“Ah, if it isn’t the sidekick,” said Michael. “Your friend and I were just going to make an appointment.
How about you wait here and we’l be right back?”
Freddy moved to my side. “How about I come along?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Freddy looked at me.
“We come as a set,” I said, feigning casualness.
“Maybe you could help my friend, too.”
“I think your friend is beyond help,” Michael said.
He turned to me and tried to smile, but the mask was melting.
“Why, doctor,” Freddy said, “that doesn’t seem very Christian of you.
Michael’s face twisted into a bal of rage. “You think you’re clever, don’t you, boy? You think I don’t know what kind of filth you are?”
“I think we better go,” I said to no one in particular.
“Did you just cal me ‘boy’?” Freddy asked.
“I’l cal you worse than that,” Michael said, moving toward us, his color rising.
I think he was about to take a swing at Freddy, but then the doors of the meeting room opened. Men streamed out, chatting away, making a beeline for Michael when they spotted him.
Upon hearing the crowd, Michael transformed instantly. His body relaxed and his practiced smile returned. To anyone looking, we had just had a friendly chat.
It was creepy how quickly his entire demeanor changed. As if his most intense feelings could be cycled through like premium channels on cable. In the time I had observed him tonight, I’d seen him be charming, friendly, inspiring, seductive, angry, threatening, and then charming again.
The Mirror Has Two Faces, I thought. Only a lot more than two.
“Wel, gentlemen,” he said to us. “It looks like you’ve been saved by the Tinkerbelles. How appropriate.”
He turned away, but not before Freddy said, “Oh, yeah? Wel, fuck you, too.”
“Good comeback,” I told him as we walked away.
“It was the best I could think of under the circumstances,” Freddy admitted.
Over dinner at the new Chelsea restaurant Foodboys, I told Freddy about how I sensed that Michael had a real sadistic streak.
“Wel, duh,” Freddy said. “That’s why I stepped in. I think if he’d gotten you into his office, you might never have come back out.”
“I know. What scares me is that for a moment, maybe even a few moments, I was almost ready to go with him. He’s got some crazy thing going-he’s super-charming one minute, then psycho the next.
He’d have made a great hustler.”
“He kind of is a great hustler, no?”
“I guess so,” I answered. I thought for a minute about how close I had come to stepping into the lion’s den. Which reminded me: “Where were you, anyway? It seemed like you were in that bathroom forever.”
“Oh, I met that guy who left the room right before we did in there. Remember him? The one with the great hair?”
“You did a guy in the bathroom at an anti-gay conversion seminar?” I asked.
“I didn’t do him,” Freddy corrected me. “I mean, OK, we made out a little, but that was it.”
Knowing Freddy, “made out” could cover anything short of fisting. I decided to let it pass.
“I got his number,” Freddy said. “He was real y very nice. Twenty-three years old. Real religious family. When he came out in his teens, his mother stood up, went to the kitchen, and put her head in the oven.”
“Real y?”
“Yeah. He told me she didn’t turn it on or anything, she just did it for effect. Anyway, they sent him to one of those camps they have for teenagers-you know, the ones that are supposed to make you straight?”
I nodded.
“They screwed him up pretty good. Tried to make him hate himself, but it didn’t real y take. When he saw the ad for the seminar tonight, he thought he’d give it one more try, but his heart wasn’t in it. He told me that Michael sounded like one of the counselors at his camp, only a little more pop psychology and a little less fire and brimstone.”
I figured that assessment was probably about right.
“Anyway, after a couple of minutes of fooling around, Charlie-that’s his name-told me he didn’t think he was going to be trying any more conversion therapies anytime soon. We have a date next week.”
“You’re truly a giver,” I said.
“I try.”
“OK,” I said, “what’s next?”
“Wel, we know now that Michael has a real mean streak. And something about you obviously makes him nervous. To me, he looks more like a suspect than ever.”
“OK, but we have to be able to prove it.”
“I know,” Freddy said. “Oy. That’s the hard part, ain’t it?”
“What’s next?”
“Check your list.”
I pul ed out my iPhone and pul ed up my to-do list.
1. Fol ow up with Roger Folds-fight?
2. Talk to Randy Bostinick
3. Research Paul and Michael Harrington.
4. Look into those gay suicides-was that true?
5. Fuck Tony
“OK, Freddy said, “you can cross one and two off the list. Number three-we’ve gotten some information about Michael Harrington-what about Paul?”
“Nothing yet,” I said.
“OK, so let’s leave that. What’s this about ‘gay suicides’?”
I shared what Tony had said about a rash of gay men taking their own lives.
“OK, so can you find out more about that?”
“Not without talking to Tony,” I said.
“Wel, that might get you closer to goal number five, too.”
“I’l find another way.” I had something in mind.
“Do that. And listen, while you have that thing out, don’t forget about tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night?” I asked.
“Sexbar?”
“Oh, right,” I said. I quickly clicked over to my calendar-yep, there it was. “I got it.”
“OK,” Freddy said, looking over my shoulder at an Asian man with the most amazing green eyes.
“What’s for dessert?”
I left Freddy at Foodboys and headed home.
Although it was 10:45 when I got there, my mother was sitting on the couch, purse in hand. She was wearing her black boots, a black sweatshirt, and, bizarrely, a black ski mask.
It was ninety-seven degrees out. This didn’t look good.
“Don’t sit down!” she cal ed as I walked through the door. “We’re going back out.”
I had, as they say, a very bad feeling about this.
CHAPTER 13
“Tell me again,” I asked, yawning in the couch-like seat of the Lincoln Continental my mother was driving, badly, down the Long Island Expressway,
“why are we doing this?”
“Your father hasn’t answered the phone al evening. Why do you think that is?”
“He’s sleeping?” I asked.
“He’s with that bitch Dottie Kubacki,” my mother hissed.
“Mom, there is no way that daddy is fu-fooling around with Dottie Kubacki.” But even as I said it, I saw my mother’s already death-like grip on the steering wheel tighten.
“Don’t say that name to me!”
“You just said it,” I reminded her.
“Wel, yes, but I was careful to cal her ‘that bitch’
Dottie Kubacki. If you say the whole thing like that, it takes the sting out.”
“Fine,” I said, exasperated. “There’s no way daddy’s seeing ‘that bitch’ Dottie Kubacki. For one thing, isn’t she kind of heavy?”
“She’s a pig!” my mother screamed, looking at me. The ear splitting horn of a tractor trailer in the lane into which she was carelessly drifting forced her to turn back to the road. “A heifer! She puts ice cream on her hamburgers!”
“Then how could you possibly be threatened by her?”
“Who knows what men like? I’d found magazines in your father’s drawers-not just naked people like that pornography you have…”
“Mom!” I cried.
“But real y dirty stuff, like two women posing together, or ladies with breasts so huge that they almost qualified for their own zip codes.”
“That’s hardly the equal to doing Dot…”