Chapter Three

Todd and Damon.

I couldn’t afford to live by myself.

Hence, Todd and Damon.

I got to my apartment at 6:25, leaving fifteen minutes to shower and change clothes. Doable, no doubt. I walked up the stairs, hand on the railing, two steps at a time. After taking off my shoes and jacket I reached for a light switch, and got treated to an eyeful of aftermath.

“Fuck”, I said.

Clumps of hair, like scattered bundles of overcooked pot roast, all over the kitchen floor. Todd’s hair, for sure. Mary must’ve cut his hair in the fucking kitchen.

I didn’t punch holes in the wall.

Forgetting why I even went in there, I grabbed a towel from the hallway closet and headed for the bathroom.

More hair.

I immediately knocked on Todd’s bedroom door.

He answered and, sure enough, that puny fucker had gotten a haircut. Crew cut. I stared at him for a few seconds, realizing that an especially loud cluck of a tongue would cave in his chest.

Todd. Pipe cleaners covered with skin, covered with moles. A head patterned after the lone-surviving artifact of an ancient stone-carving people. A face in perpetual disagreement with the world.

“Uh, Greg, is this important?”

He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Todd, why is hair on the floor?”

“Mary gave me–”

“God, you know what, I know that. Why is hair in the kitchen and the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

That look on his face. Half-squinting, brows lowered, projecting disdain for what anyone might say.

“Well I want to take a shower.”

“You can take a shower,” he said, gingerly touching a mole on his forearm as though reaffirming the welded-on presence of an heirloom jewel.

Flesh eating ants. A bull with unresolved issues. A cybernetically augmented silverback gone mad from bad science. These were the things I wanted to become.

“Can you clean up that hair first?”

He sighed then looked off to his left, probably to Mary, probably to confirm the rash, confrontational squawk of some jerk in the doorway.

My fill? Yep, done had.

“I guess I’ll just put on some different clothes,” I said, making sure to convey irritation.

“Are you sure? ‘Cause I can do that, clean up the hair.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, already walking to my room.

“Oh,” Todd remembered something, “Damon said that you need to wash any dishes that are yours, because the sink’s full and dishes are getting on the counter.”

I left.

***

“Baron Glade. My mom told me this was a good brand,” Ruth said, turning the bottle in her hands, looking over it approvingly, then looking up at me approvingly.

“That’s what I heard, too.”

“Did you wear that to work?” Ruth noticed I hadn’t changed clothes.

“Yeah. The plan was to put on some different clothes, but–”

“But Todd or Damon or Mary or Beth did something to make you mad and you didn’t have a chance.”

“Well…I bet you can’t guess what he did.”

“Who?”

“Todd.”

“I don’t care what he did. You just need to get out of there,” she said, walking into me, turning her back then guiding my arms around her stomach. She leaned back her head and tilted her face towards mine, lips scrunched over for a kiss.

Mmwaah, we said.

“I’ll be ready in five minutes, okay babe? Then we’ll get going.”

“Cool.”

She went into her bedroom. I followed.

Ruth got situated on the floor, cross-legged in front of a mirror, lining her eyes and so forth. I kneeled at the side of her bed, points of elbows depressing the comforter, resting my chin on open-book hands, adoring with such immodesty the walls blushed beneath their paint.

Ruth’s hair embodied the soul of reddish-brown, the spun lilt of a wood-nymph choir’s accolade to Nature. Her eyes were dimensional portals to the birthplace of Green, bright and piercing as simple truth. She had a small nose and mouth, with cheeks emulating the smooth camber of halves of fruit. She was sacredly diminutive, the compactness of her outline forcing that much more of the world into background. Her smile commandeered, her laugh could demand any ransom on Earth, and her sarcastic charm could slay any measure of self-importance.

What she saw in me? Who the fuck knows.

“Okay, all ready,” she said, jumping up then turning to face me. “Were you just looking at my butt?”

“No way.”

“Naughty boy. Let’s go.”

We headed outside. Ruth wore her favorite brown “hoody” and a long beige skirt.

“You are…stupendously beautiful,” I commented.

She smiled, rummaging through my ribcage with a tangible brightness only she could produce. “That’s good, Greg. Using adverbs. Complement the compliments.”

“Your approval is a drug,” I said.

