Rough Trade

by Todd Robinson

  Alex wobbled and fell off the stage, landing on one of the bottles. A good dozen shards of glass poked out of his designer suit, blood trickling out of each fresh puncture.

  Alex screamed again.

  Wait a minute…

  OLLIE?

  I spun back and looked at the face of one my oldest friends, now recognizable under the carefully applied makeup.

  Ollie smiled through his flawless lipstick, breathing heavily. “Still think I’m no good in a fight?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Remember all that self-motivational hoodie-doo I said earlier about forward movement? About not backing down and getting all manly and proactive?

  Yeah, well, when you had a hundred really pissed gay dudes on your ass… Again, I’m not cracking wise here, but you can see why my basic vernacular got us in trouble in the first place.

  So, we ran. We ran like an unwashed wind. I didn’t know the layout of the club, but Ollie moved like he did. So I followed him and tried to ignore the sounds of the mob that was forming behind us.

  I was still woozy from the bottle shot to the temple, and bounced off the walls as I tried to keep up with my friend who was hauling ass in an evening dress and heels. We ran up a short flight of stairs and Ollie burst out of a fire exit.

  Which in turn blared the alarm that alerted the lynch mob to our location.

  I heard someone behind us toward the stage yell, “They’re going out the back.”

  We had about ten seconds before they got to us.

  Piles of garbage bags and some broken furniture from the club lay in piles. Nothing that could hold the door closed behind us. I planted my feet and held my back to the door as the first body slammed into it. I heard a muffled “ow” as the body hit. The reverberation echoed through all of my injuries, but the door stayed shut.

  “The fuck are you doing, Boo?” Ollie hollered.

  I reached into my pocket and tossed him the car keys. “Red Omni. In front. Pull it around.”

  Another, heavier body slammed into the door at my back. My feet skidded in the snow and the door popped open, but slammed back shut behind me. I heard another voice behind the door alert the masses. “Hey! He’s back here. We need to get the door open.”

  Ollie ran for the car. I re-braced my feet and gritted my teeth.

  Their pushing resumed.

  Warm blood started trickling down my belly from the stab wound.

  The door opened an inch.

  Sounded like there were at least a dozen guys back there.

  Two inches. Three sets of fingers appeared in the crack. Someone yelled, “Here! Here!” A steel pole moved through the opening and began to pry the door at my back.

  My boots skidded a little more.

  The opening was the width of my fist.

  So I spun and threw a haymaker blindly into the gap.

  I connected solidly with what felt like an ear. Somebody yelped and I grabbed the pole and yanked it toward me.

  The steel pole was mine now, bitches.

  I spun off the door, letting it crash open, much to my pursuers’ surprise. The returned-to-consciousness Cornrows stood in front of the horde. I brought the pole down in a Samurai chop, whaling the semi-recovered Cornrows right on the collarbone. He screamed and dropped backwards onto the assembled lynch mob. I hurriedly closed the door, dropped the pole, and re-braced it with my faltering body.

  Spots of blood began polka-dotting the snow at my feet.

  An engine gunned and Ollie spun the Omni around the rear, almost snowplaning it into the building. Not far enough behind him, the couple dudes who were smart enough to take the long route around were in pursuit.

  “One!” I heard from the other side of my door.

  Uh-oh.

  “Two!”

  I sidestepped the door.

  “THREE!”

  I don’t know what they were expecting, but no resistance whatsoever wasn’t on the list.

  A great wave of dudes came tumbling out the door, and once the first one hit the slush and went down, it quickly turned into a Benny Hill routine as they all went ass-over-teakettle on top of each other. I limped down the alley at a brisk waddle as Ollie slammed on the brakes.

  The alley was almost too narrow for me to open the goddamn door of the smallest car in North America. I gave both ends of the alley my middle finger and squeezed myself on the passenger side.

  Then couldn’t open the fucking door.

  The door handle was currently being used by Bray’s dogs as a chew toy.

  I rolled onto the hood, grabbed the windshield well, and yelled, “Drive!”

