Lookaway, Lookaway (37 page)

“I would totally do your mom,” Dorrie enjoyed announcing to Joshua in dull moments. “Hey, when she wears that black eighties shoulder-pad Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford at Pepsico don’t-fuck-with-me-boys number? Your mom is righteous hot.”

Josh would respond in his established role: “Keep such ideas to yourself while I’m driving! You want me to wreck?”

“Hey Mrs. J.,” Dorrie would rehearse, “no offense to Mr. J., but I bet there’s certain things that ain’t been attended to in a lonnnng time…”

“Stop, in the name of all that is human!”

And Josh liked black boys. Charlotte had more than its Southern share of black queens and snapping, attitude-wielding characters, but that’s not what Josh wanted. Young, masculine, slim and smooth, loping, laconic, one of those yes-ma’am no-ma’am respectful boys raised by a hundred women, and the darker the better. Going down to Camp Greene Park to watch the pickup basketball tournaments, all the tank tops and rounded shoulders and smooth glistening black muscles fired by grace and energy—it was a friggin’ porn film. Within this acceptable looks-model were: video-game nerds with computer engineering degrees from UNC Charlotte, the rare straight-acting hairdresser, no end of waiters and club bartenders, innumerable housing-project baggy-pantsed bad boys, true thugs and dealers, too … Josh had fantasies (and war stories, misadventures, misfires) with all of the above.

Josh was gayboy-beautiful in the face, articulated features like a theater actor in makeup, dramatic eyebrows and a sharp elegant nose, big brown eyes with long eyelashes, pale skin with straight black hair, but his face was the trump in an otherwise weak hand. Josh was thin, unmuscled, soft, occasionally fey and camp when the context was right, but you wouldn’t call him “fem.” Certainly no one thought of him as macho. There was a brief leather phase where he tried to butch it up but he was still a wimp in leather—besides, beyond the jacket and the boots, it started getting real expensive. No athleticism (and no plans to buff up), thin arms and legs, uneven and whimsically sprouting body hair (no, he was not going to spend fortunes having it all taken off in painful electrolysis like some guys), your standard-issue Southern scrawny Scots-Irish guy who sunburned and freckled easily, had bad skin in high school and felt his hair was already beginning to thin. Nor was he a good guy’s guy. Hated sports, couldn’t even play video games. God, that had replaced the after-sex cigarette: every twenty-something brightening and then suggesting that they could share a post-coital round of Grand Theft Auto.

There were dates and there were hookups.

Hookups. Josh had sex once or twice a week and he didn’t always tell Dorrie about every quick encounter. While Dorrie strategized for months about her society white women, closed in strategically, worked out how to be in constant contact with her prey, Josh just clicked to the internet, went to CDL—that stood for charlottedownlow.com—looked at who was online, and then used the filter device to find African-American men of a certain age range (25–35) who were looking for or open to white guys. A few chats later and he was in the shower getting ready for a ride to the guy’s apartment.

Ooh, you had to be careful. Looming over every encounter was the memory of Marlo. Josh was too lazy to cook for himself and too poor for anywhere too nice so he ate lots of meals at the all-you-can-eat Countrytyme Buffet two miles from his house. He knew all the waitstaff, who refilled your iced-tea glass and took your dirty dishes away. Marlo was always eager to saunter over, always bored and, frankly, too smart for this minimum-wage job. Didn’t seem gay but he did hover and insinuate himself in a gay way.

“Never see you in here with no girl,” Marlo ventured one day, with a bit of swagger which the Countrytyme faux-cowboy uniform seemed to support and undercut all at once.

“Because I like guys,” Josh said.

“Maybe you need to come sometime right when I get off work.”

Josh felt something was a little off. Maybe this was a hustle. Marlo would get Josh all worked up and then ask for money. And if Josh was horny and weak, he might peel off a twenty (or two) just to get this fantasy out of his system. That kind of encounter meant Marlo would let himself be serviced but probably do nothing back, which made you feel doubly used, but then Marlo was
fine
. It probably would mean, oh well, that Josh could never go back into the Countrytyme Buffet again. Horniness won out.

