Toxic Accomplice

Beyond the headline-grabbing accomplishments in grotesquerie, he is most vividly known for his habit of so fondly fondling his shotgun while his femme du jour gave him head, finally squeezing the trigger with relish at the precise moment his so-called swimming demons shot into her mouth. Sometimes circumstance didn’t allow it to be loaded, but he still felt the bang between the membranes of his brain. Sometimes he shot an actual bullet into an actual sofa or television or once a chandelier and twice a chihuahua.

Impassive in the face of demands for shows of remorse, this young man was known as Orgasm Bullet. His court-appointed attorneys chagrined (or shrugged) while ladies across the land swooned, most of them hiding behind avatars but a few brazen enough to publicly avow their deranged affinity for the sex offender. At one point it happened that he mentioned resorting to services from a guy when no ladies were convenient to grab for the deed. He rather liked the sensation, to his twisted surprise. Such a rush of masculinity to subjugate, to spit on figuratively and literally, another man! Even one who presented as such—deep voice, crew cut, normal-fitting jeans (he fucking hated skinny jeans on a dude). Word got out in the hasty and vigorous way that is typical of the digital age, and within a week OB had a formidable following of homosexual deviants. Like the ladies, they came from a wide range of corners. There were those who reveled in the risqué and vulgar and those who were outwardly prim or conventional—suits M-F, wanton pursuits weekends.

Colin is some variation of the latter, a lanky bookish lad who works as a copywriter or a social services case manager, depending on the season. He claims an affinity for gloomy Glasgow, from where his paternal grandparents hail and where he has spent many a pleasantly listless summer, as well as the seething cities of Southeast Asia—Chiang Mai, Vientiane, Ho Chi Minh City; and he sees this polarity in his geographical allegiances as illustrative of some internal conflict, possibly a constructive one. There is dignity in complexity, but in his depths Colin’s disarming fear is that he is simple, a banal specimen of a sometimes banal, sometimes brilliant species. But what a rush this new fascination! And wasn’t it at least remote proof of his complexity?

Rare adrenaline permeated his system as he thought of OB’s vile transgressions while penning a new letter to him and even more so when he read the responses they provoked—not because the words they contained were especially inspired but they were attention earned by his own cleverly imagined acts—ones that would duly offend his entire set of friends.

When Colin initiated correspondence, he didn’t yet know the timeline of OB’s sentence. What a thrill of possibility mingled with fear when he received the news of OB’s release date a few months down the line. Up to then the idea of their meeting, of consummating the lurid sex schemes they cooked up, had been abstract, notions that would more likely than not lose their fizzle before coming to fruition. But here came this news while their flirtation was still fresh, and Colin felt that he would be an irredeemable coward if he failed to go through with at least meeting the brute, if not realizing the more deranged of the scenarios they shared. He wouldn’t own up to doubt or outright trepidation, but a subtle strain of anxiety crept into his daydreams—a  feeling that he was committed to something for which he was ill-prepared and that the intensity of his imaginings and his will to see them through may or may not contain the force necessary to transcend a lifetime of timidity.

Now Colin wonders if his recent divulging to his closest friend in the city has taken a significant toll on his confidence. In true middle class Caucasian fashion, he harbors a fundamental conviction that things will somehow work themselves out, that natural forces are fundamentally harmonious with his own. Most anxieties are a result of being brought up by priggish parents in a forbidding and punitive society, rather than concerns based in reality. This was shaken by Rudy’s reaction to his burgeoning crush on his pen pal soon to be released from a prison down state. The truth is that he was stung by the undeniable glint of disdain peeking through his friend’s usual affected judgements. “Colin, why? Out of all the inane ways to get laid… I mean, finding meaning or fulfillment in courtship or copulation or what have you is enough of a bitch in ordinary circumstances. Are you really going to indulge a hackneyed fantasy and put yourself in danger for a chance at…what, even? I mean, what’s the best-case scenario here? I’m sorry, but it’s beneath you. I’ll be embarrassed for you if you go through with it.”

