Losers (11 page)

Bates grabbed my arm and pulled me across the room. “Hold on, Jupe,” he said, “I want to talk to this guy,” he said, grabbing my arm and pulling me across the room. He stopped in front of a clean-cut guy in a team-letter jacket that was the colors of our school.

“Hey,” Bates said to him, “don't you go to North Shore?”

“Yeah! Hey, I'm Ryan,” he said, extending his hand. “Pretty cool that we're all in the same class, isn't it?”

As a reply, Bates wrapped his hand around the nape of Ryan's collar, pulling his face close to Bates's own. Even from a few feet away, I winced. Ryan was getting the same introduction to Bates's all-day morning breath that I had gotten back in the music store.

“You tell anyone I was here, and I'll rip out your placenta,” he growled.

“Uh…okay,” stammered Ryan.

“Hey, Bates?” I said, cutting in. “Guys don't have a placenta.”

“Well then,” he glowered, “I'll keep digging till I find it. Ain't that right, sport?” He leered over at Ryan. “After all,
some
of us have secrets to protect, straight boy.”

I felt my face redden, felt a sudden, deep embarrassment at having been called out. Meanwhile, Ryan had detached himself from Bates's hand, took one step back, and was shaking out his shoulders. “Harris Bates,” he said.

“Wait,” growled Bates. And then, “What are you
doing
here?” And then, “So you're…?”

“Well,” said Ryan, just as a particularly annoying mid-'90s techno remix came on, “I'm not here for the music.”

Bates's face broke out in a toothy, sea-shanty grin. “Alright, man!” He chuckled. “Nice. Don't worry about Jupiter. He's not gonna do anything. I've got him trained. Fuck, he doesn't even
breathe
unless he clears it with me first.”

Ryan, not sure whether to take it as a joke or not, assumed the best and laughed, hitting Bates on the arm in that comradely way that jocks always do. I was sure it was going to set Bates off like a cell phone in a gas station.

Bates, though, didn't show any signs of werewolfing out. He didn't even break his smile. “This is frigging crazy,” he was saying to Ryan. “Who else is undercover at North Shore? You think Mr. Denisof is gay, since he's always calling different guys in our class pussies? Think he's trying to make up for something?”

I could feel the party rapidly growing more exclusive. Now that I had helped Bates find himself a community, I was back to being the lone alien on my planet. “Hey, take it easy,” I said, giving Bates's arm a friendly slap. “I'm gonna take off.”

Bates had caught my hand in mid-slap, and now he looked at it like he was going to break it. Then he tilted his head, thought about it, and reconsidered. “Yeah, I'll see you later,” he said. “Remember—one word about this and your neck turns to toothpicks.”

“No problem,” I said, nodding to Ryan and ignoring Bates as best as I could as I took off—straight out the room and down the corridor.

Outside, it was still close to daylight. The afternoon sun hovered over the expressway, reflected over and over again off the hoods of thousands of cars, all frozen in time. With the ghostly,
ambient techno of the club in the background, the traffic standstill seemed almost beautiful. I decided at that moment that I understood people who liked listening to electronic music—it was happy and artificial and instantly nostalgic, the feeling of a party bottled up in a CD, something you would always be able to listen to and remember that moment of connection, of rejoicing, that moment when you fit in.

“Hey,” came a voice at my side. “Lost your date?”

I turned. It was the clerk from the record store.

“Nah,” I said. “He's still downstairs—he's moved on to bigger and better. Not that he was my date in the first place, anyway. We're—uh, just friends.” I realized how ludicrous this sounded even before I said it, but I'd said it anyway. “Not like that, I mean. We, um, we're mostly after different things in life.”

“Yeah, I kind of picked that up.” She joined me in leaning against the wall, then followed my gaze out to the sun on the cars.

“About the time I confessed my secret crush on you?” I asked.

