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Orphanhood

It was so obviously a momentous night that even a novice would’ve suspected something. And Joe was no novice: He had grown up in the California desert, knew its magic, knew its signs. But he noticed nothing.

He was annoyed; he didn’t give a fuck that the gods had turned up the contrast, that the world was in a state of hyper-focus. If he saw any of those billion brilliant stars, he gave no indication of it.

He should have known something was about to happen. Major things always happen on nights such as this. It was on just such a night, as this, that he had his first wet dream. On a night like this his father asphyxiated. On such a night the cats began to arrive at his mother’s house. He should’ve known.

A splay of shooting stars, which would normally put him in a state of ecstasy, burned out unseen—unseen, anyway, from that particular point in space and time: the front seat of a 1957 Lincoln Premiere convertible.

He allowed his foot to get heavier yet: sixty mph now.

He was sweating profusely. Almost ten o’clock and it was still over a hundred degrees. They, of course, had to have the top down on the car: “Why buy a fucking convertible if you’re not gonna put the top down?” Ray had said.

Ray of the blowjob going on in Joe’s lap.

It was Ray’s car, two weeks old that very night. A land yacht, Ray called it. An unmanageable tugboat, Joe thought. It had power everything. You didn’t dare give the brakes more than a whisper or you’d go flying through the windshield; hiccup and you’d change lanes; risk a sneeze and you’d likely wind up going in the opposite direction.

Sixty-five miles per hour, seemingly on its own.

The air was electric. Maria Callas soared along those electrical waves all the way from Salt Lake City, Utah, to this remote spot south of Palm Springs, California. She seemed to enjoy it, Joe thought, as he let that one part of the night enter freely. But only the siren of her voice did he allow in; he had no idea what it was she was singing. It was “Ave Maria,” Ray would recall.

If Joe felt the suckling, he did not indicate so—other than to increase their speed to seventy.

He hated the car. No, the fact of the car. Facts. Ray had bought the car without telling Joe first; Ray had used the money that would have been his half of the down payment on a house they kept saying they were going to buy; apparently they would not be settling down together, after all. Ray said they should get a trailer, a mobile home, that they could just pull around with them; they could go wherever they wanted, when they wanted. Joe didn’t want a mobile home, he wanted an immobile home, one that would be there, right there, when he needed it. Ray even had a trailer hitch installed on the Lincoln, thinking he’d eventually wear Joe down; Joe was holding firm, so far.

Seventy-five: banking through a long, sweeping curve.

Facts. The reason Joe was driving at this moment was that Ray was too drunk, Joe only slightly less so; and the only reason they were on the road at all tonight was that Ray wouldn’t stay in Joe’s mother’s house. Not fair. Ray could not stay, as he was allergic to cats, and there were no fewer than thirty of those in Mother’s house; nevertheless, he still had to drive Ray all the way to the motel in Palm Springs (Palm Springs because Ray hated all the motels in Palm Desert, which was the community in which Mother lived), he still had to drive Ray all the way to Palm Springs, and would no doubt have to put Ray to bed, then drive all the way back to Palm Desert because Mother would have apoplexy (Mothers still had apoplexy in ‘57) if he didn’t spend the night with her—after not visiting for three long years.

Eighty: sailing down into an arroyo, then rising upon its swell, grateful to find the horizon intact.

Ray created a vacuum in the hope of stimulating arousal. Had Joe known this would be the last blowjob he’d ever get, if he had known his was the last time he would ever have sex with another person, period, he might’ve made the effort to be erect. As it was, he didn’t know these things, so he didn’t bother.

Facts. Joe did not visit his mother the entire time he was at UCLA. “Mother,” he had said repeatedly, “I cannot get a degree in three years if I keep running out to the desert every time you get lonely.”

“Dora,” he had said repeatedly, “I have to do it in three years because I stayed home with you the first year, remember, while you mourned the old man—and the goddamn money is going to run out!”

“I’ll be there as soon as I have the fucking diploma in my hand!” he had said.

And he was there, this evening, degree in hand, smiling, promising to stay long enough to learn the names of the new cats, like a good boy. They had waited till five to leave the city in order to avoid the 120-degree afternoon. Ray had waited in the car while Joe retrieved his mother from the house-that-Ray-couldn’t-enter; and he continued to wait while Joe wiped Mom down with masking tape to remove (most of) the cat hairs from her dark green dress (Wear prints, Mother, paisleys, anything but solid darks!). She tried to introduce him to the new roses as he walked her to the car, but he hurried her along with a lie that Ray had diabetes and that he’d pass out if he didn’t get some food soon.

They had to drive to Indio for dinner because Dora wouldn’t eat anywhere in Palm Desert or Palm Springs or any of the other nearby towns: Daddy, as she referred to him, had taken her to all of those restaurants (only once each, mind you) and she just couldn’t bear all those memory ghosts. So they went to dinner in Indio, where she had only had a date shake, and that was with her old friend Helen.

Ray had only two lines in the dinner drama: “Martini” and “Another,” the second line having multiple refrains.

Joe had a feature role, so he had considerably more dialogue, including: “Gin Tonic for me and green Crème de Menthe for the lady, please, on the rocks.” (That line had a few refrains of its own, too, just not as many as Ray’s.) “I think we’d all better just have the pot roast.” “Ray, eat something.” Plus, Joe got to repeat all the things he’d said on the phone to his mother for the last three years (see above).

Dora, of course, was the star. God only knows why: With that voice she should never have made it out of the Silents. Voice like a cat. Not in heat, but definitely on the verge of. It wasn’t exactly whiny; it was more...well, maybe whiny is the word. Raspier than that though. Anyway, Dora did most of the talking, illustrating everything with her hands—when they weren’t tugging at the copper-red Dynel locks cascading about her head. (Dora lost her hair, every last strand of it, to some exotic and rare disease that her doctor insisted could not have come from the cats. She said.)

Ray had tuned out on Dora’s first word; Joe made a concerted effort for the first half of her monologue, but then gave up somewhere during her threat to burn down the chicken coop, chickens and all. He resorted to uh-huhs and the like until it was time to leave.

They wobbled to the car with Joe in the middle, Dora gently supported by his left arm, Ray heavily supported by the right. Dora took advantage of the ride back to Palm Desert to reiterate her views on homosexuality—certain that they had not fully grasped them during dinner, suspecting that they hadn’t even heard them—her views being, essentially, that she couldn’t understand how anybody could stand to look at one of those things, much less touch one, much less do you-know-what with it. She, herself, had never seen one or touched one and was damn sorry she ever let Daddy, may his soul rest in peace, put his you-know-where.

