Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Alec
The Lincoln Grand had the kind of lobby that wanted very badly to be a cathedral and had settled for being a Marriott with delusions.
Forty feet of atrium, a chandelier the size of a small car, and a marble floor polished to a glassy shine that threw everybody's reflection back up at them whether they wanted it or not.
I stood in the check-in line with my duffel over one shoulder and my camera bag over the other, and I did the thing I always did at these conventions, which was feel like a stray dog that had wandered into a wedding.
It wasn't the suits. It was the frequency of the place—the particular hum a room gives off when everyone in it has agreed to perform the exact same lie at high volume.
Crossroads America. Family values central.
The cornerstone of a righteous nation, et cetera, et cetera.
That was what the brochure said. The reality, spread out across the lobby in front of me, was a sea of men in halfway decent suits standing six inches too close to nobody, every one of them staring down into a phone with the hunched intensity of a man who was definitely not checking the news.
And nearly every one of them had a cocktail in his free hand.
Three o'clock in the afternoon. Brown liquor, sweating in the chandelier light.
The women were rarer, and they traveled in twos and threes along the edges of the room, and they all—every single one—had the same face.
Not similar. The same. Pulled smooth at the temples, inflated cheeks, the mouth done in that startled upholstered way, the whole arrangement frozen into an expression of pleasant alarm.
What had Hallie called it? I'd laughed for a full minute the first time she’d said it to me. Mar-a-Lago face.
“Next guest.”
I stepped up to the desk. The clerk's name tag said brENDA, and Brenda looked like she'd been exhumed from the grave. The dark circles under her eyes had their own dark circles. Her smile was a thing she switched on with visible effort, a light flickering in a house where the power was failing.
“Welcome to the Lincoln Grand,” she said, except it came out welcometothelincolngran, the words mashed flat and run together, and I had to lean in over the marble to catch it. “Checking. In.” Each word now its own separate labor.
“Friedman,” I said. “Alec. Three nights.”
She started pecking at the keyboard slowly, like the keys were far away. I watched her for a second. The fixed smile, the hands moving on autopilot, the eyes that weren't quite tracking. I knew that look, since I’d worn it many times myself.
“Hey,” I said, gentler. “You okay?”
And her face just—dropped. For one unguarded second she looked at me like I was the first person all day who'd aimed a sentence at her instead of through her, and underneath the exhaustion there was something raw and almost frightened, the face of somebody hanging on by their fingernails and praying nobody looks too hard.
“I'm fine,” she muttered. Then, quieter, like a confession: “I'll be better in an hour. That's when I get off.” She slid my key card across the marble. “This is my second job. Been here since five this morning.”
Five a.m. It was three in the afternoon.
Ten hours, and an hour still to go, and then—what, the other job?
I thought about the brown liquor sweating in two hundred manicured hands forty feet behind me, and I thought about Brenda, who had been on her feet since before dawn so that those hands would have a clean lobby to be desperate in.
“Thank you, Brenda,” I said, and I meant it. “I hope you have a great rest of your day. Genuinely.”
Something moved behind her eyes—surprise, maybe, that I'd used her name. “You too, hon,” she said, and the smile she gave me that time was real and small and tired, and somehow it landed in my chest harder than anything had in weeks.
I picked up my bags and walked to the elevators, and the whole way across that glassy floor I could feel it pressing in on me from every side—the want in this room.
Not Brenda's. Brenda just wanted to sit down.
The other want. The one coming off the men with the phones and the brown liquor, thick as the cologne, a low collective hum of need.
Two hundred men in a marble cathedral, all of them looking down into the same little glowing rectangle, all of them refreshing the same blank screen.
I'd come here to find a story. Standing in that elevator bank, I could already feel it: the story wasn't going to be a thing I dug up. It was going to be a thing I survived.
* * *
My room was on twelve, and it was beige in the way that only convention-hotel rooms are beige—a color chosen by committee to provoke no feeling whatsoever.
I dropped my bags, sat down on the end of the bed, and let myself have exactly ten seconds of feeling like a fraud before my phone buzzed in my hand.
Hallie. Of course.