“Actually, the first time I looked at the two of you,” she said. “The way he looks at people, like he's sizing them up—he's weighing their secrets against his own. He reminds me of my fake boyfriend from high school. He's a textbook example of a closet case. You, on the other hand—well, your shirt and jeans are two different shades of black.”

“Yeah, so?” I huffed, indignant.

“Color coordination.” She nodded slowly to herself, as if confirming her own theory. “Sorry, but for you to pass as
gay—well, you'd need a totally different wardrobe. And let's not even get
started
on your hair.”

“What's wrong with my hair?” My hand shot up instinctively.

“Nothing, really,” she said, laughing to herself. “Nothing at all.”

“That's alright,” I said, looking down into the cupped valley of my hands. “I didn't really have a crush on you, anyway.”

“It's okay—you don't have to say that. I took it as a compliment.”

“No, but I'm feeling honest. I don't know—when I come into the store every day, there's like five different girls at the register, and I developed different stories in my head about you all. What neighborhood you live in. The music you're into. I liked to think that we could talk to each other in songs, and they'd remind you of the same things they'd remind me of. You know that Dead Milkmen album, the imported one you had in the shop until last week?”

“
Metaphysical Graffiti
, that version from Brussels with the five extra songs that they recorded in Flemish?”

“Exactly. So, I've never heard the Dead Milkmen before. I've just looked at their album covers every day for a month, thinking about what the music must sound like. I just have this vision—I just have this idea—that it would fill something inside of me, explain something about the world that I never understood. And that
that
, somehow, is what I'm looking for in a girl. But you know what?”

“What?” She was watching me intently, listening to me for real now.

“It's not. When you started talking to me, even before I knew—not that there's anything wrong with this—that you were gay, I just had this sense that you were someone completely different from the person I imagined you were. And, I mean, you're probably better than that person—you've got a whole life I don't know about that's totally better than the one I made up for you. But my own imagination is why I had a crush on you, and that probably means that what I had a crush on the whole time isn't even you.”

I smiled at her apologetically. “I'm really sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to talk to you like that. Actually, it was just kind of rude in the first place. I should probably just stop talking and walk away. I'm sorry.”

She had stopped paying attention to the cars completely. Most of the other kids out there had abandoned their cigarettes, were heading back to the city to find a diner, or back down into the club for one last song before the bouncers started shipping out the underage kids. Standing in the cigarette alley suddenly felt naked and private, the type of moment that I shouldn't be sharing with someone unless I really cared about her. Certainly not with someone who wasn't interested in me at all. In That Way, I mean.

She reached over and rubbed my hair.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It's cool. You're actually not a bad guy, you know?”

I was about to say thanks, even though I didn't really know what I was thanking her for, when Bates stumbled out the doors of the club, rubbing his eyes from the sun. He ambled over to us.

“Hey,” he said. “What are you up to now? You want to get out of here?”

I looked at the record girl. She flashed me a knowing smile, then nodded at both of us. “Go ahead,” she said. “Come back some time, though. This happens every month. Now you know. See you around.”

She disappeared, and, when I turned around, Bates was already moving away. We set out down Front Street, the buildings framed in the half silhouette of a setting sun.

“I don't know,” said Bates. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, his forehead furrowed in concentration. “It was an overload, I guess. To see that many gay kids in a room—I don't know. I never thought there were that many gay people in the
universe
, you know what I mean? There were hundreds. Maybe there's thousands. Just in Philadelphia alone. Every guy I've ever had a crush on, it wasn't even a question—he didn't like guys anyway, so what could I do? And all of a sudden, I'm in a room surrounded by them.”

“So,” I asked hopefully, “did you meet anyone?”

He stopped walking. He turned to look at me directly.

“Nah,” he said. “They're all a bunch of pansies.”

We lay in Rittenhouse Square, on the grass, on opposite sides of a fountain, staring up at the darkening sky.

