Bad Idea

by Damon Suede

  “No hell for me, thanks.”

  “Trip, he goes away for a week and calls you.”

  He blew his nose. “Not calls, but yeah. He texts and e-mailed a couple times.”

  “That’s normal!”

  “So I’m a freak.”

  “Trip Spector, don’t you put words in my mouth. You’re not a freak. You are a-lone. You been by yourself for so long, you expect everyone to play by rules you made up in your head and wrote in invisible ink.”

  He dropped down onto the couch and picked at the cushion’s threads. “All I’m saying is that the thing has probably run its course. We have fun, but he’s not gonna get serious, and I shouldn’t get serious about someone who will never settle down with anyone.”

  “He told you that.” She looked dubious.

  “Not with his mouth, but… yeah. I don’t think he has real intentions with me. Jillian thinks so. And Ben. Hell, even Cliff thinks so… but Silas and I just have fun.”

  “Fun? Say it isn’t so!” Rina gasped melodramatically. “The shame! The horror….” She fanned herself like a granny in church. “Two homo-sex-shuls having a gay old time and yabba-dabba-doing it on every flat surface because they like each other.” She snorted with laughter.

  “Yuk-yuk. Thanks. Totally unfair. Why is it when you have a guy who’s commitment-phobic, you always say to run, but I’m s’posedta hunker down?”

  “Because he’s not phobic. Every single thing he’s doing is committed.”

  “Not committed to me.”

  “Papa, don’t start writing out how you want this whole thing to go. Or better yet, if you’re gonna write this script, then you better give him a copy so he knows what his lines are.”

  Trip wiped his nose. She was being unfair. Rina usually had a no-nonsense approach to dating: guys were right or wrong for her and she didn’t tolerate fussy bullshit. “Sometimes one and one make two.”

  Rina smiled. “You’re right. That’s exactly right.” Sesame Street voice. “And two is bigger and more complicated than one, for boys and girls. One plus one is a relationship.” She stared at him without blinking.

  “That’s not what I meant.” He blinked and scowled. “Okay, sometimes one minus one makes zero.”

  “Then you better make sure he’s nothing before you start subtracting.”

  11

  NEVER in his life had Silas had anyone he wanted to call on Valentine’s Day, and Trip wouldn’t answer the fucking phone.

  Silas had screwed things right up on so many levels. Old habits and exhaustion had steered him right back into the kind of shit that banana-peeled every boyfriend in his pathetic history. He didn’t even know which apology to make. After he lost Trip’s pages, he’d managed to locate them, but too late to make a difference. Another week had passed incommunicado. Not good.

  Years ago, he’d gone out with a slinky waiter he’d picked up at a Moroccan restaurant. They’d “dated” for about a month in the winter and had slow, sloppy sex that took hours while the radiators clanked and spat. Silas had wallowed in the hookup because his heat was out and this fuckbuddy had a super who kept the boiler dialed to tropical. Both in their early twenties with bullshit jobs and serious stamina, they’d call in sick to work and watch cartoons when they weren’t breaking commandments. They’d fuck and sweat and fuck and sweat… and drink quarts of orange juice from the health-food store downstairs. Perfect winter distraction.

  Then one night, they’d screwed for two hours, rinsed off, and when Silas had climbed back onto the futon, the Moroccan had given him a big bouquet. “Happy Valentine,” without the S because his English wasn’t so great, but he worked his ass off to fit into his new country. “Valentine” as in one “special person” instead of Valentine’s day. And—ohcrap—those soft puppy eyes wanted Silas to have something romantic in his rough hands to give back.

  Argh.

  Silas hadn’t realized February had already rolled around. For one endless, embarrassed second, he’d known for certain this pretty waiter believed he’d come over on St. Valentine’s Day because he imagined a tender romance had bloomed between them. To his eternal shame, Silas simply wanted his muffin stuffed hard with a thick North African club.

  Horrible.

  He’d never gone back to the apartment, not because he couldn’t, but because he’d used the poor guy and his father would have whupped his butt for treating another human being like that. How does anyone apologize for being so callous? Now he couldn’t even remember that waiter’s name.

  I’m sorry I treated you like a dildo.

