Bad Idea

by Damon Suede

  Cliff tugged Trip’s portfolio closer and swiped through the newest artwork… making obligatory whistles and hisses of ass-kissing praise.

  At twelve, Trip had dreamed about the perfect bodies in Spawn and Hellblazer. He imagined the sad gay kids, trapped in shithole born-again towns, dying of shame and boredom, dreaming of a never-never land of superpowered Lost Boys with tantalizing bulges, battling Captain Shnook. Trip couldn’t fly in and rescue them with his miraculous pencil, but maybe the next best thing.

  Why couldn’t Alphalad have a mastodon wang? Why couldn’t he have super speed and be a power bottom?

  “Tripwire, you gotta save me here.” Cliff’s huge cocky grin and sad smile offered the same blank Trip had always filled in without a second thought.

  Any self-respecting artist would’ve said no. Any shrewd queer would’ve felt pissed at the blatant metrosexual will-he, won’t-he come-on. Any rational adult would’ve said you don’t pay me enough and this comic is a bland rip-off of comics with tighter writing and sharper audiences.

  Not me. Trip would fix the fake problems on Cliff’s double splash page and then use that money for Scratch. Buy himself a little wiggle room. He needed a couple of weeks to finish the issue one script and get some tight samples drawn. Silas blowing him off had only steeled his resolve.

  In the back of his mind, Trip formulated a plan. Con season would gear up in the spring, and for nine months, he’d sit in convention halls across America with hundreds of indie comic publishers who’d jump on Scratch, who wanted things a little raunchy. What he needed was a package: script, concept pages, finished interiors, a slick workup of the series arc.

  Cliff froze on one of the portfolio pages. “What’s this garbage?”

  “Hey!” Trip stiffened and stood up. His sinuses throbbed. “Fuck you, man. They’re not garbage.”

  Then Cliff slid one loose page free: a random scatter of faces, limbs, and poses… too manly and suggestive to belong. Oh shit. The incubus drawing from his lunch with Rina: a three-quarter face and a head to toe. Silas retooled for hell.

  Scratch.

  How did that get in there? Stupid.

  “Oh. Sorry. That fella’s not yours.” Trip circled the desk and plucked the demon out of the pile. “He musta snuck in.” He frowned, and his heart chugged as if Cliff had caught him masturbating at his desk. He should have been more careful. Thank God it was one of the Silas sketches and not Cliff with horns and a thick uncut bazooka. He’d never have lived that shit down.

  “As bad as the Brazilian crap.” Cliff scrutinized the bulging crotch and dashing demonic profile. “I don’t like it.”

  A cold lizard of shame crept across Trip’s belly as he sat down again on the edge of the chair for the inevitable scolding. “You don’t have to.” His eyes itched for the first time in weeks.

  “He has pubes. And nipples? Jeez.”

  “Not for Hero High. For me. Just playing around with an idea. A different title.”

  “So now, you’re, like, cheating on me?” Cliff sighed and leaned back. Blink. “We’re not enough for you?” His voice got husky, and his biceps stretched the T-shirt as he leaned forward.

  Trip avoided his sexuality at Big Dog. His queerness was the elephant in the room, and however much Cliff joked, the reality had hovered for four years without landing anywhere. Comics could get weirdly bigoted, even now. Those old-school companies still had morality clauses.

  But… why did Cliff wear his clothes so damn tight, unless he was gay? Why did the Unboyfriend hang all over him all the time and flirt constantly? What was Trip supposed to think?

  Button, button, who’s got the button?

  “Six months from now, we’re gonna get scooped up by DC or Marvel, and you don’t wanna get left behind. Right? We’re so close.” Cliff’s sweatshirt smelled a little straight-boy musty, as if he’d worn it to the gym a couple of times without washing it. “I guess I don’t like you playing with the other kids.” Cliff ran a hand over Trip’s scalp and squeezed the back of his neck. “I want you all to myself.” Cock-and-bullshit.

  “Fuck off.” The feathery scrape of Cliff’s fingernails made Trip twitch. He fiddled with the zipper of his jacket. Ugh. His skin tightened in lust or disgust. “I’m not saying it’s definite. I’m just doodling, y’know?”

  “Indie comics are a dead-end road, man. If you need more work, I got plenty for you.”

  Trip sighed in exasperation. Shit. Now Cliff thought he needed to chisel work. “I need to have some fun. Like a creativity break. This’d just be a little thing I did on the side.”

