Cockeyed Page 3

“I was bi-curious, yeah. But I never did much of anything with guys till Hunny lured me into his car and took me over to his place and committed a lewd act. So, Hunny owes me. Hunny owes me big.”

  “You said, Stu, that you believe Hunny should give you half of his lottery winnings. Do you honestly believe Hunny owes you half a billion dollars for a blow job? That sounds steep to me. These days I’m guessing you only get twenty or thirty bucks.”

  “Sometimes fifty,” Hood said. “Anyways, with Hunny I just did it for the beer. He was nice to me, and I was nice to him back.”

  “So you and Hunny had a continuing relationship after your initial visit?”

  “Yeah, I’d ride my bike over there, and sometimes Art would show up and get a little, too. I’m not saying they weren’t nice to me. All I’m saying at this point in time is that Hunny did turn me into a homosexual, and then he did make certain promises. Like maybe I could move in sometime and be part of their alternative family. That would have suited me fine.”

  The bar was surprisingly busy for a summer afternoon. The air-conditioning probably served as an attraction, and in any case the two dozen or so patrons did not look like either beachgoers or men who might otherwise have been off on Adirondack birding expeditions. Some of the men in the bar glanced our way from time to time, maybe wondering who Hood’s new friend was.

  CoCkeyed 19

  I said, “Stu, you’re a cyclist. How come?”

  I knew what was coming. “I lost my driver’s license. Too many DUIs. It sucks, but I’m sort of used to it. It’s rough in the winter, though. People give me rides.”

  “Have you had any other legal troubles?”

  “A few.”

  “Hunny says you like to set fires.”

  Hood looked down at his draught beer. Almost inaudibly, he said, “I guess so.”

  “He said you had an arson conviction as a juvenile.”

  “Yes, I did. But I’ve been to counseling.”

  “You left a message on Hunny’s voicemail threatening to burn his house down if he didn’t split his lottery winnings with you.”

  He shrugged. “That was bullshit. I was drunk up to my eyeballs when I said that. Shit, Hunny should know.”

  “I’m here to tell you, Stu, that if Hunny and Art’s house goes up in flames, you will be arrested in a short time. And if you set the fire, you will be convicted and you will go to prison for a very long time. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

  Hood mulled this over and had some more beer. “I guess Hunny must be pissed at me.”

  “He is concerned about you. Hunny likes you, and he doesn’t want to see you locked up in Dannemora for twenty years. He said to tell you also that he would be willing to help you out financially, some small amount to tide you over. But half a billion is out.”

  “Hunny is so cheap. How much did he say?”

  “He said he heard you had been laid off at Target, and he said he would be happy to spring for a thousand to help you along until you located another job.”

  “Hmm. Check or cash?”

  “Whichever you would prefer.”

  20 Richard Stevenson

  “Cash money, please.”

  “But no more threats, okay?”

  “Well, shit, it’s more than I got out of the Catholic Church.”

  “You sued the church?”

  “I wrote a letter to the pope. He never answered it. A priest at Sacred Heart fucked me seven times when I was eleven.”

  “But there were lawsuits over sexual abuse by priests, and victims were compensated. This was several years ago.”

  “I heard about that later.”

  The music playing now was Donna Summer’s “On the Radio.”

  It occurred to me that the first time I had heard this song could well have been in this very bar some decades earlier, perhaps on the same night I met Timothy Callahan under a bush over in Washington Park, and we had been together pretty much ever since. I raised my bottle of Saratoga Water with a chunk of lime jammed down into it. To Donna Summer.

  To Hood, I said, “The church did shut down the compensation machinery at some point. Didn’t your friends urge you to file a claim before it was too late? Did Hunny know about this?”

  “I didn’t tell anybody back then. In fact, I kind of forgot about it. A guy I was involved with for a while kept asking me why I didn’t like to get fucked, and then I remembered.”

  “And that’s when you wrote to the pope?”