“Talk to me, Friedman.”
“And a warm hello to you too.”
“Where are you?” I could hear the newsroom behind her, that permanent low roar.
“Because you sound like you're somewhere with carpet. Why are you somewhere with carpet, Alec? The entire reason I spent two weeks getting you that credential is happening right now, downstairs, in the part of the building that is not your room.”
“I've been on the ground for forty-five minutes.”
“And a great story has never broken in forty-five minutes. Lindbergh took longer. Watergate, famously, was a slow burn.”
“I was getting the lay of the land,” I whined.
“Which, for your information, I have now gotten. You want the headline from the lobby? Mar-a-Lago face as far as the eye can see, and roughly two hundred guys in suits doing something on their phones at three in the afternoon that I promise you is not Wordle.”
A beat. “The gay dating app.”
“Yep. It’s that app, Hallie. The whole lobby's lit up like a Christmas tree. I’m telling you, this happens at every conservative political gathering. Every fucking time.”
“That's set dressing,” she said, but I could hear the grin in it. “Background radiation. We discussed this.”
“We did. You were very stern,” I giggled. “In fact, it was very inspiring.”
“Get downstairs, get faces, get a name worth printing, and call me tonight. And Alec—” the grin dropped out of her voice, and the thing underneath it was almost kind, “don't get cute down there. Whenever people claim they’re into family values, don’t trust them.
These are not nice people. Watch yourself. ”
“I'm always cute. It's a documented condition. Bye, Hallie.” And I hung up on her. And then—without deciding to, the way you scratch an itch you didn't know you had—my thumb found the yellow icon on my phone, and I opened it.
The grid filled the screen, square by loading square, and my breath actually caught.
Not because of what was on it. Because of how close it all was.
The distances under the profiles weren't ticking up in miles the way they did back home in Richmond.
They were in feet. Forty feet. Sixty. Ninety.
A hundred and ten. A sea of headless torsos and blank gray squares, all of them stacked in the air around me in this beige tower, above me and below me and down every carpeted hall—a vertical city of desperate men, and I was in the middle of it.
If every locked door on every floor had swung open at the same moment, the Lincoln Grand would've been the largest and saddest gay orgy in the history of the American Midwest.
And not one of them would have shown his face.
I stood up off the bed and rolled the dread off my shoulders, and a different feeling slid in to replace it—something sharper, warmer, a little reckless.
Well, I thought. Time to go find my big story.
And—the thought arrived uninvited, grinning—who knows. Maybe I'll get lucky while I'm down there too.
* * *
The hotel bar was called The Cornhusker Room, because of course it was, and it was doing the kind of business that would've made a Vegas sportsbook jealous.
Standing room only. A wall of cheap suits three deep, a fog of cologne and bourbon, a noise level that had nothing to do with conversation and everything to do with hundreds of men talking at once so they wouldn't have to think.
I shouldered up to a sliver of open bar and caught the bartender's eye.
“Soda water, lime.”
He looked almost disappointed in me. I get that a lot.
The truth was I had a rule, and the rule had kept me employed: nothing stronger than fizzy water until the story was in the bag.
A drink was a loosened bolt, and at a thing like this you kept every bolt in your body torqued down tight.
So I took my sad clear glass with its pathetic green wedge, turned my back to the bar, and let my eyes do the work.
It was all here. The deacon energy, and the political donor energy, the staffer energy—lanyards flipped backward so you couldn't read the org names, wedding rings catching the light, that particular too-loud laughter men do when they're standing very close to something they want and pretending to discuss the back nine.
I slid my phone out, held it low against my hip, and thumbed off a few frames.
Wide shots. The crowd, the bar, the lanyards, the rings.
Nothing actionable yet. Set dressing, like Hallie said.
But you photograph the set dressing because sometimes the set dressing is the story and you just can't see it yet.
Then, half on reflex, I opened Grindr again to check the distances— and the screen detonated.
A red badge on the messages icon. Not a one, not a three. Dozens of DMs. The number was still climbing while I watched, a little counter spinning up like a gas pump, and a cold spike of pure horror went straight through me.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed.