Chapter 6
SEND IT
HAMMER
Someone knows.
It’s all I’ve been able to think about since I got the DM on Thursday.
I screenshotted the message, and I looked at the profile, but it was nameless. The handle was a jumble of letters and numbers and there are no pics posted – a burner account. The profile picture is the Eagles logo, I guess to taunt me, and the account only follows me and the Eagles.
I still haven’t brought myself to block the guy, but. What if he retaliates?
There’s a constant panic in my head. At the club, my thoughts hum in background mode, like an air-conditioner.
I’m scared if I think about it around the boys; they might pick up on it through brainwaves or Bluetooth or whatever.
Like when you think of an OLED TV and your social feed fills with Harvey Norman ads. So, I never tell anyone about it.
Then, when I’m alone, it busts out loud and on loop, like that old pop-punk song my brother Doug used to listen to – ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’.
SOMEONE FUCKEN KNOWS, SOMEONE FUCKEN KNOWS, SOMEONE FUCKEN KNOWS.
When I’m alone, my brain is an early-2000s rock concert at a skate park and there’s nothing I can do to unplug the amps.
Sometimes, as I make my peanut butter protein shake or weigh out my morning oats, and hum my theme song, I see my reflection in the black glass of the precision kitchen scales and ask myself out loud, ‘But how do they know?’
This is what gets me. The DM was no stab in the dark, no lucky guess. This guy was dead certain: he knows for sure I’m … that thing.
I don’t like the word, so I won’t say it. It’s not the word for me. It’s not my fault my dick gets hard when I look at guys. I never asked for it.
But telling myself it’s not happening has never made it go away, even if I’ve only ever physically acted on it with one guy.
Which leads me to a second chorus.
ZEKE FUCKEN KNOWS.
Zeke Calogero. Biggest mistake of my life.
In year eleven, I let my guard down with this Italian guy in my PE class.
I used to give him shit for being crap at sport.
If we played footy, he wouldn’t even try to get the ball.
I don’t even think he knew he was meant to.
He’d stand at the end of the oval and keep his distance. Who hopes to be left out of a game?
I got drunk one time and thought Zeke looked hot.
I guess a guy can look hot, if you appreciate aesthetics, like a bodybuilder like Sam Sulek or a marble statue of a Greek god.
I think I look hot. Other players are hot.
Zeke Calogero was hot. He kissed me while I was drunk and I went with it – no homo, just drunk party stuff.
I mean, then me and Zeke hung out in Doug’s ute, but as mates. We had burgers, talked about footy, jacked each other’s cocks, had onion rings, I gave him an Eagles scarf. Just boys bein’ boys.
Then there was the last time I saw him, when I mighta, sorta, just briefly …
fucked him in the arse. I got no excuse for that.
I think I liked it more than he did. I feel crook in the guts when I think about it.
Most cringe thing I ever did. But in the moment, I loved it. I never came so fast in my life.
I’ve learned to look at that memory like it’s separate from me. I don’t factor it into my identity. It’s a mistake and it belongs in the past, like Zeke.
But now I got this DM, it isn’t safely in the past. Maybe someone saw us hook up?
We fucked in a private hotel room, but our ute wank was in a carpark, and our first kiss was in a park outside a house party.
Did someone see us and store the information, only to use it against me once they knew it could take me down?
It could be Zeke, but I don’t reckon he’d blackmail me. He’s soft as a marshmallow.
Better odds on that bogan faggot from our class, Charlie Roth, who knew about me and Zeke.
Charlie is my lead suspect. He always had a shit attitude: an emo with black nail polish who’d arc up at anyone he didn’t like.
Charlie was a smart-mouthed pissant like Oshy.
If the DM is from anyone who knew me in Gero, it’s from Charlie Goth.
Unless it’s from someone I know now, like another player. I get more paranoid the more I dwell on it. Did I leave my phone unlocked and one of the boys saw my browser history? What if I accidentally hit ‘like’ on one of those dudes who always send nudes?
I’m not that thing. But I don’t know what I am. I don’t know who sent the DM. And I don’t know what to do about it.
Someone fucken knows. But Hammer doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
The day before a footy game, our captain, Sniper, takes us through a captain’s run. The captain’s run is cruisy compared to the big, full-on training sesh we do two days before, and today’s no different.
As we’re running two laps of the oval to cool down, Sniper handballs me a footy and gestures at me to veer away from the pack with him.
I follow his lead. Once the boys have zipped past, he says, ‘I saw your Insta story.’
