Manties in a Twist

by J. A. Rock

  “This is where we scattered Hal’s ashes.”

  He turned to me so fast I kinda flinched.

  “Sorry if that’s a creepy thing to spring on you. But I love this place, and, I mean, the wind carried him off, so it’s not like we’re sitting on him or anything.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, like he was trying to figure out what to say.

  “I know it’s a little weird.”

  “It’s not. I just didn’t know.”

  I wasn’t sure why I’d done this. Taken him to this place that was maybe technically supposed to be a sad place for me—just because I thought he was feeling sad. But this wasn’t a sad place, and I guess I wanted to show him something that really confused me.

  Because when I thought about Hal and the forest, sometimes I felt like Hal definitely wasn’t alone. He had, like, trees and birds and hikers and the air and all the seasons. And the rest of us were tied to this place by him, and he got to spend forever in this badass forest that was way better than a roached-out apartment in the city.

  But then I thought about this one night a few months before he died. He’d been crashing at my place for three days, and I kinda needed him out because he kept leaving his weed stuff around the living room, and my landlord was the type of guy who’d come in every week to look at the wiring or comment on the tub rust or whatever. And one night Hal had harder stuff than weed, so I was like, “No, man. You gotta go home.”

  That makes me sound shitty, like I knew my friend had a drug problem or something, and all I could think was, you know, don’t get me in trouble. But the others and I had talked to Hal a million times about, like, “Hey, are you sure this is just once in a while, or is it becoming a problem?” And as far as I could tell, he really wasn’t crazy addicted. He was just a dude who did what felt good in the moment, and once in a while what felt good was illegal. But always drug-illegal, not, like, murder-illegal.

  I told him I’d drive him home, and he was doing the whole, I don’t feel like going home thing. And I was just like, “Why? Tell me why. I’m listening.” But he wouldn’t give me a reason, so I got him in the car, and I played his favorite music, and I asked if he needed to stop for food, and I tried to talk to him about this guy at work he’d been trying to get with, but he was just kind of a prick about all my efforts.

  I got to his apartment and took him inside. At least four roaches scattered when I turned on the light, and the place smelled like tar and macaroni salad. There were dishes piled in the sink, the microwave was open and looked like someone had barfed in it, and I thought, Dude, no wonder you don’t feel like being here. I tried to get him into the bedroom, but he said it was too hot in there and he wanted to sleep on the couch. So I helped him onto the couch and pulled a blanket over him. Rinsed out the least gross cup in the sink and brought him some water. All this mom stuff. He was quiet through all of it.

  And as soon as I started to say good-bye, he wanted to talk about the guy at the drugstore where he worked.

  Then he wanted me to play him a song.

  “I don’t have my guitar.”

  “So just sing.”

  I sang.

  He said he’d go sleep in his bed, if I’d come in with him and see if I thought his mattress needed to be flipped.

  What twenty-four-year-old had ever fucking flipped a mattress for any reason other than spilling beer or puking on it?

  But I went to the bedroom and got him resettled in there. He had these sheets that were, like, jersey cotton, with tiny white sheep all over, and every once in a while, one dark-blue sheep. I was pretty sure my grandmother’d had those same sheets. I told him I had to go, and he just stared at the wall. Eventually I patted his shoulder and left, but I had this bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the night. I imagined him lying awake, feeling totally abandoned.

  Which was ridiculous in a way, because he was an adult man who could figure out options if he was lonely. But wasn’t ridiculous at all if you thought about just . . . humans.

  So sometimes now when I left the forest, I thought I was leaving Hal someplace peaceful, someplace where he was laughing at me for having to go back to the city and the noise and the roaches.

  But sometimes I worried I was leaving him somewhere he didn’t feel like being, somewhere lonely.

  Last year, Gould, Miles, Dave, and I had gone to see some movie where a young guy lived in a gross house and drank and did drugs and, like, hired a hooker and cried in her arms instead of having sex with her. At the end, he drove his car into a pole, and you weren’t supposed to know whether it was suicide or an accident. Gould had been pissed.