  “C’mon!” Cliff leaned over to scrutinize Scratch’s assets. “Everybody’s gonna expect that. A comic with boners and boys. Lame! Where’s the surprise?”

  Trip looked away from the whole package and rubbed his pinked forearm. “It was just a thought.”

  “No shit. I can tell the kinda thoughts you were having, bro.” Cliff squeezed Trip’s knee hard enough to make him flinch. For reasons he didn’t analyze, the tingling grip made his cock chub. “Someone needs to do the gooey mambo. Trust me. If you wanna jerk off to it, fine, but gay titles don’t have enough market share to make sense. There’s no business model.”

  “I didn’t say he was gay.”

  Cliff favored him with some choice scorn. “He looks gay.”

  In his head, Silas winked and laughed at him in Scratch’s husky voice. “How do you look gay? He’s a muscular male. Hi? That’s every superhero comic.” A blush crawled up his throat.

  The Unboyfriend tapped the swell of Scratch’s glutes. “No cape. Ripped up. Massive ass and junk. So sexually confrontational I can, like, smell your blue balls from here.” He grimaced, then pretended to wipe the page and flick the finger at Trip. “The Mighty Mites don’t look like this.”

  “They’re fourteen, Cliff. Gimme a fucking break!”

  He flashed a prom king smile and chortled, “I’m kidding.”

  “I’m not. How does he look gay?”

  “Well, you’re gay, so… duh.” There. Cliff had managed to say it out loud for once. He cracked his knuckles.

  “Duh, what?”

  Then Cliff got very chummy, almost baiting him with loose affection. “Dude, dirty comics don’t make money. Queer books are like kryptonite… they take money away from you by proximity. Feel me, Harry Bush and Tom of Finland didn’t license anything to Hollywood.”

  “I can’t believe you know who Harry Bush is.” And Trip couldn’t; even gay guys who loved the iconic drawings had no idea who’d drawn them. Harry Bush had been one of the kings of the midcentury skin mags.

  “Those old pervs did that shit for love.” Cliff reopened his hands to the ceiling like Solomon dividing the baby. “Listen, do you know what amateur means?” He said it with a bad French accent.

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks. I’m not an idiot.” A hard pellet of anger lodged in the back of his throat, too deep to hack out.

  “No, I mean in French, dumbass. It means ‘love of.’ It means some dumb fuck who slaves away for love. Amat. That doesn’t cover anyone’s mortgage. Or buy cheese doodles. Or pay off student loans.” A meaningful stare. Cliff knew exactly how much debt Trip had chipped away, and for how long. He also knew Big Dog paid Trip a pretty healthy income to whip up Hero High.

  Trip took a long breath and wiped his swollen nose with deliberate slowness. “I’m a professional. I’m working on an indie comic because I want to stretch myself.” Trip had never seen Cliff so agitated or sustained such calm himself in the Big Dog offices. Stupid really, because he suspected Cliff’s whole shoot-for-the-moon plan depended on him. Trip’s high-detail artwork allowed Big Dog to seem fancier than it was.

  Cliff shrugged and tried to sound casual. “You’re bigger than indie.” He curled quotey fingers and sniffed at the incubus drawings as if at a used condom. “Comics for a small group of people.”

  “Gay people are a small group?” Now Trip wished he hadn’t agreed to redraw the fucking splash page in twenty-fou
r hours. He could still walk out. “Cliff, I’ve got an opportunity to do something on my own.”

  His editor snorted and spread his thighs with the fratboy snicker: Hrr-hrr-hrr. “Yeah. That’s called masturbation, and I’m pretty sure you’re already doing that plenty, bro.” Was he mocking the torch Trip had carried for four years?

  “Fuck off. A book of my own.”

  Cliff stopped laughing, stopped smiling. The torch guttered. “What?”

  A cool pleasure slithered through Trip as he watched this cocky motherfucker squirm and doubt for the first time in, well, ever. For three seconds, he suspected Cliff and he both knew exactly what was and wasn’t ever going to happen between them. Trip forced his voice into casual chitchat mode. “Not full time. I mean… no way it’ll interfere with any of our stuff, but something for fun, y’know? To get my mojo going again. I been real frustrated—”

  “Wait a sec. Wait a sec.”

