King Perry (5 page)

Vin, no.

This is vacation. Not cars. Think beautiful.

Let’s just say that Perry’s curious. Or hopeful. Who cares what we name the impulse that calls us to be better men?

“Perry, after the art gallery, did you cry? Maybe a little?”

“Goddamn it, Vin. You’re a fucking serial killer, aren’t you?”

“So you did cry.”

“No, I did not.”

He’s lying.

Perry takes a step back and rubs his hand in his eye socket again. My guess is that he intentionally didn’t wear his glasses today. He wanted to show me he is strong when he looked me in the eye. Men often think submission indicates weakness, that letting someone else take charge betrays a character deficit. But we all submit to strangers who drill into our teeth as long as we can see the parchment on their wall which reads “Dentist.”

I should tell him that.

“We all submit, Perry. To the dentist, to doctors. Therapists. Hell, in a hospital, anyone who says, ‘Put on this paper gown’—and seconds later, my jeans are at my ankles. I don’t even know their credentials other than they happen to be wearing aqua-colored scrubs. So, you know, get over it.”

His arched eyebrows suggest he doesn’t much care for this direction of the conversation.

“Also, I don’t kill people. I get sick to my stomach when I imagine punching someone or causing them pain. If you want a safety break this weekend, start talking about blood and broken bones and get descriptive. It will be super hard to kill you when I’m on my hands and knees barfing.

“But you should know, Mr. Mangin, I’m a whiner when it comes to vomit, which means you clean it up while I walk it off. No matter if we’re in the woods or in a shopping mall, or even if there’s a janitor nearby, you still have to clean it up. That’s
my
safety so that you’re not an asshole and make me yak all weekend for your entertainment.”

“We’re going into the woods?”

He said “we.”

“Hypothetical. Best-case scenario, what I promised comes true and your life changes. Worst-case scenario, I’m all bullshit and we have a fun, sexy weekend together. Either way we don’t talk about blood and guts, and the weekend is 100% murder free.”

Perry’s mouth opens.

Talk, Vin.

“But what about this? Maybe the words ‘remember the king’ touched something in you that requires no explanation. You want answers? A weekend agenda? Perry, no offense intended, but
fuck you
. It doesn’t work that way. Your layers of warm clothes say you came prepared to go with me. So quit your fucking games and get in line. We’re going to Alcatraz.”

Don’t get too cocky. This is hard for him.

Perry says nothing, glumly watching the people around us pack tightly together, gearing up for boarding. He probably jumped through big mental hoops just to deliver the check, allowing himself the leeway not to decide until this second.

If he decided back in his house, he’s wearing sexy underwear. But I won’t get an answer on the Underwear Test for a few more hours. I failed the Weekend Bag test, so I can’t be too much of an asshole.

He says, “Why are you doing this? I’m not… I never even heard of a king weekend. None of my friends heard of this.”

“Perry, why are you here?”

“To bring you a check,” he says with exasperation.

“You did that. Why are you still here?”

“I don’t know.”

I nod at him.
Remember.

“I’m an investment banker, not a sex pervert. I’m trying to figure this out. Why did you rip up my check? Why would you think I—”

“You’re calculating the returns.”

“No. Not exactly.”

We both chuckle.

He says, “If you would tell me more about this weekend—”

“No.”

Perry looks away and says, “Tuesday, I planned to suggest we have dinner while you’re in town. I was going to buy you dinner, Vin. You don’t… from one conversation with a stranger, you don’t set up a dominatrix weekend.”

“A dominatrix is a woman. But hey, I don’t have a problem with it, because I like words with the letter
x
in them. Speaking of words, do you like the word
vigor
? I do. It reminds me of the word
vicar
, one of those English reverends with wild hair who meddles in everyone’s business. It’s my new BBC series I’m pitching for their Tuesday nights:
The Vicar with Vigor
. He rides his red bike all over the village and he gives awful advice, turning lives upside down. Blurts out people’s secrets. But in the end, everyone ends up better off. Also, whenever he lectures young people about celibacy, they end up having sex almost right away.”

Perry stares at my cheery delivery with alarm.

