Losers

by Matthue Roth

  I jammed my hands into my pockets—quickly, because I didn’t want him to see how thoroughly my body was shaking. In reality, the only totem of gay culture I’d ever seen here was two guys with crew cuts and leather vests holding hands while they checked out the David Bowie section, but that was the firmest lead I had.

  Bates nodded his assent, and we walked into the store.

  Today it was mostly empty, the aisles devoid of people, the floor-to-ceiling black, chipping, wooden CD racks looking relatively neat and unscoured. On a busy day, there’d be jewel cases sticking out of the racks, lying overturned on their sides. The clerk, at least, was my favorite one—this absolutely beautiful pale-skinned, long-black-haired goth who wore mercifully little makeup and actually looked less like a goth than a ghost—the ghost of a quiet, thoughtful, and gorgeous porcelain girl who rarely said more than three words in a row to customers, even when ringing up their purchases.

  “Where are they?” Bates hissed into my ear.

  “They who?” I shot back.

  “The kids you wanted to show me. The queer kids.” Bates said queer like he’d been practicing it—like he’d tried out all the words to see which would fit, and this was the one that sounded the least gay.

  He brought his face away from my ear for a moment, glanced reflectively at the vinyl section in the back. “Do they have a special aisle where they hang out? Is there something you say to the chick at the desk that lets her know who you’re looking for?”

  “I really don’t think so,” I said. I spun around, bent down, and immersed myself in the flyers on a milk crate by the door.

  Bates crouched down next to me. His breath blew into my ear. “Go up and ask.”

  “I can’t go up and ask!”

  “Just ask her!” he hissed.

  “I’m not going to just walk up and ask her!” I protested loudly.

  “Why not?” Bates held a metal-lined fist to my face.

  “Because she’s devastatingly beautiful and I have a crush on her!”

  That last part, I shouted out, exasperated—which turned out to be way too loud for the fairly tiny record store. The clerk, as well as two twelve-year-olds in the Punk/Post-Punk section and the middle-aged lady with the mullet who was leafing through Foreigner records, all looked up.

  My face turned the red of blood and new cars.

  Bates flashed the world’s widest, most horrifying smile in my face.

  Then he pulled back his arm and hit me on the shoulder.

  I stumbled. Propelled by his momentum, I lunged forward, practically slamming into the cash register—and into the girl who was working there.

  “Need help?” she asked.

  She had huge eyes, eyes that looked like a Halloween special effect. They seemed to have two distinct irises, an ordinary blue one with a deeper, purple-black iris inside it.

  I could feel my face growing even redder.

  This had to be the worst part. Worse than all the other parts of today put together. Blushing was the un-gothiest thing I could think of.

  “Actually, yes,” I said, leaning into the cash register—close and confidential. “Do you know where the gay clubs near here are?”

  She blinked in surprise.

  “The gay clubs?” she repeated, as if checking to confirm just how devoted I was to this notion of discovering a club that was convened especially for people of the gay persuasion.

  I shot her a little smile back. It felt like my entire face was rolling itself up into a ball, swallowing my eyes and nose and ears down my throat. She leaned back, rubbed her chin with a lace-gloved hand, and watched me fidget. God, of all the possible first real interactions I could have had with her, I think this would rank at just about the number-one worst.

  On the other hand, there was always Bates’s fist as motivation.

  “Yes, those ones,” I said. “I mean, it’s really okay if you don’t, we were just wondering if—”

  “ALRIGHT, STORE’S CLOSING EARLY TODAY! PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE CHECKOUT COUNTER TO PAY FOR ANY AND ALL PURCHASES, AND IF YOU MONSTERS IN THE BACK THINK I’M NOT GONNA NOTICE YOU TRYIN’ TO SNEAK THOSE GREEN DAY CDS DOWN YOUR PANTS, YOU GOT ANOTHER THING COMIN’!” Her head tilted back, and her mouth opened farther than I’d ever seen a human mouth open. Her hand came down on a call bell on the counter, and instead of a dinky ding came a huge reverberation that rang throughout the store.