Ray waited in the car...Ray passed out in the car while Joe walked his mother to the front door of the house-Ray-couldn’t-go-into.

“It’s too late to meet the roses tonight, Dora,” Joe said. “I’ll meet them tomorrow.”

“Yes, I’ll be back tonight,” he told her. “I have got to get Ray to his motel. As you can see, his diabetes is acting up again.”

“I promise!” he promised.

He went inside with her, turned on the lights for her, then stood there for a moment watching cat hairs flying home to the dark green dress, followed forthwith by a dozen or so cats as Mom collapsed into an overstuffed chair. Her preoccupation allowed him a silent retreat to the car, where he gently lifted Ray’s head from the seat and slid in under it, then lowered Ray’s face into his lap—with absolutely no forethought that Ray might come to and decide to do you-know-what you-know-where. What is that man doing? Joe suddenly wondered of Ray.

Ray was no longer content with nursing limpness—and he was perfectly content for a while there (There was no sense of urgency here for Ray: This would not be the last blowjob for him, as it would be for Joe. In fact, Ray will be sucking cock well-past his seventieth birthday). But Ray did want a little substance to nosh on, so he slid his hand down farther, down beyond the sac, beyond the perineum with its mysterious seam, to poke the “on” button. Bingo!

“Huh?” said Joe.

“Hmmmm,” said Ray.

Eighty-five miles per hour.

It happened so fast. Everything, all put together, took maybe one second. So read fast: Car lights, red ones. No, not car lights, trailer lights. A silver AirStream house trailer. Buttocks tightening. A little kid’s face in the back window of the trailer. A wave from the kid. Slow down—fucking power brakes! Callas hit E above high C. Breathe! Swerve to the left—fucking power steering! Loins about to explode! Off the road, onto the shoulder, almost into the ditch. Swerve to the right—fucking power steering! Suck my cock, you bastard! Back onto the road, almost into the side of the trailer. Pop your nuts, blow the back off his head! Straighten out, that’s it, settle down. Eat it, cumface! Shit, narrow bridge ahead! Floor it—ninety—cut back in, now, or you’re gonna die! Oh fuck, made it. Flying right over the goddamn bridge. Curve. Curve? Whataya mean curve? I can’t do a curve now! I’m goin’ ninety—ninety-five!—fucking miles an hour! Blow me, bitch, for I’m about to die!

That was the first second; now here is the second second: Either there was a rock or a pothole in the road, or maybe, probably, the back bumper of the Lincoln touched the front bumper of the car pulling the trailer, because just as Joe pulled back into the right lane to make it over the narrow bridge, the car pulling the trailer severed its umbilical cord to the silver AirStream and jumped up into the air, did two complete aerial side flips, flew a good fifty yards before it caromed off a huge boulder at the edge of the wash, then rebounded in the opposite direction until it came to a thudding halt in the sand under that same bridge.

Then things went back to happening in minutes.

The silver AirStream rolled to a stop in the middle, but on top rather than under, that same bridge.

Joe very gingerly fanned the brakes, slowing to a snail’s pace of thirty-five. His chest was heaving. On her mountaintop in Utah, Callas began to cough and sputter, then spit her way into a state of perpetual static; Joe cut her off. He looked in the rear-view mirror, but saw no lights. He decided they must have pulled off the road to let the shock pass–something he, as well, considered but then dismissed because he desperately wanted to get Ray to the motel and get himself home to bed.

Ray? Ray was asleep in Joe’s lap, nursing again, where he would remain until they drove into the motel parking lot, at which time Joe reached into his lap and pinched Ray’s nose, cutting off his air supply. Ray choked, spitting the obstacle from his mouth. Joe tucked and zipped, then dragged Ray to his room. He didn’t put Ray to bed; he merely opened the door and let him fall on his face inside the door. Joe dropped the room key at Ray’s feet, closed the door, and returned to the car.

The mood had finally appeared; Callas had been replaced by a saxophone, soft and thoughtful. Jazz. So quiet. So very peaceful. It was cooler now, and Joe tasted the wind, savoring the warm flavors that filled the night air after a day of baking in the sun. He leaned his head back and took in the panorama of stars–his stars. How bright they are tonight, bet something’s going to happen. Feel that electricity. He let himself sink into the cushiony leather of the land yacht as it floated on the waves of the desert–his desert.

Oh God, free me to this, he thought. Free me from them, from their distorted faces, their voices grating at the base of my skull. And while you’re at it, Lord, dear, let’s talk about his boy-loves-boy thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that when we talked about this back in high school, you gave me the impression that it was just a phase I was going through, that I’d eventually stop dreaming about penises and start getting it on with vaginas and those other things. I mean, the very day after our talk, I did get a partial erection from Muriel’s breasts. I took that to be your sign that the “phase” was petering out...so to speak. Well, you know damn well–sorry–darn well that it got worse. I’ve become a full-blown queer! So to speak. Stop that, you idiot, you’re talking to Him! Anyway, I mean, here I was driving around with a man locked onto my manhood, bangin’ his head on the steering wheel, and I liked it. And I like doin’ him too. Well, you know, you’ve seen it all. God, what you have seen, uh, God. The point being: Is there some particular reason, I mean some good reason, why you had to make me queer? What the fuck is that, anyway. Better yet, what the fuck is that?!

It was huge, silver, and round. It seemed to be hovering over the bridge, right in the middle of the road. Joe stopped the car a safe distance away. Terrific, the Martians have landed, and they’re going to take me away from all this. They’re going to be the ones to free me. Thanks a lot, God: Your mysterious ways are going to be the death of me yet.

It was not a Martian spacecraft. If was, in fact, an AirStream; big, not huge; round only at the top; sitting on, rather than hovering over, the road in the middle of the bridge.

He got out of the car cautiously, then walked one careful step at a time toward it. What is that thing doing here? Step. Where’s the car that goes with it? Step. You don’t just leave your home, mobile or otherwise, out in the middle of the highway while you go out to dinner or something. Step. You park it in one of those, uh, those...trailer parks they’re called. Step. There’s one on every block these days–they’re everywhere.

Knock, knock.

Nothing.

“Hello?” he asked aloud.

Nothing.

He tried the door handle. It moved. He opened the door and stepped up into the thing. Again aloud, thinking he was alone in there: “Hey, this is kinda nice. Amazing how compact everything is. Look at that: a living room, and a dining room over here, kitchen, cute little stove, this must be a closet. No, my goodness, it’s a bathroom! What’s that? A showerhead? How do you...? Oh my God, you can take a shower sitting on the toilet! No, you have to take a shower sitting on the toilet. Ha! So, this must be the closet over here...ooh, tacky tacky. And back here, ladies, we have the bedrooAAAAAGGGHH!”

