The Complete Lockpick Pornography (10 page)

Is this really where I want to be, stacking printer paper in an office-supply store? Seriously? For how much longer? We're all going to die. Death is taking another lick of my lollipop, and God knows how many he'll take before he gets frustrated and just bites into it.

So I'm quitting. Happy birthday to me. I'm almost thirty. The work isn't terrible. But it's never the actual work that's terrible, is it? It's the customers. Jesus, fuck — the customers.

A customer walks over and sets the printer paper down, already staring at the little screen where the price appears.

“That's not the right price,” he says and slaps down a flyer opened to a picture of printer paper. He's jabbing at it.

“That's last week's flyer, sir,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“That's an outdated flyer. We have copies of the new flyer here, if you like.”

“You sent me this flyer, and I drove all the way downtown because of the price promised right here.” He jabs again. “Now if you're just going to give me more faggot excuses, I'd like to speak to your manager.”

Classy. So I pick up the phone and I call Wallace, my manager. Then the customer and I wait in silence. He's probably sixty years old. Dressed nice, but not fancy. He has a shirt and tie, but no blazer. It's a shirt that's been worn again and again, no crisp corners. A workingman, salt of the earth.

“How can I help you, sir?” Wallace says, coming behind the cash register with me, smiling. The customer is nicer now. Of course he is. I watch while he explains the issue politely. He shows Wallace the flyer. Wallace hits a few buttons on the keyboard, and everyone's happy. The customer gets the discount he wants.

It's always the people who are paid the least who have to take the most shit. Otherwise Captain Angry there would go buy his five-dollar printer paper at another establishment.

When he's gone, I turn to Wallace.

“That guy called me a faggot,” I say, and Wallace claps me on the shoulder warmly. He's a nice guy, I think. Not the brightest guy in the world, but mostly good. I get a bit uncomfortable when he talks about women, like he's not really talking about people. But in general, Wallace means well.

“Don't take it personally,” Wallace says. “Everybody gets what they deserve eventually. In his next life, that guy'll probably come back as a faggot himself.” Wallace walks off, and I'm left standing there holding the receipt for one packet of printer paper. That doesn't make me feel better at all.

Wallace wouldn't have said it if he knew I slept with men, I know that. He's not a mean guy, just stupid. Oh, so stupid. I stand behind the counter and I ring through people's orders, just waiting for one of them to say something. By lunch, I can feel a pressure behind my right eye that I am certain is my anger. It keeps on building until I don't know what to do with it.

In the faggot lunchroom, Wallace is laughing with Mike, watching the faggot
TV
. I've been standing behind the register all day, angry. I haven't been able to think of anything faggot else, and I bet if I fucking faggot asked him right faggot now, he wouldn't be able to even tell me what he said. Long forgotten. Unimportant.

The anger isn't making me feel better, but you know what does? Sexual harassment. The look on Wallace's face when I say, “Jesus, Wallace. You been working out? Your ass looks amazing today.” Just a flash of surprise and confusion. A bit of shame. And then I'm gone, back up the stairs to my cash register.

I'm smiling now. I feel good, less helpless. I wonder if this is why straight men sexually harass women, to prove to themselves that they have power. They get yelled at by their own bosses and head back to the office to take it out on their secretaries.

Hey, Janet, your tits look good in that top.

Later that afternoon, when Wallace is helping some guy pick a printer, I walk past him again, and this time I clap him on the shoulder and look pointedly down at his crotch.

“Come on, Wallace. Hide your erection, will you?”

“What?”

“It's impolite to walk around with candy unless you're gonna share.”

I feel like a little kid, pissing on the bully's gym clothes. Sure, there are probably better ways to handle this, but none of them seem like as much fun. It's better to make it a joke. And it is a joke, isn't it?

I get off work earlier than Clay does, so I usually walk down and meet him at the casino. Clay has birthday plans for me tonight. A surprise. I'm leaning back against the hood of his car when he comes out. He's still in his uniform, his security badge yellow under the parking-garage lights. He looks good in that uniform. He looks dangerous. I have a bit of a weakness for dangerous-looking men.

