No Ordinary Piece of Wood

A scene sketch that I wrote to help me develop two characters who have been in my head for a while. I'm disappointed by the representation of relationships between gay men and straight women in modern fiction; typically, such relationships are peripheral to gay or straight love stories, and they tend to present as lukewarm cliches. I think that there's room for something both darker and deeper - a dynamic that I've tried to get at through Luke and Lila in the story below.

Proto 4Chan Imageboard (circa 2007)

X12: This imageboard is going to hell

X13: This whole world is going to hell

X14: It’s global warming

X15: Climate change is a hoax

X16: It’s the Latinos

X17: It’s the Jews and the microplastics

[Image removed for violating site rules]

X18: It’s the Nazis

X19: Ann Coulter was born a man, did you know that?

X20: Fuck off

X21: No, it’s true! She’s a tranny. Check out this picture of her Adam’s apple

[Image of a woman, presumably political commentator Ann Coulter; she has long hair as blonde as her politics are red and an ambiguously pronounced Adam’s apple]

X22: If only our politicians could lead us with the grace and dignity of the poodle, truly the most elevated of God’s creations, we’d be able to turn things around

[Image of a WASP-ish poodle, its posture rigid and expression aloof]

X23: Ann Coulter is kinda hot

X24: That’s a man, baby!

X25: Maybe I don’t care, baby

X26: The poodle, too, embodies freedom of orientation and gender, oscillating between a short-haired, ultra-masc, Golden-retriever-type presentation and a très chic, ultrafemme, topiary-style presentation with the sort of lubed-up ease that can only be achieved by those in the terminal stages of self-actualization

[Side-by-side images of a short-haired, athletic looking poodle and a super-groomed poodle with long, curly hair styled elaborately]

X27: Everything’s going to shit

X28: Everything’s been going to shit since day one with our species, man

X29: Not according to the poodle, a creature of unbridled optimism -

X30: Shut up, poodlefag 

***

I’m ready to go

I don’t know where

I hope you’ll come

And meet me there

- Angsty poetry that Lila wrote in one of her multitudinous journals, which I preserved without her knowledge

***

Lila arrayed on the naked mattress, a cheap tinseled throw wrapped around her, examining her nails like a great cat cleaning its claws after a particularly gruesome snack. 

“What did you do?” Her mother: Fearful; spectacularly aware that the power dynamic in their relationship had shifted out of her favor by the time that Lila was five or six. 

Lila’s smile opens up like the blade of a jackknife. 

“Ethan and I broke up.” 

A sharp intake of breath. 

“You can’t keep playing with boys this way, Lila. It’s -”

Sadistic, I think. 

“Dangerous,” she finishes.

Lila lasers a look at me, signaling that she’s too tired to deal with this presently. 

I launch into a complicated discourse, the main thrust of which is that - since women are so spectacularly at risk of violence at the hands of men, as every Investigation Discovery watcher knows (Mrs. Z is a fanatic watcher of true crime) - woman’s only real agency lies in controlling the where and when. In bringing the inevitable assault to herself, voluntarily and with premeditation, she thereby gains some sort of home court advantage in dealing with it (or at least is dispatched upon her own terms, against a backdrop that can be made, with proper foresight, aesthetic). 

A particularly idiotic thesis, even by our standards, which of late have grown depraved. 

It is our private, unkind joke how susceptible Lila’s mother - not “the maid” but “a maid,” as Lila puts it - is to our sophistry (one of the cons of living above your means to send your child to a school far better than the one that you attended, we reckon). 

Still, we cherish Mrs. Z. In our way. 

Flippantly, unless a better word occurs to me, in which case I shall return and replace it. 

***

Two musky months later: Lila having in her own fashion taken Mrs. Z’s admonition to heart and set her sights on more ambitious prey. 

I study Lila at her locker, flashing her tombstone eyes at Josh J., who shows the early signs of love and fever. 

“I think you need to be careful with this one,” I warn Lila later as we eat microwavable noodles from Styrofoam cups that bear a mutagenic aftertaste. I feel a mild buzz as the perverted microplastics leech into my system. 

Josh J. is the son of our privileged hamlet’s boldest, if not best, defense attorney. He has a campaign ad smile and the entire lacrosse team behind him – socially if not anatomically, alas. 

Lila and I are scholarship students, the capital “O” Others of the anthropologists; rudimentary Marxist analysis suggests that this could end badly for us. 

“You’re just jealous because you could never have a guy like Josh; they don’t make gay versions of him,” she wounds me. (She backed off a little at the end, I intuit: She meant, and could have said, that I wouldn’t be able to get the gay version of Josh even if he existed). 

Lila’s observation hurts me less because I recognize that she has a point. In our strange dynamic, we must forever hurt each other first, worst, to protect ourselves from being so wounded by a stranger. 