“I invited you because you took the blame for the caterer’s fuck-up instantly, and I felt humbled to stand near a man so rich in compassion, so beautiful a person. That, and I think we’re going to have rock star sex all weekend.”

“Vin—”

“Having a single word trapped in your head is worse than having a song because you can only repeat the one word over and over. Vigor, vigor, vigor. If you emphasize the
v-i
, it’s like ocean waves.
Vig-grr
,
vig-grr
,
vig-grr.
”

The line presses forward around us, catching us up in the swell.

I pull two tickets from my back pocket and hold them in front of him.

Perry scowls.

“I have a ground rule,” he says, “and your answer must be the single word
yes
with nothing else after it, or I leave right now. I will not discuss the topic of my father at all this weekend. You can’t bring it up.
Not fucking once.
Agreed?”

“Yes.”

Perry jerks a little. “Wait, seriously?”

“Yes.” I pause to mirror the solemnity in his eyes. “I will not bring up the topic of your father. I promise.”

If he considered ground rules, that means he showed up ready. Or at least having given it some thought. That’s good. Another tipping point in our favor.

“However, Perry, if you invite me, I get to talk about him. I get to ask anything. But you have to open the door and verbally confirm I may.”

“Agreed,” he says, still surprised. “But I won’t bring him up. You guessed pretty well at the art gallery about me playing the cello and him dying young but—”

“I will not initiate a discussion about your father.”

Perry frowns a little, another big argument cut short. I don’t think I gave him the answer he hoped for. “I’m serious. I did therapy, books on tape. Saw a psychic once.”

With intentional firmness, I say, “We’re done with this point.”

“Fine,” he says, watching the Alcatraz pilgrims tentatively shuffle the chain-link maze of walkways leading up to our ferry.

I can’t resist needling him. “You saw a psychic?”

“I was with friends and they dared me. But this counts as you bringing it up.”

“Okay. We’re done talking about your dad. Unless, of course, you initiate the conversation.”

We are quiet for a moment.

“Which you can.”

We advance a step or two.

“Anytime. Like, whenever.”

“I’m allergic to bees,” he says. “I have meds with me, but still, no tours of bee farms. And charming serial killers from the Midwest. I’m allergic to them too.”

I like his tone. This is exactly the right growl I need from him right now.

“Perry, if you add onion rings to your forbidden list, swear to God, I will rip up your ticket.”

“Please don’t be a serial killer,” he says in a joking tone. “I showed several friends your note and described your appearance. My friend knows HTML. If I go missing, he could put up a website.”

“That’s cool. By the way, we should trade e-mail addresses when this weekend is over. About a week ago, I installed a counter to track the number of hits to my AOL page. It’s pretty cool. Some AOL pages have, like, many, many hundred hits. My page already has 118 hits, which is crazy. I don’t even know 118 people.”

Perry does not strike me as comforted.

In a deadpan tone, he says, “You’re a World Wide Web fanatic.”

“I do AOL and CompuServe, but I wouldn’t say fanatic. Less CompuServe these days.”

He grunts. We shuffle forward.

“Perry, if you don’t have an AOL account by next year, you’re going to be in the minority. If we’re not all killed by Y2K in three months, AOL is going to take over the world. They’re going to completely own the World Wide Web in 10 years. But we won’t call it the World Wide Web anymore. We’ll call it something like, the AOL. Everyone will say, ‘Did you see so-and-so on AOL today?’ We’ll do all our socializing—”

“I don’t use the World Wide Web,” he says brusquely. “Just for work.”

Nice to have that confirmed. I thought he seemed a little overly vague when he expressed his enthusiasm on Tuesday night. He may have lied about other things that night as well; I better be careful in my assumptions.

Since we’re bumper to bumper in three lanes of people, all of us trudging forward in half steps we believe will help hurry our experience, Perry says no more but jams his hands in his jeans pockets and grumbles throat noises.

Why did Billy creep into my thoughts a few moments ago? Don’t care for that.

The dock crew seems relieved to board the last shipment of cattle, playfully jeering at their coworkers trapped on the boat. I present our tickets to a college student who hands us back our stubs with undisguised boredom.

