Chapter 16
16.
Breakfast Revelations
“A Disco Witch must be on high alert at all times—even in their dreams.”
—Disco Witch Manifesto #39
Joe awoke at two PM with an unusually painful hard-on. He vaguely remembered having another Elliot dream—something that had happened regularly in the twenty-two months since his death. When he tried to recall the details of the dream, he realized the man in the dream wasn’t Elliot at all. It was Gladiator Man, wearing Elliot’s favorite long-sleeve rugby shirt. It was three sizes too small on him, and the seams were ripping, slowly exposing his muscles and skin. The dream Gladiator Man, like some puppet master of lust, had the power to simply look at Joe with his angry-sexy stare and instantly cause an overwhelming and unquenchable longing in Joe—a longing that could make him do anything.
“Joseph!” Howie’s voice called up from downstairs. “Breakfast is on the table!”
“Coming,” Joe shouted, waiting a moment for his hard-on to deflate. Then he scrambled down the ladder to find a plate of eggs with a side of brisket on the table. Howie was cooking something else on the stove. “Where’s Lenny?” Joe asked.
“Out back in the yard, exercising.” Howie pulled down several little jars from the floor-to-ceiling spice rack next to the stove. Each shelf was crowded with dozens of small jars containing dried leaves and powders, as well as others that appeared to hold small twigs, roots, and other organic materials. The lowest shelf had corked test tubes filled with liquids, mostly brownish and yellow, but a few with more vibrant blues and greens.
“Whatcha cooking?” Joe grimaced at what smelled like potpourri and rancid tuna.
“Just putting a little infusion together for Chrissy Bluebird. She’s in the middle of selling her late mother’s house and has lots of inner turmoil. She tried carrying around my cleansing green tourmaline for a week, but it didn’t work. So I’m preparing an old radical faerie remedy I learned from a sous chef up at the Moosewood Kitchen in Ithaca.”
“Gotcha,” Joe said, suppressing about a dozen questions. As he dove into his breakfast, he looked out the window and saw Lenny twirling around in a circle in the middle of the herb garden. He held one arm up toward the sky, the other toward the earth, his eyelids half closed. Joe expected him to stop any second, but the man kept spinning, first slowly, then faster, à la Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” music video. “I thought you said Lenny was exercising?”
“He is.” Howie stirred the various pungent ingredients into a doll-sized saucepan.
“Looks more like some sort of dancing to me,” Joe said, crunching off a bite of toast.
“Well, dancing is exercise—especially twirling. It’s also fantastic for the brain and an important tool for restoring the Great Balance.” Howie stuck his head out the open window. “Take it easy, Lenny! Remember your stent! Also finish up and eat lunch! I need you to drop off this infusion to Chrissy before you go to your meeting!”
“Be right there!” Lenny hollered back, gasping heavily, having stumbled out of his spin. “Let me just do a minute on the left so I’m not lopsided!” Five minutes later, still sweating, Lenny sat at the dining room table, eating a brisket sandwich and flipping through the personals in the New York Native .
“Oh, by the way, Joe,” Howie said. “ Everyone has been gushing about your bartending debut.”
“Seriously?” Joe said, feeling a little giddy that people might actually be talking positively about his bartending skills.
“Absolutely,” Howie continued. “You are a huge sensation.”
“ Really huge, it seems,” Lenny said. “You know they’ve already nicknamed you Falafel Crotch, right?”
“Falafel crotch?” Joe squinched his eyebrows. “What does that even mean?”
“Lenny, stop it.” Howie looked annoyed. “Why’d you mention that?”
“What’s the big deal?” Lenny slapped the air with his sandwich. “It’s ’cause you got a big package—if it’s real. Also, because you’re Armenian, which is the Middle East. Besides, everybody gets a nickname around here. Really, it’s a compliment. The guys think you’re aces.”
Joe sighed. “I guess it’s better to hear what people are saying. Still, that nickname’s bullshit. Falafel isn’t even Armenian. And Armenia is in Central Asia, not the Middle East.”
“I’m happy to spread a new nickname around if you want,” Lenny said. “What’s an Armenian food that sounds good next to the word crotch ?”