The shadowy figure loomed in front of the window over the bed. It flew toward him screaming!

“Mommy!” is what it was screaming, and it leapt from the end of the bed into Joe’s arms. It locked its arms around his neck and continued to scream, directly into Joe’s ear, until the screaming became wailing, and that in turn became continuous sobbing.

As he was mildly hysterical himself at that moment, Joe’s first impulse was to bat it to the floor and stomp on it, but fortunately he realized what it was before he had time to act upon the impulse. He couldn’t have done, anyway: It was attached much too securely to be repelled. Instead, he put his arms around it and began to whisper a soft shhh, with his lips pressed gently against the child’s ear. He lowered his left arm to the behind to keep the kid from falling–should it loosen its grip–and, with his now-free right hand, he stroked lovingly, starting from the top of the head, into the recess of the neck, and down the back. And again, shushing and caressing until, finally, it got the hiccups and could cry no more. He switched from caress to pat, pat, pat and changed his shhh to a cluck.

“There now, you’ll be all right,” Joe said in a real voice.

The kid reared back, arms braced rigidly against Joe’s chest, and looked this strange man in the eyes. You are not my mommy, the eyes said. Even in the moonlight, those eyes were blue.

“Hi,” Joe said.

The kid said nothing. Just stared.

“I’m Joe. Who are you?”

The kid said nothing.

“Where’s your mommy and daddy?”

No reaction.

“Well, at least your bottom’s dry, that’s something. And no diapers, good for you. How old are you? two? three? Bet you’re only two, and trained already. Your mommy must be so proud of you. Where is your mommy, anyway? How could she leave you out here in the middle of nowhere? Don’t answer, it was rhetorical.”

The child cocked its head to the side.

“Aha, you are listening aren’t you? We’re making progress. Next thing you know, you’ll just be chattering away, telling me your whole life’s story...all the girls you’ve loved and lost. You are a boy, aren't you? Let’s see.”

When Joe pulled on the elastic waistband of the pajamas, the kid flinched, eyes suddenly frightened.

“Oh stop that. I’m not going to molest you, for crissake. I just want to see if you’re a him or a her. Sens-i-tive. I promise I won’t touch your precious little peepee, if that’s what you’re hiding in there. Okay? Okay. Well, my goodness, you really are a boy. I had no idea that...never mind, we know that you’re a he. Let’s make up a name for you...unless you want to make it easy and just tell me. No? Okay, let’s see, your peejays say Lone Ranger. That your name? Lone? Hey, Lone, howya doin’? Ah, but a boy with your features, those high high cheekbones, that coarse dark hair, your blue eyes aside for the moment, you have got to have some Native-American blood in there somewhere. I know! You’re Tonto! And Lone loaned you his pajamas for the night. Ha! Get it? Lone loaned? Forget it, I’m not well. Can you say that? Ton-to.”

The boy giggled.

“Gotcha!”

That time, the boy laughed out loud, and Joe laughed with him, pulling the boy to him, rocking from side to side.

“Oh, Tonto, what am I going to do with you? The Lone Ranger seems to have gone off and left you to fight this battle all by yourself. I guess we better go find the posse.”

With the silent boy in his arms, Joe searched both sides of the road on both sides of the bridge; he found no tire tracks in the shoulder sand and no signs of disturbance in the roadside brush.

He lied to Tonto as to why they were searching the side of the road: “I’m looking for posse tracks,” Joe said. “I thought they might already be in the neighborhood and we wouldn’t have to go all the way into Dodge City to find them. Problem is, you see, is that your, uh, your cabin is right in the middle of the trail, there...and my car, uh, my horse is on that side, but we want to go thataway. So, how do we get the–I have a trailer hitch!”

His plan had been to simply pull the AirStream off the bridge and leave it at the side of the road, but after spending a half-hour turning the boat of a Lincoln around and figuring out how trailer hitches work, he decided to tow the thing all the way to the Sheriff’s substation in Palm Desert. And, as they were pointed in the wrong direction, he had to drive two miles out of the way in order to find a place big enough to circle around (instead of turn around, because no way could he back up with a trailer).

He babbled endlessly, apologizing at least a dozen times to Tonto for going on and on about things that couldn’t possibly make sense to a little boy. “You see, I think I’m going to have to keep my job waiting tables, in a coffee shop of all places, and I just don’t think I can handle that. I mean, here I am, a so-called expert in Theatre Arts and I can’t find a job. I don’t want to be a waiter in a coffee shop, Tonto. You understand, don’t you? Plus, I think I just broke up with my lover. What do you think of that, huh? Actually, I think I’m going to have some kind of a nervous breakdown. Are there different kinds? Don’t worry, I’ll hang on till we get you taken care of. Okay? And I think...no, I know my mother is nutty as a fruitcake–runs in the family–father was a drunk, died in chicken coop, passed out with his head buried in chicken sh– uh, doodoo, all night. Methane did him in. You know, I used to be a quiet person. This is all new, this is strange. This is...Lord, help me, this is my mother! Whatever happens, I love you.”

Tonto was mesmerized by this man who talked so much, this man who had so many different tones to his voice, and who went from whisper to shout to song and back again, seemingly without ever taking a breath.

“I know!” Joe screamed, causing Tonto to pull away. Joe quickly apologized, in one of his soft tones, patted the boy on the head and nudged him back into his snuggle position at Joe’s side. “Why don’t you come home with me?” Joe said, almost in a whisper. “We could live together, you and I. Two abandoned lads finding solace in each other’s companionship. You’d love my little house, even if it is rented. I’ve got two of the cutest little birds you’ve ever seen and a–No, wait, I know: Why don’t I come live with you? I mean, we could live in your trailer house. If nothing else, it’s closer. I know I said I didn’t want to live in one of those cramped things, but, uh, but that was with Ray. You’re smaller, it won’t be so crowded. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Joe waited for the next turnout, then pulled the rig off to the side of the road. He scooped Tonto up into his arms and carried him back to “our new home.”

