One of the Boys
Us boys are in the parking lot pretending to smoke. We skid the bottoms of our work shoes on the pavement and cough into the wind so anyone passing by might think they see a puff of something.
Macbeth shouts all in one breath, goingoutsidetopretendtosmoke, to the old lady at Checkout on our way through the sliding doors. She rasps from her register and asks to come with, but we leave her in the dust. Macbeth lets her in on the secret only to show she is not invited, to show she is not one of us.
Mr. Blonde was the one to hack the modern workday, figuring this was what you called profit maximization. That was how he talked about our trick out there, in a business sense. Macbeth and I followed suit. Neither of us had the kind of money where we could hear something like profit maximization and ignore it.
“I’ll lie for time but I sure as hell ain’t getting lung cancer for it,” Blonde explained on our first day in the lot. He tapped the end of his unlit cigarette with the pad of his finger, smoothed the front of his flat jeans’ pockets to show us where a lighter should be but wasn’t.
The two of us had already lit up when he said this, taken a few puffs. Come prepared. But that’s the thing about Mr. Blonde, once he says something you know it’s right.
We pick cigarettes like drawing straws. You’re lucky if you pluck one from the carton that isn’t still spitty from the break before. Blonde never lets you redraw, says it’s bad luck.
“We drink each other’s beers all the time,” he says, and of course he’s right.
“Slummed around in Kitchen today, hit it off with some babe trying to reline her cabinets,” Blonde says. “Sold her the wrong stuff so she’ll have to come back, see me again.”
Chances as they are, I had made some luck of my own with Cass in Hobby earlier that morning, but I wasn’t about to open my mouth about it. Last time I’d done that Blonde had gone wingman and made a move for me. Closed for me, too, when she showed interest elsewhere. I learned from some mistakes.
Boss scuttles across the far side of the parking lot, briefcase facing us as his eyes squint for smoke. We’ve been trying to figure out what he could possibly have in that case. The three of us cough simultaneously. Wave.
“A lot of pens, maybe,” Macbeth says as we watch him pass. “But, no. You’d hear a bunch of pens rolling around in there.”
“I am telling you, this was a babe. Hotter than Kristie in Home Goods. Which…” Blonde goes on, shakes his head. He knows how to end a sentence. He doesn’t need to say any more. We’ve heard him clock hours enumerating the filthy things he would like to do to Kristie on the plastic-wrapped store couches, the flat carts we keep in the stockroom for delivery. Last week not even the express checkout was safe—Blonde had promised he’d spank her five items or less. “And then don’t even get me started,” he said.
We treat Mr. Blonde like our god because of the way he mouthed off at his last DUI, asking “Do I have to?” when the cops told him to turn around so they could cuff him.
Whenever we’re keeping company in Blonde’s basement with a few beers in our guts, we beg him to tell us the story as if we weren’t there when it happened. We have fun. “Tell us about the cuffs!” we holler.
I remember the way the light from the sirens bounced off Macbeth’s river-black hair while he laughed in the passenger seat. About how, when the cops asked Blonde to walk a straight line, he went to retie his shoe first and stopped to ask, “The bunny goes down the hole when?”
Me, small and shrinking in the backseat and how the uniform leaned in real close and asked, “Miss, you okay back there?”
And even though we have all these stories and more, how the rain made it hard to see Blonde through the car window as he stumbled his line—how quiet it was on the ride home in the plastic-backed seat of a cop car—it’s more fun when it’s stuff of legends, made heroic around pulls of PBR and spit asides, fuck the cops anyway, when it’s stuff of Blonde. And sometimes it’s best just to let him go on for a minute or two.
It is also easier to focus on something as legendary as the cuffs when otherwise Macbeth and I would be forced to admit we revere someone whose creation story is watching Reservoir Dogs in some filthy dorm room, only to take away that one thing: Mr. Blonde is a real cool hard-ass.
Kristie in Home Goods needs me in aisle fourteen, stat and pronto, which means to really pick your feet up and hoof it, store policy. I think, who’s got time for any of this? I’m some version of busy.
“She sounds desperate,” Blonde says.
We can hear her breathy voice over the store loudspeaker from where we’re sucking on blank cigarettes just a few shuffles outside the sliding doors, which open and close whether there’s a customer waiting or not. We’re a thin excuse for believable here but it’s too hot for moving beyond the shaded overhang. Maximizing profit be damned.
“She sounds like a baby,” Macbeth says. He runs both his hands through his hair and strikes a cool guy pose.
I say nothing, make no move to stat and pronto. I drag the busted toe of my paint-your-own-canvas-shoe through a wad of hot gum on the sidewalk and watch it stretch pink like a tongue. I can feel it through the thin rubber of my shoe as it moves. Wet and sticky.