  Eight years later, he offered a metaphorical bouquet to Trip, who now thought he was that guy: the asshole who used someone like a Fleshjack. For anyone to think that seemed gross; for Trip to think that made him want to binge eat until he ruptured and died.

  His mama believed in apologies and gratitude. You screwed up, you said you were sorry. All he wanted was to get Trip on the phone so he could make amends. He’d messed up the script thing, but he’d fallen into his own crappy habits. Going out of town and then hiding hadn’t helped. He’d gone silent. He’d panicked.

  Silas had spent most of his adult life in the secret club in which casual dating persisted as a mildly athletic hobby. All metro queers had slept with each other, all knew each other and kept each other’s secrets… but committing to one guy became a white flag of surrender waved by men too worn-out or damaged to stay in the game. The truth was, he didn’t dread ending up alone as much as ending up chained to the wrong person.

  He’d left two voice mails, texted, and e-mailed. He didn’t care if Trip thought he was nuts, because the chance to apologize had become more precious than anything he could imagine.

  The night he’d canceled with Trip, he had gone through garbage at Splash for three hours, up to his thighs in sticky and sweet shredded paper and clanking bottles. Their dumpsters had smelled like hobo vomit, but he had dived in. No way were Trip’s pages going to vanish because of his fuckup.

  Even if Trip didn’t know what had happened, Silas would.

  I’m sorry I treated your work like a rehab diaper.

  On Valentine’s morning his phone rang: Tiffany.

  “You’re not going to believe this shit.”

  Silas grunted. “Probably not. It’s 9:00 a.m.”

  Tiffany sounded breathless. “Yeah. Remember that guy from the park? New Year’s. That doctor guy. I found his card. Remember? He left his deets and I lost ’em.”

  “What?” He pressed his eyeballs. The universe had a nasty sense of humor. “It’s okay, I don’t—”

  “The hottie from the zombie run.” Rustling. “Trip. The card says Big Dog, and on the back he wrote his name and number.”

  Silas laughed. “That’s a lousy idea.”

  “C’mon. It’s Valentine’s. Grudges don’t count. Write this down.” Then she recited the number Silas already knew by his heavy heart. “Everybody wants a Valentine.”

  Silas hung up and studied the digits he’d written down for no reason. Maybe Tiffany had a point. Trip had to forgive him on Valentine’s Day.

  I’m sorry I didn’t know how to help you.

  He decided to call and not leave a message until Trip finally picked up. By now, he needed to know what had happened. Trip cold-shouldered him. Silas groveled for forgiveness. Never the twain shall meet. Unless he did something drastic.

  Silas stared at his clock. Still way too early to call. For ninety minutes, he paced in his apartment, scripted out the words he’d use. The date he’d offer. He’d beg and cringe to make his complete shame clear. The manifold proofs of his regret and awareness.

  Confident at ten in the morning. By noon, cautious but still ready to give it a go. By three, he worried Trip wouldn’t pick up. Maybe he had his ringer off while he drew or wrote. Maybe he’d gone out with his girlfriends or that Cliff and told laughable tales about the overeager muscle bottom he’d scraped off. Maybe he’d moved on, gone on a date with some cooler, thinner, smarter, calm
er, S-less Valentine who made him happy instead of a miserable sack of shit fritters. Or maybe Trip sat alone and disappointed on the couch, watching The Dark Knight.

  Silas couldn’t even call Kurt for advice because Silas wanted something Kurt didn’t understand.

  I’m sorry I expected you to fall for my same old rigmarole.

  In the past, he’d have cut bait the minute things got heavy, but somehow everything with Trip had been heavy since they’d met at the zombie run.

  Was he serious about Trip or not? Why did all this matter to him? And if it didn’t, why didn’t he just ball it up and toss it like he’d done with so many other perfectly fine guys?

  Because Trip was not perfectly fine for him.

  Perfect.

  Supposedly, they still had a date to go to the Showtime affiliate party together, in a couple of months. No time like the present.

  By six, words felt worthless. Was there anything salvageable enough to make it worth camping out on Trip’s stoop like a stalker? A lifetime of being the ugly fat kid from Shitkick, Alabama, had left no leeway on that front. Agonized by the wait, Silas knew he wasn’t strong enough to stand on the street with a drip on his nose watching Trip hate him.