“Oh look, I carried you over the threshold. That means we’ll have a long and happy life together. See? Look how much room there’ll be for us. Of course, I can’t ever gain any weight, and you can’t ever grow any larger,” (This is what is known as an unwitting prophecy) “...but other than that, we’ll do just fine. I wonder if we have any tea. Or cocoa, that’d be even better, get a good night’s sleep that way, and we can take off for parts unknown first thing in the morning, all rested and fresh as daisies. Good, here’s some cocoa. You like hot chocolate, don’t you? I knew you did. We need milk, though. God, I hope we have some milk. I’ve got my heart set on...oh good, and it smells fine, too. Where are the pots, Tonto? Under the oven, I bet. Or in the oven with so little storage. Yep. Now, while that’s heating, let’s get ready for bed so we can hop right in after we’ve had our nightcaps. Obviously, I’m going to need the big bed, so where...but you would’ve had a bed of your own, wouldn’t you? Where would it be? Where...ah, there. Now that’s clever, tucking a little bed up in the recessed window like that. Okay, that’s settled, now what do we sleep in? Oh, you’ve already got your peejays on, don’t you? Well, I’ll find something. The milk’s hot, let’s drink up. I can’t wait to get to sleep, then get started on our new life in the morning. Hot hot. Blow on it first so it doesn’t burn your mouth. Will you listen to this motor-mouth of mine. I haven’t given you a chance to get in a word edgewise. But then you don’t talk anyway, do you? I’ll bet you do. Tomorrow. You can do all the talking tomorrow and I’ll just listen. Okay? You know why I’m going on like this, don’t you? Excitement. I’m just so excited about the future–about everything. You know, I’m never going to get to sleep.”

But he did. About ten seconds after his head hit the pillow. He used those last ten seconds to look up at Tonto nestled in his window-bed, to stretch up to give him one last kiss and one last tuck-in, and to say one more “Night-night.”

“Joe Dixon! Can you hear me? Come out now, you pervert, and We won’t kill you! Send the boy out first, then come out with your hands over your head! You’ve got ten seconds, then we’re comin’ in after you!”

Joe’s eyes slammed open. He sat up. Red lights flashed angrily through the lace-curtained windows. He reached up and pulled the still-sleeping boy to him, clutching him, too confused and too frightened to move. “All I did was peek in his pajamas,” Joe sputtered, barely audible.

“That’s it, Dixon, your time is up! We’re coming in!”

The door seemed to explode inward, and a flood of cops filled the trailer. A screaming woman lunged toward the bed, crying, “My baby, my baby!” and “He’s wearing my negligee!” and right behind her was this maniac of a man who leapt all the way from the passageway onto the bed, landing on top of Joe just as the screaming woman snatched Tonto from his arms. The wild-eyed man grabbed Joe around the throat and began to choke him, yelling, “Die, pervert, die!”

Joe’s eyes slammed open. He sat up, screaming and reaching for his throat, and finding Tonto’s arms wrapped securely around it. Tonto was also screaming. They continued to scream in unison, in harmony actually, until Joe finally came full-awake and realized what was going on. He shushed and caressed the boy back to a state of semi-calmness, and made a decision. “We’re leaving,” Joe said.

Outside the Sheriff’s office: “The nice Sheriff will find your mommy and daddy for you. Okay, Tonto? When you get in there, you just tell them the whole story and they’ll fix everything up hunky-dory and I’ll see you next time I’m in town. I’m kidding! Don’t look at me like that. I’m going in with you, all right? It’s just that cops, uh, police officers make me so nervous. They’re so...well, never mind what they are. Let’s go.”

The plan was to leave the boy and the AirStream at the substation, and Joe would’ve done just that–if anyone other than Max Kell had been on duty that night.

Max Kell was the reason Joe thought of himself as a “queer.” Max and Joe went to high school together, graduated together. In fact, it was on graduation night, in back of the gymnasium, sneaking a beer, his fifth for the evening, that Joe broke his three long years of silence and confessed his undying love for Max. Unfortunately, it was not Max he confessed to. Max knew it anyway, and didn’t care. Joe told Butch Gilmore, and the reason he told Butch Gilmore this great secret was that Butch had just told his great secret: that he regularly masturbated his sister’s dog, a boxer named Spike. Well, after a secret that great, Joe felt obligated to tell one that was equally shocking (which his was, of course). Then, on the way back inside, Joe stopped off in the boys’ locker room to piss, and when he walked back into the gym, what he saw was Butch leaning into Max’s ear, whispering and laughing. Max wasn’t laughing, but he was staring right into Joe’s eyes. Joe ran. Joe was still running.

As faddish as that historical decade has become, the fifties were not Ozzie and Harriet for everyone: There were no gay people then, just queers. And Joe was one of them.

So, it was a fair amount of crawl-in-a-hole anxiety that greeted Joe as he swept Tonto up into his arms and marched boldly into the Sheriff’s substation that night, only to find Max Kell sitting behind the desk.

“What can I...Joe?”

Joe could only nod.

“Jesus,” Max said.

Max stood and began to move toward them. Joe didn’t actually back away, but he did lean away, just enough to get the message across. Max stopped.

“So...Howya doin’?” Max asked, trying to keep his voice in check so as not to scare Joe any more than he already had.

“Uh, fine,” Joe muttered.

“How...was college?”

“Fine,” Joe said, then took a deep breath in order to say: “How was the army?”

“Boring.”

“Yeah.”

“Four years, huh?” Max asked.

“Yeah.”

Max put his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching out with them. Tonto squirmed from the tightness of Joe’s grip around his legs and back.

“What’s this?” Max asked.

“What?”

“In your arms, dummy.”

“Oh. It’s a boy–I mean, it’s a, he’s a kid I found.”

“Found?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, Joe, what say we sit down over here, and you can–”

“I really can’t stay. I, uh, left Dora buried in cats...and, uh, God knows what’ll happen if I, uh, if I don’t....”

“Okay, okay. Just tell me about the kid.”

“I told you. I found him.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Out there. On the highway, I mean.”

“All by himself?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus. No sign of anybody?”

“No.”

“What’s he say? What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk?”

“Sure he talks. What’s your name, kid?”

“He won’t tell you.”

“Sure he will. Hey kid, I got a son at home about your age or a little younger. Why don’t you–”

“You have a son?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, Max Junior. Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“But your mom said–”

“I didn’t even know you were marr–uh, Max. Who’d, uh, who did you, uh, marr–?” The word just would not finish.

“Muriel, who else? Shit, we went steady for three years. Then you get married, right?”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“Anyway, the kid can stay with us till we find his folks. Okay? How ‘bout it, kid? Wanta come to my house and play with little Max? First, you gotta tell me your name.”

“He won’t–”

“Tonto,” Tonto said, giggling.

Max laughed.

Joe turned deep, deep red.