“Let’s just forget it,” Joe said. “Anyway, I totally had a blast last night. I even invented my own version of a Long Island iced tea and took home over two hundred bucks in tips. Oh, and I think Vince went home with Ronnie.”
“Do tell.” Lenny salaciously sipped his coffee.
“How nice!” Howie effused earnestly—clearly, he wasn’t holding a grudge about Ronnie’s rudeness from the previous day. “I sense those two would be good for each other.”
“Oh, it’s just a sex thing,” Joe said. “Remember the whole point of Ronnie being out here is to find a rich guy to marry. He’s pretty focused.”
Howie nodded his head over his now steaming saucepan. “Like I said, Fire Island summers rarely turn out the way you plan. It’s all up to the Great Goddess Mother, after all.”
Great Goddess Mother? Why did he keep saying that? His housemates’ obscure and unexplained allusions were starting to frustrate Joe, as well as give him the heebie-jeebies again.
“What do you mean exactly?” Joe asked.
“I mean that at her best, Fire Island has a way of giving you what you need, not necessarily what you want. But at other times …” He looked into his saucepan, as if the strange concoction had reminded him of a sad memory. “At other times it can tear your heart out—”
“Hey, let’s keep it light,” Lenny interrupted, his mouth full of brisket. “So, Joe, what time did you finish work?”
“Five AM .,” he muttered, still absorbing Howie’s puzzling comments.
“And you just went to bed after?” Howie asked.
“Not exactly,” Joe said. “I went to chill on the beach and ended up seeing this guy …”
Joe caught himself. Did he really want to tell Lenny and Howie about the Gladiator Man? They knew almost everyone on the island, it seemed. But then again, what would they think of him practically stalking a complete stranger? A stranger he was so obsessed with that he was now haunting Joe’s dreams. They’d think he had lost his mind … and maybe he had.
“I knew it.” Lenny said. “You met someone! Do tell.”
“Nothing happened,” Joe said. “It was just some random hottie. Unfortunately, he left before I could say anything, and I ended up talking to some asshole deckhand who was out swimming at five in the morning.”
Lenny’s and Howie’s eyes lit up with a newfound eagerness.
“A deckhand from the ferry?” Howie asked, giving a side-glance toward Lenny. “Swimming that early? Which one?”
“Be specific,” Lenny added. “What did he look like?”
“I dunno,” Joe said. “Like any hungover straight guy, I guess. Around my age, tall, arrogant, and annoying.”
“Dark brown hair?” Lenny asked Joe for confirmation. “A little scruffy but adorable, with stunning blue eyes?”
“Yeah, his eyes were kinda blue,” Joe said, not wanting to go overboard with praising the looks of a cock-blocking straight man. “I wouldn’t call him ‘adorable,’ but he’s good-looking enough. Oh, and he had huge feet, and I swear his toes were webbed.”
“I knew it was him.” Lenny laughed and clapped his hands. “That’s our boy!”
Joe let his fork clack down on the plate. They really do know everyone. “Your boy?”
“All you had to say was webbed toes.” Howie smiled broadly. “That’s our Fergal!”
“Fergal?” Joe wrinkled his nose at the funny name.
“We call him Fergal the Ferryman,” Lenny declared.
“Such a cutie patootie.” Howie faux swooned. “He’s worked on the ferry since he could crawl. Always such a sensitive soul. As a child, we’d watch him comb the shoreline for any beached sea life he came across: horseshoe crabs, octopi, baby sharks. He started swimming before he could walk. Max, Lenny, and I would babysit sometimes, and we’d all spend hours splashing and diving. Such a wonderful, curious child.”
“His uncle, Captain Harve, became my—” Lenny stopped himself. “Became one of my best straight friends, very open minded. I call him hetero-savant.”
Joe smiled and shrugged. “So, I guess Fergal’s not homophobic like I thought …”
Howie and Lenny looked at each other and chuckled.
“Homophobic?” Lenny said. “Someone’s not paying attention.”
“Just between us,” Howie said with a wink to Joe, “while it’s said that in the past our young ferryman has dabbled with girls quite successfully, he’s definitely not straight.”