  Trip didn’t wait to hear the bullshit logic. “Y’know? Needing to cut loose. Like you said. And it’s—”

  “This is big business.”

  “Going really well, actually. Not big. This would be an independent book. More Vertigo than DC. Totally niche. But it feels great to let my hand go.”

  After wiping his sweaty forehead, Cliff mapped out the future with athletic hands. “Mass media doors are waiting to be opened. Hero High would make a great cable movie. Something on Lifetime? The kind of wholesome American entertainment that will end up on lunchboxes across America.”

  “And Scratch won’t. That’s what you’re trying to say. In case I had expected a rush on sex demon merchandise for sixth graders?” Trip’s exasperation crept out. Maybe Cliff carried a kind of torch as well: for a shortcut, a secret handshake, overnight success.

  “So work with me.” Cliff leaned forward on his elbows. “Be serious. Comic books make serious money.”

  “Great. But I’m not under exclusive contract. I’m not gonna just sit at home like a monk. I want to draw. Big Dog doesn’t own me. And until Mr. Big-time Movie-pants pays me, he doesn’t own me, either!”

  “Trip, I wanna sell out. You wanna sell out. They just gotta pay us for the privilege. A big licensing deal will put us on the map. Money, control, access. One deal and we can write our ticket. The big time.”

  Trip scowled at his knuckles. All this rah-rah sounded… wrong. Silas never talked about movies like this at all. Actually, come to think of it, Cliff’s version of movie production seemed like People magazine bullshit. Silas had gossiped about film school interns on the set who swore that Spielberg was drooling, had a thousand projects in development, a deal away from the big time.

  Without thinking, Trip stole the words and pretended they were his. “Man, a thousand projects get optioned and kept on life support for years. Studios write checks so they can keep their D-girls and bitch over Cobb salads.”

  Dead silence.

  Cliff goggled at him as if he’d coughed up a toy poodle onto the desk.

  “Cliff, I’m not a nimrod. I mean, I follow the trades.” Trip shrugged.

  “You do?” His editor stared in bafflement at the desk as if the imaginary poodle had taken a crap and then danced on its hind legs across the Bristol boards.

  For the first time, Trip felt in control in this office. “Well, not directly. But I pay attention to people who read the trades.”

  “Who wanna use you? Like an agent?” Cliff narrowed his eyes. “Who have you talked to?”

  “Cliff, I can’t only draw this weeny-bopper shit 24/7.” He flapped his hand at the Hero High banners and merchandise all over the jumbled meeting room. The collected junk of the company’s eight years of comic cons angling for acquisition.

  His Unboyfriend nodded with veiled condescension. “Go with me…. If it got out that the genius who draws the Mighty Mites did kinky shit on the side….” His voice trailed off into the pitfalls and poison ivy of Trip’s career path.

  Oh. Surely Cliff didn’t expect him to live in fake, cardboard, no-budget, half-assed not-quite-Oz for the foreseeable future to save a buck and close this deal? Somewhere… there’s a land of lollipops and rainbows. His stomach turned over.

  On the table, Scratch’s world-weary leer stared back at him with hazel eyes. Not hazel. But not Cliff’s eyes ever again.

  Cliff flexed his hand and rubbed the thick wrist. “And then you got the Fundies marching up your ass because you showed a wang. Worse! Wang and fang. No thanks. Keep that stuff in your pants for now.” He opened his hand. “I mean, hey, Alan Moore had to do Swamp Thing before he got to do Lost Girls. Once we’re done here, you can really cut loose. Crazy as your gay heart desires. You won’t have to draw a straight line if you don’t want.”

  Cliff’s shirt rode up to reveal his abs, but seeing the calculation killed the effect. What would have looked like temptation dissolved into a strip of hairy skin.

  “I’m not Alan Moore. And my gay heart is fine, thanks.” Trip reached across the desk and dragged the damning page back into his lap. He examined the sly seductive brow and the exaggerated muscle. What if it was all worthless? What if he fucked up his job here and Cliff gave all his work to Dee? Cliff had shamed him, the way his parents had when he’d fought back. As soon as the humiliation spiraled through his veins, anger chased it. “I’m not going to kill this because of some possible deal that might never happen.”

  Cliff’s soft fingers closed into a loose fist. “Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, Triptophan.”

  “You’ve warned me.” Trip refused to go, dissecting him. “I’m fully warned.”