“Tonto, huh kid? Sounds like Uncle Joe’s been tellin’ you some stories.”

“I, uh, I didn’t, uh....”

“Yeah, kid, your Uncle Joe was always the one with the stories. Some imagination. Hey Joe, I’m off in a few minutes. Why don’t you come over, too? Muriel’d love to see you.”

“Don’t forget Dora.”

“Oh yeah. Tomorrow for lunch then. I’m not on till four. You can help me figure out what to do with the–with Tonto.”

“All right. Well, I have to go now. Good night,” Joe said, turning and walking away.

“Joe.”

“Huh?”

“Leave the kid.”

“Oh yeah.” Joe walked back toward the desk, but stopped short by a couple of feet. He kissed Tonto on the cheek and held him out at arms’ length to Max.

Max could stand it no longer. He took the boy in one arm and threw the other one around Joe’s neck before he had a chance to get away. “Missed ya, Joe,” Max said, pulling Joe forward and kissing him on the cheek.

Tonto giggled.

Joe ran.

Fortunately, Dora had a circular driveway. Strangely, it ran around the back of the house instead of the front, but it was circular nonetheless. It was fortunate that Dora had such a driveway because Joe had pulled into it before he remembered that he was towing the silver AirStream. And he didn’t actually remember it: He pulled around to the back of the house, turned off the motor, got out, and tried to walk around the rear of the car, where he encountered the trailer.

He stared at it...defiantly, as if to say, How dare you still be there! You’re in the past. Or you’re supposed to be, anyway. He dislodged the tongue from the hitch: too easily, he thought, lucky it didn’t bounce loose somewhere on the highway. He fished around in the glove compartment of the Lincoln until he found his diploma, on the back of which he wrote the following:

Dear Dora,

Something has come up, and I have to return to the city tonight. Sorry I couldn’t stay longer, but I’ll get back out as soon as I can. I’ll call you tomorrow and explain everything, including this big silver thing.

Love and kisses,

Joe

which he impaled on the door handle of the trailer.

He got back into the land yacht and plotted a course for his rented house in Sherman, that little strip of county that a decade later will become West Hollywood. The moon had risen to the top of the sky, whitewashing the crispness from the stars. The high contrast, the hyper-focus, that had once been the night’s was now in his head.

But the sounds that were heightened in his head were not the sounds he loved. They weren’t the sounds of the desert. They were the sounds of Dora: raspy whines that ripped at the base of his skull and threatened to drive him mad. But he defied them, demanding to be free of them. He cast them out; he cast them overboard.

And the texture he felt so keenly in his hands was not the soft leather touch of the seats or the steering wheel cover, but rather the cold steel touch of the car that had taken his lover from him. But he tossed that sensation as well. And sailed on.

The smell of his father’s death, the excrement of hens, drowned out the freshly-baked aromas of the desert rocks. That, too, he overcame. That, too, he released into the night.

And the sweet taste of Tonto’s cheek.

The sight of boyhood love.

Gone.

Free.

Unfortunately (Try to explain symbols to a cop), somewhere along the freeway, between the outskirts of San Bernardino and the L.A. County Fairgrounds in Pomona, Joe had begun selecting physical symbols to represent the spiritual symbols he was casting out. Those physical symbols were: his shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and lastly but not leastly, his underpants.

It is four o’clock in the morning. There are four beds in the small room, two on either side, each appended with a nightstand.

The room is too-well lit for four ayem. The source of the light is not immediately apparent, but the tone is recognizably florescent.

Everything–walls, doors, furniture–is painted green, a pale sad green.

His pajamas don’t match: the room; or top with bottom. The shirt is a sickly yellow and the pants are turquoise. He is lying on his left side, staring at the man in the next bed. The mad is old, thin, shriveled, white-haired and looks dead, but is merely bombed out on thorazine. The man’s pajama top is red; he can’t see the bottom to know the color.

He rolls onto his back to see who else is in the room. In the other beds are two young men: The one on the left is Satan; the one on the right is God.

Satan is the younger of the two, about sixteen, probably. He is small and looks like a cat. His skin is ashen, and his hair and eyebrows are black. His eyes are dark, narrow and tapered. Satan’s pajamas are striped.

God looks to be eighteen or nineteen. He is muscular and tanned. His hair is brown, long and curly. His eyes are soft, but they seem angered or perhaps confused. God’s pajamas are polka dot.

Joe is awake despite the sedatives; he is not dreaming.

“I wish I were,” he says aloud.

“Were what?” someone asks.

“Huh?” Joe sits up, startled.

“You wish you were what?”

“Oh,” says Joe, and nothing more.

“Don’t be frightened.”

But he is, and he slides down into the bed, pulling the sheet over his head.

They introduce themselves–Satan’s name is Alan; God’s name is Mark–and wish him a good night, telling him it will all be better in the morning, none of which makes any sense at all to Joe.

Sleep, followed by some daylight realities:

“Mr. Wade. Mr. Wade? Ray? Wake up now,” a woman said in a little singsong voice. “C’mon, Ray, time to wake up. It’s after noon already, and we only have seventy-two hours to find out all about you.”

Joe opened his eyes.

“Well, good afternoon to you, Ray. I’m Nancy.”

“I’m Joe.”

“Oh, my poor little boy,” Nancy said. He’s twenty-two, she’s twenty-four, and he’s her poor little boy.

“My pajamas don’t match.”

“Oh, silly.” She wasn’t wearing pajamas: What the hell did she know? “We have bigger problems to solve right now than your peejays, Ray.”

“My name is Joe.”

“And we’d better start with that little problem...Ray.”

Seventy-two hours is how long the State of California gives county psycho wards to evaluate the crazies they drag in off the street. At the end of three days, they either commit you to a state institution or put you back out on the street. Joe slept the first twelve of his evaluation hours, so he had only sixty in which to influence his fate. And a little bird told him that his fate was in the hands of dear, dear, motherly, condescending Nancy.

“Okay...you can call me Ray.”

But why did they want to? When the arresting officer asked the naked Joe if he any any ID, Joe told him it was in the glove compartment. The officer had no reason to look for more than one wallet, so he grabbed the first one he saw, which happened to be Ray’s. The officer delivered a blanket-clad Joe to Los Angeles County General Hospital along with that wallet. It was before drivers' licenses had photos, and the physical description was close enough, so they welcomed him to the ward as Ray Wade.

Nancy escorted Joe to the day room and introduced him to the other current residents. He remembered none of the names, nor would he speak to any of them during his stay–with the major exception, naturally, of Mark and Alan.

