“Wait a minute,” said Vance. “Back up a second. You came in here—how’d you know who we were? How’d you know where we were?”

Vance, Vance, Vance-man Vance…

“Well, I—I called the Saint Ray house and asked to speak to you,” said the dork. “They told me you were over here.”

“How’d you know what we looked like?”

“I asked some people.” He motioned vaguely in the direction of the entrance. “You guys are pretty well known!”

Big grin from the dork, big flattering grin. The flattery left Hoyt with conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it was time to let the dork know that dorks existed on a plane…way down there. On the other hand, was it really so bad…to be well known? Was it really such a frightening prospect…the possibility of becoming better known? “Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we’re doing!” What would be so bad if that line, that great line, were recorded in print?

“I never read the Daily Wave,” he told the dork. “You read the Daily Wave, Vance?” He addressed Vance with a Sarc 3 inflection.

“No, I don’t,” said Vance. Hit the don’t just a little too hard. It made him sound petulant. “So you write for the school newspaper?” he said to the dork.

“Yeah…”

“What do you guys do if you want to run some story and it’s a great fucking story and you ain’t got one fucking fact to go on?”

The dork was jolted by the suddenly aggressive tone. His lips did some funny things, as if he could no longer control the little muscles that enabled them to go this way and that.

Timorous again, the dork said, “We just hope we can…get the facts. Look”—the big eyes again, pleading, pleading—“that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys directly! A story like this, we try to double-check the facts with the principals. We can always go with what other witnesses said, and I guess we will if we have to.”

“What other witnesses?” said Vance. Still in the alarm mode.

“Well, like you guys and the governor and the girl weren’t the only people there.”

“Like who else was?” said Vance.

“The bodyguards,” said the dork.

“The body guards?” said Vance.

“Well, they were there.”

“Body guards…plural?” said Vance.

“Are you denying there were bodyguards there?” Then to Hoyt: “Can you deny or confirm it?”

Hoyt could hardly believe it. The little fuck had ratcheted his courage up again. Vance was staring at him, dumbstruck.

“ ‘Do you deny it or can you confirm it,’” said Hoyt, contempt dripping from the legalistic phrases. “Deny and confirm my ass…‘Do you deny it or can you confirm it’…” He shook his head and twisted his lips in the way that says, “You…pussy.”

Pleading, pleading: “I have to ask you that! It’s not up to me, it’s up to you guys. My editor’s going with the story either way! We’d rather go with your version of the whole thing, but it’s like up to you guys.”

“What’s it?” said Vance. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Petulant again.

“See those two guys over there?” said Hoyt, pointing to two students, a couple of real porkers sitting about three tables away, laughing and carrying on. “Go ask them. Maybe they did it.”

The dork’s big eyes began bouncing from Hoyt to Vance to Hoyt again. Silence. Both were giving the dork okay-and-now-what stares.

The dork stood up and said, “Well, thanks for talking to me, guys…and here…” He twisted and slipped his backpack off his shoulders and fished around in it and came up with a Daily Wave calling card and a ballpoint pen. “If you want to get hold of me, here’s the number at the Wave, and I’m going to give you my cell number,” which he did, using the pen. He gave the card to Hoyt. “Thanks,” he said again.

Hoyt said nothing and didn’t stow the card anywhere. He just held it insouciantly between his first two fingers. He gave the dork a small Sarc 1 smile as the guy turned and headed off. The guy’s backpack was mauve with a yellow Dupont D on the flap. It was very dorky to go around with Dupont backpacks and jackets and things, as if you thought that the mere fact of being a student at Dupont was a big deal in and of itself. The fact that it was a big deal in and of itself was part of the inverse spin of the snobbery.

Vance sighed a high-blood-pressure sigh and fixed Hoyt with accusing eyes. “Goddamn it, Hoyt, how many times did I tell you to stop talking about it! Now we got this shit-bird at the Daily Wave—”

Hoyt said, “Relax. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

“We get fucked, is what happens. This fucking tool has us assaulting two bodyguards, like we started it. Two bodyguards—I mean the fuck, the fucking guy’s talking about two bodyguards, and who the fuck needs to get caught in the middle of some goddamned story about the governor of California getting himself sucked off by Syrie Fucking Stieffbein?”

“Ea-ea-ea-ea-sy, Vance-man. Chill. Chill out! We didn’t make the guy’s gorilla go insane!”

“Yeah, but this guy’s gonna get it all fucked up. He’s already got it all fucked up. And now they’re gonna run the bodyguard’s version! You can imagine what that’s gonna be! Why didn’t you just deny the whole thing, the way I did? You strung it out. You strung it out so far, now the guy’s telling himself it’s obvious we were there.”

Hoyt broke into a grin. “Me? I don’t believe what I’m hearing! The little shit says ‘two bodyguards,’ and you say, ‘Whattaya mean, two? There weren’t two! I only saw one!’”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Well, you might as well have,” said Hoyt.

Vance eyed Hoyt for a few beats. “You know what I think? I think you’d like for somebody to write about it. That’s what I think.”

Hoyt turned his palms upward. “Who sent the guy packing? Who told him to kiss my ass?”

He stared Vance down, but hmmmm…the Vance-man had just painted him a little picture…

“Let me see the fucking guy’s card,” said Vance.

As he handed it to him, Hoyt flicked a glance at it himself. Adam Gellin.

“Never heard of him,” said Vance, handing it back.

Hoyt shrugged in as bored a fashion as he could. But he wasn’t bored. He jotted the name down in his mind. Adam Gellin was the little shit’s name.

Fuck! Why the fuck did that make him think of his fucking grades? He could be a legend in his own time—one of the very greatest. But what the fuck was he going to do next June?

12. The H Word

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals—male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge…but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell’s phrase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him—that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation—even now—in the twenty-first century!—when life’s major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.