  “Another guy I used to date who had a computer helped me send an e-mail to the Vatican. Maybe the pope only speaks Italian, but there must be other dudes who work in his office who speak English. I think the guy is just a geek, that’s all.”

  “You said you’ve had counseling. When was that?”

  “At the farm the judge sent me to. I was thirteen years of age.

  Anyway, that wasn’t about sex, it was about fires.”

  “Have you had any problems with the law since then? Hunny said he was unaware of any run-ins. But he said that when you drink you sometimes threaten to set people’s houses on fire, or CoCkeyed 21

  their cars, and it is very frightening to people.”

  “That’s just the Bud Lite talking,” Hood said. “I would never do it. Hunny doesn’t have to worry. Though I would appreciate a little compensation for Hunny turning me into a homo, since it looks like the friggin’ pope is gonna be of no use to me whatsoever.”

  “Hunny told me about your parents,” I said. “And about the terrible way they died. That must weigh on you, too.”

  “Hunny has a big mouth.”

  “It’s why even though he is fond of you, he is somewhat afraid of you.”

  “Yeah, well. Mom and Pop never replaced the battery in their smoke alarm. Does he know that part of it? Let that be a lesson to Hunny.”

  “Stu, what you are saying to me isn’t all that reassuring.”

  “What I’m saying to you, Strachey, is that I don’t set fires anymore. I’m all talk. Talk and beer, beer and talk. And if it’s reassurance you want on a Saturday afternoon, this homo bar is not the place to find it.”

  ChAPteR fouR

  Hunny was back on the Channel 13 news Saturday evening at six. This time he was defending his lottery boodle not against blackmailers but against a co-worker at BJ’s Warehouse who claimed that half of Hunny’s winnings were rightfully his. Dave DeCarlo said he had given Hunny ten dollars to buy twenty dollars’ worth of tickets for the two of them, and they had agreed to split the winnings from any of the tickets purchased.

  DeCarlo, who was interviewed first, along with his attorney, Thurmont Fewster, said it was the deep pain of being betrayed by a man he had always thought of as a friend that was hurting him most of all. His lawyer focused on what he referred to as a

  “broken oral contract.”

  When it was Hunny’s turn, he said that while he and DeCarlo had once purchased lottery tickets together, that had been back in the spring and had been for an entirely different drawing, not the August Instant Warren. Hunny added that while he had planned on giving all his co-workers what he called an “August bonus” from his lottery winnings, now that DeCarlo was trying to swindle him, “that bleep bleep” wasn’t going to get a cent.

  Timmy and I were watching the news in our bedroom at our house on Crow Street before heading out for a Saturday night Thai dinner with friends. After that, I planned on meeting another of the blackmailers when his cleaning-crew shift at a Corporate Woods office building ended at eleven.

  Timmy said, “Hunny is quite the sleazoid-magnet. It looks as if he’s going to keep you hopping.”

  “DeCarlo does appear to be an unscrupulous fellow. Most of the other skeletons tumbling out of Hunny’s voluminous closet, though, look like they’re just hapless shmoes. I phoned three of them this morning after Hunny left my office and warned them off, and none of the ones I talked to seemed to want any trouble. I’m more worried about two other guys who do sound a 24 Richard Stevens
on

  bit unhinged and maybe even dangerous. I saw one of them this afternoon at the Watering Hole. He’s a hustler named Stu Hood who has a history of arson.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He has only one conviction, as a juvenile, but Hunny says the guy was a suspect in a number of later cases. When Hood was thirteen, he burned down his parents’ house with them in it. He was supposed to be out mowing the lawn, but instead he poured gasoline from the lawn mower can all around the downstairs and lit it and ran out. He told the police he didn’t know his mother and father were upstairs napping and that he thought they had gone out for the afternoon. But Hunny said the family car was in the driveway, so Hood’s story was widely doubted. On Thursday, Hood threatened Hunny and told him he would torch his and Art’s house if Hunny didn’t go fifty-fifty with Hood on the lottery winnings. He claims Hunny turned him into a homosexual after Hunny picked him up while Hood was cruising the park.”