Nancy seemed especially fond of Mark and Alan; and now Joe. She ignored everyone else on the ward, devoting her entire shift to these three. Perhaps the others had different social workers, but Joe would not remember other such persons being in the day room; just Nancy, and she was with the three of them all of her available time. They started counting down the minutes leading to her coffee break or meal breaks and, finally, to the end of her work day. They counted down the minutes to the time when they could actually get to know each other, without her syrupy yet insipid interruptions.

Mark was not God. He was Jesus Christ. Well, he thought he was Jesus Christ, anyway. And he told people he was. With black and red bold marking pens he created self-portraits and other religious icons in a stark and painful, expressionistic style. Mark drew incessantly, turning out thirty or forty of those hideous images in a single day–on large sketch pads left there for him by his mother, who was also the one who left him there. His voice was deep and harsh, often colored with anger. He was born and grew up in Ohio, came to Los Angeles six months ago with his mother and her new boyfriend.

Alan was not Satan. Well, he didn’t think he was Satan, anyway. But he did think he was evil, something to do with a very ancient evil. He didn’t know how or why he was so evil, just that he was, and that the only way to control that evil was through death, as in suicide. As in both of his wrists were bandaged. As in he had been transferred to the psychiatric ward from emergency after they determined he was medically out of danger. Alan had the voice of a much-younger boy, clear and soft and pure, as yet unspoilt by testosterone. He came to Los Angeles as a child with his widowed father who was some kind of foreign diplomat. Alan was a Spanish Jew who carried a rosary. He wouldn’t say why or when he started carrying a rosary. Perhaps he didn’t know.

So, when the man named Ray said he was really Joe, the boy named Alan who was really Ancient Evil and the boy named Mark who was really Jesus Christ had no trouble understanding that Ray was really Joe.

Within hours, they were inseparable. Nancy decided that it would be therapeutic for them to bounce their delusions off each other, so she encouraged their bonding. One can’t really know the mind of a do-gooder, but it is imaginable that she was “all warm inside” as a result of her seemingly astute action. How was she to know that their images of each other would provide a lifetime re-enforcement set in concrete: Mark and Alan will both come to believe that the other is who he thinks he is, and that each exists because the other does; Joe will never again be able to see Good and Evil as merely White and Black.

By dinnertime, Joe was obsessed with this mystical duo; he would’ve been perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life manacled between them–which he figuratively will be, as a matter of fact.

One of the strange things about this ménage à trois was that they barely spoke. This is not to suggest they used some form of extrasensory perception–nor to deny it. There was no reading of actual thoughts between them, or conscious transference of insightful visual images. It was more basic.

Perhaps in 1957 the human race had not yet completed the plastic-coating of instinctive responses, because for Joe it was a bit like sniffing.

In Alan he sniffed fear, fear most of all, and incredible vulnerability. Feline mystique and its accompanying grace. Alluring female sensuality. Homosexuality.

In Mark he sniffed pain, both physical and mental, and the kind of aggression that leads to conquest. Equine strength in the frothy sweat of muscular domination. Male sensuality. Omnisexuality.

In other words: Ancient Evil was the sweetest little boy Joe had ever met, and he wanted to throw his arms around Alan to protect him from the hard, cruel world, to kiss away his tears, heal the slash wounds on his wrists, to caress away his fears; whereas Jesus Christ was a potential mass murderer who scared the living shit out of Joe, but Joe was especially frightened by the dark sexual desires Mark aroused in him.

This dichotomy would so preoccupy Joe’s mind for the remainder of his hospital stay that he would not have time to think about Dora, Max, Tonto, his miserable past or what he thought was going to be his miserable future, i.e. it gave him time out of mind to heal.

By bedtime that night, Joe was committed to a fantasy in which the three of them were brothers, living their whole lives in blissful companionship, and he slipped easily into a daydream-cum-dream designed specifically to fulfill that wish. Well, almost:

It was a “Father Knows Best” dream, entirely recast to fit his purposes: He was Princess in a boy-body; Mark was Bud; Alan was a boy Kitten; Father and Mother were faceless, benevolent props. The boys romped and roughhoused, squabbled and giggled. They rolled on endless lawns, lawns that never needed mowing. They ran through open fields, played hide-and-seek in friendly forests, climbed infinite trees, and tickled each other till dawn without a single scold from parental chambers. They wrestled amid rumpled sheets clad only in underpants, knowing even from tyke-hood that that was one of life’s true pleasures.

But, alas, such fulfilling dreams are restricted to the fringes of sleep. Deeper sleep means deeper dreams evoked by deeper emotions. Father and Mother developed identities, although not faces, and over milk and cookies one afternoon they started to make unreasonable demands upon the boys, demands the boys could not meet. As punishment, they were sent to their room. But when they got there it was no longer one big room they shared; it had been multiplexed into three smaller rooms, three separate rooms. They were kept in those separated rooms for what seemed like years, until one day a neighbor came to let them out and to tell them that they had to go live in separate places because their Daddy had died and their Mommy had moved to another dimension, leaving them virtually orphaned.

He had awakened when the neighbor let him out of the room, but he couldn’t prevent the story from concluding.

He looked around the too-well lit room. The man in the next bed had his eyes open, but he seemed not to be actually conscious. Mark and Alan were both asleep. Joe buried his head under the pillow and thought about bananas...because he had a habit of going right back into the same dream if he didn’t clear his head before returning to sleep. Fruit always worked for some reason.

The next morning, both Mark and Alan had their interviews with the staff psychiatrist, and they both spent the remainder of the day isolated, Mark in one corner of the day room drawing, and Alan in another counting his rosary beads. Joe tried a half-dozen times to start conversation, crossing from one corner to the other, but neither would speak, not even to tell him to go away. He gave up and sulked off to yet another corner. He had pretty-much resigned himself to a day of moping when an old man without teeth walked up to him and said, “I’ll cut ‘er fuckin’ tits off, the old bitch, lock me up! Fuck ‘er!” at which point the man dropped a book in Joe’s lap and walked away digging at something in his crotch.

The book was David Copperfield. At first Joe used it as an excuse to avoid having to chat with Nancy and to shield his stare alternately toward Mark and Alan (Not that he needed to hide his stare; staring is perfectly normal behavior is such places), but after a few pages of pretending to read, the words caught is attention and drew him into Davey’s heroic life. He forgot the hurt Mark and Alan had caused him, and devoted the rest of the day to commiserating with Master Copperfield’s plight.