“Get her panting and I’ll swoop in on my way back from Photo. Finish it off.” Blonde flicks his thumb and pretends to ash his cigarette. Macbeth jerks from his lean on the wall, immediately follows suit. As if that’s the thing to really do it.
The boys talk about people in three categories: boys, babes, and hags. For instance, the tobacco-wrinkled woman on Checkout is a hag. Kristie, babe—simple as anything. Scuffing under cheap flickering lights all day, you make some sense of order where you can.
“Well, you in or you out?” Blonde asked me the day it started, meaning: was I going to teeth cigarettes with them or not? Meaning, was I a boy or something worse?
I’d been showing a customer a factory-rusted hubcap, shoveled out in the middle so one could use it as a picture frame. Most of my workdays consist of convincing customers that art doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to make a statement.
I started to apologize to the customer before stopping dead, looking toward Blonde, shoving the hubcap at the lady and turning my back in a way to mean I was done helping her. The tails of my apron hit the clenched muscles in my stomach as I swung around.
“You know—”
“I know you’re a girl,” Blonde cut me off, rolled his eyes. “That’s just, like, accepted fact. What I’m saying is are you maximizing profit with us or not? Cooper quit for Hobby Lobby and we need warm bodies.”
What could I say? I never thought of Mr. Blonde as someone who got lonely. Charmer that he was.
“Haircut like that…” Blonde trailed off. “Listen, you eat pussy, right?”
I told him I guessed that was true, although my parents in Ann Arbor still did try to set me up with the sons of their friends every time I went back east for the holidays. Mom’s latest was that living near the city’s nude beach had put some things in my head that had no business belonging, but I wasn’t going to go about saying that out loud.
“Then,” Blonde said, all matter-of-fact, hucking his head, the c’mon hanging in the air between us. As if this was the thing that changed everything. You’re one of us.
That morning: “Hey stranger, who cuts your hair?” Cass in Hobby wants to know. It’s not just for the sake of saying it, we really are strangers.
“I was a stylist in LA, B-list,” Cass says. “You’ve got good hair.”
“I cut it myself,” I say. I squint my eyes to show that I won’t be fooled. I am taking the year off from mirrors and it shows.
“You should do me some time,” Cass says.
I hold my breath until the swinging ponytail disappears around the corner of the aisle.
Although I couldn’t have guessed it when I first met him, Mr. Blonde is a man of many words.
For instance, Blonde was the one who named Macbeth the day he got to the basement with blood still smearing his chin from where he licked some girl down there. It made my tongue flip when I saw it. I thought, why not just suck a handful of pennies? Save yourself the mess.
But there he was, tamponed and smiling about it, a new kind of grease for the boy previously known as Michael. Smiling like he was waiting for one of us to say something, and I knew it wasn’t going to be me, the first to commit to an opinion.
“Our bloody man! All hail!”
And that was that. You could say Blonde contains depths.
You could also say he keeps a woman in his mouth, him and Macbeth both carrying markers of their manhood for all the world to see. These things I wouldn’t know.
SAMA is etched off-center across Blonde’s inside lip, the way horses’ sometimes are. You can only ever see it when he’s drunk and making fun of himself, stretching his face open, in a good mood about the whole thing.
“Too cocky to end at Sam, too pussy for the full,” he likes to say with his lip out, shrug, like what are you going to do about it? Get dumped by Samantha twice?
“You know I’m worried about you with those boys. I don’t like it.” Kristie starts as soon as I turn into the aisle. Jumps right into it. She’s straightening a display of bark meant to make your bathroom smell like the beach. “And I feel like I owe you my worry, you know?”
Kristie is a Pisces and uses it as the reason she’s allowed to mother me all serious like this, sharp brows and everything. Most of our conversations go through her alone. I’m not much of a talker.
“What do you all even do together, anyway? Besides get picked up by cops and shit. I’ve heard the stories.”
Blood warms up my throat. I fight the urge to go full Blonde, roll my eyes and say “Besides what? What else has there got to be? Besides get picked up by cops and shit.” I can quote him from nothing. Something I’ve been practicing.
Myself, I wait to see where else Kristie may feel like taking this. The thing about her is you just never know.
“Whatever,” she says, turning it out ugly. “And one more thing. When you bind your tits like that it makes your top one giant boob. You’re not distributing them right. No offense, obviously. You’re just not fooling anyone.”
Blonde cuts the corner then, his eyes toward Kristie. His Lakers cap bounces gold as he struts under the fluorescents. The air in the aisle is all sucked in. Blonde is puffed like a man and ready to go.
I duck my head and tag out without ever saying a word, leaving Mr. Blonde to start and finish it off.
The day it began with the cigarettes we celebrated with crab. At the monthly staff meeting we told Boss we’d be collecting our extra time as new smokers, the only useful thing to come out of the event since the all-inclusive friends and family discount.