I kiss him hello and then, in the car, tell him about the customer, and about Wallace. But it's my birthday, and mostly I want to talk about something else.

“What're we doing tonight?” I say, and Clay smiles.

“Tonight, sir, there's a meteor shower,” he says. “I don't know if you heard. It's kind of a big deal. We're going to go out to the country, where there are no streetlights, and we're going to watch the sky fall.”

This is Clay's birthday surprise for me. It's hard to believe he even remembers the meteor shower. He's got no interest in anything like this, but I must have gone on about it one too many times, my voice all earnest, waving my hands in the air while I talked.

Clay gets excited about things too. It's one of the things I love about him. He gets an idea in his head and it lights him up. There's not a cynical bone in his body. Everything is fun; everything's an adventure. It doesn't matter what the plan is. He has dozens of plans. Let's go to the movie on Tuesday. Let's go to China. Let's learn how to leave no trace at all in the world's databases and let's live off the grid. Let's learn to knife fight. We saw an ad about that: learn to knife fight using training methods developed for Russian Special Forces. The flyer ended with an ominous “You don't win a knife fight. You survive.” There is always more room in our lives for something so deadly serious.

Clay's enthusiasm is infectious. Now he's talking about Wallace again. He wants to come into the store wearing a leather vest. I have no idea where Clay would even find a leather vest. He wants to wear a big fake cop moustache. A disguise. Wallace has never seen him, which makes me feel weird, now that we've said it out loud. Clay's never been into the store. I've never been into the casino either.

“I'll seem like just any other customer,” Clay says. “Oh, this is going to be brilliant.” He's repeating himself now. This is how you know when he's really excited. He goes around in circles, and the idea is more exciting to him every time. He wants to get his friends to do it too. Every queer he knows. Go in and blow Wallace kisses. Pat Wallace's ass affectionately after he's been helpful. Ask Wallace for his phone number.

When Clay's around, I feel like I'm more exciting too. That's a good quality to have in a gentleman friend. I come up with plans of my own for us. Let's try to befriend the squirrels that live in the walls and attic. Let's go get some candy and stay up all night watching horror movies. Let's sleep over in a graveyard, so the dead can visit us in our dreams.

I don't fall in love easily. It takes a long time, and then, when I have fallen in love, I'm still not sure. I'm suspicious of myself. What if tomorrow I don't feel the same? I have to wait, to be sure. And I wait and wait. I think I might be at that stage now, with Clay. I've been waiting for a while. I have dreams about telling him.

We drop the car off at the apartment and unlock our bikes. I love biking in the dark. I didn't think I'd get a chance to see the meteor shower tonight. I thought for sure he'd take me out to dinner or to some movie. Meteor showers are amazing because to the human eye it just looks like little moving points of light, thin streaks of light. Except it isn't. It's debris falling to earth. Fast and burning and where do they come from? I'm not sure. It's little bits of something else. Space always makes me think of infinity. The universe just keeps going and going and, when I think about it, it actually feels like my thoughts have to get bigger to understand. And then I get scared.

We bike out to the dark and find a perfect spot. We're in a field, with a hill blocking the streetlights from the road, the best place for us to stretch out and watch the sky fall. We lie down side by side on the grass and dirt, watching. Beside me, Clay says, “There!” and I see it too, the first streak of thin light.

We watch for a while, until I get scared thinking about the yawning void of space and the maddening smallness of our solar system in it, and the smallness of our planet in that solar system and of my own voice in the dark, and I almost say, “I love you,” right then and there, but instead I pull him on top of me.

I like having his weight on me. I like the feel of his breath against my cheek, and I like the feeling of being trapped too. Pinned down. He kisses me and smiles, and then tries to roll off me. I hold on to him tightly.

He pins my wrists to the dirt. He stretches me out so my belly's exposed, and he kisses my neck. He puts his mouth right up against my ear and says, “Nobody can hear you out here. Cry for help all you want.”

And I struggle against his grip. He pins my wrists with one hand, and with the other he pulls my belt open, shoves his hand down to wrap cool around my cock, and I say, “No.” And I try to pull free.