When he finished the book after dinner, he went looking for Mark and Alan, and found them in their mini-dorm, each sitting silently on his own bed, Mark drawing and Alan counting beads. The comatose man was out for a walk or something.

Joe wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say. He wanted to scream but thought better of it when visions of straight jackets appeared in his head. He lay down and closed his eyes.

“What were you reading today?” Alan asked, still counting.

“Huh?”

“He asked you what book you were reading out there,” Mark said with a little annoyance, as though it had been Joe who’d avoided them all day–

–which pissed Joe off, but he was so grateful to have them both back, he happily shrugged the anger, sat up and launched into a detailed retelling of the Dickens’ classic.

They wound up with all of them sitting on Mark’s bed, cross-legged in a triangle. Mark and Alan touched; Joe did not. These two boys, as fucked up as they seemed to be, were completely unself-conscious about touching each other. Knee against knee. A hand resting on a forearm. Foot across the other’s ankle. Hand on the other’s knee. But not sexual. Sensual, not sexual. Joe wanted to touch; as he talked he could envision reaching across that vast one-foot gap, but he drowned himself in the self-consciousness of such a move, practicing it in his mind, considering its implications, its hidden meanings, and before he could arrive at a decision as to whether he should, could, touch or not, the moment to touch was gone, the object of the exercise having shifted to another, even more remote, more unreachable position. The best he could muster out of several hours of trying was several minutes with his right hand nestled up against the flannel softness of Mark’s polka dot pants leg. But that didn’t happen until the very end of the book, so Joe was left sitting there in rapt concentration on those pajamas with absolutely nothing more to say. Embarrassed, he made things so awkward that they all became self-conscious and had to pull apart to their separate beds. A weak “g’night” was the last communication they would have.

Joe fell asleep staring at the empty bed next to him, wishing the man would come back and stare with him. And, on another level, he pictured the pajamas in the beds across from him, causing his own pajamas to stir.

As always, the dream began with an effort to make a wish come true, then turned on him to make him see things he did not want to see, or to make him see how totally absurd his mind could be:

He tiptoed across the room to Alan’s bed, drawn by some irresistible force. He pulled down the covers, pulled down the pants, pulled down the foreskin....

He was suspended three feet in the air. Not in a sling. Just floating. Alan was beneath him, lying with his body arched painfully backward and his erection was jutting forward like a spear in and 3-D movie. Alan’s hands were grasped behind Joe’s head and he was pulling Joe onto the huge red penis. Alan’s eyes were fiery and evil. Joe resisted; Alan said, “Tell them the devil made you do it.”

Which he did.

Joe could feel soothing hands massaging his thighs and buttocks, then Mark lowered his full weight onto Joe’s back. Mark whispered love and comfort into Joe’s ear as he rammed the godhead to the hilt, crying, “Christ is in you.”

Which he was.

Joe shot awake like a cannon. Literally. There was white sticky stuff all over his belly. The covers were thrown back, his pajama bottoms were at his knees, and his hand was locked around his now-fading penis. God, he thought as he fumbled to cover himself, I hope no one saw me doing that. Oh, what the hell, this is a loony bin. Who would care?

But, he cared the next morning. His first thought was that he didn’t dare show his face on the ward. Maybe Mark or Alan had still been awake. Maybe a nurse had walked by the door checking for late-night weirdo-things. Maybe he had called out in passion at the moment of climax. He rolled over and went back to sleep, determined never to see any of those people again.

Nancy woke him at ten: “Mr. Wade. Ray. Time to get up. We’ve slept in again. And today’s the day we see the doctor. I’ve saved you a little breakfast. And some coffee. I know how you like your coffee in the morning. Now, you wake up and eat, and I’ll come back for you when the doctor’s ready.”

If you weren’t nuts when you came in, you would be after a few mornings of that.

She left.

He opened his eyes.

No Mark and Alan.

He slugged down one of the cups of cold coffee and ran out to the day room. No Mark or Alan.

He ran to the bathroom. No Mark. No Alan.

Ditto at the nurses’ station.

“Where are Mark and Alan?” he asked.

The duty nurse ignored him.

“Nancy!” he screamed.

Nancy rushed out of the doctor’s office, slightly panicked: “What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Why did you call me? Are you all right? Nancy will–”

“If you’ll shut up for a second, I’ll tell you,” Joe said.

“I can see you’re upset, so–”

“Where are Mark and Alan,” he interrupted again.

“Oh, they left this morning.”

“Left?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Where?”

“Now come and sit over here, honey. The doctor will see you in just a moment. I was just on my way to your room to tell you that the doctor–”

“Where did they go?!”

The answer: Their period of observation having expired, they were shipped out as part of a daily busload of transfers from the county’s short-term, over-crowded mental hospital to the state’s long-term, over-crowded mental hospital.

Nancy’s answer: “They’ve gone where they can get the kind of personal care we can’t offer in a temporary facility such as this. Oh good, the doctor can see you now.”

She left.

The doctor invited Mr. Wade to join him inside.

Joe decided right then and there to tell it all. He was really going to let go of it all. Boy, would he tell. This was an opportunity to find some clarity, to exorcise some of those ghosts from his past, an opportunity to start anew on life. Maybe he needed therapy, maybe not, but either way he was going to face this head-on, stand up to it...like a man?

“Well, Son, what seems to be the problem?” the doctor asked with much-practiced fatherly entonations.

That did it. Cancel the confessions.

Joe stiffened. No parental concern, thank you very much.

The doctor made a notation on his pad: Anger.

Joe suddenly relaxed, sat back in his chair, crossed his legs as manly as he could manage, and let go: “Well, Doc, my problem as you call it, is this place. You pile people into ugly green rooms, you dope ‘em up on drugs or television all day, shove a ditzy social worker at ‘em, then you deign to conduct your little interview before shippin’ ‘em off to the whacko warehouse for permanent storage.” Joe thought that they would consider hostile behavior to be normal at this point in the game.

The doctor made a note: Hostility. Doc wasn’t into the stereotypical “Ums” or “Uh-huhs.” He just made silent notes. He did do little things with his eyebrows, though, just at the moment he thought he was having an insight.