  The woman with the mullet dropped all the records back into the bin but two, and handed those to the clerk, along with thirteen dollars and ninety cents exactly, which she clutched in her hand. The two tweeny boys scampered out right after her, leaving a trail of CDs on the floor in their wake.

  Bates craned his head to watch them run away, fascinated. “You want me to run them down for ya?” he offered keenly.

  “No, that’s fine,” said the clerk girl, whose voice returned to its normal autumny whisper, but still felt different, like she’d let go of all the pretense. She stepped over the CDs on the ground, reached into her plaid tartan skirt for a key, and stuck it into the front door. “They didn’t swipe anything; I was keeping count. I’ll pick up those tomorrow. Besides, are you coming with us—or is your diminutive friend here the only one who’s looking for queer kids?”

  “No!” Bates roared—and then, embarrassed, coughed into his hand and started speaking at a normal volume. “I mean—I suppose I could be persuaded to accompany you guys. But where the hell are you gonna take us?”

  “Just come,” she said, walking past us and out the door. Mystified, Bates and I looked at each other. We both felt clueless, all our hunches without base. We’d never before had so much in common.

  The club was called Bubbles, and ordinarily—she told us—it was one of those ambiguously gendered clubs for twentysomethings. “You know, eighty percent straight, but they play enough Pet Shop Boys to keep us coming back,” she said, laying one soft hand on each of our backs and guiding us through a narrow, black-lit corridor that was lined shoulder-to-shoulder with people leaning against walls that were painted with black and white globs like a cow. “One afternoon a month, all the city’s queer youth organizations pool their money together and rent out the club so that the underage kids have a chance to meet each other and get their groove on, too.”

  We ducked underneath a couple of skinny guys in white tank tops and rainbow necklaces who were making out in a doorway, and stepped into the next room, which was lit in bright orange, glowing neon tables and kids dressed up in the quirky, Day-Glo colors of cartoon characters. Heavy, pulsing thuds of techno music rocked our stomachs. I had to blink. It felt like night in here, like it had instantly gone from four o’clock to ten-thirty. It felt even weirder when I looked at our surroundings: This was an actual club, something I had heard about before but had never seen with my own eyes. People came here and drank alcohol, fancy alcoholic drinks in bright colors with little umbrellas. People came here to flirt with each other. I looked over at the luminescent red vinyl couches, the shiny metal poles. People might have made out right where we were standing. People might have actually had sex in this room.

  “Wow, Bates,” I said. My head couldn’t stop looking around, mouth open, eyes wide. “I guess we found what you were looking for.”

  “Yeah,” Bates echoed back, gazing around the room, his brain in a similar orbit to mine. His voice sounded smaller than ever, as if something had finally managed to make an impression on him. “I guess we did.”

  “So,” I said, picking up a carrot stick off one of the appetizer trays they had lying around, “this is what gay people look like, huh? And this is what they do with their time.”

  “This is what they want to do,” Bates corrected me. “They spend the other twenty-nine days of every month waiting for this shit to go down, and as soon as it breaks, they leap on it.”

  I chewed on my carrot, listening to him speak. It was fresh and crunchy. My teeth sank straight through it. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking,” I said,
baffled by his vocabulary, but trying not to let on. “So, I don’t know how it works. Are you supposed to notice guys that are cute and start talking to them? Or are they supposed to notice you?”

  “I don’t do ‘cute,’ ” Bates snapped. He caught hold of himself. “I don’t like cute guys. I mean, I don’t frickin’ know. I’ve never done this before. Shit, do you think I’m supposed to be somebody’s type? Are there secret signals or something?”

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure that anyone would notice whether you were their type or not,” I said, subtly trying to communicate to Bates how, in a room full of boys wearing designer jeans and sequined sleeveless shirts and girls in vintage polka dot skirts, he was pretty much the only one who fit the two-hundred-pound, leather-wearing construction-worker type. If that even existed for teenage gay kids. Why hadn’t Bates kidnapped Sajit instead of me? He was a bona fide gay boy, while I was just an innocent bystander. If there was a secret handshake, Sajit would know it for sure. Maybe that’s why Bates would have been nervous about talking to Sajit? It was kind of funny to think of Bates being totally intimidated by Sajit, of all people.

  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 s
top 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.