  I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to see you clearly.

  By the time dark rolled in, he’d reached some kind of horrible impasse, like a stupid walrus pining over a seagull. He mixed an oversized salad of dry romaine lettuce because he needed to eat. It tasted like weeds.

  Then the idea hit him.

  Trip deserved more than a fucking card, or a date, or a string of sentences that said all the right crap. Instead of scrabbling around to figure out what Trip wanted to hear or what he could do to prove himself worthy, Silas decided to give Trip what he really deserved.

  A gift.

  Not something expensive or fancy. Not some jokey trinket to break the ice.

  Trip had said something the day they met in Central Park. “You’re really gifted.” That’s where the spark started. Two artists alone in the woods, surrounded by fake monsters.

  And I’m so sorry I wasn’t ready for you to be so wonderful.

  Silas smiled at the memory and missed him. At some point Trip Spector had started to mean more to him than a lean body on top of him on cold nights. Trip just kept on pulling rugs out from under him and making all the dim corners of his life seem empty. Maybe he didn’t understand yet how much Silas had changed.

  If Silas cared at all, if this guy meant one fucking thing to him, the time had come for some swooping and saving.

  Some mistakes are worth making.

  No bed tonight. His feelings had flip-flopped so completely that he felt as if his heart were dyslexic. Yearning disabled.

  His father had always said, “Nothing lost that can’t be found.” He just needed to go look. I can do this.

  He went to his desk and pulled out the photocopy he’d made of Trip’s stained script, worse for wear but still legible. He pored over the half-written pages and the panel descriptions, tried to see what Trip had built behind his closed eyes. Some of it was there, but some came from hints Trip had let slip.

  Silas took a deep breath and shut his lids as if playing hide and seek with his future. Ready or not, here I come. What could he give Trip that would save them both a whole bunch of misery and mistakes?

  Trip would be signing Hero High’s new issue at Forbidden Planet on the twenty-fourth. He’d seen the Time Out ad on Trip’s corkboard a couple of weeks back, and Trip had complained about going. Silas would fucking stand in line if he had to.

  His mind snapped and churned like a piranha tank. In his mind’s eye, he saw the sad Moroccan waiter and that sad bouquet of deli roses. At 9:17, he decided to give up and leave a Valentine’s message, however unwelcome, because he was fixing to come apart like a ten-dollar suitcase at the bus station. His hands sweated as he dialed. His scarred fingers smeared the face of his phone. In his own ears, his voice sounded breathless and worried, but so it was.

  But I’ll never-never-never in my life be sorry for knowing you or needing you.

  “Hey, Trip.” A cough. “’S’me. Uhh, Silas. And I wanted to say hello. Silas Goolsby, I mean. Actually I want to say I’m sorry. But I figured I should start with hello and then I could get going on the sorries because there are quite a few which I owe you. And—I’m thinking about you. Umm. A bunch. All the time. You might be out tonight, but I wanted to say I miss you and—” He cleared his dry throat quietly. “I hope you have a wonderful Valentine.”

  Valentine. Only after he’d hung up did he realize he must have immigrated to the land of lonely, deluded fuckbuddies at some point, because he had dropped the S too.

  CLIFF had summoned Trip to the principal’s office at Hero High.

  Rather, he’d demanded an emergency editorial meeting at Big Dog, on Valentine’s Day no less.

  Same diff.

  On the train, his eyes started to smart, so Trip popped open the Allegra bottle, rattled a pill into his hand. His first in how long? He spitswallowed it.

  As soon as he came through the door of the midtown office, Kimmie waved him back to the office where Cliff paced red-faced around a scatter of inked Bristol boards on his desk.

  “Emergency?” Trip knocked on the doorframe as he stepped through. For once, the moldy recycled air didn’t clog his lungs instantly. “There a problem?”

  Cliff obviously wanted some kind of rescue, else why had he shown up all flushed from a run, wearing sweatshirt and shorts in the middle of February?

  “Sex maniacs, bro!” Cliff turned and scowled at the waterstained ceiling. “Fucking South America.” He waved his hand at printouts on his desk. “See for yourself.”