So, there it was, his first unequivocal disapproval arising from a confession to a friend. He remembers trembling while telling his best friend in college that he went to a sex club in London and had been giddy at the cornucopia of men he had had the possibility of sampling, all in a matter of hours. She expressed concern about his health and safety but had then gone on to smile excitedly and be pleased by his adventure. Of course, he had spared her the details: the bodily fluids in abundance and in strange places, the insistent old buggers wedging their way in between you and your desired object, the searing rejections sometimes peppered with incomprehensible Brit-slang. Regardless, it had felt freeing to share this bit of deviance and to have it accepted. This time, he is alone with it, not daring to try again with another friend and anyway not having another strong candidate for confession.

Tonight Colin feels an echo of the resounding loneliness that enshrouded him that night Rudy sighed in that way that means ‘Oh despair. You are on your own, dear. I give up trying to understand’ and walked out to catch the last brown line train back to Boystown. Colin turns off his quiet residential street lined with banal brick apartment buildings, on to the gritty commercial strip of Lawrence, low end Middle Eastern and Mexican restaurants mostly closed this late but bodegas open for booze, cigarettes and potato chip runs. He wants none of these but stops in for a lighter for the candles that lend his modest bedroom a modicum of ambiance. Mostly he just needs a walk to spur his ruminations forward. Last night he cancelled his plans to catch the new Almodovar film with Raul because the day looms so near, too near for him to think clearly about other matters (including following an intrepid Almodovar plot) or to be around friends without being thrown by the secret consuming him. Neither a prison release nor the possible start of a newfangled sexual relationship are to be taken lightly. Even if what transpires between them is only sexual, it will be a brave new sexuality. He wants desperately not to be a disappointment, not to flounder in the moment of truth. When the meeting arrives, will he be able to live up to the renegade vision of himself he has rather recklessly painted in his letters? How will he hold OB’s attention, let alone his attraction?

Returning along Lawrence, he feels the persisting, evenly paced series of vibrations in his pocket that is so rare because everyone texts these days, unless it is somehow urgent. When he answers the call, Ruby’s delivery is cautious—a shade conciliatory but not so generous as to concede he overstepped in their last exchange. “I have been a bit uneasy about the way we left things. I don’t just abandon friends. I don’t get what you are doing, and I still think the contradiction of an avowed feminist chasing after some lowlife jailed for multiple violent attacks on women is…um…tricky to reconcile. However, I want to be someone you can call if you are in danger. If I can get a friend in St. Louis through a budding meth addiction, then I can…I mean, he eventually went back on it, but I did my part, prolonged the ignominy as long as I could. Colin, just be careful. And remember, fantasies exist for a reason; they are ways for the gloomier corners of our mind to process and indulge pernicious notions without actualizing them.”

When he hangs up, Colin reflects on how detestably weak his mumbled responses were. If pontificating, at least Rudy’s words speak to his poise, his steadfastness. He, on the other hand, is nothing if not wavering. Yet in this project he is defiant; at last, at age 37, he will see through an idea manifest from a tenebrous chamber of his mind, one he didn’t even imagine existed until…until what? He can’t locate a moment of discovery, and it doesn’t matter. For a fleeting moment, Rudy’s words seem like a transmission from another era, muffled as if through murky water, vacuous and irrelevant. He imagines that his friends have never been more peripheral, their opinions more dispensable.

He is still sifting through his mental responses to Rudy’s words when home, lighting seven or so candles dispersed across his nightstand, window-side writing desk, and the top shelf of the modest bookshelf his ex bought him to contain his mess of half-read philosophy texts and worn paperback novels. He selects a brooding record and wonders if this dirty flirtation will be as short-lived as his only romantic cohabitation. Leaning his back against his low bed, he lights a spliff; and as he slips into an indica stupor, his usual serenity in that state is tainted by an alien sense of being utterly rudderless, of being an atom drifting away from magnetic fields, warm emissions that bound him to those who love him. Then, confronted with the dismay on his friends’ faces, familiar yet abstracted, he senses that he is an imposter in their presence, a lone wolf, pale skin stitched across diabolical innards. Each with a particular gesture and pace, they gradually give up on him, turning away to other rituals, leaving him to his consuming desires, his confounded reticence when confronted by ordinary conversation. Raul scowls, but another cinephile fills the seat beside him. Colin is the adrift one, adroit only in the arcane machinations of his libido-mind. He’s hopeless to them. 

