fuck is so funny about death?
“Shove it up her ass. And just what’s your plan, Corky?”
“I don’t know what the good Lord’s got in store for my body, but I know what I’m doing with my soul. Tonight. This is it.”
“What?” I tilt my head.
He reaches into his shorts and holds up a small, clear bottle full of what could be vodka but certainly isn’t. “Best shit you’ll ever have. You want to come with me?”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?” I set down my drink and take his out of his hand and set that down too. “Just what the fuck are you talking about?”
“This is it. Look around you, Cheryl.” He waves a fey hand at the sea of silver-haired men milling around in tight leather and jeans, half of them bare-chested with man-tits starting to sag. Among them are peppered dark and blond heads trolling for free drinks or trading sex for the drug du jour. “This is the ghost of Christmas future showing us the way it’s going to be, and honey, I’m not here for it. I have just loved this ride. Loved it even when I hated it. Loved it even when I got the clap from the love of my life. So tonight’s my wake, baby. Could be yours too!” He shakes his drink at me and finishes it, flags for another.
“You selfish, cowardly son of a bitch.”
He shrugs and pockets the vial. “Suit yourself. But I’m going out on a high.”
Well, that fixes it for the night. How the hell am I supposed to properly send off BJ’s when all I can think about is Corky’s dead body—
“Hey, you little twit.” I grab his arm before he can saunter off. “Where exactly are you going to carry out this ridiculous plan?”
“Center stage, baby, just like Ms. Wash. Civic Center Park. I’m leaving now and gracing every gay bar on Broadway with my presence on the way up. Last cocktail I’ll ever have at eleven, a little more of this and that,” he pats his pocket, “and I should be gone by the stroke of midnight. They say alcohol helps it along, so who knows. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?” He winks at me again.
“Stop winking, asshole, and just let me think. Good God.”
He doesn’t wink, but he does grin. “You believe in God, Cheryl? I do. Haven’t set foot in a Baptist church since nineteen seventy-five but Mama didn’t raise me to blaspheme. I can’t wait to meet my maker and party in heaven. Hell, I bet the drinks are free and the boys are clean!”
“You think your mama’s waiting for you up there, just sitting on a damn cloud knitting a scarf? You’re dumber than you look.”
“I don’t know about that. But don’t you want to see Kathy again?”
“Now don’t you dare bring her into this.” Like I hadn’t thought about Kathy the minute that man started talking about this nonsense. She’d been the only one I let stay with me, so she was the only woman who’d ever really left me, even if she didn’t have a choice about it. Missing Kathy made me want to believe in Sky Daddy big time. I slapped my face before things got out of hand.
“That’s just the thing though, isn’t it?” he continues. “I miss them all, girl. I miss them all. But I miss who I used to be most of all.”
Only a dumbass would argue with that. I thought about Kathy. Who she used to be, and the drunk khaki-coated Delta Tau Delta boy who ran her down, probably after he raped some girl. I thought about Jackie, whose husband beat her until she gave up men forever and stole part of her she’s never gotten back.
Most of all, sitting on that barstool, I thought about Faven, who never even got a fucking chance to be who she really was in the first place. How she laughed and ran through the stacks all summer and then stopped in the autumn. I thought about all the broken women of the world and who I had been before I’d opened my eyes and given myself a front-row seat to their pain.
“Corky, I take it back. You’re not a coward. You’re an asshole and you’re selfish, but you’re sure as shit not a coward.”
“Well, thank you, darlin’. It wasn’t my place to ask you to do it too. I’m ready to go, just not alone. Hold an old man’s hand one more time?”
He offers his limp wrist and what can I do. What can I do? I take it. Smash out my cig, finish my drink, and we sashay together through mourning revelers, out into the hot summer night just coming to life on Broadway.
Junk Feed
by Mark Stevens
Glendale
Katy Cutler’s neatly trimmed right eyebrow arched like the top curve on a question mark.
“When I imagine private investigators, I picture them on long stakeouts, sitting in their cars eating greasy sandwiches out of paper bags. So perhaps you never—”
“That’s kind of a movie-type cliché.” Wayne Furlong swallowed hard. He hoped she didn’t press the question. “Trope, I guess. Never quite sure of the difference.”
“The point is, we can’t afford to let this linger,” said Cutler. “The only ones who want to book a room in the hotel are the podcasters and amateur snoopers who treat murder cases like a ghoulish hobby. The wannabe investigators. The pseudo journalists. The sickos. Business is bad enough. The pandemic, of course, whipped our ass.”
“And most restaurants.”
Cutler, the general manager for the hotel and its embedded restaurant, shook her head in a sad combination of disgust and dismay. It had been two years since the pandemic put the economy on ice and one year since the return to “normal” began, albeit at a lethargic pace. “We started off even worse. Right before 2020, we got clobbered by a bad review. Vicious. And then all the others piled on too. Like jackals on a dead antelope.”