  “Which way?” Ollie looked to both ends at the impending angry gay Malachi Crunch that was about to swarm and beat us to death.

  Behind me, I heard the scrape of someone picking up the discarded pole. One would assume to plant it in my skull. I didn’t like that option. There were still only a couple of guys coming up the other end.

  “Reverse it!” I hollered.

  Ollie stomped the gas, and if the engine had had more power in it than a farting weasel, I might have shot off the hood. The handful of guys down the other end quickly decided to push a hasty retreat as the petite car mewled its pitiful roar and charged.

  The slower of the bunch dove out of the mouth of the alleyway as the car spat out onto the street. Luckily, the traffic was moving slower than normal in the gusting snow, otherwise we could have easily gotten blasted in the cross-traffic. Instead, amidst a couple of hard swerves and angry horns blaring, Ollie cut the wheel hard and sent the car into a spin on the ice.

  When suddenly—centrifugal force, everybody!—I was launched like a scud missile off the hood.

  I was in the air long enough to process this thought in its entirety: Whoa! I’m really flying, here. This is actually kinda cool. Going to hurt a lot when I land, though.

  Then I landed.

  And I was right.

  I tried to go limp.

  I tried to roll with it.

  I really did.

  Instead, I bounced and skidded on the slick street. I may have passed out for a few seconds. When I came to, the car was next to me, and Ollie was trying to get me to my feet. I saw a ten-foot skidmark of blood that I’d left behind on the macadam. Hell, I was really bleeding hard again.

  I fell into the car and Ollie jumped back into the driver’s seat as the first rock hit the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass. Ollie put the car into drive, and we made our escape. Only took about half of the blood in me and about a foot of skin, but at least I didn’t get any new information or anything.

  Sigh…

  We headed up toward Allston, and, presumably, my apartment. I pressed my hand against my belly underneath my shirt and coat, the duct tape soaked through and no longer sticking. The point of knife-insertion was alarmingly warm in contrast to the frozen rest of me. My knee didn’t hurt yet, but I could feel it swelling under my jeans. There was a hazy spot in my vision on the far corner of my right eye, and I was a little nauseous, no doubt slightly concussed from Alex’s attempted vodka bottle lobotomy. And I was still brain-rattled from Ian Summerfield soing his cha-cha on my head the other night.

  I was not doing well.

  I took my hand out from under my layers. It wasn’t pretty. Dark blood stained my fingertips like I’d dipped them in thick red paint.

  Ollie’s eyes went wide. “Why are you bleeding? What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital? Are…are you duct-taped together?”

  “All my life, Ollie. All my life.” I tried to smile, while ignoring the distracting fact that my brother was still in full makeup, driving in an evening gown and fuck-me pumps. I immediately closed my eyes against my own mental imagery with association to Ollie wearing fuck-me pumps.

  And the fact that he’d kind of given me a chubbie up on that stage.

  Goodbye erections! See you in maybe a decade.

  Ollie’s plucked eyebrows were knit in concern. “I’m not kidding. You look like you’re
bleeding pretty bad. What happened?” Were his eyebrows always so well groomed? Had I just not noticed under his thick Elvis Costello glasses? Ollie kept trying to look at the damage to my person swerved the car every time he did.

  “Please keep your concentration on the icy road, Ollie. Let me worry about bleeding to death.”

  “Did that happen just now?”

  “Nah. Happened at The Cellar.”

  “Who stabbed you?”

  “Ginny.”

  Ollie shot me another shocked look. “The waitress?” Another swerve.

  “Eyes on the road, please,” I said, pointing to said road. “And, yep.”

  “The one with the luscious titties?”

  A moment of silence.

  And then I laughed. It hurt really fucking bad. Maybe it was the blood loss, the renewed concussion, or a combination of traumatic injuries to my mortal coil, but pieces were coming together. Twenty years late, but they were coming together.