This is, I suddenly realize, a funhouse mirror reincarnation of the Investigation Discovery logic that I’d espoused to Mrs. Z. 

***

Six stale and sentimental months later: Josh J. has gotten my cell phone number from God knows who. 

“Please tell Lila to call me. ASAP.”

“We need to talk.”

“Please tell Lila to call me.”

“Tell her to call me.”

Lila forbids me from responding. My palms slick with sweat, I pretend that the number is disconnected.

Later that night: Six cups of putrid jungle juice deep; I am at the tawdry kind of house party that, after only two years of high school, I am already weary of. The entire five-thousand-square-foot McMansion smells of sex, and to my knowledge no one has even started hooking up yet. 

I am waiting in line for the upstairs bathroom. Twenty-five minutes later, someone will discover that the guy inside the bathroom has passed out cold on whatever combination of pills and powders and weed and alcohol he was patenting tonight. 

A screwdriver and an ambulance instructed to wait at the end of the street remedy the situation, but not before I notice reddish bronze, thick-veined arms braced on either side of me. My eyes ascend slowly from a pair of light-brown oxfords to bulging-thigh-hugging designer jeans to a surprisingly modest white t-shirt stretched across a torso like a department-store mannequin’s. 

“Hi, Luke.” 

Eyes drift further upward: Reach a broad, classically handsome face ornamented by plump, red lips arrayed in the center of a jaw like a metal bracket and a strong, blunt nose with an azure eye on either side of it. Bushy black eyebrows and a French crop, like every other atom of the perfect bastard, suggest robust masculinity. 

Josh is alone, and he wastes no time getting to the point. 

“Please talk to Lila for me, Luke. I don’t know what the fuck happened. It was going so well, Luke.”

The overuse of my first name rubs me like coarse-grained sandpaper on my nuts. Needless to say, Josh is too drunk: The first part of what he’s said sounds like Pleesh–talkdaLilaferme; my brain immediately begins trying to identify which foreign language it is listening to. 

I wonder if Josh’s car, an exclamation point of a cobalt Ferrari, is parked outside. Then, I wonder why I wonder; it’s not like I’m going to do anything about him driving, if it is. 

“JoshIdunno–Lila–is…”

I slow it down so that I can choose carefully.

“She’s…”

“She can be…”

“...Fickle.” 

 For the record, I have probably consumed at least twice as much alcohol as Josh has (not to mention the Xanax that I’ve popped throughout the day and night, prescribed by a sympathetic psychiatrist who smiled as he agreed to diagnose me with a Panic Disorder that, as I explained it, centered upon anxiety spikes triggered by not possessing enough antianxiety medication). 

“Come with me,” Josh orders. With the grace of a ballerina, he pivots so that he is next to me before slinging an arm around my side / waist and pushing me down the hallway to a guest room where there is apparently a quaternary upstairs bathroom that only our host and the rest of the lacrosse bros know about.

Josh gestures to the open door. I am shocked when he follows me into the small space, closes the door behind us, then hovers in the corner as I prepare to relieve myself. 

“Is it true that gay guys pee sitting down?” I hear from behind me as I unzip my fly. 

“What the fuck, Josh?”’ I pivot my neck to shotgun an incredulous look in his direction.

“I heard that once… Think it had to do with butt sex, or something,” he mutters. 

“No, Josh.” 

I realize that I’ve had to pee for at least the past four drinks as an aggressive-sounding Niagara of piss begins. Something about the sound is strangely gratifying to me. Suddenly, I am inspired. 

“Actually, we shit standing up too,” I remark. 

“Really–?” 

His chuckle cuts off whatever idiocy was meant to come next. 

“Hey, we could all three of us have some fun sometime,” he says as I am zipping myself up. 

Josh has stepped forward so that he is next to me; I beat a hasty retreat as I notice that his dick is out already.

Josh is, as expected, well-endowed; either he has what in the next decade will come to be known as a semi, or he is the poster child of Showers. 

“Me and you and Lila,” he continues nonchalantly as I retreat into the corner. Strangely, I do not open the door and leave. 

Another powerful stream of piss ensues; I feel weirdly certain that he is forcing it out, competing with me. 

There is a hollow desperation to Josh’s suggestion that turns me off with magnificent efficacy.

I wonder how he pictures that scene unfolding - me, the voyeur, in a corner with a white sheet covering all but my eyes as Lila and Josh go at it on a no doubt sumptuous bed stationed somewhere in the J. manse…

“Gross, Josh,” is all I allow myself to say. I’m angry at him, but I’m raging at Lila for putting me in this position.

For myself, I am simply humiliated.