  “I hate that. Everyone who dies young in movies is either this perfect innocent or this tragic douche bag.”

  I’d kind of liked the movie. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if someone living is in their twenties and drinks or experiments with drugs or fights with their partner or spends hours lying on the couch feeling sorry for themselves, then we’re just like, ‘Yeah, that guy’s in his twenties.’ But if they die and they did all that, then it’s like they were always in some metaphorical fast car careening out of control, destined for tragedy.”

  I’d thought a lot about that afterward, since I knew he was talking about Hal. Some of the news articles about Hal had done the He had his whole life ahead of him thing. But I’d also heard people from the kink community talk about how Hal had been on poppers and high as fuck that night and how he’d always taken a lot of risks. That was when I’d started learning Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and playing it at Pitch.

  “Hey.” Ryan nudged me. “You okay?”

  I glanced at him. “Yeah. I’m thinking about Hal, but it’s not bad or anything.”

  I thought suddenly about how D and Drix and maybe GK and Kel would have had to do this too: figure out how to be there for Dave and Miles and Gould when they were grieving. I wondered how they’d reacted. I could see D being awkward in the face of strong emotion. But Dave had tons of strong emotions, so maybe D was actually good at dealing with that. I bet Drix had handled Miles’s Hal-baggage like a pro. I still couldn’t even picture GK and Kel with Gould, period, so I had no idea how they dealt with the fact that Gould was still kind of a wreck.

  Ryan looked uncomfortable.

  I scooted closer to him. “I don’t need you to do any big thing to show me you love me.”

  “What?”

  I didn’t have a clue how to explain this. “Dave told D he wanted to do domestic discipline, and that was, like, a turning point in their relationship. And Drix told Miles he’d help him raise the kid, and Miles was like, ‘Holy fuck.’ I just want you to know that I don’t need anything huge from you. All the stuff you’re doing is perfect. Megalodon stories and pony competitions and helping me with my music.”

  He seemed to relax a little then. “So it doesn’t bother you that I’m . . .”

  “What?”

  “You don’t mind half-finished drawings?”

  At first I was confused, because I thought he meant literally. Then I figured maybe he meant the whole thing with what his mom had said, and the I wish I had a different job or I wish I lived in a different city or Let’s get a cat instead.

  “Hey,” I said. “We don’t need to finish the drawings until we’re, like, ninety-eight.”

  After a few minutes, he said, “Come here, Kamen.”

  He held me. Tiny little Chihuahua dude just took me in his arms like I fit there. And then I started singing “Fast Car”—softly—and I figured he wouldn’t think I’d gone off the rails or anything, since I randomly burst into song all the time. So I just sang it because it made me feel good, and because I wanted Hal to know fast cars didn’t mean tragedy and for Ryan to know that he and I were gonna keep exploring and that we didn’t have to end up with a life that made perfect sense—just one we’d built together.

  In the final two weeks before PetPlayFest, the montage got intense. Pretty much every chance we got, we were up at D’s property,
practicing. Dressage sucked. I still couldn’t remember the difference between passage and piaffe, and I got the cues all mixed up. If he used word commands, I got confused. If he gave only whip and rein cues, I wasn’t quite as confused, but I still struggled.

  “I’m never gonna beat Cinnamon,” I said after a particularly rough practice. We’d brought handmade letter signs and set up an arena. We’d started working to music—I’d chosen Survivor’s “High on You” as my performance piece. It was a fast song, and neither of us was a great choreographer, but it gave me a chance to do a lot of pirouettes, which I was actually pretty good at.

  “Hey, don’t talk like that. Your pirouettes are looking great. Your half pass is, at the least, entertaining. Your prancing is getting better.”

  It had been getting better. Mostly because Ryan had found, in our gear bag, a curved plug designed to rub the prostate. He’d started having me wear that instead of the tail when we practiced dressage. In some ways, it hindered us, because all I could think about was coming, and not piaffing. But Jesus Christ did it get me lifting my legs.