  Ollie—all at once the most sensitive amongst us, and the crudest. Always the guy with the most nerdishly inappropriate comments about sex and women—although, to be fair, the large majority of those statements were regarding fictional characters from Battlestar Galactica and the Marvel Universe. Always the kid who talked so much over-sexual nonsense that the inevitable conclusion was that he was covering up for his deficiencies with the other sex. That he was trying to impress the boys with a distracting crassness in lieu of actually having ever had his hand on a warm boobie in his life.

  Suddenly I realized the reason for Ollie’s overzealousness. I knew the exact reason he’d never known the pleasure of cupping said tit.

  “Holy, holy shit,” I said, seeing a kid I’d known for twenty years, seeing him for the first time—albeit underneath a metric ton of L’Oreal products.

  Ollie was keenly aware of my staring, maybe of my seeing him for the first time. Even underneath the makeup, his color rose. His Adam’s apple—which should have been a giveaway while he was singing on that that stage, but what are you gonna do?—bobbled up and down. “What?”

  “You look very pretty,” I said, with a serious attempt at sincerity.

  Ollie looked like he was debating for a second whether to start crying or laughing.

  I busted out howling again. It was all just so, so hilarious and fucked up.

  After a minute, he also broke into a smile, then the deep honking guffaws that he called laughter.

  He pulled Junior’s new car in front of my house. Hippy Phil, my upstairs neighbor, sat on the front steps, staring up at the thick snowflakes falling around his head with a childlike grin on his face. Between his knuckles, he held a tobacco product the size of a Polish sausage, no doubt filled with Tijuana’s finest crop.

  That innocent grin fell off his face when he saw the half-dressed drag queen and the beaten and bleeding me limping out of the car.

  He had good reason to be nervous. It had been a few months since I’d even come across Phil sitting on the stoop in a cloud of his own making. I was pretty sure he’d been dodging me ever since our last encounter, which had me carjack him and his party van into a high-speed rescue attempt with a fresh bullet hole in my leg. It ended with a flipped van, three cars totaled, and me surrounded by cops in the middle of the street whilst clad only in my tighty-whities.

  Good times.

  At least the underwear was clean.

  Phil looked like he didn’t know whether to have himself a good old-fashioned freak out, run for the tree line, or both.

  “Hey, Phil,” I said.

  “Uh…hey, man.”

  “Ollie, Phil. Phil? Ollie.”

  Ollie extended his hand to shake, his fingers tipped with nails painted blood-red. “Pleasure.”

  “Hey,” Phil said, blinking rapidly.

  I bent over and scooped a handful of snow and pressed it against my stab hole. It hurt for a second, but then felt so, so good. If my life was going to tear me apart one wound at a time, at least Mother Nature was providing me with ice packs everywhere I went.

  Phil turned his terrified blinking to my gut. “You okay?”

  “Never better.” I grinned, then took my hand away, the quickly melting snow veined red with my blood. Then I faceplanted into the snow.

  Like ya do.

  ***

  I was cold, but I was comfortable. I was in a safe place inside my mind, after my body had endured enough and given me the old fuck you, I’m outta here.

  I felt pressure on my belly hole, a throbbing on my temple where I’d taken the vodka bottle, and my heartbeat in my poor knee. Nothing hurt too badly, but I could feel each and every spot of trauma.

  My vision, or what passed for it, was a field of white. I didn’t think I was in Heaven, since I didn’t believe in it, but saw a Chinese angel smiling at me when I could focus enough on the blurry images floating within the pristine landscape.

  My first confused thought was that there had been a mix-up and I’d wound up in the Asian afterlife. That wouldn’t be so bad, since as far as my long history of karate movies had taught me, it was a pretty cool destination for warriors. I would be happy in the same eternity as Wong Fei-hung and Bruce Lee.

  She handed me something to drink. I expected a golden celestial goblet, but it was only my old Tom & Jerry jelly glass. The heavenly nectar also tasted suspiciously like the Goofy Grape Kool-Ade I had in the fridge, but I was so, so thirsty, and didn’t feel I should start complaining during my first hours in paradise.

  Maybe it was slightly odd that my angel had blue dreadlocks, but fuck it.