They got in Josh’s car (Marlo took the bus to work) and Marlo said he needed to run by home to get out of the cowboy-waiter drag. As they drove northeast, the neighborhood declined, then got worse, then got worryingly bad. Josh didn’t balk—he’d been all over Charlotte on hookups and knew a bad neighborhood from a merely poor neighborhood—he saw a Sugar Creek landmark or two … then they arrived at a dark block without working streetlights, rows of tract houses, some boarded up and condemned, some lawns becoming weeds and a place to dump discarded rusted appliances. There were clusters of young men in the shadows, lingering on the corners. Marlo hopped out and ran into a house and was back in a flash, in the same clothes.

“You using this?”

There was a Diet Coke can on the floorboard of the passenger side. Josh shook his head. Marlo, newly frantic, groped around the car, the glove compartment …

“You got a pen?”

Josh handed over the pen kept in the unused ashtray.

Marlo used the pen to punch two pinpoint holes in the side of the Diet Coke can, then he bent the can so the holes were on the crease. Then he took out from a little plastic bag a crystal which he balanced on that crease in the bent can, then a lighter where he shot a flame sideways onto the crystal, then he sucked in the smoke from the can’s opening. The acrid, burnt-hair smell of crack filled the car. Josh drove forward, his heart beating fast. In North Carolina if you had drugs in your car, no matter who brought them in there, the state could confiscate your car, and Josh saw a world of trouble and bad newspaper publicity and speculations that after his sister shot her husband, Duke and Jerene Johnston’s fag drug-addict son went wild—

“You want some?”

“Get out of the car.”

Josh drove several blocks from the drug-dealing corners. He was going to pull over … when he saw a police cruiser slowly moving down the street in the other direction. White kid in this neighborhood? Must be here to buy. Josh turned his head as the cruiser rolled by, praying for some magical invisibility. Marlo, watching his crack burn away, inhaled from the can again, making the coal glow—
as the police car passed by
. What degree of addiction would make you light up with the cop
right there
? Josh pulled the car to the curb once the cruiser was well behind him.

“Out! I mean it.”

Marlo leaned back in the seat, free of all worldly cares and tension. “Chill out, brother. Ain’t no thang.”

Josh reached across him and undid the passenger door. As he did, Marlo weakly tried to push his head down to his crotch, his stale jeans with the cowboy trim. Josh reared up and undid Marlo’s seat belt for him.

“Go.”

Marlo stumbled out and Josh drove on, a little too fast, turning left, then right, then illuminating with his high beams a spray-painted street sign as if that would help him know where he was, then turning right again, into another, different block of young men idling, slingin’, cars in front of him slowing, business being done at the car window. Josh could not calm down; he wanted to cry but was too scared to let it happen. Five more panicked and lost minutes later, he followed a glow at the end of another street, a service station, with metal bars on the window, a gathering of Mexicans out front, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags,
reggaeton
blasting from a portable radio. His car smelled of crack; he wanted to gag. No cop would mistake it. He gingerly picked up the Diet Coke can and buried it in the trashcan beside the gas pump. He drove until he found a twenty-four-hour drugstore and bought two air fresheners. Even months later, driving to his parents’ house, going home from work, he would smell a molecule of the indestructible crack-smoke stink, still reminding him of his naïveté.

Joshua thought of his own first cousin, Christopher, Aunt Dillard’s son, who died a few years back from his inability to get free of crystal meth. Chris liked slumming. He liked the danger, the bad side of town, heading out to the woods with guys with guns to see the rusted trailer where they cook it, he liked dealing to his college-educated friends. Chris thought we were all fools to be plodding along in the straight boring normal life when there was this wild-ass adrenaline world out there. Joshua had none of that in him. If he ended up in the occasional seedy housing project or hooking up with a gay guy with a drug problem—and, friend, they were legion in George W.’s America, where gay men were
so
admired, welcomed, embraced, supported—it was solely due to aesthetics. And the hope that Love might triumph over squalor.

But dating sucked, too. He kept falling between extremes. Josh, the English and Afro-American Studies double major with the 3.8 GPA, would end up spending evenings with the high school dropout he met at Starbucks, talked to for an hour, exchanged phone numbers. Nathan knew every word in “Bring Da Ruckus” but had never read one good novel. Then there was Horace, a charismatic professor who had been his customer at the clothing store, who invited Josh to his town house to be cooked for, in order for Horace to tell him about wine and wine pairings with food, as a mentor would … and that was just not what Josh wanted either. He was already cultured, knew a lot about wine and drink from his debt-ridden years at Chapel Hill, had his own fully formed opinions about art and literature, and he didn’t want to be some black professor’s decorative whiteboy at faculty dinner parties that fell to dry discussions of UNC Charlotte politics and speculation about budget cuts.

