DAMAGED - A Bad Boy Romance (91 page)

My shoulder connected squarely with the cop’s neck, and my momentum took the two of us to the ground.
“RIOT!” I screamed, but the crowd was already one step ahead of me.

Every dog has his day.

“Cum Drunk”. That’s the best way of describing how I felt after the two of us finished.

My entire body was tingling, and I knew that I had achieved something spectacular, but I wasn’t quite sure what that was. I knew that I was available for whatever exchange had taken place, and I knew once he had gotten up that everything was over.

“STOKER” was written on his chest. I wasn’t sure if that was his name, but he seemed like an arrogant sort of guy who would have his own name tattooed on his chest. For some reason, within the chaos of that moment, that detail stood out for me. I didn’t have that much longer to pay attention to him, because he launched himself over my body toward some member of the crowd. When my eyes followed him to the other side of my body, I saw him connect -- not with a crowd member, but with a cop.

Oh shit
, I thought, and I sobered up immediately.

It was a weird kind of sobering -- something where I didn’t have complete control of my perceptions, but was still pushed into a highly functional state. I was in dreamland, with a lucidity provided by a surge of adrenaline. I had to get out of there, and fast. I knew that if I stuck around any longer, things would not end up well for me.

I looked to the side of me, and saw a jacket get kicked by another member of the crowd. Not thinking, I crawled over, and picked up the jacket. Throwing it on, I managed to grab my bearings. There was another cop headed toward me, but he was cut off by an enthusiastic raver dyke. She wore industrial type clothes, and had leather spikes on her gloves. A bottle flew from her hand, and clocked the cop in the side of the head. The officer was disoriented, and turned to face her.

“FUCK THA POLICE!” she shouted, obviously enjoying her moment in the glowing light of rebellion.

Another body shoved a pair of pants into my arms, and slapped me on the ass.
 

“Good show,” they said, “Follow me.”

He was a bear type, with scruffy facial hair and biker tattoos. Someone that I would have been intimidated by in absolutely any other circumstance, but I did what he said. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, he held my hand and charged full speed through the crowd, knocking people aside with his shoulders and free arm. He had been headed toward the exit, but on his way toward the final departure point, he was intercepted by a police dog and a can of mace.

The biker got furious, and completely lost track of his righteous purpose in helping me escape. The dog was flung to the side, and the police officer who had sprayed the man with mace was doing his best to fight off the blind rage of the biker. I opted to slink off to the side, finding myself once more at the side of the stairwell which lead up toward the roof.

The rope was still up, and I didn’t bother to undo it this time. I simply ducked underneath the cord, and ran up the stairs. My bare ass was available for the entire club to see, though I didn’t look back to find out who was paying attention and who wasn’t. The crowd was in absolute discord, and I had no desire to be seen by anyone -- security or otherwise. Making my way up to the roof, I opened the door, and looked out at the evening sky.

The roof was vacant, and the noise from the riot downstairs was only a murmur through the insulation provided by the ceiling. Realizing I had a moment to myself, I hastily put on the pants that had been given to me. The pants were actually mine, which was alarming, but the jacket had belonged to someone else.

“Divine providence,” I said to myself, offering justification for the fact that I had blatantly stolen someone else's jacket, and had no plans to return the item.

With a frenzied pace, I walked over to the side of the rooftop where the garden was most prolific. Interestingly enough, I found a sequence of platforms available for climbing. Beyond the planter, on the other side of the seating area, there was a fire escape which lead down the side of the building. Not wanting to remain visible to any of the people who might still come up the stairs, I climbed down the fire escape first, thinking I would plan my escape from that point afterward.

Definitely a “Leap before you Look” type scenario.

On the other side, climbing down the rusted metal grating which composed the fire escape, I heard the door slam open. Whoever had opened up the door was now talking through some kind of radio device, which I heard click on and off frequency. Looking to the side, I noticed an indentation in the wall where a window and ledge had been placed. Without thinking, I left the safety of the ladder, and positioned myself on the window’s ledge.

A dog barked above, and I heard some noise moving outward toward the ladder where I had climbed down. Pushing myself as close to the window as possible, I flattened my body, and held my breath.

“If you saw him up here, he’s not here right now,” the officer said into the radio. “Looks like he may have climbed down the fire escape into the alleyway between Fifth and Camino. Should I pursue?”
“That’s a negative,” the voice replied. “Primary objective at this point is crowd control. All officers will be needed to make arrests for the riot downstairs. We can’t divert resources to pin down a couple of perverts.”

“Got it,” the officer replied.

The dog barked and growled once more. I stayed in my tiny inlet, pressing my hands up toward the ceiling as tightly as possible so that I wouldn’t fall into the alleyway below. Usually, I wouldn’t be this brave, but I had an unnatural sense of my own abilities. There was a confidence in me, that modified how I looked at the situation. Instead of considering whether or not I would fall down, I was simply acknowledging the amount of effort that would be required for me to stay secure on the ledge, and exerting that amount of effort. I had no illusions about where that extra amount of confidence had come from; it was Thomas’s drugs, to be sure.

When the door to the rooftop closed once more, I took a deep breath and assessed my situation.