“But I saw him talking to a girl the other day in the harbor,” Joe countered.
“Talk schmalk.” Lenny waved his hand. “According to my own hypersensitive, cosmically powered gaydar, I’d say our boy’s at a sixty–forty split these days, with the percentages having shifted in our direction.”
Joe’s brain skidded to a stop, recalculating all its previous assumptions. “Fergal is bi?”
“More like gun-shy gay,” Howie added.
“Then why did he act like such a dick around me before?”
“Usually, people act like dicks because they’re nervous or insecure,” Howie said. Then his eyes glazed a bit, seeming to watch a more intriguing idea flit across his brain. “Very interesting, Fergal swimming at dawn. I’ll look closer next time. It’s been all very hazy.”
“ What exactly was hazy?” Joe threw up his hands, making his frustration evident. “Can you please just say what you mean?”
“Oh, pish!” Howie laughed and tipped the pot of his rancid potpourri into a very small tincture bottle. “We’re as clear as a cataract.” He sniffed the greenish-brown liquid in the bottle and scowled as if Joe hadn’t said anything. “Lenny, I’m not sure if I did this right. I think it needs more elder knot and some maidenhair. If you’re in the Meat Rack later, could you keep an eye out?”
As Howie and Lenny began cleaning up while discussing where to find the plants, Joe was forced to surrender once again to the strangeness of his housemates with their mysterious and obscure slogans; their healing potions; their spinning in circles; the omni-present disco music playing; and the strange, flamboyant way they dressed. Of course, while they sometimes tied his mental wiring into knots, he had to admit he enjoyed how different they were from the middle-class gays of Philly, with their limited ideas of gay identity. Most just wanted to be able to pass as straight, get into a monogamous relationship with someone equally “straight acting” who worked in a law firm, and own a Society Hill townhouse and maybe a weekend place in Bucks County. For Joe, Howie and Lenny’s weirdness was a bit like being awakened with a bucket of multicolored ice water being poured over his head. Despite what Ronnie always said, there wasn’t just one way of being gay. Joe liked how Howie and Lenny made him feel a little less self-conscious. Maybe they wouldn’t judge him if he admitted to stalking the Gladiator Man—and they, of all people, might actually know who the man was.
“Hey,” Joe interrupted. “I wanted to ask you about this other guy …”
“Uh-oh, here we go,” Lenny said, giving a wink.
“Was it the other man you met at the beach?” Howie started wiping off the condiment bottles.
“I haven’t really met him,” Joe said. “But he’s probably the hottest man I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Howie and Lenny cast their rags aside, sat down at the table with their chins on their fists, and stared at Joe with enraptured faces.
“Go on,” Howie insisted. “We love stories about beautiful men.”
“I’m sure you know him,” Joe said. “He’s really built, about six four or six five, salt-and-pepper beard?” Both his housemates nodded their heads in approval. “He looks like a cross between a Colt Magazine model and an actor in one of those old Italian gladiator movies? About thirty-five or forty—maybe older, maybe younger, hard to say.”
“Not ringing a bell,” Lenny said, looking at Howie, who appeared to agree. “But sounds delicious.”
“Come on,” Joe practically begged. ”You had to have at least seen the man I’m talking about. He was in the harbor the day I met you guys—he was wearing a Titans sweatshirt? I keep trying to talk to him, but he keeps disappearing. He has these really dark, intense, angry eyes that feel like they’re ripping you open—”
At the exact same moment, Howie’s and Lenny’s expressions changed to something a lot like … dread? No, that couldn’t be right. But there was no doubt their eyes showed recognition. “So you do know him?”
“No,” Howie muttered. “We have absolutely no idea who you could be talking about.”
After Joe had pressed Howie and Lenny two more times about the Gladiator Man, he surrendered and headed into the bathroom to shower. Once he was out of earshot, Howie whispered to Lenny anxiously, “This must be what Max was trying to tell us to look out for.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again,” Lenny insisted. “Remember, he’s nowhere near the age of the others.”