  Scratch smoldered there, ready to liberate the lost and the lonesome from lives of surreptitious porn-trolling. Got an itch?

  Trip spoke calmly. “I’m getting your work done. I’ve delivered the next two interior pages early, and I only got this double splash to clean up Brazil’s imaginary mess.” He semishrugged, enjoying the lazy power he felt.

  Cliff’s gaze snapped up, icy in the open fratboy face. “And what if I put my foot down and told you to stop?”

  Boom.

  “I would tell you—” Trip swallowed to make sure his mouth wasn’t dry. “To blow me. A little.” He pretended to smile.

  Cliff pretended to laugh. He fidgeted with the pen in his hand, capping and uncapping and recapping it with his left hand: clickitaclick-clickita-clickit. “Right.”

  After all these years of Trip acting like Cliff owned him, they’d both forgotten that nobody owned anybody. Trip stood up for himself and poof—they were just two hairless apes with a passing familiarity, and Hero High was just colored shapes on mashed wood pulp, held together with two splinters of bent steel.

  We have the gift of bullshit.

  Trip nodded and made a mental note to thank Silas, and instantly erased the thought because Silas was on his shit list for balling him and tossing him. Silas wasn’t wrong about much.

  Clicka-clickit-clickita. Cliff’s pen finger twitched.

  An awkward few seconds of silence hummed between them under the fluorescents. Scratch stayed put on his page, watching them with sly eyes.

  Trip glanced up to find a Cliff he’d never met before taking his measure.

  Cliff sucked his upper lip and nodded. “Fuck strategy. Fuck loyalty.” Clickita-clickaclick. “Huh?”

  “Loyalty?” Trip plucked the goddamned pen out of his hand, just to stop the clicking. It was hot from Cliff’s skin and a little gummy. Someone was sweating and it wasn’t him. “You hire some intern with a cow’s hand to draw a book I drafted. You drag me in at 9:00 a.m. to fix a fuckup in twenty-two hours. A fuckup I predicted and you marched yourself into. I’m cleaning up your mess, Mr. Stapleton. I’m the cavalry.”

  “Get those pages to me by Tuesday.” Cliff pushed files around in a tacit signal for Trip to clear the fuck out.

  The Unboyfriend has spoken. The Unboyfriend is displeased.

  Trip crossed his arms and didn’t budge.

  Cliff glowered at the demon that had
snuck onto his desk in the middle of all the Mighty Mites. “And don’t waste time on this homo-baloney.”

  He sneered at Scratch’s sneering face. Scratch won that staring contest hands down.

  Fuck you, Staplegun.

  “Well, boss, until you’re paying me for this book, you can’t tell me to do anything on it.” Trip kept his tone light, but he’d never said no to Cliff before.

  Again the cock-and-bull fratboy laugh Cliff thought would cajole him into line: Hrr-hrr-hrr. “Promise me you won’t be stupid about this.”

  The disdain on Cliff’s face had quite the opposite effect. Trip’s protectiveness of his strapping sex demon surged inside him. He wished he could call Silas and thank him, but instead he took pride in not crumbling.

  Fuck you, Unboyfriend. In fact, all the unboyfriends could go fuck themselves.

  Suddenly, Scratch made his fingers itch, and he wanted to draw nothing else for the rest of the night. Dreams don’t cost anything. He’d finish the character models, at least. He offered a silent vow to himself that he’d get the sections and masters done by Sunday so he didn’t lose the thread of the original excitement he’d found with Rina. He could summon Scratch all by himself.

  “Good boy. We’re gonna sell to the big guys, and then we can write our ticket. You and me, right?” Cliff got up, wrapped an arm around Trip’s neck, and squeezed him close in a jocky hug and kissed Trip’s head with a wet smack. “Mwah.” He poked at the drawing.

  A small poison bubble of irritation slipped up Trip’s spine. The sight of Cliff’s perfect fingertip thumping Scratch’s two-dimensional crotch, trying to pound it into Ken doll impotence, unlocked something in him. For a moment, he thought he might say something insulting just to get it out into the light where it belonged. Instead, somewhere in the cluttered closet of his soul, a decision made itself, and made itself known to him.

  He’d draw his beautiful demon… and no one on this fucking earth would stop him. Without Cliff ever knowing it, he’d just lost the chance to be a hero in the new comic. Without Silas ever knowing it, Trip would capture his good bits on paper as raw material and make magic. Delicious decision.