  “Why, Donald, it’s our story.”

  “Exactly. I was a confused youth, and when you fondled me behind that bush, I thought, oh, wow, I could get used to this.”

  “You were the mixed-up youth? I’m reasonably certain it was the other way around.”

  “Then how come you were carrying that towel thing around with you at eleven o’clock at night? You even told me at the time that it was so you wouldn’t get moss on your knees.”

  “I seem to have repressed any memory of that.”

  “Anyway, Hood’s story is as ugly as it gets. He told me that he was repeatedly raped by a priest when he was eleven years old but that he didn’t recall these incidents until it was too late for any legal recourse.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I’m not sure. But it was two years later that he started setting fires. Or two years that anybody knows of.”

  “Were there any church fires around that time?”

  CoCkeyed 25

  “Good question. But my role here is not to prosecute or to clear Stu Hood for any crimes he may have committed in years gone by. My job is to get him off Hunny Van Horn’s back.”

  Timmy zapped off the TV — no more Hunny news for the moment — and started getting into his dinner togs, his nicely pressed slacks and a polo shirt he had ironed earlier in the day. He said, “I keep hearing that gay people in the Capitol really do wish somebody other than Hunny had won the Instant Warren. He is just such an excruciating public embarrassment.”

  “I find him interesting and sometimes even entertaining,” I said. “Hunny is one of a vanishing species. Also, here is a client who, when I bill him at the end of the month, will be in a good position to pay it.”

  “Vanishing species, I don’t think so. God, if only.”

  “Hunny is gay man at his most primitive. He’s the untamed queer Neanderthal. He’s the rugged individualist on the old gay frontier. He’s a homo Huck before Aunt Polly tried to civilize him. Hunny is proudly out and proudly nelly. Hunny am what he am.”

  “What Hunny am,” Timmy said, “is a loudmouth drunk and a hideous old letch. It wouldn’t surprise me if the greatest threat to Hunny at this point is not some juvenile delinquent arsonist he had sex with, but any of the thousands of decent, sober, well-behaved gay men and women across America who see Hunny on national television and are now looking for ways to make this grotesquely embarrassing creature just disappear.”

  Timmy had at least a partial point. Maybe looking after Hunny was going to be even more complicated than I thought.

  § § § § §

  The first thing Mason Doebler said to me was, “I’m not taking any shit from Hunny and I’m not taking any shit from you. Don’t waste your time threatening me, and don’t waste your time pissing me off. Hunny has owed me three thousand dollars for four years, and now he can afford to pay his debt to me —

  with interest.”

  26 Richard Stevenson

  “He told me that the other day you demanded fifty thousand dollars. That represents a lot of interest on three K. It’s even more than Citibank charges.”

  “I’m charging him a lot because now that he’s won the lottery, fifty K means nothing to Hunny. And because his refusal to pay me anything at all has been a thorn in my side that I am sick of. I have it coming, and, believe me, I am going to get it.”

  Doebler looked like a man who, when he made demands, generally had them met. A good six-three, two-forty, with a crew cut above a whiskery moon face, he had the heft and sartorial coloration of a gay bear but not one with a cuddly demeanor.

  We were seated at a table in the upstairs restaurant in a noisy bar on Lark Street. The music was some type of heavy metal lite, though the band playing it did not appear on any of the eight large flat TV screens arrayed around the room. These were showing a variety of sporting events — baseball, pre-season football, nAsCAR — and the overall feel of the place was that of a rest home for people with severe Add.

  Doebler was chowing down on two double chili burgers, and I was keeping my grip moist on a sweating bottle of Sam Adams.

  I said, “Hunny told me that you think he was responsible for wrecking your car. But he says none of what happened four years ago was his fault, and he accepts no financial responsibility.

  What’s your side of the story, Mason?”

