by David Stukas
“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing my towel and pushing Michael toward the locker rooms.
“What’s with the pushing and the rushing all of a sudden?” Michael exclaimed.
“Later,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “I’ll tell you later ... outside.”
Michael looked at me as if I had just started eating bugs. “I don’t get it,” he added.
“Just grab your bag and let’s go,” I pleaded.
We retrieved our gym bags and were about to leave when a hulking presence blocked our retreat. The appearance of this form looming over us scared the bejesus out of me. It was Eric. He grabbed my gym bag out of my hand, took a CD-ROM jewel case from his own gym bag and tossed it into mine, then returned my bag while I stood there with my jaw wide open.
In a whisper that bordered on softly yelling, he said, “Hold on to this, I’ll be back to retrieve it ... later!” He and his precious gym bag headed toward the emergency exit, pushing the door open and causing the unhappy door to wail in alarm. Michael and I left the gym, noticing that the two imposing men were nowhere to be seen.
As we descended in the elevator to the street level, Michael pawed at my gym bag several times, prompting me to slap his hand away each time.
“Michael, let’s get clear of the building before we look at what Eric gave me,” I explained. “I don’t want those goons to see that I have something they might be looking for.”
“I don’t get it,” Michael reported. “What the hell is going on? I go with you to the gym to do legs and I step into an Alfred Hitchcock film.”
As soon as we turned the corner, I hailed a cab and suggested that we look at the mysterious object once we were safely ensconced in Michael’s apartment.
“Why wait until then?” Michael suggested. “Let’s look at it now ... we’re far enough away.”
And so we did. I glanced out the back window of the cab to make sure we weren’t being followed. We seemed to be safe, so I reached into my gym bag and pulled out the CD-ROM case, my hand trembling as if I held a bloody dagger.
“I don’t believe this!” Michael exclaimed. “ZZ Top—Greatest Hits?! The steroids that guy is taking didn’t just shrink his testicles ... his brain has lost significant mass, too.”
“Now wait a minute, Michael. It doesn’t mean that’s what’s inside. Let’s see,” I said, prying open the case to reveal just what you’d expect to find in a CD-ROM jewel case: a CD-ROM. But this CD-ROM didn’t have a printed label bearing the best of ZZ Top. It was, quite truthfully, blank. “Whatever is on this must be pretty important. Let’s go to your apartment and look at it, Michael. We’re already downtown.”
“Fine, but I tell you, if there’s anything on there from ZZ Top, I’ll poke my eardrums out.”
“I think it’s much more than that, Michael. It’s so important that the Mafia is after it.”
“How do you know those two guys were from the Mafia?” Michael challenged me.
“Look at the way they were dressed. You’ve seen The Sopranos. The Mafia is very hip nowadays.”
We were both musing about what the CD contained when the cab pulled up in front of Michael’s building. Michael paid the driver, leaving a tip so small, I ran back to the cab to throw the cabbie another two dollars.
“Why did you do that?” Michael asked. “His cab was filthy!”
“There was one gum wrapper on the floor!” I corrected Michael.
“I call that filthy!” Michael protested. “I’ve fired housekeepers for less.”
Michael was being his old, imperial self. The world, as Michael saw it, was divided into Michael and those who served him. It was as plain as that. Of course, being the heir apparent to a herpes ointment fortune gave him the sort of economic bravado that allowed him to treat salespeople like any of Henry the VIII’s wives and waitresses like chattel. This was perhaps why Michael always complained that his food tasted like spit when he sent a dish back to the kitchen. His proclamations weren’t limited to people who served him, either. He would approach perfect strangers guilty of fashion violations and tell them that what they were wearing was wrong, wrong, wrong. He was like a one-man traveling roadshow of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
We rode up in the deco elevator to Michael’s floor—which he alone occupied. As he opened the door, turned off the burglar alarm that he occasionally activated, and headed toward his computer room, I noticed that the décor had changed again—drastically. This was nothing new since Michael changed his apartment’s look the way most people changed underwear (those who bothered to wear it). It had gone from early battleship with rusted steel, raw concrete, visible heating ducts, and bolted I-beams to Italian minimalist. His penthouse was a sea of excessively calculated nothingness. Two white sofas of impeccable Milan pedigree stood silently contemplating each other. There was nothing else.
“Michael, you didn’t tell me that you did your apartment over again.”
“Oh yeah, that,” he said, barely raising his eyes from his computer screen. “I got tired of the old look. I wanted something cleaner. Ah, here we go,” he stated as he inserted the CD into his computer and clicked on the icon. The disk was full of cryptically named folders.
“Click on the one named JRD21303,” I suggested. There was no telling what we were about to find. “It looks like a zip code ... 21303. Where is that?”
The folder opened magically and we were presented with a list of photographs, the .jpg suffix giving away the contents. Michael clicked on one and we found ourselves looking at a photograph of a man dressed in silk boxer trunks wearing boxing gloves and tied up in a chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into this.
“I’ve done that,” Michael proclaimed proudly.
I ignored his comment. He clicked on some other folders and the pictures inside. Our next foray brought us face to face with a guy completely encased in an archaic deep-sea-diving suit that looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel. He was suspended in midair by ropes.