The slow fade of this stupor is an interval of a singular sort of anguish—not a wall but a hammock of despair on which he can’t find the right position to settle, a feeling that two concurrent truths confuse each other to the point of cancellation, obliteration, possibly of self. Colin has always felt firmly that he knows himself, that beneath the habits he bemoans and the behaviors he is sometimes ashamed of, is an upstanding man who will sort out the weaknesses. But this is something else, crossing of wires at the point of desire.

As the edges of the world come back into focus, the flames just flames and shadows just shadows, so does a dread. Really, he thinks, he is an imposter with OB. A fake who will be found out, who will anger further an already angry man. He makes an ambiguous promise to himself to find a way through this without bailing and without being inauthentic to his new acquaintance. There must be something in him that is true in his pursuit with OB; he only has to grasp it, aggrandize it, downplay the disingenuous parts. 

Graham Correctional Facility is 258 miles down state. Today OB, in all his offending force, is to be released back into the world from its austere gate; Colin is to make good on his lustful declarations, smashing any lingering fear of faltering with the sheer exhilaration that will thrust him forward down the highway, overcoming the fear of driving that has risen in him over the years since he flipped his car in West Texas and traded in his car for a transit pass. Because the thought of driving on the congested streets of the city mortifies him, he takes the blue line towards O’Hare, to a suburban rental car outlet in the ugly tangled mess that is airport sprawl. It’s odd, in a remote way, to return to this act he associates with his teenage and college years— driving to concerts, sneaking out to meet his senior year boyfriend at a pond where they could make out with intensity and no fear of parents returning home ahead of schedule, weekend road trips with mostly female friends in undergrad—in order to realize this turn in his mostly bland adulthood. Is it peculiar that in his twenties his sexual imaginings were temperate, prone more to the tender, and now…well…he could make himself blush, which seems an amusing quirk of psychology.

The train has rattled through the northwest strip of hipness—Wicker Park, Logan Square, Avondale—and now runs through the center of unsightly I-190 East—a transition that has always roused Colin on his way to the airport. A sudden thrust back into the pervasive baseness of Americana. A moment after the train doors close, he feels eyes on him. What middle class dullard is staring at him now?

“Colin!” He looks up and sees a beaming thirtysomething woman in a sleek black blouse and crisp indigo jeans. “It’s been ages. Are you on the way to O’Hare? I thought I was a light packer! Where are you going with just a backpack?”

He shakes his head imperceptibly. A flash back several years to the campus in Greektown, a markedly straight female set of acquaintances. “Layna, hey. How unexpected. What are you doing in…Irving Park?”

Though they were never close, Colin always admired Layna for being a bit of a rebel—a no-bullshit leftist with a tinge of punk in her attitude and aesthetics, which made her a prize in a sea of mostly basic white girls driven by a vague moral sense but with little to no political conviction to undergird it. Now there is something faintly maternal in her excitement to see an old classmate.

“I moved a few stops up the blue line to be closer to work. I got a job overseeing a program in an assisted living facility. It’s a turn in the road I imagined, but one I’m enjoying and getting a lot from. I’m heading to a sister facility now. It’s so good to see you.”

She seems to be waiting on some sort of information from him. He realizes he hasn’t answered her question. “That’s great. I’m actually renting a car and heading to pick up a friend from prison.” The words sound alien to him, and it takes her a moment to digest them.

“Oh, are you doing decarceration work?” Her interest is keen, and he feels an undercurrent of shame for being preoccupied by libido while others are busying themselves with meaningful work. There are those who strike a graceful balance, who manage, not a duplicitous double life but a cleverly integrated life of subtle defiance—pushing back against societal bullocks in the daytime and sliding into harmless pleasure-seeking at night. Layna must be one of these. Here they are in the day, and he so badly wants to respond that, yes, he is a member of one of the city’s organizations fighting for inmates’ rights or pressuring policymakers to shutter immigrant detention facilities. And then, on some other occasion, perhaps at a boozy house party, he would hint at sexual pursuits that would cause some to gasp and some to glimmer with rarefied delight.

But he’s not a liar, not a spontaneous one anyhow. “No, he’s actually just a personal pen pal.”