We forget all about watching the stars. He kisses me and I struggle against him just enough. “Let's move,” he says. We stand up and we kiss in the moonlight with the stars falling and no cars anywhere and it's all very perfect and romantic and all I can think is I want him inside me. I want him to press his finger inside me.

There's a tree here, and he pushes me against it, with the dark field behind him. I spin us so that he's against the tree, and I put his hand in my hair and make a fist of it. He's smiling. He forces me down to my knees, and I squeeze the front of his pants. Gripping a cock through them that isn't fully erect yet, but doesn't really need to be. I pull at the button. I open my mouth, looking up at him, and he takes my hair in both his fists and shoves my face down on his cock. My lips are forced open. Then further. I'm still struggling, my hands waving helplessly in the air.

He's hard now. I make a choking sound as he reaches the back of my throat, and I struggle. He pulls my head back to let me gasp for air and to force me to look up at him. He spits on me. His spit is thick on my face, and he says, “Whore.” He shoves me down on his cock again, fucks my face while I dig my fingers in the bark of the tree, the zipper of his pants cutting against my lips and cheek, again and again. Then my hand is up his shirt, pulling at his nipple and leaving streaks of dirt on his chest while he uses my mouth. Then he pauses.

“Is this okay?” he says, looking down, and I can only nod.

Yes.

I want him to come on the ground here in front of me, or to come across my lips. I want him to push my face into the dirt and pull my pants roughly down just far enough so he can get at my asshole. My knees are wet and cold through my pants.

Clay pulls me back by the hair and forces me to look up at him again.

“My turn!” he says.

And so I twist his arm behind his back and push him against the tree with his shirt pulled up. The bark is digging into him, and I've got his pants pulled down so I can get at him. My free hand is wet with my own spit, my finger pushing at his asshole. I use my body to hold his arm twisted between us. My teeth are tearing at the condom wrapper. I wrap my hand around his throat while I enter him. “If you make one sound, I'll kill you,” I whisper in his ear.

When I come, I panic a bit, because I can suddenly see everything. I have my hand around his throat, and I feel like I am just returning to my senses, and did we go too far?

But Clay reaches up and kisses me on the cheek and then on my mouth and he says, “You're beautiful.”

Afterward, still half-naked, we watch the night sky. His chest hair is soft in the dark and I rest my head on him. The dirt and twigs are digging into the skin of my hip. My pants are still around my ankles. This is so quiet and would be such a perfect time to say, “I love you.” But you can't say something like that just because the moment is right. It's too seductive, having the moment be perfect. I would worry that I said it just because it seemed like the right time. The stars keep falling.

“It makes me nervous,” I tell him. One after another after another, the streaks of light appear and vanish. “It goes on forever.”

I sound stupid. Chunks of burning rock from God knows where, raining down on us. Rocks that are older than our whole solar system. And when our sun explodes and we are all destroyed, we'll be rocks and chunks of I'm not sure what, and maybe we'll rain down on somewhere else.

On the ride home, we keep making wide slow turns from one side of the road to the other in the dark. We talk about Halloween, which is soon. I say maybe tomorrow night we should go climbing trees in the neighbourhoods we grew up in, and Clay says maybe we could learn how to fight with our bare hands. Everyone should be able to kill a man with just their thumb. We could be ready for anything. There are whole martial arts devoted to disarming someone, disabling them, and getting away, Clay tells me. He knows just what I want to hear.

My lips are raw and they taste a bit like blood and dirt, and this is nice.

I try not to look at myself in the mirror. I brush my teeth, spit in the sink, and wipe my face. No need for a mirror. Clay goes in to brush his teeth, and he kisses me on the cheek as we pass. He trails his hand over my stomach. The telephone is ringing and it's probably my mother. Nobody else calls at this hour.

“Arthur, did you know a witch becomes more powerful when she goes through menopause?” she says.

“Good morning, Mom. I'm just getting ready for work.”

“There are two times in a woman's life when she has this huge surge of power. Puberty and menopause,” my mother says.

“Is that your mother?” Clay calls from the other room.

“Clay says hi,” I tell her.