The alleyway was about two stories below, and there were police cars on the street on either side. Fortunately, it seemed that for the moment, the majority of the police presence was still inside of the club, or just outside either of the main entrances. Looking across the alleyway, I noticed that the building on the other side had a number of small balcony structures, complete with their own terraced planters. I made a quick evaluation of the distance, looked down once more to re-affirm that climbing down to the alleyway would
not
be an option, and then jumped.

My heart leaped up in my chest, and adrenaline coursed through my body. When I landed, one foot slipped, and I gashed up my leg pretty bad, causing some of the wooden terracing to fall down into the alley below.

Shit…
I thought, struggling to get up, and crawl my way forward to the edge of the fire escape.
At least I made it.

The piece of wood fell harmlessly to the floor below, but the sound of the fallen object was drowned out by the noise of the riot, which had spilled out into the street. My leg had been protected by the pants, but only so that the damage was not as severe as it could have been. My feet hurt from the impact, and my heartbeat was racing beyond that which was reasonable. Knowing I needed to move forward, I climbed up the side of the balcony to the roof access for the second building.

Fortunately for me, the second building was part of a larger series of industrial warehouses that were linked together for the better part of one city block. Within moments, I was away from the noise of the
‘Lectricland
. The new sounds which surrounded me were industrial heating and cooling ventilation shafts, and the sounds of traffic on the streets three stories below. I felt irrevocably alive. So many parts of the evening shouldn’t have happened the way that they did, but the fact that I had made it through each trial had given me an unrealistic sense of confidence in my own abilities.

I didn’t have time to reflect on the events of the evening yet. I knew I wasn’t out of trouble, but I was past the danger zone and that felt incredible.

The next descent was much less problematic than the first. When I got to the end of the warehouse line, I was only a couple of blocks away from the club. I hadn’t run into any problems, and the drop down to the street was easy enough. The warehouse periphery included a loading dock with a parked box van. Transitioning from the rooftop to the van was not a big deal after the incident in the alleyway. I dented up the top of the van a bit, but nothing too bad. When I got to the street level, I was so excited to have made my escape that I decided to go for a run. I ran all the way home, not even stopping once to catch my breath.

***

After I arrived home, I finally found laughter from the evening’s events. My brain was moving at about a thousand miles a minute. I couldn’t keep a single thought in my head if I tried, but I kept getting reoccurring themes.

You lucky fuck
, I thought.

Time and time again, I found myself saying those three words. You couldn’t really believe how fortunate I had been in getting away from that whole situation. I thought about all of the other people who had gotten into trouble because of my actions. I also thought about Stoker. The way that he had launched himself at the nearest cop in order to prevent me from getting arrested. He was so brave.

Sure, there was probably a strong element of self-preservation involved in an action like that. In all likeliness, he had some kind of record. I felt like a bad boy like that probably didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the law, or at the very least he had a deep disdain for authority. Then I thought about the biker guy who had helped me out.

It seemed like somewhere in the undercurrent of the queer community, there was a general disdain for traditional authority figures, and that tonight had only been a scratch on the surface of that veneer. I also realized that it was highly likely that the percentage of the queer community who held such a disdain for police officers was small. I had to keep my conjectures in check. It wasn’t like I could deduce something about an entire community of people from a small subset in an isolated experience.

Likely the people there were full of artificial bravery from alcohol. There was also likely the pre-conception that the people within that room were examples of those who advocated free love. In that microcosmic sense, I had inadvertently become some kind of mascot for the free love movement. People likely saw my submissive form of exhibitionism as a wave of freedom that they could stand behind. The presence of authorities with the intent to destroy that public demonstration was probably what had set the crowd of so easily.

All of these thoughts came to me so clearly in my state of heightened awareness. The drug had certainly shifted from being a primarily sensuous drug into a highly analytical substance. I was making connections and observations along lines that may or may not have been accurate. I was aware of the fact that my theories were fallible, but that didn’t slow their onset. My mind continued to reel without my permission, spinning out a near endless cacophony of tangentially related conclusions. Eventually the whole thought process had exploded into a cosmic battle, in which I had participated equally on both sides.

On the side of the angelic, I was the representation of freedom and love within our society. By getting fucked in the ass in public, I had shared myself deeply. I was Christ on the cross, who suffered for the sins of my people. Those for whom I suffered were the ones who felt like they couldn’t freely love one another in a society which was primarily heteronormative. I was the demonstration of love in a place that wanted love sorely, but was too restricted to make any use of the action. I was not the force of the revolution -- but I was that which the revolution had been pinned upon. People would go home that night with a renewed sense of freedom -- if they made it out of the club without getting themselves locked up. As for the people who fell into police custody, they would be my disciples. For years, those who fell tonight would likely think of this as their critical moment, when they stood up to the authorities in the name of true love and queer rights. I felt in some profound sense of the word, like tonight was a victory for the side of righteousness.

Then, when self-doubt and curiosity about alternative perspectives came into my mind, my mind drifted toward the demonic. I considered what it might be like if we had been in the wrong. What if the entire point of our exchange had been a violation of stringent sexual taboos which had been in place for the greater protection of society in general. We had stood up against God’s abhorrence for homosexual behavior. We were the fly in the ointment. We were leading the people astray, and the police were there like angels from the right hand of God. They were the agents trying to put us back in our place, and restore order to a society founded on designer jeans and child support allegations.