“Let’s take my car. You drive.” Her hand shot out, presenting me with keys. Most times, Ruth had me drive her car, but I never interpreted this routine as laziness or shirking on her behalf. In a way, I always thought of it as Ruth wanting to be taken somewhere by her man, but not particularly in the car that came with him.

After a few blocks, she noticed something.

“You’re totally pissed off about something, aren’t you?”

I glanced over, giving her that bullshit “who me?” look. “No I’m not.”

“What, did Tammy bring yogurt for lunch and–oh my God–lick the excess yogurt off the lid?”

I had to admit, most days, that would’ve been a pretty good guess. That sort of thing does stay with you.

“No. Tammy was pretty gross today, but nothing I’d jot down for the chronicles.”

“Oh. You did mention Todd earlier. So what’s up?” Ruth probed with a stare, snaking optically-born tendrils through my ear canal to pull out an answer.

I let out a sigh. It wasn’t just Todd, but oh well.

“He left a fucking mess all over the bathroom and I needed to use it. That inconsiderate fuck.”

Ruth thought about this for half a second.

“So, because of Todd’s mess, you were unable to do anything or go anywhere, and you cried and cried because Ruth had to go eat dinner without you. Oh, wait.” She ended on a pause.

“That’s not the point,” I explained, perhaps getting louder. “Todd needs to realize that other people live there, and his fucking getting haircuts all over the apartment can make them late.”

“But you were on time,” Ruth flatly stated.

“Because I chose to circumvent my original course of action. I wasn’t late because of something I did, but could’ve been late because of something he did. Is this not clear to you for some reason?”

A traffic light went from yellow, to red, to green.

“You better not get all withdrawn and brooding when we get to Fran and Duncan’s.”

“What?”

“Don’t do that. You know what I mean, Greg. Two weeks ago, someone at work accused you of loading the wrong paper in tray five, or whatever, in the copier, and hours beyond the fact you were a total dick at my friend Stacy’s. You wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

“I talked to you.”

“Yeah, and you complained the whole time. Just…be a sweetie Greg, like I know you can.” Ruth took my right hand off the wheel, interlacing her fingers with mine. “We’ll just relax and have fun, okay?”

Relax and have fun, I could do that. Heck, I was planning to do that.

“I get worried that if things don’t…I don’t know.” She let out a long breath. “Ever since…”

She was no longer talking about Stacy’s.

Last month, Ruth went out of town to stay at her sister’s for a couple days. Work had recently implemented a three-week period of mandatory overtime, and I was on day two, week two of this horrendous stretch. My car wouldn’t start because of the timing belt, so I’d been taking the bus to work. And people on the bus are fucking crazy. I sat next to this one girl who had tattered ribbons and other such pieces of meaningful trash stuck all throughout her hair, and she told me a story about how she peed on the bus, right there on the seat.

“On this bus?”

“No. I was going downtown.”

Really, who does that then fucking talks about it? Of course, after hearing this story, all I wanted to do was throw up or bang my head on something. I didn’t even change seats, wanting to avoid appearing rude to some stranger.

Then, work. Since my car was down, I had to catch a ride with someone to eat elsewhere during lunch. Brice was happy to take me if we saw each other, but some days I had to go with Paul.

“She was probably trying to turn you on,” Paul laughed, responding to my account of that morning’s bus trip.

Paul was a regular-looking, brown-haired guy. Nothing stood out. Any time I thought about him, though, I always pictured him as needing to shave his face and iron his clothes.

Paul and I had just gotten back from the Christy’s drive-up window, and he decided that we should eat together. I sat on the raised edge of the parking lot, legs extended, not really enjoying a Caesar chicken wrap. Paul stood next to his car, hefting a double-cheeseburger, regaling me with emotive commentary.

“I can’t believe my nephew’s godfather might be gay,” Paul said, smashing beef and bread and cheese into saliva-softened gray (the word “macerate” came to mind as I watched). He ate while he talked, barfing up cakey globs of rant between smacking and swallowing his food. Paul took huge bites of hamburger, opening wide his mouth for mess-free accommodation, then snapped up French fries three at a time until his mouth could barely close.

Not that it closed.

“I mean, what would you do if the person you picked to be the spiritual coach of your kid turned out to be gay? Like everything’s fine, and then all of a sudden you find out that the job’s been entrusted to a fucking faggot. Would you want them around your kid? Or have your kid going to them for advice?”