“Tell her I say hi,” Clay says. He comes into the kitchen, already wearing his uniform. I don't put my uniform on until I get to work. I don't like leaving the house in it, even though nobody will see me.

“She says hi back,” I tell him.

“Tell him I say hi back,” my mother says. “The crows around here have been sitting in the tree outside my bathroom. They've been keeping me company. They must have heard that you weren't going to be coming for Christmas. They must have realized that you'd be leaving your own mother alone for the holidays.”

“We
are
coming for Christmas,” I tell her.

“One week is not Christmas.”

“Tell her I got to handcuff somebody!” Clay says. He takes the phone from me. “I got to handcuff someone!” he says. “It was my first time. A big drunk guy too. He had a little fold-out nail file that he was waving at the blackjack dealer like a knife. I got to fill out a police report and everything.”

I pour myself a glass of juice and listen to Clay tell my mother the story. I know that my mother sounds just as excited on the other end of the phone. They could talk for hours, if you let them.

I should just tell him,
I love you
. I should just say it, matter-of-factly. I point at the clock, and Clay holds up his finger. One second.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Okay, I'll talk to you soon.” He hands me the phone.

“I don't like these mountains, Arthur.”

“You have a beautiful view, Mom. That's why you got that apartment in the first place,” I tell her. “I have to go. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. “Call me later, I'll tell you about my new friend. I knew those dance classes were a good idea. Clay was right. It's about time too. I was starting to forget that they even made cocks that weren't silicone.”

“I have to go, Mom.”

At work, I change into my uniform and pass Wallace on the stairs up to the floor. I keep my face deadly serious, until we are right beside one another, and then I wink. He stops.

“Arthur, listen,” he says. “I know you're just joking around, but people might start getting the wrong idea. We used to have a guy here who made jokes like that, and we joked for a while before I found out that he was actually homosexual.” Wallace lowers his voice for this last part.

“Oh, I didn't mean to give anyone the wrong idea,” I say, and Wallace looks relieved. “I really do like to have sex with men. I thought you did too.” This last part is too much. I know it even as I'm saying it. The expression on his face changes to startled and then angry almost immediately, and before I can backtrack or laugh it off, Wallace has shoved me. It takes me off guard, and I try to grab the railing of the stairs. He's got a disgusted look on his face and then my head cracks against a step.

Wallace doesn't say anything as I pull myself up with the railing. He looks horrified now. Especially when I put my hand to my head, and it comes away with blood.

“Oh fuck, are you okay?” Wallace says, but I'm already on my feet and pushing past him to the bathroom. I close the door. Lock it. There's a bit of blood on my hand, but it's just a scrape. I don't know what to do with myself. There's a garbage can there, and I kick it as hard as I can. The side caves in and then pops right back to its shape. I put my hand to my head again, and there's nothing. No more blood. I'm fine. What am I supposed to do? Why is there no other door in here? I keep thinking, this is getting out of hand. But it already is out of hand, isn't it?

When I finally come out of the bathroom, Wallace still looks terrified.

“I didn't mean to do that,” he says, and his voice is quiet, like it was when he said the word
homosexual
. “I think you're a good guy, Arthur. You know I didn't mean to do that, don't you? I overreacted, that's all.” I just stand there in the hall, looking at him. Shelly comes out of the break room and walks between us. Wallace smiles at her like nothing's wrong. “Morning, Shelly,” he says. And when she's gone, he says, “I love this job. I know you think this company is stupid and shitty, but I'm good at this. I'm thirty-five years old, and this is the first job I've had where I wake up in the morning and feel good about what I do. I sell computers, and I'm good at it. They made me manager. I've never been a manager before. I love this job.”

I can see that. And I know that he's just trying to save his ass. He pushed me down the stairs, and now he's worried that I'll rat him out, that he'll lose his job. But he does always seems happy to be here. He's always cheerful, always smiling, even when he's dealing with an angry customer. He's always got a joke. He loves this job, he really does, and I don't know what to do. I'm sore and angry, but I'm not seriously hurt.