That accomplished, Joe leaned forward intimately and began his tale: “I’m sorry. The truth is I’ve had just about the worst week I’ve ever had in my life. First, this idiot teaching-assistant I had in philosophy lost my thesis on Karl Marx’s alternate hedonism theory, if you can imagine, so of course they held up my admission to the doctoral program. Then, I go out to the desert to be with my fiancée...you know, to cry on her shoulder or whatever, and try to forget about it for a while. Anyway, we’re just about to, uh, climb into bed to, uh, you know...and she starts all this shit about she isn’t sure we should get married so soon, maybe we should wait till I’m out of school. Bull–Shit. I mean, she was feeding me bullshit. Because then she sneaks her way into tellin’ me maybe–just maybe mind you–maybe she might be thinking of seeing her old boyfriend once in a while so she can be more sure about whether or not we should get married. Bullshit, like I said. So I get out of bed and get dressed and drive out of there as fast as I can go. Y’know, fuck her and her old boyfriend.” Joe wondered if he was using enough cuss words.

The doctor made a note: Profanity.

Joe donned a pensive look. “That’s when I saw him, the hitchhiker. He was wearing construction boots, cutoffs and a T-shirt, but he looked pretty clean, so I decided it was all right to give him a ride. Anyway, he got in the car, and he’s friendly and everything, so we talked about dumb stuff...like school and jobs...he was a carpenter, I think he said...and then we get on to the weather, how hot it’s been lately, how hot it still was in the middle of the night...and, well, he took off his shirt. Didn’t say a word, just took it right off.

“I couldn’t help but look over at him. I mean, somebody does something unusual like that, and you look over. I’ve never paid much attention to other guys’ bodies...y’know, no more than anybody else does...sure, there’ve been a couple of times, like in college, you see certain guys and they’re just so, just so really good-looking that you gotta admit he’s a beautiful man. Well, this guy was like that. First of all, he was tanned from head to toe...well, his ankle was as far as I could see...and he had really strong legs. His cutoffs were split on the side so you could see the thigh muscles all the way up to the hip....”

The doctor had not taken one single note, but his eyebrows seemed to be locked in the “Up” mode.

Joe sniffed a “closet case” sitting across the desk from him, and he decided that an even-more detailed account might be fun: “...I mean, all the way up to the hip, and the guy was not wearing any underwear. Anyway, he had one of those washboard stomachs and really well-developed chest and arm muscles...not like a weight lifter, more like a swimmer...in fact, I think he said something about he was at a swim meet that day, that’s why his muscles were still so pumped up, and he missed his ride home, so he was hitchhiking.

“When I finally got a chance to look at his face, I thought I was gonna drive right off the road. He looked just like James Dean. I know the lighting was bad and everything, but in that light he really did look just like James Dean. Looking at this guy, you could see why everybody went ape over James Dean, I mean, everyone thinks James Dean is, uh, sexy. Right? I stopped looking at him right there and then. It’s one thing to think a guy’s good-looking, but when you start thinking another guy is sexy, you’re getting off the track. So, I just looked at the road...and we talked some more...I don’t remember about what...because that’s when he says something about his shorts being too small or too tight or something, anyway they were hurting him, and would I mind if he took them off?

“Well, at least that time he had the good manners to ask, but before I could decide whether I minded or not...I mean, I didn’t want to encourage him, but I didn’t want him to think I was some uptight kinda prude or something who thinks nudity is dirty, but then I also didn’t want him to think I was a closet case who was afraid to be around a naked man...anyway, without waiting for my answer, he took ‘em off! And there he was, sitting stark naked! Except for his shoes, of course...Is it warm in here or is it just me? Well, I had to look, didn’t I? A guy gets naked in your car, you look. His tan was so dark that the middle part practically shined white in comparison. I mean, it really stood out, even in such dim light. Now. here’s the hard part...I, I don’t know quite how to say this...I started to...I was getting an erection.”

So was the doctor, Joe thought. Doc’s eyebrows ran amok, trying to climb up on top of his head.

Joe put his hands to his face to cover his shame.

The doctor put his hands to his face, too, presumably to retrieve his runaway eyebrows. He said nothing.

Joe kept his hands over his face until he could bring his grin under control.

Joe outlasted Doc, who finally muttered, “Please continue. What did you do then?”

“I pulled over and asked him to leave. What else? Imagine what might have happened if I hadn’t!”

Doc dropped his pencil.

“Fortunately, we’d come to his off-ramp by then, so he put his clothes back on and got out of the car. I don’t remember if we even said goodbye to each other. And, as I drove along the freeway, I started to feel really dirty, and I guess that’s when I started ripping off my clothes and throwing them out of the car. I just couldn’t stand to have them touching me for another second. I’m sorry.”

The doctor fumbled for his pencil, then made a note on his pad: Temporary Homosexual Anxiety. He looked up, cleared his throat and said, haltingly, “Son, you seem to have worked your way through this crisis. I think we can let you go home today.” Then, without rising, the doctor asked Mr. Wade to return to his room to await his release.

Ray–the real Ray–was livid. Especially about the car. It was bad enough that he had to hitchhike back from Palm Springs, but then he had to get a damn rent-a-car when he got home because he didn’t know where the hell his brand-new Lincoln was, and even when he found out where it was he had to keep the rental because he couldn’t get his car out of impound because he didn’t have his wallet to prove that he was Ray Wade. He found out where the Lincoln was when the hospital called looking for Joe Dixon, to tell Mr. Dixon that his friend Ray Wade had listed him as the person to notify in case of an emergency. It took Ray a full twenty-four hours of alternating anger and laughter to finally call them back, pretending to be Joe Dixon. He told them that he’d be happy to give “Ray” a ride home when they were ready to release him. And, yes, he could bring some clothes for “Mr. Wade” to wear home.

His delight over the charade did not, however, assuage his anger completely, and he was determined to get even. Yelling and screaming, silent treatments and the like, or sexual blackmail never worked with Joe, so Ray was faced with a serious challenge. Pretending not to be angry seemed to be the best place to start:

“So, Joe,” Ray said with a smile as they pulled away from the hospital in the rented car, “have a nice vacation?”

“It wasn’t bad, actually. I had the weirdest roommates, though. One was dead, I think, and the other two were God and Satan.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back for a little while?” Ray asked, teasing when he said it but then wondering if that mightn’t be a good idea.

“Did you know God wears polka dot pajamas?” Joe said.

Ray almost turned the car around on that one. But he had the feeling he was the one being taken for the ride. Still, he persisted in his smiling-stewardess camaraderie, convinced that Joe would eventually explode into guilt-ridden apology.

“Oh, this is a nice car,” Joe said. “Is it new?”

Ray bit his tongue, first figuratively then literally. And he was about to explode, himself, when Joe changed course yet again, and Ray was reduced to jello:

“I found this kid out on the road...” Joe said quietly, “...like a little lost orphan in some book. Y’know, sometimes I think homosexuals are like orphans...one way or another...so we should all adopt each other...Don’t you think?”

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