He stopped talking. He really wanted me to answer.

“Paul, are you sure you should be talking about this at work?” I asked.

“No one can hear us,” he said, piqued at my caution.

Us? How could he possibly use that pronoun? I didn’t say anything inappropriate. I questioned his topical discretion, not ours. Because we didn’t both speak on a subject. Only he did. All I did was sit there while he jabbered on about some meaningless bullshit that involved saying the words “gay” and “faggot” really loud. Probably when people walked by, too. That’s why–

Holy fuck, I realized. If other people heard Paul, and saw me sitting there with him, they could easily assume that a discussion, rather than a one-way diatribe, took place. Like I was either a waiting participant or silent condoner when I didn’t agree with him whatsoever. Goddamn it. Bigotry should be kept secret, I always thought. Or spread anonymously through a newsletter.

“Oh shoot, I forgot. John wanted to talk to me,” I said, hurriedly wadding up my fast food bag then jogging off, away from Paul. There was no John, but I couldn’t handle being around that burger-eating cock for another second.

My heart pounded until day’s end. It could be anyone, I thought. Tina from the mail room. Jeff from Indexing. They think I hate queers. They can corroborate my fag-hating session with Paul and file a complaint with boss-people. What a nightmare. I couldn’t imagine actually getting in trouble, but there would be this whole process of talking and sitting somewhere and at the end, even with no wrongdoing found nor punitive action taken, I could still be hated for shit someone else did.

I tried to forget about all of it on the bus ride home.

The bus made three stops en route to my neighborhood. At the first, two guys got on, opting to share a seat despite the bus’s nearly empty capacity.

That’s weird, I thought.

One of the guys, a guy with a spiked mohawk, wore a small black tank top with black cargo pants and black wristbands. The other guy, a guy with a flat mohawk, was in a green, tight-fitting army jacket and worn out jeans. They sat directly across the aisle from me, holding hands and talking quietly.

“Excuse me, do you have a fucking problem?”

The guy in black looked right at me.

I swallowed. “No.”

“Then why are you staring at us? Are we being too gay for you?”

I swallowed again. “No, um, not at all.”

“Does it bother you that I take it up the ass? Does that bother you?” He enunciated his query, head doing a tightly contained three-axis shake throughout.

Before I could answer, the one in green joined in, pointing my way.

“Because it bothers us that you don’t take it up the ass, buddy.”

At some point I must’ve hit a switch or backed into a lever. Maybe a tripwire set something off. Because I was clearly the victim of an apprentice gremlin’s machinery, the target for obtaining a master’s mark in Painful Awkwardness. In high school, when something surprised or initially confused him, my Physics teacher would hold up his hands and say, “Whoa, now, let’s rewind.” If he had appeared right then and made that very suggestion, he would’ve been speaking on my behalf. Seriously, though. Why were these guys attacking me? I mainly stared because of the hairdos, honestly. Then this character-questioning and public challenge…I just wanted to go home.

The interrogation continued.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like being called out on your prejudice, Mr. Staring Problem? Can’t say anything without a group of people holding up signs behind you?”

“Yeah, does an officially ordained bigot have to write out your response on a little card for you?”

They practically yelled. Passengers further down turned their heads to view the commotion.

I slumped forward, nauseated, resting my forehead on the back of the seat in front of me. My breathing felt cut off, the onslaught of words and aggression one-two chopping across my windpipe. An image of Paul stuffing burger parts into his mouth got stuck in my throat shortly after.

“Of course not,” I managed to reply.

“Oh, so you’re an original-thinking hate monger? Let me tell you, that is so advanced.”

That’s not what I meant, I tried to say, but my tongue got sidetracked in an effort to push its way through the roof of my mouth. I don’t hate you, you fucking assholes.

The subsequent minutes became very indistinct, a blurred rattle consisting of me picturing a guy who sat alone on a bus, scratching rivulets down his face from bottom eyelids to jaw-line while biting through the skin beneath his lower lip. I got off at the next stop, running all the way home, up the stairs and into my room. I stayed there for a while, ignoring phone calls and door knocks until Ruth came to get me.

“Hey babe, can I come in?”

“Yeah, it’s unlocked.”

I noticed she bought new shoes on her trip.

“Greg, why are you under the bed?”