If I report him, he'll get fired. And I guess that'll make me feel better, except I know that he'll start to actually hate gays then. You take away the one thing that makes somebody happy, and you're the bad guy. It doesn't matter if he deserves it. Nobody believes they deserve it. I report Wallace, and Wallace has his life ruined by a gay.

And if I don't report him? Look at how terrified he is. His face is practically white. I'm surprised his teeth aren't chattering. He's not a bad guy. I don't know him very well, but I can't bring myself to see him as evil, just stupid. He's stupid and he pushed me down the stairs and threw away his whole career. This office-supply store is his career and he pushed it down the stairs, and my head is sore and I'm angry and he's put me in this fucking situation where I want to let him off the hook. Where I want to save him from himself.

“I won't say anything,” I tell him, and he looks so relieved that I half expect him to hug me. “I'm going home for the day though. I have a headache.”

He starts nodding even before I finish my sentence.

“Of course, of course,” he says. “Thanks, Arthur.” He holds his hand out for me to shake, and it takes me off guard. I shake his hand and immediately regret it. “Take the day off,” he says.

Halfway across the parking lot, I realize that I left my regular clothes back in my locker, but there's no way I'm going back. I don't even know if I'm angry anymore. I don't know whether this is my own fault for goading him. I can't tell what I'm feeling. There are tears on my cheek, and my hands are in fists, and I want to kick in every window along this street. I'm supposed to meet Clay for lunch, then point out Wallace so he can make a pass at him, but instead I get on a bus and I go home.

At home I take off my uniform and I put it in the garbage. I sit down in front of the television in my underwear.
The Muppet Show
always makes me feel better. It's hard to hold on to real-world problems when you're watching something so fantastic.

You can tell a lot about a person based on their favourite Muppet, I think. Clay likes Animal. He likes how wild Animal is. Thrashing at the drums. Chained to the wall, but always pulling against those chains. Always rocking as hard as possible. I think that's what Clay wants to be, and that's more interesting than who someone is, sometimes. Nothing can calm Animal's simple enthusiasm for bashing his drums.

My favourite Muppet is Gonzo. I love how crazy he looks, first of all, especially in the first season of the show. He's all purple and blue, with that long nose curved downward. I love how completely he devotes himself to his useless, insane performances. He's like Animal that way. He loves what he does, no matter how completely weird and baffling it is. Plus he looks like he's made out of garbage and he dates chickens! So. There's that.

So yeah, Gonzo is my favourite. No contest. Like all the best Muppets, there's a sadness to him, but he's not particularly sad himself. He's plucky! He's optimistic and enthusiastic. The sadness comes from an underlying sense of longing. Once in a while, that longing comes to the surface.

There's a scene in a later season where Gonzo is leaving
The Muppet Show
for a career in Bollywood, and he's up onstage singing that Frank Sinatra song “My Way.” He breaks down crying at the end, with his back to the audience, and Kermit comes out and asks him what's wrong. And Gonzo says he's upset about leaving. So Kermit tells him, “But this is your dream! This is what you always wanted!” and Gonzo says, “I want to go there. I just don't want to leave here.”

Fuck, that kills me
. I want to go there. I just don't want to leave here.
It comes in the middle of the show, out of nowhere. That's where the sketch ends too. Kermit turns to the audience and says something like, “I guess we'd better leave him alone.” And then on with the variety show. The singing vegetables. The dancing cheese!

By the time Clay gets home, I'm smiling and cooking dinner, singing. I haven't forgotten about Wallace, or today, but I don't need to think about them right now either. I feel good about having thrown my uniform in the garbage. I don't ever have to go back. Tomorrow morning I'll wake up and start looking for a new job. I'll wake Clay up early; maybe I'll feel more like having morning sex. It'll be good. I feel optimistic. I cook dinner for the two of us, and afterward I pull Clay into the shower with me.

I reach down for his cock, and he shoves me up against the wall to kiss me. I didn't see it coming. He's done this a thousand times. It's sexy. I like being pushed around by him. But when he shoves me today, it startles me too much. My shoulders hit the tile wall, and Clay is coming in for a kiss, and my eyes must have gone wild, because he stops and pulls back.

“Are you okay?” he says.