Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  Don’t misunderstand. I don’t think that’s what made him queer. No one knows how that happens, but I do think it taught him to keep people at a distance, and I think that…well it kind of helped him when he… I think it made his job easier.

  Dude X—A source close to the victim, August 17:

  Oh hell no, Jimmy didn’t know his husband du jour was Robert Wright. No way, not until later. I mean it’s not like the dark queen of the fundie movement gave him a business card or invited him to prayer meetings. I’m pretty sure Bottom-Boy Bob wanted Jimmy on his knees, but it had nothing to do with repentance. Right? We get these closet cases all the time in our line of work—married guys, politicians, priests—and part of the job is being discreet. The client is paying you to keep your mouth shut until he wants it open. Right? Ha!

  I totally understand why Jimmy flipped on Wright, though—I think any one of us would have—because I’m not gay for pay, you know what I mean? Once I get my acting career off the ground, I’m done with buyaboy.com like forever. It’s good money and the work is easy, but the glamour wore off fast, you know what I mean? After that, I’m still gonna be queer, and I have to live in the world assholes like Wright are fucking up.

  I mean he’s like the spiritual leader to half the fuckers in congress? You keep hearing about separating church and state but they go together like lube and anal beads, you know what I mean?

  I absolutely think Wright and his Wrongs are behind Jimmy’s death. If Wright didn’t hire the job out, then one of his freak-tastic fundie followers did it to save the Reverend’s good name. Whatever, man. It’s fucked up, and Jimmy’s still dead.

  Remember, I don’t want you using my name. This is totally anonymous. Call me Dude X. Right? That sounds fucking rad. Dude X. Ha.

  Jimmy “Angel” Royce, quoted in the Daily Register, May 15:

  “Mr. Wright hired my services through the buyaboy.com website. At that time he inquired about my rates for a variety of sexual acts. We came to an arrangement and met. I will not go into details, but I can say that our meetings were sexual in nature.”

  “Yes, we did have sex.”

  Statement from reporter Yvonne Valdez, June 14:

  As a professional courtesy, I’ll say…do your own fucking work. I’ve been on this story for weeks, and every piece of relevant information has already appeared in one of my articles. So read them! Or if you can’t be bothered, I’ll give you the highlights. Anti-gay Christian Celeb slams nasties with rent boy in Dallas hotel. They get caught. Rent boy tries to protect his client and says things never got hard and moist. Rent boy finds out exactly who his trick was and decides to come clean. He gives me an exclusive interview and is murdered later that same night while laying low in the apartment of a friend who was out of town. The cops have suspects falling out of their asses but not a bit of evidence.

  There, now you know what about sixty million other people know. Fucking amateurs.

  Quotes drawn from a variety of social media sites:

  May 15:

  “OMG!!!”

  “Like there was any doubt. Wright was just another self-hater who punished the LGBT community for living the life he wanted for himself.”

  “Up is down. Black is white. Wright is wrong! So fucking wrong.”

  “Wright served the church and let them drain his humanity, because he believed it when they called him abomination. Self-loathing. Vicious. Disgusting. Bravo Jimmy Royce for dragging this piece of shit kicking and screaming into the light of day.”

  “Bravo, Angel [Jimmy]! You’re our hero!”

  “This is heroic? He was forced by the media to say SOMETHING. He was either going to align himself with Wright, who’s on his way down or with the gay community, who will put his face on magazine covers and support his ass for the rest of his life. Was the decision that difficult? That heroic? Reach higher people.”

  “I <3 Jimmy!”

  May 16:

  “If we lose, Satan wins. Send your donations today.”

  “Wright’s church is actually raising money for his de-queerification! WTF?!?!”

  “We’ve all swallowed a load here and there, but those poor dumb fuckers have to be drowning by now.”

  May 17:

  “Rest in Peace, Jimmy. My heart holds you.”

  “Another Angel in heaven.“

  “One more fag in the fire. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  Statement from the Reverend Robert Wright, May 26:

  Never before have I so well understood the weakness of man. I thought I was beyond temptation, far from the whispered invitations of sin. That was my pride, and this is my fall.

  Without delving into the unwholesome details, I am issuing this statement to confirm that the well-publicized allegations against me are, to some minor extent, true. I admit this knowing that the only path to Our Lord is one of honesty, and though this path often winds through brutal and unforgiving terrain, I will travel it, guided by love and light.

  I have embarrassed my family, my friends, my church and the countless devoted who have looked to me for guidance all these long years. I can only say that I’m sorry. I’m unwell, and with the help of Our Lord I will fight my way back to grace.

  Placing myself in the hands of my brothers and sisters, I will undergo counseling at one of the excellent Family in Front facilities. I prefer to leave the location unspecified so that my personal shame and the notoriety it has fostered will not interfere with the enlightenment of myself or any other Christian seeking clarity and grace.

  Statement from Myrna Jones, August 17:

  Jimmy and I were best friends. We’ve been friends since grade school. We came to Austin together last year because he’d heard all about the music scene, but mostly we came to Austin because we both wanted to get the heck out of Fulton, Mississippi.