  Trip leaned closer over the inks. Yep. The Mighty Mites had wandered into the Land of Kinderslut again. Because Cliff constantly cut corners and leaned on young foreign artists with hellish deadlines, the racks and tackle always ballooned and the costumes shrank in the wash.

  While Cliff geared up to beg, Trip shifted his portfolio and backpack. He had the odd sensation he was watching the Big Dog offices from above. He could predict the way this maneuvering would play out, like chess moves, and for once, Cliff’s tizzy left him unflustered. In one sense, he missed the simple pleasure of Staplegun soft-soaping him. Still, four weeks after Cliff had swiped his Campus Champions idea and given it to that child, watching his Unboyfriend squirm gave him a steady intravenous drip of contentment.

  Now he was relieved Cliff had hijacked the new project. Compared to Scratch, it seemed like an insipid rehash of about fifteen other titles. Let some other pathetic wannabe corner the market on anodyne pastel co-eds.

  Cliff scratched his sweaty head and licked his lip. “I can cover most of these with balloons when we letter… but a couple of these are like Sir Juggs-alot.”

  “I don’t have time, Cliff. I’m already finishing pages on two books.” He put his sketchpad on the desk and lowered into a chair. “I can’t squeeze more hours outta the day. I gotta sleep sometime.”

  “Please.” Cliff gazed up through his eyelashes and bit the inside of his cheek without shame. He literally bumped the edge of the table with his fat basket, and Trip had to look. Neanderthal brain.

  The wad in front of him trapped Trip’s gaze for a split second, but he didn’t soften or step closer. “Full fee, Stapleton. You’re paying me my full quote. What IDE and Image pay me. No shit about it, either. This is me saving your penny-pinching ass at the fifty-ninth minute.”

  “Deal.” Cliff gave him a thumbs-up. “And it’s just the one splash page. Tomorrow if you can swing it.” Blink. Sexy smile. Asshole. Cliff’s chrome had flaked off.

  “Tomorrow?” Trip reached across the table and spun the drawing around: a doublewide splash page. “Wait….”

  “Twelve and thirteen. I guess that is kinda two pages.” He perched on the desk on one round buttcheek.

  Trip blinked, breathed, and didn’t say anything.

  Cliff flashed the f
ive-hundred-watt smile and circled his chair to lay big hands on Trip’s shoulders. Kneading them gently and well, he leaned down. “Ohh-kay. I can pay for two. Or I could blow you a little.”

  Ha ha.

  The black-and-white page depicted a crowded lockered hallway, packed with squeaky clean multiethnic students on their way to class. The main scene showed a pert blonde kissing Alphalad. In the foreground, Princess Quantum pouted, her arms folded under her cleavage as she roasted with jealousy and gave them the third-wheel side-eye: a teen superhero love triangle.

  “I mean, dude….” Cliff pointed and sniffed. “Eugenia almost has nipples, and Alphalad’s packing a superstiffy. These fucking Brazilians.”

  “What stiffy? I don’t see anything stiff on him.” Trip put his face closer to the inked board. “Or nipples. I think your mind’s in the gutter.”

  “His bulge is in the gutter.” The space between the panels, he meant, and no, it wasn’t. “Like a possum in his pants. Jesus.” Cliff tapped Alphalad’s crotch with his tan finger. “Or a gigondo gonad-wad. He could get her pregnant if he sneezed.”

  Trip scanned Alphalad’s basket again, unable to detect the gruesome cockmonster. “Cliff, you’re overreacting. I don’t see an erection. Maybe the angle of the zipper is a little wonky. And maybe, if you’re trying, the shadow makes some camel toe. If you’re an incorrigible chicken hawk and you squint.”

  “Well, check out Eugenia’s headlights front and center. Princess Quantum’s lactating like a sow.” The brunette, he meant. C-cups yes, nipples… not a one. “Nips of steel.”

  Phantom nips, apparently, because Trip spotted nothing erect under her sweater, just another bland googly-eyed teen Barbie drawn in a country where artists worked cheap and sexism still seemed sexy. Whatevs. “You’re paranoid.”

  “No. I’m cautious. Walmart is paranoid. I can’t have a Million Mom March against Hero High.”

  You should be so lucky. Sales would explode as kids assumed this dumb title was racier than it was.