“I don't know who I figured would show up,” Bates told me. “Another metalhead guy. No, you know what? Not even a metal-head. Just some guy with long hair and a pierced septum and a really greasy soul patch. Or a biker dude. A goth, at least.”

“You can't force yourself to judge people on surfaces,” I said,
feeling a rush of inspiration. I wanted to tell him all about the record-store girl, everything that had happened. “On one hand, you're thinking the whole time that just because he listens to the same music as you, you're going to have all this stuff in common, but once you actually start talking, you could find out that he's a totally different person than—”

“Save it,” Bates grunted. “I know exactly what you're going to say. I'm not an idiot, you know.” He swallowed, a hard, throaty swallow that sounded either like he was about to cry or like he'd just gulped down a small bird. “I didn't want you to fucking show me around the queer youth of Philadelphia because I was looking for some guy to blow. I just wanted to meet other people like me, you know?” he said, and went on before I had a chance to reply. “I just wanted to walk into that room and to have the DJ playing Slayer, or for there to be at least some other guy who wanted to hear a Slayer album. Not even a guy. If there was a speed-metal dyke, shit, I'd probably be even happier.” Just thinking of the image put a grin across his face. “I don't want somebody to fuck. I just want someone to say, ‘I know the shit you're going through, and I know about it ‘cause I'm going through it, too.'”

I opened my mouth, still staring at the sky.

Before anything could come out, Bates cut me off. “
Don't
.”

“Don't what?” I asked, more startled than anything.

“Don't tell me you know what it's like, okay? Don't tell me that you're different too and that you relate and that you understand what I'm going through and all that crap. Just don't.”

I said back quietly, almost a whisper, “But I do.”

Bates didn't say anything for a while. I turned my head and
stole a glance at him, nervous about breaking the moment. He was still staring down the sky.

“Because I used to be the kid in school everyone shat on, and, the first day at North Shore, you made it official. And then everyone started being friends with me. Not because they actually
liked
me or anything, but because, somehow, I became acceptable. And still, nobody cares about me or hangs out with me one-on-one or wants to hear what I actually have to say. As long as my accent doesn't get out of control and people like Reg and Devin keep saying hi to me, everyone else will too. And there's still no one I can trust, and I still wind up having fantasies about imaginary girls and CD covers.”

There was silence on Bates's end.

Then, finally, he looked over at me and said, “You have an accent?”

I walked home from the bus stop—the same route, the same sights, the same thoughts. Bus shelter, radioactive garbage pile, the long empty boulevard, the sleeping wino. Sometimes it felt like a drill. Other times, it felt like meditation.

The walk home was getting a little darker every day, the curse of an Earth that was sinking slowly into autumn. Today I walked the long way, which took me by the warehouse from that fatal first night, the night I learned how to be popular. It started stirring up something in me—that combination of people, the lonely loud synthesizer dance music, the feeling of a night. The best parties always feel nostalgic afterward, like you'll never get the chance to be at that exact same configuration of party again. And I longed to be back there. I played the night in my
mind a million times over again, sometimes hooking up with Devin, sometimes running away with Margie, and sometimes with Crash and his gang. I imagined the last few people out there, closing the party down, standing on the sidewalk, holding on to the feeling of the night. Most of them were drunk, but it was a happy drunk. I remembered saying good night to Devin right there on the sidewalk, blown away by the idea that I was actually talking to her, even more blown away that she'd said good-bye to me. Had she really smiled as she said “I'll see you on Monday,” like she was glad of that fact? Had she really leaned over to kiss me on the cheek? Had we stood right over there, leaning against the big warehouse door, huddled in conversation, our bodies almost touching, just like that?

I realized that it wasn't just my imagination rehashing. There really were two people standing in front of the party warehouse.

And then, as I got closer, I realized that one of them actually was Devin Murray.

She had already seen me approaching. It was too late to turn around and run—well, this was the Yards, so it wouldn't be entirely unexpected, but I'd feel stupid just the same.