  We talked about everything, and yeah, he told me about Wright. I mean, he didn’t know the guy was a reverend, certainly didn’t know he was famous, but he told me about a guy—I figured it was Wright because of the timing, you know? Anyway, Jimmy told me about this client—Jimmy always called them clients—and this one had hired him off the website and paid Jimmy to drive up to Dallas. He did it in February and then again in May when…well, you know.

  Jimmy said the guy was into role-playing, which happens all the time I guess, but Wright was a strange one. He didn’t want to be a naughty schoolboy or a prison inmate getting worked over by a guard. He wanted Jimmy to stick a doll with needles while he was fu…while they were conducting business. Jimmy told me the guy howled like a snake-bit dog when one of those needles slid into the doll’s body. Like voodoo you know?

  Jimmy laughed his ass off about it after the first time they met, telling me all about the nut job with his dollies. The second time he didn’t think it was so funny. See, Jimmy and Wright had finished their business and Wright was in the bathroom cleaning up. The door was closed and Jimmy heard the water running, and he was kind of bored so he picked up the doll and for laughs, he jabbed a needle through the thing’s chest.

  Well, the next thing he knows Wright is screaming like a stuck pig—which is about right if you ask me—and Jimmy yanks the needle out of the doll. Wright comes screaming out of the bathroom, and he snatches the doll from Jimmy’s hand and tells him to get out of the room.

  The whole thing freaked Jimmy bad. Then those pictures hit the web and suddenly reporters and weirdos were everywhere. It just got worse after…after he di…was killed.

  You saw what happened at his funeral. All those a-holes with their “God Hates Fags” signs, and the gays were there and the two groups were screaming at each other across the street, and there were all of those cameras and news crews and I kept thinking, why are you people here? You didn’t love him. You didn’t even know him. He’s just a thing to you. A doll for stupid, greedy children to tear apart.

  Statement from Esther Boutte, parishioner at Sacred Calling Church, May 10:

  The Reverend was married, you know. His wife, Evelyn, was a
beautiful Christian woman. They were a blessed couple. When she died he was absolutely devastated, as anyone would be after losing a true and pure love. I’m not surprised he never married again. The whole thing was so tragic. She fell down the stairs of their home in Nashville. Broke her neck. What made it all the more heartbreaking was that Reverend Wright was talking to her on the phone the very moment it happened. He called Evelyn from his hotel in New York as he did every night when his calling took him away from home, and they were having a pleasant as you please conversation. And then she lost her footing. He had to listen to her fall. Can you imagine anything so horrible?

  Note from Kim Vanderhoof, Professor of Religious Studies, St. Paul’s University (Dallas):

  I’m afraid you’re the victim of lurid horror films and the machinations of the Caribbean and New Orleans tourism boards. In actuality “voodoo doll” is, at best, a misnomer. Firstly, the use of sympathetic magic is more in line with the practices of Hoodoo, a bastardization of Vodou (note the spelling) that became popular in the Southern United States centuries ago. Of course, the practice of jabbing pins in representational figures has an extensive history in folk magic and has examples in nearly every primitive culture. This is not unexpected when considered in the context of a population of immature intellect. For instance, when a child plays with a doll, she gives the toy attributes—whether of herself or others—essentially creating a kind of reality for the plaything. In an environment of pervasive superstition and limited intellectual growth, it is easy to see how this function of childhood imagination could evolve into a facet of an overarching mystical belief system. The doll not only represents the subject, but is also magically connected to the subject. Once this belief is established in a receptive population, it is easy enough to manipulate and propagate.

  This is not to say that dolls are completely foreign to Vodou practitioners. Often, they will nail effigies—called poppets—with an old shoe to trees. They generally do this near cemeteries, with the dolls acting as symbolic messengers to the afterlife. And the dolls of babies may be placed on altars and other objects designed to honor spirits, but only in the lowest of folk religions do we see the use of sympathetic representations—i.e. dolls, photographs, etchings—in rituals meant to curse or bless an individual.

  That noted, I can provide you an extensive list of resource materials if you are interested in pursuing a detailed study of Vodou as a religion and its cultural impact.

  Statement from the Reverend Robert Wright, August 21:

  I cannot thank my brothers and sisters in Christ enough for their support during this difficult time. After succumbing to weakness and confusion, straying far from the path our Lord has designed for me, I can now return to my teachings and my calling, feeling embraced and emboldened by the Word of God.

  When I was first instrumental in creating Family in Front, I never thought that I would one day walk through those doors, low and shamed and seeking the warmth and light of their charity.

  Perhaps it was always God’s plan that I should save myself by first seeking to save others. I thank Him every moment of every day for guiding me home.

  I leave this facility a stronger, yet humbled man, who is truer to himself and closer to his Lord.

  Patrolman Joel McCauley, August 19:

  The Jimmy Royce investigation is ongoing

  The Dodd Contrivance

  Imagine looking into a raindrop and seeing an entire world at work—the labor and the joy and the pain of its populace; the celebrations and the battles; the shifting currents of climate traversing miniscule continents and infinitesimal oceans—all encased in a liquid pellet with a volume no greater than that of an inconsequential breadcrumb forgotten between stove and larder. With this as your supposition, it is then necessary to discard the premise or become overwhelmed, because surely if such a world can exist in one drop, others must exist as well, and following this hypothesis it stands to reason that the real world, the one occupied by man and beast, king and servant, is likewise sheathed and similarly fragile.