“That’s great. I’m glad he’s getting out. You must be thrilled.” She sounds sincere and adeptly conceals any disappointment at the lost opportunity to discuss decarceration work.

The next stop is hers. Suddenly, a violent urge to confide shoots up his body, as if a simple, concise and sincere account of his pursuit would somehow convey the complexity of his desires and his moral convictions, the perennial well of impotence that he knows makes him susceptible to corruption, and finally his struggling yet still shining stream of resolve to simply be kind and generous and just to everyone he encounters and not to be led astray by degenerate compulsions.  A sexual intrigue gone too far; promises of depravity and servitude he can’t fathom fulfilling, yet…yet he so badly wants to, in the part of his mind beleaguered by his merciless analyzing and worrying and striving to be a moral ideal he’s too inert to embody. He’s benign only because he’s idle? He wants to be a writer, a theorist of these things! That makes sense considering his composition, but isn’t sense itself the matter that the demon desires to devour? He’ll drown if he leaves the safe shore of social studies! Layna’s femininity and toughness are perfect. She’ll sympathize with the demented urge, but she’ll talk him down from playing it out.

When she rises, he manages his effete half-wave and wishes her a great weekend once her work is done, the closing train doors ushering back that permeating aloneness he felt when Rudy ended their call—like a sturdy, land-bound vessel passing him on the stormy sea, leaving him to his raft rising on the crest of a wave whose dangerousness he’s powerless to gauge.

Colin catches himself performing the same fatuous half-wave to the rental car agent and curses the inanity of his gestures, even on this momentous day. Maybe a velocity of hard-edged thoughts will help him vanquish the queasiness inching forward in his gut. As perhaps will racing furiously down the highway in the rented red compact (he keeps forgetting the model or make, but it’s Japanese or Korean). Corn. In rows, columns, lines to heaven, lines to hell, lines to the horizon, mazes, amazing in its dominance. It is the cheap porn of the produce world. This fodder for the steaks-to-be, this inedible symbol of the backasswardness of America’s giddy obeisance to the capitalist mandate, the quantity over quality that is at the core of the American brand. The truth is baseness fascinates him. The greater the proximity, the greater the discreet pique of intrigue, tantalizingly treacherous to his internal order.

At this rate, he should be at Graham Correctional Facility in less than four hours, he thinks, without actually calculating. It’s only when a gleaming white Chevrolet Crown Victoria to his right causes him to reflexively brake in a flash of fear that he realizes his temerity in speeding. It’s just a soccer mom—perhaps married to a cop but not a cop. He introduces caution, not without lament. Is the fundamental curse in society the paradox that it is the fact of being checked, censored, controlled by laws and codes that makes men secretly (or not) revile anyone who obstructs their total independence, relishing those ‘fuck you’ moments in which they reinforce their pride in their recalcitrance, while we are all too afraid to remove those checks for fear we’ll all revert to the primordial blood sport? Perhaps this pursuit is his little resolution—experiment anyhow—with loosening the leash, a modest concession in the scheme of things (or was Rudy’s severe assessment more accurate?). Was OB’s sexual lashing out a sort of desperate claiming of his manhood, personhood, in the face of unknown emasculating forces, real or perceived?

He feels his un-freedom in his slowing to just above the speed limit, more brazen folks passing like stallions leaving a lone gelding in a cloud of dust on the plains. To have the delicious wind on your face as you race down the highway sucked out by society’s mandate for caution. God, he thinks, his thoughts are like a gun nut’s, waving his nine firearms in the face of reason and restraint, vowing to clutch their cool metal until the grave. Is it any better to clutch the cock of an avowed sexual offender, one who happens to be a gun fetishist himself? He’ll never be an offender, but he can be a toxic accomplice.

He glances at his threadbare plaid shirt in the rearview mirror, wondering one last time if he made the right choice in dressing—to embrace his usual indie nerdiness rather than assembling his leather boots and jacket and a particular pair of jeans that lend a badass air, an image of a bloke perhaps taciturn but poised for crassness. He reasoned, in front of his bedroom dresser’s mirror, that OB, in his way, fetishizes his nerdiness and might disdain a pale version of himself, one that he might sneer at as a simulacrum. He must have had his fill of badasses in prison. But he’s not certain. Rejection comes from so many angles.