“Bye, Josh,” I bid him; he spins around prematurely as he realizes that I am leaving, spraying his pants with an arc of droplets that should’ve been shaken off according to the time-honored procedure. 

“Luke!” 

We have both sounded strangely sober for the past several minutes, I realize quizzically as I leave. 

***

Forty-five minutes later: I study Hillary Clinton as the Empress.

I’d walked through all six “downtown” blocks comprising our shitty, bourgeois town. I’ve decided to sleep over at Lila’s. 

The two of us are reading our fortunes in a Tarot deck that we bought during a recent excursion to the Village, which features American politicians.

We’re using a Pentagram spread, and - as I draw a card featuring Ronald Reagan as the Devil - I see Lila’s green-brown eyes light up internally in that feline way that they have. 

A moment later: Brash, insistent knocking on the downstairs door. 

“Lila!”

“How the fuck does he know that I’m home?” Lila hisses.

“Oh, shit – he followed me from the party,” I put together as the muscles in my balls and lower gut tighten in the least sexy way imaginable. 

I part the heavy purple curtains of Lila’s bedroom window by half an inch so that I can look down the street to where, sure enough, a cobalt Ferrari has been parked on the wrong side of the street.

“Lila, we need to talk!” Josh screams as the pounding resumes. 

“What the fuck, Lila!”

“Let me in!” 

“I love you, Lila!”

Another sound begins to punctuate the banging on the downstairs door. This one is a frantic scratching - something like the noise from a few X-Acto knifes cutting through heavy fabric all at once. 

“Lila, let me in!” 

“I know you’re in there too, Luke!”

Beneath Josh’s bellow is a whirry whining that reminds me of the asthma attacks that plagued me when I was younger.

“Let!” 

Pound. 

“Me!” 

Scratch. Pound.

“Fucking!”

Pound. Scratch. 

“IN!” 

Pound. Scratch. Scratch. 

A kick thrown in for good measure?

“Bitch.”

Scratch. Slap-punch-knock. 

“Cunt!”

Sixty additional seconds of pounding and scraping, then a keening “huh” that, for the first time tonight, makes me feel genuinely bad for Josh. 

He is gone.

Lila and I maintain eye contact for a good ninety seconds before either of us speaks or moves. Our faces are expressionless. 

“I’m sorry, babe,” Lila whispers. 

I’ve told Lila about what Josh said to me at the party; she gets it right away.

Because Lila always gets it right away, somehow.

“The only boy who I will ever love,” she sighs as we arrange ourselves side-by-side on the mattress. 

Lila smells so fucking good: Like coconut and some fairytale bouquet. 

I wonder, not for the first time, why I can’t just love her. 

***

The next morning, I go downstairs to assess the damage to the door frame before Mrs. Z gets home. 

Lila and I had learned something from the ID specials that Mrs. Z perpetually has on in the background: We didn’t leave the apartment at all last night in case Josh was patiently lying in wait. 

The door is in fine shape on the whole (relative to its initial condition, at least), but it is missing a small, varnished panel of about twelve inches by eighteen inches, which had been placed over a rotting section of siding: Josh’s banging has knocked it off the side of the house. 

I pick it up and examine it: There are Jackson Pollock-esque gouges of various thicknesses and lengths running over each other at animated angles. I notice brownish flecks and smears, which I hesitate, at first, to confirm as blood. 

I bring the panel upstairs and show it to Lila, who examines it reverently. 

This piece of wood remains with us through four years of college in the City, when Lila and I place it on the very first mantle that is truly ours. 

Two years after graduation, I usher in Valentine’s Day by sticking one of the needles that I have been using to inject heroin through the eye of a small Teddy Bear, which I rest upon the panel, which I place upon our bed. 

Two years after that, I give the panel to Lila for safekeeping while I'm in rehab.

The panel appears again during my first gallery show four years later, where I set it atop a swanky chrome-and-glass end table; the staff take my cue and cover it with wine and hors d'oeuvres. 

Toward the end of the show, a bombed corporate lawyer inquires after its provenance. I explain the story behind it, and he offers me ten grand for it.

“Not for sale, my friend,” I tell him. 

Three years later, when the wood makes another appearance at a much larger show, I sell it to a raven-haired bombshell with a strong jaw and a somewhat wide nose - who introduces herself as Joselyn J., and who, I quickly realize, was Josh J. in her previous incarnation. 

The price that we agree upon: Two dollars and forty five cents, which is what I paid for my black coffee that morning. 

Neither of us laughs as we remember that night, during which all three of us learned things that we already knew, not the least of which was that - no matter how preppy and put-together and popular a guy is, he is really only one bad night away from clawing at construction materials like a beast in heat - and, for that matter, only a few years away from discarding the mixed mantle of manhood entirely.