  And what should happen when those drops collide? Could gutter streams and filthy puddles be universes unto themselves, where the many worlds come together to struggle anew with fresh species from neighboring worlds, or merely confluences of destroyed planets with uncounted casualties that had briefly thought themselves immortal as they plummeted from cloud to dirt?

  Samuel Beaufort smiled at this whimsical notion, sitting in his favorite chair at the window and listening to the rapping rain. It was a familiar fancy, one he revisited often, though only in his thoughts. In the one instance he’d actually voiced the idea to a small group of colleagues at the club, he’d been summarily excoriated with disdainful glares, so he’d learned to consider the theory a personal entertainment rather than a topic of conversation. Coffee cooled in a china cup resting on the mahogany table beside him, forgotten as he gazed at the precipitation beading on the pane. Rainfall speckled the glass, smearing the light cast by the few lamps still burning in the city beyond. At his feet, the honey-colored hound whimpered and nuzzled his ankle. He looked down into the warm dark eyes and nodded solemnly.

  “Of course, it’s impossible. It’s likely quite insane, but isn’t that what makes it such an interesting study?”

  The hound responded with a second whimper and a more forceful push at his leg. Then the animal stood, stretched out its front paws and began circling the Persian carpet. The bitch was still quite young, though her exact age Samuel did not know. One afternoon just over a month ago she had joined him on his stroll through the central park and proved fine company, and since he lived alone—his long-passed wife having died in her twenty-second year—he thought to bring a second heartbeat into the too-quiet home. He’d named the animal Ruby after a particularly scandalous aunt, and though she often still bounded with the unrestrained energy of youth, he found her a pleasant companion in an otherwise empty home.

  “You’re quite right,” Samuel told the dog while pushing himself from the chair. “We should take the next step and examine this phenomenon in greater detail. What kind of scientists would we be if we left all things in the realm of theory and speculation?”

  After retrieving Ruby’s tether, his own topcoat, hat and gloves, Samuel withdrew his umbrella from the stand at the front door and allowed Ruby to lead him into the storm. Samuel had always loved the smell of the rain, reveled in the clatter of a particularly forceful storm. When viewed through the pelting drops the buildings around him took on the texture of raw wool—gray, nebulous, and frayed. A climax of thunder cowered the dog, who pulled back on the lead, now uncertain about taking her constitutional in such dreary weather.

  “Ruby,” he said, “discovery is a terrifying thing, which is why so few have the heart to accomplish it. Now, let’s explore.”

  Though apparently not convinced of her master’s supposition, Ruby took a hesitant step toward him. Soon enough, she fell in at his heel, beneath the cover of the umbrella as Samuel guided her to the south.

  The gray static of rain against the black backdrop of night soothed him. Streetlamp flames spluttered, flashing yellow auroras in the gloom. Carriages crossed the boulevard ahead, but the streets were otherwise unoccupied, and Samuel’s fascination with worlds within the rain transformed into a new fancy. Turning away to allow Ruby some privacy while she relieved herself beside a stoop, Samuel began to consider what being truly alone might be like. What if the entire city, the entire world, were to be emptied of humanity, leaving only himself and his fine companion to wander smooth roads and grassy dales, seeing the important locations of the earth without the hindrance of a populace? Would such desolation prove soothing or maddening?

  Ever since Leslie’s death some ten years past, Samuel had been alone. Parents long dead and no siblings, his only remaining family consisted of an Uncle who lived in Charleston and another in Albany, along with a number of cousins with whom he’d socialized extensively in his youth but had seen rarely in recent years. His so
cial circle was quite large, but his friendships few. The men at the club were such rigid creatures, never questioning their status or the social structure that allowed them it, but rather blustering on without a hint of inquisitiveness, reaffirming their position and denigrating those who fell beneath it. Samuel knew they considered him an odd-duck, perhaps even crazy for all of his chatter about what might be rather than extolling the virtues and vices of day-to-day existence. The only member of the club who truly intrigued him, though he could not claim friendship with the man, was one Hubert Dodd, a bearish braggart with a penchant for inappropriate often scandalous humor and the ability to weave gilded lies that engaged with their sheer brazenness. Though not close to the man, Samuel admired Dodd’s imagination and listened intently whenever the man regaled the salon with one of his outlandish tales.

  Often, Samuel had thought to invite Hubert Dodd to his home for a meal. He found the man at turns overbearing and standoffish, yet always fascinating. He’d thought to question the man in some detail about the adventures he’d recounted, perhaps even catch Dodd in a lie, though not to embarrass the man, but rather to show that Samuel thought the stories remarkable, regardless of their veracity. He felt a kinship with Dodd. They both had suffered the hushed derision of their conservative peers, yet both were established enough in the society to remain on the guest lists for all of the right gatherings. But he’d never managed a proper introduction, let alone extended a social invitation.