  I drifted back into the void for a bit before Godzilla’s roar brought me back.

  I rethought my position on eternity in the Asian afterlife if Godzilla was going to be there too.

  I opened my eyes and found myself propped up in my bed, clothed in nothing but my boxers. My sternum was wrapped in clean white gauze. I was weak as shit, but overall felt better than I had in days, banged up to hell, but rested. Shee-yit, I even had morning wood. Yaaay.

  My brain was stuffed with tapioca, but I managed to prop myself out of the bed and slowly followed the roar of the King of the Monsters back into reality. Sunlight streamed through the windows.

  How long had I been out for? My internal clock couldn’t calibrate.

  My blue-haired angel sat on the couch in my living room, watching Godzilla fighting Mechagodzilla on my TV. She didn’t see me for a second, enraptured by the carnage and the chili burger she was munching on.

  “Hey,” was all I said. Even that was tough to enunciate through my numbed lips.

  “Ohmygod!” She startled, then choked for a second on her burger. Through her wheezing, she said, “You’re up.”

  I had so many questions. But before they could gel inside my pudding-filled mind and scramble their way into my mouth, I saw her gaze drop and her eyes widen.

  Oh yeah. My boxers.

  And my raging erection.

  Lil’ Boo had decided to see what was going on, and was just as interested as I was in figuring out who the hell this girl was.

  Hooray! Despite my horror at the sexual attraction I felt toward Drag Queen Ollie, I was still able to pop a boner. Victory!

  Then the memory of Drag Queen Ollie made my erection disappear faster than a hot dog at fat camp.

  “Excuse me,” was all I said. Then I worked my way back down the hallway to my bedroom. I tucked Lil’ Boo into a pair of black Levi’s and slowly put a T-shirt on over the bandages. That hurt a little bit. Whatever had been keeping the pain at bay was receding, and I felt a pull at my wound. Had somebody stitched me up? Sure as hell felt like it, but I didn’t want to unwrap myself to check.

  I heard the front door opening and grabbed the aluminum baseball bat propped next to my closet door. I stood in my best Big Papi stance, ready to knock the head of my next unexpected visitor over the Green Monster.

  I heard Ollie say, “He’s up?”

  I put the bat back down, a little disappointed that the fir
st time I was ready for an attack wasn’t going to be fulfilled with triumphant bat-swinging and possibly a witty catchphrase or two.

  Ollie and Phil were carrying a box of Dunkin Donuts and a cardboard tray of coffees. “Figured we’d grab some supplies if we were going to be battening down the hatches.” Ollie had removed all his makeup, and was dressed in clothes I could only assume he’d borrowed from Phil. I could still picture him singing jazz standards in full Veronica Lake drag, but not in a patchouli-soaked rainbow Phish shirt.

  “What happened?” I asked

  “Uh, you passed out,” Ollie said.

  “Got that. Then what? Who is this?”

  My Chinese angel stood and extended her hand. “Sophie. Figured you should know my name, since I’ve already seen your dick.”

  “What?” said Phil, a light distress in his tone. Well, that explained a bit about where she’d come from.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “He didn’t know I was here. He walked out in his boxers.”

  “Oh, okay,” Phil said. Still unhappy with the events, but eased by the explanation.

  “He had a big boner poking out.” Sophie smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up. Flattering, but a little weird.

  And Phil’s distress was back.

  I cleared my throat, wondering if I should thank her for the thumbs-up. “I think we can dismiss with the full descriptive. Who patched me up?”

  “Me again.” Sophie wiggled her fingers happily at me. “Pre-med at BC. Was kind of cool getting some real-word application for my classwork. It’s a little different from stitching up a dead piglet.”

  “Always glad to help the cause of education,” I said through lips that wobbled like gummi worms glued to my face. “Just how doped up am I?” I took another sip of Kool-aid and managed not to dribble the warm sugar water all over myself.

  “You’re pretty doped up,” Sophie said. “About eighty milligrams of Oxycodone, ground up into the Kool-aid. Which made the fact that you even could get a boner that much more impressive.”