“I’ve done that too. Some guys panic the first time they try it. It takes a little while to get used to,” Michael added, pleased that he was in possession of such important, albeit useless information.
“Thanks for the information. I’ll remember not to panic the next time I find myself in a deep-sea-diving suit, suspended in someone’s living room.”
Michael gave me a look of disapproval, then displayed more pictures.
Our next treat was a man dressed in soccer clothing, complete with cleated shoes. Other photographs in the folder showed a distinguished-looking man dressed as a baseball player, football quarterback (I guess), cop, and fireman.
“Boring,” Michael commented.
“I beg your pardon, Michael, I have a police uniform. My boyfriend Marc got it for me in Palm Springs, remember?”
“Yes, that was quite an adventure,” Michael said with a misty reminiscence.
“We almost got killed ... several times, and you call it an adventure?”
“Oh, c’mon, it was fun,” Michael said, egging me on to agree with him. “Let’s go on, more pictures.”
It was more of the same. Every kind of kink you could imagine. Guys in rubber ...
“Done that,” Michael commented.
. . . wrestling ...
“That too.”
. . . superheroes ...
“Been there, done that.”
On to other photos. A few clicks and we were looking at a very large baby crawling across a floor—a baby with very hairy legs and a hairy chest.
“I haven’t done that,” Michael added definitively.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked.
“Unfortunately,” Michael echoed. “What an ugly baby!”
“Michael, that baby is a grown man.”
Michael studied the screen for a while, and like a thousand monkeys typing for millions of years, he actually came up with something—although it wasn’t Shakespeare. “Eric is running a sex fetish business and these are his client
s!”
I hated to admit it, but Michael had hit the nail on the head. It wasn’t difficult to arrive at that conclusion, but I gave him points for his finding.
“I take it you know a little about this stuff, Michael.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Most of it’s new to me. I mean, I know it exists, but I have no firsthand knowledge.”
“Robert, and you whine to me that you can’t find a boyfriend!”
“Michael, I’m looking for a boyfriend who won’t wet himself at the Union Square Café during lunch.”
“You’ve got to stop being a prude about the Internet, Robert. I get lots of my dates this way. For everyone out there with a special kink, there’s someone willing to supply it.”
“Apparently ... and in Eric’s case, for a price,” I responded, shaking my head in wonderment. “Michael, the names of these folders are probably the initials of the client and the date of their ... er ... session. Notice that all the folders end in zero-three or zero-two.”
“Look at this one, Michael. I don’t get it.”
Eric’s client was photographed from a very high angle so that the naked client would look very small.
“This guy’s into microphilia—or is it macrophilia? He gets off on being made to feel that he’s really small.”
“You’re joking,” I replied.
“No, I’m not.”
“And I thought my fantasies about gladiators were kinky.”
“No, there’s a whole group of guys who get off on being overwhelmed by giants.”
“Baby Snookums is starting to look better all the time,” I said. “Wait a minute ... Michael, correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of these guys are prominent New Yorkers.”
“Now you’re kidding me,” Michael replied.
“No, I’m not. Open that folder back here.” I pointed at the computer screen. “Yeah, that one. The guy wearing the fishnet stockings and bustier is Frank Addams, the fashion designer.”
Michael snorted in disgust. “Boy, for a fashion designer, he sure has lousy taste. I wonder why he thinks that bustier goes with those stilettos.”
Michael had a point.
“And look,” I said, pointing to the initials under the folder when I clicked my way back to it. “FA.”
“No!” Michael protested, then looked at some more photos in the folder. “You know, you’re right.”
“Hey, lookee here, Michael. One of the folders is called index.” He clicked on the document and before our very eyes were the identities of the men on the CD all neatly laid out for us, in a chart no less. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and sexual fantasies. “Eureka!”
“Boy, Frank is so hot now, I hate to think what these pictures would do to his career if they got into the wrong hands.”
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “Michael, I think you’ve just hit on what we’ve got here! No wonder those goons wanted Eric’s gym bag.”
“Wow,” he replied.
“Oh fuck!” I added.
“What? I suppose now you’re going to tell me that the guy dressed in the baby clothes is the model for Baby Watson cheesecakes.”
I couldn’t tell if Michael was joking or really meant what he just said. Because he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, there was no way of knowing. It was a good thing he was wealthy and good looking.
“Look here,” I said, grabbing the computer’s mouse and clicking on a folder. “This guy here is what’s-his-name, the Republican candidate running for mayor.”
“George Sheffield,” Michael said, supplying the answer.
“Right! See, the folder is marked GS. And this folder ... I’ve seen that face before. Who is he?” I asked aloud, inviting Michael to help me solve the identity.
“It’s hard to tell under the surgical mask he’s wearing, but he looks like Allen Firstborn, the televangelist. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence! I can’t get a good look at his face because the angle of the photograph and the feet stirrups are in the way.”
The folder was labeled AF. Michael was right again, a fact I confirmed after checking some other pictures in the folder. Yup, Allen was getting what some Manhattanites would pass off as a high colonic. To you and I who poop the old-fashioned way, it was an enema. I closed the folder. Ugh.