My first thought is: Holy shit, I forgot to tell the club.
My second thought is: Did Sniper send the DM?
Me and Sniper have been drunk and coked-up together more Mad Mondays and off-season footy trips than I can remember.
What if I got stupid enough to say something under the influence?
Shit, what if I did something? I have foggy memories of being naked with the boys on a lot of footy trips.
If Sniper showed me video footage of me out of my skull on the booger sugar and taking him up the arse, I’d believe it.
I handball the Sherrin back. ‘Already deleted it, mate,’ I say gruffly. ‘It’s a non-issue.’
Sniper frowns. ‘Some of the boys saw it before you took it down,’ he says, shooting a short, sharp handball back at me.
‘Including me. Who knows who else? Someone will tell Roo and then everyone will know. You’re better off self-reporting it to the club now.
It’ll look better for you if you admit to doing the wrong thing before you’re caught.
The AFL takes these things dead seriously these days. ’
He’s not wrong. My manager – the legendary shark, Lee ‘Wookie’ Wook – phoned me Thursday night and made me delete the story immediately.
He also told me to report myself to the club, which, in all my obsessing about who sent the DM, I forgot to do.
But it woulda only been seen by a few people and if I’d deleted it, what was the big deal?
We’re still jogging. I bounce the footy, wait for it to spring back up at me predictably, which it does, then palm it off to Sniper. ‘Isn’t it a bit late, now?’ I ask. ‘Water under the bridge?’
‘The water hasn’t even started flowing yet,’ Sniper says, thumping the footy back. ‘Club’s announcing a Pride Guernsey next week. We all gotta wear it. You gotta let ’em know in case someone makes a stink out of your comment, you know?’
I fumble the footy; it spikes off my fingertips and rolls uselessly into the grass.
‘A fucken Pride Guernsey?’ I spit. ‘What, so we all have to wear it on our bodies? That fugly-arse rainbow flag and shit? Are they fucken serious? Forcing us to accept this and put it on ourselves? Is this still men’s footy anymore or not? ’
Sniper retrieves the footy. When he draws level with me, he raises an eyebrow like he’s sorta got my back.
‘Look, Hammer, I’ll be honest with ya. For real, I don’t hate anyone,’ he says.
‘I got a gay cousin. I like him. There’s lesbians working in there.
’ He jabs his thumb at the clubrooms. ‘I like them. I get the principle of inclusion, making sure footy is for everyone. I also dunno why we need to make a big song and dance about it. I don’t particularly care about the Pride Round or the Guernsey, to be honest. I just wanna play footy. ’
‘Then say something!’ I blurt out. ‘We could all band together, and—’
Sniper holds his hand up to interrupt me.
He pinches the fabric of his guernsey over his pec, where the Hungry Jack’s logo is.
‘I also prefer Maccas burgers to Hungry Jack’s,’ he goes on, before pinching the ECU logo on the other side, ‘and I’m doing my accounting degree at Curtin, not ECU.
’ He gives me a serious look. ‘We’re players.
We wear what the club makes us wear. We have the sponsors on our guernsey whether we like them or not.
Same as this. Doesn’t mean you agree. Just do what’s right by the club. Be a team player.’
I stare at the Hungry Jack’s logo in horror, imagining it turning into a rainbow burger. ‘Burger preference isn’t the same as sexual preference, though,’ I say. ‘We shouldn’t have this rammed down our throats.’
‘I agree,’ Sniper says. ‘But it’s not my job to fight it. I gotta lead you boys into a game. Winning should be our focus. Having a hissy fit about what we wear is … sorta gay itself, right?’
He says it casually, like I’m meant to laugh with him, but my mind darts to the DM again. It was him, wasn’t it? He’s stirring me up.
Sniper handballs the footy into the air. ‘So you’ll report yourself to the club?’
I shrug. ‘Yeah,’ I say. I’m excellent at lying to myself, so lying to him is a piece of piss. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
After the captain’s run, I drive south to see my brother at his workshop in Canning Vale.
Doug was always a classic car loser. Once he moved to Perth to become a mechanic, he made ‘revhead’ his whole identity.
He runs his own business – Hammersmith Automotive Performance Centre – specialising in car mods to make souped-up V8s go even faster and louder.
Doug’s found a client base of cashed-up bogans, so he’s broken even as a business, bought a house in Thornlie, and hits the speedway every other weekend to race his Clubsport.
When we were teenagers, I used to call him Pizza Face, cos of his acne.
The acne went away but left his face scarred and dented, so I don’t insult him anymore. Feels too mean.