The solution for the moment was the bed-buddy, the sweet good-natured minimum-wager coming over for a regular
thang
after his shift was done, curled up together on the sofa, a six-pack and a pizza from Papa John’s, watching the NBA game (whose tip-off made them rush the sex an hour before), with the young man’s cell phone buzzing throughout, his woman nagging him about something, diapers for the baby, when is he coming home. In the last five years, the most regular guy was Silas, who would pop by in his Bojangles uniform after work, smelling comfortingly of chicken grease.

“You see,” Dorrie said once, “there’s the big difference. I can go out to a classy wine bar with my older white sugar mama and we can talk about art, literature, whether the symphony played the
allegretto
in Beethoven’s Seventh too slowly. What are you gonna talk to Deshawn about?”

Josh was patiently resigned to lots of earnest conversations about what working-class young men did for a living, in exhaustive detail. Together, he and Dorrie had lived through Samir’s getting his hours cut back at the Flower Hut, Dwayne having to go back to court for not seeing his parole officer (a marijuana arrest), and Rudy’s Jiffy Lube closing down on Independence to make way for lane-widening. (Rudy made the Jiffy Lube uniform
work,
even Dorrie was impressed.)

“I like RayRay,” Dorrie said, sitting beside Josh on the couch, perusing the goods on charlottedownlow.com, in her advisory role, ready to sanction or forbid an online contact.

WAT IT DO MY NIGGA.… . WAT IT IZ??? YO wudup fellas ya boii RayRay b outta brooklyn nu yurk. new 2 tha downlo system checken shyt out. da kidd iz mad laid back luv 2 blaze, smoking treez, and most deff a FREAK. and all wayz lookin 2 meet new headz. if u read my joint & wana know more screem atya RayRay.

Ray let his face picture show; had the thug thing down, he was fierce and hard and buff as any gangsta rap star. God, what Josh wouldn’t give for one night with one of these guys. Not a middle-class Kappa Alpha Psi frat boy at Emory pretend-thug, but a
real
banger.

“I’d get in that stream,” Josh said.

“I hear that.”

YO, SUP WIT YALL? DIS BE DAT ONE AND ONLY NIGGA TRELL, HOLDIN IT DOWN, ON HURR COME AT ME CORRECT AND YOU’LL GAIN MUCH RESPECT, I DUN BEEN THRU ALOT WIT PEOPLE ON DIS HERE MADHOUS! DONT HAVE TIME TO DEAL WIT NO FEMS, IF DAT WAS DA CASE I WOULD FUKK MY GIRL, EAZYSKETCHIN’, PRODUCING, SUPERVISIN MY KORNER KREW, GETTIN BLAZED, DICKIN’ BITCHEZ. O U WANNA PLAY GAMES BIIIIATCH? JUS LET YOU KNOW,,,, NIGGA ABOUT TO GET BROOOOOKKKE OFF.… . THAT’S RIGHT, YO BOY FROM NEWTON IS IN DA HOOOOUS MUHFUKKAS

Dorrie shrieked before ranting: “What—this gangsta is from Newton, N.C.?
Newton
in da house? Negro, this is metro-fuck-you-politan Charlotte, North Carolina! You come correct to
us
with your two-bit Dollar Store played-out country ass from
Newton
…”

Josh loved it when Dorrie went ghetto on someone. Dorrie who had spent three summers abroad studying the old masters, in Paris, Madrid, and Florence respectively. “Newton stays out in the yard, it don’t
get
in da muthafuckin’ house,” she muttered, the storm over.

Every once in a while, Josh thought he recognized someone from a bar or high school; Dorrie was sure
wideopen
was an elder in the church she grew up in. One after the other, at the bottom of the profile with stats, invariably it read:

Out?
No

Married or living with a woman?
Yes

You identify as …
Straight

And a little farther down, after height and weight and endowment, circumcised or not, was a stat for preferred sexual role:

Preferred position?
Bottom

“Ha!” Dorrie laughed. “All these b-boys with their bling and signature NBA jackets and eight-hundred-dollar shoes, looking to take it in the hiney. Maybe they got used to it in jail.”

“I need to get sent to jail,” Josh whispered.

“One of them down east Sampson County brokedown jails in the swamps, niggas still in there for looking at a white woman in 1949. Where all the guards are black and mean as shit, letting the gen pop take turns with that new pretty whiteboy prisoner from Charlotte.”