The boat itself is nothing to romanticize. Every footstep squishes on the soggy Astroturf carpeting, and a film of dirty white paint covers the boat, chipped, repainted, and chipped yet again in many places. Grasping the handrails reveals that the undersides are dotted with sticky globs of gum. The entire ferry smells stale: overcooked hot dogs, burnt popcorn, burned oil. We crowd each other politely, model prisoners all, wandering the confines of the vessel, discreetly checking out our fellow inmates.

“You want a hot dog?”

“No,” he says, turning toward the center of the boat. “Is that that smell?”

“Yeah, I think so. That and burned popcorn.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“Yeah. So, anyway, no hot dog?”

“Do I have to?”

“No. I’ll let you know what’s required.”

Perry nods stiffly.

I leer at Perry and waggle my eyebrows a little. “I hope you get off on getting your dick sucked.”

He cracks a weak smile. I don’t think sex is on his mind right now.

“Would you consider
waggle
to be a real word?”

Perry does not smile. In fact, he looks seasick.

Once we launch, most everyone crowds the island-facing side of the boat, watching the famous landmark grow closer. I lead Perry to the opposite side, the open water facing the iron bridges connecting the East Bay, Golden Gate’s working-class cousins. For a moment, we watch the cloudy sky in silence.

“Ever visited Alcatraz?”

He says, “No. People who live here rarely do the touristy things. No offense.”

I nod. “Yeah, people are like that.”

We chat about tourists, San Francisco, and places we’ve always meant to visit, continuing a Tuesday conversation. He remains uneasy, but he’s closer to the man I met that night: not flirty-relaxed, but more relaxed than on the pier. I bet Perry can’t believe he’s on the boat.

The topic of his father was important, his automatic excuse for saying, “No thanks.” Men often show up with a safety net. While he definitely won that battle, he somehow knows he won the battle that didn’t matter, resulting in him headed toward a prison island. In terms of symbolism, not great for Team Perry.

What he does not yet realize is that I am also on Team Perry. Hell, I’m our team cheerleader.

Three seagulls fly formation alongside the boat, our winged guards. They’re waiting for popcorn or bun nubs, whatever food drops into the bay, and plenty of our shipmates oblige. One college-aged woman chucks a handful of popcorn at the birds, and after swooping to avoid her attack, they dart to retrieve the bounty bobbing below. I like the idea that we’re escorted, that they’re taking head count. I think to make the Alcatraz experience more realistic, the people who run the island should distribute orange jumpsuits when the boat docks.

Halfway across the bay, I close the foot or two distance between us, standing close, too close perhaps. I see that Perry would rather not be this intimate in public. He backs away slightly, and I nod at him to stand still. He’s good at reading physical cues; we established that on Tuesday night.

“Vin,” he warns me slightly.

“Aren’t you curious to see what happens if you refuse to submit? Do you suppose the challenges get harder? Even bigger public displays?”

He frowns at my cheerful tone, squints his eyes closed, and purses his lips, waiting for our first kiss. I almost laugh because his strained expression looks as if he’s expecting something painful.

Instead of kissing him, I trace my thumb from his eyebrow to his jawline, stopping him from leaning closer. He opens his eyes and exhales oddly, a half breath of confused expectations.

I move close, cheek to cheek. Over his shoulder, I watch until the skyline has receded enough that the buildings no longer shrink dramatically on the horizon. The Transamerica building points its metallic finger to God, a stern demand for repentance. But who is to blame and who must repent? City or God?

The ferry coughs out a regular series of discordant grunts as we cross the final stretch of water. The engine stinks. Someone’s not putting in the right oil. It shouldn’t make that grinding noise either. Maybe that’s the burned oil smell, not popcorn.

Focus up, Vin.

Despite our intimate proximity, I doubt Perry could hear me whisper. The boat lurches through choppy waves with resonating booms, tourists chatter with excitement, and the woman throwing popcorns squeals whenever our seagull guards reappear, ready for the next assault. Conditions aren’t ideal, perhaps, but it’s time to begin.

“Once there was a tribe of men,” I say in a strong voice, audible to none but him, “a tribe populated entirely of kings. Odd, you may think, and wonder how any work got done in such a society with everyone making rules. But these were not those kinds of kings.”