“So what are we going to do, Michael?”
“What do you mean, what are we going to do?” Michael commented.
“Someone just threw the hottest potato in Manhattan right into our lap ... and two goons are going to eventually find out we have it.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Michael clarified. “I said, ‘What do you mean we?’ I don’t remember being a part of this.”
It was a maneuver that was typical of Michael. When the going got tough, Michael got going. But I wasn’t going to let him get out of this one easily.
“Michael, when those two guys get hold of Eric, they’re going to make him tell who has it.”
Michael smiled confidently.
“Eric isn’t going to tell them a thing, Robert. The guy is two hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle and has big tattoos on his biceps. He’s not going to talk.”
“Michael, just last week, Eric pinched his hand in one of the weight machines and he screamed like a baby. I think we’re sunk. I guess we shouldn’t go back to the gym for a while.”
“Oh great. Can’t go the gym?!” Michael stated as if I had just told him that he would never walk again. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“Well,” I said, scrambling for an answer, “join another gym for a while. You can afford it. I can’t—you paid for my membership to Club M and I can’t afford to join another.”
“I just can’t go to another gym, Robert. This gym and I are in synch with each other.”
Then I remembered something. “You’re right. You can’t go to another gym—you’ve been thrown out of all the others because they caught you having sex in the shower room.”
“Sort of,” Michael confessed. “You know how I hate it when you’re right, Robert.”
“The only course of action is to lay low for now, which, for you, Michael, shouldn’t be much of an effort.”
“Ha, ha,” he replied sarcastically.
“So I’ll just leave the CD here ...” I said, laying the CD case down on Michael’s table and preparing to leave.
“Oh no you don’t,” Michael said, flying into action. He shoved the CD case back into my hand and clamped my fingers down on it with his iron grip.
Oh well, you can’t blame a guy for passing the booby prize off on someone else. I snatched the CD and left Michael’s apartment. It wasn’t just because I was trying to protect Michael that I took the CD home with me. I figured if I was accosted by the two goons in the gym, at least I would have something to give them. Michael could only plead in agony as they put his feet into cement galoshes and dropped him in the East River. On the way home in a cab, I chuckled to myself over and over at the mental picture of the henchmen trying to sink Michael as his pectoral and penile implants kept him bobbing up to the surface. I would have kept on laughing all night long if it weren’t for the fact that the next morning, I caught the news and found that Eric Bogert made headlines. It seemed that he, too, had tried to fly off his apartment balcony and forgot to pack a parachute.
2
If Life Hands You a Hot Potato, Make French Fries
The press had a field day with Eric’s death. One headline screamed, BODYBUILDER SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE? I tried to ignore the story, except that as I perused the article, there was my name as the proud recipient of the CD-ROM that contained unnamed VIPs in compromising positions. Great. Now the press, lawyers, and assorted psychos had a clear road map to my door. I was a sitting duck.
I sat in stunned silence. How the fuck did the press get hold of that information when I was sure that only the pavement-kissing Eric Bogert, Michael Stark, and I knew who held the dreaded disk? I would never again underestimate the power of the Four
th Estate. For years, I had reveled in celebrity dirt exposed, but now I had been exposed and I knew exactly how Jackie O. felt when the press snapped pictures of her changing from a swimsuit into her beach clothes after a swim in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard: I felt naked for all the world to see.
In times of crisis, I did what I did best: I panicked. Then I slapped myself and picked up the phone and called Monette O’Reilley, towering lesbian, amateur sleuth, and the person most likely to get me out of this mess.
She answered the phone with a psychic sense of intuition that it would be me. The woman didn’t need caller I.D.
“Jeeeeeeesus, Robert! What have you gotten yourself into this time?” she whooped into the phone. “This makes your adventure in Berlin look like child’s play.”
“Thank you for reminding me that someone just pulled the rug out from under my feet and that my life, dismal though it often seems, is now bleak with a capital B.”
“Now, now Robert,” she chided me. “There is another way of looking at this matter.”
“And what, pray tell, might that be?”
“A lot of people are willing to pay dearly for those photos: the tabloids, corporate competitors, but mostly the guys whose photographs are on the CD you now hold. You’re a rich man, Robert.”
Monette had a point, bless her. I didn’t know the legalities of selling the photographs and figured that blackmail wouldn’t be looked upon too favorably by the law, but this was America, goddamnit, and the entrepreneurial spirit that allowed some poor slob like me to make a fortune off the misfortunes of others was a part of what made this nation great. After all, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers had built empires off the same principle of taking advantage of a situation and muscling others out of the way with threats and intimidation.
My life was about to become Gourmet magazine and Vanity Fair all rolled into one. My life would be perfect. I would live in a fabulous downtown loft made of glass and I would wear clothing made entirely of titanium that was comfortable as well as practical. I would listen to jazz and classical masterpieces from microchips inserted into my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen to all the stupid shit that people said. I would be driven around Manhattan by my gorgeous bodyguard and sidekick, Ito, in a hydrogen-powered SUV while I dined on Himalayan Mountain chickens and drank champagne and tossed garbage out the window at the feet of people like Donald Trump. I would—