  He put his hands on his hips. “I do think your biggest issue is headspace. Like, you’ve got to let go and believe you’re a pony.”

  I sighed. “Sometimes I believe I’m a pony. But sometimes I believe I’m a guy prancing around in a leather harness, looking ridiculous.”

  He cupped my cheek. “You’re only as ridiculous as you let yourself feel. And if you want me to cross-stitch that on a throw pillow, I will.”

  I threw myself into the montage once more. The leather pants arrived, and I started working in those, and tried to get used to having my balls and sheathed cock exposed. I even started shaving my balls, because let’s be honest, if they were gonna be on display in my crotchless pants, I wanted them to look good. We also incorporated the furry boots and the Slash wig. We didn’t practice bobbing for apples, or the balloon pop, since we figured those competitions were pretty self-explanatory. But we did buy kneepads so I could practice running on all fours, since all pets in the balloon pop had to be on their hands and knees.

  The cart pulling, I loved. We timed ourselves each practice, and I got better and better. We didn’t really have a way to measure the oval we’d marked out in the meadow and compare it to the size of the course we’d be racing at PetPlayFest. But whatever. I was athletic, and Ryan was light, and I felt confident I could win a race.

  I got a bunch of texts from Dave about Gould’s party, which was gonna be in the poolroom of a sports bar downtown. Something was niggling me about the date, and I couldn’t figure out what until Ryan and I were singing “Bent” one night to get us in the mood for the Rob Thomas concert that weekend. And then it hit me.

  Gould’s freaking fake thirtieth birthday was the same night as the concert.

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I called Dave.

  “Hey.” Dave sounded like he was chewing.

  “I’m not gonna make it to Gould’s party.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “I, uh . . . There’s this concert. Ryan and I were talking about Matchbox Twenty last week, and we thought it would be funny to try to see Rob Thomas in concert. And I was drunk and bought tickets and forgot that was the night of Gould’s thing. So I’m just gonna drop by Gould’s work at lunch Friday and wish him happy birthday. And then maybe we could all do dinner sometime soon?”

  I expected some protest. Expected Dave to rant about how we’d been planning this for two weeks, and it would suck without me. But he just said, “Fine.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “You do what you gotta do.”

  “You really okay with this?”

  “Yeah,” he said shortly. “We’ll still have plenty of fun. You go do your thing with Ryan.”

  That kind of hurt my feelings. “I’m sorry.”

  “What? No big deal. We’ll live.” I didn’t like how he said that. I was pretty sure he was gonna bitch about me to Miles as soon as we hung up. Plus there was a part of me that wanted my friends to be devastated at the idea of having a party without me.

  “Well, anyway . . .”

  “You talk to Ricky?” he interrupted.

  “Yeah. He was . . . I mean, he likes Bill. I don’t know if I can do anything about that. But I warned him to be careful.”

  “Did you tell Gould? About Ricky and Bill?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he found out somehow.” More chewing.

  “Oh.”

  “So Ricky’s not speaking to us. And, for once, it wasn’t me with my loud mouth who ruined things. Gould, like, went after him about it.”

  “Went after him?”

  Dave swallowed whatever he was eating. “I just don’t get how Gould can play with GK and Kel but hate Bill so much.”

  “I know, man. But you know . . .” There was a thing I wanted to say, and I wasn’t sure if I was gonna say it right, or if it was even the right thing to say. “Maybe we all need to move forward.” Not just me. And not just where Hal was concerned. But, like, all of us needed to keep going, keep growing up.

  A pause. “He’s going to the drugstore again.”

  “What?” Gould had gone through a period after Hal’s death where some days he’d go to the drugstore where Hal had worked and just sit there in the car. Dave had been super creeped out by it, but I’d thought maybe it was pretty normal for someone who was in shock and grieving and all that. But if he was doing it again . . . “Did you talk to him about it?”