“Yes, but did you see how mesmerized he was when he talked about that Gladiator person? The hottest man he’d ever seen? Couldn’t look away? Kept disappearing? Angry, dark eyes ripping him apart? That’s nearly the identical language all the others used. What if a chosen one can be a few years younger? People mature at different ages. I can’t believe it’s happening again at the worst possible time—”
“Basta! You’re being paranoid! It was just some random hot guy. Joe’s on Fire Island for the first time, for Chrissake.”
“Oh come on, Lenny! Someone who looked like his Gladiator Man would be the talk of the town this early in the season. You know that!”
Lenny shook his head adamantly. “I’m not buying it. Joe seems too levelheaded. The others were all in very bad places in their lives.”
“Then why are my intestines all balled up like this?” Howie’s eyes lowered to the table as if he were searching the swirls in the wood pattern for possible disasters.
Lenny took his old friend’s hand sweetly. “Let’s just take a breath, okay? The world is a mess, and our heads aren’t in the right place. Let’s not start comparing Joe with …” Lenny stopped himself from saying the name, but Howie knew exactly who he meant.
A dark memory—an event that was considered one of their coven’s worst failures—flashed simultaneously before their eyes. It had happened during their final summer as the holy guardians of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The young man’s name was Lucho, an adorable carpenter who did repair work on the artists shacks in the dunes. Half Portuguese, half Nauset Indian, Lucho had been born on the Cape and had beautiful, sad black eyes, a beard, and a traditional azulejo design tattooed onto his shapely right pectoral. So sexy yet so pure, and prone to falling desperately in love with the worst men who visited P-town. His dream was to become a writer and to compose stories that would change the world.
Max, consulting his sacred rubric, had concluded without a doubt that Lucho was one of the chosen ones—a holy lover, blessed by the Great Goddess Mother, destined for greatness, a warrior for the restoration of the Great Balance. Because of this he would be marked for death by the Great Darkness, and require protection and guidance by the Disco Witches in order to survive his dark summer of the soul.
It had been the Monday after Labor Day. Max, fearing Lucho’s most recent man obsession had been sent by the Great Darkness to lure Lucho toward annihilation, asked Lenny to stand sentinel over the boy while the others attended a midsummer “cleansing boogie” at the A-House. Lucho, a master trickster, managed to slip away under Lenny’s nose. A local drag queen reported seeing Lucho stumbling in a stupor across the stone jetty to Long Point, “as if he was chasing something.”
A dozen Disco Witches piled onto the dance floor in a last-ditch effort to boogie out some protective magic to save Lucho from his dark fate, but it was too late. Rumors spread that Lucho had left town without telling anyone. The regular folk assumed the disappearance was simply another instance of a worker who couldn’t bear the pressure of another Provincetown summer and fled on the midnight bus. The Disco Witches knew differently. Lucho’s tank top and shorts were found in a tidal pool behind Herring Cove beach. They never found his body.
“To be quite honest,” Lenny said, having shaken off the awful memory and averting his eyes from Howie’s, “I’m not sure I believe in all that crapola anymore. We did a lot of drugs back then …”
“Just stop, Lenny,” Howie spat. “It’s not time for your periodic agnosticism again. Think of that anxious look in Joe’s eyes. Think of how he was transfixed by those photos in the attic—the ones we know were taken on the days when you-know-what was afoot.”
“Okay, fine.” Lenny threw up his hands. “Maybe it’s not just us being delusional together. But until Max gets out here and gives Joe the once-over, there’s no way to know for sure. Of course, there’s another way.”
“What is it?” Howie said excitedly, hoping Lenny had remembered something.
“If Max doesn’t get back in touch soon, we could just send someone to get the sacred texts from him. We might as well face it: it’s time you took over—”
“I don’t want to hear it!” Howie slapped his hand on the table. “Max is going to get better.”
“Sweetie.” Lenny gently reached for Howie’s arm. “It’s time.”
“Don’t,” Howie snapped, pulling himself away. “I’m not ready for him to be gone. Please, just give him a little more time to get better. Meanwhile, let’s just focus on keeping Joe out of any harm’s way. We can’t risk losing another. We just can’t.”