  Through a mouthful of dough and ground beef, Doebler said, “Hunny was sucking my dick while I was driving out Western Avenue near suny, and I ran off the road and smashed into some bushes. The air bags went off, and we didn’t get hurt much. But my Firebird was a mess and my collision insurance had a three thousand dollar deductible. I had told Hunny to wait till we got to his place. But Hunny’d had a few cocktails — as Hunny always does — and he was totally out of control, as usual.

  He was smoking a cigarette, too, and we were just lucky we didn’t go up in flames. Getting the Firebird back on the road cost over five thousand, and three thousand of that was out of pocket. My pocket, even though Hunny was totally to blame.”

  CoCkeyed 27

  “Something doesn’t quite add up here, Mason. Are you claiming that while you were driving your car, Hunny raped you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you are saying, as I understand it, that your erect penis was out in the open air, and Hunny was bent over and sucking it.

  Did you take your dick out of your pants, or did Hunny?”

  “Well, he did. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “It must have taken Hunny some minutes to get your pants open or down around your ankles. During that time, why did you not pull to the side of the road — taking proper care and utilizing your directional signals — and retrieve your dick from Hunny and place it back in your trousers where you claim you wanted it to remain?”

  Doebler glared at me and said, “You know goddam well why I didn’t make him stop. If somebody is sucking your cock — and they’re as good as Hunny is at it — you’re not really thinking clearly. But I did tell Hunny to fucking cut it out.”

  “If we were in a court of law, I doubt you could fall back on ambivalence as a justification for your behavior. Or temporary insanity, either.”

  “Look, if Hunny had not been stinko and out of his mind, the whole thing would never have happened. That’s the point, and that is why Hunny owes me three thousand dollars. No, fifty.”

  I said, “Hunny says that when you called him on Thursday, you threatened him. He has this on his voicemail.”

  A rivulet of chili sauce ran down Doebler’s chin, and he wiped it off with a napkin. “Oh, Hunny told you that, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, fuck, I was just making a point. And I guess I made it.

  What with you all of a sudden ragging my ass.”

  “I understand, Mason, that you have a couple of assault convictions on your record.”

  “So?”

  28 Richard Stevenson

  “This has Hunny concerned. If you choose to sue him for three K, that’s your right. But you have no right to
hurt him, and I am strongly advising you not to do it.”

  Doebler, who was having a Coke with his burgers, said,

  “Those incidents were when I was drinking. I’m sober now, and this enables me to manage my anger. What I said to Hunny the other day was just to get his attention. What’s fifty thousand dollars to Hunny, anyway? Why doesn’t Hunny just fucking help me out? He could do it with no sweat. I have issues, and he knows it. The suspension on my Firebird is practically shot and the catalytic converter is shit, and the check-engine light is on, and I know that in October I’m not gonna pass inspection. Fuck, it’s no skin off Hunny’s nose if he helps me out in my time of need. Ah, shit.”

  I said, “Hunny is willing to give you a thousand. Not as a settlement but as a gift. He said you two had some nice times together, and he is sorry that there are hard feelings. This present, if you took it, would not indicate that he accepts any financial responsibility for the accident. Hunny is sorry it happened, but he believes that it was your own inebriation at the time that was the main cause of your driving off the road. You were still drinking then, Hunny told me.”

  Doebler shook his head. “Fuck.”

  “The thousand should cover the catalytic converter and get you an oil change, too.”

  “I saw Hunny and Art on TV the other night,” Doebler said.

  “That looked like quite a party they were having.”

  “If you quit pestering Hunny about the three thousand, my guess is he would be willing to let bygones be bygones and you two could be friends again.”

  Doebler had finished off the first chili burger and now he started in on the second. “Well, I could use the thou. I can’t deny that.”

  “It’s up to you, Mason.”

  Before Doebler could reply, my cell phone went off. I excused CoCkeyed 29

  myself and walked back toward the men’s room, partly for the privacy but also so I could hear anything over the barroom din.

  Hunny said, “Donald, girl, I’m sooo sorry to be phoning you at this late hour. You’re such a good boy and it’s probably past your bedtime. But Lawn just called me, and he is extremely upset.