  He is distracted by a drive-up ice cream shop just outside the center of a one street town—elaborate looping vintage sign in chipped yellow and red paint and huge panes of glass revealing archaic machines and listless teens toiling behind a greased counter. He stops. With soft serve chocolate dripping down his lips and onto creased pages on his lap (erratic handwriting he grew accustomed to over the months, sometimes squinting to decipher debauched details), he settles his nerves with sugar and salacious scenes set in his mind between fantasy and reality-to-be. OB’s sweat and spit swirling on his own over-exerted, stripped torso as he is dragged, blindfolded, through a forest in the suburb of OB’s childhood home in Indiana, where there is an abandoned shack by a grimy pond. OB cramming lit Camels into his mouth, forcing him to chain cigarettes (a notion he clung to upon learning that Colin only smokes the occasional weed) in between serving his body, OB boasting about its past crimes.

The lurid prose of OB fresh in his mind, Colin is full throttle, primed for an offensive adventure. No harm, no hatred emanating from himself but one definitive step closer to the bliss of annihilation through some yet-to-be-determined sort of brotherly collusion. Maybe it’s even a sort of sublimation, he tells himself – OB mollifying certain demons through these acts.

Colin imagines his downtrodden apartment transformed into an alternative to detention—a sort of halfway home for parched and paroled sexual offenders poised to indulge their newly awakened homosexual desire on the outside. Sweaty cots, copious smoke and whiskey and waking hours fondling rough-hewn bodies.

He slows, driving with relish, as he pulls up to the gate—‘Graham Correctional Facility’ carved into a wooden block sign conjuring for him signs announcing the summer camps he used to attend with his father and other nature-loving fathers and sons as a kid, contrasting with the off-putting coldness of the rest of the premises—drab, low, mostly windowless blond brick buildings with triangular peaks by the main door and the expected expanse of barbed wire, seemingly puncturing Colin’s stomach as he inches towards the entrance.

Pulling into the nearly desolate parking lot of the facility, he is unflappable, soaring across the final yards to his initiation into a new domain. Parked, he watches a flabby woman in a striped shirt walking ahead of a sluggish man, a growing space between them as she strides through the lot, a young son running figure eights around them. He continues watching from his spot at the far end of the lot, squinting at the bleak entrance. OB sees him first and emerges from a shadow at the end of the building. Lean, long arms gleaming, enhanced by intentional muscle growth. Gaze and body containing no waste—exactitude and assurance. Colin leans and peers out the window, seeing what he judges to be OB’s sly or solicitous smile as he runs over. He makes to get out and greet him, but OB hustles around to the passenger side of the car and plops down beside him, Colin shifting to confront his object. The primacy of lust, the greed of it is just a gulp as he takes in the bronze, thinly muscled arms he has imagined with such rigor, up to his lean neck and stubbly hard chin; then its life is gone. Colin’s gaze meeting OB’s transmutes it all, though he’s slow to understand. Transfixed and obtuse. The soft-edged fraternity exuding from the body beside him begins to register. This is the offender who will squeeze Colin’s skull with vicious will and thrust his head into a sweaty, freshly un-incarcerated crotch as greeting?

“Dude, I’m done.”

Domination is nowhere to be found in OB’s voice as relief spews out. He releases a short laugh of amusement at Colin’s paralysis, then shakes him by the shoulders.

“Dude, let’s DRIVE. I have so much to tell you. Writing to you has saved my fucking life. I got the demons figured out—gonna study or some shit, get my life on track. I feel liberated as fuck. I have to say, your fantasies are like poetry, bro. I want to live, I want to breathe. I want to piss in the woods, piss next to a brother in the woods—but not on any fucker who doesn’t want it. You’re my bro. Plus, I’ve never been buds with a real life homo before.” Oscar Bryant’s smile is radiant, his voice resplendent, as he slaps Colin on the back like a brother and they roll towards the highway.

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Kevin Langson is a queer social worker whose focus is forced migration. In 2021, he left Chicago to begin working at a refugee resettlement agency in New Haven, where he continues as a grant writer. He has been published in TAYO Literary Magazine and the Best Gay Romance 2014 anthology.