You could say he took it okay. Boss said cultivating cancer as we were, we may as well kick it off with a feast to remember. Go all out. He got sarcastic like that sometimes. It didn’t matter—we still got our extra fifteen minutes.
But we did kick it off, no one gets funny with Blonde and walks away clean. The thing suddenly called for a trip to the fish market where they threw it at you and wrapped it however you liked. Blonde had a specific idea of luxury: an icebox of pre-ripped legs ready for the next break. “Ready to eat, they’re calling this.”
Blonde’s got a way of making things happen. Like when Macbeth said he’d never been fishing and Blonde’s dad so happened to have a small motorboat and a pole for each of us, a cracking plastic bait box full of lures from Blonde’s childhood on the lake.
He took care of us better than I knew how to appreciate. Where Blonde’s front pockets were smooth for smoking, he turned to show us his back and there it all was, full glory: crab picks, one for each, and a big splitter for the claws.
“Williams Sonoma,” he said. I was glad to know.
Macbeth cracked first, his hand as the mallet and the bed of Blonde’s truck the table. His teeth dug so tight into his cigarette the thing just snapped as he swung, tobacco flung out on the pavement like a drunk Blonde trying to tie his shoes.
We toasted our cigarettes like New Years. In some ways it was like a baptism. I can’t explain why.
Blonde wastes no time letting us know what’s what. It doesn’t matter it’s last break and we’re all sweating tired. He may as well sit us in desk chairs out here, he’s that serious: Kristie from Home Goods is likely a dyke. The heat of the word spreads across my face like a slap. A new category.
“Not like dyke-dyke,” Blonde says, catching my eye on the enunciation. Nodding, like I should know this has nothing to do with me. The consideration of this guy.
“The fact of the matter is I’m on Cass now. In Hobby. Take notice of it.”
“Noticed,” Macbeth says. He goes in for a manly handhold, makes a grunt from the back of his throat that sounds like approval. Cass is a babe.
Cass being passed to Blonde makes no sense until it does, like a fish swimming up and suddenly becoming visible beneath the surface before being hooked and brought to the market where it will be sold. Blonde keeps mouthing off and here is this version of Cass, sworn to be into yarn play and punishment by janitor broom.
Say what you will about Blonde, he’s got creativity.
“What’s under the hood then? In this scenario?” Blonde jabs his cigarette toward me. Left behind is a dry fleck of filter papered to his bottom lip. I want to reach out and peel it, save him the embarrassment.
We pull cigarettes whenever we walk now, even at clock-out when we can do with our time what we want. Oral fixation and all that. It’s also helpful to have something to do with my face when Blonde goes, all out of the blue, turns out Cass in Hobby is queer, like queer-queer, they queer, and does this mean he is gay, yes or no?
I purse my lips to tighten the hold on my cigarette, spitty, but what isn’t at the end of the day? I roll some words around on my tongue and see how they feel. Fold my apron careful over my arm like some fancy waiter, see how that feels. Fancy.
“Well, what kind of gay are we talking?” Macbeth asks. He taps his fingernails across his quarterback-smile to show he’s thinking about it from every angle.
I don’t understand why we are talking about this, which I stop pretending to be a fancy waiter to tell the two of them.
“I don’t understand why we’re talking about this.”
Blonde waits. Looks me full in the face like, surely I’ve more to say than that. The muscles in his jaw move beneath his skin.
I think, fine, let me cut to the chase and put this real simple for him. Get to the part where this is discussed and over and I can shut back up, sit quiet with things. “Cass is a babe or they aren’t. Fuck them or don’t. That’s it, two options, easy as anything else you do. We all three don’t need to have a sit-down and talk genitals. For one time we could just, not.”
“Hm,” Macbeth says. He’s still playing intellectual.
Blonde keeps silent. I wait. I think about the cuffs. I think about the crab meat I took from Macbeth’s warm palm. About piercing our earlobes with fish hooks that day on the lake just to say we bled together, numbed with ice from the cooler. We wire-cut them out together, too, once we sobered up.
And then we’re back. Blonde blinks twice, slow as he resets. I watch. For once I don’t know what will happen.
He picks at the paper on his lip, scratches it off clean.
“You know what I think? I think they may as well be all Ken-doll down there, smooth like a jockstrap.” The way Blonde says it, eyebrows up and voice flat, you can tell he’s decided this is the last word on the matter. Macbeth nods. He has found his opinion.
I want to say to Blonde that he must not have heard me. That if he’s going to make everything about himself, can’t he at least be more original? That if Cass isn’t allowed a body, then what am I to Blonde and Macbeth? I have some things I want to say but I keep my mouth shut and drag my feet across the pavement and pretend to smoke.