  “No. He told Miles.”

  “Shit.”

  I could hear Dave shrug. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

  “No, hold on.”

  He sighed. “You tell me, Kamen. You tell me what to tell Gould about moving forward.”

  “It’s not just Gould. It’s like what Ryan said about thinking of the Subs Club as, like, bigger than our personal tragedy.”

  “Please, don’t quote him on this. I can’t handle—”

  “Well, learn to handle it, because he’s not fucking wrong!” I didn’t really mean to interrupt, but it was already happening, and sometimes words are like a fart—you can’t stuff ’em back in. “You like it. You like being stuck in the past. We all do, probably, in a way. Because who’s gonna blame us if we don’t know where to go from here? All we have to do when regular adult shit gets hard is, like, point a finger at Bill, or Cinnamon, or GK and Kel, or whoever, and— You know? And Ryan’s got a different perspective, and that actually helps me with moving on.”

  “Yeah, you’re drinking his Kool-Aid.”

  “What Kool-Aid? The Kool-Aid where I actually have a life now that’s not just being sad about Hal or mad about BDSM injustices or whatever?”

  “He doesn’t even understand about Hal, or us, or anything! He wasn’t there. He’s just another person who thinks this is some sensational thing that happened that they can fucking tell their friends about, or whatever. ‘Cool story, bro.’”

  That was such unbelievable hypo-fucking-critical bullshit I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. “Maya wasn’t there. Neither was Ricky. Neither was D.”

  “Maya fucking cried when I told her about Hal. Ricky was scared shitless. They get why it was such a big deal. And D— Fuck, yeah, he wasn’t there, but he never asked to be part of the club. Okay? Ryan asked to be part of our group—part of our group. And then he comes in with his having-no-fucking-idea, and talks about—about Hal being stupid—”

  “That’s not what he said!”

  “He said subs need to take more responsibility, and he was talking about Hal, and I don’t get how it doesn’t bug the shit out of you that he’s completely insensitive to people’s feelings.”

  “You.” I jabbed my finger furiously, even though he couldn’t see me. “You are blunt. You say shit without thinking, and it hurts people’s feelings. Maybe this is just a taste of your own medicine, dude.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You do.”

  “But I’m not�
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  “Just listen!”

  “You listen!”

  “To what? I listen to you all the freaking time, man. You tell me how to feel about political issues or how I should feel about my own relationship, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of listening to you.”

  “Then hang up the fucking phone!” he shouted.

  So I did.

  “We should move,” I said to Ryan that night.

  Ryan looked up from his latest “Snow Wanderer” drawing, surprised. “What?”

  “Not right now. But we ought to pick a city, and then, in a year, move there. I’ve been thinking about it. And I do want to try it.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  Moving forward. I’m fucking moving forward. Look at me doing that.

  He set the tablet aside. “Kamen, that’s . . . awesome.”

  There was way too big a pause there, and he didn’t look like he thought it was awesome. So what the fuck was that about? Why didn’t people just say what they fucking meant? Except Dave. I don’t want him to say what he means ever again.

  “Is it?” I demanded. “Is it awesome?”

  He looked startled. “Sure. Yeah. Where do you think we should go?”

  I forced myself to breathe. “Maybe Austin, since it has a good music scene. Or Nashville.” I was having a really hard time making my voice sound pleasant.

  “Or Seattle.”

  “Or Seattle.”

  He leaned back and stretched, chewing on his lip. “Well, we’ve got some time to think about it.”

  “For sure.”

  “You’re being really weird right now.”

  “I’m just hungry. We should make dinner. Pasta Boat? What about juice? You want juice? I could juice some shit.”

  He was staring at me like I’d grown a microwave-sized Collingsworth head. “I don’t think you should be around the juicer right now. It has sharp things.”

  “I can handle sharp things.”

  I got the juicer out and juiced the fuck out of some apples and some kale and a star fruit, just to prove a point.